Aug 3, ‘26

Soon: in September I’ll have the honour of introducing the great Maggi O’Farrell with a laudatio at her ILFU talk in Utrecht. Come!

Reading: recently I watched A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and at the end of a very good episode noticed it was dedicated to one of the screenwriters, Aziza Barnes, who passed away during production. I looked them up and found one of their poems, alleyway, and it moved me deeply and I think about it often. I’ll never get to know them beyond the writing that they’ve left behind but I grieve them from my own small corner of the world all the same. What a talent! I encourage everyone to sit with Barnes’s voice for a while.

Doing: walked a bit of the Mullerthal trail in Luxembourgh. Did you people know about ROCKS?? I feel someone should have told me sooner in life about ROCKS. Wow, rocks!

Noticed: this ‘Marken flower’ wall linen by Karun Thakar at Soane, and the below picture a friend sent the other day of a girl in Marker-island hair dracht where you can see what appears to be a shaven back of a head to accommodate the style in which the Marker girls wore their bonnets (long curls to the front). This sent me down a rabbit hole trying to verify the image and the tradition: did all Marker girls shave the back of their heads? Every time this is mentioned anywhere online, the only source for it appears to be a 1976 picture book about clothing traditions in The Netherlands (also on wikipedia). This seems to be the only photo and any form of illustration in circulation that depicts an upshave, and I can’t find any additional writing on it. (The original pic seems to have come from ModeMuze, an online archive of fashion history via Museums through NL and Belgium, but it seems this specific picture has been taken offline—or I’m rusty in my archive searching skills and it’s there and I just can’t find it). This lack of information is interesting in comparison to the easily available info on the rest of the Marker hairdo, the bangs stiffened with sugar water, the curls kept in shape in what for me is the traditional Hassidic way. Seeing this picture, my first thought was, (after, WOAH, COOL), this girl probably did this once or twice because it was summer and she was hot under her bonnet and this seemed clever to her, and maybe the other girls were like woah, cool, or maybe the other girls were like, yiiiikkkesss and she was desperately waiting for it to grow out—and that was just exactly the accidental day that some anthropologist came to the island to take pictures and now everyone thinks it’s what all Marker women did. If you’re reading this and you know for SURE if this was a tradition and have receipts, please do reach out!