A Mystery Moth and Desuetude

I found this oblong white moth while walking on Hampstead Heath Extension a little more than a week ago. I'm not familiar with it and I can't seem to readily identify it online.

It's a mystery -- admittedly a rather plain one. I think its elongated shape caught my eye more than anything else. Anybody know what it is?

I returned to the Tate Britain yesterday to see the Ithell Colquhoun exhibit, a sort of companion to the Edward Burra show I saw a few days ago. I didn't enjoy Colquhoun's art as much. She was an occultist and experimented with methods of painting that were supposed to channel the subconscious or universal rhythms or whatever -- some of them seemed frankly gimmicky to me. What she often wound up with were compositions akin to Rorschach blots. Even her earlier, more representative work of flowers or mythological scenes were weirdly fleshy and unappealing, I thought.

Here's one little work I did like, "Diagrams of Love: Marriage of Eyes" from 1940-42.

From the museum I walked up to Westminster and caught the tube back home again.

Not much else of note happened yesterday. I spent the morning reading Guy Trebay's memoir of life in New York in the '70s, "Do Something." I'm enjoying his stories about life in a world of artsy decrepitude during the years of "Ford to City: Drop Dead." In one sentence I read yesterday he used a word I don't recall ever seeing before: "Mostly these are places that, like the city itself, are slumping toward desuetude."

From Oxford Languages: (Desuetude: noun (formal), a state of disuse. "The docks fell into desuetude.")

Speaking of books, I enjoyed this article in The New York Times about a man who habitually kept a list of all the books he'd read over the years -- almost 3,600 of them. When I was young I kept book lists of my own, usually in the back of my paper journals, and in 2003 or so I started keeping one on my computer. It's up to about 830 books now. I occasionally consult it if I can't remember an author or title or (rarely) if I'm not sure I've already read a certain book. In one of my lamest blog posts, in 2008, I published the whole thing. (It was much shorter then.) It's kind of a silly habit but it's interesting to look back and see how many of those books I do or don't remember.

Dave and I are off on an adventure today -- a very brief one. We both need a change of scenery and thought it would be nice to get away. So I'll be coming to you tomorrow from somewhere other than London! Stay tuned!