It's the last Friday before Christmas, which means only one thing; it's time for the Fem Fri books of the year!
First, though, an admin note. I am switching the provider I use to send this newsletter, and the email address I send from will change as well, to feministfriday@buttondown.email. If you think you didn't get a Fem Fri last week, check your spam folders for that email and, if you want to follow Fem Fri to the end (episode 520), retrieve it from your spam.
Okay, now it is time for books of the year. Starting with a big one in every sense.
There is little in this life that is more exciting than reading a book that could only have been written by one person. Ducks, Newburyport is, in my edition, 1,050 pages (a lot of pages). By around page 400, I knew I was going to re-read it. On page 750 I started feeling sad because I'd been used to having several normal sized books of reading left, but at that point I only had one normal sized book of reading. For a while, I thought there wasn't a plot, then the plot just absolutely blazed through and it was exciting and scary and some of the finest writing I have read. It's been a while since a book I was reading for the first time hit my top five of all time, but Ducks, Newburyport is absolutely in my top five of all time.
HNNNNNGGGGG. Look, are you interested in conflicted relationships with parents? Do you absolutely revel in awkward situations pushed to their limit? Do you want to do a horrified shrieklol every five minutes or so? HOOO BOY do I have a book for you, and it's My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. Really superb and also quite stressful, so I'm going to advise you to save this one to Jan if you're currently spending time with your parents.
The debut novel from friend of Fem Fri E. Saxey! I hope you enjoyed their short stories from last year, and their novel is a whole new level of creeping dread, English weirdness, odd people becoming odder. It's also funny and prickly and charming. The days are going to be short for quite some time still, and this is just an ideal book to read in ACANYNY*, as the freezing fog swirls and night drops at three thirty pm.
This book has introduced me to some of the most interesting stories and some of the most challenging music of the twentieth century. The only non-fiction book on this list, it runs through ten composers you might not have heard of, their lives and influences and their music. I would read this on the train while listening to the musician the chapter was about. All of their music is about pushing limits in one way or another; it is rarely easy to listen to. One night I got home and took off my headphones and felt honestly glad not to be listening to difficult angular janglings based on found sound, and I poured pasta into a pan and thought - it's still there - heard the music in the difficult angular jangling I had just created. This book made me experience the world differently, and I don't know that there's much more I could ask from a book.
Feel like this is the equivalent of recommending Taylor Swift at this point, but also, despite the hype I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. The thing about woman centered novels based on history is that sometimes men are actually doing interesting stuff, so what you get is this weird soft focus effect where the thing you are looking at is not at all where the action is. Not so Circe. It's beautifully written, it feels real, and it's actually quite horny which other reviewers have really soft pedalled. JUST THE FACTS FROM FEM FRI!
This year I kept quite good track of the films I have watched this year, which is why I can bring you the Fem Fri films of the year. I know that Anatomy of a Fall is brilliant but I've not seen it, which explains… well, it explains a bit about the first film on my list. And yes I have seen Aftersun and it is fantastic but also, you do not need me specifically to recommend you Aftersun.
Point Break
Okay. Okay. This film is amazing. Why have I never seen this before? Did I think it was just like… a big long meme? Do you think that Point Break is a big long meme? It's a sexy nineties thriller! The best genre.
Saint Omer
This year I learned about both negative capability and misophonia and this film will be huge for fans of the former and utter torture for everyone with the latter. It just sits there with these incredibly long silences, occasionally punctuated by the soft breathing noises that make up about 15% of the film. There is also - and this is my personal sound trigger - the sound of someone rubbing a sleeping bag with their hand argh don't even like to type this. ANYWAY, if you like morally difficult media, this is an incredible courtroom drama that will leave you feeling Not Sure.
Rye Lane
As you know I love South East London so a film that was, as far as I could tell, shot entirely in SE postcodes was always going to be on the shortlist. Rye Lane is also incredibly funny and charming. Plus, it's just not that often that you see a mooncup on screen, let alone the big screen.
Past Lives
Not a wasted frame in this one. I keep going back to it in my mind and turning over some of these scenes. It's painful and delightful. It gives you the information that you need to understand its characters but it doesn't perk that information in your face, so you constantly feel like you're on the journey with them. There's probably a film criticism way of saying that better, or at least more compactly. You'll really enjoy it.
Saltburn AKA Sexy Brideshead AKA PENISES 3D: THEY FLY AT YOU FACE.
I have heard criticism that this film is tonally uneven, but there were probably about 15 minutes (non-consecutive) where I wasn't doing a low growl of approval while watching this. Class anxiety, webs of lies, the purest awkwardness, it is wonderful.
I am watching "For All Mankind", the alternate history of the space race. It's basically Mad Men in space, so obviously I am enjoying it enormously. It also means I am looking into the "Mercury 13" program, the widely used but "ahistorical and innacurate" term for the private women in space program run by William Randolph Lovelace II.
One episode in particular was a tribute to Jerrie Cobb. I love this photo of her in front of a House subcommittee with her shoes off under her desk, like every woman who is wearing heels and has her feet under a desk:
Cobb’s persistent lobbying inspired the House subcommittee hearings that investigated whether NASA was discriminating on the basis of sex. Two years before sex discrimination became illegal, subcommittee hearings of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics showed how ideas about women’s rights permeated political discourse even before they were enshrined in law.
This is super cool - here's an interview with Jessica Watkins, who recently spent 6 months on ISS, talking about how she was inspired to be an astronaut:
I certainly came into geology excited about the idea of studying the geology of other planets. I first kind of expressed some interest in being an astronaut when I attended an after-school enrichment program at the Sally Ride Elementary School. And so I had kind of asked my parents about who she was and what her story was. And I think that was the first time that I realized that you could actually do this as a career.
Now I am reading about Sally Ride and SHE'S cool as well, plus her sister is a Presbyterian minister called Bear. Here's a photo of them together, just looking so happy in their work. I think this is one of the loveliest pictures I have seen:
So, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the two Ride sisters were making names for themselves—though in different ways. Sally was becoming the first American woman to venture to space, and Bear was joining the fight within the Presbyterian church for ordination and marriage rights for the gay community. Where Sally was quiet and private, Bear was participatory and vocal.
I am on a train to Scotland as I send this. What a country. Here's a Fem Fri about Scotland, what else?
Margaret Moir brings together two of my most loved locations by growing up by the Forth (in Scotland) and also by being the first woman to walk through the Blackwall Tunnel (in South-East London - that's the connection to a beloved location, not the Blackwall Tunnel specifically. SUN IN SANDS ROUNDABOUT CREW PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR etc).
The Women’s Engineering Society (WES) was founded in 1919 by a small group of influential women, including, as she now was, Lady Moir. She and other members of the WES worked tirelessly to set up training courses for women engineers and encourage women to take up engineering as a career.
This song, which I learned in primary school, gets stuck in my head so often. It's a traditional island spinning song, and like so many Scottish songs that go with manual labour, has partly nonsense lyrics. Spinning has traditionally been women's work - in fact, Fem Fri kicked off with an article about how that's why we have the word "spinster" - so that's the connection:
By the way, I actually have a super cool interview in the tank for you all, but work is extremely full on right now so I've had no time to edit it. Just so you know that I am still thinking of fun and innovative things to do for Fem Fri! I want the last nine months of this newsletter to be so great <3
At the end of a long week, what could be nicer than a lovely long bath? Nothing, according to both me and Imagiste poet Amy Lowell:
Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.
Here's more about Amy (sounds like she earned that bath):
A flamboyant woman whose behavior belied her upbringing in a proper and prestigious New England family, she flouted convention with her proto-feminist poetry and unabashedly public persona. “Poet, propagandist, lecturer, translator, biographer, critic … her verve is almost as remarkable as her verse”
As the nights fly in (northern hemisphere), let's think about what's good about that. Radiators. Jumpers. Cups of tea. Okay great, there's our Fem Fri.
I just love the quality of heat that a radiator gives out. And were you aware that the first gas powered heating patent was filed by Alice H. Parker. What's amazing about this blog post is that it's from her alma mater who kind of say "given the context, she probably did a STEM degree, but we don't know":
While living with her family in a small, Morristown home, the Parker family found difficulties in heating its entire home at the same time, a dangerous scenario during East Coast winters. Coal and wood, commonly used to fuel heating models in the 19th century, were not readily available. Parker allegedly chose gas since it was a safer, easily accessible alternative and did not require a fireplace.
Jumpers, then. Here's a lovely article about the history of Victorian knitting manuals (sometimes I wonder if this newsletter is a bit too niche? Surely not):
They provided a general sense of a pattern but you would need to know how to work around them in order to complete. So, as was the case then and still is now, you would need to already be a skilled knitter. In addition some of the notation was notoriously difficult to follow. It is worth checking out Jane Gaugain’s work, for example, Mrs Gaugain’s minature knitting netting and crochet book from 1843 pages 8-9 to fully appreciate the complexity before instructions were standardized. […] due to mass publication and the high demand for these manuals, print runs were rushed out and as a result a number of editing mistakes are evident, which was yet another obstacle that users of the manuals would have to acknowledge and overcome.
Well, I hope you liked the cocktail recipe from a couple of weeks ago because I have another one to represent cups of tea. This is called (for reasons not quite interesting enough to go into here) Soon May The Enys Men Come:
50ml bourbon or rye
25ml acorn liqueur (possible substitutions: Frangelico or simple syrup)
25ml chai (chilled)
You'll need to put this on ice, but don't worry you'll be warm because of the heating and the jumpers.
Today I have had a solid day of calls. Usually this is a very stressful situation on a Friday because not only can I not write Fem Fri in a timely fashion, I also can't think about what I want to write about. NO SUCH PROBLEM TODAY THOUGH because yesterday on the train home I read about two extremely interesting Ethopian woman and that's the Fem Fri we are going to share together today.
Did your mum ever accuse you, when you were just sort of slorming around the house contributing nothing, as "lying around like the Queen of Sheba"? No, neither did mine, but the mums of some of my friends did and I sort of love it as a phrase. Wildly innacurate though as the Queen of Sheba was a pretty active lady, altho presumably with relatively little time for pointless stuff like vacuuming or wiping down the countertop, MUM:
The story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba appears in the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles: An unnamed queen from Sheba travels to Jerusalem bearing gold, jewels, and spices. A seeker of knowledge, the queen has a special interest in the reputedly wise Solomon and tests him with some “hard questions.” Solomon meets the challenge and lavishes hospitality on the queen, who reciprocates with gifts. “Never again were so many spices brought in as those the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon.”
The reason I am thinking about Ethiopia is because I'm still reading Sound Within Sound and have got to the Ethiopian nun, pianist and composer:
her playing evokes the delicacy and grace of early spring: a sparrow alighting on a branch, a wildflower bending toward the sun, a tiny, persistent sorrow. It’s the sort of thing—soothing, meditative, elegant—that immediately softens everyone who hears it.
It's the Friday closest to Halloween, and I'm sure long term subscribers know what that means - it's one of the many excuses I might take to share with you a picture of Susan Sontag in a bear suit.
It's easy to assume that Susan Sontag is the only remarkable woman of the twentieth century to dress up in a costume. I'm here to debunk that idea. For instance, it's clear that Josephine Baker, if she didn't exactly wear a costume, certainly dressed up especially for this cheetah:
The cheetah, based on this facial expression, would have been grateful for a little more effort on Josephine Baker's part. But come on, cheetah! This is Josephine Baker, anti fascist heroine and sex symbol for the ages!
Zelda Fitzgerald was a real fan of dressing up, and I like that this photo has been coloured in too. Here she is as a high school student dressed as "Folly":
How are you doing? I am reading a great book by Kate Molleson, called Sound Within Sound:
Molleson has employed her expert knowledge and refined perspective in selecting which ten artists to include in what, in less discerning hands, could have been an unwieldy, daunting tome. She has chosen ‘ten beautifully messy, confounding, brave, outrageous, original and charismatic composers’. Each one of these elegantly written biographical essays describes a remarkable, singular, creative life, strewn with political, social and domestic obstacles. They describe a fierce commitment to their art, a refusal to compromise and a determination to write whatever music they pleased. They are wonderful characters, if apparently not all easy people to get along with.
… and found out about a new composer. Well, not really new, but I didn't know about her before I read her chapter. Here's Ruth Crawford:
Ruth Crawford Seeger, who was born 100 years ago this week, saw beauty in small things. Amid Chicago's indifferent, hurried sprawl, she could find herself transfixed by a piece of scrap paper, which, "rustling along the sidewalk, created a perfect scherzo of rhythmic variety and subtlety". When she made that observation at the age of 26, Crawford Seeger was already becoming a confident and daringly original composer. In her mid-30s she stopped writing. At the age of 52 she died.
So you know, I haven't massively engaged with her work with vocals, although it is considerably less distressing that some of the other vocal stuff in Sound Within Sound, blimey.
I have had an exhausting week, and I think you're great, and here's a Fem Fri guide to a nice night in.
Let's start with dessert. Don't worry about ruining your appetite, you're going to be fine. I love the recipes and cooking thinking of Samin Nosrat so this mango pie/cheesecake is going to be great. It also suggests it for Thanksgiving so maybe good to practice this a bit if you're going to be making Thanksgiving dinner:
While that's cooking, you're going to want a cocktail probably. Here's one that calls for gin with booze in it but if that's not your scene of course use Sipsmith or similar:
Duck's
40ml gin
20ml lemon juice
15ml rose liquer
Pretty sure this is a "shaken" one and as you will see in the image it's served in a coupe. In any case, I think this is probably enough information for you, play with the space and let me know how it works out for you.
You might also want to listen to an indie pop album as you wait for your pie to cook and chill out with your cocktail. Give MEMORIALS a try, and their album Women Against the Bomb. Here's It's In Our Hands:
