Hope you're having a lovely Friday. It's a really pretty morning here in London and I hope it is where you are too.
And this is the first Fem Fri of 2022! This means that as usual I wrote my review of reading for the year. Some familiar stuff here for Fem Fri readers but also some new stuff because I write about books by men way more than I do here:
When I first read [Ulysses], at 19, I thought that Bloom and Molly were… basically ancient, destined for the knackers’ yard at any moment. When I read it the second time around I found it stated actually quite clearly in the text that Bloom is a year younger than I am now, and Molly by extension is in her mid thirties.
I'm not a big one for resolutions, but maybe you are, and maybe you would like the help of a powerful AI in constructing yours. If so, Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness has your back. This made me laugh so much:
Attempt to find peace living with an army of puppets.
Wear a dinosaur costume to every public event I attend.
Go to the beach every day for a week and shout the names of colors into the ocean.
I mean I say I'm not a big one for resolutions but this slice of my message history indicates that I'm looking to change things at least a bit. It it also looks like it's been generated by an AI that has been trained on a corpus of the world's pettiest problems:
Love to you and your army of puppets and your Bentley Rhythm Ace CDs,
I hope you are well on the last day of 2021! Thank you to everyone with Cyrillic skills who helped me to identify the artist in last week's Fem Fri. She is a political prisoner called Yulia Tsvetkova and here is another of her charming drawings:
This reminds me that "galspreading" is a word that could definitely happen in 2022.
Here's an interview with Yulia:
“I think I underestimated the power of art,” she said. “As it turns out, art is something so important for the government. If they are scared of art, that means that art has power, big, huge power, that I myself did not think was there. In a way, it is good to know that art — and women — are so scary for them.”
How are you? I hope you are pumped for Christmas tomorrow. Whatever you have planned I hope it's going to be cosy and delightful.
One of the things that I loved about Christmas when I was wee was the stocking presents. You had no idea what fun treat you were going to open, and sometimes the gift was something that you don't even know exists. Do you remember those trees that were made of paper, and you put them in water and they grew "blossoms" of crystals? Stuff like that. I remember really liking those.
All of this is a really long way of saying, this is a Fem Fri of stocking presents, things that I have taken photos of that didn't fit in any kind of bigger theme over the year but that I thought, that's a Fem Fri sort of thing.
Let's start with a puzzle, that's a good thing to get in a stocking. It's a picture of a happy beach lady that obviously immediately reminded me of Fem Fri when I saw it in a magazine:
What I didn't do, though, was to take a photo of the artist's name, so I don't know it. My cyrillic is not very good and let me tell you right now that performing an internet search for "russian artist woman naked line drawing" does not get you results that help in identifying an artist. So do let me know if you know who the artist is. I'm sure she was Russian, but that's famously a fairly big country.
Now how about Amy Johnson! I took a photo of this on a day trip to Herne Bay.
Amy left Croydon Airport on 5 May, 1930 in a second-hand Gipsy Moth called Jason. Unlike today’s pilots, Amy had no radio link with the ground and no reliable information about the weather. Her maps were basic and, on some stretches of the route, she would be flying over uncharted land. […] Daringly, Amy had plotted the most direct route – simply by placing a ruler on the map. This took her over some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain and meant she had to fly the open-cockpit for at least eight hours at a time.
This is a house in Barnes where Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, lived. She lived to be 102! It doesn't say that on the plaque:
Her great strength lay in her integrity, her complete lack of interest in getting rich - she never did - or in acquiring glory for herself. In her final years, past achievements mattered less and less to her; she looked urgently, impatiently, to the future, concerned only with what "her" ballet was going to become.
Let me tell you about my grandmother. My mum’s mum, that is; I’ll tell you about my dad’s mum another time. My mum’s mum would always read the last page of a book first, to see if it had a happy ending. If it didn’t, she wouldn’t read it, on the grounds that it was a waste of time to read all the way through a book just to get to a sad ending. I’ve spent almost three decades being sniffy about this habit – PERFECT ART CAN BE UNCOMFORTABLE, GRAN – but for the first time understood the impulse as I read Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby. It geniunely occurred to me that I could stop forty pages before the end, never finish it, just imagine that the life I wanted for its characters was the life they got. All of this is to say, Detransition, Baby is my book of the year and one of the most emotionally involving novels I have ever read. I’m not going to tell you whether or not my Gran Dot would have liked it, but I can absolutely guarantee that you will. It is, if this means anything to you, all of the things I love about Iris Murdoch. Kind, flawed characters. Good jokes. Emotional truth. You need this book.
Square Haunting is a beautiful book about women finding their place in the world, and using Mecklenburgh Square as a base from which they find that place in the world. It told me new things about women I already knew about, and introduced me to some brand new women as well. This is a non fiction book with a clear argument in a tight field; it's clever without being overbearing and charming without being sickly. You should read this book if you like social histories, intellectual histories or the early twentieth century, and also if you are thinking of writing non-fiction. There's so much here.
Surely everyone knows and can delineate the way that (for example) every member of their family sulks on holidays, but this sort of thing rarely written about and, I'm going to say, never so well written about as it was by Natalia Ginzburg. Her incredible gift is to take all of this… not quite everyday, but day-in day-out stuff – jokes and little habits and moments of grace and rage – and make it into something that's lovely and sad to read.
Kind of the Taylor Swift's Folklore of my books of the year list, I know that you have already read this or feel like you don't have to because the discourse has caught you up on the key themes. I'm not sure that the discourse has, though! Incredibly, given that the title tells you directly that it's about the Christian church, I didn't go into expecting new insights into my faith, and in fact I got several new insights into my faith and the transformations that love and faith facilitate and demand. And what happens when we don't meet the insistent demands of love and faith. I know you know it's funny, and yeah, it's also really funny. But the jokes aren't the things I remember the most.
I encountered The Great Gatsby in several ways this year, and this comic is the one that stayed with me the most and opened up the most about the text for me. Nicki Greenberg imagines each of the characters as a weird, often invertebrate, sometimes imaginary creature. Gatsby is a seahorse! Nick is a slug (ha!) and Tom is a hairy chested demon thing. It's so good, and it feels completely new and fresh.
Also, this isn't fully a part of my books of the year list, but did you read The Babysitter's Club books when you were a kid? Do you remember Mallory, who was the bookish one? In the book in which she was introduced, she said she was reading All Quiet on the Western Front, but that she was finding it boring. I remember, at the time, being highly critical of the way she was reading, and even thinking that maybe she was a bit young to be embarking on that particular book, but somehow also I absorbed the idea that All Quiet is not very good. If you too have allowed an IMAGINARY ELEVEN YEAR OLD to shape your literary tastes, let me tell you right now that I read All Quiet on the Western Front this year and it was straight up fantastic, not the only work of fiction I read about the First World War this year but absolutely the best. I can't believe I waited all this time. If you are writing a young adult novel, don't try to put your readers off reading classics of world literature! Your words matter.
Hey I will see you next on Christmas Eve!!! EXCITED.
I hope you are excited for the Fem Fri albums of 2021. I thought that I didn't listen to a lot of music this year, but it turns out there are easily five albums I have loved and engaged with, and maybe you will as well.
The Weather Station – Ignorance
This is my album of the year. It was out last February and is absolutely one for all of the seasons, through the whole year I've not stopped loving it and getting something new out of it every time I listen. My own personal standout track, Tried to Tell You, I've already featured in Fem Fri, so here's Robber which opens the album and is also fantastic:
I had my first away holiday for quite some time in August this year, I went to Glastonbury and camped where the Circus Field would usually be. Something that made me so excited for that was seeing Wolf Alice playing in the stone circle, and it looked… I mean, it didn't look cold, but it didn't look exactly comfortable either, and the whole thing was so Glastonbury and I couldn't wait. I've had a look and I can't see footage of that on youtube so instead here's the video for Lipstick On The Glass:
It's all been very outdoorsy so far, with the Weather Station's video being outside and memories of Wolf Alice on a Somerset hillside, so what better now than an album by a woman who actually lives in the forest, Eris Drew! This is a cracking album for a Friday, you can put it on and just crack through everything you want to finish working on in the week, then it just seamlessly deposits you in the weekend. Such a kind gift:
Okay look yes I know that this album came out in 2020 and I'm approximately the eight billionth person to get into it, but it turns out I only listened to party bangers in 2020 and this year I REALLY got into Folklore. I remember listening to this while walking down Charing Cross Road and I had one of those feelings where I was just… totally aware of the intense rightness of the moment. Hard to describe but I hope you've felt that way too at least once this year. Here's The Last Great American Dynasty:
After her husband passed away in 1954, Harkness poured more money into her Watch Hill compound, installing 8 kitchens and 21 baths. She even hosted a ballet workshop there for 20 dancers from the Robert Joffrey Company (now known as the Joffrey Ballet) in 1965.
What an incredible album Deacon is. Last week I promised you albums to walk around South East London to and this is such a perfect album for that. It's 37 minutes long so definitely doesn't outstay its welcome, it's sweet and sexy and funny and the dude just has an incredible voice. Enjoy getting lost in this over Christmas:
How are you? I have the week off next week but my brain and body have decided that now is an okay time to knock off actually. So I'm feeling pretty spacey currently. Maybe let's start with the schedule of festive Fem Fris.
As you know I would usually do my books of the year on the last Friday before Christmas, but as that's actually Christmas Eve and you might want to buy some recs for your friends and family, I am going to move Books of the Year up to the 17th. That means that next week, the 10th, will be Albums of the Year. If you want to know the best five albums to listen to while walking round South East London in the winter this is absolutely not to be missed. ✨
I've got a lovely lino cut advent calendar this year, and it's designed by a woman, Angela Harding. It's these Scottish robins here:
But I also love these hares:
Here's an interview with Angela about her inspiration and her process:
I always try to bring movement into my work, so there is a natural fit with the bursts of new growth and new life you get at these times of year. Also, the intensity of colour, the fresh greens of the garden and hedgerow. Birds become so much part of our day in spring and early summer, in the beauty of their songs and in their mad dashing flight to build nests and find mates.
Have you ever tried lino cut printing? I did in high school art and it is so much fun. Obviously I did this a while ago and probably part of the fun was being allowed to use a very sharp instrument, I was still the age when that was particularly exciting. ANYWAY if you want to have a go yourself, here is artist Sasha Compton doing a tutorial. It's on "YouTube Kids" but it's hard to imagine that the process is that different? You should still be careful with the sharp stuff:
Finally, I love the incredibly fine detail in Rachel Louise Hibbs' work. And she's South East London based!
You have to imagine you are not creating lines with pencil but rather erasing (carving away) where you don’t want the colour to show. I like to create tiny lines using a very fine micro chisel from Flexcut to create dappled lines of fur or feathers.
I saw a fantastic film last week, and it's quite a recent one too. Sibyl, directed by Justine Triet. Have you seen it? It's tense and funny and sexy and intricately patterned AND ALSO Sandra Hüller is genuinely hilarious in it. So here is a Fem Fri that is about that film and films and work.
Okay so yes Justine Triet made an incredible movie but I'm profoundly grateful that she is not my boss:
I push the actors emotionally very hard in the beginning of a series of takes, and they love that, to get really emotional and feeling they have done their best scene. But then in fact the next one, when they contain it a bit more but still have a trace of emotion in their face, that is often the best take. I need to really wear out my actors. For example Virginie […] when she is crying in the cinema, she was really in that state. Even when we said ‘cut’, she kept crying. I love to get them in that state, but of course only when the scene requires it.
Here's a review and a pullquote that captures some of the tension I really enjoyed:
In an early session with the patient, Sibyl encourages her to talk about her sex life, seemingly to help her work through things, but Efira shows Sibyl’s lurid enjoyment of the retelling in the way her breath hitches and her face gathers interest even as she keeps her body tightly controlled and unmoving. With her other patients, though, she listens with compassion, leaning in, calmly engaging them. You can see a woman who’s good at her job and yet on the verge of becoming very very bad at her job.
Staying with movies and work, here's a great example of a one joke Reductress slide show in which every execution of that joke is perfect. I genuinely howled at this, Pictures of Young Richard Gere with Captions about Sales and Marketing so You Can Read This at Work:
They sort of don’t make ‘em like anymore, you know? Like, when’s the last time you saw a man who looks like this? Never. Only Richard Gere looked like this, and now he certainly doesn’t. But to think! To imagine that he once roamed the streets with this face and this hair. Astonishing. And THAT’S how you INCREASE EARNINGS for a LUCRATIVE QUARTER. Synergy! Okay, go to the next.
I hope you are well! I hope you are excited for a Fem Fri special investigation today. I really found myself down a rabbit hole of borderline relevant research this week, and I thought that you might want to know about some of it. There's also a normal Fem Fri afterwards!
This rabbithole started when I read a reference (in "Benjamin Button") to a pink shirt for a little boy. I've read, on the internet, as I'm sure you have, that pink used to be "the colour" for a boy and blue used to be "the colour" for a girl. I cheerfully made a note to footnote this, thinking, ah this is great, super easy, I'll find that reference and put this fact in there.
Reader.
It was not super easy!
The most common reference is to a 1918 copy of a magazine/catalogue called Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department. This is not available online, nor are there copies going back to 1918 in either the British Library or the Library of Congress. Already, it makes me a bit nervous that something is being referenced that I have genuinely no idea how to get access to.
No matter, though, because something that is nicely archived and online is Time magazine! You might also have read that in 1927 Time did a piece showing that according to "major US department stores" pink was the colour for boys. Okay great let's look at what they actually say:
Time, November 14, 1927
Mmmmn. They literally tell you not to draw a conclusion from this, so I'm going to follow that instruction, and instead I'm going to cast the net wide and stick "pink for boys" as a search term in newspapers.com. PAYDIRT:
LA Evening Post-Record, 29th March 1918
Harford Courant, 11th April 1928 (also… bimbo? I mean it makes sense now I think about it!)
Altoona Tribune, 27th June 1923
Although… not extremely conclusive paydirt. This is something that people argue about, and write to newspapers to settle! Honestly the clue should have been that this is written down at all in the form of an instruction; no media now would say "blue is for boys and pink is for girls", it's just assumed. There is no one who stands at a gender reveal party, festooned in pink glitter, just quickly googling what that means exactly.
It looks, overall, like the colour/gender mapping in the 1920s was similar to the question of what gifts you get on which wedding anniversary. You know that there is a convention, you know that it might apply to you or to your friends at some point, but you can't say exactly what the convention is without looking it up. Similarly, it is a convention that is designed to sell stuff, but – for wedding anniversaries now and for gendered clothing then – in a more low key way than, e.g., the convention of buying one another gifts at Christmas time.
Now, let's have some links about women and colour!
Of course, you know I love the work of Ann Veronica Janssen and her use of colour, sometimes as the only thing in her art. Here's an interview:
It’s also about creating the feeling, the perception, of dissolving the limits of the architecture. There are no limits any more when you’re there. You have a vision, but it’s almost more internal than external: you’re in the light. When I started working with coloured mists, I thought it was interesting because it was like a zoom into a painting, a zoom into blue or orange or a combination. And that’s what I try to experiment with.
Now here are molas, incredible colour saturated textiles of the Guna people of the San Blas islands:
Molas are made using “reverse appliqué on several layers of cotton fabric,” says Rita Smith, owner of Rita Smith Molas Gallery. “It’s almost like when you’re making a sandwich,” she says. “Some require two layers, but some require more than two.” Once the fabrics are layered, the artist cuts away the top layer in a specific pattern to reveal the color beneath, and then sews along the edge of the cutout to secure the design. The artist repeats this again and again to form the design, a process that can take months. The technique has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations.
I hope you are well today. I hope it's been a good week and that you are looking forward to the weekend. And if it has not been a good week – if you feel, for example, like you have been toiling away for little reward – I have a super Fem Fri for you about women who probably also felt like they were toiling away with little reward quite a lot of the time. And one who actually just did what she felt like, which was, one gets the impression, its own reward. Something for us all here today. Let's go.
Starting with the main event, Katalin Karikó, who is pretty much entirely the reason why we have mRNA vaccines. Many many thanks to the friend and subscriber who sent me this amazing story; I knew that there was a story but not how intense it was. This is a lovely picture of a woman who loves her work:
Another scientist might have felt orphaned. Karikó could have pitied herself. But she takes far too much pride in her work. With a placid smile, she recounts how someone once introduced her to a group: “Oh, Kati works for me,” he told them. “I said, ‘Oh, Frank. I don’t work for you. Do you think when I come in on Saturday and Sunday, I’m coming for you?” The weekends she spent, the late nights she worked—she did that for her research.
And, I mean, of course it's Julian of Norwich next, spending twenty years in a cell thinking about the meaning of her visions. A voluntary cell, but also not one she could get out of. This is a really good article about the philosophy of her thought, so if that's something you are into then click through, but this quotation tells you a lot about how important it was for her to speak out about what she had seen:
Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?
I'm going to be honest with you, I'm not actually wild for Emily Dickinson or her poetry, I'm including this because it's quite funny to see a woman just absolutely checking out of stuff she is expected to do, and very funny that her family's term for this was 'elfing it'. ELFING IT. One to think about as the yoke of festive responsibilities descends. Anyway, most of her poetry was also discovered posthumously, so this definitely fits the rubric:
Emily Dickinson loved to flee. Long before […] her withdrawal from society became almost absolute, she devised elaborate ways of avoiding people, a habit her family referred to as ‘elfing it’. When she was sent to deliver a letter, she would ring the doorbell and leg it; she greeted family guests with what she called ‘sorry grace’ and played the piano grudgingly – and only if visitors remained in an adjoining room. She avoided chores like the plague – ‘God keep me from what they call households’ – and left the burden of domestic toil to her mother and sister: ‘I do love to run fast,’ she said, ‘and hide away from them.’ She arrived late to church to escape small talk.
I saw such a good film last week (it's horrible btw) so let's have a Fem Fri about… Halloween stuff? Horror and dressing up and that. Let's go.
The film that insipired this Fem Fri is Host, which is written by and mostly stars women. It's set on Zoom (I knowwwww but this one really works) and during early lockdown and it really captures the claustrophobia and misery of that whole experience. As well, obviously, as a load of other experiences I didn't actually have and I hope you didn't either:
'Jemma, how do you feel about a wine bottle being thrown at your head? Do you think you could do that stunt?'.
Here's another amazing horror film by/for/about a woman – it's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour. This quote, from an interview with Amirpour, really captures the dreamlike beauty of this movie. Unlike Host it is not too scary, I think you'd really like it:
But it’s not Iran, it’s like a fairy tale world, it’s universal. It’s like any town where there’s corruption and there’s secrets and there’s loneliness and people that got dealt a shit hand. They’re searching for something in this loneliness. I mean, that’s what I am and that’s why I made the film.
Obviously not everyone in this list is dressing up per se, but I think it's fair to say that Janelle Monae is because no one needs to wear that many top hats. This is at the Met Gala which as far as I can tell is a party where dressing up is absolutely mandatory and someone else picks the theme. Not quite my worst nightmare but put it like this, I've never been bent out of shape about not getting an invite. Anyway. Janelle!
Time, November 14, 1927
LA Evening Post-Record, 29th March 1918
Harford Courant, 11th April 1928 (also… bimbo? I mean it makes sense now I think about it!)
Altoona Tribune, 27th June 1923
