Thank you to the friend and subscriber who sent me the link that kicks off today's Fem Fri. I think you're going to like this one too because it's all about women and their relationships to, and friendships with, dogs throughout the years.
We start with the indigenous women of the Pacific Northwest, who made blankets and clothes from dog fur in what seemed to be a happy and mutually supportive relationship:
Back in their village longhouses, the women transformed that fur into yarn, spinning it and mixing it with the wool of mountain goats and adding plant fibers and goose down to make the thread strong and warm. They beat the yarn with white diatomaceous earth to deter insects and mildew. They dyed some of the yarn red with alder bark, tinted it a light yellow with lichen, and produced blue and black threads using minerals or huckleberries. The rest—an ivory-hued yarn—they set aside. Then the women set up their looms and began to weave, turning out twill-patterned blankets of various sizes, some with elaborate and colorful geometric designs, others with simple stripes. The dogs did more than provide fur. They were also part of village life: sometimes, a favorite wooly dog would keep a weaver company.
This history of Pekingese dogs is interesting on its own – they were bred to look like tiny stylised lions! They were bred to think they were tiny stylised lions! but also because a woman, the Empress Dowager Cixi, was maybe responsible for how immensely fashionable Pekes were in the West in the early 20th century:
When the Manchu or Qing Dynasty overthrew the Ming in 1644, once more the Lion Dogs survived. Documentation on them is scarce for much of the era, until the time of the Empress Dowager Cixi (or Tzu Hsi). She was dotingly fond of Pekingese dogs, and during her rapprochement with westerners after the Boxer Rebellion, she gave Pekes as gifts to some European and American visitors. The empress herself had one particular favorite named Shadza, which means "Fool."
Finally, here's Mathilde De Cagny, who trained a dog you might know – Moose, the wee Jack Russell from Frasier. A lot of her job, it seems, it getting dogs to like people more by putting pate behind their ears:
But I like the spontaneity of what’s going to happen and dealing with it in the moment. I’m self-taught — I learned by intuition and by being around dogs. I like to work with their personalities […] It’s kind of like cooking — you see what’s in the fridge and you make something out of it. I never quite know exactly how I’m going to get something done; I take my cues first from my animals and then from the director.
I've been reading the loveliest book this week, it's Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. It's about Italy in the early 20th century so, you know, not entirely untroubled, but it's also about what it means to be a part of a family and what it is to build a family.
Let's start with Natalia Ginzburg herself:
At the age of eighteen Natalia published her first novella, I Bandini, in the distinguished Florentine periodical Solaria, following it with works in Il Lavoro and Letteratura. She was the first to translate Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann into Italian. Completed in 1937, it was published by Einaudi only in 1946, but its autobiographical nature particularly influenced Ginzburg’s own writings […] she identified with Proust, having herself as a child felt profoundly marginalized. She always found it necessary to bring the reader back to her childhood as a point of departure for her work.
Here's a review of the book, including her father's opinions on Proust – you don't have to agree with him for this sentence to delight you:
“At home, we lived in a recurring nightmare filled with my father’s sudden outbursts, exploding as he did often over the most trifling things.” These outbursts are punctuated by insults like “moron,” “buffoon,” “poser,” “dimwit,” and “lummox” (her mother prefers the more flowery “hooligan” and “rapscallion”), which her father lobs at his family, friends, colleagues, and even the ghost of Marcel Proust, who, in his estimation, “must have been a jackass!”
Her family were friends with Anna Kuliscioff. You'll notice in the below article that Kuliscioff "conducted her life in defiance of the dominant morals of her age", something that Natalia Ginzburg's family only spoke about in whispers and mutters so little wee Natalia was fundamentally confused for a long time about whether or not she (Anna Kuliscioff) was married, had a child, etc.
Kuliscioff opposed “the confused conception that considered the women’s movement as a matter of sex, as an indistinct mass.” Accordingly, she rejected the universalistic discourses of bourgeois feminists and their elitist defense of the interests of upper-class, privileged representatives of womanhood. As she remarked, if “for bourgeois women, men and exploiters are synonymous, for working class women, the exploiter can also be a woman.” Kuliscioff thus deemed “sentimental and utopian” a feminist struggle that ignored social divisions and concealed the conflicting interests of women opposed to one another across class divisions.
Isn't it beautiful outside? Well, it is in London at least, right now. I hope that it's beautiful where you are as well. I hope your Friday is off to a good start. One of the things that is beautiful to me now is that I am planting wee plants on my windowsill AND THEY ARE ACTUALLY GROWING so here is a Fem Fri about plants and that.
Vita Sackville-West was good at basically everything, including gardening. I had no idea about this until today but she is in large part responsible for how great Sissinghurst looks:
Vita was a gifted amateur who gardened instinctively and without the desire for perfection. When it came to planting she didn’t want to see the soil but vibrant flower beds bursting with colour – in her words she wanted to ‘cram cram, every chink and cranny’.
Staying between the wars, here's Norah Lindsay, who took up gardening to avoid penury after her marriage collapsed. She was really good at both landscape design (pictured) and making people like her (not pictured)
In 1924, at the age of 51, with her marriage having fallen apart and with her financial situation dire, she put her garden design skills to use and embarked upon a garden design career that continued for the next two decades. Her commissions ranged from manor houses on the country lanes of England, and grand aristocratic estates, to royal gardens on the Continent. Her client base consisted of royalty, English nobility, and American expatriates.
Gertrude Jekyll was also good at everything, and I've seen her lovely garden at Lindisfarne. Just as soon as you are able, go to Lindisfarne, it is an incredible place that I think about often:
She was a musician, composer, embroiderer, woodworker, metalworker, artist, garden writer, photographer and botanist. Above all, though, she was the creator of plans and designs for around 300 gardens in Britain and some abroad in France and the United States. She wrote some 15 books and over 2,000 articles for magazines, including Country Life and The Garden, (1870) founded by William Robinson. She also photographed and developed her own pictures.
How are you doing? I hope you are well and safe and looking forward to the weekend. I also hope that you are excited for a newsletter of links about women and data and privacy, because that is what I have for you today.
Let's start with Joy Buolamwini, who researches and fights algorithmic bias, particularly around facial recognition. She founded the awesomely named Algorithmic Justice League as well, here's an interview about her work:
Within the facial recognition community you have benchmark data sets which are meant to show the performance of various algorithms so you can compare them. There is an assumption that if you do well on the benchmarks then you’re doing well overall. But we haven’t questioned the representativeness of the benchmarks, so if we do well on that benchmark we give ourselves a false notion of progress.
Karen Levy's work is on data privacy in intimate relationships. Incredibly important work that I'd love to see more B2C tech take account of. Her paper is here, it's longish so maybe one to print off and read over the weekend:
This article provides an overview of intimate threats: a class of privacy threats that can arise within our families, romantic partnerships, close friendships, and caregiving relationships. Many common assumptions about privacy are upended in the context of these relationships, and many otherwise effective protective measures fail when applied to intimate threats. […] we explore implications for both technical privacy design and policy, and offer design recommendations for ameliorating intimate privacy risks.
Finally, as you might know I work for a data privacy company and for IWD I interviewed the amazing Ivana Bartoletti. You can watch it here, rest assured that although it's for my company you don't need to sign up and at no point do I try to sell you enterprise software:
International Women's Day is coming up and I'm sure you all have the same question: what will my partner get me for IWD '21? If your partner is a woman, I'm sure you're equally wondering: how can I adequately recognise her magnificence? Well never fear because here is the official Fem Fri IWD gift guide.
This could be a thoughtful gift – a canvas by the second gen abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell (no relation, but great to see other Mitchells doing well):
If you're interested in a bit more on Joan Mitchell's life and career before you start bidding, this article provides a summary:
An oft-repeated anecdote recounts how, at a party, a man once approached Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell and asked them what they, as “women artists,” thought about something. “Elaine,” said Mitchell, “let’s get the hell out of here.” Critic Peter Schjeldahl, a one-time witness to the artist’s meanness, concludes that Mitchell was quick to escape any situation that threatened her freedom. In a 2002 review of her Whitney Museum retrospective, Schjeldahl wrote: “Her orneriness was the palace guard of her lyricism.”
Now here's something absolutely stunning. How about a first edition of A Room of One's Own, one of fewer than 500 signed by Virginia Woolf herself. This doesn't just say I love and value you – it says I love you, I value you, and I know that you need the right conditions to succeed as you deserve.
Of course the whole text of A Room of One's Own is online which means that you can read it in full for considerably less than £31K:
Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here–how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; 'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.
Finally, what could be more lovely than a ring that is a big startled bird made of precious and semi precious gems. The hardwearing gemstones of topaz, tourmaline and diamond make it ideal for everyday wear. This really communicates WOAH GUESS WHAT ITS INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY AGAIN AND YOURE STILL SO INCREDIBLE!!! (birds are great but they don't use a lot of punctuation)
I've been getting into watching plays from the National Theatre app, if you've not tried it I definitely recommend it. It used to cost about as much as a streaming service, but now it seems to be free. I don't know how long that is going to last so maybe now would be a good time to try it out.
This newsletter was inspired by watching Lucy Kirkwood's Mosquitoes last week. It's got Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams in it, so really the top two Olivias, and it's as good as you might imagine from that. It's also kind of baggy! Don't let that put you off though:
It juggles so many strands, personalities and ideas that it hasn’t a hope of keeping them all in the air, but every single one of them makes a fascinating pattern as it falls.
A short play, maybe good for a weekday night, is Polly Stenham's Julie. It's an excellently staged retelling of Stringberg's Miss Julie, and it messed with my emotions in a way I really enjoyed. Here's an interview with the director, Carrie Cracknell, which illuminates a lot about what was good in Julie:
"I do think we live in a culture of liking to know where we're being led," she says. "I would much rather be drawn into a work, and asked lots of difficult questions, than be taken on a well-worn story where I know what the outcome will be." She pauses then adds: "We still make enormous divisions between dance and theatre, and actually all acting is movement. All acting is breath."
Here's another play adapted from another play, it's Yerma from the Lorca. This wasn't adapted by a woman but obviously the main character was a woman and she was played by Billie Piper who is SO SO GOOD. It's a pretty brutal watch so I can't recommend it if you're feeling sad about basically anything but especially parenting related stuff. If you think it's the sort of thing you could like, though, I can't recommend it highly enough:
I'm reading a great book right now, it's called Square Haunting and it's by Francesca Wade. As a project it's sort of like a very long Fem Fri, about five women between the wars and the connection is that they all lived in Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury. It fills one with a very strong desire to live in Bloomsbury (even if the people there are having a miserable time of it) or at least to visit/look at Bloomsbury. If you live walking distance from Mecklenburgh Square, please feel free to take a photo of it and text me that photo. I'm also scratching this itch via estate agent listings but it's not the same.
Here's a review:
Francesca Wade has made a lofty, secluded square into a terrific subject for her first book. She wandered into Mecklenburgh Square, on the edge of Bloomsbury, by chance. She responded to it fervently, researched it vigorously – and identified it as a magnet for adventurous women. Her starting point is modest: she writes about the Mecklenburgh years of five 20th-century women, not all of them long-term residents. Her reach is wide: Imagist poetry, the rise of Russian studies, detective fiction, the League of Nations. Her aim is high: she argues that taken together these lives suggest a new way of looking at the mid-20th century.
Anyway, the chapter I've just read is about H. D., imagiste and moderniste. She was friends (frenemies?) with D. H. Lawrence and, well:
H. D.! We all have these dreams! There's a really good reason why we don't write them down!
On the other hand:
Also, fiery golden dream D. H Lawrence was totally correct – H. D. is a stunning writer. Here's the first section of her amazing poem Eurydice, if you have time to spend with a poem today I strongly commend this one:
How are you! I have some good links about women and films for you today. Let's get cracking.
We begin with Lisa Enroth, who was the sole attendee of the Gothengerg film festival. Just chilling on an island with a load of films.
She also agreed not to take her phone OR BOOKS so plenty of time to spend with movies/her own thoughts. I'm not sure how well I would have done with this but she seems ready for it here:
at Goteborg, the Nordic countries’ most important festival, organizers have made an unusual virtue of necessity. “So many people who have been home alone, unable to meet friends or family, have turned to cinema for company and comfort,” said the festival’s artistic director, Jonas Holmberg. “We wanted to experiment with that, to isolate that feeling, and take it to the extreme. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we isolate the person on a small island with nothing but films?’” […] Like health care workers everywhere, Enroth has found the past several months stressful. “Every day at the hospital we’ve been dealing with so much,” she said. “With all the patients, and all the new protocols, I’ve never felt so unisolated in my life.” So when she saw the video’s call for applications, she didn’t hesitate. “Alone in nature, on an island? Plus movies? I was like, ‘Yes, I need this.’”
Here's an amazing film project by a woman, Véronique Aubouy. She is directing a complete read of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, getting normal people to read it aloud in different places where they are. Like an extremely long highbrow TikTok, I guess. Obviously I'm wildly into it:
Travelling from place to place, I read any books I could lay my hands on. I discovered each country through the bias of its novels, its poems. I fantasised the whole journey at the same time as actually living it. It was a marvelous sensation. It was as if I passed by the characters I'd read in novels at every corner of the road. I followed the routes they dictated, choosing to visit villages that featured in books… I felt I was actually part of the stories. Reality and fiction seemed to fuse into one. It was also during that trip that I began reading A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Here's something I've been getting into lately, it's lunchtime food properly from my childhood. Quavers and Pom Bear crisps and ravioli from a can. Italians, please avert your eyes at that last bit. At least I am not having them on toast.
Going even further back in the past (and, to be honest, far more authentically Italian food) I will never not be utterly rapt at stories on the excavation of Pompeii. They're still digging it up! They keep finding new awesome stuff! In this case restaurants, which were all over the place:
According to Dr. Anna Maria Sodo, director and archaeology officer of the Antiquarium of Boscoreale […] only 40 percent of the urban dwellings of the working poor and 66 percent of the middle-class homes had fixed hearths for cooking. To meet this high demand, there were at least 80 food and beverage outlets at Pompeii.
Of course, it was great for the ancient Pompeiians that they could go to a restaurant whenever they wanted – this is all relative of course – I'm not saying they didn't have their own problems – anyway, here's an excellent and detailed guide to making an American breakfast sandwich. The article doesn't explicitly say this but you could also wrap it in tinfoil for your trip from the kitchen to the office, then unwrap it and try not to get the bits in your keyboard:
I have not been doing anything impressive or productive; most of my days are spent listening to the soft fizz, like a Coke being opened slowly, of my brain disintegrating; I’ve started several craft-based hobbies that have not progressed since May of 2020 and my inbox is like a war zone. The one thing I have managed to focus on and find any fulfillment in is perfecting the breakfast sandwich. I have so much admiration for y’all who really discovered the meditative joy of making risottos and three-day sourdough breads, but that is not my ministry. I, like many people, have found eating regularly to be very challenging of late; I have accepted that the best way to get myself to eat meals is to make sure they’re something I really like and also something easy and fast to put together.
Northern hemisphere friends, isn't it nice that it's no longer dark at 4pm? Southern hemisphere friends, I hope you're loving that it's still the summer. Equatorial friends, I don't have weather based relatable content for you but I hope things are going fantastically.
Having covered some of the top Fem Fri preoccupations in the last three weeks – books, music and art – this week we turn to the fourth big one, which is critters.
Most readers will know me as a fan of corvids of all stripes, so naturally I was delighted to read Sabrina Schalz' work on urban crows, which shows that they pay more attention to unfamiliar languages. Not for treats. It seems like they are genuinely interested. There's a Twitter thread here, which is a good summary:
Large-Billed Crows in Tokyo pay more attention to an unfamiliar language than to the local Japanese, without prior training or rewards.
When presented with sentences spoken by multiple speakers, the crows showed significantly more responses to the Dutch than to the Japanese, which suggests that they discriminate two languages with distinctive linguistic features, and that they might also be more attentive to an unfamiliar language, Dutch, compared to a familiar one, Japanese. These results further extend the hypothesis that language discrimination is based on a general perceptual mechanism that predates the evolution of language.
Crows are ideally suited to urban environments, where they constantly get to hear new words and solve new puzzles, and apparently it's the same thing for mice. Next time you see a mouse in your flat (I hope you don't) you can think about how much more clever that mouse is than the equivalent mouse in the countryside. We know this because of the work of Valeria Mazza and Anja Guenther:
Valeria Mazza of the University of Potsdam and Anja Guenther of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, in Plön, captured 17 striped field mice from farmland and 14 others from various places in central Berlin. They kept these animals in a laboratory for a year, to acclimatise them, and then challenged them with various tasks which, if performed successfully, would yield a reward of food. Tasks included opening the window panes of a house made of Lego bricks; opening the lid of a Petri dish; and yanking out a wad of paper jammed inside a clear plastic tube.[…] Both groups seemed equally eager to participate in the tasks, but the urban mice were better at solving the novel ones. They had a 77% success rate, to the rural mice’s 52%. When it came to the control task, though, both were equally good, solving it 85% and 88% of the time respectively.
I'm kind of interested in the "various places in central Berlin" you can catch a mouse. It probably really changes your relationship with department stores and restaurants to be doing that. Or maybe they just asked their mates to put down humane traps. Either way. Various places.
H. D.! We all have these dreams! There's a really good reason why we don't write them down!
