How are you doing, are you well? I want to introduce you today to an artist whose work I love, Hito Steyerl, but first I want to tell you how I encountered her work.
I was in New York for work. We'd been doing a big event, the event had gone well, the afterparty had gone well, then we went to a bar after the afterparty and had shots and I guess they went down well, then, much later, we got a cab to a club night in Brooklyn. I remember having conversations like the ones you have in fresher's week. The ones where one part of your mind is thinking THIS IS A GREAT INTERACTION! THiNGS ARE GOING VERY WELL! and the other is thinking but am i absorbing or constructing meaning? shouldn't that be happening? traditionally? in a conversation?
This sets the scene for how I felt the next morning.
I and a friend – also feeling rancid – had made plans to go to MoMa the day after the event, and like troopers we stuck. right. with. that resolve. I don't think we knew how bad things actually were until we were getting tickets and, on finding out that we were from London, the woman behind the desk told us that she was going to London, what would we recommend doing?
"…"
"…"
"…"
"…"
"The Tate… Modern… is a good gallery", my friend finally managed.
"Also… the Hayward… it's very close. To the Tate. Modern.", I said in a feeble attempt at a "build".
Those of you who know London will have spotted what just happened. Someone asked us for a recommendation for London, the most visited city in the world, and we volunteered the most visited tourist attraction in London and another gallery a matter of yards away from it. She already worked in a major art gallery in a world city! She had probably heard about the Tate Modern.
I stood there, feeling like sweat was being physically squeezed from my person. My eyebrows, my breastbone, my knees. I was about to make a last ditch attempt to salvage the situation and say "you could… have… a curry", when this woman – now looking really quite worried – pointed out to us that we had our tickets and could perhaps take the opportunity to get out of line.
I hope that this paints a picture for you of how we were feeling when we found Hito Steyerl's amazing work LIQUIDITY INC. This is the setup; note the beanbags and the calming blue light:
The runtime of LIQUIDITY INC is apparently 30 minutes. We certainly watched it in its entirety. I think we probably spent about 45 minutes spaced out in front of it but it's not impossible that we watched it all twice plus a bit. It was perfect. Weird, funny, disconcerting, kind. I wish it were online. If it comes to a gallery near you (for example, the Tate Modern or the Hayward) make every effort to see it.
Here's an interview with Hito Steyerl about a London exhibition she did:
Actual Reality OS is one of four commissions Steyerl has produced for the Serpentine, each exploring politics and technology. Inside its darkened Sackler Gallery, stacks of screens show accelerated footage of plants evolving. Familiar varieties – lily, rose, cactus – have had their futures predicted by artificial intelligence. Steyerl describes these sci-fi flora as “ruderal” – a term for plants that colonise disturbed lands, such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
What is up! Hope you're well. Today's newsletter is on an obscure theme, but I think you're going to enjoy it – it's all about lost music by women.
Here's the beautiful story of Mirry Lomer, who had… an entire music career for an audience of one. She composed music and her nephew recorded it. He preserved loads of secondary materials too, films and photographs and poems she wrote. A beautiful project to make this body of work and a beautiful project to bring it to wider light:
we invited director Camella Kirk to re-work some of the found footage, which has brought magical new insights into Mirry and her life, her talent, warmth and her character. Camella highlighted the poetic rapport between Mirry and Geoffrey, who had great fun creating these experimental, intimate vignettes together. We witness them playing with camera angles and set-ups, lingering sometimes at length on details of flowers and the landscapes close to where they lived, illuminated by trippy hyperreal colours. The dual stereoscopic slides demand you look and look again. We pored over them and chose a selection, which you see here and throughout the record artwork.
A near-contemporary of Mirry's, Zabelle Panosian, recorded for Columbia Records in 1918. This article was written, it seems, before more of her music was found, but you can listen to an album by her here and if you like podcasts there is one here, might be nice if you fancy a run this evening. Here's the article anyway:
Zabelle Panosian recorded her first sides, including her masterpiece, Groung. I first heard it about a decade ago on a broken copy of the disc and worked for days, obsessively, to restore it, ultimately publishing it on my compilation To What Strange Place in 2011. Tens of thousands of people have heard it since then, and it was arranged for strings and played by the Kronos Quartet in both New York and Yerevan a couple of years ago.
Connie Converse was folk singer/songwriter ahead of her time. There are links to her music in the article and I love these details of her life growing up and making things fun for her brother:
One of Phil’s favorite memories is of Connie painting on the sewing room wall a life-sized portrait of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, which she then used as the backdrop to performances for her brothers. “At the time,” he says, “I had no idea other little boys weren’t a tenth as lucky as me.” Phil is biased, of course, but Connie was objectively remarkable. She was a polymath, and when she wasn’t inventing games to cure her brothers’ boredom, she was reading and memorizing poetry or the biographical details of famous politicians and explorers. Once, she and Phil — “Mostly Sis,” says Phil — mapped out the entire journey in Pilgrim’s Progress, meticulously diagramming locations like the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Slough of Despond.
How are you doing? Well, I hope. I hope you are safe and that everyone you love is safe.
I also hope that you are ready to be distracted by some guff about books, because that is exactly what I have for you today. This includes my yearly review of books, from what was a pretty big year for my reading. You already have my books of the year, of course. There are more recommendations in this review, as well as a link to a big list if that's the sort of thing you are into:
I also reread A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was, yes, very well written and so forth, but also felt like Joyce himself was just skewering me aged 17. I last read Portrait when I, like its main character, was an insufferable teenage try hard. As I read I could almost hear myself thinking, mmmmmm this dude thinks about Ibsen when he walks past shops and so do I.
Potentially one of the reasons we can read all of these books is Betty Ballantine, key innovator in the paperback format. And also in science fiction! Thank you Betty:
“She birthed the science fiction novel,” […] With the help of Frederik Pohl, a science fiction writer, editor and agent, Mr. Wise said, “She sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them.” In doing so she helped a wave of science fiction and fantasy writers emerge. They included Joanna Russ, author of “The Female Man” (1975), a landmark novel of feminist science fiction, and Samuel R. Delany, whose “Dhalgren” (1975) was one of the best-selling science fiction novels of its time.
Now here's one of my favourite authors, Iris Murdoch, with a review of a Charles Sprawson book about swimming. I present this for the sheer joy in the reading of it. She's so good:
I am not in the athletic sense a keen swimmer, but I am a devoted one. On hot days in the Oxford summer my husband and I usually manage to slip into the Thames a mile or two above Oxford, where the hay in the water meadows is still owned and cut on the medieval strip system. The art is to draw no attention to oneself but to cruise quietly by the reeds like a water rat: seeing and unseen from that angle, one can hear the sedge warblers’ mysterious little melodies, and sometimes a cuckoo flies cuckooing over our heads, or a kingfisher flashes past.
Happy new year! This is the time of year when I like to rank the women playable characters in games; usually computer games, but this year I'm going to rank the goddesses whose powers you can enlist to help you in 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon. This is obviously pretty niche #content, so firstly I recommend the game which is super fun and of which I have played more than 100 hours this year, and secondly they are all historical goddesses so you can enjoy reading about that too.
I don't want to get super into the rules and stuff, so here's the basics of what you need to know about the game:
Mespotamian goddess of love, beauty, sex, war, justice and political power. In the game, though, she is one of the more niche goddesses, sometimes helping you to win in one fell swoop and sometimes having basically no powers at all. So indie. So above it all. Don't let anyone change you Ishtar.
Roman goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, and the sponsor of arts, trade, and strategy. Again, super cool. But remember how I told you that in this game winning is one of the things that is good? Minerva helps you to prevent your opponent from winning, which is fine, but not quite as good as winning yourself. Nice owl though.
Now we're getting into it. Mesoptamian goddess of writing, learning, and the harvest. Nisaba lets you steal the achievements of your opponent, which is satisfying in its own right, gets you money and points, and might actually mean that you win outright right then. Go ahead and snake those achievements, you have earned it.
Phoenician goddess of fertility, sexuality, and war. Astarte gets you both money and points, and is accordingly quite a treasure. She's placed outside the top three because it's not quite the vulgar wealth represented by her sister:
Look, in this game, 12 coins is SO MUCH MONEY. You can do so much to advance your agenda or frustrate that of your opponent with the kind gift of Tanit, Phoenician goddess of the end of the drought. MAKE IT RAIN, BEAUTIFUL GIRL.
AKA Beautiful Virtuous Isis, so called because the Egyptian gods who are men in this game are absolute dicks. She's an Egyptian goddess whose maternal aid was invoked in healing spells to benefit ordinary people. She benefits you in this game specifically by letting you build a wonder, which is, you will remember, good.
SO POINTSY. 9 points is a lot, easily enough to tip the balance of the game in your favour. Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation just hands them to you. Here's something fun to do – whenever your opponent activates Aphrodite, say "Is that yer bloomin' girlfriend." It's always funny, or at least it still is to me after over 100 hours.
Of course Christmas is going to be different from the usual run of Christmases for many of us this year, so I thought you might like to hear a story about a Christmas I had when I was quite young, when I was six.
My family were moving from the west coast of Scotland to the east for my father's work, and we were between houses. We'd been staying in a hotel (which I guess work had been paying for?) but took a short term rental in a house in the Edinburgh suburb of Barnton over the festive season itself.
When you're a little kid, pretty much everything is exciting and this house that we would live in for a month was no exception. In my and my brother's room, there was an ancient book of fairy tales with all the scary stuff left in. The master bedroom was obsessively decorated in lilac, like Cildo Meireles' Red Shift but for the suburbs and also the 1980s*. One of the most immediately awesome things about this house was that after only a short time of playing in any of the rooms, you could do very good hand prints anywhere you wanted. (This feature went away faster than I would have liked; I later found out that my parents had the carpets steam cleaned at their own expense).
That year, my folks went all out for Christmas. The way I remember it, pretty much every day in that house was a day of feasting and revelry. There were gifts under the tree in the morning – diminishing in volume, but still things to unwrap – from Christmas Day until the new year. In a move that dates this story pretty precisely, my parents rented a VCR and let me and my brother watch the things we liked again and again and again and that is how I engage with culture to this very day.
This Christmas is, for my brother and me, perfect. Whenever we describe to one another a Christmas we've enjoyed, the question will always be "but was it as good as the Barnton Christmas?" and the answer will always be "Barnton was the best Christmas".
Weird Christmases are the best Christmases, mega love to everyone. Last time I did a childhood memories Fem Fri I also included a recipe, let's do that again. Staying with the 1980s, here's a recipe for a gingerbread house from a book that was a huge part of my childhood. My mum had this book and made cakes from it, presumably I reminisced about it at some point because a friend's mum went through a lot of charity shops until she found it and gave it to me as a gift. In this season of unprompted kindness, I hope you enjoy it:
Look it's so good it's on the cover:
Much love,
Alex.
*I don't want to overplay this in the main text but the extent of this was genuinely weird even for a six year old. It's not just that the walls and lampshades were lilac; every detail was lilac. The book by the bedside was Maeve Binchy's The Lilac Bus. I had to have it explained to me, not once but several times, that Maeve was the name and mauve was the colour and they weren't at all the same thing.
It's the last Friday before Christmas, and that means one thing – it's time for the Fem Fri books of the year! This year I was pretty focussed on reading books by/about/relevant to Scott Fitzgerald (NB not a woman) so this list is correspondingly very heavy on nonfiction. I think you are going to like it.
Further notes:
I'm going to assume you don't need me to recommend you The Mirror and the Light
Ditto Normal People
A list of my books of the year specifically about Scott Fitzgerald is available on application.
You don't have to be into ghosts and the supernatural to enjoy this book, which is also secretly a history of art and printing. It's a look at how our view of what ghosts are and what they can do has changed, in part as the means we have to depict ghosts has changed. For example in the medieval age ghosts were basically "heavies" who would hit you with a chunk of wood because you owed them money when they were alive. Obviously if you are into ghosts and the supernatural this is a wall to wall treat.
This superb book about the Spanish Flu of 1918 was my pandemic reading for the year, and it was also modernist/early 20th century reading. Pale Rider really helped me to think about how people have responded to the pandemic – Spinney makes the point that they tend to be forgotten, that their narrative structure is not pleasing and so we don't think about them in the way we do about wars. The Spanish Flu killed more people than the First World War but the number of words devoted to it is much, much smaller! Lots in here that feels familiar, really well written, definitely add it to your list.
Since about 2003 I've been saying things like, aaaah yeah I should definitely read some Willa Cather!!! What I learned this year is that if you think you should read an author you probably should. My Àntonia is the single showing from fiction on this list and it's a beautiful and medium-sad (the best kind of sad) story of childhood and friendship and love. There's also a lovely description of a Christmas so this could be a really good one to curl up with in ACANYNY*.
The subtitle of this book is "A History of Sexuality in America" and the small, dense print, as well as the fact that it's really an academic book made me a bit wary of it. There was no need for this wariness. It's so engagingly written, and there's some fairly startling stuff that's handled with a delightful deadpan. If you're interested in the historical antecedents of people behaving dreadfully, saying "sorry" and then getting away with it, I'm not going to say this book explains it all, but the chapter on the early Puritans is pretty illuminating.
This is the only hardcore modernist book on my list and YOU GUYS IT IS SO GOOD. It was a really great companion piece to Pale Rider, as it's about the influence of the First World War on modernism and, I suppose, of modernism on the First World War. There are lots of primary sources in the letters of soldiers at the front; it's about modernism as a lived experience more than about modernism as an intellectual movement. I read it at the start of the year and I'm still thinking about it. If you are interested in any aspect of the history of the 20th Century, I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Hey, the next time I see you it will be Christmas Day! So happy Christmas everyone, I hope it's restorative and wonderful.
How are you doing? Well, I hope. You will be even better with my albums of the year, these are all the party bangers all the time. ENJOY.
Firstly, this isn't an album, it's a mix and you'll love it. Avalon Emerson's DJ Kicks starts kind of elegiac and then moves into str8 up party bangers, it's been this year's top way of getting me into a Friday night. Here's how it opens, the youtube is also worth watching because it's a sweet home movie of a roadtrip she took. With karaoke:
Let's start with Dua Lipa. I liked it when Dua Lipa released an album in what was for me the low point of the year, on the grounds that people needed to cheer up a bit. DEAD RIGHT, I DID, and this album was a huge part of it. Here's my favourite song from it, fans of the 1990s (or, to be honest, people who remember the 1990s) will enjoy this particularly:
I also loved Georgia's album, it's extremely sweet and happy. There is an innocence to her songs that I engaged with really deeply, and I hope you will as well. Also, ahead of this video YouTube gave me an ad by "Visit Finland" which was just Santa telling you to tell people that you love them. It's good advice, thank you Santa and thank you Finland.
Now we move into the "elegiac party bangers" section of my recommendations. Don't worry you're still going to have fun and dance! Rina Sawayama has you absolutely covered there, but you can also feel lots of nostalgia and maybe, when you have finished dancing, stare out of the window:
Denai Moore combines spacey with a sense of creeping dread that just absolutely works. So if you need some Saturday Night Space Madness in your festivities – and I would argue that you do – check her out:
Okay, you know the first time you heard Wicked Game and you felt like you'd been listening to it all your life, like it had always been a part of your life, in a good way? That's exactly how I felt the first time I heard India Jordan's For You, and that sheen of perfection has just not worn off:
This week Margo sent me a bear meme, and it prompted the realisation that I don't remember, any more, how the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears ends. The bits I remember are:
Goldilocks gains entry to house in the woods, samples porridge and variety of furnishings before settling in a bed
Narrative focus shifts to the occupants of the house, who we discover are bears* and understandably angry at the incursion into their home and pantry
Goldilocks wakes and finds herself entirely surrounded by bears
Then what happens? I've done some informal polling, and the answers vary from "Goldilocks runs away screaming" (respondent born after 1980) to "Goldilocks eaten by bears" (respondent born before 1980) to "dance off" (I don't think this is a serious answer). Anyway, if you want to let me know what you think happens, I'd be interested.
These thoughts of childhood stories brought me naturally to the incredible work of Iona Opie, who as part of a husband and wife team documented British childhood… things. Nursery rhymes and games and little bits of childhood folklore.
Let's start with her obituary and this beautiful quotation:
Their first publication was I Saw Esau (1947), a slim precursor of the wide spines of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) and The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955). The Opies applied years of rigour to an oral culture too commonplace to have received attention before: their scholarship, informally communicated, was important to the postwar discovery of the words of ordinary people. “It took 50 generations to make up Mother Goose,” Iona said. “Nursery rhymes are the smallest great poems of the world’s literature.”
The British Library has recordings of her research, you can listen to this today! There's loads of it too, although you probably need to go to the BL for most of it:
Their audio archive consists of 85 open reel and cassette tapes recorded by Iona during research for The Singing Game (1985) and deposited with the British Library in 1998.
What's up! I've been a bit glum these last few weeks, but last weekend I had two big walks with friends and it properly cheered me up for the whole week. This isn't related to today's newsletter, particularly, but maybe if you are feeling a bit glum a walk or outdoor time with a friend might help. I hope so anyway. 💗
Now, of course we've covered Anne Lister (businesswoman, diarist and lesbian) in Fem Fri before, but I've only just found out that the woman who decoded her diaries, Helena Whitbread, was also quite amazing. She left school at 13 and didn't go back to education until she was 35, following which she made her incredible literary discovery.
Helena instead discovered the diaries of Anne Lister, and the “crypthand” code that filled a large amount of the journals. At that time she was completely unaware of the journals’ explosive contents […] The diaries and their contents had been hidden for over a hundred years.
If you don't want to do that, perhaps consider that you might… actually… be Anne Lister:
Do you feel confined by the expectations of the era you are born into? Are your desires repressed both literally and metaphorically under several layers of thick fabric? Do you often stare out across a cold, gray, windswept beach and wish for more? Individual circumstances may vary, but odds are good that you may in fact be stuck within the plot of a serious lesbian period drama.
I was a bit low on inspiration for Fem Fri today, so I had a big think about what I'd want to read in a newsletter and what I came up with was a big absorbing read and something hopeful and nice and also something that would make me laugh. So that's what I have today and they are all by or about women and I hope you enjoy them too.
Here's one of my favourite writers, Patricia Lockwood, writing about. Well. I'm not sure where I am in my relationship with Nabokov right now, but Patricia Lockwood writes very well about what is appealing and what is also clammily unappealing about Nabokov. If you have opinions on him, I'd like to hear those too.
If you read Lolita as a young girl, you feel clearly, colourfully, photographically seen – someone is paying attention to the little tendon twitching at the side of your ankle! ‘The thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood.’ I know many women of my generation who bear a half-shamed attachment to it, for the same reason many of them love Léon; the girl still nominally the focus. It is easy – it seemed easy to me, when I was a teenager – to discard the surrounding pervert, and simply keep his eye.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet and a nature writer, and this kind and gentle interview with her might be something that makes you feel happy today:
Knowing names correctly is everything; it’s a key to connection and tenderness and a turn to kindness. When you get to learn about an animal or plant, get to know their names, when you learn that there are birds out there who read the stars to fly home at night (indigo buntings), and how wondrous and lovely that is — maybe it might become harder to want to use a product that clogs up the sky with smog so these birds can’t see the stars? More hesitant to cut down trees where these birds live.
As part of his transition plan ahead of the inauguration, Biden has created a task force and advisory panel devoted specifically to boyfriends who don’t like or comment on your posts enough.
https://www.icaboston.org/art/hito-steyerl/liquidity-inc
