And thank you to to friend and subscriber who sparked off today's Fem Fri, which is about arty/designery book projects by women. There's a bit of modernism in there too, so something for everyone I hope!
Let's start with the modernism, and Bookmaking on the Distaff Side. It's a collection of designs, poetry and articles by women, collected by the wonderfully stern looking Jane Bissell Grabhorn:
It includes a contribution by Gertrude Stein! Here's a photo:
More on the history of the book here. Only 100 copies were printed so if you have one it's an absolute treasure:
The Distaff Side is a loosely-knit organization of women enlisted from printing-offices, publishing houses, studios and other hiding-places where may be found devotees of the graphic arts. The group was born out of a righteous indignation that sufficient recognition had never been accorded to woman’s place in the history of printing. To amend this deficiency, The Distaff Side published its first book entitled Bookmaking on the Distaff Side, which disclosed the monumental contributions which spinsters, wives, and widows have made to the graphic arts.
But also here are some punctuation pets for you from the book itself. I love the quizzical cat and the officious little semicolon:
There's an interview with the collective that made the book here, MMS. I really like their message about finding missing histories as that must be one of the best things a person can do:
The collective hope that by providing a contemporary update on this important section of graphic design history, that it will not only allow people to experience these schools of thought, but unearth more of the same too. “There are so many histories about people working in ‘graphic design’, especially before it was even called graphic design, waiting to be uncovered and brought into the discourse,” says Sara. “We hope that other people, who find other missing histories, will follow and make more books that continue to expand understandings of graphic design.”
What is up! I hope all is well. For those of us in the UK, there is the added treat that this is a bank holiday weekend, so here's a newsletter of tracks and mixes to get you pumped for that this evening.
It's an incredible experience to listen to a song and to immediately feel like you have been listening to and loving that song your entire life. That's how I feel about India Jordan's For You, and maybe you will as well:
There is also a Sarah Waters inspired song on their album, so definitely listen to the whole thing:
“Dear Nan King,” which takes its name from the story’s [Tipping The Velvet's] main character, “reflects the energy and the excitement that came from understanding myself. It’s also sort of an ode to my 12-year-old self, who was about to endure all this pain, and a way of telling my 12-year-old self that it was all going to be okay.”
How about a mix? This one is is by Octo Octa and she talks through it song by song. You might have got out of the habit of having dances in your front room but what better night than tonight to kick that off again. Or for the first time!
This vinyl mix starts with doubles of the intro to Todd Terry presents The Raid’s ‘Jump Up In The Air’. It’s a quick conversation that sounds like one woman yelling over to her friend who’s in the other room getting ready to go out. ‘House music?’ ‘Yeah! You know house!’ So what’s your house sound like? Where did the sounds come from? And how do they move you?”
DID YOU KNOW that Eris Drew and Octo Octa live together in a cabin in the woods in New Hampshire? Just when you thought this whole thing could not get more charming, here's a nearly four hour video of them having a forest rave, just the two of them:
Staying true to my minimal commentary brief today for the first time in years, with a series of links about bugs and bees. Thank you to the friend and subscriber who sent me off on this path.
Let's start with some modernism in the form of Elsa Schiaparelli's bug necklace. Lots of pictures of Schiaparelli's other designs in this article, well worth a click:
A true modernist and innovator at heart, Schiaparelli was the first to experiment with synthetic materials in couture, effectively turning her fashion creations into art. One of the most controversial and bizarre was called Rhodophane, a clear plastic related to cellophane. Schiaparelli used this material to create a floating insect necklace as well as a cape that apparently shattered like glass if handled improperly.
I enjoyed this interview with Helen Jukes, on beekeeping and what bees "are":
“you can think of a colony either as individuals or as a collective. The whole of beekeeping history seems to be this repetition of confusion. Each time people try to fit them into categories, they seem able to escape them. Are they individuals or a collective? Is honey animal-based or plant-based? Are bees wild or domestic?”
How about you make like Adrastea and outsource your job to some bees today. Looks like they would do a great job. This is an extract from the Ladies Dictionary, the first book aimed specifically at women!
How are you doing, alright? I have been thinking this week about some books I loved in my childhood, those of Enid Blyton, and before I knew what had happened I got carried away on that theme and here is a newsletter.
Enid Blyton wrote about 10K words a day, it's been a while since I read any of them but apparently as an adult you can sort of tell that she was putting the emphasis on quantity. It's also important to note here that I couldn't really find anything on the internet that was saying anything nice about Enid Blyton's books. The articles I could find tended to be about how sexist and racist and classist they are, and I expect that is true. I'm certainly not advising you to rush out and buy a set for your own children. But when I was reading her school stories, the world that they depicted was enough like my life that I could imagine it, and far enough away from my life to feel weird and magical. Like good science fiction.
Another thing that her school stories did – which good science fiction also does – was flag up the inadequacies of our own world. For example, midnight feasts. Midnight feasts, in the school books, were this incredible treat, food tasted better at them, they allowed participants to be the people they really were rather than the people they felt they had to be, plus it was a high subterfuge activity with real stakes if an adult found out.
I was, if not constantly, pretty often, trying to recreate these conditions. A futile effort. Our parents fundamentally did not care that my cousin and I were eating Smarties in bed at 10.30pm with both of our personalities fully intact, and the Smarties, obviously, tasted exactly like Smarties.
Imagine, then, after thirty or so years of this just boiling away inside me, how delighted I was to find that Ysenda Maxtone Graham has written a book – an oral history – all about life in girls' boarding schools in the exact period described by Enid Blyton. The fact that life was very far from that described in the St Clare's books only makes me want to read it more:
Wherever you were, the food was terrible:
The very same pudding – sponge-roll with red jam smeared along the surface and oozing out of both ends – was known as ‘Dead Man’s Leg’ at Wycombe Abbey, ‘Matron’s Leg’ at St Elphin’s, Darley Dale, ‘Granny’s Leg’ at Southover, and ‘Reverend Mother’s Leg’ at the Presentation Convent in Matlock. This shows how very like a varicose-veiny or actively bleeding human leg the puddings must have looked.
I don't think I will ever stop laughing at that extract. The whole article is great. I cannot wait to read the book.
As I remember it I pretty much promise you at least two links per newsletter. I don't have a recipe for Dead Man's Leg so how about a ginger ale based one from the Vintage Cookbook Trials:
This one is pretty simple. You freeze and periodically stir ginger ale till you get an icy mash, like a primitive version of a slushy. It is pretty hard to mess up – as long as the ginger ale is acceptable tasting to start with, so will be the final result.
A fairly abstract Fem Fri for you today – a series of links about abundance – and there's some incredible stuff under that capacious umbrella. Enjoy.
Let's start in the early modern era. They really understood the luxury lifestyle in the early modern era, as this article about cookbooks demonstrates. If you fancy trying this yourself, do let me know how it goes:
Make the likeness of a Ship in Paste-board, with Flags and Streamers, the Guns belonging to it of Kickses, bind them about with packthread, and cover them with close paste proportionable to the fashion of a Cannon with Carriages, lay them in places convenient as you see them in Ships of war, with such holes and trains of powder that they may all take Fire; Place your Ship firm in the great Charger; then make a salt round about it, and stick therein egg-shells full of sweet water, you may by a great Pin take all the meat out of the egg by blowing, and then fill it up with the rose-water, then in another Charger have the proportion of a Stag made of course paste, with a broad Arrow in the side of him, and his body filled up with claret-wine; in another Charger at the end of the Stag have the proportion of a Castle with Battlements, Portcullices, Gates and Draw-Bridges made of Past-board, the Guns and Kickses, and covered with course paste as the former; place it at a distance from the ship to fire at each other.
The thing that I love about this is how much it mixes its metaphors. I can just about get behind ships and castles fighting each other – one can buy chess sets on this theme – but there's also an enormous stag full of claret in the mix. Where does he fit in. Is he as big as the ship and the castle? If no, is that enough wine? Turns out you aren't really meant to worry about these questions because:
printed cookery books were socially aspirational culinary fantasias that claimed to offer a window onto the life of the most privileged by purporting – usually quite spuriously – to be making available the secret recipes of a particular noble household. The idea is not that the reader might prepare any of these dishes as home; rather that, conversely, they might be imaginatively transported into a world of luxury, abundance and multi-sensory pleasure that itself constituted a lavish work of fiction.
Now, in the modern modern era, here's artist Barbara Iweins who has taken a photo of everything she owns as an art project. I have to admit that I am impressed by this project while also finding it exceptionally stressful to think about:
in the ‘katalog’ project, barbara iweins shares photographs of all the 10,532 objects in her house, isolated and classified according to specific criteria. for two years, 15 hours a week, the belgian photographer spent time in voluntary isolation, documenting all her possessions as an experiment to help her face the value of her belongings in total honesty.
Finally, in an era so far away it's not at all modern, here's the Ivory Bangle Lady, a Black Briton of the past who was buried with some lovely objects that tell us so much about her:
The coffin contained a skeleton of a woman, laid to rest with a range of unusual objects. She wore bangles of elephant ivory as well as bangles made from Whitby jet. Ivory and jet are both types of jewellery associated with high status women. She was also wearing a large necklace of blue-glass beads and a pair of yellow-glass earrings.
Hope you're doing well today. I've been reading an excellent book, Pamela Regis' Natural History of The Romance Novel, and thought you might like to read some of my favourite paragraphs. Then there is more on classic romances and classic literature. I hope it is a real treat for you.
Back to Pamela Regis. This woman is not messing around:
Because this charge claims that the form of the romance novel genre – its ending in marriage – extinguishes the heroine and binds the reader, every romance novel by virtue of its being a romance novel has these powers to extinguish and bind. If this argument is right, Pride and Prejudice, for instance, an acknowledged work of genius, must, because it is a romance novel, extinguish Elizabeth Bennet and bind its readers. I intend the whole of the present work to stand as a refutation of this claim.
Similarly:
If Pride and Prejudice alludes to, but does not explore in detail, Elizabeth's intellectual development through her reading and her study of music, then Moby-Dick alludes to, but does not explore in detail, Ahab's life on shore, where his sea-going skills, much in evidence in the novel, would be eclipsed by whatever lands-man's abilities he may or may not have possessed. Art is selective.
Tell us one more time Pamela:
The story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines is, finally, about freedom and joy. In the twentieth century, for the most part, romances are stories written by women and read by women. They feature women who have achieved the ends fostered by affective individualism, control over their own property, and companionate marriage. In other words, romance heroines make their own decisions, make their own livings, and choose their own husbands. [...] to attack this very old genre, so stable in its form, so joyful in its celebration of freedom, is to discount, and perhaps even to deny, the most personal hopes of millions of women around the world.
Obviously having read that I just ran straight to the new film of Emma, and I was not disappointed. Obviously, the plot is that of Emma, so it has a headstart, but the production and sound design are something else entirely. Clashing pastels. Deep, bruised maroons. Moments when everyone is yelling at once and uncanny, impossible silences. Raw, joyful, uncontrolled bursts of hymns. The overall effect is as though you went to read Emma in a macaroon shop just as the hallucinations kicked in. It’s very good. Here's an interview about the visual style of the film with the director, superbly named Autumn de Wilde:
"I was really excited by how colorful the Regency period really was. Color was how you showed your wealth and your class rank," explains de Wilde, who encouraged the team to excitedly lean into the vibrant hues. "It does feel like a heightened world, but it is based on historical accuracy."
Finally, it might have been ages since you last read Pride and Prejudice. It's still there waiting for you and just as good as it ever was, a perfect novel. What better weekend companion:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”
Mr. Bennet made no answer.
“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.
“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”
HAPPY SUMMER! This has been a great year for music so far so I hope you're looking forward to a newsletter of woman artists I've been jamming on lately, all totally ideal for listening to in a park this evening.
We start with Denai Moore, whose album is called Modern Dread but don't let that put you off, it's amazing spacey R&B and you will love it. Here's the pop song, it's called Fake Sorry:
“A lot of the sounds on the record were very intentional, but a lot of them also just chose themselves. I wanted to make a record that had urgency about it. There’s a lot of really fast, visceral songs because, in reality, the concept of panic and anxiousness feels like that - it puts you through a whirlwind emotionally. I wanted to capture that feeling, to make it sound very cold and bold but in a very intentional way.”
Are you ready for some more summer funtimes? I hope so because it's always sunny when you are listening to Azana. If you remember the Simmy album from a couple of years back, Azana is from the same group of musicians. Here's Your Love:
In case it's not totally clear, I am imagining that you are listening to all of these albums in the park, so maybe now you are heading towards sunset and want to something a bit slower, something to which you can stare into space and feel loads of emotions you aren't ready to categorise quite yet. The new Haim album is superb for this, and here is my favourite song from it, here's Hallelujah:
Finally, if you are ready to categorise at least one of your emotions as at least wistfulness, you've probably guessed what's coming next – it's the astonishing Phoebe Bridgers and ICU:
What is up! I hope you are enjoying the sunshine and that you're looking forward to a newsletter of women from the 1920s and 30s. I've been reading Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out, which is about the generation of women who came of age during the First World War and who found themselves outnumbering men by a much bigger margin than they expected.
The contemporary commentary on this situation was more or less what you would expect. But LOOK at this delightful caricature of a "literate spinster with her busy little brain". If you are looking for a new profile pic, you could do much worse than this:
There were lots of stories of women drowning their heartbreak in the life of the mind (notably archaeology, which seems to be a time honoured way for a woman to get over heartbreak) but my favourite thing was the opening of Gordon Holmes' autobiography. Gordon was the first woman to run a stockbrokers and she was tremendously successful at it:
Have I ever been in love? Always. In love with life, with people, projects, things, thought. Always in love, always some star on the horizon.
What an answer to the question "have you ever been in love". Always. Just beautiful.
Finally, here's a treat for you all from my personal archive. When my great-grandfather was a young man, a private in the First World War, his own father gave him an autograph album as a gift. These were fashionable then, your friends would write doggerel verse and draw pictures in them, and now it's a beautiful thing to look through and to hear these voices of people from the far past. Some of these voices, of course, are women's, and this has been my favourite entry for as long as I can remember. Let's meet Bessie:
I hope you have had a good week and that you are looking forward to a newsletter of music and bravery and archiving. Just writing those words feels good so let's get stuck in.
We start with a friend and subscriber link about the work of Sandy Stone for Olivia Records in the 1970s. In case you, like me, didn't know, Olivia Records was a lesbian separatist record label and, later, successful cruise line. I am prepared to bet that even in the present Trying Times For The Cruise Industry they are faring better than 99% of record labels founded in the 1970s. The pullquote below from this long, wide ranging and fascinating interview meets Sandy Stone at her pre Olivia business – a stereo repair shop for women:
We became extremely popular and we became more, perhaps, of a center for women than I had ever expected. I mean, we were a store with a couch in it; people would sit and schmooze and drop off things to be repaired […] I was doing that one day, and I looked up from whatever the hell I was doing, and there were two women in the front of the store looking at me, and I said, “Can I help you?” and they said, “We’re from Olivia Records, and we hear that you’re a recording engineer. We’re looking for a woman to engineer some music for us. Would you like to try doing that?”
If you want to know more about the history of Olivia itself – including a bit of cruise ship stuff, although the focus here is on the music – I enjoyed this article about archiving and cataloguing the label's contribution to culture:
On the 45th anniversary of Olivia’s founding, conversations about preserving both concert tour and voyage highlights have taken on a new urgency too. While all the original collective members and artists and most of the original distributors, producers and fans are still living, it’s crucial to preserve their stories now. Olivia’s material culture is secure—with many original albums still shrink-wrapped— but full oral histories and narrative memoirs are needed to pass along this torch of music activism.
This is a track from this year but the opening feels very much of a piece with the openness to the world that we've just been reading about. Here's Ahya Simone, talking about bravery and mortality and then performing her song Frostbite:
I'm delighted to be writing Fem Fri today because so little in this life is nicer than the success of our friends. In this case, E. Saxey, friend and occasional editor of Fem Fri, who is, officially, one of the Best of British Fantasy 2019! You can read their story, No Children, in its original setting here:
My unmarked tatty white van carries the two of us along the coast road: not sea-side, but scrub grass and wind-chill in no-man’s land.
It’s best to be cautious so I let the van stutter to a stop in a layby some distance from our client’s house. We skulk there between heaps of bramble bushes until my phone pings, and a moment later a red car shoots past us in the other direction.
This story references my absolute favourite mythological/folklore thing and somehow makes it… even weirder? I highly recommend that you read this over lunch as I'm sure you will enjoy it as much as I do.
The fact that this was first published on a site called Corvid Queen reminds me of how much I love the shiny, clever corvid family of birds. Here's a guide on how to tell a crow from a raven, by Rosemary Mosco and Kaeli Swift, the latter of whom has an incredible corvid research blog:
If you want to enjoy distinguishing a crow and a raven while also fighting linguistic imperialism, the Kituwah Preservation and Education Program has a version in Cherokee. I am prepared to bet that a bird failing to execute a barrel roll is funny in every language:
Here's an interview with Rosemary Mosco. I really like this image of just walking in the woods and finding things to laugh at and enjoy:
“Nature is really funny. It’s never not funny,” Mosco says in SciFri’s latest SciArts video. “You can go into the woods and find 20 or 30 hilarious potential comic prompts anywhere you go.”
