It's deep midsummer here in the Northern Hemisphere and of course for many Brits that means it is Glastonbury weekend. If you are missing Glastonbury, I have for you a Fem Fri that gathers what I think is the best thing about that festival, which is biffing around and having little serendipitous moments. Enjoy.
Wandering around the site looking into different tents and having a dance is a key driver of serendipitous little moments. There is no joy that is quite like being in the middle of a massive party that you didn't know was happening ten minutes ago. For party vibes this weekend, how about Kampire Bahana's latest RA mix (708):
I really just wanted to highlight some of my favourite East African tracks and global producers, and also give people a taste of what I've been playing these days, so it has some well-loved tunes that I've been rinsing on tour recently. […] I think one of the things I've loved about DJing is that everything is in the moment. You put your art out there and even though it never measures up to what you had in mind, you do your best and hope that people enjoy it. Nothing is perfect and while you're obsessing about a missed transition, the audience is just happy that you made them dance and introduced them to something cool and new.
Of course I talk about "tents" but it would be just as likely to be in a big art installation. Installation art is something I am genuinely missing right now so if you are in the same sort of spot, here's Abigail DeVille! She's done loads of site specific work and gets deep into the history of the places she's doing installations for, I chose this article because there are lots of cool photos but plenty to dive into here:
She uses found objects and architectural forms to create fantastically complex and immersive experiences. You might feel, entering the space, like a character on a set. “I’ve consistently done theater work for the last four years,” DeVille said. “It’s totally changed the way I think about space, or the people as actors in these spaces, and history always being re-enacted.”
Finally, and this is more intangible, something else that's fun about Glastonbury is the feeling of being… potentially surrounded by forest sprites? Usually between seven and eight pm, if you have some trees near you and want to try it out tonight. You might get longer into the evening at home as the people in the environs will likely be less drunk. Anyway, an alternative activity to make you feel surrounded by sprites is to watch The Bridge's incredible production of Midsummer Night's Dream which was one of the best theatre things I saw last year. Stars Gwendoline Christie looking absolutely regal:
Actually finally now, another thing that happens at Glastonbury is you are definitely going to talk to someone from a charity so maybe a good time to mention that bail funds will still thank you for getting protesters out of prison:
I hope you are having a good Friday! I hope you are as stoked as I am for some amazing women and their amazing work.
If there is a red thread that runs through Fem Fri as a project it is the idea that our thoughts and words are powerful even when we feel like they are not. That's why I'm so excited to share an exclusive interview with experimental sociolingust Kelly Wright, who uses machine learning to look at human bias. There's so much in this interview – including but not limited to a description of how it feels to make a model with ninety six percent accuracy – but let's start with this remarkable pullquote:
You get all kinds of words you wouldn't expect. "Rolex" only occurs in the white corpus. Athletes of both races have endorsement details with Rolex, but sports writers only talk about it when it's white players. You could write a lot of words associated with race, and never get to Rolex. But you can see it with an analysis like this.
Kelly also wanted to make the point that these models are not hard to build. Are there unconscious biases that you want to look at? You can totally do that! You can do that this weekend. Kelly made a guide for us; if you do your own analysis based on this let me know:
Here's a great piece from Autostraddle about talking with your friends, family and colleagues about racism and anti-racism. It's practical, calm and fact based, which are also the things it advises its readers to be:
People’s minds are rarely changed when they are confronted with a lot of information that conflicts with what they already know and/or believe. They usually have to be guided carefully and gently out of their comfort zones, hands held by someone with whom they have an existing relationship, toward understandings that conflict with their current beliefs. When I was in graduate school getting my teaching credentials, we learned that children have a “zone of proximal development,” or ZPD. I think it applies to adults too.
Finally, while we are talking about changing minds and changing how language is used, here's Kennedy Mitchum, who wrote an email and as a result Merriam-Webster is changing its definition of "racism":
“I kept having to tell them that definition is not representative of what is actually happening in the world,” Mitchum told CNN. “The way that racism occurs in real life is not just prejudice; it’s the systemic racism that is happening for a lot of black Americans.”
How are you doing this morning? I hope you are energised and happy with the work you have done over the last week. There's still a few hours to go before the weekend so if you need to cram any wee achievements in you definitely have the time.
Last Friday I was reminded by the excellent Margo that writing to your elected representatives is also a good thing to do. That forms the backbone of this week's newsletter, and then there are some matters arising from last week.
And now! Writing to your representatives! Maybe you are already into this, in which case you can skip this block of text and move on to the links. If you are not, though, it might be that you feel a bit weird about writing to a stranger with your opinions. I used to feel that, certainly, but then I got used to it and now my MP knows only marginally fewer of my thoughts than, like, you do. All they need to know is:
Here is the thing I care about
<ul>
<li>e.g., I write to you today as I hope to better understand your position on restorative justice.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>Here is why I care about it</strong>
<ul>
<li>e.g. ,Restorative justice has repeatedly been shown to produce significant reductions in recidivism, yet it is not a part of the approach to reducing crime in the area you represent.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><strong>What are you going to do about it</strong>
<ul>
<li> e.g., Please let me know what you, and your party, plan to do to advance restorative justice as an approach in the area you represent.</li>
</ul>
</li>
Once you have that scaffolding it's quite easy to add facts and evidence as wanted. Also the thing that I always forget is that you need to put your full name and address on an email to your representative most of the time.
I used restorative justice in my example up there, and you might have guessed that there is a reason for that. Here's an interview with architect Deanna VanBuren, and her work in and with prisons to advance restorative justice:
Those working in criminal justice may become defensive as their role within the context of the system appears to be under threat - or if ideas about designing spaces for refuge and rehabilitation conflict with entrenched ideas about crime and punishment. Both are often seen as soft options. Examples of New Zealand are intriguing to people and sometimes helpful in advocating for restorative justice, but often what is more impactful are the stories of our interactions with the men and women in prison.
Actually now that I've written all that, Reductress have also done a guide to writing to your elected officials and it might be better than mine:
People around the country are making their demands clear in efforts to defund police brutality, abolish prisons, and dismantle other systems of racial inequality. And among your protest actions, you’re going to want to learn how to contact your representatives. We’ve put together some easy tips in the guide below, which we’ve now amended to include a bit about wearing Kente cloths.
And now, an update on the bail funds analysis! Last week I could not find bail funds for New Mexico or Arkansas, and this week I can. Your contribution is going to be extremely welcome in either or both of these places:
New Mexico (second lowest median income, fourth highest arrest rate)
Finally, artist Anna Chapman Parker put a series of drawings on sale, with all of the proceeds going to bail funds I highlighted in my analysis. They are beautiful, sold like hot cakes and are getting protesters out of jail:
How is it going today. I am going to guess that you, like me, want to be able to usefully support protesters against state-endorsed violence directed at Black people and communities. That is what most of the words in today's newsletter are about, then later some links to things to read.
I've seen lots of links to bail out funds and my instinct is always to support things in the Pacific Northwest, because I really like the Pacific Northwest. But then I thought about wanting my contributions to have the most impact. I've done a bit of data analysis on that and thought that you also might be interested to see where contributions will have the most punch.
Firstly, I thought, where in the US is going to have the highest arrest rates, so the highest likelihood that people will need to be bailed out? You can find that information here if you are interested in my source data: https://www.statista.com/statistics/302328/arrest-rate-in-the-us-2012-by-state/ (ignore the URL it's data from 2019 for 2018)
I used those things to rank the US states and come up with a top five of places where arrests are highest and incomes lowest. Donating to funds in any of these states is likely to be extremely impactful to people on the ground:
1.Mississippi (lowest median income, fifth highest arrest rate)
Note that I can't find bail funds for New Mexico or Arkansas so this is the top five for which I can find bail funds. If you know of any, let me know. And of course if you find this useful, feel free to share, copy/paste to Slack, etc. Here's a link to the analysis in case that's the sort of thing you are into. You'll notice it's not especially sophisticated:
The list above is from a combination of this list (https://bailfunds.github.io) and this one from Autostraddle:
Raising bail for those who cannot afford it — especially, though not only, during a viral pandemic like Covid-19 — is absolutely a matter of life or death. We already know that the United States is a global epicenter for the virus, and thanks to our criminal (in)justice system, prisons and detention facilities are left without the proper PPE and the necessary sanitary conditions to mitigate spread.
Anne Helen Petersen's thread and subsequent article on small town protests highlights a shift in who is marching and where – that it's not just big cities:
The movements and marches that convulse big cities don’t usually (or ever) make it to Havre. Nor do they usually make it to hundreds of other small towns across the country. But the protests following the death of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody on May 25, are different.
Here are just some of the young women who are organising protests in their small towns:
“George Floyd’s death, it brought anger to me and it brought anger to the two other people that helped me organize this,” said Ariona Fairlee, 15, one of the organizers. “And you can’t just sit around anymore. Like, we’re young but the young is what needs to change things because nobody else is going to do it.”
“I wanted to do something — nothing had really been done down here, so I was asking for ideas.” Her friend Green suggested the peaceful march, and they began to get the word out. […] Blue said she saw violence in large American cities and said she noticed no protests were occurring in small towns. She said she hoped one small-town protest could inspire another small town to do the same.
I've been on holiday this week! It's been great. I've spent the whole week sitting outside in a camping chair reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy and it's been quite idyllic. If you've considered doing something like this but worried it would not be fun, know that it's been extremely fun for me and I think you would enjoy it too.
Of course the immediate practical consequences of this for you is that really the only thing I've been thinking about for a week is the Tudor court, so I hope that's something that you can enjoy with me this morning.
Let's start with the Devonshire Manuscript, a book of poems collected, gossiped about in the margins, and in part written by the women of Anne Boleyn's court:
[Margaret Douglas] appears to have transcribed 16 of them and annotated at least 50 of the pages, with comments such as "and this" or "learn but to sing it". The other main transcriber appears to be Mary Shelton, whose name appears in an acrostic verse. Occasionally Margaret and Mary differ on their view of the worthiness of poems – Margaret writes on one "forget this" and Mary replies "it is worthy".
One of the reasons why I like history as much as I do is that it lets me read other people's diaries and private letters and put a veneer of respectability over that curiosity. OR SO I THOUGHT until I read Anne Boleyn's letter to Cardinal Wolsey and it makes me feel actively on edge about my safety:
I acknowledge that I have put much confidence in your professions and promises, in which I find myself deceived. But, for the future, I shall rely on nothing by the protection of Heaven and the love of my dear king, which alone will be able to set right again those plans which you have broken and spoiled, and to place me in that happy station which God wills, the king so much wishes, and which will be entirely to the advantage of the kingdom. The wrong you have done me has caused me much sorrow; but I feel infinitely more in seeing myself betrayed by a man who pretended to enter into my interests only to discover the secrets of my heart.
Up next is the theory that the reason why everyone was mooning after Anne Boleyn was that she was actually extremely funny. Hilary Mantel does not specifically draw this theme out in her books but it checks out to me. You can't put words together, as above, for nastiness without being about to put them together for laughs as well:
They are all absolutely desperate to sleep with her. They are behaving like the most appalling show-offs, competing with each other to get her to look at their dumb faces, and they are beginning to resent her. They come away from a meeting with her feeling just sick with love, just nauseated by it, and they are trying to work out why. Is it because she is so pretty? No, she is actually quite pinched and has an unnaturally long neck. Is it because she is so kind? Absolutely not. Well-dressed? No one cares about that. Good at the piano? Please. Sewing? Lol. Can make up boring poems in French? Stop it. Funny? Cue the screeching of brakes.
Many thanks to the friend and subscriber who reminded me of the women's art twitter feed. This is what inspired, but does not entirely explain, today's Fem Fri. Today's Fem Fri is about women with highly specialised skills that are also very satisfying to watch. There are a range of video lengths as well to suit all of your needs. Enjoy.
Let's start with the video that kicked this whole thing off – Masayo Fukuda and her kirie (papercutting).
I stick to the eyes and the expressions of living things. In the constantly changing natural environment, wild creatures do not show anger or sadness against it. Nature accepts the way you are, and draws the line of evolving creatures that will continue to thrive. I am glad if anything is felt in the mind’s eye when such creatures look at you.
Right, here's a question for you – do you want to watch a two hour video of a woman making a glass penguin. I really hope you do because that's what I have next from Catherine Labonté and her team:
I'm going to finish with a video that is almost impossibly soothing. Ashley Harwood is a woodturner, and in the following video you can watch her making a spherical box on her lathe. It's so satisfying. I'm actually just watching the video in a slightly hypnotised state rather than writing this newsletter to you. Okay here you go:
Ashley talks about her work here. Originally she wanted to be a glassworker!
When I make a bowl, I’m very particular about the curve. It has to feel perfect. Our hands can pick up on subtleties that our eyes miss, so I am constantly running my hand inside the bowl to check that the curve is flawless—it should be uninterrupted, fluid, and totally smooth. I think that the feel of the wood is so much a part of what people fall in love with.
I hope, as always, that you are safe and well. Do you want to read some stuff that will cheer you up? Me too. Let's go.
We start with Kayla at Autostraddle, who is absolutely committing to recreating the environments she enjoys in her own home. I also like – there are a whole series of these, all great – the red thread that they are all called some variation on "Jane's". I recommend that you try this for yourself in your home. I was recently missing being in bars that are done up in a vaguely Moroccan style and before I knew it I was on aliexpress looking at gauze and thinking, FEZ JANE'S:
After turning our apartment into a tea parlor, a fancy restaurant, a spa, and a beach, it was only a matter of time before my girlfriend and I decided to make a fake gay club. Before, we kept making and changing plans to go out dancing at one of the queer spots in Vegas. Now we’re extra-regretting that it never happened. So we turned the apartment into Club Jane’s (our fake beachside bar was called Sailor Jane’s, and I don’t know who Jane is, but apparently she’s a very busy lesbian entrepreneur in the realm of our quarantine fantasies) and we had so much fun getting sweaty and silly that it’s now a weekly tradition.
Just unbelievable stuff out there, startling glimpses into the inner worlds of people who apparently believe that the main reason Shakespeare wrote King Lear was because he felt an obligation to be “productive” during a period of quarantine, and also that although they themselves were clearly capable of churning out something of a similar quality, given the right conditions, they would not be embarking on that journey, because to do so would be to succumb to capitalism’s overweening demands. Standing unbowed even as capitalism’s hot, meaty breath is huffing in your face, even as its bloodied claws swipe at your midsection, not writing King Lear. Head held high, tremulously belting out “The Internationale” to the accompaniment of battered tin flutes, refusing to take the sucker’s path, which is to write King Lear.
Finally, Janelle Shane's aiweirdness so often comes through, and indeed it does here with a delightful illustrated post on AI generated court cases. FIVE HUNDRED AND TWELVE OTTERS:
Something that cheers me up immensely right now is the quality of light in the evenings. Just after the sun sets when all the trees are silhouetted against that intense indigo blue sky. It never fails to fill me with wonder that this quality of light happens all over again at this time of year, so let's ride that process of forgetting and remembering all the way to a Fem Fri about women and light.
We're starting with one of my favourite pieces of art by a woman, Shirazeh Houshiary's window for St Martin's in the Fields in London. Every time I walk past it the chances are maybe two in three that I will grasp the arm of my companion and say "look – look at that – isn't that great". It really is:
Reminiscent of a cross, the horizontal and vertical lines move towards a central opening that allows light to pass through. The grid-like concept blends elements of religion with complex architecture, forming a monochromatic piece that produces a unique light experience. The window is held within a stainless steel framework composed of a number of handmade glass panels, each of which is etched with fragments of Houshiary’s paintings to create a subtle feathery pattern on both sides of the glass.
Moving on to more distant light, here's Tabetha Boyajian who discovered a mysterious star with patterns of light fluctuating around it. It's informally called Tabby's Star, she is quite young to have a star named after her and that must surely be one of the best things that can happen to you in a career in astronomy. Or a career in anything, I suppose. Astronomy increases your chances of having a star named after you but offers no guarantees. Anyway, here is a story of professional and citizen science working hand in hand to do cool work:
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.” Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
Bringing it back home while also staying in space, I enjoyed this essay on Goodnight Moon's debt to Gertrude Stein:
When my children were still little, I went from reading Goodnight Moon at night to teaching Gertrude Stein to my college students in the morning. In the midst of talking with them about Stein’s radical experiments, I was struck by how familiar they seemed. Instead of noticing Stein’s break with tradition, I noticed how much her work had in common with the books I was reading at bedtime: a love of color, joy in ordinary objects, repetition with unexpected variation. This dovetailed with another observation: My students are not as puzzled by Stein as I expect them to be. Stein writes: “Glazed Glitter. Nickel, what is nickel,” and my students recognize the moment of wondering. This habit of wonder is familiar in part because we have been raised on the lists of Goodnight Moon. That similarity is no accident: Gertrude Stein was Margaret Wise Brown’s favorite writer.
How are you all doing today? I hope that you and yours and everyone you love are well. I hope you are looking forward to the treats I have in store for you today.
I've been reading an absolutely belting book this week, it's called The Ghost: A Cultural History and it's by Susan Owens. It's one of those great non-fiction books that take an incredibly proscribed idea – in this case, the idea of the ghost in British culture – and then just dig right in so every page you read you think oh! right! of course!
If you are remotely spookily inclined it will be an absolute treasure trove of the things that have influenced you without your necessarily knowing about it, and if you are not spookily inclined it's a delightful sideways look at British thought and history and art.
Here's Susan Owens herself in an article that races through some of the ideas in her book:
I was intrigued to find the idea of the dead returning to their old homes so entrenched in the British imagination, and it made me reflect on the place ghosts have in our culture. We tend now to think of ghosts as personifications of our history. Was it always this way, I wondered – or have our perceptions of them changed over time? What I quickly discovered was that spirits were not always regarded as the insubstantial presences we think of today. Far from it. While nowadays a ghost might be expected to materialise, drift gently towards the door and disappear, in the 12th century it was more likely to break it down and beat you to death with the broken planks. Before the Reformation, some ghosts were thought to be refugees from Purgatory, slipping back – often in the guise of dogs or horses – to beg for prayers to shorten their suffering. Later, in the 17th century, they were devils pretending to be human spirits to trick us. Woodcut illustrations for popular ballads fixed a stock ‘ghost look’: shrouds tied up at the head, but undone at the feet – they had, of course, to walk. It was not until the late 18th century that ghosts would become transparent.
Of course another thing that I love about non fiction is that it's normally bursting to the seams with interesting women of whom I had never heard before. The Ghost was no different, and it introduced me to Georgiana Houghton, whose AbExey drawings from the Victorian Era were inspired by her experiences as a spiritualist. This one is called The Love of God:
Half a century before non-figurative art was popularised, Houghton’s drawings, in their psychedelic colours and passionate fluidity, in many ways, anticipate the abstraction of early twentieth century art.
As Marco Pasi puts it:
Houghton transferred authorship and agency to the spirits. In doing so she could radicalise her artwork and make alien objects that could not be placed at the time in which they were made.
Finally, if you just want to read a ghost story now, here's one by Violet Paget AKA Vernon Lee. One of the best sections in The Ghost was about women's frustrations in the Victorian Era just bursting out in the form of ghost stories. Snuggle up with 'The Phantom Lover' tonight, or maybe during an afternoon conference call you rebel:
MY DEAR BOUTOURLINE,
Do you remember my telling you, one afternoon that you sat upon the hearthstool at Florence, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst?
You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and urged me to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such matters, to write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that printers' ink chases
away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallons of holy water.
But if, as I suspect, you will now put down any charm that story may have possessed to the way in which we had been working ourselves up, that firelight evening, with all manner of fantastic stuff – if, as I fear, the story of Mrs. Oke of Okehurst will strike you as stale and unprofitable – the sight of this little book will serve at least to remind you, in the middle of your Russian summer, that there is such a season as winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend,
The National Theatre is putting its plays online for two weeks at a time, and I'm really happy today because it's the day for one of the best plays I've seen at the National – Twelfth Night, which is also one of the best Shakespeares I've seen. Here is a YouTube link:
I really can't encourage you strongly enough to watch this. It's genuinely very funny and works better onscreen than I expected it to. Not like watching a home video of a school play, which is what I was a bit worried about. Maybe have it as a matinee tomorrow, that's a fun thing to do.
One of the key innovations of this version is firstly swapping Malvolio for Malvolia, but the second masterstroke is getting Tamsin Greig, who is incredible, to play her. Here's an interview with Tamsin Greig about that:
I thought in this hyperreal world, where she’s a woman, what would be shocking about her wearing yellow tights? So we needed to push it to find ultimate embarrassment. And because I have teenagers I thought what would upset them most to see me doing?
Of course this rendering really ramps the gender fluidity of the piece, but here's a nice long article about gender fluidity in Twelfth Night as it was written, which is also pretty gender fluid:
as Valerie Traub notes, ‘it is as object of another woman’s desire that Cesario finds her own erotic voice’. When Olivia falls for Cesario, she does so in the full belief of the servant’s masculinity. As famously declared by the gender theorist Judith Butler, ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender … identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. Cesario dresses as a man, and therefore for all intents and purposes is a man in the eyes of the other characters.
