What is up? Thanks to a submission from a friend and subscriber I have a belting newsletter for you today of geometric shapes and "joyous invention". I hope that it works for you.
Let's start with Bridget Riley, and her piece for the LRB about, I suppose, discovering squares all over again. This is a lovely description of how it feels to create something good:
I drew the first few squares. No discoveries there. Was there anything to be found in a square? But as I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form. They were taking on a new pictorial identity. I drew the whole of Movement in Squares without a pause and then, to see more clearly what was there, I painted each alternate space black. When I stepped back, I was surprised and elated by what I saw. The painting Movement in Squares came directly out of this study. My experience of working with the square was to prove crucial. Having been lately becalmed, now a strong wind filled my sails.
Now, how about Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, modernist and Fifer? Known as "Willie" – a quite common nickname for a woman in Fife and as far as I know nowhere else in the UK – she gave us seven decades of work:
In old age, however, despite physical weakness, she discovered a serenity that came out in a series of radiant works in the 1980s and 1990s. She no longer found it necessary to pose questions, or set conundrums, still less to look over her shoulder at what others were doing. She no longer had to work doggedly through some course of work she had set herself years before, or fear that something she painted was not quite "characteristic". In practice her work always was so, whether she chose to express herself through representation or joyous invention.
And now you can enjoy this joyous invention for yourself! Jeni Allison has made a knitting pattern of one of Wilhemina Barns-Graham's ties. You can download it here and knit your own modernist tie:
In the mid-1980s, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham designed and knitted a collection of over 50 stunning unique wool ties. Some of these ties were recently shared on the Trust’s Instagram account as inspiration for an activity to do while we are all shut in at home […] The ties received an enthusiastic response, especially so from knitwear designer and design educator Jeni Allison who offered to create a DIY knitting pattern for one of them.
You know how sometimes your friend brings his girlfriend to the pub and although it's the first time you've met her, the two of you immediately engage with one another and spend the next two hours talking and swapping phone numbers and planning to go for wine once a fortnight for the rest of your lives? Well, I guess the going for wine is a dated reference, but the basic point here is that this is exactly how I feel about Sheilah Graham, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last mistress.
I'm reading another of her books right now and she's still so good. I mean, look at this! She thought this, believed it, and, later, it occurred to her as a good enough principle to put in a book:
Here's an interview with Sally Koslow, who wrote a novel about Sheilah Graham. Quite recently and you can get it new on Amazon! Might be nice reading over the coming evenings:
beyond the paper trail of Sheilah Graham’s columns, she wrote quite a few memoirs in which, I was surprised to learn, she was the very definition of an unreliable narrator. Never, for example, did she admit in print that she was born not only poor, but also Jewish. Nor did she always tell her story the same way.
Of course, Sheilah Graham fought to make Old Hollywood work for her, here's Madame Sul-We-Tan who did that too; the first black actor, male or female, to sign a film contract and be a featured performer. Her name, obviously, is a stage name, and according to Lillian Gish everyone was too frightened to ask her her real name. Unfortunately she (Sul-We-Tan) did not write a memoir, but you can read more about her here:
Over the course of her four-decade career, Madame Sul-Te-Wan didn’t just craft an intriguing star persona. She forced her foot in the door of the film industry, becoming the first black actress to land a studio contract, carving out a place for herself in the emerging Hollywood scene.
How are you doing, alright? I hope so. In any case, you have made it through another week which should be a cause for celebration in every Fem Fri reading household.
How about some music to help us celebrate. Dua Lipa, genuine hero, has brought up the release date of her album full of joyful songs. There's a special treat in this track for British subscribers of a certain vintage, but I think you'll all enjoy this:
Here's another woman with a fun and high energy LP, it's Georgia! This is my favourite song from her album (Seeking Thrills), the song is called About Work the Dancefloor:
Finally, do you want to read a story about the happy surprises that life can throw you? And if yes, don't you think it would all go better with a bit of disco? I KNEW IT, ME TOO. Here's Rupa Biswas:
“It feels great to have so much love,” Rupa acknowledges. “After all these years, people like my music.” She admits that she wouldn’t trade the life she has now for any fame she would have achieved then. “I don’t care about the money. I’m just happy that people like my music. Boys, girls, everyone is dancing so much. That’s what makes me happy.”
How is it going? Better, I hope, now that you are reading Fem Fri because I have an exclusive interview for you all to enjoy, and it's with one of my favourite writers.
Ann Wroe edits the Obituaries column of The Economist and is a huge part of what makes that magazine a joy to read. Every week, you get to read about a different life through Dr Wroe's calm, kind, detailed immersion in that life:
To be true to the people I’m obituarising, I need to be true to their character, not the character of their times. That’s who they are, they can’t choose the time that they died. I’ve just delivered this week’s obituary, and it’s a pretty jolly one – Michel Roux. The first thing I thought when I delivered it was that it’s sad now that the restaurants are all closed; maybe a frivolous thought, but I wondered if we wanted that as an antidote to how we are feeling.
Maybe you'd like to read some more of her writing, here's a recent one you will enjoy – Katherine Johnson, NASA mathematician, exceptional early prodigy and exceptional woman:
This attention was all the more surprising because, for her, the work had been its own reward. She just did her job, enjoying every minute. The struggles of being both black and a woman were shrugged away. Do your best, she always said. Love what you do. Be constantly curious. And learn that it is not dumb to ask a question; it is dumb not to ask it. Not least, because it might lead to the small but significant victory of making a self-proclaimed superior realise he can make a mistake.
Finally, I hope that that has cheered you up, but if you are feeling like you are never going to be cheered again, maybe you will get some use out of a guide to grief that I have written. There seems to be a lot of it around right now and it's something I have experience in, so if you need this here it is:
Anger is the least well understood stage of grief. Far from the concrete targets one might imagine – "the person who cheated on you", for example, or "God" – the anger stage consists of a diffuse rage at everything in the world, which turns to concentrated rage at the moment you interact with a thing in the world. Like toothbrush packaging! Or poorly executed parodies on websites you otherwise enjoy! Or your DUMB PHONE with its COUNTERINTUITIVE SETTINGS MENU why do people PERSIST in this BIZARRE FANTASY that Apple can design AN EVEN HALFWAY TO USABLE PIECE OF SOFTWARE.
How are you doing? I expect that wherever you are in the world, things are pretty weird, so I hope you and yours are staying safe through all of this. It's hard, but here's some good news: the amazing Margo of Margo of threeweeks fame has made a spreadsheet to help us share tips and projects to keep us all sane. Please join our spreadsheet community for the common good 💪💪💪:
If you are a parent and have ideas for things to keep kids sane/entertained, that would be especially good. This week my thoughts have particularly turned to parents, and to parents who are working from home while their kids are under their feet and bored. I am sorry if this is you and good luck with it all. It reminds me though of a time that I very vaguely remember – I must have been three or thereabouts. There was a time when, for no clear reason that I could see, my dad was in the house way more than usual. He'd take me for a walk every day, along the little river at the back of the estate we lived on. One day we collected watercress and took it home, and my mum made soup with it. On another day, we walked through a gate that we'd not been through before, and I said "is this further than we've ever walked", and my dad looked at me and smiled and said "yes darling, this is further than we've ever walked."
Absolutely halcyon days. Perfect.
Anyway, recently – maybe 18 months ago – my dad said to me, "you were very young, but do you remember when [employer] was making everyone take unpaid leave for two weeks at a time and me and you went on those walks along the burn?". It made me realise that these times of, for me, absolute magic, must have for him been conducted at an incredible pitch of stress; one small child, another on the way, a mortgage, suddenly half the salary you were expecting for a month.
Where I'm going with this, I guess, is that when you talk to your kids about this in the future you might say "do you remember that time of plague, when everything was awful and so stressful" and they will say "you mean those amazing times of unfettered ipad access and you were always there bringing the funtimes, they were beautiful, it could have lasted forever."
The watercress soup is obviously a big part of my memory here, and the watercress season is upon us, so might be a nice idea to make a peppery green soup with watercress you collect or buy in a bag. As a Delia Smith recipe, this is quite likely to be the actual recipe my mum made all that time ago:
First of all melt the butter in a large thick-based saucepan, then add the prepared leeks, potato and watercress and stir them around so that they're coated with the melted butter.
Here's a fun thing to do with maybe with older kids, or you don't need kids for this, it's hard enough for you to master making these biscuits:
These are from Bee's Bakery. Bee is both Scottish and an incredibly lovely person, I bought jammie dodgers from her one Christmas. Here she is, talking about food trends and science:
Berrie’s science background is not forgotten. She credits lab work for her attention to detail, and her patience. 'Science projects go on for years, so you have to have commitment,’ she says. 'We get orders for thousands of cookies at a time. That takes days and days, so you have to be able to see it through.
As you know, my Fem Fri go-to in stressful times is loads of nice pictures, and today is no exception. These include some cool art by women from the Modernist workshop I went to! I'm not done with Modernism and I hope Modernism is not done with me.
Let's start, though, with the more postmodern Charlotte Moorman, cellist, artist and Miss Little Rock 1952. Here's a gif of a video of a cello playing a video of her playing that cello:
Here's a bit more about Charlotte Moorman and her way of working:
Fluxus artists with whom Moorman collaborated, for example, wrote instructional works that allowed for anyone to be the executor of the artwork or that required audience participation to be realized. This is not to say, however, that an investment in single authorship ceased to exist. The fact that Moorman’s instrumental role in many of Nam June Paik’s works has been largely overlooked or trivialized in histories of the period is a testament to the persistent valorization of single authorship in art historical discourses.
Now let's enjoy some wood cuts from Virginia Woolf's also astonishingly talented sister, Vanessa Bell. These are to illustrate Virginia Woolf's story, Monday or Tuesday:
More on Vanessa Bell:
Blurring fine art and applied arts, Bell was also an innovator in the realm of design. With Fry and Grant (her longtime partner and the father of her daughter, Angelica), she co-directed Omega Workshops. Their modernist products ranged from furniture to stained glass and mosaics, as well as textiles, which Bell patterned in vibrant hues that revealed her distaste for restrained Victorian designs. In 1915, she began to incorporate these fabrics into popular dress designs.
Finally, look at this incredible work by Sonia Delaunay, illustrating a poem by Blaise Cendrars (Prose on the Trans-Siberian Railway):
Here, just as Cendrars experimented with achieving a sense of motion in his writing, Delaunay explored the simulation of movement through the juxtaposition of contrasting colours and dynamic shapes in her contribution. In this way Delaunay’s artwork was not an illustration of Cendrars’s narrative, but a visual equivalent, intended to be seen in unison. She transcribed the poem in colours, as she heard it being read out:
The Simultanism of this book is in its simultaneous rather than illustrative presentation. The simultaneous contrast of colours and the text form depths and movements which are the new inspiration.
Here's something I have been meaning to talk to you about for ages, it's the idea of microgratitude. Being grateful is something that we are told to do and told it's good for us, but when things are bad and you try to be grateful, you often think about big things that, instead of being comforting/centering/whatever, remind you of problems in other areas of your life and leave you feeling like gratitude "isn't working". That's where microgratitude comes in, it's about noticing and enjoying tiny things that you see and do every day. Here are some examples:
A cat executes a perfect leap from one wall to the next.
A small child on the train is talking to their parent in English, but the parent answers in another language. The conversation continues in this way a full five stops.
You look at the clock and it says 12:34.
A crow interrupts eating from a crisp packet to stare at you in a threatening way, as though you might at any point swoop in and take the crisps away from him.
The credit cards on the table at the end of a meal out form a pleasing range of harmonising or contrasting colours.
Obviously this is not a panacea, but well worth a shot if you are feeling a bit glum. It's why I'm so chipper so much of the time anyway. Here's Kylie Taylor talking about her career and her own microgratitudes:
I was going through an intensely difficult period in my personal life and thought I would never survive it. I was trying to cope in various ways, when a friend said to me that I just had to focus on taking baby steps - one tiny step at a time… Small, little victories, micro reasons for gratitude, such as getting out of bed, or making a piece of toast, putting one foot in front of the other. I felt like I was failing myself and losing my mind, but this conversation changed my whole outlook and I truly think, saved my life.
Now let's enjoy this extract of a Jane Kenyon poems together:
from At a Motel Near O'Hare Airport
Here comes a 747,
slower than the rest,
phenomenal; like some huge
basketball player
clearing space for himself
under the basket.
How wonderful to be that big
and to fly through the air,
and to make so great a shadow
in the parking lot of a motel.
Wondering what it must be like to be an aeroplane is very aligned with the sort of thing I am talking about. How about a bit more on Jane Kenyon:
“The poet here sears a housewife’s apron, hangs wash on the line, walks a family dog and draws her thought from a melancholy, ecstatic soul as if from the common well, ‘where the fearful and rash alike must come for water.’ In ecstasy,” Muske continued, Kenyon “sees this world as a kind of threshold through which we enter God’s wonder.”
Finally, here's kind of a microgratitude anthem; it's Julien Baker's Rejoice. Maybe you have heard it before, however I recommend that you listen to this utterly beautiful rendition at your earliest convenience:
Are you into the music and mythology of Phoebe Bridgers? I very much am, so was extremely excited this week when a friend and colleague slacked me her latest song a mere fifteen minutes after it dropped. Let's enjoy Garden Song together before the rest of Fem Fri:
I really enjoyed this interview with Phoebe Bridgers about writing her new album and being confident in the decisions she was making:
"Doing boygenius especially definitely changed the songwriting process - the whole ethos of the band was to stop second-guessing yourself,” she says. “I always do this thing where I’m like, ‘Here’s this song, this might suck’. And then I play it and my friends suggest changes, and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t serious. I was just being humble, but now you don’t like it…'"
More singing women, except these ones aren't singing about death and feeling sad and stuff, they are singing extremely loudly in order to call their cows home. I'd like to introduce the ancient Swedish singing technique of kulning:
The herds grazed during the daytime, wandering far from the cottages, and thus needed to be called in each night. Women developed kulning to amplify the power of their voices across the mountainous landscape, resulting in an eerie cry loud enough to lure livestock from their grazing grounds […] Rosenberg, who’s researched the volume of kulning, says it can reach up to 125 decibels—which, she warns, is dangerously loud for someone standing next to the source. Comparable to the pitch and volume of a dramatic soprano singing forte, kulning can be heard by an errant cow over five kilometers away. This explains how the song might reach a distant herd, but what prompts animals to trot over remains a bit of a mystery.
How is it going? I hope you have had a good week and that you, like me, are looking forward to the weekend. Today’s Fem Fri was inspired by a subscriber submission, so many thanks, friend and subscriber!
Daina Taimiða is a mathematician who works on hyperbolic planes. These were very fussy and difficult to represent physically until she solved the problem with crochet. Enjoy this interview about maths and crochet:
I realized that Thurston’s construction could be made with knitting or crochet—basically all you’d have to do is increase the number of stitches in each row. I grew up in Latvia doing these handicrafts and I decided to try and make one. At first I tried knitting, but after a while you had so many stitches on the needles it became impossible to handle. I realized that crochet was the best method.
Obviously I immediately wanted to find a hyperbolic plane crochet pattern and obviously Cornell’s maths department delivered. NB I don't crochet, I just wanted to be sure that if I did one of my projects could be this one:
In order to make the crocheted hyperbolic plane you need just a very basic crocheting skills. All you need to know is how to make a chain (to start) and how to single crochet. That's it! Now you can start.
Finally, I’m an enormous fan of Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness, and here’s her AI knitting patterns in further maths/handicrafts collaborations:
Knitters are very good at debugging patterns, as it turns out. Not only are there a lot of knitters who are coders, but debugging is such a regular part of knitting that the complicated math becomes second nature. Notation is not always consistent, some patterns need to be adjusted for size, and some simply have mistakes.
Last week I went to a modernist editing workshop and saw some terrific books and art by women. This week is all about the best of the books in the National Library of Scotland. The workshop itself was also great and organised by Imprints of the New Modernist Editing and My Bookcase. If you are into modernism you should definitely check them out and if you don't know if you are into modernism maybe this email will help you to make up your mind in either direction!
There is a cool story about our first book. As you can see it's Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, with a cover illustrations by Scottish Colourist J. D. Fergusson (a man). It's a limited edition of 1,000, hand printed by Virginia Woolf, but even all of this is not the cool thing – the cool thing is that after printing about five of them Virginia Woolf decided that she didn't like the cover illustration very much so missed it off the other 995. I felt a bit worried handling this extremely rare item:
Here's a Katherine Mansfield poem, 'Voices of the Air':
I really liked Parallax, this book of Nancy Cunard poetry, with cover illustrations also by Nancy Cunard:
She was an utterly remarkable woman; heiress to the Cunard shipping dynasty, modernist and committed anti-fascist:
In Authors Take Sides, she created a unique political literary genre, calling on famous writers to take a side for or against fascism. She continued her anti-fascist efforts during World War II as a writer and broadcaster of coded material for the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). After the war, she fought tirelessly to rescue Spanish refugees from the Franco regime and to find them a homeland in Latin America; she eventually joined a guerrilla movement to restore democracy in Spain. Throughout, she continued writing poetry, essays, and news reports.
There's a great overview of her life and the influences on her work here:
H.D. wrote constantly, and in a letter to her American friend Viola Jordan said, “I sit at my typewriter until I drop. I have in some way, to justify my existence, and then it is also a pure ‘trade’ with me now. It is my ‘job’.”
