Do you remember last week when I said I would have huge news this week? Well here it is, I hope you are excited for it; for the last ten years, I've been collecting and editing the complete short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and now I… have done it! Here they all are in their five volumes!
It is 183 stories and 1.01M words. The stories have never before been collected in a single edition. Three of them have never even been published in a book before because Fitzgerald's daughter (name: Frances Scott Fitzgerald) suppressed them to protect her father's legacy. But they are in my book; Scott Fitzgerald wrote an extremely limited number of stories set in the medieval age in which all the peasants talk like sharecroppers and the hero is, I regret to inform you, Sexy Hemingway.
We will get to the blog post where I explain the project in a minute, but first, I want to break an ironclad Fem Fri rule and ask for a favour. No is an okay answer. Because of the vagaries of copyright law, I can't sell these volumes at any sort of scale. I'm looking to work with a publisher to get them fully out into the world, and it will very much help to get the fact that I have done this "out there". So if you would share it with your friends and network and websites you own and write for, I would appreciate that tremendously. Thank you.
On which note, here is my blog post:
In 2010, I awoke with the clearest vision and the purest happiness I have ever felt upon waking up. I woke up knowing, firstly that it was possible for me to collect the complete short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, secondly that it was possible to print them in a proper book, and finally that I could do both of these things and then read them all. This year, I finally completed this project. Before now, no truly complete collection of Fitzgerald’s stories existed.
THANK YOU EVERYONE who has already seen this and been kind about it on the internet. It is so exciting for me to talk about what has been a huge part of my life for so long, thank you for sharing this time with me. 💗
A xx.
PS: It just doesn't feel right to send out a Fem Fri of purely Alex content. Please enjoy The Great Gatsby as glossed by Kate Beaton, click for the full thing, I will never stop laughing at this:
I'm back! Thank you Kerry for the BELTING guest editing for the last fortnight, I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.
I learned on holiday about the Iban women, native to Borneo, who use their dreams and visions to inspire designs for their beautiful intricate weaving. This took me down a rabbit hole so I hope you're looking forward to a Fem Fri about women and dreams. Let's start with this long, good and lavishly illustrated article about Iban women and the pua they weave:
Weaving pua was therefore a spiritually charged endeavor, carried out only by women. For a weaver to reach the highest level of her craft, she had to possess the ability to communicate with the spirits, who would in turn inspire her powerful designs through dreams. Anak Embol is one of Sarawak’s last “dream weavers.” […] In the very first dream she had, a spirit told her to wash the yarn in the river and gave her specific instructions on how to treat the yarn before weaving. Anak Embol knew then that she had to fulfill that dream, and when she did, she found that the ritual released her emotions and cleansed her mind. Thus liberated from all negative distractions, she felt ready to receive the new designs that came to her. She called these inspirations her “dream designs.”
Dreams and visions are not something that modern/secular societies pay a lot of attention to, but that doesn't mean that we understand what dreams are or how they work; we still basically don't. There are women who are working to change that, though – Cristina Marzano and her team recently enjoyed a huge breakthrough in understanding why we remember dreams. This is fascinating. It looks like they are brand new memories:
This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.
Finally, here's a dream memory that a woman used for creativity and profit; were you aware that the idea for Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley from a dream? Because I wasn't until this week! Enjoy this article about the dream (and the miserable summer) that inspired the indisputably best gothic novel yet written by a teenager:
That night, or during a night soon after, Mary Godwin had a dream. The dream was a morbid one about the creation of a new man by a scientist with the hubris to assume the role of god. History is quiet on whether or not Mary Godwin (soon to become Mrs. Shelley) won the competition at the villa with the tale that “haunted her midnight pillow,” but her story became more than a fireside bit of entertainment. Properly developed, it became a successful novel in 1818, one of the firsts in a new genre of fiction that would eventually be branded “science fiction.” In time, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would make a cultural impact that still reverberates even now, almost two hundred years later.
Have a great Friday, everyone, it's really nice to be back! Hey and be sure to tune in next week because I will have genuinely huge news about a personal project I've been working on.
It is still I, Alex's friend Kerry, and hello from Antwerp! This week there is lots of genever, and a summer school on historical book ownership involving one of the most excellent museums in Europe, the Plantin-Moretus printing museum.
Thank you for reading last week, and especially for your feedback. OK, I heard you say, it's all very well about these early modern women in literary culture, but how exactly were the books themselves printed? Where is the materiality?!
Well have I got the place, and family story, for you!!
In the 1570s, Christophe and Jeanne Plantin set up a printshop in Antwerp in 1570s. A 16th-century printshop was different than how we think of book publishing today: the creative work of commissioning and editing happened in the same place, and often by the same people, as the physical production activity of printing like setting type, rolling ink and pressing pages.
The Plantins had five daughters, and this family is seriously ready for an ITV ten-episode miniseries or really lush atmospheric novel by Sarah Perry or Jessie Burton. The daughters – Margaret, Martine, Catharine, Madeleine and Henriette (or Henrica, which seriously sounds like a font) – all worked in the printshop, setting type (which is extremely hard! You have to read upside down and backwards, Ginger Rogers through the centuries) and checking the proofs.
That all of the daughters worked there is especially exciting because the Plantin printshop specialised in books in multiple alphabets, especially Hebrew, Syrian and Greek. The printshop's most famous work was the 'Polyglot Bible' – printed in six languages – which was commissioned by Philip II of Spain; and one of the known proofreaders was third daughter Madeleine Plantin, who at the time was in her early teens.
Some people (men) have challenged the idea that the Plantin girls could read, instead of just matching letters like-for-like like a memory game. A male visitor to the shop wrote to a friend about what he saw, and stress very vehemently that Madeleine was only matching the characters. This cracks me up for two reasons: it's an attempt to diminish a girl's education as if being able to quickly match long strings of characters without understanding them wouldn't also be incredibly impressive; and also it is literally factually wrong! Plantin wrote himself that he had educated them in different languages to be able to work with him:
I arranged for the four oldest, according to their age and place in the family, to learn how to read and write properly, so that between the ages of four or five and twelve, they were able to assist with proofreading in any language or any alphabet.
Ah, the great thing about feminism in the past is that it's hard to decide whether to be delighted by women learning lots of languages, or horrified by the child labour.
Printers in the 16th century had a lot of control over what they produced, including commissioning writers and scholars, and therefore over what ideas were able to spread; it's exciting to me that the Plantin printshop – at its time, the biggest in the world – had so many women doing the work of creating books.
Many thanks for reading, it has been a genuine pleasure writing for you these past two weeks! I'm handing back over to Alex but you can find me at @kerrypolka or reply to this if you want to email further about feminist book printing and/or headchopping! ❤️
Hello friends and potential future friends, and welcome to LATE NIGHT FEMINIST FRIDAY: SEMI-DIRTY EDITION!
I'm Kerry and I'm subbing in for Alex while she's on "holiday". I've just wrapped up an MA and am not yet finished rattling on about it so this week you will have the DELIGHT of hearing about female characters in 15th-century English manuscripts and printed books. Ooh yeah!
My favourite at the moment (= all time??) is the Biblical (Apocryphal) character Judith.
Judith was a rich, beautiful widow whose town was under siege by the Assyrians (bad guys those Assyrians!). She dressed up, packed a kosher picnic basket with some wine, went down with her maid/sidekick to the enemy camp, and convinced the Assyrians they wanted to switch sides. The general, Holofernes, had his soldiers bring Judith to COUGH drink with him in his COUGH COUGH tent; she waited for him to get bladdered, called in her maid to hold him down, and took his sword off the wall and cut his head off. Hooray, victory against expansionist imperialists and dodgy creeper men alike!
You may recognize her from many paintings of her cutting a man's head off and/or with a man's head she has just cut off.
Judith looking smug (with the head of a man she has just cut off)
Judith looking glam (with the head of a man she has just cut off)
The norks-out theme started fairly suddenly in Italy in the 1450s and then carried on for hundreds of years, because when men figure out they can put norks into art HOO BOY YOU TRY TO PUT THEM BACK AWAY.
However my favourite Judiths are the ones in 13th-14th century bibles, mostly because the logistics of book production mean the illuminators had to paint teeny tiny blood spurts.
this is like four inches high! so wee!!
Obviously many parts of the Bible are shall we say not ideal for feminism, but it is mildly annoying to me when people try to argue there is 0 feminism. Lots of women in the 15th and 16th centuries used Judith as an excuse to say basically, "I do what I want": Joan of Arc used her as a legal precedent in her trial (not to make a point about her military activity, but to argue that it was OK to dress like a man because Judith had also dressed unusually, i.e. mega sexy), and feminist poet Christine de Pizan also used Judith as an example to illustrate why men need to shut up and butt out of women's business (I paraphrase). Mary Tudor called herself a "Judith" after ordering the beheading of one of her major political opponents, John Dudley, duke of Northumberland. Eat it, Dudders!! Elizabeth also called herself Judith after ordering the death of Mary Queen of Scots. (Hmm, is that feminist? It's complicated I guess!)
Basically I think we can all agree that, in terms of feminism, there are few simple pleasures like women getting together to murder a creepy possessive guy - norks out or norks in.
FEM FRI ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm delighted to be able to tell you that Fem Fri will have a guest editor for the next two weeks, and doubly delighted to tell you that this guest editor is Kerry Lambeth. You guys are going to have so much fun together, here's some top line info on Kerry:
She has just completed a Masters degree in early modern English and her thesis is making waves already
I once met Kerry by chance at a Magic Mike double bill at the Prince Charles cinema, if you too want to meet Kerry by chance a Magic Mike double bill might be the one
Very funny
Okay, now let's do a Fem Fri for today! It's about doll's houses. I love doll's houses because they are and have been a way for women to show their everyday lives and the love and care that goes into those lives. And at a tiny scale, which is extremely cute. They give us a look at the typically neglected everyday throughout history, and I'd like to start with a doll's house that shows the everyday in a favoured architectural era, that of modernism:
This is Whiteladies House, created by Mrs Moray to "model the benefits of the modern architecture and interior design being enjoyed by a social elite of bright young things". Here's a nice detailed article on the house and the paintings in it:
When it was first displayed to the public in 1936, Whiteladies House was accompanied by a small pamphlet detailing its historically-educative purpose and its features. Thomas wrote that it was intended:
to record in miniature the habits, homes, tastes and ideas of the people of today – the young people who are unhampered by choice possessions of old furniture or by old conventions of drawing rooms, calling hours, formal manners or privacy.
With uncanny prescience, she described these youths as ‘A generation bred in one war and living its little time of sunshine to the full before the next.’
Of course, we all know how charming the past is, so who is making the present tiny and cute? The answer is Marina Sokalskaya of the Etsy store EvenTiner. I love her focus on the present day here, look at this coffee machine:
KitchenAid mixer:
And IKEA dresser, to my chagrin this one sold before I could download a proper photo:
Finally, a project I'd not heard of before – the Childhood Cube by artist Sarah Raphael. She got children to furnish 216 little rooms to reflect their daily lives (it was for display in the Millenium Dome). This is an article about restoring the Cube, which had fallen into disrepair:
The variety of the themes and compositions is astonishing. We were constantly surprised by these quirky and funny scenes, finding something new every day. […] This wide range of modern materials such as Plasticine, Perspex and plastics can be challenging to be conserved. We carried out preliminary research on the type of materials present and also tested adhesives and cleaning methods to make sure we would not cause any damage during conservation and to guarantee their future preservation.
Today's newsletter is about being a very specific sort of teenage girl. I personally was much better at being a teenager when I was 25 than I was when I was 15; having more feelings, drunk more frequently and – this last one is the relevant one – certainly crushing harder on Pete Wentz.
Imagine, then, my excitement on seeing the title of this article. I could not jump on it fast enough: Another girl tells me, 'I think that it is OK for people to comment on how attractive a "famous" person is, but there is a line with that kind of stuff that has been crossed many times'. I asked her what that line is. 'Just downright saying that they want to have sex with them. When I leave a comment it is usually just a quick "hey, I love you, you’re awesome".' On one particularly cute selfie of Pete, she had commented 'STRANGLE ME WITH YOUR PHONE CHARGER'. https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/fangirls-extract-emo-fall-out-boy I will never stop laughing at that last line.
The author of this article, Hannah Ewens, has written a whole book, it is called Fangirl and you better believe I already have my copy. Here's a review: From Beatlemaniacs and Brosettes to Directioners and Beliebers, female pop fans have long been gathered into amorphous groups and variously painted as sad, hysterical, sexually predatory and mentally ill. The message, both within and outside the music industry, is always the same: male musical appreciation has to do with a deep understanding of artistry while girls are driven by idolatry and lust. Labelled in relation to the men they admire, they are frequently dismissed as groupies or, in today’s parlance, “fangirls”. But as the American music critic Jessica Hopper once tweeted: “Replace the word ‘fangirl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/24/fangirls-by-hannah-ewens-review
Finally, here's a terrific interview with the Jessica Hopper of that pullquote above, stalwart of the early emo scene who here talks about her book about Chicago in the early 2000s: I just wanted it to feel like a precious little bubble of my life. I think with the remove of more than a decade, almost fifteen years in some cases, you look back on your younger self and go “Why didn’t you?” — that gimlet-eyed, adult regret and nostalgia. I didn’t want to operate from a place of either of those things. I didn’t want to neuter that history and I didn’t want to romanticize how carefree it was. https://longreads.com/2018/09/28/falling-in-love-with-chicago-at-night-an-interview-with-jessica-hopper/
Were you aware that Franz Kafka once said that a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within you, and that's what emo music was to me, an axe to the frozen sea within me. I suppose it still is. I hope you liked this week's newsletter.
I have had a pretty intense week at work so hope that you, like me, will enjoy spending today just looking at some pretty pictures in today's lavishly illustrated Fem Friday.
Were you aware that Tove Jansson, celebrity introvert and creator of the Moomins, illustrated a Swedish edition of The Hobbit? It's as delightful as you think it's going to be:
Staying on a literary theme, how about this NYRB cartoon about Iris Murdoch? It encapsulates much of what I love about Murdoch, I know she is not for everyone but this comic explains in a very nice way why she very much is for others, and why she is for me:
Finally, as well as being a gifted creator of lovely children's books, Beatrix Potter was an avid mycologist and, for want of a better term, mushroom illustrator. Enjoy all of this:
Beatrix’s interest in drawing and painting mushrooms, or fungi, began as a passion for painting beautiful specimens wherever she found them. She never saw art and science as mutually exclusive activities, but recorded what she saw in nature primarily to evoke an aesthetic response. She was drawn to fungi first by their ephemeral fairy qualities and then by the variety of their shape and colour and the challenge they posed to watercolour techniques. Unlike insects or shells or even fossils, fungi also guaranteed an autumn foray into fields and forests, where she could go in her pony cart without being encumbered by family or heavy equipment.
How are you doing? Today's Fem Fri is all about language and language learning, and I am very excited to share it with you.
Let's start with language revitalisation. This is the incredible (and hard!) work of stopping a language from going extinct, and it's what LaRae Wiley of the Salish School of Spokane is doing with the Interior Salish languages. I first read about her school in Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter, and this week I interviewed LaRae about her work. The link is up next but first you may like to know the Salish for computer, which is is málx̌aʔs c̓asyqn, "fake head". Lots to enjoy in the echoes of artificial intelligence here, as well as the idea of a computer as something that you think with, rather than something that things for you. Plenty for the language fans here as well as the fans of community and grassroots organising:
In the wider community as well, there's been a ripple effect. When there are rallies around indigenous causes, there are people who will stand up and speak the language, introduce themselves in the language. They see that it's important to use what they have.
Oh and this morning's greeting, way̓, is the Salish for hullo! Don't worry I'm not going to turn the newsletter into Flickr. It seems relevant for today though.
From a language that's being carefully nurtured back to common usage to a language that flares up and then goes out of fashion almost immediately – here's Gretchen McCulloch, linguist of the internet! Her book arrived for me yesterday and I'm very excited to read it. I also love this quotation from her on language as a team sport:
I’ve never met someone who isn’t at least somewhat intrigued about why certain people say certain things or how kids can make sense of language when we’ve spent decades building computers that are only beginning to get there. I think people get put off by dull or judgemental explanations, but we all have the potential to be fascinated by language as a living, collaborative phenomenon.
For some McCulloch Classic, how about this Toast article which I remembered as the story of the singular "they" but which is much more the story of the English language in general:
[W[hat you really have is an extended period of several centuries in which many people were more-or-less proficient in both Norman French and Anglo Saxon, which in actual fact meant speaking the highly intermingled versions known as Anglo-Norman and Middle English. But words that belong to one gender in one language don’t necessarily belong to the same gender in the other. To use a modern example, the word for “bridge” in French, pont, is masculine, but the word for “bridge” in German, Brücke, is feminine. If you couple this with the fact that people had begun to stop pronouncing altogether the endings that indicate a word’s gender and case, you can see how these features became irrelevant for the language in general.
That's extremely relevant to our next link, which is about Old English! A language that did not die but that evolved into something else. Eliis Saxey has been learning Old English (which is, as you might know from the above link, QUITE HARD compared to New English) and they put together this interactive piece about the language, its poetry and the process of learning itself. Enjoy:
As it is Proms season, and also I am reading The Rest is Noise, I've been thinking a lot about classical music lately. Please enjoy a Fem Fri about two women composers and one grumpy woman patron.
Helen Grime is not only a woman composer but also Scottish woman. I enjoyed this interview with her in which she talks about her works based on two Joan Eardley paintings:
Catterline in Winter is much darker, an almost leaden grey. Musically, Grime knew she needed to find something to unify the two works. That prompted her to dig further into the musical history of the area’s landscape. Grime eventually unearthed an old folk song from the area, sometimes referred to as a bothy ballad. The ballads originated with farm laborers in the northeast of Scotland. They would gather in their shacks (called bothies) at night to sing and entertain each other.
And here's the Eardley painting, Catterline in Winter, for you to look at while you listen:
I knew that Fanny Mendelssohn was incredibly talented, but until today I didn't have a sense of just how prodigious her output was. She composed over 500 pieces apparently and only lived to be 42. Here's an article about her and Angela Mace Christian who is the leading academic of her work:
For decades, scholars believed that the original manuscript was lost. But in 2010, Christian was able to trace it to a private archive in France. When she had the opportunity to examine the manuscript in person, her suspicions about its authorship were confirmed. “I was able to see that it was in [Fanny’s] handwriting,” Christian says. The manuscript also contained page numbers that were missing from a different manuscript known to have been authored by Fanny. Taken together, Christian says, these were “major factors pointing to the identification that [the Easter Sonata] was hers.” The discovery of the Easter Sonata further cements Fanny as a masterful composer in her own right.
Finally, I promised you a grumpy patron and here's a really good one – it's Winnaretta Singer! This is also a classic and beautiful story of an early C20th American industrialist and a penniless European aristocrat getting what they need out of marriage. Here's an excerpt from The Rest is Noise about her stern listening habits. Please note that I've been doing the reading and it's possible that Alex Ross and I have substantially different definitions of the word "secretly":
Winnaretta and Edmond lived happily together until his death in 1901, united by the common passion of music and by the desire to be surrounded by the emerging composers and performers of the time.
Today, here's a Fem Fri that I've been promising myself I'd write for ages – it's about Oaxacan ceramics! I found a book in a library about this traditionally female art form, and liked it so much I took loads of pictures to share with you. They're beautiful because they combine being really stylised with being really familiar – look at these works by Angelica Vasquez:
Country Girl
Classy Lady
Interesting story about Angelica Vasquez. She had been making ceramics for a while, but it was only after her husband left her that she found out that her father-in-law had been signing his name to her pieces and selling them at a considerable profit to him. After she started selling her own pieces, he used his (again, the father-in-law's) influence to make sure that none of the galleries or shops would talk to her or take her pieces. After a few years of taking in washing and working 12 hour days in a department store, she had enough money to move out of her father-in-law's house and is now an internationally recognised ceramics artist:
She is the recipient of the prestigious Mexican National Arts and Sciences Award in the “Arts and Traditions” category in 2009, which is Mexico’s highest honor for artists. It was presented to her by the former President of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, at the Presidential residence of Los Piños.
And now onto the Aguilars, the founding family of Oaxacan ceramics:
The Aguilar family of Ocotlán de Morelos are from a rural town in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. This town produced only utilitarian items until Isaura Alcantara Diaz began creating decorative figures with her husband Jesus Aguila Revilla. The couple taught their five daughters who continued innovating their own styles and then teaching the two generations after them.
Extremely real and familiar is this little Noah's Ark scene by Conception Aguilar:
Noah's Ark
I love this. Look at Mrs Noah. "I know, sweetheart, I don't like that it's still raining either. No, I don't know why G-d hasn't told you when it's going to stop. Yes, I'm quite sure we have enough supplies for however long it takes. You've done a great job. You are doing a great job! Tell you what, there's still tea in the pot if you fancy it?"
Guillermina Aguilar's much bigger figures are a bit disconcerting. Like something from a slightly other world has found its way into ours:
Carrying Water
Finally, Josefina Aguilar's crying people going about their lives are lovely. Especially the mother and child on the Day of the Dead:
Day of the Dead
Funeral Procession
I hope you like these as much as I do. Here's the book for more info, if you did!
