One of the chief joys of writing Fem Friday is that sometimes I read an article on the internet, love it with a wild joy, and find out after reading it that it’s written by a woman and therefore clears the honestly quite low bar for inclusion in Fem Friday.
ON THAT NOTE, please enjoy this long article from the internet that was written by a woman. And yes also it’s about a bunch of dudes, but the dudes are so weird and secretive in a weird and inept way, so it’s also about tracing through the internet to find out who people are and what that might mean for what their motivations are. The motivations, specifically, to write poetry on Instagram while being rude about other people who write poetry on Instagram. This is the stuff that Friday lunchtimes were invented for. Tell your colleagues you have plans, buy your favourite sandwich and settle into this:
The website for Bone Machine listed only Young and a fellow writer he frequently promotes online and in interviews, Scott Laudati, as authors. Though the listed editors are Milo Savage and Jerry Ovad, the web domain is registered to Laudati. (In an email, Laudati told me that he had a discount from registering his own personal website’s domain, so he let Bone Machine use it.) No trace of publishers or editors named Jerry Ovad or Milo Savage turns up elsewhere online, but the name Milo Savage does appear in one suggestive place: It’s the name of a character in Young’s book Resign.
I like poetry myself sometimes, here is a poem by Elaine Equi I found ridiculously charming this week. Thanks as usual to Pome newsletter:
Numeric Values
The Prime Mover
The Second Sex
The Third Wheel
The Four Seasons (see also Horseman)
The Fifth Dimension
The Sixth Sense
The Seven Hills (see also Dwarves)
The Eighth Wonder (see also Octomom)
The Nine Muses
The Tenth Inning
The Eleventh Hour
The Twelve Tribes
And here’s more from Elaine Equi:
When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They’re not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be “real.” I think it is real, but I like the idea of it being non-utilitarian.
I hope you too enjoyed that poem about numbers, and here are two more women who (presumably) like numbers as they have just won Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. Meet Donna Strickland and Frances Arnold:
Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate in Physics, plays her cards close to her chest:
AS: What was your immediate thought on hearing the news?
DS: Well, obviously, I think like many people said we wondered if it was a prank. I knew it was the right day – it would have been a cruel prank, but that is what I was thinking.
Frances Arnold, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, seems like a woman who loves her job:
Her enzymes have been used to make biofuels, medicines and laundry detergent, among other things. In many processes, they have taken the place of toxic chemicals. “I think of what I do as copying nature’s design process,” Dr. Arnold said in an interview with NobelPrize.org. “All this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about to this one simple beautiful design algorithm.”
I’ve recently been enjoying the work of two Phoebes, and you might enjoy them as well.
To start with, I am enjoying Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve enormously. I thought it was just a murder thing (which would also have been good) but it’s extremely funny too. And all still on iPlayer! Here’s Waller-Bridge talking about writing and female friendship. Amongst other things. Some great clothes in this link as well:
“I guess I’ve always been fascinated by tits because in some way they are an expression of femininity and they are so important when you’re growing up. Whether you have tits or not, when they’re going to come, the girl who’s got massive ones who doesn’t want them and is trying to cover them up, and the girl who hasn’t got them and is stuffing them with tissue. The stakes are so huge around tits, and I think that remains through life.”
I also enjoyed this investigation of the lipstick that Fleabag wears all the time in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s first television show, Fleabag. I bought Dare You off the back of this article despite the fact that it says, extremely clearly, that Dare You comes off easily. And it does! It’s not as bad as Studded Kiss – what is – but it’s not at all as good as Ruby Woo. Anyway:
Then I realized […] that it might be possible to find the actual perfect red lipstick worn by Phoebe Waller-Bridge herself. I would file a FOIA request if I had to. The people needed to know.
Over the last couple of months I’d been hearing about Phoebe Bridgers, but had thought “oh how sad that Phoebe Waller-Bridges [NB: also not Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s name] has divorced Mr Waller, but cool that she has a music career as well”. As you well know, Phoebe Bridgers is a completely different person. Who is also excellent! Here’s a song of hers that I have been listening to several times a day for the last two weeks:
And an interview lavishly illustrated with pictures of Phoebe cuddling a little dog:
“[M]e writing sad songs doesn’t mean I am a sad person," she says. "It’s all real and true, and I suffer, but I am not going to be moody all the time just for a brand. I just want everyone to know, which is what everyone already knows: everyone is everything all the time.”
I’m back! How are you doing, are you alright? I hope everything is great and that you enjoyed two week’s of Saxey’s editorship. If you’re missing it already, don’t worry! Novellas and short stories abound here at lightningbook:
I was on holiday by the sea, and also I read Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic which gave me 66% of the idea for today’s Feminist Friday. You’d enjoy Sympathy, I think, definitely check it out if you’d like something fun and creepy to read as the winter approaches.
Anyway, here’s our first Fem Fri hero for today! Kathleen Drew was a Lancashire scientist whose pioneering work in seaweed headed off at the pass a famine and the collapse of an industry. She didn’t live to see the immense impact of her work, or the immense regard in which she would be held in Japan where she is honoured to this day:
The Japanese began cultivating nori in the 1600s. Due to a change in the farming methods, and after a series of typhoons in 1948, the seaweed bed was decimated and since next to nothing was known about the life cycle of seaweeds, no one knew how to grow new replacement plants. The nori industry tanked. In the same year however, Drew-Baker published a landmark paper that saved Japan’s nori farmers, put sushi on tables worldwide, and paved the way for international seaweed cultivation. […] In Japan, Kathleen Drew-Baker has become known as the ‘Mother of the Sea‘, and each year on 14th April there is a celebration of her work. A monument to her was erected in 1963 at the Sumiyoshi shrine in Uto, Kumamoto, Japan.
My favourite of all of the last fortnight’s links was about the Sardinian woman who dives for sea silk, and in a tribute to that, here’s a piece about the ama divers of Japan – women who free dive for pearls. I like how the key to this is not so much being good at anything technical as being good at (1) making decisions and (2) making the most of your time:
Regular accidents have become a way of life, shark encounters aren’t unheard of and there’s always that biting cold. […] The key, she explained, is not how long the Ama can hold their breath for, but how fast they can hunt. Beneath the waves, sometimes for a gut-wrenching two minutes at a time, the Ama need to be decisive and efficient.
Finally, I’m reading The Pillow Book, which is making me think about my favourite character in The Tale of Genji, the Akashi Lady. LOOK AWAY NOW if you don’t want spoilers for Japan’s premier medieval epic. The Akashi Lady lived by the sea and was therefore seen as a bit of a bumpkin and was aware that she was lower status than the city court ladies. Needless to say, she had the last laugh by becoming the Empress Mother. There aren’t any great links about her online, so instead you can enjoy this painted screen showing her interacting with Genji while gentlewomen snicker:
Happy Friday! Saxey here again, looking to fantasy fiction, and plucking out one ancient fictional woman, and one modern real one.
I’ve been reading Old English poetry. The poem Beowulf is the big guns of Old English, so I’m saving it until I can read it with more confidence (and fewer trips to Bosworth and Toller’s Dictionary). But I’m intrigued by Maria Devana Headley’s new book, which rewrites Beowulf from the perspective of the antagonist, the monster-mother.
In most English language translations of Beowulf, aeglaec-wif is translated as some version of hag, hell-hell-bride, creature, while Aeglaeca, when applied to Beowulf, is translated as “hero.” If we apply a different translation to the word, something like “fierce fighter” or “formidable,” things in the Beowulf story change, among them that Grendel’s mother can be seen as human.
To really pin down the nature of Grendel’s mother, why not ask a bunch of teenagers to doodle a biro picture of her? Thijs Porck offers extra exam marks for a quick sketch. More scholarly commentary on the character, and illuminating diagrams of varying quality. (You can also see student renderings of Judith cheerfully cutting off the head of Holofernes, here.)
Moving forward a thousand years, to modern fantasy: author N.K.Jemisin has just made fiction history! She's the first author to win the prestigious Hugo award three times, in three years, for all three books of a trilogy. Here’s her acceptance speech.
I get a lot of questions about where the themes of the Broken Earth trilogy come from. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m drawing on the human history of structural oppression, as well as my feelings about this moment in American history. What may be less obvious, though, is how much of the story derives from my feelings about science fiction and fantasy. Then again, SFF is a microcosm of the wider world, in no way rarefied from the world’s pettiness or prejudice.
Good morning - it's me, Saxey, focusing on textiles! I've got some great material. And some fascinating threads.
Sorry.
First up, not all cotton is white cotton, and some women work to preserve its multicoloured variety. It feels like a sad giant metaphor that in both these stories the multicoloured cotton is threatened because it might contaminate the white cotton crop.
Sally Fox in California:
"And that’s how it was that I became fixated. I would never spin or weave anything dyed, only natural colors.” This discovery led Fox to a life-long pursuit to secure natural fibers, wherever they came from—whether it was dogs from the grooming station or musk-ox hair she used to gather from the San Francisco Zoo.
When we started looking for wild cotton seeds, we realized there were almost none left – we looked in every house, on every plot of land, but, no one had any seeds. We eventually found some buried in pillows…
Next, dive into this story which begins like an epic fantasy novel, and continues to bewilder.
Each spring, under the cover of darkness and guarded by members of the Italian Coast Guard, 62-year-old Chiara Vigo slips on a white tunic, recites a prayer and plunges headfirst into the crystalline sea off the tiny Sardinian island of Sant’Antioco. Using the moonlight to guide her, Vigo descends up to 15m below the surface to reach a series of secluded underwater coves and grassy lagoons that the women in her family have kept secret for the past 24 generations.
And to increase your disorientation, let's zoom from the smallest and oldest weaving imaginable, to a futuristic industry - fibres made from pineapple leftovers.
When she first started looking for an alternative to leather, Hijosa wanted the new product to look like the one it was replacing. Now, however, she says: “I am not really happy if it looks like leather because it has to start looking [like] itself.”
I first heard about the versatile fruity Piñatex this summer, at a panel on SciFi clothing which also praised mushroom leather and looked forward to hag fish slime replacing nylon. Tactile Trends is a site by designer Rachel Higginbottom which keeps an eye on techno-fabrics while being visually sumptuous. In honour of Chiara Vigo the sea-silk seamstress, here's a marine-themed mood board which I found very soothing.
For our textile trend story, 'The Mariners Muse' we look at the world through the eyes of a seafaring mariner and his castaway muse. As they travel the oceans together braving the elements, their voyage of discovery reveals textural wonderment, ship wrecked beauty and curious beach finds.
Spanning a real range of brow heights today, so I hope you enjoy them all. It’s about computer games btw.
OTHER BIG NEWS, I will be away for the next two Fem Fris so you have Saxey’s amazing mind, live and direct to your inbox, for first two weeks of September! Stoked for us all, these are always a treat.
Here’s a really good, long article about the early days of Atari through the eyes of the women who worked there. It’s pleasingly nuanced in a way that the pullquote below sums up nicely; you can have an experience you are grateful for that was also not an unmixed good. Make a yrself a nice cup of tea and settle in:
Two years after she started, Shirley moved to the production office; after that, customer service. In 1986, she became that division’s director, sitting in on executive meetings. Shirley left Atari in 1999 with a salary of $125,000. “I know people who had psychological issues after Atari. It never prepared us for the real world,” Shirley said. “Nobody could have asked for a better experience.”
I have searched the newsletter archives and it seems that I have never written anything about Princess Peach, which is at this stage incredible. This is the thing I like about Princess Peach, it’s that when you play Mario Kart she is pretty much a heavyweight and can compete with Bowser and Wario, but also while wearing a pretty dress. Not a lot of people on the internet have written about Princess Peach, so if you have, please send me a link! If you have not, you night like to consider pitching it if that is the sort of thing you do. Anyway, this week, enjoy some thoughts on Peach from Shigeru Miyamoto (a man and the originator of the Mario universe):
It was important to us in Super Princess Peach for Peach to be Peach-like. […] As for what “Peach-like” means, it’s that free optimism of a Princess. She has never seen herself as “protected” by Mario. Our image of her is one of strength.
Finally, I know how to treat a lady right, when that lady is a Fem Fri subscriber; it’s classic Toast articles. Have at it, Zelda fans of all or no genders:
if Link were going to hang up his sword and spend the rest of his life in peaceful retirement on a farm somewhere, Malon would be it. She gave him a horse. He’s been to her house. Her dad likes him. She’s got cute red hair, and she’s not trapped in the body of a ten-year-old or a fish princess or anything weird.
Only the very best vibes this Fem Fri as we head into the Bank Holiday Weekend. Firstly you have a newsletter to enjoy that is all about the female DJs who are spreading party funtimes across the globe, and secondly you’ve got double the links you usually would as there’s a mix and an interview for each DJ.
Let’s start with Avalon Emerson. I saw her play at a festival this year and she was great, but I like her even more now I know some of her weird playlist names. She also quit her job as a computer programmer far more recently that I would have expected. Here’s a mix for you to enjoy:
And here’s an interview which is about her DJing and music making process:
When I play, I think of things in terms of words I’ll string together to make a sentence which can develop into an idea or a feeling. Whether it’s a similar, rolling, percussive, fast, techno agitation things or earthy, deeper, more emotional house-y stuff. I basically just have all of my different oddly named playlist names. I have acid techno crucible, earthy power, weird drum.
And a nice interview about letting go of the idea of perfection and, I suppose, finding ways to enjoy discomfort:
The first party I ever played was at university and it was amazing, but even after that I quit DJing for a while because I didn’t feel good enough. I was practising for hours every day and getting good feedback but I had no self-confidence whatsoever and was terrified of making a fool of myself. I had to let go of the idea of perfection and just accept that being outside my comfort zone was the only way to progress.
And an extremely charming interview with her about (amongst other things) how it feels to suddenly have a very popular song out there:
I personally did not expect this kind of reaction. […] I still get messages from everywhere in the world - shops like H&M, radio, hotel, clubs, beach bars etc are playing my tune! Sometimes I get a message saying somebody 50-60 years old or a young kid likes my tune and I get very emotional! So I’m very very thrilled, and because my expectation wasn’t so high I get surprised everyday.
Have a lovely long weekend. If you are not in the UK and don’t have a long weekend, perhaps you could listen to these mixes on Monday to keep the party going.
Here’s something that I think I should be good at but that I am consistently very bad at; it’s pub quizzes. I think I should be good at them because I have a good memory and read a lot, but what this analysis ignores is that I read a lot on a relatively small number of topics. This is bad for the very obvious reason that pub quizzes require shallow knowledge of a large number of topics (to be clear; the opposite of my thing) and for the more subtle reason that when something on one of my specialist topics does come up it appears to me so easy that I can’t properly enjoy answering it. So, for example, when the question is “who wrote The Great Gatsby?” I find it really hard to suppress my irritation that the question was not “Who was Harold Ober’s most famous client?” It would also be permissible in this question to note the space in which Harold Ober agented. I am not a complete maniac.
Anyway, all of this is to say that today’s Fem Fri is about women who are much, much better sports around triv than I am, and also better at it. Let’s start with the ladies of Agnes Scott College and their exciting victory over Princeton* in American University Challenge. It’s a gripping story and I highly recommend that you read the link in full:
For her part, Malinda Snow, the captain of the 1966 team, dismisses the idea that the tiny women’s college was at any sort of disadvantage against the Ivy League boys of Princeton. “I never felt that we were a David and Goliath,” said Snow. “I was assuming that Agnes Scott was an excellent college, which it was, and I was assuming that we were representing one of the best women’s colleges and that we would do well and nobody was better than we were.”
Something else that I like to read about quiz show rigging scandals. Here’s Dr Joyce Brothers – allegedly, the producers of The $64K Question tried to get her off the show as they thought she was not engaging enough for the viewers, but she had done the research, answered the questions correctly, won $64K and launched a successful television career. Good:
Dr. Brothers arrived in the American consciousness (or, more precisely, the American unconscious) at a serendipitous time: the exact historical moment when cold war anxiety, a greater acceptance of talk therapy and the widespread ownership of television sets converged. Looking crisply capable yet eminently approachable in her pastel suits and pale blond pageboy, she offered gentle, nonthreatening advice on sex, relationships, family and all manner of decent behavior. It is noteworthy, then, that her public life began with fisticuffs. The demure-looking, scholarly Dr. Brothers had first come to wide attention as a contestant on “The $64,000 Question,” where she triumphed as an improbable authority on boxing.
Finally, here’s a lovely bit of writing about trivia and its social limits, from Margo’s Three Weeks newsletter. I think you would really enjoy Three Weeks! As the name implies, it’s less frequent than Fem Fri, but it has more dresses and more links and some of them are about men sometimes:
If I knew everything about music, movies, comic books, and any other really important subjects, I figured that other people would be drawn to me. I'd dazzle them with my knowledge of Counting Crows songs and X-Men cartoons, and they'd want to be my friend/make out with me/invite me to parties/lift me from this weary suburban vale of tears and into whatever real life was.
This episode goes out to the friend and subscriber whose first word was “plane”! It’s all about women and flight.
We start with an absolute tearjerker (be warned, people at work or on a commute) about family and love and belonging and… Christa McAuliffe, who was to be the first woman in space:
“Dear Christa McAuliffe, you are my hero and my favorite woman on earth (and in space.) Love, Jennifer P.S. Please write back I have something very important to ask you. P.P.S. My home address is on the back of this card. P.P.P.S. Thank you.”
Here’s more about Christa McAuliffe, whose project as stated below sounds like something that would still be good. There could for sure be more humanising of technology, with or without space in the mix:
‘My perceptions as a non-astronaut would help complete and humanize the technology of the space age,’ she added. ‘Future historians would use my eyewitness accounts to help in their studies of the impact of the space age on the general population.’
Finally, within the atmosphere, here’s a superb Economist obituary on Mary Ellis, who loved Spitfires and died at the age of 101:
Who needed love, with all its tortures and entanglements, when there was this? From the age of three she had wanted her wings to grow so she could reach the shimmering sky. Now she had them she was free, full of adrenalin and purpose.
This morning’s Fem Fri is built around a single quotation that I found particularly resonant; “There is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018”. I did the research on the phrase “moral clarity” and found that it is also a sort of Manichean approach to foreign policy, so to clarify, that’s not what I mean and given the context it does not appear to be what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez means either.
Anyway, having got thoroughly wrapped around the axle ahead of a newsletter about clarity, let me now introduce Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is running for Congress in New York. We come quite close to sharing a name and she knows her way around a zing:
Ocasio-Cortez says that her Catholic faith brought her to seek an end to mass incarceration […] When a reporter asked her on election night to respond to critics who called her too radical, she fired back: ‘There is nothing radical about moral clarity in 2018.’
Here’s another woman of certainty around what is right; it’s the also splendidly named Argula von Grumbach, a major player in the Reformation. She was the first person to publicly stand up for Seehofer and she did so by literally asking for a fight:
With a letter, a single woman challenges the whole faculty of the university of Ingolstadt: Argula von Grumbach requested that the professors ought to enter a public dispute with her about the exegesis of the Holy Scripture. While they rubbed their eyes when faced with this audacity, the sender knows exactly what she wants: to contribute theological arguments to the case of the young follower of Luther, Arsacius Seehofer, and ultimately to the cause of the Reformation itself. She confidently ends her letter with the words: "I have not written women's gossip to you, but the word of God, as a member of the church […] I find nowhere in the Bible that Jesus or his disciples or prophets had incarcerated, burned or exiled someone.”
There are, to my mind, very few writers who address morality more successfully than Iris Murdoch, and even fewer who are as funny about it. Here we see her defending democratic socialism and Watership Down:
