I hope you had a lovely Christmas, and for both those who did and those who did not enjoy your Christmases, I have something you will like – it’s my new favourite pained female singer-singwriter, Julien Baker.
Let’s start with a song and then move onto the interviews. This is the title track from her first album, Sprained Ankle:
Julien Baker grew up in an intensely Christian family in Memphis, and dreaded coming out to her folks. When she came out to her dad, he made it his business to go through the Bible and show her all of the verses about love and acceptance so that she would know how loved and accepted she would always be. My own father told me this story over breakfast this week, and it was a happy little conversation, to be sharing in the kindness and love of another family far away. Here’s a great interview with her about, amongst other things, the musical influence of her faith:
“Many of my songs just come together in quatrains because that’s how a hymn goes,” she said. “Another thing that I love about hymns is that despite being antiquated modes of worship — maybe — they contain these really emotive phrases. All of my favorite hymns are admissions of faults, and finding redemption even in those.”
A lot of her musical influences, certainly lyrically, come from emo music. You might be wondering, does she do a song in which she fantasises about being in a car crash? Julien Baker will not let you down is all I will say on the topic. Here’s an interview where she talks about emo music:
“I think of my music as being for sad alt kids with too many feelings, but then I play shows and get an audience of folks that wouldn’t normally go to shows.”
Finally, you know I love an article by Jia Tolentino, and she reviewed the latest album, so this one is a twofer:
Punk teaches the same inversion of power as the Gospel—you learn that the coolest thing about having a microphone is turning it away from your own mouth.
Today’s Fem Friday is all about horror and the women who write it, and there are also four links instead of the usual three. I hope you enjoy all of them.
Mariana Enriquez’ Things We Lost In The Fire was one of my books of 2017, and if you were interested in that but have not yet bought the book you can read one of her stories, Spiderweb, and see if you like it:
If they were always cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Paraná, or of the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. But as chicharras they make me think of the heat, rotting meat, blackouts, drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park.
Here’s an interview with Mariana Enriquez, talking about horror and the setting for Spiderweb:
the tradition there of ghost stories, local monsters, and saints is very different from what you can absorb in Buenos Aires. Even in the cities of the northeast there is a relationship with the supernatural that is not cynical and sometimes can feel deeply disturbing.
In a totally different kind of horror, have you seen Alice Lowe’s Prevenge? It is superb and also horrible, and she was really pregnant while she was making it:
In the very personification of the adage “necessity is the mother of invention”, Lowe came up with the concept when she found herself jobless and pregnant for the first time at 37 years old. “I had projects in development and it was taking ages and I was getting frustrated […] I got pregnant thinking: ‘Nothing’s happening right now with the film world, if I’m gonna have a kid, it’s gonna be now.’”
To finish this theme of the casual horror of the everyday, here’s a Mallory Ortberg classic – Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body. Please enjoy:
“Jostling occurred for an extended period of time, then silence.”
Once again, please enjoy my books of the year, just in time for the last shopping weekend before Christmas. It’s this sort of commercial insight that makes Fem Friday such a draw for premium advertisers.
I have never been so thoroughly frighted by a book as I have by this one. It’s a collection of short stories – the first of Enriquez’ to be translated into English – and they’re all very short and very horrifying. She has an unnerving ability to press all of, certainly my, and maybe your, buttons at once – writing about soured faith, unwanted children, seeing nothing when you expect to see something. Most of these stories walk the line between supernatural and not – sure, there might be a greater evil in play, or maybe it’s just teenagers on acid, or kids playing silly games, or a woman wild with grief. I can’t in good conscience recommend reading this if you are pregnant, have ever been pregnant, or plan on being pregnant.
There is no doubt that you will have seen this book repped for elsewhere, but what these reviews might not have noted is what an incredible piece of writing it is on the sentence to sentence level. It’s really astonishing to read passages as bleak as some of the ones in this book and to still not want to even take a wee break from reading it. I feel like this book has been extremely feted and I don’t have a lot to add to what has already been said, but if you are a fan of a good sentence and have been unsure about whether you will like this book, you will like this book.
This is one of those books (handwave) of social history that are also about the author and the author’s experience, but it’s also one of the most successful of those books that I’ve read. Lauren Elkin captures that lovely sense that you sometimes get in a city that all of the history in the city is happening at once – that George Sand is watching from an upstairs window as a revolution is brutally crushed and that Virginia Woolf is still storming around Bloomsbury. It’s also about building a life and the women who have build lives for themselves in and with their cities.
My only complaint with this book is that it thinks it is too cool to have an index. Every work of non fiction should have an index! Official Fem Friday stance.
Longtime subscribers will know that I am an enormous fan of the everyday and this book writes about the power that the everyday has. It’s about the British cohort birth studies – the five studies that follow all of the babies born on a certain day – and their influence on life and policy in Britain since the war. This makes it sound enormously dry, which it is not at all – there are wonderful, personal stories of the people who took (take!) part in the studies and the people who worked (work!) against tremendous odds to keep them going. This was the only book that I cried at this year, and it’s out now in paperback so if you don’t find it under the tree on Monday perhaps you can buy this as a treat for yourself on Wednesday.
You know that amazing thing that truly clever people can do, where they make you feel more clever rather than less clever when they are around? This is exactly how it feels to read this book by Sarah Bakewell, whose kindness and braininess radiates through every page of this delightful work. She takes you through some exceptionally difficult philosophical concepts and makes you feel like you know and understand them well enough to form an opinion of them. The existentialists were an inherently interesting bunch as well, so it’s good to read about them on that level too.
Honorable mention also to Joe Moran’s Shrinking Violets and Eimear McBrides’ The Lesser Bohemians. Finally, if you have a small child or children, or are just looking for a gift for same, Sandra Boynton’s Hippos Go Berserk! has been my go-to since July of this year. It is SO GOOD.
Lots of fun links on the topic of climbing this week. I hope you enjoy them and that you are winding down for Christmas now.
We start with an excellent subscriber-submitted link (thank you!) – it’s an intersectional feminist review of climbing books! Very useful if you want a climbing book that represents a diverse range of people, and if you don’t, here’s a nice pullquote on why that matters:
other climbers will typically approach my climbing partner to ask questions about the route, even when I'm clearly geared up as the lead. Why don't they see me? Then I stumbled upon an explanation. Typically, the people with whom I interact in outdoor arenas are white. Similarly, the industry's media tend to showcase scientists, activists, or athletes as white and usually male. No wonder people don't see me; I am not what they are accustomed to seeing in our field. But I am here, and so are other women
You might have seen this lovely story about raising a teenage daughter, with annotations by said teenage daughter. The whole thing is well worth your time. There’s lots about climbing here, too:
Also a teenager, here’s an article about Ashmina Shirashi, champion boulderer (I am sure there is a better word for this):
She was using toeholds that didn’t seem to exist. For a moment, she was caught in the corner, reaching up toward the ledge, and then suddenly the implausible was made to seem routine. I thought of a phrase that a champion climber named Sasha DiGiulian had mentioned to me, about certain climbers having “a voice on the wall.” Ashima’s was distinctive, purposeful, fluid.
We have another musical Friday this morning, brought to you by the feminist delights of folk songs. I am sure you are looking askance at that sentence, but have a listen to these and let me know what you think.
Before you get your headphones on, though, here’s an interview with Maddy Prior, intermittently of Steeleye Span. My parents were massively into Steeleye Span, so Prior is the reason I love folk music. Here she is talking about what she, in turn, loves about folk music:
"The thing about that material," Prior says, "is what they used to say about The News of the World: all human life is here. It really is with traditional material: you can study it, you can read about it, it brings you into history; it was only getting into the music that got me into history. And traditional music has such scope in it; it has the humour, there’s great ribald stuff and there’s the archetypal material if you want to get into interpreting that, which I love."
Now let’s listen to Marrow Bones by Steeleye Span. This song has one of the best punchlines I know. Please listen right to the end, it will not disappoint.
OKAY OKAY this one isn’t strictly speaking feminist but it is hilarious, and it’s about a woman. It’s Queen Eleanor’s Confession by Tim Hart and Maddy Prior. If you know me in real life, and have ever walked home from a pub with me, you have absolutely heard me bellow the refrain and funny bits of this song on the walk back. Now you can hear it as it is meant to be, i.e., featuring the otherworldly beauty of Maddy Prior’s voice:
This Fem Friday we turn our attention to the beautiful county of Fife, slightly north of Edinburgh or slightly south of Dundee depending on your perspective.
This is inspired by my having been to see modern classical composer Anna Meredith, who I thought until I reread this interview was from Fife (i.e., North Queensferry) but who is, in fact, from very very slightly south of same:
Yeah, it's a slightly strange place to grow up, South Queensferry – in that your postcode's Edinburgh, I went to school in Edinburgh, most of my mates lived in central Edinburgh, and I went to orchestras and music groups every night there after school – but I spent most of my teenage years wishing we actually lived in the city. I feel like I spent half my life back then on incredibly infrequent buses. There was this amazing bus that used to go back and forth late from the city centre, it was called the Night Reveller – isn't that a great name for a bus? You had this kind of Sophie's choice between either a bus at quarter past midnight and then there was nothing till quarter to three. So you'd just be sat there, on Waverley Bridge, in your tiny little sparkly dress, waiting and waiting for the Night Reveller. Or the Night Hawk, that was another one. They were always like the seventh circle of hell, those buses, with everyone being sick, winding through all the little rural villages out of the city.
I’ve featured Mary Somerville here before, but mainly her thoughts and impressions of her hometown, Burntisland*. This episode, I want to really focus in on one thing – that she was such a brilliant scientist the word scientist was coined just for her:
William Whewell, in his 1834 review of Mary Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, coined the word "scientist" to describe Somerville in part because “man of science” seemed inappropriate for a woman, but more significantly because Somerville’s work was interdisciplinary.
Another great bit of Fife history relating to women – Mary Queen of Scots was kept in captivity there, in the castle on Loch Leven. You can see her escape illustrated on this vintage cigarette card:
And read about it here:
Mary attempted to escape from the castle in March 1568, disguised as a laundress, but was, unfortunately, recognised by the boatmen taking her across the loch and so was returned to her prison. Her next attempt, on 2nd May 1568, was successful. This time, she was helped by sixteen-year-old Willie Douglas, a page in the castle. He sabotaged all the boats at the jetty except one and signalled to Mary, who had swapped clothes with her lady, Mary Seton, when the coast was clear and everyone was busy with May Day festivities.
How are you doing? If you are in London and don’t have plans for the weekend, allow me to recommend the Rachel Whiteread show at the Tate Britain! She is my favourite visual artist – I remember seeing one of her works (which I now know is Village) at the Tate Modern and it was the first time I’d been truly and unexpectedly taken aback by a work of art. I didn’t know what to do with myself and came quite close to crying.
Before this newsletter totally eludes my control, Village is now a permanent exhibit at the Museum Of Childhood:
“Over the years,” she says, “through my interest in sculpture and architecture I started to buy the odd doll’s house, then thought about lighting them, and it became a bit obsessive – I started to see doll’s houses everywhere. These amazing parcels arrived from eBay, the extraordinary way people packaged them. And when I unwrapped them, it became a village.” She donated the work to the museum, where it will live in a dark corner, a hillside of crates, the houses lit from within.
And back to the original topic, here’s an interview with Whiteread about the Tate Britain show. Note on the Tate Britain – it’s a lot less crowded than the Tate Modern! If you found your last visit to a Tate museum really stressful, consider that you might have been in the wrong Tate. I love this idea of "shy sculptures" – pieces that look like they "should" be there until you look closer and see that they are inside-out:
The importance she attaches to finding the right location for her sculptures is evident in a strain of her work she calls “shy sculptures”. These are castings of sheds or cabins — “miniature homes” — placed in remote, difficult-to-access locations such as a Norwegian fiord, a hill on Governors Island, New York, and the Mojave Desert. Standing temporarily outside Tate Britain is her latest example, a casting of the inside of a chicken shed in Norfolk, showing the details of hand-sawn timber used in the shed’s construction. “Sheds are furniture for people to dream away their lives in. It’s become a part of my language.”
There is something, too, in the quietness of sheds and dreaming that reminded me of this article about Annie Baker’s plays – our lives are not speed and yelling, most of the time, and culture could maybe use a little more staring into space:
Baker’s 2010 play The Aliens epitomizes the quiet style. It’s set in the dingy backyard of a coffee shop, and for the first act, the characters just talk. In the second act, one of the ‘aliens’ has dropped dead, but everything else is pretty much the same. There’s a long meditative interlude, in which a character repeats a single word so many times that it starts to function like a mantra. Forget the Daytona pit—the play is more like getting a flat tire and then running out of gas. It could hardly be slower or quieter (“at least a third—if not half—of this play is silence” is Baker’s instruction on performing it), and it’s a brilliant play—subtle, richly felt, completely believable, and both heartbreaking and funny, without straining for any effects.
I have some classical antiquity related treats for you this morning. I hope you are stoked!
We start with an interview with Emily Wilson, who has translated Homer’s Odyssey – and is the first woman to do so. Lots of interesting thoughts about translation as well as about women in this one, I highly recommend clicking this link and reading in full.
“If you’re going to admit that stories matter,” Wilson told me, “then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? The whole question of ‘What is that story?’ is going to depend on the language, the words that you use.”
Of course, Homer is traditionally thought of as a man, so let’s now turn our thoughts to Sappho, who was held (according to the below article) in similarly high regard and who invented the gay goth look:
imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as “the Poet,” and they referred to her as “the Poetess.” Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and “feminize” the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her “comrade in arms”—in love.)
Onto philosophy, I studied several of the works of Plato at college. I did not get on with Plato. I know this is mostly my problem and not Plato’s, so bear that in mind as you read what follows. My main memory is a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates says to some poor sap he’s interrogating about the nature of pleasure, “so I guess your idea of the highest human good is to endlessly cycle through thirst so you can sate your thirst and hunger so you can sate your hunger”* which struck me as so fundamentally terrified of the human form that I think of Socrates as the guy who is nervously trying to avoid shaking hands with his fellow windbags in the Agora, in case he catches Ancient Greek Bird Flu. ANYWAY, have you ever wondered what Plato would have been like if Socrates had been a woman! Apparently you don’t have to:
If you peruse the first volume of M. E. Waith’s series A History of Women Philosophers, you’ll find a wealth of primary texts that represent the ideas of female ancient thinkers, from Pythagoras’ wife Theano, daughter Myia and other Pythagorean women, to Plato’s mother Perictione, as well as the Cyrenaic Arete and the Cynic Hipparchia. If you’re willing to use Plato’s dialogues as records of historical fact (which you shouldn’t be), you could also throw in two prominent women characters from those dialogues, Diotima in the Symposium and Aspasia in the Menexenus.
It’s the Friday closest to Halloween! As is traditional, let’s celebrate with this classic Annie Liebowitz portrait of Susan Sontag:
I started a paragraph that tried to explain why I love this so much, but I don’t really think that this is required commentary. Perhaps spend the time you’d spend reading a paragraph noting tiny details about Sontag’s facial expression (“Sweetheart, do you have to keep playing with that thing? I’m quite busy”) and work environment.
Speaking of women photographers, here’s an article on Vivian Maier, of whom I was only vaguely aware before this year. It's not the happiest of stories but it is a testament to taking one's own projects entirely seriously without seeking the approval of others:
[D]omestic work is placed in opposition to artistic ambition, as if the two are incompatible. But are they? Street photographers are often romanticized as mystical flâneurs, who inconspicuously capture life qua life, who are in the world, but not of it. The help, like the street photographer, is supposed to be invisible. Menial tasks like child care have, historically, been relegated to working-class women, who give up domestic autonomy to live in intimate proximity to their employers while remaining employees.
Onto painted portraits, enjoy this article on Laura Collins, who paints pictures of celebrities and near-celebrities. Her series, Real Housewives Pointing Fingers, is pretty relentless.
“For centuries, women have been portrayed through paint as reclined nudes and doting mothers,” Collins told me. “We idolize the Mona Lisa and praise her gentle smile, but all it does is reinforce in our society that women should be objectified and keep their mouths shut.” With paintings ranging in subject from Celebrities Crying to Lady Gaga’s Hats, Laura Collins is challenging the status quo.
In case I’ve not been banging on about it enough, I have a new job! Which is great, and which is causing me to remember that imposter syndrome is something that occasionally women get. In case you ever feel imposter syndrome, here are some links that you will enjoy, illustrating that some women imposters in history have done absolutely fine and maybe there are worse things to be.
Firstly, though, if you’re going to get up to some sort of scam, think it through first - make sure it’s not something revolting and easily disproved like “I give birth to rabbits”:
Both the mother- and sister-in-law were in on the hoax, and, conveniently, Ann, the mother-in-law, was a midwife. Simply, the family wanted money. As Mary later put it, “to get so good a living that I should never want as long as I lived.” (This is one of the few places in her history that her voice comes ringing out.) Exhibitions of “sights and monsters” were hugely popular in England at the time and took in pennies and half crowns at a good clip.
Here’s the real deal - Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia Romanov for a very long time, and who did fine out of it! Lots of interesting stuff that I didn’t know in here, including that she was not the first to claim herself as one of the Romanovs, and that she was pretty rude to people who supported her claim most of the time:
For nearly a decade, Anderson bounced between castles and homes, dependent on the kindness of royal or wealthy strangers. The stream of visitors continued, and she soon had as many detractors as supporters. Anastasia's old nursemaid, her former tutor, and other royal employees flatly denied she was genuine, yet others still believed.
Finally, I believe this has long been considered the definitive work on imposter syndrome, presented here for the sake of completeness:
Social scientists working on a decades-long population study have recently concluded that every single living resident of the United States suffers from a condition known as imposter syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments, except for you, an actual fraud who is almost certainly on the verge of being found out by the people who only think they love and respect you any day now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmGVIvf8Q6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdBu21i9aEE
And read about it here:
Before this newsletter totally eludes my control, Village is now a permanent exhibit at the Museum Of Childhood: