Today, Fem Friday is all about fame and people’s reactions to it. I read several of today’s links with a quiet smugness, as though I am totally immune to any kind of reaction to famous people at any kind of proximity. Then, in a quiet moment, I remembered a passage in Mrs Dalloway which I reread extremely recently, and which caused me to note that I am as immune to being impressed by fame as any normal person, i.e., not immune at all:
Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey. Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it?
This bout of self reflection was prompted by a wonderful article on Justin Bieber moving to New Jersey, and particularly the following account of one woman’s reaction to same. There’s much, much more in the article - and people seem quite keen to swear about the town of Montclair, NJ - but you get a sense of how things are going to play out here:
McCaffrey hadn’t been much of a Belieber, but when she saw Bieber walking into her local Target, something jolted her. “I locked eyes with him, I smiled, and then I waved like an idiot,” McCaffrey said. She then yelled at a teenager in the parking lot to alert her to Bieber’s presence, and immediately updated her Facebook status. “I’m 43,” McCaffrey said. “This is so stupid.”
Moving a bit away from the normal mania induced by fame, here’s a great Hairpin article on the world of One Direction tumblrs. High school English classes, plus an obsession with a band, plus a community, adding up to a distinctly female (distinctly feminine?) form of paranoia:
There’s a lore to these paranoid girls’ conspiracy theory and it builds upon itself, which means there’s also comfort to be taken from participating and contributing. In that sense, they’re wedding themes of postmodernism with the structures of academia and a platform with a system of additive reblogging that gives it more in common with oral storytelling than writing.
Perhaps you are interested in the fandoms that I have invented and think about often, here they are. If you want to write anything on either of these topics, please send it to me, it is guaranteed that I will enjoy it:
Patrick Stump and Terius Nash are best friends now; they play racquetball together. This causes Pete Wentz to be extremely jealous and miserable, but he can’t stop watching them from the cafè above the gym. In this fandom, also, Pete Wentz has batlike wings and can fly, although poorly, because his right wing has a shorter span than his left.
Son Heung-Min and Dele Alli swap Pokèmon cards. This is all there is to this one really, so you should feel free to play with the space.
Have a great weekend, I hope you meet the people you want to meet,
I'm Alex! I'm back! Thank you Saxey for the last fortnight of Fem Fridays, they were a true delight.
One of the places I was away in was Sardinia, so let's have some links about the women of this amazing island today. Linguistics fans may enjoy the note that the Sardinian language more closely resembles Latin than any other living language. For the literature fans, here's Grazia Deledda, the Nobel Laureate who had four years of primary school education and a pet crow:
At home, Deledda had a pet crow called Checcha […]. When journalists and photographers crowded the house the following day, they were astonished to find Checcha fluttering through the rooms. When the crow finally escaped the hullabaloo and flew away, Deledda asked the visitors to leave also, so that the bird would return. "If Checcha has had enough, so have I," she reportedly said as she showed her guests to the door.
Another thing to know about Sardinia is that the food there is astonishingly great. Obviously I would never tell you something banal like this unless I had something to show you around arcane, woman-only knowledge, and GUESS WHAT I DO, it's a pasta that only women know how to make, and then only three of them:
in a modest apartment in the town of Nuoro, a slight 62-year-old named Paola Abraini wakes up every day at 7 am to begin making su filindeu – the rarest pasta in the world. In fact, there are only two other women on the planet who still know how to make it: Abraini’s niece and her sister-in-law, both of whom live in this far-flung town clinging to the slopes of Monte Ortobene.
Finally, in a call back to the embroidery and sewing links of three weeks ago, here's a documentary on traditional Sardinian dresses, which are embellished and changed over a lifetime and show the events of a life on them. There is video at the link as well as an interview with the director:
the dress is a code to express the condition of the woman at a particular period. The interesting thing is that, [unlike] the black of mourning, the dark red can be reversed by using natural substances to dye the wool. For example, in case they mourn the loss of a child and then become pregnant again, women might decide to bring the dress back to a light red color to express joy for the birth of a new child.
Hello again - Saxey here again, moving around and dressing up in the city.
I will read anything about flâneurs (strolling urban observers) and like to misuse the term horribly by referring to 'flânning about'. Lauren Elkin has written a book about the figure of the flâneuse, and in this interview says 'it's always a choice to flân in the city' and also uses the term 'guided flân'. I feel a strong kinship with her.
You sit down at a bus stop and your feet dangle off the edge. I’m 5’4”, a very average height for a female, and I often find myself feeling like a little girl in the city.
The Nigerian fashion line Maki Oh is also about moving around (and getting it on) in urban spaces: the designer, Amaka Osakwe, has been recently inspired by the idea of women taking the bus for a booty call. She's also working with traditional motifs and approaches (including adire, a wax dying technique):
With adire, it’s always used as a hidden conversation about the collection,” she said. In one collection, about the vagaries of romance, she used a mat motif, representing the bed given to newlyweds in the hope that they have many children, and a comb motif, which women wear to say “I’m angry at you."
I want to introduce two of my weekly sources of delight to one another: FeministFriday, meet #FolkloreThursday! Once a week, when Twitter gets too fighty, I turn to this hashtag. It's full of engaging snippets and vivid images, many of them relating to gender.
This week, #FolkloreThursday drew my attention to medieval penis trees (it didn't take much drawing). (Be warned that this link contains scholarly discussion, but is lushly illustrated.)
It is worth noting that Kramer put some serious theological work into how a penis could feasibly be stolen. He concluded that the theft was not physical, but actually an illusion created by the witch – presumably small comfort to the men afflicted.
I also ended up in a deep dive on mermaids and their meanings.Here’s a quick report on the Victorian Mermaid craze:
In it, she describes how, while out walking with her cousin along the shore, her attention was caught by three people on a rock “shewing signs of terror and astonishment at something they saw in the water.”
For significantly earlier fishwomen (before the 16th-century), I’m looking forward to the Mermaid Map project, by Professor Sarah Peverley. Some brilliant images are already on the site, and the map will follow.
…mermaids were often inseparable from the Homeric sirens, branded as allegories of temporal pleasures that lead men to their doom. Yet this ongoing link with the classical sirens also connected mermaids with man’s eternal quest for knowledge.
Today’s topic is the law and legal pioneers. Very much sort of. We start with a genuine legal pioneer, in the form of Patsy Mink, who was the first woman of colour in the US house of representatives, the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress, AND ALSO she wrote Title IX which, as noted below, is a big deal for women in America:
Her best-known achievement was Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, of which she was the principal author. Title IX prohibited sex discrimination in academics and athletics at institutions receiving federal aid. The law, together with the larger women’s movement, changed the country. In 1971–72, for instance, nine percent of law students were women. In 2011–12 almost half were.
A dear friend and subscriber has been watching The People Versus OJ Simpson, which I found almost impossible to watch for its theme of (amongst other things) a strong, clever woman being thwarted by a man’s hubris. Here’s a Vogue interview with said strong, clever woman, Marcia Clark. This plays on a common horror, I think, of the possibility that people actually might notice if you look less than perfect every day:
After the trial, friends of mine who realized that I actually had straight hair and permed it said they wanted to kill me. But I had two little boys in diapers. I had the perm because I wanted wash-and-wear hair. I didn’t want to be bothered with it. The thing that happened was, the perm grew out, and I didn’t have time to get myself re-permed, so I kind of gave up. I just blew it out. I know this is going to sound so clueless to you, but at the time, I thought, Oh, people aren’t going to notice.
You might remember that Sarah Paulson played Marcia Clark in that show, so now let’s all enjoy some classic the dash toast dot net on what it would be like if Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend:
If Sarah Paulson were your girlfriend you’d routinely finish things before the deadline; that’s just how your life would go. You wouldn’t send them in when you’d finished them because that would feel a bit too much like boasting, but you’d send them in a couple of hours early.
Today’s Fem Friday is about being haunted, in one way or another, and what better way to kick that off than with a review of a cultural history of ghosts. I’m so excited for reading this:
These imaginative spirits had their more energetic heirs in the phantasmagorias of the Victorian age. Suddenly ghosts could be captured on screens and in photographs. Indeed the medium of photography, with its pallid figures emerging out of shadowy backgrounds, seemed to make ghosts of all its subjects. This was also the era of spiritualism – when mediums allowed matter-of-fact contact with the dead – only weakly combated by the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 to provide rational explanations for apparently otherworldly phenomena.
Moving on to what being haunted does for our lives and our tastes, here's a beautiful article about emo music. I don’t get too many chances to give my love of emo its due in Feminist Friday, as emo is… probably the least feminist genre of music there is. Are we not then lucky to be able to enjoy this fun and thoughtful examination of this silly, delightful genre:
I valued emo music because it allowed me a way to not keep it together. When I listened to emo, sang along at shows, or replayed lines, like The Early November’s “It’s never been harder to fall / there’s nothing to grab and that’s all I want to hold onto,” in my head over and over again, I allowed myself to truly feel. The melodrama of emo did not seem melodramatic to me—it expressed exactly the heartbreak I felt, at exactly the pitch I felt it. Those overwrought, heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics; those screams and whines; those blaring power chords were the outward expressions of the anguish I kept tamped down.
I too have found myself recommending people media, only to have them gently tell me that they did not enjoy it because they found it “a bit melodramatic”. My response is always along the lines, hmm, interesting, I enjoyed its depiction of a normal range of human emotions, which we see so rarely! This particularly applied to Lorrie Moore’s “A Gate At The Stairs”, which obviously I recommend to you, but indeed many reviews seem to have found it melodramatic or some variation on that adjective:
Moore has been described as writing in the tradition of 19th-century realism, but her characters’ hyperaesthetic sense of the strangeness of life would make that an unlikely categorisation, even without the highly mannered concatenation of events that forms her novel’s climax. Moore herself mentions Jane Eyre as an influence on her novel, and certainly she has an interest in the Gothic tendencies of domestic life.
NB I know the above is a Telegraph link, but remember, the Telegraph is not just for luxury lifestyle #content, it’s also for book reviews with a minimum of spoilers! If you would still prefer not to, though, here’s the LRB:
I’ve been told that Lorrie Moore once addressed an audience at a writers’ retreat and asked them to list their greatest fears, their most important relationships, the biggest problems facing the world. There, she seemed to be saying, that’s where your stories are. A Gate at the Stairs seems to have an auditorium’s worth of jostling nightmares as subplots.
I’m going to be away for the next two weeks, and I’ll be leaving you to the brainy charms of Saxey for the next fortnight. Longtime subscribers will know that this is always a treat, I’m looking forward to it as much as you are.
It’s my sister in law’s wedding tomorrow, and as this will be an event involving lots of bright and happy textiles, please enjoy a Fem Friday that’s all about using embroidery and sewing to put your own stamp on the world. We start with a great piece on body image and making your own clothes. It makes it sound like something that’s a lot less difficult than I’d previously assumed, so I’m interested in any stories you have on how easy or hard, or rewarding or frustrating, this is:
I want the clothes I imagine, and not from some distant past. And I won’t wait for some distant future, where it makes economic sense for brands to grade their clothing patterns to the middle of the road, or somehow intuit my exact and perfect shape. I have the tools, and the skills, and I will do it myself. I’ll grade the patterns myself. I can do it. I’ll sew the garments myself.
I liked these traditional styles even more when I read this article, which makes the point that embroidery is like handwriting – that everyone has their own identifiable style even within traditions like those seen above. This is actually about making clothes for Game Of Thrones, which I am aware is not real history, but the point stands:
Like drawing, embroidery is inseparable from its maker’s hand, and embroiderers have recognizable styles: Carragher’s lines tend to be flowing and organic, with a loose, gestural vitality, and she is fascinated by plants and insects. “Growing up on the Isle of Wight, I was always collecting dead butterflies and things off the ground,” she told me. “With Cersei over the years, with her various lion embroideries, I’ve thought, Right, I’m going to pick a sculpture and copy it exactly—but when I start to stitch it winds up drifting back into my world.”
This Fem Friday gives a lot of space to a talk I read about two months ago that I’m still thinking about and learning from. It's a long piece by the artist Jenny Odell – Medium guesses around twenty minutes to read, which feels about right – but well worth your time. Print it out and read it on the train home! Or PDF it and put it on your e-reading device. Whatever works for you. The core of this is about the political value of doing and expressing nothing, nicely summarised here:
I believe that having recourse to periods of and spaces for “doing nothing” are even more important, because those are times and places that we think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves. It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something. In this time of extreme overstimulation, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.
Here’s a close look at some of the artists referenced in the talk. I was particularly taken by Pauline Oliveros’ philosophy of Deep Listening, defined in this article as "Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening":
It’s impressive when an artwork doesn’t require specific conditions of reception in order to function well, when it can be that open, that permeable, that present. Her holistic approach to making music is a testament to the generative powers of listening, noticing, improvisation and responding to what is already here rather than seeking to overwrite it. Her work doesn’t shut out the world; it remains thoroughly connected to it.
Also resonant for me was Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ art around “maintenance work” – not creating new things but making sure the things that are here are maintained and safe and clean. I love this view on “women’s work” that doesn’t just say “women's work happens” but also that “women's work is good” and why. Here is her manifesto for her first maintenance work:
Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art. I will live in the museum and I customarily do at home with my husband and my baby, for the duration of the exhibition […] and do all these things as public Art activities: I will sweep and wax the floors, dust everything, wash the walls (i.e. “floor paintings, dust works, soap-sculpture, wall-paintings”) cook, invite people to eat, make agglomerations and dispositions of all functional refuse. The exhibition area might look “empty” of art, but it will be maintained in full public view.
This is the last Fem Friday that I’m going to be sending out from my current employer, and there are going to be quite a lot of words in it. But don’t worry! Most of them aren’t written by me! In fact, most of them come from the text file that runs my work life. It is called brand-colours.txt and it’s been open in the background probably 90% of the time I’ve worked here. As you may have guessed, it started as just a place to keep the brand colours so I could make pretty graphs, but over time it picked up other things – the phone numbers of my various bosses, my conference call details, key pieces of ASCII like (╯°□°)╯︵ and ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and o/*\o – until it got to the point where my job would be really a lot more difficult without this one .txt file.
Given the frequency with which I consulted it, I also started to add in various quotations that, whilst not universally cheering, consistently served to redirect my thinking when I felt angry or glum. So for this Fem Friday I’d like for you to have these quotations as well, to enjoy and think about and perhaps add to your own to-do list.
The first piece of text in brand-colours.txt is a quotation from Iris Murdoch’s The Nice And The Good. It requires no explanatory gloss from me but is still easy to forget:
Goodness is simple, it's just very difficult.
Turns out reviewers did not particularly care for The Nice And The Good when it came out! If you’re thinking of starting with Iris Murdoch, I’d certainly not recommend starting with it – it’s solidly mid table – and it’s interesting to read the below review in the knowledge that there are fifteen more quite similar books to follow:
This is Murdochland. One expects complications, revelations, tricks and red herrings, invitations to guess at what is coming, echoes, jokes and clues. One gets them aplenty. And because they are so solidly introduced by the thriller opening – that shot, that necessary investigation – the premise of the book justifies and sustains them. this is a mystery story, says Miss Murdoch. I am simply using its conventions. But the mystery she is exploring is the universal ambiguity of living creatures in relation to each other, of good behavior and bad, of pleasure and pain, of responsibility, obligation, influence, meddling and neglect; or, if you like, of the Nice and the Good.
I will also frequently read Samuel Beckett’s letter to his longtime translator and collaborator Barbara Bray, who had written to him about the death of her husband. I suppose this is a grim thing to keep in a text file that you read often, but it’s a very kind letter:
Dear Barbara
Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you. But I can’t talk about solace of which I know nothing. And beyond all courage and reasonableness I am sure that for the likes of you and me at least it’s the ‘death is dead and no more dying’ that makes it possible (just) to go on living. Forgive this wild stuff, I’m not one to turn to in time of trouble. Work your head off and sleep at any price and leave the rest to the stream, to carry now away and bring you your other happy days.
Affectionately
Sam
Here’s an obituary of Barbara Bray, and some thoughts on her influence on his thought and work:
Bray spoke of writing a memoir of her life with Beckett, but never completed it. She abhorred others' tell-all accounts of sometimes superficial relations with him, and perhaps preferred in the end to allow silence to descend on the mystery of their relationship. We can nonetheless speculate whether the second part of his career would have been as varied and adventurous without her, ranging across television and film and inspired by sources including the Noh theatre, to which she introduced him. Her last collaborative act with him was to type his final work, What Is the Word (1989), which he composed when confined to the Tiers Temps nursing home in Paris.
More Murdoch! Of course, more Murdoch. This next is from The Philosopher’s Pupil, and it’s a speech by one of those extremely rare Murdoch characters who is genuinely good and uncompromised throughout the action of the novel. He is, obviously, a minor character, but I’ve long loved his address to a Quaker meeting, an excerpt of which is shown below:
Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not just every day but every moment. Shun too the cynicism which says that the world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things that we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbour's downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one's evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.
Joyce Carol Oates reviewed The Philosopher’s Pupil for the New York Times, you can read what she thought of it here:
Finally, it’s been a real reach to get this one to be about a woman, let alone feminism, but I made it in the end. Here first is Cavafy’s beautiful poem, The god forsakes Antony:
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
C. P. Cavafy
And here’s an article on Sharon Robinson, who with Leonard Cohen adapted this poem for the song “Alexandra Leaving” (NB this is a link to her singing it, which is a treat for all):
She is classically trained as a pianist—she was walking home from elementary school and saw an old woman on the porch of a nearby house waving flyers. “I grabbed a flyer and asked my mom if I could take piano lessons.” She smiles at the memory. “Ethel Newman,” she adds, shaking her head and smiling, “[…] was practically crippled by arthritis. She would hold a baton between her fingers and point to the page, and if you made a mistake, she would hit you with the baton.
A history based Fem Friday today, as this week I went to the British Library exhibition on Russia. It was superb, and it finishes on Tuesday, so if you are in or near London I highly recommend it as a Bank Holiday weekend activity.
To start with, here is a detailed and nicely illustrated article about the role of women in the revolution, civil war and subsequent government:
Historians generally agree that the February Revolution began in Petrograd on International Women’s Day, 23 February (Old Style: 8 March) 1917, when thousands of women from different backgrounds took to the streets demanding bread and increased rations for soldiers’ families. […] The Women’s Day demonstration is often upheld as the main (and even sole) example of women’s involvement in the Revolution. Yet, […] women activists and workers played a crucial role throughout 1917. In the months leading up to the October Revolution, for example, working class women and Bolshevik activists staged a number of strikes and demonstrations to protest the continuation of the war and poor working conditions.
It being a British Library exhibition, a lot of it is made up of books, so naturally I stood and gawped for minutes in front of every diary I could find. One of these was Nelly Ptachkina’s – she was an early teenager when the revolution started, and you can read her story and excerpts from her diary here:
Nelly flits between astutely describing and reflecting on the political situation and relating her girlish and adolescent thoughts, interests and dreams, the latter giving away the fact she was only 15 when she began this diary in 1918. She is conscious of the gravity of the events unfolding around her and writes of her wish to record them:
Truly we are going through a terrible, terrible time … It would be a good thing to collect the newspapers, but that is impossible as we move from place to place; at least I have my diary.
Here – and much more showy – is the diary of Clare Sheridan, Londoner in Moscow in 1920. She was a sculptor who had been summoned (via friends of friends! I suppose that is how a lot of things happen) to sculpt the likenesses of key Bolsheviks. Her first few weeks in Russia were pretty grim as she didn’t speak the language and there was, apparently, a lot of red tape involved in trying to meet Lenin. Here’s Clare in that period failing to read a room:
And here she is, having finally met Lenin, discussing her cousin Winston Churchill with him:Have a great weekend and let me know if you make it to the exhibition!
Coping
And here she is, having finally met Lenin, discussing her cousin Winston Churchill with him:
Have a great weekend and let me know if you make it to the exhibition!