Hope everything is great with you. I have a literary Fem Friday for you this morning, which is also about grace and giving of yourself. Some really super things in here and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Do you remember Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”, from everywhere on the internet and also, some months after it went viral, Fem Friday? Here another poem of hers, which I also loved immediately on reading it:
Heart
A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape
she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold,
As a fun bonus, have an interview with its poet, Maggie Smith, from a while ago. Remember, if you’re relying on Fem Friday for current news, it’ll be about three years before you find out that the Lusitania sank:
I submitted poems to my high school literary magazine, but I never had one accepted. I wish I’d known then that I’d still be writing twenty-some years later.
And now, here is an actual Grace – Grace Warrick, who translated Mother Julian of Norwich’s “Revelations Of Divine Love” from medieval to modern English. Very little is known about Grace in general; she was a suffragette, she was Scottish, she had a sister – and even less is known about why she translated a then extremely obscure work, with apparently no prior interest in or aptitude for medieval English. She is the reason why we can read and enjoy and learn from the Revelations now, so whatever her motivations are I am grateful to her for bringing this book to a modern audience.
Her sister commissioned a stained glass window to be dedicated to Grace in St Andrew’s Martyr’s Kirk. Might be a nice weekend trip for you if you live in Scotland, but if you are not so fortunate here is a photograph:
RELATED: did you know that there are YouTube tours of the stained glass in churches? This is very soothing! I might make a playlist.
Finally, bringing together the themes of bodies and grace and giving, enjoy this sermon given by Charles Ledbetter, trans* activist, preached on Ascension Sunday at my local church. I’m sad not to have been there to hear it in person but happy to be able to read it on gdocs and share it with you:
I listened to a radio programme of trainee morticians, who practiced their craft with the spiritual enthusiasm of trainee priests. When asked how they imagined their funerals, one said she wanted her body to be left on a mountaintop and for its pieces to be carried by vultures to far-flung places. And I thought—yeah, that is the ascension of the body. Not that we are hermetically embalmed, or perfected, or even reducible to the meanings we ourselves inscribe in our own bodies—The point between the yes and the no is that we hold our bodies lightly. That at the same time as we must acknowledge that we are this matter, that “THIS is my body”—there is also the generous and abundant letting go that opens-out to a beautiful and infinite universe.
Isn’t it wonderful that it either is or is nearly the weekend. Enjoy Fem Friday, your traditional herald of the incoming funtimes and, today, on the theme of disguises.
This whole comic about the origins of Wonder Woman is lovely, but I particularly enjoyed the pictures of Wonder Woman through the ages – always, more or less, fitting in with or exemplifying the style of her times, including the 1990s. I realise that we are the exact distance from the 90s where its clothes look the worst, and that in five years or so we are going to be all over that aesthetic as exemplifying powerful wymynhood, but for now:
I don’t know if you watch The Americans, but it is easily one of my favourite things ever to have been on television. It’s about spies, so there are lots of wigs, disguises and really beautiful 80s clothes, and you can follow the fashion designer on Instagram. This is worth looking at even if you don’t know or like the television show, as it’s fun to see how people are thinking:
Finally, here is more art. It's from Miranda Tacchia, and is about women who aren’t making any effort at all to disguise themselves or their lack of interest:
Her characters are mostly “unimpressed women”, each individual but with a common trait that “they don’t give a shit about you” she says, and drawn from personal experience. “Throughout my life, people have drawn attention to my demeanour, my lack of smiles or reactions to things. One time, when I was a kid, an adult said to me: ‘Miranda, you’re going to make some poor man really miserable someday.’ I assume he was referring to my inability to be effusive. That stayed with me, and though the situations I draw aren’t necessarily literal, the characters I create are an extension of me. I found a catharsis in drawing them not caring about how they’re being perceived, whether they’re talking to someone, being sexual, or just existing.”
Here are some links about fascinating and inspiring women from or related to the 1960s.
Last week I went to see Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass at the Royal Festival Hall. It was excellent and I’m not going to link a review because the only review I can find liked it less than I did. Anyway, Laurie Anderson told a story about her interactions with JFK. It was delightful, and here is a video of her telling the story so you can enjoy it as well. It’s really lovely and you can just listen, the visuals are not necessary:
Acclaimed musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson was “just a young twerp” running for student council when she was advised by Senator Kennedy to “find out what the people want and promise it.” In this video she discusses her relationship to the late president, his politics and views on poetry and art: that poetry is the soul of the country and art is what makes us who we are. Neither before nor since, says Anderson, has an American president recognized poetry or art as the engine of society.
Of course, this exchange of letters would have happened in the 1960s, and by way of a segue, what could be more 1960s than psychedelics. I’ve long (I mean, since Feb 2015) been fascinated by this New Yorker article, and did not realise the Beckley Foundation, mentioned in this article as funding psychedelic research, was set up by woman and English peer, Amanda Feilding:
She got serious about activism, founding the Beckley Foundation in 1998, raising support for increasingly ambitious studies. In 2016, after years of regulatory hurdles, The Beckley/Imperial Research Programme published two groundbreaking studies. One was the first UK government-funded research into psilocybin as a treatment for depression. Three months in, 42 per cent of patients remained depression-free. Then, the world’s first LSD imaging study charted how the drug affects the brain, validating Amanda’s early hypotheses about a system now known as the Default Mode Network.
By the way – I’m aware that I’ve been very video heavy on Fem Friday lately. Have you been enjoying that? I don’t watch a ton of videos (although obviously I watch the ones I send to you!) so feel like a bit of a hypocrite for recommending that you watch so many. Let me know what you think, anyway.
I’m back! Thank you Cecily for the lovely Fem Friday last week. I was in Venice for the first weekend of the Biennalle, and I hope you are looking forward to today’s special Fem Friday ART REPORT. Everything here is installation based or at least sculptural, so I recommend seeing these in person if you have the chance to do so. This is also a video heavy newsletter, so if you are interested it might be nice to set aside some time at lunchtime for these.
We start with Leonor Antunes and …then we raised the terrain so that I could see out, her enormous installation in the Arsenale.
Obviously my camera phone photo does not really capture the scale of the piece; it’s not just that it extends from a high ceiling to the floor, it’s the entire length of a huge hall as well. Here’s Leonor talking about her artistic practice, and why she works in fabrics, for SFMOMA:
Secondly, Yee Sookyung and her incredible vase forms. These are made from what are essentially factory seconds – anything that isn’t perfect is thrown away, and Yee Sookyung takes what is thrown away, fuses it together with gold, and makes something amazing. Again, hard to get a sense of scale, but this – Translated Vase_Nine Dragons In Wonderland – is several feet taller than I am:
Enjoy this a video in which she explains this in more detail, and in case you don’t watch it here’s a great fact for you to take to your best friend, loved one or date tonight; in Korean, the words for “crack” and “gold” are the same:
Finally, I love halls of mirrors and visual tricks so I was delighted by WeltenLinie, the Alicja Kwade installation that made me fundamentally suspicious of all my fellow attendees in case they were secretly me but in a mirror:
The New York Times liked it too, including it in their "ten best" report:
The static objects on the floor — rocks, a tree trunk, a duo of chairs — are set into motion by mirrors. Reality seems to shift as viewers walk through the piece. “I always try to give sculpture a time sequence,” Kwade explains of the mesmerizing doubling and tripling. “I hope that it is more like a feeling or experience than a solid sculpture; that is why I included the space so much — it’s like a phantasm rather than an object.”
Cecily here, standing in for Alex. I hope you have all been thriving since the last time I wrote for Fem Friday.
It's Mass Observation Day today. I love Mass Observation day. I always start with high hopes that I will produce a very detailed and highly personal day diary, from which some future researcher will get not only some useful data points for whatever they're doing but also a sense that here is a charming friend separated from them only by time and anonymity conditions. I generally give up after about lunchtime. Things get busy, or the business of remembering details turns the whole thing into a messy jigsaw, or I start to feel self-conscious about what my diary reveals about my bad habits (did I really just spend an hour reading twitter in bed?). I'm never going to manage the achievement of a Nella Last, and keep my Mass Observation diary going for 30 years. But surely this year I can manage a day of it. Maybe you want to write one too! It may be evening now but it's not too late to remember what you've been up to.
I like the idea of my day diary being sorted away with thousands of other day diaries, part of an archive, to be read or not to be read. I like the idea that a diary of my day could be part of an archive that, collected together, represents an ordinary day in the everyday life of ordinary people. It's taken a lot of years, but now I like the idea that I am very ordinary. That everything about me that seems weird and specific, that people might comment on or that I might feel pride or shame for, is extremely normal - that the parameters that define an ordinary person have to be set pretty wide if they're going to reflect anything like reality. That, it turns out, I get to be the person who sets those parameters.
Of course, this isn't just an ordinary day. All days are special in their own way! Plus today I handed in my notice, so that is pretty unusual. As someone who graduated into a recession and highly alienated job market (or, if you like, "a millennial") I'm not sure I've ever had to hand in formal notice before. Truly the future is always full of new and exciting experiences. Like, for example, being extremely demob-happy even though you've got a month-plus of work to go.
I was discussing the phenomenon of the "career change" with a friend just now and learnt a great Eurovision Fact. Remember Ruslana's 2004 Eurovision tribute to Xena Warrior Princess? (ok ok "Ukraine's 2004 Eurovision entry") Turns out:1. 'Wild Dances' is still a banger 2. She subsequently became a Member of Parliament as well as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. That's the power of Eurovision!
It is nearly my birthday! As last year I am celebrating with a load of links to things that I like. I note that last year I made this all about saints, this year I am going hard lowbrow, I hope you like it.
I say “hard lowbrow”, but there is the obvious exception of Nicole Cliffe’s powerful erotic fan fiction, which is pretty much everything everyone wants from fiction I assume. Please enjoy this one, it’s about Benedict Cumberbatch:
REPORTER: But she refused to break her vows?
BENEDICT: I almost talked her into it that night. I said, “please, please, siren, lie down on this couch in my dressing room while the heat from our bodies melts the greasepaint on my angular, British form,” and then I kissed her.
REPORTER: That must have filled her with confusion and arousal.
I am sure you are aware of the hip hop collective Turquoise Jeep and their songs Smang It and Treat Me Like A Pirate, but did you know they have added a female rapper to their ranks? She is called Moonrock and she has a list of demands. (DATA SCIENCE NOTE: people are more likely to click a video with a “play” button on it, which is why I put a “play” button on the link to this video. I am not about to let these important details slip just because it’s nearly my birthday!)
In an act of what I can only describe as pandering, since it was such a hit last time, you may enjoy reacquainting yourself with McSweeney’s “If Women Wrote Men The Way Men Wrote Women”:
There is a particular look about a teenage boy that lets you know what kind of man he’ll be. A certain fullness of lips, a frank sensuality in his gaze. We all know what the word for that is, but it’s not polite to use it until he’s proven he’s that kind of boy.
I’ve been chastised, recently, for covering abstruse topics such as Kevlar and ignoring what is perhaps more fun and accessible #content. In response to this feedback, Kylie, I have created a fem Friday guaranteed to entertain as well as engage, and remember, you’ll be grateful for Kevlar when you need to buy a bullet proof vest!
When I saw the link to this article – Why Millennial Pink Refuses To Go Away – I did not know which pink that meant, and had not realised that there is a shade of pink that I see everywhere, all the time, and had never thought to name. I enjoyed both reading the history of this colour and looking at the pretty pictures:
For one thing, with Millennial Pink, gone is the girly-girl baggage; now it’s androgynous. (Interestingly, back in 1918, the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department published an article saying, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls.”) In these Instagram-filtered times, it doesn’t hurt that the color happens to be both flattering and generally pleasing to the eye, but it also speaks to an era in which trans models walk the runway, gender-neutral clothing lines are the thing, and man-buns abound.
My favourite picture from that article is of the new Le Creuset pots in millennial pink. They would look hideous in my home, but probably perfect in yours, so if you buy them, would you send me some photos? Cheers.
The first time Le Creuset made their pots in a different colour from their standard sort of burnt orange it was for Elizabeth David, pioneer of non-depressing food as Britain emerged from an era of rationing. Her pots were blue, apparently inspired by the Galouise cigarettes of which she was so fond. If you’re wondering how depressing British food was during and after the Second World War, and what Elizabeth David did to kick it up a notch, wonder no further:
To understand Elizabeth David, and her place in the history of the mysterious eating habits of these islands, one must have some sense of what it was like to live through the second world war. Last summer, I spent several days in the British Library reading austerity cookbooks: survival manuals for housewives who had to cope with the rationing that would outlast the war by several years (butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fats and meat did not come off the ration until 1954). In my locker downstairs, my (Elizabeth David-approved) lunchtime sandwich of prosciutto and brie patiently awaited my return, but even so, it was a dispiriting business. Before me were the least appealing recipes ever written: mock marzipan cobbled from haricot beans and almond essence; "eggs" that were tinned apricots fried in bacon fat. I opened one book, and realised with a horrible gulp that I was looking at advice for cooking crow. "Boil it up with suet," said the writer, "to keep the meat as white as possible." There was a recipe for sparrow pie too – though the Ministry of Food did not "encourage" the eating of these tiny birds.
While we’re on the topic of famous women cooking, CHECK OUT this Delia Smith fact, this is incredible. The book, if you are interested, is Joe Moran’s Armchair Nation:
Finally, it’s not to do with women or cooking or pink, but it’s to do with my best friend and I’m so happy for and proud of her I could explode:
Charlotte Gill always had a sense of fair play. She was especially concerned when she heard of failures in the criminal justice system, which was among the reasons she pursued a bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Cambridge. But her studies also pushed her in a different direction, one that brought the assistant professor in George Mason University’s Department of Criminology, Law and Society to what she called the shocking announcement she has been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
One of the several things I have found out today is that I can’t spell the word “miniatures” first time around without a spell check. I will add this to a list that includes “architecture” (only one “ch”!), “commitment” (only two “t”s!), and “achievement” (“i” before “e” except after “c” and sometimes except after a “ch” but sometimes also the rule holds after a “ch” and achievement is an example of this latter case, so)
Anyway, this newsletter is not about spelling but is instead about women who used modelling and miniatures to advance both forensic and medical science.
I really like how Frances Glessner Lee used a traditionally feminine craft – making tiny models, as for dolls’ houses – to move forensic investigation forwards. Enjoy, as I did, reading about her life and grim little scenes:
Despite these successes, however, Lee felt that more was needed to teach students the emerging art of evidence gathering. It was impossible to bring them to crime scenes, so Lee decided to create her own miniature crime scenes to use for training. She called her creations the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. “She came up with this idea, and then co-opted the feminine tradition of miniature-making to advance in this male-dominated field […] Like Sherlock Holmes, she was setting a scene and creating something like a character study of the victims, and she went about doing this very much from a detached investigator’s point of view.”
If you’ve been to Florence, you might have been to the Natural History Museum there. If you have not, I can’t recommend it highly enough – I went in expecting it to be a quick look at some things I already knew and leave after half an hour and instead I spent four hours absolutely entranced by wax models of increasing delicacy and depth showing every area of human innards. Really incredible. What I did not know at the time was that these were the work of a woman, Anna Morandi Manzolini:
When she married at 26, Morandi had been trained as a professional artist and could also read and write Latin, the language of academia. She entered into the world of the university as the wife of a professor of anatomy, and when he died of tuberculosis in 1755, Anna, a widow with two children, stepped into her husband's former teaching position at the University of Bologna, continuing his studies and establishing an anatomical laboratory that even caught the attention of Russia's Catherine the Great.
Happy Good Friday! I hope you enjoy today’s feminist treats as well.
I was vaguely aware of Leonora Carrington before I read this article – enough that I read the headline and thought, Leonora Carrington isn’t forgotten, don’t patronise me – but then I read the article and realised that I knew next to nothing about this interesting woman and her tumultuous life:
In contrast to the tendency of Surrealism's male artists to depict women as thin, young, fragmented, static, and perpetually naked muses, Carrington's women fell across a spectrum: often very old, powerful and threatening, in a state of action and transformation. Her idiosyncratic way of filtering them through her imagination and experiences meant a Carrington painting or story had a uniquely charged, multi-dimensional meaning. As her patron Edward James said, her paintings were "not merely painted. They are brewed."
As well as being an artist, Leonora Carrington wrote short stories and a memoir. The story referenced the most in the above article is The Hyena, and it’s got a great first paragraph – enjoy the full text in the below link:
WHEN I was a debutante I often went to the zoological garden. I went so often that I was better acquainted with animals than with the young girls of my age. It was to escape from the world that I found myself each day at the zoo. The beast I knew best was a young hyena. She knew me too. She was extremely intelligent; I taught her French and in return she taught me her language. We spent many pleasant hours in this way.
This got me reading about hyenas and hyena societies! Which are also incredibly interesting, not only because of their matriarchal societies but also because for a long time it was thought that hyenas could change gender at will. Lots here for biology fans and people who didn’t know they were biology fans until they read an article about hyenas:
female spotted hyenas are bigger and more aggressive than males. Every clan is a matriarchy ruled by an alpha female. In the clan's strict power structure, adult males rank last. […] At a communal carcass, adult males eat last—if there's anything left. When a male kills dinner on his own, he must gorge quickly before female clan members shove him aside. Nor do things improve much when it comes to mating. "With most animals, males duke it out and the winner gets the girls," says Holekamp. "But with hyenas, females have 100 percent say."
Today’s Fem Friday is all about tough things. Tough things in the materials science sense, not in the difficult things happening sense, although if there is a groundswell of demand for a newsletter on the Bigger Issues I can definitely do that.
We start with the woman who invented Kevlar and thereby saved thousands of lives:
Ms. Kwolek’s peers suggested that the polymer she had concocted would probably not work as a fiber. But Ms. Kwolek persisted. She persuaded another scientist to “spin” the liquid in the laboratory spinneret, a machine used to remove liquid solvent and leave behind fibers. In “a case of serendipity,” as she put it, she discovered that polyamide molecules in the solution, a form of liquid crystal, lined up in parallel and that when the liquid was “cold spun,” it produced a fiber of unusual stiffness. When the fibers were tested in 1965, they were found to be five times as strong as steel of equal weight and resistant to fire.
You know what else is hard? Diamonds. Enjoy this article about the women who made diamonds cool and desirable in the 1950s:
Ms. Dignam was busy making sure average consumers saw diamonds everywhere. Her theory was that “the big ones sell the little ones.” Capitalizing on the country’s newest obsession, she wrote a monthly letter to newspapers describing the diamond jewelry worn by Hollywood actresses. She sometimes appeared as a guest columnist on the women’s pages, writing under the name Diamond Dot Dignam. (“Jimmy Durante’s valentine to his dream girl, Margie Little, was an eye-opening diamond ring. Rosalind Russell wears only two costumes in ‘The Guilt of Janet Ames,’ but one of them consists of three and three quarters pounds of diamonds and only two and a half pounds of foaming tulle and net and sequins.”)
RELATED: did you know that there are YouTube tours of the stained glass in churches? This is very soothing! I might make a playlist.
Obviously my camera phone photo does not really capture the scale of the piece; it’s not just that it extends from a high ceiling to the floor, it’s the entire length of a huge hall as well. Here’s Leonor talking about her artistic practice, and why she works in fabrics, for SFMOMA:
Enjoy this a video in which she explains this in more detail, and in case you don’t watch it here’s a great fact for you to take to your best friend, loved one or date tonight; in Korean, the words for “crack” and “gold” are the same:
The New York Times liked it too, including it in their "ten best" report:
The first time Le Creuset made their pots in a different colour from their standard sort of burnt orange it was for Elizabeth David, pioneer of non-depressing food as Britain emerged from an era of rationing. Her pots were blue, apparently 