I love this visual explanation, by Ellen Forney, of how you imagine being depressed when you are not depressed:
This is from her book Marbles. It is uneven but has some great stuff like the above in it and also, NB, a lot of pictures of naked ladies, if that is your jam or an aspect of your jam.
These billboards showing the reasons people live in/leave London are great:
[A]s part of the "London is Changing" project, Ross has been collecting anonymised, individual testimonies of why people are leaving or arriving in London. She's using the billboards to highlight her research into the personal stories behind London's migration patterns.
"In most hunter-gatherer societies, it's men that do the killing. But it's often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are," Snow said. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around."
Enjoy these two interviews in which famous and excellent women talk about everyday life in one way or another.
Nicki Minaj doesn’t take no guff. She is wonderful. If you've spoken to me in the last six months you'll have heard me talk about this interview, which is a delight:
She was fired from a waitressing job at a Red Lobster after she followed a couple who had taken her pen into the parking lot and then flipped them the bird. I asked her if it was a special pen."No," she said. "It was the principle."
Patti Smith! There are lots of nice things about normal life in this, as well as Patti Smith’s art and recording life.
[W]hen I started doing interviews, people kept saying “Well, you didn’t do anything in the 80s,” [… h]ow could you say that? The conceit of people, to think that if they’re not reading about you in a newspaper or magazine, then you’re not doing anything.
This piece on being a photojournalist has been doing the rounds, and if you've not read it yet I recommend it now. It really helped me to reconceptualize "having a difficult day working for my and Lynsey Addario's mutual employer". Obviously, there's lots more going on in it than a tough day at work:
“I’m Dr. Verma,” she announced, with no enthusiasm. “Everything looks fine.”
This is a really great interview with Patricia Arquette:
Sometimes actors get bummed out, but if you don’t really detach your self esteem from if you do or don’t get a part, or if you do or don’t get a good review, this business will drive you insane. [..] You really have to have some sense of yourself and your own value as a human being that noone else can take away.
Quite a range from low to high brow this week. I hope you enjoy it!
“Born To Make You Happy” is probably my least favourite Britney Spears song and I liked this perspective on it:
But what’s not so often talked about – and what’s most relevant right here – is the idea that a pop song itself is a model. Not in the sense of something to be emulated, but something to be learned from – a way to process ideas and feelings.This song is desperate, awkward, overdramatic, and stylised, and it’s far more a soap opera breakdown than a come-on. Just like “…Baby One More Time” all this grand guignol emotion is squarely put there for teen or tween fans to relate to. In this case, it’s a soundtrack to some of their basest, most self-destructive instincts, Britney’s equivalent of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”
Do you remember that The Toast article about the history of science that I sent round in episode 13? I’m reading the book now and it’s excellent. Apparently in the mid eighteenth century there was a trend for women writing science books aimed at women and children, as science (1) became a cool thing to be into and (2) remained, to a great extent, the preserve of rich men. Of course we all know about Michael Faraday and his Faraday cage, this is a little article about Jane Marcet, the woman whose book inspired him.
Marcet’s […] most famous reader was the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, who read the pages of her book while working as a bookbinder’s apprentice.(In those days most books were sold as paperbacks and bindings were added at the purchaser’s discretion). Faraday was inspired by Marcet’s work to go into science instead.
A long article and book review on literacy, patriarchy and the way we process information. I’ve read the Lévi-Strauss quotation about literacy not being an unmixed good for the world, and had at the time considered it biting the hand that feeds – this is an interesting expansion of those ideas.
To perceive things such as trees and buildings through images delivered to the eye, the brain uses wholeness, simultaneity, and synthesis. To ferret out the meaning of alphabetic writing, the brain relies instead on sequence, analysis, and abstraction. Custom and language associate the former characteristics with the feminine, the latter, with the masculine. As we examine the myths of different cultures, we will see that these linkages are consistent.
In reading about her particularly brutal early life, we learn that Saint Olga of Kiev was ahead of her time on bat bombs:
Now Olga gave to each soldier in her army a pigeon or a sparrow, and ordered them to attach by thread to each pigeon and sparrow a piece of sulfur bound with small pieces of cloth. When night fell, Olga bade her soldiers release the pigeons and the sparrows. So the birds flew to their nests, the pigeons to the cotes, and the sparrows under the eaves. The dove-cotes, the coops, the porches, and the haymows were set on fire. There was not a house that was not consumed.
This week is about identity and clothes and makeup! I hope you enjoy it.
This article is about “made-down” dolls, and circles but I don’t think fully lands the point that: playing is at its most fun when you get to be someone else, whether that's playing with toys or with your own identity:
The idea that we might adopt styles of self-presentation as if in a cultural vacuum, supports the circulation of more insidious gender norms. It presents us with the idea that there is a way to look like a “real” girl.
This is an interview with Jill Soloway, creator of “Transparent”. The question highlighted below will never stop being fascinating to me:
Soloway turns to me: "How do you figure out what to wear every day? Do you go through feelings of, like, I don't know how butch to dress, or how femme, or how ladylike, or how much makeup to wear, or how to be fancy?"
Today’s Feminist Friday is all about bedrooms, as I had a cold this week and have been confined to my home.
Here is a piece about that classic of bedroom literature, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. To be clear, I had 1½ days of working from home and it was nothing at all like this story.
The narrator is incarcerated within a bedroom that stares at her; she is surrounded by a hideous wallpaper that has a "recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down" […] The room may indeed resemble a Panoptican, as Bak argues, and the very idea that the bedroom is a contrived viewing apparatus with "hidden mechanisms" indicates a gaze that covertly seizes the body at any one point in time.
This is a wonderful article about being a reclusive teenager and having an overblown, (obviously) unrequited crush on a celebrity. Contains awful Orlando Bloom fanfiction. Enjoy!
My parents put a computer in my room because really, what's the worst that could happen if you give a pre-pubescent kid a portal to the rest of the world? I would come home from school at 4:30 and have uninterrupted Internet time until I was forced into bed at 9:30. And while no one at my junior high appreciated my particular affinity for this C-grade actor, there were people on the Internet who did.
DID YOU KNOW that the patron saint of television is St Clare, because when she was ill and shut in her bedroom she had a vision of Mass? She is the patron saint of other things as well, I have previously fielded disbelief that television could have its own devoted patron saint. There’s not a lot on the internet about her so the best source of information is probably Wikipedia.
I enjoyed this article about the origins of the phrase “hav[e|ing] it all”. There are also some horrifying extracts from the 1982 book of that title, please let me know your least favourite:
“Having it all,” at least as it applies to women and work, has a relatively limited pedigree. Ruth Rosen, a scholar who has written extensively about the history of feminism, told me that you can’t find much archival evidence of the phrase before the tail end of the 1970s — and even then, it wasn’t so much a feminist mantra as a marketing pitch directed toward the well-heeled “liberated” consumer.
A useful piece on preparing your daughter for the adult world. Parents, you will probably want to bookmark this one.
As your daughter starts developing into a young adult, she may start asking questions like, “What is sex?” “Why does my body feel different?” and, “What are those ominous green creatures that are trying to lure me into the woods?”
As a little light relief on a similar topic, have an article about Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”.
Rossetti's work is pervaded by Dantean–Petrarchan themes of earthly love beatified. That the culpable sister in Goblin Market is called Laura may not be coincidence. This Laura is not the object of carnal love, but she is, perhaps, its conduit.
A more old school mixed bag of links this Friday, because I have spent the last I don’t even know how many days waking up at midday and playing Pokèmon. Happy new year! I hope you are enjoying similarly chill times.
I encountered Margaret Cavendish via Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, which is a wonderful novel. She (Cavendish) was one of the first women to write a secular autobiography – unlikely to be a happy story, however interesting a tradition it founded:
Margaret wanted more than anything to be recognised by the scientific community. In 1667, she enjoyed a personal triumph when she was the first woman to be invited to visit the Royal Society. Her visit was one of the best attended in the Society’s history. She and her entourage watched a programme of experiments staged by the respected scholars Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Afterwards, the society officially banned women. The ban held until 1945.
I explained the Diana myth repeatedly over the Christmas period, on the basis that it is what I imagine the plot of Frozen to be. Now that I am back in some semblance of the real world, this seems somewhat less likely, but please enjoy some Ovid:
She, although surrounded with the crowd of her attendants, stood sideways, and turned her face back; and how did she wish that she had her arrows at hand; and so she took up water, which she did have at hand, and threw it over the face of the man, and sprinkling his hair with the avenging stream, she added these words, the presages of his future woe: "Now thou mayst tell, if tell thou canst, how that I was seen by thee without my garments."
This is what I post on New Year’s day, so you can be sure that I won’t be pushing my own writing in your face any more frequently than once a year. Contains recommendations on which wedding book to buy or read, and a shocking graph illustrating a general skew towards male authors:
I hope you are having a lovely Christmas time! Today’s links are about where we focus our attention, what we ignore, and what the results of that might be.
It is not usual for Feminist Friday to include articles which are both by and about a man, but I like this a lot and hope you do also:
The deliberate decision to call on only female reporters was a subtle gesture but a big deal. While there is no shortage of talented women in political journalism, like in many other sectors they're often crowded out of highly ranked and conspicuous positions due to individual and institutional prejudice.
Dominique Howard is better than anyone else in the world at Word 2007 WHERE ARE YOU ALL GOING, THAT IS INTERESTING. If you want to, you can also read this as an article about the power of not being ignored:
I see a person who identified this awesome, unexpected achievement as a key to unlocking some inner positivity, and proceeded to turn that key—the kind of practical, efficient choice that makes her a virtuoso of Microsoft Word. I see a person propelled into diverse endeavors throughout her life by a relentless curiosity, all along waging a quiet fight against self-doubt, and growing up, and starting to win that fight.
On the flipside, there are nice pieces in about ignoring failure in order to get your work done in this vintage article about Nora Ephron:
For a long time, Ephron kept a picture of the mobster John Gotti on her desk, taken during the trial that sent him to prison for the rest of his life. “He was walking out of the courthouse in the most perfect suit, and he looked so great,” Ephron told me. To her, it symbolized a spunky defiance that she could appreciate: self-confidence in the face of humiliation and defeat.
