I am in Margate! You might expect that this means a Fem Fri about the impressive women of Margate, but since the B&B I am staying in has a table purchased at auction from the Jackie Collins estate it’s actually about the Big Three women of bonkbusters.
We start of course with Jackie Collins, who lest we forget designed her house to look like Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” because she couldn’t buy Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash”. I really admire people who, when denied something they want, think very closely about what it was they wanted about the thing, and go after that instead:
She had imagined not a house exactly, but a David Hockney swimming pool with house attached. “I’d always wanted the Hockney painting A Bigger Splash,” she explained. “But I could never get it. So I thought the best alternative was to have my own Hockney pool that looked like the painting.”
Here is my story about our next author. My father, at the dinner table, made some comment about class differences – I think it was about how married couples arrange themselves in cars by class. My stepmother asked him how he knew this stuff, and he said, calmly and blandly, “I expect I read it in a Jilly Cooper book, darling.” Have you ever seen what someone’s face looks like when they realise that you can never truly know someone, not even the person you married? She didn’t actually say the words “life is a rich tapestry” but that was the sentiment I understood.
failing to get into Oxford - in her interview they asked why she had written 'no time to finish' on her paper, and she told them that was a lie and that actually she hadn't been able to think of anything more to say
Okay, we’ve had the glamour, we’ve had the horses, now how about the clothes. Judith Krantz!
As an adult, Krantz followed trends the way that some people follow stock tickers, and in her later years (after writing novels, including a “Scruples” sequel, had made her wildly wealthy) she obsessively collected Chanel and Hermes.
I am in Boston! That's the starting point for this Fem Fri - Isabella Gardener, who created a giant collection of… stuff, including but BY NO MEANS limited to incredible art in Boston:
sabella Gardner is a perfect example of the difficulty in distinguishing an eccentric collector from a compulsive hoarder. Where does one draw the line? Is it a matter of taste or refinement? Quality over quantity? The ability to purchase more space so as to not wallow in what’s been amassed?
Of course, amassing doesn't have to be physical possessions - how about Sidney Robertson Cowell, who collected American folk songs:
She was comfortable in the company of these towering figures of modernity, but she was also at home hanging out with lumberjacks, miners, and fishermen, or among singers and musicians who retained bits of ancient traditions.
“I don’t scare easily,” she wrote once in allusion to her willingness to track down songs in unlikely places—like the time she spent a night riding in a hearse just to question an informant (the driver) about the Child Ballads.
I’ve had quite a week! All is well though. This is a Fem Fri First as I am writing it on a train. It’s about found sound because there is a super cool new found sound LP from Nyokabi Kariuki:
There is a recording of her feeding mangos to noisy goats, but it is blended with gospel-style vocal harmonies and the sound of tuned percussion played on clay pots. On A Walk Through My Cũcũ’s Farm, you can hear Kariūki and her grandmother talking in Swahili about lessons learned from nature, but the footsteps and voices are accompanied by a quiet riot of harmonised humming, farmer’s whistles and electronic percussion.
I always like to think about Delia Derbyshire too, and how it must have felt to have been doing all this stuff for the first time:
early electronic composers, like Delia Derbyshire, weren’t all that dissimilar from foley artists. As with foley, it was ultimately the job of these pioneers to hear the potential in a breath of wind, to envision the musicality of the neck of a wine bottle, or to hear the rhythm of the sound of clogs on cobblestone. The result: a process that was at once organic and alien, a distinctly human-made noise that was also implacably not of this earth.
Here is a question for those of you in corporate life. Do you ever sit staring at a powerpoint slide and feeling like there's a perfectly elegant solution to how to visualise something that is nevertheless totally out of the reach of your brain? I hope so because that is how I feel in this moment. I honestly only think I'm working with two dimensions and yet a table isn't cutting it!!! argh.
Anyway, speaking of powerpoint (tangentially) I love that Alice has started doing book reviews on her blog. Let's look at one that she did of Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint:
Now, you may be thinking ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to put myself into this presentation on our OKR progress for Q3’. Well you’re wrong my love. Of course, the presentation should contain the facts you want me to understand, but I’m only going to understand them if I am paying attention, and I’m more likely to pay attention if you’re being interesting, and you can be interesting by just being you.
Once again, a pretty niche Fem Fri for you, because this week I found out about the 1930s Shanghai girl's magazine Linglong. It sounds very cool - the whole article is worth a click - and a fashion designer is doing a collection based on the fashions in it. Note the pocket square in the vintage photograph <3
While Janny looked through the digitised archives of Linglong, she noticed many themes in the submissions could have been published now, instead of 90 years ago; particularly when it came to the images women readers submitted of themselves wearing garments more typically worn by men. These photos were thought of as subversive for the time, and were the starting point for Janny’s work on her new collection Cardinal – a range of 11 outfits designed for S/S 2023, based on her research into Linglong’s archives and other fashion references of that era.
How would you feel about a super super niche Fem Fri? Good I hope, because that is what I have for you. A Fem Fri of Chinese woman outsider artists!
This is inspired by Zhemao, who wrote an imaginary history of Russia in Chinese Wikipedia. Millions of words. Millions. I don't know about you but I am profoundly moved that someone would create a detailed, internally consistent and totally imaginary world for no clear reason and with no obvious endgame. She uses the word "nebulous" in this quotation, which is a good word for half of this but doesn't even touch the scale of her, I want to call it, acheivement:
Using four puppet accounts, Zhemao—who wrote in an apology via her English Wikipedia account that she was a housewife with a high school degree—created one of the largest hoaxes in the history of Wikipedia, earning her the online nickname, “Chinese Borges.” She went on to write that
As the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words, and a circle of academic friends collapsed. The trouble I’ve caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, work honestly, and not do nebulous things like this any more.
Now let's look at the visual arts and the works of Guo Fengyi. In case you are asking, was she inspired by visions, yes!!! She was totally inspired by visions:
She worked with Indian ink and brushes, producing works up to five metres long, drawn with no initial plan in mind, discovering her own creation as she worked. The multitude of delicate lines form ghostly figures, dragons, phoenixes, and faces, sometimes interwoven, smiling and serene or terrifying and monstrous.
Finally, I can't find anything on the internet about Tao Zi except on China Daily to which I do not especially want to link. However, lookkkkkkkk at these mechanical rabbits:
Let's look at some paintings together, in a rare Fem Fri devoted to only one woman - Hilma af Klint, mystic and modernist. Really one of my favourite combinations.
You can read her story here. She was made her money as a commercial artist while creating these incredible works:
In 1905, the Swedish female artist Hilma af Klint began cleansing herself, in preparation for a series of artworks that would be executed at the directives of someone named Amaliel. More than a century later, those paintings would force a rewriting of the history of abstraction. According to the notebooks the artist left behind, Amaliel was one of several guiding spirits who spoke to her from above (and within), instructing her and even leading her hand. During her lifetime, at the behest of the spirits, af Klint produced more than one thousand works, but they remained largely within the confines of her studio.
How is it going? Let's spend this time between work and the weekend with an evening poem by H.D., one of my go-to poets and perhaps, after today, one of yours:
Throughout the pandemic I have been quite determined not to talk about the pandemic, on the principle that Fem Fri should be a delightful reprieve always from what is going on in reality. This is still not a newsletter about the pandemic but it is a newsletter of books you might like to read if you catch - or indeed currently have - the coronavirus, covid-19.
One from my all-time favourite genre of rich people being awful to each other, this is a supremely easy read that also rewards familiarity with south east London. It's like Katherine Faulkner knew I was going to get covid and wrote this book especially for that moment. Maybe it's for you as well!
Rereading things is a particular pleasure when you are ill because you know what's going to happen so you can just enjoy the words drifting past you in a comforting way. But why not try some fiction that combines the best of knowing what is going to happen with the best of surprises? Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful is The Great Gatsby but Jordan Baker is (a) the main character and (b) a queer Vietnamese adoptee and also there is magic. It's great. Also endorsed by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, if that sort of thing matters to you!
For the fans of non fiction, Mindy Kaling is a highly appealing person and this book is not a difficult read. There's also some really smashing career advice in this (don't think about your job while you have covid) that I have applied with a decent level of success.
Back to the pleasures of rereading, maybe you read this book when you were a younger adult? If so, it definitely bears another read, and if not, it's an easy read albeit one with some moral problems that you might want to think about when you are getting better rather than when you are IN IT.
I don't read a ton of science fiction, but I got this on a book subscription and absolutely love it. A crisply built world, so pleasingly written, and just enough moral problem. Again, I'm endorsing this one for during recovery as there is a lot of stuff about bodies that might not hit right when your own body is feeling weird.
Enjoy, team, let me know if you read any of these and if yes which is your favourite <3
Every now and then I do a giant binge on Virginia Sole-Smith's substack. As not a parent, I don't know exactly why I find it so nice to be told that feeding kids is really difficult and that they are mostly going to be fine! Maybe it makes me think that other things where we hold ourselves to silly standards might also not matter so much. Anyway, I think you would like this substack as well, particularly this lovely interview (also available in podcast format) with Amanda Martinez Beck:
But I say that the purpose of my body isn’t health or thinness or perfection. It’s relationship. My body can be good, no matter my ability or my size, because I can have relationship with anyone and it can be a fruitful and deep relationship. And that’s what really keeps me going with my kids. When I do feel that shame of sitting in my car when they’re playing on the playground. I know that the other 95 percent of the day, they’re with me, and we’re investing in our relationship. And it’s part of my relationship to let them go and experience things that I don’t have experience with.
And, you know, of course Reductress has something to say about body neutrality:
“You probably don’t know this, but body positivity can be really toxic,” the Pillsbury Doughboy said angrily. And it’s like, yes I know, I reposted a whole infographic about it. Who does the Pillsbury Doughboy think he is? When one woman generously asked about his experience with fad diets and their harmful effects on the liver, he responded, “I don’t know. I am made entirely of dough.” Then added, “So, have you ladies ever confronted your thin privilege?”
