I went to an amazing restaurant last night, it's called Chishuru and it's in Brixton. You should definitely go if you are in London, and imagine my joy when I found out that the chef was a woman! It's a pretty dreamy story as well, she was a home cook who won a competition and now makes incredible West African food for you:
“There’s a perception I think that it is just one thing we cook, but the region is diverse and vast, and not general at all. I want to shine a light on the food, the produce, the spices. I’ve always wanted to go into hospitality and champion our ingredients.”
In case you haven't guessed this is a Fem Fri of London women chefs.
Another excellent London restaurant with a woman chef is Mere, Monica Galetti's restaurant. It's a lovely setting as well, especially in the summer, you're in a basement so you can look up at the sky getting more intense as the evening wears on. Here's an interview with Monica:
The menu is an accumulation of the past 25-odd years. I’m classically trained in a French kitchen, but I hail from the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, and my husband is French. It’s an amalgamation of all that, plus my love of travel and learning from other cultures. For example, I bring in elements of what I love about New Zealand, like hokey pokey ice cream [vanilla with small pieces of honeycomb toffee] — my favourite.
In the slightly more affordable category, here's Erchen Chang of the incredibly successful and also excellent Bao mini chain:
We love cooking and making things with our hands and when we were travelling, we talked about ideas on how to make the perfect BAO and how to search for the perfect balance of flavour. We firstly launched as a pop up and quickly settled into Netil Market where we built our first six-man shack.
How is it going? I hope it's great. I hope you are on sparkling form. I went to see some really cool art earlier in the month, I can't believe I've not told you about it yet! It's Alienarium 5 by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at the Serpentine Gallery.
The coolest thing about the show is the video work. My actual favourite thing was a singing hologram, which you have to peer in at through a window. It's really moving, you don't know quite what the alien's mood is and the music is quite odd. Anyway, I'd recommend you going to see that in person as it's not on the internet! A preview of the VR component is though:
“Part of the reason sci-fi and speculative fiction exists is as a laboratory for exploring multiple identities,” explains Gonzalez-Foerster. “Multiple relationships to gender, sex, to all sorts of possible liberations and revolutions.”
How is it going? I hope you have an incredibly chill weekend planned. I do, and to add to that chill sitch, here is an old fashioned Fem Fri of links you might like.
Firstly, did you know that friend of Fem Fri E. Saxey has a book out? You absoloutely need to get on this train because I have read it and here are some of the things you will love about it:
Saxey is a fantastic writer
Their stories are full of warm, rich insights about love
Their stories also have this incredible quality of taking a mundane situation and just turning it inside out. I don't know how else to describe it, I suppose I spend a lot of time thinking, what would Saxey think about this and with their book, so can you!
Couple of other things: it's not just me that thinks this book rules, check out the pullquote from Publishers Weekly; also I hope to do an interview with them soon so you can find out more how they think and work. <3 You can buy their book here:
Speaking of the mundane turned inside out, here's a Janelle Shane article on AI weirdness in the wild:
The Orioles are a professional baseball team in Baltimore, Maryland. They are a member of the American League East division. The team has won two pennants and three championships. Jellybeans are a type of food that is often eaten by the Orioles. Ants are also often eaten by the Orioles. The term “jellybeans” and “antoids” are used interchangeably to describe the two types of food.
I don't think you need a gloss from me to enjoy this:
In a peculiar story coming out of Tacoma, WA, 23-year-old Adeela Williams stopped her friend Krys while she was explaining how Bitcoin works to tell her that she didn’t understand what she said because she’s “more of a visual learner,” even though she just wasn’t really listening.
Here's something you might remember about me - when I'm having a stressful week, I like to think about the medieval age and will normally do a Fem Fri about it. Well, I'm having a bit of a busy week, but you are about to benefit from this in the form of a lovely Fem Fri that is all about Japan in the Heian period (a long time ago btw)
How about we just look at some lovely woodcuts. Imagine how lovely it would be to be just chilling out and staring into space right now.
Okay but how about stop motionish videos of people doing highly skilled work? I know, I should get out of your brain, but not before I share this lovely video of Jennifer Worsley making a woodcut:
Finally, do you want to read about this period that was relaxing to the point of enervating? Sure you do. Here are the diaries of three court ladies, including Lady Murasaki:
This week I was trying to think of an example of something I didn't want to get emails about. At first I landed on barge restoration, but thinking about barge restoration for about a minute made me think about the lovely bright paints, and what if the emails had stop motions of people painting those beautiful letters with roses on them, and bottom line is, now I want to be on a barge restoration email list. Trying to bring a little slice of that magic to Fem Fri this morning.
Let's start with a group of women who are restoring Sailing Barge May so she becomes a floating bakery and space for women who have experienced trauma. It's also going to sail around delivering bread and cakes. Dreamy:
“We’ll also have a big table on the barge, so once we’ve baked, we can all sit down and enjoy a meal together, getting to know each other and build those all-important companionships.” The Bread and Roses Barge will be using flour from local mills - and the bread, cakes and biscuits that have been baked onboard will be available for collection when May arrives in various ports across the East coast. “May will have a regular route throughout the year.”
Here's some history I did not know about at all - the "Idle Women" (NB not idle at all, they called themselves that as a little inside joke) who delivered vital goods around the UK via canal boat during the Second World War. It sounds like a pretty hard life (more at the link, the pullquote just skims the surface) even though canal boats are awesome:
The girls crewed in threes, but sometimes events meant that they had to manage with two. Each crew carried two loads in a motor (diesel engine) and a butty (no engine), which was towed on a snubber (70-foot rope). Mostly they picked up cargoes of steel or other goods from London, sailed to Birmingham where they unloaded and went to Coventry for coal. Coal was taken to factories and mills and some of it went to London. A round trip could take two or three weeks. They worked 12 to 14-hour days and the boats never stopped. The boats also carried cement, grain, flour, and other foodstuffs.
How are you? I've been thinking a lot this week about… well, honestly, about making powerpoint slides, when I'm always careful to have one joke per slide for people to discover and enjoy, but more broadly about communicating and how to make words easier for people to pay attention to. So it feels like a good week to highlight the work of Rebecca Monteleone, disability researcher and plain language advocate.
Thank you Margo for sending me this excellent illustration of plain language and the volume of work it takes to make sentences and paragraphs explicable. Here's Rebecca explaining her process:
When doing a plain language translation, my first step is always to do a close read of the original text. I identify the main points, the order information is presented, and any terms or concepts that I think will need to be defined or replaced. I always think to myself “what does this sentence/idea/concept assume the reader already knows?” There is so much implied in how we write, and plain language should aim to make the implicit more explicit.
Here's an interview with Rebecca on her work. She's talking specifically about plain language in news media here, lots to learn in general too:
Talk, talk, talk to disabled people. That’s going to be the number one way to do it. Hire disabled people. That’s the beginning of the transformation, to make sure that that people are in the room. That has historically not been the case in the news media and in many other places. The first step toward moving toward anti-ableism is putting your money where your mouth is and hiring talented, disabled journalists.
How is it going? I hope you're having a good April. Something lovely that I did recently was go to a butterfly house. It's easy to forget how incredibly lovely it is to just stand there while these incredible insects go about their business around you. So here is a Fem Fri on the women who study and work with insects.
Let's start with Maria Sibylla Merian, who was born in 1647 so a very early reasearcher and illustrator. And she invented field trips for herself:
[A]t the age of fifty two years, Merian decided that it was time to go and see how these tropical insects were living. This was in 1699, and she embarked on a two-year field trip to Surinam – at a time when field trips didn’t exist. It must have taken her a lot of courage. Her determination is admirable. It was in Surinam that she watched insects in their natural habitat, meticulously recorded their morphology, made observations about their nutritional habits, natural predators and behaviour. Thanks to her detailed drawings and annotations, we know these insects today.
Definitely read this whole interview with Natalie McIntyre about her incredible insect drawing practice. I'm not going to put any of her images here in case anyone reading this is particularly… not good… with bugs, but I think her work is incredible:
The exhibition is tailor-made for my work so I have tried to show a good selection of specimens using the various techniques I employ. I have been working on an insect portrait series which depicts the close-up faces of insects in minute detail. They appear to be posing, almost smiling as we anthropomorphise the images.
It's Good Friday! How are you all doing? I have a "classic" (i.e., saints 'n' scientists) Fem Fri for you today, with an added thematic twist, which is that all these women are called Mary.
Let's start with Mary Anning, our scientist. She had no formal education but she was a pioneering palaeontologist and… you know, I knew this story, but I didn't know how young she was when she discovered the ichthyosaur:
Around 1811, when Mary was 12, Joseph found a strange-looking fossilised skull. Mary then searched for and painstakingly dug the outline of its 5.2-metre-long skeleton. By the time she was done, several months later, everyone in town knew she had discovered what must have been a monster. Scientists thought this was a crocodile. At the time most people assumed that unearthed, unrecognisable creatures had simply migrated to far-off lands. By this time, Georges Cuvier, known as the father of palaeontology, had only recently introduced the theory of extinction. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species would not be published for another 48 years.
Now, here is a saint - it's Mary of Egypt, who was a very popular saint in the middle ages. She was the subject of this blog writer's Master's thesis, and clicking on the "Mary of Egypt" tag on his blog gives you the pleasant impression of someone who trots around Western Europe looking for pictures of his favourite saint:
There is plenty of evidence attesting to Mary of Egypt’s cult in England from the early middle ages. Her feast-day was commemorated there as early perhaps as the late seventh century, in Northumbria. She figures in just under half the surviving liturgical calendars of the Anglo-Saxon period, with indications of a centre of devotion in the southwest. Her name is frequently found (but not by any means universally) in calendars, litanies and other texts from the later medieval period in England, including a St Paul’s, London calendar with which Chaucer was familiar.
Finally, a musician! Mary Lattimore is a harpist and you could do much worse than to put this on the stereo and go to a Latvian seaside town with her:
’Baltic Birch’ didn’t entirely start out as a song about Latvian seaside towns. It came out of a broken heart and need for liberation from it, but I took that feeling to Latvia so it was infused with that feeling of being a stranger exploring a new gorgeous mysterious place, being hungry for new-ness. Things that might feel like landscape odes are, but you’re also bringing your personality to these places so descriptions of trees will always be the story of you describing trees, if that makes sense. In general, though the song-ideas come out the way they start, but since they’re instrumental, the listener can take them to another place.
I hope you are well! The last time I went to the British Library there was some really cool art by women in the Treasures Library, that I thought you would enjoy as well.
Let's start with Francisca Prieto's Antibook, which makes no sense on the page and which you have to fold to see the poem. When I saw this I'd just done a puzzle that involved folding paper to reveal a message, so I really engaged with this:
Mette Sophie Ambeck makes critters and faces out of typographic symbols, they are really quite appealing. Maybe I should start doing this in my powerpoints, just to endear people to me at the start of the meeting:
I must clarify an idea: a poem does exist even if it is unpublished. Its true essence appears when it is published. The purpose of any piece of writing is its existence before a reader’s eyes. It’s one thing to write and another to publish. A writer exists when he fills the blank page. A writer fulfills her task when she can be read by readers. The important thing is to write, first of all.
How are you? I have found out about an amazing/moving art project this week that I have to share with you. This is from Sara Hendren's terrific newsletter, undefended/undefeated, so if that's not one you're subscribed to it's definitely worth it.
Here's the write up of the project itself:
The artist Laurie Jo Reynolds was one of the chief organizers on this five-year project initiated to close Illinois’s “super max” Tamms prison—where an extreme, truly unimaginable style of solitary confinement was carried out for 15 years. Inmates were first brought to Tamms from other prisons as a radical, one-year measure of shock treatment for behavioral concerns. While there, they had almost no interpersonal contact at all: no group activities, no phone calls, meals pushed through the door, and exercise carried out alone. But what had been designed as a temporary measure often turned into long-term solitary. Tamms opened its doors in 1998. By 2008, about a quarter of the 500 men inside had been held there for the entire decade. Tamms Year Ten was a coalition of people who lobbied, cajoled, pressured, protested, collaborated, organized, photographed, wrote letters, and did a hundred other incremental, patient tasks to get Tamms closed down. And in 2013, they succeeded.
A really intense description of one of her group's interventions here - three people stood onstage for a minute for every year they (or in one case their still-incarcerated son) were in solitary confinement. If you think about being in a meeting, people start to feel uncomfortable with silence after five seconds, so a minute is, in the context of our ideas of "an event", a very long time to sit with the idea of solitary confinement:
Someone dimmed the house lights; as silence thickened around us, the air grew colder and more still. The only movement seemed to be the dust mites in the stage lights focused on Townsend, Berry and Cannon and the small changes in posture as they shifted weight from one foot to the other, heads bowed. Slowly, as the seconds elapsed, I became aware of noises from the audience; first the unmistakable sniffing back of tears and next a murmur of whispers a few rows behind me. Just as the whispering grew louder and someone uttered a sharp, outraged “Shhhh!”—six people in the front section of the auditorium stood up. And then a few more. And so on, until a good half of the audience stood facing the three onstage. Townsend was crying where she stood. The man seated next to me, who had been making watercolor sketches of the proceedings using a plastic miniature palette, had tears streaming down his face as well. I stood but did not cry; the truth of this “moment of endurance” was too dark, too real, too not mine. Berry departed the stage first, then Cannon; Townsend was there alone for what felt like hours, 14 minutes in all for each of the years her son lived in solitary confinement.
Another of Reynold's projects was Photo Requests from Solitary - prisoners ask for a photograph of anything, complicated or simple, and people pick up their requests and send photos. You can browse the whole site here:
A face-shot of a woman with a smile that shines as bright as the sun. Not a model type but an everyday ordinary woman who, perhaps, enjoys every moment of life. Who is not bias or judgmental towards anyone but full of love & compassion for everyone & everything.
