Good morning!

Perhaps you have seen around or read this article in which Sara Benincasa responds to an anonymous internet commenter who asks her why she gained weight. If you’ve not read it, it’s definitely worthwhile to do so. It also makes me feel totally inadequate, but for non weight related reasons, as she says it took her ten minutes to write  this post and it takes me half an hour minimum to write Fem Friday which, you will note, is usually at least 65% copy-pasted from things other people have written. Anyway, I thought this bit was lovely:

People kept on asking to be my friend, hiring me to do stuff, inviting me places, asking me to work on stuff with them, hugging me and looking after me when I was sad and checking me on my bullshit when I did something stupid. They’d tell me they loved me no matter what. They meant it, too. And I share your astonishment at this. I really do.

https://medium.com/@SaraJBenincasa/why-am-i-so-fat-91564fc3a0c7#.docnci0et

Moving from the particular to the Platonic, the LRB did an article about Iris Murdoch! I hadn’t really felt up to reading our copy of the LRB so was delighted, this morning, to find that it aligns nearly 100% to my interests. If you have yet to read any Iris, here are my recommendations (in order) to get you started:

• The Black Prince
• The Bell
• The Red And The Green
• A Severed Head
• The Sea, the Sea

Sometimes her novels read as though a French farce were being redescribed by Sartre. Sometimes Hugo (as it were) pitches up for no apparent reason other than to tell the protagonist he needs to sort out his karma, and everyone suddenly falls in love. At these moments it’s hard to tell if Murdoch’s fictional tongue is in her cheek, or if it’s just poor engineering in the plot, over which she laboured with less care than she did over representing material actions, or some deeper failure to recognise that people usually do things for some kind of reason.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n16/colin-burrow/i-am-a-severed-head                                                               

The LRB also has a long article on TS Eliot, with lots of words used on my favourite poem. You will note that TS Eliot is not a woman so instead here is a Margaret Atwood poem on similar themes which is also excellent:

It is touch I go by,

the boat like a hand feeling

through shoals and among

dead trees, over the boulders

lifting unseen, layer

on layer of drowned time falling away.

This is how I learned to steer

through darkness by no stars.

To be lost is only a failure of memory.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2012/08/01

Happy Friday!

Alex.