Good morning all,

This is the last Fem Friday that I’m going to be sending out from my current employer, and there are going to be quite a lot of words in it. But don’t worry! Most of them aren’t written by me! In fact, most of them come from the text file that runs my work life. It is called brand-colours.txt and it’s been open in the background probably 90% of the time I’ve worked here. As you may have guessed, it started as just a place to keep the brand colours so I could make pretty graphs, but over time it picked up other things – the phone numbers of my various bosses, my conference call details, key pieces of ASCII like (╯°□°)╯︵ and ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and o/*\o – until it got to the point where my job would be really a lot more difficult without this one .txt file.

Given the frequency with which I consulted it, I also started to add in various quotations that, whilst not universally cheering, consistently served to redirect my thinking when I felt angry or glum. So for this Fem Friday I’d like for you to have these quotations as well, to enjoy and think about and perhaps add to your own to-do list.

The first piece of text in brand-colours.txt is a quotation from Iris Murdoch’s The Nice And The Good. It requires no explanatory gloss from me but is still easy to forget:

Goodness is simple, it's just very difficult.

 Turns out reviewers did not particularly care for The Nice And The Good when it came out! If you’re thinking of starting with Iris Murdoch, I’d certainly not recommend starting with it – it’s solidly mid table – and it’s interesting to read the below review in the knowledge that there are fifteen more quite similar books to follow:

This is Murdochland. One expects complications, revelations, tricks and red herrings, invitations to guess at what is coming, echoes, jokes and clues. One gets them aplenty. And because they are so solidly introduced by the thriller opening – that shot, that necessary investigation – the premise of the book justifies and sustains them. this is a mystery story, says Miss Murdoch. I am simply using its conventions. But the mystery she is exploring is the universal ambiguity of living creatures in relation to each other, of good behavior and bad, of pleasure and pain, of responsibility, obligation, influence, meddling and neglect; or, if you like, of the Nice and the Good.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/20/specials/murdoch-nice.html

I will also frequently read Samuel Beckett’s letter to his longtime translator and collaborator Barbara Bray, who had written to him about the death of her husband. I suppose this is a grim thing to keep in a text file that you read often, but it’s a very kind letter:

    Dear Barbara

    Far from being troubled by your letter I am very touched that you should tell me about your great sorrow. I wish I could find something to comfort you. All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have said to yourself long ago. And I have so little light and wisdom in me, when it comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for us but the old earth turning onward and time feasting on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the heart of the gales of grief (and of love too, I’ve been told) already they have blown themselves out. I was always grateful for that humiliating consciousness and it was always there I huddled, in the innermost place of human frailty and lowliness. To fly there for me was not to fly far, and I’m not saying this is right for you. But I can’t talk about solace of which I know nothing. And beyond all courage and reasonableness I am sure that for the likes of you and me at least it’s the ‘death is dead and no more dying’ that makes it possible (just) to go on living. Forgive this wild stuff, I’m not one to turn to in time of trouble. Work your head off and sleep at any price and leave the rest to the stream, to carry now away and bring you your other happy days.

    Affectionately

    Sam

 Here’s an obituary of Barbara Bray, and some thoughts on her influence on his thought and work:

Bray spoke of writing a memoir of her life with Beckett, but never completed it. She abhorred others' tell-all accounts of sometimes superficial relations with him, and perhaps preferred in the end to allow silence to descend on the mystery of their relationship. We can nonetheless speculate whether the second part of his career would have been as varied and adventurous without her, ranging across television and film and inspired by sources including the Noh theatre, to which she introduced him. Her last collaborative act with him was to type his final work, What Is the Word (1989), which he composed when confined to the Tiers Temps nursing home in Paris.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/mar/04/barbara-bray-obituary

More Murdoch! Of course, more Murdoch. This next is from The Philosopher’s Pupil, and it’s a speech by one of those extremely rare Murdoch characters who is genuinely good and uncompromised throughout the action of the novel. He is, obviously, a minor character, but I’ve long loved his address to a Quaker meeting, an excerpt of which is shown below:

Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not just every day but every moment. Shun too the cynicism which says that the world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things that we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbour's downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one's evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.

 Joyce Carol Oates reviewed The Philosopher’s Pupil for the New York Times, you can read what she thought of it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/20/specials/murdoch-pupil.html

Finally, it’s been a real reach to get this one to be about a woman, let alone feminism, but I made it in the end. Here first is Cavafy’s beautiful poem, The god forsakes Antony:

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear

an invisible procession going by

with exquisite music, voices,

don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,

work gone wrong, your plans

all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.

Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say

it was a dream, your ears deceived you:

don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,

as is right for you who were given this kind of city,

go firmly to the window

and listen with deep emotion, but not

with the whining, the pleas of a coward;

listen—your final delectation—to the voices,

to the exquisite music of that strange procession,

and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

C. P. Cavafy

 And here’s an article on Sharon Robinson, who with Leonard Cohen adapted this poem for the song “Alexandra Leaving” (NB this is a link to her singing it, which is a treat for all):

She is classically trained as a pianist—she was walking home from elementary school and saw an old woman on the porch of a nearby house waving flyers. “I grabbed a flyer and asked my mom if I could take piano lessons.” She smiles at the memory. “Ethel Newman,” she adds, shaking her head and smiling, “[…] was practically crippled by arthritis. She would hold a baton between her fingers and point to the page, and if you made a mistake, she would hit you with the baton.

http://www.vogue.com/article/sharon-robinson-on-tour-with-leonard-cohen

Love,

Alex.