Good morning,

Today, Fem Friday is all about fame and people’s reactions to it. I read several of today’s links with a quiet smugness, as though I am totally immune to any kind of reaction to famous people at any kind of proximity. Then, in a quiet moment, I remembered a passage in Mrs Dalloway which I reread extremely recently, and which caused me to note that I am as immune to being impressed by fame as any normal person, i.e., not immune at all:

Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind and there was nothing to be seen except a square of dove grey. Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to Atkinson’s scent shop on the other, passing invisibly, inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling indeed with something of a cloud’s sudden sobriety and stillness upon faces which a second before had been utterly disorderly. But now mystery had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of authority; the spirit of religion was abroad with her eyes bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide. But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales’s, the Queen’s, the Prime Minister’s? Whose face was it?

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91md/

This bout of self reflection was prompted by a wonderful article on Justin Bieber moving to New Jersey, and particularly the following account of one woman’s reaction to same. There’s much, much more in the article - and people seem quite keen to swear about the town of Montclair, NJ - but you get a sense of how things are going to play out here:

McCaffrey hadn’t been much of a Belieber, but when she saw Bieber walking into her local Target, something jolted her. “I locked eyes with him, I smiled, and then I waved like an idiot,” McCaffrey said. She then yelled at a teenager in the parking lot to alert her to Bieber’s presence, and immediately updated her Facebook status. “I’m 43,” McCaffrey said. “This is so stupid.”

http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/justin-bieber-montclair-new-jersey-summer-2017.html

Moving a bit away from the normal mania induced by fame, here’s a great Hairpin article on the world of One Direction tumblrs. High school English classes, plus an obsession with a band, plus a community, adding up to a distinctly female (distinctly feminine?) form of paranoia:

There’s a lore to these paranoid girls’ conspiracy theory and it builds upon itself, which means there’s also comfort to be taken from participating and contributing. In that sense, they’re wedding themes of postmodernism with the structures of academia and a platform with a system of additive reblogging that gives it more in common with oral storytelling than writing.

https://www.thehairpin.com/2017/09/the-paranoid-girls-of-tumblr/

Perhaps you are interested in the fandoms that I have invented and think about often, here they are. If you want to write anything on either of these topics, please send it to me, it is guaranteed that I will enjoy it:

1. Patrick Stump and Terius Nash are best friends now; they play racquetball together. This causes Pete Wentz to be extremely jealous and miserable, but he can’t stop watching them from the cafè above the gym. In this fandom, also, Pete Wentz has batlike wings and can fly, although poorly, because his right wing has a shorter span than his left.
2. Son Heung-Min and Dele Alli swap Pokèmon cards. This is all there is to this one really, so you should feel free to play with the space.

Have a great weekend, I hope you meet the people you want to meet,

A xx.