Morning team,

Today’s Fem Friday is about being haunted, in one way or another, and what better way to kick that off than with a review of a cultural history of ghosts. I’m so excited for reading this:

These imaginative spirits had their more energetic heirs in the phantasmagorias of the Victorian age. Suddenly ghosts could be captured on screens and in photographs. Indeed the medium of photography, with its pallid figures emerging out of shadowy backgrounds, seemed to make ghosts of all its subjects. This was also the era of spiritualism – when mediums allowed matter-of-fact contact with the dead – only weakly combated by the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 to provide rational explanations for apparently otherworldly phenomena.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/29/the-ghost-a-cultural-history-susan-owens-review

Moving on to what being haunted does for our lives and our tastes, here's a beautiful article about emo music. I don’t get too many chances to give my love of emo its due in Feminist Friday, as emo is… probably the least feminist genre of music there is. Are we not then lucky to be able to enjoy this fun and thoughtful examination of this silly, delightful genre:

I valued emo music because it allowed me a way to not keep it together. When I listened to emo, sang along at shows, or replayed lines, like The Early November’s “It’s never been harder to fall / there’s nothing to grab and that’s all I want to hold onto,” in my head over and over again, I allowed myself to truly feel. The melodrama of emo did not seem melodramatic to me—it expressed exactly the heartbreak I felt, at exactly the pitch I felt it. Those overwrought, heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics; those screams and whines; those blaring power chords were the outward expressions of the anguish I kept tamped down.

http://hazlitt.net/feature/growing-emo

I too have found myself recommending people media, only to have them gently tell me that they did not enjoy it because they found it “a bit melodramatic”. My response is always along the lines, hmm, interesting, I enjoyed its depiction of a normal range of human emotions, which we see so rarely! This particularly applied to Lorrie Moore’s “A Gate At The Stairs”, which obviously I recommend to you, but indeed many reviews seem to have found it melodramatic or some variation on that adjective:

Moore has been described as writing in the tradition of 19th-century realism, but her characters’ hyperaesthetic sense of the strangeness of life would make that an unlikely categorisation, even without the highly mannered concatenation of events that forms her novel’s climax. Moore herself mentions Jane Eyre as an influence on her novel, and certainly she has an interest in the Gothic tendencies of domestic life.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/6227469/A-Gate-at-the-Stairs-by-Lorrie-Moore-review.html

NB I know the above is a Telegraph link, but remember, the Telegraph is not just for luxury lifestyle #content, it’s also for book reviews with a minimum of spoilers! If you would still prefer not to, though, here’s the LRB:

I’ve been told that Lorrie Moore once addressed an audience at a writers’ retreat and asked them to list their greatest fears, their most important relationships, the biggest problems facing the world. There, she seemed to be saying, that’s where your stories are. A Gate at the Stairs seems to have an auditorium’s worth of jostling nightmares as subplots.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n22/deborah-friedell/the-family-that-slays-together

Have a great weekend,

Alex.