Good afternoon everyone,

One of the chief joys of writing Fem Friday is that sometimes I read an article on the internet, love it with a wild joy, and find out after reading it that it’s written by a woman and therefore clears the honestly quite low bar for inclusion in Fem Friday.

ON THAT NOTE, please enjoy this long article from the internet that was written by a woman. And yes also it’s about a bunch of dudes, but the dudes are so weird and secretive in a weird and inept way, so it’s also about tracing through the internet to find out who people are and what that might mean for what their motivations are. The motivations, specifically, to write poetry on Instagram while being rude about other people who write poetry on Instagram. This is the stuff that Friday lunchtimes were invented for. Tell your colleagues you have plans, buy your favourite sandwich and settle into this:

The website for Bone Machine listed only Young and a fellow writer he frequently promotes online and in interviews, Scott Laudati, as authors. Though the listed editors are Milo Savage and Jerry Ovad, the web domain is registered to Laudati. (In an email, Laudati told me that he had a discount from registering his own personal website’s domain, so he let Bone Machine use it.) No trace of publishers or editors named Jerry Ovad or Milo Savage turns up elsewhere online, but the name Milo Savage does appear in one suggestive place: It’s the name of a character in Young’s book Resign.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/instagram-poetry-atticus-duncan-penn_us_5bb2df2de4b0ba8bb2104b1b

I like poetry myself sometimes, here is a poem by Elaine Equi I found ridiculously charming this week. Thanks as usual to Pome newsletter:

Numeric Values

The Prime Mover

The Second Sex

The Third Wheel

The Four Seasons (see also Horseman)

The Fifth Dimension

The Sixth Sense

The Seven Hills (see also Dwarves)

The Eighth Wonder (see also Octomom)

The Nine Muses

The Tenth Inning

The Eleventh Hour

The Twelve Tribes

 

And here’s more from Elaine Equi:

When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They’re not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be “real.” I think it is real, but I like the idea of it being non-utilitarian.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/08/i-would-have-made-a-terrible-futurist-guernica-interviews-elaine-equi

I hope you too enjoyed that poem about numbers, and here are two more women who (presumably) like numbers as they have just won Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. Meet Donna Strickland and Frances Arnold:

Donna Strickland, Nobel Laureate in Physics, plays her cards close to her chest:

AS: What was your immediate thought on hearing the news?

DS: Well, obviously, I think like many people  said we wondered if it was a prank. I knew it was the right day – it would have been a cruel prank, but that is what I was thinking.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2018/strickland/interview/

Frances Arnold, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, seems like a woman who loves her job:

Her enzymes have been used to make biofuels, medicines and laundry detergent, among other things. In many processes, they have taken the place of toxic chemicals. “I think of what I do as copying nature’s design process,” Dr. Arnold said in an interview with NobelPrize.org. “All this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about to this one simple beautiful design algorithm.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/science/frances-arnold-nobel-prize-chemistry.html

Happy happy Friday. We’re properly into autumn now huh, Northern Hemisphere friends.

A xx.