Good morning everyone,

What's up! It's Friday. NO THEME FRIDAY today, just some writing by women I've really enjoyed recently, and I hope you will it too.

As you perhaps know, Rosa Lyster is great. I've recently read her piece on "ultra-humans", or how she imagines a life where you don't think about what people think about you. There's some good stuff about poetry, and also critters, so pretty squarely in the Fem Fri sweet spot:

Imagine! Imagine how much you would get done, how soundly you would sleep. Imagine you were able to counter the question “Do you ever think about how you come across?” with “When did you last win the Olympics?” You would be so rich, and you would never worry about the implications of that either. You would just saunter into a room and charge on up to people. Leave it to them to manage the conversation and chivvy things along. You are just here to be you.

https://rosalyster.com/2016/04/29/essay-53-the-little-green-cat-is-a-bug-in-the-grass/

One for the modernists now. Umn, kind of. This Jenny Turner piece on Tolkein has just kept giving:

A writer, born around 1890, is famous for three novels. The first is short, elegant, an instant classic. The second, the masterpiece, has the same characters in it, is much longer and more complicated, and increasingly interested in myth and language games. The third is enormous, mad, unreadable. One answer is Joyce, of course. Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.

A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien

Finally, a site that I often turn to on these days of no themes. I laughed so so hard at this Reductress piece:

Approximately seven months into quarantine, Brooklyn resident Lucia Delgado is making the slow transition from thoughtfully baked sourdough loaves and three-course, home-cooked meals to slamming loose ham and flat Diet Cokes five times a day.

https://reductress.com/post/woman-who-once-baked-fresh-sourdough-now-just-slamming-loose-lunch-meat/

I've not had a Diet Coke in so long. The last time I went this long without a Coke was when I was a little child, when my parents would only let me drink it on holidays and I was too young to buy my own. Is it still good? Do write in to let me know.

A xx.