Good afternoon everyone,

I was a bit low on inspiration for Fem Fri today, so I had a big think about what I'd want to read in a newsletter and what I came up with was a big absorbing read and something hopeful and nice and also something that would make me laugh. So that's what I have today and they are all by or about women and I hope you enjoy them too.

Here's one of my favourite writers, Patricia Lockwood, writing about. Well. I'm not sure where I am in my relationship with Nabokov right now, but Patricia Lockwood writes very well about what is appealing and what is also clammily unappealing about Nabokov. If you have opinions on him, I'd like to hear those too.

If you read Lolita as a young girl, you feel clearly, colourfully, photographically seen – someone is paying attention to the little tendon twitching at the side of your ankle! ‘The thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood.’ I know many women of my generation who bear a half-shamed attachment to it, for the same reason many of them love Léon; the girl still nominally the focus. It is easy – it seemed easy to me, when I was a teenager – to discard the surrounding pervert, and simply keep his eye.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n21/patricia-lockwood/eat-butterflies-with-me

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet and a nature writer, and this kind and gentle interview with her might be something that makes you feel happy today:

 Knowing names correctly is everything; it’s a key to connection and tenderness and a turn to kindness. When you get to learn about an animal or plant, get to know their names, when you learn that there are birds out there who read the stars to fly home at night (indigo buntings), and how wondrous and lovely that is — maybe it might become harder to want to use a product that clogs up the sky with smog so these birds can’t see the stars? More hesitant to cut down trees where these birds live.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/aimee-nezhukumatathil

More key issues of today:

As part of his transition plan ahead of the inauguration, Biden has created a task force and advisory panel devoted specifically to boyfriends who don’t like or comment on your posts enough.

https://reductress.com/post/biden-creates-task-force-on-boyfriends-who-dont-like-your-online-posts-enough/

Love,

Alex.