Good morning everyone!

What's up. I hope many many good things as we head into the weekend. I've got a Fem Friday for you that I think you're going to really like, inspired by a poem that a friend and subscriber sent me in the week.

The poem is You, a Teenager by Ella Frears, which I've read several times in the week and it always feels fresh:

Of course this makes me think about being a teenager in an English class, which reminded me of Sarah Bakewell's delightful book At The Existentialist Cafe. It's a delightful primer on existentialism but she also shares (for fun mostly, I suppose, but there was also a serious point) the "weirdly emphatic marginalia" she wrote as a teenager. Tolkein thought that "cellar door" was the most beautiful phrase in the English language and there's a real case to be made for "weirdly emphatic marginalia". Here's an interview with Sarah Bakewell:

What was unusual was that personal quality—the inhabiting of ideas, a whole philosophy, and living it out in a personal way. That’s part of the existentialism itself— concrete existence, and what you actually choose to do and how you respond to other people. It’s a living philosophy. It’s more intimately linked to what they do in their personal lives.

https://hazlitt.net/feature/freedom-easily-abused-word-interview-sarah-bakewell

I also just searched for "teenage marginalia" and there's a whole group devoted to specifically Oxford marginalia. Most of these anonymous authors are probably teenagers so I'm confident that this fits the rubric:

Ms Pierce said: "It's probably not the most enlightened form of literature but it's entertaining and people enjoy it." She said the collected examples of marginalia - a term used for comments made in the margins of books - were "guttural or visceral reactions to a reading experience".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-36110000

Happy weekend, everyone 💗

A xxx.