Things I have loved reading
Some commentary; Women Healers; Willa Cather; Reimagining Friendship; "Kitchen Dances"
One of the things I have always done is…well…I guess I could call it archiving, tho often it is not just storing it away, but sharing it with specific people who I think would appreciate it or could use it to further their work (whatever their work is, personal or professional.) I read things that interest me (and I confess I have very broad interests), and they remind me of someone I know who is working on something related, so I send it to them. I love doing that. So maybe that’s a bit of what I am trying to do here, only it’s not exactly the same because with this I am just spreading it out there for people to find. I hope you find something in it that helps you! If you find something particularly helpful, let me know and maybe I can also send things directly to you if/as I come across them.
(Note: I seem to be having trouble with the links, so if the link to the page doesn’t work, try clicking on the highlighted name, then scrolling through to find the article I tried to link.)
I have a deep interest in Medieval culture and women in Medieval times, so this newsletter really captures me.
Excellent piece on the erasure of women in medicine. All kinds of interesting info, people, stories I didn’t know and love learning about.
Willa Cather. In college I read My Antonia, and though I don’t remember the story all that well (typical for me), there are aspects that have really stuck with me. I ached for Antonia’s family, who couldn’t seem to get an even break. That cold, damp dugout house where they lived, always trying and hoping for their fortunes to turn. So painful. So beautifully rendered, the contrasts between them and the other families. How lives could be so different for what amounts to no real reason at all.
But that’s not what this piece is about. It is about Willa herself. And she was cool. I mean tough, interesting, determined, independent.
“Seen as a poetic writer emphasizing scene rather than plot, her minimalistic and elegiac style focuses on nostalgia, exile, yearning, desire, and a strong attachment to place. She was an apolitical writer who did not attempt to affect social change but was concerned with how ideologies are codified. She was concerned that dominant cultures try to mold their time's values and moral norms while subordinate cultures attempt to assert their reality.”
This concept is dear to my heart.
I have in my life been fortunate enough to share living space with very dear friends. I also grew up with quite a few people living in our home with us who weren’t family. We shared all meals together, chores, and for awhile I shared my room with my best friend. I find now that I very much miss the proximity of friends that I had back then. It takes alot of time and energy to really build a friendship, and the way life works nowadays, everyone so busy and having to carefully schedule half an hour to have coffee, it seems impossible to really grow and nurture a friendship as I would like. I like to have “sleepovers” with friends—I don’t mean sleeping together—so we can be together through the evening, and then again in the morning, giving us time to both be together and process that togetherness before being together again.
I often wish I could live next door to my dearest friends. That seems to me an ideal way to spend life. I keep trying to figure out how to do that. My friends now are all in different parts of the country. There is not a way I could be next door to even two of them at once, and there are at least three of them I would most like to live beside.
In any case, I think that a life with friendship at the center is the very best life one could have, whether you could live next door or not.
writes about mostly women academics from Cambridge.
Wonderful piece on Eileen Power, a medievalist and economic historian.
“‘I like people to be all different kinds,’ Eileen Power told a friend in 1938.... ‘I like dining with H.G. Wells one night, & a friend from the Foreign Office another, & a publisher a third & a professor a fourth’. Her regular ‘kitchen dances’ in Mecklenburgh Square were attended by economists, politicians and writers: at one party Virginia Woolf recalled sharing a packet of chocolate creams with a civil servant.”
I want to have “kitchen dances” like that!
The ideal wife, Power joked, ‘should endeavor to model herself on a judicious mixture of a cow, a muffler, a shadow, a mirror.’
Wow, how interesting!
I love Willa Cather as well. Her writing captures so much and has depths to uncover. I read one of her books in a book club I was part of and one of the members attended the Willa Cather convention every year. I mentioned noticing some symbolism where the characters were entering a cave that was very sensual during the book club. Another member told me later that the one who attended the conventions had never seen that aspect in all the years he had gone to the conventions. Different perspectives can open our own sightlines!