#feministfriday episode 486 | Twelfth Night
Good morning everyone,
It's twelfth night! I for one am doggedly keeping my tinsel up until the end of the working day. Good luck to everyone who is taking a tree down today, and as a fun distraction, here is a Fem Fri of Twelfth Night.
Of course the traditional twelfth night gift from one's true love is twelve drummers drumming, so here's a terrific interview with Terri Lynne Carrington, who has been drumming on stages all over the world since she was ten:
The revolution really happened when we started the Institute — to call it something, to say something in a name. I went back and forth on that, and Angela Davis helped. It definitely couldn’t be “Women in Jazz.” We never need to use those words again. So the conversation shifted to gender. And we have to start talking outside of the binary. It’s also an inclusive space for non-binary and trans musicians. Our motto is “jazz without patriarchy.”
https://tidal.com/magazine/article/terri-lyne-carrington-interview/1-86749The traditional cake to eat is Galette des Rois. This looks incredible to me as a fan of puff pastry, almonds and paper crowns:
You will need:
a dried broad bean or charm, such as a little china figure
a gold-paper crown
Galette Des Rois | Nigella's Recipes | Nigella Lawson
I should come clean about my interest in the traditions of the Epiphany: it also happens to be my birthday, and I find following French tradition by eating this cheers me more than taking down the Christmas decorations. The galette itself is simple: puff pastry covering a disc of damp frangipane, hidden within which is a china bean or charm; the person who gets this charm becomes king for the day and is crowned with the gold-paper crown which comes automatically with the cake as sold in French p...
Twelfth night is also Shakespeare's cross-dressingest play, and if it's still on the National Theatre app I highly recommend you watch Tamsin Greig as Malvolia. Maybe after you have taken the tree down argh. Get stoked with an interview here:
Malvolia had a lot of internal voices which were powerful and controlling. So the audience embodied those internal voices and during the letter scene she is engaging with them to help her work out what this all means. I was afraid of it but the stage is so well designed to hold all of those people that it became weirdly intimate. The audience’s delight in the comic thrust of that scene encourages Malvolia. No internal voice stops her – there is no voice of reason.
Tamsin Greig on Twelfth Night: 'The self-judgment of women is awful' | Theatre | The Guardian
As the National Theatre streams its acclaimed staging of Shakespeare’s comedy, its star recalls playing Malvolia and eliciting help from the audience
Also, not twelfth night related, but I have done my annual review of reading which you can read here:
Obviously, anyone who writes about T. S. Eliot needs to address his seemingly quite enthusiastic engagement with the more horrible ideas of his day. This is — also obviously — hard to write about for anyone who has devoted their working lives to study of his work. I’d like to propose, for anyone teaching or writing about problematic modernists, the Duce Scale.
Vincennes Review of Books 2023. Books read and enjoyed in 2023… | by Alex Mitchell | Jan, 2024 | Medium
Books read and enjoyed in 2023, lavishly illustrated with graphs and charts.
A xx.