March 8, women's day

March 8 2026

my dad in yugoslavia was gifting flowers to the women in his life on the eighth of march. I haven't met any man here who could remember on what day is women's day.

I want to read more feminist theory this year and I've organized a sort of research project for myself to do so. after avoiding for too long a proper confrontation with the bleak condition of women, I was finally pushed in class to read the cyborg manifesto, bell hooks, the french novelists colette and duras, and so on. I have wanted to elaborate for a while now on women and oedipalization and 'desiring repression' that I felt was so blatantly neglected in Anti-Oedipus, so the research begins now.

the first book on my list is the 1997 "zeroes and ones" by Sadie Plant. its first chapters introduce Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Byron, and her involvement in an early conception of a computer, the "analytical engine," more popularly credited to Charles Babbage. Plant argues that ada's contribution is grossly underestimated; the main body of texts are hierarchized to literally "marginalize" notes like ada's as only secondary supports. an idea that really excites me in this book is that the hyperlinks of the internet now "walk all over what had once been the bodies of organized texts. Hypertext programs and the Net are webs of footnotes without central points, organizing principles, hierarchies." it's a little what I talked about in my blog for last month's indieweb carnival.

an ironic example of women's writing relegated to the margins is Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." What inspired this romantic solitude "along the margin of a bay" was not so much a bed of daffodils but his sister's diary writing about a walk they had together.

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. source

I noticed that the Wikipedia for the poem and other sources say Wordsworth was inspired by their walk, and though it's silly enough that the lonely romantic doesn't acknowledge the presence of women in his life, I think it's more accurate to say that he was inspired by Dorothy's writing about the walk. I think intertextuality should extend beyond what references another work edited neatly enough to be published and commodified for a market. it doesn't have to fit a narrative of progression from a Greek to Dante to Byron, it can be a sprawling web of a woman friend's notes to a sister's diary to a wife's edits and suggestions.

but technical developments are rarely simple matters of cause and effect, and Ada was right to assume that the Engine would have more than an immediate influence. While they may have left few trails of the kind which can easily be followed and packaged into neat and linear historical accounts, Ada and her software did not evaporate. The programs began to run as soon as she assembled them.