BOOKS COVID RECOMMENDATIONS EMAIL #88: The End

that's it

Hello comrades,

The time has come. As u may have anticipated from the 3 week? one month?? long lack of emails, this will be the last recs e-mail. Thank you for continued support pals. It would’ve been nice to get to a round 100 but it is what it is. I’ve been v slow and had no time to look at stuff w/ the shop & collections etc and now I’m going back 2 school next week so best end now rather than slowly fade away. BUT anyway, I do have a bumper pack of recs to bow out with & gloss over the reality that actually I’ve just watched all 3 seasons of Selling Sunset;

TO WATCH:

Start with the gold; this BBC doc on african writing is an absolute banger, make a whole series and put it on BBC 1 you cowards!!

I also watched the first 4 eps of Lovecraft Country which is Very Good as promised.

Thanks 2 Samra for linking the great Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One about 50 years ago which I finally watched this week - amazing film about making a film v v recommended.

I also watched this bonkers hour-long GDR interview with this ex-Nazi mercenary called The Laughing Man cos throughout his recounting of insane neo-colonialism in the Congo he’s got a full on shit-eating grin.

Absolute polar opposite is the very relaxing film of Raymond Williams The Country and the City about rural & urban divisions & their representation in literature.

TO READ:

Thanks to Alice for the link for this essay on the role of women editors in the mimeograph revolution which is v good and very up my street.

Close pals will know I love rats so of course enjoyed this piece on how Cambodia are training rats to locate unexploded mines and also to ‘demilitarise’ the whole perception of mine removal! We Love Rats!

I missed the AngryWorkers zoom panel on the wapping strike but have been reading some of the shared material instead. Not finished yet but this first-hand account is an amazing document. If like me you find reading long texts on libcom nigh on impossible dw cos sussex have an archive of 80s political ephemera and they have a pdf of the actual zine.

Also relatedly this is a great collection of digitised radical publications i’ve not fully dipped into yet but sure there’s some gold.

Also read this v short piece by the legend Mike Davis on the california wildfires and the relationship between them and different species of plant life, this on Novara about the ‘cosmic right’ & how the left trying to argue against conspiracy theory with rationalism is a dead end, Tai Shani in art review on art workers and this opportunity to demolish the whole fuckin thing (sort of) and this guardian piece on operation condor lol.

RIP of course to comrade David Graeber, this piece by James Butler was a good summation of a v good egg indeed.

TO LISTEN:

Another comrade gone is anarcho legend Stuart Christie so enjoyed this v short BBC piece where he recounts his arrest in Spain for his involvement in a plot to kill Franco. RIP.

Another good lil BBC piece is this show w/ Linton Kwesi Johnson.

VERY into this NTS mix w/ Moesha 13 around Divided Publishing’s new book What The Fire Sees - absolute gold. Also NTS v enjoyed this Whirldfuzzz black punk special.

Also v enjoyed Yaeji’s boiler room set, Kai and Ehima’s great MRR food special, the new Ribbon Stage, this great resource on Alice Coltrane’s ashram music incl this great doc and last but definitely not least, maybe actually most, the legendary Piggybank Shoe’s latest New Age Jackhammer show on Noods is wall to wall gold as always.

and thats it! Forever!! Please remember to cancel your subscriptions or message me if you can’t figure out how. Feel free to still send me cool stuff, we can do more peer-to-peer rather than one-to-many. Come say hi at the shop. Thank you all for keeping me sane it has been a pleasure to share this stuff with all of you,

bye,
P x