Five Dials asked So Mayer to send us an omnivorous list of everything, or almost everything, they’ve consumed in the previous month.
Bandcamp Fridays have been my pandemic sanity. February’s auditory highlights included:
— Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Live At Le Guess Who?
— LauraVeirs’ My Echo
— Leyla McCalla’s Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes
which led to …Three gorgeous books about music:
— Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith
— Sara Jaffe’s Dryland
— Laura Veirs’ and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s picture book Libba: The Magnificent Musical Life of Elizabeth Cotten
Listening, differently, to a chorus of parent and carer voices on their pandemic experience while researching Back from the Brink: A Scoping Study for Raising Films, a process made bearable with:
— Goulash (first home-made attempt)
— Birds Eye Potato Waffle cheese sandwiches (two toasted waffles, cheese in between)
— Fantasy flódni (to be baked when it’s possible to see twenty-four people)
—Tony’s Chocolonely mini eggs
Three radical and various films about women at work and rest (which reminded me why I do the work):
— Working Girls by Lizzie Borden
— Lingua Franca by Isabel Sandoval
— Cycles by Zeinabu irene Davis
Two confluent novels of family and/as activism (which revivified me):
— Tara June Winch’s The Yield
— Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life, as recommended by Elhum Shakerifar writing for Culture Club.1
Short breaks were enlivened by dipping into the multifarious voices of:
— Dardishi, Issue 2
— Ache Magazine‘s Cusp: Feminist Writings on Bodies, Myth and Magic
— Inger Christensen’s essay collection The Condition of Secrecy, translated by Susanna Nied
— Wanda Coleman’s Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems
— Incomparable World by S.I. Martin
And finally, three differently vivid TV shows whose characters live on with me:
— It’s a Sin
— Resurrection: Ertugrul (two seasons down, 300+ episodes to go)
— CNN’s coverage of Impeachment #2, its urgency heightened by Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-crisis novel, The Ministry for the Future.◊
1.^https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/portfolio-item/culture-club-reading6/