he thought he'd lost his blogger account (he had visions of having to put together a new one - prospective title horsemouthfolk revival).
this is ironic following on from his comments on facebook yesterday;
'if the great myspace blog dieback and the facebook notes tool obliteration has taught him one thing it is the importance of diversifying cultural output and storage across many platforms.'
horsemouth would like to tempt people out to his substack (where he unfurls more of his kipple).
horsemouth has become interested in jean-jacques rousseau's seventh walk from his reveries of the solitary walker.
'I have only just begun to write down all my long reveries and already I can feel that I shall soon have finished. another pastime has taken over and now absorbs me so completely that I do not even have time for dreaming...'
what is this miracle hobby? botany! rousseau had botanised before but as he grew older it grew more interesting to him. he started writing the reveries in autumn 1776 but by july 1778 he was dead. the seventh walk is the last one with a fair copy in rousseau's own handwriting.
kilvert is away from clyro. tomorrow he is away up to london. meanwhile by saturday (in 1871 and on the opposite side of the channel) things are hotting up for edmond de goncourt during the siege of paris.
tonight (as we see it) the bell-ringers ball. (horsemouth will have to check if there is a dress code etc.)
20th january the inauguration of the donald j. trump as president of the united states moment (followed by the communal endeavour evening meeting).
and from here on in it is an entirelywritteninthemorningblogpost
'the ‘three energy transitions’ narrative isn’t just a simplification of a complex reality. it’s a story that progresses logically to a happy ending. and that raises a question. what if it isn’t a realistic account of economic or technological history?'
the argument is that at each previous energy transition the new energy source (coal for example) has simply been added to the energy mix and that indeed more of the previous energy source (wood for example) has been necessary to extract and use the new energy source (as railway sleepers, as pit-props in mines). look at steel (smelted with coal) despite oil being the new energy source.
what we are planning with the third energy transition then (the complete replacement of oil and gas by renewables) is unprecedented (and thus, it is argued, less likely to work).
meanwhile at the communal endeavour things may be progressing. (heaven forfend).
horsemouth has got his coffee (he has fed the chickens) and in a bit he will be off down the abbey. horsemouth apologises in advance, this will be a bit of a poorly thought out splurge.
the political situation continues to be confounding. the people have had a taste of representation (the brexit referendum).
52-48 was my numberhorsemouth often sings to himself.
they liked it. they want more but there's no obvious way to get it. some put their faith in the founding of a new party (reform) but that will just lead them back into the same quagmire of parliament, parliamentary representation, government.
at the moment they are focused upon seizing seats on local councils - a more thankless task than councillor cannot be imagined.
the right wingers think the stars will align for them (trump-musk-farage) but they are more likely to form into opposing constellations (trump vs. musk vs, farage vs. trump etc.) and cancel each other out.
horsemouth does not think immigration is the key issue, the one which will solve all the problems. matter of fact he doesn't even think it's a major issue. he just doesn't see it as a problem. he sees it as a benefit to the economy - increasing GDP, driving consumption. he sees it as an all around benefit, he likes the mix, he likes the variation, he sees it as culturally enriching.
but more than this he sees it as a fact of life in a globalised world economy.
but what's the use of the economy as is if it cannot keep people decently fed, clothed and housed?
horsemouth focuses on the workers' share of GDP - everything else is just fluff and distraction (and yet it cannot be evaded).
here horsemouth pauses to go to the abbey.
the opinion here (in the hills) is not the same as the opinion there (in the town). this is the message of carlo levi. even if gramsci had succeeded in making left-wing ideas hegemonic in the italy of the 30ies it still would have not reached the peasants of lucarnia.
and yet here in the wilds in 2025 the process of politicisation is complete. changes in the inheritance of farm land (for example) are seen as part of the new world order's attempt to seize the land (ok ok that's just one person so far) but people are clear-sighted enough to realise that this will lead to the break up of smaller family owned farms in favour of larger agri-businesses.
similarly horsemouth would say that changes in renting and house-building are likely to favour large private equity firms rather than tenants and small landlords.
meanwhile the meeting of the communal endeavour moves closer. (now there's another confounding political project).
tuesday; chickens. milk. abbey. walk on common. abbey. chickens
'when I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the idea of community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness... so much of the spirit that opposes the community I have and have always had in me...'
- josiah royce, author of california, a study in american character.
there, horsemouth was just playing quote roulette (bibliomancy) with joan didion's where I was from.
it's not the kind of thing you usually hear or read. people are fulsome in their praise of community as an abstract good (one with no downsides or costs).
horsemouth is part of a real actually existing community and, like communities everywhere, the actual lived experience is a bit shit. horsemouth's view is that far from being perfect comunities are usually unworkable and held together not by a belief in a utopian future but by a struggle over the allocation of shared resources.
and yet here we have the free jazzers coming together to learn and play each other's tunes.
and yet you can see why horsemouth would find this actually existing community tiresome and be looking for a way out.
'so horsemouth's retirement plan looks something like this - live out of his savings until the state pension hits...'
erm. so obviously horsemouth should be worried by the upcoming financial instability.
given the likely length of his ride out to pension day he can't expect it not to be bumpy. what the late 2020ies will bring he has no idea (all bets are off). what the 2030ies will bring he really has no idea.
he thinks that he's sufficiently close to his state pension that they are unlikely to up the date on him but that even if they do it will only be by a year or so. governments of all political persuasions seem keen to keep the wrinklies onside by giving them a better deal than they give the young or working age population. (horsemouth thinks this is a bad idea but you won't catch him complaining). eventually this will pop.
he expects his situation in life to have changed again by then (assuming he is still alive and healthy).
his current lifestyle - halfway between the wild and the wen looks sustainable to him. the question is where does he really want to be in ten years time?
ok it's monday evening and horsemouth has just done a womble down to the abbey and back with his mum. no sign of a dore abbey calendar this year. horsemouth will have to get into town at some point to get a diary and a calendar (he doesn't think he can live with the RSPCA one). he also needs to pick up some more books to get his reading back up to speed. he has books he hasn't read here (but he has no desire to read them).
he has been reading joan didion's where I was from but curiously didn't have the courage to start it.
and at some point he needs to get more shelves (so that he can get more books). you see the problem.
ok chickens and milk done. off to the abbey in a bit.
winter solstice 1, a tribute to steffen basho-junghans by buck curran.
HD video filmed on location in bergamo, italy on this day in 2023 by david james logan. the track was recorded using robbie basho's 12 string on the winter solstice 2022.
today (monday) the usual unleashing of the chickens but also horsemouth will go down and open up the abbey in the morning (and close it up in the evening). remind him to do this.
weatherwise it looks pretty good for the week (not warm but there's some sunshine at least).
'los angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.. so the violence and the unpredictability of the santa ana affect the entire quality of life in los angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. the winds shows us how close to the edge we are...' - joan didion in slouching towards bethlehem.
the archive of gary indiana is removed from his new york apartment, flown to LA and moved into a house (the next day it burns down). the fires threaten to burn down the houses of the german exiles (thomas mann's old house for example). mike davis returns from the grave to tell us of the end of agriculture (and of the importance of agriculture as firebreak) and to warn us against reading joan didion.
'there is no real way to deal with everything that we lose' said joan, in a different situation.
horsemouth has been taking a peek at joan's where I was from, her book about a wider california. joan was born in sacramento.
an artshow based on the life and work of alice coltrane, monument eternal, will be on view at the hammer gallery at UCLA in los angeles from february 9 to may 4, 2025. and akashic books are reissuing alice coltrane turiyasangitananda's book of that title with a new foreword on february 4th.
but that's assuming it hasn't all burnt down (of which there's no way of telling yet 'flames threaten UCLA campus' the grauniad). alice coltrane's ashram burnt down in a wildfire many years ago (2018).
and today is the anniversary of her death in 2007.
saturday afternoon/ evening horsemouth had a zoom beers session with howard (1 bottle). the topic of conversation shifted from james joyce to bram stoker (dracula) to mary shelley (frankenstein) to mary shelley's mum mary wollstonecraft.
horsemouth then got into a huge spiel about how wonderful mary wollstoncraft was including theletters written in sweden, norway and denmark (and the story before that - mary goes to the french revolution). horsemouth has since been reading the introduction to it by tone brekke and john mee on google books.
the wikipedia article on it discusses the influence of jean-jacques rousseau's reveries of a solitary walker upon mary wollstoncraft (which is another book of which horsemouth is a big fan). it makes him want to reread the wollstonecraft (and lend howard his copy of the rousseau).
branford marsalis interviews alice coltrane - they want to know about her jazz career and john, her subsequent years as a swamini, the ashram etc. they are not interested in.
'our civilisation is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness' - werner herzog
so horsemouth learned from a nosferatu video (and so it seems to horsemouth).
we are heading into interesting times once again (gawdeplus).
gaza. ukraine. yemen. sudan. syria (soon again, probably). these are our starting points.
but on top of the thin layer of ice someone has added a clownshow. for from the 20th of january we will be entering trumpworld.
'the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters...' but this is not gramsci, it's a zizekian reformulation.
the gramsci is this; ‘
the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear'. even symptoms may not be exactly right, the italian says fenomeni morbosi. there is much debate about what situation gramsci was talking about (for he cannot have been talking about ours).
it is a red sky in the morning kind of dawn over the frozen fields. today a journey to the forge in search of the newspaper.
horsemouth would like more retrofit right reports. at the moment he doesn't have all the reports for all the houses and the communal endeavour fast approaches.
