yesterday sunshine. as usual sunshine always makes him feel slightly guilty.
he has had the pleasure of potting up the tomatoes bought at madley plants and planting the cosmo he bought there. the other thing (the trailing thing) horsemouth was less successful at separating the roots than he would have liked to be (bit of a fuck up ah well never mind).
soon horsemouth will have the pleasure of turning over the pages in the calendars. (he will probably start with the triple negative calendar or possibly the family calendar downstairs).
then he will be able to see where he is.
he was feeling a bit out of sorts.
today
ok. it's the morning. horsemouth has just turned over the page on the triple negative calendar. (yay!)
judging by the weather forecast a watering of the plants is coming.
it's bandcamp friday as well. as usual horsemouth is recommending you buy everything you do not yet own by musicians of bremen. (he knows they haven't got a song called everything you do not yet own but you know what he means plus that's a pretty good song title).
no more bandcamp fridays until august now (so may as well get your purchases in now).
in kilvert land (and time, on this day in 1872) he stays over for dinner at whitney rectory and then walks home under the stars.
so yesterday horsemouth didn't end up going for a wander and doing a little light reading like he said he would.
instead he was away to lock's garage and then madley plants in search of tomatoes and various other plants. everything was beautiful in the sunshine.
tonightwalpurgisnacht various witchy goings on (allegedly).
ok one of the chickens has died (old age mostly). no horsemouth did not sacrifice it to infernal forces. in a bit he goes to bury it. (but first his coffee).
hey hey! a wholly written in the morning blogpost (first one in a while).
there's no kilvert but there is a coltrane anniversary to wireframe it on. after the rain recorded at the van gelder studio on this date in 1963.
yesterday rain. today a beautiful morning. a bit of haze but otherwise a blue sky.
goldfinches in the garden.
bookpilled has been out thrifting for books (horsemouth will watch this this evening - who is he kidding? he'll crack and watch it this afternoon). ok he's closed the window to youtube so he's not tempted to look at that.
politics. what of politics?
well starmer survives for now. 15 labour MPs voted to subject him to the parliamentary privileges committee.
that list in full;
emma lewell (South Shields)
kate osborne (Jarrow and Gateshead East)
cat smith (Lancaster and Wyre)
luke myer (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland)
grahame morris (Easington)
mary kelly foy (City of Durham)
apsana begum (Poplar and Limehouse)
richard burgon (Leeds East)
ian byrne (liverpool West Derby)
imran hussain (Bradford East)
brian leishman (Alloa and Grangemouth)
rebecca long bailey (Salford)
andy mcDonald (Middlesbrough and Thornby East)
john mcDonnell (Hayes and Harlington)
nadia whittome
respect to all of these.
meanwhile (andsee horsemouth's notes from yesterday on the use of 'meanwhile'...)
the king goes to washington and talks the old common sense to the congress and senate (but it changes nothing (really)). let us pretend that our imperialisms are kindly and beneficent and wise. the new thing is ugly and stupid, more of a grift than an ideology, but perhaps it is just more honest.
horsemouth had a look at a vote to keep reform and the conservatives out website for his local area. it recommended voting labour. horsemouth doubts that the labour vote in south herefordshire will hold up given their poor showing in office.
of course housing is no longer horsemouth's problem (and won't be for a while).
anyway it's a long way off. even the local elections are a year off round here.
the first real political bump is the may 7th elections. horsemouth thinks labour will lose wales but then he also thinks that labour (nationally) won't really care (any more than when they lost scotland).
dylan riley discusses stagnation and its political effects. to be class conscious it is not enough for workers to just act in their economic interests they have to act in their class interests which means having a vision of a world that is organised differently, one organised politically. this is usually held to be generated dialectically in class struggle. but levels of class struggle are low. there are sectors of workers still capable of defending their economic interests but can the mass nature of a movement to do this be created again given changing patterns of employment.
no help from kilvert today. (nothing until may day).
yesterday a walk over to st.michael's well (and then a loop through the nearby fields in the dulas valley).
on his way back through the woods he found the bottle from some owbridge lung tonic in a stream. the bottle was made of thick, heavy green glass embossed with the firm's name.
benedict anderson's imagined communities has a discussion of biblical 'prophecy' time - where one event 'prefigures' another.
'such an idea of simultaneity... views time as something close to what benjamin calls messianic time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. in such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance.'
it then moves on to discuss railway timetables (the time at bristol must be the same as at london) and a national sense of time (british summer time). we are into the modern notion of simultaneity and uniform empty time and this creates the possibility of 'meanwhile'.
horsemouth (as you know) is fond of the term meanwhile (and of diaries). if he quotes something from kilvert on this day in 1872 he is offering something that partakes both of modern time and of messianic time.
today (for it is indeed today when he types this) a grey morning. grey all day apparently (horsemouth can't know this for sure yet but it certainly looks like it). no the forecast actually says rain in the morning (possibly) and sun in the evening.
rainy days ahead says one of the little weather icons on his computer.
last night (or rather this morning) a dream of marike in some kind of warehouse space. horsemouth watched the shadow with alec baldwin. he thinks dan barker lent him the comic books once upon a time. he realised he had watched it before.
yesterday morning and horsemouth was up and grumpy. there are a number of flies in his ointment.
(ah well).
he'll finish up his tea and then go for a walk and see if that sorts it.
(but first he watered the garden)
a wander down by the abbey across the fields along the road up along the footpath towards the almshouses stopping within sight of the orchard (and back again).
today meanwhile is one of the days on which the john coltrane album crescent was recorded in 1964 (the other was june 1st). horsemouth just gave the title track a listen. he has it somewhere (most of his CDs are now in drawers making finding them when you want to play them difficult).
ok by a process of elimination he's come round to the conclusion that it must be in a bag on top of the wardrobe. ok no. it must still be out in the garage (that's possible).
it was in the garage. he's recovered his slab of john coltrane CDs. he will listen to it again today and on june 1st (remind him).
here it is a beautiful morning. horsemouth is up slightly later than usual. last night he began reading benedict anderson's imagined communities (a further investigation of nationalism to go with his reading of herder).
here it moves towards the end of the month (thirty days hath september, april...). horsemouth should start on his end of the month lists. after all he has a gig to report.
and this is the mutation horsemouth is trying to undertake, to move away from his concern with the communal endeavour (many of whom, to be honest, never wanted horsemouth's concern anyway). if all goes well the communal endeavour's attempts to raise the properties to an EPC C will move into the doing phase - at this point we move from things that help the co-op as a whole to doing things that benefit individual members in the houses.
this (horsemouth is saddened to admit) he finds much less compelling.
for cioran politics is an egotistical, envious business and best recognised as such. horsemouth is inclined to sugar coat his egotism and enviousness with rhetoric about the greater good of the greatest number but, he is sad to say, it's egotism and enviousness all the way down.
horsemouth likes to get on and do. if toes get trodden on along the way to the greater good he's quite bad at reflecting on that.
horsemouth has been listening to some early orbital concerts (they were an interesting bunch). here a gig by various followers of alice coltrane, brandee younger, the ashram choir etc.
of course a book called history and utopia is liable to contain some jottings about utopia. now given the depths of cioran's negativity you wouldn't expect him to be able to find much positive to say about the various utopias but he has definitely done his reading, hesiod, cabet, saint-simon, pelagius, robert owen etc.
he sees them all as attempting to return us to hesiod's golden age.
of course he finds voices against such foolishness also - dostoevsky for example. he instructs us to make that mutation of pride and abandon our attempts to re-obtain the golden age.
