the late night life of trains (interior emigration)

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live—moreover, the only one.” e.m.cioran

 so horsemouth went to see the owl service play in a fisherman's chapel in leigh-on-sea - and very good they were too, beginning with the first song from the wickerman and then gingerly picking through the rest of their back catalogue. for horsemouth it's the harmonies that make them - the combination of the women's voices - the use of a drone box is smart, the bass playing unobtrusive, the guitar playing supportive.

elsewhere there was a mismatch that ewan macoll would have divined between the singers speaking voices and their singing voices and song topics - the girl with the anne briggs voice (fran mortimer) spoke purest essex, the girl with the poshest accent (country parish music) sang a song of hiring fairs (at which the staff for big houses were hired). you are wolf were enjoyable, live multitracking a sort of kate bush sound. alison o'donnell of mellow candle and flibbertigibbet back in the day was clearly a hardened performer with a new album to promote. she was backed by firefay - good band, on the money, the guitarist's guitar died halfway through the set (until that point he'd sounded very portishead - a compliment in horsemouth's world) - their own set earlier had an indistinct mix which was a pity.

(horsemouth doesn't know enough to comment really so please don't take his characterisations as gospel). horsemouth and john dived back and forth between the two rooms but if your name's not here horsemouth didn't see you (well ok crafting for foes, steve ashley you were good).

leigh-on-sea itself (the old town) was a pretty-ish ramble beset by salt flats and estuarine mud (the water far away), boats plied their trade at canvey island opposite (those little white dots - caravans). it was a seaside town (as john noted) and so should fit in well with horsemouth's mumblings - being the kind of place horsemouth has said he wants to 'retire' to (and to which he has already in some ways made the interior emigration).

on the train on the way back two drunken care assistants from an old people's home had found a black woman from texas and were questioning her with true essex enthusiasm (houston she said, 'euston' replied one uncertainty), they blundered about well-meaningly, she handled them with glamorous aplomb, they got off at benfleet (connections to canvey island). their seat (not that they used it being too enthusiastic) was taken by a punk gentlemen (piercings, spiky collar) with four anxious basset hounds - soon the woman from houston was cooing to them. horsemouth pretended to sleep before saying goodbye to john and getting off at limehouse.

'he had taken all of obsolescence as his province'

fenchurch street station is a station horsemouth thinks he has never used before - marylebone barely, paddington often, liverpool street, london bridge many times, victoria on ocassion. from here horsemouth will depart to leigh-on-sea to see various bands play. including a band called the owl service who (pardon the pun) are named after a crazed alan garner book where stiff-upper lipped english holiday makers in wales go crazy beset on all sides by welsh character actors who have clearly gone to the german expressionist school of acting. it is  all very angular and very celtic. very colonial it is too. there's even a 'you can't trust them' speech at one point. it's quite arthur machen in a way - in wales the sun only has to come out for the welsh to go all celtic and revert to human sacrifice.

as someone born in england but brought up in wales horsemouth can't help but respond to this one. under normal circumstances horsemouth will claim to be welsh, one of his grannies was probably welsh (though the herefordshire family won't admit it) and he looks pretty welsh (of the dark variety). though the other granny was scottish (but born and brought up in yorkshire), horsemouth digresses...

here. fortunately perhaps in a way, the sun has gone in. two of the chinese poppes have come up on horsemouth's balcony (pale purple flowers - horsemouth is bad at describing colours, practically to the point of colourblindness). they're in the same pot as the nasturtiums (and various semi-flowering weeds - chickweed etc.). horsemouth is going for a cottage garden effect - all this in the plastic waste and storage buckets he has found - he needs to find some more (perhaps get some winter onions in).

he's feeling unenthused by his education reading - and so he's started on moravagine by blaise cendrars which looks like a promising little potboiler - the last one to the ends of the earth was enjoyable enough (it reminded horsemouth of celine journey to the end of night).

(at first horsemouth typed project)(and variously mis-spelled obsolesence - he was sure there was another c in there somewhere) 

horsemouth is reading arthur machen's hill of dreams  which seems like a victorian preview of christopher priest, the uncanny of the countryside in summer. machen (and horsemouth pronounces it like the village just up from bedwas with a 'ch' as in 'loch', or as in ernst mach) lived in stoke newington (his character moves from caermaen (caerleon?)  to acton). it's engagingly twisted (ina psycho-sexual way). lord dunsany (inventor of gnolls) compares him, in his love of the countryside, to turgenev or, closer by, richard jeffries. the book it is closest to is de quincey's confessions of an english opium eater (which crops up a few times).

this is the second great book in a row horsemouth has borrowed from andrew - the previous one was journey through britain, a walking lands end to john-o-groats memoir, by john hillaby). he's also reading some stuff by the edu-factory collective on education.

the (in)dignities of taylorism

only some types of labour are afforded the (in)dignity of taylorism. housework for example is hardly ever scientifically analysed or managed because then it might appear as work and as work that should be paid for.

school teaching has to some extent become taylorised. as a child of the 70ies horsemouth remembers being taught by teachers demobbed out of the military without teacher training qualifications, his mother (a teacher) attended a teacher training college in the early 60ies (and later did an education degee at cardiff university a hotbed of cultural studies). with lesson plan and stopwatch and formal qualifications to teach the 'profession' is remade as something less than a profession and made into just work.

and yet this is this construction of a 'type' of teacher, of a professionalism ( modeled on the medical profession - ofsted, inspections, professional bodies - the institute for learning for example) that gove is in some sense dismantling - in that the teacher is no longer required to have a dtls qualification to teach.

there may be institutional resistance to these changes - schools continuing to 'prefer' candidates who have the qualification for example. it may be that gove's strategy is more about 'divide and rule', more about expressing power through an ability to enforce arbitrary decisions (or at least appear to do so).

teachers who started dtls courses with an attitude that they had to do 'this bloody course' because they ' need(ed) it for work' usually, from horsemouth's experience, fell into either two camps at the end either, a) thank fuck that's over (it will be good to get my life back) or b) the enculturated who had 'bought in' to its logic.

university teaching (or lecturing) is much less taylorised (though there's a much resented research review procedure to taylorise lecturers knowledge production). this is perhaps because taylorisation reveals teaching as work but more because it reveals knowledge as product and commodity. education's status as commodity reveals the social status produced by it as a commodity also and casts doubt on the disinterestedness of the knowledge produced. for these ideas to functional socially (in reproducing workers, teachers, sociologists etc.) the educational content must appear to remain autonomous - its social production and function hidden.

our ideas of society are structured by inequalities (hierarchies) and equalities (democracies) if ones position in the social hierarchy can be learnt or taught (if there can be what was named on its deathbed as 'social mobility') then this is an egalitarian idea (or at least a meritocratic one). there is a counterposed idea that the hierarchies are natural (the rich are not just posher than us but smarter and more hardworking than the rest of us - a different breed). the post-war experiment with egalitarianism is over.

for mary shelley

'Of all the correspondence found posthumously at Castle _______ from the philosopher Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel to that ill fated Polar explorer the 3rd Baron perhaps the most perplexing is the anonymously authored 'Letter from X' received by Hegel and forwarded by him to the Baron.

The controversy surrounding the Baron (widely believed at the time to have been the model for Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein), just as with Polidori's account of Byron that accused him of being a vampire, has faded with time, as has the reputation of Mary Shelley's minor novel. She is mainly now remembered, if at all, as the child bride of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley or perhaps as the daughter of radicals William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecroft.

This has however been sufficient to distort understandng of this letter (which predates Mary Shelley's book by a good few years) in that it appears to conform to her story (as told in the 1818 manuscript) and furthermore claims to be from the creature itself. This has unfortunately led to the whole correspondence being referred to as the 'Frankenhegel Letters' and largely discounted by those few academics interested in the brief flourishing of German Idealism.

Hegel had made a few hurried notes on the letter itself (these have been discussed by Hegel scholar Georges Bataille in his 20th century riposte 'Letter to X'). It is of interest to Hegel scholars in that the author of the letter appears to be familiar with Hegel's master-slave dialectic, initially the 'creature' claims only to want recognition from humanity as a thinking subject or failing that the creation of a female of its own kind so that it may achieve recognition that way (and pleads most piteously that Hegel intercedes with his protege the Baron) but all to soon the creature's mood darkens and it begins to rail against Hegel's whole system, criticising it from both within and without, announcing itself as 'unemployed negativity that as negativity will act', it will have none of 'an end to history without me', threatening to 'exterminate all of humanity or drag it down into the pit'.

There is a rage to this letter that far exceeds the moral, schoolgirlish imaginings of Mary Shelley. It is notable that Hegel at first suspects the Baron himself of having written the letter, as some kind of elaborate hoax or as an attempted refutation (this is it's major interest to those who still study Hegel), and the Baron to have written it while sleepwalking.

Then there is a turn, Hegel admits to feeling 'stalked like an animal.' Hegel, who as a youth saw Napoleon 'the world spirit' astride a horse, describes one night waking to to find the creature at his bedside. The creature (in his account) first begs for recognition, which the philosopher withholds,or a mate. Hegel writes a hurried letter calling on the Baron to 'accede to the creature's wishes and then to lead them out of this world', later he changes his mind and writes to the Baron calling on him to 'exterminate the brute'.

Here in this correspondence, we have the last extended piece of thinking by Hegel, who retires from public life thereafer, leaving much work undone, his 'system' incomplete. This is part of that strange malaise that seems to affect philosophers, poets, radicals, even engineers all over europe at this time, so many unexplained deaths, so much madness, so many retirements from public life. The Baron, a keen scientist in his time but now grown old and disappointed, resolves to make his first polar expedition and dies on the ice.'

school's out!

'the communication of knowledge is always positive. yet, as the events of may (68) showed convincingly, it functions as a double repression: in terms of those it excludes from the process and in terms of the model and the standard it imposes on those receiving this knowledge.'

- foucault, revolutionary action: 'until now', actuel no.14 (nov. 1971)

meanwhile horsemouth has been following a trail trying to connect deschool-er ivan illich and subjectification guru  michel foucault. he wanted to find  foucault talking explicitly about schools (rather than merely tagging it on the end of a list of disciplinary institutions said to be producing a particular kind of power and knowledge). there are bits in the foucault reader (ed. paul rabinow) and an interview with some post-68 school activists in language, counter-memory, practice (quoted above). in j.g. merquior's foucault it is pointed out that there is no history of pedagological thought in discipline and punish because the key texts would probably have been rousseau's emile  and pestalozzi, the new 'natural' teaching of the enlightenment replacing  (or failing to replace) the 'pedagogy of surveillance' of the 17th century (as discussed by gary snyders's book that foucault quotes). 

wheras rousseau  is not much taught on teacher training courses (horsemouth is thinking of nursery school teachers here) pestalozzi is (it's where horsemouth first heard of him). (further up it is taught as a variety of approaches, functionalism versus humanism perhaps). but this rousseau/ pestalozzi is very much what teacher's think they do - the 'real' thing they do when they are not taking registers, making sure everyone is sitting quietly, leading structured activities, preventing allegedly 'unstructured' activities from drifting into chaos, marking etc. practically in the aftermath of may 68 discussing education directly might have dragged foucault into a dead issue, wheras by displacing  these concerns in both time and space might have allowed him the distance to think about them properly. kids always complain about school as being like a prison - in this they are right - later, at college, the disciplinary effect is more in terms of the kind of knowledge produced, the kind that is useful to power. 

jacotot does not make the list of enlightenment educational thinkers - his 'each-one-teach-one'' practice is everywhere but his legacy (officially) only survives in language teaching (where students are resistant to it, demanding to be taught by the teacher). teachers either see it minimally as a call for more groupwork etc. or they recognise the full egalitarian demand of it (as resurrected by ranciere) for the end of teaching the activity. 

of course, as you would expect from a child of the middle class, horsemouth is an enthusiastic promoter of education, regarding it as a way up and out  for the ghetto youth (or indeed suburban youth, or indeed just about everybody,'social mobility'  as it was posthumously named). yet it seems it is increasingly failing to serve this function and the state is backing away from supplying it (or perhaps only monetising its supply). perhaps illich's diagnosis of the failure of education in latin american countries to lift up the poor is returning home to the first world, perhaps his diagnosis of education as the superstition of the industrial age is an idea whose time has come. perhaps educationnever did lift people up, perhaps horsemouth was/is just well enculturated.

horsemouth never quite knows what to do with long and sunny days. it's one week to the solstice and thereafter the machinery of the heavens goes into reverse (summer iz y goin' out as a friend once put it) and yet we will still be in the bright quarter of the year for another seven and a half weeks, not until 15 weeks will we be back at the equinox (and at that time horsemouth should be returning to work and whatever conditions may be under the new dispensation). then he will work through the darkness til the next spring equinox.

big river - flush times in alabama and mississippi

'all things began in order, so shall they end and so shall they begin again: according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven' 

so remarks sir thomas browne author of a book on the religion of doctors and another on commonly held errors full of 'a sense of qualified despondency because fabulous yet enchanting beliefs ... must be sacrificed on the altar of demanding truth' (as patrides his editor puts it) and yet the prose itself continues to celebrate the lamprey with its nine eyes and the beaver's biting off of its own testicles when hunted. there is browne the would-be scientist but also browne the religious man who believes in eternal time, that 'the last trump is already sounded' and that they are not inconsistent with the browne who is not so afraid of his own inconsistencies to mix humour into his prose.

similarly unafraid of his own inconsistency is samuel clemens who was not even afraid to steal his name (just as horsemouth stole his) not just from the activity of sounding the depth of the river ('mark twain' the boatmen would yell - this horsemouth already knew) but from an actual living pilot of a mississippi paddlesteamer - one isiah sellers. clemens (now rebaptised mark twain) returns to his old haunts travelling down the river to new orleans working in earlier manuscripts to his life on the mississippi as he goes, even as he tells us that it draind delaware and that the waters of the mississippi and missouri rivers will not mix.

in returning to water and to his childhood clemens finds the way (as jefferies did in after london).

clemens (twain) travels on down through (or past) the towns named by johnny cash in big river (st. paul, davenport, st. louis, memphis, baton rouge, new orleans) and then (after a decent interval back up returning to new york). he gives us as southern the word lagniappe, a spanish word (allegedly) for the sweetener added to the end of a transaction - the little something 'thrown in', a word that horsemouth had only previously heard (but not understood) in treme. the penguin edition show us a bird's eye view of new orleans drawn from nature on stone (1851) on the cover - a city on a grid with broad french avenues stretching down to the paddle-steamers on the river.

bigger here

faced with text that can only with difficulty tell the truth clemens opts for the lie, the routine, the confidence trick of the riverboat hustler (as mellville does in his the confidence man), the trick of language that first annexed these lands for france.

'i taught the weeping willow how to cry' lies johnny cash at the start of big river and again at the end when he's told us he'll 'dump... (his) blues down in the gulf' , just as people in scatter the ashes of their loved ones at new orleans and into the ganges.

'all things began in order, so shall they end and so shall they begin again: according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven'

zombie governments, zombie courses, zombie students, zombie workers?

just because horsemouth's head isn't in the game doesn't mean the game is over 'the hustle never ends'

    zombie governments, zombie courses, zombie students.

one problem with the education sector (one horsemouth sometimes visits) is that you are in bed with the government and so (currently) at the mercies of the talented mr. gove. the g(l)ove puppet who (for strange ideological reasons presumably involving smashing professionalism in the education sector) has decided he's against teacher qualifications for the time being - why bother to have time and motion studies of educational workers (lesson plans aka deskilling) if they can not just be switched around interchangeably on the educational assembly line - (at a later stage it may be expedient to be in favour of it - who can tell).

but let us imagine a scene. horsemouth is in a lesson - a lesson intended to teach teachers - interestingly the course has been cut (but will continue long enough to finish off the existing intake of students - it is therefore a zombie course). there are other courses the teacher can teach (this is the meaning of transferable skills) and flexibility (we are all smart people) - so she is not yet a zombie teacher. some of the students (who are also teachers remember) teach courses that may be cut - they are therefore (potentially) zombie students. horsemouth wishes them luck.

the argument that will be made in educational institutions is one of the courses profitability (or at the very least contribution towards costs - but these kinds of arguments always assume that something more profitable can be swapped in that is just as important educationally.

to add insult to injury (for the possible zombie teachers in this imaginary scenario) imagine the minton cycle (forming, storming etc....) for the class is drawing towards the mourning end of the course and students are being encouraged to discuss their learning journey that had brought them to this point. maybe this introspection will be useful to them - maybe not.

horsemouth (club footed mule that he is) has blundered into situations like this and blundered about like an idiot (he hopes at such times he didn't offend anyone too badly) - next year things may get interesting for horsemouth himself - beachside donkey rides will soon be under new management, he may be a zombie already. maybe he'll have to demonstrate his flexibility and transferable skills.

the relapse into barbarism (beyond capital and the last man)

yesterday horsemouth worked - tomorrow he works. he's trying to finish early this year - often there's a period at the start of summer with dribs and drabs of work that at least pay the rent but horsemouth is keen to be off.

there is, horsemouth's brother notes, in the later rousseau, the figure of the solitary (think reveries of the solitary walker), but horsemouth notes this figure haunts other social philosophers as the last man (in canetti, fukuyama, mary shelley), the fear that we may turn our backs on what we have created together, but also a desire expressed in the many collapse/ depopulation fantasies (most recently horsemouth has been reading and watching 1975's survivors and the victorian richard jefferies after london (wild england) - by far the best bit of this is the 'future history' at the start called the relapse into barbarism). at the flick of a switch the social world dissolves into conflict (perhaps this is what the rage zombies are).

yet these are countered or assuaged by fantasies in which the centre can hold - the panglossian enthusiasm for the social, a world where there is always already no conflict (rather than ones where conflict dialectically leads us out of conflict and to a higher state of society, or conflict destroys and anulls civilisation leaving us to wander round the ruins).

curiously horsemouth found this most ably expressed in the truly terrible 2010 jack black remake of gulliver's travels - the giant gulliver is confined by the lilliputians, they're buiding him a house, workmen sit on the blades of the ventilator fan (like workmen atop skyscrapers in new york), tiny workmen are at work everywhere the human labour made visible in all the material items round his room, 'good morning gulliver' they chorus when he gets up. what is interesting about the gulliver clip is that this complexity and interdependence is celebrated. the world has grown happy under its secret benefactor alexander shulgin..

in istvan meszaros's housebrick sized book beyond capital one of the barriers to revolution is imagining the organisation necessary to produce our material world (it is the speech the old deaf schoolmaster gives in an early episode of survivors, the explanation as to why technology has faded in after london). to counter this we are encouraged to imagine a seamless transition from within capitalism or a going forward by going back (or ernst bloch style where the future appears in the clothes of the past) in william morris. and if this fails?

the cover of horsemouth's edition of richard jefferies after london is a watercolour by victorian religious nut and painter of apocalypses john martin, the last man stretches out his hand towards a red sunset from his vantage point on high rocks surrounded by dead lizards overlooking the darkened plain.

 (how do we know it's a sunset and not a sunrise? it would be a simple matter in photoshop to reverse this.)

hail the vandals

horsemouth (thanks to john clarkson) went to see richard skelton play - he bowed a bouzouki laid flat which made a pleasant feedback-y kind of noise at important moments and a string quartet produced a range of textures (sometimes reducing the volume to (near) silence). horsemouth knows too little about music to tell you what was going on structurally but at the level of texture and dynamics it was very pleasing. he makes a wide range of things (recordings, pamphlets, poems, books, and no doubt physical appearances as well as all authors of books, and not just recorders of music, are required to do these days http://richardskelton.wordpress.com/)

the peformance space was st. luke's - a church at old street with a giant hawksmoorean monolith instead of a tower (horsemouth has a memory of max climbing in a window when it was still derelict and wandering about a bit), the performance didn't start until 7.45 so john and horsemouth adjourned to the cafe downstairs sited in what had formerly been the crypt full of dead victorian citizens (displaced in the name of art rather than invited to join proceedings). just like the archeologists at the exhumations in the crypt of christchurch spitalfields the rumanian/ albanian/ polish workers doing the exhumations at st. luke's (largely chosen because of their up-to-date vaccinations against a wide range of victorian pestilences) were shocked at how recent the bodies were and in what a 'good' condition they were in. some of the archeologists at christchurch had required counselling to deal with the feeling that they were tampering with the bodies of the dead - whether the east european workers at st. luke's were offered counselling is not recorded.

there were fears that the coffins might contain still active anthrax spores and that upon release those spores would drift over the silicon roundabout wiping out a whole generation of startups, spreading over shoreditch and brick lane (hipsters bohemians dying in the street), then seeming to gather its forces before rolling downhill into the financial district. (this was not to be).