'get'em out by friday'

'unrestricted and grandiose developments of productive forces will render political revolution superfluous' - g. lukacs, goethe and his age. 

 it's not looking too bad outside. horsemouth has woken up with a mild headache something he puts down to either;
 A) the igor like deformation of vertebrae where it joins his skull,
B) the humongous quantites of wax filling his ears causing ear infections
C) his persistent under-caffeination.

of course lukacs isn't arguing for this - or inventing that particular wired-neo-liberal panglossianism (we may not live in the best of all possible worlds just yet but we will do soon and even then it will keep on getting better and better by means of smart design and total quality management). what he is doing is identifying it as the ideology of faust, in particular the faust of book two, faust the developer, or so marshall berman argues in his all that is solid melts into air. faust unites metropolis (heart and head) in himself but this still won't stop him from doing evil in the service of his plan, philemon and baucis (that delightful old couple from ovid) still survive on some prime real estate, the winkler has failed to get them out, faust despatches the heavies but says he doesn't want to know about it.


there is always a human price to be paid for development - a necessary sacrifice - this is the real faustian bargain (or so berman argues). lukacs writes on mandeville and the fable of the bees horsemouth will have to find this. horsemouth is back from his brother's - but he's back up there soon. he's now contactable by phone. in a bit he'll go for a wander and read some more berman.

work (having been renamed and re-organised) will begin again sometime after 8th september.

'everybody has a part to play'

so horsemouth watched snowpiercer round anthony's (it was that or the remake of battle for the planet of the apes) - if modern films are theme park rides then a film set on a train after the end of the world (by ice) hurtling on a loop round the world once every year should be a perfect set up. there is indeed the old soviet-era gag about russia as a train, under lenin .... this, under stalin... this, under andropov... steadily getting worse, how much longer can this train keep rolling, if indeed it hasn't been shunted into a siding and forgotten.

at the 'head' the engine are the decadent ruling class, at the tail the surplus people. or so it at first appears, but as tilda swinton. a representative of the head, says, 'everybody has a part to play'. every so often the heavies appear to take some children. there is a religion that sanctifies the social position of everybody on the train but during the rebellion an angel winged party-goer is thrown down into the grinding cogs of the engine. beneath the art deco surfaces are revealed... it is metropolis on wheels, modernism on a loop sliding back into myth, the driver needs reminding of the factories act.

here it is not the fact that the train must get somewhere at a particular time (12.10 to tuscon or whatever) but that the train has a structure - a head and a tail, social stratification by carriage/ by ticketing, that is the unity. the plot (of course) has more holes than a thing with a lot of holes, it shows its comic book origins carriage by carriage, set up by set up, in an excess of detail, it obeys the genre conventions (but it could just as well be a spaghetti western, or a horror film or a whodunnit). it's that czech special effects with korean/ western actors slumming it co-production (old boy, tilda swinton, ed harris).

it ends with a polar bear as a symbol of life outside the train.

there is the big fantasy takeover of both children's reading and the cinema - hunger games, the terminal girl of alien becomes the 'right-of-passage' girl it's girls because girls still read as darshavini pointed out, she'd watched one recently set in an underground silo that she felt worked better spatially. there are all these mainstream dystopia - but horsemouth is not clear what they are for. the real problem is when people don't have a part to play - when they really are, or will be, surplus to the needs of capitalism. can't capitalism retreat from being a world social system, what precisely does this mean.

 -------------------
 today horsemouth is probably off to chateau bremen - then he's away to a gig (by one of grizzly bear), thursday, friday, he babysits his brother's kids (maybe monday too).

the love of the worker bees (horsemouth at 50)

this morning is grey. horsemouth has survived until 50 in line with the statistical trend for people of his colour, class, and birthplace. later he goes to the pub to be commiserated by his few remaining friends. horsemouth feels better about it than he did last year - last year he was in the pub drowning his sorrows by about 2pm - he was making some efforts to record a slide guitar part for dorothy, but it wasn't happening, for some reason horsemouth couldn't count bars. this year horsemouth is a little more organised (he has told people in advance).

so yesterday morning horsemouth went up to 3 mills green and lay about in the sunshine reading alexandra kollontai's love of worker bees (no definite articles please, she's russian) and in particular the first story vasilisa malygina - vasilisa struggles to establish a communal house, but the residents treat her like shit, defeated she retires. as horsemouth walked back he watched two pieces of litter engaged in some love play or perhaps doing the tango seemingly oblivious to the fact that one of them was an empty bag of crisps and the other a plastic bag containing the byproduct of the warm social relationship between a dog and a human. they skipped and danced and circled round each other until horsemouth drew near when they went silent and pretended to be inanimate again (at least until he had passed). if horsemouth were gogol they'd talk and have careers.

sean has been in touch;

 "Had some more thoughts about androids/replicants or whatever (hey, you asked).... Isn't all this Dick stuff about "empathy" a bit like speciesism? Animals lack what we might call empathy - red in tooth and claw and all that - but does this mean they have no right to exist on their own terms? I mean, why should intelligent machines behave like humans? Perhaps they will have other qualities - quite likely more viable ones - that we don't have....
What would be the point of creating machines that behave like humans anyway? We can already do that - under capitalism, the planet has become a huge facility for the mass production of humans....why build even more artificially? That is, of course, a rhetorical question. The ruling class want to make fake humans for the same reason they've made machines since the mechanical loom - to intensify production. Replicants would solve the difficulty of labour discipline - the final solution of the worker problem. So of course they wouldn't be designed to fully duplicate humans anyway.
I'm waiting for the internet to become self aware and start sending out terminators. Any day now...."

animals and empathy

well wild animals may exhibit some empathy (dolphins saving the odd sailor lost at sea etc. but in general they're too busy staying alive, hunting and killing (and, presumably, having fun doing it)).

but young animals definitely do exhibit empathy (and this is why we keep dogs and cats and monkeys as pets and deliberately infantilise them from their wild state). beyond that (rabbits, tortoises, goldfish) they function entirely as blank screens on which human's can project their empathy (and fondly imagine they are getting it back). the animals don't get a choice whether they are used as empathy surrogates by humans distressed at the 'red in tooth and claw' nature of capitalism and seeking succor in a trans-species domestic realm.

I think in a way PKD is parodying this by having people keeping squirrels and ostriches as pets - at least they're alive (unlike humans under capitalism). children are impelled towards animals as natural allies by sentimental adults (and then back away when they realize they have sharp teeth).

as the empathic (but not yet an ethical) circle expands less suitable animals are drawn into the 'pet' relationship - lions, bears, wolves etc. - traditionally 'wild' animals now seen as natural, balanced, and healing (of course these experiments are not always successful - look at 'bear life' dude killed and eaten by a particularly grumpy older bear ). only this morning on youtube horsemouth was watching some dude 'playing' with a pride of lions like they were big cats...

replicants and production - horsemouth will have to think about this.

do sheep dream of electric blankets?

'the whole experience of empathy is a swindle' - R. Baty. 

so horsemouth wandered out to canning town (kind of along the route of the green way but not actually using the green way) - there he bought a copy of do androids dream of electric sheep? once again, another book by philip k. dick that revolves around empathy. affect. once again it is a depopulated world, in ruins, post-war. unreliable narrators to the left of me, androids to the right. it's no.4 in the SF masterworks series, first published in 1999. like pets the androids don't live long - back on earth animals are rare. empathy is now a much bigger thing than it was in the jobmarket, 'emotional intelligence' etc.

horsemouth missed his chance to pick up some dark woodstained louvre doors that he could have used as a screen - that's no good horsemouth you've got to be quick.

 today is a bright sunny morning, last night horsemouth went and did his duty to prevent backsliding at the monkey-on-a-stick housing co-operative (he was right - there was some attempted backsliding) and to prevent the camelisation of a good initiative (when he arrived they were trying to fit wings to the poor beast and to fit it into a bobsled). he's agreed to babysit his brother's kids at the end of the month. it would be nice to get in another gig before howard goes back to work. and then there's that pesky birthday.

 sean has been in touch,

"Haven't read do androids dream... for ages, so I could be getting mixed up with the film, but.... I find all that stuff about empathy pretty uninteresting. A lot of it just seems like needy whingeing elevated to a worldview. Literature for man-children who like to complain their parents never hugged them when they were young. 

At the same time, its also somewhat suspect.....isn't lack of empathy the proverbial defining quality of the sociopath? Aren't they people too? Not to defend sociopaths, but this classification of certain people as less than true humans seems iffy; perhaps this is why Dick's work has become increasing acknowledged by the chattering classes in the age of the war on terror and the prison/industrial complex. Especially, as you point out, empathy doesn't necessarily translate to ethical action; torturing afghans is a dirty job, but someone's got to do it, right? 

Actually, the despicable authority figure appears as a sympathetic character on several occasions in Dick's books (eg Flow My Tears The Policeman Said). They're a bit like the Hitchhikers Guide cops who kill people, then agonize about it to their girlfriends afterward (remember them?), except they're not figures of fun and we're expected to...er...empathize with them. 

Compare this with Jack Kirby's brilliant (but alas, short lived) early 70s comic Omac; they cover similar territory to Dick, but in just a couple of pages completely blow him away. Omac sees in the machines a reflection of his own alienation (as former lower class worker Buddy Blank); unlike Dick, Kirby has a critique of political economy. Omac proceeds to blow up the android factory (hooray - down with the machines!) Thought you might like the Robert Crumb page (on Philip K. Dick's moment of religious conversion)" .

horsemouth and howard continue working (at chateau bremen naturally) on world's bliss (which come to think of it takes a pessimistic view of human existence) and howard's new song, which last week was called your child self but this week appears to be stealing lyrics from matty groves. oh - he forgot - they also worked on chris bell (of big star)'s you and your sister (as covered by this mortal coil with kim deal and tanya donelly singing). horsemouth recorded a guide version of the guitar part for howard to practice against, it's a difficult one to sing.

'the young to the young, the old to the old, the living to the living, the dead to the dead'

outside it is grey.

horsemouth's friends are much exercised by a swiss artist who claims to be painting with the ashes of holocaust victims from majdanek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majdanek_concentration_camp), of his 'work' he says the following "(it was) as if the ash contained energies or memories or 'souls' from people... people tortured, tormented and murdered by other people in one of the 20th Century's most ruthless wars". 

it is argued that this is wrong because it would be 'against the wishes' of the dead - initially it may seem that the dead are dead, they can have no say in the treatment of their remains, and 'their' ashes are merely ashes, disenchanted chemical. but the careful and respectful treatment of human remains in many cultures (and not just those 'of the book')  suggests that this is important for the living. the long, arduous and carefully structured process of burial or cremation is there to ensure a proper separation - to generate an acceptance of the departure of the animating spirit. these processes and materials are handled in the modern world by professionals and also and earlier by priests and relatives, concerns of taboo are replaced by concerns of hygene. but it is a mark of the breakdown of society if the dead lie unburied (and not just a the level of hygene) - they are both (to quote 'man of constant sorrow') 'sleeping in their graves'  awaiting the last judgement and risen again and living 'on god's golden shore' -  conversely if the dead were on display in bone chapels andmemento mori paintings, or if the remains are handled (some hindu practices), it is because the meaning of the practice is fixed by religious certainty - a certainty that now seems archaic to us. for these reasons the dead return and if they the dead return, as zombies seeking brains, or as ancestors bringing cargo, it is a cataclysmic event.

at majdanek itself 1,300 m³ of surface soil mixed with human ashes and fragments of bones  from the 79,000 victims (59,000 of whom were jews) was collected and turned into a large mound. in 1969 this was covered over with a concrete dome in a mausoleum designed by the architect wiktor tołkin. here the aim is clearly to memorialise and contain, to prevent further interference.

for these reasons the remains of the dead cannot be disenchanted, this is why this work of art is possible at all (no-one would be interested if he were painting with polyfilla) and why it is impossible - a world so sure in its disenchantment that art could redeem this material would be frankly terrifying to live in.

what has changed is the role of art - art has assumed the role of deciding the distribution of the things that formerly was the concern of religion and then of politics, it does this by means of play at lower levels of seriousness (and perhaps experiment at higher levels), by transgression of taboo, bringing into the gallery, into the painting, what should properly be kept out of it, and by taking art out into the realm of the streets and the political. in this art exactly matches the new spirit of capitalism - art as world spirit sanctifies the redistribution of mere matter and bodies below. 

horsemouth could conceed a parallel with the 'nuclear art' of james acord. horsemouth also remembers the artist jailed for violations of the anatomy act - for his keeping of parts of bodies from a morgue in his house. for these reasons some may be inclined to defend these paintings. one could point to Otto Freundlich - one of the artists included in the nazis' 1937 "degenerate art" exhibition - who died at majdanek. it may be that the artist is disabled and could point to the large numbers of the disabled killed particularly in the last year of the camp's operation  (he is not) or has some other proper connection. 

horsemouth finds this art, this transgression and his offers to explain it (if a ticket is purchased) deeply fucking tedious and deeply wrong, a continuation beyond death of the disrespectful treatment of holocaust victims as mere matter ('even the dead will not be safe if the enemy wins'), to attempt to make art out of this is just to continue the crime. horsemouth is not surprised however that he is a sound artist or composer -  it is typical of the 'feeble mindedness' that afflicts the field.

an apology and a return of the remains must be made.

'it's too long and it all sounds the same'

horsemouth feels a bit tractionless and yet he has things he needs to get on with (isn't that always the way). the travs are parked up near bow ecology park (and for some reason the park is locked up). as an alternative, yesterday horsemouth wandered down to east india dock - he's reading dostoyevsky white nights, he's read it before but he can't remember how it ends, the characters sit talking on a park bench by the river. here  we are later in the year,  the sun is gradually removing its patronage - sneaking back behind the blocks of ex-council flats opposite or showing up late for work, hiding its face in clouds as yeats would say.

of horsemouth and howard's cover versions it seems it still might be possible to do I'm sad and I'm lonely on the basis that it is a traditional tune and lyrics (a trad. arr. - a traditional song arranged by... as it is known in the music trade), gently johnny from the wickerman may not be possible as the arrangement owes much more to paul giovanni than to the original folk song (gently johnny, my jingalo) - paul giovanni took the first two lines of each verse (the A) and then lost the 'fol-de-rol, de toodle-ay-ye' second part of each verse  (the B) - so the song then became AAAA rather than ABABABAB (see the wallace house's version for folkways) - even though musicians of bremen have changed the chords against which these words and the A part of the melody is sung (broadly to those used in the cuckoo) it would be difficult to argue that they are not in fact singing paul's version rather than the original folk song. for silver raven, a  la luna yo mi voy, blue crystal fire, father death blues - these are clearly songs written by discernable authors and nothing much can be done with them until musicians of bremen are more firmly established, similarly for the werewolf and what a wonderful world even though horsemouth and howard have made substantial changes. 

one reason for doing the covers - other than interest/ curiousness  - was to leaven and broaden the set of howard's songs (which often arrived fully formed) and their instrumental textures - musicians of bremen now think electronic distribution on two EPs is the best way forward and have divided up the songs accordingly. 

reviews of the CD are arriving slowly from the smurfs of bremen  - horsemouth's personal favourite (and he thinks the most useful) is 'it's too long and it all sounds the same' , similarly 'it needs another instrument', he also liked the comment that singled out the musicians of bremen tunes and in particular all my dreams for praise (it is interesting that they haven't played this live yet). almost everybody likes the way the CD looks (the cover etc.) - horsemouth was uncertain. horsemouth approached a possible backing singer additional instrumentalist (harmonium) - but she hasn't got back in touch (so that's probably a no)  - howard's voice is much multi-tracked on the recordings but it needs a better more accurate voice than horsemouth's to do it live.

it's all about getting the maximum of variation out of limited means while remaining true to the core impulse  - good luck horsemouth!

something good (world's bliss)

last night horsemouth returned from administrative duties at chateau bremen - thinking about a bandcamp site and a blog etc. - which had in fact turned into a productive afternoon's music with good work being done on freight train (elizabeth cotton), blue crystal fire (robbie basho), your child self (howard mostly), and 12th century monk's plaint the world's bliss (trad. arr. horsemouth, found in edward lee's music of the people) but also work on playing keyboard on all my dreams, second skin and you're not god so that when they can face carting the keyboard to gigs they can have a set with keyboards.

musicians of bremen have already recorded blue crystal fire the trick is to now find a way of doing it live or to make it sound like the recording by farming off all the additional parts that horsemouth played on guitar when recording it (other than the main chord strum) to the ukulele - perhaps it will change in the process. horsemouth thinks it is perhaps a verse too long

 'worldes blis ne last no throwe 
hit wit ant wend away anon 
the lengur that hich hit I knowe 
the lasse ic find-e pristher on 
for al hit is i meynd wyd kare, 
mid sorewe ant wid uvel farce 
and at the laste poure ant barre 
hit let mon wen hit 
ginnet a gon' 

world's bliss is of a similar age to summer iz y-cummen in or edi beo thu hevene quene and is (as you may have noticed) a cheerful little ditty. horsemouth recorded it before and you can hear that version on his myspace page, he modernised the lyrics and the tune a bit he's sorry to say, but it seems to work. it will be interesting to see what howard makes of it. at the moment he is grappling with the medieval turnarounds. it's main virtue (other than being totally not what either of them would write) is that it's traditional and can thus be covered without having to pay anybody anything. it needs a better pitched voice than horsemouth's.

( ah interesting - the tune (which with the words is all that has come down to us, and that at least as re-imagined by horsemouth) harmonises much better against Dminor and Gminor (beginning with a nice D suspended 4th) than against the deliberately dischordant G major, Bb major (A7, G7, C passing chords) that horsemouth used on his version. perhaps a nice tuneful introduction before the horror.)  

there, horsemouth thought he was going to write about how he had no memory and has to write everything down.

black hole space echo box

horsemouth is intrigued by busker and musical instrument inventor michael o'shea - it turns out horsemouth has heard of him before - sometime (presumably during the late 70ies/ early 80ies) he was interviewed by tommy vance for the friday rock show (or possibly on the jazz show) about his black hole space echo box - the name itself being enough to excite the teenage horsemouth's interest. michael o'shea was mainly famous for playing the mo chara - a kind of combination hammer dulcimer/ sitar and several albums of him playing this exist.

 horsemouth is also intrigued that he's mainly reported playing on the platform of covent garden station (something you can no longer do under the current restrictions on busking underground) - but even more so by a blog that seems to describe covent garden as quite a 'happening' place (early 80ies?), this may be a false memory but it does seem to be the case that there were plenty of punk and new romantic themes shops, plenty of clubs. now it seems to horsemouth like an airport departure lounge, it seems scrubbed clean of interest.

it being a small world it turns out that one of horsemouth's friends (jim bermingham) actually knew michael. this is a discovery horsemouth owes to the combinatorial powers of facebook - or at least the internet - or perhaps a steampunk rapid postal service and daguerrotype photocopying would do it (with mule delivery for inaccessible spots).

 jim bermingham says;

'' I remember Mick O'Shea well. sorry to hear he's passed away. We used to busk together in London and Dublin. Even got thrown out of O'Donnahue's together cos Mick was drinking his own whiskey. He had a talent for getting thrown out of places. 

Mick was essentially a percussionist. He built several instruments that I know of. Me and him [on percussion] and Cahir O'doherty [on bass] used to busk outside the bank of Ireland and in Grafton street, Dublin one Summer c. '79.'80.He also used to play the platform at Covent Garden Tube. 

His *Mo chara* [pron. ma kara] Gaelic for "my friend", was essentially a self built hammer dulcimer played with chop-sticks. It had two pick-ups and was amped through two seperate phaser pedals, giving it an incredible spacy cyclic pulsing effect. That album track doesn't do him justice. 

He was also know to dress up in ladies atire in public.He somewhat resembled the Vulture from Spiderman comics. I had to pull his ma cara out of a campfire on a beach in Wicklow once after he'd drunkenly thrown it on the fire. "Interesting" is an understatement."

horsemouth has never busked (perhaps this awaits him as a retiree) but playing music for money has always struck horsemouth as an honourable profession whether it be in the club. the coffee shop or in the street. he thinks attempts to sanitise or regulate the trade should be resisted.

the gig (house of moleman) and the recording

last night musicians of bremen were celebrating not only their second ever gig (ok there was the abortive 'first ever gig' where howard got ill and had to go home) but also the arrival/ release of their eponymously titled first album ('like led zeppelin' hopefully remarked horsemouth).

the album

this morning

horsemouth is gingerly feeling round his skull for the lager-lager-lager hangover but he seems to have escaped the worst of it, just when he was about to go for the fatal final can the bar closed. saved by the bell. earlier he had bullied tim goldie into buying reduced price beer tickets (thereby drinking the proceeds of the event before it had even been played).

before the gig

to kill time horsemouth and howard went for a womble about in sunny and prosperous de beauvoir - horsemouth took howard to the stabilised concrete backfilled carcass of house of the hackney moleman - who after 40 years of tunneling under the gentrifying streets (undermining property values one street at a time) was evicted by the council, harrasssed to death, (and with the plot of land later sold for 1.2 million pounds). it's better than rachel whiteread's house in horsemouth's humble opinion.

the gig

so lisa fannen & jer reid opened (http://vimeo.com/86801954 http://jerreid.co.uk/), tim goldie having retired behind the decks. a very poised poetry/ guitar and effects collaboration (and one capable of responding promptly to world events). later jer reid played again in a trio caroline kraabel / jer reid / mark sanders (http://www.marksanders.me.uk/biography.html http://masskraabel.com/ http://jerreid.co.uk/) horsemouth liked the way they weren't on the stage behind the apparatus of microphones and p.a. - the drummer in particular did it for horsemouth. as usual he would like to put all the 'bands' or improvising duos and trios together into one 'super group' (but it probably wouldn't work).

between these two setups musicians of bremen played - howard was complimented on his voice, there were a few fuckups in horsemouth's playing (but nothing too shameful - better placement onstage would probably have sorted most of it out), they played the same set as the first gig but with the order swopped around a little and with the addition of a short guitar instrumental - horsemouth had left the guitar slide at home and so had to play the set dobro style (with the slide guitar flat in his lap). myk became the first person to buy a musicians of bremen cd, horsemouth tried to tempt nick (but he wasn't having it).

the night ended with a.j. holmes (the hackney empire)http://ajholmesandthehackneyempire.co.uk/doing a solo 'palm wine guitar' show. curiously enough he was taught by folo graff who also taught horsemouth (very briefly) courtesy of the inner london education authority and their evening classes way back in 1988 at jenako arts in balls pond road. to horsemouth there's a trick to finding out how to 'place' this music with people (which a.j. manages very well and which horsemouth and the band he was in never quite did - plus a.j. plays it much better than horsemouth ever did). horsemouth has mythologised this so much in his backstory.

thereafter horsemouth chatted drunkenly before shlepping his way home through the liquid darkness. thanks once again to tim for booking them and thanks to the other musicians and the soundman - that was good dudes.

it's a greeny blue world that we live in (planet of the apes)

so horsemouth is up and about and no longer seeing red (it is a greeny blue world that we live in). argentina has defaulted on its debts to various vampire squid hedgefunds, israel keeps shelling gaza, it's probably all still going on in syria and iraq and ukraine (off camera) and two and a half thousand years ago the buddha achieved enlightenment.

he's been reading a large brick sized book about play - it's role in development and evolution which argues on the basis of children and young chimpanzees (and various other juvenille pongids) - it summarises research that has had an enormous impact on education (and has lots of articles about chimpanzee pant-hoots and playface).

 Sylvia, Brunner and Genova (here horsemouth thinks of them as 3 slightly older alice-type victorian children) worked with children aged 3 to 5 at fishing a prize out of a latched box - the group that was simply allowed to 'play' with the materials beforehand did nearly as well (39% spontaneous solution) as compared to those shown the solution (41%), the groups that were instructed in how to do it or shown part of the solution did less well. the value of play (by the Yerkes-Dodson law) is that it prevents the learner from getting frustrated, the animal/child doesn't need to find a solution he/she/it is just 'playing' - 'the more complex the skill to be learnt, the lower the optimum motivational level for fastest learning'. 

the corollary is that the young animal/ citizen must be supported to play - the starving and harrassed need not apply.

 there is another 'rule' - 'the young are more inventive' only young chimps, orang-utans etc. exhibit the valued trait of 'curiousity' , the older ones do not, in fact konrad lorentz puts it like this;

 'when I observe how such a young animal plays with building blocks or places boxes inside one another, I am repeatedly struck with the suspicion that thesecreatures were, in the distant past, once of much higher intelligence than they are today, and that in the course of their specialization they have lost abilities which now only appear as a silhouette in the young animals' play.' 

 one can imagine a french structuralist anthropologist remake of planet of the apes/ the monolith scene from 2001 aiming to answer herder's question 'what does the animal most similar to man - the ape- lack that prevented it from becoming man?' showing apes acquiring the skill to continually reassess activity (the one useful in hammering in a nail) and curiousity, are retaining it into adulthood. further with the shift into language and the division between knowing how to (skill) and knowing that (knowledge) and a structured series of opposites,

knowing how to (skill) - done/ spoken, embodied/ oral, and so less portable, less copyable, pro-play

knowing that (knowledge) - oral/ written, disembodied and so more portable, more copyable, anti-play,

there is a shift in the role of play in education we are given an evolution of educability (in Bruner's phrase) but not in a nietzschean sense (not a genealogy of educability). the sun is shining horsemouth is off for a wander. thank you for entertaining his musings.
 -----------------------------------

 he wandered down to the hollow ponds and then through leytonstone and across to wanstead park, then via wansted and snaresbrook and back - there's a lot of it out there.