ramakrishna in pittsburg (pleasure ruins) fetishize the manuscript object

it doesn't look too bad out so far. horsemouth has finished the vietnam set portion of duras' wartime journals - from whence (well at least from the translator's comments) comes the last part of the title of today's blog - they think about releasing the journals in a a facsimile copy with the handwriting, the erasures and the drawings intact, they then retreat (faced by the expense of the finished book)  and say this would be to fetishize the manuscript object in its physical form  when the text itself is so lucid, so eminently portable.

horsemouth also read large chunks of the observer review 25.01.15 and did a shopping run.

in the observer review a number of things (mainly) struck him - one was the phrase stuffocation (suffocation sic.) seemingly opposing minimalism - having less stuff - as too puritan, it offered the collection of experiences instead 'to have or to be' in a kind of reinvention of erich fromm, not that anyone was admitting it wasn't an entirely new thought that had dropped complete from out of the skies. horsemouth is a hoarder - downsizing and decluttering  is unlikely to appeal to him - capitalism would like him to be more flexible, to be able to 'drop everything within fifteen seconds if you see the heat coming around the corner'  but this isn't him.  it would take him several years in the wilderness to read everything he hasn't read yet, re-read what he wants to re-read in his collection. this does not stop him from wanting to go out and buy more books.

in thinking inside the box sean o'hagan observes polly harvey recording a record in a box beneath somerset house and complains of how boring the music recording process is. he cites joan didion as evidence. but recording (for horsemouth at least) is much more like building a house (or painting a picture) than it is about the release of spontaneous seconds of musical performance and communication when the recording itself  is played. for horsemouth it is about craftsmanship - about laying firm foundations, building solid walls, careful attention to detail and  knowing when corners can be cut (and when they can't) - for people to feel free to emote they must be confident that the backing will not intrude (or that if it does intrude they can handle it) they must feel supported.

just as capitalism would have us streamline our lives to make us more flexible workers (whilst trying to sell us tat to compensate us for those losses) it also feels uncomfortable with the slowness care and skill that production actually takes (preferring magical spontaneous moments 'captured' on video). (this is of course a fantasy)

that said this weekend horsemouth did not attempt any music nor go and see any played.
 

'the automobile stands forth in my mind as the very symbol of falsity and illusion.'

henry miller grumps it around america (by car of course) unable to put pen to paper. horsemouth has also been reading (and desecrating in the manner of city am) ruin lust the pamphlet for the ruin lust exhibition (from whence the pleasure ruins portion of the title) - it is not the pleasure of ruins but their institutionalisation as pleasure gardens, the kind of garden presented to their neighbours in bouvard and pecuchet.

pittsburgh is no longer the industrial powerhouse it was when henry miller visited - it is the very heart of the rust belt (horsemouth would like to go), kenneth patchen becomes the symptom of the whole of ohio (anais nin couldn't stand to be near him).

horsemouth mainly reads for the story, he has to slow himself down (often to desecration speed, to the recomposition of the text from fragments) to read the text properly with due care and attention, to see how the text's effects have been achieved or have arisen. for this reason he finds only what is new in the marguerite duras wartime notebooks interesting. her work, her archives, her sayings, are recorded with the fidelity devoted to benjamin (his archives in facsimile).

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on the subject of his book stash neither e-bay nor e-readers (nor indeed sneaky pdf files) work for horsemouth - he needs the pleasure of browsing, of fortuitous discovery, the thrill of the chase, a bargain or a luxury, the book to glow in the stacks or to climb out of the bag and into his hands on the journey home. new covers make horsemouth want to buy the book afresh. one day, whilst bored, horsemouth reviewed some friend's bookshelves - he must admit he did rather enjoy this.

exxon

uuurghgh! they've poked horsemouth with a stick and he's awake. last night (well, this morning actually) he dreamt of being a peacemaker - mind you he was pushing a bicycle up a hill at the time (in the midst of a crowd of people pushing bicycles up a hill). wednesday he is involved in a painful decision making process.

horsemouth has stopped saving - but at least he has some savings - it's not like he's already mortgaged his future work.

in his wanderings (falafel wrap waterloo three squid) at dolden street near gambia street horsemouth found a house once occupied by mary wollstonecraft (mind you the week before he'd fund another st. alfege church in a backstreet). he dipped into tate modern and felt slightly out of place reading marguerite duras' bloodthirsty if fictionalised account of torturing nazi collaborators (in the wartime diaries during the liberation of paris) while surrounded by peaceable (if bored) euroyouth.

on his way into work yesterday several streets were blocked off - he thinks it's an unexploded german bomb discovered on a building site.

monday was the anniversary of not one but two tanker disasters - what are the odds? horsemouth and ross once wrote a song about the exxon valdez tanker disaster - sadly they sang it valdez not valdeeez - over the years it mutated from folksong to rave anthem to rave anthem with slide guitar - the rave version (written by mickey mann pressure of speech) became the basis of his tracks x-0n and x-beats.

'it was a beautiful, natural death, quite startling in its perfection.'

there's not much privacy and dignity in violent death. david simon, in homicide: a year on the killing streets gives us one, an elderly music teacher over near hopkins university dies on her daybed, the score for a mozart piece on her piano, the radio (tuned to a classical station) plays ravel's 'pavane to a dead princess'.

 'it was a beautiful, natural death, quite startling in its perfection.'

the cops feel like intruders.

but for their usual clientele the indignity does not stop with death - there's been a black widow murdering husbands (and other family members) for the insurance - an exhumation is ordered on one of her dead husbands - they go to the cheapest city cemetary and exhume the body - after the dissection they notice the hospital tag on his wrist - it's the wrong name - they go back, consult the burial plans, exhume again, again there's a hospital tag, again it's the wrong name. the supervisor tells them the bodies might have moved, the workers say that on rainy or snowy days the boss just lets them bury the bodies in a mass grave regardless of the cemetary plan. looking down the list of names the detective recognises many of the same names as the homicide bureau's clients - cases they've worked, some they've solved, now buried in a mass grave by the city as cheaply as possible.

strangely with the black widow murdering family members there were other family members who were aware of it. for the cases that make it to court the dead are of course not present to see the justice enacted in their name - even where the victim names their murderer with their dying breath it might not be admissible on the basis that they may not have been aware that they were dying.

when he visits his parents horsemouth sometimes goes with his mother to the churchyard to ensure that his grandparents' graves are being kept clean. he'll finish the david simon sometime today - then it's either henry miller the air-conditioned nightmare or a death in the family karl ove knausgaard

what will you find in the horsemouth folk archive?

the triumphs of hope over experience, dark equinoxes, utopian experiments, air-conditioned nightmares, sky-technology bureaucracy, lodowicke muggleton and john reeve the last witnesses, dreams, plans of attack and defence, remembrances, titles of books, potential creditors, obsessive phrases, monuments, the dance of the inhabitants of the invisible city of bladensburg, the penance for eating horse meat, a requiem for misissippi john hurt, but above all remember this ...

the kingdom of heaven is within you

how can I be a folk?

the lowing of cattle, gemeinschaft / gesellschaft, Allopia, potatoes, bunin, fruitlands, the utopia experiment, apocalyptic communes, insomniac philosophers, beachside donkey rides, the fine art of jumping ships, the intellectuals get off their horses, agapemone, the co-operativist and economical society, the same rages, the same rebellions, musics for piano, whistling, microphone and tape recorder, the key utopian question,'how do you get to utopia? by rainbow or railway?'

and am I born to die?

morrissey, jeff buckley, king crimson, ''life is beautiful', mayakovsky (who committed suicide aged 30), benedict erofeev, samizdat, learning styles survey - zero as a 'reflector', away the crow road, 'the mob begin to think.', social technologies, the categorisation of animals in ancient china, he flinched and turned away, he begins to cry 'his tense, trembling hand sought mine on the tablecloth', he has misunderstood spem in alium.

fragments of unremarkable style.

the triumph of hope over experience (dark equinox)

Eclipse carrek loes Jonathan Polkest

in the grauniad weekend magazine 31.01.15 horsemouth discovers more about dylan evans' utopia experiment - at the end dylan just lets it go, the volunteers make it clear they have no intention of leaving and rename it the phoenix experiment. he thinks he is not afraid of the collapse of civilisation (because he's 'looked that possibility squarely in the face'). the guardian clearly is and plays it for laughs.

when survivors recount tales of communal endeavours horsemouth is always reminded of chris cutler's (brief) description of his time in the maoist groupuscles (he's forgotten it though and needs to reread it).

today is a grey morning, horsemouth sits with his back to the radiator, he's wearing a jumper. he's having his morning cup of coffee - he has 2.5kgs of coffee and 3kgs of museli stored up against the apocalypse. in the meantime he goes to work - well he says work...

'the greatest men in the world have passed away unknown'. 

in his the air-conditioned nightmare henry miller introduces us to varese (anais nin probably did the introductions), he hails him in terms remarkably similar terms to anais (voices in the sky/ edgar varese in the gobi desert - horsemouth hears voices in the sky as sung by the moody blues). miller curses america - really he only liked romain rolland's translations in the life of vivekananda (from whence the quote above)..

horsemouth has also been reading worner's book  on schonberg's moses and aaron (forgive him - he was raised by atheists, he doesn't even have the basic myths down). somewhere he has adorno's account of moses and aaron - it was a success! worner is less sure. this appeals to horsemouth, it opens up more possibilities. years ago (at the time of occupy) horsemouth was interested in all of this. he spoke about it with darsavini/ eve. moses speaks like a sky-technology bureaucrat, his language post-human, aaron can speak to the people (and even perform miracles to convince them) but on his own he lets them slide back into worshiping the golden calf. moses returns from isolation in the mountains with god with the (written) tablets of the law... aaron function like the satanic verses (but spoken) - a what if of communications breakdown with god. again tensions between the written text and the spoken word but curiously elaborated.

today is the equinox - we have survived winter and will move into the light half of the year - horsemouth will go out to a gig. his plan was to play gigs in tune with the skies - but it only worked retroactively.

'and I have given thee lodowicke muggleton to be thy mouth...'

horsemouth woke to a friend having posted a film on the muggletonians - who, it was said, could damn you into hell (the last man so cursed was walter scott). they too held to a doctrine that 'the kingdom of heaven is within you'.

two persons lodowicke muggleton and john reeve, were appointed the last witnesses to fulfill the prophecy of revelation 11:3, 'and I will appoint my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.' the muggletonians viewing them as being like moses and aaron (and again specifically in the way schoneberg thinks of moses und aaron in his opera about them - that aaron was the mouthpiece who could speak (and that moses could not))... although for the muggletonians no distinction was to be drawn between one witness and the other, and yet reeve did "and I have given thee lodowicke muggleton to be thy mouth: at that very moment the holy spirit brought into my mind that scripture of aaron given unto moses." 


yet the religion descended to us through muggleton (that is through aaron).

of course adorno and schonberg write about aaron and moses - horsemouth has karl h. worner's book on the opera round here somewhere (it was something to which he intended to return at some point) - it parallels the god-metatron thing - a division between the power of speech and the power of thought.

horsemouth is safe from being damned by the muggletonians (he hopes), the last one having dies on 26th february 1979. horsemouth goes to work. he's finished the knausgaard and nearly finished julius newsome by gerard donovan.

dreams, plans of attack and defence, remembrances, titles of books, potential creditors, obsessive phrases, monuments.....

'I would stand at the table and register in this celestial sort of ledger the innumerable little items which constitute a writer's book-keeping: dreams, plans of attack ... and so on..'   - henry miller, preface to the air-conditioned nightmare. 

dreams

he has remembered a past lover in a dream (this pleases him). horsemouth hardly ever remembers his dreams and certainly not by the time he's made coffee and hand cranked the computer into operation. he has zadkiel, sibley, freud and jung on hand for interpretation.

plans of attack

seeing as there's so much conflict in horsemouth's existence (well in his head at least) and seeing as almost nothing ever happens in horsemouth's life without him having the opportunity to think about it first, horsemouth is almost never without a plan of attack (usually formulated as a list), similarly,

plans of defence.

usually horsemouth tires himself thinking about these things even before actual hostilities begin. consequently he tends to avoid most conflict (very wise) but sadly does not manage to avoid thinking about it. while horsemouth may dive into writing something unprepared at some point he will get pen and paper (and it is almost always pen and paper) out and begin to make a plan, to sketch out the major oppositions, to note down the key phrases (see obsessive phrases op.cit.). derrida has trained him to look for the hesitations in a text but deleuze enjoins him to treat those hesitations as deliberate moves.


remembrances

horsemouth is a very forgetful creature - that is why he keeps diaries, notebooks, draws spider diagrams, venn diagrams. at the moment he is vexed at forgetting the chords to a song he has not played in maybe 5 years. titles of books/ songs horsemouth tries to keep a list of books he has bought, a list of books he has read, and tries to write about books just after he has read them in an effort to jog his memory and critical faculties into engaging with them. it would be a shame to have a book pass beneath horsermouth's eyes and have it emerge undigested at the other end. further he keeps several lists of songs he plans to write or learn to play or it might be possible to play. he keeps a list of good lines or quotes both from books and from life. writing things down is one of the things that works for him.

names and addresses of potential creditors this one is not relevant to horsemouth - in general he subscribes to the principle (inculcated by his scottish granny) of neither a lender nor a borrower be - he never borrows, he never lends out real sums of money. one of the things he is most pleased about is a certain financial independence and having a flat of his own (at least until he loses his job) - this means he can suit himself (this is important to him).

obsessive phrases

horsemouth is always on the look out for these - largely to serve as titles to his blog posts but also as weak points in an argument (tells - see derrida, adorno), indications of ideology .

editors to harry

during his theory writing phase this was more important to him... but no not really... similarly with promotors to harry, he is a bit remiss about sorting out gigs, recording etc. - he would pay a manager to do this for him, he really would.

battlefields ah where would the cantankerous old mule be without his conflicts?

monuments

the entire borough of hackney, the monkey-on-a-stick housing co-operative, various recordings, articles, desecrations and scribbles, his extensive and eclectic library (not so much his record and cd collection, his cassette tapes have pretty much gone west already). to be frank horsemouth's cultural legacy bothers him, he just sees it all piled in a skip after his death...

monastic retreats

his parents place, his flat, spain, portugal, the czech republic, brittany, the salt marshes, bow ecology park, east india dock - broadly anywhere he can wander around and read books in the sunshine and scribble a few notes in his diary.

inside the new soft city

'I would stand at the table and register in this celestial sort of ledger the innumerable little items which constitute a writer's book-keeping: dreams, plans of attack and defence, remembrances, titles of books I intended to write, names and addresses of potential creditors, obsessive phrases, editors to harry, battlefields, monuments, monastic retreats and so on...' - henry miller, preface to the air-conditioned nightmare. 

horsemouth - a graduate of seaside towns university college (the one with the founder in a box), struggled hard for years with a sciences type degree before lunching it for the world of anarchist politics (if indeed such a thing ever existed). despite an unpromising start due to lack of any real ability and manifest efforts in the second year he left the institution largely defeated and with the confirmed belief of his own stupidity. to horsemouth, not knowing what he wanted to do, all he had to do was survive and not fail, and this he eventually managed (though not as well as he would have liked). but lets be honest about this - he finds it hard to write the word fail - he has rationalised it so that he can see the benefits of having done it.

partly today horsemouth wants to talk about education - he has met a true believer precisely at that point where social formation, the way forward to an organised life, is open before them.

this makes horsemouth to cast his mind back to his own time at universe-ity. horsemouth was forced to recognise his manifest lack of talent in the area he had chosen but the mental resilience that comes from bashing his head against the wall of his own stupidity has never entirely left him (nor the sheer determination necessary). similarly he has always been cautious over what can be said. in fact his determination, focus and single-mindedness is one of his key problems - when he is afraid to jump he often gets pushed.

he stepped off the yellow brick road and self-rusticated to hackney (which felt like a forgotten corner of the known world) made up of even more forgetable bits, and built a new life in the ruins. he liked the ruins (ably described in paul harrison's inside the inner city) and took great pleasure in the anonymity. horsemouth arrived just as the population stopped droping - as the city began to repopulate, as hackney became in effect the new islington (like jonathan raban's soft city but with lower rent)...

horsemouth has no great natural talents as a musician and he has not studied it hard enough - it has all been work - he has become good at what he does - but he has not been consistent in dealing with his weaknesses. indeed as one jazz musician remarked to him it's no good having weaknesses... (horsemouth did admire his focus at least).

yesterday horsemouth went to an exploratory jam with john clarkson (john playing harmonium -and if and when they can find enough batteries - omnichord - a kind of electric autoharp) - it went well - horsemouth is very hopeful. they worked on the devil song, walk on guilded splinters, fanfare.., (down by) riverside, and rain and snow (a little). the drones, the little melodies, it was all sounding good. previously john had remarked he liked a version horsemouth had worked out of a song denise taught him sleabh na gael (maybe) - that will be worth revisiting. later horsemouth went off up into the hills to babysit returning by car this morning.

he did some of his usual book-keeping when he does a project, keeping a list of possible songs, possible singers, spider diagrams of possible parts

dance of the inhabitants of the invisible city of bladensburg (a year on the killing streets)

(again, in part, fahey with the titles). inspired by rimsky-korsakov’s opera legend of the invisible city of kitezh, a city which became invisible when attacked by the tatars, a legendary city of beautiful people with gracious hearts. fahey eventually renamed this one dance of the inhabitants of the palace of king phillip XIV (er... and then named it back again). how much any of this resembles the real bladensburg horsemouth really couldn't say. the outro (on the version from the yellow princess) is played by Jay Ferguson and Mark Andes from Spirit apparently - not a lot of people know that.

horsemouth is back in b'more with david simon's homicide: a year on the killing streets - the murder rate is two every three days - the forward is written by richard price (who wrote clockers - horsemouth's other guide to the underside of america). strangely enough horsemouth would probably add jerome charyn's isaac series of novels (though they'e clearly old new york / kojak style fantasies). 

it's bright and sunny out - horsemouth is up early so he can read a bit more and blog a bit before he goes out. yesterday he played a little guitar with andrew (he took the resonator) - there are moments when they're managing some rough-hewn harmonies he swears. he should probably take the nylon guitar though - it's just better and clearer and easier to pitch to.

flatwise - he should get some more compost and begin planting stuff out on his balcony (or at least starting stuff off on his windowsill).


horsemouth listened through to alabama by john coltrane - mcoy tyner vamps away on an Aminor chord while coltrane runs around a scale - this states the major themes - two descending notes lead it back into single notes backed by chords that lead it back to A minor (not once but twice) - that's the head of the piece, they return to it at the end, the band are then off onto the second page of the music (where horsemouth cannot follow them without paying). at the start it's not so much a drone as a churn - horsemouth will probably have to learn the initial melodies from the recordings (his reading is not so good) - once it's into the chords he's better.

the penance for eating horse meat is four years on bread and water - irish penitential (7th century)

matsuo basho (the haiku poet) took his name from a banana tree given him by a grateful student - robbie basho was the name taken by another takoma park guitarist who relocated to san francisco, adopted at birth he had previously gone by the name of daniel robinson, Jr. in east germany in the 80ies steffen junghans became interested in the music of robbie basho (and the poetry of matsuo basho) and renamed himself steffen basho-junghans.

watchers of the jamaica set caper film rockers will notice in it the reggae drummer leroy wallace (who renamed himself horsemouth). musicians often take the opportunity to improve their names.

horsemouth has finished reading patrick hamilton's hangover square - like derek raymond's the crust on its uppers  it's a good account of the seedy side of the posh. hamilton's novel is set in 1939 just before the second world war kicks off - curiously it is like sartre's nausea in describing the sense of disgust at the collusion with fascism. it's another novel horsemouth has read in record time. (and another good recommendation from andy). as derek raymond notes people in that life (of idleness, drinking and low level crime) are vivid if nothing else.

horsemouth always planned to turn more of his brief acquaintance with this scene into song (beyond gentleman john that is). he would (of course) heavily anonymise it all.

saturday was candlemas.

'when the catfish is in bloom' (how bluegrass music destroyed my life)

well fahey week (featuring basho day)  is over. horsemouth hopes you have enjoyed it. 

this is another thing horsemouth loves about fahey - his song titling. broadly fahey has the difficult proposition of selling essentially very similar guitar instrumentals (album after album, short song after short song) to a largely indifferent public over and over again. but like an abstract work of art half the battle is in the titling.

'on the sunny side of the ocean' (what does that mean?),
'when the catfish is in bloom' (conflation of fish and vegetable genera, possible confusion of singulars and plurals, all going along euphoniously together to create a deliberately fake southernism),


'requiem for mississippi john hurt' (deliberate admixture of song titling procedures from western classical music with subject matter of blues musicians).
 and take the album titles
'death chants, break downs & military waltzes (1963)', 
'the dance of death and other plantation favourites'. 
'the transfiguration of blind joe death'....

 this extends to fahey's collected writings how bluegrass music destroyed my life (quality fake moral panic) and to the sleeve notes on his albums - the finest quality frontier gibberish available. his academic writing (his thesis on charlie patton) displays this also - this maybe where he learnt it, titling academic essays is an object lesson in surrealist juxtaposition.