‘allegories in the realm of thought are what ruins are in the realm of things’
- benjamin
horsemouth is just waiting for the rush hour to die back before heading off to paint his new room. thursday he moves - in so he’s on the clock.
horsemouth has been reading jameson's marxism and form - he’s completed the adorno chapter (featuring a concise and pithy hegel deviation) and is onto the benjamin. he made progress because yesterday he hung around waiting in the sun. he finds parallels between Jameson's writing on adorno and ranciere (dialectical sentences/ surrealist juxtaposition - ‘its strength increases proportionately as the realities linked are distant and distinct from each other’) and parallels between benjamin's the origin of german tragic drama and Foucault's discipline and punish.
There is (in particular) s a fine plot synopsis of game of thrones;
‘'as a form trauerspiel reflects the baroque vision of history as a chronicle, as the relentless turning of the wheel of fortune, a ceaseless succession across the stage of the world’s mighty: princes, popes, empresses in their splendid costumes, courtiers, masqueraders, and poisoners - a dance of death produced with all the finery of a renaissance triumph.’ says jameson.
‘baroque drama knows historical events only as the depraved activity of the conspirators. not a breath of genuine revolutionary conviction in any of the countless rebels who appear before the baroque sovereign...’ says benjamin.
The Grail and the Lotus 7:11( 6str.) Cathedrals Et Fleur De Lis 7:28(12str.) Pavan Hindustan 7:39( 6str.) Song of the Kings 3:33(12str.) California Raga 8:52( 6str.,voc)
this is basho’s ‘mature’ set - compare his setlist for set 2 at the stone city general store in stone city gig in iowa (september, 20,1982) four years later;
The Grail and the Lotus 8:24( 6str.), Cathedrals Et Fleur De Lis 8:44(12str.), The Blue Lotus 3:18(12str), Pavan Hindustan 8:279( 6str.), Claire De Lune 5:24(12str.), California Raga 8:52( 6str.,voc)
it has a clear beginning - middle - and end.
horsemouth enjoyed this song - then realised it was in Spanish and by manuel de falla.
redwood ramble - starting with some ‘country picking... to get limbered up, fancy-pickin, show-off stuff’)
a little retuning
memorial day - starts fast and then decelerates into those trademark open chords of harmonics - sounds like flamenco guitar-type trills, ending with those harmonics.
sound of the seating being adjusted ‘a friend of mine leo kottke...he knew what to do with what I showed him’ tuning no.35
variations on easter
sound of the bass strings being tuned down, treble strings being tuned up, some breathing and position shifting.
rocky mountain raga spoken introduction over opening chords, immaculately timed cough during the opening phrase, robbie begins to sing.
‘Hmmnn let me see... I wanted to do one more of what I call guitar paintings’
moving up a-ways introduction ‘a contemporary song’ - the lyrics frequently going wordless...
'last year' ... ‘four ladies across the board’
‘thank you’
platonov has a strange attitude to materialism. in most of the books that horsemouth has read he affirms it and then reduces his characters to such material poverty that theirs becomes a struggle with mere existence (this is one interpretation - possibly a wrong one). it has more in common with the works of the desert fathers than with other novelists of the soviet era.
but in the foundation pit it is as if he has been possessed by the spirit of bulgakov. he gives us a character who goes on and on about thinking when he should be working, the arguments for materialism and against idealism are given to his workmates, that and good honest ‘shoulder to the wheel’ exhortations.
it is a world close to home not mythically far away (in a chevengur or a dzhan) - the book (at least in this translation) is almost banally critical and this overpowers the usual effect of platonov’s work (that material reality is not enough and is in the process of dying out anyway - things age and are sad in his work, they are reduced to mere fragments, discarded they are lonely without people, that material reality is so hostile to humanity that it can almost be left behind).
the harvill edition is carefully constructed kasimir malevich's head of a peasant on the front cover, a feed in quote from viktor erofeev of the times literary supplement, some stage direction by joseph brodsky on the back cover - we are steered to towards reading the novel both in terms of ‘the theme of chronic alienation’ and as the history of that alienation as a product of the soviet state.
in the introductions (by his daughter maria platonova, by robert chander one of the translators) we are offered collectivisation and the famine that caused as the source of platonov's disenchantment and his daughter is offered up as the role model for the girl in the book who dies and whose burial ends the book (is she buried in the foundation pit?).
brodsky points us towards platonov’s language - seen as sick and sundered from reality - platonov as krauss, as sprachskritik. but elsewhere platonov gives his incantatory communist glossolalia to his central characters - his heroic engineers.
horsemouth always assumed it was there because it had to be there to give the book a chance at publication - that it was code and disguise to get it past gorky and the socialist realists - but it also reveals the hegelian mystical kernel still present within marxism (for all this loose socialist realist talk of materialism). quite how this relates to platonov’s other themes horsemouth does not know.
today is the anniversary of the death of alan lomax (2002)
so says common sense who (in a metaphysical poets style) appears as a character in jose saramago’s the double - common sense had presumably warned pessoa that writing poems under the names of dozens of other invented poets was not a good idea (and here appears to warn our central character that meeting his double is not a good idea).
horsemouth has simon schwarz's culture of the copy round here somewhere which deals with doubles, twins, conjoined twins, copies, recordings, photographs, mirror images, things so numerous as to be effectively identical (actually it is not round here it is in a box of books waiting to be moved to it’s new home - it is in that particular box of books because they were printed and bound at the same size - it will be next to it will be daniel heller-roazen’s echolalias).
in the same book (the double) there is a discussion of folk sayings (or saws as they are sometimes known because they can be put to work again and again, or because they cut through the appearance to the reality of the situation). the folk saying chosen is to tether one’s donkey - meaning to go and deal with one’s bad mood.
yesterday horsemouth was in a good mood - he wandered down the hill to walthamstow garden party bumping into dave and claudia (and philly) in the queue - their next door neighbour was playing bass with walthamstow acoustic massive (a mixture of bands and choirs that literally filled the stage) - they ended out with a bowie tribute with great version of space oddity and then heroes (with the great and neglected singer david mcalmont). this was probably horsemouth’s favourite thing of the festival.
the other thing that caught his ear was chipsy and EEK Egyptian chaabi music updated with thundering double drumkit (adam and the ants style) and a pleasantly noisy keyboard set halfway between the middle ages and rave. fanfare cariocala he largely missed because he was getting beer and food and other necessities at extortionate prices (you should be able to bring beer in - judging by the queue out of the main beer tent they could have done with a whole other beer tent). emcida (latin hip-hop with percussion) he liked but didn’t entirely do it for him.
horsemouth didn’t hang around to hear adf soundtrack la haine (at one time this would have been horsemouth’s dream pairing) this all seems a bit close to the knuckle in the light of recent events. before la haine the band had soundtracked battle for algiers - but they found few takers - French municipal mayors were unlikely to want to put on a film teaching the ghetto youth how to make a revolution. to horsemouth it is an interesting lesson in doubling and distance arab youth for asian youth etc. then for now - and now it is possible to think of the banlieu revolts as a then.
today there is more - horsemouth may go back or maybe Lambeth er... there’s a lot on.
sun this morning now clouding over. horsemouth is hiding out up in the forest and has fed the cat (and a very cat-shaped cat she is too). he is hiding out in a house with a sold sign on it.
last night he went out to see stick in the wheel play at leytonstone folk club - once again they were awesome - there was a time when horsemouth thought they were getting a little boring (too many short songs that didn’t develop, too many songs arranged in the same way, the permutations and combinations of the instrumentation exhausted) but now they seem to have hit a second wind.
there were two singer/ guitarists on beforehand - the first worked a dylanish/ donovanish thing (he joked he had studied with wiz jones but the songs were too complicated so he couldn’t learn them), the second horsemouth has seen singing backing vocals before and worked a comedy routine (though ended up singing long lankin).
to start their two song encore stick in the wheel got the audience singing poor old horse - one of those songs where a myth animal is boiled down to its bones and to glue. stick in the wheel sang the sea shanty version ('and we say so and we hope so') part of a ritual where after a month at sea a sailor would be taunted that his horse had died and a model of it would be thrown over the side.
there is a landlubber version (but it is less interesting).
this is how current events feel to horsemouth (suffering on an almost mythic plane), skip james speaks of hard times, of people going door to door, as a stick in the wheel do in hard times in old england.
monday was the anniversary of the day alice coltrane recorded isis and osiris live at the village gate. wednesday the anniversary of the death of maupassant (whose the horla anticipates it follows).
horsemouth found an appreciation of alice coltrane (including an interview with the oud player on this track - detroit bassist vishnu wood) online.
of tulsi (the tamboura player on the first four tracks on journey in satchindananda)horsemouth can only find the following; Tulsi Sen Gupta is an American player of the tambura. She played on a number of albums by Alice Coltrane in the early 1970s (credited simply as "Tulsi"). She also appeared as part of the Alice Coltrane Group at Carnegie Hall (21 February 1971). Coltrane wrote of Tulsi, in the liner notes of the 1970 album "Journey in Satchidananda": Tulsi's tamboura [...] is played with as high a degree of sensitivity as any I have heard from any instrumentalist native to the East." Tulsi now lives in Jersey City, New Jersey with her husband Ashish, is involved in running the Cultural Association of Bengal, New York, and with the performance and recording of Indian classical music. She also translates booklet notes and other material for concerts and recordings from Bengali into English.
majid shabazz who plays bells and tambourine on tracks 1-4 of journey in satchindananda also plays on pharoah sanders thembi (bailophone dance) and his izipho zam (which features prince of peace). he now seems to be working as a drummer in tampa in an italian restaurant.
yesterday evening horsemouth wandered out to the duke in wood street (walthamstralia) to meet up with johnny and denise (and dave and claudia) (and children various) to pick up keys and chat. there was much evidence of prosperity (within 100 yards of a classic tower block estate) - girls in halter tops danced to disco and house, people supped craft beers. horsemouth and dave stayed on after to finish up.
there was discussion of the knock on effect on ireland of brexit. horsemouth should get back into the habit of listening to the news (but it’s just too depressing).
ranciere quotes leo strauss (or at least mentions him). while he was away horsemouth had a really good chat about education (one of ranciere’s concerns) - the panglossian enthusiasm for the social (as horsemouth would put it) is rendered by ranciere thus;
‘the utopia of a rationality immanent in the social which heralds the eventual common end of philosophy and of politics.’
horsemouth is back from seeing tinariwen at esmoriz (just down the coast from porto - about the length of led zeppelin I by car). great gig - good band.
before the gig horsemouth and friends sunbathed on the beach \ drank a bottle of cheap but presentable wine \ played a dice game vaguely resssembling yahtzee \ there may be photos of the sun sinking into the sea - he met a youngster who´d lived in england and studied product design (now he was back home and a lifeguard).
though this may not be the time to say it brexit has a utopian content - an archaic content refusing the mangerialism of political parties with nothing to offer but austerity. of course their solution to the problems caused by brexit will be more austerity but never mind. ´the worst kind of scarcity a nation can suffer from is a lack of inhabitants´
- rousseau, political economy.
in cabeza de vaca´s los naufragios the spanish sailors are shipwrecked on the shores of a native american texas. they find neither cities of gold nor utopias but only grinding poverty. only a handful survive and cross that immensity to reach the spanish garrisons of mexico.
on his return to spain cabeza de vaca writes a book for the king - he tells him of his discovery of the indians´humanity and, at the moment of greatest poverty, the rediscovery of human capacities, in particular the capacity to heal others.
when the last boat sank the spanish laid down on the beach and cried - the indians cried with them.
at the start of his (1988) on the shores of politics (horsemouth was reading it at the beach) ranciere says this,
´to speak of the boundaries of the political realm ... evokes no precise or current reality´.
but time has changed this. instead of globalised world of the free movement of capital and thus necessarily (to a lesser extent) the free movement of people, instead of an end of history in a strangely delayed prussian democracy, it is as if on a boat at sea we had run aground on a rock - a rock with a plastic union jack on it. (to be fair these are precisely rancierian themes)
instead of no borders we have campaigns for the corollary more borders - what is the content of this in terms of the ideas of the people? (and what kind of tap-dance on the decks will our leaders have to do to annul this atavistic irruption?).
what the fuck!
there is the return (or the revenge) of white van man here - where the rulers bemoan the stupidity and racism of the poor slobs they must govern (and the ruled insist on their right to their stupidity and racism).
horsemouth is (as they say) glad to be out of it - the second (non-serious) part affords him pleasure - watching the scots nats emerge from the wreck dressed as statesmen and europeans. he takes less pleasure in contemplating the unravelling of the good friday agreement (where the northern irish were encouraged to re-attach to europe rather than ireland or britain).
like horsemouth says he´s glad to be out of it (but soon enough he must return ' and indeed he has).
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of course where once there existed a possible escape to europe this may now become more difficult (it is all a bit up in the air) - a number of horsemouth´s friends are now trapped in this. a while ago (while desecrating a copy of city am in burroughsian style), horsemouth noted that themes of limitation on the freedom of movement were cropping up. sadly he did not heed the warning.
