horsemouth as selector howard as operator

it’s yours (but we’re going to share it) 

the title comes from a student discussing the perils of flat-sharing with particular reference to the contents of the fridge.

‘getting his way by not attracting attention’ this was max ophul’s strategy during his hollywood career. (and a large part of horsemouth’s plan).

‘the tyrant’s devilish plan, necessity’ (milton) necessity (the mother of all abominations) is of course the mother of austerity also - the ugliest of her myriad daughters but also (seemingly) the most eligible. everywhere you go her stingy wedding feast is being celebrated by the depressed hordes, some drink to forget, some to kill the pain, some drink because they have forgotten why and suspect that the reason may not be good.

‘it is as though it could be miraculously arranged that a fish could carry with it its crystalline stream into the thin air while it cohabited with a bird.’ (john cowper powys) animals form a big part of myths (and the stories we tell children also) - the stories that explain why the pie is divided the way it is.

horsemouth is just out the door for the week - certainly he’s broken its back - he has the plan for next week and the week after. monday is halloween (samhain) but he suspects the masses will be out celebrating all weekend long. he is delighted to make the third combined howard/ horsemouth mix available to you - please give it a listen (horsemouth will be ransacking his home for a pair of headphones to give it a test run saturday.

the photo comes from the m.r. james short story that horsemouth was recommending.

the perch is the fish of wealth (beulah land)

horsemouth was reading john cowper powys’s the art of growing old but it put him to sleep (a hazard of growing old cowper powys affirms). indeed what with de sica’s umberto D and the powys book horsemouth has been tarrying overlong with the aged and the inanimate (which comes to dominate the souls of the aged - or at least, so powys affirms) .

horsemouth is done with the week (and nearly half done for the term) - soon after british summer time will end and samhain will happen and we will properly be down the long dark tunnel halfway to the winter solstice from the autumn equinox.

all that is solid is affirmed figuratively and negated practically

government by irony continues as the ruling class relentlessly inform us how unironic they are now about how they are serious and not smiling a bit and yet what is affirmed figuratively is in fact negated practically - ‘it says what it says’, ‘it is what it is’, ‘brexit means brexit’ etc. while they scrabble about like cockroaches in search of a plot by means of mass callisthenics. they’re not playing (no), they’re not making it up as they go along (no), they’re not buffeted this way and that by events (no), why look how determined they all look.

thursday morning horsemouth chatted with a british asian brexiteer- she’d been up to lincoln to interview people about their reasons for voting brexit (and they were exactly the ones you would expect).

beulah land "the peaceful land in which the pilgrim awaits the call to the celestial city" derives from the king james bible isaiah 62:4;

"Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate; but thou shalt be called Hephzibah and thy land Beulah; for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married." 

it forms the basis of a well-known gospel hymn written by edgar page stites in either 1875/1876, based on that there is also a southern gospel song sweet beulah land written and composed by squire parsons in 1973.

friday it was 50 years since aberfan. saturday is a friend’s birthday.

horsemouth prepares for the weekend - he watched yasujiro ozu’s an autumn afternoon - in a bar the ex-navy men speculate (philip k. dick style) on what would have happened if they’d won the war - they’d have made it to new york (new york!) and ‘blue eyed women with topknots would be playing the shamisen and chewing gum’.

there is an extended fish metaphor going on - we are told (in the subtitles) that the perch is the fish of wealth but that fish is merely chosen to permit it’s confusion with a peach.

while eating the managers describe a fish as a perch (at least according to the subtitles) - this is to set up a gag where this is misheard as peach by their old and impoverished teacher- in japanese (so kyoko hirano tells us in the bfi guide to the film) the pun is between ham (pork, swine you know the deal) and hamo (‘a sophisticated and expensive fish , which requires the skill of a highly accomplished chef to prepare’.) which is usually eaten in the summer.

but this is not the only fish to make it into an autumn afternoon - the japanese title is sanma no aji - the sanma or mackerel pike being an unrefined fish enjoyed by ordinary people - one of the chinese characters in its name is the character for autumn, when the fish tastes best apparently. (hence autumn afternoon).

once again (with ozu, with the john cowper powys, with umberto D) we are with the ageing - people do the right thing but still they are sad, and there are all those shots of inanimate things.

‘the fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman’s prudence’

listening to this (a kind of modern robbie basho instrumental)
 


hopefully horsemouth has just done the months bureaucracies. looks like they are paying him anyway for the month’s work in the month where he actually did it - instead of waiting 7 weeks to see his money - this merely means if his poverty is relieved a month early now it will be brought forward by a month in the coming summer. in exchange for this benificence he now has to do his own spreadsheeting - in any event horsemouth is uncertain how future government dicking around with his sector will affect him - he assumes he’s on borrowed time.

last night he met up with denise and darsavini/eve - it was good to see them situations and old friends were discussed - d/eve wanted to make sure she had heard horsemouth correctly that capitalism would not fall (it survived 2008 didn’t it? - and all it did was beat the so-called lost value out of the workforce, the workforce did not beat the lost value of their labour out of capital, despite people’s hopes to the contrary).

‘in that town across the water 
 where the dead take the census’

horsemouth has been buying books, this poem fragment from john berger’s landscapes, and this from an automated tape on a bus;

 ‘please move down inside the bus 
so we can continue our journey’ .

he also bought john cowper powys’s the art of growing old (three squid calder theatre bookshop, the cut) and another three squider whose name temporarily escapes him. he has discovered a copy of austro-marxist ernst fischer’s the necessity of art hidden in the stacks (presumably the result of a book buying incident many moons ago).

‘we are forced back to offering visions’

so john berger remarks of ernst fischer's concerns. fischer ended his days living in a workers appartment in vienna - but it wasn’t a conducive environment to write in so he would spend long holidays in the country at friends houses or guest houses. it was on a trip to view a new one of these, with berger, that he died.

‘I have kept only the images that enthrall me 
(without knowing why).’

remarks roland barthes of his own choice of photos. (this is strange because berger compliments him on having a pleasure that knows what it wants.

horsemouth (the bodger, the temporiser) has completed another week of work and now prepares to fart about a bit. last night he watched pasolini’s the decameron, the night before robert bresson’s mouchette - small town girl lives miserable existence - it starts with quail caught in snares (this is the whole of the movie in microcosm).

saturday he met up with howard - they hid in the murder mile and drank.

here comes everybody ( ‘everything is a puzzle’)

on identifying sonny rollins in four bars flat - horsemouth was going to say coltrane (but something stopped him). pure luck really. he's only ever owned one sonny rollins album (same for albert ayler). john coltrane he has masses of (but then there's masses to own).

horsemouth was in buying books (his major sin) - a book on encounter culture (here comes everybody) and er... he’s forgotten, no, it has come back to him, cesar birotteau balzac (horsemouth moves closer to his long term goal of having read all of la comédie humaine - a hardback one of the rare ones that never makes it into english (fortunately here in english). two squid the pair.

wednesday he bumped into an old friend (and brother of an ex).

reading wise the john berger landscapes is going well - horsemouth is on to the walter benjamin piece. the opportunity cost of this blog is one pound and seventy pence (horsemouth has had to break his usual traverse of the seaside towns to do it).

‘everything is a puzzle’ sadly remarked a passing student. (aw bless).

four months of snow

horsemouth has completed his first 'week' of work (something like 12 hours together with something like 9 hours of mostly unpaid travel to and from donkey portage bookings).

the uber of the donkey portage word has not come yet (and now will not come) - instead by judicious use of registration requirements and expensive auditing requirements the government has ensured that a direct deal between the customer and the labour cannot be done. this will ensure the continued existence of agencies who will now drive down costs by driving down wages right across the sector (until it collapses because people can no longer afford not to work a less than minimum wage job in order to do it).

the government has already ensured that wages will fall by instituting a 'race to the bottom' (requiring the lowest bid to be accepted regardless of ability to perform) in the name of 'value for money' and (by regulation designed to ensure a professional service) ensured the correct barriers to entry to prevent the workers from selling their services directly (and thus saving the taxpayer at home - you lucky lucky people - money).

why is horsemouth even surprised? they after all have a vast amount of experience with the roaring success that was railway privatisation.

... and yet here we (all - mostly) are again.

horsemouth has something every day next week - he's trying to spread himself a little more thinly - he realizes that he cannot get much sympathy due to his low working hours - even the government would like him to work more hours - sore shoulder or not. marvin (the paranoid android) had (you will remember) a terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side - horsemouth has mild pain in his shoulder and various neck ligaments etc. he is still decades from retirement. again he would like to apologise to you for the gig economy.