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.