'see my face from the other side' (fahey week 2019 begins)’

fahey week, as inaugurated by delta slider, the 22nd to the 28th of february, begins again for this year.

horsemouth has recently read two pieces about fahey from outside the fahey canon and he feels he should respond to them.

the first was an account of an attempt to tour late era john fahey round the uk that ended in disaster and lawsuits, horsemouth has discussed it earlier but will probably return to it.

the second is an account by john jeremiah sullivan (in a collection of his journalism pulphead - dispatches from the other side of america) of phoning up fahey in pursuit of an old blues lyric for a piece he was fact checking for greil marcus.

the record with the difficult to hear lyric was on last kind words blues,  a record that is actually a duet by geeshie wiley and elvie thomas - horsemouth has read sullivan writing on this theme before, in his excellent april 13th 2014 article for new york times magazine the ballad of geeshie and elvie 

horsemouth finds another piece by daphne a. brooks in the february 7, 2017 edition of oxford american again she hears the line differently from sullivan and fahey, she hears it as 'see my face from the other side' 

another song of theirs crops ups in ralph ellison’s the invisible man.

fahey (on this occasion) was friendly and helpful (doesn't sullivan realise how rare that was?). fahey identifies the line as  ‘lord, blessed daughter, don’t you be so wild’. fahey is only mentioned in passing, as part of that strange tribe - the white blues aficionados - but sullivan detects, in fahey’s pointing out that early blues singers ‘didn’t care about the words’ and ‘were all illiterate anyway’, a

‘reflexive swerving between ecstatic appreciation and an urge to minimise the aesthetic significance of the country blues’ 

sullivan wants to save the memory of the blues musicians (and their words) from the blues aficionados and collectors - he wants to save them as writers capable of great aesthetic effects achieved by purposeful juxtaposition and conscious understanding of form.

and so (horsemouth thinks) would fahey - but it doesn’t take literacy to be capable of creating (‘writing’) lyrics like these (that is a modern prejudice). blues was often music for dancing played for extended time with improvised lyrics using many ‘floater’ lines from other songs. listen to some son house - you’ll see what horsemouth means, the same backing tracks recycled over and over with new lyrics as the situation demands. musicians going to record would probably pick their best lines but little seems through composed - most of it seems inspired juxtaposition, a skillful arrangement of the lines that worked. and the lines that work are the ones that we remember - and the singers who sing those lines are the ones that we remember. it is not for nothing that musicans call a memorable line (or muscial phrase) a hook.

the hook we hear - it catches us - but the other lines have become indistinct.

there is an analogous argument to the conscious creation argument in sullivan’s pulphead piece about blues musicians learning from records (rather than from direct face to face contact in some imagined ur-folk moment). this happened, the musician’s tell us this in their surviving testimony, but it proves little about the process of creation.

getting recorded was, in any event,a rare event. in attempting to free the bluesmen up from the mystification spread over them by the (predominantly) white collectors sullivan ends up casting that mystification (that ‘blues twilight’) over the music of fahey - instead of robert johnson it is fahey who becomes haunted and hoodooed and damned and ‘irony free’.

horsemouth thinks one can safely say if there was one thing fahey was not it was irony free - all of fahey’s career is a deeply ironic (indeed postiviely sarcastic) attack upon the ethnographer’s interpretation of the blues, the folkies’ version of the blues, an attempt to defend the object itself from its fans. his is a similar mission to sullivan's.

the point of departure for sullivan’s comments on fahey is in fact fahey’s ironising.

fahey infact wants to save the bluesmen as writers capable of great aesthetic effects achieved by purposeful juxtaposition and conscious understanding of form but in terms of the music not so much the lyrics - he has little interest in the lyrics, and has excised them away in his own work in an attempt to reveal what lies beneath.

in this disparagement of the lyric he is like adorno, but like adorno they have a way of sneaking back into his argument.

with sullivan we have a piece that allocates central place to the lyrics that begins with the inaudibility of lyrics. (horsemouth mentions this in passing - it proves nothing).

sullivan searches intending to find dispatches from the other side of america but he is trapped within the machine of writing that is a machine for myth making. all he can do, as can we all, is redistribute the facts and themes and attributions round the point of the indeterminacy.

in all our struggles for truth and clarity we wrestle with ghosts but they will not out of the flesh.

(if you enjoyed this piece horsemouth prattles on in a similar way in his appreciation of the artist steve mcqueen’s film hunger entitled hungy ghost which can be found on the metamute website).

horsemouth and his homestead (three poles four opinions)

the kitchen and the bathroom are due a refresher. this is slightly problematic because horsemouth and the denizens of the gaff will still need to cook and eat and wash. worse still people have opinions on how it should be done. (three poles four opinions as the old adage goes).

horsemouth’s strategy will be to find some boxes, find some box tape and make some space available in his room to store stuff. beyond that he couldn’t give a shit. he responds to any other suggestion with the warmth people usually reserve for vipers. (here we see the content of an early morning conversation with horsemouth it is really not better to poke him with a stick before breakfast).

as far as horsemouth can see everybody in the house has some kind of a hoarding problem
- in time of peace a cupboard can always be found (hell they have a whole room devoted to tat and then there’s the ‘living room’ currently used as a ‘temporary’ repository for tat - for tat that is just resting). (and don’t get him started on the dead bicycles, solar panels, microwaves, bits of wood, duplicated tools and the beer trophy potlatched kipple that clusters by the front door).

horsemouth, as you know, is himself a hoarder. he’s a hoarder of books 
(and to a lesser extent guitars and musical instruments, CDs, clothes).

broadly if horsemouth has storage space he will keep things - he is unable to resist a) cheap and in particular b) free. it is a couple of years since he last moved so the books are beginning to creep up again (they could do with another cull). but this is the critical point - horsemouth has acquired (and had built) enough shelving to store his kipple within his room - none of the other members of the house has done that and so they are obliged to make use of the communal spaces (and mostly any available floor space) of the house.

horsemouth recognises the size of the problem and the timescale but it’s all do-able. they’ve got til next wednesday - today and tomorrow are write-offs, so it’s mostly the weekend.

maybe now horsemouth can have a bowl of museli.

the gaff enables horsemouth to do something fairly important - it enables him to remain in the seaside towns and keep earning (so that most of his wages can go on paying rent for the gaff). horsemouth likes the seaside towns - he likes the opportunities they afford and it makes living cost neutral. or he could get more work/ get a decently paid job.

alternatively horsemouth could fuck off somewhere cheap(er) in the global south and live off his savings - that way he would be running down his savings in the direction of retirement and the state pension which (currently) can be taken anywhere.

let mermaids flirt with me

so goes the song by mississippi john hurt. horsemouth is listening to the american music show acoustic blues special.

as a bonus last night horsemouth discovered that michael hurley (the original writer of the werewolf) is a) still alive (79 and still going strong) and b) has a documentary about him (presented by a somewhat annoying sock puppet). he still in good voice too and horsemouth can’t knock his picking.

Snock 'N Roll: Adventures With Michael Hurley (Complete Documentary Short) from Marc Israel on Vimeo.


online also there is an account of an abortive attempt to tour late era john fahey round britain - trust breaks down right at the start, mysteriously fahey arrives early at the airport, he’s sick, old and mean. fahey announces he is going home (and then goes on to play several of the gigs with a rival promoter). in doing so he makes an enemy of the original promoter - a texas lawyer with a side career in americana. the lawyer hounds him till his death.

when mississippi john hurt dies he wants to be taken to the sea and given to the mermaids - we see hylas being dragged down to a watery doom by nymphs (lots of nymphs) in john william waterhouse’s painting recently on display/ not on display in manchester.

yesterday horsemouth did some shopping - 5kg rice to the gods of the apocalypse (chris grayling et al.), lots of tins of beans. and cooked a chickpea and swede curry.

on the anniversary of the death of j.sheridan le fanu

according to russell kirk, in his essay a cautionary note on the ghostly tale j.sheridan le fanu ‘is believed to have literally died of fright’ but kirk does not give the circumstances. (source: wikipedia -  checked 7th feb 2019 the anniversary of his death).

on the anniversary of the death of j. sheridan le fanu - horsemouth watched dreyer’s vampyre - largely performed by a non-professional cast and based on le fanu to celebrate. he watched lars von trier discussing dreyer and in particular his joan of arc (also largely filmed with a non-professional cast and simplified down to a series of tightly framed static shots).


‘we encounter a divided world defined by the clash of opposites, bitter hatreds, and the unmitigated conflict of absolutes.’ - the foreward to belarmino and apolonio by ramon perez de ayala (1921).

the next word (in this excellent piece of stall-setting out) is spain, but they could just so easily be brexit britain. horsemouth has bought a copy of derek raymond’s a state of denmark (calthorp street project -99p). in this a broken down writer is pursued to his hiding place in the tuscany (that much is autobiographical) and enticed back to his death in uk by the evil fascist british regime. it’s kind of a 70ies 1984 (curiously enough it must have been written in the late 60ies). famously andy and kate attempted to read it (on horsemouth’s recommendation) and were just ground down by the sheer miserableness of it. 

there was a similar sense of end times in the anarcho-punk of the 80ies, from conflict’s the serenade is dead to zounds’ dancing - and pretty much everything by the mob has this feeling. later (of course) horsemouth read v for vendetta - later still there was a movie (but by then it was too late).

when he was an anarchist punk horsemouth pretty much took these as an accurate diagnosis of the present and prediction of the future. but later, during the years of new labour prosperity and widespread gainful employment, horsemouth thought he had been scaring himself unnecessarily, that in fact the uk’s system of government was so overwhelmingly stable that there was simply no need for the ruling class to pull on the black leather gloves of fascism. ok ok people at the margins could be treated like shit, but campaigns for justice could succeed. still, great central stability no sudden moves and no sudden surprises.

please don’t let him be wrong.

horsemouth is not of course reading either of these books right now, he’s only just got them. (nor is he listening to conflict and the mob for that matter - the only bands he retains much affection for from that era are zounds and blyth power). instead he has been reading cabeza de vaca’s the shipwrecked men - an eyewitness account of the shipwreck of a group of conquistadores near galveston in texas and the subsequent journey of the handful of survivors through the tribes of native americans to mexico and thus back to spain.

they left spain on the 27th of june 1527 and did not make it back to lisbon until the 9th of august 1537.

it is a life of horrific material poverty - starving, naked, frozen cold, beaten their captors, their feet bleeding, cannibalism, it is like something out of platonov but it is real, for the native americans are doing little better (though to be fair the native americans were thoroughly horrified by the cannibalism) . cabeza de vaca (head of a cow) and the others discover they can perform faith healings - this is what saves them. this power cabeza asserts comes from possessing nothing.

the great tsundoku (blue crystal fire)

‘my friends, we are all in a damnable state, and I scarcely know how we will get out of it’

this is the thought that occurred to the reverend grimshaw (one of the fathers of methodism) in the middle of one of his sermons. once the thought had occurred it had, in all honesty and simplicity, to be uttered.

horsemouth has finished millstone grit by glyn hughes - a walk of the pennine way and a memoir of his time living there. it escapes the great tsundoku (the great pile of books that horsemouth will buy and not get round to reading) because now horsemouth has read it. all that remains is to put down his impressions of it sufficient to stir memory when he comes across this note again (or until facebook/ blogger/ the web collapses and it is lost forever).

hughes is a disciple of richard jefferies, of english transcendentalist nature writing, but a reader of fromm and e.p.thompson also - he teaches (intermittently) in the schools and colleges, cultivates his garden (when he has one), visits friends, walks and watches the weather, the rest of the time he paints and writes poetry. there are digressions on the mills and the luddites, on methodism, and a chapter like ranciere’s the nights of labour - on the study and culture of the newly literate working classes.




the locals sing the john o’grinfelt’s ballad that we would know in its june tabor or stick in the wheel version four loom weaver - the old ones sing it secretively as a ballad their parents sang in victorian times, the youngsters sing it loudly in the folk clubs as something ‘relevant’ they learnt off bert lloyd’s record.

horsemouth has this morning off (in a bit he will have a shower out of kindness to humanity and then some breakfast). in the evening there’s a documentary (inside europe: ten years of turmoil) on greece. thursday is the anniversary of the death of j.sheridan le fanu (horror writer of this parish), next week the anniversary of the release of the first album by black sabbath, the recording of stellar regions (by john and alice coltrane) and also on the 14th let’s kill captain cook day.

as saturday afternoon shaded into evening (and the sun set in the west) horsemouth wandered down the canal into pop(u)lar to visit howard -- this time directly at the pub the gentrifier’s arms. there they sat and drank a few pints of session and chatted - horsemouth was as usual the cheerleader for the more beer party, howard for the that’s enough party.


horsemouth spoke in praise of glyn hughes' millstone grit - and promised to lend it to howard when he was done. there’s a plan to do some work on another version of robbie basho’s blue crystal fire that howard has been working up. (and more controversially to bring back a version on all my dreams). perhaps they will have it together enough for the april gig at waterintobeer (who knows).

kick out the jams (IMBOLC/CANDLEMAS)

horsemouth is still stung by his brother’s accusation that he is a technocratic managerialist for wanting to stay with the EU rather than follow the will of the people and leave. all he can say is that he thinks it will cost people and while they do, when challenged, say they are happy to pay any price, that doesn’t mean they will be so sanguine when they are actually paying it. he wonders what has happened to his brother’s attachment to progress that he thinks a reversion to the national form of technocratic managerialism is a good thing.

horsemouth is keen to stay out of it. he just sees the whole thing as a kettle for brewing up even more nationalist reaction with no way to lance the boil of it and shift people onto fighting the imposition of austerity (and the continued collapse of the worker’s share of GDP) which he views as having been the real problem all along. he doesn’t see the boil being lanced naturally because people will now be busy rowing over distractions like immigration and sovereignty, they will be busy blaming the EU for the next round of austerity. he doesn’t think the labour party are capable of lancing the boil or moving us out of this distribution, he doesn’t think the corbynistas are capable of doing it, he doesn’t think the extra-parliamentary left are capable of doing it, he doesn’t think it will just happen in the streets.

the corbynista position on brexit makes sense to him if he is understanding it correctly (stay out of the way, wait for it to crash, get the tories out on the back of it), horsemouth thinks of it as a way to resolve the divisions dialectically by actually going through them - but it is, of course, unprincipled on immigration (witness their half-hearted opposition to ending freedom of movement) and this is how labour always has been really.

but then the real issue is will it work - and horsemouth thinks not. as you may have noticed

horsemouth has started styling himself a remainder - rather than a remoaner, the process is underway (ok it’s not quite yet because it is a ridiculous gargantuan task quite beyond the ability of the existing ruling class), the division has been made (52-48) and all social forces not in this distribution are suddenly irrelevant.

it is groundhog day when the positive face of cyclical time (the seasons - that spring will come) is affirmed, in the film bill murray is trapped in his cynicism but a cyclical time is offered to him as a chance to do it again until he gets it right. eventually he gets it right and is set free to live. (sigh).



it is also the 50th anniversary of the release of kick out the jams (MOTHERFUCKERS!!!)