horsemouth’s hands are tied - literally - apparently there was something in the job description for god-emperor of the EU that he failed to read. something about provisions in the event of a poor harvest.
re-wilding the population goes well they tell him.... europe is being broken up and brought together as a patchwork quilt of ethno-historical theme parks (sans-culottes on the streets of paris, the helvetians are the baitiest of all and don’t go up north jack...) this has affected the EU. all business now conducted in bad medieval latin. pilgrims to the shrines clog (literally) the street of strasbourg and brussels. pasolini's trilogy of life is popular as a style-guide. huzinga is widely read. there is a brisk trade in counterfeit breughels.
the viking confederation has announced a date on which fenris will eat the sun.
here it has stopped raining (a temporary respite perhaps). p(h)easants walk about (cautiously). ok - no that was an illusion. it hasn’t stopped raining.
at the moment horsemouth is on holiday and it will take him a while to adjust to living without even the minimal structure of work - if he were abroad he could go off exploring, or go lie on the beach, but it is expensive to do this from the seaside towns (plus you need the weather or the clothing, you need to be sanctioned in this by time being exceptionally valuable in some way). horsemouth likes projects - he likes to keep busy.
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80 years ago yesterday benjamin wrote a letter to gerhard scholem containing a harsh (but fair) critique of max brod’s biography of kafka (it is collected in illuminations). brod is a tasteless oik who doesn’t get it, he goes on about kafka being holy and then goes on about with unwonted familiarity about how they were the best of mates etc. on his own he might have been a minor austro-hungarian novelist but in proximity to kafka he is irradiated and destroyed. all that is left for him to do is steal the unpublished manuscripts from kafka’s funeral pyre - but this is why we have the castle, the trial, america.
otherwise all we would have of kafka would be the short fiction of metamorphosis, a country doctor, meditation, a hunger artist... the material published in his lifetime, parables almost, evacuated of anything reassuringly human. the process is continued in the short fictions of robert walser - but there there is nothing not even dread.
yesterday horsemouth read the daily torygraph business sections and went for two wombles (one on his own, one with his mum and the dog) up on the common. he listened to a talk on robinson crusoe on radio 4 (it is a very strange book) - curiously it was abram tertz’s favourite book (or so he says in a voice from the choir) while he was in prison, because crusoe makes the world, he makes all the items in it from nothing on his desert island, he overcomes the division of labour. marx takes against this as a nonsense, but tertz (sinyavsky) finds it inspiring.
some friends are playing a gig (as unmoor kiva) - horsemouth may even go.
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