‘I attended the sick, painted, read, and wrote, in a solitude that was pervaded by animals and spirits’

‘ of what avail was a poor madonna with a black face against the ethical state of the neapolitan followers of hegel’

horsemouth went for zoom beers with howard yesterday (well a zoom beer). the video call now feels warm and authentic (rather than alienated and pointless). which was great

they did some planning for the eventual release of musicians of bremen volume four, just getting ready to have it mastered. the current plan is to have an ‘LP’ of 10 to 12 or so tracks and then a couple of ‘EPs’ of the rest. to master the LP tracks expensively (and the EP tracks less so). the covers - turn your heater on, painbirds, blue crystal fire will probably sit on one EP. there may be some haggling and horse-trading to be done over which tracks to have on the LP but most of the choices are obvious. howard is a bit doubtful about having physical CDs. horsemouth is still keen.



horsemouth has finished re-reading christ stopped at eboli by carlo levi (one of his favourite books). carlo has fallen foul of the italian fascist authorities but unlike gramsci he is not stuck in prison but sent into internal exile in lucania in a series of small villages. eventually (december 43) he makes it back to the north, to florence, and writes this book (he had been freed upon the fall of addis ababa).

 ‘many years have gone by, years of war and what men call history. buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know when, if ever, I can keep my promise. but closed in one room, in a world apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from history and the state, eternally patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilisation on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.'

carlo levi was in exile in a village thinly fictionalised as gagliano for about 1 year. later he writes an impassioned manifesto over several pages over the failure of the cities to understand the countryside and the peasants. (similar, in a way, to gramsci, he thinks about what prevented revolution, the specific conditions). re-reading it horsemouth found he had forgotten levi’s dog, barone, who had a nearly human personality, the many strange creatures of gagliano that have a dual nature, werewolves, the woman whose mother was said to be a cow, goats etc. the awe with which the peasants regarded the appearance of carlo's sister (for now he could be fitted into a familiar pattern of family relationships), the black madonna, the sudden outbreak of boal’s forum theatre as the locals protest when he is banned from practicing medicine.

‘at dusk three angels come down from the sky to every house. one stands at the door, another sits at the table, the third watches over the bed. they look over the house and protect it. neither wolves nor evil spirits can enter the whole night long.’

 ‘when rain stopped play’ - from now on we must be alert - be alert, your country needs lerts, was a joke horsemouth and his brother often cracked as children (it’s probably from the goon show) ...