friday the 13th (horses of the invisible)

good morning! good morning!

horsemouth has his coffee. it's a grey morning outside. 

there are various anniversaries of horsemouth playing live coming up. 

firstly there was the anniversary of the horses of the invisible gig with peter holmgren 4 years ago (which horsemouth thinks has gone already). horses of the invisible  were named after a carnacki the ghost detective episode of the rivals of sherlock holmes. the heiress on the eve of her wedding is terrorised by a ghostly horse charging around the mansion. horsemouth guesses they played the devil song, the get carter theme music, a song by sting about a new orleans vampire (at pete's insistence) probably the devil song and probably the werewolf. 

secondly there's the upcoming anniversary of the friday the 13th gig at the oranges and lemons church for the closing party of max 'crow' reeves' mirkwood booklaunch. more about that when the anniversary comes up, but horsemouth played a complete set. if he has a complaint about it it was that the audience were a bit far away. 

this made it four gigs in a year for 2017 (an astonishing rate of work that horsemouth has never subsequently duplicated). he thanks his friends for giving him the opportunity to engage in his psychodrama. 

ten years ago horsemouth was losing his copy of ubik  and thanking the heavens for not having a tv (or a radio nor indeed broadband probably). 

yesterday horsemouth went out for a walk with TG to the new international zone (they has an expensive but very nice coffee - TG bought so horsemouth owes next time). it is still a building site. in the corner community centre there was a food bank (which was a bit incongruous). later he did a school run.   

in horsemouth's accessions diary - today's great book potlatch moment -  a university of minnesota (grey cover) hullot-kentor translation of adorno's aesthetic theory. horsemouth thought he owned an athlone red and white edition of the same translation, but when he came to look in his adorno box (adrorno, benjamin, lukacs, krauss, frankfurt school reader, western marxism reader) it wasn't there. horsemouth was thus somewhat stymied in his 'keep the new copy' (because it being new horsemouth is more likely to (re-)read it) and 'give the old copy to TG' strategy that he had devised. (in any event he forgot to give the new copy to TG - he will have to arrange an alternative).  

perhaps hullot-kentor overdoes the caveats in his translators introduction. (but then e.b.ashton, translator of negative dialectics, blithers on seemingly oblivious to the dangers). 

'the right word is always there. it just can't be used...  line by line the wrong word is always, unbearably, coming to the rescue.'

the rumours are always that the adorno translations are unreliable. ashton calls for adorno to be thought in english, hullot-kentor notes the problems with rendering adorno's german into english not in such a way that the book fits with its times  but that the ways in which it doesn't fit with its times are visible (closer to adorno's intention). but then hullot-kentor finds even adorno's own rendering of his own thought in english unsatisfactory (in his translation of adorno's philosophy of new music). 

when horsemouth read and wrote about this stuff he tended to follow adorno 'in lockstep' as one perceptive reviewer noted, a little blindly in fact. he tended to read it, contra to adorno's intentions, as a kind of positive sociology of music (and eventually art). this is a function of horsemouth's lamentable desire to get things done  and get to work. that said the world does not stay the same, it is moving through its contradictions which, curiously, even when they are fully expressed, can seem to lose their sting and become blocked. 

now that horsemouth thinks about it this book swap/ potlatch thing unites his two main interests - wandering about and books - rather nicely.