'we feel the totality to be insane'

'one thing I have at least in common with kafka and musil, none of us has an actual biography; we lived and wrote, nothing more.' - herman broch

horsemouth lifts this from herman broch's  'the romantic' (introduction by milan kundera from the art of the novel that horsemouth has read before) in a penguin classics edition (2000) somewhat battered. he found it at the sally army in walthamstow opposite the william morris museum - four for £1.

'we feel the totality to be insane'  remarks broch (he'd met lukacs). it's his writing being translated that gets him out of austria when the nazis invade. he wanted a novel that wasn't  'a novel of garrulous intellectuals' but one that demonstrates the decline of values, one where instead of religion binding everything together all actions of people are within differing discourses inadequate to the task they face. 

'a pervasive culture of confession, combined with the revolution in internet-based communication, has crowded bookstores with autobiographies and biographies and generated an unprecedented amount of personal exposure... . our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined.'

horsemouth suspects this is from the publisher's blurb (rather than the text) of  the ethics of life writing CUP (2004), edited by paul john eakin. it used to be true that broch, kafka, musil came out of nowhere and there was no way of finding out who they were, but soon a pervasive biography grew around them. kafka at least tried to prevent this, this was surely kafka's intention when he instructed max brod to burn everything that had not yet been published. 

and yet here we have it. horsemouth supplanting woodshedding music with writing a blog. 

horsemouth is listening to wall matthews of entourage being interviewed by NTS radio.  it's a classic moses asch of folkways story he pays them $100 to record the first album (and $300 for the second) but nonetheless they are out there and on folkways (a label with panache as wall puts it, if they recorded you you were part of history).  matthews comes from being a jobbing musician. entourage are kind of like a homemade oregon (it is kind of DIY prog-jazz). they were poor so they lived communally a lot and practiced a lot. there's a dance element as well. the albums got nice reviews in national magazines the music has escaped its time because of the smithsonian folkways/ tompkins square releases and more music has come out since. 

yesterday (as the songs have it) horsemouth watered the allotment, picked some plums and cooked some courgette, and felt virtuous. earlier he went on book hunting mission. he failed to hit the book box on the way back because a japanese girl with a dog got there ahead of him. he's debating if he needs to hit the oxfam or if he has enough extra books (and reading to do) from this mission already. last night he even gave up on the internet and went and sat upstairs and read (the introduction to the broch).