two consecutive days in august 1933 (nearly done)

'I came into the world under the sign of saturn - the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays...' - walter benjamin. in agesilaus santander. 

this was a  text written by benjamin in ibiza on two consecutive days in august 1933. it is quoted by  susan sontag in her introduction to one way street and other writings in the nlb edition. instead of taking this in a dark way horsemouth was delighted to see that walter hails from the same planet as sun ra (or at least under the same set of influences). 

horsemouth doesn't have a physical copy of one-way street with him but he does have a pdf. he will make an effort to give it more of a reading.  

he begins today's blog  with location film for a warning to the curious using the soundtrack from the episode and a k-punk connection. k-punk went on a hauntological pilgrimage (of sorts) to the locations for both this and 1972's whistle and I'll come to you publishing the blog on april 15th 2007.  it's a nice piece of work.

last night he watched a documentary on michael tippett (presumably not born under saturn but under dancing  jupiter) who went from stalinism to trotskyetism to pacifism and eventually to a CBE and national treasure status.  horsemouth has a musical biography and his moving into aquarius at home. horsemouth doesn't know enough about music to know what is going on musically in his pieces but he does find descriptions of people's compositional processes useful - he has rather a lot of books by or about satie and debussy, and lesser stashes on british composers. 

‘my feeling about brexit was not anger at anybody else, it was anger at myself for not realising what was going on. I thought that all those UKIP people and those national fronty people were in a little bubble. then I thought: “fuck, it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.” there was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it.’  - brian eno (as quoted by dominic cummings in his latest email).

as usual brain emo stands revealed as the smart one. 

now this is the bit of cummings' argument horsemouth can agree with. later cummings posts a picture of the cover of  when reason goes on holiday: philosophers in politics a book by neven sesardic, using  goya's el sueno del razon (you know the one - the sleep of reason produces monsters...)

at first inspection, this book looks filthily dull, whining on about certain philosophers being 'leftists' and insufficiently rational.  it looks like you can read it yourselves online, maybe it is not as bad as horsemouth makes it out to be. it seems to be concerned with leftists statements by western analytic philosophers (and that's a fairly particular breed of philosophers, people who claim a strong logical basis for their thought). 

it is of course possible to take the opposite (or is it differing) view that philosophers are bad at politics because they are logical (plato etc. when what politics requires is negotiation) or that all of this arises because of confusion between the terms rational and logical.  horsemouth can see that if you were behind the iron curtain and wanted out that you would run towards the philosophers who seemed untainted by marxism, hegelianism etc. only to be horrified to discover them compromising with 'the leftists' when you got there (or got access to all their work). 

now this would be an interesting tale of philosophical disillusionment opening up new directions. 

today more travelling for horsemouth and then this phase is done.  

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