'29 IX 11 goethe’s diaries: a person who has no diary is in a false position in the face of a diary. when, for example, he reads in goethe’s diaries “11 I 1797 busy at home all day with various arrangements” it seems to him as if he himself had never done so little in a day...'
horsemouth has lifted this quote before (from franz kafka's diaries). as you know he's a big fan of diaries, journals, autobiographies etc.
horsemouth read it the other way "busy at home all day with various arrangements” just read like some empty flummery (which arrangements? what were you up to goethe? nothing, that's what).
the diary makes it look like you have been busy when really you have just been sitting around. it causes you to look for the material to fill it - in this case with goethe's flummery. later kafka is off with max brod to italy. then he's meeting with alfred kubin. then he's mentioning learning to swim.
after kafka's death max brod will gather all this material up and, despite having been left strict instructions to burn it, save it for posterity, ensuring that progressively more and more of it is published. mining kakfa's notebooks for aphorisms.
but it is a distraction from the true nature of kafka's real work. we wish to humanise him with biographical accretions. here we can even see kafka's handwriting (like the holy relic it is).
iris murdoch hand writes her manuscripts - a worrying thing for the publisher because only one copy can exist. she cites the ability to move back and fore between the pages as the major advantage of doing it this way, that and the ability to make changes and corrections.
at the end of the interview she is tempted out onto the thin ice of discussing derrida, structuralism and deconstruction, 'linguistic determinism' as she sees it. she does a great job of marshalling the arguments but it is a piece of heavy lifting (not always assisted by the interviewer who wants to be entertaining and yet has asked her this).
more moki and don cherry material has surfaced. a friend went to a gig at the ICA connected to the exhibit (and some of the banners were present and correct).
over at the leigh folk festival there is a scandal about a band having been 'cancelled' - first invited to play and then 'disinvited' by one of the stages.
it is probably worth stressing the conditional and last minute nature of these decision with the list of bands playing only published close to the actual festival leaving little time to make a decision. it is a volunteer run festival, they can invite (or disinvite) who they like. nobody is obliged to go (unless you live in leigh). if people wish to boycott the leigh folk festival on account of this they are free to do so.
to horsemouth art has different duties to politics but nonetheless there is, or can be, a distribution between the two. some bands are 'political', some are not. to horsemouth the political claims made for music act to the detriment of the power of the music itself, and yet the power of music itself to make a change is unclear, and the nature of the change offered is unclear. to communicate effectively the message must be kept simple and clear. there is a requirement on people engaged in collaborative endeavours not to be a loose canon and involve fellow creatives in distracting rows about issues that are off-topic. there is a necessary degree of collaboration.
it can be objected that this is self-censorship of a sort and not an untrammelled expression of 'free speech' (and so it is).
look how horsemouth puts 'free speech' within quotation marks - almost like he doesn't believe it really exists.
today a scan. wednesday a meeting about a scan. thursday back to the wen. friday a meeting about collaboration.
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