books, gigs films, events september 2023

books

 - aubrey beardsley (stephen calloway biography and arthur symons appreciation)

- intimate journals (baudelaire). essay/ translation by w.h.auden 

- - j.m. coetzee, waiting for the barbarians

- old calabria (normal douglas). century traveller series.

- john turner obituary (guardian)

- jeanette winterson's ghosts (DT)

- the WIRE special on don (and moki) cherry

- LRB blog on vegetarianism

films 

- 'raw documents': uk hip hop documentary

- the lady from shanghai (orson welles)

- ed michel interview (10 minute record review guy)

- downfall. laura K. in three parts

- the garden of stones (clip)

- LRB on 'woke capital'

- thrift a life/ book pilled, outlaw bookseller, hawkbinge on 80ies hawkwind, novara media, spain speaks 

- 'a roof of my own'  (john turner 1964, UN films)

- three heads of cerebrus doc. on global warming (radio 4)

- DJ krush at daichuji

- john grey interviewed on net zero

- oil city confidential (dr. feelgood etc.)

- - a visual celebration of pharoah sanders

- parco lambro festival (near milan)

- life of philip k. dick 

- how power really works (novara media interview)

-  david runciman making sense of joan didion

- naima karlsson interviewed on NTS (and an americana raga show)

- hal foster looks back at 'the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture' interview on artforum

gigs none

events 

exhibition 'at home in hackney: a community photographed 1970s-today', john visits (go up to look at the frank brangwyn exhibit at the william morris),  death of the bid.  visit back to hackney, walks enza, TG, andrew minty, hanging around up the park (lise, paul, shona, lisa, siobhan, lethal, everybody), harvest time (pharoah sanders) re-released

somewhat apocalyptic (longterm decisions for a brighter future)

Tuli Tuli Tuli - 1001 ways to be joyfully revolted (short teaser) from David Liver on Vimeo.

horsemouth missed the centennial but hail tuli kupferberg! 

last night horsemouth was mostly thinking about art critic hal foster (following an interview on artforum). 

'we were young, somewhat apocalyptic... we drank that kool-aid.' 

foster is repeating an argument he has made before, now that he comes to look back on his book the anti-aesthetic his book  from the early days of post-modernism he desires to see continuities not breaks, the end of... is no longer the crucial thing. where once he embraced an anti-humanism (not putting 'man' at the centre of things) now he wants to examine what was at stake in the various humanisms. 

horsemouth continues to enjoy norman douglas's old calabria - there is a map so you can trace his journeyings round the south of italy. he examines the succession of hermits by monks - the replacement of caves by monasteries. 

the harvest moon was lost behind clouds. the spirit animals horsemouth has seen are wrens, crows, rabbits and grey squirrels. a blue tit magically appeared inside the house and knocked itself out trying to fly out of a closed window.  horsemouth opened the window and gave it time to recover itself. 

spirit plants - the humble potato, the carrot, and the sunflower - the last one that horsemouth brought back from the village hall plant sale seems to be blooming.

the tory party go to their conference with the slogan on the lectern 

longterm decisions for a brighter future

but this is not where they are now. they have retreated into a short-termist anti-ecological position hoping that there is mileage in the car-driving, anti-recycling vote. it was one thing to push alok sharma out on stage at glasgow COP 26 with a net zero 2050 commitment from the UK government in his hand it is another thing to actually have to deliver it. 

even boris johnson (the belated statesman) can see the sense in not fucking this one up (or so he says). 

last night a beer with his mum and an episode of some scandi-noir kind of thing. 

today zoom beers with howard (maybe). yesterday horsemouth walked into ewyas harold to post off the WIRE magazine with the moki and don cherry articles in it to him - only about a mile there and back but uphill and downdale. 

'na - immer schleppen' (harvest moon)

morning! morning! horsemouth bounds out to greet you like a dog. (we know we said he was a mule).

horsemouth is up and the sun has not yet made it over the hill opposite. 

the visit to TESCOs yesterday went well. the plan is to stock up more and thus reduce the number of visits. similarly the plan is to buy more in TESCOs where it is cheap and (regretably) buy less at the local shops where it is more expensive. horsemouth would (of course) drag his mum over to ALDIs in search of even better bargains but it is the other side of town wheras TESCOs is this side of town  out near the ring road (or would be if hereford had a ring road).  

horsemouth did some researches on the heating oil situation. he believes he has found a company who supplied his parents before (so - he assumes - they will have a lot of useful information). he needs to know what sized tanker they can get up the drive, how big the family tank is (2000L horsemouth estimates and his mum seems to remember) he has got an initial quote and will follow it up with a phonecall today. 

at the moment horsemouth's plan is just to stealth it through the winter.  he plans to get enough to survive the winter and then refuel again in summer when it is cheaper (if it is cheaper).

ok the sun is cresting the hill opposite we are going into full golden glow. horsemouth will  nip downstairs for a second round of coffee (he has it).

horsemouth has gone all german on you because a) triple negative have a test copy of matthew's book (and anya is german) and b) he started reading peter paul fuchs book on the music theatre of walter felsenstein (which is east berlin set). 'na - immer schleppen' is sort of 'heavy load there!'.  it is harvest moon tonight - horsemouth is tempted to play you the blue oyster cult song about it (he probably will tomorrow now).

elsewhere horsemouth read a guardian interview where over 50ies report favourably on retiring early/ going part time. 

horsemouth versus first past the post

“A ROOF OF MY OWN” (1964) - Uncensored Version copy from Nick Wates on Vimeo.

you find horsemouth with few thoughts in his head. 

ah good he has found his thoughts on first past the post (the candidate with the most votes wins) these will do. 

now first past the post has lots of problems - the main one is that as there are more than 2 parties in the election you can get 'third party effects' that mean (for example) more people in a constituency can have voted 'not tory' rather than tory and the tory party will still get in - the 'not tory' votes are not counted elsewhere so the relationship between votes cast for a party (nationally) and how many seats they receive in the parliament is not proportional. 

the gallagher index is a good measure of how unrepresentative this is. with the UK 16th in the world in terms of how unrepresentative in terms of the votes of the people its elections are (between panama and liberia)

arguably the factor that does even more to distort elections in the UK is low voter registration with it is now thought 8 million people not registered to vote or incorrectly registered, out of an electorate already depleted by the removal of the right to vote in UK elections of 5 million EU citizens with settled status.

instead of addressing these the government has chosen to address the uneven size of of constituencies and voter fraud both of which have a negligible effect upon representation. though arguably addressing them effectively constitutes gerrymandering and voter suppression in all but name.

horsemouth is a grumpy old mule. he complains long and often about politics and when the opportunity is afforded him he votes. 

if some form of proportional representation were used horsemouth would vote green or some variety of ultra-left party that would at least make the argument for the destruction of capitalism. (once upon a time, when he had just moved to london he voted SWP, at  a time when the SWP ran candidates, not that he had any great faith in them you understand).  

under first past the post system horsemouth would tend to vote labour (as the party the farthest to the left (!!!?) with a decent chance of getting in) or perhaps tactical vote elsewhere for whomsoever will keep the tories out. 

here we can see that first pat the post objectively skews and supresses political opinions not at the alleged 'centre' of the debate. votes for leftwing (and rightwing) parties are effectively suppressed and reframed as useless and wasted protest votes.

of course many of the political levers of power are not accessible from the house of commons but nonetheless parliamentary majorities can be used to leverage improved conditions for the working class or at least the defence of their interests. it can provide a perception of increased working class autonomy and confidence that feeds back to produce increased working class autonomy and self-confidence. 

securing political representation for the working class is however not a substitute for generating actual class power for the working class but it can be a useful adjunct (see the peruvian bariadas as mentioned above). 

today a visit to TESCOs (the monthly shop). 

'a carpet of flowers... concealed the abyss beneath'

anniversaries 

RIP joe bussard

RIP langdon jones.

 

the three heads of cerebrus - spain, italy, greece. a heatwave. the beauty. the fear that their spring will dry up and the land will dry up. the lavender dies (the bees don't come). the wine grapes they have to harvest early (a success story - the vintage is saved). the sheep and the dogs suffer in the heat. one of the farmers quotes the  comte de ségur. 

'without regret for the past,

without anxiety for the future,

we walked gaily across a carpet of flowers

which concealed the abyss beneath'

- louis philippe, comte de ségur.

'a single eucalyptus will ruin the fairest landscape'  opines norman douglas in his old calabria. (don't google him).  horsemouth knows many who agree. the eucalyptus burns at a high temperature, it is an oily wood and spits out burning gouts of oil. it is a major wildfire hazard. horsemouth heard a story that it was general franco who imported it en masse to spain. 

yesterday horsemouth finished moving the wood into the shed (he started the day before) and finished moving things out of the woodshed to permit the wood to fit in. there is something very satisfying in stacking wood (it is kind of like dry stone walling).  of course this wood is destined to be burnt in his parents' wood-burning stove (thus contributing lots of particulates to the air in the living room and lots of carbon into the atmosphere). 

the fact that wood is a renewable source of energy no longer counts for anything. we are now on a mission to get carbon emissions down.

the house's other source of heating is an oil-burning aga (even more unfashionable). 

last night's diner - potatoes and beetroot out of the garden, sweetcorn and quiche. 

there is a moon in the sky behind the trees (on the night before the day you will read this). soon harvest moon.  today rain (according to bbc weather). 

on the omnishambles permacrisis ('I think we lost our minds')

horsemouth watched this (most enjoyable). 

then he watched laura K as she watched the tory party crash and burn (themselves and the economy). 

now horsemouth is not primarily concerned with the state of the economy. he is only really interested in the share of it that goes to the workers and the working class in general. also he is not fussed about how it gets there - through actual wages or through government ameliorative programmes. he thinks as actual wages is better because it indicates that the working class are in a strong enough position to demand better wages (but on the other hand through ameliorative government funded programmes indicates that they are strong enough politically that they must be bought off en masse). 

the omnishambles permacrisis of the last 15 years (since the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent austerity) has enabled the rich to massively loot value from the working class and drastically lower wages in real terms. at the same time. this is a continuation of a rolling-back of post war gains that began under thatcher (if not under wilson). 

under the influence of free market ideology, the political elites have contracted their own tax base to the point where they cannot afford the ameliorative measures necessary to keep a lid on society and are funding it through loans. the argument is made by the capitalists that these loans are unsustainable and that tax take must be increased  and austerity applied (again). the argument is also made by sectors of capitalism that the political class is too captured by free-market ideology to successfully defend its own interests.

ground floor coming up. 

the political instability of the last 15 years is a dark reflection  of the economic harm done. brexit is a folk remedy for a global crisis in capitalism - as such it can only provide more opportunities for capitalist looting. 

horsemouth sees few (if any) economic benefits from doing it and only economic harms - he doesn't even see any political gains from the working class from doing it because it divides the working class between british citizens (with full political rights), EU citizens with settled status (without full political rights), and people trapped in the immigration system (without full political and economic rights) rather than uniting them in their economic interest as workers. 

(god he is a tediously predictable pseudo-marxist). 

the strategy proposed by the political class is a retour a normal to boring political competence and that the past 7 years or 15 years or whatever have just been a fever dream. this is a fantasy - normal, safe and boring has gone, and even if it weren't gone it will not resolve the deeper contradictions at work in society. 

it is little remarked upon that in removing liz truss the financial markets overstepped their alleged bounds and pronounced on a matter of politics (this is because nobody liked liz truss excepting the braindead tory membership). 

but beyond austerity, brexit and covid is the climate crisis - promising disruption on a world historic scale. 

horsemouth has already argued that net zero is poor target, a wrong way to frame it. net zero is just the start (we are not actively making global warming worse). the current bien pensant opinion is that, with the correct application of technology we can simply move to a net zero world with minimal disruption and no lowering of living standards and wages - this is as much of fantasy as the tin foil hat brigades vision of utter eco-stalinist oppression. 

actually the tin foil hat brigades vision of utter eco-stalinist oppression might be an accurate appreciation of what it will take to get there. 

the most likely thing to happen is for net zero to fail. for the ruling classes will to deliver it to mysteriously dry up as the difficulties and costs with delivering it become more obvious. of course there are costs and difficulties with not delivering it (run away global warming, climate refugees in their billions etc.) but they can be blamed on someone else. 

-----------------------------

outside it is a bit grey. horsemouth will finish putting the wood in the shed (his major task for yesterday).  he mostly read the daily torygraph's money section and some landlords kvetching about having to do up their properties to EPC C level (and then not having to do their properties up to EPC C level as the government u-turned). 

soon breakfast. 

 

out at sea the sun glints on the disused windfarms (water purification ritual #1)

horsemouth has posted a picture of himself amid the ruins of net zero - giant dangerous beasts stalk the land and out at sea the sun glints on the disused windfarms and sunken freighters. horsemouth worries about the scale of the transition, that's cost on a pharoah-beating world historic scale, and he worries about the lack of political will to see it through. 

deep down horsemouth is a technocratic managerialist.

are the novara media lot really just technocratic managerialists? or have they just taken the net zero pill? has the government actually taken the net zero pill (or are they just holding it under their tongue).

here in the countryside the great thermonuclear furnace is ascending into the skies, lighting all, irradiating all, powering all. we pass into autumn soon, and  soon the equilux (though horsemouth is not sure quite when). 

horsemouth has a spy and his spy has been out and about. (cue spy theme music)

what did the spy tell him? well nothing that he didn't know already.  it's a long way away and the  people's  negativity is a correct reading of the situation they are in (and at some point they will realise this). horsemouth wrote some emails full of the pessimism he feels but then he wrote a positive appreciative email focusing on what could be done. 

some sample dialogues; 

- where were you before you moved here? I asked. 

- in the communal endeavour. she answered. 

- oh. I said. (it's like bloody alan bennett out there!)

horsemouth is in a gap in the kafka diaries. 

he has been reading the WIRE special on don (and moki) cherry. don sound-tracked a number of low-budget films (the song above is used in a sequence from barbara mccullough's 1979 water purification ritual #1, horsemouth will try to find more of them.  this version of the album shows don in front of the watts towers (perhaps the most famous bit of outsider art ever). 

horsemouth did pick up the guitar yesterday and he also went to sleep looking forward to typing this today.  he made no progress with his reading. he watched the second part of laura K's trilogy on the tory years. 

in the day he spent a little time digging (though quite why he is not sure) and tidied out the greenhouse a bit (there may still be more tomatoes to come).  at some point in the afternoon he will ask his mum about the apple and pear trees and when a good time to pick these fruit is. 

doomed and we know it

horsemouth is out in the countryside. it is rainy and grey (now read on). 

john gray is kvetching on about net zero.

'we will look back at the net zero era and almost laugh'

now net zero itself doesn't matter. it simply means the point when humanity as a whole are no longer adding more CO2 (or more of other greenhouse gases) to the atmosphere and thus humanity is no longer contributing to the warming of the planet. this does not remove existing warming. and further, this does not mean that the planet will cease warming because the already existing warming will cause other effects likely to lead to warming - the unfreezing of the permafrost in siberia leading to vast releases of methane (a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2) etc.

global warming is not linear. it is an avalanche. a cascade of tipping points. 

humanity (capitalism) is capable of starting global warming and climate change off (yes) but may not be capable of stopping it moving once it is started. 

what matters is how you get to net zero. or rather how soon you get to net zero.

the important thing is to make drastic cuts in the release of greenhouse gases now. a strategy of getting to net zero at five minutes to midnight will, even if it succeeds, simply dump many more millions of tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere leading to far greater global warming. a straight line decline is simply not enough and we are far from even that.

otherwise we face the on the beach moment of being doomed and we know it.  

would it not be easier to accept that we are doomed and work with that? 

meanwhile horsemouth observes this from the trenches. the tories have handed out more north sea drilling licences and let private landlords off the requirement to insulate their homes (up to EPC C standard) in order to have a more honest public debate (allegedly) about what reaching net zero will require. 

further the bid for government money to decarbonise social housing has fallen over (even horsemouth (the eternal optimist) has pronounced it dead). the communal endeavour (and the other co-ops involved in their particular small consortium) will have to find all the money to do their decarbonisation (rather than half of it).  decarbonisation that (lest we forget) they are obligated by law to do. money was tight before and at the current high interest rates it will continue to be tight for a long time (or rather long enough to strangle these attempts to decarbonise).

horsemouth has not fully unpicked the john gray interview but he will endeavour to do so soon.

there was a similar one on the prevalence of numbers in current political debate - immigration has been the major hot topic in british politics for decades but this was despite the fact that there were no accurate statistics about it.  similarly with GDP. of course, it being the LRB, there is some self-congratulatory back-slapping about how smart they are (not so smart you couldn't lose the brexit vote eh fuckers?). 

gray (see above) sees hope for electoral reform allowing a wider range of opinions into parliament and potentially, through coalition, into government. but, of course, this does not mean that the crisis of representation that representative democracy is going through can be resolved by these means, it may be that it just intensifies. 

today. looking out the window at his mum feeding the chickens. probably not a lot can be done. the tasks outside mostly need a dry day. 

ok there's a chance of it being dry this afternoon and dry tomorrow.  soon the first 'ember' (september) will be done. soon enough we move to daylight saving time and after that halloween. 

it moves towards autumn: and horsemouth must away

horsemouth has survived his visit to the seaside towns but now he must away. he must be back to herefordshire for the autumn campaign. 

and indeed it is the equinox. day and night are of equal duration but seeing as it begins with the sun half way over the horizon and ends with the sun halfway over the horizon we will have to wait until the equilux for perfectly even days and nights. 

horsemouth will conscious for the equinox on saturday 23rd september, at precisely 7.50am BST. it is the somewhat undertheorised mabon. 

in theory some friends are coming round to drop some stuff off. and then horsemouth is away. (but first he must pack). 

yesterday morning horsemouth wandered round the east end with andrew minty (there are photographs). they started over near stepney green, then cut across towards brick lane for a coffee and then for a bagel at rinkoff's, they went round allen gardens, up to hackney road (to crypt of the wizard) and then back down again to near the museum of childhood. 

up on columbia road they bumped into JJ (long time no see dude). horsemouth then wandered back up mare street to home (and after that he was bushed). there are photos (here is one).

and in the time it took horsemouth to type that the equinox 'happened'. 

elsewhere  al karpenter make it into the wire office ambience (the forthcoming a track that features some of horsemouth's friends percussioning away). horsemouth was continuing his don and moki cherry researches when he found this out (minty gave him a recent copy of the wire featuring an extended piece on don cherry and his music). 

in the lifecycle of an artist horsemouth is out of the early promise of 'gifted kid', passed the 'a burned out disappointment' phase and into the lush uplands of 'an old weirdo with a home studio' (except of course that he doesn't have a home studio). 

it got me (the bid is dead/ long live the bid)

it got him. 

just as he was walking past the front of homerton hospital he heard the crack of thunder. by the time he was halfway down chatsworth road it was  chucking it down and he got drenched. when he got in he had to change out of all his clothes and put them out to dry. in the evening he felt feverish and out of sorts. 

he was just coming back from having seen john off from the exhibition at home in hackney: a community photographed 1970s-today. this consists of a large number of photographs of people in hackney by photographers from hackney and tom hunter's model installation of a tower block (cedar court) from the holly street estate. interestingly enough john and tom turned out to know each other and have lived or worked in the tower block at some point. through the windows photos of the residents could be seen. 

it's on until 24th of february.  horsemouth recommends it highly. there's an upcoming artists talk 26th october.

the bid is dead (long live the bid)

tragedy peoples! the bid is dead. given the withdrawl of the lead bidder the forces of good were simply not able to resuscitate it in time to the condition that would satisfy the awarding body and leave themselves with enough time to actually do the thing the consortium was created to do.    

beyond a certain point there just wasn't time to get all that needed to be done done (if you see what horsemouth means). 

at a stroke the communal endeavour move from a situation of getting half the works (and our sunk costs) paid by the government to having to pay for it all ourselves. there may be other sources of funding and other helpful things that can be done so the group so it will continue in existence meeting once a month.

further it may be that future waves of social housing decarbonisation fund money might be released and (having once run a successful bid) the consortium could relaunch and put in another bid. having formed a department of energy security and net zero it is difficult to tell what the government actually wants. perhaps  they would actually prefer that the people suffered energy insecurity (not to mention fuel poverty) and the road to net zero was as long and winding as possible (with as much CO2 being put in the atmosphere as is congruent with our treaty obligations). anyway we must have more democracy and debate in the media  (these are sure fire guarantors of good outcomes ). 

ok today a morning walk with andrew minty then (probably) a siesta, a chat with horsemouth's brother (online) and then some packing for horsemouth's relocation to the countryside.  

down by the jetty (doing the hokey cokey)

huzzah! horsemouth is up again and now he has just finished his coffee (drat it). 

the government are doing the hokey cokey with their net zero commitments yet again. now this is a bit foolish in horsemouth's opinion because for the tin foil hat brigade only burning more coal and oil (and banning electric cars) will do. 

actually (as john points out) this is pretty much what they are planning to do.

fortunately the government seems to have left its insulating social housing/ improving energy efficiency programme intact (er. except for private landlords who will not have to do this). horsemouth says fortunately because he is due to attend a meeting on it this afternoon and would hate for it to fall into even more doubt. 

horsemouth has just discovered he has a copy of down by the jetty by dr. feelgood (he should give it a listen). he was just watching oil city confidential (with john fromporto) last night which was very enjoyable. horsemouth has never been to canvey island. he has only seen it from the train on the way to leigh. 

horsemouth had not quite understood the timing of dr. feelgood. there's all this beautiful footage of canvey island, the oil refineries and storage tanks, and of the band themselves, all in glorious 70ies film colour (that helps make it). 

meanwhile there's another scandal  - the figure has been on a journey since his days as a media figure, he has been round the left, he has been round the tin foil hat brigade, picking up support. this support may not be enough to save him. interestingly facebook have cut off his facebook revenues (they can do this? of course they can). the figure's relationship with the public (his audience) is still mediated. 

 

horsemouth's dilemma in a nutshell

good morning! good morning!

horsemouth is up (slightly sore throat, slightly itchy eyes, slightly blocked nose). 

yesterday a wander up to the sally army in walthamstow (and a quick peek into the william morris museum to see the frank brangwyn collection. the 'guest' exhibit being shut.) this is quite a way for the old mule on foot (so sensibly himself and john paused at the old pumping house for a coffee).  even with returning by bus having done the walk in the morning he did not get up to a lot subsequently. 

following his lankum fest round at enza's himself and john were investigating the side projects done by the members of lankum. there's a podcast/ radio show for example. 

up at the sally army he let john purchase him a copy of old calabria by norman douglas (in a four for a squid deal). from whence the following;

'one cannot have everything (inasmuch as one thing sometimes excludes another)' (re-punctuated in a horsemouth style)

(from his wikipedia entry norman was a terrible human being so it is difficult to warm to his engaging travel guide act).

this of course is horsemouth's dilemma in a nutshell - he must perforce chose. at the moment he is trying to envisage ways in which he doesn't have to chose and ways round the choice to leave all options still on the table (his preferred state). . 

today john is off into the centre. horsemouth will go out for a wander then he has plans to make. tomorrow a zoom call on communal endeavour stuff. at the weekend travel (probably).  thereafter the equinox, autumn (so-called) and the run out to the winter solstice and winter proper. 

did you like the music? (an ornithological theme)

john (fromporto) is visiting - he arrived fourish and they talked (up in the living room).  as john notes the hazel tree outside the front window is doing well. 

then horsemouth went off to enza's for six thirty.

they went for a walk round the park and then enza fed him (a lentil pesto and pasta sort of thing) and they listened to music. 

there was an ornithological theme at one point.

enza had started it with british sea power's the great skua, horsemouth had continued it with lankum's  hunting the wren (lots of lankum) and  with mike and lal waterson's fine horseman ('fine fine sparrow'). 

there was (to end out) a diversion into aphrodite's child's the four horsemen and lena platonos's the witches. there was a discussion of how incomprehensible greek was. it was a work night so horsemouth headed off early.

john was out meeting up with myk and steve. 

because horsemouth was out enjoying himself he can't tell you anything about laura K's documentary on how the government of boris johnson coped with covid. 

a boxed set is coming out of pharoah sanders' harvest time featuring two previously unreleased live versions of that song (and a lyric video for love will find a way - thank you luaka bop). as aquarium drunkard say in their review 'it’s rare to hear the universe at work, and rarer still to get it on tape'. it does at least clear up two questions horsemouth had - who is bedria sanders? (pharoah's wife), who is edith johnson? (pharoah's aunt).

today some dodging of the rain and some walking around (probably). it's a grey morning and not warm. 

a literary causerie. by way of epilogue

 

and didn't it rain children! (well not so much, probably more rain today but at the moment golden hour sunshine)

horsemouth has been progressing with stephen calloway's aubrey beardsley (who autographed horsemouth's copy october 6th 1998, with the year in the style 19.98). 

at first horsemouth went hunting for ernest dowson (having just finished a biography of him) but beardsley disliked dowson so while there are 13 or so references to him there is nothing in depth because they had few real interactions. failing this horsemouth went back to the start of the book and investigated beardsley's early career (welcomed by burne-jones, spurned by william morris, browsing the now vanished second-hand book barrows of holywell street). 

he spent a little time reading, a contemporary of theirs, arthur symons, in the collected drawings of aubrey beardsley, 

a literary causerie. by way of epilogue was the title of symons' afterward in the final issue of the savoy (banned from w.h.smiths for the 'indecency' of a blake illustration).

later today john from porto comes to visit. possibly a meet up with enza in the evening. tuesday a delivery. thursday a zoom meeting. saturday (equinox/ birth of john coltrane) the journey back to herefordshire.  sunday (the death of pharoah sanders).

'a moment of time captured on paper'

horsemouth is writing these lines on the evening of the saturday (because he can).

howard has been. they sank a bottle of beer each and listened to music - mostly the tunes you will find here on horsemouth's blogspot. howard read a little of one of horsemouth's blogs. horsemouth sent him off with a number of paul bowles' books after the topic turned to moroccan music. 

tomorrow (as it appears now), today (when you read this), is when it will all change. 

thunderstorms and rain from early afternoon and pretty much persisting all week (jesus) and that's just down here in the seaside towns, up in herefordshire it starts earlier and there are yellow warnings for flooding on the sunday (the today/ tomorrow mentioned above). 

horsemouth will try and get his walk in early today/ tomorrow. he's due to be meeting enza monday - looks like the weather may not hold for a park walk. john is arriving monday as well. 

outlaw bookseller has been out and about and has been watching the 1970ies survivors (he's to over-awed by the scenery to say much about it though, maybe another time).

dammit. things have just got complicated with the return to herefordshire. damn drat and blast it. it looks like horsemouth will have to head back earlier than he planned. 

it's sunday morning. horsemouth is up he has his coffee. it's a grey overcast morning.

horsemouth has finished reading jad adams madder music, stronger wine. in its concluding pages he juxtaposes the decadents against the horrors about to be released by the first world war. he frames them as if they were the last poets,  as if they were aware of what was to come. above the uk hip-hoppers of the 2000s write and recite. 

'a moment of time captured on paper' says one (like joan didion). a photo from an earlier visit is getting lots  of likes. 

today some wandering round and tidying up. 

pewter suitor

horsemouth is back with you. it is morning. he's only slightly hung over. 

yesterday a wander around on the marshes. later a visit to a friend to see about arranging storage. later a quick walk over to london fields. on the way up he met welsh john and adam having a chat. 

at london fields he met shona, lise and paul (a friend of theirs showed up - sorry horsemouth didn't catch their name) and they sat around in the sunset and warmth drinking beer (shona has a great 'live from the beer commercial' photo showing the assembled crowd of them from the previous week). they then discussed the relative merits of afghan hounds. later they relocated to lise's front step for a last two and to listen to some music. horsemouth borrowed lise's acoustic guitar and serenaded the passing masses. 

eventually (being sensible this time) horsemouth headed off home using a considerably improved route on the somewhat erratic one he'd used on the previous occasion.  when he got home he ate some of the rice ian had left. 

and so to bed. 

it is the morning. nothing in the diary. horsemouth has despatched an email attempting to get his thoughts on the likely smallness of the surplus at the communal endeavour this year in order. 

'poverty can hide in london better than anywhere else'

one of the first things horsemouth does when he gets up in the morning is to check the clock in the kitchen. this is because he does not want to be getting up too early (much before 7am) or too late (much after). he is a great fan of the daylight and tries to see as much of it as possible. 

horsemouth has opened his curtains - this is probably the first thing he does when he gets up in the morning. the binmen have been (and by the looks of it they have emptied the bin and taken the recycling). hail the binmen (truly the people who make our wasteful lives possible). 

'poverty can hide in london better than anywhere else' - ernest dowson

horsemouth has been reading jad adams' biography of dowson (poet, decadent and translator) and the short-lived london decadent scene. oscar wilde is around (and then he is not). aubrey beardsley refuses to design the cover for dowson's translation of la fille aux yeux d'or (because conder had done the illustrations) but beardsley does illustrate dowson's pierrot of the minute. 

dowson goes and hides in the french countryside to try to live more cheaply and get more done (at pont aven in brittany - horsemouth has a biscuit tin from there - it is wheat country). 

john (from porto) was due to phone (he did not - maybe later). in a bit horsemouth will wander out for his morning constitutional. 

yesterday's excitement was that horsemouth had an item removed and destroyed by facebook cybersecurity. they haven't told him what item yet (so he doesn't know what he did 'wrong'). maybe he has impugned the good name of some tory politician if such a thing is possible. 

for pharoah sanders

horsemouth watched a video in homage to pharoah sanders on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2020. it was narrated by jazz singer charlotte dos santos. 

it featured a poem by south african poet keorapetse kgositsile  pro/creation (for pharoah sanders) which appeared in the liner notes for sanders’ 1971 record thembi. kgositsile spent time in exile  from the apartheid regime in the USA. 

pharoah sanders was born 13/10/1940 dies  24/09/2022. horsemouth will try and observe the memorial calendar this year. 

in the late 80ies/ early 90ies horsemouth owned a number of albums by the african poetry collective african dawn there is a podcast about them hosted by kwesi owusu and narrated by eugene skeef - friend of steve biko. 

he also watched a video on the life of philip k. dick and one on the festival in parco lambro near milan, 

he's got a phonecall from john this evening (so remind him to plug the phone in to recharge). john may be over visiting next week. outside it looks like a beautiful day. horsemouth has just consulted his diary (no guidance there). 

last night he went to a meeting of the communal endeavour. after quite a few people went up the pub (adam, lianne, pete, andy). horsemouth drank about 2 1/2 pints and then got a falafel wrap on the way back (so it was an expensive business). 

 

two pages (the multiplications of poverty)

'again barely two pages' - kafka on this day in 1914.

horsemouth typing this in the evening of the previous day

horsemouth found a bag of out of date tins of plum tomatoes. he has tried cooking with the first one of these (seemingly with no ill effects). olives, plum tomatoes, onions, peppers, chillies, pasta, red kidney beans. ok so if he's still alive tomorrow he'll be posting this. (he's poisoned himself before with out of date avocado it gave him gut pain and the squits). now tomatoes can be a bit acidic and affect the tin, so horsemouth examined the tin for breaks and bumps, gave it a good sniff, a little taste and then fried it to within an inch of its life. (hopefully that will work). 

he had a beer while he was waiting for it to cook. he'd been creating space in the spare room. he's hoiked loads of  his old furniture out into the far corner of the back garden (not that the garden seems big). he's done some sorting out. he's going to move the keyboards etc. into the spare room. he did some wiping down of the kitchen cabinets as well.

horsemouth takes the view that the house would be liveable if people just took the time to be tidy and considerate (but he knows that is not going to happen). 

horsemouth typing this in the morning of the actual day

hail the artwash. hail the housing crisis.

horsemouth's friends moved out of london 13 years ago. driven out by rising rental prices (and by not earning enough to buy) to an admittedly beautiful town in the south east of england. and here they are under threat of being squeezed out again (13 years later) by rising rental prices and by not earning enough to buy.

and when they get up in the morning what should their feeds be full of but the council opening a new arts and education centre in converted old council offices. how beautiful! how very improving! there are reassuring noises about footfall and estimates of  income captured for the town etc. but surely the council should be devoting its energies (and indeed people's money) to fighting the town's housing crisis?

and it is horsemouth's friends who are saying this, people who are art lovers not filthy philistines like horsemouth. 

meanwhile in hackney (well, just) up at manor house on the site of the former woodberry down estate the demolition of council housing continues and its replacement by luxury tower blocks with stunning views. these look stunning and the architects pat each other on their backs. there will be some drivel about a certain proportion being affordable (at 80% of market rent or purchase price) as if that changed anything. 

in general the local councils are quite keen to get rid of the poor and replace them with solvent consumers. 

as the hackney squatters used to chant where do we go?

this evening he goes to a meeting of the communal endeavour. 

there have been a number of harsh large bills and they will knock down the surplus on the year considerably. in a normal year the regulator would be looking for (a surplus of about 5% on normal operating activities). 

now most years the communal endeavour does much better than this (but probably not this year). 

but, to be frank, this is the members' money, and further this is each individual member's money, the money they need to get food, to heat their houses etc. horsemouth is fascinated by the multiplication of poverties that now goes on - food poverty, energy poverty, housing poverty etc. but not actual poverty you understand. by these measures many of the members are in particular poverties and many more than one. 

horsemouth understands what is being done here - by making the poverty a specific problem relating to a specific issue it is seen as being sortable as opposed to generalised poverty which is seen as unfixable. heaven forfend that we might start to think about the poor and what society would need to look like for them not to be poor. 

in which we go the way of the horse (towards obsolescence)

 'anyone, provided that he can be amusing, has the right to talk to himself.'  - baudelaire

yesterday horsemouth went out for a walk with TG. they got a coffee and some cake over at the olympic village. later horsemouth took advantage of the clearing out of the living-room of dead cardboard packaging to get up close and personal with the TV (the remote has died). 

this enabled him to watch laura K's state of chaos (or rather chaos of the state 9pm BBC2). himself and sten watched cameron and teresa may get scythed down by 'the awkward squad' within their own party and were encouraged to view this as some kind of tragedy or loss. (we lost pigf***er, captain austerity (george osborne) and little miss hostile environment - you will pardon horsemouth if he does not cry).

we are with laura's breathless over-identification with the ruling class. 

in terms of global politics the country has chosen to knacker itself and retreat off the world stage into a dream of little england (scones and pasties all round). and so we go the way of the horse (towards obsolescence). in some ways this is not so bad - there is little the UK can do in the world except act as a tail-gunner for the US in pointless wars, it might have been able to participate more in the EU's not doing very much (but then they weren't doing very much beyond ensuring peace and stability in europe). 

domestically it is bad news with serious knock on effects upon the economy. and thus the amount of money in the workers' pockets. the key question is whether the british working class can organise to defend itself  - if it can't then things for them will be very rough indeed (and just tickety-boo for the rich). 

next up, in the horror show that was the 2010s, more brexit to be followed by covid (2020 onwards). 

and for our next featured presentation  the climate crisis. 

'we are fucked already - it's the wile e. coyote moment - we have run off the cliff but we haven't noticed yet because we are still running.'

opines horsemouth. but a friend was saying this already. 

from horsemouth's position (in the trenches on this) it doesn't look very good. there is a vast amount of infrastructure (the big expensive stuff) that has to be built and also paid for. there is a vast infrastructure (the gas grid for example) that has to be decommissioned and dismantled. none of this is planned for (c.f. brexit - was there a plan? no). 

money has to be found to do the necessary works but the most likely variety of decarbonisation is less use driven by increasing prices (let us hope and pray that winters will be milder). 

over on novara media a girl who did PPE at oxford and is just back from a surfing holiday in latin america tells us about the monoculture that is the british ruling class (sans blague).  come the the crisis they will step into the breach and ensure that strange british semi-feudal continuity of class power. 

horsemouth's plan for the next few years is to learn to grow food and to disguise his political opinions.

today cooler weather with thundery showers in the afternoon (maybe).  

ring ring 7am (week 2 begins/ normal service is resumed)

horsemouth is back with you after the post-drinking anxiety fest. (ok ok less sympathy at the back there it's really not so bad).

whilst the air temperature is warm the sky has gone out. grey cloud has been installed low over his head. 

he's slightly in the doghouse from failing to go see howard the day after (but it will clear he thinks). 

actually it doesn't take alarm bells to wake horsemouth up in the morning these days (the guilt will usually do it). 

he watched the lady from shanghai - evil rich people, the virtuous poor. (rita hayworth, orson welles).  he read a old FT weekend magazine. he has marked out the three weeks of his holiday on his calendar (the bulk of september out to the equinox).  week 2 begins/ normal service is resumed. today 25-26C, dry, possible rain tomorrow afternoon.

the laramie is tuned open D6. horsemouth has to plot which guitars to take back with him/ which to leave down here for possible recording/ playing contingencies. he should probably try and take a tranche of books back (while there are plenty of books at his parents' house they are not all to his taste). this is the difficulty of knowing what will actually be to his taste when he gets there. he thinks he will want to read christ stopped at eboli again, and probably reveries of a solitary walker

yesterday horsemouth was bored. so bored he cleaned the woodwork on the stairs (this follows on from his mopping of the kitchen floor). his problem now is to work out how to clean the stairway carpet (it is very dusty and neglected). he did two walks - a powerscroft road book box (and round), and an 'over-onto-the-marshes and round by the lee valley offices' walk.  

first off he's going for a walk with TG today. 

hungover and slow after a friend's birthday. so no blog post yesterday.

plus it was baking hot out there. 

he was due to go over to howard's. so howard was disappointed. as usual after the joys of the drink horsemouth gets mildly anxious and mildly depressed. his state of poisoning provides an objective measure of his foolishness. (he is condemned to live with the consequences).

he does hope he wasn't too much of a pain when he was drunk. 

ho-hum.

last night horsemouth spent a lot of time listening to record producer ed michel reminisce. his interviewer (mr.ten minute record reviews) was a particular fan of the cosmic jazz era (alice coltrane, pharoah sanders), so that worked for horsemouth. ed remembered hearing marion brown's ECM album afternoon of georgia faun and liking that and so getting him in to record the follow up. 

horsemouth will slowly get back up to speed today and then he is into the second week of his holiday. he has done a phonecall with his brother (who was on herefordshire duty) midweek some communal endeavouring. 

the light is filtered through heat haze and golden. horsemouth will try and get out for a bit before it heats up.   

war, vengeance, justice

 '... there is only a single character. it is the barbarian character war, but it has other senses too. it can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. there is no knowing which sense is intended. that is part of the barbarian cunning. 

it is the same with the rest of these slips.' I plunge my hand into the chest and stir. 'they form an allegory. they can be read in many orders. further each single slip can be read in many ways. together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of war, or they can be turned on their side and read as a history of the last years of the empire - the old empire I mean. there is no agreement among scholars about how to interpret these relics of the ancient barbarians. allegorical sets like this can be found buried all over the desert...'

- j.m. coetzee, waiting for the barbarians, king penguin edition, p112.

this forms part of the judge's defence (or maybe provocation).  the judge has no idea what the characters on the slips mean, but he claims he does so that he can teach his captors a lesson.

waiting for the barbarians  is a good read but it is also kind of unsatisfactory. it is unsatisfactory to offer an allegory when what is required is direct speech (or at least others far away in the safer seats might think so). this makes it different from the other j.m. coetzee books horsemouth has read - these are faked biographies  of literary life (summertime, disgrace, elizabeth costello). 

the notion that turned upside down or laid on its side the symbol will come to mean something else makes it like a tarot card in a spread. justice indeed is a tarot card (though when it is upside down it does not necessarily spell war). there is something tarot-ish about the cover illustration on the king penguin edition by bascore. 

last night horsemouth listened to a number of ten minute album reviews of the kind of cosmic jazz he likes - pharoah sanders, alice coltrane, this sort of thing. he listened to one on the first return to forever album by chick corea, one recorded for the ECM label (this horsemouth had forgotten) and featuring a young stanley clarke. 

he also listened to a dj set by three of casual gabberz (most enjoyable) - strangely it started with uk apache and shy fx's original nuttah mixed into origin unknown's valley of the shadows (jungle classics).

yesterday a quick zoom meeting on building the consortium (decarbonisation) and another one today. later it is someone's birthday in the park. saturday howard may be round to visit. next week (wednesday) a communal endeavour.

'unire la musica alle idee del proletariato e dei movimenti giovanili'

a clip from the start of angelo rastelli's movie nudi verso la follia. the film begins with an excerpt of don cherry's show at the 6th re nudo pop festival in 1976, at the parco lambro, near milan.

among the other musicians toni esposito on drums, giampiero pramaggiore on guitar (here with don and moki on italian tv) and moki cherry on tampoura (but you can't really hear her because the others are firing off into the heavens).

'the real merit of this document is as a  photograph of a movement that, as finardi says, after at least three years of illusion of uniting music with the ideas of the proletariat and youth movements, was now on the verge of an epochal change'.

the full movie is available on youtube. horsemouth continues his researches into an era he knows little about. 

wait let horsemouth check what day it is. 

it's the thursday. 

horsemouth goes off to sit in on a zoom meeting 4.30pm in the afternoon (decarbonisation stuff) to be followed by a consortium meeting friday (after tuesday's social housing regulation stuff). otherwise the communal endeavour stuff all rolls along keenly - they have taken on debt and are paying it off but do not yet have the rental income to cover that debt (but they will do soon). 

next week the management committee meeting. 

for the meeting this afternoon he will journey down through the sun fried streets and across the parched parks full of beautiful people. h_____y is, horsemouth has argued, the equivalent of montreal's plateau. 

he listened to david runciman making sense of joan didion's disquiet with the era. 

horsemouth is a vegetarian (here are some reasons why). he has been a vegetarian for something like 40 years now and does not regret it one bit.

'so you wanna be a writer...'

two years of outlaw bookseller. thank you dude (it has all been very enjoyable).  horsemouth is impressed with the gift and that both outlaw and bookpilled are making a go of it. 

horsemouth and sten have just had one of their kitchen conversations (not the one where horsemouth remonstrates about the kitchen being a tip but the more pleasant one where they discuss the news/ collapse of the tory party/ state of the world). both horsemouth and sten nurture ambitions to be writers - though neither is clear, horsemouth would say, as to where their talents lie and how best to direct them. 

horsemouth wakes up with a sore throat (and a number of mosquito bites).

yesterday a walk down through the burning streets of the city to the office of the communal endeavour to catch up with colin and participate/ observe a zoom meeting about the social housing regulation act and the current government enthusiasm for using the consumer standards model for this. horsemouth is not convinced that increasing the regulatory burden here will necessarily lead to better outcomes (personally he's firmly convinced that it won't but force majeure etc.). 

the basement was nice and cool (for once horsemouth sees the sense in it).

a lot of the impetus for this comes post-grenfell. instead of focusing on the governments failure to legislate to ban inflammable cladding as they promised the coroner they would do after the lakanal house fire (which in all probability would have actually prevented the 72 deaths at grenfell) we have the misdirection onto the quality of housing services the residents of grenfell experienced before the fire. 

this is the pseudo-problem the current legislation is designed to fix. 

at the grenfell inquiry their inaction had to be explained when faced with the  persistent complaints and safety concerns of tenants. housing worker attitudes were taken to be the problem  when a discussion of the limiting of resources made available would have more clearly explained the situation. 

really and truthfully the poor services social housing tenants receive derives from their being labelled 'chavs' and social failures - the housing workers working with them only reflect and enforce wider societal attitudes.

horsemouth suspects that when the next (labour) government gets in they will add their own legislation on top of this. 

after the meeting horsemouth wandered back up across the park (and very pleasant it was too). about a four and a half mile walk there and back all told. 

thursday and friday horsemouth goes for further zoom meetings in pursuit of  social housing decarbonisation money

naima karlsson (grand-daughter of moki cherry) picks some tunes and is  interviewed (briefly) about one hour in to this show. there's a good discussion of  an improvisatory turn (and there's some nice music). horsemouth will give it another listen when his head is more in tune with it

SOND - the 'embers' (the fall of another year) and after that the 'u-aries'

'immense depths of thought in expressions of common speech; holes dug by generations of ants.' - squibs I, baudelaire from intimate journals.

and so here we are. horsemouth is in his bed (he's sitting up in bed). outside there is glorious golden light coming from leyton (and probably leytonstone beyond it). he has his coffee but he will need to recharge his cup after this sentence. 

cup recharged.

well it looks like september in the city will be glorious. 

this is by way of consolation for upcoming winter (SOND - september, october, november, december, the 'embers' and after that the 'u-aries'). but for now september doesn't belong to it - it belongs more properly to the summer. temperatures edging up to 30C, the young ladies wandering around in appropriate clothing (pardon horsemouth he's a filthy old letch). 

yesterday afternoon horsemouth sat outside in the shade and read for a bit (j.m. coetzee's waiting for the barbarians - an uncharacteristic work because it's not ostensibly about being a writer). the spine on horsemouth's king penguin edition (so probably a slim 'b' edition) is broken and the textblock has fractured into sectors held together by dried glue so that he has to be careful not to spill out the blocks of pages. that said his reading of it goes well (p.41). 

in theory coetzee's book lifts something of zbigniew herbert's report from the besieged city (nope horsemouth has got that wrong, it is in fact based of cavafy's waiting for the barbarians, but the sentiment is similar).

'too old to carry arms and fight like the others- 

they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler'

later horsemouth was in victoria park to see enza. they sat out in the golden sunlight and talked. they drank some italian non-alcoholic drink that tasted of almonds (it being a work night), horsemouth failed to catch the name of it. horsemouth had brought tangerines but they didn't go well with it. eventually (growing cold) they set off for a walk managing a half-circuit before the locking up of the gates chucked them out onto the side streets. 

horsemouth is planning out his activities for the week. minty is off for a number of early morning excursions (going for a wander before the day warms up too much).  horsemouth would like to join up but that means addressing it early doors. he has some meetings he must attend on zoom.  thursday he goes to meet colin. friday he has a choice to make. saturday howard comes to visit. 

 

drac's back

horsemouth wakes up. he slept well.

he is back in his bed in his shady basement flat in sunny hackney. 

in his absence his room had filled up with flies. he slept with the window open at night and they are mostly gone. 

once he had got home (walking back over from hackney downs) he had a quick chat with ian and then headed up london fields on the off chance (sunday, bright sunny day) that there was someone about. 

hackney was beautiful in the sunshine (as were the people). 

there he bumped into stipey paul, lisa, and lise and sat around drinking and chatting. horsemouth wasn't into discussing anything deep and heavy and so he rolled the discussion in the direction of zoltan hound of dracula and race with the devil  - the two classic, have motor home will have shocking horror experience movies. 

horsemouth had two whitstable bays and then wandered home. some indian dudes had over-catered their party so there was some free food (thanks dudes). pretty much as soon as it went dark he headed off to bed (getting up at 11pm for a shower). 

it's a greyish and cool morning. the bbc weather shows blazing sunshine all day and all week (and possibly immobilising hot temperatures - he sees a 31C in there). sunrises from a quarter past six, sunsets ending at a quarter to eight. we roll in the direction of the equinox. 

he checked the colenso road book box on the way over to london fields (nothing special).

it is a monday morning and most of horsemouth's friends will be off to work. friday a birthday party in the park. horsemouth will endeavour to get in as many visits to friends as he can in the coming few weeks. 

p.s. he's had a quick look but can't tell if his sphere girl with the golden eyes edition is the dowson translation. 

the girl with the golden eyes (and the dying poet)

ernest dowson is poor, drinking way more than is good for him and not eating correctly - but at least he's in paris (and hanging out with paul verlaine (who is frankly even more fucked up than he is)). he is there with the abstemious o'riordan. he has finished translating balzac's  the girl with the golden eyes (horsemouth should check his copy when he is back to see if this is the translation he owns). 

now the genius of balzac's short novel lies in the opening chapters eulogising the hard-working, multi-tasking we would now say, citizens of paris. veritable universal men capable of doing every task and trade. living negations of the division of labour. 

horsemouth plans to travel back to the city today. there has been a train strike (hell there have been two train strikes by different unions - friday and saturday), there seems little point in being out the door too early, best to let normal commercial operation re-assert itself (financial tragedy that it is). the unions are correct - the railways are not unprofitable to the private companies running them (but they should be), these companies are simply farming the subsidies. the structures of the industry a labyrinth designed to obfuscate this. 

once back in the city horsemouth will be available for meetings and such like. 

currently we are in the RAAC crisis - it has been known for years that rapid autoclave aerated concrete can become unsafe over time and that many schools, hospitals and public buildings were built using it. as the government moves towards the exit door (and not during the 13 years of its rule) it has decided that it is a major issue that must be dealt with now (ten seconds before the schools re-open). 

everything seems permanently on the point of falling apart (or to have fallen apart already and we are into the 'pretend it hasn't happened' phase. 

yesterday a bottle of beer with his brother before dinner. (in a bit probably breakfast).  

a grey and foggy day ( the embers of the year )

it's a grey and foggy day out there.

good morning! good morning! good morning!

it's 50 years of  a live supreme. carlos santana and john mclaughlin attempt to take heaven by storm. today the anniversary of the release of hergest ridge as well. 

'in complete helplessness barely wrote two pages...' - franz kafka 1914

on his visit to hereford horsemouth bought a stash of decent pens (black hi-techpoint V7s), these are the kind of pens he used to use for work, and his preferred writing and drawing means. maybe this will encourage him to physically write and draw more. broadly since the pandemic he has drawn/ written with whatever cheap biro/ pencil etc. came to hand or could be scavenged (and his diaries bear the scars of it). 

to write horsemouth often needs to read (he needs a project). he has a number of books ready to go or moderately commenced (the ernest dowson goes well)

we enter the embers of the year (september, october (sic.), november, december. we are into autumn (soon enough we will be into winter). in general horsemouth continues to find the weather in september pretty decent. from here on in about a third of the year remaining. 

horsemouth's brother arrives at 3pm ish (having dropped his eldest off in oxford). horsemouth returns to the wen at some point soon (he has much of september off).  he has a number of (zoom) meetings. 

from the summer solstice to the autumn equinox (after the golden age then what...?)

we are three-quarters of the way from the summer solstice to the autumn equinox.

out here it is a misty morning with a heavy dew upon the trees. there is a reliable golden-ness to the sunshine. the swifts are flying about. horsemouth has seen some rabbits. 

today a visit by relatives. saturday horsemouth's brother arrives. sunday or so horsemouth returns to the wen for a little while.

horsemouth takes refuge in cyclical time.  

last night horsemouth watched an appreciation of john carpenter - there was the usual chat about they live being a documentary of reaganomics. the truth is that the early stuff is the good stuff (horsemouth would find it difficult to pick a movie where it all goes to pot - but to pot it all goes). 

the crime drama horsemouth has been watching with his mother has finished (leaving ample set up for series three). there are (of course) holes in the plots (she was banging on the door for ages but none of the neighbours saw it or mentioned it?).    

horsemouth walked down to the post-box to post some mail and then over to a house in the village to deliver some eggs. earlier in the day a visit to hereford. he bought  alexandre kojève's the notion of authority in a verso hardback (ten squid) in the oxfam. he had an enjoyable wander round the back streets (it's a pretty town in many ways). 

'there comes a moment, with the contradictions of history ultimately resolved, when this teleology itself comes to an end. the end of history thesis...'

what is this teleology?

'an immanent teleology that guides the dialectical movement of negativity, the very force of ideologies of progress.'

all the above able summary of the end of history thesis from françois terré's introduction to the french edition of the book (in hegar weslati's translation). it is a strange book for  kojève to be writing,  a discussion of the sources of authority in the era of marshall pétain. 

there is a piece on the pandemic horsemouth would like to review but it is from 'across the tracks' - he will take another look at it. 

the consortium meeting for the collective endeavour has been delayed by a week (the better to assemble it).