snowfall in birmingham (severance - a thought experiment)

'in the darkest hours of my life, when I felt completely alone in the world and without hope, I found  tremendous solace in listening to skip james ..' - gary lucas

on 9th june 1871 'southgate, the druggist at hay, was in birmingham and saw snow fall for an hour' according to kilvert. 

kilvert and his father will start for north wales on the 12th. 

triple negative will be playing a gig at cafe OTO on the 18th of june with some cat from montreal  (but horsemouth won't be in town). 

apart from the previous two lines this is an almost entirely written in the morning blogpost

horsemouth was thinking about the drama severance (which he has never seen only read about or watched clips from or read reviews of). 

the central conceit of severance is this - what if you could sever your existence at work from your social existence outside of work. your working self would go to work and earn the money for you while your social self could get on with your life without being troubled by memories of work this (of course) would be deeply unfair on your working self (condemned to a life of wage slavery) while your social self partied it up on the passive income. 

but it is interesting that this easy severance is not the way capitalism is going - instead (as hardt and negri argue) it is involving more of the worker's time outside of work hours in work or involving more of the worker's human capacities (empathy etc.) in the work itself. 

indeed severance may be a thought experiment upon this. 

but then there is that annoying stub of work - the getting to work on time, the coming home from work, the having to live in particular town for particular periods of time (because the work is there) - surely these would start to grate. 

the fact that people would do this to themselves 'voluntarily' indicates the pessimism about work and its overcoming.  

in many ways we are severed under capitalism already - in that people have been alienated from the value their work creates so that I can appropriate that value through my stocks and shares ISA.

alternatively workers may effect a voluntary severance themselves through quiet quitting where they reduce their emotional and other investments in the work to a stolid just doing the job. the trick here (report the quitters) is to go  undetected in the refusal of the extra tasks outside of work hours that work requires. 

here in horsemouth's world of leisure and retirement (effected by savings and stock markets) it is a grey morning. the sheep are back.