at the sign of the two black swans (slip inside this house)

horsemouth’s hands are tied - literally - apparently there was something in the job description for god-emperor of the EU that he failed to read. something about provisions in the event of a poor harvest.  

re-wilding the population goes well they tell him.... europe is being broken up and brought together as a patchwork quilt of ethno-historical theme parks (sans-culottes on the streets of paris, the helvetians are the baitiest of all and don’t go up north jack...) this has affected the EU. all business now conducted in bad medieval latin. pilgrims to the shrines clog (literally) the street of strasbourg and brussels. pasolini's trilogy of life is popular as a style-guide. huzinga is widely read. there is a brisk trade in counterfeit breughels.

the viking confederation has announced a date on which fenris will eat the sun.

here it has stopped raining (a temporary respite perhaps). p(h)easants walk about (cautiously). ok - no that was an illusion. it hasn’t stopped raining.

at the moment horsemouth is on holiday and it will take him a while to adjust to living without even the minimal structure of work - if he were abroad he could go off exploring, or go lie on the beach, but it is expensive to do this from the seaside towns (plus you need the weather or the clothing, you need to be sanctioned in this by time being exceptionally valuable in some way). horsemouth likes projects - he likes to keep busy.

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80 years ago yesterday benjamin wrote a letter to gerhard scholem containing a harsh (but fair) critique of max brod’s biography of kafka (it is collected in illuminations). brod is a tasteless oik who doesn’t get it, he goes on about kafka being holy and then goes on about with unwonted familiarity about how they were the best of mates etc. on his own he might have been a minor austro-hungarian novelist but in proximity to kafka he is irradiated and destroyed. all that is left for him to do is steal the unpublished manuscripts from kafka’s funeral pyre - but this is why we have the castle, the trial, america.

otherwise all we would have of kafka would be the short fiction of metamorphosis, a country doctor, meditation, a hunger artist... the material published in his lifetime, parables almost, evacuated of anything reassuringly human. the process is continued in the short fictions of robert walser - but there there is nothing not even dread.

yesterday horsemouth read the daily torygraph business sections and went for two wombles (one on his own, one with his mum and the dog) up on the common. he listened to a talk on robinson crusoe on radio 4 (it is a very strange book) - curiously it was abram tertz’s favourite book (or so he says in a voice from the choir) while he was in prison, because crusoe makes the world, he makes all the items in it from nothing on his desert island, he overcomes the division of labour. marx takes against this as a nonsense, but tertz (sinyavsky) finds it inspiring.

some friends are playing a gig (as unmoor kiva) - horsemouth may even go.

WANTED: ‘strange things that are considered valueless’

such are the things collectors like (according to benjamin).

you could think of illuminations by walter benjamin as being two books - a book of collecting, translating, story- telling, mechanically reproducing (printing), and a book of engagement with the key writers/ poets of the era - kafka, proust, baudelaire, ending with the angel of the future.

there is always something foolish about collecting (horsemouth bibliophile knows this) - as of all this stuff is going to be buried with you when you are gone, or set up as a museum, as if it is not in fact junk already. benjamin collected children’s books - like the opies. 

both benjamin (writing on leskov in the story-teller) and victor serge (in the beginning of our power) have the metaphor of the seeds from pharoah’s tomb germinating - where did they get this? from the newspapers? or from the same book? horsemouth wonders.

horsemouth is on the train back to his folks in the wilds of herefordshire (where it will be reliably grey instead of unreliably sunny). he’s brought some sheet music and some financial stuff (in case he gets bored) - because (as benjamin says) ‘boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’.

how much boredom there is in the modern world unamused is another matter.

'such flowers as the hares will not eat'

lady luxborough discusses her planting (1748).

at 10am horsemouth meets his drop to hand over vital photographs of an incriminating nature together with several back issues of the monkey-ona-stick housing co-operatives newsletter monkey-on-a-stick. today is cooler so far than yesterday that was a swelterer rather than a scorcher.

both tuesday and wednesday evenings horsemouth went round andrew minty's for a little play - green manalishi, the kingdon of heaven (is within you). horsemouth still has to put the effort in to learn the complicated bits of green manalishi.

last night horsemouth selected from his bookshelf alain the gods and read the introductory essay by the translator richard pervear- alain would set him self down to write two sheets of paper each day without revisions or rewritings (kind of like just a minute) a similar tactic is taken by the painter frank auerbach who if he is dissatisfied scrapes all the paint of the painting and begins again keeping only what works and trying again and again until he finds a way into the material. struggling to find the material's limitations - 'such flowers as the hares will not eat'.

there horsemouth has achieved re-incorporation and so should stop.

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the next day he continued...

horsemouth is up late (9am) and the birds are singing. again he will try to write this without re-editing in the style of alain. richeard pervear's essay at the start of alain's the gods discusses benjamin's the storyteller essay - as books replace the spoken word that moment of verification between the storyteller and the listenener dies away (think how this works in ranciere's 'each one teach one' philosophy and pedagogy - where you can verify learning even if you do not understand the subject simply by asking questions and listening for inconsistencies in the replies). horsemouth should really sit down and compare these.

storytelling also crops up in rona edwards and monika skerbelis's 'I liked it, Didn't love it' subtitled screenplay development from the inside out - there they go round the office and tell you who reads what in film company, in an agency etc. what the forms look like. there are cursory nods to aristotle the poetics, carlo gozzi's the thirty-six dramatic situations (via geroges polti), the seven basic plots.

of the seven basic plots beasts of the southern wild is probably man against nature (sorry that should be person against nature) - it is a carnivorous eat or be eaten world waiting for the flood that shows lots of development in that horsemouth finds it unbelievably sentimental - already halfway to fantasy. perhaps he's not appreciating its naive  qualities - its parable like nature. it takes more than a somewhat unhygenic diet of seafood to convince horsemouth of social realism - but how does it compare with say the first series of treme where the effects of hurricane katrina are still present - via a ghost a lost body.

horsemouth listened to lutoslawski (but quietly in case the neighbours hear), nick lacy's tv music (tracks one and two together would make a good song horsemouth thinks, the others horsemouth is familiar with from his time in the snatch foster band), and tracks 3 onwards from alice coltrane's universal consciousness (the softer end of her output). he also read some newspaper review sections (saul bellow came from lachine - who knew) and glanced through stephen calloway's book on aubrey beardsley (like the script writing book one pound from emmaneus - the housing charity shop - and god botherers horsemouth writes somewhat ungenerously).

up at three mills green the grass was burned golden like corn - there were long shadows and sexy running girls.