boris was sent by god! (why, had he run out of locusts?)

donald trump has departed in a snit with all the other boys laughing at him in the lower sixth common room (but they’ll be laughing on the other side of their faces if trump gets a second term - which he probably will).

of course that little sneak boris should have stuck by him (seeing as he’s leaving the gang) but there he is snickering away with the french boys (trudeau and macron). you didn’t know boris spoke french? (from his grandmother).

the ‘birthers’ continue to point out that boris was born in new york.

but our boris (to quote wikipedia) is even more exotic than that, he's the grandson of ‘Osman Kemal (later Wilfred Johnson) and Irene Williams (daughter of Stanley Fred Williams of Bromley, Kent, and Marie Louise de Pfeffel). ... Osman's Anglo-Swiss mother Winifred Brun died shortly after giving birth. Ali Kemal returned to Turkey in 1912, whereafter Osman Wilfred and his sister Selma were brought up by their English grandmother, Margaret Brun, and took her maiden name, Johnson...

stanley johnson (boris’s father - conservstive MP and sometime world bank population wonk, you know, the annoying one who thinks that being able to spell pinocchio is a matter of importance), his maternal grandmother's parents were hubert freiherr von pfeffel (born in munich on 8 december 1843) and... hélène arnous-rivière (born on 14 january 1862).’ in other words boris is as perfect a european as you could wish for.

yes that’s right boris ‘millions of turks’ de pfeffel johnson is as perfect a european as you could hope for.

boris has been passing as an englishman from a very young age (like his father before him). but really he’s like something out of a powell-pressburger movie. who knew that such creatures still existed? 

doubtless the box-set of his life will be made and we will all have the pleasure of watching it in our old ages. boris will be played by an up-and-coming comic actor, he will be played like a tussle-haired and on the go I claudius (crossed with up pompeii), crossed with yes minister crossed with house of cards.

 there is one more scene for certain to be played with boris. when his successors come for him with the knives (going ‘here piggy piggy’). will boris flee squealing through the sewers? or will he try to face them down with dignity? what will be his flash back to in his final seconds? will it be him on a box, as a child, giving a churchill speech?

 CUT

(you know they never liked you)

a few things had to happen (zombie nation)

a few things had to happen for horsemouth to make his discovery

first someone in horsemouth's hood had to potlatch out their old copies of new left review

second horsemouth had to fail to find his preferred book this morning and so selected a volume of the above from the stacks in his rush to get out the door -

finally he had to have the long slow bus journey back...

and what should he read in julian stallabrass's article on the mute magazine anthology 'proud to be flesh'. (you will remember horsemouth has an article in it zombie nation).  the quote here has been doctored to assist his anonymity.

'her (josephine berry's) concerns were shared by horsemouth in an essay on the close connection between enterprises selling film and music, as the commodity basis of those media is challenged, and the art world move to 'relational aesthetics' in which social interactions are taken as artworks. horsemouth's essay put the problem sharply because art and business have been emulating each other closely, and the gap is shrinking from both ends.' 

cue horsemouth doing his "I'm a published author' dance - once again he wishes to thank his mute (and non-mute friends) josie, anthony, ben, matthew, anya, tim,denise, martin denyer, darsavini, is there anyone he's forgotten? for encouraging him on this path and providing him with the opportunity to vent.

he is reminded of the time one of his other mute articles was one of the sources for an art lecture he was attending - fortunately is co-workers and the client failed to notice. (otherwise it might have been embarrassing).

it’s all available online anyway - www.metamute.org

meanwhile the nation stomps on towards the finishing line of brexit (yes, like a zombie). and afterwards? we’ll be out in the fields picking potatoes.

horsemouth should hurry up and sort out his set for saturday (he’d forgotten he has the devil to p(l)ay).

horsemouth's care package has arrived

featuring the angry brigade and utopia (books of poetry) and on the cusp (a guitar CD by robert john lawson). there was some concern about whether it would all arrive or not (it was miss post-coded) plus horsemouth has an ongoing paranoia about the postal service having it in for him. try E* was the helpful suggestion from some postie somewhere (and it worked).

horsemouth has a cough and so any time not spent working is being spent in bed sniveling (ok there’s the time spent coughing and spluttering on public transport). fortunately he hasn’t had to work much this week and then he’s into this is not the last week, ok this is the last week.

horsemouth has high standards in the poetry lark having been raised by ranting (ok, ok, ‘performance’) poet and king of the turn-around mr. social control. these poems do not disappoint - neither utopia ‘rain-swimming with my brother in the former west germany’ nor the angry brigade ‘a bomb in the boutique, a pox on those distractions’ - look at the castlist; anne sexton, anna mendelssohn, sabate, godzilla (‘giant radioactive lizard/ film star mostly tokyo based’).

as you know from recent posts, these are both very horsemouth topics. a friend pronounced himself heartily sick of utopia (after a year of art students rocking up with utopia conversation platforms and alike) - but for horsemouth the moment before the certainty came down, the moment when a better world became thinkable (and not just innevitable) is the interesting one.

cusp too - guitar instrumentals, some dialogue (sounds like kids at breakfast, some traffic noise, the wind, at one point a woman’s voice ‘I hear you’ causes the track to become self-conscious and quieten itself down) perhaps some hand drumming following the tap delays (very 90ies digital delays and reverbs here). is that poor boys... horsemouth hears in there? it cuts out suddenly.

(you’ll remember howard has gone in for some of this - on the last musicians of bremen album)

recorded on a ranch in the utah desert sometime in 1999 - 100 copies made and still a few left - kind of a late-fahey vibe edging towards that pre-loop pedal thing , of allowing the delay to support you and guide you forward (steve hillage style), a wyndham hill/ ecm texture. certainly as good as much of the stuff on dying for bad music (probably it’s natural home) - horsemouth will try it from howard.

'but is it an EGG or a TURD?'  asks the letter - it is of course eggs - but don’t knock turds, full of seeds they are, good sites for spore growth - all that we throw away as dirt could be golden for it all becomes soil with the help of the worms (here horsemouth is having a neal-style wonders of nature moment - aww bless). your egg is immediate. your turd a gift with a timer and a do not disturb notice.

sean was up visiting - now it’s irish pirates.

horsemouth will have to respond with some gifts.

revelation by the side of the charles river dam (‘the opposite of writer’s block’)

this is where it happens for alice w. flaherty in boston (home to riverside records sometime distributor of john fahey records coincidence freaks) near to the science museum (so the wonder that is the internet tells us). graphomaniac/ hypergaphia ‘sufferer’/ neuroscientist/ aspiring writer alice hears the phrase ‘the opposite of writer’s block’ and her book the midnight disease is born in flurry of scribbled notes.

yesterday horsemouth had a much needed day off - he listened to john fahey (for it was the start of fahey week) and had a veggie breakfast in a very west ham cafe next to the old ground. he was quite taken by brenda’s blues by fahey (particularly since pianist george winston has thoughfully told us the chords).

horsemouth’s hands (and nails) are still a bit fucked after his two recent ‘gigs’ but soon he will be returning to ‘form’ and try to make some progress on it.

as well as being big on the motivations to write, alice is also big on eureka moments,k the moments where life suddenly makes sense or we make sense of life or we at least come up with a plausible story/ metaphor. 

horsemouth is slightly off balance at the moment (but everything is great).

something like an autobiography

horsemouth has survived another week at work and in a short hour he goes to make music (andrew minty - et al? maybe). then he is babysitting (this double booking gets him out of two birthday celebrations and a gig - oops sorry people horsemouth has self-sabotaged again). monday he attends a meeting. tuesday is the anniversary of the death of fanny kelly (hostage of the souix) and world galaxy day (the anniversary of the recording of world galaxy by alice coltrane.

the week after the anniversary of ten years of horsemouth’s blogging (and of the recording of robbie basho’s live album in bonn - bonn ist supreme).

‘... revolving forever inside his own skin, on him the spirit has spoken its anathema’

horsemouth has been accused of wishing his life away (there is some truth in this) and documenting it in excruciating detail. the blogs (starting on myspace and transferring not exactly seamlessly to facebook - then migrating (in part) to here), the blogs constitute something like an autobiography that horsemouth the songwriter has been too lazy to write

‘thus, when the universal sun has set, does the moth seek the lamp light of privacy’

horsemouth watched an early kurosawa film ikiru (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru) in part lifted from tolstoy’s the death of ivan ilych - a bureaucrat realizes he is dying but (kurosawa takes further) as a dying gift he creates a park for the children - no tear is left unjerked but at the same time its a restrained movie sanguine about the possibilities for change. takashi shimura is (as alex cox says in his introduction) a flexible actor - from the inspector loman like character he plays in kurosawa’s police procedurals, to the bureaucrat so dead his co-workers refer to him as the mummy, he’s got a great craggy expressive face.

did horsemouth mention that howard had resequenced the first album (and in doing so created another compilation of b-sides  as well, no? ah well- here it is.

ruined utopia (between one book and another)

horsemouth had a plan to talk to you about two books (well three really) agota kristof’s novel the diary (and her autobiography the illiterate) and e.m. cioran’s history and utopia (in particular his musings on nationalism and democracy letter to a faraway friend.) he will have to do this largely from memory (and a few notes he made of more quotable passages - no he can’t even do this, he’s left his own diary at home) because the first and last books he has left at home and the third (the middle) book he has never read (only read about).

the diary ends with an afterward by slavoj zizek - he finds the twin boy protagonists of agota’s novel admirable - they are relentlessly honest and relentlessly ruthless and they ‘write’ (in their diary) a sparse stripped-down descriptive prose cataloging the(ir) horrors as they struggle to survive the second world war and perhaps bring a little justice along the way.

but the children are not meant to be wholly admirable - if they fail to participate in the xenophobic hypocrisy of their times, if they fail to acquiesce to the exploitation of the weak by the strong that society ( in times of peace and in times of war) requires hushed up, it is more because they are children of the book, of the idea, who have made the word strong within them and the flesh weak (by means of self-discipline).

it’s a theme probably better dealt with in j.g. ballard’s empire of the sun - here it is just a fantasy for an academic determined to inject some grit into the comfortable and self-satisfied world in which all passion has been spent and the fantasy of an exile in the west.

agota fled hungary in 1956 first to austria and then to switzerland, having survived the nazi occupation, the soviet liberation and the failure of the 1956 rising. in switzerland she found herself illiterate and struggled to learn french - eventually writing plays, novels and an autobiography (the illiterate) in it. just as her twins keep a diary recording their activities she emphasizes how much she was a reader, a child of the book.

e.m. cioran (from neighbouring rumania -a country under the domination of the hungarians at the time of his childhood) also learned to write in french - again it was a struggle,

 ‘how many hours, how many cigarettes, how many cups of coffee, just to write a half -decent sentence’ (here horsemouth reconstructs the quote from memory).

he too sees the savagery under democracy (he sees democracy as the result of the exhaustion of the political passions of youth rather than a positive achievement) - again we have an observer who can show us both sides of the division of europe and of political thought that structured the 20th century. on the one hand he sees an exhausted west (waiting for the next outbreak of passion to rise up from the depths - horsemouth is reminded of derrida writing on potocki - ok no, Patocka,  

Jan Patočka).

on the other the ruined utopia of communism. utopia is closed off and no longer available. 

the twins survive because of their cruel grandmother (the witch as the locals call her) because she can grow food, and hoard it, and is smart enough to know that the liberators will come looting and raping and murdering. the twins also survive because they become harder, more evil and more determined than the 20th century.

it is a strange victory to be celebrating in the pages of the guardian (where zizek’s review first appeared) but that is the nature of the toleration under which we live.

horsemouth was never brave. but then conditions never consistently demanded it. yesterday he read (and snoozed) - hence this.

horsemouth ass button - his most used words on facebook decoded

of course (as friend london happy dance hastened to point out) most of the words from horsemouth’s posts on facebook are actually not horsemouth’s at all but from nuclear war by sun ra (it’s a long song it counts disproportionately).





this is what horsemouth has gained for parting with all his account details (he feels so sullied). fortunately -as you know horsemouth is largely a fictitious character.


ah data data data

and ah photographers and their ethics - there was good (ethical) taking of the photographs of people without their consent for the purposes of categorisation (of the mad for example, of criminal types revealed through the bumps on their skulls and by their ugly criminal features) and there was bad (unethical) taking of photographs for the purposes of classification. of course now we know better (so that’s alright then).

ah data data data next week you will have been subjected to nine whole years of horsemouth’s blogging and willful self-exposure on various platforms largely alibied as an attempt to promote his music. horsemouth suggests you cut out the middlemule and listen directly to his music. alternatively you could write an app to continue posting on social media in horsemouth’s already existing pattern and the same for all your friends - in fact who is to say that this has not already happened.

the monkey in the mirror

When and why did you first write music? 

 It would be when I got my first guitar when I was 15. I thought it would attract the girls if I could sing some songs but I couldn’t sing anyone else’s (so I set out to write my own). Later I was told that I couldn’t sing - so I just concentrated on playing the guitar (even though I was terrible at that also - at first).

What’s your composing method? (a) sitting at a piano (b) computer (c) pencil on manuscript paper (d) improvisation with musicians (e) other. 

Mostly (e) Other - guitar, pen, various bits of paper, my voice. Normally I’ll have a few guitar parts sitting around for ages and then some ideas for a topic will come and then I’ll sit down and work at it until I have all the lyrical bits and all the instrumental bits stuck together in kind of the right place. Then once I can play it through I stop work on it. Jarvis was right - lyrics are kind of like the homework that has to be done so you can play the song - this is why I favour songs with repeated choruses, wordless lyrics..., working with other people to write either the music or the lyrics, or both. I spend a lot of time arranging, working on other people’s stuff, trying to find the useful thing for the guitar to do in the tune, or for any other instruments. I’m quite quick at writing lyrics - normally songs come very quickly but take a long time to be finished.

Usually I don’t write enough lyrics to tell a story - but perhaps enough to suggest that something is going on. Really I think you only need a few really good lines - and the rest just have to be good enough so that they don’t let the song down.

When I was in a band (bush house) playing electric guitar the bassist was incredibly inventive - whatever I played (or thought could be played behind it) he’d come up with something better, sometimes (though less often) other members of the band would come up with smart things and I’d respond to them. I’ve never really done improvised music and I don’t much like doing it really. I’ve written on computer (but I was always thinking about what the guitar, the bass or the lyrics would be doing) - it’s fun (it gets rid of a lot of that haggling with other musicians to get your ideas played that you get in male bands).

Music is an irrational activity so song-writing partnerships don’t tend to last long - the ease of recording that technology affords means the song can be quickly completed (and then it’s on to the next project). Now that you no longer need to be in a band to play some tunes they tend to stay together for less time.

Where do your ideas come from? 

 Life, books, newspapers, other people’s songs. I keep lists of good lines, good titles, ideas for playing things, ideas for songs, lyrics.

“Noah’ (which I co-wrote with Howard Grange) came because we were opening a book at random at picking out lines - once it was about Noah - once we had the chorus, the rest of the lyrics wrote themselves - for me it’s about loss, the world has been swept clean and can begin again but somebody is missing. The chords came (both verse and chorus) because they fitted with the ukulele part. Howard wanted a longer version of the song with more lyrics and a bigger overall production on it - so we did a version like that that’s on volume one - but there’s also a shorter version arranged much more how I would like it online (we’ll probably put it on my EP when i get round to recording it). The second guitar I wrote in the studio and started improvising out over the end of it - I’ve always been interested in layering guitar parts, it’s something I picked up from african music and my brief studies with Folo Graff at Jenako Arts in Hackney in about 1988.

Do you find inspiration from other composers? Which? 

Since about 2002 I’ve started learning other people’s songs from sheet music, chord guides etc. and listening to more classical music and learning some of it (or at least trying). In particular french classical music written for the piano- debussy, satie, faure, messiaen. Conversely I’ve worked on learning country and folk songs because they are straightforward - the guitar is just there to support the singing and singing has become more important to me than fiddly guitar parts. In general I’ve been inspired to simplify.

Which non-musical influences are important to your music?

Life, books, newspapers, politics, sex, death. Death is big (I’m a bit of a goth really).

What do you say when asked to describe your music?

 ‘Post-apocalyptic folk’, ‘I play in a guitar and ukulele duo’, ‘Slide guitar versions of french parlor piano.’ 

Do you think about the listener when you’re composing?

Not really. Sometimes I imagine me playing it and people really liking it.

When did you feel ready to call yourself a composer? 

 Well I don’t. I don’t really call my self a song-writer either (I just don’t write enough songs). Musician for hire - Guitar, Bass, one finger keyboard, backing vocals, arrangements.

What’s your musical guilty pleasure? 

Metal. Big cock-rocking guitar solos. Gangster Rap. R n’ B. Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Yes, Mike Oldfield, ECM airbrushed jazz ... I’ve always been told I had ‘bad’ taste in music. I can’t say I care very much. 

What’s your ideal night out?

Old school Drum and Bass - I like to dance. Failing that a decent pub dancefloor. Failing that beer and friends. These days staying in and not having the hangover the next day.

One last question: What are you doing musically at the moment? 

Working on singing a version of world turned upside down for the phoenix 35th anniversary party (and learning the lyrics), working on a slowed down version of bad moon rising by creedence (strangely apocalyptic), failing to finish writing a song that’s a cross between ghost town/ mac the knife and erik satie’s gnossienne no.1.

Failing to get on and record an EP with me singing and playing new versions of songs I’ve written, co-written or arranged, country, folk and early music. Plenty of Death and a little sex maybe. And slide guitar versions of french parlor piano songs.

pinch punch first of the month (rain rain go away)

howard has been busy and added a musicians of bremen  facebook page - see the links list on the right (or click here - in an old school stylee)

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


later this month horsemouth goes back to work (ok he has an orientation thing friday). the sun is turning on and making it through the cloud. really horsemouth should be away in brighton (or somewhere where there will be sun today).

yesterday it rained - at best horsemouth made it up to the supermarket. he jammed with andy (it went well) and read the newspapers.

 'a sort of musical comedy without music.. (or) going right deep down into real life and not caring a damn' 

so p.g. wodehouse delineates the two basic approaches to writing - horsemouth (though not a fan of musical comedy - well other than the wizard of oz) is more in the musical comedy line. horsemouth sometimes gets angry about the terrible state of the world but he will always search for an amusing way of slinging mud at the people he holds responsible rather than a mere cursing. this reflects his general temperament - he is uncomfortable with rage (voice) preferring exit.

horsemouth is going to try to get out for a wander before the heavens open and autumn descends - he's seen a few fallen leaves but not enough yet. his tomato plant has grown long and lanky and still has some flowers on it - maybe there will be cherry tomatoes for christmas.

books, records, gigs, films august

books: 
george steiner - after babel, 
edward timms - karl kraus: the apocalyptic satirist, 
derek raymond - the crust on its uppers,
lucian - trip to the moon (intro and part), 
sergei aksakov - a russian schoolboy (intro and part), 
cabeza de vaca - the shipwrecked men 

records: 
miles davis - sorcerer,
lee perry - black art compilation

gigs: 
sons of kemet 

films: 
generation kill -7 episodes,
hammer house of horror - 3 episodes.
the curse of the werewolf.

horsemouth has published his booklist for august, some photos of the flat in its new dispensation and some photos of his scrbbles.

the booklist shows a continued interest in language and writing - george steiner,  edward timms, karl kraus, the  lucian has a section on how not to write history, he continues with the slavophils versus the modernisers (as described by herzen) with sergei aksakov's a russian schoolboy (intro and part), and he continues with his interest in castaways, monks, penitents with cabeza de vaca's the shipwrecked men.

horsemouth needs to hurry up tidying up his flat (though it does look good with blinds and more shelves) so he can get on with recording - the zoom reproaches him from its box. he's got a few weeks before the year begns again but even once he's working again he has plenty enough free time for music making. he should also get out and gig again.

'this is a box, a musical box'

it's a grey unhelpful morning while horsemouth has the windows open he's also wearing a jumper.

horsemouth has dedicated a red metal file box he found to music. It now contains all the various lyric sheets, sheet music and scores for various things that horsemouth found in the course of his wanderings (at library sales, in second hand shops and alike).

 

 

 
     

horsemouth has been playing la fille au cheveux de lin a lot (well he stretches out some bits and omits others and plays it on a slide guitar tunes sebastapol maybe he'll rename it in the manner of tomita). he's thinking about making the first thing he records. then there's fanfare for the common mule. satie's gnossienne no.1 is a bit too obvious. over the years he has made many lists of tunes to record (and indeed recorded many of the songs on those lists). there was a piece by messiaen prelude no. 2 'chant d'extase dans un paysage triste' it was very satie-like (and for this reason it works for horsemouth). but first he has to learn to use the recording equipment and to do that he needs to get it set up.

 horsemouth has proposed moving to the hills and growing potatoes, corn and beans.

'who does not at times dream of the impossible ideal of being totally recorded?'

so asks john berger in his photo essay (with jean mohr) a fortunate man - which is, like everything horsemouth has ever read by john berger, stunning. a piece of ethnography on a doctor, (the fortunate man himself) and on his patients - the poor of the forest of dean. but it has true depth - a diagnosis of the whole culture. it sits comfortably with horsemouth's reading in we the cosmopolitans (we are all together) and with his thinking about empathy (the mental attitude that makes this possible).





one of the things that is interesting about berger and mohr's a fortunate man is the way it diagnoses a cultural deficit that results in an expressive deficit in the doctor's patients. in this it is like many late 60ies books, or the early works of john borman - it resembles a bbc documentary - horsemouth can practically smell the dampness as the voiceover buzzes in his ears. later (as it searches for an ending) it begins to worry about the process of writing and genre itself - we have biographies because 'X is the famous X' , there are few biographies of the humble because people are famous for what they did and what they did prior to that (or what was done to them) is held to explain what they did later. if they never did nothing there's nothing to explain the later absence of action (and nothing to explain).

in lucio colletti's reading of the problems of the left hegelians (from hegel to marcuse) there is something of this. hegel is taken to have a radical method that (due to historical circumstances maybe?) produced conservative conclusions - the left hegelians can now surpass him. but in doing so they supplant hegel's god/ worldspirit object and they change the realm of action of the theories to the political realm. colletti tells us however that marx does not buy it.

horsemouth also read lucio colletti's mandeville, rousseau, smith which tracks mandeville's fable of the bees: or private vices, publick benefits through rousseau's discourse on the origin of inequality, and adam smith's review and juxtaposition of them in the edinburgh review. in rousseau the desire to rise above other men, and the necessity of tricking them to do so, is the motor of development and this is a bad thing - and in mandeville also, but it is a good thing, as this development lifts up man out of abjection and want it is a publick good deriving from a private vice... and of course thence to marx 'the accumulation of capital is therefore the increase of the proletariat' .

of course when horsemouth has done with the cosmopolitans (who he finds agreeable) he has to engage with the transnationalisers of empathy.  kroker (one of them anyway) - talks about not cosmopolitanism but claustropolitanism - the peoples of the world are all together but we are fearful.

bah humbug!

"how difficult it is to tell even a millionth part of the truth and how harshly one is punished for doing so." - edmond de goncourt.

so merry christmas one and all. god bless us each and every one. bah humbug. at this point horsemouth would usually be going  'having survived yet another year...' 
 ----------------------------------------------------------

having survived yet another year horsemouth is pleased to have played and recorded an album of songs with john smith as musicians of bremen, he's pleased to have released it (both online on bandcamp and as a physical cd), he's pleased to have played three gigs in this line up and a fourth as musician of bremen - combining the best of musicians of bremen with the best of his horsemouthfolk days and all in 30 minutes - and all these gigs in some kind of alignment with the heavens. he is pleased with the progress of various songs he's involved with writing and arranging (worldes blisse dirge and noah), though he really should hurry up a bit with all this. he plans to continue with it all in the new year.
horsemouth thanks the people who put them on (gertrude, tim goldie, albino).

horsemouth has blogged daily (or nearly) and continued with the promulgation of yam zombies but he has not, so far, managed to get his theoretical endeavours going again.

horsemouth has been pleased to go out and see more music this year (thanks to john clarkson mostly) in no particular order idiot saint crazy, georgina brett, the owl service, stick in the wheel, a reformed les ambassadeurs internationaux, richard skelton, the bohemianauts, pelt, richard youngs, rick tomlinson, united bible studies, aine o'dwyer, gertrude, daniel rosen, david thomas broughton, adam sherry, com(in)us, arthur brown, jonny halifax & the howling truth, tim goldie, jah wobble, various improv'ers and jazz improv'ers. (kevin davy, dreamtime etc.).

on youtube/ spotify/ i-player he made some good discoveries - judee sill, more karen dalton and robbie basho, gene clark etc. mc5, sonic'.s rendezvous band and some working musicians robert curgenven, sproatly smith.

tv wise. (not that he has a tv you understand) treme, true detective.

books? akenfield, michael jeffries - wild england, cobbett rural rides, kilvert and anais nin, diaries, john hillaby,  anna kavan - ice, albert camus  the plague, imogen holst gustav holst,  lillian hellman the unfinished woman, and a threefold cord - alex la guma, memories, dreams, recollections - marianne faithfull, the prisoner - thomas m. disch, magic hour - jack cardiff, hadrian VII - fr. rolfe. denis johnson train dreams, anton chekov letters, dubravka ugresic the ministry of pain, george lois damn good advice (for people with talent). re-reading pkd -do androids dream of electric sheep?, rousseau - reveries of the solitary walker, the lover - marguerite duras, blues people - leroi jones, beneath the visiting moon - david grubb,   ...

healthwise.  horsemouth (a vegetarian already let us remember) has reduced the amount of cheese and pastry he consumes and walked more - moving towards a term time 20 miles a week.(if only he could face the tedium of jogging).  his frozen shoulders have unfrozen and he has not been coughing his lungs up, the only downsides are that he is balding rapidly and his teeth continue to be a bit rubbish. ( but hey never look a gift horse in the mouth).

at work. he has been revisiting material that gave him trouble in his youth and (at last) being able to see the wood for the trees. he is generally pleased with the work-life balance, while his unemployed friends are being mercilessly fucked with by job club etc. at least horsemouth doesn't have this. sadly the ideology of capitalist austerity finally arrived in beachside donkeymule land (friends have lost their jobs already, pay and conditions have been cut and there may be further trouble ahead).

gentrification. housing wise the seaside towns continue to gentrify at an astounding rate ('how much?') but at least there have been some signs of effective resistance (e15 mums, new era, ASS), horsemouth's housing co-op has continued to lose housing and to lose people - the longer this particular can can be kicked down the road the better. he doesn't want the street food but (secretly) he quite likes the craft beer (motherfuckers - 'how much?' ).

horsemouth made 50 this year (he outranks you all) some people have left the party, some have arrived, some have got ill, people's kids continue to grow. he's off for a walk with his parents soon. merry christmas.

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'in my journal I have tried to collect all the interesting things that are lost in conversation.' - say the two goncourts (edmond and jules) united as one writer (as one I) in the process of 'dual dictation' . they would go out to the parties and make notes on the comments and on the bad behaviour - frankly their friends (the daudets mostly, theophile gautier, balzac, sand, zola, flaubert...) were glad when they stopped doing it (not that they ever did stop it really).

early on they give us the typical end of an evening - 6am, a friend drunk and in tears over a showgirl who doesn't love him, another showgirl semi-naked, drunk and vomiting, cursing loudly, the goncourts (drunk) taking notes (well jules taking notes on the cuff of his shirt).

they begin their journal with the coup d'etat of louis napoleon. in 1856 the read poe and recognise his genius. in 1857 theophile gautier tells them how he writes (he's under considerably less economic pressure than balzac clearly). their novel germinie lacerteux (a thinly fictionalised account of their housekeepers bad behaviour) paves the way for zola (but they themselves do not follow it up).

' a daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.'

ambrose bierce is phlegmatic about what a diary can achieve noting its inevitable self-censorship;

hoggart is struggling with the dangers of self-censorship (and, if one should succeed in that battle, of censorship itself). hoggart notes 3 kinds of aphorism in common use - putting up with things, those concerned with tolerance, belonging and charity, ones on the value of honesty, against these he counterposes the aphorisms of the state and of management 'you're not living in the real world' and the positively bloodthirsty 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' .

horsemouth is positively a fan of 'you can't make an omelette...'. this is because he is a sucker for the romance of development, he feels a positive moral need to respond to the pain and suffering of the world with some concrete action, one that is not just a repetition of eschatological revolutionary pieties (a series of token tantrums and shock slogans). or at least he used to and it is still part of his mental make-up.

strangely meszaros is concerned with the 'there's no alternative'/ 'in the real world' refusal of debate also - pointing out that if this were the case (as politicians often say) there would be no point in electing politicians as politics would have no meaning.

the hoggart book (the way we live now) is wise and sane and a little stodgy.  horsemouth was pleased to read clinical wasteman (in 2012 piece on mute) praising capitalism for its impersonalism, attempting to escape the black hole of 'community' and 'authenticity' - in capitalism (for all that it is evil) we are granted at least global rather than local opportunities. while many would welcome a retreat into community, a world reduced to a human scale, it would still be a reduction. hoggart points out that many 'community' activities are in fact often staffed by the middle-class and yet intended to make provision for the poor and so do not demonstrate community but its division.

confessions of the r(ev)eal

so horsemouth is back reading beneath the visiting moon by david grubb - he had it lent out until just recently in a fit of prosyletising. horsemouth doesn't do poetry much - he should do, he admires its concision, but he doesn't - he needs the stealth and seeming directness of prose. it is subtitled an english childhood but for horsemouth his time as a psychiatric nurse or indeed meeting the actor who is supposed to play him in the film of his life (horsemouth can't find any other reference to this film anywhere) or his proposal for 'memory photographs' in prose (and the blank pages he leaves for you to do this) are just as interesting.

one hundredth post

horsemouth's morning routine involves getting up, opening the curtains, turning on the computer, putting the coffee on, brushing his teeth (and perhaps getting dressed - depending on the weather)... and then he checks facebook (he may check his email or he may listen to the 5.30 news on iplayer either before or after doing this depending on his level of inspiration). it is there (or rather here) that he diarises whatever he did or thought about in the previous day or dreamed the previous night. he finds this form of digital confession very useful - similarly the ability to show people what he's been listening to, to invite them to listen to it too. but there is a sense in which it grants the control that prose gives to his actions - he can chose when and where to tell people these things, and they are not obliged to respond by social convention, they can elect to respond.

there's a problem with doing this in the morning in that this is often the sunniest part of the day (and horsemouth likes the sun).

of course in the old days one would have just gone round someone elses house for a cup of tea and chat - he does that a bit these days (friends on the block and that) - but it's a bit more like last of the summer wine than the likely lads. another outbreak of the bookgroup would be good.

horsemouth should get on with writing his gert ledig tribute - live from the social housing trenches of east london, he should do some more work on his singing and playing, and then of course (sigh) there are more books to be read. soon horsemouth is back at work - he's already taking boookings.

on our nevsky prospect everything is also, once again, made elsewhere. they will take us off to crystal palace, once again.

horsemouth invites you all to the musicians of bremen bandcamp page which even includes a free download of musicians of bremen's  cover versions.

now read on...

'I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect.'  - andre gide (last words).

horsemouth is proposing a little fiction (collectively authored). will people bite? he needs to go get a copy of a gert ledig book - here we have an omniscient god's eye view of everything but one that stays with one character (and even goes inside his or her head) but then when they meet another character the worldview hops into that characters head and away they go - chain letter/ pass the parcel/ video game. this works well for warzones and characters at the end of their tether or beyond it. it makes the world feel like a vast senseless and malevolent  machine, like being inside a dardennes brothers movie, and it makes it easy for people to co-operate on writing a piece (hopefully). fiction will allow us to telescope events together.

horsemouth proposes that they thinly fictionalise their own struggles, conflicts etc. - stay with what you know. 

horsemouth's brother's kid plays a lot of shoot'em up video games - once you have seen an enemy (or an ally) they become highlighted and can be seen through walls. this probably helps reproduce the effect of being able to hear them moving about or perhaps it just makes the actual experience less random, makes it seem more like it makes sense and is logically satisfying. the character even continues to see for a limited time after their own death and the death is replayed (horsemouth suspects for these reasons). and then the character is off - reborn into this world of endless conflict once again. (strangely horsemouth's brother's kid seems in no hurry to become a buddhist). 

today horsemouth will probably finish off all that is solid... he's also dipping into the oxford book of death (dj enright) which has a part of the ressurection at cookham as its cover. currently horsemouth is a little squeamish about the topic (death not resurrection)  - he hasn't played the reverend gary davis's death don't have no mercy recently because truly it doesn't (and neither does life), he liked (and will probably steal) the following stanza,

'life's too short for worrying.'

'yes, that's what worries me.'

origin unknown. 

'a curious document this journal'

the second character in unforgiven years by victor serge (daria) keeps a journal;

 'a curious document this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes of people, events and ideas, a poem constructed of gaps cut from the living material, because - since it could be seized - it could not contain a single name, a single recognisable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past, a single allusion to assignments accomplished... no expression of torment or sorrow (this was for the sake of pride), no expression of doubt or calculation (for the sake of prudence), and nothing ideological, naturally for ideology is the sludge at the bottom of the pitfall... the construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely towards some undefinable and secret fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation...'