see horsemouth's washing on the line (horsemouth hails our new slime mould overlords)

horsemouth's washing is on the line since yesterday evening (he wants to get the shorts dried before the heat comes on this afternoon). yesterday evening (after he'd watched a documentary on the moody blues) he went for a wander round. thereafter he sat and drank a bottle of beer and watched quatermass 2 (british government aids and abets alien invasion by giant slime moulds).

he spent some time critiquing an illustration by bob moran (the good reset he calls it).

bob is where horsemouth once was in a paroxysm of rage against the system except his proximate causes are different, his utopia is one of naturally controlled CO2 levels (good luck with that), functioning immune systems (well who could argue with that) and buried lockdown advice (stay home), no wind turbines, lots of children but shrinking cities. bob wants us to be ok with risk and all this is built on the buried corpses of globalists. . 

a lot of people (and not just giorgio agamben) see the extension of government power over people during the pandemic as a bad thing. their liberties were curtailed and the simplest argument against it was not to deny the efficacy of the measures but to deny that they were necessary at all ('it's just a cold. it only kills old people. what's all the fuss about? the state is only doing it because it wants to extend its power.'). 

in this they have been helped by confused and inconsistent government explanations and the government's rapid rowing back from these restrictions as soon as they could.

horsemouth views the british state as only accidentally fighting covid - it could so easily have ended up adopting the herd immunity/ laissez faire/ let rip US strategy producing even higher death tolls than the ones we achieved.  without cummings (curiously enough) they didn't have the bottle to persist in unpopular measures and were soon driving us (coughing and spluttering) back onto the tube trains and back to work.

all of this anti-vaxing  and anti-lockdown rhetoric dovetails neatly into an idea that the real enemy are globalists - people who argue for global solutions to global problems - people who now argue for decarbonisation and wind turbines. it is them who are driving up heating bills as part of their green agenda  when what we really need are more nuclear power stations, more coal fired power stations, more oil etc. (but carefully out of shot).

the globalists are viewed as planning a great reset to surveillance capitalism. of course they may as well be venusian slime moulds or V style reptiles. the point of these themes in 60ies science fiction  is not to imply that the rich are no longer human  (really) but that they are badly behaved, it is a kind of satire. the modern variety it is a bit less clear that it is satire. 

now horsemouth is himself guilty of similar thinking - he hates capitalists and neo-liberals people who seem to argue for free markets but are in fact engaged in scurfing up as much state subsidy as can possibly be achieved. horsemouth blames the rich but beyond them the whole capitalist system. 

like the jehovah's witness pictures of the peaceful kingdom the picture of the good reset  is initially appealing - it is only on closer examination that the problems with it appear. there is this  appeal to the natural as if it were an uncomplicated good (plague is natural counters horsemouth).

horsemouth types this  in his torn b-boy t-shirt (that's got to go - horsemouth has enough clothing that he can get rid of the torn stuff) and jeans. horsemouth is no longer a boy (mind you he has also never worked for portuguese social security as one of his other t-shirts claims). on the washing line are his shorts, several t-shirts and a few pairs of socks. 

horsemouth is an anti-social son of a bitch. he could have been off camping. he should have gone down to a gig in south london. he should have gone out to a friend's birthday earlier in the week. he could even have gone out to ronnie scott's and listened to jazz (but no). 

 

 

horsemouth a man of few words (but at least they fit)

in the master and margarita margarita is about to ask for the favour from the devil (thus tidying up the loose ends of the plot). horsemouth only opened it before deciding he wanted to sleep more than he wanted to read. 

with the broch he has hit p.32 - pasenow has met ruzena.

three years ago horsemouth was recording guitar parts for musicians of bremen volume four (tracks that became broadbury down, a demo for pagodas, painbirds). 6 years ago horsemouth was moving into his current abode. 8 years ago the musicians of bremen were playing only their second duo gig for TG, the headliner was a.j. holmes of the hackney empire who played a palm wine guitar set (he had been taught by folo graff of orchestre jazira - horsemouth was briefly taught by him at jenako arts back in the 80ies).  thanks TG much appreciated.  9 years ago he was recording guitar parts for musicians of bremen volume one. 

this year horsemouth is not being recorded (howard, who usually does the recording, is off frolicking in the rivers of maine - he has sent a photo). howard also sent a recording of a new song of his and complained that he was having problems making the lyrics fit, horsemouth replied that it was good, howard replied that horsemouth was a man of few words, horsemouth replied yes he was a man of few words (but at least they fit). 

typical actions of the evening

horsemouth often tells you what he is up to in the morning (when he writes these blogs). it is  less often that he tells you what he is up to in the evenings.

the days are consecrated to work (even though horsemouth is now a mule of leisure - he has been put out to pasture - he still feels this). 

only after 6pm does horsemouth relax ('his time is now his own' how ridiculous is that?).  he had watched a little of the bbc news earlier (freeview 231), he watched the C4 news (7-8pm) sat in the living room, he watched some camping videos and then some thrift a life/ bookpilled  videos lying in his bed. the guy's a comic genius, he does a review of his picking choices as a reaction video 'didn't sell', 'hasn't sold yet', 'in fact, none of these sold',  the sadder, wiser him interacts with the younger more enthusiastic him (there is some eye-rolling). 

around about 9.30pm horsemouth is replying to howard (as detailed above) -he can tell this because he's researching the lyrics to cagey cretins by the blue oyster cult (the only reference to the state of maine he thinks he's found in a rock and roll song at about 1.05). 

yesterday (day) horsemouth walked over to the supermarket in the fields  to buy coffee (four miles there and back). this compares with the 3 miles and back over to aldi (but horsemouth was carrying a rucksack with about 10kgs of food on the return portion of the journey). after that he researched the PAS2035 standard for housing retrofit. after that he listened to the world at one and then alternated between the back garden and his bedroom to do the reading. 

it looks like horsemouth's redundancy money and work's pension taken in advance will stretch out until roughly the winter solstice. thereafter he will be digging into his savings to support his louche and lazy lifestyle. last time he tried unemployment it was  the boredom that got him. 

horsemouth (the characteristic gestures of the morning)

the rattling old sash windows of horsemouth's room make a very particular sound as he opens them up in the morning. it is because they are old and poorly fitting. for this reason (and because winter is approaching) horsemouth would like them replaced by double glazing. there was a plan to do it two years ago (but then the pandemic intervened). 

horsemouth would like to get some extra insulation up in the attic too (this is probably the cheapest and most cost effective insulation you can do his researches have revealed. 

these are the characteristic gestures of the morning. 

horsemouth's bed is in the bay of the window. he will stand up on it to unhook the curious arrangement that passes for curtains (leaving only a burgundy-ish net curtain. he will then open up the sash window more fully (it being summer). horsemouth still has an hour or two before the sun makes it into the room - his house being broadly south facing and him living in the basement. the steps down from the front hall and the tree that grows in the narrow front garden afford a fair bit of shade. 

there goes sten.

by dint of a strategically placed basket liner horsemouth can hide from his view the bit of the front garden that is devoted to the waste dump. he took some time yesterday to compose it in a more compact fashion (prior to its inevitable departure - here he jokes). 

by placing a compost bin centre to the garden horsemouth has managed to save it from being turned into a waste dump (mostly). the compost bin is simply too stinky to move and thus provides a most effective 'fact on the ground'.  

horsemouth will then clamber off the bed (which is slightly raised to permit better storage underneath it) and walk to the kitchen. he will empty the coffee pot, charge it and put it on the stove. he will then go pee or come back into the bedroom and turn on the computer. he will then remember that he needs a cup for his coffee and go and get it from the bedroom (by this point the coffee pot will have boiled). 

when he has his coffee he will go on facebook and deal with the various likes, comments and messages, then he will open up blogger and start blog-ing. this is where you now find him (engaged in turning his humble existence into prose). he now blogs everyday and posts a once-a-month books read, films watched, gigs attended aide memoire.

yesterday he chatted with john in far off porto. john is back in touch with ze and nuno (which is good) having bumped into nuno on the street. horsemouth and john exchanged book recommendations. john has an e-book copy of a history of reading. they had a discussion about the ethics of life writing - john found the improbably good recall of conversations from childhood off putting in woody guthrie's bound for glory. (horsemouth has it somewhere but has only actually seen the movie).

last night horsemouth made a start on broch's the romantic. in the day he made progress on the master and margarita - the witches sabbat is done (horsemouth detects more of the flavour of gogol in it this time around but it is both gogol's, the gogol of the city and  the gogol of the countryside). 

in the morning horsemouth did the run to the supermarket (aldi) and returned home across the fields with something like 10kgs of food (for someone who lives in a city horsemouth does live in a most rural fashion). horsemouth leans heavily into the carbs (starch). he believes you need bulk (to convince your body it has been fed), sauce for flavour (to encourage your appetite) and protein (and some fat and vitamins) for health. 

remind horsemouth he's got to phone the doctor's - they want to take his blood pressure readings etc. 

horsemouth has finished the coffee (sad to say) he will now get a bowl of museli (or perhaps some toast). later he will have the first of several cups of tea during the day. 

last night he found the guitar tuner again and got the 12 string out and put it in tune and had a quick play round jai guru and such like - on single notes it sounds most like the byrds (perhaps horsemouth will dig out a plectrum and become a flatpicker). 

today is the anniversary of the birth of maupassant (1850). it looks like a bright sunshine-y day out. horsemouth will go for a wander - perhaps to the other supermarket to get some more coffee (horsemouth lives in mortal fear of the price of coffee increasing and mitigates this by keeping a stockpile well in advance). 

ok end blog.

horsemouth blundering from one disaster to another while dark clouds gather

good morning! good morning!

and it's a bright sunshine-y morning all over the salt marshes.

last night horsemouth was derelict of his duty and failed to get out to a friend's birthday (bad mule). he'll message and apologise in a bit. he's got some kind of blockage/ ear infection that is fucking up his hearing and he's still less than fully comfortable in indoor spaces. at 7pm he realised he should be there (or at least on his way) and bottled. other than agreements to go walking, and visit pubs/ pub gardens, 

these days horsemouth tends not to wander out. 

yesterday some reading of the ethics of life writing (introductory and concluding essays) while sitting in the garden and later horsemouth rewatched some of bookpilled/ thrift a life recounting his experiences with employers and with social media. his is the poor scholar's problem. 

now horsemouth has made an effort before to write his own life or rather his own life in music. it's about ten years old (and things have moved on since then a bit) but still it is a good place to start. 

still there are a number of things horsemouth doesn't tend to talk about.

• his childhood in south wales and herefordshire
• his struggles at university
• his involvement with the squatter/ anarchist scene (and all the trouble that entailed) 
• his hopes for is first band (huge)
• his anti-nuclear activism and volunteering
• his work in the web design sector
• his time in gainful employment 

now frankly most of these (excepting the last one) were a disaster. it seems to  horsemouth that he has spent a lot of his life blundering from one disaster to another underachieving uptown and downtown. it took horsemouth a long time to find a position in life lowly enough for him to shine (even dimly) and, even there, eventually capitalism decided to dispense with his services. 

horsemouth is not especially bothered. he has become very comfortable on very little. however what is that dark cloud on the horizon this winter

now dominic cummings is a prize shit-stirrer but he's also no fool. he has said a campaign of non-payment of energy bills could be huge (with or without organisation). even working-class tories are talking about the need for a campaign of non-payment over rising energy costs when interviewed in focus groups at ConservativeHome. 

a campaign already exists with the aim to have 1 million people pledging not to pay when the energy prices increase in october (DON'T PAY UK  horsemouth believes).

the new PM (probably liz trust) lands in the job 5th september and doesn't have much time in which to defend price rises on the backs of record profits at the energy companies (that these profits aren't being made in the bits of the business that deal directly with the customers is neither here nor there). 

now that's a bit of a sticky wicket anyway the real issue is in any event CAN'T PAY.  after 10 years of austerity topped up by 2 years of pandemic the great british public can no longer afford to be able to heat their homes and eat. they will chose to eat and invite the power companies to piss off (horsemouth guesses). 

horsemouth doubt the political wisdom of siding with the baliffs against the great british public (it's not a good look). the sensible thing to do is to side with the public against the power companies and windfall tax them. 

horsemouth (as you know) is a stone chicken. he will wait and see where things go. 

it is interesting that the metaphor being used here is sleepwalking (sleepwalking into disaster) as broch used that metaphor (the title of his trilogy which includes the romantic is the sleepwalkers). 

today horsemouth will go out for a wander. 

what is the point of horsemouth’s blogging?

horsemouth is up. he's nearly finished the coffee. he started with rush and ended up with emmylou. 

horsemouth has removed from the cloud forest (back to the salt marshes) and types this sitting up in bed. bbc weather predicts grey all day until evening but thereafter it returns to the kind of weather horsemouth likes (sun sun sun  and very pleasant temperatures) 

from four years ago: 

'what is the point of horsemouth’s blogging? he does it partly as advertising and partly as confessional (though not of anything genuinely shameful as that would be too embarrassing for all concerned). he boasts to you that he’s read such-and- such but he hardly ever stops to tell you enough about it so that he (or you) could derive much benefit from his labours. 

he’s reading milan kundera’s the art of the novel  at the moment - kafka, musil, hasek, and the one horsemouth hasn’t read broch.' 

well he's got some broch now (fast forward four years) so he will soon be in a position to read it (when he has killed off several other things he has to read - not the least a history of reading, the master and margarita etc). 

alberto manguel (in a history of reading) claims to remember the first word he read. it was boy underneath a picture of a boy, the b the severed arm and body, the o the severed head, the y the legs. a similar thing happens to berlioz at patriarch ponds in the master and margarita - he has the honour to be chopped up by a tram, his head severed (and later stolen). he is the sacrifice that drives the book forward.  

he's done some reading of guy julier's 20th century design and designers in the world of art series. julier in his foreward notes daniel miller's anthropological study of north london kitchens - horsemouth has seen daniel miller lecture, it was a fun ride. 

horsemouth's (physical) diary for the year is falling apart under the pressure of horsemouth's impressions (or perhaps just the sheer repetitive strain of being put in the bag, taken out the bag, opened, written in, closed, the pen re-attached). the covers are off. pages are detaching (like the b-o-y of alberto manguel or the berlioz of bulgakov). .

the local black and white tom has just been spraying in the front garden (oi! fuck off! horsemouth yelled at it - to little effect granted).

this evening. birthday beers maybe.  in the day horsemouth has a sneaky plan to render the front garden more to his liking and to make an effort to collect in the gas and electricity money.  

this winter horsemouth suspects that a rigorous campaign of non-use will need to be implemented within the house.  a friend was noting that if people want to build a campaign of non-payment (similar to the campaign that felled the poll tax) they had better work out how to defend the poorest. it would probably be the time for those with memories of the anti-poll tax campaign to revive them. like the poll-tax the ruling class's eyes are off the ball, the people are falling into a debt and cost of living crisis of epic proportions and this is (probably) the final straw. 

'we feel the totality to be insane'

'one thing I have at least in common with kafka and musil, none of us has an actual biography; we lived and wrote, nothing more.' - herman broch

horsemouth lifts this from herman broch's  'the romantic' (introduction by milan kundera from the art of the novel that horsemouth has read before) in a penguin classics edition (2000) somewhat battered. he found it at the sally army in walthamstow opposite the william morris museum - four for £1.

'we feel the totality to be insane'  remarks broch (he'd met lukacs). it's his writing being translated that gets him out of austria when the nazis invade. he wanted a novel that wasn't  'a novel of garrulous intellectuals' but one that demonstrates the decline of values, one where instead of religion binding everything together all actions of people are within differing discourses inadequate to the task they face. 

'a pervasive culture of confession, combined with the revolution in internet-based communication, has crowded bookstores with autobiographies and biographies and generated an unprecedented amount of personal exposure... . our lives are increasingly on display in public, but the ethical issues involved in presenting such revelations remain largely unexamined.'

horsemouth suspects this is from the publisher's blurb (rather than the text) of  the ethics of life writing CUP (2004), edited by paul john eakin. it used to be true that broch, kafka, musil came out of nowhere and there was no way of finding out who they were, but soon a pervasive biography grew around them. kafka at least tried to prevent this, this was surely kafka's intention when he instructed max brod to burn everything that had not yet been published. 

and yet here we have it. horsemouth supplanting woodshedding music with writing a blog. 

horsemouth is listening to wall matthews of entourage being interviewed by NTS radio.  it's a classic moses asch of folkways story he pays them $100 to record the first album (and $300 for the second) but nonetheless they are out there and on folkways (a label with panache as wall puts it, if they recorded you you were part of history).  matthews comes from being a jobbing musician. entourage are kind of like a homemade oregon (it is kind of DIY prog-jazz). they were poor so they lived communally a lot and practiced a lot. there's a dance element as well. the albums got nice reviews in national magazines the music has escaped its time because of the smithsonian folkways/ tompkins square releases and more music has come out since. 

yesterday (as the songs have it) horsemouth watered the allotment, picked some plums and cooked some courgette, and felt virtuous. earlier he went on book hunting mission. he failed to hit the book box on the way back because a japanese girl with a dog got there ahead of him. he's debating if he needs to hit the oxfam or if he has enough extra books (and reading to do) from this mission already. last night he even gave up on the internet and went and sat upstairs and read (the introduction to the broch). 

happy lammas! happy lughnasadh!

good morning! good morning!

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee (thank you coffee making machine). 

bit of a grey morning.  

the importuning kitties have been fed. 

happy lammas! happy lughnasadh! 

we have reached the celtic quarter day midway between the summer solstice and autumn equinox (nearly). we are still in the bright half of the year but we must accept that the year is moving on. 

it is also the second anniversary of the release of musicians of bremen volume four.

the other musician of bremen will not be available for the celebration. he is away in the land of miracles and wonders and he has even sent back photos (the rotter).  horsemouth will be having an anniversary listen to this the height of their achievements (so far). 

ok horsemouth has broken bandcamps heart by failing to purchase volume four but carrying on streaming it for free like a pirate. next time pagodas/ dark was the day/  broadbury down. 

horsemouth profoundly regrets not having anything new to play you by musicians of bremen at this stage.  the way things are with work commitments and recording opportunities  you are almost certainly going to have to wait until next year. 

he would direct you over to their soundcloud where you can hear the new tracks horsemouth is working on, there are a few new tracks by the other musician of bremen (but he prefers to keep them closer to his chest). 

horsemouth was trying a lot of covers to practice his singing and to see which ones would stick. the key new tracks are no name resonate (shortly to be renamed guitar piece(for pier marton)) a duet between the resonator and the 12 string,  jai guru (extrapolated out of fragments of across the universe  but more in the style of tyrannosaurus rex) and murder ballad (the first song horsemouth has written round the lyrics in a while). 

horsemouth would be interested to hear people's opinions. 

today horsemouth isn't sure (perhaps a book hunt). he's not back to h-----y (aka. the seaside towns, aka. the salt marshes) until wednesday. yesterday a phonecall to his mum. some allotment watering. an attempt to understand the government's insulate social housing competition (peasants win prizes).  

horsemouth seems to have forced his way through the pre-lammas ginge and into the sunny uplands of a view over the city.