horsemouth in the wild

sounds like howard is starting off his mixcloud golden glow mix from this date in 2022 with the cocteau twins and then manaha do carnival. (good cover photo to this too! with lots of howard's drawings)

tomorrow horsemouth is back on the diary rota. 

phew. it's the day before and horsemouth has done his tasks for the day (excepting rolling the waste bin down the drive and feeding and locking up the chickens this evening). 

tasks make horsemouth grumpy (he never likes to be observed when he is doing them). ok he's going to nip outside now and feed and lock up the chickens (for their own protection you understand). there's a moon up in the sky but it is not yet full. (beaver's moon friday)

hmm. just saw marlowe chan-reeves in shetland (series 9 episode 2). well done dude. this follows on from seeing django chan-reeves in van der valk a few years ago. 

horsemouth watches very little tv with his mum now that the internet is available but he does find himself bored (and boring) at the moment. 

similarly he's not reading much. in theory he has victor serge's the conquered city and the diary of the reverend william poole on the go. the victor serge is great (the little horsemouth has read of it). 

in the morning he will go down to the bottom of the drive to get the bin (after he has fed and unleashed the chickens of course).  thursday night bell-ringing. saturday the new washing-machine is coming. sunday horsemouth's brother comes to visit. 

it's the morning. horsemouth hasn't been down to the bottom the drive to get the bin yet but he has fed and unleashed the chickens. 

he's been trying to catch up with his reading on the decarbonisation side of things. there's a mancom monday with a necessary vote by this point horsemouth will be back in the wen. he will be up in the wen until the friday (he'd like to go up earlier and stay longer but he thinks he may be needed back in the wilds). 

halfway to the solstice

accessions diary 

11/11/24 - dore abbey - ten squid- the diary of the reverend william poole, the: perpetual curate of the parish of hentland & hoarwithy

'... (at) the end of 2021 a victorian diary, quarter-bound and with marbled boards, was donated to a charity shop in york. among the handwritten entries, the words ‘hentland and hoarwithy’ were noted, enquiries made... . covering the years 1857–62, the diary was identified as belonging to the reverend william poole – the wealthy curate responsible for transforming hoarwithy’s chapel of ease from ‘an ugly brick building’ into one of the county’s loveliest and most surprising churches...' - logaston press website.

so far, in horsemouth's reading, he is an interesting fellow, and horsemouth will be sharing some of his diary entries as they come up. 

 'so much is brilliant about the digital age' 

the FT discusses music. their aim? to break out of the spotify algorithm of machine driven recommendation. people have never liked this idea - that their tastes are predictable. 

their recommendation? more mixtapes, more playlists. 

yesterday horsemouth's mum has some business down at the village hall - they sat around in the sunshine by the abbey (which wasn't so bad). today  

today horsemouth is up (ad so is the sun). it's a cold morning (it has been down to 4C overnight assisted by clear skies). it's going to be a sunshine-y day.  horsemouth has a decarbonisation meeting to attend on zoom (or the equivalent) in the afternoon. at some point he has to make a journey into ewyas harold. sunday horsemouth's brother arrives for a visit.

horsemouth is halfway to the solstice from the equinox  (approximately speaking).   

diaries and notices for a monday morning

 so how are we doing in the 'embers?

sunday howard was out at the big empty pub doing some reading. 

diaries and notices.

- eleven kilvert diary entries for the rest of november and the tale begins of the death of his aunt maria kilvert of worcester (and of her funeral and inheritance). but nothing new now until the 15th. (1870)

-  edmond de goncourt (1870) nothing now until december the 5th

- two entries in kafka's  diary - the 19th and 21st of november and then nothing until nearly the end of the year. (1915)

- thoreau has quite a lot to say (from november 20th a trip to philadelphia and new york)

- similarly with john clare's letters and sinyavsky's letters to his wife and anton chekhov's letters - they are either undated or the correspondence is too broken up to make a good story. 

14th november there's howard's last golden glow before he moved on to distant sounds. horsemouth is listening to it now as he types this. it's the sunday afternoon, he's a little bored, but he's already been for his walk up on the common (up over to the house at st. john's well). ok he should get out for a quick wander before the sun goes down.

'in 2020(4) the pattern for the next few years will come into being.' 

so remarked horsemouth at the end of 2020(3). now we are moving towards 2020(5). 

horsemouth has made a premature review of the year (he was surprised how much music he has seen).

he saw alula down play in malvern and (backing jacken elswyth) play in camden.  charlie parr and two white cranes  in hackney (thanks mike), lou and leo and the water chorus at waterintobeer (thanks martin), ruth crawford-seeger 'three chants for women's chorus' at the QEH foyer, minny pops (thanks iona), triple negative, evan parker and bill nace, the renaissance music festival in  crystal palace ( killercorp, concrete age, die|kur etc. thanks enza), stick in the wheel and laura cannell at cafe OTO (thanks howard).

his mum has some business down at the village hall monday midday. horsemouth has a decarbonisation meeting to attend on zoom 3-4pm tuesday afternoon. sunday horsemouth's brother arrives for a visit.  

films, books, gigs, events october 2024

 books

- love's work gillian rose

- a voice from the chorus abram tertz

- station eleven emily st.john mandel 

- an article on the gig economy (the new yorker) and the google books excerpt of band people (franz nikolay)

- the selected letters of anton chekhov lillian hellman

-  susan sontag, on photography.

-  a somewhat ungenerous article in the LRB on soviet era dissidents (sheila fitzpatrick)

-  tom howlett, ITV central news 14th october 2024, housing campaigners outraged as birmingham city council plan to slash affordable housing targets. 

- fragments of hannah arendt's poetry 

- kilvert's diary, the goncourt journals, kafka journals on a hiatus 

films

- doomsterism from paul kingsnorth

- andy edwards ten nails in the coffin of rock

- the coming storm (R4) 

 - annie briggs interviewed (R4)

- zodiac (1976) - a whodunnit solved with astrology

- roger barnes has released another video about his life in a small breton fishing town

- outlaw bookseller, book-

gigs none 

events

visit london, mike visits (soho, hazlitt house, natlib), john visits (the william morris museum to look at some of the japanese prints upstairs, self-storage location), witness  protesting school-shildren from st. dominic's, quick wander with TG, visit howard's and the big empty pub. ewyas harold floods, 

did horsemouth drink the kool-aid? (nipples on the thumbnail)

horsemouth is a bit stuck. he has no (inspiring) quotes for the day (there's a gap in his writer's diary coverage). 

facebook have removed one of horsemouth's posts 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_at_the_End_of_the_World on the basis that; 

You shared this on your profile 28 Jan 2023

This goes against our Community Standards on nudity or sexual activity

horsemouth is glad to see that facebook are against wikipedia articles on obscure portuguese novels (even if they are somewhat indelicately titled in the portuguese).  

ok on reflection horsemouth thinks he's bang to rights but they have restored his content (for now)(to be continued). 

fairplay there are some very small nipples on the thumbnail - that people would only be able to see for sure if they clicked through.

six years ago horsemouth was playing a solo gig at waterintobeer (thanks martin).  he's up on a stool, he's got the hummingbird copy guitar out and the slide (horsemouth guesses satan your kingdom must come down). 

five years ago he was rehearsing for the gig with peter, paul and enza. 

 as horsemouth noted here three years ago now; 

'you find horsemouth at a transitional moment and it's not just that he is stuck between years... the work has ended and so the necessity to stay in the seaside towns has ended. on the other hand horsemouth has no firm real plans to move out. he has a somewhat enlarged library to potlatch for starters...' 

here the sun is breaking through the fog. monday a sunny day (allegedly). it's a dry week coming up so maybe the chance to do something in the garden without having the mud stick to your boots. horsemouth has unleashed the chickens. the visiting sheep munch contentedly. 

 

'certainly they themselves do not count on being read, the pleasure of writing itself is their only motive'

'most young  novelists present their thinly veiled autobiographies as fiction 

(I, for variety, present mine as neuroscience).

thanks to the internet, there is even a new variety of continuously updated on-line memoir sometimes called the blog... thousands of authors simply write their diaries onto web page for the rest of the world to read...' - alice w. flaherty, the midnight disease: the drive to write, writer's block and the creative brain (2004).  

'certainly they themselves do not count on being read, the pleasure of writing itself is their only motive' - emil kraepelin, german psychiatrist on graphomaniacs, as quoted in the midnight disease.

it was the night before the blogpost and horsemouth saw some fireworks (he assumes it's the neighbours). 

one two. buckle horsemouth's shoes but he's grumpy. 

he's not sure why. everything worked. 

well, the washing machine has died. its parts are made no more. it will go to join the great scrap heap in the sky (well under the ground actually, ok no some of it will be recycled horsemouth would like to believe).  

they can get it out of the kitchen that is. 

and that's horsemouth's worry - the kitchen is too narrow to just roll it in on a trolley, it will have to be lifted (worries horsemouth)- this is horsemouth's latest paranoid fantasy (and, more importantly to horsemouth, there's getting the new one in too). 

horsemouth guesses the repair man wouldn''t have stood there in the kitchen and suggested its replacement if there was no hope of either getting the old one out or getting the new one in (other people must have narrow kitchens). 

what worked is getting the repair man out to call it.  

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

'recording improvised music – freezing a performance which happens once and then is gone – depends on one’s being able to count on the likelihood of something important, some unique combination of elements worthy of being captured and frozen, taking place...' - ed michel on the recording of alice coltrane’s february 1971 performance at new york’s carnegie hall.

andy edwards (the ex-grump of prog) mentioned the above track (good isn't it).  andy is much exercised by collaboration seeing it as the way to unify people's audiences and thus grow the bands. he has seen the different political economy of music available in dance music and hip-hop and wishes to offer the advantages of this system to performing musicians. record sales are dead, gigs are pretty much dead, facebook (and the other platforms) control your ability to communicate with your audience. how is our poor scholar to make his living?

here a grey day and horsemouth has finished his coffee. 

each phase of nature (mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and gardens)

'each phase of nature, while not invisible, is yet not too distinct and obtrusive. it is there to be found when we look for it, but not demanding our attention. it is like a silent but sympathising companion in whose company we retain most of the advantages of solitude, with whom we can walk and talk, or be silent, naturally, without necessity of talking in a strain foreign to the place.' 

- h.d. thoreau, a writer's journal, 8th november 1858. 

today and tomorrow are the anniversaries of the recording of central park's mosaics of reservoir, lake, paths and gardens by wadada leo smith and amina claudine myers. it was recorded in 2021 at sear sound, new york. 

horsemouth is up early (well the same time as usual actually). he is waiting for the washing machine repair man (or his phonecall even - ok he's due to be arriving 10am-12 am). 

and here in schadenfreude corner

mike amesbury mp (the one who repeatedly punched a disgruntled constituent) has been charged with s.39 common assault. usually this sort of behaviour results in a community service order not a custodial sentence but it all depends on what happens when he comes to his trial.at magistrates court.  

a custodial sentence would be the trigger for a recall petition.

even if he is given a custodial sentence  he may still appeal (because this is not a typical outcome for s.39 cases). look at the claudia webbe case (largely cleared on appeal) for how long this sort of thing may drag on. 

and of course all this time mike is continuing in role as an mp and taking that mp's salary. 

horsemouth is making slow progress with the bell ringing but he's making progress.