'the diary I let people read' (mail art)

'... my written diaries are private; they form a closed document of my world and allow me the distance to analyze it. 

my visual diary is public...'

- nan goldin, the ballad of sexual dependency, new introduction, march 1996.

well it's a rainy grey morning in the wild (when horsemouth writes this) and it will almost certainly be a rainy grey morning in the wild when you are reading this. 

yesterday a brief email exchange with colin (just to check how things are going). 

horsemouth's mail art collections (a preliminary survey)

following on from a recent suggestion on a comedy show, that instead of reading through old texts and emails on the bus you should bring a shoebox full of old letters, horsemouth plans to make an itemised list of his mail art. 

there was also a post on substack suggesting that the whole internet, mobile phone, email thing had been a dreadful mistake and that we should bring back landlines, letters, postcards and cassette tapes.

horsemouth thanks howard, rob lawson, TG. there may be some actual post that he's forgotten (if so please remind him). 

in addition to the three letters shown here horsemouth also has two books annotated by howard - millstone grit by glyn hughes and practicalities by marguerite duras. 

horsemouth has many more CDs, covering letters and poetry chap books from rob lawson. 

here's a selection. 

horsemouth also has a (small) collection of his friends other artworks/ comic books but as these were not posted to him they cannot be included here. (those are the rules as far as horsemouth understands them). 

here, out in the wilds, a frosty morning. horsemouth is off to the abbey in a bit. 

'that most wretched and dreary of towns'

buck curran wanders round bergamo with robbie basho's 12 string (in honour of stefan basho-junghans) on this day in 2023. 

it's a 13th. a saturday the 13th in 1872 but still not a good day for kilvert nonetheless. 

'I missed the 12.25 train from hereford to hay and had to wait three hours in that most wretched and dreary of towns. I felt fit to hang myself...'

kilvert returns to clyro from langley on the 8.42 to swindon. his hat box gets lost and he telegraphs from the gloucester cloak room after it. he thus misses the train from hereford to hay and has to wait 3 hours for the next service. 

in a grump he walks into town and buys a book to console himself - summer on the lakes by american transcendentalist margaret fuller ossoli. (interestingly enough she is a relative, an ancestor, of buckminster fuller the architect). 

on the 20th of january  kilvert writes to the station masters at gloucester and paddington inquiring after the hat box. he is heartened by the possibility of compensation.  horsemouth will let you know if it reappears or if he gets compensated (if kilvert mentioned it again, if cromer (his editor) allowed it in). 

kilvert would have a similar wait for the bus service today. seems there are two services - one every four hours and the other... horsemouth can't be arsed to wait for the website to load. there's even a service on a sunday (funded by the welsh tourist board). these pass within 4 miles of horsemouth's mum's house (and are thus the only way of getting home from hereford apart from a cab on sunday). 

horsemouth has fed the chickens and unlocked the abbey. he's just going to nip out and bolt the chicken shed door (having opened the the chicken flap in the door).  his mum will be off soon to get more chicken food. 

horsemouth has carried on with his viriconium reading 

the luck in the head, the lamia and lord cromis, the dancer from the dance

lamia is not set in the city (viriconium/ uroconium etc.) but it is set in that most familiar of settings, a city so ruined it looks like countryside. 

soon enough it will be all gone again. 

is horsemouth a doomster? does he think that net zero and all such measures are just a fig leaf, destined to fail, that the rich have a death drive that is overpowering their rational calculation for survival?

kind of no. he just thinks it's an accident of history. there are some forces one way, there are some forces the other, and our current (failing) trajectory is the result of this. 

essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry (hungry, despairing, hopeful, all at once)

'the plague is difficult to describe. it had begun some months before. it was not a plague in the ordinary sense of the word. it was a kind of thinness, a transparency. within it people aged quickly, or succumbed to debilitating illnesses... the very buildings fell apart and began to look unkempt, ill-kept. businesses failed. all projects dragged out indefinitely and in the end came to nothing.' 

- m. john harrison, in viriconium.

'this week the high city can think of nothing but the barley brothers. what they wear, where they go, what they do when they get there, all this is suddenly of paramount interest. the most vexing question is; where do they live?... I do not encourage such speculation.' 

- ashlyme's journal  in  m. john harrison's in viriconium.

a novel. a journal within a novel. later within the novel, a book of reminiscences. horsemouth is reading in viriconium (having read a young man's journey to viriconium). viriconium is every city and thus it is not one city in particular. it's also every travel destination rue, strasse, plaza, canal, lime walk and a location as if translated the terrace of the fallen leaves, the plaza of unrealised time. 

'the plague permeates all our decisions like a fog.' - ashlyme's journal  in  m. john harrison's in viriconium.

horsemouth has brought in his copy of leopard II a collection of many foreign authors in translation - lampedusa, magris, saramago, and many russians. 

today (as it will be) rain and the start of horsemouth and his mum's abbey duty. the seasonal average seems to be 7C by day, 3C by night, and rain. it is the night before and horsemouth is listening to the rain. 

'audsley king seems to observe all this from a dream. her expression is terrible: hungry, despairing, hopeful, all at once.'  - ashlyme's journal (started on a new page) in  m. john harrison's in viriconium.

soon it will be over. horsemouth will probably read the other tales in the book. 

following the death of bob weir horsemouth has been thinking about ripple by the grateful dead which reminds him (in part) of  I am a pilgrim covered by the byrds. 

'I am a pilgrim and a stranger

travelling through this wearisome land

I've got a home in

that yonder city, good lord

and it's not

not made by hand...' 

'and the thrushes singing like mad...'

'the air early this morning was as warm as the air of a hot-house and the thrushes singing like mad  thinking that spring had come.'  - kilvert, kilvert's diary, 11th january 1872. 

on the 13th kilvert returns to clyro (with a 3 hour lay-over in hereford because he had missed the 12.25 train to hay - but hey at least there was a train to hay). 

possibly zoom beers with howard later. (possibly an egg delivering walk).

'the plague zone had undergone one of its periodic internal upheavals and extended its boundaries another mile. I would care as little as anyone else up here in the high city if it were not for audsley king. her rooms above the rue serpolet now fall within its influence. she is already ill and I am not sure what to do.' - from ashlyme's diary in m. john harrison's in viriconium.

a very neat set-up there. 

'viriconium is all the cities there have ever been.' - audsley king, reminiscences. 

here (in the wild)  it is sunny (but not very warm). freezing over the night (and then raining tomorrow). horsemouth is enjoying the keith jarrett album spirits - this is very much a home-made album (which is the thing horsemouth likes about it). 

'these tapes were made in my studio in new jersey without an engineer and without anything but cassette recorders. they were recorded during the month of may–june 1985 with no purpose other than allowing them to happen; filling a need. the music was not recorded with the intention of release to the public. during the month or so that the project lasted, I would go into the studio every day and "make" something... since I could be in complete control I avoided controlling anything (including the recordings themselves).'

he's just found a basho interview from the night before the bohn gig on the british forces broadcast service (so he'll be commenting on that soon) and a piece by george orwell about working in a bookshop. 

early on in the interview there's an interesting section on basho's creative process, he will be playing a song and have recorded it but after a while he will be 'open' enough to realise that the song needs changing, an additional section will occur to him and its full and proper structure will be realised. 

'why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?' (a sea-change)

'why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?...'

'the sea is like memory. however lost or forgotten, everything in it exists forever...'

- two quotations from a dialogue in prisoner of the coral deep by j.g. ballard from the short story collection the day of forever (panther science fiction 1967)

these two stories are early ballards. the simple tropes of surrealism are still present. 

in the title story of the collection,  the day of forever,  the earth has stopped rotating and the hero has moved to a deserted town on the border of between night and day, that dream/ dreamless state - ballard quotes the painters delvaux, chirico, ernst, the composer webern. 

the next story prisoner of the coral deep seems to echo something of this speech from the tempest. 

'full fathom five thy father lies; 

his bones are coral made;

those are pearls that were his eyes:

nothing of him that doth fade,

but doth suffer a sea-change

into something rich and strange...'

- william shakespeare, the tempest. 

the book itself (the day of forever) is a trade paperback (the text on its cover all lower case).  it is small and the text size is also annoyingly small (making reading it at night difficult). 

a young man's journey to viriconium

is the story that ends m.john harrison's viriconium cycle. we are in the seedy and run down present hunting for clues for a way to enter into viriconium. what might it be like to live in viriconium?

a comedy sketch suggests that old people should take a shoebox full of letters on the bus rather than cycle through old emails and texts on their phones. (perhaps they would in some ubik type world of technological regression). 

or maybe, it is suggested, we should all just look out of the window and daydream or be bored  or even just sit there and think (again). 

a coldish morning here. 

horsemouth and his (former) subterranean lair

currently (in the wilds of herefordshire) it has snowed. but then it has rained on top of it. (god knows where it will all be later on). 

here's a photo of horsemouth pausing while moving some furniture with a friend 

this was when he was last in london at the end of september. the sun is shining. he's down to his t-shirt.  the one set of shelves was mostly hidden behind his clothes rack, its former place in the kitchen was usurped by yet another cupboard that just meant more space for things to be hoarded. it was a gift from the guy upstairs next door (it was very decorative/ not very practical). 

the two small box shelves (one of which he is sitting on) horsemouth found on the street and sawed to size for his downstairs flat in stoke newington (when he lived there). they probably date back to the nags head. these he used to store his 'mass-market paperbacks' (the little ones).  

he regrets not giving away more of his shelving now - at least he knows it has gone to a good home. 

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

as you can judge by pictures of his former room horsemouth was the absolute king at packing things into small spaces

the folding shelves (behind the guitars) went to TGs (if he remembers correctly). the shelves on the wall (built by darryl) did not (this was probably a mistake). the CDs/ books came with horsemouth (of course). the CD player did not. the oak chest stayed (he hopes people have found a use for it). various bits of kipple went in the bin. 

meanwhile his books/ CDs/ records seem to be surviving ok out in the garage he really should work out a way of getting them inside (purchasing more shelving probably or getting it built by someone more practical than himself). 

and here's sort of a reverse shot from the corner of the room featuring horsemouth with a bottle of beer. we are talking about three and a half years ago here. the box shelves are just visible above his head and to his right. as you can see it is a raised bed with space for storage underneath (this was used).  the table he's sitting next to he (kind of) regrets leaving behind. there was also a tilak coffee table under the bed (that would have been nice too)

it's was all very cosey in his subterranean lair 

after a great deal of conflict horsemouth managed to secure a decent view out of his window of green growing things (and then, as if by magic, while he was away, it was fucked). he is always reminded (when he sees it) of mole in wind in the willows.  

of course moles adventures start when he says 'oh bother spring cleaning!' and leaves his safe hidey-hole. 

last night bellringing. horsemouth is making progress. he was shown the technique for ringing down the bells at the end of the night which he will have to practice. 

inexplicable plagues

a possible yellow snow warning (which is not the same as a warning about yellow snow)

more like. rain. lots of rain. 

no kilvert (at least in plommer's selection). he is still in langley burrell.

horsemouth is intrigued by glyn hughes's account of his village millbank, a run down mill town, in millstone grit, reader's union (1975).  

'the calendar of its decay was marked by plagues...

for a year or two, quite inexplicably, many stray, or at least semi-abandoned, dogs menaced the village. one mother, worried about her children's safety, was told by police that they had no power to rid the village of its dogs until the dogs actually bit someone; but before they bit anyone, the bony, ragged dogs vanished as inexplicably as they came...

then there have been plagues of untidiness...

when a village is uncertain of its future, it becomes squalid: there is no point in investing in long term repairs.'

something similar happens in m. john harrison's fictional city of viriconium. most particularly in the third book in viriconium. 

inexplicable plagues. vague portents.

these would all have happened between 1970 (when hughes bought the cottage there) and 1975 (when the book was published). 

at this point horsemouth (in his previous life) would be off round the bookshops tying to find another book by glyn hughes to find out more information. he would have tried the second hand bookshops first (and then coughed and raided the first hand bookshops).

all he can do out here is a few desultory searches on google books and yahoo etc.

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

here rainy all day turning into snow as it gets colder. possible bell ringing tonight (weather permitting).  horsemouth is going to wander into the village to pick up the newspaper and some kindling wood. 

above further proof, if proof were necessary, that the youth increasingly have it proper shit (but don't worry there's also stuff about pensions and older people in private rentals on housing benefit).