books, gigs, films, events november 2022

books

- clark ashton smith (the dark eidolon and other fantasies)

- paul bowles (photografien) in german so can only look at photos

- a woman's battles and transformations (edouard louis)

- reveries of the solitary walker (jean-jacques rousseau)

- best sellers (brian stableford - intro)

- elizabeth broadwick (the decline of the art of book-reviewing, harpers, october 1959)

- diana athill (somewhere towards the end)

- various h.p.lovecraft

- the giant under the snow (john gordon)

- utopian communes: a bunch of poles who ended up in anahem california (in a novel by susan sontag and in local history websites)

films

- patrick keiller's london (1994)

-  massacre time (spaghetti western) 

- invasion of the body snatchers (b&w classic version)

- disappearance (1977 - featuring montreal in winter and habitat 67)

- the cat with 9 tails (dario argento)

- C4 news focus group on leveling up

- laurie lee interview

- hollies documentary

- outlaw bookseller, thrift a life/ book pilled/ the rest is politics, 

- our mutual friend (anna friel version)

- ralph bakshi documentary

- judee sill movie teaser trailer and interviews with directors

- rose simpson online book launch video 

- john fahey interviewed on WHYY radio july 25th 1980.

gigs none

events 

arrival of under gaspar's house and a night at the museum by the robert lawson trio. interviewed about refurb. visit to catastro/FILLE for recording and enza's for lunch. refuel, RIP nik turner, RIP dan mcCafferty, rose simpson's birthday, brother's youngest down to  visit.  horsemouth switches to AI driven automatic blogging.

when horsemouth said fuck it (and why)

horsemouth has just been reading about mary shelley (following the outlaw bookseller mentioning that she had written much of frankenstein while living in bath). 

on 30 the december 1816 (today's date lest we forget) percy shelley and mary godwin (the soon to be mary shelley) marry at st mildred's church, bread street, london (now the location of the 30 cannon street office building). mr and mrs godwin were present and the marriage ended the family rift.

yesterday horsemouth was asked if he wanted to work. he said no.  

he announced that he had retired from the note-taking work.

the notetaking part of the work and the working with the deaf  he enjoyed (mostly). it was more  the prospect of self-employment and the IT wrangling  he found not to his taste. 

on the IT side the work changed from a paper based operation (handwritten notes  and hand-annotating hand-outs) to typing things in on a laptop, emailing things to people in particular formats, attending zoom and teams lectures. none of these changes  made horsemouth feel he was doing a better job of supporting the deaf in higher education – in fact it made him feel he was doing a worse job. 

it finally  became time to admit this to himself and call it a day. 

in addition to this it was the increased reliance on submitting your own timesheets and (effectively) processing your own payroll via a variety of bespoke systems that finally pissed horsemouth off. there was seemingly never any training to be had to do this, like bill bruford said of playing in king crimson 'you were just expected to know'.  the analogy horsemouth often uses is the great leap forward. 

like many people the technoshock and the flexibiity required for pandemic working were the final straw. horsemouth would have carried on but the job had changed under him – it may well be that it is changing back (but it is  too late horsemouth has bolted out of the stable door). 

when the work looked like changing to self-employement there was just more of this, plus the need to purchase memberships of professional bodies, insurance etc.  and all this for less work and less regular work. now horsemouth had worked self-employed jobs before (as an addition to his main employment) - it was the face of self-employment post these later changes that put him off. 

the great casualisation was supposed to drive down horsemouth's pay and conditions and hours (in real terms) but as a matter of fact they had been declining all the time he had been working the job. the work (being insufficient to cover his costs) would have become the alibi for his universal credit claim etc. etc.  

horsemouth said fuck it. 

he can do this because he has enough to carry him for a while at least until he knows more what he wants to do.  he has some money left from the redundancy cheque he will see how long that lasts. 

today (well this evening)  horsemouth goes to a meeting of the  communal endeavour (afterwards there is pizza - possibly). thereafter in a busy social whirl horsemouth is heading out of the back door of the year towards christmas. (horsemouth hates christmas but it is the best that can be done given the circumstances). 

before and after folk music (the strike in philosophy/ thought as work)

'this was before folk music'  - john fahey interviewed on WHYY radio july 25th 1980.

horsemouth is listening to his golden glow mixes (ok he didn't do the mixes, howard did the mixes, horsemouth just selected the tracks). hopefully through the mix of jazz and folk you can  see where horsemouth is going. 

greek witches, one of those fucking terrifying ennio morricone giallo movie soundtracks with children singing, linda perhacs, pharoah sanders, popul vuh (soundtracking herzog's nosferatu)... amon duul (sandoz in the rain), robbie basho, 

horsemouth had great fun doing them but they are a substitute for him getting on with his guitar playing, playing gigs and recording. it's a shame that they are going. they are kind of perfect for long winter's evenings. apparently they will be stored somewhere they are just going to be delinked. 

today (as he types this). yesterday (when you read this – or perhaps further on) horsemouth went for a longish wander with TG. they went down to bow locks TESCOs and back through the wilds of stratford  (and westfield east). there was plenty of youth and beauty (but horsemouth was not contributing to it).

horsemouth admits to re-reading his blogs – briefly it looks like he has made some kind of literary achievement. 

the strike in philosophy/ thought as work

there is a lecturer's strike about to happen. this of course affects philosophy and non-philosophy lecturers. this kind of assumes that thought is work (if done by philosophers). but are they required not to think for the duration of the philosophy strike (in case they come up with a piece of philosophy that would be valuable to the institutions they work for while on strike)? that is the question. 

perhaps they may safely philosophise for other employers, and on projects as long as they ensure there is no leakage back that might in any way benefit their employers (this is difficult to achieve in our biographised/ social media age).

do they have to forgo reading, writing, blogging, stimulating  conversation etc. because their work is held to concern (mainly/ entirely) thought? 

a friend proposed that weed stimulated creativity and horsemouth opined that therefore striking philosophy lecturers would have to forgo that as well.  double injustice. 

what about the vaunted separation between philosophers (brain workers) and the rest of (ahem. mere tools). 

what about for other workers withdrawing their labour? (if their work is not about thought or is it that their work is  not held to involve thought). obviously almost all work involves some thought (all that is held to merely involve a skill or a trade for example). 

is this some kind of restatement of negri's  time for revolution? - on how the work day has exceeded its bounded limits and come to invade/ occupy facets of the workers life and skills beyond the workplace and the hours of work up until their human affect and communicative abilities.  now negri holds this gives the workers additional powers over their bosses - horsemouth holds that it shows the weakness of the workers that they cannot resist the bosses invasion of the daily (outside work) life. 

it is a far cry from althusser's (failed) view of philosophy as the class struggle in theory. is not the strike an attempt to provide a break in practice. 

before, during and after  68 people were turning on the philosophers of revolution, the philosophers (for their part - adorno, althusser, arendt) were horrified with the solutions the youth had come up with. ranciere accuses althusser of staging a retour a normal (a back to work) in theory, adorno calls the police to clear the lecture theatre, arendt (see her on violence) retreats into constitutionalism and checks and balances. there are philosophers who do well out of the student movement and the new left - marcuse for example, sartre, but how does their work look now? 

in opposite to the strike from work there is of course the work of the strike - the activities that the strike requires and the thoughts that come with that. 

there is a parallel with the enforced inactivity of the pandemic for philosophers (the stage when the pandemic happened independent of their thought and without their consent) and then the sudden flurry of on-line teaching activity supplanted direct face-to-face teaching. the pandemic also followed close on the heels of an earlier  lecturer's strike.  

horsemouth phones it in. he is not even working from home. he has become economically inactive and retired. he is free to think  but his thinking is not necessarily thought (because it is not sanctified by an institution - he is like the straw man  before his certification).  

two dwarf mood

 ''horsemouth is anxious and grumpy again (that's two dwarves this time, a two dwarf mood). he has to wait for a vote to be taken the only thing to do is to wait for it to be taken and to treat it like a minor matter.'

horsemouth has added an additional worry to his plate – that people won't want their houses insulated, that they won't want the inconvenience of the work being done, that they won't want the government to pay for half of it. He has 'gamed' the situation in his head where they call an emergency general meeting to call a halt to the whole evil scheme (what were you thinking horsemouth! Government inspectors! Government inspectors!)

Wednesday – management committee and vote (and maybe pizza afterwards). Thursday – another Net Zero Thursday (gas and electricity bilLs come due). Saturday possible meet up with howard. Sunday walk with ayesha and then guitar recording with catastro/FILLE. 

in a bit a wander with TG (horsemouth is still on the coffee). He types this into a textfile (the internet being buggy and unco-operative). Hopefully it will unblock at some point and horsemouth can share his wit and wisdom with you. Thereafter horsemouth is free to flee to the countryside. (ever cautious horsemouth is keen to avoid any problems with the railstrike). 

Bob calvert has his blue plaque (on a high rise). Book pilled is chuntering on about fix-up novels (where the text has been written and published as short stories and then bolted together for later publication)

another sunday

good morning! good morning!

horsemouth has made it to another sunday. 

he's posting the mini-player version of mixcloud so that when the link pops it's not too embarrassing. (soon all this will be gone. last chance  people). he's giving it a listen himself. he's listening to some kind of santoor and saxophone thing (in that indo-jazz fusion thing).  ok now we are into steve hillage's rainbow dome music. 

yesterday (on his wanderings about and at home in bed later) he was mostly reading a children's book (john gordon's the giant under the snow). today is a cloudy grey day, he has a book of ghost stories (selected by roald dahl) and the clark ashton smith on the go as well. he has edward abbey's desert solitaire cued-up and ready to go too. yesterday was sunny enough to sit out reading.

he watched a documentary on the hollies - they sang 3 part harmony (which was good practice for graham nash for when he joined crosby, stills and nash and later crosby, stills, nash and young). after the failure of their prog singe mickie most said they had moved out of their segment (and should get back to it sharpish). nash left the band and  went off to america, the rest of the band recorded he ain't heavy, he's my brother and had a number one hit with it. they weren't deep they just wanted pop hits, nash wanted to write, the rest of the band were content to play other people's material, nash was deep(er) 

ok horsemouth has had his coffee now it's probably time for breakfast (the remnants of the potato/ chick pea thing he cooked yesterday afternoon). probably  with toast he thinks. 

horsemouth is getting his head straight about the amount of pushback to expect. soon we are into december.

today he doesn't know what he is up to. next weekend is a busy one as he tries to get in all the necessary meet ups in before he is off to the wilds of herefordshire. (he wants to go early so as to avoid the train strikes - everybody has to travel so they just travel before or after the strike days).  

horsemouth and his diary-keeping habit

'I have never acquired the diary-keeping habit - mainly, no doubt, because of my uneventful mode of existence.' - journal of giles angarth, 31st july 1930 (from clark ashton smith's the singing flame finished january 15th 1931.)

ladies and gentlemen for horsemouth the golden glow on mixcloud is over (or nearly). they plan on charging (and horsemouth does not plan on paying). he is often listed as 'guest DJ' or his picture appears in the icon. it will continue on in some other form (but without horsemouth's mixes).you have 5 days left to enjoy these. 

 time allowed: 5 days.

horsemouth very much enjoyed picking the tracks. they were a bit too long to warm to as a whole. but they staked out the corner (or the area) horsemouth was intent upon working. he was listening to the transition between a guitar version of sweet earth flying by marion brown and a piano la fille au cheveux de lin by debussy - precisely and nicely done howard. 

horsemouth (as he has remarked) is keen to get the year done. after the 30th (well after the 1st another decarbonsiation thursday) horsemouth basically becomes free (well  after that sunday). he has no compelling reason to hang about in the great wen. 

stuff rolls in the right direction but it is too slow paced for him. horsemouth would like to get it done and be rid of it. the stress of wondering when someone is going to come along and fuck it all up is telling on him.

yesterday he went for a wander with TG (the sunlight was good). he went for a wander earlier on but his head was still too fucked with the stress of staying reasonable.

horsemouth and the balloon game. in the balloon game the balloon is sinking and you must chuck some historical character overboard to lighten the load (everybody argues for the significance of their favourite). horsemouth has been chucking people out of the balloon for a while now (but it doesn't seem to be doing him much good. the balloon gets no lighter. horsemouth feels no more cheerful). 

last night he retired to bed with the clark ashton smith and john hassel/ farafina's flash of the spirit - ah he thought he didn't recognise it (it has turned into a gavin bryars/ harold budd thing). he was writing his blogpost early (and is now changing a few tenses and generally tidying it up). he did this because it is fun and has a calming effect on him. here in the world of words he makes sense.

4 down, 10 to go (maybe 9) blue door

god what a nightmare! 

horsemouth was trapped in a bar at a hawkwind gig and the bar staff had lost his order (and were being surly unhelpful knaves). earlier (according to the dream) he had been working. at some point he made it all the way through someone's house to the back garden before he realised he couldn't get to the venue from there (and then, shamefacedly, had to make it all the way back out). oxford he thinks it was.

horsemouth has to make it clear  that this was a dream. 

‘where did you hear that music?... before tonight, I have only ever heard it in the spirit world.’  so said an audience member after richard osbourn after he played some of robbie basho's music. (maybe robbie is raving it up in the spirit world). yesterday was the anniversary of robbie basho playing the kulturforum bonn 42 years ago.

the meeting is done - 4 houses contacted, 10 remaining. a meeting next thursday.(cherry-ripe, cherry-ripe). possibly only 9 need to be contacted. (two flats are EPC C already - one can be insulated as 'in-fill' because the other flat in the house is being done, the other exceeds the limit on infill properties and so will have to wait. 

horsemouth forgets how tense this all makes him.

people want what they want. gawdelpus. people's default setting is that nothing must be allowed to happen, because if nothing happens then nothing can go wrong. 

he was recently asked why he still did it. he replied because it is an intriguing puzzle and made various rubik's cube motions with his hands. in truth it is because he still hasn't achieved what he wanted from it (which was to use the resources of the co-op to house more people). 

ok enough of that.  horsemouth's dream reveals frustration (in a somewhat comedic fashion). 

things are being rolled in a positive direction. that is enough. get the ducks (tasks) in a row (and the shoot them).

4  down, 10 to go (maybe 9) blue door - horsemouth's life resembles a numbers station. 

yesterday horsemouth bumped into glyn transporting a chair to leyton. they agreed to go up to leyton together and then horsemouth would raid/ add to the bookbox on the road to aldi (a copy of alex ross's the rest is noise). glyn is interested in getting back into music. it too them a while to find the chair place (a nondescript blue door - and the guy's workshop was really in the basement, and the guy who answered the door and took the chair wasn't the guy from the basement.(this is what real life is like - exceptionally messy and logically inconsistent).