books, films, gigs, events march 2025

books 

- diaries (edmond de goncourt, kilvert, thoreau, fernando pessoa)

- we're into endgame by benedict seymour, metamute 

-  tales of unease by sir arthur conan doyle

- stuff on substack 

- archive anxiety (art review)

-  john stewart collis, down to earth

-  'bifo' befardi, quit everything (excerpt)

- FT on global warming and climate change

- rent cap proposal

-  colonel chabert by balzac 

- graveyard and ballroom (howard slater)

- GDN mipim, housing and heating stuff in general

- ted gioia music business healthy again. really? (substack)

- review of paul preciado's dysphoria mundi (art review) and follow up

- LRB, nlr, nlr sidecar

films

- ian christie documentary on 'the new babylon' (1929 russian silent film about the 1871 paris commune directed by grigori kozintsev and leonid trauberg. 

- outlaw bookseller, bookpilled

- john f. szwed, cosmic scholar: the life of harry smith (presentation)

- andy edwards, rick beato, 

- stick in the wheel interviewed by max reinhardt 

- uncanny landscape (justin hopper) interview with stick in the wheel 

- poem in a straight line (fernando pessoa)

- R4  a radio show from september 2023 on heatwaves in the south of europe

- a review of one of PKDs non-science fiction novels

- a bbc hereford and worcester show about mike oldfield's old house where he recorded hergest ridge

- martin scorsese's music documentary about bob dylan

- the robbie basho listening party (bandcamp)

- two vids by jeremy gilbert (LRB and self-promotion) 

gigs none

events

'our revels now are ended'

'it is my design to recount the singular adventures of my life. some of them have been strange and some beautiful. in bringing them back to memory it is doubtful whether I have not dreamt them.' 

- anatole france, at the sign of the reine pédauque. 

the last ever points of view

howard jacobson presents it. he talks about notebooks/ essays/ a voice (broadcast).

did he know? did he know it was going to be the last?

the title? 'our revels now are ended' 

that gavin barwell is on the radio talking about the house building targets. horsemouth has just turned it off in disgust.

(but he will have to listen to it again in a minute).  

like any of the housing ministers from that era (pickles the unfunny clown for example) he's the real murderer of the 72 dead of grenfell - on his watch the failure to learn the lessons of the lakanal house fire and implement the necessary changes was continued. 

horsemouth is in favour of building more housing but it is only in part a shortage of housing problem, it is in many more ways an affordability problem, a problem of low wages and low benefits, a problem of multiple poverties. 

ok let's try barwell again. 

barwell knows all this. 

he's making sense (ah. he's a  non-executive director of clarion, the largest housing association in the country). his talking about getting rent certainty for housing associations (following on from michael gove's 5% plus inflation effective reduction in real terms in HA rents (and thus HA incomes). barwell says this was during the cost of living crisis but really gove's aim was to lower the housing benefit bill. 

to horsemouth barwell always looks like those oriental masks from brazil by terry gilliam. 

'our revels now are ended. these our actors,

as I foretold you, were all spirits and

are melted into air, into thin air;

and, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

the cloud-capped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,

the solemn temples, the great globe itself,

yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

and, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

leave not a rack behind...' 

il faut cultiver notre jardin

well it's a nice day here. there was a plan to get the bus into the village and load up on provisions (but horsemouth always thought it was a bit foolish). 

he's been out in the garden and the greenhouse attempting to plant things. so far only the nasturtiums (13 in all) have come up (and the hellebore have survived being potted out). horsemouth is not seeing any sign of anything else yet. 

if it all works out he's put in half a row of peas, and some spring onion and parsnip seeds in the lower raised bed (now to see if they come up). horsemouth is adopting a plant-it-and-see strategy.  having taken the time to read the self-sufficiency guide more closely he's now soaking the remainder of the peas before planting them. 

for the afternoon shift he tried separating out a grown hellebore (in a pot) from some kind of a woody shrub (also in the same pot). this he could have done while listening to the 1 o'clock news (except he couldn't because it was a saturday). 

at some point horsemouth had an exploratory dig in the old garden to see what happened to the potatoes they didn't lift last year. (they are there still but tiny). 

in the evening a zoom call with howard - lots of old photos, a cat visit,  howard has been listening to autechre. he has a week to go and then it's half term for two weeks (when he hopes to get some music done). when he goes back it's exam weeks. 

here a beautiful morning. horsemouth was up at what claimed to be 7.30 (but was in fact 6.30). it will make staying up late to watch things easier (at least temporarily). 

last night he watched sapphire and steel: escape through a crack in time.  time breaks in (a malevolent force). how is a house built (from the cellar up). is the roof really raised last? 

'a ruling class which is searching for new ways of organising the economy (but can't find it).'

it starts with stuff on leftism in norway but then (about 20 minutes in) it moves onto the notion of crisis. (as influenced by mandel and poulantzas)

capitalism produces crisis - ok so it's weak because it's always falling into crisis, 

but crisis (re)produces capitalism - so it's strong, flexible. 

polycrisis - suddenly, in 2020, crisis becomes much more apparent, the ruling class start talking about it a lot.

'a ruling class which  is searching for new ways of organising the economy (but can't find it).'

unlike the 20th century (long hegemonic eras) the crisis re-appears with shocking regularity now, every 10 years or so. 

of course an economic crisis does not always become a political crisis. 

this is pretty much how horsemouth thinks about it. people expected in 2008 that the financial crisis (aka. the great depression) would cause a backlash against , consolidate resistance and possibly defeat the measures that the state and capitalism itself was going to introduce.

instead we have had a decade and a half of defeat and (at the moment) that looks like continuing. 

a useful book at this point may be hannah proctor's burnout: the emotional experience of political defeat (2024). 

here (in the wilds) a beautiful morning. 

symmetrical risk (hanging on and praying for growth)

'the powers that be are facing symmetrical risks, on the one hand they are scared of rudely awakening the population to the scale and stakes of the cuts, on the other hand, of frightening capital – i.e. themselves - with the scale and stakes of the crisis...'

- from we're into endgame by benedict seymour,  published 14th october 2010.

'often I can give the truest and most interesting account of any adventure I have had after years have elapsed, for then I am not confused, only the most significant facts surviving in my memory. indeed all that continues to interest me after such a lapse of time is sure to be pertinent and I may safely record all that I remember.' - thoreau, diary, 28th march 1857. 

of course when ben  wrote this what we were into (really) was the corporal clegg (cameron/ clegg) government. this is when the real author of our misfortunes, george osborne, got his start. thence we were off into the land of austerity and the lost decade (well the lost last 15 years really). a decade when borrowing costs were low and the economy could have been rebuilt.

but those days are now over. 

and here we are going down the long dark tunnel of austerity once again (as if no one learned anything from the last go around). 

for this time we are much further on in the process of decomposition. 

the assumption is that there is low hanging fruit to pick (there may not be).

now what we seem to be seeing is labour taking its economic cues from the OBR and announcing the cuts loudly and all in one go (to show loyal to the financial markets) - but maybe this is just the beginning of the cuts process, rather than stealth it in (as in the corporal clegg era), now the intention is to go hard from the start pleading the pressure (and unpredictability) of international events. 

it may be that the strategy is no more than hanging on and praying for growth. 

eventually (dialectically) come tax rises (we move round one dinner place in the triangle of state finances - tax, cut, borrow) - but tax rises on whom? they cannot be applied (like the increase on employers national insurance contributions) upon the working part of the population (because that would slow down growth even more). 

so where will we be by 2030?

older (for sure)

poorer (almost certainly)

paying more for gas, electricity, water and sewerage? (almost certainly)

paying more tax on whatever economic activity remains (almost certainly)

yesterday horsemouth was in yet another meeting - after he went for a walk on the common to clear his head. later he went bell-ringing (which is making progress). today a perfectly decent morning. horsemouth has sent in an email to check that various cosas or coisas are on track (hopefully they are). 

thoreau and his attempt to obtain a stereoscopic vision of events by means of writing ('this is not... a record collection')

'I would fain make two reports in my journal, first the incident and observations of today; and by tomorrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part...'  - thoreau, journal, 27th march 1857. 

thoreau and his attempt to obtain a stereoscopic vision of events by means of writing. 

horsemouth was just grumpy. 

having done a meeting (for the shhh you know what) (which went well) he was tempted by his mum to have a beer (which he did). they sat out briefly in the evening sun. then horsemouth dealt with the fuzzy head. but now he's feeling tense and grumpy - he has disrupted the usual flow of the central heating and now he worries that it isn't coming on. ok fairplay it has come on (so no need to worry about that). 

time told if he was being paranoid or correct. he was being paranoid.  

there he just went to check if the wounded chicken was ok - in a little bit he'll go downstairs and dry up the washing up. 

allegedly there's a modern gothic horror movie on at 9 on film4. horsemouth will give it a go. despite an engaging lead it's a turkey. 

'this, despite appearances, is not a record collection. I prefer to call it an accumulation of records. a collection implies some kind of organising principle and this doesn't have that. these records are just records that, if you like, just followed me home over the years..'  

advert goldmine, the music collector's magazine, featuring the guy who used to present the old grey whistle test (but not whispering bob, mark ellen? no. david hepworth).

he  discovers an album by laraaji he bought 45 years ago, he has never played it, he plays it, it is wonderful. (about 20 mins in. skip the rest they are still bloody annoying)

horsemouth is contemplating how to get his records home (and his books, dear god his books). 

the AGM is coming up (end of april) as usual horsemouth is dreading it. there's the rent rise, there's the accounts and now there'll be discussion of the thing. but horsemouth will survive, it will soon be over, he will soon be up the pub. 

'jack of diamonds...' (I'll-see-you-when-I-see-you)

diaries

there's nothing from kafka until 19th april 1916 in keeping with horsemouth's diary laws. he can't publish a kafka diary entry until that one (so that we are moving through kafka's inertia and writer's block at the speed that he is. wishing that we were in the earlier chapters where he was actually writing the stories that would make him famous etc.)

five years ago horsemouth was first introduced to remote working (and shortly thereafter he was out of the workforce). as he remarked to ben it was the paying into a pension that did it, no maybe it was covid.

'      oh, wonder!

how many goodly creatures are there here!

how beauteous mankind is! o brave new world,

that has such people in ’t!'

true horsemouth has derived great compensation from the messaging apps - last night a chat with ben (after another friend vanished), there's the regular zoom beers with howard etc. other friendships are pretty much on the I'll-see-you-when-I-see-you basis. 

yesterday instead of going for a wander on the common horsemouth went down behind the abbey and across the valley to the dore river and then up along it.

a bridge (largely used by farm animals) across the dore had collapsed (severing a foot path), similarly the banking alongside the river had been eroded making using the main footpath difficult. 

horsemouth turned back just before he reached the orchard. 

further along are the abbey dore workshouses. there has even been a book about them by a local historian. 

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

it's a greyish morning (but yesterday didn't turn out so bad). horsemouth awakes beset by memories (get away from me you mutts). 

still it means he can have coffee. 

online horsemouth discovered a rory gallagher album of (mostly) acoustic guitar songs. some of them were duets - with bert jansch, with martin carthy. here we have rory solo doing the cuckoo. 

'jack of diamonds

jack of diamonds

you're the cruelest 

card I know...'