as usual for this time of year horsemouth's misanthropy is exercised by the 'boxing day hunt' - horsemouth repeats that this is not a hunt but a piece of pest control probably not most efficiently carried out by 40 poshboys on horseback wearing red coats and acting as cheerleaders to a pack of hounds - blowing horns, flattening crops, all noisly and unspeakably in pursuit of one uneatable small dog sized scavenger. people who hunt with guns for food will be upset that their past-time is derided as 'cruel' by the 'huntsmen' - who hold that being ripped apart by a pack of dogs is virtually painless and will doubtless be recommending it to the national health service as a means of euthanasia without delay. horsemouth's experience in the countryside is that a farmer with a problem fox will shoot it (end of).

this 'hunting' has been 'banned' but in such a mealy mouthed way that there have been only 9 prosecutions for breaching the act (and only 3 of those have been successful) - it's hardly a stalinist jackboot we are seeing here. in a poll recently conducted by the countryside alliance (a worthy organisation disgustingly hijacked by posh pro-'hunting' single-issueists) 67% of people said they thought the act wasn't working and 49% called for it to be repealled. to horsemouth this is evidence that 51% of people freely polled either have no opinion on or wish the act to remain as it is - and at very least 2/3rds of them think the current legislation needs toughening up. 

instead an yet another 'independent' regulator is being proposed.

humans, you do not need independent regulators you need the laws you have democratically elected your parliament to make enforced. the truth of the matter, for our american friends, is that here we are seeing class warfare conducted under the guise of animal welfare. 

this 'hunting' is an expensive hobby - a luxury product - but if the trickledown from this were the only thing sustaining the rural economy then horsemouth's parents would have starved by now. you want to help the rural economy - build some houses so that people can afford to live out here other than the retired, reopen railway lines so people can live out here and still get to work - this would be a rural economy. this would be proper work for the so-called countryside alliance. instead they are determined to retain the countryside as an impoverished theme park for the rich so that they can carry out their acts of animal cruelty. given the huge tracts of land owned by the rich there is already a de facto hunting ban in this country anyway.  

horsemouth has argued that if they want to hunt animals on horseback that bears should be re-introduced. 

last night horsemouth watched the sting (with his parents) - particularly enjoying the scott joplin music - of course learning to play the blues scale very fast (as so many banner ads on myspace offer horsemouth) is not going to help you understand this music, as john fahey's musicology thesis proved charley patton (and by extension other bluesmen) did not play the blues, the joint stock music they played was much more interesting. people would simply call a song a blues if they were stealing or reworking the music and didn't want to pay for it.

yesterday horsemouth went to hay-on-wye (a very pretty country town) that shows the possibility of a rural economy in its concentration of 2nd hand bookshops. horsemouth bought anatole france's L'Île des Pingouins (1908) or penguin island that shows the problems that occur when a short sighted saint begins baptising penguins. he also bought ismail kadare's three elegies for kosovo (published in france as Trois chants funèbres pour le Kosovo (1998)), victor segalen's paintings  (that he failed to buy on a previous visit) and a three-volume collection of the letters of pushkin (including some to turgenev).

horsemouth always thinks his parents house has been purposely built and sited to avoid sunlight, further horsemouth's parents planted fast growing fir trees all round the house, in a few more years it will be set in a wood. it has small windows, is set into a hillside and the kitchen (the most used room) is at the back of the house. in the early afternoon the sun sets over the back of the hill  (behind some more fir trees and a wood) from then on it is only a matter of time before the darkness of night.

horsemouth thinks he should do some work on vampires seeing as his work on zombies has gone over so well. horsemouth has enjoyed wandering around in the snow and mist.

he listened to the film programme and a show on letters to writers.

coleridge  and wordsworth's debt to german philosophers is well known, so much so that de quincey accused coleridge of plagiarising schelling(but forgot to name the work plagiarised), in a later footnote he insists that he is not taxing him with plagiarism from an imaginary work as lauder did with milton (but still fails to name it). what is less well known was that government agents were sent by pitt to spy on them and  heard them (in the aftermath of the french revolution) converse of 'spy nosey' - who was in fact not the man sent to shadow them but the dutch philospher baruch spinoza. horsemouth is enjoying reading 'the lakeland poets' but will soon have to hand it over to his dad as a christmas present. horsemouth particularly likes the description of the lakes themselves - a landscape so sublime it kills again and again in the opening chapter. 
 
the book was printed in edinburgh by charles and adam black in mdccclxii - that's 1862 to the likes of you and me. it's worthless though because someones had the spine off.

horsemouth can't make out if there's a connection to blackwood's magazine (but it would seem not). blackwoods was a tory magazine that published many of the romantic poets ... and a lot of horror fiction (including, horsemouth believes, margaret oliphant), it was satirised by edgar allen poe and eventually published conrad's heart of darkness. de quincey wrote for it,  he notes the 'gloomy excesses' of the hatred for illigitimacy in scotland and directs the reader towards the two volume 'life of alexander alexander' who late in life was sheltered by mr. blackwood.

you may remember horsemouth's praise for the man who declared email bankruptcy - but he was gratified to read in de quincey of napoleon's first consul bourienne - letters he dropped in a dead letter bureau - saying that events would answer 9 out of 10 of them, the remainder (regretably) would have to be dealt with, but in a few months time. only this last part did colerdige not comply with.

ok - to be honest with you horsemouth has only listened to the first of beethoven's late string quartets (by the juliard quartet) but he plans to listen to more.

this year horsemouth has failed to put up his christmas single 'in the bleak midwinter' written by christina rossetti - he pleads pressure fo work.

horsemouth's human alter-ego paul helliwell is doing the 'I'm a published author' dance. his free copy of proud to be flesh a compilation of writings by the estimable mute crew has arrived wrapped in cardboard (indeed it was too big to fit through horsemouth's letterbox so he was forced to go and collect it from the so-called royal mail). it includes his piece on zombies - who entered teh english language through southey. he has started on de quincey's recollections of the lakeland  poets which affectingly enough begins with the death of parents in the snow, the children huddled round a peat fire waiting for their return.

ok - he's off on a final book buying spree then he's off to the countryside to hide out for a bit. he may find time to post a further missive from home - connection permitting.

as far as horsemouth can remember solstice were an early 80s prog band - while horsemouth saw here and now and hawkwind a few times (and the enid), he can't remember ever seeing solstice. interestingly enough they're not on wikipedia - having (it seems) been displaced by a band of the same or similar name by the ex- sore throat guitarist (horsemouth always liked their version of 'walking in the air'). horsemouth had 'coaxed out from oxford' on cassette - if he remembers correctly 'so glad you're here' is just a ska-ed up version of 'so glad you made it', he used to have the split LP with alternative tv and was particularly fond of the 'twinkle twinkle little star' song.
 
on this the shortest day of the year (or is it something to do with the declination of the poles and the moon halting in its progress to the north or south) horsemouth has again been practicing his talking people down from rooftops skills. horsemouth is aware that some people have taken to reading his missives looking for stockpicker hints and as a guide  to the stock market values and board room battles of beachside donkey rides. he cautions against this - almost all of this is senseless chunter designed to avoid real work and too oblique to be reassuring.

horsemouth is almost done reading kafka's diaries. what next? coleridge on shakespeare maybe. he spent yesterday sorting out his books - russians and (former) east europeans to one set of shelves, hugo, balzac, zola, maupassant, stendahl to another, gothics, romantics and decadents to a third, several boxes of musical or theory influencd books. horsemouth begins the chore of collecting them together by theme - though this is a pointless task (does meyrink's  the golem  go with the east europeans or the gothics?).

horsemouth listened to this show on music written by composers from beyond the grave and transcribed by mediums (or indeed , posthumously released).  in rock music he can only think of alice coltrane's claims to be channeling stravinsky and frank marino's  claims to have been visited by the ghost of jimi hendrix during an acid trip. frank marino was in mahogany rush - who also, strangely, also turn out to be canadian, like rush (thenselves) and indeed anvil. for the life of him horsemouth can't remember what their track on axe attack the k-tel heavy metal compilation he owned as a child was, black sabbath did paranoid, ufo did doctor doctor, aerosmith did sweet emotion (which has remained a favourite with horsemouth to this day), judas priest did breaking the law, iron maiden did running free, ted nugent did cat scratch fever, but the mahogany rush track... it's vanished into the aether.

for more conventional kinds of influence horsemouth thanks eric burden for showing him the close connections between leadbelly and nirvana - to horsemouth's mind this makes the white stripes sound much less radical - and wikipedia for pointing out that flying lotus's great aunt is... alice coltrane. horsemouth is indebted to franz kafka's autobiography for showing him that alfred kubin was a close friend of kafka's ... which would probably explain the kafkaesque atmosphere of what horsemouth thought was his only literary work (though wikipedia has disillusioned him) produced duing a prolonged period of artists block - the other side.

whilst babysitting horsemouth used the time between naps to read e.a.poe's the purloined letter - much has been made of this by althusser and lacan and god knows how many others  - but to horsemouth it seems to offer the same advice for hiding things as nadezhda mandelstam's  hope against hope  - if you want to hide something, hide it in plain sight, the secret police will be too busy assuming you are being devious and dismantling everything to bother looking on the kitchen table.

on the anniversary of its first invocation in a christmas carol, horsemouth is beset by the ghost of christmas past who yet again wishes to show horsemouth where he went wrong.

on the positive side a distracting project appears to have come to fruition. Yay!... but it sneaks in under the radar because of the overstimulation of recent excitements.  horsemouth should make some phonecalls and attempt to do some horsetrading over the weekend - but not today - tommorow is the day for communal endeavour. perhaps monday horsemouth will be able to engage with the full transformative potential of it.

'one advantage fo keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised and admitted by you, but which you'll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope  or peace from such an admission.' horsemouth is reading kafka's diaries and derives reassurance from the familiarity of some of the placenames on kafka's walks round prague - he could visit them.

horsemouth liked this article on mute - particularly because the author is writing a book about witold gombrowicz.  

yesterday horsemouth babysat his neice but it was too icy to make a foray to the library so she watched rather too much children's tv. horsemouth has lent his copy of 12 dreams of dr. sardonicus to sean, who expressed an unexpected enthusiasm for it when it was mentioned. it's reasonably sunny out - horsemouth may have to make an exit... but on the other hand his connection to the immaterial realm being unusually direct and clear is encouraging him to stay in - horsemouth is reminded of the frustrations experienced by w.b.yeats ('a sad old demonologist' as crowley described him) and doctor dee in their efforts at communicating with other realms, yeats kept a diary of the experience. 

'the parties of the hassidim where they merrily discourse on talmudic problems. if the entertainment runs down or if someone does not take part, they make up for it by singing. melodies are invented,if one is a a succes, members of the family are called in and it is repeated and rehearsed with them. at one such entertainment a wonder-rabbi who often had halluscinations suddenly laid his face on his arms, which were resting on the table, and remained in that position for three hours while everyone was silent. when he awoke he wept and sang an entirely new, gay, military march. this was the melody with which the angels had escorted to heaven the soul of a wonder-rabbi who had died in a far-off russian city.

on friday, according to the kabbalah, the pious get a new, more delicate soul, entirely divine, which remains with them until saturday evening.

on friday evening two angels accompany each pious man from the synagogue to his home: the master of the house stands while he greets them in the dining room; they stay for only a short time.'

horsemouth feels incredibly reassured - he's been running around like a blue arsed fly and finally he's run into someone who isn't a process server. now begins the bit where the next 3 months work gets negotiated - by doing the small things horsemouth hopes that things can be moved forward. of course this requires the acceptance that bygones are bygones - that what there is in the future is worth being prepared to detach from the wrongs of the past. the way forward for beachside donkey rides lies in prosaic quotidien things like staff and management training - not in a grand drama and courtroom scene.

edgar allan poe went to manor house school in stoke newington - he wrote a doppelganger short story set there. today horsemouth was finally supposed to get on with his homework essays - but everything was conspiring against him - nonetheless he feels he has turned a corner by asking for an extension and so freeing himself from the stress and strain he'd been under, by re-arranging his bedroom. now all he needs to do is buy a hole-punch, arrange his workfile, read it through a bit and he can get on with work. he feels a bit of RSI in his shoulder.

maria was round last night and they played through estoy sentado acqui and la pistola y el corazon - horsemouth was looking for help with the pronunciation - maria sang a spirited version of la bamba.  both maria and howard think horsemouth has been doing more work on his songs lately - but it's an illusion caused by horsemouth focusing more on songs to sing rather than versions of debussy piano tunes that take forever to learn and can only be finished by multitracking with the computer.