the inauguration of british summer time

both duras and sartre are stuck with their childhoods. wartime diaries is a little disappointing - the stuff that is recorded for the first time here is better written (and so more convincing) elsewhere, the cookie-cutter kernels of wisdom designed to enable each fragment in the notebook to be self-sufficient do not work, and cannot until they are excised and the fragments made whole. their lives could not be more different - sartre the bookish child of alsatian grandparents, duras the white trash colonial girl gone bad.


with the rolling back of horsemouth's sickness (he's been ill with a filthy cough for about a week now) came the return of his quotidian anxieties. realistically, when horsemouth had a fever, the shivers, a raging cough and a week long headache he could not be expected to consider politics and music - but he has just picked up the guitar for the first time in a week and so his 'duties' cannot be far behind. he tried out the latin riff for tv eye on the resonator (following iggy's vocal emphasis) - this would be a companion piece to don't fear the reaper as cuban son. of course horsemouth should really hurry up and commit more of his music to recordings - he's done some nice things but really he's no further forward than when he was forty - or at least, crucially, he has no evidence to demonstrate that he is.

the sun has moved its way through the block opposite and now sets beyond it's furthest edge (shining into the northernmost recess of horsemouth's flat) this happened sometime around the inauguration of british summer time (horsemouth was adrift in time spending as much of it in bed and asleep as possible). horsemouth once awoke in what he took to be the early hours of the morning only to discover it was 9.30pm at night (only to realise it was really 10.30).

every cough says to horsemouth remember thou art mortal and proclaims unclean unclean to every creature (with a heart and lungs) in earshot.

one of sartre's schoolfriends bernard dies - and almost immediately his double walks into the classroom - the teacher (in shock) asks him his name - paul nizan -

 'nizan was the most obsessed: sometimes in center of the city, he would see himself as a corpse; he would get up, his eyes swarming with worms, grope for his round-brimmed borsalino, and disappear; next day we would find him drunk, among strangers.'