‘this remorse, I should start my preface from here’

as it turns out produced by Ric Ocasek RIP (and one of the best records ever)


a few nights ago horsemouth failed to go out (bad boy) but he did watch perry henzell’s the harder they come - one of the the three seminal reggae movies (the others being babylon and rockers -in horsemouth’s humble opinion).

in italy post war italo calvino finds the people changed, emboldened by his (brief) time as a partisan he writes ‘a book born anonymously of the general atmosphere of the period’. he notes that people had ‘a mania for narrating their experiences’, a re-birth in story-telling, even shading into folklore, even the uncommitted he finds changed. .

years later he writes a preface for it - one full of remorse for its distortions (‘this remorse, I should start my preface from here’). in the preface the partisan tales of another writer (beppe fenoglio’s a private question) is substituted in to stand for his story. 

but this neo-realism that is really a neo-expressionism is not where calvino’s genius lies - pavese speaks of the fairy-tale quality in his writing and calvino becomes the author we know.

horsemouth is often afflicted with remorse (his sins are small but numerous) - it creeps up on him when he is insufficiently active. in the harder they come ivan the gunman is seemingly not affected by remorse - at every stage he wants to be paid the full value of his work and that is what all the interlocking rackets (religion, law, property, the music industry, the ganja trade) are designed to prevent.

in the day horsemouth went for a walk round the marshes at one point - he saw a tree that had been cut down and then been lifted up by new grown branches from its roots (like some kind of art installation). he read a little (italian writing today, penguin 1967) in the back garden in the sun and (of course) farted about on line.