john prine has died. horsemouth knows hardly any of his stuff. the clip horsemouth has of him singing the paradise he first starts off by talking about his hometown, about the radio, about the kind of music they’d listen to ‘country and rockabilly’. about the trips back to where his family is from, kentucky.
having read excerpts from their journals, horsemouth is reading the goncourts brothers’ novel germinie lacerteux, matter of fact he’s nearly finished (p.131 out of 170 penguin classics edition). it’s a servants gone bad novel, both the lady and her maid have hard lives but we are initially told about the lady’s in more detail. her family hides out after the revolution, living on the edge of starvation, herself reduced to a servant. every day there is an announcement of ‘the list of winners in st. guillotine’s lottery’.
this works to balance things up and not to show too much sympathy with the servant. (whose life is frankly harsh and terrible and made so by human needs).
jules (the younger goncourt brother) dies at 40 but edmond lives on to 74. there he is being sprightly and malicious and unreconciled when suddenly;
‘here ends the journal of edmond de goncourt who died twelve days later...’
they lived and worked together for 20 years, hardly ever spending more than a few hours away from each other. they would finish each others sentences, that sort of thing. together they wrote as an ‘I’, their journals ‘for the most part written late at night, with none of the laborious care which is so obvious in the authors’ novels.’ (says their translator robert baldick in his introduction).
down in pop(u)lar with howard things are moving forward.
‘kkkhhhrk. the parrot is dead. the parrot is dead. he’s sitting up in bed...’ sing the parrots in the trees. swedish greens (beautiful plumage). the world is troubled by an apocalypse. meanwhile horsemouth is more concerned with the pulled muscle in this right hand side. later he may be working. in the modern way of working.
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