'today I was walking beside the railway line near passy station when I saw some men and women surrounded by soldiers. I plunged through a gap in the fence and found myself at the edge of the road on which the prisoners were waiting to be taken to versailles...'
the paris commune has fallen and the government forces are busy massacring, interring or exiling the defeated communards. the communards respond by killing 63 hostages. the massacre that people know about, the one at pere-lachaise cemetery will happen tomorrow. goncourt is making his rounds. somewhere in the city maxime du camp (flaubert's mate) will be making his rounds too.
'no one knows the exact number of victims of the bloody week. the chief of the military justice department claimed seventeen thousand shot.' so wrote prosper-olivier lissagaray, who had fought on the barricades during bloody week, had gone into exile in london, and was writing soon after the events. later he will claim 20 000 in paris and the the surrounding countryside. the bodies were originally buried in mass graves in the parks where they fell, roughly 7000 were eventually re-interred in the public cemeteries.
'20,000 killed in the streets... lessons: bourgeoisie will stop at nothing...' lenin will later remark.
maxime du camp (flaubert's running buddy) investigates (in his les convulsions de paris). he comes to an estimate of only 10,000 (but even so).
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it's a grey day. outside the workers are unloading building materials from a lorry. they've blocked in one of the neighbour's cars while they do it who is remonstrating (because presumably they need to get to work). ok they've got the lorry moved.
next door the downstairs kitchen has been removed. the foundation for the new back wall has been poured. the upstairs flat's kitchen is supported on props. the steel lintel to support it has arrived and the hole has been made in the party wall with the next next door neighbours to support it. the new extension is being built out pretty much to the boundary lines of the garden.
next next door is a very inspiring conversion of a house like horsemouth's into four two bed flats (up into the attic, down into the basement, extended out back on more than one floor) but (as sten pointed out) it took almost a year to do. horsemouth thinks of all the additional members the co-op could house if it adopted this strategy.
but then he laughs at his own stupidity to think the members would ever agree to it.
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horsemouth's analysis of the upcoming changes in university education is flawed. he had focused too much on employer staff pressures, changing in working habits (zoom lectures and the like), and foreign student numbers. he had forgotten that most of the money comes from the government in the form of student loans and as such is directed by the government's ideological approach and its fear of mounting unpaid student debt (or at least that is the alibi).
'we know something is coming and that it’s going to be bad. we just don’t know what it is yet,' says one vice-chancellor.
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like horsemouth said earlier it's a grey morning. he's a little stuck for things to do. his routine is boring him. horsemouth is onto series 3 of lone wolf and cub. he has worked to defend the peasants not for his usual 500 ryo (a lot of money clearly) but for a bowl of rice (claiming that each grain must be worth at least a ryo because it incorporates the work of the peasants).
as horsemouth is a completist and an archivist he is showing you a track by the second incarnation of his band that was on a compilation. it doesn't totally do it for horsemouth (but it sounds better than he remembered it). later they recorded a better sounding version (and had some mixes of it). a while ago horsemouth was contacted about this track by a fan of it from norway/denmark (wow).
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