horsemouth has just walked home in the beautiful dawn light coming from the east across the marshes (having spent the night guarding a friends property, leaning out of the window and growling at passers-by, rushing up to the door barking, this sort of thing).
yesterday (after a visit to check that the property was secure) a day of lounging in the garden and reading at casa horsemouth (the builders next door are strangely absent). he has found a decent pen that works too, after about a year of not possessing one, having formerly being reduced to a large scrawl with an orange laundry marker.
he has 'borrowed' a copy of susan sontag's at the same time and is misreading it.
in this book the voice writes of her mother's dying (in the forward) but it is the daughter writing (horsemouth eventually worked out). we realise we have been reading an account of susan sontag's death (but many deaths are so similar that we did not at first realise it).
and then horsemouth realises it's not her daughter but her son. the line 'so in this writing, let me be one of those admirers, and not a son...' this (at first) horsemouth read metaphorically and without comprehension (and pressed on).
sontag planned to write on aphoristic thinking 'as future publication of her notebooks will show' (krauss, adorno, benjamin, cioran...) but death overtook her. she is great company (she writes well) and she keeps good company - pasternak, rilke, tsvetayeva, dostoyevsky, tsypkin, sinyavsky...
pasternak, rilke, tsvetayeva correspond '... angelic conversations. nothing to teach. nothing to learn.' but when tsvetayeva is added the whole thing blows itself apart, and then after rilke's death reforms itself. 'if you were alive this is the letter I would send you today.' writes pasternak to the dead rilke in safe conduct.
on death you become your admirers (as auden wrote of yeats apparently). even death becomes his admirers. or maybe all except for death. for only death does not die. (horsemouth is fond of folk death, a cowl wearing, scythe wielding harvester of the living).
tsypkin (the archetypal writer for the desk drawer, for the future) and sinyavsky were to meet (but then sinyavsky was arrested and revealed to be abram tertz). tsypkin (the son of an unpublished writer father) is eventually published but his book (summer in baden-baden) is lost again (only to be found in a charing cross road second hand bookshop by sontag).
she shows you a beautiful memory palace where each writer has their place and gives you just enough of each writer so that you want to have more. for horsemouth it sketches out a project of reading (summer in baden-baden, safe conduct etc.)
today horsemouth goes to make music round howard's.
he had planned to go direct from where he was staying (but then the temptation to blog first and rethinking which guitar to take overcame him). he aims to travel after the morning rush. while the weather is good now it is due to piss it down after 5pm.
howard is reading pierre clastres account of his time with the guayaki indians (as translated by paul auster). this is another book that is nearly lost and only survives by a miracle. horsemouth remembers dave social control quoting fitzgerald's translation of omar khayyam 'one moment in annihilation's waste'.
horsemouth goes to make music. perhaps to record it. to attempt to leave some survivals behind him and to attempt to survive through them.
friday the seventh anniversary of the second ever musicians of bremen gig, sunday the sixth anniversary of the release of musicians of bremen volume two. a weekend of rain but perhaps after that a decent august.
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