'suddenly he started speaking about marburg...'

'suddenly he started speaking about marburg. this was the first description of the town and not of the school which I had heard. later I was convinced that it is impossible to speak of its antiquity and poetry other than like this, but at that time this enamoured description made to the clatter of the ventilator fan, was new to me...'

good morning people (and what a beautiful morning it is). horsemouth just heard birdsong. 

today horsemouth had planned a comparison of boris pasternak's writing about the medieval city of marburg and m.john harrisons fictitious city of viriconium. 

eventually he (boris) gets there,

'I stood craning my neck and breathing hard. above me towered a dizzy height on which in three tiers stood the stone maquette of the university, the town hall, and the eight hundred year old castle. after my tenth step I ceased to understand where I was... the streets clung to the steps like gothic dwarfs...'

the city is the lead character. pasternak tells us more about the city than he does about the personality and appearance of his beloved. like viriconium it is a city with a high city-  a city of philosophy and history and science, and a low city.  

a little while later he is in venice. but venice is well walked and written already. 

horsemouth has found a podcast where a neophyte is introduced to the music of hawkwind album by album. his judgements are sometimes utterly wrong-headed (and then sometimes shockingly perceptive).  

there is (of course) something deeply wrong with a band who can lift longfellow's a psalm of life  for the verse of a song and then add a chorus of 'assault and battery of the human anatomy maaan!' to it. (and not in a good way). 

thinking about it the post silver machine history of hawkwind it is one of the supression of lemmy - someone with talent and the sidelining of nik turner (his songs are forced down the batting order and eventually he is ejected from the band), it is also the professionalisation of hawkwind - simon house, alan powell (actual musicians). 

on hall of the mountain grill lemmy is allowed a song lost johnny,  he's allowed to sing the b-side of the single kings of speed  (er. a track you may have heard of called motorhead) and you can hear him fully formed already, he can sing, he can write and what he does is fully stamped with his personality. but this must be prevented from happening again. curiously the band has lost focus and will not play to its strengths, but in some ways it is doing its best work. 

still. nobody can sing well. 

it will fall. 

from quark it will reform around calvert's lyrics.  

the podcasters have (of course) sabotaged their own work by only looking at part of hawkwind's work (the studio albums) much more of the tale is in the live albums (they've already had to admit space ritual) and in the singles (silver machine) and the compilations (roadhawks in particular), the books, the side projects. 

how will they retain the will to live throughout the years of endless regurgitation -  the 90ies, the noughties, the 2010s? does our genial host really think there is much in this worth saving from annihilation's waste. 

they are excellently slapdash (failing to notice the literary antecedent to the track steppenwolf in herman hesse's identically named novel for example) and formulaic. 

horsemouth is planning a trip to the bank but he's also noting the covid uptick (and from quite a high level) and the imminent return of schools (that great driver of sociability and infection). horsemouth has gone all howard hughes about these things (er. except when he's drunk). 

 

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