rain. rain. go away.

'this book helped us pass the time. from the beginning of autumn to the end of winter.' 

- marguerite duras (and jerome beaujour) in  la vie matérielle, translated into english (somewhat strangely) as practicalities.

outside it is raining proper slate grey skies and constant fall (it looks like it's in for the day). the light is so poor that horsemouth has had to turn on the light in his room to type this and to read the notes in his diary.  everything is getting a thorough drenching and will be turned into mud. 

horsemouth is sad to see the sun go. he likes sitting in the back garden reading, with that he can make good progress on his books. 

'a novel disguised as a memoir, or a diary disguised as a novel.'

the ice monkey (m. john harrison) has gone quickly. egnaro is not the new viriconium - but it is really, beneath this seedy, grim world is a perfect world only overheard of in passing conversations or glimpsed in dreams and adverts.

horsemouth is now back with practicalities (a book of edited conversations between marguerite duras and jerome beaujour). howard has made some notes in horsemouth's copy (horsemouth did not recognise his hand writing at first). start with this he says.

'the ladies talk on the terrace overlooking the sea until dusk, when it starts to get cool.'  

perhaps he thinks the ladies of the black rocks is performable? 

later he brackets a paragraph;

'you have to move faster than the non-writing part of you, which is always up there on the plane of thought, always threatening to fade out, to disappear into limbo as far as the future story is concerned; the part which will never descend to the level of writing; which refuses all drudgery.'

this time last year horsemouth was off to rehearse for  the fall of the house of fitzgerald. this is a thing that himself, enza and catastro/FILLE did to help pass the time during lockdown. 

later he went to hide at his parents for some months over winter. he would put on his boots and raincoat and go out in the rain (and sometimes snow) up on the common (because what else was there to do).  it is the same now, it  breaks up the day. the morning is easy (because he can write). later the daytime drags. in the evening there is food to make and the tv news to be watched (or the radio news to be listened to), later either something on tv (rare at his parents) or a film/ series from youtube or daily motion. horsemouth has read less than he thought he would.

thursday morning a meeting (horsemouth has to get on with what he promised).  in the evening maybe some child-minding. saturday possibly some music (we'll see). 

a journey to the future (2034) to review somnia (the new hawkwind album). 

the hawkbinge podcast has done it for you. 

imagine if you had gone to sleep around the time of quark, strangeness and charm in 1977 and woke up to hawkwind as they are now...

the youngster had never heard hawkwind before and now he must listen to all the studio albums in chronological order and review them. but now they have sent him off into the future to review the latest album. horsemouth views it a particularly cruel experiment -there are a lot of albums, and there are (true) various phases where hawkwind get it together and produce something decent but beyond a certain point the results are dismal. the early days are strong, the lemmy years, the calvert years, hell the huw-lloyd langton years even have their moments, but then what? 

take unsomnia (the first track). the riff is not my sharona as the youngster guesses but mother sky. sorry singing dude but the vocal and the lyrics are weak, definitely  under-produced to be where they are in the mix, the distorto-guitar comes in in the wrong place, the digital keyboard sounds have not enough  character to them, the drum programming is weak. it ends nicely in some faux-floyd that's the best thing.  

horsemouth thinks the young dude will lose the will to live in about a year's time. meanwhile quark up soon, PXR5, hawklords 25 years, the calvert years, it's a good era.