'there is not enough time for me to write all the letters that I would have wished to have written.'

'there is not enough time for me to write all the letters that I would have wished to have written.'            - walter benjamin's last postcard (given to henny gurland on this day in 1940).

'this passage, a scoop out of a seemingly endless and relatively homogeneous stream of detail, somewhere in the history of writing.' -  fredric jameson on karl ove knausgaard.

the way horsemouth has edited this quote distorts it. to quote him more fully jameson is saying he wished 'to situate this passage... somewhere in the history of writing' that this passage of knausgaard's  is 'a scoop out of a seemingly endless and relatively homogeneous stream of detail' that is not already somewhere in the history of writing' but needs to be placed there by the critic.

but having topped and tailed this quote horsemouth just liked the look of it. 

fredric jameson has gone to join the choir invisibule. 

but he has (hopefully) done enough to help us situate knausgaard's work in a history of writing already.

horsemouth has two books called a history of reading with him in the wilds - one by alberto manguel, the other by the less well known steven roger fischer. but he doesn't have one single unique book that claims to be a history of writing. 

he has instead various books on writing in various guises - alice w. flaherty's the midnight disease (on writing, writer's block and graphomania), creative writing: education, culture, community on creative writing courses and students, the ethics of life writing (ed. paul john eakin) on the perils of biography (and perhaps autobiography) and erich auerbach's mimesis: the representation of reality in western literature. he has terry eagleton's literary theory - who will soon be writing jameson's eulogy in the LRB. he has zeraffa's fictions, he has eco and carriere's this is not the end of the book. 

he has also numerous diaries and journals and collections of letters from writers (rilke, kafka, chekov, montaigne, rousseau, abram tertz, bunuel (with the assistance of carriere), madame de sevigne, durrell, jefferies, clare, kilvert, the goncourt brothers etc.) - for how else would the diaries and journals and letters have been produced if the writers of them were not writers? 

and how would these books have been produced if their writing had not been kept. 

horsemouth's  current reading in this field is diana athill's memoires of her childhood (and very good they are too).

and yet he is often stuck for something to read.  

horsemouth has read volume one of knausgaard's 'autobiography' (if that is what it is) but jameson has only caught up with him on volume six (the main preoccupation of which is the effects upon his friends, family and himself of writing the previous five volumes).  

here the usual pattern there is the golden hour of the dawn when the sun shines horizontally from the horizon but soon enough it is up in the clouds and the wait for the rain begins. horsemouth has been out to feed the chickens and water the tomatoes. the big question is will the chicken feed last out until the weekend. 

he has remembered what kind of a day it is - it's a wednesday. it's a deliver some eggs and take the bins down the drive kind of day.