'this book helped us pass the time....'

'a wild and rainy night and the rain poured all day so that the clyro court party could not shoot and played battledore and shuttlecock in the hall. gentlemen and ladies.' 

kilvert at a guess.  yes kilver 24th november 1870. another entry tomorrow and then a break until the 28th and the bredwardine bridge flood story. 

horsemouth's brother has returned two of horsemouth's favourite books to him.  

they are practicalities by margueritte duras and christ stopped at eboli by carlo levi. these are both books written by people in lonely circumstances - levi in exile, duras over winter. judging by the bookmark horsemouth's brother only read the first few pieces in practicalities. 

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

but the bookmark is from a church in east ham. it is more likely that howard or horsemouth put it in the book (more likely horsemouth), it is possible (whisper it) that horsemouth's brother has returned it to him unread. 

the book begins in italics with a description of how it was written before the named chapters begin. and yet this untitled introduction makes it onto the contents  page as 

This book helped us pass the time      1, 

the rest of the chapter titles are not in italics.

practicalities - this is a very influential book for horsemouth. 

look at what he is doing now. it is a rainy day, he has reached for some books on the bedside table, he has pulled out a plum (the duras), in it he finds his method and his object, to write about some topic as it comes into his head, to edit it and then to publish it (in the modern delusion), such that 'none of the pieces deals with a topic exhaustively'.

it differs from duras in that the words are not spoken or sounded. they are not transcribed  they are merely typed in. whole sections are seldom edited out (though they may be copied and pasted to another location in the post as a whole, or saved for a later post).  

two years ago horsemouth was reading Édouard Louis' a woman's battles and transformations.  a book he had found in the 'on-the-way-to-aldi' bookbox in a nice slim  hardback edition. 

you see horsemouth has moved this last paragraph from near the start of the piece (from before when he knew he would be writing about practicalities) to the end (when he has decided that the post will mainly be about welcoming back his copy of practicalities). nonetheless he doesn't want to waste his researches on what he was reading way back when. 

'when you're writing, a kind of instinct comes into play. what you are going to write is already out there in the darkness. it's as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of tenses; between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing...' (the black block, p.25)

it was this tangle of tenses, one horsemouth often gets himself into, that made him realise that what duras and jerome beaujour are doing here, and what horsemouth does when he blogs, have  similarities.

today a rainy day.