all the good times are passed and gone (beggars with dreams)

so what does the future hold?

'I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I am not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself.

or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riff raff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories.'  - fernando pessoa, the book of disquiet. 

pessoa's book - cobbled together from fragments after his death - is a perfect urban work. we have a map of the low town in lisbon, a workplace, a rented room, cheap restaurants to eat in, characters who seldom leave their neighbourhood (this is their virtue). but pessoa's heteronym bernardo soares (the character who is supposed to be the writer) dreams of a life elsewhere and after (but not very convincingly). 

fahey week and basho day are over for the year (not that horsemouth did much to celebrate them).

fahey, basho, pessoa (and all his heteronyms) enjoy an afterlife because they made art while alive (and now they are gone and all we have is the art they made, and sometimes someone finds more of it). this is what has happened with robbie basho, liam barker made a film about him and because of this his old guitar, his unreleased recordings and his unreleased live recordings have come to back to life.

and elsewhere you have the (allegedly) silent masses (as ranciere would note, only 'allegedly' silent). 

so (horsemouth enjoins you) make art while you can. 

in parallel with the pessoa he is reading john stewart collis's the worm forgives the plough in particular the second part of his second book down to earth, the wood. here collis is clearing some woodland for folklorist rolf gardiner (who is famously dodgy as horsemouth has remarked before). 

'having opened the gate of labour I had suddenly stepped inside the world and could see the objects with fresh eyes.' remarks collis in his first book while following the plough. what makes collis unusual is that he writes about these experiences (and that people wanted to read them).

saturday afternoon a zoom beer with howard (seen here in microcosm) 

and with horsemouth (seen here in macrocosm).

there was some discussion of aztec camera  but not much discussion of books (as far as horsemouth can recall).