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Monday, September 29, 2008
TWIN LAKE
Arve Henriksen
Strjon
Rune Grammofon : 2007
[Buy It]
MASK
Radicalfashion
Odori
Hefty : 2006
[Buy It]
OTHER'S GAIN
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
Lie Down in the Light
Drag City : 2008
[Buy It]
"It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."
-Jorge Luis Borges, from "Borges and I"
It's the other one, it's Howe, that things happen to. I sit on my porch in Durham and pause, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the portcullis of the house next door or a hummingbird alighting on a chestnut tree. News of Howe reaches me through Technorati and I see his name on an indie rock blog or in a bio line in a poetry journal. I like detuned pianos, handmade books, postwar minimalism, the taste of coffee, and Borges's prose. The other one shares these predilections with me, but in an ostentatious way that converts them to the label tags of a blogger. It would be too much to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Howe may contrive his pop criticism and that pop crit subsidizes my existence. I do not mind confessing that he has managed to write some passable words, but those words cannot save me, perhaps because the best part no longer belongs to anyone, not even to the other one, but rather to the English language or to commerce. Otherwise, I am destined to be free, definitively, and only a few scraps of me will persist in the other one. Hand over fist I am yielding him everything, although I am well aware of his perverse habit of obfuscating and overwriting. Spinoza held that all things long to preserve their own nature: the word processor wants to be a word processor forever and the CV, a CV. But I must live on in Howe, not in myself--if indeed I am anyone--though I recognize myself less in his reviews than in his poems, or than in the revelatory glissando of a harp. In recent years I have tried to free myself from him and I passed from technology- and process-based texts to poems of metaphysics and intuitions, from reviews of music to reviews of books and video games and films and visual art, but those games are Howe's now, and I will have to conceive something new. Thus my life is running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other one.
I do not know which of us two is appropriating this page.Labels: brian, homage
posted by Brian
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