Spurious has made a small error on his May 14 post, where he mentions coming by and looking through Temblor (the Language Poet anthology/journals I keep at the very end of the Poetry bookcase), Milosz, Xenakis, etc. – he says I copied Berio for him; it was in fact Henze, but the most radical and bizarre of Henze's works, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer. (Hmm, do I have the nerve to let that stand without checking the spelling?... oops, I made two mistakes, not spelling but case... and now those are corrected. Thanks to electronics.) Perhaps this is a mistake that interests only me, but – as I've spent a lot of my career trying to get people to talk about high modernist composers who aren't of the Big Three, or Four (traditionally Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, but with Berio always right behind them), and because I just weathered a slightly tiresome Amsterdam conference where Berio came up far too often, it seems worth noting...
The tricky thing: Spurious, who is as intelligent and focused as his beautiful blog shows him to be, is endlessly interested in these products of high art, of the most difficult, most complex, at times most stressful. He played me, indeed, a track by Scott Walker – 'Clara', which he mentions in his post – which was indeed an amazing piece of work, though emotionally brutal; I was impressed, but am not going to go out and buy the recording. Comparisons are of course invidious, but I can't help feeling somewhat unable to compete, both with his interest and with my own younger self, the one who collected and was fascinated by these 'higher' works. It may be just the insecurities of the INTJ (go look up your Myers-Briggs personality typologies), but I feel so unwilling to grapple with these things these days – too much of feeling tired or unwell, too much television. I read Toussaint's nastily wonderful novel Television last month, and identified with it far too much – the dangers of the sitcom...
Ah well. It's not a competition, I know that; and nobody expects me to look towards the difficult all the time. But perhaps my life would be better if I were reading Hejinian more, or even Beerbohm, and watching Friends less....
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