laberintos de perplejidad

I read Órbitas. Tertulias like a rendez-vous manqué, a desencuentro in which, alas, estabamos condenados a no coincidir. Grasping it is similar to the author’s attempt at grasping his dream: se mueve casi sin límites por el mapa…de tan nítido el sueño se ha vuelto borroso. Am I dozing off out of genuine fatigue, or is Orbitás itself the somnífero? As is often the case when reading blurry phrases—Pero me gusta el dark. Super Dark. Recontramosfostrofólico—I’m never sure whether their impenetrability is a formal characteristic of the work, or whether it owes more to my limited access to the Spanish language. In the case of Mirko Lauer, it is probably both. Reading the experimental cut-ups of a writer like William Burroughs (whom Lauer apparently frequented and with whom he seems to share a fondness for peyote) is work enough in English. But reading his Hispanic imitators, or in this case Czecho-Hispanic, is work and then some. ¿Enjoyadísimo? Hardly. Quite frankly, I’d rather be watching Burroughs eat lunch naked; or, like participants in a nautical tertulia, be drinking vulgar but honest wine; or be buying second-hand clothing in London; or even be reading Dé Hache Lawrence.

What is uncomfortable about this is that it subverts any confidence I might have in making a plausible aesthetic judgment—No te entiendo Mirko—, making it tempting to fall back on the prestige generated by the cultural economy—¿Primado en París? It must be good—to make it for me. But that would be too easy. I’m as susceptible to the aura of Parisian cultural mandarinism as the next guy, but not a slave to it. So I will only risk a question: Could Oribitas. Tertulias be surfing the same waves as Lauer's poetry, those cargada[s] de dioses varios que va[n] llevando [al autor] hasta [su] propria parodia?