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If you are interested in both the mundane and glorious aspects of the presentation of the world in literature, and also in the way that literature must present itself as a part of its presented world, thereby biting its own tail --
If you are interested in the way that words sometimes operate as things, exuding mystery and dampness in their jumble, summoning up and annihilating memory, offering with one hand what they take away with the other --
If you are interested in reading fragmentary yet luminously whole passages such as the following, from Emigres:
In the language of emigres, there are three tenses: past, present, and hopeless.
Or the following, from Joseph Cornell's Operas:
Someone let a cloud into the opera house, this is no place for meteorological phenomena! we shouted, incredulous despite the suspension of disbelief that held sway, Stieglitz, however, was charmed, he spread the legs of his camera and disappeared beneath the black cloth, I shall make a series of cloud portraits, he said, his voice somewhat muffled because of the cloth . . .
Then you will be interested in owning Norman Lock's Emigres/Joseph Cornell's Operas. Two short, beautiful books for the price of one, printed in such a way that as you read one text the other appears upside down on the facing page, like an Arabic mirage.
--Andrew Wilson
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