Thanksgiving Is Ruined

The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

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April 29, 2007
 
what hooked me*

I knew that I had to walk out of the bookstore with the used, $2, paperback copy (Grove, 2nd printing, 1978) of Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, when I turned to the title page and saw the following notation inscribed in meticulous, black felt-tip handwriting:

"The hallucinatory effect derives
from the extraordinary clarity
and not from mystery or mist.
Nothing is more fantastic ultimately
than precision."
Robbe-Grillet
(on Kafka.)
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth's Sequel to History       sources the passage to R-G's For a New Novel. She provides a somewhat fuller version of the passage.

To add to the used paperback's air of mystery, the upper corner of the front matter's "about the author" page shows the following notation in the same meticulous hand:

C.N. SIDNAM
SEPTEMBER 1978

[?]



* one       of       an       on-going       series