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Anyone who in recent years has been paying attention to what’s going on in the public sphere, the media, and even in one’s private life will perceive in the title of Emma Winsor Wood’s brilliant book The Real World a curl of irony. That is certainly present—and for good reason. The main instrument at work in what one might call the perpetual modernization of the cultural environment is reality production, the generation of commodities and simulacra and the fostering of a taste, and even a desire, for them. Emma Winsor Wood has made herself literate in the vernacular of this “real world,” watching its ongoing commodity melodramas, witnessing the dramatic unwinding and rewinding of streamed realities. And she has done so while conducting a wry and surprisingly happy flirtation with cynicism. That happiness is fostered by Wood’s sense of the absurd as in many ways glorious, as for example in the magnificent final work in the book, “Westworld,” a foray into a landscape of triumphant pathos and ridiculous sublimity. The hilarity may be worth the trip. Most of us don’t know how to deal with the reality of the unrealities in which we find ourselves living. Wood shows us one way to do so—and it’s a great one, one in which we can be real.

— Lyn Hejinian

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