I Ben Lerners Transcription besöker berättaren Harvard Museum of Natural History med dess samling av blommor och frukter i glas, skapade av Leopold och Rudolf Blaschka. Det är som en hel estetisk filosofi inbäddad i de här två korta styckena:

We entered a large room full of dark wooden display cases containing thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom, but also models of fruit in intricate, perpetual decay: strawberries turning ghostly with mold, peaches collapsing inwards on a branch, leaves curing at their edges. (I loved the names of the diseases on the placards, and read them aloud to Anisa as we moved among the specimens: brown rot, soft rot, blue mold, stony pit, pear scab, fire blight, leaft spot.)

I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn't quite believe that this moth orcchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. (That I'd recently read about the firebombing of Dresden in one of my classes with Thomas, seen slide of the ruined city, added another layer of pathos to the brittle flowers.) I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaces them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instans and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by "unspoiled" mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touched or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child's game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I'd call this "fiction."

Uppdatering: vid sidan att man fick lära sig lite om vilka personer som kan ligga bakom Thomas i Transcription – Keith och Rosmarie Waldrop, förutom Alexander Kluge – så förekommer också scenen från museet i Maggie Millners recension hos n+1:

Distinguishing the world from simulations of the world, the virtual from the real—it’s a tough job for anyone, let alone for those of us who spend our lives writing texts in the service of “expression” or “creativity.” When your livelihood is language, it becomes almost impossible to tell where experience ends and representation begins. And when you’re a writer famous enough that your own work intervenes on the culture in a significant way, and changes the material and interpersonal conditions of your existence—well, you can go ahead and forget about separating art from life. Seen in that light, the instability of Lerner’s prose is not just a stylistic choice but also a painstaking effort at mimesis; the more perplexity we feel when we read it, the more accurately it reproduces the endlessly recursive experience of being a writer (or at least the kind of writer Lerner is). Here’s a telling sentence from his introduction to the 2019 reissue of Rosmarie’s novel, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter: “For a poet, ‘realism’ is at least as much about the reality of the work itself, its status as a made thing (a ‘machine made out of words,’ as William Carlos Williams put it) as it is about the vividness of the world that the words denote.”