PREFACE: A FIELD PHILOSOPHER WITH A CERTAIN TASTE FOR FISH, AND WHO DOES NOT MISTAKE HIS HAT FOR AN ETHOLOGY

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Notes

1 Or, rather, marvelous realists, as in Alejo Carpentier's original expression: lo real maravilloso, in “Lo Barroco y lo real maravilloso” (1975).

2 One counts no fewer than seven books of his in the past ten years, without counting the unfinished ones, and the ones that escaped; like one of his friends, Professor of Philosophy at Mistakonic University, he is better understood as a book breeder.

3 And especially those that are the color beige, with many pockets, and no sleeves (although the confusion with paleontologists might be feared, then).

4 Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, 1778, in reverse, like some Bible story read backwards by Robert Priest: “There is only one true backwards Church / Born to carry on god's curse / Face to the wall its wheels squeal / stuck in reverse // Its spiritual leader is always wrong / Everything he and all his predecessors // Ever said is incorrect / In the backwards Church” (9). Thank you Robert!

5 In this his name is to be inscribed in the long list of nonexisting, and yet real, entities, who/which have populated our consciousness, from The Nonexistent Knight (Calvino), via Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa, to Shakespeare himself, as Borges once showed in “Everything and Nothing.”