Ben Lerner Quotes
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...it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary prizes—that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal.
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On various occasions I’d said to a woman I was interested in, “I would invite you to dinner, but I can’t cook,” at which point I would hope she’d say, “I’m a great cook,” so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we’d get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything.
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My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
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But the burns were like the fingerprints of an older time—before Ziegler and his brethren decided that traditional sources of value were merely superstition. “Those thousands of generations of technical progress” obliterated ritual, emptied out all meaning, glossolalia without divinity. I decided that’s what the painted mother foresaw, that she was saying farewell to candlelight, that she knew she was trapped inside a painting addressed to the future, where it could only be, however great, an instance of technique.
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And finally, an intern pushing the metal show box: see the cow, the purple of the hide barely perceptible, blood seeping from the small holes punched by a .22, ears tagged with plastic. Shitting itself, despite the tranquilizers, out of terror at being nearly real.
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I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
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Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.
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It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed.
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Poetry: What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.
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Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.
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The chicken is a little dry and/or you've ruined my life.
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Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?
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Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
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It was like how, when he read a poem to himself, the rhymes were neither sound nor silence. Unheard melodies in the mind’s ear. The muted music of consciousness.
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There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
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I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.
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I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.
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I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.
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I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City. It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real.
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I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.