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The voices and laughter and birds and wind and traffic combined and separated gently.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner
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I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
Ben Lerner -
There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.
Ben Lerner -
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
Ben Lerner -
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
The electorate, Adam had read in The Economist, would grow increasingly diverse and the Republicans would die off as a national party even if something remained the matter with Kansas.
Ben Lerner
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That they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don’t even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping and some physical labor; these kids, Klaus also said, are undergoing a profound archaic regression.
Ben Lerner -
I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.
Ben Lerner -
The lie described my life better than the truth. Until it became a kind of truth.
Ben Lerner -
So much of the most important personal news I'd received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially the events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message ("Apologies for the mass e-mail...") a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multi week descent, worse for being so embarrassingly cliched; while in the bathroom at the SoHo Crate and Barrel--the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan--I learned I'd been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zucotti Park I heard my then-girlfriend was not--as she'd been convinced--pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 department store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.
Ben Lerner -
You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.
Ben Lerner -
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.
Ben Lerner
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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.
Ben Lerner -
The opposite of a truth, is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth. It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed...
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?
Ben Lerner -
Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.
Ben Lerner -
What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many.
Ben Lerner
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I’m going to kill the president. I promise. I surrender. I'm sorry. I'm gay. I'm pregnant. I'm dying. I'm not your father. You're fired. Fire. I forgot your birthday. You will have to lose the leg. She was asking for it. It ran right under the car. It looked like a gun. It's contagious. She’s with God now. Help me. I don't have a problem. I’ve swallowed a bottle of aspirin. I'm a doctor. I'm leaving you. I love you. Fuck you. I’ll change.
Ben Lerner -
I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.
Ben Lerner -
The feeling of a fiction collapsing inside you. A fiction you’d forgotten was there. Frame, crossbeams, slats, braces, joins. Revealing the softer sapwood, which is marked by candle burns. ...Jonathan holding both of my hands under the table, one of the first times we’d really touched. You must think I’m a lunatic. No, I think it’s a beautiful story. About family and art and memory and meaning, how it’s made and unmade.
Ben Lerner -
I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.
Ben Lerner