Ben Lerner Quotes
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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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The real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence.
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How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.
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I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
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I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.
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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.
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I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor.
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You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.
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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.
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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.
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I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former.
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Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.
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I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and that’s all I’d ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.
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Her breath smelled terrible and I told myself to commit that fact to memory, to remember it the next time I was intimidated by her unwavering grace.
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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.
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A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
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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.
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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.
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Happy were the ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, ages of such perfect social integration that no drug was required to link the hero to the whole.
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Your interviews or blog posts or whatever are less supplements to your novel than part of it. I'm not private, but I believe in literary form - I'll use my life as material for art (I don't know how not to do this) and I'll use art as a way of exploring that passage of life into art and vice versa, but that's not the same thing as thinking that any of the details of my life are interesting or relevant on their own.
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I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
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Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn’t get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality.
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I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.