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All I ask the haters – is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences, it might come to resemble love.
Ben Lerner -
I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
Ben Lerner
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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.
Ben Lerner -
Part of what makes the book bizzare is that Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be less a historical person than a marker for democratic personhood, can't really write a memoir full of a life's particularities.
Ben Lerner -
Could come to terms with aspects of my past without those terms being set by the Foundation’s unexamined Freudian tradition, which pathologized women’s experience when it didn’t fit the great man’s theory.
Ben Lerner -
To the distinguished female author’s left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom.
Ben Lerner -
But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
Ben Lerner -
All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence.
Ben Lerner
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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.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
...no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
But we were also Jewish, one of two Jewish families in our neighborhood, our complex, our compound, and the ovens had been active only fifteen years before.
Ben Lerner
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I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
A "poem" is understood as something referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner -
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
Ben Lerner -
I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
Ben Lerner
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On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?
Ben Lerner -
I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
Ben Lerner -
In 1903 the scientists found out that the brontosaurus was a fake! They realized that the brontosaurus was really an apatosaurus with the wrong head. However, although the scientists realized their mistake, most people didn’t know about their new discovery. Many people thought that the brontosaurus still existed because museums kept using the name on their labels—and because the brontosaurus was really, really popular! So even though the scientists discovered their error, most of us didn’t know.
Ben Lerner -
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.
Ben Lerner