Ben Lerner Quotes
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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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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 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.
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Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
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What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.
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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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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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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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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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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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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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What normally felt like the only possible world became one among many.
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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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I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.
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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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I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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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 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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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.
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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?
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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.