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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.

Ben Lerner

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Ben Lerner
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: February 4
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Faces
Glowing
Eye
Bodies
Black
Instead
Night
Playing
Dream
Game
Fireflies
Remember
Vision
Mashed
Body
Eyes
Firefly
Kind
Games
Recurring

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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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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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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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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.
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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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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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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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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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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Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
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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 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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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
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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
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Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
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Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. Ari appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
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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 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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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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