Quote

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
Dream
Game
Fireflies
Remember
Vision
Mashed
Body
Eyes
Firefly
Kind
Games
Recurring
Faces
Glowing
Eye
Bodies
Black
Instead
Night
Playing

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Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
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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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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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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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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 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.
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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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.
Ben Lerner
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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.
Ben Lerner
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I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
Ben Lerner
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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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I usually see the word metafiction applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
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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.
Ben Lerner
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I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
Ben Lerner
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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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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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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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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.
Ben Lerner