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The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Ben Lerner

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
BEN LERNER

Feels Logic Saturated
The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.
BEN LERNER

Kind Self Trying
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
BEN LERNER

Cutting Shaving Way
When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.
BEN LERNER

Mean Octopus Order
Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
BEN LERNER

Astronaut Carry Cases Sidearms
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.
BEN LERNER

Attention Order Reality
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
BEN LERNER

Burn Fog Quote Scare
Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do – really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel – was move towards something like sincerity.
BEN LERNER

Irony Moving Writing
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.
BEN LERNER

Fiction People Thinking
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

Building Fiction Past
I guess when I’m frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I’ve tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.
BEN LERNER

Bored Order Pain
I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
BEN LERNER

Book Want Writing
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
BEN LERNER

Awe Exciting Inspiring
Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
BEN LERNER

Art People Stupid
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

Criticism Fiction Writing
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

Fiction Light Tears

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

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The scare quotes burn off like fog.

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