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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.

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
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

Contemporary Fiction Literature Thinking
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.
BEN LERNER

Ideas Powerful Thinking
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.
BEN LERNER

Cutting Feelings Fog
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
BEN LERNER

Burn Fog Quote Scare
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
BEN LERNER

Artist Culture Stupidity
I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.
BEN LERNER

Important Reading White
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
Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
BEN LERNER

Country Firefly West Coast
The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they’re no longer the works that preceded the novel.
BEN LERNER

Changed Novel Stories
I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
BEN LERNER

City Grid Sincerity
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 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

Fiction Knowing Thinking
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
I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
BEN LERNER

Dying Fiction Genre Literary
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
BEN LERNER

Bipolar Liars Real

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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