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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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.

Ben Lerner

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  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.

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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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  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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  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’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

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  The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

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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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  If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

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  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.

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

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