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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Ben Lerner

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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Contemporary Fiction Literature Thinking
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.
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Irony Moving Writing
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
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Artist Culture Stupidity
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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Character Privacy Way
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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Book Couple Real
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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Building Fiction Past
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
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Burn Fog Quote Scare
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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Bipolar Liars Real
Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
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Cutting Shaving Way
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.
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Changed Novel Stories
I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
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Lost Medical Trying
Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.
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Astronaut Carry Cases Sidearms
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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Bored Order Pain
Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
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Country Firefly West Coast
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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Cutting Feelings Fog
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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Attention Order Reality
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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Fiction Real World
I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
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Book Want Writing
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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Fiction Mind Thinking
I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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Dying Fiction Genre Literary
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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Fiction People Thinking
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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Contemporary Fiction Historical Past
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.
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Dream Eye Firefly
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
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Awe Exciting Inspiring
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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Art Despair Offers
Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
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Feels Logic Saturated
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

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

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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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