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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.

Ben Lerner

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.
BEN LERNER

Admitting Kind Practice
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.
BEN LERNER

Lost Medical Trying
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
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
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

Character Privacy Way
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNER

Art Despair Offers
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
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 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.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Story Writing
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
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
Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
BEN LERNER

Country Firefly West Coast
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
I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
BEN LERNER

Dying Fiction Genre Literary
The scare quotes burn off like fog.
BEN LERNER

Burn Fog Quote Scare
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.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Mind Thinking

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ben Lerner Quotes