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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.

Ben Lerner

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

Cutting Shaving Way
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
BEN LERNER

Awe Exciting Inspiring
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
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 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.
BEN LERNER

Dream Eye Firefly
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
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
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.
BEN LERNER

Contemporary Fiction Historical Past
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
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 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 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
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNER

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

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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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