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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

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.
BEN LERNER

Fiction People Thinking
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNER

Art Despair Offers
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 was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
BEN LERNER

Bipolar Liars Real
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.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Real World
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’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
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
BEN LERNER

Awe Exciting Inspiring
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 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 didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
BEN LERNER

Book Want Writing
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
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

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

Cutting Shaving Way
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
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.
BEN LERNER

Book Couple Real

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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