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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

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.
BEN LERNER

Irony Moving Writing
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
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
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.
BEN LERNER

City Grid Sincerity
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
BEN LERNER

Bipolar Liars Real
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
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 like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Knowing 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.
BEN LERNER

Contemporary Fiction Historical Past
I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
BEN LERNER

Dying Fiction Genre Literary
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
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
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
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
BEN LERNER

Lost Novelist Want

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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