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

Ben Lerner

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

Country Firefly West Coast
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
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
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
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 didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
BEN LERNER

Book Want Writing
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
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
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
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
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
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
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
BEN LERNER

Awe Exciting Inspiring
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
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.
BEN LERNER

City Grid Sincerity

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

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

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