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 LERNERShaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.
More Ben Lerner Quotes
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Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
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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.
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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.
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I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
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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.
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Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
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