In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

Ben Lerner

Categorized in : Art Reading Offering

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular... by Ben Lerner

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

literary-genre dying fiction

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the t... by Ben Lerner

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

awe-inspiring awe exciting

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

self writing thinking

The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way, so that there's always this shifting relation to the narrative of the disaster. Sometimes apocalypses are just structural fictions, and sometimes they're real. Sometimes a narrative requires an end - the fact that the beginning was always leading somewhere becomes clear at the end. There's an idea that we're always in the middle, but we posit this apocalyptic end in order to also be able to project into the past or the beginning. I think that's true and false.

real past thinking

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting you... by Ben Lerner

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

shaving cutting way

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair. by Ben Lerner

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

offers despair art

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

admitting kind practice

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.

matter art thinking

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.

important reading white

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

stupidity artist culture

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.

fog cutting feelings

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.

powerful ideas thinking

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms. by Ben Lerner

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

astronaut cases

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

cities would-be way

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.

tears light fiction

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.

firefly eye dream

The scare quotes burn off like fog. by Ben Lerner

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

cutting dream moving

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. by Ben Lerner

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

bipolar real liars

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.

athlete baseball kids