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Quote by Ben Lerner

“I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.”

Quote by Ben Lerner

Author

Ben Lerner, born on February 4, 1979, is an American poet known for his unique style and profound reflections on contemporary social issues. more

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“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.”

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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.”

Made Artist Culture Interest Stupidity Affirmative Fetish

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“I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.”

Thinking Way Light Political Pleasure Silence Sky Color Storm Bridges Streams Tails

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“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.”

Thinking Kind Literature Ability Fiction Bounds Contemporary Posts Blogs Sitcom Intellectualism Contemporary Fiction

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“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.”

Mind Firsts Kind Past Fiction Historical Contemporary Repeats Gestures Contemporary Fiction Minus Vanguard Crass Historical Context

Author:Ben Lerner

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

Exciting Awe Awe Inspiring

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“When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.”

Feels Mean Body Order Individual Perception Starting Limbs Narrators Octopus

Author:Ben Lerner

“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.”

Past Fiction Building Residency

Author:Ben Lerner

“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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Author:Ben Lerner

“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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Author:Ben Lerner