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.
Ben LernerIf 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.
Ben LernerI have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
Ben LernerEvery relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
Ben LernerHenry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
Ben LernerThe 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.
Ben Lerner