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 LernerI have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
Ben LernerI don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
Ben LernerI'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.
Ben Lerner