10:04

 

10:04 by Ben Lerner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is ostensibly about an author writing a book amidst health problems, personal relationships, and natural disasters. But it's really about art and how it reflects, albeit distorted, our experiences and observations. What do you recycle? How? It makes the premise infinitely more interesting. I can't say I loved the main "character", but it may just be because barring his health problems, who couldn't help envying a life in New York, living off your writing while going to art openings and writer's retreats? Weirdly, I think this will be a book I read again (recycling it, hah!) for inspiration/instruction.

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Including myself, I was older and younger than everyone in the room.

the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.

her, “I can’t figure out if abolishing the memory of pain is the same thing as abolishing the pain.”

“If I take the drugs, it’s like dividing myself into two people.” He ignored her again. “It’s a fork in the road: the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t. It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.”

On the wall behind Dr. Roberts hung a tactically inoffensive abstract painting, rhythmic brushstrokes in lavender, blue, green—very competently executed visual Muzak.

“But the problem, one of the problems”—cold spreading through him, as when they’d injected him with contrast dye—“ is that these images of art only address the sick, the patients. It would be absurd to imagine a doctor lingering over one of these images between appointments, being interested in it or somehow attached to it, having his day inflected by it or whatever. Apart from their depressing flatness, their interchangeability, what I’m saying is: we can’t look at them together. They help establish, deepen, the gulf between us, because they address only the sick, face only the diagnosed.”

When he got out of bed late the next morning and had his coffee—iced so as not to disrupt the clotting—he realized: I do remember the drive, the view, stroking Liza’s hair, the incommunicable beauty destined to disappear. I remember it, which means it never happened.

prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all.

It was as if I could register in my hands a subtle but momentous transfer of weight: the twenty-one grams of the market’s soul had fled; it was no longer a commodity fetish; it was art before or after capital.

An art commodity that had been exorcised (and survived the exorcism) of the fetishism of the market was to me a utopian readymade—an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price.

nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.

The tapetum lucidum, the “bright tapestry” behind the eyes, bounces visible light back through the retina, making the pupils glow. I remembered the red-eye effect in the photographs of my youth, the camera recording the light of its own flash, the camera inscribing itself in the image it captured.

Just as in the poems, he has to be nobody in particular in order to be a democratic everyman, has to empty himself out so that his poetry can be a textual commons for the future into which he projects himself.

But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it’s the same shape.

I saw no spheres, but I loved the idea of them—the idea that our worldly light could be reflected back to us and mistaken as supernatural.

If I were to learn she was faking her death, she’d be dead to me.”

What if she lied about lying in order to release me?”

the doctor arrives to read your future in your organs, the modern haruspicy that exorbitant insurance barely covers.

“I could long to be nostalgic. Yearn for the time when I will yearn for the past.”