His coach is a young man named Peter Evanson who, Brooklyn Adam interjects from the future, will go on to play a key role in the most right-wing governorship Kansas has ever known, that of Sam Brownback an important model for the Trump administration. Evanson tells Adam to leaven his virtuosic command of policy details with quick swerves into the folksy: I want you saying, right after some hyper-eloquent riff about Yeltsin breaking a promise, Now, in Kansas, we call that a lie. After you go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the Arctic: Now, in Kansas, we wouldnt shake on that. I dont care if theyre not real sayings, just deliver them like theyre tried-and-true. This kid, who I think was later murdered, came up to me in the hall while I was going to the nurses office. He asked what Ben was doing; Ben said he was sick. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); When asked about his home, Czesaw Miosz said that he came from another planet, another time, Charles Simic has been Poet Laureate of the United States. He treats the self like an archive of social data from which it is possible to construct a larger story about our times. Lerners characters both enjoy their access to obscure consumer goods andresort to living onunemployment cheques. And it sounds more like her. For Lerner, the whole drama of the book is the present-tense Adam remembering his childhood from his parents perspective, because he has more access to their voices than he does to the child version of himself. Jane describes aspects of their family life, the institutional sexism she faced in her career and the misogynist trolling (as a child Adam often picks up the landline phone and encounters men calling to whisper abuse at the famous feminist) and damaged friendships that resulted from her success. Or, see all newsletter options here. When Leaving the Atocha Station appeared from Coffee House Press (a small, independent outfit), it received lavish praise and soon acquired classic status among a certain cohort of literary readers. Who Is Ben Lerner's Wife? (917) 270-7901 is the phone number for Ariana. Some years ago, after eating one at a Japanese restaurant, the poet andnovelist Ben Lerner became interested in the sensory life ofthe octopus. When I first met him in Brooklyn earlier this summer, he and his wife, Ariana Mangual, a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, were about to buy a house in Kensington, not far from Brooklyn College, where Lerner teaches English and creative writing. He agrees. Earlier that day, a grand jury had declined to indict the police officer who killed him. New school year, new Associate Professor! The version quoted by Lerner shrugs off poetry, and we nod yes because, of course, we think we know what she is talking about, but as it turns out, we dont. Insofar as I was interested in the arts I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf, Adam says. The world of competitive speech is portrayed, persuasively, as a school for future elites, a place where the next generations politicians and corporate personnel learn how to wield language for coercive and deceitful ends. ena are important. . As we rolled into town, the family pointed out various landmarks. Professor Ariana Mangual Figueroa (Credit: The Graduate Center, CUNY / Alex Irklievski) Black Theater Is Having a Moment. Degenerate literature, the Nazis called much of it; bourgeois individualism was the Soviet name for it. Of course, theres some truth to it. result is not poetry, NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. The thing Im proud of about this book, Lerner tells me, is just that I didnt know what I was doing, and it was hard and upsetting. Rasmus Lund Nielsen 26.03.2022. (The acknowledgments page of the new novel is filled with their names.) When a cop orders him to tell one of his daughters to stop drawing with chalk on the sidewalk, Adam says his children barely listen to him. The book is rooted in the narrators subjectivity, but it keeps returning to instances of collective participation, from Occupy Wall Street to the fleeting solidarity of those afflicted by extreme weather. If poetry renders Adam suspiciously effete in the eyes of his peers, then debate offers a forum in which to flex his masculine will to domination. Without Harriet and Stephen, Ben certainly could not have written The Topeka School, a book about inheritance, about the repetitions just beneath the threshold of consciousness. His parents discussed the project with him at length as he was writing it, going over their memories of his childhood and reading multiple drafts. The poet, by his very claim to being a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and an accusation. Those who live in present-day America will know how this story ends, or at least where its headed: The Men who once abused Jane over the phone in a trembling whisper now speak in a deafening collective voice. The book thus embodies a poignant reciprocity.10 The grown-up Adam foregrounds the fact that Janes voice is his creation or reconstruction. Well, youre a broken condom! Matt would shout back. They hear a great variety of poets and even purchase their books afterward. hvem som helst. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a Howard Foundation Fellow. Lerner was born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, which figures in each of his books of poetry. The story of this irregular conception causes Ben to reconsider his relationship to the world around him. Despite the traditional structure of his own nuclear family (Mangual was pregnant with their daughter during much of the time he was writing the book), Lerner wanted 10:04 to address the expanded spectrum of domestic arrangements. Photo by Tom HinesOcean Vuong (b. This is a long way from the expansive social novels of earlier times; Adam barely grasps whats going on under his own nose. He tends to enjoy poetry more when its lines are embedded in works of prose. The fact/fiction divide is like a therapeutic frame, he says. As Adam babbles into the phone, his parents, back in Kansas, hear his speech and his personality coming apart at the seams. Esther Bubley/Pix Inc./The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images, Marianne Moore with a cockatoo at the Bronx Zoo, 1954. Anything a white male writes is going to be disfigured by that subject position, he told me. Reading it, however, with a For Ben and Matt, every street corner seemed to bring back the memory of some childhood ordeal. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click on download. Her research primarily examines the ways in which having or lacking legal U.S. citizen For his next novel, 10:04 (2014), Farrar, Straus and Giroux paid him a strong six-figure advance, a detail we learn within the text itself. For America, spread from above, it remains an open question. In between storms, the narrator getsa book deal, tutors aneight-year-old immigrant from ElSalvador, takesketamine at a writing residency inMarfa, Texas, and navigates the donation of his sperm. He had no first-person memory of the gum incident, he said, only the euphemistic account he gave his parents afterward: The gum had fallen out of his mouth and got stuck on his body. Ben Lerner's income source is mostly from being a successful Writer. Lerner describes his first novel, a satire of the poetry world and serious young men, as "accidental". By Ben Lerner. (August 2018), Charles Wright in Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis ODriscoll (Copper Canyon, 2008), p. 6. Ben goes to museums instead spending all day and night at Occupy Wall Street, but that does not mean he has given up on the promise of the latter. Lerner had decided to devote his life to art, but had he ever had an aesthetic experience of comparable magnitude? Which is, Weve learned our lesson, universality is impossible, so theres no point in even testing which parts of consciousness are shareable. And that was something I felt now more than ever that I needed to do.. CAREER: Poet, magazine editor, and educator. Lerner quotes George Packer in a New Yorker blog post asking whether it is too late to convince president-elect Obama not to have a poem written and read at the inauguration: For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings. As I lick lamb juice off my fingers,. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, begins with a scene in the Prado in Madrid. [4] important not because a, high-sounding interpretation can His wife, Ariana Mangual, is a professor of education at Rutgers University. Irene soon passes, leaving the city largely unscathed, but the specter of collapse it raises, however fleetingly, entrains an awareness that the way things are is neither permanent nor necessary. Ben Lerner (f. 1979) er en kritikerrost og prisvindende amerikansk forfatter. The Topeka School is the story of a family, the Gordons, but it is also the story of a voice that of the novel itself. To learn how to speak again, Lerner suggests, you first need to unlearn the old way of speaking. Wed met at a bar in Prospect Heights to watch the second debate of the Democratic primary season. There follows a very funny portrait of the artist as a young mansplainer: Then Ben pulled out all the stops to construct a major feminist case. They said nothing, so Id read them poems by E.E. genuine, you are interested Home. The vain attempts of Americas middle-class liberals to put their firstworld problems into context and acknowledge their disproportionate share of the worlds limited resources have been highly satirised in recent fiction, where Jonathan Franzens Walter Berglund (in Freedom) can be read as the literary heir to Charles Dickenss Mrs Jellyby. He was very worried we were going to be upset, Harriet said. While a feeling of impotence paralyzes anyone who becomes fixated on language and starts thinking about finding the right word not as an aesthetic problem, but as a theological one, its a false quandary. Lerner describes this section as the big psychological gamble at the core of the book, and its also the place where it becomes clearest that Lerners interest in language that conceals rather than reveals has never been only intellectual or artistic its also connected to intergenerational trauma. that which is on the other hand And Ive always been interested in the 90s, right before Columbine, and the end of history discourse, and the advent of the Clinton dynasty.. Her age is 42. If, as many critics remarked upon its release, the book didnt read like fiction, that was hardly surprising. Who in their right mind would choose a lifetime of poverty and ridicule? they wanted to know. Though she doesnt define genuine, we know what she means and recognize it when we encounter it in a poem. all of us, that we do not Lightbox . All his vocabularies were colliding and recombining, says Jonathan, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language hed lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. Its as though the spread, which Adam once deployed so ruthlessly, has returned to take its revenge. $140 per post at $7/CPM. So, how much is Ben Lerner worth at the age of 43 years old? I couldnt help but wonder if it was a kind of simulated castration thing, an attempt not to be a boy, a man, one of the Men, says Jane, ever the analyst. Menu. As a teenager, he excelled at competitive debate, and he remains a formidable talker fluent, composed and quick on his feet. genuine. Not so long ago, the big, ambitious social novel, the novel that wanted to tell us about the way we live now or the state of the nation the novel as exemplified by Don DeLillos Underworld (1997) or Jonathan Franzens The Corrections (2001) enjoyed a prestige and cultural centrality that, in recent years, have come to seem distinctly suspect. Ariana Mangual. Yet exploring some of the more intimate territory in this novel clearly affected him in a new way. He is from United States. If he writes verses, kick him out. Writing in the New Yorker, the critic James Wood described Adam as a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through atime of inflamed political certainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty. His parents dont appear in the book, but they are briefly mentioned when, in desperate bids to impress the two women hes been orbiting, he says, falsely, that his mother has just died and that his father (gentlest of men) is a fascist. It made me really crazy, sometimes. (He jokes that after this Im going right into genre fiction. all its rawness and We had met to discuss his new book, The Topeka School, the third and most intricate in his acclaimed trilogy of novels featuring a Lerner-like character named Adam Gordon, and yet it wasnt easy to tell who was interviewing whom. January 30, 2020 Professor Ariana Mangual Figueroa draws on her own upbringing and experiences as a New York City teacher to study how schools and immigration policies impact young, bicultural students. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. Lerner himself has been married for eight years. The book wants to acknowledge all of that as an attempt to see what spaces for healing can exist, as opposed to the model of fiction thats like The way I deal with the political is that I pretend to have access to the mind of a nine-year-old boy in Sudan instead of evading the material conditions of the book.. 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