Sunday, January 04, 2015

Ben Lerner: ‘People say, “Oh, here’s another Brooklyn novel by a guy with glasses”’

The poet and novelist, whose new book 10:04 is just published, talks about art, octopuses, and new ways of writing about families and politics

Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner likes to write about 'contingent stuff, like how you feel and how you slept, and who you’re in love with or not in love with'. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian
Some years ago, after eating one at a Japanese restaurant, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner became interested in the sensory life of the octopus. He went on the internet, where he learned that the cephalopod’s neurons are evenly distributed, and that as a result the octopus can taste anything it touches. As a downside of this nervous condition, the octopus has a poor concept of its overall position in space.

The word for what the octopus lacks is “proprioception”: the unconscious sense by which a being monitors the position of its limbs. In Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, the word appears many times. It’s a literary homage (the poet Charles Olson wrote an essay about the term) but also a refrain about the poor perceptual relationship of the individual to the social body.

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