Transcription Quotes

“Unconscious inference, our brain guessing, making us hear what it thinks is likely there. We hear as if.”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel

“kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed.”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel

“I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that this moth orchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. (That I’d recently read about the firebombing of Dresden in one of my classes with Thomas, seen slides of the ruined city, added another layer of pathos to the brittle flowers.) I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaced them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction.”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel

“It is one thing to fail to provide for your children because you live under brutal material conditions, because you are impoverished or displaced, because your city is being firebombed; it is another to have every privilege, every resource, every organic berry and cut of grass-fed beef, and to see your child starve herself, to see her—this is how it felt—refuse life, the life you have offered. Is it because the life on offer is a lie? Is it because she knows that privilege involves the immiseration of others? is it because she registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe—fires, floods, fascism? Of course she couldn't tell us; she didn't have the language for it.”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription

“extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more. Like the eyes, all dreams are brown until they are shared. You asked me a beautiful question when you were a child: Were there dreams before cinema? And”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel

“(Anisa was studying musicology; she was always saying things I only half understood about the gamelan.)”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription: A Novel