Orality and Literacy

Real time has no divisions at all, but is uninterruptedly continuous: at midnight yesterday did not click over into today. No one can find the exact point of midnight, and if it is not exact, how can it be midnight? And we have no experience of today as being next to yesterday, as it is represented…

— Walter J. Ong, amazon.com

Time Abstractions

The intern broke off from us to join one of the groups and Diane led us out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen, also giant, a thousand copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above an island the size of my apartment. I was introduced to Diane's friend, a handsome woman with silver hair, silv…

— Ben Lerner

Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cort…

— Ben Lerner

Blackwater Water

I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased— the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.

— Ben Lerner

Originality Plagiarism Quote

As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction. When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one displ…

— Ben Lerner

Ficiton Time

I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan's skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the pr…

— Ben Lerner, sagasgas

Disappear Here New York City Urban Landscape

Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked…

— Ben Lerner

Capitalist Movements

I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Ale…

— Ben Lerner

The Emergency Changes Things

If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don't look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight— a blank expression as the body begi…

— Ben Lerner

Expressions of Sorrow Sadness

Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.

— Walter Ong, sagasgas

History Of Communication History Of Writing When Did Writing Emerge?Emergence of Writing In History

We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.

— Walter Ong

Photography Walter Ong

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