10:04
10:04 is a hard book to take a picture of because the cover art is a somewhat indecipherable/inverted dark image of Lower Manhattan with part of the electric power grid out. Also, it’s sporting a plastic library dust jacket. (If you saw all the pics where you could see me in the book’s reflection…) But if you viewed this book IRL, it would look essentially the same as what you’re seeing here — it’s not as if this image is some massive distortion. It’s the same even if you’re looking at it through a different lens.
Concurrent to 10:04, I read The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. It’s by a philosophy professor named C. Thi Nguyen and I’m so enthralled by this book that 1) sounds more self-help-y than it really is and 2) dives into the philosophy of games as well as how and why we have all become so metric-focused. Ngyuen seems fascinated by the types of things that fascinate me. And one of these things is this idea of process vs outcome. (In games parlance, Nguyen would say “striving play” vs “achievement play.”)
Ben Lerner’s second novel is many things — it’s a dip into auto- and meta-fiction (is the protagonist novelist/poet who lives in Brooklyn Ben Lerner or…????), a look at NYC during the era of Hurricanes Sandy + Irene and Occupy Wall Street, a nod to repetition (so many references to “tungsten lights” and “yuzu” and Walt Whitman as well as Lerner’s wordsmith-y focus on the art hub Marfa and Marfan Syndrome) — but I mostly found it to be an interesting exploration of the relationship between process and outcome and whether or not one changes if the other does. Here’s an example from 10:04: If the novel’s protagonist helps his best friend become a mother the old-fashioned way or via reproductive technology (process), will the eventual kid (outcome) be the same?
Like this book cover and my photographic attempts, are things the same if their journey to “become” differs? Our protagonist wonders about “discovering you are not identical with yourself” and I guess this rumination happens when one takes a deeper look at the process of how you become the outcome, which is … you.
(I think C. Thi Nguyen would like 10:04.)
originally published on instagram