6
" On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout? "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
7
" The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy – even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagines East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines.
Fortunately for Adam, this shifting of aggression to the domain of language was sanctioned by one of the practices the types had appropriated: after several hours of drinking, if no fight or noise complain had broken up the party, you were likely to encounter freestyling. In many ways, this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés. But it was socially essential for him: the rap battle transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool. His luck was dizzying: that there was a rapid, ritualized poetic insult exchange bridging the gap between his Saturday afternoons in abandoned high schools and his Saturday nights in unsupervised houses, allowing him to transition from one contest to the other. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
11
" Think about how often—before cell phones, before any kind of caller ID—you answered the landline as a child and had to have an exchange, however brief, with aunts or uncles or family friends. Even if it was that five-second check-in, How are you doing, how is school, is your mom around—it meant periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community, which, through repetition, it reinforced. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
13
" I think I’d felt that as long as I avoided looking for the tickets, they would be there; it was only if I searched the archive that they’d disappear, as if the past were up until that point indeterminate, that I might outrun it. Do you know what I mean? We had to pay a lot of money to get the tickets for the next day; luckily they still had seats, although I suppose there are usually seats to and from Kansas City.
It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
14
" The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
