Yoon Kim

John Cale - (I keep a) close watch (Brussels, 1992) YouTube video by fglmusic

Happy birthday John Cale. We’re glad you’re still with us ❤️
youtu.be/yjhEMGMf5_Y

🤎🤎

“The one whose story you read is more yourself than you are.”

(“Celui dont vous lisez l’histoire est plus vous-même que vous-même.”)

— Pascal Quignard, Mourir de penser

“Je ne suis pas sûr que les récits des hommes soient plus volontaires que leurs rêves… Les romans sont aux jours ce que les rêves sont aux nuits.”

“Novels are to the day what dreams are to the night.”

(Pascal Quignard, Albucius)

What predatory beasts could they sustain such that their life would cease to be the image of a kind of stalking, a kind of desire, a kind of prey? We call this the meaning of life. We love words that are striking.’”

(from Albucius, tr. Bruce Boone)

Such are evenings spent about the fire, such are our dreams.’

He said: ‘I’m not sure humankind itself chooses the stories that it tells any more than its dreams. Novels (declamations) should be as imperious as that, being to daytime what dreams are to night. (2/3)

Pascal Quignard:

“Albucius said: ‘Humankind is the bees. They spit up their lives in the form of stories, so they won’t remain stunned into silence… With each nightly return, they restore, amass, share, and consume the nectar they’ve gathered and the tales of their quest. (1/3)

“[…] whether some things that men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.”

(Pierre, Book XXI)

#MelvilleMonday 🐳

I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. […] I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.”

(from “A Sketch of the Past”)

and Virginia Woolf:

“Though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome… I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. (1/2)

another voice comes to mind:

“My plays are first endured, then written, then constructed. The architecture comes last. I only write what I have lived, felt and suffered in my own skin or from bathing in the stream of human life… Truth is always the greatest protest.”

— Lispector, Too Much of Life

“Writing is ungraspable future.”

— Rosmarie Waldrop
(as quoted by Jabès in The Book of Margins)

Reminds me of Edmond Jabès:

“I believe that the act of writing is an act of the future: one is always ahead. Why? Because the origin is not behind, but before us.”

(“…l’origine n’est pas derrière nous mais elle est devant.”)

— “Dialogue avec Edmond Jabès,” in Écrire le livre

“I write because I need to say something I do not know.”

[J’écris parce que j’ai besoin de dire quelque chose que j’ignore.]

— Pascal Quignard (interview, 2001)

Pascal Quignard:

“I’m a firm believer in the distance between the hand that writes and the eyes that read, and that this distance can’t be augmented: it’s an infinite gap. Hand and eye are not located in the same body.”

(from Albucius, tr. Bruce Boone)

Ian Monk’s monovocalic translation (from “The Exeter Text,” in *Three*):

“We seek the essence where the end meets the endless!”

recovering from a bath

recovering from a bath

Thinking this morning (for no particular reason I’m able to discern) about four books I found to be formative during my graduate training as a medievalist and which helped me understand and appreciate the history and politics of my academic field.

“Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère!”

[I seek at once the eternal and the ephemeral.]

— Georges Perec, Les Revenentes (1972)

Later used as the epigraph to the last chapter of *Life: A User’s Manual* (1978):

“To say the inside by describing only the outside: this could be a definition of Perec’s art and manner.”

— Claude Burgelin, Georges Perec (2023)

🖤 Georges Perec at his desk

(in his apartment on rue Linné, Paris, shortly after receiving the 1978 Prix Médicis for *Life: A User’s Manual*)

The violet hour grows later with every passing day.

(@avecsesdoigts.bsky.social 🌸)

and somehow, Proust again:

“…since each of us sees clarity only in those ideas that have the same degree of confusion as our own.”

(trans. Charlotte Mandell 🌸)

In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.

— John Ashbery (“The Explanation”)

“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents… We cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.”

— Walter Benjamin (1916)

from “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 1916; trans. Edmund Jephcott

(Currently rereading some of Benjamin’s early writings.)

“In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable.”

— Walter Benjamin

A great one.

And I was hoping he'd finally get his Nobel next year.