Yoon Kim @nicoscosc Twitter profile

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 month

Rereading 달걀과 닭 (a Korean translation of Lispector’s stories)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

27 days

Clarice Lispector

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

Richard Rorty on Pale Fire: “Nabokov reminds us of … why it is so hard [to notice suffering]: we all spend a lot of time inventing people rather than noticing them, reshaping real people into characters in stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, stories about how beautiful

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

Sunday.

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

19 days

Roland Barthes in an interview (1979): “Have you ever noticed that everyone always talks about the right to leisure activities but never about a right to idleness? I even wonder if there is such a thing as *doing nothing* in the modern Western world. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

“History decays into images, not into stories.” — Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project, tr. Eiland et al.)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

5 months

“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” — Charles Baudelaire (Just started reading 2666.)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

“…all horrors are dulled by routine.” (Bolaño, By Night in Chile)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Proust in a Christmas letter (written at age 27): “While little by little Christmas has lost its truth for us as an anniversary, it has at the same time, through the gentle emanation of accumulated memories, taken on a more and more living reality, in which [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

Walter Benjamin on criticism: “True criticism does not attack its object: it is like a chemical substance that attacks another only in the sense that, decomposing it, it exposes its inner nature, but does not destroy it. The chemical substance that attacks spiritual things [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

Walter Benjamin: “Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

9 months

Beckett in his Proust essay (1931): “There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. … We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

Roberto Bolaño: “So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it’s always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Proust in a letter to a journalist (written a year before his death): “Personally, I prefer the telescope to the microscope as a working tool. But because I had the misfortune to begin a book with the word ‘I,’ people jumped to the conclusion that,

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

This just arrived. I’m so looking forward to reading it.

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

“The habit of thinking prevents us at times from experiencing reality, immunises us against it, makes it seem no more than another thought. There is no idea that does not carry in itself its possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.” — Proust, The Fugitive

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

“At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.” — Mike Davis, from his 2006 preface to City of Quartz

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

“There is no greater desire than that of a wounded person for another wound.” — Bataille, Guilty (trans. Kendall)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

9 months

“Who among us does not spend the greater part of his life in the shadow of an event that has not yet taken place?” — Robert Musil (Diaries, tr. Payne)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

rereading Nabokov: “She thought … of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners;

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

10 months

Bolaño in an interview: (Q: Which five books have marked your life?) “I’ll mention these only as the tip of the spear: Don Quixote by Cervantes, Moby-Dick by Melville. The complete works of Borges, Hopscotch by Cortázar, A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 month

Borges: “Every writer *creates* his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” (“Kafka and His Precursors,” tr. James E. Irby)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Hélène Cixous: “If Kafka had been a woman. If Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger had been able to stop being German, if he had written the Romance of the Earth. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

9 months

Now reading

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

“[Proust’s] real goal is escape from the future, filled with dangers and threats, of which the ultimate one is death. In contrast, the future is precisely what Benjamin seeks in the past. … Benjamin listens for the first notes of a future which has meanwhile become the past. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

W.G. Sebald in an interview (1998): “The reverse of melancholy is always irony. One is amused about one’s distress occasionally and they are two complementary moods and you can’t really have the one without the other. … And if you happen to get into this profession of writing,

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

17 days

Virginia Woolf in her diary: “There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice…” (July 26, 1922) “At last, I like reading my own writing. … At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain…” (Oct. 4, 1922)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

3 months

“My dog teaches me to live. All he does is ‘be.’ ‘Being’ is his activity. And being is my most profound intimacy.” (Lispector, A Breath of Life)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 years

Proust to his father: “I still believe that anything I do outside of literature and philosophy will be just so much time wasted.” (from a letter written in 1893, when he was 22)

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@nicoscosc

4 months

“Curiosity … is insubordination in its purest form.” — Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

5 months

“Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. […] Without nervous disorder there can be no great artist.” Marcel Proust

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.” Now (re)reading:

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 years

Richard Rorty: “...I thought that the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged were The Phenomenology of Spirit and Remembrance of Things Past. ... It was the cheerful commitment to irreducible temporality which Hegel and Proust shared—the specifically [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

“Who among us does not spend the greater part of his life in the shadow of an event that has not yet taken place?” — Robert Musil (Diaries, tr. Payne)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

“There will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.” Murnane

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

“Indeed nothing is more painful than this contrast between the mutability of people and the fixity of memory.” — Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

“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

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

One of my favorite reads of 2023 🖤

Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

I have just accidentally started reading this book and I may not be able to stop. 🙃

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

10 months

Walter Benjamin: “Falling asleep is perhaps the only [threshold] experience that remains to us. … The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A ‘Schwelle’ (threshold) is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

“No one has ever died as far as I’m concerned and it’s rare that anyone is living, except in the theater of my thoughts.” —Bachmann, Malina (tr. Boehm) I first read Malina as a teenager (in Jaccottet’s French translation). Revisiting it now.

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

Sebald in an interview: “However short the period of time is, even if it is only a decade, if you only spend your childhood in the place where you were born, it remains, I think, the primal landscape that determines a good deal of your make-up and the way in which you react.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

10 months

Now reading

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

Q: Why is memory so ineluctable and so destructive? W. G. Sebald: The older you get, in a sense, the more you forget. That is certainly true. Vast tracts of your life sort of vanish in oblivion. But that which survives in your mind acquires a very considerable degree of density,

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

“To restore silence is the role of objects.” (Beckett, Molloy)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

W.G. Sebald in an interview (1988): “The past, horrendous though it is, with all its calamitous episodes, nevertheless seems to be some kind of refuge because at least the pain that you had there is over. … The presence of the past has something very ambivalent about it.

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 month

Clarice Lispector (1968): “In my books, I remain anonymous and discreet. In this column, I am, in a way, letting myself be known. Am I losing my secret, private self? … I’m consoled by something Fernando Pessoa wrote: ‘Speaking is the simplest way of making ourselves unknown.’”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

5 months

From Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: “He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

Don Delillo: “Fiction will always examine the small anonymous corners of human experience… The writer wants to see inside the human works, down to dreams and routine rambling thoughts, in order to locate the neural strands that link him to men and women who shape history.” (1/3)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

“I am not contradictory, I am dispersed.” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

“Reality takes shape in the memory alone.” — Proust, Swann’s Way

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

Now reading

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 years

“Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all designation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states.” — Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

“I don’t find solitude agonising . . . Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.” — Beckett in a letter (Jan. 26, 1959)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

“Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.” (Don DeLillo, Libra)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 years

“When there is nothing left, there will still be sand. There will still be the desert to conjugate the nothing.” Edmond Jabès

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

20 days

“I write to be loved: by a few, but *from a distance*.” — Roland Barthes

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

Flaubert in a letter to George Sand (1866): “YOU don’t know what it is, to spend an entire day with your head in your hands, taxing your poor brain in search of a word. With you, the flow of ideas is broad, continuous, like a river. With me it’s a tiny trickle. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

the sheer beauty of the fantasy, the sheer joy of the prose. … For even though beauty can indeed drive out pity, it can also create pity of a previously unimaginable intensity: the more beautiful the story that caused us to forget, the greater the pity when we finally remember.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

9 months

Clarice Lispector: “I would like it if there were such a thing as reincarnation. … I want to be reborn over and over. And in my next incarnation, I will read my books like any other interested reader, and I will not know that I was the one who wrote them in this incarnation. +

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Now (re)reading

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

“Life was to be grasped only in metaphor, and metaphor could express itself only in metaphor; the chain of metaphor was endless and death alone was without metaphor...” — from Broch’s The Death of Virgil (trans. by Jean Starr Untermeyer)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

11 months

“When one knows that something will soon be removed from one’s gaze, that thing becomes an image.” — Walter Benjamin (from “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” trans. Howard Eiland et al.)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

9 months

From DeLillo’s Mao II: “Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches +

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

“No, it’s not easy to write. It’s as hard as breaking rocks. But sparks and splinters fly like flashing steel.” — Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (tr. Benjamin Moser)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

Michel Foucault: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

and rare we are. […] [Nabokov] discovered that the best way to get his readers to notice suffering was to show it to them for a moment, then get them to forget it for a long time, and then bring it back again just as the reader has gotten completely caught up in

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 month

Roland Barthes: “Proust’s work, for myself at least, is *the* reference work, the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony. … Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an ‘authority,’ simply a ‘circular memory.’ Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

7 months

“I doubt everything, even my doubt.” — Flaubert to Louise Colet (1846) ☕️ Today’s morning read:

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

4 months

“When one knows that something will soon be removed from one’s gaze, that thing becomes an image.” — Walter Benjamin (tr. Harry Zohn)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

Flaubert in a letter (1853): “I maintain that ideas are action. It is more difficult to hold the reader’s interest with them, I know, but this is a problem for style to solve. I now have fifty pages in a row without a single event. ... Everything is a question of style...”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

5 months

W.G. Sebald in an interview (1998): “The reverse of melancholy is always irony. One is amused about one’s distress occasionally and they are two complementary moods and you can’t really have the one without the other. […] All melancholic writers had a very funny side to them.”

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380

Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

5 months

“Ultimately, it seems to me, the writer doesn’t write in order to be admired, approved of (or criticized). For my part, I don’t like people saying good or bad things about me; I write to be loved: by a few, but *from a distance*.” — Roland Barthes

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

“I read [Proust] over again each year, and each time I see a new aspect, discover a new meaning. It is as if he had struck an infinite chord which never ceases to vibrate on different levels.” (from The Diary of Anaïs Nin)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

“Some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth.” — Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

10 months

“…all horrors are dulled by routine.” (Bolaño, By Night in Chile, tr. Chris Andrews)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

Walter Benjamin: “Early on, I learned to disguise myself in words, which really were clouds. The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. In me, this compulsion acted through words.

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

Don DeLillo, Libra: “We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings +

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

Nabokov: “Art is a magical deception, as all nature is magic and deception. To speak of a ‘sincere’ poem or picture is about the same thing as to call ‘sincere’ a bird’s mating dance or a caterpillar’s mimetic behavior.” (from Appendix 2 to his translation of Eugene Onegin)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

24 days

Roland Barthes: “Structurally, literature is only a parasitical object of language. […] One could say that literature is Orpheus returning from the underworld; as long as literature walks ahead, aware that it is leading someone, the reality behind it which it is gradually [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

3 months

“I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.” — Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

“A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.” — Guy Davenport (in his foreword to Every Force Evolves a Form)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Proust on Baudelaire: “For every sorrow, every consolation, he finds these unprecedented forms, snatched from his own spiritual world and never to be found in any other, forms from a planet where he alone has dwelt and which resemble nothing of what we know.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Time for a reread

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

W.G. Sebald in a speech (shortly before his death in 2001): “There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

20 days

“…I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times.” — Proust, Time Regained (tr. Scott Moncrieff et al.)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

So looking forward to reading this.

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 years

W. Gombrowicz: “Sincerity? As a writer, it is what I fear most. In literature, sincerity leads nowhere. There is another of the dynamic antinomies of art: the more artificial we are, the closer we come to frankness. Artificiality allows the artist to approach shameful truths. +

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 months

“It is strange how the passage of time turns every work—and so every man—into fragments. Nothing whole survives—just as a recollection is never anything more than debris, and only becomes sharper through false memories.” — Paul Valéry (in a letter to his wife, July 1909)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

5 months

Bolaño in 2666: “These ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. +

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Proust: “Your Christmas card has given me great pleasure. If we were creatures only of reason, we would not believe in anniversaries, holidays, relics or tombs. But since we are also made up in some part of matter, we like to believe that that too has a certain reality.” 🎄💌 👋

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

Proust in an interview in 1913 (on the publication of Du côté de chez Swann): “I am like someone who has a tapestry too large for present-day apartments, and who has been obliged to cut it up. … Well, for me, the novel is not only plane psychology, but psychology in time. [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

“Yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images. […] Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language. During the second part of my life, it was generally English, my own brand of English—not the Cambridge variety.” — Nabokov

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

6 months

“It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don't know how to live, that you will never know.” (Perec, A Man Asleep, tr. A. Leak)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

21 days

Virginia Woolf: “There is a sadness at the back of life which [the Greeks] do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, [+]

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

2 years

Proust in a letter: “Your Christmas card made me very happy. If we were nothing more than creatures of the mind, we would not believe in anniversaries… But since we are also composed of a small amount of matter, we like to believe that it, too, is a part of reality.” 🎄💌 💕 👋

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Walter Benjamin on Kafka: “It is impossible to overlook the fact that he stands at the center of his novels, but what happens to him there is designed to reduce to insignificance the person who experiences it, to render him invisible by concealing him at the heart of banality.”

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

8 months

Why have I cited these names? To try to sketch out the general vicinity. Over there is where Clarice Lispector writes. There, where the most demanding works breathe, she makes her way.” (Cixous, “By the Light of an Apple,” tr. D. Jenson, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays)

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 month

Now reading

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

1 year

I have just accidentally started reading this book and I may not be able to stop. 🙃

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Yoon Kim

@nicoscosc

3 months

“She sighed. She missed being little… and thought she’d been happy. Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.” (Lispector, The Hour of the Star)

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