“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
初めまして。ナナです。
(writer, creative doer, caffeine fiend.)
in which i talk about books & adventures in cooking and baking & fashion (in the loosest sense of the term). and in which i expound upon my love for nell.
i also write the kissing tree.
おつかれさまでした.
• about
• Ask me anything
counting pulses:
(writer, creative doer, caffeine fiend.)
in which i talk about books & adventures in cooking and baking & fashion (in the loosest sense of the term). and in which i expound upon my love for nell.
i also write the kissing tree.
おつかれさまでした.
• about
• Ask me anything
counting pulses:
jisan, you’re making me cry.
Nell, Radiohead, eAeon, Lucid Fall, Busker Busker, Monni, Peterpan Complex, 검정치마 + others, but these are the important ones, especially Nell, Radiohead, eAeon, and Lucid Fall.
My first rock festival, and it’s good to know we’re doing it right.
(Nell!!! I wonder how drunk Jongwan will be.)
—
01. Rather surreal, this weekend of the same question: When are you leaving? Mid- to late-August is the answer, but it hasn’t quite struck me yet — no, not yet because there are still three weeks left of being an undergraduate then two weeks moving out and reorganising shelves then five weeks in Japan and Korea then two-three weeks recuperating …….
02. Three weeks — THREE WEEKS — simultaneously overjoyed and … well, overjoyed. I say I’ll miss it because these last two years wrapping up my undergraduate education have been amazing because I think the Comparative Literature department is amazing. I have nothing but good things to say about all the professors I’ve had (within my major) and the classes I was able to take (and even those I couldn’t!), and I’m going to miss being a Comp Lit kid so much.
03. (On that note, my brain has already checked out of school because I’m done with my major and am taking no major courses this quarter — and, with nothing Comparative Literature in my academic life, my attention is diverted elsewhere.)
04. Whenever I read anything about/by Sylvia Plath, I wonder what it might be like to be married to a writer. Or to date one. I generally think that would be a terrible idea, though; I don’t know how my own writer’s ego would fare.
05. Katakana just flat-out refuses to stick in my brain.
“나란 사람 참 힘들죠
고장나버렸단 걸 알아요
그래도 날 포기해버리진 말아 줬으면 좋겠어요
고쳐질수만 있다면 사실 난 아주 아름다울테니
그러니 부디 놓아 버리지 말아요”
—
Nell, Separation Anxiety
(a rough, rough translation:
Someone like me is quite difficult, isn’t it?
I know I’ve been broken.
But I’d like it if you didn’t give up on me.
Because, truthfully, I would be quite wonderful if I could only be fixed,
So please don’t let me go.
)
잊어버린다 vs. 잃어버린다
To forget vs. to lose: a distinction brought up on one of the talks during one of the music shows in which Nell appeared. Jongwan talked about how his fear of forgetting things has changed into a fear of what he loses naturally over time and how, in a sense, <Slip Away> is an expression of this — or maybe ‘fear’ is too strong a word, but I don’t really wish to find the talk at the moment (I think it was You & I), and it’s really the distinction between the two words that stuck with me, anyway.
There could be more to say on this later, especially because the word/theme of this term is memory, but that’s all I wanted to put down on the record at the moment.
here’s a passage:
And yet what else does it mean to be loved, Samson wondered, than to be understood? What else but to be profoundly touched by another? He thought about who he had been before the tumor, telling himself the story of his old life like a sad tale. Once there had been a woman he loved whose body he had taken into his own hands, maybe amazed that such touching left no impression. Turning on the bedside lamp, he had found her unmarked. Her name was a sound you could go through, coming out the other side onto an identical place, Anna, a mirror image, a double echo in which there was nothing to grasp onto. Maybe he had loved her too much, feeling he was unable to get her close enough; that so long as she remained a separate person, he could get to know her only so well. And because the core of her would always remain elusive, threatening to slip away, he’d switched course and faded away to protect himself from the loss, his voice breaking up, over and out, like a pilot’s adrift in space.
Or maybe the story had happened differently. Perhaps his love for her had frustrated him, the impossibility of ever getting through. Maybe they had taken drives out of the city, crossing delicate bridges whose steel fibers hummed and swayed imperceptibly in the wind. They traveled north into the country where they imagined a future, passing through small towns with steeples and weather vanes. Anna would take off her shoes and draw her feet up under her. December, a faint snow on the ground, they would come to a crossroads and the dying yellow light would glow under the sky’s dark hem. She would be silent, her head tipped against the glass. Then suddenly she would look up, her mouth open, her face changed by an expression he’d never seen before and that made her seem unrecognizable. Maybe he had wanted to rage out against such changes, against the fact that he could not account for her.
Or maybe even before the tumor developed, it was he who had tired of being bound to her. Maybe he had just wanted to get free, having outgrown the person that all along he’d been to her, on whom she depended. How was it possible to wake up every day and be recognizable to another when so often one was barely recognizable to oneself? If Anna was right, if a person was no more than a collection of habits, perhaps the habits were maintained only so as not to disappoint the lover that one slept beside each night. But what chance did that leave for becoming, one fine day, a wholly different being? Maybe it was he, after all, who had not been able to abide being accounted for, who had no longer wanted to be reached.
Once there was a woman he loved. That was how it had begun. But from there the story might have unfolded any number of ways. Only the end was always the same: he had emptied himself of the ballast of memory and lunged weightless into the future. Alone and astonished, attempting to take with him not even a trace. In the end he had betrayed the woman he loved, and who was there who would not judge him for that?
Anna, backward or forward, the name a ghost of itself. If he called her, if he could reach her now, what would there be to say?
- Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
Murakami’s 1Q84 Manuscript at the Knopf offices!
Looks about right.
damn, i wonder if i’ll ever write something that massive. &, look! on the shelf! it’s the smitten kitchen cookbook!
(and i continue to flail over sneak peeks into publishing offices …)
—
People can surprise you. It’s nice when it’s a pleasant sort of surprise, but, when it’s of the unpleasant sort …
Luckily, tonight’s was a nice surprise.
—
01. At this rate, I think the only way Remembrance of Things Past is going to be read is if it’s the only book(s) I take with me to Japan/Korea because I am determined to finish it — the whole damn thing — before law school. (Taken on Zoë, of course; imagine having to lug those bricks of books with me all over Japan and Korea …)
02. Camus’ The Fall is one of the more elegantly written books I’ve read in my twenty-some years. This is my third or fourth read of it, and it still astounds me, particularly because I find the second person to be an incredibly difficult voice to write convincingly.
03. I’d like Franzen’s new collection of essays (the cover is quite nice) (but that’s not the reason I’d like it) (it doesn’t hurt, though).
