0 min ous Yeong Min Adriana Kim / 2010 ‑ Present Vivere per mangiare! Published writings. Blog stalkin'. DECEMBER 23, 2011
Handmedowns.
(1) The above words can more or less be translated into “I wish you a Venice that made you realize that if you want something bad enough and prepare for it diligently enough, dreams do come true. Dad.” Who knows? Maybe some hundred years later, when paperback and hardcover tangibles have long since faded into obscurity and are hoarded as treasured cultural artifacts of the past, some curious soul will smooth his or her palms over the dust/nuclear wasteridden jacket of this book and open the covers to find this inscription. That person will infer from this one sentence that this book had once belonged to a someone named 영민 (‘Ah! A man,’ that person will wrongly assume) and that it was given to him by his caring father. 영민 supposedly embarked on a trip to Venice and supposedly realized that if he wanted something bad enough and prepare for it diligently enough, anything is possible. Finito. Mildly fascinating at its very best, hackneyed at worst. What that person won’t ever know, however, is that 영민, a 23 year old female college grad and longtime wanderlustsufferer, had once held this book with dizzying joy, almost bursting in the seams in anticipation of her impending Venetian adventure; or that the noristiff, bleeding, waterdamaged pages were the product of her having carelessly left the living room windows open on a stormy afternoon; or that the book, to her, represented the single most happy day of her life, but also conjured up a kind of wistful fearfulness fear that she might not ever be granted such intense feelings of euphoria again.
(2) I came into possession of this particular book (The Moderns: A Treasury of Paintings Throughout The World, by Gaston Diehl) a couple of years ago. I wonder how such a book, picked out with ‘best of love’ no doubt, found itself in a $1 book crate at the usedbooks corner of Barnes and Nobles an overpopulated orphanage in the world of literary reads, really. I guess I felt a sense of duty to rescue it from the sad pile of castoffs (“Vegetarian Christmas Dinners Made Easy” and “The Art of Flower Pressing,” to name a horrid few) and give it a home. And that is exactly what I did. I put down the good as new copy of “The Art of Flower Pressing” I meant to buy for my flowerpressing fanatic mother, plucked Gaston’s magnum opus out of the damn crate, and paid the single dollar that was due. I wonder what led the previous owner of this book to lose, donate or throw away this book. I wonder if she, the artist daughter, is still alive; if she still thinks of that one Christmas morning when she breathlessly tore off some tacky 70’s holiday wrapping paper to find this colorful thing tucked neatly inside a box; and if she misses it at all.
(3) “사랑하는 영민의 20세기 마지막 성탄절을 보내며. 승신 이모가 1999. 12.” My Aunt Sue gave me my very first copy of the Harry Potter books on the Christmas of 1999, which, incidentally, led up to one very intense year of waiting for my very own admission letter to ye olde Hogwarts. (What an idiot!) I cannot fathom parting with this. I will read it to my future children at bedtime and make them believe that once they reach the age of 11, they too, will be delivered a Hogwartscrested acceptance letter by a snowy white owl. If anything, it’ll teach them that life is full of disappointments and small tragedies (evil laugh*).
(4) The unimpressive waves of 해운대. The amiable June heat. The MSGloaded 탕수육 and 짜장면 and 수박바 wiping away the lingering taste of cheap whiskey from the night before. Min Joo 언니 sprawled out on a beach towel, turning her head back to me to remark “Dude. This book is reallllly well written.” “I knowww, right?” I concur, adding, “You can write in it if you want.” Hwajung, a ballpoint pen in one hand, a page scribbled with collective thoughts in the other. Angela’s bookcase, where our “traveling book” found respite for nearly a year. These wisps of bygone memories come at me in a fragmented emotional rush as I sift through the graffitied pages of Alain de Botton’s “The Romantic Movement”. Now ebooks can’t possibly do this, can they? Surely not on such an intimate, personal level? Technological advancements in the digital publishing industry have been admittedly staggering, and the experience of reading “Jane Eyre” on iBook has been surprisingly satisfactory (much to my disgust and chagrin), but the day that the ebook masterminds succeed in the currently insurmountable feat of preserving poetic line breaks in ebook formats (essential for the enjambments to work and the overall rhythm of the poem to properly shine), I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe set my dad’s iPad on fire; the possibilities are endless. But I digress. I guess I just want to say that I find the advent of electronic reading devices very sad. With ebooks, you can’t “hand it down”, the way you can hand down your barbeque saucestained copy of Le Petit Prince, or your battered “Feely Bugs: To Touch and Feel” popup book that once belonged to your baby brother but now belongs to your 24 month old cousin. Someday I might read the barelyintact, sansfeather and sansleather book to my cousin and laugh over how my own brother used to smugly recite, “feathery VUG. leathery VUG.” every time I read to him by his bedside. The books you download onto your Kindle, a Nook, and what have you, won’t come with a piece of its previous owner (if
there was one at all.) Not really. You won’t, at age forty, switch on your iPad 658 and smile at “This Book Belongs to: (Your Name)” penciled in with utmost care in your horrible 2nd grade cursive handwriting. It won’t bring you back to times and places and people and the old you. Tech geniuses will surely figure out how to accommodate these small personalizations, but let’s face it; it just won’t be the same. Now. They can’t do this either, can they?:
(5) How creepy/disturbing/somewhat honestly portrayed (to my utter horror) is this? Future students of Medieval English literature will open this textbook to find a caricature of me staring back at them. I owe it all to my loyal friend, 김모씨의 아들 모지강군. Nonetheless, every time I peer into this admittedly hilarious drawing, it makes me laugh. And I am sure it will do the same ten years later. 8:38AM | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLIN7yDfvCCZ
RSS feed: http://0minkim.tumblr.com/rss
PREVIOUS POST
NEXT POST
Theme is The Atlantic by Peter Vidani for Tumblr.