so I finally caved late last night and on impulse went ahead and bought another $50 worth of asian literature books from amazon.. just several anthologies of short stories by Yukio Mishima, Naoya Shiga, Yasunari Kawabata, and Osamu Dazai.. whether or not I'll ever get around to reading them is another matter altogether, but for now they'll do fine in filling up all the empty spaces of my life, just like the rest of my dvds.. come to think about it I've only read about 65% or so of the ~80 'asian' books on these dusty shelves, haven't even opened or flipped through the pages of some of them yet, but it's always good to know that they're there whenever you feel the need to turn back to something familiar.. personally I don't keep too many personal mementos or photo albums of the sort to remind me of the past (cameras do steal your soul after all), but nothing beats the sense of nostalgia you get from some of these authors.. Soseki's still the one that does it for me probably, though I am finding the modern Chinese revolutionary authors like Lu Xun and Shen Tsungwen rather appealing now as well, Beat Takeshi for the movies, and probably Joe Hisaishi, Kenji Kawai, Yoko Kanno, and Taku Iwasaki for the music.. yeah, quite a few there but they all have their subtleties.. I bet there's just as many weirdos out there playing the air violin as there are air guitarists in the world, but that's just me.. maybe I'll even try my hand at the Japanese reed flute or zither one of these days.. nice simple instrument but you can do quite a bit with it.. so let's see.. 4 books on Japanese art & architecture, 5 books on Japanese grammar, 6 books worth of Kanji dictionaries, 2 books on Japanese linguistics, 5 books on Japanese history, 5 books of Japanese plays and poetry, 25 books of Japanese fiction, 10 volumes of assorted manga, 5 books of Chinese classics, 80~ dvd vcd vhs worth of anime, 10 on Japanese cinema or so, 15 on Chinese and Korean cinema, and a nice clothbound Cambridge copy of the King James version of the Holy Bible which just seems out of place on that shelf right next to Confucius' Analects, but dunno.. God could be asian after all.. but let's not get into that.. and all the way on the bottom of the bookshelf where there's the most dust rests 15 or so oversized books on programming, computing, and the sort.. something which I've pretty much given up all hope on awhile back.. but they're good for show I guess.. I'm sure all that stuff's still sitting in the back of my mind somewhere, pointers, queues, factories, flyweights and what not.. but course those books are way too sterile to read for enjoyment anyway.. it probably would've been better had I started off my college career as an east asian studies major, but of course like every other misguided HS youth at the time I was undoubtedly over-concerned with my future and finding a job and so forth, which ironically is the dilemna I face now.. but life's short and I'll just take it a step at time.. better to enjoy the present as much as you can rather than worry about the future I guess.. but then again that's not a luxury everyone has.. but life sucks anyway so there's not much you can do really.. so I guess we're all screwed either way.. and then there's so many other things you have to worry about and so forth.. but.. well, I could keep arguing this in my head which probably is how I occupy most of my days, but in the end of course I'll just end up where I started again, and the process will just start all over the next day and so on and so forth.. really must stop thinking so much.. but that's just the way I am.. now if I could just find that off switch..
posted by Jeff at 3:14 PM
