IT'S EASY TO FORGET A NOTBOOK

It's easy to forget a thing that isn't a book. Especially something that pretends to be a book. The other night I put my Kindle Fire - my large-paperback-sized notbook containing Joyce, Chekhov, Thoreau, Vonnegut, Tolstoy, Dick, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Hemingway, you name them, and many other favorite authors' books - down beside the bathroom sink, and when I'd finished brushing my teeth beside all those literary icons I turned off the light and went upstairs to bed, where I was going to read, and forgot to take a whole library with me. We have much to get used to in the world that is coming.

I forgot my Kindle Fire because as I say it's not a book; my mind doesn't love it the way it loves a book, doesn't heft it or revere it like a book, and never will. My realback books, on the other hand, I have always guarded like my own skin and never left behind. I'd leave my bag behind sometimes, or even my wallet or glasses or car keys, but never my book. The book was always in my hand, where it was held dear. There was an umbilical aspect to our relationship.

When I use my notbook, even after several months I still can't fully digest the fact that there are hundreds of volumes in there, largely public domainers I used to have to pay for nonetheless, because they'd been "published" in hefty paperbacks that were in themselves an accomplishment of manufacture, but back then their cost gave them worldly value. In the notbook, a big thick book is the same as a little thin book; all you get is one silently sliding page at a time, though out of lifelong habit as my eye reads down the page my dutiful forefinger creeps up toward the corner to get ready to turn the page that - is not there - the finger nonetheless searching in space on its own, like an inchworm. Even after several months, my faithful finger refuses to abandon this lifelong occupation and slides up to the corner, to - oh, this isn't a real book, is it - the forlorn digit (big etymology there...) reminds me with its sudden unemployment. Moreover, I don't close the device, I turn it off. You don't turn a book off! And how do you console an unemployed finger?

Nothing like book2notbook has ever happened to humans before. When we went from scroll to Gutenberg we didn't have any trouble remembering the book; we didn't forget the book because it wasn't a scroll. Nor did early scrollers-to-booksters try to unroll their book to open it, or try to roll it up when they finished, they just closed it. They slipped easily into the book groove, their forefingers happy with their new job; there were none of the surprises that await me at every nonturn with my notbook, unlearning things I never thought I knew, like my forefinger, or the entire me, unnecessarily rolling over in bed to comfortably read the next page.

Now I can read in complete darkness! Or turn up/down the page brightness! These are not book inherencies. The digital book has brought with it a whole new set of concepts I've had to open up to for the first time: how, for example, take possessive delight in a masterpiece in digital form? I still can't. A file is not a book, insists my old mind, even as I read; I don't feel the visceral connection of true possession. When it's only numbers, there's just something digital about it.

The bookmind has other problems, some of which may fade as I advance into this new and deweydecimalless life, carrying my library in one hand. For example, Great Gatsby and War and Peace now have the same heft. Also, the fact that I am devouring Ulysses is unobservable by others. How can I impress an interesting lady at the cafe by browsing an invisible Tropic of Cancer? Scorsese's cinema masterpiece After Hours could never have developed if the main character had been reading a Kindle. That feeling of weighty accomplishment under way is gone too, as is that deep sense of reward implicit in the heft of what is being portioned deliciously into my mind, of feeling how much has been read and how much remains to be read by the relative volumes of pages; priceless measures of effort and gain to the veteran reader. But no more.

So what happens from here? Digitally, so much is now out of the question. Terabytes of zeros and ones just ain't got it. Spacial and voluminous reality will always matter, at least until we ourselves become digital; but in my present form, how backbreakingly heavy are the many hundreds if not thousands of actual books on my shelves and in boxes stacked upstairs that I dare not open or I'll be absorbed for hours, dare not move or I'll be in pain. Fact is, they're getting to be a burden by comparison: how crude, to be lifting and moving those chunks of increasingly dead weight around for the rest of my life...

Yet I can't forget them, unlike the entire canon by the bathroom sink.

BOOKS AND PENS

Now that I've had my Kindle Fire for a couple of months, I saw a guy reading a physical book the other day on the train and felt a touch of how old-fashioned it was, turning paper pages, page after page... The pace of tradition...

My Kindle isn't even nearly filled, despite all the free (public domain is vast!) and purchased books it contains (before too long it will hold more books than I have in physical form, a voluminous heaviness of former trees, believe me!) What's more, I can find any of those ebooks within seconds. (I don't know where the hell my actual copy of Emerson among the Eccentrics is; it's in one of those boxes in one of those rooms upstairs, knock yerself out.)

On top of that, when I summon any one of my ebooks from their endless bookshelf, it opens to where I was last reading. Also each word is a link to a dictionary, there is also wi-fi for interneting, and I can read in the dark without turning back and forth to get to page after page, also keeping hands warm in winter. I can read even a 2000-page book without danger of falling asleep and injuring myself. Physical books seem so HEAVY now... I used to carry two books max in my bag; now I carry hundreds in the weight of one.

I look at my stacks of physical books and boxes of physical books and rooms of physical books and shelves of physical books made from who knows how many pulverized trees that over the decades I have bought and read and kept and stacked and boxed and dusted and lifted and carried and moved from home to home and shipped both domestically and abroad, put into and taken from vehicles and picked up at the post office and lifted into rooms and unboxed and shelved and reboxed to make room for new books, back in the days when the world was going postal...

And fountain pens, remember fountain pens? In grammar school I learned the Palmer method (!) of cursive writing(!) with a steel-nibbed(!) quill pen(!) dipped into an inkwell(!), an inkwell set into the desk itself! Is that immediately post-stone age or what? Back then, fountain pens were sold everywhere, even in pharmacies! Like books! All professional men had a fountain pen clipped to their shirt pocket.

But the inky fountains were soon being backgrounded like so much else in this modern age; you gotta wonder where it's all heading now, as those beautiful things (like the Japanese writing brush of not so long ago, now exclusively an art form, like Western calligraphy is fast becoming) being shunted into the past where they'll be missed by those who remember, but what will my great-great-great grandchildren do with a fountain pen if they can find one?

I feel the same kind of thing I feel now when I come across my beloved old Mont Blanc: I love it, and love writing by hand, which draws from the mind the rhythms and breathings, the flowings and secret urges of words, lost to those who learn to merely tap on a keyboard. I love writing by hand as much as I love physical books-- I've always worshiped the reality and magic that pens and the books contain in their silence, always loved their heft and scent, the sound of the ink flowing out onto page, from page into eyes, into meanings... how can that become anachronism?

Armfuls of books, roomfuls of eloquence, pages of elegance written by hand, all heading for long ago now; we elders are the formal bearers of these things into the past, where books and pens will one day be like hieroglyphs on stone walls beneath desert sands...

After us they will become mysteries, and will have experts down the ages to tease out their secrets, but they will no longer be lived...

It goes without saying that I'm keeping my books and my pens.

 
TWAIN ON A ZOOK

Talking to a book-loving friend this morning about the gradual disappearance of physical books, and how infants today, growing up into an increasingly bookless world, may learn to read from a kindle or a nook, dook, fook, hook, kook, mook, zook or whatever comes after, and for their children it may be implants.

They'll never learn to love the promise in the heft of a book, portending the words, thoughts and adventures within; they'll never learn to love the scent of pages or the thrill of an entire library-- no exploring the stacks, no class visit to learn about books and how to use the card catalog-- the Dewey Decimal system will go the way of the pen, and cursive writing's ancient grace will have no place in their minds, as is happening already. It may all be MacWisdom by then, with one day the entire politically and academically corrected canon implanted at birth, science fictionally speaking. [There may come trolls who say that life is grate witout reeding or riting we got lots of time for other stuf an joystiks to]

And judging from what is considered worthy reading matter these days, comes the correction of Huck Finn, the dumbdowning of Gatsby, the dispassionate writing-class flavor of modern LitFic and all that will follow as the word bends over backward to accommodate the loss of education that schooling is becoming, I realized that I may well have the largest genuine library on the mountainside... I certainly have the largest English library on the mountainside, maybe in all of Shiga Prefecture...

Until recently it has been a problem for me, what to do with all these books, but now that there are Nooks and the like, which I will not use for hefty mindstuff; maybe a mystery for the train, but I will never read Fyodor Dostoevsky on a Pook or Mark Twain on a Zook, are you kidding me? Some literary efforts and their life-passions require the heft of deep respect; there is something karmic going on here, after all, there is more to books than pixels...

So rather than continue to be burdened as before by the mass of my own tomes, I now realize that my home has become a cultural repository against the looming loss of calligraphy-driven writing, much like the stone cloisters of the Dark Ages, when books were known, scribed and saved from the dark by a passionate few as treasures for the future, when they would be needed. So for you folks centuries hence who can still read and have somehow found this blog, up in that ruin on the mountain you can find Mark in the original.

EXPAT BOOKWORM JUBILATION

As a long-time traveler who has experienced many of the world's markets (in fact, sold in a few) and the infinity of trickery therein, I of course did not believe it when I visited an online bookstore with an Amazonlike selection range and Amazonlike prices, but that offered FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE (Amazon offers "free" shipping in the continental US for only $79 a year!), I thought who are you kidding, from Seattle to here it's usually book price plus ca. 50% for shipping costs, and this new place was in the UK, but then after checking a bit deeper decided to try it and see, ordered two paperback books (one of which Amazon had only in hardback (to be pre-ordered!). Received the two books in perfect shape by air, the first in about 2 weeks, the other at a bit over 3 weeks (delayed by to the Icelandic volcano, as discovered via order tracking). I don't know how they do it but I hope it lasts. I suspect that Expat English bookworms worldwide are now rejoicing.

Notes on the alleged decline of reading

By Ursula K. Le Guin

JAPANESE GESTURES

Japan has many useful gestures generally unknown in the West, perhaps the most useful being the oddly polite chopping gesture used to pass in front of or between people; very handy. I often use it reflexively when I'm back in the States and people look at me funny, since I thereby assume rights that haven't been granted.

As to another gesture, I remember being a newbie here, having only been in Tokyo for a few weeks, when in Ginza one day I saw an elderly man who had been called to by a stranger on the street point to his nose and raise his eyebrows!' A stranger told him there's something on his nose? What a polite country!' I thought. However, I could see nothing unusual, probosciswise; his nose looked entirely normal. If I'd had this book back then, I would have known what he meant right away...

"Okay, maybe Japanese is a bit hard to learn to speak and write. But there’s a lot you can say in Japanese using just your hands, nose, arms, and other forms of suggestive "body" language. This whimsical look at Japan’s "language of no language" introduces 70 gestures that will help you hurl insults, flirt, agree, excuse yourself, cross the street, and even make promises-—wordlessly!" ---- 70 Japanese Gestures

And as to the other side of the coin, all the many gestures I imported from NY have been of little use here over the years, which has been very disappointing at the reflexive time of use. I've now abandoned most of them, though they return at once when I hit US soil...