KYOTO JOURNAL DIGITAL NOW OUT!  

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The folks over at Kyoto Journal recently announced release of their 77th issue, after a long transition from print to digital (and a complete website rebuild). This puts KJ back on track as a quarterly publication providing "insights from Asia."

The 22 articles in this issue (200 pages+!) take readers beyond the ancient capital to Hiroshima, Tokyo and Fukushima, on to Korea, China, Nepal, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, delving into film and fiction, poetry, "off-the-beaten-track" travels, craft and calligraphy, architectural and archaeological investigations, yoga, post-disaster initiatives, and reviews, finishing up right here on Pure Land Mountain.

A KJ 77 sampler is available at: http://kyotojournal.org/current-issue-digital-edition/

And a full contents list, here: http://kyotojournal.org/current-issue-digital-edition/)

If you go to KJ's homepage, http://kyotojournal.org/, you can sign up for an occasional newsletter — and receive a free download of a classic issue, KJ 73.

A one-year subscription to KJ (4 issues) is just 4,000 yen.

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.

 
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.

HOLDEN CAULFIELD, SENIOR CITIZEN

If you really want to hear about it, here I am, still acting like a teenager, over 70 years old now with no hope of ever retiring, pension forget it, still mouthing the same damn text word for word, following the same old routine page after page in the same depressing scenarios, even though none of those places exist anymore, if they ever did, how the hell should I know, locked in sentences and paragraphs like I am, day in, day out, acting like a self-centered 1950's adolescent in millions of copies of the damn book by now and I'm telling you it's making me sick, I think I've got cancer. Or maybe it's my gall bladder, this terrible diet and lifestyle...

I'm not a teenager anymore, and for once in my life I'd like to act my age, get to bed early, have a decent meal, wear some adult clothes, maybe marry, have kids who aren't disturbed characters in novels like their old man, live out in the country where it's quiet, raise a few vegetables, forget all this. I'm tired. I've grown way out of the stuff in the book, it's been over 50 years now. I'm not self-centered anymore, I'd like to be more like a character in real life, a guy who's responsible, thoughtful of others, maybe a country doctor or organic farmer. But to think that I'll be going on exactly like this for as long as people read this damn book is enough to make me commit suicide, as if I had the option.

I never did much reading myself, my author saw to that, but I was talking to Ishmael not long ago, he's had it up to here too, with Queequeg, Ahab, Starbuck, whales, the sea, every damn thing day after day in libraries all over the world, wants to get his landlegs back, maybe open a bed-and-breakfast in Nantucket, fat chance. Raskolnikov was saying just the other day how he wants to lead a less stressful life, maybe join the clergy, but he's always got to have killed some old woman with an axe, no matter what he might think about it now.

Even though all of us are famous-- Hester, who's been pregnant in another century for I don't know how long; Tristram still living with his crazy family; Oliver still picking pockets in the London smog; Huck still trying to get back upriver; Valjean, all he wants is to return that damn candelabra and shuck the whole sewer scene; so many others--- the libraries are full of us, but what do our true feelings matter, we're just literature.

Fame means nothing to us; how could it, since no one knows who we really are, who we really want to be, what we truly feel after all this time; characters do change; but no one cares, not even our authors, who put all these words in our mouths; they're mostly dead now anyway, or if not they're writing some other characters into this hell; anyway they never really listened while they were writing us, then they just cut us off at the end, like they were god or something.

Just once I'd like to get my monotonous hands on that sneaky-fingered guy who did this to me, created this whole damn thing without putting at least one decent female in here, not even a good meal, or some interesting people, just a bunch of discontents like I used to be, full of aimless angst and all that fifties' shit, over and over again. I've had it up to here.

At least I haven't got it as bad as Anna, though, poor woman, jumping under a train for over a hundred years now, she's a trooper, but I can tell it's getting to her; she'd just love to get her hands on a guy called Tolstoy. Hester offered to switch novels with her, but Anna would rather jump under a train. Huck offered to switch with me too, get away from his old man, see some modern life, such as it is; not that I want to get anywhere near Huck’s old man myself. Anyway Huck's way older than I am, doesn't know a thing about the fifties; besides, he hates history, and the future is just history in reverse.

Well, nice talking to ya but I gotta go, some blankhead just bought a copy, gotta get back to where it's cold as a witch's tit, and that secret slob sneaking his finger up his nose, start all over again from the beginning, word for word for the trillionth time, settin' out to catch whatever the hell is in the rye, and old as I may be, I'm still the only one who can do it right, I guess. One does have a certain responsibility to what they call The Canon.

Don't misunderstand me though, I'm sure as hell not recommending you read the book.

HANDI-BARF

Do you find yourself among the growing number of perceptive individuals suffering the onslaughts of modern life who don't want to cause dangerously slippery carpets, sidewalks and stairwells, yet are experiencing a steadily intensifying need to barf your guts out right on the spot, several times a day?

Well here's the solution to that nagging problem: new Handi-Barf, a compact, portable place to toss your cookies pretty close to spontaneously, anywhere irrepressible nausea is generated.

Handi-Barf is just what the intelligent and tasteful modern-day individual needs to keep in social trim without losing any throwup time from the metaphysical rollercoaster of modern living. Carried in purse, slipped into a pocket, hooked onto your tie, placed on your desk or suspended from the person in front of you on the subway, Handi-Barf affords civilized relief in a flash-- with no muss, no fuss and no apologies.

Bring Handi-Barf with you to bureaucracies, financial houses, art openings, fashion shows, political gatherings–- anywhere that old metaphoric finger can slip down your throat. And while you're reading the latest best-seller, just clip your Handi-Barf to the bottom of the book, so you can upchuck as you read; could anything be more convenient?

And if you have to watch the tube, simply suspend your Handi-Barf from the patented Handi-Barf headgear as you experience an evening of typical programming, and you won't have to stop watching, even during commercials, to ralph your tv dinner.

Or should you be unavoidably exposed to the fundamentally righteous, simply whip out your Handi-Barf and let your soul experience the truth and light afforded only by the joy that surpasseth the surrender of understanding.

No more waiting, hand over mouth! No more scrambling for a door handle, racing for a toilet bowl, groping for a wastebasket, searching for an open window, hassling with a coat pocket or wrestling with a handbag! No more panic at the surging of all those existential cookies that so urgently need tossing in these times of potentially non-stop nausea!

Handi-Barf, Inc.: pioneers in metaphysical hardware.