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.

THE FROGPHONE ONLY RINGS ONCE

The other day I was out splitting wood and I heard the phone ring. I put down the axe, took off my gloves and ran into the house because I was expecting a call from Echo, who was on her way home from visiting her folks in Nagano, and I’d have to pick her up at the station. Got to the phone and it had stopped ringing. Or had it rung at all? Went back to work.

At some point on the next day the same thing happened: the phone rang just once, I standing there with the phone in hand, wondering if in fact the phone had rung at all. Was I hearing things? My ears didn’t seem to be ringing, but all those decades of loud music, even that full-volume Zappa this morning...

That afternoon I was out on the deck, with a higher aural vantage, and I heard the phone ring again. Only it wasn’t in the house: the sound was coming from the paddy across the road! Just one ring. It was a frog calling. Without a phone. So one frog had learned to emit a tradition-breaking ribbet that was precisely like the sound of our telephone ringing. But only once.

You can stand there for an hour, if you’re like me this afternoon, and not hear our phone ring in the paddy even once; but get into a distracting task or a distracted state of mind, and suddenly the phone rings (is the frog watching?); you respond to the sound with what we humans call a Pavlovian reaction, but in this case I guess would have to be called Frogovian.

The only onceness of it is what makes it effective in tweaking any human with a phone like mine. If he went riiiing riiiing riiing etc. as frogs have historically done with their ribbetry, I would pinpoint the sound and not be fooled. The wily singularity of the ring, coupled with its sonic precision, leads me to an ominous surmise: that there may be purpose here, or at least a natural encroachment of some new kind upon we humans, naively isolate in our technococoonery.

It seems to be just one frog at the moment, since there’s no cacophony of ringing phones and no callbacks that I can perceive, but how long can that last, if the frog is having such fun? If my intensifying surmise is true, this could get worse, and more diverse. Soon there may be more events of this nature-- frogs sounding like doorbells, alarm clocks, chatmail... Already there’s that bird - in the Amazon I think - that imitates the call of the chainsaw… Nature, being everywhere by--well, by nature-- is always listening and always learning, and now it may be conspiring, in this mild instance to run us pointlessly to our phones. But if one morning in the future you rush out of the house and jump into your car only to discover that it’s a tree-- and it's taking you somewhere you’ve never been-- remember you heard it here first.

And no, I haven’t taken hallucinogenics in years.