ORDINARILY, a newly arrived package of books sets off a rash of sniffing around the spine and cover, usually to postpone the anticipated first taste of the first page.
However, when I touched the pouch containing the biographies of Isaac Newton and Pablo Neruda, I felt a third unexplained spine.
It was a notebook, nearly six inches by nine, covered in blue cloth, with about a hundred blank, acid-free pages.
On a card inserted inside the notebook, the seller said the notebook was a gift.
The Internet is amazing. Where is the marketplace that can bring together strangers whose purposes cross and match: one person wants to clear his apartment to make way for other books, the other is just dying to read the unwanted titles?
Where else but in this online chaos can the intangible and the impersonal produce a thing as blank but definable, as common but inimitable as a notebook?
Nothing, even on the Internet, can be as magical as a notebook.
In elementary, I used to pass on my school books to a friend who visited our family during summer vacation.
Although she was two or three years younger than I, she pored over those books, a feat that amazed me not only because this was done in summer, a time I used for thinking of creative ways to do nothing. A. told me that in her hinterland barangay, neither her schoolmates nor her teachers had these books or any books at all.
A. just wanted to read my old books because she hoped that, after finishing sixth grade, her parents would send her to high school.
My friend was specially drawn to Math. She spent nearly an entire summer just scanning my workbook before she asked me, a bit hesitantly, if she could also have my old notebooks.
I was about to tear off the unused pages but A. showed me how to remove the staple wires. She painstakingly snipped off the used pages, aligned the trimmed blank sheets, and backstitched with twine to bind a new notebook from the remnants of my old ones.
Today, I see some of my students bringing these “green” notebooks. Some deconstruct old notebooks and create a new one, using saved string or yarn, even shoelaces with neon smileys. In a sidewalk bin downtown, I saw notebooks made to look as if they were handmade.
It’s quite a trend, hip and cool for some youngsters.
All those summers ago, A. was not driven by a trend. She swam against the currents and eddies swirling her family and neighbors round and round their tiny sitio.
When she practice-solved the mathematical problems in my workbooks, she wanted a notebook that would fix in place and hold for keeps all her trials, errors and final solutions.
Doing her Math on loose slips of paper would not have worked. How would she know if she was doing something right if she no longer had the proof when a problem whose solution she had worked out years earlier would suddenly turn up in that remote classroom, by chance, by magic (what else could have made some things materialize in a blackboard in a classroom where no books warmed the hands and opened the minds of teacher and the taught)?
When I think of my friend, now entrusted with the finances of her long-time employer’s varied businesses, I am sure A. unknowingly started something else when she faced those blank, bound sheets as if she were Ali Baba unsealing the doors of the cave of wonders with the cry of magic, “Open Sesame!”
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* First published in the “Matamata” column of July 26, 2009 in Sun.Star Cebu
Monday, July 27, 2009
Saturday, July 18, 2009
The messenger is the medium
I learned about the deaths of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Walter Cronkite from the Internet.
But after reading in one website about the transitions, I automatically surfed the Net for other sites and related stories.
More than curiosity, a need to verify the information fuels my reading.
Despite the power and the glory, the influence they wield over the public and the private, the awards and the accolades, journalists err.
I have to thank growing up during the Martial Law years for this unforgettable insight of media.
But in between reading and then rejecting the crony papers, borrowing and passing around underground papers, Xerox journalism and the alternative press, I also had a class reading assignment on “broadcasting icons,” among them, Walter Cronkite.
This Walt Disney lookalike, a fixture in American households for covering milestones such as John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Neil Armstrong’s first steps in the moon for mankind, urged everyone who hung on to his words, who trusted him more than any politician, who felt that nothing would shake order and continuity for as long as he would wrap up each day’s happenings, the trivial and the disastrous, with his Zen-like wrap—“And that’s the way it is”— to take to heart the exact opposite message of his TV-conferred image: “'For God's sake don't! Be skeptical. Be careful.'"
Cronkite was quoted as saying this to a fan who exclaimed, after meeting him, that she believed everything he said.
His passing last Friday brings back the memory of that class assignment, specially because now, more than ever, news-mediated realities are our closest approximations of truth.
Technology improves by leaps and bounds. In contrast, public’s trust of media shrinks, sputters, inches forward.
This love-hate relationship must give hope to journalists and the public. For media workers, it’s a challenge to make each article, every newscast matter. For the audience, it’s a call to do more than read, listen and view.
Think, said Cronkite.
Cronkite didn’t reach his peak in this age, jaundiced against journalists, governments, priests, advertisers and all other gods of clay.
He enjoyed a 20-year honeymoon with an American public that was still virginal, starry-eyed and dependent on national TV in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Watching his archived broadcasts on YouTube, I got a glimpse of the iconic shadow cast by the man for whom pundits created the word “news anchor.” Ever the professional, he reported facts, not speculation, and told audiences where the information came from (when fellow CBS reporter Dan Rather filed that Kennedy was dead, Cronkite noted that there was still no official confirmation of the president’s condition).
But such was the man’s credibility and the TV medium’s power to amplify, Cronkite’s handling of his black-rimmed eyeglasses magnified the moments when the news stirred the person beneath that impartial anchor’s demeanor: after he read the flash report citing official confirmation of Kennedy’s death, Cronkite removed his reading glasses, looked down as if avoiding the camera’s intrusion and swallowed convulsively. I can’t imagine anyone in the audience not breaking down then.
Or when Apollo 11 successfully made its lunar landing, Cronkite chortled off-cam, “Man on the moon!” Seconds later, removing his black rims, he muttered “Boy!” and rubbed his hands, like a child just delighted by the magical and the unimaginable.
Yet, what makes Cronkite a giant in my view is that he didn’t believe in the hype his adoring public created around him. He went on field before reporting the news, parachuting in during D-Day and covering the bloody Tet offensive from the ground. Based on his wartime coverage, he spoke out against military solutions, in Vietnam and after 9/11 in particular.
During and after his TV career, he never ran for public office, never endorsed a politician nor any brand of dishwashing liquid.
Until he died at the age of 92, he believed that journalists should take the time to think before opening their mouths, and that the public should think and think again after consuming the news.
Salamat, Mr. Cronkite.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 19, 2009 edition of the “Matamata” column
But after reading in one website about the transitions, I automatically surfed the Net for other sites and related stories.
More than curiosity, a need to verify the information fuels my reading.
Despite the power and the glory, the influence they wield over the public and the private, the awards and the accolades, journalists err.
I have to thank growing up during the Martial Law years for this unforgettable insight of media.
But in between reading and then rejecting the crony papers, borrowing and passing around underground papers, Xerox journalism and the alternative press, I also had a class reading assignment on “broadcasting icons,” among them, Walter Cronkite.
This Walt Disney lookalike, a fixture in American households for covering milestones such as John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Neil Armstrong’s first steps in the moon for mankind, urged everyone who hung on to his words, who trusted him more than any politician, who felt that nothing would shake order and continuity for as long as he would wrap up each day’s happenings, the trivial and the disastrous, with his Zen-like wrap—“And that’s the way it is”— to take to heart the exact opposite message of his TV-conferred image: “'For God's sake don't! Be skeptical. Be careful.'"
Cronkite was quoted as saying this to a fan who exclaimed, after meeting him, that she believed everything he said.
His passing last Friday brings back the memory of that class assignment, specially because now, more than ever, news-mediated realities are our closest approximations of truth.
Technology improves by leaps and bounds. In contrast, public’s trust of media shrinks, sputters, inches forward.
This love-hate relationship must give hope to journalists and the public. For media workers, it’s a challenge to make each article, every newscast matter. For the audience, it’s a call to do more than read, listen and view.
Think, said Cronkite.
Cronkite didn’t reach his peak in this age, jaundiced against journalists, governments, priests, advertisers and all other gods of clay.
He enjoyed a 20-year honeymoon with an American public that was still virginal, starry-eyed and dependent on national TV in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Watching his archived broadcasts on YouTube, I got a glimpse of the iconic shadow cast by the man for whom pundits created the word “news anchor.” Ever the professional, he reported facts, not speculation, and told audiences where the information came from (when fellow CBS reporter Dan Rather filed that Kennedy was dead, Cronkite noted that there was still no official confirmation of the president’s condition).
But such was the man’s credibility and the TV medium’s power to amplify, Cronkite’s handling of his black-rimmed eyeglasses magnified the moments when the news stirred the person beneath that impartial anchor’s demeanor: after he read the flash report citing official confirmation of Kennedy’s death, Cronkite removed his reading glasses, looked down as if avoiding the camera’s intrusion and swallowed convulsively. I can’t imagine anyone in the audience not breaking down then.
Or when Apollo 11 successfully made its lunar landing, Cronkite chortled off-cam, “Man on the moon!” Seconds later, removing his black rims, he muttered “Boy!” and rubbed his hands, like a child just delighted by the magical and the unimaginable.
Yet, what makes Cronkite a giant in my view is that he didn’t believe in the hype his adoring public created around him. He went on field before reporting the news, parachuting in during D-Day and covering the bloody Tet offensive from the ground. Based on his wartime coverage, he spoke out against military solutions, in Vietnam and after 9/11 in particular.
During and after his TV career, he never ran for public office, never endorsed a politician nor any brand of dishwashing liquid.
Until he died at the age of 92, he believed that journalists should take the time to think before opening their mouths, and that the public should think and think again after consuming the news.
Salamat, Mr. Cronkite.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 19, 2009 edition of the “Matamata” column
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The cape is the man
NO man can shoot a priest in cold blood.
When she heard the news that a priest had been shot, apparently a victim of street crime, Yaya rued that he was not in his “sotana” during the accident.
The cassock would have turned away the bullets? I asked, incredulous to hear her state this with all seriousness.
My yaya is approaching her sixth decade, with nearly 50 years of that spent in the city. She regularly tracks the news. None of the issues embroiling the clergy escapes her. Yet, she retains the view that priests are essential, a life without them as unimaginable as a town without a patron saint and a mayor.
Yaya mused: How can a sinner, already blinded by evil, not be stayed by the fear of God if he had no sign that his victim was a priest?
Shouldn’t fear of God put a stop to any thought of taking away any life, I retorted.
Yet, monitoring the follow-up news and commentaries about the incident, I realized that others share Yaya’s view.
For many, the cassock, also known as the soutane, is a symbol whose power of association has ironically outstripped its wearers.
While controversies have pummeled the Church as an institution and its clergy’s lives have been encroached by the vicissitudes of worldliness, the cassock remains virtually unsullied, its associations with purity turning the vestment into a kind of wearable litmus test for the wearer as well as for the viewer.
So though priests, like doctors, live in great intimacy with disease and corruption, the white of the usual cassock seen in the Philippines and other tropical countries raises almost instinctive reactions: Am I clean? What have I done to be clean? What personal stains mock the whiteness I exhibit/witness?
According to Internet sources, a Papal indult (or permission granted by canon law) allows the ordinary cassock to be white in tropical countries. Black is the usual color of house cassocks worn by Roman Catholic clerics.
Another online source points out that Roman Catholic cassocks have traditionally 33 buttons down the front. The number stands for the years Jesus Christ spent on earth.
I’m not sure how many of the faithful know this trivia. But I know that whiteness and its association with purity and the religious is almost an automatic perception among many people.
I remember my late father reacting to the practice of the nuns in my school to wear civilian clothes instead of their habit in the late 1970s. “How will we be alerted to their presence?” worried my father, who was irreverent about nuns wearing mini-skirts and embracing street protest.
In the trigger-happy drug-addled view of street thugs, though, will a cassock still function as a spontaneously activating shield of virtue and privilege?
“Even if we wear cassocks in the streets to show that we are priests, we are never exempted when it comes to death and danger,” declared Fr. Bernardo Oyao to Sun.Star Cebu’s Justin K. Vestil.
Vestil interviewed the cleric, a member of the Young Clergy of Cebu, a group of newly ordained priests, for the paper’s July 11, 2009 story.
Once the daily clothing of priests, the cassock has also undergone political coloring. The wearing of it during liturgical services accounts for the vestments’ association with the traditional roles of priests.
The abandonment of its wearing is justified either for practicality in the face of parish outreach to communities or as a rejection of the Roman Catholic Church’s association with power and the status quo.
In pop culture, the soutane has not also been exempted from morphing. In “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions,” a trim and grim Neo mows down enemies and kicks ass, apparently unhampered by his close-fitting, floor-length cassock.
Although many of the faithful still reserve a deep respect for the cassock as symbol—perhaps inspired by etymological roots derived from “cassaca,” meaning “white”—it would not be irrelevant to remember the word’s other origin: “casaque,” meaning “cloak.”
As with all garments, the cassock takes its shape from the nudity it cloaks.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131
* First published in the “Matamata” column of Sun.Star Cebu’s July 12, 2009 issue
When she heard the news that a priest had been shot, apparently a victim of street crime, Yaya rued that he was not in his “sotana” during the accident.
The cassock would have turned away the bullets? I asked, incredulous to hear her state this with all seriousness.
My yaya is approaching her sixth decade, with nearly 50 years of that spent in the city. She regularly tracks the news. None of the issues embroiling the clergy escapes her. Yet, she retains the view that priests are essential, a life without them as unimaginable as a town without a patron saint and a mayor.
Yaya mused: How can a sinner, already blinded by evil, not be stayed by the fear of God if he had no sign that his victim was a priest?
Shouldn’t fear of God put a stop to any thought of taking away any life, I retorted.
Yet, monitoring the follow-up news and commentaries about the incident, I realized that others share Yaya’s view.
For many, the cassock, also known as the soutane, is a symbol whose power of association has ironically outstripped its wearers.
While controversies have pummeled the Church as an institution and its clergy’s lives have been encroached by the vicissitudes of worldliness, the cassock remains virtually unsullied, its associations with purity turning the vestment into a kind of wearable litmus test for the wearer as well as for the viewer.
So though priests, like doctors, live in great intimacy with disease and corruption, the white of the usual cassock seen in the Philippines and other tropical countries raises almost instinctive reactions: Am I clean? What have I done to be clean? What personal stains mock the whiteness I exhibit/witness?
According to Internet sources, a Papal indult (or permission granted by canon law) allows the ordinary cassock to be white in tropical countries. Black is the usual color of house cassocks worn by Roman Catholic clerics.
Another online source points out that Roman Catholic cassocks have traditionally 33 buttons down the front. The number stands for the years Jesus Christ spent on earth.
I’m not sure how many of the faithful know this trivia. But I know that whiteness and its association with purity and the religious is almost an automatic perception among many people.
I remember my late father reacting to the practice of the nuns in my school to wear civilian clothes instead of their habit in the late 1970s. “How will we be alerted to their presence?” worried my father, who was irreverent about nuns wearing mini-skirts and embracing street protest.
In the trigger-happy drug-addled view of street thugs, though, will a cassock still function as a spontaneously activating shield of virtue and privilege?
“Even if we wear cassocks in the streets to show that we are priests, we are never exempted when it comes to death and danger,” declared Fr. Bernardo Oyao to Sun.Star Cebu’s Justin K. Vestil.
Vestil interviewed the cleric, a member of the Young Clergy of Cebu, a group of newly ordained priests, for the paper’s July 11, 2009 story.
Once the daily clothing of priests, the cassock has also undergone political coloring. The wearing of it during liturgical services accounts for the vestments’ association with the traditional roles of priests.
The abandonment of its wearing is justified either for practicality in the face of parish outreach to communities or as a rejection of the Roman Catholic Church’s association with power and the status quo.
In pop culture, the soutane has not also been exempted from morphing. In “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions,” a trim and grim Neo mows down enemies and kicks ass, apparently unhampered by his close-fitting, floor-length cassock.
Although many of the faithful still reserve a deep respect for the cassock as symbol—perhaps inspired by etymological roots derived from “cassaca,” meaning “white”—it would not be irrelevant to remember the word’s other origin: “casaque,” meaning “cloak.”
As with all garments, the cassock takes its shape from the nudity it cloaks.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131
* First published in the “Matamata” column of Sun.Star Cebu’s July 12, 2009 issue
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