Keepers of the faith

THE CHALK trick worked like magic. Or should have, if only some wise guys did not repeat the trick every year.

At St. Theresa’s College (STC), some textbooks were rented. Before the school year ended, we returned the books but not before readying these for next year’s users.

The most unpopular task was sanding the sides of a book. Sandpaper was rubbed carefully to remove the stains without tearing old, fragile paper.

Every year, I was resigned to a day or two of sneezing. Increasing my annoyance was inhaling dust from textbooks I hardly opened. And then in fourth grade, I saw some classmates rub chalk on the sides, turn in their copy with immaculate sides, and walk away as cool as cats.

Perhaps the gods that spot cheaters were back from coffeebreak because when I tried the same trick, my teacher opened and slammed shut my book in quick succession. Not only did I inhale paper AND chalk dust, I had to sand the sides until the book looked as if it had jumped straight from some virgin forest. To think that I read no more than five pages of that grammar tome.

My short-lived career as a chalk artist made me realize some shortcuts take longer and are dustier. And a book is loved best when it is read and shared.

Thus, nothing strikes greater horror than coming upon a school library with books that look as if they were last opened when someone wrapped the covers with plastic. Reacting to “The empty shelf” (published in this space last May 19, 2013), Ara Chawdhury, a University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu alumna, recalled that in a public school she attended, the library was held off-limits to students. The librarian was afraid that the few books they had would be ruined or stolen.

Despite our chalk tricks and other antics, my STC teachers and librarians drummed in us the principle that loving the written word meant never defacing a book.

How are readers created? Ara suggests storybook reading and storytelling sessions when books are few and have to be shared.

Reacting to the same Facebook thread (permission was given to quote them), UP Cebu alumnae Eva Marie “M” Gamboa and Cris Evert Lato wrote about Basadours. “M” said they are “volunteer ambassadors” advocating for literacy by holding storytelling sessions with kids of various places and groups.

As a Cebu Daily News journalist covering the threatened closure of the Cebu City Public Library (CCPL) in 2008 and later volunteering with the Friends of CCPL, Cris felt that closing the library was “purely unacceptable”. Yet, she also saw how the place had become a “cemetery of dead books”.

“For us, Basadours, the library should be an activity center. Kanang sadya, bibo ug naay kinabuhi,” wrote Cris.

Fun and life. That’s exactly what’s in the rapt faces and wide-eyed expressions of public and private school children joining the Basadours’ storythons, storytelling, read-along and story writing sessions held at the CCPL, various daycare centers, barangay reading centers, barangays, and towns in Cebu and Mandaue.

Their Facebook page informs that the fledgling organization just turned two this year. Gathering young professionals as diverse as librarians, teachers, nurses, lawyers, media personalities and filmmakers, the Basadours partners with government, non-government and private entities to tell kids that nothing is cooler than reading.

After more than a hundred enthusiasts showed up for the first “Storytelling 101” last May 18, the Basadours invites the public to join another free training at CCPL on June 8, 2013.

Yet, if reading to a tough audience of young readers is not your thing, you may just be like Peedi Aranas who, when she was a teacher, opened her classroom during recess and lunch break for those who wanted to rest from scrapes, read, draw or just listen to tales.

With a lot of faith, there will always be readers.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 2, 2013 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday main op-ed column

Of mockingbirds and readers

MUCH-LOVED books are many things to their readers.

Take Harper Lee’s 1960 classic “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

It’s been praised as a coming-of-age tale. When I first read it in 1979, the friendship that developed between childhood friends Scout, Jem and Dill and their enigmatic neighbor, Boo, made me cry—and this had nothing to do with the book review my teacher, Madam Rebecca Montaño, made us write after weeks of critical reading of the novel, chapter by chapter.

Prodded by our English teacher, our 13-year-old minds became aware of the fate of mockingbirds in Lee’s tale set in the American South during the Great Depression. Yet, perhaps because we were so engaged with the narrator, six-year-old Scout, my classmates and I were only vaguely aware of the trial of a Negro for the rape of a white girl.

The themes of sexual taboos, discrimination and injustice were then mere flashes of lightning briefly illuminating a darkening sky. It was only in college that I absorbed the underside of Lee’s genial, sleepy town of Maycomb.

My rereading of the novel during the late 1980s was helped a lot by that era’s salvaging, hamletting and purging. Somewhere in the coils of English contorted by martial law violence and ideologies were Lee’s mockingbirds. When their father, Atticus Finch, gives Scout and Jem their first air rifles for Christmas, he cautions them: “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

The Finches’ neighbor, Miss Maudie Atkinson, makes it less cryptic for the children: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

It’s not just generations that separate my sons from me. I realize this after I unearthed my copy of Lee’s novel for my younger son’s grade 9 Reading assignment.

This 1973 Penguin edition was reprinted by a Quezon City publisher “under the authority of Presidential Decree No. 285.” The same law prohibits exporting the book from the country. The warning is printed at the back of my copy’s flyleaf, on which my 13-year-old self has written: “Personal property… Private Property! no dog ears please!”

Then, I didn’t see the irony of juxtaposing my prickly sense of ownership rights with a regime’s curtailment of information, its rape of human rights. While turning the book’s yellowed pages, I wonder how my younger son will find Maycomb. Will he be entertained by the quirkiness of a Southern Gothic morality tale, and miss the real haunting that continues to this day?

For this reader, Lee’s tale survives the decades better in spirit than in physical form. A staple in classrooms and libraries, “To Kill a Mockingbird” has something for everyone: children, parents, teachers, lawyers, neighbors, citizens.

Rereading it on my 47th year, I belatedly realize it is also a book for readers. Love for the printed word is in nearly every critical scene. When Dill of Meridian first makes his appearance to Scout and Jem in Miss Rachel Haverford’s collard patch, he introduces himself as, “I’m Charles Baker Harris… I can read.”

It’s a declaration that hardly impresses Jem on account of his sister’s feat: “Scout yonder’s been reading ever since she was born…”

Reading may not solve some problems, but it may prevent creating others. When Atticus keeps watch over the imprisoned Tom Robinson, the Negro accused of rape, he brings a chair, a light bulb with an extension cord, and a book. (In his youth, Atticus was nicknamed “Ol One-shot”.) So armed, the “deadest shot” in Maycomb faces the mob thirsting for a lynching.

That reading so imbues the novel without overpowering it testifies to Lee’s craft. As Scout declares after an epic struggle with a grade one teacher who demands Scout stops reading with her father so she can “properly” learn to read in class: “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 26, 2013 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday main op-ed column

The empty shelf

I ALWAYS have the same rite to mark the closing of summer: I go through my boxes of books.

It starts with a pretext: my sons are required to read the classics. I have yet to meet a teenager who will spend time with Homer and Shakespeare without demanding pizza, cappuccino with extra whipped cream or some emergency measure of resuscitation. Asking teen boys to search for my 30-year-old copy of “Hamlet” is sending them on a heroic quest without any expectation of an epic end.

I undertake the mission for many selfish reasons. I know fully well my sons. I like Wiki plot summaries—for a tip on which movie to watch on the big screen. I think SparkNotes are “lifesavers” when you’re “confuzzled”: meaning, in the words of the website, “you don’t understand your teacher, your textbooks make no sense, and you have to read sixteen chapters by tomorrow.”

But nothing is cooler than the Book.

I have fewer boxes now after giving books away. I swear, though, after I open a box, there’s always a novel I have to reread. Or an enigmatic spine to be explored.

Although the high school reading list rarely goes beyond two required classics, the day is nearly done and I am still among the boxes, sweaty and dirty, turning pages, willingly detained by the clutch of a good story. Humdrum Homer and Zzzz Shakespeare have long been found, of course.

So it was an illuminating experience to spend nearly an hour in a public elementary classroom that served as a holding area for voters last May 13.

Half of the chairs needed repairs; the rest, replacements. A fellow voter ran home when the toilet turned out to have no water. The lone ceiling fan creaked and agonized like a hurting conscience that could not be silenced.

My thoughts then were not on the deliverance promised by the ballot. What pierced me was the poverty of a room where children spend at least eight hours every day for five days a week in about 10 months every year.

Limping chairs and a dry faucet did not embody the poverty as well as a single empty shelf on the wall. In handwritten block letters, the label read: “Mini-library”.

I had not been in any of the other classrooms. I had not seen the school library.

Yet the shelf, that abandoned shell, reproached me: how can learning take place when children don’t read? When they’re not lost in a book? When not even a torn cover or a dogeared page betrays some trace of life, an imaginary life, an imagined one?

On a low table were several textbooks. At least, these looked battered, as if an army had stomped over the pages, pillaged for information, and moved on to other conquests.

But as someone who devours fiction and finds required references paltry fare, the absence of story books in the classroom gave me pause: books transform a life; how does absence shape it?

Were the books taken home after the school year ended? When school opens in June, will there be new books to fill the tiny confines of this book shelf? Will lunch break and dismissal encourage a generation of browsers-turned-readers? Can there be a shortcut to learning more diverting than reading?

At St. Theresa’s College, many of my grade school homeroom teachers encouraged us to bring a book or two from home to be placed in the classroom’s designated book nook. The books were returned when school broke for summer. By sharing our favorites, we also anticipated fresh titles and new authors brought by our classmates. And there were book fairs and the mighty library card one raced to fill within the year.

It took a one-shelf library, so diminished it was empty, to remind me how this is a country where classrooms can cost more than they need to, where families that make do without basics will never part with pesos for a novel, and where children acquire an education without discovering a book.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 19, 2013 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday main op-ed column

Book alike

XEROX is God’s gift to Philippine education.

Walking through the shopping complex situated in this campus, I see that more than half the stalls are into “copy reproduction.” Following, in dwindling prominence, are eateries, optical shops, school supplies and a parlor. Surprise: the last place does not cater to funerals.

Perhaps because this is the heart of academia, I don’t overhear anyone committing the faux pas of turning a brand into a verb: “Pa-Xerox ng chapters 1 to 16, one copy only”.

Xerox, though, is everyone’s open grey secret. Grey because everyone feels justified in violating the intellectual property rights of some Ivy League schmuck writing and publishing in the US of A or some other dominion in the oppressively affluent First World, which, by rights, should bear the burden of sharing 90 percent of the world’s wealth with 90 percent of the global population, in particular their brothers and sisters in the poor, oppressed but not unresourceful academia of the Third World.

Though I had my first meal here in campus, I now avoid the place. It’s not just because the coop canteen serves hotter, larger and cheaper helpings.

When I enter the complex, the smell of paper, ink and some other chemical—stress, panic, the fear of 5.0 ulcerating in sleepless imaginations that have yet to read 32 chapters—shoves aside the aroma of fish fillet, black beans and ampalaya.

The rhythmic click-clack of metal trays catching and disgorging reams of readings drowns every other sound like the mighty sonorous exhortations of a pumping metallic heart keeping everyone alive, barely, until the next meeting. The aftermath of a power failure defeats imagination.

Trying to eat here and achieve that zoned-out state of chewing food on an empty mind is just that: another mortal striving.

For of human agonies, there’s no end of the “reproduction”. If you lack sleep, you are bound to see every passing face as that of the classmate who has such a perfidiously pluperfect command of your assignments, she alone can answer the professor after rereading the bottom end note in the last chapter found on the 61st page.

And I used to love reading. And writing.

The day, though, I ordered a back-up copy of my one-page assignment, I heard a terrible roar. It sounded like a multi-vehicle pileup on the SLEX when the road turned slippery after a truck spilled with all its egg cargo.

Or it could have been the coughing from the queue behind me. On campus, one normally walks away with at least a ream of copies carefully tucked away. I felt like a kid with a notecard walking into a conference of PowerPoint presenters.

In the age of virtual learning, why is the photocopier still lording over, a technological alpha male?

Some professors are saints. They scan and upload next week’s readings a semester before. Yet, for a traditional reader like me, reading a screen is penance for a crime I have yet to commit. After 10 minutes of scrolling up and down a 15-page abstract visible in my five-inch screen, I get slot-machine eyes and my comprehension is terminal.

Simple is out, unless it’s torture. Academic writers are tougher than lawyers. Just when you think you can summarize what they’re pontificating about, they pull out densities of language and meaning, such as: “transnational media… provide their diasporas symbolic resources to create ‘new ethnicities’ that empower local meanings”.

To be empowered, virtual orphans and academic underlings like me run to the Man with a finger on the button for speed copying. The stiffness of a freshly copied set of readings can deeply console, whether one actually reads and makes notes on it, or one simply holds it up when the professor is firing off questions like a sniper and in taking cover behind the sheaf of papers, one realizes that this was so last week’s readings.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 8, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Book alike

XEROX is God’s gift to Philippine education.

Walking through the shopping complex situated in this campus, I see that more than half the stalls are into “copy reproduction.” Following, in dwindling prominence, are eateries, optical shops, school supplies and a parlor. Surprise: the last place does not cater to funerals.

Perhaps because this is the heart of academia, I don’t overhear anyone committing the faux pas of turning a brand into a verb: “Pa-Xerox ng chapters 1 to 16, one copy only”.

Xerox, though, is everyone’s open grey secret. Grey because everyone feels justified in violating the intellectual property rights of some Ivy League schmuck writing and publishing in the US of A or some other dominion in the oppressively affluent First World, which, by rights, should bear the burden of sharing 90 percent of the world’s wealth with 90 percent of the global population, in particular their brothers and sisters in the poor, oppressed but not unresourceful academia of the Third World.

Though I had my first meal here in campus, I now avoid the place. It’s not just because the coop canteen serves hotter, larger and cheaper helpings.

When I enter the complex, the smell of paper, ink and some other chemical—stress, panic, the fear of 5.0 ulcerating in sleepless imaginations that have yet to read 32 chapters—shoves aside the aroma of fish fillet, black beans and ampalaya.

The rhythmic click-clack of metal trays catching and disgorging reams of readings drowns every other sound like the mighty sonorous exhortations of a pumping metallic heart keeping everyone alive, barely, until the next meeting. The aftermath of a power failure defeats imagination.

Trying to eat here and achieve that zoned-out state of chewing food on an empty mind is just that: another mortal striving.

For of human agonies, there’s no end of the “reproduction”. If you lack sleep, you are bound to see every passing face as that of the classmate who has such a perfidiously pluperfect command of your assignments, she alone can answer the professor after rereading the bottom end note in the last chapter found on the 61st page.

And I used to love reading. And writing.

The day, though, I ordered a back-up copy of my one-page assignment, I heard a terrible roar. It sounded like a multi-vehicle pileup on the SLEX when the road turned slippery after a truck spilled with all its egg cargo.

Or it could have been the coughing from the queue behind me. On campus, one normally walks away with at least a ream of copies carefully tucked away. I felt like a kid with a notecard walking into a conference of PowerPoint presenters.

In the age of virtual learning, why is the photocopier still lording over, a technological alpha male?

Some professors are saints. They scan and upload next week’s readings a semester before. Yet, for a traditional reader like me, reading a screen is penance for a crime I have yet to commit. After 10 minutes of scrolling up and down a 15-page abstract visible in my five-inch screen, I get slot-machine eyes and my comprehension is terminal.

Simple is out, unless it’s torture. Academic writers are tougher than lawyers. Just when you think you can summarize what they’re pontificating about, they pull out densities of language and meaning, such as: “transnational media… provide their diasporas symbolic resources to create ‘new ethnicities’ that empower local meanings”.

To be empowered, virtual orphans and academic underlings like me run to the Man with a finger on the button for speed copying. The stiffness of a freshly copied set of readings can deeply console, whether one actually reads and makes notes on it, or one simply holds it up when the professor is firing off questions like a sniper and in taking cover behind the sheaf of papers, one realizes that this was so last week’s readings.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 8, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Book alike

XEROX is God’s gift to Philippine education.

Walking through the shopping complex situated in this campus, I see that more than half the stalls are into “copy reproduction.” Following, in dwindling prominence, are eateries, optical shops, school supplies and a parlor. Surprise: the last place does not cater to funerals.

Perhaps because this is the heart of academia, I don’t overhear anyone committing the faux pas of turning a brand into a verb: “Pa-Xerox ng chapters 1 to 16, one copy only”.

Xerox, though, is everyone’s open grey secret. Grey because everyone feels justified in violating the intellectual property rights of some Ivy League schmuck writing and publishing in the US of A or some other dominion in the oppressively affluent First World, which, by rights, should bear the burden of sharing 90 percent of the world’s wealth with 90 percent of the global population, in particular their brothers and sisters in the poor, oppressed but not unresourceful academia of the Third World.

Though I had my first meal here in campus, I now avoid the place. It’s not just because the coop canteen serves hotter, larger and cheaper helpings.

When I enter the complex, the smell of paper, ink and some other chemical—stress, panic, the fear of 5.0 ulcerating in sleepless imaginations that have yet to read 32 chapters—shoves aside the aroma of fish fillet, black beans and ampalaya.

The rhythmic click-clack of metal trays catching and disgorging reams of readings drowns every other sound like the mighty sonorous exhortations of a pumping metallic heart keeping everyone alive, barely, until the next meeting. The aftermath of a power failure defeats imagination.

Trying to eat here and achieve that zoned-out state of chewing food on an empty mind is just that: another mortal striving.

For of human agonies, there’s no end of the “reproduction”. If you lack sleep, you are bound to see every passing face as that of the classmate who has such a perfidiously pluperfect command of your assignments, she alone can answer the professor after rereading the bottom end note in the last chapter found on the 61st page.

And I used to love reading. And writing.

The day, though, I ordered a back-up copy of my one-page assignment, I heard a terrible roar. It sounded like a multi-vehicle pileup on the SLEX when the road turned slippery after a truck spilled with all its egg cargo.

Or it could have been the coughing from the queue behind me. On campus, one normally walks away with at least a ream of copies carefully tucked away. I felt like a kid with a notecard walking into a conference of PowerPoint presenters.

In the age of virtual learning, why is the photocopier still lording over, a technological alpha male?

Some professors are saints. They scan and upload next week’s readings a semester before. Yet, for a traditional reader like me, reading a screen is penance for a crime I have yet to commit. After 10 minutes of scrolling up and down a 15-page abstract visible in my five-inch screen, I get slot-machine eyes and my comprehension is terminal.

Simple is out, unless it’s torture. Academic writers are tougher than lawyers. Just when you think you can summarize what they’re pontificating about, they pull out densities of language and meaning, such as: “transnational media… provide their diasporas symbolic resources to create ‘new ethnicities’ that empower local meanings”.

To be empowered, virtual orphans and academic underlings like me run to the Man with a finger on the button for speed copying. The stiffness of a freshly copied set of readings can deeply console, whether one actually reads and makes notes on it, or one simply holds it up when the professor is firing off questions like a sniper and in taking cover behind the sheaf of papers, one realizes that this was so last week’s readings.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 8, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Book alike

XEROX is God’s gift to Philippine education.

Walking through the shopping complex situated in this campus, I see that more than half the stalls are into “copy reproduction.” Following, in dwindling prominence, are eateries, optical shops, school supplies and a parlor. Surprise: the last place does not cater to funerals.

Perhaps because this is the heart of academia, I don’t overhear anyone committing the faux pas of turning a brand into a verb: “Pa-Xerox ng chapters 1 to 16, one copy only”.

Xerox, though, is everyone’s open grey secret. Grey because everyone feels justified in violating the intellectual property rights of some Ivy League schmuck writing and publishing in the US of A or some other dominion in the oppressively affluent First World, which, by rights, should bear the burden of sharing 90 percent of the world’s wealth with 90 percent of the global population, in particular their brothers and sisters in the poor, oppressed but not unresourceful academia of the Third World.

Though I had my first meal here in campus, I now avoid the place. It’s not just because the coop canteen serves hotter, larger and cheaper helpings.

When I enter the complex, the smell of paper, ink and some other chemical—stress, panic, the fear of 5.0 ulcerating in sleepless imaginations that have yet to read 32 chapters—shoves aside the aroma of fish fillet, black beans and ampalaya.

The rhythmic click-clack of metal trays catching and disgorging reams of readings drowns every other sound like the mighty sonorous exhortations of a pumping metallic heart keeping everyone alive, barely, until the next meeting. The aftermath of a power failure defeats imagination.

Trying to eat here and achieve that zoned-out state of chewing food on an empty mind is just that: another mortal striving.

For of human agonies, there’s no end of the “reproduction”. If you lack sleep, you are bound to see every passing face as that of the classmate who has such a perfidiously pluperfect command of your assignments, she alone can answer the professor after rereading the bottom end note in the last chapter found on the 61st page.

And I used to love reading. And writing.

The day, though, I ordered a back-up copy of my one-page assignment, I heard a terrible roar. It sounded like a multi-vehicle pileup on the SLEX when the road turned slippery after a truck spilled with all its egg cargo.

Or it could have been the coughing from the queue behind me. On campus, one normally walks away with at least a ream of copies carefully tucked away. I felt like a kid with a notecard walking into a conference of PowerPoint presenters.

In the age of virtual learning, why is the photocopier still lording over, a technological alpha male?

Some professors are saints. They scan and upload next week’s readings a semester before. Yet, for a traditional reader like me, reading a screen is penance for a crime I have yet to commit. After 10 minutes of scrolling up and down a 15-page abstract visible in my five-inch screen, I get slot-machine eyes and my comprehension is terminal.

Simple is out, unless it’s torture. Academic writers are tougher than lawyers. Just when you think you can summarize what they’re pontificating about, they pull out densities of language and meaning, such as: “transnational media… provide their diasporas symbolic resources to create ‘new ethnicities’ that empower local meanings”.

To be empowered, virtual orphans and academic underlings like me run to the Man with a finger on the button for speed copying. The stiffness of a freshly copied set of readings can deeply console, whether one actually reads and makes notes on it, or one simply holds it up when the professor is firing off questions like a sniper and in taking cover behind the sheaf of papers, one realizes that this was so last week’s readings.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 8, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Unfinished quest

THE QUEST is heroism distilled.

It’s been weeks since I’ve been tagged by friends to come up with a list of 15 books I read “that will always stick with me”.

Stickiness, as defined by the tagging rules, means the first 15 books to be remembered within 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes lapsed, I realized that my list, if it ever was going to be done at all, was going to be different.

Some titles naturally figured in the list because every rereading is nearly like the first time of discovery. When the sharks first hit the marlin in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” always stuns and saddens decades after I first read the novel in college.

Although the impact is partially due to the wily technique of inserting the unexpected at a paragraph’s closing rather than its opening, where it would be more predictable and less shocking, the storytelling is as powerful as the currents that test the old Cuban fisherman Santiago, battling with the sea and mortality.

In this list of mine, hardly 15 yet, some books had to be dredged up, like striking faces seen quickly and lost in a crowd, and remembered again. I have read two out of three of the Cormac McCarthy novels making up The Border Trilogy. I have yet to see the “architecture” of romanticism and desolation, which the novels, taken as a whole, are supposed to set up.

Yet, meeting 16-year-old Billy, as he returns to Mexico the she-wolf he rescues and loses in “The Crossing,” the second volume in the trilogy, and encountering him three years later in “The Cities of the Plain,” the final volume, where he finds and loses a friend, I wonder if the missing first novel reinforces or contests the storyteller’s claim that, without desolation, all love is suspect.

In working to finish my list of 15, I recognize one theme uniting the disparate members of this incomplete company. The stories that find their way beneath the skin are all centered on quests.

Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” is a trilogy that follows two friends—Lyra and Will—making their way between parallel worlds, intertwined consciousness (humans and dæmons) and three novels: “The Golden Compass,” “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass”.

Bought in a school sale for my children, the volumes have been read and reread by the same fan at home. Pullman’s tale turns inside-out the Creation story of Adam and Eve: while Lyra is as deceitful and manipulative as Eve, the first stereotyped female, she and Will use Knowledge to destroy the fabrications of organized religion. Caveat: this trilogy will upset Narnians and expose anti-Potter critics as far from being wide readers, if at all.

Set in a less ambiguous but as magical stage—the Third Age of Middle-earth—“The Lord of the Rings” is my favorite of all heroic quests.

While Pullman’s wordplay is keen and tensile, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s prose can be earnest and bland as a grade school student’s effort to write “moral” poetry. Yet, perhaps because I discovered “The Fellowship of the Ring” first and then “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King” when I was barely a year out of this school level, I am more forgiving about the starkness of Tolkien’s vision of good and evil (fair Elves and pure-hearted Hobbits versus power-hungry Wizards and deformed Orcs).

Why do these fictional quests enthrall? There is a goal that seems unreachable but turns out to be attainable. There is an unlikely hero (or heroine) who surprises not just the reader but even himself (or herself). There is a tale that, after much unraveling and unwinding, returns home.

In the real world, not all quests have these three elements, specially the third.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 10, 2010 issue of the “Matamata” column.

Homecoming

NOT all booksellers are created equal.

Years ago, my grandmother came home, empty-handed, from New York. She could not find a copy of a book I implored her to find, Joan Didion’s “A Book of Common Prayer.”

It seemed she trailed behind clerks in two bookstores, peering up and down interminable shelves. Didion was a no-show in the “Religious” section, where my grandmother was invariably led.

Until now, when I discover a bookseller, I give it the Didion test.

Not just in New York but some bookstores in Cebu, Dumaguete, Bacolod, Manila, Bangkok and Chiang Mai did not know what to do with her.

“A Book of Common Prayer,” a novel about an American mother searching for a daughter she loses to Marxism and history in Central America, is almost always shelved under the categories of “Religious,” “Spiritual,” and, once, as “New Age”.

My desire to come upon emporiums of books is partially fueled by the dream of encountering in some shelf categorized as “Christian,” “Travel” or “Health” Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” her New Journalism essays on shooting LSD and the alternative lifestyle in San Francisco.

One weekend granted me this wish, sort of.

Head down and quickly losing oxygen, I was running through a pile when I found “A Book of Common Prayer” sandwiched among some New Testaments and devotionals.

The honor of making it to my personal record belongs to Les Trésors de La Belle Aurore Bookshop.

I’ve had my eye on this bookstore since last year. The sight of a glass display of book covers was so shocking, it got my mind off the usually heavy and trying traffic along Hernan Cortes St.

I grew up in nearby Barangay Tipolo. Some of my memory cells are still suffused with the reek of wet manure (from the two poultries located in the neighborhood), rotting fish guts (courtesy of the fish canneries) and the desperation wafting from the picket lines of striking workers (our homes jostled with factories and warehouses).

On the day we dropped by, there was among the trade books displayed on the show window a yellowing but still mint copy of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” written by Ernesto Guevarra after a journey he and a friend took across South America. The memoir is hard to find; it is coveted by those who know how that travel later transformed the man the world would come to know as the Latin American revolutionary, Che Guevarra.

In this city, one can find other bookstores with better inventories, certainly better filing. But I doubt if you will find a more memorable ambience, within and outside the shop.

My husband, who buys my books usually during business trips, engaged Edmond, the assistant at La Belle Aurore, about the system of filing and finding authors. From him we learn only the science fiction titles are alphabetized. If you cannot find parking space or require a database to simplify a search, first call Edmond.

But if you are superstitious like me, if you believe you are meant to find the book that finds you, you won’t begrudge losing track of time at La Belle Aurore. There is a wooden ladder you can climb to read the titles ranged along the ceiling. The wood creaks under your feet while you discover several Sartres, a few fat Hemingways, Gordimers, Booker Prize awardees, Dahls and several titles devoted to mapping the inner landscape of Middle Earth and its creator, J.R.R. Tolkien.

The door squeaks from time to time. The chimes are lovely to hear until you notice nobody has stepped inside, at least no one you can see. Edmond assures us it is just a quirk of the door lock. The sheathed vintage piano, half-covered by volumes, has been tuned but awaits someone to take time off from browsing.

In my old neighborhood, I saw how it’s not just possible but quite easy to spend one’s life just waking to the chime of the Bundy clock, lying down only to wake anew. To find this place of books, this retreat in such a place, where a young, clean-cut Che Guevarra looks out to a spot that’s seen workers clash with scabs and factory security for a raise of a few pesos is to be handed a morsel that even Didion, clear- and dry-eyed journalist that she is, might lovingly spear.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 28, 2010 issue of “Matamata”

Possessed

G is a bottomless wonder. Since college, I’ve seen her cram in a lot of stuff—communication theories, jokes about men, law studies, jokes about men, liaison pressure, jokes about men, possible studies in finance.

Looking at that unflappable, endless profile, a stranger can have no inkling of the oceans sloshing inside.

But if you were to spend an hour with her, G can’t help but give herself away.

One, she whets her waspish wit on anyone born unfortunately not female.

Two, food commands her absolute focus but not as much as obsession no. 3—coffee.

Yet, last Friday, I was racked with doubt and seriously considered revising the Rules of G after my friend exhibited alarming unpredictability.

For a full 20 minutes and 37 seconds, she abandoned a steaming platter of spicy back ribs.

After placing her order for lunch, G excused herself, saying she would return after “quickly checking out something” in the mall.

When she finally returned, I thought my friend was a little too bright-eyed.

Later, after G ignored her brewed coffee for a full millisecond, I watched her with concern.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if something, or someone, she ate was wreaking havoc inside my bottomless friend, G takes out three things from her purse, which holds a notebook, phones, a coffeemaker and its back-up.

The three books rivet my attention.

And I end up plotting to murder my friend.

G turned out to be one of the first to check out “Their Books,” a benefit sale of books and magazines that were owned, read, reread and hoarded by what must be the most rabid sub-species of book lovers: writers.

Those familiar with the malady know that reading is a two-edged possession. At the outset, a person simplistically thinks that buying makes one own a book. But when turning a page already holds one in thrall, the balance of power shifts to the irreversible, and the possessor becomes the enslaved.

Short of the divine, can any earthly force induce a book lover to part with his opiate?

Now on its third and last day on the second floor of Ayala Center Cebu, positioned just across Watson’s, the sale is organized by the Tsinelas Association Inc., a group of volunteers that has been helping public school children and their families.

(Check out The Tsinelas Diaries (tsinelasdiaries.wordpress.com) to find out what this tireless bunch has been doing, from contributing chairs and setting up libraries to sending upland high school scholars through college.)

To fund two months of free art lessons for selected public schools, Tsinelas cajoled journalists, artists, musicians and just about anyone that cannot be trusted around a pen to contribute the books that moved them, blew a chill through them, made them howl when they saw the moon.

If you want to feed a book habit on a Third World budget or just desire to own a copy that was possessed by (or once possessed) your favorite writer, check out “Their Books” before mall closing today.

G’s coffee actually went cold while we examined her finds. We smelled the paper, tasted how the first pages read, and left the best for last: finding out who owned the books.

Her “Chicken Soup for the Soul” was well-thumbed by Louie Nacorda, memory warrior extraordinaire, whose collection of antiques and intimacy with old Cebu and Church lore confuse many to refer to him, very seriously, as “Monsignor.”

Black without relief and nearly unreadable, the signature scrawled on the inside cover of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories” is unmistakably Insoy’s of Missing Filemon. The disenchanted seminarian and Bisrock diehard is also the tireless idealist behind Tsinelas and their collective dream of helping children discover the world of ideas and possibilities.

G’s last book was the easiest to place. Handsome, pristine and rare, the hardbound collector’s copy of Sylvia Plath’s poems was signed by the flowing but precise pen of Isolde D. Amante. Plath rivals Hemingway as America’s most prominent writer-suicide. Less morbidly, she shares with Amante, Sun.Star Cebu journalist and Peryodistang Pinay blogger, an ear for words and feel for nuances.

Looking across at G, I contemplate slitting my friend’s throat and walking away with her copy of Plath/Amante’s poems. Then I shudder, and the murderous thought abandons me. I return G’s books, smiling.

I have my revenge: her coffee’s cold and “Their Books” is still on.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Nov. 9, 2008 edition

Identity crisis

IF you could take a piece of Cebu with you, what would it be?

The supermarket of a mall near the Mactan airport was an education. The native delicacies ranged near and far, such as Bacolod, Iloilo and Camiguin.

It might have been due to my eyeglasses, but I swear the dried mangoes from Guadalupe looked a little sallow and overshadowed.

Munching later on toasted peanuts from Iligan, I wondered if Cebu, as an entrepot, can still offer something unique and vibrant to visitors.

Somehow, the lechon of Cebu has become quite the cosmopolite, often boxed and ready for claiming from many an airport's conveyor belt.

In one TV magazine show episode, the host lifted a grimacing compatriot from its airport box, peeled away its suit of tinfoil, cubed the rubbery skin and meat, and then slathered the cuts with the sweet sludge-like sauce favored in the nation's capital.

If that lechon could protest about the disrespect, I bet it would have gathered what remained of its bodily parts and walked out of that show. Cebu lechon must be crispy on the outside, moist inside. It needs nothing more than a dash of pure coconut vinegar, with kolikot pepper and tiny but pungent Bisaya nga ahos.

It's not just the lechon that's having an identity crisis.

When my New York-residing cousin was here last month, he had an unusual request. Ito wanted to read about the alibata, the 14th-century native writing, or anything about the Cebu of our childhood.

For the record, he was born less than a year before I was. For complex historical as well as plain personal reasons, I set out to look for books to correct my cousin's time-warped recall, mainly that we were not born before the era of Spanish contact.

As it turned out, the task demanded a missionary's zeal.

After visiting bookstores around Cebu's malls, I concluded that publishers think there is a voracious market out there for the secret lives of cats, and none at all for Cebu and its past.

Going through one of my accidental purchases ("The Tribe of Tiger"), I had to agree. (To mark its territory as inviolate from other toms, a cat can twist his penis to spray even the undersides of leaves, where the rain cannot wash away the spray.)

As I had no intention to arouse in my cousin a deeply atavistic and competitive side, I shelved the books about the super cats and continued the search for the invisible Cebuano.

For the evidence seemed incontrovertible: Cebu has changed and yet remains the same.

In my childhood, there was only the Paul's Bookstore along Sanciangko St. Today, there are even specialty bookstores fulfilling every bookish desire except the wish of a Cebuano to bring back with him a whiff of the old home to his children, born across the seas.

My cousin would have gone back to Huntington with only just the murmuring of desire, if not for the excellent Cebuano Studies Center.

Here, I came upon a copy of Ayala Foundation Inc.'s "Cebu: More Than an Island." Published in 1997, the coffeetable book is unrivalled for its essays and photographs distilling the essence of being born in the kinapusoran (navel) of the country, to cite the unforgettable opening in Dr. Resil Mojares' essay.

I would have bought more than a copy except the few remaining ones in the library were reserved. When the Cebuano Studies Center's last stocks will be claimed, there will be no more copies left for purchase.

I hope there will be a reprinting, or a coming out of new works preserving what is surely passing.

Back in Huntington, my cousin found that jetlag or age was making it difficult for him to settle down.

Reading "Cebu: More Than an Island," Ito once "imagined tartanillas passing by my house at the crack of dawn."

Even more disorienting than hearing a horse-drawn carriage break the stillness of the New York suburbs is trying to glimpse the Cebuano in the narratives back home.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu's Nov. 2, 2008 issue

Good works

LAST Thursday’s downpour brought anew the threat of flash floods, garbage-clogged drainage and homelessness in many barangays.

Though I arrived, dry and unmarked, at the Grand Convention Center moments before that rain storm, I was driven almost out of my mind by a different case involving barangays.

Visiting only on the last day of the 35th Annual Albasa Book Fair held last May 20-22, I missed books I had been tracking with all the obsession and lack of restraint of a 16th-century ship-raiding pirate.

One of them was William Henry Scott’s “Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society.” This has been off the shelves in the local outlets of this national chain of bookstores for almost a decade.

True, Cebu has become a cosmopolitan mall brat. No one here will have difficulty procuring a copy of any title shortlisted under the latest version of any American, British or continental list of bestsellers and critics’ choices.

But Scott’s account of the Philippines at the time of the Spanish contact—winner of the 1994 National Book Award for History and the 1998 Gintong Aklat Award for Social Scienc—is nowhere to be seen in the malls dotting Cebu.

If awards and critics leave you cold, you might still want to get your hands on a copy of “Barangay,” if only to check out why it is arguably the best-loved of the books written by Scotty, the only non-Filipino teaching Philippine history in the University of the Philippines for many years.

The Episcopalian lay missionary earned respect as “the white Filipino nationalist historian” who wrote, taught and rescued our history from being buried under mistranslation, misinformation and myths.

As “Great Scott: The New Day William Henry Scott Reader” points out, to read Scott is to be “reminded not only of Napoleon’s characteristically iconoclastic bon mot, ‘What is history but a fable agreed upon?’”

Any parent or teacher concerned that students will not languish under a common Social Studies misconception that the barangay was a Bagong Lipunan innovation of the late Ferdinand Marcos should hunt down a personal copy of “Barangay.”

Though I had to content myself with ordering the titles last Thursday—not only “Barangay” proved to be elusive; all five sets of the three-volume “History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands” by Ignacio Francisco Alcina, SJ, were sold out at the fair—I am consoled that many schools turned up and replenished their library collections at the fair.

Established in 1973, the Academic Libraries Book Acquisition Systems Association (Albasa, Inc.) annually conducts its general assembly and book fair in Cebu. It provides an essential and unappreciated public service not only to its member schools but also individual readers.

During the Albasa book fair, there are seminars and opportunities to buy at discounted prices book titles that are deemed not commercial and thus not carried by most book stores.

Though the exhibitors include distributors of foreign publications, what I consider to be the chief draw in the Albasa Book Fair are the local publishers. If public discourse seems parched and bereft of hope, it cannot be blamed on the institutions that have the courage, vision and will to produce titles that may never become bestsellers, be sold as mall fodder, and yet more than deserve the trees that were felled to produce the paper used in its printing.

Yes, a lot of improvements can still be done for Filipiniana, a genre eternally marginalized in many a bookstore and library. Many titles are still priced beyond the reach of many wage earners. In some cases, the paper used, binding and book design make one more conscious of and disgruntled about the discrepancy between the book’s price and packaging.

More Filipiniana books should also reflect “provincial” interests and concerns, not just those of imperial Manila or the commercially safe “national interest.”

However, it is no less than an act of nationalism to produce through the years the publications that make one proud to be born in this country: the University of the Philippines Press, the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House (publisher of the monumental and seminal Alcina history), Ateneo de Manila University Press (publisher of “Barangay” and many award winners), New Day Publishers (which carries many of Scott’s works) and Ibon Foundation (I grew up reading Ibon Facts & Figures, one of the earliest attempts to make student-friendly economic analysis).

If people are still writing books about this country, and people are still reading them, then it’s not yet time to abandon ship.

Mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 25, 2008 issue

No plain Jane

IN Creative Writing class last semester, one of my students was ribbed by her classmates for being a Janeite.

Unknown to them, I was pleased to come upon another member of the sisterhood. A Janeite is a keen follower of the early 19th century English writer Jane Austen.

Strictly speaking, my sister and I discovered Austen by way of Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” the unabashed 2001 tribute to the tug and pull between Elizabeth Bennett and Mark Darcy, protagonists of Austen’s famous romance, “Pride and Prejudice.”

After my sister ferreted out a copy of the 1995 BBC TV serial, starring an “incandescent” (a favorite Austen praise) Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennett and brooding Colin Firth as Mark Darcy (a role he recreated in “Bridget Jones” and its sequel), the DVD set has crossed oceans from down under to be ensconced in our rack of frequently watched movies, much to the chagrin of my two sons who don’t think it is the height of suspense to watch damsels crumpling after the tragic reading of yet another note.

For there are undoubtedly readers—all husbands and sons, I hazard—that consider Jane Austen as a tireless spinster writing about tiresome romances, minus the bursting bodices.

Fortunately, the British film industry has not tired of this writer, hailed by some as only next in greatness to William Shakespeare. The 2007 movie, “Becoming Jane,” is cause for celebration among Janeites (and perhaps gloom, for long-suffering male members of their households).

Starring Anne Hathaway as a “pre-fame Jane Austen” and James McAvoy as Thomas Lefroy, the movie is a dramatization of an early flirtation between Austen and Lefroy, who, in real life, became a Lord High Justice of Ireland. Although their romance is nipped in the bud, Lefroy is portrayed as Austen’s inspiration for sketching the heroic outline of Mark Darcy.

“Becoming Jane” has met mixed reviews. The website Rotten Tomatoes has given it an approval rating of only 58 percent. Even if one refuses to nitpick about Hathaway’s British accent (an inevitable fate for American actors portraying English heroines, as Renee Zelwegger learned in the making of “Bridget Jones”), the movie is less than forthcoming about its plot’s speculations beyond proven facts.

For instance, the movie implies that Lefroy named his eldest daughter, Jane Christmas, after Austen. Scholars dispute this sentimentality as he could have very well named her after his mother-in-law, Lady Jane Paul. A private correspondence also cited by Wikipedia quotes Lefroy as referring to his affection for Austen as a “boyish love.”

Upon her death, though, Lefroy traveled from Ireland to England to pay his respects. He later bought at an auction a publisher’s rejection letter of “First Impression,” the original title of an early version of “Pride and Prejudice.”

“Becoming Jane” succeeds in stirring renewed interest in Austen. Like other literary figures who became popular, she, too, has her anti-Janeite following. Charlotte Bronte dismissed her as middle-brow: “She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound… What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study: but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores…”

Any library without a volume of Austen, declared Mark Twain, whetting the keen blade of his irony, was “a good library… Even if it contains no other book."

Yet, despite the confines her age and society placed on her potentials as a writer, Austen wrote six novels that continue to be read decades after her death at 41 from a complication of tuberculosis. Her nondescript start as a writer inspires anyone trying to make the writing matter. Aside from publishers’ rejections, she infamously misspelled one of her juvenile works, “Love and Freindship.”

With only 26 years of exposure to provincial society and intimate family life, Austen proved, as Hathaway declares so passionately in “Becoming Jane,” the towering power of the imagination, the one true thing that recommends any writer to readers of all persuasions.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Nov. 4, 2007 issue

Delirium

IT WAS in a honkytonky shade of pink. When, at the end of a school year, it was stamped all over with “Returned” in virulent screaming purple, I was over the moon. When one became two or even three cards consumed in high school—a time I flunked with genius regularity daily quizzes but knew almost every title in the Literature and History sections, not to mention the Life and National Geographic files—I figured I could die young and be happy for as long as the Great Library in the Sky would renew my card.

In years of reading, teaching and writing, I’ve stayed in many libraries far longer than the mortal duration of a dozen celebrated marriages summed up and then multiplied by infinity.

I’ve dozed in a couple of libraries, got lost among what has been described as the most extensive collection in Southeast Asia. As a student, I endured the effluvium from a nearby urinal when I had to sit daily in the only remaining vacant section in a library the size of one classroom and a half. As a teacher, I’m horrified by students who crow that they have never stepped inside the library, not even to photocopy someone’s notes or get end-of-term clearance.

I cannot believe anyone can miss the point, planted like book-crammed shelves before them: libraries are among this life’s graces.

And of all the ones I’ve known, I am sentimental about the first to put a library card in my hand. One Friday afternoon, in second grade at St. Theresa’s College (STC) Cebu, my class was brought to explore the library. I found then my favorite subject.

Today, interactive learning is the pedagogical fashion. During those endless afternoons at the library, I discovered nothing can be more stimulating than books. From grades two to three, I was drawn to illustrations. I came to embrace paragraphs and chapters later as one comes to accept the kid brother trailing after one’s best friend, only to find that the twerp is even cooler than the friend.

Starting at the age of eight, I squirreled away finds behind the stolid encyclopedia tomes, hoping no one would borrow these before I could. When, a week later, I checked and found my stash had been reshelved, I was fired up to hunt again for a “good read.”

The search for a book better than the one just finished is the culprit behind lifelong squinting and neck ache, acquired from systematically going up and down the shelves, with one’s head angled awkwardly. The “good read” is an elusive, maddening beloved.

The STC main library of my time was more than up to this sweet torture. When I ran through all the available Carolyn Keene titles, from Nancy Drew to Dana Girls, I dawdled around Louisa May Alcott before all that cloying virtue made me jittery. Then, in lieu of mitosis and frog dissection, I swung around with Tarzan of the Apes and other interplanetary explorers created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Even though I hardly saw in campus any boy of my age, I signed out with my library card and brought home John Carter of Mars, Carson Napier of Venus and David Innes of Pellucidar. Much later, I discovered J. R. R. Tolkien, D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov.

Coming upon Lolita, 12, and her Humbert Humbert, 37, made me question the way I saw the nuns running my school. After I read the opening lines of Nabokov (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul."), I decided then the nuns were not strict and uptight. Or they had not read everything in the library.

Even now, when I sign out references using my library card, I get the same rush. The card is now in a sedate shade of ecru. But I haven’t given up hope. One day, while researching on civic journalism, I might run smack again into Lord Greystoke, swinging from tree to tree in his birthday suit, or poor, lost, besotted Humbert Humbert, who taught me: each to his own delirium.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 28, 2007 issue

Watch the language

SHOULD we wonder when an intention to fight terrorism creates sheer terror? When cameras are placed to freeze public smiles?

We should not. We must rage and denounce.

In the novel acclaimed as his criticism against the dream of a utopian state, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” author George Orwell shows how the last “man” in Europe is turned against the person he loves by a regime employing spying, illegal detention, torture, brainwashing and extermination.

To ferret and wipe out the enemies of the state, Big Brother, as the leader of the elite Inner Party, passes a law: “Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death.”

The irony of ironies is that Big Brother commits the original thoughtcrime by using language to deny reality and mutilate truth. So in this futuristic state, where Big Brother is neither kind nor loyal, Newspeak is far from truth and closer to invention.

Dictatorships and thin-skinned tyrants need no instruction in Newspeak, where the Ministry of Truth turns out propaganda; the Ministry of Peace conducts Perpetual Warfare; the Ministry of Plenty hoards and rations; and the Ministry of Love tortures and kills state enemies.

How does any autocrat get away with this doublespeak? By rewriting the past, punishing criticism, and allowing only the Official Truth, one creates “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” Orwell writes.

Though written in 1949, Orwell’s vision is not so much hallucinatory as prophetic of present realities.

“1984”: Telescreens, hidden microphones and informers are planted in public places and households. Purpose: catch subversives in the act of thoughtcrime, which divert from the orthodox view and endanger Big Brother.

July 12, 2007: Acting on the directive of Governor Gwendolyn Garcia, Cebu security consultant Byron Garcia declared the start of the implementation of the “bawal ang nakasimangot (frowning is banned)” policy for all provincial employees. To encourage Capitol employees to be courteous to all visitors, surveillance cameras will monitor and record.

“1984”: Displayed everywhere is a poster of Big Brother, with the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Before his destruction by Big Brother, Winston Smith realizes that, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

July 20, 2007: The Human Security Act (HSA), or Republic Act No. 9372, is implemented on this day. According to the Arroyo administration, the anti-terror law will protect the people from acts of terrorism. Critics say that HSA allows law enforcers, on mere suspicion, to subject the accused to preventive detention, warrantless arrest, house arrest, prohibition from the use of cell phones, computers and any other means of communication even when granted bail, surveillance and wiretapping, and examination, sequestration and freezing of bank deposits and other assets.

“1984”: To complete his brainwashing, Winston is sent to Room 101, the most dreaded place in the Ministry of Love. A cage of hungry rats is placed in front of his eyes so, when released, the rodents “will eat their way through his skull.” Screaming, Winston begs his jailers to torture instead his lover. After this final betrayal, Winston is released and scheduled for later extermination after he is paraded publicly as “cured.”

July 20, 2007: The Army reveals publicly for the first time that Jonas Burgos is a member of the New People’s Army. The activist-son of Malaya publisher and press freedom icon Jose Burgos was abducted from a mall by an armed group on April 28. The Army does not say how its background check on Jonas affects the search for him. According to the HSA, those wrongfully detained are entitled to P500,000 compensation for each day spent in jail. Given a financially and morally bankrupt state, critics say this will only fuel more “disappearances.”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 22, 2007 issue

Growing a library

A LONG time ago, before the boys came, when the world seemed to be full of possessions giving you lingering, sidelong glances, we bought two bookshelves.

In time, I lost one shelf to the boys, a noble but doomed experiment to get these creatures of the wild to be proprietary about space.

But to my sons a bookshelf is just a thicket of books. Just as trees grow at random, a book is found because a hand just happens to pull it out of the pile.

The gods of random might laugh behind my back but I am the crazy woman in the forest that tends her books, growing them by size and shape and genre.

Having only one shelf to hold all the books collected in a lifetime of reading is one reason for the annual rearrangement.

I prune regularly, giving away books to those I hope have more generous hearts and minds to house them.

Yet the boards of my bookshelf still sag lower each year.

One time, I tried piling nonfiction at the base as I figured the seriousness would be grave enough to support the second and third layers.

As it turned out, the upper layers holding works of imagination were anything but buoyant. One dawn, on my sleepy way to the bathroom, I pulled out a novel from somewhere in the middle of a pile and caused all three shelves to slide slowly towards me.

Whoever wrote that fiction is froth has never had masses of imagination dumped on his person.

In a fit of democratic alphabetization, I have also tried mixing genres and literary reputations. Cartland before Chekhov, Simenon preceding Steinbeck.

In real life, Eco might never circulate in the same cocktail party as Ellroy (who might consider such urbanities as filthier than swigging in the gutter) but my copy of Eco has less molds and fewer roach droppings simply because it is next to Ellroy’s crime noir, taken out whenever checking papers threatens the old lucidity (and I darn well mean “whenever”).

However, leavening literary differences turned out to be an underestimated struggle against snobbishness.

Truth to tell, I enjoyed more hanging out with Gaiman, Hemingway and Macdonald, but quickly stiffened in the petulant presence of the never-finished, never-penetrated Hesse, Ibsen and Melville.

Eventually, the bookshelf followed a new order, split between the Riotous, Irrelevant Contemporary, a section more populous and definitely untidy compared to the Dead Classics, impressive, dignified and undisturbed.

And then this year the screws gave way under the irretrievable shelves.

Realizing that many of my old friends are older than my 40 years (many of the titles were serendipitous finds in bargain bins), I thought for weeks how to reshelf them while minimizing harm.

Age is bad for book paper. It’s gentler though on people, the way our sandpapering at term’s end in grade school left textbooks with soft edges for the lower years to reuse.

I’ve long given up ordering the boys or setting a good example or rearranging my sons’ books on the shelf I lost to them. It’s enough for me now that the boys read, have a favorite title or two inserted in the interstices of their busy, full lives.

I’m even proud that they still consider me as the crazy woman who can find a title anywhere in their part of the thicket, as well as in mine.

For I no longer treat the bookshelf as if it were a European garden with rigid rules of formality to follow. These days, I just put in front what I want to read again.

Of course, being crazy all these years is hard to just undo. So the books are arranged according to the desire: titles-to-reread-now-that-I’m-older, titles-to-compare-with-their-movie-versions, what-on-earth-was-I-thinking-when-I-bought-this-title.

Like I say, raising books is never random.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)