Not just on paper

LOVE is physical, most of all love for a book. You know the signs of obsession: the desire, always keen, never stale, to open a new book and dip your nose into the fusion of odors rising from the crack of its pages, to run the balls of one’s fingers on the unevenly serrated pages, and more.

By now, you know I am talking of a book made of paper. In the age of ebooks, this love endures. Nothing replaces the sheer physicality of bodily contact with something that segues into imagining, reflecting, thinking.

Like all loves, this one, too, has its perils. This week my search for a book took me to one of the libraries, where I and then a succession of librarians realized that the anthology edited by Seyla Benhabib and others, “Feminist Contentions,” did not exist except in the virtual sense.

While a digital system keeps track of entire collections in all the libraries of the university, this particular collection was recently transferred from one building to another. According to a librarian, the book may have been “misplaced” during the relocation.

Another book I sought was also lost to history. My professor’s copy of “Gender Studies: Terms and Debates,” edited by Anne Cranny-Francis and others, went up in flames along with other irreplaceable collections in the destruction of the Bulwagang Rizal some years ago.

Pursuits drive obsessions. There are other libraries, friends with collections, friends who know other book lovers, secondhand bookstores, and, if all else fails, online sellers.

Paper may be a fragile vessel except in the estimation of those for whom its existence matters. Fire took away all that my professor collected over a lifetime of studies except for those she had turned over to the college photocopier for reproducing the reading packs in the courses she was teaching.

In the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman Main Library is a collection that represents a collective resistance to amnesia. The Philippine Radical Papers were criticisms printed from the late sixties to the early seventies against the Marcos dictatorship.

Activists donated collections. Students, teachers, and library staff gave the manifestoes and leaflets collected during teach-ins and rallies. Underground organizations sent copies of newsletters.

Library tables became depositories for unknown others, who left behind materials, possession of which turned one into an enemy of the state and subject for arrest or worse during martial law. In 1998, the UP Press published a subject guide to the collection.

When the object of love cannot be physically possessed, what comes closest is anamnesis (remembrance).


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)



*First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 23, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata"

Bookavores, unite!

BEFORE E. could leave the country, she had three matters to settle: the cat that adopted her, her books and bookshelves, which she couldn’t lug back to Melbourne.

With prescient feline wisdom, the cat spared E. by disappearing a few weeks before her departure. It knew what E. did not: that, after finding a dirty ball that pussyfooted into a coffee shop and bringing this home, all clotted fur and lice, E. would never be able to leave it.

With the novels, E. was less sentimental, leaving several boxes to me, a stranger whose Sun.Star Cebu musings about reading had become part of her Sunday ritual.

Then there were just the bookshelves.

These were beautiful, solid wood mellowed with the patina of age and frequent contact with paper. I yearned for, even dreamt about them. But unless I could convince my boys to sleep on the shelves or move up on the roof, our home could not accommodate another bookshelf.

Less prescient than E.’s cat, I was slower in drawing up a conclusion from the incident of the unrequited shelves: life is short; books, unending; and shelves, finite. Conclusion: share books.

Last Nov. 27 was an opportunity to renew these articles of faith. Since 2008, the country observes November as National Reading Month. Its culmination is on Nov. 27, “Araw ng Pag(b)asa (National Reading Day)”.

Nov. 27 is also the birth anniversary of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. The play of meanings in “pag(b)asa,” interchanging “reading” with “hope,” was an advocacy of the late senator, in whose honor were dedicated last Friday’s storytelling sessions in public elementary and high schools.

Reading a story to a child can translate into sharing novels with young adults. Familiar with the ways my students read, write and express, I tried to match titles and authors with last Friday’s classes.

I’m happy to report that the appeal of a free book still cuts across generations. For these Cebu-based millennials—only two of us in one class use a basic phone and that’s only because my student said, sheepishly, that she recently lost her smartphone—the paper book is more than a thing inspiring wonder and delight.

Unlike an e-book, a traditional book stuck together with glue, words and imagination can be turned over and sniffed. J., a bookseller, once said that buying books, a luxury in this country, constrains us to stick to favorite authors. A gift of books frees one to take risks and discover new voices.

Paper books are also better for testing your BQ (bookavore quotient): do you leaf or flip through the pages before choosing what to read? Leafing helps one search for the first paragraph (or page) that decides the leap into the tale.

Flipping is for quickly checking if the previous owner left any trace. (E. and I clip book reviews and insert it in novels. After reading, we review the reviewer. Judging by the squealing, a student or two share the same quirk.)

Any separation anxiety over breaking up a book series or works by the same author collected over the years can be assuaged by donating to public libraries. As the librarian of a public school attested, fiction is rarely a priority for scarce funds. Yet, students look for fiction to make book reports.

And for pleasure, I should think. All bookavores live by this article of faith.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s December 1, 2015 issue of the “Matamata,” an editorial-page column that usually appears on Sunday