Category: books

bookbug blues

i could be more upset about the book tax.   i am a bookbug, after all.   i buy imported and local fiction and non-fiction regularly, mostly imported mostly english, and i read them all as a matter of pleasure, of study, sometimes of survival.   do i really not mind paying more?

i mind, of course.   times are hard, money is tight.   maybe it’s just mercury being retrograde, i’ve been through this before, the post office has been taxing our mail-order books for someyears now, and talaga i know i should could be angrier but i just can’t get beyond a hay-naku sabay buntong-hininga.

kumbaga sa “straw that broke the camel’s back” this is not it, this is far from it.    because a tax on imported books simply is too lightweight and too burgis an issue to get me as mad as i already am about the scandalizingly high cost of basic goods and services e.g. food, shelter, clothing, utilities, medicines, and schooling.    “non-educational”  books simply don’t belong in the same category.

nonetheless i wish robin hemley and manolo and jessica and teddyboy and the blogosphere success in the campaign to jolt the government back to its senses and back to full compliance with the florence agreement. until then, books getting more expensive just means i’ll be buying less.   maybe i’ll even stop going to bookstores, as a matter of protest, as 1read2 suggests:

… the government as represented by the Department of Finance and Customs Bureau has made its stand on the Book Tax and Duty.  “Sue us” seems to be the battle cry: A very arrogant one at that.

…Hopefully, someone does sue thembut in the meantime what to do?

Given that it seems that the bookstores and booksellers are somewhat hesitant to challenge this ruling. Perhaps it would be time to do something against this taxation.

Do not buy books that have duties imposed. Do not buy it. Book readers and book collectors are the customers of this industry. And they make it prosper and if the industry cannot defend itself from unjust and illegal taxes it might be the time to not buy.

Books can be downloaded from the Net . Read and even share the ebook with a friend or fellow book reader.

…Refuse to pay the taxman his unjust taxes

Books can be gained in several ways and not all of them involves buying. No I am not referring to stealing. Borrow from the library or share a book with a friend.

Establish book clubs with libraries…

meanwhile as reminds in his comment to mlq3 there’s the 2010 elections coming.   how about if we not vote for candidates who support the book tax.   or, to be positive.   how about if we campaign and vote for candidates who would rescind the book tax (other things being equal ;)

also meanwhile, there’s always booksale.   i don’t mind secondhand books.   i’m also willing to trade, but first i have to put together a list of books that i can bear to part with, fiction and non-, all of them educational.   promise.

“The Book, the True, and the Beautiful”

missed the bookfair this year but, thanks to rayvi sunico, not the keynote speech for the gintong aklat awards 2008 delivered bypoet professor ricky de ungria, which indeed “goes beyond the usual platitudes and actually talks about what’s going on now and relates this to the book industry we have today. no punches pulled.”

The Book, the True, and the Beautiful

by Ricardo M. de Ungria

Recent events in our history, specifically in the past twenty years or so, have more than less convinced me that ours is a culture not of ideas and intellection but of emotions, hints, and suspicions. Our predilection is for the unsaid or the merely implied, the shadowy and adumbrated, the peripheral and the underground as appropriate instruments to counter what has been perceived as the given brutality of power and force exercised by the few oligarchs and pseudo-monarchs in appropriate political positions. The dynamics in our culture is such that there seems to be always an agon between the outer and the inner, between the overt and the secret, the official and the unofficial, mainstream and underground-with the outer and overt and official conceived of as tyrannically powerful and repressive, and the inner and secret and unofficial wielded as a submissive and abiding force whose time will eventually come. The complexity of the interplay between these two “forces” has remained inexhaustible and a source of inspiration for our inventiveness that has spanned the gamut from the ludicrous to the ludic.

Our basic stance is subversive of any established order, and the reality of our daily life is rooted in infringements of various kinds tolerated and even elevated to the level of norms-from blatant disobedience of simple traffic signs and rules, to secret deals and agreements at the highest levels of the echelon that explode in the faces of the players when exposed to the public. Witness the aborted Memorandum of Agreement between the government panel and the MILF, which has plunged the peace process in Mindanao into a crisis and cost deaths to civilians and soldiers alike and displacements of hundreds of thousands of families in central Mindanao. “If you were the MILF,” Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of Davao had remarked, expressing the sentiment of many Mindanaons, “after a gestation of five years, talking laboriously for five years, tapos sabihin na, ‘Oh no, the MOA-AD is just a piece of paper,’ and as a matter of fact, ‘they [that is, members of the government panel] were not given the authority to sign.’ If you were the MILF, would you be happy to hear that?”

Little wonder that given the kind of governance that this sad republic of ours has, who wouldn’t want to break away from it? Our memories are full of treacheries and betrayals, and our ideal is martyrdom for a cause that should not have been put on the pedestal of grievance had our civil life been shaped and ruled by simple observance of basic laws and rules of public conduct. But we prefer to move with stealth, duplicity, and cunning, and make a show of conservatism and righteousness to make up for our deep lack of a strong moral center. Of course, the majority of us have their religion to fall back on, but even in that realm we know how to play the gods.

All these may appear to be bad sociology simplified for dummies by a poet, but this poet thinks we’ve allowed ourselves to be played with as such for as long as he can remember. And at no time in our history had we been placed in such a moral quandary-or muck, or nadir-and at such tragic scale of helplessness and inaction than the one we are in at the present time. There is certainly no lack of imagination on our part to cope with this kind of predicament, but in our present case, we seem to be facing a blank wall-and making the best of the cracks and fissures we see on it.

I mention these things here because I want to locate the publishing industry to which you belong within such dismal state of affairs as I see it.

One can go over statistics in your sector-which, by the way, is just beginning to appreciate the importance of data and data gathering in your field (which is something we should all be thankful for)-and see its continued though slow flourishing or progress in terms of revenue, gradual increase in number of stakeholders or new publishers, and in the number of books published by the year. This is all heartening to note, especially for an academician like myself. But the fact remains that, for all the increasing richness and variety of publications you have made available to us the reading public through the years, we still have to see an intellectual culture forming before our very minds-one fueled by discussions and debates not only in the academic world but also in the realm of newspapers and magazines-and helping sustain a healthy public opinion and pointing at directions in the rational formulation of principles and policies for governance. For isn’t a rational life and an intellectual culture in the service of truth and the common good among the basic end products of books and literary? But one can think of many reasons for this abysmal lack.

Outside of Manila, the culture remains mostly oral and informal, lending itself immediately available to blogs and egroup discussions that appear to have improved on barbershop or streetcorner disputations of yore. In Mindanao, egroup discussions on the present situation-fervid and informed and varied-have overtaken the news and are well on the way to developing a dialogue among intellectuals and other stakeholders in the island. (Whether the discourses will turn towards a plan of action remains, however, to be seen.) The wealth of such informal discourses is simply staggering, and media and the book industry would probably do well to address this new source of information and knowledge as viable contributions to the knowledge economy.

While a number of good local books have been made increasingly available to the public, the public, including the underpaid academic, has not found them affordable enough to spend enough on them. This is embarrassing but true, given the difficult, unkind, and unequal economic opportunities in the country. But the money, or lack of, is not all there is to it. The more shameful thing is that given a degree of purchasing power, most people will opt to buy foreign books than local ones. Not only is there glamour and sophistication in being up-to-date with bestsellers in the American market, there is really no interest at all in matters Filipiniana, which have never really been a part of our breeding in our formative years. Having been the first among our Asian neighbors to grow up globally in Americana, most of us have really very little choice but to sustain such global interests above the local ones. It is hoped that the present cultural mapping project at the NCCA should lay soon enough the groundwork for a cultural literacy program from elementary to college that will help instill a sense of pride in the Filipino student for the achievements in his own varied culture and in the exploits of his culture bearers.

Still and all, even if we do dip into local publications and scholarship, we appear clueless as to what to do with ideas we’ve read. We are at this point still very good consumers of ideas but very poor developers and producers of these. Perhaps this is due to the lack of and respect for criticism and the critical outlook that should help guide us in the choice, evaluation, validation, and furtherance of ideas.

Specifically in the field of the arts in this country, everyone wants to be an artist or a writer and no one wants to become a critic. A proper appreciation and understanding of criticism remains a heavy psychic baggage of our culture. As it is, our criteria for merit and excellence remain ambiguous, fluid, and undefined-all the better for a culture that sits in darkness and moves sideways on haunches and hunches. Even in the choice of our National Artists, we have to defer to politics and executive prerogatives, so we end up with legitimate and illegitimate kinds, so to speak, of National Artists. If it’s not negotiable, it may not be true at all.

Varied and many, indeed, are the strange ways we have devised to avoid facing up to truths we don’t want. Without hard truths to stare us down, we are freest and most contented; with truths hard by, we become murderous. Where, pray tell, is truth in all these new books that come out every year?

As disseminators of culture, knowledge, and information, you may find all these things bitter pills hard to swallow. But these issues may be beyond your control at all. Or these may be among the many contradictions inherent in your business in this special country of ours and which you may perhaps have learned to cope and live with, in your own special way. The lucrative textbook industry, for instance, helps educate future professionals who will leave the country immediately after graduation to work elsewhere in the globe. The advocacy for intellectual property and copyright remain as a voice in the wilderness where photocopied textbooks and texts in the classroom and pirated movies and computer programs and games in the living rooms have found a niche and established themselves as the norm.

How can truth hold up to these? The truth may be simple enough, but it is not cheap.

Again, to be truly a national industry, your growth must involve publishing in the regions where there remains a pressing need to recover, develop, and sustain local knowledge that should help locate the missing pieces in the uncompletable puzzle that is this nation. Your distribution system should also be far-ranging than what it is today-even if you can never be sure if only six people would buy your books. That, in any case, would be a good start, especially in areas that SM will never find worthy enough to erect a mall in.

These are dark and trying times, indeed-literally and metaphorically-and it’s easy to fall into despair and cynicism in the face of work thatremains to be done. But the comforting thought, ladies and gentlemen, is that-despite the virtual lack of a critical thinking, and not merely a reading, public-the attempt to create a meaningful sense of ourselves and of our history out of the shards of our lost traditions and indigenous knowledge continues in the work you are doing in this business. The unearthing and gathering and examination of narratives and poetries that define the range and limits of our imagination and creativity as a people remain a worthy and priceless task in a country that has still to find the correct balance among contending truths and between the push and pull of reason and emotion. The matter of money might have been there initially, however little the returns may be in this business.

But eventually, I imagine and I hope, you must have broken through the great wall of emptiness and absurdity that attend and threaten any worthy human endeavor-the better to give it shape and character-and settled down with the hope that somehow the threads of all these texts produced every year will be picked up and find themselves woven into a tapestry where discourses of all kinds can be discerned as fitting triumphs of the Filipino imagination.

Artistic and intellectual creations entail long and laborious processes whose purposes are not any more edifying and ambitious as the sheer and simple satisfaction of its artist-producer. I like to think that you, producers of artistic and intellectual products, are like artists in this regard who are of this time and yet not of this time, having gone ahead to a time when everything shall have been prepared for and the ripeness is just there for the plucking.

For instance, this Gintong Aklat award that you have initiated and nourished for many years now. In this country where publication is highly selective and competitive and a published book is already an achievement of a kind-however smudgy and full of errata or misalignments it may be-honoring the book not merely as an intellectual and artistic creation but as an intellectual and artistic creation embedded in the physicality and materiality of paper and colors and ink already involves a next and sophisticated level of relationship with and valorization of the printed page. The book as book, with a specific weight and size and binding and texture and color of paper and a cover and the pages within so designed as to have an artistic value by and in themselves.

Very few are conscious of the well-designed book as book, and very few actually care for it. But for the few who do care and are in the know about book design and the well-made book, this award is a moment of grace and reprieve from the drudginess of politics and life around us. It took foresight and inspiration to conceive of this award-for like art and all crafted things, the making of books must always be pushed to its edge of beauty and pleasure. In this regard, I salute you and your association for this added dimension in the appreciation of books-a dimension that is valuable yet invisible, unappreciated yet intrinsic and necessary in elevating the business of publishing books to the level of art.

This award is just a small corner in the entire universe of books and book production, but it helps restore to our jaded spirits the power of art to surprise and delight with details where god is supposed to reside. In a country where there is little respect for honor and truth, the fact that some people did care enough to get something done right in so insignificant a thing as a book is testament enough that human passion for the beautiful object remains a truth in itself that gives off light, bravely and briefly as it may be.

Congratulations to the winners of the Gintong Aklat this year!”

beyond conspiracy: ninoy’s politics

it was impossible not to weep as i watched the retelling of ninoy’s life and death by the docu Beyond Conspiracy: 25 Years after the Aquino Assassination courtesy of the Foundation for WorldWide People Power. impossible because i so remember those days.

i was 23 when marcos declared martial law and i remember ninoy aquino before that, the chubby bespectacled senator who was the fastest talker and the most fearless and most ardent critic of marcos. and i remember those news photos of a thin Ninoy through the military trial and the hunger strike,and that one time he was allowed to speak out on television — when the streets of manila were empty because everyone was indoors watching and listening to the last man standing, painfully lean, and, to me, painfully sexy, in his hunger for justice and freedom.

i remember feeling abandoned when his heart failed and he flew off to america for treatment, and three years later exulting when he announced that he was coming home, tie a yellow ribbon ’round that ol’ tree, it’s been three long years, do you still want me… and i remember that fateful sunday afternoon, how my heart sank when i heard that he had been killed, and how i wept for cory and kids and country.

but the second half of the docu left me cold. i suppose okey lang for young viewers hearing the story of the assassination and the trials and witnesses for the first time; otherwise it told me nothing new, except maybe for some trivia. to my mind the big question, i mean, the big story, is no longer who ordered ninoy killed, rather, why aren’t these masterminds in jail? because blood, or maybe even just class, is thicker?

hindi rin lang ito kayang itanong o sagutin, sana iba na lang ang tinutukan, such as ninoy’s politics, on which subject there is ample material. then maybe the kids’ iamninoy campaign would have some ground to stand on other than faithhopeandcharity.

in his goodbye statement to the house of representatives of the u.s. congress in 1983 ninoy spoke of a “program of action” that he drafted during his three years in exile which he intendedto take up with the leaders of the non-violent opposition at home, hopefully to end the bloodletting and set the economy right. nothing has been heard about this program of action since. but the book Testament from a Prison Cell published by cory in 1984 has a wealth of information about the man and his politics.

TESTAMENT Foreword:

This book is Ninoy’s ‘closing statement’ before Military Commission No. 2.

Ninoy started working on his ‘closing statement’ in 1975 and he finished it in 1977. Although many believed that the charges against him were fabricated, still Ninoy believed he should present his side to the Filipino people.

Ninoy was determined that this book should reach his people and so my children and I smuggled out the manuscript, page by page. He instructed me to furnish the international press with copies of his statement. Perhaps he had a premonition. As it turned out, the Military Commission prevented Ninoy from reading his ‘closing statement’ by keeping him locked up in his cell during the last vital eight hours of the proceedings.

I cannot help but point out the striking parallel between Ninoy’s closing statement before the tribunal that condemned him to death on November 25, 1977, and his ‘arrival statement’ for August 21, 1983. In both instances Ninoy was stopped from reading them.

Allow me then to present to you, the Filipino people, Ninoy’s testament.

CORY AQUINO

coming next are selected excerpts from Testament:

Three Generations… “I am Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., 45, Filipino, married, father of five…”

The Filipino As Dissident… “In 1954, when I first established contact with Huk Supremo Luis M. Taruc…”

A Christian Democratic Vision… “As I delved deeper into the underlying reasons behind our chronic insurgency problem…”

Manifesto For A Free Society… “In the most unequivocal terms, not a few communist leaders have told me that there is no room for politicians in the CPP/NPA set-up…”

ninoy, 21 august 83

‘FAITH IN OUR PEOPLE AND FAITH IN GOD’

August 21, 1983
Manila International Airport

I have returned on my free will to join the ranks of those struggling to restore our rights and freedoms through nonviolence.

I seek no confrontation. I only pray and will strive for a genuine national reconciliation founded on justice.

I am prepared for the worst, and have decided against the advice of my mother, my spiritual adviser, many of my tested friends and a few of my most valued political mentors.

A death sentence awaits me. Two more subversion charges, calling for death penalties, have been since I left three years ago and are now pending with the courts.

I could have opted to seek political asylum in America, but I feel it is my duty, as it is the duty of every Filipino, to suffer with his people especially in time of crisis.

I never sought nor have I been given any assurances or promise of leniency by the regime. I return voluntarily armed only with a clear conscience and fortified in the faith that in the end justice will emerge triumphant.

According to Ghandi, the WILLING sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God and man.

Three years ago when I left for an emergency heart bypass operation, I hoped and prayed that the rights and freedoms of our people would soon be restored, that living conditions would improve and that bloodletting would stop.

Rather than move forward, we have moved backward. The killings have increased, the economy has taken a turn for the worse, and the human rights situation has deteriorated.

During the martial law period, the Supreme Court heard petitions for Habeas Corpus. It is most ironic, after martial law has allegedly been lifted, that the Supreme Court last April ruled it can no longer entertain petitions for Habeas Corpus for persons detained under a Presidential Commitment Order, which covers all so-called national security cases and which under present circumstances can cover almost anything.

The country is far advanced in her times of trouble. Economic, social and political problems bedevil the Filipino. These problems may be surmounted if we are united. But we can be united only if all the rights and freedoms enjoyed before September 21, 1972 are fully restored.

The Filipino asks for nothing more, but will surely accept nothing less than all the rights and freedom guaranteed by the 1935 Constitution-the most sacred legacies from the Founding Fathers.

Yes, the Filipino is patient, but there is a limit to his patience. Must we wait until that patience snaps?
The nation-wide rebellion is escalating and threatens to explode into a bloody revolution. There is a growing cadre of young Filipinos who have finally come to realize that freedom is never granted, it is taken. Must we relive the agonies and the blood-letting of the past that brought forth our Republic, or can we sit down as brothers and sisters and discuss our differences with reason and goodwill?
I have often wondered how many disputes could have been settled easily had the disputants only dared to define their terms.

So as to leave no room for misunderstanding, I shall define my terms:

1. Six years ago, I was sentenced to die before a firing squad by a Military Tribunal whose jurisdiction I steadfastly refused to recognize. It is now time for the regime to decide. Order my IMMEDIATE EXECUTION OR SET ME FREE.

I was sentenced to die for allegedly being the leading communist leader. I am not a communist, never was and never will be.

2. National reconciliation and unity can be achieved but only with justice, including justice for our Muslim and Ifugao brothers. There can be no deal with a Dictator. No compromise with Dictatorship.

3. In a revolution there can really be no victors, only victims. We do not have to destroy in order to build.

4. Subversion stems from economic, social and political causes and will not be solved by purely military solutions; it can be curbed not with ever increasing repression but with a more equitable distribution of wealth, more democracy and more freedom, and

5. For the economy to get going once again, the workingman must be given his just and rightful share of his labor, and to the owners and managers must be restored the hope where there is so much uncertainty if not despair.

On one of the long corridors of Harvard University are carved in granite the words of Archibald Macleish:

“How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms; by truth when it is attacked by lies; by democratic faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, and in the final act, by determination and faith.”

I return from exile and to an uncertain future with only determination and faith to offer – faith in our people and faith in God.

BENIGNO S. AQUINO, JR.