Authors' ghosts

I think that authors' ghosts creep back
Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves
And find the books they wrote.
Those authors put final, semi-final touches,
Sometimes whole paragraphs.

Whole pages are added, rewritten, revised,
So deeply by night those authors employ
Themselves with those old books of theirs.

How otherwise
Explain the fact that maybe after years
Have passed, the reader
Picks up the book - But was it like that?
I don't remember this...Where
Did this ending come from?
I recall quite another.

Oh yes, it has been tampered with
No doubt about it -
The author's very touch is here, there and there,
Where it wasn't before, and
What's more, something's missing -
I could have sworn...

--Muriel Spark
(In: Litt, Toby and Ali Smith [eds]: 13. New Writing. London: Picador and BAC, 2005.)


(When I reread Muriel Sparks' "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" about three years ago, it totally wasn't the same.)

Bookworm manifesto (or, some snobbery if you care to read it)

There's a cliche about bookworms, and I come across it every once in a while: that they're the type to read anything they can get their hands on. I don't know about you, anonymous reader, and I have no idea if you consider yourself a bookworm or not, but I submit for your inspection the opinion that this cliche is really not true. (I've found it annoying enough to go and spend a full hour to write a short treatise on a useless cliché.)

Think of yourself as you go into a bookstore, whether it's the corner booksale beside the grocer's inside Robinson's Ermita, or a posh one in Serendra, or the Solidaridad along Padre Faura. Maybe even--if you care more for the books themselves than for the covers, like me--the dingy little booksale along Pedro Gil St., which holds a lot of treasures: it was there I bought most of my Inspector Maigret books in English, since the originals are harder to find. My first was Maigret hésite (Maigret hesitates). I also found a book I've been looking for, for many years, but which I hadn't seen at any bookseller's for the last eight years: A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, first read in high school care of my best friend, Michelle Calsado. Rereading the story was like reacquainting myself with my best friend--all over again. And who would have thought that this rat's hole of a bookstore would be the place to find many Dorothy L Sayersssss, which aren't sold (except by overseas book order) in National Bookstore or Powerbooks? And which, once found in Fully Booked, will cost you 600php apiece, while one may cost 95php here?

My purpose isn't to catalogue all of my booksale purchases or spectacular bargains, but to underline the fact that when a true bookworm goes into a store, there is a specific section to which he gravitates. I again submit for your inspection this anonymous, masculinized person, the True Bookworm. He may like Science Fiction and Fantasy; he might like the Mystery Genre best of all; he may have a penchant for biographies; he may enjoy most those thrillers that are always the second most numerous (never outnumbering the romance pocketbooks of the Mills and Boon/Harlequin variety). He may go through the bookstore through a circuitous route: first glancing at the bestsellers, hardbound and shiny; then browsing casually through the thrillers and young adult fiction; before concentrating more fully on science fiction and fantasy, saving his best for last. Or, pressed for time, he might go to his favorite section first.

As a True Bookworm he does not choose books based on how they will look, sitting with him and sharing his latté in a coffee shop, or propped on his backpack on a long bus ride. As a True Bookworm he hardly pays attention to what is popular--but unlike the snobby elitist (with all the redundancy this entails), he doesn't balk at reading something just because everyone else is. (How silly it would be, for example, to eschew Tolkien just because he's popular.) As a True Bookworm he knows what he loves, and there is a kind of program in his head for finding the specific books he's looking for. His eyes merely slide over titles and authors' names that he finds uninteresting or which provoke that lukewarm response, "I must get round to reading this author sometime" (for me: Robert Parker, CJ Cherryh and Sara Paretsky); his mind is programmed to stop and squeal with glee upon sighting a familiar and beloved book, whether or not a copy is already in his possession. (For me it's always The Beekeeper's Apprentice, of which I already have three copies; it doesn't matter that I already have it, but encountering it here is like meeting an old friend.)

Most importantly, his mind is also programmed to spot names of books that he doesn't already have, and wants badly to possess. (For me this is anything by Julian Symons. It was a victory for me to find his book, "Death's Darkest Face," at a sale years ago, but I'm still in search for the holy grail among crime aficionados, the seminal study called "Bloody Murder.")

Whatever genre it is, he does not, like the indiscriminate reader of the cliché, devour everything. The very point of becoming a bookworm is that you cultivate your taste, so that at the end of years--after accumulated experience of reading books both enjoyed and hated--you can choose your books more carefully. You can tell by looking at the cover or its blurbs if it is the kind of book you will probably enjoy. (That other cliché that is hardly ever true is that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover; apart from the Internet at home, the True Bookworm stranded in the familiar strangeness of a bookstore has no better tool with which to decide to buy a book.) For every bookworm may be all right with reading any given book if asked, but in his heart, there is a genre (or two, or three) that has made a home, and which will always spell out to this bookworm the things he most desires from the reading experience: comfort, or distraction, or escapism, or consolation, or stimulation. (For me it is all these.) So a bookworm is defined not by the diversity of the books that he reads (though diversity wouldn't really go amiss), but by the intensity, the voraciousness with which he hunts for the books that he wants and his enjoyment of them, and by the sheer ability, honed by experience, to know what he will like and what he will not.

Berthe Morisot, La lecture, 1869-1870.

The Divided Heart

I was listening to this song on my "Random Musicals" playlist:

All that I ask for
Is one little corner
One private room
At the back of my heart.
--Jason Robert Brown, "Nobody Needs to Know" (from L5Y)

And the musical ends with the lead couple (the only couple. Actually they're the only cast in this two-person play) splitting up because of a myriad problems and because, ultimately, the man singing the above song cheated on his wife. This isn't me playing pot, kettle, black. This is me reminding myself and the small circle of people who read this blog: He has no use for divided hearts.

I see this all the time in Facebook. "I am Catholic. But I support the Reproductive Health Bill." Sometimes we even drop the "but" as though the two could be in any way compatible. All of this... is an attempt at cafeteria Catholicism. We pick and choose. Oh, being a Catholic's nice and all, I love our devotions to the saints and to the Blessed Virgin Mary and I love Mass songs ladidah. I love Jesus. But when it comes to those hard solid issues that the Church is so adamant about, like homosexual marriages and the use of contraceptives and the use of abortifacients--when it comes to commandments five onwards, especially the sixth and the ninth--I pick and choose.

When you're in school, you dream of a 1.0. How is that we're satisfied with the bare minimum of a 3.0--mass on Sundays and an occasional confession, maybe even some charismatic prayer meetings if our friends are going--when it comes to what should be the most important thing in our lives?

When you're a Catholic, there should be no BUT. Let's not put conditions on a faith that we propose to have. He said He has no use for divided hearts. You can't say you love Him if you don't love His bride the church and His clergy. They are just incompatible (and if you say this isn't true, we can talk about why). We live in a world where everyone is so cautious to say things absolutely. Moral relativism is the theme of the century. But let's call a spade a spade. Let's get past all of the politics surrounding the bill and actually read it. Read it in the light of the Constitution that we hold sacred as Filipinos. Read it in the light of true statistics. Read it in the light of comparisons to other countries (ie contraceptives have been legal and affordable in the US since the early 1900s; has the abortion rate dropped even when changes in their population have been taken into consideration?). And if you're a Catholic, read this in the light of the faith you say you have and the moral code that should follow.

If you have questions, don't just rant on facebook. Don't call people bigots when you don't have a correct understanding of what they stand for. Grant us the respect you would grant an opponent on the other side of a proper debate, and don't assume that just because we oppose the bill, we are being "blindly obedient," or we are simply ignorant, or we haven't read the bill. Because we have, because there are fewer of us and we have to be sure about what we're going to say when we're up against so many. You have things to say, I know, and you have good points. So do we. And they don't necessarily begin with "Because the Church says so."

Talk to me here. And since everyone's battle cry is respect--let's go with that. Respect. I'm trying to detach myself from my fear of being persecuted for my beliefs, because I've been there and done that and the experience wasn't pretty, but sometimes--all the time--standing up for what you believe in is necessary (and isn't that UP's long-held battle cry?). Try to detach yourself from your anticlericalism or your anger, or both. And let's talk.

Whisper of the Heart

(Because it's always easiest to write a blog the night before an exam!)


Consider: it is a summer evening in 1994, in a suburb in Tokyo, and Shizuku Tsukushima, a junior high school girl, looks through the checkout cards of her library books and is amazed by a pattern: each book was previously checked out by a person called "Seiji Amasawa." The name burns into her mind, along with a muddle of other worries and concerns. High school entrance exams are coming up and everyone is in cram school except her. She's restless and doesn't know what to do about her future; the only thing to excite her is the prospect of borrowing a new book (and doesn't that sound familiar!), and even this excitement has paled. Still, she makes her way to the library and borrows a new book of Fairy Tales--she's the first one to borrow it--and is pleased and astonished to find the name "Amasawa" stamped onto the book, probably the name of a previous owner.

Later in the day she leaves the book behind on a bench in front of the baseball field. She comes back to get it. Enter a curiously good-looking but sardonic boy, who looks to be about her age, and who is sitting at the same bench and looking through the same book. He calls Shizuku by name--her name is on the library card after all--and refers mockingly to a translation of a song, "Concrete Roads", on a piece of paper folded into the book. "Forget 'Concrete Roads'," he says, and leaves Shizuku fuming. "Baka!" she says as she storms home.

This is the first of a handful of encounters--either spotting each other at school, by the public library, or at the curious antique shop that Shizuku has discovered by following a nomadic fat, gray cat from the train and through the city.

Shizuku and the cat-of-many-names aboard the train.

One day, after a terrible time after school, she goes to the shop again finds the same boy, who turns out to be the grandson of the shop owner. He takes her inside the house and the shop and when she learns that he's studying to be a luthier, she's awestruck by the ambition and purpose she never expected to find in someone her age.

Shizuku and a mysterious boy, whose name she doesn't know--but she feels like she's known him for years...

It comes as no surprise to the audience that the boy turns out to be Seiji Amasawa, and that he knows perfectly well who she is. "I had to read all sorts of books so I could check them out before you, and you would see my name," he tells her later on, when they are alone. "I even sat with you once, but you didn't notice."

The movie goes on--about two hours of it--and follows Seiji as he wins the battle with his parents to go to Cremona for an apprenticeship to be a luthier, and follows Shizuku as she lingers restlessly at home, hating her lack of purpose and perceived lack of talent. A conversation with Seiji's grandfather convinces her that she has just as much potential as Seiji--she just has to find what she's good at and to polish herself, as one would purify a beryl ore. She makes the decision to start writing a story--to finish it, to work on it day and night, even to the detriment of her studies, because she has to test herself, to see what she's got. Her parents are supportive but cautious. "It's not easy when you walk a different road," her father tells her, after she blurts out that she's working on something more important than even school, and that if this means compromising her chances at high school, so be it.

The morning after Shizuku finishes her story and accepts that it's not enough to want--one must do, she looks out the window and finds Seiji standing outside. And the reunion is really too beautiful to be written down--you have to see it for yourself.

---

This is Hayao Miyazaki's 1995 film Whisper of the Heart or Mimi o Sumaseba. I am not a big fan of everything Hayao Miyazaki does--part of me still can't forgive him for the travesty that was "Howl's Moving Castle"--but I remember watching "Mon voisin Totoro" (My Neighbor Totoro) and Kiki's Delivery Service when I was little, and was so pleased when I gave this one a try two summers ago. Miyazaki has a beautiful way of portraying children. He sees into their secret world and understands, and never trivializes, their worries and feelings. And as always the animation is beautiful, the details are incredible, and the music is simple and appropriate and dear.

Mimi o Sumaseba has the advantage of being perhaps the clearest, most coherent of Hayao Miyazaki's plotlines. It doesn't try to be more than what it is--it's a coming of age story if there ever was one--and it actually makes sense, which is more than I can say for other films! But my favorite part about it was how it wasn't just a story of a romance, though it is that. Shizuku was surprised and pleased and flattered and enchanted, but her affection for Seiji Amasawa didn't turn her into a moonstruck idiot--it made her confront things about herself, and made her force herself to grow, when she had been fighting this growth for so long. It made her understand that she had to step up, not only to be worthy of the love and admiration that she wanted, but to have, too, the ability to stand before the person she loved and know that she was a whole person with or without him--completed by love rather than diminished by it.

Doesn't it make you wish Bella Swann, and her ilk (of irritatingly lampa damsels in distress), had taken a cue from a high school bookworm with short messy hair, and an awkward way with boys? Sometimes young children know more about true love than their elders.

Glass bones

There's no point in being oversensitive. No matter where you are or what job you take up, the experience will always be abrasive, and even if you ran away from one job or one school to another, it would still be the same. Your only other option would be to live as a hermit, like that man with the bones as fragile as glass, and you wouldn't last a day in that kind of life.

So just suck it up! Long faces never attracted anybody. Particularly on old Yorick here.