1. Once again, the relatively lighter load for the day affords me with the luxury of jotting down a few points in this online space. The last time I was asked to talk about new media and blogging, one of the things I emphasized is regular and frequent postings as one key to developing one’s readership. It is clear that the only regular thing in (Mis)readings is the irregularity and scarcity of postings. Hence, I apologize to my anonymous regular readers. One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2011, apart from taking more seriously the call for “simple living,” would be to (as much as it is possible) update this blog at least once a week (while not letting it distract me from more important tasks).
2. My readings in the past few weeks once more brings the issue of what book to read or what not to read to the surface. In as much as I have a (sometimes negative and at times positive) tendency to go to the end with most books I read once I’ve started them, the recent experience in the past few weeks emphasizes how this should not be universally applied to all books. I should take more seriously Bacon’s injunction with regards to reading books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
3. Reading Antonio Enriqeuz’s Subanons, for one, could have simply been avoided have I been more circumspect in scanning the beginning of every chapter. The first few gory pages, detailing the torture of a Subanon by drunken Army soldiers somewhere in Zamboanga in the 80s, is bad enough. But the theme of how the ordinary people are simply caught in the middle of the armed conflict between the two evil factions of communist belligerents and the State’s military forces is simply misleading. Then again, this should be no surprise considering the fact that the point of view Enriquez assumes in the novella is that of an imaginary Subanon family of noble descent struggling to retain its old feudal privileges and power in the face of intensifying competition from rival political clans, creeping encroachment of lowlanders, increased military presence, and the growing heroic resistance of the armed revolutionary movement. At least, there is an attempt to picture out the black terror experienced by the Filipino people under the Marcos dictatorship. But woe to the less critical reader who might just take things as they are presented.
4. Some of David Foster Wallace’s witticisms in his essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments are a droll. But most, unfortunately, are dull. I should have skipped trying to find some spark in all of them. I hope his fiction, which I still have some hopes of reading in the future, would not be as disappointing.
5. Amado Guerrero’s essay “Pomeroy’s Forest Nightmare” should have been enough warning against reading the whole of Rogelio Sicat’s Filipino translation of William Pomeroy’s The Forest: A Personal Record of the Huk Struggle in the Philippines. Everything in the book simply affirms Guerrero’s assessment on its bourgeois pessimism. In the main, as already pointed out four decades ago, ”The book deals mainly with panic and blind flight through the forest and sheer struggle for physical survival in the absence of a wide and strong political base to rely on.” In this sense, the book reminds me of Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diaries. While abounding with details of Pomeroy’s day-to-day experiences, the book fails to raise these to the level of theory. Instead of becoming a constructive vehicle for learning lessons from the Huk uprising’s defeat, the book serves to discourage against revolutionary struggle.
Perhaps the only good thing is that I actually got acquainted with some of the quirks of the Huk movement (executions and excessive punishments for minor transgressions within their ranks, allowing of polygamous relationship for ranking leaders, etc.). One more thing is the literary quality of Sicat’s poetic translation in Filipino over Pomeroy’s drab English original. I like the part about how they tried to preserve their books while traversing through the jungles:
Sa lahat, ang higit naming inaalala ay kung ano ang mangyayari sa aming libro; napakakaunti ng mga ito at iyong tungkol sa mga teoretikal na paksa ay halos hindi mapapalitan. Napakalaki ang kakulangan namin sa libro kung kaya’t kailangan naming sulatin at mimyograpin ang lahat ng textbook para sa aming paaralan. Ngunit kahit ano pang balot ang aming gawin, ng damit, ng plastic, ng papel, ng lona, nakapapasok pa rin ang halumigmig at namiminsala. Ang una naming ginagawa pagkaraang mabasa sa isang martsa sa ilog o ulan ay ilabas ang aming mga libro para patuyuin sa tabi ng kalanan o sa araw. Itinatago ang mga ito sa pinakatuyong sulok ng kubo. Balewala rin. Nasisira ang binding, ang tela sa takip ay nababakbak mula sa cardboard, lumuluwag ang mga pahina at nakahahabag na sumasama sa kamay. Para mapagsama-sama, matiyaga naming tinatahi ang mga pahina, at kapag napunit, kinokopya namin ang libro sa makinilya. Sa ganitong paraan, nagtatagal ang isang libro sa amin, patibayan, tulad din mismo ng paglabang ginagawa namin.
6. As part of the efforts to resolve the two main problems sorted out in here – that of irregular blog postings and bad book reading habits, I will be going over Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive and Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read after I’m done with my present readings. ■
(Mis)readings