A bloody chore it always was, covering textbooks with plastic. Now that classes have just begun for them youngsters, Keolo and Kaira, grades six and two respectively, the housemaid has been painstakingly snipping plastic covers here and there and securing them on the kids' textbooks with scotch tape.

I managed to bring a book along, the crowning glory of all my book collection: Anthony Burgess' The Complete Enderby, which contains four books inside, Inside Mr. Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament, and Enderby's Dark Lady. It's the book that snatched the number one spot of my previous favorite book, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Complete Enderby chronicles a fattish writer named Enderby and his incurable addiction to writing poetry on rolls of tissue paper in the bathroom. It's my second read, despite its being 631 pages long. The first time I was spellbound by it I was prowling through the aisles of the College of Arts and Letters Library in UP just last year. Seeing the collection of Anthony Burgess books (whose A Clockwork Orange I once bought, never read, and resold to a friend who was ravished with the movie) on a shelf, I fished all his books out, about five of them, all voluminously thick and intimidating, and laid them on the floor. I squatted on the floor and studied each one, the first being Enderby.

"Pfffrrrummmp," the first word said on the first page. And before I knew it I had read thirty pages. I inspected the other books on the floor but they all lost their charm; Enderby stole every bit of it. I borrowed the book right away and stashed it in my bag on the way to the dormitory, where I'd relish the book under the glow of a flashlight up til four in the morning on my creaking bed. Ever time the due date would arrive, I'd return the book and borrow it again until I finished it.

I asked for a copy in all bookstores I'd been to, but alas, none of them had any other book by Burgess besides A Clockwork Orange. Then a clerk from Fullybooked texted me one day, some time later last year, and said that The Complete Enderby they had ordered just for me had arrived and asked when I could pick it up. I picked it up that same afternoon.:p

Ah yes, finally, a copy of my own.:DD

Reading it again, I found Enderby's character oddly familiar. Waitaminute, I know this person. He's almost a mirror image of the two protagonists in my fiction, Gaysha and Balut, written ages ago. EPIPHANY.:o

Back home in Taguig, I rummaged my backpack and pulled out the copy, which was in a reusable plastic bag in case of unwanted spills and scratches that might harm its smooth and white cover. I took out the book from the bag, riffled through the pages, and sniffed its intoxicating scent of black ink and pulpwood cellulose fibers. The book was innocently pure and vulnerable in its nakedness. I asked the housemaid for some rectangular bit of plastic cover from the roll she had by her side. I sat beside her in the dining room and together we covered books in silence.

Covering the book filled me with intense oneness with the universe.XP I've never covered a book I like before, since most of them were secondhand and would be worthlessly covered in their worthless, pitiful condition. I meticulously measured the size of the book and the plastic cover, trimmed the excess plastic with utmost caution, and held them all together with scotch tape without leaving a fingerprint on the sticky side. The finished product was a success, the plastic pressed and tight and it blended easily with the book. When I asked Keolo to look at it and admire my superior craftsmanship in book covering, he said he thought the book didn't have a plastic cover at all.:p I cried and Keolo cried and the housemaid cried and we all cried. It was so beautiful.XD

The back cover with a layer of plastic.

Enderby on the front.

Anthony Burgess is a literary wizard. He's an obscure writer to most people, especially during his time, the poor dead bastard.

Today is the presidential inauguration of the highest moron official in the country, Benigno Aquino III. And today being a historical day for Moron History, is a holiday. Oh joy. Spent the whole day in bed reading Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels.

I didn't read this book for pleasure, mind. It's part of the reading list of the Creative Writing Program in UP; the list being a selection from the literary canon in the Philippines. Composed of: 13 novels, 79 short stories, 150 poems, 21 essays, and 2 plays. All these readings for just one subject: FUCK: THESIS. :faint: Stretcher!

The Woman Who Had Two Navels reads very much like Toni Morrison's Beloved. Both thread on realism with a pinch of fantasy, or rather, schizophrenic elements--delusions, hallucinations, lucid dreams, and what have you, which rather bored me. Connie Escobar first becomes deluded that she has two navels. Whether she has two mothers or she was born twice, I haven't the foggiest thought. She simply believes herself to have two navels without actually seeing them.

The book isn't an interesting read, as it is easy to digest, discard, and move on. The novel is self-explanatory (the explanation for the problems presented are analyzed and resolved within the book) and there is nothing else to think about--which is why I haven't written anything about it. If I were to write anything about it, it would just be summarizing the entire book: Connie is a monster because her mother is a monster because they share the same men. Is all. Yawn. And Connie is schizophrenic because she's protecting herself from the harsh reality: that she and her mother are both whores. Their cunts penetrated by the same old dicks.

So?

Methinks it's rather overdramatic. And besides: I don't care. It's boring, I'm sorry Mister dead National Artist. I just don't invest emotionally in a book. Besides, why should I care about Connie? Who the fuck is she to be cared about? I rather prefer your frenzied short stories, the Tadtarin and everything, where women rule and men worship them and lick their feet erotically.XP

I feel like I just wasted my entire day. I should've just finished reading Anthony Burgess' The Complete Enderby. (I used to think the author's name was Anthony Buggress, you know, the one to be buggered.XP) But so what. Everybody in this country just wasted his day today so. Is alright.:p

Say, speaking of buggering, a novel entitled The Man Who Had Two Assholes should be published. The protagonist would have gender identity issues, or maybe split personality disorder like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. He'd live a man by day, and a buggress by night. It isn't he who is confused, but rather his asshole. And so his asshole duplicates itself, as natural selection asks for it. Like Connie, the man too believes he has two assholes but can't be sure because he can't contort himself into a yoga position that would allow him to see his own buttcrack.

Warning, this is an academic reaction scribbledeeeeeeeegook. And holy fuck yes, I have Shakespeare this semester.XP

My very first real encounter with Shakespeare was through a website called Shakespearean Insult Kit a couple of years ago. The objective is to combine words from each column to create your own biting wisecrack. The first ten rows include:

Example: My neighbor's sex slave is a droning boil-brained boar-pig.

Right away you can surmise this Shakespeare person was a man of profound vocabulary, can whip his personal neologies out of thin air, and he might have been the greatest smartass who's ever lived.

With the insult kit, you can tell this Shakespeare pompous asswipe person can express one idea with so many words and so many different variations that permuting them would atrophy your brain. He's a bottomless well of novelty, to put. And perhaps this is what makes his works fresh to whatever age and time, making him a transcendental, ageless, and immortal smartass.

Prior to this I've seen his plays Hamlet and A Midsummernight's Dream on stage, and found them all rubbish because I didn't understand a thing. Pop culture turned his Romeo and Juliet and "To be or not to be" into household terms. Beyond these, rumors of his "greatness"--not only in the field of smartassness--came from authority figures, them high school teachers, film directors, critics, writers, scholars, the janitor, etc., who all chewed Shakespeare for us to swallow.

What makes this 16th century smartass so great?

I haven't chewed enough Shakespeare to appreciate his importance, but he must be the most popular person who's ever lived next to Jesus Christ--not that I'm saying Jesus Christ ever did live.

According to the wise guys, them authority figures, the historical Shakespeare was a 16th century simpleton with a simple brain who led a simple life, which would equate to much of the idiots that make up the universe today. This historical Shakespeare (whom I will now refer as the "historical Shakespeare") didn't have a university education or any evidence of intellectual elitism that would otherwise render him an instant wizard in the English language and literature, psychology, philosophy, politics, law, medicine, astronomy, and foreign languages, among other things; and write 38 plays, 154 sonnets, 2 long narrative poems, and several other poems, all of them exceptional, and by exceptional I mean the multiple layers of meaning, the depth of the many characters and situations, the wisdom of the lines, not to mention the rhythm and style--it's bordering on the fantastic he might as well have been divine. In the words of Henry Caldecott, Shakespeare's works are described as:

so stupendous a monument of learning and genius that, as time passes and they are probed and searched and analysed by successive generations of scholars and critics of all nations, they seem to loom higher and grander, and their hidden beauties and treasured wisdom to be more and more inexhaustible; and so people have come to ask themselves not only, 'Is it humanly possible for William Shakespeare, the country lad from Stratford-on-Avon, to have written them?', but whether it was possible for any one man, whoever he may have been, to have done so.

The historical William Shakespeare was far beyond the author William Shakespeare they couldn't have been the same person. Conspiracy theorists argue this historical "William Shakespeare" was just a facade that masked a group of eminent writers at the time. Others say the real author was just using the historical Shakespeare's name to assume a pseudo-identity. Scholars argue it really was Edward de Vere who wrote them, since his intellectual sophistication and biography mirrors those of Shakespeare's plays. Others say it was Sir Francis Bacon, who wrote most of it and lead the collaboration of writers behind Shakespeare in an attempt to erect a philosophic system that would educate men through the medium of the stage. Still, others say it was Christopher Marlowe, who had similar vocabulary and style with Shakespeare. All such speculations just point to Shakespeare as a hoax. But then again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence wasn't just enough.

Let's just say, right now, I am agnostic of Shakespeare. It is uncertain that he wrote his oeuvre, and it is just as uncertain that somebody else, or a group of people, did. Nevertheless, his name condenses a wide range of knowledge that it's as ponderous and immense as any field of critical study. How I know this, I don't know. It's just an assumption. I have yet to read his works to find it out myself.

(So okay, I am bored stiffstonedshit with the topic. You can very well see the plunge to boredom right at the very middle of this entry. Harhar.XD)

Just another bout of emotional existentialist whining.

It struck me just now (it struck me before but never really really thought of it real hard, I mean really) that a massive portion of my books were written by atheists. Right. All my four favorite authors are atheists: George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Moore, and Chuck Palahniuk (in that order :p). Other atheist writers I've read include:

• Douglas Adams
• Isaac Asimov
• Ray Bradbury
• Charles Bukowski
• Albert Camus
• Arthur Clarke
• Richard Dawkins
• Marquis de Sade
• Daniel Dennett
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Harlan Ellison
• William Golding
• Sam Harris
• Stephen Hawking
• Robert Heinlein
• Ernest Hemingway
• Christopher Hitchens
• David Hume
• Aldous Huxley
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Ian McEwan
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Terry Pratchett
• Thomas Pynchon
• Ayn Rand
• Bertrand Russell
• Carl Sagan
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Mark Twain
• H. G. Wells

...and everybody else I missed mentioning. Did they influence me to become an atheist or did I read them just to affirm my own beliefs? Hurr. It didn't even occur to me they were atheists from the stuff they wrote but read them anyway because they were rather honest in expressing the human condition.:p Lines that melt me:

Looked into the sky, heavy with smoke and human fat, and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. It is not God that kills the children, not fate that butchers them, nor destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us.
--Rorschach from Alan Moore's Watchmen

Sadly, the movie left out 90% of the graphic novel. Meh.

Why isn't there any atheistic debate in this country?? Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh. Oh god, I am alone.

Alone, alone, oh so alone.

Book fair at MOA.

At any given moment, it's just either I'm incurably curious or I don't give a shit. Now books and malls are two universes apart in my spectrum of interests. I can spend my entire life locked up in a library, but I'd go bonkers if you lock me up in a shopping mall. Friday just happened to be a convergence of these two extremities. I materialized in a book fair inside a mall.

Mall of Asia was packed with so many people you'd think the rockstar Jesus was having a free concert. The illusion of a three-day sale is that you pay less for the things you don't really need. But you buy them anyway because you think it's a good deal. The word "sale" is just part of a catch phrase predatory corporations use to trap their prey. A mousetrap with bits of rotten cheese. A psychological manipulation. They're the brains us zombies are programmed to feed on.

All those shit inside malls, they're either the stuff we want or the stuff we're trained to want.

I've been avoiding adverts forever. I haven't seen a TV commercial in ages; I don't watch TV. I haven't seen a single cyber-advert. (Thanks to Firefox's AdBlock plugin.) Inside jeepneys and buses and train rides, I read books instead of looking out the window. Corporate motherfuckers have been screaming at me to buy their shit that I've created my own little universe cramped inside my skull.

It just gets fucking annoying. You don't know it but everyday you subconsciously filter in an average of one thousand ads.

Two thousand years ago Homer and Virgil wrote epics they thought the gods whispered to them.

Two thousand years later we see an anti-dandruff shampoo on TV and we rush out to buy. Today this is what passes for free will.

Why we're all suckers for shopping malls is particularly why I avoid adverts. We're all hypnotized into wanting all the wrong things without even knowing it.

Now books, they're a different mofongo altogether. Reading defies all boundaries, liberates the mind, and generates creative and original thought. Reading is the best antidote against this marshland of boredom and vacuity. Reading is the supreme experience of living. The more I read the more I think the more I feel alive.

Humdaboogerdum.:p

But books inside a shopping mall, I'd be intensely curious and intensely disinterested at the same time they cancel each other out.

Buddies at UPWC.

Nevertheless I sauntered to the book fair in the mall with two girls (Yes, I hate girls and stupid girls in particular but this is an exception.:p) whom I share my passion for reading with. And would you believe it, half the books sold were strictly religious, strictly catholic, and strictly fucking pathetic. Them spiritual book stalls, they're infested with the same people who are trained to want the same things. They're the aimless lost zombies of our nation. The people who think they want the things they're conditioned to want. The idiots who think life's lessons can be reduced into a simplified and generic self-help manual.

On the tarpaulins inside the mall they say they've slashed up to 75% off the original price. But if you look at the original price they're so inflated you'd think they've wedged gold bars inside.

But me, I'm a sucker for books. I melt at the sight of them. I want to liquefy and drain all the ink from their pages. So to put it briefly, I've been sold into buying books at the book fair inside the shopping mall.

I am a zombie. But I am a zombie breaking borders, not building them.:p

Blabbityblah.

I'm saving moolalalah for a Mt. Apo expedition this coming semestral break. Mt. Apo, the highest peak in the country.:o But I don't know--I still don't get the logic behind mountaineering. It sounds like we all have the chutzpah and feel like we need to prove it. But really, I don't want to prove anyone anything. Why I'd spend ten grand on some stupid hiking experience, I haven't the haziest idea.

Or maybe, I'm simply a fool for nature. Maybe I'm vomity sick of the city. I don't know.

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