Lectiograph 2

Books I'm planning to read:

1. The Primal Scream Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis by Arthur Janov, Phd. (1970). Yes, this is the book that inspired one of the most successful singing duo in the 80s, Tears for Fears (and also one of my favorite. though i have yet to lay my hands on some CD copies of their old albums. i can still remember patiently waiting for this local radio station to play everybody wants to rule the world back in the 80s so i can record it in my cassette tape). In fact, the band's name was taken from a phrase from the book, "tears as a replacement for fears". Both Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith were deeply into so-called primal therapy when they formed TFF. Earnings from album sales were supposed to finance their primal therapy sessions with Janov (must have been one expensive therapy). And apparently, the titles of two songs -- Ideas as Opiates and The Prisoner -- from their first album, The Hurting, were also derived from chapters of The Primal Scream. After 13 years of separation and a string of solo albums, Roland and Curt are back with TFF's recent album, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending (that record stores here in Manila have yet to procure).
   
2. War With The Newts by Karel Capek (1936). Sorry, I don't know how to make that Czech diacritical mark above the "C" (that one site described as the "convex-down bow" and is supposed to be pronounced as "cha", as in "Chapek"). Anyway, got my own battered and yellowing copy from a popular shop here in Manila that sells second-hand books. For only 21 pesos (or almost half a dollar). It has been in my shelves for almost seven years now. Which means, I should really read it soon. Read the synopsis of War With The Newts from one of these Capek sites. And I thought the theme has a startling resemblance to that of the Matrix movies: Capek's novel had the humans enslaving this race of intelligent amphibians; the Matrix world had humans initially oppressing machines. By the way, Capek is also famous for coining the word "robot", from the Czech "robota", in his play R.U.R. or "Rossum's Universal Robot".
   
3. Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson (1998). Have I already mentioned that Robinson is my favorite sf writer? I have read the Mars trilogy and the prelude book, The Martians (well, partly -- i wasn't able to finish it as i also lost my copy somewhere. which could be the last extant copy here in the Philippines right now. damn). I've also read Icehenge which is about human expeditions to Pluto. But Robinson is also known for his novels that are closer to home. Like Antarctica. Don't know much about literary works that feature the barren, cold environment at the earth's poles (does shelley's frankenstein count?). I started reading this nonfiction book on the arctic by this naturalist-environmentalist. Again, wasn't able to finish it. Coincidentally, I've been scanning this paper on "rapid change, resilience and vulnerability in social-ecological systems of the Arctic" that my boss passed on to me in preparation for writing a proposal of our project's next phase. So, this should be a good read.

Next, Books that I've already read but am planning to read again . . .

My luckiest month

i remember it was also a cold night in december when i lost my first mobile phone. i was wearing a regular polo shirt and jeans then. still, i must have been overdressed for that dark, very crowded place along the highway where i got off from this provincial bus coming from a friend's place somewhere north of manila. i also recalled taking out my phone once or twice to check for messages in my inbox. it was enough to attract the attention of these shady characters that night who were out to victimize unsuspecting people like me. i was squiggling my way through this whole pack of people who were all trying to get on another bus when i felt an elbow pressing against my right side. seconds later, i found myself standing on the bus, breathing hard to calm myself. i just realized my pocket had been emptied and my nokia 3210 unit had been snatched. i remember staring at the faces of these guys who had a funny look on their faces. i was thinking they must have noticed something and knew even before they took their seats that i was in for a big surprise.

five years later, on another cold december night, i lost my second mobile phone. this time, there was nothing forced about the whole thing. my phone just decided to leave me for another owner. must have resented being neglected these past few days. it kept on complaining about the fake battery pack i bought to replace the busted one from the factory. mumbled this weird phrase -- "contact service" -- whenever i plugged it up or turned it on for the first time. sometimes it would have this catatonic look on its face. you'd then have to wrack your brains out dismantling it and trying to figure out what the hell's wrong with it. it even had some beige paint on it when it ran away the other night, fresh from my recent room renovation project. i was still trying to contact it yesterday, hoping to convince it to return. but to no avail. so now, i'm slowly pushing myself again to get pass through the denial stage of losing something.

my nokia 3310 and i had some good days together. i still remember those rainy saturday mornings when it woke me up for my masteral classes. and those hectic days in another country when, not having any roaming privileges, my mobile phone patiently showed what time it was back home, or helped me look busy whenever my tagalog-bred jaws grew tired of conversing in english. i recall those precious moments of composing catchy ring tones with my daughter (until the day she replaced her unit with one that played polyphonic tunes). guess i will miss my mobile phone badly in the coming days. a week before its unilateral decision, i was in fact trying to imagine a life without it. thought then that i could survive a cellphone-less existence in much the same way that i've been able to get on with a meatless diet these past five to six years. just wonder now how this would impact on the quality of my communication and my relationships with other people. it's terrifying, but exciting too.

though i really can't understand why of all the months in a year i have to lose my phone in december.


"A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised."

Tom Robbins
Jitterbug Perfume

Lectiograph

Walking to the office this morning, I was thinking of a word to describe a captured image of one's "reading life" -- sort of a mental snapshot of the books one is currently preoccupied with. The word "bibliography" came to mind. So I searched for its definition and etymology in Google. Found out that it came from the Greek word bibliographia meaning "the writing of books". The first time it was used in its modern sense to refer to a list of books on a particular subject was in 1869. Interesting, but not quite the word I was looking for. Finally deciding that the concept was too complex for a Google search, I tried inventing a term. And I came up with the title for this post. Lectio is of course Latin for "reading". But it also means "picking out", which is even closer to what this post is all about.

I painted my room beige last Saturday. The night before that, I had to remove all of my things and pile them up somewhere in the kitchen. And these things included my growing book collection. With my eyes squinting and my nose starting to itch from the dust, I realized I have about half a lifetime left to read all of my books. So, as I was putting them back into these boxes, I picked out titles that I would be prioritizing in the next few weeks. That yielded around ten to fifteen books. The next thing I did was to plan out my strategy. There was this erotic film that I saw last week at the university film center, "The Pillow Book". And the pillow book is just that: a bedside reading material that ends up under one's pillow. But this ancient pillow book in the movie was very peculiar as it contained nothing but lists of things. That provided initial inspiration for lectiograph.

So, here's my current lectiograph.

Books I'm reading at the moment:

1. Time Frames: The Evolution of Punctuated Equilibria by Niles Eldredge (1985). Been reading this for weeks now. Midway, had to pick up John Irving's Water-Method Man to provide this mind some rest from all those concepts on evolutionary theory. But Eldredge's book is certainly worth reading. Gives a different perspective on the role of ecological processes on evolution. For instance, generalists (also "k strategists") or species that are able to exploit a wider range of environmental conditions are not necessarily privileged in evolutionary terms. While most generalists would tend to show a lower extinction rate, they also experience less speciation. And with reduced structural variation comes boring reproductive behaviors. Good thing that Eldredge concluded we're not strictly generalists.
2. Titan by Stephen Baxter (1997). Guess that a fourth of my collection right now would be science fiction and fantasy books. So my lectiographs would probably often include one or two sf or fantasy titles. I've read Baxter's Voyager a few years ago. That was my first encounter with this aeroengineer. Voyager belongs to the alternate history genre of sf and answers the question: what if the U.S. went ahead with a manned mission program to Mars as early as 1996? This time, with his Titan, the target would be Saturn's methane-covered satellite. Years ago, Carl Sagan speculated on the similarities of current Titan conditions to the early life-forming environments on Earth. With the recent Cassini-Huygens mission to the Jovian system, I think now is the right time to read this book.
3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling (1997). All these years, I've always relied on my daughter to supply me with missing details in the Harry Potter films. With the more exciting Goblet of Fire, and the latest installment of the printed series, The Half-Blood Prince, thought I had to do something about my ignorance once and for all. So, finally borrowed the first book from my daughter's collection and have been poring over it since then. Although everything has been preempted of course since I've already seen the films. Just the same, it's still interesting to know that Harry's wand had the same type of phoenix feathers as that of You-Know-Who, that Hagrid's first name is Rubeus, and that Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans could sometimes taste like sprouts, pepper or even booger. Wicked!

Next time, Books I'm planning to read . . .

Futuristic politics

one of my favorite trilogies is the mars series by kim stanley robinson. and one recurring theme in all of the three books is politics. martian politics to be exact. imagine shipping out to the red planet a hundred (actually, a hundred and one) brains on gaia, with all their scientific, technical and political biases. and then consider the fact that mars is around 220 to 240 million kilometers from us. that would be around 7 to 8 months of space travel. mainly, because of such distance, any future human colony on mars would have this tendency to think of itself as a completely separate socio-political unit. they would be practically on their own out there, with their own little world to govern. and robinson has added utopia-building -- this desire to re-establish human civilization from scratch -- as a motivating force among the future martians.

so you get all these interesting political animals. in blue mars, the first hundred pioneers and thousands of others who came after them have just gone through a successful global revolution that freed the entire planet from earth's control. a worldwide convention was called to draft the first-ever martian constitution. in one of the memorable debates, this popular russian scientist who was part of the first hundred (and whose opinion therefore carried much weight) was arguing for an economic democracy where working people would be assured of the right to own shares in any enterprise and would have the prerogative to either manage the firm directly or hire professional managers to do the job for them. of course, other constitutional delegates questioned his scheme as "socialistic" or "communistic". but the russian guy simply brushed off these terms as mere labels and reiterated the scientific soundness of the proposal, citing historical precedents that have nothing to do with the known socialist or communist states. this won the day for him.

a bigger political fault line separates the martian greens or those who believe in transforming the red planet's natural cold, arid environment into something more suitable for human habitation (terraforming), and the martian reds or those who believe in preserving the planet's natural barren environment before human colonization. all other interesting political colors fall somewhere between these two poles. in the early novels, there were the esoteric spiritual cultists who hid themselves in colonies under the martian polar ice caps and who believed in organically growing a unique martian viewpoint. maybe a reddish green, or a greenish red political color. or even a genuine mix like brown. fans of robinson have set up this site that features a forum for relevant topics and themes tackled in the three books. one interesting discussion chain asks about the readers' political stance. the forum is called "demimonde", a term which referred to settlements in robinson's futuristic mars that existed outside the network of colonies controlled by gaians.

Guaranteed to raise a smile

can't remember now what year it was exactly when i first heard about the eraserheads. my memories of that period are now all tangled up. the only thing i do remember today is that it was on this new fm radio station (i think it was DWLA) that featured budding local talents as well as some of the best creators of world music. don't know if it was the unique mix of local and foreign acts, or if it had something to do with the post-EDSA euphoria that made eraserheads' music then a breath of fresh air for a young ex-activist college dropout bum pinoy like me. growing up with my parents' musical icons of the 50s and 60s, the mushy and glam rock acts of the 70s, and the new wave sounds of the 80s, nothing prepared me for the new and witty eraserheads music. hearing pare ko and maling akala for the first time, i had to finally renounce my self-imposed vow of maintaining a grim demeanor. the future didn't look that bad at all.

i do remember the night i went home with my cassette tape of ultraelectromagnetic pop. played it so loud in our karaoke that i woke up my parents and got my brothers asking about my new find. don't know which actually came first, but another memory i had of that period was happily walking down morayta avenue, coming from my shitty job in malacañang. my partner had just given birth to our first daughter. i was earning some money, enough to buy a can of milk and some used books every payday. contentment was splashed all over my face as i kept humming ligaya and with a smile. when circus came out, it was pure nostalgia. i was a bum once more and stayed home most of the time taking care of my daughter. but what the heck. i also had my guitar and my song books, and my daughter and i would be spending some afternoons in our room singing alapaap, magasin and kailan. weary from all that strumming, i would then woo my little girl to sleep while reminiscing on those crazy drinking sessions at katipunan or the u.p. sunken garden with college friends.

bought my cutterpillow cassette tape in a shopping mall close to our office. i was finally able to finish my undergraduate studies, and got my first real job with an organization working with urban poor communities. coming home from a seminar with adolescent boys in this rat-infested community in manila, i would be listening to poorman's grave and huling el bimbo as i try to will away the day's depressing images from my tired mind. had a hard time hiding my surprise when i found out that some of my officemates were hob-knobbing with members of the eraserheads. when the christmas album fruitcake and the book came out, i promptly bought my copies and asked my officemates to have the book autographed by the guys. it was my first graduation gift to my daughter who now has this priceless possession standing on her table along with those harry potter and jostein gaarder books.

some months later, i was among the few obnoxious customers who kept on bothering those poor sales ladies at this record store in manila for cds of bananatype and sticker happy. i recall listening to andalusian dog and milk and money with an unexplainable sense of anticipation. i knew then that changes were fast catching up with the band. their tunes and lyrics were getting more polished but complex. gone were the edgy and raw qualities of their initial outputs. can't wait then to hear their next albums. changes soon caught up with my life. i got a new job. we moved out of my parents' house. got a dalmatian and a labrador. then came aloha milkyway, natin 99 and carbon stereoxide. critics kept harping on the new not-so-popular style of these later albums. i simply loved the new tracks' more serious, darker moods. with headphones attached to my home pc, i eagerly listened to the new songs while writing the initial drafts of my masteral thesis. and when music stores placed the e-heads cds on sale, i decided to replace my outmoded tape collection.

epilogue: more than a decade has passed since that first encounter with the eraserheads. the guys disbanded sometime after carbon stereoxide. attempts at continuing with a female vocalist did not last long. each of the fab four has been busy with his own project since then, recording and performing with new bands and collaborators. rumors of a reunion concert have been quickly dispelled, much to the dismay of their avid fans. meanwhile, younger bands and artists have appeared on the local music scene. with the rising cost of living in manila, i've been taking on these rackets to earn extra bucks and get myself copies of releases by sandwich, cambio, the mongols, pupil and other acts formed or inspired by former members of the defunct eraserheads. and if you still haven't smiled by the time you reach this part, i think you should know that the title doesn't refer to any reaction that this entry might elicit from the reader. it's just a line from sgt. pepper's lonely hearts' club band.

postscript: bmg is coming out with a tribute album, featuring some of the newer bands covering their favorite eraserheads songs. a launching concert is scheduled on 29 november at the university of the philippines.

see you there.