The trouble with reading...

Especially for writers, says the fictionist Ben Bautista, is that soon enough you begin to neglect your writing. Reading is so much easier, not to say more relaxing, but when one talks of psychic rewards, then being able to finish a written piece is itself the prize.

When one reads, one already becomes a participant to the poem or story, a sort of interactivity between author and reader that borders on the metaphysical if we must make reference to an all-time great interactive author/reader, Borges, who once said that the secret to reading is rereading. In the same breath we could say that the secret to good writing is rewriting. Always there are lessons from the other: if there’s such a thing as creative writing, then there’s certainly creative reading.

We hope we are not putting words into Sir Ben B’s mouth, but the context of his statement about the trouble with reading, during our annual visit to his New Manila residence between Christmas and New Year last year, was when he asked if I was doing any writing lately.

The standard reply was “not much” followed by a litany of excuses, like “barely have time” or “on the other hand, Sir, there’s so much to read.”

He said he too often could not resist the temptation to just spend all his time reading. Maybe I am already imagining things, but it’s possible that if we spend a fraction of our time reading with some writing, done edgewise in a manner of speaking, like a crabwalk, then we could get a little work done, even if it means dusting off the old stuff and reworking it.

Yet there was a time when we found reading a formidable task, particularly during high school days when assigned texts in Filipino, which back then we called plainly Tagalog.

There must have been at least four different textbooks/workbooks in Filipino for each year level, including Diwang Guinto, Diwang Kayumanggi, and Hiyas. The class was made to memorize certain poems, whole passages from epics like Florante at Laura, to be delivered declamation style in front of the class during oral exams. It helped if the teacher was a kindly one like Miss Jorda, but there were perceived “terrors” too like Mrs. Manacsa who during the first week assigned us to do a reaction paper on Aawitan Kita, our first exposure to the kundiman, after which we never looked at Armida Siguion Reyna the same way again.

Panic time came during junior year, when we were required to read the first of Rizal’s novels Noli me Tangere in Tagalog, with El Filibusterismo reserved for the senior year. As far as we can recall, we got no farther than the “piging” chapter, the party in Don Tiago’s house in old Binondo, where creeks in Chinatown ran clear and the streets were all made of cobblestone. To the rescue came a comic book version of the Noli, circulated from the most obscure sources, which we passed around until it got dog-eared and grimy like the BTS that also made the rounds, but mostly for the male barkada.

Of course back then we just called it comics, little did we know we were promoting what would today be called the graphic novel. The illustrated Noli was far more helpful than any Monarch or Cliff notes, the point being to be able to grasp the storyline in the shortest time, and we could go back to the book for details later.

The old forays with the comics Noli came to mind again after receiving late last year a copy of the graphic novel El Indio by Francisco Coching (Vibal Publishing) digitally restored by Gerry Alanguilan and Zara Macandili. We couldn’t help but revel in the Tagalog used in dialogue — lofty is how the critic Patrick Flores described it — the kind of which we hadn’t heard in years save for movies of LVN and Sampaguita studios shown at odd hours on cable TV.

El Indio treats us to a time beyond time, with the tulisan barbaro Sabas and his love child Don Fernando, father and son vying for the hand of the delicate Victoria, who seems to have emerged from the Maria Clara template.

The drawings evoked whatever could be remembered from the high school Noli, with Crisostomo Ibarra and Maria Clara and Elias wrestling the crocodile in the river, in rather admirable black and white.

Come to think of it, not even in college Philippine Institutions 100 class were we able to appreciate Rizal’s two novels without benefit of illustrations, finally getting to read them only during an extended furlough down south with much time on our hands, where the novels seemed to take root in our minds like so many mongo sprouts.

We can’t help but wonder if it was Coching himself who had illustrated the Noli we read in quick fashion in junior year; we weren’t too engrossed with the credits anyway, all that mattered for a bunch of teenage kids was that it was written by Rizal and we knew the story well enough not to get zero in recitation.

So when someone asks what have we been reading lately, or what’s the latest book we’ve read, we’re not sure what to answer. Everything can digress into creative nonfiction in an instant around here. Bestsellers, potboilers, pulp fiction, the usual bargain fare.

Not sure what we’re writing either, or if we plan to go back to rework the old stuff. Truth is Sir Ben may have got it right when he reserved a room for books he never finished reading and was unlikely to finish. Not that the books were unreadable, it’s just that there are types of literature that can’t hold attention for long, and can be read only in spots, like a pet Dalmatian. By confining books unread to a special shelf or two, much more a room of their own, might be the only way to get any writing done and not be accused of introducing a new genre of anti-literature.