Outrageous sellouts and atrocious notes

Letters of Leonard Woolf being sold at P375 at NCCC Mall Booksale. In another booksale (at Victoria Plaza) I found Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at P45. Publisher’s or book seller’s revenge?

NCCC Booksale also very recently disposed of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch at P65; Susan Faludi’s Backlash (my third copy) at P15.75 and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! at P35. Early on, I found Kate Millet’s The Sexual Politics at P95, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will Men, Women and Rape (my third or fourth) at P65 and This Bridge Called My Back Writing by Radical Women of Color at P85.

The sad fact about life (mine) is that I would have not gotten these life-changing books if they didn’t first go out of print decades ago that they may be retailed today at sidewalk vendors’ prices. So don’t blame me, dear reader, if the feminist revolution took very long in coming or never happened in the Philippines. Blame ABS-CBN, the chatbox, and cybersex.

Anne Proulx’s The Shipping News I bought at Gaisano South (then JS Gaisano at Ilustre) at P65; then very recently, it was being auctioned at Victoria Plaza Ground Floor for P35. I also found there Gloria Naylor’s Women of Brewster’s Place, Fannie Flag’s Fried Green Tomatoes, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, along with her The Hundred Secret Senses and The Kitchen God's Wife, all sold at P35 apiece. I don’t have my copy of these treasure books anymore, but I didn’t buy them, just prayed over them that may others who deserve them as I once deserved them would find them. I bought other unread ones instead, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at P15 and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God at P35 and other books of plays (Alan Bennet, August Wilson, Willis Hall) and one on Sanford Meisner, plus a novel by David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars, priced at P10 to P65.

Back at NCCC, I found Marge Piercy’s He She It, a book I would recommend as a bible to anyone who thinks about how may revolutions happen in the future. My own copy is with a gay friend-enemy who first refused to read it, then later, refused to return it (after I refused to return her – right, her, not his – treasured Camille Paglia bomber The Sexual Personae Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson unvandalized and unmolested.

I am almost happy with what I’ve got, though I still think a lot of those I lost and rather miss: Nadine Gordimer’s Sport of Nature, Arundhati Roy’s The Gods of Small Things and its Filipino translation deftly done by that UP FQS rad Monico Atienza, now dead.

I also rather miss Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I especially miss her Mrs Dalloway; too bad I lost it before I could even read it (at the time I thought of VW as a little way inaccessible for my rather rough-straits education) and too sad that the literary wanna-be who took off with it did not do better by it or by me.

The Atienza translation was a case of double tragedy and double injury: I lent it to a street dyke who was pretending to go through my books when in fact she was only looking for paper bills I have the habit of using as page markers (it was one of the three four or five paperbacks I had then in the collection that was written in Filipino, the others being Lualhati Bautista Palanca-winning novels Bata, Bata Pa'no Ka Ginawa, Gapo, Dekada 70, and Eleyna S. Mabanglo’s also Palanca-winning poetry book Kung Ibig Mo). This my semi-illiterate dyke friend would tell me later that it was taken by the storm that flattened the shoreline community where she lived. At the time the typhoon struck (it must be that deadly destroyer Ruping), the author-translator was dying of cancer on top of his house getting burned for which he didn’t get sympathy (read as donations) because he didn’t pretend to the humilities that he didn’t feel in the least towards the UP literary and academic community. Bakit nung si Jun Cruz-Reyes ang nasunugan ng bahay, nag-donate sila lahat? he said, as he was autographing the The Communist Manifesto poster that I untacked from his office wall while he wasn't looking. (When I informed him about my theft all he said was that it belonged to a fellow faculty member occupying the other table and that he will autograph it anyway.) I did not inform him that I had also untacked another thing from the board as he was doing the autograph, a news item and a picture of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and novelist. My guess was, the Jelinek piece was done by the lone female occupant of that faculty room, who would surely miss it, and take to task the two other guys, Who ripped down the news cutout off this wall!!!???!!! Did you?!? Did you!?! Earlier, a little orgasmic over his ouvre, Atienza had bragged: Sa kanila na iyong one million centennial novel award nila, they can have all the Palancas they like, basta ako nasalin ko sa Filipino ang nobela ni Arundhati Roy. I imagine Karen's ex Duke Sumthin', an Atienza follower, nodding: Olrayt. Saludos, maestro.

Books I still treasure for one reason or another? Sydney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels and Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tide. Then all of Kate Millet, of course: (TSP, Flying, The Loony Bin Trip), Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, James Francis Warren’s The Sulu Zone, Cesar Ruiz-Aquino’s Word Without End and his prose collection Chronicles of Suspicion, Lia Lopez-Chua’s The Fate of All Progeny, Merlie Alunan's Hearthstone, Sacred Tree, Dolores Feria’s Project Sea Hawk The Barbed Wire Journal and her other book The Long Stag Party. I still hurt for losing the latter, and would be happy if I’d get Adrienne Rich’s What Is Found There Notebook on Poetry and Politics back.

Books I haven’t got around to seeing as yet? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Mary Wollestonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Somehow I never got to read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in its entirety while it was within the vicinity and also Vladimir Lenin’s The National Question. I also don’t have any of Gertrude Stein, want to get hold of Agnes Smedley's China's Red Army Marches and couldn’t wait to read Zadie Smith, Jelinek Elfriede and all of Jean Genet (who I only happened to know through Kate Millet and Marge Piercy, though God knows every little theft I make, I do in tribute to his life and art). I think Rushdie a goner now, and that Satanic Verse not as good a book as The Gods of Small Things, Haroun and the Sea of Stories knots behind Lewis Carroll's Alice, but I still want to read Midnight Children which, at the time it was making the rounds of activist circles, was a sure miss. Other misses I’ve made: Nabokov’s Lolita, Doris Lessing’s Ben in the World, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Dee Brown’s no never mind that.

Finally I propose that a better tract be written to improve on or replace Philippine Society and Revolution, thank you.