More on Libraries

I was looking forward to having more opportunities to write on this blog during my two-month vacation here in Wellington. Alas, I find myself having less control over my time than I’d hoped. Not having easy Internet access also leaves me out of the loop, so I’m afraid I’ll be late passing on the news about many different things.

Still, there are some remarkable advantages to not being “wired.” One of them is, I get more time to think. And right now I think one of the many, many things about my New Zealand visit that I’m grateful for is access to a public library. I’m there at least twice a week, and in-between raiding my uncle’s private stash, I forage in Upper Hutt and take home some titles that I’m sure I wouldn’t easily find in the places I frequent in the Philippines.

For me, the Upper Hutt Public Library is, quite simply, a little slice of heaven. It’s been a while since I was last able to visit a decent library – in fact, the last time was over four years ago, when I was doing research for a certain writing project, and I was able to enter the University of the Philippines’ Main Library again.

Every time I step through the doors of the Upper Hutt Library, though, I’m bombarded by conflicting emotions. One of them, I was surprised to find, was guilt. I keep thinking about certain people back home who would love the gorgeous selections – I have yet to email a certain friend about the extensive Dragonlance collection there, another friend about the newer Iain Banks titles, and someone else about the surprising number of Storm Constantine’s non-Wraeththu books. Hell, I even took pictures.

And I feel like I don’t deserve to be there. I no longer set aside a sizeable amount of my earnings to books, and while I do love to read I don’t dare call myself a bibliophile anymore. I know other people – aspiring writers like myself, only more passionate and more talented – who would kill for the chance to be in the presence of so much quality reading material.

Yet I’m the one who’s here.

It’s a more personal neurosis, I think – I wouldn’t ascribe it to a Pinoy trait, a “girl thing,” or anything so potentially explosive. I simply hate picking up a paperback at Powerbooks and sitting down to read it, because I feel like I’m depriving other more worthy readers of good seats. I think things like: there’s a kid out there somewhere who needs to read more Rimbaud than I do; I’m just here rereading Un Saison en Enfer for the nth time on a whim. I’ve already read enough and it’s time for me to write; I shouldn’t take up too much space or too many hours.

It made me wonder if my self-esteem issues are still within normal, or if I should start seeing a shrink. Also, it made me think about how quite a few of the active literati in the Philippines can afford to have their own private libraries. I imagine that really good writers consciously know that they will never have read enough, and in their heart of hearts they are always on the lookout for the next textual high.

The question is, how many of our would-be writers can actually afford that high, and how many can’t?

We always hear talk of Pinoy writers needing to write more. But as a good friend once said and I never forgot: “The more I read, the more I want to write.” Some of us tend to notice it off the bat – our most productive times are when we are in the company of other artists, when we’re being forced to catch up with a reading list, when we’ve just experienced something awesome and we’re driven to share it with other people. In short, when we’re being inspired.

And in other countries, they have places where you can just walk in and be inspired, and you have no excuse not to be. When somebody says “I think you should read ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ by Susanna Clarke,” you don’t have to shell out P600 just to take that godawful thick but hugely entertaining title home. You don’t have to commute 20 miles to the library at the metropolis or strain your eyes reading pirated ebooks (which are usually badly formatted and poorly spellchecked, by the way) just to catch up with the artists you admire.

We already have a fair number of great bookshops and publishing houses, but I’m wondering if they would ever be able to afford customer-friendlier sales schemes. At Dymock’s bookshop, you can even return a brand-new book within a certain number of days (two weeks?), and as long as it’s in excellent condition you can exchange it for another title – with adjustments duly made to the cost, of course! To be honest, I don’t know if our local bookshops operate with a similar principle, but I’d sure love to see something besides the traditional “No return, no exchange” policy.

I don’t blame publishers for wanting to make money. I certainly don’t hate bookshops, especially ones that make it a point to stock not only bestsellers, but Really Good Books. All this helps in furthering literacy in the country. But you still have to ask what’s slowing us down, what’s making it harder for the rest of us to catch up.

Make no mistake here, I’m not nursing a resentment for people who have the means to buy the next bestseller hot off the shelves and think P200 for a hardcover is a great buy – for the record it’s a huge bargain, but I think I’ll wait for the paperback to go on sale. But I do want to call more attention to the rift that is being created by lack of access to information. Are we really asking to breed more novelists, when even local novels cost P500 a pop, our cost-effective presses can only produce a limited number of quality titles, and our benchmarks of modern literature are only available via Amazon.com? Are we serious about expecting people to become better writers, when it’s so difficult for them to even have an idea what good writing is?

I’d like to think this isn’t just whining. It’s something that’s been in my head for a while now, but it’s only now that I’m living close to a really good library (well, not that close – around 7 km) that it really niggles at me.

Moreover, and just to be clear, what I’m saying is not “How can we guilt-trip the haves into slowing down for the have-nots?” but “How can we empower the have-nots so they can finally catch up?”

I’m aware that inequalities will persist. It doesn’t follow that just because we will have more and better libraries, we’ll be able to breed better writers – i.e., that people will actually go to those libraries, and read, and be inspired. It’s not that simple. Still, if we’re serious about our dedication to literacy, and if we’re serious about wanting to pull our fellow writers up to global standards, we should at least acknowledge certain realities about the playing field. There’s “coddling” and there’s “helping,” and right now we’re still at that stage where we need all the help we can get.

For the record, I do agree that being able to purchase bestsellers or live near a library should not be the prime responsibility of the writer. If public access to information is anyone’s responsibility, it’s the government’s, or it’s that of any driven altruistic soul who does more than s/he thinks.

“Just write” – that’s the writer’s only obligation. But if issues like this trouble you, isn’t writing about them also a way of fulfilling that obligation?