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| THE BALLAD OF READING GOES From Pentagon to Davao City? |
Norman Mailer, the Pulitzer prize winning author and critic, who wrote The Armies of the Night, a seminal book about that famous march towards the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam War, might be in for another protest. Yes, you heard me, if he were alive today, he would have given us his patented confrontational take on our literary preferences, including the price we have given him over the counter.
I happen to find a book about Mailer in some tiny bookshop at SM Ecoland, Davao City. It was a biography, Mailer, His Life and Times, written by one Peter Manso. And not a typical biography, to start with, an oral history of the celebrated writer and a boxing enthusiast. A series of interviews in a span of three years, Manso has collaborated with and collated his interviews from a host of some important literary figures (along with non-literary ones) in our time, like James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Kurt Vonnegut to name a few. It was a price of a book, a literary gem, in my opinion, since a Mailer saga doesn't come in handy in our stores lately, not until I stumbled upon it and saw the incremental value attached to its billing.
A biography about Mailer is worth P20 only. A what? Like a drugstore commodity, Mailer, a writer who has had a Pulitzer on his sleeve and with a school of equally Pulitzer price winning accolades (plus the thought that some of his books are still in print), and to have that inconsequential reception in return is definitely a crime beyond mere poetic license. When I look upon the price after scouring it under a thick file of paperback novels, I immediately examined the other end of its cover to see if the price outside was simply an anomaly, and it was indeed 20 pesos only. It didn't even reached a dollar. That's how anomalous it has become. And when I asked the attendants over the counter about it, "Sure mo?" I said, they only gave me a smile. And that probably says it all.
It's unthinkable that a writer of Mailer's magnitude is only worth a penny (at least in our time). The biography itself is a thick, exhaustive study of Mailer unlike anything since Haley's The Authobiography of Malcolm X, more like Plato's The Republic done in a casual, contemporary manner between two people (Manso and someone else) talking about Mailer and his idiosyncrasies, and despite some criticisms from the author and a few of Manso's interviewees about the biography and Manso himself. But such episodes come with the territory, I guess, especially with Mailer, a relentless fireband. The book, however, can be a representative study for anyone interested in canonizing Mailer and his unique combination of history and fiction. But for those who are simply curious about the author, this book is an inside look.
Thanks to that bookshop anyway. Feels great to have that access to anything classic at a cheaper price. It was my second time in there. The first one was a collection of poems by D. H. Lawrence worth P25. Only. Sounds like a joke, isn't it? For a writer who once said of writing "the foulest book in English literature" being reduced to a loose coin is not only foul for his England, My England, but somehow insulting to the author himself. Norman Mailer and D. H. Lawrence may be decades apart from each other, and may be too old for our own Hobbit Generation, but their works are not worth P20 and P25 respectively, that's more like an entrance fee than a life's work on the bestseller list.
Not that I'm against the fellowship of these popular novels, they are great books of conventional plot and linear motives, but somehow there's something amiss in those recent genres. They're definitely one in the same sort of stories that tickles only the superficial side of literature, more like emphasizing the value of entertainment rather than highlighting the conflict from within. Nowadays you only have to unleash that fire-breathing dragon or that prisoner from Azkaban just so to intensify the story, and you are paying for it, mind you. I doubt even if you can single out a quotable phrase in those books, aside from its unusual twists, of course, which is it's main source of attraction.
I happen to find a book about Mailer in some tiny bookshop at SM Ecoland, Davao City. It was a biography, Mailer, His Life and Times, written by one Peter Manso. And not a typical biography, to start with, an oral history of the celebrated writer and a boxing enthusiast. A series of interviews in a span of three years, Manso has collaborated with and collated his interviews from a host of some important literary figures (along with non-literary ones) in our time, like James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Kurt Vonnegut to name a few. It was a price of a book, a literary gem, in my opinion, since a Mailer saga doesn't come in handy in our stores lately, not until I stumbled upon it and saw the incremental value attached to its billing.
A biography about Mailer is worth P20 only. A what? Like a drugstore commodity, Mailer, a writer who has had a Pulitzer on his sleeve and with a school of equally Pulitzer price winning accolades (plus the thought that some of his books are still in print), and to have that inconsequential reception in return is definitely a crime beyond mere poetic license. When I look upon the price after scouring it under a thick file of paperback novels, I immediately examined the other end of its cover to see if the price outside was simply an anomaly, and it was indeed 20 pesos only. It didn't even reached a dollar. That's how anomalous it has become. And when I asked the attendants over the counter about it, "Sure mo?" I said, they only gave me a smile. And that probably says it all.
It's unthinkable that a writer of Mailer's magnitude is only worth a penny (at least in our time). The biography itself is a thick, exhaustive study of Mailer unlike anything since Haley's The Authobiography of Malcolm X, more like Plato's The Republic done in a casual, contemporary manner between two people (Manso and someone else) talking about Mailer and his idiosyncrasies, and despite some criticisms from the author and a few of Manso's interviewees about the biography and Manso himself. But such episodes come with the territory, I guess, especially with Mailer, a relentless fireband. The book, however, can be a representative study for anyone interested in canonizing Mailer and his unique combination of history and fiction. But for those who are simply curious about the author, this book is an inside look.
Thanks to that bookshop anyway. Feels great to have that access to anything classic at a cheaper price. It was my second time in there. The first one was a collection of poems by D. H. Lawrence worth P25. Only. Sounds like a joke, isn't it? For a writer who once said of writing "the foulest book in English literature" being reduced to a loose coin is not only foul for his England, My England, but somehow insulting to the author himself. Norman Mailer and D. H. Lawrence may be decades apart from each other, and may be too old for our own Hobbit Generation, but their works are not worth P20 and P25 respectively, that's more like an entrance fee than a life's work on the bestseller list.
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| THE MAILMAN For 20 pesos? |
I find it a loss lately everytime I visit the National and nobody's paying attention anymore to what Dickens has to say about poverty and injustices. Instead, people flock to see the latest witchcraft series with nothing but formulaic conflicts and a possibility of a salacious film rendition. Somehow we are not reading the books anymore, even if it comes at a lesser price. But we're paying too much for books that offers only an adventure towards forgetfulness and some crass commercialism in between, rather than finding someone or something you can relate to, a kind of privilege to those who are reading and reading it right.
The way I see it, that bookshop is doing me a nice favor, but they are not generating an income as they should if they go by that biography. I wouldn't mind if they overprice this Mailer bio as far as I'm concerned. Learning from Mailer's life, or to any author for that matter, is always a life-changing experience, especially for someone who believes is in the same business with Mailer. The particular nuances of a writer, the times in which he participated and reacted, in Mailer's case the late 60s and early 70s: the circumstances surrounding the Pentagon march, his belligerent comments on national TV, the inception and the imagination of his stories, his take on Muhammad Ali, his films, and even his brief excursion in the Philippines decades earlier, all went into my head as I tried to reconcile the P20 tag on its front cover.
Lucky for me though I had the backing of the city. Despite being amazed at the timidity of the book's price, I still consider Davao as a major source of literary inspiration. It has become a habit. Everytime I visit the city, I always see to it that I leave with a purchased book at hand, out of the many bookshops sprawling downtown. Davao, I think, has the highest figure as far as our literacy rate as a country is concerned, which now stands at 92.6%, surprisingly higher than Singapore (92.5%) by a page, according to Wikipedia. And, this bookshop has no idea really that their presence and their seemingly "cheap" business is actually dictating some of the more pressing issues this country has to deal with.
But I'm still reading my P20 worth of contraband, and smiling from ear to ear, knowing that I got more by paying less. Talk about cost cutting measures but still enjoying the finer things in life, like reading a book, and a Mailer fanfare at that. No doubt I could get something out of reading this Peter Manso bestseller, a peculiar insight into the mind of Norman Mailer and the historical perspective of a contemporary novel he once wrote and mastered since the publication of his Armies. Good or bad, my 20 pesos has come a long way, and had come full circle, from Pentagon to Davao City.
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