Jack The Scribbler

Fan reading jackthescribbler.com on a WiFi-enabled Kindle 3.

(Disclaimer: No arrangement, financial or otherwise, has been made between Amazon.com, which produces the Kindle 3, and this blogger. But then again, if Jeff Bezos insists, I’d probably be willing to reconsider. After all, what’s a few hundred shares of Amazon.com between friends?)

Nope, it’s not the Apple iPad.
The Kindle 3 offers no sharp color images, no touch-sensitive screen, no huge digital storage.
However, what it does — which is to be an eBook reader — it does exceedingly well.
Once you turn it on and dive headlong into an eBook, the world disappears — just about the same kind of magic you get from reading a book with magnificent prose and effortless storytelling.
Of course, there’s more to the Kindle than just replicating and enhancing the reading experience on a digital screen.
Unfortunately, that’s where its features fall short. Sure, it can play podcasts and mp3 files.
Except you can’t see a fancy colorful icon representing the music being played unlike in other devices. (And the tinny set of speakers can barely hold its own against say, the hubbub of a regular household.)
The Kindle 3 can also connect to a wireless network even though typing on its keyboard is more tedious than texting on a touchscreen.
But then again, all this is beside the point.
Nobody intends to buy a Kindle just to use it for wireless surfing anyway.
You get a Kindle because you’re a voracious reader and, for one reason or another, you’d like to try your hand at eBooks.
Here are my five reasons why you should get a Kindle now.

1) It’s sexier than its predecessors.

Let’s face it.
Many people who use gadgets judge them by how they look and not just about what they do. This partly explains the popularity of Apple products.
Besides being easy to use, iPods, iPhones, iMacs, iPads, and MacBook Air laptops all look like the gadget equivalents of FHM cover models.
The same goes for the Kindle 3.
I never gave the first two Kindle iterations a second look. But that was then.
When Amazon.com reduced the Kindle’s size, replaced its sharp edges with smooth contours, changed its color to graphite from white, and introduced what is now called the Kindle 3, I was awed.
Jeff Bezos’s favorite company finally got it right the third time.

2) It’s cheaper.

The very first Kindle was launched in November 2007 and sold for $399. The second was released in February 2009, sold for $359, a price that was later cut to $259.
Kindle 3 was launched in August this year and was priced at $139, less than half of the launch prices of the first two.
At current exchange rates (roughly P43 to 1), the Kindle 3 is cheaper than the many cellphones used by most, if not all, salaried Filipinos.
If you can afford to buy a web-enabled mobile phone, you can easily get the K3. (That is of course if you read, like, you know, books. If you don’t, go get yourself a new textmate or something.)
Here’s another explanation: the dollar is currently weak.
As a result, dollar-based imports — including the Kindle 3 — are cheaper. Which also explains why fuel prices should be lower as well.
But that’s another story.

3) Tons of free eBooks.

And I’m talking about the classics whose copyrights have expired and are now in the public domain — Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and any of Arthur Conan Doyle’s books in his Sherlock Holmes series.
History geeks will also be glad to find out that the six volumes of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is also freely available in various eBook formats.
So are the Doctrina Christiana (the first book published in the Philippines), Ibong Adarna, and the Kartilyang Makabayan by Hermenegildo Cruz.
These and many more — including a Dutch translation of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere — can be downloaded for free from www.gutenberg.org. [See: Noli Me Tangere, Project Gutenberg]

4) It’s a handy, accessible library.

The K3 is slightly smaller and thinner than a regular trade paperback.
But it can store as much as 3,500 books.
Or at least that’s what Amazon.com says.
And I’m not about to verify that claim.
As far as I’m concerned, the 38 fiction, non-fiction, reference, and do-it-yourself eBooks I’ve downloaded have yet to make a dent on my K3′s storage capacity.
I still have three gigabytes worth of storage and I’m not about to complain.
Access to these many books can’t hurt especially if you’re in line that seems to go on forever inside a bank whose staff moves at a glacial pace. [See: Bank of the Philippine Islands]

5) It’s a professional tool.

Besides reading science-fiction and fantasy books on his Kindle, the friend who convinced me to get one uses his to store notes.
Useful, he says, in meetings where laptops are overkill because no one is really expected to deliver a PowerPoint presentation.
Yes, you can store and access notes and PDF files on the Kindle.
Notes can be converted to either mobi or azn — Amazon’s proprietary format — using freely available apps.
Meanwhile, PDF files can be read by the K3 in two ways.
They can copied and later viewed as native PDF files or they can be converted and viewed as azn files on the Kindle.
PDF files can also be converted to the azn format for free once you register your Kindle with Amazon.com. [See: Free PDF Kindle conversion]
The K3′s ability to store notes is so useful that I’ve begun to look forward to meetings.
After all, it’s just another opportunity to show off Juanita del Pablo.* (Yes, that’s the name of my K3).

*From the Trivial Pursuits Dept. JDP is a name of an actress in the adult entertainment industry mentioned in Martin Amis’ novel, Money. She is referred to by John Self, the protagonist, but she has no lines in the book, just like Diana Proletaria, an industry colleague.

The very first Granta I ever owned and read (Tinzeen.com)

(WARNING: This piece is roughly 1,800 words long and reading it may interrupt your Facebook status updates. It is recommended that you read this at the office while pretending to work since doing so at home may reduce time for casual surfing.)

Granta doesn’t call itself the Magazine of New Writing for nothing.
Through the years, it has published many young writers, introducing the world to the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, among others, through its Best of Young British Novelists issue, released every decade since 1983.
However, a few volumes have been underwhelming. Or at least to me they were.
Take Granta 45 which carried the theme Gazza Agonistes.
Half of it is devoted to football player Paul Gascoigne, which I’m sure would be a hit among fans but not to this reader, who knows next to nothing about sports. I tried to read it twice — promise! — but I was unable to finish it. (Sorry, Ian Hamilton) [See: Paul Gascoigne]
Another such issue is Granta 106: New Fiction Special.
More than half of the stories in the issue failed to impress me, a person who reads for entertainment more than anything else.
But then again, that’s another story.
Nine times out of ten — probably even more — the contributors, editors, artists, and staff at Granta produce a volume of writing so refreshing that readers are prompted to store and collect them as “books,” not as magazines, which are likely to be disposed of as soon as the new issue arrives.
This explains why I have more than 40 volumes of Granta “magazines” on my shelf, which have been bought from Booksale, a used bookstore in Paris, and
through a subscription in the US.
The collection includes volumes published as books, such as The Granta Book of Reportage, the Granta Book of the Family, and Joan Didion’s Miami.
To this day, I have yet to personally meet someone who has a larger Granta collection than I do.
And so, as an indulgent tribute to my collection, I have come up with five reasons why I remain grateful to and for Granta Magazine.

1) Granta publishes good writing. Period.

A chunk of readers still distinguishes fiction and journalism, as if one was a diametric opposite of the other. Granta makes no such distinction, offering to publish good writing. To this end, it has published pieces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who also wrote a non-fiction book, News of a Kidnapping) and Salman Rushdie, Ryszard Kapucinski, who went to Ethiopia in 1974 after the downfall of Haile Selassie, and James Fenton, who covered the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. (Another Granta contributor, James Hamilton Paterson, who shuttles between Italy and the Philippines, has written a Granta-published book about the Marcos family entitled America’s Boy). [See: America’s Boy]

The special Granta issue featuring james Fenton's coverage of the EDSA I revolution

In his introduction to the Granta Book of Reportage, Ian Jack refers to the so-called demarcation between literature and journalism:

“Are they to be described as ‘writing’ in the sense of literature, or as ‘journalism’? I have never quite known where one begins and the other ends and…the question is neither interesting nor meaningful — literature not being an ‘objectively ascertainable category to which certain works naturally belong’ but more or less what ‘culture-controlling groups’ decide it is.”

2) Granta offers both history and geography lessons.

The magazine is decidely British but its outlook is global.
Its latest issue is about Pakistan, which was recently reviewed by the New York Times. [See: Blown Away by Pakistan: A guide to scoring beer and avoiding suicide bombers in the Land of the Pure]
The Magazine’s Pakistan-themed Autumn 2010 issue is “a good place to start…if cross-cultural interaction can play a part in minimizing anomosities and encouraging amity,” its reviewer Isaac Chotiner says. [See: New York Times Review of Granta’s Pakistan issue]
Based on its previous issues, the magazine will continue to cover other countries below the radar of privately-owned international news companies.
In its Travel issue (Granta 26), Jeremy Harding wrote about the Polisario (Popular para la Liberacion de Saguia El Hamra y Rio de Oro), a movement that sought to liberate two Western Saharan provinces — Saguia El Hamra and Rio de Oro — from Spanish colonization.
But in 1975, when Western Sahara was decolonized — coinciding with the end of Francisco Franco’s term — Morocco and Mauritania claimed the territory.
Polisario’s guerillas were later able to debilitate Mauritania, prompting the country to give up its claim, Harding writes in the issue.
But not so with Morocco.
With US support, Morocco was able to build a wall — known as the Berm of the Western Sahara — that not only protected its territory but encroached on the claim of Polisario and its independent state, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic. [See: Western Sahara Wall]
In his piece entitled Polisario, Harding continues to say that:

“[t]he great success of the wall, it struck me, was to assert its presence to such an extent that you seldom felt unseen or unaccounted for. It had imposed its own order on the desert by turning vast, homogeneous tracts of rubble into an arcane grid of concourses and pathways, some brightly lit and therefore dangerous, the others dark and apparently safe.”

3) Granta rarely repeats its themes.

And when it does, it’s an improvement over the original.
Take its Travel issue, which came out in Spring 1989, with four contributions from travel writer Bruce Chatwin. (If you haven’t read him, he’s the guy that Moleskine uses to advertise its notebooks. Chatwin loved them so much that when its store was about to be shuttered, he bought nearly all their supplies. Or so Moleskine claims.)
The Travel issue was so successful it was repeated nearly two decades later with Granta 94: On the Road Again: Where Travel Writing Went Next, released in Summer 2006.
I preferred the sequel because the original had one Chatwin piece too many and the former featured one of the best short stories I have ever read in Granta entitled How to Fly, by John Burnside, which begins thus:

“I flew for the first time when I was nine years old. Nobody saw it happen, but that didn’t bother me: the Wright Brothers’ earliest ascent had also been conducted in the strictest secrecy and, until public pressure forced them out of hiding, any number of successful flights had gone unwitnessed. Of course, Orville and Wilbur hadn’t attempted to do what I was doing: like Bleriot and Santos-Dumont, they were changing the known world, but they weren’t committed to flying in the purest sense. They were mechanics, not angels; and what I wanted was something that they had never even considered and, though I knew I was destined to fail, I wasn’t prepared to settle for anything as mundane as a flying machine.”

And speaking of Granta themes, I have a couple of favorites, including but not limited to Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater and Murder.

The former wasn’t actually a theme — it was a mishmash of stories and pieces, including one about the Peruvian photographer Martin Chambi, who was an apprentice of Max Vargas, the father of Alberto Vargas, who would become famous for stylized drawings of pin-up girls, also known as Varga girls. [See: Alberto Vargas]

Alberto Vargas' pin-up girls were the Anime of the 1950s. (http://illustrationart.blogspot.com)

Meanwhile, the second theme featured the Murderee, a novella by Martin Amis that later became the novel London Fields. In 1989, it was delisted from the Booker Prize because judges disliked the way women were portrayed.
I have yet to get myself a copy of the novel because the story’s structure and the language is highly original, as indicated in its first few chapters published by Granta:

“Nicola knew two strange things. The second strange thing was that she must never tell anyone about the first strange thing. The first strange thing was this: she always knew what was going to happen next.”

“…the shrieking gossip of the yard — with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, here a cheep, there a moo, everywhere an oink-oink.”

4) Granta helps with playing Trivial Pursuit.

Yes, it’s true.
Some four years ago, when friends regularly played the 20th edition of Trivial Pursuit during weekends, I was asked to identify a South American country whose leader was named Stroessner. (I forgot how the question was phrased exactly and I’ve searched far and wide on Google for it to no avail.)
I was able to answer the question immediately, to my rivals’ disbelief.
“Paraguay,” I said.
“How could you know that?” I remember the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Alcuin Papa asking me, right palm on his forehead.
“Simple,” I told him and his teammates who couldn’t believe their bad luck. “I just finished reading Granta, which did a feature on Paraguay.”
Granta 31, published in Spring 1990, was entitled The General, referring to Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator of Paraguay, who ruled for 35 years from 1954 to 1989. [See: Alfredo Stroessner]
In an 82-page piece written by Isabel Hilton, she says:

“When he fell, thirty-five years later, he held a number of records. He was the longest-serving dictator in the western hemisphere and the second-longest in the world.: only Kim Il-Sung outlasted him. The world had lived through thirty-five years of history, but three-quarters of the population of Paraguay had known no other leader, and there was not an institution or political party in the country that had not been shaped by his presence…Television began and ended with his heavy features and a march named after him. There was a Stroessner Polka, for more light-hearted occasions. The airport was named after him. The free-port on the Brazilian frontier was called Puerto Stroessner. There were Stroessner statues, avenues, and roads, and official portraits of him hung in every office and school.” [See: Isabel Hilton]

5) Granta has yet to gain a following among Filipinos.

Many Filipinos hooked on Western publications read New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, and the usual glossies (i.e., Time, Fortune).
Once, more than fifteen years ago, I walked into an upscale magazine store in Makati and asked for the latest copy of Harper’s Magazine.
“We have Harper’s Bazaar,” the salesperson said, dismissive. “And sir, there’s no such thing as Harper’s Magazine.”
I let it go, despite the fact that I knew all along about the magazine that Lewis Lapham edited and that years before, my grandparents bought me a year’s subscription of the magazine, which, surprisingly, was delivered to my doorstep a month ahead of the issue’s date.
Ignorance is bliss and I wasn’t about to get in the way of her Nirvana.
So what’s my point?
Some people — even those who read New Yorker — may not know about Granta.
As far as I know, it’s not even available in Solidaridad Bookstore, owned by writer F. Sionil Jose, which is frequented by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Adolf Azcuna. [See: F. Sionil Jose, Adolf Azcuna]
Which is a good thing.
It means less demand for Granta in the Philippines, and more chances for me to buy it, whether on Booksale or Fully-Booked.
Granta may not like that but hey, that’s the way it is.

Travel allows for the best education the world can provide.
Or so say those who can afford it.
Fortunately, a cheaper alternative is always available.
And it’s not necessarily made in China.
It’s called reading, an activity, usually solitary, that may not be as exciting as visiting foreign shores, flying business class, or flirting with flight attendants.
Once undertaken, especially with a good writer as a guide, reading allows anyone to take a trip anywhere — including the planet Tralfamadore* — without having to clear immigration and undergo intensive cavity searches.
While travel transmits knowledge firsthand — how to get the best seats in economy class**, how to request alcoholic beverages in an Islamic country***, and how to avoid looking like a promdi in Manhattan**** — reading does the same but through filters, the writer’s inclinations and idiosyncrasies.
Whichever of these two activities is considered the best teacher in this school we call life remains arguable.

The cover of the third and latest edition of Author's Choice by Kerima Polotan, one of the best English-language books written by a Filipino. (Pic by kabayancentral.com)

For those indifferent to the pleasures brought forth by the well-crafted sentence, the quick, cutting remark, or the penetrating insight, reading may never be able to hold a candle to any other activity, including the lure of travel.
But that’s just one school of thought.
Others prefer to read and stay at home.
Given a choice between reading a well-written essay by American gonzo journalist P. J. O’Rourke and a trip to any one of the world’s hellholes (i.e., Pasay), certain individuals, including myself, may prefer the former.
Who can blame me?
Nobody, save perhaps for certain irate Pasay residents and the mayor himself.
After all, they can always cite the city’s historical and cultural landmarks which help make this country and the world at large a better place.
Sure.
Although Pasay may offer attractions even to overstimulated, cynical urbanites, the experience of touring the city may be matched by the vicarious thrill of reading any good book.
Hundreds of them abound.
These include Author’s Choice by Kerima Polotan (who by the way gives a picture of the Pasay of yore), Occasional Prose by Adrian Cristobal (which remains sadly out of print), and yes, any of the books written by P. J. O’Rourke (All the Trouble in the World and Holidays in Hell are my personal favorites).
For the past year or two, I have been so consumed by reading a number of books that they have convinced me to temporarily ignore all other activities regarding my life, such as it is.
The Granta Book of Reportage had exactly this effect on me. From the moment I read Ian Jack’s introduction until Wendell Steavenson’s Osama’s War some 400 pages later, I was held in thrall, recognizing I was being transported to places that, like Pasay, isn’t exactly on my list of places to visit.
Despite the desperation, the violence, the iniquities that occur in these places, writers in the Granta anthology — which include James Fenton who wrote about Edsa I in a separate Granta issue — show further proof that reading occasionally does trump travel, didactically speaking.

———————

*The fictional planet in the earlier works of Kurt Vonnegut. It featured prominently in what I consider as his best work, The Sirens of Titan, one of the very few books I’ve read three times.

**Always ask to be seated in the bulkhead seat, which offers larger legroom. Besides being a heaven-sent convenience during long haul flights, the attendant will recognize you as a seasoned traveler even if it’s your first trip abroad.

***Show your passport upon checking into a hotel and order before nine in the evening (or at least that’s what I did when I took an all expenses paid trip to Pakistan, courtesy of the Pakistan government).

****You can never go wrong wearing black in Manhattan, especially during the cold months. Wear some other color and you stand out like an idiot. What can I say? Been there, done that.