Tuesday, July 22, 2008 Obenieta: Books in a bottle By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
IT ENDS with infrastructures, period.
Talk about progress, and politicians would likely have blueprints of skyscrapers for a fairy tale. But if there’s one for the books, that’s certainly the city official with stardust in the eye about building an honest-to-goodness public library.
No, not the hole-in-the-wall sort just a shriek away from the Cebu Capitol, which a bookworm would mistake for a mausoleum.
In Wim Wender’s cinematic poetry, Wings of Desire, the camera shows there’s no place on earth more heavenly than a library. See how angels hover around and eavesdrop on the readers’ chorus of silences and the constellations of thoughts between the covers.
In this paper’s Speak Out section recently, a school administrator of Buagsong Elementary School in Cordova, Cebu wrote something that local officials not only in Cordova ought to consider. To put their heads where their feet are, Viurina B. Baguio wrote: “I pity some of my pupils, who are already in grade school and yet are not familiar with the popular fairy tale stories…because storybooks are considered luxuries and rare items.”
Waxing ecstatic about Department of Education’s (DepEd) “Library Hub Project,” she acknowledged the financial aid from the Cordova mayor in propping up DepEd’s plan to counter what plagues in every public school division across the country—the decline of schoolchildren’s literacy level.
What DepEd hopes would be a tall tale without the fair share of commitment from the local government and civic groups to promote “the love for reading.”
Now that’s something in short supply, too, even in America. In a report released last November, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had reason to get grim: “Reading in America is in serious decline especially among the young.”
And that still happens, mind you, even in spite of the sheer bounty available in American public libraries.
In the capital city of Kansas, for instance, my family and I might as well burp at the buffet offered for free at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library (TSCPL) seven days a week. Even the blind would wink in agreement why it has been ranked 29th in “the quality of public service and general administration” among 8,000 public libraries in the United States.
Coming from a place where the comforts and privileges of a public library are best left to the wildest imagination, I can only refer the inquisitive to this website (www.tscpl.org) to see and to believe why TSCPL is a bookworm’s luxury hotel, a mall, and a charity center rolled into one adjective-frenzy package. And did I tell you that the library’s total land area, including the parking space, can accommodate three football fields? Does that justify this seizure to slobber and vomit like I’ve been gobbling up exclamation points from a sales brochure?
No less effusive, however, is the iconic poet Langston Hughes who once lived in Topeka. “There I fell in love with librarians,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and I have been in love with them ever since… the silence inside the library, the big chairs and long tables, and the fact that the library was always there, and didn’t seem to have a mortgage on it, or any sort of insecurity about it–-all of that made me love it. And right then books began to happen to me.” Makes me wonder if they also sell beer in this library.
