Going to bookstores offers a different and amusing respite from my day to day routine. Specially high-end ones like Powerbooks with its browser-friendly lounges and mini coffee shops and nearby record store (Tower Records in Megamall) where most so-called bibliophiles and audiophiles swarm. Most people find the place spectacular because of the amenities and reader-friendly comfort i just mentioned, however those are not the reasons why I find the place so amusing.
My work like any regular office jobs, starts at Ten AM and I leave the office at Six Thirty. Sometimes, when my girlfriend and I decide to meet after hours I loiter around powerbooks to wait for her until 8 pm as she's in the graveyard shift for a call center in Ortigas, where I also work. So I usually spend my waiting time reading something that had its protective plastic cover torn out of it by some overeager browser---which I am also guilty of from time to time especially when it comes to comic books.
It's usually when i'm already within a quarter of the book/magazine that I am reading when I usually hear it. Anybody would have heard it too, every time one goes there or any other bookstores in some other business center. At first it would be just some random comment about this or that book; or how this author stinks and how the other one is brilliant. Commentaries like that are often voiced out in that unmistakable burgis-just-came-back-from-d-isteyts twang with a hint of boredom as if what the speaker is voicing out is already common knowledge. You'd hear cerebral comments like: "My god! How come there's a lot of books about Hitler
?! Don't the publishers know the gravity of their actions?!" to "Hillary Clinton
? She's a bitch. But I like her."Susmaryosep.
Sometimes you'd be lucky (or unlucky depending on your point of view) to catch a group of artistes sitting around a large table in the center of the store discussing art and all sorts of pseudo-intellectual masturbatory aides at the top of their lungs. They're not yelling, but they see to it that everyone gets to hear what they say. You can actually feel the self-congratulatory pat in the back everytime someone blurts out a comment or critique about a certain film/book/music. I swear, hearing those exchanges make Roger Ebert
seem like an amateur. The way they voice out criticisms in their discussion you'd feel like they'd do a better job than the hapless author they choose to eviscerate in their little soiree. Oh, and the discussion is, of course, in English. with a dash of taglish every now and then for that token coño effect. Because, as you can see, intellectuals in the philippines voice out their opinions in perfect, American english. So there.Now that's entertainment you can't buy.
