Classic Cory

What a treat, Cory Doctorow's latest novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is indeed available online--free! Naturally I still intend to get the 'dead-tree' version for my collection, but it's terrific to be able to download a free electronic copy. Thank God for Creative Commons, and thank you Mr D! You are one classy dude.

[Cross-posted from The Coven]

What nonsense

Proclamation 1017 was lifted last Friday, but the Supreme Court hearing on it will continue as scheduled, at least according to the papers. Good. Even two-bit lawyers—heck, two-bit law students!—can see that GMA’s declaration of a state of emergency is unconstitutional, a blatant manipulation of the constitutional provisions for declaring a national emergency and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. (Connie V makes a good job of dissecting it in her Manila Standard Today column.) Proclamation 1017 has no basis at all in law, and why the Supreme Court didn’t issue a TRO right away is a great mystery to me. It just makes no sense. The only thing that makes sense at this point, actually, is to keep shouting 'FOUL!' at the top of one's lungs.

Pure pleasure

My head feels empty if there's no story percolating in it somewhere so, no matter how much I have to read for school, I can't abide not having something else to read on the side—before bed, during my morning commute, or as a reward in between reading cases. Not that the Rules of Court don’t make for compelling reading (pweh), but there's reading for school and there's just reading. My classmates don’t understand why, on top of my remedial law textbook I’m also carrying a copy of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (the legend of Draculya—fiction, of course ;) How can I manage to read anything else on top of our caseload, they ask. I don’t bother answering. What John Carey says in Pure Pleasure is true: “…the gap between people who read books and people who do not is the greatest of all cultural divisions, cutting across age, class, and gender. Neither side understands the other. To non-readers, readers seem toffee-nosed. To readers, the puzzle is what non-readers fill their minds with.”

So what have I been filling my head with these days? Well, I’m still reading The Historian, as I said, coz I had to put it down to prioritise Steve King’s Cell—naturally—which was a great romp but actually a bit unsatisfying. I was speed-reading through most of it, couldn’t wait to see what would happen and why, only to collide with a solid blank wall of an ending. Then again what zombie story has ever had a satisfying conclusion? As far as zombie stories go, *The End* is a given. What matters is the carnage and the chaos ;P

More on The Historian when I finish it. Malapit na!