A FISHY ? by E.R. TABIOS

First, the tangerines made Moi do it.

The tangerines, that is, inspired me to do a mini-book when I looked at that netting which had bagged the fruit, and thought to do something more interesting with it than just recycling.

At the time, I was also cleaning up my mother's room and discovered some old Philippine postcards, like this one:

The combination somehow made Moi think of a "fishy question", which became the title of the mini-book!

And that question is, "Must you net me?":

How inspiration unfolds is not an exact science, of course.  One can say that the question arose from knowing that net can denote fishing, which is also denoted by the Philippine postcard where fishing occurs a lot among its more than 7,000 islands.  But the notion of "Must you net me?" also goes further into Philippine history, i.e. its colonial past with Spain and the United States.  I won't give you a history lecture here; feel free to do your own Googling as regards, say, the Philippines which was one of the U.S.' first forays into colonialism (an element which was long been elided by many U.S.-American textbooks that teach history to American kiddos).

Anyway, I cut the netting to fit it around the mini-book's page.  So when you open the book, the accordion page looks like this:

Because of the inclusion of the netting, when you fold the accordion page into is 2" x 2" book size, you have a "thick" book. 

Thus, this is also the mini-book where I first tinkered with the idea of incorporating a spine!

So I present to you A FISHY ?, which -- with apologies to the fish population -- encourages us all not to "net" other people into becoming slaves to our empire-driven desires.  May your "nets" unfold otherwise ...

And now, which chair shall be net-ted by this mini-book?  But of course, let's "shelve" it on a handsome Windsor settee! The American chair is seated, aptly enough, on some indigenous Filipino fabric ...