For the past decade, book stores have been downsizing or shutting down and have been surviving on the sales not of books but of school and office supplies. Local publishers are going for commercial writers who need no marketing and no tasteful book design, and are shunning literary writers whom they consider to be high-risk, especially poets. Despite the situation, everyone is launching books, organizing book festivals and award-giving bodies, and pretending that the book business is alive and well.

Theater is also dying, if not already dead. It costs millions of pesos to stage a work (that includes costs for sets and props, power for lights and air-conditioning, printing, talent fees, and catering, plus sundry items). Producers will not gamble on an original play by a playwright, the way movie producers will not gamble on an original screenplay; the screenplay must be derivative of box-office movies by foreign movie makers).

As though to join the bandwagon, artists are creating paintings that are becoming larger and larger in dimension, perhaps in denial that art may also be dying and, also in denial, perhaps to show others that they really don't care whether their paintings sell or not.

University publishers, school-based theater, and school-based art projects, of course, do not count. Frankly, their strategies and their statistics are different.

This is what I see. I see things that others don't.