Pinoy Penman

Flotsam & Jetsam (35) for Friday, May 11, 2007

THE TEXT will follow, but here are some pics from my ongoing (and first) visit to South Korea. As usual, all shots were taken with my point-and-shoot Lumix.

Flotsam & Jetsam (34) for Monday, April 30, 2007


Who, ME, a test DRIVER? Well, why the heck not? I'd almost forgotten about this piece I wrote last year for the September issue of Top Gear magazine, Philippine edition, but yes, for one glorious week, I zipped around town (and parts beyond) in a brand-new Honda Civic, courtesy of some very broadminded (and possibly chemically-inspired) motoring editors who thought it was a fun idea to put multimillion-peso cars in the hands of creative writers who normally think of "suspension" in terms of "disbelief." Our motley crew included Pete Lacaba (driving a BMW), Lourd de Veyra (driving a Volvo), and Conrad de Quiros (driving a decidedly un-pedestrian Mercedes SUV). Here goes--vroom, vroom!

THE LAST time I drove a brand-new car was almost exactly ten years ago; come to think of it, that was also the first time I drove anything that had a fifth gear. My very first car—a 1963 Datsun Bluebird that I got in 1975 (and which ended up in a police station full of bullet holes, but that’s another story)—just had three. So you can’t blame me if I thought that my 1996 Daihatsu Charade was a scorcher. Scorcher or not, I drove it out of the showroom in no higher than second gear, deathly afraid of scratching the pristine paintwork against a wayward lamppost or tricycle.

The Charade’s still with me, driven now by my daughter Demi, who keeps dreaming of winning the lotto so she can steer the Daihatsu to the junkyard; it shares the garage with my fully restored 1979 VW Beetle, and the 1997 Suzuki Vitara that Demi and I fight for driving rights to.

Then suddenly this red 2006 Honda Civic 2.0s turned up outside my gate, begging to be driven around for a week with a full tank of gas and, it seemed, a tsunami of pure kinetic energy gurgling under the hood. What did I do to deserve such a blessing? I didn’t bother to ask. For once in my life, I was going to drive what in the ‘80s would have been called a “macho machine,” and I was certainly qualified to drive one, if desire and despair were to be the main criteria.

Dressed in her duster, my mom inspected the car and pronounced it fit for me to drive and for her to be driven in, but then issued her expert opinion: “It’s nice, but it isn’t new. Where’s the plastic on the seats?” I wasn’t going to be that picky; as far as I was concerned, the car passed my new-car-smell test with flying colors.

I don’t know diddly about automotive mechanics, so don’t expect me to spout words like “power-train performance” or “torque.” I can tell you, from the press kit, that I was looking at an eighth-generation Civic with a 2.0 liter DOHC i-VTEC engine.

I owned and drove a Honda once—a gloriously zippy two-door Civic hatchback, one of those early ‘90s classics, that I sold for a song to my everlasting regret. This sleek behemoth at my door wasn’t your old Civic, and certainly not mine; in heft and footprint, it was more like an Accord. As you can see from my stable, I like little cars, and was slightly worried that I’d taken on something too big to handle.

It proved to be a silly fear; on the road, the Civic handled like a charm as perhaps only a brand-new car with state-of-the-art technology can. Even standing still in the driveway, the car displayed the touches that you could trade a healthy kidney for—the so-called Multiplex Meter (a new dashboard, to you and me) that shows your speed in big, easily readable digital numbers, a smallish three-spoke steering wheel, and a handbrake that pulls out in the most logically ergonomic position. Nice extras included a CD player that could also play my homemade MP3s, and an AUX IN jack hidden below the dash for hooking up your iPod (for which a small shelf is also thoughtfully provided).

The model I got came with a five-speed manual transmission, and its velvet smoothness was an absolute relief from the arm wrestling I have to do with the stick shifts in my other cars. The sporty Modulo body kit (“one million pogi points,” said my badminton instructor) and the “habanero” red paint job didn’t hurt my image, either (you know, that image of a gigolo trapped in an overaged nerd’s body).

On its inaugural ride, I put my wife Beng and her friend Amie in the back of the car, and we drove to the UP Shopping Center a few blocks away to buy a big bottle of Coke and some nilagang mani—maybe not exactly the sort of cocktail fare that the car’s personality deserves. But the car had to pass what I’d call the Friendly Neighborhood Test: can you comfortably drive it around the corner on the kind of errand that husbands and real people have to run?

The answer was a resounding yes. Over the next few days, I drove the Civic around UP, to the mall, and to my badminton and poker dates, increasingly impressed by its power and nimbleness. A slight flick of the wrist enabled the Civic to dodge jeepneys, tricycles, pushcarts, dogs, freshmen, and such creatures as inhabit Diliman.

On its last full day with us, I took the Civic to Tagaytay for the obligatory hataw ride, but being a sensible and law-abiding sort of fellow, I didn’t dare push it past 125 kph—and then only before I realized that the speed limit on the SLEX was 80 kph. I may also have been influenced by the fact that in the backseat were my parents-in-law, octogenarians whom we fully expect to see to their 90s. Along with Beng, our combined ages came up to something like 265 years—the equivalent of more than a dozen teenagers; that’s a lot of maturity to put on four wheels, but I can say that these folks had the ride of their lives. On the expressway, I felt like we were riding on a whisper.

The most important test was taken and passed by Demi, who’d been kvetching about how the guard in her office kept sending her up to the fourth-floor parking lot, just because she drove a Charade, while her officemate got a ground-floor slot in her BMW. Just for that, I had Demi drive the Civic to work one morning. The guard waved her through, no questions asked. “I felt like Cinderella!” Demi told me later. For that one week, so did I.

Flotsam & Jetsam (33) for Friday, April 27, 2007

Flotsam & Jetsam (32) for Thursday, April 19, 2007


The University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing (ICW) has released the official rules governing the UP Centennial Gawad Likhaan--the literary competition that UP will be sponsoring in commemoration of its centennial in 2008. I'm posting the rules below as I received them. If you have any questions whatsoever about the rules or the competition, please don't ask me; I can't and won't respond to any of these inquiries; call the UPICW at 922-1830. There's an official entry form you need to fill out. You can download it from my homepage here. Scroll down the page and look for the "Gawad Likhaan Form" link. Good luck!

1. The Contest is open from February 2007 to March 2008. It is open to all Filipino citizens of all ages (including Filipinos holding dual citizenship), except members of the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing (UP-ICW) and its staff.

2. There are six categories for the Awards:

(a) Novel or Short Story Collection in English
(b) Nobela o Koleksiyon ng mga Katha sa Filipino
(c) Poetry in English
(d) Tula sa Filipino
(e) Creative Nonfiction in English
(f) Malikhaing Sanaysay sa Filipino

3. Only original works, not published in whole or in part, in print or online, may be entered. Any translation or adaptation of another author’s work is not eligible.

4. Authors may submit only one (1) entry per category.

5. A translation of one’s own work submitted as an entry in one (1) category shall not be eligible in the corresponding linguistic category.

6. A work which has been awarded a prize in another contest is not eligible.

7. In submitting an entry, the author warrants that the work is his/her own and that he/she has absolute ownership of all intellectual property rights thereto. Together with the entry, the author should submit the Official Entry Form and the Authorization Form for the Contest.

8. All entries shall consist of a soft copy (CD in Word or Text Format) and three (3) hard copies.

(a) Each entry must be encoded, double space, on 8-1/2 by 11 bond paper, about one-inch margin on all sides of the page. Font should be Arial, Times New Roman, or Book Antiqua, and font size 12.

(b) Page number must be consecutive at the right-hand corner, bottom of the page.

(c) Author’s real name and address must not appear on any entry; rather, the author should seal in a letter envelope both the prescribed Official Entry Form and Authorization Form, together with the author’s bio-note or brief résumé; and this envelope should be submitted together with the entries. On this sealed envelope should be written or typed the title of the entry, its category, and the author’s pen name.

9. All entries should be legible and neat. They are all to be submitted to the Board of Judges, U.P. Institute of Creative Writing (UP-ICW), College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines , Diliman, Quezon City . The said Institute is on the second floor of the Faculty Center (FC), UP Diliman campus.

10. All entries must be accompanied by the author’s written consent to abide by the rules of the Contest, duly signed by the author.

11. The deadline for submission is March 31, 2008, Friday, 5 p.m. The office of the UP-ICW closes at 5 p.m. Entries sent by mail or courier should be postmarked no later than the same date of the deadline.

12. Winning entries shall remain with, and become the property of, the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing which shall have prior right to its publication. Copies of non-winning entries may be claimed by their authors at the same Institute no later than one (1) month from the date of the announcement of the winners.

13. In all categories for the Awards, the subject or theme is open and free. Neither is there any limit to the maximum number of pages of the entry.

(a) In the FICTION category (NOVEL or SHORT STORY COLLECTION) in English or Filipino, what is required is a book-length NOVEL or SHORT STORY COLLECTION; book-length, that is, about 200 pages or more when printed out, double space, on 8-1/2 by 11 bond paper, or as the Board of Judges for this category may determine.

(b) In POETRY in English or Filipino, what is required is also a book-length work or collection, that is, about 50 poems or more, or about 100 pages or more, or as the Board of Judges for this category may determine.

(c) As with FICTION, what is required for the category of CREATIVE NON-FICTION is a book-length work. By this category is meant biography, autobiography, or the personal essay (talambuhay o personal na sanaysay).

14. In order that the winning entries may be accessible to the reading public, the author grants, assigns and transfers to the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing the following rights without any necessity of any payment other than the prize already awarded: (a) to publish from time to time any winning entry or selection or portion thereof as it may at its discretion determine; (b) to designate or appoint editors to edit the work or any portion thereof to suit the demands of publication; (c) to furnish a reasonable number of copies of the work to the National Library or other libraries; (d) to make the work available for downloading on the Internet or other electronic medium; and/or (e) allow scholars and students to make copies for their research.

In making the works accessible to scholars, students, and lovers of literature, the Institute only intends to promote a wider literary appreciation of the works.

15. The exercise of the rights of the U.P. Institute of Creative Writing as regards the winning entries, such as the right to publish the work, shall not be deemed a waiver of any right of action which the Institute may take against an author should it be discovered later on that the author is not the creator or owner of the copyright to the award-winning work. Moreover, the said author likewise undertakes to indemnify the Institute for any and all damages, fees, costs and expenses that the Institute may incur on account of the said author’s violation of the intellectual property rights of another writer.

16. The prize for each contest category is P200,000.00. (I've summarized this portion, but that's what the rules state: P200K for one prize for each category.--BD)

17. The U.P. Institute of Creative Writing has the sole right to designate the persons who shall constitute the Board of Judges for each contest category.

18. The decision of the majority of the Board of Judges for each contest category is final. The same majority of the Board for each contest category may decide not to award any prize if, in its judgment, no entry deserves the prize.

19. There is only one grand prize for each category; no prize shall be divided or reduced.

20. The names of the winners and the members of the Board of Judges for each contest category shall be announced on June 1, 2008 .

21. All parties submitting entries to the UP Centennial Gawad Likhaan literary contest are deemed to have accepted all the rules of the contest, and agree to abide by them.

Flotsam & Jetsam (31) for Friday, February 9, 2007


THIS JUST came in to my inbox, so I thought I'd share it with you. Please don't ask me for details--there's an e-mail address below that you can write. Take note that there have been some changes in the categories--reflecting, I believe, the sponsors' desire to try and do more with less, given the limits on the prize money and the relatively low number of entries it had been getting in some categories. While thanking the Palanca family for their continuing generosity, let's hope for a more catholic (note the small "c" and what it means) distribution of judges, to account for broader, less traditional, but no less exacting tastes.

The Carlos Palanca Foundation announces the opening of the 57th Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. The country’s premier literary awards will accept entries until the midnight of April 30, 2007.

The literary awards are open to all Filipino citizens and former Filipino citizens. The competition includes the following categories: Short Story, Short Story for Children, Essay, Poetry, One-act Play, and Full-Length Play in Filipino and English divisions; Screenplay in Filipino division; and Short Story in Cebuano, Hiligaynon and Iluko regional languages.

This year’s theme for the Kabataan Essay is “The Filipino Value I Would Like to Share with the World” for the English division; and “Ang Kaugaliang Pilipino na Nais Kong Ibahagi sa Mundo” for the Filipino division. This is a special category open to persons below 18 years old.

Established in 1950, one of the objectives of the Palanca Awards is to serve as an incentive for Filipino writers to craft their outstanding literary works. It is noteworthy that more and more first-time entrants are winning in the contest.

National Artist for Literature Edith Tiempo noted that writers should take full advantage of the annual literary competition to hone their craft. “We are all privileged to have a good number of our writers and their best works being acclaimed and applauded – and we, readers and writers may well wonder about the enormity of literary expertise and craftmanship and long earnest labor that must have gone into the performing of these chosen works.”

Entries for the literary competition may be submitted in person, or sent by mail or courier service to Carlos Palanca Foundation, 6th Floor, CPJ Building., 105 C. Palanca Jr. St., Legaspi Village, Makati City. Entries may also be submitted through e-mail in Rich Text Format or in Microsoft Word Document as an attachment, together with the author’s resume, official entry form and original copy of the notarized authorization form.

Complete contest rules and official entry forms may be obtained from the Carlos Palanca Foundation office or via e-mail to cpawards@info.com.ph or palancaawards@yahoo.com. For inquiries, please call 818-3681, local 31.