Pinoy Penman

Flotsam & Jetsam for September 18, 2007


I DON'T know where else to let off steam—it’s been a while since I’ve had a newspaper editorial all to myself to whip up by the end of the day, and I don’t want to saddle my Manileño readers in the US with another jeremiad about the hopeless morass of Philippine politics—so let me cry it here and now: “We are not stupid!”

Joey de Venecia dropped a bombshell at the Senate today, naming “First Gentleman” (I can’t ever use that phrase without quotation marks) Mike Arroyo as the “mystery man” who tried to intimidate him into backing off from the $329-million ZTE broadband deal with China. (If you don’t know the details, check this out.) That deal stinks worse than week-old eggs, with Commission on Elections chairman Benjamin Abalos being accused by the Speaker’s son as the political operator who took as much as $130 million in bribes from the Chinese for brokering the overpriced contract, in addition to prodigious bouts of sex with Zhang Ziyi’s less demure sisters.

Never mind, for now, what really happened. It’ll all hang out in a week or so—trust Manila’s coffeeshops to produce even saucier details and to run them through the filter of what’s already known about the principals.

Let’s just take a look at what they’re saying.

The man of the hour—Mike Arroyo—is nowhere to be found. He left last night for Hong Kong—on, his spokesman says, “a long-scheduled trip.” (But of course it had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he flew out on the eve of the whistleblower’s Senate testimony.)

The two Arroyo sons in Congress are squealing like pigs in a poke: “Why is it that every time a scandal breaks, our father’s name gets dragged into it?” (Hmmm, why, indeed?) “Don’t they know he’s a sick man?” (Yes, we do, and we know how sick. Makes you wonder if he had our BPs and temperatures in mind when he filed all those nuisance libel suits against 43 of us journalists.)

Abalos says he declined to appear at the Senate hearing and clear his name because he was being careful not to compromise the independence of the Comelec. What would future Comelec chiefs think if he allowed himself—a Constitutional officer—to be prodded and tickled by those publicity-hungry buffoons in the Senate? (On the other hand, he took no such risk when he flew to China “to play golf” with his ZTE buddies and then also “played golf” with them here—all in the name of good-neighborliness, mind you, with no strings attached whatsoever. I may be alone in not knowing that election commissioners make such great ambassadors of stringless goodwill.) Faced with de Venecia’s outrageous accusations, wasn’t Abalos going to hale this upstart to court and let him feel the full brunt of justice? “I’ll have to talk to my lawyers about it” was his answer.

GMA has been telling her people not to testify before the Senate—thinking that “all those jerks want to do is to find something new to hang me with, and I won’t let you give it to them”—and trying to prove, by example, that if she was able to brazen “Hello, Garci” out, the people will swallow this kickback-tainted deal as well, and happily pay for the golfing vacations and girlfriends of those we should be thanking profusely for linking up government's myriad arms and legs digitally. (That was the original idea for this contract, wasn’t it? At least until the ministers who signed it supposedly “lost” the contract papers. Holy moly! A billion-peso contract for high technology, and no one thinks to back up a copy?)

I’ve had it. Somebody up there (or better yet, down there) please punish these people—with bolts of lightning, vats of boiling sulfur, suppurating sores, a rain of toads, anything!—if not for whatever crimes they may have committed, then for the worst offense of all, that of thinking of you and me as halfwits and of themselves as geniuses—which may well be the case, if we do or say nothing against this systematic, State-sponsored, shameless moronization of the Filipino.

UPDATE, 9/19: I'm listening to Mike Arroyo's lawyer, an Atty. Jess Santos, telling a TV news program that his client was there at that Wack Wack meeting, except that here's what "really" happened. Mike A had been playing golf, when he happened to spot the group of Sec. Mendoza; he saw the young Joey de Venecia, to whom he was introduced for the very first time. And then he caught a whiff of something highly irregular going on—why, the young JDV was trying to land a contract! He then told Joey to "back off"—or words to that effect—as a warning that what he was about to do was illegal, since he was a relative of a high government official. At that point, Atty. Santos says, Mr. Arroyo then left.

Riiiight. E, pinagsabihan lang naman pala. And I have $130 million deposited with the Nigerian Central Bank for you to collect, Atty. Santos, if you'll be so kind as to send me your bank details.

Flotsam & Jetsam (49) for August 5, 2007


I FINALLY had the chance to hold and play with an iPhone during our Philippine Macintosh Users Group (PhilMUG) meeting yesterday, and what can I say? Despite all the brickbats thrown at it by its detractors (many of whom have never seen or held one!), this is one heck of a gadget, and much more than a phone. In other words, folks (and as PhilMUG chairman Elbert Cuenca, whose iPhone it was that I'm modeling here, says), "Believe the hype!"

It can't work as a phone here in the Philippines just yet—that probably won't happen for at least another five or six months, until its official release in Asia—but a few units have already trickled in to the Philippine gray market. You can't call your Mom or your sweetie with one, but you can use it as a terrific Web browser, an iPod, an email device, and a camera. You'll need a hack—available on the Internet—to activate your iPhone here. (And if you're lucky to find one, it'll set you back from P35K to P40K.)

More details from the Apple site. I'm saving up for mine. Somebody need a ghostwritten book?

Flotsam & Jetsam (48) for August 1, 2007


I WAS bone-tired and stressed out this afternoon—my VW’s brakes gave out on me on my way back from lunch, sending me to the repair shop for the rest of the day instead of a Makati meeting I was supposed to attend. But then—five hours later and P4,500 poorer—I couldn’t help parking the Beetle at home and grabbing my camera when I saw the mist rolling into Diliman and the sky turning a purplish orange.

Here’s one shot from that refreshing foray into the wet grass: another view of the Oblation, the very symbol of the University of the Philippines. And here are some facts about that statue you may not know:

UP President Rafael Palma commissioned Guillermo Tolentino to translate a line from Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios into a magnificent piece of sculpture. The line was “to serve our home and country’s need.”

Palma chose the name “Oblation.” President Jorge Bocobo, who succeeded Palma, prudently had Tolentino add a fig leaf to the work-in-progress.

The models for the statue were reportedly Fernando Poe Sr., a fireman named Jose Villanueva, and Tolentino himself for certain body parts.

The Oblation was unveiled on National Heroes’ Day in 1935 at the quadrangle of the UP campus in Padre Faura. Gregoria de Jesus unveiled the statue.

The original statue was made from concrete, made to resemble bronze. The original remains in storage in the UP Main Library. All UP campuses have replicas fronting their main buildings.

On Feb. 11, 1949, the Oblation was moved from Manila, standing on a dump truck in a motorcade bound for Diliman—and for another six decades of weathering the elements.

Flotsam & Jetsam (47) for July 29, 2007


The Philippine Star marked its 21st anniversary yesterday, and came out with a special issue for which we columnists were asked to send in a short piece about what we were doing when we were 21. So here's my "When I Was 21" contribution, published yesterday.

IT WAS 1975 when I turned 21 that January. Just eighteen months earlier I had been in martial law prison, but in that time since my release I had managed to find myself a job as a responsible if hapless member of the New Society, to get married, and to become a father. I had lots of hair, weighed 140 pounds, had a 28-inch waist, and smoked three packs of Marlboros a day.

It was, by any reckoning, an eventful year—more so for the nation, which marked 1975 as the year the Filipino people supposedly approved of martial law and Marcos’s extended powers in a referendum, the year Muhammad Ali collided with Joe Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila,” and the year the Philippine Basketball Association took off at the Araneta Coliseum.

Aside from the babyhood of our unica hija Demi, however, I remember 1975 for two other firsts: my first Palanca award as second prize co-winner for the short story in English (for a forgettable story titled “Agcalan Point” that I didn’t keep a copy of and have therefore almost forgotten). I felt, of course, elated, not knowing that I would lose for the next four years straight, and come to see my first victory as a fluke.

But with the prize money (a share of second place, probably around P1,500) plus P1,000 of my own meager savings, I bought my first car—a lemon-yellow 1963 Datsun Bluebird that I had seen on the street outside the apartment. It was a piece of junk, but it showed promise, and P2,500 was all I could afford. (The pic here is of the exact same model and year—looking about 200X better than mine did.)

I didn’t even know how to drive, but I wanted a car badly, so I had a friend who was a mechanic (let’s call him Felix) take the car for me in the meanwhile and get it all repaired and dolled up. Felix applied himself to the task with great enthusiasm. Many months and thousands of borrowed pesos in expenses later, I still didn’t have a car, could barely drive, and then Felix vanished to the Middle East with nary a peep about where my spiffed-up Bluebird was.

And then I received a telegram from the QC Police, asking me to claim a car in their impounding area that they had traced to my registration. When I went there, I found my Datsun—all caked with mud, its tires busted, and its body and windshield shot full of bullet holes. They asked me for P3,000 in storage fees. I said a prayer and left the Datsun to oxidize its way to car heaven.

Flotsam & Jetsam (46) for July 28, 2007

WHAT BEGAN as a pleasant albeit polite dinner at a friend’s home in Makati last night turned into an even more pleasant and riotously fun evening at Club Mwah on Boni Avenue in Mandaluyong, where our host took the entire party after dinner.

I don’t know if I’m the last man alive to have discovered the place—and thanks only to our host (seated in the colorful shirt beside another highly improbable Mwah visitor), who loves the place and the entertainment—but these all-Filipino performers were fabulously talented, rivaling the best shows you can find in Vegas.


They make you guess after the show how many of the performers in the “Follies de Mwah” are, uhm, real ladies. (Apparently—or maybe not that apparently—the correct answer is three.) I was asked to pick one—and of course I got it wrong (feeling like that poor sod in the "Nice car, pare!" commercial). But a great time was had by all. Check out their performances and schedules on their website here—no need to fly to Paris for the Folies Bergere! (And that's me about to be devoured by a feathery creature in the pic below.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (45) for July 20, 2007


NOW YOU know what's been keeping me so busy. Last Sunday was the deadline for the full submission of requirements for authors long-listed for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. I'd been told by e-mail that I was one of them, but I had about a week to come up with the rest of my novel, after submitting a sample of 10,000 words last March.

The Man Asian Literary Prize is sponsored by the UK-based Man Group, which now also sponsors the Man Booker Prize. The US$10,000 prize is to be given to the best unpublished novel by an Asian (in English or in English translation). The "long list" (think of these as semi-finalists) will be pared down to a short list of five finalists by October, and the prize will be awarded in Hong Kong in November.

More than 240 qualified entries were received, mostly from India (two-thirds of all entries came from South Asia--those guys write novels like we produce bad politicians!). The full long list of 23 entries came out today. Not surprisingly, India dominates the list (11 out of 23), followed by China. As far as I can tell, there's a Malaysian, a Taiwanese, a Japanese, a Burmese, and a Filipino (me); surprisingly, I can't find any Singaporean, Thai, Korean, or Indonesian.

Frankly, I'm not too keen about my chances, but just getting to Hong Kong should be swell. Full details in this official press release.

Tulsi Badrinath, The Living God
Sanjay Bahadur, The Sound of Water
Kankana Basu, Cappuccino Dusk
Sanjiv Bhatla, InJustice
Shahbano Bilgrami, Without Dreams
Saikat Chakraborty, The Amnesiac
Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad’s Sister
Reeti Gadekar, Families at Home
Xiaolu Guo, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
Ameena Hussein, The Moon in the Water
Nu Nu Yi Inwa, Smile as They Bow
Jiang Rong, Wolf Totem
Hitomi Kanehara, Autofiction
N S Madhavan, Litanies of Dutch Battery
Laxmi Narayan Mishra, The Little God
Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Nalini Rajan, The Pangolin’s Tale
Chiew-Siah Tei, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes
Shreekumar Varma, Maria’s Room
Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, Seeing the Girl
Sujatha Vijayaraghavan, Pichaikuppan
Xu Xi, Habit of a Foreign Sky
Egoyan Zheng, Fleeting Light

Flotsam & Jetsam (44) for July 17, 2007


I JUST want to announce—as I’ve been shamelessly texting my closest friends these past two days—that I finally completed my second and long-overdue novel last Sunday evening. I gave my students some special assignments and took the whole week off last week to try and complete in seven days what I had been sitting on for seven years. (I had a reason for needing to finish it by July 15, but I’ll tell you about that later.)

What I can tell you now is that it’s titled Soledad’s Sister. Its protagonists are a small-town cop and a nightclub singer. It takes place over, uhm, three days. It begins with a corpse and ends with two—and in between them, at least a dozen other deaths and disappearances happen or are reported. I know it sounds bad and it probably is, but I’ll leave that to the critics to figure out. Today I’m feeling good (or maybe not too good—I’m beginning to crash after living on adrenaline and macaroni soup this past week); haven’t felt like this in a long, long time—I mean, like a real writer again.

Here’s a random excerpt from that crazy, curious work:

IT WAS midday when they reached Laguna, announced by a concrete arch on the highway, on either side of which the scenery looked exactly the same, a seamless flat stretch of rice fields fringed by coconuts. Walter had gone around enough to know that many parts of the country looked very different from this—and that there were Filipinos who grew up and grew old dreaming of mountains and oceans, of places like Paez on the far side of a big island—but he knew, in the same way, that you could drive for hours and see nothing but ocean on the one side and coconuts on the other, so large was this land, yet so familiar. Walter knew something else: that deep in those groves of coconut and bamboo, beneath the duhat and the tamarind trees, some people bore arms much bigger than his service .38, stewards and devotees of a stubborn faith in—what was it?—justice, or the future, or some such abstraction that never seemed to be worth another open-mouthed, fly-infested corpse in a ditch. He had seen a few of those along this same road the first few times he had traveled on it, although the last time—sitting in a provincial bus as a civilian—he thought he had seen them very much alive, sharp-angled shadows in the thorny bushes and the bamboo brakes. Even now, as he made a careful turn around a blind corner, pounding on his horn and with the engine keening, he did not know if he would be met on the other side by an Army carrier, or by a makeshift checkpoint—a fallen log, a 55-gallon drum—marking the temporary confusion of zones. That was what this country was all about: zones, boundaries, demarcations, reminders of where you belonged and where you stood. To forget these things was to invite disaster, and Walter had no intentions of going down that road again. Prudence was his watchword now, prudence and circumspection, the studious avoidance of unnecessary conflict—of which, as God himself knew best of all, there was entirely too much in Walter's world.

Flotsam & Jetsam (43) for July 12, 2007


IT WAS a sad time for poets and their friends last week. First, the terrible news of the young and talented Ana Escalante Neri’s passing. And then in my mail came a message I thought was junk, being unfamiliar with the names, until I remembered that I had marked and praised this poet's work on this blog a year ago. Matthew Engels wrote me to say that “I am so happy my father's poetry moved you. I am just writing you to let you know that dad passed away on June 13, 2007.”

I had found a book of poems by John Engels in a BookSale bin, Vivaldi in Early Fall (1981), and was taken by his vigorous lyricism. He taught at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, and one of his books was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Hayden Carruth would write of his poetry that “Back in the noble days of modernism, when we had such fearless exponents of poetic form and language as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Roethke, Engels was an acknowledged master. His poems remain as strong and compelling as ever. His expressly demonstrative relationship to nature is entirely cogent and stimulating. Engels will always be an American treasure. His poems are a joy for all readers and a model for the young.”

For more samples of his poetry, please visit this site. Meanwhile, here's one of his poems:

Eve Overlooking the Garden

The garden has ignited.
It’s feverish. Even the white clematis
flutters with sun,

and the red lilies and coral bells
burn back at it. Windblown petals
of cardinals flash

across the buttery primroses:
a good year for gardens.
Everything shines.

I write this standing at my window.
I don’t go down into the garden.
From here I see everything

at once, all the flowers trapped
in color, in their showy, slow
ignition — petal, pistil, leaf and stamen

separating off. Perhaps
there is a way
out of such fiery

gorgeousness. It must
be wearing. Even at night
when I’ve gone blind

I hear a splendid confusion
of harmonics, what only can be
the sharp yellowing

of gloriosas, the speckle-
throated oranging
of the Canada lilies.

From Recounting the Seasons: Poems, 1958-2005, University of Notre Dame Press. Copyright 2007 by John Engels. Used by permission.

Flotsam & Jetsam (42) for July 1, 2007

WITH APOLOGIES to another blog I contribute to, which uses a similar tagline, here's a picture that shows exactly how useful elections are to some citizens. Gee, didn't we have one just six weeks ago? Taken just this afternoon on a walk around the UP Sunken Garden.

Flotsam & Jetsam (41) for July 1, 2007


ONCE UPON a time—make that July 1987—a group of five Filipino writers went to China: Krip Yuson, Ricky de Ungria, Eric Gamalinda, Timmy Lim, and Pinoy Penboy. I had a Nikon FE with 28mm and 200mm lenses, and I happily clicked away from Beijing to Shanghai to Guangzhou and Macau. It was the first time any of us had ever been to China—heck, it was Ricky's first foreign trip, ever. None of us knew how to use chopsticks, excepting maybe Timmy; when we landed in Beijing close to midnight, we were famished, but our noodles kept slipping from our chopsticks. We learned quickly—and learned quite a few more things since then. (These come from scans of old 3 x 5's, so excuse the quality. And just for the heck of it, that last shot was of the same visitor in Shanghai 20 years later.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (40) for June 21, 2007


I SHOULD be writing my column that's due tomorrow, but I'm bone tired and need some fun, so I'm taking an hour off to play with my new toy--a Canon G7 digicam that I picked up yesterday. Here are some shots I took of some nice old things around the house.

Flotsam & Jetsam (39) for June 11, 2007


I WAS in Shanghai last week for a spa convention (!) about which you will certainly hear more, but meanwhile here are some shots I took around the place with my trusty Lumix.

Flotsam & Jetsam (38) for June 9, 2007


I WAS nearly done with my "Green-Onion Chicken" in this restaurant in Shanghai when I realized what I had left behind—proof positive, I suppose, of just how famished I was, and/or how good the chicken was. As the Indians did toward the deer and bison they hunted and devoured, I paused to give honor to this mute witness to my ravenous appetite. Sic transit gloria chickenini.

Flotsam & Jetsam (37) for Monday, May 21, 2007


I WAS walking to the UP Oval this afternoon for my Sunday jog when I chanced upon a most unusual sight: the bells of the UP Carillon, some of which had been taken down for what I'm hoping is a full-scale (and long overdue) restoration. My first impression was, I didn't realize those bells were that big! All I had with me was my 2-megapixel phone camera (on a Nokia E61i), but I couldn't resist the chance to shoot those bells while they were there.

So here:

And, following the pics, an article I wrote some time ago for the UP Alumni Association, which has been conducting a campaign to restore the bells and their incomparable sound to their full glory.


THE UP CARILLON: THE VOICE OF THE ALUMNI SPIRIT


WITH THE possible exception of the Oblation statue, nothing symbolizes the University of the Philippines more than the 130-foot Carillon Tower—a structure unlike any other in Diliman, a ringing echo of the university’s glorious past.

Built in 1952 at a cost of some P200,000, the carillon has serenaded generations of UP students, teachers, employees, and campus residents with its sweet cascade of chimes, rising above the early morning mist and attending the fall of twilight in the afternoon. From UP Beloved and Planting Rice to the Beatles tunes and The Internationale of later years, the carillon grew with the times, and itself grew timeless, marking the same hours of different days as if to remind the listener that some things never changed—love, honor, idealism, the joy and the challenge of learning beneath the broad canopy of a university life.

It was a musical instrument—to be technical about it, an assemblage of 46 tuned bells sounded by hammers, controlled from a keyboard or clockwork mechanism—whose player we never saw, a perfect surrender of the person to the music. What was important was for the bells to be heard, for the listeners to be reassured that there was order in their universe—and not just order but beauty and pleasure, especially at the beginning and at the end of a long day.

When it played, the carillon charmed us without the boisterousness of a brass band or the self-absorbed intensity of a piano; its delight lay precisely in its distance. It was a soothing voice over your shoulder, a scattering of happy notes in the vagrant wind. The carillon could be heard in all corners of the campus, from classroom to laboratory to janitorial closet. It was solace democratized.

But lately it has fallen silent once again, ravaged by age and neglect. The tower itself is firm and robust, as are the Holland-made bronze bells, but the wires and wooden levers of the keyboard have crumbled over time. The last time the bells were played was at the Lantern Parade in 1988, and since then the structure has been used as a stockroom, an art studio, and for various other purposes. Previous restoration efforts fell short of the funds needed for a complete overhaul.

It’s a sad slide from the dream of the National Artist for Architecture Juan F. Nakpil and UP Music Conservatory director Ramon Tapales, who—along with UP President Bienvenido Gonzalez—had conceived of the carillon as early as 1940. It took the UP Alumni Association to realize that dream, mobilizing mightily to build the tower and buy and install the bells. On August 1, 1952, according to the UP Bulletin, the carillon “was dedicated as a memorial to the spirit of the UP alumni, living and dead.”

It’s the voice of that spirit that must have whispered in our ear when the bells of Diliman last played—and which we hope to hear again, once this proud tower of music is finally restored.

Flotsam & Jetsam (36) for Saturday, May 19, 2007


LONG-TIME READERS of this blog will note a few but significant changes around the place. In a fit of what was probably heat-induced madness, I (1) finally took out my First-Communion picture and replaced it with something closer to the unsightly truth; (2) banished those silly Google ads that earned me a grand, uncollectible total of $16.50 after more than 55,000 hits; and (3) introduced a “Comments” feature that will now allow you to say your piece without having to email me.

I do reserve the right to change my mind about this setup again, but in the meanwhile, I hope you like the (slightly) new look.