Pinoy Penman

Flotsam & Jetsam (91) for November 19, 2009

THANKS TO my fellow Philmugger Arel Virtusio, I got a chance to play with a BlackBerry 8520 this past week and to compare it with the BlackBerry 9000 (also known as the Bold) which I’ve been using since March. (Yes, I still have my iPhone 3G, but I use it as a backup; I’ve realized—as have a good number of iPhone users—that I really need the BB’s push e-mail service more than I do the iPhone’s indubitably sexier features, besides which I still prefer a real keypad to a virtual one for texting and writing.)

My first impression of the 8520 was that it looked like a slimmed-down version of the Bold (something like me after six months of strenuous exercise). Indeed, it seemed very much like a cross between the Bold and my first BB, the 8320 Curve. It had the Curve’s size and shape, but it also had the Bold’s sharp screen and smart graphics—no big surprise, since it runs pretty much the same OS my Bold does. I was pleased to see the same basic application set, the same functions, etc. The sound quality and the picture quality (of the built-in camera) are as good as any phone’s I’ve used. The battery life must be pretty good as well, because the phone’s been sitting on my desk for days now without having to be recharged, and while I haven’t used it all that much, I’ve kept the wi-fi and Bluetooth on, so I know it’s stingier than my Bold where the juice is concerned.

One big difference—small in size but important enough to be the deciding factor for some people—is the mini-trackpad that the 8520 sports in lieu of the old trackball. I can’t tell you how much tearing of hair and gnashing teeth I’ve had to do because of a stuck trackball in my 9000. (Luckily, I’m brave and stupid enough to take these things apart and repair or replace them myself, but I can see most ordinary users giving up on their trackballs and BBs in disgust.) The new trackpad banishes all those blues, bringing a laptop-like feel to the instrument.

Like the old Curve, the 8520 is a delight to hold in the hand; like I’ve said before, the Curve is the perfect size for a phone whose keypad can be navigated by thumb alone. The rubberized finish around the phone helps with the grip; it’s interesting to note that the side buttons lie beneath the rubber on the 8520—protecting them, I suppose, from the intrusion of dust and grit and reducing general wear (I’ve already replaced a couple of these buttons on my Bold).

Given all that, am I ready to give up my Bold for the 8520? No, but only because I really need and appreciate the Bold’s wider screen; I’ve gotten used to writing on the Bold with Docs to Go—it’s good enough to write whole 800-word columns on—and I just don’t think the smaller Curve and its smaller keyboard will do that job as well. Other than that, I can see this phone going into many people’s pockets and handbags. As BlackBerries go, it’s a great one—for starters, or for keeps.

(Pic courtesy of ubergizmo.com)

Penman for Monday, November 16, 2009

MORE (AND last) from San Francisco: since my son-in-law Jerry was driving us into the city from the airport in a rented hybrid (another new experience for me: these things don’t go vroom-vroom at startup), and since Jerry and I share the same passion for old mechanical objects (vintage pens for me, vintage radios and aeronautical books for him), we decided to stop over first at the San Francisco Antique and Design Mall, which was on the way.

I was giddy with eagerness, and as soon as we stepped into the place, an ancient beauty caught my eye—no, not a pen this time, but another writing instrument of yore, a typewriter. It sat on top of a glass case near the store manager’s desk, where it shouldn’t have been, suggesting that it had just come in and was probably still being inventoried.

I don’t think it will surprise anyone who knows what a pack rat I am to be told that, yes, I also collect old typewriters (and old Macintosh computers), albeit in a much more modest and haphazard way than I amass fountain pens. While my pens now number in the shameful hundreds, I have only four or five typewriters tucked beneath some bed or into some drawer.

My affection for typewriters goes back to a sad story. My father was a clerk, and I often hung out in his office, entranced by the majesty of it all: the large wooden desk, the swivel chair, the red-blue pencils, the desk pen, and yes, the heavy typewriter whose signature clackety-clack announced important business in the making. Early in high school, when I began nursing fantasies of becoming a writer, my father had gifted me with a Singer typewriter, the virgin newness of which I could hardly bear to disturb or to mar with carbon smudges and eraser chaff. I loved that Singer, and slept with it by my side. And then one day it was gone, repossessed by the installment people in one of those dark swings of fortune we’d learned to live with, but this one hit me particularly hard, and I swore, like some raving Scarlett O’Hara, that “As God is my witness, I’ll never be typewriterless again!”

And so it happened that I bought a used typewriter as soon as I was able to, and churned out dozens of stories and scripts on one battered Royal or Underwood, then another. In the 1980s, when one of my employers and mentors—the kind Dr. Gerry Sicat—resigned from his post and prepared to leave for work abroad, I found the gumption to ask him for a parting present I spotted in a corner of his library: an Olympia portable typewriter, which accompanied me to graduate school in Michigan, even as my American classmates were already beginning to use Macs and PCs, which I stubbornly resisted.

This one in San Francisco was truly special, both in its design and its condition. It was a Corona portable, still in its open carrying case, which also contained the original manual and cleaning accessories. It had been well used, as the indentations of thousands of keystrokes on the platen or hard rubber roller testified, but it had also been very well kept. The black enamel gleamed on the machine; its stainless steel ribs and ligaments were bright and fragrant with oil; a perfect decal marked the paper table behind the platen, the roseate glow behind the white dove still intense despite its age.

I was smitten, but like a young man stricken by but slightly dubious of overwhelming pulchritude, I had to move and look away for a while, and I spent the next hour reconnoitering the stalls and shelves, trying to interest myself in this old leather bag and that old book, my restlessness mounting by the minute. I found and picked up a Parker 51 Vacumatic pen in near-mint condition, a steal at $10, but even that failed to stop the quickening that I felt every time I glanced in the direction of the Corona, just to make sure it was still there, and still no one else’s.

Finally I could resist no longer and returned to the manager’s counter. I asked him if I could handle the machine. “This just came in,” he said, smelling a sale. “You’re only the second one to ask.” He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter; I pecked out some letters: “The quick brown fox….” They all came out crisply, and something in me groaned. Perhaps I had been hoping that something would go horribly wrong—like the letters would come out broken, like buck teeth, or not register at all. This one even had a fresh ribbon—and the ribbon reverse worked. I sighed in surrender and asked, hoarse with hopelessness, “How much?”

“One hundred twenty five dollars,” the man said. “Any discount?” It was Beng, who had drifted into the transaction in a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable. “Nope,” said the man, knowing a goner when he saw one. I tried pulling the lid over the Corona, in a last-ditch effort to locate some mortal flaw—aha, it wouldn’t close! The machine was simply too big for the box—I knew there had to be a catch somewhere!

Indeed there was; the manager seized the platen and just bent the whole thing over on itself, and the machine collapsed compliantly, fitting neatly into its case, and I went over the edge of stupefaction at the mechanical genius of the thing: a collapsible, therefore portable, typewriter, the clamshell notebook of its time. “Sold!” said my speechless smile. (Thankfully, my daughter Demi picked up the tab—an advance Christmas present for her daffy dad.)

I would later establish that I was looking at a collectible classic, the “Corona 3,” made between 1916 and 1941 by the Corona Typewriter Co. in Groton, NY; a check on its serial number told me that this one had come out of the factory in 1922. That was almost 50 years after the first Scholes and Glidden typewriter—the first truly useful and commercially successful model—was sold. The price in 1873? $125.

Sometimes I forget—or am rudely reminded—that not only are there kids these days who have never written with a fountain pen; some of them have never touched a typewriter, much less composed a story or written a book on one. The only keyboard they know is that whose keys travel mere millimeters, with the barest of clicks and whispers to announce the deed.

“Ay, Tatay! Why will you even lug this home to Manila,” Demi kidded me, “when you’ll be leaving it to me anyway when you finally go, along with all your pens and Macs and watches?” Because, I should’ve told her, I just want to look at it for a while, and to feel the keys, and maybe listen to how they clackety-clack. I hope she does, too, when the time comes.


(More pics of this black beauty here.)

Second Semester, AY 2009-2010


Hi, folks, please download the zipped folder of stories for our class here, thanks!

Penman for Monday, November 9, 2009

I WAS going to write this column a few months ago, when a cosmic confluence of events (of the “moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars” variety) suggested it, but I’m glad I held off a bit, because our recent visit to San Francisco added immeasurably to the experience I’m about to describe.

The events I mentioned are landmarks that any child of the Sixties would recognize with a smile and maybe a lump in the throat: the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival last August, the release of the digitally remastered complete Beatles albums last September 9, and the death of Mary Travers last September 16.

Of course we were too young, too far away, and maybe too stuffy to be at Woodstock when it happened on Max Yasgur’s farm that balmy mid-August. I was 14 in 1969, a high-school sophomore with the un-coolest crew-cut and a rash of pimples on both cheeks, but I was already—indeed acutely—aware of the fact that some people out there led more interesting lives than I did in Barrio Malinao, Pasig, Rizal. Mostly we got that from the movies we watched (the truly interesting ones had titles like “Bedroom Mazurka”) and the music we listened to on our ‘60s iPods, those plastic transistor radios with the mushroom earbuds.

We knew the Beatles by heart, and could name any Beatles tune in three notes, from “Love Me Do” to “Come Together”; we dreamed chastely of our crushes to the accompaniment of “If I Fell” and bemoaned the passing of a “Yesterday” that we hadn’t even gone through yet. Not only could we sing the Beatles; back in those days, it was crime to be a teenager and not to be able to play the guitar, albeit with the aid of a chord chart that we memorized better than we did the Periodic Table. (Which reminds me, I’d be happy to pay a small fortune for a copy of an obscure songbook titled The Book of NUDES, which had the most esoteric chords and featured classics like “Yellow Days.”) We snuck out of school to take a bus trip to Quiapo and Raon to blow our savings on Lumanog guitars—and maybe indulge our budding, uhm, literary sensibilities with a bootleg copy of Fanny Hill from nearby Recto.

But compared to what was a-borning in places like San Francisco, the Beatles and their kind (the Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Monkees) were cute and clean-cut; even the Rolling Stones were a tad too uncouth for most of us, although we did groove to “Satisfaction” and got moony over “As Tears Go By.”

The inner hippie had yet to be released in us—imagine how my swishy bell-bottoms went with my military hairdo—and for some, it took a Woodstock to push them over the edge. Without cable TV, the Internet (which was busy getting born that year), and YouTube, we had to settle for a screening of “Woodstock,” the movie, many months after the event. I remember standing in a packed Galaxy Theater on Rizal Avenue to marvel at how singers like Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin—who looked like they’d either just woken up or hadn’t slept for five days—could get thousands of people all worked up. I still preferred sweet to sour, lapping up Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young when they launched into “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” and a cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”

And who could be sweeter on the ear than Peter, Paul and Mary, whose “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” might well have been the decade’s anthems, paeans to a lost innocence and to the inconstancy of life? They were clean enough to be sung in church (“Five Hundred Miles”) and yet ambiguous enough to be accused—almost certainly unfairly—of pushing mind-altering substances through a song like “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” When they harmonized on a piece like “Early Morning Rain,” they made even loneliness sound good. And all over PPM’s work was Mary’s signature alto, clear as a bell, soaring above the raucous confusion of the age.

All these came back to me in San Francisco, where—with a rental car to use and a morning to while away—I answered the question “So where should we go?” with something I’d never done in three or four previous visits to that city. There’s no streetcorner more revered in the history of American counter-culture than that spot where Haight meets Ashbury, and that’s where we went.

Home to 1967’s famous “Summer of Love,” Haight-Ashbury would come to epitomize the best and the worst of the Age of Aquarius: the free love, the pacifism, the hallucinogens, the grime and grit, the long, languorous drifting away into another realm of thinking and being, at a time when B-52s (flying out of our own Clark AFB) were pulverizing much of Vietnam, when other Americans were walking on the moon, when Barack Obama was a young boy and it was still illegal for blacks or Asians to marry whites in 16 American states, when even the Beatles themselves had traded in their suits for Nehru jackets and Pancho Villa moustaches. Haight-Ashbury attracted the genius and the lunatic, the earnest and the curious, the divine and the drifter.

For a time, the district went through a steep period of decline and decay, until its rehabilitation into the present neighborhood, one as welcoming of bug-eyed tourists as any other San Francisco locale, dotted with shops selling distressed-fabric T-shirts, silver jewelry, Tibetan imports, and the inevitable bong (if you don’t know what a bong is, you’re too young to need one). Psychedelia still hallmarks the place, in the fruit-cocktail colors and the swirly scripts, but gentrification has also set in, in the neatly restored Victorian homes and the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store, even in the cheeky exhibitionism of hosed and posed legs popping out of a window, among other signals of mid-life mellowing.

I didn’t meet anyone wearing flowers in her hair, nor was I offered anything more mind-blowing than Coke with a capital C, but as we drove away from Haight-Ashbury to explore nearby Castro with Beng, our daughter Demi, and her husband Jerry, I couldn’t help humming a tune in my head, something that spoke about “You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by…. And so become yourself, because the past is just a goodbye…”

A goodbye, indeed, and sometimes a welcome back.

Penman for Monday, November 2, 2009

I KNOW there are probably 2,000 other topics worthier of being written about, but let me brag shamelessly about a victory I posted last week—not in a literary competition or anything so noble, but in what we’ll call a battle of wits, plus a little bit of luck.

I’ll start by confessing to a childhood longing for medals, honors, and prizes—baubles that my classmates seemed to be winning right and left, but which had a way of zipping past me for one reason or other. If you look at my CV—which I burnish to keep my mother happy and to attract prospective employers of fat, balding men—you’d think that I was one of those despicable high achievers who must’ve gotten the Best Baby award and went on to become class valedictorian, basketball team captain, ROTC corps commander, and student council chairman, but no.

I kept joining declamation contests in grade school, entranced by the gold, silver, and bronze medals that glowed at me from their boxes on the judges’ table. But for all my throaty, heartfelt renditions of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Carlos P. Romulo’s “I Am a Filipino,” I never won a thing.

Indeed, I got out of elementary school with nothing more to show for my competitive prowess than a candy bar I won for shoving someone smaller off the balance beam in intramurals. Of course, my report card was strewn with stars (in our school, green stars and purple stars were given for high marks) for excellence in such nerdy subjects as Reading and Spelling, but what I really yearned for was the adulation for my peers for excellence in some guy thing. I couldn’t hit a softball even if it came at me like a soap bubble, and my flat feet doomed any chances of my becoming a track star, so I was fated for more sedate undertakings like writing for the school paper. Instead of becoming a jock, I learned big words like “adumbrate” and swung them like a bespectacled Babe Ruth.

I got into the Philippine Science High School as my batch’s topnotcher (only to nearly flunk out after my first year with a 5.0 in Math—still another story); got into UP and somehow graduated cum laude 14 years after becoming a freshman; won a raft of Palancas, CCPs, and other prizes they give you for stringing up words in certain ways. But I remained hungry for another kind of victory, one that was more fun than work.

Flash forward to late October 2009. I’ve been playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker for more than three years now, and have learned to play decently enough to win a couple of small tournaments in Manila (never mind how much tuition I’ve had to pay for that kind of education, where my PhD in English means, as Hemingway himself would have put it, absolutely nada nada nada). For all that, I’m still what they call a “donkey” in poker parlance—someone curious and dumb enough to call big bets with a pair of deuces. I’m so curious about poker that Daniel Negreanu has replaced Daniel Defoe on my reading list, and I don’t fantasize about winning the Nobel or the Booker half as much as I dream of winning the World Series of Poker in a heads-up showdown with Phil Ivey (edging out his aces full of kings with my baby straight flush).

And now I’m vacationing with my wife, my mother, and my sister in the poker capital of the world—Las Vegas, Nevada. The women are here to gaze and gape at the dancing fountains of the Bellagio. Me, I’m like that Chevy Chase character in 1997’s Vegas Vacation—wide-eyed, open-mouthed, ready to hit the tables even before I’ve unfastened my seat belt. I’ve played blackjack here before, but never poker, and I’m eager to join—perchance to win—my first Las Vegas poker tournament. I’ve done my Google homework, and of all the tournaments in town, I’ve chosen the 8 pm one at the Imperial Palace, which has an affordable entry fee and is closest to my shuttle stop, so I can be sure to get home even if I lose my shirt.

The Imperial Palace looks anything but. Its driveway is cluttered not with Rolls Royces but with big old taxis whose drivers are puffing away, waiting for drunken tourists to tumble out. Its “poker room” is a corral of six tables covered in a disturbingly flesh-colored felt that you almost expect to bleed if scratched badly; the poker chips look as battered and shiny as ancient Roman coins. When I step in to sign up for the tournament, only one table is active, playing 2/4 limit poker, a game guaranteed to minimize your losses. I could kill some time there, but I remind myself that I’m here to take risks, not to pose before the gondolas at the Venetian for souvenir pictures. Of course, with my floppy hat and my camera bag, I look every bit the tourist, but all that’s camouflage for the killer within—at least that’s what I tell myself to calm my nerves.

The tournament begins with 18 players at two tables—all men save one; a few locals, mostly visitors like myself, some conventioneers, an Australian, another guy I spot immediately to be a fellow Pinoy. I win my first hand at my table, checking my paired ace at the flop, or the first three table cards. It’s a good sign, and I go on to become chip leader—the guy with the most chips—after a streak of two pairs and an open-ended straight. (Never mind the poker lingo; all it means is I got lucky—in fact, those of you who don’t play poker can go straight to the end of this piece, and skip the table drama below.)

After an hour, I move to the final table—not a herculean feat, when all you have is two tables to begin with. I’m still chip leader, but I quickly run into trouble and lose most of my stack when, with me going all in with top-pair ace-kicker, my opponent sucks out his second pair on the river (translation: I thought I was going to win it all, but nearly lost it all when someone got luckier at the very last card).

But I recover and become chip leader again when I call an A-Q all-in with my A-10; I flop the 10 and it’s enough to win and to double up. We’re down to four; the other Pinoy, a billiards player named Sonny visiting from San Francisco, busts out in fourth place. After more skirmishes and a lot of safe plays, the short-stack small blind goes all in; the big blind, with a stack just a little smaller than mine, also goes all in! My hole cards are K-J suited. Tempting fate, I call.

Show cards: SB has A-Q suited, diamonds like mine! BB has pocket jacks! I’m done for, I tell myself. The flop comes out 9-K-5 rainbow; turn 10, river K! My three kings win, and I’m one happy boy who feels like he’s made up for all those bad beats at the declamation podium. I feel like singing the Philippine National Anthem, the NHI-sanctioned way.

But don’t do this at home, my young friends; if you’re going down the path of poker perdition, I strongly suggest that you learn a few useful things on the side—like editing the school paper.

Penman for Monday, October 26, 2009

NO, I don’t mean that Palace by the Pasig that many Pinoys would rather have nothing to do with, but the venerable Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry took Beng and me last week for a weekend treat.

First opened in 1875 but destroyed in the great earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees in 1906, the Palace was rebuilt and inaugurated anew in December 1909, for which centennial it’s preparing to celebrate grandly. The hotel is an imposing structure at the corner of Market and New Montgomery Streets downtown. When you step in, what immediately strikes you is the glass-roofed atrium, called the Garden Court, that serves as the main restaurant and which must have witnessed the entrance of many a distinguished personage beneath its Austrian chandeliers.

But what impressed me most about the Palace was its unusual Filipino connection, beginning with the large number of Pinoys on the staff, starting with the general manager, Clem Esmail, to the executive chef, Jesse Llapitan, and Amado Benin, one of the senior waiters who attended to us at breakfast with that extra solicitude that comes naturally to Filipinos. The front desk was manned almost entirely by Filipinos; many of the bellhops and the housekeepers were Filipinos.

And while the likes of Lea Salonga have checked in to the Palace, the most celebrated Filipino on its guest list was none other than Jose Rizal. Until Amado reminded me of that fact—and of the presence of a brass marker honoring Rizal on the hotel’s wall around the corner—I’d forgotten that I’d actually written about Rizal’s visit to San Francisco a few years ago, in a long essay on the complex history of Philippine-American relations (in Portraits of a Tangled Relationship: The Philippines and the United States, published by Ars Mundi Philippinae, Manila, 2008).

Drawing on other sources, I noted that “… In late April 1888, a ship arrived in San Francisco and was quarantined for seven days to guard against smallpox. One impatient passenger, a Filipino, indignantly affixed his name to a letter of protest. When he got off the boat, he checked into the Palace Hotel, took a stroll, and seemed impressed by Market Street. But he would later write his friend Mariano Ponce that ‘I visited the largest cities of America with their big buildings, electric lights, and magnificent conceptions. Undoubtedly America is a great country, but still has many defects. There is no real civil liberty.’ That letter was signed ‘Jose Rizal.’”

The marker at the streetcorner reads thus: “Dr. Jose P. Rizal, Philippine national hero and martyr, stayed at the Palace Hotel from May 4 to 6, 1888, in the course of his only visit to the United States. Imbued with a superior intellect and an intense love for his country, Dr. Rizal sought to gain freedom for the Filipino people from centuries of Spanish domination through peaceful means. His writings, foremost of which were the novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, dared to expose the cancer of colonial rule and agitated for reforms. For this he was arrested, tried and executed by a firing squad on December 30, 1896. With his martyrdom, the man of peace fanned the flames of the Revolution of 1896, the first successful uprising in Asia against a Western colonial power. Installed on December 30, 1996 in commemoration of the first centennial of his martyrdom.”

We can argue, as many scholars and critics have done, about Rizal’s exact contribution to the revolution and the stature he enjoys, but you can’t look at that marker without feeling a surge of pride in your connection, however tenuous, to this remarkable man who went around the world before the rest of us did.

On that trip early in 1888, harassed by the Spanish authorities after the publication of the Noli, Rizal had gone to America from Manila via Hong Kong and Japan. (“I left my country in order to give my relatives peace,” he would later write Pastor Ullmer in London. He ends it by vowing, “Nevertheless I will go back!”) From San Francisco, he would go on to Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Illinois, and New York. On May 16 he left New York for Liverpool, England, crossing the Atlantic in nine days.

Looking back, he would reflect that “I visited the larger cities of America, where I saw splendid buildings. The Americans have magnificent ideals. America is a homeland for the poor who are willing to work. I traveled across America, and saw the majestic cascade of Niagara. I was in New York, the great city, but there everything is new. I went to see some relics of Washington, that great man whom I fear has not his equal in this century.”

Many Filipinos—or those who imagine that only with the coming of the Americans in 1898 did we learn English—forget that Rizal could speak and write in English. A gifted polyglot, he had been offered work in Japan after learning Japanese, and those who traveled with him marveled that “I could speak to every one in his own language and understand what he said.” In London, he wrote the chief librarian of the British Museum in perfect English: “Sir, As I wish to become a reader and to copy sculpture at the British Museum, I herewith forward the necessary letter of introduction from a house-holder and I shall be glad to hear from you. I am sincerely your obedient servant, José Rizal."

As the critic E. San Juan Jr. reminds us, Rizal foresaw America’s role in Asia, but curiously missed out on that country’s imperial designs. In “The Philippines a Century Hence,” Rizal writes: “Perhaps the great American Republic, whose interests lie in the Pacific…may some day dream of foreign possession. This is not impossible, for the example is contagious, covetousness and ambition are among the strongest vices… the European powers would not allow her to proceed… North America would be quite a troublesome rival, if she should once get into the business. Furthermore, this is contrary to her traditions.”

Speaking of Rizal in California, I was reminded by the Palace marker of a bust of Rizal that I saw in National City in San Diego during a previous visit, right in front of a mall where you can get anything Pinoy, from Goldilocks cakes to Chow King siopao, which hordes of Filipino-Americans line up for. Nothing quite so grand as the Palace Hotel’s Victorian opulence, but I’m sure Pepe himself would have appreciated the gesture of standing where most of the passersby actually knew who he was.

(With many thanks to Dr. Robert Yoder’s website at http://joserizal.info and to http://www.joserizal.ph for many of these quotations.)

Penman for Monday, October 19, 2009


I ENDED the first part of this column-piece last week by mentioning how government propaganda typically burnishes the image of The Boss Almighty, to make him or her larger than life. A recent item on the Palace website demonstrates this penchant for melodramatic mythologizing. (Before I go any further, take note that I’m reproducing these messages verbatim, with all the hurried grammatical and mechanical errors you can expect especially from email and SMS, so let’s dispense with the sic’s. At the same time and on the other hand, if I were the propagandist, I’d probably make sure that the item was as close to letter-perfect as it could be before sending it off, shouldn’t I?)

“GABALDON, Nueva Ecija - More than 5,000 residents warmly welcomed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as she visits Gabaldon Municipal Hall here today to further enhance the administration's social services program.

“Residents brought placards thanking the President for her social programs in the province of Nueva Ecija that uplifts the lives of the poor citizens.

“Some of the placards have inscriptions extolling President Arroyo as ‘dakilang ina’ (great mother) while others thank the Chief Executive for the implementation of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) that benefits most of the residents….

“Licab resident Filipina Manuel stood up and went on the stage and expressed her profound thanks to the President for the said program. “Manuel said that she started receiving the cash grant from the 4Ps program since August 2008 stressing that the money she received was spent for the needs of her family, especially to the education and health of her children.

“Manuel tearfully told the President that meeting her onstage is a dream come true because she never imagined that she will be able to meet the country's leader despite her status in life.”

Now, I don’t doubt that melodrama sells, especially in this land of the telenovela, and I can even believe that the fortuitously named Filipina Manuel was moved to tears by presidential charity. But the medium for this message—a news story, online, in eminently editable English—only emphasizes its contrivance.

To be fair, it’s still a long way from the “Malakas at Maganda” fantasy of Marcosian times, but the article reminds me that, within certain institutions like presidential palaces—where employees feel much less accountable to vague abstractions like “the people” or “the truth” than to The Boss—propagandists often find themselves writing not to persuade the masses out there but to please The Reader up there. It’s the office culture, not the writer, that produces these confections.

The flip side of canonization is, of course, demonization, and in a 180-degree turn from the above, here’s an emailed message I got from another reader, ominously titled “The Truth Regarding the Bondage of Gloria Arroyo with the Devil”:

“As our people struggle amidst one of the worst calamity our country has experienced, we learn that Gloria Arroyo's net worth ballooned from P6.7 million to P143.5 million between 1992 to 2008—and that she spend P2.7 billion in foreign travels since 2003—including the Calamity Fund which our suffering people needs so badly today. We have come to the conclusion that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is possessed by a demon! A person can be a graduate of a Catholic school, a believer in Jesus Christ, will go to church and have her picture taken as she received Holy Communion which is the most disgusting picture of her (to use the most sacred mystery of our faith for her evil purpose is beyond our understanding), but still be in bondage to Satan and demons. To be more accurate, we state that she has been invaded by Satan! We believe that she cannot commit all her nefarious activities unless she is bond with Satan! It is essential to look at what the Bible has to say about the devil.”

As most of you know, I’m no fan of the little lady, but this example illustrates another aspect of poor propaganda: too much can backfire and become too little. The only people who will buy demonic possession here are the same ones who already believed it to be begin with.

But never mind the patently incredible or hyperbolic. It’s even worse when I find myself in fundamental sympathy with certain views and positions, but see them articulated so poorly or so awkwardly that my toes curl. Here’s an account by an activist group of a recent assault on demonstrators marching to the Palace:

“What happened at the Malacañang gates is an exaggerated use of force against the youth and students. At the moment we reached Gate 7 of Malacañang, elements of the PSG and PNP immediately welcomed us with blows and nightsticks. Some of them were not even in uniform. Negotiations went underway only after they have arrested 20 of our fellow students and 17 of us have suffered mild to serious physical injuries. They were like rabid dogs hitting many of our fellow students in the face, abdomen, some even pinning them to the ground like common criminals. Those who have fallen were stepped on by the perpetrators like they were putting off cigarette butts. Female students were harassed by un-uniformed elements which held and pulled their clothes off, almost getting them undressed.

“Our message is clear: we are enraged over Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s corrupt practices and tyrannical rule. Shame on this government who has the gall of lavishing millions for foreign trips and banquets while raking millions in corruption, one after another ever since she came into power.”

The potential power of the indignation in this case is sapped by the clumsiness of the prose, often a result of righteous anger bubbling over. These young comrades might consider that, when handling explosive material or strong emotion, ironic understatement and restraint will often produce a more profound impact on the reader than thunderous bombast.

And sometimes I get messages that simply leave me dumbfounded, not knowing where or how to even begin understanding what I’m being told. Take this from a tireless proselytizer for—well, something to do with conscience, since it’s mentioned half a dozen times. Perhaps this propagandist needs to be reminded that repetition can be more tedious than persuasive:

“This particular pastoral care to our COMMISSION ON ELECTION through the Chairman on Comelec in the Office of the Municipality of Balayan in the name of MR. NOLASCO MABUTAS in this coming NATIONAL & LOCAL ELECTION year 2010 to the homily of REV. FR. FROILAN CARREON, JR., this 24th day of September through the intercessions of our Mother BLESSED VIRGIN MARY is important on October 7, 2009 to all of us Filipinos about our MORAL CONSCIENCE.

“Sincere gratitude that it was timely about the homily through the GOSPEL today September 24, 2009 that we should now to start to examine our own conscience. It is truly sad that we see into our lives from political point of view, social point of view, cultural point of view, economic point of view and even to our religious point of view etc., that what the homily says about erroneous, scrupulous an delicate conscience are truly what we should or be careful to determine through our examination of conscience of what level of conscience doe we have and do we follow. For what is happening around us and even around the world of the reason SINS are rampant is because we are not truly know of how to listen to our true conscience.”

Angels and demons, demons and angels, indeed!

Penman for Monday, August 6, 2007


(Because something's apparently gone screwy with some of my archives, and because some readers have asked me about this piece—which I adverted to in last week's column—I'm reprinting a post from two years ago.)

IT COULD be that I’m just getting old, but lately I’ve been dismayed and depressed by the state of manners on the Internet. I help moderate a message board (www.philmug.ph) that now has over 9,000 members, and I’m a member myself of several more such virtual hangouts devoted to everything from electronic gadgets like iPods and Palm PDAs to fountain pens and heritage conservation. (The one thing I avoid, perhaps surprisingly, is any public forum made up of writers and wannabe writers, for reasons you’ll find shortly.)

Our Apple users and fans club (that’s basically what it is) has been a generally pleasant and helpful group, ever ready to dispense free and quick advice about everything from the difference between SATA and PATA drives and between FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 (and, of course, between Mac OS X and Windows Whatever). But some weeks on the board can be more vexatious than others, and last week was one of those, with an inordinate number of people, it seemed to me, venting their assorted resentments, rages, and anxieties, caring little if their rants produced or provoked similarly negative vibes in others.

Never mind what those specific issues were; they matter little to anyone but geeks. It wasn’t the questions or issues that disturbed me so much as the way they were raised and pursued—often with undisguised meanness, if not malice aforethought, and with no concessions to diplomacy, compromise, and good-natured humor. Indeed, what used to be the domain and the art of ironic humor has been taken over by sarcasm and verbal battery.

It isn’t just on this message board I moderate, either; it’s all over the Internet, this creeping outbreak of ill will and gutter behavior that ironically seems to afflict those with the money and the education to buy computers and get DSL service. Over at another forum I frequent—devoted to the arcane pursuit of fountain pen collecting—two grown men were bashing each other a couple of weeks ago over, believe it or not, the exact configuration of solid-gold 1940s Sheaffer pens. Here’s how part of that discussion went:

“I would be most interested in your assertion that in general, a sample size of 0.1% of the subject population cannot produce a statistically significant result. Merely characterizing a survey's characteristics as ‘lunacy’ without providing a shred of supporting math is, to put it mildly, uncompelling, and your embedded assertion that the ratio of sample size to population is the determinant of statistical significance calls into question your grasp of statistical theory.”

That, at least, was an intelligent and even illuminating if occasionally pungent debate. (The other side responded: ‘Your penchant for avoiding the issue being discussed and branching off on some tangent is pretty typical of your discourse. Try and stay focused.”) Most “flame wars”—as these long-distance quarrels are called—employ considerably blunter language, chiefly because, I suspect, the antagonists possess the linguistic skills of ten-year-olds, and in many cases are just a bit older. Endearments like “Moron!” routinely get exchanged in these flame wars, which erupt with the spontaneity of a scuffle in the schoolyard during recess, usually between boys trying to sound like men, and also usually over the presumption of some exotic expertise, although I’ve yet to witness a flame war over prescriptions to end global hunger.

It’s in the nature of the Internet, of course, to host these brutal and often unrefereed skirmishes. Some surfers see the Internet as an open and wide frontier where no rules obtain and manners don’t matter. The Web’s anonymity encourages boorishness, recklessness, and other behavior that might land you in court, in jail, or in the hospital in the real world. People tend to shoot their mouths off and say the cruelest things online because there’s no sense of public accountability. Slinging mud from behind an alias, you can’t get sued, you can’t get slugged, and your mother won’t even know.

Some people mistakenly presume that what’s said on the Internet will stay there. (Well, here’s proof that it won’t; there’s no such thing as an online whisper—and, surprise, print still matters.) I’ll bet anything that the people in my forum who feel alluded to in this piece will be caterwauling again tomorrow, to screech that I dragged their private plaints and torments out into the open—as if posting a message that could reach 9,000 members weren’t public enough.

Now, we didn’t need the Internet to realize that the world is full of idiots and bigots, and that most of us, yours truly included, will occasionally be a bit of both, given the right astral configuration and the way we wake up in the morning. One thing I happen to be openly and proudly biased about is Apple and nearly anything that rolls out of its Cupertino, CA plant. (And yes, friends, I’ll be first in line for the iPhone when they release it here next year.) But when Apple drops the ball—as, like any other big company, it will from time to time—there will be no louder complainers than we the faithful, who should justly feel abandoned and betrayed. So admittedly we’re not immune to these seizures of what will seem to others a silly passion, and now and then we might even raise our voices in defense of a block of plastic.

But that’s entertainment, and it has little to do with the witless vitriol that I’ve been catching around the Web—again, not only here, and not only now. Years ago, almost when the Internet was just beginning to take root in this country, I joined an online group of Filipino writers based here and in the US, and for a time that exchange proved useful and cordial. But as the group grew in size and variety, the chemistry changed; one day I found myself being savaged by a fellow I’d never met and never heard of, for some strange reason I couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t worth the aggravation; I had better things to do than to explain or defend my writing and myself to complete strangers, and I swore from then on to limit my Web time to things I could enjoy as a respite from literature, which I reserved to my private practice.

But even in literature—and especially in its newest form, the blog—it seems that ranting has taken over prose and poetry. Many blogs are amusing, a few are highly informative and thought-provoking, but a vast multitude barely get beyond retching, whining, venting, cursing, and putting everybody else down.

Aside from the pervasive meanness, I’ve been bothered by another recurrent note in the message traffic: the brazen sense of entitlement that many young people seem to possess and brandish, almost like a weapon. Over at PhilMUG, we’ve had an 18-year-old brashly demanding that someone give him/her (on the Web, where people use pseudonymous nicknames or “handles”, you never know) a free computer. “Gimme a Mac!” cried this newbie in his/her very first post. “I damn need one!”

In this “gimme, gimme, gimme” culture, the world owes everyone a Lamborghini, and people don’t need to work or suffer for the things they want. All they have to do is scream like they did for their baby food, and the object of their desire should appear at their feet and make mewling sounds. If it doesn’t, then that’s good enough reason for another rant.

Forgive me if I suspect that these are people—many of them in their surly mid-twenties—who’ve never been truly whacked by life over the head, who’ve never laid their lives on the line for a cause larger than themselves, who’ve never stared into the barrel of a gun, who’ve never spent a day in jail, and whose daily crises consist of having to choose between the mocha latte and the cappuccino.

Thankfully, some of them grow up. I once had a student who kept loudly complaining that the Palanca Awards for Literature were rigged, because he joined them year after year and never won a thing. Surely there was some grand conspiracy to deny him his due. When I could no longer stand his whining, I lost my temper in public (think of it as doing a Pinatubo after 600 years of dormancy) and suggested to him, perhaps a bit too sharply, that the simpler reason for his spectacular string of losses was to be found in himself. (I could’ve added—meaning no offense to the generous Palancas—that with the number of prize categories open at that time, any fool and his dog was bound to win one sooner or later, if you just submitted enough entries with the consistency of a parking-ticket dispenser.) Well, either my sermon challenged his spirit or his number was up, but he soon won a Palanca, and I was truly happy for him; I doubt that he’ll be thinking the same sullen thoughts now.

A few weeks ago, I had occasion to discuss the poetry of Anne Sexton in class, and if you know anything about her—apart from her plaintively powerful poetry—it would be the inescapable fact that she committed suicide, in 1974. A beautiful and brilliant woman, Sexton had grappled with her demons all her life, and took to poetry as a means of taming them. She would even write that “Poetry, after all, is the opposite of suicide.” That she ultimately took her own life doesn’t detract from the quality and the legacy of her poetry. (In “Wanting to Die,” she would say that “… Suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”) This leads me to think that those who can write poetry, do; those who can’t, rant.

Can’t the world use a little kvetching, however inartistic? Sure, it can—it had better, or otherwise we’ll end up wallowing in treacly (and very possibly shallow) good feelings. But there’s a difference between the ranter who just rants, and the ranter who disses the world then picks up a chisel or a compass to change it—or a pen, to write beautifully and even blissfully of one’s pain, ultimately to transform it into something more valuable and enduring than this season’s hemline or tomorrow’s gadget.

Penman for Monday, October 12, 2009


I CAN imagine all the hate mail that this column is going to generate, so much so that I almost wish I hadn’t thought of writing this, but this has been rolling around in my noggin for so long that I’m convinced I’ll go nuts if I don’t let it out now, today, this very minute. In fact, I’ll do myself one better by devoting not just one but two columns to this particular peeve.

The immediate spur was a text message I received just hours ago from an anonymous sender, whose phone number I’ll keep to myself for now. It said: “ABS CBN reported to have received more than 100-Million pesos worth of donations in cash & in kind but they have only released around 130 thousand of relief bags. Assuming that each bag contained 100 pesos worth of goods, that is only 13-Million pesos. There are more than 80-million pesos worth of goods and cash in their possession still. And why does ABS CBN have to wait for Kris Aquino and their stars to be the one to distribute these relief goods?”

Now, I’m no friend of the network or of any network—I generally mistrust giant organizations—although I have to admit having some good personal friends at ABS-CBN, and to appearing now and then on ANC as an unpaid resource person on everything from Macintosh machines to cultural scandals. But I had to ask myself, where was this coming from, and why? Why was anyone trying to put down ABS-CBN, which took a leading role in the Ondoy and Pepeng relief effort, at a time when people were properly focused on getting help from whatever source to whoever needed it most? What was ABS-CBN supposed to be doing with all those bags of noodles in its possession—hoard them for its own use?

The ridiculous and ill-timed message—clearly a cheap shot from a personal or corporate adversary—was just another reminder to me of how mean-spirited and (to use a word I’ve been employing a lot lately) snarky we’ve become. It’s a common hazard in this Age of the Rant, which I wrote about two years ago in my piece here on the “anti-rant rant.” For anything you do or say, there’s always someone out there with some vile and nasty retort, especially if it can be launched behind the guiltless anonymity of the Internet or of SMS. (I texted the sender back to ask “Who is this please?” but never, of course, got a reply.)

One thing you learn from the Internet is that the world is full of idle, unhappy people—curmudgeons, killjoys, and crackpots who can’t wait for an opportunity to make you as miserable as they are. When I recently wrote about my bumbling attempt to find a suitable birthday present for Beng, and eventually gifting her with a box of imported Spanish soap, I got a message from a reader castigating me for not being nationalistic enough to give her locally made lather; didn’t I know that I was harming Philippine industry, etc. etc? Presumably, this fellow didn’t type out that message on a Taiwanese computer while cooling his fiery Filipino spirit with a gulp of American cola.

But never mind me; the bad vibes are all over the air, infecting and afflicting millions, and we’ll be sure to catch more of them in the months to come. Indeed, in the wake of several natural and man-made disasters and another spate of political exposés and scandals, and with the national elections looming over everyone’s head, we can safely say that ‘tis the season for propaganda, with which we are now being deluged by every medium available: SMS, the Internet, radio, TV, and even billboards along the highway. Sen. Miriam Santiago’s recent diatribe against thinly veiled, premature political advertising (paid for in some conspicuous cases by public funds, to add material injury to the insult of being taken for fools) just barely scratches the surface of the phenomenon.

Call it any way you like—public relations, advertising, advocacy writing, editorializing, persuasion, proselytizing, guerrilla journalism, citizen journalism, negative campaigning, etc.—it’s still propaganda to me.

Just to be clear about this, I have nothing against the word itself and what it represents. Defined by Webster’s as “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person”, propaganda as a concept is ironically neutral—it can champion both laudable and tawdry causes—but once put into action can be anything but. Etymologists also tell us that the word can be traced back to Pope Gregory XV’s establishment in 1622 of the congregatio de propaganda fide, a cardinals’ committee for the propagation of the faith, so we can assume (depending on how you look at the Catholic Church’s motives and machinations) that “propaganda” was conceived with the holiest of intentions.

Three centuries later, speaking to the party faithful at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work in March 1957, Mao Tse-tung left no doubt that propaganda was a good thing: “Our comrades in propaganda work have the task of disseminating Marxism. This has to be done gradually and done well, so that people willingly accept it. We cannot force people to accept Marxism, we can only persuade them.”

Apparently we share the same positive appreciation of the word, because our historians refer to the reformist efforts of Rizal and company between 1880 and 1895 as the Propaganda Movement, and we activists of the 1960s and 1970s borrowed some of that shine and exalted our own campaign for a new nationalist, progressive consciousness as the Second Propaganda Movement.

It’s usually when you’re on the receiving end of it—and in a very bad, often underhanded way—that you think of propaganda as being “black.” This is when an enemy or rival deliberately spreads lies or plants malicious rumors to undermine your position or your reputation. (And when the rumor happens to be true, you typically shrug it off by saying something like, “That’s politically motivated!” or “I refuse to dignify that rumor with a response!”) A classic example of black propaganda was when right-wing fratmen smeared the walls of UP Diliman one election eve in the early 1970s with red paint and “communist” slogans, effectively scaring and steering many student voters into supporting the ultimately victorious administration candidate. (Many years later, campaign managers and partisans from both sides—some of them now professional political operators—would still speak of that tactic in admiring terms; nasty or not, it worked.)

It’s no big surprise when the government’s PR machinery churns out press releases extolling the virtues of the Great Incumbent, whoever or whatever he or she may be. Like new iPhones, politicians are smudge magnets; they attract dust, scratches, grime, and whatever else will stick to shiny plastic. So you expect a brush-up now and then, but government PR being what it is (and yes, I’ve been there and done that), it can’t help a touch of the melodramatic, as an excerpt from a recent Palace release demonstrates—but let’s save that for next week!

Flotsam & Jetsam (90) for October 11, 2009


AS SOME of my friends know, I’ve become an intensely addicted poker player. I've won a couple of tournaments, but as pokeristas go, I'm not a very good one (a “donkey,” in poker parlance, who can’t help making bad calls out of sheer hubris or dumb curiosity and enriching the rest of the table in the process), but one besotted enough about the game to be reading books by the likes of Daniel Negreanu instead of Thomas Pynchon, and watching video replays of classic poker games on YouTube instead of the new Pinoy indie movies that have “important” written all over them. My excuse is that I'm gathering material for my next novel (I am!) but it's really to get away from everything else I have to do, especially anything having to do with words more elaborate than the only three words you need to know in poker: "call," "check," or "raise."

Yesterday, a Saturday, I joined a group of poker enthusiasts from pokermanila.com to play in the first PokerManila Inter-Collegiate Tournament at the new Big Ace Liberty Club along Shaw Boulevard. I was part of the UP Maroons “seniors” team—meaning, I guess, anyone with a UP student number earlier than 80-xxxxx. My pair of aces got painfully cracked by a straight and I busted out of the tournament early. So I moved over to the cash game, at the 25-25 table (the so-called “blinds” or mandatory first bets are 25 pesos), and promptly began losing again. Story of my poker life!

But I hung on, because aside from the pot or the money on the table, we were all going for the "High Hands" promo of Big Ace, which gives special prizes to the day's best hands as of 12 midnight (a neat marketing ploy, of course, to keep you glued to your seat way past bedtime). That deadline passed and I had hit nothing better than a full house of jacks (JJJ77), and others were hitting quads and even a straight flush, so I said I’d cut my losses and pack up after another “orbit” (a complete turn around the table; for a glossary of poker terms, see here).

Now here’s what happened in one of those last few deals, where I had just about P1,500 worth of chips left.

My hole cards (the two cards every player is dealt) are 7h-8h. I often make donkey calls (way too often!) and I can't resist suited connectors (the 7 and 8, same suit), so I say, okay, here’s where we make a gallant last stand, and I call the blind (the minimum bet), as do several others.

Now comes the flop (the first three “community” cards on the table): 5h-Kh-3s.

Aha, I say—a four-flush! I need just one more heart to complete a flush, which is probably enough to win, so I make a bet of about 200, forcing two or three players out, but one player goes all in for 850, and the next guy calls! Of course I call, and I think someone else after me also calls. So now we have a monster pot all of a sudden, and we all get up on our feet and people around us start following the action.

The turn (the fourth card, second to the last) is 6h. I hit my flush! But the guy beside me goes all in with his remaining chips, so I happily call, and we have a side pot of about 1,200.

Now everyone shows his cards before the last or "river" card is drawn. Player A, the original raiser, has Ad-Kd (ace and king of diamonds). So as far as i'm concerned, he's drawing dead to my flush (no way he can win). But Player B turns up his cards—Ah-Qh! Suffering Jesus! He has the nuts (the highest possible flush, with an ace-high, short of a straight flush, or five cards of the same suit, in sequence)!

So now I'm showing K-5-6-7-8, all hearts, against B's A-K-Q-5-6. I have a very faint hope of making a straight flush—either 4-5-6-7-8 or 5-6-7-8-9 of hearts—but another player has already folded the 4h, so my one and only out is the 9. That's one card in a deck of 52!

The dealer draws the river card, and... drumroll... it's the 9 of hearts! The crowd goes wild, I go nuts with the nuts, Player B is stunned speechless (as I certainly would be), and I get my name on the leader board for the next day's High Hands, since it's already 12:30 am.

Two deals later, I get up and cash out, to make doubly sure that my day has a happy ending. Hallelujah!

(You’d wish poker was like this every God-given day, but sadly, it ain’t necessarily so. And thanks to deejay of PokerManila for the pic of Penmanila in action—or rather, wondering where all his chips went at the inter-school tournament.)

Penman for Monday,October 5, 2009


MY DEEPEST sympathies, first of all, to the victims of tropical storm Ondoy, whose wrath we barely escaped. We drove out that fateful Saturday morning to have my bronchitis looked at the Lung Center, and by the time we left the hospital, the whole area around the Quezon Memorial Circle had turned into a churning lake. We plowed through the water and snuck out to the higher ground of UP Village just in time; another 15 minutes would have made a terrible difference. I spent the rest of the week coughing and wheezing like a neglected Volkswagen, but it takes a disaster like Ondoy to remind us how trivial our complaints and rants are, compared to what many of our countrymen have to endure—with or without typhoons.


LEST I completely forget, let me attend this week to a few more interesting details I noted from a recent visit to Singapore. I’d wanted to report on these very shortly after that visit, but more pressing concerns like the National Artist Awards controversy came into the picture.

During that trip, I was privileged to judge a competition to which young Singaporeans—most of them in high school—submitted their own short stories. I read over 150 entries over a few days before choosing the three winners and citing five other meritorious pieces on the shortlist. One thing that left a deep impression on me was how many of the stories I read (certainly more than half) had to do with the death and loss of mothers—many of whom are taken for granted by the protagonists, who then undergo deep remorse. I’ll leave it to the sociologists and psychoanalysts to puzzle that one over, but it was such a salient feature that I thought I’d take note of it.

I also observed how many of the people we met in Singapore were fellow Filipinos, and how well they did in their jobs: Sherwin on the river boat cruise, Marby in one of the quayside restaurants, Tere in the specialist shoe store. They do us and their families proud, keeping our heads above another kind of economic deluge, and I keep hoping that when they come home, they’ll bring with them the higher expectations that will turn this country around toward a more just and modern society.

And now, as I do once every other year or so, I’m going to turn over the rest of this piece to Beng’s own impressions of Singapore, specifically her visit to its Heritage Conservation Centre, to which she had been invited by a friend and fellow conservator, Ricky Francisco of the Lopez Museum, who’s training with the HCC. Beng (also known as June Poticar Dalisay) is, of course, an art restorer and conservator, and keenly interested in learning new and advanced conservation techniques from the best of the world and of the region. It was her first trip to Singapore, and while I was busy with my own functions at the literary festival, Beng hied off with Ricky to the HCC for a day with their peers. She reports:


“HCC IS a government-funded institution whose primary task is to preserve, conserve, and maintain the art collections and all acquisitions of all government museums. I was so glad that the director of the HCC approved Ricky’s request to show me around the center.

“I was introduced to Ang Jee, a quiet but talented conservator, who gave me a tour of the storage rooms, which were huge and had very high ceilings to accommodate big and tall artworks. I noticed that vinyl tiles covered the floor, laid out just like hospital floors, without seams or corners, to prevent the accumulation of dirt and for easy cleaning. Small boxes to trap insects were strategically placed on the floor near the doors, which were lined at the bottom with plastic bristles to filter the air that passes through the gap between door and floor and to prevent insects from entering.

“I was then shown a room where paintings are stored. It was a very spacious area that held a sizeable number of artworks from different Asian countries, including several oil paintings done by Filipino painters. The paintings hung from panels and glided smoothly along tracks laid out on the floor. This room and the other room for storing huge and tall items were equipped with temperature and humidity controls. Video cameras are strategically located not only in these rooms but along corridors as well.

“Ricky led me to a conference room where I was introduced to Heng Noi Loh, Director of the HCC. Though slight of built, this lady impressed me with her energy, dedication and vision for the future of the Centre. We discussed common problems experienced by art conservators all over. Heng Noi was very interested in our Art Conservation and Restoration Services, Inc. (ACES), today the biggest private art conservation company in the Philippines, which I helped to establish with six other Filipino colleagues in 2001. I was informed that Singapore does not have any similar company. Ricky, on the other hand, shared his experience in organizing a forum (which I attended) where art conservators/restorers, museum curators, art historians, art critics came together to discuss problems and concerns that affect the practice in the Philippines.

“’And what is the most serious problem of Filipino conservators?’ Heng Noi asked. I told her that our government does not seem to give enough priority and seriousness in preserving our history and culture. Government institutions and museums need more financial support to modernize conservation laboratories. We also need to include art conservation as a certificate or degree course in universities and colleges. The Philippines has very skilled conservators, but the existing laboratories and equipment are not at par with our neighbors in Asia. Singapore and Thailand are far ahead of the Philippines since these countries recognize the importance of protecting their culture and heritage, a valuable asset that also contributes to the economy. Heng Noi and I ended our meeting with an agreement to continue to communicate with each other.

“Singapore is basically a young country but it has taken every step to preserve not only its artifacts, but also its old districts lined with quaint and colorful shop-houses. I was really impressed with the Singapore’s efforts to revive and bring to life the river that meanders gracefully throughout the city. Butch and I had a wonderful time exploring Chinatown and Little India where we saw the blending of the old Singapore with the new and modern structures around the city.

“My visit to the HCC gave me the opportunity to meet and observe conservators of different nationalities as they went about their work. I felt such envy as I looked around the modern and very well equipped laboratories. I told myself that this should and will serve as an inspiration for me and for my country to aim for the best.

“My tour of the HCC was almost over but before I left, I was able to join the centre’s conservators—Amanda, Cheryl, Mar, Selina and Ricky—in discussing the treatment for a painting on paper. We were so engrossed in this activity that we forgot about our differences, our race, our age, our color. And for one moment, we were one, united by our desire to save a piece of history—Singapore’s history, our friend, our neighbor.”

Flotsam & Jetsam (89) for September 28, 2009


TO ALL our relatives and friends overseas who may be wondering, Beng and I and the members of the Dalisay and Poticar families are okay, even if our feet may still be wet from Saturday's awful flooding. I actually rode out to the hospital with Beng that morning to get my bronchitis looked at, and we left the hospital just in time to drive past the growing logjam of cars, jeeps, and buses around the QC Circle, which was fast turning into a lake; another 15 minutes in the open would have made a terrible difference. Parts of UP--one of the city's highest areas--were submerged in rushing water.

So we were lucky to escape the worst of Typhoon Ondoy, but many if not most Manileños weren't. Again, and as usual, it takes a tragedy to shake us by the collar. As I observed in another forum, one of the things that literally saved many Filipinos is this country's heavy dependence on cellular telephony. People on rooftops called in to TV stations and relief hotlines for rescue; others tweeted about local conditions. (Sadly, that didn't much help the poorest of the poor, who could only scream and cry as the floodwaters took their homes and loved ones away.)

Right now the effort is rightly focused on rescue and relief, but there's going to be a lot of soul-searching and finger-pointing when this is over. While this was probably one of those once-in-50-years events, we've always had a problem with flooding, and have made things worse for ourselves by building over and clogging natural waterways. In other words, some of this damage is man-made; a painful and sobering lesson, just as the world meets on the subject of climate change.

Here's a video of Ondoy's damage, if you haven't seen it yet (thanks to GMA-7):


For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV

Penman for Monday, September 28, 2009


YOU NEVER know who or what you’ll run into at weddings. A couple of Sundays ago, Beng and I were pleasantly surprised to find that we knew the father of the bride, Eliza Hao Chin; it was the groom, Johannes Sia, who was my friend as a fellow Apple and fountain-pen fanatic, but Beng had long known Vic Hao Chin Jr. from the Theosophical Society of the Philippines, which Vic leads and of which Beng and her father Jess had been longtime members. (If you’re wondering what “theosophists” are, think of them as some of the world’s gentlest people, believers in nonviolence and in a rich spiritual life.)

So we chatted with Vic while the reception area was being set up, and it was in the course of that conversation that I discovered a bit of good news worth sharing with readers whom a daily barrage of the bad stuff—corruption, abuse, ambition, exploitation—threatens to turn into sullen cynics. When we asked Vic what he was busy with these days, he mentioned the Golden Link College.

Like most of you, I’d never heard of the GLC before, but it turns out that this school in Camarin, Caloocan City—set up by the TSP and the Theosophical Order of Service as the Golden Link School in 2002—practices a unique and pioneering educational philosophy that our mainstream institutions would do well to learn from. It’s a school that emphasizes learning without fear and punishment, and that promotes harmony and cooperation over competition.

“We don’t give out medals for, say, declamation,” Vic says. “Instead, we have each and every one of our students recite a piece before an audience that includes their parents. It may take two days, but everyone’s happy.”

Key to the success of GLC’s approach is the retraining of teachers more used to shouting, threatening, and other forms of intimidation. Vic admits that “It’s hard, because you have to be very patient, and sometimes you lose it after a couple of weeks. But we can’t give up.” Patience and caring, GLC-style, can do miracles. Many of the school’s students are problem children expelled from other schools. “At first, they have to adjust to the new environment, but soon they learn to be trusting and caring as well.” Only in the most extreme case, where a student might physically threaten the safety of others, will he or she be asked to leave.

Located in a poor neighborhood, the college has one form of scholarship or other for most of its 400 students. It offers bachelor’s degrees in secondary and elementary education, and emphasizes English instruction, “although we focus more on public speaking and using English in everyday situations than on grammar,” Vic says.

Vic Hao Chin wants to establish closer ties with the community, such as by providing books for local libraries and turning them into youth centers. If you want to help Vic in this endeavor, or if you want to learn more about the Golden Link College, check out their website here.


A FEW weeks ago, I stumbled on another praiseworthy cultural initiative, this time under the auspices of the Vibal Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Vibal Publishing, better known to most Filipinos as the publishers of textbooks. I was invited by the foundation’s Tin Mandigma and Karen Lucero to hold a one-day workshop on writing for their staff, and since I had know Tin from her days as a reading advocate (she still is), I was happy to oblige.

I did some Googling on my hosts, and was even more impressed to find that, through its foundation, Vibal has pushed the learning envelope much farther into the digital age. The foundation runs four websites: www.wikipilipinas.org, www.filipiniana.net, www.thepoc.net and www.e-turo.org. The Wikipilipinas site is a localized version of the more familiar Wikipedia, and—given the inherent difficulties and pitfalls of something so large as the “wiki” concept—is probably the one among the four that needs the most work. The other three, however, are well on their way to becoming mature, robust resources for the scholar looking into Philippine affairs.

The Filipiniana site—still a work in progress—offers digitized versions of many of our most important historical and literary documents, such as the massive Blair & Roberston series, the Philippine Revolutionary Records, the complete Jose Rizal, the Philippine Legal Database, and 100 Filipino Novels, among others. The Philippine Online Chronicles is a snappy, literate, well-laid-out newsmagazine. And E-Turo is a priceless resource for the hapless teacher who needs help with his or her lesson plans. (Here’s a sample lesson: “ENGLISH 4 Quarter 4 Week 2: Looking at Problems in a Global Context. Explore the opportunities for obtaining comprehensive information and varying perspectives about looking at problems in a global context. Agree/disagree with other people's outlook on a given issue. Get information about global problems and their solutions from various sources. Express appreciation for human nature presented in literature. Stress worthwhile values as portrayed in a literary text.”)

When I think about what a mess we often make of things and of how easy it is to surrender to cynicism and to say that nothing really works anymore so we might as well give up, I remember exemplary private initiatives like these and reflect on my own mission as a teacher. Compared to the challenges that others have so boldly taken on, my job’s a breeze.

Penman for Monday, September 21, 2009

BENG AND I were glad to host a special friend who was in town last week, someone who’s been to every corner of the world and who has seen and written about most of its most fabulous markets and bazaars, but who wanted Beng to escort her to the one place that practically all of our foreign visitors—especially the women—find irresistible: Greenhills and its pearl bazaar.

Our guest for the day was an old Manila hand named Julie Hill, who had spent many years here during the late 1960s and 1970s as the wife of the late Arthur Hill, who had served as director of the Ford Foundation. Now based in San Diego, California, Julie drops in on her Manila friends every now and then, despite the aggravations of Philippine life that have caused her more than once to swear never to return. But still she does.

I didn’t know Julie until about six years ago, when former Central Bank Governor and art connoisseur Jimmy Laya asked me if I was willing to look over the memoirs of an American friend of his named Julie. Jimmy had become fast friends with the Hills during their Manila years, in a relationship nurtured not just by their professional association but also by a shared love of art. When Jimmy’s wife Alice was conceiving, Julie took a look at her and told her, “You will have a son.” Many months later, indeed a son was born, to whom Julie became godmother, and the friendship was sealed for life.

When Jimmy introduced me by email to Julie, she had recently lost Arthur to cancer, and writing about their many-splendored life—one spent on a global jaunt from Australia to Afghanistan to America, with long, colorful pauses in Samoa and Thailand—was a way of keeping his memory alive. Mrs. Hill had been looking for an editor, and there were thousands of them in California, but she had taken Jimmy at his word when he assured her that this Filipino was as good as any of them, and I was anxious to prove Jimmy right.

I was happy to work on Julie’s draft. Though she was fluent in many languages, by her own humble admission, her English needed some help—she was, after all, an Alexandrian Greek who had grown up in Egypt and had only later moved to the US to take her master’s in chemistry in Minnesota, where she met Arthur—but the material was rich and unique, a feast of cultures and memorable encounters.

For while she stood by Arthur as dutifully as any diplomatic wife, Julie had always had a sharp eye and an absorbent mind of her own. (She would later become an AT&T and Lucent executive, crossing other boundaries in the corporate workplace.) Whether she was on the trail of a rare Afghan coin or quaffing vodka head to head with Russian peasants, Julie recorded her adventures with both a war correspondent’s tenacity and a poet’s sensitivity.

That first book, A Promise to Keep: From Athens to Afghanistan (XLibris, 2003), would be followed by another volume of travel pieces that I would also edit, The Silk Road Revisited: Markets, Merchants, and Minarets (Author House, 2006), which chronicled Julie’s journeys across Central Asia. It has to be said that these books are not self-indulgent diaries of the “Here’s me in Paris, here’s me in Rome” variety. Witness this fine sample of Julie’s prose, from a morning in Mongolia:

“At dawn I stepped outside my ger. It was a soft morning with the sun rising behind high clouds. Seized by the clarity and the silence I stood and listened. Not a breath of wind; not a sound from the gravel paths of our encampment, no machine whirring, no horse snorting, no voice coming from the nearby gers, no bird calling. I felt that I was in one of the emptiest places on earth.

“Freed of distraction I held my breath and listened to my own heartbeat; I sensed nothing. There was no wind to move the clouds or dust or bushes. No sound, no movement, no scent, no warmth yet in the sun, no cold remaining in the air. The only sensation was through the eyes: the desert, the mountains, and the hills. This was the Gobi. I wondered if it was possible to be happier….

“We started early every day, sailing on over billowing sand; there were dunes on the left and a huge horizon on the right…. For miles we saw nothing but dirt tracks. The only inhabitants of these immense plains were herds of dromedaries and horses. Once we saw a fine chestnut stallion galloping relentlessly from slope to slope. Another time four gazelles darted in front of us. There were two colors: the yellow of the grasses and the blue of the sky. The emptiness was startling. Mongolia made the sky, with its ornate clouds, seem crowded and busy.

“During the day the temperature was pleasant; through the hot hours of midday, mirages fluttered across the flat expanses. Phantom trees came and went. The nights were cold, bitter cold as temperatures plummeted; we sat around campfires and shared ghost stories. The sky wore extravagant shawls of stars.”

And here she is in Ashkabad:

“The modernesque Sheraton was my first glimpse of globalization, Central-Asia style: a tangle of tattooed truck drivers hauling food and medical supplies to Afghanistan, a Malaysian businessman, Swedish consultants, French architects, British engineers, and a mob of Russian and Turkmen hookers. In the mezzanine two young Turkmen perched on stools strumming ‘Yesterday’ and ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ on vintage guitars, and then segued in to a frenzied rendition of ‘Manitas de Plata’ before ending their set with Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Philadelphia’ sung in Russian. Out of curiosity, I entered the casino of the hotel; a cloud of smoke assaulted my eyes, leaving me with the mere impression of dubious characters playing baccarat. I retraced my steps quickly.

“Around the bar, rough and tumble oil drillers were busy fending off a dozen local beauties dolled up in cowboy hats, boots, and miniskirts or tight jeans. They swiveled their hips at potbellied old codgers from Exxon Mobil, Shell, Boeing, Halliburton, or one of the scores of multinational corporations looking to turn a profit in Turkmenistan, the wild westernmost of the Central Asian republics.”

And so Julie’s peregrinations go, to fabled places most of us can only dream about—Dunhuang, Urumqi, the Taklamakan Desert, Kashgar, Samarkand, and so on. As her editor, I too felt transported.

When, a few years ago, our daughter Demi met a man online who seemed to really like her, and she liked him, too. He lived in San Diego, so Beng and I took the opportunity of a visit there, with Julie playing hostess, to check him out over lunch at Julie’s in Rancho Sta. Fe; that way we actually met Demi’s husband-to-be, a very bright and affable guy named Jerry, even before Demi did. Needless to say, and with Julie’s concurrence, he passed. Months later, when Demi and Jerry were married at sunset on a ship that cruised the harbor. Julie was among the beaming guests.

Sometimes books bring us, indeed, to the strangest places in the strangest ways.

Penman for Monday, September 14, 2009

ONE OF the great side benefits of being a writer—in both journalistic and literary capacities—has been the opportunity to do a bit of traveling abroad, something I ‘d dreamed of feverishly since childhood, when we accompanied a departing neighbor to the old Manila International Airport and when I saw that Pan Am jet take off for the pink horizon.

Many decades and a couple of dozen countries later, I continue to be thrilled by the prospect of travel, despite the aches that now attend every long flight and my general desire to come home after a week or two. I still look forward to—and save up for—my annual visit to my daughter, mother, and sister in America, and am gratified when an invitation comes along (a rarity in these recessionary times) to fly off to some literary festival at the host’s expense.

Thus, one of the things I’m very careful about is my passport, which I keep along with other important documents in a small fireproof box at home. I’ve collected quite a few passports over the years, even given that I started traveling fairly late—at the ripe old age of 26 in 1980, on my first visit to the US. Now and then I look these passports over, and marvel at how such a hairy and reed-thin young man could metamorphose into this fat and balding creature I wince at every morning in the bathroom mirror.

About three weeks ago, I came across a press release from the Department of Foreign Affairs announcing the imminent availability of a new kind of passport—an ePassport, a state-of-the–technology travel document with whiz-bang features aimed at preventing tampering and fraud. As a self-styled techie, I was instantly intrigued. Now, I’ve never lost a passport, and I can’t see anyone wanting to steal my mug, but I’m hopelessly attracted to anything with a computer chip and a hologram, and while I had nowhere interesting to go until mid-October, I convinced myself that a new ePassport was the thing to get and to try. I remembered how my old green one wouldn’t register at the self-check-in kiosks in Stateside airports, requiring some manual intervention by a bleary-eyed clerk.

I noted the date that the DFA was going to begin taking applications for the new ePassport—August 26—and made an appointment online at the DFA website (www.dfa.gov.ph) to be there on that day and be among the first in the queue.

There are a few things I need to make clear at this point. Since the current number of ePassports is limited, the DFA is giving them out for the time being only for renewals, not for first-time applicants. There’s a list of requirements and some paperwork to complete—all the forms are online—and you do need to make that appointment online and be prepared to appear in person at the DFA office along Roxas Boulevard on the day and time slot reserved for you, as indicated in the e-mailed confirmation you’ll get pretty quickly; this is something your travel agent can’t for you just yet. And don’t forget to bring P950 for the new passport.

Having done all of these, I turned up at 9 am on August 26 at DFA’s Gate 2 (another entrance on the Libertad side), through which all passport applicants pass. I found my way to Window 28, where ePassport applications are received, only to discover that I had filled out the wrong application—the one for the regular maroon machine-readable passport, which remains a valid option for most people until the ePassport can be fully regularized. This, of course, is every paper-chaser’s Kafkaesque nightmare: shuffling around the bureaucracy from window to window, from room to room, only to be apprised of more requirements or to be told the dreaded words that government clerks seem trained to recite in a monotone, “Come back tomorrow.”

Thankfully the clerk who took my form seemed understanding enough, and even smiled when I found the presence of mind to ask to see her supervisor, so I could explain myself. I hadn’t intended to use my media connection to gain any advantage in the process—and indeed, I never do—but having sincerely applied and fallen in line like everybody else, I thought I might as well identify myself as a footloose writer intrigued by this newfangled technology, which I certainly was that morning. I was directed upstairs to the office of the chief of Consular Affairs, who turned out to be a very pleasant man named Renato Villapando. He and his assistant Fernando Beup seemed to know me from my writing—another happy surprise—and promptly walked me through the rest of the application procedure. (It emerged that I had caused the foul-up by applying a few hours too early—the proper form for the ePassport was uploaded after I went online—so Asst. Sec. Villapando had to approve my modified application personally.)

I took the opportunity to find out more about the DFA’s new baby. Given our country’s position as one of the world’s chief suppliers of skilled labor (not to mention Disneyland tourists and Hong Kong viajeras), the DFA processes an enormous number of passport applications everyday—a number that jumped from 500 in 1980 to 3,000 at present. With all this traffic, some passports don’t pass through the DFA—the fake and tampered ones, which often lead to grievous consequences for the holder. Thus, the DFA under Sec. Alberto Romulo has given high priority to improving passport security, leading to the ePassport, an innovation now adopted by more than 60 countries worldwide, including five other Asean countries.

What exactly is so special about the ePassport? The maroon MRP meets minimum global standards for security, but the ePassport has enhanced features like an embedded microchip that contains the photograph and personal data of the bearer. It employs biometric technology, and has invisible digital watermarks readable only under UV light. And here’s one neat trick: your passport photo is actually made up of microletters readable by a special decoding lens. In other words, until the next criminal genius comes along, this document is virtually tamper- and counterfeit-proof.

Oh, yes—when you apply for your ePassport, do come in your Sunday best and with your hair nicely done. Smile—but no teeth showing, please. I discovered that they’ll take your digital picture on the spot; the old passport photo will soon be a thing of the past. I came with my crew cut standing on end and my shirt collar wilted by the morning heat, an ignominy I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my new ePassport’s five-year validity.

It takes a few weeks to receive the new passport, so be sure you’re not going anywhere in the meantime. Also, your old green or maroon passport remains valid until its expiration date, although you can choose to renew and upgrade it to an ePassport now, following the process I outlined earlier.

And if you have time, visit the very interesting exhibit on the history of the Philippine passport—from Rizal’s time to ours—in the DFA lobby. Among other snippets of information, you’ll discover that President Ramon Magsaysay never traveled abroad while he was in Malacañang. Apparently, it isn’t just technology that’s radically changed.

Penman for Monday, September 7, 2009


OVER AT the University of the Philippines, which I’m fortunate enough to call my home as well as my workplace, I was recently asked to share my thoughts about two different but somehow related concerns—artists’ awards and new campus writing. Since the comments I prepared will probably circulate within a very small academic circle, I thought I’d share them with you here.

The first is a brief contribution to a roundtable discussion that will be published by the UP Forum, an official university publication, on the recently contentious issue of awards given to artists. What purpose do they really serve? The second is an introduction to a forthcoming issue of the Literary Apprentice, published by the UP Writers Club with the assistance of the Vibal Foundation, whose praiseworthy and pioneering cultural work I’m going to feature here soon.


LIKE MOST other people, Filipino artists need and seek recognition from their peers and from the public for their labors. With rare exceptions, a career in the arts brings few material rewards for the artist. His or her work will very likely remain obscure and unappreciated by most Filipinos.

Artists know this—or learn this lesson soon enough—when they embark on that career. As humans with material needs, they may complain about it from time to time, but it doesn’t stop them from persevering and producing wonderful new works that enliven the imagination of both their creators and audiences.

Awards for artistic achievement are an important form of recognition for the artist. In some cases, they bring a little monetary remuneration. But their greater value lies in delivering some affirmation and encouragement for the artist’s work. For new, young artists, an award is a spur to move on; for those in mid-career, an award is a welcome reminder that they still matter; for those approaching the end of a long life in art, it is a toast at sunset.

Problems may arise with these awards because of two things: one, if they are not credible, and two, if their givers and recipients take them too seriously. Awards are useful and meaningful only if they are given fairly and competently, with the integrity of the judges and of the selection process always above suspicion. Where people are involved, no competition or awards process can possibly be perfect, and mistakes or misjudgments may happen, but these should be the rare and acknowledged exceptions.

Likewise, winners should take these awards as indicators rather than guarantees of talent; they would do better to look forward to their next work and to its new challenges than to linger in the fleeting celebrity an award might bring. An award is probably best used to promote a cause rather than just a person—the need for more publishing opportunities and promoting readership, for example.

I might also note that ours is a country of sore losers, and every award given to a person means its loss for many others, so we should be used to hearing a cacophony of complaints—some valid, some plain griping—come awards time.

Critics who say that artists shouldn’t ever think about awards or about recognition and compensation, who argue that all awards are tainted and compromised, and who insist that artists should just plod on in penury and obscurity for some imaginary public good must be living on another planet. Perhaps awards for criticism—which a few will archly disdain—will help turn that attitude around. Indeed, we might be less dependent on institutionalized awards if we had a more active, more accessible, and more receptive body of art criticism in this country—the way that the newspaper supplements in the UK carry substantial but readable articles on the latest books and movies—but we don’t.

It seems that a lot of the art criticism here remains a snarky academic activity, often carried on in an impenetrable language even the artists can’t understand. Until that changes, awards will be the Filipino artist’s major albeit inadequate source of spiritual sustenance, beyond the intrinsic pleasure of creation and vision-sharing that art brings.


I HAVE a small collection of old issues of the Literary Apprentice from the 1950s—a period that we now look back to as a Golden Age for creative writing in the University of the Philippines, which had just moved its main campus from Padre Faura in Manila to Diliman in the new suburbs rising out of the postwar haze in Quezon City. In these issues can be found the names of writers who would soon form the veritable canon of modern Philippine literature, especially in English—among them, those of NVM Gonzalez, Francisco Arcellana, Amelia Lapeña, Virginia Moreno, Ricaredo Demetillo, Alejandrino Hufana, Edilberto Tiempo, Tita Lacambra-Ayala, Andres Cristobal Cruz, Adrian Cristobal, Rony Diaz, SV Epistola, and Elmer Ordoñez.

Most of these people were not yet the literary luminaries they would become; many were still students at the university, inflamed by the fire that had been lit three decades earlier by the founding of the UP Writers Club by the likes of Jose Garcia Villa and Angela Manalang-Gloria. Some of those students and UPWC members were not even English majors—such as the sculptor Napoleon Abueva, the economist Benito Lim, and the lawyer Alexander SyCip. But they were all—in the words of Virgie Moreno, in her foreword to the 1958 Apprentice—“madder Gaugins among the Tahitiennes,” unlike others whom the famously outspoken Moreno tartly likened to “safe cabbage hearts at home, fit only for soup.”

It was too bad that the Apprentice and the UPWC itself underwent a period of decline in the following decades, the understandable result of the decline of English as an area of academic interest at a time when the nation was swept in the 1960s and 1970s by a nationalist upsurge (in which, perhaps ironically, many UP English majors such as Jose Maria Sison, Epifanio San Juan Jr., and Elmer Ordoñez figured prominently).

The UPWC staggered on through the ‘90s, and slowly rebuilt itself in an environment that had become more encouraging of English and literary studies, and also open to new writing of many different persuasions—and not only in English at that. (It’s interesting to note that while creative writing in Filipino had never been one of UP’s strong suits at least until the 1960s, the 1958 Apprentice does open with a short story in Filipino, “Matandang Balon,” by Andres Cristobal Cruz.)

This new, bilingual Literary Apprentice of 2009 comes more than 50 years after that particular issue, and it is the best proof yet of how strongly resurgent creative writing has become in UP over this first decade of the 21st century. At UP and at its Institute of Creative Writing, we keep hearing complaints and criticisms about how academicized and formalistic writing has become, and about how our young students can think and write of nothing but their own small lives and middle-class concerns.

But yet here we find stories and poems that go far afield in both form and content, displaying the great diversity (and yes, the inevitable confusion) of life and experience in this Age of the Blog. Older readers comfortable with the old Apprentice may cock an eyebrow at words like “cosplay” and “fubu”, or be disturbed by a seeming penchant by some authors for dissection and decapitation; but these are the children of Dexter and CSI, of Gaiman and Murakami, of Linkin Park and the Eraserheads, of FHM and Wowowee. If they disturb, it is because they mean to.

How well they succeed in communicating—thematically and stylistically—the anxieties and aspirations of their time will be for the critics to sort out, but certainly they will require an aesthetic more open to dysfunction and dislocation than, say, Edilberto Tiempo’s demand, in the 1952 Apprentice, that Manuel Arguilla hew to Aristotelian unities.

Only time will tell, as the cliché goes, if the names of this issue’s contributors—those, for example, of John Paul Abellera, Sarah Matias, Anne Lagamayo, Clara Buenconsejo, Pia Benosa, U Eliserio, and Mary Anne Umali, to name just a random few—will continue to be read 50 years from now. I don’t think they should care about that as much as they should want to be read now. The breadth and depth of talent in this volume tells us that they well deserve it.

Flotsam & Jetsam (87) for September 2, 2009

I JUST got the horrifyingly sad news that Filipino-Canadian film critic Alexis Tioseco, who was with me on that "Media in Focus" episode I mentioned below, was shot dead last night along with his partner Nika Bohinc in their home in Quezon City in what appeared to be a robbery. I met Alexis and Nika on the ANC set and we chatted while waiting for Carlo J. Caparas and the other guests; he impressed me as a very bright young man, soft-spoken but insightful. Beng sat beside Nika during the episode and gave her quick translations of what was going on.

Thanks to a link I found on Kenneth Yu's website, here's Alexis writing Nika "The Letter I Would Love to Read to You in Person," from last July's issue of Rogue magazine--not a bad way to remember both of them by.

(Top photo from UNO Magazine.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (86) for September 2, 2009

I WAS at the 59th Palanca Awards ceremonies last night when I saw Carlo J. Caparas come in with his wife Donna Villa and seat themselves at a table close to ours. They had just missed a blistering speech by the guest of honor, National Artist Bien Lumbera, on the debasement of the National Artist Award by the President's inclusion of such names as Caparas's. You'll recall that Carlo J and I were panelists, along with film critic Alexis Tioseco, on a recent "Media in Focus" episode on ANC where we took opposite sides on the issue. Since it was going to be an awkward moment for some people, I thought I'd go over to Carlo and say hello, just to assure him that there was nothing personal about the way I've been going after the NCCA and GMA over the "DNA" scandal. He seemed warm and friendly, and we all just relaxed for the rest of the evening.

(Thanks to Rayvi Sunico for the pic. The annotations are his.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (86) for September 2, 2009


I PROMISED my readers in the STAR that I would give them a break and hold off talking about the DNA scandal for a while—and yes, I’ve already sent in next Monday’s column and it has little directly to do with DNAs—but thankfully I have this blog to keep you posted on the latest goings-on as far as this brouhaha is concerned.

Yesterday, I was actually at the NCCA office attend a regular meeting of the National Committee on Literary Arts, headed by Prof. Ricky de Ungria, who is also an NCCA commissioner. As soon as that meeting adjourned around lunchtime, I hurried off to another meeting in Quezon City. At some point during that second meeting, I glanced at my mobile phone—which I semi-permanently keep in silent mode, as matter of habit, not being much of a phone talker—and saw that I had been rung up three times by NCCA Executive Director Cecile Guidote Alvarez, one of the DNAs I’d been writing about these past four weeks.

Cecile and I know each from way back in the early 1970s, when I was a PETA trainee; much later, I worked briefly for her husband Sonny when he headed the DENR. Cecile and I have always been on cordial terms—but like many of her old friends at PETA, I too felt deeply disappointed when she chose to put herself over what would have been the proper and honorable thing to do, and clung on to the National Artist Award she had been bestowed by her boss and benefactress, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

I could’ve returned Cecile’s call, but I didn’t, and I don’t think I will. First of all, anyone who knows Cecile knows that she can talk up a storm, and I don’t feel like listening to one. As I’ve often said before and have written about on this blog, I hate talking on the phone for longer than a couple of minutes—more so when I know that the conversation will probably be less than pleasant. Also, being a signatory to the petition we filed at the Supreme Court for an injunction against the conferment of these dubious NA awards, I believe that anything the other side has to say to me should now be in writing. To put it simply, I don’t trust the NCCA leadership anymore. (If you wonder why, read my piece below on “Tampering with the evidence.” And Cecile, if you’re reading this—and I know you are—please do write me at jdalisay@mac.com. I promise to reply promptly and civilly.)

As it happened, I didn’t have to wonder long about what Cecile would have had to say to me. I soon got a text message from Ricky de Ungria, telling me that Cecile had turned up at the NCLA meeting, where the rest of the committee members had stayed on for lunch, and had promptly launched into a lecture justifying the changes the NCCA made on its website and, more to the point, elaborating on the basic theme of “I deserve to be a National Artist.” The dumbfounded NCLA members had to eat their lunch mostly in silence as this went on, but Ricky found the composure to ask if and when the NCCA Board is going to be convened to take up the issue. He didn't get an answer.

The NCCA, you’ll remember, was given ten days by the Supreme Court to come up with its response to our petition. The question now is, who speaks and decides for the NCCA? Will it be just the Executive Director herself, or the Chair (Vilma Labrador), or the Board, which includes commissioners like Ricky de Ungria and another outspoken critic, Elmar Ingles? It seems like Chairperson Labrador has gone straight to the Office of the Solicitor General for help, without even consulting the NCCA Board on what the NCCA’s institutional position should be. Is that right? Who benefits from no board consultation? You tell me.

Meanwhile, de Ungria has written the Acting Board Secretary to ask him to call an emergency meeting of the Board. Here’s the full text of that request:

2 September 2009

Mr. Bernan Corpus
Acting Board Secretary
National Commission for Culture and the Arts
633 Gen. Luna Street, Intramuros
Manila

Dear Mr. Corpus:

I wish to formalize my request for an emergency meeting of the Board to address the issue of the NCCA's reply to the charges of some National Artists and the Concerned Artists of the Philippines re the issue of additional National Artists for this year. I have texted you about this matter last August 24and 25, and, as syou have texted back, you have relayed my text request to the authorities, namely the ED on August 27 and the Chair on August 28.

To date, however, I have received only the text message that the Chair will still confer with the OSG on the matter. Yesterday, the ED sat in with the Committee on Literary Arts after our meeting and while we were having lunch. She defended the "updating" of information in the NCCA website which our member Dr. Jose Dalisay Jr. wrote about in his Monday column at the Philippine Star and proceeded to defend not only the idea of presidential prerogative and but herself as well against her detractors.

The sight of someone defending her own worth for an award that would not have been brought to the courts had only the legal processes been observed and such "prerogative" not brazenly abused by the President is unpleasantly pathetic and embarrassing. I am very sorry for her and for anyone in her position who would have been spared all the trouble of putting her own achievements as meritorius and deserving of the National Artist Award had they been only chosen by their own peers, as is the usual practice, and not by a committee of mostly former military generals now in government positions who have absolutely nothing to do with the arts nor with merits connected to the arts.

I am afraid the NCCA's position—based on all the unfortunate statements made by own Chair to the media—will be a defense of the wrong that the entire arts community had decried and brought to the Supreme Court. I don't think I will stand for this misrepresentation of an institution that I had served honorably as elected volunteer cultural worker for almost twelve years now.

  Thank you very much for bringing this matter to the attention of the Board.

  Truly yours,

Ricardo M. de Ungria
Commissioner for the Arts

Penman for Monday, August 31, 2009


ALONG WITH many other friends in the arts community, I was elated to receive the news last week that the Supreme Court had issued an order restraining the Palace from conferring the National Artist Awards until it had decided on our petition citing an abuse of presidential prerogative in the matter. Since that case is now in court, I’m not going to comment on it any further (didn’t I say that last week as well?), happy to leave things to the wisdom of our Justices for the time being; in truth I’m just as weary of the dagdag National Artist controversy as you are, and I wish I could move on like I promised to more congenial chit-chat about social networking, gangster movies, and Vietnamese rice noodles.

But hold on: someone at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) seems to be trying to pull a fast one—again. To put it mildly, I don’t think it’s very sporting of that someone to do this—effectively tampering with the evidence—while the case is being looked into by the Court.

A friend told me that when he looked up the National Artists page on the NCCA website, the rules had suddenly changed—now there was a mention of Executive Order 236 empowering an Honors Committee to make up its own list of NA nominees to the President. That wasn't there before the recent DNA scandal blew up—neither the rule nor the role of the committee in the NAA process.

Now that the case is before the High Tribunal to be sorted out, how fair is it to try and pull the rug from under the feet of those of us who've been arguing that the Honors Committee never figured in the selection process before, by sneaking it into the rules posted on the website?

What are they going to call this—a regular update, for something that hasn't been touched in years? Or do they actually expect the honorable Justices and other observers to believe that the revised rules had been there all along?

Unfortunately for whoever ordered the NCCA webmaster to monkey around with the rules page, I saved it—Web-archived it, to be more precise, preserving the full contents and appearance of the page—as soon as the scandal broke a month ago. Pardon my suspicious mind, but I had a funny feeling this would happen. So I’ve uploaded this file onto my Website for anyone who wants to see what the NCCA rules originally and always were. You can access that file here. (As soon as you’ve downloaded it, manually remove the .html tag from the filename then click on it to see the page in its original state.)

To whoever may be calling the shots these days at the NCCA, a friendly appeal: stop this silliness, play fair, and do the right thing—restore that page to what it was four weeks ago. And please remember that things work differently on the Internet, where everything you do or say leaves a digital trace behind, no matter how hard you try to cover up your tracks. Not only does it not pay to lie; worse, it just doesn’t work.


LET ME take this opportunity to mark and to lament the recent loss of two members of our writing community, both apparently from prolonged and catastrophic illnesses. The first was former journalist Leticia Salanga, whom I will choose to remember as the bright, laughing woman of her best days; the second was the very young Mae Astrid Tobias, my former student, also very sharp and talented, a writer of stories for children. We will miss them both, and my deepest sympathies to their families.


IT SEEMED just like yesterday when we were snotty kids in shorts kicking a football around in the dusty grass of the PGEA compound along Quezon City's Elliptical Road—behind a creaky building that a sign hopefully identified as the Philippine Science High School. But a message reminded me the other day that it's been 45 years since that place opened.

Aside from producing hundreds if not thousands of scientists as it was mandated to do—many of whom now lead the Philippine S&T effort, doing pioneering research in engineering, agriculture, and medicine, among others—the strongly multidisciplinary school has also graduated the likes of Mapua president Rey Vea, Palace stalwart Jun Esperon, model Anna Bayle, composer Joel Navarro, Congressman Jun Abaya, writer Jessica Zafra, and filmmaker Aureus Solito (who immortalized teenage angst, PSHS-style, in his movie “Pisay”).

This Saturday the 5th, the PSHS—which has since moved to more modern but also aging digs on Agham Road not too far away—will celebrate its 45th Foundation Day with the usual homecoming. Not so usual will be a couple of innovative projects advanced by the jubilarians, the Class of ’84.

Batch busybody Yeyet Ongchangco-Diaz wrote me to say that “My batch is putting up the Pisay alumni hub, a web-based portal that works much like Facebook but is less complex for now, but which will be upgraded in the months following. PSHS has never really had a useful and updated alumni database, and every time there is a need to round up information about PSHS alumni, we go into a mad scramble to put together bits and pieces of data from all sources available. We are hoping to put an end to that with this hub.

“Also, part of the evening's highlights is an auction of school needs. Here’s how this goes: there will be photos of rundown (almost all, actually) rooms, ceilings, labs, roofing, equipment; the auctioneer will ‘sell’ the item on the floor to any bidder. Say a room needs repainting; if the estimated cost is P20,000, it will be cut up into chunks of P5,000 each (so it's easier to sell) until the P20,000 is completed. The PSHS Alumni Association will take care to follow through on these pledges. All unsold 'items' will be featured on the website for online 'purchases'.”

Terrific idea, Yeyet—and let’s all go there and pitch in, my fellow nerds, especially those of you who haven’t done too badly since your agawan-base days. You have nothing to lose but your loose change and your guilt.

Penman for Monday, August 24, 2009


IT WOULDN'T have happened if a legal mission hadn’t sent me down to the old neighborhood. Last Wednesday, along with several dozen other writers and artists, I trooped to the Supreme Court in Padre Faura to file a petition for an injunction in the dagdag National Artists case.

As interesting as that was, what followed next was even more envigorating, as I found myself treading streets I hadn’t walked in ages, in a part of the city—a corner of the memory—where I had grown up very quickly more than three decades earlier.

For it was on Padre Faura and its sidestreets where, in the early 1970s, my life took sudden and sometimes dizzying turns. I’d stepped out of martial-law prison in August 1973; I was out of school and out of a job, having dropped out in my freshman year to work for a couple of newspapers, which martial law had shut down. Then I was detained for seven months in Fort Bonifacio where, under the tutelage of artist and fellow detainee Orly Castillo, I indulged a childhood fancy for drawing and painting.

With release came the unfamiliar strangeness of nowhere to go and nothing to do—the Left was crippled for the time being, there were no jobs in the much smaller media, and school seemed pointless in the grand scheme of things—so I drifted to Ermita to look up Orly, who had been released as well, and took up printmaking.

There, in a small nook on Jorge Bocobo rented by the Printmakers Association of the Philippines as a gallery-cum-studio, I learned how to etch with nitric acid and how to cut a design directy onto a zinc plate using a compass point. I made cheap prints of nipa huts, bamboos, carabaos—anything that would sell to the tourist trade. On good days a generous dealer bought my prints wholesale so she could stuff them into the picture frames which were her real business.

One time I drew and etched something different, a portrait of a pretty girl who had come by the studio to say hello to some friends. Her name was June, and after a few months of courtship carried out in letters written with a Mars-Lumograph, I told her—and my mother—that I wanted to marry her. I was convinced—given how so many of our comrades were dying young—that if there was anything important we wanted to do, we couldn’t wait for tomorrow. “Get a regular job first,” said my mother; she may also have meant “Get a little older,” because I was only nineteen.

Later that same day I was walking around Ermita, thinking of a job, when I ran into a friend from my days at the Herald. He was now working as a PRO for a new government agency—the National Economic and Development Authority or NEDA, just around the corner from J. Bocobo on Padre Faura—and they were looking for a feature writer; would I be interested?

The idea of working for a government for whose downfall I had been willing to go to prison seemed a bizarre novelty, but I had other things in mind that day. Jun ushered me into his boss’ office; Dr. Sicat asked me if a starting rate of P700 a month sounded fair enough. In those days, it was a lot of money. I said yes, and when I went home that night I told my mother, “I have a job. I’m getting married.”

I had yet to ask June (or Beng, as I would come to call her); I did some figuring on a napkin the next time we were in a restaurant. “I think we can afford to get married, so let’s.” She couldn’t dispute my computations, and I think she liked my voice, so within a few months, we were.

I would work in Padre Faura for the next few years. The NEDA then was a collection point for many smart young people, one of whom was a bright economist and a fraternity brother named Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega, who also wrote plays. For a time we were working in the same office, pounding away at our opuses on adjacent typewriters. We took long lunches in nearby restaurants like Ermitaño, Hongkong House, and Shady Lane, and browsed the shelves of Erehwon and Solidaridad. One day in 1976 I discovered a book titled One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I felt like another, secret door had opened on that street.

Boy’s gone, and so is Erehwon, as are many of our old haunts. Last Wednesday, with some time to spare, I decided to take a walk around the area, thinking that I might stumble across some vestige of my remembered youth.

The NEDA compound itself had been taken over by the University of the Philippines-Manila; the old PAP studio was now an employment office, although, surprisingly, the Norba nightclub that stood beside it—a laughing funnel that sucked in many a printmaker’s take for the day—remained where it was, reincarnated as the Ginza, or the Geisha, or some such stretch of fantasy. The only landmark that stood unchanged on Jorge Bocobo was the conjoined Hizon’s/Za’s Cafe, a haven for the equally immutable pleasures of pastries and politesse.

I remembered how hungry and eager I was to be an artist and a writer then, and Ermita seemed to be the best place to be for that to happen. Those were the days my fingers grew blisters doing drypoint plates, when I typed my manuscripts with secretarial care. I longed for my first book, my first screenplay, my first CCP production, my first Palanca. Whenever Boy or I finished a new play or won a prize (especially over the other), it was time for a treat of a free lunch, over which we dreamt furiously and loudly of all the great work we were going to do, as only 20-somethings can.

The greatness aside, all that would come to pass. And on a day when I went to the Supreme Court seeking justice for Art with friends (a white-haired Orly among them) who had gone through the same urges, the same fatigue, the same exhilaration, all for the love of an inconstant Muse, it felt good to see where it had all begun, and why we were there, and how—no matter how much the place had changed—we had never left.

Penman for Monday, August 17, 2009


NOW THAT the controversy over Malacañang’s recent selection of “dagdag” National Artists appears set to move to a court of law—where we might yet get justice and relief, since the principal and most vocal beneficiaries of the Palace’s largesse seem adamant about holding on to their tainted honors—I’ll devote just a few more remarks to the issue before moving on next week to other and hopefully less vexatious aspects of our cultural life.

A point I’d like to raise this week has been the development of a kind of “backlash”—both in the press and in any number of online venues—against those of us who’ve protested the outrageous manner by which the Palace went over the heads of the arts community to anoint its own National Artists, ostensibly through an “Honors Committee” that came up with the final recommendations to President Arroyo.

Those protestors include many of our living National Artists; other leaders and members of the arts community, including members of the board of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and commissioners of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts; and Filipino artists, academics, and concerned citizens at large. In other words, the protest has come from within what might be called the cultural Establishment—the bodies and the persons who most often decide what’s good and bad in Philippine art and culture.

One of the interesting side effects of this controversy has been the way it’s encouraged nearly everyone who’s ever had a bone to pick with that Establishment to come out and say, “Belat, buti nga sa inyo!” This isn’t the government propaganda machine, which is beyond appreciating these nuances, and is simply hell-bent on defending GMA’s executive prerogative, no matter what.

In both tabloid and weblog, I’ve come across comments that say, “It’s about time we had someone like Carlo J. Caparas, because you snoots haven’t written anything for us.” It’s either that, or “Have you people ever examined yourselves and the way you’ve judged and misjudged your own kind? Aren’t you just sore because another faction of the same elite grabbed your cookie?”

The first—what we might call the populist—argument is at least a superficially valid and attractive one, a lament of the perennially neglected. Mr. Caparas has been adept at playing the class card, because he knows that it will resonate with the millions who feel no stake in something as esoteric as the National Artist Awards, except the vengeful thrill of barging into them, whether through the front door or back. I myself have often remarked that those of us who write in English about ourselves and people very much like us are fated to alienation, to remaining unread by the many; that’s a choice we make and can’t complain about. Within this view, it almost doesn’t matter—as many of us insist it must—if Caparas is the best representative or not of his komiks art and of the class it primarily caters to; a baseball-capped homeboy has just stepped into the ball, among the tuxes and the beaded gowns. Imagine that in komiks terms—shocked expressions, thought-balloons and all—and we can begin to understand where some of the backlash is coming from.

The other reaction is something I’ll subdivide further into that coming from the griper (typically, someone who’s lost in the Palancas and is forever convinced that a grand conspiracy is afoot to deprive the world of his genius) and that from the more serious cultural critic, who likes to take a long view of things and sees armies of ants where some of us see very large faces of very specific people.

An implacable cynic, the griper is happy when he sees his imagined tormentors brought down to his level—so he takes the equation of Carlo J. Caparas with Virgilio S. Almario as a kind of justice. On the other hand, the metacritic tends to lament how short-sighted and self-interested other people are, unaware and unmindful of the big picture that only he and his fellow illuminati can see. Thus, the ongoing furor over the NAAs is just another tempest in a teapot, the symptom of a larger malaise having to do not just with prizes and presidential politics but with the uncertain position and definition of culture in our society, and thus the competing claims made to its leadership and legacy.

There’s surely something in that latter perception that deserves further examination, and it’s one of the few good things to have come out of this mess—beyond the fact that, for once, the words “artist” and “culture” have appeared on Page One. When all this blows over, we should take a longer look at the relationship between culture and the State and what we valorize in culture, and why.

But in the meanwhile, at ground level, there’s still the elephant in the room, the matter of the National Artist Awards going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons, which is something I’m not going to be philosophically paralyzed from harping on; we can deal with the fallout later. And also in the meantime, and in the every least, NCCA Executive Director Cecile Guidote Alvarez and NCCA Chair Vilma Labrador should resign from the commission, having compromised their leadership and rendering their further stay in office untenable. The NCCA’s work depends to a great degree on the labor of hundreds of volunteers who make up its committees—among them, the Committee on Literary Arts, to which I belong. Our committee members are one with others in seeking the resignation of these two officials, whose actions have effectively violated or circumvented the NCCA’s own rules, which we had been trying very hard to enforce and abide by. (To be fair, Mrs. Alvarez says she had wanted to resign months ago; now would be a good time to repeat the offer.)

Labrador’s ardent justifications for the Palace’s choices puts her squarely at odds with the arts community she’s supposed to represent (but then again, she too is a square peg in a round hole, with a background in education rather than the arts). Instead of taking the side of the artists, she’s vigorously defended the Palace with such bizarre notions as the idea that the “Honors Committee” was needed for “balance.” (This committee, we’ve since been informed, is composed of the Executive Secretary, Foreign Affairs Secretary, Chief of the Presidential Management Staff, Presidential Assistant for Historical Affairs, Chief of Presidential Protocol, and the Department of Foreign Affairs Chief of Protocol and State Visits.)

A balance between what and what? Between art and politics? Between principle and accommodation? Did she not believe in her agency’s own constituency enough to think that they could come up with a “balanced” shortlist all on their own? And with all due respect to the members of this Honors Committee, a couple of whom I know and might even call friends, it’s a committee better set up for counting gun salutes than the naming of our finest artists. A friend likened it to getting a GP to do your triple bypass.

In any event, a court case—whether we win it or not—should establish the paper trail, or the lack thereof, that led to this fiasco. Questionable motives and mangled processes lead to bad decisions, and we just might see how and why.

Penman for Monday, August 10, 2009


IF THE Palace imagines that the current uproar over its outrageous selection of some “dagdag” National Artists is going to blow over quickly, here’s more proof that it won’t. And that’s because a week has passed and we’ve yet to receive a satisfactory explanation from the Palace for its actions, beyond fuzzy generalizations like “there was a process” and “they deserve it.”

What process, we again demand to know. Who nominated whom when and for what? At what level of deliberation were the four new names introduced, and one from the original list of four dropped? What’s this “honors” super-committee that Malacañang suddenly came up with to justify its choices—who are its members, and what are their credentials? When even the Chair of the CCP Board of Trustees, the highly respected Emily Abrera, denies that the CCP knew anything about the mystery nominations and expresses surprise over the existence of the “honors” committee, something fishy is clearly afoot.

Did I hear NCCA Chair Vilma Labrador right when she was interviewed on TV? “Cecile [Guidote-Alvarez, the NCCA’s executive director and GMA’s cultural adviser] didn’t even know she was being nominated,” protesteth the lady. Then how come we, the cultural community, learned about the nomination even a week before the formal announcement, having been forewarned about it by text messages from within the highest echelons of the cultural bureaucracy itself? Are we supposed to believe that in this country where secrets have a shelf life of five minutes, the NCCA Executive Director had no inkling of the good fortune about to befall her?

If there’s something I hate, it’s being taken for a fool, even if I happen to be dumb and clueless about some very basic and important things in life, like the care of dogs and infants. But I didn’t get to write 20 books and as many screenplays (a dozen of them for the late National Artist Lino Brocka but none so far, unfortunately, for Carlo J. Caparas) without some notion of how people’s minds and hearts work.

What were they thinking? Tell me it isn’t so, but the irrepressible scriptwriter in me keeps coming up with this thought-balloon: “Let’s brazen this out. If we don’t get this now under GMA, we never will. In a few weeks, all will be well, people won’t care, and we can go to our graves in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.”

On the record, Mrs. Alvarez’s position seems to be, “If you don’t like what happened, then get the law changed. Besides, I deserve it.” A Palace spokesman—stepping out of his supposed specialization in economic matters—was quoted as saying that “Since Mrs. Alvarez was nominated outside of the NCCA, there was no violation of delicadeza.”

I’m sorry, my friend, but that’s not how delicadeza works. It emanates from the receiver of the boon, from his or her sense of decorum and good taste. Propriety dictates that one decline or forgo an honor that could well be deserved, but may also be clouded with suspicion because of one’s position—which explains the dismay and the sadness I’ve heard from many of Mrs. Alvarez’s longtime friends in theater over her adamant embrace of something she could have waited for to ripen in its own good time.

“I deserve it” or “She deserves it” just doesn’t cut it. The same thing could be said by or of a dozen other outstanding perennial candidates for the NAA—who, however, don’t have the good luck of having the President’s ear on matters of culture.

A lawyer-friend provided me with this apt and useful quotation to ponder: “Non omne quod licet honestum est—not everything that is allowed is honorable.”

Mr. Caparas’s reaction, on the other hand, has been a blithe “Why not me? I’m young and alive.” Young and alive or not, there are scores of other more deserving filmmakers, film artists, and real graphic artists—Dolphy, Nora Aunor, Celso Ad. Castillo, Mike de Leon, Malang, and Larry Alcala being just a few among them. And if you think that Caparas has done the komiks world a heroic favor by breaking some elitist barrier, think again. How can a non-illustrator even be a National Artist for the Visual Arts? Last Thursday, when we were both interviewed on ANC’s “Media in Focus”, he tried to offer proof of his drawing skills—which still doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t illustrate the comic serials he scripted.

(For anyone still in doubt about the quality of Carlo J’s directorial vision, check this out. For his achievements in comics art, see here.)

Again, all we’d like to know is the exact process that led to the addition of four names from left field and the dropping of one highly qualified nominee from the official list of prospective NAs. NCCA Chair Labrador, for one—not know-nothing Palace spokesmen—owes the cultural community a formal, written accounting of this process, if she wishes to dispel any suspicions of impropriety.

The irony of the matter is, all this could have been avoided months ago—if people had really wanted to. Early last May, Prof. Ricardo de Ungria—a renowned poet, academic, and chair of our National Committee for Literary Arts in the NCCA—sent up a letter to Dr. Labrador and to President Nestor Jardin of the CCP to propose ways of avoiding these unseemly and embarrassing situations. He proposed a review and an overhaul of the NAA selection process. Among others, Ricky (also an NCCA commissioner, by the way, and someone privy to the process at all levels) suggested that a fixed cap on the number of National Artists be maintained; that only living artists be so honored; that other awards—not the NA—be created or considered for some other categories. More specifically, and I quote:

“… Isn’t it time to lift the veil of secrecy that seems to shroud the selection process from the public eye? I am not sure if the present process really lessens, much less prevents, the ‘lobbying’ for certain nominees…. An award as prestigious and prominent as the National Artists Award probably deserves more public scrutiny and debate than what we have now….

“While the President of the Philippines retains the prerogative—and this is the potential and inherent tragedy in the selection process—to appoint his/her candidate as National Artists, it remains incumbent upon the joint Boards of the CCP and NCCA to respectfully remind the President, when they submit the list of awardees to the President for ‘confirmation, proclamation and conferral,’ to desist from exercising such executive prerogative as it is only counterproductive and demeaning to the entire selection process, foisting only ill will and acrimony among members of the arts communities and making pariahs of these ‘backdoor National Artists’ who shall forever be treated with scorn and disdain by their fellow artists.”

I’m not surprised that Prof. de Ungria’s proposals weren’t acted upon. It would have meant shutting the door on the only way by which the proper judgment of one’s peers could be avoided. (You can find the full text of de Ungria’s letter below.)

“Magaling siya” was Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita’s defense of one appointment. Magaling nga, I’d have to admit. That person got to be a National Artist without going through hoops of fire.

I hope they bestow these awards the same way they were arrived at—through the backdoor—if they want to avert an embarrassing boycott and picket of the ceremonies by the real and reputable NAs.

Flotsam & Jetsam (85) for August 7, 2009


I WAS invited by ANC to guest last night on a "Media in Focus" panel devoted to the National Artists controversy, and I was happy to oblige, despite my misgivings about the show’s head-to-head format, which can sometimes lead to more heated and less sober, less focused discussions. With me on the guest list were Cecile Guidote Alvarez and Carlo J. Caparas, who had just been named National Artists by President Arroyo under what many see to be highly suspicious circumstances; National Artist for Film Eddie Romero; Cultural Center of the Philippines chair Emily Abrera; and film critic Alexis Tioseco. Hosting the show, which you can view here, was the unflappably professional Cheche Lazaro.

Overall, I felt that it went pretty well, despite Cecile's sudden unavailability on account of a personal emergency (she was, however, on the phone to Carlo J. after the show—I could hear Carlo assuring her that he couldn't be pushed around.)

On the show, Carlo's tack was to focus on his being a champion of the poor masses and their entertainment, vs. the ivory-tower elitists (meaning people like me) who allegedly kept shutting him out of the awards. He even brought his drawings to refute the charge that it was strange to be named a National Artist for the Visual Arts without being the illustrator of his graphic novels. (It’s one thing to be able to draw; it’s another thing to practice it well enough to be the best of them.) But I refused to take the bait and dwelt on the issue of a mortally flawed process, on the abuse of a dubious presidential prerogative.

(I wanted to tell him and the audience, if we had more time, na laking-komiks ako; I was a fan of Hiwaga, Tagalog Klasiks, and Liwayway as a child; and I also wrote most of Lino Brocka's mass-market potboilers and tearjerkers like "Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan" and "Maging Akin Ka Lamang," so I'm no academic snob. But I didn't want the discussion to stray into credentials. It wasn’t about me, and I didn’t need to prove anything.)

I really now suspect that he was unaware of the exact process, thus his insistence that he had passed the NCCA and CCP screening, which just happens to be untrue. (Donna Villa whispered as much to my wife Beng in the sidelines. "Di niya alam ang proseso." Up to you to believe him or not.) He seemed surprised when I told him—since he asked me if I could prove anything—that I was part of that process as a member of the NCCA's Council of Peers (although I didn’t take part in this year’s deliberations), and as a member of the NCCA's literary arts committee; he must've thought I was just some commentator mouthing off.

I didn't want to be mean and rude by rubbing his nose in the general conclusion, within the NCCA, that he wasn't qualified to be an NA under any category. Indeed, according to my sources on the NCCA board, Cecile Guidote Alvarez (with whom I think he's done some projects) kept plugging for him all the way and was not very pleased when he kept getting rebuffed by this committee and that.

The big mystery remains: who and what was this midnight "honors committee" that Malacañang is now using as its excuse for the nomination of the four? NCCA chair Vilma Labrador, who reportedly admitted to meeting with that committee, has a lot of explaining to do. She's the key figure here, the go-between, the message carrier.

Slowly but surely, a factual account of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering for the awards is emerging. I have a copy of one such account from an NCCA commissioner who was involved in the whole process (at least until the "honors committee" butted in), and more will follow, and this will go to responsible journalists who will put the full story together soon. This trail of shame will be an eye-opener. (Ask, for example, who nominated Mrs. Alvarez, and start figuring out why; see what kind of support the NCCA under her has been providing this politician's pet projects. Of course he appreciates her artistry.)

Still, from a more positive point of view, this controversy has been one of the best things to have happened for arts and culture in this country in a long time. I've never seen people so engaged and so conscious of what art and culture should mean to us, beyond just another extension of patronage politics. I hope we sustain this critical consciousness well beyond this controversy.

Poignantly, Cory Aquino's death reminds us of some very basic values that apply to art as well as they do to business and government: honesty, integrity, the public good. Our dagdag NAs should ask themselves if they pass those tests, beyond screaming "I deserve it!"

Maybe so, but we, the public, deserve much better.

First Semester, AY 2009-2010


Tomorrow, August 5, having been declared a holiday in deference to former President Aquino's interment, I'm moving your paper deadline to Friday, August 7. See you all in class, thanks! (And thanks, Tobey, for suggesting this notice.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (85) for August 4, 2009

Many months ago, Prof. Ricardo de Ungria--a renowned poet, academic, and head of the NCCA's National Committee on Literary Arts--wrote a letter to the heads of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the Cultural Center of the Philippines suggesting ways by which to improve the selection process fro National Artists and to safeguard the integrity of the awards. If they'd listened to him and acted on his proposals, the National Artist Awards wouldn't be in the dagdag-bawas mess they're in now. Reprinted below, with his permission, is the full text of Commissioner de Ungria's letter.

11 May 2009

Dr. Vilma Labrador
Chair, National Commission for Culture and the Arts
Intramuros, Manila

and

Hon. Nestor O. Jardin
President, Cultural Center of the Philippines
Roxas Blvd. Manila

Chair Labrador and President Jardin:

Madayaw!

In the light of the final deliberations for National Artists held May 6 at the CCP, I wish to update my previous letter of May 3 on some contentious issues regarding the award and the selection process involved. I hope that these issues, among other issues that other Board members may raise, would be adequately debated on by the joint Boards of the CCP and the NCCA and help improve and enhance the ways by which we choose our national artists and accord them emoluments and benefits. As I did in my previous letter, I present my ideas in the form of questions, as follows.

One, wouldn’t it be more practical to fix the number of living National Artists—say, fourteen, or two NAs per artistic category, or any number to be determined by the two Boards—to be given the award and, consequently, to go through the process of selection only when a vacancy has occurred, i.e, a National Artist dies, in any category? Given the budgetary constraints under which the Order is administered, this would seem a sound solution to the perennial problem of ascertaining every three years the actual number of National Artists to choose. If this would be the case, the existing budget could be used to enhance—or make more decent—the financial support for these National Artists. Their monthly life pensions, for instance, could be increased to equal the monthly salary of members of the Supreme Court, who are probably their equals in terms of level of achievement in the arts. Their medical and hospitalization benefits, as well as life insurance coverage for National Artists still insurable, could either be made unlimited and maximized such that there is no cap on these anymore or else fixed but doubled or tripled than the present pitiable amount that it is. [Please refer to the “Honors and Privileges” section of the ONA Criteria and Guidelines.]

Two, corollary to the above, isn’t it time to separate the nominees who have passed away from those who are still alive? The award, to my mind, should be given only to living artists who should be given the chance to enjoy, for the rest of their hopefully still artistically productive days, the fruits of their labours and the national acknowledgement of the excellence in their works and their influence and legacy in their particular field in the arts. It is always never a fair deal to allow the dead to compete with the living, even if both are equal in terms of merit and excellence. Perhaps a selection process for posthumous awards could be instituted every five years, with the existing benefits for the families of the awardees to continue to be given and with the names of the winners placed on a Wall of Honor at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (as suggested in the last deliberation). Perhaps, too, the existing criteria for National Artists could be slightly revised to accommodate pioneering artists who made substantial contributions to the development of their art and who should not be judged, especially those who worked prior to the institution of the Order, by present-day standards. This should help minimize, if not correct, the oversight that the deserving dead are usually heirs to. (Details, such as whether only the names of posthumous awardees be placed on the Wall of Honor or whether such Wall would also function as a columbarium, could also be opened for discussion.) As fate would have it, not all artists will become National Artists, and not all artists will become National Artists in their lifetime.

Three, corollary to the above, shouldn’t we facilitate the institution of more awards other than but equally prestigious as that of the National Artists? The Republic Heritage Awards, for instance, could be revived and refurbished, among other national awards. More national awards other than the National Artists Awards should address the need to validate the works of artists—especially those in the regions—who have devotedly plied their art and have made quiet yet substantial contributions to the development of the art in their particular places of operation without consciously bothering to, as it were, “go national.” As well, these awards should help recognize the fact of a range and variety in terms of talents, technical achievements, scopes of influence, and accomplishments in the field of the arts.

Four, shouldn’t there be a provision to the effect that works of National Artists be immediately factored into the curricula of primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education—within a year, at least, of their appointments? This should assure correct, proper, and widest dissemination of exemplars of excellence in the artistic fields, and encourage interest, familiarity, and debate among students especially at the university level, which should all lead to an informed and intelligent community of appreciators, consumers, and benefactors of the arts. If this were so, then there should be established immediately a mechanism within DepEd and CHED by which the works of the National Artists could be included as additional instructional materials in the schools.

Five, couldn’t the traditional, old-fashioned meanings and referents of the seven arts be retained, and a different and new award for new genres—like industrial arts design, landscape architecture, fashion design—be instituted? The inclusion of subcategories under each of the seven arts is probably a fruitless and eventually futile attempt—I am beginning to think, at least—to please everybody and yield to the charms and mysteries of the “new,” whatever these may fashionably be for the nonce. There will be no end to the proliferation or “invasion” of these “new” forms or genres, and the senses and meanings of the seven arts would eventually be stretched to the limit and rendered meaningless. Please don’t get me wrong now. I am one of the zealous enthusiasts for new forms and genres, but I think sufficient time should be given for these new forms to ripen and to develop a core of practitioners and craftsmen who will evolve the poetics (of artmaking), esthetics (of appreciation), and criteria for excellence of their art form before they can be considered worthy of inclusion as a category in a high-level award such as the Order of National Artists. Too often does the mass appeal of a popular form entice us to blindly equate popularity with quality without our knowing any criteria of success or failure in that art form. In this regard, a related discussion about how the relationship between popular art and academic art in this country relates to, or figures in, the choices made for National Artists would be most welcome.

Six, shouldn’t the selection process—at the first and second levels of deliberation—be left entirely and respectfully to experts in the different fields of art, such that the joint Boards of the CCP and NCCA would simply confirm—unless there are serious moral, legal, or aesthetic objections involved—the names submitted? This should hold true especially within the framework suggested above that the selection be done only upon the death of a National Artist in any category of art and only by peers in the art category concerned (although this would also be helpful in the present state of the selection process). This idea effectively addresses the issue (raised at the second and the final levels of decision making) of competence of the Board members—or of the members of the second deliberation panel representing a cross-section of the seven arts—who, as I argued (but on a more positive and encouraging note) in the May 6 meeting, could only make reasonable decisions on the worth of artists outside her area of expertise based on evidences produced by the assigned presentors and on her own personal knowledge or awareness and valuation of the various personages and events in the art communities around her. (It need hardly be pointed out here that as members of cultural bodies like the CCP and NCCA, it is incumbent upon us to acquaint and familiarize ourselves with the activities, personages, and issues in the different arts.)

I strongly feel that it is time we look seriously and deeply into the role that a democratic populism (such as the one prevailing now) plays in the selection of National Artists and the formation of art canons in this country—vis-a-vis the specialized and authoritative “elitism” {this word is unfortunate here) of experts and practitioners in the different arts separately defining their own standards of excellence in their particular fields and choosing by themselves the worthy exemplars of such excellence.

Seven, isn’t the constitution of the joint Boards of the CCP and NCCA, who have the final recommending power to the President of the Republic and are therefore the final arbiters in the selection process, such that regional representation is practically nil, thereby effectively putting into question the relevance and scope of standards used in the selection (are these universal or international principles? what about standards specific to regions?) and problematizing the very idea of “national” in the term National Artist? For it would seem that—and this is already an old argument repeated time and again—such standards have been defined only Manila-based arbiters of taste and are indifferent to, if not discriminatory of, art productions and art practitioners in the regions outside of Manila. This center-periphery discourse is crucial here because it applies to conditions in our country: the means of artistic production, the more popular modes of dissemination and programming of art, the economic valuation of art products, as well as determination of quality and worth of such art products, are generally done or are available mostly in Metro Manila. While it is true that there are many excellent artists in the Metro Manila area, it is also true that there are other artists in the regions who may have their own brand of excellence but remain unknown and unacknowledged simply because the resources available to the Manila artists are not available in his region. The playing field, in other words, is uneven—and this at the expense of artists at the periphery.

Again, from the discussion in the May 6 meeting, I got the intimation that the idea of “nationhood” required of the nominees has somehow been defined and is operative to the extent that it could be used (or wielded) as a kind of a given already. I submit that this concept of “Filipino sense of nationhood” is nebulous and problematic as a criteria for selection of National Artists because not only has it been inadequately defined, but it also is an unreliable yardstick of excellence because it reeks of a very limited and conscious program of action on the part of the artist that may actually be deleterious to his art as it is subversive of the aleatory, chaotic, and unpredictable nature and instinct of the creative process. The concepts of “nation” and “nationhood” are parts of an evolving discourse for this young republic of ours, and they should admit—not shun—simple contributions from regions outside the seat of government.

Eight, isn’t it time to lift the veil of secrecy that seems to shroud the selection process from the public eye? I am not sure if the present process really lessens, much less prevents, the “lobbying” for certain nominees. Despite the gentle reminders from the Secretariat, word does get around about the identities of nominees and presentors, for the art community here has long ears and quick, secret mouths. I don't know how private this selection business is, or how public it should be; but I am not comfortable with the tayo-tayo muna mentality that seems to be at work here. An award as prestigious and prominent as the National Artists Award probably deserves more public scrutiny and debate than what we have now.

Nine, shouldn’t we agree on the strict observance of the following procedural matters under direct supervision of the Secretariat? First, that the Council of Peers be reviewed by another body to clean it of personages who have little or no qualification whatsoever or who were probably put in at the committee level so that a region would not be without representation—however inadequate such a representation may be. Second, that those in the Council of Peers who submitted a nomination for National Artist be identified and excluded from the pool from which the panels for the first and second deliberations will be drawn. This is highly irregular and it makes the process suspect because subjected to forum shopping by the nominators themselves. Third, that ample time—definitely not just five to ten minutes—be given to presentors at the second and third deliberations who should be required to provide visual or (in the case of music) aural proofs of the worthiness of the nominees. Case presentations in the seven arts should be clear and cogent enough to be able to define (beyond reasonable doubt?) the value and worth of the nominees and their works and to convince those in the second and third deliberations of such merits even if they do not belong to the same artistic endeavor or field. Fourth, corollary to this, presentors should either be drawn by lot in public or appointed from the list of Council of Peers by the Secretariat. They should be asked to agree to present a cogent and well-prepared case of the nominees before the joint Boards. If they feel that they disagree with the choice of nominees, then they should not be forced to “attorney” for them. As we all saw in the last deliberation, some presentors were lackadaisical and sounded unconvinced of the worthiness of the nominees they were tasked to dignify. Under the present system, because presentors can make or break nominees, they should be chosen judiciously and advised of the gravity of their duty appropriately. And fifth, neither the Secretariat nor the joint Boards should assume the function of oversight since adding new names not discussed at the first and second deliberations will only open them to charges of politicking and bias and cast doubt over the integrity of the whole process. All nominees should be properly and duly nominated by individuals or groups outside of the Secretariat and the members of the Boards of the CCP and the NCCA, who should then protect the process by refusing to add or allow the addition of new nominees at any level of the deliberations.

Finally, while the President of the Philippines retains the prerogative—and this is the potential and inherent tragedy in the selection process—to appoint his/her candidate as National Artists, it remains incumbent upon the joint Boards of the CCP and NCCA to respectfully remind the President, when they submit the list of awardees to the President for “confirmation, proclamation and conferral,” to desist from exercising such executive prerogative as it is only counterproductive and demeaning to the entire selection process, foisting only ill will and acrimony among members of the arts communities and making pariahs of these “backdoor National Artists” who shall forever be treated with scorn and disdain by their fellow artists.

I reiterate here the hope that these issues be discussed by the joint Boards at length and at a separate policy meeting so that acceptable and correct measures could be undertaken to rectify problematic areas in the selection process and in the very idea itself of national valuations and awards.

Daghang salamat!

Truly yours,

Ricardo M. de Ungria
Commissioner for the Arts, NCCA
and President, Davao Writers Guild

Penman for Monday, August 3, 2009


WE OFTEN speak, in these Arroyo-addled times, of the “culture of corruption” that has seeped into the very marrow our society’s bones. Last week, that phrase took an interesting twist.

Sometime last Wednesday, as I was writing this column on a totally different subject, I got a text message telling me that Malacañang—meaning President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself—had just named seven new National Artists. That in itself wasn’t the big news—even if the announcement had been long forthcoming—but that four of them weren’t even on a list of finalists who had gone through a prescribed and exhaustive selection process.

I checked the news online, and sure enough, seven names were announced by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita. An examination of the names and some further inquiries revealed that of the original shortlist of four NA candidates who had passed the process, only two deceased artists (yes, National Artists can be dead; it’s a cheaper honor to give) and an accomplished painter had been approved by Malacañang; the other one, a respected and living musicologist, had been inexplicably dropped. In other words—as she herself and some of her predecessors in the Palace had done before—Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had exercised her prerogative to go over the heads of the arts community to accord the award to people who can only be imagined to be either her personal favorites or the beneficiaries of a vigorous backdoor lobby.

What I have to say next will very likely strain if not sever my longstanding friendship with some people who have been very kind to me, and whose personal achievements I still hold in high esteem. But I’m sure that I will be speaking for many other writers and artists in this country when I congratulate our new National Artists while deploring the manner by which some of them appear to have achieved that loftiest of Philippine artistic distinctions.

For those unfamiliar with this award and its process, the National Artist Award (now formally known as the Order of National Artists), initiated in 1972, is the highest honor that the Philippine government can accord to the country’s most outstanding artists. The distinction carries some material rewards as well. In the more recent past, the NAA has been jointly administered by the boards of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), acting on the recommendations of several levels of selection committees composed of respected artists, scholars, and experts and the current, living National Artists themselves. The final list of nominees is then sent to Malacañang for approval by the President—who, we have been repeatedly told, has the power and the privilege to add her own names to the list, although I have yet to locate the precise letter of the law saying this.

Curiously enough, Sec. Ermita took pains to explain that an “honors committee” had decided on the final list of NAs, suggesting that Mrs. Arroyo’s action was merely ministerial. Which “honors committee” is this, may we ask, and composed of whom? These names just didn’t walk to Mrs. Arroyo’s desk; they were carried there by someone with a signature pen in hand. Who, pray tell, might this most powerful cultural consigliere be?

If this process was aboveboard, whatever happened to the NCCA’s own rules, published on its website, that “NCCA and CCP Board members and consultants and NCCA and CCP officers and staff are automatically disqualified from being nominated…. Nominations received beyond the announced deadline (December 31, 2007) for the submission of nominations shall not be considered”?

Now, there may be other rules or exceptions to rules I just never heard of, being too busy fiddling around with my leaky fountain pens, but even granting that Mrs. Arroyo’s private, in pectore selections were legal, were they moral? Whatever happened to delicadeza, to our appreciation of the word “unseemly”?

Let me be very clear that my protest is not directed at the appointees themselves, who all possess some sterling qualities that lifted them to the prominence they justly deserve. I do not mean to put down certain categories or definitions of the word “artist,” which in these times must surely go beyond the age-old figures and spheres of the poet, painter, and musician.

I and my colleagues do strongly object to the wanton disregard of the Palace for the collegial wisdom by which the four official nominees were determined, in favor of backdoor, last-minute, undocumented, anonymous recommendations. We decry the shamelessness of lobbying the Palace, or of even bringing names to the attention of the President, outside of the prescribed process. That process itself may be and has been politicized—but that’s a debate among artistic peers, not politicians or bureaucrats more attuned to pork than poetry.

It is precisely this kind of machination, more likely to be found in the backrooms and restrooms of Congress, that diminishes the stature of the National Artist Award, and especially the esteem in which its questionable holders are held by their more discerning peers. For all the arguments that have typically and necessarily gone into the evaluation and selection of previous NA awardees by committees of experts and peers at various levels, once those choices are made, the results are applauded, accepted, and respected by the arts community. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of some Palace appointees, whose hard-earned reputations have consequently suffered from being stained with the odium of patronage politics.

At the very core of things, no true artist needs an award, especially one granted by a government whose credibility and sincerity many artists will or should find trouble with. But the National Artist Award was meant to rise above petty politics, to give some material recognition and sustenance for our most creative and most productive imaginations—a vain hope, as it turns out, in this politically besotted and benighted country. As one pundit has put it, why be so surprised? How can we be so naïve as to expect that our cultural bureaucracy would be immune to the same strain of corruption that infects our public works, education, and customs offices?

If the current crop of National Artists wishes to choose their fellows by themselves, as an academy, without the vetting and the meddling of their juniors, that’s perfectly fine. If the President wishes to name her driver a National Artist, it’s her right to do so—indeed, at least one National Artist has reminded us rank outsiders that it isn’t any of our business to tell the President what to think. (And then again, excuse me: my taxpayer’s pesos and even my Pagcor poker chips contribute to the sustenance of our National Artists, so I do have at least a private citizen’s say in the matter.)

But let there be a transparent process we can at least follow and hopefully respect.

The question isn’t whether it’s Mrs. Arroyo’s right or privilege or prerogative to appoint whomsoever she wishes a National Artist. The question is whether such appointments and their acceptance are in good taste—an element you’ll find even in the most disturbing of the arts.

Executive privilege can silence vital testimony in Congress; it can return convicted but privileged heinous criminals to our streets, if the Chief Executive decides that they have suffered enough in their air-conditioned prison cells; but it cannot command the respect and obeisance of artists, who are accountable to a higher order of sense and sensibility, beyond the reach of lobbies, Charter change, Executive Orders, and blind ambition.

Penman for Tuesday, July 28, 2009

(This piece was commissioned by the STAR for its special anniversary "collectors" issue.)

PEOPLE ask me what it is about fountain pens that I find so obsessively fascinating. I’m a writer, so I have a natural affinity with writing instruments, but I tell them that fountain pens, to me, represent the perfect marriage between art and engineering. Fountain pens produce written words, and thus have been the handmaiden of countless works of literature, both public and private; but they’re also art objects in themselves, the product of thoughtful and often ingenious design and meticulous craftsmanship.

Fountain pens have been around since the early 1800s, but it was during the early to mid-20th century—the Golden Age of fountain pens—that the best and loveliest pens were made, in a swirl of materials, colors, and mechanisms that remain unsurpassed, even as modern penmakers strive to revive the fountain pen industry by reviving classic designs.

These are the pens that I’ve been collecting for the past 20 years, from all over the world, wherever I’ve been privileged to travel—the United States, England, Scotland, France, and Vietnam, among others. Today, I get most of my pens online, off eBay, although now and then I still get lucky and stumble on a prize pen in the unlikeliest of places.

Two of my favorite pen-collecting stories took place thousands of miles apart.

In 1994, on a writing fellowship in Scotland, I visited the Thistle Pen Shop in downtown Edinburgh, whose address I had found in the phone book. (Every time I travel to a new city, I look over the yellow-page listings for pen shops, resale shops, and antique stores.) On a lark, I asked the lady behind the counter, “Would you happen to have a 1934 Parker Vacumatic Oversize in burgundy red?” That pen, at that time, was my “Holy Grail” pen, something I had been fantasizing about since seeing its picture in a catalog. The lady beamed at me and said, “As a matter of fact, we do!” And then she whipped the pen out from under the counter, much to my great surprise, disbelief, and grief—grief, because I was sure I couldn’t possibly afford it, unless I went deep in debt via my credit card.

And that, of course, was what happened. I carried that pen home with as much care and wonderment as I would have accorded a newborn baby, but I was almost immediately stricken with buyer’s remorse. “Oh, my God,” I thought, “how could I have spent a whole month’s salary—the rent, the groceries, the bills, etc.—on a single pen?” To soothe my throbbing conscience, I resolved to write a story about—guess what—a fountain pen. That was the story “Penmanship,” which later won a prize that made up for my precious Parker’s purchase price.

The second story has to do with a 1926 Swan Eternal—a gorgeous pen in woodgrain with a huge gold nib—that I found, in all places, in a stall at the Greenhills tiangge six years later. I spotted the pen sticking out of a coffee mug in this stall among other bric-a-brac. I trembled as I held it—even more so when I realized that it was in perfect condition, despite being more than 70 years old—and asked the seller in a barely audible croak, “How much?” “Five hundred,” the man said—about a hundredth of what the pen would have sold for on the collector’s market. No faster sale was ever made; you could smell the leather burning as I whipped out my wallet.

Today my collection comprises almost 200 pens, about two-thirds of them vintage pens from as early as the 1890s, and one-third of them Parkers old and new. My favorite pen is the 1930s-1940s Parker Vacumatic, whose pearlescent stripes remind me of a city skyline at night. I have about 60 of these Vacs in various sizes, colors, and trims, making me a certified Vacumaniac. I can get bored talking about literature and politics, but never about Vacs.

I also enjoy collecting Pelikans and Montblancs (except the ultra-pricey and blingy “limited editions”, more a marketer’s rather than a writer’s dream). Other brands that collectors favor include Sheaffer, Wahl-Eversharp, and Waterman, as well as Esterbrook, Conklin, Swan, and Conway-Stewart, among others. After many years of trying all my pens out, I’ve settled on a rotation of five “daily users,” one or two of which you’ll be certain to find in my pocket at any given time, loaded with either blue-black or brown ink: a Pelikan M800, a Montblanc 149, a Montblanc 146, a 1935 Parker Vacumatic, and another Vac from the 1940s.

I try to bring most of my pens up to good working condition. I can do simple repairs myself, such as replacing the rubber sac or bladder that holds the ink, but I send away more difficult jobs to a suki repairman in Arkansas in the US. I often have to remind people—especially those interested in showing or selling their old pens to me—not to try repairing or even polishing their pens, because they can be very fragile and easy to break. Also, their grandfather’s Wearever may have a lot of sentimental value and may even look priceless, but Wearevers were generally low-quality pens that few collectors would bother acquiring.

Few people actually write with fountain pens these days. I do most of my writing myself on a Mac, and use fountain pens only for signing letters, memos, cards, and books. Still, the few times a day that I scrawl something with my pen are always moments of pleasure—a very sensual pleasure, I must say, whenever the wet nib, or writing point, touches paper.

One of these days, try it yourself, in the stationery section of your local bookstore. But beware—fountain pens can become highly addictive, as the 20-plus active members of our local pen club, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, have realized. If you want to see more of my pens, you can find pictures of them here. Welcome back, we say, to writing in style, and writing with feeling, as only a good fountain pen can physically convey.

Penman for Monday, July 27, 2009

I HAD a wonderful time in Singapore last week with my fellow guest writers at Lit Up: the Singapore Young Writers Festival. No, I don’t think I can be called a “young writer” any longer—I crossed that threshold at least 20 years ago—but I was invited to the festival as a resource person and keynote speaker, to help in firing up the imagination of young Singaporeans (by which I mean high schoolers and junior college students around the ages of 13 to 19).

The festival is being held under the auspices of Word Forward, a kind of literary NGO that’s made it its mission to promote writing, reading, performing, and creative thinking among young Singaporeans, with support from the National Arts Council. I’d met Word Forward program director Chris Mooney-Singh and his gracious wife (and festival director) Savinder Kaur at a British Council seminar in Singapore early last year, so this was a pleasant reunion. This time, we were joined by a group of highly accomplished writers and performance artists from around the region. They included:

David Oliveira, a poet originally from California and now based in Cambodia, the founder of the Santa Barbara Poetry Series and founding editor of Solo, an award-winning poetry journal;

Paul Kooperman, an Australian screenwriter who’s published two books on screenwriting and whose work has taken him to Hollywood;

Arianna Pozzuoli, a Canadian poet now based in Singapore, winner of various poetry slam competitions in the US and Canada;

Arka Mukhopadhyay, an Indian poet, director, actor, teacher, and performance artist whose work involves theater in conflict and bringing Shakespeare to children from all backgrounds;

George Wielgus, a UK-born, Malaysia-based community arts worker, writer, and spoken-word artist who works with marginalized groups; and

Jacyntha England, a Canadian educator, writer, and theater artist whose work has taken her as far as Kazakhstan, Tanzania, and Romania.

It’s always a privilege—and it gives me a huge charge—to share the company of brilliant artists dedicated to their craft, and last week’s exposure to these people taught me as much as it did our young audiences. We spent most of the week moving from one school to another—giving lectures, readings, performances, and workshops to hundreds of children, most of whom had never seen or heard a live writer before.

As in many other places around the world—including the Philippines—literature is becoming something of an endangered species on the Singaporean curriculum. It’s there, but it doesn’t figure as prominently in people’s minds as it used to. Most students see literature as something to study so they can pass exams that will qualify them for college—Singaporean exams for the General Certificate of Education or GCE include a literature component featuring the infamous “unseen poem,” a presumably obscure, sometimes local, piece of poetry that examinees will need to analyze well enough to pass and to move on to the great Singaporean future of academic and professional success and prosperity. When young people see Shakespeare and even Singaporean literary icons as Edwin Thumboo as exam topics and hurdles on the road to personal accomplishment, some unpleasant results arise: imaginations freeze, wonderment goes dry, and an aversion rather than a desire for literature develops.

So we were brought in to work with our Singaporean counterparts in reminding our young audiences that literature and creative writing can be fun, exciting, invigorating, and liberating. Every day last week, we visited one or two schools, speaking and performing before several classes in each school, and giving tutorials to more advanced students who showed us their work. I couldn’t help remarking that every school we went to was immaculately clean and smashingly modern, with every conceivable external need provided for, so anything else we could do for the kids could only work on the level of their minds.

On the whole, we found our young listeners to be eager but shy; quite a few were highly talented, clearly attuned to a global youth culture that favors, for example, epic fantasy of the Lord of the Rings variety and Japanese anime. Some works we came across were extremely moving, such as a young girl’s love poem for her cancer-stricken mother.

At the same time, I felt it necessary to remind them that it was all right, if not better, to begin writing about themselves, their place, and their time. One work I thought to be particularly brilliant, a Poe-ish tale involving an old woman, a black cat, and unexpected fortune, was made even more curious for me by the fact that one character was identified as “Daniel MacPherson,” or some such Western name. While recognizing the easy possibility that post-colonial Singapore could still host a few MacPhersons in its population, I asked the girl who wrote the story why she chose that name.

“I thought it would make the story more universal, give it greater appeal,” she answered in so many words. “I think your story will be stronger if you gave this character a local name,” I said. “We already know of many great British and American writers. You should want to become a great Singaporean writer, writing about your people.” Another interesting encounter was with a boy whose story plot involved a young Singaporean who had everything but was deeply unhappy; not even the best psychologists could tell why. The writer himself hadn’t worked out the reason why—“and that’s for you to find out,” I told him, feeling that he had latched on to something very important.

Overall, we had a grand time with the children and with our sessions at the Arts House, Singapore’s old Parliament building. I’d been to Singapore several times before but had never really interacted this closely with its people and its artists. Naturally, I brought Beng along, having resolved to see as much of the world as we can together before our knees crumble. It was her first time in Singapore beyond stopovers at Changi airport, so the city and its dazzling cleanliness—and the joys of Mustafa and Little India—were a revelation for her.

We spent a lovely evening out with a Filipino friend, the architect Jun Tenza, whose firm has built some of Singapore’s best-known landmarks, and his daughter Kath and son-in-law Paul. After a seafood dinner at East Coast Park, our hosts drove us up to Mount Faber, a lookout from where Singapore’s night skyline can be best viewed.

But rather than just dwell on the beauty of the scenery, Paul and I got around to talking about the few Singaporeans who fall through the cracks of this provident society. Paul teaches new media in an arts teachers’ school and, in his mid-30s, belongs to a generation that has both enjoyed the benefits but has also begun to worry about the implications of living in a place that seems to have everything and where everything seems to be going right.

It’s a question that Singapore’s writers and artists—more than its politicians and businessmen—will have to explore and to answer, and I hope that our brief visit contributed to its contemplation.

Penman for Monday, July 20, 2009

IT'S NOT every week—not even every year—that I get to have two of my books launched, but late last month, the incredible happened: I had two new books out within practically a week of each other. The sad thing was, I was still largely bedridden then—or La-Z-Boy-ridden, to be more specific—from my recent operation (about which you’ll hear no more, I promise), so the books were launched without me.

That was all right, not only because the launch dates had been set way ahead of time, but also because these two books were of the kind that were focused much less on the author than on their subjects. Indeed, you may not even find them in the regular bookstores, having been privately commissioned by their publishers.

The first, launched last June 18, was The Voices of the Mountain: The People of Mount Apo Speak (Energy Development Corporation, 2009), a chronicle of the Mount Apo geothermal project implemented by what’s now the Lopez-owned Energy Development Corporation. Possibly the most controversial infrastructure project in recent Philippine history, the Mount Apo project—from its exploration to its production phases—generated a lot of heat, not just underground but aboveground, because of the threats that many people thought it would pose to the mountain’s fragile ecology and to the lives of the mountain dwellers. The book presents the project’s history, and the pros and cons of the ensuing debate, drawing mainly on the testimonies of the mountain’s residents—many of them native Manobos—and of the people who saw the project through.

The second, launched on June 26, was Wash: Only a Bookkeeper (SGV Foundation/AIM Scientific Research Foundation, 2009), a biography of the 88-year-old Washington Z. SyCip, founder of the accounting giant SGV. As I noted in the brief remarks I sent to be read at the launch, “It was a great honor and pleasure for me to be asked to write this book. Wash SyCip is a biographer's dream and an interviewer's delight: a truly accomplished and distinguished man who—unlike some other such high achievers—always saw the world to be larger than himself, and acted with both bold resolve and disarming humility… someone whom I can only describe as the most Filipino of Americans, indeed even more so than many Filipinos. I have only authored a book; Wash has authored a remarkable life.”

Both of these books were challenging but also exciting to write. As a frustrated engineer, I’m fascinated by technical subjects—my other nonfiction works include a book on the Malampaya natural gas project, and I’m now also at work on the history of a leading Philippine engineering and fabrication firm—and the geothermal industry and the accounting profession, as different as they may be, provided me with a quick education on the way things work. From a fictionist’s point of view, it was also a chance to recast what otherwise might have been a dry journalistic report into something more dramatic. As a teaser, let me share with you the opening paragraphs from Wash SyCip’s biography, where I depict him as a passenger on a ship, returning home in 1946 from his wartime service as a volunteer soldier in the US and a codebreaker in India:

“To the small, wiry man on deck, the city across the water would have been barely recognizable. The smoke of war had cleared—a few months had passed since the last shot had been fired in a bloody campaign to drive out the invaders—but much of the rubble remained; indeed the city itself was a mound of rubble, many of its old majestic landmarks gone up in dust and smoke.

“In the city’s oldest section, within the stone walls of Intramuros, an entire procession of churches—the Manila Cathedral, Lourdes, Santo Domingo, San Francisco, San Ignacio—had crumbled to the ground; only San Agustin remained. Of the city’s many universities and colleges, only two colleges—Letran and Sta. Rosa—withstood the bombs and the artillery. The City Hall, the Post Office building, and the Metropolitan Theater were all vacant hulks, their bone-white shells pockmarked in thousands of places by sustained bombardment between February and March 1945.

“The man on board the Navy ship was too far to see these details for himself, but the strange concavity of what had been the metropolitan skyline, the impression of a body supine and overrun by tubercular rot, and the brooding silence that waited across the bay would have encouraged his worst fears.

“The last time he had seen this city, more than six years earlier, it had been the Far East’s liveliest port, and looking over his shoulder, on the ocean liner that would take him to Hong Kong and then to America, he would have, in the gathering dusk, seen and remembered Manila as a ribbon of sparkling lights, throbbing with trombones and saxophones, belching from a surfeit of good food and easy liquor, puffing Lucky Strikes and whistling coolly in the tropic dark.

“Now he was returning in the afternoon, when the bay typically turns leaden, the blinding clarity of morning replaced by a dirty, vaporous film. His ship lay at anchor, unable to dock just yet because the city’s longshoremen had inexplicably chosen this moment—this day! this ship!—to go on strike, but its engines would have been running at some level to keep its officers and refrigerators cool while temperatures and tempers rose, and its fumes, however faint, would have contributed to the general pallor of the day.

“…. The ravaged landscape was the least of the young man’s worries. The city that waited for him was steeped in death; the liberation of Manila had exacted the lives of more than 1,000 Americans, 16,000 Japanese, and 100,000 Filipinos, these latter victims ruthlessly massacred by the retreating defenders. They could have included the young man’s relatives; at one point he had believed that his father had been executed. It wasn’t true, this he now knew, but the euphoria of learning that his father had been spared would have since been replaced by the gnawing impatience to rejoin his family, to squeeze their bony arms with his own small but steady hands, to recover the lost years, and then to rebuild his future.”

I love writing these stories, and I hope you get a chance to read them.

Penman for Monday, July 6, 2009

ONE OF the things I learned to appreciate all over again during my recent period of confinement was TV. When the admitting clerk at the hospital asked me what kind of room I wanted, the first thing I said was, “It has to have a TV!” I would’ve liked wi-fi—and the hospital did have an ultra-pricey presidential suite, with Internet access, on its menu—but I’m old enough to be of a generation that’ll take TV over the Internet, if forced to make a choice.

In fact, I’m old enough to remember the transition from radio to TV. Like the telephone—which, as I noted in last week’s piece, we didn’t have in the house until I was a grown man—the TV was the thing from tomorrow, something that only rich and tech-savvy people had. In our corner of Mandaluyong, in the early ‘60s, that meant our neighbor the airline pilot, on whose TV I awaited and devoured “Highway 54”, following the afternoon news sponsored by Bre-a-col Cough Syrup. On yet another neighbor’s TV—this neighbor had a sister who was a nurse in the US—the fare was decidedly Pinoy: “Oras ng Ligaya,” “Munting Banal,” and “Ang Hiwaga ng Bahay na Bato” (the latter two being the ‘60s versions of today’s telenovelas; I got my kicks not from some silly romantic plot twist, but from Ben David playing a hunchback and cursing, “Ngitngit ng mga pangit!”) Upstairs, where our landlord lived, I could sneak in to watch “The Rifleman,” “The Rebel,” “Tugboat Annie,” and, on Sundays, “Eskwelahang Munti.”

Come to think of it, everyone had a TV but us. We got our first TV in the summer of 1966, only after it had been established that I’d won myself a scholarship to something called a science high school, thereby absolving my parents of the need to slave away so I could keep going to a private school where people didn’t just have TVs, but cars. To celebrate the occasion, they bought a TV, and I can still remember the day they marched it home in its original box (which, like true Pinoys, we never threw away), borne between the arms of two burly men, like a touring monarch.

Never mind that that TV was probably all of 17 inches in screen size—and, of course, in glorious black-and-white (a feature my father enhanced by taping a plastic “filter” on the screen with blue, red, and green bands, mimicking a sky, grass—and red people). Having a TV meant that we had finally arrived in the 20th century, that I no longer had to pester the neighbors to see “Mission: Impossible” or “Lost in Space,” and that I could hold my head high in school and speak sagely about the weekend antics of the Monkees come Monday morning.

Now you must be imagining that I have one of those 60-inch plasma behemoths in my living room or bedroom, to compensate for all those decades in the TV-less desert. I don’t; I wish I did, but I can’t afford them. Or maybe if I put all my pens and Macs together I could get a honking big plasma TV in exchange, but again, maybe because we got into the TV game fairly late in life, Beng and I have been happy for years to have nothing bigger and sexier than a conventional 21-inch TV at home.

Or at least that was the case until a few months ago, when a friend sent me an SM gift certificate worth P10,000, in thanks for a small job. Immediately the words “shopping spree” flashed in my brain; Beng and I spend a third of our lives at SM North, and the GC was like a kid’s ticket to the carnival, never mind that P10,000 doesn’t get you as much these days like it used to.

I was all set to make a beeline for the computer shops—a new external hard drive? A new printer? Beng was probably thinking how many grocery carts we could fill up with that budget. Everything stalled when we walked past the Appliance Center and saw a rack of plasma and LCD wide-screen TVs on display. Our P10,000 was good for a few square inches of plasmic real estate, but inside the store were lots of old, cheap box-type TVs made in China and Korea. “Don’t you think,” I told Beng, “that it’s about time we helped our aging eyes and treated ourselves to something bigger?” Beside me stood a Korean-made 29-incher; sure, it had a big butt, but its screen was stylishly flat, and its sale price was a tolerable P15,000. I whipped out my plastic to add to the GCs, and the deed was done.

So today, in the tender clutches of post-operative recovery, I’m enjoying a megadose of cable TV in its infinite variety, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from “Waking the Baby Mammoth” and “Treasure Quest” to “World Poker Tour” and “America’s Next Top Model.” (I should admit that it didn’t help my mood much when I tuned in at the hospital just as I was coming out of my Demerol haze to watch an episode of “Extreme Surgery,” followed by a parade of comestibles on the Asian Food Channel.)

OK, it’s not HDTV, and you can see the lines on the screen if you come close enough, but hey, it’s mine and not my neighbor’s, and it looks awfully sharp from ten feet away. (My mother used to admonish me and my siblings not to sit too close to the TV. “You’ll ruin your eyes!” she’d say. I’ve since wondered why I, indeed, sat with my nose glued to the screen. Now I understand: there was no such thing as a remote control then, and someone had to turn the dial to switch channels.)


SPEAKING OF SM, I remember flying into my annual panic a few weeks ago when Beng’s birthday was about to come up and I was, as usual, clueless about what to give her. Not only am I a guy to begin with; I’m also the world’s worst gift-giver, and long-time readers of this column will recall that episode many years ago when I gifted Beng with a can opener, which didn’t go over too well. (And the rueful couplet I wrote afterwards: “A can opener / Can’t open her.”)

Now here I was again, racking my brain for the ideal gift idea: it had to be cute, it had to be meaningful (whatever that means), and it had to be, uhm, affordable (a criterion I mysteriously forget when it comes to my own purchases). Thankfully, I remembered a previous trip to a pharmacy at the mall, when Beng picked up a bar of imported Spanish soap, brought it to her nose, closed her eyes wistfully, and put it down again.

So who buys birthday gifts in a drugstore? I do. I drove back to SM, scooped up all the varieties of that Spanish soap that I could get my hands on, put them in a nice box, and waited for the receiver.

When she opened it, she broke in tears (Beng, I must remind you, weeps over dead ants), and said, “I feel rich!” I did, too.

(TV photo from www.tvparty.com)

First Semester, AY 2009-2010


Here's where you can download the file of additional poems we're taking up in our CL 151 class. Click this link, thanks.

Penman for Monday, June 29, 2009

SO I had this pesky operation—hellishly painful post-op, as my surgeon warned me early on—and I’m back home waddling like a diapered duck. Having made my bargains with God, I shall henceforth have to add bales of fiber to my diet, to chew everything down to microscopic mush, to run around the UP Academic Oval (without treating myself to ice cream at the end of the second lap), and to generally reduce my intake of creatures horned and hoofed. All this, because I never want to make the intimate acquaintance of another catheter, ever again.

I’d agreed to the operation in the expectation of certain side benefits, and I wasn’t thinking of just the break from work (except column-writing, which I’ll probably be doing on my deathbed, tapping out tepid wisecracks on my laptop). I was wishing that my surgeon would toss a tummy tuck into the package—might as well, while I was high on Demerol—or at least drain a tubful of lard from the old tire, but his scruples dictated him to keep to his mandate, which was to snip the most sensitive half-inch (well, maybe the next-most) off my poor, 216-pound body. Still, I was hopeful that several days of Dextrose would produce transformative wonders, and deliver me out of the hospital a svelte, sprightly 170-pounder.

Didn’t happen. Beng put me on the bathroom scale as soon as we got home and pronounced me trimmer—by three whopping pounds. I glumly theorized that I was probably just waterlogged and bursting with all that fiber additive I’d had to ingest. I looked at my profile in the mirror and everything was peachy—or rather, peach-shaped. UP Oval, here I come.

That’s as soon as I can get back on my feet. Thankfully I have the world’s best post-op recovery platform, a.k.a. my trusty, treasured La-Z-Boy Reclina-Rocker, my official residence for the next week. The only trouble is, “La-Z-Boy” is the antonym of “exercise.” Once you get on this thing, it won’t let go. Come to think of it, that may be where and how this whole mess began.


FRIENDS WOULD probably do me good right now, but thanks to a personal firewall I’ve put up, they won’t be too many. That’s all right. Friends are one of those things that, as you grow older, tend to get fewer but better.

That flies in the face of what’s been going on in the Internet, where an explosion of “friendships” seems to be the order of the day. Like you, I receive numerous invitations online—many of them from people I don’t even know—asking me to be their “friend” and to join them on this or that social network: Facebook, Multiply, Wayn, Jhoos, Hi5, Unyk, etc.

Just in the hospital, I must’ve received a dozen reminders on my BlackBerry to respond to this and that invitation—all of them, I’m sure, well meant. A week earlier, a friend wanted to send me some information, but sent me a Facebook link instead, thinking that I could access it. I had to tell her, sheepishly, that I must be the last person on earth (or at least in Diliman) without a Facebook account. Which is, admittedly, a rather odd thing, considering my penchant for all things digital.

But my stubborn resistance to “social networking” online is rooted deep in my analog, pre-computer psyche.

I don’t chat online (except during the annual Macworld keynote speech where Steve Jobs used to announce new gizmos—now sadly a thing of the past). I don’t even chat on the phone, coming as I do from a generation for whom a telephone—the big, black, plastic, two-headed doorstopper—was a luxury only rich people had in the house. Our family didn’t have a phone until I was nearly 30 and already married. I grew up thinking that there was no phone conversation you couldn’t finish within a couple of minutes (maybe remembering all those store signs that asked you to limit your call to three), and even today I get ear fatigue when someone keeps me on the phone for more than five, unless they’re truly friends.

I don’t think I’m anti-social or misanthropic or anything like that. I don’t mind meeting people and talking to them; I wouldn’t be a teacher otherwise. It’s just that some part of me recoils when someone I haven’t even met asks—nay, demands—that I be his or her “friend” online. I especially dislike messages that threaten me with being thought of as unfriendly or uncaring if I don’t respond positively and quickly to an “invitation”—you know, the ones that say, “XXX might think you were ignoring him/her if you don’t click the button below.”

None of this, of course, is the fault of the kind person who thought to invite me into his or her circle of acquaintances. It’s the Internet, and the nature of the beast, that’s blurred the distinction between an acquaintance and a friend, between someone you might exchange a juicy tidbit of gossip or a snippet of technical advice with on the fly and someone you’d trust your house, your car, or even your child with for a week or longer.

My friends are the people I drink beer or coffee with, play poker with, fuss over pens with, listen to live music with, and argue passionately about literature and politics with, without the discussion degenerating within three comments into what, online, would be called a “flame war.” My friends are people I may not be in touch with for weeks or months, who will understand and won’t mind the great pools of silence that sometimes well up between us when things get too busy or life yanks us in unexpected directions.

I can appreciate how Facebook, Multiply, Twitter, and such can be great meeting-places for people and convenient, speedy conduits of personal information. I’m probably missing out on something big, and I’m not silly enough to say “never” to something so clearly essential to the digerati (to catheters, yes). After all, I resisted blogging for years, and here I am.

In the meanwhile, like my friends know, the best way to reach me is by email, which gives me time to think of a sensible reply.

Penman for Monday, June 22, 2009


(With apologies to my editors at the STAR for uploading this a day early, for reasons made clear below—so people will know why I might be out of reach and out of circulation for a few days!)


I SAT up from my work and watched the TV more closely one day last week when I heard the news story about former First Lady Imelda R. Marcos weeping over what she claimed was her present state of penury. She was now so poor, she said, that she was having to tap into her late husband’s meager pension as a veteran, just to get by. It might have been the story of an epic downfall—if it were true. I have my own suspicions, but whether it is or not is something beyond my personal competence or interest to establish.

The image did remind me of the two instances when I met Mrs. Marcos face to face. The first was a brief encounter. It was sometime in July 1972, when killer floods were ravaging Luzon; I’d dropped out in my freshman year to work as a reporter for the Philippines Herald, and, being the eager beaver in the office, was given all kinds of odd assignments. One of them was to go to Malacañang one wet morning to check out the Palace’s relief efforts. I was led to a hall where Mrs. Marcos stood before a huge, pyramid-like mountain of “nutribuns”—enriched bread loaves—that she had amassed to send out to the famished poor. I frankly don’t remember anything of what I discussed with her afterwards. I was 18, and—while also a card-carrying anti-Marcos activist who just seven months later would find himself in martial-law prison—I was star-struck.

Our second encounter was by no means brief. Indeed, it went on and on. It must have been around 1977; I’d just begun working as a scriptwriter for Lino Brocka. One day we got a call to present ourselves at the Goldenberg Mansion, now a state guesthouse near Malacañang, to meet with the First Lady. When we got there, we realized that all the luminaries of Philippine filmmaking had been assembled for a massive film project on Philippine history, from Magellan to Marcos. Every director and his writer were assigned a historical segment to shoot; Lino and I got the Gomburza episode.

We were seated around a table flanked by floor-to-ceiling mirrors and silver, silver everywhere. For many hours, Mrs. Marcos lectured the gathered directors on her vision for the movie and on her penchant for “the true, the good, and the beautiful,” with a pronounced emphasis on the last (“No shots of slums or squatters, please!”). There was still daylight when we had stepped into the mansion; it was past one or two in the morning when we rose to leave—but not before we got a personal tour of the place, which contained some of the Madame’s collections, including a piece or two from Angkor (with a book opened to a page showing a picture of the same item). They handed us curfew passes, but I can’t recall how I got home, since I had no car and you couldn’t get a taxi past curfew time. The multimillion-peso Kasaysayan movie did get shot, in bits and pieces, but it was never shown. (It wasn’t a complete waste: in Lino’s portion was a young actor who took the part of a Guardia Civil, by the name, then unknown, of Philip Salvador. It was, if I’m not mistaken, his first break.)

I was tempted to think for a second, after witnessing Mrs. Marcos’s TV outburst, “How the mighty have fallen!” But I thought again, and moved on to the next bit of news.

IF THINGS go according to plan, I should be in semi-hibernation these next couple of weeks, following what I can only delicately describe as a surgical procedure scheduled to be performed somewhere in my nether regions—right about now, while you’re reading this newspaper. Never mind, for the time being, what that operation is. I knew this was coming—have known it for about a year—and, like a typical guy, kept putting it off until the last possible minute. I’m a boy (the minute men step into a hospital, they revert to boyhood); boys don’t like being poked, having been raised to believe that we should be doing whatever poking needs to be done. (On the other hand, women—as Beng never tires of reminding me—live with pain all their lives, and face scissors and scalpels with stoic equanimity.)

When the hospital nurse sat me down last week to draw blood for an alphabet soup of laboratory tests, I cringed, and looked away as she swabbed and palpated my arm for a big fat vein, forcing myself to think of ice cream, rare vintage pens, Angelina Jolie, and a straight flush on the flop. I hate needles; I carry with me the grade-school-clinic memory of syringes bubbling in stainless-steel tubs over tongues of purple flame. The word “inoculation” or “vaccination” was a death threat.

I should be kicking and screaming, but I find that something about hospitals soon turns my fear into resignation, and my resignation into abject docility. A nurse’s smile could be all it takes to induce me to gulp down a gallon of castor oil and waddle off to the bathroom to surrender my precious contents. I’m a pussycat in blue pajamas.

Strangely enough, I like hospital food and airplane food—the kind of moist fodder that my finicky friends would just as soon feed to their dogs. After the blood exams, I dragged Beng down to the hospital cafeteria to break my night-long fast, ordered adobo, pancit, and rice (with an operation around the corner, why worry about cholesterol and carbs?), and ate like a condemned man, making jokes that Beng didn’t appreciate about the plenitude and freshness of meat in the place.

Then we went back up for more tests, this time with a kindly but sharp-eyed cardiologist, who looked hard at the peaks and valleys of my printout before sending me back down to the Heart Station for yet more tests—in the first of which I could hear my heart on some loudspeaker going ga-thump, ga-thump, and the blood going spluuurkkk, spluuurkkk in what I suppose were the ventricles. And then they put me on a treadmill—to which they should have attached a grinder processing bushels of corn, because it seemed a complete waste of labor, otherwise—and made me run in three-minute cycles that kept getting faster and faster.

My knees were turning to spaghetti and I was thinking of passing out when I heard the cute lady doctor who was pressing the buttons say, “It would be nice if you scored higher than XX,” (I forget the exact figure) so I dug deep into my psychic reserves, played the Chariots of Fire theme in my deoxygenated brain, and finished the last cycle just like in the movies, where the champion breasts the tape in slow motion, on behalf of all balding, undersexed, overweight 55-year-olds.

Again, as you’re reading this, I should be in some kind of post-operative haze. (Last week, when I told her about my forthcoming ordeal, my colleague and former professor Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio assured me, “If you have faith, you’ll be visited by St. Martin de Porres, who appeared before my nephew in the hospital. Do you know what he looks like? He’s black, and he carries a stick.”

I’ll be waiting, ma’am. If an orderly resembling Barack Obama comes into my room with a mop, then I’ll know that I didn’t give up all my faith with all that blood and the other day’s adobo.

(Thanks to wikimedia.org for the pic above.)

Penman for Monday, June 15, 2009


THE RECENT controversy over the so-called “Book Blockade of 2009”—happily resolved, at least for the time being, in the Filipino reader’s favor—brought up some other issues that proved interesting for more than academic reasons. In discussions I had about the matter with, among others, the good people at the National Book Development Board (which as been at the forefront of the effort to enforce the Florence Agreement exempting book imports from taxation), it emerged that some very basic questions still needed to be answered to enlighten not just our tax collectors, but also the public at large, on books and literature, and on their value to a society.

For example, can the blockbuster vampire-romance novel Twilight by Stephenie Meyer—reportedly the book whose importation triggered the whole “blockade” brouhaha—be in any way construed to be “educational”? I have to confess that I haven’t yet read the book (as you can imagine, vampire novels are not exactly my top choice of reading fare), but some reviewers apparently think so. The venerable Times of London has been quoted as saying that Twilight captured “perfectly the teenage feeling of sexual tension and alienation”—material that any adept teacher can draw on for class discussion as much as Romeo and Juliet.

Over at the UP Institute of Creative Writing, we’re sitting down to mull these questions over, hoping to provide the NBDB and other government agencies with some friendly and useful advice. Here are some of my preliminary thoughts on the matter, which we’ll finalize soon for transmission to whomsoever may find these ideas helpful:

Literature pertains to any and all material—written or spoken—that employs words and language to convey meaning. In a narrower sense it is an art form comprising printed or recorded words that may be further classified into the genres of poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction. Literature is an imaginative exploration, through language, of human experience.

Thus, the creation and consumption of literature is an important cultural activity. Literature helps to describe, define, and even direct the thoughts, feelings, and practices of a community of readers.

All books, regardless of what may be perceived to be their artistic merit, belong to literature. They possess intrinsic educational value, as they can be used to illuminate and instruct the reader about some particular aspect of human life or about the craft of literature itself. Thus, even "bad" literature (bad whether in form or substance) may have something of instructional value to be derived and developed by a capable teacher.

It is not only the Bible nor Shakespeare nor a physics textbook from which or from whom we can learn. Even works of popular fiction—such as the Harry Potter series or The Da Vinci Code—conceived primarily for their entertainment value, can be used to teach readers about life and about literature itself, and may even have greater cultural and social significance precisely because they tend to reach much larger audiences.

It should never be left to government—and not even to literary critics—to decide which books are “educational” or of “social or cultural value” and which are not. Literary tastes and fashions change, as do societies themselves, and there is certainly more to literature than its moral content or the lack thereof, as important as this aspect may be to some readers and policymakers. Books facilitate cultural exchange, fostering in the reader a better understanding of the outside world and improving his or her ability to engage with that world.

As with democracy itself, literature must allow for a wide variety of subjects, themes, treatments, and styles, even the shallowest or most repugnant of which helps define a range of standards that can guide intelligent readers in forming their own informed assessments and conclusions. Thus, all books deserve equal protection and consideration under the applicable laws, as far as their tax-exempt status is concerned.


SPEAKING OF books, I’m happy to announce the launch of the first book of a former student of mine, Carljoe Javier, along with that of a former UP Workshop fellow, Vlad Gonzales. The launch takes place tonight at 7 pm at Mag:Net on Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City. Both Carljoe and Vlad were fellows at this year’s Baguio workshop, and both acquitted themselves handsomely with some very sharp prose—Carljoe in English and Vlad in Filipino—that also highlighted many of their generation’s preoccupations: chiefly among them, what Carljoe might call “geek civilization,” that predominantly youthful mindset of those raised on computers, the Internet, Neil Gaiman, the X-Men, and the Eraserheads. Carljoe’s And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth and Vlad’s A-Side/B-Side: Ang Mga Piso sa Jukebox ng Buhay Mo are both published by Milflores Publishing.


I WAS surprised to realize last week that a full year had passed since I went to Sydney last May for that beautiful city’s Writers Festival; it took a message from poet Marjorie Evasco—whom I’d recommended to the festival, and who’d just returned—to remind me of time passing.

Here’s part of Marj’s report, which I’m quoting to emphasize the point that it isn’t only our boxers and singers who represent us out there and who give us cause to rejoice:

“I had two events: the first, called ‘The Poet’s Voice,’ was held at the Banggara Theatre on Pier Two of Walsh Bay in the early afternoon of May 20; and the second, ‘Writing the Mother Tongue’, was at the Sydney Philharmonic Choir Studio in the late afternoon of May 21.

“The first event was moderated by Susan Hayes and there were five of us reading our poems for 10-15 minutes each: Australian poets Robert Grey, Emily Ballou and Emma Jones; American poet Devin Johnston; and myself. Susan had asked me to read one poem in Cebuano so the audience would be able to hear the music of the language. I read my short ‘Origami’ poem in Cebuano. It was good that there were three Cebuanos in the audience: Filipino-Australian Dr. Agnes Reynes Williams (from Davao), Ross Camara and Monet Aranas (both from Cebu). “After the reading, we all went to the authors’ book signing table at Gleebooks near the cafés on the pier. Good thing I followed your advice and sent copies of the final edition of my first book, Dreamweavers and the just-released Skin of Water (both by Aria Editions, Inc.) I enjoyed signing copies and meeting those who attended the events of the festival that day.

“The second event was an ‘Author Talk’ session moderated by Katrina Schlunke, a writer and Cultural Studies professor. We decided to make the presentation a combination of a poetry reading and a conversation on the language of poetry, and postcolonial acts of language, including ‘transcreation’ (my term for my process of navigating between English and Cebuano). This session gave me the chance to read more poems in Cebuano. Once again, it was good to have Filipinos in the audience.

“When I was done with all the events, I could relax as a member of the audience. I especially enjoyed the session of novelist Tash Aw (of Malaysia) and Abbas El-Zein (of Lebanon), which was on ‘Childhood and Conflict’ in their novels and memoirs.”

Good for you, Marj! Cebuano poetry in Sydney—that’s cultural exchange in action and at its best.

Penman for Monday, June 8, 2009

MY FRIEND (and former professor) the poet Gemino “Jimmy” Abad is one of those rare people whose lives are almost completely devoted to pursuits of the mind. For someone like me who’s more at home with trench warfare, Jimmy’s ability to blithely tune out of the here and now and to dwell instead on the implications of the Latin root word for “vernacular” is an admirable talent. The sort of problems that vex Jimmy—like using the ATM, or dealing with spam email—are not like yours and mine.

It isn’t very often that I get to outsmart Dr. Abad on anything vaguely scholarly; indeed, I can recall only one such instance, when we were talking about old songs and the chatter came around to that Cole Porter showstopper, “C’est Magnifique.” (If you don’t know or can’t remember the song—no great reason why you should; it was first sung in 1953, in the musical Can-can—it’s the one that begins with “When love comes in, and takes you for a spin, ooh-la-la-la, c’est magnifique!”) The song, I reminded Jimmy, climaxes with the line “But when once more she whispers Je t’adore”—at which point Jimmy frowned as if to ask, “She whispered what?” Je t’adore, I repeated—“I adore you,” a somewhat more emphatic version of “I love you” in French. Then Jimmy smiled sheepishly and said, “Darn it, kaibigan, I always thought she was saying ‘Shut the door!’”

While he may occasionally garble his lyrics, Jimmy’s a perfectionist when he comes to something else he does exceptionally well, aside from his own poetry (which, not incidentally, just won him Italy’s coveted Feronia Prize)—putting together anthologies of the country’s best poetry and fiction in English. His poetry compilations—Man of Earth, A Native Clearing, and A Habit of Shores—are landmark studies of the form. He has since turned his attention to the Filipino short story in English, following through on what the late Leopoldo Yabes began in his three-volume anthology that covered the years between 1925 and 1955. Jimmy has now completed work on the second part of his own project, spanning 1973 to 1989.

Titled Underground Spirit, the two-volume work covers more than 80 stories culled from the many hundred written and published during that period—the dark days of martial law, followed by an explosion of new work post-EDSA. I myself produced most of my short fiction then, and remember it as an exhilarating time—before computers and before the Internet, for most of us—when I wrote my stories longhand on yellow pad paper before pecking away at the final manuscript on a Royal typewriter. It’s a wonder to me now how, with all the technology at my fingertips, I’m writing a lot less than I did back when all I had was a leaky Bic.

But back to Jimmy Abad. He wrote me last week to ask for a bit of help, specifically with securing permissions for republishing some short stories he’s chosen for the anthology. There are about 20 stories he still needs permissions for, so I’m providing their titles and authors below, hoping that the authors (or, in the case of the deceased, their heirs or copyright holders) will read this and can write Dr. Abad to give him their blessings at gemino_eugenio@yahoo.com.

The Boarding House. D. Paulo Dizon
Agua de Mayo. Jose San Luis
Gift to the Earth. Lina Espina-Moore
Night Music. Alfredo O. Cuenca Jr.
The Children. Jose Ma. Espino Jr.
Gargoyles. Mario G. Lim
The Song of Eulalia. Freda Jayme
The Traveling Salesman and the Split Woman. Nick Joaquin
The Party-Hopper. Luning Bonifacio-Ira
In Hog Heaven. Jessie B. Garcia
But Not Too Gently into the Night. Letty Salanga
Where the Blossoms Fall. Maria Aurora Agustines
Angiyátolan. Fanny Haydee B. Llego
A Nobel Prize for Jorge Luis Borges. Eli Ang Barroso
Crossfire. Dennis Arroyo
Thirteen Chestnuts on Fifth Avenue. Mary Agnes P. Guerrero Levin
Of Stings and Kings. Hermel A. Nuyda
The Wall. Armando R. Ravanzo
Our Lady of the Arts and Letters. Eli Ang Barroso
The Guest Who Came to Dinner. B. S. Agbayani Pastor
Islanders. Clovis L. Nazareno


BENG AND I marked her birthday last week by attending the exhibit opening of a dear artist-friend, Katrina “Kim” Bello, whose "Drawing Encounters from the Turnpike and a Light from a Distant World" opened at the Mag:Net Gallery at The Columns on Ayala cor. Gil Puyat Ave. in Makati.

The US-based Kim (she works for the Conde Nast publishing group in New York) comes home every now and then to present new work, and each exhibit explores and reveals another facet of her artistry. This time, Kim evokes a city in both decay and rebirth, using strong geometrical shapes and lines in what she calls “paintings on paper” (a graphic artist, she’s more used to leaning over the work than to painting on canvas).

As the exhibit notes observe, “This process of continual diminishment or rather perpetual construction is evinced through the recurring lattice patterns swathed by broad pale washes of intermittent shades of gray. The polyhedrons, drawn predominantly as skeletal frames, are reminiscent of American architect Lebbeus Woods' rendering of his Locus Memory Plan for the WTC memorial in NY. Where Woods' lines are precisely scratched over a dense layer of ink wash, Bello's lines are similarly drafted with such exactness, forming polyhedrons that are bisected and intersected by milky drips and lacey cobweb mesh. The color used in some paintings seems to underscore the ghostliness of these empty structures.”

It was good to meet up with Kim and another mutual friend, the photographer Dominique James, on our last visit to New York, and even better to see her here, against the backdrop of her most recent work. The show’s on until July 6.

Penman for Monday, June 1, 2009

AND NOW let me move away from the contentiously big issues of the past two weeks (thanks for all the mail, folks, pro and con) back to my comfort zone—the trivial and the transitory.

I’m going to indulge myself in a bit of chatter about one of the strangest of human impulses, the urge to collect, and by that I mean the compulsion to find, to acquire, and to keep more than one of basically the same thing (although collectors will argue that no two objects of theirs are ever truly and exactly alike).

It doesn’t really matter what the particular objects are—they could be Amorsolos, cars, matchboxes, swizzle sticks, dolls, Star Wars figurines, handbags, knives, or battle tanks (yes, the real thing, not the toys—Google the name “Jacques Littlefield” and enjoy, if you can, his collection of 66 tanks, not to mention 160 more military vehicles). The obsessive drive’s the same—a knot in the stomach and an itch in the fingers, a sudden breathlessness that seizes the collector upon sensing a target-object on the horizon, more so within grabbing distance.

I felt that telltale anxiety sweep over me a month ago, when—right after my writers’ festival stint in New York—I took a side trip to Chicago to treat myself to something I hadn’t experienced in almost 20 years: a pen show, and a major one at that. The annual Chicago pen show is America’s largest showcase of vintage pens, and the lift I got from attending it—first in 1990, and then this May—has been equaled only by another personal pilgrimage, not to Lourdes or anything so holy, but to the Macworld Expo in San Francisco in 2006, and just a notch down to the Volkswagen factory and museum in Wolfsburg in 2004.

Collecting is a form of misery, and misery loves company; that’s what a pen show is all about, a weekend’s gathering of the global faithful (none originating farther than me, in Chicago). For two or three days, everything strange makes perfect sense, in that special language intelligible only to the initiated: “Is that ebonite feed screw-in or friction-fit? And, oh, I think a silicone sac will be better than latex for your Mandarin Duofold….”

Displaying herculean restraint, I picked up only three pens in Chicago among the many thousands laid out on the dealers’ tables. To be honest, it was probably more a paucity of resources that kept me in check, a eunuch in the harem. (Having to dip into their grocery kitty, collectors quickly become expert not just at their subjects, but also at finding reasons and excuses for their self-indulgence. My noble justification for splurging on inky tubes in a time of recession is that my savings are better parked in resaleable antiques than in low-interest deposits susceptible to bank failures. At least that’s what I tell Beng, who, bless her soul, is a fountain of trust.)

Indeed, collecting sadly involves money, so those of us with less of the green stuff have to make up with gray matter. For me, this means scoring bargains on eBay—the collector’s Paradiso and Inferno all in the same place—using my wits and some tricks I’ll teach you some other time. Meanwhile, here are some lessons I’ve picked up from 20 years of pen collecting, applicable as well, I suppose, to Barbie dolls and Abrams tanks:

1. It takes time to discover what you really want (in my case, Parker Vacumatics, Pelikans, and Montblancs). In the meanwhile, you might run around like a headless chicken, and pick up every object in sight. It's good to have a collecting plan, but it's also good to be loose enough to be open to surprises.

2. Collecting is a lifelong learning process. As with all learning, you make mistakes—and you should be able to forgive yourself for them. Two decades into the hobby, I've still overpaid for pens i should've done more research on—but then I've also made great bargains by acting decisively or even impulsively, going by gut feel.

3. Collecting and using pens or whatever it is you collect (unless you're a professional dealer) should be a pleasure, not a job. When collecting becomes mechanical acquisition, just because you can afford the item or just because you have to fill an empty slot in the tray, it may be time to pause and give things a rest.

4. At some point, it’ll be good to pass on the good stuff to younger, newer collectors. I'll hold on to my best pens to bequeath to my daughter and son-in-law, but as the years go by I’ll be selling off other pens to younger people at prices they can afford, to allow them to share my joy and my obsession—or even just the sheer and increasingly rare pleasure of writing with wet ink on a blank, dry page.


SPEAKING OF collecting, a couple of months ago, I attended a different kind of book launching at the Manila Polo Club—unusual if only because no books were actually on sale. The books were there, for sure, but none of them had a price sticker, because they were all meant to be given away to the invited guests—friends all of the three authors, Jimmy Laya, Bert Bravo, and Mar Lao—in exchange for a donation to one’s favorite charity.

The sumptuously produced coffeetable book itself was also something of a one-off. Titled Hidden Treasures, Simple Pleasures (Bookhaven, 2009), it’s a visual record of the personal collections of three fast friends, all successful business leaders, who turned a brain wave into a virtual catalogue of some of the best art you can find in this country, outside the museums. Exquisitely photographed by Wig Tysmans, the book offers page after page of Ocampos, Manansalas, Amorsolos, Botongs, santos, antique statuary and jewelry, and the odd object or two (how about a golf course and a Mercedes-Benz?).

Jimmy Laya—to whose previous book Consuming Passions: Philippine Collectibles (Anvil, 2003) I had contributed a chapter on fountain pens—asked me to edit and introduce the book, and I was happy to oblige, since I felt that—as a collector myself, albeit of much smaller and more modest objects—I understood the passion of these three gentlemen for things of beauty.

Private collectors do what the government can’t and probably shouldn’t: they seek, they find, they acquire, and they preserve some of the best that artists can come up with. Through books like this, they also share what they have with the rest of us.

The objects represented in Hidden Treasures, Simple Pleasures (well, “simple” might be, shall we say, stretching a point) may not all fall under the rubric of fine art, but even their exuberant eclecticism brings a note of freshness, a touch of the amateur in the original sense of the word as a lover, rather than a professional acquirer, of things.

One of the best descriptions of a collector that I’ve come across was in a book titled Objects of Desire—a book on the American antiques trade by a journalist-historian named Thatcher Freund. He said: “Decorators tend to see objects in the context of a room, while the eyes of a collector always fall on a single object.”

As you can see from the book (although I wonder how other people will ever get one, making this an instant collectors’ item in itself), these men have been to many rooms, and saw many single objects, now all together in one place, thanks to this unique adventure in art and friendship—the friendship of art, the art of friendship.

Penman for Monday, May 25, 2009


LAST WEEK, I apparently upset quite a few people by taking the side of singer Martin Nievera in the matter of his recent rendition of the National Anthem. This time, let me ruffle a few more feathers by weighing in on what’s come to be called the “Book Blockade of 2009”—the sudden discovery by the Department of Finance that imported books should be taxed, regardless of the law and previous practice.

Prior to all this, books have been coming in to the Philippines duty-free, under the provisions of the 1950 Florence Agreement on the Importation of Educational, Scientific and Cultural Materials, which the Philippines signed in 1952. That agreement was sponsored by the UNESCO to promote the free flow of knowledge around the world, and it’s accorded its signatories the privilege of duty-free and therefore more accessible books ever since.

So what happened? I was away when reader and fellow blogger Martin Cruz alerted me to the brewing tempest, so I read up on it online and established the following:

1. Because of the runaway success of a popular novel (Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight), a Customs examiner named Rene Agulan decided that its importer ought to be paying duties on it. Faced with the prospect of having no books to sell, the importer complied.

2. Alas, not just Agulan but his superiors in the DOF realized that they were sitting on a gold mine. Finance Undersecretary Estela Sales released new guidelines and her boss Secretary Margarito Teves subsequently issued a department order limiting duty-free importation to 10 copies per institution and two copies per individual, and otherwise imposing a 1 percent tax on “educational” books and a 5 percent tax on “non-educational” books.

This contravenes, however, not just the Florence Agreement, but also our own more recent and most applicable law—RA 8047 or the Book Publishing Industry Development Act of the Philippines, which created the National Book Development Board. Not surprisingly, the Book Development Association of the Philippines—an association of Philippine book publishers—and the NBDB itself have protested the DOF order strongly, citing both the Florence Agreement and its effective reiteration under RA 8047.

In its position paper (which you can find here), the NBDB quotes directly from the Florence Agreement Guide: “Under the Agreement, books, newspapers, periodicals and many other categories of printed matter are granted duty-free entry. Printed music, maps and even tourist posters are similarly exempt. All the items of this annex to the Agreement, except architectural plans and designs, enjoy exemption from customs duties regardless of destination. Books are the most important category. The exemption granted to books is not subject to any qualification as to their educational, scientific and cultural character.” Nowhere is a limit set on the number of copies that can be imported duty-free.

The BDAP, which has appealed the DOF order to the Secretary of Justice for his opinion, also noted the irony of the fact that it was Finance Secretary Teves himself who co-authored RA 8047—back when he was a congressman.

So why the sudden eagerness of our tax collectors to go after the book importers? Teves’s DO 17-09 itself doesn’t explicitly say why, but by setting limits on how many books individuals and institutions can bring in tax-free, and by collecting taxes on everything above those limits, it does come across as another revenue-generation measure—which, to be fair to the DOF, is after all within its mandate.

But in seeking new money, can the DOF reinterpret the law on its own, and go against both the spirit and the letter of the Florence Agreement and RA 8047? Here, Usec. Sales’s creative justification for her reading of the applicable provision of RA 8047 (taking “the tax and duty-free importation of books or raw materials to be used in book publishing” to mean “books… to be used in book publishing,” whatever that actually means) borders on the absurd. (Is there an exemption from the Florence Agreement exemption? Yes—only when “national security, public order, or public morals” are involved. As the BDAP argues, revenue generation isn’t one of those grounds.)

True, books are commodities like any other, and if the authorities insist on interpreting and applying the law in its narrowest, most ridiculous sense, I suppose they could, even if it means flouting a noble and sensible international convention we signed on to.

But this kind of action reeks of desperation, and can only lend credence to the suspicions of a public all too used by now to a rash of kidnappings and bank robberies on the eve of national elections. It demonstrates a misplaced zealousness better applied to the collection of taxes on truly big-ticket items (such as the smuggled crude oil pegged last year by Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes at P14 billion in lost taxes) and from big-time tax evaders. By all means, collect taxes from whomever and wherever they may be lawfully due; but respect the status quo ante and spare us our books, which are often our only comfort in these hard times, and our people’s best hope of improving their minds and futures.

Which brings me back to last week’s piece on the anthem and the law—the Flag and Heraldic Code—that Martin Nievera’s critics have rediscovered to threaten him and other deviant anthem-singers with. I’ve read the law more closely, hoping to find some leeway for artistic interpretation but finding none. It’s a dour, demanding measure, which if strictly applied will punish anyone who sings the anthem too slow, too fast, off-key, and without fervor (yes, the law requires that singing be done “with fervor”) with up to P20,000 in fines and one-year imprisonment. Next time I’m at flag ceremony, I’m going to be glancing left and right and pricking my ears to make sure no one strays from the straight and narrow—especially those government officials who barely mumble the lyrics while I’m straining to hit the high notes.

All this reminds me of one of my favorite sayings: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Of course—unless you cheat by Googling—you’d need to import and read a book of American literature (or at least one of quotations) to know who said that.

Penman for Monday, May 18, 2009


TWO BIG issues having to do with culture blew up while I was away these past two weeks, and I feel constrained to say what I think about them, because—well, I’m a Filipino.

This week I’ll take up the first one—the brouhaha that followed singer Martin Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem, Lupang Hinirang, at the Pacquiao fight in Las Vegas last May 2. The National Historical Institute and some commentators took Nievera to task for his interpretation, which deviated from what turned out to be news for many Filipinos—a legally prescribed way of singing the song, under Republic Act 8491 or the Flag and Heraldic Code.

I didn’t get to see the fight live, so I had to go to YouTube to listen to Nievera—and when I did, I had to wonder what the fuss was all about. The performance was a tad dramatic, to be sure, but wasn’t the moment titanically theatrical as well? I didn’t think that anything was wrong with Martin; rather, I think something’s wrong with the law in its intent and implementation.

Let’s begin with intentions. Can you imagine what it would be like if some emperor declared that, say, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) or even Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” should be read aloud in one and only one way?

Of course, the National Anthem isn’t just a poem or a pop song, as many have archly observed; it’s a verbalized symbol of national unity, and therefore—the argument might go—singing it one way would concretize the spirit of that unity. In this sense, I can understand the NHI’s exasperation. If we can’t even get the tempo of Lupang Hinirang right, what can we?

But I think that misses the point, which is that the anthem is also a work of art, and as such is inevitably subject to interpretation. Its meaning can be affected by its context. When I sing it together with a quadrangleful of other Filipinos, all at one pace, I find and put myself within the collective, the me-in-the-nation. When I sing it by myself, more expressively, I seek and find the-nation-in-me; I reread it and sing it as a poem to which I bring my own experience and emotions. When an accomplished artist reinterprets the anthem, it’s not a form of disrespect, but high praise and a way of revivifying what to many of us have turned to stale, memorized, emotionless words sung at flag ceremony.

I don’t think our revolutionary heroes will turn in their graves if they heard this blood-hallowed hymn played differently from they way they heard it in 1898—to begin with, it didn’t even have any official Filipino lyrics, as we know them today, until 1956! The freedom they fought for was handmaiden to a democracy—at least a theoretical one—that should allow for diversity, divergence, and dissent. As unpleasant as it may be, that includes the right to quarrel—nonviolently—with and about the nation and its symbolic representations.

This nation’s more than a hundred years old. We should feel confident enough about ourselves to accommodate a range of expressions about who and what we are. If we’ve failed to cohere as a nation, it isn’t the fault of the anthem or of its singers, or because we’ve failed to sing the anthem to the one lawful beat, or flown flags with the prescribed shade of blue. It’s more likely because we haven’t been open and inclusive enough as a society in more significant and more material ways.

And what of implementation? Since when has the Flag Law—crafted in 1998 in a fit of Centennial fervor, when we were too busy contemplating the embroidery on our barongs—been applied with the religiousness it demands by law enforcers bearing color swatches of Pantone 286, the official shade of blue? (Since when, for that matter, have we observed the Constitutional separation of Church and State, with Catholic Masses and prayers held at nearly every government function from the Palace down? And before that comment cranks up the hate-mail machine, let me say outright that I do pray—privately, without requiring or expecting it of my State-university colleagues and staff.)

Cultural policing like this promotes a narrow, mechanical sense of nation, one grounded on ultimately impractical rules rather than an appreciation of the nation as an organic entity.

I don’t see the United States diminished in any way when Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, and Clay Aiken choose to sing The Star-Spangled Banner this way and that (if you want proof, go to YouTube and check out their versions). We may argue with the quality of their singing or the excessive flourishes of their interpretation, but hardly with their privilege to sing the song the way only they can. That’s why professional singers—and not Marine or Army sergeants (unless you were Barry Sadler)—get invited to sing at big events; for a few minutes, they bring new life to an old tune (or, to use the fancy critical term, they defamiliarize the familiar, which is basic to any art).

I seem to remember—and please correct me, fellow boomers, if I’m wrong—that RJ (yes, that RJ) and his band the Riots got banned from the airwaves for a while back in the ‘60s for doing a rock rendition of Lupang Hinirang. Was Jimi Hendrix any less American for doing the same thing at Woodstock in 1969?

As a workable compromise, let the anthem be played and sung the prescribed way in official government functions, and perhaps in schools at flag ceremony; that’s all the practice of uniformity we need; but leave artists to interpret it as only artists will, emotively, with all its possibilities for both artistic success and failure.

I’m not saying that artists are above the law, or that laws are unnecessary. If a writer or musician steals, rapes, or passes a bouncing check, he should be jailed or punished like everyone else. As for singing the National Anthem—well, I can’t sing a tenth of Martin Nievera’s notes, but I’d be willing to try and sing it the way he did in a public venue, to be prosecuted as a test case for the Supreme Court to sort out: ang makulong, so to speak, nang dahil sa iyo.

Next week, I’ll take up the other and perhaps more materially important issue—the so-called “Book Blockade of 2009.”

Penman for Monday, May 11, 2009

I HAD a very fruitful trip out to the US these past couple of weeks, mainly to participate in the 5th PEN World Voices Festival in New York, a gathering of about 160 writers from more than 50 countries. The festival was focused on the theme of “Evolution/Revolution”—the political, social, and economic changes taking place around the world, both fast and slow, and their impact on literature (or, conversely and perhaps more hopefully, the impact of literature on societies and governments at large).

I was, I was told, the first Filipino to be invited to the World Voices Festival, thanks to the efforts of Filipino-American novelist Jessica Hagedorn—who was, unfortunately, too burdened with teaching duties to attend the festival herself. But in three separate events, I had a chance to meet and interact with fellow writers from all over—as well as to touch base with New York-based Fil-Am writers like Luigi Francia and Angel Shaw, and even the traveling Robby Kwan Laurel, who just happened to be attending a conference upstate at the time.

Like true Pinoys, the US side of the family—my mom Emy, daughter Demi, sister Elaine, sister-in-law Mimi, nephew Toto, and niece Eia, not to mention Beng, who followed a day later for a surprise reunion with everyone else—all trooped to New York to attend my talks and readings, soon to be joined by Pinoy expat-friends including the photographer Dominique James and artist Kim Bello.

The first event, “Prison Deform,” gathered a group of four writers—Hwang Sok-yong (South Korea), Khet Mar (Burma), Susan Rosenberg (US) and myself, who had all spent some time in prison—to talk about how that experience had helped shape our writing. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), we found and agreed that we had put the worst part of our confinements behind us, and that, indeed, writing and writing well was the best revenge.

The main reading itself—held at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, a pillared, cavernous amphitheater that put any speaker literally in the spotlight—went off very well, with each of the nine scheduled readers given eight minutes on the podium: Muriel Barbery (France), Nicole Brossard (Canada), Narcís Comadira (Spain), Jose Dalisay (Philippines), Edwidge Danticat (US/Haiti), Péter Nádas (Hungary), Sergio Ramírez (Nicaragua), Raja Shehadeh (Palestine), and Salman Rushdie (UK/India). I was in formidable and formidably talented company—Ramirez, for example, served as Vice President of Nicaragua aside from being an accomplished novelist—and we spoke against the backdrop of a screen on which our words were electronically scrolled.

I’ve long lost my stage fright—25 years of teaching and lecturing will take care of that—but I still get star-struck in the company of genuine celebrities (excluding politicians) and my encounter with the festival’s luminary and chairman, Salman Rushdie, proved no exception. Thanks to a very tight window between my own first event and the Big One in Cooper Union, many blocks away, I arrived too late to clink wineglasses with my fellow readers who had foregathered in a holding room, and I hovered in the background as the official photographer (with the improbable but utterly appropriate name of Beowulf Sheehan) snapped pictures of everyone and as Rushdie—who, I was comforted to find, is my close match in sheer poundage—exchanged pleasantries with those around him, one hand in a pocket, beyond the reach, at least for the moment, of fatwas and such. But I, on the other hand, could’ve nailed him, could’ve peppered him with questions like “So what do you really think of organized humanism?” or “What time of the day or night do you feel most comfortable writing?”, but I didn’t want to spoil the good time he was having.

I could’ve told him what my mother did when she heard that I was coming to New York to read something of mine along with a much more famous writer named Salman Rushdie—she ran to the Centreville Public Library and loaned out an armful of Rushdie opuses, only to find that she couldn’t get beyond Page 3. “Bakit ganiyan siya sumulat, Toto?” she asked me when I arrived, employing the diminutive by which she’s addressed me, her first-born, all my life. “Sumakit ang ulo ko, sinauli ko na lang ang libro!” she cried. I’d wanted to tell her, “Now, now, I’m sure that’s not what Salman’s mother would say,” but I let it drop. Truth to tell I sometimes get a headache myself from the prose of Rushdie and his Indic brethren, which makes me feel like I’m biting through five layers of chocolate cake. I’d thought of bringing along my copy of Shalimar the Clown—the gift of another friend—for him to sign, but it weighed about as much as five or six copies of my own novel, and I couldn’t go to the reading with that in hand.

I read a passage from Soledad’s Sister that introduced the audience to our physical and social landscape, and by the end of my eight minutes I was happy to have come and given voice to our literature, still so little seen and heard even in the world’s largest literary marketplace (a shortcoming that, among others, Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado should soon help redress, building on the headway gained by Bulosan, Gonzalez, Santos, Sionil Jose, Hagedorn, Rosca, Roley, Linmark, and others). I’m sure my mother, in the audience, felt the same. (And I did have my moment with Mr. Rushdie: after the readings, I took his hand and said, “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rushdie.” “Likewise,” he said, before he was whisked off to indulge his autograph-seekers and I joined family and friends for a late dinner at a ramen place on the Lower East Side.)

My last event, a reading titled “Defiance” at an apparently popular venue called Joe’s Pub, was dedicated to the memory of that one man who stood up to a tank at Tiananmen Square in 1989. We were all asked to read pieces not written by us but manifesting and celebrating that same spirit of resistance to unjust authority. It was a lively and varied reading; one participant read from a letter of Mahatma Gandhi to the British raj, another a letter of a former US military prosecutor urging the dropping of charges against an Iraqi detainee who had been arrested at 16 and kept for six years at Guantanamo.

Most of us read poetry, and before leaving for New York I had asked some writer-friends like Rio Almario, Jimmy Abad, and Mario Miclat for their recommendations, wanting to represent Philippine literature at its defiant best. They gave me terrific suggestions, but in the end—taking the atmosphere of a crowded pub and the need for a more direct approach into account—I chose to read a pair of dramatic monologues by the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga from his work Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather, where US General Elwell Otis meets spirited resistance from the young General and President Emilio Aguinaldo.

It was drizzling when I rushed out to take the subway back to my hotel from Joe’s Pub, but I couldn’t have asked for a better combination of weather and circumstance: rain and poetry, refreshments both for the vagrant spirit.

(And many thanks to Dominique James for the photo above.)

Penman for Monday, May 4, 2009

LIKE I promised last week, I’m going to give you a sampling today of what and how some of our best young writers are thinking about their work and when they work. It’s been a feature of the UP Writers Workshop these past few years to require all fellows to submit a brief discussion of their “poetics”—a fancy term for describing why they write what they write. There’s no set format for this presentation, so each writer is free to approach the subject any way he or she pleases. We then evaluate the writer’s ongoing project in the light of these poetics.

As you’ll see from the following excerpts, every writer has a different focus or concern: Dean Alfar talks about craft, Mikael Co about “dating” or “affect”, Carlomar Daoana about the how being the what, Carljoe Javier about the pleasure of watermelon-smashing, Jing Panganiban about getting away from oneself, and Alvin Yapan about why magic realism is a valid native response to colonialism. (It’s too bad that, this being a family newspaper, I can’t reprint Norman Wilwayco’s delightful exploration of the Pinoy Bastos.) In future, we hope to be able to edit and publish these papers—interesting and insightful works of the writer’s art themselves—in a collection, but for now, have a taste of the good, raw stuff.

Dean Alfar: I write speculative fiction, and what guides me when I write my stories is the need to produce a well-written story. Yes, there needs to be a speculative element (or at the very least a speculative sensibility) but I am decidedly old-school when it comes to crafting a story. On my totem pole of priorities, techniques of characterization come first (and not “the idea”, as some would expect of a writer of non-realist fiction). After that, anything goes: narrative structure, space, plot, dialogue and other discourse elements. For me, what makes a story work is character, not conceit.

Mikael Co: At ano nga ba ang paniniwalang ito tungkol sa dating, sa affect? Ganito, in a nutshell: Oo, siyempre, logical system ang wika. Pero ‘yung sining, ang nagpapasining sa kanya, ‘yung katangian niyang i-extend ‘yung boundaries ng logical system na iyon—o, siguro, more accurately, ‘yung kapangyarihan niyang ipa-intuit sa atin kung ano ang nasa kabila ng boundaries na iyon. Art transcends (or at least attempts to transcend) mere logic to remind us of that human part of us, the part that thrives in the humility of saying that no, not everything can be explained. That thrives in faith, actually: Faith that there is a langue upon which each of our paroles are anchored upon—that there are things that cannot be encased in our feeble attempts at understanding. Kutob ko, nandu’n ang affect, e. The heart has reasons that reason cannot comprehend.

Carlomar Daoana: Perceiving and speaking consciousness in the poem is the insight and the how in the telling of the poem (the slant in the narrative) may offer more light and access to the mind of the poet than any message received by the reader at the end of the poem like some kind of reward…. The challenge in writing a poem is not to work towards a pre-determined, articulate and wise destination but to offer a tenacious, clear-eyed and unique (neurotic, abrupt, disinterested) point-of-view—a voice that is alive from the first line, insisting its human capacities, singular in its observations and declarations, not explaining itself.

Carljoe Javier: I imagine a lot of my literary contemporaries, those with smashing new visions for literature, those that seem to straddle the worlds of writing and theory effortlessly, those who at such a young age are racking up awards and pushing the envelope of Philippine literature as youths; I think of them being exposed to literature early in their lives, I imagine their parents supporting their writing, I imagine the books around them, the teachers that encouraged their writing. While others get this, I spend the majority of my time watching Gallagher smash watermelons. That might be something to help define my poetics: with others locked in various intellectual and aesthetic struggles, striving for beauty, pondering the art for art’s sake vs. art for society debate, trying to question and transcend the limitations of form, forwarding new genres, I aspire for the same effect that Gallagher got when he put a watermelon on a table and smashed it with a mallet.

Jing Panganiban: Natumbok ng aking kaibigang si Lawrence L. Ypil ang problema ng maraming manunulat ng personal na sanaysay na kumbinsihin ang mambabasa na interesante ang kanyang buhay sapat para magsulat tungkol rito. Sa kanyang sanaysay na “Look at My Life! and Other Outrageous Claims of Creative Nonfiction,” inilatag ni Larry ang suliranin tungkol sa self-referentiality sa isang masturbatory genre. Itong-ito rin ang mga isyu ko. Paano ko iiwasang malunod sa sarili sa aking akda? Paano ko matitiyak na karapat-dapat ikuwento ang kuwento ng buhay ko? Paano ako iigpaw sa personal na sanaysay bilang akology, ang walang pasintabing pagbibida sa sarili?

Alvin Yapan: Hindi dayuhang konsepto sa ating pagkukuwento ang magic realism. Sa ating mga epiko, kuwentong bayan, alamat at mito, sa ating mga katutubong naratibo hayag na hayag na ang buto ng magic realism, na ayon kay Alejo Carpentier na isa sa mga unang nagbigay ng kahulugan sa marvellous realism ay isang uri ng pagtanaw sa mundo kung papaano ang buhay sa mga kolonisadong kultura ay nagiging absurdo na kung minsan, nagiging pantastiko na sa lenteng dala ng realismo. “Bagabag” ang nararamdaman ng tao sa kolonisadong kultura sa nararanasan nilang patuloy na pagbabanggaan ng dalawang kulturang nararanasan nila: isang kulturang taal, katutubo, malalim ang ugat sa kanilang kamalayan at isang kulturang hiram, Kanluranin, kolonyal. Kung kaya siguro matatagpuan ang paksain ng mga kuwento ko sa ugnayan ng lungsod at lalawigan, ng pagbabago ng tradisyon.


I HAD an interesting chat in the sidelines of the workshop with crime novelist Felisa “Ichi” Batacan, whose Smaller and Smaller Circles quickly acquired a following after its publication in 2002. Now based in Singapore, Ichi is working on a “prequel” to Circles, and has co-edited a collection of Filipino crime fiction. Both of us continued to wonder why the crime-fic genre hasn’t been as popular here as it is elsewhere, especially when—as the tabloids never fail to remind us—we’re swimming in a sea of crime.

I had some ideas to offer Ichi:

Crime in this country often isn’t just crime against persons; crime tends to be socially and politically rooted, involving issues of power, privilege, and, inevitably, justice. Our crime fiction begins where others end—the solution of the crime is just the beginning of the search for justice. Our problem isn’t solving crime—our problem is the solution: once we know whodunit, what then? How do you go up against the powers that be?

But then we’re no longer talking fiction, are we?

Penman for Monday, April 27, 2009

THIS YEAR'S UP Writers Workshop started auspiciously enough, albeit in a somewhat unusual way. National Artist and workshop director Virgilio Almario and I took the two front seats on the bus going up to Baguio last Easter Sunday, forcing us to watch whatever the bus driver fed into the DVD player.

This, for me, is always a moment of great anticipation: you half-expect an action epic featuring Jet Li or Jean-Claude van Damme, something to stir the stale, refrigerated air with throaty yelps and roundhouse kicks.

As it turned out, our first DVD was what the business calls a “romantic comedy” — a Pinoy confection titled A Very Special Love, starring John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo, an overbearing-boss-meets-adoring-secretary story. It became, in effect, our first workshop subject, with Rio and I agreeing that it was very well scripted and acted, with Sarah demonstrating a fine comedic talent.

But when the movie ended somewhere in Pampanga and we hankered for the obligatory provincial-bus action film, the conductor pulled out a disc that he claimed to be the recent car-racing flick The Fast and the Furious 4. It was fast and furious, all right, but it was something else titled Bikini Girls from the Lost Planet — featuring actresses with no surnames like “Syren” and accompanied by spooky theremin music. I was just thinking that any movie whose first line of dialogue was “Hey, baby, how ya doin’?” had to be worthy of a workshop, when the lead actor began gorging on Syren’s cleavage, and National Artist and workshop director Rio regretfully ordered the tape stopped, mandated by his lofty position to maintain wholesomeness in our entertainment fare, at least for the time being.

“Wholesome,” indeed, would be the last word you would use to describe the literature being produced by our best young writers today, as the week-long workshop established. If that’s a disturbing thought — well, it’s meant to disturb. Just to make it clear, the workshop fellows themselves were as flush with schoolboy and schoolgirl charm as you can imagine (maybe with one or two deliberate exceptions), but their work, on the whole, displayed a fine cutting edge, eager to challenge what came before them.

Next week, I’ll give you a more detailed report on what these concerns were; for a quick preview, I’ll just mention the words tunay na lalake, ineffable, cultural fidelity, spec fic, secret-sharing, and akology, engaging concepts all. For now, as director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing that ran the workshop, let me thank our sponsors and friends: the National Commission on Culture and the Arts; the Chancellor of UP Diliman, Gerry Cao (the very first Diliman chancellor to actually sit in on a workshop session); the Baguio Writers Group, who hosted us for an evening of beer and poetry at Vocas on Session Road; William Aquino, the ever-affable and generous manager of the AIM Igorot Lodge, the perfect nook for intensive workshops of this kind; UP Baguio chancellor Precy Macansantos and our colleagues at Benguet State University, where I gave a talk on the short story; writer and bookman Del Tolentino, whose home every writer dreams of owning; and painter BenCab, for the kind favors described below.


THE WORKSHOP fellows and panelists were welcomed to Baguio with a special lunch laid out by painter and National Artist Benedicto Cabrera — or BenCab, as most people know him — long a friend of writers and of the workshop. His friends among the local tribespeople offered a cañao in his honor — it also happened to be his birthday just a few days earlier — and many other friends from Manila came up to share the moment with him, including publisher Karina Bolasco, historian Ambeth Ocampo, printmaker Pandy Aviado, and poet Rayvi Sunico.

After the kamayan lunch, Ben took us on a private tour of the new museum that he had just opened (Km. 6, Asin Road, Baguio City), and what a breathtaking showcase it was of some of the best works of Philippine art and of northern highland culture. The ultramodern building is, in itself, an impressive piece of sculpture in glass and black rock, nestled on a hillside commanding a view of a valley flecked by gardens. The museum has various rooms devoted to contemporary art, Philippine masters, erotica, Bencab’s own work, and his incomparable collection of native wood sculpture and furniture.

BenCab’s resounding success on both aesthetic and commercial planes has been certainly well deserved, for someone who worked his way up from magazine illustration to the creator of iconic images such as his scavenger Sabel, who now lends her name to the museum’s coffee shop.

I kidded Rio and another National Artist for Literature who was with us, Bien Lumbera, about not yet having a museum in their name. We all laughed about it, knowing that we writers may have all the words in the world at our disposal, but that it’s the painters whose inarticulateness we often deride who can make from one afternoon’s painting what a lifetime of 10 novels won’t. That’s life, and that’s art!


SOMETIMES I think that the writers’ workshop is really just an excuse for us to go up to Baguio and to indulge ourselves in what workshop oldtimers have come to consider the ultimate Baguio treat: listening to the fabulously good singing group named On Call, composed of arranger and pianist Dr. Dennis Flores, and vocalists Jett Acmor, Mari Laoyan, and Danny Imson.

We’ve followed this group for many years now, from Pilgrims Café on Session Road to its reincarnation on Leonard Wood and then to the Manor at John Hay and now in Forest House on Loakan Road, where they sing every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Their Broadway and OPM medleys are better than any aperitif or dessert, and this time around we got a special treat in the form of a kundiman medley that would’ve melted any dalagang bukid’s heart.

We keep hoping that they’ll have a stint in Manila or put out a CD we can listen to at leisure. They’re the kind of group that you can listen to for hours without tiring of their music — indeed, the couple of nights we listened to them, the same people were at the other table, camp followers just like us (our group included National Artists Bien Lumbera and Virgilio Almario, whose presence On Call kindly acknowledged).

Penman for Monday, April 20, 2009

BENG AND I snuck out a couple of weekends ago for a few days in Ho Chi Minh City—what used to be Saigon—to take advantage of my Mabuhay Miles which were about to expire at the end of the month. I would’ve much preferred for us to go to Hanoi, which I had last visited 15 years ago on my first and only trip to Vietnam, but PAL doesn’t fly there, so we had to settle for HCMC, which I remembered as being as noisy and chaotic as Manila.

It still was, when we got there—the dust was flying everywhere, stirred up by roadwork and new construction—but one difference I immediately noticed was that the hordes of bicycles I’d had to wade through to cross the street had been replaced almost universally by motorcycles, hundreds of them streaming at you like a swarm of angry bees.

The first time she met Vietnamese traffic, Beng stood paralyzed at the sidewalk’s edge, utterly terrified by the prospect of having to plow through it like Moses in the Red Sea. She had good reason to be afraid: in Shanghai last December, she had made the unscheduled acquaintance of a motorcycle and its driver, who gave her a mouthful of choice Shanghainese to boot. There are hardly any stoplights in Saigon, and except for the most important corners, no one seemed to mind them much. “You just need to take a deep breath, take a step forward, and keep walking,” I told Beng as much as I was reminding myself. “Don’t worry, they’ll adjust to you and move around you. Don’t stop suddenly, because that will just force them to stop, too, and cause an accident!” Beng didn’t look convinced one bit, but I grabbed her hand and dragged her into the maelstrom. “I’m never coming back here!” she screamed above the tumult, although we had barely been an hour in the city.

Barely an hour, and we were already on our way to my not-too-secret objective, Le Cong Kieu Street—Saigon’s antiques row, home to a possible plethora of vintage fountain pens. Giving Beng another stamp on her passport was surely generous, but I had an ulterior motive in returning to Saigon. Fifteen years earlier, on a sidewalk leading up to the Opera House, I had chanced upon a vendor selling an assortment of used goods—including a fabulous pen I’d never seen before, a 1920s French-made “Kaolo” safety pen with its woodgrain barrel encased in chased aluminum, a rarity for its time. I swiped that pen for the vendor’s asking price of $20, and—seeing other pens in her trove—swore to return the next day, as it had gotten very dark, and I’d already had two men try to pick my pocket earlier. Of course, and alas, when I turned up again at that same spot, the seller was nowhere to be found.



So now I was back with a vengeance and a fistful of dollars, having been told by an equally footloose friend that bundles of pens were to be found in the shops of Le Cong Kieu and nearby Dong Khoi Street.

On top of our free tickets (loaded, however, with a litany of taxes and surcharges), Beng and I had made the serendipitous choice of being booked into a cozy, modern, but inexpensive hotel, the Lavender, which stood right next to HCMC’s own version of our Greenhills bazaar, Ben Thanh market, which was also just a couple of blocks away from Le Cong Kieu.

As it turned out, LCK and later Dong Khoi Street did contain a small hoard of pens, including two more Kaolos, but they were either too expensive, or I already had them, or they had some mortal flaw like a missing nib to make them worthwhile. I came away with a pretty wartime Pilot in marbled amethyst and a couple of Parker Vacumatics from the ‘30s—and with the pens out of the way, we settled into serious tourism: eating, shopping, traveling by bus to some island on the Mekong River where they tried to sell you snakes and giant scorpions pickled in a jar. A highlight was a walk to and through the War Remnants Museum in downtown HCMC, a storehouse of leftover armaments, ordnance, and barely diminished anguish. With its colorful shirts and silk scarves, the museum shop at the end of the tour lent an incongruously bright note to the surroundings, as did the chilled fruit drinks in the freezer, by then desperately needed to slake the thickening dryness in one’s throat.



Over the next couple of days, Beng’s attitude would improve along with her street-crossing expertise, encouraged by the plenitude of cheap tropical fruit turgid with syrupy goodness—atis, star apple, chico, macopa. The bowls of steaming pho—with strips of tender beef swimming in a bed of glassine noodles—were more than a fair reward for a day’s traipsing and street-crossing around the city. At night, the street in front of our hotel was transformed within minutes into a parked caravan of stalls hawking food on the one side and clothes and lanterns on the other.

For Filipino tourists, Vietnam—like Thailand, but much less-traveled—offers that most amenable of options: something familiar enough yet also strange enough, another version of our might-have-been, indeed a country with which we’ve shared the sad, scarring patrimony of war but which, like ours, surprises us with sudden bursts of beauty. Like I’d noticed on my first visit 15 years earlier, it was a place in a hurry to get over its past and to modernize and to sell itself, sometimes with bizarre effect (like T-shirts at the War Remnants Museum declaring “Good Morning, Vietnam!”).

Ho Chi Minh City wasn’t quite as sprawling and as mall-crazy as Manila yet, and parts of it looked like Cubao might have, pre-Gateway. Best of all for the casual visitor, it was still very affordable, with a full seafood dinner for two costing little more than P500, and a day trip to the Mekong Delta—complete with bus, lunch, boat rides, and bottled water—at just P800 per person.


When we heard other excited voices in Ben Thanh market speaking Tagalog, we understood not just what they were saying, but why they were there at all.



(More pics from Vietnam here.)

Penman for Monday, April 13, 2009


I’M VERY happy to report that in a couple of weeks, I’ll be flying to the US to take part in a big literary event in New York City, the 5th PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. I received an invitation to the festival from its director, Caro Llewelyn, last October—many thanks to a recommendation from Filipino-American writer Jessica Hagedorn, who’s based in New York and who’d read my two novels and apparently liked them. The WVF will bring 160 writers from 50 countries together—some of the big names on the program include Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Neil Gaiman, the young Vietnamese sensation Nam Le (the current David TK Wong Fellow and Dylan Thomas prizewinner), and Francine Prose, as well as performers Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson.

I’m deeply honored to have been included in the headline event on April 29, a reading by several authors from all around the globe on the conference theme of “Evolution/Revolution.” I’ll be in the company of Muriel Barbery, Nicole Brossard, Narcís Comadira, Edwidge Danticat, Péter Nádas, Sergio Ramírez, Salman Rushdie, and Raja Shehadeh. I don’t know most of them, but they surely have never heard of me, either, so it’ll be a great opportunity to tell them a bit about us. I’ve yet to choose what I’ll be reading. The event blurb says that “Writers will read in their original languages as the English text is projected on screens behind them. Don’t miss the best literary voices from East and West.” Rushdie, of course, will read in English, but I’m thinking that I’d like for the audience to experience the sound of Filipino, so I might just pick something out of one of my plays in Filipino and provide a translation, unless the organizers request me to read from Soledad’s Sister, which is what they presumably invited me for.

There’s more information on the World Voices Festival here.

It’s a good time for Philippine literature, the recession notwithstanding (I was briefly worried that America’s economic woes would scotch my trip to the WVF, since they’re sponsoring my travel and other expenses). Miguel “Chuck” Syjuco’s Man Asian Literary Prize winner Ilustrado is being published by a raft of prestigious publishers worldwide, including Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in the US, Penguin in Canada, Picador in the UK, and Random House in Australasia. Early last month, he gave a reading in London at the Asia House. (My own Soledad’s Sister has yet to find a publisher in English outside the Philippines, but I was glad to recently receive my author’s copies of the published Italian edition from Isbn Edizioni, translated by Clara Nubile.) Meanwhile, next month, from May 18 to 24, poet Marjorie Evasco will be representing us at the Sydney Writers Festival, where I had a blast last year paneling with Junot Diaz.

Call it shameless self-promotion, but we need this kind of exposure in the global literary market, which we’re not going to break into by sitting demurely on our fingers, waiting to be discovered. The best way to do that, I’ve often argued, is to write more novels in English, or to get our best novels in Filipino and our other languages translated into English. And then we need to get noticed by publishers and agents through such means as by joining and winning international competitions, participating in literary festivals and conferences, contributing to major literary journals and magazines, securing writing fellowships, and getting into university-based writing programs abroad. These, of course, are the traditional means of doing things, and I’m sure there are other, though largely untested, alternatives. If you self-publish, for example, the burden on you to promote your work will be even greater, since you’ll be working without a network or a system in place. Publishing first on the Internet and gaining a wide following might conceivably also be a new way to gain attention.

Speaking of attention, mine was drawn to a recent blogpost by a brave young man, Adam David, who advocates what he calls “literary patricide by way of the small independent press—killing your literary daddies and mommies.” It’s a very provocative essay, something that will not (and clearly wasn’t meant to) sit well with many writers my age. Here’s an excerpt from it (you can find the rest by Googling “xeroxography adam david”):

“We can't expect Mainstream Publishers to change the present condition for us, because the present condition is a condition that benefits their bank accounts. The present condition is a condition that benefits their egos. Mainstream Publishers will publish anything as long as there is money to be earned in it, if it maintains patronage, quality of thought and writing distant second and third concerns.

“What we should be focusing on is creating and providing new venues for alternative attitudes in Reading and Writing, creating and providing new venues for ourselves and our ‘unmarketable’ material, for our ‘unrefereed’ efforts. What we should be focusing on is developing and cultivating an audience that will read and understand and actively seek our work. We should stop writing down to Mainstream Publishers’ standards of marketability and literariness and start writing up to raising the quality of available reading material, and the only way to do those things and remain untarnished—remain honest to ourselves and to our art—is to do the publishing ourselves.”

Them’s fighting words, but Adam has very specific and workable ideas in his piece about what younger, non-mainstream (or anti-mainstream) writers can do to promote their work. I may have a quibble or two with some of his statements, but I like this attitude. I sent him this note: “Right on, Adam—I'm one of these poopy popsies myself, but I've also said that there's nothing sorrier than a 30-year-old who thinks and acts like a 60-year-old. Claim your own space, make your own mistakes, win your own battles. No one else is going to do it for you.”


AND I'D like to publicly thank some people at my favorite express courier service, Johnny Air Cargo, for going the extra mile to make sure that an important package I was expecting from my sister in Virginia via their office in New York got to me in time for a meeting where the contents of the package were eagerly awaited. JAC’s Jet Creus, Leiden Godinez, Edwin Sison, and two fellows I knew only as Rodel and Peter showed great poise and patience as I practically screeched in their ears to get my shipment on time. And I did get it—20 minutes before a scheduled meeting of our happy group of fountain-pen fanciers. (Yes, that’s what “important” means to me—a precious bunch of vintage Parker Vacumatics from the 1930s and 1940s, one of them endowed with a super-flexible nib that got everyone delirious. Like they say, whatever floats your boat!)

Penman for Monday, April 6, 2009

I DON'T think of myself as a particularly religious person—I have issues with Church doctrine that will take another column to sort out—but I look forward to the Lenten season not only for the break from work that it brings, but also as a time for some quiet introspection, a reconnection with a time and spirit past if not lost, with a boy’s unquestioning faith.

Many decades ago, around this time of year, you knew Holy Week was here because of a general if not total shift in the mood of things. First of all you sensed it on the movie page, on the radio, and on what passed for TV in all its black-and-white glory. Happy movies like “The Sound of Music” and happy music like the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” vanished all of a sudden, to be replaced by somber perennials such as “The Ten Commandments” and Barber’s Adagio. On Good Friday and Black Saturday, there was nothing at all—just a deep, penetrating, enshrouding silence, relieved only by the caterwauling of a pabasa somewhere in the neighborhood.

I took part in those pabasas, in our corner of Pasig. I was, after all, a good Catholic boy who knew all the Latin hymns by heart and who went to Mass twice a week, and who proudly belonged to the local Legion of Mary, Praesidium Virgin Most Powerful. There were worse ways to spend Lent than to sing verses of Christ’s Passion, with occasional breaks for tepid cups of coffee or macaroni soup and hard jacobina biscuits. We sang the Pasyon in two tempos—slow and fast, depending on the state of our wakefulness—and in some strange way it was both penance and pleasure, an agelessly rhythmic retelling of an old story coming off the lips of young and old alike. We sang seated on rough, unflinching benches, shielded only by a makeshift roof of plastic sheets from the harsh summer sun, and in the evenings a few bulbs hanging from snakelike ropes of wire illuminated our pious labors.

The highlight of Holy Week for me was the grand Good Friday procession, a virtual pageant of the town’s worthies and notables decked out as Marys, Magdalenes, Roman soldiers, and the velvet-robed penitents called pasos. The train wound around Pasig’s poblacion, and I dutifully tagged along, carrying one of hundreds of candles that soon marked a trail of waxen tears on the asphalt of the narrow streets. I reveled in the procession’s communal escape from the tawdry present—I sold slices of overripe pineapple in our sari-sari store then, and when I was bored I read the Reader’s Digest perched on a crook in a jackfruit tree—into something exalted by smoke and paraffin. The agony of the man honored to bear the Cross seemed more real than his costume and theatrical cohort suggested; whatever sin or divine favor he was marching for seemed outrageously beyond his capacity to pay. And of course there were the girls, the nameless Pasig beauties I pomaded my hair for, never as beautiful as when they assumed the mantle of simple supplicants tinged only by the most venial of sins, like vanity.

As the years wore on, I would witness other Lenten spectacles, sometimes more garish, sometimes more gory. In 1971, I would sing the Pasyon again as a student activist weekending on the foothills of Biak-na-Bato, among peasants who believed in both the miracle of Easter and the invincibility that special pebbles to be found on the dry riverbed were supposed to give them against blades and bullets. (They didn’t; many of these people had died in a hail of gunfire while protesting on the streets of Manila as the Lapiang Malaya in 1967, but still the belief persisted.) Two decades later, I stood by as 13 Filipinos—at least one of them a woman—were nailed to the cross on a hilltop in San Fernando, Pampanga one Good Friday, and I nearly passed out myself just from the pain of watching, until I saw one of the Kristos later walk away, nursing a Coke in his bandaged hands.

These days I mostly stay at home and find my own quiet way of atonement for all my sins, real and imagined; I may have my quarrels with the Pope, but that hasn’t banished the wormy guilt that imprints itself on every Catholic schoolboy, and which just seems to get worse the farther you stray from the easy gestures of the sacraments, with nothing but your reasoning to fall back on. There was something in all that smoky mystery I sorely miss, and I suspect it has to do with boyhood itself.


I'VE PROMOTED the annual writers’ workshops in Baguio and Dumaguete often enough in this space, so now let me mention another important workshop that’s been around for quite some time, serving young writers not only from the great island of Mindanao but from Luzon and the Visayas as well. This is the Iligan National Writers Workshop, now on its 16th year, sponsored by the National National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) in cooperation with the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT)-Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Extension’s Multimedia Information & Dissemination Unit and the Mindanao Creative Writers Group, Inc.

Sixteen fellows have been chosen for this year’s Iligan workshop, which will be held May 25-29, 2009 in Iligan City. These fellows are: LUZON: FICTION (English): Timothy James M. Dimacali, UP Diliman/Pasay City; (Filipino): Ma. Fe de Guia, UP Los Banos/Caloocan City; POETRY (Filipino): Jason G. Tabinas, Ateneo de Manila University/ Pasig City; Arvin T. Ello, De la Salle University/ Paranaque City; PLAY (Filipino): Marianne Mixhaela Z. Villalon, UP Diliman/Quezon City.

VISAYAS: POETRY (Waray): Phil Harold Mercurio, UP Tacloban/Calbayog City; Jhonil C. Bajado, UP Tacloban/Maydolong, Eastern Samar;(Cebuano): Russ Raniel A. Ligtas, UP Cebu/Cebu City; Cindy A. Velasquez, University of San Carlos/Cebu City; and (Hiligaynon):Sam S. Prudente, UP Diliman/Iloilo City.

MINDANAO: FICTION (English): Gabriel P. Millado, UP Mindanao/Davao City; Justine May R. Torregosa, Ateneo de Zamboanga University (ADZU)/Zamboanga City; Paul Alfonse J. Marquez, ADZU/Zamboanga City; POETRY (English): Anderson V. Villa, Ateneo de Davao University/Davao City; (Chabacano): Edgar Darren G. Bendanillo, Zamboanga State College of Marine Science & Technology, Zamboanga City; and, the Manuel E. Buenafe Writing Fellow (poetry-English): Everlyn T. Jaji, ADZU/Zamboanga City.

They will be mentored by a distinguished group of panelists, who include Ma. Rosario “Chari” Cruz Lucero, Jaime An Lim, Merlie M. Alunan, Victor N. Sugbo, Antonio Enriquez, Leoncio P. Deriada, German V. Gervacio, Steven Patrick C. Fernandez, Macario Tiu (this year’s keynote speaker), Ralph Semino Galan, and INWW Director Christine Godinez-Ortega.

All best to our colleagues in Iligan and to the incoming batch of fellows. UP will be holding its own workshop in Baguio starting on Easter Sunday, so you can expect a report from me from there.

Penman for Monday, March 30, 2009


I HAD a couple of chances these past few weeks to serve as a judge in public speaking competitions involving young Filipino students in high school and college, and the experience reminded me of how, once upon a time—before we all turned to singing and dancing or simply surviving our way to fame, Big-Brother-style—public speaking and oratorical contests were considered de rigueur for the precocious Pinoy.

In grade school in the ‘60s, we even had a subject called “Declamation,” which culminated in an annual competition among representatives from various grades and classes, doing their best if somewhat squawky impressions of the likes of Shakespeare and Whitman. We were good Catholic boys in a semi-colonial private school, where our textbooks miraculously transported us to virgin snow in Idaho (in contrast to the unspeakable horrors of Communism in places like Red China—where, warned our teacher, devout Christians were skewered through the ears with barbecue sticks).

In that benignly disembodied environment, it was perfectly natural for us to recite Patrick Henry’s speech to the Virginia colonists (“They tell us, Sir, that we are weak, unable to cope with so formidable an adversary”—and you can imagine what “so formidable an adversary” sounds like on the lips of a ten-year-old). We knew the Gettysburg Address by heart, as well as perennials like “Invictus” and “O Captain, My Captain!” We thought nothing of donning white bedsheets, clutching little bags of ketchup under our senatorial robes, so we could stab Caesar with our bamboo knives and let Mark Antony call on “Friends, Romans, countrymen!” I was most impressed by a silver-tongued classmate named Johnny Valdes (who later became a pioneer in the air-cargo business), who took on Christopher Marlowe’s rich, dark version of Faustus, pleading for the demons of the night to vanish: “Lente, lente, currite noctis equi!” I didn’t have a clue what it meant then, and even with a PhD in English I’m not sure I do now, but it sounded mighty terrific.

And what did I declaim? One year, it was Carlos P. Romulo’s “I am a Filipino” (“… and these are my people: short, sunburnt men who love to fling the salty net….”—so you can imagine a short, sunburnt boy practicing how to fling a salty net, whatever that was). Another year, it was John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” a frighteningly complicated piece that had my teacher explaining to me how the word “Provencal” was pronounced (again, whatever that was) but had the virtue of containing what one critic has called the most beautiful image in all of English poetry: “magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.”

Memorizing and reciting poetry was difficult (and, as with many things difficult, also surprisingly pleasurable) enough; extemporaneous public speaking was even more challenging—without the crutch of a script, we now had to come up with our own ideas. Usually those ideas had to do with big things like democracy, nationalism, idealism, science, etc., and we harrumphed our way through to the finals of events like the Voice of Democracy competition. In high school, I looked up to such gifted speakers as Rodel Rodis (now a lawyer and community leader in San Francisco) at the same time that I envied the writing prowess of two people on the other side of Diliman, older than me by just a few years: Joey Arcellana and Gary Olivar.

We were all, I suspect, speaking well beyond our years, like 12-year-old singing contestants warbling about heartache and lost loves, but then the times called for it. We were just a few steps away from marching in the streets to protest American imperialism, militarization, oil price hikes, and all the aggravations that heralded martial law. Big times called for big words, and were happy and proud to know them, and used them shamelessly.

In one of the public speaking events I recently judged, fellow judge Manolo Quezon and I chatted backstage about public speaking then and now. Manolo was curious about what I thought the difference was, and I had to preface my response with the obligatory caveat that older people tend to romanticize their past and to imagine that everything was better back then—but eventually I said that, yes, I thought I heard better speakers in my time, not just because of the big ideas they took on, but because they seemed to know what they were talking about, speaking with a persuasive command of the details of particular situations. And that was without the benefit of Google or the Internet.

Don’t get me wrong: I was also much impressed by the oratorical skills of the winners of the two contests I judged, and by quite a few of the finalists, and my warmest congratulations go out to them. Sheer talent will always rise to the top. I was bothered, however, by the obvious problems of those who didn’t do so well; their shortcomings weren’t irremediable, which led me to make this short list of suggestions for would-be public speakers:

1. Say something sensible and interesting. Nothing counts more with judges than good ideas—sharp, fresh, thought-provoking, and reasonable or well-reasoned. Strategize. Think of what everyone else will likely be saying—and find something else to say, or another way of saying it.

2. Speak from your own experience, and deal with specifics. Motherhood statements, clichés, and generalizations that you can buy off the shelf will impress no one, especially if all you’re doing is stringing them up one after the other. (Please, no more “The youth is the hope of the fatherland”—but if you have to say it, at least quote Rizal correctly: “the fair hope of the fatherland.”)

3. Read or watch the news. Show some awareness of and concern for what’s going on around you. It’s typical of today’s youth (and us their elders) to speak of “me, me, me,” and that’s all right for starters (see No. 2 above), but make or suggest the connection between your situation and that of many others. Balance those references to Tolkien and Harry Potter with Mindanao and the here-and-now.

4. Compose yourself. No shouting and no shrillness, please. Go easy on the space fillers: “ladies and gentlemen,” “I firmly believe,” “so to speak,” etc. Clarity and sincerity are more important than a twangy accent.

5. Find good coaches, and listen to them. Our two ESU international public speaking champions—Tricia Evangelista in 2004 and Gian Dapul in 2008—were gifted speakers to begin with, but had the humility and the discipline to listen to their coaches, and to stick with the plan. Know your limitations, and welcome professional advice from those with more experience.

Above all these, remember that public speaking—like writing—is just one more way to personal fulfillment and happiness. Don’t take it or yourself too seriously. Don’t feel like you have to make a killer of a speech every time you open your mouth.

I took public speaking as a personal challenge. One of my grade-school teachers actually did me a favor by taking me aside to tell me that I was never going to make it as a public speaker; I had a speech defect, he said, that was going to make it very hard for me to win any medals for public speaking. In a way, he was right. I never did win a prize for public speaking, but I built up enough confidence to address any classroom or conference, anywhere, anytime. Speaking as a teacher, that’s public speaking where it still might make a difference, and it’s good enough for me.

Penman for Monday, March 23, 2009


THESE PAST nine months, I’ve been shuttling between my teaching duties at the University of the Philippines and my work as the new director of that same university’s Institute of Creative Writing (ICW). The ICW started out more than 25 years ago as the Creative Writing Center (CWC), under the auspices of such literary stalwarts as Francisco Arcellana, Alejandrino Hufana, and Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio, all of whom subsequently became CWC directors.

The idea behind the CWC/ICW, then as now, was to provide a haven for creative writers within the university, where they could meet among themselves and initiate and implement programs to promote new Philippine writing not just within the campus but around the nation and to the world at large. It’s done that chiefly by conducting the UP National Writers Workshop every summer, by publishing Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, and by holding lectures, performances, and seminars on Philippine literature for students, teachers, and the general public. The ICW also administers the Madrigal-Gonzalez First Book Award to encourage new authors in both English and Filipino.

Truth to tell, I didn’t want to be director, having more amusing things to do in mind, like playing poker and hunting for vintage Parker Vacumatics on eBay—and, yes, writing another novel or two in my spare time. But having been associated with the CWC/ICW since 1984, and practically having grown up (and big, and bald) in the place, I’d run out of excuses to avoid administrative work, I finally said yes last July.

As things turned out, it hasn’t been too bad. I believe in managing with a light hand, and with a little help from my BlackBerry, I can keep on top of things without being stuck to a swivel chair that threatens to keel over every time I threaten to relax and lean back too far. It’s a small office, with very few heads to watch over; we don’t have much of a budget, so I don’t need to curry favor with politicians (or maybe put that the other way: since I don’t curry favor with politicians, we don’t have much of a budget). I’m fortunate to have a capable deputy and a whiz-bang administrative officer, and between the two of them, 90 percent of our problems get taken care of before they even get to me.

Best of all, I share the company of some of our country’s and UP’s best writers. Membership in the ICW’s directorate—its board of fellows, associates, and advisers—is limited only to the most talented and most productive of university-based writers. To become a “fellow”, you’d need a minimum of five published books and a slew of awards—and the high regard of your peers; the requirements for the junior category of “associate” are only slightly less stringent. Some critics have called it a cabal, but I know that we disagree often and deeply enough among ourselves over matters of both style and substance to take that suggestion too seriously.

The current, active fellows of the ICW, aside from myself, are National Artist Virgilio Almario, Neil Garcia, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Vim Nadera, Charlson Ong, Jun Cruz Reyes, and Roland Tolentino; our associates are Joey Baquiran, Conchitina Cruz, and Mario Miclat; and our advisers are National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, Gemino Abad, and Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio. I’m especially happy to welcome Joey, Conchitina, and Mario into our ranks as our newest members; Mario brings decades of writing experience with him, but Joey and Chingbee (as we call her) represent the best of our new poetry in Filipino and English, respectively.

Next month, right after the Holy Week, most of us will be making the annual trek up to Baguio for the 48th UP National Writers Workshop to be held from April 12 to 19 at the Igorot Lodge in Camp John Hay. We’ll be there to talk shop for a week with 12 of the country’s brightest writing talents, now in their mid-career—past college, past their first workshops, and past (or very close to publishing) their first books.

This year, for Filipino, we’re bringing up Mikael Co and Ayer Arguelles for poetry, Jing Panganiban for creative nonfiction, and Norman Wilwayco, Vlad Gonzales, and Alvin Yapan for fiction. For English, we’ll be meeting with Angelo Suarez and Carlomar Daoana for poetry, Felisa Batacan and Dean Alfar for fiction, and Criselda Yabes and Carljoe Javier for creative nonfiction.

It’s a formidable batch, featuring some names already well known to the Filipino reader. Ichi Batacan, for example, has reenergized Pinoy crime fiction with her novel Smaller and Smaller Circles; now Singapore-based, she’s flying home just for the workshop. Kael Co is a bilingual wonder, winning Palanca first prizes for poetry in both English and Filipino one year after the other. Dean Alfar is acknowledged to be, well, the dean of Filipino speculative fiction. It should be a terrific workshop, where these fellows will be presenting their works-in-progress and talking about how and why they write.

While we’re on the business of the ICW, I should note that the third issue of the Likhaan Journal is now accepting entries for possible publication—short stories, poems, essays, creative nonfiction, and even the graphic novel. This issue’s editor is Jing Hidalgo, who will be backstopped by Roland Tolentino and Charlson Ong. The deadline in May 31. I’ll put out more details as the deadline approaches, but meanwhile you can look them up on http://www.panitikan.com.ph. Only unpublished material will be considered.


AND LET me not forget to remind readers that the deadline for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Award for the best unpublished Asian novel in English is coming up very soon—next Tuesday, March 31. This year’s judges will be Gish Jen, Pankaj Mishra, and Colm Toibin. Last year, two Filipinos—Miguel Syjuco and Alfred Yuson—made it to the five-person shortlist, with the young Syjuco emerging the eventual winner. His novel Ilustrado has now been picked up by many prestigious publishers worldwide. Can the Pinoy perform a hat trick and make it to the finals three years in a row? For more information, go to http://www.manasianliteraryprize.org/2009/2009.php

Penman for Monday, March 16, 2009


LAST TUESDAY, over a celebratory lunch at Le Souffle in Rockwell, we met the winners of this year’s “My Favorite Book” contest (sponsored by the Philippine STAR, National Book Store, and Globe), and I was asked as one of the judges to say a few words. There were just two things I thought I’d share with the audience then and with you today:

First, a book is only as good as its reader. An interesting, intelligent book comes alive only in the hands of an interested, intelligent reader. Of course authors like me also have much to do with what goes into that experience, but it’s the reader’s imagination that ultimately shapes and defines the outcome. Reading is a skill as much to be developed and recognized as writing.

Second, the great thing about books is that they never lose their value. Indeed, a book is just about the only thing whose price can have very little to do with its worth. A P50 book can be just as good as, if not better than, a P500 one; the fifth reader of a book can derive as much from it as its first one. In these recessionary times, I can’t think of a better investment than a book; one of them could even change your life, as it did for some of our “My Favorite Book” winners.


SPEAKING OF books, and also last week, my fellow columnist Krip Yuson published a very short excerpt from an essay I wrote for the new coffee table book on the Araneta Center in Cubao, Quezon City, which Krip and Paulo Alcazaren put together for the J. Amado Araneta Foundation. Since most of you won’t ever see that book, let me share a longer excerpt from my piece, which recalls Cubao as I knew it from the 1960s and 1970s:

Cubao has always figured in my life, which is something of a surprise, considering that I’ve never lived there. But then, very few people probably did decades ago, among the many thousands who thronged daily to its stores, markets, restaurants, and moviehouses. Cubao was the commercial heart of Quezon City, and people went out of their way—from as far as Pasig, in my case—to lose themselves in Cubao’s myriad offerings and its promise of immediate and affordable satisfaction.

Indeed, in the 1960s, it was possible to suggest that the growing metropolis converged in that intersection between what was still Highway 54 (now EDSA) and Aurora Boulevard—from Pasay-Makati to the south, Caloocan to the north, Manila to the West, and Marikina to the east. It was more than a geographical convergence; the old and the new met in Quezon City, and Cubao stood at the very crux of all these changes.

Tradition and old-fashioned charm held sway in the district’s older corners—such as the Benitez mansion on Mariposa Street and the LVN studios nearby—but it was around the coliseum where the present was happening and the future was taking shape, big time: in Farmers Market, in the theaters sprouting up on both sides of Aurora, in the swanky New Frontier supermarket and its Matsuzakaya shopping annex. Highbrow and lowbrow also stood cheek-by-jowl in Cubao, which boasted a Rustan’s, a Soriente Santos, and a D’Marks (which, long before Shakey’s, brought pizza to the Pinoy on the corner of P. Tuazon and EDSA), even while it offered a Little Quiapo, a Ma Mon Luk, and the poor man’s balut and siopao stands at the Farmers bus stop.

This was the Cubao I felt intimately familiar with, the Cubao I haunted whenever I had the chance—and I created my chances, knowing the good times when I saw them, and knowing even then that they couldn’t possibly last forever. The cusp between the ‘60s and the ‘70s was my generation’s age of awakening—intellectually, politically, emotionally, and sexually—and Cubao had something for all these needs.

My earliest memories of Cubao were formed by the Araneta Coliseum, a veritable eighth wonder of the world in my boy’s eyes, made even more wondrous by the sight of dancers pirouetting on sheer white ice in the perennial “Holiday on Ice” tours that visited the Philippines come Christmas time. This marvel was exceeded only by the thrill of being brought to the only store that truly mattered to a child: Arcega’s, that multi-storeyed mecca of toys on the far side of Aurora.

A few more years brought us to high school and hijinks: billiards instead of biology at the Fun Center, enervating encounters with Rosanna Podesta and Jane Fonda (as Barbarella) at the New Frontier.

Meanwhile, we had learned something about politics and revolution, and encamped as freshman activists in an apartment on Arayat Street. This would be raided come martial law, and as a general darkness fell on life and society and as I found myself transported to realms afar and underground, I sought Cubao’s comforts with a furtive longing. The day after New Year, 1973, I watched Robert Redford play a crusty “Jeremiah Johnson” at a theater in Cubao before taking a late bus ride home to Diliman; hours later, I would be arrested, yet 18, to spend the next seven months in prison.

Release and freedom inspired the urge to get married quick, and once I had found the right girl and gotten a paying job, I took Beng out for lunch at Skorpios (where Gateway Mall now stands), did some figuring on a napkin, and announced, by way of a proposal, that it was now possible for us to live together and forever as man and wife. Our first major purchase as a married couple was a portable cassette player, from the radio shops at Farmers; when our daughter Demi began to walk, we also began to feed her kiddie lunches at Yum-Yum Tree in Rustan’s. We watched the low-tech but high-fun Christmas manikin shows at C.O.D., bought shoes for everyone at the Marikina Shoe Fair, and gave Demi the run of the 50-centavo rides at Fiesta Carnival.

Even today, many years later, and even with the glossier and snazzier attractions of Ortigas, Ayala, Rockwell, and Eastwood to compete for my attention and disposable income, I keep a soft spot for Cubao and still go there at least once a week, to scour the Book Sale bins at Rustan’s and Ali Mall, the Surplus Shop at the SM basement, and the tubs and of fresh crab and prawns at Farmers. When my dentures break, I drop in on my dentist at 15th Avenue, then try out my refurbished chompers on Lydia’s Lechon at the Ali Mall food court.

I’ve realized that Cubao has survived—as well as my affections—by continuing to reinvent itself and to keep pace with my needs, but never too suddenly nor too much, like one big comfort zone. I still don’t sleep in Cubao, but now I think I’ve lived there longer than anywhere else on earth.

Penman for Monday, March 9, 2009


IF YOU'RE over 60 (or getting there) and you think the Internet holds nothing of interest for you, think again.

A few weeks ago, Beng and I came home from a rousing performance of “Atang” (written by Floy Quintos and directed by Alex Cortez) at the Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater in UP Diliman, whistling and singing the kundimans from the show. You know how it goes with the kundiman, that quintessentially Pinoy profession of lovesickness to the point of near-death. I’ve often used the kundiman in class to illustrate just how sappy we Filipinos can get.

Observe, for example, how the lover prostrates himself in utter abjection at the altar of the beloved in these typical lines from the refrain of one of my favorites, Pakiusap, composed by Francisco Santiago with lyrics by Jose Corazon de Jesus: “Kung sakali ma’t salat sa yama’t pangarap / May isang sumpang wagas ang aking paglingap / Pakiusap ko sa iyo, kaaawaan mo ako / Kahit mamatay, pag-ibig ko’y minsan lamang!” (Pardon the translation—I’m not a natural-born Tagalog—but it says, more or less: “Though my affection want in wealth or ambition, it bears the truest promise. I beseech you, take pity on me. If I should die I shall love but once!”)

That’s the kind of melodramatic sentiment that suffuses Filipino drama, onstage and onscreen, and I used to think that we Pinoys invented the genre until a good dose of English Renaissance and Restoration Drama in graduate school reminded me that people elsewhere, in other places and other times, have been just as florid in their expression of passion.

Yes indeed, the kundiman’s sappy, but we can’t get enough of it—I certainly couldn’t that evening we saw “Atang,” so, on a whim, I fired up YouTube to see what I could find by way of old Filipino songs. I was astounded by what I found: one classic kundiman after another, professionally performed with accompanying lyrics (many of them uploaded by a user named “maybelar”—whoever you are, thank you!). I listened to and downloaded as many as I could in one sitting: “Pakiusap,” “Bituing Marikit,” “Nasaan Ka, Irog?”, “Madaling Araw,” “Ibong Sawi”, “Mutya ng Pasig,” and “Ang Tangi Kong Pag-Ibig.”

The great thing about the Internet and big collection sites like YouTube is how one link leads to another, and soon the kundimans led me to more nostalgic pleasures: scenes from old Tagalog movies (Charito Solis in her first movie, “Niña Bonita” from 1955, Gloria Romero as an unlikely “Kurdapya” from that same year, a cooler-than-cool Diomedes Maturan in a duet with Lerrie Pangilinan in “Tawag ng Tanghalan,” 1958). (Stop snickering now, 30-somethings: a couple of decades hence, you’ll be talking about the Eraserheads reunion concert with the same glazed eyes.)

And here’s a special treat for baby boomers and their parents—we can watch this from our wheelchairs, folks: go to YouTube (www.youtube.com) and, in the “Search” box, type in the words “Old Manila.” If that doesn’t bring you to tears, I don’t know what will, but we’re such soft touches that I’m sure the sight of a fair damsel in a balintawak alighting from a calesa in a city aswarm with tranvias and stores selling mongo con hielo will reduce many an octogenarian Pinoy to a blabbering idiot. Those were the days, my friend.

Speaking of sappy things, I've been thinking a lot about Chippy lately. He turned ten last month, and while that would be a bubbly young age to humans, it's more than halfway to ancient in cat-years. I really don't know how old cats can get to be. Once, in the States, my host told me that the strip of spiky fur that crawled across the floor was 23 years old. I'm not sure I'd want Chippy to live that long, blind and batty, unable to tell one door from another.

He used to bound up the stairs and into our bed as a kitten; these days he seems quite happy to lounge in the sunlight and to squat, though unproductively, on poor Sophie, our other Persian, and the day will surely come, not too long from now, when he'll simply stop moving wherever the mood or the pain strikes him, and he'll lie there like a rug until I nudge him awake; he'll open a drunken eye and stir, might even yawn mightily enough to recall the perky young lion he once was, until one afternoon he simply won't.

I wonder if I'll find the courage to have him put to sleep before that happens. The euphemism sounds so benign that way, and I can imagine myself cradling Chippy in my arms, awash in tears, and muttering nonsensical things while the vet jabs a needle where it can't hurt him too much. I'd like that needle too, I'll be thinking then.

Even as I write this I can feel a huge clot forming in my chest. I think of myself as a curmudgeonly alpha male who’s never cared much for anything but his toys, and maybe Chippy’s just that, a big orange furball who’s fun to feed and tickle, but I can’t figure out how I came to love a cat much more than I honestly do most people (I know, a terrible thought that the ethicists can have a field day with, as if I cared). Or maybe it’s my own incipient old age I’m lamenting underneath, for which Chippy just serves as a cuddly analogue. According to the Cats’ Age Conversion Chart (yes, there is such a thing online), 10 cat-years are equal to 56 human years. I’m 55 going on 56. No wonder I feel your pain, Chippy boy!


MOVING FROM death lines to deadlines, here’s a couple of announcements from friends, the first of them from the English-Speaking Union of Hong Kong, who wrote in to share some good news about a new literary prize:

“To celebrate their lifelong love of books, Verner Bickley, MBE, PhD, Chairman of the ESU (Hong Kong) and Gillian Bickley, PhD, have established a new annual literary prize, The Proverse Prize, for an unpublished full-length work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, submitted in English. (Translations are welcome.) The first prize is HKD10,000 and the winning submission will be offered a publishing contract by Proverse Hong Kong. The Prize is offered for the first time in 2009.

“Full details at http://www.geocities.com/proversehk/proverse_prize. The closing date for the first round is May 30.”

For the currency-challenged, HKD10,000 is just over P60,000. I should note, however, that the competition requires an entry fee of GBP30.00, so think twice before sending in those five unpublished novels or epic poems gathering dust beneath your bed.

The other notice comes from Dr. Esmeralada “EC” Cunanan of the Philippine-American Educational Foundation (PAEF), which administers the Fulbright, Hubert Humphrey, and East-West Center scholarship programs in the Philippines. Dr. Cunanan reminds potential qualified candidates for the Fulbright Student awards in the US (i.e., master's, PhD, doctoral dissertation/enrichment) to submit their complete applications by March 23, 2009. The application form can be downloaded from the PAEF website www.paef.org.ph (under scholarship-Fulbright Graduate Students). They can encode the data in the form and send the filled out application form together with the other required documents via LBC.

Grants under the Philippine Student Program are for five months to nine months for non-degree, one to two years for master’s, and two years for doctoral degree studies. The grant provides for round-trip international travel, monthly maintenance allowance, tuition and fees, book/supply allowance, and health and accident insurance. Those applying for non-degree awards must be currently enrolled in a doctoral program in any of the universities in the country.

As a former Fulbrighter myself, I can’t endorse this program strongly enough, as an opportunity for young Filipinos to learn from some of America’s best professors. If you think you have the academic aptitude, the experience, and the commitment to return and to serve the country after your scholarship, pay the PAEF website a visit. It could change your life.

Penman for Monday, March 2, 2009


BEFORE ANYTHING else this week, let me thank some old friends—Mrs. Pua and her daughters Terrie and Rose—for so warmly receiving me and my friends from the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines when we paid them a surprise visit a couple of Saturdays ago. (FPN-P, which now has almost 50 members signed up in its Yahoogroup, decided to mix pens with a Saturday lunch of chicken and pancit canton at the old Savory Restaurant in Chinatown. A great time was had by all.)

And who, you might ask, are the Puas? They’re the proprietors of Luis Store on the Escolta, the country’s oldest and perhaps only shop that specializes in quality fountain pens and pen repairs. Luis Store has been around since 1943, and it’s one of the few places in the world where you can still see row upon row of gleaming vintage Parkers and Sheaffers—many of them new old stock from the 1950s and 1960s—alongside newer pens, all of them for sale.

I hadn’t visited the Puas for over a decade, so I was delighted to see them all still there, waiting for the law student, the Supreme Court Justice, and the odd writer to pick up a pen or have one fixed. (They proudly mentioned a friend of mine, the lawyer and blogger Ted Te, among their recent customers.) I have a soft spot for people who engage in what we might call endangered trades (my vintage watch repairmen at Worldwatch in Shangri-La Mall near Rustan’s, for example), and selling and repairing fountain pens has to count among those occupations.

But you can sense it when people love their work, and the Puas conveyed that, and we had a pleasant chat about pens and time passing over fresh chicken pies that Mrs. Pua served everyone who came. Like a kid showing off his school medals to his mom, I displayed my trove of 1930s and 1940s Parker Vacumatics to Mrs. Pua, who nodded appreciatively, being one of the few people around who even knew what they were. In a completely unexpected gesture, she gifted me with a vintage Sheaffer engraved with my name, and I melted in gratitude and delight. Indeed, you might find pens at lower prices online these days, but you won’t get the kind of personalized attention you’ll get from the Puas (and you can’t dip the pen to try it out before you buy, like Terrie will urge you to do). Next time you’re on the Escolta, pay them a visit or give them a call at 241-3484. Be nice to the ladies, and they’ll be nice to you.

IT USED to be that the worst crime you could commit as an author—aside from writing atrociously—was to publish yourself, meaning, you paid to get your manuscript in print. The suggestion was that you needed to publish yourself because (1) your work was so bad you couldn’t find a decent publisher; (2) you were too proud and impatient to submit yourself to the usual publication process; (3) you had too much money, or at least enough to publish your own book and give them away to friends; and (4) all of the above. This was why the practice was called “vanity publishing”—you published your own book, and risked being its only reader.

Of course, we forget that there was a time, before the advent of the big publishing houses and even the small presses, when self-publishing was the only way to go. A self-publisher like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau once lamented that “I have nine hundred books in my library. Seven hundred of them I wrote myself.”

But later, as commercial and academic publishing grew into an industry and established certain standards, vanity publishing fell into disrepute. It was seen, with some reason, as the recourse of the desperate and the gullible. Frustrated writers who just wanted their name in print forked good money over to “publishers” (actually little more than printers) who put out ads in the back pages of perfectly respectable magazines like The New Yorker soliciting “new authors.”

Willing and paying clients did get hundreds of copies of handsomely produced books delivered to their doorstep, with their names boldly emblazoned on the spine—only to soon find themselves sharing Thoreau’s predicament. (As authors quickly realize, printing is the easy part of publishing—marketing and distribution is more difficult.) It didn’t mean that all books published this way were bad; it was just harder for them to get serious attention.

But much of that is changing, and technology is the reason. Two years ago, TIME Magazine was already saying this: “Self-publishing, the only real success story in an otherwise depressed industry, is booming, thanks to the Internet, digital cameras and more sophisticated digital printing. It's also gaining respect. No longer dismissed as vanity presses, DIY publishing is discovering a niche market of customers seeking high-quality books for limited distribution.”

Just this January, TIME followed that up by reporting that “Saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were a self-taught brain surgeon. But over the past couple of years, vanity publishing has become practically respectable. As the technical challenges have decreased—you can turn a Word document on your hard drive into a self-published novel on Amazon's Kindle store in about five minutes—so has the stigma. Giga-selling fantasist Christopher Paolini started as a self-published author. After Brunonia Barry self-published her novel The Lace Reader in 2007, William Morrow picked it up and gave her a two-book deal worth $2 million. The fact that William P. Young's The Shack was initially self-published hasn't stopped it from spending 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.”

One key factor is print-on-demand (POD) technology, which, as the name suggests, produces supply based on demand: if you need just 10 copies for 10 confirmed buyers of your book, it will spit out just that many, sparing you the problem of unsold inventory. Per-copy costs, of course, will be appreciably higher. But without middlemen and storage to complicate things, you still might come out ahead this way.

During last month’s Taboan writers’ festival, Bacolod-based writer Elsie Coscolluela was telling us how her university invested P5 million in a POD operation that now serves all comers and is able to produce a book within minutes for around P300 per copy. That’s not too far from what the same book will cost you in the bookstore, markups and all.

And why even go to print? For some kinds of work that—let’s face it—will never really sell, like poetry, the Internet’s reach seems far more attractive, and it’s practically free. When a young man asked me at Taboan what I thought the best path to getting published was, I told him, “the fastest one.” If I were 30, I said, I wouldn’t think like a 50-year-old, waiting to be published by some university press. With talent and perseverance, all that respectability will come, but for now, getting that book or its digital equivalent out might be the more urgent imperative.

It was only after we had ended the session that I remembered something I should have noted—my very first book, Oldtimer and Other Stories, was essentially self-published in 1984, when I was 30. My friend Raffy Benitez had just started a printing press and had some leftover paper and ink; I had ten stories that looked ready to go. And so they went.

Penman for Monday, February 23, 2009


LAST WEEK, I published a letter from a reader named Jewel, who gave us an update on her life as a writer eight years after writing me for some advice. This week, I’ll excerpt a similar letter from another reader named Reggie, and then I’ll address a concern that both readers raised—that of writing for love and living.

Dear Mr. Dalisay,

A couple of Decembers back, during the UP Writers Night and launch of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, I fell into an interesting conversation with you. I asked your take about going to grad school—I was then toying with the idea of getting a degree in creative writing—and you enthusiastically advised me to go for it.

The idea of going back to school went onto the back burner, until the day I lost my job in advertising. That, coupled with midlife crisis, forced me to reassess myself, ask myself what I really wanted. I was tired of the rat race, tired of selling out and prostituting my craft amidst the canyons of Ayala Avenue. I was aimlessly wandering about, literally and figuratively, until the day I picked up one of your books, The Knowing Is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction.

When I read the chapter “The Best Revenge”, it struck me with the intensity of a bullet between the eyes. When you advised your reader, Cecille, that “you need to affirm your ability to write something else, something good by your own high standards,” it articulated the malaise within me, put a name to the unhappy restlessness that marked my last few years in my corporate writing gig. Right there and then, I bought the book, picked up a few more on creative writing, and set the ball rolling in reentering the academe.

Now, I'm on my third term in school, and I'm having fun! And while you warned another reader, Jewel, in the chapter “Living By Writing”, that you can't live off creative writing alone, well, I can say that I've been on that side of the fence before, and while it can be financially rewarding, I felt it emptying my soul faster than a psychic vampire could.

I suppose it IS possible to combine commercial writing with literary writing; after all, you've done it yourself. I guess it is just the absence of the latter that finally did me in. But, thanks to your encouraging words, I'm now taking steps to correct that lack in me. And one of these days, I might just take up your offer and visit you at your office with some of my stories in hand. With luck and hard work, I just hope to be worthy of being published someday.

Sincerely yours,

Reggie


THE ANXIETY that both Jewel and Reggie have felt—the tension between writing what you want and writing what you have to—has been my lifelong companion. I’ve been living by, and living from, writing all my adult life, if not a little sooner. I’ve never had the luxury of the amateur who writes (as the word “amateur” suggests) for the sheer love of it. I write to live rather than live to write.

The first piece of writing for which I got paid was a television play I wrote for the “Balintataw” TV series when I was 16; by 18 I had dropped out of college and was working as a reporter for the Philippines Herald and Taliba, and from then on it’s just been one writing job after another, in the spaces between which I’ve been able and lucky to write my own stories, plays, and poems. Even today, not a day goes by without my facing the blinking cursor, and very likely it won’t be for my next novel or short story collection, but for a commissioned biography, or a company history.

Am I complaining? Most certainly not. These are jobs I’m happy and lucky to have in these parlous times, and while friends and relatives keep reminding me that my time (my remaining time, my finite time) might be better devoted to high art, that’s an option we can scarcely afford in a country that doesn’t buy novels. I remind myself that I could instead be selling insurance or real estate. I have nothing against those jobs, which might make me even much more, but the sheer privilege of earning off a keyboard at my own desk is humbling, when you think of what a mechanic or a dock worker has to do to feed his family.

Of course, writing is more than typing, and I know the deep and searing psychic pain that Reggie speaks of. I’m not saying, “Well, that’s life, so suck it up.” What I am saying is that even that pain can be of use, as so much tension you can hoard and creatively expel at a better time. I distinctly remember a night in the late ‘70s when tears were streaming down my cheeks as I was typing a movie script that had to be finished so we could meet the bills. It was also the deadline for the Palancas—an important thing to me then—and I was aching to write a story. (I know, I could’ve written it sooner, but that’s not how these things work.) I still draw on that memory to help me soldier on in wee hours when I’m of two hearts: We’ve been here before, I tell myself, and in the end what had to be written got written; it’s all a matter of focus, discipline, and the willingness to straddle art and life.

Early on, from my father, I learned the necessity of compromise, which to me has never been a bad word. It makes things happen, it makes things possible. It is, in its own way, an art, a working of one's attitude and skill on the material and situation at hand. We often look at our heroes as those who never compromised their principles, and that's admirable, but not all principles are created equal. Some involve the survival of the nation, others merely the survival of the self, which is important enough on most days, especially if the survival of others depends on you.

There is joy and excellence to be found in the most mundane of tasks. When I’m hired to write a brochure, I tell myself that I will write the best brochure my client can get for his or her money. I leave my PhD, my literary prizes, and my ego at the door; but when I sit down to doing the job, I try to make all of those factors help—and not get in the way of—producing a fine commercial product. Whenever I take on a job I tell myself that I will be learning something new that I could use in my fiction if not in my life, and that this job will lead to other jobs more exciting and more rewarding, and often enough, it does.

Everything, in sum, is material for a writer. When I once asked a fellow playwright was he was up to, he simply answered, “Gathering material.” Indeed, for us, that pretty much explains everything.

Penman for Monday, February 16, 2009


I ALWAYS feel like I’m cheating a bit when I publish letters from readers instead of dreaming up a column from scratch, but the art of letter-writing (as opposed to the monologue of blogging) being endangered as it is, I feel even worse about putting well-crafted letters aside after a polite acknowledgment.

So once or twice a year I let the readers take over, and I’ll do that again this week and next—partly because my involvement in last week’s Philippine Writers Festival (Taboan 09) would surely have left me too exhausted to think of something smart or funny to say, but even more so because, in an uncanny coincidence, I received two letters within a day of each other from two people who probably have no idea that the other one exists, but who share the same passions and predicaments. So let’s call this a follow-through on Taboan, a ground-level appreciation of what it’s like for young Filipinos wanting to be writers—and getting there.

I’ll first publish an excerpt from the letter of Jewel, now a successful screenwriter who first wrote me eight years ago, and whom I have yet to meet. Her letter will explain the rest. I’ll respond to her concerns next week, and also bring up another letter from a reader named Reggie.

Dear Mr. Dalisay,

Eight years ago, I wrote you to ask a question that was very important to me. Back then, I was a college freshman pining for the "writing life," which, I felt, was out of my limits because it was better suited for people who didn't have to worry about making money to support their families.

Do you remember? I was the reader named Jewel who wrote to ask you, "What kind of future awaits the Filipino writer?" You gave me a generous answer through your Penman article, "Living by Writing," which eventually made it to your book, The Knowing Is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction.

At that time, I was taking up Communication Arts, which sounded more practical than Literature because it was a course that taught you different skills—video, TV, and radio production, book and web design, photography, and scriptwriting. Despite all the fun I had learning all these things, none of them made my heart flutter the way fiction and poetry did.

I was fortunate to have been granted a scholarship by my university; however, it also meant I was not allowed to shift out of my course. So I accepted my situation, and eventually, I learned to like Communication Arts the way mail-order brides learn to like their well-to-do husbands. In lieu of getting a degree in Literature, I lurked outside my university’s Creative Writing Center and gazed at posters, announcing writing workshops and literary conventions, as if they were love letters addressed to someone else. I stalked my Literature professors to ask them questions on literary craft and kept myself up-to-date with the latest "literary" gossip (like, how this writer had a tryst with that other writer, or how this writer had an argument with that writer, and so on).

Also, I tried to write. I became associate editor of our school's literary publication, and I was able to get a fellowship for fiction at a creative writing workshop.

It makes me smile now, remembering those days of "undergraduate passion," as you put it. Things have changed much since then.

After graduation, I tried many different jobs. First, I had a short stint writing for a noontime TV show. For a year, I taught English at a prominent Chinese high school. Then, I wrote storylines and scripts for a leading film production company, where I worked for three years. Now, I am teaching again, this time at my alma mater, where I am also taking up my master’s in creative writing.

From time to time, especially on stressful days when I cleaned my desk and drawers, I would find my clipping of "Living by Writing" between the pages of a book, or in a plastic folder, between my birth certificate and transcript of records, and I would read aloud your words, "Yes, Jewel, you can have a future as a creative writer—if you don't mind everything else you have to do to stay on your feet."

Then, I would sigh (sometimes cry) thinking of "everything else," the everything-else that gave me enough excuses to put off writing, the kind of writing I dreamed of doing.

In the three years that I wrote for the film company, I deliberately avoided reading poems or novels (Literature with a capital 'L') because they made me sad. Reading them made me want to write something else besides the formulaic stories I had to churn out, like a worker in an assembly line.

Last year, when I read Soledad's Sister, I felt for your Soledad and her sister Rory. Like me, they were always dreaming of being somewhere else, always wanting to "see what it's like out there!"

After reading Soledad's Sister, I was reminded of how the novel, unlike mainstream cinema, leaves more room for an honest search for truth—to ferret out secrets from sealed coffins, to uncover our real selves obscured by our borrowed identities.

It struck me how, at the end of the novel, the story of how exactly Soledad dies is left untold, emphasizing instead an even darker tragedy: that the demise of Soledad is reduced to "that dash of morbidity people everywhere seemed to crave in their humdrum lives." The sufferings of our people are portrayed as entertainment, in the same way that Wowowee makes a spectacle of brittle-boned old women pleading to Willie Revillame and the TFC subscribers for help.

Last December, I quit my job as a scriptwriter, despite friends and colleagues telling me to stay. Mainstream cinema is a powerful medium, and I knew I was in a position to write good stories for mass consumption, but somehow that wasn't enough. It was like living a borrowed life—writing concepts to suit actors' whims, making characters "sympathetic," revising plot points towards "acceptable" endings.

You were right: I had to toss out my most cherished romantic notions about writing. I learned how to write for others, not just for myself. In the process, however, I started to feel as if my function was to be an appendage rather than an artist. In trying to execute someone else's vision, I felt that I had lost sight of mine.

Have you ever felt that way, Mr. Dalisay? It's hard to imagine a writer of your caliber writing with an unsteady hand. When I checked your blog this morning, I read your "Letter from Milwaukee" entry where you wrote about writing scripts for movies like "Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan?" and finding new ways to make the Filipino audience cry. I was surprised and relieved to know that Lino Brocka also made movies that were un-Brocka in the sense that they were made for their commercial ("the money-making melodrama") rather than their artistic value.

I wonder what it takes to be able to do both commissioned and literary writing. Is it a matter of being able to disassociate one's self from commissioned work? Or is it a matter of skill? I am very interested to know what you think.

Sincerely yours,

Jewel

For February 9, 2009


I FINALLY found the time and the energy to do a little housekeeping on the blog so it doesn't take an eternity to load and to wade through. I've uploaded about a year's worth of Manileño and T3 Select Opinion columns, and have archived everything, so if you'll click the Archive links there's bound to be some "new" stuff there. I've also archived the past year's Penman columns into six-month bundles. Many thanks all for your patience.

Penman for Monday, February 9, 2009

NO, I don’t mean the presidential burden of an economy in recession, two foreign wars, and Rush Limbaugh. I’m referring to the pen that Barack Obama signed his first official documents with, which I had a very quick glimpse of on TV, just long enough for me to note that it wasn’t a fountain pen. I thought that it was very likely a rollerball and not a ballpoint, given the ease with which the lefty (not leftist, although Limbaugh might disagree) Obama scrawled his name.

So who cares, right? Well, there are at least a few thousand kooky pen people around the planet, like me, who do, on top of several thousand other presidential autograph collectors who must be wondering what President Obama’s signature looks like.

As it turns out, I was right about the rollerball. A dispatch from the Providence Journal proudly announced that “Rhode Island’s own A.T. Cross Company made the pen that President Obama will use to sign a series of inauguration documents and executive orders today.

“The company, founded in Providence in 1846 and now based in Lincoln, was selected by the Obama-Biden transition team to provide the president’s official writing instruments. Marketing manager Lori Geshelin said yesterday that Cross has provided pens for many presidents.

“With just a week’s notice, the company delivered the specially designed Cross Townsend black lacquer rolling-ball pens that will be used today.

“They feature the presidential coat of arms and are engraved with Obama’s signature on the barrel.

“The company sells a similar pen on its Web site, www.cross.com, for $135. A version in 10-karat gold is also available.”

What—many of us immediately thought—not a fountain pen? No, apparently because these ceremonial pens are traditionally given away after the signing, and fountain pens would have been too ostentatious for the budget-conscious Obama—who got brownie points for using an American-branded pen, notwithstanding the fact that Cross Townsends are now made in China.

This reminded me to look up another article I’d read years ago by autograph collector Philip J. Ross on American presidential pens. Ross reports that John F. Kennedy used a poor man’s pen—a dip Esterbrook—in addition to a black Sheaffer desk pen. For their signatures, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton favored the even humbler $1.59 Sanford Sharpie—which, despite its lowliness, gets high praise from Ross as “one of the best writing instruments from an archival viewpoint because of the bold permanent marks it makes.”

I don’t know what pens our presidents have used. Might Proclamation 1081 have been signed with a Montblanc? I rather doubt it; somewhere in my drawers is a slip of paper with Ferdinand E. Marcos’s signature from a blue felt-tip pen. (Remember when Papermates were in everyone’s pocket—along with the obligatory Cross ballpoint at Christmastime?) From my time as a speechwriter, I also remember getting drafts back from Fidel V. Ramos with his comments beribboning the margins in bright red, again from a felt tip. The only public official whom I recall wielding a fountain pen like it had been made for him (as it might well have been, given his prodigious writing talent and energy) was the late Blas F. Ople, whose Parker Duofold I lusted after, if not his cigarettes.

If you think fountain pens are a throwback to some Jurassic past, meet Nancy Floyd, who—presuming she’s still alive at 73—makes goose-feather quill pens for the United States Supreme Court, not for the noble Justices to inscribe their judgments with, but to give away as presents. The Washington City Paper reported in 2002 that “The court has been offering a pair of quill pens to each attorney who argues a case before it for more than 200 years. In 1801, Chief Justice John Marshall first presented quill pens, parchment, and an inkwell to an attorney for note-taking purposes. Since the development of newer writing instruments, the court has continued the tradition as a way of offering lawyers a memento of their time debating a case. The court also presents quill pens to visiting dignitaries as an expression of goodwill.” Every year, the court orders about 1,200 pairs of quill pens from Nancy, who can make 100 pairs in about five hours if the need arises.

I’m tempted to wish that our high officials were as tradition-minded, but I’m afraid of spawning another procurement scandal possibly involving fake Montblancs and overpriced chicken feathers. (I wouldn’t mind collecting the pen that was used to sign the ZTE-NBN deal.) When Joseph Estrada was about to take his presidential oath in 1998 amid the full panoply of the Centennial in Malolos, I wanted to tap my Palace friends to suggest that I lend the new President my oldest pen—a German-made one from the 1890s—to complete the effect. Wisely, second thought prevailed. That pen would have been lost to me, and lost on him.


THIS WEDNESDAY, Thursday, and Friday, most of the country’s best writers, young and old, will gather in Quezon City for the first Philippine International Writers Festival, also known as Taboan ’09, under the auspices of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). Taboan (meaning “meeting” in Visayan) is the literary component of the ongoing Philippine Arts Month, and it will bring together about 150 writers from all over the country, plus two guest writers from Thailand and Vietnam.

It isn’t exactly the first congress of Filipino writers to be organized on such a scale. Just a little over 50 years ago—from December 26-29, 1958—almost a hundred writers got together in Baguio for the “National Writers Conference” under the Philippine Center of International PEN.

By happy coincidence, Taboan will be opened by a lecture on Philippine literature today by someone who also figured prominently in that Baguio conference: National Artist F. Sionil Jose. In the first panel (“Ganito Kami Noon: Writing Through the Decades”), another Baguio attendee, Elmer Ordoñez, will lead off the discussion.

Taboan will be, so to speak, a moveable feast, with panel discussions and other events scheduled to be held at UP Diliman on Wednesday, Ateneo de Manila University on Thursday, and Cubao Expo on Friday. The topics range from the practical (“Writing for a Living” and “Write to Life”) to the provocative (“The Young and the Litless” and “Atbp: Writing Off the Mainstream”) to the pensive (“The Poet-Critic” and “Text and Context”).

A special feature of this festival is its emphasis on the younger Filipino writer (defined as those 40 and below) for whom this will be a formal debut of sorts, a recognition by one’s peers and seniors of acceptance into that loneliest yet also rowdiest of fraternities. There will also be strong and broad regional representation of both senior and junior writers.

Our Festival Director is poet Ricky de Ungria, but as one of the festival coordinators (along with Prof. Lulu Reyes and fellow fictionist Sarge Lacuesta), let me thank our many sponsors—among them, the University of the Philippines, AdMU, and other parters such as the Filipinas Institute of Translation, Filipinas Heritage Library, Samarami Asia, Kape Isla, Kolektib, Pablo Gallery, and Mogwai, and, of course, the NCCA.

The all-day panel discussions are open to the public, subject to the availability of seats, so come early to these venues on their appointed dates if you want to catch the action.

Penman for Monday, February 2, 2009

I'VE BEEN under enormous stress lately—the natural result of taking on too many book-writing jobs on top of my teaching, admin work, and column writing (yes, it may look like fun and it thankfully often is, but it’s still a labor to write 1,000 words of anything and try to make sense)—so you’ll forgive me if I veer off from the matters of language we’ve been immersed in these past few weeks into a personal pleasure, my love of pens.

I know that it’s not a terribly exciting subject for many (unlike language, grammar, and all that, which never fails to raise temperatures, including mine, despite my own memo to myself to eat ice cream and leave the fulmination to the congenitally argumentative, which the Internet seems to breed in droves)—so those of you who have more pressing things in mind this Monday morning, please turn the page, now.

I, on the other hand, need to catch my breath and clear my brain (not that there’s too much in it but all manner of junk), so I’ll return to something familiar and soothing. That subject is fountain pens—those plastic tubes that spit out lines of ink on paper, which our grandparents went to school and to work with. They carry both aesthetic and therapeutic value for me in a way, I suppose, that only other stylophiles (the fancy word for “pen lovers”) can understand. Every other month or so, I take my babies out of their cases, ink a few and write with them, polish them, photograph them, look at them, then gently put them back to bed.

Every collector has a ritual, and these are mine; I take, say, a 1938 Parker Vacumatic in hand and turn it around in the light, appreciating the way the pearlescent bands resemble a city skyline at night; and then I imagine all the letters that pen wrote in all its 70 years, from someone to someone else—words of comfort, promises, lies, supplications, and so forth, apart from the more mundane business of checks and receipts. This pen bled meaning, breathed passion, turned minds and feelings around. Every time I uncap a pen it promises a performance, and dares me to discover its possibilities. Will the nib write smoothly? Will the ink gush? Will it leave—with flexible nibs—a line that unravels like a bundled saffron scarf from fine to double-broad?

There was a time, of course, when fountain pens were much less objects of romance (and fashion or conspicuous consumption, as they have become, or become again, among trendsetters in need of revival-worthy pieces). People filled them up from bottles of ink and stuck them in their pockets before marching off to work. Children tossed them into pencil cases and chewed on their butts during essay exams. Inevitably someone came home with a big purple splotch on his shirt pocket; inevitably someone dropped a pen and bent its nib—its writing end, more likely steel rather than gold—and, being too poor or too busy to replace the nib or the pen itself, went on to write impaired, with one injured foot or tine scratching the paper.

Today I’d like to put the regal Waterman Patricians and the big, fat Montblanc Meisterstucks aside and talk a bit about these pens for the common person—the work pens and school pens that our parents and some of us in their 50s can still remember growing up with. These were the pens that didn’t cost more than a dollar or two—or a few pesos, back in the 40s and 50s—and which were never meant to become classics or collectibles, though quite a few have become exactly that despite their modest aspirations. These were the Esterbrooks, the Wearevers, and any number of no-name brands and low-end models of leading makers like Parker, Sheaffer, and Pelikan.

A few weeks ago, when I wrote about losing a couple of nibs down the drain while cleaning some pens (they’re still down there), I received a letter from Michael Blackwell, Sr.—a senior master sergeant in the USAF who has since retired here—which said in part: “I really enjoyed your article about the fountain pens you have collected. I once owned some of those Esterbrook pens when I was in high school (‘50s) many years ago. I do recall how pleasant and flowing it was to write with a fountain pen which gave you so many choices of tips or nibs. I moved up to the Parker pens because they offered the replaceable cartridges, rather than having to fill from an inkwell the traditional way. I am glad you included a photo as well because I had forgotten about the Esterbrook pens until I read the article and saw the picture.”

SMSgt Blackwell is typical of that generation of pen-users who still remember when pens required unscrewing, rather than pulling, the cap from the barrel, and took up ink by dipping the nib into an ink bottle then pumping a lever on the barrel’s side. Esterbrooks were particularly popular because they were inexpensive, pretty, sturdy, and as Blackwell points out, had easily replaceable nibs in a variety of points from the extra-fine tips that accountants preferred to broad ones for impressive signatures.

Today, what once was a lowly clerk’s pen has a cult following among collectors (for more details, check out www.esterbrook.net). Esterbooks can still be had in the range of $20 online, which makes them a great pen to start a vintage collection with.

But one thing I fail to emphasize often enough is that even among modern pens, there are many perfectly capable and great-looking models Filipinos can buy from the usual school and office supply shops downtown for a song. Inoxcrom, Sheaffer, Parker, Pilot, Waterman, and other brands all have fountain pens below P1,000 that can match the hundred-dollar classics in performance. Many Chinese pens like Jinhao, Duke, Wing Sung, and Hero also offer a satisfying writing experience for a few hundred pesos. (For my money’s worth, the best inexpensive FP out there is the Japanese-made Pilot 78G, available for less than $10, if you have a friend going to Hong Kong, Japan, or anywhere around the region. Produced only for the Asian market, it writes a superbly smooth line.)

And then again, I can hear some people saying, “Why buy a P500 fountain pen when I can get a ballpoint for less than P50?” Ah, why indeed? Why even bother with pens you have to fill up, clean out, and maintain when you can write just as well with a disposable Bic you don’t have to think twice about?

The only answer I can give right now is that people write for different reasons. For most, the physical act of writing is a means to an experience; for a few, writing is part of the experience—if not the experience itself, a commitment of one’s character to paper. For the pragmatic, any line you lay down—broad, medium, or fine, in whatever color—is ever the same, with the same practical effect. For the romantic, lines and even the way the colors bleed within them are expressive of more than what the words mean in themselves. Guess which of these fountain pen lovers are.

Penman for Monday, January 26, 2009


THE CONTINUING stream of comments and questions provoked by my column on “irritating Pinoy expressions” a few weeks ago leaves me with little choice but to “do the needful” (more on that later) and respond to some of them—with pleasure, of course. Let’s get right to them.

First, reader Butch Noceda asks: “Concerning some confusing words, how about ‘moot’? It both means ‘debatable’ and ‘of no significance.’ What's up with that? And then there's ‘sanction’ which could mean ‘to approve’ or ‘to punish.’ Whatever happened to these words?”

Earlier, I took up the words “cleave” and “enjoin” in this same respect. Pete Lacaba pointed me to the term “Janus word” to describe such words with dual or contradictory meanings; I’ve also seen the term “antagonym” applied to them. True enough, “moot” means both “subject to debate” but also, and perhaps more helpfully, “having no practical significance, typically because the subject is too uncertain to allow a decision.” In other words, it’s something we can argue about all day, but all that yakking isn’t going to matter. The word “debate” often comes to mind alongside “moot” because of the phrase “moot court”—meaning a mock court where law students can argue hypothetical cases. To answer Butch’s question about “What happened?”, the meaning shifted from “debatable” to “irrelevant” sometime in the mid-19th century.

My dictionary has this to say about “sanction”: ‘Sanction’ is confusing because it has two meanings that are almost opposite. In most domestic contexts, sanction means 'approval, permission': voters gave the measure their sanction. In foreign affairs, sanction means 'penalty, deterrent': international sanctions against the republic go into effect in January.” Another source notes that “sanction” has had at least three meanings over time: first, in the 1500s, as an ecclesiastical decree (think of the Latin root word sanctus, “holy”); then, in the mid-1600s, as a penalty for violating the law; and finally, in the late 1600s, as a reward for observing the law.

Second, from reader Efren Fabic: “Is it correct to say “God bless’ only? I very often see the expression used by people in emails, letters, greeting cards, etc. Many radio and TV announcers, commentators, and program hosts say ‘God bless!’ when they are about to end a program or a presentation. Doesn't ‘bless’ as used in this context need a direct object, e.g., ‘God bless you’?”

I hear you, Efren. The truncated expression makes me wince as well, and yes, formally speaking, it does require a direct object, although I suppose the more graceful thing to do is to accept and reciprocate the good wishes. As I’ve often said, for as long as the meaning is clear between both parties—and as long as they’re aware that others might not understand things the same way—then I don’t see a problem (perhaps in grammar, but not in communication). I do wish people would complete these statements, but that’s just my personal sense of order coming to the fore. Something I find even more, uhm, unique is that Pinoy greeting (which I’ve been hearing a lot this past week), “Belated!”

Third, Ma. Leticia Estagle asks: “What do you think of the word ‘CR’ or comfort room? Did we Filipinos invent it?”

I don’t think we invented the phrase “comfort room,” Leticia. Wikipedia tells us that while “toilet” and “washroom” are very commonly used in the West, “In the rest of the world (usually Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia) the term ‘comfort room’ is used.” I must admit that this was something of a surprise to me, because, despite having traveled quite a bit, I’ve never seen it used anywhere else, except to mean a room for comfort or solace, a refuge.

But “comfort room” or CR is a good term to bring up, because it illustrates my point about language being all about communication before it’s about anything else, like being grammatically correct, stylistically elegant, and so on. If you need immediate relief for your bursting bladder, you’re not going to insist on looking for the “washroom” or the “WC” or the “lavatory,” not if you’re in this country. No, sir, you better know the local term for that most important of facilities, or risk profound embarrassment.

Every language—or some variation of it—serves the people who use it, and not vice-versa. There may be a few people—teachers, scholars, writers, linguists, lawyers—for whom language has to be extraordinarily precise, because it’s the working material of their profession. For most others, it’s just a way of getting meanings across, the more clearly and more efficiently the better. What’s annoying about the way some of us use English isn’t necessarily wrong; and what’s wrong isn’t necessarily annoying.

Also, as reader Mrs. Hill Roberts points out, “Filipinos love underestimating themselves. There's no need to. A couple of years ago, a ‘paediatrician’ was beaten up, left for dead by British people. Why? They didn't know the difference between a paedophile and a paediatrician! The poor guy stayed in hospital for three months wondering why he was beaten up. To cut the story short, those Brits who lived in the housing estate were hardly educated (another shocking reminder to all Filipinos: the majority of the British leave school at 15 or 16—they go on to become plumbers, electricians, carpenters: David Beckham, Simon Cowell, Richard Branson, former Prime Minister John Major, the chairman of TopShop, Dorothy Perkins, etc.”

Finally, reader Romeo Ybañez wants to know about the word “needful” as it’s used by Indians—for example, in the phrase “do the needful,” meaning “do what’s necessary.”

It was the first time I’d come across the word being used this way—ordinarily it means “needy”—but again it reminds us how different peoples around the world have refashioned English to their own uses. Yes, “do the needful” is an example of Indian English, as are the words and phrases “foreign-returned” (the equivalent of our balikbayan), “immoral traffic” (prostitution), “updation” (update), “upgradation” (upgrade), and “godown” (warehouse).

What’s even more interesting—according to a comment on a blog put up by a fellow named Matthew Barnson—is that “You've gotten it exactly backwards—“do the needful" is not a neologism. It's a quaint old phrase, suggestive of the 1940s. It was used by the British in India before India won its independence, and after the British left India the phrase didn't die out there the way it did elsewhere. Something similar happened with many words used in American English—for example, "fall" (meaning the season when leaves fall from the trees) was used in Britain during colonial times, but subsequently disappeared in favor of "autumn.” But we Americans, unmoored from British influence on our language, kept "fall.” For evidence of ‘do the needful’’s antiquity, see this archived Time magazine article from 1949. The article quotes John Foster Dulles saying ‘... I think we are now in a good way to do the needful quickly.’”

So there we are.

Penman for Monday, January 19, 2009


I'VE BEEN swamped with messages responding to my past two columns on "irritating Pinoy expressions," with readers from theater director Freddie Santos and lawyer Ted Te to retiree Crisistomo Arcilla and old friend and colleague Minnie Yonzon (who wants me to do a similar piece on annoying expressions in Filipino) contributing their take on the subject, for which I thank them all. Poet and editor Pete Lacaba (the real language maven among us) sent me a flurry of messages late one night to prove his case (which he did, convincingly) that “in fairness”, all by itself, is indeed used in standard prose elsewhere, though not quite the way we Pinoys deploy it as a virtual shield, from behind which we can feel free to say even saucier things.

Another reader gently chided me for carrying on what he called “a colonial discourse” in talking, I suppose, about imposing standards of usage in a foreign language, thereby trying to be more English than the English. I’ve heard that argument before, and that would be true if we were settling what was “good and bad” or “acceptable or not” based on just British or American usage.

But I was saying that we should negotiate these things among ourselves—to sort out what was clear, meaningful, pleasing to the ear, and so on, to us as Filipinos. I submit that it would be even more colonial-minded if we left the teaching or studying of English to the English, or if we didn’t think we had a right to discuss standards and usage on our own. (Of course, the extent to which English may be said to have become “ours” is another subject for debate.)

Any discussion of language and standards of language sooner or later turns vexatious, because it’s inevitably political. When you talk about English in the Philippines, people tend to divide themselves into the “Inglisero” snobs and the “Pinoy sa puso’t diwa” flagwavers. It’s very hard to stake out a middle ground, which is what I’ve been trying to do all along, and I hope our readers see that. The one thing I strongly object to is the imposition of a language on others—and the snobbery that comes with it—without knowing why or understanding how language works, which is often more complicated and more interesting than the grammarians, teachers, editors, and certainly the politicians see it.

I have a feeling that if I wrote a book on the subject I'd be a rich man, but I'm going to take a short break from wordplay this week to report on an interesting foray into—perhaps appropriately enough—our pre-literate history, a time before the written word.

I FOUND myself in Angono, Rizal last week with fellow members of our college's Executive Board, headed by our dean, the National Artist Virgilio Almario. The dean had decided to take up a standing invitation by one of our faculty members, the writer and scholar Ligaya "Gaying" Rubin, to hold our monthly meeting over lunch at her house in Angono, her hometown.

It was a short drive from Diliman on a breezy January day, and the sumptuous lunch—for which the perfunctory meeting had clearly been an excuse—was even more pleasant, capped by take-home bags of fried itik, Angono's specialty, that the dean had sent his driver out to buy. But an unexpected treat was yet to come. "Would you like to see the petroglyphs?" Gaying asked us. "It's only 15 minutes from here." Why, yes of course, I wanted to say, but first I had to ask, "Will we need to walk very far?" I heard the magic word. "No," said Gaying, "they've built an access road so we can drive right up to it."

I'd heard of these petroglyphs or rock carvings before, from accounts of their discovery and the research conducted on them by the National Museum, which still oversees the site. Dr. Jesus Peralta, among others, has written about them, noting that a National Museum team first studied the site in 1965, concluding that “The archaeological aspect of the research into the petroglyphs gave no positive results. The presence of cobble, flake tools and polished stone adzes, and fragments of pottery in the immediate vicinity of the shelter is no indication of a relationship between the makers of the stone tools, and the petroglyph maker, although the probability exists.”

It seemed appropriate that they were located in Angono (or just outside it; the site seems also to be claimed by Binangonan) which today continues to be known as a cradle of folk art, breeding such luminaries as Carlos "Botong" Francisco, Jose Blanco and his family of painters, Nemiranda, and Perdigon Vocalan, the artist whose ethnic Balaw-Balaw restaurant attracts visitors from afar.

There's been some skepticism over the authenticity of the petroglyphs, which are really little more than figures drawn and cut into the rock face; you can easily discern figures that look like animals and humans on the volcanic tuff. I know someone (I won't tell who) who believes in UFOs and reincarnation, but who's convinced that the wall figures are, uhm, less than ancient. It's easy to see where the skepticism comes from, because, before the National Museum put railings up to protect the site, thoughtless vandals had scrawled their names right beside the turtles and the lizards of a bygone age.

Gaying told us that she saw those figures there (as Botong did, before her) when they hiked up the mountain in the '60s. That sounds ancient enough to me.


AND NOW for a truly pleasant surprise. I was typing this up on Thursday, the 15th of January, and just as I was working on the column, I heard a “ping” in my inbox—a message from Antonio Andre Calizo, who had written me months earlier about a common ancestor of ours, a Marianito Dalisay Calizo of Aklan. He sent me a link which led to this discovery about “Sayaw,” a yearly moro-moro presentation held during the Sto. Niño fiesta in Ibajay, Aklan:

“This moro-moro was originally written by Marianito Dalisay Calizo of Ibajay, Aklan, intimately and popularly known to his townmates as Maestro Nito, sometime during the middle part of the 18th century.

“The sayaw, without which the celebration of the Feast of the Sto. Niño every January in Ibajay, Aklan, would seem incomplete, has for participants… blood relations of the venerable Maestro Nito, who have formed a cohesive group (barangay-style) known as the Calizo clan. “This group, led by its elders, recruits, trains, finances, and preserves the weapons and uniforms of wars of the Muslims and Christians and imparts to the participants from generation to generation the intricacies of warfare (estokada) used in the play.”

How about that—a fellow playwright for an ancestor? But the real surprise, at least for me, was not only that I was receiving the message on the day of the fiesta and the presentation itself—January 15—but that it also happened to be my 55th birthday.

(I’m announcing that fact not in expectation of some belated gifts—but if you really must, then give me your old pens, and don’t be shy!)

Penman for Monday, January 12, 2009


LAST WEEK'S piece on “The 10 Most Irritating Pinoy Expressions in English” unleashed a torrent of responses, many of them contributions to a further listing of words and phrases that sound like fingernails on a blackboard. I’d clearly forgotten many more of these expressions, so let me take note of the choicest ones on my readers’ lists, as well as add a couple more of my own.

1. Actually, basically, honestly, as a matter of fact. Favorite opening lines, no matter what follows. I suspect that “actually” is the Pinoy’s translation of another phrase revered in showbiz, “sa totoo lang,” mouthing which is supposed to instantly enhance the truthfulness of one’s statement. “Basically” sounds more educated than “uhmmm” and “duhhh,” so it fills those gaps just nicely, like so much starch in a sausage. And don’t you just love it when someone says, “As a matter of fact…” followed by an opinion?

2. Stuffs, equipments, jewelries, evidences, baggages, luggages. Who said we didn’t know our grammar? Add “s” to form the plural, right?

3. As in, as if. These, to some Pinoys, are complete—albeit elliptical—sentences, as in “As in!” or “As if!” For the full explanation, grab someone below 25 off the street and torture him or her for the answer. That person will probably be dead before you’re satisfied.

4. “I want to be clarified.” Unless you happen to be a vat of syrup, fruit juice, butter, or petroleum, clarifying you will be difficult, even lethal. Some matters may need to be clarified, but not people, as dense or as confused as they may be.

5. “Like what you said….” What’s with the what? Like last week’s “wherein,” “what” has insinuated itself into our English in this very strange way: “As what the Golden Rule says, do unto others….” or “Independents can sometimes win, like what the last elections proved.” What? Not!

Not all Filipinisms are or should be annoying—although “annoying” depends on who’s getting annoyed. I don’t see myself ever using such words as “presidentiable” or “Imeldific,” but I can’t take them away from Filipinos for whom they’ve acquired a very clear and precise meaning. (My abhorrence for “multiawarded” stems from the crudeness of its construction, but I’m resigned to hearing it until I croak.)

We have as much a right to contribute to the ever-growing vocabulary and usage of English as other people who use the language. If we have to bend over backwards to understand what the British mean by “dressed to the nines” or what young Americans do when they “diss” someone, then it can’t be too much to expect them to figure out what we mean by “for a while” (which some of my readers roundly scored, but which I’ve come to appreciate for its certain charm).

Of course, things get tricky when we invent words, fully expecting others to understand and to accept them the way we do. Reader Peter Stitt suggested that “fiscalize” is Pinoy news-speak, and I had to Google the word to see that he was right (or nearly so—it’s used in an even larger sense by the Portuguese, who, asserts one article, have fiscals for everything, from college exams to food and drink and taxes).

If we banned the word “votation”—the ultimate solution to every argument in this country, next to knives and guns—no one would ever get elected, and nothing would ever get done (considering where “votation” has taken us, maybe that’s not too bad). And how can anyone tell the Aggrupation of Advocates for Environmental Protection (AGAP) or the Pagadian-based Baganian Aggrupation for Development (BAD) that they have no right to exist, because... there’s no such word? (Their defense will be to fall back on the precedent of the Concerned Citizens Aggrupation, which won many votes in Zamboanga in the early 1980s.)

As I’ve said in this corner many times before, the important thing is for those who use English to deal with the outside world to be aware of the difference between our English and theirs. Otherwise, whatever works, works. (And sometimes, English among the non-English can be marvelously mangled and crystal clear all at once, as when we were haggling with a seller of T-shirts in Shanghai last month and were told by the fat lady, “This one, that one, same-same!”)

How boring life would be if we all spoke like a BBC announcer (or, as they would say over there, “presenter”) or wrote like Henry James; tuxedos are silly when we should be wearing jeans. But to those for whom language is as important as clothing on the job, appropriateness is everything, and we should know when to put on that “grammar Nazi” helmet and when to let our hair down (or whatever’s left of it).

My friend and fellow English major Marlu Balmaceda wrote in to submit her pet peeve, which is the way “enjoin” is used by most people these days, as a synonym for “encourage”—“I enjoin you to support this project, etc.” Ernie Hizon of Unilab also disliked the word, reading it as so much corporate gobbledygook. Marlu’s objection came from the fact that “enjoin” originally meant the opposite: to prohibit (“I enjoin you from returning to these shores”).

“Enjoin” happens to be one of those words whose meanings have doubled or even reversed over time, so that today, curiously enough, it can mean both things, depending on the particular usage, although its older sense is largely forgotten. “Cleave,” “awful” and “fulsome” are three other such words. To cleave is to split something apart, but it also means to hold fast to something (“the ax cleaved the dry wood” but also “the child cleaved to its mother”); “awful” used to mean “awe-inspiring” in the reign of Henry VIII, but now means something considerably different; and “fulsome” doesn’t just mean “a lot,” but also—and more correctly, today—“excessive.”

Reader Jun Mongcopa enlightened (clarified?) me about the origins of the phrase “at this point in time,” which he traces back to the early ‘70s, when “every Tom, Dick, Harry and Jane of an American speaker/lecturer visiting our country started using the phrase. There was an article in Time magazine about it and it would seem that the phrase was coined by a Harvard professor. Locally, by the mid-‘70s, the phrase was picked up and popularized by the Asian Institute of Management. Every Juan, Tomas, and Maria who ever set foot upon the hallowed grounds of AIM, be it by attending lectures, seminars or taking up an MBA, had to use the phrase when asked to speak. It became the badge of distinction; when you used the phrase it meant you had some intellectual enlightenment from AIM, which was a really big deal at that time, AIM being touted as the Harvard of the Philippines and equally expensive as hell to enroll in.”

Durnit, I knew I missed something by not going to Harvard or AIM! Many thanks, Jun, and to all the others who sent in their contributions. I have a feeling we’re not done yet. I’ll get back to this topic one of these days—oh, I almost forgot another of your/our favorite expressions, the perfect way to end a Pinoy conversation: “Promise!”

Penman for Monday, January 5, 2009


LAST NOVEMBER, the folks at Oxford University came out with a list of “top ten irritating expressions” in the English language, by which I suppose they meant the English language as it’s employed in their corner of the English-speaking world, and not necessarily in what used to be the backwaters of the Bard’s dominion, in places like India and the Philippines. “Irritating” is, of course, a matter of cultural and personal predisposition. One man’s joke—such as the “Barack the Magic Negro” song that top Republicans passed among themselves—could be another man’s slur, and what annoys an American—such as a Pinoy texting in the middle of conversation—might be perfectly normal to the other fellow.

So the Oxford list might cause some of us to just go “Eh?”, but it’s always interesting to see what ticks off other people. Now let’s see which among the following words or phrases feels like a bug in your ear:

1. At the end of the day
2. Fairly unique
3. I personally
4. At this moment in time
5. With all due respect
6. Absolutely
7. It's a nightmare
8. Shouldn't of
9. 24/7
10. It's not rocket science

Well, come now, that wasn’t too bad, was it? We hear these expressions hereabouts now and then, but not that often, so they don’t grate on us as they might with the English. For example, we hardly ever say, “It’s not rocket science,” because, well, we don’t have rocket science in this country. Indeed we have our own, uhm, fairly unique ways of putting things and of getting annoyed by them.

I’ve compiled my own list of irritating expressions in English as we Filipinos use the language among ourselves, with others, over the airwaves, in the office, in conferences, and in the papers. I’m sure you can add to this list—do send me your pet peeves—and this comes with the caveat that the annoyance may be entirely mine. If they don’t bother you, then don’t lose any sleep over them; Lord knows we suffer enough aggravations in this life and in this country without having to be upset by wrong or awkward prepositions.

(Speaking of which, a reader wrote in recently to say how he or she—there was no name in the email address—failed to appreciate whatever I was doing in my column-piece on getting a La-Z-Boy, because I had committed the grievous error of saying “in the mall” instead of “at the mall” in my first sentence. I said I agreed that “at the mall” was probably the preferred and “correct” form, but I also asked him/her to Google the whole phrase “in the mall” to see how it’s entered common usage. Language—unfortunately or otherwise—isn’t graven in stone like math, perhaps to the distress of ruler-toting schoolmarms; one billion people saying “1+1=3” isn’t going to make it so. But if enough people—including influential writers and editors in places like Newsweek and The New York Times—say “different than” instead of “different from,” which I’m sticking with only because it’s what I’ve been used to, then the language will change; it already has. This might as well be the place for me to remind readers that while I do teach English and while I deeply value and enjoy language as a writer, I don’t think of myself as a stickler for rules, as some would like me to be. I cringe at bad language and poor grammar, but there are far worse things in life to fret over, and some of the worst damage to English is being perpetrated by some fools in Congress who insist on an English-only policy when they can barely speak or write it. I once had to sit through a hearing where a congressman held forth on “the youngs, the youngs of this country!”)

But here’s my list of the ten most irritating Pinoy expressions in English—irritating not necessarily because they’re wrong (although some are), but because they’re everywhere you look and listen.

1. “In fairness.” The most popular phrase in Pinoy showbiz, where fairness is apparently in great demand. Every time I hear this, my mind goes, “In fairness to whom or to what?”, but you never get to hear the other end of the phrase, so much so that you begin to suspect that the speaker really means “In fairness to me!”

2. “As far as.” I don’t mean “as far as the eye can see,” but “As far as accommodations, everything is already taken care of” (or, more likely in these parts, “taken cared of”) or “As far as Manny Pacquiao, either Hatton or Mayweather will be okay for his next fight.” As in the above, I keep looking for the missing “is (or are) concerned” after “as far as”—but it looks like that’s as far as most people will go.

3. “At this point in time,” the Pinoy version of “At this moment in time.” I can recall precisely when I began hearing this wondrously redundant expression over the airwaves—during the coverage of the 1986 EDSA revolt and its aftermath, from which point (in time?) it became a staple of reporters and broadcasters. Why not just say, “at this point” or “at this time” or the even more economical “today” or “now”?

4. “Remains to be.” Not in the sense of “It remains to be seen if Filipinos will finally vote for the right person,” but rather “The deposit remains to be unclaimed” or “This painter remains to be unappreciated by the critics.” “To be”? Not to be!

5. “Wherein.” I don’t know how this word crept into the vocabulary and overran the place, rather like the carnivore snail someone imported that ate up all the other garden creatures both good and bad, but you hear it everywhere, taking over where (or wherein?) the good old “where” (or, sometimes, the more precise “whereby”) should suffice. Hear this: “The house wherein the hero was born will be turned into a museum.” Want to have some fun? Google these two words together: “wherein” and “Philippines.” You’ll find choice examples like “He entered the University of the Philippines wherein he studied Medicine.”

6. “Demand for.” I’ve already written about this before, but obviously no one in government and corporate officialdom reads me, so we still have signs screaming “Demand for your receipt!”

7. “Literally.” Don’t people know that “literally” means, well, “literally”? I’ve heard people say “I’m so hungry I could literally eat a horse!” Really? I tried horsemeat once, in little nibbles—no, it didn’t taste like chicken—so I guess I could say “I literally ate horse,” but literally eating a horse will require hunger the size of Africa.

8. “Whatever.” You ask someone a perfectly good question you’ve taken minutes to compose, and that person shrugs her shoulders or rolls his eyes and says “Whateverrrr….” Don’t you just want to strangle that person on the spot?

9. “Wholistic/holistic.” First of all, just how do you spell this thing? Does it come with a W or not? The medical dictionary defines “holism” (no W) as “the conception of a man as a functioning whole.” But then you have websites devoted to “The Wholistic Pet” and “Wholistic Health Solutions” (which, incidentally, sells the Home Colon Cleaning Kit). This word (with or without the W—whatever) seems to be one of those warm and fuzzy buzzwords that came in with New Age music, organic tomatoes, and NGOs. (I’ll talk about “stakeholders” some other day.)

10. “Multiawarded.” It’s No. 10 on this list, but it tops my list of Ugliest Frankenwords in the Universe. Of course, it’s popular because it does the job of saying “He (or she) has won not just one but many prizes!” Anyone should be happy to be multiawarded, and I should be honored that this word’s been often applied to me in introductions and such—but it isn’t false modesty at work when you see me wincing at the word. “Prizewinning” will do. Or, better yet, “many-splendored.” But that would no longer be me.

For MetroHIM Magazine, November 2007

LAST MONTH—after three years and eleven countries of traveling together—I finally retired my first Moleskine notebook, having reached those last few pages where you jot down an odd jumble of things like people’s phone numbers, stray lines of poetry, your cat’s vaccination schedule, and your Multiply password.

I’d picked up this notebook in the US after seeing it for the first time in a bookshop in Rome. As a certified gadget freak who never leaves the house without a laptop and a smartphone, I didn’t think I needed a physical, old-fashioned notebook, but it was finally the Moleskine’s snob appeal that got to me. It had been used, its ads proclaimed, by writers like Ernest Hemingway. And since I also collect vintage fountain pens, I thought that the combination of pen and notebook was very stylish in a retro way—as indeed it was.

But little did I expect that style would be resoundingly trumped by substance. I came to depend on the Moleskine much more than I expected—because it fit in my shirt pocket, could open flat on the table (another of its claims to fame), and never needed to boot up or to be recharged. Its creamy paper absorbed ink without feathering; it had a sewn-in bookmark, and best of all a small pocket in the back for business and phone cards, receipts, and ID pictures.

That notebook accompanied me to the Netherlands, Germany, America, Italy, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Korea, and China (aside from dozens of places here at home). I’ve whipped it out to write on in trains, boats, buses, and planes. Mostly I used it to take notes in passing, for some future story or column: the names of places, the flavors of food, the kind of details and impressions you can’t catch with a camera. It’s the closest thing I’ve kept to a diary, chronicling both moments of elation—like riding business class to Europe for the first time—and despondency (never mind over what grievous trifle). Here and there you might spot a dab of ketchup or a blooming blot left by a droplet of Coke. For a few pages the ink might be jet-black, then brown, then blue-black; the letters might display happy flourishes, or be cramped and sullen.

I was sad when I put that first Moleskine to bed, but then I very quickly unwrapped my next one, which I’d stored in reserve for over a year. I can hardly wait to fill it up—and to open many more before I myself reach my own last pages.

I got this e-mail message from Manolo Quezon responding to a recent piece I wrote about his grandfather. I'd asked him if MLQ had said "country" or "government" in that famous quotation mentioned below, and Manolo had replied "country"--a little too quickly, as it turned out. I wrote Manolo back an amused note absolving him of all blame--"it happens to the best of us"--but it's a hallmark of Manolo's thoroughness that he went to these lengths to get the facts of a seemingly small detail straight. Here's what he wrote:


Uh oh. Read your column. Mea maxima culpa.

I couldn't find the massive encyclopedia of Quezoniana put together by Alfredo Saulo (Manuel Luis Quezon on His Centenary: Appraisal, Chronology, Reader, Bibliography commissioned by the the National Science Development Board in 1978), which is massively footnoted.

Here's the proper quote:"I would prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by Americans, because no matter how bad, a Filipino government might be improved."

Saulo cites the ff. sources: Teodoro M. Kalaw's autobiography (Ms) pp. 259-260; quoted in Theodore Friend, Fn. 19, p.40. They basically date the statement to 1922.

He (Saulo) also cites another, more contemporary, version:

"When we have our unfettered self-rule, I dare say we shall make mistakes, but in that respect we shall not be original or monopolistic. It is by our mistakes that we shall learn. America has aided us to learn much of the art of government, but we can master the art only by self-practice. In politics, as in law or medicine or music or painting, concrete achievement is not in the scholastic sphere, but only in the sphere of scholasticism applied. And, anyway, even in the United States and in England, democracy is still on trial. It is better for the Philippines to be ill-governed by the Filipinos than well-governed by the Americans."

Which came from an exclusive interview with Edward Price Bell for the Chicago Daily News, 1925.

But there's another quote from a speech MLQ made in 1939 (CLU-sponsored inter-university oratorical contest, Ateneo Auditorium, December 9, 1939) which has him quoting himself:

"I have listened to a speech warning our people against independence, on the ground that every liberty you now enjoy may be lost, while under the American flag you are not denied any individual liberty.

"No one has outdone me in giving credit to the government and people of the United States for what they have done in the Philippines. But I cannot permit anyone to say in my presence that our people have enjoyed greater freedom under the American administration, or that our people will not enjoy their freedom under an independent Philippines, as much as they have enjoyed it under the American flag.

"It is true, and I am proud of it, that I once said, 'I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.'

"I want to tell you that I have, in my life, made no other remark which went around the world but that. There had been no paper in the United States, including a village paper, which did not print that statement, and I also had seen it printed in many newspapers in Europe. I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by any foreigner. I said that once; I say it again, and I will always say it as long as I live." (applause)