Tuesday, June 30, 2009 RSS Logo

Days of Dextrose

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.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 | |

Pussycat in Pajamas

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.)

Sunday, June 21, 2009 | |

Cultural Exchange in Action

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.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 | |

Desperately Seeking Permissions

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.

Monday, June 8, 2009 | |

A Collector’s Joys

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.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 | |

A Misplaced Zealousness

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.

Monday, May 25, 2009 | |

A Narrowed Nation

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.”

Monday, May 18, 2009 | |

No Better Weather

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.)

Monday, May 11, 2009 | |

The Good, Raw Stuff

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?

Monday, May 4, 2009 | |

A Baguio Treat

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).

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 | |

Weekend in Vietnam

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.)

Monday, April 20, 2009 | |

Shameless Self-Promotion

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!)

Monday, April 13, 2009 | |

Remembrance of Lents Past

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.

Monday, April 6, 2009 | |

Advice to Young Speakers

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.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 | |

A Haven for Writers

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

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 | |

An Ode to Cubao

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.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 | |

Sappy Together

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.