Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, July 21, 2008

SOME SCHOLARS might quibble with my use of the word “Filipiniana” in the title of this piece, but now that I have your attention, let me announce that the world’s biggest gathering of people seriously interested in all things Philippine and Filipino will be taking place this week in Quezon City.

The University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University will be the venues for the 8th International Conference on Philippine Studies (ICOPHIL). Held every four years, ICOPHIL brings together world-renowned scholars and experts in Philippine Studies for several days of sharply focused discussions on various aspects of Philippine life, culture, and society covering history, politics, economics, and art and literature, among others. This year, more than 70 panel discussions featuring some 270 speakers have been organized, with seven panels to choose from at any given time from July 23 to July 25; there will also be several plenary sessions revolving around the conference’s overall theme of “Philippine Studies in the 21st Century: New Meanings, Critiques, and Trajectories.”

The Philippine Studies Association, headed by its president, Dr. Bernardita R. Churchill, is organizing the conference with the help of the Philippine Social Science Council (PSSC) and the International Board of Philippine Studies Conferences. (I sit on the PSA’s board, which is why you’re reading this.)

It still comes as a surprise to me sometimes to realize how interesting we are to the world, and how some foreign scholars—say, Roger Bresnahan at Michigan State and Alfred McCoy and Michael Cullinane at UW-Madison—have spent much of their lives mulling over our history and our problems. Beyond America, there’s also been a lot of critical attention coming recently from Japanese, Australian, and other scholars from the region. I’m particularly happy to be hosting an old friend, historian Greg Bankoff, who has developed a unique expertise in environmental history and who has written and lectured on disasters and on crime in 19th century Philippines. Greg now teaches at the University of Hull in England after many years of being based in Australia and New Zealand, but he’s never lost his interest in the Philippines and has tied up his ICOPHIL stint with some research and lecturing he’s doing in Baguio.

And in the Philippines, of course—thanks to the promotion and strengthening of Philippine studies in UP and other universities—our own scholars, researchers, and writers have been confronting the complex and often difficult realities of life in these islands. (In this ICOPHIL’s lineup of topics, I’ve noted that people have also begun looking into how Filipinos have been making an impact beyond the Philippines—in places like Austria, Brazil, and Macau.)

It’ll be impossible for anyone to attend even half of all the sessions on offer, so participants will have to plot their days very carefully. (The sessions on Wednesday and Friday will be held at the PSSC; those on Thursday will be at the Ateneo). I won’t be reading anything, but I’ll be moderating a session on Philippine Literature in English, so I’ll use my free time to run around and listen in on a virtual smorgasbord of sessions.

I’m intrigued, for example, by such topics as “Forty-Eight Nights at the Opera in Manila in 1865” (William John Summers); “Blogs and Blogging: Writing in the Diaspora (Judith B. Salamat); “Making a List: Analytical Bibliography, Literary Historiography, and the Filipino Novel” (Patricia May Jurilla); “Jose Rizal in Hong Kong and Macau” (Isabel Morais); “Voices from the Underground: Life Stories of Women in the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines” (Maria Vina A. Lanzona); and “Locust Outbreaks in the Philippines 1909-1934” (Ma. Florina Orillos-Juan).

You can look up and download the full conference program and find other details at http://www.pssc.org.ph/icophil. There’ll be a substantial fee to pay—this is, after all, an academic conference—but I believe there’s an option to pay just for a day’s attendance, if that’s all you want to do. You can also email the ICOPHIL Secretariat at icophil@pssc.org.ph or call them at 929-2671 for more information.

ICOPHIL 2008’s other sponsors—aside from UP, ADMU, and PSSC—include the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the National Historical Institute, the University of Hawaii, De La Salle University, and the Quezon City Mayor’s Office.


AND ON a completely unscholarly note, I ended a long day of meetings last week by granting a request of my mother to go out and watch a movie—what else but “Mamma Mia!” She had seen the play in the US and was eager to check out the movie version, so we took her out to the mall to catch the last full show. I was dog-tired, but at 80 years old my mother can command me to climb a tree or jump into the river if she wants something that badly, and I wouldn’t mind.

I love it when my mama giggles at the little pleasures that come her way, like the chocolates I bring her from my trips abroad, or the tiyan ng bangus that Beng makes sure she gets a regular supply of. “Mamma Mia!” was no problem; I had, in fact, been looking forward to seeing the movie if not the play, having been frustrated at every chance I had these past ten years to catch it on Broadway or the West End.

Like many of you reading this now, I was one of those people who thought they discovered sophistication in the ‘70s and dismissed ABBA’s oompah-oompah melodies as the cheesiest sound in music. That resistance eventually faded as I came to appreciate the sheer singability of their songs; like the Beatles, the music endured long after the band, returning us to a time seemingly as pure as Agnetha’s voice.

In brief, we had a blast watching the movie. I can’t recall having had as much fun, and I can only admire the skill of the writer who wove all those ABBA songs into a coherent thread (a task made easier by the fact that, as my friend Neil would point out, ABBA’s songs are all different from one another, unlike our one-track love songs). This is a movie to be watched with your high-school barkada; stay on until the closing credits, and I’ll guarantee you’ll be walking out of the theater singing. Neil says that at Robinson’s Galeria, they showed the film with subtitles, for a community sing-along.

After a long day’s critical colloquy in ICOPHIL, what could be better than some mindless fun at “Mamma Mia!”—and what, strangely enough, could be more Pinoy?

T3 Select Opinion for May 2008


WE GUYS generally hate lugging things around—especially when they come in paper or plastic bags with handles, looking suspiciously a lot like groceries or something stamped with “On Her Majesty’s Not-Too-Secret Service.” I know for a fact that, as ungentlemanly as it seems, I try to avoid carrying Beng’s shopping bags—not necessarily because they’re too heavy, or will make me look like a sissy, but because I believe that my precious hands deserve to hold something worthier, like a computer or a camera bag.

That’s right, we’re not absolute slouches, and we can carry even 50-pound bags and backpacks—as long as they contain something we’d happily march up the Himalayas with, or march up the Himalayas for. Usually, that means something that has at least three of the following attributes: (1) black, gray, or silver; (2) fluorescent green, yellow, or orange (NOT pink or purple!); (3) hard plastic, chrome, burnished wood, or anodized aluminum; (4) red, green, or blue diodes; (5) wi-fi, Bluetooth, and/or GPRS; (6) screws, dongles, and USB ports; and (7) ballistic nylon, epoxy paint, Velcro, saddle leather, and self-healing zippers.

In other words, we want bags, but man-bags, not girly-bags. Nothing with “Hello Kitty” written on them. Nothing with braided handles, satiny strips, or four-inch buckles.

This fundamental truth dawned on me the other day when I looked at a corner of my room—the corner where I toss my bags at the end of the day—and realized that I had about a dozen of them, not counting suitcases, carry-on bags, and serious travel gear. These were just my daily bags, for daily use—or so I thought, until I saw a Nike bag I hadn’t used even once. (For that matter, I have an iPod, somewhere, that I’ve yet to open.)

I had become luggage accumulator, a certified bag man—the kind of guy who thinks that every new gadget deserves its own bag, just as sure as our mates believe that you can’t use for Tuesday what you used on Monday, as if anyone would remember. I have bags within bags; I have laptop sleeves that go into compartments within backpacks; I have containers for earphone plugs that go into pouches that go into pockets within compartments within backpacks.

What makes things worse is that we can’t help thinking that the other man’s bag is always smarter—or that, whatever we’re toting for the moment, somewhere out there is the better luggage that maketh the better man. Never mind what the bag contains; it can’t be worse than what’s rolling in our spacious noggins.

T3 Select Opinion for April 2008


(I've been remiss in uploading my T3 columns for these past couple of issues, so here you go. Starting June, by the way, Lourd de Veyra and I will be alternating in the Select Opinion section.)

LAST DECEMBER, I marked an anniversary that I’m still not sure if I should rejoice over or not: my tenth year as an eBay member, with over 200 purchases recorded. Can you believe it? Some readers of this magazine were still walking around without any underwear, and I was already scouring the digital aisles for PowerBook Duos and Pelikan pens.

The worst things in life are also often the most enjoyable ones, and one of the very worst things that happened to human civilization since the dawn of the Internet has been—you guessed it—online shopping and merchandising. Online, you’re always one click away from financial perdition, and that’s the beauty of it—everything (except the shipping) takes place in a blinding, blissful instant, and before you know it you’ve been charged for a new laptop, a new media player, a new book, or a new pair of hiking boots without feeling a thing—at least until the bills come under your door like unwelcome houseguests.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, and if you’ve been following this corner for more than a few issues, you can probably guess why. I’ve been buying up stuff online like there’s no tomorrow—and there will be no tomorrow if I keep doing more of the same, which more or less depends on how fast Steve Jobs keeps trotting the goodies out of Cupertino, CA.

There’s the infernal nature of the beast: he announces something in San Francisco, I jump for joy on my sofa and nearly bust the cushions as I hit the “Buy now!” button on my downward trajectory. I won’t see the thing at my door for weeks, during which I can do nothing more productive than twiddle my thumbs.

It used to be that you bought big-ticket items like refrigerators the time-honored way, first by window-shopping (a kind of visual foreplay), then by canvassing prices, and then by saving up for long, arduous months before marching into the appliance center and plunking down cold cash with a triumphant sigh. There was no such thing as FedEx; you dragged the behemoth home in the back of a rented jeep, and slaughtered a pig or some other four-legged animal to celebrate the purchase of a lifetime.

Today it’s all too quick and too easy. With eBay and PayPal, the world is your mall, and you can let your fingertips do the malling as you hop from “Computer Accessories” to “Vintage Watches” and “Japanese Erotica” (I’m talking theoretically, boys).

But am I complaining? Heck, no! I’m convinced they invented the Internet to mate me with my $1,799 MacBook Air, bought online on credit. Ten years of practice on eBay either taught me everything, or taught me nothing. I’m broke, but I’m happy. How do you explain that?

Penman for Monday, July 14, 2008

A MOST unusual meeting took place in my front yard a couple of Saturdays ago. I belong to a Web-based group called the Fountain Pen Network, and as you can gather from the name, it’s devoted to the worship, care, and propagation of those tubes that spit ink at the pointy end, which old folks knew as fountain pens. My longtime readers know about my addiction to these toys that happen to write (which explains the title of this column), but for those who tuned in just now, I’ve been collecting vintage and modern fountain pens for over 20 years.

As it turns out, I am not alone. Just looking around FPN, I observed that there were at least a dozen Filipinos similarly pen-smitten, so I thought I’d bring them all together—out of the Web and into my yard—for an afternoon of show-and-tell. There’s nothing that collectors enjoy more (whether you’re into stamps, blue bottles, rare books, or Kewpie dolls) than showing off what you have while drooling over and lusting after the other guy’s rack of goodies. It’s also good to know the competition—not to poison them, but to keep things friendly, and maybe even swap a pen or two.

I sent out invitations, pitched a tent (the kind you rent for outdoor weddings) in the yard, ordered up some pancit and turon, and laid out two tables with writing paper, bottles of ink, and some reference books. To make sure that no one dropped or picked up a 1930s Sheaffer Lifetime or a Pelikan M1000 by mistake, I posted signs saying: “Mind your pens! Any pen left or mislaid in this place becomes mine!” Sure enough, from 2 pm onwards, the fountain-pen faithful came, clutching telltale boxes and bags that could only have contained years and years’ worth of collecting and, in some cases, enforced starvation.

And what company we had! Just to show you the range of pen nuts out there, from out of the digital woodwork arrived a former pharmaceuticals CEO (Chito Limson), an advertising executive (Leigh Reyes), a chef-cum-stockbroker (Jay Ignacio), the proprietor of my favorite noodle house (George Mamonluk), a New York-based artist (Pep Manalang), a poet-publisher (Rayvi Sunico), and a horseracing journalist (Jenny Alcasid). They were joined by fellow collectors Butch Palma, Caloy Abad Santos, Boojie Basilio, Elai Santiago, Iñigo de Paula, and myself.

Chito and Leigh also brought their specialty inks to share, which Caloy and Pep happily dipped their pens into; my fellow Butch and I discussed the intricacies of repairing Parker Vacumatics and using Waterman safeties; Elai practiced her Mandarin with George; Jenny reported on the big race she was giving up that day in the name of pens, while Iñigo mused about switching jobs and reminded me of his fascination for the Red Baron; Boojie and Jay talked stocks. In the background, Beng kept the pancit and the chicharon coming.

In the end, we all just oohed and aahed over Leigh’s inimitable collection, especially of her modern Japanese pens, including urushi-lacquered Nakayas (“These are my son’s college education,” she would say). We were left even more breathless by her exquisite penmanship (which led me to comment that she had every reason and excuse to collect pens, but I didn’t).

Nobody left a pen behind—too bad—but Leigh and I exchanged old Parkers, my Parkette for her Duofold Senior, and a good time was had by all.

I slept that night dreaming furiously of Jay Ignacio’s fabulous Faber-Castells. I somehow forgot the fact that I already had two of them, as well as a flock of Pelikans. But Leigh’s right: given the way cold cash keeps losing value everyday, investing in Fort Knox-worthy pens may not be such a bad idea.

So now I have a new excuse. My dear daughter Demi, I’m building up your inheritance—one Parker at a time. (For more pictures from that meeting, check out my Flickr page.)


YET ANOTHER major writing competition is afoot, related to the ongoing Centennial of the University of the Philippines, with a grand prize of P200,000 awaiting the winner. This is the UP Sarsuwela Writing Contest, a kind of follow-up to the recently concluded UP Centennial Gawad Likhaan literary contest, which had no drama in its line-up.

This particular contest focuses on the sarsuwela, a popular form of musical theater we imported from Spain and developed for our own audiences and purposes (such as Severino Reyes’s oft-produced Walang Sugat, which has a young revolutionary officer torn between his girl and country), and later even subverted (as in Nicanor Tiongson’s Basilia of Malolos, which questions the patriarchy, the elite, and their central position in our life and imagination).

The UP Sarsuwela Writing Contest is open to all Filipino citizens of all ages (including Filipinos holding dual citizenship), and has for its theme “Amor, Vida, Patria” (Love, Life, Nation), which can be approached in historical or contemporary terms. The work must follow the three-act structure of the sarsuwela and must be written in Filipino.

Entries have to be sent to the Board of Judges, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, by 5 pm of August 29, 2008 (I know, that’s just six weeks away, sorry!). Entries sent by mail or courier should be postmarked no later than the same date of the deadline. There are a few more rules to bring up than I have space for, so if you’re seriously interested in joining, I suggest that you send an email to person in charge of the contest mechanics, Prof. Romulo Baquiran, Jr., at jbaquiran@gmail.com.


ALSO, TODAY and tomorrow will be the last playdates (for now) of an independent film that premiered in last year’s Cinemalaya. It’s called Barako, and it’s about how the people in a Batangas town take part in a weekly public forum on political and economic issues—which, strangely enough, they call a barakuhan. It’s written by Manolito Sulit, who shares directing duties with Emman Pascual. What drew my attention were the names of some writer-friends in the cast: Vim Nadera, Mike Coroza, and even Bien Lumbera. C’mon, guys, does writing pay that poorly? Catch Barako (produced by East Indie Films) at Indie Sine at Robinsons Galleria in Ortigas.

Flotsam & Jetsam (78) for Monday, July 7, 2008
By Sarge Lacuesta
for the Inquirer, July 7, 2008


(To my pleasant surprise, a review of Soledad' Sister by fellow fictionist Sarge Lacuesta came out today in the Inquirer, but it appears that Sarge's review was truncated, most likely for reasons of space, so Sarge sent me the full, original text, which I'm posting here, begging his and the Inquirer's indulgence. I think it's a very generous review, for what I've described to friends as "my glorious mess of a novel" as many will no doubt agree, but I'm deeply grateful to Sarge for taking the time to try and make sense of what sometimes still baffles me. Maraming salamat! And incidentally, the book will be launched by Anvil Publishing at the UP Faculty Center on July 31 at 4 pm. Many thanks again, all.)

THE TITLE, at once dislocated and removed, is a tantalizing articulation of the story's tragicomic problem: a casket unceremoniously arrives from Jeddah carrying the corpse of a Filipina identified by the label on the crate as Aurora M. Cabahug, mysteriously certified by the Jeddah authorities as having died from "drowning." Uniting the body with the grieving family should be a simple thing, except that there is no one to claim her at the airport, and the woman in the box is not, in fact, who the label claims she is.

But even before that misunderstanding surfaces, Filipino bureaucracy and SOP take over. A missive calling for next of kin is sent to Paez, the woman's hometown, a backwater five or six hours by car Manila. Here, the real Aurora M. Cabahug lives, and languishes—she sings nightly at the Flame Tree, a KTV nightclub frequented by cops, the town's vice mayor, and the occasional gaggle of Koreans passing through. But if "Aurora" the corpse is aimless and nameless, Rory, younger sister of the titular woman, who has never set foot much beyond the leafy borders of Paez, is still caught in the Filipino dream, drunk on her raw, God-given talent and flush with wonder about the world beyond.

The unglamorous task of reuniting the two sisters and their split identities falls upon SPO2 Walter G. Zamora, a lonely cop who knows Rory to be alive: he remembers her during that one visit to the Flame Tree. Walter is himself a victim of circumstance, having found himself in Paez from Manila, by way of romantic indiscretion and a string of bad luck. But most significantly, Walter is a good cop, and the last time we saw a believably good cop was in Aureus Solito's "Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros," where Victor, the object of Maximo's affection, appeared a bit too green and soft to become much more than a clever plot device.

Precision play is perhaps precisely where Philippine prose has one over cinema. We see that Walter is not that green—and not that soft-hearted either. "He had just turned thirty-eight," Dalisay describes him "—an age that was neither here nor there, but at which point, with most lives, the future should have emerged with a certain clarity, an invitation to hurry and grab a hold of some great last chances." (Not that this reviewer doesn't happen to be thirty-eight, either.)

In writing him so, Dalisay performs an important trick—not just on our literary senses, but also on our Pinoy sensibilities. Why not a Pinoy cop who can suffer the mundane depths of worrying about the weight and waste of his age?

It's a tough trick, but if anyone can do it, Dalisay can. He even places his policeman in the role of a classical hero, charges him with an actual quest and even requisitions for him an ungainly mount (a pre-FX Tamaraw that, true to the discipline and economy found in the author's most celebrated short stories, finds its own significance later on). He asks you to note his clumsy attempts at chivalry, his trademark emotional scar, the stray cat he befriends and now tends to like a child in his apartment. In fact, even the most jaded reader will perhaps find himself, despite himself, aching to see him find some love.

As soon as Walter enlists our empathy, you breathlessly follow him (and you can almost hear the author smile broadly to himself) as he drives Soledad's sister from Paez to various points in Manila, with stops in Hong Kong and Jeddah, where the dead Soledad's itinerant memory takes us. Though the frame story takes place over only three days, the separate accounts of each of the main characters tightly bridge plot points and points of view, so that the novel easily gains scope and momentum as the van and its strange cargo of bedfellows covers more ground toward Manila—and many unexpected parts within. In the hustle of events that follows in the great city, Rory's strange reunion turns into a strange separation, Walter's unscheduled homecoming becomes a puzzle and a chase, Soledad's character sheds mystery and gains motivation, and a series of outside and past happenings and forces comes to a head, across a clever convergence of timeframes, crime scenes and cityscapes.

It is the city, of course, with its illusions of quick employment and easy money, that has lured millions of Filipinos out of small towns like Paez. In the novel, it is Dalisay's prose that lures us to stop and stare—whether it's Hong Kong, its harbor lights "like white letters on a black page" or Jeddah and its "stream of kaleidoscopic and cacophonic impressions." But what Dalisay makes us share most are his sharp observations on the bright, dark city of Manila itself, its vast, seeming omniscience, its near-complete sentience, where "the people themselves all seemed to know where they were going, or how they were expected to act in this massively choreographed, painstakingly produced performance, the pedestrians sure of step even with cellular phones glued to their ears, the motorists puffing blithely away on their cigarettes and tapping their fingers on their dashboards in tune to some muted radio, staring a hundred meters ahead."

Still, there is a special warm, fuzzy feeling touchingly reserved for the town and the townfolk of Paez, so that pages set in its confines somehow acquire the gauze and the veneer of a 1950's romance, furnished with all the right elements: the virgin chanteuse, the hard-boiled cop, the old songs laden with flowers and moonlight and promises. But while Paez makes for a quick and simple stand-in for that photo-album town many of us alternately cannot imagine to have lived in and secretly long to return to, this reviewer chooses to interpret the place as the dusty origin and never-forgotten hometown of the modern Filipino heart.

And there lies one of the most engaging attributes of Soledad's Sister. It stands firm and true however the reader might choose to see it—as a tale exquisitely formed and told, or as a page turner full of real grit and glitter. Almost unbelievably, and quite reassuringly, Soledad's Sister stands quite well and quite handsomely on both legs, and all of 194 pages. The book's slenderness, which may be seen by some as a bit too slim, is in fact what points us to its most singular and most difficult accomplishments: deceiving simplicity and breathtaking restraint.

Seasoned readers will be immensely satisfied by these discoveries in Soledad's Sister. And practicing writers will do well to note them, if at least to learn what separates the truly meaningful story from the ordinary anecdote or flight of fancy, and what distinguishes the writer who is being true—from the writer who is merely being creative, or, shamefully, self-promoting.

It is, I suspect, the novel's simplicity and verbal restraint that also allows Dalisay to introduce his vulnerable characters without fear. Why not, indeed, a Pinoy cop who can restore some love and bring back some faith in …Pinoy cops?—I don't know if even the most speculative fictionist will go that far, but with this sublime novel, with its invisible, careful style, the author does farther than most of us—Filipinos, not just writers—have, in restoring our forgiveness for, and our faith in our own Filipino hearts.

But that's just the gauzy, shiny leg of the novel. The fun part is actually the functional, full-daylight part—where Dalisay's clear prose and sure handling allow him to deliver rich, layered material to the reader's mind without piling on the adjectives (or worse, adverbs). When adobo, binagoongan and dalag sa mustasa are dished out, almost in their raw transliterated form, presumably for the non-Filipino audience, the transparency of the ingredients, curiously enough, only gives the Pinoy reader more direct access to his personal experience of the dish—just the way his mother (or his housekeeper, or considering the state of reading in our country, his caregiver) cooked it. When Dalisay introduces Nicomedes Panganiban, an old hotel piano player-turned-momentary gurô/guru who would, early on, provide a soft sustained note of hope for Rory (and the somewhat gratified reader), we also see, and are almost sure, that the "nails immaculately trimmed and polished by the girls at the barber shop" and "the slicked-back hair, which may have been thinning but was dyed absolutely black" may have also belonged to that other master of the art, that other Nick—Joaquin.

Perhaps it's wishful thinking to search for anybody you know in a novel, but Soledad's Sister is, after all, is a wishful biography, a list of things that may really happen to real people you may know.

Toward the end of the novel, it is these things that happen that perform a grand choreography, massive and minute, bared further and further toward the end, constantly testing the author's heroic literary restraint. This restraint, perhaps, is how the novel's slim scale outwits the reader to think it is a simple tale. To me it is the author's most fascinating trick of all.

After all, you could list a lot of curious, interesting and proseworthy things about the life of the OFW, from the most embarrassing personal detail to the most dramatic economic observation. After all, there are eight to ten million Pinoys out there. You could crowd us with relevant, surprising, self-gratifying data until the last of those millions comes home—or stops returning. You could write a zillion stories, with all kinds of granularity, that will make you feel rewarded for writing your work, or your reader believe he is rewarded by reading it. It is these hundreds of things that seem to alternately inform and caution Dalisay every step of the way, so that so much is hidden, and so much revealed—but only in the circumstances he chooses to explore, and repeat: a name is repurposed, a person comes home, a crime is committed.

Soledad, the book's first victim, is also its last, and if she is anonymous, faceless and nameless in the beginning, she is, also, in the end. The quests for identity, solace and escape remain the same, and for the same people. The novel begins and ends quietly, and simply, with the Filipino alone—in a crowd, in a city, in death, out of nowhere, in history. The sweep and the thrill and the movement that you feel when you read it—that's the Filipino in you stirring, claiming Soledad's Sister as your own.

Penman for Monday, July 7, 2008

I ENJOY being a tourist, and I don’t pretend to have been anything but a tourist in almost all of the foreign places I’ve had the good fortune of visiting, even if I’ve been there several times and may even have lived somewhere for months.

That includes London, my favorite of all foreign cities, which I first visited in 1994, and deliriously fell for. When Beng and I were staying in Norwich for nearly a year between 1999 and 2000, we snuck out to London as often as we could, touring the museums and tanking up on the cheap Chinese buffets in Soho before taking the two-hour train ride back to our cinderblock apartment.

Alas, London has since become one of the world’s most expensive cities (a bottle of Coke costs the equivalent of P100, a movie about P1,000), so that I looked forward to my recent trip to the UK with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Aside from some fail-safe plastic in my wallet, all I had on me was 150 pounds (I meant my money, not my weight, which was considerably more generous) saved up from my speaking fees in Sydney. I wondered what I could do, see, eat, and bring home on that budget for a few days.

I don’t mind doing shamelessly and mindlessly touristy things, like blitzing through Paris on a tour bus over a weekend. (“Hey, we just passed Rodin’s The Thinker!” I told Beng then, as she came out of the onboard toilet.) When people ask questions like “If I just had one or two days in a new city, should I try and see as much as I can, or should I just visit one place and get to know it well?”, I’ll say do the quick once-over first, so you’ll have a better sense of what you’ll come back for. (Oddly enough, I keep going back to the same things in London—the British Museum, Portobello Road, and Leicester Square.)

This means I was prepared, even at this late age, to go economy all the way, short of pitching a tent in Hyde Park. The last time we stayed in London eight years ago, we had been lucky to find a bed-and-breakfast for 55 pounds a night. I was staying two nights in the city, so that would have meant more than half my stash gone to lodging, with precious little left for lunch, dinner, and Portobello.

Thankfully there’s the Internet to help the thrifty traveler these days, so a month before I enplaned to see the Queen, I stayed up online all night and finally located the hotel of my budget dreams: the London Visitors Hotel, an establishment that seemed to be named with a deceptive plainness, as it consisted of “a pair of Victorian houses, built in 1870, on the Estate of Lord Holland. Typically these were single family houses, and we have retained many period features, lending the hotel much charm and character… in a posh residential area near upscale Kensington.” The clincher was a notice that the hotel was Internet-ready, with free wi-fi available in the rooms.

And how much was this unusual combination of Old-World glamour and high-tech hotness going to cost me? Why, no more than 28 pounds a night, with an English breakfast thrown in! (Of course, at that price, I had to content myself with a shared bathroom and toilet in the hallway, but I figured that doing my thing very early in the morning or very late at night was well worth the savings.) I promptly made a reservation for two nights, printed out an area map, figured out the Tube connections, and congratulated myself on my Web-search smarts.

Comes now the 20th of June, and I’ve just come into London on the train from Norwich, lugging a 20-kilo suitcase. I don’t mind that I have to switch Tube trains then walk over a bridge in Kensington Olympia at the very end of the District Line to get to my hotel, although my eyeballs are bulging from the exertion. I reach the right street, and the London Visitors Hotel is exactly as it is in the Web photos—a domicile worthy of a Victorian gent.

I drag my luggage up the steps and into the lobby, and a young Eastern European lady acknowledges my reservation and hands me the key to Room No. 15 after I give full payment. Oh, good, I think, it’s right on the first floor. “It’s at the very top,” she tells me helpfully. I look around; there’s no elevator. It looks like a simple two-storey affair from the outside, but I go up six flights of stairs, until I reach No. 15—right up in what must have been Lord Holland’s attic, because one wall of the room is straight, and the other’s diagonal.

The bed is a cot with a blanket, a pillow, and two towels for my two days. There’s a window and a washbasin in the far corner, and a chair but no table. I notice something else—the absence of TV noise from the neighboring rooms, no annoying static or game shows or football games—because there’s no TV. I look for the restroom outside—and it’s there, all right, but it’s two floors down. I gaze at my washbasin with demonic intent. I throw the window open and at least there’s fresh air out there, even if the view is of a brick high-rise apartment, today’s probable equivalent of something damnably Dickensian.

Having gone to martial-law prison in my late teens, I can appreciate every amenity any lodging place has to offer, although this establishment practically has none, except for the free wi-fi in the lobby (yes, only in the lobby). The next morning, I come down for the English breakfast, expecting my nostrils to be seduced by the curling smell of bacon (“A full English breakfast,” says an online authority, “consists of bacon, eggs, toast, and an abundant supply of tea or coffee.”) Alas, somebody forgot about the bacon, although we have a choice of boiled or scrambled eggs.

I tell myself that I came to London to have fun and to enjoy the sights, and I’m not about to let the absence of certain luxuries spoil my weekend. For my first and last Saturday in London in eight years, I have Portobello, the West End, and Soho in my sights, a hundred pounds in my pocket, and good walking shoes. I peer out my window and inhale the summer air, feeling like Mark Lester about to warble “Who will buy this beautiful morning?” I have some business to settle between me and the washbasin; for 28 pounds a night, I’m getting what I paid for, and life could be a bit better, but it could also be much, much worse.

Flotsam & Jetsam (77) for Sunday, July 6, 2008

(EDD ARAGON is a Sydney-based artist whose editorial cartoons have livened up many of Australia's major publications. He was in Manila recently for an exhibition of his works, and it was then that I was introduced to him by Beng, whom Edd knew from way back as "Hune." When I visited Sydney for the Writers' Festival, Edd interviewed me by email, and here's that interview, slighty edited, which you can also find on his blog. Many thanks, Edd, for the interview and for the cartoon!)

EA: An extensive traveller you are—is this your first time in Sydney?

BD: It’s actually my second time (not counting stopovers), but the last time I was here was ten years ago when I stayed in Canberra for a month and spent a weekend in Sydney (for reasons that anyone who stays in Canberra for a month will appreciate). The Sydney Writers' Festival is supposed to be the world’s third largest such gathering of writers, with over 300 writers attending, about 70 of them from overseas, like myself. I’m here with the support of the Philippine Consulate-General.

EA: You were working as a journalist when imprisoned in 1973 for being a staunch Marcos critic. Did it change your perspective in life?

BD: Well, I was very young then, but I realized that principles are something you can’t just write about, and also that everyone has a threshhold of pain.

EA: What would you consider most frustrating moment of your life... and your reaction?

BD: I once spent two hours alone with (Filipino actress) Ara Mina—for an interview. I didn’t know where to look.

EA: LOL! Err.... You teach English and creative writing. Are kids receptive to the genre? How would you compare today's generation to boomers?

BD: Well, the kids still read, but they read different things; they seem to be more interested in fantasy than reality.

EA: Uh-huh. Will English and creative writing free the Filipinos from political and economic oppression?

BD: Heck, no! They never saved anyone from anything, except maybe from stupidity and boredom.

EA: If in Philippine journalism, to be critical is to search for truth, are governmental threats and violence worth the writer's risk under an American paradigm of democracy but wrapped tight in feudal values?

BD: Wow, what a loaded question! The search for truth is vital under any kind of regime, whether in hardship or in comfort.

EA: Feudal and old sometimes leave traces on the planet. How many old fountain pens have you got in your collection? Which is better, a Sheaffer or a Parker?

BD: I prefer Parkers, especially the old ‘30s and ‘40s Vacumatics that look like a cityscape at night. I probably have around a hundred pens lying around. It makes me look romantic and old-fashioned—but I’m also a Mac and a gadget freak, so I have an analog and a digital side.

EA: Har-har... a well-balanced Yin-Yang then. I heard from Hune you collect beetles then later I found out you’re not into entomology at all! :-) The Volkswagen Beetle was designed for the most fearsome dictator in history... and I learned driving in Manila under a dictator's regime using my aunty's cheeky ’73 Volks. And you collect them, too?

BD: I have a collection of exactly one—a fully restored late '70s Beetle that I drive around once a week. If you can drive one you can drive anything.

EA: Okay, back engines are cool, I guess :). Any word for our young Filipino-Australian writers?

BD: Write about who and what you are—as Filipino-Australians. It’s a unique situation to be in!

EA: Thanks Butch, and with due respect, Dr. Dalisay, Jr. More power to you!

BD: Thanks, Edd!

Penman for Sunday, July 6, 2008 (Gadgets section)

WHEN THE first iPhone was sold about a year ago, thousands of Apple fanboys like me lined up—literally and figuratively—to get our rightful share of Steve Jobs’s goodies. We were prepared to go into debt and pay small fortunes for the dubious distinction (well, to the non-believers) of being early adopters, convinced that this was the phone to end all mobile phones. At the same time, many more thousands held back, sagely aware that first editions of anything—cars, planes, typewriters, toilet bowls, and mobile phones—can’t possibly get everything right.

Pretty soon, even those doubters will have a few less reasons to resist. Just last month, Jobs announced the imminent release of the second-generation, 3G-enabled iPhone at an unbelievably low price of $199. Almost simultaneously, Globe Philippines announced that it had been tapped to bring the iPhone 3G into the country later this year.

But before you break the piggybank and dash off to your nearest Globe dealer, read on.

First, “later this year” is nowhere near July 11, the promised date for the new iPhone’s delivery in the US and almost everywhere else it’s being sold in the world. Remember that “early 2008” was when the original iPhone was supposed to have been released here in Asia. It’s mid-2008, and, yes, there must be several thousand first-gen iPhones already in the Philippines (you can get them off the shelf at Greenhills), but they’re all basically hacked units, brought in directly from the US and running by virtue of some clever bits of software.

Then as now, all iPhones with the exception of those sold in France—where the law forbids mobile phones to be locked into a network—are supposed to be used only with an Apple-approved network, with which Apple shares iPhone profits. “Unlocking” gets around this restriction, although its legality is, to be sure, questionable, despite a loophole in US law that seems to permit unlocking for private use.

Now that Globe has secured iPhone rights in the Philippines, expect the 3G model to be sold only through Globe, and only upon signing up for a new plan. (It isn’t very clear yet how existing Globe subscribers can migrate to the iPhone, although Globe’s press release specifically mentions its coming availability to both “postpaid and prepaid” subscribers.

That brings me to the second caveat, which is that Apple’s $199 quoted price is what it will cost Americans signing up for a two-year AT&T contract (read: not you and me). As many observers have pointed out, that plan could be the deal-breaker, even for foreign users. Forget about the cheapness of the phone; do the math on the total package price. (Heck, they even give phones away for free with high-end plans, don’t they?)

Again, Globe hasn’t come out with its table of options yet, but the phone pundits have pegged the actual cost of getting and using a Globe iPhone at around P47,000-60,000 a year, more or less, depending on your chosen model and plan. (And if you’re thinking of learning French so you can pick up a legally unlocked 3G iPhone in Paris, take note that the present unlocked French iPhone costs about 750 euros—that’s over P52,000.)

What’s so hot about the new iPhone anyway? Except for a new plastic back (supposedly improving wireless reception), silver keys, and other small cosmetic touches, it’s pretty much the same phone—but with major upgrades inside. First of all, it will have 3G (that’s for third-generation), a technology that’s theoretically twice to almost three times faster than the current iPhone, which uses a not-too-shabby 2G technology called EDGE (don’t wince when I tell you what it means—Enhanced Data GSM Environment), which is already faster than GPRS, which is already faster than plain-vanilla GSM. (And will a real engineer please step in here to correct any awful mistake I’m making? I nearly flunked out of the Philippine Science High School, which is why I’m writing newspaper columns instead of software.)

Forget the alphabet soup: it means we all could be surfing and watching YouTube on our phones a whole lot faster than the way we’ve been going (which, on non-iPhones, usually means painfully nudging a cursor onscreen until you hit a clickable link). Sounds good, right? Sure, sounds like high-tech heaven—but it ain’t free (and it also means a heavy toll on the battery life).

Every kilobyte you download (and with things like pictures, those KBs add up quickly to MBs and then GBs) normally costs 15 centavos, although Globe has a “Visibility” package that allows you unlimited surfing for a flat fee of P2,000 a month, postpaid. (Here, enter my horror story: in the early days of GPRS, when I was a naïve young cellphone nut, I thought it was so cool that I could use my GSM phone as a modem through which to surf the Net in the boonies of Cebu, connected by infrared to my laptop. The coolness vanished when my Globe bill arrived—for a whopping P24,000, which I tearfully paid, vowing “As God is my witness, I shall never do GPRS again!” And I haven’t—except for emergencies, I rely on free wifi.)

The new iPhone also has GPS (I wonder how much help that’s going to be, through our pasilyos and esteros) and a truckload of new third-party apps.

Will these be enough for Pinoys to make the switch from their Nokias, SEs, and first-gen iPhones to the iPhone 3G (and to Globe, and to a new plan)? My gut feel is that those who held out in 2007 will go for this version; they’ve waited long enough. (I don’t have the space to tell you how neat even the original iPhone is, on its own; buy one while you can, because you can’t buy them even in the US anymore without a plan, and soon they’ll be completely phased out.)

Those of us happy with our old iPhones, BlackBerries, and Nokias will probably be the ones waiting this time—for the inevitable loosening of the market, the software workarounds, and, who knows, 4G?

Penman for July 6, 2008

(It's a busy weekend: you're going to get a flurry of pieces from me—articles I'd written for the STAR since a couple of weeks ago, but which all came together in the Sunday issue, plus tomorrow's Penman, so here goes.)

BACK IN the ‘60s, when we were in high school and beginning to cultivate what would become our best and worst traits (some of them quite interchangeable), my buddies and I found ways of going home as late as we could—in other words, of loitering around the city, just so we could prolong our time together and find new adventures along the way. (For me, that meant taking a bus with the guys from Diliman to Quiapo, then hanging out there for an hour or so, before taking another bus to Pasig.)

Maybe that wasn’t the best filial thing to do, when I could’ve been home much earlier helping with the housework, but I had my reasons: my friends and I were bookworms, and we used those trips to scour the bargain bins of bookstores like Goodwill, National, Alemar’s, PECO, and Bookmark—not to mention the stalls of C. M. Recto—for cheap paperbacks from the likes of Ian Fleming and Isaac Asimov. We’d hop from one place to the next, running the gauntlet of pickpockets and toughies that infested downtown Manila.

As we grew older and our tastes in books became a bit more refined (i.e., the Grove Press editions of the erotic classics), we began to frequent the specialty bookshops that often become every large city’s best-kept secrets: Erehwon and Solidaridad on Padre Faura, Popular Bookstore on Doroteo Jose. (“Amazon” was still a big river in Brazil.)

We capped these bookhunting forays with chicken sotanghon soup at Good Earth Emporium, burgers at Goodwill, and coffee and cakes at Hizon’s in Ermita. All this goodtiming meant gallivanting for hours from here to there, taking one pleasure at a time.

And then something changed in the environment. Before we knew it, something called a “mall” emerged in the urban landscape, and what it did was to collect everything in one place and make it easier for people to zip through their entire list of to-dos and wanna-dos without crossing the street.

In no time at all I became a mall rat, attracted (like most Pinoys) by the arctic airconditioning and by the sheer plenitude of things in malls for the eyes, the tongue, and, yes, the mind. There’s a common notion that the mall’s a place where you lose your mind (not just in shopping, but in what snobs will perceive as a sudden drop in the average IQ), but it’s a rep poorly deserved.

Sure, it’s not the British Library nor is it the Louvre, but it’s a bit of everything and more—a home for movies, food, fashions, décor, gadgets, appliances, and even paintings and, of course, books. And the best thing is that it’s open to both the high and low ends of the economic ladder; not all can buy, but all can browse in a democracy of sorts under one roof.

Living where I do in Quezon City, the two malls I frequent the most are SM Megamall and SM North. A horde of other malls has cropped up around these two bastions, and they each have their own attractions, but being first has its advantages. Over the decades, I’ve come to know these places like the back of my hand (the first thing you always ask when entering a new mall is, “Where are the restrooms?”), and the familiarity has bred not contempt but comfort. (This, more than any other element—even more than novelty—is what I think every mall developer should live or even kill for: the customer’s sense of control, of being welcomed and not overwhelmed by the place. My wife and I figured out SM North’s The Block within a couple of visits, and is now our preferred cinema station; its competitor across the street came up at about the same time, but despite many sorties there, Beng and I still can’t get a mental map of the place in our heads.)

But back to books: the Megamall for me has been as good a place as any (and better for its other attractions) for bookhunting, given the presence of Powerbooks, National Bookstore, Goodwill, and some smaller but no less interesting purveyors of books and magazines in the area. Powerbooks can always be relied upon to provide the latest and greatest books from overseas, while NBS—the titan that it is—covers practically every interest, with an annual sale always worth the wait. (Truth to tell, however, I’ve found some of my best bargains at the BookSale bins in the basement—there’ nothing like the thrill of the hunt to unearth an overlooked Garcia Marquez or a Richard Selzer I’ve been chasing for ages.)

Over at The Block, there’s a sprawling Fully Booked branch that caters to the smarter set (I mean, smarter than me), following through on FB founder Jaime Daez’s vision of bringing the Kinokuniya experience to Manila. (Going back more than a decade, one of my favorite SM North encounters had to do with writer NVM Gonzalez, whom I met stepping out of a bookshop specializing in computers. “I was looking for something on multimedia,” he told me with a twinkle in his eye.)

If even a National Artist—already then in his late 70s—thought the mall worthy of his bookhunting presence, who was I to disagree?

Penman for Monday, June 30, 2008

AT THIS point in my writing life, I usually go to literary conferences to read a paper or be part of a panel, but on my recent visit to the University of East Anglia in Norwich I joined the “Human : Nature” conference as a listener. I didn’t mind; I was there as a former David TK Wong writing fellow, and we fellows were attending the conference (as we Pinoys would say) as a salimpusa. I liked it that I could relax in a corner and enjoy the conversation—or step outside and enjoy the sunshine if I felt antsy.

But I had another reason to be lurking around Norwich. The South African Nobel Prize and double Booker Prize winner J. M. Coetzee—whose novels Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe I’d read in graduate school—was the conference’s star speaker, although (like most real stars, I suppose), he was so simple and soft-spoken that you could have mistaken him for the maintenance man or the postal clerk. He wore the same get-up of a shirt, fleece vest, and jeans to the weeklong conference; he opened doors for people, and queued up in the cafeteria along with everybody else. The only unusual thing about him seemed to be his surname (which, by the way, is pronounced koot-ZAY, more or less); otherwise, people called him “John.”

For those few days I trailed and practically stalked Coetzee, trying to find the right moment to introduce myself and say hello without saying something stupid, and then get him to sign my copy of Disgrace. I remembered how, at the Sydney Writers Festival a few weeks earlier, I got so caught up in things that I forgot to get a book signed by my co-panelist, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. (If you’re one of those grimly snooty “The writer is dead!” lit-crit types, all this ga-ga fascination with writers and their signatures will be so much romantic hogwash, but do you think I care? At one time or another I ran after and got the likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Frank McCourt, and Joseph Heller to sign my copies of their books—aside from just about everyone in Philippine literature—and it still gives me a thrill to think that the same fingers that hit the keyboard and wrote those words also held the book I now have.)

To cut to the chase, I did get a book signed by Coetzee, when I joined a long line of people who had attended his reading on the conference’s last evening (in which his introduction actually proved more interesting than the excerpts, because he related how he came to learn the identities of the secret South African government censors who passed judgment on his novels and ultimately let them through, before the collapse of the apartheid regime in 1994; much to his surprise, they were fairly familiar members of the academic and literary community, leading double lives). Fellow Wong fellow Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy was also there, and being a braver soul, Bing managed to chat him up and get him to inscribe the book to her personally, which he wasn’t really doing for everyone. As Bing proudly related to the members of our dinner table afterwards, she wangled from him the information that one of the characters in his latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, is a Filipino. (Why, I have Filipinos in my latest novel, too, I wanted to say, but I shut up and let Bing enjoy her version of what we were calling our “Coetzee moment.”)

I had nothing so substantial to report from my few seconds with Coetzee at the booksigning table; I had had many lines in mind to tell him, but I forgot them all as he scrawled his name on the title page of my/his book (which, unknown to him, I had found just the day before in a thrift shop in downtown Norwich). “Thank you, Mr. Coetzee!” was all I finally blurted out, careful to pronounce his name correctly.

But come to think of it, I did have my Coetzee moment a day earlier, at lunchtime when we were about to set out for an afternoon field trip to the fens (the peat-covered meadows that East Anglia is famous for). Instead of a regular sit-down lunch, we were getting brown-bag lunches, each one of them prepared to our individual dietary preferences.

This was one of those shoulda-had-a camera moments. There, on a shelf, were two paper bags that bore the lettered names of their owners, and they stood side by side, alphabetically, like natural equals and confederates: “J M COETZEE, VEG” said one bag; “J DALISAY JR, NO CHEESE” said the other.

As a matter of fact, I did have a camera, and instantly realized the historicity of the instant; I was never going to stand beside J.M. Coetzee shoulder-to-shoulder again, even if we were being represented by kraft-paper bags filled with sandwiches and apples. I was unlooping my point-and-shoot from my neck when a hand reached out and lifted Coetzee’s lunch. The hand was attached to the rest of J. M. Coetzee, who sauntered out before I could say something profound like, “Oh, so you’re a vegetarian!”

(PS. A few weeks ago, in a column piece titled “My Favorite Thongs,” I noted how Australians use the word “thongs” to describe rubber slippers or flip-flops. A reader subsequently wondered about my seeming obsession with thongs. Well, dear reader, I am not alone. Here’s an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee’s newest novel, Diary of a Bad Year: “She has black black hair, shapely bones. A certain golden glow to her skin, lambent might be the word. As for the bright red shift, that is perhaps not the item of attire she would have chosen if she were expecting strange male company in the laundry room at eleven in the morning on a weekday. Red shift and thongs. Thongs of the kind that go on the feet.”)

So there you go, and there I go.

Penman for Sunday, June 21, 2008


I WAS asked to write something up for the Star's new Sunday gadgets section, so I turned this in (as if you don't hear this from me enough, already.)

Like a true Apple fanboy, I managed to get my grubby fingers on a working iPhone barely a couple of months after its splashy rollout in the US last June 29, and I’ve been using it since—with the occasional resort to my other backup phone, a Nokia E61i. That makes a total of nine months’ experience with the iPhone—time enough, among gadget freaks, to develop an itch for the next great thing. (I had a long-running affair with the Treo 650 and its predecessor, the Treo 600—“long” in cellphone years being 18 months.)

But I’ve always been intrigued by that other star of smart telephony, the BlackBerry, which over the years has acquired a fan base almost as fanatic as Steve Jobs’ minions. These “crackberries” include Barack Obama, John Mayer, and Jessica Biel (and speaking of terminology, “smart” in phonespeak means a cellular phone that not only makes calls and plays music and movies but also takes pictures, organizes your life, has gobs of memory to spare and/or room to expand, and all kinds of ways of connecting wirelessly to Timbuktu: wi-fi, EDGE, GPRS, GSM/CDMA, etc.)

The BB’s killer application is “push” email, which means that you get your email on the road—anywhere, anytime—without having to go online, a few minutes after it’s sent. (Like most nice things, that translates to “you’ll pay more”, as it requires a special plan that you can get from both Globe and Smart.) If you’re one of those people with three or four e-mail accounts, coupled with an urge to check them every 30 minutes, then the BlackBerry will get you drooling.

Blackberry phones have been around since 2002, but they used to be clunky one-trick ponies, looking like large pagers with monochrome screens (which the original BB was, in 1997). Now, with the Curve, the Pearl, and the even sexier (and, hmm, iPhone-like) Bold, the BlackBerry’s exterior has become as smart as its innards, and people too long accustomed to Nokias, SEs, Motorolas, and even iPhones are giving it a second look. I’d actually tried the BB experience on the E61i, and liked it (some non-BB phones can make use of the software), but I wanted to see it working on a BlackBerry itself.

So when I found myself with some loose change (make that a lot of loose change, from an analog alcancia the size of a 55-gallon drum), I scored a new T-Mobile BB 8320 Curve off eBay, unlocked it, and put it to work.

The iPhone and the BB share nearly all the bells and whistles a top-tier smartphone should have: wi-fi, the Internet, email, SMS/MMS, camera, media player, etc. Price-wise, they’re both in the P20-25K range. But going head-to-head, which one would you rather bring with you to your desert island?

(Ah, decisions, decisions! And just to complicate things further, let’s not forget that the 3G-enabled Nokia E61i is no slouch, either, and has its own pluses over the other two. Sadly, I never developed fuzzy feelings for Sony Ericsson smartphones; I used an M600i and its unique “rocker” keypad for a few months then handed it down to my youngest brother, whose phone had been stolen. Moving to that from the trusty Treo was one of the stupidest things I ever did. The Treo 680 would be on this list if it had wi-fi.)

As a Web browser and mp3 player, the iPhone is “light years ahead” of the BlackBerry, as even local BB guru Ric Pacana acknowledges. The iPhone’s Safari browser is the only real usable phone browser out there that comes close to the desktop experience, and the iPhone’s ability to automatically reorient images (horizontal or vertical) and to resize them with a two-finger “curtain” effect is matchless. However, Ric prefers his BB for its strengths: push email, long battery life, better security, and multitasking.

Me? Take a peek into my bag—I’ve got the iPhone in there, and the BB Curve in my pocket. Call it a reverse-Solomon: instead of having just one, why not two? Or three? (I keep the E61i on my table.) When they get Truphone or Skype (the real thing, not clumsy workarounds), push email, and cut-and-paste into the iPhone, then maybe I’ll consider ditching the other two for good.

Here’s a quick overview of my own findings and conclusions:

Best camera: the BB (it’s got digital zoom, and flash to boot)
Best sound: the iPhone (but get third-party earphones)
Best screen: the iPhone, hands down
Best keypad: the Nokia E61i—good size, great feel, easy layout (still nothing like a real, physical keypad for your fingers to walk on)
Best for SMS: the Nokia E61i—one button press and you’re ready to text
Best for email: the BB, of course
Best calendar: a draw, although you need third-party software for a “Today” list on your iPhone’s home screen
Best looks: the iPhone, all around
Killer programs: Truphone on the Nokia, Safari on the iPhone, push email on the BB
Sturdiest: the iPhone (pretty but also tough as nails; I use mine without any sleeves or protectors); the steel-backed Nokia comes close
Easiest to hold: the BB (just the right size and weight; the iPhone’s too thin, the Nokia’s too wide)

Penman for Monday, June 23, 2008

NINE YEARS ago—with Beng and then later our daughter Demi in tow—I took up residence at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, on a fellowship to begin what would become the novel Soledad’s Sister. We got there thanks to the visionary generosity of David T. K. Wong, a retired Hong Kong civil servant who moved to England after the handover, did well, and endowed UEA with an annual fellowship in his name, for the production of new fiction about Asia. I was the second such Wong fellow.

Last week, thanks again to Mr. Wong, a gathering of Wong fellows took place in Norwich, in celebration of the fellowship’s tenth year and in conjunction with a larger conference devoted to the literary nexus between people and nature (formally, the conference was titled “New Writing Worlds 2008—Human : Nature”). I’ll try to report at greater length about the conference and its proceedings another time; suffice it so say for now that perhaps only English academia can discuss beech trees, rooks, and trout fishing in the same breath as “theology” and “moral paranoia.” Not only the English were represented at the conference, which sought to look beyond the surface assumptions and platitudes of environmentalism and climate change; the Nobel and Booker prizewinning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee and the American Pulitzer prizewinning poet C. K. Williams were among the conference attendees.

Our sub-group of Wong fellows represented a broad range of writing origins and sensibilities. The very first fellow, Po Wah Lam from Hong Kong and the UK, was unable to attend, as was the 2004 fellow, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, from Thailand and the US—but as their binational addresses show, many writers these days are culturally and personally situated in more than one place.

The fellow who followed me, Simone Lazaroo (2000), lives and teaches in Australia but also has roots in Singapore. After graduating from Curtin University in 1983, she took a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia, and teaches Creative Writing at Murdoch University.

Liisa Laing (2001) is a Canadian with an Estonian mother and has lived for many years now in Thailand, where she works as a freelance writer and editor as well as her Wong project, a novel on the Thai sex industry. Liisa studied in Manila for two years in the 1970s when her father, a journalist, worked for DepthNews and the Press Foundation of Asia.

Wendy Law Yone (2002) was born and raised in Rangoon; her father—an editor and publisher of a liberal English-language daily—won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1959 for his work. Wendy studied German and modern languages in Rangoon and the US, and now lives in the UK, where she is working on her third novel. She was once married to the author Sterling Seagrave, who wrote a book on Ferdinand Marcos.

Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy (2003) is the other Filipino to have received the Wong fellowship. One of our finest fictionists and the author of two collections of short stories, Bing spent a year at Roskilde University in Copenhagen after her Wong fellowship, and maintains strong personal and professional connections with Europe—still a new frontier for Filipino fiction, despite the great numbers of Filipinos now inhabiting that vast and varied continent.

Linh Dinh (2005) left Vietnam for the US as a refugee at age 11. He studied painting in Philadelphia, then published several collections of his fiction and poetry, both in English and Vietnamese. He returned to Saigon in 1999 but eventually re-embarked for the US after, he says, one too many encounters with the Vietnamese police, thanks to his translation of dissident Vietnamese poets.

Mulaika Hijjas (2006), of Malaysian and Australian parentage, studied literature at Harvard and Radcliffe, then took up Classical and Medieval Islamic History at Oxford, followed by a PhD in traditional Malay literature at the University of London. She is working on a novel set in contemporary Jakarta.

Balli Jaswal (2007), the newest and youngest Wong fellow, was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia, and the Philippines (where, like Liisa, she went to the International School). After college in the US, she taught in Singapore, the setting of the novel she is completing.

The world, indeed, came to Norwich last week, and I was glad to be there, lending—with Bing—a Filipino voice to dialogues about writing that were even more interesting off the conference floor. For more information about the David T. K. Wong fellowship, check out http://www1.uea.ac.uk/cm/home/schools/hum/lit/awards/wong.


I WAS in Norwich when I received an email sharing the happy news that two lifelong friends—stalwarts both of the Saturday Group of Artists—are putting up a two-woman show of their newest paintings, aptly titled “Duetto”, opening this Friday and on view till July 19 at Galerie Stephanie on E. Rodriguez in Libis, Quezon City. Migs Villanueva and Anna de Leon Marcelo were classmates since grade school, and being creatively inclined, both gravitated to painting, although from different backgrounds—Anna is a sought-after interior designer, Migs is a prizewinning fictionist. “Duetto” is their first show together, and it displays their convergences and divergences as artists.

As the Saturday Group anniversary book puts it, “Migs believes—and trusts—that art is a projection of the self. Therefore in painting as in writing, Migs gives way to unplanned impulses where thoughts and feelings she might not even be aware of have a way of becoming form. She aims not so much for beauty or polish in her art as for a rugged, expressive mess of a sort—like her characters are in her stories. While she goes for a very illustrative effect when writing stories, in her visual art, she takes on a reductive sensibility that reduces all illustration into distilled essence.”

On the other hand, Anna—the SAG’s new president—is fascinated by “Fusing odd but familiar pieces together…. Rendering it in drab colors but giving it touches of bright hues over it gives it its twist.” She formally launched her painting career with a one-woman show called “Fragments” at the Crucible Gallery in 2006. “Fragments” was a collection of nude paintings patched with strips of veneer. The adding-on of raw wood is a major element in de Leon’s art, perhaps a take-off from her many years in design.

It’ll be interesting to see how two different sensibilities and talents come across on canvas—one of them is exuberantly gregarious, the other pensively reserved, but you’ll have to check out “Duetto” to find out who.

Penman for Monday, June 16, 2008


THIS IS being uploaded a bit late because I'm in Norwich, England for another writers' conference (I know--how many does one need to go to?--but I'm not complaining! I'll be back early next week!)


A FEW weeks ago down in Sydney, I picked up a newspaper and discovered a new word: “stoush.” Two rich and pretty sisters (always guaranteed to wake me up with the morning coffee) were embroiled in a catfight, but before I could even get to the sordid details, I got stuck on “stoush,” which I’d never seen before, least of all in a headline. Now I, of course, was in Australia, whose people—like ours—speak English, or some variety of it that makes perfect sense to the locals, as any language should, but which can perplex the casual visitor.

We Filipinos grow up thinking that anything other than Standard American English (and its pronunciation) is strange, so it comes as a surprise for us to go to places like Australia and New Zealand, to open our mouths and speak in our MTV-American accents, and to see the natives cringe in disgust. Australians are particularly proud of their tongue (as are the Kiwis; I once got a lashing from a Wellington cabdriver when I suggested that he sounded like an Australian). Thanks to cable TV and to CNN’s news anchors, we can now revel in the glories of Australian English without having to fly eight hours to Sydney, although I doubt that many Filipinos will want to listen to it for more than a few minutes at a time.

It isn’t just the corkscrew nasality of Australian English we find forbidding; as with any language, there’s a whole slew of new words and phrases to learn. It’s easy enough to figure out that a “barbie” means a barbecue and not some ponytailed plaything, and you can probably guess what “have a naughty” means (and, no, I didn’t, in the absence of a willing sheila), but a “mozzie”? A “yobbo”? (That’s a mosquito and an “uncouth blue-collar person” for you.)

I didn’t come across all these lexical gems in Sydney (whose majestic Harbour Bridge, incidentally, is known to many as the “coathanger”), but a little trawling around the Net will bring you a trove of “Strine” expressions. (“Strine”: Australian slang and pronunciation, and “the world’s most advanced English dialect, according to, uhm, www.convictcreations.com; if you still can’t guess where “Strine” comes from, you’re linguistically hopeless.) If you really want to know what an Aussie means by endearing words like “freckle” and “bush oyster,” go look them up in the Australian Slang Dictionary (http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html), which is enough for me to qualify Australian English as the world’s most colorful, if not exactly the most polite. (I’m sure the New Zealanders would agree, especially since the Aussie term for them is “sheepshaggers.”)

“Stoush,” as it turns out, goes a long way back, as a commentator named Kel Richards observes: “There was a time when stoush was both a noun and a verb: to stoush someone was to bash them or fight them, while a fight was called a stoush. It probably had its highest currency in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In typical Aussie fashion, the Great War of 1914-18 was called ‘the big stoush.’ The earliest citation is from a report in the Bulletin in 1893. The source of the word remains a mystery, but the English Dialect Dictionary records a somewhat similar word ‘stashie’ meaning ‘uproar’ or ‘quarrel.’ So stoush may have started life as an English dialect word that immigrated, changed, and then lived on here while it died out back in the British Isles.”

That’s a great story for a word that doesn’t even sound good, but the informality’s typically Australian, and “stoush” does take up far fewer inches on a headline than “encounter” or “confrontation” (“fight” should do just as nicely, but then again, why fight when you can stoush?). Thus, the Aussie media will be full of news like “Political stoush continues over oil prices” and “Geeks get personal in standards stoush.”

Me, I prefer to run away from a stoush, even and especially when I’m abroad, so I spent much of my free time in Sydney walking benignly up and down George Street—the city’s commercial center—in search of a good Chinese noodle shop. Those strolls introduced me to more signs and more Strine. I learned, for example, that nobody wears briefs in Australia; they wear “trunks,” whether they’re swimming or not. More to my surprise, even big potbellied men like me could go around in thongs—as long as we wear them on our feet, “thongs” to Sydneysiders being slippers or flip-flops to us.

Weeks later, in Boracay, I would look over an array of rubber slippers at a shop in D’Mall, suddenly needing a new pair after my gout-afflicted right foot couldn’t squeeze into the old one. I gave out another yelp when I saw the price of the only model large and soft enough to baby my paws, but eventually I forked over the money and hobbled onto the sunswept beach. Almost immediately my aches vanished as I surveyed the horizon. “Now those,” I said, “are thongs.”


FOR THOSE who’ve been asking, I’m glad to say that Soledad’s Sister (Anvil Publishing, 194 pp.) is now on the shelves of National Bookstore, selling for P275 the newsprint copy. (There’s a pricier version on better paper at P495.) And while it’s out in a form that I think Filipino readers can intuitively appreciate, it remains a work in progress, as my agent, Renuka Chatterjee, is still out selling foreign rights. (Very wisely, she has also signed up Charlson Ong. Grab him, I told Renuka, before somebody else does.)

This is a new and very interesting process for me, something we Filipino writers generally aren’t used to—the back and forth between the writer and the agent/editor and the negotiation over what needs to be revised, expanded, or clarified. I realize and accept that, without giving away too much or slipping into exoticizing, some things do need to be made more explicit for foreign readers to enhance their enjoyment of the text. I’ll write more about this in a future piece, this novelty of agents and editors that should become standard practice as we explore the foreign market.

So the first international edition, when it comes out (and I can happily report that the novel will be published in Italy by Isbn Edizioni, for starters), will be just slightly longer than the present one. It’s actually the kind of story that could go on and on, but as one of my favorite quotations goes (and this is from Paul Valery talking about poetry, although it could well apply to the novel), “A poem is never finished, merely abandoned.”

We’ll have a formal launching for the book next month, on July 22, in UP. Stay tuned!

Penman for Monday, June 9, 2008

PEERING THROUGH my window in Seat 7F, I watched a dog strolling nonchalantly beside the runway as our plane landed in Kalibo airport. Apparently the mutt didn’t or couldn’t read the signs I saw as we drove from the airport to the campus of Aklan State University: “Beware of the exhaust from airplanes.” Any place where people and dogs come perilously if indifferently close to steaming jets has got to be worth a visit, and we were not to be disappointed. Kalibo would prove refreshingly laid back, over the days that our group of UP professors spent there to conduct a workshop for teachers at Aklan State University.

The formal title of the workshop was “Online Journalism: Web Writing for Cultural, Literary, and Historical Content,” and we had been invited by the good folks at ASU—through the sponsorship of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology—to help teachers write for the Web. Like many other schools around the country (including the University of the Philippines), ASU has entered the Digital Age, with impressive banks of computers hooked up to a fast Internet connection and wi-fi routers spreading the signal, but the teachers and staff themselves have some catching up to do with the technology now available to them. ASU President Benny Palma and CICT Project Manager Leanna Beltran put their heads and resources together to support a workshop to produce both the content and the means to get ASU’s teachers and their ideas online.

I’d originally thought of begging off from the workshop, pleading fatigue after having already taken one too many flights and road trips this summer, but I really couldn’t say no, for more than one reason. If I could gallivant around the world, I could certainly go to Aklan. Also, and unknown to even many members of my own family, the Dalisays—those of us whose grandfathers, like mine, were farmers in Romblon—have roots in Aklan. I’ve found Dalisays in Davao, Iloilo, Quezon City, and Central Luzon, but there’s probably no greater concentration of Dalisays than in Aklan, specifically Ibajay. There, in 1673, a man named Don Francisco Calizo Dalisay was elected gobernadorcillo by the principales. Presumably, his descendants crossed the strait to Romblon and settled there; one of them was my grandfather, Anatolio, whom I met just once when I was ten; he was a big tall man who was husking coconuts, and didn’t say a word to me.

So going to Aklan was a homecoming of sorts, and I looked forward to visiting Ibajay or even just passing through it, on our way to our one day in Boracay, after the workshop. I was also challenged by the prospect of bringing my fellow teachers onto the Internet.

I’m a strong believer in technology as a means of bridging or leapfrogging over social and economic gaps. We can talk all day about the “digital divide,” which is sadly real; but that divide won’t close unless and until we bring the machines to the people—and, in ASU’s case, bring the people to the machines. Too many computers rot in the offices of presidents and principals and in locked “computer labs” because the people who are supposed to use them either can’t, or don’t know how.

Over three days, around 35 teachers and staff members from ASU’s several campuses listened to lectures on literature and the Internet from me and my colleagues, Drs. Isabel Banzon-Mooney and Lily Rose Tope. Isabel and Lily Rose guided them through a reappreciation of Philippine and Third World literature, then I stepped in to talk about the Internet, hypertext, reading and writing for the Web, and finally, publishing on the Web.

Predictably, many participants began with an admission of being ignorant about or intimidated by computers and Internet. As far as they were concerned, they may have felt too old to learn about the Internet in a workshop they didn’t even ask to attend (the visionary Dr. Palma had ordered them to go). They could write ideas down on paper, but putting them online was an entirely different challenge.

To put them at ease, I recounted how I myself at one time avoided computers like the plague—I even lugged my Olympia portable typewriter with me to graduate school in the US and worked on it doggedly for my whole first year, before succumbing to the lure of my first Mac. From then on it was love sweet love.

But more practically, I walked them through the process of putting up a group blog (http://asuseminar.blogspot.com), using a live Internet connection. They had worked on individual translations, critiques, and commentaries, and we uploaded a few of these, plus a few pictures, for them to see how easy it was, before breaking up for lunch. I had given them the password to the blog so they could upload their own material, and I saw people finishing their lunch early so they could go back to their computers and try their hand at getting their work and their names online. Within less than two hours, I was happily astounded to see that our three original entries had grown to 21.

They may not exactly have been literary gems, but suddenly we had a nosegay of Aklanon translations of poems by such stalwarts as Alfred Yuson, Marne Kilates, Marra Lanot, and Angelo Suarez, where just a day earlier we had none. And now they were online for all the world to see. The joyful wonderment in our workshoppers’ faces mirrored ours. With a few guided keystrokes, these Aklanons had empowered themselves as writers and publishers, claiming their rightful spots in cyberspace.

Many thanks to Dr. Palma, Len Beltran, ASU Arts & Sciences Dean Mary Eden Teruel and Prof. Edecio Venturanza II (whose life story beats any telenovela, but I’ll save that for another time) for the opportunity to have been of service to my sometime provincemates. Fittingly perhaps, I never would never discovered Don Francisco Calizo Dalisay if it hadn’t been for the Internet. It’s a long way from 1673 to 2008, but last week, my past and present came together, and for many others, the future just began.

Penman for Monday, June 2, 2008

ALMOST AS soon as I checked into my hotel in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, a woman jumped or fell into the harbor and drowned. When I pulled my curtains open—drawn to the window by the buzz of a helicopter and a speedboat casting searchlights onto the water—I saw nothing at first, and proceeded to unpack my bags.

I was there for the 11th edition of the Sydney Writers Festival, reputedly the world’s third largest literary festival (don’t ask me what the other two are—I forgot to ask), bringing together over 300 writers, some 70 of them from overseas like myself, to what had become a very fashionable corner of the harbor city. This was Walsh Bay, and our hotel, the Sebel Pier One, was, as its name suggested, a rough old 1920s warehouse on the pier converted into a posh hotel. Form a vantage point you could see both the Harbour Bridge very close by and the Opera House in the distance. The venues for the SWF were mainly the buildings on the other piers—so, as with much of Sydney, we were never too far from the water.

It was an apt metaphor—the water as our Mother, our blood, our home—underscored by the woman’s sad demise (I’m presuming the sadness; I didn’t even know it was a she, until I read the papers the next morning; when I opened my window again, the harbor police were loading someone onto a body bag and a gurney, so I knew something terrible had happened.) It wasn’t the best of omens for the week ahead, but I wasn’t about to trivialize one person’s passing into a sign; I chose to take it as a reminder of the urgency of what we artists do—to capture the passing scene and then to redraw and to frame it for others to marvel at.

Indeed, Jeanette Winterson’s opening address—delivered before a capacity crowd at the Opera House, many of them having paid good money to hear her speak (as they would all week for us writers—how amazing is that?)—dwelt on the necessity of art, on its even more vital role in a world taken over by pragmatists, corporations, governments, and Disney mania. “Festivals like this [respond] to a need, to a hunger, to an impulse in people. That tells me that people's genuine natural creative impulses, both to make and participate, are real and they want those instincts to be fed." Winterson added, quoting Susan Sontag: “Art isn’t just about something; it is something.”

And what a something it was from Wednesday to Sunday, as the SWF got into high gear and I dashed like a madman from session to session, catching up with Filipino-Australian writer Merlinda Bobis in one of the SWF’s most intriguing panel discussions, on “grit” and “gloom and doom” in literature; her new novel, The Solemn Lantern Maker, had just been published by Murdoch Books. My own Soledad’s Sister had also just come off the press, rushed by Anvil Books so I could have some copies to show and sell, and a trade was quickly made. (Fellow UP professor and ANU graduate Jose Wendell Capili was also at the festival, to launch a new book on Filipino-Australian writing that he co-edited, titled Salu-Salo.)

Over the week I would make the acquaintance of writers of all kinds—subdued, funny, sensational. On the bus to the Opera House a gentle, bespectacled American in his 60s took the seat next to me and we began chatting about our daughters, both of them now in California; his name sounded familiar; he was his father’s junior, and James Reston had been a titan of American journalism, but James Reston Jr. had, I would later find, written more than a dozen scholarly books on everything from the Inquisition to the Civil War and Richard Nixon. Over cocktails at the Sydney Club, I ran into another fellow named Matt Costello, who had also written crime novels and screenplays but whose most interesting work, to me, was scripting computer games. Another man, only in his early 30s, had written and published a thick memoir—normally a presumptuous exercise at such a young age, but then Naldo Rei had joined the guerrillas in East Timor as a courier at the age of 9, and had gone in and out of prison since then, before studying in Australia and seeing freedom come to his country, whose government he now advises.

Sunday was my busiest day; in the morning I sat on a panel with Indian-Canadian novelist David Davidar and Singaporean poet Felix Cheung, for a “Spotlight on Asia” session, where we gamely took apart the notion of a single, inscrutable “Asia”, as we were as different from each other as Australians were from Americans. That afternoon I shared a session with the festival’s other big star aside from Winterson, Pulitzer prizewinner (for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) Junot Diaz; what a privilege and challenge, I thought, to be the only other one onstage with him, aside from our moderator, Australian novelist Antoni Jach. But Junot was such a warm and friendly person (and did I say brilliant?) that our one-hour conversation went by in a flash, and before I knew it the festival was over.

The exposure to a foreign audience was bracing and encouraging, but the most satisfying part of my Sydney sojourn was meeting with our compatriots, some of them old friends from the ‘70s. I gave talks to two groups in the public libraries of Parramatta and Hornsby in the Sydney suburbs, and was much heartened by the attendance and their response to a kababayan most of them had never heard of, much less read. Many also came to my session with Junot, and they went home poorer in the pocket but richer in signed copies of books by the both of us. (And here go my deepest thanks to Consul-General Tess Lazaro and her staff, and to Violi Calvert, Raych Stafford-Gaffney, Vicky Manalo, and so many others whose hospitality flattered me enormously. The NCCA, I should also say, supported my travel.) I shared a very special evening with two long-lost friends from high school, Nitz Axalan and Edwin Avila, and their spouses.

Oddly enough, I hardly spent anything on this trip—my only souvenir was a $15 cap I had to buy to ward off the chill of an Australian autumn—but my homebound luggage was seven kilos heavier, from all the books and, ah, the bottles of wine my Sydneysider friends sent me off with.

My last afternoon in Sydney went to a harbor cruise; writers begin as tourists, and maybe they also end as such, ever the visitor in a mutable landscape. The water sparkled everywhere I looked; I’m not sure what drove that woman to desperation, but there was something in the water that she saw, and which I didn’t, not just yet.

Penman for Monday, May 26, 2008


DESPITE THE ordeal we had to go through to get there (as I recounted here last week), Beng and I had a great time in Dumaguete with the fellows and staff of the Summer Writers Workshop, now lodged once again with Silliman University.

This year’s fellows were Lawrence Anthony Rivera Bernabe (UP Visayas), Noelle Leslie G. dela Cruz (De La Salle University), Ma. Celeste T. Fusilero (Ateneo de Davao), Rodrigo Dela Peña (London PR Consultancy, Dumaguete), Arelene Jaguit Yandug (Xavier University), Bron Joseph C. Teves (Silliman University), Marguerite Alcarazen de Leon (Ateneo de Manila University), Dustin Edward Celestino (UP Diliman), Joshua L. Lim So (De La Salle University), Liza Baccay (Cebu Daily News), Fred Jordan Mikhail T. Carnice (Silliman University), Ma. Elena L. Paulma (Xavier University), Anna Carmela P. Tolentino (De La Salle University), and Lamberto M. Varias, Jr. (UP Diliman).

Arriving midway through the three-week workshop, we caught up with the fellows frolicking on a break at Antulang Beach, a first-class resort about an hour out of Dumaguete. The ride’s worth it, because of the spectacular ocean view over an infinity pool, and the tastefully appointed cottages and cabanas available to the harried weekender.

The workshop itself proved fruitful, with National Artist Edith L. Tiempo and her daughter Rowena providing the fellows with a taste of what it was like in the old days, when the Tiempos held forth on “objective correlatives” and other notions that critics today may find outdated but which, to creative writers, make intuitive and everlasting sense.

Over dinner hosted by SU President Ben Malayang, we were assured of the university’s continuing support for the workshop, and of Ben’s own commitment to liberal education—to ensuring that all SU graduates, be they writers, nurses, or mathematicians, get a proper grounding in the humanities. I’m confident that, with sustained cooperation and consultation between SU and the writers who’ve kept this endeavor alive since 1962, the Dumaguete writers’ workshop will remain an indispensable guidepost in the development of the Filipino writer in English.


ANOTHER PLEASANT discovery in Dumaguete was Bethel Guest House, a relatively new hotel on Rizal Boulevard facing the bay. In years past, we’d favored staying at the South Seas on the other side of campus, because of its seaside location and its poolside rooms (and, for inveterate smoker-friends Krip Yuson and Jimmy Abad, its liberal smoking and drinking policy). But last summer we were disappointed by the creeping shabbiness of the lodgings and the slowness of the restaurant service, so Beng and I decided to try out Bethel—which, to begin with, cost half the South Seas’ tariff, and was much more centrally located.

Run by Christian owners (thus a strict no-smoking and no-liquor edict in the rooms, no great loss to me), Bethel turned out to be cleaner and quieter than most hospitals, with all the amenities you can expect from a modern hotel: air-conditioning, cable TV, and, boon of all boons, wi-fi on all the floors (not free, but cheap at P100 for five interruptible hours). The ground-floor cafeteria looked out on the sparkling bay; the food was good and reasonably priced. The staff was smart and courteous, handling our requests for a late checkout and airport transfer with a smile. On every floor was a balcony that hovered over Rizal Avenue and a view of the bay. That prospect alone was worth all the trouble of getting there.

I WROTE in praise of painter Jason Moss a few weeks ago, forgetting that I had another talented painter to recommend to my readers, one to whom I had an even more personal connection: my second cousin Lotsu (yes, that’s his name) Manes, a former winner (in 1996) of the Shell Art Competition and a prime exemplar of the realist tradition brought up to date.

I knew Lotsu (or “Nonong,” as we more prosaically call him) since he was a shirtless kid with a play trowel and a bucket in Romblon, and—as an artist of another sort—I‘ve been very happy to see him come into his own as a serious painter devoted to his craft, aside from being a doting father and husband. When Beng and I decided to leave our house in San Mateo, we turned it over to Nonong for his use as a studio, and the last time I visited there, after an absence of many years, I was glad to see the evidence of his labors. An abandoned house taken over by an artist is never wasted; it becomes decrepit only as a cocoon is later shredded; new wonders and beauties are birthed, even in grime.

You can see some of those wonders in Nonong’s second one-man show titled “Kamunduhan” (at Blanc, 2E Crown Tower, H. V. de la Costa, Salcedo Village, Makati, running until May 31). Let me quote from the catalog notes, written by Karen Ocampo Flores, to give you a sharper idea of Manes’ work:

“Manes’ figuration is borne of careful skill and keen sensitivity to light, shade and color. These are the basic demands of traditional realism, which he manages to honor and subvert with his subtle iconography. By utilizing realism’s power to unravel iconic scenarios from everyday objects, Manes attempts to fuse two perspectives: the sundry of domesticity as seen by a typical father, and the musings of an observer of social realities partly distilled from mass media.

“This play on reality is conveyed quite literally with a thing common to nurseries and classrooms: the inflatable globe, that piece of plastic used as representation of the world. A child easily encounters the twin functions of this object altogether: it is both a teaching tool for the rudiments of geography, and a plaything for all sorts of imaginings. Truly a laudable invention for the stimulation of left and right brain functions. This model world and its presence in his home provide for Manes opportune ways to expand the specific into generic models of positions and situations that not only bespeak of global affairs but about human behavior in general.”

Flotsam & Jetsam (76) for Friday, May 23, 2008

I'VE BEEN in Sydney since Monday to attend the 11th Sydney Writers Festival (in which I've been preceded by my illustrious elders Krip Yuson and Ricky de Ungria, and where I'm scheduled to share a panel on Sunday with Pulitzer prizewinner Junot Diaz). You'll hear more about it in my column a couple of weeks from now, but meanwhile here are a few shots taken with my D-Lux 3:

More pics here.

Penman for Monday, May 19, 2008


THIS SAGA began with me booking our airline and hotel reservations in Dumaguete a month in advance, on the Internet, as soon as I knew I was going to be a panelist in this summer’s writers’ workshop in that southern city. (That’s typically me doing the predictably Capricorn thing; with 2008 shaping up to be the busiest year of my life travel-wise, I’ve made online bookings for flights, hotels, and shuttles all the way to December; that way I lull myself into thinking that all these nice things will actually happen as they should, without a wayward asteroid or a bathroom fall to spoil the fun.)

So I had every reason to believe that the universe would simply follow the dictates of the Internet when I chose to fly to Dumaguete early in the morning of May 12 on PR291 (Air Philippines, ticketed by Philippine Airlines), in time for me to catch the writers’ workshop at 9:00 am—where, jolted by two cups of coffee, I would launch into the usual disquisition on plot and character before a roomful of fellows probably even sleepier than I was. At least that was the plan.

As it turned out, it took less than an asteroid to remind me that Nature (as Thomas Hardy suggested) was indifferent to man and the Worldwide Web. About a week before May 12, I got a call from PAL Reservations, telling me that PR291 had been canceled for unspecified reasons, and that Beng and I had been moved to the afternoon flight, PR293, departing at 1:00 pm. I was mildly annoyed—I prefer to fly early in the morning, to avoid the midday traffic and to be able to enjoy a full day in a new place—but not surprised; with luck I could still catch the afternoon session and earn my day’s keep.

On May 10, I got another call from PAL, saying this time that our 1:00 departure had been moved to 2:40. There goes the workday, I thought, but at least I could just stroll along the boulevard in the late afternoon, chug a couple of beers, and enjoy the sunset.

By 11:30 am of the 12th, Beng and I were checked in (I’m also one of those early-bird freaks; being claustrophobic, I try to get an aisle seat as close to the front as possible). Holding Seats 3E and 3F, all was well with the world—at least until about 2:15, when, instead of a boarding call, we heard an announcement saying that PR293 was canceled, because of bad weather in Dumaguete. It looked sunny right where we were, at least until that moment, but I wasn’t about to argue with how the Almighty dealt the weather cards (“God has his reasons,” a friendly fellow passenger named Eric would say to me, shrugging his shoulders).

We all moaned and groaned, but thinking ahead I had Beng collect the baggage while I made a beeline for the Air Philippines ticket office, where they said we would be rebooked for the next available flight the next day. I felt proud to grab something like Stub #3 in the waiting line—only to be told, when it was my turn to be served, that I had to go to the PAL office across the hallway, since my ticket had been issued by PAL. Cursing under my breath I dashed over to the other queue—and got Stub #822; I looked up at the monitor; they were still serving customer #741.

Flash forward to a couple of hours later. Glassy-eyed from monitor-gazing, I’m finally talking to an agent, who tells me that all flights to Dumaguete are booked till May 15; but—for a surcharge—I could go via Cebu early the next morning, and take the ferry from there to Dumaguete via Tagbilaran. The idea appeals to me; I’ve become obsessed with just leaving, period, and getting to Dumaguete has now acquired all the urgency of one of those TV-trekker challenges.

Beng and I go home to Diliman, shower, work, then suddenly it’s 1:30 a.m. and time to scoot back to the airport. Maybe it’s just really dark, but I can’t see a drop of rain. Our plane takes off as scheduled at 4:30; I’ve texted some friends for help, and as soon as we step out of Mactan at 6:00, a van comes along to scoop us up and bring us to the ferry terminal, which we catch with more than a few minutes to spare. We settle into our seats, I text the workshop folks to announce my now-certain arrival, and at 7:00 the Weesam fastcraft revs up for the commute to Tagbilaran. A light drizzle is falling, but I think it’s just pretty.

Midway through our two-hour journey it becomes clear that the weather gods are feeling naughty, and our ferry starts pitching and rolling in huge arcs; through the portholes the ocean looks like a sudsy carwash. People start praying and puking; the crew hands out barf bags. Highlights from my 54 years flash before me (ie, my tomcat Chippy when he was a baby). We straggle into Tagbilaran and everyone cheers in relief—at least until the crew announces that the onward leg to Dumaguete is now canceled, because of bad weather. We could try again tomorrow.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’ve already lost a day, but then I remember Eric’s line and decide to take things in stride. Beng’s never been to Bohol; it’s too rainy to see anything like Baclayon or Loboc, so—after checking into a cheap hotel near the pier, beside a funeral parlor—we do the next best thing and hit the local mall. At the Book Sale, I find the perfect companion to my Crime Fiction course, and Beng picks up a P200 pair of Harry Potter specs. We’re happy campers—at least until we return to our hotel, to find that a karaoke marathon has just begun beneath us.

We stroll along the waterfront, and find a dampa-type resto called Joving’s By the Sea. I order the local tinola, and one slurp of the smoky fish soup tells me why we were delivered here. A light rain starts falling peacefully in the gathering darkness, but I say, it’s just God giving us a final rinse.

The next morning we’re back at the terminal, and take another rollercoaster ride to Dumaguete. Our hotel, Bethel Guest House, turns out to be a clean, well-lighted place—but our room’s on the fourth floor, and the elevator’s out of order. We march up, then down, then an SUV comes by to bring us to the workshop, which is taking a break that day at Antulang Beach, about 30 kilometers away—the last ten of them on a dusty, corrugated road that wrings the last drop of perkiness out of me.

“Hello, fellows,” I mumble when we get there. “I feel like a dirty sock that went through the washer on the ferry, then the dryer on the road!”

Penman for Monday, May 12, 2008


I’LL WRITE about them at greater length another time, but let me just announce that tonight and tomorrow night, one of my favorite singing groups—the UP Singing Ambassadors, led by conductor Ed Manguiat—will be holding farewell concerts before they embark on their next European tour. The concerts (at Teatrino in Greenhills, San Juan on May 12, and at the Church of the Risen Lord in UP Diliman on May 13, both at 7:30 pm) will help defray expenses for this prizewinning group, the only Asian group to win the 2001 Grand Prize in the Guido d’Arezzo competition in Italy. Catch them while you can! (Tickets at P300 and P500, half-price for students with IDs.)

I'M NOT an art critic, but I have this pedestrian conviction that the best art of whatever kind speaks to you across all times and spaces, and says something not just about the circumstances of its creation but also about who, where, and what you are, right now.

I’m always prepared to be surprised and entranced, even enchanted; I like to think that I’m as hard-boiled a writer as they come, with few illusions left about the harshness of life, and I don’t respond well to art that tries to pretend otherwise. On the other hand, if all the artist does is tell me what I already know, and make me feel even more miserable than before, then I don’t feel enriched or enlightened, either. If I start smiling despite my dourness, or look at a piece for more than a few minutes—whether it’s a bronze fish by Brancusi or a father-and-son pastel by Roel Obemio—then something’s happened, and I’m in touch with something far larger than myself.

That’s what happens every time I look at a painting by an artist I’ve known since he was in his teens, and whose work I’ve followed ever since. Jason Moss put up his first exhibition in 1993, when he was only 17; last Saturday, he opened his 18th show (which he tongue-in-cheek calls “Debut”) in 15 years, a testament not only to his prodigious energy but also to his unflagging vision. Exactly what that vision is is something that art-studies theses and dissertations will be written about, and it’s best appreciated up close—or rather, as a cluster of paintings on a wall, from about 15 feet away.

Jason’s work blends grotesquerie—his manifest suspicion that our world is beset by demons of one kind or other, some of them within the self—with humor and wit. His latest collection, Jason says, “pokes fun at the superficialities of the age,” but there’s no doubt that Jason himself is having fun, no matter how dark his view of life may be. I don’t usually bother much with the titles of art works, but it’s hard to resist taking a longer look at anything titled “The end of the word organic,” “The Dull and the Dutiful,” “Play this game by yourself,” “It will kill you to trust me,” and “What some gay folks end up with.” (In the last piece, two men hold up a blue-headed, pink-bodied baby between them—except that the baby looks like a happy hybrid between a dog and a dolphin.)

When Jessica Zafra first encountered Jason Moss’ work 12 years ago in his second one-man show, the first word that sprang to her mind was “Europe.” She would later describe it with more specificity as “Berlin of the 1930s, cross-pollinated with goth-rock: Kurt Weill meets X-Mal Deutschland, Lotte Lenya meets Siouxsie and the Banshees.”

I bought a pastel piece (high praise from a UP professor with a pauper’s salary) from that show that Jessica saw titled “Mother and Child with Faun,” and to this day it hangs in my office, an inexhaustibly enigmatic triad that makes me want to write a book around it. Most recently something of the reverse happened. When my new novel Soledad’s Sister was being readied for publication (it should be out by the time you read this, courtesy of Anvil Publishing’s Karina Bolasco, who had patiently waited for over seven years for the manuscript to be finished), there was no doubt in my mind whose artwork I wanted on the cover, to capture all the dualities in the text. I’ll leave you to guess—when you go and see the exhibit (at the Blueline Gallery on the 4th floor of Rustan’s Makati, entrance at Glorietta 4 near Starbucks, running from May 10 until June 7)—which work might best represent the dark comedy that I had in mind. “Dark comedy” might not be too bad a description for Jason Moss’ work itself. He doesn’t let one element get way too far ahead of the other.

The Moss mystique also made itself felt to the late writer-painter Andres Cristobal Cruz, who invited then 20-year-old Jason to exhibit some of his own early Picasso-inspired works alongside Andy’s in a show at the Lyceum. “The young students immediately found themes in Moss’ paintings familiar,” Andy would recall in mock lament. “They identified more with him than with me and my landscapes and mass protest images.” (Pointedly, one of Jason’s pieces in that show was titled “No More Pablos.”) Painter Marcel Antonio was “struck by the nature of his themes, most of them transgressive in a genuine, non-contrived way that dares to push the borders of the limits of taste. He’s evidently an artist who helped redefine certain grand narratives in art, at least in the local scene, and puts into question what constitutes taboo for one person yet is liberating for another.”

Those are fine words to be said of anyone, but again the best test is in a personal encounter with the work of the man. (It’s a poor substitute, but you can also go online and check them out at www.weloveintimidation.com/jasonmoss.) It’s sometimes hard to reconcile the painter of “Manners and Etiquette” (showing a restaurant full of dead monkeys, with the only one left alive, in the foreground, suffering a nosebleed as he contemplates eating a crab on his plate) with the passionate illustrator of children’s books that he also is (he has also been, at one time or another, an editorial cartoonist, a bartender, and TV art dir