Pinoy Penman

First Semester, AY 2009-2010


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

Penman for Monday, June 29, 2009

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 22, 2009


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 15, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 8, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 1, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 25, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 18, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 11, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 4, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

I had some ideas to offer Ichi:

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

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

Penman for Monday, April 27, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Penman for Monday, April 20, 2009

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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


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



(More pics from Vietnam here.)

Penman for Monday, April 13, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Penman for Monday, April 6, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, March 30, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, March 23, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Penman for Monday, March 16, 2009


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, March 9, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, March 2, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, February 23, 2009


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

Dear Mr. Dalisay,

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely yours,

Reggie


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, February 16, 2009


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

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

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

Dear Mr. Dalisay,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely yours,

Jewel

For February 9, 2009


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

Penman for Monday, February 9, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, February 2, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, January 26, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there we are.

Penman for Monday, January 19, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, January 12, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, January 5, 2009


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For MetroHIM Magazine, November 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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


Uh oh. Read your column. Mea maxima culpa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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