Pinoy Penman

Some Upcoming Changes


BECAUSE OF recently announced changes in the way and the direction Apple will run its business and operate on the Web, I shall soon have to migrate this blog to a new host (www.penmanila.ph) using new software (iWeb), as my old, proprietary software (Blog.Mac) is no longer supported by Mac OS 10.7 (Lion).

When that happens, you can access my blog—which I will call Pinoy Penman 2.0—at http://www.penmanila.ph/Pinoy_Penman_2.0/My_Blog/My_Blog.html. The contents of this present blog and its archives should remain accessible for some time at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.

It'll take me some time to learn how to port the old site over, to enable comments, activate links, etc. so please bear with me.

Thank you all for your readership and support, and see you on Pinoy Penman 2.0!

Penman for the Star's 25th Anniversary Issue, July 24, 2010


1. ALL MEN are babies.

2. To men, all women are (or should be) mommies.

3. Men hate asking for directions, even if they’ve driven 50 kilometers into the mountains, the wrong way. They think they have a GPS somewhere in their lower intestines. Otherwise, the GPS is the wife, who does the asking.

4. Men hate admitting they’re wrong, even if it’s clear as daylight that they are. Something else didn’t work in the universe—Jupiter was misaligned with Mars, the bus was late, the equipment malfunctioned. Men don't have excuses. They have explanations, which should be good enough to excuse anything.

5. Men love ratty old shirts and will fight tooth and nail to keep them, even if their armpit fuzz and love handles start poking through the holes.

6. Men donate sperm, which women somehow convert into screaming babies and unruly children, leaving the donors to wonder how they can be held responsible for the outgrowth of a few drops of fluid, and for a lifetime at that.

7. Like all babies, men enjoy being (and expect to be) pampered—bathed, powdered, cradled, and so on—but like all small children, they will resist some things to the death: being fed food they don’t like, being deprived of their toys, being reminded of bedtime, and being spanked for something they did.

8. Men will never admit to staring desirously at other women in the company of their mates. They were just gazing at the scenery. To provide deniability, they can practice and will perfect that “gazing at the scenery” gaze, with the distant mountains at 12 o’clock and the luscious babe at 3 o’clock.

9. To men, the difference between having sex and making love is purely semantic, but all men will swear under oath that love and sex are two completely different things (as in "It was only sex, I wasn't in love with her!")

10. Men can appreciate fine art, spirituality, cute puppies, and romantic comedies—whatever it takes for a woman to say "OK, let’s go to bed!"

11. Between food and sex (particularly with the wife), many men will choose the NBA finals.

12. To men, the most demonic people in the world are a woman’s previous, other, and future boyfriends. They will be objects of eternal jealousy and suspicion, reeking with malicious intent and ulterior motive.

13. Men expect their exes to say: “You messed up my life in the worst way, but I not only forgive you. I will love you forever and be always available to you—even if you can’t and won’t love me back the same way, which of course I understand.”

14. Try as they might, men can fit only x number of things into a suitcase. Women will boast—with justification—that they can pack twice as many things into the same space, which, by some mathematical logic, therefore gives them the right to bring two suitcases instead of just one.

15. Men know that the best way to sneak a new gadget into the house is to give their wives the old one.

16. Men know that the second best way to sneak a new gadget into the house is to give their wives, uh, the new gadget. (“Happy birthday, honey! Look what I got for you—a Microtech Kestrel tactical knife with a razor-sharp 154cm black-coated, partially serrated, hawkbill liner locking blade with dual-ridged thumb studs for smooth, crisp, easy, one-hand operation! I just know you’re gonna love this… right?”) Maybe the tactical knife isn’t such a good idea.

17. Men love machines almost as much if not more than they love women. Sometimes they mistake women for machines, but strangely enough don’t treat them as well as their cars and computers. Men will buy expensive lotions and potions for their cars, and fancy dresses for their laptops.

18. Men will never understand why women have to buy a dress, a new bag, and a new pair of shoes for every wedding they attend. The usual explanation (“My friends will see that I already wore this dress at XXX’s wedding last month!”) just doesn't cut it, because men can't even remember what their wives wore yesterday.

19. Speaking of which, men will sooner spot a percentile uptick in the stock market or a faint burp in the car’s exhaust than a new hairdo, a new dress, or a facelift. They will take notice if and when they have to pay the bill.

20. After 20 years of marriage, men acquire telepathic powers, which they apply to their wives. Long, deep silences across the dinner table, punctuated by the occasional grunt, are supposed to say, “Yes, dear, I love you today like I loved you yesterday, and pass the ketchup, will you?”

21. Men grunt, women talk. The male equivalent of “You know, we’d all be better off if your Tita Sonia decided to sell her property to us instead of leasing it to that cousin of hers who’s just being used as an ATM by her durogista boyfriend, whom you met at the Cruzes’ party, do you remember the guy with the earring and the smoker’s breath?” is “Ungh.”

22. Men can remember the most complicated things, especially when it comes to their toys. They can mumble things in their sleep, like “The Panerai Logo Luminor has a Calibre Unitas 6497 movement which came out in 1993, with a power reserve of 45 hours” or “I think I should hold off on getting a new MacBook Air until the Sandy Bridge version comes out, so I can get a lot more power without the corresponding hit in battery performance…”

23. But men can forget the simplest things, especially when their wives send them out to the grocery to pick up a few domestic necessities, as in “What was that again that she wanted? Donnee, Tawny, Downy? That was a shampoo, right—or maybe a detergent?”

24. To men, buying a new or another gadget—even one that looks suspiciously a lot like the previous one (say, the iPhone 3GS, after the iPhone 3G)—is called “upgrading.” When women do it, of course, the men call it “accumulation” (as in, “What, another blue bag? Didn’t you buy one almost exactly like this just last month?”).

25. Ten percent of logical male reasoning is devoted to a careful weighing of the pros and cons of a decision. The other ninety percent is devoted to finding creative justifications for things they already did, but didn't think about.

Penman for Monday, July 18, 2011


ON THE heels of my three-part series last month about my Italian escapade, I’ve been ribbed by friends bemoaning my utter lack of culinary sophistication. How could you go to Venice, they said, and look for Ligo sardines? (Well, I did—I came, I saw, and I ate them; and they tasted even better, devoured in the recesses of a 15th-century castle in Umbria.)

But just to dispel the notion that I know absolutely nothing about good European food, let me insert a plug for the divine paella of a friend for whom paella-making is an art and a livelihood. I ran into Ditto Lesaca shortly after my return from Italy, and wished fervently that someone would send me to Spain, where I’ve never been, because I can live on Spanish sardines, chorizos, jamon serrano, and paella forever. Until that happens, Ditto’s heavenly creation—not cheap, I must say, but brimming with fat prawns and chunks of chorizo—will satisfy my cravings. You have to call him to cook your order, at 0918-9634886; no such thing as a quick takeout, here.


NOT SO appetizing is the continued force-feeding of my UP mailbox by the Office of the Presidential Spokesman. I began last week’s column by begging—too politely, I think—the OPS to release my mailbox back to me, after hijacking it for weeks with daily doses of at least one or two 5-megabyte “good news” messages about what the government is doing.

They expect me to read them, but apparently, they don't read me, because a week later, the assault continues, and again nothing is getting through to my jdalisay@up.edu.ph address but OPS releases, which refuse to be filtered out as spam. (This is like that mythical hydra—you chop off one head, another one pops up—and I don’t have the Herculean savvy to kill it.)

Can’t they at least reduce the file size of these releases to, say, 50 kilobytes, which is already as long as this garrulous column? Show a little consideration, guys—you’re not going to get any good press for your boss by doing something so rude and stupid as spamming journalists’ and academics’ mailboxes. Sonny, Ricky, Manolo, and whoever is out there I can call a friend—please find that brainless creep in the Palace who’s spewing out these releases (not the clerk, but his boss) and find him another job.


GETTING BACK to the real good news—in literature, that is—I'd like to share some choice bits of news that I’ve received these past few weeks, all of them having to do with advances made by Philippine and Asian literature on the global stage.

First off, let me acknowledge receipt of a new book of poems from a Macau-based Filipino poet, Oscar Balajadia, writing under the pseudonym Papa Osmubal. Pan Chai, A Filipino Boy in Macau is a collection of finely wrought poems detailing the travails of an expatriate worker in that former Portuguese colony. Married to a Chinese, Balajadia holds an MA in English Studies from the University of Macau, but his poems focus on the pan chai—the local, somewhat derogatory term for “Filipino.” In what might well be his signature poem, “The Filipino Workman in Macau,” Balajadia relates:

I come home from work. Sip an ice-cold beer.
See the evening news. Sip another beer.
Take dinner. Throw garbage. See more TV.
Sip one more beer. Feed the fish.
… Stagger to bed.
Say a prayer of thanks for not waking up the kids.
And for not waking up the wife who pretends to be asleep.

And so on goes the poem, detailing the “litany of blankness” undergone by this fellow every working day. Many thanks to my friend, Rene Villapando, now our consul general in Macau, for bringing to my attention this new, resonant voice from the diaspora.


SPEAKING OF Filipino voices on the global stage, I was pleasantly surprised to hear, through an intermediary, from Trevor Carolan, the Canadian writer and editor who, back in 1992, put together one of the most comprehensive anthologies of the contemporary short story from the Asia Pacific, titled The Colors of Heaven. The Philippines was represented in that collection by F. Sionil Jose and myself. This time, Trevor has edited and released two new anthologies: The Lotus Singers and Another Kind of Paradise—two collections of contemporary stories from South Asia and East and South Asia, respectively.

Together, the two books offer 39 stories by some of Asia’s best writers from 21 countries. This time, Philippine writing is represented by Gilda Cordero-Fernando and Marianne Villanueva. Another Kind of Paradise is published by Cheng & Tsui, and is available on Amazon.

While we’re on the subject of Asian literature, you might want to check out the Asian Review of Books at www.asianreviewofbooks.com. Now a decade old, this Web-based magazine provides incisive reviews of new, significant, and interesting books from all over Asia, covering a wide range of concerns from art and literature to politics and economics. On the editorial board is Peter Gordon, formerly executive director of the Man Asian Literary Prize and a friend to Filipino writers.

Right now the Review seems to be more oriented, as “Asian watchers” traditionally have been, toward China, India, and Japan, so we hope that it will also look more to the southeast in forthcoming issues. A search box would also help in navigating the site. But it’s a very useful portal to what’s new in Asian publishing, and what they’re talking about in the coffeehouses of Hong Kong.


I BEGAN this week’s piece with a reference to Italy, and I’ll close with one. One of the things I kept marveling at during my six-week visit there last May was how well the Italians have been able to preserve their art, which ranks among the world’s greatest treasures. Indeed, many of these masterpieces by the likes of Piero della Francesca look like they were painted very recently, so vivid are the colors and so nuanced the figures—thanks not only to the long-departed artist but also to the skill of the modern art restorer and conservator (which my wife Beng happens to be).

Starting today until August 5, however, you no longer need to fly to Italy to appreciate the restorer’s art. In cooperation with the Italian Embassy, the UP College of Fine Arts will present an exhibition titled “Saper Fare, il Restauro,” a collection of thirty panels showing the restoration of significant Italian paintings and structures, at the lobby of the University Theater in Diliman. The featured subjects include Leonardo da Vinci’s Cenacolo, Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino, and St. Francis’ Basilica in Assisi.

Also, from 4 pm today, and daily until Wednesday, an Italian art restoration expert, Dr. Maria Teresa Castellano, will give a lecture/workshop in the same venue. She will discuss the exhibition and also her own experience restoring the works of Federico Barocci (1535-1612). (The workshop is actually already fully booked, but the CFA says it will do another workshop to echo this one.)

Of interest to local conservators and art teachers and collectors will be Dr. Castellano’s diagnosis and discussion of intervention techniques on a badly damaged portrait done by Fernando Amorsolo of President Manuel Roxas from the art collection of UP. She will also be looking at a 1903 painting of Jose Rizal at the College of Fine Arts.

Beng, for sure, is going to be in the front row taking in every word, and fascinated as I am by these things, I won’t be far behind.

Penman for Monday, July 11, 2011

BEFORE I go to the main subject of this week’s piece, may I please ask the people at the Office of the Presidential Spokesperson (it’s hard to tell these days who that person really is, but I’m guessing or hoping that I have some friends in that office) to stop spamming my mailboxes with their press releases and “good news” bulletins? Each one of those PDF messages is about 5 megabytes, or about a hundred times as large as this column.

In my UP mailbox alone—for which I, like all Dilimanians, have a measly 20 megabytes of total disk space to use—I get as many as five OPS messages in one day, which makes sure that nothing else gets in. In other words, my jdalisay@up.edu.ph address is now nothing more than a trash bin for Palace junk. Any kind of anti-spam filtering I do gets foiled by some OPS algorithm that automatically morphs, say, spokesperson.govph12 into spokesperson.govph13, ad nauseam. And nauseam is exactly what I feel, guys—I like your boss, but invading and overwhelming citizen’s mailboxes this way isn’t going to make him any cuddlier. So, please, OPS—stop the spam!


FROM THE Atlantic Magazine’s April 25 edition comes this sad bit of news—that, along with Kodachrome and other staples of the 20th century, the typewriter will no longer be produced, with the recent shutdown of the last typewriter factory in the world, in India.

Quoting the Daily Mail, the Atlantic reported that a company called Godrej and Boyce still produced up to 12,000 typewriters a year in India until 2009, serving the courts, the military, and other government offices. That inventory went down to 200 machines at closing time—the lowest point for a company that had been around for six decades, from the time when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called the typewriter a “symbol of India's emerging independence and industrialization”; up until the early 1990s, Godrej and Boyce were still selling 50,000 units a year.

The culprit, of course, was the personal computer and “word processing,” a phrase that I remember hearing for the first time in the 1980s and which I found rather strange until I ventured into WordPerfect and then Microsoft Word. Up until then, I still wrote most of my stories and plays in longhand—vigorously striking out long passages here and scribbling cryptic marginal notes there—before moving the text over and “finalizing” the manuscript with a typewriter. The typewriter gave the work a polished, formal, impersonal look that was supposed to be more objective and more believable than one’s own penmanship.

Among other writers, T. S. Eliot was fascinated by the typewriter and was acutely conscious of its effect on his work. In a letter much-quoted on the Internet, he told fellow poet Conrad Aiken in 1916 that “Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”

Speaking of the Internet, several sites like http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/26423 provide a list of famous writers and the typewriters they used—Hemingway and his Royal Quiet de Luxe, Steinbeck and his Hermes Baby, Updike and his Olivetti MP1, Orwell and his Remington Home Portable, among others.

There’s a whole cottage industry to be spun around writers and their tools—call it the fetishization of writing—encouraged by the appealing notion that if you use what they use (and maybe drink what they drink), you can write as well as Hemingway et al. Never mind the fact, of course, that for a century, masses of clerks and secretaries used Coronas, Underwoods, Olympias, and Remingtons without any one of them becoming an Eliot or a Flannery O’Connor. (O’Connor’s typewriter still sits on her desk at her farm in Georgia. Brad Gooch has a wonderful anecdote about O’Connor sitting at that typewriter for three hours a day; weakened by lupus, she reduced those three hours to one, and she would tell a friend that “I et up that one hour like it was filet mignon.”)

I’ve told a story or two about my love affair with the typewriter before (see Penman for November 16, 2009, where I rhapsodized over the Corona 3 folding portable typewriter that I dragged home to Manila with me from an antique mall in San Francisco). Until around 1988, the typewriter was my best friend; all my early stories, plays, and screenplays had been written on one. When I went off to graduate school in the US in the mid-‘80s, I handcarried an Olympia portable that had been a gift from my mentor Gerry Sicat; my first novel’s first lines flew off its keys.

I suppose I was lucky in a way to have been part of a generation that still used typewriters well into adulthood, and for whom the clackety-clack of the busy keyboard would become so hypnotic that, even when personal computers held dominion over our desks, we still looked for and employed software that mimicked the sound of the keys, and used a font called “American Typewriter” to pretend that little had changed.

To be honest, however, it wasn’t always love. On a bad day, the typewriter could be the writer’s worst enemy—keys went limp, ribbons ran dry, carriages got stuck, paper got scrunched on the platen (that’s the large “rolling pin” in the middle of the thing). Even when it was you who made the mistake—like mistyping the last line on a long page with five carbon copies underneath—you cursed the machine. More likely than not, you were going to let that mistake stay, hoping no one would look too closely. And what about moving that paragraph on Page 16 to Page 2, where it more logically belonged? Forget about it.

This leads me to conclude that when we lament the passing of the typewriter, we’re bemoaning the loss of a “simple” past that was truly much more complicated and troublesome than we now like to imagine.


SPEAKING OF antiquated writing instruments, let me just note that our pen club, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, celebrated its third anniversary last Saturday. It's hard to believe that from an impromptu gathering of about a dozen people in my front yard back in July 2008—most of whom thought they were all alone in this inky madness—FPN-P has grown into a Yahoogroup with over 160 members online, about 40 of whom I’d call diehard fountain pen, paper, and ink addicts.

I’d like to thank our members and our sponsors (yes, can you believe it, we actually have corporate friends!), particularly Charlene Ngo of Times Trading and Marian Ong of Scribe Writing Essentials, for helping out with the celebration. Charlene took the opportunity to remind everyone that the new, gorgeous aquamarine Lamy Safari is now available at the Lamy stalls in National Bookstore Glorietta5, Greenbelt, Rockwell, Shangrila, Trinoma, Quezon Ave, North Edsa, Filinvest, Megamall and Scribe Writing Essentials. It comes with medium nibs, but you can get a broad nib as an extra purchase. Marian, on the other hand, was happy to share the vibrant colors of the new Pelikan Edelstein inks, which you can check out at Scribe’s shop in Eastwood City—and what about a Pelikan M215 pen to go with the ink?

Penman for July 4, 2011


WE SEEM to be in the season of centennials (and sesquicentennials, and quadricentennials), so it may not be all that novel to celebrate another one, but that’s what we did, anyway, last month at the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the University of the Philippines.

That’s where I work, and where I’ve spent most of my adult life. These days I wear the exalted title of “Professor,” and sometimes I still wonder if I deserve it, refusing to believe that it was that long ago when I was a wet-eared freshman trying to find his place (and many other places, in the typical freshman runaround) in Diliman.

I entered UP in 1970 as an Industrial Engineering major. I was a Philippine Science High School graduate, and while we didn’t have any contracts then to tie us down to a career in science and technology (on a side note, I firmly believe such contracts to be stupid and counterproductive, as many of these bonded teenagers then do everything they can to get out of it), I did want to become a scientist of some kind.

I’d grown up on Tom Swift books, and the McGraw-Hill documentaries on space travel and marine research that we were shown in school whetted my appetite. For a while back there, I thought that the coolest thing anyone could wear on the planet and beyond was a space suit or at least a laboratory smock; in bed, I dreamt of making wild discoveries with Bunsen burners and pipettes (assisted by a curvy aide with a sharp resemblance to Rosanna Podesta).

Unfortunately, my aptitude (or rather the lack of it) in mathematics refused to cooperate with my ambition. My shimmering halo as the entrance-exam topnotcher in my PSHS batch dissolved quickly with a “5.0” in Math in my freshman year, and only a written appeal kept me in school, on probation. With some help from my dad, I pulled out all the rhetorical stops and poured my 13-year-old heart into a document that began grandiosely with “At the outset, let me state that I bear malice toward none…” It must have worked, because they let me hang on, and I even became editor in chief of the school paper not long afterward.

I guess that was my personal initiation to the power of the written word: the words you chose to put on a piece of paper could change your life, create happy outcomes, and even get you girlfriends, plane tickets, and wads of cash, never mind changing society and improving human lives beyond your own.

So I straggled on to UP as an IE major, and this time hubris did me in. Having taken and miraculously passed such esoteric subjects as integral calculus in our accelerated high school, I felt insulted to be taking up Freshman Algebra again (there were no advance placements then), and skipped my classes, earning me another “5.0.” This must have eased my decision to drop out of college altogether just before martial law was declared, to work as a journalist on the one hand and to pursue my activist agenda on the other.

To cut to the chase, I was out of school for ten years, during which I went to martial-law prison, met and married Beng, got a government PR job (former activists made good propagandists), and started a family. But I longed to go back to school, not just to pick up the diploma my own father never got but also to indulge myself in what I really wanted to do, which was to immerse myself in the heady stuff of prose and poetry. I’d kept on writing plays and stories and started picking up Palancas, but it was nothing like waking up in the morning to read Shakespeare or Marlowe, with Arcellana or Brillantes in the afternoon and Neruda or Dylan Thomas in the evening. That’s what I imagined the life of an English major to be, and I wanted to be one, especially after spending a summer in Dumaguete with the Tiempos, who urged me to “save my soul.”

So I applied for readmission to UP as a returning freshman in 1981 (I had quit UP with just 21 units in tow). For a moment, I dithered between English and History as my major—history continues to be a keen private passion—but settled on the original and more practical option.

For the next three years, I reveled in my second life as a UP undergraduate, and the English Department became my second home. The names on the department’s doors at the Faculty Center were those of a gallery of icons in literature and its teaching: Francisco Arcellana, Leopoldo Yabes, Damiana Eugenio, Concepcion Dadulfalza, Alejandrino Hufana, Gemino Abad, Wilhelmina Ramas, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, and Nieves Epistola, among many others.

I was thrilled to study with Sylvia Mendez-Ventura, who walked us through the English Renaissance, and also led me on my first systematic study of the short story. Her closed-books, spot-passage exams were excruciating for many, but I must have been a masochist, because I loved these guessing games. When I couldn’t for the life of me remember the answer to one question—very likely because I never knew it in the first place—I quoted a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“So quick bright things come to confusion!”) and escaped with a 1.25.

Indeed, to be an English major then was to worship at the altar of agony, whose votive fires were kept burning by such avatars as Prof. Ramas (whose five-hour exam on “The Idea of Tragedy” was the very demonstration of the subject); Profs. Eugenio and Filonila Tupas, whose objective quizzes were legend; and Profs. Yolanda Tomeldan and Dionisia Hermosura, whose survey courses toured us around the English landscape. (Many years later, living and working in England, these landscapes would come alive for me, as would “Beowulf” in the British Library.)

But I drew comfort from the company of fellow writers and English majors—our seniors like Franz Arcellana and Alex Hufana, and fellow juniors like Charlson Ong, Gina Apostol, Isabel Banzon-Mooney, Ramon Bautista, Judy Ick, and Luisa Mallari. We’d sneak beer and gin into the old Creative Writing Center office, and get drunk on liquor and literature (alcohol was officially prohibited on the premises, but the dean himself, the late Pablo Botor, often tippled with us). Franz sort of took me under his wing, encouraging me to produce new work and eventually writing the introduction for my first book in 1984.

That year, 1984, would mark not only the publication of Oldtimer and Other Stories, but also my graduation with an AB English degree and my entry into the teaching staff of the department as Instructor II. Soon my own shingle went up on one of those brown doors, and I felt like I had just been given a new mission in life, to awaken in my students the same wonderment at words that had set me on this path.

Penman for June 27, 2011


EVERY NOW and then, I get asked about the purpose and the value of writing workshops. Quite a few people—notable writers among them—have dismissed writing workshops too easily, pointing out (correctly) that writers like Jose Rizal, Leo Tolstoy, and William Shakespeare never went to one, and (incorrectly) that writing can’t be taught, and that workshops only end up creating technically perfect but unexciting and insubstantial works catering to the tastes of an academic cabal.

Facing another such question in an online forum a couple of weeks ago, I felt obliged to respond that what you get out a workshop depends to a great extent on what you bring into it—your work and your expectations.

People often go to workshops aware that their work is encountering a problem, and are therefore open or should be open to suggestions. Some others attend workshops in search of an audience to appreciate what they think is already polished, superlatively good work—and when they catch flak, they react and resist, and the workshop turns into a fruitless and ugly experience for everyone. Some people expect writing workshops to be therapy sessions or support groups; writing can be tremendously cathartic, and sharing one’s deepest hurts with others can be a good way of exorcising them.

Experienced writers don’t need workshops, because they’ve internalized its principles, and are in constant dialogue with themselves. Some others—perhaps less confident and craving the company and attention more than the instruction—might go workshop-hopping, gaining a bevy of e-group and Facebook friends.

Workshops can serve these needs, but that's not their primary purpose. Workshops are meant to help writers—especially those just getting started—with their attitude and technique. A good writing attitude is one that knows how to accept and dispense criticism, and also to determine what the core of one’s own writing is, and to discern which comments help that core, and which don’t. While I suspect that insight and linguistic brilliance come with the person, I believe that writing technique can certainly be taught, and those who think otherwise need only ask why piano teachers and voice coaches exist. At a certain level, a workshop will also raise more philosophical issues—whom do we write for, and why? How does our writing relate to the life of the nation?

Much depends on the workshop director or facilitator—usually, a person who is not only a credible writer himself or herself, but someone who knows how to manage people and expectations. Good facilitators keep their own egos in the background and lead discussions gently but firmly, steering them toward important learning points (say, point of view, dialogue, characterization, description, etc.). They should tread a fine line between candor and crudeness, and always seek to maintain civility in a potentially explosive situation, mindful that—no matter how badly done—a creative work is an extension of the writer’s person. The useful question to ask isn't really "Do you like it? Do you hate it?" but "Why?" A good facilitator will not seek to impose his or her own critical standards on others, but will offer up many ways of looking at a work; he or she will also not seek to create clones or carbon copies or his or her own work and style among the workshoppers.

In almost every workshop, some people will talk more often and more loudly than others—and quite often, the best talkers aren't necessarily the best writers. Speaking of talking, in my workshops, the writer whose work is being taken up doesn't speak until everyone else has spoken, so the discussion doesn't become unnecessarily defensive early on, and people don't clam up when they sense resistance from the author.

For me, one of a workshop's best values is that it gives the author a sense of how his or her work is going over with ordinary readers, a chance he or she will never get in the open market—and you spoil that chance by intruding too soon into your reader's responses. Let them speak freely—and then make your clarifications afterwards (in a good work and to a sharp reader, the clarifications will be embodied in the text.)

While it's important to listen keenly to what people are saying and to their suggestions for improving the work, the author should feel under no obligation to accept them all. They will often be varied, if not at cross-purposes. So a workshop teaches the author discernment, and encourages him or her to develop his or her own critical faculties. Eventually, the workshop will end—euphoria for some, torture for others, a bit of both for most—and the participants will have to go home to face the blinking cursor all by themselves, keeping whatever they learned in mind.


FROM A former student of mine and a UP workshop alumnus, Carljoe Javier, comes the good news that his book And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, originally published by Milflores, has come out in an e-book version on Amazon. You can download it for $2.99 at (http://www.amazon.com/Geek-Shall-Inherit-Earth-ebook/dp/B0053ZJ2P6). This is a boon for all Filipino writers, as it opens the door wide to global publishing and distribution, without all the complications that come with finding an agent who then finds a publisher, and so on. I asked Carljoe how he did it, and this was what he told me:

“I submitted my book to local digital publisher Flipside (www.flipsidecontent.com) and they took care of digitizing the text for iPad and Kindle versions. They are registered with both iBookstore and Amazon (Flipside is a Filipino company that works as a BPO digitizing books for the likes of Barnes & Noble, and they've branched out to offer new local content).

“We could always go directly to Amazon and Apple and publish through them, but the registration, taxes, and other hassles were too big for me to think about, so I outsourced all the worry to the digital publisher.

“As someone trying to get read by a larger audience, I've published with two digital publishers already. Vee Press publishing Kobayashi Maru of Love, and now Flipside is publishing And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.

“I believe in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, which says that if it's on the Net, someone will download it. I don't hope to be a big hit like Rowling or Meyer, but I do hope to get enough of a readership, a niche readership that's larger than the one I have in print here in the Philippines.”

All the best of luck to you, Carljoe—the rest of us won't be far behind. By the way, another Javier book—Geek Tragedies, for which I wrote a blurb sometime back—will be launched by the UP Press on July 1. This guy’s on a roll!


AND HERE'S another UP Press plug—an appeal, actually. My UP colleague and good friend Dr. Gemino “Jimmy” Abad would have been distinguished enough if poetry were all he did, but Jimmy is also fast shaping up to be the most important Filipino literary anthologist of our time. After completing a monumental series of anthologies covering Philippine poetry in English over the past century, and picking up where the late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes left off by selecting the best Philippine stories in English of the past six decades, Jimmy is about to complete the final volume of his story series. This book, Hoard of Thunder, will cover the best stories of roughly the past two decades.

Jimmy needs permission from several authors he can’t reach, for him to publish their stories: J. A. Romualdez, "The Apartment," 1994; Carmelo Juinio, "The Fairy Prinsoid," 1996; Merlinda Bobis, "White Turtle," 1998; Iris Sheila B. Crisostomo, "Passage," 2000; Rhea B. Politada, "The Epic Life," 2008.

If you know these authors or have their email, please let them know about this call. Jimmy also wants the authors to know—with some sadness, I’m sure—that “The UP Press, as it is subsidized, can afford only a 20% discount for authors included in the anthology.” Thanks, all!

Penman for Monday, June 20, 2011

ONE OF the great things about a Civitella Ranieri fellowship is the castle’s proximity to a host of cultural destinations, which could range from single works like Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in nearby Monterchi and the contents of fabulous palaces such as the Duke of Urbino’s to entire cities like Florence and Venice, reachable by train. I had been to Italy twice before, but never, in an almost literal sense, this close to Italy’s cultural glories.

Strolling in the vicinity of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence with no fixed plan in mind (sometimes, I take this approach to escape the frenzied anxiety of the guidebook-driven first-time visitor, which I was, to Florence), I strayed into the Galileo Museum and marveled at the telescopes, globes, and scientific instruments that described not only the frontiers of the physical world but also those of the human mind. As if that were not enough, as soon as I stepped out of the museum and turned right, I found myself at the Uffizi Gallery and saw a door leading to a free exhibition of drawings by the masters, and soon brought my nose within two inches of work by Mantegna, Titian, Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Raphael.

While our immediate brief was to work on a creative project over the five to six weeks of our stay at the castle, Civitella’s executive director Dana Prescott made it clear that it was all right, even encouraged, to spend some of our fellowship time exploring the cultural countryside, especially for those of us to whom these opportunities would come very rarely. We plunged into this diversion with relish, availing ourselves of day trips or even overnighters organized or suggested by our sponsors (but payable out of our pockets, being optional activities). There’s no country, after all, like Italy for stepping back into the Renaissance, and even today, on a train ride across Tuscany, many scenes appear like they might have five centuries ago, with castles and churches towering over the farms and ochre houses of the common folk.

And thus it happened that my Malaysian friend Lat and I decided to run off to Venice during our last week in Italy. I had never been to Venice, the setting of some of my favorite movies: Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice and Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 psycho-thriller Don’t Look Now (okay, I’ll admit, I watched The Tourist as well—I’m a sucker for anything with Angelina Jolie in it—and let’s not forget that fabulous chase scene from 1979’s Moonraker).

We did Florence as a day trip, but it seemed such a pity to rush through Venice, especially since it was more than five hours away by train from Perugia, the city we were closest to. So Lat and I decided to look for an inexpensive bed and breakfast online—a tough job, since we were going to Venice around the June 2 national holiday (their equivalent of our June 12) and the opening of the big Biennale art festival, which guaranteed that all the good, affordable places in Venice itself were going to be either booked or overpriced.

Thankfully we found a small B&B in Mestre, a residential district across the long bridge, close to the train station; this way, Venice was a five-minute, 1-euro ride away. The optimistically named B&B Romantica was a tiny, Hong Kong-style walk-up on the third floor of a building; it had no name on the street, and we had to call the owner, Giorgio, 20 minutes in advance of our arrival, as soon as our train hit Padova, so he could stand on the street to wait for us and to let us in.

Despite that curious touch, the Romantica proved just fine for two hefty, middle-aged Asian guys; our two-bed room was so small there wasn't even space for a desk, but the place was clean, fresh, and well maintained. Our room even had a balcony to sit out on for watching the street life. We had to share a toilet and bath with other guests, but there was free wi-fi, and best of all, it cost us only 30 euros a night per person. Giorgio himself turned out to be a very amiable person who, in halting but clear English, advised us to take the vaporetto shuttle boats around the island using a 12-hour pass, to skip the tourist trap that was Murano, and to spend time on Burano and Torcello instead.

That’s exactly what Lat and I did the next day. But we couldn’t wait for morning to get into Venice itself, so as soon as we dropped off our bags and got our briefing from Giorgio, we ran back to the train station at Mestre, and rode off into Venice just in time for sunset and a dinner date with Dana Prescott, who was also in Venice for the Biennale. We let the Italian-speaking Dana guide us to a small but apparently very popular restaurant along the edge of the canal for a five-course all-seafood dinner—something Lat and I had sorely missed in the hills of Umbria—and we laughed and swapped life stories as the setting sun, casting the kind of light I’d always associated with the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner, gilded everything around us. Indeed to be in Venice is to live in a painting—the city, after all, having been home to Bellini, Canaletto, and Tintoretto.

A Civitella colleague had told me this before we left the castle, and it proved to be true: when you step into Venice for the very first time, coming out of the Sta. Lucia train terminal, you smile, and smile. There’s everything you’d always imagined Venice to be, right at the doorstep: the Grand Canal and all the vaporetti and gondolas weaving past each other, the brilliant blue sky, the new glass bridge by Calatrava, the marvelous architectural mix-up of the Byzantine and the Moorish (something, I thought, that a set designer today would have been hard-pressed to conjure, given absolute liberty). I had expected to see this for ages, but I still smiled to understand with my own eyes that Venice meant islands without shores; standing flush against the water’s edge, its buildings looked like upthrust apparitions.

Like James Bond, Lat and I had secret missions to accomplish in Venice: our wives’ birthdays were coming up on that same first week of June, and we had to find and bring home suitable presents to show for our six-week bachelorhood in Italy. The next day, in a shop in colorful Burano, we settled that issue like real men, with decisiveness. “How much for this necklace, please?” I asked the salesgirl. “Twenty-one euros,” she said, “but for you, I give it for eighteen.” Thinking I had scored a bargain without even asking, I said, “Excellent, I’ll take it!” Lat quickly chimed in: “I want one as well!”

We walked out of that shop laden with trinkets, and, pleased with our accomplishment, we spent the rest of our one full day in Venice hopping from one island and vaporetto stop to another, parking ourselves for most of the afternoon in the vicinity of the Piazza San Marco, enjoying the doves, the pretty signorinas, and the bands playing everything from “Al Di La” to Broadway showtunes. I didn’t get myself any Venetian souvenir, but back at Mestre, I found Ligo sardines at an Asian food store near our B&B (“Prodotto in Filippine,” the label said proudly), and brought back two cans of comfort food to the castle for my final week.

Just a few days later, Lat and I were together again, on a bus taking us from Perugia to our flights home at Rome’s Fiumicino airport. Outside the window, a rash of vermilion poppies was welling in the fields. Given all that beauty and vitality, it wasn’t hard to imagine how the Renaissance could have come about where we had just been.

Penman for Monday, June 13, 2011

AS YOU read this, I would have just returned from a 40-day residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy—still dizzy, no doubt, not just from the long plane ride via Doha, but also from nearly six weeks of immersion in the thickest of cultural brews: the company of a dozen artists, writers, and musicians in a castle in Italy’s medieval heartland. I went there to begin work on a new novel, and as far as that’s concerned, I’m happy to report: mission accomplished. I can’t possibly write a full novel in a month (some people have, but they’re better than I am), but I’m glad to have stepped out of my Italian hermitage with a substantial, 20,000-word beginning that I feel good about and know what to do with.

Let me just get this clear: like I said last week, no one needs a castle to write a novel, and I suspect that the best novels were written in much more difficult circumstances, driven by some inner urgency rather than by leisure. Indeed, it’s been my experience that a comfortable bed and sumptuous food in a postcard-pretty setting don’t necessarily conduce to sharp, energetic writing; rather, they encourage slumber and sightseeing.

But in the meanwhile, with the mind and body at rest, the imagination rejuvenates, and inevitably fresh work begins; sometimes artists also seek residencies to finish nearly-completed work, or to achieve a breakthrough in a project that has reached an impasse, and the alien surroundings provide just enough defamiliarization for them to see their own work in a literally new light. The real luxury of a residency is time and concentration. Away from the clamors of office and home, artists can focus on the work and the aesthetic problem at hand.


The company of fellow artists, while not always easy, can also be stimulating, especially in a non-competitive atmosphere of mutual respect and support. Since these residencies are international, typically few of the fellows know each other beforehand, except perhaps by reputation, and it’s a special treat when one gets to meet and to know an icon in one’s own field.

There are few more knowledgeable and distinguished figures in the art of the personal essay, for example, than Phillip Lopate, who wrote a seminal work with precisely that title. We had many interesting discussions over dinner at Civitella because Phillip (I know, it still sounds strange and presumptuous to use their first names), a cinephile, has had a longstanding interest in the work of Lino Brocka, and had employed a Filipino main character in a recent novella. Civitella, Phillip said, was the first time he’d stayed in a castle: “It’s cold, it’s dark, but otherwise it’s great.” (That's him with me in the pic below.)


There are other, similar programs available to creative artists and scholars from around the world, aside from the better-known ones in the United States, such as Iowa, Breadloaf, Macdowell, and Yaddo. In Italy, aside from Civitella Ranieri, the Rockefeller Foundation has run a residency program at its Bellagio Center on Lake Como, and the Bogliasco Foundation runs the Liguria Study Center for Arts and the Humanities on the seacoast near Genoa.

All of these programs offer residencies of at least a month, board and lodging included, and each one happens to be located in a place conducive to contemplation and quiet work, but they have their minor differences. The schedules at Bellagio tend to be more fluid, with overlaps between artists’ stays, creating a larger community but also more people to deal with; dinners are also more formal, with place cards on the table and jackets required. You can, however, bring your spouse or partner with you, and Bellagio is also open to a wider range of disciplines, including historians, lawyers, and even, in my 2002 batch, an arms expert. Civitella is much more relaxed, the batches better defined, the work likely more focused. (I haven’t been nor have I applied to Bogliasco yet, so I can’t talk about that experience.) Bellagio and Bogliasco take applications online (do make sure to read the guidelines first, as they both require a body of past work, along with a proposal); Civitella is by invitation only, the fellows culled from a long list of several hundred names contributed by experts in the field.

The fellows’ presentations are privileged glimpses into the work of some of the world’s most accomplished and most avant-garde artists. In our batch, percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson gave a mind-blowing performance using mainly found objects—wooden planks, wine bottles, clay tiles, porcelain cups and saucers, even ropes and plastic grocery bags. Performance artist Pat Oleszko’s outrageous visual puns (she’s been described as a “cunning artist and punning linguist”) were at once politically scathing and yet childishly delightful. Guitarist Marc Ducret played notes with one hand in a way that most of us didn't even think was possible. Lat’s cartoons of a boyhood in rural Malaysia might as well have described many a Pinoy’s experience. Whether by novelty or familiarity, the presentations confirmed the bond that ties together artists from all places—a compulsion to see and to represent the world in a way that most other people don’t or won’t.






I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say that I abhorred the luxury of our situation—all the hardship and privation I went through in martial-law prison didn’t yield me more than a few pages of actual writing; the novel came much later—but precisely because these were not your everyday digs and I was not your everyday duke, castle life took some adjustment.

My greatest adjustment, as I’d expected, was the food. I know that I just said I didn’t abhor the luxury, but in this case I think the luxury abhorred me. Italy’s gastronomical wonders were largely wasted on me, a self-confessed culinary philistine whose idea of haute cuisine is a bucket of KFC, and who landed in Rome with 13 packets of Lucky Me ramen and two bags of Boy Bawang cornik. If truth be told, I love Europe’s museums, but dread traveling there because of the need to adjust to the local fare, which Beng and Demi and maybe nine out of ten other folks would kill for. I’d rather go to China on assignment than to France, for the noodles and the congee.

I happened to be among some of the world’s most gifted and accomplished artists, whose connoisseurship naturally extended to food. Common subjects of passionate discussion included the best coffees, wines, and cheeses. The meals at the Castle were, I’m sure, impeccably delicious and nutritious; our chef was a slow-food advocate working only with the best and freshest produce, much of it from the Castle gardens, and if you were the foodie I’m not, you’d have been in seventh heaven. Thankfully, Italy is also a carnivore’s Paradiso. I’m adding bistecca fiorentina (think of it as Italian porterhouse) to my death-row, last-supper menu; the porchetta (roast pork) sandwiches were great, although our lechon is much more flavorful and softer.


On our Wednesday morning trips to the Co-op, the local supermarket, I noticed that I was the only one lugging home two-liter bottles of Coke (or Sprite, as a break from Coke), sliced bread, rice, cans of tuna, Knorr seasoning, and Nescafe instant coffee. Everyone else seemed to be stocking up, logically enough, on the best of the region. Central Italy’s one of the world’s best places for truffles, and, one Sunday, most of my batchmates went off on a truffle binge, to a local restaurant that served nothing but truffles in various dishes—pasta, quiche, etc.—for a very reasonable sum. I, of course, stayed home with my canned tuna, secretly lusting for the pig that found the truffles (here, though, they use dogs, because the pigs, being even smarter than I am, eat the truffles).

One of my best buddies at Civitella was the renowned cartoonist known as “Lat,” the Malaysian equivalent of his late friend Larry Alcala, whose depictions of kampung life are both mordant and hilarious. A practicing Muslim who likes Elvis and Patsy Cline, Lat couldn’t share in the wine and the porchetta, but he must’ve seen how homesick I was when he slipped me a packet of what turned out to be dried anchovies, which his wife packed into his bag. That packet was my lifesaver, imparting a salty lick of the ocean to nearly everything I ate, from my macaroni soup (rigatoni, actually, but of course all pasta except spaghetti is macaroni to us Pinoys) to my rice.

Late in our residency, Lat and I decided to run off to Venice, where neither of us had ever been, and that will be part of next week’s concluding piece on my Italian sojourn.

Penman for Monday, June 6, 2011

IT'S OFTEN said that a man’s home is his castle, but now and then, once in a lucky while, a castle is his home. That’s been my unusual lot for a month now, here at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, near Perugia in the region of Umbria in Central Italy, where I’m working on my third novel—and, when I need a break, on odd jobs like this column, which I’ve been putting off for as long as I could.

The Civitella Ranieri is actually a 15th-century castle, standing on a hilltop overlooking the broad Tiber valley, with turrets, stone walls, and heavy wooden doors of the kind you see in medieval costume dramas. The family tree which is the first thing you encounter upon entering the castle keep goes back a thousand years, and counts a Pope and two cardinals. The recorded history of the Ranieris is a colorful and bloody one, including at least one massacre while they were sleeping in bed in the late 1300s. The castle itself has survived wars and earthquakes, and it’s uncanny to be living in a place that essentially hasn’t changed for centuries.


In 1968, the late American benefactress Ursula Corning, a relative of the Ranieris, decided to lease the castle indefinitely, so it could be used as an international retreat for writers, visual artists, and musicians. Every year, in batches, several dozen such fellows are invited from around the world to spend five to six weeks at the castle to work on their projects, to rest, to enjoy the art- and history-rich environs, and to interact with one another. Fellows get free airfare and board and lodging; their spouses or partners can join them, but only for the last three days (making it too expensive for me to fly Beng over, especially since I have to fly back right after my fellowship to start teaching in June).

I don't mean for this to sound like a boastful habit or a habitual boast, but as it happens, I’ve lived in castles and villas before—and not just for overnight stays, either, but for weeks on end. That’s what you get for applying to fellowships and residencies in princely places to write, ironically enough, about the Third-World miseries of home. Like quite a few other Filipino writers, I’ve had the privilege of enjoying residencies in such places as Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, another 15th-century castle overlooking the River Esk not far from Edinburgh, and close to the Rosslyn Chapel whose equanimity was disturbed by the fanciful fiction of The Da Vinci Code; this was where I wrote much of Penmanship and Other Stories over a month in 1994. A picture window looking out on a lakeful of swans and ducks in Norwich, England served as the backdrop for initial work on Soledad’s Sister, pursued later in a villa in Bellagio, Italy, perched above and between Lakes Como and Lecco. On my second visit to Italy in 2005, I spent some time in the mountain fortress of Cervara di Roma, not too far from Rome.

Whether all that majestic beauty necessarily translates to good artistic production is another matter which I’ll discuss next week, but just so you don’t have to hold your breath, let me tell you right now that in my experience—and that of other artists I’ve spoken with—our best work often happens on the run, produced in dinky, oppressive, everyday surroundings and situations.



But these retreats, as the word implies, provide space and time for the imagination to rest and to recover, removed from its accustomed orientation, and allow it to take risks and to explore other possibilities. The artist’s body rests as well, given a respite from its daily chores. Sooner or later, we do get down to work, whether out of guilt or sheer routine, but the refreshment of the mind, body, and spirit is a retreat’s greatest boon to the artist.

Six Filipinos have preceded me to Civitella: the musicians Jose Maceda, Ramon Santos, and Josefino Toledo; the LA-based artist Reanne Augustin Estrada; and the writers Eric Gamalinda and Gina Apostol; after me will come the New York-based artist Lan Tuazon and novelist Miguel Syjuco. This isn’t a workshop, so there are no panelists and sessions here, only fellows. My batch includes the composers Martin Bresnick (US), Marc Ducret (France), Oliver Schneller (Germany), and Vanessa Tomlinson (Australia); the visual artists Lat (Malaysia), Yael Kanarek (US), Loredana Longo (Italy), Pat Oleszko (US), and Jorge Queiroz (Portugal); and, aside from myself, the writers Alexander Chee (US), Eliza Griswold (US), and Phillip Lopate (US). We were also joined at various points by several Director’s Guests, accomplished individuals invited for shorter stays: writers Julia Glass and Cynthia Hoffman, philosopher Richard Lee, and visual artist Catherine Lord, all from the US. (Of note, the acclaimed composer Oliver Schneller, now based in his native Germany, has many fond memories of his school days at the International School in Manila, where he went when his father was assigned here as director of the Goethe Institut in the early 1980s.)

Each fellow is assigned a spacious suite containing a bedroom, a studio, a small dining room, and a toilet. The musicians and composers, who tend to make what others might consider noise, may be farmed out to corners or even separate villas around the premises. Each suite has a name, and mine—“Pontenuovo”—denotes the “bridge” that was built in more recent centuries between one wing of the castle and another; my three rooms on the third floor look out to the inner courtyard on one side and to the garden, the valley, and the mountains on the other. It’s not a five-star hotel and wasn’t meant to be one. While every effort has been made to introduce modern necessities and amenities where possible and suitable, the furniture is not just antique but ancient; my door closes not with a key but a hammered iron bolt. At the same time, the entire grounds are covered by wi-fi, and photoelectric sensors light up the hallways and staircases as soon as you step into them.

Given that all the residents here are artists with different body clocks and habits of work, there are few schedules observed in Civitella. Breakfast is to each his own—a good thing, because it allows me to start the day with rice. Lunch is served at 1:00 pm, in three-level metal “lunchboxes”, typically containing some salad and some pasta, each one coded to the fellow’s suite and mindful of the fellow’s preferences and peculiarities (mine says “no cheese”). Bread and fruit are also always available, along with the ubiquitous olive oil and balsamic vinegar. We can take these back to our rooms, although, on sunny days, we might sit in the garden and have lunch together. Each fellow is expected to wash and return his or her lunchbox back to the kitchen. (After a couple of weeks, I opted out of lunch entirely, preferring to work late, wake up late, and have a hearty brunch of rice, tuna, egg, and banana.)


Dinner is served at 7:30 either at the Volte dining room or in the garden, and it’s the only time of the day when all the fellows are expected to gather together, often joined by Civitella’s executive director, the writer-painter Dana Prescott. Every now and then we make individual half-hour presentations, in which we introduce ourselves and our work to the others.

The Italian-speaking Dana and her husband Don are Americans who have lived and worked for many years in Italy, and have come to love the country and its culture so much that they have acquired Italian citizenship. Dana’s deep and insightful knowledge of Italian art and her impeccable taste allow her to authoritatively curate our occasional sorties to places of interest around the region like Gubbio, Arezzo, and Monterchi and even as far afield as Urbino and Florence, without neglecting the fun side of things.

On Sundays, we’re left entirely on our own, so some fellows might drive into Umbertide—about five minutes away—for pizza, or cook in the castle kitchen; I, of course, see Sunday as my all-rice day.

Over the next couple of Mondays, I’ll sum up this experience by talking about the writing itself, my companions, and personal discoveries of Italy gleaned from my Umbrian holiday.

Penman for Monday, May 30, 2011


IT MAY be silly and presumptuous to introduce a book that hasn’t even been accepted yet for publication, but humor me as I compose this piece—here in my Umbrian hermitage about which I’ll write some other time—trying to justify why I just emailed a collection of my poems to a friend who just might be foolish enough to publish them.

This friend, a publisher, had asked me some time ago if I had any unpublished manuscripts left that she could consider for her press, and I had quickly said no, certain that I had exhausted even my juvenilia (I finally yielded my first Palanca-winning story from 1975, a fanciful piece titled "Agcalan Point" which I was never happy with, to Ateneo’s Kritika Kultura last year). And then I suddenly remembered that I had a rarely-visited folder somewhere in my computer, and finding both challenge and opportunity in my friend’s inquiry, I boldly went where I had never gone before and said, “Well, how about my poems?”

If my friend looked surprised by my response, she should have been; I, too, felt instantly embarrassed by my audacity. At 57, I’ve written and published over 20 books and edited as many others, but never a book of my poems. Very few people know that they exist, and I myself practically forgot about them; I’m not even sure they’d qualify as publishable poems, by today’s standards, which seem to eschew rhyme, fun, and things too comfortably familiar. Many of my poems were and are jokes, happy to be met with a few chuckles; I find—the philistine—that I can't much appreciate poems that I can’t read aloud or memorize, or that I need a thesaurus or Google for.

In his introduction to my first book, Oldtimer and Other Stories, in 1984, Franz Arcellana mentioned that he expected me, at some point, to publish a book of poems. I remember being mystified by that remark, because I simply couldn’t imagine it happening. I had written stories, plays, and screenplays, and even some doggerel for Jimmy Abad’s poetry class, which I attended as an undergraduate returning from almost a decade of dropping out. But seriously good poetry was for me then—as it still is, today—something that better writers wrote.

But indeed it was poetry, not fiction, that brought me back to school. Not my poetry, which was non-existent, but that of Robert Graves, that prolific, white-maned Englishman who lived to be 100, had a tempestuous love life, and who reportedly rendered speechless our own young Nick Joaquin, who went to visit him in Majorca. (You can find the Gravesian influence all over “Summer Solstice” and “May Day Eve,” but that’s another story.) I came to know about Graves and his unabashedly male—but not macho—poetry through Cesar Ruiz Aquino, on the boat that took us to Dumaguete in 1981, where he was a panelist and I was a fellow at the workshop.

By the end of that summer I was so intoxicated by the stuff that I gave up my job and went back to school for an English degree, supported only by Beng’s charity. If I had any doubts about whether I had done the right thing, they quickly vanished when I heard a video, at the old British Council, of the poems of Dylan Thomas being read by Thomas himself. I say “heard”, because you didn’t see the poet, just visual interpretations of such stirring pieces as “Fern Hill” and “Poem in October.” That last poem begins with “It was my thirtieth year to heaven…” and I was 27 at the time, but I felt like the poem had been written for me. When I went to class, it was to savor the sonneteers—Wyatt, Sidney, and of course Shakespeare himself. I soon discovered more poets whose voices resonated in me: Rilke, Lorca, Dickey, Larkin, Neruda, Cavafy. In my own work, I was happily married to fiction—but poetry was that dark-eyed witch who could quicken my blood within seconds of glimpsing her in the window.

I began writing more of what literally passed for poetry for a graduate class in Wisconsin under a professor named Robert Siegel—a very fine poet, going by the comments on his own work ("To meet the unpretentious versatility of Robert Siegel after the single-mindedness of other poets is like returning to the mainland after a tour of the islands," said the Times Literary Supplement). One day, he called me to his office and said, “This Septych poem—do you know that it has 49 lines?” I honestly did not, and was surprised that he had bothered to count them. I came out thinking that my intuition was probably working harder than I imagined, and that maybe I was on to something. After that semester, I had about a dozen poems, most of them about Pinoy life in the USA, and having nothing more to do with them, I sent them off to the Palancas in Manila, and promptly forgot about them.

Of all the literary prizes I’ve won, the one I’m proudest of is the second-prize Palanca (or, technically, one-third of it) that I received for that small collection titled “Pinoy Septych and Others Poems” which I submitted, anonymously of course, in 1990. It didn’t matter to me that I had to share that prize, modest as it was, with two other winners—Fidelito Cortes and Jaime An Lim. This was back when the Palancas allowed prize-splitting—trading, I suppose, a little cash for a lot more glory. If anything, I was ecstatic to have been able to slip into that realm, the naked swimmer in a pool of Philippine poetry’s great white sharks (Ricky de Ungria shared the first prize with himself, for “Body English and “Decimal Places”; the third prize was shared by Luisa Igloria, Neil Garcia, and Lina Sagaral Reyes.)

I’ve never joined a poetry competition since, because I just haven’t written that much more, and still don’t and can’t think of myself as a poet, 1990’s fluke victory notwithstanding. Indeed I cringe when I hear the word “poet” tossed around at universities and workshops the way a bored and sleepy dealer hands out the cards at a poker table, and the way a losing player desperate for a pair of aces grabs them. I suspect that poets should wait to be called that by others; until then we just write poems, or try to. Poetry remains for me the hardest thing to write well and the easiest thing to do badly.

Whatever happens, this slim book, if it gets published, will very likely be my first and last fling with poetry. That should make it something of a novelty or even a collector’s item, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be doing most of the collecting.

Penman for Monday, May 23, 2011


IT WAS a bit of a shock when I realized a week ago that, as of last Saturday, 20 years would have passed since the film director Lino Brocka died in a car crash on East Avenue in Quezon City. The awareness of his impending death anniversary came to me when I was reading a book—Filipino Directors Up Close: The Golden Years of Philippine Cinema, 1950-2010—that its author, Bibsy Carballo, had gifted me with some time ago. I had glossed over the date of his passing once or twice in the essay about him until it hit me that May 21, 1991 was almost exactly two decades ago.

I was away when that happened. I had just finished my graduate studies in America and was about to come home (and I would within three weeks, just in time to catch the ashfall from Pinatubo). I can’t even remember who called me on the phone to tell me the terrible news. This was long before email and the Internet became as we know them today, long before cellphones and SMS.

Over the five years of my stay in the US, Lino had kept in touch by long-distance phone to give me jobs and to talk about projects. He had a habit of calling me from Manila without thinking about what time it was in Milwaukee, but that was all right. He loved to talk on the phone, so the bills must have been horrendous, but he kept me employed, knowing that I needed to make extra money for my family back home, since I could barely support myself with my teaching assistantship.

(Typically, on June 14, 1989, I would write him, by mail: “…. By the way, are you familiar with Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, which dealt with Filipino immigrants in California in the 30s? That was a great novel, and it's been one of my dreams to do a screen adaptation of it—maybe for TV, when we get the chance?... I know you'll want or need something more contemporary for this SF project, so I'll work on that. Give me another couple of weeks, unless you need it rush-rush. And I haven't forgotten the Toronto and post-Marcos things. As it is, this is all I plan on doing this summer (think of storylines, at least; Viva's final payment will be enough for me to live on, I think). I thought I was going to do another script for XXX, but it fell through because I couldn't, for the life of me, do just minor surgery on the script they sent me of XXX’s other radio serial; I don't exaggerate when I say that this is the worst movie script I have ever read—great for high camp, but of course they want it dead serious—more baby switches, lost mothers, etc.; I gave them a completely rewritten storyline, but they said they preferred to stick to the original, anyway, so I just said fine, whatever you wish, but I'd rather do something else....”)

We ended up doing about 14 movie projects together over his lifetime. Lino has nearly 70 movies in his filmography, and for most of those he relied on a stable of writers that came to include, most prominently, Pete Lacaba, Ricky Lee, and Joey Reyes (Mario O’Hara, Doy del Mundo, and Orlando Nadres, of course, also wrote memorable scripts for Brocka). Ricky and I would figure out years later that Pete got all the serious, pang-award assignments like Jaguar and Orapronobis because he was the slowest one among us, an accusation Pete has not disputed; Joey got the dramatically masalimuot projects like Adultery (Aida Macaraeg); Ricky and I got the scripting jobs that had to be finished within two to three weeks (working, mind you, on typewriters with onion skin and carbon paper, making cut-and-paste revisions nearly unthinkable). I wrote one script (1981’s Dalaga si Misis, Binata si Mister) so fast, in three days, on a schedule so tight that I didn’t even see the movie when it was done.

Today, when people ask me about Lino Brocka and what I did for him, I tell them, only half in jest, that I wrote the scripts for some of Lino’s most forgettable movies. You’d have to be a diehard Brocka or Pinoy movie fan to remember Burgis (1981) and Hello, Young Lovers (1981), our contribution to the Bagets genre. To be a little kinder on myself, I must say that I was privileged to write such blockbuster dramas and tearjerkers as Tahan Na, Empoy, Tahan (1977), Ina Ka ng Anak Mo (1979), and Maging Akin Ka Lamang (1987), as well as the small but lively comedy Inay (1977) and the politically charged Miguelito, Ang Batang Rebelde (1985). (Please don’t ask me about the movie titles, which will take another column to explain; the short answer is, producers provide the titles, sometimes even before anything else, as was the case with Hello, Young Lovers). In what would become something of a pattern, Lino would do two or three unabashedly commercial projects, so he could earn enough credits to do something more aesthetically or politically risky.

It was at PETA and its Raha Sulayman theater, where I’d cut my dramatic teeth in the early ‘70s, that I met Lino Brocka. He saw one of my plays, and invited me to write for his drama anthology on Channel 2, Lino Brocka Presents. (It proved to be a terrific training ground, even and especially for my subsequent fiction: when you need to work within one studio, within one day, with no more than two cameras and two sets, you learn dramatic economy well and quickly.) I got my break into the movies in 1977, when he asked me to develop a script for a project that would become Mananayaw (1978), with Chanda Romero; in the meanwhile, Tahan Na, Empoy (with Niño Muhlach) and Inay (with Alicia Vergel) got made first.

Lino was thoroughly professional—he discussed the storyline, the sequence treatment, and the script with you, but not overbearingly, giving you enough leeway to develop your own ideas; when he had to make changes to the script during the actual shooting, he told you about it, and told you why. But beyond his professionalism, he was kind and generous to a fault, making sure that everyone on the set—especially the lowest-paid workers—got their due, often dipping into his own pockets (never bulging to begin with) to give out loans to other artists and persons even needier than he was.

I would come to know and work with many other directors after Lino, and almost without exception, I found each one of them a different challenge, in a positive way. Today, many new, young directors have also emerged, especially on the “indie” scene, brimming with talent and energy (last April, during the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio, I had the pleasure of watching Khavn de la Cruz’s marvelous Son of God, which had even National Artist Bien Lumbera clapping after the screening). But as many claimants as there have been to his mantle, Lino Brocka remains unique in that combination of artistic vision and humanity that he possessed. His art was never just a means to glory, or a manifesto for a cause; it was a job he took on and performed diligently, knowing how many others depended on him for their economic and artistic survival.

(Photo of Lino Brocka courtesy of the Philippine Star.)

Penman for Monday, May 16, 2011


ON THE heels of Miguel Syjuco’s acclaimed Ilustrado comes another important breakthrough for Filipino fiction in the international market. Marivi Soliven Blanco, author of the bestselling Suddenly Stateside expat essays and the Spooky Mo horror stories and who’s now based in San Diego, California with her husband John, has sold her new novel, In the Service of Secrets, to Penguin Books. I’ve often complained about the lack of humor in our novels, despite the fact that we’re a funny people with a wicked comic nerve; well, here’s humor in spades.

When I visited with Marivi and John a couple of years ago, she was working on a novel for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month, an annual global frenzy that’s surprisingly given birth to more than a few decent efforts), and Secrets came out of that initial push. The novel, says Marivi, involves a mail-order bride, but “begins in Manila in the 1960s and follows three generations of a family and its servants all the way through to the mid-'90s in San Francisco and Oakland. It runs along two parallel story tracks, and bounces back and forth between the Duarte-Guerrero clan and the Obejas sisters (their servants).” Pinoy readers should find many of its locales—UP, Malate, the Hotel Intercontinental, and Cubao—thoroughly if disconcertingly familiar. Here’s a brief excerpt from the book—which should come out next year—that Marivi was kind enough to allow me to share with Penman readers:

“Beverly—over here!” The Filipina Sweetheart manager waved from an armchair at the far end of the lobby. She could tell Carmelo was sizing her up as she approached, and wondered if he was ticking off the checklist he called her “pointers for self-improvement”: hair worn long and flowing; tasteful make-up; elegant jewelry; a dress, never pants, hem no longer than knee length; pedicured toenails; open sandals. That last bit had been hard to manage with the heavy downpour, but she had carried her sandals in a plastic bag and put them on in the taxi.

“Ano ba yan, may supot ka pang dala—why are you carrying that plastic bag?” Carmelo stood up, tilting his head as he looked her over. “Ah good naman, you remembered to pluck those eyebrows. Aren’t you glad I forced you to take that make-up tutorial at Shear Beauty Salon?”

“Opo Mr. Capulong,” Beverly blushed. The previous weekend Carmelo’s dear friend Esperanza Datung, the salon’s glamorous transsexual Aesthetic Directress, had used Beverly’s face as a blank palette for a dizzying array of shadows, creams, and rouges. After demonstrating how to use each cosmetic, Esperanza coaxed Beverly into buying it “for practice at home.” In two hours, Beverly spent a fourth of her month’s salary on a handful of beauty in matching pink jars. “Até Esperanza taught me everything I need to know about make-up.”

“Good, good. That’s why I insist all my girls see her before meeting the guests. Best investment you’ll ever make.” Carmelo put a finger under Beverly’s chin to lift it. “I see you’re using Esperanza’s fave lipstick: Maiden Mauve. Very nice, very nice.”

He glanced lower and frowned. “Next time wear a strapless bra with that bateau neckline, ha? Only certain women—yung mga mababa ang lipad, those low-flying doves –expose their underwear. None of my girls are like that.“ Carmelo straightened her blouse, tucking the straps underneath its rim. “Ayan!” He spread his hands like a magician presenting his latest illusion. “See how much prettier it looks when you display those lovely collarbones? Trust me, hija, I’ve been doing this forever. I know what works. Now, don’t be nervous when I introduce you to Mr. Stein. Just give him your best smile, yes? SMILE like your heart will explode through those pretty lips.”

Beverly smiled, in spite of the clammy chill numbing her bare toes, the gnawing emptiness of her belly, and the cramp between her shoulder blades that came from standing as beauty-queen-straight as Esperanza had directed. She had come this far to claim happiness, and by God she was going to smile, even if it killed her.


THE OTHER bright light in the expat literary firmament is Patria C. Rivera, or “Patty” when she was our colleague at the Economic Information Staff of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) ages ago. Patty moved with her husband Joe and their four daughters to Canada in 1987 and have lived in Toronto since. While we knew her to be an outstanding journalist (Joe—now a retired lawyer—was also a talented playwright), no one knew, maybe not even Patty herself, that she was nursing a fine, keen poet within her, although she was already literarily inclined. She started as a junior reporter with Toronto's Catholic newspaper and rose up the ranks to become news editor. She now edits a magazine for the Canadian missions.

“One of the reasons why I wanted to come here was to follow and track Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, two of the world’s greatest story writers,” she says. “I used to read their stories from The New Yorker way back when we were still living in Quezon City. Had an inkling they were Canadian but didn’t know for sure until we arrived here. I’ve never met them in person yet but hope to someday.”

She reports that “The Toronto publishing industry is thriving, with titles appearing both in print and digitally. There is a hunger for good content, and readers are a mixed breed, because the city is very multicultural with more than 100 languages spoken, heard, and read.”

Today, Patria Rivera has two very well-received collections of poetry behind her. Her first, Puti/White, published by Frontenac House, was shortlisted for the 2006 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and was a co-winner of the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry. She has also published The Bride Anthology, also by Frontenac House, and co-authored Weathering: An Exchange of Poems. Her poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff's Implicate me: short essays on reading contemporary poems. She has received fellowships from the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat Centre in Scotland.

Her third collection, Be, was launched last May 2 in Toronto. “It aims,” she says, “to seek out the human in an increasingly inhumane world, using micropoetic narratives to explore the insular and peculiar ways that language and emotion scour the surfaces of unknown depths. The mode could be tragic or comic, but my goal was to stretch the context of the most ordinary things into new shapes and meanings.”

Here’s a poem from Be, titled “Afterwards”:

Maybe because the mass of old trees
was not visible from the house
the only signs of life
flourished in the modest flower
of my imagination

The old house run-down and peeling
stirred uncomfortably like a restless bird
in the heat-exhausted sky
The minutes shut in their concentration
the table returning
to tree with my profuse admiration

Most of the melody would go
in the height of that stumbled-across summer
All the wrong shoes and sandals
the accepted offer of a ride
the abandoned furniture
Not even a fan or photographs
on the table to overcome my embarrassment
The hurts came
at night one after the other
not just along with the crazy mail
which did no harm
when the season changed

And we drank the evening lying
in that solitude united
by the full length of our denials
because unlike the tears
when the pilgrims reached their destination
afterwards the house opened inside

Mabuhay kayo, Marivi and Patty!

Penman for Monday, May 9, 2011

I SAVED the Pangasinan leg from last week’s piece on our “Northern exposure” trip for another installment because I thought it merited its own report, given the two delightful architectural discoveries I mentioned.

Let me just repeat that our hosts in Pangasinan were the Arcinues—Titus and Luz—both of them retired physicians from California who came back home to see as much as they could of the homeland and also to live and do some business in it. Titus was born and grew up in Lingayen, and met Luz in medical school at the PGH in Manila. With the Quesadas who had organized the trip to as far north as Maira-ira in Ilocos Norte, our party rode down south in a convoy to Vigan and then to Lingayen with the Arcinues.

The first discovery we made was the home—indeed, the compound—of the Arcinues itself. Sitting on the banks of a tributary of the great Agno River, the Arcinues’ place would seem, at the gate, to be a ghostly ruin, with the empty hulk of a squarish gray building guarding the entrance.

And indeed it is a ruin, as the concrete shell is all that remains of the main building of the Colegio de la Nuestra Sra. del Santisimo Rosario, set up by the Dominicans toward the end of the 19th century; after the Second World War, the Columban sisters took over the property and opened the co-educational St. Columban Academy. As a boy, Edgardo “Titus” Arcinue had studied there; during one visit home from the US, he learned that the place was up for sale, and bought it. (“Imagine,” I remember thinking, “buying your old school—what sweet revenge!” The word “Columban” also rang a bell for me, because it was here that the subjects of one of my biographies—the lawyer Chito Buenaventura and his brother the late banker Paeng—had gone to school after the war. Businessman Hermie Disini had also studied there at about the same time.)

Titus and Luz have lovingly preserved the ruins, building around it and with it, transforming what had been stuffy old classrooms into comfortable living quarters; the graceful arches of the walls now act as hangers for exuberant growths of bougainvillea and as picture frames for views of the vegetable and fruit gardens. Close to the water’s edge, a spiral staircase leads up to an open balcony from which to enjoy the spell of sunset; as fires burn on the slopes of hills in the distance, fruit bats explode skyward from the dark recesses of the main building. The crumbling masonry, the wild and rambling foliage, the bats, and the bursts of floral color suggest a Gothic beauty; and yet, like an English garden, all that unruliness is deliberate and carefully planned.

It would be the perfect place to hole up and write a book—which is what Titus, an expert in pediatric critical care, plans to do: his memoirs and the story of his family, and also a historical novel on Diego and Gabriela Silang who, he notes, collaborated with the British against the Spanish forces. Otherwise, Dr. Arcinue is occupied by his high-tech chicken farm, which supplies chickens under contract to a major food company. The Columban sisters must have taught the young Titus well.

The other discovery we made was a building that Titus insisted on bringing our group to, for good reason. It was none other than the provincial capitol, a great Neoclassical yellow-ochre structure close to the waterfront facing Lingayen Gulf.


I’ve been to quite a few statehouses in my travels here and abroad, and I have to say that Pangasinan’s left me and my companions enthralled. Built in 1917, the building was completely renovated in 2007 by local architect Cris David during the first term of current Gov. Amado Espino, Jr., to whom the credit must go for giving not just his fellow politicians but his provincemates and the country a public building that all Filipinos could take pride in.

Neoclassical buildings (think of the Post Office and National Museum buildings in Manila) are an enduring legacy of American colonial rule, but they are among the easiest to mangle and destroy, physically and architecturally. Today, many of those remaining are blighted by unsightly add-ons, airconditioning exhausts, ghastly paint jobs, and crusty grime.

The Pangasinan capitol is a paean to grace and tastefulness, evoking a sense of nobility and purpose that all lawmakers should be imbued with and guided by. You get the impression that however much was devoted to the capitol's renovation, it was public money well spent. Nowhere do you get a hint of abuse or excess; everything seems just as it should be.

On the afternoon we visited, a steady flow of ordinary citizens streamed into the capitol, taking in the quiet grandeur of the place and eager to enjoy the breeze and the view from the capitol's open rooftop. There were no pompous security guards or search procedures to stop them. Truly it felt like a capitol of the people.

And it was no aberration: as we drove back to the Colegio, we paused at the nearby Sison Auditorium and the Narciso Ramos Sports Complex, and saw the same care for detail and openness to the public that we can only wish other local governments and communities would foster.


SPEAKING OF ruins and writing books, I’m away for the month (yes, at this very moment) in a 15th century castle in Umbria in central Italy, working on my third novel, thanks to a generous fellowship from the New York-based Civitella Ranieri Foundation (www.civitella.org).

A few Filipinos have preceded me here: the writers Eric Gamalinda and Gina Apostol, and the musicians Ramon Santos, Chino Toledo, and the late Jose Maceda. While not quite as well known to Filipinos as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center up north, the Civitella Center has been supporting writers, visual artists, and musicians from all over the world since 1968. The fellowships come by invitation only, so I feel doubly honored and doubly pressured to produce good work. Pray that these five weeks of enforced isolation away from home, family, and regular work result in something we can all be happy and proud to read.

Penman for Monday, May 2, 2011

I'VE ALWAYS believed that the best way to know a country is to see it, starting with one’s own. Thankfully, my late father Joe—who once worked for the Public Highways—often took me along when I was a boy on his sorties up north to places like Bayombong and La Union, and I grew up feverish with wanderlust, ever eager to see what was on the other side of the mountain or behind the next corner on the road.

We Pinoys have a word for such footloose folk—kaladkarin, the easily engaged, for whom the merest suggestion of a trip provokes a panic about which shirts and shoes to bring along. Beng and I are incorrigibly kaladkarin—I don’t think we’ve ever said no to an invitation to travel, and have made quite a few invitations ourselves—so when Beng’s UP High 1967 batchmates organized a Holy Week trip up north to the Ilocos and Pangasinan, we didn’t think twice and signed on.

It was a trip I hadn’t taken in more than 30 years. Once, in a previous life as a professional officer for the United Nations Development Program, I joined a couple of foreigner colleagues in a Toyota Land Cruiser on a weeklong northern swing that took us to Camalaniugan in Cagayan then back down through Isabela. I remember encountering the rugged beauty that many had written about our northern coast; in Camalaniugan, we crossed the river close to midnight on a ferry beneath a breathtaking spray of stars; by day, we sometimes had to cut directly across dry rice paddies in the Toyota to get around obstructions on the main highway.

This time our program was less strenuous. The trip was put together by balikbayans Primo “Bimbo” Quesada and his wife Vangie, who were vacationing from their hugely successful food processing and real estate businesses in California and Hawaii. Among other things, Vangie—who just happens to be the younger sister of the late lamented Fernando Poe, Jr.—wanted to visit the sand dunes of Paoay, where her kuya had shot much of his signature film, the original Panday.

We were accompanied on the trip by their batchmates Cynthia Cruz Conine, a former model, restaurateur, and food merchandiser who now divides her time between Manila and Manhattan; Lulu Palattad of the UP College of Home Economics, whose husband Fred gamely and expertly drove the Starex van that Beng and I rode in; and Myrna Uy and her son Joey, a bright young man who had spent some time down south as a Jesuit volunteer.

Our first destination, which we reached after a 12-hour drive that began at 2:30 am in Quezon City, was Pagudpud in Ilocos Norte. While not quite as wide and white, the beaches of Pagupud can rival those of Boracay, with the advantage that it’s a lot cheaper to get there than to Boracay, and there’ll be far smaller crowds to deal with (or be a part of). Holy Week accommodations anywhere, of course, come at a premium, and our group had to split up here between the Villa del Mar and Saud beach resorts. The wide lagoon behind the hotels was just as interesting as the beachfront, with large flocks of ducks homing there, and egrets resting like white confetti on the deep green foliage.


Pagudpud was well worth the long trip, because it has much more than beaches to offer; nearby, within a 30-minute drive, lie a surfer’s haven in Maira-ira’s “Blue Lagoon”; the “hanging bridge” hugging the mountainside in Patapat; the otherworldly windmills in Bangui; and, harking back to another time as does most of the Ilocos, the windworn Bojeador lighthouse in Burgos, from where a spectacular view of the coast can be seen. From such eyries, with little but green shrubbery, brown earth, and blue ocean on the horizon, Ilocos’ history, soaked in sweat and blood, can perhaps best be imagined—a hardy people taming the land, kneeling before the majesty of a Christian God and yet not quite so willing to be subservient to the white man’s lordship.


Much of that past remains visible and accessible in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, to where we headed after a couple of nights in Pagudpud, stopping briefly to take in the magnificence of Paoay’s 18th-century church and to gorge on the scrumptious empanadas of Batac. In Paoay, we also made the obligatory visit to the sand dunes, and toured the so-called “Malacañang of the North,” the Marcos home whose upkeep has been more logically assumed by the provincial government. (I always wonder if the surviving Marcoses are aware of what a postmodern parody the flaunting of Imelda’s penchant for designer shoes and handbags makes; they were on display again in Paoay, against bizarre if accurate caricatures of the Madame.)




This is all over the tourist brochures, but Vigan is truly a window on a bygone age, on the lifestyle and culture of a now-citified gentry. It must be said, of course, that they are the houses of the wealthy and the powerful that most often endure, and so a history of the lives of the common folk must be inscribed elsewhere, by some other means. But just as enduring as the rock that forms the foundation of Vigan’s old houses is our unabashedly plebeian fascination with the lives of the rich, or of those who once were, and so entry to Vigan’s grand heritage houses had to be on our itinerary.



It didn't hurt that we were welcomed to Vigan by Vice Mayor (and reportedly soon to be Congressman) Ryan Singson, an old family friend of Cynthia’s who also owned and managed the Vigan Plaza Hotel with his lovely wife Patch. A hotelier by training, the low-key and affable Ryan proved the perfect host, leading us on a walking tour of the city’s most picturesque street, Calle Crisologo (at the head of which the writer Leona Florentino’s house has been turned into a café), and then into the family home—the first of several Vigan houses we would be treated to. (Beng and I couldn’t help noticing a painting by another son of the Ilocos, Juan Luna, in the hallway.)



While the Singson home was clearly a residence in current use—kids were splashing about in the swimming pool outside—the Quema house across the street was much more like a time capsule. Built in the first half of the 1800s, the Quema house has been wonderfully maintained and restored in pretty much the same condition it was in a century ago. As if to underscore the historical value of the place, we ran into the veteran cinematographer Dik Trofeo during the visit, and he told me how he had shot El Filibusterismo for director Gerry de Leon in the same house back in the 1960s. (It turned out that some scenes for FPJ’s Panday had also been shot there—and that a young and then not-very-well-known American actor named Tom Cruise had walked in from a shooting one day and had broken the mechanism on a folding table.)

The next morning, we left for Lingayen, but not before a tour of the Syquia-Quirino mansion, another impressive repository of interesting objects and memories, including a hauntingly beautiful portrait of the presidential daughter Vicky Quirino. We learned from caretaker Rusty—who had lived there all his 62 years—that the Quirino heirs had done the good thing and set up a foundation to ensure that all the objects in the house would remain there and be properly cared for.


Up in Pagudpud, we had met up with two retired physicians from Pasadena, Edgardo “Titus” Arcinue, Sr. and his wife Luz; they would host us on our next and last stop in Lingayen, and I’m reserving that report for next week, because of two architectural wonders we unexpectedly ran into in Pangasinan that deserve more than a passing mention, as do the Arcinues.

Many thanks, before I forget, to former Judge Fulgencio Vigare for the hearty Ilocano breakfast at his roadside restaurant in Burgos, and, of course, to Bimbo and Vangie Quesada for their unstinting generosity and lively company.

Penman for Monday, April 18, 2011

IT'S ALWAYS a pleasure to be back up in Baguio for our annual UP National Writers Workshop, and that’s where we are and what we’re up to again as I peck away at this piece on my laptop. We’ve traditionally gone up on Easter Sunday, but with Holy Week falling late in April this year, we decided to move up the workshop a couple of weeks earlier.

And it was a good thing we did, because we got up just in time to celebrate the birthday of National Artist Benedicto “Bencab” Cabrera with the artist himself in his sprawling hillside museum. A visit and merienda with Bencab has become a workshop tradition over the past few years—we’ve seen that museum literally rise out of a hillside—and while our métier is writing and Bencab’s is painting, it’s always good for the workshop fellows to see how an artist can work and succeed with perseverance, vision, and, of course, abounding talent and energy.

Every time we’ve returned to that museum, something new has been added to the place—not just more galleries and more objects, but more terraced gardens, more walks, and now a café and—for private use—a large meditation room with a glass window framing a ribbon of water running down the rockface. Leading to and away from this room were shrubs of coffee and beds of strawberry.

I wasn’t surprised to hear from Ben’s gracious wife Annie Sarthou that hundreds of visitors—many of them schoolchildren—come to visit the museum every day. The museum works outside as well as inside—as a showcase of both modern and indigenous art and of architecture that rises above the landscape but also blends seamlessly into it.

When we went there, it was the sunniest it had ever been in all our years of pilgrimage to the place; by the time we departed, approaching six, the fog had rolled into the valley, muting the brightness and sharpness of the colors and lines of the museum. The workshop fellows left with a sense of the purposefulness of art, of its public, welcoming aspect. That’s what a visit with Bencab always does for us, and again, on behalf of the workshop, I’d like to thank him and Annie for the privilege.


THE WORKSHOP itself got off to a rousing start with a discussion of—among others—two pieces by two young women writers in English, both of whom happened to be students of mine in UP many years ago. I should add here that we’ve reoriented the UP workshop for some time now to focus on what we call mid-career writers who’ve already published at least one book, given that many other workshops now address the needs of absolute beginners. It’s in mid-career that the writer—long out of the university and working by his or her lonesome—needs reaffirmation, some form of assurance that one’s travails have been and will be worth it, despite the absence or the shortage of recognition and remuneration for one’s creative labors.

The first writer whose work we took up was Jennifer Ortuoste, a mother of two who came with a very interesting background in journalism (she’s now doing a PhD in Journalism in UP) and horseracing. Yes, horseracing—she used to ride horses as an apprentice jockey and was married to a professional jockey, and has had a long and distinguished career as a horseracing announcer, columnist, and historian. Last year, she attended Dr. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo’s class in Creative Nonfiction, and blew the class away with a piece on Sta. Ana Park, juxtaposing the racetrack’s history with snippets from her personal life.

In Baguio, Jenny presented a longer work, something approaching autobiography—a memoir of growing up in troubled circumstances, and of keeping herself whole and well in an adulthood steeped in heartache. It’s a narrative worthy of a telenovela, but what I appreciated most was the acuity of the storyteller’s eye. For example:

“This ceramic pig was a family heirloom. No one remembers where it was bought or where it came from to begin with. But it was meant to be used as a coin bank—there was a slit on its top. It was about as large as a real pig, made from white ceramic, and encrusted all over with faux pearls, rhinestones, and other glittery bijoux. Its mouth was open in a smile; its tongue was of soft red felt and its teeth were pearl beads. I would wiggle my fingers into its mouth to touch the tongue, which was the only soft part of the pig, and run my hands all over its encrustations. I didn’t give that pig a name; somehow it seemed beyond that, for I knew it was older than I was. It first belonged to Lola Bennett’s mother, my great-grandmother, who always wrote her name in her books thus: Dña Marciana Ledesma vda. de Lacson—and naming her pig would have been presumptuous on my part. That pig looms large in the family mythos. One creased color photograph from 1968 shows me, less than a year old, pink and chubby all on fours on a blue chenille bedspread beside that pig, wearing only a toothy grin. People who see that picture comment on the resemblance.”

Yvette Tan, whose session I moderated, is a writer of horror fiction, a genre that we Pinoys—with all that’s happening around us—should be naturals at writing and reading, but which has been surprisingly under-represented in our literature. Yvette submitted three stories, asking that the last one, “Stars,” be taken up because it seemed to be the one that needed the most help—and indeed it was. Dealing with a sea monster that turns out to be divine, the story was, as yet, unrealized, and Yvette received some helpful suggestions for reworking the material.

What most impressed us, however, was her other story titled “Seek Ye Whore,” a pun on “Siquijor,” involving two white American men who order brides from the Philippines by mail. We’ve encountered that deplorable situation before, but Yvette Tan brings a new twist to the practice: the women come in boxed pieces, literally, from siquijorbrides.com: first the right leg, then the left, and so on, and without waiting for their bodies to be completed, the women make love to the men, to the point that the men start complaining (“I’m not in the mood!” one says, one of many ironic reversals. Also, the more sex they have, the weaker the men become, to the point of bodily corruption and disintegration:

“Foster stared at the person in the wheelchair. Donovan smiled back at him. Or at least one side of his face did. The other side sagged, drool pooling at the side of is mouth. He had gained an enormous amount of weight over the weeks, so that his once-fit frame was now bloated, his flesh sagging over the wire that kept him in place, parts of it cutting deep groves into the fat. He was dressed in boxer shorts, a wifebeater, and socks. He had wet himself recently, the stain on his crotch still wet, the stink still new. His skin was covered in sores, some of them ripe, some of them oozing a thick, greenish liquid. His limbs were thin from lack of use. His left leg looked gangrenous, as if it was being eaten alive from the inside. And yet Donovan's smile, despite being half paralyzed, was genuine, and sane.”

It’s bizarre, it’s horrifying—as a good horror story should be.

Penman for Monday, April 11, 2011


I'D BEEN meaning to write a piece like this for some time now—an omnibus review of assorted things that have caught my fancy that my readers might want to check out for themselves. They’re not really about books or paintings or movies, but you can think of them as the hardware of art and culture, the odd objects and little pleasures that make life just a tad more bearable and comprehensible.

I’ve been talking a lot about music and radio lately, so I’ll begin with an accessory that I never leave home without these days. First, let me just say that I’ve long subscribed to the notion that you shouldn’t skimp on things you’ll be using everyday—your glasses, your phone, your watch, your pen, your shoes (not that you’ll have just one pair, of course). You’ll want these to work well and to be comfortable all the time. You won’t want them to be too expensive that you can’t afford to lose them, because you likely will. But you also don’t want to be so cheap that you’ll be starting your day with a complaint about why you can’t understand a thing on your tinny, gurgly P1,000 car radio.

That brings me back to the art of listening, which requires not only taste but a little technology. Having grown up in a time when “stereophonic” and “hi-fi” were big words describing what the fellow next door had and you didn’t, I’m still amazed by how clear and pure sound can get, even if it’s just some polyphonic cellphone ringtone. You can imagine my surprise when I first used earphones that didn’t come in the box with the phone or the iPod, that I actually had to pay good money for. These, I remember, were Shure E3c’s that cost about $99 when new, and when I put them on the only thing I could say was, “Oh my God, I feel like my mother cleaned out my ears for the first time since 1966!”

Like I said a couple of weeks ago, I’m no audiophile, and surely can’t find my way around an audio shop. But I can appreciate a good pair of earphones, and those Shures became my constant companion for more than a year; I liked them so much that I gave my new son-in-law his own set as a present. Then one day I just couldn’t find them, and I felt bereft. By this time that specific model had gone out of production, so I had to content myself with replacing them with Shure SE115’s, in the same price range but not quite the old pair; these were so big and round that I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was sticking a beetle in each ear every time I used them.

The Shures were followed by a succession of other pretenders to the “best earphones” throne: two models of Ultimate Ears, another couple of Sennheisers, and then, finally, thanks to a blog post I came across, I discovered the A-Jays Four, which had everything I was looking for in a pair of earphones.

Made in Sweden, the A-Jays Four not only has great sound (don't ask me about highs and lows—all I can say is, it’s all clear and sharp to me, from the Rolling Stones to Yo-Yo Ma); it also has flat cables (like black fettuccini) that minimize all that twisting and tangling, it has an L-shaped plug that puts less stress on the connection, and best of all, it sports a microphone that also contains the remote to control the volume, song selection, and (perhaps the coolest feature of all) voice commands, including voice dialing on the iPhone 4.

If you’re looking for a better alternative to the stock earphones that come with your IP4 (or most other phones, for that matter), it’s hard to do better than the A-Jays Four. You can get it online from Hong Kong for about US$70, but if you can’t stand the three-week shipping wait and can afford the mark-up, you can get them from www.jaysphilippines.com, with free and fast shipping, for P4,500. The earphones will come to you impressively packaged, with spare buds in several sizes for that perfect fit. I’ve been using them for a couple of months now, and have even gotten myself a spare set, against the day when I lose the first one or when it wears out (loss is the greater likelihood, these earphones being made of materiales fuertes).

Let’s move on to something different altogether. I was at Shangri-La Mall a few weeks ago to have some vintage watches cleaned by my suki guys at WorldWatch, near the Rustan’s escalator. (They say that I’ve driven so much business to them that they keep insisting on giving me fat discounts on their services, and I just as insistently pay them fairly, because I don’t ever want them to go out of business, for the sake of my vintage Hamiltons and Wittnauers.) But this has less to do with good watches than good food.

As it was approaching lunchtime, I went back up to the ground floor in search of a place to eat, and remembered a restaurant that a friend of mine had opened. It was called Pages, and I’d been there once before with my friend Jojo Paje and her daughter Maita. I’d wanted to write about it afterwards, but not until I’d paid for my own meal (I’m sure you’ve heard a thing or two about food bloggers and freebies), so I snuck up to Pages (along the walk, streetside), and had the same thing I had before, just because I liked it so much: the Hungarian sausage—big, fat, and juicy, served on bread with a tangy mayonnaise and potato crisps. There was much more to choose from—“Animal Farm,” a turkey and ham sandwich, and “The Red Badge of Courage,” a pastrami treat described as “a soldier’s sandwich through and through, pastrami on rye with Emmental cheese and sauerkraut—no deserters allowed!”

You can credit Pages’ literarily smart menu (the chicken sandwich is, of course, “To Kill a Mockingbird”) to the talented Maita, a French-speaking bookworm who’s been helping Jojo out at the restaurant (while dad Ramon battles illegal loggers and other environmental miscreants as Secretary of the DENR). But don't judge these books by their covers or titles: the food is genuinely yummy, at prices that won’t make you weep. Give Pages a turn one of these days—it’s a great place as well for beer, coffee, and spirited conversation.


Lastly, for my fellow lovers of fine writing instruments, I’d like to introduce two lines of ink that you might want to buy as much for the stylishly collectible bottles they come in as for their coloring. I won a bottle of the Pilot-produced Iroshizuku ink in the dark-brown Yama-Guri shade as a prize in one of our pen-group meetings, and I haven’t stopped looking at the bottle since. I know, I should be writing with it, but that’s almost like guzzling a bottle of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1945 just because you’re thirsty.

I also received a gift of three bottles of Pelikan’s new high-end Edelstein ink in onyx, topaz, and the lovely green aventurine, none of which will make my penmanship more readable, but again, for those with more expressive hands and worthy pens, these inks are as exquisite as they come. For now you can get the Iroshizuku only by ordering from abroad, online, but the Edelsteins (along with the J. Herbin line) are available at Scribe Writing Essentials in Eastwood Mall. Happy cursive trails!

Penman for Monday, April 4, 2011


I'VE BEEN to Hong Kong quite often since my first visit in 1987, and thanks to the generosity of sponsors and friends, I’ve been fortunate enough to taste some of the good life out there during my most recent trips: swanky hotels, limousine service, and what a TV host used to call “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” And thanks to our daughter Demi’s job with a major hotel chain, Beng and I have been able to get sizeable discounts at fine hotels all over the world—you know, the kind of place where they greet you with fruit baskets and a personal welcome letter from the manager, signed with a Montblanc (and, conversely, charge you something like $20 a day for the wifi).

Of course, it wasn’t always like that. Like most Pinoy tourists, we used to check into the usual cheap hotels in Kowloon or the New Territories as part of a budget tour package that included a mandatory visit to the same jade factory and the same outlet shop for the nth time. “Breakfast included” meant a coupon to the next-door McDonalds.

Last week, Beng and I took a trip back to the old days. We went to Hong Kong, to burn up some expiring Mabuhay Miles. That meant the ticket was free (at least before the hefty surcharges and taxes kicked in) but we had to find our own lodgings, so I sent the usual parental SOS to Demi, who told us that, this time, we were out of luck; because we were flying into Hong Kong on the week of an international film festival and a big flower show, no discounted rooms were available anywhere on her hotel chain.

So off I went to Google, keying in “Hong Kong hotels.” Within seconds, I had a list of nearly 200 hotels, sorted out by price from highest to lowest. Regretfully I had to pass on the Peninsula, which was going for more than US$600 a night. Then I was seized by a perverse inspiration, partly out of nostalgia, largely out of necessity. I reversed the sorting order, and liked what I saw. “Hey, Beng,” I said, “what if we go to the cheapest place on the list and see if we can survive four nights in it?” Being the adventurous sort, and having no real say in the matter anyway, Beng said “Sure, why not?”

The place in question was the optimistically named USA Hostel in Kowloon. Take note, that’s “hostel” with an “s,” not the usual “hotel.” Well, I thought, there goes the lobby with the Grecian pillars and the curved staircase, but what the heck, “hostel” had a warm, homey ring to it. My spirits rose even higher when I read the blurb on the hostel’s website (note how smoothly it morphs into a “hotel” in the first sentence):

“Situated in the center of Hong Kong, this hotel is an excellent hub to the main business, shopping and entertainment area of Kowloon. USA Hostel has the perfect combination of attentive care and modern convenience. Located in the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui… USA Hostel provides a central location on a budget with great accommodations you can't resist.”

And no, I didn’t resist. How could I? At US$55 a night, I figured I could save enough to bring home some souvenirs that were dancing in my head—one or two PokerStars jackets from the Grand Lisboa in Macau, to make me look more fearsome at the tournament table, and maybe a new pen (or two); the rest would go to Beng and her charities. So I booked us into the USA Hostel for four nights, and we flew out to Hong Kong right after the semester ended.

Yes, I did read some reviews of the place on TripAdvisor—something I always do when I’m going somewhere I don’t know. I should’ve been deterred by the comments I read, along the lines of “the smell is just awful! Imagine, while sleeping, being hugged by a sweaty athlete who just brushed his teeth using curry powder and garlic paste! I bought a pillow at Disneyland the next day so that i wouldn’t have to use theirs” and “this is the worst place I’ve ever stayed in 20 years of traveling around the world—the room is tiny, the staff are rude, etc. etc.” On the other hand, a few guests did write “it wasn’t as bad as the others say” and “great location at a good price!”

My mind must’ve been stuck on Parkers and Pelikans, because I could focus only on “great location, good price” and forgot everything else. I should perhaps add at this point that I spent more than seven months in martial-law prison, so tight spaces and even funny smells don’t bother me as much as they might other people; Beng, for her part, dreams of reincarnation as a Buddhist monk, so every trial for her is one step closer to nirvana. But were we flying to Hong Kong to willingly go to prison? What was the truth behind all the hype?

The hostel’s location was, indeed, terrific; the airport bus stopped practically in front of the building on Nathan Road. A few steps away was Exit D of the MTR’s TST Station. The hostel itself was on the 13th floor (yes, I didn’t think buildings had 13th floors, but I suppose they have different ideas about numbers in China) of the “Mirador Mansions,” which looked like what Hong Kong tenement housing might have been in the ‘70s, refitted for 21st century entrepreneurship. The ground floor was crammed with tailors, cellphone stalls, and souvenir shops; budget tourists like ourselves—Filipinos, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Germans—queued up at the elevator for the upper floors, which had been subdivided into “hostels” going by such names as “London,” “Venetian,” and “Cosmic.” When the elevator door opened, you were greeted by laundry hanging out to dry in the corridors.

We were led to our room by a receptionist named Tess, formerly from Cavite; our “double de luxe” suite stood at the end of a pink-themed corridor no wider than the door we stepped through. We opened the inner door and found ourselves stepping into a room half of which was occupied by the bed, a quarter by the toilet and bath, and the rest by the sitting/standing area, whose wall also doubled as the closet. The window on the far side served as the fourth wall. At least we had a view, even if it was only that of the building across the street. I had never been in a smaller room in a foreign city, unless I count the triangular attic I booked in London three years ago, which had only a sink in lieu of a toilet.

On the plus side, the room was clean, the water strong and sizzling hot, and—best of all for incorrigible surfers like me—the wifi was free and fast. The TV had two English channels, featuring news, rugby, and kiddie cartoons. Beng and I learned a lot about seahorses that weekend. As usual, we brought in bread, jam, and bananas from the nearby 7-11 for breakfast, treating ourselves to full lunches and dinners with rice at the malls and streetside in Mong Kok. We had a blast walking through a fresh-produce market we discovered in Sham Shui Po, gawking at the monster-sized cucumbers, carrots, and starfruit. We even hopped on the ferry to Macau, had an egg tart and corn on the cob, and shuttled from one casino to another just for the free ride. The PokerStars souvenir shop was closed, so I saved several hundred HK dollars, which I blew on three tiny but tough Kaweco Sport fountain pens back at the City Super in Kowloon; Beng got herself a pretty caftan at a closing-out sale in Central, where we sat on a bench watching birds and people go by.

By the time we staggered back to the USA Hostel at the end of each day, we were too tired and happy to worry much about curry and garlic smells, and flopped down onto the bed and fell asleep. Maybe former prisoners make terrible hotel reviewers, but if you’re on a tight budget and not too finicky about the neighborhood, the USA Hostel might just be in your traveling future.

Penman for Monday, March 28, 2011


FURTHER TO my piece on music last week, let me tell you what else I’m listening to. I’ve long been a follower of AM radio; as a writer, nothing brings me closer to what’s really on people’s minds than radio commentators and their phone-in listeners. Granted, much of what’s out there is highly opinionated if not bigoted blather, but that comes with the territory. I usually switch to something else after five minutes of this toxic dose, and that something else could be a legal or medical advice program from which I can actually learn something.

Half the legal questions I monitor seem to have to do with the division of property following, in effect, the division of families, and the most popular ailments seem to involve pains in the joints and other typical afflictions of the working stiff. What rights do I have as an illegitimate child, asks one caller; why do I get a throbbing headache every time I take the bus ride from the office, asks another. Past midnight or early in the morning, when I’m driving home from one of my poker binges, I catch the lonely and the lovelorn, calling in from as far as Saudi Arabia, asking for advice or, more often, just for sympathy as they try to explain why they’ve fallen for a Filipino nurse at the company clinic despite having a wife and six children back in Pangasinan.

I suppose you can call this “reality radio,” not so much a new genre as a modern rebranding of what radio has been doing all along and done rather well. It’s arguably done this even better than TV, in that classic, pre-teleradyo radio’s a cross or a halfway house between the printed word and the visual image: you can hear the words and imagine the speaker and his or her situation. With no pictures in the way, you latch on more to what’s being said and how, to every tremor and inflection. Radio’s a medium for which your active imagination has to work overtime, while TV, the remote control, and the La-Z-Boy provide pure passive entertainment.

I was born in the ‘50s, meaning that I grew up during the infancy of the TV age in the Philippines—something akin, I suppose, to being born in the ‘80s, just before the Internet and cellular telephony swept nearly everything away like a tsunami. Pre-TV, we relied on reading and listening for our education and entertainment; “watching” was something we did in school once in a while, when the teacher put on a 10-minute McGraw-Hill film on a clackety spool about something exotic like outer space or the Kingdom of Tonga. When TV came to a neighbor’s house, we flocked to it in droves, leaving a mountain of slippers at the doorway. And soon I, too, would drift away from radio, trading “Erlinda ng Bataan” and “Eddie, Junior Detective” for “McHale’s Navy” and “The Green Hornet.”

Unfortunately (or maybe not), much of radio’s magic is lost to today’s young Pinoys. There’s the FM band, of course, but it’s mainly music of the same kind you can put and get on your iPod. On the other hand, the good thing about FM, aside from its relative clarity, is that your tuner doesn’t go off into the far side of the moon when you enter the underpass, and you don’t have to pull out and brandish your car antenna like a fishing rod to get a signal.

This brings me to my happy discovery of recent weeks—a station that brings the best of AM and FM together: 92.3 News FM, also known as “Radyo 5,” the radio arm of the revitalized Channel 5. For years, I’d been stuck on the far left side of the AM band, where the two major TV-radio networks reside.

There’s some ear-worthy material there, especially on DZMM—I’ve enjoyed Ariel Ureta’s mid-morning banter with co-host Winnie Cordero, especially when they take up a word for the day, culled from one of our many Philippine languages, and have listeners phone in on what it means in their own language or locality. On Sundays, Boots Anson-Roa and Willie Nepomuceno walk me down memory lane; early and late most days, the team-up of Gerry Baja and Anthony Taberna keep me informed and amused.

But it’s hard to shake off the impression that one of the two top stations specializes in a machine-gun-style delivery of the news, and the other in a hysterical, vein-popping delivery of almost anything. I know the old wisdom about TV being a cool medium and radio being hot, and maybe announcing every little bit of news thunderously like Moses had just turned up at the corner with two stone tablets does get people’s attention according to the focus groups. But it grates on the ears, and worse, it reduces all the news—big and small, from earthquakes that kill thousands to Starlet X’s newest boyfriend—to the same sensory register.

Enter the alternative. My car radio defaults to AM, if only because I know I can rely on it for up-to-the-minute news and traffic updates, but I must’ve had too much of it one day and switched to FM, where I stumbled on 92.3. I’ve been parked there since.

Why? Let me give you two words: intelligence and moderation. Paolo Bediones co-hosts a program (“Sakto Kay Paolo, Sakto Rin Kay Cheri”) with Cheri Mercado from 7 to 9 pm, and they’ve been a pleasant revelation as far as these two qualities go. They’ve treated current issues with taste and sensitivity, not pretending to be know-it-alls but asking the right questions in a manner and tone of voice that put you at ease but keep you engaged. I can say the same for the hosts of the early-afternoon “Relasyon,” Atty. Mel Sta. Maria and Luchie Cruz-Valdez, who prove that you can have interesting programs with broad appeal without pandering to the least common denominator. Even the station’s tagline for its news updates, “Ikwento mo,” is clear and simple, and the reporters don’t feel obliged to recite an ad for the network with every extro.

Not everything is perfect on 92.3. I thought I’d left a “public service” personality behind at another station, a guy whose talent seems to consist in haranguing and cursing public officials he has adjudged guilty—but he’s here, drafted by the station bosses. I’m sure he gets things done his way better than schoolboy politeness will, and I realize what an ugly world it is out there, but I’m clinging to my old-fashioned belief that people in the broadcast industry (and, for that matter, in academia), like the very same public officials they excoriate, should be models of manners. Thankfully every radio has a tuner and an off button.

One of these days, or the next time you cruise down the expressway or get stuck in a traffic jam, give your radio a serious listen. (While I’m at this, check out our university station, DZUP as well, at 1602 on the AM band, for a refreshing kind of programming.) It isn’t as sexy as the Internet or cable TV, but for better or worse, there’s nothing more powerful as a molder of public opinion, and I’m glad that some stations know what to do with that kind of responsibility.

Penman for Monday, March 21, 2011


I'M NO audiophile—which means I haven’t spent anything bigger than than four figures to pamper my ears—and, until recently, I couldn’t tell a tweeter from a woofer if my life depended on it. This, I’ll admit, is one of the great gaps in my education in the modern manly arts. While some Pinoys might plow a year’s salary into transforming their cars into boomboxes on wheels, or their homes into Sensurround theatres, I content myself with what I can literally get between my ears—which means to say, whatever music I can put on my iPhone (doubling as an iPod) and pipe through my earphones.

I’ve always liked listening to music—back in high school, when earphones were a single pod the shape and size of an acorn connected to a transistor radio as large as a shoebox—I curled up in the crook of a jackfruit tree in our backyard, listening to the Dave Clark Five, the Monkees, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and, of course, the Fab Four (whom I almost listened to live during their July 4, 1966 gig here, but that’s another story). The sound was tinny, but since you didn’t know any better, you had nothing to complain about. You could have something called Hi-Fi on a turntable—I could swear that those shiny records not only hissed and crackled but also bore this peculiar smell, but that was probably just all those hot tubes simmering inside the wooden cabinet.

Today, thanks to the iPod and its precursors and successors, everything you need will fit into your shirt or pants pocket. Where you had to raid flashlights for batteries in a fix, or crawl under tables to stick a plug into the wall, you can now carry whole orchestras and concerts in a matchbox and listen to them the whole day and half the night.

I’d actually forgotten what a pleasure it was to choose and listen to one’s favorite music until I started playing poker seriously (too seriously, for someone of my middling talent). If you go to a poker room, you’ll see that half the people at the table are wearing baseball caps, shades, and earphones—presumably to ward off any distractions, but actually to look like, well, serious poker players. I started wearing earphones, and—given my dismal tournament record—I think I forgot about the seriousness of the poker somewhere along the way and actually listened to the music. (It’s also hard to be taken seriously when the guys around you are wearing caps screaming “2007 World Poker Tour” or “Full Tilt Poker” and yours says “Discovery Travel & Living.”)

There are some singers, musicians, and composers whose music I can listen to all day and never tire of: Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, naturally for a baby boomer like me, but also Lisa Ono and Luis Miguel, Earl Klugh, Michel Legrand, Burt Bacharach, and Broadway show tunes, not to mention, yes, Sharon Cuneta, APO, and ‘70s-‘80s OPM.

My tastes are unabashedly middle of the musical road, where things are easy on the ears; the rowdiest piece I have is probably the now-grandfatherly Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Most of the time, I’ll be chasing flushes and straights to the sound of Lisa Ono cooing a bossa-nova-ish “I Wish You Love,” Luis Miguel warbling “Sabor a mi”, Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls essaying “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, Jean Pierre Rampal’s flute weaving ribbons around Claude Bolling’s jazz piano on “Sentimentale”, Yo-Yo Ma romancing his cello on “Doce de Coco,” and APO wooing the sullen lover on “Ewan.”

Speaking of APO, in the middle of writing this piece, I ran into and struck up a chat with composer, photographer, and fellow Star columnist Jim Paredes, who turned out to be a huge fan of Brazilian music, and he gave me a list of names to look up, which I will: Dori Caymmi, Maria Bethania, Trio Esperança, and Joyce Moreno. Despite my paltry Spanish and nonexistent Portuguese, Latin—indeed, non-English—music accounts for a big chunk of my music library.

I’d always wanted to know what was being professed in “La vie en rose,” “Sabor a mi,” “Dein ist mein ganzes herz,” and “Non dimenticar,” and now that I do they resonate even more strongly, but I never could have imagined that “Amapola” was a poppy flower. So I’ve taken to looking up the lyrics to some of my favorite foreign tunes, so I could sing along or at least hum intelligently along to them, aware of the dramatic situation, especially to the operatic staples (no, I’ve never been to a live opera—another big hole in my cultural education, to which I should add, while I’m at it, a live ballet performance). I can now better appreciate the nuances of “Al alba, vincero” at the end of “Nessun dorma,” savor the exoticism of “Flower Duet,” and cheer the pledge to undying friendship that the two friends make in the “Pearl Fishers Duet.”

For one reason or other, I can’t get duets out of my head—from “People Will Say We’re In Love” from Oklahoma and “I Might Frighten Her Away” from Lost Horizon to Richard Tan and Bambi Roxas on “Kailangan Ko, Kailangan Mo.” Indeed, when you see my noggin bobbing like a metronome from side to side, that’s probably me listening to Doris Day and Bing Crosby on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” with me mouthing the male portion. Once upon a time, before smoking seared my throat, I used to imagine myself as Rolf in The Sound of Music singing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” to a virginal Charmian Carr, but at 57 going on 58, I’d sound like a pervert if I kept at it today.

When I’m not looking to get excited, I have a playlist I call my “Ton-Ton” music, findable in most catalogues as “New Age”—you know, those long tracks with birds chirping, brooks gurgling, and windchimes tinkling in the background. I put it on when I go with Beng to our suki Ton-Ton massage parlor for our weekly foot rubs, before we hit the ukay-ukay next door; I’m snoring in three minutes, and inevitably I feel cheated when I wake up to find that a whole billable hour has passed without my having savored each individual toe pull.

And to think that I work all week so I can pay for these massages. I should win more often at the poker tables, but the music isn’t helping any.

Penman for Monday, March 7, 2011


SOMETIME LAST year, an anti-smoking group invited me to take part in an orientation program of sorts for media persons whom they were presumably interested in winning over to their campaign. I politely declined the invitation, since I didn't have the time. Besides—I told the group—it was like preaching to the choir, in my case, being what the morally minded would call a reformed smoker. I promised them that I would, one day, do my civic duty and write a piece on smoking, and here it is.

I didn't say, however, that I would write about its evils, which have been fairly well documented, even if ignored by millions of our countrymen. What people who have never smoked realize is how pleasurable it is. Those fingers of nicotine reach deep into your rib cage to scratch and soothe your every little itch. On a cold night, it's a warm balm; on a hot day, it keeps you cool, venting your inner heat into the atmosphere—into someone else’s atmosphere, for sure, but do smokers really care?

Like food and sex (with both of which a cigarette goes swimmingly well), smoking’s all about pleasure and, to some extent, sustenance—that bolt of energy that swarms through your senses with the first long drag, tapering down into a buzz that just might get you through another page of prose or another stanza.

What’s smoking got to do with writing and literature? Everything, if you ask the guys I bum around with—two-legged chimneys like Krip Yuson, Jimmy Abad, and Joel Toledo (there’s Charlson Ong, too, but he correctly if primly calls himself a “social smoker”) who probably can’t write a couplet without sucking the life out of a Winston. I don’t know if Nick Joaquin ever smoked, or NVM Gonzalez, or Franz Arcellana—I certainly never saw these old gents light up, but then I didn’t know them in their 20s and 30s, which is when it’s cool to puff away while staring at the ceiling thinking aloud of a perfect rhyme for “orange.” A beat-up Underwood, a sweet chick, cheap gin, piano jazz—what more can a guy ask for? A Marlboro, of course.

I doubt that scare tactics work. Heck, I doubt that any amount or method of persuasion can work, unless the smoker is willing to be persuaded. I had a friend who was dying of emphysema and who yet insisted on being fed a lighted cigarette on his deathbed. In his case, it was too late, so it didn't matter.

But even for those with a realistic chance of recovering, I don’t think that all the finger-wagging in the world is going to get them on the wagon if they haven’t convinced themselves that a smoke-free life is more fun—and generally lasts longer, if you’re interested in getting a senior citizen’s discount card.

I know all the horror stories. I used to smoke up to four packs a day, one unopened pack in my shirt pocket and another in my pants, the easier to fish out a stick—often to be lit with the smoldering butt of the previous one. You know you’re a serious smoker when the skin between your second and middle fingers turns a dirty, unwashable yellow and your gums lose their pink and the first thing you do every morning is to cough up and spit out a sticky green blob. Been there, done that.

So why did I quit? Because I wanted—still want—to see a granddaughter, with her lola beside me, and because I’m intensely curious about the future: about what computers and cars will be like in the year 2025 (remember that 2025 song?), who’s going to be the president (who is already alive), and how many more novels I can churn out before croaking.

I’ve actually quit smoking twice—cold turkey—for two long stretches. (Remember Mark Twain, who supposedly said, “It’s easy to quit—I’ve done it dozens of times!”) I started smoking in high school, like most Pinoy teenagers in the ‘60s, and didn’t stop until 1980, when, on my first visit to the United States, I picked up a book that said that it takes about four days for the smoker’s body to get rid of the physical gunk; beyond that, it’s all in the mind. What a silly claim, I thought—but I was intrigued enough to try it, and, yegads, it worked.

I stayed clean for a whole decade, until—appropriately or ironically enough—I returned to the US for graduate school, and resumed smoking as I was finishing my PhD. That set me off on a steep slide back into the old four-pack-a-day habit. What’s worse, Beng began smoking with me, too, and soon our small apartment was swathed in fumes, with badly charred ashtrays in every little corner.

And then we both quit—together. I know how corny it sounds, but Beng and I made a Valentine’s Day pact in 1995 to quit smoking for good. We finished one last Marlboro each—then tossed the rest of the carton into the trash. We haven’t smoked a stick since; I haven’t even touched a cigarette to my lips these past 16 years. When I finished my first novel without a single puff, I knew I was over the hump.

My lungs can’t thank me enough for that decision—but there’s been another price to pay, in terms of the ample poundage I gained, just because my taste buds came alive from having been embalmed in nicotine. Am I sorry? Heck, no—I’m still enjoying my food, if a bit too much, and I’m sure there are better weight-loss options than taking up tobacco again. I can always buy bigger shirts, or get them from the ukay-ukay; I can’t buy new lungs.

Let me tell you something, though: quitting smoking, even after all these years, is still a day-to-day decision. You never quite lose the urge, you never forget how good that tingle in your throat and chest feels. Sometimes, in a crowded café with friends, I cheat by sniffing second-hand smoke—I know, that’s worse—but then I pay for it the next day by coughing my guts out. Your body will be its own alarm, its own reality check. The best advice I can give to non-smokers is, get off smokers' backs if they resist your efforts to get them to stop. If you can’t stand their smoke, steer clear of them, or designate spaces where they can burn their lungs away.

These people (paging Noynoy and Barry, here) have made a presumably informed and intelligent decision to the effect that the pleasures of smoking outweigh its dangers. It's sad that some smokers can no longer decide for themselves, as it's their chemistry making their minds up for them. But once upon a time they had a choice, and they made it. If they want help and are willing to be helped, good; if not, wish them as long a productive and happy life as they can manage, and a quick passing, which unfortunately will very likely not be painless.

My own father died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, but I'm convinced that it was the decades of non-stop smoking that really did him in, that weakened his resolve and his body's ability to help itself. He knew his end was coming—he was all set for an operation but chickened out at the last minute and walked out of the hospital (for a quick smoke, I’m sure). Today, when someone in the family sniffs a curl of smoke that seems to be coming from no one in the room, they’ll say, “Oh, there’s Tatay.”

To smokers, please don't smoke in a no-smoking zone. Certainly you have rights to do as you please, but not at the expense of the people around you. It's an imposition many of us would be happy to be without. If you smoke and I still hang out with you, that means I like you enough to shave a few minutes off my life for a few in your company—so buy me a beer, will you?

Penman for Monday, March 7, 2011

TWO SATURDAYS ago, we had a very busy and exciting afternoon judging the finals of the selection process for the Philippine representative to the International Public Speaking Contest (IPSC) in London this May, an annual event organized by the English Speaking Union (ESU). The competition for the sole slot was handled very ably, as usual, by the University of the Philippines Debate Society, which ran a day-long elimination round that trimmed a field of around 40 aspirants from all over the country to a group of six finalists. This year-the ESU's 93rd and the IPSC's 30th-the local or national aspirants were asked to speak on “Lessons for the Future.”

Participants from the ESU's 53 member-countries will be in London from May 23 to 27 for the competition, and for tours and workshops that will introduce them to British culture and sharpen their speaking skills. The grand final will be held at the headquarters of HSBC, the IPSC's main sponsor. (The Philippine eliminations were sponsored by HSBC, Shell, and the Inquirer, aside of course from the UPDS and ESU-Philippines. Pilipinas Shell, through the generosity of Ed Chua, has traditionally donated the airline ticket of our IPSC representative.)

I was joined on the judging panel by fellow officers and members of ESU-Philippines: our chairman Ambassador Cesar Bautista, president and Ateneo dean Dr. Marlu Vilches, and lawyer Katrina Legarda. We were very keen on listening to the finalists and making a good choice, given a reputation to protect: since we started joining the IPSC less than a decade ago, we have already produced two world champions: the columnist and TV producer Patricia Evangelista (2004) and the then-Philippine Science High School senior Gian Karlo Dapul (2008).

Each finalist was given five minutes to make his or her speech, followed by a round of questions from the panel. The presentations were impressive-ranging from the philosophical to the personal to the comic-but of course, in the end, we could choose just one, and we were happy to come to a quick and unanimous decision.

This year's Philippine champion and our official entry to the IPSC in London is Germaine Ang Chuabio, a Communication Arts and Accountancy sophomore at De La Salle University, who spoke on what it has been like to have a special child as a twin sister, and how society should learn to cope with such situations. Her alternate-in the event that for any reason, she can't make it to London-will be the runner-up, UP Business Administration senior Elfermin Mallari Jr., who addressed the growing role of creative artists and thinkers in business.

The other finalists included, in alphabetical order, UP Business Economics senior Angelo Paolo Kalaw; UST Nursing junior Carl Anly Ortiz; UP Psychology sophomore Regina Isabelle Jaimee Ranada; and UP Business Administration and Accountancy sophomore John Lenard Robles. We wish all of these young people well, as they will very likely go on to make a mark in their schools and beyond.

Meanwhile, my fellow ESU-Philippines members and I-a cohort that includes Krip Yuson and Anglophile Ed Maranan-will do our best to coach Germaine into another winning performance. Unlike the case in previous years, IPSC participants will be taking on a separate topic-“Words Are Not Enough”-for the global event.

The guidelines state that “Speakers may interpret the theme in any way they see fit, but they should not use the theme as their title. In choosing their title, participants should not be afraid to be provocative, hard-hitting or humorous, as long as their intention is constructive and the speech is not offensive. Speakers must avoid speeches that are likely to be perceived as highly political.”

This means that Germaine will have to craft and master a whole new speech, pitched to an international audience. The challenge here, as always, will be in saying something that will stand out above everyone else's presentation-a speech with global appeal, and yet rooted in Philippine realities and experience.

Given that we've already produced two IPSC world champions, we Pinoys might have cause to claim that we're great, natural public speakers, and certainly quite a few Filipinos are-or were, like Ferdinand Marcos and his nemesis Ninoy Aquino (I remember listening to both as a high school student and being mesmerized by their ability to speak fluidly, without notes). There's no doubt that we, as a people, love to talk and to give our opinion of everything from the Middle East crisis to the lovelife of our movie and sports stars-an hour of AM radio will tell you that.

But I suspect that we have quite a way to go to do the kind of public speaking that seems effortless, but has, in fact, been well thought out. Too often we rely on memorized scripts, delivered stiffly, or otherwise we read off the printed page, again without the kind of emotional tone that conveys sincerity and conviction. That could be because we've been trained to equate public speaking with declamation, or the recitation of memorized poems (another art in itself all too often practiced with wooden grimness and determination). The best public speakers are those who can think on their feet, prepared to adjust to the character and temper of the audience, to reach out and to grab their hearts and minds. This is why the IPSC has a question-and-answer component at the end of the participant's five-minute talk, during which the judges can throw questions at the speaker to gauge his or her mastery of the subject.

As the IPSC Handbook points out, “Most 'real world' public speakers will, at some point, be faced with questions about what they have said. They need to be able to answer those questions confidently, reinforcing or defending their original statement, or clarifying their original statement where it has been misunderstood or taken out of context.

“As part of the competition, each speaker's ability to answer questions is tested. At the end of each speech, audience members and adjudicators are invited to put brief questions to the speaker. These may ask for clarification or expansion on a point, or seek to know the speaker's views on a related issue not covered in their speech. Although questions are not meant to be combative, they may sometimes ask the speaker to justify their views.”

While this accounts for just 15 percent of the total score, I have to admit that it's a much more important factor for me than the figure might suggest, because it's where I can catch a real glimpse of the speaker's mind at work. (As I often remind my students, I don't care much for term papers with a dozen quotations from other writers or critics embedded in them-I want to see them make their own arguments, in their own ways.)

Here's to Germaine's success in London, and again, to all the finalists, my warmest congratulations.

Penman for Monday, February 28, 2011


BEFORE ANYTHING else, let me announce and congratulate the fellows to this year’s UP National Writers Workshop, to be held April 10-17 in Baguio City. The workshop is run by the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing, and for the past many years, we’ve focused on the development of mid-career writers—people who have already published at least one book, with proven talent and dedication to their craft. Over a week, we talk about their works in progress, and strengthen their resolve to press on.

This April, we’ll be joined by the following young writers: (Filipino) Khavn dela Cruz, German Gervacio, Axel Pinpin, John Torres, John Iremil Teodoro, and Genevieve Asenjo; (English) Ronald Baytan, Nerisa Guevara, Clarissa Militante, Jennifer Ortuoste, Alan Pastrana, and Yvette Tan.

Congratulations and an advance welcome to all of you!


HERE'S MORE happy news for Filipino authors. Later this year, on October 1 and 2, a Filipino-American Book Fair will be held at the San Francisco Public Library under the auspices of the Literacy Initiatives International Foundation (LIIF) to showcase the works of contemporary Filipino and Filipino-American authors. I’ll be there to promote the publication of my two novels—Killing Time in a Warm Place and Soledad’s Sister—in a single-volume edition titled In Flight: Two Novels of the Philippines, by the small but highly respected Schaffner Press. Members of the Book Development Association of the Phiilippines (BDAP) will be attending to help raise the global profile of Philippine writing and publishing.

But other, younger Filipino authors can go there, too—and unlike me, they won’t be paying their own way. Thanks to a grant from the LIIF through the Asia Foundation, six Filipino writers between 20 and 40 years old may qualify for free airfare and accommodations if they (1) have already published a book; (2) already have a US visa or can get one; (3) and can do an interesting presentation. According to the BDAP, the applicant’s book and prospective presentation will have to fall under any of the following preferred categories: children's books; cookery; inspirational books; travel and culture; health and wellness; and fiction “that is not too localized.”

Qualified authors may send their written application to the BDAP Secretariat at AZ Bldg., 723 Bumatay St., Plainview 1550, Mandaluyong City. They can also send an email to flor.javier@azdirect.com.ph, or call Flor Javier at 533-2309 for more inquiries. Applications should contain a short résumé, a list of books published, and a 2x2 colored picture. The deadline for submission of applications is March 31, 2011. Take note that if you qualify for a grant but can’t show or get a US visa, your slot will be given to the next person in line.


SPEAKING OF going global, I had a fun chat over lunch recently with two ladies, both Penman readers, who happen to be running one of the most vital services connecting Filipinos to the rest of the world. I don’t mean another Internet operation, although some aspects of it can be accessed online; rather, I’m talking about standardized English examinations, specifically the Test of English for International Communication or TOEIC (pronounced the way you would say “stoic”).

I’ve always been curious about these exams, having taken a couple of them myself—the more widely known Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), which happens to be TOEIC’s chief competitor, and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), which were required for my graduate studies in the US. (Indeed, so eager was I to study in the US 25 years ago that I took both exams on my own account, and brought the exam results with me to my Fulbright interview; I guess the strategy worked.)

So when I learned from Bambina—the wife of Cesar Buenaventura, the business icon whose yet-unpublished family biography I wrote—that her company, Hopkins International Partners, was the Philippine representative of TOEIC, I asked her to take me behind the scenes and to tell me a bit more about this test and what exactly it does. Bambina obliged and brought her partner along, Hopkins president Corina Unson. As it turns out, the TOEIC, the TOEFL, and the GRE, among other tests, are all products of the New Jersey-based Educational Testing Service or ETS. “ETS was founded after the War to help democratize access to higher education based on merit,” Corina told me. “Where only the sons and daughters of the rich used to be able to gain entry to the best schools, standardized entrance exams made it possible to identify qualified candidates from all classes.”

The TOEFL was brought out in 1964 to see how well non-native English speakers would do in an academic setting in the US. The TOEIC followed in the 1970s, largely on the initiative of the Japanese, who wanted to prepare their managers and workers for international business. However, unlike the TOEFL and yet another popular test, the International English Language Testing System or IELTS, the TOEIC focuses less on the school than the workplace and real-life situations such as a new immigrant to the US, the UK, or other Anglophone countries might encounter. The two-hour, 200-item test checks for linguistic competence and proficiency rather than, say, grammatical correctness, and a wide range of scores sets thresholds for all kinds of positions from senior managers and technical staff to utility workers.

More than 5 million people take the TOEIC around the world every year—for job placements, proficiency assessments in schools, professional qualifications, and immigrant visas. It’s required of all Koreans seeking post-university employment, which helps explain the influx of Koreans to the Philippines seeking English-language training.

That figure includes many thousands of Filipinos, especially those leaving to study, work, or live abroad, despite the fact that, notes Bambina, “We Filipinos hate exams, especially those dealing with English, which we think we already know.” The sad fact, however—and I know this as a university professor—our proficiency in English has been declining, and the test scores bear this out.

This is why Corina and Bambina have been promoting the TOEIC in Filipino schools as a proficiency test (and yes, teachers can and do take it as well); FEU students take it in their sophomore year, and La Salle students take it before they graduate. “While many Filipinos know only the TOEFL, the TOEIC is accepted just as well by many countries, universities and institutions—and it costs a lot less!’ says Bambina.

So just how did these two highly accomplished women end up (Bambina has been a longtime English-language advocate, Corina went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard) end up promoting the TOEIC? According to Bambina, “We started out training call center agents, only to realize that technical expertise wasn't the agents’ problem—their English proficiency was.” So Hopkins was born. Tests can be taken at the Hopkins office in Makati, but more often, Hopkins will send its examiners to schools and large institutions where the tests are given to whole batches of examinees. For more information, you can check out their website at www.toeic-phil.com.

“If we're serious about being globally competitive, we should rate ourselves against global standards,” the ladies pointed out. Well said!

Penman for Monday, February 21, 2011


MY PAL Krip Yuson already did his roundup of this event last week, but let me turn in my own report on the Third Taboan International Writers Festival, which took place in Davao under the auspices of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, supported by the Davao Writers Guild and the LCB Performing Arts Center. In previous years, Taboan had been held in Manila and Cebu, and it was Mindanao’s turn to host the festival, which has become a major feature of National Arts Month.

This year, we had several writers join us from overseas: the fictionist Xu Xi from the US and Hong Kong, and the Singapore-based poets and cultural activists Chris Mooney-Singh and his wife Savinder Kaur. They contributed immensely to the festival not only by presenting opportunities for Filipino writers to expand their horizons (such as through the low-residential MFA program that Xu Xi directs at the City University of Hong Kong and WritersConnect.org, which Chris and Savinder run), but by giving them more ideas how to promote literature locally, such as in schools.

The usual topics were on the festival menu—e.g., breaking into the literary market, the importance of translation, writing and the Internet, new genres and techniques—but special focus was given to the literature of the region, and to the problems and opportunities faced by writers in Mindanao. I participated in a panel on the memoir and creative nonfiction and moderated another one on “Globalizing Local Writing.” But I sat in on many other discussions as well, and took the opportunity to meet with fellow Filipino writers across regions and generations.

Among others, I had a good time chatting with the fictionist and former Manila Times publisher Rony Diaz at Taboan. While he was almost a generation ahead of me at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, I discovered that he and I had quite a few things in common: a background in college and professional journalism, an interest in history and politics, time spent in government service, a passion for poker, and, not the least, a penchant for using and collecting fountain pens.

Rony—whose short story “Death in a Sawmill” has become one of the standard texts of postwar Philippine literature—has just completed the first of three novels spanning Philippine history from the Spanish period to the present. He relishes the opportunity that retirement affords him to do nothing else but write fiction—a pleasure I’m looking forward to, not too long from now. Rony stepped out of his writer’s cubicle just long enough to attend Taboan, to reconnect with the literary community and to see for himself what today’s young writers were up to.

While he was impressed by the energy and the talent of the young, Rony admitted to being dismayed by their seeming lack of interest in the past, and even in current affairs, beyond what they read in the headlines. Instead—as another Taboan delegate put it—they were writing about vampires, not even in the Filipino mold but in that of Ann Rice and Twilight.

In a session I moderated, mention was made of a seeming aspiration among many Filipinos today to avoid or ignore the intermediate stage between the local and the global—that is to say, the national. I’d heard this before: the loss of the sense of nation, or the suggestion that “the nation” has been rendered irrelevant by globalization and the Internet.

I think myself that it’s not only a troubling but ultimately a mistaken proposition, given how so much of what we call “globalization” is merely submission to more things Western and, indeed, American. Pity the poor Filipino author who thinks he or she can leapfrog into “globality” by removing all traces of Filipino-ness from his or her work in anticipation of being published in New York or London, only to come up with a mediocre, wannabe-Updike or wannabe-Gaiman piece that thousands of native New Yorkers or Londoners could likewise have produced, with better mastery of the idiom at that.

Still and all, I’m confident that young writers will sort things out for themselves and find their own voice, their own grand causes beyond the “me, me, me” drone of so many blogs on the Web (an affliction to which I can’t say I’ve been immune). You wonder if it takes something titanic like World War II, martial law, or an EDSA to define a generation’s connection to its own society, or the lack thereof.

Or perhaps we’re just being too literal. Perhaps those vampires do have a social conscience, or at least a social consciousness—you know, half beast, half human, half rich, half poor. Somebody write that story.


EIGHT YEARS ago, early in 2003, I did something very unusual for someone more often obsessed with such baubles as PowerBooks and Parkers. I took up the plight of one Dionisio “Bong” Ulep, a driver for a security agency whose wife worked as a domestic helper in Hong Kong until she had to return home to help him fight kidney disease and raise their brood of three.

The true humanitarian in the family—my wife Beng—soon devoted herself to Bong’s cause with a passion, raising donations so Bong could have dialysis, secure a kidney transplant, and resume a productive life. It got so that Beng would sometimes collapse in tears over her failure to secure a few thousand pesos for our patient, who bore his pains with courage.

But Providence smiled on Bong; his daughter proved to be the perfect kidney donor, and the National Kidney Institute and the PCSO helped with the transplant. Bong soon recovered and entered the employ of a good friend, and for a while back there it seemed as though Bong was back to leading a full and happy life with his family, going to church, and waving at me with a smile whenever I saw him.

However, things would take yet another turn for Bong, who would realize that an extended life was in many ways more difficult and full of challenges and disappointments than impending death. Where there had been faith and joy, he soon found doubt and sorrow.

Last week, on Valentine’s Day, I heard that Bong had died, early that morning, of yet unknown causes. His kidney may have failed him for good, but I suspect it was his heart that finally gave way.

We’re no longer taking donations, but to all those who helped Bong Ulep, our deepest thanks. Everyone deserves a second chance at life and happiness, and Bong got his.

Penman for Monday, February 14, 2010


A RECENT job took me to a southern city where I was billeted in a hotel close to the airport—a thoughtful touch on the part of my hosts, since I had flown in just to conduct a couple of brief interviews, and was set to fly home first thing the following morning. It was a city of great natural beauty, with vast waves of green, rolling hills blanketed by mist.

From the air, coming in, I tried hard not to think of the fact that the same airline I was taking had suffered its first catastrophic crash there, and that the pretty memorial parks close to the airport probably held many of that crash’s victims six feet under. I suppose there’s really no lovely way to die—as one of my favorite spy authors, Len Deighton, would have put it—but you could die in worse places.

For some reason I remembered a scene I passed on Oahu Island in Hawaii, a few years ago; we were on a tourist bus, headed for a luau, threading a road at the foot of a brooding, cloud-capped volcanic range. A long ribbon of lawn opened up on the left, its manicured surface broken only by a clump of bright red earth that had been upturned. As we got closer I noted another detail in the aberration: a brown wooden coffin rested beside the excavation. I didn’t think that the place was a cemetery, as there were no headstones or markers to be seen anywhere. It seemed odd to be buried there, all by one’s lonesome, and yet it also made perfect sense to lie amid such splendor—not, of course, that the departed would have noticed.

Before I could dwell too long on death, the van that had picked me up at the airport swung into the grounds of my hotel—a new one, tucked into a corner of a large estate that had been almost completely turned over to golf. It was more accurate, indeed, to say that this was a golf course with a hotel in it. A driving range stood right next to the open lobby, and you could hear the thwack and the zing of club heads making contact with balls, along with banter in another language—Korean. I very quickly discovered that nearly everyone in the place, with the exception of the service people, was Korean. There were whole families of them, obviously expatriates who had work to do in this city, for whom golf was a perk if not a passion.

I like watching golf, but—like firing a gun—it remains one of those things many people I know do and like to do but which I’ve never done. Except for making a few putts in a friend’s backyard amusement park in the States, I’ve never even held a golf club, certainly not a driver. Nor have I ever had the desire to wield one, even out of writerly curiosity. Somehow, from early on, I must have understood that golf belonged to another way of life, perhaps a tad pretentious for someone in my station. (I have some journalist-friends, neither poorer nor richer than me, who indulge in golf, but that’s another story.)

That hasn’t prevented me from watching the occasional tournament on TV and feeling genuinely excited by the drama of the game, the same way I enjoy watching master chefs cook fabulous meals I’ll never get to eat and—given my philistine tastes—probably wouldn’t even want to. When Tiger Woods won the Masters in Augusta in 2005 with a downhill putt—an outcome we followed on the radio as we drove through Virginia—I exulted as loudly as my brother-in-law Eddie, a golfing nut who dreams of Callaways and Taylor Mades the same way I dream of Parkers and Pelikans. I’m aware that satirists have had a field day with the notion of grown-up men beating up little balls with sticks, but you can say the same for my penchant for tubes of metal or plastic spitting ink.

When I look back on nearly all the prominent Filipinos I’ve interviewed or written about for my biographical projects, one detail that leaps out is how important golf was to their social and business life, and therefore to the economy itself. I remember Wash SyCip telling me how his banker-father Albino and Albino’s friend the industrialist Vicente Madrigal would go to the Wack Wack golf course at four in the morning, using their cars’ headlights to illuminate the fairways. A kind man who lived by the Golden Rule, Albino would often tell Wash that “It’s better to be on the golf course on Sunday thinking of God, than to be in church thinking of golf.” Wash himself gave up golf completely after missing a game with his buddies, who got ticked off by his absence; Wash had to attend to a visiting businessman, whose semiconductor company eventually became one of the country’s top exporters. “I figured that this was going to happen more often,” Wash said with typical understatement. “So I just decided to stop playing golf. Otherwise I’d lose my friends.”

The accomplished Buenaventura brothers—the engineer and business leader Cesar, the lawyer Chito, and the late banker Paeng—were also golf fanatics, the influence of their father Antonio. Chito remembered a time when the three brothers were playing golf with their father, and Chito had driven them all to the golf course in the family Pontiac. But on the 16th hole, Cesar refused to concede the putt; incensed, Chito left in a huff and took off in the car, leaving everyone stranded. “I have a temper,” Chito conceded with a wry smile, “which is why I don’t like litigation.”

The road- and bridge-builder Rudy Cuenca recalled how important golf was to doing business on his way up. I would write that “One thing that brought Cuenca and Marcos even closer together was golf. Indeed, golf—a Marcos passion—would be one of the ways by which anyone who had business to do with the President could gain access to him. Since the early postwar days, a golf course had been built within the Malacañang Palace complex, mainly at Malacañang Park on the other side of the Pasig River—with the first tee at the main Palace grounds, and ‘the golfer expected to clear the Pasig, to hole No. 1 on the other side,’ according to the Palace guidebook.” Like Rudy, businessman Hermie Disini grew close to President Marcos on the golf course, and looks back to his six-year presidency of Wack Wack and to bringing over the 1977 World Cup to the Philippines as one of the highlights of his life.

Some of these men were political adversaries, but pals on the golf course. (On the other hand, I’ve also heard stories of friendships sundered on the greens, so it isn’t all roses.) I suspect that if the greens could speak, our political and economic history would be much more colorfully and truthfully told.

Meanwhile, back at that southern hotel, and having done with my interviews, I came down in the afternoon looking for snacks to buy, and discovered that since the whole place was devoted to golf, there was nothing by way of a corner dispensing Chippy and peanuts. “Try the caddy house,” the front desk clerk suggested, indicating a cottage on the other side of the road.

I stepped into the place, much to the surprise of everyone there. On one side was a sari-sari and a turo-turo with trays of noodles and fried fish, but the room itself was full of women with bags, watching TV in their idle time, and I wondered if they were the caddies’ wives waiting for their husbands, or masseuses waiting to be called. I tried not to stare, and went about my business quickly, even if I wanted to stay on for the pancit. Into my bag went crackers, Chippy, a bottle of Coke, and that southern staple, Snow Bear menthol candies. I paid my tab—P32—and retired to my room to work on my fiction.

Penman for Monday, February 7, 2010


I CAN'T think of a person whose political and cultural views would vary more with mine than the former chief censor, Mr. Manoling Morato. He’s a crusty conservative and I’m a flaming liberal, and while we’ve never met, we’ve often found ourselves on opposite sides of the issues of the day, such as last year’s National Artist brouhaha which saw his good friend Carlo J. Caparas appointed—wrongly, I thought—to that exalted position. I’ve also never believed in censorship, which I think turns people into idiots by robbing them of the responsibility of choice. But never mind that.

A week ago, on the heels of a column-piece I wrote about a new book celebrating Art Deco in the Philippines, I received a letter from Mr. Morato—and, much to my surprise, I found myself in agreement, on principle, with his concerns. It’s a very long letter so I won’t reproduce it here—I gathered later that the same letter had been published by Mr. Morato as a paid advertisement—but the gist of it is that Mr. Morato wants to save the Quezon Institute building on E. Rodriguez Ave. in Quezon City from demolition by the Department of Public Works and Highways. Morato used to chair the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, which has been using the building, now owned by the Philippine Tuberculosis Society.

The PCSO’s new chairperson, Margie Juico, had sought the DPWH’s opinion about the safety of the building, and DPWH Sec. Rogelio Singson had written her last August to say that, based on the findings of DPWH engineers, the QI’s main building would not probably withstand a major earthquake and should be demolished. The PCSO then moved its offices and employees to the PICC.

Mr. Morato suspects, however, that Mrs. Juico and the DPWH are merely facilitating the entry of a major private developer into the site. Last December, Ayala Land, Inc. acknowledged that it was interested in developing the 6.5-hectare property.

The building—a graceful prewar structure from the days when Mr. Morato’s father Tomas was Quezon City’s first mayor—was designed by National Artist Juan Nakpil, who also designed many metropolitan landmarks, including the administration and library buildings of the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Morato wonders why the QI building should be singled out for demolition while Nakpil’s other structures—erected at a time when engineers didn’t skimp on materiales fuertes—remain standing to this day.

There’s probably more to this issue than meets the eye, and I’m willing to listen to technical explanations from all those involved. On the surface of things, however, before the wrecking ball descends on another irreplaceable architectural treasure, a way should be found to reconcile the needs of heritage with the demands of safety, even as I realize that considerations of beauty and culture fall a far second to those of safety. The Quezon Institute building should be preserved and its safety issues addressed without tearing the whole structure down.

I’m sure it can be done—with imagination, goodwill, and, of course, resources. Back when I was a graduate student in Milwaukee, I enjoyed walking through the Grand Avenue Mall, a stately building and now a bustling mall which in its earlier incarnation used to be a home for Douglas MacArthur’s family.

Sometimes, the best way forward is one step backward.

SPEAKING OF the past, my hometown of Alcantara, Romblon, will be marking its 50th Foundation Day anniversary sometime next month, and I was asked by the celebration organizers for a page or two of my words that they could include in the souvenir program. Rather than provide the standard greetings, I came up with some reminiscences of the place, and because only a few hundred people, if at all, will come across that program and even fewer will actually read it, I thought I’d share them with my readers here, on behalf of all the island boys-turned-city boys in this archipelago:

The last time I was in Alcantara, in 1996, my father Jose Sr. was still alive, and we had come home so I could be welcomed and publicly recognized as one of Alcantara’s more successful sons. We had a ceremony in the plaza, where a drum-and-bugle corps played “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” as the formation spelled out W-E-L-C-O-M-E-T-O-A-L-C-A-N-T-A-R-A” letter by letter across the wide lawn. As impressed as I was by this artistic display of affection, I took pity on the young boys and girls who marched in the hot sun in my honor, and it was the one time that I wished, on their behalf, that Alcantara had a shorter name.

My passport actually gives my birthplace as “Looc,” so that would have been kinder on my hosts. Born in 1954, I came from a time when Alcantara was still part of that bigger town and had yet to come into its own. I have passed through Looc now and then, but only by necessity; I have little to do with it, otherwise. Alcantara, Romblon, has always been my hometown, and in every other document except my passport, I proudly say so.

It seems strange that I would feel such a close affinity to a place I hardly know. My parents left for Manila with me just two or three years after I was born, and while we returned to Alcantara now and then—taking the boat to Looc or Romblon, or the DC-3 to Tugdan—I don’t think I ever stayed in Alcantara for longer than a month, except in 1964, when I spent a whole glorious summer there, enjoying the ocean, the hills of Lauan, and visits to my mother Emy’s relatives in nearby Guinbirayan. It was everything a ten-year-old city boy could ask for: the sense and memory of an island hometown where the hilltop was never too far from the shore, where the people took their problems in stride with a hearty laugh and a glass of tuba, and where the nights were punctuated only by gas lamps and fireflies.

The next time I returned to Alcantara, it was in 1974, and I was 20 and an expectant father; I had come with my new bride Beng, and I recall walking home with her under a canopy of stars. It was the most starlit sky I had ever seen, and as if that were not dramatic enough, a comet hung up there, like a bridal veil.

This was the Alcantara I memorialized in my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place. While I could not always come home, and maybe because I could not, I wrote my hometown into my novel, so I could visit it every time I turned the pages.

These days, working in Manila, I wonder now and then what life must be like in Alcantara. The last time I was there, television and VCRs were all over the place, but cellphone services had yet to be started. I can imagine that the Internet must have invaded Alcantara’s schools and living rooms.

For all that technology, Alcantara will always be that spot for me where, somewhere on a pretty hillside, my grandfather Anatolio’s bones lie in an unmarked grave, reminding me how important it is to leave our signature where and while we can, but also, ultimately, how we all return to our native soil, rich and poor, lettered and unlettered alike.

A lot can change in 50 years; people can, too. But the Alcantara I was privileged to be born in and to visit from time to time will be as it always was—my hometown—in this 57-year-old boy’s mind.

(The pic's of the house where I was born in Alcantara, Romblon. It's no longer there.)

Penman for Monday, January 31, 2011

THESE PAST two weeks have been marked by all kinds of unexpected and almost odd but happy reconnections with a part of my youth that, until recently, I hadn’t thought about in a long, long while. That’s the time I spent as a schoolboy at La Salle Green Hills in the early ‘60s.

A couple of weekends ago, Beng and I drove out to what’s becoming one of our favorite hideaways, One Tagaytay Place near People’s Park in that city, on the ridge overlooking the lake. I’d written about One Tagaytay before and how glad we were to discover it for its cozy appointments, tasteful décor, and reasonable rates. I was even more pleased to find that its manager was an old batchmate from LSGH, Karl Velhagen, whom I sought out for a chat before checking out. It turns out that Karl had worked previously with another La Salle classmate of mine, Johnny Valdes. I haven’t seen Johnny since I left La Salle in 1966, but many Filipinos will know and appreciate the company he founded: Johnny Air Cargo, which transports parcels and packages quickly and cheaply from the US to the Philippines. I’d been a JAC suki long before I realized that the “Johnny” in the company name was someone I knew; I use them to bring my fountain pens and other eBay pickups over.

Two Saturdays ago, our special guests at the monthly meeting of our pen club were the JAC sales people, who had come over to promote their services. (The Parker pen sales representatives were there, too, but I’ll write more about Parkers another time.) They lit up when they learned that I knew their boss from way back; they were even more surprised when—after they described him as a “soft-spoken” man—I told them that Johnny was a great orator, who creamed us regularly in the declamation contests with such memorable pieces as the climactic monologue from Christopher Marlowe’s “Faustus.”

That was the kind of training we got at La Salle, which has been on my mind a lot these past few months, since I began working on a book to commemorate the centennial of the arrival of the La Salle brothers in the Philippines in 1911. I’ve been interviewing the brothers and their students for the book, which we expect to launch later this year.

I can’t write about my own experience with the La Salle brothers in the book, so let me tell my story now, in the hope that it will spur others to share their own recollections. It’s a sob story that I’ve told many times before, so bear with me when I say, again, that I must have been the poorest boy in La Salle Green Hills, which I attended from 1960 to 1966, covering Prep to Grade 7; our class was accelerated twice, saving me some time and my parents a lot of money. My mother was a minimum-wage postal clerk in Mandaluyong, and my father was often in between jobs, but they had resolved to give me, their first-born, the best schooling they thought I could get.

La Salle Green Hills had just opened, and it looked very promising, so they enrolled me there, marshaling every peso they could find for that purpose; my younger siblings either went to public school or stopped schooling for a year so their kuya could be a La Sallista who spoke and used English as well as anyone could—a family sacrifice I was expected to repay later in life.

Still, we were happy at home, and I enjoyed my days in school. My teachers and classmates were kind to me; some friends would give me rides in their family car—otherwise, I would have had to walk, as a I did most days, to the bus stop on EDSA (then Highway 54), and then walk the same distance from the highway to where we lived on Boni Avenue; others shared their sandwiches and candy bars. While I couldn’t share in my classmates’ enthusiasm for remote-controlled cars, I found comfort in the library, and became a bookworm.

That, I’m sure, is how and why I wanted to become a writer, beginning with crude but spirited imitations of the Hardy Boys and whatever else I was devouring. I wasn’t the smartest kid in my class—a quiet but very bright boy named Tofi Reyes seemed to have a lock on that distinction—but I picked up enough “green stars” to keep my parents happy. I also somehow became the Most Outstanding Cub Scout and then Senior Patrol Leader of our Boy Scout troop.

This is where my recollection of our principal—a tall, lean, and stern-looking German named Brother Alphonsus—comes in. Trained as an engineer, Br. Alphonsus liked to oversee every little thing that was going on in his fiefdom, from construction projects to misbehaving boys. From our knee-high point of view, he seemed to be the last person you would expect any favors from.

And yet, kept by my parents among the family’s most treasured papers, is a handwritten note from Br. Alphonsus to the school cashier. I had been due to receive an honor as a Boy Scout, but my parents couldn’t afford to pay the P25.00 that a new uniform would cost. So my father had written the principal to ask if he could sign a promissory note for the uniform, or else we would have to decline the honor. Br. Alphonsus directed that the uniform be given to me, free of charge.

I’m sure my father found a way to thank Br. Alphonsus for that kindness, but I don’t recall that I ever did. So let the book be my token of thanks for what Br. Alphonsus and the good brothers did for boys like me.

Working on this book has led to some fascinating stories and discoveries. Dr. Joey Lapeña, now a professor of otorhinolaryngology at the UP College of Medicine, sent in a story about Br. Francis Cody that I’m not even sure will make it to the final text of the book in these days of political correctness, but which, you might say, packs a narrative wallop, and so deserves to be shared:

“Brother Francis was a ruddy, robust monk whose bite left as strong an impression as his bark. When we were in seventh grade, some fellows had been caught fooling around with maryjane and Br. Francis paraded them from one class to another to teach us all a lesson. He made them stand on the platform facing the board and brace themselves with their buttocks facing the class, then roll up the sleeves of his holy habit, holding the hefty wooden paddle (a.k.a. the ‘hot seat’) like a baseball bat (or so it seemed to me as I contemplated ‘the loss of heaven and the pains of hell’), relating the litany of their transgressions as he took a few practice swings (that seemed like an eternity) before making audible (from the whack as well as the whacked) contact that reverberated through the deathly-quiet room and the lads therein. He definitely left his mark on us all.”

The other stories, I assure you, are much more pleasant than that, and you’ll read them all in the book when it’s done.

On a visit to the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod—the alma mater of such notables as business leader Oscar Hilado and film director Peque Gallaga—I interviewed Br. Ray Suplido. Quite apart from his own remarkable odyssey as a Bacolod boy returning as USLS president, I learned from Br. Ray that one of the rules of the brothers stipulated that ink should be provided to the students, and a brother went around with a very large bottle of Quink (yes, they used to make them in liter sizes) so people could fill up their fountain pens from it. In more olden times, a brother was permitted to bring a knife into the school—for the sole purpose of sharpening quills!

Incidentally, if you’re a La Salle alumnus and have an interesting story to tell, serious or funny, about the brothers who made a difference in your life or left a firm impression on you (not necessarily of the kind described by Dr. Lapeña), I’d be happy to hear it. Please download the questionnaire I posted for this purpose here and email me your responses at jdalisay@mac.com.

Animo, La Salle!


(That's our Grade 1 class with Br. Alphonsus and, if I remember right, Ms. Elena San Juan. I'm the rearmost, rightmost guy.)

Penman for Monday, January 24, 2011

ONCE IN a while a book comes along that excites your imagination with a feast for both the eyes and the brain, and one such book that I came across recently was Art Deco in the Philippines, edited by Lourdes Reyes Montinola and published last year by ArtPostAsia. I chanced upon the book while waiting to interview “Lourds”—as her friends call her—for the biography of a dear friend of hers whom she had met in New York where she was a young college student just after the War.

As I Ieafed through the pages one visual delight followed another, and when Lourds stepped out to meet me I told her how wonderful I thought the book was, and asked where I could buy a copy. She seemed somewhat surprised that a baby boomer like me could be so interested in Art Deco, but I wasn’t just being polite.

Beng and I have been Art Deco fans for the longest time, smitten by the style’s clean lines and curves, the sublime embodiment of early 20th-century Modernism and its obsession with motion and speed. (The term itself comes from a 1925 Paris exhibition titled the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.) It’s most visible, of course, in architecture, but you can also find its unmistakable imprint on everything from jewelry and fashion to cutlery and, yes, fountain pens.

No stranger to clear, poised prose—her two previous books, Piña (Amon Foundation, 1991) and Breaking the Silence (UP Press, 1996), won National Book Awards—Dr. Montinola applies her connoisseur’s eye to a style that swept the world and inevitably reached the Philippines through such architects who studied abroad as Tomas Mapua, Juan Nakpil, and Juan Arellano.

As she notes in her preface, “The mid-1930s brought about American Deco, manifested in New York skyscrapers and by the ‘streamlined’ look. It spread to as far as Japan, India, Australia, and Shanghai. Although the Philippines is at the farthest end of the map, its gifted architects came home from abroad and created works of art inspired by their observations but adapted to their own culture. Some of these works were their interpretations of Art Deco.

“Its official reign was from 1910 to 1939, but in the Philippines it lasted into the 1940s and thereafter, in some records. Here, as in the rest of the world, cinemas and palaces of pleasure were among the buildings constructed in the Art Deco style.”

Beng and I have sought out Art Deco wherever we’ve traveled from Manhattan to Shanghai, without forgetting that some great examples can still be found here at home. Just strolling along the Escolta a couple of years ago, for instance, we were able to spot and photograph some buildings whose Art Deco facades managed to survive the War (not to mention the wrecking ball that took out the jai-alai fronton, and the no-less-criminal neglect that let the Metropolitan Theater go to rot—again—after it had been so meticulously restored in 1978.)

The Montinola book—to which Art Deco enthusiasts Gerard Rey Lico, Manuel Maximo Lopez del Castillo-Noche, John Silva, and Augusto Villalon contributed—chronicles past and present specimens of the finest in Art Deco architecture in Manila, Iloilo, and Quezon. These include, most notably, the aforementioned Metropolitan Theater, which Lourds was fortunate to have had photographed before it fell into its present disrepair, and the showcase campus of Far Eastern University, the board of which she chairs. We are privileged to enter the Hidalgo-Lim house on Vito Cruz in Manila, designed and built in 1930 by Juan Nakpil, and to savor its indigenized Deco details. We discover that, where the Philippine National Bank now stands on the Escolta, a magnificent Crystal Arcade once stood in the 1930s, “the first shopping mall to introduce a walkway leading to the glass-walled shops on the first level.”

Elsewhere in the Philippines, we visit Art Deco palaces in Baguio, Dagupan, and Iloilo. We see how three future National Artists—Botong Francisco, Juan Nakpil, and Victorio Edades—took part in creating a mural for Capitol Theater on the Escolta.

It’s not a terribly big book, and clearly much room is left for more material (Lourds would tell me later that, since copies of the book began to circulate among friends, leads have poured in about other Art Deco treasures around the country). But as a pioneering foray into the documentation of this important art movement in the country, it’s an invaluable contribution to the literature, and to raising our general consciousness of another threatened aspect of our cultural heritage.

I learned from Lourds that the book had been published as a limited edition for largely private distribution, but if you like Art Deco as much as we do, you’ll have a chance to buy a copy of Art Deco in the Philippines at a public launch that will be held on February 10, a Thursday, 6 pm at the Ayala Museum in Makati. I’d urge you not to miss out on this opportunity to acquire what will surely be a collector’s piece and in any case a delightful read.



MY RECENT series on the early presidents of the University of the Philippines drew some interesting responses, two of which I’ll publish here. Lawyer Antonio C. Pastelero, chairman of the UP Student Council from 1968 to 1969, wrote to point out that “For the sake of historical accuracy, Jose Maria Sison never figured prominently during the U.P. student activism days during the period I was enrolled in the University, between 1966 to 1970. Furthermore, Carlos P. Romulo was President of UP until January 1969, when he was forced to step down when UP went on a general strike.”

Another lawyer and UP graduate, Rem Maclang, had this to add: “Allow me to insert a facet of Dean Vicente Sinco's authoritarian mien, as our College of Law Dean in 1957, before he became UP president. As a reminder of its pursuit of the tradition of excellence, if you happen to be at the second floor of the UP College of Law building, atop at the entrance to the Dean's office, is a long unbroken list of first placers in the bar exams from its incipience up to 1953, when the line was abruptly cut. So, there was a gap of three years (1954-1956). During our graduation rites, Dean Sinco, in his characteristic demanding, crisp and somber voice, ended his speech: ‘This class is mandated to restore the tradition of excellence in the bar exams.’ Subsequent events proved him to be not only an intellectual dictator but also a keen prognosticator. True to the mandate given by Dean Sinco, UP College of Law class of 1957, not only grabbed the first place, but seven of the first 10 places!”

Flotsam & Jetsam (102) for Wednesday, January 19, 2011

My piece on Rosario drew many responses from readers, some of them so sharply written that I thought it would be a pity if more people didn’t read them, so I’ll post them here, verbatim, for your delectation.

From Roy Boggs:

Dear Prof. Dalisay,

I just can't thank you enough for your column today.  I'm a foreigner, an American retiree (a former California lawyer)  living here in Makati.  I've written to you before, mostly about our common interest in fountain pens and typewriters (for which, by the way, I'd love a repair person referral) and all things related to the written word.

As a foreigner, I've felt it wasn't my place to speak out on this matter of the MMFF awards injustice to Rosario. After all, I speak almost no indigenous Filipino language, Tagalog or otherwise, and I'm  a guest in this country.  So who am I to judge?  Still, I'm  a lifelong film fan and even student.  I've been in movies and am a member of the Screen Actors Guild in the US, the largest and most influential union of motion picture actors in the world.  I go to see just about everything that screens commercially in Metro Manila, foreign and local product, notwithstanding the lack of subtitles on the local productions.  That's not as big a handicap as the ticket sellers seem to think it is as they invariably warn me when I buy a ticket to a Tagalog movie, that "It's a Tagalog movie, sir."  I don't think they realize how much English dialogue is in the typical Tagalog movie, especially if the characters are "upscale" and "urban."  In addition, as you noted today, the typical comedy and melodramatic performances are anything but subtle (Why oh why does every chase have to be in fast motion and every joke punctuated with music score circus music and clown-like mugging?) and play to Western eyes much as a silent film would.  In fact, one can generally judge the villainy of a Filipino movie character by the extent to which he or she speaks English, the more English, the more "snooty" and "out of touch" the character generally is.  Though that's not always true as it pertains to aspiring students and professionals like academics, physicians and lawyers.  Bollywood films often have much the same socio-economic, linguistic dynamic.

But I'm digressing, the lot of a retiree with too much time on his hands.  In any case, I see just about everything that plays here: Cinemalaya, the embassy-and-cultural-center-sponsored film festivals: Spanish, Japanese, European Union, etc, all the Hollywood releases I can, at least, stomach, except the horror stuff.  All of the above is simply to say I love movies and think I know something about them as art.

Your colleague, Butch Francisco, as you undoubtedly know, was one of the MMFF judges and, when faced with the consternation from countless others that you and I share about the treatment of Rosario, wrote, maybe a couple of weeks ago, a really weak and petulant defense of the judging in which he described the scoring process which seemed more appropriate to judging an ice skating or gymnastics performance than dramatic acting.  Judges were actually obliged to see the film and submit a score from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100 or something like that, without  having seen the other movies in competition.  That makes no sense at all.  So, Ms.  Mercado's cigarette technique hurt her score just as if she had not stuck her landing in a gymnastics vaulting competition!  This is pure madness.  Then Mr. Francisco finished his defense by dismissing any criticism of the judging not based on having seen all of the MMFF releases as the high-and-mighty judges like himself had done, all 8 of them I think.  Well, I have seen 5 of them, I think, all save Father Jejemon, Dalaw, and Shake, Rattle and Roll (again, the horror stuff is just not for me, and the Dolphy comedy just didn't interest me much as I admire the comedy veteran who doesn't get work worthy of him any more save for cameo gems like his role in Rosario).

Still, I don't think it takes having seen all these formulaic, commercial releases to take the position that you and I do, namely, that not having, at the very least, nominated Rosario's director and lead actress, in their respective categories renders the MMFF as unworthy of any serious consideration as a venue for the evaluation of motion picture artistry.

As you said, the film might be said to be a bit too pretty for its own good, but it had so much to say, says it so well and with such care, with subtle, understated performances and stunning period detail.  Most important, as you said, its aspirations are so admirably lofty and thought-provoking.

I tell you what.  I don't think this film was snubbed because Ms. Mercado's smoking technique was off.  No, it's the subject matter of a "fallen woman" who was, nevertheless, defiant and determined to survive, that didn't sit well with the taste and values arbiters of this country and we know who I mean.

I agree with you as well that some commercial films in this country can be better than one might expect because Filipino writers can be so good and their actors so skilled that the finished product transcends its merely commercial aspirations.  Two recent examples for me are the comedies, Ded na si Lolo and Kimi Dora starring the brilliant Eugene Domingo.  Those pictures were funny and accessible to the mass audience, but they also had a strong subtext of social commentary and values assertion that made them worthy of repeat viewing and international exposure.  It can be done.

Please feel free to pass this on to Mr. Francisco, who, unlike you, does not provide an e-mail address on his column for replies.  Pass it on to anyone you please.   I don't want to get deported.  I enjoy my life here and I respect Filipinos and their values.  But I think the treatment Rosario and its artists got in the MMFF was a crime against Filipino culture and every Filipino artistic aspiration.

Maraming salamat po Sir Butch for saying that which needed to be said.

Your constant reader and admirer,

Roy Eugene Boggs

From Charlie Leonor:

Dear Mr Butch Dalisay,

I am an avid reader of your column and Philstar. And how most gratifying it was for me to have read your article in today's issue entitled "The True 'Tanging Ina' ". Somehow I felt vindicated having wrote an article to the entertainment editor of the newspaper and indirectly to Mr Butch Francisco. Pls see my email below. My email never got answered. Of course it never would because these movie people are not interested at all in readers who have views that are above the mundane things they are busy with. It was my mistake though that I did not think of sending my email to Arts and Culture where it should really belong. Again, thanks for the article and may you continue to inspire us with your columns and insights.

Sincerely,

Charlie Leonor

Date: Thursday, 30 December, 2010, 9:41 AM

Dear Mr. Ricky Lo,

I would be most grateful if you can forward a copy of this email to your Mr. Butch Francisco. He is a member of the jury board of the recent MMFF and my reactions are directed to his columns yesterday and today.

1. He had defended the board and the entire festival being true to his role as member of the board. It also deprived him of a better perspective to comment on the real worth and value of the movies shown in the festival. I am not a professional movie critic but someone who has an eye for customer-focused quality as the standard of evaluating results and performance and value-for-money. And I can speak with conviction that the movies we saw during this season, with the exception of "Rosario" are not worthy of being pushed down our collective throats as the best that Filipino cinema can muster during this Christmas season. In fact, they are right on the edge of being considered pure mediocrity. We saw no exceptional quality in even the most elementary aspects of movie production, much less in acting competence.

2. As an example, I cannot for the life of me, understand how "Tanging Ina..." became best picture. This is a TV 1-hour special at best, not worthy of a festival!. I cannot see how it can be classified as comedy! The actors struggled to elicit any ounce of hilarity from the audience, "trying desperately hard", as it may. I do not know how screaming, falling down on the floor, doing "ABS_CBN insider jokes", slapping faces, hysterical crying, melodramatic speeches inside a church, etc as award-winning". There must be some kind of collective sudden brain-injury that plagued the board simultaneously when their deliberations were going on, knowing their caliber and the disappointing results of their decisions. Ai-ai as best actress? The director of that movie as the best? C'mon guys, you can do better than that. The only reason I can see for you making those decisions was that these were made during Ninos Innocentes day!

3. There were notable performances that you noticed, giving you credit where credit is due. The supporting role of Dolphy in "Rosario" was terrific. But in Fr Jejemon? If there is no one worthy in this category, then do not award just anybody! Well of course we understand that this is an act of recognition for Dolphy whose acting years may have come to an end. But how about the others you even failed to nominate? Who does the nominations? Example is Albert Martinez as Director. How can he even be compared to the Director of "Tanging Ina...". The former showed results in cinematic composition without the benefit of special effects. The latter showed disorganization in a story that is severely wanting in total quality.

There are many more that I can mention and encourage my students in two universities where I teach to discuss. The main theme in my discussions above is this: Movie festivals, such as the MMFF, are held to continuously upgrade the quality standards of works of art produced by our very own talents by recognizing and awarding results that are at par or even surpassing the standards we have set. (Perhaps this year you have standards that are quite low, which is a pity).  That is one sublime mission the festival executive committee and the board of jurors should have given foremost consideration. I sincerely believed that in the case of the 2010 festival, you have failed us, the public, miserably.

From Rem Maclang:

Hi, Butch

  Having been shocked, myself, by that degenerate MMFF's verdict totally eliminating "Rosario" and emboldened by your well-grounded, as well as, elucidating critique, which is, by no means, belated, for righting a wrong never prescribes, I'm inclined to prefix "Pu" to Tanging Ina and throw the invective at the cabal pretending to be movie jurors.

  Cheers!

  Rem

Penman for Monday, January 17, 2011

THIS COMES a few weeks too late to affect anything or maybe even anyone, but there’s something I need to register for the record, simply because it would be the right thing to do, even if I rile up ten million Filipinos, most of whom won’t read me, anyway.

As has been our annual habit, Beng and I went out to see a couple of movies in the recent Metro Manila Film Festival, and our first choice was Rosario, the period drama that intrigued me because I’m always interested in seeing representations of the past and because it was said to be based on a true story, no less than that of businessman Manny Pangilinan’s grandmother. The second was the festival’s surprise Best Picture winner, Ang Tanging Ina Mo Rin—Last Na ‘To, the latest in a series revolving around the mother-character of comedienne Ai Ai de las Alas.

I came out of both screenings speechless, at an utter loss to explain how and why Tanging Ina could have bested Rosario by any conceivable standard of responsible and credible criticism. I later read that the producers of Rosario diplomatically chose not to complain about the snub and to take it on the chin. Well, I’ll complain—totally unbidden, although I’ll admit to knowing MVP (who’ll be surprised by this ruckus I’m raising)—on their behalf.

Let me get this clear, before someone accuses me of being just another snooty cineaste (which I’m sure I’ll be tarred and feathered as, anyway): I have nothing against popular movies, not even against slapstick comedy and certainly not melodrama, of which I’ve done more than my share as a sometime scriptwriter for the likes of Lino Brocka, Laurice Guillen, Marilou Diaz Abaya, and Gil Portes.

I understand the part about giving the audience what it wants, so the producers can make their money back. Heck, Lino and I did that all the time, with such treacly confections as Tahan Na, Empoy and Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan. But we always sought to raise whatever standards we had to work with, believing that even the most hackneyed cinematic conventions could be infused with some freshness. And even so, we never confused box-office success with artistic excellence; while the two could come together on rare occasions, commercial compromise most often remains just that.

But never mind us—let’s dwell on these two movies and their relative merits and demerits. Rosario’s not perfect—the periodizing can sometimes get too satiny-smooth (in the way that the soldiers in our World War II movies always come out wearing new-looking uniforms, which even Bataan failed to crease and scuff), and I have a hard time believing that Filipinos in what they called “peacetime” really said “Nueva York” instead of the easier and jazzier “New York.”

But it has that rarest of Filipino-movie qualities—grand ambition, not just in being a period piece and all the extra expense and fussiness that that entails, but in its depiction of a Filipino woman and mother who was in many ways atypical of her time. The coquettish Rosario—deftly played by Jennylyn Mercado in a role that seems to have been tailor-made for a face so evocative of the age—meets three men on a tumultuous wave of fortune.

Tanging Ina, on the other hand, is the latest rollout of a proven franchise (don’t ever believe that “last na ‘to” bit—I can just see next December’s Ang Tanging Ina Pa Rin, Huling Hirit). Mistakenly diagnosed with what she’s led to believe is a terminal illness, Ai Ai de las Alas as single-mom Ina Montecillo rediscovers (more literally than you think) her family and what keeps families going.

It’s an admirable sentiment, but the basic problem with this comedy was that, for the most part, it wasn’t even funny—I kept groaning at lines and setups that could’ve sparkled, with the right inspiration. (“In fairness,” to use the industry’s favorite expression—understandably because fairness in this business seems to be in short supply—I enjoyed that bit where Ai Ai’s maid kept playing background music to accompany her dramatic arias.) I have no doubt that Ai Ai de las Alas—beneath all that screaming and fainting—is a fine actress just waiting for better material; but she has to step out of the Tanging Ina mode and take more risks, real risks, to realize that potential.

I had high hopes for this year’s MMFF, having read somewhere that the ridiculous criterion of box-office bankability had been removed for the Best Picture, to be replaced by “artistry; creativity; innovativeness; global appeal; technical excellence (70 percent, up from 50 percent); and historical and cultural value (30 percent, up from 25 percent).” By all—not just one or most, but all—of these standards, Rosario should’ve been the runaway winner.

Jennylyn Mercado wasn’t even nominated for the Best Actress award; neither was Albert Martinez as Best Director. Reportedly, Jennylyn lost the judges’ nod because she couldn’t hold her cigarette right. Excuse me, but—speaking as a reformed chain smoker—is there an approved way of holding a cigarette? Never mind if the jurors found themselves more moved—one has to wonder how—by Ai Ai’s histrionics; failing to recognize Jennylyn’s performance (one that required a complete transformation of her character from privileged daughter to abandoned wife) is like being punished for jaywalking by a trip to the electric chair.

Sure, her character went to America, where she presumably learned to smoke, but the young Rosario was still new at this business of acting all grown-up and smart. Why fault the actress for that tiny lapse—which I don’t even think it is—when she carried the most difficult scenes requiring the registration of a whole range of emotions within a couple of seconds (remember that scene where the landlord pressures her for sex?) with both power and subtlety? Here was a real mother faced with a real dilemma, which she resolved in favor of saving her family, even if that family was reduced to only her son Hesus—how much more Filipino can you get (and I’m asking that of those who reputedly said that Rosario didn’t project Filipino values well enough)?

By giving the sensitively photographed Rosario the technical awards it rightfully deserved, the MMFF jurors just proved that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees—they saw and liked the pretty little details but failed or refused to acknowledge the achievement of the entire project.

And yes, I heard that they “improved” the MMFF judging formula by bringing in new jurors, as it were, off the street. Exactly what that achieves by way of raising critical standards, I don’t know; would you have butchers and bakers on the Nobel Prize committee? If they want to give Most Popular Movie awards, fine. But please let’s not pander to the notion that what’s most popular is best, especially if you’ve trotted out sensible-sounding criteria like “artistry, creativity, and innovativeness” as well as “historical and cultural value.”

Is this being elitist? Of course. Great art is almost inherently elitist, because it takes uncommon risks and defies the norm, even when it expresses something we all feel but don’t have the words or the images for.

This sad experience of having the recycled Tanging Ina sold to us as “Best Picture” over the thematically more daring and technically more accomplished Rosario convinces me that until we learn how to develop, recognize, and respect high standards, we’re not going to make great movies. Those who want to, and who can, won’t—why should they, if this all they get?

The ultimate irony is that these were both “mother” stories, but the mother that truly stood out, the real tanging ina, was Rosario.

(Photo from igma.tv)

Penman for Monday, January 10, 2011


EAGER TO start the new year on a note of high purpose and industry, I cajoled myself into performing two tasks that I had been putting off for the longest time: archiving two years’ worth of blog entries, and darning three buttons back onto their respective shirts. The archiving was a tiresome chore, but as it happens, I do enjoy sewing for some strange reason—I used to hem pants bought off the resale rack by hand during my grad-school days, so the button job was a pleasant diversion. In these mid-50s, threading the needle should be the hardest part of sewing, but I’m nearsighted, so that’s not a problem; it only becomes a problem—and it did—when I drop the needle on the floor and can’t bend over to pick it up.

With these self-assignments out of the way, I congratulated myself, eased back into my La-Z-Boy, took one remote control in each hand—one for the TV, another for the cable Digibox—and fired away like a grizzled gunslinger. The TV’s old, but the Digibox is new; I usually make a grab for any black box with blinking lights, but I’d stubbornly resisted getting digital TV, too cozy with my current setup to make the transition. What nudged me was the realization that with the little black box would come two channels that I waste every free minute of my American vacations on—the History Channel (not so much for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire but for such plebeian pursuits as Pawn Stars and American Pickers) and, even more importantly, the crime channel (here, Crime & Investigation or CI).

I say “more importantly” because I have a crime fixation. I’m not a criminal (well, at least not yet) but I love reading crime fiction and true-crime stories, and watching crime movies and programs. I started out with the Hardy boys, but soon graduated to Erle Stanley Gardner and then The Godfather, which I surreptitiously read while hiding underground during martial law. (My Marxist handlers denounced it as capitalist trash but I finished it anyway, enthralled by all that artificial blood even as the real stuff was flowing around us; later, when I was arrested, I even wangled a day pass to watch the first Godfather movie, marching back to prison afterwards with a satiated smile.)

I’ve tracked all three CSI flavors since they came out, and know the characters from Dexter and Law & Order better than my cousins. I want my crime books and movies raw and bloody, not artsy-fartsy (I’ll take Michael Mann’s Heat anytime over Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, thank you); if possible, I like them real, with dates, timestamps, crime-scene photos, mug shots, the works.

Semi-Buddhist Beng, who literally can’t hurt a fly (she shoos them away with such perplexed pleadings as “Mr. Fly, what are you doing here?”), can’t understand this obsession of mine with malice, mayhem, and morbidity. She prefers cooking and makeover shows—you know, those shows where you learn cool new words like “frittata” and “sabayon”, and see reasonable people justify hoarding a roomful of toilet paper, a sentiment I can sympathize with.

Mind you, I like these, too—especially when they show cheese (which I hate), or houses stuffed with garbage, both of which make me squirm. Come to think of it, it’s the squirming I probably enjoy, whether it’s from looking at the stringy mozzarella on a pizza or at the grisly aftermath of a murder. It’s sick, especially since I know there’s nothing truly funny about death and suffering, but there’s a very human reason for all this, as I’ll explain shortly.

“No wonder you get all these nasty dreams,” Beng tells me. It’s true—some demonic crook keeps chasing me in my nightmares, where I’ve been shot three or four times, only to be saved (and nudged awake, screaming) by Beng, who probably dreams of pink marshmallows and saffron-robed monks.

So why wallow in the pits of human depravity, to the point where I can recite a litany of the world’s worst serial killers from A to Z (that’s Charles Albright to the Zodiac Killer) and their ghastly deeds? Maybe because, first of all, there’s just too much of it around us; death—gory, senseless, dripping death—is no longer a TV taboo, and CSI accustomed us to watching autopsies over dinner. Today we can use words like “epithelials” and “blunt force trauma” in the same sentence as “birthday” and “wedding anniversary.”

And why even bother with TV—why, there’s the Philippines, all 7,100 islands of it, the sunny hospitality of whose people is matched only by the propensity of a notable few for crimes of power and passion (never mind, for now, the smalltime pickpockets, cellphone snatchers, and sampayan sungkiteers). Years ago, writing an essay for an American literary journal devoted to the theme of “Crime and Punishment,” I remarked that “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.”

“It relaxes me” is the most honest answer I can give Beng, and it’s the terrible truth. The answer to “why” is the same answer I can expect to get to the questions I keep raising in class: Why don’t we write more stories with happy endings? Why does bad news sell better than good news? Why do we consider tragedy timelessly sublime, and comedy a passing chuckle?

There’s a German word—Schadenfreude—a literal conjunction of “harm” and “joy” that tries to describe how we can find pleasure in the pains and misfortunes of others. Even before the Germans, the Greeks had a similar idea—catharsis—which involves those paradoxically good feelings you get from feeling bad. The idea is, hey, it’s happening to them, not to you; if you see someone else die, then you, lucky you, must be alive, so drink and be merry (and never mind the continuation)! Is this inhuman, or just plain human? You tell me.

I suppose that, like Beng, I should get more pleasure from seeing oranges turned to marmalade and virtual dump yards turned to showrooms. Surely, positivity has its virtues—it’s just not as interesting.

To accommodate our preferences, Beng and I keep separate TVs—hers in the bedroom, mine in my study. But sometimes I get bored watching bloody murder all by myself, and sneak back to bed while she’s watching, say, Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson making pear pudding (Nigella I don’t mind watching for longer stretches). Then my fingers find their way to the remote, and as soon as the next commercial comes I switch over to the crime channel.

“Oh, look,” I tell Beng, “there’s a new show called Crime and Punishment!”

“Crime is punishment!” she mutters, then rolls over.

Penman for Monday, January 3, 2011

TO MOST people here and abroad, “fountain pen” means a basic Parker or Sheaffer—or, when you go up the corporate ladder, a fancy Montblanc. (And remember when—back in the ‘70s and ‘80s—Christmas meant you got three or four silver Cross ballpens from friends and sponsors?)

I don’t mean to knock these brands—I specialize in vintage Parkers myself, and keep a few very nice Sheaffers as well, including a modern Targa with a buttery-smooth broad nib; two Montblancs are in my daily rotation, and as for Cross, well, they made President Obama’s inaugural pens.

But the fact is—for both personal use and corporate giveaways—there are many other top-notch pen makers out there, based in Europe, Japan, and the US whose products promise not only a pleasant writing experience but also great looks worthy of a pocket or a purse.

Two of those brands have now come to the Philippines, thanks to young Filipino entrepreneurs who have combined their interest in fine writing instruments with their business acumen. Sensing that Filipino professionals now want more and better choices for their personal accessories, these two ladies—Marian Ong of Scribe Writing Essentials and Charlene Ngo of Times Trading—have brought Pelikan and Lamy pens to Manila.

“Pelis” are no newcomers to the writing scene. The first Pelikan fountain pen was made in 1929 in Hanover in Germany, and—thanks to a sturdy and efficient piston-filling system, smooth nibs, and classic styling—the brand has risen to the very top of premier pen makes, along with Parker, Sheaffer, Waterman, and Montblanc. I use a gloriously deep-red-barreled Pelikan M800 myself more than any of my other pens, and when someone asks me to recommend a pen other than the most popular brands, I unhesitatingly suggest trying out a Pelikan.

Last December 18, at the Christmas party of the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines—our local pen lovers’ group which now has over 130 members online—we were joined by Marian, who brought a preview of what she now has for sale at Scribe Writing Essentials at Eastwood Mall.

An engineer by training, Marian set up Scribe in 2002 out of her love for reading and writing. (Her brother Warren Yu is an FPN-P member with, as far as I know, the only titanium pen in town.) “We first started with the Personal Sealing Wax sets which were then very hard to find,” Marion told me. “It all started when I was gifted with my very own Sealing Set which I really loved using when I wrote cards and letters to friends. But since this was not popular in the Philippines, purchasing sealing wax was really hard. I eventually sourced the supplier and from there we decided to bring in the products. We became popular for this product and eventually moved on to bringing in calligraphy sets as well.

“Aside from writing stuff, we are also known for unique reading accessories such as metal bookmarks with etchings and quotations as well as imported journals and notebooks. In 2009, we opened our very first store in Eastwood Mall. We offer imported journals, reading accessories, personal seals, calligraphy sets and other gift items.

“Our customers requested writing instruments and fountain pen accessories. This brought us to the idea of bringing in J. Herbin Inks and accessories, as this was one of the best ink brands in the industry. To complete the whole writing experience, of course it was only sensible that we also have a good writing pen brand. Our search eventually led us to Pelikan. Scribe Writing Essentials in now the official and exclusive distributor of Pelikans in the Philippines. We will be concentrating on the flagship line, Souveran, as well as entry-level models such as the M200. Special and Limited Edition pieces will also be available for special order.”

Lamy is another under-appreciated pen brand, but one that has developed a fanatic following worldwide. Generally very affordable, Lamy pens are known for their sleek, modern contours, snappy colors, dependable nibs, and trademark “paperclip” clips such as you find on the Safari, its best-known model. (It should tell you something that given all the possible pens she could ask from me for Christmas a couple of years ago, my daughter Demi specified and got a pink Safari, which I had to order from a dealer in Malaysia.)


Like Pelikan (which now happens to be Malaysian-owned, but still German-based), Lamy pens are still made in Germany, in Heidelberg, where the company has existed since 1930. It was this German passion for quality that prompted Charlene Ngo and Times Trading to bring Lamys to the Philippines.

She says: “We appreciated the brand and its quality, and we wanted to share it with Filipino consumers—for them to experience the quality that Europe is used to and to give them another option versus what's available mainstream. It is also a way for us to learn from other cultures—especially German design and engineering—their fastidious attention to every detail, making Lamy No. 1 in Germany.”

“I was never really a pen enthusiast,” Charlene confesses, “but ever since we started to carry the brand, I had to study each model and discovered the beauty of the pen and the money and effort that Lamy invests in each model. We are so used to how a Parker or a Cross looks, that at first glance, I didn't give any notice to Lamy pens due to its utilitarian feel and design. But I fell in love with it after using them. Aside from the fact that Lamy writes so well, each pen has a distinct personality of its own. Each pen is guaranteed for quality—if your Lamy pen is defective, let us know, and we will replace it as long as it was not tampered with or intentionally destroyed.

Charlene also attended a recent FPN-P meeting and was impressed if not overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of our members for these ink-spitting artifacts that seem to belong to a bygone age but clearly have undergone a modern revival, as people seek a more personal writing experience away from the laptop keyboard. “During my first pen meet, I got to understand why people get attached to a pen and develop an emotional bond to it, she says. “Hopefully, I can start my own pen collection soon starting with Lamys!”

Lamy pens are now available at National Book Store in Shangrila, Rockwell, Trinoma, Quezon Ave, and Alabang ACC, as well as in Scribe in Eastwood, Luis Pen Store in Escolta, and Times Trading in Binondo. They start at P600 but can go up to P16,000 for the most special models, which use gold or platinum-coated nibs; the entire pen itself could be platinum-coated. Lamy also produces Swift rollerballs and Pico ballpoints. (They package a Pico with every Aston Martin—thankfully you can now buy the pen without the car.)

Penman for Monday, December 27, 2010

THANKS TO the university’s class-free Mondays policy and to Cebu Pacific’s ridiculously low budget fares (and, let me add, to our daughter Demi’s hotel job which gives us staff rates in her chain’s hotels worldwide), Beng and I managed to sneak out for a mid-December weekend in Beijing.

Anyone who knows where Beijing’s latitude is would realize that winter may not be the best time to visit the place, but Beng and I are incorrigible cheapskates when it comes to travel, and we’ll happily fry or freeze if it means getting somewhere for next to nothing. In this case, I’d booked this flight minutes after the fares were posted online by Cebu Pacific last August. (To give you an idea of how irresistible these deals can get, our round trip fare per person—with all surcharges, travel tax, seat selection, checked baggage, and travel insurance thrown in—came out to about P5,000.)

I’d been to Beijing once before—more than two decades and about a hundred pounds ago, in 1987, in the merry company of fellow writers Krip Yuson, Ricky de Ungria, Eric Gamalinda, and Fatima Lim. While Beng had joined me on another wintry CP sortie to Shanghai in 2008, she’d never been to Beijing, so I thought this would make her a nice pre-Christmas treat (we have our own “open skies” policy, a pledge to travel together while we can walk, and while we can afford it, before arthritis and penury bring us down).


You go to Hong Kong for the gadgets, to Guangzhou for the food, and Shanghai for the skyline, but there’s really only one major reason to go to Beijing: to imbibe the majesty of China, old and new. Beijing visitors invariably have two destinations on their itinerary: the Forbidden City (and Tiananmen Square, just outside it) and the Great Wall (one of several sections open to the public).

I’d seen both of these before, but a young man’s awestruck eyes can gloss over many details; back in 1987, many sections of the Forbidden City were still closed to public viewing—they were just shooting The Last Emperor then—and I was happy enough to be able to take a passing glance at Chairman Mao’s embalmed body in his mausoleum in a corner of Tiananmen. (“What do you want to see him for?” our Chinese guide asked me, not knowing I had been a fervent teenage Maoist. “He had my grandfather killed during the Cultural Revolution.”) As guest writers, we were also on a strictly guided tour then, with official guides and drivers shuttling us from place to place.

This time Beng and I decided to play tourists to the hilt, although we decided to forgo the services of an English-speaking guide (and many of them will approach you, boldly but politely, asking “Have you been to the Great Wall?”), at least for the Forbidden City. We took a cab from our hotel—cabs are plentiful and relatively cheap in Beijing—and arrived at the East Flowery Gate, which yielded us a seasonable view of the moat turning into black ice flecked by yellow leaves, the last stragglers of departed autumn.


It would seem that a palace with some 9,000 rooms would be the last place you should go into without a guide, but we wanted to muck around the corners of the City and not be hurried along. It proved to be a good idea, as the Forbidden City—basically one pavilion after another strung along a north-south axis—was best taken with many pauses. Too many things to see—a constant threat in China—can dull the senses, and the train of imperial images soon melded into that of one eternally undulating dragon. The most poignant scenes were those of desolation: the last emperor Pu Yi’s living quarters, for example, shone with ghostly dust. Indeed one’s lingering impression of the massively ornate Forbidden City is not that it is full, but that it is empty.


We did take a van with a guide—along with new friends from Manila, the Chinese-speaking sisters Conchita and Christine—to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. An old friend, the former activist and now Beijing CNN bureau chief Jimi Flor Cruz, had recommended that we choose the Mutianyu stretch of the wall over the nearer and more popular Badaling, and I’m glad we took his advice, because this is the Great Wall that snakes through your imagination, like a spiky ridge on the mountain’s back, vanishing into infinity at either end. Nothing more can be truly added to what thousands of historians, archeologists, and poets have already said about the Great Wall, and again the wintry silence that greeted us—it wasn’t snowing yet, but the sub-zero temperature guaranteed that there would be very few of us on the wall that day—was like a vault in which our smallness resonated.


Solitude, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found in the one place off the typical itinerary that I insisted on bringing Beng to: the sprawling Panjiayuan weekend flea market, where all manner of jade jewelry, Tibetan relics, fake Ming pottery, and ancient coinage could be found. My search for vintage Chinese Parker pens went for naught, but the vitality of the marketplace was a welcome tonic, reminding us—perhaps better than either the Forbidden City or the Great Wall did—of what China has been about all these centuries.


And let’s not forget the food, sumptuous and inexpensive, particularly if you walk out of the hotel and follow the hotel staff to where they themselves have lunch around the corner. For 11 yuan or about 70 pesos each, Beng and I had huge bowls of steaming noodles laced with mushrooms, chicken, and vegetables, the perfect antidote to the December chill.


A few days after we got back from China, Beng and I went to a favorite haunt, Ma’s Noodle House in Trinoma, for bowls of hot chicken mami, and then we watched Frozen, a snowbound survival saga. For a moment back there, it felt like Beijing all over again.


(That's Beng in between the flags in this panoramic shot of Tiananmen Square, taken with my iPhone 4.)

Penman for Monday, December 20, 2010


LEST I may have given the impression in last week’s piece on UP presidents that Jorge Bocobo was little more than a killjoy, let me add that Bocobo was also a visionary who believed that the university community should immerse itself in “the daily life of the masses,” and who urged professors to lecture in public high schools and students to assist in adult education. He also set up an Information Service that government officials could tap into if they needed data for policymaking.

When Bocobo moved on to become Secretary of Public Instruction in 1939, he was replaced by Agriculture Dean Bienvenido Gonzalez, whose father Joaquin had been the first rector of UP’s progenitor, the Universidad Literaria de Filipinas. Gonzalez would serve for two terms that straddled the war, and when he left in 1951—practically forced out of office by President Elpidio Quirino—it was over his vigorous defense of academic freedom. Former PGH director Antonio G. Sison served briefly as president during the Japanese Occupation; not surprisingly, Sison kept the PGH going in the last and worst days of the war.

It was during Gonzalez’s second term that UP moved to its new campus in Diliman, then a forested area that was part of what was known as the “Mariquina Estate” owned by the Tuasons. In a poll taken of UP students before the war, almost 85 percent rejected the idea of moving to this “rainforest teeming with snakes, wild pigs, lizards, monkeys, and a huge swarm of mosquitoes.”

Gonzalez was replaced at the helm of UP by Vidal A. Tan, a Renaissance man whose first degree was in the liberal arts before he turned to science and mathematics. Under Tan, UP’s liberal atmosphere flourished, and the ‘50s became another golden age of learning, debate, and artistic productivity for UP. To the everlasting gratitude of the UP faculty, Tan abolished the daily time record (DTR), replacing it with the monthly form we now sign “Upon my honor…” He also instituted study privileges for the children of UP personnel. Worn down by political intramurals, Tan retired in 1956, and Enrique Virata took over as acting president. It would take more than 21 months and 30 postponements to find a permanent replacement for Tan, as the regents bickered among themselves. In the end it took no more than four minutes and one balloting to elect law Dean Vicente G. Sinco as Tan’s successor.

The authoritarian Sinco would meet his match in such troublesome students as Homobono Adaza, who was expelled for maligning the regents in the Collegian, and of whom Sinco would say that “To graduate Adaza is to graduate criminals, communists, bandits, and traitors.” At the same time, however, Sinco democratized admission, and can be credited for establishing UP’s trademark general education curriculum. Sinco was also known to drop in unannounced on random classes and to take part in class discussions.

Sinco’s replacement in 1962 came in a rather unorthodox way: President Diosdado Macapagal had openly indicated his preference for the diplomat, general, and former UP English professor Carlos P. Romulo, predictably sparking opposition from many who saw it as another instance of Palace meddling in UP affairs. Macapagal got his wish anyway: by a 9-2 vote, the BOR “unanimously” elected Romulo (the BOR has a tradition of considering all such key votes unanimous after the fact), who was inaugurated in April 1963 to stirring choral music composed by Eliseo Pajaro, who used as his motif Romulo’s own words: “The university is a citadel of truth; let no one make of it anything else.”

Though known and sometimes derided for being unabashedly pro-American, Romulo saw himself as also a fervent nationalist, and instituted flag ceremonies on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, and had the UP ROTC wear the rayadillo uniforms the UP honor guard still uses today. Romulo’s liberalism would be challenged by students and young faculty members like Jose Ma. Sison who were already exploring more radical solutions to the nation’s ills. As fraught with ideological tension as Romulo’s presidency was, it was also a time when some of UP’s most important new institutions were established, among them the Asian Center, the Department of Filipino and Philippine Studies, the University Press, the International House, and the UP Computer Center.

In April 1968, 70 years old and recently widowed, CPR took his leave and told the regents he was moving on, pleased with what he had been able to achieve.” I bow out, as it were,” he said, “within full sight and hearing of the throb and hum of an academic machine in high gear, a power plant generating that force, that electricity, which brings light to every dark corner and cranny of our lives.”

Romulo was succeeded by another diplomat, Salvador P. Lopez, who however was an avowed socialist, at least in his literary leanings. Lopez’s assumption of the presidency was promptly greeted by student strikes in Diliman and Los Baños, and ironically it took the intervention of Lopez’s Upsilon “brod,” President Marcos, to meet some of the student demands for better facilities (some other demands, like the abolition of exams, did not fare so well).

Lopez would lead UP through its most turbulent period, one now remembered by its middle-aged veterans as the First Quarter Storm. Events both within and outside the university would mark UP indelibly as the bastion of the Left, the sworn antagonist of US imperialism, the Vietnam War, the Marcos regime, and everything they were associated with. In December 1969, the visit of American Vice President Spiro Agnew provoked a protest which resulted in the mauling and brief jailing of three UP students—Rene Ciria-Cruz, Jorge Sibal, and Gary Olivar. A month later, thousands of students would mass outside Congress as Marcos delivered his State of the Nation Address, and for the next few days and weeks, a virtual war would be fought on Manila’s streets between the police and student protesters.

On January 29, 1970, Lopez led 16 faculty members and four students to Malacañang to meet personally with Marcos to present their “Declaration of Concern.” Instead, Marcos read out to them the dossier of what he implied was a Communist on the UP faculty, who also happened to be in the delegation: Francisco Nemenzo Jr. who himself would become UP president about 30 years later. As it happened, Lopez bowed out when his six-year term ended in 1975, and was replaced by Onofre D. Corpuz.

And here is where I’ll end this quick overview of UP’s earlier presidents and their presidencies, having entered UP myself as a callow freshman in October 1970—yes, in the second semester, a one-time option offered to some of us who wanted to graduate earlier out of high school. Decades later, as a vice president, I got the chance to look around the UP president’s office and noticed a little back room with a simple cot behind the president’s desk. Diliman’s helmsmen must have found that facility useful at one point or other in their uneasy and unenviable lives.

Penman for Monday, December 13, 2010


FIRST THINGS first: Bert Labog, whom I mentioned in a column a few weeks back as having been one of the creative spirits behind the WOW Philippines tourism slogan, which then Tourism Sec. Dick Gordon championed, wrote me to complete the picture of that campaign’s genesis. Says Bert: “Bobby Caballero and I met then DOT Secretary Dick Gordon in his office and together we created ‘WOW, Philippines’, discarding ‘Exciting Philippines’ in the process, Dick's additional contribution being the turning of WOW into an acronym for ‘Wealth Of Wonders’, ‘Walk On Walls’, etc., which Bobby and I further expanded. This international poster campaign was art-directed by Eric Nepomuceno of Caballero & Associates, this company being DOT's agency of record at the time. Caballero produced and financed the material, for payment by DOT through PCVC later. Dick, however, decided to use BBDO-Guerrero for the TV commercial which used ‘More Than the Usual’ as its thematic line, without reference to ‘WOW, Philippines’, except at the ad's final frame which mentioned DOT's website, www.wowphilippines.com.”

So there we go, and kudos to all three: Bert, Bobby, and Dick.

JUST TEN days ago, the Board of Regents of the University of the Philippines elected the 20th president of that institution, now known by its revised charter as “the national university.” The election of former banker Alfredo Pascual came as a total surprise to many—myself included—because he was seen, despite his UP degrees and his membership on the board as Alumni Regent, to be an outsider.

Time will tell whether the BOR chose wisely, but the episode had me reaching for a unique resource on UP presidents—an unpublished and as yet untitled history of the University of Philippines, a massive project (over 330,000 words covering 963 single-spaced pages in its draft form) commissioned by former UP President Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo. As Dodong’s VP for Public Affairs at the time, I had the honor and the privilege of copyediting the manuscript, which explains why I have one of the very few extant copies around. Now and then, when I need some perspective on current UP issues, I pull up my soft copy onscreen and trawl merrily through a century of often very personal stories about a very public institution.

Researched and written by some of UP’s most accomplished writers, that history was meant to be readable and anecdotal rather than severe and academic. It would leave a lot to argue about, which—in addition to its formidable printing and funding requirements—probably contributed to its shelving. (A much shorter version—an update of the 1983 diamond-jubilee history—was eventually published last year by the UP Press, with History Department chairman Ferdie Llanes directing the project and myself again as copyeditor.)

While it was indeed too gargantuan to be published as a single volume—and think of the pictures it would have demanded—it’s a pity that the Nemenzo history didn’t push through, because it would have reminded us of how difficult and complicated—if not sometimes how seemingly capricious—the BOR’s selections for the presidency were.

It may surprise people to know that UP had no president for its first three years, even if the BOR had been authorized from the start to choose one; the regents were simply too busy setting up the university’s colleges. When they finally sat down to elect a president—and amid the clamor to choose a Filipino—they favored one of their own, Dr. Murray Simpson Bartlett, who happened to be a Protestant pastor. Despite the initial misgivings and his odd status as a clergyman in a secular university, Bartlett proved to be more progressive than expected, working to build what he called a “University for the Filipino.”

When Bartlett resigned two years later, he was succeeded by a Filipino, Judge Ignacio Villamor, whose selection was met unenthusiastically by students who thought that another American academic should have taken over and by the Manila Daily Bulletin, which argued that that UP had “not advanced far enough at the present time to be turned over to the guidance of any but a trained university administrator.”

According to the history, Villamor proved “listless”, and moved on to another post in the judiciary. The names tossed around for his successor—this time the board wanted another American—included those of the prominent philosopher John Dewey and, even more improbably, President Quezon’s reputed bet, outgoing US President Woodrow Wilson. The final choice was Dr. Guy Potter Benton, who had been assigned to the Philippines to look after the education of soldiers in the army. They had to offer him a salary almost equal to that of the Governor-General to get him to agree; the legislature also allotted P10,000 for his inauguration—in which the UP professoriat (for the first and the last time in UP history) wore white togas. In his speech, Benton urged the creation of a permanent endowment for UP supported by a mill-tax levy and land grants; that permanent endowment still has to be granted, almost a century later.

Rafael Palma was, in a sense, an accidental president, having agreed to take on the job in 1923 when Benton had to return to the US for medical reasons. Despite having served on the BOR since its inception, Palma—notes the history—“was easily the most reluctant president in the university’s history. He was at pains to convince others that his academic preparations were inadequate and his experience as legislator and regent—no matter how vast and impressive—did not qualify him for the post.” Palma would usher in what alumni would remember as a “golden age” of liberalism; he charged fees to support and strengthen the UP Student Council and the Philippine Collegian. He was also known as “the builder president,” turning much of what had been bamboo and wood into modern concrete. Later, Palma (pictured above) found himself at odds with his old friend Quezon over Palma’s defense of free speech in UP; the legislature cut the UP budget, and when he left the university in 1933 after ten years of service, the government denied him a gratuity.

Palma was succeeded by Jorge Bocobo, an earnest but very proper man who banned “frivolous activities” and insisted that every school activity have a learning component to it. When he was still a dean under Palma, Bocobo had made one significant contribution to the design of the new “Oblation” statue that was still being drafted by the sculptor Guillermo Tolentino—the addition of a fig leaf in a strategic spot. I’ll have more on UP’s presidents next week, but let me leave you for now with three memorable vignettes from the unpublished book:

The College of Agriculture, ca. 1912: The newly arrived batch immediately got a taste of the rigorous foresters’ routine as they were made to hike around the campus through the muddy trails along Molawin Creek then climb up Mount Makiling—in their leather shoes and white togs with neckties. The four-hour orientation sometimes disheartened a boy or two who went straight back home instead of proceeding to their quarters.

President on a horse: Quezon liked keeping in constant touch with the UP constituency, making an appearance at every invitation. The sight of him inspecting the campus while astride a white horse, which he would ride from Malacañang, was nothing unusual to the students. The hospitality was mutual, because Quezon would play host—cordial and even affectionate—to the UP constituency when they held picnics on the Malacañang grounds.

The one-foot rule: It was “the very strict” Dean of Women Ursula Uichanco-Clemente whose job it was to turn the girls into ladies mindful of the rules of decorum, personal hygiene, demeanor, and manners. She seemed entirely impervious to double-entendres and established the pithily worded “one-foot rule,” which was the distance that a male and female student were to keep between them when dancing at tea parties.

Penman for Monday, December 6, 2010

SOME FRIENDS and readers asked me to elaborate on remarks I made in passing in my column on “Family Time” a few weeks ago about the features of the new iPhone 4, so I’m going to devote this week to a roundup of recent Apple offerings. If you want to get yourself or your loved ones a Christmas gift, one or more of these goodies may just be the thing. (I know, I know—more than one friend has told me that I should get paid handsomely by Apple for doing such faithful and free promos for them, and I said yes, I’d be a rich man if I got even 1 percent of all the Apple products I’ve helped to sell these past many years, but even an Apple T-shirt or umbrella will be much appreciated—Steve, are you listening?)

Let’s begin with the iPhone 4, which is now being offered locally by Globe. I got my IP4 factory-unlocked from the Apple Store in Singapore, but I also got a Globe unit for Beng, under my Globe retention plan. They’re virtually the same, of course, except that the Singapore IP4 has that hideously large UK-type plug, and the Globe IP4 is, not surprisingly, Globe-locked. (Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, the UK, and Canada, among others, sell unlocked iPhones, mainly because of local laws prohibiting network locks.) HK sells the cheapest unlocked IP4s in the world at around US$642 for the 16GB model, with Singapore following closely at $657, but the HK units have been in such great demand that, until Apple began selling the phone officially in China last September, they were being bought up and sold in the mainland for twice the price.

What’s in the IP4 that’s gotten angry mobs pounding the doors of Apple Stores worldwide, for such an expensive chunk of glass and steel that, when it was first launched last June, seemed doomed to fail because of “Antennagate”? (The antenna problem—a reported signal glitch that nobody talks about anymore—didn’t dampen IP4 sales, which hit 1.7 million units in the first three days.)

You’ll find extensive technical reviews all over the Internet, but for me, as a user—and as I noted in my previous column—the IP4’s standout feature is its 5-megapixel camera, which takes outstandingly sharp and clear shots, as well as high-definition video. As a fairly active amateur photographer, I can say that the IP4 is the first phone that’s allowed me to leave my Nikon D90 and Leica D-Lux 3 at home for most shooting situations; it’s that reliable and that good.

The IP4 has two cameras, actually—a smaller one in front can take pictures of yourself and your companion with, but it comes in handier when you use it for what I consider the IP4’s killer app, FaceTime.

To those who’ve done video calls on Skype or Yahoo, FaceTime may seem nothing new, but FaceTime (which works only on wi-fi) is literally a one-click operation from your phone favorites screen, and it’s absolutely free. For Pinoy families separated by an ocean, FaceTime alone could well be worth the price of admission, over the long run. (I watched as my father-in-law spoke to his granddaughter Demi in San Diego, and tears streamed down his cheeks as she greeted him, laughing. As that credit-card commercial might put it, it was “Priceless.” Indeed, I think it was my demonstration of FaceTime that persuaded at least four relatives—my brother-in-law Eddie, my sister-in-law Mimi, and Mimi’s two daughters Gigi and Eia—to switch to IP4s during our recent US visit. I call and see my mother and my sister on Eddie’s phone almost everyday, and it’s like they never left.) Apple, by the way, has also released a FaceTime program for Mac desktops and laptops.

And did I say that the iPhone 4 is also, yes, a phone and an iPod? It’s more than capable as a smartphone—you’ll appreciate the threaded messaging—but I have to admit that I still use my BlackBerry as my main business phone, because nothing still handles email and messaging better than a BB, and I still prefer a real keypad to a virtual one. Rather, I use the IP4 more as an iPod, in which case only the iPod Touch might be better for its sleekness. I was never a big iPod user until I began playing poker, where Mahler’s “Adagietto” can be a great help in isolating the table action from everything else that’s going on.

Let’s move on to the iPad, which I also wrote about soon after it came out last April. As of this writing, it has yet to be officially released in the Philippines, although units and accessories abound in the usual corners in Greenhills, as well as on the Internet. After months of using it, I’ve found that the iPad works best—at least for me—as a reader and media viewer. I’ve loaded my syllabus and my semester’s readings on to the iPad, sparing me from having to lug books to class. Of course, I’ve also downloaded dozens of books—most of them free—onto the iBooks app, which also serves as a PDF reader. (For just $1.99, GoodReader is an excellent all-around documents reader and text editor; I save all my important documents like plane tickets as PDF files and store them in GoodReader, which also handles my schoolwork.)

Using a free program called HandBrake, I’ve converted my favorite DVDs (classics like Black Orpheus and Dr. Zhivago) into the iPad-friendly MP4 format and view them with the Videos app, along with TV shows (again, some of them free) like American Pickers and Victory by Design. But I think the iPad works best as a magazine and news reader (and for younger users, a comic book reader). You have to see apps like Zinio, Flipboard, Press Reader, Pulse News, and Slate to see how technology can affect the presentation of the news. Zinio and Press Reader will give you full downloads of magazines and newspapers (initially for free, then at very competitive prices). Once you begin to use them, and once you see how vivid and sharp the colors are and how easy it is to navigate around, it’s hard to justify newsprint. There’s no better timekiller for those long car rides and airport layovers.

Finally, the new ultralight, ultrathin MacBook Air—specifically the 11-inch model, which Steve Jobs disdains to call a netbook but may well be one on steroids—is, for a footloose writer like me, simply the best writing machine there is. That’s quite a claim to make, but lift that screen and tap those chiclet keys, and tell me if you can’t feel the words just rushing out of your fingertips. Think of this as a sliver of a laptop with a full-sized keyboard, a gorgeously clear screen, and specs to challenge many a bigger brother. I feel a little silly carrying both my iPad and my MBA with me sometimes, but they’re so light that I often have to tap my bag to make sure they’re both there, and I’ve pretty much decided that the MBA is for work, and the iPad is for fun.

Excuses, excuses, but I’m a fictionist, so you’ll excuse me for my extravagance. If only it were limited to words!

(The picture above is a shot of the new MacBook Air, taken at the Narita Airport Sky Lounge with an iPhone 4.)

Penman for Monday, November 29, 2010


I DON'T mean to flog a dead horse, but like many other Pinoys perplexed and dismayed by the abortive “Pilipinas Kay Ganda” slogan of the Department of Tourism, and as an occasional travel writer, I think that DOT Undersecretary Vicente “Enteng” Romano did the decent and honorable thing by owning up to the responsibility for the failed campaign and resigning from his position.

I have no problem believing that he and the DOT had the best of intentions in wanting to replace “WOW Philippines” with something new. Unfortunately, in this case, something new also turned out to be something awful—an ill-conceived idea that should have been shot down the minute it was raised, simply because it was pitched to the wrong, non-Tagalog-speaking market, a case of misplaced or confused nationalism.

I must admit to some bias in this opinion, because I wrote the yet-unpublished biography of former senator and DOT Secretary Richard “Dick” Gordon, whose idea “WOW Philippines” was. To add some perspective to this issue, let me quote from the draft of that biography:

“[Gordon] also wanted something new and powerful—a catchy slogan he and everyone else could use to sell the Philippines abroad. One day, he found it, and announced it to his staff—only to be met almost universally by profound dismay and disapproval. The tagline was ‘WOW Philippines’—a worthy match, in Dick Gordon’s mind, to ‘Malaysia, Truly Asia,’ ‘Incredible India,’ ‘Amazing Thailand,’ and whatever the country’s regional competitors had come up with. WOW Philippines? What was that?

“He had come up with ‘WOW Philippines’ after a meeting with Bert Labog, a fellow Atenean who specialized in advertising. Gordon wanted the country to have a nickname that was both grand and happy. When he mentioned that he wanted tourists to ‘Go wow!’ upon visiting the country, Labog encouraged him to stick with that idea, and Gordon began to see why. His marketing experience at Procter & Gamble and in Subic told him that he had stumbled on something special.

“But again, and typically, ‘Nobody liked “WOW Philippines” at first,’ recalls Rosvi Gaetos. It seemed too flat, too plain, and dead in the water—at least, until Gordon began walking them through its possibilities. ‘WOW’ could mean a plethora of things, beyond a simple exclamation: Wealth of Wonders, Wear Our Wares, Warm Over Winter, Wacko Over Wildlife, Watch Our Whales, Walk Our Walls, Walls of Worship, Women of Wonder, etc. The variations were endless. The idea caught on, and the DOT went to work to flesh Dick’s vision out—never an easy task, with Dick looking over their shoulder, fussing over the details of his pet notion.

“‘The conception of the original WOW Philippines poster layout took many months,’ says Rosvi. ‘I had to convene the DOT undersecretaries at 10 in the evening so we could come up with the final layout.’ Nina Carpio, one of Dick’s executive assistants at that time, recalls that ‘When he presented the WOW Philippines program to the Cabinet, nobody slept in DOT until 6 am. But it was all worth it, because the DOT’s budget, which was just P800 million, was increased by P200 million more.’

“Dick brought the slogan to the airwaves—on CNN, which he knew was watched all over the planet, and on which a placement, however brief, made a strong impact. But he didn’t have even a fraction of the billion-peso budget that countries like Malaysia had for their tourism campaigns. Again he turned to old friends and to his negotiating skills. The ads were produced by BBDO Guerrero at a steep discount, and better yet, he was able to get CNN to accept his placements at a similar markdown. ‘WOW Philippines’ came on the air.”

Of course, it takes much more than a catchy slogan to bring paying visitors to our shores, but perhaps the new people at the DOT could leave well enough alone and focus their efforts on substantiating that “wow” factor in our tourist offerings.


ANOTHER ITEM from Undersecretary Romano’s resignation letter caught my eye—his assertion that “Getting inspiration from existing designs is not an uncommon practice. In fact, in one of the definitions of plagiarism, it is stated that ‘While plagiarism is condemned in academia and journalism, in the arts it is often a major part of the creative process.”

It’s an interesting statement, and coming from Enteng (he graduated from the Philippine Science High School a year or two after me, and is well known to and highly regarded by his fellow alumni, including myself, so I can presume the familiarity), I’m sure he understands that it needs to be nuanced even if it contains more than a germ of truth.

Indeed, artistic creation often begins with unabashed imitation. Back when people had fuzzier notions or cared less about copyrights and what we today would call “intellectual property,” writers often filched plots and stories from one another, or from those who came before them. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were drawn from previous sources—compare Hamlet, for example, to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. (As Dryden once said cattily of Shakespeare, “He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him.”)

The “imitation-as-inspiration” argument in art is easier to accept, however, when the resulting product—as in Hamlet—emerges vastly superior to the original (and, in these IP-conscious times, properly acknowledges its source). In contemporary music, “sampling” or the practice of using parts of another artist’s recording in one’s own song has been advanced by some musicians—mainly rappers—as a way of conversing, if you will, with another artist, but most musicians today seek prior permission and pay fees to do this.

Mere copying, lifting, or fiddling with just one or two minor details will get you in trouble, as even the big-name author Alex Haley realized in 1978 when his bestselling and groundbreaking 1976 novel Roots was discovered to have lifted “significant and extensive” portions from an earlier novel by Harold Courlander, for which Haley had to pay a hefty out-of-court settlement. In other words, plagiarism goes beyond simple imitation or inspiration—it’s the stealing and the use of whole, identifiable elements or blocks of text without proper attribution or permission.

It doesn’t help, of course, that our Supreme Court now seems to have basically said that anyone can commit plagiarism except its own members, particularly if the act is not accompanied by “malicious intent to appropriate another’s work as our own.” Can our honorable Justices indeed be too noble or too intelligent to possibly plagiarize?

Unfortunately, from my own experience in school, I’ve found that it’s the smarter ones who often cheat and copy, thinking perhaps to outwit and to show up their professors. In grad school, I had a classmate—a cum laude graduate from a prestigious university—who got a 5.0 on his final paper because our professor had read exactly the same thing elsewhere; and as a professor, I had to change a student’s grade from 1.25 to 5.0 (yes, she was graduating with a cum laude standing) when it turned out that she had merely translated an old Tagalog story word for word into English, and tried to pass it off as her own original story.

Thank God those cases never went to court.

Penman for Monday, November 22, 2010

I'VE BEEN fascinated by airports and airplanes ever since I was a boy who tagged along to what was then the Manila International Airport to see off a neighbor who was going to be a nurse in the States. As God was my witness, I swore that, one day, I was going to get on one of those huge silver jets zooming off beyond the horizon to parts unknown.

Half a century and two dozen countries later, and thanks to the writing life, I can say that I’ve been to more places and on more planes than I could have ever imagined, to corners as remote as South Africa and New Zealand. The plane ride itself has become more of a chore than a wonder, and I can’t wait for the plane to land almost as soon as I get on board, maybe because I almost always have to ride like a creaky jackknife in economy.

But I’ve never lost my eagerness to get to another airport and to wander around during stopovers—I’d rather take a flight with lots of them than a straight one, anytime—never mind that many airports today tend to have the same Starbucks, Tie Rack, and Sharper Image shops. It must be the writer in me at work, but there’s always something different about every airport, not just in the goods or amenities they offer, but in the menagerie of people who pass through them and in the implicit drama that every departure and arrival brings with it.

Like emergency wards and police stations, airports tend to collect people from all social classes and backgrounds, often in heightened emotional states conducive to great theater. While on a fellowship in the UK a decade ago, I was mesmerized by one of the earliest reality TV shows, not surprisingly titled “Airport,” which dealt with the travails of passengers going through customs and immigration at Heathrow, and inevitably with the stories people make up to get their foot and their goods—not always legal ones—in the door.

Indeed I often find myself parked in a corner of the transit lounge, observing my fellow passengers and constructing their fictional histories as a kind of finger exercise. In my creative writing class, I sometimes ask students to write me a goodbye scene at the airport—with the requirement that they will not use the word “goodbye,” to force them to find other verbal and visual ways of expressing the sentiment. (And now and then a real drama takes place: a few months ago, a fellow passenger collapsed and convulsed while waiting for our Cebu Pacific flight to Cebu; he had the uncanny fortune of having former Health Undersecretary Jimmy Galvez Tan on the same flight, and Jimmy led a group of volunteers, including a nurse who had just arrived from Saudi Arabia, in saving him.)

But aside from serving as a set with props, airports today are, of course, also the crowning glories of modern architecture, the showpiece of the host country, of which it just might be the only thing a transit passenger will ever see. Not too long ago, the Brussels-based Skytrax World Airport Awards recognized ten of the world’s best airports, based on the results of almost 10 million survey forms. In descending order, they were Singapore Changi, Incheon International, Hong Kong International, Munich, Kuala Lumpur, Zurich, Amsterdam Schiphol, Beijing Capital, Auckland, and Bangkok Suvarnabhumi. Much to my surprise, I realized that I’d been to all of them except one—Zurich, to which I hope a kind benefactor will send me one of these days to buy him a box of chocolates. (Of the top ten, I do agree with Changi and HKI as the top two, although I slightly prefer HKI over Changi because of the free wifi and the great Chinese food choices.)

One of the most inspired airport ideas comes from Schiphol in Amsterdam, which put up something that every airport should have for the thousands of passengers sitting glass-eyed in the departure lounge with hours to kill and maybe no more money to spend: a library. Writes Nicola Clark in the New York Times: “Between Piers E and F and alongside the airport branch of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the collection is meant to be read on site and left on the shelves for others to browse. The library plans to offer e-books and music by Dutch artists and composers that can be downloaded, free, to a laptop or cellphone. The library also is equipped with nine Apple iPads loaded with multimedia content, including photos and videos, that is likewise devoted to the theme of Dutch culture. A digital guest book invites visitors to jot down their musings or leave messages for wayward companions.” ProBiblio, a library NGO that runs the Schiphol library, has done the same thing in beaches across beaches in Europe and plans to extend the service to train stations. Why not libraries with the best of Philippine fiction and nonfiction at NAIA and Boracay?

Meanwhile, here’s my own take on what happens hundreds of times a day at the NAIA—a poem I wrote 20 years ago for our OFWs, many of whom take the first plane ride of their lives into a void that will engulf them for the next two or three years.

BOUND FOR SAUDI

Airports are where
The families of the poor
Reconstitute themselves

Around the loss
—Albeit temporary—
Of one bound for money.

His passport gleams;
Again he checks the spelling
Of his unusual name.

His contract clads
His abdomen in iron;
No one will go unfed.

While businessmen
Rush past him, wifeless and cool,
To Tokyo, Rome, and LAX,

Deserts blanket
His cold brain. He dwells on their
Irrigable vastness.

Cousins bemoan
The porkless tracts of Jeddah.
(Go for the VCR!)

Uncles applaud
His inbred plumber's genius.
(Tax-free Johnnie Walkers!)

His father counts
The interest to pay on
Their mortgaged happiness.

His mother frames
His swarthy neck with special
Bishop-blessed crucifix.

His bride endures
The taunts, his gritty silence,
Their hard, abraded love.

He wonders if
It will still be morning when
They lick the scraps of his

Pre-departure
Feast, propitiate their saints,
Then bolt the door, and sleep.


SPEAKING OF poetry, a national conference for poetry in Filipino is going to be held later this week, on November 25 and 26, at the Pulungang Claro M. Recto, Bulwagang Rizal (Faculty Center), University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, with the theme “Mahalaga Ba ang Tula?” (Does Poetry Matter?)

The plenary speakers are National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario, National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera, and former Dean of the School of Humanities of the Ateneo de Manila University, Dr. Benilda Santos. Other invited lecturers are notable writers and educators Rebecca Añonuevo, Roberto Añonuevo, Romulo Baquiran Jr., Michael Coroza, Victor Emmanuel Carmelo Nadera Jr., Danilo Francisco M. Reyes, and Edgar C. Samar.

The conference is endorsed by the Department of Education (DA No. 95, s. 2010), Commission on Higher Education, and Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, and is organized by the Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (LIRA), the leading group of poets in Filipino founded in 1985 by National Artist Virgilio S. Almario.

For inquiries, contact Eva Cadiz at 9818500 loc. 2117 (Monday to Friday) and 0927-9245242, or by email at gondour03@gmail.com.

Penman for Monday, November 15, 2010

ON OUR penultimate day together in New York a couple of weeks ago, we decided to do something different and unplanned. “Let’s go to the very end of the subway line,” I said, “to Coney Island.” Beng, Demi, and I were staying with Beng’s sister Mimi in Queens, and the F line traveled all the way to the tip of Brooklyn, where Coney Island was.

I’ve been visiting New York fairly often since I first flew into JFK thirty years ago, but I’d never been to Coney Island, a beachside amusement park that teems with locals and tourists in the summer and which I’d seen in the movies and newsreels many times. When you think of the old-style rollercoaster running on wooden tracks and of a Ferris wheel decked out in lights, along with dogs and children running into the surf, you’d be looking at a picture of Coney Island, as American an icon as they come.

We were going there at the wrong time, in the wrong season—at dusk, in late autumn—but no matter. I wanted to take the long subway ride—all 77 minutes of it between 75th Avenue in Queens and Stillwell Avenue on Coney Island—as a kind of capstone to my brief vacation. Because this ride was so long—it went aboveground as well as underground—it was a great opportunity to see parts of the city I never would have thought of visiting, otherwise.

For all the horror stories you hear about the New York City subway, the same $2.25 single-journey ticket will take you from one end of the line to the other, as much as it will from one station to the next, unlike London’s Underground which works on the basis of six concentric zones, a single ride for which could cost you more than $6 within just one zone. Of course, the smart tourist or visitor will use cheaper day or weekly passes, and armed with these, we ventured up and down New York, finally funding ourselves in Coney Island.

As we expected, everything was at a standstill when we got there; the Ferris wheel and the rollercoaster stood in stark silhouette against the dying sun, which cast a chrome-yellow glow on everything. In the distance, red neon signs invited us to partake of another American moment at Nathan’s Famous Frankfurters, where the annual hotdog-eating contest still takes place. Properly stuffed, we went out to the Boardwalk, and caught the sunset there.

The silence and indeed the serenity of the moment seemed incongruous against the backdrop of a circus, but it was surprisingly refreshing, allowing us to collect our thoughts. Our daughter Demi was flying back to California the next morning, and I myself would be flying home the day after, and we all took pictures of one another with a kind of desperate glee, wishing the sun would linger just a while longer on the purpling horizon.

To cheer us up, Mimi then treated us to a new and rousing Broadway musical, The Scottsboro Boys, the electric energy of which revived our spirits (and whose theme of racial oppression reminded us that life could be far worse than spending a lazy afternoon by the ocean). And then, walking back to our subway stop, we ran into James Earl Jones stepping out into his limo from his performance in the Broadway version of Driving Miss Daisy, which he topbills with Vanessa Redgrave. Looking nothing like Darth Vader, he smiled and waved at the small crowd that had gathered around the theater exit. Demi heard nothing from me for the rest of the evening but a throaty “Demi, I am your father,” but I don’t think she minded.


I'M CUTTING this travelogue short to make room for some pictures that I took on this trip. I know how boring it is to look at other people’s vacation snapshots, but bear with me for a moment, because I want to share a discovery with you.

It’s no big secret—and I’m sure it disgusts some people (and if you’re one of them, read no further)—that I’ll buy anything with an Apple logo on it. Not surprisingly, soon after its release a few months ago, I got an iPhone 4—not because I needed another phone or another gadget, but because I was curious about what it could do.

Let me get right to the point: the best thing about the iPhone 4 is its camera. Of course it’s also a phone and an iPod, in which respects it’s not too shabby, but I never expected to be using the IP4 so much as a camera more than anything else. Indeed, on this last visit to the US, I used the IP4 almost exclusively to take over 400 shots; the Nikon DSLR stayed at home, and the Leica rangefinder stayed in my bag. The IP4 has only a 5-megapixel camera, but it’s proof positive that photography isn’t just about megapixels. If you want to be technical about it, the IP4 also offers an HDR (high dynamic range) version of your shots, and shoots remarkably crisp high-definition video.

I’m not the world’s greatest photographer by any stretch, but I hope these pictures help to convince you that if you want a phone that can truly double up as your road camera, the iPhone 4 is it.

And did I tell you about FaceTime, which makes free video calling a breeze with literally one click, and about apps like Diptic, with which you can organize your shots into frames? Maybe next time.

Penman for Monday, November 8, 2010

ABOUT A week ago at this same time, I was ironing a shirt in the basement of a townhouse in Centreville, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It was a short-sleeved linen shirt, black with faint gray checks, and I’d bought it earlier at the local resale shop for a few dollars, then laundered and dried it for pressing. It was nothing special—my paunch is beyond any kind of cosmetic salvation—but it reminded me of a similar shirt my late father had worn as a young man, the same shirt in the picture I keep of him in my home office in Quezon City.

I’m older now than my father was when that picture was taken. He’s seated at his clerk’s desk, holding a pen—they all did in those office shots—poised to leave his mark on the world. I remember when he’d take me along to his office and I’d rock in his swivel chair, playing with a double-headed pencil that was red on one end and blue on the other. I thought that to grow up like my father would be the coolest thing, and when, these days, I look up from my work at that picture of him in that shirt, I feel doubly glad to have become a writer.

My father published no books, wrote no novels or poems, but he was good with words, and wrote speeches and letters for politicians who didn’t know half of what he did. But then of course they knew or had something he didn’t, so he ended up writing for and about them instead of being written for and written about.

That’s just the way it goes, I tell myself today. My brother Jess and I have gone a few steps past our Tatay to write our own books, but we’re not too proud that we won’t do what he did, so we both work as professional wordsmiths, lending our skills to those blessed with either less time or less articulation. Our father wanted to be a lawyer and would have become a sharp one; in his middle age, Jess is completing Tatay’s dream for him, and should take and pass the bar exam next year.

When I saw that shirt at the resale shop in Centreville, I felt as if the planet had taken an extra spin to remind me of how much things had changed and yet also, as the cliché goes, how they had remained the same.


Centreville is where my sister Elaine lives with her husband Eddie and my mother Emy who, like many widows and retirees, shuttles back and forth between Elaine and me and my siblings in the Philippines. Since our married daughter Demi also lives in the US, in California, Beng and I have been spending our Octobers—my semestral break—with our Stateside family, and we all try to get together on one coast or the other.

It’s an arrangement that my father, who’s been gone for 14 years now and who never stepped out of the Philippines in all his 73, would have found bewildering. It’s an expensive annual pilgrimage that uses up all my leave credits and nearly all my savings, but I’m literally buying time. The older I get, the less utility money seems to have beyond meeting basic needs, and family time has become one of the most basic of such needs, and yet, paradoxically, also a luxury in this global age. Of course there’s the Internet and Skype—and now even FaceTime video calling on the iPhone 4—which is a far cry from when I had to save up for the three-minute Sunday phonebooth calls to my family back in Manila when I was a graduate student in the Midwest, twenty years ago.

But there’s nothing like time spent together, never mind that you blew more than a month’s pay on the plane fare (and thank God for seat sales on Delta) to share a cheap Chinese $6.29-a-pound dinner with the family, or to haul three bags of good used clothes and knickknacks home from the resale shop with your mother and sister, laughing in the autumn chill. This is what we work and live for; this is what I wouldn’t trade for all the writing prizes in the world—the mundaneity of moments that will mean little or nothing to anyone else, but which bring sense to sacrifice, in their emotional clarity.

For all the meanness that consumed this year’s American elections—and I’ve seen quite a few of them—Centreville remains my refuge and safe room, where I can feel sequestered, albeit temporarily, from the claims of all my jobs and all my responsibilities, and become just a son and a brother again. And I never take for granted what a privilege these vacations are, for all that I have to do to make them happen, at a time when hundreds of thousands of other Filipino families remain sundered by work without options, without savings, without hope of a reunion for the time it takes to complete a contract or to pay for the two-bedroom subdivision house.

This week, Centreville will be another memory of another year. Classes resume at the university, and I will be back in the classroom in Diliman, sweltering in the unseasonable heat, talking about how English both enslaved us and set us free. Back in Virginia, my mother will be playing Scrabble by herself, waiting for bluejays to descend on the offerings she leaves out for them on the porch; Demi will be attending to another stream of guests at her hotel in San Diego; my sister Elaine will be minding the collections of her Jewish law firm in DC; my sister-in-law Mimi will be looking for more ways to fight global poverty from her cubicle in the United Nations; Beng will be spending another week in New York helping her sister and her nieces settle into their new apartment, before flying home to attend to a growing stack of paintings awaiting her restorer’s touch.

And for the next twelve months, I will be pecking away at my keyboard in my study, beneath my father’s picture, saving up for that next ticket to IAD, or SAN, or JFK, wherever the family decides to become family again.






MY RECENT columns on editing as a profession drew a lot of responses, and some of them brought up that dreaded question: “How much should you charge for your editing services?” I knew someone was going to ask this, and my unfortunate and frustrating answer had to be, “It depends—on the job, on who's contracting you for the job, on your own credentials, on the schedule, etc.” Within that range I've asked everything from a couple of bottles of good wine for something almost token—a review of a document taking no more than a few minutes—to the low six figures for editing a full-sized book.

Again, there's no fixed set of rates for these things, not even for me, although established publishers like Anvil or the UP Press will have some system to go by when they contract editors for specific jobs. What I often do is to keep a personal goal in mind—I'd say, for example, that this particular job will cover all my credit card bills for the month or get me a new MacBook Air, or take care of my next ticket to the US to visit my mother; that way I'm happy and motivated.

I try not to undersell myself, but I also try to understand the client's needs and capabilities. I have no compunction charging affluent clients and institutions top rates; but sometimes I might also do jobs pro bono or at a deep discount for something or some people I like.

After everything I wrote, that might sound awfully unprofessional—let me just add here that I do have a bookkeeper and that I issue official receipts—but what was it that I just said about money? Next to buying food, it should buy you and others some happiness—on which, if you’re lucky, there just might be a sale.

Penman for Monday, November 1, 2010


THROUGH MY editor, Millet Mananquil, I recently received a rather impassioned pair of letters from some people within the Department of Education—a group of regional and district supervisors—taking me to task for “libelously” maligning former Department of Education Undersecretary Dr. Vilma Labrador, whom I said was overstaying in a position that I and many others believe to be no longer rightly hers as Chairperson of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

I was actually glad to receive those letters, albeit belatedly (these days, nearly everything is done by email) because I was worried for a while that my plaint had been lost to the wind.

I can understand the letter-writers’ admirable sense of loyalty to a former superior and mentor. “That article maligned a well-loved and respected educator. That’s quite a libelous piece! Having served the government for 42 years, Dr. Labrador definitely has a big following due to the fact that she was not only a teacher and official of DepEd but a professor in Masteral and Doctoral programs in some universities as well. She has lawyers, military officials, priests, nuns, politicians, etc. who consider her as their icon and model,” said Mrs. Flor Musa, Region IV-B regional supervisor, in her version of essentially the same letter.

That’s all very nice, but none of it addresses the basic point I raised, and the only point material to the issue—if Dr. Labrador is no longer a DepEd Undersecretary, why is she still on the NCCA board, which the law requires to seat a serving undersecretary, not a “special assistant” or some such substitute? This isn’t about Vilma Labrador’s character, nor even her administrative ability; it’s about her eligibility for the position she continues to hold.

The letters accuse me of attempting to steal Mrs. Labrador’s honor, but why should I do that? I have no personal stake in the matter beyond that of an artist and an NCCA volunteer who believes that, with a new administration and presumably a new ethos in government, the law should be respected, and the NCCA would be a good place to begin to do so. I don’t covet her position, and I’ve never even met her (and will be properly courteous should we ever meet). In other words, I bear Dr. Labrador no malice; I have no reason to.

I never impugned her reputation as a teacher, which may very well be impeccable—in which case, I extend her my sincerest congratulations. I have only the highest respect for teachers and what they do—my mother was one, my mother in-law was one, and I’ve been one myself for over 25 years now. (I may be a gadget-crazy and footloose columnist on Mondays, but for the rest of the week, I’m a full professor of English at the University of the Philippines—and yes, it’s something I’m quite proud to state.) But where I teach, we do not let our juniors or subordinates raise our arguments and fight our battles for us—and we do not need a fearsome phalanx of “lawyers, military officials, priests, nuns, politicians, etc.” behind us to occupy and defend the moral high ground.

If Dr. Labrador feels that I was in error, why doesn’t she write me herself so I can correct the record if I gravely misstated any facts, instead of having a posse of subordinates threaten me with a lawsuit? (I know a thing or two about libel, having faced a couple of cases—one of them from the former First Gentleman, no less—which were both thrown out.)

Why don’t these good ladies and gentlemen of the DepEd have their lawyers explain how a non-Undersecretary can legally continue not just to sit on the NCCA board but to continue to chair it, instead of rattling their sabers in the face of a journalist validly questioning the eligibility of a public official for her position?

In a month or two, all this will become moot, as even Dr. Labrador’s supporters have pointed to December as her ultimate retirement date, and I entirely agree with them that she should be enjoying the afterglow of her career rather than face pesky questions from strangers like me at this late hour. I apologize for that aggravation, hoping at the same time that Dr. Labrador can appreciate this in the impersonal manner it was meant.

If we were to argue on the level of injured pride and wrought emotions, I can assure her it goes both ways—many of us artists and NCCA volunteers also feel deeply aggrieved by the apparent imperviousness of high authority to our longstanding plea to keep politics out of cultural administration.

Let me end with a question for my fellow teachers at the Department of Education. Personal loyalty is a fine spectacle to behold, but what about the damage done to our sense of right and to our cultural institutions by these continuing circumventions of both the intent and the letter of the law? What are we supposed to tell our students?

When even the Supreme Court makes it difficult for teachers to uphold a clear and unerring standard of intellectual honesty in the classroom, and would even chastise those who teach the law for their “misplaced vigilance” in raising the issue of plagiarism, how can students understand that the truth is more important and more valuable than brute power?

My calendar tells me it’s 2010, but some days it feels like 1972.


AND APROPOS of our last two columns on editing, let me share a message I got from a faithful and unfailingly insightful correspondent, reader Rem Maclang:

“I'd like to bring your beef (about people not wanting to be edited) nearer home. Being a UP alumnus, you must be aware of the now famous case of Justice Mariano del Castillo, who wrote the decision that became casus celebre among legal beagles, particularly from UP. In this connection, what is the duty and obligation of an editor, when he discovers text or comments copied verbatim without proper attribution, which of his own knowledge belong to others? If the answer is to refuse to edit and return the manuscript untouched to the writer, which is what the majority of the Supreme Court justices did in said case, then plagiarism is nothing more than wanting of editing that doesn't entail any legal implications. And, for editors, like you, work will be a lot easier. By the way, it's all right to comment on the said case because it is no longer sub judice. Justice del Castillo has been vindicated. His decision is merely wanting of editing.”

Penman for Monday, October 25, 2010

LET ME acknowledge, first of all, the messages I received from people who, as it turns out, do the same thing I do: edit documents and manuscripts for a living. Dine Racoma helps local writers—from students and professionals to stay-at-home moms—provide material to a US website, acting not just as an editor but a go-between; Emil Medina edits press releases that are translated from English to Spanish and French by freelance translators; Rea Uy works as an editorial assistant for a medical journal and just finished editing a tuberculosis handbook. I wrote them back to tell them how good it was to know that they—we—were not alone; as I noted last week, you hardly ever meet editors, but they’re out there, their magic fingers burnishing the text to its finest sheen.

Now let me pick up where I left off. I’ll begin by listing down some basic resources that I think all editors, at least in English, should have access to.

First—and particularly because English isn’t our first language—the editor should have some good books on language and style on his or her shelf. These for me should include that thin but weighty book that first opened our eyes to the nuances of English, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, a project that Strunk began in 1918 and that his former student White carried on to a third edition in 1979. Its fourth edition, published after E. B. White’s death, has been updated to account for, among other things, sexism in language. I first came across this book in the 1970s, and never quite forgot its urgings for clarity and simplicity (although I do stray from the path now and then, especially in my fiction).

Every editor should also have a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, now on its 16th edition, the Bible of professional editors almost since it was first published by the University of Chicago in 1906. This is the book that will tell you everything from where and when to use those pesky commas and apostrophes to how to prepare a manuscript for publication. But like the Bible itself, its prescriptions have been subject to debate and interpretation, over issues that give editors and only editors sleepless nights (the serial comma, for example—yes or no?).

And then you’ll need a good dictionary, suited to the kind of English you’ll be editing in (American, British, Australian, and so on). While it would be wonderful to have something on hand like the venerable Oxford English Dictionary (only two full print editions of which have come out, including the original 1928 one), it isn’t very practical to lug all 22,000 pages of it around.

For years, I myself used the American Heritage Dictionary, which I thought was adequate enough and offered interesting information about the origins and usage of words. I say “for years,” because now I rely almost entirely on the built-in dictionary on my MacBook (it comes with the Mac OS as well as on Kindle machines), one based on the New Oxford American Dictionary. I like it because it yields meanings for words as obscure as “adscititious” (a word from my grad-school Shakespeare that I’ve used as a kind of litmus test to check dictionaries by) and as contemporary as “dis” and “def” (if you don’t know what those mean without reaching for the dictionary, you must be over 50, like me). The great thing about living in the 2000s is that all of these references are available online, often for free—just Google them—or in self-contained software you can load onto your laptop or smartphone.

And since we’re using and writing English as Filipinos, it always helps to acknowledge that we weren’t born to the language and will therefore encounter problems with it, and may need some help. (The same thing applies, of course, even to many native users of English.) You may want to check out Jose Carillo’s trilogy of eminently readable guides to better English, available locally: English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, The 10 Most Annoying English Grammar Errors, and Give Your English the Winning Edge (there, I just used the serial comma).

What kind of problems should editors expect on the job?

Let’s begin with human psychology: people don’t want to be edited. Most people take any revision of what they say or write as a personal affront, a challenge to one’s education or even to one’s authority. It’s a cliché to say this by now, but everyone needs an editor (including me). You may be the sharpest writer on the face of the earth, but if you’re writing in a frenzy at 2 am, you’re bound to miss a pronoun here and a past tense there (it’s happened to me many times—I decide to transpose everything to a different tense and leave out an annoying straggler).

People used to jargon—which is the way certain closed communities use special terms that are perfectly clear to them but not to others (like “myocardial infarction,” “collateral damage,” “network externalities,” and “ceteris paribus”—will tend to insist on those terms instead of more easily understandable ones. I’ve often been hired to “popularize” technical texts to render them more accessible to lay readers, and I think I’m pretty good at it, but I’ve sometimes found that—after doing what I was contracted to do—the client reverted to the original, finding the jargon-free version too strange for comfort.

This brings me to problem clients and problem situations. With editing as with commissioned writing, I try to avoid situations where I will be answerable to a roomful of people—say, a board of directors—each one of whom will have turf to protect (remember—no one wants to be edited). I will deal with someone senior and authoritative enough to take up the cudgels for me.

This leads to another point. Especially within organizations, where the editor is often not a member of a department for that purpose but someone given that task (as well as drafting memos and speeches) because “her English is good,” the editor can easily fall prey to political intrigue, and to dangers far more disastrous than dangling modifiers. Word power is political power—at least it seems so to the threatened.

So what do you do when your edits are overruled by someone far less capable, even after quoting ten sources to prove that “in spite” is two words and not one? Lick your wounds, read a good book, and move on. In spite of everything, you’ve done your level best at your salary range. Let them make fools of themselves if they insist; but if they don’t, make them shine like stars.

Penman for Monday, October 18, 2010

AS I'VE mentioned once or twice before in this column, I occasionally teach a special-topics course at the university, mainly for English majors, that I designed myself—Creative Writing 198 (Professional Writing). I was worried that our students were graduating with wispy notions of poetry and fiction in their heads, but without the foggiest idea of the kind of writing that the world out there will actually pay for, enough for them to make a living.

Shakespeare is great for the soul, and I can’t recommend him and his noble ilk enough to people wanting transport to the rarefied summits of language, but—unless or maybe even if you’re an absolute expert on the man and his work—all that exquisite knowledge won’t feed you in this country. Neither will writing novels, epics, or three-act plays.

So I put together a package of practical tasks and skills that I thought would help the typical English major make a profession of writing. As tell everyone on Day One of CW 198, there’s writing you do for yourself, and writing you do for others—and this is all about the “others”: the media organizations, the private companies, the government agencies, and the NGOs, among other institutions, that will need their writing talents. Our syllabus includes introductions to and exercises in business correspondence, the press release, interviewing, feature writing, speechwriting, publishing, new media, and audiovisual scriptwriting.

But one other item on the syllabus is often underemphasized, even in writing classes: editing. We didn’t have enough time this semester to practice enough of it, but I was able to give them an overview of what to expect—not just in the newsroom, where much copyediting has traditionally taken place, but also within private organizations like banks, law and accounting firms, and international agencies, all of which need and employ editors for their public relations or corporate communications departments.

What’s editing all about? The way I see and teach it, editing involves understanding, correcting, and finetuning the draft text of a manuscript to present it to its intended readers in the best and clearest possible form. Much of the work has to do with grammatical, mechanical (i.e., punctuation and spelling), and stylistic corrections to the text. This is where you make sure that tricky words like “Massachusetts” are spelled rightly, and that superfluous expressions like “at this point in time” are reduced to “at present” or even “now” (and, also, that “presently” is used not to mean “now,” but, in more conservative if paradoxical usage, “soon”).

But a good editor will also go beyond spotting and fixing technical problems in the text. He or she should be able to appreciate, respect, and harmonize the author’s intentions and the publisher’s or reader’s requirements. Above all, he or she should give the text the attention it deserves—to polish the draft to its finest form, clearing it of all roughnesses and infelicities, so that reading the text becomes a pleasure rather than a chore or a conundrum.

I also tell my students that there are many kinds of editors, and many kinds or degrees of editing. The editors we probably know best—although most people rarely if ever meet one—are those who sit at the desks of newspapers and magazines, checking the reporter’s or writer’s copy for errors and infirmities in style and substance.

Before the days of email, when you had to be in the office every day and physically hand over your typescript to a deskman, you saw and felt how powerful these godlike gatekeepers were. As an 18-year-old reporter on the Philippines Herald—with raw writing talent but little journalistic sense—I once had a story sent back to me for rewriting half a dozen times by a deskman; I was in tears, but it was an effective crash course in writing tightly and objectively. “Omit flowers!” I was told about my tremulous tale, which was about an activist’s funeral, a topic of deep personal interest and therefore a dangerous one. Deskmen are often gnomish and obscure, but now and then a star is born around that table; one of our pit bosses at the Herald was a fellow who also wrote songs on the side, named George Canseco.

Other editors work not on the news, but on documents produced and published for more specialized readers—technical reports, book manuscripts, correspondence, and even material for the Web. These editors often work within and for organizations, the larger ones of which will have editorial or PR departments to service their internal and external information needs. Some editors, like myself when I put this hat on, work freelance, under contract; I typically edit books (e.g., the biography of Hans Menzi, the Malampaya natural gas project, a coffeetable book on Muntinlupa, and Kasaysayan, a ten-volume history of the Philippines) as well as occasional publications (Newsbreak magazine’s special reports) and technical material for agencies such as the National Economic and Development Authority and the Asian Development Bank.

Depending on the task at hand and the terms of the job, some kinds of editing can be easier than others. I’ve simplified this idea for my students into light, moderate, and heavy editing. Light editing is little more than proofreading (yet another indispensable editorial skill)—checking grammar and spelling, ensuring conformity with the stylebook, giving the text a few tweaks to perk it up. Moderate editing will involve all that plus a bit of rewriting—moving sentences and paragraphs around to improve overall clarity, shortening a draft considerably to meet word-count limits or to tighten up the prose, returning the draft to the writer with comments for correction or clarification.

Heavy editing, the most challenging of all, demands massive revision—indeed, practically writing a whole new draft or another version of a document. I might be asked, for example, to produce an executive summary of a long report; one of my most ambitious projects along this line was the the production of a “popular version” of the national development plan, rendering complex economic concepts in a language accessible to high-school readers.

What does an editor need to know or have to be, to be a good one? To begin with, not just proficiency or competence in but mastery of the language being edited, particularly its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Beyond knowing the language, a good editor also needs to know the culture of both the writer and reader (not to forget that of the commissioning client), to be sensitive enough to nuances of meaning and interpretation. An exposure to and interest in other areas of knowledge—economics, history, science, and information technology—can also mean the difference between getting an editing job or not, or doing it well or not.

A good editor can save an important but badly written story. It’s a fair deal—many editors won’t know the first thing to do if they had to step out of their cubicles and write a story, while some reporters have the sharpest instincts and the bravest hearts but a sorry command of language.

I don’t think that you have to be a great writer yourself to be a good editor, although it will surely help. Editing and writing will sometimes entail different sensibilities and frames of mind, although good experienced writers can switch from one mode to the other. Writing is more intuitive and subliminal; editing, like criticism, is much more conscious and deliberate. I’ve turned down many writing offers, but I’ve hardly ever said no to an editing job, even if the pay tends to be lower—it’s more predictable, and I’ve yet to hear anyone complain of “editor’s block.”

Next week, I’ll talk about resources available to editors, and about problems they should expect to encounter on the job.

Penman for Monday, October 11, 2010

IF YOU'VE been following this column for even just the past year, you would have noticed what footloose Filipinos my wife Beng and I are, ready to take off for parts unknown at the drop of a hat. We did that again a couple of weekends ago, taking the early-morning bus to Baguio, and this time my excuse (as it usually is) was that I was completing another book project, and needed the mountain scenery for that final push.

The incentive worked; the draft got finished in good time, with a little help from my kind of comfort food (a big bag of lanzones and nilagang mais). But even more encouraging was the thoroughly relaxing environment of the lodgings that we had chosen for this particular trip—the newly renovated Casa Vallejo on Session Road.

I’d gone there for dinner with some writer friends during our annual summer workshop last April, intrigued by the news that the old Baguio landmark (indeed as old as Baguio itself, the original structure having gone up in 1909) had been taken over and thoroughly refurbished by new owners. Our immediate destination then was the adjoining restaurant, called Hill Station, set up and managed by Mitos Yñiguez. I waxed ecstatic over the crispy duck flakes and the lamb chops (I know, I should eat more cabbage), but I was also charmed by the hotel itself, which looked positively smarter than when we had seen it last, years ago; I peeked into a room and noted the ceiling fan, the round, old-fashioned bedside alarm clock—and the flatscreen TV. I had to come back, I told myself.

So finally, I did, with Beng and her sketchbooks in tow, and it proved to be the kind of weekend you’ll want to keep doing over and over again. Casa Vallejo lived up to the promise of that first and passing glance—the rooms were more than adequate, with bright, white linen, a neatly tiled toilet, and a view of pine-crested mountains. When we went there, in late September, off-season rates were in effect, so rooms could be had (and there were 24 of them) for between P1,500 and P3,000 each—a bargain, even by Tagaytay standards. For the incurable surfer, there’s free wifi all throughout the place.

The bonuses were Hill Station (Beng raved over the linguine with sundried tomatoes and the green Thai chicken curry; I had the duck flakes again), the coffeeshop below (which also sells select goodies for taking home), a spa next door, and the Mt Cloud bookshop, run by poet Padma Perez. Dinner at Hill Station isn’t cheap, but neither, you’ll see, are the ingredients and the obvious care that go into the food. The décor is simple but impeccably tasteful, with comfortable nooks for coffee and a newspaper—or Facebook, as the case may be. (And if you hanker for something more pedestrian, like I do more often than I should, there are two hole-in-the-wall bulalo stands just a few feet away from the hotel, serving no-frills bulalo for less than P100 a meal.)

Next time you think of going up, give Casa Vallejo a try—you can check out the place and make a reservation online like I did at www.casavallejobaguio.com, or write them at info@casavallejobaguio.com.


SPEAKING OF travel, I’ve long been a fan and user of digital travel tools. (Two free, mutliplatform travel apps that I can recommend right off the bat—especially for those who go abroad often enough—are WorldMate, which gives you local times, local weather, currency conversions, etc. and reminds you of your flights, and Metro, which guides you through the subways and mass transport systems of dozens of cities worldwide, including Manila.)

I’ve also long believed that we Pinoys don’t do enough domestic tourism, so I was happy to come across an app for the iPhone that makes local travel easier to plan and to do. MyTravel Philippines is a program that, first of all, locates where you are, then gives you maps of important and interesting tourist destinations in your area and beyond, in ever widening circles; you could, of course, just go straight to a menu of possible or preferred destinations.

Choosing “Baguio,” for example, will yield a list of hotels and tourist spots (though Casa Vallejo isn’t one of them, yet); tapping on a name will yield addresses, phone numbers, websites, and even a button to make a direct call. Some sites—say, the Bibak Museum—will yield a brief description of what the place has to offer, and a map to help you get there. In other words, it’s a tourist guidebook to the whole country, literally at your fingertips.

What’s equally interesting is the story behind the app. It was developed by two UP alumni, Rupert de Guzman and Caloy Libosada, who met in UP years ago to develop a travel website. Rupert studied geodetic engineering and was an expert at mapping, and Caloy was teaching at the Asian Institute of Tourism and had authored a raft of books on Philippine tourism, so it was a match made in heaven.

Professional opportunities soon led Rupert to China and then to Australia, where he now lives with his family and works for an asset-protection company. By night, Rupert continued pecking away at his dream of designing a mobile travel app, so he corresponded with Caloy over Skype and Facebook, and soon MyTravelPhilippines was born. It has since ranked consistently among the top five free travel apps in the Philippine AppStore.

Why the iPhone (and, by extension, the iPad and the iPod Touch that run on the same OS)? Because, Caloy says, they read that there were now over 100 million users of these devices worldwide, and they saw it as a tremendous opportunity to market not just the app, but the Philippines.

MyTravel Philippines has two versions—a free one, for which you need a wifi connection to download the data, and a paid, offline one, which stores the data on your phone. (For $2.99, the cost of a merienda, I say it’s a steal.) Says Rupert: “MyTravelPhilippines Offline is 100% Internet-free. I chucked the whole dataset of OSM or OpenStreetMap for the Philippines into the database. It also includes user-generated content such as photos, attractions and hotels, which users can upload via the website. We plan on creating quarterly updates of the app to sync it with the online version. The online version is always Internet-connected but totally free. So you can experience the app even before buying it. Some 10,000 users downloaded the free version on the first month of its launch.”

Adds Caloy: “I should be saying that we are doing great now. But honestly, it’s been a constant struggle to convince the Philippine tourism sector and even the DOT people on the potential of the app. The constant reply I get is that they don’t own an iPhone. I’ve been having a hard time explaining that it’s not about them owning an iPhone or a similar device, but about the travel markets that own the device and will finally get the chance to see the tourist attractions of this country.”

If you have an iPhone, you can download MyTravelPhilippines from the AppStore, or, for more information, you can visit www.mytravelphilippines.com.

Penman for Monday, September 27, 2010

THREE NEW books crossed my desk recently, each one of them very different from the other, so I thought I’d share a bit of what they have to offer.

The first is decidedly offbeat (for us old fogeys, anyway), but a treat for its target readership: Filipinos in their late 20s and early 30s, that messy age by which some very basic things like loves and jobs should have been sorted out but often aren’t. Carljoe Javier’s The Kobayashi Maru of Love, published by The Youth and Beauty Brigade, is a voyage into romantic disaster, a collection of informal essays about lost girlfriends and other misadventures.

The title derives from a Star Trek episode where the Kobayashi Maru is a distressed transgalactic freighter, and here Carljoe assumes that persona—heavy, rumbling, stuck on some jagged romantic reef. Unlike what you might expect of Carljoe’s Web-worn generation, these aren’t rants, but plaints; his métier isn’t anger but melancholy, that most poetic of postures.

As I observed about a previous book of his, “Like any sharp writer, Carljoe Javier articulates the aches and pains—and the occasional pleasures—of his generation. His typical persona is that of ‘a comic book character driven to the edge,’ speaking in a voice emboldened by fantasy but also tenderized by youth. His characters come coated with a veneer of Western pop culture, but at heart they're still just people looking for connections, for consequence. ‘He dreamed of touching her,’ Javier writes in one story. ‘She would bring him the things the arcade could not.’ Welcome to the arcade, and welcome to him and her.” So, dudes and dudettes, this one’s for you.

The second book is Where the Children Are, published by ArtPostAsia, written by Gizela M. Gonzalez (also known to her friends as Ging Montinola) and photographed by Jake Verzosa. I couldn’t refuse when the publisher requested me to write a blurb for the book, not just because Ging, a Harvard-trained lawyer, was a sometime graduate student of mine (and one of the finest prose stylists I’ve come across in my classes) but also because—among all the social causes out there—nothing moves me as much as the plight of poor, working children, who should be in school or playing with toys rather than trying to earn a few pesos with their tender limbs.

Not all the children in Ging’s book are in such dire straits, but, as the book’s introduction says, they “live under trying conditions. Yet they face each day with a steadiness and lack of resentment many adults would be hard-pressed to muster: Aninia, twelve, dances in the mountains in the way of her tribe, a way in peril of being lost; Jelwin, twelve, embroiders piña cloth with a craftsman’s calm assurance; Rachelle, also twelve, sleeps atop a tomb; Rochelle, fifteen, and Releonor, twelve, string sampaguita flowers they sell from house to house; Nelson, twelve, the descendant of seafarers, dives from a pier for coins; Paul, thirteen, pushes a cart as he gathers trash to sell to junk shops; Aaron, fifteen, and Czarinah, fourteen, both blind and both nurtured by family and school, move beyond disability’s usual preconceptions; Simon, seven, son of a fisherman, plays the classical violin.”

I had this to add: “In these ten vignettes—each one devoted to a child somewhere in the Philippines—Gizela Gonzalez Montinola provides sensitively drawn, deeply moving portraits of what it is to be young and poor in this country. Whether it’s the story of a boy who embroiders barongs or a girl who loves to dance, these accounts depict not only the sobering realities but also the fervent hopes of these children and their families. Perhaps none is more symbolic than that of the girl who lives in a cemetery in Caloocan—insistent vitality in a place of death, nothing less than a paradigm for the nation itself.”

The last book is my own, co-written with another former student, Antonette Reyes: Builder of Bridges, The Rudy Cuenca Story, published by Anvil and now available at National Book Store.

As my older readers will remember, Rudy Cuenca was the Marcos-era contractor responsible for some of the biggest construction projects of that time. As the back of the book notes, “Though he never finished college, he built the San Juanico Bridge and the North and South Expressways, undertook the massive Manila Bay reclamation project, initiated the export of Filipino labor to the Middle East, and ran the Sheraton, the Pines Hotel, and the Taal Vista Lodge, among many other enterprises. He built the Construction Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP) into the country’s largest construction conglomerate of its time. And yet many Filipinos remember him today only as a ‘Marcos crony,’ a tag he will not deny.

“At his heart, however, Rodolfo 'Rudy' Cuenca was a builder of bridges—and a witness to some of the most interesting and significant events of 20th-century Philippines. ‘This book was conceived,’ he says, ‘in the hope that a new generation of Filipinos would look back to my life and times and realize—without condoning whatever wrongs and evils may have happened then—that some lasting good emerged out of that period that we can still enjoy and be proud of.’”

This project was particularly interesting for me as a writer, because my initial impulse when I was approached to do it was to say no. I was a martial-law prisoner and had not forgotten the horrifying excesses of that period, and I told Rudy so.

On the other hand, here was an opportunity for a Marcos insider to share his privileged insights into the day-to-day workings of that regime, the full history of which has yet to be written by far more qualified authors than me. So I let Rudy Cuenca speak for himself—it’s a truly remarkable life, quite apart from Marcos—for interpellation by the scholars and critics.

It’s a good read (if I may say so), so check it out, jog your memory—then make up your own mind.


SPEAKING OF books, let me just announce and congratulate the winners of this year’s Gintong Aklat Awards, which have been given out every other year since 1981 to outstanding book publishers by the Book Development Association of the Philippines (BDAP). Book entries are judged for all-around excellence, and are subjected to close scrutiny by three professional panels in book manufacture and design, writing and editing. This year’s winners are: Compendium of the Economically Important Seashells in Panay, Philippines (Liberato Laureta, UP Press), Natural Science; Finding God: True Stories of Spiritual Encounters (Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Marilyn Ysip Orosa, Anvil Publishing) and Everyday Warriors: The Faces and Stories of Breast Cancer (Jay Lara, Cathy Paras-Lara, UST Publishing), Inspirational; Kulinarya: A Guide Book to Philippine Cuisine (Asia Society Philippine Foundation, Inc., Anvil Publishing), Culinary; Palaspas: An Appreciation of Palm Leaf Art in the Philippines (Elmer Nocheseda, Ateneo Press), Arts and Culture; Ah, Wilderness! A Journey Through Sacred Time (Simeon Dumdum, Jr., Ateneo Press) and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (Gina Apostol, Anvil Publishing), English Literature; Pag-aklas Pagbaklas Pagbagtas (Rolando Tolentino, UP Press), Filipino Literature; The Philippines Through European Lenses: Late 19th Century Photographs from the Meerkamp Van Embden Collection (Otto Van Den Muijzenberg, Ateneo Press), Social Science.

Penman for Monday, September 27, 2010

AS THE lives and fortunes of former student activists go, Elso Cabangon’s trajectory has been typical: spanning a long and sometimes wavy arc, never too long in any one place or any one job, but invariably—wherever and whatever he was—interesting if not important.

I first met Elso in the early 1970s, when he was an editorial writer and columnist for the student paper of the University of the East, the UE Dawn. When martial law was declared, he joined the resistance, and was captured in 1974 by the Southern Luzon Military Intelligence Group, after sustaining four gunshot wounds. That led to his detention in Camp Aguinaldo, Camp Vicente Lim in Canlubang, and Camp Crame for more than two years.

Upon his release, he found a job with EEI as a personnel officer. The boom in jobs in the Middle East had just begun, and Elso joined that exodus, sent by his company to Saudi Arabia in 1978 and to Kuwait as administration manager in 1983. He came home briefly after EDSA 1 to work with the Manila Chronicle as an editorial and features writer from 1987 to 1989, but soon Elso was back in the Middle East—in Saudi Arabia as brand manager for a trading firm dealing in perfumes and cosmetics, moving to Dubai in 2007. In 2009—then 63—Elso came home for good. That’s when we reconnected, by email, after more than 30 years. Elso wanted to know where everyone else was, and how they were doing. I wasn’t the only one he asked—writers Al Mendoza and Sol Juvida were also on his list, which soon grew.

That list was made up largely of alumni from the pre-martial law College Editors Guild of the Philippines (CEGP). Founded in 1931 and later led by the likes of Angel Baking—editor of the University of the Philippines’ Philippine Collegian who was twice imprisoned for his political views—the CEGP had already had a long tradition of militancy even before we joined it.

And there seemed to be no better time to join both the Collegian and the CEGP than 1971, on the cresting wave of the First Quarter Storm. I was 17, an industrial-engineering freshman whose ambition at that point had been to get into the staff of the Collegian as soon as I got into UP, inspired by the examples of Vic Manarang, the Collegian editor who had been my Physics teacher in high school, and Joey Arcellana and Gary Olivar, who my English teacher Mrs. Vea touted to be among the best student writers she’d ever come across. My own high school heroes—Mrs. Vea’s son Rey (now Mapua president and former UP engineering dean) and Mario Taguiwalo (later health undersecretary)—had gone ahead of me and were already writing for the Collegian. How could I not follow? I sought and got the editorship of my high school paper, the Science Scholar, thinking it would be my ticket to the Collegian; I suppose it helped.

In June 1971, I joined a group of Collegian staffers on a trip to UP Los Baños, where the 40th National Congress of the CEGP was being held. On top of our agenda was the election of Tony Tagamolila, the Collegian’s editor in chief, as CEGP president. It was a classic match between the progressives and reactionaries—the other side offered a bus to a free screening in Manila of the hottest ticket in town, Love Story—but our forces prevailed. I felt dizzy with revolutionary fervor, even as I cringe today when I read the purple prose of my account (in Filipino!) of that election, published in the Asia-Philippines Leader the following month. Later that year, we all took a boat to Bacolod, then a bus to Dumaguete, for another CEGP conference on the Silliman University campus. I wore a jacket emblazoned with the slogan “Pierce the enemy with your pens!”; in my bag, Chairman Mao’s Quotations had to share the space with an 8” x 10” framed photograph of my first and now former girlfriend, whom I was still pining for.

In such encounters were lifelong comradeships forged. The CEGP and a parallel but more explicitly progressive organization, the League of Editors for a Democratic Society (LEADS), became many a young student writer’s introduction to the profession of journalism. In the decades to follow, our paths and even our views would diverge—Tony Tagamolila, Babes Calixto, and Jack Peña would die fighting the dictatorship; Jessica Sales and Leticia Pascual would become desaparecidos; Manolet Dayrit would join the World Health Organization in Geneva; Gary Olivar and Sonny Coloma would become presidential spokesmen; Jimi Flor Cruz would become CNN’s bureau chief in Beijing; Mercy Corrales would become a Starbucks executive; Jo Ann Maglipon would edit YES magazine; Diwa Guinigundo would become deputy governor of the Bangko Sentral; Judy Taguiwalo would become Faculty Regent at UP; Ding Marcelo and Al Mendoza would become two of the country’s top sports journalists; Willie Nepomuceno, a Collegian staff artist, turned to comedy; Jack Teotico now publishes an art magazine and runs an art gallery; Obet Verzola would become one of civil society’s most important voices; Edd Aragon would become a prizewinning editorial cartoonist in Australia. Whatever they did and wherever they went, these CEGP-LEADS alumni seemed to have an uncanny capability to do well and to excel.

And now, thanks to Elso Cabangon, all these people will have a chance to get together again after almost 40 years, in a CEGP-LEADS reunion to be held on Sunday, October 10 at the La Colina function room of the Valle Verde Country Club in Pasig City. Registration will start at 3 pm. All editors and staff members of campus publications during the pre-martial law period (1969-72) who were also members of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines are welcome to attend, and they can sign up as well with the LEADS-CEGP egroup at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/leads-cegp/, which was set up by US-based Gerry Socco and which now counts almost 70 members. They can also email Elso at kasoels@yahoo.com or text him at 0917-7274064 for more details.

I frankly don’t know what to expect—at 17, I was the Benjamin of the group then and forever will be, although I’m sure I’ve more than made up for that with my present poundage—but I’ll be there, perhaps a touch less fiery but no less curious about life and my fellow travelers in time.

Penman for Monday, September 20, 2010


SO EXCLAIMED Yul Brynner, a.k.a. the King of Siam, in one of my favorite musicals, The King and I. I thought the same thing last week when two unrelated messages came into my inbox, one of them involving a government cultural agency whose volunteer work force I happen to be a part of, and the other concerning a writer-friend and academic colleague. What connects both matters is the puzzling way our government sometimes works.

The first case—brought to my attention by people within the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), where I sit on the literature committee—has to do with the overextended tenure of Dr. Vilma L. Labrador, the former and recently retired Undersecretary of Education for Programs and Projects, as Chairperson of the NCCA.

Labrador is a holdover from the previous administration, which managed to get her elected Chair in 2007 by the 15-person NCCA Board of Commissioners, a body dominated by government bureaucrats rather than artists. Her anointment—expressed through a “letter of desire” from Malacañang—came over the protests of many in the Filipino cultural community, who could not understand how and why someone so marginally connected with arts and culture could be entrusted with such authority over the sector.

Indeed, while the law creating the NCCA, Republic Act 7356, provides for an Undersecretary of the Department of Education to represent the agency in the commission, it doesn’t say that that Undersecretary has to chair the commission. Labrador was named Chair anyway, for reasons we can only guess at.

But that’s all in the past. Dr. Labrador has served her term—albeit one marked and marred by her faithful support for the dubious proclamation of people likewise close to the Palace as “National Artists.” What concerns the NCCA’s public now is the fact that with her compulsory retirement last February 4, her 65th birthday, from the Department of Education—where she has since been replaced in her old position—she no longer has anything to represent.

Nonetheless, she continues to hold office at the NCCA as its Chairperson, on the strength of a July 29 letter from DepEd Sec. Armin Luistro designating her to represent the DepEd seat on the NCCA board. The new education secretary—perhaps needing some oldtimers in the department to help him through the transition—apparently appointed Labrador a “Special Assistant to the Secretary” upon his retirement. But a “Special Assistant to the Secretary” is not the same as an Undersecretary, even if they happen to have been the same person at one time or another. As problematic as Dr. Labrador’s election as Chair was in the first instance, her clinging to the position now on the excuse of being a “special assistant” in the DepEd is even more anomalous.

Surely the Department of Education does not lack for Undersecretaries to assume the post? The suggestion that Dr. Labrador needs to stay on at the NCCA to conclude unfinished business is silly. As some concerned artists have pointed out in an open letter to Sec. Luistro, “The programs cited as justifications for Mrs. Labrador’s continued representation of DepEd in the NCCA are part of the regular NCCA approved work programs and inter-agency commitments. They do not rely on a single person to be accomplished as the NCCA Secretariat and its various units—including the purely voluntary corps of artists and cultural workers serving in the 19 NCCA national committees and four subcommissions—have been very diligent in their tasks to implement the agency’s programs and mandates. The NCCA should be committed to implement them regardless of any change in its leadership, administration or management. This is the essence of participatory governance where programs are not dependent on anyone’s departure from the agency.”

Sec. Luistro and President Aquino himself should be aware that the cultural community has been keenly waiting for signals from the new administration as to its arts policy, given how the sector has historically been treated as the poor stepchild, always the last to be asked to the table. We might even understand how—with hostage crises and anti-gambling drives consuming its attention—the Palace can’t make any bold pronouncements for the arts at the moment.

But it can take some small but meaningful steps to show that it stands for what’s right and what’s just here, as it has declared in other spheres of our national life. We’ve already seen one such sign—the return of credible, sensible people to the board and the leadership of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, putting an end to the temporary madness in that place. Now Sec. Luistro can go one step farther by listening to the artists—not to the bureaucrats—and doing the right thing by replacing Dr. Labrador with a proper Undersecretary on the NCCA Board, ASAP.


THE OTHER item in my mailbox that intrigued and dismayed me—although this one had a touch of absurd comedy to it—was a lament from my colleague at the English Department and the Institute of Creative Writing, the prizewinning fictionist and essayist Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, titled “Why Am I Being Hounded by the Office of the Ombudsman?” (see the full text below)

Jing, as we call her, is a Professor Emeritus at UP, and until her recent retirement served as the university’s Vice President for Public Affairs (a job she took over from me in 2005, along with the service Toyota that figures in this story). The VP job—and the forthcoming UP Centennial—required her to work overtime, even on the weekends, to get alumni support for university projects.

Let me just summarize the case.

One Sunday in June 2006, Jing and Lydia Arcellana (AVP and Director of the Office of Alumni Relations) had a lunch meeting with a group of UP alumni at the Dulcinea, a restaurant on Tomas Morato.

On September 14 that year, UP received a subpoena from the “Task Force Oplan Red Plate” of the Office of the Ombudsman, directing it to submit the driver’s trip tickets “and all other appurtenant and relative documents authorizing the use of government vehicle with plate no. SET-536 (the car assigned to the VPPA) for the period June 13-28, 2006.” Threatening Dr. Hidalgo and Dr. Arcellana with unspecified charges, the Ombudsman claimed that the red-plated car had been seen in front of Tonton Thai Massage on Tomas Morato Street at 3:30 pm.

Jing says: “The strange thing is that the accompanying photos (the evidence, I assume) showed the car to be parked in front of—not the massage establishment named—but the restaurant Dulcinea with the sign above its entrance prominently shown. They even got the time wrong. As indicated in the trip ticket earlier submitted, we had left Dulcinea at 1:30 pm. On the basis of this, my driver and I were being investigated for graft, and for ‘dishonesty, grave misconduct, and conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service.’” The investigators didn’t bother checking with the restaurant nor the massage parlor to see if Jing, Lydia, or her driver were there.

This matter should have gone to the basket four years ago, but last month Jing received another “order” from the Ombudsman concerning the “administrative case” against her, which curiously remains unfiled.

“I am an elderly academic, with an impeccable record of more than 20 years of public service, and numerous awards, for both my teaching and my writing. I feel most aggrieved.” Jing says. “Given the countless cases of blatant graft and corruption, involving billions of pesos, which seem to be resolutely ignored, why am I being singled out for this harassment by the Office of the Ombudsman?”

Why, indeed? ‘Tis a puzzlement!

Flotsam and Jetsam (101) for Thursday, September 16, 2010


THIS IS so silly and infuriating that it's almost funny, but I thought I'd reproduce this piece here in support of my friend and colleague, the fictionist, essayist, and academic Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo (or "Jing," to those who know her). And those who know her will know what a poor target the scrupulously honest Jing should make for the Ombudsman, especially in the circumstances described below.

Why Am I Being Hounded by the Ombudsman?
September 2nd, 2010

By Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo

From February 2005 to May 2010, I was Vice President for Public Affairs of the University of the Philippines System, serving under UP President Emerlinda R. Roman. Under me were the Information Office, the Office of Alumni Relations of the UP System, and the Gurong Pahinungod.

Because UP was preparing for the celebrations of its Centennial in 2008, our work load—heavy at best—became considerably heavier. A slew of other tasks was added to the regular responsibilities of running three newspapers, maintaining the UP System website, producing regular magazine-sized reports, writing and sending out regular media announcements, providing support for the Office of the President during the annual presentation of the UP Budget to Congress and the campaign in Congress for the approval of the new UP Charter, and providing communications support for the offices of the other Vice Presidents.

Among these additional responsibilities were President Roman’s alumni caravan, which took us around the country to involve UP alumni in the celebration and in the fund-raising campaign; and several special projects—a coffee table book, another book called Kwentong Peyups, a short documentary film, a UP history book project, supplements for the print media, and several Centennial contests (for the Centennial logo, the Centennial literary award, the Centennial song, the Centennial short film, etc.). My Assistant VPs and I worked long hours, including weekends, and out-of-town trips.

Throughout this period, I continued to teach graduate courses–sometimes one, sometimes two, each semester.

On one such weekend in June 2006, Lydia Arcellana (AVP and Director of the Office of Alumni Relations) and I had a lunch meeting with a group of UP alumni at the Dulcinea, a restaurant on Tomas Morato.

On September 14, 2006, UP received a Subpoena from the “Task Force O-Plan Red Plate” of the Office of the Ombudsman, directing it to submit my driver’s Trip Tickets “and all other appurtenant and relative documents authorizing the use of government vehicle with plate no. SET-536 (the car assigned to my office) for the period June 13-28, 2006.” It contained the ominous threat that failure to do so within 3 days of receipt would “merit the filing of criminal charges” as well as administrative charges. The document, signed by Atty. MARK E. JALANDONI, Assistant Ombudsman, “issued by authority of the Honorable Ma. Merceditas Gutierrez, Tanodbayan,” did not state what these “charges” were. Atty. Marvic Leonen, then UP Vice President for Legal Affairs, assured me there was nothing to worry about. The car might just have been seen outside the UP campus. He would submit the required trip tickets and a letter with a detailed explanation of the nature of my job. This was in September 2006.

Since we did not hear from the Ombudsman again, we assumed the documents were satisfactory. We were wrong.

In May of this year, I officially retired as full-time UP Professor and VP for Public Affairs. On July 12, 2010 (four years after the initial communication), UP received an “Order” from MEDWIN S DIZON, Acting Director, PIAB-A.

Atty. Marvic Leonen had left his post to become Dean of the UP College of Law. So it was Atty. Theodore Te who replaced him as VP for Legal Affairs who helped me plough through the legal jargon to determine what the problem was.

The Ombudsman was claiming that on June 25, 2006, a Sunday, the car assigned to me had been seen in front of Tonton Thai Massage on Tomas Morato Street at 3:30 PM.

The strange thing is that the accompanying photos (the evidence, I assume) showed the car to be parked in front of—not the massage establishment named—but the restaurant Dulcinea with the sign above its entrance prominently shown. And the affidavits of the people who allegedly saw the car and took the photographs—a certain Peter John R. Arellano and a certain Rholie C. Besoña, “Associate Graft Investigation Officers”—did not claim that they had gone inside Tonton Massage to see whether I was indeed there, or that they tried to find the driver and examine his trip ticket. They even got the time wrong. As indicated in the trip ticket earlier submitted, we had left Dulcinea at 1:30 PM.

On the basis of this, my driver and I were being investigated for graft, and for “dishonesty, grave misconduct, and conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service.” Mr. Jacinto claimed that we had “caused undue injury to the government, consisting in (sic) the unnecessary consumption of fuel and undue wear and tear of the vehicle.” He added that this was “flagrant wastage of government funds,” and “showed utter disregard on (sic) the policy that public officers and employees should uphold public interest over and above personal interest.”

Does not working on weekends to raise funds for UP qualify as “upholding public interest over and above personal interest”? Apparently not. For the Ombudsman it might even be a crime.

After we had filed our counter-affidavits, we received yet another “Order” dated August 9, signed by the same Mr. Dizon, concerning the “administrative case” against us. We have complied with more affidavits containing basically the same facts.

I am an elderly academic, with an impeccable record of more than 20 years of public service, and numerous awards, for both my teaching and my writing. The latest is the title Professor Emeritus, surely one of the highest honors UP can confer on one of its own. I cannot understand why the Ombudsman seems determined to believe that I (and my Assistant Vice President and my driver) are lying about our whereabouts on that fateful Sunday, particularly since their own evidence shows my car to be parked in front of the restaurant where we said we were, and their own investigators did not bother to enter the restaurant to confirm this.

I feel most aggrieved. Given the countless cases of blatant graft and corruption, involving billions of pesos, which seem to be resolutely ignored, why am I being singled out for this harassment by the Office of the Ombudsman?

Penman for Monday, September 13, 2010


THIS WEEK I’m going to hand out some thanks and praise to friends old and new who have done something good—not just to me and for themselves, but to others who might also enjoy and benefit from their creative work.

I’m happy to report that my call for help for Rogelio Bibal—the Baguio-based artist who has done some pioneering work propagating monopodial bamboo up north—received a positive response from Edgar Manda, administrator of the Laguna Lake Authority and another bamboo enthusiast. Mr. Manda and his associates have offered to shoulder part of the expenses Rogelio will incur in attending an important bamboo conference in China later this month, in exchange for a report on his bamboo propagation work. It’s as fair an exchange as you could imagine, and my congratulations to both parties for cooperating on behalf of a valuable natural resource. So thank you, Ed Manda and the Philippine Bamboo Foundation, for your support. (Update: possibly because of recent developments at the office, Mr. Manda and his associates were unable to come through with their contribution, but many thanks, anyway, for the the thought and the effort.)

My thanks also go to a friend named Eduardo “Ditto” Lesaca, an entrepreneur and businessman who also happens to be a great cook—particularly of paella, that Spanish rice, seafood, and chicken wonder that never fails to lift up the spirits and fill the stomach. In this case, the spirits and the stomach were mine; both were seriously depressed, as I was laid up with arthritis. Ditto sent over a large pan of his paella, which didn’t last a day, with the whole family plunging into the feast.

I emailed Ditto to ask him how he got into the paella business and why his paella was so good, and this is what he emailed me back:

“The paella recipe comes from my maternal grandfather, the late Alfredo Guidote. He passed the recipe to his daughter—my mother, Carmen ‘Mita’ Guidote Lesaca. One day, after years of eating the paella cooked by my Lolo Freddy and eventually my mother, it dawned on me that my mother is going to pass away one day just as her father did. I didn't want the recipe to disappear and get stuck going to Spanish restaurants for commercial paella, so I decided I had to learn Lolo Freddy's paella.

“My mother taught me the recipe and as soon as I knew it by heart, I decided that I would do what my mother and grandfather never did, which was to make the paella available for sale to the public. Moreover, to distinguish my paella from all the others on the market, I decided to give my potential patrons excellent value for their money by overloading my Paella with much more of all the condiments that everybody wishes there was more of in commercial restaurant-made paella. With my Paella Valenciana, you will not even see the rice until you break through all the tiger prawns, chicken, squid, clams and chorizo.”

Ditto says that it took a while for his paella to catch on because it’s not cheap. But word of a good thing always gets around, and soon he had his hands full filling orders, particularly during the Christmas season, when he needs at least two weeks’ advance notice. He buys ingredients fresh from the market on the same day they’re cooked, and requires a 50% downpayment to confirm the order.

If you want to taste the Ditto difference for yourself, give him a call at 0918-9634886.


Finally, congratulations to someone best described as an ambidextrous artist, a former Creative Writing student of mine, a Palanca-prizewinning fictionist who’s also a talented painter and a leading member of the Saturday Group of Artists. I hadn’t seen or heard from Socorro “Migs” Villanueva in a long while so I was pleasantly surprised to get a message from her announcing her first one-woman show, opening on September 21 at Galerie Francesca at the Festival Mall in Alabang.

Migs’ show will focus on a subject close to her heart: children. She had always been interested in children—having four of her own—but her painting took a long detour into non-representational art before an incident brought her back to them:

“In 2009, while caught in traffic, I witnessed a scene involving street kids along Shaw Boulevard. Boys and girls clutching rugby in plastic containers were in a cat-and-mouse chase with security guards from the surrounding buildings. The hardness I saw in their eyes—and all other emotions I felt within me— gave me the conviction to paint kids again. I painted Shaw Kids that week. The artwork was so well received that i took that as a sign that this is my access: access to my own voice, as well as my access, as an artist, to an audience.”

The abstractions she used to worked with, she says, remain in her current collection. “I like it that even as I am making representations of children now, my work still has the look or sense of the abstract. I seldom render kids in action, although I get a lot of requests for that. Sometimes, I make them dance, or pose in a cutesy way. But for the most part my kids are like deer in headlights.”

Children, she says, “represent a pure a state of mind so that in my artworks children are seldom seen in action, like playing, or running, as children are often rendered. They are often just standing and looking straight at the viewer. Children playing tag will be seen as children playing tag, and not much else. Make them stand there vulnerable, open, and you have a world of interpretations and readings; they become like a door that leads the viewer into his/her own world.”

Migs cites the Saturday Group icon Malang as a major influence in her work, even as she dreams of “being like a Cy Twombly, a Richard Prince or an Antoni Tapies, or a Lao Lianben, or a muted Basquiat. You know what I like in those artists? They don’t seem to take themselves or their art too seriously, but they are taken seriously.”

Her two callings—writing and painting—may contend in her, but Migs says “One informs the other. My stories—I’d like to think—are an investigation of psyche and character. I like to reach really deep into the heart of my audience; I want to say, ‘Isn’t that how it is?’ I go for the same effect whether I paint or write.”

And now we await Socorro Villanueva’s first book of stories.

Penman for Monday, September 6, 2010


FOR THE first time in a long while, I failed to attend the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature ceremonies last Wednesday, for the most annoying of reasons—arthritis. I woke up last Tuesday with a throbbing pain in my right knee, something I’d never had before. A visit to the orthopedist later that day confirmed what I suspected: my age and weight were taking their toll on my bones. They bled out some fluid and injected cortisone into my knee to get me back on my feet, but I still felt too wobbly to go up the Palanca stage.

But never mind my medical travails. What made this year’s Palancas special was the fact that it was the 60th anniversary of this cultural institution, an event anyone who’s ever won a Palanca—and there should be several hundreds by now—would have wanted to be a part of. Some of us had earlier suggested that President Noynoy Aquino be invited as guest speaker to share his thoughts on Philippine art and culture—for which the event would have been the perfect occasion—but with his administration just settling in, the Palancas thought it more prudent but no less an honor to invite one of the true icons of Philippine literature, the fictionist and essayist Gregorio Brillantes.

I had other reasons to want to go: I chaired the board of judges for the short story in English, and the first-prize, first-time winner—a teacher from Cagayan de Oro named Elena Paulma—was a student of mine; her story “Three Kisses” was written in my graduate fiction class. Now before your eyebrows hit the roof, listen to this (short) story.

While I think of the short story in English as “my” category, having won most of my own Palancas there, I haven’t been a judge in it that often—this will have been only my second or third time this past decade, I think—because I’d purposely avoided judging when I knew that my best Creative Writing students were joining in the category, as I’d encouraged them to. My reason was precisely to avoid any hint of favoritism, and to give my students, if and when they won (as quite a few did), the full satisfaction of knowing I had nothing to do with their selection.

So again I wasn’t expecting to be a judge this year, and as usual, I urged my best students—Elena among them—to submit their stories, which I suppose they did, and we all went on with our lives. And then I got a call from the Palancas, asking me to chair the board of judges in the English short story; it was a special request, because, on their 60th anniversary, the Palancas wanted their Hall of Famers to chair the boards, whenever possible. I couldn’t say no, and just vowed to be as fair as I could, whoever and whatever came up; after all, I would be joined on the panel by two very gifted and sharp readers—the advertising maven and cultural stalwart Emily Abrera and the prizewinning speculative fictionist Dean Alfar.

Over a month, we sifted through about 120 stories, trimming the pile down to a shortlist of 12, which we further segregated into three groups—the A group, which all three of us liked (three stories); the B group, which two of us liked (also three stories); and the C group, which contained stories that at least one of us thought was worth another long look, for reasons not immediately obvious (six stories).

I was pleased though not surprised to see “Three Kisses” in Group A; I said nothing in its favor, preferring to let the others speak first. After further deliberation, it became abundantly clear that “Three Kisses” and the eventual second prize winner, “Waiting for Rain” (another Group A starter), were a cut above the rest, for their merits described below. “Café Masala” shot out of Group C to claim third prize, after its subtler qualities emerged.

Why did these three stories win, and what were we looking for?

“Three Kisses” was a strong and early standout not only for its unobtrusively surefooted language but, more importantly, for the maturity of its insight—and, perhaps not incidentally, even the maturity of its characters. It’s a story about the improbable, difficult, and achy love that arises between two characters in their 60s—she a Filipino, he a Belgian. She follows him into the harsh European winter, struggles with his quirks, and almost leaves him, but inexplicably doesn’t; later, stricken by disease, she receives the equally inexplicable gentleness of his affections. We were all deeply moved by the story—a rare thing these days, when linguistic cleverness often overtakes human characterization. It was the youngest and the least traditional of the three of us, Dean, who pointed out how the story also defied the “ageist bias” in much of contemporary fiction, which is almost relentlessly focused on affairs of the young.

Rachelle Tesoro’s “Waiting for Rain,” on the other hand, does deal with the very young—a 12-year-old girl named Carlie, caught in pain-prone adolescence, who gets dragged around by an itinerant mother. “Rent is cheap, Ma says, in the provinces. She makes a living teaching piano, the only thing she can do well besides seducing men. I go to a public school whenever I can, but mostly I like wandering around town looking at people’s houses…. It's been this way all my life. We travel by bus, by train, by boat, my mother tucking my hand into hers, talking about a clean slate, a fresh start, while outside the window the sky burns bright and untarnished.” Carlie pines for an elusive constancy, but the real power of the story lies in the tension between toughness and tenderness, between the mother who’s often more like a child and the child who’s often more like a mother.

Catherine Rose Torres’ fluidly written “Café Masala”—the story of a Filipino woman seeking happiness from New Delhi to Manila—is utterly now, utterly cosmopolitan, and earned this accolade from Dean: “Perhaps the best praise I can give is that despite the absence of a huge plot (it is a quiet story), technical wizardry (no structural trickery to be found), or any of the classic social realist tropes (perhaps expected of a Palanca winner), the story held my attention. It succeeds because it simply tells its story well. The author’s obvious comfort in using English allows the reader to trust the narrative, especially when parts of the story take place in a foreign country. The dialogue is ably handled as well as the excellent character work, and with other elements of the story contributes to the text’s overall delight.”

So our warmest congratulations go this new crop of winners—who happen to be young women writers all (my pal and perennial Palanca tablemate Krip Yuson would text me his summary impression of the evening’s laureates: “Puro bebot!”) Many thanks as well, Emily and Dean—always a pleasure to work with you!

I end with a friendly but serious suggestion for next year’s Palancas: please do away with the requirement of a synopsis at the head of a story. It actually spoils or distorts the judges’ reading (and might provide an easy out for the lazy reader). And then again, next year, it’ll be back to the woodwork for me.

Penman for Monday, August 30, 2010

I MIGHT as well have shouted that when we stepped off the plane a couple of weekends ago, since it was technically morning by the time we reached Taipei on a short two-hour hop from Manila. Landing past midnight in a foreign country was the real price we paid for availing ourselves of a ridiculously cheap budget fare on Cebu Pacific, which likes to sneak into Asian cities like Shanghai when everyone else is snoring.

I booked the promo flight online last April, aware of the possibility that we would be flying—if at all—into Taipei in the typhoon season. As it turned out, late August was steaming; we were soon dripping—not from rain, but from sweat. Our tour guide would later explain that, because of its topography, Taipei was a natural hothouse, a valley over which, to borrow an image from Steinbeck, the clouds closed in like a lid over a simmering pot.

The hotter-than-Manila weather was a novelty to Beng and me, because neither of us had been to Taiwan before, which was another reason we made the trip. We’ve made a pledge to travel together as much as we can—and as far as our meager budget will allow—before arthritis and dementia make even a trip to the bathroom too arduous to manage. We’d seen a ton of documentaries on Taiwan on Living Asia and the Discovery Channel, so we had some idea of what to look for and what to expect—the National Palace Museum was right on top of our list—but as always, you never know what’ll turn up until you actually get there. (I’d circled the charmingly named “Museum of Drinking Water” on my city map, but ran out of time to verify the oddity.)

So as soon as we woke up in our hotel at noon the next day, I went down to the concierge to book a couple of bus tours that would take us around the city and a bit of the island. Each afternoon tour ran for about four hours and didn’t cost too much—the city tour included the National Palace Museum and its entrance fee, for less than P1,300 per person (one Taiwan dollar is about P1.40). For just a little more, we also signed up for the next day’s tour of the old hilltop mining town of Chiufen and the northern coast.

I’m a great believer in package tours and bus tours, especially for first-time tourists, which was what we were. They’re cheap, they’re efficient, and they make sure you hit all or at least most of the tourist highlights. If I were in my 20s or 30s, I probably wouldn’t mind backpacking and darting off into strange alleyways with little more than The Lonely Planet Guide in hand, but in my 50s, I want a soft seat, air-conditioning, and someone to tell me what I’m looking at.

The tours were, as I expected, a great success. We gaped and gawked at the crown jewels of the National Palace Museum, which houses over 600,000 artifacts, much of it carted across the strait by the late Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek when he and his forces fled the mainland after Mao Tse-Tung and the Communists won the civil war in 1949. As a self-confessed teenage Maoist, I couldn’t muster a drop of reverence for Chiang, even as we stood at the foot of his colossal, Lincoln-like statue in his memorial. At the same time, I had to be quietly thankful that many of these artifacts escaped the destructive wrath of the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards, who would have found such baubles as jade cabbages insufferably bourgeois.

Still better than guided bus tours, however, are the walking tours that literally ground the tourist in the everyday realities of a new city. At street level, some of these revelations popped out immediately:

- All taxis in Taipei are new, yellow, and spotlessly clean. Some drivers decorate their dashboards with huge, fragrant lilies.

- The sidewalks along the main roads are three meters wide. No vendors, no billboards, and, unless you look really hard, no cops.

- Taipei loves coffee, with homegrown coffee shops dotting the boulevards—Merry Café, Barista Café, Coffee+, eCoffee, Ikari Coffee, Is Coffee, Mr. Brown Coffee—aside from the inevitable Starbucks.

- Taipei loves English and an American education, with a whole street downtown devoted to review courses for the GRE, the GMAT, the TOEIC, the TOEFL, the IELTS, and whatever will bring your son Edison Chan or daughter Penelope Wong to Princeton.

- Clothes are expensive by Manila standards, but food is cheap and scrumptious (although I didn’t dare try the stinky tofu—that’s what it’s called, and it’s the honest, godawful truth).

- As with much of Asia (except, strangely enough, the Philippines), the night markets are the place to go for food and shopping. The sprawling Shilin Night Market goes on and on (as does the underground Taipei City Mall, beneath the main Train Station), offering everything from mushroom-rice balls to the new iPhone 4. (Shopping note: fellow Filipinos, get your iPhone 4, factory unlocked and at the cheapest global prices, from the online Apple Stores of Hong Kong and Singapore. You’ll need local friends in those places, though, whose shipping addresses you’ll borrow.)

- The fashion du jour for young women in Taipei seems to be—aside from hot denim pants—frilly, lacy, and flowery skirts, also worn short, of course. Beng couldn’t help noticing the ubiquity of short shorts in Taipei; on the racks of the Shilin stalls, they seemed to be no more than four inches from top to bottom. Everywhere we looked, long pairs of milky legs grew out of these shorts. I, of course, sympathized with Beng’s dismay, remarking for her benefit, “Ugh, isn’t she disgusting… and there goes an even more disgusting one… oooh, I can’t bear to look.”

- There seems to be a 7-11 around every corner in Taipei (alternating with its chief competitor, FamilyMart). When you step into one before noon, you’re greeted by the cashier with a chirpy “Good morning!” When you step into the same place at, say, six or seven in the evening, everyone behind the counter greets you again with, you guessed it, “Good morning!”

Good morning, Taipei!

Penman for Monday, August 23, 2010


I WAS deeply saddened to hear, last week, of the passing of two people whom I fondly remembered from a highly formative stage of my young life. They were both redoubtable University of the Philippines professors—the economist Agustin Kintanar, Jr., and the political scientist Loretta Makasiar Sicat.

Dr. Kintanar was married to our colleague at the English Department, the scholar and essayist Dr. Thelma B. Kintanar. Aside from that, he was also my professor in Macroeconomics when I attended the Program in Development Economics at the UP School of Economics in the early 1970s.

Dr. Sicat, on the other hand, was never my teacher, but she was the wife of my boss then, Dr. Gerardo P. Sicat, who was Director-General of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA). An eminent social scientist in her own right, Mrs. Sicat was kind, sharp-witted, and always smiling. She put those of us on her husband’s junior staff at ease, during those times when work or socials took us to the Sicat home in La Vista.

How did I find myself among all these economists, anyway? I may have told bits and pieces of this story before, but let me tell it again, if only to show how people can sometimes find themselves in places they never expected, and how a career path can be anything but straight.

I entered UP in 1970 as an Industrial Engineering major (I hadn’t the foggiest idea what an industrial engineer did, but it sounded good, and seemed to suit my Philippine Science High School background). After 21 units, I dropped out—heck, it seemed like everyone smarter than me was dropping out as well—to go deeper into activism and also to get a job (another long story, but I ended up as a reporter for the Philippines Herald and a correspondent for Taliba). When martial law came, and with Makati as my beat, I was absorbed among other jobless journalists by Mayor Nemesio Yabut into what he called his “Performance Team”; we checked the attendance of streetsweepers in our assigned barangays early in the morning and played Scrabble for the rest of the day.

All that changed when, in January 1973, I was arrested at home by the military for “subversion”; I marked my 19th birthday and spent the next seven months in Fort Bonifacio with the likes of Jejomar Binay and Orly Mercado, strictly small fry among people who were, even then, big fish. Released one August morning, I went back straight to UP in the afternoon, only to find that a deathly pall had fallen over the campus. It wasn’t the rowdy, carefree UP I had left, and at that moment I knew I wasn’t going back to school for a while.

In the meantime, I learned printmaking, and practiced it in the old Printmakers Association shop on Jorge Bocobo Street in Ermita. That’s where I met a pretty artist named June, whom I’d had a schoolboy crush on back in Diliman. After a flurry of love letters (the only other skill I suppose I had), she became my girlfriend—just my second one at that point, and after having lost the first, I resolved never to let her go.

Sometime in early November, I announced to my mother at breakfast that I wanted to get married (June, or Beng, didn’t even know that yet). My mother said what all mothers would: “Are you crazy? You’re only nineteen, and you don’t even have a regular job. Get a job first!” That same morning I went to my Ermita haunt and walked around the block a bit, mulling over what my mother had told me; that’s when I ran into a friend who’d also been a reporter before martial law, Jun Medina. He was now working as the PR officer of NEDA, which stood just around the corner.

“We’re looking for a feature writer,” Jun said. A bulb lit up in my head, and minutes later we were talking to his boss, Gerry Sicat, a soft-spoken man in his 40s, obviously very bright in the way soft-spoken people often are. Jun must have said something right because soon I heard Dr. Sicat saying, “Let’s start at seven.” It took me a while to understand that he meant “700 pesos a month,” a small fortune to me at a time when I was making about 30 pesos per print, if ever (the dealer who bought my prints wholesale used them to fill up the frames she was selling in the US bases).

That night I went home to my mother and told her, “I got a job. I’m getting married.” The next thing was to tell—or, well, to formally ask—Beng about the plan. A few days later we met in Cubao at the old Skorpios restaurant and, on a napkin, I proved to her that we would survive on my new salary. Though rudimentary—we didn’t have too many zeroes to deal with—the math worked, and she said yes. (Years later, she would claim, “I didn’t know what I was doing.”) We agreed to get married in January, on my 20th birthday, and we did—with my mother having to sign her approval, as I was legally underaged (my mother-in-law found out how old I was only on the ride to the judge; I was a big boy).

And that’s how I got into NEDA, and into a decade of economics and writing about it. Dr. Sicat soon discovered that I could also write speeches and had me draft a few. When he realized that he had hired a technical freshman, he made the kind of gamble I was to be forever grateful for. “There’s a program in UP in development economics, but it’s at the graduate level. I’m sending you there as a special student to learn some economics.” I went, and I did learn; it was one of the most exhilarating years of my life, in the course of which our baby Demi was born. Under the likes of Dr. Kintanar and other UPSE stalwarts such as Drs. Gonzalo Jurado, Rosalinda Tidalgo, and Dante Canlas, I began to grasp the outlines of “the dismal science.”

Dr. Sicat’s mentorship didn’t end there. A few years later, when the martial-law military brought up the matter of my spotty security background, he sent me away again to cool off for a year with the local office of the United Nations Development Programme, where I put both my writing skills and economics to work drafting project documents in such esoteric fields as civil aviation. At the end of the year, however, I asked to be reeled back in to NEDA, to my old writing duties; as fun as the UNDP had been, an old urge to just write was welling up within me.

In 1980, Dr. Sicat called me into his office again. “I’m sending you to the United States,” he said. “I think you should see what it’s like out there.” It was my first foreign trip, and for three months I observed and apprenticed with media organizations in Washington, DC and Michigan. It was to prove ironic, because—in the sylvan surroundings of an American college campus—I felt a yearning to go back to school.

Not too long afterwards, I was back in UP, having re-enrolled as a freshman at 27. Soon, Dr. Sicat was out of NEDA, a casualty of Palace politics, and I myself resigned shortly, and joined the yellow marchers on the street.

Today, when I work on the biographies of business leaders or edit technical papers for companies and international agencies, I look back on these odd turns in my life with humor and gratitude, thanking Providence for another skill and another, more grounded, view of the world.

Penman for Monday, August 16, 2010

I GOT an unexpected letter in my mailbox last week from a Baguio-based artist named Rogelio Bibal, whom I’d never met before, but whose work and situation seemed compelling enough that I thought I should share it with you. Rogelio produces functional bamboo sculpture, but beyond fashioning bamboo into pretty yet useful objects, he has also developed a passion for the plant itself and for its propagation in this country. It wouldn’t be wrong to call him “Mr. Bamboo,” given his interest in both the artistic and scientific aspects of bamboo.

In September 2009, he was among our country’s representatives to the 8th World Bamboo Congress in Bangkok, Thailand. “I witnessed the inclusion of bamboo as one of the priority species for mitigation, adaptation and development by the United Nations. It was also at this event that a declaration was made to celebrate World Bamboo Day every September 18th of the year,” he said.

Rogelio is involved in propagating bamboo in La Trinidad, Benguet where, he says, “30 monopodial or running bamboo species were introduced last May 2007.

These monopodial bamboo species—the kind of bamboo that shoots at a distance—comprise ornamental bamboos, sweet bamboo shoots-producing species, and timber-producing species. The project was a collaborative effort of the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), Beijing, China, the Rotary Club of Makati Central and the Cordillera Bamboo Development Council of Benguet State University.”

Citing the work of Dr. Celso Lantican of the Bamboo Network of the Philippines, Rogelio notes that our total bamboo coverage in this country is only around 52,000 hectares. Also, most of what we know about bamboo is concerned with the sympodial type of bamboo, or bamboo that grows in clumps. “There is little information about monopodial bamboo species in terms of propagation, plantation establishment and utilization since this species is still new to us,” he adds.

Since monopodial bamboo species were introduced in Benguet in 2007, Rogelio has been engaged in developing technologies to propagate them further not only in Benguet but other places like Tagaytay and Bukidnon whose cooler temperatures can support monopodial bamboo stands.

Now here’s Rogelio’s problem: he has been invited to attend the 2010 International Training Workshop of Bamboo to be held September 7-27 in Zhejiang, China, organized by INBAR and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. He’s eager to attend this workshop, which will sharpen his skills further and provide invaluable new knowledge about bamboo that he won’t find anywhere else, particularly in respect of monopodial bamboo.

But he needs a kind donor to help him shoulder his fare to China and part of his hotel bill. His Chinese sponsors have already agreed to waive the training fee of US$350, to foot half his hotel bill, and to cover some local travel costs. Unfortunately, unlike many of our more traditional artists who work in oils and canvases (any one of which, I often kid these painter-friends, will take me ten novels to earn), bamboo artists like Rogelio Bibal—despite exhibits at the CCP and other prime places—don’t make too much.

So if anyone out there is as moved by bamboo as much as Rogelio is and can offer some help, I suggest they get in touch with him soonest at rbibal2020@yahoo.com.


DESPITE A low-grade fever and an unseasonable attack of gout, I flew down to Dumaguete two Saturdays ago to fulfill a commitment to teach a one-day class on the short short story (or “sudden fiction,” as it’s more commonly called these days). I had a wonderful time with the Silliman University students, for which I’d like to thank SU English Department chair Dr. Eve Mascuñana, who arranged the visit, and Prof. Philip Van Peel, whose class I took over for the day.

Beyond the class, however, a happy bonus was a short trip up to Camp Lookout—a valuable piece of property owned by Silliman up in foothills of Mt. Talinis in Valencia, about 45 minutes from the downtown campus. I remember having gone up there for the first time in 1981, when it was little more than a ramshackle cottage with only the most spartan appointments; even so it was a pretty place, with falling stars streaking across the night sky and ships crawling through the strait far below like glowworms in the moonlight.

The new Camp Lookout was anything but rundown. Under the administration of SU President Ben Malayang III—a philosophy major turned environmental scientist—the facility has been completely rehabilitated and expanded, with a two-story main hall and five duplex cottages, and has been renamed the Rose Lamb-Sobrepeña Writers Village, in honor of its main sponsor and in recognition of Silliman University’s pioneering role in promoting creative writing in the Philippines.

We’re referring, of course, to the Silliman (or Dumaguete) Writers Workshop started in 1962 by the late Dr. Edilberto Tiempo and his wife the National Artist Dr. Edith Tiempo. I myself was a product of this workshop, and I credit my going back to school to the Tiempos’ urgings and to a magic spell spun by Dumaguete resident wizard Cesar “Sawi” Ruiz Aquino. (And this is why, fever or no fever, I run when Dumaguete calls.)

The new Writers’ Village is a facility that other universities, including mine, can only envy. They held the workshop here for the first time last summer, and my friends on the panel came back with rave reviews—and now I can understand why. It’s not a luxury hotel by any means—you’d be hard put to tell that the duplexes were crafted out of shipping containers—but the beds and couches are comfortable, the scenery gorgeous, and the fragrance of pine (they also call this “Little Baguio” for a reason) uniquely bracing.

“The university uses this for all kinds of meetings,” said Dr. Mascuñana, “but writers always have priority.”

That’s my kind of place.


I HAD the privilege of visiting Israel a few months ago, and wrote about that memorable trip in a couple of columns where I observed how much of ancient Israel remained, and yet also how quickly it was moving into the high-tech future. Away from the headlines, the visit gave me the opportunity to witness Israeli society up close and personal.

Now two lucky Filipino students will enjoy the same opportunity I had, if they join and win “Discover Israel: 2010 College Quiz,” a college-level contest the Israeli Embassy is holding to test how much Filipino undergraduates know about Israel. The top two finishers will go on an all-expense-paid trip to the Holy Land, while the third-place winner will get a netbook from Acer Philippines. Many other sponsors will also be contributing other valuable prizes. They include Jollibee Foods Corp., Wow Videoke, ABS-Herbs Inc., Metro Market! Market! Department Store, The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, The Peninsula Hotel, People's Palace Restaurant, Sala Bistro, Lane Moving and Storage, Mineral Flowers (an all-natural skin care line using Dead Sea minerals), and National Bookstore.

The qualifying round will be held between August to September and the finals in October at De La Salle University. For school partnerships, please email culture@manila.mfa.gov.il or call telephone number 8925333 local 512. More details can be found at the Embassy website at www.manila.mfa.gov.il.

Penman for Monday, August 9, 2010

BENG AND I were in Tagaytay a couple of weekends ago, trying to get away from work by, well, working away from home. We packed our laptops and cameras into our bags and drove off into the southern horizon.

The night before, I’d gone online to check out some hotels in the area. You’d have to agree that—for us Metro Manilans—Tagaytay is the ideal spot for weekending, promising great food in cool weather against a spectacular landscape. As far as I’m concerned, and having seen quite a bit of the world from Northern Italy to South Africa, the view offered by Taal’s crater lake ranks right up there with the best of them.

Not surprisingly, all sorts of hotels and inns and have sprouted along and near the ridge, spanning a wide range of amenities (and the lack thereof) and room rates. Even after years of ducking into this and that hotel in Tagaytay, there’s always something new to discover, but I’ve settled on P3,500 a night as my comfort zone—neither too cheap to get you bedbugs and a view of the parking lot, nor too pricey to leave you with an ache in the back pocket after two nights of sheer comfort.

My Internet search turned up several interesting prospects, but two stood out in that price range: Potter’s Ridge Hotel—technically past Tagaytay, in Alfonso going toward Splendido—and One Tagaytay Place on the other end of the ridge road near People’s Park. From the Web pictures, I could see that Potter’s Ridge was of modernist design, with Asian-fusion elements—lots of glass and airy space, and the promise of a great view almost anywhere you were billeted. It practically hung out on the mountainside, and its clean lines and white walls ensured a pleasant contemplative experience, with little to distract the eye.

And indeed that’s what Potter’s Ridge turned out to be—an ideal spot for gazing over the lake and mulling over one’s craft or sullen art, the meaning of life, etc. For Beng—who prays for 30 minutes every morning for peace on earth—it might as well have been five steps away from nirvana.


But alas, our visit coincided with repairs being done to the place on account of the ravages of a recent typhoon; the credit card hook-up wasn’t working so we had to pay in cash, and worse, the wi-fi was down (when I book a hotel these days, I always check their wi-fi arrangements). Thankfully the manager took care of the wi-fi problem by lending me a Globe Tattoo USB unit for the next 24 hours—a solution that worked so well that I got myself one of these gadgets after our trip, as a backup.

Still on the downside, however, our room with a view was rather spartan; the blanket was nothing more than a bedsheet, there was no fridge, the TV was smaller than my iMac at home, and—in what Shakespeare might have referred to superfluously as “the most unkindest cut of all”—we had to pay for extra pillows. The breakfast of daing na bangus was just passable. Too bad, because it was a pretty place in a pretty spot, and the staff was friendly; I just hope that they sort out their problems soon. If you’re in a monkish mood and don’t require too many “mod cons,” as the Brits call them, Potter’s Ridge might yet be a good place for you.

We moved to One Tagaytay Place the next day, driving past the cut-off to Sta. Rosa towards DAP. On the outside, it didn’t look too promising, resembling a Makati office building; it was also on the other side of the road away from the lake, so only the upper floors would get a view, and we didn’t. But I’d seen pictures of the rooms online, where I made our booking, and was impressed by the modernity and yet also the apparent comfortableness of things.

When we stepped into our room, we didn’t immediately realize how small it was, because every inch of space had been used thoughtfully, so that we actually had a small kitchen and dining table at the far end. I had a small, easily movable work table for my laptop (and yes, the wifi worked, and was free), and the large flat-screen TV was a pleasure to use. The bedcover was thick and snuggle-worthy. Too busy to step out—I was finishing a book draft, so this was really no vacation—we took our meals in the restaurant downstairs, and were surprised by how good and reasonably priced the food was; Beng pronounced the pumpkin soup the best she’d ever had.


On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, we had to settle for a view of—yes, the parking lot, and the green, fog-draped hills of Cavite beyond. The breakfast buffet was so-so—again, a pity, because I’m one of those guys who thinks of the breakfast buffet as one of the highlights of a hotel stay. Overall, One Tagaytay Place proved well worth the tab. (Let me also remark that the interior designer did a good job using muted colors—avocado green, coffee brown—instead of the pinks and violets that seem to afflict many other places in this country.)

It was a restful weekend, capped by a stop along the way to load up on buko pie and white corn. And, of course, some take-home bulalo from Leslie’s, which has probably the best public view of Taal Lake. Can’t wait to finish another book!


ONE OF the nice things about watching TV in a hotel is that you’ll probably get more channels than you do at home. In Tagaytay, that meant the History Channel and the Crime and Investigation Channel—just the thing I was looking for to complete my weekend escapade.

I mean it—there’s nothing I find more relaxing, strangely enough, than watching murder and mayhem, much less for the gore than the sheer cathartic effect of witnessing the evil that men (and some women) do—especially if they do it to others and not to you. So Beng and I spent much of our two restful Tagaytay evenings watching shows about serial killers, cannibals, and other miscreants while munching on peanuts and chippies.

Why, we soon wondered, did all or most serial killers happen to be in America, and why didn’t we have them in the Philippines? (Of course, as I was writing this, real life just had to butt in and spoil this thesis, by flushing out a suspected serial killer in Angeles City, preying mainly on Caucasians, in an odd twist.)

Could it be, I theorized, that they don’t eat rice, like we do?

Don’t be silly, Beng said, what would rice have to do with the compulsion to kill?

Well, I said, it’s the chewing…. We need to chew our rice, and in the process, we calm down, we get sleepy, we don’t think about killing people…. I’m getting sleepy right now….

You’re just getting old, Beng said.

And that’s the last thing I remember hearing.

Penman for Monday, August 2, 2010


LET ME put this down before I forget. A few weeks ago, an old Hong Kong friend named Peter Gordon wrote me to invite Filipino writers to vie for a new essay prize sponsored by the Asia Business Council and Time Magazine.

Called the Asia Challenge 2020 Essay Prize, the competition seeks to generate fresh ideas for tackling key challenges to Asia’s continued competitiveness and development, as well as encourage young professionals to make an impact on public policy and business in Asia. In 3,000 words or less, entrants need to deal with these questions: What is the most important challenge facing Asia over the next decade? Why? What should be done about it?

The contest is open to all Asian nationals under 32. The deadline for electronic submissions to prize@asiabusinesscouncil.org is August 31, and the prizes are $3,000 for first prize and $1,000 each for two second prizes, to be awarded in Singapore in an all-expenses-paid ceremony. You can find more information about the prize in http://www.asiabusinesscouncil.org/docs/AsiaChallengeEssay.pdf.

It’s great to have people like Peter pushing Filipinos to engage themselves more deeply in these pan-Asian endeavors. A publisher and a longtime Asia resident, Peter was the Executive Director of the Man Asian Literary Prize when I and subsequently Krip Yuson went to Hong Kong as finalists a few years ago, and Peter was so convinced that Filipinos had it in them to win the prize (which Miguel Syjuco did, last year) that he came over to Manila to speak before young Filipino writers to get them to write more novels.

While this essay competition goes beyond what many people think of as creative writing, it’s nonetheless an interesting barometer of not only how Asians write, but how Asians think, and if I were only 24 years younger I wouldn’t think twice about contributing my 3,000 words’ worth of contemplation about the Asian future, for the chance to eat my fill of chili crab along the river in Singapore.

I HAD a very interesting lunch last week with the highly accomplished director Joel Lamangan, whose new film “Sigwa” was going to be screened at the UP Film Center later that afternoon. I’d asked Joel to meet with me to be interviewed for a book I’m writing about the award-winning actress and humanitarian icon Rosa Rosal, who counts Joel among her best friends and with whom Joel had worked on the TV series “Vietnam Rose” a few years ago. I’ll tell you more next time about that book and its inimitable subject—whom a recent Reader’s Digest survey named the Philippines’ Most Trusted Person and who celebrated her 60th year with the Red Cross last month—but let me segue for now into another topic to which our conversation drifted, perhaps inevitably: the state of Philippine cinema, and what can be done about it.

Let me preface that by saying that Joel and I had collaborated before on an unabashedly commercial film project, the Sharon Cuneta starrer "Ikaw" (1993); we hadn’t seen each other much since, so this was a happy reunion. Joel reminded me that I had a whole other life in film as a screenwriter, from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, during which I scripted more than a dozen films for the late Lino Brocka before moving on to work with the likes of Laurice Guillen, Gil Portes, and Marilou Diaz Abaya.

“Why aren’t you writing for the movies anymore?” Joel asked.

“Well, there doesn’t seem to be much of an opportunity to do good, serious movies for mainstream cinema these days,” I said. “You could go indie, but you can’t make much of a living there, it’d be a labor of love.”

In truth, I’d been out of touch with the local movie industry for so long that I had no real idea where things stood at the moment. I knew that we had a vibrant indie scene—with Cinemalaya just having been held and with new directors like Brillante Mendoza and Lav Diaz earning accolades abroad—but other than that I didn’t know what was going on. The last Filipino movie I saw and frankly enjoyed was “A Very Special Love”—in DVD format, on a bus on the way to Baguio. Call me an unsupportive, colonial-minded hypocrite, but that’s the way it is. I think I’ve paid my dues to the industry, and I don’t think watching Pinoy movies should be a patriotic duty, but an experience you should look forward to for both pleasure and enlightenment.

At any rate, I threw the question back to Joel. Where, exactly, is Philippine cinema these days?

To begin with, said Joel, only about 25 to 30 movies a year get turned out by mainstream producers. That’s a far, far cry from our heyday back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when the figure easily breached 200, putting us just below India as Asia’s most active film industry.

So what happened? Well, the Hollywood blockbuster, for one thing, and then the oversize growth of the studios and the high costs of production that favored safe, formulaic movies, and then, most recently, the dominance of the major TV networks not just in their medium, but in film production.

“It’s the TV networks that basically dictate these days what gets shown on the big screen,” said Joel in so many words. “The big stars are under contract to them, and they have the power to promote their movie projects all over the media.”

Because TV’s staple is the telenovela or soap opera, and because these telenovela-trained stars are the same ones who appear in the movies, a curious phenomenon has emerged. “The acting in our movies is very soap-operatic. The actors don’t know any better.”

Also, and perhaps more alarmingly from a purely aesthetic point of view, directors and writers are now often overseen if not overruled by “creative committees” who may be more concerned with bankability or with how difficult some stars are to deal with than with a project’s truly creative aspects. (I’d had my own brushes with this “management by committee” in the big studios, where everyone’s brother and alalay sat down to make suggestions about the script.)

You’d think that the solution to all this would be to go indie—independent films, after all, cost only about P3 million to make, and give directors and writers much greater latitude to try new things—but think again. “No Filipino indie films have made any real money,” said Joel. “They may garner critical success and attention abroad, which is good, but at the same time, they have been drifting farther away from the sensibility of ordinary Filipinos. They no longer know or use the language of the masses, both verbal and non-verbal. So they haven’t really made a major impact on the local market. Think about this—our best-known film directors abroad such as Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal were first accepted here before they gained international attention.”

So what needs to be done? “We need to set up a National Film Commission, like most major film-producing countries have, even Bangladesh, to help Filipino filmmakers market their films abroad. These commissions make sure that their films are in all the right markets, are properly dubbed or subtitled, and so on. Instead of giving cash awards or rebates to a few good movies, why don’t we solicit and fund good scripts? Also, we directors should find a middle way between patronizing and alienating the Filipino audience.”

With a new administration in place, Joel echoed a perennial plea of mine: “Culture needs to get the attention and respect it deserves, perhaps through a Department of Culture. The government should see us not just as entertainers for intermission numbers, but as an industry capable of employing thousands of people and generating many millions of income, with the right supportive policies.”

Amen, Joel Lamangan! And thanks for lunch.

(Image from igma.tv)

Penman for Monday, July 26, 2010

A FEW weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending one of the most unique launches I can remember. Let’s start with the lunch menu: McDonald’s burgers—and champagne. The venue was a cavernous restaurant called Republic in the huge Resorts World complex across Terminal 3. The guests tended to fall into one or more of three general categories: theater and music, the media, and the bloggerati (aka people who write about their lives—or the lack of it—online). In the center of the room, where the buffet table would normally be, was a row of laptops; at the far end was a large screen on which something was bound to happen—and it did.

Threading all these elements together was the man who soon occupied center stage to welcome us all—the veteran theater, concert, and events director Freddie Santos, who had gathered his closest friends and associates for the launching of what he called his “blography,” the online, serialized version of what could have been a standard autobiography between two covers. Drawing on nearly four decades of his work directing live performances of every variety, Freddie had decided to commit his memories and their embedded lessons to the World Wide Web—indeed, just about as live a medium as anything today. Titled “Direksions: Life Blogs of a Live Director” (www.direkfreddie.com), Freddie’s project defies even our expectations of a regular blog.

As he puts it in his intro, “I’m no book writer so to try and write down these memories in book or biography form would be way too daunting for me. Neither am I into blogging which, as I understand blogging to be, is more of a journal of events as they happen. However, I do like the casualness of a blog and, since this could be considered a biography of sorts, I’ve decided to make this effort a Blography… casual writings of life memories as they come to mind.”

Well, casual yes and no. While there’s a delightful candor and spontaneity in the entries (I arrived from Arvada at the age of 17 brimming over with aspiration and opinion…not always a great combination. I expected to become a star, IMMEDIATELY. I mean, didn’t this country realize how fantastic, how astronomical a star I could be?! No. Oh.), the design of the “blography” itself is the most comprehensive and deliberate you’ll ever see in a blog site. Instead of writing about life at random, Freddie has mapped out the entire terrain of his professional life, covering all the groups and personalities he’s worked with, leaving titles as placeholders to be fleshed out when he finds the time.

At the launch, we saw the barest skeleton of this grand design. Today, it’s begun to acquire more body and shape, and true to his many talents, Freddie has even provided a voice track—just in case you’d rather hear than read him—as well as eyebrow-raising German and Spanish versions of the page. A blog entry about growing up in Cebu moves from a map of the place to a YouTube outtake from the 1945 Frederic Chopin film bio “A Song to Remember” and Grace Moore as Cio-Cio-san, early but powerful influences on his impressionable senses. If this is a preview of things to come, then we’ll be looking not only at Freddie Santos’ life but a multimedia history of Philippine musical theater.

Oddly enough, while we greeted each other warmly like old friends, Freddie and I had never personally met before. I’m sure that—given the 500-plus shows he’s directed and the fact that we’re about the same age, and that I love musicals—I would’ve seen a Freddie Santos opus or two. But it’s a fact of theater life that you hardly ever get to see or to know the director—although you will, now, with this blography.

Freddie and I have been corresponding for years—I as a columnist and he as a faithful reader and commentator. This blog of his makes the reverse possible, and I look forward to more fascinating entries soon from Direk Freddie.


SOME FRIENDS couldn’t keep from ribbing me about my new toy, the iPad, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Did I really need it? Did it really improve any aspect of my writing or my social life?

Of course not, I said. It’s pure extravagance, a gift to myself at age 56, which requires no excuse or explanation, other than pleasure and convenience. Anyone who says he can’t live without an iPad is, as far as I’m concerned, a liar—we did, and we can. But then again, if you can live with one, why not?

So far, after about a month of carrying it around, I’ve found that I’ve been using it for a few basic things: as storage for my digitized class readings, getting around the need to bring my thick, printed reader to class; as an e-book reader, through which I’ve already read more books in a month than I have in years; as a movie viewer, for those long rides to Makati or out of town; as a Skype machine, for calling my daughter and sister in the States; as a world radio and TV set, allowing me to listen to Broadway musicals 24/7 or to National Public Radio, or to watch the Poker Channel and British ITN TV on the road; and as a magazine and newspaper reader, for all the free news and features you can download. On top of these, of course, it does most of the other things my laptop (which is increasingly becoming my desktop) does—email, surfing, and photo and music libraries.

Very recently, the iPad App Store came out with a free application called Flipboard, a virtual magazine covering everything from hard news to arts and culture, sports, and technology. Flipboard is probably the best example of what the iPad can truly be useful for—as a portable, readable, and essentially free (well, post-hardware) carrier and updater of vital and interesting information online.

Flipboard also integrates your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Not that it matters to me, because this is where I draw the digital line, just beyond my blog—no Facebook and no Twitter for me, because I’ve also realized that, the older I get, the more misanthropic I tend to be. I’d like to have the world at my fingertips, but I don’t want the world to find me.

It’s a strange world, indeed, where you can blog to all humanity about what a private person you are.

Penman for Monday, July 19, 2010

AS YOU folks know, I’m interested in anything having to do with the technology of writing. In this—as in other things—I have an analog and a digital side, the legacy of my graduating from the Philippine Science High School only to finish an English degree in college.

You can find the analog side in my obsessive collection of vintage fountain pens and typewriters; there’s nothing more pleasurably old-fashioned than dragging a wet nib across blank paper, leaving a line to last for the ages. (This reminds me of that recent movie Letters to Juliet, to which I took Beng as a special treat, knowing I’d rack up major points I could cash in some other time. “We’re going to see a movie,” I told my disbelieving wife, “and no one’s going to die or get his head bashed in it.”) So along with my pens, I have bottles of ancient inks—some of them unopened since they were put away when Dwight Eisenhower and Ramon Magsaysay were signing proclamations with Parker and Sheaffer desk pens—in colors like my favorite blue-black and brown.

The digital side is manifest in my little trove of Macs, BlackBerries, and other blinking beauties that won’t survive for too long without batteries. For sheer writing efficiency, let’s face it, nothing beats a laptop, and my MacBook Air is just about the most ideal writing machine you can think of—lightweight, with a full-sized screen and keyboard, and able to go online for quick access to Google and to email.

It’s not easy to reconcile my affection for a 1935 Parker Vacumatic with my fascination for a 2010 iPad, but I think the words “affection” and “fascination” pretty much describe the thrall in which these objects hold me; I like one but love the other. Unfortunately, practicality dictates that I spend more time these days with a computer than with a pen.

Some people on the global Fountain Pen Network that I subscribe to still fantasize about writing novels on their Moleskines with their Watermans or Conway Stewarts—and why not, since that’s the way novels were written for a long time—but I know that, for myself, that’ll never happen. Sad to say, for all my lovely pens, my fingers have forgotten how to write for longer than a few lines; as if they were children all over again, they tire easily, make grudging gestures, and sulk at having to make loops, until the letters get uglier and uglier.

There’s no such strain with the even-tempered keyboard; the emotion isn’t in the writing itself, but in the communicated thought. You can produce masses of words in a minute, and you can reject or change any one of them without compunction. True, it looks and feels impersonal, which is at once its merit and demerit. The “processed” word (a horrible idea, but a useful one) will look the same to all readers in 12 points Times Roman, unlike unique but barely legible penmanship.

I was thinking all these when I met up with a new friend, an engineer named Edwin Sybingco, a few weeks ago, curious to take a look at something that promised to bring my analog and digital sides together. Edwin works for a company that markets what they call the Pulse Smartpen, and he rang me up to ask for an hour of my time to demonstrate what they had.

I’d never heard of the Pulse Smartpen before, and frankly I was in such a harried state at that time that it wouldn’t have mattered to me if I never saw one, but my natural curiosity prevailed, and I agreed to met Edwin over a late lunch in a burger joint. He took out the pen and the special pad of paper that came with it and soon we were laughing like long-lost brother-geeks.

So what’s a Pulse Smartpen? It’s a big, fat, silver pen that looks like an ordinary ballpoint (which it also is), except that it has an infrared camera at the tip that works when you use the pen on the accompanying paper, and what it does aside from write is to remember and record every stroke you make. When you hook it up later to your Mac or PC (yes, it works with both platforms), it copies everything over to a digital file you can now view and review. In other words, it’s a pen that writes on (special) paper, which also makes an exact digital copy of whatever you write, draw, or doodle.

The bonus is that the Pulse pen is also an extremely sensitive digital voice recorder. You can set it up so that it also listens to and records whatever’s being said at the moment you’re writing—so you can either make voice notes to accompany your write-up or your drawing, or you can record, say, a lecture while making your own annotations on that same lecture. Then you can play them all back together on your computer. (I tested the pen’s recorder, and was blown away by how clearly it picked up our voices over the din of the lunch crowd, even from the table.)

How neat is that? I could imagine the kind of people a pen like this would be perfect for—doctors, lawyers, journalists, architects, designers, students keen on catching the prof’s every word (indeed, the Pulse Smartpen’s tagline is “Never miss a word”). Edwin told me how students for whom their parents had bought the US-engineered pen (it isn’t exactly cheap, folks—think in the neighborhood of $200) had seen marked improvements in their grades, and I could see how that could happen.

I was never much of a note-taker myself—I was an arrogant fool who believed that sheer genius and dumb luck would carry him through exams—but my sister Elaine was the tireless scribe of her law-school class, and I can just imagine how much higher Elaine’s (or rather her classmates’) scores would have been, with her neat notes instantly available to everyone else digitally. (Notes can be shared online through an account you can set up at www.livescribe.com, where you can also find tons more information about the Pulse pen and its accessories.)

You can find the Pulse pen—which comes in 2-gigabyte and 4-gigabyte versions—at high-end computer shops like PowerMac. It connects with your desktop or laptop via USB, and the built-in rechargeable battery should last for years. My only beef about the pen is that it doesn’t come with a pocket clip, although it does have a leatherette sheath to protect it from a fall.

So if you see me one of these days toting what looks like a silver cigar instead of the usual Pelikan M800, that’s just me playing with both my analog and digital sides. Now if the Pulse Smartpen people could just invent a version that spits real fountain pen ink from a flexible nib, then I’d truly be in hybrid heaven.

Penman for Monday, July 12, 2010


IT'S THURSDAY and I’ve been sick since Sunday—sick, as in feverish, sweaty, wobbly-kneed sick, courtesy of some vengeful variety of the flu. I’d been flu-free for a year, thanks to a flu shot, but I missed my anniversary shot last April and now I’m paying for it.

Fifty years ago it was fun to be sick and housebound for a week; it meant a pass from school and all things official and mandatory. Today, in the Age of the BlackBerry and Wifi, it just means working in bed in pajamas between cups of lugaw and doses of paracetamol. (I even did my civic duty and snuck out of my sickbed to join the 2010 Star Lifestyle Journalism Awards at the Ayala Museum last Tuesday—only to be tortured by a tantalizing lunch buffet spread, one morsel of which didn’t get through my gullet.)

I’m worried that the semester’s barely a month old and I’ve already missed at least two of my biweekly class days. I’m sure that most of my students aren’t exactly in mourning about the lost class time, but it bothers me that they can’t or won’t expect to me to be there, like clockwork, every Wednesday and Friday afternoon. I’ve been teaching for nearly 26 years now, and I’m coming to the odd realization that, the older I get, the more my classes mean to me than they might to my students.

Because I have some administrative duties as director of the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing, I get to teach only two classes a semester instead of the usual load of four. It’s a privilege—I almost want to say a luxury—I appreciate, knowing how many of my colleagues especially in the downtown universities have to carry as many as 40 units or even more (that’s eight hours a day, five days a week) to make ends meet.

Of course, you can argue that 40 units is what everyone else puts in, in a sense, from factory workers to bank employees. Teaching, however, is a huge psychic drain. As I’ve written here before, every class is a performance, and no matter how well you know the subject and now matter how many times you’ve taught it before, each class is new and different, and deserves the full intensity and freshness of your material and your approach to it. All this means that lecturing for just an hour leaves me exhausted (and, I’m sure, my students as well), and I feel like a wet noodle afterwards, although my students don’t see it, because I believe that teachers should do their best to communicate enthusiasm and not weariness to their students.

So I try to make my six hours of teaching a week worth my students’ time and mine. This semester, in a break from the usual, I’m teaching two undergraduate courses instead of doing at least one graduate workshop in fiction or nonfiction. It’s something I don’t mind and in fact strongly support. I don’t know when and how I became a senior professor when it seems just like yesterday when I was a beanpole of an instructor, but I also believe that senior faculty should teach undergraduate classes now and then, if not regularly, both to keep abreast of what the kids are thinking and to have them benefit from your presumptive experience early on.

It was my own encounters with such senior figures that made me feel good about returning to the university as an English major (and a technical freshman) at age 27 in 1981 after having dropped out for ten years. They were called “terror” professors in those days, and I quickly found out why. These big-haired ladies had all the charms of Medusa; they smiled at me, perhaps amused to find in their classroom such a big, cocky fellow who already had a string of Palancas and other prizes to his name—but they absolutely cut me no slack, and indeed held me up to a higher standard than my younger classmates (who included, among others, a fellow named Francis Pangilinan). In two diagnostic quizzes, I got a “4.0” in Greek and Roman literature, and an even more embarrassing “5.0” in early Philippine literature. It was a great start, really—I got shocked out of my wits well enough to take my return to school more seriously.

Almost 30 years later and standing on the other side of the classroom, I sometimes find myself wishing that I had a little more Gorgon in me. The fact is, I’m a lot like my marmalade friend Chippy—a fat, grumpy, but basically non-menacing pussycat. Oh, I’ve given out some 4.0’s and 5.0’s and made three or four students cry, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let me tell you something: you won’t flunk in my class unless you’re hopelessly stupid or incorrigibly irresponsible. Since you probably wouldn’t have gotten past the UPCAT if you were anything close to stupid (although some days I wonder), these historic few whom I flunked very likely belonged to the second category.

The pattern was almost always the same: the students would appear for one or two meetings, then vanish wordlessly for the rest of the semester, only to reappear for the final exam, hoping to be allowed to take it. Now, these kids may actually have been smart enough to have learned and done the coursework all by themselves, but they were also dumb enough not to have told me first. I took it as a personal affront for them to have imagined that they could have sailed through a semester’s readings in, say, American or Philippine Literature without the benefit of my runaway reflections.

I don’t call the roll religiously, but I do expect people to be in class—and to speak up when I ask them to. I don’t mark down people for wrong or bad answers—that’ll only shut them up even more—but I do give the best classroom performers a slight nudge in their final grade. I’ve always believed that people—myself included—should have the right, the opportunity, and the responsibility to make fools of themselves, if that’s what they want. Sometimes it’s even fun; often it’s even educational.

This semester, my two courses are Comparative Literature 111, “The Short Story,” and Creative Writing 198 (Special Topics, “Professional Writing”). It’s an interesting shift from the art and craft of what we’ve taken to looking at as “highbrow” literature to the art and craft of writing for a living. I bridge that gap by reminding my CL111 students that Poe didn’t write “The Cask of Amontillado” to win prizes or to provide scholars a century hence with dissertation material; he wrote it to make money and to keep himself alive. I also remind my CL198 students that writing for others doesn’t mean lowering one’s standards and thinking like a hack, and that corporate brochures and AVP scripts—whatever produces the paycheck—deserve as much of their creativity and attention as their novels and epics-in-progress.

Teaching’s a tough job, but there surely are far worse fates for both teacher and student. Tomorrow I’m going to try and teach. Vacation time’s over, folks!

Penman for Monday, July 5, 2010


SEVENTY-NINE days. That’s how long my resistance and resolve lasted, a heroic effort when you consider what a softie I’ve been when it comes to any black or white box rolling out of Cupertino, California. That’s where Apple designs its gadgets, and the latest of them (well, at least until the iPhone 4—but more on that another time) was the iPad, the tablet modestly described by Apple boss man Steve Jobs as “our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.”

As I’ve often declared with utter shamelessness, I’ve been an Apple fanboy for more than 20 years—longer than some kids using iPods have been alive—and an early adopter of its technology. I know, I know—as Alexander Pope sagely wrote, “Be not the first by whom the new are tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” but that was in the pre-industrial age, when “new” probably meant a new breed of cattle or a different way of feathering your hat. In my time, I’ve been quite happy if not delirious to be a paying guinea pig for the first, albeit problem-prone, iteration of a new PowerBook, MacBook, iPhone, or whatever iSomething they cook up in Cupertino (which I, of course, as a true fanboy, made a pilgrimage to in 2006, coming away with a T-shirt saying “I visited the Mothership.”)

And then the iPad came out—in a preview by Steve Jobs in January, and in the US Apple Stores on April 3. Within a week of its US launch, the gadget was here, ported over by fellow diehards at the Philippine Macintosh Users Group. The local tech media who normally interview me about these things soon called to ask if they could have me talk about the iPad. “I don’t have one,” I said. “So when will you get one?” they persisted. “I don’t know,” I said. “Right now, I don’t think I will.” My caller gasped.

Indeed, last February, when the buzz about the new Apple toy began to build up, I wrote in this same corner: “For the first time in a very long time, Apple came out with something that actually had me asking ‘Do I need this? Or even if I don’t, why should I want one?’ Unlike that mind-blowing moment a couple of years ago when Steve Jobs pulled a MacBook Air out of an office envelope to introduce the world’s thinnest laptop, the iPad’s stage debut left me underwhelmed, maybe because I was too busy figuring out where, in my lifestyle, the gadget would fit.”

And so it was for 79 days. I even played around with a Dell Mini netbook—my first Windows machine since the days of Windows 95—to scratch my itch for something small, cute, and functional (my burning if futile wish has always been for an Apple netbook, something Steve Jobs has quite plainly said will never happen). That Mini’s with my brother now, because, on June 21st, I finally gave in and got an iPad.

Why? Let’s call it charity. A balikbayan flew in from Hawaii with an iPad and needed more cash for her vacation, so her brother put up her iPad for sale on Philmug so cheaply that (I convinced myself) it would have been criminal to pass it up. Having performed my Christian duty, I now felt obliged to enjoy the beast.

And, much to my surprise, enjoy it I did. The functional, rationalizing side of me went quickly to work, transferring a whole semester’s readings to the device. So no more lugging the laptop (suddenly, my wafer-thin MacBook Air feels like a ton) to the classroom, with “The Cask of Amontillado,” et al. just a few finger taps away. Setting up email was a breeze; mine’s just the wi-fi, not the 3G, model, so I have to be in a wi-fi zone to go online, but these days you’re never too far from a router, so surfing and emailing hasn’t been a problem. (I still entrust my email to my BlackBerry, which remains streets ahead of Apple in that department. So am I getting the iPhone 4? Mark my words—not yet.)

But the app that bowled me over was the iBooks reader, Apple’s answer to the Kindle. They bundle a free, downloadable copy of Winnie-the-Pooh with the iPad, and while I’m no great fan of yellow bears, I was entranced by the way my finger could turn and even wiggle the corner of the page, and the way the colors bled through the page—I know, I’m so stupid and so cheap, but an effect like that sent a jolt up my spine.

To my even greater delight, I realized that there was a pile of copyright-free classics I could download and even append original book covers to, and I went on a downloading frenzy for many hours, counting among my finds some childhood favorites such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Chessmen of Mars and H. G. Wells’ Tales of Space and Time. Of course, for that proper academic touch, I had to load up on classics like James Joyce’s Dubliners, Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and Aldous Huxley’s The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems.

A real treasure trove and a special interest of mine was a cornucopia of books about colonial Philippines: Blair and Robertson’s The Philippine Islands 1493-1803, Mary Fee’s A Woman’s Impressions of the Philippines, Needom Freeman’s A Soldier in the Philippines, and Paul de la Gironiere’s Adventures in the Philippine Islands. But when it came the time to actually pay for a book I really wanted to read, it was Michael Craig’s The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time, an account of a dizzying series of games at the Bellagio in Las Vegas a few years ago when millions of dollars changed hands in a matter of hours.

The piece de resistance was when I discovered that, with a bit of freeware called Calibre, I could transform my own manuscripts within minutes into e-books (in the iPad’s .epub format). It’s the height of narcissism, I sheepishly confess, but looking at the covers of Soledad’s Sister and Killing Time in a Warm Place beside Beowulf and Machiavelli on the same bookshelf convinced me, for good, that I had blown a month’s salary on something truly valuable, if only to my ego.

And what about those movies? Let’s face it: the iPad isn’t a work machine but an entertainment center, and movies are a big part of that traveling show. I keep DVDs of my favorite movies lying around but rarely get to watch them again, so now I’ve converted (through software called HandBrake) and uploaded a raft of them to the iPad: classics such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Lang’s Metropolis, Murnau’s Nosferatu, Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Bunuel’s and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, as well as all-time love stories (yes, I’m sappy) such as Black Orpheus, Brief Encounter, Doctor Zhivago, Friends (the 1971 movie with Anicée Alvina), Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and A Man and a Woman.

With all these, and excluding the five-figure price (how many cash-strapped, iPad-toting balikbayans can you meet), how can anyone say no to an iPad? Easy. I’ll tell you where this first-gen iPad still falls short for me. I can’t type on it for long stretches—the virtual keyboard is good for short email messages, but I have to keep toggling between the alpha and numeric modes for something so simple as an apostrophe; it’s not going to replace my MBA as a workhorse. I had hoped they’d build in a TV tuner (a $20 option on the Dell) to this thing so I could happily curl up with it to watch CSI while Beng gorges on her cooking shows, but no. And until PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker come up with iPad-compatible software, I’m out of luck, online-poker-wise.

Will it eradicate global poverty? Certainly not—it may even worsen the situation, among some gadget-crazy people I happen to know. Is it useful? Sort of. Is it fun? Muchisimo.

Penman for Monday, June 28, 2010

AS I was saying last week, one can easily get stuck in the ancient past when visiting Israel—there’s certainly enough of that to go around, just in Jerusalem itself, where traditional attractions such as the Temple Mount and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre draw tens of thousands of tourists every year. That journey back to history extends far out into the desert to Masada, the mountaintop fortress where Herod built a sumptuous palace complete with heated water, and where, some seven decades after him, the embattled Jews were said to have committed mass suicide rather than yield to the advancing Romans.

For someone like me who grew up on Hollywood epics and on profusely illustrated Bibles, our group’s visit to Masada—little more these days than a cluster of rocky ruins offering a spectacularly vast view of the desert and the Dead Sea, with Jordan just across the water—was a highlight not to be missed. The short cable car trip to the top might as well have been a ride on a time machine, to a place whose present solitude might as well be an echo chamber for the clash of swords and the crunch of sandaled feet on the sand.

(This dense and heavy quietude seems to pervade large swaths of Israel. It was inescapable in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem museum, the country’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, where our guide Rita—whose mother and grandmother had been at Auschwitz—invited us to form our own connections to her people’s past. Even so the present kept butting in, like an ironic refrain; hardly had we stepped out of Yad Vashem when “Welcome to Palestine” messages began appearing on our roaming cell phones.)

Not far below Masada, the Dead Sea offers another kind of cleansing, a scouring of the body’s every nook even in the briefest of immersions in its briny embrace. Modern resort hotels have sprung up on its beaches, attracting busloads of tourists from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, many seeking relief in this sprawling natural spa. This is a sea—actually a lake—without fish and without boats, but it is threatened even in its desolation; the Dead Sea is receding by about a meter a year, and sinkholes have appeared near the shore.

The ride back to the city is a return to life, to the vibrant present. Along the way one passes settlements—kibbutzim—caught somewhere in between, in a communal lifestyle forged in a more romantic, more idealistic past but soldiering on bravely in an age of globalization.


The Ein Gedi kibbutz is nestled in an oasis close to Masada and Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and archeological studies have turned up many links to the biblical past; in 1956 some settlers went there to carve out a village and a life in the desert. Now Ein Gedi blooms as a garden resort, a burst of bright colors in the ashen landscape. Its botanical gardens, with over 900 species from all over the world (including the Philippines, I would often remark to our host Daniela, herself transplanted from North America), materially express the spirit of struggle and survival that animates the people here, Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike.

But after the dry desert, Tel Aviv’s cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity are like a tall, chilled glass of beer (Goldstar is the local brew of choice). A new city even by global standards—it was founded just over a century ago by people coming out of ancient Jaffa to the south—Tel Aviv is, quite literally, Israel’s modern, Mediterranean face.

That modernity is emblazoned not just on the city’s trademark Bauhaus architecture but in the familiar shouts and grunts of cities everywhere, in the cacophony of traffic and the susurrus of markets. It is manifest in the inventive athleticism of the world-famous Mayumana dance group, for whom body and music seem to be one fluid thing, and in the broad appeal of singer and performer Idan Raichel, whose lyrics we didn’t need to understand to appreciate his art and his passion for multiculturalism.


The future flies in your face in Israel when you confront its advances in technology—no huge surprise for a people who count Albert Einstein among their intellectual fathers, and whose battle-ready mindset encourages innovation. They’re building not just a 100% electric car out there in a place called, well, A Better Place, but also the nationwide network of charging stations that the enterprise will require.

Speaking of cars, however, whatever you do, don’t open a car wash or a car insurance business in Israel. Nearly all the cars I saw, old or new, sported a thick sprinkling of dust and a rash of nicks and dings on the fenders. Apparently, unlike some places we know, a slight nudge or bump on the road is no cause to kill or even to get worked up in Israel.

My sweetest hour in that country came, oddly or perhaps appropriately enough, close to the very end, away from all the history, the politics, and the economics that had dominated my visit. With a couple of hours to while away before dinner on our penultimate day, our first free period in almost a week, I went out by myself to the beach behind our hotel in Tel Aviv.

A 30-minute walk in the dry heat tired me quickly, but the sun was setting, and I thought I would watch the sun drop into the ocean from behind the clouds. The “ocean” here was the Mediterranean Sea, and I realized that—despite having visited many European countries and bodies of water—I had never been to the Mediterranean, so I went down to the water’s edge and performed a little ritual I had done on my first encounter with the Atlantic 30 years ago: I bent over, dipped a finger into the swell, and licked the salty drop off.

As I did that the onrushing wave surged around my feet, drowning my shoes, so I parked myself in a yellow plastic lounge chair on the public beach to dry them out. This curve of the beach was apparently for families with children. I hate screaming toddlers, but here I found strange comfort in their gurgling laughter. The children were very small; some couldn’t even walk yet, and a charmer of a girl crept over to me on all fours in the powdery sand, egged on by her father to greet me “Shalom,” although she could talk no more than she could walk. I saw a mother rinse her baby’s face with seawater; these children would lose their fear of the ocean early.

Soon the sun slid beyond the horizon, not in the burst of molten gold that we Filipinos prefer for our sunsets, but in a wash of silver over a leaden sea. I imagined this view as it may have looked a millennium ago, with ancient galleys and triremes coming in on the surging waves to sack Jaffa, just a few kilometers down the same shore. Now I saw a fine young woman wade boldly into the shimmering water, trailed by her boyfriend’s camera; in the foreground, a girl of about ten skipped across the beach, her marriage and motherhood still a decade away.


Just the day before, I had visited other children in a special ward in a hospital just outside Tel Aviv. Here, the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation, founded by a Jewish American doctor, brings a couple of hundred children every year for heart operations they couldn’t afford or couldn’t get; often the mothers come, too. Many if not most of the children treated by the volunteer doctors aren’t even Jewish; when I visited, the children were mainly Palestinians from Gaza, Angolans, and Chinese. Last year an eight-month-old Filipino girl from Benguet named Lyka was flown here for the open-heart surgery that saved her life.

It’s a messy world outside that hospital, but for a moment back there I thought I saw the best of the place and of the people, driven not by governments or regimes but by humanitarianism without borders.



More photos from Israel here.

Penman for Monday, June 21, 2010

YOU'LL HAVE to excuse me if you read the word “Israel” more than a few times in this corner over the next couple of weeks. I visited that country recently, and my head’s still spinning from the sights and sounds of a place I’d only dreamed of since boyhood.

If you were a kid in the 1960s and saw “The Ten Commandments,” you wanted to grow up and visit the Holy Land, the Promised Land, or Israel—wherever it was that Moses brought his people to—never mind that the 1956 opus was actually shot in Egypt (where, to be fair, much of the story took place) and California. Whatever those of us who begin as young Christians turn out to be later in life—atheists, agnostics, fundamentalists—a soaking in Biblical lore is hard to shake off, and the complicated politics of the Middle East (complicated not just today but since ancient times) tends to recede in a dusty blur against the cinematic sharpness of Jericho’s crumbling ramparts, the parting of the Red Sea, and Christ’s tortuous ascent to Calvary.

Still, as dramatic as the history (or some would say the mythology) might be, nothing quite prepares you for the majesty of the real thing. It was clever of our tour planners to start us off literally at the very top—on the Mount of Olives, which overlooks many of Jerusalem’s holiest sites: the Temple Mount, with the gold-topped Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque; the Jewish Cemetery; the Church of Mary Magdalene, and the Church of All Nations beside the reputed Garden of Gethsemane.

Your eyes sweep not just over kilometers of biblical territory but also centuries of a rich but tumultuous history, from pre-Roman times to the reign of Herod, the Jewish revolt, then Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Egyptian, Ottoman, and British rule, before the establishment of Israel in 1948, and subsequently the conflict within and beyond its borders.

Indeed only the most insensible of tourists can visit Israel without acknowledging the uniqueness and the challenges of its position—historically, politically, and culturally. To see it merely as an exotic movie backdrop or a pilgrimage destination would be to shortchange both the country and oneself. (Not incidentally, our visit took place just before the Gaza flotilla episode—a sobering if not chilling reminder of just how lethally difficult relationships remain in that part of the world.)

The ironies and paradoxes abound in Jerusalem, where we set off on what most Catholics (a nominal one, in my case) would do in Israel—follow the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus supposedly took to his crucifixion, and one that begins and mostly stays in the old city’s Muslim Quarter. The Holy Sepulchre, the holiest of Christian shrines where Jesus is held by tradition to have been crucified and entombed, is also the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. Some Jewish women, keeping with traditional dictates prescribing modesty and simplicity, shave their heads—only to acquire and wear expensive wigs. While Israel is officially a Jewish state, it is also very much a multicultural and multireligious society, and one in continuing transition, as we would find at nearly every turn we made during our week there.

I traveled with a group of journalists—Kat Kat de Castro and Uma Khouny of ABS-CBN’s travel show “Trip na Trip,” with their writer Jigs de Castro and cameraman Dave Bola, and Cheryl Tiu of Lifestyle Asia—most of us first-timers. Kat Kat had been there thrice before, but on quick-and-dirty news assignments that left her little time for any real touring. Uma—yes, the “Pinoy Big Brother” discovery—was a godsend, being an Israeli Arab who not only was born and who grew up there and a native speaker of Hebrew, but also a bright young man with a sharp mind and a sense of humor and irony. His unique position provided informed perspective to the rest of us, although Uma himself admitted that much of what we saw was new to him as well, coming from the other side of the fence.

Depending on your circumstances, getting into Israel can either be painless or excruciating—in the latter case, if Israel’s security or immigration people have any reason to suspect your motives. You fill out a short form which the immigration officer stamps (you can tell them if you want your passport itself to be stamped—many people don’t, because some Arab countries reportedly refuse entry to people who have been to Israel); another officer collects the form, and you’re off.

This may come as a surprise to many, but Israel is one of the few countries outside the Asean region that don’t require Filipinos to have entry visas. However, that special status doesn’t guarantee automatic entry. You could still be questioned at immigration, and you will be sent back if it becomes clear that you have something else on your mind than visiting the Mount of Olives or floating belly-up on the Dead Sea. For this reason, says Ambassador Avi Vapni, Filipinos might be better off with a visa to spare them the hassle on arrival. That said, about 70,000 Filipinos live in Israel—many of them, shall we say, well beyond the 90 days officially granted to visa-free tourists. That may not sound like much compared to Filipinos in California or even the UK, but that number already makes up 1 percent of Israel’s population of 7 million.

Clearly, tourist traffic between the Philippines and Israel can improve both ways. Some 6,000 Filipinos visit Israel every year as tourists—most of them elderly people on a lifetime’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The inbound figure peaks at 3,000 Israelis—a drop in the bucket compared to the 250,000 who troop to Thailand every year. The Tel Aviv-Manila route is served by El Al, among a few other airlines, via Bangkok and Hong Kong. I’d heard horror stories about El Al’s security procedures and about the airline service itself, but thankfully none of our fears about excessive security and rude flight attendants materialized.

The evening was cool enough at around 20C when we got into Ben Gurion International Airport, stately with tall marble columns in its main lobby, after an 11-hour flight from Bangkok. The coolness was welcome because, instead of using airconditioning, our Israeli driver pulled his window down, something Uma said was typical of the locals’ practicality. There was little to see at night during our 40-minute ride from the airport to our hotel in Jerusalem on the impeccably smooth highway, but over the next two days, now with our guide Sharon, we saw the basic truth of Israel’s topography—it was, indeed, a country divided into shore, valley, and mountain, its vast deserts punctuated by huddles of date trees, then suddenly outgrowths of villages and cities built largely in the same yellow-ochre “Jerusalem stone,” the limestone that gives the city of its name its architectural character.

First Semester, AY 2010-2011

Ladies and gentlemen, come get the file you need for class by clicking this download link.

It's a zipped folder containing all the stories we'll be taking up in class, with a few extras. The stories are numbered in the sequence we'll be following.

Penman for Monday, June 7, 2010

I WAS delighted to receive, recently, advance copies of two new books soon to be launched by the University of the Philippines Press—UP Diliman: Home and Campus, edited by Narita M. Gonzalez and Gerardo T. Los Baños, and Sundays in Manila by Robert H. Boyer. That all these people are known to me is a pleasant bonus— Narita is the widow of our fellow provinciano and mentor NVM Gonzalez, and Beng’s teacher; Gerry was my student and now my colleague; and Bob Boyer taught with our department and has since been a great friend—but the books themselves are the prize.

Narita’s book (I call it Narita’s, although Gerry ably co-edited it, because the memories are mostly hers and her generation’s) is a compilation of reminiscences and reflections about life in what’s often been called the “Republic of Diliman,” a nearly self-contained “communiversity” as Narita and her fellow pioneers call it. The term “pioneer” itself holds a special meaning in the context of Diliman, that wooded, grassy stretch of land on the fringe of the postwar country’s brand-new capital, still occupied in 1948 by the US Army’s General Records Department, with their Quonset huts and barracks that would become UP’s trademark over the next half-century. The pioneers were the first families to move into the new campus—often into a sawali cottage before graduating to a “permanent house.”

The great academic families of UP roll off the tongue in this fond memoir—not just the Gonzalezes, but the Arcellanas, the Lagmays, the Corpuzes, the Bonifacios, the Lesacas, the Monsods, the Nemenzos, the Macedas, the Mirandas, the Hidalgos, the Encarnacions, and the Abuevas, among many others. If, as they say, it takes a village to raise a child, it soon dawns on the reader that it takes a community like Diliman—as it was in the ‘50s and ‘60s, with family and school practically indistinguishable from one another—to raise a scholar. In Narita’s book—which also features the recollections of dozens of other contributors—the babies who are born and the children who break their bones climbing mango trees soon become professors themselves, after a rebellious diversion or two, and take over their parents’ houses in the closest thing the staunchly democratic UP has to a dynastic tradition.

I was never a member of the UP Student Catholic Action nor a fan of the fabled Fr. John Delaney—by the time I came to Diliman, the winds had turned firmly leftward—but it’s hard not to share the wonderment of the characters in this memory of Narita’s, about the genesis of a landmark: “One evening, during one of those scheduled meals in Area 17, in the home of the Abueva brothers—Billy, Teddy, and Pepe—Father Delaney met an architect. It was quite a fortuitous event. The architect was Leandro Locsin, who was only twenty-six at that time.

“Thirty years later, Pepe Abueva would be UP president and Billy a National Artist, an honor Leandro Locsin would also win for himself. ‘I was the architect Father Delaney was looking for,’ Locsin would recall from that evening. The concept of a church-in-the-round was exactly what Father Delaney wanted.

“Locsin presented a model of this church to Father Delaney. One afternoon, after cleaning up the old chapel, counting host for the next Mass and like chores, Father Delaney called in some ‘sacristines’ and his two favorite grade school volunteers, Evelyn Lesaca and Selma Gonzalez. Not too long ago he'd given the two girls paper dolls, lifted them off the ground in his arms when they were light. Little did he know that they might have something to say about the model of the church-in-the-round. Like the sacristines, the two girls thought the church-in-the-round was a far-fetched dream. ‘A flying saucer of a church’ was the way the girls described it, to tease Father Delaney. They had been so used to the sawali chapel and had been comfortable with it, but now here was this dome model, suggesting a church that not only would look big, solid, and permanent but would also cost a great deal of money.”

Bob Boyer’s book is another kind of treat altogether, although much of it also takes place in the groves of Diliman. Dr. Boyer was seven when the War broke out—“playing war games with my older brothers, reenacting the landings at Leyte Gulf and Lingayen Gulf.” Thus began a lifelong interest in the Philippines, now culminating with Sundays in Manila.

I must confess, with some shame, that I and my wife Beng appear with inordinate frequency in Bob’s book; I suppose you could say that we, among many others, hosted Bob during his many visits to the Philippines, a favor he returned when I went to his college in Wisconsin a few years ago as an exchange professor. When Bob asked me to write the blurb for his book, I was only too happy to contribute these words:

“Bob Boyer offers affectionate—often intimate—portraits of Filipino life and culture, formed over many visits to a country that many if not most Americans know only in the broadest terms: as a staunch ally in the Pacific and its other wars, as the rack of Imelda’s shoes, and as the home of Manny Pacquiao. Bob sharpens that picture with factual detail, but also softens the resulting image of the Filipino with his sympathy and understanding. Whether he’s riding a jeepney, sipping iced tea at the Chocolate Kiss, exploring the mysteries of Quiapo and Mt. Banahaw, or marching up Bataan and Corregidor, Dr. Boyer invariably delights and inevitably instructs; sometimes—like all good teachers do, but ever so gently—Bob disturbs and critiques us with his observations. It’s hard to imagine how a visitor from the snowbound American Midwest could connect so well with sun-baked Pinoys, but Bob Boyer did—and does again, through this eminently enjoyable book.”

Here’s Bob musing on that phenomenon we Pinoys all know about, “Filipino time”: “Unaccountably, between 1:05 p.m. and 1:12 p.m., more than fifty people had materialized— late and together. I was baffled by this synchronized tardiness, except for Tita. Why was Tita not in tune with the others? Perhaps even Filipinos, in certain circumstances, such as a sabbatical leave, misjudge ‘Filipino Time.’ I was still further surprised later that afternoon to discover that what I had thought was the entire photo session was only the beginning. I went to lunch after the session in the reading room, unaware that there were two more sets of pictures taken, one in front of the Faculty Center and one across the road from it, with tropical shrubbery as backdrop. Cora had sent a graduate student to look for me when they noticed my absence, but I had apparently already left. When I later asked a colleague how he knew about the other sites, he said, ‘I followed the photographer.’

“So not only were my colleagues synchronized in their (late) time of arrival. All fifty-some, including Tita this time, were inexplicably in communication about the unannounced multiple sites. They clearly wanted to include me, but somehow, despite their attempts and my watchfulness, I missed the less overt cues of ‘Filipino Time,’ the ones that are so natural to Filipinos that they do not think to mention them.

“Speaking of mending one’s ways, I had to change some of my own behavior because of student politeness. I have the habit, after class has ended and I have gathered up my notes, of chatting with one or more of the students still lingering in the front rows. This is a way of getting better acquainted with students, but I had to eliminate such after-class chats at UP. As soon as the other students heard my voice, they all, including a few on their way out the door, promptly returned to their places to pay attention.”

It’s always interesting to see how others see us, because it gives us another way of seeing others—and, of course, ourselves.

UP Diliman: Home and Campus will be launched June 25, 3 pm, at the UP Executive House, while Sundays in Manila will be launched July 2, 3 pm, at the Sulod Tagibanwa on the 4th floor of the UP Faculty Center. See you there!

Penman for Monday, May 31, 2010


IT'S HARDLY surprising that everybody seems to want a minute of Sen. Noynoy Aquino’s time, or even to bend his ear, before we all start calling him Mr. President, which can’t come too soon. His predecessor didn’t seem too interested in listening to suggestions from people she didn’t know or didn’t like, and indeed her administration will long be remembered for that word, impunity, which she practiced with such, well, impunity.

All around town, I’m sure that memos are being written for the presumptive President-elect’s consideration. Gang Badoy’s “Dear Noynoy” page generated such a huge wave of responses that she’s had to move it from Facebook to its own website. Heftier efforts are underway in academia and civil society to draft all sorts of agenda for the incoming Chief Executive, the handler of whose inbox—online and snail mail—I can only sympathize with. Many of those notes and treatises will be in the nature of bills due and payable—not in the sense of political debts, although there will inevitably be a few of those to deal with, but rather yawning needs and shortcomings left unattended by the government, which Noynoy will now have to meet.

So I don’t suppose it’s going to hurt much more if I add my one small voice to that roaring chorus, following in the wake of Krip Yuson and F. Sionil Jose, among other writers. Mine’s really a simple prescription, or plea if you will, although like all things seemingly simple, the devil will be in the details, which more competent authority can flesh out in the future. Let me now address this to you, Senator Noynoy, in the vague if not vain hope that this message will get through.

First, some disclosures and disclaimers. I didn’t vote for you—my vote went to the Man of La Mancha, Dick Gordon, whom I truly believed was best qualified for the Presidency. I wrote Dick’s yet-unpublished biography, so I can be accused of believing my own prepaid prose, but that’s beside the point—or maybe not. I knew Dick better than I knew you; I’ve written speeches for many of your colleagues in the Senate, as well as a few for your mother, an honor that I cherish. But I don’t think we’ve ever met, so I didn’t really know you, and I suppose you can say the same even for many of those who voted for you. They did so on what could be the best reason—next to informed judgment—for voting for anyone: sheer hope and blind faith.

But you already know that, so I’ll go straight to my point, which has to do with an arts and culture policy that your administration will and should inevitably come around to formulating. I say “inevitably” because I know that arts and culture won’t be the first thing that will come to your mind, for understandable reasons. You’ll want to whip the government back into shape, create jobs, promote new business, strengthen education, boost food production, straighten out the judiciary and military, and try to stamp out corruption like you promised. These are all worthy priorities, and six years might not even be enough to move far forward on all of them.

But please try, one of these days, to devote an hour or two of your precious time to thinking about arts and culture, and what they can do four our country and people. You should, if only because, among your recent predecessors, no one really did—with the ironic exception of Mrs. Imelda Marcos. Granted, she wasn’t the President; she nearly was. Granted, her idea of culture was often appallingly elitist; but she did create institutions like the Cultural Center of the Philippines which now, for better or for worse, help shape the way we think and feel about ourselves, in our imaginations.

And that’s why arts and culture are important, and why they’re more than entertainment and tourism—as significant as these components may be to arts and culture. Culture defines us as a national community with shared values and visions, albeit with diverse ideas and expressions; the arts embody those ideas and enable those expressions. Culture is really more descriptive than prescriptive—it’s who and what we are at this very moment—but it can also be molded, through enlightened policy, into a vision of who and what we can become. What exactly does it mean to be a Filipino, and what are our national goals as Filipinos?

These are questions that not only your economic, political, military, or spiritual advisers should be dealing with. Believe it or not, they’re the questions to which our painters, musicians, and writers can provide the subtlest but also the strongest answers. If you want us to act like a nation of Filipinos, you’re going to have to make us think and feel like Filipinos—and again, that’s what you have artists and art educators for, beyond government poobahs prescribing how the National Anthem should be sung or what movies we should watch and shouldn’t.

And let’s not forget that the arts also belong to what we can call our creative industries—art-related activities from publishing and show business to graphic design and animation—that generate and contribute huge sums of money to the economy.

So what’s a new President to do, or at least to ponder? I’ll make two suggestions:

1. Give the arts and culture sector its proper prominence in government and streamline cultural administration by creating a Department of Culture. This won’t necessarily mean creating yet another lumbering bureaucracy with ill-defined functions, but will pull together—for better management and a firmer sense of purpose and direction—existing agencies such as the CCP and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and even possibly such bodies as the National Library, the National Historical Institute, the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa, the National Book Development Board, and (with apologies to my pal Krip) the MTRCB.

2. Whatever you do, Noynoy, please leave cultural and arts policy to the artists, and cultural administration to professional arts managers and administrators. Leave the politicians, socialites, retired generals and judges, hangers-on, and Presidential manicurists out the door. From your end, depoliticize cultural policy and administration. Of course, you can never really take politics out of arts and culture—our artists will keep arguing among themselves over how best to represent this and that—but it’s a debate they should be allowed to conduct as peers, and with their own constituencies.

Your predecessor made a mockery of the National Artist selection process—a relatively minor issue affecting just a few people, but highly indicative of the way arts and culture have been treated by our political leaders with callous disregard. Trust Filipino artists with their own judgments, and they will help restore our sense of ourselves, and help define our investment in a shared future.

Penman for Monday, May 24, 2010

WE HADN'T gone there for a couple of years, so Beng and I joined a posse of pilgrims—friends from our pen collectors’ group, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines—on a sortie to the Pahiyas festival in Lucban, Quezon a couple of Saturdays ago.

Pahiyas—otherwise the feast day of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers—always falls on May 15, and this year we were lucky that it came on a Saturday, when more of us could go, many for the first time. Well, lucky and no—the weekend also meant that hordes of visitors went south with us, guaranteeing horrendous traffic both ways; but more on that later.

We took what I call the scenic route, via Antipolo, Teresa, Morong, and Pililla, descending on the zigzag road into Mabitac in Laguna, and thence to Pagsanjan and Lucban. I’ve traveled this route many times, and I’m always pleasantly amazed by how pretty the countryside can be just an hour out of the city, especially with the flame trees and golden showers abloom.

There’s a spot in Pililla on the crest of the highway that overlooks Laguna de Bay and the surrounding towns along the lakeshore, and we always make it a point to stop here for a cool drink or to snap some pictures, but really to appreciate the majesty of the scenery, rivaled only by Taal on the other side of the horizon.

This is a crook of the road that leads to a string of roadside stalls selling jackfruit, mangoes, coconuts, and woven baskets, just before the view opens up to the lush ricefields and belfries of Laguna. It doesn’t get more Pinoy than this, and to urbanites like myself steeped in the frigid air of malls and condos, the blast of sunlight and the slow curls of smoke in the distance are a bracing reminder of what life was like—and still is—for our countrymen in different situations.

And it isn’t all romantic, because this sprawling valley and the mountains that surround them have cradled a history of suffering and conflict. In September 1900, Mabitac was the scene of an important battle between Filipino forces under Gen. Juan Cailles and the American invaders under Col. Benjamin Cheatham; the Filipinos won, having the advantage of familiarity with the muddy landscape. And as I told my friends as we took our lunch at the aptly named Exotik restaurant in Kalayaan (formerly Longos), Laguna, we were in the very neighborhood where the Huks operated in the 1950s. Even earlier than the Huks, the schoolteacher-turned-rebel organizer Teodoro Asedillo was born there in Longos in 1883; he would be killed in an encounter with government troops in 1935 in nearby Cavinti, his savaged body paraded thereafter from town to town as a warning to insurrectionists.

But last Saturday morning, save for the infernally slow traffic on Ortigas Avenue all the way to Antipolo (a tip for future pilgrims: take the long, lazy route along Sumulong Highway instead of Ortigas, then turn left towards Teresa at the very end), our thoughts were directed to pleasant things: our pens (of course), movies (how good Robin Hood was), martial arts (Jay Ignacio’s film on kali), and more pens (of course).

We’d left the Ortigas area around 10, and didn’t get to Exotik, just beyond Paete, until past 1 pm. Living up to its name, they keep huge pet pythons in the place—no, they’re not on the menu—including a fat one named Samantha who was sleepy in her cage from having swallowed what looked like a couple of sandbags. I don’t much like snakes, although I dream about them (and the ocean) quite often; I was glad to see one so perfect of form, and so obviously cared for and cared about by its handler. Other than its serpentine attractions, Exotik’s food (yes, they do serve frog’s legs and other uncommon dishes) is well worth the long drive, and it won’t break the bank—our party of 14, including the driver, ordered whatever we wanted and got stuffed to the gills, and the total bill came out to less than P4,000, or about P300 each.

It was past 3 when we finally drove into Lucban, which may sound awfully late for anyone coming into a festival, but I knew from previous experience that this was just right in terms of catching the procession of carabaos around town; the scorching midday heat would also have simmered down a bit. And so we caught Pahiyas in its full glory and frenzy; the streets were jammed with throngs of townspeople and visitors like us poking their Nikon and Canons at anything colorful. And the town was ablaze and awash with color, the gay pastels of the rice-leaf kiping brightening every window along this year’s appointed route.

Beng and I took the opportunity to drop in on some old friends, the Salvatus family who tend a shop of unique arts and crafts pieces near the church. Annie and Ramsel were hospitable to a fault, as usual, but this time we had a chance to chat with their son Janzen, whose kiping design and display won second prize, for the second year in a row. One of four artistically gifted Salvatus brothers (his painter kuya Mark , whom I interviewed years before, was in Australia on an arts grant), Janzen isn’t even a Fine Arts major but an electrical engineer who—when he’s not busy with Pahiyas—works as EE’s should for the National Grid Corporation. Like Mark, Janzen is also a prizewinning painter who’s rated highly in the Shell and Petron competitions. The Pahiyas display, however, is a special mission, not just for Janzen but for the whole Salvatus family. “We order the kiping many weeks earlier, according to the design,” said proud papa Ramsel. This year’s runner-up finish was worth a sizable P50,000, but “We just about broke even,” said Annie. So why do they do it? “Because it’s our way of thanking the Lord for all our blessings,” said Peter. And this family, no doubt, was bountifully blessed.

At 6 pm, we regrouped for the journey home, many bearing bundles of the town’s famous longanisa. We took the southern route back via Calamba—big mistake, as it turned out, because of logjams in Calamba and on the expressway, which was anything but. It was a good thing we’d paused for dinner at a roadside restaurant in Victoria called Kainan sa Fiesta Laguna, where I had the best lechon kawali ever—crisp and crackling on the outside, scrumptiously soft on the inside. That pretty much sedated me for the rest of the unbelievably long trip. It was past 3 am when we staggered off the van in Diliman. “We could’ve gone to Baguio and back!” I remember saying, but sometimes southern sorties can be more interesting.

Penman for Monday, May 10, 2010


EVERY NOW and then I get requests for interviews, usually from some hapless student assigned to do a term paper about my fiction. I don’t mind these and I try to indulge the students as much as I can, believing that we writers should do our utmost to encourage greater public interest in what we write.

I do, however, have some pretty firm requirements. The interviewers should have read whatever it is they’ll be asking me about; they should have done some preliminary research; and they can’t ask me what my stories mean, because that’s their job to figure out and not mine. I don’t mean to sound like some cranky snob—and I don’t think I am—but the teacher in me wants to train these students in getting the most out of an interview. As I’ve written about more than once in this column, interviewing is an art that requires preparation, flexibility, and a healthy but critical respect for one’s subject and his or her work.

That respect includes setting up the interview properly, giving the subject sufficient notice and, if possible or advisable, a preview of the most important questions to be asked. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be talking about climate change or peanut butter sandwiches; I can understand and even forgive some sloppiness on the part of students, but professional journalists have no reason not to know and to observe these basic rules.

Last week I got two calls on the same day from two journalists—one from print media and the other from TV—asking me for an interview about, coincidentally, the same thing: my fountain pen collection.

Now this is, as you know, a subject dear to my heart, and something I’ve written and spoken about many times over the years. I’m not dying to talk about my pens, but if someone asks me about them, I feel obliged to proselytize in the name of good old things. So I gladly said yes, and set a time and date for both people two days hence, in consideration of their impending deadlines.

The print journalist—let’s call her A—thanked me and said she would try to bring a photographer; if no one was available, she would take pictures herself. That was fine by me.

The TV journalist—let’s call her B—called me on my cellphone. (Or called me again, because she’d called very early while I was sleeping. Thankfully—and perhaps people should know this—my phone is almost always in silent mode. I’ve never been a phone person, maybe because I grew up without one. I don’t like being called, and the best way to reach me and get a quick and positive response is by email. I’m online all the time.)

Of course this young lady didn’t know that, so I didn’t take it against her. But what she said did put me off a bit: she would be sending a TV crew, she said, but meanwhile, could she interview me on the phone? She rattled off a few questions, which I tried to answer as best as I could, albeit briefly, as I was working on another book project. I began to worry what kind of report she was going to come up with, even for a one-minute or two-minute clip.

The next morning, Journalist A came on the dot, with a camera. I laid out my pens, and we began a pleasant chat about them and, just as importantly, the collector’s mind. She didn’t know very much about fountain pens—no reason why she should—but she displayed a real journalist’s natural inquisitiveness. She probed the difference between collecting and mere accumulation, and sweated the minutiae of one design over another.

In the middle of this interview, I got another call from Journalist B. How much was my most valuable pen worth, she asked, and how many of them did I have? I’m in a meeting, I told her; give me your email and I’ll send you an essay I wrote about what pens I collect and why. After the interview with A—which was fun but businesslike—I emailed the essay to B. I don’t know if she even opened or read the piece—I received no acknowledgment—but I soon got another text message, asking me more questions about the monetary value of my pens. How many of them were in this price range, how many in that, etc.

At that point I blew up, in a manner of speaking. “Why all these questions about prices?” I texted back. “Collecting is about beauty, not money.” She texted to apologize—of course they were interested in beauty as well, but the value angle was part of the story.

And that was the last I heard from B and from her network. (No, it wasn’t one of the two major networks, with which I’ve had nothing but pleasantly professional experiences. I’ll leave out this network’s and this reporter’s name, as I don’t want her to be unduly punished over some stupid pens.) Her camera crew was supposed to arrive at 2 pm; she’d asked for directions and I’d sent them. I’d given up a poker tournament that afternoon to accommodate their request—no matter, maybe they were saving me some money.

Two pm passed, then 4, then 6. As the shadows lengthened and Diliman settled into a warm summer dusk with no one buzzing at the gate, and no apology or explanation coming into my phone, I put my pens away, returned to my writing, and let my annoyance subside into amusement over how two interviews and interviewers on the same subject and the same day couldn’t be more dissimilar.

At least I now have some new discussion material for my undergraduate class next month in Professional Writing, where we’ll be taking up, among other topics, the art of the interview.

Penman for Monday, May 10, 2010


I WAS working merrily on my book projects last Monday evening when the frantic calls and text messages started coming in around 6:30 pm—was I okay? Was I in London? And then my computer started flashing a message: my email couldn’t come in because my password was no longer valid. When I keyed in my password, sure enough, it wouldn’t work. Uh-oh, I thought: big trouble.

The gist of the alarms was that I was supposed to be in London, and that I had been mugged. Apparently, dozens of friends in my contacts list received this from “me”:

“I’m writing this with tears in my eyes, I came down here to United Kingdom for a short vacation unfortunately i was mugged at the park of the hotel where i stayed,all cash,credit card and cell were stolen off me but luckily for me i still have my passports with me.

“I’ve been to the embassy and the Police here but they’re not helping issues at all and my flight leaves in less than 3hrs from now but am having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let me leave until i settle the bills,

“I’m freaked out at the moment.”

If you answered this email, like a number of addressees did, you got another message telling you to send $1,600 by Western Union to an address in Cambridge.

Now, I’m no newbie to these scams and can smell them a mile away. In fact, I’ve received messages like this, from people purporting to be my friends—the scholar Resil Mojares, the poet Jimmy Abad, and the music professor Maurie Borromeo among them. So I assumed—naively, as it turned out—that anyone receiving such a preposterous message would trash it immediately. And I have to admit to a bit of snobbery—how could anyone, I imagined, think that I would write so badly, even in the throes of despair?

As the calls and texts kept coming in, I began to seriously worry. I went online to the Apple site to reset my password—but what should’ve been a two-minute operation began to turn into a nightmare. Apple asked me for my birthday as the first and easy step in a verification process—and my birthday was wrong; tried it three times, my birthday was wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s when I knew that someone had really gone deep into the bowels of my account (I would realize yet later how deeply).

Thankfully, Apple has a toll-free Customer Support hotline for this sort of thing (it’s 1-800-1441-0234, in case you’ll ever need it). I got through to someone in Singapore, who set me up for an online chat with her Indian supervisor. Over the next 20 minutes or so, she asked me all kinds of questions to verify my identity (I won’t reveal what questions, but let me suggest that you keep a record of every transaction you’ve ever had with Apple). When she was satisfied that I was who I said I was, she reset my password, and I was back in.

That wasn’t the end of it. First, I realized that my Yahoo account had also been hacked, although this was a bit easier to reset. The hacker probably knew or expected that my requests for password changes and such would be mirrored in Yahoo, so was also waiting for them there. My Gmail account had been hacked as well. (I keep all these accounts for different reasons—the Mac is for business and friends, the Yahoo is for my Penman mail, and the Gmail is my digital “dump”, where I stash away copies of works in progress.)

Using yet another account (it pays to have some backdoors), I sent test emails to my Mac (MobileMe) and Yahoo accounts; none were going through. I could send out mail, but no messages were coming in, so they were obviously being diverted elsewhere. I looked further into my Yahoo and Gmail, and saw that the hacker had set up mail forwarding to a fictitious address (jdallisay@yahoo.com—the two LL’s were a giveaway). It was easier to spot in Yahoo and Gmail, but MobileMe annoyingly buries that forwarding command in an interface you can only access online, not within the Mail application itself. Thankfully, my friends in the Philippine Macintosh Users Group, who were eagerly following this saga, walked me through the process, and I was able to root out the traps that the hacker had left in place.

It was nearly 5 am when I got done replacing all my passwords, upgrading my security, and mopping up the mess. I was exhausted, but it was an educational and even, in some ways, an amusing experience. I didn’t mean for it to be any kind of loyalty check—my more Internet-savvy friends sniffed out the scam right away and texted me to say that I’d been hacked—but I was genuinely touched, if somewhat bewildered, by the kindness and sweetness of some others who called me directly or found some other way to ask if they could help. I only pray that no one cared for me too much to send $1,600 to Cambridge by Western Union without so much as asking Beng if I was, indeed, in England.

On my blog—at the quick-thinking suggestion of my daughter Demi, who woke up to the message in California—I put up a notice announcing the attack. “Don't send any money to the UK!,” I implored my readers. “I love you all and appreciate your concern—and I dearly love London and am always in need of money—but that's not me. Send it to me!”

My sister Elaine, in Virginia, actually assumed the role of a “scambaiter” and led the guy on in a hilarious email exchange you can read on my blog. Another friend said, “I saw a typo and knew right away it couldn’t be you.” Yet another friend said, in so many words, “I haven’t heard from you in months, and this is how you say hello?” But I have to give the Most Impressive Response Award to a well-connected friend who texted: “Do you need help? I have friends in Scotland Yard.” How good to know, if ever!

So how, exactly, had I been hacked? My Philmug friends and I came up with some theories. It couldn’t have been from “phishing”—giving out your password online because “Yahoo verification needs it” or “Citibank is updating its records,” for example—because I’m too familiar with these scams. The likely culprit is what’s known as sidejacking—stealing your password on the air as you type away at Starbucks. (If you want to see how it works, check this out.)

It’s a scary world out there, folks—so scary it could put tears in your eyes!

Penman for Monday, May 3, 2010

I'VE BEEN promising to share what our fellows presented to us in last month’s UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio, so here, finally, is a sampler of excerpts from some of the fellows’ poetics—in plainer words, why they write what they write. I think the range of voices and concerns represented here is reassuring—from the challenge of revisiting history and the mythic past to the delights and rigors of a new formalism. The future of Philippine literature is in good hands.

Kristian Cordero: “Bilang manunulat, malay ako sa mga isyung kinakaharap ng isang makata lalo na’t nasa akademya rin ako. Naroon ang mga sosyo-pulitika na kaayusan, ang dalumat ng kasaysayan, ang mga pwerasang nakatitig sa akin. May mga teoryang maaari kong gamitin para basahin ang aking karanasan at kung ano ang nakapaloob sa mga tekstong binubuo ko. May mga inaasahan na rin akong pagbasa sa aking mga akda. Maaari rin akong dumulog sa karanasan ng aking kubling-malay, sa aking etnisidad, sa aking topos, at sa kung anu-anong kategoryang ipinapatong sa akin na tila unos na rin, mga di mapangalanang bagyong nakalambong sa aking alaala, sa aking abot-tanaw.

“Maaaring kong gawing lunsaran ang mga tambisan ng loob at labas, ng kung ano ang rehiyonal at pambansa, ang kanon at ang alternatibo, upang gamitin bilang representasyon ng sarili, ngunit gusto ko nang igpawan o kung baga man, mas tingnan ito sa ibang pamamaraan, itong mga sangang daan na pauli-ulit na tinatahak ko upang ang mga pagkilos at iba pang mga karanasan na may kinalaman sa aking pagsusulat ay mailagay sa konteksto ng isang mas lumalawak at mapagpalayang karanasan ng panitikan at ng nagbabanyuhay na lipunan.

Mabi David: “Ten years after the 50th anniversary of the Battle for Manila, which devastated our city and killed 200,000 Filipinos, I undertook the appraisal of the general registry of its survivors. While horrific, this incident was safely tucked away as “history.” Studying the records was a turning point for me. For 50 years the survivors refused to talk about the events. According to one, “After this month, I shall not talk about it anymore and the story will be buried with me.” Conversely, a lot of the survivors chose to finally speak about the horror they experienced so that the story would not be buried with them.

“My encounter with the archives was unsettling to say the least. Everything seemed spoken from an abyss and would soon recede back into it. And the burden of speaking has come upon us: a generation that did not directly experience the horror, whose knowledge of history is, at best, partial and mediated, and whose parents only vaguely remember living inaudibly throughout the period…. My preoccupation with this particular incident was bedeviled by a nagging voice that said, You were not there. That is not your story. And consequently, I wondered, does it also mean that it is not my history?

Marc Gaba: “My artistic activity has been premised on the art object’s capacity to be, rather than a receptacle of experience, an experience itself. That is to say that in poetry, I select, orchestrate and calibrate a number of poetic techniques in order to produce an experience that, outside rare instances of such visceral clarity, could not be had in life as its common days are lived. Without a gift, a fondness, the material nor the temperament for the anecdotal style, but with a deep appreciation for craftsmanship, well-designed processes and philosophical vantage points, my creative impulse has been mostly based on a desire to construct—and the book, a ready and wide open site of possibilities for construction, has since 2004 been my main unit of composition.”

Alwynn Javier: “Bagamat karamihan sa mga tula ko ay nasa anyong berso, medyo dumarami na rin na ang mga nasa anyong prosa. Nang binubuo ko ang konsepto ng bago kong proyekto at basahin ang mga tulang nasulat ko na sa ganitong anyo, napagtanto kong mas nagagamit ko ang isang nakahiligan kong istilo na malamang napulot ko sa pagsusulat ng dula—ang paggamit ng eksena o dramatikong sitwasyon bilang talinghaga. Napansin ko rin na naibubuhos ko ang lahat ng frustration at kagustuhan kong makapagsulat ng kuwento sa ganitong anyo—mas nakakadaldal ako nang walang iniisip na putol ng linya at nakakapagpalusot ako ng mga salita at parirala na kadalasa’y hindi maituturing na matalinghaga.”

Telesforo Sungkit: “I am striving to write what I am now. And thus my writings reflect what I have become. I am a Higaonon but I write in the tongues which still are symbols of oppressive colonizers. For I was molded to become a colonized subject to the king of Spain, then to the white men of North America, and finally to the brown men of Luzon and Visayas. And so I got acquainted with Cebuano, Filipino (which is considered another name for Tagalog by my brothers), and yes, English. For me, Cebuano would forever be associated with unscrupulous people who benefited much as business intermediaries between Higaonons and the colonizers; Filipino still represents imperial Manila; and the English of North America is yet to answer what happened to Higaonons brought to the St. Louis Fair.”

Auraeus Solito: “In making this film, I shall recreate a time of isolation and innocence, of great magic and a culture that is almost gone, of stories that is almost forgotten, and how its own people and the country’s political history contributed to its eventual fall from grace. It is a film that will fulfill a promise by my Ancestors to the spirits of the islands, that no children of their children will ever leave Palawan. Even though I grew up in the city, it’s as if I grew up in Palawan itself through my mother’s stories. Through my film Sumbang, I shall re-live my mother’s world, as if she and I never left Palawan and by this, fulfill a promise made by my Ancestors.”


WITH ANOTHER Baguio workshop having concluded successfully, let me thank our usual friends who make every April sojourn to the highlands a special delight: National Artist Ben Cabrera, who hosted a merienda for the workshop staff and fellows in his museum; AIM Igorot Lodge manager William Aquino, who went of out of his way as usual to make us feel welcome and comfortable at the lodge; UP Baguio Professor Del Tolentino, whose home remains Baguio’s coziest cultural nook; filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, poet Padma Perez, the Café by the Ruins, and Baguio’s other writers and artists, kindred spirits all; and, of course, the On Call Vocals (now performing at the Manor), whose debut CD we snapped up to cheer us back in steaming Manila. Thank you, all!

Penman for Monday, April 26, 2010

I WAS going to feature the recently concluded UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio this week, as I’ve been promising for a couple of weeks now, but I’m going to have to push that back again because of news just in about another major workshop—the Dumaguete workshop now co-sponsored by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and Silliman University.

Director-in-Residence Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas has just announced the full list of accepted applicants, who will be trooping to Dumaguete very soon for the workshop, which will last from May 3 to 21.

The following writers made it: for poetry—Gian Paolo Simeon Lao (Ateneo de Manila University); Dominique Allison Santos (University of Santo Tomas); Jacob Dominguez (University of Santo Tomas); Oscar Serquina, Jr. (University of the Philippines-Diliman); for fiction—Aaron James Jalalon (University of the Philippines-Mindanao); Jenette Ethel Vizcocho (University of the Philippines-Diliman); Gilda Ysobel Galang (Ateneo de Manila University); Anne Carly Abad (Ateneo de Manila University); Gino Francis Dizon (Ateneo de Manila University); Jose Carlo Flordeliza (De La Salle University); Ida Anita Del Mundo (De La Salle University); Samantha Echavez (University of the Philippines-Diliman); and for creative nonfiction—Kelly Marie Tulio Conlon (University of the Philippines-Mindanao); Miro Frances Capili (University of the Philippines-Diliman); and Christina Mae del Rosario (Ateneo de Manila University).

I wasn’t involved in the selection process, but I heard that many talented young writers applied this year. To those who didn’t make it, do try again next year—the Dumaguete workshop’s 50th anniversary. Many of us who went through those portals just might make the trip back with you.


THE COUNTRY'S newest literary sensation, Montreal-based Miguel “Chuck” Syjuco, was in town recently to promote his Man Asian prizewinning novel Ilustrado, published by Macmillan. A large crowd gathered at the Filipinas Heritage Library last April 14 (he also spoke at the Ateneo earlier that day) to meet the author and buy the book. Along with fellow writer Tony Hidalgo, I was asked to say a few words at what amounted to the book’s Philippine launch, and here’s what I said:

“At the risk of sounding like a parody of one of the many literary characters and hangers-on that inhabit Ilustrado, allow me to share a few quick impressions about the book.

“First of all, I like any book whose author knows what a Parker Vacumatic fountain pen is and whose protagonist uses one. It’s a romantic anachronism in the age of email, and it sets the tone for the constant tug of war between past and present that provides the tension in this grandly ambitious novel.

“Is it an easy read? Most definitely not. Is it worth buying and reading? Most definitely yes.

“It’s a relentlessly intelligent book, by which I mean that every word and turn of phrase seems to have been deliberately thought out and chosen. There’s a complex uniformity, or perhaps a uniform complexity, in the way everyone speaks, whether they’re PhDs or blog kibitzers, and it’s all by design.

“While much of the book will be rich and new for the Western reader, that will probably not be the case (at least as far as newness is concerned) for the Filipino reader, whose satisfaction will come from recognizing the familiar rather than from novelty and surprise. There are analogues galore, thinly disguised references to people and things we know too well: the Lupases sound suspiciously like the Lopezes, the Changcos the Cojuangcos, and President Fernando Estregan can only be the ultimate actor-president.

“These are all devices and diversions that have been tried before by Filipino novelists trying to wrap their heads around our bizarre and baroque realities. Like I’ve often mentioned—and Ilustrado is just the latest iteration of this idea—we like our novels writ large, tragic love stories set against the backdrop of flaming revolution, featuring Crisostomo Ibarras returning from some Western horizon to find themselves in a home that’s inexorably changed beyond their grasp.

“What’s new for us is how Syjuco foregrounds the Filipino in the world, and in the world of ideas, through his use of the characters of Crispin Salvador and his eponymous narrator—both of them Pinoys privileged in more than an economic sense. These are wickedly bright Filipinos no one can fool, except maybe themselves. They know, first of all, a plethora of words and what they mean—words like bricolage, meniscus, mackinaw, and oubliette, including words I’d never heard of, like tofurkey. They’re clearly parallel creations, both in search of lost daughters and lost women, perhaps of lost families and lost countries.

“I’m not going to spoil things for you by talking about the ending; let me just say that while I did labor, at times, to hack my way through the jungle of books-within-books that crowd this landscape, the ending is brilliant and poignant, and well worth the effort of the expedition. “This is a book full of names and things, with a proper noun seemingly punctuating every other slot in the sentence; you’ll find everything from Schumann to Shoemart, from Thucydides to Tim Yap.

“My favorite image comes from a scene where a boy observes a parade of men on tall horses—‘centaurs in a field of wheat,’ as Syjuco describes them. It’s a thoroughly alien image, of course, but it best demonstrates, for me, the wonderment at foreign objects—from his girlfriend Madison to the architecture of Gaudi—that Syjuco shares with the reader. I see this fascination with the foreign as the Filipino’s claim upon the world, as if to say, we know these things, they’re no longer just yours.

“While his discursive prose is unfailingly sharp, Syjuco’s strongest suit is actually dramatic dialogue; there’s a hilarious scene where Miguel interviews Crispin’s sister Lena, or tries to; where he sits down to dinner with the typically dysfunctional Gonzaleses; and where Sadie performs a sex act on him in the car. All of these involve expertly orchestrated utterances, more a series of outbursts and manifestations than a real conversation.

“There’s no doubt, however, that Miguel Syjuco—the novelist who’s here with us today—is conversing with us, posing the age-old questions about who and what we are. Again, the questions may not be new, but rarely if ever have they been dealt with so stylishly.”

Bravo, Syjuco!

(With many thanks to Dino Manrique for the photo.)

Penman for Monday, April 19, 2010

I HAVE no connection to Paete, Laguna, other than the fact that Beng and I take a drive around Laguna de Bay every other summer or so and stop over in Paete occasionally to buy papier-mache horses or wooden angels to decorate the house with. This is how many of us know that town—as a haven for craftsmen and artists, particularly where woodworking and sculpture are concerned. Indeed, its inner streets are lined with small shops selling everything from Sto. Niños to Marilyn Monroes in their full upskirt glory.

Last Black Saturday, however, on another of our lakeside sorties, we discovered another treasure in Paete well worth visiting—that is, if they can first be saved from decay and destruction.

The St. James the Apostle Church in Paete was built in 1646, so that the church itself is a site worth visiting, but among its treasures are three murals or large wall paintings (actually four, including an earlier one closer to the altar) near the main entrance. Two of the murals have been attributed to the local artist Jose Luciano Dans and dated 1850; the third one—a fresco that literally came to light when they lifted the San Cristobal mural off its moorings—is unsigned, but details in the painting strongly suggest it to have been done by the same artist. From the entrance, the two on the left depict San Cristobal (St. Christopher) fording a river with the Child Jesus on his shoulder; on the right is a towering, phantasmagoric rendition of Langit, Lupa at Impyerno (Heaven, Earth and Hell).

The artistry in all three works is superb, the kind of detailing and nuancing you could mull over for hours, seated in a chair in front of the painting. However, all three—indubitably national treasures—are in dire need of restoration.

The slightly newer San Cristobal is in the worst state, the wood beneath the paint having rotted away and sloughed off in parts, especially at the bottom where a large hole now exists. It’s truly sad, because the periphery suggests that the lost portion also contained charming but now almost invisible details as fish poking their heads above the water.

The fresco that was originally beneath the painting is in the best relative state, having been hidden for so long; its colors remain sharp and vivid. However, the stone or plaster surface has chipped off in parts, and early attempts at slapping concrete over these patches and painting over them have only accentuated the damage—if not, in fact, adding to them.

The magnificent Langit, Lupa… has retained most of its fine details, but like the old Sistine Chapel ceiling, the painting has been darkened by more than a century of grime and, ironically, sunlight, which has grayed out what would have been a vibrant vision of the cosmos from a 19th-century Paeteño’s point of view.

Beng cringed when she heard one of the church assistants suggest—no doubt with the best of intentions—that local artists might be able to “restore” the paintings themselves with some wood here and some paint there, Paete after all being famous for its exquisite folk art.

It's a complication that Beng and her fellow restorers have had to deal with too often in this country of churches; knowing no better and without the funds to undertake proper, scientific restoration, too many priests and parishioners have eagerly painted or cemented over precious artworks and buildings, thinking that a fresh coat of enamel or concrete is all that's needed in these cases. These careless gestures can't be undone in most instances. I keep thinking of a Botong Francisco mural reportedly buried under a wall of paint in a private college in Quezon City whose sisters apparently didn't realize what a treasure they had tired of looking at.

Aware of these issues, parish priest Fr. Joseph de la Rosa told us that he had approached the National Historical Institute for help, but that the National Historical Institute had asked him to raise P500,000 for the restoration, an amount well beyond his parish’s capacity to produce. (In fairness to the NHI, I’m not sure if this was meant to be some kind of local counterpart fund.) I advised Fr. de la Rosa to approach the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, which has also financed the restoration of other important artworks in churches such as the ceiling paintings in Jimenez, Misamis Occidental and the camarin of Sta. Ana Church in Manila.

I surmised—hopefully correctly—that if the NCCA could splurge on such projects as an influential senator’s hometown initiatives and the staging of certain plays abroad, then it could spare a few million to rescue these priceless, 160-year-old treasures from certain destruction.

Not incidentally, it’s also unfortunate that Paete’s town bosses decided to put up a concrete stage or grandstand right in front of the church—or actually, along its length—blocking it from view. Laguna’s governor did the same thing to Pakil, whose lovely church is now obscured across the street from the Dalena house by some kind of multipurpose hall whose only purpose at the moment seemed to be to serve as a garage for the municipal dump truck. What ignominy!





SPEAKING OF saving valuable cultural sites and objects, I was very happy to find—during our recent writers’ workshop in Baguio (about which more, next week)—that the historic Casa Vallejo hotel on Session Road near SM has been massively renovated and has reopened for business. When I say “massively” I don’t mean that they’ve changed everything. From the outside, it’s still pretty much the old Vallejo from Baguio’s colonial American years (it first opened in 1909); but they’ve redone all the rooms and the old ballroom, modernizing the place while keeping tastefully to the old design.

Guests taking any of the 24 rooms (whose rates range reasonably from P1,900 for a standard room to P3,000 for a double queen) will appreciate the new toilets and the flat-screen TVs, but also the ceiling fans and the round, old-fashioned alarm clocks on every bedside table. The floors remain the old wooden planks, sanded to a new life. The old fireplace has also been refurbished and is fully functional.

Easily the most distinguishing feature of the new Vallejo is the Hill Station restaurant that sprawls where the old, dank ballroom used to be, with wide glass windows and a menu featuring such to-die-for entrees as crispy duck flakes on a bed of rice and enormous servings of tasty lamb chops, punctuated by homemade ice cream.

Restaurant manager Mitos says that more improvements are underway—Baguio poet Padma Perez will be opening a bookshop in the hotel soon, and a function room good for about 20 people is also being finished. For more information and to make your reservations, visit http://www.casavallejobaguio.com.

Penman for Monday, April 12, 2010

I WAS delighted to be able to listen to the free farewell concert of the University of the Philippines Singing Ambassadors (UPSA) last March 29 in UP Diliman’s Bulwagang Gantimpala. Conductor Ed Manguiat thoughtfully invites me to these events, and I take him up on his generosity whenever I can, knowing that an hour or so of great music awaits me.

The “farewell” was because of the UPSA’s imminent departure for a summer visit to Europe from April 1 to June 1. It was also an anniversary celebration, and it’s hard to believe that the UPSA—often considered a young junior to more established UP singing groups like the Madrigal Singers and the Concert Chorus—is now 30 years old.

The group usually travels abroad to concertize and invariably to win prizes in international choral competitions, but this time around the Singing Ambassadors will simply be spreading cheer and goodwill in Belgium and France, if I’m not mistaken.

Emmanuel Yap, the UPSA’s first president, helped to arrange a series of cultural exchange activities for the UPSA, who will visit homes for the aged and an institute for cancer, and do workshops for children on Filipino culture through folksongs and dances.

For those who may have never heard them yet or even heard of them, the UPSA was the Aliw Awardee for Best University Choir in 2002. In 2005, the group was nominated and chosen as the official Philippine Entry to the UNESCO International Music Prize in Paris. Under the able stewardship of its founder and conductor, Ed Manguiat, the UPSA has won grand and top prizes in European choral competitions, including the Grand Prize in the highly prestigious Guido d’ Arezzo competitions in 2001, which qualified UPSA to represent the Philippines in the 14th European Grand Prix for Choral Singing 2002 in Italy.

When Josh Groban came to Manila in 2007, he asked the UPSA to back him up for his concert at the PICC. Whether they’re singing the haunting Je Suis Malade or the irresistibly upbeat Musika medley, the Singing Ambassadors never fail to hit a spot in the listener—the heart, the belly, or the brain.

Few people know that Ed Manguiat wasn’t even a Music major, but a graduate of Hotel and Restaurant Administration. He does trace his roots to the UP Concert Chorus, another UP cultural mainstay which was founded in 1969 by the late Prof. Rey Paguio, a very amiable man who also happened to be our music teacher in high school.

I was also happy to learn that Melvin Gado Cano, the senior assistant conductor, comes from my hometown of Alcantara, Romblon, and even had a favorite relative of mine as his teacher in elementary school. What were the chances of two boys from a tiny island town finding their way to a concert hall in UP, one to perform and one to watch?

A mixed wave of joy and sadness swept over me when the group began to sing Rey Valera’s Tayong Dalawa. I suddenly remembered my connection to the song—no, I didn’t write the lyrics, but I did write the script of the movie of the same title, for which the song was written as the theme. (Which reminds me that two other movies I scripted may have now long been forgotten by their viewers, but their theme songs live on—“Ikaw” (1993) with Sharon Cuneta and Ariel Rivera, and “Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang” (1994) with Christopher de Leon and Alice Dixson.)

So here’s bon voyage to the UP Singing Ambassadors, knowing this latest tour of theirs (financed through the kindness of friends and families) will bring even more honor to our country and comfort to the lonely and the afflicted abroad.


LATE AS it is, let me thank Hong Kong-based Filipino journalist Rex Aguado for faithfully attending my events there last month and for putting me in touch with their very active group of UP alumni in Hong Kong. Rex briefed me on the general situation of Filipinos in HK, particularly the domestic helpers I’ve been writing about.

Rex and his group have been helping these compatriots, and are also working on a plan to map out a “Jose Rizal” trail in Hong Kong—where Rizal stayed (he visited there with friends in 1888, and returned three years later to work as an eye doctor on D’Aguilar Street), where he met Josephine Bracken, and so on. I thought it was a great idea, especially as an alternative to the usual tours of Nathan Road and Disneyland.

I’d also like to thank the Hong Kong-based poet David McKirdy—a former director of the Man HK Literary Festival and an organizer of events related to the Man Asian Literary Prize—for alerting me to a highly positive review of my novel Soledad’s Sister by David Walker that appeared in the April 4th issue of the South China Morning Post. Modesty inhibits me from quoting that review, but I’ve sent on a copy to my publisher here and my agent in New York, who should be equally pleased.

Speaking of the Man Asian, 2008 prizewinner Miguel “Chuck” Syjuco is going to be in town this week to promote his novel Ilustrado, published by Macmillan. I’m reading an advance copy of the book right now, as I’ll be speaking about it with Chuck at the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati at 3 pm on Wednesday, April 14. Go there, listen to us, buy the book, and get it signed by our newest literary star, whose work has already been picked up by major publishers in the US and Europe—opening doors, we hope, for other Filipino writers. To Miguel Syjuco, a well-earned “Mabuhay!”

Penman for Monday, April 5, 2010


AN INTERESTING question came up recently in one of the forums I frequent online: what gear do you take with you on the road? I thought about this again a couple of weeks ago as I packed my bags for a week in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where I had been invited to speak at two literary festivals.

Travel has been one of the great boons of being a writer, and I hardly ever say no to a chance to go up in the air and then to touch down in some place where the food, the English, and the cellular networks are all different. I get tired by all this traveling--and more easily the older I get--but I never really tire of it, seeing each journey as a ticket to knowledge, in the very least to more material for all those unwritten novels.

Some years are busier than others, but the day invariably comes when I have to pack my bags for another road trip to another city.

For trips of more than a couple of nights, I bring two bags. One is a big, black, many-pocketed, virtually indestructible Tumi that was the gift of a friend, and which has now slogged through dozens of carousels. That bag carries the usual stuff: clothes, shoes, toiletries, books, and the cups of ramen and tins of sardines that are my most faithful companions, especially to places ruled by cheese and curry.

Into a front pocket of this Tumi goes another drawstring bag containing a small warehouse of electronic thingies: a yellow extension cord (yellow so it's easy to see and not leave behind in some hotel room), chargers for the camera, laptop, cellphone, and iPod, a USB cable, and cables and adapters of all kinds.

It's the carry-on backpack that carries the essentials and the fun stuff. The MacBook Air--easily the most delightful and useful piece of computing hardware I've ever owned--goes into the padded rear compartment.

Into the main compartment goes the camera--either the DSLR or the point-and-shoot, depending on the trip's photographic possibilities and on how much weight I feel like lugging. Then I'll throw in a book--very likely nonfiction, as anything else makes me dizzy on the road. (This last time around it was One of a Kind, about the rise and fall of Stu Ungar, probably the greatest card player who ever lived.)

The front pouch carries the little things:

- An early iPod shuffle, which has the 250 songs I've decided are all I really want to listen to;

- Two pairs of glasses--shades and spare bifocals--either one of which can provide an answer to the question I keep yelling at Beng ("Where did I put my glasses?");

- A USB SD card reader-cum-thumb drive for transferring pictures, which--at P50 from CDR-King--is the most cost-efficient digital accessory I know;

- A Moleskine notebook, now on its second year of jerky scrawls and water stains;

- A Parker rollerball, for immigration forms, and one of my vintage fountain pens, just to hold and to look at when I need to feel good; and

- A wad of business cards for the inevitable exchanges, especially around Asia;

Into the side pouch goes a small folding umbrella, less to be foppish than to protect valuable electronics against a downpour.

I should add that I also always carry one of those needle-and-thread sets they give away in hotels, for the occasional wardrobe malfunction. I'm pretty good at sewing and pressing--skills learned from years of enforced bachelorhood in graduate school--and can hem pants should I ever need to.

One more thing that goes into the backpack is a pair of chopsticks--at least until the TSA disallows them as lethal weapons. I can disappear for days in my hotel room with a stash of ramen, wi-fi, and the Discovery Channel, and chopsticks rule in that domain.

Let's not forget the Snickers bar and the M&M peanuts that I need for those bursts of energy in the midst of walking or shopping (or, more likely, trailing after Beng). I'm not much of a desserts or pastries person, but I do crave chocolates and nuts, and no trip would be complete without reserves of these in my backpack, coming and going.

Speaking of travel gear, I'd like to recommend two software programs that have proved extremely useful to me for many years now.

One of them goes all the way back to 1999, from the days of the Palm Pilot, when I had to navigate the Tube in London over the many months of our stay there.

That's a program called Metro--available for all kinds of devices and OSes--that plots routes across all the world's major subway and metro rail networks. You input the stations where you're getting on and getting off, hit a button, and get a readout of your route plus all the stops in between and the estimated time.

The second program I use a lot is WorldMate, which gives you local times, weather reports, currency rates, and other travel information. If you email WorldMate your flight details, it will embed these into your calendar and remind you of your imminent departure.

And the best thing about both programs is that they're absolutely free. Google and download them into your smartphone or PDA, and ease the pains of being on the road.

Penman for Monday, March 22, 2010


LET ME start with a warning: if you’re just about to read this with your breakfast, you might want to turn the page and get back to this later in the day, or after you’ve performed your, uhm, daily ablutions.

I was in Hong Kong for the umpteenth time earlier this month to attend a couple of literary events, and I thought I’d pretty much seen everything the place had to offer the casual visitor, but no; Hong Kong always finds a way of showing you something you never imagined you needed. If the idea of dining shabu-shabu-style out of a toilet bowl turns you on, then look no farther than Mongkok in Hong Kong—where, according to a tourist brochure I picked up, a new way of dining had taken hold in a chain of restaurants named, descriptively enough, Modern Toilet.

Curious but with neither the time nor the compulsion to check the place out personally, I did a bit of Googling and found out from the folks at spotcoolstuff.com that “At each Modern Toilet restaurant patrons sit at a glass tabletop with a sink or bathtub base. In some cases, the tables are next to, or inside, showers. There are rolls of toilet paper on the tables in place of napkins. Drinks are served in mini urinals instead of glasses. Meals are served in bowls—mini toilet bowls, that is—and come with a little plastic turd on the side for, you know, ‘decoration.’… If you’re wondering, each Modern Toilet restaurant does have proper bathrooms. They are very well marked to prevent patrons from making the horrible mistake. However, after you use the facilities you’ll have to wash your hands at a sink that is in—you guessed it—a toilet.”

I did look around for something I truly needed, having just replaced my 15-month-old BlackBerry 9000 with a spanking new BlackBerry 9700, on the excuse that the old phone was falling apart because of a crack in its housing. The fact was, I could’ve replaced that housing for less than $10 on eBay, but I was itching for something new to hold, so I didn’t say no when a 9700 was offered to me at what I convinced myself to be an irresistible bargain.

The 9700 looked too pretty to go without a case, and Hong Kong being the mother lode of cellphone cases, I snapped one up for nearly HK$200 in a shop in upscale Windsor House in Causeway Bay. I was happy, until I strayed into the flea market on Apliu Street in Sham Shui Po, where I found an even better one for the ridiculous price of HK$35—and that only after I croaked (a huge effort, for a male) the obligatory albeit halfhearted “Any discount?” after the seller quoted me HK$40. I didn't even bother retorting "Thirty?", so relieved was I to get a bargain practically without asking.

Wonders never cease, indeed, in this shopping and dining paradise. I’ll save the serious literary reportage for next week.


‘TIS THE summer workshop season, and two of the country’s oldest and biggest writers’ workshops will soon be underway. The UP National Writers’ Workshop will be held in Baguio from April 4 to 11, and the Silliman University National Writers’ Workshop will follow suit in Dumaguete City from May 3 to 21.

The Silliman fellows are still being chosen, but I’m pleased to announce the roster of accomplished mid-career writers who will be going to Baguio as fellows: in English, Marc Escalon Gaba and Mabi David Balangue for poetry, Karl de Mesa, Timothy Montes, and Dada Felix for fiction, and April Yap and Faye Ilogon for creative nonfiction; in Filipino, Auraeus Solito and Jim Libiran for screenwriting, Kristian Cordero and Alwynn Javier for poetry, and Jun Sungkit for fiction. UP Mass Comm Dean Roland Rolentino will be directing this year’s Baguio workshop. Readers keep writing me to ask if I can recommend some other writing workshops they can attend over the summer, so let me share some information about three that I know of that are still open to applications from the general public.

The UP Department of Filipino is accepting applications to the Third Rogelio Sicat Workshop, which will be held in Baler, Aurora from April 28 to May 2. It is open to beginning writers in Filipino, especially college students, who write poems, fiction, and children’s stories.

Applicants must submit the following: manuscripts (12 points, double-spaced, 8x11 inches) of any of the following: five (5) poems, two (2) short stories (10 pages), and two (2) children’s stories (5-7 pages); short bio-note; photo (2x2, colored); and an accomplished Application Form, which can be secured by email. All expenses from UP Diliman to the workshop site are free for the chosen writing fellows. A modest stipend will also be provided. Send manuscripts to palihangrogeliosicat@yahoo.com.ph not later than April 9, 2010. For further details, write the given email address.

If you want to learn more about filmmaking or want to get into the film industry, you can do worse than sign up for one of the UP Film Institute’s courses this summer. The courses run for varying periods of three to six days each, from April 5 to May 22, and for fees that run from PP4,000 to P8,000. All workshops will be held at the UP Film Building in UP Diliman, except for Bing Lao’s workshop which will be held in Baguio. The course offerings include Advanced Scriptwriting with Bing Lao; Digital Photography with Cris Sevilla-Bilbao; Non-Linear Editing with Ramon Bautista; Basic Scriptwriting with Nick Olanka; Digital Cinematography with Lyle Sacris; Digital Photography with Steve Tirona; and Non-Linear Editing with Melissa de la Merced. For more details about specific schedules, fees and requirements, visit the UP Film Institute, 2nd floor Cine Adarna Bldg., Magsaysay and Osmeña Ave., UP Diliman. You can also call 925-0286, email upfi_workshops@yahoo.com.ph, or check out the UPFI website at http://www.upfilminstitute.net.

The 17th Iligan National Writers Workshop will also be pushing through from May 24 to 28 at MSU-IIT in Iligan City, featuring panelists Chari Lucero, Tony Enriquez, Steven Patrick Fernandez, Merlie Alunan, Victor Sugbo, Leo Deriada, Carlo Arejola, and Christine Godinez-Ortega, with Lawrence Ypil as the keynote speaker. Because of funding constraints this year, qualified applicants will be asked to pay for their own transportation, as well as for board and lodging in the amount of P10,000 (the panelists are providing their services gratis).

The workshop is open to writers in English, Filipino, Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Sebuano, Waray, and Chabacano. Translations in English should also be submitted with the manuscripts in their original languages. Application forms can be downloaded at www.msuiit.edu.ph. Applicants should submit any of the following: a group of five poems; a short story of not more than 30 pages double-spaced; a one act play; or a chapter of a novel or novel-in-progress, accompanied by a background and a summary of the novel. The deadline for applications is April 15. For more details, please call Pat Cruz or Alice Bartolome, MSU-IIT, OVCRE, at (063) 2232343.

Penman for Monday, March 15, 2010


LAST WEEK I promised to share a few paragraphs from my first Palanca-prizewinning story, “Agcalan Point,” which I saw again recently for the first time in 35 years. I’m going to do this not to praise myself, but precisely to show how artificial my voice was back then, and how it’s changed since, by way of talking more generally about how writers and their words change over time.

Here goes:

“Approaching Ginbulanan harbor from the west, as it is the only entry the sea leaves open short of tearing your craft apart with its sunken teeth, the traveler meets Agcalan.

“From afar you perceive a decrepit Spanish fort more than a thousand feet above the bobbing horizon, thickly overhung with clouds in the month of August. From that crown Agcalan plunges madly downwards into jagged slivers of gray sandstone into the sea, carpeted by a fine silken spray.

“Treachery lurks but a fathom below; ships passing this point must have crews of redoubtable courage. So far from the open sea, so near to land—and there the danger lies, to founder on some ill-anchored reef or be crushed against the immutable cheek of Agcalan.

“Agcalan has always been there, and you have only seen it now. It has seen everything, and you know nothing, a speck of flotsam in time and space, and you are overwhelmed. There is majesty in the primeval, some godly attribute magnified by the prism of the transparent mind, and it is here.”

Now let’s a do a little self-analysis.

Note the tone and setting of the story. It doesn’t happen on a typical Tuesday on a city street. It starts on the swell of the ocean, wrenching the reader from the familiar. We are introduced to a “decrepit Spanish fort,” suggesting a bygone era, cloaking the piece in a mythic mist. This effect is reinforced by words and phrases like “thickly overhung,” “redoubtable courage,” “ill-anchored,” “majesty in the primeval,” “godly attribute,” and that last mouthful, “the prism of the transparent mind.”

Those lines will probably get past or even be liked by an impressionable audience. But looking at them now, as the 56-year old reader rather than the 21-year-old writer, I can sense a certain stridency, a palpable anxiety to be taken seriously, which seems easiest to achieve with the use of windy, resonant, polysyllabic words.

It’s the bane of wet-eared writers, this notion that big words and foggy settings will get you far. It’s an understandable crutch, especially when you don’t feel too confident about your material—or haven’t found it yet; a retreat into the romantic past provides a good excuse for mock-heroic prose and a touch of melodrama. I find myself having to tell my students to unlearn this tendency by, among others, asking them to throw their thesaurus away, especially when the only reason they turn to it is to find a fancier word for something as basic as “talk” (expostulate?) or “walk” (perambulate?).

For comparison, here’s a scene from a story I published in 2002, when I was 48: “Some Families, Very Large”:

“Finally they emerged into a street with one side lit up like a carnival and smelling like flowers. Boys Sammy’s age ran from one end of it to another, and men and women sat in chairs on the sidewalk, smoking and chatting, scratching their ankles. Vendors sold fried bananas, jellied drinks, and duck eggs on the street. It seemed incredibly alive, this nook of the city, and Sammy soon understood why: it was a street of funeral parlors all in a row, and even Christmas saw no let-up in business here.”

Note how narrow my field of vision has become, and how much simpler the words are. Here I try to get mileage not from my vocabulary nor from the exoticism of the setting, but from the irony of the situation—of how places of death can be so full of life, even and especially at Christmastime.

Indeed this movement from the exotic to the familiar seems to be a trajectory that many writers go through as they mature. Take a look at these lines from a poem titled “Night Music” written by the British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) in 1945, when he was 23:

Only the sound

 Long sibilant-muscled trees

 Were lifting up, the black poplars.
And in their blazing solitude

 The stars sang in their sockets through the night:

 `Blow bright, blow bright

 The coal of this unquickened world.'

Notice anything? Now here’s Larkin again, 13 years later, in 1958, with “Home Is So Sad”:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
…
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Not only has the language become radically simplified (note how all of the words in the first line are of just one syllable); the imagery is now pointedly domestic. “That vase,” such a seemingly plain phrase, carries tremendous referential power, implying some experience we don’t know but whose emotional significance we can infer, in a way that “the coal of this unquickened world” just can’t manage.

Such shifts in vocabulary are, I suggest, merely the ripples on the surface of the ocean. The real changes occur much deeper, in the writer’s growing appreciation of the complexity of seemingly simple acts, statements, and figures. The maturing writer realizes that verbal virtuosity is the easiest and cheapest trick in the book, and that only with the genius of a Borges or a Nabokov can big words regain and reassert their grand precision.

The change may not even be in the words but in the sensibility, which can be a subtler spoor to track. I remember a professor of mine from graduate school—a tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking Shakespeare scholar named Russell Fraser—who gave us one of the most maddeningly difficult final exams I ever came across. He gave us two blind passages from Shakespeare—certifiably obscure, nothing like “To be or not to be” or “Friends, Romans, countrymen”—and asked us: “Which is early and which is late Shakespeare, and why?” We had to argue our answers purely on the basis of the text and what context we could generate from it, trying to imagine what an aging bard would feel like, and how the weight of the years would convey itself in his words.

The next time you read works by the same author, look up their publication dates, and see if you can sense any change in his or her language, outlook, or style. Come to think of it, I suppose some of us actually get worse with time, but that’s for another column.

Penman for Monday, March 8, 2010


SOMETHING VERY unusual happened to me a few days ago. I got hold of a story I hadn’t seen in 35 years. I vaguely remembered what it was about and how it began, and what the climax was, but I couldn’t recall what the characters said, beyond the heroic swagger that the author gave them, thinking that it would give the piece a classic feel, as if it had been written by someone older. That part I remember, because I was the author, and the story was the first one I ever submitted to the Palancas.

The year was 1975; I was 21, then employed as a writer at the National Economic and Development Authority in Padre Faura. I was writing feature stories about government projects like Pantabangan Dam and the Philippine National Railways, but what I really wanted to do was to write stories and plays. It was the time of martial law, so there wasn’t much to write for except Kerima Polotan’s Focus magazine, to which I’d submitted a rather tepid story just the year before, my first major publication in a national magazine.

I wanted then what any young, brash writer wants—a little fame and fortune, and the Palanca Awards, which I’d heard about but which seemed just beyond my reach, looked to be the ticket.

So I wrote a story I called “Agcalan Point,” pounding away at my father-in-law’s Olympia typewriter. It went on to win a share of Second Prize—something like P2,500—with which I bought my first car, a battered 1963 Datsun Bluebird that ended up a year later in a police garage, shot full of bullet holes; but that’s another story.

I was, of course, deliriously happy when it won, but strangely enough, after I submitted that story to the Palancas, I practically forgot about the piece—and I can’t remember exactly why. I suspect that I realized early enough that it wasn’t that good, because I never included it in any of the three short story collections I later published; I didn’t even have a copy, although the Palanca Foundation had one in its library. I think it won mainly because of its theme—and we’ll get to that in a minute—but the language was, well, exactly what it was: that of a 21-year-old doing his best to sound 42.

About a month ago, I received a request from Lulu Reyes, an old friend who teaches English at the Ateneo and who edits an online magazine called Kritika Kultura; they were going to publish an interview with me, but also needed an unpublished story to go with it. I didn’t have any, I said… until I remembered “Agcalan Point,” hibernating in the Palanca Foundation files since 1975.

A request to the kind Mr. Ross Bautista at the Foundation promptly produced a Xerox copy of my original manuscript. Seeing the familiar font of the Olympia and flipping through the pages was like taking a ride in a time machine to watch myself thinking and working back when my hair was thick and wavy and my waist size a demure 28 (and now it’s 40; tell me, how can a foot of fat grow around any man without his realizing it?).

I remembered what had inspired me to write that story: in 1974, Beng and I had to spend a couple of weeks in my seaside hometown of Alcantara, Romblon, after I’d received a tip that I might be re-arrested for continuing to work with the Left, despite my government job. Beng was eight months pregnant, but we ran all the same, fearing for our freedom. There in Romblon—where the old people pinned talismans on Beng’s blouse to ward off evil spirits—I looked at a hill looming over the water, and saw a story.

When I sat down to it, I would set that story in the mythic past—remembering Jose Garcia Villa’s “Mir-i-nisa”—and imbue it with all manner of dramatic flourish. My story was about a brave young warrior who refused to believe in demons, and who—forced to fight one such demon—found himself facing the old, oppressive datu, whom he then destroyed, thereby elevating reason over superstition.

I know, it doesn’t sound too bad, but as every writer knows, a plot synopsis tells you nothing about the execution of the story, or about the quality of its language. When I read the manuscript again last week, I couldn’t help smiling at my own turns of phrase—some of which I wouldn’t be caught dead using, today. But then again, when you’re 21, who’s to tell you what not to do?

Next week, I’ll publish the opening paragraph of “Agcalan Point,” and discuss how a writer’s language changes over time, and why.


THERE'S ONE more thing I need to do today: offer a heartfelt apology to the man who gave me first professional writing job. City editor Nemesio Dacanay took a risk on an annoyingly persistent 18-year-old dropout and brought him in as a reporter for the Philippines Herald in 1972. A few years ago, I remembered “Dac” in a piece I wrote to acknowledge my writing mentors, but inadvertently turned it into a eulogy by describing him as “the late…” His daughter Christine Dacanay Kelley wrote in to say that her father is, in fact, very much alive and well here in Manila. I’m sorry about that most terrible of journalistic bloopers, sir, and hope to see you again one of these days!

And finally, on a truly sadder note, my deepest condolences go the family of Engineer Patrocinio Manes, who died very recently. It was Manong Patring and his wife, my father’s cousin, Manang Adoring, who gave Beng and me shelter in Romblon when we needed a hiding place back in 1974. He was a great guy, the kind of man you think every father, uncle, or elder brother should be.

Flotsam & Jetsam (93) fro March 8, 2010

YOU CAN'T put a new phone through a better (or worse) baptism of fire than to take it out on the road the day after you get it, trusting that everything will work as it should. That’s what I did with my BlackBerry Bold 9700, which I picked up just before leaving on a weeklong road trip to Hong Kong and Shanghai. I’d actually been planning to find one in HK, but an irresistible deal came up and I found myself unboxing a new unit less than 24 hours before departure. I know, it’s probably a crazy idea to switch phones just before you go roaming, but I was still going to take my old BB 9000 along, just in case.

I’d had that 9000 for almost a year and a half—what techies would call the proverbial eternity in digital time—and while it had served me magnificently, relegating my iPhone to an inglorious backup, the kind of punishment I put my phones through had begun to take its toll on the phone, and on me. By punishment I mean using phones without cases—I can’t be bothered with one more thing to unwrap every time I make or answer a call—and sticking them into my pocket with my coins and keys. I like my phones “naked,” so I can feel them in my hand the way they came out of the factory, unencumbered by more rubber or plastic.

Surprisingly, the old BB’s unprotected glass screen stood up very well, surviving with nary a scratch. But I’d dropped the 9000 more than once, and soon I had to replace the pitted chrome bezel with a black replacement I sourced on eBay, as well as to clean and swap out the trackball, which was a gunk magnet. I don’t think most BB users would go that far—and yes, it was a pain to do the first time—but I happen to like tinkering with my machines, so it was also fun. Up to a point. The fourth or fifth time I had to replace the trackball (no replacements were as good as the original one, which I ended up soaking overnight as prescribed in a bath of alcohol), I knew that it was time to shop around for a new phone, especially when a metal strip on my BB broke after yet another drop.

But what to get next? Something without a trackball, surely; but I still prefer physical keypads to multitouch screens, so the iPhone was out, as was the BB Storm, which I’ve never been too thrilled about, because it just looked too much like a wannabe iPhone when it first came out. I’ve realized that I can’t do without push email, so it was going to be another BlackBerry. I’d reviewed the 8520 and it was pretty nifty like my old Curve, which preceded the 9000, but then the 9700 came into the market at just the right moment, and a match was made.

You can find a ton of other reviews on the 9700 online, so I’m just going to add a few, quick-and-dirty observations from the point of view of a new owner and user.

First, it’s the best of both worlds—a combination of the smart looks, sharp screen, and technical versatility of the BB 9000, plus the more hand-holdable size of the Curve and the 8520. I’ve never had a phone fit my hand as well as this 8320/8520/9700 form factor. The 9000 was the size of a boat, which was great for texting and writing (yes, I wrote columns on that phone using Docs to Go while playing poker), and the downsizing on the 9700 requires some readjustment, but the RIM guys (those are the BB’s makers, folks) are geniuses at keypad design, giving the individual keys a slight ridge that your nails can tap to ease typing, so the switch wasn’t too hard. I expect to get used to the slightly narrower spacing in a few days.

Second, no more lint-guzzling trackball, hallelujah! The 9700’s mini-trackpad is the killer feature on this phone, making navigation silky smooth. This must have been what a plowman felt like when he clambered aboard his first tractor—wheee!

Third, the fit and finish are first-rate, although that chromed bezel is just begging to be scratched, so maybe I’ll ease up on my prejudices and get a rubber skin on it. The leather-look battery cover is smart and very grippable, and the rubberized nubbins that replaced the old side buttons work well. The sound is louder and the camera is sharper than the 9700’s, so that’s another bonus. Fourth, the phone came with the new OS 5.0—ironically, a software update came up for the BB 9000 on the same day I got the 9700—and it has a crisper look throughout.

Porting my calendar and contacts over was relatively painless through BB’s Desktop Manager (now, thankfully with a Mac version), although I had to redownload and reinstall some of my favorite third-party apps (the indispensable Docs to Go, which I inadvertently erased on the new unit; Worldmate and Metro, for my global gallivanting; and SMS Contact and Forward & Edit). A huge bummer is that we Pinoy BB users can’t officially access BB AppWorld, where all the good and free apps are, because it’s still limited to some countries; and, as ever, I’m still shopping around for a real VOIP app for the BB, like Skype or Truphone.

The real road test came when I landed in Hong Kong to find that my designated greeter wasn’t there (through my own fault—another story), necessitating a flurry of texts and Internet searches for possible alternatives to get to my hotel in the New Territories. The 9700 came through magnificently, picking up the free wi-fi signal at the airport and allowing me to Google quick questions about tipping taxicab drivers in HK. In the end, my driver found me, and as I settled into the back of an uncharacteristically luxurious limousine, I took out the BB again to type up memos about some other things I needed to get at the nearest mall or 7-11 to help me settle into a week of hotel living: ramen noodles, candy bars, peanuts—you know, the kind of things you need a great new phone for.

(Picture courtesy of nexus404.com)

Penman for Monday, March 1, 2010


I GOT such encouraging responses to last week’s piece on writing for a living (or, to put it a tad more nicely, becoming a professional writer) that I thought I’d come up with a Part 2—another set of ten tips for the writer who thinks that he or she has what it takes to write full-time and earn from it. Consider these advanced lessons, meant for the writer who’s already taken the plunge, who has the talent and the drive, and who may already have notched some successful projects.

I know that you can find many how-to books out there that will probably tell you the same things, but let me save you a few pesos and a trip to the bookstore by drawing on my experience and that of some friends.

1. Don’t just write, edit. Many projects don’t require writers—especially when the writing of the draft is done in-house by the regular staff—but they do need editors with a sharp eye for grammatical, mechanical, and stylistic errors and problems. Editing, of course, demands a higher level of mastery of the language. (Last week, I promised to do a full-blown piece on interviewing; today I’ll make another promise to do the same for editing.) While we’re on the subject, prepare to be edited. Don’t be so proud as to imagine that your prose is flawless. Even the best writers can misplace commas and apostrophes, or confuse their tenses (or worse, like I once did, their characters’ names).

2. Learn how to take pictures. Many writing jobs—like this column—occasionally require pictures to go with the text, and without a separate budget or extra manpower for photography, it’s left to the writer to take pictures as well. Invest in a good digital camera, and learn the basics of photography. I may never get good enough to become a professional photographer, but on the level of snapshots meant to illustrate a story, I can probably stand toe-to-toe with my fellow fictionists and journalists. Besides, photography is fun on its own, and can be a welcome break from working with words.

3. Understand and learn basic layout and design. Understand press and video production. This is the area of the graphic designer and art director, whose jobs I don’t mean for you to take on (although some gifted writers can, and do), but it’s good to know basic design principles and production processes, so you can anticipate the designer’s needs and work more closely with him or her for a cleaner product, and meet production deadlines.

4. Learn to work with other professionals. If possible, learn to work with the best. Learn and practice teamwork. Prima donnas don’t last. I’ve been fortunate to work with excellent photographers, designers, publishers, and fellow writers. Knowing them not only expanded my network of contacts, and brought me into theirs; I also observed and picked up work habits and attitudes that served me in good stead. It’s fascinating to see a master craftsman at work; many years ago, working on a ten-volume history of the Philippines which I edited and Nik Ricio designed, I watched as Nik labored on his own initiative to remove unsightly “rivers” that ran through blocks of text; imagine doing that to ten volumes! (And if you don’t know what these rivers are, you can begin your self-education right now.)

5. Be prepared to travel. Okay, let’s be honest and admit that travel is more often a perk than a pain, especially when your ticket says “Paris” or “Boracay.” But do it often enough—or slog into the muddy hinterlands in a rickety tricycle—and you’ll be singing a different tune. Be ready for all kinds of trips, rides, and destinations. Make sure your passport is valid and your visas are current—you just might get lucky (or otherwise).

6. Back up your work. I can’t say this often enough, but there’s nothing worse than entrusting a major project to a single computer—then, when it’s halfway or nearly finished, losing it all to a virus, a sudden brownout, or some other disaster, and only then realizing that it hasn’t been backed up anywhere. This is why I prefer to work on a laptop—if the power fails, as it often does in these benighted isles, the battery will give you some time to save your work. I’m a redundancy freak and keep multiple copies of ongoing and completed projects on USB drives and external hard drives. I also email copies of ongoing work to myself, so I can retrieve them anywhere online.

7. Register as a professional, and keep proper accounts. If you’re going to undertake major projects with lots of zeroes on the check, your client will very likely require an official receipt. You can do that—as I did—by registering as a professional with the BIR. (Oddly enough, writers are classified—according to my certificate of registration—under “Other Entertainment Activities, Dance Instruction.” Hmmm, I think that merits yet another column.) Get familiar with contracts and conformés. On this note, write down your Taxpayer Identification Number and your cedula details on a card you can keep in your wallet, or encode them on your phone. Of course, ORs mean that you’ll be paying or at least be liable for taxes, so make sure you keep track of everything, or better yet, hire a professional bookkeeper. Believe me, it’s well worth the peace of mind.

8. Learn how to deal with failure. Not everything you do will turn out right. Sometimes it will be your fault, sometimes not. Take your losses, learn from them, lick your wounds, and move on. I’ve had a couple of sad experiences with clients who—after agreeing to how the job should be done—realized later that they wanted something else. You can save a lot of grief by getting things mutually clear right at the beginning. When dealing with agencies or corporations, ask to liaise with just one or two persons with the authority to speak and decide for that organization; the last thing you want is to defend or explain yourself before a board of directors. (NGOs, I have to say, can be the most difficult clients; their management style encourages everyone to have a say in things, from texts to logos to titles, resulting in excruciating delays.)

9. Give yourself an incentive for doing well. In my deepest moments of anxiety or depression—when I’m facing a deadline but would rather be playing poker or pecking away at my next novel—I offer myself a little prize to keep me going: a weekend dash to Tagaytay for the repose and the bulalo, or a new digital toy, or yet another 1930s Parker Vacumatic in a rare color or configuration. Create your own carrot.

10. Give credit and give thanks to others. Again, whether it’s God, family, friends, co-workers, or people who were perfect strangers before you met them on the project—or all of the above—don’t forget to thank them for making your work possible. Writing is a lonely business, and you might think you’re so good to have done it all alone. But in fact, you’re hardly ever truly alone. The spouse who brings you coffee and puts up with your tantrums, the research and editorial assistants who scurry to come up with what you need, the colleague who covers for you in emergencies so you can finish a job—all of them deserve a word of thanks, or better yet, a share of No. 9, above.

Penman for Monday, February 22, 2010


I WAS supposed to give a short lecture at the Taboan Writers Festival in Cebu a couple of weeks ago on the subject of “Writing for a Living”—something in which I’ve had to acquire some practical expertise, having nothing else to fall back on but the pauper’s wages we get from teaching. For lack of time, however, my fellow panelists and I (Tibo Fernandez of MSU-Iligan and Jigs Arquiza of the Sun-Star) chose to dispense with the talks and went straight to the open forum, so I had to leave quite a few things out of my responses.

So here’s what I would have said. This partly recaps some previous columns I’ve already written on the same general topic (remember my letters to readers Jewel and Reggie?), but I’m adding a few more points for the uninitiated to ponder. I’m actually glad to be doing this again, because it allows me to respond to some recent inquiries from readers anxious to know if they have what it takes to be a successful writer.

“Success” is, of course, a highly relative term, especially in this country. Do you mean critical success or commercial success? Whose critical evaluation do you value, and where are the critics, anyway? (One quick answer: not here, not me. I keep having to repeat this—and I do so with sincere regrets—but I just don’t have time to read and to critique all the novels, stories, and poems people send me, outside of class. If you saw my workload—nine book projects running simultaneously, mapped out on a whiteboard in my home office—you’d understand why. But that’s another story.) One point often raised at Taboan was how sorely we lack serious, full-time literary critics, even in our newspapers, so you’d have to go to school or attend a workshop to get some feedback on your work.

If you mean commercial or financial success, it’s possible, although highly unlikely for most writers, not for want of talent but because of the lack of a market and of opportunities. I can tell you now that, in all probability, your fortune’s not going to come from that book of poems or short stories or even the novel that took you ten years to put together, no matter if they won you a raft of literary prizes and trophies. There are some genres that might make you some decent money—screenwriting, komiks writing, and what we might call coffeetable-book writing come to mind—but it isn’t easy to get these jobs, which require some special knowledge and, almost just as importantly, the right contacts.

So rather than fuss over what “success” means, I’m going to address these remarks to people who want to become professional writers, by which I mean people who depend on their writing to support themselves and their families. Journalists naturally fall into this category and already know pretty much what I’ll be saying here; it’s the creative writer and the academic who may need a bit of a reorientation, since I’ve found that it’s this person who often doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the market needs.

1. For starters, master the language. This seems obvious enough, but I’m always surprised by how many people want to become writers or even editors without knowing how language works, or why rules of grammar and conventions of usage exist. Language is your stock in trade. Even the best of us make the occasional mistake with language (especially with a borrowed language like English), but pros should make very few of them. I’d be very worried if I spotted more than a couple of grammatical or spelling errors on a page.

2. Be versatile. Learn how to write a variety of texts—speeches, brochures, audio-visual presentations, press releases, annual reports, advertising copy. These are the kinds of writing most clients need. None of these should be beneath you to do, and to do well. While you may believe you weren’t born to write about the virtues of a bar of soap, if you had to do exactly that, you’d better know how—and do it with a smile.

3. Learn to write bilingually. Many clients—NGOs, government and international agencies—need material in more than one language, especially when they’re reaching out to local communities. Also, you may need to conduct interviews in Filipino or other non-English languages.

4. Leave the juvenile angst at the door. Drop the literary and philosophical airs, and quit complaining about the job especially if it gets in the way of getting things done. Some kvetching over beer with the boys or the girls might help you decompress, but remember that no one put a gun to your head to take the job on. The world owes you nothing; deal with it.

5. Cultivate an interest and some expertise in fields beyond literature and art—particularly economics, politics, and history. Again, most clients aren’t interested in your lyric poetry. They do expect you to be interested in business and industry, in the intricacies of politics, and in what they have to say as experts in their own fields, which could be anything from feedmilling to steel fabrication to central banking. Have a head for figures, and keep a sense of wonder about the way things work.

6. Be a good listener, and learn how to ask the right questions. Learn and master the art of interviewing. Come prepared, come on time, and make sure you record everything. (I’ll write a separate piece one of these days on how to conduct good interviews.)

7. Establish a network of contacts. Make yourself and your skills visible. Unfortunately, you won’t get any jobs unless people know you and what you can do. As a pro, you can’t afford to be too shy or too modest to make yourself available or even to chase after jobs. I don’t mean that you should take every job that comes along, but it might help not to be too choosy, especially at the beginning, because you need experience and you need professional credits to move ahead. I’ve even taken on some special jobs for free or for very little because the connections they opened were far more valuable than whatever I would have charged.

8. Think, look, and act like a professional. Prepare solid, neat, polished proposals; treat your clients with the same respect you should expect from them. Dress appropriately for client meetings, and don’t be late. And, yes, charge what you believe your services are worth.

9. Deliver quality work, on time. In the end, it’s all about your output. Keep your standards high, and stick to them. I have to confess that I don’t always hit the mark—sometimes, fatigue and the distractions of life will take their toll, no matter what—but I try to make up for the slack as soon as I can. A bad rep travels fast, and since your byline is your equity in this business, make sure you keep it clean and shiny.

10. Don’t forget what you’re doing all of this for. Whether it’s for God, country, family, fame, or just the chance to get some paid time off to write that novel, or for that down payment on a new apartment or a new car, you have to remember why it’s important to keep writing, and to write well. Good writing can be its own reason for being, and provide its own satisfaction—but it’s even better if it means that much to somebody else.

Penman for Monday, February 15, 2010

I’M IN Cebu as I write this, attending the second edition of Taboan, the Philippine International Writers Festival which was first held in Manila at about this same time last year, February being National Arts Month. Taboan will be making the rounds of the regions from year to year before returning to Manila, so this moveable feast (poet and NCCA commissioner Ricky de Ungria beat me to the metaphor) will see many places yet. The Arts Council of Cebu under the very gracious festival director Mayen Tan and presidenta Petite Garcia is in charge of Taboan ’10, a project of the Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

The festival got off to a lively start with a keynote speech by Cebu’s own Dr. Resil Mojares—a formidable, internationally recognized scholar of Philippine literature, history, and society—who chose a deliberately provocative subject and title for his talk: “Will Magdalena Jalandoni Ever Be a National Artist?”

For those who don’t know Jalandoni (and—perhaps to prove Resil’s point—99.99 percent of us don’t), the Iloilo-born Jalandoni (1891-1978) was a prolific writer in Hiligaynon of fiction, poems, and plays, her novels alone totaling an astounding 36.

Resil made it clear that he wasn’t making a brief for Jalandoni’s selection as a National Artist; with typical scholarly modesty, he said that he simply didn’t know her work well enough to make that judgment. Rather, he was using Jalandoni’s case to draw attention to the gross disadvantage at which Filipino writers working in languages other than English and Filipino lie, particularly when it comes to recognition on a national or international level.

While they may have achieved much in their own literature in, say, Cebuano, Bikol, or Hiligaynon, they remain obscure elsewhere, because their work has been little translated, little critically reviewed, and therefore little seriously considered for national or international awards. Jalandoni is hardly alone in this predicament; the Philippine literary landscape is littered with the skeletons of mute inglorious Miltons whom most Filipinos will have never heard of, much less read.

Critiquing the NA selection process—of which he himself was occasionally a part, one of the expert “peers” who sift through the nominees at the first level—Mojares noted that “In the discussion of the nominees of Jalandoni last year, all the 10 or 12 members of the ‘Council of Experts’ (except perhaps for one or two) had not read Jalandoni’s works, either due to language, unavailability of texts or translations, or simply because Jalandoni did not fall within their area of expertise. This has been the problem in the three or four times in which she was nominated.

“This is abetted by a procedural constraint. Because of confidentiality rules, members of the Council of Experts know who the candidates are only on the day of deliberation itself. Hence, they have no time to prepare for the deliberations by way of reading, research, or consultations with those knowledgeable about particular candidates. Although brief research reports are prepared by the Secretariat for reference by Council members, these reports are made available only on the day of the deliberation and are not of much help.”

Again, Resil was really much less concerned about awards than by the inequality (and, therefore, the injustice) of popular perceptions. “The politics of national recognition” he went on to say, “is such that it matters where you are read, in what language, and by whom. Someone who publishes in Hiligaynon (or Cebuano, Waray, or Iluko) in a periodical with a circulation of 50,000 is a ‘regional writer.’ A writer in Manila who publishes a 500-copy of English poems is a ‘national writer.’” (Interestingly enough, we’re holding our sessions at the Casino Español de Cebu, a social and architectural tribute to a language we’ve almost entirely lost, literarily.)

The marginalization of writing from the regions has been a long-festering sore in the body of Philippine cultural politics, and Taboan’s discussions following Resil’s speech revived some of those familiar issues. To the Antique-born poet and playwright John Iremil Teodoro, the common practice of denoting any writing outside Manila as “regional” literature merely reinforced “Manila-centrism,” according, by implication, a superior quality to products coming out of the capital. However, to Carlo Arejola from Bicol, the regional badge was a challenge rather than a hindrance. “You don’t need to look to Manila for approval or affirmation,” Carlo said. “You can create a readership among yourselves. We created our own awards, our own workshop.” Indeed, as other delegates and Resil himself echoed, the question to ask was “What can the regions do for themselves?”

I offered the opinion that, while some form of affirmative action or intervention may be required to level the playing field, there’s a point at which the national/regional or national/local dichotomy becomes patronizing and ultimately more destructive than constructive. It’s not as if a Cebuano writer can or will only think of Cebuano, and not national or global, ideas; one’s local roots and experiences may provide strong, unique material, but that’s still only raw material, yet to be refined. And the world out there couldn’t care less: it doesn’t see us as Tagalog, Iluko, or Bikol writers—we’re just all Filipino writers, period, and perhaps we should think as such.

Resil Mojares’ conclusion put it succinctly: “The greater challenge lies outside the awards. We need to address inequalities in conditions of literary and cultural production by investing more heavily (by the regions themselves ad not just Manila) in more effective and strategic initiatives in scholarship, literary education, translation, publishing, dissemination, and promotion. We need to build the national in the National [Artist] Awards.”

I’ve always suspected that a great work will manifest that greatness in whatever language it’s written in or translated into. (Of course, you need to have that translation first.) Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Clearly, before we can begin recognizing good and great Filipino writers from all parts of the country, we should lay the critical groundwork and first develop and support translators and critics who can give literary judges a fairer basis for their evaluations.

Curious about how the Nobel Prize committee in charge of literature managed to choose a laureate from hundreds of nominees writing in a dozen languages, I Googled the subject and discovered the following exchange at nobelprize.org between Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, and a reader who sent in the same question I had in mind.

Question: Are Nobel Prizes in literature based on the assessment of the writings in its original language, translations, or both? If assessed in the original language, how does one remove nationalistic interests, if any, from the nomination process? Unlike physics, chemistry, etc., where the symbolism/equations/conventions are clearly agreed upon globally, I would imagine that language and its interpretation would pose an additional challenge.


 Answer: Whenever possible, the Nobel committee and the Academy will read the works of the candidates in the original language. Obviously, we often have to rely on translations, but in those cases, we make an effort to read several versions of the same book, e.g. one French and one German translation. It is true that literature, unlike science, is rooted in a cultural code with language as its most important expression, but a great work of literature should have the power to reveal the universal meaning of local symbols and conventions.

Re-read that last sentence; I couldn’t have said it better.

(Magdalena Jalandoni's photo from http://sea.lib.niu.edu)

Penman for Monday, February 8, 2010



FRIENDS AND readers have been asking me what I thought of Apple’s new digital product, the iPad, a tablet computer that—like the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone before it—has been touted by Apple’s angels as humankind’s next greatest invention.

I, of course, am a hard-core Apple and Mac freak, a guy who still counts going to Macworld in San Francisco and standing within ten feet of Steve Jobs (well within SJ’s fabled “reality distortion field) as one of the highlights of his life, who still keeps a stable of aging Macs and PowerBooks going back to the Classic and the PowerBook 100 in his study and beneath his bed, and whose sometime chairmanship of the Philippine Macintosh Users Group he looks back on with more pride than most of his trivial, professional titles.

And unlike even most Apple fans, I’ve never waited for the so-called “Rev B”, or improved version, of a new product to run to the store to get one. Here in Pinoylandia, I was among the first, if not the very first, to get a Titanium PowerBook, a 12-inch Aluminum PowerBook, an iPod shuffle, an iPhone, and a MacBook Air. This usually meant waiting up all night for the Macworld extravaganza and for that inevitable announcement from Steve Jobs about “one more thing”—and making a beeline for the Internet to order or pre-order whatever that new gizmo was, sight unseen.

I feel a need to say all that because—for the first time in a very long time—Apple came out with something that actually had me asking “Do I need this? Or even if I don’t, why should I want one?” Unlike that mind-blowing moment a couple of years ago when Steve Jobs pulled a MacBook Air out of an office envelope to introduce the world’s thinnest laptop, the iPad’s stage debut left me underwhelmed, maybe because I was too busy figuring out where, in my lifestyle, the gadget would fit.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPad, from what I see, is still a neat, beautifully designed device embodying the seamless integration of hardware and software that’s been Apple’s calling card since the very beginning. It should do a good if not a great job as a browser, a media viewer, an e-book reader, a gaming console, a repository of a zillion iPhone apps, and, in a pinch, a mini-workstation running a modified office suite (in this case, iWork).

But my MacBook and my iPhone can already do 90 percent of that, so why should I want one more thing to carry—and something I’ll need to hold in one hand while the other one works?

I’m sure there will be many Mac users—and yes, new converts—for whom the iPad will be the perfect convergence device or digital accessory. Just because I don’t need it now doesn’t mean others don’t, or that I wont. The thing about Apple is that it’s gotten ahead not just by meeting needs, but by creating them. Heck, nobody needed an iPod before Apple made one. As TIME’s Josh Quittner puts it, Steve Jobs is “a veritable Innovator Bunny: while competitors scramble to follow him, Jobs races ahead to invent the next thing.”

Here’s my theory about my initial reluctance to embrace the iPad like the Mosaic tablets, which I’ve been telling anyone willing to listen: another tectonic division is upon us—that between those who need keyboards and those who don’t. We already got a glimpse of this when the iPhone arrived three years ago. Like many others, I grabbed one and pronounced myself in love with it—until I realized how much I missed the tactile pleasure of typing on a physical keypad; and so, like many others, I took to using a BlackBerry, and haven’t let go of it since.

Of course the iPad will allow typing on a fairly large virtual keyboard on its multitouch screen. That should do well enough for email, but I doubt that it’ll be as good for heavy-duty, long-distance typing. A physical keyboard’s virtues don’t consist just in the audible confirmation—in the reassuring click—of a keypress. The key travels downward and springs back, cushioning the impact of thousands of strokes. When I think of typing for long stretches on the iPad’s glassine surface, I imagine my fingers falling like heavy rain on hard concrete. But then again, maybe that’s just me and my romantic notions about the physicality of writing; the farther away we move from ink, the more ephemeral things get.

I’m beginning to wonder if my natural age (56) is finally catching up with me. I’ve been arguing these past several years—some of which I’ve spent writing product reviews and columns for techie magazines—that what I love about being on the cutting edge of new technology is how it allows me to cheat time, to experience now what people will be taking for granted ten years hence. I still believe that.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed myself slipping way behind the curve. When I took serious stock of things, I realized that my interest in newness for newness’ sake has begun to wane, to the point that I should probably be surrendering my techie credentials soon, if I were to be honest about walking the walk instead of just talking the talk. For example:

1. I don’t play games. I’ve never even tried World of Warcraft, or the Sims, or Grand Theft Auto. My mom bowls on Wii and can give my brother-in-law Eddie a run for his money. I’ve never even touched a Wii, or a PSP, or a Nintendo.

2. I don’t do social networking. I don’t do Facebook. I don’t Tweet. Nor have I ever accepted any of the hundreds of invitations I must’ve received to Hi-5, Multiply, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, and what have you.

3. I haven’t bought a new tech toy in ages. And it isn’t just because poker’s sucked up all my loose change, along with the Christmas bonus. Strangely enough, I’ve been very happy with the computer (a MacBook Air) and cell phone (a Blackberry Bold) that I’ve been using for over a year now; the MBA’s going on two—an eternity in digital time. Where I used to dress up my gear like they were blushing debutantes, my MacBook’s hard shell has acquired all sorts of battle scars; even my desktop pictures have been banished in favor of blank gray screens, the better for me to focus on the work I need to do. My iPod and iPhone—both one or two generations behind—have been languishing in the drawer.

So—will I eventually get an iPad? Knowing me, probably, yes. I’d be too curious not to. But at least you can’t say I didn’t stop to think about it. Just let me make these noises about not needing it, and valiantly saying no, for the time being, while the reality distortion field works its magic on me.

(Image from apple.com)

Penman for Monday, February 1, 2010

AS I mentioned last week in my piece on our overnight trip to Corregidor, Beng and I took pictures of the sites we visited, just like any other pair of tourists out for a weekend of exploration and reflection on an island drenched in history.

The rugged beauty of many corners of Corregidor—its serenity even—stands in sharp, ironic contrast to the savage fighting that went on there, albeit for a noble cause. Inescapably, death and suffering pervade the place, their pallor relieved only by the sterling courage and endurance of those who lived and died there.

There’s something more than vaguely disquieting about the notion of looking for thrills and spills in a hallowed graveyard, and the tours do try their best to preserve the sanctity of the place with constant reminders—as if they needed to be said—of what happened in those fire-blackened bunkers and ammunition depots. “The Japanese refused to evacuate these tunnels,” noted a guide, “and the Americans who were retaking the island poured gasoline through these vents and set them on fire.”

But also because of such horrific stories, visitors who believe in ghosts can’t help looking for them, and even those who don’t sometimes come away from the island with their skepticism somewhat shaken. I belong to the latter category of staunch “rationalists,” as I think they call them in India, where debunking and demystifying the tricks of swamis and spiritualists have become nearly as fascinating as the tricks themselves.

Unfortunately (or otherwise), I married a believer, a practicing Theosophist who believes in souls, reincarnation, third eyes, and the virtues of vegetarianism, so we’ve had a philosophical truce of sorts around the house going on 36 years, enabling me to eat my medium-rare steak in peace, and her to commune—telepathically or astrally—with my chief rival for her affections, a long-dead (but presumably since reincarnated) fellow by the name of Paramahansa Yogananda.

As you can imagine, this has led to some interesting differences in our lifestyles and expectations. Her lifelong dream is to spend a week of abstinence and meditation in Tibet; I’d like to spend that week playing poker, guzzling free beer, and ogling half-clad women in Las Vegas. When we get up in the morning, she mumbles mantras for a solid half-hour; I grab my bedside laptop to check my overnight e-mail and my eBay standings.

So it was that we went to Corregidor in search of different experiences. I wanted to see big guns; she wanted to discover (or be discovered by) ghosts. I can now report that we found both, although the artillery was a tangible certainty, seen by everybody else; the apparitions played favorites, who included Beng but excluded me.

(This wouldn’t have been the first time for me to have been studiously ignored by the dear departed. Many years ago, I went on a writing fellowship to Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, a 15th century structure on a cliffside near the Rosslyn Chapel made famous by The Da Vinci Code. A couple of other Pinoy fellows who preceded me at the castle swore that they’d been visited in their rooms by ghosts—one of them seizing the poet by his ankles—but the only thing that seized me there over the four weeks was an acute longing for Nissin’s Ramen and Ligo Sardines.)

Beng’s alleged (that’s the objective journalist talking) encounter came when our tour bus swung by Battery Hearn, a shrapnel-studded gun emplacement behind which stood a bunker that had been carved into the hillside. There—said our tour guide Stella—three comfort women had been kept and probably killed by the Japanese. Stella also told us even before we entered the bunker that many previous visitors had reported capturing “orbs” with their cameras in that particular place—whitish circles that seemed to float in the air, suggesting ethereal presences.

Our group of about 15 tourists filed into the bunker, which was dark and clammy but not, for me, necessarily spooky, my courage bolstered by all the warm bodies around. I, of course, was on the trail of artifacts, not apparitions, and clicked away with my Nikon at the military hardware, like the rusted hooks lining the concrete wall. Beng, with her Lumix, was taking pictures of the darkness itself.

When we all stepped out back into the light and reviewed our shots, a great cry came up around Beng and her viewfinder. “Orbs!” she exclaimed to the huddle. “I found orbs!” She pressed the magnification knob and an even bigger gasp arose. “I can see a face! Look, there’s a face in this orb!” Instantly the crowd swelled around Beng like traffic around a U-turn.

Naturally, this skeptic stayed away from the oohs and aahs, stubbornly refusing to be suckered into a sighting; I knew that I’d get a private viewing afterward, anyway, whether I liked it or not. Sure enough, as soon as we got back on the bus, Beng thrust her images into my face, silently but pointedly demanding that I confirm that I was looking at a cluster of orbs, floating in the darkness like talahib blossoms in the wind. Yes—I reluctantly agreed—I could see a lot of cloudy round things. But did I see the face—the two eyes, the nose, the mouth? Well… if I were a ghost, why would I want to return as a blur?

Now, the Panasonic Lumix is a nifty little camera, a virtual copy of my other camera, a Leica D-Lux, whose exact same lens it has, minus the hefty price tag and the trademark red dot (Panasonic makes these digital Leicas as well as their own Lumixes, those “like a Leicas”). I knew I could trust Beng’s camera; heck, it used to be mine (a tip for husbands: upgrade yours, pass the old one on to the missus). But could I trust my eyes?

I’ve since Googled all I can about “orbs + Corregidor + ghosts” and all the search terms to go with them, and have turned up a pile of predictable, even plausible explanations for them—atmospheric conditions, the curvature of lenses, static electricity, etc. But after all that, all I can say for sure is, I can’t be sure, which is as scientific a conclusion as they come. Unfortunately for comparison’s sake, I was using the Nikon instead of the Leica inside the bunker, where my shots of the dark remained just that. I suspect, though, that even if I’d grabbed the Lumix from Beng’s hands and taken the next shot, mine would’ve turned up a complete blank in the orb department. Like I said, these spirits—if they exist—don’t only play tricks; they play favorites.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what Beng saw, you can click on this link to my Flickr page, where I’ve put up Beng’s shot (for non-commercial use only; all prospective royalties—whether from Scientific American or The Fortean Times—go to me). (Expand the image in the link to its largest size for best effect.)

Penman for Monday, January 25, 2010

WANTING TO celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary a couple of weekends ago—but without the budget to hie off to our favorite haunts (a foggy town called London comes to mind)—we decided to look for some fun closer to home. I took this as an opportunity to revive an earlier plan, a destination I’d been suggesting to Beng since two of our American friends went there during a recent visit: Corregidor.

I know, you don’t normally think of Corregidor as a romantic getaway. It’s a place steeped in history but also in blood, albeit heroic blood. When I first broached the idea to Beng of going to the island and staying overnight, she cringed, thinking that we would be making a date with ghosts that went all the way back to the Spanish-American War. (There’s something that needs to be made clear here, something that 36 years together hasn’t changed: she believes in spirits, I don’t—or at least I don’t think I do.)

But persistence prevailed, and I happily made a booking with the tour operator, Sun Cruises, which also runs the ferry and the only big hotel on the island, Corregidor Inn. Most people take just the day trip to Corregidor, which costs about P1,900; few know that, for not too much more—just P900 more per person, in our case, going by double occupancy—you can get a very nice room at the very nice inn, a terrific bargain, considering that the whole package of P2,800 won’t even be enough for a night in an upscale metropolitan hotel. But we’re getting ahead of the story.

We assembled at 7 am at the ferry terminal near the CCP; with us were a good number of both foreign and local tourists, and while it meant that every one of more than a hundred seats on the boat was taken, I was glad to see that Corregidor still held that kind of attraction for people, especially the young, to whom war these days is a video game.

The ferry itself was sleek and modern, manned by a smart, efficient crew, and blessed with such amenities as air conditioning and an on-board convenience store. The ride took about 90 minutes over generally smooth water, and before we knew it we were being met dockside by tourist buses gaily decked out as prewar tranvias. Each bus had a tour guide, and we were lucky to have, on Bus No. 3, a smart and sassy lady named Stella Cordoba to introduce us to Corregidor’s unique charms.

Thus began a day of forays into tunnels, batteries, ruins, and promontories, each one of them informed by some story of conflict and courage. The 30-minute light-and-sound show at the Malinta Tunnel, written and directed by no less than the late National Artist Lamberto Avellana, was deeply affecting—and to me, a student of the craft, good proof of what a difference a literate script makes to such productions, too often smothered these days by silly and self-indulgent effects.

The Spanish-themed Corregidor Inn, where the tour paused for a generous buffet lunch, was a pleasant surprise. For the price we paid, I was frankly expecting some spartan dump evocative of a POW camp, but the inn turned out to be a clean, well-appointed place, with a restaurant that offered spectacular views of the bay on both the Cavite and Bataan sides. (The only things I notably missed were a TV in the room and an Internet connection.)

One good reason for taking the overnight option is that a day is simply too short to visit and appreciate all the sites the island has to offer. I suppose red-blooded males like me will never have enough of the big guns and the battlegrounds, but in truth the Corregidor experience is most moving at its quietest.

The night tour begins with a viewing of the sunset from Battery Grubbs, then moves on to “ghost hunting” at the ruins of a hospital once used as a barracks by the victims of the infamous “Jabidah Massacre” of 1968, whose graffiti still marks the rooms they stayed in. It ends with an hour-long march into the lateral tunnels of Malinta. I’m claustrophobic, but I survived, and am glad I went; this is as close as one gets to what the war must have felt for the thousands trapped in those tunnels.


(A tip for the tourist: bring a flashlight. They hand out some on the night tour, but there won’t be enough for everyone, and you’ll want a flashlight in your hand or pocket should the unthinkable happen and you stray from the group into dark oblivion.)

The next morning, Beng and I went beachcombing, taking a long, leisurely walk at the South Dock, exploring the rugged cliffside, picking up the island’s red-tainted pebbles and observing how, strangely enough, the beach was strewn with the sandals of children and the shoes of women.

The one eyesore that stuck out in certain coves was Manila Bay’s garbage, collected and deposited by the current. The most valuable souvenir we brought home was a piece of the The Rock—indeed, a rock itself, a fist-sized panghilod that should remind us every day of a weekend well spent in the bosom of history.

(So did we encounter any ghosts? Beng says she did, and has pictures to prove it in strange “orbs” that appeared in her shots but not mine. More on this next week.)

You can find more pictures from that visit on my Flickr page, by clicking here.

Penman for Monday, January 18, 2010


I KNOW I said something a couple of weeks ago about how stressful holidays are—to the extent that you need to take a holiday from the holidays—but one great thing about Christmas, beyond the material gifts, is how it manages to bring people together and people home. For most of us Pinoys, there’s nothing lonelier than Christmas away from family and away from home, so we make an effort to reconnect with loved ones over the season, especially those we haven’t seen for ages.

It’s strange and funny how some of the unlikeliest reunions happen. Two months ago, I was due to give a talk before a professional association, and needed to ask the friend who invited me—UP music professor Dr. Maurie Borromeo—exactly what time and place the talk had been set for. Unknown to me, at that very moment I was calling, she was with another friend of hers from the same hometown—Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya—who overheard the conversation, and who asked which “Butch” it was that Maurie was speaking to. The next thing I heard from Maurie was, “There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” and then I found myself listening to a woman who introduced herself as “Dollie Gutierrez.” She’d been looking for me, she said, for the longest time, and now here I was on the other end of the line, delivered by serendipity.

And as soon as I heard her name, a 50-year-old curtain lifted suddenly, and I was back to being a boy in Bayombong, visiting the young Gutierrezes whom I called “cousins,” and who indeed felt closer to me than my blood relatives. In fact, I called them my “Syrian cousins,” and you’ll see why.

The odd thing was, we had nothing to do with Bayombong or anything up north or certainly anything Syrian, otherwise. My family came from down south, in the island province of Romblon. But a young man named Pat Gutierrez was born there as well, and he came to know and to work with another Romblon fellow named Joe Dalisay at the Department of Public Works, Transportation and Communication. (I used to park myself there as a boy, in the old Post Office building, rocking in my dad’s swivel chair, doodling with his pencils that were red on one end and blue on the other, and pecking away at his typewriter, which to me was the most majestic of all machines.) I gather that Joe gave Pat a leg up in the latter’s career, and they became fast friends. But Pat now lived and worked in Bayombong, where he had met and married a Syrian mestiza named Lorice Zuraek.

So how did Syrians end up in Nueva Vizcaya? As it turned out, early in the last century, a young man named Alfredo Zuraek followed his brother Nicholas to the Philippines, both of them Christians fleeing religious persecution in Damascus. Nicholas eventually went back home, but Alfredo stayed on, and married a Filipina named Maria Panganiban, and they settled in Bayombong, where they had several children, among them Lorice. Pat and Lorice Gutierrez themselves would have ten children, Dollie being the eldest.

And these were the “cousins” I played with during idyllic summers I would spend in Bayombong, when my father Joe came over to visit his good friend Pat, bringing me along for the ride. And what a ride it was, back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, on those Rural Transit buses we would take overnight over the dustiest and bumpiest of roads, stopping for a chilly breakfast at the junction in Sta. Fe. Even today, as an older man, I trace the romance of travel back to those bus rides, which were laced with the fear (perhaps unreasonably, with more informed hindsight) of being ambushed by headhunters, who were supposed to jump out of the bushes when the fire trees bloomed. I was five years old when these summer sorties began, and around 11 or 12 when they ended—and at that age a boy’s senses are wetted paper, with every experience an inkblot spreading like a glorious stain into one’s fibers.

I remember the cacao and the balimbing in the large and leafy Gutierrez yard, the fresh corn and the bales of dalandan from a gathering in a neighbor’s house, the sweet-sour flesh of rattan fruit sold in cords on the street. I remember going up Bangan Hill, a Bayombong landmark. I remember the pretty girls in nearby Solano, where I tagged along to teenage parties I was tragically too young for. But most of all I remember the delicious cakes that Aunt Lorice used to bake—chocolate upside-down cake best of all—moist and quivering with yummy goodness, filling the air with an aroma that I haven’t been able to shake off in 50 years.

What a joy it was when Dollie told me that Aunt Lorice and Uncle Pat—who now live in Canada—were coming home for Christmas. I quickly asked them out to lunch (at Abe in Trinoma, which has become one of my favorite restaurants for its bamboo rice and calamares en su tinta, among other unique offerings). Meeting them again after so many decades brought out a boy, a smiling boy, I myself hadn’t seen in a long time. Uncle Pat, now approaching 90, was slower of walk, but as tall and as handsome as ever; Aunt Lorice remained everyone’s ideal of a surrogate mom—kind, generous, brimming with stories about her children and grandchildren. Dollie, now a mother of two and who came with her husband Boy Basa, was still the ate to me and to the Gutierrez boys—especially Russell and Walter, now white-haired gentlemen in the pictures Aunt Lorice showed off. Before we knew it, three hours of happy reminiscences had passed.

Over lunch, Maurie gave Dollie a book that reminded us of another Bayombong connection. Its author was the Bayombong-born poet and novelist Edith Lopez Tiempo, one of our National Artists for Literature, and a literary mother to many writers such as myself, who first met her and her husband Ed as a fellow in their famous Silliman Writers Workshop in 1981. Without the gentle nudging of Ed and Edith in Dumaguete, I might not have gone back to school and on to a lifetime of writing and teaching.

And yet another Bayombong connection turned up when Maurie mentioned another beloved professor, this time from our own UP, who came from that place—the late, lamented Concepcion “Ching” Dadufalza, mentor to generations of students and future teachers. Not only was I one of those students; when Ching moved in with her sister seven years ago, she left her house on the UP campus to a younger faculty member—none other than that boy who spent a few summers in Bayombong.

Penman for Monday, January 11, 2009


MY RECENT piece on hats drew appreciative responses from quite a few readers, so apparently I'm not the only hat-wearer around town. (But of course I knew that: National Artist for Literature Rio Almario fancies fedoras; his fellow NA Frankie Sionil Jose favors berets; and poet Teo Antonio and artist Danny Dalena have been wearing hats for the longest time, although Teo—like me—has more urgent reasons to protect his pate, having to do with endangered follicles.)

Reader HRV—who, I imagine, is as elegant an octogenarian as they come—calls them “joys in my golden years,” something to grace her “silver profusing” hair. Reader Rolando Perez shared not only my passion for Tilley Endurables but also a picture of himself wearing one. My globetrotting friend Julie Hill, writing from her home in Southern California, shared her favorite: “cost 99 cents and is the best; I bought it at a nursery; it is made 100% from paper! Of course made in China—you crush it, no problem, it retains its shape.”

But the hat story that I found the funniest came from theater director and Penman suki Freddie Santos, who recalled how he came to own and wear a solitary cap you could've traded for a full outfit, from shirt to shoes, with change to spare. I asked Freddie for permission to excerpt his story (which he'd intriguingly titled "Hat and cold"), promising to do my best not to make him look foolish. I should’ve expected this trouper’s answer, which was “You couldn’t possibly make me look any more foolish than I already did!” So thanks, Freddie, and here goes.

“Hi, Mr. D, top of the season to you! Oh, what painful memories you churned up within me with your article this week. Two weeks ago, I was in Hong Kong directing an event. Temperatures were dropping all over the place so rather than walk around, I decided to ‘chill’ indoors at the hoity-toity Pacific Place mall. Considering the general pricing in this place, I had no intention of buying anything; I just wanted to window shop until my rehearsals that afternoon.

“Well, however cold it was outside on Hennessy Road, it was even cooler inside the mall and, with my pate clean-shaven (by choice!), it didn't take long before the aircon draft started affecting me. Gotta get me some head covering, I thought. I hadn't brought my favorite Russian farmer leather cap which I keep in my car for emergency headcover, so I decided to buy a cap before my slight coughing started to resemble something of the swine flu.

“I looked around, saw the Lane Crawford store, and walked straight into their jeans and casual wear area. I spotted a fatigue military cap, tried it on, found it fit wonderfully, and handed my credit card immediately to the salesperson... all without checking what the price tag was. I mean, this was a cap! Fifty Hong Kong dollars from any hole-in-the-wall grocer on Nathan Road! Granted, this was Lane Crawford, I figured 200, maybe 300 HK$ at the ridiculous most.

“Then the credit card printouts were given for me to sign. One thousand bloody effing HK dollars!!!! Roughly seven thousand pesos... for a cap, not even a hat, a cap the imitation of which could have been accomplished by any supplier of any stall in the Greenhills tiangge!

“But because...grrrr ...my body fat is superseded only by my arrogance, I signed away, doing my darnedest best to keep my hand from shaking. I immediately went outside and lit a cigarette, fuming literally and otherwise, all the while staring at my capped reflection in the Lane Crawford window wondering how... just how... could I possibly maximize this situation?

“Reselling the cap was out of the question since no one in his right mind, at least not in the Philippines, will pay anywhere near that kind of money for a second-hand military cap. Throughout the latter half of that cigarette, in between very short puffs, I just kept whispering to myself: you look really good in that cap!! You look like, wow, at least ten thousand bucks! In that cap. That is now yours. Forever. And when I put out that cigarette, I swore... I would be the best-looking capped person on both Hong Kong and Kowloon sides! Passersby of all nationalities would glance and think: oh man, who is that great-looking no-makeover-needed dude...with the cap?! It fits him like... like... like hair! Is it bespoke?! Has to be, just has to be!! A bespoke cap, yeah!!!

“Only after I had pushed myself onto that level of self-delusion did I muster the wherewithal to continue with the rest of my life. And for the next three days, in my hotel room, at my worktable, in the bathroom (!), all the way till I got back to Manila, I wore that cap.

“This coming January, I'm scheduled to go back to Hong Kong. Guess what I am sooooo bringing with me! Sigh.”

I had a good laugh over that story, but I suddenly remembered my own brush with the costs of ignorance, many years ago, when I went to the USA for the first time, on the first foreign trip of my life. I landed in Washington, DC, and not knowing anything but the grumbling of my stomach, I stepped into the nearest restaurant next to my hotel to assuage my hunger.

Having been to DC many times since, I know now what DC means—“dining costs”! I ordered something like a chicken sandwich—and got a bill for $10. That’s par for the course today, but this was 1980, folks, when you could still take an airconditioned Love Bus from Manila to Makati for P1.50.

When I told a cook in the fellowship center about my first American meal, she laughed (while making me a $2 lunch) and said, “You shoulda framed that chicken!”

Don’t lose that cap to the harbor wind, Freddie. Better yet, frame it!

Penman for Monday, January 4, 2010


“HOLIDAYS ARE joyful,” goes a popular Yuletide song, and while it’s a notion I cheerfully embraced as a kid, joy has sadly taken the back seat to something else—something suspiciously like stress—in my middle-aged Christmases. It doesn’t even come from having to give people gifts—a task at which I’m hopelessly inutile, and which Beng has assumed, compounding her own hypertension.

I think it has more to do with the fact that the Christmas break’s the time when I try to catch up with all the work I failed to finish over the year (because I told myself, “Well, there’s always the Christmas break), so I end up canoodling and wrestling with my laptop when I should be enjoying the fruit salad while contemplating the birth of the Infant Jesus.

This Christmas was no different. I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pecking away at edits on a book, not even mine, that needed to be done before the New Year. I’m also working simultaneously on three or four other book projects, and while I can’t complain about my good fortune to be having these jobs when other writers are staring at the ceiling, I couldn’t help thinking, one particularly lonesome moment, “Why? What for?”

And the answer, of course, is that I’m doing all this so we can take a break from work, which we can’t afford unless we first work our butts off, holiday or no holiday. Such is the lot of the petty bourgeoisie, whose dreams consist not of buying villas in Spain, but of taking package tours to Hong Kong.

In any event, Beng and I decided to take a post-Christmas excursion, using whatever remained of my Christmas bonus (a meager one, as a UP professor) and a bit of plastic, to decompress. A year ago, we were able to catch a budget fare to Shanghai, but no such bargains were to be found this time, so we settled for the closer and travel-tax-free charms of Tagaytay. We didn’t even know where we would stay; so eager were we to leave that we just tossed our bags into the back of the back of the Vitara and sped off.

We were just approaching the Sta. Rita exit when strange noises came from the engine compartment, so we pulled off the road and opened the hood, to be greeted by a curl of smoke rising from behind the radiator. I can find my way around computers and fountain pens, but am an absolute klutz when it comes to cars.

I watched helplessly as the smoke thickened, befouling the air with the smell of burning rubber, and I began computing how many book projects it would take to get another SUV, even a 12-year-old one like mine. I phoned my mechanic, rousing him out of his holiday stupor, and he confirmed that my airconditioning-whatever was stuck up, and that the fried fan belt would have to be removed if I didn’t want to spend New Year on the expressway.

Imagine that moment: you’re out for a break, just dying to get a day’s rest from the seasonal stress—and your car not only breaks down in the middle of the highway, but is threatening to literally go up in smoke. Thankfully the smoke subsided; even more thankfully, PNCC traffic officer Jaime Bulalacao appeared on his motorcycle like, well, a bulalacao—and within minutes, a second Santa, a mechanic named Benny, arrived from nearby Calamba to take a look under the hood. After much heaving and pulling, the busted fan belt came off, enabling us to hobble on to Tagaytay, albeit without the aircon, which Tagaytay has in spades, no Freon required.

Just cruising along the ridge, we located a small hotel called the Pura Vida, overlooking the lake. Its rates were substantially lower than those of the bigger and fancier hotels, and while its general architecture and design was what you might call Pinoy eclectic, the rooms themselves were very tastefully appointed, with real hardwood floors, a medium-sized ref, cable TV, and that most indispensable of modern conveniences, free wi-fi. Not too far from the Pura Vida, we discovered a simple restaurant called the Anak ng Seaside which served fresh seafood, paluto-style.

It’s in the lobby of the Pura Vida from where I’m typing and sending this piece; out the window, the crater lake sparkles, prettier even than Lake Como; the aroma of daing na bangus fills the air, inviting an imaginary dipping into strong garlic-laced vinegar. I did bring work to do, and I’ll get around to it, but for the first time this season, I’m beginning to catch a whiff of peace.


AND NOW a plug for a worthy cause. A reader named Paolo Chikiamco of Rocket Kapre Books wrote me to announce the release of new anthology of Philippine speculative fiction titled Ruin and Resolve, which you can by and download as a .pdf e-book.

Paolo says: “I started soliciting stories September 30, a few days after Ondoy hit, contacting a few Speculative Fiction writers I knew, to gauge if there would be enough interest/support to make the anthology possible. We have contributors not only from the Philippines, but from across the globe, Filipino writers pitching in from Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. The anthology contains a wide variety of stories, from those with a young adult flair to much darker tales, as might be expected of an anthology which deals with the theme of Ruin (because of such content and the use of adult language in some stories, prospective purchasers will see a parental rating).

To purchase the book, free registration is required on Smashwords (just as with other distributors like Amazon), after which payments may be made via major credit cards or via Paypal. For more information, check out http://www.rocketkapre.com/2009/ruin-and-resolve/.

Second Semester, AY 2009-2010


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

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)