Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, April 30, 2007


WHILE SPENDING this last Holy Week break with friends on the beach in Lian, Batangas, I drove out to town for some supplies, and on the trip back to the beachhouse I saw four small boys on the roadside, walking in the same direction I was going. It was a long, dusty, single-lane road leading to Matuod, and only tricycles plied the route, aside from private cars and four-wheel-drives. (I thought about that name. Tuod among the Tagalogs means “tree stumps”; in my native Visayan it means “truth.”)

I saw the boys pause and raise their hands, flagging me down to hitch a ride. They were slight dark smudges on the horizon. I drove past them for about fifty meters—then I stopped, perhaps remembering the long marches I used to have to make between my grade school and the main highway, where I took the bus home. I put the Vitara in reverse, braked in front of the incredulous boys, unlocked the door, and let them pile into the rear seat. They smelled of sun and sweat—a healthy, effervescent smell, like grass stalks broken.

“How far are you going?”

“Just to Matuod. It’s not too far!”

It was far enough a drive for me.

“We’re visiting a friend!”

“That’s a long walk,” I said. “You better make sure to stay together on the way back.”

“Oh, yes,” said one. “We always hold on to each other. We’re afraid of the tikbalang.”

“The tikbalang! You believe in the tikbalang?”

“Oh, yes. We saw it on TV! We saw it in Pedro Penduko.”

One of the boys must have sensed my skepticism, and pointed at a tall hill to our right. “Do you see that cross on the hilltop? On Good Friday, you can go up there and make a wish. After three days, your wish will be granted. It’s true! I know someone who did that and made a wish. After three days, she got a new cellphone.” The other boys nodded furiously.

“What do you want to wish for?” I asked the firmest believer.

“I want to be rich!”

“Yes, we want to be rich!” They broke out in mad laughter.

“And I wish my mother could speak,” one added. “She’s dumb, she can’t speak.”

It was Holy Thursday. I could imagine the boys climbing up that hill the next day, shutting their eyes and mumbling their wishes. I let them off on the road where I had to make a left turn to the beachhouse, wondering which wish was the more difficult one—sudden wealth, or the gift of speech.


SOME READERS have asked me to write a bit more about fountain pens—this column, after all, is supposed to be that of some self-styled “penman”—so I’ll indulge them with what I’ll call Fountain Pens 101, or a layman’s guide to the use and care of fountain pens (you know, those odd cigar-shaped things old or fussy people write with that squirt ink and leave huge blue-black blooms on your shirtfront if you’re not careful).

Right after my daughter’s wedding on board a small yacht in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, some papers needed to be signed, and when the captain asked for a pen, I, of course, quickly handed over my fountain pen to the captain (who had apparently seen and used quite a few of these things on duty, and used it with aplomb) and then to one of the ninangs (who signed with the nib facing the other way, but hey, no damage done, good nibs should be able to do that, producing a much finer line). With those precious signatures (no, there wasn’t a blank anywhere for the father of the bride to affix his consent), the marriage was officially sealed and I happily got my pen back in one piece without the tines of the nib pointing in different directions.

One of my excuses for collecting fountain pens has always been that it’s good to use one for life’s most important signatures—the ones you’ll want to lay down with a flourish, with the varying width of the line registering your subtleties of mood and expressiveness.

Alas, it’s also during these most momentous occasions when your pen is in its greatest danger of loss or destruction, chiefly because (a) your mind, understandably, is dwelling on profoundly more important things, like where to get the cab fare for all those trips to San Diego you’re soon going to have to make; (b) what looks to you like a rare 1934 Canadian-made Parker Vacumatic Oversize in burgundy red that you paid three months’ salary for is no more than a funny-looking, pointy-headed disposable ballpoint to the fellow next to you; (c) something so sharp has got to be meant for stabbing paper and cracking blocks of ice with; and (d) of course everyone knows how to use a fountain pen, so let them, including your nine-year-old niece, the short-order cook, and who was that delivery person who came in off the street asking for a signature on a receipt for flowers?

In other words, people break and lose fountain pens all the time—maybe not you, but someone else—and with these pens tending to be dearer than cellphones or PDAs, you’ll want to know what to do with them once you get one—say, from the office (for your ten years of hard labor—what, a silly Sheaffer for all that?) or as a wedding present.

What about wedding presents? Well, my new son-in-law Jerry—who, I’ve been proudly telling friends, is part-geek and part-artist—found himself the possessor of the same pen that people used to sign the wedding papers with. I suddenly realized that no one else was going to inherit my colorful trove of plasticky junk (and Beng’s precious blue bottles) than Demi and Jerry, so what better time was there to start moving the inventory over than the present? So from my breast pocket to Jerry’s went the late 1980s Parker Duofold International medium-point in blue marble (when Jerry’s savvy brother Ray heard that description, he told Jerry: “That means, don’t use it!”).

But of course you can, Jerry—with a few caveats (which he got from me the day after, when things had begun to calm down; Fountain Pens 101 only works in an atmosphere of cold sobriety).

1. Don’t pull—unscrew. I mean the cap, which seems to attract world-class yankers and pullers, or people who come from a generation reared on pulling the caps off ballpens, rollerballs, and sign pens. With very few exceptions—such as the modern Faber-Castell guilloche—fountain pens come with caps that screw on and off the barrel. Yanking the cap off (or, conversely, slamming it back into place) will strip the threads, and while some repair work can be done to restore these threads, you don’t need the trouble and the expense. So the rule of thumb, when handling something that looks suspiciously like a fountain pen, is to unscrew—counterclockwise.

2. Hold on to the cap. In those inevitable situations when someone wants to borrow your cherished fountain pen for a quick and mindless signature, and you don’t have a “loaner” ballpen in your pocket (that’s Rule No. 3, below), unscrew the cap yourself, then hold on to the cap. This serves two purposes: you’ve just made sure your threads are safe, and holding a cap (as stupid as you might look) serves as a reminder that your pen is out there somewhere, performing its noble mission. The borrower’s also bound to look at the uncapped pen in his or her hands (and go “Eeeeuwww!” once they see the inkstain on their fingers) and remember that it’s yours, not theirs. Half a pen is no good to anyone.

3. Keep a ballpen or a rollerball handy. Find a nice one that won’t look too shabby beside the Pelikan M800 in your pocket, but which, push comes to shove, you can lose without grieving for the next two months. These standbys serve as loaners—you’d hate it, and others would, too, if you had to make a prissy little speech every time you lent out your Duofold (“Now let me tell you about the proper handling of fountain pens….”). And let’s face it: fountain pens weren’t designed to sign office forms in triplicate.

4. Know how to refill when. Pens dry out faster than ballpens, and you don’t want to run out of ink just as you’re recording those priceless impressions of the Parisian underworld or the Davao food scene on your Moleskine notebook. Fountain pens come with a variety of filling systems—lever, twist, piston, and, most popularly these days, cartridges (ugh). It’s a pain to have to carry a bottle of ink around—I can’t help thinking of an accident wanting to happen—but that might be the price you pay for choosing an expensively elaborate way of saying “I was here!” when a cheap Bic could have served the purpose. And speaking of ink, remember that there’s more to them and more of them than black. Visit the website I’m mentioning below for more information about your pen and ink options.

5. Empty pens when not in use. While it can be charming and therapeutic for a collector like me to remove dried-up clods of ink from barrels and sacs that hadn’t been flushed in 50 or even 70 years, you don’t want to wake up one morning to find your Cross Townsend—you know, the one you filled up six months ago—all gunked up and refusing to spit out a single letter. (In such instances of benign forgetfulness, soak the pen up to the “section” or the part where your fingers grip the barrel in lukewarm water overnight; flush the dried or old ink out before refilling; repeat as necessary.)

So there you have it, ladies and gents, and if you feel like you’re up to an even more specialized education in fountain pens (with topics such as “disassembling a Parker 51” and “What alternatives do I have to the Montblanc 146?”) then you can visit the friendly folks at the Fountain Pen Network (www.fountainpennetwork.com).

Are you reading this, Jerry?

Penman for Monday, April 23, 2006

"SO HOW did the wedding go?” Last week’s column on my daughter’s wedding in San Diego brought in a flood of congratulations and good wishes—many of them from perfect strangers—which my family and I are deeply grateful for.

The wedding went swimmingly well, thank you very much. “Swimmingly” might not be the most appropriate of terms, since we were on a boat—a small yacht named the Renown, rented for the occasion. Demi and Jerry were wed on deck by the youngish captain while the boat cruised around the harbor in a lovely sunset. There were only about 30 guests, just enough for the Renown to keep afloat, and the reception followed the ten-minute ceremony right after, with great food and an open bar.

I managed to keep my poise during the wedding, having no other role than to lead the bride to the bow of the boat and busying myself with my camera thereafter. But after the vows and the snapshots, I took Demi to the stern to call her Nanay Beng, who had been left behind in Diliman and who was hosting a lunch for her parents and closest friends to celebrate the event from 7,000 miles away. That’s when we both lost it, and we could’ve sunk the ship right there if our tears didn’t fall overboard.

My crying binge actually began on the plane coming over. I thought I was having a good time listening to the inflight music—I always try to enjoy myself on plane rides, taking everything from the hot towels to the peanuts like it was my first and last time to fly—when a familiar song wafted into my ears and everything I had been holding back burst forth like my heart was a cheap plastic bag.

The song was the “My Boy Bill” soliloquy from the musical Carousel; strangely, serendipitously, it had been playing on the PA system in the hospital the moment Demi was born in 1974. If you know anything about Carousel and about that song, you’ll know that no-good hero Bill sings it in anticipation of having a son, only to realize that his namesake-to-be could very well be something else: “But what if he is a girl?” Then he goes into that chorus which wrings me dry every time I hear it, as I heard it as Demi was coming into the world: “My little girl, pink and white as peaches and cream is she….”

It was bad enough in 1974; it was worse in 2007, when I was about to give my girl, no longer so little, away. Did the airline music programmer or the captain know what the passenger in Seat 24-J was going through?

So I wept again on the Renown, and Demi wept with me, and Beng was crying on the phone, and a good cry was had by all, but a day later, after I’d emailed her the wedding pictures, Beng was able to tell me that “My baby is beautiful, and I’m at peace.” And so we are.

To our new in-laws Jerry, his parents Ric and Gudy, and his brothers and sisters-in-law Ray and Lorie and Dean and Gayle, many thanks for receiving Demi into your family, and be forewarned: she can be quite a handful.



“WHAT HAPPENS in Vegas stays in Vegas,” so the saying goes, so I was eager to make something happen when I swept into Las Vegas for the first time last week, rather belatedly in this footloose life.

It took us six hours in a rented SUV driven by my brother-in-law Eddie, with my sister Elaine and my mom in the back seat, to get from San Diego to Las Vegas, plowing into the fog of the high desert before emerging into the vast, windblown, Joshua-tree-punctuated plains below. (“A kitty litter box,” someone once aptly described the Southwestern desert.) Overhead, traveling in a style befitting their new status, were my daughter Demi and her husband of one day Jerry; a couple of days in Vegas was all Jerry could spare from his crushing workload for a honeymoon, and now the poor guy was about to share it with a carload of his new in-laws.

Nevada’s promise of gambling and glitz rose up from the desert as soon as we hit the state line at Primm, where Buffalo Bill’s Resort and Casino—sporting no less than a roller-coaster—competed with the Primm Valley and Whiskey Pete’s. We’d meet them again on our way out, but for now it was Vegas or bust. We got there in blinding daylight at past noon, and the starkness of things didn’t do anything to diminish the sheer visual impact of the place: it was Egypt, Paris, Rome, Disneyland, Manhattan, and China all at once, along the same short strip with probably more hotels, casinos, stretch limos, entertainers, showgirls, and of course gamblers per capita than any other place on earth. “Over the top” probably describes Las Vegas best—or, that failing, “everything in excess.” Everything about Las Vegas—from the garish juxtapositions of settings and colors to the exuberant and elaborate fantasies wrought by its designers in glass, marble, and water—is meant to transport you to another world, where you can be someone and something other than yourself. That new and other person can therefore do outrageously different things—like bet a week’s pay on a throw of the dice.

For a semi-retired gambler like me—a veteran of Atlantic City, Macau, and the Manila “floating casino,” now content with penny-ante Texas Hold ‘Em weekend games—going to Vegas meant facing my demons.

As a writer, you can always have the grand excuse that you’re “gathering material,” and I suppose that’s what I thought I was doing, spending night after night for a couple of years sharing blackjack tables with car salesmen, japayukis, manicurists, and off-duty cabaret singers. It was a colorful world—if you could see the color through the cigarette smoke—and I preserved a bit of it in my story “Except Felisa,” writing which marked the end of that particular addiction.

I don’t mind admitting that I had a gambling habit once—I tend to get obsessive about things I love or like—and I became such a daily fixture in one of the local casinos that the dealers and my fellow regulars at the blackjack table came to know me as “The Prof.” I may have been the professor, but I came in for an education—never mind how much the tuition cost—learning such vital statistics as the fact that the house advantage over the player is smallest in blackjack, at 52 vs. 48 percent.

I quit when the silly futility of it hit me cold one morning (a gambler was once famously described as someone who “went out for his daily dose of injustice”) and I decided that there were easier and surer ways of making money, like writing coffee-table books. Thankfully, I also lost my nerve—I couldn’t make a big bet without squirming in my seat, thinking of all the cans of corned beef and tubs of ube macapuno ice cream that I was wagering away—and when that happens, you’re fundamentally done for as a gambler.

So when I sauntered onto the casino floor of the Golden Nugget, it was with a combination of frenzy and fear; I knew I was going to play—what else did I come to Vegas for?—but I finally decided that I would limit myself to the $5 tables, and that I wasn’t going to win my dream Mini Cooper on this trip, but would be happy to go home with a few dollars more in my pocket than when I came in.

And that’s what happened in Vegas: over the next couple of days and nights, I fished out no more than $100 from my wallet, played by the book, bet no more than $20 at any one time, and won no more than $120 at any one time, but also emerged $60 ahead, $20 of it going back to the casino in tips to the dealers and the cocktail waitresses (ah, yes, I treated myself to quite a few of those “free” drinks, which maybe explains why my winning stash of $120 came down to half). Twice I went down to about $15, but worked my way back up to $100, and soon as I hit that, I quit, figuring that I’d gotten my entertainment dollar’s worth shivering in my shoes over a $10 hit-for-double. I still walked away from the tables a $40 winner—which is probably more than most people who go there can say.

The best way to take Vegas is with lots of tongue and lots of cheek, to enjoy it as a simulacrum (look that up in the dictionary, boys and girls, it’s your word for the day) of the real world. Having been to Bellagio in Italy, I didn’t expect to find Bellagio in Las Vegas, and I didn’t. I found showtime, not real life, which is what you go to Vegas for. Just try and keep your shirt on.


THE SUMMER'S halfway over, but if you’re still looking for something new and worthwhile for you and your kids to do, you might want to try learning puppet-making with no less than the master puppeteers of Teatrong Mulat ng Pilipinas, one of Asia’s leading puppet troupes. TMP is holding a puppet-making workshop from April 24 to 28 at Tita Amel’s Children’s Theater on 64 Mapagkawanggawa St., Teachers Village, Quezon City. Kids (five years old and up) and adults (most especially parents and educators) will learn to make their own puppets from recyclable materials and get to present their own puppet show. Registration is on April 24 starting at 1 pm. For details call 921-9773, 929-0895 or text 0918-9032040.

Penman for Monday, April 16, 2007

AS YOU read this with your Monday morning coffee, I’ll be across the Pacific, giving our unica hija Demi’s hand away in marriage to a fine young man by the name of Jerry Ricario. They met online—she had a blog, which he responded to, and they were soon e-mailing and calling each other up; thus are romances born these days, with blips crossing the digital ether and recomposing themselves into something as close as you can get to a human emotion like wonder, like love.

It’s a day I’d been trying to imagine for a good many years now. Was I going to cry? (I’ve been weeping buckets, for the silliest reasons.) What was I going to wear? (Methinks a black suit and a silver tie.) What was I going to give the couple? (I’ll tell you soon enough.) Who was she going to marry? (Oddly enough, I’ve never worried about it—Demi’s a smart girl, and will choose wisely.)

Demi’s taken her sweet time to get here; she turned 32 last October—a sensible age, by current standards, to settle down. Kids these days, they put all kinds of carts before their horses—the job, the career, the car, the apartment, the MBA. I suppose you can’t blame them, either, because that’s what most parents look for: “Can he feed you? Where will you live?” Me, all I ever wanted for Demi was happiness, in whatever shape or form it took—and I’m glad she finally found it in Jerry, an avionics engineer with a passion for museums, books, and music.

Beng and I actually met Jerry even before Demi did, on a trip we made to San Diego sometime last year when I was a visiting professor in a Midwestern college. Within ten minutes he and I were talking about Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot for the X-15 (Jerry tests the guidance systems he designs in the Mojave Desert—a major score, in my boy’s book), and I knew we were going to get along.

Today I can’t help remembering that Demi’s mom and I got married when Beng was 23, and I was 20 (it was, in fact, my 20th birthday, and my mother had to sign a consent form before the judge could do what he was supposed to). It was all over in five minutes; one of my brothers ran to the restroom to take a leak and when he came back we were signing the papers. Then we repaired to a nearby restaurant for merienda cena; there was no honeymoon, except the one in our newly rented apartment, which we gave up after several months of playing house, realizing how much cheaper the parental dominion was.

Back then, you didn’t plan for these things too much; thanks to martial law, our comrades were dying all around us with numbing regularity, so we figured that we would be lucky to reach 25, and that if there was anything else we felt like doing in life before being shredded by an Armalite, we had best do it soon.

Three months after getting together—and after I’d just been released from martial-law prison—Beng and I figured out our budget on a paper napkin and decided to get hitched as soon as I turned 20. After nine months, right on schedule, Demi arrived—and for a moment back there I nourished the thought that I’d become a grandfather at 40, if children did what their parents did, but of course they never do.

All I can think of right now, hours before enplaning for San Diego, is shining my shoes. In the mad rush to get everything together—my semester’s grades, everyone’s presents, a slideshow I’m going to surprise the couple with, and cans of sweet banana that Demi specifically requested—I’d forgotten to have my black pair resoled, so I’m going to have to make do with my dark brown loafers, which need a good waxing. Whatever else I do—fathers of brides always seem to manage to make fools of themselves in the movies—I won’t be charged with going to the wedding in scruffy shoes. Maybe that’s the Pinoy in me: look smart, from your toes up; always wear a watch; always change your underwear; don’t let them think you’re clueless, even if you are.

I shouldn’t be so nervous, because our new in-laws the Ricarios are Fil-Ams from Bicol, vagabond provincianos just like the Dalisays from Romblon and the Poticars from Iloilo. Just a week ago, our balae Gudy sent us a letter—by snail mail, in longhand—whose simple but heartfelt words spoke volumes about her family’s down-home values.

Maybe that’s what scares me—never having been a balae, could I live up to expectations, as a sometimes stubborn nonconformist? No, it isn’t like I’ll turn up at the wedding half-drunk in week-old jeans and swearing at the preacher like a bad Jack Nicholson; when it comes to fashion, my idea of nonconformity is to press my jeans, not rip them. It’s more like I, uhm, don’t care much for church weddings, especially big ones, and am immensely relieved that Demi and Jerry decided to get married on a rented yacht, with just a few people aboard. I’ve been told that there will be a proper ceremony in church next year in Manila (for which I suppose I’ll have to make a special confession, and a long one that will be)—but I’ll be a good sport, and be the Catholic schoolboy I once was, just for the kids.

I’d probably be breathing easier if Beng were coming with me, but she’s not; she’s packing my bags, but we couldn’t get her a tourist visa in time for the wedding. She’s being customarily quiet about folding my shirts and tucking the balled-up socks into little corners of my bag, but I know—even as she tells me it’s all right that I’ll be going to San Diego alone—that she’s writing her own piece in her heart and head, although it’ll never get published, unlike mine. Her baby’s getting married across the ocean, and she’ll be watering the plants and changing the curtains at home, as if she had nothing better to do.

If I cry today as I know I will, my excuse will be that I’m shedding them on behalf of the mother of the bride. We did something good and right together, Beng—and there she goes.



AND WHAT of our gifts? Surely someone else will provide the inevitable pots and pans, the immutable cutlery, the deathless fondue set. (Just for the record, we never minded receiving those; three decades later, we’re still in need of them.) I wish I could write the newlyweds a ticket to Europe, but I’ve never been to Europe except on someone else’s tab. For a lot less, I could give them a new Mac, but I can sense that this is already a marriage of two geeks, with Demi bringing her own iBook into the bargain to complement Jerry’s PC and his awesome networking skills.

Ours, at any rate, is a family of modest means; in this country, writers and artists make only so much. Unless you count my old pens and watches and Beng’s old bottles, there are no family jewels to speak of, no heirloom silverware.

Beng, however, has always had her present at hand: a 1973 drawing by her former mentor and later National Artist Jose Joya—the first of what we hope will be the couple’s own little trove of artworks by Filipino masters.

As for me, a month ago and purely by chance, I came across an unusual message in my inbox, advertising the sale of one of my Holy Grails: a first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart, a moving, often gut-wrenching, account of a Filipino immigrant’s life in America in the 1930s. (I turned green with envy when I saw a near-mint copy of it, dust jacket and all, on the shelf of one of UC San Diego’s leading Fil-Am scholars, Dr. Jody Blanco, during my visit last year; someone had gifted him with the very book and edition I’d been chasing after for ages.)

I’m not a compulsive book collector in the same way I collect fountain pens, but I simply couldn’t pass this one up, and I made a bid for it; after a couple of weeks of polite negotiation by text and e-mail between myself and the seller, my bid prevailed, and he turned over the book to me at Jollibee Philcoa. My hands trembled as I accepted the book; I had written my undergraduate thesis on Bulosan, and as a Filipino writer in English myself and an occasional visitor to America, I felt that I understood Bulosan’s complex character.

I don’t have to report how much I paid for the book—you know how it is with these things, the price is always a little too much for the buyer and a little too little for the seller, although we were both pleased with the outcome.

The book itself was in only fair-to-good condition, as collectibles go; it had long lost its dust jacket, and some pages had been taped together. But it had something that even Jody’s copy didn’t—a personal inscription by Carlos Bulosan himself, to an equally famous Filipino, a former (then future) Chief Justice: “For Fred Castro: This story of my life will, I hope, bring me closer to you and our native land through our good friend, J. C. Dionisio, with my best wishes. Carlos Bulosan Los Angeles 3-6-46.” Fred Ruiz Castro received the book in Manila and signed it on the 4th of April.

I thought for a minute whether I would be defacing and devaluing the book by adding my own inscription to it, but given to whom and where it will now be going, I should think that its return to California, 61 years later, merits a few squiggles in my own pen-wielding hand. If Bulosan’s America was in the heart, for our dear daughter, the heart is in America.

Live long, live right, and every now and then look homeward.

Penman for Monday, April 9, 2007


THE HOLY Week will be over by the time you read this, and some of you may even have made the trek up to Baguio—though God knows Holy Week is the worst time to be up there among the teeming hordes of refugees from the lowland heat. If you were there last Saturday and happened to drop by Camp John Hay Manor for a nightcap, you would have been treated to the best musical show north of Manila (heck, let’s include Manila as well).

We go up to Baguio every year for the UP Writers Workshop, but I have to admit that for a good many years now, the city’s best attraction for me hasn’t been its piney scent or sweater weather, but a trio of singers going by the moniker On Call. The name comes from the fact that Jett Acmor, Mari Laoyan, and Ivan Cruz—as well as their musical director, Dr. Dennis Flores—are all medical professionals.

I’ve followed them around Baguio from corner to corner—last year’s Pilgrims Café on Leonard Wood Road has gone Korean, like many places in that city—and have never been disappointed by their exquisite blending of voices and a repertoire that’s guaranteed to make you wonder whatever happened to music and lyrics, especially if you’re over 40 and have some memory of the art of the singable song. On Call’s Broadway and Carpenters medleys are to die for, and my two gin-and-tonics (somehow, I felt the moment deserved something smarter than beer) went perfectly with the group’s two sets.

If you want to catch them, however, better be at the Manor’s lobby bar by 9 pm on a Saturday—that’s the only time and place they perform, having other missions in life; the place was packed when we got there, so come early or make reservations. On Call’s music was pleasantly potent medicine, and our little party of poets and fictionists marched back uphill to our hostel with a spring in our step and a song in our resuscitated hearts.


ONE OF the sidelights of this year’s UP Writers Workshop—which took place March 25 to April 1—was a symposium on “New Trends in Philippine Literature” sponsored by UP Baguio and featuring five of the workshop panelists: Jing Hidalgo, Rene Villanueva, Jimmy Abad, Bien Lumbera, and myself.

Since these distinguished colleagues were all experts in their fields—fiction and nonfiction, children’s literature, poetry, and regional literature, respectively—it fell to me to find something else to speak on, and I chose alternative literature, specifically, the blog as a new literary form.

I don’t know exactly how many Filipino bloggers there are, but I’m sure they must be in the tens of thousands. We’re one of the world’s largest users of social-networking services like Friendster and Multiply, so the blogs they spawn can’t be far behind.

I’ve written about blogging in this corner at least twice before, so I’m not going to go over the basics again, except to remind the uninitiated that blogs (from “Web logs”) are online journals maintained by people all over the world. I started a blog in November 2005 (you can find its Internet address below), after some initial misgivings, but now I think I can say that I understand why it appeals to both writers and readers. What attracts people to blogs and blogging?

First, it’s democratic, to the extent that the Internet can be accessed by (some, admittedly not most) Filipinos. Once you get online, blogging is free in terms of hosting and of the software you need to produce a blog. It’s your dream realized of becoming a columnist, editorialist, commentator, reporter, analyst, and critic—and nobody can tell you what to write; you can choose to rave about your new curtains and your cousin’s indie film, or rant about dripping faucets in Binondo and vanishing rainforests in Brazil.

Theoretically, blogs give you a broader reach than newspapers, reaching people around the planet with a tap of the “enter” key. But even more important than the size of this audience is its specificity. Certain blogs—certain personalities and subjects—attract certain people. You audience can be very faithful, following your postings from week to week; but they can also be very demanding, and will be quick to let you know what they think about what you think.

That’s because most blogs are interactive, featuring comment spaces that allow readers to chat with the blogger and with fellow readers. Interactivity enhances the blog’s democratic character, creating small communities strengthened further by links and cross-postings. (I’m the autocratic exception, having decided from the start to turn off the comment feature—which I feel invites vexatious chatter—in favor of e-mailed messages I can review and post selectively.)

Another feature of blogs is their anonymity—or at least the option to remain anonymous or to create an online persona such as the “Sassy Lawyer,” “Rambling Soul,” or, in my case, the “Pinoy Penman.” This persona (Latin for “mask”) isn’t necessarily you—it’s your public face, maybe smarter-sounding and sharper-looking than you really are.

Blogs are meant for today, this week, maybe this month—certainly not for all eternity. If a virus or a hacker wipes out your Website and you didn’t back up, it’s gone forever, lost to the great trash can or recycle bin in the sky.

Blogs are extremely flexible and variable in terms of form and language; you can have blogs with pictures, you can have blogs with nothing but pictures; you can have blogs in English, Filipino, and Taglish, all in the same place.

The question some people might raise is, yes, it’s a blog, but is it literature? Of course it is; it’s writing; you just can’t find it on a paper page. Whether it’s good or bad literature depends on what standards have yet to arise for this kind of literature, but I have a gut feeling that bloggers don’t particularly care; 90% of blogs may be a digital form of navel-gazing, but hey, it’s my navel. Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine, and that’s all there is to it, at least for now.

(Incidentally, the 2007 Philippine Blog Awards were due to be given out last Saturday in the following categories: personal, technology, travel, entertainment, home and living, socio-political, news and media, business and entrepreneur, sports and recreation, fashion and lifestyle, photo blog, and podcasts. It should be interesting to see what Pinoys value in blogs—and how they’re evaluated, in the first place.)


I'D LIKE to take this opportunity to announce that the Philippine Science High School National Alumni Association (Lord, what a mouthful!) will be holding a General Membership Meeting at the PSHS Main Campus in Diliman on April 14, Saturday, at 2 pm. Important amendments will be discussed and voted on by members in good standing. For more details, please check out the PSHSNAA website at www.pshsnaa.org. (I’ll be away for my daughter’s wedding—oops, that’s another story!—but if you’re a PSHS alumnus, I hope you can attend this meeting to see how we can best help S&T advance in this country, if only for our grandchildren’s sake.)


GOING BRIEFLY back to music, let me acknowledge all the people who wrote in to inform me that the Celeste Legaspi album of Rolando Tinio’s translated songs has been reissued on CD. Pete Lacaba also reminded me that Celeste had apparently already recorded a Tinio translation of “Sabor a Mi.” I look forward to savoring these rare delights—and if On Call ever goes down the salinawit road, I’ll be in double heaven.

Penman for Monday, April 2, 2007

WE WERE up in Baguio last week for the 46th edition of the University of the Philippines National Summer Writers Workshop, and this year we had twelve fellows not just from UP, but also from the Ateneo, La Salle, UST, and other universities.

As I mentioned here last February, the fellows in English were Daryll Delgado and Katrina Tuvera (fiction); Conchitina Cruz and Mark Anthony Cayanan (poetry); and Adam David, Sandra Nicole Roldan, and Lawrence Ypil (creative non-fiction). In Filipino, they were Eros Atalia and Honorio de Dios (fiction); Edgar Samar and Jerry Gracio (poetry); and Jose Dennis Teodosio (drama).

The UP Institute of Creative Writing has redesigned the workshop so that it no longer caters to neophyte writers but to people who’ve already put some work behind them—in a first book, or a manuscript fit for one. We even invited several former UP workshoppers to join this one, to check up on how they were doing and to give them a fresh boost in mid-career, knowing how solitary the writing life can get for most young people after college and in the thick of a career and family concerns. We asked the fellows to present and to speak on an ongoing writing project—to share with us (their literary elders, and in many cases their classroom mentors) their current anxieties, their plans and hopes for the future, and their take on the literary situation in the Philippines and in the world.

Not surprisingly, the fellows responded with great alacrity, reporting on their progress (and occasional and inevitable missteps) in their writing and raising some very basic but also very difficult questions about the writing life.

For example, Katrina Tuvera—the daughter of the renowned fictionists Kerima Polotan and Juan Tuvera, and author of the recently-launched The Jupiter Effect, a novel on the martial law period—battled with the desire to write more fiction about that time from the point of view of a family whose fortunes were tied to those of the Marcoses, without being seen to be autobiographical or privy to some information she simply didn’t have.

Larry Ypil contended with being gay, being Cebuano, and being middle-class—and with the transition from poetry to autobiographical prose. He noted that “While my problems in terms of craft will certainly present themselves in the workshop of my essay, and of the short pieces that I’m working with, and from, (and maybe the stranger-reader’s eye would be sharper by far to determine and name these numerous lapses), perhaps it would be more productive to end with some theoretical issues which I continue to grapple with as a ‘creative nonfiction’, ‘autobiographical’” writer.

“How does one possibly avoid the inherently indulgent method of talking about one’s life? When I am half-tempted to both stare at my ‘navel’, and pretend it isn’t there (in a fit of self-consciousness), how does one possibly balance the excesses of self-referentiality and the ‘universality’ of all powerful artforms, especially in what seems to me to be an extremely ‘masturbatory’ genre? Upon what kind of validity is the creative non-fiction autobiographical writer built on? Is my navel your navel too?”

Playwright J. Dennis Teodosio—who writes plays with gay themes—confessed that “I’m not ‘out’ as a writer yet, not to my family. They know very little about my writing. Because I’m the head of the family, nobody demands an explanation for what I write and why I write. All they know is, I earn from my writing and I must’ve achieved something because of all the certificates of recognition I’ve had framed on Recto. When my mother saw Gee-Gee at Waterina, she asked me how I could have possibly written about gay characters. I told her that I conducted interviews and did some research. She was so happy. So that’s why the dialogue was so natural, she said—so very, very gay.”

For poet Mark Anthony Cayanan, “My persistent devotion to the sort of writing that is intensely informed by autobiography… was a personal reaction drawn from a more fundamental source: my need for identification. I was (and still am, occasionally), in the presence of these poems, my younger self: the 11-year-old kid whose life was quickly reconfigured the moment he saw Michelle Pfeiffer, in shiny black leather, crack her whip in Batman Returns (1992)…. Poetry, like all art, is a gesture towards the immortal, one made by the writer who so painstakingly affixes his/her thoughts onto paper. That the poet occasionally seems to announce this intention—and his/her degree of involvement in it—so willingly does not strike me as an unpleasant idea.”

Most provocative was Adam David’s presentation titled “DAZZLE THEM WITH BRILLIANCE, BAFFLE THEM WITH BULLSHIT! Or DON’T BE SO HUMBLE, YOU’RE NOT THAT GREAT!: Perplexions on Brief Exercises In Youthful Blasphemy.” Throughout his piece, this angry young man inveighs against the “elitists” with the earnest contempt Holden Caulfield had for the “phonies,” but Adam’s disgust is leavened by humor and a touch of self-deprecation. He was, he said, in the workshop not so much for validation but for an audience—and he got one, even as the Tatay-from-Elitist-Hell in me wondered with some amusement what song Adam was going to be singing in 20 years, not that it particularly seemed to matter to him at the moment.

Among most of the fellows slithered the snake of doubt about what exactly they were doing and how they were managing the transition from this genre to that. I suspected that their apprehensions—couched in aesthetic and ideological questions—more simply had to do with the transition from one’s literary youth to incipient middle age (something that comes earlier in a writing career than it does in real life). How was one to find one’s own voice? What was one’s definition of a successful career in writing? Was there a formula or well-trodden path to follow to literary prominence, or should one just go on writing one’s own way regardless of the consequences?

This led me and my closest friends and colleagues among the panelists—Charlson Ong, Jimmy Abad, Jing Hidalgo, and Ricky de Ungria—to muse about our own lives in writing.

We began writing at a time when there were no Creative Writing programs to attend or degrees to be had. We didn’t know too much about and therefore couldn’t be bothered by what other writers were doing, apart from what swatches we’d read of their work. We didn’t even think of ourselves as “poets,” “fictionists,” “playwrights,” “writers in English”, “regional writers,” or “critics.” We wrote all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons—money was a good one—so sometimes we were newspaper reporters, sometimes we were copywriters, sometimes we were editors, and sometimes we were all of the above; the category didn’t matter. We were driven and fascinated by writing, not by being or becoming writers.

When contests like the Palancas and the CCP awards came along, we joined them with gusto and enjoyed competing with each other, because there wasn’t much else to be excited about—there wasn’t much literary publishing under martial law—but we didn’t think of them as the be-all and end-all of writing. (Today, when some writers all-too-stridently denounce these contests and their joiners as a sell-out and swear never to join them—or join them again, in the case of at least one perennially loud whiner—I want to tell them to put on some shorts, take a walk, drink some buko juice, and get back to their own writing.)

At some point we realized that what mattered most, in practical terms, was to write and publish books—that you could talk about writing and literature until you were blue in the face and lead the most Byronically riotous life, but ultimately you would be remembered and valued for your words on the open page.

So we wrote and we wrote—as I keep doing from week to week—despite and against the claims of life and livelihood, trying to produce a page for ourselves against the ten pages we wrote for others. I sympathized the most with fellow Jerry Gracio, a fine poet who’s had to pay his dues by writing scripts for such sex sizzlers (the vegetal monologues, you might say) as “Talong,” which I happened to see and to review on my homepage, a coincidence over which Jerry and I had a few good laughs.

Ultimately, every literary life follows its own trajectory. You can take the safe and proven path by going to writing school and maybe taking an MA or an MFA in creative writing abroad; you win a few Palancas, publish a couple of books, teach a course or a workshop in creative writing, and then one day you wake up to find someone asking you to write a blurb for the back of his or her first book. You have arrived—somewhere, somehow—slightly dazed, vaguely unhappy, but gratified to have a family, a house, and maybe a car you can call your own.

Or you could choose the rebel’s way, slaying every literary father and every literary dragon you encounter, piling on the inevitable welts and bruises, refusing to accept a peso you didn’t bleed for, embracing struggle and suffering with a martyr’s passion. And then you wake up alone, embittered and unloved, wondering if anything you ever said made a difference to the world, or even to someone else.

One afternoon last week—on a break from the workshop and quite without intending to—some of us who had our jogging shoes on took the Eco-Trail up and down a series of hills in Camp John Hay. It proved a murderous trek for the uninitiated, but we were rewarded with a spectacular view of a sunset swathed in fog; a daylong brownout had hit the city, but in the distance twinkled gaslight and candlelight, and the faint possibility of a cold bottle of beer salvaged from the heat of the afternoon.

No workshop can plot or promise the future, but one could bring you to some hilltop for a view of the other side.