Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, February 26, 2007


AS A writer of dry-eyed realist stories, I find it hard to believe in miracles, or even the happy endings I’ve been challenging my writing students to produce—believably, logically, inevitably. It’s a sad sign of our times that we view goodness and grace with suspicion, thinking that there has to be a catch somewhere—some private angle, crushing disappointment lurking in the wings.

And so it was that when I received word that an appeal I posted here a few months ago actually produced results, I was amazed, hardly imagining that something you type out into the digital ether could change lives somewhere else in the city or the planet.

But it’s true: and I’m very happy to report that two young men from Naga will be achieving their dream of going back to school, thanks to the kindness of Filipino-American entrepreneur and philanthropist Loida Nicolas-Lewis, assisted by Dr. Josefina Jayme-Card of the Jayme-Card-Ayala-Pathways (JCAP) Scholarship Fund and Solvie Nubla of Pathways Philippines.

Luz de Leon, a Fil-Am community leader in San Francisco, had read my appeal last year seeking help for Emmanuel Baesilico, an honors Business Ad sophomore at Ateneo de Naga, who had been abandoned by both his parents, and Fermin Curaming—the eldest of six children, and the product of a broken home—who had been hoping to enroll at the Ateneo de Naga this June. Luz passed the appeal on to her network of US-based friends and organizations, and got a positive response shortly after.

Loida Nicolas-Lewis has committed to pay for these boys’ tuition; however, she wants them to learn some entrepreneurial skills so they can help cover their own expenses. Fermin will be taking up BS Psychology instead of BS ECE, having volunteered with the parish church and done community work during the time he was out of school; now he thinks he can help others more by taking a more people-oriented course.

Again, what can I say but many, many thanks to Loida, JJ, Solvie, and of course to Luz for making this gift possible—and, who knows, for convincing this hardboiled fictionist that good things do happen in the real world, just because.


SPEAKING OF good things, I was killing time between classes one afternoon recently, sipping a Coke in the parking lot of UP’s Faculty Center, when I heard a voice calling me from the driver’s seat of a shiny new Honda Civic.

“Sir! Are you going anywhere? Can I give you a lift?” Driving the car was a man in his 40s, smiling brightly, dressed in a smart blue shirt. I had to do a double-take to realize that it was Dionisio “Bong” Ulep, driving my friend Fidel’s (or, to be more precise, his wife Mo’s) service car.

A few years ago, Bong was on the brink of certain death. He had little more than his family—a wife who came home from being an OFW to stand by her husband and seek whatever help she could get, and three bright kids whose studies and dreams had to be put on hold while their father and his illness used up whatever resources came in. His diseased kidneys were killing him. At that point, there was no help forthcoming from anywhere; no one knew nor cared who Bong Ulep was and what was happening to him.

Then a journalist took pity on him, and put a story out about his case. It was one of those things you glance at for a second over breakfast, then very quickly forget—or try to. In my case, I couldn’t; I’d thought I was inured to reportage about thousands of deaths in Bangladesh from another tidal wave or another explosion of toxic fumes in India, but this one man’s struggle to stay alive for his family bothered me enough for me to clip the story and save the clipping. Not that I did anything about it—it just hung there on the fridge beneath a magnet, another idle to-do, perhaps to send a check to when the spirit truly moved me.

It was Beng who saw the clipping, and read it more closely. She knew it was uncharacteristic of me to respond to these appeals or to take up charitable causes; my writing was my cause, and I had enough writing to do—enough fictional tragedies—to be bothered by specific cases of real people. But being what she is, Beng didn’t let go; she took the case and the cause on, met with the Uleps, and launched a personal campaign to get Bong the kidney transplant he so desperately needed.

It was a long, taxing, and often bruising effort that sometimes left Beng and Rissa in tears when no contributions were forthcoming for Bong’s dialysis, which became more frequent. He was living on a wing and a prayer; sometimes prayer was all he got. We were dipping into our own savings for strangers, and I often wondered what we had gotten ourselves into—if it was a mistake in the first place to even get Bong’s hopes up, only to dash them in the end.

But a magnificent combination of charity, guts, and just plain luck got him through. Friends and strangers chipped in, the PCSO pledged to underwrite his transplant, his daughter Mariel proved a willing and compatible donor, and Bong himself found the inner strength to pull through from his operation in December 2003.

Today Bong—a professional driver before his illness—drives for my friend Fidel, and he couldn’t have found a fairer and gentler employer; he drives with pride and confidence, his sons are back in school, and Mariel has a full-time job with a fastfood company.

And I still can’t believe it happened not just because we read his plea, but because dozens of people took the time and trouble to give a little of their extra cash to give someone another chance at life and a few more, hopefully many more, years with family.


YOU'RE PROBABLY wondering why I’m telling you this story. That’s right, despite everything we’ve learned about slinking back into safe and quiet uninvolvement, Beng’s found another sad soul to seek help for.

How much more Pinoy can these stories get? Lita Peñaflor worked as a seamstress in a shop until kidney disease forced her home. Her husband is a carpenter and they have a son who just graduated from a computer college and is now working and helping with his mother’s medication. Lita’s younger sister Baby helps Lita with whatever she earns in a handicraft shop.

Despite her illness, Lita continues to be very active at home. She accepts sewing jobs as well as orders for pancit and fresh lumpia.

But Lita has been sick since 2003 and needs to have a kidney transplant soon. She was able to request assistance from a foundation for the transplant, but can have it only after all the necessary tests or workups have been done on her and her son, Aris, who will be giving his mother a kidney. The workups will cost P60,000 and do not include the thrice-a-week dialysis she has to undergo. About P100,000 needs to be raised to cover everything.

Is there a politician out there who can spare this from his or her campaign kitty? Or better than vote-getters, are there ordinary citizens who can help give this story a happy ending? (If you think you can help, please e-mail me, and I’ll find a way to put you through to the Peñaflors.)

Penman for Monday, Feb. 19, 2007


IT MUST be term-paper time again, because I’ve been receiving the seasonal slew of frantic messages—by e-mail and by text (ah, the price of going public) from hapless-sounding students beseeching me to help them with their term papers on my novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place. These people, of course, never read what I wrote in this space last year, or the year before that, nicely explaining why I can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t write their answers for them, even if I’m responsible for their present grief.

I do send them a stock answer, which I’ll trot out again in a minute, but these poor kids must be wondering why—for all the time and effort I put into that gentle brush-off—I didn’t just write an essay about the novel and its meaning, to put them out of their misery.

So, all right, for the umpteenth time, I’ll you why. I believe, first of all, that an author’s job is to write a story, not to explain it. If you have to explain something you wrote, that almost means that you failed (and maybe I did). Second, I’m also a teacher, and I think students should put a game and honest effort into figuring things out for themselves—or even by and among themselves, in a discussion group.

Writing an author to ask him what his work means may seem smart and resourceful, and I’m sure there will be many, more kindly disposed authors out there who will be only too happy to tell you what they think about their own work. But for me, relying on the author’s own interpretation comes awfully close to cheating; you didn’t learn much, you let someone else do the work for you, and you got an unfair advantage over those who had to think for themselves, or those who had to study works by dead, offline, or otherwise inaccessible people.

Sometimes it’s not what you ask, but how you ask it. If I see some evidence from the questions that the student has arrived at some basic understanding of the text and wants to engage me in a debate or discussion, then I might be that much more inclined to respond. If a student lays out an intelligent hypothesis and asks me to comment on it, I might indulge that, too—if I have the time. There are, indeed, a few questions I’m quite happy to answer, again time permitting, questions that have to do with the writing of the novel or of my stories, as opposed to what they mean.

The kind of question that makes me recoil is “What’s the plot of the story?” and “What does your title mean?” Some students also ask me to provide them with a virtual biography, or to tell them the most basic details about my life, which a simple Google search would have yielded in less than a second—not because scores of academics have written about me, but because I already put up all that information on my website, precisely to spare you and me the trouble of rehashing my poor-boy saga every other day.

But most of you have heard all this before, so let me try and be a little more helpful this time. If you’re a student perplexed by your homework in literature and desperate to submit a paper without actually cheating by plagiarizing someone else’s work, here’s a lifeline of sorts for you, a list of questions you can ask and try to answer yourself without rousing the work’s author from his or her well-deserved nap. They’re not the only questions you can ask, and some teachers may not be interested or may not believe in this approach, but it’s better than nothing, and—trust me—you’ll have something intelligent to say about the work should your professor decide that it’s your lucky day and choose you for recitation.

1. Who’s the author? What do you know about him or her? When and where did the author write the story or novel? What was going on then in that place, or in the author’s life? Take note that it’s often foolish if not pointless to draw a straight line between events or details in the work and those in the author’s life—in other words, the biographical approach can get you only so far, but at least you might get some insight into why and how the story or the novel was written.

In the case of Killing Time, I’ve made no secret of the fact that it’s partly autobiographical, like many first novels tend to be. Like my protagonist Noel Bulaong, I was born in an island village, grew up in Manila, became a student activist, was arrested and imprisoned during martial law, then worked for the government after my release. Many of the characters in the novel were based on, or composites of, people I knew. But I can’t and won’t say which parts are “true” and which aren’t; I made up a lot of things for that book—I was supposed to, since it isn’t a factual memoir (and even memoirs can be liberal in their imagination). The novel is based on fact, but in the end, it’s fiction, and what’s important is that the events in the book should sound and feel like they really happened.

2. What is the historical and social context of the events in the work? Where and when are these events set? What can be said about that time and place? This time, you’re not looking at the author, but at the story itself and its setting. Poems and even short stories can be very private and narrowly focused, but novels and plays are almost always set in a concrete place and a time period, for a reason that has to do with the narrative and the characters.

My novel begins in the 1960s—a reference to the Beatles should tell you that—then moves to the period of martial law. Anyone wanting to understand the novel has to read up on martial law in the Philippines—especially if you were too young to have experienced it. (I sometimes forget that my current students weren’t even born in time for Edsa 1, and that martial law is more distant for them than World War II was for us.) 3. What’s the plot of the novel or the story? Never mind what it means, for the time being; before anything else, what happens in it? It will help to draw up a timeline—a chronological listing of events, what the characters do, what happens to whom, and why. What’s at stake in the story? What are the characters fighting for, and who stands to lose or to gain the most, and why?

Killing Time can be a bit confusing for people unused to reading novels because the plot goes forward and backward in time. To establish a timeline, you need to follow the main character as he grows up and moves from one place to another.

4. Perhaps most importantly, who are the most interesting characters in the novel or story, and why are they interesting to you? Do they reflect your own beliefs, values, or experiences? How?

There are several ways of describing a character—externally, in terms of their most obvious traits (gender, age, appearance, speech) and internally (in terms of their social and economic background and the way they think. It’s also important to know how they feel about themselves, about others, and about the world around them.

For me, the most important question to ask about characters is “What do they want?” What stands in the way of their happiness? What decisions do they make or what actions do they take to get what they want?

I’m not a particularly religious person, but I remember discussing a script with a film director once and saying that if we wanted to show a character’s most intimate moment, it wasn’t going to be in bed—it was better to show him or her in prayer, and to suggest to the audience what the character is praying for.

5. Lastly, what have other people said about the work? Granted, Filipino critics don’t write a whole lot about Filipino writing, and given the way academics today write about literature, you can barely make out what they’re saying (and that’s because they’re writing for each other, and not for you). But with a little help from Google, you just might stumble on an essay or a review that could help you form your own ideas about the work. (If you use such a reference, never forget to copy and cite the source.)

So you see, boys and girls, there’s a lot you can think about on your own, without having to waste your precious “load” money on frantic text messages to me, which will get you only this column-piece back in your e-mail.

Penman for Monday, Feb. 12, 2007


LET ME put on my Diliman correspondent’s hat this week and report on some interesting developments in the literary scene in that sylvan corner of the metropolis.

First off, the UP Institute of Creative Writing (ICW) has selected the fellows for this year’s National Writers Workshop in Baguio, to be held March 25 to April 1 at the AIM Lodge in Camp John Hay. The fellows in English are Daryll Delgado, Katrina Tuvera (fiction); Conchitina Cruz, Mark Anthony Cayanan (poetry); and Adam David, Sandra Nicole Roldan, Lawrence Ypil (creative non-fiction). In Filipino, they are Eros Atalia, Eugene Evasco (fiction); Edgar Samar, Jerry Gracio (poetry); and Jose Dennis Teodosio (drama).

As with last year’s batch, and following the reconceptualization of the Baguio workshop as an activity better reserved for writers with some substantial work behind and ahead of them rather than one for absolute novices, the ICW associates decided to go beyond the immediate list of applicants and actively invite some fellows whose recent work impressed them.

When they go to Baguio, these fellows will be expected to present and discuss a work-in-progress, as well as their poetics or ideas about writing, in a format that’s much less an examination or interrogation by one’s seniors as it was in the workshop’s past and more a conversation between peers. I look forward to that conversation, and to welcoming these fellows into the writing fraternity.


THE CONTINUING if surprising vitality of Philippine writing was among the topics that animated my encounter last week with Dr. Rajeev Patke, a critic and professor at the National University of Singapore, who was visiting UP with another Singaporean writer, Su-Chen Catherine Lim, as a guest of our department’s specialist in Southeast Asian literature, Dr. Lily Rose Tope. Rajeev, Su-chen, and I hunkered down to a few beers with poet-scholar Jimmy Abad—with whom, as it turned out, Rajeev shared a scholarly interest in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, both of them having written their dissertations on this rather unlikely subject, Jimmy at Chicago and Rajeev at Oxford.

Inevitably our conversation turned to language, and Rajeev—who was born in India—was very much interested in the situation of our writers here, knowing that we have over 100 languages. Jimmy and I did our best to explain that while an active literature survives in some regional languages, the lack of publishing opportunities, the loss of readership, and the dominance of English and Filipino have relegated most such languages to a literary backwater.

What about translation, Rajeev asked—were we translating our work from one language to another? Hardly, we said; we had no professional literary translators to speak of, with authors being expected to do their own translations, which rarely yields the best results.

We learned, on the other hand, that India—which has 23 official languages, among 800 other languages and some 2,000 dialects—continues to have a vigorous publishing industry, and that work written and published in most of these local languages is eagerly devoured by an enormous readership.

“Tell me,” Rajeev asked, “do your writers in English write for America?”

I didn’t think so, I said; that may have been the case before, and some Filipino and Filipino-American writers have indeed been published in the United States, but I didn’t think that we harbored any illusions of elbowing John Updike out of the New Yorker. It would be good to write a novel that could and would gain a wide readership abroad—we could certainly use a Gabriel Garcia Marquez or a Salman Rushdie to promote our literature—but I myself was more interested in being read first of all by more Filipinos, wherever they were.

Rajeev went on to observe that in India—I’m paraphrasing him hyperbolically, here—“nobody reads Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh”, citing the grand trio of expatriate Indian writers, “except those writers in English looking to London and seeking to be the next Rushdie, Seth, or Ghosh.” (My interest piqued, I looked into this a bit more closely when I got home, and found a Guardian Review article by William Dalrymple, which observed, among others, that “[Arundathi] Roy fingered what is without doubt the strangest aspect of the renaissance of Indian writing in English: the extraordinary degree to which, at least at its highest levels, it is now almost entirely written by the diaspora. As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction. It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog.”)

Another fascinating detail we learned from Rajeev Patke was the fact that, in his native language of Marathi, there are no specific words for “sorry” and “thank you.” And why is that? “We don’t think words could convey these things as sincerely as actions,” said Rajeev. That’s a timely reminder, even and especially to fellow wordsmiths.


SOME PEOPLE—especially young writers—have been asking about the Likhaan Journal, the new literary annual being edited and to be published by the University of the Philippines Institute for Creative Writing. As editor of the first issue, I announced the journal in this column last year, and while we were hoping to come out with it in time for Writers’ Night last December, we’ve had to move some deadlines back to make sure that our maiden issue is an uncompromisingly good one.

The editors received a total of 226 submissions—128 in English, and 98 in Filipino. These totals comprised 54 stories, 59 suites of poems, 14 essays, and one play in English, as well as 35 stories, 55 suites of poems, six essays, and two plays in Filipino. (We didn’t ask for plays for this first issue, thinking to reserve that for later; but finding ourselves with excellent entries we decided to include at least one, invoking editorial prerogative. We had also reserved a slot for an excerpt from a graphic novel, but perhaps because of the relative novelty of the genre or more likely the fuzziness of the parameters we gave—we’ll do better as we learn—we received no submissions in this area.)

Out of these submissions, our referees selected a few of the very best for our first issue, which we now expect to launch by June this year. I’m also pleased to say that UP Diliman Chancellor Gerry Cao is committing to support the Likhaan Journal beyond the first issue, ensuring that the year’s best new work in Philippine literature can look forward to being published in a journal worthy of the writer’s talent and effort.


HERE'S ANOTHER bit of good news coming out of Diliman: in celebration of its centennial next year, the University of the Philippines will be sponsoring the UP Centennial Literary Prize, consisting of a single P100,000 award to each winner in several categories such as fiction in English and Filipino, poetry in English and Filipino, creative non-fiction in English, the essay in Filipino, and the play and screenplay in Filipino.

As envisaged by the Centennial Commission headed by former UP President Sen. Edgardo J. Angara, the Centennial Prize competition will be open to all Filipino citizens, whether or not they have any ties to UP. (Since the UPICW will be administering the competition, the ICW associates—composed of the university’s leading creative writers—have graciously disbarred themselves from competing.) No theme has been set for the competition.

The exact details, however, have yet to be worked out, so don’t take my word for the gospel truth just yet. Those details include the deadline, although the awarding itself will take place sometime early next year; but if I were you, I’d begin working on something right about now. All entries, I believe, have to be entirely unpublished.


I GOT this message in my inbox from playwright and former UPCWC Director Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio:

“The first of the three lectures by the Associates of the Institute of Creative Writing was a very exciting lecture last January 25 by Jun Cruz Reyes. This award-winning novelist first moved in circles, starting with the writers around him, then slowly and surely making evident what he was starting to focus on. That was when the excitement, at least for me, began. For what was clear to me who has worked in theatre for many years was that Jun had started not only to focus but also to polish and mount two words, giving their linguistic properties and their uses in the everyday life of the Filipino. So here now are two Filipino words one has been looking for so long—what the Greeks dichotomized into the comic and tragic! And both have the sound and the endurance of the concept – the word galak and the word lumbay!”

That lecture was followed last Friday by Rene Villanueva, who spoke on “Saan Nagpupunta ang Araw Kung Gabi?”; on March 9, it’ll be the turn of Charlson Ong, who recently launched his second novel, Banyaga, and who will be speaking on “Writing the ‘Other’ in Philippine Literature.” Free to the public, these lectures are held 2 pm at the C.M. Recto Hall of the Faculty Center in UP Diliman.


AND FINALLY, today at 5:30 pm, a new book will be launched by Anvil Publishing at The Lounge in front of NBS-Bestseller at The Podium in Ortigas. The book is titled A La Carte: Food & Fiction, and it was put together by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Marily Ysip Orosa—the same team that, not too long ago, gave us the enjoyable Behind the Walls: The Life of Convent Girls. This time, the editors have put writers and recipes together, featuring fiction in which food plays a central role. My own contribution is a story titled “Wok Man,” which I wrote in 1989 to put four months of a part-time job frying egg rolls in Michigan to literary use. Do check the book out!

Penman for Monday, February 5, 2007


I DID something very odd and maybe even foolish a couple of weeks ago, shortly after Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco: I went out and sold my Treo 650, and got—well, not the iPhone, which won’t even be available in the US until June, and in Asia until 2008 (count the number of nights we’ll have to sleep, boys and girls). I got myself a Sony Ericsson M600i—about which more, later.

Call it “upgraditis”—the mind-numbing, toe-curling urge to get something newer and snazzier than what you already have, even if what you already have seems to be working perfectly and has served you as faithfully as a St. Bernard in the wintry Alps. It’s a painful and recurrent condition, something you can’t be vaccinated against for life like the measles or chicken pox. But like these diseases, it takes hold of your body and soul for a few feverish days, driving you to reconnoiter dark corners of the Internet for tech specs, street prices, and notices of availability. It’s on your mind when you fall asleep, and it’s on your mind when you wake up, this spectral vision of a digital device so irresistibly slick and feature-laden that it practically vibrates with the promise to improve your life, your earnings, and the way you appeal to the opposite sex.

Now, having said that, let me add quickly that that wasn’t exactly how I felt about the M600i—but only because the iPhone prototype was already out there somewhere in Cupertino, California, on display under lock and key, and under development in the lab. The day the iPhone gets here sometime next year, I’m going to cancel classes and dash off at dawn to the nearest Apple Center for my pre-reserved unit, which will probably require me to apply for a fresh salary loan.

But this isn’t about the iPhone.

Let’s start with my trusty Treo, with which, as I’ve already said, there was basically nothing wrong. Well, nothing aside from the fact that, from a certain angle of view, it could be described as butt-ugly (the fellow who observed in a techie forum that the organically-molded Treo resembled a salagubang wasn’t too far off the mark). But like a devoted pug, the Treo’s looks grow on you, and I’d have to admit that I have yet to hold a phone as, well, hand-holdable as this one. Its contours fit your palm perfectly, and nearly every stubby key is within reach of your thumb for easy one-handed (and one-fingered!) operation.

I’d used Treos—including the earlier 600 model—for well over two years, an eternity in digital-gadget time. For those of you who’ve never seen or used one, it’s a smartphone (phone + PDA + music player + media viewer + camera + Internet browser) produced by Palm. It’s a little computer, really (or “convergence device,” in techie talk). It wasn’t the only smartphone in town, but it was arguably the best. The Palm Operating System on which it runs is pretty long in the tooth by now and has been due for a major makeover, but old age has its benefits: tons of great apps have been written for the Palm, and the system itself is rock-stable. If all you want is something that does what it’s supposed to do, you can’t go wrong with a Treo, which itself has been upgraded to the Treo 680 here and the Treo 700 in the US (as well as to a Windows version, which I know nothing about and can’t say anything for). With the notable exception of wi-fi, the Treo had everything: quad-band networking, Bluetooth, GPRS, camera, expandability via an SD card slot, etc.

So why did I give my Treo up? Back to upgraditis, which afflicts me every 18 months for laptops and every 12 months for cellphones, on the average. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and promptly put it back on the display shelf, not to be opened for a year, I felt cheated out of a new toy, and so began shopping around for a substitute—something, anything to amuse me for the next 12 months while Moses crosses the Red Sea into Canaan with the iPhone in hand.

That hapless task of playing iPhone substitute fell to the Sony Ericsson M600i, another smartphone with an impeccable pedigree; I’d used three SE’s before, most notably the K750 which I thought was built exceedingly well, a slim business phone whose wraparound matte silver band complemented and reinforced the charcoal black body handsomely. The M600i employs the same cosmetic scheme—it’s like a bigger, broader K750, in a way—but it has lots more goodies beneath the skin. Or does it? Like the Treo and the K750, the M600i inexplicably lacks wi-fi; unlike its SE sibling, it doesn’t have a camera, not even a built-in radio. It’s a 3G phone, which means you can theoretically watch TV on it and download music from online services, but do those extras really matter to the text-crazy Pinoy?

An even bigger adjustment was the realization that the Symbian 9.1/UIQ3 OS (never mind what the alphabet soup says; just read “not Palm, not Windows) used by the M600i—and, with a few differences, other smartphones like the SE P990i and the Nokia E61—still doesn’t have half as many apps written for it as there are available for the Treo. Among the software essentials I immediately missed was a full backup program like BackupMan, a simple checkbook program, and, for the globally footloose digerati, a subway guide planner like Metro. I also missed uniquely Treo touches like the “chat” feature of SMS, which allows you to keep and view your texts as a running dialogue, and the “QuickText” feature that lets you create and use template replies like “My address is 81-F Masikap Street, Bgy. Central, QC, etc.”

So what there’s to like in the M600i? For one thing, it’s cheaper than the Treo by almost half—about P15,000 on the open market. (But hey, we’re here to spend and not save money, right?) It’s also much slimmer and lighter than the Treo, at only 112 grams vs. the Treo’s 178 and the P990i’s 155. The touch-screen is large and bright, the icons sharp and smartly designed. (One little complaint I’ve always had against the Palm was how rough and elementary-schoolish its icons were.) That’s just eye candy, but if you have to look at something all day, you’ll appreciate the difference. The keyboard with its unique two-sided “rockers” takes a bit of getting used to, but if you’re used to a Treo’s nubbins, this won’t be a problem. The keys are illuminated gloriously, and there’s a scroll wheel and enough buttons on the side to let you navigate the screen without missing the old Treo’s 5-way dial pad too much.

The M600i can take up to 2 gigs of flash memory on its tiny M2 (“Memory Stick Micro”—aargh, yet another form factor) card. I put a 1-gig stick in mine, uploaded about 150 songs to it, and still had almost 400 MB left over. As a Sony product, the sound quality of the M600i is excellent as to be expected, but the proprietary jack prevents me from using the standard 3.5mm Shure e3c’s I favor my iPod with.

Are you still with me? Let me keep this simple for you: the M600i is a great, sleek smartphone with a lot to recommend it on its own, but it’s no Treo-killer, let alone an iPhone-killer. I’m sure I’ll learn to love it over this long year as I discover its hidden charms, but for the time being, let’s just say that I have a suspicion that my upgraditis resulted in a rare complication called downgraditis. And to smoothen the transition, I’ve moved the old Treo ringtones over to the M600i.

Now, where’s that iPhone?