Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, June 30, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there you go, and there I go.

Penman for Sunday, June 21, 2008


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 23, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 16, 2008


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 9, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, June 2, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 26, 2008


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 19, 2008


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penman for Monday, May 12, 2008


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it’s one and the same complex sensibility, this fusion of power and charm that sets off Jason Moss as one of the most original and compelling Filipino artists, in this casual gallery stroller’s eye, of our time.

Penman for Sunday, May 5, 2008

This came out in last Sunday's Travel Section in the STAR, but I was out of town and didn't get the paper, so here it is now.

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, Honolulu was the first American—indeed, the first foreign—city I’d ever been to. It was September 1980, and I was 26 years old, winging my way to Washington, D.C. on my first trip abroad; our flight stopped over in Hawaii, and I took the opportunity to step into my first American restroom. I’d pass through Honolulu again a couple of times after that, but never went beyond the airport. I actually had a chance to study in Hawaii—the PhD program in Manoa had accepted me—but I felt that Hawaii was a bit too close to home, literally and climatically, so I opted to freeze out in the Midwest instead.

But everybody dreams of going to Hawaii. You can’t escape it; it’s one of those fantasies hardwired into the 20th century mind, generated by wobbly hula-girl figurines and Elvis serenades beneath the palms. I remember having a favorite Hawaiian shirt when I was a small boy—or maybe it was my mom’s favorite, because she kept dressing me up in it—and what fascinated me about it were its coconut-shell buttons. Now and then my mom also served up something called Hawaiian Punch out of a colorful can. On truly special Christmases we ran into a box of Hawaiian Host chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. When Ferdinand Marcos got shipped out in 1986, we all thought he deserved a sorrier outcome than exile in Hawaii; it didn’t seem right, since Hawaii’s supposed to be a reward, not a punishment.

“Rewarded” was certainly how I felt a few weeks ago when a message dropped out of the sky sending me to Honolulu to check out the award-winning service of Hawaiian Airlines—which, after almost 80 years of shuttling people around the South Pacific and to the US mainland, was inaugurating its Manila-Honolulu route. It seemed a bit overdue, considering how many Pinoys populate the Hawaiian islands and how long they’ve been there, but better late than never—which was also true for this one passenger in Seat 40C.

It’s a ten-hour flight to Honolulu, and it helps those easily disoriented by time zones and jetlag that Hawaiian Air’s four-times-weekly flights (Mo-Tu-Th-Sat) leave Manila at 7:00 pm, touching down in Honolulu at 11:15 am—of the same day! (That’s right, you actually go back in time.) So it’s just like sleeping the night away, something easy enough to do in HA’s spacious cabin. (A big guy like me often has to ask for the bulkhead seats to hang loose; this time, I didn’t have to, and had enough space to work on my laptop.)

Our hotel turned out to be the 101-year-old Moana Surfrider, the so-called “First Lady of Waikiki,” whose only sign of age was its exquisitely preserved frontage and lobby (and the huge, triple-trunked banyan tree in the back, fronting the ocean). Ah, yes, the ocean—you stepped out the back door and it was right there, a broad sweep of blue flecked by sailboats and surfers, and fringed by a creamy curve of sand called Waikiki, with the famous Diamond Head at the far end. I got my feet wet, but never did get to swim in the water, preferring to observe, uhm, the local beach culture, which seemed to involve a minimum of fabric and a maximum of skin. (It’s hard to be an old man on Waikiki beach.)

After a day of contemplating navels (not mine) and convincing myself that there was more to Hawaii than Waikiki (of course there was, but I pointedly avoided calling my university contacts, to imbibe the tourist experience), I joined my Hawaiian Air group on a visit to the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor and, the next morning, to the Polynesian Cultural Center across the island. I have a nearly morbid fascination for war memorials and museums, but the one thing that impressed me about the Arizona—whose hulk remains embedded in the mud below the elegant white memorial that now crowns it—was how oil continued to bleed from its tanks 67 years after it sank, casting a rainbow sheen on the water.

The Polynesia Cultural Center, on the other hand, showcased the major ethnic groups of the Pacific, and here (as on the tour bus) we realized that every guide in Hawaii calls their visitors “cousin”; our guide himself was “Cousin John,” a Samoan Mormon ex-missionary who spoke fluent Tagalog. It was at the PCC that we got treated to the inevitable (and why, indeed, avoid it?) luau.

A famously finicky eater (translation: I avoid things most normal people enjoy, like cheese and curry), I didn’t think I’d like the food, especially after an initial encounter with fish dipped in coconut batter and a swig of coconut beer (strangely enough, I love coconut, all by itself). But I discovered, at the luau, that I could live on Hawaiian staples forever—okay, maybe not the sticky poi, but the Chinese “chicken long rice” (dried chicken sotanghon, to you and me) and the imu roast pig (lechon served in strips).

On the way back to the hotel from the Arizona, the bus let us off at the Ala Moana Mall, and like a homing pigeon I went straight to the Apple Store and picked up my Hawaiian souvenir: a USB-Ethernet adaptor for my MacBook Air. I successfully resisted buying an aloha shirt, despite the tremendous pressure to do so; the only ones I really liked—those that came in pure silk or cotton with just the barest hint of a bamboo or a vegetal curl on them—cost over a hundred dollars. (Why is it that the simplest looking things always cost the most?)

It’s easy to dismiss much of the Hawaii we saw as a tourist trap, but if you’re a tourist, there are worse fates than being trapped in Waikiki, watching the sunset with a cold beer in hand. Waikiki was indeed teeming with boobsy babes, Pat Morita lookalikes, ABC Stores, barrel-chested Samoans, Filipino shop clerks, and camera-toting tourists like us in cargo shorts and flip-flops, living out their memories of Hawaii Five-O and Magnum, P. I. The killjoy academic in me kept thinking what a different experience the first Filipino sacadas had when they came over to the islands in 1906, and what it must feel like today to be among the 1 percent of pure Hawaiians left in the population.

But whichever Hawaii you’re looking for, Hawaiian Air will help you find it, and if you book before the end of May, it’ll cost you less than $500 round-trip (plus taxes) to see Hawaii for yourself. And the tourist hordes aside, any place where they still give up their seats for old ladies on the bus can’t be too bad.

(More pics from Hawaii on my Flickr page here.)

Penman for Monday, May 5, 2008


IF YOU'RE involved in teaching and learning English, and especially if you have anything to do with the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, you can’t miss a forthcoming lecture-discussion which is being jointly sponsored by the British Council and the English-Speaking Union of the Philippines, Inc. (of which I used to be president, now happily replaced by Ateneo Humanities Dean Marlu Vilches).

The event will deal with “A Multipurpose Approach to English Language Assessment in the BPO Industry: How Does It Work?”, and the featured speaker is one of the world’s top experts on the subject, Dr. Jane Lockwood. Dr. Lockwood heads the Centre for Language in Education at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and is also Director of Education, FuturePerfect Business English Centre in Hong Kong.

In her talk, Lockwood will focus on the need to be able to properly assess how well English is used in the BPO workplace, contending that commercially and internationally available business English tests have failed to provide reliable assessments of English in BPOs in non-native English-speaking countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.

“The BPO industry reports that apart from the steep per-head cost and the turnaround time, the results do not predict nor do they correlate with successful performance on the job,” Lockwood says in her abstract. “This presentation reports on the problems identified, and solutions reached, when consulting recently into some of the large BPOs in India and the Philippines. Specifically it describes the diverse BPO industry need for language assessment within the workplace and highlights the Business Procesing Language Assessment Scales (BUPLAS) as a solution to the need for a multipurpose and contextually sensitive assessment approach for this fast-growing industry.”

Dr. Lockwood has written and published papers on English in Asian call centers, including and especially those in the Philippines. For those of us who’ve always wondered if there was more to this job than acquiring a Midwestern American accent, the lecture should be an eye-opener, and the ensuing discussion a spirited one.

The lecture-discussion will be held next Monday, May 12, at the SGV Hall of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati. A registration fee of P500 will be charged all participants, inclusive of snacks. Registration begins at 2:00; the lecture starts at 2:30. You can also register in advance at British Council Philippines; call them at 914-1011 for details.

Alas, I’ll be arriving in Dumaguete for the Writers Workshop at that very hour, so I’m going to miss the event, but if you’re not going anywhere you could do worse (and spend P500 more forgettably) than learning something new about how we Pinoys use English to talk to the world. (And just as an afterthought, it would have been great if the organizers had been able to present even a snippet from Chris Martinez’s hilarious 2005 Palanca Award-winning play, “Welcome to Intelstar,” about what you need to do to succeed in a call center.)


I WAS in a moviehouse a few nights ago having a blast watching Robert Downey Jr. ham it up as “Iron Man” when got a frantic text from my young but industrious research assistant, Lambert, reporting that his sister’s PC, on which he had been working, had crashed, taking his newest files with it. I’m not an easily excitable person, but I freaked out and did something I despise when other people do it: I texted him right back in the theater. “Ack!” I shrieked. “What did I teach you? Lesson No. 1: back up, back up, back up!”

I wasn’t mad because screwy things happen in the universe; they do, all the time, with far worse consequences like war and famine. I was livid because this was a preventable (well, to some extent) disaster, and the course I taught young Lambert and his classmates (“CW 198: Professional Writing”) did emphasize the dangers of living digitally—crashed hard drives and lost files being two of them. I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories about how “my computer ate my homework,” so I make sure that my students understand how important backups are—which, of course, being good undergraduates, they nod respectfully to, then promptly forget.

I teach them a few tricks I’ve learned about backing up. Let me say, first of all, that I’m a redundancy freak. Maybe it’s a bad sign of a kind of preciousness, but I stash copies of everything all over the place. I’m deathly afraid of losing a book manuscript as much as I am of getting five years’ worth of digital photographs wiped out by a virus or a power surge. (Since I use Macs, I can pretty much forget about viruses, but digital death lurks behind many masks and doors.) So I keep three or four external hard drives on which the contents of about as many computers are backed up at least once if not twice. (The piece de resistance is a 500-gigabyte Time Capsule, which backs up my Macs automatically and wirelessly every hour—ah, storage heaven! It’s a guy thing, I’m sure, to be able to say or even suggest that “My hard drive is bigger than yours.”)

Let’s agree that keeping more than a terabyte of storage around the house is a bit of overkill. Of course you can also burn your precious data onto CDs, DVDs, and USB thumb drives, but a simpler and neater solution, especially for text files like reports, manuscripts, and novels-in-progress, is to email them to yourself. I keep an unadvertised Gmail account just for this purpose—I dump all my drafts there, so I can retrieve them from anywhere at any time. And (God forbid) even if my house burns down and takes my terabyte with it, I can still work on my ongoing projects, which I’ll need even more badly than ever. (Too bad I can’t back up Chippy, but there’s hope in cloning yet.)

A last thought for the day: backups are more critical for works in progress, rather than works completed. Your published novel or epic is already on the shelf; the one you’re writing is in your mind—and on an eminently zappable wafer of silicon. Are you listening, Lambert?

Penman for Monday, April 28, 2008

OUR RECENT visit to Baguio for the UP National Writers Workshop—an annual pilgrimage, really—turned up another bonus in the form of a new publication passed on to me by writer Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez, now Baguio-based: the Baguio City Yearbook 2008, which she co-edits with Jack Kintanar Cariño. Baguio City is gearing up for its centennial next year, and this yearbook is a picture- and story-rich contribution to that great city’s history.

I flipped through it quickly, and much as I’d like to say that the pictures of old Baguio alone are worth the price of the yearbook, I soon found myself engrossed by the articles, nearly all of them written by Baguio oldtimers.

The yearbook focuses on “Baguio’s Forgotten Ibaloi Heritage,” and one of its most fascinating stories (written by former UP workshopper Nonnette Bennett) is that of its cover girl, the resplendently named Eveline Chainus Guirey, who became Baguio’s first Carnival Queen in 1915 at the age of only 13. The daughter of a wealthy Igorot or baknang family, Chainus, as she was called, was said to have been known for her “golden smile and intelligence.” She wore a gold-plated tooth adornment called a shekang, and her clothes were made of green and purple silk.

Alas—in a tragedy worthy of Poe—this pretty young woman did not live long, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 18. The article reports that when Chainus died, “Schools were closed, classes suspended, and a large crowd [of VIPs] attended her funeral on Oct. 5, 1920.” One sister—Helen, born seven years after her death—is still alive and preserves the memory of Chainus Guirey.

The yearbook has many other stories of Baguio lore—for example, about women cargadores who carried rations and ammunition for American soldiers during the War, about Benguet cowboys who looked over the vast cattle holdings of the Ibaloi, and about the “haunted” Laperal House on Leonard Wood Road—but one that touched a personal chord was a report, by architect Toti Villalon, on the rehabilitation of Teachers Camp, where I spent many a summer as a high-school conference- and party-goer. Indeed, Baguio’s white-and-green, colonial cottages are as unique as the city’s pines in the Philippine landscape.

And you can’t put down the engaging piece written by Linda Grace Cariño on “English Like a Native,” which traces the way English has been indigenized by Baguio speakers. For example: “Notice how natives say ‘country club’ like it was one word? Papanam? Diay countryclub. Manila cousins like to affect the answer: the club. The climbers actually say count-ry club, as in count your blessings.”

For true Baguio sons and daughters—or even avid visitors—there’s a long list of all the things every self-respecting Baguio native should know (e.g., “The only thrift shop you knew was the Pines Thrift Shop near the Justice Hall, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Woelke (it was the first ukay).” I don’t know if I should be proud of admitting to understanding one of these “insider” factoids (“You knew what Chaparral signified”)—but that’s another story.

Baguio City Yearbook 2008 is available for P350 at National Book Store and other outlets. For more inquiries, email the editors at baguioyearbook@gmail.com.


AND SPEAKING of Baguio memories, workshopper and journalist-poet Frank Cimatu informed me that a literary anthology—a collection of essays, stories, and poems about Baguio—is now being put together for publication in time for the city’s 2009 centennial. If you’re interested in submitting your work to this anthology, please email Prof. Grace Subido of UP Baguio at miscommunication.arts@gmail.com.


TOWARD THE end of the UP Writers Workshop a couple of weeks ago, one workshopper raised a question that, I’m sure, has occurred more than once to many a young writer: “After the workshop, what?”

Writers workshops can be intoxicating, providing writers with something they’ll be hard put to find anywhere else: the company of sympathetic souls who understand what they want to do, and also how hard it is to do it. Workshops can occasionally get nasty and end in tears (or worse), but they serve, for the most part, to reaffirm and reinforce one’s commitment to the writing life.

The kind of “mid-career” workshops we now hold at UP aren’t even intended any longer to dwell on grammar and the other basics of writing; they’re meant to focus and to sharpen writers’ attitudes toward their own work and that of others. Admit it or not, entry-level workshops do a service to writing, the individual, and the environment by discouraging the unfit from wasting any more paper (and then again, I can imagine how some workshop judgments can be spectacularly wrong; workshop panelists are hardly gods, and have their own hang-ups to deal with). In the UP Writers Workshop, we don’t want people to stop writing; indeed, we want them to press on, more resolute than ever, and surer of their own voices.

But, yes, after the workshop, what?

I wanted to tell the fellow what immediately came to my mind: “Many more years of solitary confinement and hard labor.” It’s a fair summary, in many ways, of the writing life. You can drink and talk all you want, you can bask in the afterglow of Rilke and Plath and Neruda and whoever moves you, and quote them till the cows come home; but when it comes to your own work, it’ll still be just you and the blinking cursor, and maybe a tepid cup of coffee or a half-finished cigarette. No nodding readers, no owl-eyed critics, no triumphal bouquets, no one to say, “That’s good, can’t wait for the next chapter.”

But just think: a hundred years ago there were no workshops, no writing programs, not even computers (and, in many places, not even electricity). But authors churned out 300-page books. Writing is always a solitary act and solitude can get lonely, but the books get written and suddenly there’s more than you listening to your voice at 2 a.m.

Penman for Monday, April 14, 2008

WE HAD a very fruitful and engaging time last week in Baguio at the 47th UP National Writers Workshop, run by the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing. This time around, we shared the company of 12 of our best younger and newer mid-career writers: Bobby Añonuevo, Jun Balde, Ian Casocot, Frank Cimatu, Allan Derain, Luis Katigbak, Mookie Katigbak, Jun Lana, Nick Pichay, Rica Bolipata Santos, Tara Sering, and Vincenz Serrano.

I was particularly impressed by the work of two fictionists in English, Luis Katigbak and Tara Sering. Both had been my students when they were undergraduates, and even then they had shown the promise they soon realized. Luis has gone on to write science fiction, music criticism, and advertising copy, among other things. Here’s an excerpt from a story titled “Dear Distance”, the climactic scene which brings the aging but technologically-enhanced narrator into physical contact with a new girl named Jenn5:

“She turns her back to me, and I notice three pairs of metallic ridges slowly rising through slits in her shimmery dress. They push up and out, and grow. They begin as shards, then shape themselves further until they resemble swords, then expand, downwards, outwards, row upon overlapping row of shiny leaf-like protuberances, and I realize that what they are is wings. Glorious steel wings sprouting from little Jenn5’s back. More sounds of admiration from the other clubgoers. I am ecstatic. Some people seem to crowd in closer, some seem to be moving away, and in this place, it’s hard to tell which is which, really, and after a while, hard to care.

“Jenn5 spreads her wings, turns to face me again, and we continue dancing, our movements unusual and mesmerizing, a city and a seraph engaged in the oldest of rituals in this newest of places.

“We dance and laugh and little else matters for now.

“We will never really know each other, Jenn5, though eventually—and briefly—we may imagine we do. Whether you are too young and I am inexcusably elderly or vice versa, there will always be things we have in common, and things we will never understand about each other. In the end, distances and surfaces are all we can ever be sure of, and this is no sad thing. In a world that has accelerated almost beyond recognition, it may be the only comforting thought of which I am still capable.”

Tara, on the other hand, has found success as a magazine editor and a writer of “chick lit” novels. In this excerpt from her novel-in-progress titled “Good People,” she flexes her literary muscle in a paragraph worthy of Greg Brillantes:

“With adjectives she didn’t even know existed, they toss praises over his casket so relentlessly it almost makes the dead man blush. Lola Paz calls her departed husband ‘the most generous man I know’—her mind a camera panning over years of imported clothes, jewelry, allowances, houses, a farm, a roasted calf every time she turned a year older—because she does not suspect, for the time being, that two days after the funeral, the lawyer will read out the will, unrevised since 1985. It lists all his properties and to whom they should go—the houses to his wife, parcels of land to each of his children except Andoni, his old car to Fred, another farm further north to his other son, Michael and his mother, Dina. Within minutes, they will also all discover that the house on the beach had been sold five years ago to an unknown buyer, along with everything else, except the house in town where Lola Paz still lives part of the year. But for now, at the wake, not a soul suspects that the lawyer, a long time friend of the deceased, will utter the words, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s nothing left, actually.’ The lawyer will then think to himself that the formerly wealthy, when they brace for a fight over phantom spoils, are among the most tragic people in the world, and close his briefcase.”

Away from the workshop, the highlight of our evenings was a visit to an old Baguio favorite—the singing ensemble On Call, one of this country’s finest, and always a pleasure to hear for their Broadway and OPM medleys and old standards. Many thanks to performers Jett Acmor, Mari Laoyan, Miles Vazquez, and Ivan Cruz, and to their brilliant musical director, Dr. Dennis Flores, for a great show as usual. For the rest of April, you can catch On Call at Forest House on Loakan Road on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and at the lobby bar of the Manor on Fridays.

And speaking as this year’s Workshop Director, I’d like to thank AIM’s Henry Tenedero for ensuring that we had a pleasant stay at AIM’s Igorot Lodge. We hope to return next year, with another batch of our best and brightest.


I'VE OFTEN brought Beng shawls and scarves from my foreign travels (because—thinking like a guy—they’re cheaper and lighter than jewelry) but they’ve often ended up in closets and boxes. It’s a good thing they haven’t been used, because they’re now coming out and joining many others that Beng and her UP High friends (who opened a shop called 57 & Co.—their age, ooops, and its location at Unit 57, Cubao Expo, Araneta Center, Cubao, Quezon City) are presenting in a show and sale called “Romancing the Shawl.”

The shawls and scarves come from India, China, the US, and the Philippines—in silk, cotton, and nylon; they’re machine-made, handwoven, embroidered, and embellished in beads and sequins. Handmade jewelry and costume jewelry from the Philippines and abroad will be on sale. The exhibit will also feature watercolor paintings by the art group Kulay Agos and other leading Filipino artists. “Romancing the Shawl” opens at 4:00 pm, Saturday, April 19.

Penman for Monday, April 7, 2008


I'm putting this up early because I'll be away again for a whole week starting Sunday, this time for the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio, and from my experience there last year, the wi-fi was spotty where we were. So again, if I don't respond to emails or don't see or acknowledge your comments right away, my apologies in advance.

IT TAKES a lot to bring a tear to my curmudgeonly eyes, but I came close to it a couple of weekends ago at a graduation event in Marikina. Nope, no one I knew was among the 80-odd graduates who went up the stage. They weren’t even really graduating from high school yet, much less college. So what did I find so moving? I think it was the fact that these students came from schools in poor communities in Marikina and Quezon City, and they had just undergone a program to prepare them for college entrance examinations.

Those examinations, of course, mean more than just another test. They’ll be gateways to the future of these children, determining who’ll become an engineer or a doctor, and who’ll have to drive a truck or sell insurance—or maybe sing and dance in Yokohama—for a living. Standardized exams are supposed to represent a kind of intellectual democracy that rewards the intelligent, but ironically and unfortunately, the way things work in a highly stratified society like ours, they often produce anything but democratic results. Students who’ve been privileged to go to grade schools and high schools with good teachers and facilities—what we Pinoys refer to as “exclusive” schools—will always have a leg up on those who didn’t.

This has been a matter of great concern for us at the University of the Philippines, where the “excellence vs. equity” debate has gone on for quite a while, the central question being, “How are the people’s taxes better spent: on investing heavily in our best minds, no matter where they come from (most likely Metro Manila’s middle and upper class), or on affirmative-action programs that can help less-advantaged Filipinos catch up with the leaders and create a more level playing field?”

It used to be—and I still caught the tailend of this—that some public schools could go head to head with private ones, and produce graduates who may have been short on some social skills but could run rings around you in the chemistry lab. I met a lot of those promdi whizzes at the Philippine Science High School, and their brilliance and modesty put me—coming from a private boys’ school, though none too rich myself—in my proper place.

Today—while outstanding students no doubt exist in even our poorest schools and communities—that’s sadly not the case. The better libraries, teachers, computers, laboratories, and other facilities of private schools do matter, and it shows in tests like the UPCAT, not to mention other exams like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE).

If I had one advocacy to choose, it would be education for the poor, and this program sponsored by the Ateneo de Manila University’s Pathways to Higher Learning is a fine example of how far a little volunteerism can go in our society to even up people’s chances. What Pathways does is to send volunteer teachers—many of them Pathways alumni themselves—to high schools where they help out students (typically in their junior year) with science, math, and English, the subjects they most need to master to do well in college entrance exams.

The tutoring has made an enormous difference, not only in the hundreds of Pathways students who made it to college after six batches (the batch I observed was the seventh), but also in the attitudes of the kids, who come to feel that, with proper preparation and support, they can study as well as anyone else in our country’s best public and private universities. Five members from the second batch have just graduated with honors from college—at FEU, Ateneo, and Assumption College.

Pathways Executive Director Solvie Nubla introduced me to young men and women who had finished or were now taking up Computer Engineering, Psychology, and Mathematics in UP, Ateneo, and other institutions; they had returned to pay the program back with their time, as Pathways kuyas and ates leading on the next generation. (I was personally glad to meet the energetic Solvie in person, finally, after corresponding with her online for over a year to help work out the placement of two young and bright but impoverished boys in Bicol, who are now doing very well in their studies at the Ateneo de Naga.)

Pathways had invited me to speak to the graduates, and instead of a prepared speech I brought along a slip of paper with some bullet points to share with my young audience. Here’s what I told them:

1. You can blame poverty only so much for holding you back. Instead of using it as an excuse to do nothing, use it as a reason to do all you can. Don’t waste time grumbling, or feeling embittered.

2. Those of us who are poor simply have to do more to catch up. The only thing we have is our intelligence and resourcefulness, and no one can help us best but ourselves. Find ways of compensating for your shortcomings (in my case, this was through reading and, later, writing).

3. Education is the great equalizer. Don’t waste this chance when you get it. Have fun learning, and learn to have fun, but stay focused. Your richer classmates can afford to bum around, but you can’t.

4. A good school is a great help, but a good mind is even more important. The best school can’t help a lazy mind.

5. Learn how to write and to speak well—it really helps. And read, read, read. Read things beyond your immediate interest and competence. Nothing you read is ever wasted.

6. Be engaged in the issues of your time. Some things are more important than personal prosperity and success. When you succeed, give back. UP’s “iskolar ng bayan” and Ateneo’s “a man for others” suggest the same thing: we study to serve the people, not just ourselves nor our families.

Thanks again to Solvie Nubla and the Pathways people for the chance to hook up with their wards, for whom I have the highest hopes and expectations.

(If you’re interested in knowing more about Pathways and its work, take a look at their website at http://www.pathwaysphilippines.org, or send them an email at info.pathways@gmail.com).


AND SPEAKING of studying and lucky chances, I’d like to invite all Fulbright alumni in the Philippines to attend the general meeting (heck, let’s call it a grand reunion) of the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association (PFSA) on April 18, Friday, at the Dusit Nikko Hotel in Makati. This year happens to be the 60th anniversary of the Fulbright program in the Philippines—which also happens to be the longest-running national Fulbright program in the world.

For those who don’t know, this program—originally conceived by Arkansas Sen. James William Fulbright—has been one of the United States’ most effective ways of extending its influence around the world, through graduate scholarships extended to students and professionals from all over the world—nearly 300,000 of them to date, including more than 100,000 Americans sent for studies overseas. There should be over 2,000 Filipino alumni of the Fulbright-Hays program (and the related Hubert Humphrey and East-West Center programs) by now, give or take a few who’ve passed on to another kind of fellowship in the sky.

Those alumni include many of the most illustrious names in Philippine education, science, arts and culture, agriculture, law, and public policy—among them, just for starters and in no certain order, Cesar Buenaventura, Lucresia Kasilag, Bienvenido Lumbera, O. D. Corpuz, Jaime Ongpin, Rolando Dizon, Maximo Soliven, Gabriel Singson, Jose Cuisia, Rene Saguisag, Corazon de la Paz, Doreen Fernandez, Antonio Arizabal, Cayetano Paderanga, and the PFSA’s current president, Isagani Cruz (the writer, not the jurist). Younger alumni include filmmaker Nick Deocampo, lawyer Macel Fernandez, and poet Ricky de Ungria, and engineer and educator Rey Vea. (I was a Fulbrighter myself from 1986 to 1991, at Michigan and Wisconsin, and it was an experience that changed my life and how I saw the world. To this day, I still reckon my life in terms of pre- and post-1991, which was when I came home.)

The Fulbright bash is going to be a whole-day affair from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, featuring a cultural exhibit and a program in the morning and a cocktail reception in the evening. A talk will be given by Thomas Farrell, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Academic Affairs of the US State Department, who will be accompanied by Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones and Undersecretary for Administration Franklin Ebdalin of our Department of Foreign Affairs. The reunion’s highlight will be the giving of seven Outstanding Fulbrighter awards across different disciplines, with trophies designed by National Artist Napoleon Abueva, himself a Fulbrighter.

If you need more information, please call the Philippine American Educatonal Foundation at 812-0945, or email them at fulbright@paef.org.ph.

Penman for Monday, March 31, 2008


BEFORE ANYTHING else, here’s an announcement on behalf of my friends in the Volkswagen Club of the Philippines. The VWCP is spearheading an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest motorcade of Volkswagen vehicles. The event will take place next Sunday, April 6, at the Quezon Memorial Circle, with the assembly time set for 6 am at the Quezon City Hall. Free registration, a certificate of participation, and a commemorative sticker await all participants. So haul that Beetle, Scirocco, or Kombi over to the big parade—all VWs welcome (especially my old friend Lisa Araneta’s priceless Hebmuller)! (Alas, I’ll be on my way to Baguio for the Writers Workshop at that same hour!)

IT'S 10:15 am and we should’ve landed in Hong Kong half an hour ago; Beng and I should be making our way to the downtown shuttle just about now. Instead, we’re still inside the plane, on the ground, at the airport—the wrong one, in Manila. We actually took off on time at 8:00 am. We’d just risen above the horrible smog that’s become to Manila what a morning cough is to smokers, winging our way north for the westward turn into the South China Sea, when the pilot made a most unusual announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. I’m sorry to say that we have to return to Manila, because of a problem with pressurization. Please fasten your seatbelts.”

And so we made a great arc in the air, and I leaned over to look out the window so I could pick out landmarks we’d passed earlier. I’ve never quite lost my boyhood fascination with takeoffs and landings, eager to see the city as God—or some hapless soon-to-be crash victim screaming to his death—might see it, a patchwork of rusty roofs and manicured lawns and straight-edged factories and ribbony highways. Everything, I’m sure, is ten times uglier up close, but up there it’s easy to be seduced by the comforting fiction of patterns. You begin believing that everything’s been planned, that someone actually took the trouble of putting all the people here and the cows there and the fish elsewhere. As I’d jotted down in my notebook years ago, on another flight, “Cities are never prettier than when you’re leaving them.” I can’t remember now what city that was, but it could have been Manila, caught in a moment of ethereal beauty, in a mood of anticipated longing.

Right now all I want to be is somewhere else. The plane’s been parked on the tarmac for more than an hour and they’ve served the breakfast we were just about to have when we turned around, and there’s a busy to-and-fro of technicians attending to something in the plane’s midsection, but nobody can tell me for sure when or if we’re taking off again. I’m reminded of the “Trip to the Galaxies” an aluminum company sponsored in my childhood; my father clipped out and saved enough coupons from the newspaper to get tickets for the whole family, and—led by a lumbering attendant in an aluminum space suit—we boarded this fat fuselage, sitting like a big toothpaste tube on Aurora Boulevard—and strapped ourselves into our seats for our “intergalactic flight,” which happened when the windows opened and we began zooming past Jupiter, Saturn, and whatever else the universe offered in lieu of newspaper coupons. I was mesmerized, and bought into the fantasy completely.

I have claustrophobia, which is one reason I turn up four hours before every long flight and buy bus tickets a week in advance, so I can choose my seat, the closer to the front door the better. Not only will it get me to my destination sooner than almost everybody else; I can’t stand being cooped up in a cramped seat in the back, sandwiched between a sumo wrestler and a crying baby. I usually take the aisle seat in planes, but this time I’ve chosen the window, so I can take pictures; I know Beng will be seated beside me, so that’ll mitigate the claustrophobia. Sometimes I come very close to panicking in literally tight situations. I like bus rides with lots of pit stops, and plane rides with multiple stopovers (I like airports, besides, if only to gawk at the local food and the curios in the shops); the businessmen may be very happy with the non-stop trans-Pacific flights that now take you from Manila to the West Coast, but as far as I’m concerned I got cheated out of my stop in Narita or Seoul or Honolulu.

I suppose I got my transit time this time—except that it’s in Manila, I’m stuck in my window seat, and the passenger in front of me has reclined his backrest all the way to my knees, and I can’t even get up to take a stroll because the passenger in the aisle seat has fallen asleep and I’m too nice and timid to wake her up. Beng’s busy reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement—a copy I brought home from another trip, which I haven’t even touched yet; for some reason Beng tells me, “You won’t like this.”

So instead I pull out my laptop from the backpack at my feet—an unscheduled road test for the wafer-thin MacBook Air. It weighs next to nothing on my lap, but it’s not easy to type when the screen’s tilted toward you, thanks to my front neighbor. I peck away at the novel I’ve been promising my publisher and my agent for ages; it’s a sex scene, but I’m finding it hard to focus on creative copulation, and soon enough, intent on making the most of a bad situation, I start filling out a column for Monday, having vaguely to do with being trapped in unmoving planes. At 11:00 the gods of aviation take pity on us and wave our three-hours-late flight through. I feel like cursing, but then I remember the first and only other time I took a plane that was sent home before it could land—back in the late ‘70s, going to Tacloban in the middle of a typhoon; a private plane tried forcing its way through the same storm, and never reached its destination. I’ve learned to be happy for small graces—and maybe anything having to do with a big bad plane can’t be such a small one.


I TRAVEL often enough, but I’m a notorious cheapskate when it comes to eating out at my own expense. That’s all right, because I hate fine dining (defined by me as anything you can’t find in Ma Mon Luk, Tokyo Tokyo, KFC, or Barrio Fiesta). This means I’m a slave to street food, junk food, and whatever you can scrounge up in a 7-11. (Unfortunately, the same bondage applies—unwillingly—to Beng, whenever she travels with me. A few years ago, coming off a month of ravioli in an Italian villa, I took Beng on a budget tour of Paris and three straight days of Chinese food. When she finally expressed a wistful desire for a taste of what the locals ate, I said, “Here’s ten euros, go splurge on ratatouille,” or something to that effect.

Well, Beng’s with me now in Hong Kong, and this isn’t France, so she has absolutely no excuse to pine for non-Chinese cuisine. We stepped into a noodle place in a Kowloon sidestreet for lunch today, and she gamely ordered noodles with shredded chicken—an eminently sensible choice, if you ask me (I had duck soup and rice). The servings were huge; but I finished mine, while Beng nibbled through a third of hers before giving up.

We saved the remainder in a styrofoam box which I stowed away in my backpack, and when it was close to dinner time, I asked Beng graciously and obligatorily, as we marched up Nathan Road from the Star Ferry terminal, “What would you like for dinner?” Thankfully, she knew me well enough not to say, “Whatever’s cooking at the Peninsula.” Instead, she smiled and said, “Oh, I’ll get something light at the 7-11.” I beamed; we’d picked out our dinner from the same 7-11 across our hotel the night before, so I knew what an excellent selection of takeout dinners they had, such as the shrink-wrapped salmon sushi, for just HK$18. “In fact I’ll probably have the salmon sushi,” she said, “but what will you have?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, “I can’t let these fine noodles go to waste. I’ll just get a bottle of Coke and I’ll be okay.” And that’s what we did—achieving new lows in budget travel. Back at our two-and-a-half-star hotel, we laid our humble fare out on the wooden strip that passed for a table, with a lamp at one end and the TV on the other. Her salmon sushi looked scrumptious, but the leftover noodles had become impacted from our walking tour of Wan Chai. Then a bulb lit up above my head and I remembered a technique I’d used at the Edsa Shangri-La, one New Year’s Day, on a similarly recalcitrant bundle of noodles (another long story, so never mind).

I got the hotel’s hair dryer, put it on HIGH, then began blowdrying the cold noodles as if they’d been on the head of Posh Spice herself. I tell you, the noodles soften, fly away, and curl just like human hair. “Take a picture, Beng!” I said. “People should know about this—just in case they ever need to warm up their noodles in their hotel rooms!” And now you do.

Penman for Monday, March 24, 2008

THE ASSIGNMENTS have yet to be formalized, but I’ve decided that—should I be teaching a graduate fiction workshop again next semester—I’ll devote this particular course to the writing of crime fiction. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that our fiction needs a kick in the seat of the pants to go out and deal with what millions of our people read about every morning in the tabloids, but which seldom gets into the rarefied prose of our creative writers, especially those writing in English.

I’ve always had a fascination—bordering on the morbid—with crime and death. I relax by watching new and old episodes of all three CSIs, Dexter, Wire in the Blood (my favorite of them all), and Law & Order. I’ve yet to see even one show of the youngish fantasy Heroes, although now and then I catch up on the medical mysteries on House. I’m a big fan of the “true-crime” genre, and have practically memorized the lives and misdeeds of the world’s most notorious serial killers.

I’m sure that reading all those Hardy Boys books in grade school had much to do with it, but real life took a hand in stoking this interest. Thankfully it wasn’t through any crime that I or my family fell victim to, but through my reading and, eventually, my journalistic writing. I devoured the Free Press reports on such sensational ‘60s cases as the RCA ax murders, the Lucila Lalu dismemberment case, and the Annabelle Huggins abduction case; many of these cases had been written up by Nick Joaquin as “Quijano de Manila”, so I suppose I was imbibing two things at the same time.

Not too long afterward I found myself in the center of the action, during a brief stint as a police reporter in my early days as a journalist in training with the old Philippines Herald. I was 18, a dropout, and gung-ho; my editors could have sent me to cover the goings-on in the Ninth Circle of Hell and I would have happily obliged. Instead they made me a general-assignments reporter, which was just as interesting, because it required me to make the rounds of all the beats from City Hall to sports to the Manila Police Department.

Watching the MICAA basketball tournament for free and from courtside was thrilling, but nothing could match the police beat in pumping adrenaline into the system. In just a few weeks on the beat—practically on the eve of martial law—I got a lifetime’s fill of blood and mayhem, from student demonstrations (where I was parked on the police side, for a change, and could see how they were planning to assault the demonstrators at a pre-arranged signal) to bank robberies (a private jeep oozing blood from the piled-up bodies of people who had been shot in the bank), suicides (an 18-year-old American girl shooting herself in the bathroom with a .38), and hospital fires (bodies of hapless patients thudding to the ground from a desperate leap from the rooftop).

I kept a little black diary with the phone numbers of hospitals and morgues, and learned the routine of ringing them up periodically to check if anyone had given up the ghost that morning or that afternoon—and, if so, if their departure had been spectacular enough to merit some column-inches in tomorrow’s paper. I didn’t mean to become inured to human misery, but I suppose my hide thickened a bit, which was just as well, because martial law would bring me to a long, sad train of funeral wakes for comrades whose bodies had been savaged by the enemy beyond recognition.

I’ve often wondered about this fascination, which we can ascribe to two basic and somewhat related human experiences. The first of these is catharsis, that sensation of being cleansed or purged of your foulest and darkest feelings after you’ve just seen something awful happen to somebody else (whether in a Greek tragedy or a disaster movie). The second’s Schadenfreude, that interesting German yoking of the words for “harm” and “joy”—the harm suffered by others bringing joy to you. I know, they’re terrible notions that make us look like predators or parasites of a sort, but these concepts and their effects are actually great comforts; witnessing the misfortunes and the downfall of others reminds us that we are alive and relatively well. We feel pushed to the limit, at no real risk to ourselves (thus rollercoasters).

As that list of TV programs shows, I’m hardly alone. There’s a bloodthirsty lot of us who’ve come to use the words “epithelials,” “blunt force trauma,” “blood spatter analysis” and “gunshot residue” with the same casualness we apply to talking about vegetables, prescription drugs, and coffee flavors.

So I’m not surprised that we find crime and crime stories obsessively interesting, as a mirror of our worst fears and also as a reassurance of our own well-being. What I do find surprising is the palpable absence of crime—except possibly for rape or sexual abuse, or something political—in our fiction. With few notable exceptions (such as Ichi Batacan’s novel Smaller and Smaller Circles, which began if I remember right as a story submitted to my graduate workshop years ago), characters don’t get robbed, mauled, defrauded, stalked, bilked—nor, for that matter, murdered. (They do occasionally commit suicide, after some agonizingly long “to be or not to be” aria serving the plot less than the author’s own desire to unload his or her “I hate the world” rant on the unsuspecting universe.)

I think that’s a sorry omission, not only because it denies a fundamental reality in our daily life and because it otherwise creates the illusion of a genteel, imperturbable society where people worry only about their love affairs and sexuality and whether they’re more American than Filipino. (This isn’t to put down the many great stories that have been written in this vein.) In our society, crime seems often to be a cross between personal and social imperatives, and without meaning to find easy excuses such as “Society made me do it,” crime fiction could provide us with a genre that looks both at the psychology of the criminal and the topography of his or her environment while providing Pinoy readers something truly saucy to sink their teeth into. Inevitably, it’ll also look into what passes for criminal investigation and law enforcement in this country, into issues of justice.

As usual, the most likely pitfall of genre fiction like this will be the cliché—the story with all too predictable plotting and characterization. A good crime story will demand inventiveness, plausibility, a deep understanding of human psychology—and, I think, a sense of the wicked, maybe even in a comic way.

I’m still putting a tentative syllabus together, so if anyone out there has any good crime story or reference to share, I’d much appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance for helping me walk some students down a dark and rain-soaked boulevard—or better yet, a brilliantly sunlit avenue, along a sidewalk of which something catches our eye in the gutter: the red polish on the nail of what, on closer inspection, turns out to be a severed ring finger.

(The Maltese Falcon cover courtesy of ejmd.tripod.com.)

Penman for Monday, March 17, 2008


NO, THIS has nothing to do with broadband and burgers, but now that I have your attention, let me take a break this week from more ponderous topics such as Pelikans and PowerBooks to make a few announcements having to do with language and literature (how’s that for abusive alliteration?).

The first has to do with the UP Gawad Likhaan Centennial Literary Award, which is being given out by the University of the Philippines to celebrate its ongoing centennial. The UP Institute of Creative Writing, which is in charge of the competition, has decided to extend the deadline for the submission of entries by a month, to April 30, 2008. That should give people just a little more time to finish and polish their masterpieces in English and/or Filipino. There are three categories under each language (the novel/short story collection, poetry, and creative nonfiction), for each of which the sole winner will be awarded P200,000. For more details and entry forms, please visit http://www.upd.edu.ph/~icw/gawadlikhaan/index.htm.

We’ll be plugging the competition (and the deadline extension) in the media and on an electronic billboard in UP Manila—which prompted a question, in our meeting, about what message we could put on that billboard to draw public attention to the Gawad Likhaan. I had an easy answer to that one—“How about ‘Bok, may 200 ka dito?’” Not quite P200 million—but hey, at least it’s honest money.

At that same meeting, I learned that our two National-Artist colleagues—Virgilio “Rio” Almario and Bien Lumbera—were leaving together soon for a working visit to Hawaii, where I expect they’ll be properly feted by their compatriots for the literary luminaries that they are. Just out of curiosity, I asked, “Are you flying first class? Business class?” Rio made a sad face. “Hindi, e.” He didn’t mind it, of course—we writers are a scruffy, pedestrian bunch, happier with pancit than caviar—but something in me wondered if and when the day will come when we can afford our finest artists a little comfort, at least with an upgrade to business class on our flag carriers. No self-respecting senator or congressman would expect any less.


SPEAKING OF poetry in Filipino, the Filipinas Institute of Translation, Inc. (FIT) has opened a “Katext Mo sa Katotohan” (Your Textmate for Truth) contest to bring tradition and technology together in pressing for the truth, given the recent course of Filipino events. Texters are invited to send in a four-line, eight-syllable, rhymed dalit—a traditional Tagalog verse form—commenting on “the value of telling the truth.” Entries can be texted to 0915-7832810 or emailed to dalitext@yahoo.com. The weekly winners get P2,0000, with runners-up getting certificates.

Thousands of entries from as far away as Guam and Hong Kong made up the first week’s batch, which was judged by Virgilio Almario, Vim Nadera, Joey Baquiran, and Ronald Atilano. The winner was Danilo de la Cruz, who sent this in: “Noon ay bulag na pinya / Ang burukratang Lozada / At nang imulat ang mata / Pati madla'y nakakita.” My personal favorite among the runners-up was Adjani Arumpac’s sly four-liner: “Dear wala akong sikreto.
/ Tingnan mo pa ang selpon ko.
/ Naka-save dya'y puro text mo.
/ 'Wag lang buksan ang inbox 2.”

Right on—if you can’t march, at least text for the truth!


I'D LIKE to announce a change at the helm of the English Speaking Union of the Philippines, Inc., of which yours truly was president these past four years. In a recent meeting, our board elected Dr. Marlu Vilches—former chair of the Department of English and incoming dean of the School of Humanities of the Ateneo de Manila University, and a specialist in English-language education—to take over ESUPhil.

The ESU was founded in London 90 years ago to promote international understanding and friendship through the English language, with one of its first chairmen being no less than Winston Churchill. (And just to get this clear, the ESU isn’t one of those snooty, we-wannabe-Brits, English-only or English-forever clubs; we’re working on helping Filipino teachers improve their English-language skills, among other initiatives, but respect and value multilingualism in our society.)

Since its founding, the ESU has grown into a worldwide organization operating in more than 50 countries; its Philippine branch was chartered in 2005—a year after our first entrant to the ESU-sponsored International Public Speaking Competition, Patricia Evangelista, emerged world champion in London.

It’s time to prepare for that annual competition again, and as we’ve done for the past several years, we’re collaborating with the UP Debate Society in selecting this year’s Philippine representative to the 2008 IPSC, which will be held May 6-9 in London on the general theme of “New Horizons, New Frontiers.” IPSC participants—who should be no younger than 16 and no older than 20 by the date of the competition—will be expected to give a five-minute speech on the given topic.

Elimination rounds will be held by the UPDS in conjunction with the Philippine Intercollegiate Debating Championship. The finals will be held in the afternoon of April 7, Monday, at the College of Engineering Theater at UP Diliman. (He doesn’t know it yet, but since public announcements have the force of law, this goose is as good as cooked: my friend Krip Yuson is once again going to be in charge of this event from the ESU side. I’m going to be in Baguio at that time for the UP Writers Workshop.) If you’re interested in the competition and fall within the age limits, please email the UPDS at jez.magpantay@gmail.com for more details.

And to Marlu Vilches as well as to ESUPhil regulars Ambassador Cesar Bautista, Pilipinas Shell Chairman Ed Chua, and writer-artist Linda Panlilio, my best wishes for a more fruitful year ahead!


FOR THE past few years, a visionary family in Bicol has been doing what the Palancas have done for nearly six decades now on a national scale: promote literature in Bikol (that’s spelled with a “K”, when it refers to the language—or, actually, several varieties of it). The Arejolas of Camarines Sur established the Premio Tomas Arejola para sa Literaturang Bikolnon and the Juliana Arejola-Fajardo Workshop sa Pagsurat Bikol to help revive and promote creative writing in Bikol.

Open to anyone who writes in Bikol, the 2008 Premio Arejola offers prizes for the best entries in the poetry, fiction, essay, drama, and novel categories. Winners in each category will receive P3,000 and a diploma of merit; the Grand Prize winner, chosen from among them, will be given an additional P10,000.

Looking forward beyond writing to its audience, the Premio Arejola is reserving a special prize for young readers (aged 16 to 22), the Premio para sa Parabasa, given to the best 150-to-250-word review of a Bikol book (a list of eligible titles is provided).

If you’re thinking of joining, please email the organizers at premiotomasarejola@gmail.com for more details. The deadline is July 31, 2008. The names of the winners and members of the Board of Judges will be announced on or before September 18, 2008, Tomas Arejola’s 143rd birth anniversary, in awarding ceremonies to be held in Naga City.

Arejola Foundation Chairman Carlos Arejola also wrote me to share the good news about the workshop, which has been instrumental in launching new, young Bikol writers onto the national scene. “Since its launching in December 2003,” Carlos says, “the Pagsurat-Bikol Workshop has awarded about 60 writing fellowships to aspiring writers from Camarines Sur, Sorsogon, Albay, and Camarines Norte, providing them the forum to hone their craft. The workshop has, likewise, continued its pro-environmental advocacy by symbolically planting pili, a tree indigenous to Bicol, in honor of Bicolano writers and literary scholars, thus drawing attention to their contribution to the advancement of literature in the region. Almost 200 pili trees have been planted by the workshop over the past four years.”

That’s great work, Carlos. I’ve always believed that aside from seeking a larger and fairer share of national resources, regional and local cultural workers and enthusiasts could begin with what they have, tapping the vision and the goodwill of such local families as the Arejolas to get projects off the ground. Our regional literatures have always had a hard time competing for space, attention, and funding with writing in English and Filipino (not to mention Harry Potter and Tom Clancy), but thankfully the Internet has evened things up a bit, and today there are a number of literary blogs devoted to the resurgence of writing in Bikol, bannered by such young writers as Rizaldy Manrique, Jason Chancoco, and Kristian Cordero—previous winners all of the Arejola Prize.

Penman for Monday, March 10, 2008

THIS THURSDAY, March 13, from 3 to 5 pm at the Main Lobby of Palma Hall, the University of the Philippines in Diliman, a new book is going to be launched by Anvil Publishing with the somewhat improbable title of Militant But Groovy: Stories of Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan. I wondered where the editors—chiefly human rights lawyer Soliman Santos—had gotten that title until I re-read my brief contribution that volume, which I’d submitted more than two years ago, and I realized, much mortified, that it came from me.

The book is a collection of personal memoirs from veterans of what’s come to be known as the First Quarter Storm—that long period of intense, rousing, and sometimes frightening political protest that presaged (and, some say, provoked) martial law in the early 1970s and set the stage for EDSA. For those of us born in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, it coincided with our physical, emotional, and intellectual coming of age; and those of us who managed to survive the FQS and stagger on to midlife will always look back on it as our defining moment; indeed, it defined us as much as we defined it.

The Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan, or SDK, was one of several “mass organizations” that brought young activists together under the banner of what we proudly avowed to be the “national democratic revolution.” I was 16 when I joined it and embraced its yellow-starred red flag; barely two years later I would land in martial-law prison. I’ve always considered myself lucky to have come out of martial law alive, because many of our comrades didn’t. When I wrote my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (Anvil, 1992), it was a form of thanksgiving, of memorializing the dead, and also, I should admit, of apologizing to them for straying from the path that led them to their graves.

It’s easy to see the events of 35 to 40 years ago with a moist, romantic eye and to cast ourselves as noble heroes; the definitive, scholarly history of the martial law years has yet to be written, and when it is, I’m sure that all our petty foibles—the bare humanity of those whom we swore could walk on water—will come through. That will not tarnish nor diminish the very real contributions of those young Filipinos to the causes and crosses that we sadly continue to bear today: the struggle against tyranny, injustice, exploitation, and corruption.

A few weeks ago, on the 22nd anniversary of EDSA 1—I was interviewed on TV as an FQS activist and as a writer for my impressions of the current political scene. As often happens with these things, I forgot what I really wanted to say until I was driving out of the studio. And it was this: that when we look at or look for the champions and the heroes who will lead us out of the darkness, we shouldn’t expect to find a perfect man or woman of entirely unblemished character.

I can’t prove it with statistics, but I have a dramatist’s suspicion that every great hero is, in one way or another, deeply flawed—by hubris, ambition, venery, naivete, or some wayward passion—but they became and they remain heroes because, at the tipping point, they rose above their flaws and did something for the greater good that may have surprised even themselves. When I see all the muck that’s dredged up and thrown at anyone who dares to blow the whistle on bigtime corruption and oppression in our society, I can’t help thinking what a demolition job they could’ve done on the likes of Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, and Ninoy Aquino—and if we had believed them, or let ourselves be distracted by Bonifacio’s pride, Rizal’s romances, and Ninoy’s ambition, then we would have gained nothing in the end, perpetually hostage to our mistrust and fear.

An interviewer asked me: how should young people—your students—look at a character like Jun Lozada? I gave a rather broad answer, but I should’ve just said, “He’s no Rizal and no Ninoy, certainly not, but if you’re a teenager, just think of him as your father, warts and all. Now what would you do and how would you think if your Dad were caught in that situation—if armed men took your Dad away to keep him from telling the truth?” (And for that matter, what can you say to a child who demands the truth from his teacher, only to be told, “I can’t tell you—it’s executive privilege”?)

But to get back to the book: these are the stories of a generation of street-marchers, and how ironic and yet how apt it is that it’s being launched not in the soft and cozy lap of safe nostalgia, but in the grip of another crisis, whose noises—whispers, alarms, clamors, slogans, and soundbites—seem all too familiar.

Here’s what I sent in for that book, and for many more of these reminiscences from such names as Butch Hilario, Gani Serrano, Rol Peña, Jeepy Perez, Jorge Sibal, Lynn Castilla, Ome Candazo, Jonat dela Cruz, Efren Abueg, Ven Jose, Jerry Araos, and the late Alex Ontong and Popoy Valencia, join us this Thursday afternoon for the launch. I don’t know how militant or how groovy we remain, nearly four decades after the facts being recollected here, so we’ll just have to go there and see.


I JOINED the SDK almost as soon as I entered UP in 1970, through what I later realized was the normal recruitment route—first, membership in the more innocuous Nationalist Corps, then integration into SDK itself. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, as it turned out), SDK appealed to me as being somehow just as militant but groovier, to use a word from that time, than the fire-breathing, roughshod Kabataang Makabayan (KM).

A lot of the people I knew and idolized were with SDK—Gary Olivar, Tony Tagamolila, Mario Taguiwalo, Rey Vea—writers and editors all of whom I, a couple of years their junior, wanted to follow. Some members were also fraternity brothers in Alpha Sigma—Benny Tiamzon and Joey Calderon, most notably. I felt I was in the best company; these guys (and some very nice gals) couldn’t possibly go wrong. I was small fry then (and remained small fry), too young to be in on the big discussions, but it impressed me to overhear people like Vic David and Titus de Borja chat about the “18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte.” I was good only for Mao and the Five Golden Rays.

I remember a blur of HQs—Scout Castor, Arayat, an apartment near Sulo Hotel—but our favorite hangout was the “Trialogue,” a small room at the far left end of Vinzons Hall. At this time my family lived very close by—we were squatters on Old Balara—but I liked spending time at the Trialogue, watching Willie Tañedo draw figures for flyers and streamers (I recall being entranced—with horror and fascination—by Willie’s depiction of Francis Sontillano’s splattered brain).

I fancied myself a propagandist and had had some training in theater with PETA, so I signed up for what was then Dulaang Sadeka as soon as it was formed, and even joined a chorus that performed a piece from Brecht—can’t remember now which one it was, exactly—in whiteface at the ALEC. This was even before Gintong Silahis emerged as SDK’s cultural arm, and even before Brecht had be set aside for being too bourgeois in favor of more overt Peking-Opera-style tableaus.

It was exhilarating to be in as many rallies and demos as possible, to be right there in the thick of the Diliman Commune, to march with a thousand others from Los Baños to Manila, to actually carry a small Beretta in a hollowed-out Bible, Godfather-style, for Tony Tagamolila at the CEGP conference (not that I would have known what to do with it; I’d never fired a shot in my life, and still never have).

There were, of course, deaths and betrayals to contend with, especially as martial law approached and took over the landscape. The bloated face and mutilated body of my tocayo Butch Landrito has stayed with me all these years, and the last time I counted all the people I personally knew who died in the FQS, I came up with 21, and certainly there were more, too many more. There was this one time, early during martial law, when I found myself in a UG house with people who’ve all passed on—Tony Hilario (with his trademark way of holding a cigarette between the tips of his circled fingers), journalist Henry Romero (technically still a desaparecido), and Jack Peña (ever the Ilonggo, railing against imperiali-sum and the o-well price hike). Ironically, I may have been saved by being arrested in January 1973 and spending the next seven months in Fort Bonifacio.

And so I live on, we live on, as the articulate survivors, a little yellow star imprinted in some imperishable corner of our graying minds.

Penman for Sunday, March 9, 2008


(No, I haven't moved from Monday to Sunday in the Star, in case you're wondering. This is a one-off, produced for a special issue of the Star. We'll be back to regular programming tomorrow.)

ASK MOST people what their idea of the finest pen in the world is, and the name that will almost surely spring to their minds and lips will be “Montblanc.” There are, in truth, quite a few other makers of top-rank fountain pens from Japan, Italy, the United States, and the UK—as well as from Germany itself, where Montblanc is based, in Hamburg—but few brands have acquired Montblanc’s inimitable familiarity, even among people who’ve never held and used a fountain pen in their lives.

We say “Montblanc” in the same breath as we say “Rolls Royce”, and that says a lot for the mystique of a company that started out 102 years ago as the Simplo-Filler Pen Company before switching to “Montblanc” in 1910. And a good thing, too, that they did: “Simplo-Filler” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue with the same panache as “Montblanc”—which, incidentally, is always spelled as one word when applied to the pen brand, and two words otherwise—that “otherwise” being the snowcapped massif (the “white mountain,” thus the name) in the Alps between Italy and France. (The white “star” on the cap of every Montblanc pen is meant to be the mountain summit itself, and the number “4810” you’ll find on the nib is the height, in meters, of Europe’s tallest mountain.) The story goes that Montblanc’s founders—two men, Claus Johannes Voss and Christian Lausen—chose the name to signify their desire to reach the absolute peak of penmaking success.

And, boy, did they. Capitalizing on the brand’s cachet, the company has since gone on to craft not just writing instruments but high-end luxury items such as watches, leather goods, jewelry, eyewear, and even fragrances, sold in about 360 boutiques worldwide. A line of limited-edition pens—named after and dedicated to such luminaries as Mozart, Hemingway, and Agatha Christie—demonstrates the ultimate in Montblanc’s core competency, the making of fine pens.

But never mind the press releases and the global sales figures. Like any other writer and fancier of fountain pens, my relationship with Montblanc has been an intimately personal one, forged over decades of distant admiration and constant use. Like many, I’d always dreamed even in my youth of owning a Montblanc, equating it to that model that, once you see it, you’ll never forget—the hugely impressive Meisterstuck (“Masterpiece”) 149, beloved of diplomats, CEOs, and politicians. Unfortunately, it was well beyond what I could afford as a young reporter, even if I forsook a year’s lunches.

My first Montblanc would have to wait until 1990; I had begun to seriously collect pens as a graduate student in America, and where I was—the Midwest, around Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio—was the heartland of antiques and vintage collectibles; great pens were still quite easy to find at reasonable prices, as long as you were willing to track them down in shops, auctions, yard sales, and conventions (the Internet was still in its infancy then). There was a big pen show in Chicago that I was willing to skip classes for to attend, and attend I did, clutching what few pens I had that I thought I could trade for something I truly coveted.

One of those pens in my pocket was a lapis-blue Parker Duofold junior-sized fountain pen from the mid-1920s, the barrel of which I’d gotten for $5 from another show and had found the right cap for, for another $5. Its lustrous blue color was much sought after, and I knew I had a winner in my hands. I ambled over to a stall that seemed to sell nothing but marvelous Montblancs—rows and rows of gigantic 149s and the somewhat smaller 146s—and sighed when I saw their prices. But then the stall owner saw the little blue Parker in my pocket and said the magic words, “Wanna trade?” I didn’t think twice, and walked away with a 146 that remains, hands down, my best “daily writer” today in terms of the smoothness of the flow of the ink from its gold nib.

That 146 would be joined by a few others; some years later, following what had to be a windfall, I finally got my 149; I’ve never used it on a daily basis, still astounded after all this time by its sheer size. When I see one in someone else’s pocket (like my friend’s, the architect Toti Villalon) I still let out a small gasp of longing, forgetting that I have one stashed away under lock and key.

Also some years before she died, the food critic and social historian Doreen G. Fernandez gifted me with a small black box that turned out to contain a pen-and-pencil set of Montblanc 220s from about 1960. And fairly recently, the art dealer Eric Duldulao made me a present of a very fine silver Montblanc Noblesse from the 1970s.

I still can’t come up with a good answer when I ask what I’ve done to deserve such extravagant kindnesses, but I’m not complaining. Sometimes I think that our greatest desires emanate from us like a big red sign, and my passion for pens led my friends to turn over what they believed to be their most precious ones, their Montblancs. Thank you all! And now for that Ernest Hemingway Limited Edition, seen here with its glorious orange barrel…. Hither, dear, come hither!

Penman for Monday, March 3, 2008

I WENT to school one recent Wednesday in a polo barong—something I don’t normally do, not since I gave up my administrative posts, but which I did anyway since I had a meeting outside of the university earlier that morning.

I like polo barongs; I don’t think there’s a better compromise between formality and informality, or tradition and modernity; the fabric—a sturdy linen, sporting the colorfully descriptive nickname of gusot mayaman—is neither too dainty nor too rough, and the embroidery around the half-open front lends just enough (and take note, boys—just enough, shouldn’t ever be too much) grace to the total effect of the piece. I like to have my barongs stiffened with a spray of starch, perhaps as a throwback to my days as a Catholic school boy, when our shirts were a kind of shining armor, at least until recess; sure, they’ll get creased over the long workday, but even the crinkles contribute to the implicit narrative of a man on the job.

I used to be a shirt-and-tie guy, until my girth got too big for my beltline to stay where it should have—not six inches too high (the man-in-a-barrel look) or too low (the gut-runneth-over look); ties look awful either way, like downward arrows pointing to the scene of the crime. On the other hand, worn over a cotton sando or T-shirt, the polo barong works wonders for the overfed, without marking the wearer as a slouch. It’s the “white” in “white-collar worker,” and wearing one always makes me feel better about working.

But this isn’t really about the polo barong. It’s just a prop in my story, which began with me going off to a meeting in Ortigas that morning, wearing the barong with one of my favorite fountain pens—a big Pelikan M800 with a gorgeous red barrel and a black, gold-trimmed cap—clipped onto the barong’s front flap, right above my heart. This Pelikan had been another of my Holy Grails, tracked down on eBay a couple of years ago and paid for with the noble blood of teaching.

When they feel successful, many businessmen and politicians go out and reward themselves with a Montblanc, which is the only premium pen brand most people know. But let me give you a tip, folks: Montblancs are fine, and there are a couple of them I wouldn’t mind having once I get that $1 million advance for my next novel, but among pen collectors and fanciers, doting on Montblancs suggests that, uhm, you don’t get around much. There are Italian, Japanese, and yes, other German pens to die for, and Hanover-based Pelikan makes some of them. The M800 is nowhere near Pelikan’s grandest, biggest, or most expensive piece, but it’s a lovely illustration of the penmaker’s craft in itself, from the trademark bird emblazoned on its crown to the swirls engraved on the 18K nib.

I know that some of you are squirming in your seats and muttering, “Why doesn’t this jerk of a show-off just use a Bic like the rest of us?” It’s a fair question, and I’ve often wondered about the answer. I’m sure psychologists have all the studies to show how collecting (not just pens, but everything from milkmaid figurines to grandfather clocks) can be a pathological addiction; I just think of it as my chosen quirk, my kaartehan, a shortcut to looking and sounding interesting for someone who won’t ever be mistaken for George Clooney or Brad Pitt. It doesn’t take a psychologist to establish the connection between a pen and, well, you figure out its male counterpart, which probably explains why, in the pen-collecting fraternity, bigger is generally better, with pens the size of Cavendish bananas granting their holders top-gorilla status.

But back to my tale of terror. I rushed back to Diliman from Ortigas for a thesis defense, in the course of which I took out and uncapped my Pelikan to make some notes and doodles in the margins of the thesis (lest I be accused of inattention). I remember thinking (make that, narcissistically gloating), “What a wonderful pen this is, what a great bargain this was, oh look at the size of that nib, see how that line fades from black to blue!” The thesis defense over, I went to the UPICW office to make some inquiries, then entered my own cubbyhole to write a note, with a pencil I fished out of a can. Then home I went, relieved to have completed another day. I began unbuttoning my polo barong—then stopped cold as I realized that, horror of horrors, the Pelikan’s cap was still hanging there, but the barrel—the rest of the pen—was gone. It had come unscrewed, somewhere on campus within the past half hour, and I had no idea where.

Here, insert all the clichés you can imagine: “The blood drained out of my head.” “A knot formed in my stomach.” “My throat felt dry as sandpaper.” You know how it is when you’ve suddenly lost something you weren’t supposed to; remember when, as a kid, you lost that P100 bill your Dad gave you to buy a textbook with, or the P1,000 that was supposed to pay for your tuition? Or—to use what my students, in a quick classroom survey, rated as their foremost fear, in this age of tsunamis, megascams, and desaparecidos—have you ever lost your cellphone?

That’s what it felt like: a solid hit in the gut, and instantly my defense mechanisms swung into action, seeking to protect me from further pain. A philosopher’s voice (sounding a lot like James Earl Jones) whispered in my ear: “We are not to cling to the things of this world, which have been tainted or corrupted by evil…. “ I listened for about five seconds, decided that this guru had been badly misinformed, then dashed out the door to my car, and broke all the speed limits around campus to get back to the office and literally retrace my steps, hoping to find, on some gentle floor, the Pelikan’s pristine barrel, unscathed from its precipitous fall.

On that frantic drive back, I thought of how stupid I had been—vanity of vanities!—to have even thought of bringing such a treasure along, like a toy to show off in elementary school. I remembered how I had lost many other pens, but never learned. One of them, a century-old filigree pen, was a Christmas gift from a friend, tucked into a box with a book; I kept the book and threw away the box; another was a 1925 Parker Duofold, dropped on a bus in Milwaukee; the sickening list goes on. That should’ve stopped me from trotting these little masterpieces out, but I have this strange notion that nice things are meant to be used; so I put my best pens through a set rotation, and now I was paying for my stubbornness.

Despite my most diligent efforts, the Pelikan was nowhere to be found. I crouched on all fours in the faculty parking lot, thinking that it had rolled to the safety of a gutter, or—ghastly thought—had been crushed beneath the wheel of a prosperous professor’s Volvo; I would’ve scavenged the remains and given them a proper Viking send-off, relieved, at least, from the horrifying prospect that my wayward pen was out there, being employed by some mindless undergraduate as an icepick. Better to know it was dead than forever lost, I said, so I could grieve—and start looking for a new one. I interviewed the security guards, and put out an APB; but no one had seen anything—no one ever does, as I’d learned from CSI.

I drove back home, dejected and desultory; I thought of printing out and posting “Wanted” pictures, like our friends Boojie and Chingbee did, when their cat Minggoy decided to take a stroll around the village. Again the endorphins came flooding through me, blocking out the pain, not too successfully. I thought of all the times that Pelikan and I had spent together, all the notes it had imprinted onto my Moleskine, the reassuring gravity of its presence in my pocket. The pocketless barong, I realized, was no place for a fine pen; today would be the last time I would make that mistake.

In a final gesture of surrender and acceptance, I stepped into the bathroom to undress, perhaps to ritually remove any reminder of the sorry outcome of that day. My polo barong was all messed up and stained with sweat; I began thinking how different things would have been had I worn a long-sleeved shirt. What if this, what if that…. In front of the mirror, I pulled the barong over my head—then saw a blue-black stain blooming across my undershirt, just below my belly button. Instinctively I clutched the odd-colored wound—and touched a familiar shape. Indeed the barrel had fallen off its cap, but it had been caught and trapped in the sando beneath my gut and above my belt! I’d been running around like a headless chicken for nearly an hour, and the thing was right there all along.

I jumped for joy and kissed the pen, making all sorts of fervent pledges never to stick it into a barong again. “Don’t do that again! I don’t ever want to lose you like that!” At least that’s what I said to the Pelikan—but not to the Montblanc, the Parker, nor the Faber-Castell.

PS. And for people who like fountain pens, click here for a few more pictures from my collection.


READER EMMANUEL alerted me to this Essay Writing Competition, which seems worth a try if you’re between 18 and 25 and have a fly of an idea buzzing around your head. Check this out: “The World Bank, the Cities Alliance, and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs invite youth aged 18-25 from all countries of the world to participate in the International Essay Competition 2008: ‘WANTED: Your Practical Ideas—What can you do to shape the city of your dreams?’ Essays can be submitted online in English, French, Spanish, Arabic or Portuguese until March 23, 2008. Awards: 5000 USD and 1000 USD plus a free trip to the awarding ceremonies in South Africa for the finalists. For more information and submissions, visit www.essaycompetition.org.

Penman for Monday, February 25, 2008

I LOVE stories of personal quests. One of my favorite nonfiction books is titled Objects of Desire: The Lives of Antiques and Those Who Pursue Them (by Thatcher Freund, Penguin Books, 1993) and it has to do, among other things, with one man’s obsession with a seemingly unremarkable blanket chest from the 1750s, a piece of folk art that spoke to him across 200 years. (I’ve told my own “quest” story once or twice before in this corner: how I, vintage fountain pen collector, had lusted after a burgundy-red 1934 Parker Vacumatic oversize, only to find it in a pen shop in Edinburgh, with a price tag exceeding a month’s salary; I paid for it by credit card with my eyes closed, and was immediately consumed by yawning guilt. To try and make my money back, I then wrote a story about that pen, which became the title story of my next book, Penmanship.)

Let me now share with you the remarkable story of another man’s quest for a treasure trove of Philippine art.

I first heard of Manuel “Nonoy” Buncio as a friend of my daughter Demi—who, back in her grad school days as an Art Studies major, kept running into interesting people. He was supposed to be someone with a quenchless passion for art—but I didn’t know how quenchless until I actually met him a couple of weekends ago, when he invited Beng and me over for a cup of coffee and a preview of… but we’re getting ahead of the story.

Indeed, I didn’t realize that Nonoy and I had a lot more in common than we thought. In January 1973, as it turned out, both of us became involuntary guests of the Philippine military, on suspicion of being subversives (the word “destabilizers” had yet to come into fashion). We never bumped into each other in martial-law prison—I would be “detained” for only seven months, he would be stuck there for three years—but I’m sure that both of us came out of the place and the experience with the sense that there was more to life than whatever it was we were dealing with: barbed wire, bad food, and the bad vibes of martial rule. Strangely enough, that pathway out the prison led us both to art—I to printmaking, which I did for a few years with the help of my “ka-cosa” the painter-printmaker Orly Castillo, and Nonoy to collecting.

He had actually, in a way, been born into art. Across the street from the Buncios’ home in Cubao lived Lyd Arguilla and her Philippine Art Gallery, into which streamed artists such as Vicente Manansala, H. R. Ocampo. Cesar Legaspi, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and Fernando Zobel. Nonoy’s father, an engineer, became involved in clearing the Luneta for the 1952 Manila World’s Fair, and this was where Nonoy witnessed another artist leading a team in constructing and painting the fairground’s wall. That muralist was Carlos “Botong” V. Francisco, whom Nonoy observed as he and his fellow painters dashed off quick still lifes and portraits on the side for the American engineers they were working with.

It would prove to be an important and life-changing encounter for Nonoy Buncio, who went on to an economics degree in UP, involvement in the Left as a co-founder of the Socialist Pary of the Philippines, a senior vice-presidency a the Iligan steel plant, and—after his release from prison—self-exile in America and a job with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Unionism was in Nonoy’s blood, but so was art, which he had never really ceased to be interested in. He had begun building up a collection of Filipino masters even in his Iligan Integrated Steel days, only to have it seized when the government took over the Jacinto-owned company during martial law. A second collection mostly of Ang Kiukok works was also lost when the company he joined tanked in the economic meltdown following the Aquino assassination.

But his time and his work in the States provided Nonoy with a unique opportunity to reignite his desire to find the best of Philippine art, right where he was. Art historian Reuben Ramas Cañete recalls what happened next in his book Homecoming: The Buncio Collection of Philippine Art (Quezon City: The Artists’ Guild of the Philippines, 2007): “Meeting art dealers at Bowles, Sorokko & Yarger at Beverly Hills in 1986, he slowly acquired a set of Miro prints. This reawakened love of collecting, heightened by the enforced hiatus away from the Philippines, revived Nonoy’s interest in finding the paintings he saw being purchased by his father’s engineer friends back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He became adept at prowling the homes of the Filipino-American manongs, who had substantial, if not unknown, quantities of genre paintings that were purchased as far back as the 1930s…. Nonoy was able to look up old acquaintances and renew connections with the two decades of owners. Through this regular and patient series of visits lasting more than a decade, Nonoy was able to acquire these ‘exported paintings’ and bring them home, precious relics in canvas tubes.”

Those paintings included six Botong oils, which in themselves now form an impressive collection covering some of the artist’s most productive years, from 1939 to 1962: Orasyon (1939), La Jota (1947), Fluvial Procession of San Clemente (1952), Tribal Dance (1957), Warrior Prince (1961), and Moriones (1962).

I’m not an art critic, but I could see—as Prof. Cañete acknowledges in his book—that these paintings echo many other Botong creations. Like many other prolific painters, the man had his favorite motifs and figures, and kept returning to them over the years. Nonoy is also aware that questions will be raised by some quarters about the authenticity of the works, but he stands confident that provenance and scholarship will erase any doubts that these six are, indeed, the handiwork of Carlos V. Francisco. (That's him on the right, courtesy of globalpinoy.com.)

For the moment, they remain unrestored (although some had been poorly retouched); some are in a much better condition than others, depending on how they had been kept through the decades. (Nonoy found one of them—the large, complex Fluvial Procession—rolled up like a carpet in a garage, and it would take him over 15 years to convince the American family that now owned it to sell it to him.) Cañete notes that “Another commonality is their generally poor surface condition, due perhaps to the thin dilution of paints that Botong often resorted to (perhaps to save on paint) and to the vicissitudes caused by tropical humidity and excessive heat.”

For all their flaws (easily remediable ones, in Beng’s professional opinion), the works exude the inner glow and the energy that typically animate Francisco’s art. I found the woman dancer in La Jota particularly intriguing—captured in mid-movement but in a contrapuntally pensive mood.

After storing them for years, Nonoy Buncio now believes that the time has come to share his find with the public. The limited-edition Cañete book—an easy but engrossing read, carefully researched and richly illustrated—will be launched this Saturday, March 1st, at Popular Bookstore on Morato Circle in Quezon City, at 5 pm. The book will be accompanied by a special printing of archival-quality individual posters of the six Botong paintings. (If you want to see the works themselves, you may have to arrange a private viewing with Nonoy, who runs the Deanna Gallery in Cubao.)

You and I may never get to own these paintings, but it’s good enough to know—at a time when a growing awareness of the achievement and the value of modern Philippine art is sending some of our finest works abroad—that a counterflow is also happening, thanks to the likes of Nonoy Buncio, who , like that old big game hunter Frank Buck, brought ‘em back alive. See you this Saturday at Popular Bookstore!


AFTER THE successful launch of the maiden issue of Likhaan: the Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature last December, the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing is now inviting submissions for the second issue, which will be edited by National Artist Virgilio S. Almario.

Submissions will be considered in the following genres, in both English and Filipino:

- Short stories ranging from about 12 to 30 pages double-spaced (in 11-12 points Times Roman, New York, Palatino, Book Antiqua, Arial or some such standard font). A suite of short prose pieces will be considered.

- A suite of four to seven poems, out which the editors might choose three to five. Long poems will be considered in lieu of a suite.

- Essays (critical, scholarly, and/or creative nonfiction), subject to the same length limitations as short stories, above.

- Excerpts from graphic novels, or full short graphic stories, for reproduction in black and white on no more than 10 printed pages, 6” x 9”. Excerpts should be accompanied by a synopsis of the full narrative.

All submissions must be original, and unpublished anywhere else. They should be accompanied by a biographical sketch (no more than one or two short paragraphs) of the author, including contact information (address, telephone number, email address). Submissions may be emailed to likhaanjournal@gmail.com, or posted to The Editors, Likhaan Journal, UP Institute of Creative Writing, Rizal Hall, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, 1101. They should be received (whether by email or post) no later than May 31, 2008.

For more information, please send an email to the address above, or call the UPICW at 922-1830. By the way, panitikan.com.ph is migrating to a new host, so don’t be surprised if something strange turns up at this URL for the time being; I found a pic of Lindsay Lohan, which I must admit was more engaging than the usual mugs I see around the UPICW, including the guy in the mirror.

Penman for Monday, February 18, 2008


ON BEHALF of the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW), I’m very happy to announce the names of the 12 fellows who will be joining us in Baguio this April for the 47th UP National Writers Workshop. The fellows are: (Fiction in English) Tara Sering, Luis Katigbak, Ian Casocot; (Poetry in English) Ana Maria Katigbak; Vincenz Serrano; (Creative Non-Fiction in English) Rica Bolipata Santos; (Drama in Filipino) Nicolas Pichay, Rodolfo Lana Jr.; (Poetry in Filipino) Roberto Añonuevo, Frank Cimatu; (Fiction in Filipino) Abdon Balde Jr., Allan Derain.

They were chosen by the Associates of the UPICW through a selection process that combined direct nominations and invitations by the Associates with open applications. As in the past two years, the workshop—one of the major annual projects and the most important outreach program of the ICW—will engage writers in mid-career who have already published or are about to publish their first books, and who have received previous writing awards and distinctions.

It was actually five years ago when the UPICW first tried out this approach, with a stellar batch of “Kumustahan” workshop fellows that included standouts such as Sarge Lacuesta, Paolo Manalo, and Allan Popa. We decided to implement it for good when we saw how many new workshops were coming up to serve beginning and student writers, which led us to focus on more advanced writers who might still need some encouragement and feedback to sustain their commitment to writing.

The fellows will be making a presentation of their respective works-in-progress during the workshop, based on a manuscript to be submitted to the ICW.

I’ve agreed to be this year’s workshop director, and assisting me on the panel will be the usual suspects: ICW Director Vim D. Nadera, National Artist and Dean Virgilio S. Almario, National Artist and Professor Emeritus Bienvenido Lumbera, University Professor Emeritus Gémino H. Abad, Dr. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Professor Jun Cruz Reyes, and Mr. Charlson Ong.


I HAD a pleasant chat last week over merienda with Sylvia Palanca Quirino and her daughter Atty. Christine Pacheco, who wanted to show me the new website they’re setting up for the Palanca Awards. Much of the site is still under construction (you can preview it at http://www.palancaawards.com.ph), but it promises to be an important addition to the roster of websites that are creating an impressive presence for Philippine literature on the World Wide Web. I, among others, had long urged the Palancas to go online, since they have the largest repository of contemporary Philippine literature in their library, and are directly responsible for many annual additions to that trove.

The details are still being worked out, but I think we can now look forward to seeing and downloading the works of Palanca prizewinners from 2006 onwards, once copyrights and permissions issues are sorted out. (The Palancas do have the right to publish winning work, but are being careful not to deprive Filipino authors and publishers of their commercial prospects.) Once the modalities are resolved, the Palanca website will be a great help to readers, researchers, students, and teachers interested in the best of new Philippine writing. It will also do much to promote Philippine literature abroad—and be, in effect, an annual online literary journal and permanent portal, complementing other sites such as our own www.panitikan.com.ph.

Our chat spilled over to an informal discussion of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, now on their 58th year, which the family continues to sponsor through the Carlos Palanca Foundation, of which Sylvia is the Director-General. The two ladies sounded me out on some possible refinements to the contest rules—in my capacity as an institutional friend, an oldtimer by now to the competition and its processes—and I was glad to give them my opinion. (I’ll leave it to the Palancas to announce whatever changes or improvements they deem worthwhile—nothing too big nor too different, we can be assured.)

By the way, the CP Group—which includes the Palanca Foundation—has moved to new offices at One World Square Building, 10 Upper McKinley Road, McKinley Town Center, Fort Bonifacio, Taguig City, telephone 856-0808, fax 856-5005. This means another change of venue for all the writers who like to hang out on the foundation premises—less for companionship, I suspect, than for ritualistic reasons bordering on voodoo—on the very deadline of the competition on the 30th of April.

I remember when the Palancas were still headquartered at the old La Tondeña building on Calle Echague in Quiapo; some writers were reported to have been seen typing out their manuscripts by the foundation door in a mad dash to beat the deadline, or maybe to impregnate their manuscripts with a whiff of the winning spirit. (In one recent and important change to the rules, the Palancas now accept entries by email—except, this year, for the novel and the full-length screenplay, which could bankrupt the foundation if it had to print out and reproduce four copies of every entry; so take note, novelists and screenwriters—don’t throw out that inkjet printer yet.) Sylvia spoke enthusiastically of other possibilities, beyond the contest, made possible by their new offices—of readings and writers’ gatherings, tertulia-style. We may yet see a new cultural oasis emerge in this part of town.

(And let me just correct an announcement I made weeks ago about three major novel-writing competitions—the Palanca, the UP Centennial, and the Man Asian—sharing the same March 31st deadline. The Palanca deadline falls a month later, on April 30.)


SPEAKING OF workshops, here’s another one from our friends at the UP Department of Filipino, which will hold its 2008 Creative Writing Workshop on May 15-18, 2008 in Angono, Rizal.

This workshop is open to college-level, beginning writers in Filipino who write in one or more of the following genres: poetry, short story, story for children, play, or creative non-fiction (essay).

Applicants should submit five copies of the manuscript in 12 points, double-spaced, 8½" x 11" bond sized paper, along with a digital file. The manuscript may consist of at least one of the following: five (5) poems, two (2) short stories of at least 10 pages each, two (2) stories for children of at least 5-7 pages each, one (1) short play, and one (1) creative non-fiction of at least ten pages. Also, a short essay about the author and photo must be submitted along with the manuscripts.

Application forms are available at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, College of Arts and Letters, UP Diliman. Deadline of submission is on March 31, 2008. For further details, please get in touch with Prof. Jimmuel Naval or Prof. Vlad Gonzales at 9244899, email them at palihanan2008@yahoo.com.


A GROUP led by prominent writers has just been organized to protect the intellectual property rights (IPR) of Filipino writers. It’s called the Filipinas Copyright Licensing Society (Filcols), and what it aims to do is to collect manage arrangements for copyright licensing, marketing, and distribution of the members’ works, and enforce their IPR. Filcols will handle, among others, the collection of royalties for its members.

This is great news for writers, as it will help professionalize writing as an industry, and secure writers their legal and moral due. There’s nothing wrong with writing for the sheer love of it—the original and valued meaning of the word “amateur”—but anyone who’s written long enough will know that writing is also a form of labor whose dignity, as such, should be recognized by fair wages, among other means.

Writers and artists, unfortunately, often make for the worst businessmen. We don’t know what to charge, we work without contracts, we don’t know where to go or whom to get in touch with for our royalties and, in many cases, we don’t even know what we’re owed by our publishers. Our stories and poems get published in anthologies and textbooks that make fortunes for their authors and publishers—without our permission, without our knowledge, and without any royalties paid.

(When we do get paid, our standard royalties of 15% are actually quite high, compared to 10% in the US, but that’s a bigger slice of a much smaller pie, since local print runs rarely exceed 1,000 copies. In other words, if your magnum opus of a novel sells out at P200 a copy, you stand to earn P30,000 for a few years’ labor—barely enough for a high-end cellphone.)

Thankfully, in my experience, respectable publishers such as Anvil, the UP Press, and Milflores are very professional about these things, and send royalty checks and sales reports out to their writers without even being asked. But I suspect that they’re the exception rather than the rule. Filcols will now do for writers what the Filipino Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (Filscap) has done for music composers, with resounding success; Filscap collects many millions a year in royalties. The market for Philippine literature may never grow as large as that for music, but every peso will help.

Filcols is being supported by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IP Philippines), led by its Director-General, Atty. Adrian S. Cristobal, Jr. Through its Copyright Support Services Unit, IP Philippines aims to facilitate the creation of four collecting societies by 2009 to cover not just literature and music but also fine art (photography, paintings, sculpture) and technology-based works such as computer programs. National Artist and poet Virgilio S. Almario is Filcols chairman.

Penman for Monday, February 11, 2008

JUST AFTER last Christmas, in the throes of what the doctor would much later tell me was pneumonia, I spent most of my time chained to my laptop (so what else is new?)—not writing, which my fevered brain was sullenly refusing to do, but poring over thousands of digital pictures that I had managed to accumulate over the past five years: over 12,000 of them, taken with three or four cameras in a dozen countries. For all that trigger-happiness, I was sure that not a third or even a quarter of them deserved their space in my hard drive, so I began the long and ultimately engaging task of pruning down my iPhoto files to create a new and drastically slimmed-down album of my favorite pictures.

As it turned out, I was just being prescient. With January came Macworld (what one saucy wag has called the annual “nerdgasm” of Apple Macintosh computer freaks) and the inevitable announcement by Steve Jobs of a new Apple product that most people weren’t even sure they needed until he said so: the MacBook Air, a 0.76-inch, three-pound wafer of a laptop that you can slice cucumbers and julienne carrots with. This was the Mac ultraportable (well, sort of—see the technical review below, if you like geek drama) that I’d been dreaming of for years, in between bedroom brawls with Angelina Jolie and zipping around Monte Carlo in a Mini Cooper. I’ll save the specs for later, but all you need to know is that this is one of the thinnest laptops ever made, and certainly the lightest in the Apple lineup, at no more than 3 pounds.


I’d been praying for something like the MacBook Air because I’ve been using portable computers since 1990—almost as soon as they came out—and by “using” I mean lugging one around every single day, everywhere I go; my three-year-old PowerBook G4 might as well be grafted to me. At 5 pounds, it isn’t much, but my back and my shoulder can certainly tell the 2-pound difference. Again, let’s skip the tech talk for now and zoom in on the one indisputable fact: the MacBook Air is a thing of beauty, a sliver of modern sculpture you could be happy just to look at or to stroke. You may not need it, but you’ll want it; when you see it, you will.

To cut what could really be a long story short, I threw my credit card to the wind and ordered a MacBook Air online even before Steve Jobs had left the auditorium in San Francisco. (This was, mind you, sometime past 2 am Manila time; I’m sure there’s a marketing study somewhere to show that 2 am is the hour most Web shoppers are most likely to click the “Buy now!” button. They can’t be very happy people if they’re up that late by their lonesome, and there’s nothing like an impulse buy to bring on the sweet dreams. My excuse was that it was still January 15 in California—my birthday!) Three weeks later, following an age-of-globalization shipping route that took it all the way from Shanghai (yes, everything is made in China) to Anchorage, Indianapolis, and Virginia (from where my sister handcarried it to a courier in New York), my MacBook Air turned up in Manila, and here it is, typing up its first “Penman” piece.

It’s a thing of wonder, but I had an immediate problem: how to fit 140 gigabytes' worth of odds and ends into the 80 gigs that was all the MBA had.

And here I remembered my swollen picture file, and all the sunsets, beaches, clouds, pussycats, pedestrians (pretty ones), and hotel rooms (I have a thing about taking pictures of every hotel bed and bathroom I go to, just before I trash them) I ever took a snapshot of. It would never have happened in the old days of film (remember Eastman Kodak?), when the cost of a 36-shot roll of film was enough for a movie and a burger, and when processing that roll could feed a family of four. You actually had to think twice if it was worth taking even one shot of anything. Today, with 4-gig SD cards, you can shoot a whole movie and erase it afterwards without spending one peso more than you paid for the camera and digital memory.

It often comes to us as a surprise what digital pack rats we’ve become. Hundred-gigabyte-sized hard drives have spoiled us rotten. Suddenly, quantity is king, and the easy theory (heck, it’s my theory) is, if you take 50 shots of the same sardine can, one of them’s bound to be Art.

So I picked up where I left off in my New Year’s mission of curating my own collection and trimmed down my cache to some 2,800 shots (about 800 of them featuring a surly orange tomcat in various poses—reclining, half-sitting, reclining, half-sitting). Out went all the shots of writers drinking beer (6,342 pictures); in stayed my loving close-ups of various computers being dissected, down to bare logic boards and microscopic Torx screws (this is what’s been called “computer porn,” minus the heavy breathing); I also retained a picture of the electric toilet bowl in my Nagoya hotel, a kind of sit-on carwash, if you know what I mean. (To see a sample, check out my Flickr page.)

I turned next to my iTunes playlists, which weren’t half as bad. I had digitized some 1,700 songs—still good enough, as iTunes helpfully reminded me, for uninterrupted listening over 6.4 days. That sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the 10,000 songs that my younger friends claim to have in storage. Now, I can imagine taking tens of thousands of pictures (Chippy alone could easily account for 2,000), but I didn’t know that human civilization had produced 10,000 songs—or at least 10,000 ones that I’d actually care to listen to.

It’s probably a function of age more than anything, but the older I get, the fewer songs I want to hear over and over again—explaining why, despite the regular growth in storage capacity of the annually-revamped iPod, I’ve never been an iPod freak, and have been quite happy with a one-gig Shuffle that I keep tethered to the car radio, containing all the 250 songs I truly ever want to hear, from Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Herz to Sana’y Wala Nang Wakas. Music, I’ve come to believe, is a comfort more than anything (the only art, Leonard Bernstein was quoted saying, incapable of malice—but then Bernstein didn’t live long enough to savor the charms of gangsta rap); it revives and reinforces what we already know in our bones, deep beneath the skin, which gets massaged by familiar melody and rhythm. I’m sure my teenage students would disagree; music wakes them up and gets them through the day better than coffee.

So it wasn’t all that difficult to drop the 20-minute version of the Warsaw Concerto from my playlist, along with a stray copy of Metallica’s Carpe Diem Baby (I have no idea how that crept into my computer—must have been a virus sent by the only Metallica fan I know, my poet-friend Fidel Rillo).

By day’s end, I had successfully migrated my drastically downsized PowerBook folders and files over to the anorexic Air, still leaving just a little less than 20 gigabytes for all the new novels, movies, epics, and encyclopedias that I’d sworn I was going to write to pay for my new baby. Ah, the joys and pains of being a digital daddy! (That's my new MacBook Air desktop, below; I thought it appropriate to use a shot of clouds I took over Palawan.)


OKAY, HARDCORE nerds and Mac freaks, let’s get down and dirty: is the new MacBook Air for you? That depends on what you do or expect to be doing. At 3 pounds, this laptop will go anywhere; it’s so sleek and sexy that you’ll want to bring it everywhere. But all that portability comes at a price—literally and figuratively. At $1,799, the MBA costs more than a full-featured, entry-level MacBook (5 pounds, $1,099), but it doesn’t have the MacBook’s CD/DVD drive, its extra USB ports, its FireWire port, its Ethernet port, its easily swappable battery, and its standard hard drive. (The MBA comes with an optional external SuperDrive for reading and burning CDs and DVDs.) The MacBook Air, as its name suggests, communicates with the world almost exclusively by air—through wi-fi and Bluetooth.

So did I just buy three pounds of, uhm, air? Well, not exactly. In those 3 pounds is a fast 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 13.3-inch screen (glossy, sharp, and brilliant, with a 1280 by 800 resolution), an 80-gigabyte 1.8-inch hard drive, one high-powered USB 2.0 port, a Micro-DVI port for presentations, an audio-out port, and a built-in iSight camera—plus, of course, Apple’s very capable Mac 10.5.1 “Leopard” OS. It has a full-sized, backlit keyboard that’s a joy to type on, an aluminum body (stiff and strong, despite its thinness, with no flex), and a small MagSafe power adaptor. In real-world usage, I got about 3.5 hours on one battery charge with all the energy-hogging options turned on, except the optical drive.

So what’s it good for? Writing, surfing, and emailing, basically, with some Bach in the background (its mono speaker sounds surprisingly loud and crisp). That’s all I need to do 90 percent of the time. If you do heavy-duty video and audio work, or if you insist on having all your 20,000 pictures and 10,000 songs at your fingertips, then the MacBook Air isn’t for you. (And please, PC fans, spare me the obvious and inevitable comparisons to the Sony Vaio and the Asus EEE PC; they’re great machines I’ve also recommended to friends, but they’ve got their own pluses and minuses—the comparable Vaio costs a bit more, and the unimaginably cheap Asus carries no more than 8 gigs—and they don’t run the Mac OS, which lies at the heart of what I’m paying for.)

Bottom line: don’t look at or buy the MacBook Air for what it’s not and what it can’t do. You might be surprised how happy you can be with what it is and what it can.

Penman for Monday, February 4, 2008

I WAS in Singapore last week with poet Vim Nadera and publisher Karina Bolasco for a British Council-sponsored seminar on “Animating Literature: Bringing Texts to Life.” I like to think of myself as a pretty capable teacher of literature and language, but listening to the presentations of teaching experts like Prof. John Corbett of the University of Glasgow reminded me just how much there remains to be learned, and what an inexhaustible wonder literature is. Facing deadlines for other writing assignments having more to do with politics and economics, and still grappling with revisions to my own second novel, I remembered what I was a teacher of literature for, and why students everywhere could benefit from bringing literature into their lives, with a little help from their mentors.

I was asked to make a presentation on animating literature in the Philippines—an overview of what we’ve been doing to get literature off the printed page—and here, for posterity, are highlights of what we shared with our colleagues from Asia and the UK.


THERE HAS always been something vital and interesting going on in Philippine literature, and much of it has taken place off the printed page. The problem emerges when we look at the sales of books—especially those of the kind that we want our students to read and make for good paper topics: in other words, the kind of literature you and I write and patronize. As a recent study by Prof. Patricia May Jurilla notes, “the readership of Filipino literary books is not at all very wide. It is usually limited to a small circle that includes authors themselves indeed but also academics, critics, teachers, and students.” Editions are very small, at a standard 1,000 copies for a print run—in a country of 90 million people, most of whom are at least nominally literate, many in English and/or Filipino. Sales are slow, taking at least two years for 1,000 copies to sell out.

There are many reasons for this, but the most basic one is, not surprisingly, economic. A typical paperback novel can cost most Filipinos a day’s wages. Another obstacle is language, and a third, I think, is simply material. By that I mean that most of our writers aren’t writing what most people want to read.

While highbrow literary publishing may have relatively languished, we have had a vigorous and profitable popular literature in comic books, romance novels, radio and TV dramas, and, of course, movies.

This isn’t to say that Philippine literary publishing has had very little success. As my colleague Ms. Karina Bolasco—who manages our largest literary publishing house—will tell you, there has been no shortage of new, talented authors seeking to get published every year. Many of these writers come from the annual literary workshops that we have been holding since the early 1960s and from the many creative writing degree programs now in place in Philippine universities, from the bachelor’s to the doctoral level.

In strictly financial or professional terms, the future might not be too bright for these people. But instead of dwelling on our failures and shortcomings—which will be familiar to every developing country and yet-modernizing society—I’d like to focus today on things we’ve done, done well, and done right in the Philippines to promote literature. I’ll then try to distill some useful lessons we’ve learned, toward a kind of best-practices list that we can all contribute to.

For example, for six years now, the National Book Development Board—a government agency with a self-explanatory name—has run a program called Booklatan sa Bayan that promotes readership in far=flung and underserved regions by holding seminars on the establishment and administration of libraries and reading centers, storytelling training, and a workshop for reading trainors. This program has been supported by major corporations as part of their own CSR programs. The NBDB also sponsors National Book Month in June (since moved to November), and last year’s highly successful celebration—devoted to the theme of “The Literary Imagination and the City We Live In”—included fully-booked bus tours of literary Manila, on which students could visit sites memorialized by Filipino authors in their works.

NGOs and private foundations have also been engaged in readership development. The Philippine Board of Books for Young People gives out much-awaited annual awards for the best new books for children—to authors and illustrators alike. The Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation seeks out sponsors to promote reading and teacher training in public schools. Major Philippine corporations such as HSBC, Petron, and Jollibee have been behind SAS, which has reached over 100,000 students and 3,000 teachers in 500 public schools over the past six years.

Read or Die (www.read-or-die.org) is a group of young bookworms who also pronote reading and literature in the Philippines. Last August, it launched what it calls its Propaganda guided reading program at a suburban high school, under which 46 students read a book for two hours every week under the guidance of a Read Or Die facilitator, capped by a visit from and a conversation with the book author. Read Or Die also organizes the Write Or Die series with Filipino authors meeting with their readers in local bookstores.

Private publishers and booksellers have done much to raise the public profile of literature. Riding on the vast network of its parent company, National Book Store, our biggest and most prestigious literary publisher, Anvil Publishing, has always been supportive of Filipino authors, and has sought ways to connect them with their audiences. Last October, Anvil cooperated with the British Council to bring reading expert Dr. Alan Pulverness to Manila to speak to hundreds of Filipino teachers and to meet with leading Filipino authors. A new bookstore chain, Fully Booked, has brought no less than Neil Gaiman over not once but twice, drawing huge crowds on both visits.

This brings me to the emergence and the growing popularity of new kinds of literature in the Philippines—genre fiction, speculative fiction, graphic or comic-book fiction, creative nonfiction, chick lit, performance poetry—all of which offer writers, especially new and young ones, some alternatives to mainstream realism. These genres don’t lack for enthusiastic supporters who will go out of their way to promote their favored schools of writing. One young entrepreneur, Kenneth Yu, took it upon himself to publish the slim but groundbreaking Philippine Genre Stories, now on its fourth issue. A prizewinning novelist, Dean Alfar, leads a group of young writers called Lit Critters, who meet regularly to discuss both local and foreign stories that might help them in their own work. Both Kenneth and Dean have extensive online networks. (And here, the formula seems to be alternative + young + Internet + network.)

We already have several major, high-traffic websites and portals devoted to Philippine literature, among them panitikan.com.ph, which has scored over 3 million hits since it began almost two years ago. We have been able to secure some government funding for this portal, which is regularly updated and acts as a clearinghouse for nearly everything related to Philippine literature. A work titled Ang Kagilagilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Zsazsa Zaturnnah (The Amazing Adventures of Zsazsa Zaturnnah) deserves special mention, because of its runaway success in several versions—first, as a comic book by the artist Carlo Vergara in 2002, then a stage musical in 2006, and finally as a movie in 2006. Before the musical even opened, all 16 shows had been sold out—an unprecedented feat in Philippine theater. All three versions—comic book, musical, and movie—won critical acclaim. The lesson here? Update and adapt material for new times, themes, and audiences.

Zsazsa Zaturnnah is also unusual in that it was one of the relatively few cases where a work that had succeeded in print moved on to the stage and then to the movies. Very few Filipino stories, novels, or plays ever make it to the movies, with the occasional exception of popular novels serialized in the komiks magazines. An incipient independent film industry has emerged, with many young talents drawn from art, literature, and music, but its market, as yet, remains severely limited.

The situation in poetry is more encouraging—maybe because it involves little money and makes even less. In other words, when something has very little commercial value, people focus on making art, and do very well. Filipino poets might never achieve the same iconic status they enjoy in, say, Russia or Indonesia, but they’re carving out a space of their own, at least in the urban consciousness.

A group of mostly young Manila poets, headlined by a few of their hardy seniors, holds what the organizers call “Happy Mondays” poetry readings at Mag:Net, an art-gallery-cum-café near three major universities every Monday. Around 10 well-known and also new poets take to the stage at these readings (which an incompatibility with cigarette smoke unhappily prevents me from attending), followed by an open mike, and punctuated by rock music. On Tuesdays, the scene moves to the Conspiracy Café, a 15-minute drive away. Events like this are replicated outside Manila—in Baguio, Cebu, and Davao—where local artists and poets’ groups take the lead. They’ve been very successful, largely because it’s the young people doing the organizing. While their elders go to seminars and festivals to read papers and sign books, these young poets have the energy and enthusiasm to make things happen from week to week.

What’s truly interesting is how poetry and other literary forms have merged with the other arts in the Philippine literary scene. In January 2006, the Philippine Literary Arts Council—the country’s premier organization of writers in English—spearheaded a very special art exhibit titled “Chromatext Reloaded” at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Main Gallery. Poet and retired advertising man Marne Kilates has opened a website he calls “Poets’ Picturebook” at http://marnescripts.blogspot.com, where the featured poets write poems based on paintings, photographs, or other artworks of their choice.

The lesson here, finally, seems to be that for literary forms to survive, they have to be willing and able to mutate, and if necessary to merge. This way they break new ground and reach or even create new audiences.

Penman for Monday, January 28, 2008

WHILE—LIKE many Pinoys—I might plead guilty to disliking, mistrusting, and resisting 90 percent of whatever the incumbent poobahs by the Pasig instruct me to do, there’s the 10 percent of the authoritarian mind that strikes a responsive chord in me. It’s a terrifying thought—this little fascist ventricle in an otherwise libertarian heart—but I’ve long suspected that many artists are so inclined; we, after all, like to think that we’re essentially engaged in imposing order upon chaos.

Or maybe that’s just my way of explaining why, disregarding the dismay of my friends on the Left, I’ve pronounced myself tentatively in favor of a national ID, or any kind of document that might replace (and only if it will replace) the four or five other pieces of identification I keep in my wallet, pretending to be real money. Or—wait a minute—maybe I should hold on to those four or five IDs, and add a couple more, given what we use IDs for in this country.

Let me explain. You and I know what IDs are for—they’re supposed to tell somebody who you are, or to prove that you are who you say you are. IDs work like magic wands—you wave them, and they open doors. Experience teaches us that some IDs open bigger doors than others: IDs with that “official” look, or—the better to drive the point home—that have the word “OFFICIAL” stamped on them; IDs with the word “Palace” or “President” somewhere, preferably in at least 20 points Arial bold (no, make that Gothic, looks more official); IDs with the bearer in a suit or a military uniform; IDs with a signature that looks like a roll of barbed wire; and, let’s not forget, IDs with the word PRESS or MEDIA screaming above the bearer’s mug shot, and it practically doesn’t matter if it was issued by The New York Times or the Barangay Bilibid Viejo Newsletter.

But woe unto you if you leave your ID at home, or lose it. In a flash, you become a virtual non-entity, crippled by your shameful inability to prove your right to exist and to be taken seriously. Every failure of refusal by some officious toad to recognize you becomes a rude reminder of your abject non-celebrity status, of the painfully visible distance between you and Piolo Pascual.

Thus do our relationships with our IDs—testy and tenuous to begin with, because I’ve yet to see an ID that truly flattered its owner—become vexatiously complicated. We like IDs when they get us into special places that people without IDs have to plaster their noses against a window to get a peek at. We like IDs when they protect our precious identities, such as over the counter at the bank. But we hate them when they become more us than us, when they turn into the tail that wags the dog. (Just ask any student trying to get into his own school without his ID.)

My ID anxieties mount whenever I drive into a subdivision—you know, the kind of gated, patrician enclave which might as well issue its own visas, especially to plebeians driving cars with anything less than a 2,000-cc. engine and plates that begin with an N or a P. I’m convinced that, just going by these indicators, private security guards are trained to identify you as a suspect from thirty meters away, and by the time you’ve driven up to them and rolled down your window, they’ve formed an attitude—one that will require you to present incontrovertible proof of your good moral character and benign intentions.

For some reason, the presentation of a driver’s license seems to satisfy these stringent requirements—as if no license-toting perp ever robbed a house; but maybe again that’s why security guards insist that you leave your driver’s license with them, because you can’t possibly do anything naughty in their neighborhood if you have to drive back to the guardhouse to recover your laminated mug.

Now, I hate doing that—leaving my license—not because I’m up to no good, but because I firmly believe it’s illegal for any non-cop to take my license for whatever reason, and also because I'm too lazy to unbuckle my seatbelt so I can pull out my wallet and the license in it (and then do that all over again in reverse when I take my license back).

So I’ve been offering these subdivision guards a number of hopefully acceptable alternatives, short of a passport: my university ID; my press card; my social security card; my US Library of Congress souvenir reader’s card. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The last thing you want to do is to argue constitutional rights with a sleepy guy holding a shotgun.

And you know the truly aggravating part of this deal. How many IDs have you left in parts unknown? How many IDs do you need to last a year of entering subdivisions, buildings, and offices which all require you to leave that little token of you behind, never to be seen again?

Thankfully, these problems are over—I think. Thanks to a discovery I made online, as I was nosing around the Flickr site, you can now produce as many IDs as you want, and introduce yourself as the Sultan of Samarkand or the CEO of IOU International Corp. (I won’t be held responsible for anything expressly or vaguely illegal that you do).

BigHugeLabs has a nifty program called Badge Maker that will help you “Make your own ID card, press pass, name tag, unofficial Flickr badge, or any other kind of identification. Print it out, laminate it, wear it with pride! Make any kind of identification easily in just a few seconds!” All you need is an Internet connection, a digital picture, a printer—and, of course, the freeware Badge Maker, which walks you through the simple process.

First, upload a picture file. (Hmm. Let’s find a dorky picture of me in a suit.) Then, a style (photo badge, portrait—long IDs that hang from lanyards seem to be more impressive than wimpy ones that fit in a purse).

Next, header text. Now this is where you can put something like PRESS, even if all you do is smooth creases out of pants. But I want to be both inventive and honest (a very difficult combination), so I choose to write RESIDENT—a big word that sounds like PRESIDENT, and which is absolutely true, as you’ll surely see.

For the footer text—the bar that’ll run across the bottom edge of the ID—the template just says “OFFICIAL” (heck, the word has to appear somewhere), but I choose to say, “FOR OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES ONLY,” because it looks busy and, well, even more official.

Next on the checklist is an option that tickles me: “Include an official-looking barcode?” Heck, yes! Everyone loves a barcode, because nobody knows what it’s saying—which means that it was surely made by a superior intelligence who keeps secret tabs of everything and everyone, including supercilious security guards.

And then you put your name, and the text to go with it. I choose to say: “This certifies that JOSE Y. DALISAY JR. is an official resident of XXX Juan Luna Street, Barangay YYY, Quezon City.” And, for good measure, I add, “and is entitled to all the rights and privileges appurtenant thereto,” which again is absolutely true, except that there’s no more space to explain those privileges, which include playing with the house cats Chippy and Sophie, and staging poker marathons in the gazebo.

Then there are spaces to fill out for “Member since” (let’s put the date when we moved in, 31/10/03); “Expires” (that should be sometime in 2019, when I turn 65 and retire, so let’s put 30/06/19, the arbitrary date coming from the fact that all my credit cards seem to expire on June 30, so let’s just go ahead and copy that); and birthdate (15/01/54).

And finally you click on that big blue button that says “Create>>” and voila!—you have your own “official” ID badge, ready for lamination (after scrawling a signature somewhere) and presentation to every blue guard in the archipelago. Use it, lose it, reprint it, and if it doesn’t work, heck, enhance this and that element and make another one.

Come to think of it, who needs a national ID when you have Badge Maker?


FROM OUR friends at the University of Sto. Tomas comes this announcement that the UST Graduate School, in cooperation with the UST Center for Intercultural Studies and the UST Department of Languages, Literature and Philosophy and with assistance from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, is holding a national conference titled INTER/SECTIONS: Crossroads and Crosscurrents of Literatures and Cultures from January 29 to 31 at the UST Thomas Aquinas Research Complex.

I was scheduled to join a panel for this conference, but I had to excuse myself because I’m going to be in Singapore this week, for a British Council seminar on “Animating Literature.” (Boy, do we talk a lot about literature!) I’ll be traveling with fellow UP professor and performance poet Vim Nadera and publisher Karina Bolasco, and I hope to run into some writer-friends, both Pinoy and Singaporean, sometime these next few days. I haven’t had time to touch base with these guys, but just in case they come across this piece, we’ll be staying at the Orchard Parade Hotel on Tanglin Road, wherever that is.


AND FINALLY, let me share the news that the journals of the University of the Philippines Diliman can now be accessed online through the UP Diliman Journals Online (UPDJO), a web portal designed to increase the visibility of the journals in the national and international community. The portal—which can be found at http://journals.upd.edu.ph—hosts several Diliman journals including Science Diliman, Humanities Diliman, Social Science Diliman, Kasarinlan, Plaridel, Review of Women’s Studies, and the Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature.

The UPDJO is now hooked up to Google Scholar, the most powerful search engine that scholars today can avail themselves of. Some articles of UPDJO are also featured at ResearchSEA, a website dedicated to research in Southeast Asia. Better accessibility means citations and more impact for these journals on the international academic community. Check it out!

Penman for Monday, January 21, 2008

THIRTY YEARS ago, as a young couple with a three-year-old daughter, Beng and I moved into a two-bedroom bungalow on the fringes of San Mateo—the kind of bare concrete shoebox thousands of lower-middle-class Filipinos yearned to own.

Before the real estate developers latched on to something and began giving gauzy English names to their projects—like “Westbrook Hills”, “Dominion Farms”, and “Juniper Estates”—our subdivision’s now dearly departed owner went straight to the point of the whole construction business and modestly blessed her little fiefdom with her own name. And so she remains memorialized in the rusting sign that greets all who enter the main gate of “Modesta Village.”

Of course, in the late ‘70s, that gate and that sign were new, as was everything else on that ragged edge of a yet-hesitant metropolis. Our village was literally hacked out of a hillside; the red earth bled from the springs that tumbled out of the cloven rock, and the tall talahib grass fought mightily to stay where it was and reclaim patches that were being burnt away. At least once a year the grass blossomed and spawned hairy white tufts that the sunset tinted an orange-pink. Shortly after we moved in, we learned that about six hilltops and valleys behind us was a mountain lagoon we could still dive into like children (and we did), and swaths of forest that were rumored to shelter wild deer as well as escaped convicts from the penitentiary.

I gave up a chance to pick out a lot in a more sensible place like Fairview, which itself was then just getting off the ground, and chose instead the curious charms of Modesta Village, for reasons I now can’t remember—unless it was because my father had also or had first decided to live there, and being a good Filipino boy I figured that the best compromise between independence and filial piety was to take the house next to my father’s.

And that’s exactly what I did, becoming #20 to his #18 on Block 31. We got exactly the same concrete shell with two small bedrooms, a kitchen, a toilet, a dining room, and a living room occupying about half of a 240-square-meter lot.

With spades of faith and a dash of imagination, these subdivision houses could be transformed into dream abodes, with a little yard in front and a clothesline behind. They all had garages, but few had cars in them—at least not yet. My father had a small Ford Escort that his office lent him, but that was always parked outside, the driveway being too good to be driven on; my own first car, a VW Beetle, was still three years away. Never mind cars: we were all only too happy to move up in the world, from perennial apartment dwellers and renters to proud and permanent middle-class homeowners. That joy was manifest in the riot of colors that my neighbors chose for their houses: pink, green, purple, blue; one neighbor, a seaman, recalled his voyages in concrete, shaping his façade into a ship’s bow. Only my father’s house and mine stood out in unremarkable white.

For all that, we hocked our souls to the devil of amortization. In my case, I was paying what today would be a laughable pittance—P782.84 a month (when you write the same check month after month and year after year, you remember the exact figure) for 15 years, with no downpayment. It doesn’t look like a lot but it was half my salary then. Beng and I worked in Padre Faura, clear across the city, and sometimes it would be eight o’clock and we would still be on the road, literally, tired and hungry from waiting for the hourly bus that went the whole way home to Modesta.

Yup, that was home, such as it was. I think someone forgot to check the water table when they set up the village, so all the backyard wells dried up quickly and soon all the water had to be trucked in. Then people began forgetting that electric bills were meant to be paid, so the power company pulled the plug and plunged the whole village into medieval darkness for many months. At that woeful period’s end, our barangay chairman’s jubilation over the return of juice to our wires was such that he signed his announcement with a contextually precise “Electrifically yours.”

We lived there for about eight years. We took Demi up the hilltop to fly kites and watch the sunset. I got a car and learned to drive and sulked when I had to use it to haul water in jerrycans from down below.

And then I went abroad for schooling and our life changed, and when I returned things were never the same again, and we left the San Mateo house to resume the urban vagabond’s life. I don’t think we really knew how long we intended to stay away, because the house just sat there, and sat there, and once in a while we let someone stay there, with strict instructions not to touch or move anything. We lent the keys and the use of the place to the neighbors—my cousins, who now lived in my father’s house. Before we knew it years had passed and our house with all its books and cassettes and wooden tennis rackets and Playboys with the likes of Farah Fawcett on the cover had turned into a museum.

I suppose I avoided going back there, not wanting to see a place I loved treated so poorly by time—or, in truth, by my own benign neglect. I had this image of a blindingly white house where young and smiling people lived, serenaded by Bach and the Sesame Street gang.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, over the New Year break, my mother needed to go back to their house to recover some things and no one else could drive her there, so we did the inevitable and revisited our old manse. The roads had improved and the other villages around ours looked new and spiffy, and for a minute I hoped that nothing much had changed. But of course I was dreaming, and the harsh swipe of passing time quickly overtook my senses—the village roads felt rougher than ever, the houses looked hunched and shabby, and the people themselves—all strangers now—seemed listless and sullen.

When I saw our house I nearly wept: the ceiling plyboard had come off and was hanging like an idle tongue, and the paint had flaked all over. Our books were caked in ancient dust; door hinges creaked. But I had stepped otherwise into a virtual time capsule, for nearly everything was at it was, say, on any given day in 1987, and when we opened the cabinets our dated clothes were still all there, musty and yellowed and too many sizes smaller. Where had these slim and sexy people gone?

I pored through old drawers and documents, and saw a checkbook that had me down to my last P217 by the end of one August, only to be saved by two Palancas that netted me P6,000 on the 1st of September; the next day I wrote out seven checks—for three months’ amortization (P2,348.52), three months’ schoolbus service for Demi (P360), a personal debt (P500), a balato for my Dad (P500), three months of water (P105), a month of electricity (P97.30), and sundry expenses (P1,300). By the end of it all I had P1,000 left. I can’t even tell anymore what year that was—I couldn’t find any year-date on the checkbook—but it must’ve been an interesting and suspenseful one, to have been saved by a windfall. At that point I smiled and said—knowing my post-holiday bank balance—“So what else is new?”

We did a quick and cursory cleanup and I tossed a pile of old receipts, pictures, and letters into a sack, and when I looked back it seemed like a mountain of mementoes remained to be sorted out, but we had run out of time. I shut the door, vowing to return, not knowing when.



I'M VERY happy to announce that Peter Gordon, executive director of the Man Asian Literary Prize, will be in Manila this Thursday, January 24, to promote the prize among Filipino writers and to speak on “International Opportunities for Filipino Writers.” The UP Institute of Creative Writing is hosting his talk, which will be held that day at 2:30 pm at the AVR Room, 2nd floor, Rizal Hall (Faculty Center), UP Diliman.

The Man Asian—informally known as the “Asian Booker”—was established in 2006 and made its first award in 2007 for the best unpublished novel in English or English translation by an Asian. Last year’s competition drew 243 entries from all over Asia (out of which, I was told informally, only about ten came from the Philippines, with more than half coming from South Asia, particularly India). The deadline for the 2008 Man Asian is March 31.

Peter will speak about the prize and on literary publishing in Asia in general. The UPICW is inviting all interested writers, translators, publishers, teachers, and students to attend the lecture-discussion, which will also feature me and my fellow novelist and columnist Alfred “Krip” Yuson. Peter is also a founder and former director of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival (held each March in Hong Kong), founder and editor of the Asian Review of Books, and publisher at Chameleon Press. He writes a weekly op-ed column in the Hong Kong daily The Standard and is chairman of the Russian Interest Group at the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.

Penman for Monday, January 14, 2008


I’VE BEEN teaching Comparative Literature 111, an undergraduate course on the short story, for some semesters now. It’s a course I helped design—or, actually, to restore into the English curriculum at UP. Back when I was a returning sophomore (in 1981, at age 27; you know the story), this used to be called CL 180, and it was taught by one of the department’s most formidable professors, Sylvia Ventura.

She marched us through a great number of the world’s best stories, and by the end of the semester I felt that I had begun to understand something that I had only intuited up to that point: the form and function of the short story. It coincided with my own budding commitment to the genre, to writing the short story in English.

Until then I still thought of myself primarily as a playwright in Filipino, but after losing out in competitions with a sickening consistency to the superior skills of my good friend Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega, I decided to focus on something else. The delight I felt in CL 180 confirmed my choice for me: this was what I wanted to do, to attempt—at least in my fevered imagination—to deserve the exalted company of such as Ivan Bunin, W. Somerset Maugham, and J. D. Salinger.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who was inspired by that course, taught with the kind of methodical precision that required you to know each story by heart (Prof. Ventura—whose Shakespeare class I also attended and enjoyed—favored the “spot passages” exam, where you had to identify, contextualize, and discuss some suddenly obscure passage, blind).

Sometime in the 1990s, however, perhaps because of the rise of new literary theories that privileged craft less and ideology more, CL 180 and other such “genre” and “survey” courses fell out of favor, to be replaced by trendier alternatives. The impulse of the moment was to “subvert the canon” or to toss it out the window altogether, and like most revolutions this one produced its excesses.

While it may have been a good move for the critically inclined, it was disastrous for student writers, many of whom graduated without never having read anything by, say, Thomas Mann or Katherine Mansfield, not to mention Kerima Polotan and Gregorio Brillantes. (I know what some of us are thinking: in the old days, nobody had to force you to read anything; you went out and discovered great literature on your own—not even for a grade, but just because you wanted to.)

This was why I was glad the department decided, a couple of years ago, to restore these genre courses and to require them of our Creative Writing majors, to give them a better sense of what came before them, and to get them to know the canon before they even think of subverting it (and to realize, perhaps with a certain modesty, that each of these landmarks was, in a sense, revolutionary in its own time). I embraced the teaching of the short story (its history, elements, and techniques), as a way of paying forward what Professor Ventura had taught me. My syllabus covers about 24 stories from all over—from old popular classics such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” to postmodern puzzlers such as Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and much newer but excellently crafted pieces by Filipinos such as Merlinda Bobis’ “Shoes.”

We read these stories for more than enjoyment; since I’m taking them up with student writers, I’m ever mindful of form and technique—why this point of view, why this opening scene, why this image or this phrase, why this ending. I’d like them to be able to second-guess the author, to see how his or her imagination works and moves over the narrative. I don’t expect them to write like Kerima Polotan or Dino Buzzati if they don’t care to, but I’d like them to be aware of their options, to realize that there’s more than one way of telling a story.

There are two stories I keep coming back to—and the students have this coming out of their ears—because they mark, for me, two key moments in the history of the short story, particularly in terms of style and sensibility.

The first is James Joyce’s “Araby” (1905), part of his Dubliners suite, the quintessential coming-of-age story, dwelling on a young boy’s fervent infatuation with an older girl. (That’s Joyce in 1926, in a rather rakish pose shot by Bernice Abbott in Paris.) It’s a puppy-love story my students can easily relate to and might have written themselves, except that they can’t—not in the way Joyce sets the story up, opening with the bleakest of settings:

“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

“The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp…. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump.”

Age and decrepitude permeate this opening scene, but it’s vital in setting off the vigor and ardor of the boy’s feelings for the nameless and unnamable “Mangan’s sister.” I can’t imagine how anyone can do Joyce better in describing his narrator’s welling emotion: “My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”

I also ask my students to take note of the motif—the recurring element—of seeing and not seeing, of light and shadow; “Araby” is suffused as well with images of religion and chivalry, coming together in the boy’s imagination of himself as a Galahad protecting his precious love against the world’s coarseness and crassness. In one of the story’s most memorable lines, the narrator says: “I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.”

He goes to Araby (why “Araby”? what does it conjure in relation to our knight-errant?)—a bazaar—to buy a gift for his lady-love, only to find himself being brushed off by a salesgirl who’s busy flirting with two young men, and the boy suffers the crushing realization that he’s simply too young to be taken seriously, for all his rampant affections. The story ends with what would come to be known as the epiphany (literally, the “showing of the gifts,” in this case the insight gained by the narrator): “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

But this isn’t a young boy’s voice, nor is it a young boy speaking; many readers fail to realize that the actual narrator is a much older man, trying to make sense of what must have been a painfully bewildering experience from a bygone age of innocence.


Another classic I enjoy teaching is Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), as much for its style as for its substance. “Hills” has none of the Latinate floridity of “Araby,” and indeed it would define Hemingway’s signature spareness of language. The prose is as dry as his setting—a small train station somewhere between Barcelona and Madrid (and again, the setting is the first thing I draw my students’ attention to: why here?). (That’s Hemingway at work in the field, from the PBS website.)

“Hills Like White Elephants” has two travelers—an American man and his presumably American girlfriend—arguing over whether she should have an abortion or not. He wants her to have one, and uses everything in his arsenal, including emotional blackmail, to get her to agree; she’s reluctant, hoping she can keep both him and the baby.

Any story about abortion can be potentially explosive in class, and as the teacher I have to remind my students that we’re not about to engage in a pro-life vs. pro-choice debate. The more pertinent question in terms of substance is, who makes the decision, and how? We often think of “Papa” Hemingway as this big, burly, white-bearded macho man who loved bullfights and barracudas, but “Hills Like White Elephants” is anything but a macho manifesto. Hemingway (who, by the way, visited Manila in 1941 just before the war) writes with great sensitivity and restraint; take note of how “the girl” comes into her own in the story.

I admire “Hills” mostly for its style, which, for 1927, seemed way ahead of its time, and would in fact prefigure what would come to be known as “minimalism,” the school of “less is more”, which Hemingway himself would refer to as “the iceberg principle,” whereby only one-tenth of the whole piece shows above the surface, with the rest to be inferred by the reader. Hemingway achieves this by literally letting his characters speak for themselves, without any authorial commentary, so that the story is 80 percent dialogue, and the effect is that of the reader eavesdropping on a private conversation:

"We can have the whole world."

"No, we can't."

"We can go everywhere."

"No, we can't. It isn't ours any more."

"It's ours."

"No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back."

Many decades later, the dean of American minimalism, Raymond Carver, would pay tribute to “Hills Like White Elephants” by titling one of his books, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, with a take-off from a line in the story: "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"

That’s a great example of the short story looking back, then moving forward.

Penman for Monday, January 7, 2008


LAST WEEK'S piece on—among others—the “secret pocket” in men’s pants brought in further comments from readers, some of which were more interesting than the original article itself. One such response came from “Doc” Tony Concepcion, who took an even longer historical view of things:

“I read with interest your December 31 Philippine Star article entitled 'A Paucity of Pockets', and I just had to give my two cents’ worth on the subject matter.

“The ‘secret pocket’ in men's pants is also called by tailors of bespoke or custombuilt pants as the bolsa de relo. And that is exactly what it is, a pocket for pocket watches.

“There was a time up to the turn of the 20th century when wristwatches were not popular at all for various reasons such as its being seen to be a lady's watch (could be another topic for a future column). Gentlemen used pocket watches and there was therefore a need to have a place in his clothing to contain or hide it, and that's where tihis small pocket comes in. A matching chain usually came with the watch at one end, and on the other end, the chain is hooked to the belt holder. In Western countries the gentleman's pocket watch is hooked up to the vest where there is also a small slit that serves as the pocket watch holder.

“I hope I was able to provide a reply to your reader’s query as to the story behind the secret pocket in men's pants. There are of course other uses for this small pocket especially when pocket watches were replaced by wristwatches. The small pocket soon became a repository of coins and folded money bills, and to hide jewelry articles and one’s watch when passing through areas where holdups and snatching cases are notorious.”

Many thanks, Doc. I do have a correction to make: I said that secret pockets went out of style, but when I was wearing my jeans the other day I looked down and sure enough, there was a “secret” pocket just above the regular one. I stuck my thumb into it, whaddya know, it felt good.


THIS IS going to be the biggest of years for the University of the Philippines, which is marking its centennial (formally, on June 18, the date UP was created by law 100 years ago). Like over 200,000 other people, I’m a proud UP alumnus; more than that, I work there and live on campus, so you might say that I’m a UP creature through and through. (As I’ve often recounted, my mother—a UP Education alumna herself—made sure of that by playing a 78 rpm record of “UP Beloved” and “Push on, UP!” over and over again as I was learning to walk.)

It took me 14 years to get my bachelor’s degree from UP, but from the day I got it I haven’t thought of going anywhere else. I’ve since been privileged not just to become a UP professor but also to serve as chair of the English department and vice-president for public affairs of the UP System. Working in administration taught me what a complex organism the university system is, and that the university is far from perfect—indeed, it needs a considerable boost to become the world-class 21st-century university it needs to be. But I also understood why people chose to stay on here despite the horrendously low salaries: there’s still no other school like it in this country, in terms of the community of free minds that it has fostered, and the spirit of service to the nation that’s inculcated in every UP student (with, one has to admit, variable results).

There’ll be a lot of stories being told about UP this whole year, and the university would like to hear yours, if you have an interesting one to share with your fellow alumni and the world at large. As part of its Centennial celebration, UP is putting together “100 Kwentong Peyups,” a series of columns which will appear in major Philippine dailies throughout the year. All past students of any of the University of the Philippines' units are invited to submit their stories. Submissions should:

1. Be a maximum of 1,000 words;
2. Be a personal experience and written in the first person;
3. Be emotionally engaging—funny, sad, scary, etc.; and
4. Make the connection between the story and a life lesson that serves you well today.
5. If possible, please include an old photo or scanned memento.

Please include your name, college or unit and course, and year you entered UP as well as your email address. If you remember your Student Number (who doesn’t? mine’s 70-02858), that’ll be even better.

Send your submissions starting today to 100kwentongpeyups@campaignsandgrey.net. You’ll be notified via email if your story has been selected for publication or for use in other Centennial celebrations.

My own personal contribution to the Centennial has to do with another one of my lifelong passions, amateur photography. As some of my blog readers and PhilMUG friends know, I’ve been an active poster on Flickr, an online network for photographers (think of it as the mother of all photo albums, categorized according to subject, camera, country, and thousands of other possible preferences).

Since I was sick as a dog (pneumonia, as it turned out) over much of the holiday break and couldn’t write, I used the time to do more mechanical but still enjoyable things, like upload some of my best and favorite pictures to my Flickr page.

And then it occurred to me that a good number of these pictures were taken around campus—so why not set up a Flickr group just for UP Diliman? (Of course, UP is much more and much larger than Diliman; the System itself now comprises seven autonomous universities spread out over a dozen physical campuses. But since there are many other UP-based sites on Flickr and on other Web networks, I wanted to focus on Diliman, a place I’ve inhabited and loved since the mid-‘60s.)

Thus was “Dilimania” born, at http://www.flickr.com/groups/dilimania. This site features pictures taken in (and only in) UP Diliman—the main campus of the University of the Philippines. My aim is for people (not necessarily UP alumni) to photographically document this campus, especially with the UP Centennial coming up this 2008.

Pictures taken inside classrooms and labs, etc. as well as exterior shots are welcome. Show us corners and angles of Diliman we've never seen. Please use your good sense and good taste in choosing what to upload. This is open to both UP and non-UP alumni and students, faculty, and staff. Lastly, let's try to keep discussions focused on photography—there are better places like www.peyups.com for nearly everything else UP.

Let me share a couple of my own favorite shots of the Oblation—a subject I never seem to tire of—to get things going.

LASTLY, LET me congratulate the winners of the recent 28th National Quiz Bee Contest. At a time when all we ever seem to value is singing and dancing talent, or guessing on prizes in boxes, or surviving the enforced company of other people in the same house, these kids and the Quiz Bee itself remind us that knowledge and reading are still important and wonderful things. What’s especially heartening is that many of these winners come from small, provincial schools, whose teachers must be doing something right despite their meager resources. These champions are:

Shirlmaine Estonactoc, Elementary Makabayan National Grand Champion, from Echague West Central School, Isabela, Cagayan Valley, coached by Ms. Teresita R. Macadaeg;

Manilyn A. Cuantioso, Elementary Makabayan National Runner-up , from Surigao West Central Elem. School, Surigao City, CARAGA, coached by Mrs. Anita A. Odchimar;

Niel Benjamin DT Kho, Elementary Math National Grand Champion from San Beda College-Alabang, Muntinlupa, National Capital Region, coached by Mrs. Lormita O. Castillo;

Carlo Cardama, Elementary Math National Runner-up from Colegio San Agustin-Biñan, Laguna, CALABARZON, coached by Ms. Marife Dolloso;

Cherry Gil L. Araojo, High School Science & Technology National Grand Champion, from Legazpi City High School, Legazpi City, Bicol Region, coached by Ms. Michelle M. Daniel;

Rafael Alfred C. Montalvo, High School Science & Technology National Runner-up, from Makati City Science High School, Makati City, NCR, coached by Ms. Celia P. Flores;

John Michael Rivera, Collegiate General Information & International Affairs National Grand Champion, from Villagers Montessori College, Quezon City, NCR, coached by Mr. Arnel M. Salva;

Emil F. Ubaldo, Collegiate General Information & International Affairs National Runner-up, from Central Luzon State University, Nueva Ecija, Central Luzon, coached by Mr. Jay Villafria.

The Regional Finalists also voted for the Most Friendly Bee among them during the four-day Summit, and that was Lester Antonni B. Hesita, from Paco Catholic School, Manila, National Capital Region.