Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, December 29, 2008

I'D BEEN to Shanghai twice before—the first time in 1987, in the wide-eyed company of writer-friends most of whom, including me, didn’t even know how to use chopsticks then, and the second time last year, to cover an international conference of massage therapists (I kid you not). Last week I made good on a longstanding pledge to bring Beng to China, thanks to budget fares I secured from an online promo of Cebu Pacific last May (yes, I do plan a little early). Beng’s been to Hong Kong and Shenzen a few times but never yet to the heart of the mainland, so I thought this would be a great way to celebrate Christmas—albeit Christmas, as Deng Xiaoping would have said, with Chinese characteristics.

We landed in Shanghai’s supersized Pudong Airport past midnight, and I knew we were in the right place when I saw two nut-brown Pinoys at the arrivals area welcoming our flight with a hand-lettered sign: “Hatid-Sundo Singkuwenta ang Isa.” Had I been traveling alone I would’ve availed myself of the service, if only out of journalistic curiosity, but I had promised Beng a real holiday so we took a cab for the 30-km ride to the city center, and ended up paying five times more. (Real holidays cost real money!) Our hotel, fortunately, was nice, big, and warm (Shanghai is freezing this time of year—real holidays are cheaper in winter), and we saved ourselves a breakfast and made up for some of the cab fare by dozing till noon the next day.

As Beng should’ve suspected, I also came to Shanghai in quest of Chinese-made pens, well known (or, to be less than kind, notorious) among pen fanciers for being conscientious copies of Western classics such as the Parker 51. I’m not talking about the crude Montblanc fakes that are hawked on every streetcorner, nor the smarter and pricier “replicas” you can find in Shanghai’s backstreet emporia, alongside the Coach and LV bags. I used the word “conscientious,” because the Chinese pen company Hero did clone the Parker 51 down to the last detail, then stamped its name on it and sold it unabashedly as its own. You’d have to admire the cheekiness in this age of globalization and IPR, which apparently hasn’t caught up with Hero yet.

But to cut to the chase, thanks to some tips from the Internet, I learned that most of Shanghai’s stationery shops were to be found on “Book Street,” which I established to be Fuzhou Road. Much to my delight, I discovered that this—like most of the other must-see’s on my list—was just a few blocks from our hotel, so Beng and I marched off after lunch to explore its offerings. It was, indeed, a street full of shops selling paper, paintbrushes, art and calligraphy supplies, books, and, yes, pens! Store after store brought up the names I’d read about online—Jinghao, Duke, Kaigelu, Liseur, Picasso, Montagut (don’t ask me why), and Hero.

Sadly, despite my willingness to contribute to the health of China’s beleaguered economy, nearly all of the pens I came across were much too blingy for my taste, burdened with all manner of silly adornments—although, looking at new Shanghai’s Disneyland-esque skyline, with orbs and cones sitting on top of spires and neon lights zigzagging up and down 30 floors’ worth of facades, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. I came away with a token purchase—the most sedate Hero I could find, a Parker 45 “tribute” pen, to put it nicely—along with a bag of 10 Hero “Parker 51s” at a little over a dollar each to give away to friends as souvenirs of an earnest if misplaced admiration for something Western.

The West, of course, is all over China, most especially Shanghai, which saw more of the West than the rest of the country as a city carved up into settlements by the Western powers early in the last century. It was no coincidence that the Chinese Communist Party held its first National Congress here in 1921 under Mao Zedong; the site where this took place is now a museum devoted to China’s efforts to kick out the foreign devils (in the museum shop, you can still buy Mao and CCP pins for 5 yuan or about P35 each). As if to say something, the museum happens to be located in Xintiandi, the city’s new posh district; you can step out of Mao’s shadow and walk straight into a chi-chi French restaurant across the street.

Shanghai’s other museums seem to hardly mention Mao, looking far into the past (the Shanghai Museum, devoted to ancient arts) and squarely into the future (the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum). Two museums I regretted not having seen were the Shanghai Museum of Public Security, which promised 70,000 exhibits including “a skull with a pair of scissors sticking into it,” and The Museum of Ancient Chinese Sex Culture (a.k.a. the Shanghai Sex Museum), which opened in 1999 but moved to Tongli town 50 kilometers away in 2004 for want of more visitors (an enduring mystery, considering the billions of sexual acts that produced China today).

But what we lacked in culture, we more than made up for in shopping, and Shanghai’s Yu Yuan Garden—which I had visited 20 years and 40 pounds earlier—can’t be beat for the sheer size and variety of the offerings. (By “shopping” I don’t mean carting home Ming vases and life-size clay horsemen, but 30-yuan T-shirts and 10-yuan scarves.) I’m a big fan of Chinese cuisine, but we decided to ease ourselves into the local diet by trying KFC with Chinese characteristics, and realized (as we later would at McDonalds) that that meant “hot and spicy,” no matter what you thought the smiling girl across the counter was trying to say. When we did what the Shanghainese do and marched bravely into a restaurant whose name we couldn’t read, we ended up with a dinner of three soups—noodles, dumplings, and hot and sour—as well as an extra order of dumplings; apparently, every time we pointed at a picture of a dish, it was as good as cooked and paid for.

But it was, all told, a merry vacation, a long march into the late December chill of an otherwise friendly and familiar neighbor, armed with a map and a steaming cob of corn, bought on the street for 3 yuan. Everywhere around us were reminders of how far Shanghai and China had come from that meeting room in Xintiandi—Batman on HBO, Givenchy at the mall, Starbucks in Yu Yuan, Volkswagen on the road. Every other block, it seemed another hutong—a traditional compound or cluster of houses—was biting the dust to make way for a new skyscraper hoping to outdo the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in the bright-lights-big-city Pudong New Area across the Huangpu River. As mighty excavators rumbled late into the day, laughing teenagers flashed V-signs and had their pictures taken in front of a towering Christmas tree on Nanjing Road, and “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” tinkled out of the shopfronts, enticing pedestrians to come by and pick up an almond-eyed Santa or, better yet, a beribboned red ox for the Chinese New Year. It may not have been heaven and nature singing, but it was Yuletide in Shanghai.

Penman for Monday, December 22, 2008


AS I mentioned last week, I usually work with the TV on, and I was flipping through channels and half-listening again a few days ago when I spotted something that made me look up—the pleasant face and voice of Helen Gamboa, not singing but acting in an old Tagalog movie whose lines sounded more than vaguely familiar… because I wrote them.

The movie, produced in 1989, was one of about 14 I scripted for the late Lino Brocka. Its title still makes me wince to this day—"Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan?" (When Will the Sin Be Cleansed?)—which was typical of the kind of money-making melodrama Lino had to cook up for his producers so they would let him do something socially significant (read: box-office disaster) now and then. As I watched the movie, the story slowly came back to me, and for a while I missed those days when Lino and I slapped these tearjerkers together—"Ina Ka ng Anak Mo", "Ano ang Kulay ng Mukha ng Diyos?"—laughing at our own absurdities, although we tried to do as decent a job as we could with every movie, commercial or otherwise.

I’ll talk more about those moviemaking days (and why I put them behind me) another time; what struck me that moment was how I’d almost completely forgotten about what I’d written almost 20 years ago—an anxiety not helped by a quick visit to Google, where I found the film credited to somebody else (someone else did write the basic story as a komiks serial; I wrote the screenplay—or so I thought).

Looking for confirmation, I scanned my hard drive for anything with “mahuhugasan” in it—one of the great things about the Mac is that it has an “internal Google” called Spotlight that archives everything on your disk and retrieve the files in seconds—and while I didn’t turn up the script itself (I have to admit to not losing or misplacing the scripts of most of my early movies, especially those from pre-computer days), I did find, of all things, a letter I wrote my parents from cold Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I wrote the screenplay long-distance in between papers for my PhD.

Beng had joined me then; I wasn’t clearing much as a teaching assistant so Beng worked as a deli clerk and sold her watercolors on the street while I figured out new ways to make Filipinos weep in their theater seats; Demi was back in Manila, midway through high school, on which I missed out completely.

With your indulgence, here’s a portion of that letter, which I’m sharing because it captures a certain moment in this writer’s life, a time when I had begun work on my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place (written entirely in America as part of my dissertation project) while remaining tethered to the popular movies that paid the bills back home and the airline tickets. I must’ve typed this out, pre-Mac, on WordPerfect 4.2 and printed it out to mail home; it tells you what a pack rat I am to have saved these digital files from 1989, moving them from floppies and then from one computer to the next over 19 years:

Oct. 19/89 7:52 pm

It's been a long time since I got to write you last, and it's really just the usual load of schoolwork and writing (for a living) that's been keeping me very busy.... Well, it's finally started snowing; we got six inches of snowfall today (a record for October), and it's still at that stage where it looks pretty, but very soon it'll simply be cold, muddy and wet, and I'll have to march around again under six layers of clothing. I spent some money this week provisioning myself for the winter—I bought a new (used but clean) goosedown comforter for $25 at the resale (used-goods) store, and it was a bargain because these things normally cost $100+; also some sweaters and woolen socks....

My finances are running low again, but I'm not too worried because the good news is that I have a couple of scripting jobs lined up, thanks to Lino and Charo. Lino was here in New York last week but I didn't get a chance to see him, although we talked on the phone; there's a possibility that I might do an American-Filipino project for him next year in San Francisco (or maybe Los Angeles, now that the earthquake's been through SF); I wrote a storyline for that, and there's no rush, because this will be for 1990; the producer is an Italian who has his office in Paris, and who worked with Lino in "Ora Pro Nobis" (which Lino says the Philippine government is doing all it can to ban, here in the US and probably in the Philippines as well).... More immediately, I'll be doing a script for Viva (a love story between a young man and a much older woman—Raymart Santiago and Gloria Diaz; I don't even know these young stars anymore; plus Janice de Belen's younger sister); I've also sent a sequence treatment to Charo for a father-son movie entitled "Talikuran Ka Man ng Langit", starring Christopher de Leon.... My other Viva movie, "Biktima", will be shot much later; Lino has about three or four movies on his hands—naglalagare, as they say; it's really thoughtful of him to arrange all these things for me....

The fact is, given my schoolwork and teaching load and other writing commitments (like the full-length CCP play due in December), I don't have the time to write even just one more script, but my problem is that I can't say no, I think I can pull off another miracle; this is when I miss my old reliable secretary (Jo Elaine Dalisay), and a hot bowl of Royco soup.... I've been talking to Beng, by the way, about selling the Modesta house, and I know you probably won't like the idea, but I had been thinking about this for a long time. It's not that I or we want to move away from you; it's just that I do think a place closer to UP and to wherever Demi will be going for college (UP, I hope) will ultimately be better as far as time and money goes. I'm planning to pay off whatever I still owe the GSIS with what I might make on these scripts, get the title, then sell the house. I hope Rowie and Demi had a fun birthday celebration; I miss these get-togethers a lot—especially the food—hipon, lapu-lapu, inihaw na baboy—although I don't even want to imagine what these things cost nowadays.

One thing I'm sure of is that I'm fairly sick of American food. It was really a great thing for Beng and myself to have discovered, over the summer, Jun Capati's "Asian Food Mart" here in downtown Milwaukee, where I can get anything from tuyo to calamansi to puso ng saging; but he has everything a Filipino wants, and lots of it, too—and not too expensively; a fresh, luscious bola-bola siopao costs only 60 cents, and I usually have one of these for a snack (at half the price of a lousy hamburger); medyo malayo nga lang sa bahay, so I usually go to his place around once a week; then I stock up on Ligo, Knorr, etc.... He also has tapes for rent, and I was so lucky and happy to find "Miguelito" and "Maging Akin Ka Lamang".... I hope he gets a copy of "Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan" soon....

Demi tells me that she will be going for the editorship of her school paper next year; I urged her to do so, and reminded her that she will be following a family tradition if she does that; I also hear she's getting something that suspiciously sounds like a boyfriend soon; well, what can I say? Aba, kilatisin muna; I'll have to get approval ratings from the mother, the grandparents, and the titas and titos, siyempre. As long as she doesn't flip over completely, and as long as she handles the situation responsibly (Beng, Elaine and Rowie can tell her what that means), I guess it'll happen sooner or later.

It's just mindboggling to realize that (unless Beng has anything to do with it; she wants Demi to marry late!) I can be a grandfather in my early 40s; it doesn't seem too long ago that I was a kid, playing in the back lots of Pasig.... Time sure flies. This is a difficult time for me, having been away for so long; but things will get better and brighter—and I'll come home and collect on that lapu-lapu. I hope all of you continue to be in good health. Belated happy birthday, Rowie! Write me when you can, and regards to my nephews and nieces.

Penman for Monday, December 15, 2008


I’M ONE of those people who find it difficult to work without some noise in the background, and so I usually keep the TV on while I’m writing—tuned in to CNN or the Discovery Channel or National Geographic—without really listening. But now and then I overhear something so fresh and startling that I drop everything to focus on the program. This happened the other day when—in the course of pecking away on my keyboard at a project I had as much enthusiasm for as watching paint dry on a wall—I heard the CNN announcer ask: “If you were a grape, would you prefer to be seedless or non-seedless?” It seemed so silly that I just had to stop and figure out what was going on.

As it turned out, the segment was about the questions that interviewers asked applicants wishing to enter Oxford University—one of the world’s premier universities, and therefore one of the toughest to get into. But seedless grapes? The questions depended on which department you were seeking admission to. Literature applicants had to ponder this: “Would you rather be a poem or a novel?” The mathematically inclined were asked: “How would you define infinity?”

As the Brits would say, there was a touch of the daffy in these questions, but the more I thought about them, the more I was intrigued by the value of asking not only the unexpected, but also the truly thought-provoking. It almost didn’t matter what the question itself was—they were, after all, questions which had no single, “correct” answers—but rather what was important was how the applicants formed their responses. As one of the examiners noted, the point wasn’t to bring in more academic robots—the kind of smug hyperachievers you just hated to be seated next to in class, who knew all the formulas (or formulae, as they were bound to correct you) and who could tell the difference between “hypotaxis” and “parataxis” (don’t ask me how I know)—but original thinkers, people who could think on their feet and relish a problem like a child would a new toy.

So how would we have answered those questions? Let’s take that poem-or-novel one. It’s a question that presumes some familiarity with both the form and purpose of both genres, and a good answer would reveal the extent of that familiarity, but even that’s not much fun. Having to choose and seeing yourself as one or the other is, because it then becomes an act of self-definition, of presenting itself to the world (or, in this case, to Oxford) as someone, well, interesting.

A poem or a novel? It’s a tough call, but let’s see. A poem is generally short and compact, and therefore complex. If I were a poem, I wouldn’t be talking much—but everything I say will or should be meaningful and precise. Like much of modern poetry there’ll be a certain raggedness and restlessness about me, but don’t be fooled, because all that’s a pose; everything—from the cut of my hair to the color of my socks—will be absolutely deliberate and will accept no substitute.

There are, of course, all kinds of poems; we were talking at the Christmas party the other night about how Tennyson’s “Ulysses” continued to stir our ancient English majors’ hearts—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—but one could very easily prefer e. e. cummings’ playfulness such as when he says “I like my body /when it is /with your body”….

If I were younger I would prefer to be a poem, with all my brashness and sureness (or so I imagine) of footing. To be a poem would be to demand very much of oneself as planner and performer. There’s nothing more difficult to write than a great poem—and if one aspires to anything less than greatness, why even bother? (In truth, of course, if we were poetry, the city would be full of bad verse—malformed lines, images as cute and as plentiful as busloads of schoolchildren, thunderous preaching from pulpit and streetcorner.)

But where I am and how I am—too late for Oxford and for fevered, furtive clutches beneath the blankets of strangers—I might resign myself to the novel’s slow shuffle to often predictable endings, delighting now in recognizing the familiar more than in heart-stopping surprises. Novels are much more prone yet also kinder to mistakes; they can survive bad chapters, immemorable characters, narrative dead ends, and silly dialogue. Like life.

All this reminded me of a similar though more fateful choice that confronted the hot-blooded Achilles: did he want a short, glorious life or a long, uneventful one? Time has taken that choice out the hands of many of us (“Goodbye, early death,” as a poem by my friend Ricky de Ungria puts it) but the “what-ifs,” as ever, amuse and sometimes torment us. And we weren’t even thinking about getting into Oxford.

LET ME share a snippet from the lecture of this year’s Nobel Prize laureate for literature, the French-Mauritian novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whom I must admit I’d never heard of before. You can read the full lecture, titled “In the forest of paradoxes,” here.

“Culture on a global scale concerns us all. But it is above all the responsibility of readers—of publishers, in other words. True, it is unjust that an Indian from the far north of Canada, if he wishes to be heard, must write in the language of the conquerors—in French, or in English. True, it is an illusion to expect that the Creole language of Mauritius or the West Indies might be heard as easily around the world as the five or six languages that reign today as absolute monarchs over the media. But if, through translation, their voices can be heard, then something new is happening, a cause for optimism. Culture, as I have said, belongs to us all, to all humankind. But in order for this to be true, everyone must be given equal access to culture. The book, however old-fashioned it may be, is the ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate. Its only flaw—and this is where I would like to address publishers in particular—is that in a great number of countries it is still very difficult to gain access to books. In Mauritius the price of a novel or a collection of poetry is equivalent to a sizeable portion of the family budget. In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury. And yet remedies to this situation do exist. Joint publication with the developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and bookmobiles, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages—which are often clearly in the majority—would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations.”

Penman for Monday, December 8, 2008

I'M PART of a growing group of Filipino fountain-pen addicts who get together now and then ostensibly to socialize, but really to display and fondle trayfuls of colorful plastic and metal cylinders that hold bladders of runny ink. We don’t write novels with these pens—who does, these days?—but we might spend whole afternoons just writing the same word or line (“Caloy” or “This is a wonderful nib”) over and over again, trying to figure out the nuances of Pelikans, Watermans, Stipulas, and Sheaffers—as if we didn’t already know them.

There are stranger afflictions, of course. Some people will spend their weekends not with kith and kin, but with a different species altogether—horses, for example. Holding on to folded sheets of paper, these men—and occasionally the stray female—will ponder the performance and pedigree of this stallion and that filly, and wager their week’s paycheck on a succession of numbers coaxed out of a mixture of science, astrology, and plain dumb luck.

A couple of Sundays ago, these two worlds came together when our pen lovers’ group spent an afternoon at the Sta. Ana Hippodrome in Makati, thanks to special arrangements made by one of our members, Jenny Ortuoste-Alcasid—a horseracing journalist, broadcaster, and industry executive (and, incidentally, a former student of mine). Jenny also collects fountain pens and has initiated her two young daughters into the mysteries of nibs and inks, so she hatched this brilliant idea of setting us up for our next meeting in a reserved box at the Sta. Ana grandstand, complete with buckets of beer and platters of that perfect Sunday-afternoon merienda combination, Savory fried chicken and pancit canton.

We were also interested in seeing Sta. Ana because Jenny had told us that the place was about to be torn down in favor of a new hippodrome somewhere in Cavite. The hippodrome had been built by the Philippine Racing Club in 1930 on the go-ahead of Nicanor Garcia, Makati’s municipal president at that time (ah, so that’s whom Nicanor Garcia Street is named after!). The conservationists in Beng and me bristled at the idea of the building’s demolition and we thought instantly of sparking a campaign to save the structure, given how we’ve lost so much of our art-deco heritage to heavy-handed mayors and developers eager to make money off desultory parking lots. But it was only fair to see the place first before screaming our lungs out, so the date was set.

With Beng gamely coming along, our group of about seven or eight people found our way to Barangay Carmona in Makati and discovered—or rediscovered, in my case—the life and world of horseracing. I hadn’t been there in over 30 years—I would tell Jenny that the last racehorse I remember betting on was one named Ilocos King, back in the mid-1970s—and only because I had been dragged to the place by friends who could recite the dividendazo or tip sheet in their sleep. I don’t have any qualms about gambling; I wouldn’t be a poker victim otherwise. But horses and jockeys added more imponderables to the draw of numbers that, for me, bring on the rush of blood to the head, so I would move on to cards, darts, and whatever could fit in my pocket.

As it happened, the excitement among the punters over the entrance of the horses (and, we would soon learn, of the lovely ladies who had been harnessed to hand out the prizes) was well matched by the excitement in our box over the parade of Parkers, Wahls, Swans, and such other pensoterica as our leather cases contained. Addictions brook no distractions, and a mushroom cloud might as well have formed over Sta. Ana and we wouldn’t have known any better in our own race to establish whose nib was more flexible or broader, whose cursive italics the more graceful (certainly not mine).

But we also paid our due respects to the venue and to our host the best way anyone could—by betting on the horses, figuring that Dame Fortune was our only hope of acquiring one of the Holy Grails of modern pen collecting, the Montblanc Agatha Christie, last seen in the neighborhood of what you’d pay for a ticket from Manila to San Francisco—in business class. In the end, we made enough—around P36 each, after six races—to buy decent ballpens (or, as our member Chito Limson pointed out, an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada school pen). Here’s tip to the fellow novato in betting: don’t choose your horses based on the cuteness of their names.

A good time was had by all, many thanks again to Jenny and to her daughters Alex and Ik, and as for the hippodrome itself, I took a long look, and decided that it indeed had seen its prime, and that both the people and the horses deserved a better arena for their exertions. Let the funding go to the Metropolitan Theater, a true art-deco palace that may yet turn into the Augean stables if we don’t watch out.


THE UP Institute of Creative Writing is extending the deadline for applications to the 2009 National Summer Writers Workshop, which will be held next year in Camp John Hay, Baguio City, from April 12 to 18, to be chaired by National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario. The original deadline was November 30, but looking at number of entries we had so far received, we thought the workshop would be better served (and, more to the point, could serve its purpose better) by giving more people a little more time to join. So the new deadline will now be Tuesday, December 16, at 5:00 pm. Entries should be received at the UPICW office in Diliman by that date and time, or else postmarked no later than December 16.

As I’ve mentioned before, we bring twelve creative writers in mid-career up to Baguio every summer for a week of intense discussions about their work. We earmark eight of these slots for obvious standouts nominated by the UPICW staff, but four fellowships are available for open competition, open only to writers who’ve already published a book or are close to doing so, or who have won a number of significant competitions.

More details and application forms are available at the UPICW office in UP Diliman and on the ICW website at http://www.up.edu.ph/~icw. For inquiries, call 922-1830 and ask for Ms. Eva Cadiz.

Penman for Monday, December 1, 2008

I WAS down the other day with what my doctor said was a nasty case of a new strain of flu that tended to hang around for weeks. It was just as well, because I had things to do that could only be done at home—things to write and things to fix. I don’t mean “fix” as in “fix that leaky faucet” or “rake the leaves off the roof” (yes, we live beneath a canopy of giant mango trees). I mean “fix” as in “let’s clean some pens” or “let’s switch straps on those watches.” Because I had things to write—no, not a new novel, but the kind of forgettable if important fluff that goes into annual reports and such—I needed and wanted some distraction, terrible procrastinator that I am. And as you all should know by now, nothing distracts me more than my fountain pens—for me, the ultimate toy, which I collect (nay, amass) the way we used to stack up our “Tex” playing cards and corded rubber bands as kids.

It’s hard to explain to the non-pen person, but it’s the feel of the pen in the hand that both stimulates and pacifies me (hmmm, it’s the second time in two weeks that I’ve used that word, so I must be infected by some infantile disorder). They were never meant to be taken apart, but the truth is, pens are fun to take apart—if you can put them back together. I guess it’s a boy thing. I never saw my sisters tear their dolls to pieces to get at whatever it was that cried “waaah-waah” inside those bug-eyed noisemakers. On the other hand, I was smart enough to know that my trucks and tanks had magnets in them—though maybe not smart enough to realize that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts (or certainly, its parts, however magnetic). Thus was my childhood littered with the debris of the disassembled.

And so these days, when I’m feeling low or flu-ey, or when I’m running away from the crippling unpleasantness of real, godawful work, I take a few pens out of their cases or boxes, pretend like it’s Sunday, and clean and shine them up like I was going to need them all to sign some form acknowledging receipt of a million pesos.

Now, some pens are easier to take apart than others. Vintage Sheaffers, for example, look great but are a pain to unravel, so I generally steer clear of them. Parker Duofolds and Esterbrooks, on the other hand, are a joy to mess with (never mind what those pens are—just think of them as your grandfather’s friends, with which he may have signed the family farm away). A little pressure here, a rocking motion there, a tug, a twist, and—voila!—that part we call the section comes off the barrel (the section’s where your fingertips rest), and all the crud of the ages dribbles out of the opening. (Duofolds and Esterbrooks use rubber sacs or bladders; when the pens are put away the sacs dry up and stiffen, and after 50 or 70 years—yes, these babies are that ancient—they’ll come out in one piece like a mummy, in a spray of shards, or as an asphalt sludge.)

But of course, ever the failed scientist, I’ll use any geeky assistance or advantage I can get. At about the same time I lugged home last week’s subject—my new La-Z-Boy—I also picked up my latest helper: an ultrasonic cleaner. Used by jewelers and lab assistants, these little tubs send out vibrations through water at a frequency that causes bubbles to form and later to implode, loosening gunk and grime from its molecular moorings. (How can any self-respecting guy resist a gizmo like that?) Ultrasonic cleaners are good for earrings, necklaces, steel instruments, watches (make sure they’re waterproof!), eyeglasses, and, yes, pens—and dentures.


So for a week now, I’ve been having fun ultrasonically cleaning anything and everything; you can see it in my smile. But the other night, bored witless by the job I was doing, I decided that it was time to give my Esterbrooks an ultrasonic bath.

Those of you above 60 might remember these Esterbrooks; they were the poor man’s Parker in the ‘40s and ‘50s. They came in many shimmery colors, which is why they continue to hold collectors in thrall despite their lowly pedigree. Esterbrooks are cheap, pretty, sturdy, and—in a smart and strategic decision emulated by only a few high-end pen makers such as Pelikan—were designed so that their screw-out nibs (the pointy end of the pen that spits out the ink) could be interchangeable with one another. Thus, in seconds, you could switch from an accountant’s extra-fine or needlepoint nib to a broad stub nib for signatures. It was a brilliantly successful idea, and today “Estie” collectors might spend as much if not more on a rare nib like a 2314B (clerkish minds love numbers) as they would on the pen itself, which you can still get on eBay for around $20.

I took out all seven of my working Esties, removed their nibs and sections so I could put in new sacs, and tossed the nibs into a basket in the ultrasonic bath, along with six other nibs I had in storage. Ultrasonic cleaning leaves your things shiny and sparkly, and 13 shiny nibs were, I was convinced, going to make me forget the noble drudgery of writing about corporate social responsibility and climate change (I believe, I believe!). I let the machine hum for several five-minute cycles, turned my attention momentarily to Obama’s transition picks, then rose to collect my babies, their butts now squeaky clean. I lifted the plastic basket out of the bath and ran the whole family under the faucet for a final rinse.

I then laid out each nib on a strip of tissue paper on the counter, one after the other, each one of them a shiny little marvel. One of these—a 3550 with an art-deco-ish sunburst—was supposed to be uncommon; I chuckled and gloated. Another was a stub nib, also hard to find… so hard to find that I couldn’t find it. What the—? I counted the nibs: 11. Again: 11. Two were missing in action.

I looked everywhere around the bathroom, got on my knees, etc., and the more I looked the larger the squares in the basket and the drain hole in the washbasin seemed to grow. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness of its maw, but somewhere down there were two nibs that had survived two wars and had probably written lonesome letters home. I was supposed to be sick that day, and now I truly was.

(Red Esterbrook image from www.esterbrook.com)

Penman for Monday, November 24, 2008


I WAS at my crabby worst the other day. Beng and I were in the mall, there to find new pillows to replace the ones that I—like Barack Obama, according to his wife Michelle—had drooled on for years, and which no amount of airing in the sunshine could restore to baby-sweet freshness.

Now, I don’t mind shopping for household stuff—in fact, I rather enjoy it; I like choosing the colors and thicknesses of the bathroom towels, the grip of the can opener, the design of the faucet handles. These are objects I’m going to have to live with every day for years, and I don’t want to have to stare at something annoying last thing at night or first thing in the morning. So I fret and fuss over these details with the same care I devote to my computers and fountain pens—yes, this is okay but not that; no, too much blue, too little white, and so on.

I was actually looking forward to buying new pillows, because I could barely stand my own, but I’d gotten cranky because I was bushed and hungry, a lethal combination that trumps all other needs and pleasures. Somewhere, somehow, between the house and the mall, I began dreaming of a thick, juicy burger and a side of fries, and I knew exactly where to get it—the Wham! Burger joint in The Block at SM North, whose burgers, to my mind (and to my tummy), can be matched only by those at the Waterfront Insular Hotel in Davao. But now the slurry of pre-Christmas traffic on North Avenue was congealing and threatening me with famine, and something in me snapped and I declared to Beng that we weren’t going anywhere and doing anything without a burger in the belly to ballast my loftier predispositions.

As soon as we parked, I made a beeline for the burger place; I ordered one for each of us and we ate in a surly silence punctuated only by my chompers. (That was another reason for my displeasure: Beng had set me up for a visit to the dentist the next day and I was dreading and resisting the prospect.) Thankfully, the strange way I eat my burgers is, I think, a natural pacifier. I have this notion of saving the best for last: give me a plate of paella and I’ll work my way around and eventually to the scrumptious chunks of chorizo and shrimp. So it goes with burgers: first, the lettuce, then the slice of tomato, then—depending on how badly I’m starved—the bun, then finally, climactically, the patty! This time I didn’t wait too long; once I’d disposed of the veggies, I bit into the burger and savored the rush of bloody juices down my gullet and the sides of my mouth. I almost forgot about the pillows; by the time I was done I was meek and happy, ready to be led anywhere.

So we went down to the furniture and houseware store, and wove our way past a subdivision of sofas and dining sets to the pillows and cushions in the back, where Beng—being the female shopper that she is—promptly inspected, pinched, fluffed, and critiqued every pillow to be found on the shelves. Little did I realize what pillow technology had wrought since the days my mother stuffed handfuls of kapok into cotton sleeves then sewed them up before covering them with flowery cases sewn out of chicken-feed bags. Today, we were told, pillows shaped themselves around your head, sensed your body temperature, and adjusted their own firmness; they could relieve pain, cure insomnia, and promote world peace. They also cost a fortune—about what Beng and I had paid for our whole bed 15 years earlier. (For all that droolworthiness, Beng couldn’t find a drool-proof pillow.)

Now, as interesting as the mechanics of bedtime may be, I have a fairly low threshold of patience when it comes to objects that don’t blink or beep or throw up something digital, so I wandered off as soon as Beng said she was going to check out the pillowcases as well, having settled on a pair of scrawny-looking, vacuum-packed pillows that—the sales clerk swore—would balloon to glorious fullness once we took them home and opened them up. (I was naturally suspicious, but the boy in me wanted to see it happen.) The real problem was, I was getting sleepy; the burger had settled into my upper abdomen and was beginning to send curly little arrows of pleasure all around the place.

So I strayed to the furniture and saw a row of big, fat, leatherbound chairs, like happy, wide-hipped mommas, saying “Come here. Sit. Now.” And like a sailor charmed by some sibilant song, I shuffled forward and fell into the arms of one of them, and at that moment—sinking into the depths of plush depravity—I knew that I was lost, and that my whole life and its many labors had been a prelude to this point of final, complete, and abject surrender to the claims of late middle age. I felt enveloped by unconditional love. This chair understood me. It was attentive to every twinge of pain and weariness in my 54-year-old body. I could lie there and babble all day and it wouldn’t say one word back, except maybe words like “Stay. Sleep. Shhhh.”

Through the haze, I saw a pair of sales clerks grinning above me like cherubs. “It’s our latest model, sir! It rocks, but when you pull out the foot rest—here, let me show you, chung, chuck, thwoop!—then it turns into a recliner, which is why it’s called the Reclina-Rocker!”

Indeed it was, said the label and the accompanying price tag, which I now paid closer attention to. What, I wondered, was all this luxury worth? I saw five figures, as big and as bloated as the beast itself, and normally I would’ve jumped out of there like I’d sat on a hot plate, but blame it on the burger: I was feeling extraordinarily mellow and amenable to friendly and reasonable persuasion. I began to review my long and storied life; I recited my curriculum vitae to myself, recounting all the hardships, all the slings and arrows I had had to weather to get to where I was (namely, Home Depot).

Surely I deserved a La-Z-Boy!

It wasn’t cheap, but surely I could make it all back, dreaming up bestselling novels and screenplays while staring at the ceiling in supine sublimity. And heck, I argued further, I’d spent as much if not more on my iPhone, and whenever that iPhone rang it brought me nothing but grief because it would be someone reminding me of work, work, work. So this, I concluded, was going to be my perfect antidote to all that, my faithful companion for the rest of my working life (and even better, my non-working one as well). It came with a ten-year guarantee, which was more than I could say for myself.

Now Beng, bless my stars, is the agreeable kind. She came over with her pillows and pillowcases, and saw me stretched out on the La-Z-Boy like a man being tickled to death on the medieval rack. Against all my instincts I rose to my feet and gallantly said, “Hey, Beng, I’ve found an early Christmas present—for us!”

I don’t think she believed me, but does it matter? This thing now sits on my side of the bed, but she knows it’s one more reason for me to come home early and maybe lose the crabbiness, even without the burger.

Penman for Monday, November 17, 2008


THIS JUST in: I’ve just learned that Nam Le, the Vietnamese-Australian writer whom I mentioned a couple of weeks ago as this year’s incoming David T. K. Wong Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, has also won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his first book of stories, The Boat. Only in its second year, the prize—one of the world’s largest at GBP60,000 (that’s over P4 million)—is given to the best work in English in whatever genre by a writer under 30. Just 29, Nam Le is fiction editor of the Harvard Review. Oh, to be 29 again! Filipino 30-and-under writers, start your engines. Here’s the link to the news and the prize: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7720094.stm.

Excuse this flurry of announcements that’s about to follow. ‘Tis getting to be the season to be jolly, but as everyone knows, this time of year is also crunch time for culture and things cultural, which is probably why the National Book Development Board moved its National Book Development Month from June to November (more on that next week).

As for today, if you’re a writer and are reading this in the morning, then it’s not too late for you to make plans to scoot over to the National Bestsellers Bookstore at Robinson’s Galleria this afternoon, where—from 2 to 5—a visiting professor and expert in intercultural language education from the University of Glasgow will be meeting with some Filipino writers to discuss issues of language and writing in English in these globalized times.

I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to John Corbett earlier this year at a British Council seminar in Singapore, and I was so impressed by his presentation that I actually took notes and retained a copy of the story he used to discuss how our understanding of language can direct our life-and-death decisions.

In that particular lecture, Corbett took up the story “Walking the Dog” by Bernard MacLaverty, in which a man is kidnapped by someone whom he suspects to be an IRA gunman, and his life depends on how he pronounces the alphabet. As it happens, Irish Catholics pronounce the letter “H” as “haitch,” while Protestants say “aitch.” This is the concept of the shibboleth, a kind of verbal litmus test that establishes one’s membership in a particular group. It goes back to the Bible, where the men of Gilead used the word as a test of whether someone passing through was a friend or foe (their enemy, the Ephraimites, couldn’t pronounce the “sh” sound). So today “shibboleth” means a password, a watchword, or any word or phrase that distinguishes a group. For example, if you know “Yeba!” and “Walastik!”, that means you’re a Pinoy who was alive and sentient in the 1960s.

This afternoon, John will be meeting with writers to discuss “Writing Across Cultures,” and on tap will be questions such as:

1. When one writes consciously for a global market, must one culture-load to make the work exotic?

2. Or when that happens naturally as one writes, how much of it has to be explained to a global market?

3. Why are we not reading one another's literature in Asia? How is translation in Europe? The great classics of world literature are translations to English from literature originally written in other languages—this says a lot for the art of translation.

4. Writing in English is automatically writing for an international market. Chances are other cultures will discuss or appreciate the works. How is this method or approach to teaching another culture's literature maximized or used competently?

I’m deeply interested in these issues, so I’m going to do my best to be there, coming from another meeting. I’m told by Karina Bolasco (the managing director of Anvil Publishing, which is sponsoring John’s visit here) that the regional directors of Random House and Simon & Schuster—Rino Balatbat and Jenny Javier, respectively—will also be attending this afternoon’s session with writers.

If you can’t make it today, or if you’re a teacher rather than a writer of literature, Prof. Corbett is also scheduled to make a presentation on November 22 at a workshop on English language and literature teaching. This will be held at the Philippine Stock Exchange building in Pasig, and slots are still open for this workshop. For details, call Anvil Publishing at 637-5692 and look for Joyce Bersales or Jo Pantorillo. By special arrangement, Anvil is selling its edition of John Corbett’s An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching, and I’m sure you’ll find copies at the lecture, aside from National Bookstore.

I’m hoping that after my morning meeting and the Corbett event, I can still find the energy to drive over to Makati for the launching of Ben Bautista’s Stories from Another Time (Ateneo de Manila University Press) at 5:30 at Veritas, 4th Floor, Ateneo Professional Schools, Rockwell Center. Though largely self-taught as a creative writer (as they usually were, in those days), Ben managed to produce stories that—according to the master himself, Gregorio Brillantes—are “among the finest ever written in the world of the short story.”

Those stories have won Bautista Free Press, Focus, and Palanca awards, and it’s about time that they were put together in a book. Fittingly enough, it’s the Ateneo—Ben’s old stomping grounds—that took the worthy project on. When I was just starting out in fiction, and never having met Ben, I stood on the receiving end of his critical judgment when he served on the board of judges of the Palancas. He judged me kindly, and today I hope to repay some of that kindness back with my presence and applause.

And just to underscore how busy and exciting things get on the cultural scene as we approach the holidays, this Friday, on November 21st at 2:30 pm, playwright and puppet maker Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio—the grande dame of Southeast Asian children’s theater—will be giving a lecture on “The Challenging Art of Puppetry in the Fields of Medicine and Education” at the Pulungang C. M. Recto, Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman.

Tita Amel is widely known as a pioneer in the art of puppetry in the Philippines, and for over three decades now, her Teatrong Mulat has delighted many thousands of children (and let’s forget adults) here and abroad. Under her directorship, what used to be the UP Creative Writing Center spearheaded efforts to establish formal academic programs in creative writing, and she has been a tireless advocate of writing for children in a society too often and too narrowly obsessed with adult concerns. See you Friday as well.


I WAS still too jetlagged (strange thing—this never happened to me before, so it’s another sign of creeping age) to make it to their homecoming concert last November 4, but here’s three cheers, anyway, for the UP Singing Ambassadors, who returned from their sixth European tour with a string of major prizes. Conductor Ed Manguiat was elated to share the news that the UPSA had won two Grand Prizes, seven First Prizes, and three Third Prizes in five prestigious international choral competitions they joined in Poland, France, Wales, Hungary, and Switzerland. Bravo, Ed, and way to go!

Penman for Monday, November 10, 2008

IT'S BEEN almost ten years since I got an email message that would change my writing life. I remember surfing away on my desktop Mac late at night in our apartment on Masikap Street when I noticed a message in my inbox from a vaguely familiar name—Val Striker, a lady in England whom I’d mailed off a packet to many months earlier and had practically forgotten about. Val worked for the University of East Anglia, and that packet was my application to the David T. K. Wong Fellowship, then a newly established prize of sorts that allowed a writer to spend nine months in the UK at the UEA campus in Norwich to write, or begin writing, a novel about Asia. The message was simple: I had won the fellowship, and would I please confirm my willingness to come over to the UK a few months hence.

I was, as the British would say, utterly gobsmacked. I’d won many prizes before, but this was something different, not just for the amount involved but also the fact that it was an international and a solitary distinction. I woke Beng up to share with her the good news. “We’re going to England,” I told Beng, who was too groggy to comprehend the gravity of what I’d said. I was, I think now, also too dizzy with delight to understand exactly what I’d taken on—a commitment to deliver on an idea for a novel that I’d scratched out over two pages and a 2,500-word excerpt.

As it happened, it took many more years for that novel to be finished and to see the light of publication, and those of you who’ve followed the story of Soledad’s Sister know that it remains, in a sense, a novel in progress, ever mutable in the new edition and translation that it’s going through.

But that year in Norwich proved a valuable time for rest and reflection—I’d published about eight books in as many years before coming over—and being in Norwich allowed us to go off on weekend sorties to London and across the Channel (which answers the question of where the money went, aside from rescuing and restoring my beloved Beetle back home from decrepitude into a car show-winning polish). That was, after all, the idea of the Wong Fellowship—to give harried writers a break, some time to rest and some time to write—before they returned to infernal reality.

Astonishingly (or perhaps not), four years later, another Filipino writer won the Wong fellowship. That was Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy, as fine a fictionist as they come. Bing went on to write a novel that was longlisted for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize (whose results come out this Thursday in Hong Kong, with Pinoys Alfred Yuson and Miguel Syjuco still in the running).

Earlier this year, yet another Filipino writer made the Wong shortlist; this time I was on the final selection panel but I can’t divulge the name, as that shortlist isn’t officially released, but I can say that it was a young, Manila-based woman whose name I hadn’t come across before—someone thankfully from outside the usual circuit—whose prose was impeccable and sharp. Unfortunately, her entry came up against some very strong competition. The eventual winner, Vietnamese writer Nam Le, proposed a novel on the boat people—“History writ large,” I noted, “but with some very fine if gruesome strokes. The author clearly knows his subject, and his gifted prose is up to his ambition. We step into a very dark hold seething with unimaginable cruelty.”

I’m playing up the David T. K. Wong Fellowship because the deadline for the 2010 fellowship is coming up soon, on January 31, 2009. In a tenth-anniversary reunion of former fellows in Norwich last June, I was reminded by the organizers that, strangely enough, the competition for what happens to be one of the world’s largest literary grants hasn’t attracted the droves of applications you’d expect it to get.

So we were asked to drum up some publicity and enthusiasm wherever we came from—and here I am telling you (you, the Filipino writer with that brilliant novel in mind—and, hopefully, the language to match) that with two Filipinos having gone ahead of you, the gates are wide open to a year in Norwich, in an apartment overlooking a “broad” or a small lake speckled with swans. (I have since observed that sylvan surroundings do not necessarily lead to easier novels; the beauty can overwhelm and lull you to a dream-filled sleep, and then you wake up to another dream.)

Let me quote from the fellowship flyer: “The David T. K. Wong Fellowship is a unique and generous annual award of £26,000 to enable a fiction writer who wants to write in English about the Far East to spend a year in the UK, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Fellowship is named for its sponsor Mr. David Wong, a retired Hong Kong businessman, who has also been a teacher, journalist and senior civil servant, and is a writer of short stories himself.”

The UEA, incidentally, is regarded as one of the UK’s most vibrant centers of creative writing, with such writers as Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury having served on its teaching staff, and producing such graduates as Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. Former Wong fellows have also come from Hong Kong, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. They don’t have to be Asian themselves, nor do they need to be published writers or academics. Everything comes down to the writing sample and to the proposed novel (they’ve since begun to accept proposals for story collections). Applications need to be snail-mailed, and there’s a form to complete and a fee of 10 pounds to be paid, so keep that in mind.

Please don’t write me to look over your proposals or for tips on how to succeed. The first and last tip I’ll give you is “Be resourceful.” For more information, write to davidtkwongfellowship@uea.ac.uk or look up http://www1.uea.ac.uk/cm/home/schools/hum/lit/awards/wong.


THIS COMING Saturday, on the 15th, I’ll be joining a group of people who share a professional and personal interest in American affairs to talk about all manner of things “Kano”—politics, culture, and business. That group is the American Studies Association of the Philippines, which is holding its annual conference and general assembly at the Philippine Social Science Center on Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City on the theme of “Converges and Diversities: Dimensions of American Studies.” Like all good conference themes, that means anything and everything, but I’m told that on the menu are discussions covering the US elections, call centers, the recruitment of nurses, and, of course, American culture.

Lined up for the morning session are Dr. Dean Kotlowsky on the US elections, Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan on the recruitment of Filipino nurses to the States, Mr. Rod Spires on American corporations in Asia, and Mr. Danilo Sebastian L. Reyes on the American business process outsourcing in the Philippines.

The afternoon speakers include Dr. Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr. (who he?) on teaching American literature, Dr. Ma. Socorro Q. Perez on the association of Ilokano writers in Hawaii, and Dr. Ma. Rhodora G. Ancheta on American stand-up comedy.

For more information, contact Dough Ancheta at 0924-6104310 or Linda Bascara at 0915-9766707.

Penman for Monday, November 3, 2008

I BOUGHT four books on this recent US trip—two of them from a cornucopia of used books in San Diego called Wahrenbrock’s, one from Barnes & Noble in New York, and the last online from abebooks.com, which I’ve found to be even more useful than Amazon for tracking down hard-to-find and out-of-print books.

The two from Wahrenbrock’s are of the sort that writers and teachers of English should naturally be interested in. Lewis Thomas’s Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1990) is a lively excursion into the etymology of many common and some uncommon words. Here’s a sampling of Lewis at work:

“Take, for example, that easy-looking word SCRUTINY. We have it in English from the Latin scrutare, with the plain meaning of searching through things, rummaging, from another Latin word scruta: rags, old things, trash. The Latin can be tracked back thousands of years to our common ancestral language, Indo-European. The root for scruta was skreu, meaning to cut up something, also a cutting tool. It passed into Germanic as skraw, into Old English as screawa, the name for a SHREW, presumably because of the pointed nose, also as scroud, a piece of cloth (whence SHROUD). During the same millennia, moving from one posterity language to another, the root skreu held on to the notion of cutting something up, and so it happened that scrutilon, in Old High German, took on the meaning of inquiring into, investigating, with much the same sense of today’s English SCRUTINY, a long way from scruta, the trash pile, but still carrying the same resonances. SCRUTINY involves more than just the act of sorting through public wastebaskets; it signals to the mind that there are things that must be discarded in order to select the most useful ones.”

It’s all the more remarkable when you remember that Lewis Thomas, who wrote some of the most erudite and elegant essays in English, wasn’t even a professional writer or linguist but a physician who first enthralled readers in 1974 with The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. He died in 1993, but the Rockefeller University gives out the Lewis Thomas Prize every year to a scientist—for artistic achievement.

From the same shelf at Wahrenbrock’s came Philip Howard’s The State of the Language: English Observed (NY: Oxford University Press, 1985). The book takes us through the nuances of register, jargon, dialect, euphemism, cliché, spelling, and punctuation, but it was the stance of its premise that earned my dollars. Noting how it had become fashionable for people—chiefly old fogeys and politicians—to bemoan the decline of civilization and the loss of a golden age, Howard writes:

“Quite recently the Cassandras and associated worriers have found something new to worry about. They suggest that it is not just the world, and civilization as we know it, that are going to the dogs; but specifically that the English language is falling to bits. This is not an original worry. It comes in waves. Swift reckoned that English was going to the dogs. So did Dr. Johnson, who started his Dictionary to stop the rot in the English language, ‘which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation’….

“The House of Lords has devoted several debates to the subject of the decay of English, during which noble and eloquent voices were raised against the use of such vogue words as ongoing, relevant, and viable….

“Worriers never stop to ask when English was in its golden age, from which it has declined so disastrously. If you ask them, they tend to reply that t was when they were at school, and were taught old-fashioned English grammar and spelling, and whacked when they got things wrong. The taboo that one must never split an infinitive, and the belief that it is terribly important to know how to spell eschscholtzia, are imprinted indelibly in their memories—or some other part of their bodies.”

Howard—who had the thankless task of answering complaints about language for the venerable Times—sensibly invokes the aid of Walt Whitman, from whose 1885 Slang in America he pinches this epigraph: “Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.”

From an antiquarian bookseller in Massachusetts came a crisp copy of Yesterdays in the Philippines (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898) by Joseph Earle Stevens, “An Ex-Resident of Manila.” I’d originally ordered the book for its ample illustrations (an unexpected bonus was a small fold-out map of the Philippines in the back), but now that I’m browsing through the text, I’m discovering little narrative gems such as the following scene from a stopover in Cebu:

“The local excitement was limited, and, except that a Chinaman had been beheaded by some enemy the night before as he was walking home through the street, news was scarce. Numerous people, however, were gathered together outside the police-station, looking at the remains, and several sailors from the American ships, who had swum ashore during the night to get drunk, were being returned to their vessels in charge of the civil guard.

“The Uranus was not to stop long, and most of the through passengers returned early to the steamer to enjoy a view tempered by rather more breeze and less smell than that which the narrow streets afforded. Cebu, from the deck, was worthy of a sonnet; the white houses and church spires were set off against the dark-green background of mountains, and as the sun got lower the place did not have the broiled-alive aspect that it bore during the middle of the day.”

The last of the four books promises—at least for me—the most fun. No, it’s not fiction, sorry, but something to take my mind off it: More Hold ‘Em Wisdom for All Players (Las Vegas: Cardoza Publishing, 2008) by Daniel Negreanu, “Four-Time World Series of Poker Champion, 2004 Player of the Year.” It promises “50 powerful tips to make you a winning player”—which, the way my game’s been going lately, is something I sorely need. Here, Negreanu dispenses such nuggets as: “Show an occasional bluff. Be careful about giving away free information about your hands, but if your opponents catch on to the fact that you’re playing tight, it might be a good idea to show them a well-timed bluff. Revealing your bluff will keep them guessing and should allow you to go back to your normal, straightforward style. In fact, you don’t have to stop there. Anytime you make an uncharacteristic play—a move you don’t plan on making for the rest of the session—show your hand. It’s something that you can exploit later.”

Hmmm, I’ll keep that in mind, Dan! Meanwhile, we’re off to the airport for the long flight home—and guess which book is going to be in my carry-on bag. Clue: it won’t be on the etymology of the word poker.

Penman for Monday, October 27, 2008


LET ME be the among the first to congratulate my buddy and fellow STAR columnist Alfred “Krip” Yuson and compatriot Miguel “Chuck” Syjuco for making it to the shortlist of this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize with their newly minted novels. These two will join three other finalists—two Indians and one Chinese—at the awarding ceremonies on November 13 in Hong Kong. Only then will the winner of the $10,000 prize be announced.

I’ve peeked at excerpts from the five shortlisted works, and as to be expected, our two kababayans have turned in pieces very different from one another, strong and compelling in their own ways. Win or lose, they’ve already helped put contemporary Filipino writing on the global literary map, and international publication should follow soon for these trailblazing works.


I'VE BEEN vacationing here in the US for the past couple of weeks with Beng, visiting family in what’s becoming an annual pilgrimage, now that my daughter Demi is married and living in San Diego, my sister Elaine is in Virginia with my mother, and Beng’s sister Mimi is in New York. It’s a situation I never would have imagined 30 years ago, when most of us were huddled under a galvanized iron roof in Old Balara, and a bus ride to Quiapo seemed long and far enough. But time does strange and sometimes wonderful, sometimes perplexing things, and now I live halfway around the world from some of the people I love most dearly, my only consolation being that I am hardly alone in this predicament, which I share with millions of Filipinos, most of whom can’t even get to see their families for years.

So I spend and enjoy every day of my stay here like every hour was spun in a thread of gold, even when I’m doing nothing but watching my 80-year-old mother make me coffee, which she likes to do. I’ve toured the Smithsonian complex a dozen times but never tire of the experience, and the other day, just for the heck of it, Beng and I had lunch at the cafeteria of the Air and Space Museum where, almost 20 years ago, we had helped ourselves to a platter of French fries someone had left behind at the next table, being as destitute as we were hungry. This time we could afford a leg of chicken, mashed potatoes, and, yes, a large order of fries.

It’s a very interesting time to be in America. Of course, any October is a good time to be in America, with autumn awakening the foliage while lending a bracing chill to the air. We go abroad for a touch of foreignness, and foreignness is washing over me in waves, from the backyard barbecue tended by my blond-haired brother-in-law Eddie (who’s managed to remain cheerful despite being laid off from his software programmer’s job the day before we arrived) to the ultramodern, Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria at the Conde Nast building in Manhattan where we had lunch with two fellow Pinoys, artist Kim Bello and photographer Dominique James last week.

But nothing tells me more that I’m in America than the simmering pot that’s the presidential election, at once exciting for the clash of cultures and generations represented by Barack Obama and John McCain, and also at once boring by Filipino standards. No one’s been shot yet, and the trees and walls and lampposts of America remain desolately unscathed by campaign posters. (This is, of course, the country where elective officials lack the imagination to plaster the landscape with signs reminding people that “This footbridge is a project of Congressman XYZ.”)

Nobody’s painted New York or Washington, DC pink. The sitting president, as unpopular as he is, hasn’t made noises about changing the Constitution so he can have a third term (although he may get something like it yet, if McCain wins by some miracle). They could’ve decided to grant autonomy to, say, Puerto Rico or Guam to at least open the possibility of changing the Constitution by the backdoor, but no, tsk, tsk, no one had the gumption. The voters’ lists are swelling from the unprecedented number of new registrants, but they had to go about it the hard way, because they’ve signed up only the living. Some people think Sarah Palin has brought some excitement to the race, but they haven’t seen—much less heard—the likes of Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Jamby Madrigal.

Beng and I wanted to rush back to Virginia from New York to catch Obama at a rally in Leesburg, but we got stuck on a bus, and all we got for souvenirs was a couple of buttons and a car sticker. I’d love to stay on till the 4th of November to see how this all plays out—maybe some blood will be shed, after all, or some “hanging chads” (the American equivalent of stolen ballot boxes) uncovered. But, as I told Eddie, the last two times I witnessed presidential elections in America, two guys named Reagan and Bush (the elder) won. So I’m flying home this weekend on schedule; it could be the best thing I can do for my daughter, my mother, and my sister, whom I’ll miss dearly until next year.


IT'S BEEN a few years since I last had to defend my university in public as its Vice President for Public Affairs, but a recent issue in the media warmed up the old juices, enough for me to ask my successor in that post, my colleague Jing Hidalgo, what the heck was going on.

The subject was the 2008 university rankings released by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)—known as the THES-QS survey—under which UP rose in the rankings from No. 398 in 2007 to 276 this year, topped by Ateneo de Manila University which rose even more spectacularly to No. 254. De La Salle University and the University of Santo Tomas also made the top 500.

Never mind the UP-Ateneo rivalry; those of us who’ve worked with both institutions know what the strengths and weaknesses of each university are. What’s interesting is how those figures were arrived at.

Prof. Hidalgo tells me that UP never agreed to participate in this survey. “In fact, this year, President Emerlinda R. Roman did not even receive an invitation to be a part of it. Nor did she receive any questionnaire to answer. What she did receive was an email message from QS Asia Regional Director (Asia Pacific), Mandy Mok, informing her that UP had ‘gone up in the rankings’ for 2008. The email also contained an invitation to buy ‘an attractive package’ from THES-QS. The ‘package price,’ which includes a banner on topuniversities.com, a full page full color ad in Top Universities Guide 2009, and a booth at Top Universities Fair 2009, amounts to $48,930.”

It wasn’t just the money—which, at P2 million, UP can hardly spare—but also THES-QS’s earlier refusal to explain where it got the data for its earlier rankings that led UP to opt out of the process. When UP told THES-QS last year that it wasn’t taking part, it was told that the survey would be “forced to use last year’s data or some form of average.” Two years ago, UP came in at No. 299, while Ateneo was ranked No. 500.

I recall how, even when I served in the UP administration, we wondered how reliable such rankings were in terms of establishing academic excellence, because they were often based on such quantities as the size of budgets, number of PhDs, number of foreign faculty, and number of foreign students—indices more favorable to heavily endowed Western universities.

Just to make things clear, we need more of those plus points, too, and if we’re lacking in them, then that’s clearly a problem that’s keeping us from achieving truly world-class status. But what about resourcefulness? How do you recognize a physics department whose people can put a laser machine together all by themselves? What about service to the nation? What points can you give something like the Pahinungod program, which sends fresh graduates to teach poor children in the hinterlands?

We don’t want to sound like sore losers, but at least you expect the game to be held on a level playing field.

Penman for Monday, October 20, 2008


THANKS TO my agent Renuka Chatterjee, my novel Soledad’s Sister has been accepted for publication sometime next year by ISBN Edizioni in Italy. First, of course, it’ll have to be translated into Italian, and the publishers have asked Clara Nubile, herself a published author, to do the job. Clara wrote me to ask me some questions about the book and the Philippines as a whole, so I sent her back my answers, which I’m excerpting here, to give readers an idea of what I’m telling people out there about us. These are, of course, just my own perceptions; I’d make a lousy ambassador of goodwill.

CN: Nice to meet you through your novel, Soledad's Sister, which has the unforgettable taste of durian—tender and ferocious at the same time. How did your novel come to life? What was the spark that ignited it?

JD: Nearly one out of every ten Filipinos is working and living abroad—that's more than 8 million out of 90 million Filipinos. This diaspora, which has been going on for many decades now, is the single most important development that will define Philippine society for a long time to come—economically, politically, culturally. One day I came across a newspaper report saying that more than 600 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs, as we call them) come home every year as corpses. It was a chilling statistic, and it gave me the idea for this novel.

CN: How would you describe your way of writing? How you would describe Jose Dalisay, the writer?

JD: I'm one of probably a very few Filipinos who make a living out of writing. That's because I write a lot, in all kinds of genres—fiction, non-fiction, journalism, drama, screenplays, some poetry—in both English and Filipino. I get the most satisfaction out of my fiction and column pieces in English, however, because I don't have to make commercial compromises in them, the way I have to when I write screenplays, which are commercially produced, or political speeches, or commissioned work. I'm a fairly traditional writer in the realist mode, and I write about all kinds of subjects—politics, history, culture, the passing scene. I like looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some readers will find me boring, but I’m not going to write like the 25-year-old I’m not. I’m glad and lucky to be 54.

CN: And what about the contemporary literary scene in the Philippines, both in English and Tagalog?

JD: It’s a very vibrant scene, with new writers and books coming up every year in both English and Filipino. We have literary traditions going back to pre-Hispanic times and we have over 100 native languages, in some of which a written literature survives. Filipinos are a very expressive people, and writing and performances (in music and dance) come naturally to us. You cannot censor a Filipino! Unfortunately, literature as a market suffers from the fact that our people are largely poor and cannot afford to buy books, so our print runs are extremely small. No one here makes a living out of writing fiction in English (I earn from commissioned works, screenplays, journalism, etc.).

CN: The influence of the colonial past, from Spain to the United States: how would you describe postcolonial Philippines?

JD: One good description of the Philippines (provided by the essayist Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil) is that we spent 300 years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood. Many enduring traces and influences of our Spanish past remain—even in the language—but the modern Filipino is highly Westernized (i.e., Americanized). Several layers of thought and perception coexist quite comfortably in the Filipino—the pagan, the Christian, the capitalist, the Marxist. We absorb and adapt easily, as the situation demands.

CN: Manila. A haunting place. A memory of memories. The bay. The leaden sky. The enthralling sea. The scents of street life. The beauty of daily life in a big, voracious, cannibal city. Your own Manila, just a brief description.

JD: An aging beauty, sometimes sorrowful and languorous, maybe in the afternoons, but all dressed up and lipsticked for the evenings.

CN: There is a huge emigration of Filipinos all over the world. What is the effect of this emigration back home? Orphaned children and psychological and emotional problems between fathers, mothers, sons and daughters?

JD: Every departure has a price, and we don’t mean the airline ticket. Our overseas workers are buoying up the economy, keeping our heads above the water in times of global economic distress and in the absence of good, well-paying jobs at home. But those separations are tearing at the very fabric of family—the most important thing to Filipinos, and also, ironically, what our OFWs are seeking to protect and promote by working abroad. But also, we Filipinos are a vagrant people, lovers of travel, eager to see and experience new things.

CN: And what about music, which, somehow, is another character of your novel. Karaoke bars, musical competitions. Every Filipino seems to be a potential singer.

JD: I’ve said before that the shortest distance between two points is that between a Filipino and a microphone. Yes, we love to sing. It’s a form of relief and release, and it costs nothing. I suspect it’s a kind of poor man’s revenge—to be able to sing “My Way” as well as or better than the rich man down the street—so karaoke is democratizing.

CN: In his essay “The Philippines: Born in the USA”, the journalist Pico Iyer writes that “Every Filipino dreams to be American when he/she grows up.” What is your opinion or your experience?

JD: It’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course—but just barely so. I grew up reading American textbooks. I learned more about America than many if not most Americans. We need to demystify or demythify that idea of America as being central to our lives. We care too much about America in a way that America will never care about us. The world’s a much bigger place now; it always has been, but we just didn’t know it. Our OFWs are discovering that larger world.

CN: Prostitution is another plague of Southeast Asia, and of Philippines as well. Is it a legacy of American colonization and the massive presence of American soldiers?

JD: Well, the Americans didn’t invent prostitution, but their presence here didn’t discourage it, either. That said, the Americans are gone but prostitution is still here, and I suspect it always will, until we have a society that offers people better alternatives.

CN: Aurora and Soledad. Rory and Soli. Two sisters, so close by birth, so far by life. One is the anti-mirror of the other. How would you describe their sisterly bondage?

I’m going to say something so plainly true it’s almost stupid, but I’ve always believed—and have tried to show this in my fiction—that where people are alike, they really are alike, and where they’re different, they really are different. So these sisters share enough as sisters might, but are otherwise their own persons.

CN: The male characters in your novel seem to be hopeless, ineluctable Latin-lovers, lost in romance, sex, dreams, a need to escape. Love and loss. Love and longing. Fascinating characters. Filmic, in a way. How would you describe Filipino men and their mentality?

JD: We’re romantics, yes; we could feel as much if not more for those we lose as for those we covet. And once we get something or someone, we take that object or person for granted. We’re creatures of desire, loss, and guilt. There’s probably a million Filipino men out there who’ll roundly and loudly disagree with me, but I suspect there’ll be a lot more who’ll say, “Yes, that’s me!”

CN: The Filipino community in Italy is well integrated in the social and cultural structure. Why do you think it is easier for Filipinos to get integrated in other nations and cultures?

JD: We’re great survivors, and part of that is our ability to adapt and to adjust, our resourcefulness in the face of hardship and privation. Sometimes that translates to keeping a low profile, staying out of trouble, agreeing to whatever the prevailing terms of reference are. We’re not known for making waves—which is both a good and a bad thing.

Penman for Monday, October 13, 2008


A NOTE: I'm in the US till month's end visiting family, so I might not be able to attend to my mail as often or as quickly as I usually do.

TWO LANDMARK events—well, to the bookish among us, at least in America—quietly slipped by these past couple of weeks. One was Banned Books Week (September 27-October 4), about which I’ll have more to say in a future column.

The other was National Punctuation Day, marked last September 24, which is on its fifth year. Its press release went like this (open and close quotation marks supplied by me): “PINOLE, CA — Why is punctuation important Jeff Rubin the Punctuation Man and founder of National Punctuation Day explains that without punctuation you would not be able to express your feelings in writing not to mention know when to pause or stop or ask a question or yell at someone and without punctuation you would not be able to separate independent clauses and show an example of how a business lost millions because of an errant comma so dont forget the most important punctuation mark $$$$$$ OK so a dollar signs isnt a punctuation mark but its important dont you agree”

That reads like a paragraph some students of mine could’ve written (most of my students fortunately still know better), but let’s face it—in these days of SMS and email, punctuation’s often the first to go, even before proper spelling, and few are mourning the passing of commas and semicolons because they never really understood what they were there for, in the first place.

As a professional writer and editor as well as a teacher of English, I derive inordinate satisfaction—perhaps insanely so—from sticking commas, apostrophes, and colons where they should be, but even I have given in to the occasional act of linguistic laziness, most tangibly in the comma that no longer follows most greetings these days. For example, “Hi, Henry” is now—in 99% of emailed messages—rendered as “Hi Henry.” The expressiveness that attends the pause after a comma (as in “Oh, Henry!”) has fled its more hurried and more prosaic rendition (“Oh Henry”).

I can just imagine my perplexed sophomore scratching his head over why any of this should matter in the grand scheme of things. (I have two or three particular readers who periodically send me love notes along the lines of “Who cares what you think?” and “You talk too much!” I’ll expect to hear from them shortly.) My old-fashioned answer is that punctuation, like grammar, is a hallmark of the well-ordered mind, but in these days when such observations can only provoke rants like “You talk too much!”, who cares, indeed, about well-ordered minds?

In any case, should you want to delve deeper into the mysteries of punctuation, then I suggest that you check out http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com. Better yet, grab a copy of that unlikely bestseller by Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Profile Books, 2003), a journey through the history and uses of punctuation marks. For another view that occasionally disses Truss, Strunk & White, and other icons and mavens of language and grammar (what it otherwise calls “prescriptivist poppycock”), have a look at the Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/). Happy hyphenation!


NO ONE should be happy to receive a parking ticket, but my first one actually came to me last week as a pleasant surprise. A parking ticket—in Quezon City! In the Philippines! Who would have ever thought we would see one?

I drove up to my bank on Katipunan Avenue, and parked my car on the wide sidewalk—like I always did—without minding the pink line that had been freshly painted along one side of it, and which was obviously supposed to mean something, which I even more obviously missed. It took me nearly an hour to get my business done at the bank—no, we weren’t counting my money—at the end of which I got back to the car, only to find what looked like a flyer clamped under the wiper.

“Dang,” I thought, “another ad for a condo I can’t afford.” I reached around the windshield and was about to toss it into the trash when I saw that it had some handwriting and my plate number on it. So I looked more closely and realized that it was that rarest of ephemera—a parking ticket, issued to me for “blocking the roadway” or some such infraction.

My first instinct was to scream “Like hell I’m blocking anything!”, because I very surely was not. The sidewalk was clear to the front and back of me—which, in hindsight, was probably because everyone else knew something I didn’t. In other words, what used to be a communal parking area was now a no-parking zone, and I had deposited my Vitara smack in the middle of it. I suppose I was lucky, because the form had a checked box that said, “Vehicle not towed.” No traffic aide or policeman was in sight to argue with. Whoever had left the ticket had better things to do and had moved on, presumably to other errantly parked vehicles down the street.

My indignation soon turned to wonderment as it dawned on me that I was staring at a sign of progress. Somewhere in the system, someone had actually said “Okay, let’s do what we should have started doing 50 years ago,” and sent out uniformed flunkies with pads of tickets to hand out, with further instructions not to hang around and wait for the hapless motorist while munching on a toothpick. The ticket instructed me to go to the nearest branch of a bank and pay P200 to the government’s account within so many days. In that way, the government got its ounce of flesh, the ticket-giver got his commission, and I got my lesson in good traffic citizenship, all without too much fuss and at a price I could afford.

I promptly paid the fine, eager to help in making justice work and vowing never to cross a pink line on the concrete again. Of course, the next day, I got up to headlines telling me that a man who’d murdered two young people on the streets of Manila was back on those streets, having been set free by executive fiat, ostensibly for “good behavior.” The awakened citizen in me sighed, no longer knowing what to think, or how to behave.

Penman for Monday, October 6, 2008


I HAD a very pleasant reunion last week with two old friends, editors Thelma Sioson-San Juan and Jun Engracia, with whom I go a long way back to our activist days in the 1970s, before we all joined one newspaper or other. Our hostess for lunch at L’Opera was another friend, the vivacious Fe Perez-Agudo, EVP and COO of Hyundai Asia Resources Inc., whom I’d met on a visit to Korea last year.

It was fun because we chatted about everything but real work. We did talk cars—which is fun anytime, as far as this old boy’s concerned, even if Fe knew a whole lot more about cars than I did. Which was fair enough, since she sold them—a lot of them, even or maybe because of these penny-pinching times. Known for their fuel economy, Hyundai had sold more than a thousand cars locally just the past month, a hefty number considering what everyone else was going through. The last time I looked, Hyundai was fifth in the ranking of car companies in the Philippines; it was now No. 4.

One of these days, I’d like to personally contribute to Hyundai’s growth. In the meanwhile, I’m going to have to be happy tooling around town in my ’79 VW, which can still turn heads in a way its owner can’t. If I only put as half as much time, effort, and loose change into restoring myself the way I pamper my Beetle, my pens, and my watches, I’d be giving that Piolo and that Dingdong guy a run for their money. Or maybe not. I should be happy just to be this old, if a bit decrepit.

Let’s get back to that lunch. Jun Engracia recalled how, as a greenhorn at the Daily Express in the early ‘70s, he was sent off to cover the Senate—the turf of grizzled veterans whom he found playing poker the day he walked into their press room. Someone called him to order him out for a pack of cigarettes. “Uhm, boss, he’s a reporter,” the guy was told. And thus was Jun’s career as a newspaperman launched.

I shared my story of how, as a brash 17-year-old dropout at about that same time, I’d tried to convince Amando Doronila at the Manila Chronicle to take me in. “Come back in a few years” was what I was kindly told, more or less. Instead of waiting a few years, I went to the Philippines Herald, where city editor Nemesio Dacanay—perhaps thinking to get rid of the pesky boy as well—asked me to come back in three days with a story, any story. I did; after waiting for three days in Quezon City for the sky to fall so I would get a scoop (it didn’t), I saw a bad movie at the Delta Theater, typed up a review, and got my foot in the door of journalism.

Those were the days when I would’ve given my right arm for a byline, and in a way I did, with my deskman reducing me to tears by demanding a rewrite of a story half a dozen times. I was thin as a rake, with a shock of wavy hair, chain-smoking Marlboros, and convinced that I was chronicling the inevitable collapse of a bankrupt regime, especially when I got assigned to the police beat and to the demonstrations at the US Embassy, which I was now witnessing—for a change—from the other side of the police lines. The “inevitable”, as it turned out, would take 14 more years (if at all), but journalism has a way of chopping history up into Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I was glad to be young, alive, and acutely aware of events brushing my cheek, sometimes too roughly, and I’m sure Jun and Thelma shared the exhilaration.

I savored the grilled salmon at L’Opera, but relished even more, I think, the survival of good company into a benign middle age we never thought we’d see.


SPEAKING OF a foot in the door, I received a message from a reader named Anjeline de Dios, who’s now studying in faraway Trondheim, Norway. She wasn’t excited for herself but for another friend of hers named Gianpaolo “GP” Eleria, who was finishing his Bachelor of Music degree at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. GP, she said, had just given a speech to the college on its opening day on September 5, and did I want to read and share the speech?

Now, I normally toss forwarded material aside, but since this was personally addressed to me, I thought I’d take a look, and it was a good thing I did, because this fellow made a lot of sense as he wrapped up his US experience. Here’s the full text of that speech (an excerpt from which appears in the print version of this column):

"In 2004, September 5 was a Sunday. I was a freshman at Berklee—and so was Roger Brown (the current Berklee president), actually. I was writing home about my first few days in Boston. In my email I went on and on, gushing over everything that was happening to me in this foreign land. And my friends did their part, extolling my decision to fly off to America's farther shores and assuring me that greater things were yet to come. 

"Soon, my reports became infrequent. Daily emails turned to weekly ones. Those turned into monthly. Eventually, I turned into a "lurker," sitting in front of the computer at the end of the day, reading about my friends' misadventures—only reading, rarely ever writing back. I really, really missed them; I missed home. And I started to second-guess myself. Was this the right thing to do?

"In the four years since I first set foot on the shores of the Berklee beach, I struggled through that question. An interesting thing happened though. The source of my anxiety turned into a challenge. And that question became 'What will make this the right thing to do?' Answering that question required more than just acquiring new information. I soon learned that, to truly answer it, I had to change the way I saw things. Today, I offer to you four important lessons that I learned in the process.

“First, poverty is not an obstacle. Not everyone who goes to Berklee can actually afford to go to Berklee. A lot of us here have had to fight tooth and nail just to get one foot in the door. Many, like me, struggled to keep that foot in the door. Armed with student loans and an incredible amount of audacity, we stayed on, betting on the belief that we will make it pay off someday.

“Second, networking-schmetworking! The first tip I ever got starting out at Berklee was that I should start networking. These past four years have shown me that there is one better, more powerful, enduring thing than networking—and that is friendship. Networking can be overrated. But the essence of it never is. What people eventually learn to do here is to forge meaningful relationships. And to achieve that, there is one simple thing to remember: exchange a relationship, not just contact information. Resist being one of the many with a bloated address book and Facebook friends that don't show.

“Third, English sure isn't my first language—and I’m proud of it! The prejudice that arises from the seeming lack of a common language is a debilitating disease. And there is no better place to find that out than here at Berklee. But don't get me wrong. Everyone here actually works very hard to understand everyone else. You know why? Because while English sure isn't my first language, at Berklee it isn't anyone's first language. Music is. And the sooner students realize how eloquent they can be at speaking it, the sooner they are able to share themselves with each other.

“Fourth, doors are better opened. Forget your comfort zone. It is a prison. Many would attest that there are not a lot of things as risky as shelling out a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to go to a music college, especially for this generation of musicians who grew up downloading and sharing their music collections online. So, for those of us who came here anyway, there is absolutely no reason to shrink back into any form of comfort zone now. Being here, by definition, means choosing risk over caution—it's improvisation. And those of us that stayed in character found that the opening of doors never ends.

"I turn 29 tomorrow. Most of my friends have their own families now. If I was entering any other industry, I would probably be considered a little too old, too late in the running. But in the crazy world of tensions and resolutions that we live in, age barely matters. Fortunately, curiosity and creativity are eternal. I take with me the memory of discovering harmonic events with Wayne Naus, and of balancing numbers with Marty Dennehy, of donut-making with John Aldrich, and of meaningful management with Joe Miglio, the tasteful arrangements of Adi Yeshaya, and of late night sessions and "rehoysals" with Michael Farquharson. I take with me the spirit of all these mentors that have molded me into the artist that I have hopefully become. In closing, I would like to read you something hopeful that I wrote on my blog a few weeks after my own freshman convocation:

"'I have a good feeling about my life here in Boston. I haven't quite settled in yet, but I feel that I can manage... and that I will enjoy my time immensely. I wish I had a better view outside my window, but I do have the music that I definitely signed up for. Mostly, I am happy to meet challenges once again. Out here I'm far from the best. But the exciting fact is that I could be the best someday because of Berklee. And that, for now, is the plan.'

"Now as I continue to reflect on how I got here and what my future holds I am happy to say, What was once hopeful is now more and more true. Thank you very much."

Many thanks and all the best, GP. Here’s to your own long career in art and its special language.

Penman for Monday, September 28, 2008


ONE OF the more interesting—if not, for most of my students, the most novel—aspects of my undergraduate class in Contemporary American Literature is our discussion of the African-American experience as it can be gleaned from several poems and stories on our syllabus. With Barack Obama poised (or at least this corner hopes) to become America’s next president—and the first black man to occupy the post—I think it’s especially important for young Filipinos to understand just how historic even Obama’s candidacy is, even if he may have nothing directly to do with me and you.

English 42 is a literature course, but I teach it, in effect, as an adventure in American studies. From Day One, I try to impress upon my students the need to understand the world’s most powerful nation and its society—and one that has had a continuing and some say dominating influence on our own culture, economy, and politics—from a Filipino point of view. We’re not pretending or wanting to be Americans, although it’s just as important to try and see things from their perspective. We want to know America through its literature and culture, so we can begin to figure out and get a handle on the complexities of our century-long love-hate relationship with that Northern behemoth. I remind my students that our objective is neither to love nor hate America, but just to understand it better than when we began, and at least divest it of the undue power that mysteries and enigmas often wield over the uninitiated.

To prepare my students for the task ahead, I start every semester not with literature proper but with an overview of American geography and history. It’s amazing—appalling, actually—how ignorant we’ve become, even in this age of the Internet, of exactly where things are, and of what happened even just 20 years ago. Most of us seem to be living literally in the here and now, to the exclusion of almost everything else that doesn’t register on our social screen. (I’ll bet, however, that the average educated Filipino still knows more about America than his or her Stateside counterpart would know about us.)

So we begin with maps and a walk through America’s own colonial past, the trauma of the Civil War, its rise to industrial (and imperial) power, and its passionate—and sometimes contradictory—devotions to such ideals and concepts as freedom, the frontier, the individual, egalitarianism, and that comforting confection, “the American way of life” (for those of us looking in from the outside, “the American dream”).

Through stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and John Updike’s “A&P,” we gain insights into the mindset of ordinary people in small-town America, far away from Washington and Wall Street; they are, after all, the farmers and workers who actually elect the American President (even if only about 35 percent of them actually cast a ballot on voting day), and thereby help direct the lives of billions elsewhere on the planet.

But what we Filipinos know least about America has, I think, to do with its minorities, especially African Americans, whom we usually recognize as one stereotype or another. In the 1990s, you had to be one of two MJs—Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan—to be seen as a successful black man in America, and indeed we often think of blacks as being great entertainers and athletes, which is not a bad thing, unless you happen to be a black person who’s neither one nor the other. There is, I suspect, a benign racism in Filipinos (the kind that insists that the only good PBA imports are black ones) shaped by the fact that as nut-brown as most of us are, we see the world through white eyes, and ascribe to whiteness all things good and beautiful. Nobody ever sold a tin or a tube of “blackening” cream in this country.

We try to remedy that ignorance and misunderstanding in class by going over the history of slavery in America and the persistence of racism even long after the Civil War and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. We talk about black music as a form of protest and self-affirmation. We discuss how black Americans—who make up less than 15 percent of America’s 300-million population—exert a far wider and deeper cultural influence than their sheer numbers would suggest. I remind my students that such people and role models exist as black scientists, scholars, and artists—that Bill Cosby has a doctorate in education. Through such poems as Langston Hughes’ sharply ironic “I’m Makin’ a Road” and stories as James Baldwin’s horrifying “Going to Meet the Man” and Alice Walker’s self-critical “Everyday Use,” we confront realities about America that we Filipinos would perhaps rather not deal with, especially when we begin to realize that we have more in common with Barack Obama than John McCain.

This isn’t to say, of course, that all whites are bad and all blacks are good. Such demonizing oversimplifications serve no one. Rather, between and within black and white are all kinds of shades of gray—and brown and pink and yellow. Unraveling the complexity of human beings and human society is one of literature’s toughest challenges, and I’m glad to engage my students in that pursuit, especially when it veers off to parts unknown.


THE UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW)—of which I recently became director—is now receiving applications for the 48th UP ICW National Writers Workshop to be held in Camp John Hay, Baguio City, from April 12 to 18, 2009 and to be chaired by National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario.

We bring twelve creative writers up to Baguio every summer for a week of intense discussions about their work, and for the past few years we’ve geared this workshop toward what we might call “mid-career” writers: people who’ve already made a mark in writing and who are working on some significant project we can talk about and help them with. We earmark eight of these slots for obvious standouts nominated by the UPICW staff, but four fellowships are available for open competition, open only to such advanced writers.

More details and application forms are available at the UPICW office in UP Diliman and on the ICW website at http://www.up.edu.ph/~icwhttp://www.up.edu.ph/~icw. The deadline for submission of applications is November 30, 2008. For inquiries, call 922-1830 and ask for Ms. Eva Cadiz.

Penman for Monday, September 22, 2008


I RECEIVED some interesting invitations these past two weeks, all having to do with meeting the people who buy and read our books. One of them was at the Pistang Panitik portion of the Manila International Book Fair, where I joined a panel of writers that included Neil Garcia, Vim Nadera, Roland Tolentino, and Nick Pichay. We had been roped together to talk about the current state of Philippine literature in our respective genres and languages, and a roomful of enthusiasts who had gamely trooped out to the SMX Exhibition Center at the Mall of Asia on a Sunday morning engaged us in a lively conversation.

One point that came up (that always comes up at such forums, I must say) had to do with “Filipino-ness” in writing. Could one leave the country or any references to it out of one’s writing and expect success? Why not, said Neil—arguing, quite persuasively, that much of contemporary poetry is intensely personal anyway and barely grounded in some national space. I took issue with this just slightly in terms of fiction, which tends to be more culture-bound, remembering students and workshoppers who would turn in stories set in New York or Boston, not from a Filipino but a wannabe-American (or wannabe-published-in-The New Yorker) mindset, failing miserably just on the level of idiom, not to speak of the culture.

As far as I’m concerned, anything written by a Filipino is Filipino—including this half-amusing, half-annoying part of us that fantasizes about not being Filipino. Also, it’s about time that—having gone everywhere on the planet—we began writing about it through our eyes and experience. And indeed, as Neil suggested, why can’t we have thoughts and feelings that transcend the nation?

But that kind of penetrating, overarching vision comes, I think, at the peak and in the maturity of one’s writing rather than at the beginning. Call it old-fashioned, but you earn the right to write about other worlds by first mastering your own, as well as your own voice; and then you can sally forth and pretend to be anyone and anything, which is one of the great joys of writing.

I also had the pleasure of meeting with the members of two book clubs that had chosen Soledad’s Sister as their, uhm, penance for the month. It isn’t very often that readers get to meet and chat with the authors of their books; but conversely, authors—especially here—don’t get much of a chance to see how their work is received by their readers (except through that rare piece of thorough but accessible Filipino literary criticism, beyond the backslapping of columnist-friends, the vitriol of pathological haters, and the smog of academic jargon).

It was an eye-opening, humbling experience to hear lay, non-academic readers express their feelings about characters and situations I created. Every author hopes that his or her readers will take their work seriously, but when they do, you start hoping “Not too seriously!” You wish fervently, all of a sudden, that you had another chance to rewrite that passage or clarify that statement. I was amazed and flattered by how well my readers knew Walter, Rory, and Soli like they lived across the street, by how invested they were in the fate of these characters, whom I may have dreamed up one Sunday afternoon between a jog and a shower.

The most common question I’ve heard people ask about Soledad is why it ends the way it does—why I’m not more explicit or forthcoming about Soli’s ultimate fate. They feel cheated out of a proper closure. I think it’s a legitimate gripe—heck, I’d say the same thing, too—but it’s something I don’t think I can do too much about, given my suspicion (laid out in the first chapter) that life isn’t that neat, and will often deny us the closure we crave, the body we can grieve for and grieve over.

That’s as much as I should probably say about the novel and what it means to me, which could be very different from what it means to my reader, and happily so. I’ve always believed that authors should write their novels and then shut up to let the reader’s imagination take over the piece. Maybe that’s why I’ve never joined a book club myself, thinking of writing and reading as a very private thing, like making love or passing waste. But I have to thank these two book clubs—and my friends in them who invited me, broadcaster Twink Macaraig and writer-editor Linda Panlilio—for affording me the rare pleasure of a direct conversation with the people I write for and write about.

I DIDN'T know what to expect when I went down to Kidapawan City in North Cotabato a couple of weekends ago on a data-gathering trip for another book I’m working on. I’ve been to various parts of Mindanao many times, but I’d never been to Cotabato, and the past weeks had been full of news about rebel attacks and bombings in that part of the country, so—despite the assurances of my hosts that Kidapawan was far from the fighting—I didn’t feel too good about making this particular trip at this particular time.

But a job’s a job, and the chance of going even part of the way up Mt. Apo was too good to pass up. I’m no mountaineer—two laps around the UP Academic Oval and a few games of badminton are about all I can do for exercise—but I like elevated, panoramic views, and you can’t get any more elevated in these islands than on Mt. Apo—at 10,311 feet (3,144 meters), the country’s tallest peak.

As it turned out, Kidapawan (which sprawls at the mountain’s foot) was a prettier and far more pleasant place than I could have imagined, with concrete boulevards as wide as EDSA, split by long rows of luxuriant trees. The cleanliness and the amenities (free wi-fi in the lobby) of AJ Hi-Time Hotel in downtown Kidapawan would put many posher establishments in bigger cities to shame.

It seems that almost anything grows—and grows big—in the soil of Kidapawan, otherwise known as the “City of Fruits and Highland Springs.” Aside from being the province’s financial center, much of the wealth of this city of 120,000 comes from the once-controversial geothermal project put up on Mt. Apo’s slopes by the Philippine National Oil Company’s Energy Development Corporation, since privatized and now being operated by the Lopez group.

We went up just high enough to appreciate the hot springs in Lake Agco, now visited by droves of lowlanders eager for a soak in the steam-fed waters. We were met by the deafening screech of cicadas on the mountain’s foothills. At midday the gray wet clouds rolled in, and it was hard to tell which was fog and which was steam; at some point it all became a pelting rain. I got drenched, using my thankfully substantial body to cover my precious camera and the laptop in my backpack, but the sting of sweet rain was a bracing reminder of another kind of life in another part of the country, one we only read about but hardly ever visit, preferring the faux temples of Repulse Bay and the Starbucks on Orchard Road.

Penman for Monday, September 15, 2008


I WROTE an item here recently about a gathering of our best young Filipino writers 40 years old and below that we’re organizing for early next year as part of the Philippine Writers’ Festival. It got me to thinking, later, about what being 40 actually means in a literary life. What was 40 like to me—that fast-receding image in my rearview mirror?

A celebrity website tells us that Will Smith, Rachel Ray, Celine Dion, Hugh Jackman, Gillian Anderson, Emily Proctor, and Halle Berry are all turning 40 this year. Not too surprisingly, no such list exists for writers, maybe because they’re not the sort of people whose aging threatens your most private fantasies (really, Emily Proctor’s 40?), and also because writers hit their prime after actors do, or so we’d like to think.

Going over my own shortlist of possible attendees for that writers’ festival, I was gratified to see just how many terrific new Filipino writing talents have emerged just over the past decade or so. The one I’ve asked to help me organize this “Kumustahan” conference, fictionist Sarge Lacuesta, is just on the verge of turning 40, but already has several books and major prizes to his name, aside from a fruitful career in advertising. They’re just beginning to be anthologized—a step which, I suppose, guarantees that your work will be read and cursed by legions of hapless sophomores long after you’re gone—but I have no doubt that years from now, these writers born in the late ’60s and early ‘70s will be seen as a bumper crop, a generation that found its voice and its concerns past martial law and EDSA.

Some years are just better than others, I suppose; what, for example, was in 1899 that it would produce Vladimir Nabokov (April 22), Ernest Hemingway (July 21), and Jorge Luis Borges (August 24) one after the other? It’s an honor and also a misfortune to share my birth year, 1954, with the illustrious likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Louise Erdrich, and Louis de Berniere (and, while we’re at it, Oprah Winfrey, Matt Groening, Bob Geldof, Chris Evert-Lloyd, and Denzel Washington), ensuring that I will never be the most famous writer of my time. (When I met Ishiguro in Norwich some years ago, he grinned and said, “Yeah, that was a good year.”) Besting even Ishiguro at the cash register, no writer came out of 1954 with a rosier future in publishing than the purpose-driven Rick Warren, whose book has now sold over 25 million copies.

I was born on the 15th of January, so I had practically the full year of 1994 to feel 40. In 1994 I was beginning to settle down after a few wild and woolly years between finishing graduate school abroad and starting my first newspaper column, “Barfly”, in TODAY. I’d been a creature of Timog Avenue, cruising the bars and back to smoking four packs of Marlboros a day after an 11-year abstinence (together with Beng, I quit again cold-turkey in 1995, and we both haven’t taken a puff since).

By 1994 I had published two collections of stories, a novel, and a collection of short plays; in July of that year I went to Scotland for a month’s hermitage at Hawthornden Castle, where I finished work on Penmanship and Other Stories, writing the title piece and three other stories in the castle itself on a 386-SX laptop. It was a welcome break from teaching freshman English and churning out as many as four speeches a day for President Ramos (a task I actually enjoyed, although we never met on the job; in a postmodern twist, I got assigned to write the speech he delivered for the TOYM Awards that April, of which I was one of the recipients).

Beng and I had found a small apartment on Sorsogon Street in West Triangle, which we shared with a couple of big rats in the ceiling, with college senior Demi preferring to stay with her grandparents in Project 4; my Beetle had begun to fall into decrepitude in its first incarnation but I was still driving that around; none of these minor annoyances mattered much, because my life and my work were coming together, and I could feel one door closing and another one opening. I knew that I wanted to be a writer for the rest of my life, and I knew whom I wanted to spend that rest of my life with.

The late American poet Donald Justice wrote a great poem titled “Men at Forty,” and as soon as I read it I cried “Yes!”, which is perhaps the best accolade a reader can give a poem. It begins with these lines:

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

And it ends with:

They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

I couldn’t have said it better.

SPEAKING OF time passing, let me share a private joy. Most of you know me as a collector of old and new fountain pens—thus the title of this column—but I’ve also acquired a passion for vintage watches, especially classics from the 1950s.

I like old, gold, mechanical watches that will look good on a leather strap (you’ll never see me wearing a steel bracelet, or anything that looks like a wristbound tank), preferably simple round ones with a clear white face. There is, I think, a fundamental honesty to a round watch that does nothing but tell the time, and over the past few years I’ve accumulated a couple of dozen of these beauties—many of them, surprisingly enough, from local sources (check out ebay.ph for a fine selection; on the main ebay.com site, there are at least 100,000 new and vintage wristwatches on sale at any given moment). I especially love Hamiltons, Bulovas, and Orises (can’t afford the Patek Philippes and Blancpains, sorry), which I can still find in the range of $100-$200 and have them serviced by my suki repairmen at World Watch in Shang Mall.

But like any collector, I have a few Holy Grails when it comes to pens and watches, and one of the latter has been a gold watch from 1954 (yup, that year again)—a fellow time traveler, whose ticking would be almost like my own heartbeat. I’ve had a couple of close matches: a 1955 Hamilton Parker and a 1958 Bulova, both so pretty that I can barely bring myself to wear them, feeling like a monkey at the dinner-dance.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a gold Omega Seamaster bumper automatic on ebay.ph, and was instantly, dizzily enthralled. No year was given, but I knew it was from the ‘50s from its design, whose stepped, rounded bezel reminded me of a brass porthole or some other suitably nautical motif. I had only one other Omega—a steel Constellation chronometer given as a corporate gift, never worn, which I plan to trade away for something closer to my tastes—but I’d always wanted a Seamaster for its robust, no-nonsense build and look. This one was going for higher than any other watch I’d acquired, but you’ll eat sawdust when you know you want something, and I left a bid and said a prayer before flying off to Kidapawan for a weekend sortie.

The short of it is that I got the watch, which has now become my daily wearer. In my unhappiest moments (i.e., losing at poker even while holding a pair of aces or kings—“pocket rockets and cowboys,” we call them), I glance at its gleaming roundness, and all my tribulations vanish. The extra lift comes from a serendipitous discovery I made after making the purchase. I looked up its serial number—14318304—on the Omega database, and established that it had been manufactured in, yes, 1954. As it ticks, so do I.

Now it’s back to the salt mines, where I need to hack away a few hundred tons of the white stuff to pay for these gewgaws.

Penman for Monday, September 8, 2008


LAST WEEK'S piece on the Palanca Literary Awards (and about losing in them) provoked a number of responses from readers who were curious about the judging process. One reader hinted at the possibility of collusion or favoritism, whereby a judge might favor an entry submitted by a friend or a protégé.

I wasn’t really surprised by the questions or suspicions. I’d heard them before—more often than not (in the case of the reader I mentioned above, not) from people who’d joined and lost and who were wondering if they’d been cheated out of a prize they felt they deserved. All I could truthfully say in response to those questions was that, in the 25 years that I actively joined the Palancas and even afterwards, I have never encountered a brazen and provable case of favoritism to the point of cheating. I’m not saying that it’s never happened. When you run an annual competition for almost 60 years in over a dozen categories with three judges per category, it’s almost statistically impossible for everything to run perfectly above-board, despite the best efforts of the organizers (whose representative sits in on every deliberation of every panel). But I’ve yet to see or hear of a case where three judges criminally conspired to make a patently bad work win.

Here’s how it works: the organizers invite and empanel three judges for each category (say, the short story in English), chosen from among accomplished and respected writers, critics, scholars, and pevious winners in that particular genre and language. The judges meet three times over a month or so to bring the entries down to a shortlist, from which they select the winners at their final meeting. Depending on the mix of judges and on their preferences and predispositions, the process can be long and arduous or short and sweet.

Sometimes, the best pieces stand out head-and-shoulders above the rest, making long arguments or even a third meeting superfluous; in the more usual case, the judges will debate passionately among themselves over their respective shortlists and their choices’ merits and rankings. In extremely tight cases, we ascribe points to our ranked finalists, and the numbers break the impasse for us. There have been instances when—even as the senior member and chair of my particular panel—I’ve been outvoted by my fellow judges; in that event, I smile and give way and keep my reservations to myself.

Can a judge know whose work it is that’s being scrutinized? Possibly, yes. The entries are submitted anonymously and are number-coded, but since some entries have been previously published or submitted to workshops, they can be recognized by judges who, after all, are supposed to be on top of the current literature. Does this mean the judges will favor their peers and protégés? A few might—I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t acknowledge human frailty—but they’d have to ask themselves if it’s worth risking one’s reputation for. Besides, three different judges, not just one, choose the winners, and an indefensibly bad work will not go very far. (This isn’t to say that all Palanca winners have been good and great; some years, in certain categories, the pickings can be lean, and the judges elect to hand out prizes when perhaps they shouldn’t.) In my case, if and when I learn that my best and current students are joining the Palancas, I simply don’t judge, so that if they win—as many have—they can savor their triumph knowing that I had nothing to do with it.

By and large, it’s a fair process, even accounting for all the biases and blind spots that every judge will bring to the table. It’s the sore losers who’ve cried “Foul!” the loudest, the self-acclaimed geniuses who can’t believe that three dumb people passed judgment on their work and found it wanting. Quite a few of them have written me with a vehemence, and all I can tell them is, if you can’t afford to lose, don’t join; if you think you were cheated, don’t join again (and then denounce the Palancas and their winners as some kind of literary cabal); if you think you’re that great, forget the Palancas and send your work straight to Alfred Knopf or the Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, Milton, Poe, Rizal, Rilke, Brecht, Plath—heck, none of them won Palancas, so why should you?

The strangest case I’ve heard of doesn’t even involve laxity of judgment but rather its opposite extreme—one judge came to the meeting with a ruler to measure the margins of the printed entries, to make sure they all abided by the one-inch margin rule. Thankfully, he was overruled by his fellows, who probably remembered Emerson’s admonition about “a foolish consistency (being) the hobgoblin of little minds.”


SPEAKING OF writers, let me devote the rest of this week’s column to a letter I received from the noted broadcaster Ray Pedroche, who wrote me to take note of his late father’s centenary this month. That father was writer Conrado V. “CV” Pedroche, a stalwart of Filipino fiction in English in his time. Ray writes:

“I thought I should write you about the l00th birth anniversary of CV Pedroche. ‘Who he?’ your young readers might ask. Before he died in the ‘80s he said that no one would remember who he was in fifty years. I am afraid that he was right. But I am saddened, my being the eldest son aside, that a noted Filipino writer like CV would soon be forgotten.

“There was a time when almost every week he would have a short story published in the Sunday Times Magazine or the Philippines Free Press. And to a son like me, being the eldest and the superboy in his Ray stories of which there are about 30, he was a hero in our household. Pardon the immodesty. Anyway, since this is his centenary, I am going out of my way in writing you to pay tribute to this simple man who saw ‘beauty in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.’ An artist to the core, he was the humblest man I have ever seen. He was quiet and unassuming, never raising his voice except when he came upon an affirmation of his art whether in books, his short stories, his attempts at painting and sculpting.

“He was always a boy at heart, never ceasing to wonder and discover and, to a fault, never sauntering even in fantasy, from being the original Adam. It might interest you to know that he had written two books in his lifetime—Full Circle and Gingerbread Girl. And if you never had heard of them, that is not at all surprising, for writing was all he was concerned about, and marketing his works never was his mettle. I don't even have a copy of his books. I am sure he did not care if one kept them or not. Creating them was all that mattered. I suspect that creating us, his children, four boys and a girl, was all that mattered for he was sure that each one knew how to live. And he was right.

“He raised us in a world of books and a fairyland of art. Even the war (he was 30 during WW II) did not embitter him. He wrote a diary with a pen he fashioned out of a young bamboo twig with an embedded lead which he used in day-to-day account of how it was like to be almost bombed out of a dug-out, and, how a writer like him saw the war, through his eyeglasses not so darkly. I have the manuscript of that diary and it is my favorite since it reflects the good heart of a man amidst the chaos and cataclysm and devastation brought about by war.

“Butch, I hope you will pardon me for writing about my father which some might misconstrue as self-serving. But I say that in this world of fleeting fancies, the old verities must hold. I am much obliged.”

And so are we, Ray. Many thanks for writing about this extraordinary man.

Penman for Monday, September 1, 2008


The 58th edition of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature takes place tonight at the Peninsula, as usual, and while the full list of winners has yet to be announced, let me be the first to congratulate my new deputy director at the UP Institute of Creative Writing, Jose Claudio “Butch” Guerrero (yes, another Butch), for winning first prize in the essay in English category. It’s also Butch’s first Palanca, so coming in first has to be a double thrill for him. I mention Butch not only because we work together in the same office (he’s also a faculty member of the UP English department, as well as my student in my graduate fiction workshop), but also because any writer’s first Palanca reminds me of my own, 33 years ago, when I tied for second place in the short story in English, setting me down a road I’m still traveling on.

A Palanca (or any other prize, for that matter) is a wonderful thing to have as a young man or woman seeking early validation of his or her writing abilities, and even as an old man still wondering if he has what it takes to excite a difficult and discerning reader. But like I often remind my students, it’s just one way—and maybe not even the best one—of establishing one’s credentials as a writer; the ultimate proof lies in one’s readership. At some point in a writing life, prizes matter much less than publication (and then perhaps, toward the very end of things, they matter again).

But there’s something about the first time, the first prize (or better yet, the first first prize) that sends a lifelong rush through the system. I know now, looking back on that first Palanca, that I may have gotten lucky; the judges were in a generous mood and had split first, second, and third prizes down the line. I don’t even have a copy of that story, a fanciful piece set in the pre-colonial past titled “Agcalan Point”; it was never published, and I never thought of including it in any of my books, because it was an engaging tale but not particularly well written. (I was 21, in my thunder-and-lightning phase, and besotted with exotic effects.)

But it was enough to give me the lift I needed to pursue writing with a passion. In those days, they held the Palanca Awards ceremony in the old La Tondeña building on Echague, but they didn’t skimp on the trimmings: I remember the swan carved out of glassine ice, and bringing home a hand-lettered certificate along with a check for P2,500, which I plunked down in partial payment for a 1963 Datsun Bluebird, my first car and a pretty piece of junk.

I walked on air for months afterward, and couldn’t wait for the next Palanca deadline to leave my stamp on Philippine literature. You can imagine my dismay and despair when, with crushing regularity, I joined the Palancas for the next four years—and lost. It wasn’t until 1980 that I would win again—for a play in Filipino. In the early ‘80s I hit my stride and began writing stories one after the other, and the sheer enjoyment of writing leavened the torment of awaiting the Palanca results (delivered then by telegram, so I scanned the horizon far and wide in late August for the solitary figure of the PT&T or RCPI messenger biking his way up the road).

And so my congratulations go to this year’s batch of Palanca winners, especially the first-timers, with a gentle reminder: enjoy the evening and get drunk on the company and the champagne, and then, tomorrow morning, start thinking about your first book and your most difficult reader. (And kudos likewise to my former student Celeste Flores-Coscolluela, who wrote a story for my graduate class that won, last week, second prize in the Free Press Literary Awards. Celeste sings as wondrously as her name suggests, and it’s almost unjust for her to write so well, as well. And congratulations, finally, to another former student and poker buddy, Bridport Prize winner Joel Toledo, on the launch of his first collection of poetry, Chiaroscuro: Poems, published by the UST Press. Joel’s poems are a delight to read—not just in the mind, but aloud, as all poetry once was.)


SPEAKING OF young or younger writers, I have more exciting news to share.

We have yet to finalize most of the details and to secure formal approval for the project, but the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) is planning what promises to be one of the biggest literary events in this country in recent years. This is the Philippine Writers Festival, tentatively scheduled for mid-February 2009, which will bring around a hundred Filipino writers together in Manila (Quezon City, actually) for three days of conferencing, performances, workshops, and a book fair. As a special focus, the conference portion of the festival will engage and be devoted to writers 40 and below—also around 40 of them, so we’re calling this the “40/40” or “40 under 40” show—featuring the best Filipino writers of this upcoming generation.

Poet and NCLA head Ricky de Ungria will serve as festival director, and I’ve been charged with organizing the conference—a task I intend to devolve on a group of under-40s that I’ll be rounding up soon. I’m sure that our young writers can generate enough ideas on their own, and I look forward to working with them on this project, which will be co-hosted by the University of the Philippines and the Ateneo de Manila University, with fellow NCLA member Prof. Lulu Torres-Reyes taking care of the Ateneo end.

The NCCA will be flying in selected participants from the regions, ensuring adequate national representation, but it’s the generational aspect of this activity that should be its most valuable legacy—it will serve, in effect, as the formal debut of a new literary elite. (Writers of my age and older need not feel left out; there will be ample opportunity in those three days for us to interact with one another and with our juniors.) I’ll keep you abreast of developments as they emerge, but let this serve as an open invitation for suggestions on how best to make this first Philippine Writers Festival a success.

Penman for Monday, August 26, 2008

I WAS killing time in my car the other day while waiting for a meeting and began flipping through the pages of a book I’d picked up from the National Bookstore bargain bin—Letters from London by Julian Barnes, whose breakthrough novel Flaubert’s Parrot we’d enjoyed in grad school 20 years ago—too long ago to remember the source of our enjoyment, so it was good to read him again. But this time this was Barnes writing as a nonfictionist—that cross-breed between a reporter and an essayist—on a number of subjects occasioned by his acceptance of an appointment as The New Yorker’s correspondent in London. “I was, in effect, to be a foreign correspondent in my own country,” he mused. “My predecessor as London correspondent, the novelist Mollie Panter-Downes, began filing in 1939 and held the job for nearly half a century.”

This led me to wonder why no Filipino newspaper or magazine of any worth employs novelists as correspondents in, say, Los Angeles or Tokyo; of course we don’t have too many novelists to begin with, and we haven’t much to pay them, but I suspect that the kind of nuanced reportage that Julian Barnes produces isn’t what most Filipino readers seem to be interested in.

There are Filipinos abroad who send in the occasional report on goings-on in the Pinoy community in Daly City or Chicago, usually involving some troubled movie star or some junketing government official. Even more common—I remember how endemic this was with one Manila newspaper—are the two- or three-column-inch updates on the professional progress of the sons and daughters of Binmaley, Pangasinan or Tagkawayan, Quezon in the Great American Frontier. But we rarely write and read extended, penetrating accounts of America or Europe or the Middle East as seen through the eyes of the Filipino, as though we lacked the distance or the credibility to do a good job of it, even if we have boldly gone everywhere on the planet. (Gregorio C. Brillantes and his travel essays provide a notable exception.)

The English, on the other hand, fuss over everything above their heads and beneath their feet. On my most recent visit to England for a writers’ conference devoted to nature, I had the pleasure of meeting and listening to nature writer Richard Mabey, whose training in philosophy seems to have little to do with but inevitably informs his love affair with beech trees, and angler Charles Rangeley-Wilson, whose search for trout in the Thames (an almost spiritual quest for signs of renewal in what had become one of the world’s most industrialized waterways) embodied a mini-essay on London’s buried rivers (now shadowed by the Tube’s labyrinthine network).

Julian Barnes’s reportage on English mores and manners is tack-sharp. No one takes the English more seriously than the English, but it’s a wry, self-mocking seriousness that quickly turns on itself—something that you probably need in a country with so much pomp and circumstance. Barnes goes around with a pin poised to deflate all that high seriousness, and you should hear the air leaving the balloon. Scanning the table of contents, my eyes first fell (should I say naturally?) on an essay titled “Britannia’s New Bra Size,” a piece which begins as a report on the unlikely model chosen to represent Britannia—the quintessential, trident-wielding British warrior-queen—and proceeds to a learned disquisition on British philately, numismatics, and heraldry, then finally to a tart commentary on Thatcherite politics.

To come up with and agree on a new stamp featuring an updated Britannia, a design committee was formally constituted to fuss over everything. Thumbing his nose at a tradition that required a suitably glamorous model for the sitting Britannia (who began her iconic life as King Charles II’s mistress), artist Barry Craddock took the short cut and chose his wife to sit for him. But the controversy didn’t revolve around that decision.

“There was particular and earnest discussion of Britannia’s bra size…. Mike Denny of the Roundel Design Group explains: ‘Britannia must look powerful but she also has to be feminine. When we started out, her chest was almost flat, which looked ridiculous. Then we went to the other extreme. Eventually, we settled for a 36B size.’ This was at least democratic: 36B is currently the standard bust size of this nation, having crept up, Gossard the bra manufacturers confirm, from 34B seven years ago. The pill and better nutrition are held to be two contributing factors…. Barry Craddock remembers the moment when ‘a lady from the Post Office, Angela Reeves, took her pen and said it should be that big.’ He seems relieved that the final decision was not his: ‘A Standard 36B—they told me.’”

Such seriocomic touches permeate Barnes’s book, which I’m keeping in the car for those parking-lot or waiting-room reads that often put me in a more attentive state than if I were reading for a lecture or an exam.


SPEAKING OF London, I still feel bad that I didn’t have more than a few days (and more than a few pounds sterling) to spend there last June. I’d planned on seeing at least one play or musical at the West End or even in smaller theatres elsewhere (I missed by just one day one of the bloodiest and also liveliest plays of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Brecht’s The Good Soul of Setzuan was playing somewhere, but I wouldn’t have minded watching Mamma Mia! or even The Sound of Music for some sing-along fun.) Alas, I was booked into a cheap hotel that earned its difference by being too far away for me to catch both a show and the last Tube train.

But fate lent a hand, and I discovered—strolling from Covent Garden into Leicester Square, the throbbing heart of the city—that I’d come into town just in time for a weekend of free excerpts presented by the very same performers who were going onstage that same night. Imagine a four-hour feast of the very best of Broadway and West End musicals (this being London, the event was called West End Live)—and all of that free in the park. I got to listen to the highlights of musicals I’d never have walked into—High School Musical, Avenue Q, and for me the afternoon’s piece de resistance, the London Gay Men’s Chorus (about 40 men of every size, shape, and age in plain oxford shirts and slacks) who brought the house down with “I Feel Pretty” (“… and witty, and gay!”). No greater sign, I thought, of London’s civility than the rousing reception accorded these guys.

With a burgundy-red 1935 Parker Vacumatic fountain pen that I’d found for a song earlier that morning on Portobello Road tucked safely in my inner pocket, I marched off to nearby Soho for a 9-pound Chinese buffet, and as I inhaled the fragrant steam off the pearly-white rice, I felt like I’d imbibed the best of London—a bit of the “Cool Britannia” of Tony Blair’s prime—for not very much.

Penman for Monday, August 18, 2008


LET ME take note this week of two new books I’ve received—one from a friend, in fair trade for a copy of my new novel, and the other a complimentary copy of a book I’d gladly read and written a back-cover blurb for. Both books are landmarks in their fields—one in scholarship, and the other in biography—and both are eminently interesting and accessible to the lay reader, which is more than you can say for many seriously intentioned books that come off the presses these days.

The first is Tagalog Bestsellers of the Twentieth Century: A History of the Book in the Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 264 pp.) by Patricia May B. Jurilla, a colleague at the English Department in UP who just recently earned her PhD from the University of London. This book was May’s dissertation project, and it’s easy to see why it earned plaudits from everyone who’d read the manuscript. Jurilla painstakingly traces the history of the book in the Philippines—not just in Tagalog or Filipino, but also in English, and comes up with fascinating details like this:

“While Banaag at Sikat is now recognized as the most prominent work of the period known as the Golden Age of the Tagalog Novel (1905-1921) and a milestone in the history of Tagalog fiction for its engagement with social issues, it was a complete commercial disaster as a book. [It had been previously serialized in a newspaper, and was self-published as a book by Santos in 1906—BD.] Santos had 10,000 copies in newsprint… and 1,000 in book paper… printed with the Imprenta McCullough…. He managed to sell only 4,000 copies. Being unable to pay for the rest of the unsold books, Santos was charged in court by the printer and ordered to relinquish various possessions, including fifteen cows, as partial payment for his printing bill…. Santos spent many years paying off the rest of his debt to the printer. As he recalls, the publishing of Banaag at Sikat was meant to uplift his financial situation; instead it left him more impoverished than ever.”

Certainly not impoverished, at least in his golden years, is the subject of the second book, Dolphy: Hindi Ko Ito Narating Mag-isa (Kaizz Ventures, 229 pp.). Put together by Bibeth Orteza, the book is actually and largely an autobiography of the man we’ve known as Dolphy speaking off the cuff about the many twists and turns of his long life (the book was launched on his 80th birthday last July 25). I was privileged to read a working version of it, about which I would say that “This is an extraordinary memoir of an extraordinary man who has gifted generations of Filipinos with laughter, but whose own life has been a struggle to balance life and work, to meet the demands of family and fatherhood, to tame his prodigious passions. This story is told with searing candor and compassion, not only by Dolphy himself but also by the many people whose lives he touched (and, in many instances, brought forth)—his women, his children, his friends, his colleagues. I haven’t read a biography like this, ever, and the uncensored, unmediated first-person accounts strike home with a power and a poignancy you’d be hard put to find in any screen drama. There are moments of humor and irony as well, and all in all we gain a truly moving picture of a brilliant but complex man whom we feel like knowing, in many senses, for the first time.”

Here’s vintage Dolphy, with that bittersweet twinkle in his eye: “Sa maniwala kayo o hindi, nagsimula akong ang hanap ko sa relasyon, tulad sana ng sa Papang at Mamang. Ang maging steady lang sa isang asawa. Pero no’ng nagkahiwalay kami ni Grace, para akong nagkaro’n ng hatred sa babae, lahat na gusto kong pakialaman. Dumating ako sa gano’n, para makalimot. Nambabae ako nang nambabae. Kumalma din naman ako. With age. As much as possible, I try na maganda ang hiwalayan. Ang iba, pag nagkikita kami uli, mayro’n kaming mga secret na ngitian. ‘Remember?’”

I'M THE world’s worst foodie, as I often have to remind well-meaning editors and friends who make the mistake of asking me to write about food. Another term I use to describe myself is “culinary philistine,” which can be fairly applied to anyone who goes to a villa in Italy with tins of Ligo sardines in his suitcase. I once turned down an invitation to sit at a very special table among guests who were going to be fed by ten of Manila’s best chefs—not because I thought poorly of their talents, but because I dreaded the prospect of being served something like artichoke dipped in chocolate or grilled capsicums smothered in melted cheese. To me, the apex of European cuisine is that crusty slab of roast pork they serve you in Munich called Schweinsbraten (if only I could have it with rice)—barring which, I’d much rather stay in Asia; make that North and East Asia, to be more specific, because I can’t stand curry, either.

So it was with some trepidation that I said yes to an invitation from PR manager Yasmine Hidalgo to sample the Divine Vietnamese Cuisine at the Seven Corners restaurant at the Crowne Plaza Galleria Manila in Ortigas last week. I’d bailed out of a couple of previous feasts she’d invited me to, but I’d planned to take Beng to Hanoi for Christmas (having gone there myself on a memorable visit many years ago), so this was probably a good opportunity to reacquaint myself with the food of the place, beyond the bowl of Vietnamese beef noodles I occasionally have for merienda at the mall. They’d flown in two guest chefs and a receptionist from the Intercontinental Hanoi Westlake to conjure lunch, and this was what had me worried, because chefs to my mind tend to go out of their way to muck up something that already looks and tastes good at the streetside food stand.


As it happened, it was love at first bite—from the deep-fried spring roll with chicken and shrimps to the spicy seafood soup and the scrumptiously soft beef stew. Like I said, I’m a terrible reviewer of food, but suffice it to say that I left with a heavenly smile on my face, proof positive that the charms of good food can penetrate even the densest of diners. That may not be the compliment that chefs Nguyen Trung Khien and Nguyen Minh were looking for, but I’d be happy to risk my reputation as a philistine on this recommendation: hie off to the Seven Corners anytime until August 31st for a meal that will make you want to fly to Hanoi for more of the same.

Penman for Monday, August 11, 2008

Last week, I came out with the first part of an email interview I conducted with a number of fellow writers—Charlson Ong (CO), Cristina “Jing” Pantoja-Hidalgo (JH), Vicente “Vince” Groyon (VG), and Dean Alfar (DA)—drawing on their experiences in writing novels. Here’s the continuation of that interview.

4. How much did you have to invent? Did you depend a lot on factual material?

CO: I use a lot of familial lore and historical research.

JH: For Recuerdo, I hardly invented. The characters, incidents, were based heavily on my mother’s family’s history (as I heard it from my mother and subsequently found in the archives of the UP Library). I just embellished and disguised here and there. For A Book of Dreams, I based the major characters on real people but the dreams I gave them came mostly from my own dreams and imaginings. I did “borrow” three dreams—from Neil [Garcia], Jimmy [Abad], and Bien [Lumbera].

VG: I’d say about half was invented, half was “factual.” I did a lot of reading about the history of Negros, which I mined for material, and revisited the stories/gossip that I heard at family gatherings when I was growing up. I can’t say the gossip was factual, hence the quotes. It’s actually hard to tell, now. Sometimes the mining was apparently on a subconscious level—I thought that I had invented something or someone, only to realize much later that there was something or someone similar in existence, that I had known of but “forgotten” about.

DA: Most are invented, some are borrowed and refashioned, some are true. I used factual material to denote time and space (locality) and to anchor the novel in the country.

5. What’s the best and the worst part of writing a novel in the Philippines?

CO: The most fun is fictionalizing the past.

JH: The worst part is finding the time to do it in. I find that it’s next to impossible given the many things we have to keep doing while trying to write a novel. I found it hardest to have to jump in and out of the novel’s world because of the myriad demands on my time. The second worst part is knowing that after all that effort, hardly anyone was going to read it, again, including some of my own friends. The best part I guess is just having done it, something I had wanted to do for so long, but had not been able to, because I lacked the skill, the perspective, the “larger view” required by the novel.

VG: Best part: being able to say the phrase “my novel.” Worst part: having to deal with responses like “What’s the title?” or “Never heard of it.” or “What’s your name again?” or, worst, an uninterested “Ah... how nice for you....”

DA: Honestly, there is an unspoken edict that when you write a novel it has to be “worthy” or contribute to Philippine literature. The burden is being somehow relevant, despite whatever genre acrobatics one performs. I was also critiqued for writing in English (sigh). The more terrible part for me is that the number of readers of Philippine novels seems quite small, outside academe.

6. What challenges lie ahead for the Filipino novel in English? Why can’t we break into the big markets out there like the Indians?

CO: The novel is an industrial product and until we have a robust publishing industry it will be difficult for novelists. As with other fields, a Philippine novel will likely earn major local attention when it receives foreign recognition. Writers in English have an advantage in terms of foreign publication and we might be getting there. The Philippines has not been in the imagination of the world, but perhaps our time has come. Who knows?

JH: The biggest challenge I think is still finding the time for it amidst the multi-tasking we all have to do. Then maybe trying to decide whether as novelists, we are writing for our own people (about the things they care about in ways they can relate to or at least understand) or for the foreign markets. I’ve always thought that we just need to write as best we can about what we know best, and then the attention will come, as it did to the Japanese, the Indians, etc. But I guess I’m wrong. I can’t think why no one ever picked up Nick [Joaquin] or Krip [Yuson] or Erwin [Castillo], except that maybe they never read them. Maybe discovery by foreign audiences is just a matter of marketing. The Latin Americans made it because of Seix Baral in Madrid. And Frankie [Sionil Jose] is sold quite effectively through his own networks.

VG: I have to admit this isn’t on my mind at all; at this point in my career I’m still wondering how to break into the local market, get readers to read what I write. As far as challenges for the novel are concerned, I think (and let me posit this very cautiously) that its greatest challenge is obsolescence. It seems that our culture has moved past the printed word into the visual image for good, and the public no longer sources its myths from literature, but from television and cinema. I think it’s possible that in the future, the great narratives that will live on and become sublimated into metaphor and mythology will not come from novels, but from TV shows, teleseryes, and movies. This is partly why I’ve been revisiting filmmaking after a hiatus of 15 years. This opinion is far from being a definite stance for me; it’s just one of the things that has been rolling around in my head for the last two or three years. I don’t mean that people will stop reading or writing novels (I’m about to start another one, after all), but that they won’t be as culturally significant as they used to be, and that novelists have to think of ways to keep them relevant.

DA: To go beyond what we traditionally believe to be worthy novel themes or subjects, as well as genres. Why can’t we break into the big markets out there like the Indians? Because we worry too much about relevance and value, instead of just writing a novel that people will want to read, that engages, that provokes, that entertains.

7. Do you have a next novel in mind?

JH: No novel. I’ve gone back to creative nonfiction for a while. It seems easier to combine with the administrative work and the other stuff my job requires these days.

VG: Yes, and once again it’s going to be in partial fulfillment of requirements for a degree (this time a PhD in Literature), which I need to complete within the next year or two. It’s not going to be set in Negros. I think. (See comment above about wading into the writing.)

DA: I’m working on two. One is in the manner of Salamanca, farther back during the Spanish times. The other is a genre piece, a modern fantasy.

Penman for Sunday, August 10, 2006 (Gadgets)

IT USED to be that reporters went around with spiral notebooks whose covers flipped up and out of the way, leaving you with a small ruled sheet within which to scribble, as furiously as you could, your interviewee’s rambling, garbled, half-digested monologue. Then, when it was all over, you sat down at your desk and tried to decipher what exactly it was your subject said—or maybe what exactly it was you wrote. (I guess that notebook, ca. 1972—back when I was a reporter for the old Philippines Herald—was what you’d call today a “handheld”.)

That notebook would be replaced by the tape recorder—first, the cassette recorder (which often required the accessory of a pencil or a ballpoint to unspool that crinkly tape), and then the microcassette recorder, which was smaller and sleeker. Despite their reduced size, you still had to feed these gadgets with lots of tapes and batteries, and anyone over 40 will still remember that godawful moment when, in the middle (or, worse, at the end) of an interview, when you realized that the thing had died on you 30 minutes earlier, just before your subject opened up and shared the most intimate details of her life.

But that was then and this is now, and now is a time for all things digital. As an occasional journalist and a writer of biographies, I do a lot of interviews, often for hours on end. Those interviews have to be transcribed, filed, and preserved for future reference. That’s why—incorrigible geek that I am—I’ve been on the lookout for the perfect digital voice recorder (DVR), one with loads of memory, a battery that could run a tank if it had to, and a way of moving voice files seamlessly onto my computer—all that, and it had to be as pocketable as a pen or a cigarette lighter. (If it could transcribe notes and make coffee, so much the better.)

A few years ago, I thought I had most of that in a tiny Olympus DVR which I bought online for about $70. It was cute as a bug, but its controls were hard to follow, and worse, it couldn’t connect to my Mac (which, to me, is just about the worst thing you can say about any gadget, although Macs in those days had it coming to them; now they’re much better off for connectivity). I soon traded that thing off (curiously enough, for that most analog of recorders—a vintage 1920s Parker fountain pen).

Its replacement was no bigger than my phone—in fact, it was my phone, a Treo 650 with a 2-gigabyte Secure Digital memory card. Using a bit of shareware, I turned that phone into a DVR, a task it performed pretty well, despite the oddness of placing your phone close to another person. Alas, even digital doohickeys suffer micro- or nano-seizures of one kind or another, and it would happen that I would be interviewing a retired CEO over six straight hours (keeping the phone tethered to a power line), only to discover that my SD card had failed me. There was absolutely nothing on it; it had gone corrupt and couldn’t be saved. I spent the next few days furiously recalling what had been said, and set up a few more meetings with my client to ask him the same questions with as much casualness as I could muster, unable and unwilling to confess to my digital catastrophe.

That led me to my next DVR solution; since I couldn’t trust SD cards any longer, I opted for my iPod (the big, old-fashioned white brick), which could be transformed into a voice recorder with the addition of a Griffin iTalk—a contraption that sat on top of the iPod and which acted as a mike and playback speaker. I bought a used, cheap iPod just for this purpose, so I wouldn’t have to depend on it for music and so I could toss it around in my bag and backpack without worrying about scratches and all those cosmetic issues geeks fuss over. It wasn’t the most elegant of solutions, but it was clever, and the iPod’s huge capacity meant that you were limited only by your battery life, as you could record hundreds of hours of high-quality material on the iPod/iTalk combo if you wanted to. (The Belkin Voice Recorder offered a similar function, and both were priced in the $30-40 range.) As a DVR, the device worked brilliantly; the iTalk’s pickup was exceptionally strong, and syncing the iPod to my Mac was a no-brainer (iTunes recognizes and downloads the recordings automatically and saves them as “voice memos”).

I was pleased enough with that setup, but I wanted something even neater, especially since the iPod/iTalk combo was making an embarrassing bulge in my pants pocket. I looked around and thought for a long while about the (now-discontinued) Olympus DS-330, which seemed to have everything I was looking for, but its $200 tag put me off.

And then, in a stroke of serendipity, I was wandering around Heathrow’s duty-free a few months ago with my last 30 UK pounds burning a hole in my pocket. There, at Dixons, was a Sony Walkman MP3 player (NWD-B105) the size of a lipstick, with 2 gigs of memory and a USB connector, selling for 29.80 pounds. It was meant to store and play music, but it could also record voice. Could this thing actually work with my Mac, and work well as a DVR?

The joyful answer is yes. The controls take just a few minutes to get used to; it has great pickup, weighs about a third of my iPod, and is built like it’s meant to ride on a Humvee. I slip the business end into the USB port of my MacBook Air, then drag and drop the voice files over to my desktop (where I’ve created a shortcut to the directories on the Walkman), and they’re saved as MP3s, readable by iTunes. The only strange thing is, I don’t even know how music sounds on this gadget—I’m using it solely as a DVR, and I suggest you do, too, if you’ve been looking for your own voice recording solution.

Penman for Monday, August 4, 2008


IN PREPARATION for a lecture I gave at the University of the Philippines last week as a long preface of sorts to the launching of my new novel Soledad’s Sister, I undertook a small, private survey of some friends who had written novels, to find out what their own experiences were. Four writers responded: Charlson Ong (CO), Cristina “Jing” Pantoja-Hidalgo (JH), Vince Groyon (VG), and Dean Alfar (DA). I used portions of their responses for my lecture, but it seemed such a waste to just set the rest of the material aside, given how revealing it was in terms of how writers think and work, so I secured their permission to publish the full answers here, slightly edited. This will spill over to next Monday’s column, so wait for that one, too.

1. How many novels have you written/published?

CO: I have written two novels—An Embarrassment of Riches (published in 2000) and Banyaga (2007).

JH: Two—Recuerdo (1996) and A Book of Dreams (2002).

VG: Just the one—The Sky over Dimas in 2003.

DA: One (Salamanca, 2006).

2. What led you to write a novel (instead of, say, a collection of stories)?

CO: My first, An Embarrassment of Riches, was something I wanted to do for the Philippine centennial year [in 1998; it subsequently won the million-peso prize for the novel in the Centennial competition—BD]. When a contest was announced I had an added incentive to finish it. It is my personal reflection on the Philippine past and future and place in Southeast Asia. The second, Banyaga, started out as a screenplay. It wasn’t sold so I “novelized” it. It’s not entirely similar to the screenplay but I had a narrative to work on, which helped a lot.

JH: Stories I had been writing since childhood. I wanted to be like the heroines of the novels I read as a very young girl (Little Women, Girl of the Limberlost, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, etc.) who all wanted to be writers. The novels—I guess all writers of fiction dream of writing a novel.

VG: Edith Tiempo’s parting words to me at the 1992 Silliman workshop were “Vince, you should write a novel.” It’s something I’ve thought of doing since I was a kid (I was obsessed with the Book of Lists, which had a list of authors who wrote books in their childhood). The final push came when I had to do a thesis to complete my MFA-Creative Writing at DLSU. By that time, in my head the novel had become a kind of acid test for fiction writers; I felt that I couldn’t really call myself a fiction writer unless I had written one (no offense to short story masters).

DA: For a long time, I thought that only older, established writers with tons of credentials and experience had the right to write a novel. But a few years ago, I decided to try my hand at it, even if, I thought, I had nothing earthshaking to say. It coincided with the NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writing Month), which gave me the necessary discipline to complete a novel online. I posted each portion as I finished it, warts and all.

3. How long did it take you to finish, and what kinds of problems did you encounter in finishing it? In the end, was it the novel you had imagined at the beginning?

JH: My first novel (Recuerdo) took years and years. It started out as something entirely different and morphed several times. In the form in which it was eventually published, maybe two years. The second novel (A Book of Dreams) went faster. I pretty much knew what I wanted it to be—which was an experiment in something I had never done before, and don’t think anyone had done before. It was just a question of painstaking revisions and re-revisions. I must admit I’m a little disappointed that this book has not attracted the sort of attentive readings that has been enjoyed by Recuerdo. I really am not sure if it’s any good, and would have appreciated comments from people I respect. I think it’s a sad thing that most of us don’t have time to read each other, even our friends.

VG: About three or four years of on-and-off writing (including a chapter completed several years before), but it all came down to that one month when I locked myself into my apartment. A few more months of (rather major) revision followed after it won the Palanca, and then I submitted it for publication to (the now-defunct) DLSU Press. My difficulty in finishing it was that I had grown bored with it—having outlined obsessively for years, I knew it inside out and where it was going to go. Thus I resisted having to get the words on the page—it had become a chore. They say Hitchcock was always bored on the set because being a storyboarder, he had already directed the movie in his mind; I’d say my situation was similar. This is why I now believe that novelists ought to just wade into the writing with very little planning (perhaps just character back stories and some basic history for the world of the novel in question) and allow the project to go where it needs to go, unlike a short story writer, because the short story demands absolute control over the material. In the end, it wasn’t at all the novel I imagined at the beginning. I realized that I didn’t have the chops to write a full-on historical novel, and that I had no idea how to attack the problem of narratorial (?) voice for sections set in the past, nor the skill to pull it off. I settled instead on something grounded in a “present time” looking back at the past, because this is what my skills could handle. I also threw away the original non-linear structure that I had designed for it, which was based on a pre-colonial agricultural calendar, because it was ultimately too pretentious. This entailed rewriting substantial chunks of the narrative, and writing new material as well.

DA: One month. My big hurdle was the very notion of the vast novelistic space that I needed to fill up. Nothing in my training as a short story writer, playwright, or comic book writer prepared me for that. It was very intimidating and I was concerned I’d use up everything I knew and had to say in the first 20,000 words or so. In the end, my novel surprised me (happily, whatever other failings I have as a writer are cleverly disguised by language, LOL).

Penman for Monday, July 28, 2008

SOMEWHERE ON this planet—at least one of them’s in Denmark—are four Filipinos walking around in a daze. That’s because, sometime last week, they got an email or a text message telling them that they’d landed on the “long list” of this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize. These final (or, well, semi-final) four are the STAR’s very own Alfred “Krip” Yuson; Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy, who’s now in Copenhagen; Dumaguete-based Ian Casocot; and Miguel Syjuco.

The Man Asian, you’ll recall, was the same competition that sent my own head spinning a year ago in its inaugural, when Soledad’s Sister got longlisted and then shortlisted. Getting longlisted gave me the boost I needed to finish the novel, which had been a monkey on my back for seven years. (And here’s a shameless plug: Soledad’s Sister will be launched by Anvil Publishing this Thursday, 4 pm, at the Claro M. Recto Hall of the Faculty Center in UP Diliman, following a short lecture I’m giving on writing the Filipino novel.)

Even in its second year, the Man Asian—which is also being called the “Asian Booker” because it’s sponsored by the same Man Group Plc. that underwrites the Booker Prize—has clearly been attracting many of Asia’s best fictionists, new and old. Intended to encourage the publication of new Asian novels in English, the competition drew 243 entries last year, mostly from India (and about ten from the Philippines). This year, the total number of entries went down a bit (not a big surprise, given that the first year would have flushed out work that had been lying around for ages), but birdie told me that the entries from the Philippines more than doubled, coming in second—again, not surprisingly—to India, which seems to produce novelists next to motorcycles. I’m sure the publicity gained by my shortlisting helped in that department (“Heck, if this blabbering old fool can do it, why not me?”), but I’m even surer that the personal visit here last January by Man Asian executive director Peter Gordon fired up the Filipino novel-writing masses.

In any case, we now have four fellow Pinoys to root for—first, to make it to the short list of five, which will be announced sometime in October, and then to the awards ceremonies, which will be held in Hong Kong on November 13. It’s going to be a crazy couple of weeks for these four, unless they turned in complete novels already—you need only an excerpt of 10,000 words to join the competition, but the balance of at least 20,000 words more falls due soon after the long list is announced.

I remember walking on air last year, early in July, when I got the news telling me I’d been longlisted—only to come crashing down to earth when I realized that I had less than two weeks, until July 15, to submit the full manuscript to be considered for the short list. For a moment, I trifled with the idea of shrugging my shoulders and saying, “Well, getting on the long list is honor enough. Good luck to all the others!” But I knew I’d never live it down if I didn’t give it a game try and make a flat-out effort to finish Soledad by the new deadline, so I did: I gave my students some homework (which I suspect they were thankful for), holed up in my house with tubs of coffee and macaroni soup, and wrote 20,000 words in a week to add to the 30,000 I already had, emailing my full draft to Hong Kong hours before the deadline.

It remained, of course, a rough draft, and since then I’ve added about 12,000 words more to the novel, which I still like to think of as a work in progress, especially since my agent Renuka Chatterjee (who signed me up after the Man Asian) is still negotiating for its publication abroad. Thus, its (eventual) international edition will be slightly longer than the Anvil one—which, to my mind and on the other hand, represents what I think Filipino readers (and my imaginary target reader) can intuitively understand, without need of detailed explanations and elaborations. Revising a novel is a challenge in itself, but I’m glad to have this problem—thanks to the Man Asian.

And here’s the full long list of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, followed by descriptions of the four Filipino entries:

Tulsi Badrinath, Melting Love; Hans Billimoria, Ugly Tree; Ian Rosales Casocot, Sugar Land; Han Dong, Banished!; Anjum Hasan, Neti, Neti; Daisy Hasan, The To-Let House; Abdullah Hussein, The Afghan Girl; Tsutomu Igarashi, To the Temple; Rupa Krishnan, Something Wicked This Way Comes; Murong Xuecun, Leave Me Alone, Chengdu; Kavery Nambisan, The Story That Must Not Be Told; Sumana Roy, Love in the Chicken's Neck; Vaibhav Saini, On the Edge of Pandemonium; Salma, Midnight Tales; Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Lost Flamingoes of Bombay; Lakambini A. Sitoy, Sweet Haven; Sarayu Srivatsa, The Last Pretence; Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado; Amit Varma, My Friend, Sancho; Yu Hua, Brothers; and Alfred A. Yuson, The Music Child.

“Sugar Land is the story of three denizens of the small Visayan city of Dumaguete in the Philippines, whose lives come crashing together one August night, at the height of the traditionally festive annual celebration of the city’s biggest university. Each one comes to terms with his and her own story, and prepares to finally confront the secret that binds the three of them together.”

“Sweet Haven tells about Narita Pastor who abandoned her bastard daughter to fulfill her dream of independence in Manila. Raised by her grandparents and aunt in the peaceful university community of Sweethaven, Naia grows into a spirited teenager. Now the family are thrown into turmoil when pornographic footage of the 15-year old spreads through the Internet and cheap CDs sold by sidewalk vendors.”

“Ilustrado begins on a winter morning in 2002 in New York City, when a body was found floating in the Hudson River. Miguel receives an anonymous email suggesting foul play of the most insidious kind and returns to the Philippines to determine if the death was a murder connected to an unfinished manuscript—a novel about the corrupt roots of power of the prominent Filipino families—which has disappeared.”

“The Music Child tells about an American journalist who undergoes strange experiences in a southern island in the Philippines. He stumbles into a remote tribe of hair-string fiddlers, and encounters a half-breed child with the magical gift of song. Violence intrudes, forcing him to flee. Many years later, he encounters the "music child" again, this time as a grown man who has found a female partner with an equally prodigious gift.”

Three cheers for our four best bets!

Penman for Monday, July 21, 2008

SOME SCHOLARS might quibble with my use of the word “Filipiniana” in the title of this piece, but now that I have your attention, let me announce that the world’s biggest gathering of people seriously interested in all things Philippine and Filipino will be taking place this week in Quezon City.

The University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University will be the venues for the 8th International Conference on Philippine Studies (ICOPHIL). Held every four years, ICOPHIL brings together world-renowned scholars and experts in Philippine Studies for several days of sharply focused discussions on various aspects of Philippine life, culture, and society covering history, politics, economics, and art and literature, among others. This year, more than 70 panel discussions featuring some 270 speakers have been organized, with seven panels to choose from at any given time from July 23 to July 25; there will also be several plenary sessions revolving around the conference’s overall theme of “Philippine Studies in the 21st Century: New Meanings, Critiques, and Trajectories.”

The Philippine Studies Association, headed by its president, Dr. Bernardita R. Churchill, is organizing the conference with the help of the Philippine Social Science Council (PSSC) and the International Board of Philippine Studies Conferences. (I sit on the PSA’s board, which is why you’re reading this.)

It still comes as a surprise to me sometimes to realize how interesting we are to the world, and how some foreign scholars—say, Roger Bresnahan at Michigan State and Alfred McCoy and Michael Cullinane at UW-Madison—have spent much of their lives mulling over our history and our problems. Beyond America, there’s also been a lot of critical attention coming recently from Japanese, Australian, and other scholars from the region. I’m particularly happy to be hosting an old friend, historian Greg Bankoff, who has developed a unique expertise in environmental history and who has written and lectured on disasters and on crime in 19th century Philippines. Greg now teaches at the University of Hull in England after many years of being based in Australia and New Zealand, but he’s never lost his interest in the Philippines and has tied up his ICOPHIL stint with some research and lecturing he’s doing in Baguio.

And in the Philippines, of course—thanks to the promotion and strengthening of Philippine studies in UP and other universities—our own scholars, researchers, and writers have been confronting the complex and often difficult realities of life in these islands. (In this ICOPHIL’s lineup of topics, I’ve noted that people have also begun looking into how Filipinos have been making an impact beyond the Philippines—in places like Austria, Brazil, and Macau.)

It’ll be impossible for anyone to attend even half of all the sessions on offer, so participants will have to plot their days very carefully. (The sessions on Wednesday and Friday will be held at the PSSC; those on Thursday will be at the Ateneo). I won’t be reading anything, but I’ll be moderating a session on Philippine Literature in English, so I’ll use my free time to run around and listen in on a virtual smorgasbord of sessions.

I’m intrigued, for example, by such topics as “Forty-Eight Nights at the Opera in Manila in 1865” (William John Summers); “Blogs and Blogging: Writing in the Diaspora (Judith B. Salamat); “Making a List: Analytical Bibliography, Literary Historiography, and the Filipino Novel” (Patricia May Jurilla); “Jose Rizal in Hong Kong and Macau” (Isabel Morais); “Voices from the Underground: Life Stories of Women in the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines” (Maria Vina A. Lanzona); and “Locust Outbreaks in the Philippines 1909-1934” (Ma. Florina Orillos-Juan).

You can look up and download the full conference program and find other details at http://www.pssc.org.ph/icophil. There’ll be a substantial fee to pay—this is, after all, an academic conference—but I believe there’s an option to pay just for a day’s attendance, if that’s all you want to do. You can also email the ICOPHIL Secretariat at icophil@pssc.org.ph or call them at 929-2671 for more information.

ICOPHIL 2008’s other sponsors—aside from UP, ADMU, and PSSC—include the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the National Historical Institute, the University of Hawaii, De La Salle University, and the Quezon City Mayor’s Office.


AND ON a completely unscholarly note, I ended a long day of meetings last week by granting a request of my mother to go out and watch a movie—what else but “Mamma Mia!” She had seen the play in the US and was eager to check out the movie version, so we took her out to the mall to catch the last full show. I was dog-tired, but at 80 years old my mother can command me to climb a tree or jump into the river if she wants something that badly, and I wouldn’t mind.

I love it when my mama giggles at the little pleasures that come her way, like the chocolates I bring her from my trips abroad, or the tiyan ng bangus that Beng makes sure she gets a regular supply of. “Mamma Mia!” was no problem; I had, in fact, been looking forward to seeing the movie if not the play, having been frustrated at every chance I had these past ten years to catch it on Broadway or the West End.

Like many of you reading this now, I was one of those people who thought they discovered sophistication in the ‘70s and dismissed ABBA’s oompah-oompah melodies as the cheesiest sound in music. That resistance eventually faded as I came to appreciate the sheer singability of their songs; like the Beatles, the music endured long after the band, returning us to a time seemingly as pure as Agnetha’s voice.

In brief, we had a blast watching the movie. I can’t recall having had as much fun, and I can only admire the skill of the writer who wove all those ABBA songs into a coherent thread (a task made easier by the fact that, as my friend Neil would point out, ABBA’s songs are all different from one another, unlike our one-track love songs). This is a movie to be watched with your high-school barkada; stay on until the closing credits, and I’ll guarantee you’ll be walking out of the theater singing. Neil says that at Robinson’s Galeria, they showed the film with subtitles, for a community sing-along.

After a long day’s critical colloquy in ICOPHIL, what could be better than some mindless fun at “Mamma Mia!”—and what, strangely enough, could be more Pinoy?

Penman for Monday, July 14, 2008

A MOST unusual meeting took place in my front yard a couple of Saturdays ago. I belong to a Web-based group called the Fountain Pen Network, and as you can gather from the name, it’s devoted to the worship, care, and propagation of those tubes that spit ink at the pointy end, which old folks knew as fountain pens. My longtime readers know about my addiction to these toys that happen to write (which explains the title of this column), but for those who tuned in just now, I’ve been collecting vintage and modern fountain pens for over 20 years.

As it turns out, I am not alone. Just looking around FPN, I observed that there were at least a dozen Filipinos similarly pen-smitten, so I thought I’d bring them all together—out of the Web and into my yard—for an afternoon of show-and-tell. There’s nothing that collectors enjoy more (whether you’re into stamps, blue bottles, rare books, or Kewpie dolls) than showing off what you have while drooling over and lusting after the other guy’s rack of goodies. It’s also good to know the competition—not to poison them, but to keep things friendly, and maybe even swap a pen or two.

I sent out invitations, pitched a tent (the kind you rent for outdoor weddings) in the yard, ordered up some pancit and turon, and laid out two tables with writing paper, bottles of ink, and some reference books. To make sure that no one dropped or picked up a 1930s Sheaffer Lifetime or a Pelikan M1000 by mistake, I posted signs saying: “Mind your pens! Any pen left or mislaid in this place becomes mine!” Sure enough, from 2 pm onwards, the fountain-pen faithful came, clutching telltale boxes and bags that could only have contained years and years’ worth of collecting and, in some cases, enforced starvation.

And what company we had! Just to show you the range of pen nuts out there, from out of the digital woodwork arrived a former pharmaceuticals CEO (Chito Limson), an advertising executive (Leigh Reyes), a chef-cum-stockbroker (Jay Ignacio), the proprietor of my favorite noodle house (George Mamonluk), a New York-based artist (Pep Manalang), a poet-publisher (Rayvi Sunico), and a horseracing journalist (Jenny Alcasid). They were joined by fellow collectors Butch Palma, Caloy Abad Santos, Boojie Basilio, Elai Santiago, Iñigo de Paula, and myself.

Chito and Leigh also brought their specialty inks to share, which Caloy and Pep happily dipped their pens into; my fellow Butch and I discussed the intricacies of repairing Parker Vacumatics and using Waterman safeties; Elai practiced her Mandarin with George; Jenny reported on the big race she was giving up that day in the name of pens, while Iñigo mused about switching jobs and reminded me of his fascination for the Red Baron; Boojie and Jay talked stocks. In the background, Beng kept the pancit and the chicharon coming.

In the end, we all just oohed and aahed over Leigh’s inimitable collection, especially of her modern Japanese pens, including urushi-lacquered Nakayas (“These are my son’s college education,” she would say). We were left even more breathless by her exquisite penmanship (which led me to comment that she had every reason and excuse to collect pens, but I didn’t).

Nobody left a pen behind—too bad—but Leigh and I exchanged old Parkers, my Parkette for her Duofold Senior, and a good time was had by all.

I slept that night dreaming furiously of Jay Ignacio’s fabulous Faber-Castells. I somehow forgot the fact that I already had two of them, as well as a flock of Pelikans. But Leigh’s right: given the way cold cash keeps losing value everyday, investing in Fort Knox-worthy pens may not be such a bad idea.

So now I have a new excuse. My dear daughter Demi, I’m building up your inheritance—one Parker at a time. (For more pictures from that meeting, check out my Flickr page.)


YET ANOTHER major writing competition is afoot, related to the ongoing Centennial of the University of the Philippines, with a grand prize of P200,000 awaiting the winner. This is the UP Sarsuwela Writing Contest, a kind of follow-up to the recently concluded UP Centennial Gawad Likhaan literary contest, which had no drama in its line-up.

This particular contest focuses on the sarsuwela, a popular form of musical theater we imported from Spain and developed for our own audiences and purposes (such as Severino Reyes’s oft-produced Walang Sugat, which has a young revolutionary officer torn between his girl and country), and later even subverted (as in Nicanor Tiongson’s Basilia of Malolos, which questions the patriarchy, the elite, and their central position in our life and imagination).

The UP Sarsuwela Writing Contest is open to all Filipino citizens of all ages (including Filipinos holding dual citizenship), and has for its theme “Amor, Vida, Patria” (Love, Life, Nation), which can be approached in historical or contemporary terms. The work must follow the three-act structure of the sarsuwela and must be written in Filipino.

Entries have to be sent to the Board of Judges, College of Arts and Letters, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, by 5 pm of August 29, 2008 (I know, that’s just six weeks away, sorry!). Entries sent by mail or courier should be postmarked no later than the same date of the deadline. There are a few more rules to bring up than I have space for, so if you’re seriously interested in joining, I suggest that you send an email to person in charge of the contest mechanics, Prof. Romulo Baquiran, Jr., at jbaquiran@gmail.com.


ALSO, TODAY and tomorrow will be the last playdates (for now) of an independent film that premiered in last year’s Cinemalaya. It’s called Barako, and it’s about how the people in a Batangas town take part in a weekly public forum on political and economic issues—which, strangely enough, they call a barakuhan. It’s written by Manolito Sulit, who shares directing duties with Emman Pascual. What drew my attention were the names of some writer-friends in the cast: Vim Nadera, Mike Coroza, and even Bien Lumbera. C’mon, guys, does writing pay that poorly? Catch Barako (produced by East Indie Films) at Indie Sine at Robinsons Galleria in Ortigas.

Penman for Monday, July 7, 2008

I ENJOY being a tourist, and I don’t pretend to have been anything but a tourist in almost all of the foreign places I’ve had the good fortune of visiting, even if I’ve been there several times and may even have lived somewhere for months.

That includes London, my favorite of all foreign cities, which I first visited in 1994, and deliriously fell for. When Beng and I were staying in Norwich for nearly a year between 1999 and 2000, we snuck out to London as often as we could, touring the museums and tanking up on the cheap Chinese buffets in Soho before taking the two-hour train ride back to our cinderblock apartment.

Alas, London has since become one of the world’s most expensive cities (a bottle of Coke costs the equivalent of P100, a movie about P1,000), so that I looked forward to my recent trip to the UK with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Aside from some fail-safe plastic in my wallet, all I had on me was 150 pounds (I meant my money, not my weight, which was considerably more generous) saved up from my speaking fees in Sydney. I wondered what I could do, see, eat, and bring home on that budget for a few days.

I don’t mind doing shamelessly and mindlessly touristy things, like blitzing through Paris on a tour bus over a weekend. (“Hey, we just passed Rodin’s The Thinker!” I told Beng then, as she came out of the onboard toilet.) When people ask questions like “If I just had one or two days in a new city, should I try and see as much as I can, or should I just visit one place and get to know it well?”, I’ll say do the quick once-over first, so you’ll have a better sense of what you’ll come back for. (Oddly enough, I keep going back to the same things in London—the British Museum, Portobello Road, and Leicester Square.)

This means I was prepared, even at this late age, to go economy all the way, short of pitching a tent in Hyde Park. The last time we stayed in London eight years ago, we had been lucky to find a bed-and-breakfast for 55 pounds a night. I was staying two nights in the city, so that would have meant more than half my stash gone to lodging, with precious little left for lunch, dinner, and Portobello.

Thankfully there’s the Internet to help the thrifty traveler these days, so a month before I enplaned to see the Queen, I stayed up online all night and finally located the hotel of my budget dreams: the London Visitors Hotel, an establishment that seemed to be named with a deceptive plainness, as it consisted of “a pair of Victorian houses, built in 1870, on the Estate of Lord Holland. Typically these were single family houses, and we have retained many period features, lending the hotel much charm and character… in a posh residential area near upscale Kensington.” The clincher was a notice that the hotel was Internet-ready, with free wi-fi available in the rooms.

And how much was this unusual combination of Old-World glamour and high-tech hotness going to cost me? Why, no more than 28 pounds a night, with an English breakfast thrown in! (Of course, at that price, I had to content myself with a shared bathroom and toilet in the hallway, but I figured that doing my thing very early in the morning or very late at night was well worth the savings.) I promptly made a reservation for two nights, printed out an area map, figured out the Tube connections, and congratulated myself on my Web-search smarts.

Comes now the 20th of June, and I’ve just come into London on the train from Norwich, lugging a 20-kilo suitcase. I don’t mind that I have to switch Tube trains then walk over a bridge in Kensington Olympia at the very end of the District Line to get to my hotel, although my eyeballs are bulging from the exertion. I reach the right street, and the London Visitors Hotel is exactly as it is in the Web photos—a domicile worthy of a Victorian gent.

I drag my luggage up the steps and into the lobby, and a young Eastern European lady acknowledges my reservation and hands me the key to Room No. 15 after I give full payment. Oh, good, I think, it’s right on the first floor. “It’s at the very top,” she tells me helpfully. I look around; there’s no elevator. It looks like a simple two-storey affair from the outside, but I go up six flights of stairs, until I reach No. 15—right up in what must have been Lord Holland’s attic, because one wall of the room is straight, and the other’s diagonal.

The bed is a cot with a blanket, a pillow, and two towels for my two days. There’s a window and a washbasin in the far corner, and a chair but no table. I notice something else—the absence of TV noise from the neighboring rooms, no annoying static or game shows or football games—because there’s no TV. I look for the restroom outside—and it’s there, all right, but it’s two floors down. I gaze at my washbasin with demonic intent. I throw the window open and at least there’s fresh air out there, even if the view is of a brick high-rise apartment, today’s probable equivalent of something damnably Dickensian.

Having gone to martial-law prison in my late teens, I can appreciate every amenity any lodging place has to offer, although this establishment practically has none, except for the free wi-fi in the lobby (yes, only in the lobby). The next morning, I come down for the English breakfast, expecting my nostrils to be seduced by the curling smell of bacon (“A full English breakfast,” says an online authority, “consists of bacon, eggs, toast, and an abundant supply of tea or coffee.”) Alas, somebody forgot about the bacon, although we have a choice of boiled or scrambled eggs.

I tell myself that I came to London to have fun and to enjoy the sights, and I’m not about to let the absence of certain luxuries spoil my weekend. For my first and last Saturday in London in eight years, I have Portobello, the West End, and Soho in my sights, a hundred pounds in my pocket, and good walking shoes. I peer out my window and inhale the summer air, feeling like Mark Lester about to warble “Who will buy this beautiful morning?” I have some business to settle between me and the washbasin; for 28 pounds a night, I’m getting what I paid for, and life could be a bit better, but it could also be much, much worse.

Penman for Sunday, July 6, 2008 (Gadgets section)

WHEN THE first iPhone was sold about a year ago, thousands of Apple fanboys like me lined up—literally and figuratively—to get our rightful share of Steve Jobs’s goodies. We were prepared to go into debt and pay small fortunes for the dubious distinction (well, to the non-believers) of being early adopters, convinced that this was the phone to end all mobile phones. At the same time, many more thousands held back, sagely aware that first editions of anything—cars, planes, typewriters, toilet bowls, and mobile phones—can’t possibly get everything right.

Pretty soon, even those doubters will have a few less reasons to resist. Just last month, Jobs announced the imminent release of the second-generation, 3G-enabled iPhone at an unbelievably low price of $199. Almost simultaneously, Globe Philippines announced that it had been tapped to bring the iPhone 3G into the country later this year.

But before you break the piggybank and dash off to your nearest Globe dealer, read on.

First, “later this year” is nowhere near July 11, the promised date for the new iPhone’s delivery in the US and almost everywhere else it’s being sold in the world. Remember that “early 2008” was when the original iPhone was supposed to have been released here in Asia. It’s mid-2008, and, yes, there must be several thousand first-gen iPhones already in the Philippines (you can get them off the shelf at Greenhills), but they’re all basically hacked units, brought in directly from the US and running by virtue of some clever bits of software.

Then as now, all iPhones with the exception of those sold in France—where the law forbids mobile phones to be locked into a network—are supposed to be used only with an Apple-approved network, with which Apple shares iPhone profits. “Unlocking” gets around this restriction, although its legality is, to be sure, questionable, despite a loophole in US law that seems to permit unlocking for private use.

Now that Globe has secured iPhone rights in the Philippines, expect the 3G model to be sold only through Globe, and only upon signing up for a new plan. (It isn’t very clear yet how existing Globe subscribers can migrate to the iPhone, although Globe’s press release specifically mentions its coming availability to both “postpaid and prepaid” subscribers.

That brings me to the second caveat, which is that Apple’s $199 quoted price is what it will cost Americans signing up for a two-year AT&T contract (read: not you and me). As many observers have pointed out, that plan could be the deal-breaker, even for foreign users. Forget about the cheapness of the phone; do the math on the total package price. (Heck, they even give phones away for free with high-end plans, don’t they?)

Again, Globe hasn’t come out with its table of options yet, but the phone pundits have pegged the actual cost of getting and using a Globe iPhone at around P47,000-60,000 a year, more or less, depending on your chosen model and plan. (And if you’re thinking of learning French so you can pick up a legally unlocked 3G iPhone in Paris, take note that the present unlocked French iPhone costs about 750 euros—that’s over P52,000.)

What’s so hot about the new iPhone anyway? Except for a new plastic back (supposedly improving wireless reception), silver keys, and other small cosmetic touches, it’s pretty much the same phone—but with major upgrades inside. First of all, it will have 3G (that’s for third-generation), a technology that’s theoretically twice to almost three times faster than the current iPhone, which uses a not-too-shabby 2G technology called EDGE (don’t wince when I tell you what it means—Enhanced Data GSM Environment), which is already faster than GPRS, which is already faster than plain-vanilla GSM. (And will a real engineer please step in here to correct any awful mistake I’m making? I nearly flunked out of the Philippine Science High School, which is why I’m writing newspaper columns instead of software.)

Forget the alphabet soup: it means we all could be surfing and watching YouTube on our phones a whole lot faster than the way we’ve been going (which, on non-iPhones, usually means painfully nudging a cursor onscreen until you hit a clickable link). Sounds good, right? Sure, sounds like high-tech heaven—but it ain’t free (and it also means a heavy toll on the battery life).

Every kilobyte you download (and with things like pictures, those KBs add up quickly to MBs and then GBs) normally costs 15 centavos, although Globe has a “Visibility” package that allows you unlimited surfing for a flat fee of P2,000 a month, postpaid. (Here, enter my horror story: in the early days of GPRS, when I was a naïve young cellphone nut, I thought it was so cool that I could use my GSM phone as a modem through which to surf the Net in the boonies of Cebu, connected by infrared to my laptop. The coolness vanished when my Globe bill arrived—for a whopping P24,000, which I tearfully paid, vowing “As God is my witness, I shall never do GPRS again!” And I haven’t—except for emergencies, I rely on free wifi.)

The new iPhone also has GPS (I wonder how much help that’s going to be, through our pasilyos and esteros) and a truckload of new third-party apps.

Will these be enough for Pinoys to make the switch from their Nokias, SEs, and first-gen iPhones to the iPhone 3G (and to Globe, and to a new plan)? My gut feel is that those who held out in 2007 will go for this version; they’ve waited long enough. (I don’t have the space to tell you how neat even the original iPhone is, on its own; buy one while you can, because you can’t buy them even in the US anymore without a plan, and soon they’ll be completely phased out.)

Those of us happy with our old iPhones, BlackBerries, and Nokias will probably be the ones waiting this time—for the inevitable loosening of the market, the software workarounds, and, who knows, 4G?

Penman for July 6, 2008

(It's a busy weekend: you're going to get a flurry of pieces from me—articles I'd written for the STAR since a couple of weeks ago, but which all came together in the Sunday issue, plus tomorrow's Penman, so here goes.)

BACK IN the ‘60s, when we were in high school and beginning to cultivate what would become our best and worst traits (some of them quite interchangeable), my buddies and I found ways of going home as late as we could—in other words, of loitering around the city, just so we could prolong our time together and find new adventures along the way. (For me, that meant taking a bus with the guys from Diliman to Quiapo, then hanging out there for an hour or so, before taking another bus to Pasig.)

Maybe that wasn’t the best filial thing to do, when I could’ve been home much earlier helping with the housework, but I had my reasons: my friends and I were bookworms, and we used those trips to scour the bargain bins of bookstores like Goodwill, National, Alemar’s, PECO, and Bookmark—not to mention the stalls of C. M. Recto—for cheap paperbacks from the likes of Ian Fleming and Isaac Asimov. We’d hop from one place to the next, running the gauntlet of pickpockets and toughies that infested downtown Manila.

As we grew older and our tastes in books became a bit more refined (i.e., the Grove Press editions of the erotic classics), we began to frequent the specialty bookshops that often become every large city’s best-kept secrets: Erehwon and Solidaridad on Padre Faura, Popular Bookstore on Doroteo Jose. (“Amazon” was still a big river in Brazil.)

We capped these bookhunting forays with chicken sotanghon soup at Good Earth Emporium, burgers at Goodwill, and coffee and cakes at Hizon’s in Ermita. All this goodtiming meant gallivanting for hours from here to there, taking one pleasure at a time.

And then something changed in the environment. Before we knew it, something called a “mall” emerged in the urban landscape, and what it did was to collect everything in one place and make it easier for people to zip through their entire list of to-dos and wanna-dos without crossing the street.

In no time at all I became a mall rat, attracted (like most Pinoys) by the arctic airconditioning and by the sheer plenitude of things in malls for the eyes, the tongue, and, yes, the mind. There’s a common notion that the mall’s a place where you lose your mind (not just in shopping, but in what snobs will perceive as a sudden drop in the average IQ), but it’s a rep poorly deserved.

Sure, it’s not the British Library nor is it the Louvre, but it’s a bit of everything and more—a home for movies, food, fashions, décor, gadgets, appliances, and even paintings and, of course, books. And the best thing is that it’s open to both the high and low ends of the economic ladder; not all can buy, but all can browse in a democracy of sorts under one roof.

Living where I do in Quezon City, the two malls I frequent the most are SM Megamall and SM North. A horde of other malls has cropped up around these two bastions, and they each have their own attractions, but being first has its advantages. Over the decades, I’ve come to know these places like the back of my hand (the first thing you always ask when entering a new mall is, “Where are the restrooms?”), and the familiarity has bred not contempt but comfort. (This, more than any other element—even more than novelty—is what I think every mall developer should live or even kill for: the customer’s sense of control, of being welcomed and not overwhelmed by the place. My wife and I figured out SM North’s The Block within a couple of visits, and is now our preferred cinema station; its competitor across the street came up at about the same time, but despite many sorties there, Beng and I still can’t get a mental map of the place in our heads.)

But back to books: the Megamall for me has been as good a place as any (and better for its other attractions) for bookhunting, given the presence of Powerbooks, National Bookstore, Goodwill, and some smaller but no less interesting purveyors of books and magazines in the area. Powerbooks can always be relied upon to provide the latest and greatest books from overseas, while NBS—the titan that it is—covers practically every interest, with an annual sale always worth the wait. (Truth to tell, however, I’ve found some of my best bargains at the BookSale bins in the basement—there’ nothing like the thrill of the hunt to unearth an overlooked Garcia Marquez or a Richard Selzer I’ve been chasing for ages.)

Over at The Block, there’s a sprawling Fully Booked branch that caters to the smarter set (I mean, smarter than me), following through on FB founder Jaime Daez’s vision of bringing the Kinokuniya experience to Manila. (Going back more than a decade, one of my favorite SM North encounters had to do with writer NVM Gonzalez, whom I met stepping out of a bookshop specializing in computers. “I was looking for something on multimedia,” he told me with a twinkle in his eye.)

If even a National Artist—already then in his late 70s—thought the mall worthy of his bookhunting presence, who was I to disagree?