Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, July 30, 2007


YOU WOULDN'T know it from the quietude in which he works, but poet and scholar Gemino H. Abad has been putting together one of the most formidable literary projects this country will see in this decade. All by himself—and taking full advantage of his recent retirement from full-time teaching—Jimmy has been continuing the comprehensive anthology of Filipino short stories in English that the late Prof. Leopoldo Yabes compiled in three volumes, covering the genre’s first three decades from 1925 to 1955.

Jimmy’s first contribution to that series—Upon Our Own Ground, to be published very soon by the University of the Philippines Press—is a volume spanning 1956 to 1972, and comprising 82 stories that he culled from many hundreds more. Those years were some of the best for the Filipino short story in English, marked by the emergence of writers like Greg Brillantes, Kerima Polotan Tuvera, and Gilda Cordero Fernando. The Ravens were making their mark in Diliman, and soon beyond it; a steady stream of writers was heading for America, and when they came home they brought new ideas—among them, the writers’ workshop; the Tiempos began the Silliman workshop in 1962, and UP followed suit in 1965. It was the Age of Aquarius and of experimentation in the short story—where, for a while, sheer linguistic wizardry ruled the roost.

At the same time, the storm clouds were gathering on the political front; the Huk rebellion had abated but in its stead rose a new groundswell of protest against issues ranging from the Vietnam War and the US bases to grinding poverty, massive corruption, and militarization, culminating in the declaration of martial law in 1972.

Thus, the 82 stories Dr. Abad has chosen reflect those exciting and challenging times. I myself began writing and publishing stories just shortly after that period, so that these stories were my own models, the ones I looked forward to reading in magazines like the Free Press and the Graphic, and this was the company of writers I fantasized joining.

Jimmy had a favor to ask me, which I’m happily obliging. He’d like to secure formal permission from the following authors (or their heirs) for the use of their stories in the anthology. “I've tried but have really found no way to contact them or their heirs,” Jimmy says. “Even if their works are already in the public domain, or are no longer covered by copyright, grateful courtesy is still owing to them or their heirs.”

Those 17 authors and their featured stories are:

Estrella D. Alfon, “Man with a Camera,” 1958
Lilia Pablo Amansec, “Dream Tiger,” 1961
Eugenio Alexis R. Baban, “A Bride Across the River,” 1961
Leopoldo N. Cacnio, “The Taste of Dust,” 1962
Ines Taccad Cammayo, “People of Consequence,” 1970
E. Vallado Daroy, “Go Pluck a Butterfly,” 1970
Lina Espina-Moore, “ Onga,” 1970
Lazaro M. Espinosa, “Irma,” 1963
Jose T. Flores, Jr., “Happy Birthday Hiroshima,” 1965
Alice A. Francisco, “The Fugitives of Love,” 1960
Delfin Fresnosa, “Requiem for a Simple Man,” 1967
Ligaya Victorio Fruto, “Yesterday,” 1968
Antonio S. Gabila, “Home from the Wars,” 1956
Albina Manalo-Dans, “The End of One Maytime,” 1961
E. P. Patanñe, “Siren Song,” 1960
C. V. Pedroche, “To Walk Again,” 1964
Almatita Tayo [Alma de Jesus, pseudo.], “Naked Songs,” 1965 (also called “A Song for Sebastian”)

If you are among the writers on this list or one of their heirs, kindly get in touch with Dr. Abad directly at his e-mail address: jimmyhabad@yahoo.com. Meanwhile, I eagerly await Jimmy’s work on the second volume of his new series, which will cover 1973 to 1986.

SPEAKING OF stories, I brought a very interesting and useful book to my graduate fiction writing class last week to read from. Now, reading from books isn’t my usual style of teaching—imagine a roomful of people nodding off halfway down the page—but I thought that this particular material was too provocative not to share.

The book was Writers and Their Craft: Short Stories & Essays on the Narrative (Detroit: Wayne State U, 1991), edited by Nicholas Delbanco and Laurence Goldstein. It had been given to me as a gift by Nick Delbanco, my writing professor at the University of Michigan (that's him in the picture, taken when I visited him last year), and it had lain for years in that Great Black Void into which books, pictures, and CDs somehow vanish without a whisper when you’re not looking. When it resurfaced, I thumbed through it again, and was surprised to realize that it was saying the same things I’ve been telling my classes about writing “stories that matter”—stories that raise the bar, both technically and substantively, that don’t merely repeat or do well what a hundred other writers have already done, that boldly aspire to greatness.

The first part of the book consists of a forum among predominantly American writers addressing the question of what they think about contemporary American fiction. Here’s a sampling of what I shared with my class, and never mind that some of these names may be unfamiliar to us. Mind what they say. They’re very opinionated—thankfully so—and I might have a quibble or two with their observations (I think, for example, that some of them almost deliberately ignore the powerful writing of such people as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker). But they all point to a malady that seems to afflict not only American writing but recently ours as well, in the tepid, safe, immemorable prose (or otherwise the overwrought derivative fantasy) that passes for imagination.

Stephen Dobyns: “Film and TV have offered a serious challenge to fiction by taking over the traditional methods of storytelling: the linear unraveling of an emotionally engaging narrative. Even if a movie isn’t better than a book, it is often more entertaining…. It seems that fiction writers should be offering alternatives to TV and film…. It is not that film is wrong or TV is wrong or that it is wrong to make movies from books. It is just that fiction cannot use the same narrative methods and strategies as film. It can’t compete with film and TV. It can’t be made up of language that tries not to call attention to itself, where the language works as a kind of invisible window. A piece of fiction can’t release its information in the same way that a film does because a film can do it better. But much fiction continues to attempt this, which is why so many stories and novels read like treatments for film scripts.

“What fiction has that cannot be duplicated or improved upon in film is language and a greater variety of strategies, voices, and tones. A story or novel, no matter what it is about, is first of all a piece of language. That language should not be merely serviceable; it should be unique. All the energy and beauty and emotion and idea of the work should swim within that language like fish in a river. The language should be unduplicable.”

Edward Hoagland: “I don’t have much to say about contemporary American fiction. We’ve got lots of good, serious writers around but no great ones, no geniuses—we’re in a trough right now, as far as geniuses go. [Isaac Bashevis] Singer seems to me the last one alive. We can’t help that; genius is an accident of birth; But I am tired of minimalist fiction, or ‘dirty realism,’ or whatever term the repetition of Anderson-Farrell-Dreiser-Garland-Crane travels under nowadays.

“What would be new from many of our contemporaries would be some demonstration of faith and joy. I don’t mind pessimism. God may be dying, but I do suspect that there was a God, and most current fiction doesn’t think so. One can even believe that the world is about to blow up and yet still be transported with joy at being alive sometimes.

“Also, we remain incredibly provincial. Three-fourths of the human race lives on continents never visited by most of our writers, including the more prosperous, peripatetic ones. They buzz back and forth between Michigan and London, instead; visit nowhere that Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t go.”

John Clellon Holmes: “I still wait, mostly in vain, for the big novels that so pulse with human riches, fair and foul, that one’s life is enhanced for having read them. I still look, again mostly in vain, for the great styles that make a collection of characters and events mysteriously cohere into a world, that peculiarly mesmerizing way with language that is the ultimate vehicle for a writer’s vision. I find no Faulkners, no Fitzgeralds, in American writing now; no Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Yukio Mishima. No one seems seized by the big emotions anymore, neither the writers nor the people they create. We shy away from the oversize passions as if they were uncool. We work within our successes, no longer going for the risks that result in the important failures. Well-crafted, cautious, safe, instantly gratifying, the fiction of today seems to do little but reassure us in a sulky and unexamined pessimism about the human condition. Cleverness, bitterness, and irony seem to at once vitiate and express the extent of our energies.”

Laura Furman: “In her essay ‘The Novel Demeublée,’ Willa Cather spoke out against the overly furnished novel, one stuffed with a catalogue of journalistic details or unnecessary physical sensations, and she called for an imaginative art that works through ‘the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it.’ When Cather wrote her essay fifty years ago, perhaps much of the prose she read was too fleshy, or at least fat with details she didn’t admire. Now I would say that there is much fiction that is too slim or unfurnished and that its bareness masquerades as meaning.”

I’ll share more of these comments with you some other time. Right now I’m remembering Nick Delbanco—himself the author of 15 books of fiction and non-fiction, and as sharp a writing teacher as you can hope for—sitting me down in his room for a post-workshop conference and trying gently but firmly to restrain my Pinoy penchant for lyrical flourishes: “Mind the narrative line, Butch, mind the narrative line!”

And that, of course, is what my students now have coming out of their ears.

Penman for Monday, July 23, 2007

I was invited by the Philippine Board on Books for Young People to speak at last week’s celebration of the 24th National Children’s Book Day, and with so many people in that organization who’ve been my friends, colleagues, and former students, I couldn’t possibly say no. As I realized only when I arrived at the CCP, this year’s theme was “Basa Tayo, ‘Tay!”—a timely exhortation for fathers to read books to their children—and it turned out that the PBBY and I had the same thing in mind. Herewith, some excerpts from that talk:

I WRITE and edit books and I live and work in a world of books. As you can imagine, I have stacks and stacks of them at home, in the office, in boxes and closets I’ve forgotten about or haven’t opened in years.

But in truth, I read proportionately much more as a child than I do now as an adult. There were periods in grade school when, as a certified bookworm, I read three or four books a week, all of them borrowed from the school library and the provincial library close to where we lived.

The reason was simple: there was little else I could do. As I have recounted many times, I went to a school for privileged Filipinos—my parents scrimped and saved to send me there—but we had very little money, so the only amusement I could devote myself to was reading. And whatever else I may say or think about the distortions sometimes created by education in sectarian private schools, one tremendous advantage and resource they offer the young mind is a well-stocked library, in support of a strong language program.

For many wonderful years, I plunged into that library—this was La Salle Green Hills in the early ‘60s—and plundered it for all the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian adventures I could get my hands on. And, when I ran out of all the boy’s books, I grudgingly and surreptitiously began to read Nancy Drew.

I was probably around ten when I bought my very first book. It was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, and it came in a so-called Ladder paperback edition whose vocabulary had been especially re-edited to match the level of one’s knowledge of English. It cost me 50 centavos, which was probably more than my daily baon, but I began to appreciate the fact that to borrow books was a wonderful convenience, but to own one was a princely privilege, a sign that you not only valued books for what they contained, but also for their physical selves. They were things, yes, but they were no less valuable than transistor radios, watches, toy guns, dolls, and whatever else you had. You could give them away. You could collect and hoard them. You could make someone miserable by not giving him or her a certain book.

What truly opened my mind were the books of history, biography, geography, and science that were available to me. My favorite class was Social Studies, and the textbooks alone could not satisfy my yearning to learn about faraway places and ancient cultures. I went through the biographies of people both famous and obscure—true, most of them were dead white people—and I pored over maps and remembered exotic place-names that I swore I would visit someday. Given our finances then, there seemed to be no way I would ever visit China, Europe, Africa, or even the United States. But the books transported me to those places, even to the moon and Mars, using only the conveyance of words and images.

At home, there was always something to read, even if they happened to be just back issues of TIME, Newsweek, the Reader's Digest, National Geographic, and Liwayway. At a very young age I became aware of and interested in politics and current affairs, as well as in science and technology. To me, nonfiction was just as if not even more interesting than fiction, and perhaps my predisposition toward realism in my own fiction reflects that bias for the tangible but infinitely complex world.

With high school and college came other concerns and priorities. In high school, ever eager to get beyond my years, I discovered adult literature—and by adult I mean everything from James Bond to Playboy and Fanny Hill. In college, reading became increasingly something I had to do, rather than wanted to do. What I had done for fun became more of a chore and a labor. And perhaps to bring back some private joy into that process, I began writing my own books—in agreement with Toni Morrison’s famous remark that “I wrote my first book because I wanted to read it.”

Graduate school was a strange mixture of books I loved and loathed. I loved Shakespeare and his contemporaries in English drama; I admired much of the contemporary fiction I came across. I loathed the books on theory and criticism I had to read to get my degree, but which seemed to be written in a purposely painful English.

It has been a long time since I have read a nice, satisfying book. I simply no longer have the time. The last one I read, a year ago, was titled Objects of Desire, and it had to do with an exciting chase—for antique American furniture. Today I mostly read student papers and student stories, and once in a while I come across a piece that revives my faith in the power of words, but more often I find myself pining for the simple pleasures of reading, in grade school, about electromagnetism and white whales and nebulae.

I have given you this walkthrough of my reading history to make a few points, even if only to reaffirm some things you may already know and believe.

First, reading at a young age is tremendously important in shaping the mature person. Those books I devoured in grade school laid the foundation for my thinking and writing. I became aware that the world was much larger than my own. I developed an abiding interest in science and the scientific method. I felt inspired by the biographies of people who underwent great trials and hardships before they succeeded, and even after. Books on geography and history burned in me the desire to go to far places and see new and wonderful things.

Second, reading is still the best way of learning a language. Reading is language in action—often in the best possible ways. Reading taught me not only words but how they worked in sentences and paragraphs. Just knowing how words literally looked on the page helped me become an editor as well—a skill that requires almost letter-perfect command of spelling and grammar. Reading a wide variety of material showed me how language behaved in different situations for different purposes—from love letters to laboratory reports. I developed personal standards that later helped me in my work as a writer of fiction and as an occasional journalist—starting by shamelessly aping the styles of writers I admired, such as John Updike, W. Somerset Maugham, and Graham Greene.

Third, reading begins and should be sustained at home. Parents can’t leave reading to teachers and expect their children to be imbued with a lifelong love of books if they don’t actively encourage reading at home. They can do this by reading themselves—and showing their children what an important and enjoyable thing it is to do—and reading with and to their children, which makes for excellent family time and enduring memories. I can still remember my father putting me to bed with a story—usually something from the Reader’s Digest—making sure to leave something for the next day. I looked forward to those moments, and when Beng and I had our own child I made sure to read to her as well. (That's me and Demi up there, circa 1977.)

Fourth, knowing that few of our schools have the kind of library I was fortunate to grow up with, the government should strengthen school and public libraries—with books, CDs, and Internet access and multimedia resources. Much of my self-education after school took place at the Rizal Provincial Library in Pasig, where I tried to learn a new word every visit, randomly flipping the big Webster’s dictionary and picking a word I didn’t know.

Fifth, we should encourage young people to read as a national priority and a nationwide initiative, but also as something cool and fun to do, providing all the best prizes and incentives for young people who value and read good books. We should have more reading contests and tests such as those topped recently by the grade schools of Marikina and Las Piñas—rather than more singing and dancing contests, or those that depend on sheer luck.

Sixth, the best reason to read is for reading’s own sake. Reading is more than making sense of words on a page. It is the best form of exercise for the imagination—an invigorating experience that keeps the mind supple and poised to work harder and more creatively on concrete tasks. Those tasks could include business decisions, engineering problems, or creative writing itself.

Lastly, allow me to say a few things about the writing of books for young people rather than their reading.

Write books and stories that matter—stories that make the complex experience of being Filipino not only understandable to young readers but an inescapable civic and personal obligation. In other words, write books that will help young readers become better Filipinos. I feel that we need this badly at a time when many young Filipinos—and their parents—can’t wait to escape, to run off to a job in New York or Singapore right after graduation.

I’m not making the simplistic suggestion that we should all stay home and say no to good opportunities abroad; I do mean that wherever we are in the world, we should be aware and mindful of our Filipino-ness, and of how we can contribute to the growth of our society and nation, not just to our family and personal income.

For this we need more books for young people in both English and Filipino and even in our regional languages that engage, in appropriate ways, our present realities, but also offer strength and hope—and, yes, are interesting and fun to read.

Penman for Monday, July 16, 2007

ALMOST FIFTY years ago, on December 12, 1957, a new theater was inaugurated by St. Paul College of Manila along Herran Street (now Pedro Gil) in tree-lined Malate. It was the Fleur-de-Lis Auditorium, and in due time it would become home to the musical theater tradition that the SPCM would gain fame for, producing such theater, dance, and entertainment luminaries as Cecille Guidote, Charo Santos, Celeste Legaspi, June Keithley, Baby and Maniya Barredo, Tina Santos, Pinky Marquez, Joy Soler, Noemi Manikan, and the Revilla sisters. Under the tutelage of such teachers as Fr. James Reuter and Daisy Avellana, these talents would turn the Fleur-de-Lis into “the Broadway of Herran.”

That legacy is surely treasure enough. But another, equally remarkable treasure stood outside the theater itself, in the foyer, a gift of the architect who designed and built the Fleur-de-Lis and similar structures on St. Paul’s other campuses. Seeing the Fleur-de-Lis in Manila as his crowning achievement, Architect Jose L. Reynoso asked his Angono townmate—a brilliant painter by the name of Carlos “Botong” Francisco, much later to be named a National Artist—to do a large mural that would be the centerpiece of the theater lobby, looming high above the theater-goers and making them part, as it were, of the tradition that was its subject.

“The Evolution of Philippine Culture,” as the 3.5-by-4.5-meter mural in oil came to be known upon its completion, was unveiled along with the theater itself, and so has been part and parcel of St. Paul’s and Manila’s theater and cultural history. No better proof exists of how closely wedded the mural is to the theater than the fact that its two uppermost corners are trimmed to conform to the shape of the wall where the pilaster meets the cornice.

True to its title, the mural depicts the theme of East meeting West in Philippine culture. A muscular Filipino man beats a drum in the center, but behind him hovers a fair-haired muse, and elsewhere in the mural, native dances contrast with flamenco, an anito with a galleon. For a painting of its time and the theater it was meant to complement, the mural is spot-on, capturing in a grand sweep the strongest strains of our culture.

But decades of exposure to the elements (the only thing that stood then between the mural and the street was a grilled door and fence), the curious touches of a thousand fingers, the occasional vandal, and the molecular ravages of time took their toll on the mural. A few years ago, thinking to restore it in time for the centennial of the college (now a university) in 2012, the Paulinian sisters took the mural down, and—doing what most of us would have done—rolled it up for safekeeping, unwittingly adding to the damage in the long vertical lines that now scour its surface. When they unrolled the linen canvas, it was covered all over with a fine white powder—the “ground” underneath the paint that had come loose when the paint creased and broke up.

The SPCM/SPUM alumnae began raising funds for its restoration, but the project proved far bigger and more technically challenging than originally thought, so SPUM President Wynna Marie Medina and her administration moved more aggressively to push the project forward. Some assistance was secured from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), more alumni support was tapped, and—with much prayer and determination—St. Paul decided to press ahead with the restoration of Botong Francisco’s inimitable masterpiece.

Brought in to handle the delicate and taxing work of restoring the huge mural was the multidisciplinary team of the Art Conservation and Restorations Specialists, Inc. (ACES), a company that had previously done work on Juan Luna’s Spoliarium and many other paintings by Filipino and foreign masters. Headed by painter June Poticar-Dalisay (uhrm, someone I know very well), ACES has been championing scientific restoration in this country, providing detailed studies and reports of every step in the long process.

For its part, SPUM designated its vice president, Sister Flordeliza Deza, to serve as project manager, and Sister Flor has been painstakingly documenting the work of ACES and the university, toward a possible book that can be produced on the restoration project itself. Sister Flor also explained why the Paulinians were determined to do the job: “We’re concerned with the total formation of the person, especially of the spirit. We see art as a means of elevating man’s search for the truth.”

The mural has been cleaned, patched, strip-lined (its borders extended), and remounted on a new, sturdy frame made—appropriately enough—from old hardwood left over from the college’s demolished structures. The long and arduous task of retouching the painting itself is just beginning. “Some people and even some clients think that restoration simply means making an artwork look like new, by repainting and varnishing the work,” says June. “But it takes a lot of study and preparation, and careful cleaning to reveal the work’s original colors. In ACES, we also make sure that everything we do is reversible. A historical masterpiece like the Spoliarium or this Botong mural presents special challenges, but we approach every painting with the same concern for thoroughness.”

Wynna Medina hopes that the work can be completed in time for a formal launch of the restored mural this December, the theater’s and mural’s 50th anniversary. “God will provide. No matter what, we’ll get this done!” she says ebulliently, knowing how much more needs to be raised to complete the restoration and the requisite follow-ups, such as temperature-control and security mechanisms.

A special and limited preview for the press brought together the SPUM and ACES teams with the media last week (where I had to identify myself as the representative of the Philippine STAR, moonlighting as June’s husband) and after a thorough briefing by Wynna, Sis. Flor, and June, we trooped to the work-in-progress itself, to be awed by its emerging majesty.

Clearly, many months of hard work lie ahead for ACES and the university, but even now you can see why this project had to be undertaken, if the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres are to live up to their commitment to the upliftment of the human spirit. There was some debate in the open forum about the correctness of the title, but I think it makes perfect sense—and, indeed, the SPUM and its cultural programs have themselves become part of that evolution. A market value of P50 million was mentioned in relation to the Botong work; but I’m sure that if you ask any Paulinian student or alumna, she will say their treasure on Herran is, finally, priceless.


WE SEE and hear their work everywhere, but we don’t know them, and we’re really not supposed to. They’re the practitioners of public relations in this country, and they help shape the way we think about things. We see their work when things go wrong for companies, agencies, and prominent persons; but they can also take the initiative in identifying these entities with the public good through such means as corporate social responsibility programs.

But who are these people, and what do they really think?

Comes now a book that answers these questions: How to Make It in PR: PR Veterans Tell Their Stories (San Juan: Context Communications International, 2007), a collection of the experiences and insights of nine of the Philippines’ foremost public relations pioneers and experts. Alphabetically, the authors include Charlie Agatep, Joy Buensalido (the youngest, and the only lady in the group), Max Edralin, Rene Nieva, Pete Padre, Virgilio Pantaleon, Frankie Roman, Oscar Villadolid, and the book’s editor and moving spirit, Romy Virtusio. Interviews with pioneers Pete Teodoro and Joe Carpio are also featured in the book, and a piece on R. R. de la Cruz. That’s about as formidable a phalanx of PR practitioners as you can put together in this country since public relations began to emerge from the looming shadow of advertising, to which PR was often attached as a bonus or an afterthought.

Let’s hear it from some of the PR masters:

“The first step in crisis prevention is to build an infrastructure of goodwill to protect the firm during bad times…. The reason why many companies are prone to crisis is that they do not devote any time worrying about their reputation. Their main focus us on sales and profits. They don’t think a good corporate image is necessary until they are faced with a crisis,” says Agatep.

Buensalido emphasizes the personal element so important in this society: “Your network of friends, co-workers and colleagues will be a constant source of new contacts so always do an excellent job for them to remember and recommend you.”

Responding to the charge that PR has been too often associated with payola, Max Edralin acknowledges the problem, but refuses to yield ethics to economics. “We have to teach practitioners that PR is a respectable profession that is in the business of persuading, not bribing, people to agree with our point of view.”

He won’t remember me, but Oscar Villadolid was the editor-in-chief of the Philippines Herald when I started reporting for that paper at age 18. He started out himself as a newspaperman, then turned to PR for San Miguel, before being put in charge of the Herald, another Soriano concern. Martial law shut the paper down and returned Villadolid to San Miguel for good. “It helped us in our PR careers that we had worked as newspapermen,” he says. “What is PR? It is the art of communicating…. That is why they make good PR men, these former newspapermen, sometimes too aggressively so, but they generally do well.”

Romy Virtusio rounds out the volume: “If there is one major development in PR practice that has warmed my heart all these years, it is the increasing move by PR practitioners towards a conscious, community-oriented bias for improving social conditions.”

Part-textbook and part-biography, this book should be invaluable to young people contemplating a career in public relations. In the very least, it should set them on the right path laid out by Max Edralin and, indeed, all his co-authors and peers. It doesn’t hurt that the book is also a good read—especially when it yields inside stories, such as Frankie Roman’s account of how and why Hans Menzi bought the Bulletin, and Edralin’s partly sad, partly funny story about how anti-Marcos jokes landed PLDT’s Toto Olivera in prison during martial law, and how his friends sprung him.

Those interested in ordering a copy can call 726-51-30/32; 727-52-51; 725-78-91; 724-41-88 (fax), or e-mail rpv@virtusio.com.

Penman for Monday, July 9, 2007


MY FRIEND the renowned architect and conservationist Augusto “Toti” Villalon sent me a message to convey the happy news that a new book of his was launched recently in Paris. The Philippine Permanent Delegation to UNESCO in cooperation with UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines launched Living Landscapes and Cultural Landmarks: World Heritage Sites in the Philippines in the Salon des Delegues at UNESCO in Paris, where Villalon delivered a presentation on all Philippine World Heritage Sites.

There are five such sites in the Philippines: the Tubbataha Reef Marine Park (so designated in 1993); Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park (1999); the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras (1995), the Historic Town of Vigan (1999), and the Baroque Churches of the Philippines (1993), comprising San Agustin Church in Manila, Santa Maria Church in Ilocos Sur, San Agustin Church in Paoay, Ilocos Norte, and Santo Tomas de Villanueva Church in Miag-ao, Iloilo.

Villalon represented the Philippines in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee from 1991 to 1997, and the inclusion of these priceless legacies on the World Heritage List must, to a great extent, be credited to Toti’s tireless efforts to make the world—as well as Filipinos themselves—know and appreciate these natural and man-made treasures within our borders.

Villalon’s text is complemented by the photographs of Neil Oshima. "World Heritage inscription has taught Filipinos a sense of pride of place", Toti says. “Our people have become increasingly aware of who we are because of the beauty of our country and our creativity as a people, as our World Heritage sites, on par with the best of the world, easily demonstrate."


SPEAKING OF heritage conservation, one of the most interesting sites you can visit online is the Skyscraper City forum devoted to Photography, Heritage, and Architecture.

The forum is broken down into threads such as Wartime Philippines, The Cebu Heritage Walk, Bikol Dialects, and my favorites, Retrato: Filipinas Collection and Philippines Then and Now. I can’t get enough of these rare but now publicly accessible pictures of old Manila—say, Echague in the the 1930s, shown below—set against their present-day versions.

It’s appalling to realize how so much of our city has changed so carelessly—no thanks to mayors and administrators who either didn’t know any better, or who’ve put commercial and political considerations above the cultural, the historical, and the aesthetic.

The most recent case involved the dimwitted idea of Philippine Tourism Authority chief Robert Dean Barbers to construct an P85-million sports complex right next to the Jose Rizal Shrine in Fort Santiago, against the objections of the Intramuros Administration itself, which saw the construction to be unauthorized, disapproved, and illegal. The Intramuros Administration—headed by no less than Tourism Sec. Ace Durano—issued a stoppage order last March 5, but that order was good for only 15 days, and the good secretary subsequently got busy serving as the campaign spokesman for Team Unity.

Not having been down there recently, I don’t know what the status of the construction is—for all I know, that sports complex may already have opened for business—but I hope Sec. Durano succeeded in arresting the progressive destruction of Manila’s historic sites and their environs. This was something that the city’s past leader—thankfully now gone—permitted with impunity and even relished; while no screaming fan of returning Mayor Fred Lim, I feel more assured that good sense will prevail under his administration, and that no more “Park & Rides” will be built at the cost of another city landmark.


Sometimes I can only marvel at the tortured reasoning of our officials when it comes to approving projects that may have more angles to them than meets the eye. Until it was forced to cancel the environmental clearance of that Korean spa at the crater of Taal Volcano after a huge public outcry, the DENR risked being voted the winner of the “What Were They Thinking?” booby prize. Sec. Angelo Reyes had originally defended the spa as an “ecotourism” site—but what tourists in their right mind would want a massage on the very lip of an active volcano? And even if the tourists would have come, why despoil the scenery with a building that would have served just a stupid few?

Thankfully the DENR found a reason in the Korean firm’s illegal construction of a large elevator and a road to void its permit. But until we see that building torn down—something I seriously doubt, given all the legal and paralegal machinations in this country available to the persistent and the powerful—I have a feeling that that spa will live on, to be joined by restaurants, coffeeshops, karaoke bars, and Internet cafes, right on the dragon’s tongue. And I can just see that dragon licking its chops, eager to teach these silly humans a thing or two about Nature—which, as Aristotle reminded us, “does nothing uselessly.”


LET ME devote some space to a letter from Kurt Fang, a graduate of the Philippine Science High School (’01) and the University of the Philippines (’05). He’s now taking his master’s in finance at UP Diliman.

“I would like to thank you for your recent article featuring PDIC's attempt at increasing financial literacy among the youth. As a person who has been tutoring kids from all sorts of ‘supposed’ top-tier primary and secondary schools in Metro Manila the past seven years, I have seen how schools have been focusing on making education more academically rigorous (more work load, higher passing standards) without making their lessons more relevant to kids.

“For example, grade four kids in one school are being made to memorize the entire set of essential vitamins and minerals and the corresponding defects that result in deficiencies in them (my student recites terms like ‘notochord’ and ‘neurological defects’ as if she knows what they are). In another school, kids are expected to learn the basics of algebra by fifth grade (in my time, and that was not too long ago, we did this in first year high).

“I find it dumb how most third year high school students go through lessons in chemical kinetics without knowing how to explain chemical reactions in layman's terms. Although I have been earning a living teaching all these unnecessarily difficult lessons (thank you, Pisay!) I wish that things could change somehow. I find that most of these lessons are irrelevant to these kids, especially considering the age at which these lessons are taught, and that the manner by which these lessons are taught and tested is highly mechanical and involves plain memory work (resulting in the absurd growth of the tutorial industry in recent years).

“It is scary to realize how increasingly ineffective our (private) schools are becoming (I cannot even imagine how those in the public school system are doing!). The average kid from these ‘exclusive’ private and international schools seem to be learning very little in class (I would think that my sample of over 80 students over this seven-year period makes my observation statistically significant).

“While I am an avid fan of the sciences and math (in spite of having crossed over to the dark side to finance) I think that it is counterproductive for schools who do not have the proper manpower and resources (i.e. specialist teachers, functional laboratories) to attempt to teach these subjects in a highly technical (and effective) manner. This results only in the kids not wanting to have anything to do with science and math (and end up taking management or commerce)—thus, the very purpose for which these subjects are taught is defeated.

“Even my students who have done well in math and science would not want to have careers in S&T because their exposure to the math and sciences was purely mechanical and was not related to how these subjects are relevant to the real world. Those that do are discouraged by their parents, the most common reason being ‘Wala namang pera dyan, mag nursing ka na lang.’

“I am glad that organizations like PDIC are taking initiatives to contribute to the almost inexistent financial education among schools today (the only high schools i know of that have business-related electives are International School Manila, British School and Xavier School (as part of its senior year econ class). I do hope that more private-public partnerships develop that would make education more relevant for students in the real world sense. I would like for tutors like myself to have less students who are just overburdened with irrelevant chemical formulae and mathematical equations to teach and are thus unmotivated to study, so that we can concentrate on those who would really need our help.

“I hope you can feature more initiatives like that of the PDIC in your column. And I pray that more private sector initiatives like this come out.”

Many thanks for sharing your experiences and perceptions, Kurt. I agree with you completely about the folly and stupidity of mechanical teaching. A friend recently asked me for help in translating passages from Florante at Laura, which her son had been assigned in school. I was at a loss, because not even I, with my literature background, could do that without a dictionary attuned to the Tagalog of the 1830s.

Why couldn’t these students have been given an existing English translation of the poem to work with alongside the Tagalog original? That way they could have learned something useful and even pleasurable about both poetry and language, instead of plodding torturously from one word to the next—sadly, the only experience these kids will probably remember from their encounter with Balagtas’s masterpiece.

(Photos courtesy of "thecamerareturns" and "theavenger" on www.skyscrapercity.com)

Penman for Monday, July 2, 2007

THE CITY of Manila marked its 436th official anniversary on the last week of June this year—which was probably the reason why the National Book Development Board chose to focus on “The Literary Imagination and the City We Live In” for its ongoing “Portrait of the City Exhibit” at the Glorietta 3 Park in Makati (until July 1; it moves to the Trinoma Mall in Quezon City from July 4 to July 8).

Manila today, of course, is really much larger and much more than the Manila of Rajah Sulayman, or even that of Arsenio Lacson and Antonio Villegas. It’s a teeming, exploding metropolis, an extravagant patchwork of mud and concrete, wood and metal, grass and garbage, luxury and misery, the 21st and the 19th centuries coexisting cheek by jowl over 17 cities and municipalities housing more than 10 million people. It’s a city I’ve known pretty well. I had to, having moved around it with my family at least 18 times these past five decades. (Count them: Oroquieta St., Singalong, P. Manahan, Liberty Avenue, Boni Avenue, Nueve de Febrero, Bos. Malinao, Bambang, and San Nicolas in Pasig, UP Village, Old Balara, Project 2, Project 4, Project 6, San Mateo, West Avenue, Barangay Central, and UP Campus.)

Like many provincial migrants, we trucked our precious possessions around from one end of the city to the other, each move adding another dent to the fridge and another nick to the aparador. But every uprooting and rerooting also introduced me to another corner of a Manila I knew, from the baywaters I once swam in (and survived) to the foothills of San Mateo.

For the June 27 opening of the exhibit, I was invited by the NBDB through its Executive Director, lawyer and fictionist Andrea Pasion-Flores (a former student of mine, which might explain why) to read from my semi-autobiographical novel Killing Time in a Warm Place (Anvil Publishing, 1992)—an excerpt set in Diliman during the tumultuous First Quarter Storm of the early ‘70s. It went thus:

“I came upon a campus soaked in green: sharp days in June, the sharpness of wet leaves, of acacia branches riven at the core by lightning, the tang of broken grass.

“So fresh, it was unlike the rest of the city on whose eastern fringe it stood. A long broad avenue swept up to its entrance archway, and on both sides of this avenue lay wide stretches of grass and solid foliage in the distance. Even while in high school I had visited this place. One other summer I had watched red horses roaming the perimeter of what I was to learn was the School of Animal Husbandry, on the right of the avenue.

“In my second year of college, I ran across that field in a blind panic, hurried along by gunfire. The university was under siege by the military; we had set up barricades of commandeered tables, benches and chairs near the spot from where I had admired the study horses. We camped behind this makeshift wall, students and professors alike, listening to speeches and singing revolutionary songs. Our bones were cold, but our breath was warm. People talked of France and China and Vietnam. On the other side of the barricades stood Marcos’s assembled legions: truncheon-wielding riot police in khakis and cobalt-blue helmets, the army in fatigues, riding armored jeeps. All through the morning emissaries had crossed over from one side to the other. Colonels debated academic vice-presidents while we jeered at the soldiers and threw paper grenades across the lines, with messages like ‘DOG’ scribbled on them. I tossed a few of these with the easy conviction of my seventeen; we all felt seventeen.”

I was joined at the podium by two younger writers, poet Conchitina Cruz (who’s set to leave this October for Bellagio, Italy, on a Rockefeller grant) and lawyer Amor Datinguinoo, who read paeans-of-sorts to the city from their own work.

Indeed the exhibit itself contained far worthier tributes to Manila than ours—passages culled from the works of such as Jose Rizal, Nick Joaquin, F. Sionil Jose, Kerima Polotan, and Gilda Cordero-Fernando.

Here’s Rizal immortalizing the Quiapo Fair in Soledad Lacson-Locsin’s translation of El Filibusterismo:

“The night was lovely, and the plaza offered a most lively aspect. Taking advantage of the freshness of the breeze and the splendid January moon, the people crowded into the Fair to see, to be seen and to amuse themselves. The music from the cosmoramas and the lights from the lanterns communicated animation and merriment to everyone.

“Long rows of booths glittering with tinsel and colored decorations, displayed clusters of balls, masks strung through the eyes, tin toys, trains, little carts, tiny mechanical horses, carriages, steamships with their diminutive boilers, porcelain tableware of Lilliputian size, small Nativity cribs of pine wood, foreign and native dolls, the former blonde and smiling, the latter, serious and pensive, like little señoras beside gigantic girls. The beat of tiny drums, the toot of tin horns, the wheezy music of the accordions and chamber organs combined in a carnival concert. And in the midst of all this the crowds came and went, shoving and tripping over each other, their faces turned to the booths, so that the collisions were frequent and uproarious. The coaches had to hold back the sprint of the horses, the tabi! tabi! of the cocheros resounding at every moment; office clerks, military men, friars, students, Chinese, young girls with their mothers or aunts, crossed each other, greeting one another, winking at each other, calling to each other, in more or less merriment.”

Nick Joaquin remembers bygone Octobers in Manila in “Guardia de Honor”:

“In October, a breath of the north stirs Manila, blowing summer’s dust and doves from the tile roofs, freshening the moss of old walls, as the city festoons itself with arches and paper lanterns for its great votive feast to the Virgin. Women hurrying into their finery upstairs, bewhiskered men tapping impatient canes downstairs, children teeming in the doorways, coachmen holding eager ponies in the gay streets, glance up anxiously, fearing the wind’s chill: would it rain this year? (But the eyes that, long ago, had gazed up anxiously, invoking the Virgin, had feared a grimmer rain—of fire and metal; for pirate craft crowded the horizon.) The bells begin to peal again and sound like silver coins showering in the fine air; at the rumor of drums and trumpets as bands march smartly down the cobblestones, a pang of childhood happiness smites every heart. October in Manila! But the emotion, so special to one’s childhood, seems no longer purely one’s own; seems to have traveled ahead, deep into time, since one first felt its pang; growing ever more poignant, more complex—a child’s rhyme swelling epical; a clan treasure one bequeaths at the very moment of inheritance, having added one’s gem to it. And time creates unexpected destinations, history raises figs from thistles: yesterday’s pirates become today’s roast pork and paper lanterns, a tapping of impatient canes, a clamor of trumpets.”

Strangely enough—observes my colleague, the fictionist and scholar Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, in her study of our “city fiction”—we Filipino writers don’t write enough, and not warmly enough, about the cities that have become home to most of us. “These [few] examples of city fiction are a meager harvest when one considers the body of fiction in English by Filipinos,” Hidalgo says. “It is when we turn to our creative nonfiction that we encounter, not just the intimacy with the city that is missing from much of our fiction, but an actual affection for it. The composite picture that emerges from these various texts (and from the many others not mentioned here) is closer to the immense variety and complexity of Metropolitan Manila, taking in both squalor and elegance, and, in chronicling both in strong, resilient, powerful prose, investing both with a kind of grace, the grace required to survive in our sometimes incomprehensible time.”

In seeking to explain this oversight, Hidalgo quotes Joaquin, who said that “When I started writing in the late 1930s, I was aware enough of my milieu to know that it was missing from our writing in English. The Manila I had been born into and had grown up in had yet to appear in our English fiction, although that fiction was mostly being written in Manila and about Manila. The place-names were familiar enough but they conjured up no city to trigger a shock of recognition in a Manileño like me. It seemed as if the city itself, the Manila I knew, had become invisible to our writers in English. Something in their upbringing, in their schooling, had made them unable to see what had been so apparent to their grandfathers. These young writers could only see what the American language saw.”

That’s probably no longer true, as much of the new fiction I come across these days seems predominantly city-based—not just urban, but cosmopolitan, in its sensibility. If there’s anything missing in our fiction (especially in English), it’s an awareness and acknowledgment of the fact that we live in a country defined, for most Filipinos, less by malls and coffeeshops than by swaths of coconut, rice, and sugarcane plantations. Even our cities are provincescapes pocked by enclaves of affluence, and as much as the metropolis encroaches and ultimately despoils Nature, many of us remain country boys in city clothes.

The most interesting change in our fiction, I think, will come not so much from the contact between, say, Midsayap and Manila, as between Barrio Wawa in Tanauan, Batangas and Milan in Italy. The cities of our minds have become global cities, and the time has come to write about the Filipino’s journeys through those infernally complex passageways.


THE "PORTRAIT of the City” exhibit was just one of many activities spearheaded by the NBDB (helped, in this particular case, by the Filipinas Heritage Library) to encourage more Filipinos—especially younger ones—to read books. Earlier in June, the NBDB held various discussions on books, reading, and libraries, led by librarian Zarah Gagatiga, educator Ani Almario, and scholar May Jurilla; an accompanying “Portrait of the City” tour around Metro Manila, guided by Joanna Abrera del Prado, was sold out, but more activities such as student field trips are open to the public.

For more details, call the NBDB at 928-0048.

(picture courtesy of www.db.com)