Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, October 29, 2007


I was invited by the College English Teachers Association (CETA)—whom I had the pleasure of addressing a few years ago—to speak to them again last Saturday, this time on the topic of “Creative Writing in the Classroom.” Here’s part of what I told them:

THERE WAS a time, not too long ago, when creative writing was something people learned all by themselves. Workshops were unheard of. Aspiring writers toiled at their desks late into the night, scribbling away on thick pads of yellow paper, taking long walks along the seashore to ponder knots in the plot or the versification, then drinking themselves insensible to invite the company and benediction of sundry muses and spirits.

Today, writers still drink—some perhaps in fond and also foolish emulation of the poet Dylan Thomas, who died at the age of 39 from an overdose of alcohol—but they no longer, in a sense, write alone. They meet and work together in the classroom, in the creative writing workshop that has become a ubiquitous feature of the academe. Writers and wannabe writers are going to school in droves, attracted by new CW degree programs and course offerings that allow them to write what they want to write while earning an academic degree.

Some skeptics still wonder whether creative writing can really be taught and learned in school. CW programs have many detractors—even I have my doubts, from the point of view of return on investment, given the fact that only one or two students in a class of 20 will probably have both the talent and the discipline to become a good, productive writer 20 years down the road. Critics will say that people like Shakespeare, Poe, and Rizal never went to a writer’s workshop, nor picked up MFAs. That’s certainly true; they may not have needed them—but many people do. I don’t see why we can accept the need for piano and painting studios, but not for CW workshops. Like all the arts, creative writing requires tutelage—perhaps more so than learning the piano, because there are no real CW prodigies, no eight-year-old novelists. CW requires social experience, which simply can’t be rushed.

To move to an oft-raised corollary question, can CW be taught and taught well by non-creative writers? Much as I’d like to make everybody happy by saying yes, my more honest and pragmatic side says no. How can you teach students how to play the piano, if you can’t play it yourself? I don’t think a CW teacher has to be a great creative writer; but he or she has to have gone through the experience, to be able to predict, to answer, and to explain problems that students will encounter in the writing of poems, stories, and essays.

And let’s not forget that creative writers—even the best of them—don’t necessarily make good teachers. Writers can wax eloquent on the page, create thrilling passages and brilliant turns of phrase—and yet prove the most uncreative and soporific creature in the classroom. Like children, some are better seen than heard.

But having good, credible creative writers on the teaching staff might not be as absolute a requirement as it seems, for many creative writers have been inspired not only by other creative writers working as their mentors, but by great teachers of literature and of writing in general—teachers who have used literature to lead young minds in the exploration of other modes of thinking; teachers who have encouraged their students to express themselves, in their own words; teachers who find joy and fulfillment in nurturing talent that may even surpass their own. In other words, much of the training and the formation of the creative writer takes place outside the CW classroom.

CW degree programs and workshops help in accelerating and refining the development of young writers, by providing a studio environment where craftsmanship can be emphasized. The old feudal relationship between master and apprentice is fundamentally what is at work here. Many of the ideas about democratizing the classroom that came into fashion in the 1970s—for example, the warm and fuzzy notion that teachers and students are equal, and that one can learn as much from the other—simply don’t operate in a workshop. The workshop teacher has to know much more than the student, and has to find a way of communicating that knowledge effectively, organically, because straight lectures don’t work in a workshop, either. Literary theory has some but not much of a place in the CW workshop; it is practice, practice, practice that matters most.

CW teachers have to make connections between the student’s work and those of the real masters of the craft—the great writers to whose work the students need to be exposed, within and without the workshop, the models that students can imitate and emulate. This means that CW teachers themselves need to be well-read in the canon, as well as they should be aware of new, emerging forms like graphic novels and blogs. Workshop management is a tricky enterprise. Badly managed, the CW workshop can turn into a disaster, a traumatic experience for the students. Things turn bad when the teacher allows the workshop to be used as an arena for the clash of egos—including his or her own.

Workshops involve reading and critiquing the work of student writers; and being what they are, many of these works are drawn from the student’s own lives, making the writers feel extremely sensitive and vulnerable. To some students—including the smartest and most articulate ones—workshops can be a chance to show off, if not in the writing then in the criticism, and that impulse often leads to unbridled attacks or ill-considered remarks and witticisms aimed less at the work than at the person. In the worst situations, the teacher might tolerate or even abet this savaging. Instead of being a positive and nurturing experience, the workshop turns into a nightmare for the affected students.

But this can be prevented. Very early on, the CW teacher has to firmly establish the ground rules. In my workshops, for example, I emphasize the point that each story submitted—no matter how good or bad—is presumably each student’s best effort at that point, and deserves to be treated with a certain respect. That respect begins with reading the work. Stories need to be turned in a week before they get discussed, so no one can have a reason not to have read the stories. I expect every student to have a comment at hand—a comment that goes beyond saying “I loved it” or “I hated it,” and more usefully describes the work, and identifies its perceived strengths and weaknesses. I remind everyone that every work submitted—no matter how perfect the writer may imagine it to be—is a draft, and is open to criticism and revision. I emphasize the need for revision, and expect to see them in the final folio on which I will base my grades.

I expect workshop comments to be presented truthfully but tactfully; we do the writer a disservice both by being too kind and being too harsh—either way, the student fails to learn. In my workshops, the writer whose work is being discussed also has to listen to the comments, take note of them, and remain silent until the very end, at which point I give him or her an opportunity to speak and to address some of the points that have been raised. Workshops should also teach student writers to listen. It is their one and only opportunity to hear what reasonably intelligent readers truly feel about their work, and if the writer reacts too soon, all hope for a fresh and candid reading of their work vanishes.

If students cannot learn to write well in one or two workshops—and most of them will not—they can at least learn what to look for in the work of others, and in their own. This is the value of workshop criticism. They should be made aware that their most casual utterances can bear the gravest and often unintended consequences.

Do not allow yourself or the class to be distracted by noise. You will find—and I’m sure some of you already have—that the best readers and talkers in class are not necessarily the best creative writers, and vice versa. I have been pleasantly surprised by the work of some of my most timid students, and let down by some of the most articulate. Encourage sharp critical insights—but remember that, at the end of the day, it is the creative product that matters most, and which the student’s final grade will be most heavily based on.

There are rare instances when a student might be so offensive or inconsiderate or obstinate as to require a sharp putdown; in these cases, I will not hesitate to remind them who’s the boss. A student who thinks too highly of himself or herself—and yes, there will be those who think they know better than everyone else, including you (and indeed they might)—will sometimes respond to negative criticism by dismissing the workshop and its value, or by saying something like, “Well, I just wrote that story in one hour, so it doesn’t really matter much to me.” In these cases, I will not hesitate to tell the student not to waste my time and that of the others—and perhaps enroll in some other course.

More positively, I believe that every student has at least one good story to tell, and that it is the CW teacher’s job to help him or her find and tell that story in the best possible way.

I don’t tell my students what to write, in terms of giving them topics and attitudes. I remind them that these concerns are their privilege and responsibility, and that the point of creative writing is for them to be able to see and to represent the world in their own way, in their own words, away from the abstractions and generalizations of editorials and manifestos. I value ideas and principles as much as anyone else, and I would expect every student—especially my students in UP—to think critically about subjects like truth, justice, freedom, the nation, and the environment. But I also advise them to leave their righteous anger at the door and to trust their imagination, rather than their reason, to do their arguing for them on the page.

Fiction is a poor medium for polemics; that’s the province of the essay. Fiction works best with ambiguities, with casting doubt on what we take for the gospel truth. Fiction often reminds us that we do not really know who we are and why we do the things we do.

Penman for Monday, October 22, 2007

NOW AND then I get palpably agitated text messages from friends, asking me how to pronounce this name and that word. Last week, a media colleague asked me how “Talese” (as in the American author Gay Talese) was pronounced. “Tah-lees,” I texted back, having heard it on some TV show ages ago.

I’m not sure why they should be asking me; it could be because I’m a professor, especially when I put on a serious face (I was born with one, so that’s not too difficult). That doesn’t mean I know how to pronounce every word I come across. I’m just pretty good at pretending to know these things; that’s when I try to look deathly serious, so no one can find the gumption to prove me wrong. (Sometimes, they do. A student recently asked me how to pronounce “prescient”; without batting an eyelash, I said “pre-SIGH-unt.” She didn’t seem convinced, which annoyed me, so I looked it up forthwith in my dictionary, and sure enough it said “PRE-she-unt.” She chortled triumphantly; I quickly changed the topic, and looked around to see if anyone else had heard us.)

Well, what did I know? I spent much of my childhood in the dead certainty that “giraffe” was pronounced “jee-ra-fee.” And I wasn’t alone in my Visayan-born family. My father routinely pronounced “cockroach” in a way that somehow seemed more appropriate to the subject: “ko-crach.” “Noodle soup” came out “noodle soap.” My plebeian parents then sent me to an exclusive boy’s school, which straightened out 95% of my English, so that by the time I got to college, I could smile snidely when my fellow agitator Jack, immutably Ilonggo, railed against “im-periali-SUM” and "capitali-SUM.” (Needless to say—but I will, anyway—Jack ended up doing more against the enemy than I ever did.)

Graduate school in America smoothened a few more rough edges in my palate. Before I could make a fool of myself settling into my first Adirondack chair (“Oh, what a nice ad-EYE-ron-dack chair!”), someone helpfully mentioned “AD-uh-ron-dack.” Michael Crichton, I learned, would respond if you hollered “Hey, CRY-ten!” Even trickier was sci-fi priestess Ursula K. (for Kroeber) Le Guin, whose fiction I had to teach; thankfully, well before Google, someone clued me into the correct pronunciation (or, as we often say, the pro-NOUN-cia-tion) of her surname: luh-GWIN. As her own website now explains in response to what surely have been thousands of queries, under a section aptly titled “How to Pronounce Me,” UKL says: “Le Guin is not a French name at all; it’s Breton. It’s pronounced, to the best of my knowledge, just like its Welsh cognate gwyn—white, blond, fair. Here I am in English: URsuhluh (UR as in burr; or, in England, URsyoola) KROb'r l'GWIN.”

Life would be much simpler if famous people were as helpful (help me, Gisele Bundchen) or if everything were in plain English (of the non-Adirondack variety). Unfortunately, the world seems to have gotten it into its head that things become doubly valuable if you give them tongue-twisting French and German names (heck, anything vaguely European will do the trick). I learned just enough French and German in school to pronounce words on a menu and get myself to the toilet (the most important word in any language), but neither of those languages told me how to pronounce “Hermes” (not the minor god, but the major fashion brand): as it turns out, it’s er-MEZ (or something like it, but definitely not HER-meez).

‘Tis the sad truth: these days, you can’t be a true fashionista, a proper snob, or even a credible social climber if you can’t pronounce your conspicuous consumables right. So, boys and girls, repeat after me (or look them up on Google, followed by the word “pronounce”, if you can’t—like I had to): Audemars Piguet, Blancpain, Christian Lacroix, fondue bourguignonne, Hublot, Jaeger-Le Coultre, Longchamp, Maybach, Peugeot, portafogli di vitello con porcini, St. Emilion, Vacheron Constantin, Wienerschnitzel.

And for a change, let’s ask people like Tim Gunn, Nina Garcia, and Heidi Klum to natively pronounce Ang Tibay, bagoong alamang, chicharon bulaklak, inabraw, Tentay Patis, and “Time first!” (they’ll never get that last one).


ALMOST AS if they’d read my piece last Monday on the pleasures of poker, the good folks over at Hyundai Asia Resources Inc. threw a casino-themed party last week to thank their dealers, associates, and friends at One Esplanade by the bay, near the Mall of Asia. Seeing the “Deuce Royale” poster was enough to get my gambler’s blood churning; and besides, never having been to the MOA, I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone by coming over early and taking a stroll around the place, at least as far as my gout-ridden heels would allow me.

I arrived an hour before the party, when the sun was still a gleaming silver disk above the horizon. What impressed me most about the mall, as it turned out, was not so much what was inside—a surfeit of delectable goods and goodies, to be sure—but what lay outside, an unobstructed view of the outstretched bay and the feathered sky. I had expected to be hobbling from one store to the next, in search of digital desiderata (e.g., the perfect computer backpack), but I found myself standing still and spending nothing, a portly version of Katharine Mansfield’s poor Miss Brill, imagining what this girl was saying to that boy.

But I wasn’t about to turn into some pranic contemplative; I was merely psyching myself up for the gaming tables, for the turn of the cards and the clink of the cocktail glasses. Why, I felt as dapper as James Bond in Monte Carlo—to be flanked, I was hoping, by an equally suitable seductress with a thick Eastern European accent on one side and a suspiciously pushy midget on the other. I could just see myself driving home (not with the midget) in the evening’s advertised grand prize—a new Hyundai Sonata, to be given the first player to draw a royal flush—and I began wondering what color best suited my temperament, and if they offered Sonatas with a manual transmission, because I still hadn’t learned to drive automatics after all these years of wrestling with my Beetle’s stick shift.

Before I knew it, the sun had set and the temperature dropped, the slight chill in the breeze awakening me to my mission. I hurried off to One Esplanade—a large, hangar-type building dressed up for the evening as a den of iniquity (a very respectable one, I should hasten to add). As each guest entered, he or she received an envelope lined with play money with which to stake one’s claim to the Sonata. The food and drinks were tantalizingly real, but I avoided temptation, at least as far as the entrees went. Before meditating on the sunset, I had tanked up at the mall with a bowl of chicken mami and a large bola-bola siopao (for some odd reason, I tend to do that before cocktails and fancy dinners—as an insurance policy, I suppose, against the prospect of being served something unspeakably and unpronounceably cultured). In between appetizers and the main event, our hosts put on a show that should have capped the evening for less resolute aspirants, but I barely glanced at the overflowing charms of Regine Tolentino and Asia Agcaoili; I did wonder if these fine ladies didn’t feel a draft, given what they came in, but I suppose the sudden rise of the male temperature in the room took care of that.

There was some shyness at the poker tables at the beginning, but I had planted myself squarely in front of one of them, and my eagerness to play must have communicated itself to the dealer and to some others around me, and soon the game was afoot. I felt a rush of hot blood to my head as the cards were finally dealt out, and the Sonata of my Monegasque fantasies inched closer to my purine-addled feet.

I won’t belabor you with the details of what happened next. Suffice it to say that I must have imbibed the amber beer and the muscadine wine with what turned out to be reckless abandon. I lost my stash within half an hour, and slunk away to a conveniently available sofa to munch on some cold canapés. I thought my evening was over, until some friends from the motoring press espied me, and—having better things to do with their play money than, well, play—gifted me with their idle chips and sent me back to the tables.

By evening’s end, I held nothing close to the same-suited 10, J, Q, K, and A needed to send me home swathed in that real new-car smell you can’t get out of a sachet. But I did save nine white “thousand-peso” chips—no thanks to my enfeebled skills, but to the charity of strangers—exchangeable at the door for three large umbrellas, which I happily went home with. Next to old pens, Apple computers, and slinky Sonatas, I love umbrellas (I kid you not—preferably with curved bamboo or wooden handles, please) and thick, large bath towels. I might’ve preferred to ward off the rain with a sunroof attached to a chassis and four wheels, but maybe I’ll win that some other way, some other place, maybe in Monte Carlo. On a restroom break, fellow STAR contributor James “Simon Cowell” Deakin tried to console me by saying that the odds of drawing a royal flush were something like 1 in 250,000, which means that I have 249,937 chances more of hitting it.

Meanwhile, for making sure that I and their other guests had a blast, my earnest thanks go to HARI’s Richard Lee, Fe Agudo, Vhie Ramos, Paeng Batuigas, Marissa Balmaceda, and Don; and thanks too to press pals James, Aida Sevilla Mendoza, and Boojie Basilio for the chips and the playing time. (A lot of people to thank, I know, for a few hours of mindless fun, but you know what they say: it takes a village to raise a child.)

Penman for Monday, October 15, 2007

LET'S TAKE a break from the aggravations of politics and literature (some days I swear I feel like I’m in a graduate seminar) and talk about something truly fun for a change—albeit the kind of fun that can stop your heart or make you squirm in your seat like a corkscrew. I’m talking about the current craze (no, not for sudoku, which attracts another kind of player) for poker—specifically, Texas Hold ‘Em poker.

This is my secret life: for many months now, I’ve been spending my Friday nights playing poker with a regular group of buddies somewhere in Quezon City. I’m no card shark (that’s an expert gambler, to the uninitiated) and certainly no card sharp (that’s a cheater), but I’ve always had a thing for cards and card games—too much of a thing, at one point in my younger life, when I was known as “The Prof” at the blackjack tables—and I can’t think of a better compromise between curling up in bed with your pillow at 7 pm and taunting a sumo wrestler about his questionable parentage.

I’ve met all kinds of people at the gaming tables—from semi-retired chanteuses and airline pilots to off-duty sailors and fishmongers. When they play something like blackjack or baccarat, you know they’re after a good time and maybe a little money (or better yet, a lot), not necessarily in that order. In casinos, you play against “the bank”, represented by the dealer, and whatever else may pass between you and your co-players by way of table chatter, that’s just so much talk to fill otherwise dead air. The real enemy is the bank.

(And blackjack yields great odds for the player, at something like 49.5 percent to the house’s 50.5—meaning, the bank will win 50.5 percent of the time against all players, but if you play smartly you just might overcome that 1 percent advantage. Take note, though, that other experts have calculated this edge to be between less than 1 and over 5 percent depending on the house rules, so your mileage may vary; in craps, on the other hand—yup, that’s the game you saw in Ocean’s Thirteen—the house edge can be as high as 11 percent.) But enough of the silly math.

In poker, on the other hand, you basically play against each other, often in the most personal ways. Egos, personalities, predispositions, quirks, superstitions, constitutions—all of these factors come into play in poker, plus that most critical of skills, the ability to read not just your cards but your opponents (yes, their faces, and then their cards). Poker is as much psychological warfare as it is a game of chance; the cards you draw are just the beginning, and how you play them is often more crucial.

Ours is a truly friendly game, with no more than a few hundred pesos in play at any given time (let’s make that “play money,” just in case the vice squad comes barging in), and we all go home before anyone can say “Good morning” or “What’s for breakfast?” But for four or five blessed hours each Friday, we drop everything else to gather around a green poker table (yes, a real baize-topped one, provided by our gracious host Javie) and go off on our personal quests for “pocket rockets” (a pair of aces), a “big slick” (an ace and a king), “cowboys” (a pair of kings), and “ladies” (a pair of queens), away from more exotic combinations such as a “San Francisco busboy” (a queen and a three or a trey—I’ll leave you to figure that one out).

You don’t have to go too far to see how poker is played—these days, it’s on TV more often than most people care to watch. Basically, Texas Hold ‘Em—the most popular of hundreds of poker variations that have cropped up over the past 170 years since “the cheating game” became all the rage on Mississippi riverboats—involves combining the two cards you’re dealt with any three of the five “community cards” laid out on the table. Of course, you have to memorize poker’s hierarchy of values, from a humble pair of deuces (“ducks”) to the ultra-rare royal straight flush (10, J, Q, K, A in the same suit).

But the real fun is in the betting—like a popular song goes, “you gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” With the right subliminal signals (a.k.a, the famous “poker face”), you can bluff your way to victory with little more than “sailboats” (a pair of fours); or you can lose your shirt to some mousy, nervous newbie secretly holding four of a kind. We guys (poets, fictionists, journalists, lawyers, doctors) regularly get cleaned out by Javie’s girlfriend Den, the only lady in the pack, who looks like a college freshman but who knows how to gut macho bluffers with an “all-in” (betting all your chips at once, do or die) and a sad smile. As the senior chump, the only break I get is an exemption from the shuffling and dealing chores.

There’s almost as much fun to be had in the “table talk”—ranging from inquisitory chatting to trashing your opponents with words rather than cards, which I will not recommend except when playing with very close friends, and certainly not with sumo wrestlers.

There are worse (and, come to think of it, also less nerve-wracking) ways of spending Friday nights; the pleasures of poker are unique, and the thrill of drawing and nursing a straight flush against a full house beats—in my book—winning a prize for a story I had to think about for three months. Maybe that’s because it’s also an ephemeral high—which is why we keep chasing it one Friday after another.


FROM NANDING Josef, Cultural Center of the Philippines VP and Artistic Director, comes this important message for all Filipino artists: “The Artists Welfare Project, Inc., a private corporation of artists, is finally SEC-registered. We can now move faster to provide assistance to artists in need. Please attend our general assembly on Tuesday, October 16, 4-6 pm at MKP, 4th floor, CCP. The agenda will include a report on activities, membership, finances, donations, and an orientation for new enrollees.” All interested artists are invited to attend this meeting and to sign up with AWP, a welcome initiative that I wrote about in last week’s column.


NOW AND then I get a truly well thought-out response to a piece I write, and I was happy to receive another one last week from reader Michael G. Aurelio, who used to teach philosophy (perhaps the farthest thing I could have segued to from seven-card stud).

With his permission and my warmest thanks, I’m sharing a bit of what he said:

“I personally know a few writers and poets who would fall under your description of ‘compromised artists,’ i.e., those who can no longer deny the reality of an empty stomach as they write way into the night or who can no longer hide the wish that their books catch up on its sales because money is still money if you are supporting a family. These are not judgments; this is reality. As you said, there is (practical) wisdom in transforming one's talents in ‘producing’ something that others need, something they may actually understand, and frankly, something they will really pay for. And as you hinted, this may no longer be ‘pure art’ as it becomes sedimented with the dirty soil of reality. But we do what we can—‘so long as it pays the rent.’

“In ancient Athens (I apologize for this lengthy detour) only free men were able to practice pure art, e.g., philosophy. The life of contemplation—serving no end other than itself—was only for the few who both had the mind and the time to gaze at the skies all day, seeking answers to their burning questions. These few were called ‘free men’ because they had slaves to do all the ‘work for the house’ (Gr. oikonomia and later ‘economy’); these were ‘men of leisure’ because for them the good life meant drinking and discoursing with each other all day and night. Thus, a life of pure contemplation was for Socrates the only life worth living; for Plato, a life deserved for the philosopher-king; and for Aristotle, the happiest possible life for mortal man.

“Until today, we call some arts the ‘liberal’ arts—those arts for free men—which are distinguished from the ‘servile’ arts—you guessed it, the arts of economy. And until today the notion that learning is in essence leisurely has survived in the word ‘school,’ which originally comes from the Greek skhole both meaning ‘school, lecture, discussion,’ and also ‘leisure, spare time.’

“Yet what has changed—perhaps inevitably so—since the time of those boy-loving Athenians was quite a reversal: the free man of art has become the slave of his previous slaves. Now everything is standing on its head, or better, the life of high art has been buried to the ground—soiled, dirtied—as the strong man of economy has bought his freedom and has turned all art, e.g., poetry (creation) and politics (affairs of the state), psychology (knowledge of the soul) and cosmology (knowledge of the world), etc., into what can be determined with certainty, what can be computed like money, in other words, into a science.

“We see this today with business management classes full to the rafters while the theology class next to it lacks the quorum to begin the lessons. We see this in the bookstores where the humanities section occupies a measly corner in the back—without distinguishing what is philosophy from religion or poetry from non-fiction—while Stephen Covey, John Maxwell or Rich Dad, Poor Dad all greet you with warm dollar-smiles as you enter. (Footnote: ‘Will to Win’ silenced the arrival of Mother Teresa this past weekend.) We see this when the high school teacher leaves to become a domestic helper in Singapore, when the budding young painter is forced to take up law by his father, or when a writer dies and his death makes him more unknown than when he was alive.

“We see this and know this. But no longer do we live in the time of the Greeks nor would it be very intelligent to again become a people who bought and traded slaves in order to remain free.

“If politicians are paid to steal a nation's money, if soldiers are compensated to kill rebels who are really their brothers, should not artists get their fair share ‘for what they do to excite our imaginations, exercise our consciences, and remind us of the things truly worth living for’?... The philosopher will never really be a king. But give him and other artists the dignity of a peasant who toils all day on the soil to feed his family but is able to fly in the boundless realms of the imagination and contemplation with his oil lamp as a sun at night. Give him (back) that freedom at least. Give him that or (continue to) give him nothing at all.”

Penman for Monday, October 8, 2007


I COULDN'T say no when my old friend in theater and now VP-Artistic Director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, “Tata” Nanding Josef, invited me to the CCP for a “Sining Taktakan” symposium devoted to the issue of improving the welfare of artists in this country. I joined a group of artists and policymakers that included singer Grace Nono, actor Ronnie Lazaro, playwright Nick Pichay, CCP president Nes Jardin, and Rep. Del de Guzman, chair of the congressional committee on basic education and arts and culture. Among the reactors were radio talents Eloisa Cruz-Canlas a.k.a. “Lola Sela Bungangera” on DZRH-AM and Constancio “Ka Cade” Cadelina, who shared their colorful experiences.

All of us knew or had heard of woeful cases of artists—writers, actors, painters, musicians, entertainers—who were leading lives of abject privation, ravaged by poverty, disease, and neglect. These were people who had offered the best of their talents to the nation and the world, delighting us with wonderful objects and memorable performances. But because of the nature of their work—and, also, because of the lack of information and legal protection—they ended up being left behind, owning little or nothing, depending on the charity of others.

Artists seem especially susceptible to mismanagement—either by themselves, or by others. Caught in the heady whirl of their art and all too ready to sacrifice their well-being, they are easily exploited. I remember when, starting out as a screenwriter back in the late ‘70s and eager to break into the industry, I got gypped out of my pitifully small paycheck—not once, but twice, and by well-known people in the industry, at that. (Lino Brocka, bless his soul, fought tooth and nail for his co-workers to get their due.) Many artists never see a contract, or are forced to sign lopsided ones. There may be laws already in place to protect, say, copyrights, but artists don’t know about them. Unless they have day jobs as journalists, teachers, and the like, many artists will go through life without any kind of social security or retirement benefit. One catastrophic illness is often all it takes to wipe out whatever an artist has saved; whole libraries and collections are sold, families suffer, and artists die wondering if it was all worth it, to have created so much beauty for so much pain.

To meet these needs, a group of artists led by Nick Pichay (the newest Palanca Hall of Famer, who also happens to be a lawyer) bonded together to form the Artists Welfare Project, which was publicly announced during the symposium. Congressman de Guzman—whom I had a chance to be with a couple of years ago in a private, multisectoral initiative for political reform with Sen. Kiko Pangilinan—admitted that he was new to the cultural sector, but pledged to apply his familiarity with legislative procedures to the promotion of artists’ welfare, possibly through the enactment of a Magna Carta for Artists. Nes Jardin (who—few people know—graduated from the Philippines Science High School before becoming a dancer) gave an impressive presentation during which it was revealed that so-called “creative industries” accounted for $1.6 billion of goods and services around the world in 2005 (and, just in the Philippines, contributed to about 9 percent of GDP that year; the estimate had to be made independently, because our system of national accounts doesn’t factor in “creative industries” such as entertainment and cartoon animation). In other words, artists and their work are a vital economic force and resource as well.

I’m sure—and thankful—that the support of an enlightened politician like Del de Guzman can do much for the cause. But I also made the point in my brief presentation that government support for artists should, as much as possible, be depoliticized, as artists are so often and so easily turned into the courtiers and lapdogs of the powers-that-be. As someone who’s had to seek out all kinds of writing jobs to support his family—from speeches to Viva and Regal scripts and annual reports—I completely understand the need for compromise, and have little problem adjusting to the specific demands of a client. But however we may rationalize things, and however strongly I believe that artists cannot be exempt (but can rather benefit) from sustained doses of reality, a compromised artist is in some ways a diminished one, and that’s just something I’m going to have to live with.

The world may not owe artists a living; but they do have a right as much as anyone else to a decent and dignified livelihood, and to expect some measure of security in their old age in return for their economic and social contributions, and for what they do to excite our imaginations, exercise our consciences, and remind us of the things truly worth living for.


YOU KNOW you’ve reached a point in your writing life—somewhere just beyond the sunny hilltop—when people start asking you for blurbs for the back of their book. It’s a favor I don’t mind doing, for as long as I can find the time, and subject to two conditions: (1) I have to know and like the work and its author; and (2) sorry, but you have to ask me nicely.

I was reminded of this last week when I received a message in my inbox from a young writer—let’s call him Jason—asking me to write a blurb for his short story collection, which he was about to submit to two leading presses for consideration. The letter read: “Dear Butch Dalisay: Could you write a one-paragraph comment on my short story collection, like those comments by established writers printed on the back cover of another writer's book? What do you call that? I plan to submit my short story collection either to MMM Publishing or the WWW Press. Attached with this email is my short story collection. Thank you. Sincerely, J.”

I was, to put it mildly, not thrilled. I appreciated the “thank you” and the “sincerely,” but the body of the message was about as graceful as the Titanic making the acquaintance of an iceberg. Never mind the breezy familiarity of “Butch Dalisay”; for all I knew, the person was the gentlest of Quakers (who go through life without the baggage of “Mr.”, “Mrs.” “Dr.” and such). It was, rather, the implied assumption that I sit around waiting for unsolicited manuscripts to fall on my lap, to be read in a trice and lauded in one purple paragraph. As it happened, I was having one of those weeks from hell, with two book drafts needing to be finished at the same time, a clutch of columns and features to conjure, four classes to teach, and a raft of iPhone newbies just begging for moderation on the PhilMUG forums.

But rather than temper Jason’s youthful exuberance with a meat cleaver, I took a deep breath, held my tongue, and wrote him back in the most Quaker-like mien I could manage under the circumstances: “Dear Jason,” I said, “Let me tell you how these things are usually done. First, you send your manuscript to the publisher. Upon acceptance, the publisher may then ask other authors or critics to provide blurbs—that’s what they’re called—presuming they like the material, and have the time and the inclination to grant the request. Sincerely, Butch Dalisay.”

I hope that response placated Jason, for the time being—but somehow I doubt it. He has, in fact, been corresponding with me for several years now, asking to be read and critiqued, but like I find myself having to occasionally remind my readers, I simply don’t have the time and the energy to perform this service, nor to provide individual or personalized workshops. If you want to study with me, you’ll have to enroll in UP—I’ll be teaching a graduate course in creative nonfiction next semester—or get yourself into the Baguio workshop. Otherwise, you could read my book, The Knowing Is in the Writing: Notes on the Practice of Fiction (UP Press, 2006). But to acknowledge Jason for his remarkable patience, I might—just might—send him a personal message one of these days to give him a frank assessment of his writing. That will be between him and me.

To tell you the truth, I dislike playing judge, jury, and executioner with other people’s work. I can’t avoid it as a teacher and as an editor, but I’d much rather be writing my own stories—whatever they may be worth—than reading tea leaves in the words of others. All it often does—except for my best students, who get the toughest of my comments—is land me in trouble.

Some readers, for example, have tried catching my attention and approbation and, failing that, have begun screaming in my face. A rather persistent one (let’s call him Robin Regalo, for his own protection) started writing me six years ago—pleasantly at first, then more and more shrilly as time went on for reasons only he knows. Exactly two years ago, fed up with his harangues and crying need for some attention, I gave him a bit of it in this column (“Minding Your Manners”, Oct. 17, 2005), unleashing even more anguish from this tortured soul.

In his more plaintive moments, Robin did hint at the source of his discontents. On Aug. 26, 2002, he wrote me to say that “I think more important for Filipino writers is to get beyond writing for the Palanca. Unfortunately for me, most of my work is not palancable—there is such a thing. Something to do with sex, sex, sex, and this age’s ‘dynamic morality’—yes, there is such a thing. I end up writing one month in a year solely for the Palancas. (My main work goes to the New Yorker or Atlantic Monthly's trash bin.) It also looks like I didn't win again this year, and, honestly, this confounds me…. All the winners in last year's short story in English are awful.”

Last week, I found a fresh comment on my blog that sounded a lot like Robin, taking a stab at sarcasm, in the wake of my giddily self-serving news that my new novel had been long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize: “Hope you win. You've already humiliated yourself and maybe all Filipino writers by hustling to finish a novel in 7 days just to qualify for a contest. This may be excusable for a young struggling writer, but not for a prominent old hand. This is also a great excuse: ‘I’m frankly not too hopeful of making it to the shortlist of five authors who’ll be flying to Hong Kong in November—I can imagine what the competition will be like from India and China, with all those novels to be written about silicon Shivas and waking dragons...’ It’s great that you've actually put our country and the Filipino experience well behind other countries. Congrats. I am amazed how principled and dedicated you are as a literary writer…. Oh, don't bother erasing this one. I've forwarded copies to people.”

Dear me, whatever would I erase such a telling comment for? Lighten up, Robin, and write a book, instead of all these bilious missives (and yes, as you can see, I haven’t erased them from my cache at all—so mind what you write me, folks!).

Talk about what artists have to suffer—and not from the government, either. Might it be that hell hath no fury like a writer scorned?

Penman for Monday, October 1, 2007

THE YOUNG entrepreneur Kenneth Yu, who has been bravely publishing a slim but important volume called Philippine Genre Stories (now on its third issue, against all odds), wrote me to raise the question of what makes a work of fiction Filipino. Apparently, this has been the subject of much debate among young writers, especially as it applies to non-realist or “speculative” fiction, as Dean Alfar prefers to call it.

Thanks to a link provided by Kenneth, I’ve been able to peer into some of these discussions, and they display all the understandable anxieties of writers seeking to achieve or claim a certain identity while remaining free to write as they please about whatever suits them. Is “Filipino” determined by material, language, birth, citizenship, place of publication?

I’m not about to adjudicate that debate; I can’t, and I doubt if anyone can. “Filipino-ness” is one of those things that will take more than the six blind men of Hindustan to figure out. But having been asked for my opinion, let me think aloud and venture a few ideas toward an answer.

There’s a part of me that believes in an all-inclusive definition. Anything written by a Filipino should qualify as Filipino literature. It doesn’t matter to me where it’s published, what it contains, or what language it’s written in. I don’t even care what passport the writer carries; citizenships and passports these days are flags of convenience, and while those choices may help shape the attitudes of their makers, you can argue that a Pinoy in Warsaw or West Covina could be as Filipino, or more Filipino, than some Pinoys in, uhm, Wack Wack.

Even these “more than” or “less than” qualifiers could be fruitlessly judgmental, because they already imply a set of standards by which we determine Filipino-ness. I think that Filipinos are all kinds of people—poor and rich, saints and crooks, timid and aggressive, smart and stupid, tall and short, lily-white and nut-brown. In other words—perhaps betraying my bias as a dry-eyed realist, especially in my fiction-writing mode—I don’t think of “Filipino” as a romantic ideal, but as a plain if complex description. (I might talk differently if I were writing a billowy speech for a politician, or taking a Filipino-American grandchild for a walk and a chat about the old country.)

What connects us as Filipinos is the land we came from and some experiences we’ve shared. Many writers will focus on those commonalities, and even raise them up as national traits or virtues—hospitality, resilience, religiosity, the whole Social-Studies shtick. But just as—if not more—interesting are the things that divide and differentiate us as a people and as individuals.

As a fictionist, I write about individuals, not types. I try to make those characters as unique and as memorable as possible. I don’t even think about things like “Character Q stands for this” and “Character M stands for that”; first of all, they have to be able to stand for themselves. Most of those characters are Filipinos—not because I think I know Filipinos, but maybe because I don’t, which is why I write about them. If a critic were to pore over my work for some paper to be delivered at a literary seminar in Singapore, he or she might observe that I often deal with the Filipino lower middle class—the kind of people for whom a gas-stove explosion or a case of diabetes could set a whole family back by one generation of social mobility—but I don’t write stories pondering those things; I think of the purple splotches left by diabetes on a man’s shins, and of a molten doll in the steaming ashes.

I suppose what I’m saying is, the “Filipino” in what we write is practically inescapable; it’s hardwired into our imaginations, and it’ll almost surely come out in whatever we put on paper. (The same should be true for the Burmese, the French, the Maldivians, whoever.) I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s impossible for a Filipino to write a story or novel that bears absolutely no trace of Filipino-ness; you could live abroad long enough—in which case, you’d be better off writing about subways and mackinaws than carabaos and coconuts—or, even here and now, you could be so perfectly alienated that you could write a novel about medieval English warlords and warlocks. Nearly every semester, I have stories submitted to me pretending to take place in New York or Paris—nothing wrong with that, per se—but also as if they were written by someone from those places.

That’s where the attempt at mimicry fails pathetically, just on the level of language. In music or in art, you might be able to play like Rachmaninoff or paint like Pollock, and get away with it without anyone being the wiser. In writing, you can’t—your language will give you away, and locate you as surely as a GPS tracker. At best, you’ll leave a messy trail of purposeful evasion. Besides, like I tell these students, why even bother? There are probably 10,000 American writers out there trying to crash into the pages of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. You’re not going to beat them by writing about a farmhouse in Iowa or gang life in Chicago with an English you borrowed from the Hardy Boys or picked up from watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. When Eric Gamalinda broke into Harper’s with a short story in the 1980s, it wasn’t by posing as a chic Manhattanite, but by writing about how the denizens of Sampaloc, Manila awaited the fall of the Skylab space station. He knew that the material and its treatment were, in economic terms, his “comparative advantage.”

Whatever is perceptibly Filipino in our literature should be an asset and not a liability, especially in this age of creeping homogenization, when—thanks to the economic and cultural dominance of America—everything is beginning to look, sound, and taste alike, from burgers to verses. As soon as I say that, I have to add that this Filipino element doesn’t have to be another kapre or tikbalang (although one of the stories in the first issue of Kenneth Yu’s magazine did a great job with this idea); clichés of any kind degrade the writing, unless they’re being employed comically or subversively. This Filipino element doesn’t mean that your story has to be set in Payatas or Negros, or depend on the exoticism of tropic foliage. We can and should write about the world; it’s about time we did, given that we’re everywhere. I’d love to read a Filipino story or novel set, say, in Norway or aboard a cruise ship in the Bahamas.

And while I myself may be a hard-core realist (to me, all fiction is speculative, and I suspect that everyday life has more mysteries and wonders than can be found in distant galaxies), I’m not beyond appreciating the possibilities of Filipino science fiction and fantasy, for as long as the writer succeeds in making this 53-year-old curmudgeon believe that horses can sprout wings and doors can open to parallel universes. I get impatient with fantasies that spend 80 percent of their time on “worlding” and 20 percent on the unfolding drama. (I tell my students: to test your skills, write for the difficult reader, the one very much unlike you, and not your best friend who will be the easiest soul to please.) I’ll demand more than a localized version of some sword-and-sorcery tale; I’d prefer something contemporary, rather than historical or futuristic (again reflecting my personal bias), but something for which the science and fantasy are crucial elements, without which the story cannot yield its insight. I’d like the science to be manifest less in the gadgetry than in the culture of the piece—say, in the conflict between logic and faith. And for all its exploration of an uncertain future or an alternate reality, I’d like such a work to reflect back on our here and now—to be, as Angela Manalang Gloria put it in another context, “the gravity that ballasts me in space.”

This may be a bold statement to make, but I think that writers who know what they’re doing—whether they’re realists or fantasists—don’t worry about Filipino-ness and such, leaving that to readers and critics to discern and to sort out, if it’s all that important to them. It will always be there, in any work that acknowledges or emanates from the writer’s rootedness in a certain place and time. If it was never there to begin with, no amount of fakery is going to bring it out. You can make a big thing of Filipino-ness if you want to—in which case you might end up with a truly significant work, or just a noisy one.

When I write a story, I worry about plot and character—not about how that story will be labeled by somebody else. Writing a story that people will want to read again is difficult enough. Ultimately, the only nation that will matter to the writer is the one whose passport consists of the published book. As his student Allan Aquino remembers NVM Gonzalez saying, “Writers create their own nation, even if they've never set foot on it.”