Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, February 4, 2008

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We already have several major, high-traffic websites and portals devoted to Philippine literature, among them panitikan.com.ph, which has scored over 3 million hits since it began almost two years ago. We have been able to secure some government funding for this portal, which is regularly updated and acts as a clearinghouse for nearly everything related to Philippine literature.

A work titled Ang Kagilagilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Zsazsa Zaturnnah (The Amazing Adventures of Zsazsa Zaturnnah) deserves special mention, because of its runaway success in several versions—first, as a comic book by the artist Carlo Vergara in 2002, then a stage musical in 2006, and finally as a movie in 2006. Before the musical even opened, all 16 shows had been sold out—an unprecedented feat in Philippine theater. All three versions—comic book, musical, and movie—won critical acclaim. The lesson here? Update and adapt material for new times, themes, and audiences.

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

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

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

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

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

Flotsam & Jetsam (68) for Saturday, February 2, 2008

More on my Flickr page.

Penman for Monday, January 28, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

Penman for Monday, January 21, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Flotsam & Jetsam (67) for Wednesday, January 16, 2008


THERE'S NOTHING, apart from statues and buildings, that reminds me more of Diliman than the cadena de amor, just about the prettiest vine there ever was and one I’d suffer gladly on my walls and fences. Took these shots today of a tree bedecked with these blossoms, and of a spiky flower whose name I don’t know but find interesting. More on my Flickr page.

Penman for Monday, January 14, 2008


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

"We can have the whole world."

"No, we can't."

"We can go everywhere."

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

"It's ours."

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

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

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

Flotsam & Jetsam (66) for Tuesday, January 8, 2008

I HAVE two million other and better things to do instead of blogging (again) tonight, but I passed by Quezon Hall (the administration building of the University of the Philippines System) on my way home from fixing my father-in-law’s computer, and saw this sight. They’re dressing up the campus in lights in preparation for tomorrow’s kick-off, at dawn, of my alma mater’s Centennial. I had to stop and take this, if only to be the first to bring you what Quezon Hall won’t look like for another hundred years.

(See all of my Diliman photos here.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (65) for Monday, January 7, 2008

MACWORLD 2008 is opening next Tuesday (hey, that’s my birthday!) in San Francisco, promising a worthy end to months and weeks of alternately anguished and ecstatic prognostications by the high priests of the Mac cult as to what Steve Jobs will unveil at the keynote. (A perceptive observer described this rapturous moment and its immediate aftermath—when Jobs appears to be all done, then turns and says, “And one more thing...” before unloading the show’s biggest bombshell, like the original iMac and iPod—as a “nerdgasm”.)

Having followed the Macworld hoopla for over ten years now (and having enjoyed the privilege of attending one two years ago), I have several foolproof predictions to make:

1. That one week before Macworld, at least a dozen new wonderful products and upgrades will be rumored to appear, one more fantastic than the other; people will curse and occasionally strangle each other in feverish arguments over whose prediction rings truer.

2. When Macworld itself comes around and the keynote takes place, 3.5 million Mac freaks all around the world will stop eating, working, getting their dialysis, or having sex just to hear Steve Jobs say ".... and one more thing..."

3. When Steve Jobs finally says ".... and one more thing," 1.75 million geeks will punch the air or fall to their knees and say silly things like "Whoopee!", "Yeehah!" and "Hallelujah!" Another 1.75 million will smash their fists into the nearest wall or kick the nearest dog and say silly things like “But where’s my Intel Newton?” or “What???? Another $129 for an effing OS upgrade?” or shake their heads and mutter, “There goes the baby food....”

4. Whatever it was they said in the heat of the moment, three months later, 3.5 million Mac freaks and another 3.5 million infected friends and relatives will be camping out overnight outside the nearest Apple store, coffee cups in shivering hand, for the first-day release of whatever Steve Jobs last pulled out of his pocket.

And one more thing...

5. 28 million Windows zombies and several hundred perennially disgruntled Mac freaks will grumble and mumble “It’s too expensive....”—at least until Steve Jobs announces the Windows version, and then announces a $200 price cut, at which point 1.75 million early-adopter Mac freaks will scream “I’ve been had!”

Penman for Monday, January 7, 2008


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For MetroHIM Magazine, November 2007

LAST MONTH—after three years and eleven countries of traveling together—I finally retired my first Moleskine notebook, having reached those last few pages where you jot down an odd jumble of things like people’s phone numbers, stray lines of poetry, your cat’s vaccination schedule, and your Multiply password.

I’d picked up this notebook in the US after seeing it for the first time in a bookshop in Rome. As a certified gadget freak who never leaves the house without a laptop and a smartphone, I didn’t think I needed a physical, old-fashioned notebook, but it was finally the Moleskine’s snob appeal that got to me. It had been used, its ads proclaimed, by writers like Ernest Hemingway. And since I also collect vintage fountain pens, I thought that the combination of pen and notebook was very stylish in a retro way—as indeed it was.

But little did I expect that style would be resoundingly trumped by substance. I came to depend on the Moleskine much more than I expected—because it fit in my shirt pocket, could open flat on the table (another of its claims to fame), and never needed to boot up or to be recharged. Its creamy paper absorbed ink without feathering; it had a sewn-in bookmark, and best of all a small pocket in the back for business and phone cards, receipts, and ID pictures.

That notebook accompanied me to the Netherlands, Germany, America, Italy, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Korea, and China (aside from dozens of places here at home). I’ve whipped it out to write on in trains, boats, buses, and planes. Mostly I used it to take notes in passing, for some future story or column: the names of places, the flavors of food, the kind of details and impressions you can’t catch with a camera. It’s the closest thing I’ve kept to a diary, chronicling both moments of elation—like riding business class to Europe for the first time—and despondency (never mind over what grievous trifle). Here and there you might spot a dab of ketchup or a blooming blot left by a droplet of Coke. For a few pages the ink might be jet-black, then brown, then blue-black; the letters might display happy flourishes, or be cramped and sullen.

I was sad when I put that first Moleskine to bed, but then I very quickly unwrapped my next one, which I’d stored in reserve for over a year. I can hardly wait to fill it up—and to open many more before I myself reach my own last pages.

Flotsam & Jetsam (64) for Monday, December 31, 2007


MORE SHOTS on my Flickr page here.

Penman for Monday, December 31, 2007


I'D LIKE to give this last column of the year over to some readers who’ve been writing in with their comments, concerns, and other things to share.

From my former student Gina Verdolaga—who’s been around the world and some—came two questions at the end of her message: “Your personal parade-of-pants essay entertained me immensely. Indeed, degustibus non est disputandum. I recall elephant pants, hot pants, harem pants (that displayed aerodynamic properties when twirled on the dance floor), and BangBang! denims from Hong Kong. Wearing funky BB! meant your parents were, as they say, ‘can afford.’ Fast track to leggings, bootleg, capri, then skinny jeans (pencil-cut redux). These days, I’m in tokong surf pants without the surf.

“By the way, could you kindly explain the function of the little mysterious square known as the ‘secret pocket?’ Why was that a male domain/concern? And what about unabashed high-rise thong underwear? Don’t make me go there!”

Well, Gina, I don’t have much to say at the moment about thongs and such—it’ll be added to my long list of research priorities—but secret pockets I can certainly advance a conjecture about, as a self-respecting ‘60s “Amboy” who wouldn’t have dreamt of walking around in his tailored “Burlington” jeans, button-down oxford shirt, and cordovan mocs (with lily-white sport socks, natch) without a secret pocket stitched into a not-so-secret place—right above the semi-horizontal slit that was your regular pocket. (Just years earlier, at the height of the rage for the beltless, clip-on “continental” cut, the same secret pocket was a discreet wink in the belt line; in the ‘70s, it migrated to the inside of the waistband, beside the rubber strips that helped keep your pants up.)

So much for ancient history. Why secret pockets? You’re right, it’s a guy thing—girls don’t have them. (Well—let’s just all nicely agree they don’t. In fact, Beng keeps complaining that women’s clothes, in general, suffer from a paucity of pockets; my jackets all have inner pockets for passports, tickets, etc., but hers don’t.)

My first explanation for these mini pants pockets is a practical and therefore corny one: back when you could get from Cubao to Diliman with a ten-centavo coin and the pedestrian’s nemesis was the ubiquitous mandurukot, it made good sense to stash some loose change into that pocket, so you could get home just in case without having to bother some surly police sergeant. It was more a psychological crutch than anything: you were insured by sartorial foresight against the world’s wiliest fingers. If you couldn’t feel someone poking into your secret pocket, then you might as well have been dead to the world—a world that deserved to end, if a 20-centavo coin (yes, boys and girls, they came in twenties then, and it could buy you a Coke) was worth picking your holy of holies for. (In 1967, the National Treasurer estimated that P3.86 million worth of coins was lodged in secret pockets all over the archipelago.)

My second theory has to do with fingers—yours, the wearer’s. Don’t ask me why, but guys love to stick their hands in pockets. It pacifies them, makes them feel cool, comfortable, and pleasantly occupied. They can twiddle their fingers all they want inside pockets, or scratch some even more secret itch. In idle moments, daydreaming about Ipanema or Barbarella (folks, if you don’t know the reference, so sorry), a guy might find his forefinger straying into his secret pocket and pawing the fabric of the lining there—something like scratching your chin, but less obtrusively, so as not to embarrass yourself or whoever you may be speaking or listening to with your wildly vagrant distractions.

Sad to say, secret pockets long went out of fashion, which probably explains why men are less pensive these days and more prone to outbursts of baboonish expressiveness. At least that’s what I think.


FROM READER Ted Limpoco—a true-blue Atenean judging by the company he keeps—came this reaction to my second-anniversary musings on blogging:

“I agree that frontierless literature is a cute misperception, even with the broadened possibilites of cyberspace. Most Internet users are urban and cosmopolitan, which immediately marginalizes a substantial number of readers and consumers of literature. I do not have the romantic notion that my blog reaches legions of readers. The audience that I have in mind are the few friends who know about my blog, and, hopefully, casual strangers that accidentally come upon it and just so happen to share my interests. Given that I do not purposefully seek out blogsites myself, and just stick to the few that are my friends', I presume that the latter group is perhaps statistically insignificant. But, the possibility still exists, and I cling to it out of my own need to have an audience as a writer.

“I used to write a bit of poetry before I left for graduate school in the US. I was miserable during my first year here, and what helped me the most was my small investment in a Moleskine notebook that encouraged a modest habit of journal keeping. I tried keeping journals before without success, perhaps because of my aversion to gushing, lurid confessionals. I like keeping myself in check—in other words, to edit myself. My friend Rofel Brion asked me if I would consider collecting my émigré emails/journal entries and publishing them. I felt that, somehow, the written page was not the proper home of these informal wandering texts. And then I discovered the possibilities of the blogosphere through my friend, the Mindanao artist Jean Claire Dy, and have been blogging ever since.

“I love the open, unstructured format, and also its immediacy. This gives the form a certain exuberance that attracts youth. This also makes the need for self-editing more urgent, which I continue to strive for. Most of all, for me, the blog is way to converse, with friends, with like-minded people, and—as Jonathan Franzen says in How to Be Alone—with writers I love to read.

“I read or heard somewhere that people marry essentially to find a person to be a witness to their lives. I think the same need is at work here. It can have extreme narcissistic manifestations in the form of reality TV, but it also drives great writing that connects us with people and with our inner selves. The blog can be both.

“Somehow, after finishing a blog entry, I feel same way I do after emailing friends, which is just not the same feeling I get when I write in my Moleskine journal: I feel less alone.”

Very well put, Ted. It’s unusual, though, that you even think of self-editing, when many blogs seem to be written for precisely the opposite purpose—to serve as a bedpan for a kind of digital diarrhea. But then again that’s literature in its infinite and ineluctable variety, the vigor that comes with rawness and audacity. Here’s to both livelier and more thoughtful blogging in 2008.


PETTIZOU TAYAG, vice president of the Quiz Bee Foundation, reports that that the 28th National Quiz Bee—the country’s longest-running and most respected academic competition—has reached its National Grand Finals. The two-part finals opened yesterday and will end on January 6 at the Development Academy of the Philippines Auditorium in Tagaytay City. They will be shown on Studio 23 from 6 to 7:30 pm.

The regional contenders in the subject categories of Elementary Makabayan (Philippine history, culture & Sports), Elementary Mathematics, High School Science & Technology, and Collegiate General Information & International Affairs had to beat 6 million student aspirants to get to Tagaytay.

Aside from the competition itself, the finalists and their teacher-coaches also enjoyed a four-day all expense paid live-in camp with tours, seminars, and fellowships in what’s been called the “Summit of the Super Quiz Bees” in preparation for the competition.

Substantial, education-oriented prizes will be won by the students, their coaches, and their schools, divisions, and regions.

As a high-school quiz team captain myself, I can only root for my fellow nerds, who’ll probably end up writing columns instead of nursing anterior cruciate ligament injuries. How can you think of basketball when there’s Avogadro’s number and the value of pi to figure out?


LANGUAGE AND communications expert Dr. Dups de los Reyes wrote in to say that his new book Watch Your English is now available at National Book Store and Fully Booked.

A fellow alumnus of the UP English department, “Dr. Dups” is a much sought-after resource person for seminars and training programs on corporate and interpersonal communication. As I noted in the book’s blurb, which I was glad to provide, “In simple, clear, informative, and engaging chapters—many of which will make you laugh as you learn—the author walks us through the minefield of English, reminding us of the subtle but important differences between infer and imply, stationery and stationary, and so on. He takes the pain out of learning and remembering grammar and usage, and provides helpful exercises to consolidate the lessons.

“Watch Your English is a book that will be of great help to students and professionals, but more than a guide to better English, it’s fun to read on its own. If our language tells us and others who we are, then Watch Your English has a lot to reveal about ourselves—and how to use English to our best advantage at home, in the classroom, and in the office.”

Check it out!

Flotsam & Jetsam (63) for December 26, 2007

I’M TAKING Beng down to Palawan tomorrow for a few days of quiet time—she with her watercolors, me with my novel—and I don’t know what the Internet situation is going to be like in our straw hut, so please be patient if I’m a little late with the comment moderation.... Why even bother with the Internet down in Palawan, you say? Well, you’re talking to the guy who years ago went to Puerto Princesa with ten other friends, all of whom hit the water the first chance they got; I too hit the beach—to find the one cabana with a live outlet in it, so I could peck away on my laptop on a column-piece about, uh, the ideal vacation.

Penman for Monday, December 24, 2007


WHILE I was sitting on the throne a few weeks ago, my royal attention was caught by a TIME article reporting on what it called the “boxer rebellion”—a move by lawmakers in several US states to ban low-rise baggy pants that expose the wearer’s briefs or boxers. “Bans are being considered in at least eight states, and several towns have already passed ordinances,” the report read. “In Delcambre, La., violators can receive a $500 fine or spend up to six months in jail.”

Good grief, I thought—jail time for exposing not even your nether regions, but your flowered underwear? And in this day and age, when people can cross the highway naked without stopping traffic? While I don’t think I’m in any danger of being hauled off to prison for this offense (but then again, if it’s me doing it, maybe I should be locked up in reclusion perpetua), I’m reflexively averse to any law against any fashion, or even bad taste, which is its own punishment.

I tried to remember what the fashions and the rules were in our time—“our time” being when I was young and foolish enough to think that it actually mattered to the universe if my trouser hem swept the ground (sayad) or revealed my shins (bitin). Today I’m old and foolish enough to still believe that, although waist size and body shape, more than anything, now determine what I can wear (never mind what I want to wear).

Back in high school in the mid- to late ‘60s, we were obliged to wear uniforms, which then as now was a sensible idea, and like all sensible ideas was bound to be staunchly resisted by the young and the restless. I thanked God I was born a boy, because all we were tasked to wear was a white polo shirt and charcoal-gray long pants; the girls had to wear bright yellow outfits that lent them a sunny disposition through a kind of artificial lighting. Our pants, however, were only ours to wear, and not to measure.

The school administration’s pet peeve then (this, mind you, while bombs were falling on Hanoi and the kids were making more kids to the accompaniment of Jim Morrison and with a little help from their chemical friends) was “tight pants”—pants that looked more like they had been sprayed on than gotten into. If baggy and saggy is the in thing for today’s homeboy, it was sleek and tight back then, the tighter the sexier—although it’s hard to attach “sexy” to the image of a pimply, pubescent 13-year-old sporting a PMT crew cut and smelling like last week’s socks, which he was probably wearing.

The law-enforcement types among us (the yearbook should have marked them as The Ones Most Likely to Break Strikes) went around pinching people’s pants, to see if they could hold on to anything with their puckered fingers; if they couldn’t, then the pants were too tight, and the violator was sent home to contemplate his offense and his benighted future. (This was a science high school, so you could be Galileo and defy the Pope—but not wear tight pants. But hold on—surely Galileo wore tights while he was figuring out the phases of Venus? Didn’t they all?)

Eventually, we all succumbed to higher authority—certainly not that of the principal, but of fashion itself, which dictated at some point that the days of slinky pants and mid-calf boots were over, to be replaced by (insert drumroll here) bellbottoms. I was an early adopter even then—the trendy sort who watched every “Monkees” episode with a connoisseur’s eye and who ran the next morning to the local tailor (La Jolla, in Barrio Malinao in Pasig) with a sketch and several yards of whatever I could filch from my mother’s odds and ends. Naturally, I was among my school’s first bellbottom boys—walked right into a party, ready to shing-a-ling and to boogaloo, in my brand-new pants that still clung to my thighs like they hadn’t seen each other for years (and of course they didn’t) and, to complete the porma effect, a white turtleneck sweater with green horizontal stripes. Oh—did I say the pants were checkered red and green, and hanging about two inches off the dancefloor?

Lawlaw and sayad pants would come still later—if ripped jeans became all the rage in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, then tattered hems were it for a while in the late ‘60s. Your hems had to be as wide as your shoes; we all looked like Gumby, the Ultimate Clayboy, thus prefiguring the hip-hop era, minus the gold chains and the baseball caps. With the ‘70s came Levi’s and flared pants—the bellbottom revisited, but with a rakish angle to the tailored hem, the better to reveal your platform shoes. If people should be incarcerated for what they wear, the ‘70s would have turned the world into a penal colony—especially with the advent of double-knit pants (coming in a waffle pattern, in my case) and pointy collars you could mop the spaghetti sauce with.

Now, I say, thank God for double-vented, double-cuffed khaki slacks with hidden elastic waistbands and spare buttons for the inevitable pop-off. (I can see all these twiggy twenty-somethings clutching their throats and begging each other, “Shoot me, please, if you ever see me wearing gabardine slacks!” Well, guys, I’ll shoot you in 15 years, prepare to die.) Having successfully sidestepped ripped jeans (like a good middle-aged Pinoy, I press my denims, not tear them apart) and cargo pants, I worry less about how my pants will look than if they’ll keep hanging above my waist close to my armpits, like the man in the barrel.

Of course, I could always let them slide down, lower… and lower, below my overflowing gut. And maybe reveal a smidgen of my periwinkle boxers. Or maybe not. (Here, insert the track of “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred.)

Oh, sorry—was that your breakfast on the floor?


OKAY, LET'S move up from the ridiculous to the sublime. I can’t let the year pass without delivering on a promise to a good friend and his noble cause—architect and heritage conservation advocate Augusto “Toti” Villalon. Toti wrote me late last month to report that a very important meeting of international heritage experts was going to be held in the Philippines, and it was, from December 2 to 8.

The delegates belonged to ICOMOS (the International Council of Monuments and Sites), the official international organization of architects, landscape architects, urban planners, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, tourism professionals, lawyers, and other professionals involved in the heritage conservation profession who are recognized as international leaders in the field. ICOMOS has its headquarters in Paris, and it regulates the international conservation profession.

This year’s meeting of the Committee on Vernacular Architecture of ICOMOS was devoted to “Protecting Endangered Traditional Landscapes”, and much of the conference took place at the Rice Terraces in Banaue, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Villalon explains: “The meeting focused on the current status of the five terrace clusters located in Ifugao province inscribed in the World Heritage in Danger List. The ‘In Danger’ designation simply means that conservation measures for a site on the World Heritage List must be stepped up to prevent its rapid deterioration.

“At this moment, physical repair of the terraces is necessary. However, restoring the terraces and their walls must come together with establishment of cultural and economic opportunities that make terrace life more viable for the 21st century.” Among other solutions, UNESCO has suggested the establishment of additional income-generating opportunities such as community-based cultural and ecotourism programs.

The ICOMOS meeting also allowed Filipino conservation practitioners—many of them quite young—to interact with their foreign colleagues, a rare opportunity, given the absence of conservation courses from our curricula. Many challenges lie ahead for our heritage conservators, but Toti reminds us that it’s important to know that “Good conservation work is actually being done in the country. Our heritage is not going down the drain like everyone seems to think.”

The meeting was supported by the US Ambassadors’ Fund for Cultural Preservation, e8/TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company), Fundación Santiago, Ayala Foundation, Ramón Aboitiz Foundation, Department of Tourism, and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).


AND SPEAKING of the NCCA, here’s a reminder that nominations for the next National Artist Awards are now being accepted in the fields of music, dance, theater, visual arts, literature, film and broadcast arts, and architecture and allied arts. Since Fernando Amorsolo received the first award in 1972, 57 Filipinos—15 of them still living—have been given this highest of distinctions. Please check the NCCA website at www.ncca.gov.ph for more details.

Meanwhile, may we all have that most impossible of wishes for the season: a stress-free Christmas, and money in January!

PS / I've turned on comment moderation on this blog, but the Haloscan servers must be processing a barrage of comments this season, so it might take a few hours for your comment to appear. Many thanks!

T3 Select Opinion for December 2007


Before I forget and these pieces go utterly stale, here’s a couple of recent T3 columns on the iPhone, about which I will write no further until its scheduled release in Asia early next year (the scuttlebutt’s that it will be released in Singapore January 15, to coincide with the opening of a new terminal and an Apple Store in Changi Airport—I trust my source, but neither he nor I can verify that claim, so take it as yet another wild rumor until the real thing happens). And as I’ve noted over in the PhilMUG message board, I’m just about all iPhoned-out—and it isn’t even officially here yet!

BY THE time this column appears, we should’ve gotten more definite news about the official launch of the iPhone in Asia, scheduled for sometime in 2008—many months after the iPhone’s splashy debut in the US last June 29.

Ironically, many of the Asians most likely to buy iPhones already have them. My restaurateur friend and fellow Mac freak Elbert holds the distinction of being the first locally-based Pinoy to own one, as of July 3. He’s since been followed by easily several hundred Filipinos, who’ve gotten their iPhones directly from the US or from good old Greenhills.

The problem is, the iPhone’s supposed to work only with AT&T in the US (and Orange in the UK). Theoretically, you can’t get it to function as a phone unless you sign up for an AT&T package. How did all these people—and hundreds of thousands of others all around the world—get around that bind?

By hacking, of course. Almost as soon as the iPhone hit the streets, a global network of hackers mounted a concerted assault on the iPhone’s innards, eventually tunneling their way into several solutions, working on the device’s hardware, software, and SIM card. Apple shut off these options with a later firmware upgrade, but even Steve Jobs had to acknowledge that they were just playing a “cat and mouse” game with the hackers.

Is hacking the iPhone legal? Well, yes and no. An exemption in the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows individuals to unlock their phones—by themselves, for their own use. Have it done by someone else, and you could have a problem—that is, if Apple, AT&T, or our own National Telecommunications Commission takes the trouble of going after you. The NTC itself has said that unless someone files a complaint, they have better things to do.

Methinks that Apple should play it cool and remember its own roots in the hacker culture—back when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs did their “blue box” hack to cheat (guess who) the old AT&T out of some long-distance phone calls back in 1975. Now that they’re in bed with this corporate giant, Apple should be the first to see the irony of the situation.

The bottom line is that every iPhone sold anywhere means a clear profit for Apple. AT&T doesn’t subsidize the phone and doesn’t operate here, so it really loses no money. If it’s your phone, you ought to be able to use it any way you want—to make calls, or to break ice cubes with.

We’re not urging anyone to turn to a life of cybercrime, but there are good hacks and bad hacks, and hacking the iPhone is a digital adventure that may be too exciting to pass up for many, including not a few Pinoys.

T3 Select Opinion for November 2007


YOU KNOW what happens when a new top-of-its-class product comes out in the US market: it’s here in Manila the next week, tucked into the carry-on bag of an indulgent tita.

That’s what happened as soon as the iPhone was released in the US last June 29. Among the 200,000-plus units it sold on opening day and the many thousands more the weeks following were several dozen iPhones destined for Pinoy Apple fanboys like me who’d been waiting for the blasphemous “Jesus phone” for ages. The iPhone isn’t supposed to be released in Asia till early 2008, which made getting them now even more imperative.

They began trickling in throughout July and August, and by September 1st we had enough working iPhones to hold a historic first Philippine iPhone Users Club meet in Bonifacio High Street. (See the pic in the next article above.)

But wait, did I say “working”? Did I mean iPhones—theoretically locked in to US giant telco AT&T—running on Globe, Smart, and Sun? I guess I did. Barely a month after its release, the inevitable happened: a New Jersey teenager found a way to unlock the iPhone; his hardware hack was complemented by other software-based solutions. I’m not going to go into those details now—heck, if you’re reading this, then you know your way around Google—but suffice it to say that where there’s a will, there’s a way, and no stronger will has been exercised of late than the resolve of hackers worldwide to liberate the iPhone from its American moorings.

Of course we all felt good and extra smart: early adopters get bragging rights and whatever thrill comes from seeing other people’s tongues sweep the ground.

And then the inevitable happened: on September 5, Steve Jobs announced huge price cuts in the iPhone line, presaging the arrival of the second-gen Rev B, which will hopefully address many of the iPhone’s teething problems. The otherwise joyful news was met by a symphony of anguished cries by early adopters, who felt they’d been cheated out of $200.

But not me. Sure, I paid a lot for a new iPhone, but I’ve always been a Rev A sort of guy; my thinking is, of course Rev B’s bound to better, but if I keel over tomorrow, I’ll never see it, so why wait? The whole point of being on the bleeding edge is to cheat time. We early adopters pay the price of quick obsolescence—but for a dazzling minute back there, we had what no one else did, and that’s what technology is all about, isn’t it?

Penman for Monday, December 17, 2007


SOMETIME LAST month, my blog (“Pinoy Penman”, at www.penmanila.net) hit two milestones within a few days of each other: its second anniversary, and its 100,000th hit. I began blogging on November 25, 2005 for two reasons: (1) it seemed like an interesting thing to do; and (2) I wanted an easily accessible, online repository of everything I was writing, as much for my own reference as well as that of others.

I know that a lot of skeptics out there still see blogging as a digital form of shameless self-promotion, and maybe it is; as a personal and unsolicited newsletter, the blog certainly requires a bit of cheeky exhibitionism, in the very least some expectation that you’re going to be read by perfect strangers. But then again, isn’t all writing? Doesn’t blogging simply short-circuit (not to mention cheapen, by a mile) the print-publishing process, taking no more than a few minutes and a few keystrokes to serve up your latest oeuvre to theoretical thousands?

There’s a downside, of course, to consider: the absence of editing (and thus another pair of critical eyes), or perhaps just the absence of self-awareness and plain good sense. More than a few bloggers use their blog as a trash bin and a barf bag, ready to receive its daily load of rants and sundry discontents; others wield it like a battle axe, emboldened by the Internet’s cloak of anonymity. I’ll admit to having done a little bit of both, but I prefer to see my blog as an old-fashioned portfolio, a satchel full of papers and notes jotted on the fly.

Over these past couple of years I’ve managed to meet and make new friends over the blog (like Bro. Ronron Lorilla in Naga, Dr. Remy Lacsamana over in Florida, and Pat Schork in Pennsylvania) as well as, inevitably, attract a few persistent gadflies, stalkers, and trolls (they know who they are). The pluses definitely outweigh the minuses, and I don’t regret for one minute having opened my digital doors to the world at large.

By some stroke of serendipity, I was invited to speak two Sundays ago at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the Philippine PEN, and I couldn’t resist opening my brief remarks with something I suddenly remembered: that I had begun my blog with a piece on the very first national PEN conference in 1958. And thus did past and present come together—maybe even the future, because our session was devoted to “Literature Without Frontiers,” opened by a piece on blogging by the Dumaguete-based writer Ian R. Casocot.

I shared Ian’s enthusiasm for blogging as a means and a medium of literary expression—I think the best of the form and of its use is yet to come—but I’m not as sold as I should be on the idea of “Literature Without Frontiers” (it’s a phrase from the PEN Charter) as a present or even imminent reality. It’s one of those notions that sound very smart and timely, that are supposed to give us a warm and fuzzy feeling—almost as if we held hands and sang “It’s a Small World”—but I deeply suspect that it just isn’t true: it hasn’t happened yet, and might not happen soon.

I realize that we live in this age of globalization, where boundaries are supposed to have vanished and the Internet has made everything accessible to everyone. But real boundaries and frontiers remain. Even the Internet, with all its promise of democracy and liberation, is in fact the province of a relative few—of predominantly young, educated, affluent users.

The Internet as we Filipinos have been using it remains largely a playground for young people, and the kind of literature it will engender will be a young person’s literature—full of immediacy, intimacy, but also a certain narrowness of focus.

As someone who’s been writing for a living for the greater part of his life, I’ve never really looked at writing with a moist, romantic eye, and am acutely aware of its materiality as a profession and an industry. In this respect I have to say that Philippine literature is still bounded by many frontiers—in terms of language, publishing, translation. From the writing and publishing angle of things, we still write for very clearly defined and rather small audiences who look and sound a lot like ourselves.

But then again the Internet also offers new possibilities for more obscure and disadvantaged voices to emerge—bypassing the need to print and sell expensive books to people who prefer or privilege tradition. The encoded word may never take the place of the printed one, but it stands on its own frontier, looking out into a great and exciting space beyond.


CONGRATULATIONS ARE in order for some young Filipino authors who made a name for themselves on the global stage this year. I got a message from Philippine Genre Stories publisher Kenneth Yu to share the happy news that a number of PGS contributors and regulars got published in various magazines abroad and online.

As I was telling some of my colleagues at the meeting of the National Committee for Literary Arts in Cebu last week, someone should be working on promoting Philippine literature abroad as much as we promote our literatures among ourselves. The fact is, the foreign reader won’t know or even care whether a Filipino work was written by a Tagalog, an Ilonggo, or an Ilocano—it will all be Philippine literature to him or her. (That’s why I think we should put more effort and money into translation, because that’s the only way we can equalize access to international attention, presuming we’re interested in it—and please don’t tell me we’re not.)

According to Kenneth—who himself published a story recently in a US-based e-zine—the following young writers broke new ground for us abroad: Kate Aton-Osias, Nikki Alfar, Kristin Mandigma, Crystal Koo, and Chiles Samaniego. A number of other PGS friends and contributors also did well at the 2nd Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards sponsored by author Neil Gaiman and Fully Booked, reports Kenneth.

Great work, folks—that’s the way to do it: don’t wait for anyone to hold your hand; just write the best way you know how, send the story out, and write the next one.


LIKE MANY Manileños this season, I had to shuttle between three Christmas parties and events last Saturday evening, but one of them—smack in the middle of the PhilMUG and Newsbreak parties—gave me special cause for pleasure: the launching of the first book of a former student of mine, Migs Villanueva, at the EDSA Shangri-La mall. It’s always a source of joy and pride for a teacher to see his or her students come into their own as authors, and for Migs—a painter, videographer, and mother of four when she’s not writing prizewinning stories (the Palanca and NVM Gonzalez Awards now crowd her resume)—this first book has been a long time coming.

It isn’t a book of her fiction, yet, but a sumptuous overview of the works of the illustrious Saturday Group of Artists, now entering its fourth decade under the leadership of the master Mauro “Malang” Santos (who, if there’s any justice in this universe, should be on next year’s roster of National Artists, despite his own expressed disdain for the award).

The Saturday Group Art Book brings together both the best of Villanueva’s talents and the best of the SGA—with stalwarts Cris Cruz, Lydia Velasco, and Fernando Sena backstopped by bright younger talents such as Caloy Gabuco, Omi Reyes, Bus Convocar, Anna de Leon, Roel Obemio, and Migs herself, who also crafted the text and designed the handsome-looking book.

It’s too bad that the author wasn’t around for the launch—she was in Hong Kong, I think, on more urgent family business—but good books like this one are savored and get better long after the launch, and I look forward to another milestone from Migs in the form of her long-due book of stories—a second “first”, if you will, for this many-faceted artist. Congrats to you, too!

Flotsam & Jetsam (61) for Thursday, December 13, 2007

I felt positively pedestrian in the company of people like Tingting Cojuangco, Mayenne Carmona, and Lucy Torres, but I had fun anyway the other day at the Philippine STAR’s first-ever Christmas party for its Lifestyle columnists—all 105 of them (or I should say “us”), can you believe it—at the Shangri-La Makati.

I shared a table with my fellow Arts & Culture scribblers (that's them in those pics)—Krip Yuson, Danton Remoto, Juaniyo Arcellana, Exie Abola, and Rica Bolipata-Santos, joined later by Frankie Sionil Jose and his wife Tessie—but my neck soon ached from ogling the celebs and the young ‘uns at the other tables. (Call it my “Bread of Salt” moment.)

The food was good (even for this culinary philistine): I gorged on the asparagus and shrimp salad and the smoked salmon. The inevitable raffle was even better: like everyone in that room, I went home with something—a Swatch watch (too blingy for me, unfortunately, but not for Demi, who’s already laid claim to it by long distance) and a gift certificate from Adidas, which I intend to convert into a sensible pair of shoes, like a true pedestrian.

Penman for Monday, December 10, 2007


IT WAS the busiest of weekends for Filipino writers, with both Writers Night and its related activities and the Golden Anniversary Conference of the Philippine PEN taking place at the same time. Aside from minding the launch of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature on Writers Night, I was due to take part in a PEN panel discussion first thing Sunday morning (oooh, my hangover) and to fly to Cebu early Monday for the election of the new board of the NCCA’s National Committee for Literary Arts.

I make it sound as if writers lead exciting lives—and maybe sometimes we do—but weekends like this are a happy break from our long and torturous dates with the blinking cursor, the Muse’s Mephistopheles, that constant reminder of her ineluctable thirst for fresh blood: the next letter, the next word, the next phrase.

Thankfully, I’ve hardly been alone in keeping this deity happy, and the best proof of this lies in the journal we launched last Saturday—out, finally, after over a year in production. Let me take a page or so from the introduction that I and my associates—J. Neil Garcia and Lilia Quindoza Santiago—put together for the inaugural issue:

“Likhaan was conceived to invite and to showcase the best of new and unpublished Philippine writing in English and Filipino. It is a journal of Philippine—and not just university—writing; by this we mean creative writing of any kind that has some vital connection to Filipino life and Filipino concerns, no matter who writes the piece or where it is written….

“The editors received a total of 225 submissions—128 in English, and 97 in Filipino. These totals comprised 54 stories, 59 suites of poems, 14 essays, and one play in English, as well as 55 stories, 25 suites of poems, 16 essays, and one play in Filipino….

“Charlson Ong’s excerpt from his novel Banyaga: A Song of War is a powerful account of exile from childhood and its original grace, brotherly devotion, misfortune, predestination, molestation, an ill-fated boy taking wing in the end. All throughout the gloomy smell of incense and guttering candles pervades, alongside intimations of Peking Opera costumery and music. The storytelling is vintage Ong: robust and dramatic, but infused with the wistful magic and authority of the traditional tale.

“’An Epistle and Testimony From June 13, 1604’ by the Ateneo graduate Douglas Candano is a reassurance of sorts that the older Ong’s ‘Chinoy’ or Chinese-Filipino project is in good hands. This fabulistic narrative clearly draws on the friar-concocted cronicas and relaciones in Blair and Robertson, and has succeeded for the most part (and despite a few historical lapses we can yield to the fiction) in appropriating their voice.

“Socorro Villanueva’s ‘Foggy Makes Me Sad’ is the most elegantly narrated and clear-eyed of the lot, a restrained, well-paced middle-class family drama evoking Amy Tan in the feminine continuum it presents of Lola, Mama, Tita, and the daughter, whose innocence is both burden and gift. Other than its elegiac recollections of a lost (and breathable) Baguio, it is memorable for the twist in the end, cruel and terrifying though it may be. A painter and book designer with a background in psychology, Villanueva has an unerring eye for significant detail, more than capably illumined by her masterful language and urbane but sympathetic sensibility.

“Alexis Abola’s personal essay, ‘Pilgrim of the Healing Hand,’ is a kind of travelogue recording an actual trip from Cubao to Lucena. The physical journey is paralleled by a quest for coherence, for meaning in disparate facts and events. While its insight that fiction is neater than life is certainly not new, the details of his journey are, as well as their juxtapositions against each other, and the unique and, for many city-dwelling Filipinos, strangely collective story they tell. The interesting suggestion here is that, like many writers and artists, Abola—a professor of English at the Ateneo whose quiet fiction has also earned him critical attention—must himself have been hurt by life into art.

“Gemino Abad’s essay on Fernando Maramag historicizes this early Filipino Anglophone’s poetic utterances, arguing for their continuing relevance in relation to the question of a ‘Filipino poetry from English.’ This, of course, is Abad’s famous and impassioned hypothesis, which he pursues once more in this essay: what Filipino poets write is not in English, but from it, inasmuch as their imaginations cannot be said to be constituted linguistically, being pre-verbal and pre-symbolic.

“Mikael de Lara Co’s suite of poems impressed our readers for their ‘raw nerve tempered by passages of lyric articulation.’ His work was ‘sensitive to the urban mood of rush, frenzy, and agitation,’ and was ‘set apart by its rude, jagged music.’ Another reader took note of ‘a poem full of enjambed lines, as though holding itself tight against the threat of loss or change or suffering. The central images of wind and leaves start off as literal physical details which, in due course, attain a resonance, convincing because gradually built up.’

“The poetry of Joel Toledo—a recent winner of Britain’s prestigious Bridport Prize and among our finest new poetic voices—is a sustained feat in the lyrical mode. The various poems ring out in different tonal registers, each one well-crafted, and everyday matter gains a philosophical dimension through the poet’s meditative lens. Demonstrating perfect poise and subtlety, a Toledo poem does not rage against the dying of the light, but is quiet and accepting, coming to fullness without bombast.

“The even younger Raymond de Borja’s suite was found by the readers to be ‘fearless in its attempt to fuse seemingly unrelated cognates of poetic thought, and inventive in language without straining the given idioms. His ‘The Limits of Archaelogy’ probes the limits of reconstructing and understanding a past life, or way of life. There are only bones, finally; death and disruptions are forever.’

“The selections in Filipino display an equal richness of talent and material, and a fine blend of mastery and innovation.

“Francisco Arias Monteseña’s ‘Iluminado’—the only poetry collection selected—is a display of verbal virtuosity by a writer with a remarkable linguistic repertoire in the national language. The play with, and of, words is ‘illuminating’ which apparently is the spirit behind the dynamism in poetic expression and creation. The poet creates couplets in Filipino with ease and insight minus the florid (bulaklakin) and wordy (maligoy) style that characterize the writings especially of beginning writers in Filipino.

“’White Love’ by Rene Villanueva is a play that investigates and interrogates one of the most notorious episodes of Philippine colonial history: the attempt by then Secretary of the Interior Dean Worcester to muffle the freedom of the press and of expression to advance the interests of imperial America in the Philippines. Through the use of the ‘Koro’ (chorus) as ‘conscience’ and a foil character, Mateo, the Filipino who acts as Worcester's aide, Villanueva unfolds the drama of early American exploration in the highlands of the Cordilleras.

“’Rayuma’ by Alwin Aguirre is speculative Filipino fiction at its best. The writer uses his keen understanding of the quirks of tropical weather and merges this with an incisive description of the pain of longing and aging. The main character in this story is thus vested with an intense desire to live through it all—the nasty and unpredictable weather, and old age itself, in order to reach a destination and a dream.

“’Ang Heredero ng Tribo Hubad sa Isla Real’ by Mayette Bayuga is a peregrination story that combines mythmaking with clear references to anthropological excavations and historical accounts and taunts our sense of identity and reality. The protagonist in the story is baffled by the mystery of the naked tribe on Isla Real, only to find himself one among them. And like all members of the tribe, he does not know where fantasy ends and reality begins.

“’Huli’—here pronounced ‘HOO-li’, malumi not mabilis, and meaning ‘catch’ or ‘caught’—is a story by a very young writer, Catherine S. Bucu, and uses the device of double intention ingenuously. The narrative depicts how a friendly and exciting fishing expedition for the butanding (the Philippine whale-shark) turns into an extraordinary event for friends and lovers. An outstanding quality of this story is its unfolding of passion, courage, and drama on the high seas, making it one of surprisingly few Filipino stories that acknowledge and make use of the Philippines’ archipelagic waters as a setting and factor in the narrative.

“’Minsan sa Binondo’ is a nostalgia piece by Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio—a writer better known for her drama in English and her advocacy of children’s literature through her puppet troupe, Teatrong Mulat. In this excerpt from her first novel, Binondo, a familiar haunt in the imagination of many Manileños, is relived and revived. Memory is aided by a narrative that exhibits a childlike wonder for the old, innocent and untainted Binondo, long since lost to urban sprawl and decay.

“Reuel Molina Aguila’s meditation on the ‘Haibun’ is a challenge to both poets and literary critics. Aguila compels us to see that Haibun can deepen our mastery of our own poetic forms as well as liberate Filipino poetics from all manner of inhibitions and repressions.

“In addition to these contributions, the editors also actively solicited two pieces that should serve as templates for future articles of a similar nature: an interview with National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera and a pictorial essay on the great, groundbreaking poet-critic Alejandro G. Abadilla.

“While we have been deeply gratified by the quality and variety of this first crop—our most senior contributor, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, was born in 1930 and the youngest, Catherine Bucu, was born in 1986—we know full well that this journal can yet be better, sharper, and more comprehensive.”

And—speaking as this inaugural issue’s editor—I’m sure it will. Likhaan’s editor for 2008 will be none other than National Artist Virgilio Almario, and we’re hoping to receive an equally impressive range of responses to that damnably demanding, imperturbably impertinent blinking cursor.

PS. I sent in the column above just before I learned of the passing of Rene Villanueva and Monico Atienza. My deepest condolences to their families and friends—and we'll set aside, for Rene's, a copy of his Likhaan play that he'll never get to see.

Flotsam & Jetsam (61) for Saturday, December 8, 2007


WHEN I'M depressed or nervous—i.e., when I’m staring at a deadline I can’t possibly meet, or stuck in some kind of emotional rut—I do what any self-respecting boy would do: I take out my toys and line ‘em up, even shine ‘em up, and play with them until I remember how surrounded I am by beautiful objects (no Buddhist mantras for now, please). I have an even stranger (and more disastrous) habit of buying nice new things just when I’m standing on the verge of bankruptcy.... which explains the new 10-megapixel Leica D-Lux 3 I got off eBay a month ago and which my Mom handcarried home from Virginia the other day, so Christmas came early. I was supposed to assault a mountain of work this morning (and I will, I will!)—but first I got some of the little guys together for a family picture, and here they are:

There’s more on my Flickr page, along with some shots I took around the UP campus and in my office to show off the D-Lux 3’s native 16:9 aspect ratio (a nice wide angle to you).

Flotsam & Jetsam (60) for Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Flotsam & Jetsam (59) for Tuesday, December 4, 2007


JUST FOR the heck of it, and for the idly curious, here's a shot I took of my desktop at home a few weeks ago. So now you see how I work: with two computers open (the desktop for surfing, the laptop for writing) and the TV tuned in to CNN, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the Nat Geo channel, or CSI (I don't watch much else).

Missing from the picture are the cup of coffee and the two scoops of chocolate ice cream I have after lunch and/or dinner. I have my own small fridge in my room, filled with Popsicles (chocolate and orange), ice water, and the occasional beer.


PS. ONE READER was wondering what my UP office setup looks like, so here it is, taken just today (with my new toy, a Leica D-Lux 3). That's an original Bondi Blue 233 mhz iMac on the left, and the white cone above it is an AirPort wi-fi base station. Everything else, including the indispensable waste can, is decidedly low-tech, including two desk pens: a Parker 51 from the 1950s and a Conklin Endura from the mid-1920s. The watercolor's by Jason Moss.

Penman for Monday, December 3, 2007


TO ADD just a bit more to what I was saying last week about why we don’t write more novels, but should:

Even before we dream of selling our books in New York or London, we Filipino authors in English have to sell more books in this country, and I’m coming around to thinking that the fault, dear Brutus, is no longer in our readership but in ourselves. True, books of almost any kind are expensive here. Also true, we may have focused on just producing what we think of as great art because there’s little money to be made, which isn’t so bad. But it’s also a fact that many Filipinos are buying books—and let’s face it, these book buyers are primarily middle-class—except that they’re not buying us. In other words, the market is there but we’ve given up on fighting for our share of it.

By this I mean that we’re not writing about the things that might prove interesting to our potential readers; we wouldn’t mind being popular, but we shun the popular. The crimes that pepper our tabloids hardly ever make it to our fiction. Clearly, we need to write more popular or genre fiction—novels that employ not only the fantastic, but also more crime, more sex, and more humor. They may not necessarily be great novels, but good ones—novels that can attract and develop a new class of readers, be serialized, be turned into movies, be talked about over Monday-morning coffee. We also need more professional translators who can turn the best of our novels in Filipino into internationally marketable manuscripts.

I should admit, as soon as I say this, that I’ve done very little myself to fill my own prescription. Younger writers like Felisa Batacan and Dean Alfar and his group of “speculative fiction” writers are doing much more by raising the profile of a kind of fiction that seems to resonate with younger readers and can acquire a substantial following.

I gave myself curious little goals when I was working on Soledad’s Sister. I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to do another take on the Noli, although I still felt sucked into it in terms of creating, say, representative towns and townsfolk. I didn’t want to do—at least for now—a novel populated by writers, artists, muses, anyone quoting anyone else or giving lectures on epistemology or baroque music. I didn’t want to do a novel that spans centuries and involves dons and doñas and anyone with a three-part Spanish name. In other words, I didn’t want to write an epic. I wanted to do a small, mostly quiet, darkly comic novel involving ordinary people in absurd situations and covering no more than a few days of real time.

I think that’s sort of what I did with Soledad’s Sister, which needs more work even at this point, and which I’ll be revising soon for publication early next year. After that, it could be back to the short story for me—or maybe I never left it, because, in terms of narrative structure, Soledad’s Sister is really a long story rather than short novel. There’s a lot more for me to learn, and a lot more for us to do, about writing the novel.


STILL ON this writerly thread, let me remind interested readers that we at Likhaan: The UP Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) are now accepting applications for the 47th UPICW National Writers Workshop to be held in Camp John Hay, Baguio City, from April 5 to 12, 2008.

I’m going to be directing this workshop—something I haven’t done since the first “Kumustahan” workshop in 2003—so I’m looking forward to working with a fresh group of writers in what we might call their early “mid-career”, writers who’ve already published or are just on the verge of publishing their first books.

More strictly speaking, “mid-career” should really mean someone with about five books to his or her credit, but admittedly few of our writers produce more than ten books, so we’ll take a relaxed view of this idea for now, and look instead for writers in both English and Filipino who’ve been consistently producing good work over the past few years and can be depended on to do more soon.

Following the “Kumustahan” concept, we will be reserving eight slots for fellows to be identified and invited by the UPICW; but we will also leave four more slots open to application and competition. (And let’s get this clear from the start: there should be no dishonor to getting in competitively, as that competition will be pretty stiff.) The ICW reserves the right to reapportion the number of reserved and open slots, depending on the responses and the quality of applications received.

There’s a bunch of qualifications and requirements to meet, if you’re thinking of applying, so let me just refer you to the Likhaan website at www.panitikan.com.ph for these details. Please don’t ask me or any of the UPICW associates to invite you; that will almost certainly guarantee the opposite effect. Also, this is not a workshop for first-timers, so please make sure you meet the minimum requirements before applying.

During the UP workshop, fellows will be expected to make a presentation of a chapter or draft of a work-in-progress, and an essay on an aspect of their writing or of the genre in which they work. They must be present for the full duration of the workshop period. The deadline for submission is January 15, 2008. For inquiries, call 922-1830 and ask for Ms. Eva Cadiz.


AT LEAST two major writers’ events are coming up this Saturday, December 8. As has been its tradition for many years now, the UPICW will be holding Writers Night at the Hermogenes Ilagan Theater of the Faculty Center (also known as Bulwagang Rizal) in Diliman. But there’s more than the usual reunion of workshop fellows and virtual concert to look forward to this year.

At 5 p.m., we will be formally presenting the Madrigal-Gonzalez Award to this year’s winner. The Madrigal-Gonzalez goes to the best first book by a Filipino author of the past two years, alternating between English and Filipino books (it’s English’s turn this year). The 2007 shortlist comprises Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar; Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature and Becoming Human by Maria Isabel Garcia (ADMU Press), Barefoot in Fire by Barbara-Ann Gamboa Lewis (Tahanan Books); Love, Desire, Children, Etc. by Rica Bolipata-Santos (Milflores); From Inside the Berlin Wall by Helen Yap (UP Press); and Kapwa: The Self in the Other by Katrin de Guia (Anvil).

This will be followed shortly after by the launch—finally, after more than a year’s wait—of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature. As issue editor, I’d like to invite this inaugural issue’s authors—namely, Alexis Abola, Gemino Abad, Reuel Molina Aguila, Alwin Aguirre, Mayette Bayuga, Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, Catherine S. Bucu, Douglas Candano, Mikael de Lara Co, Raymond de Borja, Francisco Arias Monteseña, Charlson Ong, Joel Toledo, Rene Villanueva, and Socorro Villanueva—to join us for this signal event to receive their copies.

There’ll be a lot to celebrate in UP on Saturday evening, so if you have anything to do with writing, we hope you can be with us. (Unfortunately, the event coincides with another get-together in Manila that same time sponsored by the Philippine PEN, which is also holding its Golden Anniversary Conference Dec. 8-9 at the National Museum. I’ll be speaking there the next morning in a session on “Literature Without Frontiers.” I better not party too hard!)


FROM LONGTIME reader Dr. Henry Lim Yu comes this notice that the Cebu Institute of Medicine (CIM) is celebrating its 50th year with a grand event billed as “50 Years of Excellence in Medical Education” December 2-8, 2007 at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel.

As part of the weeklong celebration, a medical-surgical mission will be held December 3-7. A Medical World Congress will likewise be held December 5-7 at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel, with the theme “Challenges & Innovations in Medicine.” Hundreds of CIM alumni from all over the world will be coming home to join this big event, and if you’re a CIM graduate, Henry’s inviting you to come on over.

Flotsam & Jetsam (58) for Thursday, November 29, 2007

AN ABORTIVE coup (it looked more like an impromptu press conference to me) broke out in Makati as I was getting my haircut today, and here’s what my barber—who doesn’t want to be jailed for sedition, so he’ll go unnamed—told me as we followed the ongoing action on the barbershop TV’s tiny screen (I won’t bother translating the language, because this concerns only us Pinoys anyway):

1. If you’re going to launch a coup, make sure it has a real and reasonable chance of succeeding. Otherwise, bitin at nakakainis lang.

2. If you’re going to launch a coup, don’t call it off because people might get hurt; that was the point, di ba? Tear gas pa lang, sumuko na.

3. If you’re going to launch a coup, don’t let former VP Tito Guingona speak for you. He’s a nice guy, but he’ll go on and on in his Ateneo accent and soon put everyone to sleep.

4. If you’re a member of the media and want to cover a coup, don’t complain if you get hurt or get arrested. Don’t make yourself the bida of the issue, at least while the bigger thing (the coup, remember?) is going on. Pagtatawanan ka lang ng mga totoong war correspondent sa Iraq.

5. If you’re going to show popular support for GMA, don’t do it by gathering a group of Cavite mayors behind Gov. Maliksi. Parang barkada ng mga cattle rustler.

6. If you’re going to stop a coup, don’t remember to cut off the electricity five hours after the coup began. Makaka-recharge pa ng cellphone ang mga coup plotters.

That was my barber speaking, folks. Arrest him, not me! (I had a few of my own opinions, but I didn't think it was a good idea to debate with your barber while he slashed the air with a razor to emphasize a point.) ;)

Photo courtesy of AP/GMA7

Penman for Monday, November 26, 2007


I WAS asked to say something at the 12th Biennial Symposium on the Literatures and Cultures of the Asia Pacific Region at the University of the Philippines last week, and here’s part of what I told the participants:

Don’t look now, but March 31st, 2008 is going to be a very important day in the calendar of the Filipino novelist. On that blessed day, three major competitions involving novel-writing will mark their deadline: the Palanca, which receives novels once every three years; the one-time, P200,000 Gawad Likhaan UP Centennial Award, which has a category for the novel (or short story collection) in English and Filipino; and the Man Asian Literary Prize, for the best Asian novel yet unpublished but submitted in English.

The big question is, how many Filipino novelists will rise to this occasion (presuming they’re interested in winning prizes—which, believe me, no matter what they say, they are)?

I’ve recently found myself wondering about the answer to that question, which seems to be “Not very many.” When I attended the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize ceremonies in Hong Kong earlier this month, there was some curiosity about the state of the Filipino novel. (We have to realize, of course, that in the currency of global literary publishing, the novel is just about the only thing that counts—not the poem, not the short story, not the play.)

I told them that the novel was alive and well in the Philippines—that our writers in both English and Filipino were coming out with new work every year. On the other hand, the volume of work being done was nothing to crow about. Few novels were being written, and—like my own recent one, Soledad’s Sister—most of them were slim, no more than 200 pages in published form. Dean Alfar’s Salamanca (2006), for example, is 159 pages; F. Sionil Jose’s Vibora (2007) is just 118. Based on the current proofs, Soledad’s Sister will be around 180 pages when it comes out early next year. A notable exception is Charlson Ong’s 368-page Banyaga (2007).

Of the short story, on the other hand, we have no shortage. I was a judge in this year’s Palanca Awards for the short story in English, and I believe that we received the highest number of entries ever in this category—147 stories.

By comparison, of the 243 qualified novels received by the Man Asian, only about ten, I was told, came from the Philippines. More than half came from South Asia (mostly India, whose authors also accounted for 11 of the 23 works on the prize’s long list—four of them from just one city, Chennai). Ten novels from Manila is not a bad turnout for a new contest, except that, as with the other countries, these presumably included works that had long been in progress, or had been started much earlier.

It should be interesting to see how many novels turn up for the three big events next year.

These competitions will certainly encourage the writing of more novels, but they still won’t change the fact that we Filipino fictionists don’t write nearly as many novels as our neighbors do. The question is, why?

My own quick answer is, why should we? At least until recently, we haven’t seen enough artistic and other incentives to consistently write and publish novels, or to choose to write novels over other alternatives. As every novelist knows, writing a novel typically takes several years. Even if the physical act of writing it could be much shorter than that, the novel as a project takes a much larger and longer emotional and psychological toll on the writer than a story, poem, or essay will. We sleep, eat, defecate, and fornicate with our novels perched on our shoulders.

And all of this for what? For a first and most likely a last edition of 1,000 copies, which will take over a year to sell, if it does at all. Even at a relatively high royalty of 15 percent, presuming the book sells for a modest P300 or just over US$6 a copy, a Filipino novelist will stand to earn P45,000 or about US$1,000 for a few years’ work. There will be no overseas markets, no film rights, no residuals, and—unless the book is picked up by schools for teaching—no reprints to look forward to.

This isn’t to say that all we should write for is fortune and fame—although a little of both will always be welcome. Stories, poems, plays, and essays won’t get us very far, either. But given a range of options, the Filipino writer can hardly be blamed if he or she chooses less tedious forms of artistic expression. Short stories, for example, can be written in a matter of days and published within months; screenplays can give vent to our novelistic impulses, aside from earning us much more, provided we make the right connections and break into the industry.

But other than material reasons, I suspect that we Filipinos don’t write novels as much as we write other forms of literature because—and I realize how controversial this statement might be—we generally don’t have the sensibility or the athleticism for it (and may I emphasize “generally” here). Novels have traditionally required a largeness of vision, a broadness of scope, and our best-known ones—Rizal’s Noli and Fili, Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and F. Sionil Jose’s Rosales series—have certainly demonstrated that. I’ve often remarked that our contemporary novelists inevitably labor in the shadow of Rizal—you can almost feel him breathing down your neck—with the result that many modern novels have become reworkings in a way of the Noli and Fili: love stories set against the crimson backdrop of revolution, with middle-class characters torn between what they know, what they want, and what they actually can do, which turns out to be not very much. Rizal is a tough act to follow, and rather than produce just another update of the Noli—with a new cast of heroes and villains in the same old society, which seems to be our fated plot—I might opt to do something else, like a small private story.

Novels traditionally demand sweeping views from the mountaintop. Our problem is, we have very few mountaintops here in the Philippines; of the few that we have, even fewer of us have the lungs or the inclination to scale them. Instead we have become master pedestrians, or masters of the street scene, which is why we do so well with the short story, which requires little more than a few hours or a few days of action in places like cafeterias, boarding houses, and alleyways. We often complain that our attention span as a people is very short—such that the past 30 years of our politics might as well never have happened, since no real wrongs have been redressed and no one has really been punished as we lurch from one mishap to the next. That might explain why our attention spans as readers and writers are equally brief. We see history as a distant, bloody, romantic past that we dress up for to commemorate—not as the continuously unraveling, insidiously common thread it is.

We—especially our writers in English—rarely venture out of the city; thus the only panoramas in our predominantly short fiction are those on travel posters on the wall of the office cubicle. Our forests—albeit our denuded ones—and our oceans do not figure in our work, and neither do the lives of our people in these places. In other words, our fictional space has become very small and very crowded, with a very low ceiling. This is not again to say that we cannot do or have not done wonders within that space—within, shall we say, that rat’s eye view of the world—but I’m afraid that many of our younger writers might start believing that the world is indeed that small, and shrink their brains and imaginations just to fill it rather than expand that space.

Of course as I say this I have to add that, maybe precisely because of their larger canvases, our contemporary novels—few as they are—have tended to do bigger and different things. Prof. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo—herself an accomplished fictionist and novelist—did a recent study of four of these novels: The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café by Alfred A.Yuson, The Firewalkers by Erwin Castillo, Sky Over Dimas by Vicente Garcia Groyon, and Banyaga: A Song of War by Charlson Ong. She noted that these novelists continue to share, with Rizal, a fascination for the big picture, the acute awareness of history in progress, of history in the present; but they are also seeking new ways and forms of dealing with the material, within and beyond realism.

And this is exactly why we need to write more novels: because they are exceptions unto themselves; because they force us to form fuller, clearer pictures of ourselves; because they have so much more room to grow; and because—I say this with some trepidation, knowing that I’m making a gross generalization—no one will take us seriously on the global stage unless we announce ourselves with big, emphatic, memorable novels. As unfair as that may sound to the writers of other genres—and also to writers who may not care at all, for their own good reasons, to be read abroad—it’s the hard fact of literature as a global industry. Collections of poetry and short fiction will be picked up by university and small presses and released in small editions; but the novel is the big whale in the ocean that publishers and agents have their harpoons at the ready for.

(I’ll add a bit more to this next week.)

Flotsam & Jetsam (57) for Sunday, November 25, 2007

BEFORE I forget this, there’s a vignette from my recent Kunming trip that I’d like to share with you, from an afternoon when our hosts took us for a stroll around Green Lake—a large and picturesque lagoon and park in a corner of the city’s northwest. We came too early in the season to catch the Siberian gulls on their migratory stop at this lake, but the willows and arched bridges were pretty enough for the visitor’s eye.

But I discovered that Green Lake also offered a treat for the ear. Under the willows, small groups of local folk gathered and drew out stringed instruments with plaintive wails such as only Chinese luthiers perhaps can coax, and began playing; in each group, a woman would sing and dance. You walked down the park and listened to a virtual album of traditional Chinese music.

But of course you see this kind of busking in other parks around the world as well. The big difference was, when I was so pleased with my discovery that I thought of leaving a few yuan to express my appreciation, there was no plate or open hat to be found at the performers’ feet. They were not playing for money, but for the sheer love of music and the applause of parkgoer and passerby, one afternoon in a Kunming autumn.

Manileño for November 2007

THIS TIME last year, I was teaching a class of American teenagers at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin about Philippine culture and society. For the past four months, I’ve been doing the reverse back home in Diliman, Quezon City, where I’ve been using a class in Contemporary American Literature to teach young Filipinos about the United States and its people.

This follows my basic approach to teaching literature—that we study it not just for the pleasure of the language (which is, in itself, important) but also to learn something about the culture and the conditions that bred the story or the poem. This was why, last year, I introduced my American students to some sensitive aspects of Philippine-American relations by taking up stories like Juan Gatbonton’s “Clay” (which deals with a Filipino boy’s idolization of an American GI after the war, and his later disillusionment) and poems like Rene Estella Amper’s “Letter to Pedro, U.S. Citizen, Also Called Pete” (which, with comic sadness, tracks the changes in some Pinoys when they migrate to America, as well as the changes back home).

Literature isn’t the only way of learning about a country and its people, of course—there’s history and what we used to call “social studies” to take care of the facts—but it’s often more effective than hitting the encyclopedia in that it presents large issues in intimate human terms. Abstractions like “exile” and “alienation” become starkly painful and personal realities in stories like Bienvenido Santos’s “The Day the Dancers Came.”

The course I teach at the University of the Philippines—English 42, Contemporary American Literature—aims to provide Filipino teenagers with a sampling of the best American poems, stories, and novels over the past 60 years or so. And by “the best” we also necessarily mean “the most disturbing”, which is to say that these works aren’t meant to promote tourism by presenting postcard pictures of America and American life, but rather present the humanity (and, sometimes, the inhumanity) of America and Americans. I don’t mean for my students to love or hate America—that’s beside the point—but instead to understand it, or at least understand it better than they did at the start of the semester.

We Pinoys grow up thinking about America, and there’s no escaping its presence and influence—on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, in the news—and we can’t be blamed for thinking that we know it. Given our shared history, we probably do, better than most other people around the world. As I’ve mentioned here before—no thanks to a neocolonial education—I learned to draw the map of the US and to memorize all the states and their capitals by heart in grade school, in the Philippines; I learned to recite Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech; I knew what a mackinaw was even if I’d never seen one. My American students seemed stunned that I knew a lot more about their history than they did.

But there’s the America beyond the history books and the almanacs that both Americans and Filipinos hardly ever get to see—the America that you can access only through the imagination of its writers and artists.

There’s the small-town America that Shirley Jackson so lovingly captured then just as resoundingly crushed for its blind adherence to tradition in “The Lottery”, a story that drew a ton of hate mail when it was published by the New Yorker in 1948. There’s Flannery O’Connor’s exploration of the grotesque underside of the Bible Belt in “Good Country People”; John Updike’s paean to youthful rebellion in “A&P”; James Baldwin’s gruesome description of the lynching of a black man in “Going to Meet the Man”; Tim O’Brien’s portrayal of a Vietnam-War soldier’s fatal tenderness in “The Things They Carried.”

These stories—and the many more poems and other pieces that we take up—may seem preponderantly unsettling rather than comforting, but that’s how literature largely works: by shaking us out of the easy assumptions we make about life. Many Pinoys still think, for example, that life in America is a bed of roses; any Filipino-American who works two jobs could tell them that it isn’t, but we won’t believe it until we see it enacted in a story or a movie.

The image of America that my students come away with is that of a rich and complex tapestry of peoples, beliefs, practices, and traditions—many of which factors have given rise to problems but also to new ways of thinking and the search for new solutions. We talk about large “American” concepts such as the frontier, individualism, egalitarianism, and innovation, as much as we talk about racial inequality and discrimination, imperialism, insularity, and conservatism. If America emerges as a paradox, maybe that’s because it is, even to this long-time observer, who finds its contradictions—and the fact that American can live with them and despite them—fascinating.

I begin my English 42 semester with an overview of American history, a look at the American map, and a summary of the kind of statistics that many Americans themselves don’t know or bother to learn (e.g., population, 300 million; per capita income, about $43,700 in 2005). My Filipino teenagers may know the latest goings-on in High School Musical, but this is news to most of them.

In fact, it was news to many of my American students as well—a troubling realization for the people of the world’s only remaining superpower.

Penman for Monday, November 19, 2007

I'VE POSTED a shorter version of this on my blog (which I've edited since, below), but since not all Star readers have Internet access or the time and inclination to go over such ramblings as bloggers inflict on their followers (or their stalkers and “trolls”, as we inevitably acquire), let me say this in print as well.

I’m sorry to have to tell you all that I didn't win the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, for which my novel Soledad's Sister was shortlisted and which was given out in Hong Kong last November 10. (That's me up there with Tim Rainsford of Man Investments, receiving my shortlistee's trophy.) That distinction was achieved by Chinese writer Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem—which, going by everything we've heard about it, is a finely wrought, 450-page novel on an epic scale of nomadic life in Mongolia, the original Chinese version of which has already sold more than two million copies in China (and many millions more, I’m told, in bootlegged copies, which says something about its true appeal).

I had a chat with Jo Lusby of Penguin China—which bought the English rights from Jiang for $100,000 (no great shakes by Western standards, but a historic high for any book in our part of the world), and she told me that Wolf Totem’s strength was in its ability to be interpreted in many ways; I gathered that you could read it as being sharply critical of the regime, or (as the government surely prefers) as an argument for consensus and coexistence.

My fellow “shortlistees” and I were very happy for Jiang, who was prevented by illness from joining us for the ceremonies and was represented by his Beijing publisher. We didn’t spend more than 36 hours together—I was joined by Reeti Gadekar of India (who lives in Berlin), Xu Xi of Hong Kong (now based in New York), and Nu Nu Yi Inwa of Burma (who was happy just to be permitted to leave Yangon)—but it was enough to see not only how much we shared in terms of our backgrounds and concerns, but also how different our works were, in sensibility and substance. The heartening message is that “Asia” is not one mass, not one face, not one experience, not one thing, as Orientalist impressions would have it. In both joy and tragedy, we are as richly diverse as we are umbilically connected by land, water, and history.

We also derived pride and comfort from the fact that, aside from the very warm reception extended by our hosts, the judges, the sponsors, and the Hong Kong literary community, we received many inquiries from publishers and agents eager to publish our work for broader audiences beyond Asia. I and the other writers who made the shortlist and even the longlist of 23 are now in the unusual situation of having to decide which agent or publisher to deal with; and—as I’ve taken every opportunity to inform these interested parties—there’s lots more like me where I come from, like my partner-in-crime Charlson Ong.

It was actually Charlson who pushed me to join the Man Asian when we were both panelists at the UP Writers Workshop last March, and his only misfortune was that his epic Banyaga had just been published at that point, disqualifying him from entering it (only works unpublished in English are eligible). I’ve also been telling friends writing in Filipino that this would be a good time for them to get their novels translated into English. (Jiang’s translator Howard Goldblatt received $3,000 for his efforts.)

It’s not the only game out there, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we write just for prizes, but the Man Asian has been a great breakthrough for all our literatures and writers, and we who figured in its inaugural look forward to being followed by our compatriots in this new annual competition—the next albeit unannounced deadline for which, I must remind anyone interested, is only a few months away, on March 31st, 2008.

It's been a great ride, and we had a wonderful weekend in Hong Kong. Among other abbreviated delights, I was happy to revisit the fabled Foreign Correspondents Club, and to see Ms. Clare Hollingworth—now a very old lady, but once the intrepid correspondent who scooped the world on the German invasion of Poland, and thus the Second World War. We held a reading at the China Club—a visual feast I can only describe as neo-deco—owned by Shanghai Tang’s David Tang, who also ran the posh Cipriani restaurant in the old Bank of China building, where the awards ceremonies were held. (It was a black-tie affair, but thankfully I brought a barong along, and wore it proudly.)

The next morning, my only free time, I stepped out of the hotel for a quick breakfast at a McDonald’s across the street—only to realize that it was a Sunday, and that all of Hong Kong’s maids were having their day off, and for a moment I just stopped in the middle of the street, watching hundreds of them form small, happy knots, laying out blankets on the pavement, sharing their own food, selling phone cards, doing each other’s hair. I was, I suddenly thought, among the people of my novel, the girls from Calbayog and Cabadbaran who had come to places like Wan Chai to lay their own claims to whatever the world had to offer. Most would come home, and a few would not—or else return like my fictional Soledad did, in a wooden box.


Many, many thanks to all who sent me their good wishes—and now to revising and publishing the novel. And to writing my next one—oh, if I just had the time and the concentration to write what I really want to!


IT DOESN'T happen very often—although it should—that I fly out somewhere with Beng with me as the excess baggage, the Bill to her Hillary. But when it does I’m happy, because it means that she’s getting the professional recognition she deserves for her work, and I can slink away somewhere to enjoy the scenery and peck quietly at my keyboard on some project I can’t finish quite as languorously back home.

This was why I jumped on the chance to accompany Beng down to Cagayan de Oro sometime last month, where she had been invited to speak at a seminar-workshop sponsored by the Society of Filipino Archivists, Inc. on the subject of “Paper Conservation: Types of Deterioration and the Analyses and Diagnoses of Paper Deterioration.” I knew that she’d been working hard on her lecture—with a topic like that, I would have, too—so I was anxious to see how her presentation would go over with the crowd.

And a huge crowd it turned out to be, for something so esoteric as “The Conservation of Document Heritage Collections,” the theme of the SFA’s gathering. More than 180 archivists, librarians, and other professionals engaged in documents management and preservation came from all over the country to listen to a battery of experts discuss and demonstrate various paper conservation issues and techniques.

Founded in 1990 and headed by Emma Rey (director of the House of Representatives Archives), the SFA conducts these seminars and workshops at least three times a year in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The October 22-24 Cagayan de Oro seminar was supported by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. The participants came from government and private libraries and archives of colleges, universities, government agencies, and private institutions (such as the UP library, UP Infirmary Records and Archives, the Central Bank Archives, the Vargas Museum, the National Historical Institute, the Intramuros Administration, and the Manila Observatory).

Aside from Beng, the lecturers included, among others, Roberto Balarbar (“The Material Nature of Paper-Based Documentary Heritage Collection and Its Environmental Requirements/Emergency and Disaster Planning”; Bernardita M. Reyes (“Conservation Treatments”—mechanical, chemical cleaning, washing, lining and sizing of paper); Arnulfo Junio (“The Material Nature of AV Heritage Collection and Its Deterioration”); Yolanda Granda (“Encapsulation”); and Emma Rey (“Enclosures”).

While I spent most of my time in my room working on a new biography—and otherwise sampling the savory fish tinolas at the Food Court in nearby Limketkai mall—I couldn’t resist peeking into the seminar-workshop and marveling at how some people could dedicate themselves so assiduously to the care and preservation of paper.

But of course, as a writer and teacher myself, I could understand and even celebrate those efforts. In the course of my own reading and research, I’ve often come across library books less than a hundred years old that had turned a flaky brown and which came apart in my hands at the slightest touch, as well as books printed in the 1700s which, on the other hand, looked white and new, the letters crisply printed. (No big mystery there: the older books were made of linen from old rags, and were actually stronger than the later ones which used pulp and acid, which then later oxidized, thus the “slow burn” effect.) As Beng would say, paper also reacts to pollutants and moisture in the air, which causes acid hydrolysis. And as the other lecturers pointed out, we Filipinos live in an environment laden with all kinds of threats—pests, man-made disasters, natural calamities—and often inadequate resources to save and preserve our documents with.

(My own personal response has been to digitally scan every important document and to upload vital files such as ongoing projects to an online “safe.” But that’s just making copies, not saving the originals themselves.)

If you’re interested in this subject or your job hinges on it, drop the SFA people a line. Another seminar-workshop will take place December 10-12, 2007, in Baguio on “Safeguarding Records and Archives.” For details, call Emma Rey at 931-5966 or e-mail her at emmamrey@yahoo.com.

Penman for Sunday, November 18, 2007

KUNMING ISN'T the first city most people would think of when they plan on touring China. It can’t come anywhere close to Beijing, Shanghai, Guilin, or Xian in drawing power. While it can boast of its Stone Forest, its year-round temperate climate (for which it’s been called the “City of Eternal Spring”), and its rich variety of ethnic minority cultures, Kunming is far enough off the usual path—out in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, close to the Burmese border—to be ignored.

Indeed, when you motor on the sleek highway from the airport to your suburban hotel—plowing through the downtown area and its McDonalds and KFCs—you’ll wonder quickly where old Kunming has gone. There may have been a time when this 2,000-year-old city, like many of China’s frontier outposts, possessed a certain roughness of character that today would be worth traveling thousands of miles to see, but it’s all been replaced by high-rise apartments and swanky new hotels with bling-bling lights and splashy signs.

But for a few days earlier this month, all tourist roads in China led to Kunming, where the eighth edition of the China International Travel Mart (CITM)—one of that country’s biggest travel expos—was being held from November 1 to 4. Since anything in China is big, this is how big it was, exactly: over 2,000 exhibitors from 90 countries, spread out over six exhibition halls, each one of which could have hangared four 747s.

The CITM alternates each year between Kunming and Shanghai—an interesting idea, because the two cities couldn’t be more different: one provincial and mile-high (at an elevation of 1,900 meters), the other coastal and cosmopolitan. They share, however, the same commercial energy, drawing from the same trough of China’s mindboggling 10 percent annual growth rate (some cities in the interior are growing even faster, like Kunming’s and Chengdu’s 13 percent).

In Kunming, the economic engine is driven primarily by industry, minerals like salt and phosphate, and crops like tobacco, but tourism is rising, driven by such major events as the 1999 Horticultural International Exposition and the CITM. (You know it’s a work in progress when you see an office building with a sign that says “Yunnan Service Center for Sparse Tourists”—yup, I also did a double-take.)

The CITM, of course, serves not only Kunming but all of China, and all the world. That’s where the Philippines’ Department of Tourism comes in. This year was its fourth foray into the CITM market, and our small but lively contingent was led by the DOT’s “Team China” (one of seven such teams organized by Sec. Ace Durano to focus on our strongest and priority markets—China, Korea, Japan, India, the US, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe) under Usec. Eduardo “Edu” Jarque. The urbane but unpretentious Edu is as enthusiastic and as indefatigable a promoter of Philippine tourism as you’ll ever meet, and he was ably supported by team members Arlene Alipio, Marian Obispo, and Shanghai-based Gerard Panga, as well as a 12-member troupe of Bayanihan dancers and musicians.

Just as importantly, private tour operators and related entities also represented the Philippines, including Jeron Travel and Tours, Winfar Cebu Travel and Tours, Direction Travel and Tours, CK & Philippine International Travel, the Panoly Resort Hotel, Best Cruises ‘N Resorts, the Philippine Retirement Authority, and Cebu Pacific. With the Bayanihan’s day-long and unflaggingly high-sprited performances drawing in the crowds to the Philippines’ 90-sqm. booth—dressed up as a beach with a sunny blue sky, and strategically located near the entrance to the middle hall—all these representatives pitched in to sell the Philippines to both casual passersby and travel professionals.

With all the political travails we’ve been going through—including that explosion in Makati the investigators have yet to figure out—you’d think that selling the Philippines to tourists would be an unenviable and even fruitless task. Think again. As it turns out, tourism demand is rising at an even faster pace than we can accommodate potential visitors.

I witnessed this myself when a tour operator pleaded with Team China to open more flights and hotels because more of his clients wanted to fly to Boracay. I was incredulous—weren’t these people the least bit apprehensive?—but as Edu Jarque explained it to me during a similar sortie last June in Shanghai, tourists from China “don’t worry about travel advisories,” unlike their Western counterparts. “They know what they want, and they’ll go and get it.” (Most interestingly, Jarque says, Chinese tourists value souvenirs with the word “Philippines” stamped, silkscreened, or etched on them.)

With China’s rising affluence, it’s easy to see why overseas travel is booming among the Chinese, and why everyone in the rest of the world wants a piece of it. The Chinese now account for the fourth-largest group of foreign tourists in the Philippines, out of a total estimated to hit the three-million mark by the yearend. (The list is topped by Koreans, followed by the Americans, and the Japanese; the decline in Japanese tourists, Edu says, is a general phenomenon, and not confined to the Philippines.) To bring in even more visitors, the DOT has worked with other government agencies like the Bureau of Immigration to relax the usual requirements, such as by reclassifying Chinese and Indians as “non-restricted nationals” and allowing groups to come in under group visas.

These tourists usually head for the predictable top spots—the beaches of Bohol, Boracay, and Cebu. But Edu notes that other destinations and kinds of tourism are cropping up. “Believe it or not,” he says, “the Koreans and the Japanese love volcano tourism. Some of our partners are promoting kulinarya or food tourism. Our spas promote wellness tourism. Our schools are undertaking education tourism by teaching English and by offering sought-after courses like illustration and aviation mechanics. And speaking of film tourism, two Bollywood companies are coming over in November just to shoot their dream sequences here!”

Meeting the challenge of developing new destinations and upgrading facilities are fresh investments that now total some US$4 billion, Jarque says, poured into such places as Marinduque, Romblon, Davao, and Iloilo, as well as into the renovation of old standards like the Manila Peninsula and the opening of a Banyan Tree resort on an island in Northern Palawan. Complementing investments is the lowering of fares by local carriers and the aggressive promotion of Philippine attractions in international fairs like Kunming—for example, Palawan dive tours in Europe, where six travel fairs will be held in just the first half of 2008 (“The Germans have fairs for spark plugs,” Edu observes wryly).

Domestic tourism is also on the rise. Jarque notes how “It used to be that you went to the province to visit an aunt, but that’s no longer the case.” There’s still Tita Mely to visit, of course, but our hinterlands now offer added attractions such as the butanding or whale sharks of Donsol, Sorsogon. For this new, eco-friendly activity, locals who used to drive tricycles if not butcher these animals were retrained to serve as “Butanding Interaction Officers” who now guide limited numbers of tourists to the whale sharks and ensure a peaceful encounter.

Local government units, Jarque says, are beginning to understand and profit from the value of properly managed tourism. To help them along, the DOT provides them with tourism master plans, as well as translators to promote their attractions in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

Filipino-Americans are no longer as interested in the bahay-kubo experience that might require them to huddle under the roof with a dozen gawking relatives, Edu says. “They’re now looking for more high-end housing,” buying homes in Tagaytay and condos in Libis or Makati as investments and getaways.

Again, with distractions like the Glorietta explosion, it’s hard to imagine all this activity going on, but—as Undersecretary Jarque notes, “not one cancellation” happened because of the Makati incident. Apparently, one of Philippine tourism’s strengths is its imperviousness to politics. (Now, if they can only leave politics out of tourism administration!)

Our target of three million tourists is still a long way off from Thailand’s 12 million annual visitors, and basic problems need to be attended to if we’re to meet that objective, like infrastructure. (Hmm, did anyone say “Terminal 3”?) Direct charter flights will be starting soon between Shanghai and Kalibo—but that means, Edu Jarque says, that Kalibo airport will have to be ready to receive international flights and travelers, not just in terms of the runways and lights, but also in terms of people to provide immigration, baggage, customs, and transport services. Jarque hopes that agencies like the DOTC and the LGUs will pitch in to sort things out.

Let’s pray they do, or all that goodwill our dancers and agents generated in Kunming could go to waste, and what a pity that would be.

Flotsam & Jetsam (56) for Wednesday, November 14, 2007


IT WAS a hectic weekend in Hong Kong where I went to attend the Man Asian Literary Prize ceremonies, the details of which I've reported in "Abbreviated Delights" above. I brought my little Leica along so you could see a bit of what I saw.

Penman for Monday, November 12, 2007

ONE OF the pleasures of covering the promotional sorties of the Department of Tourism—aside, of course, from exposure to new sights, flavors, and sounds—is traveling with a group of Bayanihan dancers and musicians, as I was fortunate to experience last July in Shanghai and again last week in Kunming, China. (I’ll be filing a separate story soon on that trip to the China International Travel Mart, so keep an eye out for it in the Sunday travel section.)

If you’re a Filipino, you know what “Bayanihan” means—and I’m no longer referring to that charming if backbreaking practice of helping your neighbor lift up his bamboo house, but to the troupe that rightfully calls itself the Philippine National Folk Dance Company. Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Bayanihan has become synonymous with beauty and grace, and with the country’s representation abroad by its best cultural ambassadors.

It’s the native dances, of course, that the Bayanihan has become world-famous for, winning scores of awards from such as their most recent victories in Palma de Mallorca and Turkey. The tinikling, the pandanggo sa ilaw, and the singkil remain crowd favorites and Bayanihan staples, never failing to elicit delight and wonderment from their audiences, especially foreigners who know nothing of us and of our culture.

But sharing the same flight with this group to and from Kunming, and spending a couple of days with them in the Philippine booth, introduced me to a Bayanihan most people don’t see—the people offstage and off-camera.

You’ll probably expect me to say that they’re very different when they’re not performing—that they revert to blue-jeaned, cigarette-puffing, beer-guzzling pedestrians much like you and me. In their most private moments (which I wasn’t privy to), that might happen; but in public—meaning, wherever they could be seen and heard by anyone else, Filipino or foreigner, whether in the hotel lobby or around the baggage carousel—they conducted themselves just as if they were onstage and being watched by a thousand pairs of eyes. Beneath the charm was a tensile discipline imbibed from years of unrelenting practice.

These performers travel in smart, impeccably pressed uniforms, carrying the same, company-issue bags (as you can imagine, with all the poise of a pandanggo dancer). They don’t shriek, they don’t sweat, and no matter how fatigued they may be from performing the same dances all day before different crowds at the same exhibition hall, they never lose their smiles and their composure, even after the show. Without being asked to, they share in the chores of promoting the Philippines to the public at large, handing out brochures and gamely posing for pictures with passersby lured by the infectious music and cheerful boisterousness of our folk dances.

It’s no wonder they’ve become suki partners of the DOT, whose seven promotions teams (China, Japan, Korea, India, Asia-Pacific, North America, and Europe) fan out regularly to sustain the ongoing boom in Philippine tourism, which expects to have drawn in a historic three million visitors by the yearend. Numbering more than 50 members at full complement, the Bayanihan divides itself into smaller traveling groups for special assignments such as the Kunming CITM, one of China’s biggest and most important travel shows. This particular party had 12 members—eight dancers and four musicians; another such group was set to leave the following week for a major promotions project in Paris.

It sounds like an exciting and glamorous life, and I’m sure the Bayanihan members would be the first to agree that it is, or they wouldn’t be there. But they just make hard work look easy. The traveling alone would bring others of a lesser constitution to their knees. One dancer had been with the company for 14 years, during which she had visited 30 countries. Most surprisingly, even if they may have epitomized professionalism itself, none of them was doing it for a living; many were students, others were professionals and employees. A modest grant from the NCCA helps with the expenses, but it’s clearly the love of dance and performance that has sustained the company, whose youngest member is all of 15. (On the senior side of things, the Bayanihan counts, among its most prominent alumni, politician Lito Atienza and his wife, and broadcast journalist Che Che Lazaro.)

And five decades of high achievement hasn’t stopped the Bayanihan from trying new things. According to Ferdinand “Bong” Jose—a former chemist who served as the Kunming group’s leader and is also the company’s dance director—they’re constantly developing new dances to expand their repertoire (among them, the bangkero, sapatero, and pearl-diver dances), as well as all-male dances designed to attract more men to the art.

“We get walk-ins all the time,” Bong told me when I asked him how Bayanihan applicants—aside from being outrageously talented and good-looking (that’s two strikes for me; I’ve often told friends that I’d have traded half a dozen Palancas to be able to boogie and do the cha-cha)—got into the company. “But the most important thing is the interview, which reveals something about the applicant’s background and likely behavior.” There’s little room for prima donnas in this ensemble (among whom the donnas, in any case, were certifiably prima).

Back in my hotel, sighing as I gave my swelling paunch a jiggle in front of the full-length mirror, I imagined what life might have been like if I’d flexed my toes instead of my fingers thirty years ago. I struck a John Travolta pose, pronounced it obscene, and returned to my laptop to type up my notes for this piece.


STILL IN the general neighborhood of art, let’s move from cheers to jeers as well-deserved as the former.

I nearly choked on my airport coffee when I read the tawdry news from home about that mural commissioned from a group of Angono artists by the National Press Club. Supposedly conceived to celebrate press freedom, this mural was “retouched” to remove any references to the some of the most burning political issues of our time.

That “retouching” was, is, and will forever be unconscionable. That it was done on the eve of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s visit, and that its purpose was clearly to remove details that would have offended Arroyo had she seen them, tell us more about the people who commissioned the artwork than those who made it.

By the account I read, NPC President Roy Mabasa reportedly got the artists to agree beforehand that “the killings of journalists and libel would be highlighted by the mural and that no political statements were to be made.” How on earth, I thought, was that possible? Even putting aside the flagrant persecution of journalists through murder and libel, how could anything related to press freedom not be political in a society like ours? What did the NPC bosses think those journalists were savaged and dragged to court for?

Another NPC officer was even quoted to have described the muralists as “the lowest kind of artists” for insisting on the integrity of their work and on the price they quoted. I don’t know what he meant exactly by that remark, but it makes me wonder what it takes to be the lowest kind of journalist—will sucking up to the powers that be at the expense of those fighting for the truth qualify?

This leads me to the even bigger mystery of what the NPC is and what it stands for these days. I remember how—many years ago just before martial law, when I was starting out as wet-eared reporter for the Philippines Herald and then as a correspondent for Taliba—the National Press Club represented something vastly different, a gathering of freethinking, sharp-witted men and women who not only could hold their beer and scotch but could stand up to whoever was sitting in the Palace by the Pasig. Every time I went up those steps I trembled in awe of my seniors, and I felt truly proud to have been able to crash the profession of journalism.

Over the martial law years and through the systematic coercion and co-optation of the media, that pride and awe would be replaced by shame—which is what any right-minded citizen should feel over this incident. How embarrassing that it should take normally meek and inarticulate painters to remind these tough, gun-toting journalists what they should be fighting for—the truth, reason, and justice, and not a pat on the back from Malacañang.

I’m no Polyanna, and I understand the concessions to life and livelihood that writers have to make. But sometimes we have to do and say something for ourselves, so that—even the depths of guilt and corruption—we can remember the better part of us that still knows how to hope and dream. That mural would have been some such statement, a refreshing spark of insurgency in what’s become another venue for slippery subservience.

Any “national” press club that imagines it can get away with being “apolitical” while inviting someone whose husband tried to sue the pants off 43 journalists to unveil its mural to “press freedom” has to be joking. Worse, it’s got to be a sorry joke of a press club.

Flotsam & Jetsam (55) for Sunday, November 11, 2007


I'VE UPDATED this posting, so please see "Abbreviated Delights" above for a longer version of my original message of thanks. But here's the text of the press release issued by the Man Asian organizers:

Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem Wins the Inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize

Hong Kong, 10 November 2007 – A panel of three internationally acclaimed authors and experienced literary judges named Beijing-based Chinese author Jiang Rong the winner of the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize for his novel Wolf Totem, a fictional account of life in the 1970s that draws on Jiang’s personal experience of the grasslands of China’s border region.

The Man Asian Literary Prize aims to recognise the best of new Asian literature in English and to bring it to the attention of the world literary community. Works submitted by Asian authors for consideration must not yet have been published in English, although they may have been published in other languages.

Adrienne Clarkson, chair of the judges for the inaugural prize, praised Wolf Totem: “A panoramic novel of life on the Mongolian grasslands during the Cultural Revolution, this masterly work is also a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture. The slowly developing narrative is rendered in vivid detail and has a powerful cumulative effect. A book like no other. Memorable.”

The prize winner was announced at a celebratory dinner at Cipriani Hong Kong. Jiang Rong was awarded USD 10,000 and the book’s translator, Howard Goldblatt, was awarded USD 3,000. Jiang was unable to travel to Hong Kong due to ill health, and the prize was accepted on his behalf by the publisher of his original Chinese novel, Bo Lin, and Jo Lusby of Penguin China, who will publish the English version in 2008.

Wolf Totem was originally published in Chinese by the Changjiang Art and Culture Publishing House, and has been widely acclaimed in China. Last year Penguin acquired the English language rights to Wolf Totem and the book is scheduled for release in English in March 2008.

The judging panel for the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize is: Adrienne Clarkson, former Governor General of Canada (Chair); André Aciman, New York-based author and scholar, and Nicholas Jose, writer, scholar and former Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in China.

The shortlist of five from which the winner was chosen included Filipino writer Jose Dalisay Jr. for Soledad's Sister, Indian writer Reeti Gadekar for Families at Home, Myanmar's Nu Nu Yi Inwa for Smile As They Bow, Chinese writer Jiang Rong for Wolf Totem and Hong Kong's Xu Xi for Habit of a Foreign Sky.

Commenting on each of the other shortlisted works, the judges had this to say:

“Jose Dalisay Jr.’s Soledad's Sister is full of narrative surprise, artfully put together and richly observed. It offers an unillusioned, compassionate portrayal of contemporary society from a Philippines perspective, and is utterly compelling. The characters engage us in the epic, yet very local nature of their quest for dignity and justice. A work of warmth, humanity and confidence.”

“Reeti Gadekar’s Families at Home is a robustly humorous intrigue that delves into the murky corners of modern Delhi. The rich cast of characters is evoked with satirical gusto and the social analysis is sharp and spirited. Highly enjoyable and a real eye-opener.”

“Xu Xi’s Habit of a Foreign Sky is a sophisticated global fiction set against the background of financial upheaval with a complex female protagonist at the centre. The fine charting of this woman's journey, with its shifting and ambiguous professional and emotional allegiances, makes this something of a Jamesian tale relocated to contemporary Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York. Seductive and lucid.”

“Nu Nu Yi Inwa’s Smile As They Bow is a fascinating work of prose fiction from Burma that depicts, with extraordinary detail, energy and intimacy, the textures of a life that is both traditional and transgressive. It also tells an unconventional love story, mixing tough realism with dreams and romance in a quite moving way. An insider's view, highly sensual, informed and frank.”

This first Man Asian Literary Prize received over 240 submissions from throughout Asia from well-established as well as first-time authors. Entries included works translated from several Asian languages as well as works originally in English.

Flotsam & Jetsam (54) for Thursday, November 8, 2007


I WAS in Kunming, China last week for the China International Travel Mart, and took these shots with my Canon G7. More pics on my Flickr page.

Penman for Monday, November 5, 2007


I'M WALKING on air, after receiving the happy news that my novel Soledad’s Sister made it to the shortlist of the 2007 Man Asian Literary Prize, along with four other Asian writers: Reeti Gadekar of India, Nu Nu Yi Inwa of Myanmar, Jiang Rong of China, and Xu Xi who’s Chinese-Indonesian. We won’t find out who won until we get to Hong Kong on November 10, but I’m elated enough to be on the shortlist (and to be treated to free dimsum in HK).

Anvil Publishing will be coming out with my novel early next year, most likely under the title The Woman in the Box—the self-contained short story that makes up its opening chapter. I’ll be revising the manuscript over the next few weeks to give it just a little more heft and tie up loose ends. Meanwhile, I was asked by the organizers to submit a synopsis and a brief excerpt from the novel, so I’d like to share those with my readers.

I’ll abbreviate the synopsis to leave out the ending, which I think keeps with the darkly comic beginning: “A casket arrives at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila, bearing the body of someone manifested as “Aurora V. Cabahug”—one among over 300 overseas workers who return as corpses at this airport every year. The real Aurora, however, is very much alive, a karaoke-bar singer in the distant town of Paez; the woman in the box is her sister Soledad, who used Rory's identity to secure a job abroad. No one knows for sure how Soledad (Soli) died; the body bears signs of foul play and abuse, and now waits to be claimed at the airport. A Paez policeman, Walter, is assigned to drive out to Manila to pick up the body, accompanied by Rory. Both Walter and Rory, who vaguely know each other, find their own lives redefined by the sudden return of the dead Soledad: Walter has been left by his wife and son for a new life in England; Rory feels herself standing on the brink of great things, ambitions that her sister never achieved.”

And here’s an excerpt from a chapter titled “Walking on Water”:

THE ONLY thing Jose Maria Pulumbarit ever wanted to be was a sailor. He had grown up in Olongapo, on the fringes of one of Asia’s largest American naval bases and home to its Pacific Fleet, and from the moment he saw his first American sailor step off the USS Belleau Wood in white cap and jumper, Jomar knew that a ship was the world’s best place to be—an ever-moving island in a planet of fixed addresses. An uncle of his was already out there, serving as a “steward’s mate” or messboy on an aircraft carrier that spent most of its time in the Atlantic, and Jomar eagerly awaited the man’s letters to his mother and the chocolates that came with them, or whatever reached him after his father and two elder brothers had rifled through the stash.

But his father had other plans for his sons, especially for Jomar who seemed fine-limbed and, to the old man, even effeminate, given Jomar’s delicacy of movement and his love of anything that had to do with travel and exotic places. Jomar hung around the real sailors whenever he could, running to light their cigarettes, doing errands for their girls, leaning into the open hoods of jeeps to watch mechanics replace distributor caps and fan belts. His two brothers signed up for base jobs, hoping to work their way onto the ships and then on to San Diego and the great American beyond.

Jomar filched blue-seal Philip Morrises and sported Ray-Bans, and at age 16 was caught by the base MPs at the wheel of a jeep filled with commissary-sized boxes of Hershey’s, Frito Lays, Folger’s, and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific. The local police beat him up and, when his father claimed him, Jomar got thrashed again—not because of what he had stolen, but because he had gotten himself caught, jeopardizing his brothers’ jobs. The caper cost Jomar a cracked tooth and a broken rib that took weeks to heal, but it also strengthened his resolve to leapfrog his way out of Olongapo and not get stuck digging ditches and painting rooftops like his brothers did. He would walk on water.

And he did, in a way; six months after getting his bones crushed, Jose Maria Pulumbarit was at sea in the white togs he had imagined wearing since he learned how to tie his shoelaces—albeit a size too large, for they belonged to Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Rufus B. Melnicki, who wasn’t even on that ship, but on the USS Cushing, back in Yokusuka from maneuvers in Subic. Jomar had slipped into the USS Abraham Lincoln in the great confusion that attended the evacuation of dependents when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo suddenly spewed megatons of mud and acrid smoke. The Lincoln was more than halfway to Guam when they found him in the galley, dazed from the heat and dehydration. Even so he spun his captors a story of childhood abuse at the hands of brass-knuckled uncles and the providential relief afforded by the volcano’s wrath. Instead of tossing him into the brig, they took him on a guided tour of the carrier and plied him full of Canadian ham and mashed potatoes. He had to remain on board the ship when it docked in Guam, but he had, in a way, achieved his dream, and when he took the captain’s gig to transfer to the USS Juneau for the trip back to Subic, he felt more hero than interloper, and used the time to learn about radio electronics and grades of engine oil.

And Jose Maria Pulumbarit’s life could have taken a permanent upturn from then on, but the first thing he did upon debarking in Subic was to swipe some warrant officer’s wallet to bankroll his next great exploit, an escape to another bay in another city 110 kilometers to the south, Manila.

THIS WAS the same Jomar Pulumbarit who, many stints in City Jail and a rack of tattoos across his back and around his thighs later, had sought refuge from the pelting rain under the Aristocrat’s awning, observing the diners as they streamed in. The impish glint in his eyes had long been replaced by a dull but unrelenting gaze behind thick-rimmed glasses; the insolent grin had turned into dry, sealed lips that resisted reading. He had learned to reduce his presence to near-vanishing point. Guam and the rolling ocean was a distant, even painful, memory.

The water was but a minute’s walk from where he stood, and where he lived in Pasay, he could have brushed the sagging lines of laundry aside to see the bay from his galvanized iron roof, and point out, had he wanted, the yolk-like sun to any of his five children. He could carry the small ones, too—his slender arms had acquired some strength from hoisting cast-iron car parts and jacking four-ton vehicles. Those arms bore scars—the cuts of blades, the imprints of hot metal and nylon ropes—but the one thing Jomar had retained from his youth was the softness and the precision of his touch. Two of his right fingers had been broken by a vise grip, but he had taught that hand to work with three, and had passed the rest of its wisdom to the left.

Today he was here on a mission for the Novaliches-based gang he had hired himself out to. They needed a van—not a new one, not a fancy one, and indeed the more nondescript the better. It would be used for the getaway in a plan to remove several objects of great value from a house in Corinthian Gardens, the exact composition of which he did not need or want to know, except that he was told they would involve a certain size and weight. In that case he needed a particular make and model, and when the Tamaraw emerged up the service road in the rain, Jomar knew that he had found his mark. Tamaraws plied the city in the thousands, left no lasting impressions on anyone who saw them, and ran reasonably well; all it would take was a length of wire to pop the locks and a bit of fingerwork with the ignition to claim temporary ownership of the machine. There were other utility vehicles in the restaurant’s parking lot—a Ford Fiera had arrived earlier and would have done as well—but what clinched it for Jomar was the sight of a uniformed policeman stepping out of the Tamaraw; now the mission became a sweetly personal one, because Jomar loathed policemen, from the very first ones he met who cuffed him in the ear from a passing jeep and sent him sprawling on Magsaysay Boulevard to the one who applied the vise grip to his fingers and turned the screw, in a safehouse somewhere in La Loma, in the neighborhood that specialized in roasting whole pigs on a spit; the cop’s own fingers had been glistening with pork fat as they held him down and asked him to confess where the Mitsubishi Pajero was, or at least the money they had been paid for it. “I just steal cars, I don’t sell them!” he had screamed as they wedged his pinky into the grip, and the next thing he remembered was a torrential rush of blood from that tiny finger to his brain. When he came to, they put another finger into the slot and raised the same tiresome questions. In the end it was they who broke, not him, and Jose Maria Pulumbarit earned his professional moniker among the bukas-kotse gangs, “Boy Alambre,” both for his tool of choice and his own admirable resilience. He kept that tool—a thin coil of clothesline wire—on his forearm beneath the sleeve that also covered his tattoos; the other hand held an umbrella, the better to mask his moves; on dryer days it would have been a newspaper, or even a bag of groceries. A passerby might have seen a clerkish man dutifully waiting for his wife for their twice-weekly dinner out, and this was what Walter Zamora saw but failed to notice as he dashed back to the Aristocrat’s entrance to catch up with Rory after parking the van. Jomar had seen the girl, and she would have seen him, too, but Rory had a visceral dislike for men with glasses, and she focused instead on her rain-soaked driver, drawing a small hankie from her purse to mop his brow with.

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.

Flotsam & Jetsam (53) for October 26, 2007


LOOKS LIKE I'm up for some free dimsum. Here's some good news, from the Man Asian Literary Prize people:

Hong Kong, 25 October 2007 – Jose Dalisay Jr., Reeti Gadekar, Jiang Rong, Nu Nu Yi Inwa and Xu Xi are the five authors selected for the shortlist by the judging panel for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, the first regional prize for a work unpublished in English. The winner of the prize will be announced on Saturday 10 November, 2007 at a ceremony in Hong Kong.

The five shortlisted works were chosen from a longlist of 23 and are:

Jose Dalisay Jr. (Philippines), Soledad’s Sister
Reeti Gadekar (India), Families at Home
Nu Nu Yi Inwa (Burma), Smile As They Bow
Jiang Rong (China), Wolf Totem
Xu Xi (China/Indonesia), Habit of a Foreign Sky

More details, including authors' profiles and synopses of the shortlisted novels, from the full press release here.

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.”

Flotsam & Jetsam (52) for Tuesday, October 9, 2007

IT'S HER first birthday away from home—she has a new home now, in San Diego, CA, with a great guy named Jerry—so her Nanay and I would like to greet our one and only anak a very happy birthday. She’s 33, can you believe it? I can remember back when I was 33 myself, not too long ago.... But may this year bring her more joy and fulfillment. We miss her dearly, and hope to see her again soon.

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.”

Penman for Monday, September 24, 2007


I WAS asked again a couple of times last week if creative writers can make a living off their writing. And as I have for ages, I again had to say, sadly, no. And it’s true: no matter how brilliant you are, in this country, you can’t make a living from writing poems, stories, and essays, which is what most writers want to do. You might survive, and even prosper, writing screenplays, komiks, speeches, and biographies, but these genres require not just talent but connections to the industries, networks, and special clients that require them; they also tend to be seasonal, and certainly won’t offer you any social security or retirement benefit.

Despite this uninspiring reality, scores of students apply every year to get into the creative writing programs of such schools as UP, Ateneo, and La Salle—many of them thinking that, somehow or other, a fortuitous combination of talent, luck, and perseverance might lift them up above the crowd and turn them into the next J. K. Rowling. Many others will be resigned to a lifetime of furtive forays into poetry, in moments snatched between changing diapers, commuting to the office, fixing leaks on the roof, and pleasing the clients. And there will always be that starry-eyed few for whom art is its own excuse for being, and next month’s rent a trifle beneath one’s calling (for which Mama and Papa will inevitably provide through clenched teeth).

It’s for this reason that I designed, and have occasionally taught, a “Special Topics” course called CW 198: Professional Writing, which teaches CW majors and anyone else interested some basic skills and attitudes they’ll need to fend for themselves in a world “hostile to romance,” as James Joyce put it, demanding not ballads but brochures, not sonnets but speeches, and not aubades but AVP scripts. I also teach these undergraduates basic editing skills—rewriting, proofreading, press production processes—that should serve them in good stead whether they’re working by themselves or in an organization.

There are actually many jobs for writers out there—our bulletin board at the department is peppered with wanted ads—but they require technical rather than creative writers, and it takes a certain mindset (not to mention a skills set) to switch between the two. Time was when creative writers thought of themselves as God’s own children, when even journalism was looked down upon as an unworthy alternative. Nothing burns me up more than this attitude; having worked myself as a journalist for the pre-martial law Herald and Taliba, and as an occasional contributor to and editor for newsmagazines, I value the discipline, the commitment, and the attention to detail that journalism demands of the writer. I remind my students that they have only to look to Nick Joaquin for the finest example of a writer who saw no contradiction and only complementation between creative writing and journalism (which he, echoing Matthew Arnold, called “literature in a hurry”).

Sadly if curiously, the transition from one mode to the other isn’t an easy one to make. While creative writers used to producing one short story or a handful of poems a year may find the journalist’s daily deadlines punishing, journalists—those whom I’ve had as students in graduate class—typically find it difficult to switch off their “fact” buttons and let the logic of plot and character—not “what really happened”—drive the narrative. I may advise them in that case to specialize in creative nonfiction, something of a hybrid between journalistic reportage and the personal essay, but even then some journalists still find it difficult to insinuate themselves as characters into the unfolding story.

There’s just as much resistance in some young creative writers to the idea of writing for money—or rather, let me qualify that: not to money itself, which everyone needs to pay the bills and buy the iPod, but to compromising one’s cherished beliefs to sell a bar of soap or that hardest of sells, a politician. My response to these anguished cries is a form of tough love (and an old cliché): if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Advertising and PR (whether corporate or government) require a strong constitution and a stomach made of boilerplate steel.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in the 35 years I’ve been writing for a living is that there’s writing you do for yourself, and writing that you do for others, and you should never get the two mixed up. Anything that doesn’t go under my byline is writing for others, and is mainly meant to satisfy a client’s needs and demands; if the work requires my byline—say, a commissioned biography—I should still be able to stand by every word I say, and not willfully peddle a patent falsehood. Mostly, I think of the writing I do for myself—my stories and novels, my columns and commentaries—as a form of payback (or, sometimes, of revenge) for everything else that I have to do for everyone else; it’s a healthy release of all the bilious sentiments that build up in your bones, not to mention a reminder of what you read John Updike or Dylan Thomas for—the sheer thrill of the well-crafted phrase.

When it comes to writing for others, “compromise” isn’t a bad word; it opens doors and gets you jobs. But you should choose or know, from the beginning, whether this or that client or project is worth your talent and time, and not merely in financial terms. In other words, questions of principle should be settled at the door, because once you step in, you implicitly accept the ethos of the place. Compromise will then mean, say, a willingness to adjust to their norms, to convey their message, and to employ your skills in the service of that message. It’s theirs, not yours; signing the dotted line means you’ll do your best on someone else’s behalf, and the sooner you accept that, the better for you and your client or employer. I’ve done work for some politicians, but not for others; some of my choices turned out be poor ones, but those choices were made willingly, and I have only myself to blame.

I hope my students make better ones, in their own time. I’ll be teaching CW 198: Professional Writing again this second semester, and I’m looking forward to—in Pablo Neruda’s words—getting the hands of my student-poets dirty.


LET ME devote the rest of my space to an invitation from another professional group I belong to, the Philippine Studies Association, which is co-hosting the 8the International Conference on Philippine Studies (ICOPHIL) from July 23 to 26, 2008 here in Manila.

Since 1989, the ICOPHIL conference has been held every four years, the last one at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2004. With the theme “Philippine Studies for the 21st Century: New Meanings, Critiques and Trajectories”, ICOPHIL aims to bring scholars together from around the world and all over the Philippines to discuss issues across a broad range of concerns including Philippine history, politics, and culture, the Philippine economy, the Philippine diaspora, globalization population studies, education, the Philippine media, and Philippine Studies itself as a scholarly discipline.

The Program Committee is soliciting conference presentations from Philippine Studies Association members, affiliated societies, and local and foreign scholars in all disciplines. The committee particularly welcomes interdisciplinary or border-crossing proposals that complement or depart from conventional historical, chronological, geographic and disciplinary boundaries. Younger scholars are especially encouraged to participate.

Please submit proposals to the 8th ICOPHIL Secretariat at the Philippine Social Science Council via email (icophil@pssc.org.ph) or fax (632-924-4178 or 632-922-9621) by November 15. Proposals must include a 150-word abstract of the panel/paper as well as the name, affiliation, and contact details of the proponent. Complete panels by potential chairs will be given priority, but individual proposals will also be considered.

Flotsam & Jetsam for September 22, 2007


NOW THAT Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has “suspended” the ZTE-NBN contract, whose tangled web has already yielded the fattest spider of them all in the person of her husband Mike, expect the government’s damage-control machine to declare the issue over, all further inquiries a distraction, and GMA a hero for her sensitivity to public opinion.

In other words, they’ll want all critics of this mother of anomalous deals to cease and desist—to shut up, lest they lend themselves to “destabilization,” the worst thing you can possibly do at this point in our glorious history. Forget that Ben Abalos ever went to China; forget that Mike Arroyo ever said “Back off!”; forget that someone tried to bribe Romy Neri; forget that some people must have already made millions (of dollars, not pesos) in cash advances, leaving some Chinese paymasters very nervous or very angry, or both.

Whoever the truly guilty parties are—come on, this plot’s too thick and too good not to have some real villains in it—the Chinese dragon knows them. It’ll want to get its money back. We’ll cease and desist and let this thing pass and even sing the praises of “national unity” or whatever GMA will use to claim victory from defeat—if and only if the Chinese triads go after the bad boys, whoever they may be. It seems that nobody can touch a certain election official here, because he knows where all the electoral bodies are buried; but I wonder if the kung-fu ninjas (I know, I mixed ‘em up, so much the better for the wallop) will be so dainty as to even care. I wonder, too, if and how a certain gentleman can tell those debt collectors to back off.

Penman for Monday, September 17, 2007


A COUPLE of months ago, my closest friends got the same text message from me on their cellphones: “Consummatum est.” That’s about all the Latin I know, and those of you who remember your Bibles will recognize that to mean “It is finished,” and what was finished in this case was the agony and the ecstasy of the writing of one novel—my second, which, as I noted with both regret and relief, I hurried to finish in seven days after sitting on it for seven years.

The rush was occasioned by an unexpected letter from the people behind the Man Asian Literary Prize, a new competition sponsored by the UK-based Man Group, which has also taken over sponsorship of what’s now called the Man Booker Prize, given to the best new novel of the year from the British Commonwealth countries. The Man Group decided to extend its largesse to Asia, thus the Man Asian, for an outstanding novel in English or English translation by an Asian writer.

Sometime in March, reminded of the deadline by a friend, I’d sent them an entry—the minimum required, a 10,000-word sample. I had 30,000 words in the bank, so that wasn’t too difficult. I thought no more about the competition and about its rules until I received a letter in early July from the organizers, informing me that Soledad’s Sister had been long-listed along with 22 others (11 of them Indians, just to show how vigorous novel-writing is among those people). My exultation soon turned to panic and grief when I read the fine print, which reminded me that the full text of the novel was due by July 15—barely a week away—if I wanted to be considered for the short list of five. These five finalists would be announced by the end of October and brought to Hong Kong on November 10 for the awarding ceremonies.

For a few days I went into a tailspin. This novel had been a monkey on my back for far too long. I’d begun it in the most sylvan of surroundings—on a fellowship in England, in a flat with a picture window that looked out to a lake full of swans and fringed by cattails, followed a couple of years later by another stint beside yet another, even more picturesque lake in Italy, and you would’ve thought that with all those leisurely breaks I would’ve completed some successor to War and Peace, but in truth I felt paralyzed, in a way, by all that beauty and plenitude, in an odd reversal of my sometime pose as starving artist. (I’ve written about this elsewhere, but to sum up: I’ve realized that I write best on the run, with deadlines two inches from the tip of my nose, and with life clamoring loudly in both ears; in paradise, I’d much rather munch grapes and snooze.)

After seven years of desultory attempts at the novel—during which I published seven books that had to do with everything but my own fiction—I had about 200 pages of disjointed prose, and a vague memory of my original plan of writing a darkly comic novel—comic, I said, because I thought that we Pinoys get way too solemn every time we essay the novel, as if we were supposed to write the Noli and Fili all over again. I had a self-contained short story titled “The Woman in the Box” as my opening chapter, which I had hoped would set the tone; uncharacteristically, I had the final scene in mind; I could see it in my head and watch it like a movie. The only problem was getting from A to Z.

I was in despair. I knew that my friends and students had been waiting for me to finish the bloody novel (and bloody it is; I remember telling my classmates in my graduate fiction workshop in the mid-‘80s that I would do for death what Henry Miller did for sex), but that didn’t bother me as much as failing to see my way through to the end. I’d actually dwelt longer—11 years—on a long story that eventually became “Voyager,” stumped by the method by which one character would kill another; a flash of insight took care of that in one week in 1994.

And now I had one week in Diliman to finish what I couldn’t do in ages, in the world’s dreamiest surroundings. I took a deep breath, found special assignments for my classes to do for the week, played Friday night poker with the boys to flush out all extraneous vibes from my system, and then cloistered myself at home with tubs of coffee, macaroni soup, and good old guilt. I looked at my half-finished draft, threw away a third of it that I thought would lead nowhere (heck, that dross will probably turn up in another story; I’m a shameless recycler of unused paragraphs), and decided that I wasn’t going to write a novel—which by then I had to admit I didn’t know how to—but a long story.

And that’s what it turned out to be, from one Sunday to the next: a long, 50,000-word story that starts out with a narrative sweep like it wants to be a novel but then changes its mind in the middle to get where it wants to sooner than later. All kinds of threads get laid out in the beginning—then get pulled together towards the end, as you might expect from a short story. (As author Tim Tomlinson notes, “The short story is end-oriented: If the ending’s no good, the story suffers considerably, even fails. The novel is less dependent on the perfect ending.”) I’ve always asked my classes, “Where’s the Filipino novel that takes place not over a decade but in three days?” So—thinking I would put my money where my mouth was—I had the novel cover no more than three days. And since I’ve always encouraged my students to write about ordinary people, I used a small-town cop and a karaoke-bar singer as my main characters. It ends pretty much as I had imagined it should, albeit more quietly and less spectacularly, and while you can count about 15 dead bodies in it, I think it remains darkly comic.

Is it any good? I can’t say, and it’s hardly for me to say. It’s one of those things you’ll either love or hate. I’m immensely happy and relieved that it’s done—at least in a form I was able to email to Hong Kong a few hours before the absolute deadline—but I know where the warts and the lapses are, and will take some time to mend them. In writing, I enjoy description most, and you’ll get a lot of that here; I’m just not sure if it all hangs together in a way that will satisfy most readers.

What I do know, coming out of this experience, is that I’m a short story writer first, an essayist second, and maybe a novelist last. As with my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, I found it difficult to hit a long, leisurely stride with Soledad. I certainly can’t see myself writing 300 pages of anything (unlike my pal and partner-in-crime Charlson Ong, who can whip out an epic between brushing his teeth and combing his hair). Tim Tomlinson observes that the difference between the novel and the short story is that “between raising a family with a spouse and moving from lover to lover.” I’m a family man myself, but I can understand the seductions of the other kind.

I’d be in good company, too. There’s Franz Arcellana and Greg Brillantes, among the writers I admire, who must have struggled with the same demons. The American short story writer and activist Grace Paley, who died last month at age 84, produced little more than three volumes of stories—remarkable stories, to be sure—but never saw her way to finishing a novel, although she “tinkered with drafts.” She had a wonderful way of explaining her predicament: “I’m extremely interruptible,” she once told an interviewer. Hey, that’s me, I wanted to scream—my life’s been nothing but a series of interruptions, but gleefully so, with Macs, VWs, fountain pens, cameras, Oriental junkets, and other people’s stories always getting in the way of the fiction.

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—but that’s not stopping me from at least wishing to be in Hong Kong some time soon. It’s a place I’ve always enjoyed visiting for its computer and camera shops, not to mention its roast duck and noodles. Ah, more savory interruptions!

As for the novel itself, I’ve given it over to Anvil Publishing, whose boss lady Karina Bolasco is the probably the first and the only person to have read the draft (unless the handful of other writer-friends whom I’ve seeded copies to found it so bad they can’t bear to speak to me about it). Karina says she loves the book (as your publisher should) and wants it out soon—she even had her people work up a dummy for me to see and look over—but I’ve asked her to wait until I find the time to put in some necessary revisions. Given the haste in which I completed the draft to meet the Man Asian deadline, I’m sure I’d better.

Karina suggests that I switch titles and use Soledad’s Sister for the first chapter and The Woman in the Box for the novel itself. I think it makes sense and I’m inclined to agree; but let’s wait until I’m done with the revisions. At that point, I probably won’t care whether it gets me to Hong Kong or not. I’m more excited by the prospect of coming out with my second novel than by another prize. And like I tell my students who crave Palancas, at some point, the book is the prize. I guess that’s where we are.


I'D LIKE to apologize to Pisay scriptwriter Henry A. Grageda, whose screenplay I praised last week while noting—wrongly, as it turns out—that he was not a PSHS alumnus. He was actually director Auraeus Solito’s 1986 batchmate. No wonder he had that culture down to a T. A graduate of Ricky Lee’s workshop, Henry is the deputy director for research at an international graduate school of management, and is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on the contemporary internationalization of the Philippine firm.

Again, great work, Henry, and I look forward to more film projects from you. I was a screenwriter, too, sometime, and I can’t say that I miss it, but film’s a tempestuous mistress, and she gets better with the remembering.

Penman for Monday, September 10, 2007


EXCUSE ME for bringing up a depressing subject in what should be a section for lighthearted banter, but you get enough, I think, of the latter from me on most Mondays. I’d like to deal today with culture of another kind—with a mindset that maims and kills. And we’re not talking here about suicide bombers, but seemingly bright young men who get all caught up in a herd mentality that allows them to do things they might otherwise never do all by themselves.

I was interviewed on TV last week about the sad story of UP student Cris Mendez, who died from what, by all indications, was a brutal case of hazing at the hands of fraternity members he had hoped to be called “brother” by. Because of the usual time constraints, my soundbite got compressed to a few seconds within which I said something about not all fraternities being bad, nor do all of them subscribe to violence. That happens to be true, and I could say it again tomorrow, but in the light of what happened to Cris and others like him, it seemed such a lame remark to focus on. So let me add a couple of other points I made that never saw primetime but which might put things in a better context.

Every few years or so we get all convulsed by a Lenny Villa or Cris Mendez case—and then nothing happens. Few witnesses are found, the killers get off or get away, and new recruits get fed into the meatgrinder. This brings me to my real concern, which is the responsibility—and the culpability—of alumni “brods.” They’re often the ones who keep up the pressure on the residents to uphold “tradition”—even if it means breaking bones and snuffing out young lives. By this warped logic, “We did it, and we survived it—and so should you.” (One of the crassest remarks I’ve come across in the wake of Cris’s death was a blogger’s—apparently, one of Cris’s abortive brods—who shrugged that “Cris took his chances—and lost.”)

They’re also the ones who offer a safety net—or, to use another metaphor, who circle the wagons—once the residents do something awfully wrong, like maul or kill a neophyte, or a rival fraternity member. They’ll bring the victim to a hospital—maybe to doctor-brods—then provide refuge and succor to the suspects; they’ll make sure the witnesses either clam up or vanish; they’ll offer to take care of all the victim’s hospital bills, even as they also provide topnotch legal advice to the accused—i.e., the victim’s maulers. High-minded statements are made about justice and truth, while the PR machine starts spinning. Brods in high political and legal positions are mobilized to ensure that, whatever happens, the fraternity itself comes out unscathed, if not the brothers. (Even now, we’re hearing politician-brods in the Mendez case blithely asking, “Where’s the proof?” The lawyers of the fraternity in question—and they have lawyers aplenty—are threatening to sue the university for suspending the frat’s officers.)

I saw this happen a few years ago when I served as UP’s vice president for public affairs. One morning, I had to rush to a hospital in Manila, where a UP student had been brought, badly mauled, by unidentified persons, who quickly left. It soon emerged that he had been hazed as a neophyte by members of a very prominent fraternity. Soon the fraternity juggernaut went to work; no witnesses could be found, and all the fraternity’s alumni officers could assure me was that they would dispense justice internally, without yielding any suspects. Finally the family itself issued a statement that there was no problem, and that they wished to be left alone, and that was that.

I found myself asking why someone like that boy would have wanted to join a fraternity in this day and age, when you have many other organizations and activities to choose from, devoted to civic action, sports, culture, and politics, among others. The only practical answer I could come up with was that fraternities offer, to many, instant access to a lifelong social, political, and economic network. Especially if you’re poor—as these hazing victims almost always are—you want that equalizing edge. (And some may have other reasons; in my time, 36 years ago, I joined Alpha Sigma because many of the Collegian editors I admired were members.)

Fraternities are changing—many if not most in UP have done away with physical initiation or PI (which always seemed a silly idea to me, as tests of manhood go)—but bad habits die hard, and this latest case offers horrible proof of how much work remains to be done to change decades-old mindsets. In fact, all fraternities anywhere should have done away with PI, but again this proves they haven’t.

At dinner a few nights ago, some brods and I talked about possible ways of helping to ensure that something like the Mendez case should never happen to our residents, and of more sharply focusing the fraternity’s energies on academics and public service. I know that to many, that’ll be like teaching a dinosaur to dance, but I’d like to be more hopeful—while bearing in mind that the bottomline for fraternities is, if they can’t guarantee the safety and well-being of their members and recruits, then they’re better off dissolved. Worse than becoming irrelevant, they can be dangerous. If the alumni brods want whatever glorious traditions they may have begun to carry on to this new century, then they should take the lead in reshaping the mindsets of the young, and not condone any act of violence—even and especially if it’s perpetrated by one of their own.

BENG AND I attended the benefit screening of a movie a couple of weekends ago, and I did something I usually reserve for movies or TV shows featuring cats about to be put to sleep: I cried. The movie was Auraeus Solito’s Pisay, a personal tribute to the high school we both went to, the Philippine Science High School.

I’ve written more than enough about that school in this corner, so I’ll try to keep the drumbeating down. But the movie is its own excuse for being, as a sensitive, sensible, and often funny depiction of high-school life from freshman to senior year, the only difference being that it’s set in a special high school at a special time (the early 1980s, culminating in Edsa 1).

I can imagine how difficult it must have been to write an intelligent script about intelligent people (at least that’s what we thought we were, despite all the stupid things we managed to do), but screenwriter Henry Grageda—Auraeus's 1986 PSHS batchmate—pulls it off persuasively, capturing the ambience and the nuances of that place and time with perfect pitch.

Solito put a refreshingly gifted ensemble of young actors together, and the performances by Elijah Castillo, Annicka Dolonius, Gammy Lopez, EJ Jallorina, Carl Barrameda, Shayne Fajutagana (the only PSHS graduate in the group), Jonathan Neri, and Alfred Alain Labatos tell us that a new crop of real actors—not just your TV-matinee singers and dancers—has arrived. The brilliant Eugene Domingo leads a more than capable supporting cast.

Pisay (the familiar contraction of “Philippine Science”) is no tearjerker; if anything, it’s celebratory, a story of the inevitable passage from innocence to knowledge (of more than quadratic equations and Avogadro’s number). So what drew forth my tears?

I think it was the episode having to do with the character of Matt, who—despite his staunchest efforts to study hard and do well in his exams—doesn’t make the grade and gets cut from the school. It reminded me of the traumatic end to my own freshman year, when—despite the suddenly shameful fact that I had topped the entrance exams—I stood in peril of being kicked out, for an atrociously low grade in Math. My Math grade was 5.0, and my English was 1.0; in the end, it was my English that saved me, in the form of a letter of appeal that invoked the pity and the mercy of all the gods I knew. My parents had bought us (on installment, of course) our first TV set to celebrate my admission to a tuition-free high school, and I didn’t want that TV repossessed on my account. More luckily than Matt, I was put on probation, and squeaked by with just enough to see me through to the end.

We Pinoys really don’t form lifelong alliances stronger than our high-school bonds, and my batchmates and I still get together nearly every month, to revisit and laugh about the same old capers from almost 40 years ago. I saw some of the guys again at the screening, and I’ll bet that they, too, were wet-eyed, even if their Math grades were higher than mine.

Good work, Auraeus—now how about doing the quintessential UP movie, for its Centennial?

Penman for Monday, September 3, 2007

SO MANY of my friends have been asking about the iPhone that I might as well devote some space to it—not that you have to put a gun to my head to talk about things Apple. Herewith, an iPhone primer, something that might help you decide whether this newest icon of pop and digital culture is to die for, or just another hyped-up gadget you can live without.

What’s an iPhone?

Released in the United States last June 29—and selling more than 200,000 units on its first day of availability—the iPhone is Apple’s version of a cellular phone. Yes, it can make phone calls and send SMS messages (at least if you’re in the US—more about other places, later), but it does more than that. It’s also a widescreen iPod (in 4GB and 8GB configurations), a Web browser and e-mail device, a camera, a media viewer (yes, including YouTube), a calendar, and a note taker.

What’s to like and not to like about it?

First, the all-important superficials: it looks and feels great. (Admit it, looks are the first thing you mind.) Coming from industrial-design leader Apple, the iPhone is über-stylish, small, and light, with a large, bright, sharp screen. You can find many of its features (and maybe even more) in other high-end phones, but no one puts them together like Apple does. Just using your finger, you can navigate snappily around its multitouch screen. It uses no stylus, no mechanical keyboard. Almost everything you need is on the screen. The virtual keyboard takes just a bit of getting used to, but it works, and there’s nothing to break.


That said, Version 1.0 of the iPhone leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a quad-band, GSM/EDGE phone with wi-fi and Bluetooth—meaning, it’ll work in most parts of the world, including ours—but it doesn’t support the faster 3G network (although EDGE is supposed to consume less power and therefore yield better battery life). It’s missing copy-and-paste, to-do listing, custom ringtones, video capture, MMS, third-party applications, and wireless syncing, among other features that should be basic to any new phone in its class. Many if not all of these could possibly be added or fixed by the time Version 2.0 comes around, hopefully in time for the iPhone’s official Asian rollout next year. (Online update: third-party apps have already been written for and can be ported into the iPhone.)

And there’s the iPhone’s biggest downside, for now: the iPhone is being sold only in the US, where it’s effectively locked in to the communications giant AT&T (formerly Cingular), whose GSM network is compatible with the iPhone. Unless you apply some creative engineering (more on that, later), you’ll need to go through AT&T and sign up for a two-year plan if you want to use your iPhone as a phone (and you would, right?). There’s a less-advertised option for a prepaid plan, still with AT&T. You can use only AT&T’s pre-supplied SIM card with the iPhone. AT&T’s contribution to the iPhone’s feature offerings is Visual Voicemail—which us SMS-crazy Pinoys couldn’t care less about. In other words, the first-gen iPhone was designed for US users.

What’s wrong with being locked in to AT&T?

Nothing, if you don’t like to fuss about choosing your service provider, and if AT&T serves your area. Apple chose AT&T because of its large cellular network, but many Americans dislike the idea of having to go with AT&T and giving up their old networks and numbers (though some can be ported over). To some, “exclusivity” deals with corporate giants stand for everything that Apple (the old anti-Microsoft maverick) used to represent.

It wouldn’t be so bad if AT&T subsidized the iPhone—the way we get cheap or even free high-end phones from Globe, Smart, or Sun in exchange for long-term postpaid plans—but it doesn’t. Instead, on top of the fairly hefty tag price, you’ll need to pay AT&T a penalty of $175 if you want to pre-terminate your two-year contract with them.

So, can it be used here?

You mean, can you ask your favorite tito or tita in San Diego to buy you one as an early Christmas present and expect to be able to use it here? Sure, you can buy one—it’s now widely available in the US, at any Apple Store or AT&T store (you can get the 4-gigabyte iPhone for $499, and the 8-gigabyte model for $599)—but you can’t use it yet in the Philippines (or anywhere outside the US, for that matter, except on AT&T roaming) unless you hack the phone or the SIM card. (Clarification: you can still use your iPhone as an iPod, camera, browser, etc. except as a phone without having to sign up with AT&T by using a program called Jailbreak.)

Apple says that it will release the iPhone in Asia in 2008, and it’s safe to assume that iPhones are now being tested by the local telecommunications companies (telcos) and the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) for possible use here next year. Apple is also negotiating with European telcos for its release in Europe.

But even now, hackers have already modified the iPhone for use in many places in Europe and Asia, including the Philippines.

What does “hacking” mean?

A nicer term for it might be “reverse engineering.” It means finding and applying a hardware or software fix to enable you to use something other than what it was intended for. For example, some people have found a hack for running the Mac Operating System on a Windows machine; others have used a special chip to allow the Xbox to run Linux. In the case of the iPhone, a global effort has been underway among hackers to find a way of making it work as a phone both within and outside the USA on other networks, avoiding the need to accept a contract with AT&T or using its SIM.

So has the iPhone been hacked?

Yes, by different people using different techniques in several places. A New Jersey teenager modified the iPhone’s hardware to make it run on another network (and later got a sportscar and three new iPhones from a communications executive in exchange for the hacked iPhone). At least two companies (one in the US and one in Ireland) have made claims on the Internet of developing and possessing software solutions to unlocking the iPhone, and may be releasing them publicly—subject to legal considerations—even as I write this piece. Here in the Philippines, at least one person has been reported to have enabled the iPhone to use Globe, Smart, or Sun SIMs.

Exactly how do they do it?

I’m not about to tell you what I don’t know, and what could be legally questionable. But there are many discussions on the Internet about how this could be done. I’ve looked into them, but—not being an engineer—I have to say that it’s all Greek to me, having to do with “NORtools” and “Bootrom” and such other exotic creatures. At the end of these tedious processes, however, are unlocked iPhones, ready for use with other GSM networks.

Surely that’s illegal?

Maybe, but not surely. The NTC is reminding Pinoys that cloning SIM cards and unlocking phones (yes, including all those software surgeries in Greenhills) is illegal, but that it will need a formal complaint from, say, a telco to act against hackers. In the US, these issues are covered by the comprehensive Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which provides against the circumvention of intellectual property rights. However—and interestingly—the DMCA also contains six exemptions, one of which allows for “Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.”

Many lawyers interpret this to mean that it’s okay for you to unlock your own iPhone to use with your network—but not to do it for others, whether for free or for profit. Posting an unlock code publicly could court legal trouble, for secondary copyright infringement. But the lawyers also seem to agree that there are many gray areas in the law.

In any event, legal challenges are certain to arise both ways. Consumers have already filed three class-action suits against Apple—one of them specifically for not allowing customers to choose their carriers and unlock their phones. Apple and AT&T could also hit back at hackers threatening AT&T’s two-year monopoly.

Outside of the US and beyond AT&T’s scope, others (including yours truly) believe that Apple’s deal with AT&T doesn’t apply to them, and that—since they’re paying full price for the iPhone—they should be free to unlock it for their own use.

Hmm, sounds interesting. Where can I get an iPhone?

It’s not being officially sold by Apple here yet, but individual units have been trickling in from the US. Typically, the 8-gigabyte model will cost you P35,000—about the same as or even lower than other high-end Nokia or Sony Ericsson phones.

Should I get one now or wait till next year?

Unless you’re a compulsive early adopter like me, wait. First of all, unless your hacking skills are up to par, you still can’t use it here as a phone. Second, the second-gen iPhone is bound to be much improved, with the lessons learned from its inaugural foray. Don’t throw away that Treo or BlackBerry just yet.

Do you have one?

I’ve played with one, and just might get one, finances permitting. Having written all this (always a good excuse), I’d be too curious not to. (Online update: I think the picture below tells you something. There are more interesting pictures here.)


An endnote: I find this hacking adventure extremely interesting, because there's something to be said for the subversive spirit. This hasn't happened in a long, long time, and it's ironic that it's happening to Apple, one of the original subversives of the computing world. (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, let it not be forgot, were hackers themselves; in 1971, “Woz” designed and used a “blue box” to mimic a long-distance tone and called the Vatican, pretending to be Henry Kissinger; they almost woke up the Pope for him.) In the end, there are good and bad hacks. Some destroy—like taking down networks with viruses and such; others liberate and create fun. There could be a fine line there, somewhere, but that's for each of us to ponder.


I'M VERY happy to announce that June Poticar-Dalisay, aka “Nanay Beng,” now has a blog at http://junedalisay.blogspot.com. I got our daughter Demi to set it up for her, so she could have her own pulpit to preach faith, hope, and charity from—and tell the many hilarious and touching taxi-driver stories she keeps coming home with. Do pay her blog a visit.

No Classes in UP Diliman on Monday, July 23


IF ANY University of the Philippines-Diliman student happens to stumble on this blog tonight and tomorrow, here's official word from the Chancellor for you: no classes in UP tomorrow, Monday, July 23, because of the usual traffic and transportation problems associated with the State of the Nation Address that's set to be delivered tomorrow afternoon. Whoopee! I can sleep in and get some work done.

I got this e-mail message from Manolo Quezon responding to a recent piece I wrote about his grandfather. I'd asked him if MLQ had said "country" or "government" in that famous quotation mentioned below, and Manolo had replied "country"--a little too quickly, as it turned out. I wrote Manolo back an amused note absolving him of all blame--"it happens to the best of us"--but it's a hallmark of Manolo's thoroughness that he went to these lengths to get the facts of a seemingly small detail straight. Here's what he wrote:


Uh oh. Read your column. Mea maxima culpa.

I couldn't find the massive encyclopedia of Quezoniana put together by Alfredo Saulo (Manuel Luis Quezon on His Centenary: Appraisal, Chronology, Reader, Bibliography commissioned by the the National Science Development Board in 1978), which is massively footnoted.

Here's the proper quote:"I would prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by Americans, because no matter how bad, a Filipino government might be improved."

Saulo cites the ff. sources: Teodoro M. Kalaw's autobiography (Ms) pp. 259-260; quoted in Theodore Friend, Fn. 19, p.40. They basically date the statement to 1922.

He (Saulo) also cites another, more contemporary, version:

"When we have our unfettered self-rule, I dare say we shall make mistakes, but in that respect we shall not be original or monopolistic. It is by our mistakes that we shall learn. America has aided us to learn much of the art of government, but we can master the art only by self-practice. In politics, as in law or medicine or music or painting, concrete achievement is not in the scholastic sphere, but only in the sphere of scholasticism applied. And, anyway, even in the United States and in England, democracy is still on trial. It is better for the Philippines to be ill-governed by the Filipinos than well-governed by the Americans."

Which came from an exclusive interview with Edward Price Bell for the Chicago Daily News, 1925.

But there's another quote from a speech MLQ made in 1939 (CLU-sponsored inter-university oratorical contest, Ateneo Auditorium, December 9, 1939) which has him quoting himself:

"I have listened to a speech warning our people against independence, on the ground that every liberty you now enjoy may be lost, while under the American flag you are not denied any individual liberty.

"No one has outdone me in giving credit to the government and people of the United States for what they have done in the Philippines. But I cannot permit anyone to say in my presence that our people have enjoyed greater freedom under the American administration, or that our people will not enjoy their freedom under an independent Philippines, as much as they have enjoyed it under the American flag.

"It is true, and I am proud of it, that I once said, 'I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.'

"I want to tell you that I have, in my life, made no other remark which went around the world but that. There had been no paper in the United States, including a village paper, which did not print that statement, and I also had seen it printed in many newspapers in Europe. I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by any foreigner. I said that once; I say it again, and I will always say it as long as I live." (applause)