http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/Penman January 06.html The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Bulovas, and desktop lint. Sun, 19 Feb 2006 20:54:17 +0800 60 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/Penman January 06.html#xhp160232174


BEFORE WE return to regular programming (i.e., writing workshop) from our two-week jaunt through the world of Macworld, let me make a few corrections to some details in previous columns.

In my piece “Romancing the Gifted” (January 9), I credited Joel Navarro for composing the song “Tuwing Umuulan at Kapiling Ka”; it was another contemporary, Ryan Cayabyab, who wrote that song. Instead, Joel composed the equally catchy “Suwerte-Suwerte Lang (Pag Umuulan).” At least I got the weather right.

In that same column I identified myself as a member of Batch 1970 of the Philippine Science High School, causing some consternation among the proper members of Batches ’70 and ’71. This stems from an interesting footnote to PSHS history, in that I belonged to a unique section that finished high school in 4-½ years; if that makes us sound stupid, let me explain that, in its formative years, the PSHS had a five-year curriculum, beginning with a strangely-named “zero year.”

Later, it occurred to me—as a third-year sophomore and editor of the school paper—that if we were so smart, we should get out of high school sooner and not later than everybody else, so I fueled a campaign to bring our indenture down to a regular four years, if not shorter. Wonder of wonders, the idea was approved, and my batch found itself caught in the cusp. We were given a choice of graduating with the batch next to us (and be the last five-year batch) or to graduate mid-year in October. A handful of us couldn’t wait; we were put in one section, and graduated in October 1970. I entered UP that same month, just in time to catch the rising swell of the First Quarter Storm.

Lastly, it was Ben—not Bob—Razon who wrote me about his new Mac. This photographer is also a blogger (check him out at http://oarhouse.blogspot.com) who’s a regular at a bar and restaurant called the Oarhouse on 1803 A. Mabini in Malate. Ben wrote me again to announce that the Oarhouse will be holding a special Super Bowl XL Breakfast Buffet on February 6, Monday morning Manila time, from 6 am to 11 am, featuring the live broadcast of the National Football League Championship Game at Ford Stadium in Detroit between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Seattle Seahawks.

If you’re interested in joining this early morning Super Bowl Party, Ben requests that you pay for the P150 breakfast ticket in advance to Wilson, the bartender at the Oarhouse, entitling you to a hearty morning serving of eggs, sausages, corned beef, bread or rice, and bottomless brewed coffee and juices, continental-style. Beer at the happy hour rate and the other regular bar drinks will be available.

I’ve never been there, but cornerbacks and corned beef sound like my kind of breakfast.



OKAY, LET'S move on to something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time, having to do with the mistakes or missteps that new or young short story writers tend to make, based on the hundreds of student manuscripts I’ve gone through in class and in workshops these past few years. (Let me put in the usual caveat that a “mistake” to me might be a merit to others, and anyone taking this advice seriously should remember that marvelous exceptions exist to every so-called rule in writing. Also, to be sure, these problems are hardly exclusive to newbies.) I’m not even going to go here into problems with language, another bane altogether, but will confine myself to matters of concept or conception, of the way we look at and shape the story.

The first is what I’ll call the “cop-out,” where the writer chooses the most obvious and most predictable way to resolve a conflict. Sometimes this takes the form of the protagonist committing suicide, or killing his or her adversary.

Death may be a heavy burden to bear in real life, but in fiction, it can be an easy way out, indeed a lightweight solution to what could be a truly cosmic dramatic problem. Don’t forget that sometimes, if not often, it’s more difficult to be alive and to have to deal with the consequences of one’s actions than to be dead and beyond the pale of justice. An exception would be a story like Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” where Paul’s suicide comes as the only logical and literally breathtaking option left for someone in his situation.

The cop-out can also come in the form of the prematurely truncated ending, whereby the author—perhaps after developing a situation so complicated that he or she can no longer unravel it or see a clear way through—throws up his or her hands and says, “Well, let’s just leave it to the reader to figure out what happened!”

The bitin or ambiguous ending can be an artful device that can engage the reader’s imagination, and gift the reader with the supreme satisfaction of figuring things out; the aesthetic pleasure of discovery (and especially of self-discovery, of finding oneself in the story) should be one of the rewards or pay-offs of every story.

A great story, I’ve always thought, will generate its own future. In other words, a reasonably sharp reader ought to be able to see beyond the immediate horizon of the plot into the unwritten aftermath of events. Stories like Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and Manuel Arguilla’s “Midsummer” are much more interesting and more powerful for not telling us outright what will happen next—and by these stories’ endings, “what will happen next” is actually less important than how things got there in the first place.

But that’s different from a hopelessly muddled story that simply staggers to an abrupt halt, because the author doesn’t know any better what to do with it. To avoid a cop-out, bring the reader to a point where his or her intelligence can take over, and let go—but not before you’ve found and engaged the story’s most difficult possibilities.

This brings me to my second point, my oft-mentioned mantra for the writer to raise the stakes, to take risks and push the narrative or dramatic envelope. This can mean getting out of familiar situations—indeed, defamiliarizing them, or making the old new again.

Nothing can be too strange in a world full of grotesque realities and bizarre juxtapositions. What will happen if you transpose a story set in Pasay—let’s assume the usual urchin-pickpocket setup—to, say, Paris, where the character is no longer an urchin but an OFW seduced by the glitter on display? Or do the reverse, and transform that Burger Machine stand in Baclaran into a place of mystery and wonder. You can start with something terribly trite—like two maids dusting the furniture in the opening scene—but use totally unexpected dialogue, or throw some monkey wrench into the plot (like a monkey in the window?) to take us somewhere they and we have never traveled.

Another weakness of new writers—I think especially the young—is their inability or unwillingness to deal both boldly and finely with strong emotions, for which shock or raw anger are often made to serve as substitutes. Part of the reason, I suspect, is the influence of American minimalism, which deliberately downplays emotion and prizes a certain flatness of surface and surface effects. It could also be a studied reaction to the melodrama swirling around us, in real life as on TV and the in the movies.

People cry; people scream; people throw fits; people laugh deliriously; people make love in all kinds of places; people maim and kill each other in all kinds of ways. If people don’t do any of these in your stories—if all they do is sip tepid coffee in Starbucks talking about relationships rather than actually having one or a more active one—then you’d better have a good reason. But more than their presence, it’s the quality of these experiences (and, as much, the quality of their descriptions) that matter in good realist fiction. (I’ve slipped in the R word there, “realist,” simply to remind us that realism is, itself, a pose and an option.)

Sure, there are stories where seemingly nothing happens—again, easy examples are “”Hills Like White Elephants” and “Midsummer”—but that surface calm belies the roiling currents underneath, and their dramatic power (an extremely erotic power, in the case of “Midsummer”) is produced precisely by the restraint employed by the author on the material.

(On a related note—and as the possible subject of another piece—let me observe the perplexing absence of sex and crime from traditional Philippine fiction in English. Given our birth and crime rates, you’d think there was a whole lot of shakin’ going on in these islands—but no, not if all you had to go by were our stories, at least until recently, with some young writers invoking the F word every other sentence, as if to make up for some historical imbalance.)

It’s too easy to conclude that people don’t write about some things because they don’t know about them, and certainly too patronizing to say that they’re too young. Absolutely not; I think the true test of writing is to write beyond your own age and your own experience, to inhabit and represent other people’s lives. Until you write them and about them, you’ll never know them.

Lastly for now, let me remark on the stubborn refusal—or maybe again, the inability—of some new writers to revise their work, even after its obvious flaws have been pointed out to them in a workshop. Everyone has a right to preserve and fight for his or her own vision and version of a story, and it’s always possible that you could be right and 20 other people—including the instructor—dead wrong.

But do that on your own time; there’ll be a lot of time for it, too, after the workshops and out of school, when you’ll have no one looking over your shoulder, guessing at your intentions and commenting on your delivery (hey, you might even miss it!). As far as I’m concerned, every work submitted to class or workshop—no matter how seemingly perfect (as a rare few turn out to be)—is a malleable draft.

Revision is a sign of maturity, of finally grasping and realizing the true worth of your creation. The work matures, you mature. It may not be something you can do—and it’s something you really shouldn’t do—the day after the workshop, trying to incorporate everyone’s comments to their satisfaction. Let the sting of the critiques and the euphoria of the praises pass, maybe over a week or a month—then sit down quietly and patiently to the task at hand, “killing your babies” if you have to, as Nick Joaquin so memorably suggested. ]]> Sun, 29 Jan 2006 20:56:13 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/Penman January 06.html#oqh159633003

THIS IS the second of my two-part reportage on Macworld Expo 2006 which I attended in San Francisco earlier this month, so bear with me just one more time and indulge me my Mac mania while I walk you through some pretty amazing discoveries I made there (and one or two less so). I waited at 9:30 in the morning on a drizzly sidewalk for the Apple Store on Stockton Street to open just to be first in line for these software suites I’ll be reporting on—they’d been sold out every day since Steve Jobs announced them in his keynote address—so you can bet your life I like them, and I’ll tell you why.

We normally don’t let the software make the hardware decisions for us—in other words, we don’t buy computers because of what’s in them, tending to take the software for granted for as long as we can type documents, send e-mail, stash some pictures, and listen to some music. What often makes up our mind is the price of the whole blinking box, to whose innards we can be as indifferent as a car’s or a stereo’s, especially if we’re not too mechanically minded (and the fact is, most of us aren’t; and why should we, with errands to run, mouths to feed, checks to collect, and deadlines to beat?)

But the new software packages that Steve Jobs trotted out at Macworld look good enough to make you wish you had the Mac to run them on. Thankfully, they’ll run on old Macs as well as the new Intel-powered iMac and MacBook Pro as so-called “universal” applications.

First off is the iLife ‘06 suite that includes new, more feature-laden versions of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb. (What’s with all the “i” stuff? The little “i” as in “iMac” originally denoted “Internet,” but it’s hard not to see one’s embedded self in it.)

iPhoto is the Mac’s picture handling and sorting program, which means that if you attach a digital camera to your Mac, iPhoto can automatically download the pictures (and even videos) for you to catalog into albums, correct and manipulate, send out to friends, print out as a booklet, or publish and share on the Web. This new version can handle as many as 250,000 pictures—more than most of us can take in a lifetime (after about three years of digital shooting, I have less than 4,000 pictures in my photo library—still a lot more than I would’ve taken had I stuck with my Nikon film camera). Aside from iTunes, iPhoto is probably the Mac’s most “fun” application, something families can share and enjoy.

iMovie and iDVD are for turning those klutzy home videos into professional-looking movies, and for creating eyepopping, widescreen DVDs. GarageBand appeals to the musician and audio engineer in all of us; its vast collection of synthesized instruments and sound effects can perk up the most boring presentations and—as Jobs demoed on the keynote floor—can turn podcasts into much more than speeches dictated into microphones (the very latest “to do” thing, after blogging, which means making your own personal audio and video programs to be broadcast over the Internet and downloaded into iPods).

Speaking of blogging, iWeb finally makes it easy for you to start and publish your own webpage and your own blog within it, upload your pictures to it, and sort things out into sections like “sports,” “family,” “projects,” and so on. iWeb works best with Apple’s own .Mac mail accounts, but it also works with other servers.

iLife ‘06 was accompanied by yet another software package called iWork ’06, featuring the latest versions of Keynote—a presentation program whose stunning templates, effects, and transitions can blow Powerpoint out of the water—and Pages, a collection of desktop-publishing templates that make doing newsletters, journals, posters, invitations, and résumés as easy as drag and drop. I’ve used the earlier versions of both of these, and with absolutely no knowledge of Photoshop, PageMaker, or any of those visual-oriented programs (I do words, words, words), I had a presentation and a newsletter done after less than an hour’s work on each project, dipping into my iPhoto library for the pictures I needed.

iLife and iWork cost $79 each; but the good news is that iLife comes free on every new Mac. If you want to do something special with your next wedding or birthday video or for your next family reunion—or if you just want to surprise your friends with your hitherto undiscovered artistry—give these new apps a spin, maybe on that new iMac or MacBook you’ve always deserved.



LAST WEEK'S column on Macworld generated such interest from readers—a number of whom were contemplating switching to the Mac—that I thought I’d address the three most common and longstanding misconceptions about Macs:

First, the Mac may be cute, but it’s underpowered. Very early on in its 30-year history, the Mac instantly became the darling of creative types—graphic designers, musicians, writers—for such simple reasons as giving users a palette of colors and bitmapped fonts to play around with (as opposed to the throbbing green and orange letters on DOS machines). That near-fanatical following actually became a liability, as the mainframe and command-line machos (i.e., those who now miss the old CONFIG.SYS routines) were quick to dismiss the new Smiley-faced Mac as a “toy” incapable of serious work.

Much later, the so-called “megahertz myth” dogged the Mac, whose processor speeds remained, say, at 500 Mhz while its PC counterparts started flirting with the gigahertz range—despite the fact that, to put it simply, the Mac worked differently, more efficiently, and very often beat out its higher-spec’ed PC rival in real-world, heavy-duty tasks such as in Photoshop.

The new Intel Macs should put those anxieties to rest. If it’s brute force you want, these “core duo” machines have it in spades—although again, it’s the beauty and the subtlety with which that power is used in the software that should win you over.

And Mac OS X—pretty as it looks—is as serious and robust as any operating system can be. My American brother-in-law Eddie—who needs a computer as powerful and an OS as rock-steady as he can get for his job as a software engineer for a leading aerospace and defense contractor—was surprised and happy to find that OS X is really UNIX under the hood. (For non-techies, that’s like finding a wrestler beneath a debutante’s gown—hmm, maybe just forget that image.) A long-time Dell man, Eddie now says he’ll give the new MacBook Pro laptop a look when it comes out next month. (I think it also helps that I gave Eddie and my sister Elaine iPods for Christmas—they work fine with PCs, but they work even better with iTunes on a Mac.)

The second misconception people have about Macs is that they’re nice, but they’re too expensive. If you’re comparing apples to oranges (i.e., cheap clones, such as the “Orange”-branded DVD player I got at Greenhills that lasted me all of three months), that’s true; heck, even an original IBM or Compaq desktop’s too expensive beside a jerrybuilt clone. And yes, there was a time when even we Mac addicts winced at the price tags of our favorite things. (Can you imagine a $6,500 laptop in 1995? That was the late, unlamented PowerBook 5300ce, which you can now get for less than $100 on eBay. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, will start at $1,999—computers are actually the only things that cost a lot less over time, in terms of bang for your buck.) That was because Apple used proprietary parts—things used by and useful only to their machines, such as ports, memory, even peripherals like keyboards and mice.

Today you can attach almost any USB thingy to a Mac, or buy RAM used by PCs as well. And you can get a great entry-level but fully-loaded Mac like an iBook G4 for as low as P61,000 (and even much lower, if you‘re a UP student or faculty member, thanks to special educational discounts at ynzal.com).

Third, some people think that moving to Macs means leaving everything familiar—like MS Office—behind. The fact is, the Mac version of MS Office will translate your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations so seamlessly, you won’t even know it’s there. And if (for some strange reason) you don’t like Microsoft, you can download free and full-featured productivity suites like NeoOffice.



IT WASN'T all roses. My “Worst of Macworld” award has to go to what I’m calling the iPoop—someone’s idea of bathroom bliss, consisting of a porcelain-white iPod dock, with speakers and charger, and a toilet-paper roll. Bombs away!



INCIDENTALLY, A local Apple reseller—Microwarehouse, better known as the country’s foremost distributor of Palm PDAs and more recently of iPods—is sponsoring a unique photography contest whose title I swiped for this column. The “Apple of my i” contest requires participants to take interesting photos of both celebrities and private individuals using Apples (laptops, iPods, desktops) and loving them. Prizes include a 17-inch iMac, a 12-inch iBook, and loads of iPods. The deadline is on February 6, so hurry over here for the rest of the details. ]]> Sun, 22 Jan 2006 22:30:03 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/Penman January 06.html#bmm158948899


(Here's another advance posting occasioned by the fact that I'l be 35,000 feet above the Pacific when this is supposed to be coming out. I've added a few pix below, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous and back to the sublime. For more Macworld pictures, please visit my homepage here.)



SOMETIME, SOMEWHERE, yesterday, my 52nd birthday came and went—but it never happened, because I was in the air coming home from San Francisco, leaving at 8:45 pm Saturday the 14th and arriving Monday (yes, this morning, the 16th) at 6 am.

But while I may have lost a birthday, I gained the experience of a lifetime—or perhaps I should say, of a geek’s lifetime—from a trip to Macworld Expo 2006 in San Francisco, the realization of a dream I’ve nourished in my heart with more fervor and longing than a mountaineer might show at the foothills of Everest or a famished convict might display towards a leg of salted ham.

I know, I know, it’s a pretty strange way to explain my most recent encounter with the lords of Macintosh and their lethal (well, to PCs) weapons. But as a Manila-based American PR man—himself a recent, initially reluctant, and finally hapless convert to the iBook—observed, “I’ve seen well-educated, normally articulate, sensible human beings just lose it when it comes to explaining why they love their Macs. They’ll mumble mantras like ‘ease of use’ or ‘It’s, just, so, beautiful’ without really telling you anything, except that, well, they love their Macs.”

Let me try to put that mystique to words—or words to that mystique. If you’ve been a longtime PC user and you put your hands on a Mac—say, a PowerBook or an iMac—you’ll immediately notice that it feels different, it acts different, and—heck—it might even think different, as the famous Apple ad campaign goes. Steven Levy (author of Hackers and the modestly-titled Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, The Computer That Changed Everything—now you know what I’ve been up reading late nights) recalls what turning on a Mac was like when it first came out more than a quarter of a century ago:

“The sedateness and elegance of the Macintosh gestalt could be punctuated by exciting events. The beep when the machine is turned on. The sudden appearance of a drop-down menu. The darkening of an icon when the file or application it represents is not available at that moment. The zooming animation as the windows open and close.”

“Gestalt” (look it up in the dictionary, folks—that’s the Mac user’s way) seems hardly the word to use with little plastic or metal boxes with blinking lights, and it’s hard to imagine anyone these days getting all spoony over startup chimes and drop-down menus. But you know what? Twenty years after using my first Mac, I still get a thrill out of hearing that comforting, polyphonic “Chungggg!” every time I fire up my PowerBook, which some sensors in my brain instantaneously translate into “And now the fun begins.”

Okay, I’ve made my point: I love Macs (aren’t they just beautiful and so easy to use?). Now, multiply me by 35,000; bring us all to San Francisco for one week in January; collect as many of us as you can under one roof; bewitch, bother, and bewilder us with as many new baubles and booties as you can conjure for Macs and their musical siblings, the iPods; stoke that frenzy to an even higher pitch by calling out the great geek guru himself, Steve Jobs, and having him announce the release of new Macs promising to be up to four to five times as fast as their present versions, for the same price; and tell us that we can now more easily convert our mothers, cousins, pusoy buddies, and Friendster soulmates to the Mac by giving them the power to produce and publish their own music, their own movies and photo albums, their own greeting cards and calendars, even their own blogs!

That, friends, is Macworld, the year’s biggest gathering of the Macintosh faithful, the people around the planet who have used and stood by this “platform” that Apple Computers designed in the 1970s and—against all odds—have nurtured to a booming enterprise today. To the business suits, it’s a trade show; but you’ll be hard put to see anyone in a suit among the hundreds of people milling about the exhibition hall at any given moment in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Nor, for that matter, will you see any nerds in lab coats and inch-thick glasses. T-shirts and jeans—perhaps with a jacket thrown on in casual cognizance of the chill outside—are the fashion order of the day; kids dressed up as iPods trail after their mom, who’s looking over a perky lime-green sleeve for her iBook. On behalf of his absent son, a dad in a chambray shirt asks how his teenager might join the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, co-sponsored by Apple and to be judged by, among others, the Black Eyed Peas, Pat Metheny, and Mos Def. A new section in a corner displays cars decked out with various iPod setups; not surprisingly, accessories for the iPod—of which Apple sold a phenomenal 32 million worldwide in 2005 (two of them to me)—are the show’s most ubiquitous items, ranging from skins and cases to connectors and chargers. In Apple’s own booth, hordes of people who look like they just walked in off the street—as many probably did—line up to try out the new Intel-powered iMacs and MacBook Pros and the new iLife and iWork software suites which can help even the most inartistic klutz express the broadest or subtlest emotion.

In other words, and in keeping with the culture that’s built up around the Mac and its adherents, Macworld isn’t so much about technology itself as about using that technology for work and fun—not just for the benefit of geeks and devotees like me, but people like PC user and photographer Bob Razon—someone we like to call a “switcher”—who wrote me recently to say that “My new 12-inch PowerBook is humming along nicely, and I think the best thing I can say is that my feeling about it has nothing to do with the technical speak and comparisons between Windows and the PC, but more of the fact that this machine has not drawn any special or specific attention to itself except for how it's just functioned as simply as it has promised. Mind you I'll still be attracted and engaged to the geeky, subterranean world of Windows when I tinker with programs and hardware and configurations, but when I need to edit my pictures and be in communication with people, I think the Mac will be all I'll ever use and need.”

Macworlds and geeky gushings aside, I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. When Bob said that his Mac allowed him to focus on his work and to forget about the machine, I agreed; those of us whose jobs depend on our computers and the “creativity suites” that come with them—word processing, image manipulation, music recording, not to mention old-fashioned numbers crunching—work best when, in a sense, you forget you’re working, because the environment recedes into the background and creative decisions take over.

I should admit, however, that with Macs that’s only partially true, because I, at least, never quite forget the visible and tactile beauty of the machine; to me the machine is an end-product in itself, someone else’s work of art and labor of engineering. Try typing on a G4 PowerBook’s satiny aluminum keyboard—better yet, with iTunes playing subtly in the background through high-end earphones plugged into the audio port—and you’ll understand why.

So what new wonders did Steve Jobs and his engineers pull out of the hat this time? I’ll talk about those at greater length next issue—and why I came home with the best birthday gift anyone like me could have wished for: an Apple T-shirt proclaiming “I visited the Mothership.” I did, and I’m here to snatch your bodies.
















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In another exception to my self-imposed rule, I'm advancing online publication of my column for Monday. I'll be enplaning in a few hours for Macworld Expo in San Francisco (woohoo!), and besides, there's nothing in this piece that really has to wait till Monday. This blog is going to be pretty busy with Macworld reportage these next few days; I'll keep you posted.



AT 9:30 AM ON January 21, at the ASTB Exhibit Hall of the Philippine Science High School compound on Agham Road in Quezon City, a very interesting book is going to be launched to pay tribute to one of the PSHS’s pillars: Dr. Cleofe M. Bacungan, one of the school’s earliest and longest-serving directors. More than just a series of congratulatory essays and nostalgia pieces, the book is the closest thing we have to a history of the PSHS, which graduated in its first batch in 1969 and has since produced around 10,000 alumni.

Those alumni are now among the best and brightest lights of Philippine science and technology, many of whom have made waves far beyond our shores. Just for example, one of last year’s Gawad Lagablab (or most outstanding PSHS alumni) awardees was Dr. Rosalia C. Mercado-Simmen (PSHS, 1969), who today is one of the world’s leading researchers in the biology of reproduction, having been published and recognized widely for her work on reproduction, endocrinology, physiology, and biophysics. Her discoveries have a direct impact on women’s health in such areas as infertility, failed pregnancies, endometriosis, and birth defects.

Another awardee was Dr. Luis M. Tupas (PSHS, 1979), the National Program Leader for Global Change and Climate for the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service of the US Department of Agriculture. His research has benefited more than the United States; indeed, it has contributed to the global understanding of climate change, which affects all countries, including the Philippines.

But as I (PSHS, 1970) never tire of pointing out (or, okay, boasting about), the school has graduated people who have distinguished themselves in other professions. They include, in no particular order, CCP President and dancer Nestor Jardin; Mapua (soon Malayan) university president Rey Vea; Ibon Philippines executive director and civil society leader Tony Tujan; Army Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon; computer scientist and social critic Roberto Verzola; Economic Planning Sec. Cielito Habito; former Health Undersecretary, political theorist, and occasional actor Mario Taguiwalo; indigenous people’s rights advocate Commissioner Vicky Tauli-Corpuz; Cavite Congressman Joseph Abaya; philosophy professor and college dean Zosimo Lee; eLagda firestarter Enteng Romano; fellow writers Jessica Zafra, Luis Katigbak, Marc Gaba, and Ralph Galan; prizewinning film director (“Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros”) Auraeus Solito; cardiologist Ernie Baello; pediatrician and child TB expert Irene Reyes-Santos; composer (“Tuwing Umuulan at Kapiling Ka”) and conductor Joel Navarro; international fashion model Anna Bayle; former San Francisco utilities commission president Rodel Rodis; and former SGV partner and Accenture CEO Jaime del Rosario.

That list could go on for another couple of pages, but you get the point. We imbibed not just science and math from the PSHS, but a whole attitude to life and public service—infused, I’d like to think, by liberal humanist values as much as by scientific rationalism.

But enough of the chest thumping. Long before we began thinking of ourselves as the King Kongs of the Philippine intelligentsia, we were pimply brats, maybe bright and bookish but emotional idiots who needed massive dosages of tough love to stand up straight and start walking in the right direction.

That substance was provided by our school’s longtime director, Dr. Cleofe M. Bacungan—or “Doctora,” as everyone called her deferentially, and, on less formal occasions and moods, “Drabacs.” Rebellious knaves that we were, we often took her for the enemy, and considered it our mission to test her patience, or otherwise to generally introduce some exquisite moment of misery into her working day, such as by tossing firecrackers into her office (don’t do this, boys and girls). Once, things got so bad that an impassioned student leader climaxed his stirring speech to the mob with that deathless challenge: “Bacungan—or Barabbas?”

For all that, the doctora never gave up on us, and shepherded us through the most complicated years of our lives (it was the first time I had girl classmates, for one thing, and they were often more difficult to deal with than quadratic equations). I saw her again at an alumni dinner last year, and I could swear that she remembered every PSHS student she ever met, and could recite—in her 80s—the history of every year she ever served, graciously choosing not to dwell on the evil that boys do.

When Romancing the Gifted was being prepared, I was asked to write the foreword, and on behalf of 10,000 grateful graduates of the PSHS, this is what I said:

It is a great honor for me to introduce this book, just as it was an honor to have been associated, at one time of my life, with its subject. I belonged to the third batch of Philippine Science High School scholars, and therefore to that first generation of PSHS students who inhabited a borrowed building on a fringe of the Elliptical Road. We had large vacant grounds that we used for football, basketball, our biology plots, and PMT training, and which we shared with the rusting, overgrown hulk of a schoolbus, which I can’t remember having ever seen in motion. This was our school, our laboratory, our playground, our Eden, and here the most important folds of our brains were imprinted, coded with lifelong traits and values.

We were, to say the least, not an easy lot to deal with; many of us flaunted the brashness of the very young and very talented, on top of the hormonal surges and explosions that visit high schoolers everywhere and tax the patience and understanding of their parents and teachers. This was the challenge—and the opportunity—that a young Ph.D. named Cleofe M. Bacungan faced, a few years after her return from graduate studies in the United States, where she had specialized in biochemistry and science education.

Dra. Bacungan became director of the PSHS shortly after we ourselves entered the school, and she took on the unenviable task, and also the privilege, of shepherding a generation of young people already steeped in the counterculture of the mid-‘60s—Vietnam, the Beatles, psychedelia—into the rigors of a life of science. Inevitably, she sometimes became our political adversary, and we took what now seems a silly pride in making life difficult for the leader of our institution. But through all that and despite our youthful excesses, she remained our personal friend and mentor, knowing better than we did what our talents were worth and how they could be made to serve the national good. She never lost faith in us, even those of us who lost our faith—albeit temporarily—in such familiar guideposts as God and government.

The title “Dra.” or “Doctora” has fallen out of fashion, overtaken by the demands of political correctness and contemporary English. But we always called her that—indeed, we compacted it into that most inelegant of nicknames, “Drabacs.” But such is life that what may have been a putdown 40 years ago has now become a term of endearment. And “endearment” perhaps best describes our lifelong relationship with the good doctora, without whose firmness at the helm many of us would have lost out way.

This book is more than a tribute to Dra. Bacungan. It is also a virtual history of the first two decades or so of the Philippine Science High School—not a dry technical summary of programs and functions, but a living record of young lives as we lived and knew them. In these fond reminiscences, we hear the voices not only of Dra. Bacungan’s students but also those of her colleagues and even the parents and benefactors she worked with, filling out our enduring image of her.

Thank you, Dra. Bacungan, for this opportunity to remember not only the best of you, but also the best of ourselves, from an age of wonder and innocence that we will never see again.



LIKHAAN: The UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW) is extending its deadline for the submission of applications and requirements for this year’s UP Writers Workshop to January 16.

Two fellowships are available and—in an important change from previous practice—these are open only to advanced writers. UP ICW Director Vim Nadera says that given the proliferation of creative writing workshops on both the national and local levels, beginning writers now have many other options.

For more details and application forms, please visit the UP ICW office in UP Diliman or the ICW website at . You can also call 922-1830 and ask for Mr. Tony Serrano.

The UP Workshop will be held at the Pines View Hotel in Baguio on April 3–9, 2006. During the workshop, fellows will be expected to make a presentation of a chapter or draft of a work-in-progress, and a short essay on an aspect of their writing or of the genre in which they work. ]]> Sat, 07 Jan 2006 10:20:11 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/Penman January 06.html#cue157813807


(Just for today, New Year's Day, and just because I'm really sleepy, I'm advancing the online publication of my column by a few hours, so I can curl up with a book and get up early enough for tomorrow's class--yes, indeed, it's back to the salt mines! If your holidays were a fifth as busy as mine, you're happy. Have a good year, all!)



IT'S BEEN just over a month since I started blogging, and I think I’m beginning to understand what drives hordes of people—relatively few of them professional, trained, or even aspiring writers—to stake their personal claim on a corner of the Internet, and to use it as a diary, newsletter, pulpit, column, album, catalog, billboard, literary gazette, scandal sheet, wailing wall, digital warehouse, or any combination of the foregoing.

Blogs didn’t happen yesterday; my friend and fellow Mac addict Adel Gabot had been doing a prototypical blog—an “electric journal,” as he continues to call it—since as early as 1976. “I know a lot of you out there were yet to be born,” Adel writes on his blog—which just happens to be one of the best-looking and best-written blogs hereabouts, thanks to Adel’s skills as a photographer and a writer-editor—“but yes I started back then, on good old paper using longhand. Later on I would write using WordStar on an Apple II, saving the files on 5.25" floppies, and so on, and calling it The Electric Journal, its name today. I imagine they're somewhere in the old house, taken over by layers of mold and fungus. The salvageable ones are archived properly, but I'm loath to read them. Depressing stuff mostly. Depressing largely because the entries are naive and clueless, full of promise and hope, and in hindsight, disappointing.

“Of course there are gaps, some months long, when the futility of all my journal keeping would catch up. Then wracked by guilt, resume. I've kept a journal since 1976. My dilemma now is time—writing takes a lot out of me nowadays, and I feel like I have just enough writing energy left out of a day to do one personal purging. Of course not a lot of the gooshy stuff will come out here in the Online Edition of the Electric Journal. Just the less damaging, largely innocuous stuff. I once wrote a regular column in a newspaper for several years, and I imagine this would be a lot like that time in my life. My editors were nice enough to allow me carte blanche. So I wrote what I pleased. Well, here we go again.”

That’s the spirit that animates most bloggers, I think, and while it sounds more than vaguely self-indulgent, it’s a candor that’s much more refreshing than the usual blather you get from governments, corporations, and even NGOs. (Here I’ll trot out one of my favorite quotations, from the novelist and 1993 Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison: “I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.” A more honest reason to write has yet to be found.)

If you’ve come this far but have been too shy to ask exactly what a blog is and where it came from, let me reward your patience by saying that “blog” is a contraction of the phrase “Web log”, the Web being, of course, the World Wide Web, or that part of the Internet most of us inhabit. Think of it as a public diary.

In the sense that blogs offer the casual surfer a glimpse into what sometimes try very hard to seem like ordinary lives (or otherwise try very hard to seem like extraordinary lives), blogs offer the perfect meeting point between exhibitionist and voyeur. That sounds sexy, and it is. No matter how high-minded a blog may look and sound—such as those brimming over with avuncular political wisdom—I still can’t help thinking of a blog as a pose in a window, whether you’re dressed in a bespoke suit or a ratty towel (or even much less).

Lord knows I already have a million things to write, aside from the six or seven columns a month I do for the STAR and for other publications (that long-delayed novel, I know, but that’s not even what I mean; I’m talking about speeches, brochures, biographies, and academic papers), so why did I even bother to put up a blog, aside from metaphorically prancing behind the curtains in my checkered pajamas?

My first and admittedly corny reason was storage—students keep asking me for copies of past column-pieces or lectures (I’m not that hot; their teachers make them do it), so it helps to keep a digital filing cabinet for all these odds and ends. After I did this for a month’s worth of columns, I felt an itch to do something more, or even something else. So I came up with what I’ve been calling “Flotsam and Jetsam”—the title of a story by W. Somerset Maugham, one of my earliest influences, an anthology of whose stories I picked up at Changi on a recent flight back to Manila. I wrote: “To give some value-added to this blog and to differentiate it from everything else I write and do, I’ll scribble occasional ‘just for this blog’ notes—odds and ends that might find their way into some future column piece or story, but are best taken while fresh and on the fly.”

And as far as I can help it, except for that brief quotation itself, I’d rather leave that material—which tends to be even more personal—to the blog; I repeat myself enough in this column, already.

But what’s been more interesting about blogging is how it’s led me to other blogs—some of them, again, much more interesting, better written, and more visually pleasing than others. I’m not even worrying about quality issues at this point—because, speaking of this point, blogging remains in that early-days stage of riotous exuberance, the closest thing the world has so far to a digital democracy (well, as “democratic” as you can get among folks blessed with a computer, an Internet connection, and an urge to bare all to strangers).

There are probably at least a couple of million bloggers around the world today, and you can generally sort them out into what I call rants, reviews, and rhapsodies.

The rants are the easiest ones to write, to read, and to dislike. (I could give you a few leads, but why spoil your day?) They tend to make one basic point: “I hate the world. I deserve better. Come to think of it, I hate you—and yes, I hate myself!”)

The reviews we can sub-classify into political, techie, and literary blogs. If you’re a current-events type of person, check out the blogs of Ricky Carandang, the PCIJ, John Nery, and Manolo Quezon for fresh insights into the stories that make the headlines. (I won’t bother giving you the URLs—be a good Netizen and Google them.* Now I can hear my Mom saying: “Ano ‘kamo?”) The techie blogs will give you the lowdown on everything from iPods and PowerBooks (Jason O’Grady’s The Apple Core) to hotrods and Michelin tires (see Jalopnik's blog for his take on “Woman Attempts to Trade Pilfered Parrot for Vintage Car”). For even more ornery opinions, as only the literati can dish out, take a gander at Grumpy Old Bookman and Blog of a Bookslut. (My oh my, it doesn’t sound like a very friendly world out there.)

For friendliness we turn to the rhapsodizers—meaning the rest of us who can gaze at our navels all day and find in them not just the wisdom of the ages, but more material for next day’s blog.

*But I decided to provide live links on this online edition, anyway. Lucky you! ]]> Sun, 01 Jan 2006 21:10:06 +0800