http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanAugust06.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. Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:03:46 -0600 60 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanAugust06.html#org178567095

THANKS TO what fellow badminton nuts call their “baddiction,” I’ve acquired yet another compulsive habit: I’ve become a creature of the spa. Hardly a week goes by these days—at least before I left recently for a semester in the US—without me submitting myself to the ministrations of some robust individual who can toss and slap me around like a sack of rice.

Like many Pinoy males, I’d had my share of being massaged (and never mind our egos, which can always use the service). But also like many Pinoy males, I used to think of a massage as something that went with a “wink-wink”, a foray of fingers into the netherworld. I wonder if I—a reasonably respectable 52-year-old professor of English and purveyor of lofty thoughts about the dignity of man and such faithful bromides—should be admitting this, but I had a wild and woolly youth. Sort of.

At 18, out of college by choice and then also out of a job as a newspaper reporter because of martial law, I found temporary employment as a minimum-wage, casual employee of the Makati mayor’s office. My mission—and that of the dozen or so ex-journalists I covered Makati with—was to do a headcount of the Metro Aides (streetsweepers to the later-born) in my assigned barangays early in the morning; and then we were off to play Scrabble and basketball in the municipio, topped off by a free visit to any of Makati’s newly opened massage parlors. It was, of course, a sinecure, an accommodation provided by the late Mayor Mesio Yabut for all the press people who used to cover his office.

As despicably corrupt as it sounds, I should hasten to add that we did perform our attendance checks with exemplary zeal, and that we used the massage-parlor coupons that augmented our meager income with judiciousness and decorum. That means we kept our shorts on and behaved like First Communicants; in 1972, despite and perhaps because of martial law, you tried not to do anything too outrageous (that would come later). Heck, I didn’t even drink beer then, and remained a virgin that year and the next one (spent mostly in martial-law prison, but that’s another story), even in the veritable Gomorrahs that massage parlors would come to be known as. Maybe I was just too young, too stupid, and too broke to do anything truly dissolute, but at that point, if I’d been run over by a truck while crossing the street to buy chocolate cupcakes at Jo-Ni’s, I would’ve qualified for heaven after a few weeks in purgatory for minor malfeasances like, well, jaywalking.

It was this lost age of innocence that swarmed back to my senses when I first entered a “spa” on Katipunan Avenue a few months ago at the suggestion of a friend, to banish the aches of badminton.

The first thing I noticed was how clean and correct the place felt, what with the wind-chime arpeggios of New Age music and the sprinkling of green tea in the air. I’d signed up for the one-hour “massage therapy” service, and the word “therapy” flicked a hard switch in my brain: I wasn’t here for sensual pleasure, but for medical and spiritual relief. I could feel my, uhm, extremities shrinking prudently. If I was going to get naked, it wasn’t going to be a la Burt Reynolds, but Mahatma Gandhi.

And then my attendant emerged to greet me and lead me to our cubicle; she had the sweetest face and smile, and also the build of a UFC (that’s Ultimate Fighting Championship to non-guys) contender. Clad in ninja (or was it clinical) pajamas, she was evidently going to brook no nonsense, and I knew I was in for 60 minutes of unmitigated manhandling. To underscore the place’s seriousness of purpose, I was offered, and accepted, a pair of XXL shorts to wear over my XL shorts—and a thick towel to drape over the whole production.

But what a manhandling the service turned out to be. Given a choice of massages between Swedish (you get kneaded all over with aromatic oil) and shiatsu (you get pulled, bent, and folded like an origami chicken), I wisely chose the former. My attendant, whom we’ll call Alyssa, seemed to sprout extra fingers and knuckles that bore down on muscles and tendons I didn’t even know I had. There’s this spot on my left shoulder that’s just never felt quite right, and she found the knot like there’s been a big red X over it. She didn’t need to be prescient to know that I had a swollen right elbow from playing too much badminton too badly, but she felt that sucker right away and treated it like a newborn puppy. I got my toes and fingers pulled strongly enough to make me yelp, and yet without my knowing whether I was yelping out of pain or pleasure. I don’t have too much hair left, but I was glad to lose a fistful of strands to her vigorous ministrations. And so on—the hour passed all too quickly, and Alyssa got me out of there with a hearty “Reach for your toes!”, a final though futile exercise routine.

I often think of heaven as a place where you can get free foot, back, and scalp massages for eternity; I had to settle for 60 minutes and was P550 poorer at the end of it, but I came out smiling and shiny with oil, like a well-bred porker, happy to have made the very proper acquaintance of Alyssa and her terrier fingers.

If there’s such a thing as massaging the pounds away, I should be as light as a foil packet of peanuts by now. I know that even if I come down to 150 pounds I still won’t be mistaken for Keanu Reeves or Piolo Pascual—but hey, I can feel like them.

]]> Wed, 30 Aug 2006 01:58:15 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanAugust06.html#ulg178309861

AS A self-confessed shopaholic, I love catalogs, and one of the reasons I like flying is the in-flight catalog I can browse through over the distantly roiling Pacific, the whine of the jet engines and, these terror-infested days, the distinct possibility of spending your last earthly moments pondering the virtues of “#30107G Inversion Stretch Station, a natural non-invasive method of treating back pain” or “#NN5119G The Da Vinci Code Cryptex, an officially authorized working model you can use to store notes, poems, jewelry, keys, or other valuables.”

In more than 25 years of flying, I’ve never actually ordered and paid for anything on board beyond a snack sandwich and a bag of mixed nuts (alas, there’s no such thing as a free lunch on some airlines, not anymore). Let’s just say that while I think nothing of clicking a desktop mouse on an impulse, committing myself to the purchase of a $1,000 computer online (and saving the guilt for later, as the bills come through the decidedly non-digital door), I can be very discerning in the air, taking my sweet time to pull the plastic from my wallet—maybe because, like most guys, I hate toting bags on the one hand, and can’t wait for four to six weeks’ delivery, on the other.

But that takes nothing away from the fun of window-shopping on the printed page—again, a safer venture than doing the same thing on the clickable screen. A catalog brings a veritable market, a cornucopia of exotic goods, to your fingertips—and not just goods you can find in the department store, but very often gadgets you’d been wishing someone made but thought no one did. That’s the special appeal of a catalog like the SkyMall one I got on Northwest—a compendium you could cruise through of other mini-catalogs from such gadget havens and purveyors of pleasure as The Sharper Image, Hammacher Schlemmer, Diversions, Gadget Universe, TigerDirect—you get the idea.

It must be the Dick Tracy boy in me—I was, indeed, a card-carrying member of the Dick Tracy Club (make that the Boni Ave., Mandaluyong chapter) more than 40 years ago, ecstatic to receive my ID card and a pair of plastic handcuffs in the mail but even more enthralled by the prospects of a radio-telephone you could wear on your wrist, with a live camera image to boot. They don’t have it in SkyMall, but there are a hundred other distractions to make you go “Ooooh” and “Dang, how’d they do that?”

Take, for example, Item No. #12271G, the Emergency TV and Weather Radio with Hand-Crank Power, a device designed to ensure that you can watch “American Idol”, “Pinoy Big Brother”, or “Unang Hirit” through a week-long brownout in a Signal No. 3 typhoon—for as long as you (or, more likely, your hapless maid) can crank up the juice. It can even “recharge your cell phone with the included universal adapter set,” making me wonder if the hand-crank-powered cell phone itself—a sleek, subtle, silver-gray gizmo tethered to a bicycle wheel or a water pump—can be too far off.

Few things appeal more to guys than formidable figures—I mean, numbers—and #75296G, the World’s Brightest Flashlight, promises to be an irresistible conversation piece, what with 15,000,000 candlepower (yup, that’s 15 million) available to you at the flick of a switch. Imagine swaggering into your next party, casually toting a vodka tonic in one hand and the World’s Brightest Flashlight in the other. It doesn’t take two minutes before someone—hopefully that doe-eyed beauty you’ve sidled up to—can’t help asking, “What’s that you got?” Coolly, you take a sip of your drink before swinging it up to her eyes and saying (memorize this first from the accompanying brochure): “Babe, there’s no earthly darkness this H4 quartz halogen bulb cannot penetrate.” Linger on the last word and smooth out your hair before adding, in a gravelly whisper, “The hardened glass chimney adds strength along the length of the bulb for extra shatter-resistance. An adjustable stand allows you to position the spotlight for hands-free use, and it has a sturdy carry handle.” If she hasn’t dumped her wine on you yet and looks eager or confounded enough to welcome a demonstration, resist the urge to flick the switch and show your lady-love what 15 million candlepower looks like. Save her retinas for your next date.

And what can I say about #72763G, the Precise Portion Pet Feeder, which promises to “dispense precise pet food portions so that your pets follow their recommended diet, even if you are not home during feeding time.” I don’t think my marmalade tomcat Chippy will take to it too kindly, having been used to Friskies on demand, 24/7, in unlimited doses. I wonder, though, if the same dispenser will do wonders for me, as far as rations of rice and ramen are concerned.

For the financially precocious, there’s #71365G, the Children’s ATM Bank—an exact replica of an ATM, which “helps children learn money management as they maintain a savings account up to $999.99. The machine accepts real coin-and currency-deposits and gives up-to-date account information on its screen. Young depositors have their own ATM card and PIN for checking account balance.” Goodness, how times indeed have changed. When we were kids, “money management” meant asking for a peso and getting ten centavos, along with a five-minute lecture on frugality. This kiddie ATM’s a neat idea—I just hope it comes with a stack of play money—but for that truly authentic ATM experience, and for the lofty purpose of character development, it should require kids to line up 20 at a time, each one waiting for his or her turn; and then, when the 18th or 19th kid finally comes to the machine, nearly apoplectic with impatience, the ATM eats up his card, and flashes him a phone number to call. If the kid’s smart, he’ll give the mini-bank a good kick.

Now here’s a great idea for flood-prone Camanavans (that’s people of Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, and Valenzuela to the acronymically challenged): Item #ECA126G, the Motorized Snack Float. “No need to paddle around or get out of the water for a cold drink or snack,” claims the catalog, “make ‘em come to you! Motorized tip=proof float operates by remote control—just press a button and it zips right to you.” It’d be perfect if it worked with small kids, cats, and other strays.

For sheer nerve, it’s hard to beat #TK231NG, the Cyclone WashMate II, “the most compact washing machine in the world, no bigger than an oversized water bucket!” No need to squint and look again, because—yegads, it is an oversized water bucket (balde, to you and me), but a motorized one, with a base that electronically twists this way and that. “Four liters of water and 15 minutes is all it takes to wash a load!” And, let’s not forget, $79.95 plus shipping.

Back to Dick Tracy. I have secret stalker tendencies, and there’s been many a time when I would’ve appreciated having #TS242G, the Secret Agent Spy Ear, which allows you to “secretly hear a whisper from across the room without anyone knowing you’re even listening.” Its possibilities boggle the mind. Imagine eavesdropping on titillating conversations like “O, ano’ng ulam niyo mamaya?” “Sarciadong dalagang bukid, kayo?” “E sinigang sa bayabas sana pero panay bubot pa yung bayabas sa puno namin!”

Think machines control your life too much? The Sleeptracker, #19302G, will put you back in the driver’s seat. It’s an alarm wristwatch that does something no other alarms have even imagined doing—wake you up not when you should, but when, well, when you usually wake up. The Sleeptracker “tracks your sleep patterns to awaken you at your optimal time,” says the catalog. This means it’ll keep a record of when you usually wake up—and then wake you up at that time. Neat, huh? Huh?

Tired of sticking mice onto flypaper, or watching them writhe in the throes of rat poisoning? Then do the humane and 21st century thing, and electrocute them out of sight with #AGI101G, the Rat Zapper, a high-tech shoebox open at one end, with bait and certain extermination on the other. “Never touch a dead rodent again! A flashing light will tell you when it’s time to empty the unit and replace the bait.” If you’re not too fond of cleaning your kitchen and have rats for company like some people have grandchildren over on a Sunday, you’ll need #AGI102G, the Rat Zapper Ultra, which can send 30 rodents to the Great Perya in the Sky in one sitting. Interestingly enough, the ad right beside it shows another blue box—Item #WGN106G, the 6.0 Liter Fridge/Warmer, great for cooling or warming food on the road. Uhm, enjoy your picnic, but just make sure you don’t get it mixed up with the Rat Zapper Ultra, okay?

I’ll give the Cleverness Award, however, to #50488G, the Extra Large Realistic Boulder—a hollow plastic-composite rock you can use to cover unsightly yard problems like pipes and well covers. But then we Pinoys don’t have unsightly yard problems, just unsightly yards—heck, we don’t even have yards, just unsightly problems. I wish they made supersized versions of these camouflage covers—so we could drag them, bayanihan-style, to the Batasan and similar eyesores.

Ah, catalogs. Show me a gadget that’ll exterminate the rats in our political system—never mind being humane—and I’ll whip out that credit card faster than you can say “Charter change!”

]]> Sun, 27 Aug 2006 02:31:01 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanAugust06.html#tgl177721281

TWO EVENTS conspired last week to pull me back to corners of a past I either never personally knew or just stood at the margins of. One was largely pleasant, the other decidedly disturbing, but both were immensely educational, thought-provoking, and even moving.

The first was my completion—literally on the eve of my departure for a semester in the United States—of the technical editing of the 950-page text of the yet-untitled history of the University of the Philippines, which will mark its first 100 years in 2008. I say “technical” editing because the substantive work on the massive project—the research, the writing, and the preliminary editing—had already been completed by a team of selected UP writers headed by my colleague in the English Department, Dr. Helen Lopez, whose energy and discernment produced a document of impressive breadth, incisiveness, and panache.

As the project’s director and the book’s principal editor, Dr. Lopez—herself a former Secretary of the University—had to oversee the collection and organization of a century’s worth of information on our country’s best and biggest public university, and the transformation of those notes by her team of writers into a comprehensive but popularly accessible history. The centennial history itself had been the brainchild of then-President Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, who wanted something well researched but also readable and engaging. I came into the project as his Vice President for Public Affairs, tasked with reviewing and finetuning the finished draft.

As I entered my last few edits last Monday, I did so with a mixture of relief and regret, feeling greatly privileged to have been, in effect, this version’s first reader, and yet also saddened somewhat to realize that the book was effectively finished, and that the rest of the story had literally to be written by authors yet to come.

From my vantage point, however, I can tell you—if you’re in any way connected to or interested in UP—that this history will be an engrossing read, as much for its sheer nostalgia value as its chronicling of our intellectual life, from UP’s creation in 1908 by Act 1870 through to the Austin Craig affair, the Palma-Quezon tiff, the suspension of Jose Garcia Villa for his “coconut” poem, Jorge Bocobo’s Courtesy Appeals, the PGH at war, the transfer to Diliman, furtive flirtations at the Gregory Terrace, Dean Ursula Clemente’s “one-foot rule”, the beautiful if bygone Cadena de Amor, the rise of the UPSCA and the Pascual-Delaney match-up, an English instructor named Jose Ma. Sison, the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune, UP Los Baños’s abortive secession, UP’s growth into a system, socialized tuition, the Javier-Posadas confict, the Pahinungod volunteers, UP in cyberspace, and the Revised General Education Program. It also goes beyond Diliman and Padre Faura to report on the highs and lows of UP life in the Visayas, Baguio, and Mindanao.

I hope I won’t be revealing too much—not easy to do, when you have almost a thousand pages to go over—if I quote some passages at random just to suggest the flavor of the material.

[Of UP in the mid-1930s] “Quezon liked keeping in constant touch with the UP constituency, making an appearance at every invitation. The sight of him inspecting the campus while astride a white horse, which he would ride from Malacañang, was nothing unusual to the students. The hospitality was mutual, because Quezon would play host—cordial and even affectionate—to the UP constituency when they held picnics on the Malacañang grounds.”

[Of Bienvenido Gonzalez, writing the Japanese wartime administration to release him from his post] “(I am ) ‘begging leave to be permitted to retire from the presidency of UP…. For the last ten years my health has been maintained artificially by daily injection of insulin. With the absence of this drug in the market now, I am unable to obtain the regular treatment for the maintenance of my normal self and this is being reflected in my work.’”

[Of the transfer to Diliman in the early 1950s] “Three thousand students attended classes in Diliman, with one-third of them taking up residence there. The secondary streets that branched away from the main campus oval had military names like Infantry Ave., Artillery Ave., and Cavalry Ave. These threaded through the residential areas which, the US Army had simply designated with numbers; thus Areas 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 14, and 17. The bigger Quonsets were designated as the Men’s Dormitories and the Women’s Dormitories. The first Women’s Dorm, formerly the nurses’ quarters standing on the site of the present-day Ilang-Ilang and International Houses, housed 200, with four girls assigned to a room. Bathrooms, although not tiled, were equipped with showers and flush toilets of the water-closet type. Because the female student population was bigger, more accommodations were provided for them. Later another Quonset was converted into a second Women’s Dorm, and these two dormitories were called, simply, the North Women’s Dorm and the South Women’s Dorm.”

But mostly—and perhaps aptly—UP’s history has been one of struggle, both to survive as an institution of higher learning and to defend its much-vaunted academic freedom and secular character in the face of tremendous pressures from without and within. If the record seems scored and scarred by excessive intramurals, it can only be because these tempests in academia necessarily reflected and played out national and social issues on a smaller scale, often more intensely. Most edifying for me—as a former university administrator myself—was the realization that the same issues tend to erupt on campus over and over again, down the decades: fiscal autonomy, academic freedom, the role of religion in a secular institution, generating income, the UP President vis-à-vis (or versus) the Philippine President, idealism and pragmatism, elitism and democratization, nation and region, campus sex and other fun ways to banish the term-paper blues.

Plans will still be finalized for the UP history, but the administration is considering publishing two or even three editions of the book: the complete text, for reference purposes; an abridged, reader-friendly, generously illustrated coffeetable book edition for UP alumni; and, possibly, a short and simplified student edition in pocketbook form for the orientation packets of incoming freshmen.

It’ll take a while, but I have high hopes for the success of this UP Centennial project. If you were a Gregory Terrace, Grove, Rodic’s, Basement, or Lighthouse habitué, start saving up for your copy of this yearbook to end all yearbooks.



MY OTHER brush with history came a few days and 8,000 miles away, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. I’m a certified museophile, and have spent the equivalent of days at the Smithsonian, the British Museum, and wherever else people have put the past on a pedestal—in the case of the Holocaust Museum, a very low one, considering the sordidness and the brutality of much of the material and the evil impulses that created them. And yet here, in the lowest and darkest of habitations, it was the human spirit that survived and soared, and now preserved for the likes of us, who were never there, to encounter.

Postwar Filipinos tend to think of World War II as a series of action movies featuring tons of truly heavy metal—say, armies of Panzer tanks or swarms of V-2 rockets—and one or two mushroom clouds. We know precious little of the personal stories and tragedies that made up lives, and lives lost, in a bloodbath halfway around the world that seemed to have little to do with our own struggle against Imperial Japan. (And yet, as Manolo Quezon reminds us, it did—his grandfather President Quezon offered refuge in the Philippines to 10,000 Jews who might otherwise have been exterminated in Europe; and the Holocaust Museum recognizes this with a place-name for the Philippines on the global map of safe havens for prewar Jews.)

Although I had seen similar exhibits—the Imperial War Museum in London, Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, and the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin all offer grimly moving artifacts of the Holocaust for the distant alien’s consideration—the Holocaust Museum presents them all of a piece, in a powerfully orchestrated performance that includes a floor-to-high-ceiling, wall-to-wall album of photographs of the citizens of an obliterated Lithuanian village. We keep hearing about the murder of six million Jews, but “six million” boggles the mind; a silent roomful of shoes—the actual shoes taken from hundreds of concentration-camp inmates, from boots to booties—vividly evokes their wearers.

Easily the most awful sight in the parade of atrocities were photographs—set in a pit, away from children’s eyes—of Nazi medical experiments, including vats full of dismembered human limbs. But above and beyond the horror rises indomitably human hope: in the poetry of the survivors, and, most poignantly, in the art that the inmates produced in the midst of so much death and despair: a garland of colored leather flowers, a brooch.

I emerged wondering if and when we would ever come out with a similar memorial to record exactly what happened during our martial law years—certainly no Holocaust, but traumatic enough to those who lived through it—which many Filipinos seem all too eager to forget, and some too willing to revive.
]]> Sun, 20 Aug 2006 07:01:21 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanAugust06.html#slv177091743

I KID you not: the day after I published last week’s column on “Novel Prizes”—inspired by an accidental visitor to my blog who was looking for a “Filipino scientist who won novel prize”—I peeked into my visitors’ list again, and found someone else (or maybe the same fellow, chastised and mindfully correcting himself) looking for a “Filipino chemist who won noble prize.”

This suggested to me that there was some malevolently grinning teacher out there, sending out his or her class on a wild-goose chase, a pursuit made even more futile by the witless student’s choice of the wrong search term. (Lesson No. 1: If you don’t know what you’re looking for, boys and girls, you’ll never find it.)

It reminded me of similar sorties in graduate school, well before the Internet and the Google era, when the balding Dr. Kuist, my professor in Bibliography, would ask something like “If I were a member of the Royal Society in 1662, what books would I likely have in my personal library?” That sent us rushing to and through the stacks, poring not just over books but lists of books, and imbibing a jolting dose of 17th century history on the side. And I, especially (being what some would call a “brown-noser” when it came to making my English professors happy), loved ferreting out the most obscure details and serving them up to our academic master, tail furiously wagging.

Today Google and Wikipedia have taken most of the effort and much of the masochistic fun out of library work, and the day can’t be too far off when we’ll be able to carry the contents of whole libraries on a chip in our wallet, a day that will probably come sooner than a Filipino scientist winning a Nobel Prize.

But this new reference to a “noble prize” got me thinking as well about what such a distinction might be like: an award that would exercise and prove one’s nobility of spirit. For example, you, an ordinary citizen, could be puttering around in the garden one day and receive a telegram or a text message announcing your selection as a “Noble Prizewinner,” the prize being a voucher entitling you to build three Gawad Kalinga houses with your own hands, with the voucher ready for pickup at the summit of Mt. Mayon. Another Noble Prize might consist of the opportunity to donate ten gallons of one’s own blood to a children’s hospital, requiring the donor to forgo the consumption of alcohol and engaging in questionable sex for at least one year. Yet another might be a visa—not to the US or Europe, or anywhere with snow and Krispy Kreme—but to the world’s poorest and nastiest places, where you can have the honor of cleaning up the local sanitation system and the judiciary along with it, bringing warring parties to the negotiating table, getting the rich to pay their taxes, training ten-year-olds to become software developers, and turning animal poachers into an endangered species.

But why even go abroad? If you’re very lucky—and, of course, exceedingly noble—you could also be designated Congressman of your district for one term, during which you will attend every session, speak only when you have something sensible to say (jn straight English or flawless Filipino), craft laws that will produce more wealth for the poor than they will cost to enforce, reject any invitation to boost Manny Pacquiao’s morale by sitting at ringside on his next fight abroad, vote your conscience on the next impeachment measure that will surely come along, resist the urge to sponsor the creation of a state college or university named after your warlord-father, look at young women (and young men) as constituents to be served rather than servants to be bedded, and ride in (and maybe even drive) a car smaller and quieter than a firetruck with no more than a tricycle for an escort.

But then of course, in this country, to be noble is often to be stupid, and who wants that?


I WAS writing checks to pay off bills one morning last week—a loathsome but necessary task—when I realized that check-writing was just about all the handwriting I did these days. And while it doesn’t take too many words to fill a check, even the act of penning the payee’s name and the amount was a literal pain, forcing my fingers into unaccustomed positions and resulting in a barely legible scrawl.

The culprit, of course, is the computer and what it has gotten us to do these past two decades, practically without thinking: depend on the keyboard and the word processor for nearly all our writing. In my case, as a professional for whom not a day goes by without at least five to ten pages of writing and editing, returning to working in longhand with one of my vintage fountain pens has become a romantic fantasy, and perhaps the very reason why I collect fountain pens—as mementos of an irretrievable loss.



That loss is penmanship, the fine art of making a veritable garden out of an ordinary page of prose through one’s handwriting—not an unkempt, weedy garden (see my Moleskine notebook, above), but a well-tended one, with the hedges rising just so (strangely, I’ve often thought of Thai script this way). I remember when, as a boy, we had Penmanship as a graded course, and were taught to write our Fs, Gs, Ps, and Ts in what would now seem to be some outlandish fashion. Some private schools still do that, as much I suppose for the cachet the distinctive penmanship bestows on the user as for the sake of art and clarity. I tried my best, but never got that good, and I embraced the typewriter as soon as I could get my hands on one, never mind that I still type today with the fingers of one hand crossing over the other’s, like a pair of famished chickens.

There are two people I know whose penmanship is so graceful that it’s worth reading and keeping anything they might send you in longhand: the poet and playwright (and now London-based) Ed Maranan, and the scholar-professor Benjie Abellera. Curiously (or maybe not), both have Baguio backgrounds. I wish each of them would write me a check (one with lots of zeroes)—just as a handwriting specimen, of course, fit to be framed.


I MADE a terrible boo-boo last week by announcing the showing “tonight” (meaning last Monday) of a Filipino Noh performance in UP—when, as it turned out, the show was for Friday, August 11. My apologies to anyone who turned up at the UP Theater, only to find sophomores necking in the shadows. At least I got the weekend matinees right. Of these next two announcements, however, I’m positively sure.

Continuing the celebration of 50 years of friendship between Japan and the Philippines, the Japan Foundation is sponsoring a free demonstration of Budo: Classical Martial Arts of Japan on August 19 (4 pm at the Podium in Ortigas), August 20 (Mall of Asia, Main Entrance, 3 pm) and August 21 (University of Baguio, 2 pm). I don’t fly in the air or break stacks of bricks with my palm, but I took karate lessons in high school ages ago, at the height of the current craze over ninjas and blind samurais and one-armed swordsmen; my ignominiously brief experience as a self-defender should be worthy of another column, one of these days.

And it can’t be too soon to announce the 32nd National Congress of the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas (Umpil) on August 26 at the Intellectual Property Office on 351 Buendia Avenue. Atty. Adrian Cristobal Jr. will speak on “Writers’ Rights and Responsibilities” at a forum on IPR in the morning, with the ageless Gilda Cordero-Fernando speaking at the 20th Gawad Umpil ceremonies in the afternoon.

]]> Sun, 13 Aug 2006 00:09:02 +0800 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanAugust06.html#nqm176533146

AN INTERESTING pocket war—if it’s that, at all—broke out last week in our little corner of the digital universe, the one devoted to all things Apple and Macintosh (www.philmug.ph). At issue was a palpably and oddly pre-electronic but still undeniably geeky subject: the matter of minding one’s language and grammar in posting comments and messages online.

To sum up the situation, one reader remarked on the manifest deterioration of our English language skills in the forum discussions he was reading, and wondered if he was right in feeling (and, so far, resisting) the urge to wade in and fix those egregious errors. Some people responded that they wouldn’t mind being corrected—as long as it was done tactfully. Yet others took the other extreme, rejecting any such intervention as being contrary to the Web’s very spirit of spontaneity—grammatical warts and all. Inevitably someone just had to bring in the whole brontosaurian issue of which language to use: “Mag-Pilipino na lang kasi tayo!”

That provoked even testier responses about the Internet, elitism, and democratic discourse, punctuated by tiny shrieks (guess who from) on behalf of clarity and common sense. When last I looked, people were babbling (no offense, folks; the word goes back to the Tower of Babel) in Spanish and Capampangan, proving more than ever the need for some reasonably common tongue, and at that point—having given everyone their literal say to the point of exhaustion (1,509 views and 64 comments)—the moderators sensibly closed the thread to allow the agitated masses to get on with their lives.

I was surprised and sometimes disturbed but not unhappy that this discussion took place. On the one hand, it told me that people still cared about the quality of language (whatever language) and about the importance of coming across as clearly as possible to others—and not just people within one’s closed circle, but to faceless crowds across that great ocean of the World Wide Web. On the other hand, it also made me think about the limits of our linguistic tolerance—about how far we can or should stretch them in the name of generally being nice to all God’s children.

As a professional editor—meaning, someone who makes a living from pouncing on dangling modifiers and sorting out who’s from whom’s—I have to admit to an old urge to stamp on and stamp out grammatical and mechanical errors like they were malignant forms of interplanetary vermin. If doing that sounds like fun to you, then I’d be very much amused, indeed, in this country of ours where—as I’ve often remarked in this corner—the fast-food places all compel you with big signs to “demand for a receipt” and even teachers routinely announce that matters have been “taken cared of.”

As a professor of English, I suppose I could write an essay or two about how every such error eats away at the very foundations of civilization, chip by precious chip, and about how vital it is to draw the line, hold the fort, man the guns, and cut the salami (hmmm, one of these things is not like the others). That’s what hordes of English and grammar teachers have done all these years—uphold standards they inherited from their own teachers (often without even knowing why). Today they can join the chorus of jeremiahs lamenting the decline of English not so much because of the lost grandeur of the language but because good English means cold cash in this age of the call center. (I’m willing to bet my retirement pension that if, by some quirk of fate, the American market suddenly became Taglish-speaking, we’d all be rushing our kids and unemployed cousins to the nearest review center to learn proper Taglish.)

I’m not about to quarrel with English’s utilitarian charms, which I’ve dipped into myself for my sustenance, and never mind if the politicians who espouse them often do so in language that provides its own most compelling reason for a National Day of Protest Against Atrocious English. (I particularly remember sitting in the Batasan gallery one evening and listening to an impassioned congressman taking up the cudgels for “the youngs, the youngs of this country!”)

But I’d rather hasten to remind people—as I did in that Mac users forum—that the first and most important function of language is communication, and in communication, whatever works, works, whether it be English, Filipino, Taglish, Romblomanon, Sanskrit, or demotic Greek.

If your English is Pepe-and-Pilar simple but basically clear, that’s no problem; if you commit a spelling error or two in the course of dashing off a quick paragraph about the speed with which the new Intel Macs run Windows (but why should you?), that’s no big deal, either. If you’re chatting on Yahoo Messenger and slide into the occasional “u” and “gnyt”, I don’t suppose the sky will fall.

But if your English is so, uhm, quaint that it gets in the way of being understood in the way you want to be understood, then, Houston, we have a problem. I remembered this the other day when I peeked into CQCounter to check on who was checking on me (I know, another timewaster I can ill afford, but bloggers will recognize and understand this strange compulsion.) There was this digital trail of some poor soul searching Yahoo for a “Filipino scientist who won novel prizes.” Why on earth that search would lead to my blog, I have no idea (I did the same search, and sure enough “Pinoy Penman” was Item No. 20); but I could imagine the searcher’s greater perplexity at finding nothing that even came close to a Pinoy version of Richard Feynman or Linus Pauling. But then of course maybe he or she meant what he or she meant—truly novel prizes, as in a year’s supply of tahong, a trip to Bukidnon in a goat-drawn chariot, two weeks with GMA (and that would just be second prize, the first prize being one week with GMA).

In other words, dear boys and girls, relax and enjoy the technology. If things get so bad they can’t be understood, then that’s the time the mods (who, we can only hope, know better) should step in and fix things, with a light and painless touch. Playing grammar police on the Web will be like being a fireman at a pyromaniacs’ annual convention. For those of us seriously contemplating a career in editing and proofreading, I suggest a one-semester internship on the floor of the House of Representatives, just to make sure that you have the skill, the will, and the sense of humor to take all the slings and arrows of outrageous grammar that the profession has to offer.

An awareness of good and better language is always welcome—a fine and urbane touch, like a knowledge of good wines (or better yet, an appreciation of the power of words to reshape reality); but the plain truth is, most people can live without it, and as the cliché goes, it’s the thought that counts. Take care of that thought, and find the best (read: often the simplest and clearest) words to put it in; but never let the fear of making a mistake shut you up. As you get older and with more practice (oops, I think I just put on my professorial cap), you’ll learn (1) not to speak too soon, and (2) to say something sensible, or at least something funny, when you open your mouth.

As will inevitably happen when you spend too many of your waking hours mulling over the merits or otherwise of Intel processors and lossless compression, you’re bound to make a mistake in saying what you mean—and someone equally insomniac is bound to catch you making it. And then someone else is bound to turn your mistake into an issue, which may not be all that bad, if I can turn it into a column-piece like this one.


AND LEST I forget, let me invite you to a special staging on August 11 of a Filipino innovation on a classic Japanese theater form. To celebrate 50 years of friendship between the Philippines and Japan, the University of the Philippines Center for International Studies is presenting Okina/Ang Paglalakbay ni Sisa at the UP Theater at 7:00 pm.

Okina, the oldest prototype of Noh, consists of dances designed to win the help of the gods in obtaining peace and prosperity in the land and long life for the people. Ang Paglalakbay ni Sisa: Isang Noh sa Laguna was written in Japan in 1973 by Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, now University Professor of UP Diliman. This is Lapena-Bonifacio’s re-interpretation as a Noh play of Jose Rizal’s “Sisa” character from the novel Noli Me Tangere. “Borrowing from the Noh allowed Lapeña-Bonifacio to make possible what was impossible in Rizal’s novel,” the program notes say. “By making Sisa come back from the dead to re-tell her story, her ghost is able to speak out and confront her sons’ aggressor, Padre Salvi.”

Six Noh masters will lead the performance, including Dr. Naohiko Umewaka, Associate Professor of the Shizuoka University of Art and Culture and Japan Foundation Visiting Professor for Japan Studies of the UPCIS. Matinee performances will be held at 3:00 pm on August 12 and 13.

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