Monthly Archives: January 2019

Penman No. 338: Back to Balangiga

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Penman for Monday, January 28, 2019

 

THE RECENT return of the fabled bells of Balangiga from the American West to their home in Samar reminded me of my fleeting involvement years ago in the effort to draw renewed attention to that traumatic episode of the Philippine-American War.

Sometime in 2001, the late film director Gil Portes called to ask me to work with him on a project that would focus on what people—echoing the American view—were then calling the “Balangiga massacre,” culminating of course in the loss of the bells (hardly the event’s most tragic outcome, considering the slaughter of innocents that the Americans undertook in the attack’s aftermath).

I suppose we were still basking in the afterglow of the Philippine Centennial, and directors were eager to take on historical subjects, long before Heneral Luna would prove that history artfully told could do well at the box office. In fact, our project ran alongside a similar one being put together by the formidable tandem of director Chito Roño and screenwriter Pete Lacaba. (Pete and I were good friends and knew what the other was doing.) The main difference was that our version was going to be a Filipino-American co-production, with the script in English, for a global audience.

I can’t recall now who our producer was, but I knew that Gil was in conversation with US-based financiers, and I did get a down payment for the sequence treatment and the script itself, so we were seriously engaged in the project—seriously enough that Gil and I went on a reconnaissance visit to Balangiga.

Balangiga is a small fourth-class municipality in Eastern Samar, reachable by surprisingly good roads (at least that long ago) from Tacloban across the San Juanico Bridge and past Basey. When we went there, we were billeted in the only “hotel” in town, where the rooms cost P100 a night and I tried to read my notes under a 10-watt lamp. But we were able to find and interview the descendants of Valeriano “Bale” Abanador, the town’s chief of police who led the attack in retaliation against American repression. I was even shown the wooden stick that Abanador was supposed to have waved as a signal to begin the attack that morning of September 28, 1901.

Sadly, after all the research and three drafts of the script, and despite rumors that Sony was going to be involved and that the likes of John Malkovich were being considered for the lead roles, our project fell through, as did the other one. One reason I heard was that in the wake of 9/11, it was proving difficult to bring a battalion of American actors over. Years later, Gil asked me for a copy of the script, thinking to revive the project, but then Gil himself died suddenly two years ago.

I don’t pretend to be a Balangiga expert, although I drew heavily on the writings of such real Balangiga scholars as UP Prof. Rolando Borrinaga and writer Bob Couttie, who have sorted much of the fiction from the facts of the event. I did fictionalize my treatment, as I was expected to do for dramatic purposes, without altering the basic facts as they were known to me. My chief conceit was to create a character named Ramon Candilosas, the fictional son of the bell ringer Vicente, who was a teenager when the attack happened.

My treatment opened this way:

SEQ. 1. Intro. EXT/INT. Fort Warren, Wyoming. Day.

 An old man, around 70, walks across the yard in Fort Warren, Wyoming, to where they keep the Balangiga bells. He pauses before one of them, takes off his hat, and reaches out with a trembling hand to touch one of the bells.

 Later, we see him signing his name with a scratchy fountain pen on a guestbook; a CLOSE-UP reveals his name: RAMON CANDILOSAS. “I do not know everything,” his voice begins to intone. “This is only what my father told me, and what I imagine to have happened in our hometown, in a war over a hundred years ago. It is a war we have forgotten, a war we find difficult if not impossible to believe.”

 Indeed, as I often remark to my American friends, I can understand if few Americans remember the Philippine-American War (downplayed for the longest time in American annals as the Philippine Insurrection). What’s sad is how few Filipinos do. At least writers like the US-based Gina Apostol are reviving that memory through her most recent and highly acclaimed novel Insurrecto, a complex and contemporary take on that century-old event.

But I’m glad for history’s sake that the bells are back, and that, for once, the fact has overtaken the fiction.

Penman No. 337: A Perfect Ending

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Penman for Monday, January 21, 2019

 

I RETIRED last week after 35 years of service at the University of the Philippines, and I celebrated the special day with UP friends at a dinner graciously hosted by UP President Danilo Concepcion at his official residence, the newly renovated Executive House.

Standing in a wooded corner of Diliman close to C. P. Garcia, the Executive House was built by President Vicente Sinco in the late 1950s, and in its early years no president really lived there, but it became the venue for lively faculty colloquia, involving such intellectual stalwarts of the time as O.D. Corpuz, Ricardo Pascual, Cesar Adib Majul, Leopoldo Yabes, and Concepcion Dadufalza. When President Salvador P. Lopez decided to move with his wife into the place in 1969, they were reportedly met, in typical UP fashion, by a posse of protesters insisting on certain demands.

These historical precedents were thronging in my mind when I stepped into the EH last Tuesday evening for an all-UP dinner which, unlike all the other big events I had attended there, was being held in my honor—it was a trifecta of sorts, being my 65thbirthday, retirement day, and our 45thwedding anniversary.

Long before I became Vice President for Public Affairs, it had been my dream to end my service in UP with a small party for my closest and dearest UP friends at the EH, and that came true. Of course that dream began with entering UP itself, and it was my mother Emilia—BSE 1956, the only UP graduate among her 12 siblings—who fired that ambition. When I was a small boy, she would play a 78 rpm record of “UP Beloved” flipsided by “Push On, UP.” I guess you could say that my future was laid out for me that early, and I grew up without any doubt whatsoever that I would enter UP someday. She was with us that evening, lovely and graceful at 90. (Our daughter Demi, BA Art Studies 1995, joined us in spirit from California.)

In my farewell remarks, I also thanked my sweet wife Beng, from the UP College of Fine Arts, my 45 years of togetherness with whom was for me the better reason for the festivities. Aside from my friends in administration, teaching, and writing, some seniors and mentors obliged me with their presence—Dr. Gerry Sicat, who took me in off the street and employed me as a writer at NEDA in 1973, sent me back to school to learn some Economics, and sent me to the US on my first trip abroad in 1980 to expose a young writer to the outside world; former President Dodong Nemenzo, whom I had served as VP many years ago; National Artist Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio, my professor in playwriting; Dr. Manny Alba, as debonair as ever; and dear friend Julie Hill, whose four books I have been privileged to edit, and who flew in all the way from California to be with us.

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I also noted that VPs and even presidents come and go, but UP is unique and in some ways immutable. The University is bigger than any one or even all of us. It has a life and an integrity of its own.

We need to keep fighting for a UP truly worthy of its founders’ dreams—a UP governed by merit rather than by patronage, and led by men and women of impeccable intelligence, ability, and most of all, integrity. Honor and excellence must be more than slogans to us but a way of life—honor even more so than excellence, which is easily found in a community of intellectually brilliant minds, but also easily compromised and corrupted by power.

While every day we need to recognize and to make the pragmatic decisions that keep the University afloat, every once in a while, we need to remember what makes us different from just another school, and uphold idealism over realism, principle over practical result, excellence over expediency.

I ended with a few appeals, addressed mainly to the friends I was leaving behind—foremostly, to keep the University’s liberal spirit alive. I have often argued that the true heart of UP lies neither in the authoritarian Right nor the doctrinaire Left, but in that great liberal middle, which—despite all of its confusions, contradictions, vacillations, and weaknesses—most honestly represents the search for truth, reason, freedom and justice in our society. I would much sooner trust someone who remembers and respects the value of doubt than those—like our despots and ideologues—who insist that they have the answer to everything.

I also asked the administration take special care of the UP Institute of Creative Writing, which I was privileged to serve as director for eight years. It is a truly world-class institute whose work no one else in Asia is doing. For a relatively small investment, the UPICW keeps the literary imagination and the truth itself alive in this age of fake news and demagoguery.

It was a perfect albeit bittersweet ending to my formal career. I retired saddened to miss the company of people I had come to respect and love, but gladdened by the opportunity to serve our University and people in more creative ways—in a manner, at a time, and at a pace of my own choosing.

Beng and I expect to travel much and travel far together, ngunit malayong lupain man ang aming marating, din rin magbabago ang aming damdamin.

(The 3D-printed Mini-Me up there was a parting gift from my staff at the OVPPA. Many thanks, all!)

Penman No. 336: Goodbye to All That

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IMG_8927.jpegPenman for Monday, January 14, 2019

 

TOMORROW, THE 15th of January 2019, I retire from the University of the Philippines after 35 years of teaching, a few of them spent in administration as department chair, institute director, and most recently on my second stint as Vice President for Public Affairs.

As I write this, a week in advance, the impact of departure hasn’t hit me yet. My schedule is still bursting with meetings and appointments, I’m still shining my shoes, and the guard at our building still opens the door for me, despite my daily gesture for him not to bother getting up from his seat.

I occupy a pretty large office on the ground floor of Quezon Hall, UP’s Greek-columned administration building. Erected in 1950, Quezon Hall was renovated recently, and I was among the first beneficiaries of that facelift, stepping two years ago into the same space I had used when I first served as VP in 2003-2005, but now spruced up and modernized in all kinds of ways.

I’m really a simple guy—I can get work done with just a laptop on, well, my lap—so I can appreciate the finer things in life more than someone born to them. I still remember, like most retirees would, my first office desk back in the early 1970s, when I joined the National Economic and Development Authority as a writer, and the sense of fulfillment that one felt just to have a table and typewriter of one’s own.

Having such a nice and well-appointed office—with its own restroom, conference table, sofa, bookshelves, air conditioning, electronic security, sprinklers, and strong wifi—didn’t only make me feel privileged, but also more responsible, knowing that public money had been spent to make me feel comfortable, work efficiently, and look dignified. Indeed, I had to dignify the office, by acting as I imagined a university official should—with respect and consideration for whoever came in to see me, and with prompt attention for any piece of paper in my tray, or any message in my inbox.

The first thing I did when I moved in was to personalize the place, mainly by bringing in the best of my private collection of paintings, pens, and antiquarian books. Having lost three decades’ worth of precious items in my Faculty Center office in the 2016 fire, I resolved that my new office was now the safest place to store my baubles, although I had nothing of too great a monetary value to attract thieves.

Aside from my favorites among my wife Beng’s own watercolors, the paintings consist of midcentury landscapes by the likes of Jorge Pineda and Gabriel Custodio, accomplished minor masters but nowhere as auctionable as Amorsolo or Kiukok. I have books, maps, and manuscripts dating back to 1490 (a page from a Latin breviary, my one example of true incunabula), but who else seriously wants to sniff handwritten letters from the 1600s, or musty English periodicals from the 1700s? Now and then I get a respectful question from visitors about my curios—let’s not forget the 1970s Olivetti Valentine and 1923 Corona folding typewriter stashed in a corner—but usually they don’t even notice that the magazines on my coffee table go back to the 1930s.

That’s been perfectly fine by me, because the office was always more of a shelter than a showcase, a cabinet of curiosities for my own inspection and enjoyment, particularly in moments of stress and anxiety, as any PR job inevitably entails. Confronted with the crisis of the hour, I’d leaf through the marvelous illustrations in a 200-year-old book of world travels, or patiently clean a Parker Duofold pen that Henry Ford or Manuel L. Quezon might have used, or gaze at an indelibly orange sunset from the 1940s, and feel reassured by the certainty that all the kinks and creases of today will get smoothened out by the sheer passage of imperial time.

I’m doubtlessly going to miss this mini-museum that I’ve cobbled together. I’ll be bringing the items home, or putting them away in safe storage, but it will be the place itself that I’ll be looking back on wistfully, knowing that, unlike many less-blessed employees trooping joylessly to their cubicles, I loved going to the office and working there, in the mute but expressive company of my favorite things. (I have a home office, of course, similar in some ways but much smaller and less carefully curated.)

In my fondest dreams, I wish that UP would someday accept my best books, manuscripts, and paintings as a donation and house them in a properly ventilated reading room, so that more generations of students can appreciate what I’ve enjoyed putting together and poring over. It was, after all, for the looks of surprise and delight on my students’ faces that I first bought these old books and brought them to class—not just to be ogled, but to be held and leafed through, so they could appreciate the materiality of literature, indeed of things before their time, in this now-centered world.

As I join that past and become, myself, an antiquarian artifact, let me say goodbye to all that, thanking my lucky stars and all the people who made UP the best possible workplace and second home to this writer-cum-bureaucrat. No bigger and brighter office to next step into than the future itself.

Penman No. 335: Senior Moments

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Penman for Monday, January 7, 2019

 

BEFORE ANYTHING else, I’d like to put in a word of praise for the only movie that my wife Beng and I really wanted to see among the entries to the recent Metro Manila Film Festival, Joel Lamangan’s Rainbow’s Sunset, a film about two gay old men on the brink of death and of the family around them. I’ve often said that in our youth- and gimmick-centered culture, we don’t have enough movies (or books and songs, for that matter) about old people, and not enough intelligent movies, either.

 Rainbow’s Sunset satisfies both criteria, offering a sensitive, often comic, in-your-face portrayal of the undiminished decades-old love between two men—and of the woman who loves them both—without losing sight of the very real complications it creates for others, no matter how sympathetically inclined. It’s a project that could very easily have given in to caricature and condescension, but it doesn’t. The acting performances are solid and engaging, both individually and as an ensemble. Aside from the lead actors Eddie Garcia and Tony Mabesa, of course, Gloria Romero and the three children—Tirso Cruz, Aiko Melendez, and Sunshine Dizon—are a delight to watch.

It’s far from a perfect movie—I find the title a bit strained (I get it, I get it) and there are a few off-key notes in the drama—but the minor flaws shouldn’t take much away from its overarching achievement. It will probably be gone from the mainstream theaters by the time this comes out, but it deserves more than passing notice, and I hope it leads to more good movies about seniors, who should know a thing or two about love and life.

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SPEAKING OF seniors, I started the New Year in the best and the worst possible way: by buying an old pen, I suppose as a late Christmas or early birthday gift to myself, but whatever the excuse, I’m happy, because it was one of the last of what we collectors call our “grail” pens (as in “Holy Grail”), something I had been dreaming about for, oh, thirty years.

I woke up early on January 1, and like most of us do, I picked up my phone to scan my messages—nothing too interesting there beyond the predictable plethora of New Year greetings. And then, unlike most of us, my digits drifted off to the fountain pen sites, just to see what people could be possibly up to. There is such a thing as a global fountain-pen community (just as there’s an antique typewriter community, a wristwatch community, a Japan-surplus community, and an Apple community—and yes, I belong to all of those, too), and it’s become my virtual hangout online.

Unlike real friends, with whom you have to chug beers and trade miserable stories that inevitably involve retirement options, Metformin, and political sleaze, these thing-centered, Web-based communities offer mostly good cheer and kind intentions. Sure, we get our share of jerks and trolls, but they’re pretty easy to weed out with a few keystrokes. These sites are the best distraction I can find from the front-page news (let’s not get started on that, shall we?), and they offer something often lost in today’s Twitter-driven dystopia: a sense of wonder and discovery, and for an aging romantic like me, an enchantment with things past. I know that we keep bemoaning how consumerism has turned us into heartless, mindless brutes, but you’ll be surprised how people can be their nicest, most civil, and most helpful selves when talking about flexing vintage Waterman nibs, locating the tension lever on an Olivetti Lettera 22, and using Stage Light in Portrait Mode on an iPhone X.

But all that’s a long excuse for treating myself in my creeping old age—I’ll hit 65 and retire in two weeks—with a new old pen. “Senior moments” are supposed to be about forgetting things, but they should also be about remembering things, chiefly that life is short and keeps getting shorter, which means that any treats you deserve or expect had better come sooner rather than later.

The fountain pen I grabbed when I saw it was a (hold your breath) Wahl-Eversharp Personal Point Gold Seal Deco Band Oversize in woodgrain ebonite with a factory 14K stub nib—meaning a large, fancy, impressive-looking pen with gold trim, great for loopy signatures and maybe for stabbing malevolent strangers in the dark (but with a stub or flat nib, it won’t do much damage). A 25-peso ballpoint will probably write better for most people, but with all due respect to most people, I’m a bit odd in some ways.

In its time, the W-E Deco Band was among the classiest of them all, alongside the Parker Duofold Senior and the Waterman Patrician—think Duesenbergs, Auburns, and Bugattis in terms of 1920s cars. This pen I got survived wars (and worse, people with clumsy hands), and given a few weeks, it will make its way from Pennsylvania to California and then to me. It won’t write a novel—maybe it’ll sign a few greeting cards—but even just sitting in my pocket, it will make a boy from Romblon feel like the Great Gatsby, for once in his Nick-Carrawayish life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Penman No. 334: A Literary Yearender

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Penman for Monday, December 31, 2018

 

TWO BIG events rounded out the literary year for me, both of them related in some way to the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW), which not incidentally marked the 40th anniversary of its founding earlier this month.

The first was Writers Night last November 23, effectively an annual reunion and pre-Christmas party of the Filipino literary community. But more than a social bash, Writers Night also marks two important points on the literary calendar: the announcement of the winner of the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award (given in alternating years to books in Filipino and English) and the launch of the latest issue of Likhaan: the Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature.

Now on its 18thyear, the MGBFBA’s awarding is highly anticipated, not just because of the P50,000 cash prize but also because, miraculously, the UPICW has done a pretty good job of keeping the winner’s name secret until the proverbial opening of the envelope itself. This year’s winner was Emiliana Kampilan’s Dead Balagtas Tomo 1: Mga Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa, published by Adarna Books, which went on to win a National Book Award the very next day.

Rappler’s Margie de Leon describes the work thus: “The first few pages alone of komikera Emiliana Kampilan’s Dead Balagtas Tomo 1: Mga Sayaw ng Dagat at Lupa will take your breath away. Depicting local mythology’s creation of the universe, each page is a luscious spread of lively lines and bold colors….The next chapters are a narrative feat, interspersing short stories between pairs of Filipinos and the geological birth of the nation. The tangled tales between each pair of characters serve to personify the actual physical shifts that occurred in our geography millennia ago.”

The second highlight of Writers Night was the launch of the Likhaan Journal, and this year being a milestone, we launched not one but two issues—the regular journal containing 20 of the year’s best and previously unpublished works in Filipino and English, and a similar collection, edited by me, which we called 40@40, featuring new works by our top writers in Filipino and English—the difference being that the 40@40 writers all had some connection to the UPICW as former fellows, panelists, or members of the board.

As I noted in my introduction to the volume, when the UP Creative Writing Center was set up in December 1978, the country was firmly in the grip of martial law, which had been declared in 1972 and six years later had settled into a certain stability, or at least the appearance thereof, buttressed by new governmental institutions such as the Batasang Pambansa, the Ministry of Human Settlements, the Ministry of Public Information, and the National Media Production Center.

Martial law—particularly martial law of “the smiling kind” that the Palace liked to tout—had to create its own fictions, chiefly that Filipinos were free to express themselves and that Philippine culture and literature could find no better sponsor than the present regime, which had after all established the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1969. The establishment of the UPCWC—which became the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) in 2002—may have been part of that liberal façade, the notion that all was well in the New Society. It began as a small office where university-based writers and their friends converged for spirited chats over smuggled beer and gin (itself an act of subversion, as the university banned such libations), with no defined function graver than running the annual Writers Workshop and the occasional lecture or forum.

But over the years, and especially over the decades after the overthrow of the dictatorship at EDSA, the UPICW has grown into a truly writer- and university-driven institution, overseeing mid-career and novice writers workshops as well as seminars for teachers and translators, running an online portal to Philippine literature at Panitikan.com, conducting outreach programs, representing Philippine writing overseas, and encouraging writing in other Philippine languages beyond Filipino and English.

Even within UP, not too many Filipinos seem to appreciate the fact that the UPICW is a trailblazer and a leader in the region, indeed in all of Asia, in terms of what it does.

This proved true again in 2018’s last big literary event, the annual gathering of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators held December 5-7 at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Australia. A contingent of seven Filipinos, most of them affiliated with the UPICW, represented the Philippines—possibly the largest national contingent aside from the Australians themselves.

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APWT is the region’s largest and most active literary network, and we hosted its annual conference in 2015. I sit on its advisory board, and I was accompanied in Australia by UPICW Director Roland Tolentino, writers Vlad Gonzales, Luna Sicat Cleto, Marby Villaceran, and Deedle Tomlinson, and my wife Beng. We held a very well attended panel discussion on Philippine literature, which remains a mystery to many of our neighbors who belong to the Commonwealth loop. APWT will move to Macau in 2019, and we expect an even stronger Philippine presence there.