Category Archives: Art & Culture

Penman No. 477: (Almost) Working with Mike de Leon

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Penman for Sunday, September 7, 2025

IT’S ALMOST criminal to admit this, given the understandable outpouring of grief and adulation that followed the announcement of film director Mike de Leon’s recent passing. But the truth is, I didn’t really know him or his work all that well. I’d seen a few of his movies—Kisapmata and Citizen Jake come to mind—but for some reason missed out on the best and most celebrated ones: Batch 81, Sister Stella L, Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magising, and so on. I shouldn’t have, but there it is, like all the great books I never got to read, because I was busy doing something else.

From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, I was writing scripts for many directors—mostly Lino Brocka, but also Celso Ad. Castillo, Marilou Diaz Abaya, Laurice Guillen, Gil Portes, and Joel Lamangan. (Never for Ishmael Bernal, either, nor for Eddie Romero; they’re all gone now except for Laurice and Joel.) Mike de Leon was and remained a mystery—until, on December 30, 2022, from out of the blue, I got this message in my inbox (I’ll be excerpting Mike’s messages to me from hereon; he typically writes in lowercase but I’ve edited everything):

Butch,

We’ve never met but I guess we know of each other. 

I just wanted to know if you are interested in working with me on a possible screenplay that I hope I can still turn into a film even at my late age (going on 76, Stage 4 prostate cancer, but still able to function). 

I admit I have never seen any of the films you made with Lino, and the only book of yours that I have is The Lavas which I have largely forgotten. But in that anthology book, Manila Noir, I found your short story, “The Professor’s Wife” the best of the lot. 

The only thing I can say about my film idea is that it is part of my memories as a young boy during summer months in Baguio in the late 1950s. In other words, it is just about a group of rich people who play mahjong and the battalion of maids and drivers who serve them. This is probably the result of the flood of memories that are still spilling out of my mind after completing my book Last Look Back. It is no big production because it is the characters I am most interested in. A picture of the members of the idle rich when Baguio was still the exclusive enclave of the privileged elite, from which I’ve descended, of course. 

I did ask Sarge Lacuesta and he was quite interested but he is going to direct his first film for Cinemalaya. So I picked up Manila Noir again and looked for that story and found out that it was you who wrote it. 

Anyway, as I always say, suntok sa buwan. Baka hindi rin matuloy because of my health but I’d like to give it a try anyway. If you think you might be interested, please email me back. 

I wrote him back to say that of course I was happy and honored to be asked to work with him:

The project sounds like something I’d be very comfortable with—a quiet family drama with an upstairs-downstairs element to it. Coincidentally, i’ve been working on a novel set in 1936 in one of those Dewey Boulevard mansions, with the Manila Carnival (and Quezon and Sakdalistas in the background). But that’s at least still another year from being done. I just wanted to say that the idea of revisiting the past to show how it has shaped the present—throwing light and shadow where they belong—is dear to me.

And now, the inevitable hitch: I’m working on three commissioned book projects at the same time, and these books will be due in 2023. I’m retired, but I’m also writing columns for the Star and teach one graduate class in UP.

I can imagine from your situation that this project is a matter of great personal significance and urgency to you—which is why I so want to be a part of it, despite my own load. At the same time, I don’t want to be a hindrance to you, especially if you want this done soonest. If you just need me to flesh out some scenes and develop some ideas and write up the sequences and dialogue as we go along, maybe we can do something together. Let the thing grow and go where it will. 

Then he sent me more notes about what he had in mind:

As you probably know by now, I like shooting a film in Baguio. I now own the former family house and I’ve restored it and maintained it well. It can still pass for an authentic American colonial house of the late 1950s. Actually, the house was built in the 1930s, but I’m not sure of the exact date until I find the papers. The original owner was an American officer named Emil Speth. He married one or two native women and was the vice-mayor of Baguio when the Japanese bombed the city on December 8, 1941. Quezon was in the mansion and I read an account that Speth asked Quezon to take shelter in his house (maybe not the same one because Speth owned many houses) because he had a bomb shelter. 

By the way, this is not an autobiographical film. It’s the mahjongistas I’m more intrigued about. I used to watch them with a fascination because it was not really gambling but a form of social intercourse with its own rituals. 

Within a few days, much to his surprise, I emailed him back with a full storyline based on what he said he wanted to do. I’ve always been a fast writer, and I guess it was one of those things I would be known in the trade for. I delivered quickly, without fuss, just needing to be paid.

He responded:

Quite surprised to get this email and story idea. I just read it quickly but I will read it more carefully in a while, when I’m wide awake. It seems too complex, the characters as well. I was thinking of more opaque characters (from the point of view of the young boy, and the viewer, they cannot explain their behavior, that is what I’m looking for). His memories are speculative and will probably remain so until his old age. By which time, most of them are dead anyway. But I’m amazed at how you put this story together. Give me a couple of days to react to it and I will jot down my own notes.

On January 9, in the New Year, began what would become a painful series of revelations:

Sorry for the late reply. I’ve not been feeling well, possibly because of the gloomy rainy weather. I can’t take my regular early morning walks around Horseshoe or Greenhills. Also, I’m kinda antsy about my scheduled PET scan next week. My doctors told me last year, after the first PET scan, that I may not live another eight months or so, but it’s been more than a year and I’m still here. Fortunately, I was able to finish my book. 

I am writing my “impressions” of what I feel the film should be or “feel.” One important thing is that I think the film should start in medias res, the family is already in Baguio, several weeks in fact. The kids are playing or doing what they usually do (perhaps a little bored) and mahjong sessions are ongoing. I don’t want to give them family names, just Tita Rita, Tito Hector, Nicky (the kid). 

I think I need to paint a more vivid picture of what life was like back then for your benefit. I’m selecting photos of my youth in Baguio and sending them to you. I would like to give the impression that the film is “almost” biographical but not entirely so. So please give me another week to put something together. So there can be nothing like a murder. Psychological violence is more interesting to me. 

Pahinga muna ako, I’m always tired. 

A couple of weeks later, he followed through:

Sorry for the long silence. I’m pondering a lot of things at the moment. I haven’t written anything but the concept keeps growing in my mind that it is becoming unfeasible. I finished reading a book on the 1950s and I started reading “Cameo” last night, and I really like the way you write. 

Don’t hold me to this but I’m thinking that “The Professor’s Wife” may be the right kind of film for me but I was wondering if it can be set in Baguio. Not in my house, of course, it’s too grand for the story. I have some very dear friends in Baguio who may help me look for the right location for the story. 

I’ve been asking myself the same question over and over, do I still want to make films? It’s not just my health but a lot of other things. 

I’m sorry if I seem very unpredictable but I feel you can understand and empathize with my situation. I thought I’d be dead by now, but I’m not. 

And then:

Sorry for the long silence. My new PET scan results are not very encouraging. Although the bone metastasis has not spread (from the prostate cancer), there is worrisome new activity in my liver that was not there before. I will have to undergo a liver biopsy, an outpatient procedure but my doctor wants to have me admitted. And if I can do this early next week, it takes a week for conclusive results to come out. 

So that kinda leaves in a kind of limbo. In many ways, I feel so vulnerable, something that I did not feel when I was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2016. I feel that my life has just stopped. Anyway, the story I’m most interested in now is the aborted script of my own “Unfinished Business,” or its new title “Sa Bisperas” for obvious reasons. I was beginning to make major revisions when Bongbong was elected, but now it seems very appropriate to my life—an existential film masquerading as a ghost story.

Sorry about all of this, butch. I will keep you updated. Perhaps we can co-write the revisions if you are open to that sort of thing. But in the meantime, I have to try to beat this thing.

In January 2024, a year after our first contact, he wrote me:

I hope you’re doing fine and I’m really sorry for the long silence. So much is happening in my life right now but I’m still hoping to make one more film next year, that is if my medical condition doesn’t take a turn for the worse. 

I was wondering if anyone has made a film of your short story “The Professor’s Wife”, included in Manila Noir. I’ve been thinking about it and it could be something I can still do. If it’s possible, I can option it for a certain period and pay whatever you feel is a good price. The same would go for the screenplay—that you will be paid whether I can make it or not. I think it has the potential to become a small but intimate and intense film, character-based, with a murder thrown in, like Kisapmata. 

I wrote and sent him a full storyline based on my short story, but told him that I wasn’t going to bill him for anything until the project was actually underway. Six months later, on July 10, he wrote:

There are a couple of questions I should ask you right away. The professors’  academic argument, could it be about some “obscure” historical event or incident like something set during the Japanese Occupation? Perhaps an issue of collaboration. That way, we can subtly bring in the political situation today. 

Is it still possible to shoot in UP? Or in some relatively quiet location at the teachers’ village, so I can record direct sound, and avoid dubbing. It would be wonderful to set the story in Baguio, but I don’t want to force it. 

I’m going to travel in Europe in November, perhaps for the last time. My excuse is the restoration of Sister stella which is currently being restored in Bologna. I don’t have a Schengen visa and an invitation from my friend Davide of Ritrovata may help a lot in getting me one and for my caregiver as well. 

He wrote later about visiting our home on the campus, where my story was set:

I think a visit to your place would help me tremendously. There are so many possibilities to this story and since this is the first time we’re working together, I must warn you, makulit ako. But at least this time, the germ is there, the story is there. I just want to know more about the milieu. 

It’s a noir film and a social drama at the same time, I think. As I was writing, I was thinking of Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, and even Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series or the Cry of the Owl, yata. Are you familiar with the 1947 film “Out of the Past” by Jacques Tourneur? 

I will continue to write down my rambling notes and send them to you in a day or two. 

He came to the house on July 29, 2024. It was only the second—and would be the last—time for us to meet. We had a pleasant chat over a light merienda prepared by Beng in our garden gazebo in UP. I can’t recall if he even touched the food; he looked pale against his usual black shirt, but then he always seemed to be like that. We discussed the revisions I was thinking of making on my story to shade it even further. He said that he found me refreshingly easy to talk to, which I was happy to hear, but at the same time we were both aware that we were dreaming up a film neither of us would get to see. 

On October 12, 2024, I got the message I could not be surprised by. I wrote back to wish him well.

I’m sorry I have to write you this email, wherever you are. I’ve been quite sick these last two weeks. I was in the hospital for several days for a blood transfusion.

My recovery will be slow, according to my doctors. But they don’t really have to tell me that. I’ve been very weak, most probably due to a multitude of causes, foremost among them is the metastasis caused by prostate cancer. 

Needless to say, I don’t think I will be able to make a film, so you might as well know now. I even had to cancel my trip to Europe. I’m sorry that I wasted your time. I hope you understand.

Best and thank you very much

Mike

Penman No. 476: Angels over Angela

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Penman for Sunday, August 10, 2025

AS A collector of many things old and wonderful—vintage fountain pens and typewriters, antiquarian books, and midcentury paintings—I occasionally come across the stray and even the strange object that I simply can’t say no to.

My wife and I are inveterate junkers—as I’ve often written about, we travel the world not to visit magnificent palaces, posh boutiques, or Michelin-starred restaurants. Rather, we dive right into a city’s flea markets, resale shops, and discount stores to see what treasures could be had for a song.

But travel costs money, so the next best thing is to go to the Web for the online equivalent of flea markets, among which there’s none larger than eBay, with millions of items on sale at any given minute. Having been on eBay almost since it opened 30 years ago, and with a feedback score over 1,500 (100% positive), I practically live in it, checking out its offerings several times a day, using targeted searches for certain pens, old books, and Filipiniana. 

You’d be surprised how much Philippine material exists out there. I’ve repatriated paintings, maps, magazines, engravings, and such, feeling it my patriotic duty to bring them home. I have collector-friends scouring eBay just as diligently for Philippine medals, coins, stamps, and postcards—the results of which often turn up on our own auction sites, sometimes for millions.

Another virtual flea market that junkers like me habitually visit is the Facebook Marketplace. Facebook is full of selling groups devoted to everything from antiques, collectibles, and furniture to used clothes, fake gold bars, and broken appliances. They all end up at the Marketplace—which, frankly, was the principal reason I finally went on FB, after resisting for many years. I didn’t want to make friends and influence people—I wanted to shop for cheap gadgets like used iPhones and Apple laptops (both of which I’ve bought on FB many times) as well as the odd collectible, like the 1897 two-volume facsimile edition of Don Quixote that I picked up at a Jollibee, and a large pastel seminude by the modern Japanese master Ryohei Koiso.

But as with eBay, and because we’re right at home, nothing interests me more on FB Marketplace than Philippine material, and just this past month two outstanding discoveries reminded me why I should keep an eye out for the good, the strange, and the beautiful.

The first was a stunningly lovely picture of a Filipino woman in native dress, apparently from before the war. The dress seemed to have been colorized, but by hand and not digitally as we often find these days.

As soon as I saw that picture on FB, I knew that I had to have it (or to put it more nicely, I knew I had to get it for Beng). The seller posted it as an “acrylic on board from the 1950s,” which I wondered about but was just barely possible, with acrylic paint beginning to be used in the 1940s. (All the seller could tell me was that it had come from an old house in Sampaloc, and that he had nicknamed her Esther.)

It could have been a modern giclée print or a lithograph, but assured that it was indeed a painting under glass—the seller was highly reputable and lived just 15 minutes away from me—I took a chance and asked how much. Given a quote just in the four figures (I was expecting something significantly higher), I instantly “mined” it, as they say on the Marketplace.

When it arrived, Beng and I couldn’t believe our luck. It was large and gorgeous, but what medium was it? The painting was under glass, and we could see the paint strokes but not discern the texture of canvas. There were some mold spots under the glass, and some adhesions (this is where it pays to be married to an art restorer who has done all the Philippine masters from Luna and Hidalgo to Amorsolo and Magsaysay-Ho). Beng looked more closely at the face of the woman and, informed by her practice, realized what it was—a foto-óleo! 

It was a new word for me, which of course I looked up. Google’s AI Overview had more to say about the technique behind the picture:

“Foto-óleo refers to a technique of hand-painting oil colors onto black and white photographs to enhance their appearance, making them more lifelike and visually appealing. This practice was popular in the Philippines during the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, particularly in portraiture before the widespread use of color photography. According to the National Museum of the Philippines, it was a way for families, especially those of middle-class and prominent backgrounds, to signify their wealth and social standing. The National Museum of the Philippines and other institutions have collections of foto-óleos, some of which are displayed in exhibitions like ‘Larawan at Litrato: Foto-óleo and Picture Portraits in the Philippines (1891-1953)’.”

Before he let go of the picture, the seller asked me to take good care of his “Esther,” and we certainly will!

Just two days later arrived one of the most beautiful but also the saddest of my discoveries on FB Marketplace. My first reaction upon seeing it online—as might be any viewer’s—was a shudder of realization at what its subject was. But when I zoomed in on the details, I was soon taken and comforted by the care and love and the unspoken grief with which this child named Angela, whose passing on March 27, 1938 is marked, was sent off by her family.

These recuerdos de patay, as keepsake funeral pictures were then called, seemed more than a testament to the dead; they also exalted the living who cared enough to invoke the eternal watchfulness of glass-painted cherubs and angels over Angela.

And so began for Beng the task of restoring the funeral picture of young Angela. As the picture had presumably not been taken out of its frame for over 80 years, both the photograph and the glass were full of dust and grime. Hundreds of mold or age spots pimpled the surface.

The decorative border had been painted on the glass from the inside—but as Beng established after a quick solubility test, the painter didn’t use oil or enamel but likely tempera which dissolves in water, so she will have to be very careful to make sure its surprisingly vivid colors don’t come off. The narra frame will be cleaned and retained. It may be a morbid memento to some, but as art it gives Angela another life beyond March 27, 1938.

These two finds on FB Marketplace, heavy with emotion, reminded me that collecting sometimes goes beyond fun and profit. It involves respect and even reverence for a past that left us some brilliant images to remember it by.

Penman No. 475: True Confessions

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Penman for Sunday, July 13, 2025

AS A collector (make that a scavenger) of old books, manuscripts, and what the market generally calls “ephemera,” I inevitably come across material neither written by nor meant for kings and presidents, but rather pedestrians like myself with things to say, perhaps secrets to whisper, likely to no one but to God and posterity.

I’m talking about diaries and journals, which people of my generation used to do (and millennials are back to doing). Worse than a pack rat, I hoard other people’s memories, some in diaries that would make people turn in their graves to know I had. I come across these often as discards or stray items among people selling and buying old books, but I find them equally if not even more fascinating than published (and therefore sanitized) material.

Back then, before computers and digital journals, New Year began with the purchase of a new diary, its pristine pages waiting to be filled with birthdays, appointments, expenses—and more interestingly, interjections of love, pain, joy, and grief, life’s highest and lowest moments. 

I myself kept diaries at one time, although the entries tended to peter out around March or April, when fatigue got the better of my enthusiasm. My most interesting one has to be my martial-law diary, which I rather presumptuously began as soon as I was thrown in prison at Fort Bonifacio; I say “presumptuously” because, at seventeen, I entertained the precious thought that somehow, someday, my juvenile musings would be worth something to someone other than my mother (I had yet to find a wife then). 

When the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci languished in a Fascist jail in the late 1920s, presumably between a meager breakfast and gazing out into the starless night, he penned lines like “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” He developed his theory of hegemony and held forth on the role of intellectuals in social change, published in his seminal Prison Notebooks.

My own teenage memoirs have survived, but instead of writing about the dominance of the ruling class or about harrowing details of torture and misery—which did happen to others—I chronicled the visits of the pretty young psychologists assigned by the military to interview us; of course we assumed they were spies, but that didn’t stop us from chatting with (more like staring at) them across a table that felt much too wide.

Indeed, for most of us more interested in the personal than the political (although arguably one will always be the other), the value of diaries lies in their true confessions, in their promise of intimacy and insight—along with, let’s admit it, the wicked thrill of voyeurism.

Among the most poignant of my inadvertent discoveries has been the diary—really more a scrapbook—of a once-famous and gifted writer (whose name I’ll leave out for now as he still has family around) who was imprisoned after the War for his stridently pro-Japanese sentiments and actions. In three languages, both typewritten and handwritten, he acknowledges receipt of his beloved’s supplemental rations—beef, fish, fruits, and coffee—but no letter yet again. “Nang buksan ko kagabi ang bayong, hanap ako nang hanap…. Na naman? Wala? Namanglaw ako nang lubos. Di yata at wala ka na naming panahon.” How many times do I have to tell you, he goes on to lament, that even for important to me than sustenance for my body is sustenance for my spirit?

I once came across a whole sheaf of journals in a ditch in front of our house, which I was inspecting because it had gotten clogged with what turned out to be a plastic bag full of papers. It had been carelessly thrown there by the home’s previous occupants or whoever cleaned it out—we had just moved in. They turned out to be the personal papers of a renowned UP professor, and as guilty as I felt about peeking into her life, I read a few pages, in which she confessed her admiration for a certain man (she lived and died a spinster)—only to remind herself, with what I could almost hear was a deep sigh of regret, that she considered herself wedded to God. I read no further, and decided to turn the papers over to a friend, a former and beloved student of hers who was the closest thing to a son.

Most recently, some diaries from the late 1930s and 1940s came to me along with a medical book, and they contain nothing so revelatory, but the details of everyday life a,re always engrossing. They obviously belonged to a doctor—perhaps more than one—and while they contain medical marginalia they also carry legal notes, so the owner must have been studying to be a medico-legal person. Rather moving is the narrative in one diary of bringing a very sick mother to the hospital; I flipped a few pages and the inevitable entry appeared: “Mother died.” And there lay the stark helplessness of a doctor who could not save his own mother.

For many years now, the writer and presidential historian Manolo Quezon has been on top of an important enterprise called the Philippine Diary Project, a digitized compilation of diaries and memoirs from such notables as Jose Rizal, Ferdinand E. Marcos, Dean Worcester, and Emilio Aguinaldo all the way to the murdered activist Ericson Acosta (clearly more women need to be added to the roster).

“To me there are two holy grails,” Manolo told me. “The first is the diary of Gregorio H. Del Pilar. The diary of the American officer who led the expedition that killed him, Frederick Funston, exists but has yet to be transcribed. It was he, by all accounts, who pocketed del Pilar’s pocket diary; perhaps his papers will reveal them after a thorough search. The other is the diary of Benigno S. Aquino, Sr. The late Benito Legarda, Jr. told me that it was shown to him by one of the sisters of Ninoy, and that, in Spanish, it began, “I have been summoned to a meeting in Malacañan by the commanding general of the Japanese Military Administration…” The thing is, the last sister who had it, lost her memory and her children have not found the diary since.”

He adds that “A large portion of the Marcos diary is missing and anecdotally is said to be in the possession of a former member of his administration. For me though, what I’m seeking are diaries by Filipinos. Our own voices are woefully underrepresented. I think many were lost in Ondoy, many others have been thrown away, still more exist, but families are afraid people will take offense and so prefer to keep them secret.”

What I find from my own small collection is that whether they wrote in English or Tagalog, or used fountain pens or typewriters, our forebears recorded the smallest details such as “Auto repair 15.00” and “Won jai-alai 5-3 event.” Today we do all that with digital ink. I wonder what some digital pack rat will be remarking about us 50 years hence.

Qwertyman No. 153: Our Literary Fathers

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 7, 2025

THE RECENT announcement of the impending sale of the Solidaridad bookshop in Ermita owned and run by the family of the late National Artist F. Sionil Jose understandably triggered a wave of nostalgia for the place, the old man, his dear wife Tessie, and for a bygone era when people strolled into book stores over their lunch break or after work to browse and pick up an Updike, a Le Guin, or a Garcia Marquez—and, of course, a Sionil Jose, and get it signed by the man himself if he was luckily around. Five decades ago, as a writer for the National Economic and Development Authority just a couple of blocks away on the same street, that browser would have been me, for whom Solidaridad and the equally legendary Erehwon nearby were a godsend, an unlisted perk. 

Indeed Solidaridad and FSJ (or Manong Frankie, as we his juniors called him) were inseparably conjoined in the public’s imagination of a man who was not only our most productive and best-known novelist but also an indefatigable purveyor of great literature and critical if occasionally controversial thinking, through his journal Solidarity and his long-running column “Hindsight,” this very space I was honored to have inherited.

Like many others—even those with whom he had quarreled fiercely—I was deeply saddened when Manong Frankie passed away three years ago. It was particularly bittersweet for me because we had become quite close in his last years, after having been somewhat estranged for the longest time. 

He had taken me under his wing on a writers’ conference in Bali in 1983, in a group of young, aspiring writers finding their way in a broadening literary world. But shortly after, in an interview with National Public Radio in America where I had gone to study, I offered my rather injudicious opinion of his prose—not mine alone—which he must have gotten wind of and found disparaging, because he gave me the cold shoulder afterwards. Like other younger writers, I would bristle at his hectoring moods—which I would better understand as I myself got older—during which he lamented the seeming alienation of the Filipino writer from his or her own social and political reality. 

It was a concern we happened to share, and he began to know and appreciate me as someone who eschewed academic snobbery as much as he did, having transitioned to fiction from a background in journalism rather than the writers’ workshop system that he was deeply dubious of. In other words, we had more in common than each of us thought, and our work in the Akademyang Filipino brought us closer together. At one time I gifted him with the very first issue of Solidarity—Vol. I, No. 1—which I had found, and which he had not seen for ages; he was happy. After my speech at the Palancas in 2017, he came up to shake my hand.

Ironically, this happened at a time when FSJ, ever strongly opinionated, turned off many of his readers with his pro-Duterte sentiments, his putdowns of Nobel prizewinner Maria Ressa and others he thought undeserving of their fame, and his acerbic loathing of certain families he considered oligarchs despite their long having been supplanted by new and far more ravenous overlords. I did not share these views, and he knew that, but I think we had quietly decided that our friendship was more important than our politics. Shortly before he died, he sent me a brief letter that will be a cherished secret to keep until I myself pass on.

I didn’t learn writing from Manong Frankie; rather, I observed and admired his persistence and perseverance, literally writing to the last on what turned out to be his deathbed. I enjoyed his stories more than his novels, but in the end my own preferences don’t matter. He left a sprawling, robust, and indelible body of work that for many readers here and overseas will define Philippine literature in English for the latter 20th century. He led what our mutual friend the novelist Charlson Ong called “a well-managed life,” building a legacy partly through Solidaridad, Solidarity, and Philippine PEN which he led for a long time, apart of course from his work, and making sure he was heard when he spoke. 

His passing reminded me of the other members of his generation—his seniors and juniors by a decade or so—whom my generation in turn looked up to and at the same time, in that perpetual cycle of revolt and renewal, sought to depose. Nick Joaquin we adored as much for his prose as for his prodigious drinking (and seriously, for putting as much of his heart and craft into his journalism as into his fiction). NVM Gonzalez, who happened to have been born in Romblon (and not in Mindoro as many think) several kilometers away and forty years ahead of me, had that common touch many citified writers lost. Edilberto Tiempo I owe for urging me to return to school and devote my life to studying and writing rather than to bureaucratic servitude. 

Bienvenido Santos, twinkly-eyed and gently smiling, was my favorite of them all in terms of the quietude but also the emotional resonance of his stories, so graceful and yet so powerful. If I were to think of a literary father, it would have been Franz Arcellana, whose work may have been so vastly different from mine and yet, as my mentor in school, was the one I sought to please, slipping my story drafts under his office door and praying for his approval. Gregorio Brillantes, the youngest of them and perhaps more properly belonging to the next generation along with Gemino Abad, has been my writing hero for his superlative technique and unfailing sense of character. All these men (and women as well, for whom a separate story should be told) have taught me and my peers much, not just about the craft of writing but just as importantly the writing life, this vocation of books and words we have ddevote ourselves to for the bliss and yet also often the anguish of finding meaning in life through language.

Manong Frankie has passed on and soon so will his fabled bookshop, but his words, as well as ours, now have a life of their own.

Penman No. 474: Looking Back and Letting Go

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Penman for Sunday, June 1, 2025

AS ANY friend who’s had the privilege of being invited to his Makati home quickly realizes, Ambeth Ocampo is more than the engaging public intellectual we all know, whose Looking Back series has made history come alive for young Filipinos. He’s also an inveterate collector of rare Filipiniana—books, ephemera, art, and historical objects—all of which come with the territory he works in. 

There have been many Filipinos of a similar bent—the legendary Alfonso Ongpin and the late Ramon Villegas come to mind, as well as the more contemporary Jimmy Laya, Melvin Lam, and Edward de los Santos, among others—but the way Ambeth has amassed his collection is noteworthy on its own, as it folds the personal almost imperceptibly into the professional. 

It comes pretty close to the classic prescription for murder—means, motive, and opportunity—all captured in his classic story of how he stumbled on and picked up Emilio Jacinto’s silver quill, a writing prize, from an antiques dealer who didn’t bother to learn what it was and let it go for its scrap value. (Having as much of Ambeth’s desire for antiquarian junk but with much less knowledge and certainly less means, I’ve often joked, between the two of us, that Ambeth’s the scholar and I’m the scavenger.)

Jacinto’s quill, along with a trove of other historical treasures from Ambeth’s personal collection, will be up for auction on June 7 at Leon Gallery. They include Juan Luna’s silver belt, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s walking stick, an official copy of the Malolos Constitution, Philippine maps from 1616 and 1647, and the Noceda and Sanlucar Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala from 1860, among many others.

Knowing how precious these objects were, I had to ask Ambeth more about them, and this is what he said.

What made you think of selling these treasures now? Surely it can’t be easy letting go of them after being their caretaker all this time?

Over the years, I have come to the realization that collecting is not the hobby it used to be. As a boy I collected stamps and learned geography, history, and the culture of foreign countries in the process. I was fortunate that my father’s company had an international correspondence, so every week his secretary would send me a batch of envelopes to sort out.

I started collecting Filipiniana books in the 1980s, stocking up from the National Bookstore Quezon Boulevard branch bargain bin where I completed my Nick Joaquin essay collection because they cost one peso each. After school, I went to the Heritage Art Center in Cubao that I learned only years later was the site of the old Philippine Art Gallery. It was a ramshackle grouping of rooms upon added rooms made from old house parts that Mario Alcantara, the owner, bought from mambubulok. I had a favorite nook where I did my homework and when bored I would explore the rooms that I think gave me an eye for art and the ability to choose what I thought was good or not.

Looking back my collecting, and my life, has been the happy intersection of skill and opportunity. Napoleon once said “ability is nothing without opportunity.” I have always seen collecting as a responsibility. Collecting significant Filipiniana is not a hobby. It is not an investment. Collecting is a responsibility, the collector a steward who preserves the collection for the next generation. 

The objects I put at auction have enriched my life in many ways and I think they will enrich the life of their next steward. Some of the lots like the Malolos Republic one-peso banknote and the printed copy of the Malolos Constitution have been tucked away in a drawer. If I drop dead tomorrow these might be carelessly thrown away as trash. They should go where they are better appreciated. Collectors de-accessioning keeps the market alive and buzzing.

Let’s get this out of the way: it’s none of our business, but what will you do with the money?


Since I am not a dealer the material reward does not really factor in the equation. I have sold other things before at cost or even at a loss, just thinking that my gain was the enjoyment I got chasing after them and acquiring them. What will I do with the proceeds? When I started selling my rare Filipiniana I thought that instead of having shelves of books, maybe I should just sell and use the proceeds to buy one or two incunabula or samples of early Philippine printing from 1593-1640. Instead of caring for a whole library I will just care for half a dozen very important books.

How did you start out as a collector of historical objects? How and where did you find them? Aside from Jacinto’s pen, what was your most serendipitous find?

Collecting historical objects came naturally from my work as a historian. I would find things in used bookstores and when supply was still plentiful in the Ermita antique shops. One of the serendipitous finds was the cedula or residence certificate of a certain Julian Felipe, a musician from Cavite. It was in a heap of old papers, initially priced at one hundred pesos. I haggled it down to fifty, paid, and ran away. 

Another time my favorite antique dealer brought a “European painting” of a Virgin and Child to my home. I looked at it and knew it was Philippine. When I opened the frame to inspect the painting, hidden under the frame was the signature of the Filipino master Mariano Asuncion (1802-1855). The silver belt of Juan Luna and the bank draft in his name were acquired from Mario Alcantara. It came with the famous trove of paintings inherited by Grace Luna de San Pedro that are now in the National Museum. While everyone was going wild over the paintings, I spent many afternoons browsing the boxes of memorabilia that included the bloodied uniform Antonio Luna wore when he was assassinated, the palettes and brushes of Juan Luna, the memorabilia, some architectural plans of Andres Luna de San Pedro, and much more. I offered to buy the palettes and brushes and the painter’s smock but Mario said these were destined for the National Museum. There was also the last letter Juan Luna wrote to his son from Hong Kong, written a day before his death, not only was this letter significant, Luna did a watercolor of Hong Kong Harbor on the first page of the double-sided letter. All I could afford was the silver belt that came with Luna’s black suit that Mario said was also destined for the National Museum. Unfortunately, the Heritage Art Center burned down and with it all these memorabilia.

Do you or can you separate the collector from the scholar? Did the collecting happen naturally as a consequence of the scholarship?

The collecting grew and was enriched by my research and scholarship. If I had a PhD in Math I probably would not have recognized these odds and ends now considered treasures. I have been divesting over the years. A large part of my Filipiniana collection was donated to the Center for Kapampangan Studies, Holy Angel, Pampanga. All I keep at home are the books I need for work for teaching, lecturing, and writing, but now that I am retired from Ateneo (but still employed on a post-retirement appointment) it is easier to let go. 

The full catalog of Leon Gallery’s Spectacular Mid-Year auction can be accessed on its website at https://leon-gallery.com. 

Qwertyman No. 147: Literature Has Many Flags

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 26, 2025

IT WILL be a tempest in a teapot to most Filipinos still caught up in the aftermath of the midterm elections, a topic of interest to a limited few, but I’m bringing it up this week because it’s important enough for larger reasons.

The Philippines will be Guest of Honor (GOH) at this October’s Frankfurt Buchmesse (FBM), the world’s oldest and largest book fair. Being GOH means that the Philippines—its literature, culture, history, and politics—will be foregrounded in Frankfurt, through the dozens of writers, thousands of books, and the many exhibits and presentations that will be brought over to the FBM, through the combined efforts of the National Book Development Board (NBDB) and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), among other organizations. 

Much of the groundwork for this initiative, which began well before the pandemic, was laid by Sen. Loren Legarda, the principal advocate of arts and culture in the Senate. GOH status is an honor given every year to a different country, but it doesn’t come free; the project involves hundreds of millions of pesos, which its proponents see as a worthwhile investment in raising the global profile of the Philippines through its culture and expanding the international market for Philippine books and authors. The past two years have seen intensive efforts made by the NBDB and the Philippine GOH Committee to prepare the program, select the delegates, and arrange the logistics for our historic participation in October at the FBM.

Comes now a move, led by some prominent Filipino writers and activists, to boycott the FBM for various reasons, including what some see as the government’s misplaced priorities in funding our GOH participation, but primarily in protest of the FBM’s alleged support for Israel in its war in Gaza, and also of Germany’s complicity as an Israeli ally in that conflict. At the moment, it hasn’t gained much traction, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the intervening months between now and October, it gathers some steam—likely not enough to stop us from going, but enough to cause some dismay and dissension within our ranks.

I’m not in favor of this boycott, for reasons I’ll shortly explain, but first, full disclosure: I have been formally invited to attend the FBM as a delegate, and have accepted the invitation; I will be involved in several events—a launch of the new Spanish translation of my second novel Soledad’s Sister, several book readings, and possibly some panel discussions. All my expenses will be answered for. This will be my third (and at my age, likely my last) participation at the Frankfurt book fair, as an author whose books have been translated into Italian, French, German, and Spanish editions. In other words, I have a vested interest in going to Frankfurt. (To those who have never been to the FBM, it is no junket; expect long hours manning the booths, talking to people, selling book rights, and walking kilometers of hallways on the enormous fairgrounds. Frankfurt is not a particularly scenic city, although a side trip to nearby Heidelberg and its Rizal connections will be a welcome break.)

Some readers might find the connection between the FBM and Gaza tenuous and the call for a boycott bewildering, but it does have some basis worth serious consideration. The relationship between Germany and Israel, or the Germans and Jews, is long and complex (highlighted by the Holocaust before Israel even came to be, and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, among others), but the immediate trigger for the outcry was the FBM’s controversial cancelation of an awards ceremony for the celebrated Palestinian writer Adana Shibli in the immediate wake of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023. 

The outrage is justifiable and widely shared. In this column and other media, I myself have written against Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people (see “The Country I Wanted to Love,” from April 19, 2024), as have many other commentators. Indeed, I know of very few Filipino writers who have cheered the onslaught on—typically those holding orthodox Catholic views upholding Israel as God’s chosen nation. 

Israel’s relentless pounding of Gaza, resulting in the wanton slaughter of innocents, has long outlived its excuse of neutralizing Hamas. It is genocidal butchery by any standard, this calculated starvation of Gaza’s remaining residents, the killing of aid workers, and the mechanical attribution of atrocities to “operational errors.” Netanyahu’s encouragement of Trump’s crass and bizarre proposal to depopulate Gaza so he can turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” reveals the utter moral depravity of these two men. 

Israel’s barbarism in its campaign of terror and annihilation has now exceeded Hamas’ own (yes, unlike many protestors, I hold Hamas accountable for its own brutality—something that will surely not endear me to the far Left on this issue). Those of us who study Elizabethan revenge tragedy know this only too well: the line beyond which the revenger no longer seeks justice but mindless retribution, and becomes a horrifying, blood-soaked caricature of the very object it opposes.

The question for us writers is: will any of this be helped by withdrawing our participation from one of the world’s largest (if arguably not freest) exchanges of ideas through books? Will we prevent ourselves at Frankfurt—should the need and opportunity arise—from expressing our opinions on Gaza, among a host of other global issues concerning human rights? (Current German rules restrict financial support to artists seen as anti-Israel, especially those identified with the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement or BDS, among other repressive measures.)

My answer is no. I stand for peace and justice for both the Palestinian and Israeli people—indeed, for all oppressed peoples of the world, including our own. But divesting ourselves of a historic opportunity to express our collective resistance to injustice—not just in Gaza or over this one issue, no matter how pressing, will only be counter-productive. Unless it catches fire (other prominent authors elsewhere, as in Indonesia—which was GOH some years ago—have expressed support), a symbolic boycott will be as deafening and as consequential as a tree falling in the forest.

In the end, this will come down to an individual act of conscience, however one decides, for which we must reserve our respectful acceptance. Whether one goes or stays, one’s reasons or motives have to be clear, so the gesture will not be wasted. I will go to Frankfurt proudly, with neither guilt nor shame, to speak about our people and our struggles for freedom through my books. Engagement, not withdrawal, will be the best service writers can perform for their country and for all oppressed and silenced people everywhere. 

Politicians like to wave one flag—Filipino, American, Israeli, Palestinian. Literature, like all art, has many flags: peace, justice, freedom, equality, truth, love, beauty, and harmony. Let all these fly in Frankfurt.

(Image from Studio Dialogo)

Qwertyman No. 143: I or AI?

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 27, 2025

I’VE RECENTLY been asked to talk about literature in the time of artificial intelligence (AI) in a couple of conferences in Dumaguete and Manila. What that tells me is that, with AI’s emergence and growing popularity, there’s been much uncertainty, anxiety, and fear—even outright hostility—generated by the seemingly unstoppable intrusion of artificial intelligence not just into literature but into almost every aspect of human life and society. As I’ve said before, depending on how you see and use it, AI is either God’s gift to humanity or the destroyer of civilizations. 

While it has been hailed for its contributions to such fields as medicine and criminology—shortening diagnostic procedures and sharpening digital forensics—AI’s application to less mechanical endeavors is more fraught with both ethical and technical questions. Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazawa, for one, has forsworn the use of AI in his work, calling it “an insult to life itself.” 

For writers and other creatives, the big questions are: Will and can AI replace the author? Is AI capable of artistic imagination? Should writers, publishers, and readers feel threatened by its future development? Might there be a positive role for AI in literary creation? 

Now, we can be very brave and declare that the worst piece of writing or art done by a human is still better than the best of what AI can produce. I’ve heard many authors proudly insist that “AI can never replace me!” But do you honestly think that’s true, and will the readers of the future—say, the consumers of popular fiction—care? The sobering fact is that there is so much bad art and bad writing done by real humans that it shouldn’t be too hard to artificially produce something better, for which people will gladly pay. 

I know that this will strike some of us as being crassly commercial, but it would be naïve to deny that much of what know to be culture today has been commodified—produced and sold as entertainment, whether it be a book, a movie, a concert, a computer program, or the hardware with which to access them. These are all media in which AI is already playing an increasingly important role—initially, perhaps, merely as a facilitator, a simplifier of complex or difficult tasks, or as an aid to the imagination, but also as a co-creator or collaborator, such as in the generation and animation of images. 

Given the fact that most of us produce art to sell—and why shouldn’t we, especially when we promote the idea of “creative industries”—the entry of AI into our thought processes and methods of work could be a matter of survival for many. The question is, will it improve the mediocre, or degrade the excellent? Can we excel without it, or because of it?

Early AI’s clumsy mistakes or “hallucinations” are worth a laugh, but I’m not sure how long we’ll be laughing; AI’s present ineptitude simply means it has a lot to learn—and it will, with the kind of training it’s being fed off our books, our texts, our manner of writing. It will only be a matter of time—I’d say less than a decade—before AI can mimic the best of global writing especially as literary texts get digitized and tossed into the meatgrinder, until it can produce a decent if not impressive approximation of certain styles and approaches. 

(For AI professionals, the next phases of the AI revolution will move into Artificial General Intelligence or AGI, at which point AI can match human intelligence, and ASI or Artificial Super Intelligence, when AI becomes self-aware enough to improve and replicate itself without human intervention and possibly beyond human control. These scary scenarios will not take, they say, a century to happen—some experts predict that AGI could be realized as early as 2027.)

What’s going for us is that while literary styles can be copied, the human imagination is far richer and stranger than we think. AI tends to homogenize; the human artist strives to be unique. Even so, researchers are already talking about algorithmic imagination and experimental humanities as “true collaborations with culture machines.”

Given that it’s inescapable, I propose that instead of fearing it, ignoring it, or maligning it as I’m sure many of us are inclined to do, we study AI and use for what it might be able to offer in aid of the imagination—as unsettling or unappetizing as that proposition sounds.

We’re already tapping AI every time we use Google, and no one seems to mind. I don’t mind admitting that I have used AI—not in fiction but in creative nonfiction or CNF, specifically in writing the biography, where I ask AI to summarize and organize biographical material that I would have eventually found on my own, anyway—in days rather than seconds. 

I suspect that the use of AI in CNF is much less troubling for writers and theorists than its employment in, say, writing the novel or the poem, which we have been trained to think of as more personal, more “us,” than nonfiction. We will yield CNF to AI, but draw the line at fiction and poetry, where we feel we should resist the intrusion of the beast or the machine into the recesses of our imagination. 

I wonder, however, how long this fortress will hold, or what the first crack in the wall will be, if it isn’t there already. I’m pretty sure that somewhere out there, a plodding novelist is already using AI to chart a tree of plot possibilities—What will happen if Maria marries Oscar? What if they decide to live in Davao instead of Baguio? And so on. I wouldn’t do this myself, because the fun of writing for me is in working out the future of my characters in my head. 

And then again I write fiction for the love of it—unlike almost all other kinds of writing that I do for a living. But if I were a novelist under contract to produce a novel a year, I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t seek AI’s help to lighten my load and get the job done. So is AI OK for money but not for love? Is that what it all comes down to?

So right now we have many more questions than answers, and at the pace the world is changing, most answers we come up with will soon be obsolete anyway. But the basic questions will remain, the most vital of which could be, when we say “I am,” is that “I” me, or is it AI speaking?

Qwertyman No. 140: The City of Stories

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 7, 2025

THIS PAST weekend, I was down in Dumaguete City with National Artist for Literature Resil Mojares, historian Ambeth Ocampo, and scores of other writers for the 2nd Dumaguete Literary Festival. At my age, I’ve frankly tired of going to literary festivals, conferences, and workshops, preferring to work quietly at home—Dr. Mojares apparently feels the same way—but we couldn’t resist the allure of Dumaguete, a city central to the development of Philippine postwar literature, and always well worth visiting on its own for its gentle charms.

I personally have much to thank Dumaguete for, for what it contributed to my own budding literary and academic career. Early in 1981, shortly after I had returned from my first visit to the US, I received an invitation from Dr. Edilberto Tiempo to join the Silliman Writers Workshop which he and his wife Edith—the poet and future National Artist—had started two decades earlier upon their own homecoming from America. 

I had dropped out of college for a decade by then, and was working at NEDA, which had sent me to the US for an observation tour. What that trip to the American Midwest—mainly the campus of Michigan State in East Lansing—did for me was to rekindle my interest in learning. Dr. Tiempo’s invitation could not have come at a better time: a summer devoted to talking about poetry and fiction at Silliman University felt dreamlike, and by the time the workshop ended, my head spinning with magical lines from Robert Graves, I had resolved to quit my job, go back to UP, and just study, write, and teach for the rest of my life. And that’s what happened.

I wasn’t alone in that kind of transformative experience; as the country’s oldest writers’ workshop, the Silliman summer workshop became a virtual rite of passage for young writers, especially in English (some writers in Filipino have also attended, with works in translation). Silliman itself (older than UP by several years) has produced many of the Philippines’ finest writers, aside from the elder Tiempos—among them Ricaredo Demetillo, Aida Rivera-Ford, Merlie Alunan, Leoncio Deriada, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Elsie Coscolluela, Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas, Marjorie Evasco, Lakambini Sitoy, Artemio Tadena, and Myrna Peña-Reyes. It also has a strong performing arts tradition, contributing the likes of National Artist Eddie Romero, Gilopez Kabayao, Amiel Leonardia, Junix Inocian, and Elmo Makil, among others.

For all these, Dumaguete has been formally nominated to be designated as a UNESCO City of Literature—one of many such distinctions listed under UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network program that was launched in 2004 to recognize and celebrate cities around the world—350 of them form more than 90 countries to date—for their signal achievements in Crafts & Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Music, and Media Arts. So far, 53 cities in 39 countries have been named Cities of Literature—among them Barcelona, Heidelberg, Iowa City, Lahore, and Norwich. (Iloilo has already been named a City of Gastronomy, and Quezon City is vying to be designated a City of Film.) With the Philippines serving as this year’s Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Dumaguete’s recognition as a UNESCO City of Literature will raise our global cultural profile even higher, and let the Philippines be known for more than Boracay, Manny Pacquiao, and Imelda’s shoes.

Leading that charge for Dumaguete is Silliman University literature professor Ian Rosales Casocot, one of our best fictionists and co-director of the festival with Gayle Acar. Working with the Dumaguete City government, the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Buglas Writers Guild which Ian heads, Ian notes that aside from developing writers, “Dumaguete itself has been a constant subject of many literary works, from novels to poetry, from essays to plays. It is high time that Dumaguete is recognized for its role in shaping literature in our corner of the world.” The well-attended Dumaguete Literary Festival, now on its second edition, offers proof positive of that city’s continuing centrality to our literary life and culture. 

We had been invited to share our views on various aspects of Philippine literature in this age of artificial intelligence. I joined a panel of writers dedicated to that specific topic—or, as they put it, “Can AI Win a Nobel Prize for Literature?”—which happened to be something I’ve given much thought to.

Understandably, there’s been a lot of fear and anxiety—even outright hostility—generated by the emergence of AI in nearly every aspect of human life and society. Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazawa, for example, has forsworn the use of AI in his work, calling it “an insult to life itself.” While it has been hailed for its contributions to such fields as medicine and criminology—shortening diagnostic procedures and sharpening digital forensics—AI’s application to less mechanical endeavors is more fraught with both ethical and technical questions. 

In previous lectures and again in Dumaguete, I showed how—at this point—AI poses little threat to the writer of truly good and imaginative literature, by yielding execrable responses to such prompts as “Write a paragraph about a summer night in Spanish Manila in the style of Nick Joaquin.” It’s worth a laugh, but I’m not sure how long we’ll be laughing; AI’s present ineptitude simply means it has a lot to learn—and it will, with the kind of training it’s being fed off our books, our texts, our manner of writing. It will only be a matter of time—I’d say less than a decade—before AI can mimic the best of global writing. For me, the best response is neither to hate nor to ignore it, but to understand it and employ it for helpful uses we have yet to find. (We’re already tapping AI every time we use Google, and no one seems to mind.) It should even be possible for authors to creatively interact with AI in what I’m calling a game of prompts.

What we can reasonably certain of is that while literary styles can be copied, the human imagination is far richer and stranger than we think. AI tends to homogenize; the good creative writer strives to be unique. Like Dumaguete, there’s a whole city, a labyrinthine cosmopolis, of stories in every writer’s mind to be discovered and explored.

Penman No. 473: New Light on (and from) the Philippine Short Story

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Penman for Sunday, April 6, 2025

FEW MAY have noticed, but this year, 2025, marks the centenary of what has been widely acknowledged to be our first classic short story in English, Paz Marquez Benitez’s deathless “Dead Stars.”

As I’ve often observed as both a writer and teacher of Philippine literature, there’s probably no literary form more popular among Filipinos than the short story and its predecessors—myths, legends, folktales, and such stories that draw on the power of narrative to tell and teach us something about human life. 

A lot of this has to do with the fact that people and cultures everywhere have made use of stories to make sense of things—to establish causality in human actions—often as a way of prescribing and also proscribing certain behaviors. Stories were there to learn from, like the biblical parables, Aesop’s fables, and the creation myths. The more exciting and entertaining the stories were, the easier the learning happened. Even the mere recognition of oneself in a story that could have taken place a thousand years ago in a place across the planet makes our lives seem more meaningful.

In the Philippines—as it did in the West, where the modern short story took form—the short story was a staple of prewar weekly magazines like the Sunday Tribune, where a story written by an American author would be matched by a local story during what our early literary scholars like Leopoldo Yabes would call our period of apprenticeship. This was in English, but the short story in Filipino (then Tagalog) and other Philippine languages had developed even earlier, and continued (as it continues) to explore new forms and material.

Why the short story and not the novel? That’s another long discussion to be had, and I’ve addressed it in a lecture titled “Novelists in Progress,” but the short of it is that, well, we Pinoys like things in small doses (think Nick Joaquin’s “heritage of smallness”), and the short story satisfies our craving for a touch of fiction and fantasy in our ordinary lives. We’re not marathoners, but great sprinters; we’re not summiteers or navel-gazers, but masters of the street and alley. 

And so, over the past century, important anthologies of the Philippine short story have been published, tracking the development of the genre and its practitioners, from Yabes’ landmark Philippine Short Stories 1925-1940 (a project continued by Gemino Abad for 1956-2008) to Isagani Cruz’s Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century (2000). Outside of English, Mga Agos sa Disyerto edited by Efren Abueg came out in 1964, proclaiming new directions for Tagalog short fiction, and the much-needed Ulirat: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines was published in 2021, edited by Kristine Ong Muslim.

But the 21st century is now a quarter of the way through, and just in these past two decades or so, a fresh bumper crop of brilliant new stories has built up, awaiting harvest.

Five years ago, an American friend named Gerald “Jerry” Burns—a fellow academic and a scholar of Philippine literature in English, now Emeritus Professor at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire—decided to do just that: review the best of the newest Philippine short stories and produce a selection with which to introduce them to the world. He needed a collaborator, and having worked with Jerry earlier when he was a Fulbright professor at our English department in UP, I agreed to co-edit the volume with him. Because of our backgrounds, our stories would be mainly those written in English (and the excellent Ulirat had already covered much more ground in the other Philippine languages than we ever could) but Jerry wisely insisted that we should have at least some representation of non-English stories in translation in the book, if only to lead the reader to explore more in Ulirat.

The selection process was predictably long and bruising, with all the political, aesthetic, and practical considerations that go into anthologizing, but in the end we came up with 18 stories written by both familiar and fresh names, from within and beyond the Philippines, including the diaspora: Dennis Andrew Aguinaldo, Dean Francis Alfar, Mia Alvar, John Bengan, Ian Rosales Casocot, Richard Giye, Vicente Groyon, Ino Habana, Carljoe Javier, Monica Macansantos, Perry Mangilaya, Doms Pagliawan, Ma. Elena Paulma, John Pucay, Anna Sanchez, Larissa Mae R. Suarez, Lysley A. Tenorio, and Socorro Villanueva. We also found an agreeable and supportive publisher, Milflores Publishing, fortuitously run by Andrea Pasion-Flores, herself a fine fictionist who understood the need for a new anthology like this, especially on the threshold of the Philippines’ participation as Guest of Honor in this year’s Frankfurt Buchmesse.

The book’s title, What Light It Can Hold: The Philippine Short Story in the Twenty-First Century, was suggested to Jerry by an encounter with the piña weavers of Kalibo, Aklan, and a caption he saw that said: “How fragile a single thread of piña is, how delicate, but look how much light it can hold.” He explains that “What Light… is intended to recognize the limited capacity of the Philippine short story in this period to offer any widespread or definitive illumination of the nation’s life and culture. At the same time, a more expansive understanding of that title is possible. For the short story, as will be suggested in the next pages, is a signature Philippine product, too. And these slender narratives, fashioned by their makers with a skill, patience, and devotion comparable to the piña weavers’, bring what light they can hold to vital areas of contemporary Philippine and larger human experience.”

No anthology project will be without its perceived failures and omissions, and Dr. Burns and I remain fully open to criticism in that respect. But we believe the sympathetic reader still stands to profit from both the selections and the introduction, penned largely by Jerry, that makes salient observations on the changes that have taken place in this most favored literary form of ours over the past century. Happy reading! (What Light It Can Hold is available on Lazada and Shopee.)

Qwertyman No. 137: ICC Ex Machina

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 17, 2025

IN PLAYWRITING and fiction, we call it deus ex machina—literally, the “god out of the machine”—which has come to mean a miraculously happy or fortuitous ending to a long and agonizing drama. 

You’ll find it, for example, when a virginal heroine—beleaguered by dirty old men and rapacious creditors—seems on the brink of yielding her precious virtue, tearfully praying on her knees for deliverance, when a kindly lawyer comes knocking on her door to announce that a distant uncle has passed away, leaving her his fortune. We rejoice with her—despite feeling, at the same time, that divine intervention came a bit too conveniently. This is why I admonish my students to refrain from employing deus ex machina in their stories, because in today’s hard-bitten and cynical world, nobody really believes in it anymore, and readers simply feel deprived of a more rational ending.

Like many things we know about drama, the idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, whose playwrights used it to great effect, Aeschylus and Euripides among them. Euripides most memorably turned to deus ex machina in Medea, where the title character—having been cheated on by her husband Jason—kills Jason’s mistress and their own two children. Guilty both of murder and infanticide, Medea seems hopeless and bound for damnation—until a machine, actually a crane shaped like a chariot drawn by dragons, emerges from behind the stage. It has been sent by Medea’s grandfather, the sun-god Helios, to pluck Medea away from her husband and from the coils of human justice and deliver her to the safety of Athens.

Was it fair of the gods to save Medea from the punishment awaiting her on earth? It’s arguable, but more than a device to resolve a messy plot, the “god out of the machine” was meant to remind the Athenian audience that a higher order of justice obtained, and that when humanity became too entangled in its own predicaments, then it was time for the gods to take over.

A lot of this swept through my mind last week as the drama of Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest and express delivery to the International Criminal Court at the Hague played out on TV and social media. Had the gods come out of the machine to impose divine justice? It had seemed nearly impossible a few years ago, when Digong was still flaunting his untouchability and taunting the ICC to come and get him. Well, we all know what happened since then—and they did. 

We understand just as well that the Marcos administration performed this operation not out of some abounding sense of justice or because it had suddenly acquired a conscience and realized the evil with which it had “uniteamed” to electoral victory in 2022. “We did what we had to do,” President Marcos Jr. explained on TV, with deadpan truthfulness—referring superficially to the Philippines’ obligation to honor its commitment to Interpol, but subtextually to the irresistible opportunity to cripple someone who had become a political arch-enemy, and providentially gain the support of masses of people harmed and disaffected by Duterte’s butchery.

The outswelling of that support—at least for Digong’s arrest and deportation—was spontaneous and sincere. Not since the Marcoses’ departure at EDSA had I felt such relief and exhilaration—and surely the irony would not have been lost on BBM, who knows what it was like to leave on a jetplane, kicking and dragging, for an uncertain future.

And what I say next may go against the grain of everything I have said and thought about the Marcoses, but no matter what ulterior motives may have come into play in this episode of the Duterte-ICC saga, I feel thankful for the resolve and the dispatch that BBM showed in this instance. Along with his administration’s resistance to Chinese aggression in the West Philippine Sea, this will be certain to count among his most positive achievements. 

The great difference between this drama and Medea, as an example of deus ex machina, is that the intervention of the ICC (with BBM helpfully providing the crane) isn’t going to save Duterte, but rather the people whom his presidency soaked in blood. But as with Medea, the “gods” step in when local justice proves impotent or inadequate (and did anyone really believe that Duterte would be hauled before and convicted in a Philippine court of law, when even the Maguindanao Massacre took a full decade to produce convictions for the principals?).

The question now is what next—not for The Great Punisher, for whom a prolonged trial at a cushy court will not be punishment enough, but for the Marcos administration, which suddenly finds itself with more political capital at its disposal, and yet also put itself at greater risk? Surely it must also realize that it not only has committed itself to tearing down the entire House of Duterte and confronting the many millions of voters they still represent, but that it has also set itself up for higher expectations, on pain of suffering the same ignominious fate?

In the hopeful bit of theater playing in my mind, I imagine BBM parlaying the bonus of goodwill he has earned from this maneuver into a broader if not genuine resolution to distance himself further from his predecessor and create a freer and more just society. There are clear and immediate steps he can take in this direction. The first gesture would be the release of all remaining political prisoners, followed by the abolition of the NTF-ELCAC, which no longer serves any useful purpose (not that it ever did). He can root out and punish the enablers and perpetrators of Oplan Tokhang and eliminate oppression and corruption from the mindset of Philippine law enforcement. And then he can begin reforming Philippine governance, starting with the quality of the people he seeks to bring to power—senators, congressmen, and the like.

But then that would be the ultimate deus ex machina, and we have been shaped by experience into a stubbornly disbelieving lot.