Category Archives: Art & Culture

Penman No. 105: A Novel of Singapore

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146Penman for Monday, July 14, 2014

 

IT SEEMS entirely fitting that I’m writing this review of a Singaporean novel practically on the eve of flying to Singapore for a writers’ conference. I’m actually meeting its author—Suchen Christine Lim—at that conference where she’ll be one of the keynote speakers, so I’m sure we’re going to have an interesting conversation at the kopi tiam.

We Filipinos have generally looked at Singapore with an odd mixure of liberal disdain and a pauper’s envy. We like to imagine the typical Singaporean as an ideological robot who has to be programmed to have good clean fun, even as we shamelessly admire and imbibe Singapore’s First-World comforts on our occasional sorties through Changi’s Terminal 3 and down Orchard Road. We feel deeply conflicted by the fact that over 150,000 Filipinos work in Singapore, mainly as domestic helpers—proud of their tenacity and sacrifice, while being shamed by our inability to give them good jobs at home, with their families.

This kind of duality, we soon learn, exists within Singaporean society as well. Singapore isn’t nearly as monolithic as we commonly think, and what it is today came about as a result of a complex, continuing, and often painful process, one that involves folding the past into the ever-changing present.

This is the narrative burden assumed by Suchen Christine Lim’s The River’s Song (UK: Aurora Metro, 2013). It’s a novel that sprawls over more than three decades and straddles Asia and North America, but its achievement lies less in its scope than in its intimacy, which is sustained throughout the work. There’s no great mystery or wizardry to Suchen’s technique: it’s solid storytelling, employing compelling and credible characters caught between being rich and poor, being young and old, being man and woman, and being loved and unloved.

Premised on the modern renewal of Singapore’s riverfront, The River’s Song takes us back to that city-state’s backwater days, and follows the lives of its two main protagonists, the girl Ping and the boy Weng, whose shared passion for music helps relieve their abject poverty and turn an innocent friendship between children into an almost irreparably difficult love between adults. Suchen evokes this lost age of Singapore with masterly precision:

“Weng ran out of the hut, pulled off his shorts and jumped into the river. At the crack of dawn the river had stirred to life. Fires were lit in the stoves in his neighbors’ huts. Bare-chested boatmen squatted on the decks of their bumboats brushing their teeth with a bit of coconut husk, gargling into their tin mugs like hundreds of tenors and baritones in the choir. This was the music Weng had heard since he was a toddler on his parents’ boat, when they still lived on a boat then. He swam out to the middle of the cool brown water. Smoke from the charcoal and wood stoves was starting to tickle his nostrils. Soon the food stalls in the market would open and his stepmother would buy fried dough sticks or fried vermicelli for the family’s breakfast.”

Ping and her mother are taken in by a rich man, and she later goes to America for an education and an escape from all the pain that Singapore has meant to her, hoping all the while to keep in touch with Weng, who becomes an activist for the poor, embittered by what he sees as Ping’s desertion. How they get back together after failed attempts at happiness with others forms the novel’s present, and Suchen composes and choreographs this reconciliation in musical terms, with Ping playing the pipa (a Chinese guitar or lute) and Weng the dizi (a flute):

“The pipa lets out an anguished groan. The Ming Ensemble joins in with a sobbing of erhu strings. The guqin gives a rippled cry. In a lilting undertone, the dizi sings a sorrowful accompaniment, underscoring the pipa’s grief. When the pipa rages in the desert storm in a fury of plucked strings, his dizi soothes in calm counterpoint. When the pipa weeps among the bleak sand dunes, his dizi comforts with broef snatches of melody. The rapt assembly has never heard the likes of this before. As bamboo, wind and strings sweep across the desolate plains beyond the Great Wall, weaving an intricate song of bleak beauty and sorrow, some people in the audience weep. When the pipa grieves her loss, the dizi consoles. When the dizi queries, the pipa replies. You left, he rues. I left, the pipa sighs.”

As with all good novels, The River’s Song is much more than the love story at its core, as satisfying as that already is. It’s a virtual chronicle of how modern Singapore came to be, and an accounting of the human and social costs of modernization, particularly at the fringes of society where every penny and every inch of land matters. Reflecting its author’s maturity and sensibility, it’s not the kind of angsty rant we tend to get from juvenile writers these days, but a poignant lament that holds out hope for redemption despite—to advert to a section heading—the darkness of the waters.

Here and there, in a spot or two, I might quibble with Suchen over a note that may be slightly off-key; I suspect, for example, that the stray quotation from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney springs more from the author than from the character, whose musical artistry and intelligence I can’t contest, but whose literary inclinations had never been clearly established. Otherwise Suchen—one of Singapore’s most celebrated writers—has an impeccable gift for dialogue and scene-setting; the novel is practically a script, needing just a camera to become the movie its material seems cut out for.

I spoke earlier of the stereotypes that we non-Singaporeans have of that place and its people. Suchen Lim banishes these stereotypes and much of our ignorance along with them. Of course there were poor and homeless Singaporeans. Of course there was principled resistance to the regime. Of course there’s a steamy underbelly to the façade of manicured lawn, polished glass, and hard-edged steel that contemporary Singapore projects. Those of us who visit and remark, perhaps too casually, about the “soullessness” of modern Singapore will have good cause to rethink that assumption; the soul may not be in Marina Bay Sands, but it’s clearly alive in the literary imagination.

If you want to know Singapore beyond what the Lonely Planet guidebook will tell you, pick up a copy of The River’s Song; I know I’m going to look up Pagoda Street, one of the book’s locales, when I get the chance this week. The book is available on Amazon. (Suchen, a frequent Manila visitor and friend to many Filipino writers, also left a copy with the Gonzalo Gonzalez Reading Room of the UP Institute of Creative Writing in Diliman; have a look at it there, then find your own copy to cherish and to share.)

[Old Singapore image from nowhere.per.sg; image of pipa player from redmusicshop.com.]

Penman No. 104: The Psychology of Collecting

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48VacumaticsPenman for Monday, July 7, 2014

 

EVERY OTHER month or so, I take the 200+ contents of my fountain pen collection out of their wooden boxes and leather cases—a few of which reside in a fireproof safe—to ink, doodle with, clean, and reorganize. It’s a ritual that invariably leaves me pleased and at peace. Sometimes I reorganize the pens by age, sometimes by maker, sometimes by color or material.

Any serious collector of, well, seriously anything will recognize this behavior. And I do mean anything—I’ve met people who collect not just the usual stamps or coins or even watches and cars but barbed wire and tractor seats. (I met the tractor-seat fellow 25 years ago in a barn full of antiques in Ohio; when I expressed astonishment at his specialty, he turned around and said, with scholarly disdain at my ignorance, “There’s a fanny for every seat!”)

In the pen forums I inhabit, there’s a never-ending discussion about being either a “user” or a “collector,” the implication being that collectors are simply moneyed hoarders while users are simple, practical-minded folk who’ve never forgotten what things are for. I propose that the truth, as it often does, lies somewhere in between; many users are wannabe collectors, and most collectors have never stopped being users. It’s pointless to think of, say, a 1925 Waterman Sheraton or a 1934 Wahl Eversharp Doric as being just a pen you can write with, like a cheap ballpoint; they may have been utilitarian tools once, but somewhere along the way they crossed the line and became jewelry and art object.

At least that’s how I excuse amassing and periodically gloating over, say, my dozens of Parker Vacumatics, a 1930s-40s pen that forms the core of my collection. This was the pen I wrote my 1994 short story “Penmanship” about. (It’s a story about a story that I’ve often told, but the sum of it is that I found this 1938 Vacumatic Oversize in a pen shop in Edinburgh, paid a month’s salary for it, suffered buyer’s remorse, then decided to write a story about the pen, which won first prize in a contest that made me back my salary.) I know enough about Vacs that I can put you to sleep by mumbling mantras such as “Vac nomenclature covers a fascinating maze of models and colors—the Junior, the Major, the Standard, the Slender, the Debutante, the Oversize, the Senior, which is not to be confused with the Senior Maxima, since the Senior came out only in 1936….”

About 15 years ago it wasn’t pens but laptops—yes, Apple Macintosh Powerbooks, particularly the Duo line (the granddaddy of the MacBook Air and all those super-slim laptops people toss into their briefcases today). I had (and still have) about a dozen of these machines, which I used to take apart to upgrade the memory and hard drive (back when 240 megabytes made you king of the hill), before putting them back together again and then pressing the power button to hear that unmistakable startup chime that told me I had done everything right, so I could then step out and face the world and slay dragons and then sign memos.

So why do otherwise presumably sane people like me get our kicks by amassing strange objects most other people wouldn’t give a second look or drag into their homes even if you paid them to do it? I asked myself this question again last week as I changed out the inks (another ritual for the devotee) in my glorified Bics. Why do we take them out week after week, not to write a novel or a draft SONA but endless iterations of “I love this pen I love this pen”?

First of all, you want to be reassured that they’re still there. Collectibles have a way of walking away on little cat feet, and collectors have a sixth sense about what’s missing from the picture.

Second, you want to reassure yourself that you know why they’re there—that the objects have some aesthetic and monetary value. Perhaps that value’s known only to a very few people, which is not a bad thing, because it’s proof of your connoisseurship, of a certain esoteric form of expertise that’s taken you some time and expense to cultivate. It’s like getting a PhD in the truly little, truly fun things (and what’s a PhD these days except a lot of knowledge about very small things, hardly any of which is fun?).

You may be a total loser in nearly every other aspect of life—your face could resemble a well-worn shoe, your family may have deserted you for the coldest parts of Canada, your car could be an escapee from the junkyard—but if you know everything about tourbillons, carburetors, calibers, and (in my case) nibs, then you have good reason to face the world with pride if not arrogance; you have, after all, one of the world’s largest collection of GI Joes, or Tonkas, or Ken dolls, or whatever floats you boat.

Third, let’s go online and ask the experts. Dr. Mark McKinley, in a much-quoted piece on “The Psychology of Collecting” in The National Psychologist, goes back in time to note that “During the 1700s and 1800s there were aristocratic collectors, the landed gentry, who roamed the world in search of fossils, shells, zoological specimens, works of art and books. The collected artifacts were then kept in special rooms (‘cabinets of curiosities’) for safekeeping and private viewing. A ‘cabinet’ was, in part, a symbolic display of the collector’s power and wealth. It was these collectors who established the first museums in Europe, and to a lesser extent in America.”

Since I’m sure I don’t collect Sheaffers and Esterbrooks to show off my power and wealth, let’s see what M. Farouk Radwan (who holds an M. Sc., so who presumably knows what he’s talking about) says about the subject: “Since early years human beings used to collect food in order to feel safe and secure. Because acquiring food was a difficult process with uncertain outcomes humans learned to ease their anxieties by storing the food they needed. The same need, which is to feel secure, is the primary motivating force behind the creation of collections.

“Because life is uncertain and can easily make a person feel helpless some people use their collections to create a private comfort zone that they can control. By arranging and disarranging their collections compulsive hoarders can regain the sense of control over their lives. These actions reduce anxiety and helps those people cope with the uncertainty of the real world.”

So we go back to basic needs and instincts: food and security. McKinley puts these together: “For some, the satisfaction comes from experimenting with arranging, re-arranging, and classifying parts of a-big-world-out-there, which can serve as a means of control to elicit a comfort zone in one’s life, e.g., calming fears, erasing insecurity. The motives are not mutually exclusive, as certainly many motives can combine to create a collector—one does not eat just because of hunger.”

That’s a brilliant insight—“one does not eat just because of hunger”—and it leads to my favorite explanation of the psychology of collecting, propounded by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein (co-authors of Sparks of Genius, the 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People) in “The Collection Connection to Creativity” (Psychology Today, May 2011):

“The fact is collecting exercises a number of important mental tools necessary for creative thinking. The collector learns to observe acutely, to make fine distinctions and comparisons, to recognize patterns within her collection. These patterns include not only the elements that make up the collection, but the gaps in it as well. Learning how to perceive what isn’t there is as important as knowing what is! And the collector also knows the surprise of finding something that doesn’t fit the collection pattern: Is the mismatch a fake? An exception? Something that belongs in another collection? Broken patterns are often the ones that teach us the most by challenging our preconceptions and expectations.”

Patterns, designs, mismatches, aberrations: early in 1937, just for a few months, Parker came out with a special Vacumatic, with the word “Vacumatic” etched in the gold-filled cap band. It’s one of the holy grails of Parker collectors, one of the rarest and most expensive of finds, and I have one. That should make it the crown jewel of my collection, but it isn’t; it’s the pen that made me write a story about it that’s the rarest one of all, that gives me a lifelong excuse for picking up tubes that squirt inks.

(If you like pens, join us at Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, www.fpn-p.org. We’re marking our sixth anniversary this week!)

Penman No. 103: Too Much Drama

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Penman for Monday, June 30, 2014

IN MY other life as a dramatist, which came to an end some years ago, I wrote about a dozen plays for the stage and more than twice as many television plays and screenplays, mostly for the late Lino Brocka. Lino and I happily turned out double-hanky tearjerkers with such rousingly commercial titles (which someone presumably from the marketing department thought up) as Kailan Mahuhugasan ang Kasalanan, Ano ang Kulay ng Mukha ng Diyos, Maging Akin Ka Lamang, Miguelito, ang Batang Rebelde, and my very first one, back in 1977, Tahan Na, Empoy, Tahan.

I may have stopped writing drama to focus on fiction and nonfiction, but now and then the old skills get a workout. I’ve always said that there’s no better training for a writer of fiction than to have been a playwright, because playwriting teaches dramatic economy—how to set up a scene, how to get the most out of your characters, how to use dialogue effectively (meaning, at its most complex, how to get your characters to say things they don’t mean, or to mean things they can’t say).

Last week, I said as much again to a group of writers and program analysts from a TV network who wanted to see how writers think. I told them that drama’s to be found not only in filmscripts or on the set—it’s all around us, taking place quietly in some fastfood joint or some bus stop or some hospital ward; the writer’s task is to see that drama, to palpate it from the tedium of everyday life, and to sharpen and brighten its edges so others can see the extraordinary in otherwise ordinary moments.

We’ll save the rest of the drama lesson for another day; I bring this up only to establish my bona fides when it comes to talking about drama, and about my thesis today, which is that—even for a writer of melodrama, for which I make no excuses—there seems to be entirely too much drama around us these days, or theater if you will. (There’s a subtle difference, if you think of drama as the situation and of theater as its enactment on some kind of stage.)

Case in point: I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s sick not only of Senator Bong Revilla’s whinings about the heat in his room at the “custodial center” (it’s not even a real prison, for Pete’s sake), but also of how the media has fussed over it like it was a real news story (“Can Congresswoman Lani make it back from Greenhills in 15 minutes with the air cooler? That’s all the time she has before visiting hours end!” said one radio reporter breathlessly.) My totally un-PC prescription? Give him the fan, give him whatever creature comfort he wants, but reduce his cell to about a third of its size and keep that one window, from which I hope he sees a mall, or something with lots of people and traffic in it. There’s no better reminder of what prison means than limited space and movement, no matter what you may have with you. (I remember watching a Marlboro neon sign blink at me on the far side of martial law prison, back in 1973; that was torture.)

Senator Jinggoy Estrada’s departure for the custodial center was only slightly less theatrical, thanks again to the media who couldn’t get enough of the father-and-son story being played out in all of its bitter if obvious irony. Of course we expected the family to bond around Jinggoy, and for tears to be shed; that’s any family’s natural privilege, and its natural response. Indeed what underwhelmed me, from my dramatist’s standpoint, was how predictable everything was from start to finish, especially the inevitable “Mayor Erap, ano’ng nararamdaman ninyo sa pagkakakulong ng inyong anak?” I wanted to scream, “E ano pa?”

I can just see the video highlights from these staged “surrenders” figuring in these politicos’ next campaigns: the prayers in church, the mug shots, the hugs and waves from distraught spouses, parents, and kids; the cell doors closing, as the music goes up and under, before we hear a murmured voice-over: “May bukas pa….”

Case in point Number 2: Sometimes silence is drama; when your wife refuses to explain why she doesn’t want to talk to you, that’s drama. When the Palace refuses to explain why it dropped Nora Aunor from the list of National Artist awardees, that’s drama. All President Noynoy’s spokesmen could say was “It’s the President’s prerogative….”, which is exactly what we heard from President Gloria’s spokesmen a few years ago, the only difference being that she made dagdag, while Noynoy made bawas. I did read something about Nora’s exclusion being “in the national interest,” but it boggles the mind to figure out exactly what that means. I can understand defending the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal as being “in the national interest”; I can even understand rooting for Manny Pacquiao on fight day—temporarily setting all his other quirks and antics aside—as being “in the national interest.” But dropping Nora?

As I wrote in this corner a few months ago, I was on a large, multidisciplinary, second-level committee that endorsed Nora Aunor to a higher body (the NCCA and CCP Boards plus the National Artists); we endorsed Dolphy as well, and if I remember right, he and Nora got the same highest votes across the board. Granted that our recommendations were just that and subject to final approval upstairs, I feel among many others in the arts that we at least deserve a full and cogent explanation for all these pluses and minuses that take place in Malacañang. The Palace—and I don’t mean just the present occupant—has never been known to be a bulwark of artistic support and sensibility, if you look at funding for the arts in relation to everything else; if it never cared for or about the arts, why should it suddenly care—negatively at that—about Nora Aunor, whom the arts community clearly feels is deserving of its highest accolade? If you can’t help, at least don’t get in the way.

I’d been told by some Palace contacts that questions came up about Nora’s alleged drug use. OK, I said, it’s fair enough to raise these questions which presumably involve moral turpitude. But since when has it been fair to use morality as a standard for artistic excellence? We’ve had National Artists whose personal lives were hardly spotless, but whose art precisely may have been deepened and enriched by those encounters with their darker side. (Conversely, we’ve had National Artists who may present themselves as moral exemplars and accuse everyone else of some fatal shortcoming, but whose work is unremittingly mediocre and soporific.) Edgar Allan Poe, Salvador Dali, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Miles Davis, among many others, would never qualify for state honors in their countries (not that they ever cared) if our Malacañang’s standards were employed.

Last case in point: I wholeheartedly agreed with the NCCA when it protested the Palace snub of Ms. Aunor, but also wholeheartedly disagreed with the NCCA when it reportedly protested allowing the use of our national heroes’ names for such popular products as beer. (Think “Cerveza Rizal” or “Mabini Beer.”) The reason given by objectors was that it would be a sign of disrespect for these heroes to associate something as morally undesirable as alcohol with them.

Really? Which planet are we on? Didn’t our heroes drink beer and stiffer forms of alcohol—in spite (or dare I say because) of which they performed heroic deeds, anyway? Rizal complained that his fellow ilustrados in Spain drank and womanized too much, but that hardly meant that he was completely abstemious in either department. He didn’t care much for hard liquor, but drank beer (like me, on whom single malt would be a total waste). George Washington was a beer guy as well, and even famously left a handwritten recipe for his own brew (later marketed in an “Ales of the Revolution” line). So will the moral police please lighten up? If Nora’s good enough to be a National Artist, then Jose Rizal should be good enough to go on a beer bottle, and I’ll hoist many a cold Rizal in his own honor.

Heroes aren’t heroes because they’re perfect human beings; they’re heroes because—despite some truly terrible character flaws and peccadilloes (one of them even shot his wife, remember?)—they left something indelible to the national spirit and imagination, enough for us to think of ourselves as a nation. Heroes and National Artists (the real ones and the best ones) can do that; politicians—whether in prison or in the Palace—can’t.

Penman No. 102: The Cream of the Crop

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2014FulbrightPenman for Monday, June 23, 2014

 

A FEW weeks ago, I was happy to attend a pre-departure orientation seminar for this year’s US-bound batch of Fulbright and Hubert Humphrey scholars. I’ve been to quite a few of these PDOs over the past decade or so, and normally I’d be there up front, giving one of the orientation talks.

I’m usually the closer at these seminars, my task being to remind our scholars to enjoy their stay in America and to learn all they can—and then to come home and serve their people. “Love America all you please,” goes my spiel, “but never forget where your home is, which is here—not even here in 21st century Makati, but in those parts of our country which languish in the 20th and even the 19th century. We go to the great schools of America not just to improve our lives but theirs—those Filipinos who cannot even read, or are too hungry and tired from work to read.”

Last month, I sat in the audience on the listening end, having been privileged with a Fulbright grant—again, after my first one nearly 30 years ago, when I left for the US to do my master’s at Michigan and my PhD at Wisconsin before returning in 1991. This September, if all goes well, I’ll be leaving for Washington, DC to do advanced research in connection with my ongoing book project on the First Quarter Storm, specifically to seek out American perceptions of and experiences with martial law in the Philippines, and also to interview Filipino-American activists from that period.

The Philippine-American Educational Foundation, headed by the very capable and amiable Dr. Esmeralda “EC” Cunanan, actually administers or acts as a conduit for several distinct scholarship programs that fall loosely under the “Fulbright” rubric, named after the late Sen. William J. Fulbright, who saw educational exchanges as the best way to promote international cooperation and understanding between America and the rest of the world. (The Fulbright program also sends out American scholars for studies abroad.) Indeed, as I often tell my American friends, one Fulbright scholarship will probably cost a hundredth of and produce a thousand times more enduring goodwill than one bomb. For us Filipinos, this is the pensionado concept brought over into a new century, with the important difference that our learning is no longer meant to serve American ends, but ours.

A scan of this year’s batch of outgoing scholars offers great hope for the future. Chosen from many hundreds if not thousands of applicants after rigorous evaluations and interviews, they represent truly the cream of the crop, and I felt honored to be in their company.

The so-called “classic” Fulbright scholars—those going for their master’s and PhD degrees—include the likes of Lisa Decenteceo of UP Diliman, who’s going for her PhD in Musicology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (yay, go Blue!); Neil Andrew Mijares of the University of San Carlos, who’s doing an MA in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Iowa; and Ramjie Odin of Mindanao State University-Maguindanao, who’s entering the PhD program in Fisheries and Allied Aquaculture at Auburn University.

Among my three fellow “senior” postgraduate scholars, despite the fact that she looks young enough to pass for an undergrad, is Marites Sanguila of Father Saturnino Urios University in Butuan, who’ll be going to the University of Oklahoma to undertake advanced research in “Species Diversity and Survival in a Changing Environment: Developing a New Center for Biodiversity Conservation.”

For many years now, there’s also been a special Fulbright program focused on agriculture, the Philippine Agriculture Scholarship Program for Advanced Research, which was set up at the initiative of then Agriculture Secretary Edgardo J. Angara to improve our agricultural expertise. This year’s nine grantees include Ma-Ann Camarin of MSU-Marawi who’s going to another MSU, Mississippi State University, to do doctoral dissertation research on (hold your breath) “Disease Surveillance and Study on the Bacterial Flora of Freshwater Prawn (Machrobrachium rosenbergii) as Biological Control Against Pathogenic Bacteria.” Meanwhile, Shirley Villanueva of the University of Southeastern Philippines in Tagum is going to the University of California-Davis to conduct research on the “Genetic Diversity of Native Chicken Groups in the Davao Region.”

Among the two US-ASEAN Visiting Scholars will be Jay Batongbacal of UP, one of our foremost legal experts on maritime law, who’ll be studying issues related to current disputes in the South China Sea. The three Hubert Humphrey fellows—all accomplished professionals in mid-career—include a PNP major and former Pasay City precinct commander, Kimberly M. Gonzales, who’ll be looking into public policy and administration concerns at the University of Minnesota.

To help Americans—especially Fil-Ams—learn Filipino, the Fulbright program is sending out three Foreign Language Teaching Assistants, who include Edward Nubla from the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod; he’ll be on his way to Skyline College in San Bruno, California. Lastly, four Filipino undergraduates will soon be spending a year on a US campus, thanks to the Fulbright program. They include Michiko Bito-on of Silliman University in Dumaguete, who’s taking up Mass Communications.

It’s heartening to see the diversity not only in these scholars’ expertise and concerns but also in their representation of all corners of the archipelago, ensuring that the Fulbright experience is shared not only by the usual suspects like me from Manila’s academia, but by bright young minds from north, south, and center.

 

SPEAKING OF the Filipino presence overseas, a big cultural event will take place in Hong Kong over this weekend, thanks to the efforts of the poet and scholar Armida M. Azada, who’s been based there for many years now.

On Friday, June 27, 5:30-7:00 pm, Mida will sit in conversation with visiting Filipino writers Joel Toledo, Charms Tianzon, and Daryll Delgado in a symposium on new Philippine writing titled “Our Words, Other Worlds,” at the Amenities Building, Lingnan University. The next day, at noon, Mida’s new book of poems, Catalclysmal: Seventy Wasted Poems will be launched at the 7th Floor of Hong Kong City Hall in Central. Earlier that morning, from 10:30 to 12 noon in the same venue, a free writing workshop will be held for Pinoy helpers and HK-Pinoy youth. On Sunday the 29th, from 6 to 7:30 pm, a poetry reading by Filipino writers and their friends will be held on the first floor of DB Plaza Terrace near Dymocks in Discovery Bay.

This is a wonderful thing that Mida Azada—a gifted poet who was a colleague at the UP Department of English before she moved to Hong Kong and the UK—is doing not just for herself but for her fellow Filipinos in the diaspora. As prizewinning poet Joel Toledo puts it in his endorsement of Mida’s new collection, “Cataclysmal is a collection of haunts and visitations. The poems here flit in and out of the Philippine archipelago, travelling to London, Hong Kong, and New York without losing touch of a Filipino rootedness. The poet’s concerns stray and meander from the personal and cathartic to the phenomenal and ultimately global. But Azada’s voice is keen and focused, filtered on the page by a careful attention to language. One may argue that this is the poetics of the expatriate ruminating on both the post-modern and post-colonial. Yet at the heart of this collection is fierce integrity, a resonant ‘I’ persona that won’t flinch. Here are poems that both strain to capture the fleeting and restrain from exoticizing the past. The poet Fanny Howe once wrote, “Double the beautiful/because they are so little.” While phenomena can sometimes be indeed cataclysmal, the hurtful is never wasted—so long as poems remember and reconstruct and, in time, recollect the sorrows, parse them into bliss.”

Mida, Joel, Charms, Daryll, and the other fine, memorable voices of their generation—they too are the cream of the crop.

Penman No. 101: The Digital Tourist (2)

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photo 2Penman for Monday, June 16, 2014

 

LAST WEEK I wrote about some websites that you could check out if you’re planning to go on a trip, especially to some place you’ve never been before. Practically everything today can be planned online, from choosing destinations to booking flights and hotels and buying travel insurance. But what about when you’re already on the road?

This is where travel apps come in—“apps” being those small programs or applets (little applications) that come with your tablet or smartphone, or that can be downloaded to them. These apps can be lifesavers—literally, when you’re lost close to midnight in the bowels of a subway station in a strange city, without the foggiest idea how to get back to your hotel. Some will require an Internet connection, but many won’t, after their initial installation—and that’s when you’ll be happy and relieved that you had the foresight to install them when you could, before you even left for the airport. Whatever I’ll list here won’t be your only options—in many cases, there may even be other, better apps other will know about—but these are the ones I’ve roadtested myself, over many years of traipsing around the planet, with PDA (remember those?) or smartphone in hand. (Do note that I use an iPhone, but many of these apps gave their Android counterparts. For IOS devices, go to the App Store.)

Trip planning. If you travel often, you’ll need an all-around planner to organize your trips—remind you of your itinerary, make your bookings, check your flight status, provide weather forecasts, convert currencies, and such. Your datebook can take care of some of these things, but not all. For many years now, my reliable sidekick in this department has been an app called WorldMate, which can do all of the above, and more (it can also calculate tips).

WorldMate’s strongest feature is its flight planner and notifier, which comes in really handy when you have a string of flights to take in a mad dash from one airport, one terminal, and one gate to another. Let’s say you’re flying Delta to Detroit via Tokyo Narita, or Cathay to London via Hong Kong. As soon as you make your booking and receive it in your email, all you do is forward your confirmation email or e-ticket to trips@worldmate.com. WorldMate will automatically digest that email and reflect your itinerary on the app on your phone or tablet—and, if you’ve configured WorldMate to sync with your datebook, it’ll show up on your calendar as well. If your flight gets delayed, WorldMate will advise you of it. It will give you your terminal on arrival and departure. (WorldMate has a free basic version and a paid Gold version with more features.)

Flight tracking. You’re dashing to the airport in a cab, late for your flight, and you don’t even know which terminal or gate it will be leaving from (and if you’re really unlucky, you’ll be in Madrid, where Terminal 4 is several kilometers away from Terminal 2, and Terminal 4S takes another 20 minutes to get to); you’re praying like mad that your flight’s delayed. At this point, your friend is an app called FlightBoard, which tracks scheduled flights—arrivals and departures—at airports all over the world in real time. A similar app called FlightAware allows you to track all the flights between two airports for a given day, and to zero in on a particular one; if it’s up in the air somewhere over Siberia, it will show exactly where it’s supposed to be on a global map, much like you’d see on those onboard monitors. Both FlightBoard and FlightAware are free. (These apps are also good for when you’re meeting someone in Arrivals.)

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Getting around. Once you’ve reached your destination, there are two things you’ll almost certainly need to get around: a city map, and a local transport (subway and bus) guide. Many airports will give you free city maps on arrival, and they’re fun to spread out on the table over breakfast to plan the day, but they’re a hassle to unfold at streetcorners and in the middle of the plaza to locate where you are and where you’re going (and at that instant, you might as well wear a T-shirt saying, “I’m a lost tourist—please, victimize me!”).

A good map stored in your digital device—without needing to go online, as you would with Google Maps—can save you a lot of anxiety, if not a lot of footsteps. On our recent sortie around Europe, I was glad to be guided by one invaluable resource: Ulmon maps of Barcelona, Venice, Florence, and Paris. All of these maps were free, and could be blown up to the level of individual streets and even alleys; if you feel lost, you could input the name of the nearest street, and it will locate your neighborhood in relation to popular landmarks. Clicking on the name of a hotel will give you rates; public transport stops are also indicated.

Speaking of public transport, nearly all the major cities of the world have some kind of subway or metro rail line, and this gives me an opportunity to introduce my favorite travel app of all time—and I mean that almost literally, because I’ve been using it in its various incarnations since 1999, or 15 years, an eternity in digital time. It’s called Metro, and it’ a guide to the world’s subways, metros, and bus lines. I first used Metro on my Palm Pilot when I was navigating around London, and the app—though regularly updated—has remained essentially the same. You choose a city (say Paris), and decide that, from your hotel on Avenue Foch, you want to go to the weekend flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt. You input “Avenue Foch” and “Clignancourt” and tap an icon, and Metro will yield the information that the shortest subway route will take 16 stops involving one change (at Barbes-Roucheouart—thankfully, you don’t need to know how to pronounce these names), for approximately 33 minutes total. Each subway stop is identified, as well as the direction of the train you should be taking. The best thing about Metro? It’s absolutely free, and works offline.

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This list of apps could go on, but as travel is complicated enough, let’s keep it simple: for as long as you have these apps (WorldMate, FlightBoard, Ulmon Maps, and Metro), your next trip will be much less of a headache, and you can enjoy the view out the window rather than wonder and worry over where your train is going.

(Let me just add, before I forget: these apps will be totally useless if your phone or tablet is dead; I always travel with a universal adaptor, an extension cord, and a power bank for extra juice. If you blow air into my pants, I could go on a spacewalk.)

Penman No. 98: On Tour with Serendipity

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Penman for Monday, May 26, 2014

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MAYTIME IN Europe, particularly in Spain, is a festive season; Madrid has the same patron saint and feast day as many Philippine towns such as Lucban—San Isidro Labrador, on May 15—and so it was a fine time to be there these past two weeks. We missed the actual feast days, and in France all the buzz was going on in Cannes while we were in Paris, but it was just as well because the crowds were a bit smaller but the experiences no less interesting at the periphery.

As I mentioned last week, doing six cities—Madrid, San Sebastian, Barcelona, Venice, Florence, and Paris—in 12 days is murder for sexagenarians, and maybe not the best way to get to know places, but the intensity of this “amazing race” approach has its own advantages and surprises.

I’m usually an obsessive planner when it comes to travel, going digital as much as I can, months in advance—from consulting TripAdvisor to making plane and hotel bookings to reconnoitering possible spots to visit and downloading street maps, subway guides, and travel apps. (I’ll do a separate piece on this madness, one of these days.) This time, aside from some basic planning, we left many things to chance, going by such general interests as “museums and flea markets” or “art galleries and food” to guide us though a city. Serendipity (informed, to some extent, by a limited budget) proved to be the best tour guide, as we allowed one street to lead to the next, and open up to unexpected delights.

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San Sebastian, or Donastia in Basque, was the wild card on our itinerary. The place doesn’t figure in most visitors’ travel plans, and frankly, as global-savvy as I pretend to be, I had to look it up on a Spanish map when our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry mentioned it to me. The two had met Anthony Bourdain at an event in California, and had asked him where in the whole world he would retire if he had his choice, and Bourdain didn’t take two seconds to answer “San Sebastian,” obviously because of the food.

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That answer stuck with Demi and Jerry, and when the four of us started planning our European sojourn early this year—we made all our bookings in mid-January—San Sebastian was firmly on the list, although we knew very little about it. For me, the appeal was that it was up in Basque country, on the coast of the Bay of Biscay close to the French border, so it promised an atmosphere different from central Madrid, or Barcelona in the Balearic-Mediterranean south. I also relished the thought of taking the five-hour train ride cross-country; train travel is one of Europe’s most relaxing treats.

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The Basque language, I’m sure, has its poetic charms, but to the untrained eye and ear (like mine) it might as well be Klingon, with a surfeit of X’s, K’s, and T’s. Many words have absolutely no relation to their Spanish or Latin counterparts; a restaurante in Spain or a ristorante in Italy is a jatetxea in Basque.

That said, food is a universal language, and while I’ve maintained a stubborn and silly pride in calling myself a culinary philistine (as usual, I brought six packets of ramen in my suitcase), I had to yield to the majesty of Basque cuisine, particularly their pintxos—the local version of the more familiar tapas. Laid out on the bar of every jatetxea we entered, and selling for a little over a euro each, the pintxos were scrumptious combinations of such staples as shrimp, crab, mushroom, asparagus, anchovy, jamon serrano, and bread.

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Good, affordable food would be our constant on this tour, often found in rather unlikely places (no Michelin guide for us, just our budgets and our noses): the best pasta we’d ever had, in a nondescript restaurant in Florence; a roast chicken, rice, and salad dish at the Doner Kebab place beside our airport hotel in Madrid; a dish of stewed mushrooms in Madrid and then also in Barcelona.

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Our next high came from shopping—albeit more with our eyes than our wallets. Beng and I are incorrigible flea and weekend market addicts, and we’ve been to a few of the world’s better-known ones, from Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan and Portobello Road in London to Chatuchak in Bangkok and Panjiayuan in Beijing. Providentially, our European schedule coincided with the Mercat del Encants in Barcelona and the Marche aux Puces de Saint-Ouen at Clignancourt in Paris. Hundreds of stalls and tons of glorious junk met us in both places, from century-old magazines and posters to ‘20s flapper dresses and hats and erotic postcards of nubile maidens long vanished.

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I did find quite a few fine fountain pens—only to realize, alas, or perhaps fortunately, that I should be happy with my present collection, and that looking without buying can be pleasure enough. I came home from Europe with a new panama hat from Madrid (where, I would find, it was quite the fashion) and a 4-euro, 1960s bottle of Pelikan ink in royal blue, still almost full and certainly usable, from Barcelona. Beng and I kept looking at marvelous pieces of décor and sighing, “If we had a larger house…” or “If we were younger….” and then taking a picture for the memory before walking away.

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Third, next to food and markets, were the sights themselves. With limited time, we focused on museums, landmarks, and gardens. Everyone goes to Barcelona to see Gaudi’s outrageously magnificent Sagrada Familia, and we did, if only from the outside, from where there was more than enough to appreciate, from the strawberries to the scripted verses climbing up the spires. What resonated more deeply with me was a visit to the Castell de Montjuic, an imposing fortress with a tragic past, including the brief incarceration of Jose Rizal in 1896, shortly before his forcible return to the Philippines; an exhibition room in the fortress is named after Rizal.

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IMG_4060IMG_402214221967192_1862edc90d_zVenice and Florence were the original reasons we thought of this tour; having visited them three years ago, I vowed to bring Beng along to see them, and we just had time for a long vaporetto ride around Venice in the gathering dusk and a day trip by train to Florence. Both cities offer a surfeit of majestic sights, but again it was less the landmark everybody knows than the accidental detour to a spectacular sunset from a little bridge and a view of steeples in the Tuscan countryside that mattered more.

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Beng and I had been to Paris twice before, for very brief sorties like this one. In 1999 we almost literally breezed through Paris on a bus from England, on a 99-pound all-in weekend tour; Beng made the mistake of going to the onboard loo while we whipped past Rodin’s “The Thinker.” In 2002 we spent another couple of days in Paris on our way home from my month-long fellowship in Bellagio, and I was so starved for Chinese food that we ate nothing but Chinese, in the restaurants behind the Galeries Lafayette (we went back there last Sunday for a reprise, but the place was closed, much to our dismay).

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We revisited the Louvre, and of course again the Mona Lisa (this time set a little farther back from the public than it used to be, but still accessible enough for the inevitable selfie). The Louvre draws 15,000 visitors a day, most of them, like us, paying the standard admission of 12 euros—a cost you’ll quickly forget the minute you step into the galleries. This time I happily stumbled into a hallway exhibiting three of the most iconic of French paintings: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. Somewhere in the Egyptian antiquities section, my knees began to wobble, and I knew it was time to declare an end to our museum-hopping.

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What we’ll remember most from this trip is a leisurely walk through the Jardin des Tuileries, across the bridge to the Musee d’Orsay, then back to the big fountain in the park, trying to take in the immense joy and gloriousness of a spring day shared with the one person you’d like to see the world with. It was the gift of a lifetime, for which Beng and I would like to thank Demi, Jerry, and the gods of poker.

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Penman No. 97: Museum-Hopping in Madrid

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Penman for Monday, May 17, 2014

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I’M WRITING this at the airport in Barcelona, awaiting the departure of our much-delayed flight to Venice. Beng and I are at the midpoint of a two-week jaunt through Europe, and we’ve just said goodbye to our unica hija Demi and her husband Jerry, who are going on to Rome and to Sardinia. We spent a blissful week together in Spain—meeting up in Madrid (Demi and Jerry live in California, in San Diego), then spending a couple of days each in San Sebastian and Barcelona.

I’m taking Beng to Venice and Florence in fulfillment of a promise I made three years ago, when I first visited those cities, to share the wonders of those cities with her, the artist and conservator who will surely gain more from the experience than I can; and then we’ll pass by Paris before flying back to Madrid, then home. For us, as footloose as we already are, it’s the trip of a lifetime—largely a treat from Demi and Jerry for our 40th anniversary, and partly realized by my recent poker windfall; I figured the stash was better spent popping our heads into a few museums and cathedrals rather than vanishing chip by chip back across the green felt table.

For reasons I just made obvious, we’re calling this our “Amazing Race,” a breathless dash across three countries in Europe, with layovers in London and Hong Kong, in 14 days. I know, I know—the seasoned travelers among us will say that this is no way to see Europe, and that one’s time is better spent savoring one or two places and their features to the last morsel than hopping like mad rabbits across borders and barely seeing or tasting anything. But while it’s our first time in Spain, Beng and I have been to Europe before, and are used to and prefer this kind of cherry-picking: a little of this and that, much the tapas and pintxos on offer in the restaurants of Madrid and San Sebastian. We’ll happily admit to being shameless tourists than National Geographic correspondents, although, of course, I can’t help taking the notes I’m now sharing with you.

Having gone around the planet quite a bit, we came to Spain quite late. I’d always wanted to see what Jose Rizal saw. Today’s Spain may be a vastly different place in many respects from Rizal’s time, but so much of Europe, and thus Spain, is immutably set in hard rock, and remains impervious to rain, wind, and time.

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We flew into Madrid on a bright spring morning, and quickly discovered, to our great delight, that it was a city of parks, plazas, museums, monuments—and restaurants and bars. The first thing that hits you about Madrid is its architecture, steeped in neoclassical grandeur, the streets all at sharp angles converging in roundabouts capped by marble statues erected to the memory of heroes, not all of them warlike figures but rather also icons of art and literature. You’re never too far from reminders of Spain’s imperial legacy in Madrid. The first museum we visited was the Naval Museum, rich with exhibits from Spain’s colonial exploits, including the Philippines, represented by a roomful of precious artifacts from the San Diego wreck of 1600 and by yet another gallery of native weaponry from Filipino tribes.

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Just a few blocks away was the Prado, Madrid’s temple devoted to its most sublime masters of centuries past—Velasquez, Goya, El Greco, and Sorolla, among others. Since visiting the Louvre more than a decade ago, I’ve always been amazed by the freshness and luminosity of paintings 500 years old; some of it, of course, is due to the skill of restorers like my wife (who was incidentally trained by Spanish teachers), but in a world lit by only candles and torches, the masters knew best how work with light and to use it to best effect.

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But as enthralled as I was by this encounter with the finest art of the past, it was at the Reina Sofia museum—again within walking distance of most other places of interest in central Madrid—that I nearly fell on my knees as I approached and beheld Picasso’s massive Guernica, his enduring indictment of war. The Reina Sofia is Madrid’s modernist counterpart of the classical Prado, and its stunning façade alone and the plaza before it are well worth the visit. Here, Picasso, Miro, and Dali rule, along with many other less known but no less fascinating champions of new ways of looking at and representing reality and irreality. Here, as I did years ago at London’s Tate Modern, I remembered and understood again why classical art held me in awe, but modernism spoke more directly and more deeply to me—making me laugh, making me think, and making me angry or sad, sometimes all at once.

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One more thing I noticed about Madrid’s museums and other attractions like the Botanical Garden and the Royal Palace: you may have to pay a modest fee to get in—it was 3 euros at the Naval Museum—but if you wait until the last couple of hours (6:00-8:00 pm at the Prado) or for special days, you could get in for free. Also, for the first time in my life (and I should add the first place, because nowhere in the Philippines did I get this favor), my university faculty ID gave me free entry. That’s a society that values its teachers.

For all our museum-hopping, my favorite “museo” turned out to be the Museo de Jamon, a chain of restaurants you’ll find on every other city block offering all manner of meat, and a scrumptiously wet seafood paella. I quickly grew addicted to bocadillo de jamon—thin slices of jamon serrano in crusty bread—which was on special at the Museo de Jamon for one euro apiece.

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14143188584_c2e4c38bc2_z14153114804_184eeb2d66_z13966312100_835fd44243_zWe did as tourists do: hang out at the Plaza Mayor and Plaza del Sol, watching an anti-fascist demonstration here (like Marcos, Generalissimo Francisco Franco died decades ago but his victims have yet to receive full justice) and a busker there (playing what else but Tarrega—whose Gran Vals many will inadvertently if cavalierly know as the source of the Nokia ringtone). We dipped churros in our chocolate at the Chocolateria San Gines, which has been in the business since 1894; but even this venerable chocolateria seemed a newcomer compared to the Restaurante de Botin, reputed to be the oldest running restaurant in the world, having opened in the same place in 1725. More contemporary-minded diners will prefer a quick bite at the trendy Mercado de San Miguel, an old market converted into a covered food court just off the Plaza Mayor, and neatly organized: all the meats here, all the sweets there, and so on.

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The culinary and perhaps even cultural highlight of our Madrid sojourn took place in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant close to the Reina Sofia. Unlike me and even the far more adventurous Beng, Demi and Jerry are gourmets who seek out and relish fine food, but—perhaps out of respect for the philistine papa—we had resolved to eat like the locals on this trip, and so we spent our last night in Madrid feasting on paella, mushrooms, patatas bravas, and chicharrones, washed down with what apparently was Madrid’s if not Spain’s most popular beer—San Miguel. This is our beer, we tried to tell the genial restaurant owner in our best pidgin Spanish, but I don’t think the Empire heard us.

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Penman No. 96: A Lovely House, a Lively Conference

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Penman for Monday, May 12, 2014

 

MY WIFE Beng’s profession as an art restorer and conservator brings her into contact with some very interesting people, and one of them is a quiet, unassuming man named Mike Santos, whose arrival at our home always causes the usually calm and cool Beng to groan in distress, not because of anything she holds against the fellow but because she’s sure that, invariably, he’s going to be bringing in another job that will test Beng’s skills as a restorer to the limit.

“Why do you do this to me?” I keep hearing Beng wail at the smiling Mike. One piece I remember him dropping on Beng was a century-old poster or banner of the Virgin Mary, apparently painted or printed on silk, lovely except for the fact that the silk was stained, tattered, and coming apart in places, like a battleworn flag. “Can this even be saved?” I recall thinking. But wonder of wonders, after weeks of careful and well-studied work, Beng was able to restore the piece and to return it to a happy Mike.

Perhaps in appreciation for all her labors, Mike invited Beng and the rest of her family—that meant me, my mother, Beng’s mother, Beng’s cousin Lando, and my sister Elaine and her husband Eddie who were visiting from the States—to merienda in his Antipolo home. But as sumptuous as it was, the merienda was just the climax to the real purpose and pleasure of the visit, which was the ancestral house itself.

The Santos house now stands on a hilltop lot in one of Antipolo’s subdivisions, and what’s remarkable about it isn’t just the beauty of the Spanish-American colonial architecture but the information you soon receive that this house was transported and rebuilt brick by brick and plank by plank from Navotas to Antipolo. It had been built by Mike’s grandfather Roman—the founder of Prudential Bank—for his young wife in 1917.

Over the decades, it withstood all kinds of natural and human challenges—Navotas’ chronic flooding periodically soaked the lower floor, and during the Second World War the Japanese used the house as a garrison and torture chamber, and of course the ravages of time took their toll on the structure and the furnishings—but sheer love of the house and what it stood for drove Mike and his family to save it before it got much worse. But it would have suffered the same fate over the decades where it stood, so the Santoses decided to move the house to high ground in Antipolo, where it now towers over its more modernistic neighbors.

We were delighted with our tour of the house, marveling at how well preserved the furnishings and appointments were, many of them handed down the generations. The merienda, of course, was excellent, with everything from suman to hot chocolate with pinipig and the sweet mangoes that Mike now grows on the family farm in Bulacan. The company and the stories of Mike and his neighbor Eddie Lindenberg made the afternoon even more special. Of course Beng didn’t get away scot-free: she got a glimpse of her next headache, another century-old painting on canvas of the Immaculate Heart of Jesus that had been cut into several pieces, with losses, then mounted on a wooden board. If it’s going to a house like Mike’s Antipolo manse, I’m sure Beng isn’t going to mind. Salamat, Mike!

THIS JULY, from the 17th to the 20th, another big regional conference will take place in Singapore, promising to bring Asia’s best and most active literary practitioners together under the auspices of Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators.

This moveable feast has been hopping around the region—these past two years, it’s been held in Bangkok, but previous meetings have taken place in Hong Kong and Australia, and next year we’ll get to host it in Manila. I’ve been to most if not all of these meetings—they put me on the APWT board last year, probably in recognition of the fact that a sizeable Filipino delegation has always attended these conferences—and they’ve invariably proven to be well worth the expense of going. (APWT is almost totally dependent on membership and conference fees, and many members like myself go on our own; since the annual conference happens somewhere just around Asia, it’s often doable on a budget fare, and members in academia can and do apply for travel grants to cover costs.)

The difference between APWT and other similar literary conferences is that APWT focuses on practice rather than theory; in other words, while it welcomes teachers, critics, and scholars, APWT is intended primarily for working writers and translators, so they can get together to discuss common concerns like publishing, copyrights, digital media, censorship, and various aspects of the craft. No long and abstruse academic papers are read at APWT; instead, writers and translators engage in lively, jargon-free conversation, sharing experiences across the region and the world.

This July in Singapore, the focus will be on “Bridging Cultures,” and the first keynote will be delivered by none other than our recent guest in Manila, the Singaporean novelist Suchen Christine Lim. Another keynote, titled “Border Lover in Uncertain Times: Story-Making Across Cultures, Languages, and Literary Forms” will be delivered bythe amazingly versatile and accomplished Merlinda Bobis, who was born and bred in Bicol but who has been a longtime resident of Australia, where she teaches at the University of Wollongong. I regularly teach one of Merlinda’s short stories, and am immensely proud of how she has been able to interject a Filipino voice into Australian literature.

According to the tentative program, I’ll be involved in at least two sessions. The first will be a roundtable that I’ll moderate on “Twisting the Truth: Truth in Fiction, Lies in Non-Fiction,” an exploration of storytelling as art and why we tell stories, with David Carlin, Lisa Walker, Michael Vatikiotis, and Philip McLaren. The second will be a session on “Writing Under Political Pressure,” moderated by Michael Vatikiotis, where I’ll be speaking with translator Alfred Birnbaum, who translated the work of Burmese novelist Nu Nu Yi, and with our own Menchu Sarmiento, who’ll be giving an overview on the literary work of some political prisoners in the Philippines.

Aside from myself and Menchu, fellow Filipino writers Christine Godinez-Ortega and Hope Sabanpan-Yu are also already on the tentative program, which can be accessed at http://wp.me/p2yK4I-bD. There’s still room for Filipino delegates to participate in panels they may be interested in and qualified for, but they’d have to register for the conference very soon, according to APWT’s executive director, Jane Camens, who has been the organization’s busybody all these years, and who’s hoping for another big turnout from the Philippines in Singapore. The full member registration is now S$60, and non-member registration is $$80 (in US$ that amounts to around $45 and $65).

Filipino writers and translators interested in attending the conference should know, again, that the organization has no funds to support individual writers, so they’ll have to book their own fares and lodgings for the July 17-20 event. I got online and booked budget airfares for myself and Beng, and then looked for and found a good, clean, cheap hotel—the only seeming downside being that it’s located in Geylang, Singapore’s red light district. This is going to be an interesting conference.

For more details, please check www.apwriters.com.

Flotsam & Jetsam No. 37: The 2014 APWT Conference Tentative Program

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ASIA-PACIFIC WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS

Bridging Cultures: Creative Writing and Literary Translation in Asia Today

17-20 July 2014 

The Art House, 1 Old Parliament Lane, Singapore

Program (Draft@24 April)* 

*Sessions or times are likely to change, so check back before the event.

Our ‘roundtables’ are so-called to encourage audience participation in conversations started by the featured authors.

Speaker biographies can be found here: http://apwriters.org/singapore-2014-conference/biographies-whos-speaking-and-youll-meet-at-bridging-cultures/

Thursday 17 July

08:30     Blue Room           Sign in, collect conference badge and handout.

Tea/coffee, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

09:00     CHAMBER           Welcome and Introduction.

09:15    CHAMBER            Opening Keynote (TITLE TBA) by Suchen Christine Lim.

09:50    CHAMBER            ROUNDTABLE. ‘What is Literature For?’ featuring the conference keynotes: Suchen Christine Lim with Linda Jaivin and Merlinda Bobis. Moderator TBC.

11.00     Blue Room           Refreshments, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

11:30     LIVING ROOM   ROUNDTABLE. Poetry: Art and Soul of It – This is a free-wheeling conversation about what poetry is and isn’t, led by Alfian bin Sa’at, Martin Alexander, Mani Rao, Menka Shivdasani, and Joshua Ip. Moderated by Jennifer Crawford.

11:30     CHAMBER           ROUNDTABLE. Twisting the Truth: Truth in Fiction, Lies in Non-Fiction. An exploration of story-telling as art and why we tell stories, with David Carlin, Lisa Walker (TBC), Michael Vatikiotis and Philip McLaren (TBC) – Moderated by Jose Dalisay.

12:45    Blue Room           Lunch, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC.

2:00      WORKSHOPS (4 hours) with Martin Alexander (COUNCIL ROOM) and Tim Tomlinson (Green Room). SEE DETAILS. http://apwriters.org/singapore-2014-conference/creative-writing-and-editing-workshops/

2:00        LIVING ROOM   ROUNDTABLE. The Art of Remembering. This broad conversation about writing memoir will be kicked off by Sally Breen, Tony Birch), Jessie Cole (TBC), and Victor Marsh in conversation with Francesca Rendle-Short.

2:00       CHAMBER            ROUNDTABLE. The Art of Forgetting. Fiction can take us away from our ‘real’ lives into different ways of seeing the world. Novelists talk about their work, featuring Kathryn Koromilas, Dipika Mukherjee (TBC) and Angelo Loukakis, in conversation with Maria Carmen Sarmiento. 

2:45        LIVING ROOM   Conversation on Writing Today from Pakistan with Iram Shafique and Farheen Chaudhry and Qaisra Shahraz.

2:45        CHAMBER           Changes to the Literary Landscape in Indonesia. A panel discussion led by John H. McGlynn with others (TBC) includingIwan Sulistiawan who will talk about changes ‘From Discrimination to Multiculturalism: Indonesian Chinese in Indonesian Novels’. Moderated by Michael Vatikiotis.

3:30     Blue Room       Refreshment, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

3:45    LITERARY WALK (TBC), organized by the Arts House. Meander through the fiction, non-fiction and fantasy of Singapore with award-winning writer Rosemary Lim (TBC). You will follow in the footsteps of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, explore locations that inspired Rex Shelley and Edwin Thumboo. Discover Singapore as muse to novelists, playwrights and poets as you travel in time from colonial days to the present day through words and imagination.

4:00       Earshot Café     NEW WORK- Book Launches.

Help celebrate the launch of five new books. Menka Shivdasani launches an anthology of women’s writing from India; Eu Yoke Lin will launch her first book of poetry; John McGlynn launches a translation of a classical Malay tale “Krakatau: The Tale of Lampung Submerged”; Victor Marsh launches his memoir that draws on his experiences as a disoriented Australian who is initiated by a young guru; and Mani Rao will launch a Singapore edition of echolocation (Math Paper Press). Details will be available on a separate link.

6:30      Blue Room        Welcome Cocktails (TBC) – courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

EARSHOT CAFÉ (?)     Singapore Outloud (TBC). Poetry and short fiction readings with participating moderators Martin Alexander and Alfian Sa’at.

Friday 18 July

09:00     WORKSHOPS (4 hours) with Tony Birch (COUNCIL ROOM) and Nury Vittachi (Green Room). http://apwriters.org/singapore-2014-conference/creative-writing-and-editing-workshops/

09:00    CHAMBER            KEYNOTE: ‘Border Lover in Uncertain Times: Story-Making Across Cultures, Languages, and Literary Forms’ by Merlinda Bobis

09:45     CHAMBER           Roundtable. What Women in Asia Write About Now, with Merlinda Bobis, Menka Shivdasani (TBC),Mridula Chakraborty, Farheen Chaudhry, and Qaisra Shahraz. Moderated by Judith Buchrich

09:45     LIVING ROOM Roundtable – TBA

10.15     Blue Room           Refreshments, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

10:45    LIVING ROOM   Gender Politics: Forcing the Issue– Victor Marsh, Jhoanna Cruz and Alfian Sa’at speak about issues that brought them out as writers. Moderator TBC.

10:45     CHAMBER           Changes to the Literary Landscape and New Publishing Opportunities (#1). This session discusses new magazines and other platforms with Zafar Anjum, Simon Clews, Martin Alexander, Kulpreet Yadav and others TBC, with participating moderator Kelly Falconer (Asia Literary Agency).

12:30    Blue Room           Lunch, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

1:00        LIVING ROOM   Book launches. Help celebrate the launch of books by Lydia Kwa, Bhavna Khemlani, Bob D’Costa and Farheen Chaudhry. Details will be available on a separate link.

2:00    Workshops (4 hours) with Sally Breen (COUNCIL ROOM) and Merlinda Bobis (Green Room). See http://apwriters.org/singapore-2014-conference/creative-writing-and-editing-workshops/

2:00     CHAMBER      Writing Under Political Pressure. ‘Prison Makes Poets of Us All,’ wrote Filipino political prisoner Alan Jazmines. Maria Carmen Sarmiento discusses the literary work of some political prisoners in the Philippines. At the age of 18 Jose Dalisay was himself a political prisoner for seven months under Filipino martial law (1973) and wrote his first novel about that experience (1992). He now writes nonfiction history of that period. Others on this panel include Alfred Birnbaum who translated the censored work of Burmese novelist Nu Nu Yi. Moderated by Michael Vatikiotis.

2:00        LIVING ROOM   How Translation Transforms both Text and Translator with Alfred Birnbaum, Andrea Berrini, Sun Xuefen (TBC) and Linda Jaivin, moderated by Mani Rao.

2:45        CHAMBER           Links and Fragments into Narrative Wholes

What can be done when a novel gets stuck – when the writer just cannot imagine what the next action is?  Tim Tomlinson has suggestions, while prolific author Nury Vittachi adds advice of his own. Cristina Hidalgo who has authored more than 30 books will also offer a few tips. Moderator TBC. 

2:45        LIVING ROOM     IN CONVERSATION. Shirley Lee, translator of North Korean poet Jang Jin Sung’s recently published disturbing memoir Dear Leader, in conversation about the book, its success and the issues associated with its translation, in conversation with her with her agent Marysia Juszxakiewicz of Peony Literary Agency. TBC

3:30        Blue Room           Refreshments, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

4: 00       CHAMBER           Roundtable. On Teaching Creative Writing in English and the Influence of the Mother Tongue. Join this discussion withDai Fan who teaches one of the few English language creative writing courses in China, Jayanthi Manoj who teaches in Trichy, India, Filipino teacehers Hope Sabanpan-Yu and Christine Godinez-Ortega (TBC), and Indigenous Australian author and professor Tony Birch. Moderated by Francesca Rendle-Short.

4:00     LIVING ROOM

5:30        EARSHOT CAFÉ                 Singapore Outloud #2 – Poetry and short fiction readings with participating moderators Joseph Ip and Mani Rao.

Saturday 19 July

09:00     Workshop (4 hours) with Francesca Rendle-Short (COUNCIL ROOM). See details. http://apwriters.org/singapore-2014-conference/creative-writing-and-editing-workshops/

09:00        CHAMBER        KEYNOTE: Found in Translation – In Praise of a Plural Worldby Linda Jaivin.

09:45     CHAMBER           Roundtable – Translation Thrills and Spills. Translators speak about their translation process and challenges, and share hilarious moments from their experience translating authors and poets who are too close, too far, and even omnipresent. Linda Jaivin, Kyoko Yoshida, Andrea Lingenfelter and Menka Shivdasani with participating moderator Mani Rao.

09:45   LIVING ROOM   CONVERSATION “ASIAN SAVVY”. Changes to the Literary Landscape and New Publishing Opportunities (#2). Join in this lively conversation led by Nury Vittachi who contends that ‘Asia’ is poised to lead the literary world.

10.15     Blue Room           Refreshments, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

10:45     CHAMBER           How Translation Transforms both Text and Translator with Alfred Birnbaum, Andrea Berrini, Sun Xuefen (TBC) and Linda Jaivin, moderated by Mani Rao.

10:45     LIVING ROOM   Language and Politics: New Dynamics. Has the role of English shifted significantly in a postcolonial scenario? A dominant group can seize, assimilate, domesticate … is it any different when translating from English to vernacular languages? When so-called local, native or indigenous texts present culturally specific contexts, how can they be translated into more ‘universal’ contexts without misrepresentation? What goes into making non-English texts, “world literature”? If translation has now been exposed as colonial discourse, has it changed in a postcolonial context? Mridula Chakraborty, Antonette Talaue, Shafique Iram, Dipika Mukherjee(TBC) and/or Shirley Young-Eun Lee (TBC), moderated by Shelly Bryant.

12:30    Blue Room           Lunch, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

SPECIAL LUNCHTIME ANNOUNCEMENTS

1)      Re: Joint issue of Griffith REVIEW/ASIA LITERARY REVIEW publishers Susan Hornbeck (GR) and Martin Alexander (ALR), introduced by Jane Camens.

2)      Re: World Readers Award by Nury Vittachi.

3)      Overview of 2015 Meeting in the Philippines with Jose Dalisay (and the Filipino organizers).

1:00        CHAMBER           ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING of AP Writers. All members of AP Writers welcome. Appointment of a new Director and a new Translation Chair, account by the Executive Director of finances, and other matters aimed at improving and expanding AP Writers.

3:00        Blue Room           Refreshments, courtesy of the Arts House and NBDC

3:30 pm Literary Walk #2 TBC organized by the Arts House.

5:00        EARSHOT CAFÉ     Singapore Outloud #3 Readings, with participating moderators Bernice Chauly (TBC) and Sally Breen.

Sunday 20 July FREE PUBLIC DAY

 Full Public Program to come.

10:00   WORKSHOP Bring Out Your Best at POETRY SLAM with Marc Nair, organized by Word Forward. For poets intending to participate in our closing poetry slam. (Registered conference participants can perform in the Slam without attending this workshop.) Details to be provided soon.

From 10 AM, all day

  • Author conversations with Singapore and visiting authors before a public audience.
  • Readings with a Singapore audience.
  • Children’s session (2 pm) with Nury Vittachi. Other possible authors for this children’s session Bhavna Khemlani? Cris Barbra Pe? Angelo Loukakis? Others?
  • CLOSING EVENT

POETRY SLAM, organized by Word Forward.

Penman No. 95: Return to Hanoi

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Penman for Monday, May 5, 2014

I HADN’T been back to Hanoi in 20 years, so last January, when Beng and I thought of a place to visit for the summer on one of Cebu Pacific’s promotional fares, Hanoi was at the top of my list. I’d taken Beng to Ho Chi Minh City a few years ago and we’d had a blast with the food, the history, and the shopping, so a northern sojourn seemed in order. Joining us on the trip last week were my niece Susie and her husband Toto, taking a break from their business chores and eager to be initiated into the cheap thrills of regional travel.

When we arrived past midnight, rain was lashing the city, and the unseasonable weather persisted to the next day. For the rest of our four-day stay the sky was overcast, not altogether a bad thing, as we hardly sweated on our marathon walking tours. Few people realize how far north Hanoi is, as used as we are to thinking of Vietnam in terms of Saigon, nearly as low on the map as Davao. But Vietnam is a very long, thin country, and to fly the three hours from Manila to Hanoi is to actually fly northwest, practically toward China.

While HCMC—the old Saigon—might swelter in the heat, Hanoi is happily cooler. It’s also older, smaller, and quieter than its southern counterpart, which makes for more pleasant touring. At its core, the city is lived in by just around 2 million people, so it’s a city that can still boast of a lot of greenery and free space, with sidewalks wide enough to host the ubiquitous, low-slung food stalls that the Vietnamese would probably starve to death without.

Few cities around the world can claim to be more than 1,000 years old, and that’s a milestone that Hanoi passed in 2010, to much fanfare. The event is still commemorated by a four-kilometer-long wall of mosaic art that runs along the city’s main avenue. Ranging in inspiration from Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” to comic-book art, the vibrant mural is free of any graffiti whatsoever. Paint, of course, would have a hard time sticking to the tiles, but perhaps more significantly, it’s a reminder of how strongly social order has been maintained by Vietnam’s political managers, despite its exuberant capitalism, manifest on every street and streetcorner, in the thousands of small shops that make up Hanoi’s Old Quarter.

The charm of old Hanoi was in the fact that its traditional center—the “36 Streets District”—used to be devoted to guilds of craftsmen, with each guild occupying a street, the silk merchants here and the shoemakers there, and so on. Some of that remains—the silk shops and therefore Beng and Susie themselves were mostly to be found on Hang Gai street—but modernization, plastic, and mass production have inevitably worked their way into the Old Quarter, rendering swaths of it indistinguishable from other streets in Shanghai, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. All these are signs of the energetic entrepreneurship that has swept up the Vietnamese; I read that almost 98 percent of businesses in Vietnam are small ones, and it did seem that nearly every Vietnamese person we met was a shopkeeper or a tradesman. “We work from 9 in the morning to 11 in the evening,” said one girl in a souvenir shop, in the same tone she would have used to talk about the weather.

Paper

Speaking of shopping, any visitor to Vietnam quickly realizes that you become an instant millionaire the minute you exchange as little as US$50, which is equivalent to just over a million dong, or VND. (Toto devised an easy way to figure out how much things cost in pesos—drop the last three zeroes, then multiply the remaining number by two, so 400,000 dong is 800 pesos.) Costs have gone up a bit, but Tripadvisor recently still listed Hanoi as the world’s cheapest city for tourists: a one-night stay in a four-star hotel, and cocktails and dinner for two with wine plus taxi for two miles averaged just $141, compared to London’s $518.

When I first visited Hanoi in 1994 with a small group of Filipino journalists and artists, we stayed in a hostel in an old French-colonial building; our room had a ceiling fan and a mosquito net, and it cost us all of $5 per day. This time (thanks to our daughter Demi’s employee discount) we were booked at the swanky Sheraton overlooking the West Lake, with free wifi and the kind of sumptuous breakfast buffet that you could just as well find in Hong Kong’s or Singapore’s best hotels. A leisurely walk along the nearby lakefront revealed that a robust industry had sprung up in the construction of modern “executive villas”, presumably for expats and managers. Every now and then a coffee shop broke the succession of leased apartments; Vietnam is one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of coffee, and Hanoi is dotted with virtual temples to the godly brew.

Aside from coffee, the most popular drinks seemed to be fresh coconut water and the local Bia Noi beer—all of which, of course, we joyfully imbibed. Just as naturally, food is one of the best reasons for visiting Vietnam, and Hanoi did not fail to satisfy in this department, with rice noodles, spring rolls, roast pork, and fresh fruit topping the menu.

But for all that they had to eat and drink, the Vietnamese we met remained slim and fit, ready for another long day’s work. Surely there must be poor and even very poor people in Vietnam—you just can’t find them on the streets of Hanoi; not once were we approached by a beggar or a street person; neither were the sellers as pushy with their wares as they might be elsewhere in many an Asian market. Come to think of it, we didn’t meet too many uniformed policemen, and no blue guards stood watch over stores and businesses.

In the museums—such as the military memorial that impressed me the first time I saw it, with its display of scraps from fallen B-52s—grim reminders exist of the horrors of that terrible war by which alone many outsiders know Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum—built in his honor against his express wishes—was closed the day we visited, but even among the milling crowds outside at Independence Park, the affection for the man was palpable; unlike Mao and Stalin, Ho was more a teacher and an uncle than a ruler or despot, and books of his poetry were still sold in the bookstores.

Hanoi is a city of parks and lakes, the most famous of them being Hoan Kiem in the Old Quarter, its centerpiece a temple to which pilgrims cross over a red bridge; I daresay that no one visits Hanoi without having his or her picture taken on that bridge. Nor will tourists miss the famous Water Puppet Theater in one corner of that lakeshore, a cultural institution that draws on the traditional affinity of the Vietnamese to the water, defined as the north and south are by the Red and Mekong Rivers. Playing for at least four one-hour shows every day, the theater was packed with tourists, each one paying just around 200 pesos for truly unique, ingenious, and wholesome entertainment.

The smiles on our faces as we stepped out of that theater pretty much summed up our long Hanoi weekend, and over coffee in a park beside Hoan Kiem, the inevitable question came up: if the Vietnamese can do this for themselves, why can’t we?