Penman No. 387: Wallace Stegner in Manila

Posted on May 11, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, May 11, 2020

LIKE MANY of you, I’ve spent much of the lockdown opening boxes and sorting out files I haven’t touched in years. As a certified pack rat, I keep papers and other effects going back to my grade school years, so my periodic shakedowns inevitably turn up things I never knew I had, or that I’d completely forgotten about. Last month’s haul included our wedding pictures from 1974, a huge picture book of Paris from 1890, and prints from artist-friends like Orly Castillo, Joel Soliven, and the late Lito Mayo.

So amusing and engrossing were these finds that I almost missed a frayed copy of The Literary Apprentice1951, published by the UP Writers Club and edited by two young writers, Raul R. Ingles and S. V. Epistola. I had the privilege of knowing both men when they were still alive back in the 1980s, by which time they had become venerable professors in UP. In 1951, Ingles was only 22, Epistola 26, young bucks who were already rendering literary judgment on their peers and seniors (such as Ingles’ estimation of Zoilo Galang, our first novelist in English (Child of Sorrow, 1921) of whom he writes: “The other novel (of 1950) was For Dreams Must Die by Zoilo Galang, who blundered into the literary scene. Galang was a romantic novelist of the 1920s. His mushy prose dates farther back….” That pungent style of commentary was apparently the order of the day, as elsewhere in the issue we find Homero Ch. Veloso, touted to be “UP’s most renowned poet of the past decade,” being hacked at the knees by the expatriate Jose Garcia Villa, who writes that “I think he is completely valueless; however serious he was in his esthetic and intellectual life, his writing is utterly inchoate, unformed, and ill-written….”

But what really caught my eye in this issue (where also, incidentally, Villa’s “The Bashful One” appears, among other, uhm, essentially wordless poems) was a report on the recent visit to Manila of Wallace Stegner, who had been brought over by the Rockefeller Foundation in January 1951 to deliver eight lectures, one of which touched on his impressions of Filipino writing (but only in English, of course).

Very few people, even among writers, would recognize the name these days, but Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was a renowned American novelist who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. His name rang a bell because of two things. First, starting in 1946, Stanford University has offered the two-year Stegner Fellowship in creative writing, among the world’s prize fellowships for writers, whose recipients have included at least three Filipinos: the poets Valdemar Olaguer (1950) and Fidelito Cortes (1985) and the Fil-Am fictionist Lysley Tenorio (2000). Second, as luck would have it, I actually met Stegner when he visited my graduate writing class at the University of Michigan in October 1986; sadly I don’t remember much of that visit beyond an old man in a tan overcoat, as our classes had barely begun and I was still dizzy with loneliness and awe.

Stegner’s 1951 sortie to Manila also fell in between visits by two other notable writers from America. The first was Ernest Hemingway, who came twice in 1941, in February and May, on his way to and from China with his third wife Martha Gellhorn. I received a note last month from my friend and fellow history buff in Washington, Erwin Tiongson, who found a report from The Tribune of May 13, 1941 about Hemingway being so moved by a huge fire in Tondo that he donated P500 to a fund for the victims.

Another prominent visitor was William Faulkner, who came to Manila in 1955. I recall a small poster commemorating that visit on the wall of the UPICW in the old Faculty Center before it burned down. There are records of what Faulkner did and said then—elsewhere, so I still have to find them. In the library of Stanford University is an 18-page illustrated document from 1956 published by the Philippine Writers Association titled “Faulkner on Truth and Freedom. Excerpts from tape recordings of remarks made by William Faulkner during his recent Manila visit,” but it’s only available on-site. More tantalizingly, there’s an article titled “Faulkner in Manila—1955” in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 edited by James Meriweather and published by Random House in 1968.

So what did Wallace Stegner have to say to his Filipino audience in 1951? He deplored the lack of novelists, for one thing. “The situation is understandable because writing a novel requires the investment of about a year’s labor, the loss of productive activity in other directions, and an attendant publishing risk,” noted the article, which went on: “The Filipino short story, Dr. Stegner observed, is more on the side of the sketch: it is a slice or cross-section rather than a well-rounded whole. Sometimes the story ends; sometimes it just stops…. The Filipino writer rushes to print because he has no other alternative. He gets published easily, even on the second draft, and gets paid just the same. The result is an early sense of maturity which deceives the writer: there is nothing more to test him, to give him obstacles to get over and sharpen his writing ability. Thus, currently published stories need to be run ten times more through the typewriter to straighten out the diction and the style, to fill out the sketchiness, to clarify the characters and the moods, to smooth out all the things that make a short story.”

Funny, I thought, finding that in a 70-year-old journal, when I’d been telling my students the same thing.

PenmanNo. 385: Energems of Wisdom

Posted on April 13, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, April 13, 2020

LIKE ANYONE with access to a TV, mobile phone, and computer these lockdown days, I’ve acquired a new vocabulary associated with “coronavirus” and “Covid-19,” peppered by such words and phrases as “PPEs,” “hydroxychloroquine,” and “co-morbidities.” With time on my hands, I’ve even gone back to dig up the etymology of relevant words like “influenza,” which apparently began—in its Italian form in the 1500s—as a description of a kind of fever brought on by the influence of the stars on the human body. By 1743, the London-based Gentleman’s Magazine was reporting that “AN Article from Rome informs us that a Sort of Plague has broke out there, which destroys Abundance of their People, and they call it the Influenza.” On the other hand, I learned that “cholera” shares a Greek root with “gutter,” so that it “came to mean a pestiferous disease during which fluids are forcefully expelled from the body, resembling a gutter.”

There’s an urge to study and to learn that comes with enforced isolation, and there’s no better place to look for proof than prison, which is about as locked-down as you can get. You could study birds, like the homicidal Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” who even wrote a book on the Diseases of Canaries. Or you could study law, become a first-rate lawyer, and even become a professor of law at Georgetown University, like bank robber Shon Robert Hopwood. If you were more inclined to write behind bars, you could follow in the footsteps of convicted embezzler William Sidney Porter a.k.a. O. Henry, who used his three years in prison to produce 14 stories, or of Jack Abbott, author of the celebrated In the Belly of the Beast, who was let out from prison following his literary celebrity, only to kill again six weeks after his release.

Of course, what we’re calling “enhanced community quarantine” is hardly prison, with which I had some intimate acquaintance as an 18-year-old marched off to martial-law “detention,” Marcosian parlance for what would now be “super-mega-extreme ECQ.” Our Fort Bonifacio brig was probably where St. Luke’s or S&R now stands in BGC, and I was “quarantined” there for more than seven months in 1973. Unfortunately I did and learned nothing brilliant there, although I suppose I was—as some writers explain what they do when they’re doing nothing—“gathering material” for the martial-law novel I eventually published 20 years later.

Our present period of semi-voluntary confinement should be long enough by now to yield some scholarly dividends, which is why I’m happy to report that I have encountered some gems of wisdom these past two weeks—“Energems,” to be more specific. In case you haven’t heard, there are ten of them in as many colors (eleven if you include the elusive Dark Energem), whose “incredible power transcends space and time, good and evil.” That’s according to my source, known only as The Keeper, whose apprentice Zenowing warns that the Dark Energem is compounded of pure evil, and alone can override the powers of the other ten Energems.

That’s what you learn when you’re quarantined with a three-year-old named Buboy who barges into your room at 7 in the morning and demands, with all the cuteness a toddler can muster, that you turn Netflix on so he can watch Power Rangers Dino Charge. Season 1 has 22 episodes, and he’s been through all of them, so we’re doing the logical thing, which is rerunning Episode 1, 2, and so on.

Buboy—as I’ve written here before—is the son of our faithful housekeeper Jenny, but in the absence of our unica hija Demi (who’s locked in on her own in otherwise sunny California), he’s our adoptive grandson and pet. While he pretty much has diplomatic immunity around the house and can rummage through my possessions for anything resembling or convertible into a “toy” (his favorite word—e.g., a long plastic shoehorn becomes a sword), he’s amazingly well-behaved, knows when to say “please” and “opo,” and takes his elders’ hands in blessing (in this household, that’s a lot of hands to mano po). We’ve sent him to nursery school and have pledged to endow him on to a PhD, subject only to good behavior, but with school out all of a sudden, then Beng and I are his teachers as well, alongside his Mama Jenny and Papa Sonny.

So when Buboy jumped into our bed after a perfunctory knock on the door and made a polite but firm request with that impish smile to watch his favorite show (we’ve already seen The Lion King twice, and I’ve heard enough nursery rhymes to recite “No more monkeys jumping on the bed” in my sleep), who was his “Tatay” to say no? I may have had plans of reading my long-neglected copy of Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and the Imaginary in Baroque Florence by Giulia Calvi (U. of California Press, 1989), but with Netflix on, baroque Florence had to give way to the Amber Beach Dinosaur Museum….

And that, my friends, is how I’ve acquired a rather exotic expertise in Energems, Dino-charged Zords, Vivix, the 65-million-year-long engagement of Sledge and Poisandra, and Dr. Runga. Can’t wait for Season 2 for more, uhm, enlightenment—with or without Buboy.

Penman No. 381: The Best of New Writing in English

Posted on February 17, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, February 17, 2020

ONE OF the things we’ve been proudest of doing at the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing (UPICW) has been to encourage new writers in both Filipino and English—whether through workshops, grants, or publishing opportunities. Sometimes all writers really need is a bit of recognition from their masters and their peers, some formal acknowledgment of their talent to spur them on in a career with few rewards beyond the smiles and the sighs of their readers.

For nearly two decades now, thanks to the generosity of Atty. Gizela M. Gonzalez, herself a gifted writer, the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award has honored its self-described winners—the best first publication in book form by a writer in Filipino or English for the past two years (alternating between the two languages every other year). A cash prize of P50,000 accompanies the award. Entries are submitted by publishers, for whom victory lies in discovering the next new literary star. It’s a safe bet: previous winners have included such luminaries as Sarge Lacuesta, Luna Sicat Cleto, Ichi Batacan, and Kristian Cordero, among others.

The 19^th MGBFBA was given out at Writers Night last December in UP. I was in Singapore for another ceremony but was very interested in who would win (a surprisingly well-kept secret that even UPICW fellows are not privy to until the night itself). Only later did I hear, happily, that the winner was a former student of mine, Glenn Diaz, for his novel The Quiet Ones (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018), described by the judges as “a tour de force, an awesome game of fictional juggling, mastering multiple narratives that cascade, skim and collide, leaving the reader breathless, wondering if that was a whodunit, a philosophical foray into globalization, or a poignant story of love.” Well done, Glenn! But let’s give a shout out for the other finalists as well.

Jude Ortega’s Seekers of Spirits (UP Press, 2017) “opens up to readers a world of spirits, ancestral yet ever present, unseen yet all too powerful. They are constantly in the lives of humans, offering succor or malice. Yet, these stories suggest that, whatever power these spirits possess, no terror may be worse than that we inflict upon each other.”

Manuel Lahoz’s autobiographical Of Tyrants and Martyrs: A Political Memoir (UP Press, 2018) is “a riveting political memoir… of martial law in the Philippines and its many victims… a record of Lahoz’s own apotheosis from priest to social activist to political prisoner and participant in the political underground. In his personal transformation we sense as well the coming of age of an entire generation.”

Francis Quina’s Field of Play and Other Fictions (Visprint, 2018) displays “the sensibility of a poet as well as the rigor of the literary scholar and writing teacher. He seeks to dissect both the intricacies of the human heart and the manner by which these are re-enacted in art. His is a new, vibrant voice in fiction.”

Christine Lao’s Musical Chairs (2017) is a “small and compact chapbook… (of) stories in the way they were first invented: as lore, as fable, as stories of good and evil but, in this collection, rendered with the complexity of the modern world.”

Johanna Michelle Lim’s What Distance Tells Us: Travel Essays About the Philippines (Bathalad, 2018) covers “twelve Philippine destinations, from Batanes to Sitangkai, from Sagada to Siargao… (and) lures us with language, entices us into the territories of enchantment not always of the exotic but also the local and commonplace. In these peregrinations… she evolves en route: in the various guises of the traveler, artist, and activist she aspires to be, but also the one she was never ready for.”

Sarah Fernando Lumba’s The Shoemaker’s Daughter (Visprint, 2018) consists of “tightly woven tales, narratives sewn together with the deliberate shoemaker’s art, with the rough edges shaved off as if with a leather skiver—these are what make The Shoemaker’s Daughter an important contribution to new Filipino fiction…. (They) take us through Marikina shoemakers’ country, with its achingly familiar small-town complexion and its river changing from a benign periodic visitor to an existential threat.”

Marichelle Roque-Lutz’s Keeping It Together (Roque-Lutz Publishing, 2018) “traverses what might be called an intercontinental trampoline that stretches from Manila to Nigeria and America, which need not be only geographic because the memoirist from the start is a soul-in-search, ever moving through time and into herself. Most memoirs are helped by faithfully kept journals. Keeping It Together is directly helped by a copious streaming from the heart, a first book by an able and polished author, a fully evolved, mature soul.”

It was a strong batch, all told, which can only bode well for the future of creative writing in English in the Philippines, fraught as it has always been with political and aesthetic challenges. As the late NVM Gonzalez used to put it, “I write in Filipino, using English”—a formula that seems to be working just fine.

Penman No. 380: Commemorating the FQS

Posted on February 3, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, February 3, 2019

STARTING LAST January 26 and until early this month, some members of a generation of Filipinos now in their 60s and 70s would have commemorated—or at least noted in one way or another—the 50^th anniversary of what came to be called the First Quarter Storm, or the FQS. It was a tumultuous season at the very start of the 1970s, a period that would see deepening disenchantment with the Marcos regime, the rise of student activism, and the subsequent declaration of martial law in 1972. For those of us who were part of that generation, it was also the abrupt abbreviation of our carefree youth and our hastened transformation into missionaries of a kind, idealists fired up by the notion of becoming the Rizals, Bonifacios, and Gabriela Silangs of our time.

It was a political but—as with all politics—also a cultural awakening. We began by reading—not Marx or Mao, but Renato Constantino and, a bit later, Jose Ma. Sison. For me, it was William Pomeroy’s The Forest—a lyrical account of an American GI’s unlikely entry into the struggle of the postwar Huks—that sparked my fascination with rebels and revolutions. I was only in high school when I read it, but I swore that, in my own way, I was going to make a change in society.

I didn’t even have to wait to get to college for that opportunity. On January 26, 1970, I joined the throngs of uniformed students who gathered in Manila to protest against Ferdinand Marcos, who was delivering the SONA at the old Senate building. I can’t recall now what the specific issues were, but we had a sense that there were very large causes involved of which Marcos was only a part. The Vietnam War was still raging and for many young people, “Make love, not war” was the answer; we had watched Woodstock as a movie on the big screen, we had memorized the Beatles, and Mao’s China was still shrouded in mystery. We were somewhere between dreaming of becoming hippies or becoming bomb-throwers.

Indeed, on that day—a Monday, according to the calendar, so we were all skipping our classes—I still counted myself a moderate, marching under the banner of Ed Jopson’s National Union of Students of the Philippines. We filed out of our assembly grounds on the UST campus toward the Luneta, where large crowds had already gathered, some sporting the streamers of more vocal militants like the KM and SDK—whom, at that point, I held in both suspicion and awe. I was too far to listen to the speeches being made by the likes of Gary Olivar, whom my high-school English teacher had held up for me as a bright young man worth emulating. When things started flying through the air, beginning with the mock coffin someone had brought along to exemplify the death of democracy, and the police began wielding their truncheons, I scampered for the life of me, muttering oaths under my breath directed at both the police and the radicals for spoiling what had been a very nice day. I had just turned 16 barely a week earlier, and I was too young to die or even just to get my head bashed in.

As it happened, I did get radicalized; before that year was over, I was a freshman at UP, where I joined the Nationalist Corps and later the SDK. Within just three more years I would become part of the Diliman Commune, witness the killings of Francis Sontillano and Sonny Mesina (both of them my fellow scholars at the Philippine Science High School), drop out of UP to work as a newspaper reporter, lose my job under martial law, and be imprisoned in Fort Bonifacio for seven months. I grew up even faster than I thought I would; shortly after my release, I met and married my wife Beng (with so many people dying around us, we couldn’t wait too long), and I became a father at 20.

That’s what a few books and the FQS all led to—a quick but bracing immersion in youthful rebellion and forced maturity, from which I learned quite a bit about myself and about other people, indeed about human nature itself, beyond providing material for the obligatory semi-autobiographical first novel. Today, as a retired professor, I’m often asked (and will be again, this week) about what all of that meant, and I say that it was about taking charge of your own life and taking your people’s interests to heart, and not just yours.

What I once disavowed as my vulnerable and wishy-washy liberal core turned out to be me at my most honest and perhaps my strongest. I still seek and fight for freedom from any kind of despotism, whether from the Right or the Left (and these days, when both extremes have cohabited, when the mouthpieces of the old Left now sing the praises of the Right, you have to trust your own compass to point northward). I commemorate the FQS not by boxing it in the past and putting it away, but by hoping that a new generation of Filipinos, made curious by books and refusing to accept easy answers, will see themselves as part of a larger struggle to be human, and to be free.

(Paintings by Juanito Torres, courtesy of Jack Teotico)

Penman No. 378: My Retirement Library

Posted on January 6, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, January 6, 2020

I RECENTLY had occasion to reorganize my personal library, which involved trimming down hundreds of books into what could fit into a large aparador and three long shelves running along the wall of my study. Having retired for a year now, I thought that it was time to start bringing my worldly possessions down to the core, down to things I would actually live with in my old age, however short or long that grace period is going to be.

As you can imagine, this was easier said than done. Downsizing a library takes a lot more than a physical effort. It means going over a virtual history of your own mind, every book bought and kept being a marker of sorts of whatever it was you found interesting at that moment.

To force my hand and speed things up, last November I picked out and donated four large boxes of over 150 books to a benefit sale being held by students in my department in UP, mostly literature books and texts only an English major could love. As I was packing them up I remembered how, in my student days, we scoured the sales at Alemar’s and the old PECO as well as the used-book bins along Recto for bargains, clucking like well-fed chickens when we came across a prize catch (for me then, an orange-spined Penguin book by the likes of Graham Greene or John Updike).

Having a fixed space to move my books into also obliged me to choose well and wisely. In the end I decided that for simplicity’s sake my retirement library would contain only books that fell into certain categories: (1) books I myself wrote (around 40) and edited or contributed to (another 60 or so); (2) books signed by fellow authors; (3) books that were good or important to have, including antiquarian books, Filipiniana, Rizaliana, books on pens, machines, art and design, and collecting in general; and (4) most importantly, my personal favorites—the books that, for the past 50 years, I loved to read or would want to re-read, and, for some new ones, will want to read in retirement. It’s that last shelf I’ll dwell on for now.

As a fictionist, my favorite books of fiction are of course represented: William Kennedy’s Ironweed, J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, John Gardner’s Grendel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, which Franz Arcellana told our class was the most disgusting book he had ever read, prompting me to rush out and look for it. (I still have to find my copy of D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel.) Anthologies and books by my favorite poets include those by Robert Graves, Constantine Cavafy, Philip Larkin, and Federico Garcia Lorca.

There are also books about the practice and culture of writing: Simon Garfield’s Just My Type, Philip Hensher’s The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, The Chicago Manual of Style, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, Thomas Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist, The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil, William Harris’ Ancient Literacy, and Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (a gift from F. Sionil Jose, who asked me to pick a book off his shelf).

If my Pinoy writer-friends don’t see their books among my favorites, that’s because they’re on the shelf of autographed books, alongside those signed by John Updike, Edward Jones, Junot Diaz, Romesh Gunesekera, Charles Baxter, Lawrence Durrell, Frank McCourt, Kazuo Ishiguro, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as, of course, the Filipino standouts: Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin, and even Carlos P. Romulo (who, let’s not forget, was one of five Filipinos to have won the Pulitzer Prize, mainly for journalism).

For fun, I keep books on poker (James McManus’ Cowboys Full and Positively Fifth Street) and books about Apple and Macs (Michael Malone’s Infinite Loop, Young and Simon’s iCon: Steve Jobs and the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, Leander Kahney’s The Cult of Mac), as well as E. S. Lumsden’s The Art of Etching, which guided and inspired my shortlived career as a printmaker in the 1970s.

Perhaps most surprising is the predominance of history and nonfiction on this shelf, a tip of the hat to what I might have gone into as a profession if not for creative writing, although it’s mostly popular history for the enthusiast: Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and James Burke’s Connections, Yuvel Noah Harari’s Sapiens, the Hakluyt edition of Morga’s Sucesos, Brian MacAllister Linn’s The Philippine War 1899-1902, Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli, Dava Sobel’s Longitude, David Howard Bain’s Sitting in Darkness, Thatcher Freund’s Objects of Desire, Anna Pavord’s The Tulip, Nick Joaquin’s Manila My Manila (and his Reportage series), Richard Selzer’s Confessions of a Knife and Mortal Lessons, David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ken Adler’s The Measure of All Things, and William Pomeroy’s The Forest (which I often cite as the most influential book of my young life, because it made rebellion sound romantic, and encouraged me to carry a placard).

When I step back and survey what I’ve chosen to put together (perhaps too unabashedly male), I can still see that boy who was fascinated not so much by fiction but by how things worked and by what the world out there was like (Sobel’s Longitude will tell you that). Because (no thanks to poor math skills) I couldn’t become an engineer and make clocks and centrifuges, literature and creative writing became my second choice—to see how words worked, like cogs in a fine machine.

Penman No. 377: A Harvest of Singaporean Fiction

Posted on December 26, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, December 23, 2019

WRITING ABOUT Singaporean short fiction in the Malaysian literary journal Tenggara in 1990, the highly respected Singaporean poet and teacher Robert Yeo observed of his country’s short story writers that “They prefer the relative safety of naturalism or realism and have learned to construct the short story in terms of traditional ways of having a well-defined plot, a single moment, clear characterization, and a resolute or indeterminate end. There are no innovative tales like the surrealism of Franz Kafka, the magical realism of Marquez or the labyrinthine mazes of Borges, writers who have responded to the urgings of their personal visions of the worlds they inhabit and make….” At the same time he remained optimistic, and opined that as poets had lorded it over the previous decades, the time for fictionists had come.

Prof. Yeo’s self-criticism reminded me that, years earlier, I spotted a remark in the introduction to an anthology of Singaporean short stories that Singaporean writers had much to learn from their Filipino counterparts, who had explored the territory with both talent and audacity.

Two weeks ago, as I attended the awarding ceremonies of the Golden Point Award at the National Library of Singapore, I reflected on those comments and was happy to conclude, on my hosts’ behalf, that those days of cautious apprenticeship were over: Singaporean fiction had fully come of age. Indeed perhaps it had done that much earlier than I had noticed, but this time I was staring it in the face, in the form of the superlative pieces that won prizes in the GPA competition.

Begun by the National Arts Council in 1993—perhaps precisely to encourage the risk-taking and innovation that Robert seemed to be missing—the Golden Point Award is Singapore’s biennial version of our much older and broader Palancas, focused on discovering and encouraging new writers in Singapore’s four official languages (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil) in the poetry and short story categories. I was the sole international judge in the English short story, a task and privilege I shared with two distinguished Singaporean writers, Meira Chand and Balli Kaur Jaswal (who had also been a David TK Wong Fellow at Norwich, and who lived for some time in Manila).

The judging that we did online over several weeks was exciting but exhausting. Of the 1,200 entries submitted this year to the GPA in all categories, more than half went to the English short story. We plodded patiently through the digital pile, and were pleasantly surprised to find, when we finally met in Singapore for the final deliberation, that our top-six shortlists were practically the same, save for one or two pieces.

The stories submitted covered an astonishing and also very revealing range of themes and concerns that created (especially for me, as an outsider looking in) a comprehensive image of Singaporean society today. They included the following, in no particular order: migrant workers; Chinese grandparents; filial piety; competition and conformity; the generation gap; Western education, the English language (Oxbridge and British accents), and social status; arranged marriages; racial disharmony; sexual liberation; Singaporean history and nationhood; the Singaporean future; utopia and dystopia.

Addressing Robert Yeo’s earlier plaint, the entries also came in full range of genres, from realism to fantasy and science fiction, horror, young adult, even erotica.

In my judging, I looked for the human in the Singaporean, and the Singaporean in the human. While it may not have been explicitly stated in the rules, I tried to see how the works represented both contemporary Singaporean society and also the state of writing in Singapore.

The best stories for me displayed complexity, subtlety, intimacy, and insight; they had a palpable narrative and emotional impact, and took their time to develop their tensions and arrive at their subliminally earned conclusions. I was especially taken by our second-prize winner, “Little Fears” by Lauren Ho, which drew on the tension between a Singaporean mother and her Filipino nanny, who had clearly won over her child’s affections.

The least successful ones bore many of the hallmarks of amateurs, which I see often enough in our own workshops and the Palancas: a plethora of literary quotes and allusions, hurried summaries of situations, essayistic discussions of their subjects, revelatory titles, one-dimensional characterizations, and predictable plots.

Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of all participants—the courage of writing and submitting a story for judgment—should be commended, as I could sense that the GPA was as much about encouraging effort and expression as it was about recognizing excellence.

At the awards ceremony, I also had the opportunity to meet and chat with Singaporean publisher Edmund Wee, whose Epigram (epigrambooks.sg) imprint has been championing local literature and writers. Now Edmund is looking beyond Singapore itself for the best new works by sponsoring the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, which offers the largest prize money in the Singaporean—indeed Southeast Asian—literary circuit: S$25,000 (about P933,000) plus a publishing contract; three other shortlisted finalists will get S$5,000 and a publishing contract. Starting this year, the competition was opened to ASEAN authors, and Edmund made a point of asking me to encourage more Filipinos to join. The next deadline will be in August 2020, with the winner to be announced the following January. Check out their website, folks.

With incentives like the GPA and the Epigram Prize, Prof. Yeo can rest assured that Singaporean fiction will be alive and well for many decades to come.

Penman No. 373: Another Jewel in the the Shadows

Posted on October 29, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, October 28, 2019

AT A dinner last week with friends in Ann Arbor, Michigan—an old haunt of mine, having done my master’s there more than thirty years ago—the talk came around to finding and retrieving valuable Filipiniana from the United States and wherever these precious objects—books, paintings, and other artifacts—may have been buried for the past century. I shared the story of how the oldest book in my small antiquarian collection—a book of English essays from 1551, published in London—turned up in Cubao, Quezon City, after having been gifted to its Pinoy owner who was a caregiver in Paris.

That discussion, in turn, reminded me of another interesting message I’d received a month earlier from a reader named Wassily Clavecillas, with whom I’d been exchanging notes about our shared interests (he also supplied me with information about the long-forgotten painter Anselmo Espiritu, whom I wrote about last July). With his permission, I’ll share a slightly edited version of Wassily’s message, which illustrates how literary and historical jewels can still emerge from the shadows:

“Professor, let me tell you about a book entitled Ataque de Li-Ma-Hong a Manila en 1574 by the Spanish writer Juan Caro y Mora, printed in 1898 in Manila. The item was the only Filipiniana object in the lot of Orientalia bequeathed to my aunt by her then employer/patron, who came from an affluent family in California.

“Encompassing roughly 155 pages, the book is interspersed with artfully crafted vignettes, landscapes, and battle scenery depicting the invasion of Manila by the infamous Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong—an event whose 445^th anniversary will fall this November 29. The illustrator was none other than Vicente Mir Rivera, the Filipino Gilded Age artist, a contemporary of Juan Luna, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Lorenzo Guerrero, and the brothers Manuel and Anselmo Espiritu. Though not as celebrated as Luna or Hidalgo, Rivera was an important artist and artisan, who also designed with lavish attention to detail the canonical crowns of the Nuestra Senora del Santisimo Rosario, which was executed by the jewelers La Estrella del Norte.

“The illustrations were rendered mostly in watercolor and presumably perished in the fires of war-ravaged Manila in WWII. What we have left, though not originals, are no less beautiful in their form, abounding in visions of verdant Filipino landscapes and seascapes, complemented with renderings of intrepid Spanish soldiers, fierce Chinese corsairs, and valiant Filipino warriors.

“The book was effectively a historical record of Spain’s erstwhile military and martial glories. This is the second edition of Juan Caro y Mora’s tome; a much rarer first edition was never sold but was given to subscribers of the author’s newspaper La Voz Española, which Mora edited.”

Wassily goes on further to say that the book was included in a lot of various Oriental antiques and ephemeras, mostly Japanese netsuke, fine silk scroll paintings, Qing dynasty jade and porcelain figurines, and numerous 19^th-century travel books on Asia, which once adorned the richly decorated anterooms of a sprawling California estate.

Bequeathed to his aunt by her employer, for sentimental reasons she never sold this bounty and had the items packed and concealed away in her other home in another state in the US, where the collection remained safe, dormant but not forgotten. Some time ago she decided to go through all the contents again it was then that she found the book.

“Upon further scrutiny,” Wasily reports further, “I was excited to realize that Juan Caro y Mora had inscribed and dedicated the book to his Excellency Governor-General Fermin Jaudenes, the third-to-the-last Spanish-appointed Governor-General of the Philippines. Jaudenes was known for his role in the infamous ‘Mock Battle of Manila,’ where the collapsing Spanish forces orchestrated with the American occupiers the surrender of the City of Manila, to salvage the reputation of Imperial Spain and deny the Filipinos their hard-fought victory.

“One can only speculate if the book was given by the author as a morale booster to the embattled Governor General during what many consider as the death knell of Spain’s empire. The surrender of Manila it heralded the end of 300 years of European rule over the archipelago and marked the beginning of 50 years of Pax Americana.”

Many thanks, Wassily, for your account and perceptive commentary. I’ve never seen or even known about this book myself, of course, but it reinforces my conviction that many more treasures remain hidden out there, in some American or European attic or garage.

Over the past year, I’ve built up a small trove myself of old Filipiniana awaiting repatriation at my daughter’s place in California—multiple copies each of such popular staples as Harper’s History of the War in the Philippines, Atlas de Filipinas, and Our Islands and Their People, as well as another first edition of Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn. They may not be quite as exotic as Limahong’s story, or have such a splendorous provenance, but I hope to bring them home soon to spark wonder and delight in more Filipino eyes.

Penman No. 371: Love Letters from Rody (1)

Posted on September 30, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, September 30, 2019

IT’S NOTHING short of embarrassing to stumble upon other people’s intimacies—you know you shouldn’t be looking and you try to turn your eyes away, but you also know you’ll be taking at least a peek, as the curious and fallible humans we all are.

More than fifteen years ago, moving into a new home on campus previously occupied by an eminent professor who had retired and moved elsewhere, I went out to investigate a blockage in the culvert just outside our house. I was surprised to find a mass of papers, bundled up in plastic, that had apparently been tossed there by whoever had cleaned up the place in preparation for my taking it over. When I took the bundle apart, I realized—to my simultaneous horror and fascination—that these were Professor X’s private papers: her diaries, letters, and notes accumulated and saved over more than half a century of exemplary teaching.

Looking a bit deeper into the penciled entries (I told you I couldn’t resist), I spotted references to a nameless man with whom the writer was clearly enamored—but it was also and just as clearly a stillborn affair, as the writer professed, with fervid anguish, her commitment to a higher, spiritual calling. They would not become another Heloise and Abelard. My hands felt that they had been scorched by the papers, and I decided to turn them over to a friend, a poet who was among her most devoted disciples, for safekeeping.

Two weeks ago, I bought a trove of books from a junk shop in Caloocan, books from the 1930s to the 1950s covering mainly political and historical subjects. I was really just after a good copy of Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat and Zoilo Galang’s For Dreams Must Die (a 1950 novel based on another star-crossed romance, between Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera. When I began sorting out the lot, I noticed an unusual thickness in a book from 1953 about the struggle for Indochina, and fished out, from between pages 172 and 173, a folded letter; several chapters later I found yet another letter.

They were typewritten letters, probably drafts, with scribbled corrections between the lines—undated, unaddressed, unsigned, and unsent—written by someone who identifies himself in the second letter only as “Rody” (no, not that Rody). I was struck by the quality and quaintness of the prose; these were letters obviously crafted by an educated man, meant for a distant an unnamed beloved. All we can firmly gather from them is that she was a nurse in a hospital, while he—well, let’s read the first letter first, and take it from there. The second letter—and my speculations—will follow in a couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

Maybe you will be surprised on receiving this letter—a letter unexpected at the most inopportune time. I was overwhelmed by a magic urge which I cannot understand or cope with. It induced my pen to scribble the words coming out of my heart.

The end of the world and the complete annihilation of mankind is at hand, they say. My love for you will never end through eternity. It will be enduring as the tides of time, as lasting as the sacred flames kindled by my burning heart.

Love works so many wonders, lovers say. It can deviate the earth from its course, it can make the giddy heaven fall. It can teach the torches to burn bright like rich jewels in an Ethiop’s ear. My love for you is as deathless as Gabriel’s love for Evangeline, as infinite as Romeo’s love for Juliet.

Three years elapsed like a click. For three years, I waited in patience for a ray of light on my love affair. During this period, I found the right meaning of love and can define it even in my sleep.

Through the years I found neither laughter nor peace. I cannot associate the past, the present nor the future. Will my future be bright? Or will it be gloomy as the present and the past? You are the key to the answer. My life will be meaningless and valueless without you. No one but you can bring light to my world of darkness. Nothing but love can best cure my aching heart.

Each night I go to the hospital, just to have a glimpse of you. Wanting to talk to you for a moment which I know is an impossibility. My eyes just speak for me in the passing glance.

Each night I sink in a sea of speculation. In the maintaining silence, I think of you. I cannot help but ask myself, what are my chances? Will the answer be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? I think of the fatal ‘no’ as the answer. I think of yes. Each of them is a sentence complete in itself. Each of them is a word which can mean everything in my life—words which when heard can shatter heaven and earth.

Maybe during these three long years, you have known me from head to toe better than any living soul on earth. And it is not far from impossible that you have reached a decision.

I love you more than anything else. Do you love me too? Your silence on the matter can only signify four simple words—“I love you too.”

I am the captive of yoru charm, the prisoner of your heart. I am standing before the judgment chair—before the beauteous goddess of love.

Hoping that your sound discretion guide you in your decision, I pause

Penman No. 370: A Collection and a Collaboration

Posted on September 17, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, September 16, 2019

YOU KNOW that you’ve reached the hilltop, just in time to view the sunset, when they start compiling your works into hefty one-volume collections that could take a very long vacation on a very lonely island to plow through. Apparently I’m at that point, because Anvil Publishing has just released Voyager and Other Fictions: The Collected Stories of Jose Dalisay, a 500-page compendium of 43 stories written and published over four decades from the 1970s onwards.

I had been quietly at work on this collection these past few months with Anvil general manager Andrea Pasion-Flores and her team, and I was elated to see it being sold at the recent Philippine Readers and Writers Festival, and later at National Book Store, Anvil’s parent company. Let me just share what I said about the project in my brief preface to the stories:

“These stories span forty years, from 1975 to 2015, during which I turned from a lanky 21-year-old to a potbellied senior, and everything in between. I’ve chosen to present them in the chronological order of their writing, as best as my challenged memory could manage, hoping that this sequencing will reveal some patterns of growth and change in the way a writer selects and treats material as he himself is shaped by life and time.

“The inclusion of some juvenilia may be indulgent, but my excuse is that it may be instructive and inspiring (albeit by negative example) to the young writer who must be made to believe that better things come with age.

“I came to fiction in English from a background in drama and screenwriting in Filipino. This helps explain my interest in scene-setting and dialogue, in the unseen currents of thought and feeling that cross synapses and much larger spaces between people.

“While creative nonfiction occupies most of my time in retirement, largely for a living, nothing exhilarates me more than writing fiction—not the novel, for which I never mustered anything resembling affection, but the short story, which I find both exacting and exciting in its compactness.

“I’ve lately often argued that the best antidote to fake news is true fiction, because only fiction—not even journalism—has the power to draw us out of ourselves, out of the present, into that chill place where Honesty resides. Fiction redeems and saves the writer as much as it exalts the reader. That realization has been the personal reward of my work for these past forty years.”

After writing so many books for other people—I always say that rather than live to write, I write to live—it’s a balm for the spirit to see and review all my stories in one place, and to be reminded of fiction as my true love, the thing I most enjoy doing although the least materially rewarding. Indeed I’ve often said that my stories—invariably of lower and middle-class Filipinos like me—are the biographies of those people who can’t afford to hire me to write about them, whose lives are often dismissed as “ordinary” but which are in fact eventful and dramatic in their own fashion.

Voyager and Other Fictions cover 02 062819.jpeg

I had a second reason to rejoice with the launch of my newest book, Why Words Matter, last Saturday at the Vargas Museum in UP Diliman. With lovely and haunting illustrations by Marcel Antonio, the book is based on a TEDTalk I gave last year in UP about why we read and why we write, and how words can kill but can also heal. It’s being published by Gigo Alampay’s CANVAS (The Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development). Two other books were also launched alongside mine—a children’s counting book by artist Ioannis Sicuya, and one about horror stories from the martial law era that distills affidavits by claimants of martial law abuses into three sentence tales, illustrated by Renz Baluyot.

While this book was produced as a special, limited art-book edition (only 500 copies, all hardbound), CANVAS will allow the free, non-commercial distribution of material from the book, with proper attribution, in any medium, as part of its program for cultural literacy.

I must say that I’m awed by and deeply grateful for Marcel’s exquisite artwork (just as I appreciated Jordan Santos’ delightful cover design for Voyager). Not since I collaborated with Jaime Zobel on an art book titled The Island almost 25 years ago have I had such a visually engaging publication. While I firmly believe that every author—never mind how sharp he or she may imagine himself or herself to be—needs an editor, and even as I’ve welcomed most of my editors’ suggestions, I’ve also sometimes given my publishers and designers a hard time, having stubborn and stodgy ideas about how my books should look. I’m relieved to have had a very pleasant experience with the publication of these two new books, for which again I thank Andrea and Gigo for putting together. It’s a bracing reminder to this old man that, to a happy few, his words still do matter.

(Voyager is available at National Book Store; to order Why Words Matter, please email info@canvas.ph.)

Penman No. 367: Revisiting Paeng Salas

Posted on August 19, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, August 19, 2019

FEW MILLENNIALS would be familiar with the name today, but in the 1960s and 1970s, Rafael Montinola Salas—Paeng to many—was every bit the man a younger person would have wanted to become: smart, accomplished, attractive, very much in the center of things, privy to power and influence and yet incorruptible and prone to poetry. And like many men who blaze an incandescent streak across the dark sky of history, Paeng Salas died young. He wasn’t even 59 in March 1987 when he was felled by an apparent heart attack in his hotel room in Washington, DC, while preparing for a meeting, ensuring no end to speculation on what he might have been—and what the Philippines itself might have become—had he lived longer. At the University of the Philippines, where he studied law, he recruited another provinciano into the Sigma Rho fraternity, and though older than Paeng by five years, that recruit named Juan Ponce Enrile saw Paeng as a mentor and would later call Salas “the best President we never had.”

To the uninitiated, the Negros-born Paeng Salas was one of the first so-called “technocrats,” a bright, idealistic, well-educated young man who found himself roped into and rising quickly within the ranks of government, first as a volunteer for the charismatic Ramon Magsaysay, then as a campaigner and yet later Executive Secretary for Ferdinand Marcos, for whom he led a highly successful rice self-sufficiency program. Disillusioned by corruption within the Marcos regime, Salas gave up any domestic political ambition to join the new United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in New York, and became known as “Mr. Population” for his impassioned commitment to curbing unchecked population growth, which also led to the creation of the Commission on Population (POPCOM) in 1969. He almost became UN Secretary General in 1981—were it not for the lack of support from Malacañang, which had not forgiven him for his desertion. After EDSA, there was talk of Salas joining Cory’s Cabinet—but just weeks later, he was dead.

I’m writing about Paeng Salas because, last week when he would have turned 92, the POPCOM under its Executive Director Dr. Jeepy Perez launched a new biography of Salas titled A Millennial Man for Others: The Life and Times of Rafael M. Salas, co-authored by me and Carmen “Menchu” Sarmiento (whom I have to thank for doing most of the heavy lifting). In my remarks at the launch, I said that Paeng Salas was a biographer’s dream, not only because of the breadth of his accomplishments but also because of the quality of the man himself and of his life.

Speaking across the decades to our times and leaders today, Salas was the ultimate public servant who was not only learned and refined—among his works are two published collections of finely crafted haiku—but, just as importantly, was honest and humble. He never used his vast intellect (he loved books and left 11,000 of them to his province’s library) to bludgeon others in a display of arrogance; he was devoted to his wife and family; he was a liberal democrat who believed firmly in freedom and deplored rising authoritarianism.

I was a 19-year-old dropout when I joined the civil service under martial law in 1973 (there weren’t too many jobs left for writers), too late to meet Paeng Salas, who was already with the UN then. But I did become a “Sicat boy” along with the likes of the late Boy Noriega, Poch Macaranas, and Chito Sobrepeña, under NEDA Director-General Gerry Sicat.

At the launch at the DFA were our predecessors, who had begun their distinguished careers working with and for Paeng Salas as their boss—the likes of Jun Factoran, Joe Molano, Vic Ramos, Jimmy Yambao, Agustin Que, and company, who would come to be known as the “Salas boys,” indeed a much longer list you’ll find at the back of the book. Also present were former POPCOM Executive Director Ben de Leon, the premier demographer and Paeng’s comadre Dr. Mercedes Concepcion, and Paeng’s widow, the very lovely and gracious former Amb. Carmelita “Menchu” Rodriguez Salas. I would remark that any man who could describe his wife in a poem as a “cattleya in fluted crystal” had my admiration.

Two weeks before Ninoy Aquino’s assassination in 1983, Paeng Salas spoke at UP, where he received an honorary doctorate, and said this:

“To me, freedom is the highest of all values. It makes possible the interchange of ideas, the expression of an individual’s beliefs, the right to disagree, to put forward alternatives and express them even if one is in error. It is the value that must suffuse all technologies and instruments of direction and control since it is at one and the same time both the precondition and ultimate end of our endeavors….

“I should like to take leave with a question: what can the scholars of this university do to solve the problems of the Philippines when it will be a country of 70 million people? Judge your course of action in the light of our country’s historical experience and with the conviction that your judgement is better when your thought is free—always.”

I wish he were still around to say these things again, today.

Pinoy Penman 3.0

The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Category Archives: books