Category Archives: Friends

Penman No. 488: Artists in Residence

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Penman for Sunday, August 2, 2026

IT ISN’T every day that I get to spend time with two outstanding artists, and while I’ve become something of a recluse myself, exhausted by literary polemics and limiting my social life to very close friends, I couldn’t say no when my wife Beng asked me if I cared to join her on a day trip to Los Baños to visit the sculptor and painter Junyee. Junyee was a good friend of Beng’s from the UP College of Fine Arts, and while he lives in Los Baños with his wife Tess, Junyee has done many art installations around Diliman and often comes by our house on campus to drop off some buko pie. I’d enjoyed chatting with Junyee whenever our paths crossed, taking in his stories about his arduous struggle to become an artist, including a time when he had to work as a make-up artist for the dead in a funeral parlor in Cebu. But more on that later.

I was doubly pleased to learn that we would be accompanied to Los Baños by another artist-friend, Fil de la Cruz, whom I had known for over fifty years, and by his son Janos, also a talented and highly regarded young artist. Fil stands among our most brilliant, versatile, and accomplished printmakers; both he and Junyee have been nominated for the National Artist Award.

We had long been planning to visit Junyee in LB, where he and his wife Tess, who taught in UPLB, have lived for decades. When Tess retired a few years ago and they had to give up their home on campus, they found and bought a private lot just beyond the university property line, and built a new house there. Since anything that Junyee built was bound to be interesting, we wanted to see it, but the house was honestly just an excuse; we were going there for the artist himself. Now 84, Junyee recently hasn’t been in the best of health.

Though younger at 75, Fil has been facing serious challenges of his own. They had a lot to talk about, for sure—but we resolved to undertake this trip in high spirits, to celebrate art and life in joyful company. 

First we picked up Fil at his home in Muntinlupa. Aptly named Bahaysining, the three-story brick house is part (if not largely) studio, part gallery, and part living space, but immediately the visitor knows it’s a house made by artists for artists in both form and function. “This was much smaller early on,” Fil says of the place, ”and then I just kept adding to it as my practice and capabilities grew.” He shares the space with his son Janos, who keeps a studio of his own on the premises and helps his dad with both work and the daily business of living. 

The rooms teem with paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and most visibly, printmaking presses in various sizes that Fil himself designed and had made over the years. Much of his equipment rolls on wheels, the better to move them around when the studio has to meet a commission, and Fil and Janos have to labor long days and nights to get the job done. Fil is amazed that clients remember him and his work from way back and return to order new pieces. 

Fil also paints and sculpts as does Janos, but it’s in printmaking—the art of producing numbered copies of a design pressed on paper in limited editions—that you know his heart truly lies. I met Fil in the early 1970s in one of my past lives as a printmaker. He had graduated from his studies at UST, and I had just come out of martial law prison—where, to pass the time, I had taken up drawing with my fellow detainee Orly Castillo, who then took me under his wing at the Philippine Association of Printmakers in Ermita. The PAP was a hotbed of production for young artists then, and I was lucky to run into the likes of Bencab and Tiny Nuyda (not to mention a pretty girl named June “Beng” Poticar, who became my wife)—and yes, Fil de la Cruz, who even then was already establishing himself as a master of one of printmaking’s most difficult techniques, mezzotint, which produces an almost velvety texture. 

Perhaps because prints are relatively cheaper and come out in multiples, they’ve never quite gotten the respect they deserve, especially here in the Philippines, where the art market is enthralled by multimillion-peso paintings by the masters and by the exclusivity they exude. (Around 1974, when we were all working and hanging out at the PAP studio on Jorge Bocobo, it was a big day when a dealer came by to purchase our prints in bulk for as low as P15 per print, so she could stick them into frames she sold as décor to American servicemen in the bases.)

Fil’s come a long way from those days, and Bahaysining is a testament to his professional success, which has traveled a long arc from his youth in Bulacan and his student days at UST to further studies in New York and Paris, to over thirty solo exhibitions that have brought his prints to France, America, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Spain, Belgium, and throughout the Philippines.

As it was a sunny weekday, the drive to Los Baños didn’t take long through the Jamboree route. Junyee had offered to take all of us out to lunch, but of course we first had to see and tour his and Tess’ three-year-old home. 

To know Junyee—“Luis Enano Yee Jr.” on his birth certificate—is to understand how inseparable art and life can be in the person who, from his youth onward, has seen art not only as descriptive or decorative but liberative, rooted yet transcendent, impermanent yet memorable. Widely acknowledged to be the father of installation art in the Philippines, Junyee has always been testing and pushing the boundaries of art, unbothered by commercial trends. Whether he works with discarded wood, woven metal, or wisps of sooty smoke, Junyee seems compelled to give physical shape to our thoughts and emotions, often using outdoor space as his canvas.

Born in the South and discouraged by his father from pursuing his artistic inclinations, Junyee fled to Manila and UP, where he apprenticed with Napoleon Abueva and found support from Jose Joya—masters whom he would soon surpass in competitions. Caught in the insurgent politics of the sixties, Junyee crafted work like his “Balag” trellis on which protesters could hang their slogans, but unlike many other artists of his time, he never let ideology dictate his insight and technique. He would later devote most of his art to environmental themes.

This was most evident in his new home, a modestly modern structure from the outside, nothing showy, but warm inside with wood, stone, and other natural elements, from the balayong door to the leaflike tapestry to the upturned hammock serving as a lampshade. 

Welcoming our party, Junyee points to a blank wall and remarks with a chuckle that something big used to hang there but had to be let go of, presumably for his crushing medications. It’s one of the few times he’ll advert to his maladies, of which he—and Fil for that matter—don’t make a big thing. When Junyee learns that Fil is similarly afflicted, the men knowingly embrace and call each other “classmate.” They smile, they laugh, they speak excitedly of the work that occupies their waking hours. There’s no time to be glum. Fil and Janos keep racks of sporty bicycles at home, hanging from the ceiling; Junyee shows off a gleaming high-performance BMW motorbike which he received from a patron, adding with a chuckle that “I don’t even know how to ride one!”

Over lunch at a favorite restaurant nearby, we have an animated discussion of AI and its likely effects on art and literature. I expect them to resist, but Junyee in particular is surprisingly open to the possibilities of hybridizing art and technology, as I am. “I’ve always been a fan of science,” he says, “and when I write my memoirs, which I’ll be doing soon, I’ll make sure to include a section on how science has influenced my life and work.” But even more useful and valuable than science for both men right now is faith, and Fil and Junyee speak unabashedly of how their faith strengthens them through their trials. As an installation artist, Junyee has never worried about transience and impermanence. “Everything in this world will pass anyway,” he says.

We pay a visit to the Sculpture Garden that UP Los Baños has put up on campus to showcase some of Junyee’s most important pieces. It is an outdoor gallery of some of his finest pieces, displaying the full range of his concerns, techniques, and capabilities. It’s hugely impressive, but Junyee makes it clear that he isn’t done yet. Across his home, he is constructing an art museum that he hopes will help spark a cultural renaissance in Los Baños, better known for agriculture and forestry, which Junyee’s art has also tapped into. His labors have not gone unnoticed; on top of his numerous local and international awards, Junyee will soon be receiving the highest recognition his alma mater can confer, among the worthiest of its recipients.

Neither is Fil de la Cruz resting on his laurels. He’ll be showing his newest paintings in an exhibit titled “Ephemeral & Eternal” opening next Saturday, August 8, running until the 22nd at Art Camp in Greenbelt 5, Makati. “The central thesis of the exhibition revolves around the duality of existence—the fleeting ‘ephemeral’ moments of lived experience versus the ‘eternal’ span of divinity,” according to the exhibit notes. “De la Cruz does not present time as a linear progression but as a divine force, encompassing all. In this series, he treats the passage of time not with anxiety, but with a refined serenity and deep reverence, seeking to capture the precise point where the transitory nature of life intersects with the infinite.” 

It’s as good a description as any of that trip to Los Baños and of our visit to these artist-friends’ homes, at this point between our shared past and the eternity that beckons to all of us.

Penman No. 486: The Ghosts of Our Fathers

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Penman for Sunday, June 21, 2026

TALKING ABOUT how memory softens loss in Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes that “He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” 

As I’ve discovered from my friends and from people I know, father-son relationships are often fraught with conflict and tension, especially from those childhood and growing-up years when emotions are raw and expectations run high. There’s a host of theories to explain the problem—Oedipal competition, the emotional detachment of fathers, bars set too high, among others—but whatever causes the pain, it tends to linger, until we learn to relinquish our grievances to time and age.

I’ve been more fortunate in my experience, but I’ve asked three writer-friends to share theirs, and to embrace the ghosts of our fathers that will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

Butch Dalisay

I’ve often written about my dad, Jose Sr., whom I grew up idolizing not just because he was intelligent, but also because he was very resourceful or maabilidad, as they say. He was well known in Romblon to have been the province’s smartest young man at that time. And he would have gone on to a law degree and a distinguished career by everyone’s reckoning, except that his family was poor. And while my mother was someone who came from a family of means in Romblon, shortly after they married and had me, the first of their five children, the family fell on hard times when he lost his job. 

He worked for the Motor Vehicles Office. He worked for the Department of Public Works and Transportation as a clerk, but there were very difficult periods when my father took on jobs far beneath his competence. He did not think it beneath him to work, for example, as a barker for jeepneys just to put me and my siblings through school with the help of my mom, who was a postal employee.

I hero-worship him despite the fact that he was deeply flawed. He was a gambler, which probably explains why I’m an avid poker player to this day. I could remember the smell of the pancit that would announce a night of winnings, but more often than not, he would come home quiet early in the morning, and I kind of understood what had happened. Once he brought home a brand-new Singer typewriter to encourage the young writer in me, only to have it vanish when he couldn’t keep up with the installments.

It was my father who introduced me to reading and writing. He was an excellent writer himself, and the governor of Romblon relied on him to write his speeches and to become a kind of secretary and recorder for this and that. It was a role that he would play all throughout his life, even in his old age, as a barangay official, someone who would help people in our village in San Mateo with their paperwork. He introduced me to reading because there were many things to read in the house, Time magazine and Reader’s Digest, and soon books. 

He was a gentle, loving man who adored my mom Emy and took good care of us in ways more than money could. My wife Beng and our daughter Demi cherished him. When he died of an aneurysm at age 73 in 1996, I was crushed, and I treasure the times when we meet in my dreams, walking on the shore of our hometown in Romblon. 

I owe him the gift of words, which I am now passing on to others.

Krip Yuson

Armando Sison Yuson came from Lingayen, Pangasinan. He tried to be an Air Force pilot before World War 2, but cut out at some point. His father wrote poems in Spanish and Pangasinense, as I’ve been told by writer-friends from the region. 

I can’t really share much or anything else about my dad, except that we had a falling out when I was 16, after he became too religious and wanted everyone in the family to pray the rosary every day to start the evening. I couldn’t do it after the first few days, and said so. Nothing he said could change my mind. It broke his heart, and he blamed everyone, including himself, for allowing his firstborn to enter UP after graduation from San Beda, proving his fears right that I had joined an atheist university. My doubts about faith actually began a year earlier, and were resolved when I read Robert Green Ingersoll at the UP library: “Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

My dad (called him that because he was an Amboy) and I never became close again. As an early barkadista, I spent more time away from home. He passed away when I was 32. I tried writing a poem on him for almost a year, but gave it up. The following year, 1978, I was on my first week at the International Writing Program in Iowa City when I felt his presence in my Mayflower Apartments room as I was turning in. I recall saying out loud, “Dad, must you follow me here?” 

I couldn’t sleep. A poem started in my head, a triplet of a stanza, immediately followed by another, and another. Before my memory could give out on more lines, I got up and started pounding away on my typewriter. The lines followed until I completed the poem. My first experience of automatic writing. When I checked the page in the morning, I decided there was nothing I had to revise. It became one of my most favorite and most anthologized poems. Here it is, written in 1978. 

Father (from Sea Serpent, 1980)

Must everything begin and end 

with tension, as with father and son,

the memory of games and sins between?

In the hospital I watched your heart

tighten its flutter across a screen, a moth

blipping from breath to breath

and finally arriving at a pinpoint

of dark, the last light a feint

that threw me off your sorry hint.

Entering your deathroom I came

upon a sad peace, bent toward time

And kissed you; you were him.

Pressed your hand and in a wild

appeal to chance thumped a child’s

blow upon your chest, a field

I wanted to revive and roam

upon some more, though the dusk of the dream

hurried me along toward half a home.

Sarge Lacuesta

My father, Amado Lacuesta, Jr. quit his high-profile job at one of the country’s pioneering investment banks to become a full-time screenwriter. I don’t know if it mattered that there were four of us kids and that I was just entering high school. But because of his life decision he showed me a life that was so rare and so special that I
felt privileged to be a part of it. I would tag along to his tapings, his shoots, and his brainstorming sessions as his semi-official sidekick. Never mind that it was a school night or that the discussion—or worse, the proceedings—were not really appropriate for
someone my age.

It’s been almost 30 years since he died of a heart attack at the age of 49. I was 26—so long ago that I don’t really remember many details of him anymore. That’s more years without him than with him, so that is fair. I am also older now than he ever would have been, and there’s a lot of disconnect between who I am now and the son that I was.



But what has rubbed off on me during our years of father-and-sonhood has stayed, for better or for worse. I am overly critical of others and blind to my own faults like he was. I remember him critiquing a writing exercise I performed for him when I was ten or eleven years old, mainly by laughing at my cliches and tired turns of phrase. I am as idealistic and often as detached from reality as he was. At EDSA, he used his own car—the only car we had—to physically block the path of the tanks that were rumored to roll into White Plains Avenue.

Now I am my own father, in every sense of the phrase: I’ve lost a large part of him, but a large part of him I can’t help but carry around.

Charlson Ong

My father Conrado was a rather laidback fellow whom I think would have been more successful in another time and place. As a second-generation Chinoy born and raised in Binondo, he ended up as a business person—and, in my recollection, a rather reluctant one. He was always too trusting of friends and spent on not a few turkeys, like real estate that disappeared after landslides and high tides. I always thought his passion lay elsewhere.

In hindsight he passed on some opportunities that might have led to bigger prospects but I guess he was never the sort who ‘bore into the money hole’ as the Chinese would have it. He perhaps never had the drive or risk taking personality, content to raise a comfortable middle class family—we were three kids, I was the youngest—with vital help from our mother. There never much issue between us, as I was youngest and when I was born in 1960, my parents were more or less settled. I know he worried for me because of my interests but never interfered with my life choices, I feel he regretted not being able to leave behind enough for me to engage my whims without having to worry about livelihood.

He loved cars and, I’d like to think, singing. He was a very good baritone who took lessons in his younger years with an operatic singer. But he had difficulty with the Italian and French lyrics and eventually gave it up. But some Sundays he would sing Chinese ditties while our mom, a piano major, accompanied. In long drives—before the time of car stereos , cartridges,  cassettes, Spotify—during the 1970s and ‘80s, he would sing to himself just to stay wake driving while I pretended to sleep. But the songs embedded themselves into my psyche—romantic ditties of the 1950s and art songs of the 1930s while China waged its war of resistance against Japan and warlords. Whenever requested to sing Chinese songs, I draw on this repertoire of oldies.

He had an innate heart condition we now refer to as “athletes’ heart.” He had a health crisis as a younger man in his 30s but once it passed gave he gave in to his epicurean instincts and a two-pack-a-day smoking habit. By the 1980s he had his first heart attack but there was nothing much the technology of the time could realistically do.

In October 1987 he had his second attack. I was scheduled then for my first trip to China for the premiere of Eddie Romero’s Hari sa Hari—a co-production between the Philippines and China about the Sultan of Sulu and his embassy to the Ming emperor.

I thought my chance to go to China had passed, but my father recovered briefly and sent me on my way—I always felt he wanted me to experience the old country. But shortly after I left he suffered his third attack. This was before the the Internet, so for the week that I was in China I was blissfully unaware that he was fighting for his life. 

When I returned, I had to rush to the hospital and upon arriving, I found out he had just passed away. He was 57. I did not witness his final days, but the lore remains that while he was in and out of lucidity, he had some clear moments, and when our plane landed in Manila he was supposed to have uttered—his tongue had receded by then—that ‘They have alit, my youngest is home.’ Until this day I can never recount that tale without tearing up and I was able to mourn him only through some of my later fiction. Still whenever I am bamboozled to sing, willingly or otherwise, I know that his voice is there.

Qwertyman No. 192: Apple@50 in a World@War

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 6, 2026

A REEL circulated recently online explaining the origins of the ubiquitous Internet symbol @ for “at,” tracing it back to medieval monks seeking a shortcut and to merchants using it to mean “at the rate of,” and then finally to a coding convention adopting it to link a computer user’s name to his or her domain or location.

I found it fascinating because I’m something of a geek, a failed scientist who had to switch from Engineering to English because I couldn’t hack the math, who ended up channeling his digital side (as opposed to the analog, which collects vintage fountain pens and antiquarian books) into a decades-long devotion to Apple computers and to nearly everything Apple produced. I even chaired the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (PhilMUG) back in the mid-1990s when the handful of us felt like early Christians in a pagan universe. We had monthly get-togethers in small restaurants to unbox the latest SCSI peripherals and discuss the newest features of System 8.0. I prided myself in the fact that I could strip and reassemble a PowerBook Duo practically blindfolded. 

I mention this because Apple has just marked its 50th anniversary, having been founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne with a machine cobbled together in a garage. After slogging through its first decades as a distant competitor to the more popular Windows PC, Apple finally achieved global domination after coming out with such game-changers as the colorful iMac, the iPod that made you smile the minute you put your earphones on, the ultraportable iPad, and of course the indispensable iPhone. 

As industry observers noted early on, the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t just in its products, but in creating the need for them; you didn’t know how irresistible the iPhone was until you held one. Apple and its passion for personal computing—not just the hardware but an entire lifestyle ecology that integrated communication and writing with music and photography—arguably changed the world, or at least hastened its evolution.

But enough of the proselytization. I’m not writing this piece to sell you another Mac, which God knows Apple doesn’t need another endorser for. Instead, that half-century of Apple that just went by gave me pause to wonder where all that early joy of tech has gone, and indeed where technology has led us and will yet take us. 

Like many early adopters, as we were called then, I recall the inimitable thrill of trying out a new machine, an operating system, or a program—something to make life and work easier and faster than before, another bold step into the future, a declaration of faith in the power of technology to transform life and indeed the world itself. New technology arrived with the presumption of goodness and optimism—that it would bring relief to global poverty and hunger, find a cure for cancer and other human ailments, improve education, and generate jobs for billions; it would draw more people into the circle of development, empower the oppressed, and induce social equity. With the advent of the Internet, more doors and barriers came crashing down. We could express ourselves publicly, bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information, challenge authority, build communities of common interest, expose falsehood and spread the truth, and create a truly transparent, interconnected, and progressive global society.

The kind of tools that Apple and its competitors produced were supposed to assist that project. They did—and again they did not. Instead of tearing down walls between people, the Internet raised new ones, behind the anonymity of which we could tear each other down. Computers and smartphones now facilitate disinformation, human trafficking, money laundering, and all manner of scamming.

Worst of all, technology has made it easier to wage war and kill people (like it always has). From Desert Storm back in the early 1990s to the present Iran War, military assaults and even mass slaughter have assumed the sanitizing cloak of an e-sport, a posture Trump and his war gamers have actively adopted, reducing casualties to memes. Indeed the US-Israeli attack on Iran has now been called “the first AI war,” as an article by Michael Brown on Forbes.com substantiates:

“When I became the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Pentagon in 2018, Project Maven was already underway. Long before LLMs, DIU was supporting Project Maven with several vendors to improve computer vision, an AI capability to distinguish among objects in satellite imagery to save analysts studying pixels…. That legacy led to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, today’s cornerstone of the U.S. military’s AI-powered operation. Maven fuses satellite imagery, drone video feeds, radar data, and signals intelligence into a single interface, allowing operators to classify targets, recommend weapons, and generate strike packages in near real time. The results have been staggering: more than 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign, a tempo that would have been unthinkable with purely human targeting processes. That tempo has been maintained with only 10% of the human analysts that would have previously been required to strike 1,000 targets daily.

“Yet the system’s limitations are equally revealing. Maven’s overall accuracy hovers around 60 percent, compared to 84 percent for human analysts. Palantir’s CTO nonetheless declared it ‘the first large-scale combat operation driven by AI,’ a characterization that raises questions about the ethics of AI-driven targeting and the adequacy of civilian protection safeguards.”

Of course it would be unfair to lay responsibility for this on the doorstep of Apple or other tech giants today—barring those who, unlike Anthropic, have actively lent their resources to Trump’s war machine. The companies known to have supported Israel’s military capabilities include Palantir, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and G42 (and yes, that’s according to AI). While the biblical prophets called for swords to be beaten into plowshares, somebody found a way to turn high tech’s plowshares into guns and missiles. 

And then again, as the gun rights advocates always say, “Guns don’t kill—people do.” With some people being so stupid and devoid of conscience, why should we even wonder if and when AI will work better than the human brain? That already happened, more than fifty years ago.

Email me at jdalisay@mac.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.

Penman No. 484: The Romance of Retro

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Penman for Sunday, April 5, 2026

LATE LAST month, over two frenetic days at the Fairmont Hotel in Makati, more than 3,000 attendees crowded into a ballroom and the corridor outside for the sixth iteration of the Manila Pen Show since 2018. Not only did dozens of dealers and vendors coming from as far away as Russia and Turkey offer trays and tables full of pens, inks, and other writing paraphernalia. Seminar rooms were packed full of people learning how to adjust nibs, use fountain pens for painting, and master calligraphic strokes. What was most obvious and rather surprising was that the vast majority of attendees weren’t old fogeys like me who grew up with fountain pens, but young professionals and students eager to get their first Sailor, Pilot, or Pelikan—or even a five-figure Montblanc or Nakaya. 

The MPS is run by the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, a group of enthusiasts that began with 20 people in our front yard in 2008. Now FPN-P counts 16,000 members online, from the Philippines and parts beyond—and if you think most of those people are idle lurkers, wrong: more than 9,000 of them participate actively on FPN-P’s Facebook page. And again, here’s the killer factoid: the group’s median age is somewhere between the late 20s and early 30s, clearly marking a demographic shift in the hobby from my fellow dinosaurs to the young bucks.

And it isn’t just pens. Everywhere around the world, young people are picking up and using typewriters, mechanical watches, film cameras, vinyl records, and pretty much anything older than they or even their parents are. They’re even wearing (after actively hunting down and paying big money for) torn jeans and ratty flannel shirts from the 1950s.

The romance of retro is definitely in the air. Whether it’s old tech or vintage clothing, the urge to try something old is palpably present, and “palpable” may be apt, because much of this fascination, according to the experts, has to do with the sense of touch. 

Beth McGroarty, the research director at the Global Wellness Institute, argues that “studies show that people are hardwired for things like touch from infancy,” and frames the analog revival as “a rebellion against that shapeless, disembodied, throwaway digital world of screens, and a hunger for physical objects and tools that are touchable.” 

That’s certainly true for fountain pens, which are as tactile as tools can get, and with which users establish intimate relationships. The act of writing with a pen represents the completion, commitment, and communication of an idea, a thought that starts from the writer’s brain, and gets processed by the writer’s emotions as it travels to his or her fingertips. The pen’s nib and ink commit the thought to paper and give it permanency, but also mediates it—you can often tell what the writer’s mood is by the shape and the sharpness and the fluidity of the written word. For young people growing up with keyboards, cursors, and block letters on an indifferent screen, nothing could be more different, because more personal, more “Me!”

That’s true even for typewriters, which—thanks largely to Manila-based repairman Gerald Cha and the Filipino Typewriter Collectors group on Facebook (yes, I’m also one of the organizers)—have attracted many young enthusiasts. They seem to be little more than clunky pre-computers at first glance—metal machines using greasy ink ribbons without “delete” buttons and no connection to the Internet—but it’s precisely this isolation that’s become its main draw for young users.

According to Walid and Joujou of Mr & Mrs Vintage Typewriters in the UK, who have restored thousands of machines over the past decade, the soaring interest has been driven by what they call “a craving for authenticity and quiet.” Now “quiet” isn’t a word you normally associate with the clackety-clack of an Underwood or a Remington. But take typing as a rejection of digital noise, which is what the many thousands of typewriter collectors around the world profess to like about their Olympias and Olivettis—complete disconnection from the outside world, replaced by total focus on what you’re typing, which you can’t simply erase without making a mess. Handwriting and typing demand deliberation.

So does, for that matter, film photography, to which young people are returning in droves, as if film were some holy membrane to be treated with respect if not awe (an attitude encouraged by the eye-watering price of film plus processing). I have a good friend who, like many millennials, turned away from megapixels and pocketable phone cameras to embrace expired Tri-X and clunky RB67s. I’d kid him about spending a fortune on his new passion and for thinking every shot through before pressing the shutter button—the mark of the classic photographer, a la Henri Cartier Bresson in wait of the “decisive moment”—only to send the roll through for digital conversion. But I can understand his commitment, because it’s about more than photography; it’s a decision to take fuller control over sensors and algorithms, to almost literally stamp one’s vision over the image, in defiance of AI, putting natural beauty over artificial prettiness.

And then there’s the element of what researchers call “meta-nostalgia,” a longing to capture and reinterpret the past on one’s own terms. In a world hurtling forward into the void, the imagined past offers clarity and security, if only because it already happened. Writing with a pen—especially a vintage one that your Lolo or Lola might have exchange love letters with—returns us to a fantasy of innocence (forgetting, of course, that someone like Josef Stalin signed death warrants with a tiny Pelikan 100–the pen beneath the Leica in the pic above). 

But returning to pens, it was clear from the MPS that this wasn’t a jump back to the ‘40s or ‘50s, except for the few of us who specialize in that period. The “kids,” as Beng and I like to call them, were buying pens to play with, employing a raft of designer inks that not only sheened but shimmered, most definitely no longer your Lolo’s reliable blue-black Quink. They also brought and bought journals, cases, stamps, washi tapes, and such accessories as make not just a hobby but indeed an industry. 

Retro is back with a vengeance, and as we oldies—the so-called “OGs”—sat back and marveled at what the young ones were willing to spend on what we used to think of as no more than writing tools, one of them came up to us with a flashy pen and said, “In fifty years, this will be vintage!” Indeed. Sooner or later, we’ll all belong to the past, and as today’s Gen Z’ers are beginning to realize, it can be far more fun and comforting than the uncertain future.

Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.

Qwertyman No. 191: A Letter to Julie

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 30, 2026

I HAVE a dear friend in America named Julie Hill whom I have written about before, an old friend of our country and people. She turned ninety this past week, amid a host of personal challenges that come with age and with living alone. A prolific and published author whose books I edited, Julie was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to the US for graduate school. She traveled and lived around the world, including Manila, with her late husband Arthur, and served as a multinational executive before retiring to Southern California. She has returned to the Philippines many times to visit with her old friends and quietly supports some private charities. 

When I last came to see her last year, despite her own mounting needs, she graciously donated a substantial amount to the University of the Philippines in aid of UP’s poorest students. Despite the entreaties of concerned friends, she refuses to be confined to a nursing home, preferring the company of her memories to the chatter of strangers. She can sometimes be lonely and fearful, but she is proud and brave, and the horizon she gazes at stretches far longer than we can imagine. I thought of writing her this birthday letter to cheer her on.

Dear Julie,

With your ninetieth birthday coming up in a few days, a lot must be going through your mind. I don’t know if your roses are blooming and your oranges fruiting outside your window, but I hope they are, because they always bring you joy and delight, of which our world is desperately short these days.

You have been around that world and have seen both the best and the worst of it. Over the five travel books and memoirs I have edited for you, you found kindness and humanity in the earth’s farthest reaches, and you singled out the Philippines for your warmest affections. Even before we met, you established lifelong friendships with many Filipinos, and continued to visit them and to maintain a special relationship with this place.

And thus you would have seen that the Philippines you knew half a century ago is far different today in many ways, yet unchanged in others. You came here with your husband Arthur, when the Ford Foundation sought to help Philippine education and rural development—priorities which remain unmet. Our population and our cities have grown far beyond their capacity to sustain a decent living. Manila now teems with tall buildings and sleek condominiums, at the literal feet of which the hovels of the poor abound, a cliche we’ve become inured to, and accept as God’s design. We breed children we can barely feed, who can’t read, who seemed doomed to servitude.

Your generous donation to the University of the Philippines, meant to help the poorest of UP students complete their studies, will provide some much-needed hope and relief. While intervention at the college level is often too late for these children, your support, and that of others, gives them a fighting chance. Beyond external assistance, we need massive educational reform, which will require a singular and strategic will on the part of our government to invest in our natural intelligence, before we even speak of AI and other shortcuts. Sometimes I think we need to love ourselves enough.

And so is America changed as well—no longer the welcoming sanctuary you found when you fled Nasser’s Egypt to study in Minnesota, but a paranoid society, hostile to foreign faces, accents, and ideas. You know this yourself, living in an affluent community whose manicured lawns are dotted with MAGA flags. I’ve met some of your neighbors over lunches in your home, and they’re very nice people, except for their politics, now explainable only in terms of mass hypnosis or idolatry. 

For how else could otherwise well-educated and upright citizens condone and even applaud a mad megalomaniac who starts a war without knowing why, delivering death and suffering the world over? What does it say of people happy to be led by a man utterly without morals, without conscience, and without compassion? Not long ago, with appalling but typical coarseness of spirit, this draft dodger publicly celebrated the passing of a combat veteran he saw as his enemy—an act of crass cowardice to which his followers turned a blind eye.

I’m reminded of those science-fiction movies from the 1950s, where your smiling, all-American neighbors turn out to be aliens beneath the skin, except that, ironically, today we are the aliens, to be excluded and exterminated by ICE, the American Gestapo.

I told you that I’ve sworn not to revisit the US until after Trump and his kind are banished from office, which makes me feel sorry that Beng and I might not see you again for some time, if ever again. The fare situation seems to have made that moot. The way things are going, we can’t even afford a flight down south, let alone across the Pacific. To all those MAGAs and Fil-Ams who tell us to butt out of US politics because it’s none of our business, well, here’s the g—d—n proof: never mind my bellyaching about plane tickets and all the nice beaches I’m missing out on; our jeepney drivers are plying the streets for 12 hours a day with tears in their eyes because they can’t even make enough to cover the gas they’re consuming, let alone pay their operator their “boundary” or daily minimum. When our oil supplies drain out in a few weeks, the agony will worsen. Beng and I will get past this—we’ve been through worse—but the suffering for many poor Filipinos will be incalculable.

I know that you, too, are suffering the aches and pains of old age, and that my periodic bouts with sciatica are nothing compared to yours. Twenty years ago when we first met we were still flush with energy and optimism, full of ideas about books to write and places to go. We wrote most of those books and followed our respective itineraries. When you come to think of it, we’ve led far fuller lives than most people can even dream of.

We can be thankful for the past and for the life partners we have been blessed to share this journey with. We could not have been more fortunate than for you to have had Arthur for half your life and  for me to have Beng for most of mine. But we are not quite done yet. 

We cannot let the bastards win. Our mission is to survive—and to survive them. If only for that, you have to live to 95, or even beyond that, and I have to do the same, so that we might, before finally exiting, regain our cheer, enjoy humor without irony, feel unmitigated joy. Be strong, be safe, and bask in the afternoon sun.

Affectionately,

B.

Qwertyman No. 190: Beyond Survival

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 23, 2026


PARDON ME for this rambling piece this week, which I’m writing in a stupor, blindsided by the sudden, heartbreaking loss of a friend. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this state of disorientation, of looking for a center or an anchor to stabilize at least our view of the horizon. Every day we come across so many deaths on Facebook, amid hundreds of faceless thousands more around the world—much too many to mourn, even counting just your friends.

It’s been a tough time for many, with a war halfway across the planet casting a dark red shadow on us and our pedestrian lives, far out of sight and out of mind of Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran, but ever vulnerable to the subterranean tremors of politics and economics snaking around the globe.

A viral post tried to make the best of that by reminding us that at least we’re not dodging missiles. That’s true, but it doesn’t remove the cloud of fear and uncertainty we’re living under—not to mention the pain of brutal price increases, which is what Donald Trump’s war comes down to for 98 percent of the world.

I’ve heard many friends and even strangers saying that despite all the aggravations we face today as Filipinos—the corruption, the inefficiency, the pollution, the noise both physical and political—they’re relieved to be where they are, instead of being somewhere out there under constant threat of death falling out of the sky. I’ll admit to feeling the same way, and that I even feel safer to be here today than in America, which I have no intention of revisiting until after the Trumpian nightmare is over.

No, this isn’t another piece about “resiliency,” although there’s certainly that, at least as a way of putting a good face on a bad experience. Rather I’m thinking about how we survive at all, beyond meeting economic needs, about prevailing meaningfully as humans with purpose and dignity and even hope in this horribly oppressive and degrading environment.

The fact is, people learn to adjust soon enough to adversity and privation, excepting such extremes as Stalingrad and Gaza, where sheer survival may have been heroic enough.

Nick Joaquin recalls in Manila, My Manila how quickly the city’s inhabitants fell back on their old routines after the first bombs exploded and the Japanese marched in. The shows reopened, the restaurants thrived, pedestrians bowed to the sentries, and life continued. Certainly there was terror and suffering aplenty, but until famine hit them, followed yet later by the horrors of the Japanese withdrawal, many Manileños apparently coped with the war.

Even closer to the present, we seniors well know what it was like in the early years of martial law, when, as if domestic turmoil weren’t enough, we were hit by a global oil crisis triggered by another Mideast war. The buzzwords then were “austerity,” “alcogas” and “Asiong Aksaya.” We mixed corn with our rice. We complained, we resisted, we struggled, we suffered—but we survived.

I have to remember these when I think of how confused and depressing the present can be, and how pointless it may seem to persevere, especially when we turn on the news or go online. We seem surrounded by hostility and indifference, by death and sorrow—and yet, just as insistently, goodness, creativity, and courage abide, our handmaidens and henchmen, the torchbearers of our humanity.

Last week, on one particularly busy day, my wife Beng and I attended two consecutive book launches.

The first, in Makati, was by our friend Erlinda Panlilio, who had been my student in a graduate writing class more than twenty years ago. Linda was among several women enrolled in Creative Nonfiction—all of them already accomplished in their respective fields—who thought that the time had come to gather and preserve the wealth of their memories in a book. I was less their teacher than their enabler, and many if not most of them subsequently published outstanding memoirs that looked back on lives well lived—not just in privilege as you might expect but in struggle, whether in business, love, conflict, or self-fulfillment.

Aside from many other compilations she’s edited, this was Linda’s third book (and she claims her last as she is now in her eighties, although no one believes her). The book, Saying Goodbye to the House, comes across as a valedictory, a summing-up of a long and fruitful life. At the launch, I said that it was important for senior voices like Linda’s to be heard in today’s frenetic, youth-oriented culture, which barely leaves time to pause, reflect, and rejoice as Linda does.

And then we moved back to Quezon City, where the young Cedric Tan was launching his second novel for young adults, a fantasy titled The Hotel Titania, in which a girl steps into a hotel that turns out to be full of magical beings. You could not imagine a sharper contrast with Linda Panlilio’s domestically grounded universe (which, being Filipino, has its touches of wonder as well). Cedric not only wrote a fantasy; by giving up his job to go full-time into writing, he’s living it, exploring territory at once exciting and fraught with danger.

Stepping into the car homebound after a day full of books and stories, Beng and I felt exhilarated, our confidence in the tenacity and the infinite variety of the human imagination restored. Against dismal reality, our memory and our curiosity would save us.

And then, as I was scrolling on my phone, came the stunning and crushing news that our friend, the veteran journalist and essayist Joel Pablo Salud, had succumbed to a heart attack. A recently professed Christian, Joel had fought hard for truth and justice, and he died a man of faith who knew where he was bound. Even among hard-bitten writers used to seeing the worst of things, the passing of someone so passionate about his craft, his convictions, and his family produced profound grief and consternation. Again we had to ask: why does God take the dearest of his creatures? Why does he bring so much suffering to the world?

And I think Joel knew the answer: so we could assert our humanity while we could, and among the best ways to do that is to employ our talents against surrender and despair. Every book we write does that. We seek survival not just to eat and breathe—but to love, to sing, to endure, to yet become.

PenmanNo. 483: High School Is Forever

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Penman for Sunday, March 8, 2026

ASK YOUR Boomer uncles and aunts what period of life shaped them the most, and I’ll bet you anything I have that their answer won’t be grade school, when they were still wetting their pants and wondering why God had to make the other, completely unnecessary sex as well. It won’t be college, either, by which time you were convinced you had the world figured out and that it was obliged to conform to your vision for it.

No, it’ll be that time of our lives that never seems to lose its vividness—not the metamorphosis of one’s body and of its most secret parts, not the quivering thrill of a first kiss or the crushing finality of a rejection, not the ecstasies and the embarrassments. That period, of course, is high school, when we all suddenly grew up, perhaps more in body than in mind.

If there’s any doubt that high school stays with us longest for the rest of our lives, just take a look at Facebook—today the social dominion of Boomers and Gen Xers, deserted by the young ones for Instagram, TikTok, and Discord. Some days you just don’t want to open Facebook because of all the flickering candles you’re bound to see—but you do, anyway, because you’re curious to know if Classmates X and Y are still together, how Classmate Z surely must have botox’ed or AI’d her way to that profile picture, and—on your Messenger or Viber group chat—when and where the next batch reunion is going to happen.

Ah, the high-school reunion! Time to look one’s best, to line-dance and to cha-cha, to trot out the family pictures, to share stories of doing the Camino and of struggling with sciatica, to scan the poundage on one’s old crush, to revive rumors and recriminations dormant for fifty years, to compare maintenance meds, Holy Land tour packages (well, maybe not right now), dermatologists and urologists, and adobo recipes. Most reunions are fun and happy, but not a few end up with someone grumbling, “I knew I should’ve stayed home!” While they say that time heals all wounds, nothing will tear the scabs off like a class reunion.

But then of course it all depends on the class chemistry, and I’m glad to report that mine has been blessed with extraordinary goodwill—maybe because, unlike many alumni batches, we don’t have class officers, we never published a jubilee yearbook (a surefire prescription for High School Horrors Part 2), and we don’t handle money beyond pooling it for impromptu causes.

A Subic sortie last weekend with my batchmates in the third cohort of the Philippine Science High School, which we entered in 1966, proved exactly that—get together for fun and food, no great overarching agenda like “Let’s contribute our talents to the betterment of the Filipino future!” (we’ve been doing that for half a century), just spend time chilling out, healing and commiserating, and feeling good to be alive, given that class reunions never really get larger over the years.

If there’s a group of people I know I should speak plainly and humbly with, it’s these guys and gals. If I think I’m smart, well, many of the folks I went to Subic with are certainly smarter—not just in math and science but in the complicated business of life itself (and I don’t mean just in making money—although some of them have done that quite nicely—but in such existential decisions as spending years in the revolutionary resistance and resurfacing to seek social justice in other ways). My friends are engineers, chemists, physicians, managers, educators, pastors, etc., all achievers and leaders in their own ways. But what I appreciate about them is that, in each other’s presence, no one feels obliged to boast about this and that—except perhaps about grandchildren. (Fair warning: if you start a bragging war in this company, you will lose.)

The thing about high school is that forty years down the road you could become a hotshot CEO or a senator, but your classmates will never forget when you were caught caricaturing the teacher or were busted by a crush or locked yourself in the restroom. High-school truths are for life, and you will never outlive your high-school self. That weekend in Subic allowed us to revert to those younger selves, albeit burdened by excess avoirdupois and challenged memory. 

My PSHS life was anything but studiously boring. I came in as the entrance exam topnotcher in 1966, almost got kicked out after our freshman year (my grade in English was 1.0 but in Math was 5.0, saved only by a letter of appeal in my best 12-year-old, 1.0 English).

Having gone to an all-boys elementary school, girls were an exciting mystery to me and I became something of a party animal and I jerked, boogalooed, and shingalinged to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, DC5, the Bee Gees, Herman’s Hermits, the Monkees, Spiral Starecase, Procol Harum, the Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, etc. etc. I sometimes came to these dances in a green-and-white striped turtleneck and red-and-green checkered bellbottoms. 

We watched “Woodstock,” “The Graduate,” and “Camelot” in the moviehouses of Avenida and Cubao, huddled around a black-and-white TV in a boarding house on Maginhawa Street to watch the moon landing, and marched in the streets shouting “Student Powah!” Our eyes popped when we stumbled on a cache of Playboy magazines in a friend’s house. We bought Lumanog guitars in Raon and followed “Shindig” and “Combat” and “Ang Hiwaga sa Bahay na Bato” on TV. Despite the Vietnam War and the stirrings of activism in our ranks, there was an innocence about the ‘60s that vanished in a poof when the ‘70s opened and the tear gas and the truncheons began to hurt us more than heartbreaks.

That weekend we didn’t talk about anything much more serious than ER and OR survival stories—followed by the familiar catalogue of metformin, statins, saw palmetto, vitamin XYZ—the sort of chatter that would turn Gen Zers catatonic. 

A war broke out above our heads and we all sadly agreed that the world we were leaving was worse than the one we entered. We knew something about wars, but thankfully also knew something about having a good time, in spite of time. We went home thinking that indeed, like it or not, high school is forever.

Qwertyman No. 184: What I Told the Fil-Ams

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 9, 2026

LAST WEEK, at the Executive House of the University of the Philippines where he officially resides, UP President Angelo “Jijil” Jimenez graciously hosted a delegation of about twenty Filipino-American business and community leaders from San Diego, California, led by our honorary consul there, Atty. Audie de Castro. 

I was happy and proud to have helped facilitate this visit, having some close personal and professional ties myself to San Diego. Our unica hija Demi married a San Diegan, and has happily lived there with her husband Jerry for almost 20 years now. My wife Beng and I visit her nearly every year if we can afford it. 

San Diego also happens to be where a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Julie Hill, lives in a lovely home in Rancho Sta. Fe. Julie stayed in the Philippines for some years many decades ago when her husband was the Ford Foundation representative here and fell in love with the country and its people, and despite having traveled and served all over the world, the Philippines retains a special place in Julie’s heart. The last time I dropped in on her a year ago, Julie (who’s approaching 90) announced that she was donating what came out to more than P20 million to help the poorest of UP students. Atty. De Castro helped to formalize that donation as our consul in San Diego, cementing our relationship.

Professionally, but through Julie’s recommendation, I also served as Pacific Leadership Fellow in 2014 at the University of California San Diego, where I had previously lectured on Philippine-American affairs. Beng, meanwhile, observed operations and state-of-the-art techniques at the Balboa Art Conservation Center.

In other words, we’ve established rather close ties to this sunny and vibrant city in Southern California, where many generations of Fil-Ams have taken root, mainly because of the US naval base there, where thousands of Filipino sailors recruited from the Philippines have served. That’s how Demi’s in-laws came to San Diego from Bicol, their children born as Americans but deeply mindful of their Filipino heritage.

Many of our visitors never saw the Philippines until they were grown up, and I think most were setting foot on the UP campus for the first time. So we gave them the warmest reception and the best orientation we could, and engaged them over lunch in a lively discussion.

One of them asked: “What is the Filipino dream?” My UP colleagues responded to that in various ways, coming from different technical and academic disciplines. I tried to give a pedestrian answer: “The Filipino dream is actually a fairly simple one: a roof over one’s head, food on the table, a good education for the children, peace and justice in our communities. We dream for our families. But like all seemingly simple things, achieving that dream is difficult and complicated.”

The visitors had earlier asked President Jimenez about UP’s role in national leadership, and beyond citing how many presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices we’ve produced—which, to be honest, has also contributed to the ruination of our nation—Jijil emphasized the value his administration places on service to the Filipino people, which can manifest even from beyond our shores. He spoke of UP sharing its knowledge and resources with other SUCs, of UP assuming its responsibilities as the country’s national university—a concept perhaps alien to the American situation but entirely relevant to ours. (I was aware, of course, that UP has many internal issues and priorities of its own to sort out—it always has, regardless of administration.)

A more challenging discussion was one that I had on the side with two ladies who admitted that they represented two ends of the American p0litical spectrum, but had managed to remain friends despite their differences. Their question for me was, what did I personally think of what was happening in America?

No longer in UP spokesman mode, I could have answered as bluntly as possible, but I wanted to give them the more nuanced answer their friendship deserved. 

I began by saying that I considered myself an exemplar of American colonial education, having gone to a private elementary school in the 1960s where I learned about “heifers” and “mackinaws” long before I ever got to see real ones, and even memorized American states and their capitals, to the dismay of my future American friends when we played Trivial Pursuit. I shed off much of the mystification as a student activist in the 1970s and took a far more critical view of the American influence over our history, economy, and politics. 

But the indoctrination was so effective that I retained a fundamental affection and even admiration for many aspects of American culture and technology, and maintained a lifelong and ultimately professional interest in the US. I studied and worked for five years in the Midwestern heartland, in Michigan and Wisconsin, I taught American literature—not just in UP but in America itself, to college students who seemed surprised that I seemed to know more about their country than they did. Not just because our daughter lives there, I continue to follow American affairs keenly, starting my day with the digital editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post (the latter now sadly degraded).

What I told them was that this America was no longer the America I once thought I knew and looked up to, despite its excesses. I said I thought I understood, at least in part, where MAGA was coming from, in the neglect of the American working class and their anxieties in a rapidly changed world. At the same time, Donald Trump had ridden on those grievances to empower and aggrandize himself and the billionaire elite, trampling on the very liberties that had once defined American democracy, imposing his racist and imperialist vision of America, and endangering global peace and security. The shootings in Minnesota were profoundly shocking and depressing. I said that as much as it saddened me, with loved ones in the US, I did not plan on visiting America again until this madness had passed. If even American citizens could be dragged by masked men into vans and summarily deported to El Salvador, then I did not want to risk an encounter with the American Gestapo.

I could have added that both Americans and Filipinos, as polarized as we have become, need to find some common ground, as we share problems that cut across our differences. Bu the time was short, and we sent our guests off with a smile.

Penman No. 482: Love in Ink: The Lost Art of the Love Letter

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Penman for Sunday, February 8, 2026

HAVING NO idea how Gen Z people write love letters (and if they even do), I asked AI, and this is what it told me:

“Gen Z love letters are characterized by digital-native, emotionally fluent, and, often, casual expressions that prioritize vulnerability, mental health, and boundary-setting. They frequently use lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats, and ‘ily’ (informal) or ‘love ya’ to avoid excessive intensity. Common themes include a rejection of traditional, performative romance in favor of ‘soft launching’ relationships (gradually revealing a partner online) and a focus on authenticity over aesthetics.”

I have to confess that the answer left me feeling much relieved to be 72 years old and increasingly irrelevant. If I were young and seventeen today but with the mind and heart that I had back in 1971, I seriously doubt that I could make a significant connection to the Gen Z girl of my dreams, from whom I would have drawn derisive laughter for a long, convoluted, meandering letter asking for a first date (I will neither confirm nor deny that this actually happened). I may have lacked in “emotional fluency,” but certainly not for words, which were all I had when, in 1973, I met a pretty girl named Beng and pounded her with prose, in my crabbed, ungainly penmanship using a technical pen; within months we were married (and still are, 52 years later).

Time was when love needed to be declared in big, bold, wet letters—and I don’t mean letters as in ABC, but letters as in pages of paper filled with scribbled and impassioned professions of affection, sometimes of hurt, sometimes of longing, but always of desire for the addressee. Setting everything else aside, overtaken and overwhelmed by this most urgent need, a man or a woman sat at a desk—or kitchen table, or any hard surface on a beach or a moving vehicle—and put pen to paper to release a flood of pent-up emotion. 

It all came down to the same three-word idea: “I love you” (sometimes, or more often, with a fourth word, “but”). As with love poems, some letters were better, more unique, more persuasive than others; most, in hindsight, were likely mawkish or mediocre. But rarely—except perhaps to writers keen on grammar and style—did literary merit matter, neither to sender nor receiver; the profession of love alone was monumental enough. Because it was handwritten and signed, it was personal and deliberate, a statement of commitment impossible to deny. 

Indeed what was thought to be intimate and ephemeral sometimes became history. Little did lovers realize or perhaps care they would become famous, and that their private correspondence would become known—thankfully not to their peers but to posterity and the critical judgment of strangers. 

In one of the books I treasure most in my library titled The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Correa de Lago Collection (Taschen, 2018), two envelopes offer proof of love affairs—illicit in this case, as all the parties concerned were married to someone else—between Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton, and between the revolutionary Leon Trotsky and artist Frida Kahlo (who had given the outcast Trotskys refuge in her home). 

This was the same free-spirited Frida who would write her husband Diego Rivera that “Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.” (To be fair to Frida, Diego was far more liberal with his vagrant attentions.)

In one of literary history’s worst-kept secrets, Vita Sackville-West would write to Virginia Woolf that “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia… I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality…. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.” 

Jose Rizal’s letters to Leonor Rivera were reportedly all burned, but as Ambeth Ocampo notes, two of her letters to Rizal survive, in which she uses the pseudonym “Taimis” and tells him that “I was very much surprised that you had a letter for Papa and none for me; but at first when they told me about it I did not believe it, because he did not expect that a person like you would do such a thing. But later I was convinced that you are like a newly opened rose, very flushed and fragrant at the beginning, but afterwards it begins to wither…. Truly I tell you that I’m very resentful for what you have done and for another thing that I’ll tell you later when you come.” We know how that story ended, with the both of them going their separate ways and marrying another, although Leonor was said to have pined for Pepe to the end.

Again thanks to Ambeth, I can quote Manuel L. Quezon’s 1937 letter to his wife Doña Aurora, where he engages in what today might be called “gaslighting”: 

“Darling, I am still wondering if you really think that I love you less. Please don’t doubt me, my love has never changed from the first day I have realized that I was in love with you. I have my weakness as you know, but, dear, it’s all superficial and you know also, that, except for the case of that bailarina, my weaknesses in this respect have not been serious. When you married me, you were frankly informed by me of my shortcomings. I did not want to deceive you by promising something that I could not fulfill. After we have been married you have placed [me], sometimes, in a position when I thought that it was better that I should not confess to you what I had done that might hurt your feelings, but I want you to know that whenever such a thing took place I have felt very bad about it, because nothing I dislike more than not to tell the truth and I always resented the fact that you should prefer to put me in such a situation, thus making me almost hate myself.”

That would still have been more preferable than receiving this ardent letter from a king, and falling for him: “But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant, (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only…. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart. No more, for fear of tiring you.” The recipient, Anne Boleyn, lost her head in more ways than one, and the sender, Henry VIII, went on to court her successor, Jane Seymour, who wisely returned his love letter unopened—sparking his interest in her even more intensely.

The letter I found too coarse and too embarrassing (brimming with scatological detail) to even quote was written by James Joyce to his wife Nora, but the technologically adept will surely find it online.

My own letters to Beng, and hers to me, are stored in a moldering box that occasionally gets lost and then resurfaces in a year or two, and when we go over them we laugh and cringe at their melodramatic prolixity, as though life itself would run out soon (as it did for many of our generation, under the cloud of martial law, and thus the urgency).

So how do the love letters that we—perhaps the last of the art’s practitioners—have written stack up against history’s and literature’s most memorable? But first, who are “we?”

The immediate “we” are members of our Fountain Pen Network-Philippines who still value and use pens for handwritten communication, beyond signing checks and office forms. Old fogeys like me naturally fall into that category, but surprisingly, given the fountain pen’s and handwriting’s resurgence as a form of protest, if you will, against digital homogenization, many younger people, even some Gen Z’ers, have taken up the cause. Ballpoints are all right—but there’s still nothing better than a vintage fountain pen nib, which flexes with pressure and gives the inked line more character, to convey emotion. 

From what I’ve gathered, the best love letters people write go far beyond the often vapid promises and profuse assertions of courtship. They’re unbidden reminders and reassurances of affection, a note quietly written in the morning, a message of congratulations. This, too, is love with a deeper, more hushed voice that comes with maturity and assurance.

I should take my own advice and write Beng more love letters with my hundreds of pens, every single act of which would validate that pen’s existence and probably exorbitant purchase price. I should employ all the colors of ink stored in the dozen bottles that crowd my desk to express love in all its shades and moods, in the same spirit that Robert Graves wrote: “As green commands the variables of green, so love my loves of you.”

But sadly this old man’s fingers have become cramped from being curled too long over keyboards, and can barely finish a page of handwriting before tiring. So instead—though not quite a Gen Z’er accustomed to “lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats”—I write articles like this and stories on Facebook that suggest, ever so obliquely, how central she remains to my life, albeit in Georgia 12 points and .DOCX rather than flowing script. My idle pens, dear Beng, are like the books I’ve yet to write for you, the words still forming in the opaque ink, like the colorful and wide umbrellas I keep buying to shield you with, waiting for rain. So there, and Happy Valentine’s.

Qwertyman No. 180: Resolutions We Can Keep

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 12, 2026

ALMOST TWO weeks after the New Year, I’m sure many of us are still struggling with the resolutions we made—you know, the same ones we announced a year ago, like losing weight, buying no more (supply the object—shoes, watches, dresses), emptying the closet, and being nicer to (supply the officemate or in-law). I had to think that there must be resolutions we can make and actually keep—not easy or frivolous ones, but resolutions that will make a real difference in how we think, behave, and live. Here’s what I came up with:

1. I will not help spread fake news and hoaxes. Fighting for the truth begins with a healthy skepticism and the patience to verify. There’s no such thing as “harmless” fake news passed on. 

Last year I had to gently warn a score of friends—smart people with outstanding reputations—who posted on Facebook about Meta claiming the rights to their pictures and about pages turning blue (“It really happened!”) It’s a hoax that’s been going around for years, I told them; there was no such thing as the post described. What’s the harm, they said, just wanted to be sure. Well, the harm is in the propagation; every repost expands the space for fake news to grow, and the poster’s credibility only magnifies it further. That credibility also takes a hit, when it’s shown to absorb and help spread falsehood. Next time, visit a reputable fact-checker like http://www.snopes.com to verify a dubious post. The days are gone when you can assume that what you see is true unless proven otherwise; if you have to assume anything, assume the opposite.

2. I will think before I respond. I will reserve judgment until I understand the situation better, with clearer context and trustworthy and verifiable sources. It’s been said that today, especially online and on social media, people don’t read to understand, but to reply. Many of us have trigger itch—the compulsion to react to and comment on anything and everything that crosses our gunsights. And we do that literally without second thought, drawing on little more than scant knowledge and ample prejudice, and the unflinching conviction that we are right. 

The rise of the provocative meme—extremely compact and blunt, digitally manufactured to make a very specific point—has made this even easier, more efficient and more vicious. Memes eschew context, and invite uncritical concurrence. When I see a witty meme, I might smile and even smirk—but I will pause before joining a bashing spree if I have the slightest suspicion that something isn’t quite right. And while I’m at it, I will keep my sense of humor; I will not be baited or feel obliged to respond in anger, and I will remember that forbearance or silence is not surrender, but often victory.

3. I will use AI responsibly. I will use it as an assistant, but not let it do my thinking for me. I will use it to learn, understand, teach, and create. I will not use it to lie, malign, exaggerate, or aggrandize. I will not pretend to know everything AI can do or is doing. I will neither fear nor ignore it, but I will be wary—especially if what it produces is too clean, too good, or too intent to please. Truth often has rough edges that AI could polish out, like it enhances our portraits. 

I was watching a video on YouTube last week that purported to show the detailed production process by which the fashion house Hermes made its hyper-expensive and hard-to-get Birkin bag (am no fashionista, but am deeply curious about that industry’s workings). The video went to great lengths to demonstrate why the company’s bags commanded such high prices—the quality of the leather, the workmanship, the exclusivity—in purposeful contrast to the numerous fakes being made of the popular bag. But there was something about that video that made me uncomfortable—it seemed too luminous, its people too handsome, its tableaux too staged. An outdoor scene, supposedly outside the boutique, gave it away: the large shop sign clearly said HERMEES, with the extra E; it was no mistake—a few scenes later, they showed the sign again. The whole video was AI-driven, and no human seemed to be home and sharp enough to note the error. Now, its content may have been entirely factual, but its implied condemnation of fakery in business can’t possibly be helped by such a clumsy use of AI. 

4. I will not expect of others what I cannot expect of myself. This was something I learned during martial law, when I was imprisoned with all kinds of people—activists and common criminals, from both privileged and impoverished families. There and elsewhere, I saw how people who could speak so boldly and so well about revolution and liberty could break, sometimes so easily, under pressure. I witnessed and understood the marks of torture. I realized that everyone probably has a breaking point. I wondered what mine was. (My dentist would later tell me that I had a high threshold for pain, which surprised me.) But I came away thinking that if I asked another person to make an extraordinary sacrifice, it should be something I would be willing and prepared to do as well. I say this not to excuse weakness in other people, but to demand more of myself.

I will, however, hold public officials to a higher standard. They chose to lead—for which many are also handsomely rewarded—and so they must prove themselves better than the led. I have a right to expect that my President and congressman will act more wisely and more responsibly than me.

That said, I will live as honorably as I can, despite and especially because of the morally degraded environment in which we find ourselves today. I will not abet corruption in any way. This might be the hardest of all to keep, given how we have all somehow been complicit in this crime.

5. I will be more charitable, and share more of what I have. I will rescue “charity”—among the most human of values—from the political dustbin to which it has been relegated as useless and even harmful tokenism. I’ve heard too many people speak loudly and articulately about big themes like “social justice,” “Gaza,” and “anti-poverty” without yielding a peso from their own pockets or actually doing something concrete for the afflicted. Give, or serve. If you can’t change the system, change a life—you might even change yours.