SHE’S HERE—that obscure object of my ardent and longstanding desire, the Agatha Christie fountain pen from Montblanc. If you see me walking minus an arm and a leg, that’s what it cost me—but I’m deliriously happy. Here’s that red-eyed beast up close (yes, those eyes are real rubies):
Penman for Monday, February 4, 2013
BEEN LOOKING for a DVD copy of the 1973 Hollywood musical Lost Horizon, a 1954 Omega Seamaster, a pair of Johnny Depp’s Moscot Lemtosh shades, an 11200-mAh power bank for your iPhone, or a 1988 Stipula Baracca limited-edition fountain pen? Well, I have—and I found them all, not in my neighborhood mall or ukay-ukay, but in that largest of global marketplaces, eBay.
I’ve been buying and occasionally selling on eBay almost from the very beginning, since December 1997, and now have a feedback of 520+ (thankfully 100 percent positive). In all those hundreds of transactions, I’ve had maybe three or four bum cases of sellers not delivering, or sending me bad stuff. All of those cases were sorted out and I was refunded, so I do believe eBay to be a generally safe place to shop, with lots of wonderful bargains to be had, but as with any marketplace physical or digital, it can be tricky for the unwary.
I thought of writing up this brief guide to shopping on eBay because, thanks to my recent articles featuring fountain pens, papers, and inks, I’ve been deluged with inquiries about where to find these items and for how much. In particular, vintage and premium pens seem to be in great demand—pens like the Montblanc 149 and 146, the Parker Duofold, Parker Vacumatic, and Parker 75, and 1920s Waterman pens with flexible nibs.
I’ve sold quite a few of these pens myself, having made a pledge (a pitifully weak one) to trim down my collection of about 200 pens by half. My recent acquisitions have tended to be more expensive, so to help assuage my wallet and my conscience, I’ve had to dispose some of my loot, if only to make room for more. That means that I have to find a steady and reliable source for pens both to resell and to keep, and that can only be eBay—where, at any given moment, there will be about 40,000 pens of all kinds to compete for my attention and my credit card.
So I’ve been telling my pen-seeking friends that they could save themselves a chunk of change by bypassing me and going straight to the source—where a slightly used Montblanc 149 (which sells new on Amazon for $810) might go for around $400. But I’ve also warned them that it’s going to be a slippery slope, fraught with dangers and risks—not to mention the biggest risk of all, which is to get infected with eBay shopaholia.
Even if you care nothing about pens, there are literally a million more things to be found on eBay.com and on its local site, eBay.ph—everything from a mummified monkey’s paw (which you can buy without bidding for $13.00) and an 1864 autograph of Abraham Lincoln (bidding starts at $4,995.00) to a 2012 Lamborghini Aventador (yours for $469,991.00). Very likely, they’ll be things you don’t need but will soon want—and want badly, so mind the following tips if you plan on shopping on eBay without risking your children’s inheritance or your marriage. I’m going to use pens to illustrate my points, but these tips can apply as well to cameras, shoes, bags, bikes, or whatever floats your boat.
1. Know what you’re looking for—know the product and its current market value. Do some research beforehand and establish what possible issues there might be with the item. For example, if you’re looking for a Montblanc, understand that vintage celluloid ones in good shape could command more than new ones in “precious resin”—but also that the 149 and 146 are the most faked pens in the world (along with the Parker Sonnet); eBay actually has a guide to determining fake MBs (which means, know your way around eBay as well). EBay’s “completed listings” is a great way to determine market value—look for the median price (discard lowest and highest prices) for a better sense of what you can expect to pay. Check other websites (Amazon, BestBuy, etc.) as well, because their special deals and offers could undercut eBay. I do most of my gadget shopping, for example, on dealmac.com.
2. Condition, condition, condition. In your enthusiasm for an item, you might forget to probe its condition. Read the description very well and look out for any flaws. Especially scrutinize all the pictures. (This also allows me to spot special features that others might miss—a broad stub on a nib, for example). I think I know pens well enough that I can tell make, model, year, and approximate value for most major brands on sight, but every pen is still unique once it’s up for sale. Keep an eye out for cracks, glue, broken tines, mismatched caps and barrels, discoloration, etc.
3. Set up a PayPal account. It will make your life a whole lot easier on the Internet, since PayPal has become a global standard for electronic payments. I’ve tied my PayPal to a specific bank account I use only for eBay transactions. Is it safe? Of course you’ll hear a horror story here and there, but in my own experience, eBay and PayPal have served me very well, settling questions and disputes and sending refunds very quickly in the rare cases of non-delivery I’ve encountered.
4. Keep looking. Since I now buy and sell pens, I check out eBay many times a day—I have it on my phone—and have set up search terms for my favorite items, like Parker Vacumatics. This enables me to find what I like quickly, in a marketplace where millions of items are up for sale at any given moment. Some of my best bargains have come when buyers in the US—my chief competitors—are literally asleep. I also check out ebay.uk and ebay.ca (the UK and Canada) and have found some of my best bargains there. The first thing I check is “newly listed”, further narrowed down to “buy it now”—this way I can catch the real bargains before anyone else does. Then I check “ending soonest.” You can also refine your searches, for example by looking just for “149” under “Montblanc” under “fountain pens.”
5. Check the seller’s feedback. I’d be wary of a seller with less than 95% positive feedback. He or she may not be a cheat, but has a poor service record (delayed mailings, no response, etc.)
6. Establish your bidding threshold early on. Don’t get caught in a bidding war with another bidder. These days, since I could be bidding on 20 items at any given moment (expecting to win maybe two or three), I just bid my maximum and forget about it until the last two minutes, which are really all that matters on eBay. Some people use sniping programs that let the computer make a last-second automated bid for them; I should, but have been too lazy to set one up, and I rather like the excitement of making the last-minute bid myself.
7. Figure out and factor in your shipping options. Since most of my purchases are made in the US, I use a US shipping address (my sister’s in Virginia) and aggregate my purchases there. When I’ve gathered a boxful, I ask my sister to ship them to Johnny Air Cargo in NYC, which forwards them to me in Manila a week later. I’m sure many of you have US relatives who can do this for you (just make sure that they’re willing—be very nice to them at Christmas). I’ve educated my sister on pens so she’ll know how to check out a pen when it arrives and how to handle and package them properly; and yes, I’ve given her a nice pen or two.
8. Pay promptly, and leave feedback. You’ll see how your own feedback will improve once you become a good eBay netizen.
9. If and when you encounter a problem, report it to eBay. They have mechanisms for dealing with problems like getting a defective item (unless it was so described) or not receiving an item you paid for at all. Take note that there’s a time window (45 days, I believe) within which complaints can be filed.
10. Don’t lose hope. I’ve lost out on bids for items that I’d coveted for years, but then found another one a week later, for cheaper. If you can’t find it on eBay, it probably doesn’t exist, or is illegal to own. For me, it’s fountain pen paradise, and another reason to wake up in the morning for.
Penman for Monday, January 28, 2013
ONE THING that fountain pen fanciers rather quickly realize is that their obsession (read: expenses) won’t end at buying another Parker, another Sheaffer, or another Pelikan. You can have bread without butter, or even without coffee on the side; but you can’t write without ink and paper, so that anyone who habitually buys and collects pens soon metamorphoses—even without meaning to—into an ink and paper hoarder as well.
Indeed, inks and papers have become collectibles on their own, and not necessarily together. I have friends who couldn’t care less about pens, but for whom the sheer texture and even the faint aroma of paper can trigger paroxysms of pleasure. These are the people who seek and haunt stationery and art-supply shops, pawing through exotic papers from Thailand, Japan, and Italy, paper that might not even end up being lettered on but pressed into some other service. (And while we’re on this subject, please, please never say “stationary” to refer to writing paper; it’s “stationery” with an E, referring to “stationers”—the people who, in medieval times, sold books in fixed places, as opposed to peddlers who went around with their wares.)
My wife Beng, a watercolor painter and professional art restorer, has one such mecca on 3rd Avenue in New York City, on the second floor of which, up a steep flight of stairs, can be found an astounding array of the world’s finest art papers. But when she visits, Beng’s not looking for paper to paint on; instead, she wants a delicate, silk-like paper made in Thailand that she can use to lay over and stabilize patches of paintings where the paint has begun to flake off.
Forty years ago, when I worked briefly as a printmaker (another of the many hats I’ve worn—and I still wear them now, the real ones!), I too rhapsodized over art paper—the thicker and creamier the better—and on good days or for special jobs, I’d splurge on Strathmore paper, whose texture somehow made any print I designed, however poorly, look rich.
Indeed, it seemed rich of me to get so picky about my papers when, just a few years earlier in my mid-teens, the only paper I knew and cared about was bond paper (the kopong bond we bought at the corner store for 5 centavos a sheet), ruled pad paper for school, and yellow legal pad paper. For special purposes, there was oslo paper and onion skin, and maybe when we got moony we bought some fancy stationery at the bookstore (mine had a picture of the Beatles on every sheet) to write the crush of the moment on (yes, all I’ve ever had in my meager arsenal all my life has been words, words, words).
I still look for good paper these days, but it’s no longer to woo the wenches with (better not, says Beng) nor to pen my next novel on, but simply to test my nibs and inks, like a driver might look for a pristine stretch of track on which to lay some nasty rubber.
And what’s to like and not like about paper? While many kinds of paper—especially the smooth ones—may all look the same from the top, on the microscopic level, they could vary a lot, in terms of the makeup of the fibers and how closely they’re packed together. That means that when the ink flows out of the pen’s nib and gets onto the paper, it will either hold together and more or less stay in one place, or spread out like mad through spaces in the fibers and saturate the paper in such a way that the ink will bleed through, or be visible from, the back side of the sheet.
This latter process is called “feathering” and “bleeding.” You’ll know that your paper feathers when the line you write quickly becomes thicker and fuzzier, sometimes to the point that the letters become hard to read; bleeding or bleed-through, on the other hand, is obvious when you turn the page over and can see the ink. Feathering, I think, is worse than bleed-through; at least you can write on just one side of the paper and still have something crisp and clear, but paper that feathers horribly will leave you with one big blur.
As a general rule, cheap paper—thin, with loose wood-pulp fibers—will feather and bleed. More expensive papers, such as those that use linen, will tend to be thicker and more compact, and therefore offer a more pleasant writing experience. A simple pad or notebook could cost many hundreds of pesos, especially if they sport leather covers and other accoutrements.
In our pen club, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, members are forever on the hunt for good but affordable writing paper, even as we may indulge ourselves in the occasional pad of proven performers like Clairefontaine and Rhodia, available in some local bookstores. One sad and surprising discovery that fountain-pen users make early enough is that the iconic Moleskine notebook—whose design I love and have offered whole essays to—isn’t fountain-pen-friendly at all, showing awful feathering and bleeding.
Thankfully, many alternatives to (and copies of) Moleskine now exist, some dearer and others cheaper. A recent experience of mine seems to prove a point. Feeling more expansive than usual on my birthday, I went to the bookstore and spotted a very handsome-looking, leather-bound Jadeco notebook with what appeared to be excellent paper; the tag price of nearly a thousand pesos made me gulp, but what the heck (as I often rationalize these days), at 59 I can excuse anything. I picked it up, paid for it out of my birthday budget, and soon confirmed my expectation that the paper would hold up well to runny fountain-pen ink. The following day, on another sortie to National Book Store, I saw a small spiral notebook (that’s all it says on the kraft-paper cover: “Notebook”) that cost all of P28; on a whim, I bought that, too, and discovered to my chagrin that it performed almost just as well as the Jadeco. I would later learn from friends that some good compromises can be found in the middle of these extremes; I found another one myself a week later, at Fully Booked, under the brand-name Schützen—a regular-sized spiral notebook for P285 that didn’t feather and bled just minimally.
This brings us to inks, which really deserve another column-piece on their own (which I’ll do some other time). Let’s just say for now that inks can even be more bewildering and exhilarating than paper, given the seemingly infinite range of colors and hues you can produce from a mixture of water and pigment. Some inks are also thicker and more saturated than others; some are permanent, and others washable. Some specialty inks, like De Atramentis, can even carry the scents of fruits, flowers, and wines.
I’m not a very adventurous person ink-wise, and for the longest time wrote only with black, blue-black and brown inks; green, bright blue, purple, and red (not to mention yellow and orange) were simply out of character for me. They still are, but I’ve since nudged my range a bit to include Diamine Oxblood (a robust maroon) and Rohrer & Klingner Sepia (a greenish gray reminiscent of old manuscripts) in my small stable. I’m still on the hunt for the perfect blue-black, alternating between the Parker, Pelikan, Montblanc, and Lamy versions. Most days, I just liberally mix things up, turning my desktop into Inkspot City. (Better than alchemy, drop in at Scribe Writing Essentials in Eastwood Mall for a plethora of inks such as J. Herbin, not to mention many fine pens.)
Do take note that the final appearance of your ink will depend not just on chemistry, but on the paper quality, and also on the pen and the nib you use—a wider nib like a stub will deliver a thicker line that shades beautifully as it moves along; that’s what sends pen pushers into seventh heaven.
And what do I write with these exquisite implements? Aside from the occasional signature, absolutely nothing meaningful. I’ve come to realize and to accept that this is how I relax and make myself feel good: by taking hold of a pen worth what someone else more practical might have paid for a fridge or a flat-screen TV, and doing nothing more with it than doodling for hours on premium paper. I liken it to driving around on a lazy weekend to nowhere in particular, just enjoying the scenery and the sweet hum of a perfectly tuned engine. Such are one’s pleasures on the doorstep of one’s dotage.
FOR THE past few weeks, these two pens have held pride of place in my shirt pocket—a Parker Duofold Centennial and a Conway Stewart Churchill. And yes, they write as gorgeously as they look!
Penman for Monday, Jan. 21, 2013
AS I’VE been reporting lately, I’ve lost quite a bit of weight since my doctor ordered me six months ago to take brisk walks and go on a sensible diet to fight the onset of Type-2 diabetes. I seem to have hit the wall at a weight loss of 45 pounds, but I guess I should be happy where I am, in the low 170s. With my blood sugar in the 100 range and my blood pressure steady at around 110/80, I’m a whole lot better off than where I was a year ago—and, I suspect, than many men my age.
But this isn’t about cholesterol, triglycerides, and all that; rather, it’s about another unexpected side benefit to all this huffing and puffing. Because I take 30-minute to one-hour walks around the UP Academic Oval several times a week, I’ve rediscovered all the music I’d stored away in my iTunes. I have about 2,000 songs all in all—apparently not much by the standards of today’s kids, some of whom I’ve seen to profess having 10,000 songs in their playlists (of which, I’m pretty sure, 9,900 will sound all the same to me).
As you can imagine, most of my music is made up of what seniors know as “standards”—vintage pieces from the likes of Doris Day and Bing Crosby that can put a 20-something to sleep in 30 seconds, the kind of music you’ll hear on FM radio at 2 pm. Of course I have the complete Beatles collection (and could probably sing 80 percent of it from memory), a boatload of Broadway, Sinatra from here to eternity, Michel Legrand in both English and French, opera like I knew Italian, enough bossa nova to make me wish I knew Portuguese, and instrumentals from the likes of Jackie Gleason (yes, he was also a bandleader). Henry “Pink Panther” Mancini, and Toots Thielemans, who can make a harmonica sound like a love letter with your address on the envelope.
I do have quite a few new songs—but “new” to me usually means something 20 or 30 years old. Instead of Linkin Park, I have Led Zeppelin; instead of the Eraserheads, I have Heber Bartolome and Banyuhay. OK, I have a couple of songs by Journey (what else but “Open Arms” and “Faithfully”) and one by INXS (“Afterglow”) but no Nirvana, no hip-hop, nothing to disturb my hard-won equanimity or my illusion that the world is anything but an ordered whole.
It’s that old-guy sense of order and purpose that drives my left foot in front of the right and the right in front of the left, for 2.2 kilometers around the oval until I reach the Oblation and then do it all over again. I have to believe that all of this exertion will actually mean or bring something good, and for that I need emphatically optimistic music.
Broadway, I find, best puts me in this mood. If anything—from Carousel to Les Miserables—Broadway’s been built on selling the power of love and the indomitability of the human spirit, so you could whistle a happy tune and never walk alone and look to the rainbow and be sure that the sun will come out tomorrow. I might start with something light like “Dites Moi” from South Pacific or “Question Me an Answer” from Lost Horizon, progress to something more dramatic like “We Kiss in A Shadow” from The King and I or “If Ever I Would Leave You” from Camelot, and then push myself for another turn around the oval with something truly rousing like “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady or “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific. I’m singing all of these in my head, but being deaf to the world with my noise-canceling earphones on (not the smartest idea on the open road), I’m sure—from the strange looks I get from people I pass by—that I’m making noises I’m not hearing.
Next to Broadway, my two favorite genres are Latin music and OPM. I don’t really speak anything more than schoolboy Spanish (thank God for the old Spanish Law, which of course all of us detested in our time), but whenever I listen to someone like Luis Miguel, I find myself feeling foolishly sorry that we kicked those Spaniards out. I have eight versions of “Sabor a Mi” in my iTunes, and savor both Andrea Bocelli’s and Ennio Morricone’s versions of “Amapola” (which Morricone used for the soundtrack of Once Upon a Time in America). Speaking of Morricone, how could anyone resist “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission, especially when it’s Yo Yo Ma doing the honors? And speaking of Yo Yo Ma, how much sweeter can a cello get than on “Doce de Coco” from his Brazilian album?
Ah, Brasil, where hearts were entertaining June, and we stood beneath an amber moon…. I’ve told my wife June (also known as Beng) that when I croak, the kind of music I’ll want at my wake will be that of Antonio Carlos Jobim, especially “Desafinado.” There’s something in the gentle insistence of the bossa nova that speaks to my own temperament. And here I have to bring up one of my favorite divas (aside from the inimitable Barbra and our own Sharon—yes, I’m an unabashed Sharonian)—the Japanese-Brazilian chanteuse Lisa Ono, whose “Pretty World” never fails to add some lift to my shoes.
For something more soulful I’d turn to Laura Fygi’s “Abrazame”—and it may be an odd way of looking at these ladies, but if Laura Fygi and Lisa Ono’s voices were like ink, Laura’s would shade to purple and Lisa’s to green. To top off my Latin section, no single album gets more airplay in the car or in my earphones than the soundtrack of Woman on Top, which has an upbeat vibe you can listen to all the way to Baguio. (I was playing it in the car once while driving around Pampanga, and everyone with me wanted a copy.)
And did I say OPM? Much as I may appreciate exotic melodies like “Dein ist mein ganzes herz” or “Les moulins de mon coeur,” they can’t get me going like Sharon’s “I-Swing Mo Ako” or “Bituing Walang Ningning.” When I’m rounding that long bend around the Sunken Garden and am tempted to linger under the acacias for a lick of sweet sorbetes, I strengthen my resolve by drawing on “Sana’y Wala Nang Wakas”: “Kahit na ilang tinik ay kaya kong tapakan, kung iyan ang paraan upang landas mo’y masundan… Kahit ilang dagat ang dapat tawirin, higit pa riyan ang aking gagawin!”
And that—plus a lot of kangkong and hasa-hasa in sour broth—was how I lost 45 pounds in six months.
Penman for Monday, Dec. 31, 2012
WITH ALL the literary reportage I’ve been doing lately, I haven’t found the time and opportunity to indulge in my favorite pastimes (aside from poker, which I really can’t promote too much in this family-friendly corner), so let me use these holidays as an excuse to talk about my preferred stocking-stuffers.
Yes, you guessed right—they have to do with gadgets both digital and analog, namely phones and pens. If these things don’t excite you even half as much as they do me, you can turn the page now—or you can forget who you are and forget who I am and just join me these next few minutes as I transform into a 58-year-old boy taking out his tractors for a spin on the living-room floor. I’ll save the pens for another time, and focus on that object of desire that my undergrad students swore they couldn’t live without (as their professor quietly agreed), the cellular phone.
The phone on my mind and in my hand is, of course, the iPhone 5, and I’m writing this piece partly to answer the question that many friends who know me as an Apple fanboy have been asking lately: “How’s the iPhone 5 and do I need to upgrade it to it now?”
Let’s answer the easy part of that question first, which is the second part, and the quick answer is “No.” To be brutally honest—something that won’t come easy to those terminally ill with gadget lust—nobody really needs to upgrade to anything now or almost anytime. Seriously. That phone or that laptop or that camera that served you so well this past year or even longer should be able to do the same thing for you for a few more years, with reasonable care.
What we might call “upgraditis” is a terrible affliction that makes old useful objects—once sparkling with charm and oozing with sex appeal—suddenly look dumpy and inutile, leaving you with little option but to dig into your meager savings or even go into credit-card debt for something newer and shinier. Solid-state hard drives? More gigabytes. Digital cameras? More megapixels. Batteries? More mAh (milliampere-hours to the uninitiated). Upgraditis also leads to a state of mind that equates “want” with “need,” and makes a P35,000 phone or P70,000 laptop look not only a reasonable but an irresistible buy.
So, knowing all these nuggets of wisdom so well and dispensing them so liberally, why did I upgrade my iPhone 4S, barely a year old, to the IP5? To be honest (I make that sound easy), because I’m 58—59 in a couple of weeks—and I don’t need an excuse to get anything new, with my profound awareness that I don’t have too many more sentient years ahead of me to enjoy all the wonderful gadgets that they’ll design in Cupertino and manufacture in Shenzen; I’d be lucky to be around when the iPhone 12 rolls out of the factory, so I’ll take the 5 right now, thank you.
That was actually easier said than done, given the traditional lag time between a product rollout in the US and its appearance on Philippine shelves. The IP5 was released in the US, with the usual fanfare, last September 21, and it didn’t have an official Philippine launch until two weeks ago, on December 14, when Globe and Smart released their stocks (Smart slightly ahead of Globe, at a midnight bash). I couldn’t wait that long, and like a few hardcore Pinoy techies, I got mine in the US when I was there last October for a conference. Other members of our Apple users group (www.philmug.ph) got theirs in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UK, Australia, and even France. Why these countries? Because iPhones are sold factory-unlocked (often by law) in these places, so you can use them with any GSM network worldwide, unlike in the Philippines, where most network-supplied cellphones will require a touch of Greenhills magic to set free.
The US iPhones come in several varieties (Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint), and to spare you a long discussion about 4G or Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks and what will work here, let me tell you that the most compatible, factory-unlocked iPhone 5 version to get in the US for Philippine use is the Verizon one (yes, it’s a CDMA phone, but has a GSM capability as well) that you can now get contract-free from places like Best Buy. That’s what I got off eBay last October, and at the December 14 Philippine launch I got Beng a white IP5 for not too much under a retention plan, so now her iPhone 4 goes to my mom, who’d been using an iPod Touch. Why are we all on iPhones—us here, and my mom, daughter, sister, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law in the US? Because of what I think is the iPhone’s true killer feature, for binational Pinoy families: FaceTime, the free, limitless videoconferencing app that’s even easier to use than Skype and virtually pays for the cost of the phone over time.
So what’s so great about the IP5? Frankly, for me, nothing too earth-shaking; it’s just nice to have if you can cough up the cash. If I wanted to rationalize the hit on my Amex card (minimized by the quick sale of my 4S to my happy sister), I’d say that the IP5 is narrower, thinner, and lighter in the hand; the screen is bigger because of the phone’s extended length, the already-good camera is even sharper, the processor is faster, and the phone is LTE/4G capable, meaning that it’s good to go for the faster networks our telcos have promised to build. (I tested LTE on Verizon in New York, and it was blazingly fast.)
On the downside, the iPhone’s uninspiring battery life hasn’t really improved, at least in my own field tests, so that I’ve taken to carrying a power bank—a rechargeable battery—in my bag or glove compartment just to get through the day and my all-night poker binges. (I use my phone as a business machine rather than a toy—I check my email, surf, and even do school work and write articles like this on it—so I can’t afford to employ battery-saving tricks like turning 3G or Wi-Fi off.) Also, unlike the hard glass and tough plastic of the 4/4S, the anodized aluminum back and sides of the IP5 have been reportedly prone to scuffing in both the black and white models. (Another problem may be network-related; what’s the use of a 4G capability if your network is so slow, even on 3G?)
So what’s my bottomline on the IP5? Five million people apparently felt that they just had to have it within three days of its first release, but if you’re happy with your iPhone 4/4S or even your Samsung (and if you’re not 58 and bothered by your mortality), stick with what you have; it should serve you well for another year or so.
Otherwise, bite the bullet, sell the farm, and queue up for the iPhone 5 at your nearest Globe or Smart branch. Remember all the tedious routines and forms you’re going to have to fill out (there was much tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth at the December 14 launch over the four-hour queues, messed-up reservations, and unactivated nano-SIMs). Why? Because I’ll bet you my black 32-gig iPhone 5 that—for all the moaning and groaning and the buyer’s remorse that you’ll be going through now—you’ll be doing it all over again for the iPhone 5S, 6, 7, and 8.
Penman for Monday, Dec. 3, 2012
PENMAN READERS have been getting earfuls from me about writing and literature these past few weeks, so I’m going to hold off for another week or so about what we discussed at the recent Bedell Nonfictionow conference in Melbourne, Australia, and instead talk about Melbourne itself—a place I fell in love with on my last couple of days there, for reasons you’ll find below.
Except for a brief stopover once on my way home from Sydney, I’d never been to Melbourne, and I was both honored and excited to have been invited to come over for the conference, which was being hosted by RMIT University, right in the heart of the city. I was billeted at the Rydges Hotel, a few blocks away from RMIT, and the location proved to be a godsend, as everything I needed and wanted to see seemed to lie within a half-hour’s walk from the hotel.
I had a choice of airlines to take from Manila to Melbourne, but only Philippine Airlines had a straight, overnight flight that was also ideal for busy people—I left Manila at 8:40 pm and flew into Melbourne (which is three hours ahead) shortly past 7 am, less than eight hours total, with the whole new day ahead. (And let me note my satisfaction with PAL’s new Boeing 777-300 planes, which give you a lot of legroom even in economy, and offer individual entertainment screens.)
A cab ride from the Tullamarine airport to the city center took some 25 minutes and cost AUD$55 (right now, the Australian dollar, which used to trade below the US dollar, is stronger than its American counterpart). Tipping isn’t required or expected in Australia—where good minimum wage legislation has made sure that workers don’t depend on gratuities for their basic income—but anyway I handed back my $4-plus in change to my Indian-Australian cab driver, who must’ve been happy he’d picked up a Filipino. (“I knew a girl from the Philippines once,” he told me, pronouncing “Philippines” with a long I, “and she called me Pogi.” He also introduced me to the “hook turn”—an unusual and apparently uniquely Melburnian traffic practice that involves driving up to the middle of the road if you’re about to make a right turn and just hanging there until you get the green light.)
I’d arrived too early for my hotel room to be ready, so I left my suitcase with the desk and promptly began exploring my environs—initiating, in the process, the Melbourne leg of my daily one-hour constitutional. (Since I depend on GPS and an Internet connection—using a free Nike app for the iPhone—to track my walks and count my calories, I had to go on data roaming, which reminds me to share this tip with my fellow footloose Filipinos: try Globe’s Bridge Data Unlimited or BDU program, which gives you what its title says for a flat fee of $40 for five days or $27 for three days, all around the region, including Hong Kong and Australia. It saves you from having to look for the nearest Starbucks for the free wi-fi, and from paying exorbitant wi-fi rates at hotels. Look it up on the Globe website or dial *143#.)
As it turned out, the very street next to the hotel was Bourke Street, one of Melbourne’s main shopping arteries. I had no intention of spending a single dollar on frivolous goods even before I’d uttered a word at the conference to earn my keep—but three hours to kill on Shopping Boulevard proved to be a prescription for disaster, and I happily walked out of the David Jones store with a new raffia plantation hat, for the price I would’ve paid for a new Parker Duofold. There, I told myself, goes the Penfolds shiraz I’d been planning to splurge on; it was going to be the cheap, old Hardys or tap water from this day forward. But instead of wallowing in buyer’s remorse, I took finding that souvenir within my first hour in the city as sheer serendipity. While summer in Australia was still a few days down the road, nothing seemed more perfect for me in Melbourne than that straw hat, putting me in a good mood for the rest of my stay and keeping my balding head warm through the chilly evenings.
Founded in 1887, RMIT University (the old Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) is one of the world’s top 100 universities, with strengths in engineering and communications. It occupies a sprawling campus in Melbourne’s city center, in buildings that range from Victorian yellowstone to quirky postmodern. And that, I would come to realize, pretty much described Melbourne itself—a crazy-cut mix of old and new, of tradition and innovation, of the safe and predictable and of the risky and risqué. Across our RMIT building—topped by a green blob that threatened to devour the building like a sci-fi nightmare—was the venerable State Library of Victoria, on whose front lawn people sunbathed and pleaded various causes ranging from the plight of Palestine to same-sex marriage.
I fell for Melbourne on my fourth and last day, when I took a more circuitous walking route across the Yarra River, which was filled with rowers practicing their strokes. Viewing the city from its South Bank, I could appreciate the quaintness of the 102-year-old Flinders Street Station, still holding its own against the onrush of the new century. The banks of the Yarra were litter-free, the water looked clean enough to swim in, and the air was clear and cool and kind to my walker’s lungs; how long would it be, I thought, until I could see a Pasig like this?
But my biggest surprise still lay ahead: just a few hundred steps short of completing eight kilometers, I decided to hit that mark by exploring the blocks behind my hotel—which happened to be in the Chinatown/theater district—and stumbled on the lovely Princess Theater. Playing, for the last two days, was a touring production of South Pacific (featuring, as Bloody Mary, the Filipino-Australian singing sensation Kate Ceberano).
I’m a sucker for Broadway—especially the old, romantic, sunlit Broadway of the ‘50s and ‘60s—and I can sing nearly every word of the South Pacific soundtrack, but had never seen it onstage. When I first learned that I was going to Melbourne, I’d Googled the city, and had seen this production mentioned and wished fervently that I’d get to see it; but I’d simply assumed that the Princess was too far out of my way and that I’d have no time for theater. But now it was right there in front of me—the stuff of my boyhood dreams, beckoning me like Bali Ha’i.
It was my last evening in Melbourne, and I’d accepted an invitation to an early dinner at my hotel with a bright, young Filipino-Australian couple, Fatima and her husband Rick Measham. But they’d said that they also had a show to catch at 7:30, so I figured I was safe if I booked a ticket for the evening performance. “What’s the cheapest seat in the house?” I croaked to the lady at the box office. She handed me a seat plan and X’d the topmost row: “$89.99.” I gulped—I’d never paid $90 for any show, not even on Broadway; but this was South Pacific, and I was in the South Pacific, and I would probably never see it again for the remainder of my sorry life, so I forked the money over.
I later told the Meashams that I was also going to the theater after dinner. “What show?” South Pacific. “That’s hilarious,” said Fatima. “We’re going there, too!” So we all walked the two or three blocks to the Princess, and I went on up to my eyrie in the bleachers. I was all by my lonesome in my row, and, taking pity on me, the usher invited me to move down, but I told him I was happy where I was—for there I could and did sing along, my straw hat on my lap, as the wondrous play unfolded far beneath me, and I felt my juvenile crush on Mitzi Gaynor surging back, even as I remembered my girl back home and wished she had been next to me in Melbourne.
The soundtrack was still playing in my earphones as I boarded my flight home the next morning, and I felt younger than springtime for having taken those few extra steps around the block.
Penman for Monday, November 19, 2012
BENG AND I had hardly stepped off the plane from weather-beaten New York when we were off again to sunny Bangkok, this time to attend a conference of writers and translators from all over Asia and the Pacific. I asked Beng to come along because we hadn’t visited Bangkok in a few years and had always enjoyed the place. Here, again, we were helped by the fact that our unica hija Demi works in the hotel industry, and she was able to find us a nice place in Sukhumvit—the Aloft, Bangkok’s iteration of a global chain of smart boutique hotels. More on the Aloft in a bit.
I was there to take part in “Reaching the World,” billed as Bangkok’s first international literary showcase, under the auspices of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association (AP Writers for short) and the South East Asian Writers (SEAWrite) Award, hosted by the Faculty of Arts of Chulalongkorn University. I sat on the 2010-2012 board of AP Writers with fellow Filipino professor and STAR columnist Isagani Cruz, who served as its chairman.
A sizeable delegation represented the Philippine literary community in Bangkok, aside from Gani and myself: writer and scholar Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, who now divides her time between UP and UST; UP English department chair and Southeast Asian literature expert Lily Rose Tope; poet and UP professor Isabel Mooney; fictionist and UP Mindanao professor Jhoanna Cruz; poet and DLSU professor Dinah Roma; essayist and UP professor Jeena Rani Marquez; and UST literature professor Timothy Sanchez. Novelist Charlson Ong, this year’s SEAWrite awardee from the Philippines, joined the Bangkok conference in its last couple of days, coming from the Singapore Writers Festival which I had attended last year.
AP Writers emerged out of an earlier organization, the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership founded by Jane Camens who had also helped establish the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Jane, an Australian writer who has lived, studied and worked in the US, the UK, China, Macau, and Hong Kong, has been an indefatigable spirit bringing writers from all corners of the region together, and she will now serve as AP Writers’ general manager. The Sri Lankan-born but Hong Kong-based humorist and essayist Nury Vittachi will serve as AP Writers’ new chairman, backstopped by the Chinese-Indonesian-American fictionist Xu Xi, who runs the MFA low-residency program at the City University of Hong Kong, and by the translator Shirley Young-Eun Lee, who has roots in Korea but who read Classics and Persian at Oxford.
As you can see from just that small corner of the organization’s membership roster, AP Writers is both as regional and as global as you can get. This reflects an increasingly obvious fact in today’s literary world: international and inter-cultural exposure has become vital for writers, to expand both their perspectives and their networks. By “network” we mean here that web of connections that emanates from the writer and his or her work to the other people involved in the process of literary production and dissemination—agents, editors, translators, publishers, critics, booksellers, critics, reviewers, teachers, researchers, and, of course, students and general readers.
This year, in Bangkok, AP Writers paid special attention (and gave formal recognition, in its full name) to a vital but largely neglected member of that network, the translator. A literary work can’t be read beyond its original market unless it’s translated into another language, and that requires the skills of a very small group of specialists around the world. Literary translation isn’t just the kind of word-for-word interpretation you might get from a software program or even a live person—it involves the understanding and translation of one culture into another, the conveyance of nuances that, paradoxically, will never be perfect but will achieve interesting effects of its own. (I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Salman Rushdie, about the most interesting words of a language being the untranslatable ones.) In Bangkok, we were privileged to be in the company of some of the world’s best translators, including the Australian Henry Aveling, who has undertaken many translations from Indonesian and Malay.
We were also treated to a tour of the stately and historic Mandarin Oriental Hotel on the Chao Phraya River, probably the only hotel in the world where writers are revered. AP Writers held its business meeting there, after being regaled by Harold Stephens, an American expat and raconteur who’s written 30 books on travel and adventure and who also happens to be married to a Filipina, with stories of the old hotel from the days when the likes of Joseph Conrad (then still a ship captain), W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, and Graham Greene stayed over. There’s a room and a lounge now maintained in their honor at the hotel—where, fittingly enough, Charlson would receive his SEAWrite Award later in the week from Thai royalty).
Readings and socials are an important part of any literary conference, and while some readings can be interminable (let’s face it: authors love to hear themselves), now and then you come across an entirely original voice. This time around that voice was that of Jang Jin-sung, one of Kim Jong-il’s favorite poets who defected when he could no longer take what was going in in North Korea.
The gut-wrenching hunger and desolation that Jang spoke of in his homeland contrasted, ironically, with the culinary and visual opulence of Thailand, which makes every visit there worthwhile. Beng was landing in the new Suvarnabhumi airport for the first time and was awed by the experience, even more so when the sleek commuter train took us from the airport to the city center for a mere 20 baht (about 30 pesos). We dropped our bags off at the Aloft—a jazzy, upbeat hotel with free wi-fi, a great buffet breakfast, and an iPod stereo player in every room—and dashed off in a cab to catch the weekend market at Chatuchak.
Thailand is a shopper’s and diner’s paradise but Beng and I contented ourselves with a bag for her and an iPhone case for me—and lots of fresh fruit, spicy chicken rice meals, and heavenly foot massages. It may not have seemed too auspicious when the printed menu in one streetside restaurant offered us “Steamed Crap,” but we survived the typo.
We came away much impressed by the Thais’ devotion to culture and literature, good reason for Bangkok to be named the World Book Capital for 2013 by Unesco (a distinction that, I bemoaned, Manila would probably earn by 2053). At the welcome dinner, Bangkok’s urbane and genial governor, M.R. Sukhumbhand Paribatra, ducked out of his busy schedule overseeing preparations for an upcoming world indoor football championship to break bread and share jokes with writers and translators. I’d like to believe we were well worth his and each other’s time.
ALMOST AS soon as we got home from New York, Beng and I flew out to Bangkok where I was speaking at a conference. We stayed in a boutique hotel in Sukhumvit, a lively district that becomes even livelier after dark. I ran into this outdoor “bar” complete with disco lights outside our hotel—a new life for an old VW Kombi. Cheers!
Penman for Monday, Sept. 17, 2012
I BELONG to a generation that grew up on Broadway musicals—before Broadway got all dark and grungy, and even if we’d never been to Broadway at that point. Thanks to the movies and to vinyl, it was perfectly possible to be transported from Boni Avenue in Mandaluyong to Salzburg and Manhattan, or from Barrio Malinao in Pasig to the South Pacific and Siam. It’s hardly surprising that today, as a grown man approaching 60, I can still sing songs from South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, and Camelot with the verve, albeit without the voice, that I had at 17.
I’ve since had the opportunity to catch some musicals on Broadway and the West End, and while I’ve marveled at the visual and vocal pyrotechnics of such modern classics as Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, I miss the brave optimism of the old musicals—where, even in death, there was always a glimmer of hope in the end (“You’ll Never Walk Alone” in Carousel, “Somewhere” in West Side Story). I didn’t know then that this defiant cheerfulness was part of a commercial formula; I didn’t care. All I knew was that it felt good to whistle a happy tune, and that, approaching my crush du jour’s abode, I wanted to burst into a heartfelt rendition of “On the Street Where You Live” outside her window.
And so when I recently received an invitation from a long-time Penman reader and correspondent—the accomplished musical theater director Freddie Santos—to a preview performance of The King and I, there was no way that I was going to resist or refuse. The show took place at the Newport Performing Arts Theater at Resorts World a couple of Sundays ago, and my wife and I (or, as I rechristened the two of us, “The Beng and I”) arrived three hours early to see what the Resorts World buzz was all about, being staunch denizens of the North.
“I feel like I’m in Macau” was Beng’s first impression, and soon it was my jaw’s turn to drop when we entered the plush and capacious Newport Theater. It seemed like a daunting cavity to fill, but nothing fills space like music, and as soon as the overture began and the curtains rose, we were all elsewhere.
I had seen the Yul Brynner-Deborah Kerr film version of the musical many times, and so I wondered how Freddie Santos was going to convey all that convincingly in a practically all-Filipino production, but I needn’t have worried. Freddie earns this shameless plug: this is a wondrously good show, so good that The Beng and I will gladly return as paying patrons with friends to see it all again.
In a sense, The King and I is almost pre-programmed to succeed—which only raises the bar for any director assigned to it. Most musicals can be lucky to have more than one or two showstoppers that people will be singing afterwards (say, “I Know Him So Well” from Chess and “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line)—often without any idea of where the song came from. The King and I has at least seven of them: “I Whistle a Happy Tune”; “Getting to Know You”; “Hello, Young Lovers”; “We Kiss in a Shadow”; “Something Wonderful”; “I Have Dreamed”; and “Shall We Dance”. (The most difficult piece of all of these to essay—“Something Wonderful”—brought Beng to tears, although, without meaning to diminish Gina Respall’s achievement, I should add that Beng cries every time she sees The King and I, particularly when Yul Brynner dies in the title role.) Incidentally, Gina—as the sympathetic Lady Thiang—is a Filipino performer now based in London, where she has also played the role.
As was to be expected, the veteran Leo Valdez played King Mongkut with comic aplomb and authority. Monique Wilson (on leave from the London Performance School where she is a department head) inhabited her character thoroughly.
No Broadway musical can be complete without a pair of star-crossed lovers—think of Joe Cable and Liat in South Pacific, and of Tony and Maria in West Side Story—and the Tuptim-Lun Tha subplot in The King and I lends the narrative a romantic urgency that counterpoints the Anna-King relationship, which never goes beyond mild flirtation. Tanya Manalang as Tuptim and Lawrence Martinez as Lun Tha carried their duets with powerful poignancy.
The sets and costumes—the latter sourced directly from Thailand—were sumptuous. The allegorical “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” playlet was a masterful demonstration of ingenious stagecraft.
Of course it isn’t just Orientalia on display; after all, there’s no more quintessential East-meets-West piece of theater than The King and I. The 1951 Rogers and Hammerstein musical—based on Margaret Landon’s 1944 bestseller Anna and the King of Siam—purports to chronicle the contact between the British Anna Leonowens and Mongkut (great-grandfather of the present King Bhumibol) and thereby the incipient modernization of Thailand, but the academic in me has to add, at the risk of being a spoilsport, that the truth was far more prosaic than the play, which one critic called “a confection built on a novel built on a fabrication.” Some online sleuthing will quickly reveal that there was a real Anna (1831-1915) and she did go to the Siamese court to teach Mongkut’s wives and children for almost six years, and Mongkut did find her “a difficult woman,” but no, they didn’t waltz around the room “on a bright cloud of music.” Indeed, the movie musical was banned in Thailand when it first came out.
That said, people go to musical theater not for history and scholarship but for spectacle and romance. This unabashed and otherwise silly translation of human emotion and experience into song and dance is after all, from the very outset, a conscious departure from fact and reality, striving for truths of the heart rather than of the mind. Trust the historians and the journalists to lay out the facts, which can and should be appreciated in their own good time; but these momentary fictions and our need for them are also, inalienably, part of what make us human.
In other words, The Beng and I had an enormously good time, and we spent the long ride home singing along to the soundtrack I played off my iTunes in the car. The next morning, I took my usual walk around the UP Oval, with the Peabo Bryson-Leah Salonga version of “I Have Dreamed” streaming through my ears.
The show opened to the public just last Saturday and will run until December, with ticket prices ranging from P1,000 to P2,400—certainly not loose change for cash-strapped Pinoys, but think again of how much you’d be saving by not having to fly to London or New York for the chance of enjoying a world-class musical experience.
(Photo by Geoffrey Yusooncho)
Pinoy Penman 3.0 