Penman No. 87: The Art of the Title (2)

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Penman for Monday, February 24, 2014

SOMETIMES WE authors fall in love with titles, especially if they’re ours and they come to us in a dream or in a flash of insight, begging to be written into a story or a poem. This could work, if the inspiration they provide is powerful enough to generate a whole series of thoughts, associations, and narratives that become art. I’ve done a couple of stories myself this way, out of the three dozen or so that I published.

But as I often remind my writing students, every title is a working title until the work is actually finished. That’s when you take a step back and look at what you’ve done, and try to figure out what title might work best for the piece. In other words, the title is most often a matter of hindsight rather than foresight because—especially in fiction—you never really know what you’ve written and what it’s about until you’ve put in that final period. Writing fiction is a process of discovery, not merely the execution of a pre-planned idea.

It’s a good thing, too, that authors decide or can be persuaded to change their minds about titles. I’d like to thank my colleague and student, Thomas David Chaves, for pointing me to a website that listed down a number of these last-minute switches that left us with some of literature’s most familiar titles.

Ernest Hemingway’s With Due Respect became A Moveable Feast; William Faulkner’s Twilight (not a vampire story!) became The Sound and the Fury; Tennessee Williams’ Blanche’s Chair in the Moon (not a bad title in itself) became A Streetcar Named Desire; D. H. Lawrence’s Tenderness became Lady Chatterley’s Lover; George Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe became 1984; Carson McCullers’ The Mute became The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Alex Haley’s Before This Anger became Roots; Vladimir Nabokov’s The Kingdom by the Sea became Lolita; Herman Melville’s The Whale became Moby Dick; Stephen Crane’s Private Fleming, His Various Battles became The Red Badge of Courage; John Steinbeck’s Something That Happened became Of Mice and Men; Leo Tolstoy’s All’s Well that Ends Well became War and Peace; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Sea-Cook became Treasure Island; and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Man That Was a Thing became Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

This looking-back and revising applies as well to first paragraphs—I’ll develop this subject at greater length in another column—which could be very clear to us at the inception of the story and drive it forward, but which, at the end of everything, may no longer be the best possible way to open the narrative, and may even be clunky and unnecessary. We call this “scaffolding,” the way builders put up a temporary exterior shell just to get a project off the ground, then discard it later when the structure can stand on its own and be completed from the inside.

That’s how it goes with titles—you find and use a good working title that your story, poem, or essay can hang on to while it’s being written, and then you think about whether it’s still good (not just good, but the best) for the work, and decide whether to keep it or to change it. I’ve often found that the best source for titles is the work itself—there has to be a memorable, resonant line or phrase in the work that can carry the whole weight of the piece on its shoulders.

Right now, for example, I’m editing a book of 27 travel essays written by an American friend who’s been fortunate enough to visit some of the most beautiful and spectacular and yet also the most desolate and squalid places on the planet, from Timbuktu and Andalusia to Bhutan and Namibia; she’s fortunate, because it costs a lot of money to get around the world this way, but more than money, it takes insight and compassion to become more than another snapshot-happy tourist mingling with the natives. To acknowledge that privilege—now a double-edged word—up front, I suggested a title phrase that my friend used in one of her essays, and the book will come out later this year in the US under the title Privileged Witness.

While we’re on the subject, how about titling works of art like paintings? It’s a whole other challenge, because the artist—typically more of a visual than verbal person—is expected to find words for an image or an idea that should be able to stand on its own. But how do you refer to a painting or a sculpture without a title? (I’ve always thought of the practice of some artists to use, say, Untitled XXIV as a not-even-clever copout.) We don’t know if Leonardo da Vinci himself gave the title La Gioconda to his famous painting which later came to be known as the Mona Lisa, but that ‘s how Leonardo’s assistant Salai recorded the painting, which he inherited (“Mona Lisa” itself is a shortening of “ma donna Lisa,” my lady Lisa, referring to Lisa del Giacondo, the presumed subject).

For our amusement more than anything, Mark Hudelson, a professor of Art History in Palomar College, came up with his own list of the art world’s most remarkable titles—and you’d have to look up the art works themselves to see how the visuals match the words:

1. I Love You with My Ford (James Rosenquist, 1961)

2. The Raft of the Medusa (Theodore Gericault, 1819)

3. Clear Flippers, Release Fire Gods (James Bell, 1984)

4. The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe) (Rene Magritte, 1929)

5. Are You Jealous? (Paul Gauguin, 1892)

6. Studio of a Painter: A Real Allegory Summarizing My Seven Years of Life as an Artist (Gustave Courbet, 1855)

7. Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, a Second Before Waking Up (Salvador Dali, 1944–see the pic above)

8. High Voltage Sphincter-Winking Livewire Laxative (Robert Williams, 1990)

9. In Advance of the Broken Arm (Marcel Duchamp, 1915)

10. Through the Night Softly (Chris Burden, 1973)

I did say last week that I was going to deal with movie titles as well—an arena of atrocities some of which I, the former scriptwriter, feel personally responsible for—but we’re out of space, so I’ll save that delectable topic for another time.

Penman No. 86: The Art of the Title (1)

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Penman for Monday, February 17, 2014

IN MY graduate writing workshop the other week, I received two essays from my students, one titled “Fasting and Abstinence” and the other “Portrait of a Matron.” They were very interesting and well-written pieces, with every potential to be outstanding upon revision. Predictably, the first essay dealt with an eating disorder, and the second with the author’s mother. This prompted me to observe that other revisions aside, these pieces deserved better titles, because their present ones left nothing to the imagination, and worked like big red arrows pointing directly to their respective subjects.

As it happened, I’d already been thinking about writing a short column-piece on the art of the title for some time. As an author, editor, teacher, and reader of books, I deal with titles every working day, and while many if not most of them can be as nondescript and forgettable as the faces of people you meet on the street, a few will distinctly stand out for one reason or another. Memorable titles can be as showy as a bouffant hairdo in electric pink or as plain and as innocent as a five-year-old’s cowlick, but they’ll invariably make you want to take a closer and longer look.

I don’t think that there are any hard-and-fast rules for what makes a good or a bad title; I just know one when I see one, and while tastes will naturally vary, “memorable” can apply to both good and bad. Also, let’s make it clear and not forget that a great title won’t save a bad book, or turn a mediocre piece into a classic (what I’d call “a small shop with a big sign”); conversely, many great books have gotten by with the plainest titles (nothing plainer than The Bible, “the book” itself). Can a short story title be any shorter than John Updike’s “A&P”?

Some titles can simply be too strange; had F. Scott Fitzgerald stuck with one of his first options for titling his new book in 1925, it’s highly doubtful that even Leonardo di Caprio and Baz Luhrmann could have done much to sell a movie version titled Trimalchio in West Egg or another possibility that Fitzgerald considered, The Gold-Hatted Gatsby.

But to be helpful to my students, I told them what I thought a good if not great title should be and should do, and it’s this: it should hint at what the work will be dealing with, but not spell out everything. In other words, it should be oblique, with a touch of mystery, just enough to pique the reader’s interest. This is much more crucial in fiction, which thrives on ambiguity, than in nonfiction, where a certain degree of clarity is to be expected. “The Joys and Pains of Puppy Love” could be suitably efficient for a juvenile nonfiction piece devoted to just that topic; but the only way you could get away with that in a short story would be to assume a seriocomic pose and to deliver far more than what the title might suggest (for that kind of treatment, check out Updike’s 1960 story “You’ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You”).

In no particular order, let me just intone, as in a hypnotic chant, some titles of stories, novels, and plays that have impressed and stayed with me over the years (by editorial convention, titles of books, novels, and plays are italicized; story and poem titles are enclosed in parentheses): Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwarz; “For Esmé, with Love and Squalor” and “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” by J. D. Salinger; The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera; The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde; “Of This Time, of That Place” by Lionel Trilling; Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie; “Six Feet of the Country” by Nadine Gordimer; Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel; Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Some authors—the short story writer Flannery O’Connor, the playwright Tennessee Williams, and the novelist Carson McCullers among them—had the gift of titling, almost invariably coming up with titles that burned themselves into your consciousness. Think of O’Connor’s stories “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (which the earnestly Catholic O’Connor borrowed from Teilhard du Chardin) and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (which a female colleague, more earnest than Catholic, transposed into “a hard man is good to find”). Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana, among other plays. McCullers, brilliant but anguished, produced the novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, as well as the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Café.

You’ll see from these examples that I—and the writers I admire—seem to have a preference for longer, almost ostentatious titles, and I suppose it’s true that, uhm, length matters, generally speaking, adding a splendiferous sonorousness (now that’s a terrible title) to the work. Here in the Philippines, no one has employed longer titles than Gregorio Brillantes, some of whose stories I teach—among them “The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957” and “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro.” Manuel Arguilla’s 1940 story “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife” now sounds almost quaint, but it works perfectly with the temper of that time; and how could one not be drawn to Aida Rivera Ford’s “The Chieftest Mourner” and “Love in the Cornhusks,” classic stories both about Filipino families?

Perhaps surprisingly, despite my expressed preference for the long title, my own works have been rather sparingly titled, with a few exceptions, such as my first novel Killing Time in a Warm Place; the title-stories of my three collections—“Oldtimer,” “Sarcophagus,” and “Penmanship”—have just one word each. I know that you might be seen to be trying to be too cute or too enigmatic this way, but I suspect that my reticence was formed, early on, by an abject lesson from master to neophyte on the perils of overblown prose.

The master was none other than Greg Brillantes, who in the 1970s edited a highly regarded literary journal called the Manila Review, where I—the precocious 20-something newbie with far more ambition than talent—yearned to be published. I sent him a story about a seaside flirtation between a village maiden and a fisherman (a cheap echo of Arguilla, it seems to me now), which I grandiloquently titled “Hour of Defilement”; a few weeks later, my self-addressed, stamped envelope returned to me, with a note from Greg that he had accepted the story, but had decided to change the “sophomoric” (a word I probably had to look up then) title to the less conspicuous “Nights by the Sea.”

That wasn’t the end of my titling aspirations. A few months later, I became enamored of a title that kept running through my head—“Spinsters’ Evenings and Bachelors’ Nights”—and swore to write a story to fit the bill. I did, and sent the piece off again to Mr. Brillantes, who wrote back, in so many words: “I’ve just received and glanced at your new story, and I haven’t finished it yet, but a story with that title can’t be half-bad, so I’m taking it….” My day was made, but I didn’t push my luck, and went on to write stories with titles like “Heartland,” “Cameo,” and “Voyager,” obsessing less with the title than with the opening paragraph, which I was banking on to draw the reader in. But that’s another story.

Next week, I’ll talk about working titles (and changing your mind), and putting titles to artworks and movies.

Penman No. 85: The Mac@30

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MBAPenman for Monday, February 10, 2014

ONLY DIEHARD geeks and the tech and business media would have noted the event’s passing, but late last month, the Apple Macintosh computer marked its 30th anniversary. January 24, 1984 was the date when Apple introduced the Macintosh in what became an iconic commercial aired at the Super Bowl—directed by no less than Ridley Scott, who had already done the cult classics Alien and Blade Runner. In that video (which you can still see on YouTube), a female runner carrying a hammer smashes a screen on which an Orwellian dictator has been haranguing a hypnotized audience, breaking the spell. The clear implication, of course, was that a new hero had arrived, prepared to challenge and to crush the hegemony of industry leaders like Microsoft.

Today, three decades later, Apple has become the hegemon in many domains of computing, even outstripped in some respects by upstarts such as Samsung and Google’s Android platform. It’s sitting on one of the world’s largest stashes of cold cash—almost $150 billion, larger than the GDP of two-thirds of the world’s countries. The challenger has become the challenged; and with the loss and absence of its founder Steve Jobs, Apple under Tim Cook has had to deal with the “vision question”: what’s next for the company that built its fortune and reputation as the world’s most innovative? After the iPhone, what will Cupertino’s wizards come up with to create loops of frenzied buyers around city blocks, waiting for the Apple Store’s doors to open? In an age when most consumers have a choice between buying and using a tablet and a smartphone for everyday computing and communication, is there still room for a desktop or even laptop with an old-fashioned keyboard?

Apple thinks so. Interviewing Apple’s new bosses recently, Macworld editor Jason Snell reported: “What’s clear when you talk to Apple’s executives is that the company believes that people don’t have to choose between a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone. Instead, Apple believes that every one of its products has particular strengths for particular tasks, and that people should be able to switch among them with ease. This is why the Mac is still relevant, 30 years on—because sometimes a device with a keyboard and a trackpad is the best tool for the job.”

(Okay, here, before anything else, let’s get our terms right: “Apple” is the company; “Macintosh” or “Mac” is the computer that Apple makes, in desktop and laptop versions; “iPhone” is the smartphone, “iPad” is the tablet, “iPod” is the music player; and no, there’s no such creature as the “iTouch”; it’s the “iPod Touch.” “MacOS” is the operating system that runs the Mac; “iOS” is the operating system that runs the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The MacOS has increasingly begun to look and feel like the iOS, and people have begun talking of an ultimate point of convergence when the two might become one.)

I can certainly testify to the fact that, yes, you can have all of these devices at your disposal (resistance is futile—sooner or later, you’ll have them all, even if you have to beg, steal, or borrow), and yes, you will pick out the best one for the specific job: I use an iMac for surfing, a MacBook Air for all my writing, an iPad for lectures, books, and schoolwork, and an iPhone for calls, messages, and nearly all of the above. (I’ve trained myself to write on an iPhone in a pinch, although I miss the BlackBerry’s tactile keypad.)

This, of course, is nothing short of digital indulgence and downright excess, something our fathers and mothers never experienced (although my non-emailing mother has become a gaming freak on her iPhone, and uses it regularly to speak to her brood here and abroad via FaceTime). Ours is the generation caught between the analog past and the digital future; and while that future will surely be more technologically dazzling and perplexing than we can imagine, we want and will get as much of it as we can now, because we can’t afford to wait. The computer is the baby boomer’s ultimate toy, and I’ve often explained my obsession with new digital gadgets (the flipside of my analog obsession with old fountain pens) as my way of cheating time.

Macs and I go a long way back. Thirty years is exactly half my life, and for most of that half-life—since 1986, when I met, touched, and used my first Mac as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, where they had a laser-printing Mac available 24/7 for every 10 of their 40,000 students—I’ve been an unabashed Apple fanboy. There were also some PCs on campus—and I’d eventually buy one, my first computer running on DOS 3.0 with a humongous 10-megabyte hard disk, because it was the only thing I could afford. But it was really the Mac I lusted after, for all the reasons Steve Jobs predicted people would flock to it—it was intuitive (I had brought my Olympia portable with me to the States, and had to be persuaded to give the Mac a chance), it was fun, and it was beautiful.

It wasn’t until I came home, in the early ‘90s, that I got my first Mac—a PowerBook 520c, beloved of Scully and Mulder in The X-Files—which was a gift from a benefactor, who at that moment might as well have been The Almighty. I haven’t looked back since, amassing a virtual museum of Macs, especially portables, from the PowerBook 100 to the MBA. I was glad to learn that, as few as we were like the early Christians, we were not alone. To be an Apple user then was to be a stubborn, persnickety, secretly happy but sometimes publicly sullen member of a distinct minority, derided by the Windows 95 herd (“Windows 95? Why, that’s just Apple 87,” we riposted.)

In the mid-1990s, I joined and later chaired the Philippine Macintosh Users Group or PhilMUG, a handful of Mac addicts—themselves descended from the Macky Mouse Club, an even earlier organization of Apple enthusiasts—who met for monthly get-togethers at Angelino’s on Pasay Road and then Nanbantei near Jupiter Street in Makati. I was part of the focus group Apple assembled for the local rollout of the original iMac, and seeing it in its full glory for the first time was like meeting the Ark of the Covenant. (And to push this semi-blasphemous analogy along, what could have been more mindblowing than meeting the Mac’s messiah himself, Steve Jobs, at MacWorld in San Francisco in 2006, albeit from about 20 feet away? That trip to MacWorld and to Apple headquarters was my visit to the digital Vatican and Holy Land combined.)

Cupertino

Today, PhilMUG has become one of the world’s most active and longest-running Apple User Groups and forums (www.philmug.ph), and I’ve become something of a village elder there, helping chairman Johannes Sia and the other moderators advise newbies on everything from upgrading their machines to choosing the best travel, fitness, and entertainment apps. Everyone, it seems, has an Apple device of one kind or other, or wants to have one. Apple is in commercial heaven, but we—its angels and avatars—aren’t necessarily OK and happy with everything Apple does. Apple’s staunchest supporters can also be its stiffest critics—and we should be, knowing the machines and having invested in them more than anybody else.

But as loudly as I might complain about the iPad’s inability to natively play Flash presentations, among other gripes, I’m resigned to the fact that when the next big Apple product comes around—maybe the iWatch (the precursor of which is the Pebble watch I got for myself and Beng for our 40th anniversary, along the corny theme of “more time together”)—I’ll be there in the front of the queue, asserting my senior citizen’s priority.

As for the Mac itself, I’m also fairly certain that no mobile device, however nifty, will replace a real keyboard and a big screen. At the end of this writer’s working day, a computer is still a glorified typewriter, and it just so happens that as digital Underwoods and Smith-Coronas go, there’s nothing better than a Macintosh. 

 

Penman No. 84: Pens & Inks

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Penman for Monday, February 3, 2014

A YEAR ago, I wrote a piece for this column titled “The (ink and) paper chase,” where I talked about how obsessed some people get with finding just the right paper to write on, fussing over paper color, texture, thickness, and (important to us fountain pen users) feathering and bleed-through.

The last two factors have to do with how tightly the paper’s fibers are packed; the looser they are, the easier it is for ink to spread and scatter through the paper—not a good thing if you’re trying to write a legible letter. This is why ballpoints and cheap paper make better partners—and a good thing, too, that they do, because most people have neither the time, the inclination, nor the loose change to play around with fancy pens and papers, let alone exotic inks.

But what if you did?

In that column last year, I promised I would write a bit more about inks—the essential, indispensable companions of pens—but I never got around to doing it, at least until now.

Inks are the last thing people think about these days in connection with writing, except perhaps in respect of color, which invariably comes down to a choice among black (business formal), blue (a little more personal), and red (for marking something as “wrong!”). In my late father’s time—he worked as a clerk for a government office, so he used fountain pens regularly—you had the option of using blue-black, very likely as Parker Quink or Sheaffer Skrip, and it’s a color I came to associate with my dad, which is why I keep blue-black as a staple for one of my pens.

The fact is—before fountain pens underwent a kind of renaissance in the 1990s more as a fashion statement than as a clunky writing instrument, followed by a plethora of designer inks—there was a wealth of inks available to the discerning public. You could get them in green, purple, brown, pink, orange, and so on, in brands long vanished such as Carter’s, Sanford, and Stephens’, aside from the in-house inks of the major pen makers such as Parker, Sheaffer, Waterman, Montblanc, and Pelikan. There was also a lively competition among these makers in terms of packaging, specifically in labels and bottles (Carter made exceptionally pretty labels), and the bottles have now become highly collectible on their own, some with their vintage contents intact and still usable after 40 to 50 years.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. How did ink get its start, anyway? At the advent of writing, ink was made from soot or lamp black mixed with gum (says my trusty guide, The Fountain Pen: A Collector’s Companion by Alexander Crum Ewing); red ink was made from vermillion. In medieval times, the quill pen called for a more fluid ink, and this came from tannins culled from vegetables, converted to gallic acid, then mixed with ferrous sulfate (get that?), resulting in a blue-black iron-gall ink, which you can still procure these days. With the steel-nibbed pen (which acid corroded) came inks made with chemical dyes, which also led to an explosion of color.

“The range of ink available by the 1920s would bewilder many people today,” noted Ewing. “It is estimated that the German firm Pelikan alone produced 172 different types, colors, or bottles of ink. There were inks for writing, for drawing, for accountants (which could not be erased), for hoteliers (which could be erased) and so on.”

Which leads me to my first admonition about inks, lest I forget: never put India ink (like Higgins) into a fountain pen; it’s meant for calligraphic and technical pens, and will surely clog your fountain pen’s feed (the part of the pen beneath the nib that conveys the ink), possibly requiring repair. Use only ink clearly meant and often marked “For fountain pens.”

I used to say that I was a pen, not an ink person, in that for the longest time, I limited myself to four basic colors: black, blue, blue-black, and brown. I’m nowhere near becoming an ink fiend—some people collect basically just the inks and couldn’t care less about the pens—but over the past year, I’ve found my desk getting more crowded and cluttered by an invasion of ink bottles, in such sacrilegious colors as Diamine Oxblood and Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrun (more on these esoteric varieties later). In the ink department, I’m a novice compared to many of my confreres at the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines (at least one of whom, Los Baños-based Clem Dionglay, runs a globally recognized blog on inks, papers, and pens). Ask a newbie question like “What’s a nice bright blue ink?” and you’ll get a dozen responses within minutes (on fpn-p.org), answers such as “Pelikan Edelstein Topaz!” or “J. Herbin Bleu Pervenche!” or “Noodler’s Baystate Blue!”

Ah, Baystate Blue…. Many pen folk swear by it, but I’ve never used it myself, for a couple of reasons: I hate bright blue, and BSB (as it’s called, like LSD or MSG) has been notoriously known for staining if not eating into some pens, like vile acid. Some people love flirting with danger, anyway, in the quest of the perfect color.

That quest, of course, is what keeps the ink companies alive—companies that might as well be manufacturing precious wines and perfumes: Noodler’s, J. Herbin, Iroshizuku, Diamine, Private Reserve, Rohrer & Klingner, De Atramentis, and so on. These are no longer your basic Quink and Sheaffer inks that you can buy (and why not?) at National Bookstore. They’re specialty inks, selling on the average for something like P15 per milliliter, or P450 for a 30ml bottle. (To see a mindboggling assortment of these inks, check out a site like www.gouletpens.com, from where we order our supplies if we can’t get them from NBS or the pioneering Scribe Writing Essentials at Eastwood and Shangri-La malls.)

You won’t believe how exotic and even strange some of these inks are. Mahatma Gandhi would squirm if he learned that a 60ml bottle of his namesake ink—produced by Montblanc, in vivid saffron, of course—sells for $100 on eBay. There are inks with extravagant names such as Noodler’s Black Swan in Australian Roses (a lovely deep pink); Noodler’s even has an ink called Whiteness of the Whale, touted to be “invisible during the day, glows under black light.” Some inks are embedded with gold or silver flakes. De Atramentis makes inks that carry scents like apple blossom, or are actually made from wines like chianti and merlot.

And like fine wines and rare vintages, vintage and rare inks now command an audience and a premium. A few weeks ago, educated by online reading, I felt ecstatic to have located and landed two bottles of the now-rare, 1950s Sheaffer Skrip in Persian Rose on eBay for about $10; it’s a flaming pink ink, which makes it highly doubtful that I’ll ever write with it, but just ask the owner of that $300,000 bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc 1947 when he’s going to take a sip.

Fountain pens come with all different nibs, nib qualities, and filling systems, making ink choice both a pleasure and a pain for the penman (and penwoman). Snooty collectors prefer piston fillers like most Montblancs and Pelikans, but these pistons require patient flushing to get all the old ink and its color out before switching to something new. This is why I generally prefer everyday converters, which make flushing and ink replacement a breeze. To make things even easier, I’ve matched my favorite pens with my favorite inks, going mainly by color—a black pen gets black ink—so I don’t have to guess, when I pick up a pen or two to bring along for the day, what’s in it. And just for the heck of it, I took a shot of these happy combinations, which I’m illustrating this column-piece with.

And I can’t blame you if, after reading this frothy talk about pretty pricey pigments, all you want to say is “Hand me that cheap blue Bic!” 

(The inks and pens in the topmost pic are, downwards: Pelikan Blue-Black in the Montblanc Agatha Christie; Diamine Oxblood in the Parker Vacumatic Oversize; Rohrer & Klingner Sepia in the MB Oscar Wilde; Montblanc Carlo Collodi in the Conway Stewart Marlborough; R & K Alt-Goldgrun in the Onoto Magna; Pelikan Brilliant Brown in the Faber-Castell Pernambuco; and Aurora Black in the MB 100th Anniversary.)

Penman No. 83: A Bag of Bread

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IMG_20140110_155634Penman for Monday, January 27, 2014

ONE OF the most delightful gifts that Beng and I got a couple of weeks ago for my 60th birthday and our 40th wedding anniversary was a bag of oven-fresh bread, accompanied by a handwritten letter. I found the bread so literally warm, and the letter and its contents so unique, that I secured the permission of the sender to reproduce it for this column. It’s a testament to the persistence of good things and good intentions—and, of course, of good people in a world too often and too crassly ruled by the bottom line.

In part, the letter said: “I’m sending traditional pan de suelo breads which are pugon-baked on the suelo or floor of the 75-year-old wood-fired oven of Kamuning Bakery. The crust is crunchier and it should be reheated with a toaster and not with a microwave oven. Nick Joaquin, NVM Gonzalez, and others of past generations have written about this pan de suelo bread of the Philippines.

“I bought Kamuning Bakery just before Christmas, and have kept the old owners as minority shareholders so they can continue the traditions and tastes of this bakery. I also bought the land and old building. I invested here because I believe in the old owners, the pugon bakers who are artists and the staff with their unique commitment to their craft and vocation. I want to support this independent pugon bakery with their traditional no-preservative and no-additive Filipino breads, despite the huge challenges of this era of big multinationals, bakery chains and supermarkets and their mass-produced factory or industrial breads.”

2014-01-16 22.41.53

The sender of the bread and the letter was none other than my fellow STAR columnist Wilson Lee Flores, business chronicler extraordinaire and confidant of Filipino taipans. Wilson may move in those lofty circles, but his feet remain solidly on the ground—in this case, Kamuning and the oven floor on which pan de suelo is baked, unlike the more familiar pan de sal, which comes to life on metal trays. (Incidentally, many young Filipinos probably don’t know that kamuning—like the kamias that lends its name to the same street across EDSA—is a plant, Murraya paniculata, with tiny and fragrant white flowers.)

The Kamuning district is one of Quezon City’s oldest—in fact, the bakery was put up in its present location in 1939, when the city itself was established—and while modernization has inexorably overtaken many other parts of the city, Kamuning has managed to retain some of its 1940s charm and character, an effect assisted by the proliferation of antique and resale shops and even a vintage-car restoration outfit in the neighborhood.

You can’t get more original than Kamuning Bakery, which has stayed pretty much as it was when it opened. It’s been kept alive by the seventy-ish Ted Javier and his sister Beth Javier Africa, the son and daughter of the late Atty. Leticia “Letty” Bonifacio Javier, who co-founded the bakery with her husband Lt. Marcelo Javier.  Wilson tells the rest of the story: “It was President Quezon’s close ally Alejandro Roces, Sr. who suggested to the Bonifacio family of Los Baños Bakery that they open the new city’s first bakery. So they sent their newly-married daughter Atty. Leticia Bonifacio Javier and her husband Marcelo, who founded Kamuning Bakery.” Sadly, however, Marcelo, his father-in-law Major Miguel Bonifacio, and another of Ted’s uncles were killed by the Japanese during the Second World War.

So it fell to Letty to keep the bakery going with the help, in time, of her three young children, producing pan de suelo, described by Wilson as the “fist-sized version of pan de sal with a hard and crisp crust,” and of which Nick Joaquin wrote “colegialas got their gums toughened on their segundo almuerzo in the morning and, with hot chocolate, their meriendas in the afternoon.”

Indeed it was all the crunchy goodness that Wilson and Mang Nick promised, but don’t take it just from me. Just last month, a blogger named Tummy Traveler reported, after receiving her own gift bag of the bread, that “The pan de suelo was toasted just right. Just the right amount of crunch on the outside yet the bread still had that delicious moistness and softness on the inside. It had a faint hint of sweetness that went well with the salty corned beef together with my freshly brewed coffee and sausage.”

If all this sounds like a shameless plug, it is. Let’s help Wilson Lee Flores help keep a family and Pinoy tradition alive. I’m already planning a sortie there this weekend with Beng to stock up on the good stuff, and to visit an antique shop or two while we’re in the area. Kamuning Bakery can be found on 43 Judge Jimenez corner K-1st Street, one street inward on the left somewhere between EDSA and Tomas Morato, telephone 929-2216. They also have a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/kamuningbakery1939.

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WHILE I’M writing about bread and giving thanks to friends, let me thank another fantastic baker, Theresa Juguan, who with her family and husband Herwig hosted me and Beng in their home in Puerto Princesa over the post-Christmas break. A few months earlier, we had been first-time guests at their seaside villa just outside Puerto, and we struck up such a rapport that Theresa and Beng now call each other “sister.” I’ve also urged Theresa to write her cookbook-cum-autobiography, with her life-story being as remarkable as her cooking and baking.

What I most enjoyed about this second visit, though, was playing “Tito Butch” to Theresa’s granddaughters, particularly five-year-old Zanique and her elder sister Zitroenne and cousin Zantelle, who amazed me with their precociousness. Since the in-house wifi was down, my MacBook Air—hooked up to cellular Internet—became the center of the girls’ attention. “Tito Butch,” they cried, “we want to play! Can we use your computer?” “Sure,” I said, “where do you want to go?” And here’s what floored me: these girls knew what a URL was and could recite it by heart: “W-W-W-dot-Y-8-dot-com!”

So I keyed in the address and sure enough, a website for online games popped up. “Go to Games for Girls!” shrieked the kids, and so we did, and they quickly zoomed in on “Cooking Games,” which featured the step-by-step cooking and baking of everything from spicy corn and shrimp salad to tiramisu. “You cook this,” said Zanique, “and I’ll cook this!” And so they did, in all earnestness, arguing over the sequencing and the measuring of the ingredients. (Beng and I had watched Zanique stick by her grandma in the kitchen, helping with the making of fresh lumpia and admonishing a tita who was going about it the wrong way.)

Thus are great cooks and bakers and great traditions made.

 

Flotsam & Jetsam No. 35: New Pens for the New Year

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THE HOLIDAYS and turning 60 this month gave me all kinds of excuses to acquire new pens, and here are two of the best ones: a Montblanc Oscar Wilde, issued in 1994, and an Onoto Magna Classic in tortoiseshell, handmade in the UK just last month. I’m broke but happy 😉

They do look good beside my old mainstay, the Agatha Christie. It’s like having three gorgeous girlfriends to take out on a date (shhhh, don’t tell Beng!).

Penman No. 82: A Man Called Nik

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IMG_2939Penman for Monday, January 20, 2013

IT WAS with great sadness that I received the news a little over a week ago that my friend Nik Ricio had passed away. We knew that he had been ill for some time, but as these things go, you hope for the best, and never really think people could leave so soon.

He was, to me, indisputably the best Filipino book designer of his time, and one of the finest Filipino artists to have wielded a brush or a technical pen. More than that, he was a friend to me and to many other artists and writers, the kind of friend whose company you didn’t only enjoy but whose talent you felt enriched by and actually learned from.

I got the message about Nik’s death from another old friend, Tere Custodio, with whom Nik and I had worked on the massive, 10-volume Kasaysayan project back in 1997-98. The three of us would collaborate on other book projects after that, but nothing before or since matched Kasaysayan in its scope and intensity. We had been commissioned by Reader’s Digest Asia and by A-Z Direct Marketing to come up with this anthology in time for the celebration of the Philippine Centennial in June 1998; we had our first meeting in January 1997, and in exactly 18 months, on schedule, the anthology was launched—a compendium of 3,000 pages, a million words, thousands of photographs, and the labor of around 200 writers (not just historians, but economists, poets, scientists, priests, and artists, among others) whom we tapped for various essays. Tere oversaw the logistics and execution of the gargantuan project; I edited the text, advised and assisted by the late Doreen Fernandez; but it was Nik who almost literally shaped these ten books and gave them their final look, working with what even then was already an aging pair of Macs and PageMaker.

I recall that effort because of what I learned from Nik, with whom I sat side-by-side, going over those many thousands of pages on his computer screen. I was a rookie editor, something like an infantry captain suddenly ordered to command the Battle of the Bulge; Nik already had many coffeetable books to his credit, chiefly with Gilda Cordero Fernando’s GCF Books, sumptuous productions which Beng and I coveted but could then scarcely afford. I decided early on—sagely, as it turned out—to let the design lead the text.

Happily Nik and I shared a traditionalist aesthetic—a sense of pleasing balance, squared corners, fine detail, and subtle suggestion (this was before book design got all postmodern funky, splashy, and edgy). I could see that Nik was going for a certain look; he’d tell me, “It would be nice if all the last lines on the page ended here…. Let’s get rid of all widows and orphans (lines that hung out all by their lonesome)…. I need a subhead here, to balance the subhead there…. Could you make sure that all the subheads are at least X number of characters and Y at the most?… You see this white line running down the page? That’s a ‘river’ and it doesn’t look good. Help me remove these rivers by adding a few words here and deleting some there….”

As meticulous and painstaking as he was, I never once heard Nik raise his voice, even as the rest of us were at our wits’ end doing our darnedest to make sure we hit our deadlines. Our tie-up with Reader’s Digest afforded us a substantial budget, and as art director Nik could have had his pick of hotshot photographers to help him illustrate our books (Nik insisted that there be a picture in every spread, over ten volumes). But when he had to, no-nonsense Nik—a talented photographer himself—went out with his camera to shoot, say, a rash of rust on a GI sheet or a patch of moss on a rock to use as pictorial motifs.

There’s an ongoing retrospective until the 27th of Nik’s work as a designer, illustrator, photographer, and painter at the Liongoren Gallery on 111 New York Avenue, Cubao, and aside from his book designs and paintings, there’s a wall of his photographs, taken on Manila’s streets in the 1960s and ‘70s: an armless man playing a guitar with his toes, a dog standing his ground in front of a Mercedes-Benz, an old woman staring out a concrete window. He had the eye of Lino Brocka, but unlike Brocka, he went past the real to the romantic, insistently seeking beauty in a decidedly un-beautiful world. He never gave up; even toward the end, no longer able to hold a brush, he used sponges to create large tree paintings.

Nik sponge painting

Flashback to another New York, the real one. In October 1999, Nik had one of his finest and happiest spells when an exhibition of his paintings opened at the Philippine Center in New York. I was happy to write the text of the brochure that introduced Nik and his works to viewers, and this is what I said then:

“After more than three decades of working as one of Manila’s leading graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators, Nik Ricio returns to an old love—painting.

“This exhibition—surprisingly enough, only the first one-man show of his long career—shows Nik returning to his artistic and spiritual roots. Those roots lie deep in romantic myth in a sense of beauty and order to the natural world, in faith and hope in the regenerative power of Art. Ricio’s works are a veritable garden of the Muses. The lushly detailed foliage that has become a virtual trademark of Ricio’s graphic design is more than pretty in these paintings; every leaf and flower is an affirmation of life, which all Art aspires to achieve and to sustain.

“Ricio made his mark early by winning first prize for two successive years, 1966 and 1967, in the prestigious Shell National Student Art Competition, before graduating in 1968 from the University of the Philippines with a BFA, majoring in commercial and editorial design.

“In Manila and around Asia, he is best known and much sought after as a book and graphic designer. His book projects include the celebrated Turn of the Century, The Streets of Manila, Being Filipino, Dances of the Emerald Isles, Rizal the Saga, Tide of Time, and, most recently, Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People. He counts among his clients some of the Philippines’ largest corporations, as well as Readers’ Digest Asia, the World Bank, the Ambassador Hotel in Hong Kong, and the Manila Hotel.

“As an art director, he has been described by a critic as ‘a submarine commander, a visionary of the deep who gives out consummate orders with the minimum of tantrums.’

“Both the mastery and the modesty should come through in these paintings. They are as close as we can get to what Nik Ricio—so much of whose work has been to realize the dreams of others—really dreams of, all by himself.”

It was no great secret to those who knew him that for many of his last years, Nik was estranged from his family; there was great pain on both sides, and ironically it took his terminal illness to reunite him with his wife Tes and their children, also accomplished artists.

Beng and I went to Loyola Guadalupe for Nik’s very brief wake, to condole with Tes and the family, and with Nik’s many other friends. He lay in an open casket, like Beng’s brother had many years before, preparatory to cremation. I remarked to someone how I would probably end up the same way in the same place, having bought a funeral policy for Beng and myself there. Many tears were shed and regretful words spoken. Walking back to the car, it felt as if you had closed a well-written book full of engaging events and lavish illustrations, leaving you wishing only that it had gone on for a bit longer and had a happier ending.

Godspeed, Nik, and may you meet with all the beauty you tried to give us an early glimpse of. 

Penman No. 81: Hello, Seniorhood

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ButchBeng1974

Penman for Monday, January 13, 2014

THIS WEDNESDAY the 15th, Providence permitting, I’ll be marking two milestones I frankly never thought I’d reach: I turn 60, and Beng and I will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. (That’s right, we got married in Manila’s City Hall on my 20th birthday. It seemed a cool idea at the time, but I’ve regretted it ever since—the timing, not the marriage—because it deprived us of an excuse to party twice.)

I’ll admit this only now, but I’ve been looking forward to seniorhood with growing anticipation over this past year. At 57 or 58 you might still be in denial, walking with a pronounced spring in your step to convince yourself and everyone else that all you need is a new pair of Merrells to unleash the inner tiger in you, but the fact is, within six months of 60, you can’t wait to get there and have the inevitable done with.

The last time I knew I had to be a senior soon was just last month, when I stood in a long line in the unseasonably sweltering heat at the DFA to submit my expiring passport for renewal. Taking pity on me, a guard came up to me and asked, “Sir, how old are you?”, obviously thinking to bump me up to the express lane where a few imperturbable seniors sat smiling. “I’ll be 60 in three weeks!” I said. Not good enough. I waited three hours.

I know something about seniors—I live with four of them in the house; I know their moods, their ailments and medications, their favorite TV dramas, their exquisite skill at swallowing fish heads and spitting out the eyeballs.

And there’s no diplomatic way of putting this, but for the past three years, I’ve been married to one (Beng’s folks didn’t know she was marrying a young innocent until we were in the car on the way to City Hall; I had to get parental dispensation). But to her enduring credit, elfin Beng often has to be “carded” in the restaurants, as they’d put it in the States, while all the salespeople and cashiers have simply albeit solicitously assumed that I have a senior card to show for a discount.

So I’ve been mooching off Beng’s seniority, tagging along with her when she goes to the head of the line come boarding time at the airport, or when we queue up for movie tickets. That’s when you realize that the next best thing to being a senior is marrying a card-carrying one. But Beng doesn’t find it funny when I tell her what a shock I get to wake up in the morning beside a lola. Well, I guess we’re even now.

Of course, in a sense, you can never get old enough, maybe not until you hit 80. At 60, there will always be writers in their 80s or 70s who can’t wait to remind you what a bumbling tyro you are compared to their accomplished selves. That’s all right, because having older people on your shoulders could be the only thing that will keep you young, or at least younger, not counting strange potions meant to stiffen, uhm, one’s resolve.

It’s a pleasant surprise to get this far, because ours was a generation that was supposed to die before we even hit 25. After stepping out of martial law prison at age 19, I’ve taken every breathing moment since as a kind of grace note.

As it turned out, the grace note was my marriage, running four decades long, another unexpected, shamelessly undeserved blessing. When Beng and I stood before a CFI judge—my mom’s boss—that nippy January in 1974, it was after just three months of being together. We were in love, surely—truly, madly, deeply—but we were also gasping for breath, seizing happiness when and while we could, thinking that the State’s long and murderous hand could break the spell at an instant. As it turned out, too, the predictable State was hardly the enemy, but the inconstant self. Some of those forty years proved hard and lonesome, thankfully not too many nor too long.

As we start the count toward our golden 50th, Beng and I have come to realize that there are a few things we need and want to do in the years ahead.

With some regret, we will seek and keep fewer friends—the real, not the Facebook, kind. We’d like to focus on family, work, good health, our private charities, and, of course, more time together. This will mean socializing less and staying home more, which will be all right, because we both have so much work to do and always less time to do it.

On the other hand, lest our world become too small, and with whatever we can spare from our perennially meager savings, we will travel up a storm—march up headless hilltops, wind through strange alleyways, and wander down foreign boulevards while our knees can. This May, I hope to realize a longstanding dream, which is to bring Beng to Venice, where I had a magical moment three years ago but where she’s never been (of course, she’ll have to stay with me at that dinky hostel in Mestre, across the water and next to the Asian food store that was my culinary lifeline in heathen Italy).

We might not even need to go that far. One of the most enjoyable dates Beng and I had over the recent holidays was in front of the TV, watching a late-night screening of “Funny Face” with Astaire and Hepburn in Paris and singing along to the Gershwin score. And then another day we took our quarterly stroll around the Quiapo area, imbibing the Oliver-Twistian energy of the hardware and music stalls on Raon and Evangelista, cherrypicking the dustiest of Avenida’s ukay-ukays, and consoling ourselves with cheap mami and siopao at the Pinsec place on Recto, because Ramon Lee’s chicken house was still closed for the New Year break. We’ve been to dreamier places like the Grand Canyon and Bellagio (the Italian and Vegas versions) but it’s these slumdog sorties that we’ll remember for the fun.

With our only child Demi well set in her own career in Southern California and well loved and cared for by her own man, we can and will help others achieve fullness in life by putting them through school and giving them the same kind of guidance we gave our daughter (“Don’t worry too much about grades, enjoy your education! Make your own mistakes! Learn to think on your feet! And never forget where you came from.”)

Where she came from, I think, was us. As I turn 60 and Beng and I turn 40 (which Demi, too, will be, come October), I’d like to think that beyond all the books and paintings we ever created, Beng and I did nothing better than produce Demi, whom I named—while Beng was still in a post-partum haze—Dalisay Emilia Poticar Dalisay, “Emilia” being my mother’s name. Demi loves her lola, but wasn’t too thrilled to grow up having to explain her redundant name to her classmates, with the anciently Shakespearean “Emilia” wedged in between. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “don’t you know that Demi Moore is really Dalisay Emilia Moore?” It didn’t fly. But hey, her name seemed like another cool idea at the time.

A couple of years ago, I wrote her this poem titled “To Our Unica Hija Demi, Born Dalisay Emilia Poticar Dalisay”:

It matters not if our names end with you

If no more Dalisays walk the earth

You were all we wanted in this world

Our most joyful blessing was your birth.

When at times we seem too far apart

Remember that we are your blood and breath

And that your name to us is like a distant bell

That you bore twice, and bore it well.

Here’s to the three of us, anak. We’re all growing older, but we’re doing it together. 

Butch Beng2013

Penman No. 80: Men of Letters (2)

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FCPenman for Monday, January 6, 2014

I CAN’T remember now how the poet Fidelito Cortes fell into our circle of beer-guzzling, Yeats-quoting friends in Diliman back in the early 1980s, but I do know that he was there, on December 10, 1984, when my very first book (Oldtimer and Other Stories) was launched without much fanfare in UP. I know that, because after the event, we went for more drinks in a restaurant on Katipunan (where serving beer was still illegal then, because of some silly ordinance), and Fidelito was with us.

Also there was the late Ernesto “Cochise” Bernabe II, a popular figure on campus and an English major who had been fortunate enough to visit Stanford, and who had come back with some application forms for that university’s famed Wallace Stegner fellowship. We all feigned indifference to Cochise’s offering (who needed Stanford?), but weeks later, we would discover that at least four of us had applied for the Stegner-me, Krip Yuson, Fidelito, and I think Mon Bautista (not the currently telegenic one, but a gifted fictionist from Mindoro).

Imagine our surprise and envy when, come April, we heard that it was Fidelito whom Stanford had accepted for the one-year, well-funded fellowship, with nothing much to do but write and attend workshops on Stanford’s plush campus in Palo Alto, California. But then we shouldn’t have been surprised, as Lito was an extraordinarily good poet, whose work resonated with a deep and quiet melancholy.

Lito flew off to Stanford in August 1985; I would follow to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1986, having snagged a Fulbright. Mon Bautista got a fellowship to Kansas, I think it was. (In an even more remarkable turn, our friend and beermate Gina Apostol wrote a fellow named John Barth directly at the University of Maryland, showing him a short story that she had written, titled “Earthquake in Mexico”; Barth wrote her back, offering her a scholarship, and thus began the Leyteña Gina’s long and continuing sojourn in the US). It was, in other words, a time when another generation of young Filipino writers began looking abroad, and specifically to the US, for opportunities to broaden their horizons (before we would discover Australia, Singapore, Japan, China, and other places closer to home).

Lito, in a way, had always been prepared to go Stateside; he’d never been there prior to the Stegner, but he had imbibed its pop culture so well that he routinely beat the crap out of us in Trivial Pursuit, particularly in the sports category, where he seemed to know all the NFL teams and their key players by heart; not to be outdone in colonial education, I commanded the geography portion, having memorized the US states and their capitals since my grade school days.

On January 18, 1986, I wrote Fidelito:

Dear Fidelito, 

Thanks a lot for your Christmas card and the Stanford forms. Unfortunately, I only got the forms yesterday (you mailed them Dec 16-a month ago!), so their users will have to wait till next year…. The “US or bust” fever continues, probably because it’s application time; we’re getting deluged by inquiries about getting into a US university, any university; the GRE and TOEFL people are raking it in…. Still no news about my acceptance; I’m hoping for either Michigan or Colorado…. We’re running out of rumors, unless you count election-fever rumors, one of the most persistent (I hear it every night, in my dreams) of which is that as a token of the American government’s displeasure with the travesty of democracy in this country, all educational assistance grants are to be terminated forthwith…. Seriously, there’s a tremendous outpouring of effort and initiative here these days, even among the most unlikely people, in support of the Cory-Doy duo; it looks like everybody’s going to be voting; the boycott boys are unusually quiet; still nearly everyone agrees that while Cory has a real chance if the votes are counted straight, there’s just no way the old man’s going to yield his seat with a smile; the US is taking a beating in the crony press; there’s even talk of declaring Bosworth p. non grata…. I hope they declare me and Beng & Demi personae non grata, and ship me out on the next plane. So don’t be in too much of a hurry to get home. By the way, Isabel plans to do her MA paper for Abad’s class on your poetry. Keep it up-statistically speaking, there’s got to be one beach blonde out there somewhere who’s into football, Yeats, and Filipino poets.

A few months and a couple of letters later, Lito wrote, on April 13, 1986:

Dear Butch,

Thanks for the letter and the snapshots. I wish I could say I’ve been busy and productive these recent months… but such is not the case. ‘Tis laziness, I’m afraid, that’s responsible for my silence-that, and a more than trifling case of sensual (not sensory) disorder called hedonism. The California spring is gorgeous, the weather mild enough for tees and shorts (cherchez les femmes), the sun is always there where you want him. “In short there’s simply not a more congenial spot for happ’ly-ever-aftering than here in Palo Alt(o).”

…. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to be happy when the Stegner-ship is over. I’ll hate leaving Stanford, of course, which has such breathtakingly beautiful women, and San Francisco, and ditto, and ditto scenery, but to balance these, I’ll be glad to get away from the pressure of the workshop. I was kidding when I said that I had been doing nothing lately; on the contrary. I’ve always felt the pressure to produce, to bring something to class, and I’ve been prolific like I’ve never been before. Of course, I’m not being ungrateful-after all, I’m writing poems and they’re all before me, but I’d like to relax. Hence I’m applying for a seven-month fellowship in Provincetown, Mass. Where the only thing I have to do is write at my own pace. I hope I get in.

Denise Levertov has left. I say this not without a sigh of relief, for she has been hard on our poetry and hard on us as poets. She insists on precision, and with great justification, but boy! It’s difficult to sit still while she’s working on your poem. We became friends, mainly because as a leftist intellectual-and with a wonderful revolution going on in the Philippines-she was glad to have an actual Filipino in her class. But she still fills me with awe, and of course she’s scarred us, one way or another, with sharp criticism. I think that the inevitable consequence of studying under such a famous and demanding teacher is not that your work necessarily gets better, but that you become demanding yourself, and unfortunately more so upon those other than yourself, and you tend to take as your own your teacher’s biases and peculiar orientation. I’m afraid, Butch, that when you see me again, I will have become more opinionated and dogmatic-hence obnoxious-about craft and art. Denise has supplied me with ammunition (30 rounds on line breaks alone; 40 on the poem’s sonic structure; etc), and you will find that I can’t wait to pull the trigger.

Being here has allowed me to experience a lot of the literary life, I’ve heard Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Thom Gunn, Wendell Berry, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Alex Haley read and lecture. I had lunch with Berry. Muriel Spark and John Irving are coming in the spring to lecture and read. If it’s possible to OD on the stuff, I would’ve done so, but I keep attending readings and classes. I’m reading Leon Edel’s Henry James, and I’m beginning to understand what commitment to literature is…. Two girls have offered to marry me, to keep me here, can you beat that? But I’m too proud, I guess, although pride is for swallowing. Write soon, Butch, and keep on writing. Yours,

Fidelito

Lito and I exchanged hello’s over Christmas-me from Manila and he from New York, where his lovely wife Nerissa teaches at Stony Brook. It was great to be in touch again after all these years-I had to warn him that these incriminating letters were coming out-but as fast and convenient as email is, nothing beats a scribbled signature and a postage stamp.

Penman No. 79: Men of Letters (1)

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ImagePenman for Monday, December 30, 2013

I’M AN incorrigible pack rat; I keep restaurant receipts and bus tickets from the 1970s, business cards from associates long forgotten or even departed, and notes and memos from various points of my engagement with one bureaucracy or other. These odds and ends molder in a large wooden baul that sits in a corner of my office, a chest Beng and I bought for our daughter’s wedding but which somehow stayed with me (our unica hija Demi will still get that baul, contents and all, on one of her visits home from California). Other old letters I keep in a leather briefcase, itself now an artifact, a souvenir from my first trip to the US in 1980.

I was rummaging through the papers in that chest and that briefcase a few weeks ago, looking for something I could contribute to the benefit auction we were holding for Writers’ Night, when I stumbled on some letters I’d received (and some I sent—I dutifully Xeroxed my outbound mail then) from writer-friends. The most interesting ones were those that opened a window on my friends’ minds as writers and as persons—as young men, really, on the road to emotional, intellectual, and artistic maturity.

One of those friends I exchanged long letters with was the late Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega Jr., very probably our finest playwright, and something of a prodigy who headed the Policy Coordination Staff at the National Economic and Development Authority in his early 20s; Boy went to Harvard in 1978, when he was 26, for his master’s in Public Administration, but cross-enrolled in theater courses at the same time. Another was poet Fidelito Cortes, who beat me out to a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford in the mid-1980s (and who made up for it by greeting me in San Francisco with the gift of a Stanford sweatshirt when it was my turn to come in 1986). I also wrote letters to film director Lino Brocka, who preferred to use the telephone to respond (quite often forgetting, when I was in Milwaukee, that it was 2 am when he was calling from Quezon City).

Boy always hand-wrote his letters in small, fine script; Lito, like myself, used a typewriter; our letters went on for pages and pages, reporting on what we were writing, seeing, and thinking at that time, aware that we were standing on the doorstep of our lives’ great labors.

This week and next, let me share some excerpts from our exchanges, leaving aside more personal references. I’m translating Boy’s from the Filipino original.

Harvard U, 3 Nov 78

Dear Butch,

My drama course is the most exciting of all my subjects. We’re studying all the major dramatists. We’re done with Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Wilde, Shaw… Wagner, Dumas fils and Buchner, and soon to follow will be Brecht, Pirandello, Beckett, Miller, Williams, O’Neill, etc. The best for me are still Ibsen and Chekhov—Ibsen for characterization and Chekhov for his mastery of dramatic devices such as economy in dialogue, choice of moments, verbal counterpoint, and so on. You know, it’s only now that I’ve discovered how Chekhovian my [three-act play] Bayan-Bayanan is. When I get back home, I can return to it and give it a final revision because I know now how I can still tighten and improve it. One more thing I admire about Chekhov is his lifestyle—shy, pensive, self-assured.

I don’t know if I can still write for the CCP [Literary Contest]—I’m too pressed for time. What about you, are you all set for this, or are you working on your Filmfest entry first? My dilemma in joining contests always seems to be that I worry about how to write my play in a way that the judge who’s in a hurry will grasp. If it isn’t well-made (meaning, it has a very clear plot), it could be hard to appreciate or to draw attention. I guess that if Chekhov joined our contests, he’d lose…. His style is so refined compared to mine. Once, for example, he was asked what the “character” of one of his characters was, and he answered, “He wears a yellow tie,” and everything was in that answer.

19 Jan 79

What are the entries to the Manila Film Festival—are they any good? Have they started the songfest? These would be good to get into—I have a lot of ideas for songs, about country and love and life—but I need to look for a good composer and a good singer….

There must be many more good playwrights such as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine and Moliere, but I still don’t know them well enough. I’d like to understand them all—because I’d like to teach drama someday (as a sort of sideline in case I become a full-time writer). It looks like I keep looking to [Rolando] Tinio as a model—whatever is in my field, I’d like to know.

…. The more I learn here, the more I’m aware that there’s so much I don’t know. The truth is, I need philosophy, psychology, and more to put everything together in my head. What I’m doing now is crash education. My letter’s getting awfully long. I’m just trying out the ideas I’ve been picking up. That’s because I don’t have any students yet. I remember when PETA asked us to give a lecture about our plays. I feel like I wasn’t able to say anything. The audience’s orientation was also so different. That will never happen to me again. I will also organize my ideas.

…. This will be all for now, because I’m getting sleepy. It looks like both of us keep writing such long letters. I hope we’re not just repeating ourselves. But it seems to me that we’re progressing.

2 March 79

About some of the points you raised in your letter—you’re right about speechwriting there. The Philippines or the world won’t change because of one speech. I’ve tired of this myself. The problem there is, every presidential speech has to be a speech to impress. It would be easier if it were just a speech to inform. Another problem is that we still lack in achievement and vision, so it’s really hard to impress. If there’s truly a lot to show, there wouldn’t be much need for talk, right?

…. The finitude of everything probably remains debatable. Or maybe I’m just being optimistic—I suspect that man will always discover something to overcome natural forces…. In general, I think I’m still optimistic. Maybe this is because I believe there’s a God who guides our actions. The “meaning” of life probably just doesn’t manifest itself in its consequences (in its practical results) but in the way life is used. Could be in some small things (small acts of charity, love, etc.) that we sometimes fail to notice.

…. There was a point in my brief life (before I turned 21) when I asked myself these things—what was the purpose of life? Why are people the way they are? And so on. Every now and then, I still raise the same questions, but I’m no longer dismayed, like I used to be. I’m no longer surprised, either…. When I come home, I’ll write some essays (I’m preparing my topics)—I’d like to be able to contribute to the field of thought. I have so many plans.

Boy Noriega died of cancer in 1994 at 42; I was away on a writing fellowship in Scotland, working on what would become Penmanship and Other Stories, when I heard about it. I later put his letters to me together and gave copies of them to his family. Next week, some fun with Fidelito.