You can find many wonderful things handmade by artisans on etsy.com, and that’s where I went to get this matched pair of saddle-leather cases for my iPhone and iPad mini. It took some time and it wasn’t cheap (but then I’ve spent sillier money on pens), but these cases will outlast the gadgets in them, and maybe even the user:
You can find more from the maker here.
Penman for Monday, Sept. 9, 2013
NOW 72, Cirilo F. Bautista towers over the writers of his generation. Though primarily known as a poet in English, Cirilo—“Toti” to his friends—also writes formidable fiction in both English and Filipino. His books of poetry alone number a dozen, and have won the country’s most prestigious prizes, including the Centennial Prize in 1998. Until his retirement, he was a full professor and writing guru at De La Salle University, and had, at some time or other, taught at other major universities here and abroad. His poetry is deep and complex, conscious of the need to separate the emotional from the intellectual—difficult to many—but not without wit and humor.
Bautista has been nominated for the hallowed title of National Artist, and it’s an honor he would richly deserve and invest with the necessary achievement and gravitas. I can only hope that the bestowers of this award will take this view—shared by many in our literary community—when they sit down next to consider our National Artist awardees. I can be fairly sure that there will be great rejoicing and little dissension when that happens, unlike the controversy that met the last batch of dagdag-bawas “laureates.”
Last Sunday evening, I was privileged to hear Cirilo speak at the 63rd Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature at the Manila Peninsula. He had been asked by the contest sponsors to be evening’s guest of honor. Although forced to use a wheelchair by muscular dystrophy, Cirilo showed no sign of slowing down where his mind was concerned. That night, in a mixture of polemic and poetry reading, Cirilo lamented the diminished role of the poet (by extension, the artist) in Filipino society, diminished since the days of Jose Rizal, when poets were heroes and heroes were poets.
With his permission, I’m excerpting portions of his speech, in the hope that more Filipinos will take notice of their poets in general, and of one named Cirilo F. Bautista in particular. What follows are his remarks:
Small as the Philippines is, smaller still is its literary community—poets and fictionists caught in the bright dream of making a difference in its aesthetic and cultural development. Some are good, many are terribly bad. I speak of the good ones only since charity has no place in the critical evaluation of artistic excellence. To those who live with words, who are engaged in the art of counting syllables and harmonizing metaphors, whose constant fear is not finishing their work, to be poets in the Philippines is to live in a surreal world whose stress and strains shape their concept of existence. People regard you as a specimen of some strange thing to encounter, to examine, even to touch. But not of something to take seriously. You live on the border, on the periphery, on the edge of society, considered unique, but nothing more. The institution that you represent—the world of fine writing—has not made the priority list of any government in the history of the country, whatever our political fathers may say about the importance of cultural advancement. Poetry receives no significant financial allocation, no institutional support, no artistic infrastructure. Not that the poets should depend on the government, but that since the government is tasked with the overall progress of the people, certain measures must be taken to insure that poets do not wallow in the quagmire of neglect.
… Now we see manifestations of the absence of support for the poets. Poets are generally unknown in their own country. Few read them but in the lingering and strengthening vestiges of colonialism prefer the work of Western writers. We are led by the nose by American capitalist interest in the arts. We read what they give us, and have not been sincere and brave enough to assert our own taste and preferences. Our culture is a borrowed culture, disguised as modernistic simply because it arrived on the Internet. But of the values that assert our roots, they seem to have been devoured by TV novelas and rock concerts. Our taste is largely a mixture of truncated native idealism and borrowed Western adventurism. That we adapt to them may be our virtue, given difficult times; that we are controlled by them may be our downfall. But like them we do. They appeal to that inexplicable part of us that needs to resolve the ironies and contradictions of our existence. And it is in this that, quite strangely enough, the poets seem naturally equipped to provide explanations.
… I am a veteran poet; as I have said, I have published some 12 books of poetry. None of them made a print run of one thousand copies. By American standards I should be rich from the sale of these books, but I am not. It seems they are read only by the inquisitive and misdirected. On a few occasions when, feeling generous, I give my books to relatives and acquaintances, they ask me why I am punishing them. Those who don’t like reading poetry considering reading it a punishment; that’s the only way of interpreting the situation. And poetry becomes a burden to society which has reached a certain stage of insensitivity to the stark harmonies of the soul. This baffles me. I can’t understand why in an affluent society like ours (we are called Third World only by the political elite who handle the greater portion of our national budget for self-improvement and establishing political dynasties), a true literary resurgence cannot take place, or why we cannot remedy the effects of a fractured culture and mismanaged patrimony. The elite in society do not buy Filipino books but patronize foreign ones. It is their pride to be amongst the first to have the work of this or that European poet or novelist, but they will ignore the works of their countrymen. Is this colonial mentality or crab mentality? They still find it difficult to believe in Filipino excellent artistry, or they will down to lower ground Filipinos who exhibit excellent artistry. I find this prevalent among the young who regard foreign shores as sources of cultural inspiration. Always the Filipino is never first in their appraisal.
… It is of course an error to belittle our poets. They have proven that they can compete with the best in the world, given certain assistance and patronage. Their works appear in international publications, they have won important prizes, they are invited to global conferences and festivals of art, they exchange ideas with prominent figures of contemporary literature. Why then are they not patronized in their own country? As I said, I’m baffled by this, short of saying what I don’t want to say—that like crabs we pull down those we perceive to be making names for themselves, and consign to neglect the products of those names. Some are even proud not to be readers of Filipiniana.
… We are proud to point to a poet as our national hero. A poet laureate reflects a country’s coming to terms with the importance of poetry in the overall conduct of its affairs, but mostly with the progress of its artistic sensibility. Poetry is a civilizing factor that drives away the rudeness and coarseness of practical existence. It confers on the individual a high sense of being-ness and a true perspective of life. The poet laureate serves as a bridge to connect the people’s aesthetic education and spiritual well-being. It is seeing their world in another way, and making connections with realities that seem hazy at the start. A moon is not a moon, flying is not leaving the ground—but something else. What? That’s the exquisite area of poetic discovery that only the knowledgeable may enter.
(Photo courtesy of the Cultural Center of the Philippines)
Before starting work this morning, I took a quick shot of the pens in my current rotation (note: one of them’s a rollerball):
Penman for Monday, Sept. 2, 2013
I RECEIVED a very interesting message in my mailbox last week from a good friend now based in Singapore, the American writer Robin Hemley, who serves as Director and Writer-in-Residence of the Yale-NUS Writing Program at the National University of Singapore. Robin and I have been to many conferences and workshops together, breaking bread and chugging beer not too long ago in Hong Kong, Michigan and Melbourne.
Just retired from Iowa, Hemley’s one of the world’s foremost experts on creative nonfiction, and a mean writer of fiction himself; I teach one of his stories, a very funny piece titled “Reply All,” in my class. He’s a frequent visitor to Manila—not surprisingly, since his wife Margie is Filipino. But Robin has been more intimately engaged with Philippine culture and society than his family ties would suggest. Fairly recently, he found himself stranded on a remote island in one of the Babuyan Islands while doing research for a novel. That’s my kind of writer—someone who immerses himself in his material to the point of self-endangerment.
Thus being no stranger to risk, Robin didn’t surprise me when he sent me a copy of a letter he had written in the wake of the pork barrel scandal, by which he had been deeply disturbed. It was addressed to no one in particular—he had titled it “A letter to the Philippines”—and Robin asked me what I thought of it, and if it would be worth sharing with others. I read the letter, and immediately wrote Robin to say that I thought it was worth publishing, and that I would be happy to do the honors in this column, with his approval—which came shortly after, with his thanks.
That creative writers and other artists respond to the day’s political issues is something we’ve learned to expect, if not encourage, although our responses more often take the form of our art itself, with its necessary mediations and interpretations. When we respond directly—like Beng and I did in joining the Million People March last Monday—it’s more as citizens than as artists. And that’s actually a relief and a reminder of sorts, that we can act as ordinary people, with ordinary people, away from the pressures of performance.
I decided to publish Robin’s letter to acknowledge his participation, if not his citizenship, in our society. Surely there are many others like him, though few perhaps as articulate, who feel deeply invested in our affairs but who, out of caution or a sense of propriety, have decided to keep quiet. Robin’s letter will also surely upset some Filipino readers who may feel that the pork barrel scam—or whatever wrongdoing takes place here—is none of a foreigner’s business. And that, I think, would be a sad thing, because if evil is universal and cuts across countries and cultures, so should the outrage that it deserves to be met with. Here’s Robin’s letter to us:
I want to preface my remarks by stating that although I am a foreigner, I have nothing but love and respect for the peoples of the Philippines. I’m married into the culture, have written extensively about it, and consider it my second home. If I could, I would become a citizen of the Philippines, but becoming a citizen of the RP is much more difficult than becoming a citizen of the U.S., which my wife did a few years back, not because she loves her country any less, but for logistical reasons, i.e. visa-free travel, as much as anything.
The most recent scandal in the Philippines, involving Janet Napoles and a number of prominent politicians, has prodded me to think more deeply about the privilege of citizenship. Unfortunately, politicians in almost all countries seem to think the number one qualification for any public position is the fearless ability to betray the public trust. Political scandals in the Philippines are nothing new. In fact, they seem to occur with such frequency that the Philippines’ famously free press ironically seems to exacerbate the ability of these officials to sink to ever lower depths of betrayal by giving the public a safety valve to impotently express their outrage. The hard-working public, the people who pay taxes, have become so inured to the corruption of their public officials or so resigned to it, that the frequent scandals in the papers become so much public theater, producing little in the way of results.The latest scandal seems so egregious that it has rightfully sparked enough outrage to bring people into the streets. If I were in the Philippines right now, I would join them, but I’m living in Singapore at the moment, a country that doesn’t have the same free press as the Philippines, but that has also a low tolerance for corruption of public officials.
I wonder if I would be welcome to join the protests in the Philippines. I know my friends would welcome my presence, but Filipinos by and large are sensitive to foreigners criticizing them, and for many good reasons which I respect. But I’ve also been to Cuba several times in the last few years, and I was impressed by the willingness of the Cuban people, almost from the beginnings of their fight against the Spanish, to enlist the support of sympathetic foreigners. Che Guevara, probably the most revered figure of the Cuban revolution, was Argentinian. And there have been many others, though I hasten to add that I’m not making any comparisons here other than this observation. I’m not communist and I don’t look good in a beret or a moustache.
Still, I think of the young Dutchman, himself apparently a communist sympathizer who famously made a policeman cry and then was deported from the Philippines for being obnoxious. This seems to me a serious blunder of the Philippine government, displaying a lack of maturity at best. While the Dutchman was undoubtedly immature himself, I’m not sure that his act warranted deportation. In principle, I should say I’m not opposed to making policemen cry. Not that I’m against the police of the Philippines. My late father-in-law was an honest policeman in Mindanao, and lived relatively modestly his entire life, but led a life of dignity because he refused to take a bribe, a temptation many of his fellow police couldn’t resist. He taught his children to be honest, too, a couple of them who have become lawyers and who refuse to enter politics because they don’t want to be corrupted. One, who works for the government, also refuses to take bribes, though they are routinely offered. And this of course makes me proud of the family into which I’ve married.
These are the people who should be in politics, but they’re too wise to do so. To me, they are the real patriots, the people who will never grab headlines, but who choose to live a life of quiet dignity serving the people and their homeland in the small ways available to them.
Instead of deporting critics of the Philippines, no matter how annoying they might be, no matter whom they make shed tears, perhaps the real villains of the Philippines should finally be called to account for their multiple betrayals. To set up fake NGOs, and contribute millions to their coffers in the name of the public good while cynically using this money for their own gain, seems to me to be a new nadir of betrayal. If found guilty, perhaps these politicians should lose what they should have valued most from the start: their citizenship.
Penman for Monday, August 26, 2013
A FEW months ago, I was thrilled to read the news that TS Eliot’s pen had been lodged with the Royal Society of Literature, replacing a quill pen that had been owned by Charles Dickens and used by the society’s fellows to sign themselves into the exclusive club. Now based in Somerset House in London, the society counts some 500 fellows among its members, and not surprisingly these have included some of British literature’s most illustrious names both ancient and modern, from Yeats to Rowling. (Fourteen new fellows can be elected to the society every year; they need to have published at least two outstanding books and gained the acclaim of their peers.)
The story, according to The Guardian, was that Dickens’ quill pen had understandably lost its sharpness, and that a replacement was therefore in order (members can also choose to use Lord Byron’s pen, reportedly still in fine shape). Eliot’s widow (his second, actually) Valerie had just died in 2012 and had willed his pen to the RSL, making the turnover possible. (Before we leave the subject of quill pens altogether, let me note that these medieval tools took a lot more to make than pulling big feathers from the butts of geese, including tempering in hot sand and sharpening with what came to be logically known as a pen knife.)
It took some Googling before I found a picture of Eliot’s pen, which was never identified in the news stories (picture above courtesy of The Telegraph). From what I knew of vintage pens, it was a Waterman in black hard rubber with two wide gold bands, on one of which was inscribed Thomas Stearns Eliot’s initials. It had been a gift from his mother Charlotte; Eliot had moved to England from the US in 1914 when he was 25, so the pen, which dates to that period or a little earlier, might have been a parting gift.
I remembered Eliot’s pen over last week’s rains when, with nothing much else to do at home (that’s not quite right—I always have something to write, but am a horrible procrastinator), I took out my pens for a ritual rubdown and came across a few I hadn’t seen in a long time. That was because these were special pens kept in a special corner—pens donated to my collection by writer-friends, pens they had actually used in their work. Over the years, as word got around of my fascination with fountain pens, generous friends and patrons like Don Jaime Zobel de Ayala and Wash SyCip have gifted me with lovely pens, which I continue to treasure.But the pens I’ve assiduously run after have been those of my fellow writers, especially older friends who started writing with them in the pre-computer age.
My little writers’ corner now includes pens from National Artists Franz Arcellana, NVM Gonzalez, and Virgilio Almario, as well as from dear friends and colleagues Doreen Fernandez, Jimmy Abad, and Jing Hidalgo. They range in kind from a Parker 51 from Franz and a Montblanc 220 from Doreen to well-used ballpoints from NVM and Rio. (I’m still hoping, one of these days, to be able to ask for pens from Bien Lumbera, Frankie Jose, the late Tiempos, and Greg Brillantes, among others.) Needless to say, these pens will never be sold on eBay. If and when we open a Writers’ Museum, or at least a permanent display like they have at the National Library of Singapore, I might consider loaning or passing them on, but for now they’ll stay with me in my man-cave, feeding my fetishist longings alongside books signed by Nick Joaquin, Jose, Brillantes, Bienvenido Santos, JM Coetzee, Frank McCourt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Junot Diaz, and Edward Jones. (Some of these—the non-Filipino ones, excepting Junot’s—I wouldn’t mind putting on the block someday.)
Before typewriters and word processors made everybody’s writing look like everybody else’s, writers and their pens enjoyed a special relationship, some more so than others.
Mark Twain, a friend to Filipinos in his staunch opposition to American imperialism, preferred the Conklin Crescent Filler, a pen that used an inverted half-moon of gold to press down on the rubber sac in the barrel to release ink. It was a very popular filling system in its time and Twain became something of a poster boy for Conklin, so when the company was recently revived (like so many other long-dormant pen makers, on the heels of a neo-traditionalist trend boosting fountain pen sales), it named its flagship pen what else but the Mark Twain.
But Twain’s popularity never came close to that of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was reported to have used a Conway Stewart—a venerable British brand recently revived—through the dark days of the war. So formidable a figure was Churchill that not only Conway Stewart but Montblanc and Onoto have also come out with pens in his honor.
Onoto—another British pen maker, associated with Thomas de la Rue which used to print our banknotes in the pre-BSP days—also claimed Sir Winnie among its famous users. In the age before paid celebrity endorsements, catching someone popular using your product was good as an endorsement, and was free besides. The minders of today’s Onoto have come up with incontrovertible proof—a letter sent by the young Churchill in November 1915 to his wife Clementine from the trenches in France, where he talks about “the venomous whining and whirring of the bullets which pass overhead.” But the clincher for the company was the ending: “Send me also a new Onoto pen. I have stupidly lost mine.”)
Speaking of the French, Fountain Pens: History and Design quotes the French theorist Roland Barthes waxing ecstatic over his pens: “In the end, I always come back to fountain pens. The important thing is that they can ensure the graceful handwriting I care so much about…. I have too many fountain pens and don’t know what to do with them. Yet, as soon as I see one, I can never resist buying it.”
There’s probably no more famous user of a fountain pen today than Neil Gaiman, who employs quite a range of them, from among the 40 to 50 he reputedly owns—a TWSBI, a Pilot, a Lepine, a Delta, and a Visconti, among others—not just to sign books but to actually write his novels with. He lives, he says, in “a house full of Macs” and is a self-confessed iPod freak, but he told the BBC that, with pens, “I found myself enjoying writing more slowly and liked the way I had to think through sentences differently. I discovered I loved the fact that handwriting forces you to do a second draft, rather than just tidying up and deleting bits on a computer. I also discovered I enjoy the tactile buzz of the ritual involved in filling the pens with ink.”
Pen addicts (the fancy name is “stylophiles”) can never have just one pen to use, so we prefer to talk about “the rotation,” that merry-go-round of favorites we keep constantly inked and polished, ready to be taken for a ride. There’s a lot of debate in the group over whether one should carry one’s most precious pens; I’m of the school that believes that life is short and runs ever shorter, so that fine pens, like Rolexes and Patek Philippes, should be carried with pride and reasonable care. I can’t tell you how many pens I’ve lost in my practice of this carpe diem philosophy, but I have no regrets.
These days, my most faithful pocket companion and favored pen in hand is a 20-year-old Agatha Christie, a largish black pen with a clip in the form of a sinuous snake, a tribute to its exalted namesake and her penchant for mystery. This gorgeous pen has written nothing more noteworthy than, well, notes, but having it in my pocket puts a lift in my step, and even doodling with it puts me in a trance, poised as it were to write until its cache of ink (either Rohrer and Klingner Sepia or Diamine Oxblood) runs dry.
In these digital times, of course, hardly anyone except Neil Gaiman really writes stories and novels with a pen anymore, and even this piece is being written on a MacBook Air, which is threatening to croak any minute now for want of juice. That was the beauty of the pen, a writing instrument you could pop into your pocket and pull out as the inspiration or necessity struck you, batteries and brownouts be damned. I’m sure that Tom, Mark, Winnie, Roland, and Neil would wholeheartedly agree.
Penman for Monday, Aug. 19, 2013
I WAS online last week looking up the rumors about the impending release of the iPhone 6 on September 10 when I glanced at the sidebar of the page I was reading and spotted a new word out of the corner of my eye. The word was “listicle”, and immediately I wondered if it was something cold, sweet, and edible, or some sinister medical malady, some unnerving imbalance afflicting grown men.
I clicked the link, and learned something new, thanks to Anna Lawlor of The Guardian: “The journalistic lexicon has a new entry; the ‘listicle’, describing a list-based article. From The Sunday Times’ ‘100 Best Companies’ to Buzzfeed’s ’31 Things You Can Make Out of Cereal Boxes’, listicles are equally beloved for their condensed information format and online virility and decried as lazy journalism for the perennial lunchtime ‘news snacker’.”
News snacker? What the heck was a news snacker? Farther down the piece was the definition: someone who engages in “checking news content far more frequently, for short, sharp bursts of attention.” In other words, that’s someone who checks out the headlines on his or her mobile phone or tablet five to six times a day.
I suppose that’s me—I’m online all the time, and can’t help peeking into the news, my eBay bids, and the chatter on my favorite fountain-pen and Apple websites every few hours—but I’m also old enough to still be reading the newspaper from the front page to the back page with my morning coffee, and to watch one or two TV newscasts before bedtime. So rather than a news snacker, call me a news glutton, which I almost had to be to pick up a new word and concept like “listicle.”
Come to think of it, we are in the full-blown age of the listicle, and you don’t have to look much farther than the STAR to realize that. Toward the end of every July, the STAR celebrates its anniversary by coming out with lists of anything and everything its inspired Lifestyle writers can put together (in my case, this year, I offered “27 bits of advice I give to young writers”).
If lists float your boat, then you have to be a regular on listverse.com, which serves up lists of such engrossing subjects as “10 strange non-sexual ways people have orgasms,” “10 creepy historical vampires you’ve never heard of,” and “10 unconfirmed victims of famous murderers.” (Talk about learning something new: from a list of “10 earliest versions of everyday technologies,” we learn that the first smartphone—with email, predictive typing, and some basic “apps”—was an IBM phone named Simon, which weighed a pound, was the size of a brick, and sold for nearly $1,000 back in 1994.)
But there were lists, of course, long before the Internet. In 1977, David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, and Amy Wallace compiled the first Book of Lists. Featuring such irresistible morsels as “famous people who died during sexual intercourse,” the book became a hit, and was periodically updated and reissued.
As you can see, some lists are more serious and some more ridiculous than others, although we should probably admit that silly lists are usually more fun to read. No one really talks much about lists like “10 things we need to do as a nation to move forward,” although we should. By their very nature, lists draw attention and achieve popularity because they seem to create patterns we’ve never seen before in the raw, undigested mess of our daily lives; patterns are intriguing if not mesmerizing, a kind of eye candy of the mind, but also reassuring at the same time, in that they bear the promise of an underlying logic to everything. Lists create mass, and mass creates credibility if not consequence.
To get on the serious side of lists, the first “listicle”—certainly the best known to lit geeks like me—has to be the “catalog of ships” in Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where every Greek and Trojan chieftain who took part in the Trojan War is listed along with a description of his home city and the ships he brought with him. There’s a lot of debate among scholars about the historical veracity of this catalog, there being a 500-year gap between the war and Homer’s own time, but some scholars have come to the all-too-human conclusion that, well, lists change and grow with time. As a website devoted to Greek studies puts it:
“An intermediate theory is that the catalogue developed through a process of accretion during the poem’s oral transmission and reflects gradual inclusion of the homelands of local sponsors by individual singers… In the most recent extended study of the Catalogue, Edzard Visser, of the University of Basel, concludes that the Catalogue is compatible with the rest of the Iliad in its techniques of verse improvisation, that the order of the names is meaningful and that the geographical epithets evince concrete geographical knowledge. Visser argues that this knowledge was transmitted by the heroic myth, elements of which introduce each geographical section… W. W. Minton places the catalogue within similar ‘enumerations’ in Homer and Hesiod, and suggests that part of their purpose was to impress the audience with a display of the performer’s memory.”
(Note to self: add “Edzard Visser” and “W. W. Minton” to a list of “names that sound like heavyweight professors’ names.”)
The sidestep to Homer and the literary catalog reminded me of another famous employer of the catalog, the American poet Walt Whitman (known to many of us as the author of that perennial declamation favorite, “O Captain, My Captain!”), whose epic Leaves of Grass surveyed the broad American landscape and used poetry to do what Instagram might have achieved in another time, taking snapshots of the passing scene, creating quick portraits of “newly-come immigrants,” “the squaw,” “the connoisseur,” “the one-year-wife,” “the paving man,” “the canal boy,” and so on.
At its best—and Whitman shows how—the listicle, or at least its literary form, can achieve a transcendent significance, a more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts meaningfulness that ordinary lists such as “the 10 best-selling burgers in America” can’t convey. Whitman scholar Betsy Eikkila explains it thus:
“Whitman’s catalog technique serves as a democratizing device, inscribing the pattern of many and one. By basing his verse in the single, end-stopped line at the same time that he fuses this line—through various linking devices—with the larger structure of the whole, Whitman weaves an overall pattern of unity in diversity. This pattern of many and one—the e pluribus unum that was the revolutionary seal of the American republic—is the overarching figure of Leaves of Grass.”
If that was a bit much for you, no problem. There’s always listverse.com and its promise of a yummy news snack to get you through another day of tedium at the office, and you don’t even have to choose between “10 of the slowest plants to ever bloom” and “11 cool facts about polar bears”—you can have them both, and more. They may be low on fiber, but hey, they’re high on sugar.
Penman for Monday, August 12, 2013
LAST WEDNESDAY, I had the privilege of being part of a special ceremony at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, this time for the UP Arts Productivity System or APS awards. Initiated under former UP President Emerlinda R. Roman in 2009, the APS provides substantial monetary incentives to artists within the UP System for work produced within a three-year period (or five, the first time you apply). Twenty-eight UP artists were honored, including 17 from the first batch in 2009. (A similar system had been earlier put in place for UP scientists.)
A committee of peers—themselves highly accomplished artists, including National Artists—receives and evaluates applications from Diliman and UP’s many other campuses. Points are assigned to specific works, such as books, productions, exhibitions, and major lectures; further points accrue from notable awards and distinctions, especially forms of international recognition. Within this committee, spirited discussions inevitably arise over the merits of an artist’s work. Since the award is given for new and continuing work, it isn’t a lifetime achievement award, and no matter how highly regarded an artist may be, only his or her sustained productivity will be recognized by the APS.
Not surprisingly, many questions and concerns come up in the APS. The proper and fair valuation of artistic work is one of the most difficult tasks anyone can assume, even and especially within an academic setting, which may not necessarily reflect what the market thinks say, of a painting or a commissioned biography. Academia is the bastion of theory, and an award-giving situation like this challenges and exercises every humanities professor’s notions of what is good and valuable.
The idea that art itself is of real value is, in the first place, something one can’t assume to be a general belief in our country, and even in our university. Painters have it easier in terms of establishing their worth, because people have gotten used to the spectacle of, say, a Van Gogh selling for many millions of dollars, even if they may not understand why. They can look at a painting or sculpture in their living room or in an office lobby and at least appreciate its decorative value (although modernist art will probably leave them deeply perplexed, especially when told that the piece was worth a lot of money).
The utility and practical value of a poem is far more ephemeral. Artistry in the form of a service—say, directing a play or curating an exhibit—is even harder to apprehend for many. This is why it takes another artist—or a scholar and academic—to seek out and to recognize these obscure but important triumphs of mind, spirit, and sensibility over matter.
There are awards enough in the Philippines for artistic endeavor, capped by the National Artist Award, which the Supreme Court found the good sense to rescue from pit of political patronage. Elsewhere there are the FAMAS, the Palancas, the Thirteen Artists, and any number of music-industry awards. What distinguishes the UPAPS is its recognition of artists who also teach, or teachers who also manage to produce good art despite the well-known rigors of teaching and that other great devourer of time and energy, administration.
This is particularly important in an institution like UP, which—not unlike many other Philippine universities today, for understandable reasons—seems to have reoriented itself toward more support for science, technology, and engineering. (One thing most people don’t realize is that, based on enrolment figures alone, UP Diliman is really basically an engineering school; those of us in a small minority in the humanities and the law just happen to be noisier than the typical engineer.)
I was told that the UP science complex—an impressive array of colleges and institutes geared toward establishing UP as a force to be reckoned with in regional S&T—has so far received some P3.5 billion in various forms of support and investments, chiefly from the government. Under President Alfredo E. Pascual, UP has asked Malacañang for a small fraction of that for what we might call cultural infrastructure—studios, laboratories, theaters, exhibition spaces, and equipment that our students and their teachers need to produce significant new work; so far I’ve yet to hear of a firm commitment for even this sliver of support given to S&T. (For the record, we shouldn’t be competing with S&T, but alongside S&T for our share of the national budget.)
Never mind, for now, our standing recommendation for the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Culture to oversee national cultural policy and arts promotion. Never mind that we hardly ever hear about arts and culture in the SONA, very likely because our high officials still see culture as entertainment, as an intermission number without any material contributions to make to the national good.
Last week, where someone could do something about the lot of the Filipino artist, they did, and on behalf of the UPAPS awardees, I’d like to thank President Pascual and his administration for this initiative, and can only hope that it is picked up by other visionary academic leaders elsewhere.
Herewith, the list of UPAPS awardees—including, immodestly, yours truly (who had to publish five books in three years to make the grade!):
MUSIC and DANCE: Maria Christine M. Muyco, La Verne C. de la Peña, Jonas Baes, Josefino J. Toledo; ARCHITECTURE: Gerard Rey A. Lico, Danilo A. Silvestre; FILM: Grace J. Alfonso, Sari Raissa L. Dalena; FINE ARTS: Patrick D. Flores, Jason B. Banal, Leonilo O. Doloricon, Ruben Fortunato M. De Jesus, Ma. Eileen L. Ramirez, Reuben R. Cañete; LITERARY WORKS: Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., Ricardo M. de Ungria, Eugene Y. Evasco, Jose Neil Carmelo C. Garcia, Roland B. Tolentino, Rosario T. Yu, Layeta P. Bucoy, Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr.; RADIO, TELEVISION and RELATED MEDIA: Fernando A. Austria, Jr., Danilo A. Arao; SCHOLARLY WORK: Priscelina P. Legasto; and THEATRE: Josefina F. Estrella, Dexter M. Santos, Alexander C. Cortez.
Penman for Monday, August 5, 2013
FROM INDIA, last week, came the news that the company that handles that subcontinent’s telegram service had sent out its last telegram, ending a facility that had been available to Indians since 1850. It was also from India that, two years ago, we received word of the demise of the last operating manufacturer of typewriters in the world, a company called Godrej and Boyce, which was still making up to 12,000 typewriters a year until 2009.
It might seem then that the horizon of obsolete technologies lies somewhere between Srinagar and Chennai, but of course we Pinoys know differently. For even in this age of Twitter, Instagram, SMS, and FaceTime, many Filipinos—the oldest and the poorest of us, that is—still have one foot firmly planted in the 20th century, and it will be a while before we’ll learn to let go, at least in our minds, of the things that made our life easier back in 1963.
A surprisingly comprehensive history of the Philippine telecommunications industry, written and published online by Federico and Rafael Oquindo, says that the Spanish began laying out a telegraphic service in the Philippines in 1867.
I’m not sure if we can actually still send paper telegrams to one another, since the old telegraphic companies have either died out or been taken over by telecoms giants more interested in moving money than messages. Your relatives would surely be more interested in receiving a MoneyGram from you, anyway, than your telegraphic best wishes. If you’re feeling wacky, you could also send them a singing telegram, which—for around P2,000—will include a box of chocolates to go with the guitarist and singer, and your favorite song.
But where has the old-fashioned, STOP-punctuated slip of paper gone? Gone the way of the horse-drawn carriage and the steam engine and the carrier pigeon, it would seem, replaced by faster, sexier, and maybe even cheaper ways of getting a message from A to B. In the US, Western Union sent its last telegram in 2006.
To be perfectly dry-eyed about it, few 21st-century citizens will miss and mourn the telegram. To send one, you had to go to an office and scrawl your message on a pad of paper—a message that, depending on your agent’s sharpness of eye and adequacy of mind, could come out garbled on the other end. The cost of the telegram was computed by the word, and how fast it traveled depended on how much of a premium you were willing to pay; I remember that “NLT”, or night letter, was the cheapest option, because you had to wait for some night clerk to attend to your message after everything else went out for the day. And then your telegram, encased in a flimsy plastic envelope, had to ride along with a bagful of others in the back of a motorcycle or even a bicycle to cross rivers and mountains to get to its recipient, two or three days after pushed your message across the counter.
It all seems too cumbersome and too quaint now, but there was a reason for the telegram’s popularity in its day. Very often, it went out to people and places without telephones (yes, there was such a country and such a time), and it was much faster than a regular letter, albeit more tight-lipped. Arguably, the telegram was unique in the power it conveyed and the significance it implied, for only the most important—both the saddest and the happiest—of messages merited a telegram.
Unlike SMS, or even the pager (remember EasyCall?) that preceded the cellular phone, the telegram was too slow for casual banter, too terse for courtship or argument. It worked best at bringing you the good news and the bad news: prizes won, loved ones lost, congratulations, condolences, reminders, pleadings.
I have a soft spot for the telegram, because it figured prominently in my literary career, starting with one I received in May 1969, informing me that I—then a high school senior—had won a national essay competition. Over the next two decades, at around this time of year, I would scan the horizon for the RCPI messenger, the bearer of the only telegram that mattered to me and hundreds of other aspiring Filipino writers: one sent by the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards Foundation, telling us that we had won and inviting us to the September 1st awarding ceremony. (Our exuberant imagination supplied the rest of the unspoken message, which understandably would have cost the Palancas too much to tack on to their congratulations: “You’re a wizard of words, a literary lion, a paladin of prose whose works will sell a million copies, attract hordes of screaming fans, foment revolutions, and uplift human life and civilization!”) I did receive a number of those telegrams, a few of which I still keep as souvenirs, reminders of the Jobsian admonition to “stay hungry.”
There was one telegram I remember sending, sometime in the mid-1970s, from my small hometown in Romblon where I had gone on a short visit with my father and had quickly run out of cash, not having had much to bring in the first place. In desperation, I cabled my new bride Beng, whom I had to leave behind in Manila: “MISSUS I MISS US HONEY SEND MONEY.” And so she did.
And that’s all the old telegram companies do these days—send money to presumably happy recipients. Let text and Twitter take care of the bad stuff. If it’s the physical telegram itself you really want to send or to get, just so you can relive the good old days when people got inky fingers from writing long letters with fountain pens and licked postage stamps and waited for weeks to get something back in the mail, there’s hope for you. A company will still deliver a telegram to a Philippine address (and to over 200 other countries), for $24.95 plus 88 cents per word (no NLT option here); you’ll just need to go online at www.itelegram.com to avail yourself of this charming if pricey service.
SPEAKING OF other countries, it’s always good to read positive things about the Philippines when you’re abroad, even if they happen to be advertisements. In Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago, I beamed when I turned to the travel pages of a local newspaper and saw how many ads featured our national tourism tagline: “It’s more fun in the Philippines!” The ads offered special packages for Manila (read: the new Solaire casino) and other parts of the country (read: Boracay) via Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific.
Now, I’m one of those guys who—no matter how strongly I might criticize our foibles and follies back home—like to wave the Philippine flag when they’re on the road. Any chance I get, I invite my foreign friends to come and visit, allaying their usual fears by pointing out that they could get mugged in New York or robbed in Prague, anyway—they might as well enjoy our sunshine! Lord knows we need all the plugging we can get, with neighbors like Thailand roping in some 22 million tourists a year versus our 4 million.
I’m wondering now if it was schadenfreude—that wicked burst of pleasure you get when something nasty happens to your neighbor but not to you—that coursed through my veins when I came across an article in The Standard noted that traveling to Thailand was fraught with danger “from jet-ski scams to robbery, assault and even police extortion.” Hah! I thought—that’s what I’d been trying to tell my Hong Kong friends—it’s more fun in the Philippines!
Then I read on, turning the page: “Britain said Thailand is the country where its citizens are second most likely to require consular assistance, behind the Philippines.” Ooops! Sounds like we need to do a little more work in the Philippines.
(Image from philippinephilatest.net)
Penman for Monday, July 29, 2013
I WAS in Hong Kong last weekend to talk to an international group of graduate writing students about a subject that, I proposed, we were all acutely aware of and very likely had done something in, but rarely dwelt on in creative writing class (although we do discuss it a lot in a reading or critical context): the relationship between literature and politics, or self and society. I’d put together a module that explored the way various authors from different environments have dealt with political subjects, primarily in fiction.
The selections I chose—15 short stories and three novels from all over—covered a range of specific issues from race to sexuality, and also a range of approaches and techniques. We discussed these examples, paying close attention to how the authors drew attention to their causes and concerns in an aesthetically satisfying and politically effective manner.
My students came from the UK, the US, India, New Zealand, and Singapore, and many lived in Hong Kong or mainland China. Therefore, they represented a broad range of social and political experiences, which also informed their responses to the fiction we took up. (We Pinoys—at least the older ones among us—are relatively immersed in political literature and discourse, given our history and our circumstances; whether as readers or writers, we can’t avoid Rizal, and why should we? Despite more recent forays into postmodernism, speculative fiction, and other fresher approaches, our fiction remains stolidly realist in the mainstream, compelled to account for the harrowing truths that drip from our headlines.)
We opened by discussing three stories that dealt with the thorny issue of race—thornier, of course, in some countries and societies than others. Race may not be as visible and as contentious a political factor with us Filipinos as it is in, say, Singapore or Malaysia, not to mention the US and the UK, if only because we have assimilated the Chinese, for example, so well into our bodies and body politic that it will be nigh impossible to mount anything anti-Chinese without cutting off our own noses. That doesn’t mean that we’re above or beyond racism, regionalism, and ethnic bias; this will raise some hackles, but I suspect that we Pinoys practice a benign racism in insisting that all our PBA imports should be black. It’s for this reason, among others, that I make sure I cover African-American material in my classes.
The three race-related stories that I chose were James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man,” Nadine Gordimer’s “Six Feet of the Country,” and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use.” Baldwin and Walker dealt with the African-American experience, and Gordimer with apartheid in South Africa. (I wish I’d found a Chinese or Malaysian story dealing with race issues, and will do that the next time I do this module.)
Not only were the Baldwin, Gordimer, and Walker stories gut-wrenchingly powerful pieces of prose. They also represented different approaches to the same presumptive subject of the search for racial equality and self-realization, and this was what I wanted my students to see: how you could be so potently political, so committed to your cause, and yet also so level-headed and so composed that you never lose control of your material, or otherwise strangle it with heavy-handedness.
“Going to Meet the Man” was published in 1965 at the peak of the civil rights campaign in the US, and Baldwin—one of America’s most prominent black writers—could have written a typical story featuring a black character struggling against injustice and racial oppression at the hands of the white majority. All these elements are in the story, but James Baldwin does the daringly unexpected: for his narrator, he assumes the voice of Jesse, a white sheriff. The mild-mannered Jesse is a patronizing racist who can’t understand how blacks could be so upset with their lot that they would march in the open and disturb the peace, forcing him to take punitive action. Jesse also has a far more domestic problem: he can’t get it up for his wife, and the only way he can solve that is to pretend, strangely enough, that she’s black. But the story’s most horrifying moment comes from Jesse’s past, from his recollection of a childhood “picnic” that turns out to be the brutal lynching of a black man.
Nadine Gordimer’s story, first published in 1953—four decades before the formal abolition of apartheid in South Africa—is also told from the point of view of a white man, a landowner who albeit reluctantly takes up the cudgels for his black workers when the white authorities make a ghastly administrative mistake and return the wrong corpse for the man’s relatives to bury. (“There are so many black faces—surely one will do?”) The white protagonist here acts not out of politically enlightened outrage, but rather out of a deep annoyance with the bureaucracy, as if he himself had been personally offended. (And yes, before you ask, the tragicomic mix-up of bodies here would inspire my own Soledad’s Sister many years later.)
Alice Walker would gain fame for The Color Purple, a sprawling novel with a large cast of characters, but before that she wrote the story “Everyday Use,” which focuses on the home visit of a young, college-educated black woman to her poor mother and sister. Told from the mother’s point of view, the story shows how differently the educated and politically empowered daughter Dee now acts from those she left behind—she wants her mother to give her a precious quilt, a family heirloom, that she plans to use as a piece of décor, and can’t understand when her mother refuses to give it to her, since the quilt has been promised to her sister Maggie, who’ll be putting it to everyday use. Thus, no matter how much Dee may have gained in the city in political and cultural sophistication (she has even changed her name to “Wangero” in her own affirmation of black power), she has clearly lost touch with her own roots, no longer able to recognize the truly authentic and truly valuable.
What’s there to learn for writers from these three examples?
First, that good, sharp authors reject the obvious, and are willing to take risks with their material and their treatment. For his central character, Baldwin chose the antagonist, the one more difficult to portray with fidelity, if you’re on the other side; rather than demonize Jesse, Baldwin presents him with not a little sympathy, making him even more alarming. Rather than the victim, Gordimer chose to focus on the man in the middle, the individual caught in a moral dilemma; the man’s bravado is ultimately ineffectual, but his decision to act challenges the reader more likely to fence-sit in the same circumstances. Walker takes on the natural protagonist with her all-black cast, but also highlights the important differences between them, reminding us that “race” comprises individuals and great divergences of experience and belief.
Second, that they don’t come to easy conclusions, and allow for the complexity and even the complicity of their characters to come through. You don’t do characters and their readers a favor by creating flawless heroes and thoroughly hateful villains. Real life very often lies somewhere in between.
In other stories by authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, and our own Merlinda Bobis, my students and I also saw how authors with very strong political messages to convey did so, more effectively, by employing restraint and ambiguity, rather than excess and unyielding certainty. In other words, the best writers trust the intelligence and the natural humanity of their readers to lead them to what is reasonable and just. If you want to write good political fiction, first create good art, and leave the sloganeering to the editorial writers.
(Photo from time.com)
Penman for Monday, July 22, 2013
IT ISN’T every day or even every year that a Filipino author gets published by Penguin Books—I can think of only Jose Rizal, Jose Garcia Villa, Jessica Hagedorn, and Miguel Syjuco, off the top of my head—so when Marivi Soliven told me a couple of years ago that her new novel The Mango Bride (New York: NAL Accent, 2013) had been picked up by a division of Penguin, I immediately sent her a congratulatory note. But I didn’t realize the extent of Marivi’s achievement until I received a copy of the published book and read the novel in a mad dash to the ending.
Again, that doesn’t happen to me very often; given my crushing workload, it usually takes me weeks and even months to finish a new book, which is why I habitually decline invitations to do book reviews, not wanting to keep the authors and publishers waiting interminably. But Marivi’s case was different, because I was reading the book not as a beetle-browed critic, but as a mentor and a friend; as it happened, Marivi—whose husband John Blanco teaches literature at the University of California in San Diego, where they’ve been living for many years now—was also my daughter Demi’s English teacher in UP, and since Demi herself moved to San Diego, we’ve all kept in pretty close touch.
All this chumminess and this moving around has a point, and it’s directly related to The Mango Bride, which deals with the powerful tides, both social and personal, that continue to deliver many thousands of our countrymen to America. It tracks two Filipino women—the to-the-manor-born Amparo Guerrero, who gets banished to Oakland following an unwanted pregnancy that threatens to bring shame and scandal on her family, and Beverly Obejas, a plucky girl who also ends up in Oakland following the well-traveled path of the mail-order bride.
There is, of course, more in common between these two women than meets the eye, and it will hardly be a spoiler to say that their trajectories will cross. The task of the novel’s plot is to bring these two seemingly very different characters together—Amparo is a carefree college coed, while the orphaned Beverly works as a waitress—and when they do, toward the novel’s explosive climax, the author completes a narrative coup, with both dramatic inevitability and irony.
But more than a story of individuals, The Mango Bride is also a story of Filipino families rich and poor, which is to say that it presents Philippine society as an unfolding telenovela—bitchy matrons, philandering patriarchs, wayward sons, gay go-betweens, suffering servants, and all. This is, unabashedly, the source of the novel’s power, its appreciation of life in its broad, harsh strokes.
But unlike a telenovela, Soliven’s masterful prose lends the novel a fineness of detail that extends the pleasure of reading beyond mere plot and character into language. Here’s how she presents Amparo’s first experience of sex (as novelists know, a sex scene is always one of the hardest things to do well, and do freshly): “If there was something Amparo learned that first night, it was that the rhythm of passion was deeply satisfying for its simple circularity. Mouths making pillows of opposing lips, the call and response of interlocking sighs, a passel of caresses, cascading one into the other as waves folding into sea foam. Afterward, they gathered the thin sheets about them and curled into each other, chin to chin, chest to breast, dozing twins in a cotton womb.”
There’s a brilliant scene where Amparo tries to tell her boyfriend Mateo that he’s gotten her pregnant, but an elephant—literally—strides into the picture, having escaped from a circus and running red lights all the way down EDSA. It’s unexpected pay-offs like this that keep lifting the novel above the pedestrian, that remind us of an important literary talent at work, one with an unfailing feel for her material, whether we’re in Forbes Park or North Cemetery or a grocery in Oakland.
There will, I expect, be some complaining over the coincidences that mark the plot, but even here the improbable seems fated, precisely because of the novel’s implicit message: that we are closer to each other than we think, and might do well to acknowledge and accept that closeness while we can.
Marivi says that she began the novel in 2008 in the frenzy of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month—November, to most people) and completed it two years later. It won the Grand Prize for the Novel in the 2011 Palancas, but was extensively revised by Marivi for international publication.
If you want to buy the book and see if you can share my enthusiasm, it’s available at National Bookstore. But here’s the best part: if you want to meet Marivi herself and get her to sign your copy for you, she’ll be in town very soon for a series of readings and talks, thanks to NBS, which is sponsoring her visit.
She’ll be spending an afternoon with us in UP Diliman on Wednesday, August 7, from 2:30 to 4 pm at CM Recto Hall. The UP Institute of Creative Writing and the Department of English and Comparative Literature will co-sponsor the event, which is open to all. See you there!
SPEAKING OF new books, I was happy to have attended the recent launch of a rather unusual book—unusual because it’s a bilingual Spanish-English edition—titled La Oveja de Nathan (Nathan’s Sheep), by the late novelist Antonio M. Abad. Translated into English by Lourdes Castrillo Brillantes (a professor of Spanish at UP, and the lovely wife of our friend and literary kuya Greg Brillantes), the novel won the Premio Zobel in 1928, and was being published for the first time.
The Premio Zobel was initiated by the pioneering businessman Enrique Zobel de Ayala in 1920 to preserve the linguistic and cultural heritage of Spanish in the Philippines in the face of what Nick Joaquin would have called unbridled sajonismo. The Philippines and Filipinos had imbibed English like it was God’s own drink, and bold measures had to be taken to ensure the survival of Spanish in the new American age. Over the next many decades, the Premio Zobel did just that, and more, granting recognition to the best literary works written by Filipinos in Spanish, as well as the most valuable cultural contributions made by Filipinos to the cause of hispanidad.
Abad’s novel was one of the earliest winners of the prize (which Prof. Brillantes herself would later win), and its present publication by the Premio Zobel Collection, the Filipinas Heritage Library, and Georgina Padilla y Zobel (Enrique’s granddaughter) could not be more timely, as it deals with Filipinos caught between powerful political forces.
I’d have to admit that Sra. Georgina’s thoughtfulness in sending over an invitation to my house, with my name and address hand-lettered with a fountain pen, was what convinced me to drive across town in rush-hour traffic to catch the launch. Of course, the late author’s son, the poet Jimmy Abad, is also a dear friend, and Jimmy’s moving poetic tribute to his father’s legacy (delivered, in customary Jimmy Abad fashion, straight from memory) was well worth the excursion.
Pinoy Penman 3.0 
