Tag Archives: 1936

Qwertyman No. 25: Courtesy Ca. 2023

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 23, 2023

THIS TOPIC wouldn’t have occurred to me to write about if I hadn’t come across—in my meanderings online as a collector of antiquarian books and papers—a copy of a slim pamphlet published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1936, titled “Courtesy Appeals by the President’s Committee on Courtesy.” But as soon as I saw that title, I knew I had to get that pamphlet and reflect on the observance (most likely in the breach) of its prescriptions today.

To be honest, I never even heard of a “committee on courtesy” in UP. Neither, as a former student and professor, did I ever instinctively attach the word “courtesy” to UP, although I will not agree to any collective condemnation of “Iskos” and “Iskas” as boorish and uncultured. Granted, UP lore is rich with tales of what we’ll call youthful insolence toward their elders, in ways that would make even millennials cringe. (Who was that young poet who, in a writers’ workshop, supposedly stole a famous lady poet’s underwear—don’t ask me how—and strung it up a flagpole or hung it on a line, prompting her friend—another professor known for her fiery temper—to curse the laughing fellows: “I wish your mothers had aborted you!”) 

Meekness may not be one of a UP student’s strongest suits, because we teach them to assert themselves. But we also teach them to criticize or comment with style and intelligence, as when a young wit responded to a customary recitation of then President Carlos P. Romulo’s kilometric list of honorary degrees by saying, “Why, Mr. President, you have more degrees than a thermometer!” (In fairness to CPR, that fellow went on to an illustrious career accompanied by much—and some say self-generated—pomp and circumstance.)

Courtesy, of course, is not about sticking out but about staying in—behaving oneself for social acceptability and harmony, living up to someone else’s expectations by observing a strict code of do’s and don’ts. At least that’s how it was appreciated in the 1930s, when President Jorge Bocobo created the committee that came out with the prescriptions in the pamphlet. Although he served as one of UP’s most hardworking and effective presidents—someone who pushed UP students to go out and serve the masses—Bocobo was also known to be a rather prudish disciplinarian. He had been on the committee that censured Jose Garcia Villa for publishing his “obscene” and “ultramodernistic” poem “Song of Ripeness,” leading to Villa’s suspension and hastening his departure for more liberal America. He also cut down on the popular student dances that Rafael Palma allowed, and enforced the rule for student uniforms. When Guillermo Tolentino presented his design for the Oblation statue, Bocobo had one important comment: protect its modesty with a fig leaf, which was done. Not surprisingly, although again a bit too simply, he was called “the gloomy dean” by the editorialists of the time.

In 1936, when the pamphlet came out, Jorge Bocobo was almost midway through his presidency (1934-39). I learned that 8,000 copies were printed to be handed out to all students, and teachers were required to discuss its contents—all 20 pages of them—in class.

Some of its prescriptions are entirely understandable for the period:

“A young lady of social position does not go to a ball without a chaperon.”

“When a gentleman is introduced to a lady, he does not extend his hand first. It is the lady’s place to show whether she wants to shake hands or not.”

“When a lady leaves a gentleman to whom she has been introduced, she never says she is ‘glad to have met him’ or that she ‘hopes to see him again.’’

Some would be perfectly applicable today:

“Annoying the ladies by staring at them or making remarks about them as they pass cannot be countenanced.”

“Avoid being a bore by talking too much. Be a sympathetic listener.”

Some would be difficult to enforce:

“It would be nicer if gentlemen should remove their hats on entering a building.”

“Do not wear a tuxedo at daytime.”

“(Do not) thrust the individual knife into a butter dish or the individual fork into a pickle dish.”

“Bananas are peeled into a plate and taken with the fork.”

I was amused, as many of you would be, but these social commandments (yes, they were far more than “appeals,” and students and faculty were disciplined for disobeying them) invited me to wonder how we look at courtesy today or even think about it, let alone practice it. Thanks to the anonymity provided by the Internet and to a toxic political environment, rudeness if not obnoxiousness seem to have become the norm. It’s almost customary to assume that the other fellow is uninformed, hostile, stupid, or just plain wrong, and I have to confess to thinking this of many people I encounter for the first time, especially online. 

I’ve been on the receiving end of these assumptions as well. An expat American—a Trumper—once tried to convince me that I knew nothing about America, as did an expat Brit who lectured me about the monarchy like I’d never read a book (I could’ve lectured him back on Elizabethan revenge tragedy, but he could have been just a regular fellow who didn’t know anything about me, and why should he, so I desisted and let it slide).

Courtesy today clearly involves more than etiquette or protocol, more than observing antiquated codes of behavior requiring you to use this fork or that spoon. It’s more a matter of attitude toward other people, of assuming them worthy of respect and an intelligent and civil response (until they prove otherwise, as many inevitably do, especially in politics). 

Unfortunately we also too easily conflate courtesy with external manners, with opening doors for ladies (which I still do, although my wife Beng sometimes has to remind me there’s a door in front of us). On a higher order of behavior, aren’t profligacy and ostentation extreme forms of discourtesy to a people struggling to make ends meet? Do arrogance and impunity invite respect, or resentment and disdain?

What could a “Courtesy Appeals” for 2023 read like? “Do not waste the people’s hard-earned money” seems like a good place to start.

(Some factoids mentioned here come from an unpublished, unofficial history of UP. You can check them out against an official history published recently by the UP Press.)

Penman No. 420: Highlights and Shadows

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Penman for Monday, August 2, 2021

SOMETHING VERY unusual happened to me about a week ago. Driving my little Jimny on my way home to catch a Zoom meeting, I came literally the closest I’d ever been to a quick and fairly simple death.

I was following a student driver who was plodding along at a turtle’s pace. It was a busy street so I couldn’t overtake him, and I resisted the urge to honk my horn, remembering how it was when I was learning how to drive in my Beetle ages ago. We stopped at a corner a couple of blocks from my place, about to go into a main street. The student driver either stalled or stiffened, because he simply didn’t move. I felt my patience wearing thin; my Zoom meeting was about a commercial book project that would earn me some tidy cash (enough to pay, beyond the groceries, for my old books, rusty typewriters, and other toys), and I didn’t want to be even one minute late. 

The left side of the street was open, so I could overtake, but it was a streetcorner and I hesitated. That pause saved my life. 

The student driver inched forward and made a right turn. I drove up right behind him, but had to brake at the tall hump just at that very corner. From my left I saw a big delivery van hurtling down the main street. Its driver had lost control; the van fell on its side, rolled over, and slid straight toward me. I didn’t move forward because I would have been hit if the van hadn’t braked, and I would have even more surely been demolished if I had tried to overtake earlier. Strapped into my seat, there was no time to jump. 

As it was, I froze and, in a cinematic cliché, watched everything happen in slow motion—the van coming, braking, rolling, and coming at me. Strangely I felt very calm. “So this is how I’m going,” I remember thinking, just waiting for the impact. One, two, three—and then the van stopped, a few feet away. I saw the driver raise and wiggle his hand, and then people rushed over. I exhaled a prayer of thanks, parked the car, hurried back to make sure the driver was okay (he was), and then went to my Zoom meeting.

I didn’t tell anyone at that meeting what had just happened to me. We had a very engaging conversation, during which we established that I was not the best fit for the job (nothing to do with money but with stylistic preferences), and I bowed out gracefully, possibly to the surprise of my chatmates, who probably expected me to be more vocally disappointed by the news.

In truth, I felt liberated. For a long time now, I had felt a gnawing urge to put everything else aside and return to my own fiction, to remind myself that I still had a few good stories to tell before I croaked. At 67, I’ve begun to feel my age, in my bones and, more distressingly, in my memory and my reflexes. When I read authors and look up their lives, I can’t help noting the ages at which they published their major works, when they died, and for what reasons. (And no one beats Jose Rizal in these departments.)

That same afternoon, with nothing else on my plate for the first time in a long time, I opened a new document in Word and typed down the first thing that came to my mind, a snippet of a conversation between a young man and an older woman, set in Manila on New Year’s Eve, 1936. I didn’t know these characters or where the story would go, but that’s how I’ve always worked, which sometimes leads to dead ends but always gives me a heightened sense of discovery and anticipation. I don’t want to know what the next page will be like; that’s why I’m writing it, making things up as I go along, looking into the highlights and shadows of the scene for clues and possibilities.

Before I knew it I had started a new novel—the literary form which, I’ve often said, I least enjoy. Each of my past two novels took me years to finish. The first was done for graduate school, the second completed for a competition—neither reason, it seems to me, the best one for writing, although practical necessity can do wonders. To some writer-friends like Charlson Ong (whose White Lady, Black Christ just came out with Milflores Publishing) and Gina Apostol (starting on a new historical project), novel-writing—and doing it well—comes almost as second nature; for me it has been hard labor, because not enough of my true heart was in it. I began a third novel many years ago, and about half of it is done, but I haven’t felt like picking up the pieces just yet.

So I’m starting a totally different one, and to keep from jinxing it I’ll only say further that it will be one that will require common intelligence and not academic cleverness to figure out, that would make a good play or movie for more people to enjoy (take the illustration above as a hint), and—most of all—that will make me feel like my own writing self again, before the next delivery van turns up at the corner. Wish me luck.