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Qwertyman No. 87: A French Sojourn

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 1, 2024

MY WIFE Beng and I were in France last week to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, better known as SciencesPo. They don’t formally observe Holy Week in France (nor, for that matter, do many Filipinos to whom it’s simply come to mean “long weekend”). So we thought that it was the best time to come over and share some of our insights into Philippine literature, art, and politics with young French students as well as our countrymen in Paris, for whom I and fellow writer Cris Yabes, who’s based in France, gave a special reading at the Philippine embassy.

For those who’ve never heard of it—which won’t be too surprising given our Pinoy fixation on top American and British universities—SciencesPo (pronounced SEE-ansPO) is France’s leading university in the social sciences. It now has 14,000 students spread out over seven campuses across the country. Only 4,000 of those students are undergraduates; the rest are graduate students, including 350 taking their PhD. Unlike our universities, SciencesPo’s undergrads can finish in only three years, with their last year spent abroad. I was told that there are about 20 Filipino students currently enrolled at SciencesPo, and about half of its students come from overseas. As a public research university, SciencesPo is supported by the government through a private foundation, an arrangement that gives it a high degree of autonomy.

Founded in 1872, the university has served as the training ground for France’s political elite, producing five out of France’s eight presidents: Pompidou, Mitterand, Chirac, Hollande, and the incumbent Macron. Marcel Proust studied here for a year, and Christian Dior was a graduate.

With that kind of elite status comes criticism and controversy, and SciencesPo has had its share over the years. Nevertheless, it remains high on the list of desirable universities, especially for students with plans of joining the French civil service, after further studies at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. (At Inalco, another Fremch university, we were surprised to find eight Filipino-French students studying Filipino for their degree under Prof. Elisabeth Luquin, who studied in UP and speaks Filipino like a local.)

Beng and I gave presentations on the Philippines at SciencePo’s main campus in Paris—a sprawling complex comprising ten buildings in some of Paris’ most precious real estate—and I had an additional three sessions in Le Havre, where SciencePo’s campus focuses on Asian studies. Wherever we went, we could see signs of intellectual and political ferment; like their predecessors at the Sorbonne whom we admired for their militancy 60 years ago, SciencesPo students have protested and rallied over many causes from domestic violence to Gaza.

To be fair, these concerns have occupied much of the rest of France as well. In a country where street protests are a time-honored tradition that have a real bearing on political outcomes, differences of opinion can run deep and long, and controversy stalks nearly every issue, from the wearing of religious headgear to the extension of the retirement age. To “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” we must now add “identité,” the subject of identity so central to political discourse in many countries today, especially those with large and strong immigrant populations like America and France.

“Over the last few years, France has been torn by culture wars—a shift that was less the effect of American concepts imported into French universities, as many on France’s right claim, than of the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity,” noted sociologist Daniel Zamora in an article for Catalyst in 2021. “Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. Building on what we have in common, Macron argued, meant finding an answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to be French?’”

Identity, at least, was not in question when Cris Yabes and I gave our reading at the Philippine embassy, thanks to the invitation of Ambassador Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, one of the most amiable, gracious, and artistically inclined ambassadors I’ve ever met. (She was very game as well, happy to hoist an IPA beer with my wife Beng after our talks.) To a fairly sizeable group from the Filipino community in Paris, Cris and I read pieces that had to do with our foreign relations, particularly in my case with our diaspora, which my second novel Soledad’s Sister (which has been published in French by Mercure de France) dealt with. 

In the conversations that followed, I learned that there are around 26,000 documented Filipinos in France, with perhaps just as many existing belowground, most of them domestic helpers. One of them, Zita Cabais, was a victim of human trafficking more than two decades ago, having been enticed to come to Europe with the promise of a visa and a good job. Instead she was brought to Hungary, from where she was led on foot through Europe to finally reach France, whereupon her employer confiscated her passport, effectively holding her hostage. But unlike many other DH’s, Zita fought back, sued her employer, and succeeded. Since legalized, she now works for organizations devoted to fighting human trafficking. (The path to legalization is reportedly shorter in France, but knowing the French language is a prerequisite.)

One unexpected highlight of our visit was running into a group of Filipino seamen in our hotel in Le Havre, prior to my lecture. Beng and I had just come down for breakfast when we heard the familiar chatter of Filipinos at a nearby table. We came up to them and introduced ourselves, and we had a lively conversation during which they explained that they were still waiting for their ship to dock because of the bad weather. I’d met and chatted with seamen like them before in Hamburg and in Christchurch, among other places; as a writer and as a Filipino, I take it as a pleasant obligation.

Competition, they said, was driving them to accept shorter four-month stints at sea. “We barely break even, and it’s a tough life at sea, but we have no choice, since our families depend on us.” Part of my lecture that day was going to be about our Filipino notion of the hero as martyr, of Christ-like sacrifice for the common good. I suddenly realized that it was Good Friday. We had our smiling selfies taken, and they seemed proud to stand with UP professors, but it was Beng and I who felt honored to be there with them.

Penman No. 452: A Cultural Treasure Chest

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Penman for July 9, 2023

A NEW book launched last month by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas once again brings up how unlikely—and yet in a way also how logical—it is for a nation’s central bank to be the repository and protector of the country’s cultural heritage. 

Simply titled Kaban (treasure chest), the sumptuous 340-page book offers a guided tour of the BSP’s fabled cultural collections, from pre-Hispanic gold to contemporary art, with each section curated by experts in the field. The book’s writers include Portia Placino, Victor Paz, Dino Carlo Santos, Clarissa Chikiamco, Tessa Ma. Guazon, and Patrick Flores; I contributed a preface, from which I quote some excerpts below. 

Banks represent resources, stability, and continuity, and central banks even more so, for the financial sector. They will often purchase art for décor, and perhaps even for investment; but they will not routinely spend vast amounts on the acquisition, storage, and exhibition of valuable cultural artifacts, as the BSP (and its predecessor, the Central Bank) has done.

Only inspired and visionary leadership can achieve this fusion between the seeming banality of money and the transcendence of art. The Central Bank and BSP have had the good fortune of being led at various times by men who embodied this integration—among them, the CB’s founding father Miguel Cuaderno, a lawyer with a passion for history, culture, and art.

Decades later, Cuaderno was followed at the Central Bank by Jaime Laya—a banker, accountant, writer, collector, and cultural administrator. It was under Gov. Laya that the Central Bank embarked on its most ambitious acquisitions and began to be known for minding more than the nation’s money, but its cultural heritage as well.

Cuaderno and Laya were supported by the likes of Benito Legarda, at one time the Central Bank’s head of research, who was not only an economist but also an avid numismatist and historian who initiated the Money Museum, which became the base for the bank’s later forays into other areas of culture.

The release of Kaban—following a series of other beautifully produced books about the precious objects in its collection—highlights the value accorded by the BSP to the idea of wealth: its generation, propagation, and preservation, which is, after all, the core business of banks. But this isn’t just flaunting wealth for wealth’s sake, an exercise in ostentation and in investment by the numbers. 

The BSP collection is imbued with historical and cultural value, and the objects in its catalogues—from ancient coinage and currency to contemporary art and furniture—are physical embodiments of the things and notions we hold dear, our sensibilities and aspirations as a people, the heritage and the legacy we want to pass on down the generations. It is another bank, a cultural bank, but one whose elements have been carefully chosen and curated to reflect our finest traditions and brightest memories.

It’s interesting and important to note that the BSP is not alone in this extracurricular preoccupation. Beyond the Philippines—where many other banks and financial institutions have been known for their impressive art collections and generous support for culture—banks around the world have associated themselves with art, amassing stupendous collections and employing art to project a positive and more humane image of what most people might otherwise see as cold and soulless financial corporations. Indeed, Professor Arnold Witte of the University of Amsterdam calls banks “the new Medici,” referring to the Renaissance’s most important patron of the arts, Lorenzo de Medici, not incidentally himself a banker. 

Among the world’s most important art collections held by banks, that of the Banco de España in Madrid goes back to the late 15th century and forward all the way to contemporary sculpture and photography. The Swiss UBS holds 35,000 pieces of modern art. JP Morgan Chase, the Bank of America, the Royal Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank, and the Societe Generale have also been leaders in the field. 

Central banks have also been known for their art collections, although their origins, sourcing, and contents vary. According to a report by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, “In the US, the Federal Reserve’s fine arts program was established in 1975 by Chair Arthur Burns in response to a White House directive encouraging federal partnership with the arts. Unlike other collections, the Fed relies on donations of artwork or outside funds to purchase works of art. 

“Most European central banks’ art collections consist mainly of paintings, but this is not a global trend. In Colombia, Costa Rica and the Philippines for example, the central banks are also home to museums with exhibits ranging from archaeological treasures to medieval goldwork and pottery.

“The central banks of Colombia, Austria and South Africa, among others, host catalogues of their collections on their websites. The Central Bank of Iran’s website hosts a video documentary on the Crown Jewels collection. Many other central banks including Greece, Hungary, the Netherlands and the Philippines have physical catalogues of their collections, though these have not been digitalized.” It quoted then Governor Amando Tetangco as saying that “The BSP ensures that outstanding examples of Filipino genius in its gold, art, and numismatic collections are shared with the people through exhibits, books, CDs, social media, and provincial lectures.”

This puts the BSP in the fine company of other central banks that have recognized the special relationship between monetary and cultural wealth, and the importance of preserving heritage for the future. If, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge yields the best interest,” then an investment in cultural heritage cannot yield any less, as it shows us at our best, for all time.

The arts, indeed, are another treasure trove of spiritual resources needing constant care and replenishment. This long, historic, and mutually beneficial partnership between our central bank and the arts sector makes that reality physically manifest, and we can only hope that it will continue even more strongly in the decades to come.

Tastefully photographed and designed by Willie de Vera and produced by Bloombooks (the publishing arm of Erehwon Arts Corporation), Kaban is a treasure on its own, and is available for sale to the public at the BSP.

Qwertyman No. 48: Beauty and Horror

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Qwertyman for July 3, 2023

I WAS surprised, a bit amused, but also deeply bothered by the reactions of Filipino netizens to an event that hogged the headlines two weeks ago—the special exhibit of Juan Luna’s painting “Hymen, O Hyménée.” 

The painting, said to have been lost for over 130 years, was put on display in all its solitary glory at the Ayala Museum, evidently a prize catch and worthy of public attention. The attention came—not all of it positive. Quickly a thread developed online scoring the artist, the painting, the museum, and the curious who trooped to Makati to see the painting. Why, posters asked, was praise being heaped on a deranged man who murdered his wife and mother-in-law? Where was our outrage? Speaking of the painting, why, technically it wasn’t even that good. 

They were, of course, all fair points to raise, designed to provoke some serious re-evaluation of why we like the things (and the people) we do. While there was some quibbling about the aesthetic merits and demerits of the painting, most of the negative reaction was clearly aimed at Juan Luna’s homicidal and presumably misogynistic streak. Just to be clear, he did admit to killing the two women (he suspected his wife of having an affair with a Mr. Dussaq), but was later acquitted on grounds that merely prove how partial to men the old judicial system was.

This brings up the inevitable question—not about Luna’s guilt, which seems to have been settled in the court of public opinion, but about that of those professing to admire Luna’s talent as a painter: knowing what we know now about an artist, should his or her work be judged by his or her character? Can or should we put our blinders on when gazing at a painting or reading a book, and savor the work in denial of its creator’s evil history? Should we resist Google, adopt or feign ignorance, and leave moral judgments to others?

I know that some esteemed writers and artists, like the late F. Sionil Jose who preceded me in this space, were severe and unforgiving in their application of a moral frame to creative work. To Manong Frankie, if you supported the Marcos dictatorship and profited from it, your credentials as an artist were forever compromised. Today we would call this “cancel culture,” which has been appropriated by right-wingers to complain about being punished for being, well, right-wingers.

It seems like a logical proposition: if you don’t like someone for good reason, then reject his or her work, which could be tainted by all manner of subliminal malice. You can stand proud in your clarity of mind and emotion, in your spirited defense of the good and just.

But this also raises a very practical problem: entering a museum or a library, how am I to know which artists or authors led upright lives, and which ones flourished in depravity? If I enjoy a work, only to discover later that its creator attempted to rape a teenage girl (as the Nobel prizewinner William Golding did, and even wrote about it privately) or tortured animals and adored Hitler (like Salvador Dali did), am I supposed to regurgitate my admiration and pronounce the work worthless?

The list of artists and writers who were less than paragons of moral virtue is a long and (dis)honorable one. For this we go to Google, which has been asked the question so often that so-called “listicles” exist of the answers, which inevitably throw up the same names. Paul Gauguin abandoned his family and fled to Tahiti where he took on three child brides, infecting them all with syphilis. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound were Jew haters, as were, for that matter, Richard Wagner, Edgar Degas, and Roald Dahl. Picasso abused his women and drove them mad, calling them “machines for suffering.” Beloved writer of children’s stories Enid Blyton was a terrible mother, neglectful and vindictive, described by her own daughter as “without a trace of maternal instinct.” What am I to tell our daughter Demi, now 49, who grew up on Enid Blyton and who carefully rounded up all her Blyton books and tied them up in a ribbon during her last visit, for passing on to another child?

I recall when, years ago, a renowned actress (whom I need not name, as you can surely guess who she is) was denied the National Artist Award by Malacañang because of her reported use of drugs at some point in her troubled life. (I know, because the Palace official who recommended the disapproval told me the story.) Thankfully this was later rectified.

And as soon as I say that, you can see where I incline in this debate. I hate evil as much as any sane person would, but also recognize and accept that some of that is always latent within me and within others, and that it is my awareness of it—or my guilt when I give in to it—that grounds and deepens my art. I’m not saying evil is a prerequisite for artmaking, as surely saintly folk have produced great art (although I still have to find that listicle); it’s just there, like a shadow in the forest, the Lucifer without which the aura of our angels would dim. 

And what about the deplorable if not detestable excess of it in these aforementioned geniuses? Do we excuse or absolve their failings by accepting their art? I think not. What we are accepting is not their wrongdoing, but rather the fact of how one of art’s and indeed of life’s great mysteries is how often beauty and horror cohabit. Thus we can come to an informed appreciation of a work and its maker, wonder at how so much darkness could produce so much light, and begin to understand our complexity as humans, which artists give form and voice to.

Myself, I like to think of art as a personal act of redemption, or at least of restitution. It will never excuse one’s bad behavior, or repair the damage done. But it will show how capable we are of refined and abstract expression, despite our brutish selves.

The greater problem for me is that, today, we inhabit a moral minefield where art itself has been conscripted to disguise falsehood and deception. Artificial intelligence has neither heart nor conscience, but its manipulators can produce breathtakingly attractive lies. Much more than a long-interred Juan Luna, this worries me.

Penman No. 421: Giving Spirit: A Requiem for Riel

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Penman for Monday, August 16, 2021

WHEN I woke up to the sound of my wife Beng crying as she clutched her phone, I knew instantly what had happened in the night: “Riel is gone,” she said. “Riel” was Ronald Jaramillo Hilario, a sculptor and fellow alumnus of the UP College of Fine Arts. 

No institution in this country has been spared by Covid—every school, office, factory, and hospital will have more than one sad story to tell of unexpected loss and bereavement, of someone who was there with them one minute, laughing and shooting off on the issues of the hour, and then gone seemingly in the blink of an eye.

For the UP College of Fine Arts, it has been an exceptionally terrible year. One after the other, it lost artists and faculty members such as Jak Pilar, Leo Abaya, Joey Tañedo, and Neil Doloricon, and alumni Virgie Garcia and Riel Hilario. The arts community was still reeling from the passing of Neil—one of the stalwarts of social realism in Philippine art—when news of Riel’s death came through, and as she had done much too often since the pandemic began, Beng wept again.

Oddly, neither Beng nor I had actually met Riel—he lived in Lucban with his muse Joyce Campomanes—but he had quite a large digital footprint, from which I gleaned enough, and Beng became a kind of tita figure to him, always ready to lend an ear, albeit online. He was one of those rare artists (Neil Doloricon was another one) who was extraordinarily articulate, and who didn’t hesitate to let the world know what he thought. 

“Art is my religion, and I am a priest of that faith,” he asserted, and his life offered ample proof of that sacerdotal devotion to art—to its creation, its study, and its promotion in a society threatened by destructive and diabolical forces. 

Indeed he looked every inch the part of an avenging angel (and his name summons those winged, sword-bearing creatures), bearded and muscular, with piercing eyes that seemed like they could see right through falsehood and deception. (Lorenzo Gabutina described him as “warrior, sultan, larger-than-life… a Pinoy Thor.”) His sense of mission, his critical intelligence, and his expressiveness may not have made him the easiest person in the room to sit with, but his seriousness was a reminder that art involves far more than decorating the homes of the rich, even as he created playful objects and rebultos that drew on native folklore and religion.

His formal résumé was more than sufficiently impressive. Coming out of the woodcarving tradition of Ilocos Sur, Riel went on to the Philippine High School for the Arts and UP, transitioning from painting to full-time sculpture in 2008. He undertook residencies and explorations in the US and Europe and served as curator for the Boston and Pinto art galleries. He also co-founded Artinformal, an art-education collective. In 2012, he was the winner of the Ateneo Art Awards-Fernando Zóbel Prizes for Visual Art, and in the same year was named one of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Thirteen Artists. 

Wood sculpture, he told Glenn Martinez, “served as my self-directed therapy following a debilitating episode of manic-depression in 2007. I had schizoid visions and dreams that were terrifying and disturbing. I felt the need to find an outlet that was more tactile than painting or writing. The following year I started carving wood sculptures based on the tradition of the rebulto, but following the urgings and suggestions of my visions. The practice had a cathartic effect and also helped me refocus my cultural work to do research on the craft.”

But as brilliant and productive as his own art was, Riel was also appreciated by his fellow artists for his advocacy of artists’ rights and his generosity toward others. A Facebook page dedicated to his memory and maintained by his relative and close friend Paul, “The Feathered Angel: A Tribute to Riel Hilario (1969-2021),” is full of testimonials to that giving spirit. Riel was on a mission to make sure his fellow artists were never taken advantage of by galleries and dealers, and for them to get their due recognition and respect. (In one recent episode, he recounted how he and Joyce had been turned down by a prominent bank’s branch in Antipolo when they tried to open an account, allegedly because artists can’t show proof of regular income; outraged, he recalled how solicitous the teller was in New York when he presented a $50,000 check for deposit.)

He was still brimming with ideas and plans for the future—having taught at PHSA, he was thinking of teaching at UP—when both he and Joyce were stricken by the virus. From Lucban came desperate calls for help—especially for oxygen—to friends like Glenn Martinez, Jason Moss, and Ricky Francisco. Glenn did what he could from Metro Manila to coordinate assistance, and Riel and Joyce were brought to a hospital in Lucena. But it was too full to accommodate them, and they were sent home. 

Joyce survived; Riel did not. But as one of Riel’s favorite sayings (and mine, from Hippocrates) goes, “Ars longa, vita brevis”—art is long, art endures, as short as our lives may be.

(Images courtesy of Joyce Campomanes)

Penman No. 403: Bad Times, Good Art?

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Penman for Monday, December 21, 2020

IN MY last column, I wrote about how art and literature respond to times of great distress, like plagues and wars. My spoilsport proposition was that—against most expectations—crisis and chaos are not the best environments for great art, not just because the artists are too busy just trying to survive, but because it takes time, distance, and reflection to integrate, to re-order, the experience of falling apart.

Citing previous examples like Albert Camus’ The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, I said that this current pandemic will surely be the stuff of both bestsellers and ponderous novels, but the best writing about it will very likely not emerge for many more years, if not decades, to come.

If you need more proof, consider this: the best war stories were written long after the wars they dealt with. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, about the War of 1812, came out as a book in 1869. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, about the Civil War, was published in 1895; World War I’s All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in 1929; Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II-era Slaughterhouse Five in 1969; and Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam-era The Things They Carried in 1990.

That’s not to say that artists don’t or shouldn’t immediately respond to the tumult swirling around them. Something traumatic like plague and war can be both material for, and instigator of, great art.

The one outstanding example that comes to mind is Picasso’s Guernica, made in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The story goes that Picasso was in Paris working on another commission when he heard about Franco’s bombing of the town of Guernica in April that year, whereupon he shifted his attention to producing the now-iconic antiwar painting, which he finished in five weeks. 

Another oft-quoted story is that of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered in Russia during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance. In the more cinematic retellings of this episode, it is said that the Germans realized they would lose the battle when they heard the symphony being played by a ragtag band of Russian musicians on the radio.

On the German side, there’s the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945.

These examples, with their heroic if not tragic overtones, seem to suggest that in periods of great disorder and distress approaching chaos, artists of all kinds rise to the occasion and summon up their finest talents in the service of—and here one is tempted to say “humanity,” but I am more inclined to say “order,” which is inherent in every artist. The desire for justice, for example, is a form of outrage over the disturbance of some natural equilibrium, a sense of fairness, and bringing music into the battlefield is a willful imposition of structure and narrative into the cacophony of war. These creative outbursts in the middle of the fray are also affirmations of one’s higher consciousness, a civilized rejection of the easier option to submit to brutishness.

This reminds me of Umberto Eco’s insightful description of how art works as “a minimum of order compatible with a maximum of chaos.” The artist’s impulse is to bring method into the madness, to see pattern and narrative in the mess of things. 

Sometimes art has responded to war in the most striking ways. There was a very close relationship between Cubism and the development of military camouflage in the aftermath of World War I, with Cubism providing the inspiration for the abstraction of natural forms, culminating in the so-called “Dazzle” ships whose wild geometric designs, by the marine artist Norman Wilkinson, were meant less to hide ships than to confuse U-boat rangefinders.

But for all these illustrations of disorder as the handmaiden of great art, I suspect that they are exceptions, and that the more commonplace product is that enemy of good art, cliché. 

Dystopic times invite posterization, where subjects can either be romanticized or demonized. There’s that overwhelming urge to settle for the literal or cartoonish depiction of the obvious, which would be hardship and pain, violence and sorrow, over and over again. I’ve often pointed out to my writing students—long before the pandemic—that the easiest thing to write is a lament about how terrible and unfair life is, and how awful one feels. Walk into any serious art gallery (real or virtual) and you’ll see that most works by young artists are predominantly dark and gloomy.

I’m not suggesting that we get all Pollyanish and paint an artificially happy world; but I do expect great art to be transcendent and complex, to move beyond the immediate and the literal and to remind us of the need for beauty and hope amid the suffering. Michelangelo did that with the Pieta, which is not only about a son’s passing but a mother’s deathless love. 

Bad times and bad things may even prefigure or provoke some inner good, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” 

Penman No. 398: Bringing New Life to Old

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Penman for Monday, October 12, 2020

BEING MARRIED to an art restorer who regularly salvages battered or tattered Amorsolos, HRs, Botongs, Kiukoks, and the like and turns them into objects of joy and wonder again, I know what it’s like to give new life to something that at one point seemed utterly ruined. 

Not that I can do it myself, as I’ve often been better at messing things up than fixing them. It’s a shame to admit, being a PSHS alum and an aspiring engineer at some wistful point, but I’m generally worthless around cars, for example. I can fix a flat if it comes to that, but anything else will have to be solved by a phone call to the tow truck. Neither is carpentry my strong suit; I’d probably break a saw before it could cut through a two-by-four, or lose a finger.

There are a few things that I’ve learned to repair—many old fountain pens, for example, though not all, as some require highly specialized skills and tools. Pens from the 1920s up to the 1950s that used rubber sacs or bladders are pretty easy to fix, with some help from a hair dryer to soften (but not melt) the plastic, and a dab of shellac. I can also DIY some basic computer fixes, like replacing laptop hard drives and batteries, making sure not to lose any tiny screws by mounting their heads on upside-down tape. As I collect pens and, yes, old Macs, this has not only saved me a mint of service fees but also amplified the pleasures of collecting and connoisseurship. 

But I reserve my admiration for people who really know and love what they’re doing, are extremely good at it, and who are struggling to preserve a dying art as threatened as the objects they minister to. 

We live in a repair-conscious society; unlike the throwaway Americans and even the Japanese, for whom labor could cost more than the appliance itself, we will fight to keep our TVs, fridges, aircons, and electric fans chugging until their last breath. We suffocate our new sofas with plastic so they will live 100 years.

But repair is one thing, and restoration another. You can always buy another 60-inch TV if it can’t be fixed, but not another 1928 Parker Duofold Senior, or another signed copy of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, or another 1922 Corona 3 folding typewriter, at least not that cheaply or that easily.

Happily and thankfully, we still have people who, like my wife Beng, possess the arcane skills required to bring new life to old. And “old” is the operative word here, because the things they care for and care about tend to be far older than their owners and decidedly appeal to the senior set, although they’ve begun to acquire a certain charm for some millennials eager to connect to some thread of history.

Take vintage pens, for example. For those jobs that amateurs like me can’t do, there’s J. P. Reinoso, a retired bank executive, who’s turned his hobby into a full-on pen spa (yep, that’s what he calls it). Sheaffer Snorkels from the 1950s and Parker Vacumatics from the 1930s and 1940s will almost certainly defeat the uninitiated, but JP has the know-how and just as importantly the parts for them. (Sadly and surprisingly, modern piston-fillers like Montblancs and Pelikans will often require a long and expensive trip back to the factory in Germany for servicing, although some basic repairs can also be done here, subject to parts.)

For my old books that have begun to fall apart—and I mean books from as far back as the 1600s and 1700s, although books from the early 20th century tend to get more brittle and fragile because of their acidified paper—I turn for help to Josie Francisco of Bulwagang Recoletos, who uses gossamer-thin Japanese paper to make a crumbling page whole again. Another genius in this department is Loreto Apilado of the Ortigas Foundation Library, which accepts book restoration jobs.

Local watch aficionados swear by Andrew “Andy” Arnesto, whose shop at Makati Cinema Square has become a mecca for savvy collectors and users seeking to revive their vintage Rolexes and Omegas without having to pay boutique rates, especially for the simplest fixes. 

And what about those typewriters? I’ve written about him here before, but the guy we call Gerald Cha, based in Quiapo, is still the go-to person to get your Lolo’s venerable Underwood 5 or Smith-Corona Silent Super going clackety-clack again. Beyond giving your machine the basic CLA (cleaning, lubrication, adjustment) service, he can also repaint it to your specifications—like he did with a dull-olive 1959 Olympia SM3 that I fancied turning into my “UP Naming Mahal” standard-bearer, with its maroon-and-cream body accented by the original green platen knobs. 

As I quoted Hippocrates last week, ars longa, vita brevis—art is long, life is short. Taken another way, a bit of the restorer’s art can lengthen the life of your dearest toys and possessions.

(Privacy concerns inhibit me from giving out their numbers, but a little Googling should go a long way.) 

Penman No. 397: Vision 2020: An Artist Responds to Covid

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Penman for Monday, September 28, 2020

WHILE SHE was undergoing therapy for depression, the celebrated American poet Anne Sexton explained why she kept doing what she did: “Poetry, after all, is the opposite of suicide.” That she ultimately and tragically succumbed to her inner demons, like her friend with whom she shared revelations and martinis, Sylvia Plath—is, in a way, almost irrelevant: what matters is that she fought back, and beautifully, leaving behind the luminous corpus of her poetry.

History tells us that this is what many artists do, under great stress and even in the face of direct threats to their lives: they use their art to resist death and annihilation, as if to say “I am here, I matter, and I will survive.” It is, of course, the art that survives, both as a testament to the moment and subject of its creation and as the indelible handprint of its creator, left on the cave walls of Time. The Greek physician Hippocrates put it well in his reminder: “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Life is short, but art is long—art endures, art is forever.

Today in 2020, in the face of a horrifyingly catastrophic pandemic that has brought the world to its knees and claimed close to a million lives, the artist is once again challenged to respond to the global crisis in an intensely personal way, both as an act of self-affirmation and as the inevitable chr0nicler of one’s times. Like a traveler surveying a landscape ravaged by death and disease, the artist seeks to depict not only the obvious carnage and the accompanying cacophony of grief but also the larger patterns and movements of people in a stricken society, as well as the startling efflorescence of goodness and hope here and there amid the suffering.

From the first scientific drawings of the human anatomy onwards, there has been a long tradition of connections and interactions between art and medicine or art and science. Artists have been credited for their uncannily accurate portrayals of disease; reports exist of how dermatologists identified two dozen skin lesions on the subjects of paintings at the National Art Gallery in London, how Caravaggio depicted goiter, and so on. 

But when it strives for or achieves sublimity, art is more than illustration, and rarely is the disease itself the subject, but rather the excuse to draw attention to the responses to it—of the directly afflicted, of the physician, of the family and the neighbors, and of us the onlookers; in other words, of society itself as a complicit agent in the process of infection and perhaps also of healing. 

Indeed, if there is anything that the pandemic has achieved, it has been to force us to think of ourselves as a society, as one organism, the infection of one part of which could lead to the death of all. But despite the political rhetoric of “healing as one,” it has not made us think as one or act as one—yet; we remain as fractious as ever, trapped in feudal modes and mindsets of privilege and power. Death should have been the Great Equalizer, reaping patrician and peon alike, but yet again this plague, like its predecessors, has merely revealed and emphasized the disparities and infirmities that were there all along, with the affluent able to convert the long lockdown into albeit boring staycations and the huddled poor—already socially distanced from their neighbors across the wall long before Covid—struggling to subsist on donated rice and sardines. 

And so the artist steps back to ask: where is the body, and what is the disease? Is it just the intubated patient who is ill? 

In a new exhibit of works that he has prepared for Galerie Joaquin (www.galeriejoaquin.com), the painter Juanito Torres takes us through many of the tropes that the past six months of lockdown have embedded in the Filipino psyche: chiefly, that of the physician as hero and savior, most strikingly portrayed in “Darating Din ang Bagong Umaga,” a painting steeped in iconography—the doctor sprouting angel’s wings standing victorious over a demonic virus and holding a cross that also serves as the staff of Asclepius, entwined with his healing serpent. It’s St. Michael the Archangel, treading on Satan’s dragon. In another work, “Lupang Hinirang,” Rizal, Bonifacio and other heroes are dressed as doctors raising the Filipino flag, like the Marines on Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima. 

But most of the other paintings are decidedly contemporary, a dramatically enhanced rendering of the new normal, with citizens wearing gas masks in the most ordinary places, seemingly resigned to their fate.

These are works that clearly demand interrogation, beyond the admiration that their technical excellence will generate. In reaching for metaphor, almost to the point of parody, Torres raises the question of whether we might have overdone the “hero” bit, not because they’re not heroes, but because they may not want to be. As it is, some doctors and medical workers have resisted if not refused the “hero” tag, not out of modesty but because it has become an excuse of sorts, an easy way out for the non-heroes to underperform and lay the burden of saving society on the medical frontliners. The banality of gas masks in everyday life implies acceptance of—if not surrender to—an occupation army. But notably, the frontliners in “Tagumpay,” who toss their medical masks into the air in joyous celebration, are wingless and entirely human—as if to say, this is when we will win, when we can be again as we were, as we truly are.

We know that that will not be easy, and between now and then we may have to draw and depend on mythologizing and self-enlargement to slay the dragon in our midst. The true St. Michael may be the artist yet, and the true dragon may be even larger than corporeal disease. 

(The physical exhibit will be staged at Galerie Joaquin at the UP Town Center from October 21 to 31, 2020.)

Penman No. 395: Missing the Magazine

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Penman for Monday, August 31, 2020

FEW OF us might have noticed, but one of the casualties of the Internet age has been the magazine as we knew it—the general-interest magazine, which usually came out on weekends, often as a newspaper supplement. With the decline in print-media readership and the depredations on economic and social life brought on by the coronavirus, magazines around the world have been shutting down, although of course that decline long preceded Covid. Some survive in vestigial form, or have gone online, but are nowhere near the familiar and colorful periodicals you couldn’t wait to pull out of the Sunday paper.

People my age still remember the Sunday Times Magazine, the Asia Magazine, the Mirror Magazine, and others of their kind—including, of course, the old standalone Free Press and Weekly Graphic magazines. Unlike the specialized glossies of later decades, they had something for everybody, weren’t just trying to sell you something, allotted several pages for serious literature, and were worth saving and passing along. I spent many an hour in the barbershops of Pasig thumbing through the Free Press and imbibing Nick Joaquin’s reportage on crime and politics while trying to figure out the poetry (too abstruse for my Hardy-Boys years) and gawking at the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the society and entertainment pages. 

With martial law and its aftermath, everything became either overtly political or seemingly in denial of anything gone wrong. The age of gadgets was upon us, and we devoured magazines devoted to the minutest differences between July’s and August’s cellular phone. The pretty ladies remained on the cover, of course, but largely as purveyors of dresses or some other thing; the innocence was gone—or perhaps we had simply lost ours in the interim.

My interest in magazines became a bit more professional in graduate school when my professor in Bibliography, an old-school gentleman named Dr. Kuist, told us that he had done his dissertation on The Gentleman’s Magazine, said to be the first publication to call itself a “magazine” (from the French for “storehouse”) in 1731. Despite its title, it was no girlie mag, and contained a gamut of articles of interest to everyone (a copy I have from November 1773 features an ad for “The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook” and articles on “Arguments in Favour of Rolling-Carriages” and “Description of a Machine for Making Experiments on Air”).

Many years ago, sometime in the early 1990s, when my passion for all things vintage began to be awakened, I spotted an ad in the Classifieds of a newspaper offering a stash of prewar magazines for a reasonable sum, and I drove off in my VW Beetle to a corner of San Juan to retrieve them—three or four milk-can boxes of them, all yellowed and crumbling—from a family that would have thrown them away otherwise. They were mainly copies of the Sunday Tribune Magazine from the 1930s, and some copies of the Sunday Times Magazine from a bit later. 

I continued to add to what had become a de facto collection—copies of the prewar Philippine Magazine and Philippine Touring Topics, among others, as well as issues of Tagalog periodicals like Lipang Kalabaw and even a 1911 issue of La Cultura Filipina. I used to put copies of these on my coffee table when I had an office in UP, to surprise and amuse my visitors with—sorry, folks, don’t have the November issue of the Tatler yet, but here’s a travel mag from 1934.

Make that February 1934, when Philippine Touring Topics contained—like most good magazines of the time—a combination of substantial articles, classy advertisements, and a gorgeous Art-Deco cover. Featured were articles on Igorot folklore, Mindanao fashions, Philippine hardwoods, the gypsies of the Sulu Sea, Philippine tobacco, a voyage from Manila to Bali, and celebrity travelers. (As usual, it was the ads I found most fascinating—for the American President Lines, the 1934 Studebaker, and Alhambra cigars.)

My greatest reward in flipping through these yellowed pages is discovering things I never knew about—things not too remote to be ancient history. In my July 4, 1948 issue of the Sunday Times Magazine, for example, is an article on the winners of that year’s Art Association of the Philippines painting competition. The top prize of P1,000 went to the “basketball-crazy” Carlos Francisco (who, says the anonymously catty commentator, is also “an amateur, not-so-good photographer, avid for picnic photos”); P750 for second prize went to Demetrio Diego; P500 for third prize went to Vicente Manansala “by a nose” over the P250 fourth prize to Cesar Legaspi; two honorable mentions—good enough for artists’ materials—went to the stragglers Diosdado Lorenzo and H. R. Ocampo. Elsewhere in the issue is an article on the all-but-forgotten winner of a 1946 contest for the Philippine Independence Hymn, won by a composition of Restie Umali. On the cover is a radiant Rosie Osmeña, being walked down the aisle by her dad the former President, with an accompanying spread on her wedding trousseau.

What’s not to like? When the Internet goes down—and someday it just might—these magazines with their pictures might just be our best chronicle of life and of the Philippines BC (Before Covid).

Penman No. 370: A Collection and a Collaboration

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Penman for Monday, September 16, 2019

 

YOU KNOW that you’ve reached the hilltop, just in time to view the sunset, when they start compiling your works into hefty one-volume collections that could take a very long vacation on a very lonely island to plow through. Apparently I’m at that point, because Anvil Publishing has just released Voyager and Other Fictions: The Collected Stories of Jose Dalisay, a 500-page compendium of 43 stories written and published over four decades from the 1970s onwards.

I had been quietly at work on this collection these past few months with Anvil general manager Andrea Pasion-Flores and her team, and I was elated to see it being sold at the recent Philippine Readers and Writers Festival, and later at National Book Store, Anvil’s parent company. Let me just share what I said about the project in my brief preface to the stories:

“These stories span forty years, from 1975 to 2015, during which I turned from a lanky 21-year-old to a potbellied senior, and everything in between. I’ve chosen to present them in the chronological order of their writing, as best as my challenged memory could manage, hoping that this sequencing will reveal some patterns of growth and change in the way a writer selects and treats material as he himself is shaped by life and time.

“The inclusion of some juvenilia may be indulgent, but my excuse is that it may be instructive and inspiring (albeit by negative example) to the young writer who must be made to believe that better things come with age.

“I came to fiction in English from a background in drama and screenwriting in Filipino. This helps explain my interest in scene-setting and dialogue, in the unseen currents of thought and feeling that cross synapses and much larger spaces between people.

“While creative nonfiction occupies most of my time in retirement, largely for a living, nothing exhilarates me more than writing fiction—not the novel, for which I never mustered anything resembling affection, but the short story, which I find both exacting and exciting in its compactness.

“I’ve lately often argued that the best antidote to fake news is true fiction, because only fiction—not even journalism—has the power to draw us out of ourselves, out of the present, into that chill place where Honesty resides. Fiction redeems and saves the writer as much as it exalts the reader. That realization has been the personal reward of my work for these past forty years.”

After writing so many books for other people—I always say that rather than live to write, I write to live—it’s a balm for the spirit to see and review all my stories in one place, and to be reminded of fiction as my true love, the thing I most enjoy doing although the least materially rewarding. Indeed I’ve often said that my stories—invariably of lower and middle-class Filipinos like me—are the biographies of those people who can’t afford to hire me to write about them, whose lives are often dismissed as “ordinary” but which are in fact eventful and dramatic in their own fashion.

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I had a second reason to rejoice with the launch of my newest book, Why Words Matter, last Saturday at the Vargas Museum in UP Diliman. With lovely and haunting illustrations by Marcel Antonio, the book is based on a TEDTalk I gave last year in UP about why we read and why we write, and how words can kill but can also heal. It’s being published by Gigo Alampay’s CANVAS (The Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development). Two other books were also launched alongside mine—a children’s counting book by artist Ioannis Sicuya, and one about horror stories from the martial law era that distills affidavits by claimants of martial law abuses into three sentence tales, illustrated by Renz Baluyot.

While this book was produced as a special, limited art-book edition (only 500 copies, all hardbound), CANVAS will allow the free, non-commercial distribution of material from the book, with proper attribution, in any medium, as part of its program for cultural literacy.

I must say that I’m awed by and deeply grateful for Marcel’s exquisite artwork (just as I appreciated Jordan Santos’ delightful cover design for Voyager). Not since I collaborated with Jaime Zobel on an art book titled The Island almost 25 years ago have I had such a visually engaging publication. While I firmly believe that every author—never mind how sharp he or she may imagine himself or herself to be—needs an editor, and even as I’ve welcomed most of my editors’ suggestions, I’ve also sometimes given my publishers and designers a hard time, having stubborn and stodgy ideas about how my books should look. I’m relieved to have had a very pleasant experience with the publication of these two new books, for which again I thank Andrea and Gigo for putting together. It’s a bracing reminder to this old man that, to a happy few, his words still do matter.

(Voyager is available at National Book Store; to order Why Words Matter, please email info@canvas.ph.)

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Penman No. 369: Meaning in the Many

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Penman for September 2, 2019

 

IN MY fiction writing classes, until I recently retired, I often began the semester with what I thought was a generous offer, or actually a challenge: I would give flat 1.0 to anyone who could submit a well-written story with a happy ending—not some contrived finale with God scooping the hero out of harm’s way on the last page, but something the reader could believe in, something that would give reason for hope in the human condition, or at least the human future.

How many students, do you imagine, found their way to that happy ending and to that glittering 1.0 all these years? None, not a single one. It wasn’t for lack of talent—I did hand out a few 1.0’s for other reasons—but it seems that a believably happy story has become the hardest thing to write in these times in which the political has compounded the personal. As my students’ stories keep repeating, people feel trapped in situations and relationships that diminish their self-worth. In the age of the Internet, which is supposed to connect strangers instantaneously across the planet, many feel lonelier than ever, unable to keep up or blend in with the crowd, which always seems made up of happier, smarter, and richer people.

Everyone says they want the truth, which others—including governments and peddlers of this and that—are laboring to obscure, but when they do find it, they can’t deal with the consequences. The only ones smiling are those in power, who feel they can get away with murder, because no one else is strong and whole enough to stand up to them. As someone else sagely noted, despots feed on people’s despair.

In recent conversations over coffee with friends—chats overcast by a spate of deaths in the literary family and by a growing despondency over our political situation—the question was inevitably asked: so what can we do? How can we recover and offer hope, and find some happiness amidst hardship and despair?

To cut a long and complicated discussion short, I’ve resolved that, at the minimum, my aim will simply be to survive all the bad people and the bad stuff. I shall keep myself healthy and sane, and do things that not only give me personal pleasure—an admittedly selfish but vital element of happiness and well-being—but also help others, which can yield even greater satisfaction, as you find meaning in the many.

I know that that’s easier for me to say and to execute, as a 65-year-old retiree who’s been through enough, has hit most of his life goals, and could croak tomorrow without too much commotion. Easier, that is, than a 22-year-old with a troubled home life, a shaky job that barely pays for gas and fares, and the crushing pressure to conform and be another nobody.

But it’s certainly true that for my generation, we were ever aware that the world was larger than ourselves, and that it didn’t owe us a living, so we had work and fight for everything, and while we bitched like hell about the general crappiness of life, we were thankful for every scrap that fell our way, and prepared to fight and bitch some more the next day. We sought out kindred spirits and sang songs together, finding solace in community and in the sobering realization that many others had it worse. We found relief from our personal troubles by relieving the greater needs of others.

That may all sound peachy and preachy, platitudes that roll smoothly off the tongue forty or thirty years after one’s last rolled papaya-leaf cigarette or shot of watery gin. But it’s true: we tried to be as strong and as tough as we could, individually, but didn’t mind admitting to a soft spot here and there, maybe even turning that into an affectation (dare we say an art) like poetry, or music, or, for others, activism and public service. Whatever we had, we shared with an audience. And if sometimes we didn’t even get so much as a thank-you or a polite couple of claps, well, we could always say we belonged to a cool and tight fraternity of the underappreciated, like Poe and Baudelaire. Misery loves company, but we didn’t just stay miserable—we made something out of it, something even approaching bliss.

So in line with my new mantra of starting local and starting small, Beng and I will devote ourselves to family and community, beginning with our apu-apuhan Buboy, who’ll turn three this month, working with his parents to ensure that he’ll get a good and sensible education while we can help it—not just in school, but around the house and at the dinner table. I’ll be telling him things like “Respect food, and finish what’s on your plate. Eat fish and vegetables. Love cars—toys or real ones—but respect pedestrians. Respect working people, your parents most of all. Do things yourself. Do the right thing even when no one’s looking, and even when everyone else is doing wrong.”

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There’s reason for hope if we each do the right thing in our own lives, and not yield too easily and too soon to the clamors of submission and self-annihilation.(There’s always somebody else who deserves to go before we do.) We are not alone.