kantogirlblues

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script

2009-09-11T12:10:00.005+08:00

Josh Olson was cornered at a party by a young man and his girlfriend. The young man recently spent a year of his life writing a screenplay, and was about to submit it to a contest or whatever--but he wants a professional opinion. Is this any good? Who better to ask than someone who's been nominated for an Academny Award for his work on A History of Violence, right?

Olson knew he should have said no. He barely knew the guy but he knew the girlfriend, and so took the 2-page synopsis, read the crap, and tried to thoughtfully put down words on paper. The e-mail took him longer than several movie rewrites, and later, another mutual friend comes up to him. "I heard you pulled a dickmove on Whatshisface."

This is why Josh Olson--and any sane writing professional--will not read your fucking script:

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.

Screenwriters never really get the respect they deserve. Olson relates an anecdote about Picasso, who was approached by a guy at a party and asks Picasso to draw on a napkin and he'll pay him. Picasso does it, hands the drawing to the man and asks for a million dollars. "What, but it took you thirty seconds to do that!" Picasso shrugs, "Well, it took me fifty years to learn to do that in thirty seconds."

The anecdote underscores the fact that writers are never really perceived as professionals. Olson compares this with asking a house painter friend to paint your living room on his day off, or asking a surgeon to take out your gall bladder over coffee. Writers get paid to read someone's work and give their professional opinion on it. Nobody really just wakes up and goes to the gym, and suddenly realizes, "But, oh, I can do a triple bypass on someone right now." The same way with writers.

Elsewhere, a really bizarre internet true story by Olson: The Life and Death of Jesse James.

Campbell's Sticky Tape Soup

2009-09-10T15:18:00.007+08:00

Eddie Campbell with God: "I knew it! All of existence is held together with paper clips and sticky tape."

While waiting in the dentist's office last weekend, I realized I didn't bring any books with me. I snuck into the Powerbooks branch downstairs and went through their sale pile. And there, waiting for me was a copy of Eddie Campbell's The Fate of the Artist (New York: First Second Books, 2006). At 85% off and Php119--and a first edition at that--it's a steal and very much worth it. Managed to finish it over two dental visits.

The book's title page declares that this is "an autobiographical novel (1) , with typographical anomalies (2), in which the author does not appear as himself (3)."

What this means:

(1) The author has suffered a kind of "domestic apocalypse." He has disappeared, and what's left on the floor of his storage space was this scrawled picture of god as a smiley. We hear about Campbell's various neuroses through vignettes told by his daughter Halley, old Honeybee comic strips which portray the travails of a married couple from the last century, and other passages which portray the author as a hypochondriac, depressive, obssessive artist. But then again, which artist is not like that?

(2) The book is a collage of sorts. You have the aforementioned Honeybee strips, the interviews with Halley, the brief prose passages which are bookended with found objects, and sections which look into the tradition of comedy, humor and obscure artists, and even a comics dramatization of O. Henry's "Confessions of a Humorist" featuring Eddie Campbell who is not exactly played by Eddie Campbell.

(3) It's not Eddie Campbell because there's a guy named Richard Seigrist who appears as Eddie Campbell.

It's a very playful book. At 96 pages, it's a short one, but manages to give us a sustained meditation on "the lonely demands of art amid the realities of everyday life."

You can read an excerpt here.

The Ex-Future First Lady

2009-09-09T12:58:00.003+08:00

This comes from the Professional Heckler and reminds me so much of the stories I heard before:

Top 10 Messages Left on Korina Sanchez’ Answering Machine

No. 10: Hello ‘nak, si Nanay Cristy Fermin mo ‘to. Isaisip mo sa tuwina, ang Poong Maykapal ay hindi nagbibigay ng pagsubok na hindi kakayanin ng Kanyang nilalang. Malalampasan mo ‘yan ‘nak. Teka lang, ‘nak, ‘yong pangako mong sobre, ‘di ko pa natatanggap.

No. 9: Hi Korina, sa ABS-CBN newsroom ‘to. We’re all here! Guys, altogether now. One… two… three! Ang saya-saya!

No. 8: Hello Korina, Cynthia Villar here. I don’t expect you to believe me but… ramdam kita. Andun ka na eh! Todo-effort ka na eh! Nag-leave ka pa nga ‘di ba? ‘Tapos, biglang uurong?! Ang sakiiiiiiit! Ang sakit-sakit! Tisyu! Penge akong tisyu!

No. 7: Hi Ma’am, si Abby po ito, secretary ni Dr. Palayan. Gusto pong malaman ni Doc kung gagamitin n’yo pa ang luma n’yong pisngi. Naiwan n’yo raw kasi sa clinic last week.

No. 6: Korina, this is Mel. Yup, Mel Tiangco. Wala lang.

No. 5: Hi Korina, si Sharon ‘to. What you said about Kiko was hurtful. You were never his partner. You are not his wife! Kaya ‘di mo siya nirerespeto. Madrasta ka lang! Madrasta!

No. 4: Hi friendsheeeeeep, this is Kris. Alam mo, I heard your interview sa radio last week and in fairness to you huh, may potential ka sa drama. Promise! Sabi ko nga kay Ms Charo, i-guest ka sa MMK eh. O sige, need to go. Nangungulet na si Josh eh. Humihingi ba naman ng one gallon of ice cream. Gosh, he’s consumed two gallons already ‘noh. Ahah-ahah-ahah! Bye sis! And give my regards to Vice President Mar.

No. 3: Korina, it’s Conrad De Quiros of Inquirer. I just realized, I might have erred in saying that Mar was power hungry. He’s not. But you are!

No. 2: Hon, alam kong nandiyan ka. Alam kong nakikinig ka. Sagutin mo naman ang tawag ko oh. Bakit ba ayaw mo ‘kong kausapin? Ilang beses na ‘kong nag-sorry sa naging decision ko ‘di ba? ‘Tsaka sabi mo sa press, okay lang sa ‘yo ang nangyari. Hon, hello? Hon? Tang-ina hon, ‘pag ako napikon si Noynoy ang papakasalan ko.

And the No. 1 message left on Korina Sanchez’ answering machine…

Hello Korina! Apologies for what happened last week at Club Filipino. Nagmamadali kasi ako kaya nabundol kita. Siyanga pala, si Karma ‘to.

And from Good Times Manila, news about the "strange guttural noises" from Korina Sanchez's house.

Bibi on a Mission

2009-09-03T17:32:00.003+08:00

A bunch of stories that we took up in Creative Writing 10 recently all had to do with stories of childhood and how they handle time: Snow by Julia Alvarez, Reconnaissance by Tara Sering, Forever Overhead by David Foster Wallace (no photo), and Pet Milk by Stuart Dybek (also no photo.) So the class was divided into four groups, one for each story, and they had to figure out the story's plot and timeline and present it to class.

Since the reporting happened after the long break, I didn't really expect a spectacle, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that all the groups were huddled and ready to go. There should be four pictures, one for each story, but the kids with cameras in the class managed to "accidentally" delete the photos so these are the only ones I have.

If you're part of this class and you *do* have photos, please share with the class. Thanks.

The rest of the album is here.

Mixed Bag

2009-08-11T17:47:00.003+08:00

Since I opted to check out the Manila Design Week's Public Art exhibit at Bonifacio High Street on Saturday, was only able to make to MCC on Sunday. Got there early enough--not too many cosplayers were around yet. Went around the venue. There were too many stalls selling toys, and not enough stalls for comics. The stalls for comics were relegated to the very back of the hall, beside the pancakes and the siomai. And by 3 in the afternoon, the place was overran by people in costumes. Not that there's anything bad there, but my friend Carl and I were asking ourselves: If it weren't for the cosplay event, will there be as much people in attendance?

Here's my loot from the recently concluded Metro Comic Con held at the Megamall last August 8 and 9:

There were some reissues which I'd seen from the last two Bahay ng Alumni Komikons. "The Last Datu" by Trese team Budjette Tan and Ka-Jo Baldisimo was interesting. Also got me thinking: Is this somehow part of Trese's mythology? "Aswang Files" won the Best Indie back in 2006. They still haven't come up with Issue # 2, which is bad because I thought Issue # 1 was interesting. The manga influence was quite clear on that one: boy gets beaten up by bullies, a mystery in a tunnel under a bridge. Reminded me of the Inio Asano's Nijigahara Holograph and moody Korean horror movies.

Kill the Vampire

2009-08-06T13:52:00.003+08:00

Entertainment Weekly's Christina Amoroso asks Neil Gaiman how vampires became such a viable cultural commodity through the years, from monsters they have become anti-heroes. Gaiman thinks it has a lot to do with what vampires get to represent. Bram Stoker's vampire was more about repeated seduction in the Victorian era. The next great vampire reincarnation happened when Stephen King wanted to do a vampire story in a small town in Maine--Salem's Lot. The vampire is almost always "The Other," always about "people exiled to the fringes." This is the story of every vampire in popular culture, from Anne Rice's melancholy blood suckers to Sesame Street's The Count. "Vampires," Gaiman thinks, "should be outsiders. They should probably be sexual outsiders. They need to be charismatic. They need to be elegant. They need to be attractive in some way. But they aren’t buying nice suits and calling the shots. And if they are, the book is about something else."

Gaiman thinks that vampires in fiction arrive in waves. From the Victorians to Stephen King and Sesame Street, they have remained viable as figures in ficion because of the constantly renewed figure of the outsider. But Gaiman posits that what changed the game about vampires in fiction, and what gave them a new lease on life and death was AIDS: "You hit the early ‘80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jung quote, that vampirism is the ultimate zipless f—."

But now that vampires are everywhere, most notably the extreme popularity of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, Gaiman thinks that the wave reached its crest and vampires should go back and hibernate in their coffins for another 20 to 25 years. "Come out the next time as something really different, that would be cool."

The gazillions of teenage girls who find Edward Cullen cute will surely hate this, but I tend to agree with Gaiman. Someone should drive a stake on the sparkly Cullen dude with the weird hair, and come back out when he has a nice hair day. Curiously, I Googled "Kill Edward Cullen" for an image to accompany this blog post and there are 247,000 hits and 307,000 web results. So I'm not alone in this. But for the sake of diplomacy and to avoid getting flamed by the Edward & Bella fans, I opted for a classic Dracula-with-a-stake-through-the-heart pic.

How to Disappear

2009-07-31T17:57:00.000+08:00

Frank Ahearn helps people disappear. For 20 years, he had worked as a "skip tracer," a private investigator who specialises in finding people. He later realized that he could reverse his strategies and instead of finding people, he could make them vanish without a trace.

Ahearn outlines three key steps to a successful disappearance:

First, destroy old information about yourself. Call your video store or electricity company and replace your old, correct phone number with a new, invented one. Introduce spelling mistakes into your utility bills. Create a PO Box for your mail. Don’t use your credit cards and the like. Then, create bogus information to fool private investigators who might be looking for you. Go to one city and apply for an apartment. Rent a car in another one.

The next, final step is the most important one. Move from point A to point B. Create a dummy company to pay your bills. Only use prepaid mobile phones and change them every month. It is nearly impossible to find out where you are unless you make a mistake.

The rules are easier to follow if you are self-employed, but harder if you're on a payroll, like if you're a bus driver or teacher. (Drats.) Over the years, Ahearn's clientele included witnesses to a crime, women who are stalked (for this, he works free of charge), and a lot of men in their forties or fifties who want to be free of their responsibilities and start over somewhere, as an entirely new person. Ahearn explains that "There is something romantic about the idea of starting a new life and walking away into the sunset, but for most people it’s just a daydream." Of the ten people who inquire about his services, only one will seriously pursue it. And like a doctor, Ahearn cannot get attached to any of his clients. Very few them will afford Ahearn with updates of their new lives. He gets the occasional e-mail though, and always a different e-mail each time. They have learned their lessons well.

Sharks Playing Ball

2009-07-30T08:41:00.006+08:00

A team of scientists attempted to measure the pain of rejection. It has been a long held belief that such pain is unquantifiable--or perhaps something that targets emotion, ego--but this time, the scientists rigged a system that included small electronic doodads and a group of people playing ball. The ones who were "outed" from the game eventually felt "rejected" and there was a corresponding hit on the gadgets attached to them.

So now there's proof that the pain of rejection is undeniably also physical--gut being wrenched out inch by inch, the bread knife stabbed into one's back and pierced the heart and turned approximately eighteen degrees to the left.

Bonnie Kozek even has an interesting aside to the scientists' findings: "'Why' does rejection hurt? Their concluding theory is that 'rejection' affects the brain because it is deeply-rooted in our DNA. Long ago, mammals relied on social bonds to survive. Broken social bonds put survival in peril. Mammals therefore feared any diminishing of these bonds. And this congenital fear is so entrenched that today’s mammals still see any form of exclusion from social connection as a direct physical threat."

It's not just a physical manifestation of pain then. Even more scary for the mammals of today is the pain of not being part of the game being played out there to celebratory shouts in the field.

Whose Memory Is It Anyway?

2009-07-29T09:35:00.000+08:00

Karl Taro Greenfeld has a problem: "Had some of my earliest memories actually been implanted by reading my father's book about our family as a very young child?"

In writing his memoir about growing up with an autistic brother, Greenfeld kept comparing his own memory with that of the already published version--his father's books. He says: "Many of us have recollections that turn out to have been created or nurtured by family photos we have seen or stories we have been told. But most of us aren't writers setting down a life's story. One could argue that the more fortunate memoirist is the one who doesn't have another writer also weighing in on his childhood, who doesn't measure his own memories against those of some external, recorded source."

In a way, Greenfeld is writing his memoir with the conscious effort of not merely echoing the story that has already been told. Later on, he realizes that memory is a tricky thing: there's same game of catch and yet his father's account was similar and in other ways different. Then incident about a graduate student who spanked the very young Greenfeld when he threw a tantrum over dinner. This he remembers with clarity, but his parents cannot recall it ever happening. In the end, he resolves that "The memoirist's ultimate responsibility is to himself, his own version of his life, his truth and reality. If he does not stay faithful to that story, then why is he bothering to write it at all?"

Pomo: A Few Notes

2009-07-27T14:29:00.001+08:00

From Megan Fox and cars to Judd Apatow's movies, it seems like anything and everything can pass for postmodern these days. Chris Daley weighs in on the abuse of the use of the term "postmodern" in mainstream media: "When the term “postmodern” is used in major international publications, does it bear any relation to its theoretical roots, or has it been hijacked as yet another hot, empty signifier, like 'iconic' or 'staycation'?"

And Daley should know what she's talking about, as she "pays hundreds of dollars a month in student loans for a degree that certifies she has studied postmodernism extensively ." Ah, the indignation of the Comparative Lit major.

Daley gives us a few things to consider about the term postmodern:

1. It was first used as early as the 1870s, but theorists Jean-François Lyotard and Frederic Jameson are generally credited with making the term "postmodern" popular.

2. When used in an academic setting, “postmodern” usually refers to a sense of style featuring “disjunction or deliberate confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a kind of cool detachment, a deliberate foregrounding of constructedness, a suspicion concerning neat or easy conclusions.”

3. Postmodernism is more concerned with process than product. This can be seen in the meta “[blank] about [blank]” construction that often identifies the “postmodern”: art about art, writing about writing, architecture about architecture, etc.
It seems like postmodern is the go-to term when you're not sure what else to say but you want to sound smart. I.e., the actress Megan Fox describes her next project, a film written by Juno's Diablo Cody, as "really dark” because Cody’s “like a postmodern feminist or whatever.” Since nobody's really sure what it means anyway, you're free to use it. Ta-dah. Instant smartness.

Elsewhere in the L.A. Times, to ensure that you know what you're talking about when you're blinding us with jargon, they've prepared a list of 61 essential postmodern reads. It comes with a cheat sheet of qualities that pomo writing has.

The list includes David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Yep, pomo, that one) but also Shakespeare's Hamlet and Tristram Shandy, which again leads us to ask: How can a text written before the modern period ever be postmodern? (And a tangentially related question: How can anyone say that one of the things they're looking for in a date is "He must be postmodern?" But then again, maybe this is a gay guy thing.) What the hell does that mean? This is why Postmodernism (and I'm tempted to say "and everything connected with theory") is the Root of All Evil.

Lois Lane's New Boyfriend

2009-07-26T17:21:00.006+08:00

Jonathan Goldstein's story "Man Not Superman" gets the Post-It treatment. An interesting premise: If Lois Lane and Superman break up, what sort of relationship will she have with the regular guy she hooks up with after her Super Romance?

Told from the point of view of Lois Lane's new boyfriend, Stuart, who is forced to suffer the faith of all well meaning exes: Let us all be friends together, Super Friends included.

And, of course, something has to be said about that other odd couple--Batman and Robin:

Elsewhere, in his 1971 essay "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," Larry Niven asks the unsayable: "What turns on a Kryptonian?" In McSweeney's, "Superman's Fortress of Solitude."

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Fast Food Mafia

2009-07-23T16:17:00.004+08:00

O dahil ang mafia ay matatagpuan kahit saan at hindi lang sa guerrang pang-Fezbuk:

Kung matagal mo nang pinag-iisipan kung ano ba talaga si Grimace, heto ang sagot: Isa siyang hitman na nasa payola ni Ron "The Don" McDonald. Isa lamang sila sa mga fast food mascots na inimagine ni Silent Sketcher sa kanyang Deviant Art portfolio. Kasama sa pamilya sina "The Colonel" Sanders ng Kentucky Fried Creatures, si Wendy, si "Little" Caesar, at ang Hari ng mga Burger.

Keeping Out the Joneses

2009-07-22T12:37:00.001+08:00

Christian and Abrams posit that the development of cities--fortified, walled--was a matter of keeping out the Joneses. "[T]the first settlements – before bronze age, before iron age, even probably before the stone age – didn’t happen because folks liked each other’s company. As the old saying goes: there really is safety in numbers … and fortifications."

The city state was established as a common defense against invaders. When people stayed together in a permanent location, they brought their valuables with them--heads of cattle, goat, a barn of farmed grains. They needed to band together against marauders even if they weren't exactly fans of each other.

Or it can be the other way around. They loved each other so much that they didn't want to let anyone else in. Perhaps the Chinese had this idea first: They didn't set out and conquer the way the Europeans did. Maybe they were thinking, "Why pollute our fabulous gene pool with barbaric Mongol blood? Let's build the Great Wall!"

Meanwhile, in old Castilian Manila, the Chinese were being kept out of Intramuros. They stayed in their own Parian, prosperous though much discriminated against. Here's another point of development in urban areas: "But it wasn’t long before these separate city/states looked out from their battlements and discovered that instead of keeping themselves safe they were keeping their good neighbors out." Soon, Manila wouldn't just be Intramuros, it would expand and take in other neighborhoods, and on to the Metro Manila as we know it now. But back then, when one said Manila, it meant Intramuros. Just nuns and priests and Spanish dons. The Chinese stay in Parian.

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Riding the Scandinavian Crime Wave

2009-07-21T16:10:00.001+08:00

These days, it seems to me that everywhere you look (around the web, at least), people are talking about Scandinavian crime novels. In his Slate essay, Nathaniel Rich claims that the most peaceful people on earth write the greatest homicide thrillers. He offers a few reasons why the genre flourishes in the region: "The crime novel, and particularly the British crime novel, has been enormously popular in Scandinavia for decades. And the famous Nordic pragmatism is well-suited to the intricate mechanics of crime investigation plots. But the best explanation is the most mundane: Crime novels sell." Rich proceeds to list down the writers who started their careers in a more literary vein, but eventually, the poets, playwrights, novelists and translators found a bigger audience--and a bigger paycheck--in writing about crime.

If crime novels sell and the writers profit from it, there must surely be a very good reason why readers like it as well. For this, Rich points out that the allure of the Scandinavian crime novel from others is "not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness." There something a little bit troublesome about Rich's assertion. Rich fetishizes the blood on snow image as something close to the divine.

On the other hand, Larisa Kyzer of The L Magazine looks deeper into Rich's assertion that Scandinavians write the best crime novels. Kyzer believes that there is more to it than just the inherent creepiness--or even exoticism--of having blood spreading against pristine white snow. The narrative concerns of the Scandinavian crime novel do not stray too far away from those of the established literary tradition. It still finds its roots in the police procedurals and detective stories. However, "more often than not, the gruesome goings-on in Scandinavian crime novels have their root in everyday societal tensions and shortcomings: racial/ethnic/religious prejudices, the marginalization of 'outsiders,' governmental corruption, unacknowledged domestic abuse."

The Nordic countries are peaceful because of homogeneity. If everyone is like everyone else, then it would be too hard to disagree with the public sentiment. But because each of these countries started seeing more faces different from their own in the last several decades, change started to seep in. And according to Kyzer, "more often than not, [it] created quite an existential crisis for societies which have for so long been able to claim a fundamental sameness in traditions, language, and cultural outlook." They cannot sustain their unofficial motto, "Be like everyone else. Thus, this disturbance is articulated in their fiction: the rise of neo-Nazi gangs, Swedish townspeople getting all antsy because of their Sami neighbors, arson in refugee camps, shutting down child prostitution rings.

The writers of crime fiction are holding up a mirror to the welfare states' shortcomings. If so, then the uniqueness of the genre comes from its "unflinchingly honest stock of its failures. So often, these are novels of conscience and reflection. Novels which, in their own small way, take responsibility for a social system which makes earnest promises of inclusion and protection, but continues to fail so many of its constituents."

The curious question is this: the Scandinavian countries have a social system that works, the citizens are among the world's happiest even if they perceive their governments can do better. The low crime rate pushes the writers to imagine "tawdry crimes." On the other hand, the Philippines has a government that cannot be trusted to deliver even the basic services, most of the population live in dire poverty and yet steadily confesses that they are a "happy" people, and crime is so prevalent that you only have to step out of your house and see it happen to someone you know, perhaps committed by someone you know. We have seen all manners of killing people--the usual ice pick stabbing, boys playing basketball and on the way home they get riddled with bullets, a woman's body chopped into pieces, left to be discovered in several plastic bags, or a man killed and body sealed in a drum filled with cement and dropped into the river. Sometimes there is a desperation to the crime: I am thinking of that mother who cannot afford to feed her children, and so takes them in a Jollibee in the mall and then poisons them all.

Scandinavian crime fiction functions as a critique of a society that has its ills, is only starting to feel the disturbance of having a varied society. It also offers a way of escape, a different reality from their "we're all the same, modular Ikea" existence. But crime fiction is also a very straight forward kind of narrative: here is a body, thereafter lies a solution as to who did this and in what manner. Problem, solution. All is right in the world.

However, if crime is all around you, so desperate and gruesome that you want it to be something that you merely imagined, is it even possible that you would want to write about it? Of what use is fiction then for our collective imagination? Does this explain why crime fiction isn't flourishing in the country and yet we have stories about dragons and dwarves and a strong fantasy-oriented community of writers? If we have chosen our manner of escape, it seems we have favored magic over material explanations. But we must also have a venue for critique, something that forces us to consider our ills, and even if only imagined, a way to make things right in the world again.

July Reading Stack

2009-07-18T09:52:00.004+08:00

Since school started, haven't really had much time left for personal reading. I got my copy of Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man around registration period, and I'm barely a third of the novel in. However, that scant reading lead me to a curiosity about the musician Leonard Cohen and how he's just goyish. The novel has this running commentary about which things/people/habits, etc are Jewish and which are goyish. Cohen stepping into a cafe placing a very green order of soy mocha latte is goyish. It's difficult to explain if you haven't read the book. The novel is also described as "postmodern." Now there's a term which people are always hardup to explain.

Last weekend, faced with the prospect of having no book to read, I ducked into a trusty Booksale branch and got a copy of Alex Garland's The Tesseract, which is set in Manila--lots of crime, dirty little hotels with naked bulbs and blood on the sheets, weather so hot that the lead guy opted to stay inside a McDonald's and watched rich little kids have their blasted kiddie parties. The first chapter reminds me so much of the opening chapter of The Beach. It also reminds me that I still have a cling-wrapped copy of The Coma somewhere in my shelves in Manila. Maybe Garland is a writer best appreciated when you're in your early 20s and with a good head trip.

Also still in its original plastic wrap is The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki. The cover is a nice brown craft paper and orange, and the back cover features a body with the parts cut into parts and meant to look like a paper doll that you can join together with staples or something. The series tag line is "Your body is their business!" According to the blurb, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is about "five young students at a Buddhist university find there's little call for their job skills in today's Tokyo...among the living, that is! But their studies give them a direct line to the dead--the dead who are still trapped in their corpses, and can't move on to their next reincarnation! Whether you died from suicide, murder, sickness, or madness, they'll carry your body anywhere it needs to go to free your soul." Given the topic, the plastic is there to warn off those with weaker stomachs and those under 18 who can't properly appreciate this odd blend of Pushing Daisies, CSI, and maybe Conan the Kid Detective. (The undead also reminds me of Pizzeria Kamikaze, an Israeli comic book wherein all the suicides end up in a world similar to ours, except everyone there died by their own hands and given another chance at, uhm, living. First followed it in Bipolar and it's been turned to a movie: The Wristcutters. Anyway.) There are 5 stories in the volume, so the episodic nature allows you to jump and enjoy one of the adventures. The pullback is that this is just Volume 1 of 9 (as of last count) and it's not exactly as cheap as the other mangas, so following the adventures will be costly.

The last and newest one on my stack is Xiaolu Guo's 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. I read part (or most?) of it by hanging out in MPH and Borders in Kuala Lumpur last year. It's about a farm girl who tries her luck in Beijing by being a film extra. It's funny and (a lot of people will stone me for this) quite different from all the other Chinese writers I've previously read who have written about Mao era China. The book cover is rather pretty. But of course, the other attraction is that Fenfang works in the film business and that has always been interesting to me. 20 Fragments was published in Chinese eleven years ago, and only recently translated into English. Since then, Guo has written one other novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which was her first try at writing in English. Also read bits of that last year, but alas, I was too poor to buy it and now it's not available in the bookstores in KL anymore. But I'm looking forward to finishing not just 20 Fragments but all these books really, really soon.

The Cartography of Childhood

2009-07-14T14:06:00.000+08:00

In his essay "Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood," Michael Chabon writes about the importance of childhood adventures while growing up. Adventure is being allowed to explore the world to its limits. It means playing in neighbors' yards and vacant lots, riding your bike to visit classmates in their houses across town and knowing what flavor popsicle their mothers serve. These adventures, according to Chabon, provide a child with mental maps of their worlds which they can endlessly revise and refine. "Childhood is a branch of cartography," he says. And childhood is the first and ultimate adventure:

That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

But in the years since Chabon's growing up years, children have been increasingly forbidden to explore even the very street they live in. Many barriers were put up against adventures: Wear a helmet when riding a bike, don't ride to where your parent can't see you. Don't ride that bike or you break all your bones. The world has become too dangerous for adventuring.

In his essay "Coming of age in the years of living dangerously," Bill Briggs also looks back on this time of childhood daredeviltry with nostalgia. Kids growing up in the '50s, '60s and '70s inhaled second hand smoke from their chainsmoking parents, ate wildberries, were allowed to roam the fields and strange streets without fear. Kids were allowed to live. But now that adventuring--and effectively, living--has been outlawed in favor of a safe and monitored environment, a 47-year-old mortgage broker asks: "Who would have thought 30 years ago that it would be necessary to run public service announcements encouraging parents to get their kids outside playing?”

Choose Your Own Ong

2009-07-14T10:01:00.004+08:00

The Institute of Creative Writing Panayam Series hosts Charlson Ong's lecture this afternoon, 2.30 PM at the Claro M. Recto Hall in Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman. If you're free, please go. It'll be quite interesting to see what he has to say about novel writing, Facebook, and whether he can beat Bob Ong in a karaoke match.

Harry, Neo, Kirk and Luke: Different Hero, Same Story

2009-07-13T01:56:00.001+08:00

In class last week, we were talking about how Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and even The Matrix are actually the same movie. The journey is the same, or as Brandon Root in Spiteful Critic put it:

Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.

It's not that writers and directors of the last 40 years have not had a single fresh idea since the birth of the summer blockbuster; the similarities of the heroes' journeys, as Kottke.org pointed out, have to do with the persistence of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth.

To illustrate, here's Say No to Crack's point-by-point play of how Harry Potter and Star Wars are really just the same story:

Another interesting read, James Parker's Atlantic Online essay "Sex and the Single Wizard," on how Rowling really doesn't have any idea how to deal with the awakening of adolescent sexuality.

On a side note, I'm a bit pissed that I have acquired "premiere" tickets to HP6 on July 17th, as I learned belatedly, a day after the movie officially opens. At Php225 a pop, I feel like I've been ripped off. I bite my thumb at you, UP Stat Soc.

Facebook: The Movie

2009-07-10T08:54:00.001+08:00

Carson Reeves of Script Shadow gives us a glimpse of an Aaron Sorkin penned script about the kids who started social networking Facebook. The premise: "A look at the rise of Facebook and the effect it's had on its founders." It is also described as "an epic story that would capture the drama of late-night status updates, the power of the poke, who and who not to limit profile access to, and of course, the all important and always necessary "delete friend" feature. Okay, well, maybe it wouldn't be about those things per se. But it would be about computers and software and code and snobby rich kids."

It has to do with a kid who gets commissioned by a pair of rich brothers on the rowing team who want a website that's sort of like MySpace, but cooler. The kid teams up with a friend, works on the project and then comes up with something else as a dorm room experiment, TheFacebook. The friends will part ways later with the entrance of another web figure, Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the "informal adviser" who told Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "The" in TheFacebook.

Reeves insists that the Sorkin script is "a story about two friends - one a computer genius, the other a business expert - who began a website that became the fastest growing phenomenon in internet history. Three years later, one was suing the other for 600 million dollars (or 1/30th of Mark Zuckerberg's worth). It's a story about greed, about obsession, about our belief that all the money in the world can make us happy. But it's also unpredictable, funny, touching, and sad. It gives us that rare glimpse into the improbable world of mega-success."

So in the end, the kid who earned a bajillion dollars creating a web tool that connects people is ultimately disconnected with his friends and the rest of the world.

So who's throwing in the money to make "The Social Experiment" possible? Sony and producer Scott Rudin are supposedly attached on the project slated for release in 2011. Plus David Fincher is tagged as potential director. I loved most of the things that Fincher directed (Fight Club, Se7en, esp Zodiac) with the exception of Benjamin Button. If this turns out to be a good movie, then everything will be forgiven.

Judging the Book by its Author Photo

2009-07-09T15:00:00.005+08:00

Melanie Marquez had it wrong: Don't judge my brother, he's not a book. But what if the brother is an author whose photo appears on the dust jacket? Then he probably needs a good author photo. What's an author photo for? David Adams weighs in:

To a large degree, they satisfy the vanity of the writer; those small peephole portraits are a way for them to claim ownership, to make their long struggle at the keyboard valid (they also provide a good ID when writing a check at the bookstore). Photos are a publicity tool, of course. Something for publishers to enlarge to poster size -- depending on the author's degree of beauty -- when promoting book signings at the local bookstore (a process that would have hindered, not helped, George Eliot back in the day).

Marion Ettlinger has been taking gorgeous black and white photographs of writers since 1983, some of which were compiled into a book. My favorite is Raymond Carver's:

I have the same reaction as David Adams' when I first saw that photo of Carver's staring at me from the cover of Where I'm Calling From: "He's seated at a table, one arm slung over his chair, the other on the table, forming an L, one-half of a frame which immediately takes you up to his face. His eyes are like cigarettes burning holes in your brain. Carver stares directly at the camera --through the camera -- as if to say, 'Sit down and let me tell you a story. It may not be pretty, but it will be real.'"

But it helps to be real *and* pretty. Like this one:

where Jhumpa Lahiri is just smouldering at you from the back of cover of Interpreter of Maladies. A student of mine saw the photo and said, Wow, I didn't know Jhumpa Lahiri is hot.

If hot is impossible, then perhaps take a few serviceable ones that don't obscure your face, like this:

That's just one way to take a bad author photo. Salt Publishing offers nine other ways, none of them flattering and would never help you sell any books.

Dial up my asterisk

2009-07-08T16:58:00.004+08:00

Transient Ink educates us in typography and tart cards, a British term referring to the small advertisement cards that prostitutes leave in phone booths to garner more attention for their services. Or to put it simply: If your typeface were a prostitute, what would her card look like?

Wallpaper.com asked designers from all kinds of backgrounds to create these cards for their favorite fonts. The results range from subtle and coy

to kitschy, like this one by Emma Thorpe reminds me of some t-shirts that teenage boys wear, sometimes with bunnies

and on to the really risque, like the one below:

Are you there, God? It's me, Beckham

2009-06-19T11:51:00.004+08:00

Lemondrop reacts to the attention of a Rolling Stone cover wherein a naked girl is splashed with writing from a Stephen King novel: "In our opinion, the "naked chick covered in writing" theme is getting to be as tired as the patented "startlet with her hands over her boobs" magazine cover... we decided to turn this cliché on its head by plastering some of our favorite guys with quotes from books girls like." The result is the male body as a teen girl's notebook, like David Beckham with lines from Judy Blumes' "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret."

But if you ask me, the best male body as notebook is still Ewan McGregor in Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book.

Movie in Three Frames

2009-06-16T14:01:00.004+08:00

Your favorite movie distilled into three frames. What can I say, the three-act structure is basic and works really well. Also, this kind of reminds me of the "sweded" movies in Be Kind, Rewind, except these are "meticulously handdrawn" and rendered in animated .gifs.

via

Zim and Co.

2009-06-11T10:33:00.003+08:00

It's French Spring in Manila once more, and the 14th edition of the French Film Festival offers a selection of movies that gives us a glimpse of a France that's more than just croissants on the Rue Montparnasse.

Last Monday, I caught the evening screening of Zim and Co, which features Adrien Jolivet as Victor Zimbietrofsky, a twenty-something guy who gets a little high, spends the night playing a gig for the deaf, goes to the markets to help move boxes, gets paid, and early in the morning, his motorbike skids past a car driven by a middle-aged man.

There's a dent on the car but this man thinks it's a grave injustice. Our guy Zim gets called for it, and the judge looks in his record and finds a previous offence, which now makes Zim a two-time offender and sent to jail immediately. Unless, the deal goes, Zim can find a job that gives him a payslip (taxes for the government, yey) before the end of the month.

Zim isn't a lazy ass. He scours the ads and manages to find a job which requires a car and a driver's license, both of which he doesn't have. But Zim is a resourceful young man and enlists the help of his friends. There's Arthur, whose dad wants him to succeed in the trade of bodyworking cars and thus earn pension later on. There's Cheb, who wants to invent the next best thing to sliced bread, or at least find your mobile phone when it's ringing. There's Safia, a Muslim girl who works in her uncle's canteen.

All the young people in Pierre Jolivet's Paris are street-smart and willing to help each other get better, even through ingenuous means. They need to survive by their wits, as the system isn't exactly friendly to a young Africans, Muslims and Polish immigrants. Zim is the only white guy, and he slightly benefits from this system--after all, the bureau needs to meet the quota of having enough white guys driving in the streets. In a world like this, where people are out to rip you off, where your family doesn't quite understand why you'd quit a boring factory job, where a small mistake can cost you your future, friendship is really the only thing going for you. (The movie also reminds me a lot of the Cinemalaya film Endo.)

Director Pierre Jolivet has this to say: “At twenty most youngsters create distance between themselves and their family and find the substitution in their peers. It’s the beginning of fears yet a feeling of being indestructible. It is this battle of contrasts that we tried to portray”.

The French Film Festival is ongoing until June 14 at the Shangri-la Plaza Mall, Cinema 3. Entrance is free. Tickets are handed out two hours before the screening.

Save yourself, go online

2009-06-10T16:10:00.001+08:00

The Independent reports of a recent debate in the UK which tried to assess social responsibility in a wired world. Helen Milner, the managing director of an organisation that works to bring technology to everyone in the UK, spoke on behalf of the 25% of people who, she claimed, have no access to the internet. The unwired class has become the new lumpen proletariat in a world where cheap goods and services can be had online. Meanwhile, the general argument is that people who have no idea how to send e-mail are "Luddite losers," said to be "doomed to analogue oblivion." Technological ignorance is a sign of failure in a Darwinian digital democracry. The digital divide has turned into a chasm, and it is up to this unwired class to get online and save themselves. The network is there: in libraries, schools and townhalls. Get online and survive in this new digital democracy. However, Milner expressed a different argument: instead of a digital democracy, what the new technology culture does is to echo and replicate the unequal hierarchies of 19th century capitalism. Who has the money will prosper was the game then, and who has access to the internet--which requires money just the same--is the game now. To avoid the duplicating the same social inequalities, the wired class actually has a responsibility to help the unwired play catch up.

I can imagine that the number of the great unwired is even bigger in the Philippines, where a lot of villages across the country don't even have decent roads, regular electricity, much less telephone lines and wireless modems. It does not make sense to adopt the Keener argument: sure, wireless mobility can be had for Php1k a month, but in the countryside, who will choose wi-fi over food and electricity? It makes more sense to follow the Milner argument that narrowing the digital chasm needs social responsibility. But how to do that in a country where a broadband deal is seen as an opportunity to deepen the pockets of a few wired men?

Wag Pigilin

2009-06-04T11:42:00.003+08:00

Signboard outside a barber shop, spotted while waiting for the bus. Nothing is ever free, sadly; gall stones can be avoided for Php5.

Tintin in Las Islas Filipinas

2009-05-26T14:20:00.003+08:00

Woke up yesterday with the weird compulsion to get all the Tintin adventure books. There are 24 books (not counting "Tintin in Thailand" hehe ) and I've read a handful of them but now only have the moon books (Destination Moon, Explorers on the Moon).

Then I go online and the web leads me to this site that maps the travels of the boy reporter. I looked for the moon and found the Philippines. Tintin passed through the South China sea en route to Nanking and Shanghai. I wonder what sort of adventure he would have had if he landed on our shores instead.

At the Komikon Summer Fiesta

2009-05-16T23:35:00.009+08:00

Went to the Komikon late in the afternoon. Was planning to live tweet but mobile's battery died early. Managed to get a handful of local titles: Cadre: Amerikanong Hilaw, Baboy, The Girl Who Turned Into a Fish, and Ang Maskot. I'm liking the latter very very much. Very clean, tight panel planning, enjoyable and endearing story. Loved the set of bloopers in the end. Sushyal yung little bird. Hehehe.

Don't have time right now for a full review. But I peeked at the creator's blog and he describes the process how he made "Ang Maskot" in Adobe Illustrator. Would love to see more from this particular writer/artist.

Also picked up Wonderlost # 1 in one of the sale bins.The blurb says it's a cross between Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Mean Girls. Browsed a couple of the stories already. It's all about growing up in that hazy, romantic time called the '80s, full of U2 circa Joshua Tree references. The biggest pull for me was that these are autobiographical stories. Very interesting so far. Searched Cebulski's blog and found out there's been a #2. Will be on the lookout for that one.

Then there's "I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima" (aka "Ore wa mita") by Keiji Nakazawa. It's subtitled "A Survivor's True Story," and Last Gasp tells us that Nakazawa wrote and drew this comic book in 1972 about his own life and experience in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing. It's a single-issue comic, but his editor encouraged him to expand it into a long form work, which is how we got Barefoot Gen. In it, he rages not only against the bomb, but also at the militarists who led Japan into war. The artwork reminds me of Simba the White Lion crossed with Voltes V. Best of all, I got it for twenty pesos. :)

It was also announced that there will be another Komikon around October, and this time in a bigger venue. That means will just have enough time to read and recover from this event. Here's hoping that will have more finds (and funds to buy the finds) later this year.

A Universe of Stories

2009-05-13T16:22:00.003+08:00

Finished reading Marvel 1602, the 8-part series in which Neil Gaiman reimagines the Marvel Universe. But it's really not just a reimagining or a simple what if (think DC's Other Worlds), but something that will still fit in the current Marvel universe.

The premise: it is the last days of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The ides of March bring inclement weather, and not just the umbrella-requiring kind--lizards and fire--enough to make people think of the Apocalypse. There's threat from James VI of Scotland in the north. The Spanish Inquisition seeks "witchbreeds," people and creatures with suprapowers, and burn them at the stakes. There is a "school for the sons of gentlefolk" run by a Spaniard called Carolus Javier, who is bald, has no use of his legs, and has a page named John Grey. And oh, there's also Peter Parquah who's forever having close encounters with spiders but never bitten. It's 1602, but the Age of Heroes has started 400 years early. Something called a "Forerunner" came from the future and caused all this to happen out of sync with time and space. It has to be stopped--or returned where it came from--so that the universe will exist as it should.

I like how the story is peopled by recognizable characters from the Marvel pantheon--which Gaiman says come from no later than the 1969 catalogue, as there are many Marvel heroes. The same things happen in 1602 as they happened 400 years later. It doesn't feel too forced, and it only shows that the dilemmas felt in present times can somehow still fit in that past where science and magic live side by side.

The panel excerpt comes from issue # 7, and the witchbreeds are on their to the New World. Richard Reed was thankful for the time he spent in Otto Von Doom's dungeons. There were no "distractions" and he "was able to reduce many things to their fundamental principles." The others thought that he had discovered how to turn lead into gold. But Reed says it is the principles of stories which he had discovered, as stories give him hope. They live in a universe where they are given a chance to exist. The Flame Man contradicts him--stories end, all tales end, and it is how they will also end. But the Thing is curious about the transmutations. He wants his humanity to be restored, as he has been "a monster too long." Reed, in all his wisdom replies, that yes, a cure is possible in the natural sciences. "But the laws of story would suggest that no cure can last for very long. For in the end, alas, [you] are so much more interesting and satisfying as you are."

For me that captures the rationale for the entire series, as with the immediate sequel "1602: New World." It is possible to "treat" this monstrosity, these witchbreeds in the past and make "corrections" on the mistakes we now know as history. But then again, perhaps it won't be as interesting.

A Moveable Feast

2009-04-26T15:00:00.003+08:00

The title page of Ernest Hemingway's memoir about living in Paris in the 1920s opens with this quote from a letter he wrote a friend in 1950: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

In the book's preface he also tells the reader, that if she prefers, "this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." It is clear though that Hemingway writes about People Who Really Existed, and as one turns the page and on to the new chapter, the previous one is alluded to, and there is a linear build up as far as chronology is concerned. Each chapter is self-contained, the situation builds up and ends with what seems like insight. I don't know if that was what Hemingway meant when he said that the reader "may regard this as fiction"--in that the structure is similar but the characters are People Who Really Existed. If so, Hemingway makes it obvious that there are some Nice People, like Ezra Pound, who's really a saint, but who is also friends with opium addicts/poets--the distinctions weren't very clear as to which came first. It's also obvious that there are some Pompous Asses in the cast of characters. Some are named, like Gertrude Stein, but some are too silly that they remain anonymous, like the young man who wanted to be a Great Creative Writer but didn't have what it takes so Hemingway convinced him to write criticism. Of course, later there is an aside wherein Hemingway says that it would have been great if the young man turned out to be a great critic of the ballet, books or the moving pictures, but unfortunately, even there he was not gifted enough. So okay na rin na wala siyang pangalan para di napahiya. Hehe.

In the first chapter, "A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel," Hemingway talks about the process of transplanting oneself, wherein simply put, "in one place youc ould write about it better than in another." It's fall in Paris and the wild, cold blowing day was the sort of day it felt right to tell the story of a boyhood incident up in Michigan, which also happened on a wild, cold, blowing day like that day in Paris in the fall.

Later in the chapter, he writes about how the weather is really bad and he was thinking of leaving Paris for a while. He thinks, "Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually..." The rain in Paris was "now only local weather and not something that changed your life."

For when Hemingway finally wrote about the incidents of his life in Paris in the years 1921-1926, it would be almost thirty plus years later, he would be in Cuba, 1957, or in Idaho, 1958 and all the way to Spain in 1959 and back to Cuba and Idaho once more. It was near the end of his life, and in two years he would be found dead in Idaho.

But in A Moveable Feast, Hem is a young man, poor and hungry but happy, and it would take forty years for him to realize that.

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, Scribners Classic, 1987. Php 100 from Zeitgeist. Bought only because my Thesis Adviser kept on quoting Hemingway and I got tired of not knowing what she was talking about. Now I want to read all of Hemingway.

Jonathan Yardley reviews it for The Washington Post here, and a 1964 New York Times review by Charles Poore here.

Tunay na Lalake, Totoong Babae

2009-04-24T23:33:00.005+08:00

It started like some kind of in-joke from the fellows of the UP Baguio Workshop: "Ang tunay na lalaki hindi natutulog;" or, "Ang tunay na lalaki laging may extra rice." They formalized their manifesto in a blog and a few days in, they now have something like 30,000+ hits.

According to their hilarious, macho shit logic, Cesar Montano is not a real man, but Chynna Ortaleza is not. The evidence:

Cesar Montano's ad for a water company. I often see this plastered on the sides of mini-trucks. Cesar in wifebeaters, gaily looking at the camera, smiling and all while he splashes the contents of a bottle of mineral water all over himself. The real men ask: Sa tingin nyo tunay na lalake ba ang umaasta nang ganito?

On the other hand, you've got former 5 & Up reporter Chynna Ortaleza. She's done everything--and really, everything--acted in commercials, starred in youth-oriented shows, sang and danced in public (something a real man would never, ever do), played a kontravida in a fantasy soap opera, posed in men's magazines. Name it, she's done it. And she never came close to real stardom. In spite of everything, Real Men know a Real Man when they see one. And so the verdict: "Pero sa ganitong sigasig at pagpupursigi sa trabaho, sigasig at pagpupursiging baka pumantay o lumampas pa kay John Lloyd, kinikilala ang status ni Chynna bilang tunay na lalake. At kung ma-demote man siya'y siguradong hahanapan niya ito ng paraan."

Kaya tunay na lalaki si Chynna Ortaleza. Yun yun eh: Ang tunay na lalaki, gagawa ng paraan.

The last time I checked, somewhere in the comments someone left a link to a counterpart blog: Ang Blog ng mga Totoong Babae. Only a handful of entries there right now. But you can see the seeds of it already: Real Women Love Housework (see: Snow White), Real Women will kill for a man (See Keka--ang girlfriend mong astig, pamatay kung umibig.) But I think mas funny yung mga tunay na lalaki.

Item # 82: Doctrina Christiana, en lengua espanola y tagala

2009-04-20T17:17:00.003+08:00

I really should be doing something else, but via some links I found out that the World Digital Library, slated to open later this month, is already operational. I didn't really expect to find anything from the Philippines. But I saw that there were several entries from Southeast Asia, and the Doctrina Christiana was part of the list. The book is described as follows:

Published in Manila in 1593, this catechism in Spanish and Tagalog is the first book printed in the Philippines. It is also the first book printed in a Philippine language and the first, and only, 16th-century source showing an explicit and distinctly Philippine abecedarium (alphabet). The book is illustrated with a woodcut frontispiece of St. Dominic and initial letters in both Spanish and Tagalog. Part of the rare book collections of the Library of Congress, it is the only known copy in existence.

The book was donated to the Library of Congress by the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, and this is the only extant copy in the whole wide world. It has 76 pages, with illustrations and roughly 12.5 inches in height. And if you have the bandwidth, you can download a PDF copy of it, all 32 MB of it.

The other interesting finds in the Philippine section include a map detailing The Attack of Manila, October 1762, a photo of a religious parade featuring the Santa Rosa de Lima--the Patroness of the New World and the Philippines-- and a 22-second, black and white silent reel about Aguinaldo's Navy. All are downloadable.

The other item which peaked my interest was the journal of Magellan's voyage supposedly written by Antonio Pigafetta. The surviving copy is in French and unfortunately NOT downloadable. But really, I have nothing to complain about since the journal can be browsed, and perhaps it's only a matter of time before the World Digital Library will have a version of it available for downloading in one piece. If not, there's always the option of saving it per page--all 200+ pages of it. Then again, one has to be well versed in French in order to fully understand this.

The Great Train Wreck

2009-04-01T16:46:00.003+08:00

Pictures for Sad Children illustrates what the vortex of negativity is capable of, or at least Murphy's Law:

Kitty Wigs

2009-03-20T10:29:00.007+08:00

Fox News brings us a century's worth of bad inventions. For me, the top of that list should be this:

Cats are notorious enough for not wanting to be accessorized. Slapping on a kitty wig on them seems like the easy way out. But look at the claws on this one. You just know that she's not very pleased. But wait, there's more:

At least with this one, they were able to make her stay put and look a bit sultry. Unless what she's really saying is, "Just wait when you're asleep. You will then know what it really means to say, 'I have lost face.'"

The Smelly Dog

2009-03-10T16:02:00.003+08:00

This T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics admits on coming down hard on poetry in the past, even dismissing it: "Poetry Bloetries." But he realizes that poetry is a very sophisticated form of communication that even antedates the written word. One must memorize lines, which is easier if it rhymes. Thus the need for "The smelly dog who pooed / Has spied me in the nude."

If you roll your mouse over the strip, the author says that he looked up "poetry bloetries" in the web. It's there alright. Some people who post poems on their blogs call their works "bloetry."

Kabog. Hehehe.

Read entire strip here.

Cats Don't Care

2009-03-08T09:12:00.001+08:00

Robert Sergel of Idiot Comics shows why cats are the best pets you can ever have:

Full page here.

Call Work

2009-03-03T17:01:00.004+08:00

Callwork is one of the more interesting comics I saw at the Komikon last November. Hazel Manzano's blog calls the strip a "tribute to all Business Process Outsourcing workforce here in the Philippines."

In this particular installment, the imminent doom of the economic crisis is creeping onto the country's sunshine industry. Now, more than anything, people are just thankful that they have work and that it pays.

EDIT: Callwork is reviewed in the February 2009 issue of FHM, the one with three girls and some sliced fruits. Vincent Coscolluela writes: "More a series of comic strips than a comic book, Callwork gives you one of those, "Why didn't I think of this?" moments. Call centers, the industry's lifestyles and habits, are a rich source of material. Poking fun at absenteeism, overtime, payroll discrepancies--you name it--who knew you'd get such a laugh out of corporate suffering?"

The FHM review also got me curious about Edwin Estioko's Bless Our Trip, which is "as indie as it gets": photocopied and stapled bond paper. But what got me was the description of what happens. It's told in vignettes, and links together several characters who meet everyday at a jeepney stop: "A boy finds his girl, a father his son, and a thief his whore." Panalo. Does anyone know how to get a copy of this?

Change This Movie

2009-02-27T18:31:00.003+08:00

We literally had two minutes to get inside the theater last Wednesday. I just picked a time that was convenient, 5:10PM. I figured it wouldn't be that crowded because people were still in schools and offices. But when I got to the counter almost all the seats were taken and I didn't know it was in a THX theater. That's how I ended up paying a full day's pay for the John Lloyd and Sarah movie.

The first teamup between John Lloyd Cruz and Sarah Geronimo was A Very Special Love. Plain girl Laida desires the masungit rich boy Miggy who publishes the magazine Bachelor, which is published by Flippage, one of the many business ventures owned by the Montenegro clan, whose black dressed and tuxedoed members scowl from the cover of the Society magazine's huge billboard along Guadalupe. Laida the plain girl moons over this billboard every time she passes it, and she likes Miggy so much that upon graduation, she applies to Flippage to be an Editorial Assistant. And lucky girl she was because on her job interview, she ends up offering a cup of coffee to the love of her life. They fall in love. They do weird things like dancing to stop the downpour and hire trucks so they could sing Smokey Mountain songs on them.

AVSL was a big hit when it first came out and I suspect it was because it was pure fantasy: plain girl gets rich boy. Of course, the rich boy has issues: he was an anak sa labas. He resents that his mother (Agot Isidro, in pictures) died and his father's family doesn't really like him. The good (legitimate) brother doesn't trust his capacities as publisher. Laida helps him get through all of this, even meeting his dead mother. And in the end, Miggy's father vouches for him so Rowell Santiago has no other choice but to take him in. Sarah Geronimo is a funny girl, unafraid to make a fool out of herself and the energy with which she throws herself is admirable. John Lloyd is trading on his sullen boy act, which for some reason girls find attractive. There's one scene where John Lloyd gets sick and Sarah nurses him back to health. It's the atsay and amo act all over again. So this is what the Pinay really wants is to play mommy, yaya, assistant and girlfriend all in one.

These are the issues that You Changed My Life takes on.What happens after the "happily ever after"? In fact, I was rather surprised that the movie is actually a direct sequel of A Very Special Love. Perhaps the creators thought they had a story that worked well, and decided to just pick up where they left off. We find out that Bachelor lives, and Laida takes care of their advertising load. Meanwhile, the Montenegros venture into a partnership with an airline company, and Miggy has to write a speech for his brother announcing this. The speech was horrible and he has 30 minutes to revise it. Guess who he calls to revise the bloody speech? Laida is the middle of a client presentation, but her mobile phone fills the conference room with Miggy screeching, "Bebe ko, bebe ko!" It's one thing to be in love and announce it to the world via mobile ring alerts. But I tell you, that ring tone was like a rusty nail being dragged across a blackboard. To fill the theater with that ringtone was torture. But of course, Laida is in love, she pushes aside the client presentation and ducks under the table to think of a tag line for this wonderful venture into the airline industry.

All relationships have their ups and downs, and our protagonists have more on the way. Miggy gets entrusted with the family's manufacturing gig. It's a plant in Laguna where they make jeans. It's a low profile, minimum output operation. Rowell Santiago as Miggy's older brother used to manage it. He comes to the plant ready to roll up his sleeves and iron some jeans, the workers respect him, and Manang, the assistant, simply adores him. When Miggy shows up for his first day at work there in a coat and tie, he is greeted with hesitation. Will this wimp of a boy do the job as well?

The boy wants to impress, so he ups the production quota. He targets big clients, and one of them is Mikee Cojuangco on the verge of turning matronix. She doubts the boy can deliver. But if he hands in Mikee's huge load of skinny jeans, Montenegro Manufacturing's Clean Living can have the contract. Miggy accepts amidst howls of protest from workers. He later turns the place into a 24-hour sweatshop. The workers take arms, call his dad and kuya, and Miggy is shamed once again. "Hindi mo na naman pinag-isipan ito," Rowell tells him.

The Montenegros are forced to renege on their word and tell the clients they are sorry. Mikee and Rowell Santiago exchange memories of their old courtship. Rowell would call Mikee complaining about his sore back, that he needs Salonpas, and poor Mikee gallops to Laguna bearing Oil of Wintergreen or something. The scene affords us the opportunity for Rowell to shed the Evil Kuya role--he went through everything Miggy is being subjected to, even more. He had to let go of the girl he loved so he could be the good son. But this is also a little nice throwback to the '90s: Rowell and Mikee make for a nice looking couple, a director and model tandem for Swatch advertisements, or a loveteam showcasing the travails of boy and girl love in the dinosaur age before the Internets. It would have been a really nice cameo for Mikee Cojuangco, who had to abandon her movie career to be wife and mother. It really would have helped if they gave her a really nice wardrobe--not the mumu-esque black monstrosity they made her wear. And somebody smudge that eyeshadow!

Meanwhile, in Laida land, Sarah reconnects with her best friend from high school. Makoy also reneged on a promise: he and Laida were supposed to study in the same college, but he took off without warning and left Laida hanging. He's back now, and it seems like he wants more than just play patintero outside the Montenegro building. It's the best friend drama of the century: Makoy suffers his love for Laida in silence because he is the best friend. With Miggy busy in Laguna, Laida finds herself declining invitations from colleagues to eat and go out, only to be told at the last minute (by that annoying Bebe-ko ringtone) that yet again, Miggy can't make it to their date. Laida is taken for granted. She wants to make the ultimate sacrifice: resign from Bachelor and just play Miggy's assistant in Laguna. Isn't this what being in a relationship is all about: to be at the lover's beck and call?

It's a conflict that makes me recall all those movies from the 90s onwards, like that film with Eric Quizon and Giselle Tongi as preppies (or was it advertising executive and flight attendant, whatever). Or it could be that movie where Bea was a call center agent and John Lloyd was an accountant. Or this could have been a movie directed by Joey Reyes. It has that feel. You could replace Sarah with Bea or G or another pretty face. Except that none of the prettier faces could work as well in this particular movie. But the Laida Magtalas in You Changed My Life didn't have that many funny scenes. And the most fun part in the movie was the flashback sequence from AVSL.

There's no doubt in my mind that this movie will be a hit. The theater was full. And when we went out, there was a really long line of people waiting to see the movie. And this was the first day. I didn't even know that it was the first day of showing. Which brings us to the question: What else does this movie have to offer? The John Lloyd's scowling boy and Sarah's naivete act will wear off soon. What will the third movie offer? Miggy and Laida get married; we follow Laida's misadventures as she is introduced into "society?" We can't just follow them step by step into marriage and old age. Or maybe it's best to stop here, while the kilig (like fizz in a bottle of cola) is still there, while there's a chance at a happy ending, while Miggy and Laida still work as a fantasy project.

Judging a Book by its Cover

2009-02-25T09:59:00.000+08:00

Let's face it: sometimes you pick up a book off the shelf because the cover looks great. It gets you to flip to that crucial first page, see if the words can hold your interest longer than a paragraph, a page. Before you know it, you've been glued in front of that shelf and the store attendants are clearing their throats.

This is when you decide whether to drop the book or head to the counter and gladly pay for it.

Beth Carswell gives us a list of 30 novels worth buying based on the cover alone. The list is a little lopsided for me. Of coure, she's biased, because she's writing it for Abe Books. But there are some pretty interesting covers there. I like the cover David Pelham did for Clockwork Orange. Here I'm also biased--this the cover of the copy I picked up in a booksale bin long long ago, after I was wowed by the movie version.

Then there's the cover designed by for Chuck Palahniuk's Rant.

We see a network of what seems like a network of veins. Claire Broadhurst tells us a little bit more about this innovative design:

when you initially look at it the only indicating a title is the ‘R’ which is cut through window to the title which is placed on the layer beneath.

The graphics are undeniably abstract, however as you look closer it could represent any number of things. My initial thoughts were this was designed to indicate a curious yet confused scene which is constantly changing. However looking it again it could also be symbolic of a human heart, which has mutated into an abnormal form and is aggressively taking over the page.

She goes on to say that the book is ostensibly about a fictional character, Buster Casey, who "may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time." Reading this synopsis, one is afforded a glimpse into the character's interior life. "May or may not be," "efficient," "killer." It's a curious image, one that makes you want to pick it up and see for yourself whether or not the suggestion is true. The book cover design created by Rodrigo Corral and Jacob Magraw hit home.

Also, it somehow connects with the previous Palahniuk novel, Choke, the one that details the travails of a guy who pretends to choke in restaurants and get rescued by random people who are then grateful for being given the chance to "save" him. The Choke cover features a human body with the muscular system, the sort you find in those great big encyclopedias with the thin pages you can put one on top of the other and the human body grows from skeleton, then organs and muscles, then veins.

If you're looking for continuity or thematic unity in a writer's work as it is represented in his book covers, then this is it. I bought Choke years before. The cover was just a bonus. As for Rant, let's just say that I didn't pick it up, interesting cover not withstanding. But that's not the book designer's fault. It has more to do with being burned by a previous Palahniuk novel I picked up, Haunted. (Never finished it. After "Guts," it's all downhill there for me.)

One thing though. Carswell names Michael Collica responsible for Rant's book design and/or illustration. However, all other sources name Corral and Magraw. I normally don't trust Wikipedia and the Net 100% of the time, but if there's not a single source that names Collica as the rightful designer, then it's still Corral and Magraw for me.

The Trilogy Meter

2009-02-24T17:24:00.002+08:00

Last week, found myself in close proximity to a huge paperbag that contained all The Complete Extended Edition DVDs of The Lord of the Rings. The discs are in these nice book-looking cases, in maroon, deep green and blue. If it were gold or yellow then it would have looked like a sablay. Hehehe. Each volume had maybe 4 discs in it. The film on 2 discs, with commentaries, then 2 more discs of features alone. N, who lent her the DVDs, said that the 3 movies amount to 10 hours, with the features, it's 24 hours all in all.

Guess what we've been watching since then.

Finished The Two Towers last night and so far it's been an enjoyable ride. Then I came across Dan Meth's Trilogy Meter, where he measures how most movies which come in threes (Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, Rambo). Interestingly enough, most of the movies were uneven. It's surprising that some movies have more interesting sequels than the first (Superman, Alien), and usually, the third one is never really the best of the series.

So movies which come in threes (or more) are uneven. Hah.

But the biggest surprise: The Lord of the Rings may be the only trilogy so far which can boast of an even hand in terms of storytelling. Of course it helps that the material is already there. J. R. R. Tolkien himself didn't even think of it as a trilogy--he meant it to be one big book. But the practicality of publishing turned it into a series. In the DVD feature, Tolkien hated the title the publisher gave the last volume, The Return of the King, because it told the reader everything that'll happen in the book.

Yet anyhow, it's the solid narrative that supported the film. But that wouldn't even happen without the writers and the director who shaped that really heavy doorstop of a book into the movie that we now know. So for that, Peter Jackson takes the cake for some pretty awesome movie time. Otherwise, save us from all the Underworld pre-, sequels.

Fill my cup with burning love.

2009-02-14T15:08:00.001+08:00

Fill my cup with burning love.
Originally uploaded by xkg

Got donuts for my graduate fiction class. Found a wall full of cut out hearts at Cello's.

Have a hot Valentine's everyone.

Directions to Servants

2009-02-13T16:41:00.003+08:00

This was another accidental purchase from National's sale bins. I had been looking for poster paints, or something mundane like that when I strayed over to the piles of books under the "Under 100" tag. What first caught my attention was the ceramic marm with the wicked grin on the cover. Just one look and you know that she's up to no good.

So I picked the book up. Eighty-five pesos. How bad could it be?

The inner flap reveals that Jonathan Swift was not able to finish this work, and this is obvious when one gets to the latter pages. In the beginning, his directions were long and detailed. But when you get to the last pages, it could be as brief as a sentence or two. Take for example the very last entry:

Directions to the Tutoress or Governess

Say the children have sore eyes; Miss Betty won't take to her book, etc.

Make the misses read French and English novels and French romances, and all the comedies writ in King Charles II and King William's reigns, to soften their nature and make them tender-hearted, etc.

Kundi ba naman sign ang sangkatutak na 'etc.' diyan, ewan ko na lang.

Although it remain uncompleted until the time of his death, Directions to Servants still packed a powerful punch for a book that weighs in at 96 pages. The book takes the form of a handbook on manners, a euthenics for the non-gentlefolk. It "addressed to each servant individually, Directions to Servants is the ultimate upstairs/downstairs battle. With scathing wit, Swift pits master against servant in an endless struggle for order, frugality, and the best bits of the roast. His servants are lazy, profligate, and acquisitive—always on the lookout for a shilling to be made on the sale of leftovers, or a half-bottle of wine to share with the cook."

Directions to Servants is a hilarious read, right on the money, scathing and entertaining all at the same time. It allows us to laugh at the follies not just the servants, but also at the masters and mistresses to whom they devote their time and loyalty. One notices that this isn't mere criticism at the inefficiency of the service industry, but in a way also shows us that if one is born to a family whose family is beholden to a master, there is a very slim to none chance that one will ever escape that plight.

Swift gives the longest directions to the Footman, whom he considers to have the biggest chance of escaping the life of drudgery. The footman should flatter the ladies by memorising all the lines of the plays he watches at the theater, must know how to play a musical instrument, dress nicely. If done well, he might capture the heart of a young lady, and that's his ticket to a more leisurely life.

Then one reads in the Bio Note and in the Foreword by Colm Toibin that when he was a young man, Swift found himself in the household of one Sir William Temple, tasked with reading aloud to his patron and keeping the family's accounts in order.

Kaya naman pala.

Jonathan Swift has the "K", as some would say, to spread thick the critique on the service industry since he was once one of them, lucky enough to get himself an education and grow old and bitter and almost insane. Did early life as a servant cause his bitterness? Or was it the education and the realization that without this chance of "bettering" oneself, generations are fated to be beholden to families who came into the world with a title and an estate? The connections, of course, aren't that tenuous.

Read an excerpt from Directions to Servants: "Rules that Concern All Servants in General."

Harlan, Truman, Lobsters and Sliced Bread

2009-02-09T19:29:00.000+08:00

Was just going to buy a loaf of bread last night and I ended up with a loaf of bread, a comic book and a hardbound edition of Truman Capote's essays.

Have fallen in love with the wheat loaf from the store down the load. But when we dropped by last night, it was a full house but the bread counter displayed a lack of loaves, only pan de sal. The cashier checked in the pantry and said she'll have some sliced. Told her will come back in 10 minutes.

Browsing at National Bookstore can never be quick, and the ten minutes turned into thirty. But look at what I found:

On the left is Harlan Ellison's Vic and Blood, which collects all the "A Boy and His Dog" stories and Richard Corben's comic book adaptations. Beside it is a hardbound edition of the collected essays of Truman Capote, which I got for Php120 pesos. Not bad considering that's like 10% of the actual cover price.

The best thing about this is that they're on sale, with more than 80% markdowns:

I have yet to start reading them because right now, lobsters command my attention:

Publishing 2.0

2009-02-06T16:06:00.001+08:00

Time has an interesting article on the state of publishing in the 21st century. Technology has made publishing on the web and print-on-demand services accessible to people wanting to be authors. The landscape of publishing is now faced with very, very different challenges than say, a monk losing feeling on his right arm and the dog running away with the quill.
Just how different?

"Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world--i.e., zero and nothing--printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic...Those cell-phone novels are generally written by amateurs and posted on free community websites, by the hundreds of thousands, with no expectation of payment. For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They're circulating outside the economy that spawned them."

I wonder what sort of stories are in those novels, and more importantly, how much of it is mind-boggling perversity that only Japan seems to be capable of?

In other parts of the world, cell-phone novels haven't caught on yet. In the U.S. they have something else: fan fiction, "fan-written stories based on fictional worlds and characters borrowed from popular culture--Star Trek, Jane Austen, Twilight, you name it. There's a staggering amount of it online, enough to qualify it as a literary form in its own right. Fanfiction.net hosts 386,490 short stories, novels and novellas in its Harry Potter section alone."
But the question is: How much of the self-published stuff out there is garbage? Surely, one can only read so much Harry and Ron couplings. Imagine a world where all the books are reimaginings of the doomed Bella and Edward-look-at-me-I'm-sparkly-Cullen. If everyone with a computer and an internet connection could publish his own book, what would the library shelves look like?

Lev Grossman gives us a glimpse of reading in the future: "Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life."

There is hope yet. Vanity publishing used to be frowned upon, a sure sign that one is a talentless writer no publisher wanted to risk on. But things do change. A case in point would be Chrisopher Paolini, who published his own dragon tales before being picked up by a major imprint. With content showing up in blogs, websites and publish-on-demand services, publishers have a new role to play. Whereas before they act as gatekeepers, filtering literature so that only the best writing gets into print, they now scout the blogs and self-published titles and offer the most popular a contract to bring them under their own imprint. Publishing in the days of Web 2.0 has become a very Darwinian process.

Alan Moore Truly, Madly, Deeply Hates Hollywood

2009-02-05T14:45:00.003+08:00

If all goes well, we'll all be lining up to see Watchmen in the theatres. Total Film talked to Alan Moore and got more than what they bargained for. Just look at this bad ass photo of Moore:

If Alan Moore had his way, the movie really is a waste of money and the 100 million the studio used to shoot the film should have just gone to settle the civil unrest in Haiti. Moore even takes a potshot at Sean Connery: “The League film cost 100 million because Sean Connery wanted 17 million of that - and a bigger explosion that the one he’d had in his last film. It’s in his contract that he has to have a bigger explosion with every film he’s in...In The Rock he’d blown up an island, and he was demanding in The League that he blow up, was it Venice or something like that? It would have been the moon in his next movie.”

Ah, good times.

So, we meet again

2009-02-04T16:01:00.003+08:00

Nate Piekos cues you in on comics grammar and tradition: "Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. What follows is a list that every letterer eventually commits to his/her own mental reference file. The majority of these points are established tradition, sprinkled with modern trends and a bit of my own opinion having lettered professionally for a few years now. "

I used to wonder why comics needed a separate person to pencil, ink and letter the pages until someone pointed out that it really had its roots in the Marvel/DC assembly set up: You don't want Jack Kirby to draw pages then switch to lettering, etc. Also, since there are many titles ongoing at any given time, in house letterers give the books a "look" and "feel" that best fits the company standards.

Bonus track: Here's Piekos on handlettering, which answers my question--"What are French curves for?"

Buttons

2009-01-16T09:51:00.003+08:00

Watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last Monday. There weren't too many people in the theater. I thought it was because the after office crowd wasn't there yet at 6PM. The movie ended at 9. Didn't know it was going to last that long. The only thing commendable about it is the technology and makeup they used to make Brad Pitt look really pretty.

Read the original Fitzgerald story here. It started in 1860 and ended after the First World War. They really just took the premise: man ages backwards. Other than that: It's Forrest Freaking Gump. The only thing missing was Jennifer Aniston and it would have been a big hoot if that happened.

In my genes

2009-01-14T15:55:00.000+08:00

During an interview, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker blanked out on the question: Why are you the way you are?

The interviewer gives as example the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who dedicated his first book to his father who brought him to see the dinosaurs at age 5. Surely, something of the same magnitude happened to Pinker that's why he became interested in the human mind?

He coughed something out about growing up in Quebec in the 70s when there were heated debates about the state of the province. But it was all hokey. He acknowledges what all writers of autobiography and memoir have long recognized: “None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.”

But he also makes a case for genetics, that we are shaped by our genes in a way we can never directly know: “they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life."

& Launch

2008-12-09T15:22:00.004+08:00

If you find yourself in UP Diliman today, please drop by CAL 201 for the launch of &, the new journal dedicated to new writing by students of the Creative Writing Program. For the first volume, works from CW classes (including the free for all CW 10) from 2006-2008 were considered. A couple of former students' works are included. My favorite is the one about a crucifixion. Anyway, please drop by and check it out and get a copy. It's a handsome journal that will stop people in its tracks, and it's just Php 100.

Culling

2008-12-05T09:14:00.000+08:00

The built in dictionary in my computer tells me that "to cull" means to "select from a large quantity" or even more telling, "to reduce the population of (x) by selective slaughter." The x in the definition was wild animals, but in my case, my goal is to reclaim shelf space.

I have "panic piles": At home, there are three stacks beside the desk divided into fiction, theory/CL references, screenplays. There's one reserved for what I'm currently working on, like the stack of crime fiction I had amassed while taking up a writing class that required me to come up with a story with crime in it. In the end, I don't think I read a lot from the panic file. But it did manage to calm me down a bit to know that in case I get blocked, there's something I can refer to or take inspiration from.

I suspect it's the panic pile that made my shelves burst with all sorts of books. My desk at the office now holds two piles: one for the fiction classes, another for the comics, and not much real estate left for actual writing. The situation at home isn't any different. I already had one culling session at home, wherein I put all the books I had in my room in the middle of the floor, and began piling them into keep/throw, with special mounds for fiction, nonfiction, plays/drama/screenplay, poetry. The tallest pile was fiction, the mere molehill, poetry.

Laura Miller in her essay says that the books we keep say a lot about ourselves and our state of mind: "There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments.For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients."

I suppose my panic and to keep piles attest to that. But Miller has more: "The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read." I'm not going to claim that I've read each book I own. There are books I buy because I intend to read them. It is wishful thinking. I have a copy of the The Complete Stories and Fables of Kafka that I've had since college and I never read it fully. Or sometimes I love a book so much that I buy a copy when I find it in book bins. Only to find out later that I just bought my third copy of Sylvia Plath's novel. I eventually gave away all my copies of The Bell Jar, I think.

Right now, my goal is to get rid of previous panic piles which have no use for me anymore. While I liked The Truman Show (film and script), there's no reason to hold on to the script book, especially since it can be accessed on the net anyway. And the many many potboilers I picked up and never got around to finishing? Maybe I'll hold on to it a bit more.

Anyone want to put together a used books sale?

I suppose my panic and to keep piles att

Mlle. Personality

2008-12-04T17:38:00.006+08:00

Stumbled upon this site called Typealyzer, where you put in your blog's URL and it tells you what kind of personality you have. Apparently, I'm a Visionary. More:

The charming and trend savvy type. They are especially attuned to the big picture and anticipate trends. They often have sophisticated language skills and come across as witty and social. At the end of the day, however, they are pragmatic decision makers and have a good analytical abilitity.

They enjoy work that lets them use their cleverness, great communication skills and knack for new exciting ventures. They have to look out not to become quitters, since they easily get bored when the creative exciting start-up phase is over.

Really, now: "social" and "witty" in the same sentence? Right.

A bit of warning though: I typed in the URL of a Filipino speaking blog, but it turns out Typealyzer only supports English and Swedish (!), so there you go. But it wouldn't hurt to try.

Swiped quiz off this.

Note for Teacher, with Annotations

2008-11-26T16:32:00.001+08:00

Note for Teacher with Annotations
Originally uploaded by xkg

Here's a sample of the sort of notes that I get from students at the University. It's (1) in taglish, (2) textspeak, (3) very very rude--at least for me. And apparently, somebody else feels the same way I do: Someone left a note on the student's note. S/he said, in gayspeak (or street parlance--whatever colloquialism you have in mind): How rude.

Click on the photo and read the note yourself.

Creative Writhing for Beginners

2008-11-25T19:52:00.002+08:00

My favorite subject
Originally uploaded by xkg

Found this gem at the height of checking season last month. I know that a lot of students think CW 10 is an "easy" subject, something to squeeze in between 10-11.30 Math 57 and the 2.30-4 Physics 10. But really, writing for beginners is hard work. My Korean student from last semester got it right--maybe the course should be renamed "Creative Writhing 10."

Osamu Tezuka

2008-11-21T17:41:00.002+08:00

I got locked out of my office for almost the entire day, and now that I finally got in to cool my heels (and my head), here are two trailers of movies based on works by Osamu Tezuka. So 2009 is turning out to be an interesting year for Osamu Tezuka adaptations.

First off is the rather "Americanized" version of Astroboy, which uses a lot of computer graphics (or is it animation?) Astroboy looks like he's ready to fight, none of the blink-blink niceness of the cartoons I grew up with.

Then here is the trailer of the live action film based on Tezuka's graphic novel M/W (pronounced "Mu"). I don't understand Nihonggo, so what the voiceover actually says, I just assume to be about the wipeout of the island's population because of the spill from an American military base. I can't embed the trailer here so just click this link to watch the trailer.

The Multitudes

2008-11-19T10:27:00.004+08:00

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly spent some time interviewing and observing creative people and noted that:

Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."

Imagine the conversations an "individual" has with the "multitudes" in her brain. "Is this a good enough conflict?," she asks. "Nah," the other says. "Crossing bridges isn't interesting. Burn it!" Yet another raises her hand. "But that's not a revolution. Isn't that mere anarchy?"

Csikszentmihaly also observed that if most people are either introverts and extroverts, most creatives are both. They are also proud and humble at the same time, and this comes from an awareness that they did something important, but that others have also done more than they had. It's quite a contradiction.

He also says that the most excruciating thing for creatives is when they can't create. At all:

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

2008-11-18T15:20:00.000+08:00

I found my copy of The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam in Powerbooks Midtown. I wandered over to the nonfiction section and was looking for Persepolis (which like Maus is frequently shelved with the other "biographies") when I found something bright bluish green. I looked at the cover and was fascinated by the little drawing:

It was drawn by Ben Gibson and the inside pages suggest that it be shelved under the categories of "Magicians-China-biography-comic books, strips, etc." and also "Long Tack Sam-Comic books, strips, etc."

So is it a book about magicians from China, or a biography of a magician from China, or a comic book, period? It is all three, but the weird shelving contributes to the confusion. If I'm into comic books, I'd look at the comics shelf, or if I'm into biography, I'll head into the nonfiction section, where I'll find this between the biographies of Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Meanwhile, the review from Entertainment Weekly recommends this for fans of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Wtf? But anyway, who reads EW for the book reviews, right? Also, the American Library Association lists it as part of their Top 10 Comic Books for Teens. So what is this book really?

But anyway, I liked the cover and when I looked inside the book, there was this rather crude drawing of a girl telling me that her life was all about messing with the proper borders. Ann Marie Fleming was born in Japan, but couldn't get a birth certificate because her parents were not Japanese. Her mother is from HongKong, but they couldn't go there and so it happened that her birth certificate was issued by Korea. All her life, this is what would happen.

Then she discovers that she has a great-grandfather who was a magician with a touring company at the height of Vaudeville. But she knows almost nothing about this man because her grandmother wouldn't say anything. So she travels around the world trying to find out who Long Tack Sam is.

She pieces together old photographs, playbills, posters, and drawings of herself as "Stickgirl" interviewing various people who had known or had known about Long Tack Sam. There are pages drawn in the style of the Golden Age of comics which detail the origins of Long Tack Sam. There are many versions, but the gist is always this: that Long Tack Sam was from a poor village, and he was training to be an acrobat, or had a mean older brother so he ran away and went hungry but saw this young boy/old magician and became his apprentice and that's how he came into the magic trade.

From there he goes around the world, marries an Austrian girl in 1908, has two little girls who later join his act, and when the moving pictures came, refused to join the circuit because the movies put Asians in a bad light. After two world wars and a bad wound, he got gangrene in his leg and died. And now, nobody knows who he is until his great granddaughter stumbled upon an old costume, playbill or photograph. And I didn't know this book existed if I hadn't wandered over to the nonfiction section in a big chain bookstore.

What makes this book interesting is the mixing of different styles to tell the story of the girl looking at her family history. It's a collage of photos, posters, playbills, drawings, etc. On some pages, there's a sidebar detailing the things happening around the world on a certain year: the news headlines, historical events, popular movie or song, etc. It's an attempt to contextualize the world beyond Long Tack Sam's traveling act. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes I just wish the author could blend it with the narrative.

It's also interesting that it was first a documentary before it was a comic book/graphic memoir/whatever it wants to be. There's a note from the author saying that at first she didn't know how to tell the story on the page after doing it on video. I haven't seen the docu, but I have a feeling that it pretty much retains the humor and the collage of different elements and fusing them together into a coherent narrative. And that for me, is ultimately what it should be: a well-told story. And in that aspect, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam succeeds as a good read.

EDIT: Caleb Mozzocco of Every Day is Like Wednesday has a good review of the book. He shows page scans (which I can't do as I have no scanner and zero scanning abilities) detailing the different styles employed by Fleming in the book. Here is a sample from the Golden Age of Comics section:

Potential

2008-11-17T17:09:00.000+08:00

I've been bingeing on comics recently, and for some reason, almost all the book covers are blue (or some shade of blue). This is really bad news for my bank account--what Christmas Bonus are you talking about?--and I don't even think the university will fund such purchases even if they're for my classes.

Anyway, first off is Ariel Shrag's Potential. Let's say if I got this on Thursday night, I'm done by Friday night. It's a chronicle of her junior year in high school, written the summer after that. The art is rather simple and the narrative isn't something out of this world: the protagonist finally decides that she only likes girls, she gets a girlfriend, dumps the girl, decides to lose her virginity to a guy friend, finds herself in a long, protracted relationship with a girl who "drains" her all the time.

It can be a bit episodic, but the real narrative anchor here is Ariel's relationship with the Sally character. I especially like the parts where Ariel's character is drunk, or dreaming, or high on drugs. The altered consciousness allows for more experimentation with visual style and narrative.

What I like about this best of all, even if let's say some will argue that Fun Home does it with more grace, is that it's a story of a teenage girl written by a teenage girl. There's a rawness and roughness to it, but you can't beat it in terms of emotional realism and (yuck!) sincerity.

Also, Shrag prefers that you her work "comics" instead of "graphic novel":

The word graphic novel is stupid. It sounds like a kid trying to use a big word and having no idea what he's talking about. It sounds like someone being obnoxious and pronouncing Nabokov's name correctly just to show off.

I got into this argument with someone when I was in high school about whether or not comics could be "real literature." He was adamant that they couldn't. They're "comics," he said, they're just "comics."

About six years later, I got an email from him apologizing for the argument. "You were right," he said, "I read graphic novels now." Oh, so now that they're "graphic novels" they can be literature. Also, Maus, Persepolis and my books are not novels of any sort. The Holocaust, the Islamic Revolution and my … "teenage sexual identity journey" … are events that actually happened.

I'm curious to read Awkward and Defintion, the earlier installments of her high school memoirs chronicling freshman and sophomore years. And I'm almost sure that the final volume Likewise, which looks at senior year, will be more mature in terms of art and narrative.

You can also watch Episodes 1-4 of Potential (The Video Comic) here.

How to tell if your cat is trying to kill you

2008-11-14T17:13:00.000+08:00

My cat does this all the time, especially when I have a deadline.

I'm extra attentive though when she does this--it can only mean that she's pregnant. The first time it happened, I just thought that she's being affectionate. Several weeks later, she was getting heavy. Then I had to put a comforter on my lap because, man, those claws can dig.

Capote and Genius

2008-10-13T20:03:00.000+08:00

"Dearest Cecil," wrote Truman Capote from Brooklyn on April 19, 1965, addressing his friend, the English photographer and bon vivant Cecil Beaton. "This is just an exhausted scrawl (you owe me a letter anyway), but I wanted you and Kin to know the case is over and my book is coming out next January. Perry and Dick were executed last Tuesday. I was there because they wanted me to be. It was a terrible experience. Something I will never really get over."

The letter is among those collected in "Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote", which Richard Rayner reviews for the LA Times. The book is considered to be the most important Capote book since In Cold Blood, for it shows us through his various correspondences the demands exacted by his desire to be known as a writer and as a part of the social elite. He did get what he wanted, but with a major tradeoff. In his later years, Capote had too much drugs and drink and was never ever to capture the same litheness of prose he exhibited in In Cold Blood.

But that novel was sheer genius, and "Capote believed that he had "access" to genius himself but knew too that for him "genius" was not an all-encompassing, God-given blanket, but a state of talent and mind that could be earned, or worked toward -- and lost. Such a story arc is, in a way, the subtext of this entire collection."

Rayner adds: "It's customary to posit that Capote was a victim of the celebrity he craved, but there was something heroic about him too, for he polished his craft and sacrificed his peace of mind and moral equilibrium for the production of one supreme book, a grim and enthralling exploration of death and evil."

It seems like a sad ending. But for me, to have produced even just one "supreme book" is already a tall order. Yun nga lang, to lose one's peace of mind and be consumed by genius and the demands of craft is something that one must be prepared to do.

Page to screen

2008-09-25T17:07:00.000+08:00

Maud Newton of the IFC admits that "adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor." Hollywood wants the glitter of literature and transform it into box office gold, but there are missteps all the way. Newton says: "For every "Apocalypse Now," "The Big Sleep" or "Rebecca," there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds." She cites the recent foray of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen. But even Javier Bardem's energy can't save it. Instead, Newton points us to another film that has Bardem in it--"No Country For Old Men," a Cormac McCarthy novel which the Coen brothers adapted for the screen. So an actor, no matter how great and gifted, can't make the jump from page to screen work. The material may be a literary classic, but it's not an assurance it'll be great movie material. Newton thinks that "No Country for Old Men" worked well for the screen because it's probably not as lush as the Marquez novel. McCarthy's prose was "so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions."

So if you follow that line of thought, the sort of prose that will also work for the screen is something that is stripped down and with room enough for improvisation and development. A short story really is a good candidate, and surely editor Stephanie Harrison will agree. She put together the book Adaptations, which contains 35 short stories which were the basis for Hollywood movies. The book is divided into sections, with parts for independent movies and comic books and the "difficult" ones to adapt, like Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers." All the writers who tried to adapt Hemingway for the movies said one thing: The guy writes on water. Lots of style, but all the action is suggested. But your mind is working overtime to fill in what was left unsaid. And that is where you put in all those other scenes not in the story.

Pacino: 1, God: 0

2008-09-21T12:46:00.000+08:00

The New York Times' Lynn Hirschberg interviews Javier Bardem. He's in the latest Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Penelope Cruz, which I haven't seen yet. But I've watched him in Huevos de Oro , where he dreams of building the tallest building in Spain, and would do anything and anyone to achieve that dream. Also saw him in Love is Seriously Dangerous to Your Health, again with Penelope Cruz, a film shown in Cine Europa ages ago. Pretty much a ladies man, though he refuses to be stereotyped as such. He surely isn't that in Before Night Falls and No Country For Old Men.

In the interview, he says he admires Al Pacino so much. If someone called him at 3AM to ask him if he'd like to work with Pacino, he'd go crazy. "I don't believe in God," Bardem says. "But I believe in Al Pacino." Which is weird because in a handful of other movies Al Pacino plays the devil, a ngarag and ruffled one at that. Hmmm...

Sex and Sweden, Sex and France

2008-08-12T20:38:00.000+08:00

So I'm seriously running out of shelf space in my tiny little room. My first solution was to reshelve to see if I can free up some space. But when that didn't prove effective and books started encroaching on the space previously occupied by the printer, I decided it was time for desperate measures. It's time to let go of some books.

Now I've read most of the books I own. But there are some that I bought years ago and never got around to reading them--like "The Complete Tales and Parables of Franz Kafka," which I got waaaay back when I was a college freshman and taking up philosophy classes. But Kafka I'd keep because, hey, it's Kafka. But there are really some books which I even forgot I had. Or I read a couple of stories or essays and then stopped. Then there are those I read once and never again. And I can't see myself reading them again, except perhaps under the pain of death.

So I started weeding all these books out of my piles and came up with a selection that came up to my waist. Some of the casualties are young adult books, remnants of my college thesis. There's a bunch of old Granta issues I'm sure I wouldn't really miss. Then there's the stack of Sweet Valley Twins--one of the first books I ever really paid for with my own allowance. I'm quite hesitant to let them go, but something has really got to give.

Then there are a couple of books which I've decided to let go, but now I'm rethinking them. There's Summer of Love by Helen Cross. I first heard about the movie, which I most likely saw in a film festival, got curious and bought the book when I saw it. It's a young adult novel: two girls from opposite side of the tracks form a friendship that sometimes blurred into affection. By now I've forgotten exactly why I liked the film and the movie.

Amazon reader Maruta helps jolt my memory: "To begin with the good bits, Helen Cross's strory of Mona, a 15 yo girl in the adolescent turmoil equivalent of the perfect storm (her mom's just died, her sister's turned into a smugg adult, and the whole world is about to crumble and burn - it's 1984, the miners are striking, Yorkshire is impossibly hot, a local girl's gone missing, possibly victim to some predator with an eye for lost teenagers...) is quirky but compelling, it has the energy and sometimes the imperfection of youthful writing.

When she meets Tamsin, she finds a soulmate who has similarly been burnt by life but brings that radical class difference - the carelessness of those who have a very good parachute when they jump in the tumuly of life - that will act like a catalyst for her own addictions, to alocohol, gamble, danger and ultimately violence."

I have a feeling that it was largely the movie that intrigued me. In fact, I have this deep suspicion that I'm vaguely remembering the wrong book and the wrong movie--because the movie I have in mind is from Sweden. And now Nerve Scanner tells us that teenage girls in Sweden like other teenage girls, not boys. Now that story is so remiscent of My Summer of Love had it been set in England. Oh well.

The other book is The Sexual Life of Catherine M, which Melissa Lion over at bookslut tells us is "the memoir of French, art critic Catherine Millet. She was also a connoisseur of the orgy and anonymous sex. The book itself is a detached account of so much of the sex she had. And it’s a lot of sex. The sex is on nearly every single page. Some of it is hot, some of it is uncomfortable, some of it, despite the content, is antiseptic in its cold observation."

Her assessment is right on the money. It's not meant to be erotica, but more like a meditation on the connection between self and body and how it connects with others. So much sex, and you can almost imagine the author shrugging all of it off. But it's really hard to feel that the I herself is invested in the telling of the tale. Or maybe art critics really just consider everything as though it could be observed on a white gallery wall, who knows?

But casual observers of a bookshelf won't have that kind of detached reaction. Melissa Lion shares a kind of urban legend that surrounded the book: "I was hired just as The Sexual Life of Catherine M was published and I don’t know who started the legend, but someone, somewhere, suggested that one day a bookseller was wrapping an innocent fiction book and accidentally swapped it out for The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Maybe it never happened, maybe just the threat of it was enough that I became unreasonable paranoid, waking deep in the night worried that somehow this would happen to me." Imagine the horror (or maybe delight, and then disappointment) of the recipient of such a package.

Really, if only these two books didn't cause me an arm and a leg, I'd be quick to give them away. Or perhaps the solution is not to give them away but to sell them. Then again, who would be interested in my pile of books to be discarded?

*Mas okay ang title na yan kesa "Books books books," I think. Who would want to read a blog entry solely about books except geeks. Hehehe.

Manila in Black and White

2008-06-24T08:27:00.000+08:00

Found two videos of pre-World War II Manila in YouTube. The first is Manila, Queen of the Pacific. (Andre dela Varre, The Screen Traveler) In 1938, according to the voiceover, Manila had become a modern American city, although traces of its past as a "sleepy Spanish town" was still there--in the narrow alleys, the karitela, the horse-drawn buses, the marketplace where women tested the strength of baskets. It divided Manila into three areas: the modern city with its drug stores (not "chemists' shops") and airconditioned shopping areas in downtown Escolta, Tondo, where the masses lived, and the Intramuros, a great example of the medieval walled cities.

It was quite amazing to see the Manila that a lot of us never knew. There was a tranvia, where we only have the Light Rail Transit. Jones Bridge had been completed just a couple of years back. It showed a lot of promise: see the wide tree lined boulevard standing on reclaimed land facing Manila Bay. It was said that had Daniel Burnham's plan for the city had been completed, it would have been like Washington DC. But in fact, the waterfront road was the only thing in the plan that was accomplished. The Manila that we know now suffers from poor or lack of urban planning. I wonder what it would be like had the plan been put in place, and two, had the city not been destroyed in the Liberation in 1945.

The other interesting video is "Castillian Memoirs: 1930s" It said that the traffic in downtown Manila was insufferable. Just imagine what the narrator would say now. The most bizarre scene was the one with the rotating door for "foundlings" in the the Hospicio de San Jose. A man put a baby in the slot in what seemed like half a drum. "Want to abandon your baby? Drop it in the chute! Works every time!" But then, there was also the scene of performing prisoners in the Bilibid. The Philippines had the largest penal, er, holding area, at the time. And in the afternoons, guests may come in and watch the performances. In those days, this meant military maneuvers and the marching band. Suddenly it seems like the Cebu prisoners dancing "Thriller" is but a logical development.

Finally, found some links about the Liberation of Manila between February to March 1945. Very harrowing accounts of what happened then. If you have the stomach for it, watch the video here.

All three videos are in black and white. The thing with B/W is that the distinction between them is never too stark. Instead what we see is the different shades of gray playing off against gradations of light.

Great Expectations, Ten Years Later

2008-06-08T11:51:00.000+08:00

Chanced upon a heavily sanitized screening of Great Expectations on TV last night. When it came out a decade ago, not too many critics were crazy about Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel of transformation. There's just too much baggage: the original novel and the 1946 film version by David Lean. But seeing this again ten years later makes me appreciate how Cuaron was able to successfully take the themes of Dicken's novel and make it work in the present day context. There's the amazement of viewing a richly visualized film (always, there is green), the score by Patrick Doyle that enhanced the storytelling (and Life in Mono!), and the artwork by Francisco Clemente that helped crystallize the desires of Finn and put it in display for all the world to see.

Cuaron did fine work with adapting A Little Princess (1995) and he was praised for the visual texture of his work. A lot of the reviews of GE: 1998 also focused on the lushness of the scenery--Paradiso Perduto was literally an abandoned Eden with its ivy and weeds taking over Miss Havisham's doomed wedding party, the first person point of view of the novel was retained in the voice over--later revealed to be done for free by David Mamet, as long as it was kept a secret--and the fluid camera work that mirrored Finn's point of view that largely cast Estella as the object of his desire.

But this was just his second American film, three years before he did Y Tu Mama Tambien and much later than his Harry Potter venture. For a lot of critics, the shadow of the David Lean version loomed large over this Mexican director. It's only later that it becomes evident that Cuaron did much more than a film version of the novel and the 1946 film, he transformed that world and took the same desires and values and put it in a more contemporary setting. Cuaron took Pip away from England's marshes and brought him to a Florida fishing town, and from uncouth and common orphan to London gentleman, Finn sought out success as an artist in late 20th century New York.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times considers the switch to the American setting to be "adventurous and even apt." She calls Cuaron a great visual stylist, "capable of wonder even when its wilder ideas misfire."

Salon's Charles Taylor was quick to note that Dickens is accessible to a lot of people of different ages. Although we first see Finn as a child, what Cuaron emphasizes is the sensuousness and sexuality brewing underneath and brings this desire to the surface. In that first encounter at the Paradiso Perduto, when young Estella urges young Finn to drink from the fountain, and later on she herself drinks from the same spout and French kisses him, we can see that this is not just about a desire to go up the social ladder. Finn wants to become a gentleman so that he can stand on common ground with Estella, so that he may deserve him. He thinks this is his destiny, and when things start to go his way (an offer from a mysterious person to foot the bill for a one man show in a New York gallery), he mistakenly takes this to be the universe (and Miss Dinsmoor) urging him to go to "Estella's New York", get the girl and what he deemed to be his rightful place in society.

The key here is that Finn "thinks" this is what this all means. He is an unreliable narrator. In the opening voice over, he declares: "I'm not going to tell the story the way that it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it." That he is a visual artist and we see a lot of his work also clues us in on the workings of his mind. The first time that Finn sketches the young Estella, the camera leads us to see Estella in parts--eyes, lips, nose, mouth. This is later echoed in the New York apartment when the grownup Estella poses for him. She takes off her clothes and asks, "Do you want me to sit or stand?" He replies with a "whatever." He doesn't care, what he sees is the ideal Estella, the curve of her neck, the swell of her breasts, the strands of her pubic hair.

Estella is forever the dream (or the delusion) that Finn is chasing. In "Not Telling the Story the Way It Happened: Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations," Michael K. Johnson notes this disconnect in how Finn perhaps refusing to see Estella as she is. Since this is his remembrance of how things happened, we cannot trust him fully even in his depiction of Estella as dream/object of desire. In Finn's remembrance, even Estella expresses distance when talking about herself, like in this dialogue as she leaves him:

FINN. What's it like not to feel anything?

ESTELLA. Suppose there was a little girl. She was taught to fear daylight. One sunny day, you ask her to go outside and play in the sun and she won't. How can you be angry with her?

FINN. I knew that little girl. I saw the light in her eyes. No matter what you say or do, that's still what I see.

ESTELLA. We are who we are. People don't change.

She refers to herself in the third person, in the first person plural, or even the more generic "people." For Estella, and for Finn's vision of Estella, there is no "I."

Even in the film's ending, seven years after the New York incident, Finn goes back to Florida and Paradiso Perduto and finds Estella, he still refuses to let go. Estella stands on the beach, the bright sun obscures her face, but she will always be girl in his paintings, bright eyed and lips parted ever so slightly, the girl in the plane looking down on the forlorn Finn drowning out in the rainy New York streets. And when she says, "Will you ever forgive me?" he replies with "Don't you even know me?" and takes her hand in his. It seems like he's never learned his lesson on "the fantasy and the wealthy." Miss Dinsmoor has already informed him early on, Estella would only break her heart. But the best he could do is to take our hands, place it on his chest and declare, "Do you know what this is? This is my heart, and it is broken."

For me, this adaptation brings Finnegan Bell closer to Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, who observes the green light representing the object of his desire from across the lake. No matter how bright the suit he wears or how high he jumps in the air, the Other will not notice, will not take heed, but he will not give up. This is a lover in love with sadness, and though we should know better, we also can't do anything but witness with knowing sadness that we know how this will turn out.

What follows is my favorite scene from the movie. It is Finnegan Bell's opening night. His show is sold out, he is now a successful artist in New York. But the present is unraveled by the appearance of a person from his past, Joe, the man who raised him in Florida. Joe is too loud and careless and basically doesn't fit in Finn's new sophisticated environment. When he leaves the gallery, note how Finn and Joe are positioned, up and down, in and out, but the past refuses to disappear from the present.

Story and Structure

2008-06-07T14:06:00.000+08:00

Architect Bernard Tschumi best sums up why I love reading film scripts: "because of the conciseness of it, and the fact that you can always break a film down into separate parts: sound without image, text without cinematography."

Story and structure. And he was reading Godard's "Breathless" too. Can't get anything better than that.

The Retro Tech Allure of Typewriters

2008-06-06T19:28:00.000+08:00

In the last days of the old millenium, I still cranked out class requirements in what was probably 12 point pica, from the portable my mother bought me in high school. One classmate was amazed upon receiving her workshop copy. "How retro," she said.

For me though, it was more a necessity than fashion or aesthetic considerations. I couldn't afford computer rentals and printouts all the time. But the lasting impression of seeing "black words on white paper rolling up in front of my gaze," as writer Frederick Forsyth said, is never lost on me, and in my mind, has always been connected with the act of writing. Also, I tend to type really hard, even on computer keyboards, which is bad, but something that I can't help doing.

In the digital world, one expects typewriters to be almost extinct. Although sales have been declining steadily, I was surprised to learn that there's still a steady base of customers for typewriters. Most of them are "old people," who probably can't get the hang of using computers, and the occasional student who opts to spend on one instead of a laptop.

Somewhere in our house sits that old portable, probably gathering dust and a colony of ants. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, with coins on the back of my hands. In the beginning, you could hear metal clanking on the floor all over the typing room. It was the early '90s, and in the high school I attended, which was big on office and commerce skills, typing upwards of 70 words per minute was a minimum requirement.

Then Windows 95 came and computer classes no longer involved booting the system cold from copies of DOS and Wordstar in 5 inch floppies.

But we still had regular typing classes, and every day, we had drills which focused on two things: speed and accuracy. With speed, we busied ourselves with high word turnouts, with accuracy, we went slower and made sure that there were no erasures or typeovers. It seemed like an archaic skill to learn on the brink of the digital revolution and the new millenium. But we learned this along with stenography, salesmanship and bookkeeping. Later on, the school would change the names of these skills to reflect the present/future situation: office management, entrepreneurship, and accounting.

It's old fashioned now, but when it was new, the ability to type really fast and accurate was revolutionary, specially for women. The females first ventured into the work space at the end of the 19th century as typists or secretaries. According to Neil Hallows of the BBC, "[i]t was a limited emancipation. The new employees (often called "type-writers" themselves) were accused of stealing jobs from men, depressing wages and sexually tempting the boss, and their chance of career progression was often nil. But for women to have any job outside the home was revolutionary."

So the women's liberation movement got their big push with typewriters, whose "retro" appeal does not end with seeing words come up on paper. More importantly, in a time when computers are plugged to the internet, productivity becomes more difficult. Specially for writers with deadlines and then faced with websites with little links you clink. Before you know the day has passed and you have watched more videos of lizards eating fruits of the pandan tree than you care to acknowledge.

The distraction afforded by the internet paved the way for software to make your computer seem like a typewriter, or at least, a very early version of the unwired computer with the black screen and green blinking cursor. As one commenter said:

A laptop for a writer is like a typewriter with a TV, stereo and library attached--and thousands upon thousands of channels, songs, articles to choose from: laptops anywhere near wifi are an endless procrastination device, an infernal tool of distraction for undisciplined souls such as myself. Indeed, I've even thought of disabling the internet on my laptop just so I won't be distracted.

Although a laptop's often purchased to be used chiefly as a word processor, one all too easily whiles away the hours on websites like this one--when one should be writing. A typewriter, on the other hand, offers no such distractions. It's just there, it has no cut/paste/erase, no itunes or internet, and one must face the bloody thing on its own terms. There are far fewer excuses with a typewriter. Far, far fewer.

It makes me want to hunt up that old portable. It might be difficult now to hunt for the two tone ribbon (black and red) and some wipeout, but hearing the clacking of keys and seeing words on paper is suddenly alluring and can well prove to be the cure to internet distraction.

via

New books

2008-06-06T11:52:00.001+08:00

New books
Originally uploaded by xkg

Lookie at the my new purchases! Haven't bought this many books since the start of the year, effectively repealing my self-imposed book ban. But it's not so bad, as almost all of them are from Booksale. The most expensive of the bunch, Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, came from Powerbooks, and that's already after 60% off.

A lot of the new acquisitions are scriptbooks (4/13): There is the aforementioned Brokeback Mountain, which contains the original Annie Proulx short story which first appeared in The New Yorker, with essays on the transition from page to screen by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All of them are united in the idea that (1) The film did not murder the original material and in fact added to it, (2) short stories, not novels, make for better adaptation materials.

Also got John Hodge's screenplay for The Beach, based on the novel by Alex Garland, Andrew Niccol's script for The Truman Show, and the script for I Heart Huckabees, which I haven't seen yet but will read anyway.

There seems to be a lot of script books floating in Booksale stores. I wasn't able to get the triptych by Mike Figgis. Of the three, only Leaving Las Vegas was familiar to me. But still, I have ended up with a lot of books to read.

Also got books about writing: Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, The Practical Writer by Therese Eiben and Mary Gannon of Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Elements of Fiction Writing: Plot from the Writer's Digest Books.

Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters is the lone nonfiction book not related to the craft of writing. I was hoping to find a copy of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. But hey, this is still about lobsters.

And the last bunch of books are all fiction. Two issues of Story Magazine (Winter 1997 and Spring 1999) cost me Php25 combined. Also got Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and other stories. Then there's Murder on the Menu edited by Peter Haining. This last one contains crime stories by Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie, P.D. James and even Roald Dahl. Enlisted myself in the crime fiction writing class this term, so this will form part of my reading list.

All told, the thirteen books unloaded me of Php800. Not too bad. But then again, will probably impose the book ban again and not buy anything until I've read most of them.

Carried Away

2008-06-04T11:04:00.000+08:00

In the official website, I was able to confirm my suspicion that Carrie upgraded her laptop. You can now even browse her ~~Macbook Pro~~ Powerbook. The fun part is that if you were able to answer the questions the girls and Mr. Big will throw at you during chat, you get to unlock Carrie's hard drive. (Sounds a bit pornographic, but not really. Just geeky stuff.) Carrie Bradshaw even sent me an e-mail thanking me for "impersonating" her during the chats. Neat.

EDIT: Gadgenista argues that since Carrie's laptop doesn't use the Magsafe Adapter and does not have an iSight, it must be a G4, and therefore a Powerbook. But the website does say that Carrie is using a Macbook Pro. Oh well. The above photo was swiped from Gadgenista.

Mostly Nothing Happens

2008-05-31T23:36:00.000+08:00

"But mostly nothing happens, except in the sense that novelists and short-story writers understand. For them moving a character from not knowing that he’s unhappy to sort of acknowledging it qualifies as a pretty momentous event."

This comes from a New York Times article about the film "Smart People," which is about a depressed professor of literature who has an affair with a former student (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and lives with his precocious daughter (played by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame), a good for nothing brother. It was written by Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who now has to reluctantly call himself a "professional screenwriter."

I haven't really seen the movie. Just found the review because I clicked the links related to the reviews of the Sex and the City movie. Apparently, the "depressed academic" is a character that has surfaced in American film in the last few years, with the bar set high by Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I saw both of these films and they both happen to feature frustrated academics-slash-writers. If these are the models, then maybe Smart People isn't too far off.

But what really got my attention is Poirier's shift from fiction writing to screenwriting, where generally, things have to happen. The article says that Hollywood had always wooed the big name literary writers--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Truman Capote--but all these writers just go away puzzled. Hollywood asks them to write stories where a lot of things happen. But what about the epiphany? Epiphanies can be so subtle, if you wink you'll miss it. Poirier is from this school of writing: the only visible change is that the main character now recognizes that he *is* depressed, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any easier. No big transformations, no miracle happy endings.

What the article also makes known is that there really aren't too many fiction writers who can hack the writing of screenplays. Oh there's Larry McMurtry (whose script to Brokeback Mountain I have yet to finish reading), but there's just so few of them. Playwrights have a better batting average. So if the fictionists are having a hard time transitioning to the big screen, what about the reverse: do screenwriters make for successful fiction writers?

But We Need the Eggs

2008-05-17T21:29:00.000+08:00

This morning I chanced upon half of Woody Allen's Annie Hall on MGM. One of my favorite scenes there is the one leading to the break up. There's a split screen and we see Annie and Alvy in their respective therapists' offices. Annie is guilty that she's doing well with treatments which Alvy is paying for, and Alvy is stuck still with his own neuroses. The therapists ask them how their sex life is. They're both right on the count: three times a week. For Alvy, that's dismal, for Annie, that's frequent and more than enough. Later, in the plane from California going back to New York, we hear them thinking again. The relationship isn't going very well. Perhaps it would be better if they break up. Alvy agrees. A relationship is a shark, he says. It should keep on going forward. What they have in their hands is a dead shark. So they break up and it's only later, while making a huge stink with the lobsters with the new woman he's dating, that Alvy realizes his mistake. This new woman doesn't see what the fuss is about the lobsters. He gets on a plane and tries to convince Annie to get back together. On a health food cafe in an LA sidewalk, they finally break up.

Last week, also caught the parts of Manhattan. Manhattan starts with the voice of the Woody Allenesque character listing down all the things he loves about the city. What I like about that movie again has something to do with relationships. Isaac breaks up with his 17 year old girlfriend because he's fallen in love with his best friend's mistress. He tells her that she's way too young, and she should pursue acting studies in London. When the mistress goes back to the best friend, he suddenly misses Mariel Hemingway. He runs down New York's streets. But when he arrives outside her apartment building, she's already dressed up and headed to the airport. Isaac's profession of love comes too late, because she's been hurt, and she's now made up her mind to go to London. But if Isaac can wait six months...

I like it that both movies don't force on a reconciliation scene. Well, in Annie Hall, the Woody Allen character writes a play with characters who suspiciously re-enact the scene in the health food store, and instead of walking away from each other, they kiss and make up. But he does say that the things he can't control in life, he can at least correct in his writings. In both Allen movies, the (former) lovers either end up as friends, or they still move in the same small circles that they occupy. In Annie Hall, Allen says that he realizes that the relationships were wonderful while they lasted. As he stands in the street corner after having coffee with Annie, he tells us an anecdote about the man whose brother thinks he's a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don't you turn him in so we can treat him? The man says, I would have done that, except I need the eggs. It's the worst possible case of can't leave with (it/you), can't leave without (it/you).

Which brings me to the Spanish film I watched this afternoon, Los Peores Anos de Nuestra Vida, which roughly translates to The Worst Years of Our Lives. It starts with Alberto's voice speaking into a recorder, starting chapter 1 of his novel. It reminds me so much of Manhattan's opening scenes as well. Also, Alberto is the goofy, not quite guapo young man with a more handsome brother and he does remind me a lot of a younger Woody Allen. Alberto's brother Roberto ends up with all the girls, even the ones which Alberto likes. So it comes to no surprise when both brothers fall for Maria, the mistress of a sculptor. Alberto wails and whines that he can't understand women, and though they find him funny, they wouldn't sleep with him. So Roberto gives his brother a hand. Together they plot the break up of Santiago and Maria. They send an anonymous letter to Santiago's wife. Maria gets depressed after the confrontation with Santiago's wife, who tells her empathically that Santiago stays with him, and it's really all for Maria's own good. Maria and Roberto share a kiss, but since Roberto is also busy with his own affair with an older woman, he decides to give his brother and Maria a push in the relationship direction. Then things go wrong, and there are Grand Romantic Gestures in the last few scenes involving a train ticket to Paris and sibling generosity, which I don't quite buy. I mean, real life doesn't afford us any quick turn arounds.

But this isn't a movie concerned with real life. One scene has Alberto watching a romantic movie, and he winces, guys like him don't get the girls in real life, so cinema is just a big piece of crap. The actors get disturbed and even the director turns to Alberto. He is trying to direct a movie, not aiming for cinema verite like De Sica before he got rich. So I guess that prepares us for the kind of ending The Worst Years of Our Lives has.

Which also reminds me that since Woody Allen has probably exhausted all the possible locations in New York, he has turned his gaze on Europe. His next movie is set in Spain, starring Scarlett Johanson, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Saw the trailer of Vicky Cristina Barcelona in YouTube quite recently.

Virtual Age

2008-05-05T18:08:00.000+08:00

Answered some questions thrown at me by the Life Expectancy Calculator. If you don't smoke, up a few years. Don't drink much, good. Use seatbelt only on occasion, bad. It's actually amazing to see your virtual age rise and dip with each question answered. I went as low as 19. After 34 questions, turns out my Virtual Age is 22.5 (Hear that belly? Ha, be gone you!). If the average life expectancy for Asians is around 74 years, I can expect to live another 5.5 years beyond that. I have some 18,800 more days to walk this earth, and maybe more if I shape up some.

The Virtual Age Calculator may be downloaded as a stand alone PC program. Sadly, it's a Windows program and not available for Mac.

via

The incredible life of elevators

2008-05-05T02:20:00.000+08:00

The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten details the incredible life of elevators and those who make and ride them. The frame story tells about this man who took the longest ever cigarette break--41 hours, most of which he spent inside a stalled elevator. He asked for a beer when he finally got out, and then sued the building and settled for an undisclosed amount. What he didn't bargain for was that the ensuing trauma and law suit left him unemployed and with occasional media attention.

Elsewhere in the essay is a delineation into the kind of research that goes into building elevators. There is a minimum allowable space that a human must have, 2.3 square feet. Women can tolerate much less space, say 1.5 sq.ft, provided that it's mostly women. If men get in the picture, women cross their arms in an attempt to get more space. But the figures are much lower in Asia, where 25 Chinese people will "willingly" squeeze in an elevator meant for 11.

I'd hate to be trapped in an elevator, unless I'm Jeanne Moreau and sharing the car with me is Maurice Ronet in Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, aka Elevator to the Gallows, last viewed perhaps a decade ago in the French Spring film fest.

At the Balay Negrense

2008-05-04T10:08:00.000+08:00

This is a photo of Chaka Doll swiped from madmilkmargie, sitting eeriely in one of the rooms of the Balay Negrense, which we visited during our cultural tour of Negros last week. It was raining and the floor boards creaked a bit every time. What's amazing is that the floor boards are all of one piece from front to back of the house, so imagine how huge a tree that was. What's creepy is that this doll, along with some others in what used to be the children's room, stared at us with what seemed like a gash in her forehead. Creepy.

Later, we visited The Ruins, a huge stone house in the middle of the cane fields with the interiors gutted but still absolutely magnificent. According to the caretakers, the guerillas and the owners thought it best to burn the thing so that the Japanese wouldn't use it as their garrison. It took two whole days for the interiors made of hardwood to burn down completely. On one side of the house was a huge window, which used to have floor to ceiling glass, in a room that was specifically for watching the sun go down or up, I forget now.

The descendants of the owners had it fixed up a bit, when they found out that the kids would go there in the witching hours bearing drinks and waiting for ghosts to appear. Now there are little alcoves where you can sit down and eat little sandwiches and drink Cervesa Negra. Imagine living in that house, with ceilings so high and you can twirl around all you like without bumping into any of the solid concrete columns. Run to the veranda or the fountain in the wide front yard. Magnificence, right there.

Books Backlog

2008-05-02T18:35:00.000+08:00

The book shown above is what broke my self-imposed book purchase ban. I spent an almost monastic week in Bacolod last week. There was very little opportunity to go out--partly because we were staying inside the farthest end of the campus and going out was a chore. When we did have the chance to go out, it was for our various vices--mobile phone loads, cigarettes (not me though), etc. The panelists did take us out for the group discussions. Once we went to Calea, which I heard had great cakes and pastries, although we ended up eating pasta and sandwiches. We were brought to SM Bacolod twice, where we ate bachoy, and we went to the supermarket to gaze at the different kinds of fish for sale. Why we did that, we don't know.

On our second venture to SM, we decided to check out all the book places. The Booksale there had odd price listings--Php67, Php107. Cheaper than Manila prices--movie tickets were Php70 and Forbidden Kingdom was showing. National Bookstore had a small and paltry selection. I got the book shown above though. This copy of Feminist Locations was brand new and still wrapped in clingy plastic. The tag said Php150. I approached the customer service counter to inquire if the price on the tag was indeed correct. When the cashier ran it through their laser checker, the monitor showed it to be worth P72.50. "I'm taking it," I said. Saan ka pa makakakuha ng theory book na worth $25 sa Amazon at heto, wala pa siyang $2? We went back to the campus after this. When asked what we were able to find in SM, the guys just grumbled. I was the only one who got a book, and at a drastically reduced price at that.

Of course, my good intentions were to break it open and read it for my overdue and now lapsed incomplete paper for the gender studies class. I still hope to read it this summer though.

Best Cult Books

2008-04-27T19:55:00.000+08:00

I was recently asked what my favorite book was. The question was actually addressed to another fellow sitting on the table, but all of us eventually chimed in. What does it mean, "favorite book"? There are books that one read as a 17 year old and it forever stays with you. Someone owned up to liking Ayn Rand. Another adored Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

The key here, as The Guardian says, is that the sort of book you read early on defines you and takes you for a life turn. It's not just a "favorite" book--it's a "cult" book--the sort "often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula ' whacko.'" Further down, the article lists down the common themes running through or found in these books: drugs, sex, travel--all the things our parents probably didn't want us to get our hands on at that particular moment.

Browsing the list of books, I saw two which I really did read at seventeen: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Albert Camus' The Stranger. Then there is J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, of course. But that didn't quite hit me as all the teenage girls going crazy or slashing wrists kind of books. Or the "this is the secret to the meaning of life" book. Not in the list is Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, beloved of all freshmen who had to take a philosophy class. In the list is The Prophet, which to this day I still can't stand or finish, even after one of the professors in university assigned it as required reading in class.

Abandon the Old in Tokyo

2008-04-17T15:03:00.000+08:00

Abandon the Old in Tokyo has eight stories: most of them about working class guys in postwar Japan. There's a factory worker, garbage collector, window washer. In the title story, a young man cooks and washes for his mother, who reminds him without fail that in her youth, she worked really hard to provide for him. There's a flashback that shows the boy accidentally stumbling into his mother and her "clients." And now, in her old age, she thinks she's worked too hard. But a young man can only take the stench of pee-soaked blankets for so long. The young woman she's dating is excited to visit and spend time with him in his apartment. Japan is known for having long life spans and for families taking care of their own elderly, but two decades after World War II, a young man decides to rent an apartment in the outskirts of the city and move his invalid mother there. He must choose: mother or his own woman? Is he doing the right thing? Will it be too late?

In the introduction, Adrian Tomine claims that Yoshihiro Tatsumi predated the naturalist style of recent (say since the '80s) North American comic book artists. I'm not really a big manga fan, but in reading this book, I'm more likely to agree with Tomine. Yoshihiro Tatsumi has more in common with Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb than most of the manga I've read. It has simple enough narratives which capture a day (or days) in the life of someone, and then fades away after an emotional moment. The moments are not big either. When the lonely manga artist was caught drawing graffitti in a public restroom, the look on his face reminded me of Julio Madiaga in the final scene in Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag. It's desperation pushed against the walls. More Raymond Carver than Ranma or Fruits Basket.

I enjoyed reading the stories. Found this in the big Borders store. I finished it in one sitting, even with a headache. Also, I found out that this was the second in a series--the first being Push Man and Other Stories, which I'll be delighted to read someday. I wish we'd get these titles here in Manila.

Books and Dating

2008-04-17T15:00:00.000+08:00

Rachel Donadio writes about love and dating among bibliophiles, or how the books you read may make or break a relationship:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.

Donadio later makes the case that literary tastes may be a gender thing: "Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction." I definitely could not stand if all someone read was maybe Zig Zeglar or Who Moved My Cheese?--no offense meant, but that's just not my thing. It won't be the total deal breaker. There will be other things. But I also like Ariel Levy's idea of "compartmentalization": that compatibility in reading taste is a luxury; and that the goal of a relationship, according to her, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand.”

via

NOTE: This post was written like three weeks ago or so. Just posting it now.

Professors Strike Back

2008-03-21T19:48:00.001+08:00

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in The New York Times that professors are now using the web, either via social networking sites, blogs or personal webpages, to reveal information about themselves in the hopes of "becoming more human" in the eyes of students. And there's even a show on mtvu called "Professors Strike Back," which gives the maligned professors to refute the comments in RateMyProfessors.com.

The show has become more popular than the music premieres on that channel. Which only goes to show that for a lot of students, the thought that professors have lives beyond the classroom is almost unthinkable. Sam Gosling, psychologist and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, narrated an anecdote where a female student saw him in the street near the campus and looked absolutely horrified. "Like, ‘Wait a minute, you have a life?’ The idea that I would continue to exist — it was sort of a violation of her expectations.” Gosling goes further to say that students today think professors are not doing their jobs unless they convey information in zany, interactive ways.

Teaching has lost some of its god-on-the-podium status. To teach these days means also means to entertain. It's such a taxing demand, to relay information and to make like a talk show host at the same time. What matters is the ability to teach. But students seem to be under the impression that learning is like being part of a talk show audience. "Here we are now, entertain us," and if you fail to do so, you get comments on evaluations like, "Bring a pillow."I tend to agree with the article that this is an unfortunate trend, this need to know that your professor likes Project Runway or has climbed the rockface in Galera. Some are of the opinion that knowing these little things make for a more comfortable learning experience. Whether the "humanization" of professors come in the form of dishing out jokes or crazy anecdotes along the lines of "I have a life, too, you know" or posting more of the same in blogs or social networking sites, this need for transparency seems doubly unneccessary for me.

And yet, I'm posting this on my blog. So take everything with a grain of salt.

Why We Write

2008-03-17T13:19:00.000+08:00

Damon Lindelof, co-creator and executive producer of the TV series "Lost", tells us why he writes:

I write because I can’t help but make things up.

I write because I love to tell stories.

I write because my imagination compels me to do so.

I write because if I didn’t, I’d be branded a pathological liar.

Oh, and also because I’m still trying to make my dead father proud of me.

But that’s none of your goddamn business.

It's a freaking good story. Of course. We all write for the drama. This convinces me to finally break out that DVD of Lost I've had on my shelf for like 2 years already. But there's still a lot of things to do. So maybe I'll sneak in the viewing in between checking and writing my own papers.

There's also Bill Lawrence, creator of "Scrubs" and co-creator of "Spin City," who tells us he writes because he is "full of shit," and that writing is primarily a game of "truth/lie/exaggeration" and then you get paid for it. Not a bad way of earning a living. But, of course, this only works if you do film & tv work, and only if you don't get screwed up badly. Otherwise, all other kinds of writing pay minimal to nil amounts of money. Doesn't sound too encouraging noh?

Why We Write features essays on the topic by writers who work in the television and movie industries. Also found other "why we write" essays on the net. Here's the one by George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm.

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EDIT: One of the comments in the Why We Write blog pointed to this news article which seems to have inspired Lindelof's story.

Hello Kitty is a drug dealer

2008-03-13T02:03:00.000+08:00

Sort of. A Colombian drug lord e-mailed his minions with his directions coded in Hello Kitty images. But the police wised up and were able to decode them. Authorities say that this kind of message transmission (not necessarily Hello Kitty though) were used by the Al-Qaeda to prepare for the 9-11 attacks.

According to the report, suspected drug lord Juan Carlos Abadia "apparently picked Hello Kitty as his courier because his wife was a big fan of the Japanese icon -- she had even decorated one of her rooms in a Brazilian house with Hello Kitty-themed chairs, watches and wallpaper."

Maybe Abadia was living in Hello Kitty hell and this is way to get back at his wife. Hehehe.

Sedaris and Kureishi

2008-03-12T03:15:00.000+08:00

The transport strike is ostensibly over--at least for today. There are people stranded in the streets.

But what I'm more concerned of is that classes have been suspended--and we lose one very crucial day in the tailend of the academic year. The last day of classes is Tuesday next week, after that is the mandatory break that comes with the remembrance of the Holy Week. Then students have to come back for exams and the submission of papers. Before we can do that, there's still a few things to discuss.

Today we were supposed to take up an essay by David Sedaris, "Remembering My Childhood in the Continent of Africa." Instead of doing it in class, we'll do an online discussion. To be supplemented by a live, in class one when we see each other later this week. I left my books in my office in the university, but that doesn't stop me from reading up on the author and the text. Time Magazine has ten questions for Sedaris. Sedaris writes a lot about his childhood and his family, and Time asks him whether his family opposes being written about. He says quite the contrary--they like appearing in his stories.

Tell that to Hanif Kureishi's sister, who told his brother through an interview with The Independent to "keep [her] out of his fiction."

Outlaws

2008-03-02T21:20:00.001+08:00

Outlaws 2
Originally uploaded by xkg

Received e-mail from editor Sarge Lacuesta that my short story "Outlaws" came out in the Philippines Free Press this week. Grab a copy of the 23 February 2008 issue, the one with Jun Lozada on the cover.

Overrated?

2008-03-02T12:43:00.000+08:00

Bookride.com notes that a copy of the first US edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude goes for a minimum of $500. Solitude also consistently appears in every must-read list of books. When I get visitors in my office, they instantly check my shelves and get disappointed not to find a copy there. Solitude is also almost single-handedly credited for turning on the spotlight on Latin American literature, or particularly creating the brand of Latin Am. lit known as "Magic Realism."

However, Jonathan Bate of the Sunday Telegraph notes that Solitude may as well be one of the most overrated books ever:

The book is so in love with its own cleverness that it is profoundly unreadable. It is generally credited with inaugurating the genre of "magic realism" novels which combine the matter-of-fact narrative style of conventional realistic fiction with fantastic nonsense such as levitation and alchemy. García Márquez is at his most characteristic when a woman ascends to heaven whilst hanging her washing out on the line. Other ingredients of magic realism include gypsies, tarts with hearts, dwarves, tricksters and a cast so large and confusing that you need a family tree to keep track of the plot. Márquez and his followers are sophisticated urban intellectuals who feign reverence for the simple wisdom of peasants. Myth, fairytale and folklore are wonderful things in themselves, but it is preposterous to imagine that mingling them with domestic mundanity will somehow puncture the bourgeois complacency of our time.

He goes on to tell the readers that Solitude opened the territory for Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter and the intentionally epic-scale storytelling that they are noted for.

So is Solitude really overrated?

Herbal Hodgepodge

2008-02-20T14:19:00.000+08:00

Apartment Therapy's Re-Nest section shows us how to set up an indoor herb garden.

I've been hunting for a good pot of sweet basil, but all I've found are wilted ones in the corners of supermarkets. Once found a healthy pot in Market Market's garden section, but the stall owner wasn't there so had to let it go. Basil with tomatoes and some olive oil and pasta is sweet sweet heaven. And I'd put in a bunch of rosemary too. Rosemary is good with chicken. Still hoping to find some one of these days.

Found via Lifehacker. Their version seems more affordable and simpler.

Basil seeds

2008-02-17T19:52:00.001+08:00

Surprise
Originally uploaded by xkg

We seriously had no idea what this drink was when we picked it off the menu of a Thai restaurant. We went to Ikea on a Sunday afternoon, and of course the cafe was full of screaming children and their parents. Our solution was to hike off to the nearest mall--plenty of those to choose from. We were hungry and just wanted to eat.

When this drink arrived, A and I were curious what the floating dark bits were. They were gelatinous but had a crunch to it. I thought at first they were dragonfruit seeds. We just drank all of it without a thought and went back to the monster's lair.

Today, just found out that those tiny bits were actually Thai basil seeds, and were frequently used in drinks especially in South Asia. In some places it's called falooda.

Other websites refer to it as nam manglak.

Although I have to say that the one we had is closer to falooda instead of nam manglak. Pretty interesting drink though. Makes me think of tadpoles.

Nom nom nom

2008-02-14T00:08:00.001+08:00

Nom nom nom
Originally uploaded by xkg

Valentines? What's that?

My salt and pepper shaker set
gets all the action these days. Hahaha.

tina winnie

2008-02-11T20:34:00.001+08:00

tina winnie
Originally uploaded by xkg

Speaking of lolas, I just realized that Tina Turner reminds me so much of Mareng Winnie Monsod of "Debate" fame. It must be the fierceness common to both women. Saka yung neck motions. They could have been sisters.

Bee and Tee

2008-02-11T19:30:00.000+08:00

Most of the pre-Grammys press centered on whether Amy Winehouse would get a visa in time for the big night. She didn't. But she did win five of the six Grammys she was nominated for and everyone went 'huh?' and scratched their heads when Album of the Year went to Herb Hancock's tribute to Joni Mitchell.

But for me, the real highlight of the event was the Beyonce and Tina Turner number. I liked the intro, where Beyonce with her chair and two backup dancers rattled off all the female singers who influenced her from Donna Summer to Whitney Houston. You can watch the awesome intro routine here. (Note: This clip does not include Cher's intro to Beyonce, which you can see in the full vid.)

But as she said, the biggest momma of them all was Tina Turner.

Of course she had to sing "What's Love Got to Do with It." Then she called "Miss Beyonce" to join her onstage and they did a "nice and rough" version of "Proud Mary." (Roughly at 05:17 of the vid.)

I don't know that many women who are nearly 70 who can still rock it as hard as Tina Turner. She had to get out of a comfortable retirement in Europe for this. She wore a tight silver outfit, too. But if you would look closely at the video, at around 08:28, you can see Lola Tina's face change. It looks like Beyonce stepped on her feet. Ouch! You can see her wincing, and even in the last part of the performance, when they were bowing, Tina Turner was kicking her right foot. It must have hurt. Si Beyonce talaga, di na naawa sa Lola. Ang meaty pa naman niya. Look at those thighs. Hahaha. Buti na lang matibay ang lola.

Invasion of the Killer Jellyfish

2008-02-11T17:50:00.000+08:00

Paul Eccleston in the Telegraph UK tells us that jellyfish are born predators. They are [a] "perfect toxin-loaded killing machine, there is no creature on earth that can dispatch a human being so easily or so quickly." If they wrap part of their tentacles around you, you have 180 seconds to live. Jellyfish have four brains, are very competitive, have 24 eyes which ensures 360 degree visibility, and carry more poison than necessary. Plus the damn things are resillient: some farmers in Japan thought of killing the jellyfish by chopping them up. Turned out to be the wrong move to make--the males produced more sperm and females carried more babies. In times of stress, jellyfish make sure that they would survive and procreate more.

We know jellyfish are dangerous, and they've caused bizaare things in the past, like swarming in geothermal plants that caused power supplies to trip all over Luzon. If we manage to stay away from them, then no problem. But overfishing the seas means no food for them, forcing their population to explode (remember, in times of stress, procreate!) and to move inwards. The jellyfish decided that since we've taken their fish, they must follow it ashore. It's all weird but the scientists studied the behavioral patterns of jellyfish, even put tracking devices on them, and there you go. Unless we do something about this, it's bound to cause trouble.

We know that jellyfish hang out in the shallow waters, because it's easier to hunt their prey that way. So to avoid jellyfish attacks, wear red. It's not an absolute deterrent, but the scientists have observed that jellyfish ploughed through black and white colored poles in the water, but completely stayed away from the red ones.

Project Runway

2008-02-10T20:26:00.000+08:00

If you watch Project Runway and want to preserve the drama, don't read. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The local cable channels have yet to show Project Runway Season 4 later this month and honestly, I can't wait that long. So started trolling the net for episodes since last week and was lucky enough to watch all the episodes from parselforce in YouTube.

Just finished watching episode 10, where Ricky finally gets the boot. He really should have been kicked out way before. And the surprise is that he doesn't even tear up now that it's needed. Oh well.

New York Fashion Week is all but over, and the spoilers are starting to trickle in on the net.Traditionally, three designers show at Bryant Park. Last season, they had four. I think there's more than that this season. I'm really curious what PR has in store. But with the sneak peeks floating around, there is no cohesion in those collections. Seriously. And to think that early in the season, the judges and Tim Gunn were confident that this batch is the most talented yet. I'm starting to think that maybe they should not have kicked out Victorya Hong who, by the way, had her own show at Bryant Park. Gah.

Anthony Bourdain

2008-01-13T11:46:00.000+08:00

The Onion's A.V. Club interviews Anthony Bourdain, 'bad boy' chef and host of No Reservations, which I follow on Discovery's Travel and Living channel.

Bourdain recently became a father for the first time, and he's trying to squeeze in family time by bringing his daughter to "low impact" shoots. He shot to fame after the publication of his autobiography Kitchen Confidential, which in a way contributed to the rise of the rockstar status of celebrity chefs.

He also says that he's wary of chefs (or writers) who have a band on the side. I instantly thought of Jamie Oliver, who has a band who can never escape his popularity and would forever be reduced to providing the theme music for his shows. Oh well.

Was also pleasantly surprised that he writes fiction, mostly detective novels. When asked which he prefers writing, he admits that writing nonfiction is way easier for him:

Fiction's hard. I do it because it's therapy. I spend a lot of time writing about myself, talking about myself and what happens to me. Me, me, me. Fiction is a nice escape from that. You can also be a lot more truthful about a lot of things. Things I can't say in non-fiction, I can say in fiction. But there's that damn plot thing. I really resent plot. I like creating characters and environments.

His next writing project is about "It's about a former '80s "it" boy writer, who wrote a Bright Lights, Big City type of book, and ends up washed up in the Caribbean. Murder and mayhem ensue." Hmm..must look for that.

Landscape by Google

2007-12-12T20:43:00.000+08:00

While browsing the internet for more inane reads, I accidentally discovered that the Manila City Hall is shaped like a coffin with a cross when viewed from above. See for yourself here.

According to this page in the threads of Pinoy Tambayan: "The original Manila City Hall was a rambling structure made of Oregon pine. It sat on the same site as today’s structure and lasted till the late 1930s when an Antonio Toledo-designed structure replaced it."

Somebody else said that the architect responsible for the reconstruction wanted a memorial for those who perished during the Second World War, when the city hall was turned into a Japanese garrison and lots of people died, especially on the clock tower side.

There's also a testimonial to the place's haunted status. A bunch of guys on the night shift working on a project decided to go ghost-hunting, but they didn't even get to the 5th floor. One of the ghost hunters screamed, and while the building security knew they were there, the security people opted to wait for them in the first floor. They didn't want to go up because of the creepiness of the place.

I wish I knew this when I played GRO during our department's international conference a couple of weeks ago. I sat in the back of a van with some of the participants and I can tell you, my vocabulary level dropped to the level of 'Hey Joe, you wanna buy watch? Me love you long time." (I was apparently not alone. For some reason most of us younger instructors found ourselves using very basic sentence structures. We all wanted to tell our guests that usually we were engaging conversationalists, but our collective syntax short-circuited just then. I digress.) All I could say when we passed by City Hall was that it was built in the late 1930s, got bombed and rebuilt again. Not much help really.

But really, the things that you learn from Google. Just simply fascinating. I don't mind I spent a few minutes on the web for it.

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Reading Anna Karenina in Africa

2007-12-12T20:39:00.000+08:00

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize acceptance speech takes a jab at the internet for its seduction of a whole generation with its many "inanities:" "[E]ven quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?"

Aray.

Okay, I felt alluded to. But I think that comment was less about about dissing the internet, but more about how reading books and experiencing great literature really satisfies a hunger for knowledge. A huge part of her speech tells about the difficulties of getting books, what more a proper education, in Africa, where a book may cost one several months' wages. But still, people read books, a third of Anna Karenina at a time, like that young woman waiting for her ration of water in a store.

Buti pa nga yung babaeng iyon nakatapos ng 1/3 ng Anna Karenina, which I can't claim for myself. And I probably have more books than entire villages in Africa. I'm the downfall of the human race. Pero oks pa rin, kasi sabi ni Lessing there's a storyteller deep inside all of us.

Now if only that storyteller quits blogging and starts to work on her bloody thesis. Gah.

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How to get yourself depressed. Not.

2007-12-10T12:18:00.001+08:00

Here's something guaranteed to deliver a low blow to the your already down self-esteem: what other people accomplished when they were your age. Here's mine:

The Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his revolutionary theory of the atom.

French novelist George Sand published her first novel, Indiana.

Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Warsaw invented the artificial language Esperanto.

British physician Thomas Wakley began publishing The Lancet.

Jamaican reggae composer/performer Bob Marley recorded "I Shot the Sheriff."

Nuclear plant lab tech Karen Silkwood died in a car crash on her way to meet with a New York Times reporter and a union official to document her allegations about falsified quality control reports.

French naturalist Jean B. Lamarck coined the word biology to encompass the studies of botany and zoology.

Radio DJ Brent McCoy killed a mouse, seemingly by staring at it, in his living room.

College graduate and licensed therapist Katie moved back in with her parents to muck stalls on their farm and fold her dad's underwear, still warm from the dryer.

Now except for the last two, all the others are something I can't do and don't really care much about doing. I remember reading a similar list a few years ago, and became really sad that Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 24 or something. Somebody else said that if you haven't done anything spectacular or world-changing by age 30, perhaps you never will. That gives me a few more years. Not that I'm counting on it. I'll probably look at this post by then and consider myself bonkers.

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How to lose ten pounds

2007-11-26T14:06:00.000+08:00

This girl complained of stomach pains and when the doctors opened her up, they found a ten pound hairball. It was a mass of black, curly hair, and measured 15 inches by 7 inches by 7 inches, the doctors said. Turns out she has a condition known as trichophagia, a compulsion to eat one's own hair.

Ten pounds is exactly the amount of weight I wish to shed, but not this way. Gah.

Badger Sleep Balm

2007-11-22T01:56:00.000+08:00

It's two in the morning, it's raining steadily and I'm still wide awake. This is perfect blanket weather, and it makes me wish that I should have checked this out at the mall before I went home the other day:

A dreamy night balm rich with precious oils to calm, encourage, cheer and relax poetic badgers and other restless wanderers. Just rub a little balm under nose, on lips, on temples or other pulse points. Or use the oil for after-bath moisturizing or soothing massage. The aroma does the work. Rosemary is the traditional herb for clear thinking, confidence, and memory. Bergamot is mentally uplifting. Ginger is strengthening and confidence-inducing. Balsam Fir is refreshing, like a walk in the woods. Lavender is the traditional sleep herb; fresh and relaxing. But Sleep Balm doesn't make you sleepy! It helps quiet your thoughts, then you fall asleep naturally.

My Sleepytime Tea hasn't been working well for me the last few weeks again. Even the supposedly "calming" body wash used to do the trick, but not right now. So while I was out with friends last weekend, we stayed almost the entire time in a coffee shop, talking and flipping through magazines. There was an article on how to sleep better and I saw this product there.

The Bedtime soap bar also seems interesting. Their website has a few testimonials from insomniacs and call me a sucker for advertising, but I would want to try this out. I distinctly remember seeing some Badger products in Rustans. I might not even wait for Christmas for this.

Kawaii in a box

2007-11-22T01:17:00.000+08:00

I was looking at bento boxes when I saw this:

Here's the full description: "A great two-tiered bento set with bottom lid and chopsticks featuring Totoro from the wildly popular My Neighbor Totoro anime. This is a very well made sealing bento that will fit nicely into your bag or compartmentalized lifestyle because of its handy vertical arrangement. Includes elastic strap for keeping your sauces and surrounding stainables safe from leakage. Awwwwingly cute with two 3D Totoros on the front, and of course the effervescent soot sprites. Approximately 3 inches by 3.5 inches. Microwave safe!"

Three inches! $24 para sa lalagyan ng Dewberry ito.

But, no, kahit nagrereklamo sa kamahalan ang lola, may I look pa rin at the other products. Candidate sa usefulness ito:

Maliit pa rin at 5.5 by 3.5 inches. Para kang kumain ng second to the smallest sized index card.

Like, I totally dig this more understated one:

Might be the aluminum. At any rate, $18 is still a huge amount to pay for a lunch box. So this remains in my wants, but not necessarily needs list.

But while looking at that website, I came across something almost inexplicable:

It's not just oil blot paper, it's the Hello Kitty Oil Absorption Paper *Gem*:

Sanrio helps you maintain your peak and shiny cuteness with these Hello Kitty Oil Absorption Paper sheets -- because, after all, how can you be cute when your face is all oily? A popular Japanese health care product, Aburatori Gami (literally "Oil-Taking Paper"), are commonly sold in convenience stores. An essential cuteness care item. 50 sheets. Easily fits into any bag or purse for your convenience. This purchase is for the pack with an illustration of Kitty-chan with gems in the background.

Sa halagang $3, puwede mo nang punasan ang anumang mantikang inilabas sa mukha mo ng kinain mo. O di ba bongga? Kasi yan lang talaga ang rason na naisip ko kung bakit kasama yan sa webpage na puro lunch boxes. Feeling ko nga naligaw ito, dapat pang-Hello Kitty Hell siya.

My So-Called Influences

2007-11-19T21:21:00.000+08:00

The question I dread the most in creative writing classes is that eventually you get asked, "So who were your influences?" I made a complete rat of myself last Saturday morning with such an earnest and rambling response. I totally forgot to list down My So-Called Life.

And oh, I read in an article that Alicia Silverstone almost played Angela Chase. That would have been totally wrong. I liked Alicia Silverstone, but My So-Called Life trumps Clueless any day in my book. People just want to murder Claire Danes now, but if there's one thing she got right, it's how to play an insecure and in love teenager from the mid-90s.

I mean, I can live in a deserted island without Gatsby and Great Expectations if I have in my possession the complete series DVD of My So-Called Life. Six discs, 19 episodes, 1110 minutes. With audio commentary on six episodes. Plus a behind the scenes docu, My So-Called Life Story. And Amazon is selling it for $49.99. Can you say Christmas wishlist? I can totally live without the previous DVD set with the lunch box, thank you. If there's one thing you'll buy for me on Amazon, this is it. Go now, go!

How to Win a National Book Award

2007-11-18T14:21:00.000+08:00

According to New York Magazine, this is how you can win the Oscars of the publishing world in five easy steps:

1. Don't be a young debut novelist
2. Do Aim for World-Historical Significance
3. Don't Write Short Stories
4. Do Be a Literary Insider
5. Do Expand Your Demo(graphic)

I haven't read it yet, but this year's front runner and eventual winner is Denis Johnson for Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam War novel. Everyone expected him to win anyway, as he got 3 of the 5 easy steps. I had read a couple of his short stories anthologized in Best of collections, and Jesus' Son sounds interesting.

Moore on Polanski

2007-11-15T21:15:00.000+08:00

Tangentially related to the previous Ira Levin post, an unearthed article from the New York Times archive, from the Watching Movies With series. This one features Julianne Moore on Rosemary's Baby, as directed by Roman Polanski, and on how he balances horror from the mundane and comedy:

"Polanski keeps yanking us back and forth between cheerful and frightened. You keep getting these little dabs of comedy, all the way through. Ruth Gordon and the other neighbors are basically played for comic effect. That's how the horror is introduced in this movie, as comedy. It's never the dominant tone, but it's there. It's like in 'Macbeth,' you know? Somehow it makes the horror even more horrible."

Also from the same 2001 series, Woody Allen on Shane.