Faculty Follies 2006

It's been a very busy two weeks. I seem to be part of every committee there is at work. My latest undertaking is the College of Arts and Letters' annual Faculty Follies. This year, they've decided to do a Philippine Idol thing. It's interactive and people get to vote for their idols.

Our group represents the religious sector. Sor Naydah Piñacoolasa sings that the hills are alive with the sound of music, climbs hills, chases tractors, is chased by weird people and does cartwheels around the campus. See your favorite English teacher strip down to the barest essentials. For this, I'm still stitching beadwork on my costume and it's already past midnight.

Please watch the show later at 3pm and 6pm, Thursday, 14 December 2006, Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero Theater, Palma Hall in UP Diliman.

We'll be very happy if you'd all vote for us. Text "SOR" to 09196087838. Since we're doing so much work for this, we might as well win. We'll be very grumpy next year if we don't win.

PS. Two people from Team Angas have cameos in our video. That's another reason why you should go watch the show, and do vote for us. :)

Don't call me Babe

And today's weird animal news: Boy eaten by herd of pigs.

This stuff is almost something out of a Guy Ritchie or some other heist movie. But it happened in India. Ganesh knows what else happens out there. I suppose I won't be munching on bacon real soon.

Identity through cuisine

I've been reading Fernando Zialcita's Authentic Though Not Exotic, a collection of essays about Filipino identity. I've had the book since summer--attended the launch and roundtable discussion and all--but it's only now that I found the time to read it. It's actually more like self-required reading, but anyway.

Zialcita's claim is that supposedly, many Filipinos are uneasy about the "authenticity" of their identity. Can we really be "authentically Asian" when we've had a lot of Spanish influence? Or are the "real Pinoys" those who had resisted colonialism? Or is the real Pinoy the ingenious lowland Christian Filipino who transformed the Western culture he received into something more palatable to his taste?

Those who are into post-colonial theory and all that blah will recognize this debate about identity except that Zialcita uses a different set of terminologies. It takes a while to get used to, but replace "syncretism" with "hybridity" and you get the drift. Also, he uses a lot of Arnold Toynbee, a name I haven't really heard since high school. But I like how he argues that there is no real Asia but a multiplicity of Asias and he uses cuisine to illustrate his arguments.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised to find the introductory essay serialized at the Inquirer website last week--around the same time I was reading the book. I suppose they're making like The Guardian now. So if you'd like to know more about how the only things we have in common with our Asian neighbors are sinigang and patis, and how we're all really bastards, i.e. tisoys, here's what the Inquirer has serialized so far:

1: "An Identity Under Question"
2: "A Demonized Influence"
3: "No Sense of Context"
4: "A Limited Menu of Binary Contrasts"
5: "Reductionist Interpretations"

And that's where my patience for linking ends. If you want to read more, you're on your own. But otherwise, this book was also previously discussed here.

Trash Princess

The Americans' strong fascination with Paris Hilton enabled the hotel heiress to turn herself into a brand that can be packaged, recognized and sold like toothpaste:

Why, if Paris says so much about us, do Americans—not just college professors and the commentariat but celebrity watchers and tabloid junkies—hate her so much? And why, if she is so offensive, is she so ubiquitous?

Replace "Paris Hilton" with "Kris Aquino" and we might have the same thing. Others might claim now that a boxer can bring people together, but I really suspect that Kris Aquino is the only thing which unites us Filipinos.

American Englishes

I had to take a cab home tonight, and the cabbie had some really fierce views about Koreans and English. This mostly had to do with the accent that he found difficult to understand, and he claimed that he got at least one bunch of Korean passengers a day. But he noted that Filipinos chatted in loud (and I assume chirpy) English. "Pinoys speak real nice English. Especially those call center agents. You'd think they studied in America." I don't equate education with someone's ability to mimic an American accent, and especially on call center agents, but that's what the cabbie thinks. So there.

On the other hand, I found this quiz where you can figure out what sort of American English you speak--whether or not you have a call center training acquired accent.

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

25% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

via

Gen X, 16 years later

Sixteen years after its initial publication, Generation X grows up and hangs up the slacker ghost. Or as Christine Smallwood writes in the New York Observer, it is inevitable that the rebel becomes the very thing he despises:

Mr. Coupland was the anti-McInerney. He was the one who rebelled against the culture of consumption, who wrote about “real” things, authentic things, like girls in vintage dresses and finding yourself in the desert. He didn’t know about Bolivian marching nights in Manhattan or … whatever else it was that Mr. McInerney wrote about. Mr. Coupland is Canadian, after all: He liked nature and worried about the nuclear threat.

But now, Coupland sells Blackberries, hides in his own private island, all of which is kinda preppy. Perhaps your McJob can buy you nice things after all. In a weird turn of events, Kurt Cobain is now the highest earning dead celebrity, surpassing Elvis and Dr. Seuss. What's the sense of rebellion then?

On Beauty and Numbers

In an article for the Washington Post, David Von Drehle asserts that beauty might not really be in the eyes of the beholder, but more likely, it is something biologically hardwired in humans. There's something called The Golden Mean, a ratio of 1 is to 1.618 inches, or phi--that provides symmetry that is necessary to achieve beauty. This symmetry can be observed on Leonardo Da Vinci's sketch of a man with limbs extended, Michelangelo's David, the bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti, in the architecture of human DNA, or even in those supermodels who grace the covers of magazines hawking beauty products. What's interesting is that beauty is somehow a mathematical progression, something actually quantifiable, when through the ages we've always believed that it is based on perception.

Jack En Poy Extreme

A bunch of us were thinking of holding an Extreme Jackenpoy (aka Rock Paper Scissors) Challenge for the office party next month. It must be the easiest game there is: "Players smack their fists into their palms and count to three before making one of three hand signals: a fist (rock), flat hand (paper) or two fingers (scissors). Paper covers rock, scissors cut paper and rock breaks scissors." The game's origins is pretty much contestable, but it is generally believed that the game has been played for centuries in Japan. Even Ian Fleming's James Bond was made to play it in a movie set in samurai country.

Anyway, our plan was each participant will have a Php50 entrance and will have once chance to play. Winner of each set will compete with other winners until there's only one. But apparently, this is already old hat as the World RPS Championships were held last weekend in Toronto. There was a C$10,000 prize and hundreds of national champions flew in for the event.

About Googling your mother and writing a biography in the digital age

More proof that perhaps it's a Google world after all: John Dickerson writes in Slate on the difficulties of writing a biography in the digital age. While you can cast your net wide and google the net for sources, combing through the details of what you find about your subject, especially if said subject was a parent, it becomes a balancing act between the roles of writer and child.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

If you consider yourself a well-read person, try to check out Listology's 1001 books you must read before you die. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing these so-called lists accomplish is to remind me that I'm pretty much a barbarian. It's like when the American Film Institute came up with their 100 Most Important (American) Films Ever. While I was familiar with most of the films in that list and at the time I averaged a hundred films watched annually, I found out I haven't even watched half of it. We're not even touching the New York Times list.

The same is true with the Thousand Books List. After I crossed out all the books I've read and my batting average is so low that the percentage of what I've read is but a single digit. And I'm supposed to be an English major who loved books. Shameful.

I found out interesting things though. The only comic book in that list was Alan Moore's Watchmen. Paulo Coehlo made the list twice--for Veronika Decides To Die and The Devil and Prym. The only Stephen King in the list is The Shining.

The list was arranged from the most recent (2000s) to pre-1700. Of the 69 books deemed important and published since the year 2000, I've only read two: Chuck Palahniuk's Choke and Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex which totally bowled me over and the only book I've read this year that I really, really, really loved. It was so great that after every other page I was probably muttering, "Shyet, ang galing niya" and yes, that's a totally unintellectual reaction.

Of the over 700 books from the 1900s, I read around 20 and I read most of them during college. There's Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, novels by Winterson, Kundera, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick. Only 25% was required reading. The Catcher in the Rye and The Little Prince I had already read and would read on my own even if they weren't required in class. I was asked to read The Bluest Eye in the same course where Catcher was required. But Heart of Darkness was a different matter. I read the first page over and over again because my brain just rejected what my classmates dubbed as Joseph Conrad's "constipated" prose. But that's just half of the Joseph Conrad double bill--there's The Secret Sharer to contend with. What made things worse was that both texts had to be read using the post-colonial framework and our teacher was always asking, "And what's the political implication of that?" The only good thing about that experience was that we also got to watch Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Then again, maybe I'm just compensating for the trauma. I think some books need a certain frame of mind for you to finish them. Maybe if I gave Conrad another go and it wasn't required, things might have flowed more easily. It's more difficult if you had a week to read both pieces and Jane Austen.

Which brings us to the 1700s and the 1800s, where all the books I read can be classified into extremes. It's either the high adventure of the Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe kind or the high drama of Dickens. Of course there's also Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott--little girl favorites really. The early sci-fi from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells made an appearance. There's also the adventures offered by Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift. The weird thing is that I read all these so-called classics in grade school, before the age of twelve, between forays in River Heights and Wonderland. It's either the school librarian thought highly of us kids. Or perhaps I disdained the Ewoks story collections and I hadn't discovered Sweet Valley Twins yet.

Before the 1700s, there's really just Aesop's Fables, and that I went through before grade school. My mom got me this book that came with a cassette tape with a man and a woman reading the fables. At the end of each reading was a lesson usually as simple as "save for a rainy day" or "do not be boastful." I really liked the one about the frog who got really puffed up and burst and the one with the fox going through a vineyard sourgraping. Hmmm...

If you view this list chronologically, I seem to be reading less and less, even with the 50 book list and conscious efforts to read more. In my head, I can hear my former professor's shrill admonision: "My god, you're all so culturally impoverished!" Then again, even if all I devoted my existence to reading and forget about the world and the assumption of a life, it'll take me a lifetime or more to read all these damn books we really should be reading. Feh.