Campbell's Sticky Tape Soup

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.

July Reading Stack

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.

At the Komikon Summer Fiesta

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 Moveable Feast

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.

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

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.

Judging a Book by its Cover

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.

Directions to Servants

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

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

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.

Culling

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

Sex and Sweden, Sex and France

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.

New books

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.

Books Backlog

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.

Abandon the Old in Tokyo

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.

The Great F. Scott

I've been reading a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald lately. On my desk at home and in school I have Flappers and Philosophers, his first collection of short stories, This Side of Paradise, his first novel, and Malcolm Cowley's A Second Flowering, which is about the "works and days of the Lost Generation."

I've also just finished The Diamond as Big as The Ritz and other stories. (Book # 16) The title story has John T. Unger, who vacations with his a classmate. Percy Washington's family is obscenely rich, and for three generations, his family protects their secret enclave. Trouble begins when John falls in love with Percy's younger sister Kismine. Paradise doesn't last long. Soon enough he discovers what happens to young men who fall in love with young women whose family owns a diamond as big as the Ritz.

One thing which surprised me upon reading Fitzgerald again is not that his stories are mostly long. 20 pages is a bare minimum, which is good for me: my grad fiction class requirement is 40 pages! 40! I have 30 to go. It's that his stories contain chapters instead of the transitions that I've gotten used to in most contemporary fiction.

But what I particularly like about Fitzgerald is that most of the conflict in his stories come from what Malcolm Cowley calls the "Romance of Money." Fitzgerald was never really an out and out Marxist. But the conflict between classes was palpable because they were presented in unbearably real (and often traumatic) situations. He was part of that generation of writers born between 1895 to 1900 and came of age in the Twenties, the Jazz Age, when money, lots of it, could be earned, easily.

His young men on the make work in advertising, business, stocks, entertainment. Success was measured not by what you own, but how big an annual salary you got. These young men partied with and fell in love with debutantes, and to their simple request, "W Y B M A D I I T Y?*" the answer was always yes, why yes!

But the thing was, earned money will never be in the same league with old money. New money flowed, yes, but old money was as solid as a house in West Egg, and those living across could only yearn fitfully for that green light blinking at the dock.

There's also a lot of Fitzgerald floating about in the web. The Guardian has a series on great interviews of the 20th century. Michel Mok's interview presents Fitzgerald a few days after his 40th birthday and four years before his death, as a man "consumed with fear that his name will never be in lights again."

This is the Fitzgerald after the crack-up, echoed in his stories "An Alcoholic Case" and "The Lost Decade," where the protagonist was a weird sort of Rip Van Winkle. He had slept through most of the 1930s in an alcoholic haze. His time has passed and he didn't know how to live in this world anymore.

According to a foreword by Jay McInerney, most people have dismissed the interview as "a hatchet job," but while it was "unseemly," it's also "not unfair." He even says that there's a poignancy to it that Fitzgerald agreed to contribute to his own "depantsing":

What possessed him, you can't help wondering, to expose himself this way? It's as if he has determined to be a representative figure once again, even at the expense of humiliating himself, to reaffirm his significance as a generational totem by portraying himself as an exemplary victim of its faults. What makes this document even more poignant, almost unbearably so, is that Fitzgerald seems to have undervalued the literary achievement that would one day resurrect his reputation, even as it would always remain intertwined with the tragic myth of his life.

*Will You Buy Me A Drink If I Tell You?

Commuter Reading

Every day, I commute an hour to an hour and a half each way. It would have been nice to be able to really read something while in transit, unfortunately, I shift modes of transportation quite often. The longest ride I take is a 14 minute train ride, with perhaps a nine minute wait thrown in. Not exactly the best situation for reading.

MJ Iles, in this essay in The Guardian, agrees that commuter reading only allows you to "snatch at literature": "Though I see other people doing it, I don't think this is the way to read books. Only if I didn't care about a novel - only if I considered it not worth appreciating - would I subject it to such a reading process."

Iles suggests "episodic novels," which are "oddly out of favour nowadays." Short stories would be ideal, if only if they weren't the wrong length--it's either too short that a page is all you have, or too long that you have to stand aside and finish reading it while on the escalator, or hold up the line at the turnstiles. Poetry's also possible, but since I ride early in the morning and my caffeine buzz is still not there, I don't even want to try it.

It's really quite the dilemma, unless you're perfectly happy listening to the radio. Or as Iles suggest, do Sudoku. But since I'm not numbers oriented myself, I might just close my eyes and maybe catch some more shuteye.

Library Hours

The Library Thing must be every geek's dream widget. With it, you can catalogue your books online. So far, I've uploaded nearly a hundred of my books. Mostly, these books are the ones piled beside my desk and perhaps read in the last couple of years.

Check out the meager contents of my library here. Or you can just check out the sidebar for random book covers.

Bah, I'm sleepy and there's a wall full of books to go.

Walking Through

Screenwriters' Masterclass (Book #13) doesn't tell you how to write a screenplay, how to chop the story into three acts, or how to sell your spec script to Hollywood. There are many books which do that out in the market. They cost a lot and after reading a couple of these, they all begin to sound the same. But in the end, you throw out the books and whatever they're saying out the window.

What those guides don't tell you is how the writer actually grapples with the ideas in his head, that how stories are conceived and written is different for each story and for each writer. How in the end, no matter how much you study dramatic structure and you can quote fifty different definitions of what a plot point is, In the end, it's still you and the computer (or the pen and paper, whatever) and how your gut feel guides you in telling the story.

What Kevin Conroy Scott did was he put together nineteen screenwriters and asked them to talk about their movies. The lineup of writers and movies is more contemporary than classical, art house/indie favorites are pitted against genre/pop. Think Amores Perros/Requiem for a Dream vs Out of Sight/Die Another Day. The European sensibility is represented by Francois Ozon (Under the Sand) and Lukas Moodyson (Together); the Latin Americans are accounted for. It's through that out of nineteen writers, only one woman made the cut (Lisa Chodolenko/High Art) and there are no Asians.

But when it comes to the writing, everyone is united by the process. Conroy Scott's favorite question seems to be, "Can you walk me through your writing process?" There's someone who favors typing out his script, others insist on a 5-page quota for the day and spend the rest of the day doing other things. Paul Laverty insists on doing research and living with his intended subjects. He hung out a lot with the Mexicans and Guatemalans who cleaned houses in LA and whose stories eventually became the seed for "Bread and Roses."

The actual writing may take six months to six years. What's also remarkable was that at one point almost all the writers hit a phase where they sit up, stop and ask themselves, "What the hell am I doing?" That's when Scott pops his next favorite question, "What do you do with self-doubt?" This is apparently inevitable. You try to ignore it, you forge on and write and hopefully a solution presents itself later on.

Scott's film school education manifests itself when he starts quoting a lot of theory and Ingmar Bergman and follows that up with "So do you agree with that?" At one point, Scott quoted Bergman as saying that Lukas Moodyson is "a young master" of Swedish cinema. I suppose whenever people think of Swedish cinema, Bergman is the first thing that comes to mind. But Moodyson probably surprised Scott by saying that Bergman never really became popular in Sweden. While the National Film Institute of Sweden sends Bergman all the movies made that year for him to screen in his private home theater, the young Swedes just make their movies and pretty much shrug their shoulders to Bergman's pronouncements.

Most of the writers view themselves as "accidents." When asked whether literature or the arts played a huge role in their childhoods, most would say, yes, the family encouraged them. Or that there were lots of books in the house. Or you get someone like Moodyson who just wanted to listen to loud music and didn't like reading. His view of writing is that he's pretty much like a human Ouija board. The story is out there, he's just the medium.

Then you get a lawyer like Paul Laverty, who was supposed to become a priest but quit when he saw the cute Italian girls in Rome. Then he got sent to Nicaragua and saw what was happening. He wrote something about that experience, and when the film was finished, he brought the film reels back to the village which inspired the story. Laverty emphasizes a grassroots approach to filmmaking. He does say that "you can't copy a screenplay from life. But in many ways we've touched their experience and we've gained a great deal of insight from their lives through them. So it's a matter of respect, and in a strange sort of way it's a way of thanking and recognizing that they are the authors of the piece."

I liked the emphasis that writers placed on research--unless you are Moodyson. But also, the book gives you a great rare glimpse into how writers basically squirm around until the story's out there. Then you're free until the hell that is revision begins. More revisions if the film is connected with major stars and big studios.

This is a great book if you want more than just a guide on how to write a script. Most of the writers interviewed didn't even know what a script looked like. They got hold of the legendary Syd Field book, read sample scripts, then chucked everything out the window and wrote.

Also, this was a great buy for me. I've been eyeing this book for such a long time in Powerbooks but it was just so expensive. The acid-free paper edition retails for PhP1,300+. My copy was originally going for P995 but I got it on sale and only paid for PhP199. Not bad, not bad at all.

Screenwriters' Masterclass: Screenwriters Talk About Their Greatest Movies. Edited by Kevin Conroy Scott. Faber and Faber, 2005.

The History of the Burgis

Because it's 3am and I'm still up and restless, I decided to post the first book I read for the year: "The History of the Burgis" by Mariel Francisco and Fe Maria Arriola. I got this in one of the bookshops in Cubao X, aka the Marikina Shoe Expo. I've been eyeing it for quite some time, but the price tag kept me off it, until last month I gave in and got it.

Traces the history of social injustice in the country, the evolution of the classes and how the datus became the principalia became the ilustrado became the professional became the burgis, etc etc. Very informative, very fun, with lots of illustrations and stand alone articles. Useful political commentary. Huge chunk devoted to post-war, especially the Martial Law years. May seem a bit outdated since this came out after the first Edsa Revolution, but the non-surprising thing is that most of it still holds: 90% of the population is still poor, and the top 2% still controls the wealth of the nation.

Interesting bit: the peso to dollar exchange rate at the time of Diosdado Macapagal was Php2 = $1. Because of the conditions of the IMF/WB, the peso was devalued to Php3.90 = $1. Why does this sound so familiar?

Looking for Satrapi

After devouring Art Spiegelman's The Complete Maus (and previously Pekar's American Splendor), I find myself wanting to explore the comic book as autobiography. But just when I've finally decided to get the Marjane Satrapi books, Powerbooks and Fully Booked pulled them out of their shelves. Usually if it's just out of stock, they would ask you to leave your contact number in case they find a copy in another branch. But this time they told me the books are gone because they're not selling. So sad.

In case you know where I can find available copies of Persepolis, Embroideries and Chicken with Plums, please holler or leave a message here.