The Stranger's Child

She'd been lying in the hammock reading poetry for over an hour. It wasn't easy; she was thinking all the while about George coming back with Cecil, and she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was in a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face. Now the light was going, and the words began to hide among themselves on the page. She wanted to get a look at Cecil, to drink him in for a minute before he saw her, and was introduced, and asked her what she was reading. But he must have missed his train, or at least his connection: she saw him pacing the long platform at Harrow and Wealdstone, and rather regretting he'd come. Five minutes later, as the sunset sky turned pink above the rockery, it began to seem possible that something worse had happened. With sudden grave excitement she pictured the arrival of a telegram, and the news being passed round; imagined weeping pretty wildly; then saw herself describing the occasion to someone, many years later, though still without quite deciding what the news had been.

The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, is a pretty long book. (Close to 600 pages.) My copy is a present given by my older brother, Francis, who took the trouble of finding the Waterstones nearest his hotel in Belfast, where he'd gone for a couple of weeks. From his room he had a view of the headquarters of an entirely different H & W: Harland and Wolff, that is, or the company that built Titanic. I was going to ask for a Tóibín, and I was going to demand that it be autographed, with a dedication, that Francis fly south and find out where this favorite writer must be living, and perhaps, on my behalf, remind Tóibín about an E-mail correspondence that had been struck three or four years ago, but of course this was all a dumb fantasy. I was simply jealous of his trip: when was anyone ever going to send me to Belfast? But Francis has a kind heart. He does not care who the finer writer is; he is only after bringing something nice back to a younger brother, and making me giddy with delight, which is exactly what he did, since The Stranger's Child, as demonstrated by its absolutely beautiful first paragraph, is as elegant a novel as any. 

Writer's Block

I have a good friend in New York whom I once asked about writer's block. Why does it happen? Does it happen to you? What can be done about it? I received a thoughtful response, which you'll find below. I hope his advice is as useful to you, if you are writing something, or are planning on writing something, as it was to me. Though I can't say that I'm any closer to being the kind of scribbler that I wanted to be when I asked the question, it is possible that I have since become a much better reader.

***

Dear Migs,

Thanks for asking about writer's block.

I happen not to believe in writer's block, for what it's worth. And it's not worth much. I have bad days, when the words don't seem to come and even my thoughts are sluggish. But these are extremely rare. I always have a number of things to write about, and usually there's one thing that is a lot more congenial than the others. I write a great deal, in sheer word count. And I have arrived at a philosophy, I suppose you might say; I have a few basic ideas, a few notions against which I shape everything that I write. Although I've always written, I started making sense only about eleven or twelve years ago—until then, I was dreaming. Not that dreaming is bad. But my dreams were science fiction without the science. They were not about people.

I am a very late bloomer, which is probably the last thing that you want to hear. But I really do counsel patience. I'm sure that your blockages are attributable to unavoidable ignorance. Now, forgive me for calling you ignorant, but as it happens everyone your age is; it is, as I say, unavoidable. There is so much to know in today's world, so many connections to understand, that, as I've heard more than one person say, 35 is the new 21. What you have to understand is that if the world continues on its present course (scientifically speaking), you're going to live to a great old age. Don't be in a hurry to acquire the trappings of maturity. Let them develop naturally.

What you can do is read. Read and read carefully. Start a commonplace book, in which you write out sentences and passages that really strike you as important. You'll look back on it later and have absolutely no idea what it was about this or that that meant something to you, but copying out passages strengthens the mind. Carry the book with you. Try to memorize poetry—Shakespeare's sonnets will never let you down. In the end, you will have a happy old age if you read a lot now—always understanding that you think about what you read. There are books that you ought to make a point of re-reading. I can't tell you what they are, but I can tell you that I've read Jane Austen's Emma seven times, and that it is always a different book. Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a more recent book (much) that I've re-read and will probably re-read again soon. Write about what you read—that's something that you can do.... Or start another blog just for your reading notes. But be sure to read, read, read.

That's why I don't believe in writer's block. I believe that "writer's block" is something that happens to people who have stopped reading. Or they have stopped reading widely; they're just about obsessing one or two authors and suffocating on imitation. As you grow older, there's one deep danger: you know better and better what you like. To some extent, you have to follow this knowledge, but to submit to established taste is to die, which is why so few middle-aged people have active minds. Now, when you're young, and the field is wide open, you ought to read everything that comes to hand. When you're older, you won't believe what a luxury it was to have, when you were young, plenty of time for reading.

Real writers are turned on by what they read. Not by everything that they read, but by a lot of it. Reading creates an itch, the itch to write in response. The itch to answer. People who don't read but who want to write—and they're unfortunately numerous—are the most pathetic people on earth, in my view. My good friend B doesn't get enough time to read, owing to the demands of his life. He would be a happier writer if he could read more. But already it is very late: he is sixty. How to catch up on the reading that he ought to have done as a young man? Well, in the end there is no catching up, there is just making the best of what you can do, and B is doing extremely well with that. But it would be easier if he had read the way you do when he was your age.

The one other thing that I would counsel is this: don't try to be original, not yet. Don't be afraid of imitation—but make sure that your imitations are very good imitations, that you understand what you're imitating from the inside out. This is how all great artists learn their craft, and, to a lesser extent, it's how writers get to be good. (The difference is that, unlike artists, writers deal in a medium that's universally understood, at least as speech.) Don't try to show off, but make sure that when you do show anything, it's well done. Take pains. Look things up when you're not quite one hundred percent sure.

And now I shall close this tedious outpouring. Immodest man that I am, I hope that you will read it several times. Just remember this: writers can't help writing. If you can go for a year without writing anything important to you, then writing is not your métier. I'm pretty sure that this is not the case with you, Migs, but always remain open, now at least while you're young, that writing is not for you. Believe me: it will make you a better writer if writing is what you're meant to do.

Here finisheth the lesson (a bit of old church English).

Best

Kester

I can time Kester, the boy is so regular. His Nintento Game Boy and an odd assortment of school things in his hands, he comes in the house, unafraid of the dogs, to pretend to listen to my mother, his tutor, as she teaches him the basics. Algebra, verbs and nouns and predicates, the Blessed Sacraments, the priest as an instrument of Jesus Christ in confession, that sort of thing. Kester has big, sad eyes, and cute beads of sweat under his nose, where soft hairs will soon grow, in five, six, seven years, once puberty sets on.

But where was he last week? Nowhere to be seen. Yet he didn't go anywhere. It was the haphazardness, or the bad health, of our own household that won Kester temporary freedom. My father had shingles. My sister Lourdes had chicken pox. My younger brother Josemaria had a sort of attack Sunday inside the church, then discovered at the checkup that he had an abnormally slow heartbeat. At about the same time, all coincidentally, of course, the miraculous ministry of Father Fernando Suarez, a sort of healing priest, arrived in Manila. His pre-Lent carnivale drew mother, grandmother, early-rising aunties, and over a thousand others to a healing mass at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Mandaluyong City. It was later reported in the papers that the profundity of the religious experience was marred by fainting people and profiteering.

Once upon a time I was Kester’s age. I played and prayed. I attended novenas and joined processions, and rubbed my chest with blessed oils. I looked up at a helicopter in the Manila sky, flying over Luneta Park. Pope John Paul II was here now, said the people beside us on the grass, pulling themselves up. This was World Youth Day. Mother herself seemed about to burst; what a way for the pope, after all, to arrive. We couldn't really see without binoculars, but I, too, in the intensity of the moment, was prepared to weep for joy. The helicopter landed behind the park's Quirino Grandstand and from it emerged the caricatured ears of President Ramos.

Once upon a time I had a tutor, too—a kind of after-school governess. Her name was Miss Lyn, Miss Lyn with the fair and naturally powdery skin. I used to dread her arrival, because it meant having to face the piano. It was so embarrassing, because even then I had sweaty palms, and had to wipe the wet dirt that they made off the keys. Did you practice any since our last session? she would ask, in the same manner that mother asks Kester questions: with gathered eyebrows and a tone pregnant with disapproval, that just knew that the answer they were looking for was not the answer they were going to get. Well, you can't expect us now to move past the opening until after summer. “Für Elise” was so hard, especially for a beginner, but I knew that to have rebelled and sought refuge in my first-generation Game Boy was out of the question. Besides, Super Mario never interested me, and Miss Lyn would have frowned if it did. 

Lucky Kester. He finally showed up today and was, as usual, absorbed in the kaleidoscopic blocks of his Nintendo world. Big eyes, sweat under the nose, and—what's this?—no black Ash Wednesday cross on his forehead. I wanted to find out if he'd washed it off. But I didn't ask. Instead I pinched his ears because that means we are friends, and he can watch YouTube videos on my laptop once he finishes his homework.

Pictures

I cannot describe it, the kind of pictures you take. I can't put it into words. Well, writers are always going to have problems putting anything into words, but a couple of weeks ago, when I looked through an album you'd put up on Facebook, with pictures from your recent trip to Hong Kong, I went through a rather severe case of it. I thought I'd lost all ability to write! If we were talking of speech, I wouldn't be stammering, but mute. A troubling malady of wordlessness indeed, sucking out the vocabulary and leaving only the word "like", whatever that means on Facebook.

Of course, you must be aware that, in the first place, I know nothing about photography—other than that it's probably nice and awfully cool to be able to make a living out of it. Two: that's how many photographers I've dated. (Or two and a half, but that's a long story.) It occurred to none of them that it would be flattering, wouldn't it, at least to me, if they took my picture, just one shot, an artsy little shot with a subtle bokeh effect. Not that I ever asked, no (although I may have pathetically struck a pensive pose once or twice); I was terrified that I would cause a particular temperament to come to the surface, complaining about bad light, pleading lack of appropriate lens, muttering a carefully worded reminder that one didn't work for free, that the labor of love was expensive labor. So I learned little from them about the art of taking pictures—certainly not more than I did, than we did, about the pain of breaking hearts.

Having said that, I hope it means something when I say that your pictures make me feel something I cannot describe. It happened again with the Hong Kong album, though I've never been to that part of the world myself. It began with the picture of a red taxi in Yau Ma Tei, banners proclaiming "Drug Drug" and "Exclusiv Fashions" (without the second e) in the background. Then an exterior shot of Chungking Mansions, from across the other side of the road. Then, after a series of pictures of your friends walking to the ferry, in Harbour City, I think it was, a stunning early evening cityscape, between sea and sky. This was followed by a bunch of gorgeous pictures of Jenyne Butterfly performing in some big pole dance event, but the feeling I'm talking to you about—a description of which, because it's so unattainable, has been substituted by this letter (and if here you'll indulge me)—the feeling was keenest when I looked at an almost empty street in Wang Chai District, the neon signage of Neptune II Pub and Disco staining the concrete with red light; at a snatched glimpse of two young Chinese men on a bench (you captioned the picture with "Beautiful Boys"), looking quite intensely at each other, the plaid-shirted one holding his friend's nape; at a shadowed little staircase in Lan Kwai Fong, with a string of red and white lanterns hanging from a street lamp (my favorite from the set); at the lady in a crisp blazer sitting at a round table in the dim, old-fashioned bar (I saw barrels), accidentally lighting her face up with her cell phone screen; at a ray of morning or afternoon light spotting the heads of two women in black who were walking along heavily peopled Causeway Bay; at the blurry close-up of a couple eating at an upholstered booth inside the restaurant where scenes from In the Mood for Love were shot; at a rich grayscale image of many tourists on Kowloon City Ferry Pier, their long extended shadows heaped across the floor as though to match the verticality of palm trees and banner stands; and at an elderly man pedaling his bike along an unknown street, a three-tiered lunch box dangling from his right hand.

It's kind of strange, actually. When we met in the university eleven years ago—can you believe it? (neither can I)—I had no idea that I would not know another photographer, no matter how many I have since met, whose work moved me in the same way that yours does now. No kidding. Your pictures have a certain quality, I don't know what it is, they're all very beautiful, of course, but there is something else, an enigmatic quality, that stirs within me sadness, anxiety, yearning—all at once. It puts me in this really funky and vulnerable sort of mood; my palms sweat, my pulse quickens, as though I've been unhinged by a minor-key song. I cannot for the life of me tell you why or how, and even if I can and did, you might very well dismiss this as nothing more than the sentimental opinion of a friend trying to be a fan. But there's no denying the ability of your pictures to sweep me away in a torrent of feeling, demanding me to look upon them and see, invariably, an image of everything I have ever loved, and everything I have ever longed for.  

I just thought that you should know—and know, that is, through something other than a Facebook Like notification. But if one word, one click of a button, was all I had in the world, take it anyway to mean something nice and sincere, even if it did come from someone who knows nothing about photography.

Guttural Flutterings, or Glutterings

Are you, like, serious? So, okay. I have, like, twenty articles or whatever that I can read for free on The New York Times. (No thanks to the friggin' paywall!) And I'm trying to make it count, right? Then all of a sudden, on this sidebar or whatever, there's, like, a recommended piece, or a "Most E-mailed" thingie, published under the science section, about how young women talk. It's irresistibly entitled, "They're, Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Currrrve," and I'm like, ooh, that sounds super interestaaang. So, you know, while I don't really read a lot of science stuff, if I have one article left to read, this will be it, right? I mean, this has to be it. Because it has to do with language, and I'm a writer? Or ... yeah.

So, anyway. I click, naturally. I read about how "girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang," about how embellishments like "like," like "bitchin," like "uptalk" (which is when you end your sentence with a question mark, even though you're not really asking a question?), like what they call this "guttural fluttering of the vocal cords"—or "vocal fry"—are actually marks of linguistic innovation. To support this, Mr. Douglas Quenqua, the reporter, cites, like, a bunch of speech experts, and goes on to say that young women, from Valley Girls to the Kardashians, "serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large .... As Paris is to fashion, the thinking goes, so are young women to linguistic innovation." 

First of all, whoa. Zomygod. This must be, like, a major breakthrough. University researchers are researching on this in universities, and NYT reporters are reporting on this in the NYT? Seriously. It's just the sort of thing I look forward to every Sunday afternoon whenever I get an E-mail with a roundup of the articles I'm likely to be interested in (and which other peeps are paying for to be able to read more of than the non-paying peeps). Aaand, here's Krugman with a brief note on macroeconomics and ethics! Here's Michiko Kakutani talking about the new Penelope Lively! Here's A.O. Scott, King of the Throwaway Line, with his review of Lars von Trier's Melancholia! Finally, here's Quenqua, on, um—on female college students and their guttural flutterings.

So I'm actually surprised that the NYT hasn't gone out on a limb to herald a new era in portmanteau-making. Seriously. Isn't now the best time to declare words like "chillaxing," "awkweird," "relationshit," and "adorkable" as official words? Official—as in, good enough for a dictionary? Are their ahead-of-the-curve-going gutturally fluttering—gluttering!—utterers not incubators, too, in a way, of a revolution? It's the revolution, of course, of why say anything better if you can say everything much worse?

Or maybe this portmanteau story is already headed to my E-mail, like, this coming Sunday. Along with the note that I'll soon only have ten free articles a month. Instead of twenty. What the fudge, man! Like, who does that?

The Master of Petersburg

There is something overwhelmingly important he wants to say that the boy will now never be able to hear. If you are blessed with the power to write, he wants to say, bear in mind the source of that power. You write because your childhood was lonely, because you were not loved. (Yet that is not the full story, he also wants to say—you were loved, you would have been loved, it was your choice to be unloved. What confusion! An ape on a harmonium would do better!) We do not write out of plenty, he wants to say—we write out of anguish, out of lack. Surely in your heart you must know that!

Talk about déjà vu. I didn't know I'd already read the first several chapters of J.M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg—until a recent quick look through the notes I'd saved in my E-mail indicated that I, in fact, had had my hands on a copy four years before I bought another one. It must have been lost in the fire that destroyed our house a couple of years ago, or else it must have been a borrowed copy, since returned to its owner. In any event, it was a book that I started but had not, for some reason or another, finished reading. 

However, if it was the case before that a growing collection of Dostoevsky created the need to read The Master of Petersburg, which I am sure it was, this time it's the other way around. Reading Coetzee, reading this particular Coetzee novel, this beautiful and very powerful imagination of Dostoevsky's return to pre-revolutionary Russia after having been summoned from Germany by the mysterious death of his stepson, makes me want to go out and grab a copy of the Dostoevsky novel that I hadn't read: Demons. Where the former ends is where the latter begins.

Dangwa

There was love in the Manila air, as evidenced by the scene at Manila's most popular fresh flower market, Dangwa. At the intersection of Dos Castillas and Laong-Laan Streets, close to where the Hospital of the Infant Jesus stands, cars crawled, horns honked, romantics roamed, and the Valentine's Day crowd—a crowd of vendors, shoppers, tourists, journalists, cameramen, policemen, condom-distributing health department volunteers, and anti-condom Catholic priests—thickened. Also, colors bloomed, bloomed marvelously around this place that smelt of La Trinidad, Davao, Tagaytay, Cotabato, Laguna, Thailand, Holland, and Ecuador, of the buds, petals, twigs, and pleasantnesses of elsewhere. On any other day, Dangwa serves merely as the matrons and maids' favorite pit stop. Today was not any other day. At some other time, love means a happy or sorrowful entanglement of body parts and hearts. But this is not some other time. Surely, hours before sunrise, the vendors must have awoken, rolled up their roll-down gates to have an early start, and resolved to ply their trades in loud, unguarded superlatives under those tarpaulin canopies: the reddest roses, the loveliest lilies, the creamiest carnations, the tenderest tulips, the lowest prices. Some bundled these with chocolates, or cards, or wine. Others offered nice vases and baskets and bags. Still others banked on the sheer bigness of their bouquets, or on the strength of their reputation. Whatever the proposition, whatever the gimmick, love here was a word used to sell a flower, and perhaps nothing more.

Innocence

Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it's the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it's what adults have when they forget what it's like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can't remember what that feels like.

From Edinburgh, a novel by Alexander Chee.

Trip to A Library

I recently went to a library. Yes, a library! It's called the Mario Feir Collection, located somewhere in the Fort Bonifacio district. I write "somewhere" because, despite having lived in Manila for the last twenty-six years, and despite the very clear directions given me by Mr. Feir, I could not find it. I could not find the building—an apartment building, one of many in the area—and had to ask the taxi driver to make a U-turn when I realized that we had driven past the Manila American Cemetery then, much later, the Philippine Army Grandstand.

"This is it," I said to the driver, more than once, so sure of myself. (I am obviously extremely geographically challenged.) It turned out that I was getting off by mistake at the Embassy of the Republic of Singapore, then Fairways Tower, then Essensa East Forbes, then Fifth Avenue Place, then the place where the military dead are buried. "I don't think this is it, sir," the driver said, whereupon I jumped back into the taxi—more flustered each time. Didn't he realize I could walk? It was, you know, entirely his fault.

Anyway, about the library: I'm glad I eventually did find it, because it is a rare collection indeed. How rare and how valuable, I wouldn't know, and it might do well to ask a pro, like the outstanding Filipino Librarian, Mr. Von Totanes, for a more scholarly description. Suffice it to say that a lot of the Filipiniana and Asian books in Mr. Feir's collection aren't the kind of books that you'll find in a local public library or school library. (And the titles are definitely not the sort that you'll find in a local bookshop.) These include plenty of first editions, inscribed copies, facsimiles, other antiquarian books—more than enough, certainly, to give me the sense, as I examined the contents of the wood-panelled bookcases, that each preserved some precious part of literary history, one that cannot be told with printed words alone.

A classic bibliophile, Mr. Feir left New York about five years ago to return to the Philippines. He brought with him his growing Filipiniana collection, which, after settling into his Fort Bonifacio apartment, he then opened to students, researchers, collectors, readers. The library also includes ephemera like old postcards, posters, stamps, antique maps and prints, all of which Mr. Feir was kind enough to show to me during my visit. (I also eyed a DVD, among the music stacks, of Weissenberg's recording of Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka.)

With that said, I meant originally to seek out specific Philippine literary titles for—ahem!—research. "I have recently begun a dream project: a novel," I wrote to Mr. Feir the week before. (Although after months and months of work, I cannot for the life of me say that I have accomplished anything.) I told him I was looking for something from which I might perhaps be able to take inspiration. "This must sound like an unusually vague request," I added, "but having heard of your kind reputation from a friend, I hope that you'll be able to point me in the right direction, or that you'll be able to make recommendations based on the contents of your collection." The note brought a swift reply, and a few days later, I was speaking to him on the phone, scheduling an appointment. 

I must admit that instead of studying the stack of Filipiniana books and Rizalian stuff that he had taken the trouble of preparing before my arrival, I spent a lot of time in the library admiringly leafing through a couple of big (and inscribed) photo monographs by Arthur Tress. (I would have to keep myself in check next time.) Meanwhile, if you are doing any sort of research on Asia or the Philippines, I encourage you to check out the library's website. And if you do go, make sure you don't show up unannounced. Write or call.

One McKinley Place

26th Street, Crescent Park West

Fort Bonifacio Global City, Taguig 1634

Philippines

Phone: +632-8560957

E-mail: arbs at asianrarebooks.net

Ian

Ian F. prepared lovely strawberry ice creams, topped with cherries, and he always greeted everyone with a joyful "Mate"! It must have been a Kiwi thing. He was also a deeply religious man. He always said goodbye by saying, "May today be better than good." He bid a final goodbye a little over twenty-four hours after All Souls' Day.

No one saw it coming. He'd felt a sudden piercing pain in his stomach early in the week, while jogging or walking, like something inside had burst. When it became clear that something was seriously wrong, Bing, the mother of Ian's gorgeous five-year-old boy, Josh, took Ian to the hospital. Or wherever it was they attended to the sick in the provincial municipality of Matalam, Cotabato, where they lived, or in Kidapawan City, which they neighbored.

I went to Ian's house for a visit a couple of months before his death. The town was rural and simple; it seemed to me like a place where unhappiness did not exist. (There are many such places in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao: beautiful, undiscovered, blessedly virgin, quite unlike Manila.) There, I had a delicious Filipino lunch. I admired the expansive vegetable garden. I dribbled an abandoned basketball. In the front yard, there was a wooden playhouse, and little Josh, who takes after his cheerful father, peered at me doubtfully through its cracks and openings, and I gushed, "How cute. Look at those hazel eyes."

At the hospital the doctors operated on Ian; cut him open. The next forty-eight hours brought forth a somber exchange of phone calls and text messages between Bing and Ian's friends, colleagues, fellow expats. Her last message read, "Please help me pray for Ian as he travels to the Great Beyond to meet his Creator.” Cause of death was renal failure. He was sixty-three.

Saturday

Sometime last month, or was it two months ago? Sometime ago I read Ian McEwan's Saturday, which I found to be very entertaining. It reminded me, vaguely and likely inaccurately, of a Don DeLillo novel. I don't know why it did; it just occurred to me (as in occurrere, to run against, befall, present itself) that it did. I remember that I did try very hard not to think about what I was reading while I was reading Saturday. I just let myself be drawn in. What was there to think about? I learned nothing from it. I must be thick or I must have bad taste. From Amsterdam, also by McEwan, I learned a little bit more. From Joseph O'Neill's Netherland—to me, a more congenial post-9/11 novel (if there's such a thing as that), and which I'm rereading right now—I learned a lot more. But I'm talking like Miss Van Vluyck of the Lunch Club. Is the novel a lesson? Should it instruct more than it should amuse?

Why We Are Not Shallow

Dear Mr. F. Sionil José,

I am positive that I recently bumped into you at Book Sale in Mall of Asia. It was the Basque beret, and the walking stick, that made me almost sure of it. You stopped at the first shelf of hardcovers, flanking the line leading up to the cash register—there never seems enough room to maneuver in sorts of stores like this—while I brandished a Cynthia Ozick that I was hoping you would catch a glimpse of, and be impressed by, and take interest in, and decide to want to have yourself, and therefore ask me about—where might I have gotten a copy of the book? (the Ozick, in fact, had been tucked in between some heavy accounting and Web programming manuals)—so that I could also introduce myself and mention, as a way of saying that your entry had not gone unnoticed, or unacknowledged, not least by me, that I had sent The Pretenders (and Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado) to a friend abroad, and that I'd thought carefully about the gift, because this friend was keen on familiarizing himself with the literature of the Philippines, and that I didn't want to be sending strictly Rizalian stuff over and over.

You must think me shallow. You wouldn't be wrong. I am shallow and pretentious: a very bad combination. I once bought, as another gift to another friend, a Star Trek: Voyager novel from Fully Booked, and I made sure I didn't brandish that. There is a phrase, I believe, to describe my whole shame about the purchase: "wouldn't be caught dead". As in: I wouldn't be caught dead buying a certain five-hundred-peso science fiction book, but if it were a second-hand, yellow-paged, fifty-peso prize-winner—a veritable piece of art—I'd be exhibiting it aggressively for fellow scavengers to see.

Yet I never did move to speak to you. I was too shy! I also thought that there would be other occasions in the future for a proper introduction, such as when I would again hop in a taxi and make my way to Padre Faura, to your own bay area bookshop, ready to perform my fetishistic sniffage of books, books, books from other countries by other writers I could only hope to afford to read: six-hundred-peso Pamuks, seven-hundred-peso Coetzees, eight-hundred-peso Trollopes, thousand-peso Norton anthologies. And if there I should see the same beret, whose wearer might be instructing the perfectly helpful saleslady, or seen through the office window upstairs, above the PEN posters, writerly going over a sheaf of typed sheets, then I'd be left without a doubt that it is indeed you.

It was thus without disappointment or disrespect that, after the tinkle that signaled the end of my Book Sale transaction, I slid mutely by you and left, happy that I hadn't spent any more time, money, or words inside the increasingly cramped store.

That was several weeks ago. Shortly after the episode, I read your Philippine Star opinion piece on why we Filipinos are shallow. "This is a question...which I hope all of us should ask ourselves every so often," you wrote. "Once we have answered it, then we will move on to a more elevated sensibility." It was something of what people call these days a "viral hit"; their nerves pinched and consciences stirred, readers shared the piece boisterously on Facebook and Twitter, also commenting one way or another that it is true what Mr. José says, isn't it?

But it isn't true, if I may say so respectfully. We are not shallow—well, I am, but the Filipinos you speak of, who respond to the native tinikling dance more heartily than to intricate Japanese numbers, who fill their evenings with the dramas and raptures of telenovelas (which, by the way, one must not take for more than they're worth), who gush over the loves of movie stars but cannot be made to read the New York Times, or watch BBC, or listen to Fresh Air on NPR, who seem eternally disposed to choose the materials and entanglements of a simpler, less intellectual life over the delicate civil pleasures and gilded perfections of the life of the mind—I don't believe that they are shallow; not at all.

To not be shallow, one must attempt to engage in profundities, must he not? But there is little room for profundities in our country. Our freedoms are so minor. So, therefore, are our victories. They are victories no less. Just a few days ago, at a traffic light along Padre Burgos, on my way to perform rapporteurial (or, to be less glamorous about it, "handmaiden") duties at a conference, I noticed a jeepney pull up next to the one I was in. The driver stuck his head out, turned to my driver, obviously his compadre, and exclaimed, "Ang sarap ihataw! Ang sarap ihataw simula nang na-welding! Ikatlo ko na ito ngayon, pare." (Translated to English, rather lamely by me, it means: "This feels incredible to hit the road with! And it has felt incredible since the welding job. This is already my third round today.") Bronzed and battered though he seemed by the torrid city-infected afternoon, the man had, I could see, the sort of look that cannot be anything other than the look of happiness, and the kind of smile that startlingly exposes the teeth, as though these are bones. Only, he had no teeth.

An absurd example, surely, but I hope you see my point: that in this country the freshly shaped chassis of a chrome wagon is worth far more than any novel and that engagement in profundity does not guarantee any relief from pain. Being a writer, like you (though of course a far less accomplished one), I wish I could say something to the contrary; I wish I could say that an "elevated sensibility" is what we need to satisfy our deepest yearnings, to save us from our lingering day-to-day glooms. But it wouldn't be true—not right now anyway. Or not until such time that the state manages to expand our freedoms, and it makes a little bit more sense to call out those who are prone to trivializing.

(A side note: being a reader of the NYT, like you, I oftentimes find that the paper cannot possibly be made for people like me—for the helplessly un-American, that is. Reading its relentless coverage of Hurricane Irene around the time that underreported Typhoon Mina hit the Philippines made me feel like I had no business reading papers from the other side of the world. Or from an entirely different planet, it seemed like at the time.)

Might the irony of it all be that, with these words, I am positioning myself in a better, more sophisticated place? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What I am certain of is this: the day I put myself forward as someone who isn't shallow will be the day that I also finally, fully admit that I am a terribly unhappy man. Even possibly a terrorist—a terrorist by way of pen, if you will. Indeed, given the ruinous—at times murderous—inefficiencies of the state, I wonder why there are not more terrorists in the Philippines. I wonder why the modern-day Ilustrados haven't yet formed a group akin to, say, the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany or the Brigate Rosse in Italy and called themselves, I don't know—Los Malalims. (Now there's an idea!)

Or might I be remarking on an altogether different matter? Forgive me if you meant only to call out specific people who cannot afford to be shallow—could they be public officials?—and who cannot, must not, behave as though they were made of Tarlacian sugar: bound to melt in the face of tears and flood and blood. But—but—I am not a student of politics; I don't have anything intelligent at all to say about political goings-on.

Whatever I do have to say, I hope you'll hear me out on it. And I hope that, the next time I see you in one bookshop or another, you'll ask where I got the Ozick, so I can say, unabashedly, that Filipinos are not shallow, and you'll find a copy at that dusty little corner of the room.

Measuring the World

Once you have navigated past the first few pages of Measuring the World (or Die Vermessung der Welt), young Daniel Kehlmann’s most recent novel (strictly speaking, that is—Fame doesn't really count, does it?), you'll realize that the story at hand isn't as daunting, or even as ambitious, as the title suggests. You'll even get the sense that Mr. Kehlmann must have been laughing at himself when he wrote this delightful comic tale.

Measuring the World follows the lives of two German geniuses of the Enlightenment: Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt and the unsociable Carl Friedrich Gauss, straight as a whip. Both of them have set out to survey the world using their respective brands of genius and eccentricity, but, save for this common goal and a meeting in 1828 at a scientific congress in Berlin, the ways of these two prodigious scientists cannot possibly be more different. In the middle of a spectacular, almost mythological expedition, fearless traveler Humboldt determines the altitude by measuring a snow bridge that he and French botanist Aimé Bonpland have to cross in order to survive; Gauss, meanwhile, makes astronomical charts and calculates and corrects the trajectories of planets all by himself in his house at Göttingen, just “at home in the kitchen”.

The events proceed at a comic book pace, and Mr. Kehlmann banks on exaggeration to paint semi-faithful, semi-whimsical caricatures (as all caricatures should be) of two figures in history whom scholars (not including the author, definitely) are likely to take too seriously, and who both later appeared in banknotes. In one scene, Humboldt bastardizes Goethe in front of four oarsmen by translating "Wanderer's Night Song" in a way that will have you laugh out loud. In another scene, Gauss finds himself in a genuinely mathematical moment (he has successfully drawn a seventeen-sided figure), only to be overwhelmed by the force of a hurting molar.

(Zimmerman) felt like praying. This must be printed, and it would be best if it appeared under the name of a professor. It wasn’t the done thing for students to be publishing on their own.

Gauss tried to reply, but when Zimmerman brought him the glass of water, he could neither speak nor drink. He made a gesture of apology, wobbled home, lay down in bed, and thought about his mother up there in Brunswick. It had been a mistake to come to Göttingen. The university here was better, but he missed his mother, and even more so when he was ill. At about midnight, when his cheek had swollen still further and every movement in every part of his body hurt, he realized the barber had pulled the wrong tooth.

If you're a fan of magic realism, you'll likely enjoy all of Humboldt’s adventures. But I'm not a fan of magic realism; the chapters set in the Amazon and the Himalayas reminded me instead of The Adventures of Tintin, but wilder. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know, but I secretly wish that Mr. Kehlmann made Humboldt "explore the blessed islands" of the Philippines. He did, however, allude in the most subtle of ways to Humboldt's (alleged) homosexual tendencies.

Ultimately it is Gauss' story that proves to be the more intriguing one. What was really inside the mind of that genius? Of course, one need not take pains to illustrate that it was an extraordinary mind, unimaginably mathematical, but what makes Kehlmann's portrait of Gauss—always pining for the familiarity of all things domestic—a truly intelligent and affecting one is its picture of a man being imperfect, being all too human.

Originally written in German, Measuring the World was translated to English by Carol Brown Janeway; a few sentences get a little problematic, but I'm really just nitpicking. After all, given the difficult linguistic differences between German and English, what might one expect? At least, Kehlmann's storytelling is contemporary, and the very German irony of Measuring the World is out there for even the least alert readers to recognize. "Now he knew," reads a passage describing one of Gauss’ precocious discoveries, “that all parallel lines meet." Paired by many for measuring the world and shifting paradigms, Humboldt and Gauss may never really have had anything in common—except, that is, for 1828 and a less-than-reverential presentation in this deceptively light novel.

Fiesta

As I went downstairs I heard Bill singing, "Irony and Pity. When you're feeling... Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity. Oh, give them Irony. When they're feeling... Just a little irony. Just a little pity..." He kept on singing until he came downstairs. The tune was: "The Bells are Ringing for Me and My Gal." I was reading a week-old Spanish paper.

"What's all this irony and pity?"

"What? Don't you know about Irony and Pity?"

"No. Who got it up?"

"Everybody. They're mad about it in New York. It's just like the Fratellinis used to be."

From Fiesta, which I read again recently and enjoyed even more thoroughly. I'm finding it truer by the day that I understood so little of whatever I was reading when I was nineteen or twenty or twenty-one, compared to what I know and understand now at twenty-six. Which means that by the time I'm forty, I'm going to be even more keenly aware of what I missed at twenty-six. Or as a friend put it: "You think that you know what you’re doing, but the whole point of having brains, it seems, is to grasp, in retrospect, that you didn’t."

Goon Squad

He's standing at the railing, looking out. It's the first time I've seen him be still.

I go, Do you even remember being our age?

Lou grins at me in my chair, but it's copy of the grin he had at dinner. I am your age, he goes.

Ahem, I go. You have six kids.

So I do, he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didn't have sex with this man. I don't even know him. Then he goes, I'll never get old.

You're already old, I tell him.

He swivels around and peers at me huddled in my chair. You're scary, he goes. You know that?

It's the freckles, I go.

It's not the freckles. It's you. He keeps looking at me, and then something shifts in his face and he goes, I like it.

Do not.

I do. You're gonna keep me honest, Rhea.

I'm surprised he remembers my name. I go, It's too late for that, Lou.

Now he laughs, really laughs, and I understand that we're friends, Lou and I. Even if I hate him, which I do. I get out of my chair and come to the railing, where he is.

People will try to change you, Rhea, Lou goes. Don't let 'em.

But I want to change. No, he goes, serious. You're beautiful. Stay like this.

But the freckles, I go, and my throat gets that ache.

The freckles are the best part, Lou says. Some guy is going to go apeshit for those freckles. He's going to kiss them one by one.

I start to cry, I don't even hide it.

From A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan.

I did one last thing before deciding to stop using Facebook. I looked for Jennifer Egan's page and left a comment. "You've got a reader in Manila, Jennifer Egan!" I wrote. "Thank you kindly for writing A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is friggin' incredible and quite unlike anything I've ever read. I should buy copies for my friends, because we all seem to get caught up in the tragic romanticism of our quarter-life existential crises (growing up without knowing it, in other words). Your book reassures me—us—that we'll somehow survive."

She wrote back a few days later. (This is all public, by the way. Anyway, if a Pulitzer Prize winner sent me a message in some form or another, I'd wish not to keep it private! Pompous man that I am, I'd brag about the correspondence to anyone who'd listen.) "Migs," she said, "I love the thought that the book has meaning to you in Manila. Thank you for these fantastic words, which have made my night. I'm very happy to have you as a reader."

Like.

Thieves in Our City

It's feeling like a movie out here in Manila; a bad movie. Just recently, our help, Lisa, came back to the house from a trip to Mercury Drug weeping. Her cell phone had been stolen. Two masked men on a motorcycle had come up to her at Labo, the stretch between Laong Laan and Maria Clara, and threatened to kill her with I forget what the weapon was: a gun or a balisong? It doesn't matter. "I'm concerned about my SIM," she said. "I saved so many numbers and messages in there." We told her it doesn't matter, at least you have another cell phone, a nice new and shiny red one with a TV. She bought it from Robinsons Place Manila a couple of months earlier. It's a better phone than mine; mine has a touchscreen that doesn't do anything when you touch it.

Then a few days ago my younger brother, Josemaria, came home from work swearing he'd never ride a jeepney again. He began talking about how, earlier that morning, after six but before seven, he had closely watched a pickpocket slip inside the EDSA-Cubao jeep he was in and steal another passenger's cell phone. He said that the poor passenger must have been a construction worker, he looked so sleepy, he had no idea what was happening. I told Josemaria to ride a taxi or a Tamaraw FX. "There aren't any FXs that early," he insisted. I didn't believe him. I said I used to ride FXs to Cubao every day when I was working at Eastwood. He said again, "There aren't any FXs that early."

Even if there were FXs, or even if he began taking taxis on his way to the office, I'd still fear for his safety. Lately there has been plenty of news on television about the bukas-taxi boys, whose modus operandi is to open the unlocked passenger doors of taxis running along EDSA and seize whatever they can seize from whoever's at the backseat. Should the victim or the driver jump out in the middle of traffic and chase after them, the boys—children, really—will pick up rocks from the sidewalk for throwing. Then they'll run across the rails of the MRT to the other side of the road.

It's really kind of messed up. It doesn't even matter to these thieves whether you have cash in your pocket or not, or a credit card in your wallet or not: whatever you have with you, they're going to take it away. Yesterday morning I woke up to find that the water meter by the gate of our house was gone. I remembered the dog barking in the middle of the night, but who would have thought it was at someone trying to make a living out of selling stolen brass?

Actually, I should've known. There are enough stories in this city about the disappearance of the side mirrors of parked cars. There are enough stories about vanishing handbags and purses in food courts, about laptops lost in Starbucks. Last year, when we lost the ancestral house to a big fire, a number of men in firefighting suits went in without hoses and opened drawers and boxes and cabinets, looking for jewelry. A few days later came the scavengers, who searched the rubble for scraps of steel and crumpled iron sheets. There was this case too from last month, when, filing out of a Rise of the Planet of the Apes screening, I noticed an edgy little twenty-something guy in cargo denim place a blue Jansport backpack at my feet. I thought it contained a bomb, so I ran like an idiot to the houseware section, behind a mall security guard. It was only when I heard the crunchy obscenities of the thief's victim that I realized the bag was not about to explode.

Theft happens everywhere, but this is getting seriously stupid. I won't even call it theft. My name for it is despair: a state of being, of thinking, of feeling rather than an act of crime. And while there's little to be said about stealing—other than it's not right, and should be stopped—it worries me what might be said about what's being stolen, and why. I feel often enough like hell for being unable to make a lot of money (although I do seem to consistently spend more than what I make), but scenes of scheming out-of-school youth and water meter pilferage leave evidence not of sullen personal defeat (or kleptomaniac tendencies) but of larger disorders and societal failures. It's not a problem you can solve by chasing.

It's also not a problem you can solve by policing. When I was seven or eight years old, I stole a box of chewing gum: Chiclets. I grabbed it from the checkout counter at the grocery store in Welcome Rotonda and put it in my pocket. It felt so illegal. And it tasted even worse. The gum was disgusting because it came with a special ingredient called conscience. It certainly wasn't worth it, and if security had come after me, if my mother had caught me and told me off for taking things that belonged to someone else, I'd have given it back, even wrapped it in teary-eyed apology. I'm not saying there weren't more serious cases of theft back then, but these days one gets the sense of a new breed of thieves: those who would literally die if they ever had to say sorry; those who will not only refuse to give your belongings back, but who will also threaten you with a fan knife and hurl a big-ass rock through your windshield—hurl it, too, with all the force of their pain. And, by God, they must be hurting: conscience and punishment count as nothing more than a pinprick compared to despair.

It's like a movie, I'm telling you: some sort of poverty porn, with the state at the directorial helm and society as its writers. I believe we all know who the actors are; they're sweeping up all the hardware.

Editing James Soriano

The unedited version of this article, written by a Mr. James Soriano, originally appeared in Manila Bulletin.

"Language, lLearning, iIdentity, and pPrivilege"

English is the language of learning. I’ve known this since even before I could go to school. As a toddler, my My first study materials as a toddler were a set of flash cards that my mother used to teach me the English alphabet. (A set that must have been missing a dangling modifiers card.)

My mother made home conducive to learning English: all my storybooks and coloring books were in English, and so were the cartoons I watched and the music I listened to. She required me to speak English at home. She even hired tutors to help me learn to read and write in English.

In school, I learned to think in English. We used English to learn about numbers, equations, and variables.  (Another James—Henry James—would have disapproved of the missing Oxford commas.) With it, (and again!) we learned about observation and inference, the moon and the stars, monsoons and photosynthesis. With it, we learned about shapes and colors, about meter and rhythm. I learned about God in English, and I prayed to Him in English.

Filipino, on the other hand, was always the ‘other’ subject—almost a special subject like PE or Home Economics, except that it was graded the same way as Science, Math, Religion, and English. My classmates and I used to complain about Filipino all the time. Filipino was a chore, like washing the dishes; it was not the language of learning. It was the language we used to speak to the people who washed our dishes.

We used to think that learning Filipino was important because it was practical: Filipino was the language of the world outside the classroom. It was the language of the streets: it was how you spoke to the tindera tindera (vendor) when you went to the tindahan tindahan (store), what you used to tell told your katulong katulong (maid) that whenever you had an utos utos (command), and how you texted manong manong (a hierarchal marker) when you needed “sundo na sundo na (to be picked up).”

These skills were are required to survive in the outside world, because we are forced to relate with the tinderas tinderas and the manongs manongs and the katulongs katulongs of this world. If we wanted to communicate to with these people—or otherwise avoid being mugged on in the jeepney—we needed to learn Filipino.

That being said, though Having said that, I was proud of my proficiency with in the language. Filipino was the language I used to speak with my cousins and uncles and grandparents in the province, so I never had much trouble reciting.

It was the reading and writing that was tedious and difficult. What proved to be difficult was the reading and writing. I spoke Filipino, but only when I was in a different world like the streets or the province; it did not come naturally to me. English was more natural; I read, wrote, and thought in English. And so (do not use "and so" unless you're Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace), in much of the same way that I later learned German later on, I learned Filipino in terms of English with an essentially English understanding. In this This way, I survived Filipino in high school, albeit with too many sentences that had the preposition ‘ay.’ ('Ay' is not a preposition; it's a linking verb.)

It was really only in at university that I began to grasp Filipino in terms of as a language and not just dialect (do you mean) a "lingua franca." Filipino was not merely a peculiar variety of language, derived and continuously borrowing from the English and Spanish alphabets; it was its own system, with its own grammar, semantics, sounds, even symbols.

But more More significantly, it was had (or "inspired") its own way of reading, writing, and thinking. There are ideas and concepts unique to Filipino that can never be translated into another. another language: try Try translating bayanihan bayanihan, tagay tagay, kilig kilig, or diskarte diskarte.

Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of learning. And with With this comes the realization that I do, in fact, smell worse than a malansang isda malansang isda. My own language is foreign to me: I speak, think, read and write primarily in English. To borrow the terminology of Fr. Bulatao, I am a "split-level Filipino."

But perhaps this is not so bad in a society of rotten beef and stinking fish. For while While Filipino may be the language of identity, it is still/also (just helping you out here) the language of the streets. It might may have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned. (It was the language of Jose Rizal, though—one of the twenty-two that he allegedly used.)

It is neither the language of the classroom and the laboratory nor the language of the boardroom, the court room courtroom (a compound word—thank you, Cory, for the reminder!), or the operating room. It is not the language of privilege. I may be disconnected from my being Filipino, but with a tongue of privilege I will always have my connections.

So I have my education to thank for making English my mother language.

Editor's note: I hope that your education taught you the meaning of the word "asshole", because you'll have to forgive me for being one to you. Now go ask your mother for a new set of flash cards.

Littérature Engagée

Dear Mr. J.M. Coetzee,

I just finished reading Diary of a Bad Year. It's the first novel of yours that I've read; it certainly won't be the last. (Promise.) Also, while it hasn't, according to the Internet, generated as many good reviews as, say, Disgrace, I'll likely think of my first Coetzee as more meaningful than whatever will come next. And not just because you had rather accurately written up a Filipina character; but also because Diary exampled the kind of novel that I think the world sorely needs today. Never mind the reviews; never mind the critics.

"And one is thankful to Russia too, Mother Russia, for setting before us with such indisputable certainty the standards toward which any serious novelist must toil, even if without the faintest chance of getting there: the standard of the master Tolstoy on the one hand and of the master Dostoevsky on the other. By their example one becomes a better artist; and by better I do not mean more skilful but ethically better. They annihilate one's impurer pretensions; they clean one's eyesight; they fortify one's arm."

Of course, it isn't only at this latter passage that I'd nodded my head. (And that's all I can do! Part of my agreeing with the opinions in your book is recognizing my inability to come up with similarly intelligent ones.) An earlier one ("On universities") just went straight to the point. "The real university," it read, "may have to move into people's homes and grant degrees for which the sole backing will be the names of the scholars who sign the certificates."

This cannot be emphasized enough. I myself come from a university here in Manila that, from the looks of it, is being turned, slowly but surely, into a business enterprise: buildings being named after entrepreneurs; programs and premises being vested by moguls; professors struggling to fulfill quotas. It's the sort of system in which money so often changes hands; the sort of system, therefore, wherein gaps in learning can occur. Well, yes, but who am I to underscore the problem? No one; I am one of the damaged goods, in fact. But this doesn't make the task of restoring our learning institutions to its purest form any less urgent indeed. Otherwise, the whole freaking undergraduate bulletin will soon turn into a press release, or a sort of marketing kit. And more students will be mined ("mine!") instead of instructed.

Anyway, enough of that rant. I do hope you appreciate the fact that your books are actually widely available here, in terms of shelf presence in bookstores. (I know I do! And while I understand your fundamental aversion to the ceremonies, the prizes do help.) I'm probably going to read The Master of Petersburg next, since I see copies of it everywhere I look. This is not to mention my terrible interest in seeing how you had reimagined the life of a Russian novelist who also happens to be one of my all-time favorite writers. 

Pius

What a name: “Pius”. I didn't know him well; I just knew that he served at San Isidro Labrador Chapel. His name may explain why my most vivid recollection of this neighbor is of his performance at my grandmother’s wake, at Saint Peter’s in Quezon City, three or four years ago. As if to render unthinkable the kind of rumors that circulated about any middle-aged bachelor who attached himself to church in these fallen times, Pius played his guitar with an innocence that approached the holy. He’d brought along the usual retinue of teenagers—Len Len, Jenny, Men Men, Rey Boy, among others—who otherwise would have had nothing else to do but whistle the time away on street benches or place their fathers’ bets for the San Lazaro horse race (with its racetrack that evoked the socio fundadores, in sepia).

Led by Pius, and flanking the open casket of my father’s mother, they sang a chorus of church songs. During Mass, Pius sort of doubled as a lay minister, spreading cloth over a makeshift altar and assembling the chalice and ciborium at a makeshift tabernacle. After Mass he put his guitar in a corner and stayed with us, cleaning up cookie crumbs left by family friends whom he had also encouraged to mark their condolences in the guest book.

Pius.

Well, he died, too. He was forty-seven. Diabetes. He spent his last days walking around the neighborhood with his neck covered by a makeshift scarf; he had this wound on the back of his head, from the nape downwards, this wound that wouldn’t heal and he wouldn’t show and which people who had nevertheless seen it described as being the size of a plate. “That’s impossible,” I thought, when mother announced at the dinner table that Pius had died. She wasn't kidding me. “Maybe the size of a saucer,” I went on thinking, “but not a dinner plate, I shouldn’t think. That’s horrible.”

Xingu

"No one reads Trollope now," Mrs. Ballinger interrupted impatiently.

Mrs. Roby looked pained. "I'm only just beginning," she confessed.

"And does he interest you?" Mrs. Plinth inquired.

"He amuses me."

No one reads Trollope now. I mean, if there's something I can say to Edith Wharton about the state of "now", it's that there is so no one who reads Trollope now, compared to then, when she'd written this masterful short story called Xingu. But what is Xingu anyway? That's part of the joke that she tells.

"Amusement," said Mrs. Plinth sententiously, "is hardly what I look for in my choice of books."

"Oh, certainly, 'The Wings of Death' is not amusing," ventured Mrs. Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like that of an obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to submit if his first selection does not suit.

"Was it meant to be?" enquired Mrs. Plinth, who was fond of asking questions that she permitted no one but herself to answer. "Assuredly not."

And the joke that she tells is a joke that still works today. I smiled, I gathered my eyebrows, I laughed, I blushed—all at the same time—at the thought of a Lunch Club, and at the thought of the not-so-remote possibility that, if I were a woman, if I were living in the first two decades of the twentieth century, I'd be part of something so pretentious and terrible.

"Assuredly not—that is what I was going to say," assented Mrs. Leveret, hastily rolling up her opinion and reaching for another. "It was meant to—to elevate."

Miss Van Vluyck adjusted her spectacles as though they were the black cap of condemnation. "I hardly see," she interposed, "how a book steeped in the bitterest pessimism can be said to elevate, however much it may instruct."

As it turns out, of course, I find myself situated between the first two decades of the twenty-first century—which, really, would be the perfect time to raise my eyebrows and turn my nose up at things like Twitter, Facebook, postmodern literature, bromance and chick flicks, that sort of stuff, that sort of gimmick. But I do enjoy that sort of gimmick.

True, after a healthy dose of Wharton's shorts, I am now reading J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (pretty heavy stuff, both for dilettantes and intellectuals), but I have also already ouched at several people's assumptions that I take myself "way too seriously".

"I meant, of course, to instruct," said Mrs. Leveret, flurried by the unexpected distinction between two terms which she had supposed to be synonymous. Mrs. Leveret's enjoyment of the Lunch Club was frequently marred by such surprises; and not knowing her own value to the other ladies as a mirror for their mental complacency she was sometimes troubled by a doubt of her worthiness to join in their debates. It was only the fact of having a dull sister who thought her clever that saved her from a sense of hopeless inferiority.

So I've taken pains—or, come to think of it, taken none at all—to do Ms. Roby things like wear 3D glasses to see Avatar, stay up at night to catch TMZ, listen to Bruno Mars instead of Rufus Wainwright, and choose Evelyn Waugh over Anthony Trollope because the latter, in my opinion, is, you guessed it, more amusing.

Why have you got to be so harsh? I'm enjoying myself.

First Reaction: Norway Attacks

I have been keeping up to date with the news from Oslo and Utoya, as I am sure you have. Ninety-two dead. (So far.) That is at once incredible and horrific. While I know little about European politics, and don't have much in terms of opinion (a Swiss friend and intellectual mentor will surely advise me to zip it unless I know it), I nonetheless shake my head at what I must say is a classic case of conservative backlash. Well, it is far more than that, really. It is right-wing extremism at its bloodiest, and I am not surprised that the man who is connected to the attacks—a Mr. Anders Behring Breivik—is, reportedly, a fierce Christian and anti-Muslim political conservative (who plays war-related video games).

Ah, if I were him I'd have felt lucky, what with such a liberal government. (Cough, cough!) His resorting to terrorism proves that the world is still plagued by people who love their religion far more than they love peace.

The Assassin

I was scanning the pages of Granta 69: The Assassin when I came across a photo essay by former Magnum photographer Kent Klich.

In 1989, the first television pictures from Romania's children's homes shocked the world. More than 100,000 undernourished children were kept in institutions reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps: left lying in their own faeces, bound hand and foot, maltreated by their 'guards'. No one touched them gently.

Soon it was found that thousands of the children had been infected with HIV, either through transfusions of infected blood or by syringes that had been reused without being sterilized. The fact that low-birthweight children in Romania would be given micro-transfusions of blood to help their chance of survival only increased the risk of transmitting HIV.

According to President (Nicholae) Ceaușescu, HIV and Aids did not exist in Romania—which is why, for a decade before his downfall in 1990, the virus was able to spread so quickly. Under his regime, families were required to have as many children as possible—the norm was five children to each woman—which put an impossible burden on the poor. Contraceptives were forbidden, abortion was illegal. The result was thousands of primitive abortions and tens of thousands of children abandoned to state institutions.

Sound familiar? I don't mean to make rash comparisons and assess the state of the Philippines in light of what happened twenty years ago in Europe, but lost, it seems, in all this talk about the proposed Reproductive Health Bill is the serious underreporting of HIV incidence in the country.

According to the local health department, 6,016 cases of HIV/Aids have been reported from 1984 to 2010. Yes, that seems to be the twenty-six-year total. There are close to a hundred million people in the Philippines—over sixteen million in Metro Manila alone, meaning there are more people in this capital region than in New York City, but that's another problem, I guess.

In any event, it doesn't take a mathematician to know that those numbers don't add up.

Martin

Martin with brother Nole. 

Remember Mitzie? She had a son. His name is Martin. He looks exactly like her—cotton-haired, short-muzzled, marble-eyed, caramel-colored, soft-pawed. Which is to say he looks nothing like his hideous dad, a dog named Brutus, who is owned by my cousins Fred and Eugene, is neither Spitz nor Shih Tzu, and looks as ugly, and is as ill-mannered, as his name.

While Martin, fortunately, took after his mother in terms of looks and cuteness, he didn't exactly charm people. He certainly didn't charm me. Coming home on late nights I often turned the key to the gate of our house and heard Martin waiting on the other side—not cooing as one might herald the arrival of a master, like Mitzie did, but barking at me as though he was about to rip my head off. Or, if he wasn't being mean, he was being annoying. Like whenever he positioned himself to sleep in front of a screen door—the entrance door—so that I couldn't go in without forcing him to move, or that I couldn't go out without hitting his head or his leg, upon which he always let out a sharp, ear-piercing yelp.

"Get out of the way," I yelled at him. The son, ultimately, of his father, Martin acted like he couldn't care less. So in a move that I'm sure PETA would have frowned at, I rolled out the garden hose, connected it to the spigot, put a finger through the other end, and sprayed water, nasty man that I was, at Martin, who retreated drippingly to a dry safe corner, or under the van.

Then last year we lost the house to a fire, which ripped through everything and had us—two families, ten people in all, plus two dogs (Mitzie died four months earlier)—squeeze into a rented three-bedroom apartment one block off the rubble. Displaced from his comfort zone, Martin did not act uncomfortably. Something else happened. He behaved courageously, heroically, realizing perhaps that his family extended to include us, in the same way that we'd always thought ours included all pets. He stopped barking at me, for one, and, like his mother, became prone to humping my Pumas or Happy Feet—in addition to my father's Cole Haans, my siblings' Hush Puppies and Havaianas, my mother's sandals bought from Trinoma—as a form of warm welcome. He ran to catch roaches in the apartment, or the rats that sometimes appeared to chew the wires of my brother Francis' salvaged CPU. He moved away to give and respect space, taking little quiet dog steps to the open kitchen area upon the arrival of occasional guests. When last Christmas a cousin from California came with his hair-dyed, big-earringed, wetly lip-sticked, Prada-handbagged fiancée, Brutus went on to sniff the lady's legs while Martin played to perfection the part of a dog with manners, a dog with refinement.

As a reward, Francis began to take him out to walk in the evenings and enjoy the cool-breezed freedom of Manila suburbia. Such that Martin, the formerly insufferable beast, became Martin, the giddy, utterly lovable tongue-wagger.

I'm forced to hold on to moments like this now that Martin has been reduced to a stumbling mass of hair—no thanks to something called canine distemper. The last few weeks, he's been on IV, with an anti-bite mask wrapped around his mouth. He's also had to deal with an inordinate amount of eye discharge, which has led to futile attempts at wiping it off against the nearest solid surface, and which has basically rendered him blind: a dog walking pathetically into walls, mirrors, the legs of chairs. There's also, as I mentioned, the 'stumbling' part. He's fighting, brave little boy, he's fighting, but he can't lift at least one of his legs—can't lift it long or high enough to keep him from losing balance, like a disabled person whose grip on the stick constantly falters.

So I think to myself, come back, Martin, come back to your old self, jump up and down and bark at me if you have to.

But his breathing is increasingly labored; his life fading. Yesterday, my younger brother Josemaria sent me a text message that read, "Papa is asking if it's okay with you that we euthanize Martin." That sent me into a pretty horrible state; all of a sudden, there was a lump in my throat that made its way out through my eyes and on to a piece of Starbucks tissue. (Well, it wasn't that poignant. I actually sobbed like a wittle girl.) I responded immediately by saying I'd spend as much of my measly income to keep the dog alive. But it isn't the money, my brother replied. The neurological damage is permanent. Like in Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Martin's completely disoriented, he no longer has any idea what's going on, he doesn't even respond to his name anymore. And it will be like that for as long as he lives. He's not going to get better. There is nothing, in other words, that we can do to save him.

Today, Father's Day, seeing Martin walk limply into a pool of his own pee (incontinence is one of the symptoms of the disease) and bump his head against something every five seconds, I've decided to change my mind. I guess there was a part of me concerned about where my convictions lay, but there was a bigger part: a wavering spirit, a reluctance to admit that the lives of dogs are just so short. Too short: no sooner did I let my guard down to love and admire Martin than this happens. It's awful, the high-pitched whimpers, the sound of him weeping. The quavering legs, the eyes that no longer open. Martin is all but gone, as difficult as it is to accept. He is family all the same, and it is with nothing but love that I say it's time, finally, to put the dog to sleep.

P.S.: Martin got the injection today, 20th of June. I'm sure he'll send our love to Mitzie.