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.

Why I'm Pro-Life, Whatever That Means

There's a sticker, unpeeled, on my father's office desk. I don't know where it's from, but it's meant to demonstrate one's opposition to the Reproductive Health Bill. "Say no," the sticker reads, a thick red diagonal line dashing across the glossy sheet of vinyl. Maybe it was given out on a recent Sunday at the local parish; maybe it's meant for the family car.

You might have been hearing a lot about this bill, first proposed more than a decade ago, in 1998, and which, if approved, will serve as a kind of national health, population, and development policy, giving Filipinos—especially the poor—access to proper sex education, family planning devices and programs, and related free or low-cost social services through taxpayer support. There's been plenty of debate and controversy about it, to be sure; as for why, well—you must keep in mind that majority of the 94-million-strong Philippine population is Catholic, and that any talk of things like contraceptives, birth control pills, vasectomies, and sex education is likely to be met with raised eyebrows. Here, divorce isn't even legal. (We're something of a standout in that regard, Malta having voted positively in a non-binding referendum on legalizing divorce.) So you can imagine the humorlessness with which the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) had, at one point, threatened to excommunicate President Aquino, if he should ever signify his support for the RH Bill.

As for why now, don't ask me; true, this is the first time that legislation of this kind has won the support of the health committee in the Philippine Congress, although it seems to me that the whole affair has less to do with politics than with a kind of divine comedy. Of which I, too, have been thrown into being a part. "The problem with 'pro-choice,'" tweeted my younger brother J (who is named after the founder of Opus Dei, and who until last month hadn't yet graduated from college), "is functionalism." Being an advocate of the bill, I replied that the problem with being anti-RH Bill, or "pro-life" as the opposition wishes to be called, is theism: after all, just before this particular exchange, the CBCP had spent close to a million pesos—possibly more—on the placement of anti-RH Bill advertorials in several national dailies. J sounded irritated. "Someone's intent on building straw hats." Then I wrote, not without disproportionate, hair-pulling fury, "Don't be so cocky just because you'll have a medal round your neck," right before un-following him on Twitter and blocking him from my Facebook Wall. I told you it's funny. But it's the kind of comedy that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

And it's the kind of bad taste that I felt as a kid whenever I heard someone utter the word "condom". It sounded like a Bad Word, and I believed it was a Bad Word. "Condom" dirtied up sacred body parts like the penis and the vagina with bastard associations. As though the word itself was equivalent to sin—never mind using the thing. But like all young boys, I was drawn and tickled by the mystery surrounding this Badness, by the adult seriousness with which I'd been told, in hushed parental whispers, about the immorality of contraceptives. I remember one early summer morning at the local basketball playground when I stood by the entrance gate next to a garbage can, riveted by the sight of a crinkled, soggy latex chute, as gelatinous as a jellyfish and as clinical-looking as a test tube. Oh my, I thought. So that's what it looks like. By then I was convinced that a world of truths was being kept from me. One such truth is this: there was no dead embryo in that garbage can.

Murdered five-day old babies, the carcinogenic qualities of some oral contraceptives, the likelihood that condoms will promote promiscuity, the spread of AIDS, and abortion, the presumed evils of an increasingly secular society: these (and some) are being cited by the "pro-lifers" to present their case. But forget about the bill for a second; forget about statistics and theories on population economics; forget that there's even a debate. With or without this political culture war, there would still be an unnecessary number of Filipino women and men living in shanties—in what a visiting American friend had described as put-together "scraps of tin and cardboard"—or sleeping at night with only the comfort of laid-out newspapers on pavement; in the daytime doing nothing but beg foreigners for "dollar, dollar" with babies pressed to their breasts to arouse sympathy; and they would still truly believe that they can afford to have four, five, six children and fornicate their way to raggedy defeat more than they can afford to go against what the church says about contraceptives. I know because I asked: there is a similarly striving woman somewhere in the streets of Malate, selling twenty-, fifty-peso second-hand books by Hemingway and Nietzsche (among others)—laconic brilliance and French existentialism spread out on sidewalk—and if you go ask her why she thinks condoms are bad, you'll get the same answer.

There would also still be an unnecessary number of pregnant Filipino women jumping down the stairs, hoping to cause a miscarriage. Or they're abusing fake or generic Cytotec (gastric ulcer drugs), bought from someone in an Internet forum named "Crizzy" or from the most questionable corners of the Quiapo blackmarket—without, needless to say, prescriptions. Or, if the goal is to prevent instead of end pregnancy, they're drinking herbal potions from who knows where, containing who knows what. These are the options: thudding on stair treads, anguished online pleas, ripened cervices, uterine ruptures.

There would still be the case from two months ago at Universidad de Manila, in which a political science freshman took a .38 revolver to class and shot his pregnant 17-year-old girlfriend in the head after a disagreement on what to do with the baby. He shot himself shortly afterward. They are as dead as dead, as lifeless as a statistic, but I would not believe anyone who tells me that age-appropriate sex education, birth control, or emergency obstetric care could not have done something—anything—to keep those teenagers alive.

And there would still be, for both men and women, the very horrible anxiety from which suffers anyone waiting for the results of an HIV test. If you have never had to do that, take my word for it: it's not fun. It's crippling. No amount of Xanax or Rivotril will soften the blow of hearing the word "positive"; neither will forgiveness from God soothe the guilty conscience of a barebacker waiting, wanting, hoping, praying to hear the word "negative". I have heard terrible stories from friends with the virus—stories of disease, stories of death—but if there is anything I might be able to observe from the way these have been told, it's the resolution to be smarter sexual beings, and the joyous persistence of life.

So forgive me for disagreeing with people who accuse me—and other proponents of the bill—of "functionalism"; with generations of clergy and conservatives who deny Filipinos the freedom to question and reject the Badness of contraceptives; with members of the opposition who call themselves "pro-life". Forgive me for disagreeing with the term with which they have labeled themselves. Being "pro-life" necessitates an experience, an understanding, of the struggles of humanity, and it requires the acceptance that, frankly, humanity sometimes works to disengage us from our youthful innocence. We do not become advocates of murder for believing there are no dead embryos in the aftermath of protected sex.

"You wonder whether you should laugh or cry," an observant Swiss friend wrote on the matter of this bill. I ought to have told him that the matter calls for neither; it calls instead for more disagreeing. And I'll do just that, vehemently so, should anyone peel off the sticker on my father's desk and paste it where I can see. I'm pro-life, I'll say. And I'd mean nothing funny by it at all.

If One Didn't Stop at Apples

Twenty-five years is how long it took me to finally show up at something that happens five minutes from where my family lives — indeed, from the Quezon City district where I have lived all my life. And it happens every year. The La Loma Lechon Festival: a day for celebrating the loveliness of suckling pig — stuffed, roasted, costumed, paraded (in floats, too!), and eaten — symptomatic of the Filipino appetite for fiestas, loud ceremonies, and sustenance that can be delicious just as decidedly as it can be dreadful.

If not for lechon, La Loma would have been known for cemeteries and columbaria, which is just as well. At a ridge in this district that overlooks Manila was where José Torres Bugallón, fighting valiantly in the Philippine-American war, had died, along with many other Filipino soldiers. Let’s not forget, too, the innumerable roosters sacrificed all the time in the name of sport at the La Loma Cockpit, past which — as one heads toward Santa Cruz — stands the Chinese General Hospital. That this building has not only survived, but grown steadily since over a hundred years ago despite being surrounded by the La Loma Catholic Cemetery, the Manila North Cemetery, the Manila Chinese Cemetery, and the Manila North Green Park is truly worthy of note, one which I lamentably hadn’t taken until just now.

But back to suckling pigs: who knew how charming they can be if one didn’t stop at apples! After a day of putting on my Journalist Hat, pretending to know about photography, and falling in love with saucy, meaty, thick-skinned, and publicly idolized beings that cannot possibly break my heart — at least not until cholesterol fills my arteries to bursting — I have “photo-bloggers” (and friends, certainly) Nykko Santos, L.A. de los Reyes, Lizza Capucion, and Sidney Snoeck to thank. If they never forced me to go out and move my bottom I would’ve closed myself off for a little longer. Even from a place so close to home.

Dennis the Tricycle Driver

There is a man named Dennis who, for a living, drives a red tricycle in the island of Guimaras, located in the bigger island of Visayas. I met him when I rather clumsily disembarked at Jordan Wharf. There, a crowd of barking drivers — of tricycles and “multi-cabs” (public utility jeeps, really, each of which can fit a maximum of fourteen people) — cordially harassed us pump boat passengers; they roared in Ilonggo, announcing ridiculous rates, and pointed their greasy index fingers at their luxury tin vehicles. They must have seen us as prospects right from the start of our eleven-peso ride, which, if you board at any of the ports on the southeastern edge of Iloilo City, takes ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the weather. Most things depend on the weather, it seems like.

The day was hot and humid and the sparkling waters were almost blinding. I was thus disposed to not have much patience for swindlers. Dennis, who must be in his early thirties, stood out because he had dutifully directed me to the tourism information desk where two young ladies both wearing yellow Survivor t-shirts and denim jeans made sure all visitors were given a warm welcome, and that no one overpriced fares. They had a price list. “You’re going to Enrico Beach, right?” one of them said. She was scanning the pages of her notebook. “Let’s see. If you take a multi-cab, a one-way trip should cost you no more than four hundred pesos.”

Needing less space, I opted instead for the tricycle and hired Dennis: five hundred pesos for five hours, to the beach and back, covering a total of not more than sixty kilometers, but with likely side tours, too, to any one of Guimaras’ caves, or any one of Guimaras’ waterfalls, or any one spot where one could take pictures and notes and admire the unspoiled economy of one of smallest islands in Western Visayas.

I first heard about Guimaras in 2006 when the Manila newspapers reported the worst oil spill in Philippine history. To me, the story had the impact of a footnote — evidence of my urban snobbishness. But the mess of that has since been cleaned up; its last ugly ripple has ebbed. Now, when the island province is brought up in conversation, the beaches are praised as being better than that of Boracay. The sand and soil have been ascribed adjectives in superlative form, such as “purest” and “most fertile,” respectively. The sweet mangoes are raved about, too, with Bill Clinton and the present Pope alleged to be two of its most famous eaters. “Plant a mango tree and send your child to college,” so went the motto of former Guimaras Governor Emily Relucio-Lopez (at least that's what she had been quoted as saying), and I wonder if there’s any other place in the world where tuition is appraised in the currency of tropical fruits – and beachfront hospitality, in US dollars.

“You’re heading the wrong direction,” Dennis told me coolly. He was sporting a childish moustache and the great laughable Asian goatee. “Alubihod is where the tourists go. I’m happy to take you to Enrico, but I haven’t even been there since high school.”

Three years ago, during which time Dennis was working in a bakeshop in Libis, Quezon City, his father died. So he left Manila and went back home. After the funeral, Dennis’ wife insisted that he stay on the island, or at least in Iloilo City. He did. He effectively put Manila behind by buying the tricycle, which he now rides to go wherever in Guimaras he wishes to go, be it to a passenger’s destination, an odd boredom-conceived adventure, or his house in the municipality of Buenavista.

At the start of our Guimaras tour, Dennis filled his vehicle up with four 1.5-liter Coke bottles of reddish unleaded gas; then he drove me to Daliran Cave. We descended a long autumnal staircase before landing on what looked like a set location for the next Indiana Jones movie, if there is going to be a next Indiana Jones movie. I hasten to add, however, that it was King Kong whom I half-expected to emerge furiously from the deep black shadows of the cave.

This piece would not have been about Dennis, but I lacked the material to talk at length about the pump boat captain, whose name is Ariel. He had enough quips, mind you, but the best thing I could remember from my sea-breeze conversation with him was that he had worked for Quezon City’s First District Representative Bingbong Crisologo. Ariel had helped build the congressman’s house. Unfortunately, I found it impossible to put a fashionable "The Talk of the Town" sort of spin on Ariel’s cement-slapping endeavors from the yesteryears.

Dictation

"Everyone uses it," she said. "Everyone, all over the world."

And was that it really, what Essie gave out just then in her mercurial frenzied whisper? Lie, illusion, deception, she said — was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

From Dictation, a quartet by Cynthia Ozick.

• After my immersive, romance-tempering experience of reading The Folding Star, I thought I'd follow it up with something less draining and slightly more idle, like, say, a collection of short stories. Just then I'd purchased a copy of Cynthia Ozick's Dictation, which, as it turns out, is every bit as brilliant as I'd expected my first Ozick would be, yet certainly not any lighter or more idle than the Hollinghurst novel.

• I say that because a week after deciding I wanted to write exactly like Alan Hollinghurst, I changed my mind and decided to want to write like Ozick instead. Not that either task is easy. But probably the best advice that I ever was given is this: don't be afraid of imitation.

• And who would not want to imitate the way Ozick writes? Her stories remind me of Alice Munro's. (Hey, both writers even have the same sagacious white hair!) You cannot read them in a way that's disaffected or merely transitory. The title story is awesome, of course, and, reading it, I experienced what any fan-boy would — to be that close to, or intimate with, the genius of Henry James and Joseph Conrad — but the story I liked best is "At Fumicaro": a love story. It is a modest love story, so modest there's nothing extraordinary in it, but Ozick captures perfectly, I believe, the dynamic of any (blasphemously) interracial relationship, as well as the social and intellectual imbalances that often enough happen to contextualize that relationship. "There were scores of poor young women all over Italy — perhaps in Fumicaro itself — in her position," reads an unforgettable passage. "He could not marry them all. Her tragedy was a commonplace. She was a noisy aria in an eternal opera. It did not matter. This girl was the one that he had been led to."

• There are certain writers reading whom a wannabe like me finds his mojo. In my case, I've found that Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh, and Hemingway, among a few others, are the ones who jolt me into the urgency of "write like that if you're going to write at all". Not even coming close to any of them is not important — at least not yet. The point is to understand why it's them who jolt me and not others. The point is to identify, when one goes into studying the craft of storytelling, which writers one wants to study. Having finished Dictation in a matter of two sittings, I am left with no room to doubt that Cynthia Ozick is the newest addition to my list.

The Folding Star

"So of course you saw him again."

"I probably would have wanted to, because I was a young romantic and to me ten minutes with a handsome stranger was clearly the same as true love, and besides it had the romantic complexities of danger, and sin, as I suppose I thought of it then. I can see now that it also conformed to the sense one had in those years that everything important was secret, and so anything secret must surely be important."

From The Folding Star, by Alan Hollinghurst.

• I finished reading The Folding Star a couple of weeks ago, but it's only now that I've 'distanced' myself enough to take it in, and perhaps to write a few notes about it. 'Distanced', I guess, because it's a kind of novel that requires you think about it for a little, to sit by yourself and think and let the feelings flourish, in the same manner as one would during the credit roll of an emotional film.

• The Folding Star isn't so emotional, of course, as it is horny. There's so much sex in it, written by Mr. Hollinghurst in a way that is at once beautiful and disturbing, and narrated by the Edward Manners character in a way that's simultaneously disaffected and right-in-your-face. But in fiction, sex isn't always about sex, or it isn't just about sex, and it is these implied meanings of the carnal — meanings beyond the carnal — that The Folding Star has implored me to contemplate.

• Which begs the question: am I a reader old enough to contemplate? As shown by the above quote, to the young, beauty and sex are pretty much indistinguishable from love and importance. However, to me, I'm afraid, they are no longer quite so. I must be old! Or I must have grown so much older. Indeed, in a way, I would not have understood The Folding Star if I'd read it at nineteen as well as I did reading it at twenty-six. I would not have pushed the book back to my shelf and thought, for weeks afterwards, oh, how right you are, Mr. Hollinghurst.

• My copy, by the way, is inscribed with "Wishing you all the best in your literary career". It would have missed the point if it wished me instead all the love in my life.

Ilustrado

Dear Mr. Miguel Syjuco,

You might remember me as one of the countless fans who wrote to you with a congratulatory note after a review of Ilustrado appeared in The New York Times. Or you might remember my thoughts on your first novel as being odd, for I had told you that I didn't quite know what to think of it. Well, forget that. I'm writing now to tell you how your work has come at just about the best possible time, at least for someone like me.

You have probably heard a crazy amount of good things about Ilustrado. (I notice you even have a "Fan Shrine" that's made its way to the top of a "Miguel Syjuco" Google search!) So what I have to say probably won't mean much, I mean compared to the positive coverage that I see, say, on the New York Times or Philippine Daily Inquirer or Time or even Smile Magazine. But do you know that the novel reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's Snow? There's that sense, for the reader, of being thrust into a story that flirts with simulations of the real. There's that same kaleidoscopic quality tinging every event while the story moves on and the main character investigates the details of a mysterious death, the dirt trails of politics, and the clues to a philosophical puzzle. Beyond all these, however, beyond whatever might be said about the story, I think that Ilustrado—its existence, and the acknowledgment of this existence—carries a significance similar to that carried by Snow on behalf of the Turkish people, or by The White Tiger on behalf of India. I make a reference to Aravind Adiga's novel because it was only when I read it that I realized the extent of what you have accomplished. Which is: put us on the damned map. You are likely to think of yourself as a writer who happened to be Filipino, and not a Filipino who happened to be a writer, but I believe very firmly that Ilustrado also successfully pushes a distinct Filipino agenda.

You see, before your book I'd never come across a review of a Filipino novel on any major international publication such as the NYT. I didn't even think that it was possible. Your Time interview was headlined by describing Ilustrado as a "Breakout Novel", but it may as well have used the adjective "breakthrough". A Filipino like me used to sit and dream and think that the biggest deal would be to receive grants from NCCA, win Palanca Awards, sign copies for fans at Powerbooks and National, hold readings at half-empty lecture halls in Ateneo, La Salle, UP. Then Ilustrado happened. I don't mean to glamorize your success, and I don't mean to take for granted these national institutions, but I hope you realize—and I write to you in case you don't—that Filipino writers need not feel so cynical about themselves and their professional fate. I hope you realize that, since reading your novel, my friend in New York, a mentor of sorts, has pushed me harder (and more furiously) to work, work, work, write, write, write. I hope you realize that my mother, a housewife who cannot be made to read Dostoevsky, is suddenly paying attention to an Inquirer feature story on Miguel Syjuco and teasing her son, why can't you be more like your namesake?

So thank you. And I am sorry that, on my first note, I'd complained that Ilustrado left me without opinion. I tell you now that it has certainly brought inspiration.

Thank You For Drinking Gasoline With Me

(I wrote this in 2007, as another writing exercise. Having closed the old blog, I thought of publishing the piece here. Don't laugh as hard as I just did!)

Thank you for drinking gasoline with me. May the bartenders of Café Adriatico never call that a martini ever again. “Oh my god,” you said, smiling, “it does taste like gasoline, with a hint of puttanesca sauce. Or at least that's what you expect gasoline to taste like.” Not tight enough, I was slightly embarrassed by my choice, which does not mean that I wasn’t to blame, since I really ought to have studied the cocktail list more curiously. But there were formidable distractions all around us that evening, weren’t there? From the oval marble fountain on our left side came a childish jingle; we both wondered where the speakers were. A glittered man in a shiny gold intergalactic costume with a sort of antenna on his head was lurking nearby to frighten families promenading along Eastwood City Walk, which never fails to turn into somewhat of a posh carnival during holiday season. The powdered high school students whom father used to mistake as prostitutes for call center employees were there, too, using the word ‘like’ in their sentences to replace the commas, and then pushing each other playfully towards the Central Plaza for the Kuh Ledesma concert. Oh, the concert: we, too, were desperate to catch that. And so, contemplating liqueur amid the fluffy adult wonderland, I inadvertently ordered a glass of unleaded. But thank you all the same; it would have been a very dull birthday.

Thank you for drinking ice-cold bottles of San Miguel with me that velvet midnight. You paid me sweet attention, despite the presence of handsomer men on your periphery, and you promptly let me light your cigarette, despite the health hazards of smoking. And you whispered, whispered despite the surround sound that was blaring all that had gone wrong after the seventies. You kept drinking with me in a charming display of solidarity. Were you aware how unbelievably tired I was? That day, before our little rendezvous, I interviewed a source for a story, typed the transcript afterwards, wrote dozens of letters to friends, scoured the bookstore for a copy of Ethan Frome, played billiards with my holidaying cousins, and promenaded along Manila Bay. I thought that the beer would make me indefatigable—especially when taken in your company. It did not. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. On my way back, the world fluctuated violently and the dark became neon darkness. You witnessed me fall down under the weight of divine intoxication, once, twice, thrice, and I swear I heard you cry, “Mercy!” Mercy, indeed. But would you like to know what I was then about to tell you, if only I didn’t have to leave for the car park and remove myself from the vomit all over my Abercrombie and Fitch cargo pants? I was about to say thank you, thank you kindly for drinking ice-cold San Miguel with me. The year would have been utterly forgettable without tragedy or self-destruction.

Thank you for drinking Merlot with me, and for pleasantly surprising our party host with your mere presence. I forgot to buy him a present, you see, but reckoned that your coming along with me was enough, which in fact proved to be true. The view from the penthouse of the Greenhills condominium was beautiful; it held me in thrall. I gazed quietly at the impressive Manila cityscape right after leaving you at the round table to mingle with mutual friends from the university—artists and bohemians, directors and actors, advertising executives and vacationers from abroad, successful youth, all of them filled with congee calories and the heady goodness of red wine. Then they took photographs, many of which were of themselves with you, whom they might not see again for a long time. “I don’t want to take the spotlight,” you joked before our fashionably late arrival, “but I’m afraid it’s inevitable.” I was afraid, though, of some other inevitability: the usual prolonged exchange of pleasantries, not just with those other guests whom I didn’t recognize but also with people I knew very well. So thank you for doing my share of talking, for thus happily did I bask in my moonlit standoffishness. Thank you very much, even though this year there will decidedly be less to be thankful for, because, according to Jonathan Franzen, “the end of the binge is the beginning of the story,” at writing which I am no good.

The Finkler Question

I am not sure if I should be ashamed to say it, but the only reason I finished reading The Finkler Question is because I didn’t want to abandon two novels in a row. Less than two weeks ago I gave up on The Judgment of Paris, which, thanks to Gore Vidal's prose (it sashays!), I'd found entertaining enough, but which, no thanks to Gore Vidal's prose (it sashays!), after a hundred or so pages I could no longer keep my concentration on. So I started reading the Jacobson, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2010.

Well, congratulations. All I have to say is that I must have really bad taste. Room — one of the shortlisted novels that lost to The Finkler Question — I quite liked but didn't love. I probably still think better of it than The Finkler Question, which, like The Judgment of Paris, I initially thought I was going to fall in love with. The first two, three chapters are really funny. Like I'm-laughing-in-a-coffee-shop-by-myself funny. And then the story, or the long, long reflection, on Jewish identity suddenly emerges and before I know it I'm dreading reading. I must say that it was not solely the whole obsession with Jewishness that made it a chore to finish the book. (Besides, I thought, if I write a book, won't I find myself equally obsessed with Filipino-ness?) But The New Yorker makes an observation that I just have to agree with completely: "Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us." These one-liners work at first, I guess, but the more Jacobson uses it the more I feel like I'm being pounced on. Which would be all right if I weren't reading a novel. But I'm reading a novel, and yeah, sure, while sometimes it's okay to be pounced on, let it please not be one-liners that pounce on me. So, in my humble opinion, the P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh comparisons are way off. The Finkler Question reads more like it's written by a British Jonathan Ames. (An awesome writer still!)

Also, Mr. Jacobson will likely generate an amazing number of followers if he ever decides to use Twitter.

This is not to say I don't admire him. I do! He writes great conversation. I even recommended the book to my Kabbalah-practicing lawyer cousin, writing to him in an E-mail, "There are 'light' insights on Jewishness, Judaism, and Zionism somewhere in there — but I recommend The Finkler Question only so that you can be entertained by it. Lawyerly life can get so busy, after all."

Silver Feather

Everybody’s getting married these days. Those who aren’t getting married are, for career-related reasons, going to Singapore. No, really. I’m Facebook serious.

It usually applies to friends of the same demographic. Twenty-five, like me, twenty-six. Twenty-whatever: they’re not counting too importantly, but thirty does appear terrifying, and it looms on the threshold like an in-law. Also, a college degree. Each has watched and liked at least one art film, not including Lost in Translation; knows at least one huge local celebrity, but outrightly rejects the connection as a claim to fame; has zero experience in manual labor; pledges support for, instead of against, the proposed Reproductive Health Bill, all while feigning utter annoyance at having been unable, for one unamusing reason or another, to do anything to express that support.

Now, mother, you are free to lift an eyebrow over me beginning to talk of being left behind. God knows I did, too. “They’re blooming too quickly for their own good” was what they — we — had pronounced early on in a worry-free game of Chinese whispers among twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three-year-olds. “Seriously, how do you make a lifetime commitment to another person at such a young age?” And then one by one, tuxedo by tuxedo, Facebook album by Facebook album, in a series of creatively executed (and often also very silly) engagement announcements and bad dance floor photography, we — they — got married.

Upon receiving these good tidings I now cannot help but feel a growing sense of alarm. Like I’m running out of time or something. Even running out of friends. It’s like armpit hair in high school: you start to look under your arms once you’ve found out that everybody else is growing it. Everybody’s planning their nuptials and buying closets for their new homes, while I’m coming out of the old, I’m-so-normal-and-straight closet and planning this new sort of life. Persecuting congratulations and similarly bitter double entrendes have thus suddenly started to get old. The situation has become a lot less laughable. It’s true that only few of us are left to blurt out devastating quips about the institution of marriage, and about those who chose to protect their love lives under it.

Of this few, a number have left, or are about to leave the country. Which is understandable: anyone who is young, or anyone who hasn’t outgrown restlessness, and who has had to habitually breathe the Manila air is bound to try out some fresh pollution. Regardless of smoking bans, Singapore will seem like a good choice. A dollar there holds thirty-three times more value than does the Philippine peso. The Ministry of Manpower-issued EPEC — or Employment Pass Eligibility Certificate — can be obtained for free by any foreigner with professional qualifications, and it’s valid for a year. Movie stars in Singapore don’t shift to careers in dirty politics, because there are neither dirty politics in Singapore nor movie stars. Ask me any number of times, mother, and I will tell you every time that venturing to support the next left-wing movement or getting involved in any form of politics is going to be so much harder than just buying a plane ticket.

So one by one, kopi tiam by kopi tiam, Facebook album by Facebook album…

I walked into your bedroom the other day to borrow a handkerchief and saw you sleeping. I stopped and thought to myself, God, you’re a beautiful woman. I couldn’t imagine father having married anyone else. There was something about the way you rested your head on the pillow and clasped a rosary in between your hands, something about the way the afternoon wind let a faint silver streak of your hair sway in one soft, natural motion, like feather, made me want to cry, which I did, right after dashing frantically downstairs and shutting the bathroom door. I splashed my face with water and thought that if there’s no other man in the world to do it, I wish I could be the one to make you a grandmother.

I wouldn’t, after all, be twenty-five if you weren’t fifty-nine, and if you hadn’t been twenty-five yourself. Once, you too had to concern yourself with the legalities, the conventions, the sacrifices of surrendering to love. You had to manage what your namesake, Edith Wharton, once wrote of as not being the safe anchorage people were taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. Still you sailed through without being robbed of any of your goodness, to which the crowning touch should be, without a doubt, a grandchild.

Unfortunately, I am in an unpleasant enough position to even think of what it would take for me to help you in that department. I’m probably doomed to be heirless, and – pouncing on the armpit analogy a little bit harder – it’s all because I’m hairless.

Someday — maybe not today, but someday — I will learn to think less of being left behind. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even get married; it may never be to someone I met in a bookstore hunkered over a copy of Vile Bodies, and my getting engaged may never take place on a gondola, as I’ve always imagined it would. Any form of account of how it all happened, you can be sure, will not be published on Facebook. But by then, I think, I’d have ceased to care. The belief that everything was so urgent at twenty-five wasn’t my fault, and it certainly wasn’t yours.

Comfort Food

I was asked to write about Thai Dara – this little restaurant on Granada Street serving “Bangkok street food” – by its friendly proprietor, whose name, which I won’t tell you, is the same as that of a popular (and fictional) English spy, except it’s one letter short and ends with the letter “n” instead of “d”.

“Sure, why not,” was my equally friendly reply. “If an assignment for a food magazine comes up, we’ll certainly write about Thai Dara. But right now my editor is only covering sports and tech and corporate stuff.”

If you live in Manila, the place isn’t at all hard to find. If you don’t live in Manila, you might have to ask for directions from someone who does. Or you might need a map, and a friend who can point out the names of the streets on that map. Thai Dara is that sort of place: unassuming, unheralded, unpretentious (waiters wear shirts, shorts, and slippers), hardly advertised or publicized, perfectly content to place itself right next to an online gaming café, a bargain furniture shop, and a Chinese diner. There’s not much going on inside, which is to say it’s cozy enough: customers come in, waiters take the order, food is served, and videos of Thai musicians in concert are played on a flat-screen TV that hangs on the corner of a wall near the bar. On another wall is plastered a collage of pictures – of male models, city lights, and landmarks – torn from glossy Bangkok magazines.

I only ever order the hot basil chicken and yellow curry rice. Sometimes, the Thai green curry chicken, which is barraged with eggplants. That and some beers or, on a good night, mojitos, which are fatally yummy. I have also sampled the pork satay, of which not even a proper amateur’s assessment is possible, given my fundamental aversion to peanut butter. But servings are huge, and with two to three hundred pesos you’re likely to have on your table more than you can handle. If you have leftovers, have them wrapped in a bag and give them to the little boy in a white sando who waits outside and works for his dinner by flagging down taxis. If you have a car, let the kid assist you in maneuvering your vehicle out of parking, although if you live in Manila and have been driving in the city for years, assistance may not be necessary.

I have not been contacted by a food magazine, and I doubt if that will happen anytime soon. It doesn’t mean I don’t have anything worth writing about, because I do.

She is Cruel in Her Demands

"(What) is certain is that talent does not protect and that the drive to be an artist may set your hair on fire causing first degree burns. This is what happened with these writers before the height of the sixties and the sexual revolution would bring the rest of America into the party. This happened when I was very young and didn’t understand that a sleeping child’s breath on your neck is worth far more than any novel and that wild drink is not an answer to any inner yearning and that Art is fine but only one of the Mistresses of happiness and sometimes She is cruel in her demands."

Journalist Anne Roiphe writing for The Wall Street Journal on “Why Alpha Male Writers Became Extinct”.

Mitzie

She would fit in a shoebox, so it was hard enough to recall a time when Mitzie, our Shih Tzu, was noticeably smaller. But she was positively microscopic when we first brought her into our house about six years ago. She liked to hide in impossible spaces (if only because she could): between the fridge and the china cabinet, behind the open front door (flanking the umbrellas), under the coffee table, behind the sofa, her hairs ruining the bejesus out of the living room carpet. She hid under everything. My brother Josemaria would give her a bath, which she sometimes loved and usually tolerated, and afterwards she’d come back in to dry off and we’d have a towel running all over the place. Mitzie must have thought it was a cape.

She stopped hiding when it was time to eat. “Tzie! Tzie!” we sang after lunch or after dinner, and here was this cotton-haired, short-muzzled, marble-eyed, caramel-colored dog, in a sort of mad, funny rush to get some food, her mouth wide open, tongue sticking out, leaping to catch a shred of barbecue or a pathetic chicken bone in the air. I’d kill myself to watch this in slow motion. Mitzie didn’t like her food in a bowl; didn’t like it on the floor. When she was younger, she ate without manners and left the scraps of what she didn’t eat right where the housekeepers had just swept and mopped and polished. Years went by and floor mats became her dinner table. We have other dogs — ugly, disrespectful shits with eye discharge who live at the garage and bark all day, all looking like some sort of science experiment on sewer rats and warthogs gone wrong — but I only ever gave food to Mitzie. Feeding her made me feel — well, I don’t know, I guess it made me feel a little more human.

Mitzie became a mother about three years ago. It was a long wait. In her presence we used to feign utter despair over this impossible search for a mate. We joked about her being the forty-year-old virgin. She’d been ready for a long time. Left blood stains on the floor. Whenever someone came through the door she’d act like a nymphomaniac, raping human feet and lying on her back to showcase her nipples, which slightly swelled. For a time all she did was hump Nikes, Pumas, Islanders, Havaianas, Fred Perrys, Beachwalks. The one that eventually gave her babies was Brutus, a hideous dog who looks as rough as his name. He must have sneaked in and taken advantage of Mitzie while we’d all been away. The bastard. When Mitzie finally gave birth, I was there with father and Josemaria, and we made use of old newspapers. It was a quiet event and I almost threw up. From then on I felt even more sympathetic towards the dog.

I placed Mitzie on my lap the night before we learned she had pyometra, which I’d never heard of. It was the last night she ever stayed in our house. It was a reassuringly ordinary night, one that now seems farther back than a year ago. I was up late, working. She stayed up with me. She watched me make coffee and fill and refill my cup with hot water from the dispenser. She sighed when I told her to get off the Welcome mat. I’d told her other things on other nights, too, things I’d never tell anyone else, and she’d looked at me the way I was supposed to be looked at: like a dumb fool. If anyone made me feel as though I was taking my disenchantments way too seriously, it was Mitzie. Even when we visited her two nights later at the vet’s, she seemed to be taking everything in stride, no matter that the whites of her eyes had by then turned to yellow. Even her skin was jaundiced. It was like looking through cellophane.

She died the next morning. When we went to pick her up, she was already in a carton box. She fit well enough all right. Came wrapped in a sort of black garbage bag. I poked her body, hoping it wouldn’t lie just motionless like that, hoping the damned dog would come back to life. Poor little Mitzie. It kind of tore me up that she had to die surrounded by people she didn’t know, because a world without strangers is where she had always lived in, and what she’d always made our home.

Call Me by Your Name

If youth must canter, then who’ll do the galloping?

From Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman.

• Not long ago I found the courage to look for André Aciman on Facebook and send him a friend request. Fortunately, certainly surprisingly, he accepted. Unfortunately, at least for him, the connection gave me a remarkable opportunity to write to him directly, even if writing to him directly didn’t necessarily mean that I should expect in any way to hear back from him.

• As though the opportunity to receive and read a signed copy of his book isn’t remarkable enough! Yes, there’s Mr. Aciman’s name, right on one of the pages. The book was sent by a friend in New York and I couldn’t be happier, I couldn’t be more spoiled.

• So I wrote to Mr. Aciman to say, your novel is very beautiful, but it's also very sad. I almost cannot bear how sad it is, and I cannot imagine such a story happening to me, and I cannot imagine it because I won’t let myself imagine it. This story of love and desire — it isn’t merely of a “summer romance” — shows how difficult it is to revisit fond memories of love without the disenchantment of having lost it (if one has indeed lost it). In any event, at the end of my letter, I thanked Mr. Aciman for a book that I will always keep close to my heart. I think it’s so much better than The Line of Beauty, or Like People in History.

• Mr. Aciman, who comes from a Sephardic Jewish family in Alexandria (a good friend from Switzerland and Philip Roth fan commented, “How much poorer would the world of literature be without the Jews!”), and is known for his many reviews and essays on Marcel Proust, luckily did not have to read my ignorant views on whom I presume is his favorite author, and about whom I am under no authority to speak. But if I must go Proustian on you, I’ll say that Call Me by Your Name, in a way, makes me want to grow old as quickly as possible, if only to be able to look at the experience of youth more clearly, more fearlessly, than the young are actually equipped to do.

The Big House

Up and down, up and down, goes one of my first memories of grandmother’s house on Labo Street. I was at that young age when I could predictably be bribed with cookies. Mother used to say, go play with Eugene at the Big House, Lola would have plenty of Chips Ahoy for you if only you’d come visit her. My cousin and I ran from our apartments at the back of the family compound to where Lola Auring — our mothers' mother — spent evenings praying the Rosary and decorating the altar table. We had little idea of her unvisited loneliness. After grandfather died she lived alone in her “unit”, which was called the Big House, for it covered half of our land’s 240 square meters, with a balcony, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, built-in closets, and various sorts of colonial-looking furniture. Outside her window a lovely tamarind tree stood, in sunny days looking somewhat like out of a painting. There was also a mirror at the old-fashioned dressing table in her room that spooked us, for it was old and dirty and it turned our faces into faces we didn’t recognize, but we raced up the stairs anyway to take our grandmother’s hand and bless our foreheads with it. We eyed the little glass jar in which she had kept the cookies, and we stuck our little five-, six-, seven-year-old hands into the bottom of the jar where bits and chips of sweet chocolatey bribery had eroded. Then we climbed grandmother’s warm bed and jumped, up and down, up and down, the lace curtain swaying to the slow, lazy orchestra of summer afternoons.

Room

"World is suddener than we fancy it."

From Room, by Emma Donoghue, in reference to a poem by Irish poet Dónall Dempsey.

• Of the book itself I’m not sure what to think. It is at once gently written and surprisingly funny, but it must be a case of me having a taste for something else other than three hundred pages of narration by a five-year-old boy (with a five-year-old boy’s vocabulary) that I didn’t get to enjoy the novel as much I expected I would. Okay: I enjoyed it, but I don’t know if there’s anything I can take from it.

• Which isn’t to say that Room isn’t a book worth reading, because it is. Jack, the narrator, is adorable. That he presents a “captive’s view of life” (NYT), and that this life is determined by a soundproofed, foam-insulated, 11-by-11-foot room — or dungeon, really (the story is inspired by the Elisabeth Fritzl case) — do not mean that Ms. Donoghue’s storytelling is in any way limited in its ambition. Or imagination. “I remember that story about the Nazi camp,” Jack says, “not a summer one with marshmallows but in winter with millions of persons drinking maggot soup. The Allies burst open the gates and everybody ran out, I think Allies are angels like Saint Peter’s one.”

• There is also a very brief, very easy-to-miss gay kiss scene near the end of the novel — at a public library! — and of course Jack’s mother’s mother, or his grandmother, looks rather confused. Meanwhile the scene rolls right off Jack. Indeed, the world is suddener than we fancy it.

End of the World

Not long ago I was simply minding my own business at the computer table. But we all know, thanks to the Internet, that to mind our own businesses is not quite the same as it used to be; we may find ourselves instantly under barrage. This was exactly what happened: a new “tweet” arrived. In what I like to think of as the same manner we open mysterious doors (pushing them open, not often mindful of the consequences), I clicked and clicked, and finally I arrived on a YouTube video.

Mr. Matt Alber was singing “End of the World”.

I wish I didn’t have to talk about music in writing, or I wish I was knowledgeable enough in music to be able to talk about it in writing. If I say that Mr. Alber’s music is “beautiful”, you may think I'm just being agreeable, that I'm just exaggerating, which most people on the Internet are prone to doing. But I don’t exaggerate. No one has asked me for my opinion, besides.

Few pieces of music have touched me in this way. I mean I like to sing and play guitar, but there's an infinite number of things I know I am definitely not capable of. One of these things is the beauty of “End of the World”. It is a perfectly wonderful song.

You can go ahead and watch it on YouTube, but, in my case, it was listening to it that made me grab a Kleenex. (You can also press the Play button, in which case I shall claim no right whatsoever to the embedded audio content.)

“End of the World” was written on a bank statement envelope about seven years ago on San Francisco bus rides. Mr. Alber was working at the time as a performer in the musical revue, Beach Blanket Babylon. “Somehow,” he said, “that crumpled envelope made it to a piano at the theater before I had to be upstairs getting into costume.”

I wrote to a friend in New York about this discovery right after making it, keenly aware that I’d be listening to the song over and over, and watching the video over and over, probably until I had myself spent or I had expended it out of my system. But songs don’t seem to work that way. Or they don’t let us work that way.

“It’s such a shame,” I said to my friend, “Mr. Alber would be the complete package, except that he kind of looks rough on the eyes.” Ah, it's true all right: the Internet makes us prone to exaggeration, or sometimes bold-faced lying.

Black Swan

A friend of mine had advised me not to watch Black Swan. He said he hated it. We are still good friends, but I have learned to no longer take movie advice from anyone.

Because what an awesome movie. It’s a Joycean portrait of the artist as a ballerina. Or a neurotic. And if I say that I’d love it if Black Swan upsets The Social Network at the Academy Awards, then will that affirm the full extent of my dilettantism?

(Not that I care about the Academy Awards, which I think is too American for its own good.)

Uncorrected

(I wrote this October 2009 as an exercise on playful first-person / second-person; and, after having closed the old blog, I thought of publishing the piece here. So.)

Will you kindly get me a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? I’d be ever so glad. That’s a classic book; my friends tell me so. If you could just visit a bookshop while you’re there, ask the lady at the counter for the title, which, in case you forget it, I wrote on the back of a business card that you will find tucked in your wallet. I also wrote ‘horseradish’, which tastes very nice and which I have come to like almost as much as I do wasabi.

One thing I did not tell you: there’s a paperback copy of the Franzen at the impressive four-storey, energy-efficient, budget-breaking Fully Booked in highly societal Bonifacio High Street. We went there last August, and thus began my dilettantish search. On the first floor I found it, held it, opened and closed and reopened it, almost performed on it my fetishistic sniffing of the page; poor thing, I should have rescued it too and dug it out from the Fiction shelves, which was packed full with books crowded tightly together in alphabetical order and pressed hard one upon the other, each of them looking so very helpless and lonely. A most awful burial, since there wasn’t any room for breathing. I thought at the time, but you’re going back to London, I might as well send you on a fun assignment, which I hasten to remind you cannot be carried out online. (If I should watch Dr. Who with you, then so should you appreciate the curious, fanciful, uncertain, and, most important of all, deeply personal experience of wandering through bookstore aisles.) I also thought, while then contemplating a purchase, what the heck; waiting a few weeks will not matter much in terms of having an effect on my already direly outdated literary sensibilities, which — okay, I know this for a fact — bores you utterly and stupidly whenever I begin to talk about it.

You are none the less missed. I could not help it when, a few days ago, I replayed a video from that night when I introduced you to my friend D in a karaoke joint in Malate, and you sang “Delilah”. Lord Almighty. And such a firm grip on the microphone, too, as though you were the sole custodian of ancient, ready-to-be-bastardized music. I had laughed then, laughed and cheered, but I smiled — smiled true — while I was watching the footage, the reddish light and the fluid dark shadows of the room trembling according to the heady irregular movements of my hand, the audio sharp and loud, almost piercing, and your cradling — your rocking gently along to the song — suggestive of something milder and kinder. Forgive me: more than once I had barked, “How embarrassing!”; of course, it was in jest; it must have been the alcohol, it must have been the cozy, ethereal sight and scent of smoke coming out of the nostrils of the people in the bar, it must have been the knowledge, the desperation, the urgent joy of spending those beloved moments with someone who will be gone for awhile.

In the meantime, enjoy your stay there. You wouldn’t want to be here in Manila, not at this moment. Villages and barangays are still trying to recover from the wrath of tropical storm Ondoy, which left the streets flooded like you wouldn’t believe. Where there’s little flood left, lots of literal muckraking (not the Mitford kind). Gunshots at night in unsecured neighborhoods. Politicians are plastering their names on food packs. There’s looting among the homeless, too. The pictures are depressing, even apocalyptic; nothing feels normal. I thank the heavens for having spared my family from the indiscriminate disaster. Still, it’s like everyone has changed after this rather historic experience, and yet we — well, at least me — I have to go on with life as I know it, back to work, write for clients, earn, eat, read, sleep, constantly with a terrible new unease caused by the knowledge that carrying on such business is nothing close to heroic, and can be considered putrid and apathetic in light of people I know spending hours packing canned goods or deploying their vehicles for relief operations or using personal funds to finance volunteer efforts, all jolted after the calamity by conscience and community. “Where I came from,” a volunteer campaign poster reads, “everyone’s a hero.” But I’d done very little to help, I am sorry to say. I had done very little, period, except for miss and love and demand and disappoint, and write this letter that asks, will you be kind enough to get me the Franzen.

Horseradish.