This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.
The Boy The Girl
The Rat The Rabbit
and the Last Magic Days
Chapbook, 2018
Republic of Carnage:
Three Horror Stories
For the Way We Live Now
Chapbook, 2018
Bamboo Girls:
Stories and Poems
From a Forgotten Life
Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2018
Don't Tell Anyone:
Literary Smut
With Shakira Andrea Sison
Pride Press / Anvil Publishing, 2017
Cupful of Anger,
Bottle Full of Smoke:
The Stories of
Jose V. Montebon Jr.
Silliman Writers Series, 2017
First Sight of Snow
and Other Stories
Encounters Chapbook Series
Et Al Books, 2014
Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop
Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Handulantaw: Celebrating 50 Years of Culture and the Arts in Silliman
Tao Foundation and Silliman University Cultural Affairs Committee, 2013
Inday Goes About Her Day
Locsin Books, 2012
Beautiful Accidents: Stories
University of the Philippines Press, 2011
Heartbreak & Magic: Stories of Fantasy and Horror
Anvil, 2011
Old Movies and Other Stories
National Commission for Culture
and the Arts, 2006
FutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures
Sands and Coral, 2003
Nominated for Best Anthology
2004 National Book Awards
5:37 PM |
Ho-hum.
Remember when I was most fanboy-ish when I saw Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese’s HBO documentary about the wit and writer from New York, Fran Lebowitz? I was positively giddy, and I wrote something like: “By the end of this film, I’ve come to this foolish hope: that one day I’d be a companion around her dinner table, and just listen to her talk and talk and talk.” I still have not changed that opinion: it would certainly be such a different kind of theater to watch Ms. Lebowitz talk and talk and give opinion on God-knows-everything-including-the-brand-of-the-kitchen-sink — but when it came to reading the two seminal works of essays that have made her reputation as a funny woman who also happens to be an intellectual (these are Metropolitan Life from 1978 and Social Studies from 1981, combined to one volume called The Fran Lebowitz Reader), I found myself … bored. This was it? These are supposed to be funny essays? They try to be, and they stink of such striving for an Oscar Wilde kind of epigram-making. I like the Introduction where Ms. Lebowitz tries to detail, hour by hour, the non-events that litter her day, but I was soon exasperated by her tendencies for lists, for tables, for the tiresome glee of having pronounced herself anti-nature, anti-work, anti-whatever. I usually find stuff like these rib-tickling (God knows I treasure Woody Allen’s Without Feathers and Getting Even — two very funny books which Lebowitz’s own unconsciously seem to want to equal, but fails), but somehow not these ones. What a tiresome bore this volume was.