The Spy in the Sandwich

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

7:00 AM | Poetry Wednesday, No. 180.

Labels: poetry

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Friday, March 22, 2024

1:42 PM | Almost There!

This is ready to go to my copyeditor! It is a phone book.

Labels: dumaguete, history, literature, negros, philippine literature, writers, writing

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Thursday, March 21, 2024

12:52 PM | Happy World Poetry Day!

I rarely share poems I’ve written — this is really not my genre, although Cesar Aquino once blurbed my personal anthology Bamboo Girls by proclaiming me “a secret poet no more” — so here’s one I wrote back in 2021, when I was first dealing with ADHD in the middle of a raging pandemic. Never published this, or shared this publicly.

Labels: poetry, writing

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7:00 AM | Dumaguete in 1891.

This is the oldest photograph I’ve ever sourced of Dumaguete. For the sake of transparency, I’ve edited the image a bit to enhance the details, and to make the photo into a square. The real photo is on the Dumaguete Tourism social media. [From the Special Collections Library of the University of Michigan]

Labels: dumaguete, history, photography

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Wednesday, March 20, 2024

7:00 AM | Poetry Wednesday, No. 179.

Labels: poetry

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Sunday, March 17, 2024

11:51 AM | The Great American Novels

The Atlantic just dropped their list of The Great American Novels...

Goodness, I have only read 25 of these. Must really go back to serious reading. But happy for Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters making it. I read that book when I was studying in Japan at 21, and I loved it. [I lent it to a Finnish friend, and when she finished, she told me: “Now I understand you much better,” hahaha.] But I’m perplexed with its inclusion in this list, given its “American-ness” conceit: that novel is very much about post-war Philippines. Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart feels like the better fit.

The list, and my reads thus far:

[✓]  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
[ ] An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925)
[ ] The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (1925)
[ ] Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
[ ]  A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)
[ ]  Passing by Nella Larsen (1929)
[ ]  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
[ ]  Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)
[ ]  Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (1936)
[ ]  East Goes West by Younghill Kang (1937)
[ ]  Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
[ ]  U.S.A. by John Dos Passos (1937)
[ ]  Ask the Dust by John Fante (1939)
[ ]  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
[ ]  The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)
[ ]  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
[ ]  Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
[ ]  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
[ ]  A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell (1942)
[ ]  All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
[ ]  The Street by Ann Petry (1946)
[ ]  In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947)
[ ]  The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford (1947)
[✓]  The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)
[✓]  Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White (1952)
[ ]  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
[ ]  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
[ ]  Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)
[ ]  The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
[✓]  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
[✓]  Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)
[ ]  Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956)
[ ]  Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (1957)
[ ]  No-No Boy by John Okada (1957)
[✓]  On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
[✓]  The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
[ ]  Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
[✓]  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)
[✓]  Another Country by James Baldwin (1962)
[ ]  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
[✓]  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
[ ]  The Zebra-Striped Hearse by Ross Macdonald (1962)
[✓]  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
[ ]  The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963)
[✓]  The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)
[ ]  A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (1967)
[ ]  Couples by John Updike (1968)
[ ]  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)
[ ]  Divorcing by Susan Taubes (1969)
[✓]  Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
[ ]  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
[✓]  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (1970)
[ ]  Desperate Characters by Paula Fox (1970)
[ ]  Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion (1970)
[ ]  Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine by Stanley Crawford (1972)
[ ]  Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed (1972)
[ ]  Sula by Toni Morrison (1973)
[ ]  The Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta (1973)
[ ]  Oreo by Fran Ross (1974)
[ ]  The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
[ ]  Winter in the Blood by James Welch (1974)
[ ]  Corregidora by Gayl Jones (1975)
[ ]  Speedboat by Renata Adler (1976)
[ ]  Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
[ ]  Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
[✓]  A Contract With God by Will Eisner (1978)
[✓]  Dancer From the Dance by Andrew Holleran (1978)
[ ]  The Stand by Stephen King (1978)
[ ]  Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979)
[ ]  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (1979)
[✓]  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)
[ ]  The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara (1980)
[ ]  Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament by John Crowley (1981)
[ ]  Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson (1982)
[ ]  Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips (1984)
[ ]  Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
[ ] A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1986)
[✓]  Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986)
[ ]  Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
[ ]  Dawn by Octavia E. Butler (1987)
[ ]  Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (1989)
[ ]  Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston (1989)
[✓]  Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn (1990)
[✓]  American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991)
[ ]  How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez (1991)
[ ]  Mating by Norman Rush (1991)
[ ]  Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (1992)
[✓]  The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)
[ ]  So Far From God by Ana Castillo (1993)
[ ]  Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)
[ ]  The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993)
[ ]  Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee (1995)
[ ]  Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth (1995)
[ ]  Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes (1995)
[ ]  Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
[ ]  I Love Dick by Chris Kraus (1997)
[ ]  Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
[ ]  The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead (1999)
[ ]  Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
[ ]  House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
[ ]  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
[✓]  The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000)
[ ]  The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams (2000)
[ ]  Erasure by Percival Everett (2001)
[ ]  I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine (2001)
[✓]  The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
[ ]  Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros (2002)
[ ]  Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling (2002)
[ ]  The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart (2002)
[✓]  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)
[ ]  Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (2005)
[✓]  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)
[ ]  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
[ ]  I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (2010)
[ ]  Open City by Teju Cole (2011)
[ ]  Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
[ ]  The Round House by Louise Erdrich (2012)
[ ]  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)
[ ]  Nevada by Imogen Binnie (2013)
[ ]  A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2014)
[ ]  Family Life by Akhil Sharma (2014)
[ ]  Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (2015)
[ ]  The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin (2015)
[ ]  The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2015)
[ ]  The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
[ ]  Amiable With Big Teeth by Claude McKay (2017)
[ ]  Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)
[ ]  Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (2018)
[ ]  Severance by Ling Ma (2018)
[ ]  There There by Tommy Orange (2018)
[ ]  Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (2019)
[ ]  Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (2019)
[ ]  The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (2019)
[ ]  No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood (2021)
[ ]  The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (2021)
[ ]  Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (2023)

Labels: books, list, philippine literature, reading

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Thursday, March 14, 2024

4:20 PM | Thinking Clearly

I’m going back to meds starting today. Been having enormous difficulty concentrating since December, and my usual tricks to go around the ADHD have not been working. I honestly didn’t want to go back to taking psychotropic meds, but I feel now that I do need to—for the sake of work. But this time around, I’ll take care not to get too entangled with the meds.

But I’ve forgetten this is how a normal brain works: without noise, without fogging. Today, while delivering my lectures, I knew exactly what to say, what words to use, what points to make. The ability to concentrate without trying too hard is a gift most neurotypical people take for granted. I envy this of them. The confidence that springs from raw brainpower is like no other. The world clears up before you, and you are able to breathe a little easier. I listen better, I read better, I speak better.

Labels: life, mental health

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