Tuesday, June 29, 2021
1:51 PM |
Video Essays on Philippine Art and Culture
My
YouTube channel is just something I’m trying out for several reasons:
[1] I was surprised to know I already have more than 2K subscribers with hardly any content, which made me feel like this was an untapped platform for me;
[2] I’ve been looking for a YouTube video essayist [
parang Vox] on Philippine arts and culture, and there’s none, so I felt there is an unfilled niche;
[3] I need to somehow have an outlet for my teaching persona since I’m not teaching anymore;
[4] I had to find a way to learn to love my video voice [I hate it!]; and
[5] my recording and editing skills are very elementary [I’m only using my Photo Booth camera and my iMovie editing app], but I know all good things start small and that's how you learn anyway: jump off into the deep end.
I have two video essays up on my channel so far—and a bunch of older videos and Eddie Romero movies. Comments welcome, but please be gentle.
Subscribe and hit the notification bell if you're so inclined.
Labels: art and culture, essay, life, philippine culture, philippine history, philippine literature, teaching, youtube
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Monday, October 30, 2017
9:09 PM |
Coming to Terms with Disorder
The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Griffin Dunne's fascinating new documentary on the writer Joan Didion, begins with her voice-over, reading from the preface of
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968): "I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder." I felt this kind of paralysis early this year -- but I think most writers do. I'm glad for this film; it is a fascinating portrait of an important literary voice. Who has read "Goodbye to All That" [read
here] and not been astounded by that sheer command of language?
Labels: books, documentaries, essay, film, literature, writers, writing
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Monday, January 05, 2015
2:05 AM |
The Missives of Our Lives, Recollected
Pusheen the Cat on my shoulders watching me as I write tonight.
This should have been done a couple of years back, but I'm now seriously cataloguing all the essays I have written for a planned book manuscript. (Truth to tell, manuscripts for two or three books, actually -- each collection grouped together by a common subject matter. Part of the current challenge is trying to see how I can rewrite many of these essays so that they fit each other to simulate a flow in their book's narrative. I'm always greatly disappointed in books that are mere compilations of columns culled from newspapers and magazines, without the author attempting to create a tome with a common narrative vision.) So I'm basically going through eleven years worth of creative nonfiction and columns -- and some, I find, are quite promising, but a great many are groan-inducing. ("Why did I write about that?" is a constant refrain I hear myself emitting. One column from years back, for example, had me soliciting for
Friendster votes for a beauty pageant --
and I cringed, knowing how I stand now regarding pageants of this kind.) But it's enlightening to know what specific subjects I keep writing about, and it's heartening to identify the trajectory of our growing up as reflected by these weekly missives. This is an exhausting project and will probably take a few days to compile. I should have done this regularly.
Labels: books, essay, life, writing
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Tuesday, December 30, 2014
6:42 PM |
The Moments in Memory in Jack Wigley’s Home of the Ashfall
The thing about John Jack Wigley, author of
Home of the Ashfall (University of Santo Tomas Press, 2014), is that to read him is to fall under the stealthy spell of a born storyteller. However you are starting out on the whole enterprise of reading, you will inevitably be taken in by that inimitable voice—part dramatic, part humorous—usually reserved for campfire stories, or gossip. That voice has the bewitchment of hooks.
This was also the case with Mr. Wigley’s first book,
Falling Into the Manhole, and of which his sophomore effort feels very much like a continuation. And thank God for that, because in that first volume of collected memoir, we got compelling stories about Mr. Wigley growing up only a few meters away from Clark Air Base, where he was the illegitimate offspring of an American G.I., and soon learning to deal with the hardships of biracial existence and growing up being called “mestisong bangus,” among other things. That particular biographical detail was what led him to write in the first place, which means that issues of race is very much a part of his writerly identity. “I have never read any memoir that reflected my own story,” he told me once.
That story includes an incisive critique about our collective love affair with everything America—and in “American Visa,” one of
Ashfall’s essays, Mr. Wigley sets about anatomizing the desperation we fall into lining up for the titular “prize” in the U.S. Embassy. He brings an earthy awareness to the politics and the humiliation of the whole affair, this impossibly one-sided devotion we have to America.
There is a way of reading his first and second books, which is to think of the volumes as the linked novel of Mr. Wigley’s life, each essay in them a standalone chapter of an unfolding Dickensian existence. Or, if you like your cultural references local, each one an episode in the dramatic teleserye on his life.
Beginning in
Manhole, there is, of course, the Miss Saigon-worthy story of Asian mother and American father, a G.I. who soon leaves for America, but not without leaving traces of hopes and resentment in a son he has not seen. There are also the insights—mostly funny, sometimes sad—into the teaching life. Then there are, finally, the loves and consuming passions of Jack’s life: his DVD collection, music, Nora Aunor, Meryl Streep, beauty pageants, and the finally young man who broke Jack’s heart. Much of the first book is about growing up poor but plucky in the concrete maze of Angeles City—with the slight assurance that being the bright boy in class can lead to a brighter future—a theme continued in the second book. “You could be President of the Philippines one day,” his mother tells little Jack in Ashfall’s first essay “Getting Lost.”
Indeed,
Ashfall can be said to be an elaboration of the themes of the first book—but this time around, there is a sure hand defining an arc to the narrative. Three essays into the book, and we know that we are getting Philippine literature’s equivalent of Pedro Almodovar’s
All About My Mother. The best of the essays is a distillation for the uncommon grace Mr. Wigley’s mother has gone through, and endured—from the harried life of being a single parent, to the painful battles of the dementia that ultimately claimed her life.
These highlights, among others, resonate in Mr. Wigley’s own story, ostensibly the subject of the book. In the title essay, Mr. Wigley’s flagging determination to reach his hometown in the middle of the lahar deluge after Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption is challenged by his mother’s display of nonchalant fierceness at the end of the tale. By the time we get to “Mother’s Passing,” we have come to know Mr. Wigley’s mother so fully, his grief over her death becomes our own.
And yet, the book—while glowing with maternal tribute—is also very much about a search for a father. In “Peering Through the Window,” the tale of a bus trip to the mother’s hometown becomes a quiet contemplation about the unexpected pangs of longing for a father figure. And in “The Fancy Dancer,” the story of an impromptu dance set to the tune of “One Way Ticket” in the rundown streets of Angeles becomes more than an attempt to humanize the surface of the city’s sleaze; it also provides a kind of a coda for the book’s search of a father. We see this theme more acutely in “Departures,” Mr. Wigley’s reflections on the Oscar-winning Japanese film of the same title, which ultimately becomes a meditation on fatherly absence.
One must take note of the narrative whiplash that occurs regularly in his essays. You think Mr. Wigley is talking about one thing specifically—and then you realize he’s actually leading us to a revelation of a different sort. This is clearly demonstrated in “The Admired Classmate,” where Mr. Wigley rhapsodizes the memory of an impeccably dressed, well-spoken classmate in grade school, only for us to be amused by the twist in their shared fate. But this tendency is more subtle in such pieces as “The Choice,” where he seems to recount the joyful occasion of a class excursion—only to spring on us a dark, sad punch coming from out of the blue.
Yet, despite the seriousness of his themes, Mr. Wigley remains a funny storyteller. His punchlines, often punctuating a heart-rending tale, are both deadly and welcome, as if to remind us that there is a certain freedom in choosing bemusement as a stance, and accept life for the cruel comedy that it is.
What Mr. Wigley has accomplished in the end is being a connoisseur of moments in memory. His words are succulent pieces of life’s all-seeing videogram, and the pictures that he takes for us become universal images of our own recollections. How does he know, for example, that many of us usually pretend we are watching a movie when we peer out of bus windows? His unique life becomes, in his telling, the tantalizing mirror to our own experiences—and that’s the very province of immersive literature.
Originally published in the 29 December 2014 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Labels: art and culture, books, essay, people, philippine literature, writers
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Sunday, May 03, 2009
By Rica Bolipata SantosBecause there are days when I understand Jude Law’s nanny. After all, there he was, in all his yumminess. And there she was, in all her…nanny-ness…in what real world would make him notice her? Perhaps it was that moment when his son asked for a glass of juice and right as she closed the refrigerator door, there he was about to tack a reminder that she was in charge of picking up the kids that afternoon. Her hand on the door, his hand on the door, and Boom! life alters.
Perhaps life had disappointed her; had made her think there was more than the daily drudgery of breath to breath. How many children can one love? Maybe in this disappointment, and Jude offered his hand, she thought to herself, prayed to a being, “at least, let me have this.” I am convinced she was thinking only of herself in this moment. I am convinced, as we grow older, that we hunger for life-altering moments more and more. At least, that’s the way I would write it in a story.
And there are days when I understand Sylvia Plath more than I can understand myself. I know that moment in the day when life is so completely overwhelming that the only other option left is annihilation. Love for children is complete for Sylvia as it is for me, thus the decision to erase oneself instead of another. And there are days when I say this out loud and people get upset and I write this information down in my diary as a tally sheet and wonder about the numbers on the page.
And I wonder about Pluto and how he really feels to have been believed to be a planet and then to be demoted to something else. I think of all the tests I took in Science 5 and how I had to memorize all the planets and their features and wonder what to do with all this outdated information, and while we’re at it, with any information. If things are true, until proven otherwise, and since many things can be proven otherwise, eventually, well why even teach children that some things are constant? Do we not set them up for disappointment? In my writerly mind, the title of this story will be Pluto’s Child and I will name this child Daisy and she will rediscover Pluto.
And there are moments when I travel and I realize that I use the word beautiful incessantly. People from another country to me always belong in some kind of painting and I can spend many minutes trying to unravel my thinking. Are these foreigners truly beautiful or it is merely my need to romanticize and idealize all things? But truly, why does light look so different in other lands? What about being in another place makes one aware of the curve of light? And what color is this light? Oh the winding routes my mind can take exploring this issue!
I wonder why we are kinder to strangers than we are to the people we hold most dear. Why am I more generous with others than with my own self? Why do things really happen in threes? When I conjure stories in my head, my characters inevitably go through three things: do I reinforce this pattern in the world through the word?
And there is the wealth of snapshots running in my head, oftentimes looking random but I know by now that my memory keeps them for material. Like sitting by the stairs waiting for tears to come when our dog died when I was 12. It is not the memory of the dog I retain, it is that feeling of wanting to be consumed by grief and feeling strange that all I could feel was relief. That moment when I was 16 and I heard our neighbor screaming at her child, thinking to myself I will never scream at my child. I wonder at the irony of that now after having screamed so much at my children since then. Or that moment of revelation when my brother drew my assignment for me when I was around 5 and I was touched by his talent (at 5!). Or how weird it was that at least 2 teachers asked me to ask my brother to have something drawn for their visual aids. What word would describe that first moment when a child knows the grown-up is doing something wrong?
My days are consumed by the one need to name moment to moment – enfleshing the world into words so that they may be turned in my hand, in my palm, and what it is that sits in my heart, can sit in my hand instead, and be thrown away into the sea; or kept in my pocket as keepsake. I walk the seashore of life and decide which rocks to keep, which to discard, which to put away so that I may mix and match at some later date; call upon a memory to authenticate a point; call upon a look I hit upon to explain character motivation; always, always keeping score.
Moment to moment I think to myself, there must be a word for this obliterating kind of joy. There must be a word for this travesty, or this tragedy, or this grief. What is the word at the center of my grief? This word is both identification and spell. If I can say the word, and only say the word, I shall be healed.
People wonder what it is a writer does and it is difficult to explain as it is a job that requires treading the line between real and imagined. Another writer-friend when newly-married complained once that everyone in the house she lived in with her husband would constantly ask her to do errands after all, “she wasn’t doing anything.” People want us to produce pages to prove that we have written. In writing, production and product are severely different things. I am asked often, ‘where you able to write?” And in my head I think, well…I was able to think, which is the lifeblood of all writing.
So, to many most of the time we really look like we’re doing nothing because part of writing is the hocus pocus part. For me, that requires hours of staring and sitting. It is ephemeral, the work of catching and matching words with experience. I need to keep still to do this. And sometimes, the opposite is true: I need to keep moving for the experience to catch me this time. There are those sought for moments when it just magically happens, when crystallization occurs. But when one writes long enough, one knows that the Muse also paces her gifts so that cannot always be relied upon.
I know the signs when I know I have hit upon something. There comes an incessant need to nest, i.e., to decorate, beautify or simply move furniture. I get weepy and for some strange reason, a British accent takes over and I mull over words and my tongue lolls around them like candy. I drive around Manila uttering sentences I’ve written, pondering on cadence and rhythm, the musician in me descending. My husband says I have this faraway look and cannot be reached. And eventually that voice comes to me and propels me to write. It commands me to document.
As I write this, a man with three sons sits across from me. We have gone beyond looking at each other as a man or a woman. Instantly, my mind records. We pass a look to each other, finding ourselves complicit in the rearing of children, in the difficulty of it, in the constant guessing that we do when we raise sons to become men and raise girls to become women, knowing ultimately that it is ourselves that we raise. It is a look that is both sad and triumphant. I file it away, knowing I will need that look in some later page.
Labels: essay, philippine literature, writers, writing
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Sunday, March 29, 2009
10:01 AM |
Creative Writing with Lawrence Ypil
Calling all creative writing enthusiasts! This summer, Little Boy Productions will be offering a workshop to be led by Palanca award-winning writer Lawrence Ypil. This workshop is designed to introduce students and interested professionals to the art of creative writing. Through writing exercises, mini-lecture seminars, and on-site writing projects, the workshop aims to dispel the notion that writing is a difficult, serious endeavor, and to approach writing in a fun and imaginative way.
The workshop leads the participants through the different stages in creative writing: from the elusive art of finding a topic, to the challenge of choosing an appropriate literary form, to undergoing the delicate process of revision and publication. It hopes to also introduce participants to the primary literary genres: poetry, fiction, and the essay. While it is encouraged that participants have experience in creative writing, this workshop encourages beginning writers and interested students who have had no previous experience. In fact, it is especially open to those who have always wanted to write a poem or a story but has not had the chance to do so.
Patterned after the popular workshops for painting and drawing, the workshop for creative writing is built on the premise that the art of writing is a skill that can be discovered, developed, and mastered. We usually like to think that the gift of writing is reserved for those special few--that one is either born a writer or one is not. The writing workshop, however, runs on the belief that the writer is made, not born. That writing, especially imaginative writing, is a skill that we all have, and that all that we need to do is develop and nurture this hidden skill.
The writing workshop will be led by poet and essayist Lawrence Ypil. A First Prize Winner in the Poetry Category of the 2006 Palanca Awards, his poems and essays have been published in various publications both here and abroad. He teaches creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University and is a regular panelist in many notable writing workshops. He keeps a regular column at Sun Star Weekend called "Dog-ears in the Wrong Notebook," and his first book, The Highest Hiding Place, will be published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press later this year.
The Creative Writing Workshop will run for two weeks from April 27 to May 8, 2009. The class will meet every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2 to 5 pm at the old campus of Sacred Heart School - Jesuit on Mango Avenue. Students, aspiring writers, young professionals, 13 years old and above, are encouraged to join. Workshop fee is 2,500 pesos. For more information, please call 254-9320, 233-0452 or 0922-820-8298 or visit Little Boy Productions at Exams Advantage, 3rd Floor Manros Plaza, across Fooda, on Mango Avenue.Labels: essay, fiction, poetry, workshops, writers
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Saturday, May 31, 2008
2:48 AM |
Binding Wor(l)ds Together
Filipino-American writer
Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayoress now blogs. She also has a stirring essay titled
"Becoming a Woman of Color" over at Sheila Bender's
Writing It Real.
Labels: blogging, essay, issues, philippine literature, society, writers
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