The Spy in the Sandwich

Monday, June 30, 2025

8:44 PM | All About Tenderness

I mean to share this earlier in June for Pride Month, but life ... got in the way. Better late than never! But I was moved by Mark Fermill's [ IG: @markfermill ] recommendation for Talk Bookish to Me PH [ IG: @talkbookishtomeph ] of my book DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERATE SMUT [from Anvil Publishing: IG: @anvilpublishing ]. There's some sex in it, yes, but the book is really a distillation of what I know about heartbreak, about loving, and about longing, done in the most tender way I can write about all these. That he highlighted two of my favorite stories from my own end of the book is also a kind of affirmation for me. I cried when I wrote “Compartments.” I was exorcising all my heartbreaks when I wrote “The Boys From Rizal Street.”

You can order the book from Lazada at this link.

Labels: books, love, Pride, queer

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Sunday, June 29, 2025

9:18 AM | A Life of Culture

This is an expanded version of my acknowledgment speech at the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, given last June 28 at Brooke’s Place in Batinguel, Dumaguete.

To be invited to speak on behalf of the honorees in the Artists and Entertainers category of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards feels like standing at the threshold of history and memory. And it feels both so fitting and intimidating, perhaps simply because I know these people throughout my whole career as a cultural worker and have championed many of their works. These are people I have worked with, admired, written about, or simply held in reverence.

The theatre artist Evelyn Rose Aldecoa, who directed me in three unforgettable plays, taught me the rhythms of performance and community.

The poet Merlie Alunan is one of my literary mentors, and continues to guide me in collecting the folk literature of our province, helping us hold onto the fragile strands of our cultural memory.

When I found the films of screenwriter and film director Cesar Jalandoni Amigo, who died in 1987, I tried to give them light again in articles I have written about him and in screenings I try to do of his films, knowing that every frame of his cinema was a testament to his quiet genius.

The visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero is my most frequent collaborator. He has done the illustrations of most of my books, and I actually curated his first solo exhibit more than a decade ago. I am always drawn to the artistry he creates with his lens, which has chronicled the beauty and everyday wonders of our city, and I see as an artist who sees the world in textures we often miss.

I spent some time with the filmmaker Eddie Romero before he died in 2013. His stories for me moved beyond the screen into the national consciousness, and one of the highlights of my cultural work last year was curating the exhibit dedicated to his life and works at the National Museum of the Philippines in Dumaguete.

Edith Lopez Tiempo—Mom Edith—whose wisdom and grace launched countless literary careers, including my own, is the light we continue to follow.

I do not know Boboy Garovillo personally—but I feel like I do, given that almost all of us here have grown up with the songs of APO Hiking Society, their music inscribed in our hearts and has become our very definition of the best of OPM. That I have been chosen to be in their ranks humbles me, because I am first and foremost a rabid admirer of their creative life and a champion of their works.

You will notice that among all the categories in the current iteration of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, our category has the biggest number of honorees. This underlines what for me is the biggest and often unacknowledged truth about Dumaguete: that it is in fact a city of the arts and culture—and every means should be done by our LGU to highlight that truth, through education, through tourism, through policy. In the first iteration of this award, in 1998, only one artist was actually honored: Canuto Villariza, a musician and songwriter who brought us “Dumaguete [Do You Hear Me Calling?” Today, more than 25 years later, Dumaguete has honored eight individuals—and among us we have two National Artists in fact! We need to embrace this, and nurture a city that is friendly to its artists.

I do hope that the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards will become an annual honor, because we have so many artists and cultural workers who deserve this distinction. Francisco Sevilla Banogon, Rene Armogenia, and Dean Sinco for architecture and interior design. Cornelito Aro, Kitty Taniguchi, Jose Laspiñas, Paul Pfeiffer, Maria Taniguchi, and Muffet Dolar Villegas for visual arts. Luis Sinco for photography. Artemio Tadena, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Myrna Peña-Reyes, Edilberto Tiempo, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, Bobby Flores Villasis, Elsa Martinez Coscolluela, Lakambini Sitoy, and Eva Rose Washburn-Repollo for literature. Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham, Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez Emmanuel B. Gregorio, Jay Cyrus Villanueva, and Enchi for music. Junix Inocian and Andy Bais for theatre. Lucy Jumawan-Sauer for dance. Dennis Trillo and Glydel Mercado for film. Tingting Delfin, Isabel “Boom” Roxas, Jeanne Ong, Digna Coo, Fred Quimat, Amir Sali, Alexis Monsanto, and Rajo Laurel for fashion design. And these are only just a few that I can remember.

We speak often of progress in terms of roads and buildings and markets. But true progress lies also in the art we create, in the songs we write, in the stories we tell each other when the lights go down and we gather in darkened theaters to remember that we are human. It is in these moments that we learn empathy, find courage, discover ourselves anew. The arts are not a luxury but a lifeline. They keep the soul of a community alive.

I hope this awards tradition continues, and that every year we pause to remember the artists and cultural workers who labor often in silence, sometimes in obscurity, to bring beauty into our lives. Their work is the work of spirit, of heart, of community.

Some might ask: why honor the arts when the world is beset with crisis? Why spend time celebrating when we are surrounded by hardship? The answer is simple. Art is our response to darkness, our stubborn refusal to give in to despair. It reminds us of the beauty still possible. It gives voice to the voiceless, gives shape to the dreams we hold close at night, lets us imagine a better world. And we gather here tonight not just to give medals but to affirm our collective belief that culture matters, that artists matter, that our stories matter.

On behalf of my fellow honorees, thank you for this recognition. We dedicate it back to the community that made us, to Dumaguete whose gentle spirit continues to nurture our own. May we all continue to live a life of culture, because in the end, it is the only life truly worth living.

Archiving a digital copy of the Pasidungog 2025: The 2nd Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards programme:

Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, life

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Wednesday, June 25, 2025

7:00 AM | Poetry Wednesday, No. 245.

Labels: philippine literature, poetry

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Sunday, June 22, 2025

9:00 AM | The Weight of the World

The dictionary definition of malaise is that it is “a general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify.” From the brain fog I am in, I consider that very carefully, and think through the murk: yes, that’s exactly it—that’s the fugue I’ve been flailing in since I arrived back from Singapore a few weeks ago. I wanted my return from that trip to mark some kind of refreshed start, a clean reboot of the self. But instead, a few days into my arrival in Dumaguete, I got sick. Flattened by something suspiciously COVID-like, probably the new strain that everyone’s whispering about again but refusing to name out loud, as though we’re too exhausted to even fear properly.

That unexpected illness floored me. The days in early June were a blur of fevered dreams, sore muscles, and the desperate awareness of breath, and suddenly the world receded into muffled silence. I recovered eventually, or at least the body did what bodies are designed to do—it carried on. But something else stayed. Something stubborn, low-humming, and disorienting. Something I have come to recognize as “malaise.”

Not the dramatic kind. No weeping on the floor, no screaming into the abyss. Just this quiet slippage of self into a fog where nothing feels anchored. It’s as if I’ve misplaced the coherence of my life, and I don’t know where to look for it. I try to read a book, and the words swim away. I sit down to write, and the blank page stares back at me, unimpressed. The days blend together. I avoid calls. I forget to reply to messages. I move through the house like a ghost haunting his own life.

At first I told myself it was just physical fatigue, the tail end of an illness’ wreckage. But as the weeks rolled on, and my body grew strong enough to lift grocery bags and climb stairs again [I even managed to do my part as a resident panelist of the 63rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop for one complete week], the fog still didn’t lift. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just my body that had been infected. My spirit, too, had caught something—something darker and harder to shake. A kind of existential weariness. A deep, gnawing ennui. I know ennui well.

And when I interrogate the shape of that ennui, I see it plain as day: it’s really the world, and all the dirt we are caked in. It’s the politics that seep into every crevice of our lives, choking beauty, distorting truth. It’s the endless cycles of betrayal in the headlines, the impunity, the hypocrisy, the spinning of narratives so brazen that gaslighting feels like air. And it’s the art we try to make in the midst of all this—art that cannot help but be affected by the political, even when all we want is to simply tell a story, to nurture culture, to capture a feeling, to make something true.

But I won’t kid myself. The act of making art is no longer a neutral act. In this time, in this country, in this fraught global moment, to make art—especially art that speaks—is to wade into a battlefield. Everything is coded. Everything can be weaponized. Silence can be complicity. Expression can be read as sedition. A simple poem can be torn apart for what it did not say, or for what it dared to.

And yet all I want—if I am being honest—is to live a fruitful life of culture. To write what I must write. To teach what I love. To read a good book. To mount a play. To celebrate a painting. To attend a concert and feel joy bloom in my chest. To do these things without the constant noise of politics and the havoc it brings. But how do you do that in a world where even breathing feels like a stance?

The simple answer is: you can’t. Not entirely.

But maybe the better answer is: you do it anyway.

You write the story, even if the world is burning. You stage the play, even if the theatre is falling apart. You curate the exhibit, even if funding is scarce and freedom scarcer. You teach the class, even when students are too distracted by the collapse of everything to listen. You do it knowing that it “matters.” Knowing that every act of culture is also an act of resistance—not necessarily against a regime or an ideology, but against despair.

Because that’s the real enemy, isn’t it? Not just the politicians, or the trolls, or the systems of oppression we all navigate. The real enemy is the part of us that wants to give up. That whispers, “What’s the point?” That tells us the fog will never lift. But there is a point. There is always a point.

I used to believe we make art to make sense of the senseless. I used to believe we make art to stay alive, to find meaning, to dream another world into being. I used to believe we make art to remind ourselves—and others—that we are still here. That we feel. That we refuse to go numb. I badly need to believe in all of this again.

So this is what I tell myself on these doldrum days when the malaise continues and wraps itself around my chest like a wet shroud: write something. Anything. Like this "essay" you can barely write. Let the cultural work you do be the quiet rebellion it has always been.

But I am still tired. The fog still lingers. In these small acts of a little bit of writing, I hope I can find a way through. Maybe, for now, hoping and a bit of writing is enough.

Labels: life

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