Nabokov's Old Soundbites Still Bite

For some chinwag, nobody does it with aplomb than Nabokov. In a 1965 Playboy interview, his charitable comments on fellow Russian Dostoevsky and novelists Hemingway and Conrad is one for summit negotiations.

Q: Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as "a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. "Why?

Nabokov: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment-- by this reader anyway.

A slapdash comedian? Several chapters of Crime and Punishment and I do believe that the punishment in the title is more of a caveat. Sorry.

Q: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad"writers of books for boys"?

Nabokov: That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story,"The Killers." And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile,and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as-- but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.

Souvenir-shop style? Pets of the common room? I cannot smirk at such snobbery.

Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," from relative academic obscurity was embraced by the academic brigade when the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe blasted Conrad as a "bloody racist." Then came the discourses and the dissertations.

I wonder who the other "beloved authors" are and the dead ones not yet buried Nabokov is alluding to. Oh, writers and their catfights, so delectable on a humid day.

(Caricature from The New Yorker)

Hanging with a jerk

In a perfect example of synchronicity, my favorite musicians and novelists usually espouse the same socio-political views that I cherish, fanning delusions that you are what you read or listen to and that to a certain degree, belief in the remote possibility that these cultural heroes of our youth could be our drinking buddies. After all, the recipe of friendship is almost complete - same-mindedness, shared trepidations of a world gone awry, harboring the same misgivings...

As I grew older, I became less and less convinced that an artist ought to be evaluated primarily for his political views. I've mentioned before I've been poked for reading works of known anti-Communists but would you throw out Dostoevsky, for instance, for being a defender of the patriarchal authority of the Tsar? How many writers have conjured images of women that are despicable, shall we boycott them? If we choose to read writers substantially for their politics, we will be shortchanging ourselves.

My first hard lesson was nothing short of traumatic. This musician was a favorite since college, I wrote a paper heralding his contribution to music. In short, he was in my altar of unabashed adoration. Later, I found out that he was a wife-beater. A wife-beater? How could someone capable of writing such profound thoughts be a monster? It was difficult to reconcile but reality bites. What was I to do? Throw away his CDs and declare him as a bad artist?

The artist does have a covenant to preserve the integrity of his work, continue to sharpen his craft either by reworking his themes, push boundaries, and discover new frontiers. How he treats his dogs is of secondary importance, but God forbid, no to animal cruelty. I mean, what do I care if my cultural heroes are misogynist, miserable bastards? Their body of work speak for themselves, never mind how they behave in private.

Rilke whose poems have been my prayers is another example. In a biography written by Ralph Freedman, he was described as: an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost.

Clearly, Rilke was not a nice man. He was a con artist. And this jerk wrote this:

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willingto be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything... And I do.

Some non-jerks could not illuminate such as this. So I will take Rilke, jerk and all, any day of the week. Now, jerk off.

Running on Empty

Run, baby, run" - Sheryl Crow

Do men sprint faster than women? Anatomically, they have 2 yoyos swinging loosely and a distended rod to boot, a heavier package to carry around, if you ask me, so why do women breaking speed records subjected to gender speculations? As if it were improbable for females to race in Flash Gordon quickness.

There was Nancy Navalta of recent years. And the latest woman on the stake is South African athlete Caster Semenya. Or is it her family name, evoking masculine visceral representation? Semen, indeed, is a male thing.

Here we go again, back in the first paragraph, being pulled by the inanity of medieval ideas as if Madonna did not make us dance to "I made it through the wildnerness." It's been more than 7 hours and 15 days and yet it feels we have not actually move forward. Kabudlay, oi.

Women are already in the literature on positive politics of peace and being evaluated as a workable ethical model for corrective citizenship and yet, road blocks continue to delay the journey. I remember being asked in either a class report or was it a forum, how the experience of motherhood as distinctively female experience dictate how women engage themselves as political beings.

First of all, I don't subscribe to the notion that as mothers, women care for the world and the future more passionately than men. I don't believe that women crave for peace more than men. Perhaps, there is in our socialization a different perspective being molded but as a whole, I don't see civic participation as a function of gender.

Citizenship, as a masculinized concept, is intimately linked with patriotism. Sadly, patriotism in most cultures, is measured in military defense terms - how one gallantly takes a bullet for one's tribe/community/country and in the enduring age of imperialism, being in the forefront of expansionist projects camouflaged as pursuits of national interest. In short, citizenship is defined along the lines of glorifying the male warrior.

While men are born to run down enemies of the state and run political affairs, women are considered unpatriotic because they burn their bras or run naked protesting against wars of aggression, inadvertently getting in the way of men's preoccupation.Where do women camp out? Mostly they are at the forefront of peace and environmental movements, microfinance, solidarity-building endeavors. Some explain than since women are less exposed to violence or are not instruments of violence, they tend to have a different worldview from men. I beg to differ. Women across socio-economic cleavages get slaps, lashes, and whips for breakfast, and mind you, this is not of the kinky variety. How people readily assume women are less exposed to violence should get married and experience for themselves how it is to cohabit with males and their sharp instruments.

It is false to assume that women are remotely located in the radius of violence simply because they are not in combat gear and raining down bombs on some strange land and annihilating culture. Come on, women are collateral damges in any form of militarization, whether as a source of comfort to soldiers or are the ones massacred and raped. Perhaps, because of these experiences of war and violence that women tend to develop aversion to them and yearn for peace or are more open to dialogues of peace.

But as I said earlier, gender can be a booby trap. To accept the idea that nurturing is a woman's turf is to fall prey to the same socially-constructed binary categories of males vs. females, animus-anima, yin-yang. The machines of war march forward not because boys will be boys. Gender is not in the equation, not by a far shot. That's silly, as if war were some esoteric idea that is hard to explain. It's that simple:war is real, not metaphorical; war is physical, not metaphysical. To some, war is a neccesity to survive as an economy. War has become both a means and an end.

Meanwhile, there's a continuous revolutionizing of the means of production, the pressure of profit, the development of the production forces amidst repressive relations of power - gelling up to fuel more wars.

Yes, we are running, racing, speeding.....towards destruction.

No Mystery

"Cause you're working, building a mystery" Sarah Maclachlan

Mystery. Once the veil of mystery is stripped off, trust me, a relationship is on the doldrums. Next stop, splitsville. That's a friend speaking her mind, not me.

How in God's country can one sustain "mystery" in, say, a 3-year relationship, I silently wonder. Replicating a chameleon isn't exactly an enchanting prospect for me. What in the hell for? It's like being in a relationship with a schizo, no thanks.

Maybe I don't get it. Most of the time, I don't get it anyway. But here's my take: from the get-go, I want no mask. Layers to be peeled off, yes. No holding back, all cards on the table. Warts, zits, and all.

Mystery is so contrived, pa-epek and overrated. What possible mystery can one preserve - that you're an alien from Mars? That one grows fangs every time the moon is in full bloom?

Understanding and acceptance - how can they hold a candle in a relationship cloathed in mystery? I agree with Lucretius. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love. Isn't it the case of celebrities we like, we prepare a dossier of them, in our intent to know them in a deeper sense? Of course, it does not follow that just because you live with a person or spend time with him that you can already read the palm of his hand or that he can no longer spring a surprise. But the second-guessing is not deliberate.

I want boring and predictable, a comfortable knowledge that I can even predict the shirt my partner is going to wear on a particuar ocassion, the part of a film which he finds funny, a quotation that will rock his boat, what he's going to say in a repartee, what he is not saying, finish his sentences.

Even with friends, I would like to think I can order food for them or choose songs at videoke and there's no mystery involved anymore. Precisely you can do this because you somehow know them. Just recently, a dear friend dropped by and played some Dave Matthews in his guitar. I told him that if Baan were around, she would surely request for "Crash". True enough, when Baan got home and caught us jamming, she asked R, "can you play Crash?" R and I looked at each other and shared a secret smile, in unspoken agreement that I somehow know my sister. Maupay it feeling.

Polluting Politics

The medley of cover-ups that exposes more non-truths rather than conceal them, infuriates even more. It's not so much the callousness of the present leadership to munch and nibble to their gastronomic excesses but the deliberate manueverings to mislead. If this government cannot even be honest and transparent on its frivolous 'trivialities', what honesty can we expect from its other squanderings?


This administration slaps politics a bad name, a very bad name. Politics as conceived by Aristotle, is the "highest art," the "rarest of human activities". At the core of politics is the fundamental preoccupation as to what is the best way for people to live, both as an individual and as a collective. The "highest good," that is, the full potential of man for happiness and the best quality of life, can only be achieved outside the household. In effect, Aristotle paid homage to the polis as the vehicle and venue for the fruition of the highest good. Consequently, the marriage of politics and ethics is virtually solidified as the organization of society was paralleled with summoning what values, rules, and ideas must each person embody.

The Renaissance broke this bond with the ascendancy of Machiavelli's political realism of conquest and power and more importantly, the perpetuation of that power - 'the end justifies the means'. The Prince, to wield power, must be amoral, cunning, possessing astuteness to discern when to behave like a fox or a lion.

Today, several generations from Aristotle, politics is practiced in its crudest, most crass form, thanks to politicians like GMA.

Proust Way

We'll say there are two kinds of novelists: the snail and the swallow. The
swallow is quick, agile, and able to speed across long, tireless stretches.
Nothing a swallow does goes wrong; mistaken turns are instantly corrected, bad
weather is put to good use, and poor judgment can be tweaked just enough to look
like a flash of genius. In the implacable assembly line of prose, nothing is
ever wasted or thrown away. By contrast, the snail is slow, deliberate, fussy,
cramped. Swallows travel and seek out the world; the snail burrows into itself.
The swallow acts; the snail retracts, guesses, speculates. A swallow chugs life
down the way whales take in water, plankton and all, while the snail ingests
choice bits down a multichambered spiral, where its appetite, like its vision,
is eternally whorled. Balzac, Dickens, and Fielding are swallows, even
Tolstoy. (Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way")

I'm not too sure I get Proust's drift but I like his typology, simplistic maybe, but clearly makes the distinctive comparison. Some writers choose the trendier nihilistic outlook of the world and at a certain age, these are the writers we gravitate to, mirroring our own mugging despair and disenchantment. At the end of the day, we feel more dazed and confused, emptyhanded in our little excursions.

sense overload

A room of one's own. The room in my mind. A room I would like to have, given the chance. Small, private, with everything of great value within an arm's reach - CDs, DVDs, books, whew! This is so-called life.

Behind this door is another universe, an encounter with the incalculable, a world where disenchantments are regulated and conditioned.

The present world, the world outside can be shut out. In a contrived environment, the world left behind can be recaptured by imitations and repetitive recollections, not born out of despair but of convenient necessity.

Nothing is worthless. Everything has value, even silence. Specially silence, sublime silence. Words and speech, they take a backseat. They have a different destiny.

And Emily Dickinson's ghost hovers. And it's my mother's birthday today. She would have been 64.

Poems for "Bigo" (not Big O, if you get my drift)

I came across Anne Carson’s “The Beauty of the Husband” weeks ago – And so why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age/And the divorce decree came in the mail?/Beauty, no great secret/ Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty/As I would again if he came near/Beauty convinces/You know beauty makes sex possible/Beauty makes sex, sex/

This made me reflect on damage, er, marriage, what’s the spelling? Or how is it spelled? – these were the running jokes in college. My friend Godo even had a wisecrack “Marriage? You must be tired of living.”

I can count by my left hand the number of times I’ve attended a wedding in the last 5 years. I guess my friends prefer to live in sin or are mostly gay and can’t get married or are mostly dry-eyed spinsters like me. Oftentimes, I jest that the prime benefit of marriage is the sex becoming legal but not necessarily better.

As the poem suggests, will love transcend the loss of beauty? Will sex and sex alone keep the marital bed burning? Carole King sang “Will you still love me tomorrow?” which is a far realistic love song than say, “I love you more today than yesterday but not as much as tomorrow” which is a bit spaced-out talking about the future on certain terms – pure baloney.

All the jadedness aside, it sure takes a lot of balls to decide to get married and remain married. I used to say that I could not imagine myself organizing my life around a single person but Georgelablab, this abandoned pup looking so lost and earnest outside the dorm, wormed his doggie charm into my heart and I found my life literally revolving around a dog and I was not even raised to be a dog-lover. This is not to compare a dog to a husband but in terms of affections and commitment involved, it’s almost on the same plane.

What makes marriages tick? There are formulas and there are formulae. Most people are convinced it’s having a dynamic communication. From where I sit, it’s more of self-sacrifice – staying faithful, forgiving shortcomings, putting yourself in the shoes of the other, agreeing to disagree, humbling oneself, all these demand sacrifice. Not unless one is prepared to go the distance should the idea of marriage be even entertained.

Fidelity-this will spawn volumes and volumes of treatise and I remember a bittersweet poem I read in college – I went downtown tonight/to the capital under the clear moon/I came home: what did I see?/Four legs under my quilt/Used to be two of them were mine/but what about the other two?/ Tonight, I’m sure of this/the other two are not mine. (“Song,” Cho Yong)

Poetry isn’t exactly the most popular artform but its power isn’t exactly diminished. I’ve started posting poems I like at FS and the reactions I receive are unexpectedly tremendous. Poetry has an audience contrary to some notions that it has no effect on people, specially the younger set. This poem was well-received so I am reposting it here.

My Husband Discovers Poetry (Diane Lockward, from Eve's Red Dress,Wind Publications)

Because my husband would not read my poems,

I wrote one about how I did not love him.

In lines of strict iambic pentameter,

I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.

It felt good to do this.
Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.

Towards the end, struck by inspiration,

I wrote about my old boyfriend,

a boy I had not loved enough to marry

but who could make me laugh and laugh.

I wrote about a night years after we parted

when my husband's coldness drove me from the house

and back to my old boyfriend.

I even included the name of a seedy motel

well-known for hosting quickies.

I have a talent for verisimilitude.
In sensuous images, I described

how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,

got into bed, and kissed and kissed,

then spent half the night telling jokes,

many of them about my husband.

I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,

then hid the poem awayin an old trunk in the basement.
You know how this story ends,

how my husband one day loses something,

goes into the basement,

and rummages through the old trunk,

how he uncovers the hidden poemand sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds

that floated up the stairs that day,

the sounds of an animal, its paw caught

in one of those traps with teeth of steel?

Do you see the wounded creature

at the bottom of the stairs,

his shoulders hunched over and shaking,

fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?

It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

(graphics by www.slowpokecomics.com)

Binukbok Questionnaire

1. What author do you own the most books by? Salinger, Anita Brookner and May Sarton, I almost have all their novels, I think.

2. What book do you own the most copies of? Art of War and Bhaggavad-gita, got two of both.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? Not really. My prepositions are weak and uncertain. Prepositions still confuse me sometimes.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? My love is no secret. I think I fall a bit in love with particular characters to be truly engaged, then I totally forget about them. My heart is fickle and promiscuous.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life? Something on spirituality.

6. Favorite book as a ten year old? The Hardy Boys series.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year? There’s always redemption at the end no matter how weak a book is. This is more of a self-indulgence for me so I don’t get upset or have self-loathing, I try to find crumbs I can cart away before I close a book forever.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year? I have not actually read for almost a year because of an illness. Maybe, the essays on fishing, I forgot the title.

9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be? The Jungle so they would also have bouts of rage and depression as I had. It's a punishing novel, I have to say.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? None that I can think of at the moment.

11. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read? Those authored by French post-modernists, damn.

12. What is your favorite devotional book? The Psalms and Rilke

13. What is your favorite play? Brecht’s Mother Courage

14. Poem? Epitaph for the Western Intelligentsia, mostly because of the last line "We bark like dogs and learn to wag our tails"

15. Essay? Anything about literary criticism and critical theory usually interest me.

16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? No Comment. Ask the critics.

17. What is your desert island book? A book on humor and poetry. Maybe, some Woody Allen's.

18. And...what are you reading right now? Finishing “Tale of Two,” a book about Lucille, an adorable dog.

Defrosting in Proust

Several years ago, VF ran this Proust Questionnaire, not at all credited to Marcel Proust but believed to be character-revealing. Hmm...I'm trying my hand on it. See how it works.

What is your current state of mind?
Brimming with hope. A little nostalgic and sentimental

What is your greatest fear?
When I was young and full of shit, the prospect of becoming irrelevant. But that was pure humbug. Later, the thought of outliving my loved ones and sure enough, God’s warped sense of humor made sure I dealt with it gallantly. I am fully orphaned and dealing with cancer. Now, it’s losing my memory, my humanity, my resolve to sanctify life and love.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Romantic optimism about people and life in general, oftentimes neglectful that it has its limits.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of compassion; absence of integrity; not having a mind of their own; too much self-importance.

Which living person do you most admire?
Is Jesus dead? This is tough. Abbas Kiarostami whose films are amalgams of poetry and philosophy .

Which living person do you most despise?
My wrath is reserved for oppressors and exploiters, people wrapped in hate and greed and only love themselves.

On what occasion do you lie?
Every occasion. I’m a lousy liar, I need years of practice before I can lie with a straight face and credible conviction.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Life itself and its attendant trappings. Life has not been exactly easy but I strive to celebrate it. I am grateful, despite and inspite of its imperfections and intricacies.

When and where were you happiest?
Inhaling the rarefied air, in the company of family and friends whom I consider family.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Music - crafting it, playing it or understanding the human condition in the context by which it has to be interpreted.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I wish I had more ambition and focus.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would it be?
I’ve blogged about this quite recently. I wish to be a polygot, a physicist and a superb dancer, I wrote. In addition, I wish to swim and drink like a fish in the next life. Have a fat bank account, perhaps? And Good Lord, not to have cancer. If I were to choose one disease, it would be nymphomania.

What is your favorite occupation?
Not to have one? Be in development work, work at the grassroots. Maybe teach again. I don’t know.

Who are your favorite writers?
I am a fan of my friends’ writings. Some Continental authors, a few Anglo-Saxon.

Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Would Logan of “Veronica Mars” or Tony Soprano qualify? Phoebe in “Catcher in the Rye”; Atticus Finch

Who are your heroes in real life?
People who are governed by compassion, moral courage, and integrity.

What are your favorite names?
I like the name Rodrigo.

What is your greatest regret?
That I have been more self-absorbed at times.

How would you like to die?
By the ocean with the whisper of the waves beckoning me home or by the forest and birds are singing.

What is your motto?
Love is the strongest drug? It’s got to be from Goethe – “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.”

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Preserving my humor and sanity or at least, a semblance of it. Let me bring to the dinner-table Ralph W. Emerson “to laugh often and much/to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children/to earn the appreciation of honest critics/and endure the betrayal of false friends/to appreciate beauty/to find the best in others/to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition/to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived/this is to have succeeded.

Woke up Again this Morning

Posted a poem I liked in college (Damn, I forgot the poet's name) and became some sort of a morning prayer for a while in FB but my senses may have not yet been fully awake, I realized I skipped some of the parts and there's no way of editing so I'm reposting it here.

Here's how you get out of bed:

You get out of bed like this - one foot at a time, one leg at a time, one life at a time, then you're up. But that's only the beginning.

Then you have to drag your whole godforsaken body out from the dead of the living into the light of the world.

Fuck it! I think I'll crawl under the covers and stay where I am.

Which does't mean I don't know how to get out of bed.

It's just like what I said - one foot at a time, one leg at a time, one life at a time. Then you're up. But that's only the beginning.

(doodle from www.stereotypist.livejournal.com)

The President's Choice

"The President's prerogative, " a haughty defense for the uproar and indignation caused by the latest list of persons to be conferred the prestigious title of National Artist. This chilled my frail bone and brought back hazy memories of "Dean's prerogative" everytime administrative decisions were met with outrage in UPTC where I was employed years ago.

This so-called prerogative of the highest authority, I can understand the how of it - how it's often used, in more brazen ways than one, and how gratifying it must be but the why of it, I should be enlightened. Is this part of the Social Contract where we entrust the "common good" to the sovereign? Is the sovereign capable of deciding for the common good, all the time? Is the Leviathan infallible and who is to police his thoughts and actions?

If the president chooses to use this power of having the prerogative, what is the point in installing a democratic exercise or a semblance of democratic process through a selection committee when in the end, the recommendations of the committee carry no substantive weight? It's a waste of resources. Might as well go by gut-feel.

The GMA administration is particularly notorious for bypassing the Committe on Apointments in some of its controversial appointees in the past so this is not particularly shocking - GMA soiling her hands, yet once again, in the area of culture and the arts. Naglilinamiri na gud la, nga kagwang.

I force myself to look at GMA on TV and not puke and I see a woman who is not only so at home with power but is so smug about it. She has flabbergasted me several times by her propensity to give tongue-lashings to government officials deemed inefficient with the cameras panning on her infuriated expression. Some landlords treat their slaves better. People with lesser virtue would curb their tongue and try to act properly even on pretense, but this woman who has been raised in wealth, had a president for a father, and a crook for a husband? shows no qualms parading to the world what her power provides and how she intends using it.

Some smartass texted GMA's fitting epitaph: Here lies.....and I find myself not disagreeing.

(photo courtesy of www.weheartit.com)

"The Book is Binukbok" (Emman Lacaba)

While I am about to embark on a McEwan exploration, a long time coming really, here's the Booker Prize contenders this year. Not a single book in the list made it to my reading achievements, so far. (woe to me!)

1. The Children's Book, AS Byatt (Chatto and Windus)

2. Summertime, JM Coetzee (Harvill Secker)

3. The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (Jonathan Cape)

4. How to paint a dead man, Sarah Hall (Faber)

5. The Wilderness, Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

6. Me Cheeta, James Lever (Fourth Estate)

7. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)

8. The Glass Room, Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

9. Not Untrue & Not Unkind, Ed O'Loughlin (Penguin - Ireland)

10.Heliopolis, James Scudamore (Harvill Secker)

11. Brooklyn, Colm Toibin (Viking)

12. Love and Summer, William Trevor (Viking)

13. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters (Virago)

Will Coetzee get his third? It's too much but that would be a treasured feather on the prized cap of a novelist who writes in studied restraint and whose sparse prose is devoid of sentimentality. Well, at least, the Coetzee of old. The numerical trend suggests something - his first came in 1983, then 14 years later in 1997, he scored his second with 'Disgrace'. Well, it's only 12 years from winning his last but it's 2009, he seems to be darn lucky on odd numbers.

Speaking of novels, how many have I started and not finished? Quite a few, just quite a few. One of the things I loathe about myself is the inability to let go, such a pussy. By page 8, one more less, gets a sense that this is a lousy novel - yawn, yawn and the best idea is to throw it and find something worthwhile. But since I am rather committed to it and harbor notions that who knows, by page 72, there will be an epiphany of sorts. Or a beautifully crafted sentence you wished you had written, an unexpected twist, a funny line that reminds you of someone, a phrase evoking memories, an anecdote so close to home. I end up feeling empty and detesting myself more for being kiss-ass to throw a novel away. It's a huge character flaw I have had major battles with - knowing and deciding to give up.

I wish I could wean myself from fiction a little bit. I have friends who I see happier chewing on the fat, so to speak, nourishing their souls with the fattier tissues of political economy, biographies, history, philosophy and I envy them. While here I am, still in fictionland. Some have even become condescending or maybe this is just paranoia on my part but you feel a prejudice-vibe. Somebody asked "what pleasure do you derive from fiction?" I could recite a litany but that would sound defensive.

Yes, I agree that after being familiar with a particular genre, the genre somehow loses its suspense. You can somehow predict the nuances or read into them but as a reader, there's comfort in the thought that you are actually capable of entrusting your imagination to a writer you hardly know. It's the masterful stroke of a writer to let you experience the agony of action until the last page, regardless if you know from the very start how stories usually end.

Fiction to me, feeds that archetypal vulnerability of monkeys swinging from tree to tree, demonstrating faith in their peers to catch them, no matter what. Story plots are trite, contrived, tired, rehashed but so is life. Life finds comfort in patterns and rituals, it's not really an exciting rollercoaster ride but even rollercoasters for the sake of debate, also follow certain patterns, don't they?

Fiction may not offer something new, in the strictest sense of the term. What is more important is having that attitude that you may have heard this already, done this, read about this, knew about this and yet there is something that you can cart away that either sustains or reaffirms your spirit.

And this is not me being defensive, guffaws. To that friend who asked what pleasure I derive from fiction, allow me to drag an ally in John Gardner whose books on crafting fiction are considered major references. He competenly defends "to write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that 1 out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have some loved one dying....to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs.....to write as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged, to live on."

Thank you, Mr. Gardner. And to those who have lost their stomach for fiction, maybe you're reading the bad ones.

Farewell, President!

Somber - the national mood, a deluge of nostalgia for the gilded time in history when we felt as a people, we were more formidable than the sum of our parts; that with a clear vision, we could rise above ourselves. The aftermath - the tide swayed, giving room for man-made catastrophe to impose its way. But that’s not my story.

Tears found freedom to leak and flow as I watched the tributes for Pres. Aquino over the weekend. Most affecting was witnessing Teddy Boy Locsin’s uncontrollable display of grief. Used to have this huge crush on him and hearing him say that just by being in Pres. Cory’s presence made him feel noble made my heart constrict to a 30th degree.

Memory rush - my mother discussing national politics at the dinner table. Sophomore year, I wrote my first political manifesto supporting Cory’s call for civil disobedience which my mother typed in her office's rustic typewriter. If not for Cory, the political bug wouldn't have sucked my blood. Yes, she taught me the value of affirmative action. She opened my eyes to what extent political activism could achieve. Before I encountered Bell Hook, I already felt how to be changed by ideas was pure pleasure.

My bouts of crying I try to rationalize. Maybe I was crying for that highschool sophomore draped in youthful optimism and harboring romantic ideas of liberty. Where has she gone? Maybe, the crying was more a feeling of yearning for a generation that shed blood for freedom and stood proud, that era where political actions bore positive fruits. I remember feeling weary, drained, fatigued, following the national headlines but nevertheless hopeful and celebratory of the general tempo of those times. Now, national politics just make me nauseous. The leadership, plagued by questions of legitimacy and charges of corruption does not inspire pride.

For Pres. Cory, this poem by Goethe, one of my life-coaches:

SILENCE
Over all the hilltops
Silence,
Among all the treetops
You feel hardly
A breath moving.
The birds fall silent in the woods.
Simply wait! Soon
You too will be silent.