The refusal to give up today

GIVE UP TOMORROW exposes a Kafkaesque extravaganza populated by flamboyantly corrupt public officials, cops on the take, and a frenzied legal and media circus. It is also an intimate family drama focused on the near mythic struggle of two angry and sorrowful mothers who have dedicated more than a decade to executing or saving one young man, Paco Larrañaga.

THE REFUSAL TO GIVE UP TODAY
by Katrina Stuart Santiago

On the evening of July 16 1997, Paco Larrañaga was having drinks with his classmates from culinary school after a full day of exams. He went home at 2AM and was back in school at 8AM on July 17, for more exams. The teacher who proctors the tests swears that Paco was present in that classroom, his classmates are witness to his attendance – in school and for drinks the night before, official school records prove his presence, too. Paco was in Manila, and nowhere else, on July 16 and July 17, 1997.  Read on

 

sooo not worth it

from A tradition not worth it, cito beltran’s column yesterday, in anticipation of the afternoon SONA — a ritual borrowed from the U.S. that Filipino politicians have reinvented and trivialized.

Our local version of SONA has turned into a made for Reality TV event that looks more like a Hollywood Red carpet event where guests dress and behave like they were at a party instead of a serious political event intended to draw the true picture of country’s condition. Even media coverage of the event draws from the styles of US entertainment programs focusing on fashion, looks and social intrigue rather than “Who’s Who” in terms of being responsible for our current state of affairs.

yeah, it’s become so showbiz… all show and tight security…

The House of Representatives always spends extra to dress up the Batasan Pambansa complex. The last time Congress did this, I think they spent over several millions to spruce things up. Then the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines have to deploy their respective army of security personnel to secure the President and the VIP guests. This takes months of preparation, with cops and soldiers being deployed days ahead, which requires lots of logistics such as vehicles, equipment, not to mention food and utilities, which again costs millions.

From the Palace side, an equal amount of time, work and money is poured into preparing the SONA speech with the help of “consultants”, a lot of work and fine tuning goes into preparing the agenda, guest lists, as well as the media coverage of the event, not to mention expenses for hair, make-up, and outfits of government officials and their spouses.

… and no substance.

On the average we get a 30 to 45 minute sanitized and politicized recap of events and realities that millions of Filipinos have been living in. Rich or poor, most of us don’t want to be reminded of our sorry state of affairs in terms of crimes, under employment, corruption and poverty. Even the so-called good news doesn’t matter much because most of the economic benefits remain limited to the rich and well connected who control business monopolies in the country.

Is it worth several millions of pesos just to hear a few quotable quotes that are read from the teleprompter and not from the heart? Do we need to spend millions of pesos to watch political turncoats serve out 17 to 21 blasts of applause as if they were watching a tennis match? Regardless of who delivers the speech, the sorry fact is, we the Filipino people are paying too much money for a tradition that does not change our state of affairs.

In comparison, the US model has always been crucial to Americans because US Presidents traditionally uses their State Of the Nation Address as a springboard or opportunity to make a major policy decision or announce vital information, which in turn affects investment decisions, political directions or global relations.

this time it was twice longer than average, punctuated by some 100 more blasts of sipsip applause, the longest one when he called for responsible parenthood, perceived as an endorsement of the RH bill, which was nothing of the sort.  the speech itself, if it can be called that, was self-congratulatory (parang he believes his own propaganda), and packed with trivia.  and promises.  even some defensiveness.  but nothing about palparan and human rights, or EPIRA, or FOI, or RH really.  nothing new, nothing surprising, nothing inspiring.  and that’s the state of the nation.

Carlos Bulosan on writers after the war

By Elmer Ordonez

Retrieved from my chaotic files is a copy of Carlos Bulosan’s typewritten notes (five pages) on Filipino writers after the war. It was sent years ago by Prof. Epifanio “Sonny” San Juan (the leading authority on expatriate writer Carlos Bulosan) who had done assiduous research on the Bulosan papers at the University of Washington library.

Bulosan died of tuberculosis Seattle in September 1926. The accolades for Bulosan were marred by the comments of two Chronicle columnists who dismissed Bulosan as a plagiarist and therefore worthless as a writer. The plagiarism charge diminished somewhat Bulosan’s stature diminished somewhat and was neglected by the literary community caught up with New Criticism and the Cold War.

A group of us (Frankie Sionil Jose, Alejandrino G. Hufana, B. Burce Bunao, and myself) put out Comment to foster nationalist consciousness against what Leopoldo Yabes called conformism and the fear of ideas as a result of the McCarthyite witchhunt in the country. Prof. Dolores Stephens Feria had an article on Bulosan, her close friend in Los Angeles. Unfortunately I no longer have the 2nd issue of Comment (1957) which has Feria’s essay. In 1960 Prof. Feria, published in the Diliman Review, her collection of letters from Bulosan titled Sound of Falling Light. Thereafter Bulosan would became a literary icon during the radical 60s to the present for his progressive writings and union organizing in the West Coast.

As for the plagiarism charge, Sonny San Juan said this involved Bulosan’s story “ The End of the War” in a New Yorker issue (1944)—a case that was settled our of court. He said he compared the two texts and noted only some similarities in plot— no outright lifting of lines or passages. The critic said Shakespeare did adopt whole stories/plots from other literary works. Any graduate student in English would know the bard’s sources—like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Mirror for Magistrates, and Plutarch’s Lives.

In the 90s Prof. Edilberto Tiempo gave a lecture in UP Diliman denigrating the literary work of Bulosan by using formalist criteria– which received no small amount of disagreement from the audience.

I asked good friend Ed Tiempo afterward why he did it. With an impish grin, he replied, “because I know you guys in UP like Bulosan.” I first met him in August 1970 when both of us read papers in a conference on American literature in Srinagar, Kashmir. His paper was on New Criticism, mine was on impressionist writers James and Faulkner. I invited him to the UP Writers workshop in Cebu the following year. He said he would in turn invite me to his Silliman workshop. Martial law intervened.

Clearly leftist Bulosan was not Ed Tiempo’s cup of tea. He called Bulosan’s work a “failure of sensibility.” He also faulted Manuel Arguilla for switching point of view in his proletarian story “Caps and Lower Case” but otherwise admired “Midsummer” at the Cebu workshop—dwelling at length on the “papayas in bloom” in the idyllic story.

Bulosan’s Notes on the Foreword of Philippine Prose and Poetry, Volume Four, were written for Prof. Yabes although Bulosan wrote about the UP scholar: “Leopoldo Y.Yabes. Ilocano. He wrote several articles about me . . . Probably the best critic and historian, besides being a Marxist. He is also a linguist. Like Laya, he studied languages by himself. (Yabes) translated The Laughter of my Father into Ilocano.” Yabes and Bulosan were co-editors of the original manuscript of Philippine Short Stories (1925 -1940 that they tried to get published in the US in the late 40s. The UP Press published it in 1975, followed by two more volumes covering post-war stories.

In Bulosan’s Notes NVM Gonzalez was: “Probably one of the most versatile. Saw him in SF when he was sent to the US on a scholarship after the war.” NVM on his return in 1950 joined the English department in UP Diliman and introduced the concept of a writers workshop, with craft as its primary concern.

On the authors of the fourth volume of Philippine Prose and Poetry (PPP) published in the early 50, he said his notes were “to better understand Philippine writing today in English and my place among contemporaries . . . Contributors are all college grads except—who?” Bulosan was just a high school graduate citing Manuel A. Viray, Maximo Ramos, and Juan C. Laya as having gone to the same school as he did in Lingayen.

Bulosan recalls the 1939 visit of Fred Mangahas and Salvador P. Lopez in Los Angeles. He acknowledges his debt to Mangahas who as literary editor of the Herald Magazine gave him a page every Sunday, his poetry, stories and letters. “God, how I wrote and wrote in those days!” They met again after the war, with Fred as a Palace official; SP Lopez (“very brilliant”) as alternate (to Carlos P. Romulo) permanent delegate to the United Nations.

Of the writers who later became National Artists, he recalled Jose Garcia Villa who “never recognized my talents”; NVM Gonzalez, “probably one of the most versatile”; Carlos Quirino, “tall, suave, handsome”; Nick Joaquin, “probably the most intense writer in the islands . . . Tolstoi type.”

Bulosan met Bienvenido Santos in Washington, DC, during the war and worked in the same office. He also remembered Juan Collas, “the first to write about me in the Philippines way back in 1937 when my first group of poems appeared in Poetry, Chicago, entitled “The Unknown Quantity.”

He remembered Arturo B. Rotor (a wartime Cabinet member of Quezon) who “wrote Quezon’s autobiography” presumably The Good Fight; Stevan Javellana who had probably written the best novel (Without Seeing the Dawn) about the Philippines; and Yay Panlilio, an intrepid woman reporter who became a Marking guerrilla leader. (To be continued)

“The Filipino is Worth Blogging For” and indie publishing

The Filipino is Worth Blogging For is the title of a book katrina and i are self-publishing and launching on thursday july 19, along with the main attraction, katrina’s first book: of love and other lemons, essays personal and political about being girl-woman-pinay, otherwise known as ka-women-an (hyphens mine), in this day and age in this macho-pa-rin country, the kind of essays i would have wanted to write for my generation but never had the courage to, just because my parents and sibs would have disowned me.  a must-read for all girls, young and old, and their fathers sons brothers lovers too.  the essays are illustrated with new and previous works of artists met, friends made, in the last two years.

… an honest, moving portrait of a young woman who cannot but train her critical eye on the world even as her life splinters around her and who realizes, not without cost, that “the most personal things that informed our real lives, kawomenan could not respond [to].” Where the writer breaks into a lyrical mode, the reader becomes privy to the intimate and the hidden that the persona shares with a beloved. No mere intermissions, these privacies serve as yet another act of resistance when held in counterpoint to the weight of the public and political that inform her life, small acts but no less significant. By turns brave, bewildered, unsparing, and vulnerable, the essays strive to reinvigorate kawomenan by accommodating the experiences and aspirations of a new generation of Filipinas. — from the foreword by Mabi David

while katrina was wrapping up of love…, this second book happened on the side.  the title had come first, inspired by the slogan “The Filipino Is Worth Designing For” on t-shirts of the cobonpue-layug-pineda group at the height of the naia-1 controversy.

joel remembers when it came to him, The Filipino is Worth Blogging For! that at once he bought the domain name, for a support marketing website.  then we sat on it, haha, naghintayan, until i realized that it was i who had the luxury of time while awaiting the foreword and blurbs for my edsa uno book, so i plunged in.

the hard part was going through more than a thousand blogposts over 4 years and choosing the events / issues / people that katrina and i had both blogged about (without repeating each other), and finding that with some rearranging, under new categories and in chronological order (rather than newest blogpost first), narratives are revealed of recent and current history, social and political, as it unfolds in natural time.  a leap from the computer screen into the pages of a book, and it works (if i may say so myself who shouldn’t)!

… this collection fairly crackles with inquisitive and insightful electricity, and serves as engaging, persuasive testimony regarding the merits of following the writings of these authors in venues online or otherwise.  — from blurb by blogger Jaime Oscar M. Salazar

Binabasag nila ang pagkamanhid na namamayani sa lipunan, ipinaparamdam ang samu’t saring porma ng pang-aapi at panlilinlang. Kung hindi ka man sang-ayon sa isang tindig, hindi mo naman maikakailang may punto ang kanilang pag-iisip.  — from blurb by blogger Teo Marasigan

why indie publishing

mainstream publishing houses can make it easy for you, in a sense, put out your book at little cost to you, if any, but usually you have to make pila for who-knows-how-long — unless you’re part of the canonized circle, or very well-connected — but you get only a rather small share of sales, far from commensurate to all the time and energy and creativity you poured into your work, unless of course you’re already a sikat bestseller, in which case you get a better deal, someone correct me if i’m wrong.

the alternative is to do it yourself.  you put out your own money to pay artists who will layout your book and design your cover.  meanwhile you find a printing press, preferably one that’s known to do good work for indie publishers, like benny jalbuena’s corasia, and you choose the paper you like or can afford, and you negotiate prices, and talk serious deadlines, so you can plan your launch.

of course you’ll try to keep expenses low.  you’ll make tawad the artists — helps if you know them personally, mga kindred souls ‘yan — but make sure they’re also into digital technology, because the printing press will expect a usb stick or hard drive containing all the book data.  you’ll choose cheap but presentable paper; you might even keep the number of pages down as the cost per book goes up the thicker the book, and the fewer the number of copies you want.  if you’re lucky the printing press will ask for 50 percent down lang, the rest to follow as the book sells.

you’ll get your money back naman , and possibly turn a small profit in the long run depending on how you price your book — what profit margin you’ll be happy with — and, most important, how you sell it.  you could get into the bookstores, directly or through a distributor, but they’ll want anywhere from 40 to 55 percent of sales (yes, without any puhunan on their part, at least the ones we checked out) which would mean your book gets quite expensive, unless you’re willing to forego profit and just make bawi your puhunan, then it gets just a little expensive.

the alternative is to sell it yourself, which means turning on your most shameless and yabang self — your book is worth buying and reading, you’ll even sign every copy, who knows it might become a collector’s item!  at the launch, get as many of your family and friends and friends of friends to come and buy.  it helps a lot if you give away copies to writers and columnists in the hope that one out of ten comes up with a rave review for the papers and/or the internet.  it helps a lot, too, if you have a website for your book, where you can promote it and  post contact numbers for orders.

we learned all that when we published lola concha’s book, revolutionary routes, last year.  i didn’t want to be edited by a publisher whose concerns would be different from mine, and i wanted to be sure it would look exactly as i envisioned it, which meant katrina working closely with the artists to the very end.  and i wanted to price it cheap while making a little for my work, so i did the index myself, and a cousin did the editing, gratis et amore, and i asked for and got donations from family that covered printing costs and a sosyal launch sa filipinas heritage in makati, lots of food and drinks, lola concha style.

in contrast, of love and other lemons is a katrina project — sampid lang ang the filipino is worth blogging for — all expenses ours, so we’re doing it the way katrina’s indie-publishing friends do it.  in a launch-friendly venue, chef’s bistro in q.c, which doesn’t charge for events in the hope that those who attend will order some of their good food.  katrina’s buying the first 100 or so bottles of beer to get the ball rolling. :)

the good news is, mang benny has texted, tapos na katrina’s book, and worth blogging for is almost done, delivery on wednesday, what a relief!   see you at the launch!