While in the vague limbo nightmare ...

While in the vague limbo nightmare of a break-up half-way over, I call my First Ex in her office and proceed to read to her the first part of I Read The News Today, Oh Boy!, a choose-your-own-adventure book I’m trying to write.

It’s about a college girl who wakes up, gets out of bed and while combing her hair walks around the house looking for her parents. Finding no one, she walks out of the house (in her pajamas) and sees their street unusually deserted, save for a few cars parked haphazardly along the middle of the road, wheels paused in midturn. She walks into a neighbourhood store and finds a misshapen mongrel shivering over the countertop, and, panicking, the girl bolts for the entrance. The mongrel gives chase and the girl, confusingly pushing the door instead of pulling, is mauled by the hungry animal.

My First Ex asks just what - the hell - that was all about, and I tell her a few things I want to do with the text and growing frustrated she growls through the phone “why is it that everything you have to do has to have an agenda?”.

~

A year later I read a conversation between Lester Bangs and Brian Eno (Musician, 1979) where they talk about Eno’s then-recent albums Before And After Science and - my parents’ favourite - Another Green World. Early in the interview Bangs mentions Lydia Lunch calling Eno’s records as expressions of “mediocrity, because all it is is just something that flows and weaves, flows and weaves... it's kind of nauseating. It's like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it's very smooth going down” and Bangs continues to write, saying Eno, seemingly (my observation as reader) nonplussed, “recognizes such criticism but carries it further: ‘The corollary point is that if you're not in the manipulative mode anymore you're not quite sure actually how to measure your own contribution if you're not constructing things and pushing things in a certain direction and working towards goals, what is your function?’”

~

In a different interview, more than twenty years after the Bangs-Eno conversation in Musician, Haruki Murakami remembers writing the mammoth tome Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage, 1996) without the benefit of the safety net an outline brings (doing it “sulat-kutob”, as mentioned to me by Ariel Agcaoili). He finished writing the first part of Wind-Up Bird for Kodansha (his publisher in Japan) without knowing how he’d start the second part, not to mention end the whole story. He eventually decides to pick up on a narrative strand he laid out in the first book and make it the overarching theme for the second. After two-three years of writing, Kodansha finally publishes the two Wind-Up Bird books, to great success, the variety of topics tossed and touched in the books furthering Murakami’s image as “the literary David Lynch” of Japan. To this date, Wind-Up Bird remains to be one of Murakami’s more confusing, daunting, and “open” books.

A few years later, in a fit of what I can only imagine as a midlife crisis, Murakami decides to give structured (and what my First Ex might call “agendad”) writing a few tries with a couple of books, the second of which (in my opinion) is his worst (after the quake, Knopf, 2002). But the first one (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attacks And The Japanese Psyche, Vintage, 2000) remains to be a personal favourite. My copy lies well-read inside a drawer by the foot of my bed. I originally gave it to my First Ex as a gift for her birthday during our first year together, but in the halving of the goods it somehow ended up in my stash. In the book’s third page, my inscription for my First Ex unromantically says “in Japan, there are no ‘first books’. Literature is serialised in magazines before they turn into paperbacks.”.

Murakami’s most recent novel (Kafka On The Shore, Knopf, 2005) and short story collection (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Harvill Seeker, 2006) finds the author back to his unstructured meandering “flows and weaves, flows and weaves”, and with the movie version of his short story “Tony Takitani” being nominated for an Oscar a few years earlier, both books are greeted by a renewed/revived public interest for all things Murakami. I have tall thick paperback copies of the two books, one an uncorrected proof (a gift from a friend in America), the other I bought late last year. They remain standing on the shelves unread.

~

Baguio workshop coFellow VBG mentions Rene Villanueva in an MP class complaining about young writers putting much effort into making “unreadable, unstructured” works that don’t amount to much of anything as they workshop a poem by JRT, another coFellow. I hear the sentiment almost photocopyingly repeated by senior writers, mostly from the Filipino-language camp, and I almost buy into it for a while but then I start to see it as a jab to the chin of the spirit of “kuwentuhan” as I understand it, more dependent to “flows and weaves” than “pushing things in a certain direction and working towards goals”.

But then again, Ser Rene was mostly talking about poetry, which, like a train, “tends towards the end of the line” as opposed to prose’s form being more dictated by the “size of the page” than anything else, as if writing stories was like painting, or sketching.

~

Told to me by Ser Agcaoili in our first MP class, regarding a poem I submitted to the class for workshop: “Para kang pintor na gustong tumula. Gumawa ka muna ng tulang maiintindihan namin.”

Again, Ser Agcaoili, regarding a hypertext character sketch short story I submitted to our second MP class: “Nakaloko ka, Mr David.”

~

An omen, or, if nothing else, a metaphor: on my way home from work at the late-ish hours of the night before I prepare to write this chapter, I step on a mound of cold wet dogshit. I curse.

Not thirty seconds later, along the same floor area, I find a crisp twenty peso bill, trifolded. I laugh.

Or maybe the writing trends ...

Or maybe the writing trends of the Fifties, as Jun Cruz Reyes might say. Ser Jun, prize-winning author, eight major books on the shelves, two more on the way, whose contemporary barkada everyman tone is much-imitated, his influence upon my generation’s better (and worse) writers much-cited (also: painter, documentary filmmaker, reviewer, and nowadays a budding cultural theorist (but he’ll always be a writer to me)). The man regularly remarks that writing in the Philippines (especially Filipino-language writing) is stuck in the Thirties, still looking up and marveling at the baroque constellations of what ultimately are nothing else but stars dead all these years (and I tend to agree).

~

My First Ex wrote a story in 1999 which was published in the Philippine Graphic, and later on in the Likhaan Anthology for that year (although only published three years later). It has an opening paragraph of William Gibsonesque Philip Dickian (her favourites) marriage-of-the-micro-and-the-macrocosmic proportions, without even trying: “A star fell on my face when I was lying in bed this morning. It was a plastic, glow-in-the-dark one, with its adhesive all worn out, a chunk of some stellar arrangement Lucas made on our ceiling.” (“Lucas”, with the Hard-C, so maybe Cancer (the zodiac sign of his current boyfriend, a native of Sardegna, Italia), or Scorpio (which is hers)?) and ends it with “Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who once said we’re all living in the gutter but some of us look up at the stars.”

~

I half-jokingly set myself to writing an outline for a short story called “Dead Fucken’ Stars” as a rewrite of the 1925 Paz Marquez Benitez classic written as a parody of the street-talking faux-Anglo Irvine Welsh tradish that was de rigueur in the early Nineties, “transgressive literature” at its most popular. It was a pretty thorough outline, but like in most campaigns set out out of bitterness and bile (i.e., editorials, theses, relationships, assessments of relationships, and founding writers’ orgs) nothing usable or good ever came out of it.

~

During my freshman year in college I somehow manage to become a Fellow in the UP Baguio workshop on my first try, under Fiction In English (in direct contrast to my MP undergrad program), and like in most Fellows for most workshops, one entry was favored more than the other. Mine was called “Fifteen Photographs”, which was a series of fifteen short prose pieces that Scottish musician and writer Stuart David (no relation) pioneered in the Nineties as “Ink Polaroids” (which David explains as something you could do if you want to capture a moment (“don’t let them pass you by”) but somehow finding yourself without a camera, the likeliness of which lessens as the days go by, with the advent of digicams and phonecams in wildly affordable prices), an experiment I decided to take on as practice for writing prose as mere texture.

And just like in real life photographs, I was younger and thinner and the eyes were a little bit wider in my “photographs”, and the subjects revolved around a few choice topics that back then had immense gravitas in my life (unknown to me at the time, as per the usual in the young wannabe writer’s writing process): A) The Gradual Erosion Of Family Life, and B) The Feelings I Had For The Girl Who Later Turned Into My First Ex.

The Gradual Erosion Of Family Life was represented by snippets largely about my dead uncle. In his early thirties, he (Uncle Wowie) died of colon cancer in 1997, cremated and the ashes quartered away, later sprinkled around his father’s burial plot in Fort Bonifacio. I try to resurrect my uncle every now and then through poetry and prose, not much as subject, more like the possession or channeling of his rich bravado and machismo (as in the case of my 2006 effort Bikini Idolatry, which was, in the mildest terms, forty-plus poems about Japanese girls in bikinis, a complete book of “Bayawlit” (as Bayaw CJJ might call it) that un/fortunately remains unpublished) about as often as people in our house dream about him.

“Fifteen Photographs” was praised to the high heavens by Dr Jose Dalisay, who proclaimed it across the workshop room in his round booming voice (qualities of which I try to represent typographically in Instructions For The Inclined via Cooper Black as type) as an example of what he said the Americans call “the New Biography” (“It’s a new form of writing!” Dr Dalisay gives as further explanation). AFS, a coFellow, responded violently, remarking that the writing style I employed was hardly up to her literary standards, standards apparently upheld by countless CW classes with Dalisay himself, my writing in fact maybe only good enough for the little zines I had been championing the entire time I was up there, and not for the books and anthologies and journals promised to us by our respective academic programs, which came to me as sounding like a literary splitting of hairs.

~

Upon retrospect, the term “New Biography” sounds like something to be filed under “Creative Nonfiction”, that vague bastard oxymoronic noncategory, at best a confusing appellation, at worst nothing much but drab essays in literary garb, and by “literary garb” I mean “navel-gazing”, the Capote-pioneered docudrama mode of writing hijacked by the Literati and infected with their high ego and paranoia and conceit, a “category” I would hardly associate myself with, a “category” I’ve been well-avoiding since the first time I’ve heard of it (says the guy who with this book sets out to write an autobio).

“Creative Nonfiction” belongs to a bestiary of literary chimeras like Elbert Or’s “Grafiction”, and, worse yet, “Speculative Fiction” as appropriated by the Alfars in the “Filipino” context. The fact that the (supposedly) best of these things (so far) were created decades before they were retroactively labeled as such-and-such should be evidence enough of the terms being “genteel and unnecessary”, reeking of insecurity and desperation, all these labels of the “latest literary trends” to be “hip” to nowadays.

~

Among the literary journals mentioned, I have only been featured in three, as editor (the Literary Apprentice, self-published, 2005 and 2006), contributor (Caracoa, self-published, 2006), and book designer (the Absent Muse, self-published, 2006, and once again, the Literary Apprentice).

~

At the start of my attempt at being a young writer, I promised myself not to come out with books that will merely be collections of things I’ve done “thus far”, instead to make books that were on the outset conceptualized as meant to be read as entire books (a variation of what Vim Nadera tells us in my first MP class in 2001: “magsulat ka nang iniisip mo ay maipapublish ka”). As effect, the number of books on the bookshelves of National Bookstore with my name on the spine since 2001: one (as editor, City Lights, Psicom, 2006).

I tell a variation of this philosophy to Mang Tony, Keeper of Philippine Literary Apocrypha, after which he relates to me a story about Dr Gemino Abad’s half-regret for his youthful enthusiasm to be published and read, as in hindsight he found most of his poetry to be unimpressive. I mention to Mang Tony that maybe Dr Abad could probably make more money out of them again by publishing them together as A Habit of Snores, assuming, of course, that having more money will alleviate his half-regret (it will probably work for me).

~

In the Bangs-Eno Interview, Eno continues: “In fact, one of the reasons cybernetics keep coming up is that it does talk about ways of working that are different than that. It does talk about systems that are self governing, so which may not need intervention. They look after themselves, and they go somewhere which you may not have predicted precisely but which is generally in the right direction. But the assessment of those things is, of course, very difficult.”.

His mention of cybernetic systems as self-governing and unpredictable reminds me of CRUMBS!! (http://projectcrumbs.tripod.com, 2001), the hypertexplosion project my First Ex and I set out to do in 2001, which contained most of the aforementioned Feelings I Had For The Girl Who Later Turned Into My First Ex, themselves “self-governing and unpredictable”, in hindsight apparently the perfect marriage of medium and message.

Amazingly, after all these years, the website is still up, the last update being August 2002. All of its youthful enthusiasm to please and be pleased are still available to be explored and read, and if need be, analyzed. Although it is still not clear to me if that is a good thing or a bad thing, because just like that throw-away joke from an episode of Frasier about the urn of the husband’s first (deceased, of course) wife adorning a shelf in his second wife’s honeymoon bedroom, it continues to cast its shadow over every romantic relationship I toss myself into.

But then, the assessment of such things is, of course, very difficult.

In other words ...

In other words, the “UP” look, AKA (from co-Fellow JF) “Mula Sa Ukay”, as introduced to me in the mid Nineties via the first issue of Pillbox, the official Eraserheads fanzine. Young designer Cynthia Bauzon-Arre (back then without the “Arre”) drew cartoon versions of ‘Heads’ Raimund Marasigan and Marcus Adoro in their fashionable ukay apparel, arrowed and labelled in small handwritten type for ease of understanding, a fey teenage fangirl’s idea of fashion anatomy. I copied them down on to my notebooks at the time in an effort to imitate Bauzon-Arre’s art. As I grew fond and familiar of the style, I started drawing myself as a cartoon character, like how Bauzon-Arre might draw me if I was a member of a famous Nineties rock band, all of shaggy hair and sideburns and high school uniform and mismatched Chuck Taylors, one foot black, the other one blue.

~

I have a pair of beige corduroy pants that had its beginnings as olive green. I’ve been wearing it almost everyday since 2004, more out of necessity than fashion concerns, it being the only pair of pants I’ve found to be comfortable to wear regardless of my girth. Of course, wearing it continuously (and the regular launderings) has worn it and torn it literally to shreds, with only patches and fragments of cloth keeping it in its somewhat pants-shaped form, stitched into place by my mother. She checks it out once a week, looking for new holes and tears in the fragile fabric, trying to find them while in their shy infancy before they blossom into wide-open display windows of candid meatmarket fleshfeast.

~

Late 2006, Vim Nadera walks into the ICW and, upon finding me, points to my tattered corduroys, says: “Aba, binigyan mo ako ng ideya, a! Magpagawa nga ako ng pantalon na ganyan. Marami kaming retaso sa bahay, e, sayang naman sila.”

He then turns to talk to someone, and after a while returns to me: “Ano ba nangyari sa’yo? Guwapo ka naman, e, kung payat ka lang.”

~

The Creeper, seven-foot-tall bat-winged monster from underrated Coppola-produced horror movie cycle Jeepers Creepers, has its eccentricity as thus: it wakes up every twenty-third spring and for twenty-three days will hunt people down and kill them for whatever body part it has taken to liking, with no logical reason outside of self-preservation. As the movies proceed, it is made clear to the viewer that the Creeper’s anatomy is basically made up of other people’s body parts, detachable like modular LEGO, easily replaceable, and can be turned into weapons, if the need arises.

In one scene from the second Jeepers Creepers: needing a replacement head, a headless Creeper manages to wrap and trap a teenage jock inside one of its giant membranous wings. While inside the wing, it decapitates the boy with such vacuum force that the shirt is literally torn off of the boy’s back. The Creeper retracts its wing to unveil the decapitated boy’s topless body flapping and twisting like he’s fronting Joy Division, much to his friends’ concern and alarm.

The camera then switches to a headless Creeper as it disgustingly processes the teenage boy’s head inside its body, the profile of the face denting the surface of the Creeper’s body as the head makes its way up from the stomach to the neck, to peek and sprout out of the stump, like a giant shit pimple, finally forming itself into the Creeper’s “gnarly” new head.

~

VS, as explanation of his creative process in his thesis defence, likens himself to the gothic metal monolith (and Superman fan) Iron Giant, mentioning the final scene in the Dreamworks production as specific image, where, after blowing himself up in an existential eureka of almost Christian self-sacrifice, the camera finds the Iron Giant’s bits and parts and idiosyncratic pieces (a whole finger here, a nut there, an unknown worm-like limb serpentining its way across the snowy haze of the North Pole) all making their way towards the great big Iron Giant bullethead, from the top of which an antenna extends, beacon pulsing, the film’s ending holding the promise of reassemblage and reanimation for a possible sequel.

After the Baguio workshop ...

After the Baguio workshop, I self-consciously avoid writing stories directly culled from my life, in effect rechanneling all of my “creative writing” powers towards manufacturing Filipino-language third-person short narratives that are completely outside of my direct sphere of experience.

I invent a pseudonym for this phase, “Mona Lisa P Cajucom”, whose biography states that she is a “premyadong manunulat at mandudula, sa loob at labas ng bansa. Kamakailan lang, ginawaran si Mona Lisa ng Hansadutta Shankar Award For Outstanding Young Playwrights 2005, para sa kanyang eksperimental na dulang 14.617˙N By 121.0500˙E, na itinanghal noong 2004 sa dating gusali ng COD sa Cubao, na ngayo’y kinatatayuan na ng Puregold Express” and I collect her works, concise life sketches of people living around the same busy Cubao-area street (with drawings of houses and housecats, too, the third-person narrator to be unveiled in one of the last pieces being no one else but one of the neighbourhood cats), and plan to make a book out of it, supposedly released posthumously by the Cajucom Estate with me as editor, called various small faces of smiling grandchildren (Uhaw Na Uhaw, Pagud Na Pagod).

For the book’s introduction, I plan to write about Mona Lisa’s “verve for life”, the book “an account of her Loves, which were Home, and Family, and Cubao”. “I’d like to think that this book is my love letter to that Place, to that Mother/Lover/Sister/Friend who had given me so much, so much”, Cajucom would speak of Cubao in a rare interview, and it is a sentiment tinged with a bittersweet flavour because it is actually Cubao that would later kill her in a street corner mugging gone wrong, because (and it is a fact), as one Atenean girl queried FO (while speaking of UP Diliman, where FO was teaching at the time): “don’t people die there?”.

~

My mother dreams of Uncle Wowie as a small child of (roughly) eleven years. He sits on the side of her bed, running his hand down her hair. They talk about the house, about the maintenance, about the bills. After a while, Uncle Wowie moves to the head of the bed and cups my mother’s (his older (eldest) sister’s) face in his hands, calls her “Lah” (his shorthand for “Delilah”, my mother’s name), and says something important that my mother unfortunately forgets when she wakes up.

I dream about Uncle Wowie as a twenty-five year old. I open the door to the Boy’s Room and he’s there in his collared shirt and Levi’s and cowboy boots, listening to “Backdoor Man” (a Morrison favourite with a chorus he liked to quote), drinking and smoking. His presence is a surprise, because in the dream I know he’s already dead for quite a few years, and I tell him that. He answers “yes, but” and then he reminds me of something I promised to do for him, something I’ve delayed for some years, and the guilt and the grief wakes me up and after a few seconds I notice that I’d been crying in my sleep.

~

I have notes in my computer about a book I’ve been doing research on called a cancer. It’s about a young man diagnosed with colon cancer, and about how his older brother copes with the situation. I plan on telling the story in third-person, through fragments of paragraphs, complete enough to make some semblance of sense, yet incomplete enough to not make any, supposedly to imitate the mental haze of the physical pain of cancer and chemotherapy (also, the mental haze of the treatment to alleviate the physical pain of cancer and chemotherapy).

a cancer is actually two books, the first (first chronologically) book being the one with the fragmented paragraphs revolving around the younger brother’s cancer, mostly around the difficulties of living with it, of coping. The second book, another cancer, is a collection of annotations on a cancer, this time in clear lucid basic prose revolving around the older brother’s ruminations about what his younger brother had been rambling about earlier, after finding out that (and this is where the story twists!) he, the older brother, actually has brain cancer.

A lot of the material written about cancer speaks of it as an invasion of the natural systems and functions of the body, and I convince myself that if I have to write about cancer, I have to echo “cancer” metaphorically as well as formally, and I feel annotating the main text body with footnotes that would figuratively branch the story content out from its initial premise, from what is expected of it and what it is naturally meant to do and say, would be smart and apt and genuine imitation of how cancer affects the body. If I do it like that, I would actually be quite literally giving a cancer another cancer.

~

A year after Uncle Wowie dies of cancer, I graduate from high school. There are a couple of photographs that my older brother took of me with my batchmates in alphabetical order, wet with sweaty anticipation in the seats of the theatre. In the photographs, my hair is buzzcut, cheeks pimpled and thinner, complexion Injun red, and face looking very much like Uncle Wowie’s.

A few months later I tell my older brother about this and he tells me “it’s not such a bad thing, to look like Wowie”.

~

Which is, to say, exactly like cowboy preacher Jesse Custer from the award-winning Garth Ennis - Steve Dillon Nineties comic book horror western serial Preacher, plump lips and strong nose bridge and tired sad eyes.

Near the end pages of a personal favourite issue of Preacher, “When The Story Began” (Preacher no. 9, DC Comics/Vertigo, 1995), Jesse Custer is five years old and his parents wake him up in the middle of the night “an’ told me we were leavin’.” Jesse begins.

(Jesse’s dad, an ex-Marine, walks to his bed and sits by his side)

“‘I need you to be brave for me, son. An’ I need you to know some things, in case we... we don’t get a chance to talk about ‘em later.

(they’ve been held captive for about two years by Jesse’s mother’s sadistic Texas Chainsaw Massacre-type religious zealot family, and are now planning on escaping)

‘I love you, Jesse. You’re my own son an’ I’m proud of you, an’ you brought your mom an’ me more happiness than I ever knew there was. You be good to her, an’ look after her.

‘An’ you be a good guy, Jesse. You gotta be like John Wayne: you don’t take no shit off fools, an’ you judge a person by what’s in ‘em, not how they look.

(and Jesse’s father brings his son close to his chest, as his mother, backlit, looks on from the doorway)

‘An’ you do the right thing. You gotta be one of the good guys, son: ‘cause there’s way too many of the bad.’

“An’ they caught us before we got two miles,” continues Jesse, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, wearing his father’s face, concluding the story: “an’ they shot my daddy in the head.”

~

Early Nineties, in Pasay City, my father starts regularly complaining about inexplicably painful headaches. He finally decides to get a check-up and the doctors find a tumour on the back of his head, roughly the size of a one peso coin, circa Late Eighties-Early Nineties (which had a few centimetres shy of a whole inch for a diameter). He gets the surgery but it’s too expensive for us so we do a benefit concert for him which my mother cheesily dubs “Against All Odds”, with acts like the Breed and Sampaguita and Anak Bayan and Binky Lampano and Father & Son (!) performing back to back. My father started his career in radio when he was seventeen, so by that time he had already accumulated a lot of Friends In The Industry, so people were more than glad to help in any way they could. But even then, the money collected from the benefit concert was only just barely half of what the hospital bill was, but then a few favours were eventually pulled (and promised) and the hospital let my dad go home, the hospital he’d have to regularly come back to to get his chemotherapy.

~

Late 2006, with my Current Girlfriend in tow, I finally visit my father in Novaliches. The last time I had seen him (not counting the documentary that they did about him in 2005) was December 2002, when NU107 gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award of sorts (“Hall Of Fame” is what NU likes to call it). Four years later in Novaliches he is thinner and tired and a lot mellower than before. We sit around a table in front of the TV set and I introduce him to my Current Girlfriend, to whom he is gracious and charming and self-effacing (as always). We talk about music and books and how people are nowadays, and after a while I ask him about his weight loss and he tells us that he has diabetes.

~

I tell this to my older brother the day after the visit and he tells me: “Lagot ka pala, ano? On Mom’s side we have cancer, and on Dad’s side you have diabetes and cancer. You’re a risk for both diseases!”

Francis Stuart says something ...

Francis Stuart says something I can sympathize with: “I am in the happy position of not being likely to be forgotten, never having been known.”

Francis who?

~

With VBG in a poetry reading in Vargas Museum, a guy and a girl walks up to us and asks us to sign their copies of a zine VBG and I debuted a few hours ago. The girl pulls her copy out of her bag and hands it to me to sign and I sign the page where my story is (a love story about me and ABSCBN TV personality and newscaster Marieton Pacheco) and as I hand it back to her she reads what I had just inscribed and before she shoves the zine back in her bag she does a double-take on me and quite seriously asks “’Yan ba talaga ang pangalan mo?”

~

Ser Jun tells me he’s writing Amado V Hernandez’ biography, a book I imagine they would have to call Amado, if only to complement that other Reyes-penned biography about Armando Teng, called Armando (Amado V Hernandez Resource Center, 2006). It would be great to see these two books on the shelves, comrades not only in politics, but also by syllable-count, by author, and by rhyming titles (writ in gold ink on white paper).

But of course, he has to finish writing it first. Ser Jun, amazed and excited by the volume of information he had found that almost cancels the near-Che reverence most people give Ka Amado, plans on bringing Hernandez’ feet back down to earth.

He tells me about his research and his plans and after a few weeks when we meet again in a funeral parlour he addends that the Amado V Hernandez Resource Center wants to read the first draft of the book. I tell him maybe the Resource Center wants a few things either included into, or excluded from, the book. He reacts with what can only be described as “disgust”, and asks me if I’d be willing to let other people read my first drafts.

~

I want to push myself out of the chair, turn the table over, and exclaim “But Sir! All of my works are first drafts!!!”

In an early entry ...

In an early entry in her blog, my Second Ex maintains that she will never ever write anything dramatic or sentimental or even remotely about her personal life, yet on the third day of 2007 - on my Current Girlfriend’s birthday, no less - she launches an angry diatribe of showbiz intriga proportions where she outlines everything that had gone wrong in her life (i.e., crappy job, crappy writing, crappy yeast infection) and then proceeding on blaming it all on me, even going as far as mentioning my complete name for all the world to see.

~

A few months after our Baguio workshop, VBG shows me a manuscript he’s fine-tuning into fiction, a print-out of an immense epistolary effort between him and his First Ex. He lets me read it and with VBG having an intensely whipsmart wit, it’s about as funny as can be expected, but with the narrative having the disadvantage of being real, it is also corny and trite and eventually ugly and cruel and unfair.

He doesn’t include it in his final thesis, not even in any of his two short story collections.

~

Why can’t we all be like Eddie Vedder, pain and frustration of heartbreak distilled into the last lines of “Black” (Ten, Sony Music, 1994): “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life / I know you’ll be the sun / In somebody else’s sky / Why / Can’t It Be / Mine”?

~

All that I have to say about “heartbreak” is in a three-line poem SRM recorded for the spoken word compilation of a long time coming, a long time gone: the 2006 Literary Apprentice Lite (self-published, 2006). It’s the first track in the audio CD, and she only had me recite it once to get it right.

In the first season finale ...

In the first season finale of ABC scifi drama chaos math treatise TV show Lost, they introduce into the show what the main characters (survivors of a plane crash, dubbed by Lost fans as “the Castaways”) cautiously refer to as “the Others”, who are basically a group of people seemingly stranded in the Island with them, people who had been there before they crashed, possibly even the actual natives of the Island.

The season finale ends on a cliffhanger, but the Others are soon given more airtime in the middle of the second season, where they are shown as a raggedy band of barefooted kidnapping rogues with unkempt body hair and primitive fighting gear. They eat dried fish and live in teepees by the northern coast. They walk around the Island with knowing gaits, and generally terrorize people with their reverberating whispers and baby snatching and bone breaking ways, while the Castaways either traipse around the Island looking like you owe them a great deal of money, or stumble in the woods and cry about how their fathers let them down (prime example being Terry O’Quinn’s character “Locke”, whose kidney was stolen by his father whom he had met just a few months before the aforementioned kidney-stealing happened).

As the second season trails on, I try to imagine how living in a deserted Pacific island might be like, to actually grow up and live in one, completely detached from the rest of the world, much like how the Others are in Lost. I try to imagine what would actually be “the cool thing” in such an existence, what would “suck”, what their popular culture might be like: are pineapples “on the out” because coconuts are “the in thing” this year and I wonder if mangoes would be next year’s?

But then as Lost’s season two ends and season three begins the Others are revealed to be relatively normal people who actually live an almost suburban Americana existence, albeit transported to a scifi island in the Pacific full of mystery and intrigue and monsters and danger and sexy blonde lady gynaecologists who like reading Stephen King, and their whole Lord Of The Flies look was just that, a look.

~

I prepare three books for future publication, collectively called Bedlam Bebop Trilogy, my own bid to that contemporary cataloguing of the “modern mental malaise” of the females of my generation, dubbed “Chicklit”, but filtered through the male macho tomcatting beer-guzzling perspective of things, “written for men”, so labelled “Bayawlit”.

Bedlam Bebop is about three friends in their mid twenties trying to find meaning and purpose for their future selves while trying to make sense of their lives in the “big long now”. Each book revolves on one particular narrator’s dilemma, relevant and “of our times” although not very moralistic, written in contemporary tones but still remaining unanchored to any particular era, hopefully achieving a sort of “modern day timelessness”. All three books share an overarching theme of Growth, mostly in the emotional and spiritual sense than the physical, but it has that, too.

Some of the things that happen in Bedlam Bebop: illicit sex, vanilla sex, solicited sex, unsolicited sex, premarital sex, marital sex, extramarital sex, solo sex, participatory sex, sex in trains, confused sex, lucid sex, sex in motels, sex in parties, sex in cars, sex by proxy, sex in the morning, sex in the afternoon, sex at night, sex at midnight, sex at dawn, sleepy sex, sloppy sex, dry sex, degenerate sex, secret sex, famous sex, internet sex, sex with dead people, sex with young people, sex with old people, sex with the girl next door, sex with the girl next door’s sister, sex with famous people (not to be confused with “famous sex”), sex with members of the proletariat, sex with members of the bourgeoisie, sex by the fire, sex by the fridge, sex by the sea, sex by the TV, sex by the river, sex under the moon, sex under the sun, and, of course, as always, sex between people with daddy issues.

~

I construct these books to be written and read short and fast (the ultimate macho nightmare!) but to remain in the brain far longer than that, like boxes of fast food french fries eaten in rapid succession only to be digested for three long weeks. But this comparison of Bedlam Bebop to McDonald’s menu implies that the books will be bad for you if consumed in large doses over a certain period of time, but that’s pretty much the truth about everything, from bagoong to beans, laundry to linoleum, sleep to sex, isn’t it? The key is, of course, as always - and any regular masturbator can confirm this - “moderation”.

Number of literary references ...

Number of literary references in the book so far: 90

Number of these references that are specifically either book titles or published content: 40

~

I read Umberto Eco in Reflections On The Name Of The Rose (Minerva, 1994) explaining his creative process, saying after he read and reread “medieval chroniclers, to acquire their rhythm and their innocence” to be “freed from suspicion” (of just plain faking the contents of the book) - but not from “the echoes of intertextuality” - he “rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books”, which I take to mean that writers walk into the act of writing having (ideally) already read a lot of books, the influences of which will dictate the way the writers will eventually write what will hopefully be books that would have the same effect on other writers, texts with chapters with paragraphs with sentences with words with letters like Russian dolls that just open and open and open and open and open and open, ad nausea.

~

A few years before his death, Uncle Wowie would periodically drop by the Cubao house with books borrowed from the Quezon City Library. Of note is a wide hardcover about whales and dolphins, with large full-colour oil paintings of the animals, with anatomical facts and other information printed by the sides. In my head they are larger than life, larger than their subjects, larger than their “whale facts”: the pale narwhal, the unicorn horn an extension of teeth; the gigantic blue whale, largest animal alive, several elephants long, yet appetite whetted by unicellular sea plants; and the half-gallon of semen they require to propagate their species, older than Man.

Another book of note from Uncle Wowie: a collection of seemingly normal Renaissance paintings, but are actually elaborate optical illusions, images made up of other images: the walls of portraits are baskets of fruits and vegetables; the baskets of fruits and vegetables are packs of animals in landscapes; the packs of animals in landscapes are collages of nudes; the collages of nudes are patches of flowers; the patches of flowers are angels in flight; the angels in flight are walls of portraits; so on and so forth, all of God’s creation within dog-eared pages between water-stained covers.

~

Also: like the cartoon Abraham Lincoln portrait made up of female nudes, captioned “What Goes On In The Minds Of Men”.

~

Books on hand that directly dictate this book, by order of influence:

Pieces Of Payne, by Alfred Goldbarth (Graywolf Press, 2003); How To Be An Artist, by Eddie Campbell (Eddie Campbell Comics, 2001); How To Be Fashionable Or Consume Like Me, by Andrew Coulter Enright (The YNT Press, 2003); the internet and everyone, by john chris jones (ellipsis, 2000); Kwentong Tambay, by Nicanor David, Jr (Psicom, 2006); Trout Fishing In America, by Richard Brautigan (Dell, 1967); Lights Out For The Territory, by Iain Sinclair (Granta, 1997); My Dark Places, by James Ellroy (Knopf, 1996); ilang talang luma buhat sa talaarawan ng isang may nunal sa talampakan, by Jun Cruz Reyes (UP Press, 1998); Rapid Eye Movement, by Simon Dwyer (Creation, 2000); A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Vintage, 2001); The Extraordinary Works Of Alan Moore, edited by George Khoury and Friends (TwoMorrows, 2003); the New Comics, edited by Gary Groth and Robert Fiore (Berkeley, 1988); Lo!, by Charles Fort (John Brown Publishing, 1996).

I pull these books from the shelves and on the floor I stack them one on top of the other, finding it provides shaky foundation for much of anything else besides the writing of this book.

~

Or, if you prefer this other “dolls = books” image: anthropomorphic marionette babies of various nationalities swaying hand-in-hand singing “It’s A Small World After All”, and by “World” meaning only of course a library of Borgesian proportions, which is to say not very “Small” at all.

~

And that’s just talking about the books. Also within this book (between letters, words, lines, pages, covers) are movies, magazines, records, people, TV shows, blogs, websites, podcasts, issues, insecurities, conversations, songs, ideas, jokes, games, secrets, photographs, text messages, advice, states of mind.

From the Bangs-Eno Interview ...

From the Bangs-Eno Interview:

BANGS: “Have you ever had any formal music or theory training at all?”
ENO: “No.”
BANGS: “Have you ever felt the pressure that you should get some?”
ENO: “No, I haven't, really. I can't think of a time that I ever thought that, though I must have at one time. The only thing I wanted to find out, which I did find out, was what 'modal' meant; that was I thought, a very interesting concept.”

~

In 2003, I discover the tradition of the “journeyman”, where Old World artisans, after picking their craft and learning everything about it that they possibly could at home, would spend the subsequent years on the road plying their trade and honing their skills before going back to their respective towns and setting up shop, finally as complete legitimate craftsmen.

In the strength of this, after two years in the UP System, I decide to quit the MP program and go full-time in UP UGAT. It’s the beginning of a violently productive two and a half years.

~

The damage has been done,
I am not having fun anymore.
Do what you do when you try
what you get when you see the light,
come down I'll set my hope
in a wonderful hospital man.

.........

Well my (he)art is not a wide open thing, I know,
there is hardly not a lot to say,


- Stephen Malkmus, singing with Pavement in “Ann Don’t Cry” (Terror Twilight, Matador Records, 1999), who, in a 2002 interview to promote his solo career, reveals to fans why he left the band: he didn’t feel like writing sad songs anymore.

~

The straw that finally broke my camel’s back is in the fifth fragment of the first chapter of this book.

Also: the intrigue, the incessant gossiping, the powerplaying, the “literary careerists” within the student body and the faculty (more on them in their proper place).

~

Not to take away anything from UP Diliman’s MP graduates, of course: in 2006, my Current Girlfriend graduates cum laude from the MP program, her thesis as one of the “best” in the department.

And she’s not the only one: “suki ng MRR” poets SB and SS graduate from the program after more than half a decade in the UP System, as do budding novelists VBG and MFA and BS and anthologized and multi-awarded CW graduates AFS and CJJ, all of whom have books out in National Bookstore right now.

But when asked, none of them proclaim they’re “Writers”, or even “writers”. And they all have proper jobs! They’re just people who like to read and who also happen to like “writing”.

~

Again, from the Bangs-Eno Interview, where Bangs brings up Eno’s controversial “I’m not a musician” quote from a few years back: “It seems like a conceit turned inside out, inasmuch as I've got almost a dozen albums of his music sitting here. ‘Again,’ he (Eno) almost sighs, ‘it was a case of taking a position deliberately in opposition to another one. I don't say it much anymore, but I said it when I said it because there was such an implicit and tacit belief that virtuosity was the sine qua non of music and there was no other way of approaching it. And that seemed to be so transparently false in terms of rock music in particular. I thought that it was well worth saying, 'Whatever I'm doing, it's not that,' and I thought the best way to say that was to say, Look, I'm a nonmusician. If you like what I do, it stands in defiance to that.'

“’When I say 'musician,' I wouldn't apply it to myself as a synthesizer player, or 'player' of tape recorders, because I usually mean someone with a digital skill that they then apply to an instrument. I don't really have that, so strictly speaking I'm a non-musician. None of my skills are manual, they're not to do with manipulation in that sense, they're more to do with ingenuity, I suppose.’”

After she expresses incredulity ...

After she expresses incredulity to the “literariness” of “Fifteen Photographs”, LQS sits me down beside her at lunchtime and resolves to find out just “what - the hell - that was all about”. Between spaghettis and softdrinks, I outline the backstories of the text and intimate my plans on expanding it into maybe a pocketbook-sized novel and she, unexpectedly, excitedly, suggests that I put in “real photographs” side by side with the “literary photographs”, so that I can come out with the “first Pinoy Pop Novel”.

~

And by “Pop” I assume she means “conceptual” or “colourful” or maybe even “fun to regard with the eyes”, much like what “Pop” is in “Pop Art”, defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition (Merriam-Webster, 1998) as “art in which commonplace objects (as road signs, hamburgers, comic strips, or soup cans) are used as subject matter and are often incorporated in the work”, implying, of course, if applied to writing, that the less it resembles proper “literature”, the more “Pop” it is.

~

Then what about Luis Katigbak and Dean Alfar and Emil Flores, whose love for music and comic books and scifi fantasy paperbacks - all “dispensable” media (another aspect of “Pop”) - largely inform their championed causes and literary output?

~

What about Lille Bosse and Melissa Salva and Tara Sering, whose “ChickLit” efforts borrow their idiom from fashion magazines and “emo” music videos, Hollywood chickflicks and bittersweet medical dramas on TV (more “dispensables”)?

~

What about Jolography, Smaller And Smaller Circles, Pidgin Levitations, prize-winning literary aberrations of the High and Low?

~

What about Lualhati Bautista and Jun Cruz Reyes and Pete Lacaba, who are “Pop” for their use of the “accessible” contemporary Filipino lingo, if not for their more “every(wo)man” subjects and topicality (more aspects of “Pop”)?

~

What about the “ProletLit” tradition of writers and artists of romance novels and ghost story anthologies and tabloid erotica and Funny Komiks, some written in secret by randy literati, producers of the things I grew up on (and still like, upon occasion), who regularly one-ups all the aforementioned (and more) out of dint of their literary output being economically and intellectually “cheap”, therefore within reach of the “plebeians”?

~

What about Nicanor David, Jr’s OFW blog book Kwentong Tambay, belonging to that other kind of “ProletLit”, the kind that I actually seriously dream about from time to time, where, instead of white-collar writerly-types research or vicariously-live the blue-collar life to write about it, actual blue-collar types write their own narratives in their own words, much like the Depression-era socialist paperbacks of America, or the Fifties slim working-class hardbacks of Britain, or the Sixties didactic market pamphlets of West Africa?

~

What about Arvin Mangohig braying “PopLit has no soul!” in a workshop?

~

What about - for all its referencing and joking and quoting and chiding and lack of “literariness” of the writing - this book?

~

(Imagine GMA7 or ABSCBN making a reality TV (no, it can’t be a “talent show”, because there won’t be any “talent” to “show” (haha!)) contest out of this conceptual splitting of hairs, called “Pinoy Pop Novelist”! Where contestants are asked to make funny cutesy haikus and safe political satires! Or required by the judges to mingle with the urban poor and write moralistic “creative nonfiction” about them! Or asked to pick a judge and imitate their writing style and/or eccentricity! And have Wendell Capili as host, Ian Casocot as co-host! Almario and Tiempo and Dimalanta and Bautista as judges! A teaching position in a university of their choice, or a screenplay doctoring job under Ricky Lee or Soxy Topacio as prize! If they do it that way, it’ll be “just like real life”!)

~

AFS writes her second (follow-up “sort of sequel” to her first) “ChickLit” novel (rough synopsis: City Mouse, lost and stranded in the countryside, is forced to interact with the Country Mice, to “live off the land”, the charm and carefree Country life leading her to find “more meaning” in what was previously a very superficial cosmopolitan existence) and the editor rejects it outright by eMail, citing “seventy-five percent of it’s set in the Godforsaken barrio” as reason.

~

I compile and edit an anthology of urban-themed prose I eventually call City Lights. The pieces are disparate in subject and treatment but I try to order them in such a way that if the reader reads the book in a linear fashion, a “tour” will ensue, from MRT Taft to Pasay to Manila to Quezon City. I pass it to the editor and in complete ignorance of my intentions she hacks the book to pieces, even removing a lengthy English-language piece about Pasay and Manila that I chose to put in to counterbalance BS’ fifty-plus page Filipino-language semi-autobio travel narrative.

I find out about it and I eMail her asking about what pushed her to butcher the text, and I explain to her what I had in mind when I edited the book. After receiving my eMail she (reportedly) literally cries about it and proceeds to restore the book to its original form (even the typos) and has it published a few weeks later, and after a couple of weeks it’s on display in Booksale and National Bookstore.

In less than six months, the first one thousand copies sell out and a week later it’s on its second print run, apparently one of their more recent better sellers.

~

In a funeral parlour I tell BS (she herself edited one of the books, an anthology about haunted houses, itself enjoying its third print run) about City Lights selling better than expected and she offers, as way of explanation: “maganda kasi ‘yung cover nun, e, ‘di ba?”

~

Having “proven something”, I prepare the manuscript for the next volume of City Lights to be more ambitious than the first volume, more (physically, intellectually) difficult, more “literary”, with photographs and poetry and semiotics and a recontextualizing of space, all of these and still, of course, remaining “Pop”.

~

When I first meet the publisher, he confesses that City Lights would be one of his riskier books, because conceptually (and eventually, in content) it’s more “literary” than what they usually publish: comic books and ghost story anthologies and joke books. His previous best sellers, eighty-peso ghost anthologies, falter in the market as public interest for it wanes after Sunday afternoon horror TV show tie-in ‘Wag Kukurap gets the axe. Looking for the next novelty, he proceeds to plan on dabbling in “PopLit”. I hear about it and I eMail him some of my concepts and ideas for “Pop” books and novels and the like, most of which he approves. I pass them around to like-minded friends, and we labour on them for a month.

We were given certain parameters about what the books should or shouldn’t be: the word count should at least be 22,000; we shouldn’t use heavy and/or literary words; we should add in humour and/or “Tagalog” words (if the majority is written in English) whenever possible; we should have it finished in two-week’s time; etc etc etc.

There are also some unofficial ones like: we shouldn’t hope too much for royalties (which is not an issue for me, as I don’t care too much about that, but for some it’s a real issue); and we shouldn’t expect to claim any copyright of the text, seeing as they paid us fifteen thousand pesos for all of them, which (for my part) I used to pay for that month’s electricity and phone and water bills.

~

These things are asked of the books/us so they/we can be able to reach their/our target audience.

It’s an art phenomenon, really, it happens in movies and TV shows and comic books and magazines, and like every phenomenon, it just “happens”: what was once a “way to tell the story” turns into a “house style”.

~

These anecdotes are funny (for me, at least) because they illustrate the fact that there seems to be a consensus in the book publishing industry on what “PopLit” ought to be (or is), wholly different from what the writing scene believes it should be (or isn’t): one is dictated by the cash flow, the other dictated by the “flow of the river”.

~

Funny, again: all these different interpretations and standards for legitimacy even when the best of these things (I feel) have yet to grace our bookshelves.

Heraclitus writes ...

Heraclitus writes, “God is day and night; winter, summer; war, peace; satiety, hunger - all of the opposites, this is the meaning.”

Do you know or wish to know ...

Do you know or wish to know the pain and/or fear of:

• • the record-breaking week-long bout with constipation, and then when your bowels do finally give way they come in short and painful nuggets, and when you give them The Last Look Before The Flush, you see they’re drenched in blood?
• • the vomit-inducing cold in your stomach when you find out the results of the examination, of the polyps found in your colon?
• • the immense physical weight lifted from you as the surgeons pull out seventy-five to eighty percent of your entrails, because by then it’d be too late for anything else?
• • the immense emotional weight gained by you as you realise that you will be helpless and dependent for the rest of your life, however long that may be?
• • the guilt of fighting with your frustrated older brother every night, ten minutes after rinsing and disinfecting your colostomy bag, because you fail to successfully remove the stink of your faeces from the bathroom sink?
• • the chill of the bed you share with your wife who wants nothing to do with you anymore, even to touch you just that night, what more for the coming days and weeks and months and years?
• • the realisation that you will never know your son as a man?
• • the realisation that your son will never know you as a man, instead will know someone else?
• • the acceptance that you are already Damaged Goods, and the freedom that it doesn’t bring?
• • the surprise in your eyes as your stomach bloats five-hundred percent its original size (you just never thought it could grow that big)?
• • the regret of letting go?