~
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.
