~
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.”
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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).
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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.
