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.
