Ang Dating Daan vs. Ang Tamang Daan

Has anyone checked out Bro. Eli Soriano’s Ang Dating Daan (SBN) and Iglesia ni Cristo’s Ang Tamang Daan (Gem TV) on cable these past few weeks? Maybe it’s just me, but I find it amusing, and bemusing, to watch them waste precious airtime by attacking each other, but only for a minute or two; they eventually lose my interest. The way they sling mud at each other—so petty, so ridiculous. There were times they made the interminable ratings war between ABS-CBN and GMA pale in comparison. Really. It’s ultimately sad, though. At their worst, their mudslinging proves once more how religion can cause conflict, how it can divide people, sometimes irrevocably.

And another thing: Pat Robertson really damned himself this time. A respected televangelist calling for Venezuelan president Chavez’s assassination? I would have laughed if I didn’t found the news appalling. So there goes his credibility.

Somewhere, Jesus wept.

Yet another post on Philippine novels in English

After reading Dean Alfar and Ian Casocot's recent blog posts about Philippine novels in English, I can't help but react by recalling some of those novels, and the academic setup wherein I read them. Had I not started pursuing my M.A. years ago, I probably wouldn't have read them.

When I first entered the M.A. CW program in UP, one of my pre-requisite classes was CL 151: Philippine Literature in English, under Butch Dalisay. My classmates and I were required to read Carlos Bulosan's America Is In the Heart and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo's Recuerdo, but since copies of the former were no longer available, Butch substituted it with Stevan Javellana's wartime novel Without Seeing the Dawn. This particular novel basically chronicles how its protagonist, Ricardo Suerte, evolve from a simple farmer into a hardened guerilla. I remember how startled I was when I finished it in one weekend, but then again I shouldn't be: it was an easy read, evenly paced, very linear, and very cinematic. So cinematic, I think it would have worked better as a war movie.

On the other hand, Recuerdo is an epistolary novel, showing the one-sided e-mail exchanges between a Bangkok-based widow and her college-age daughter in Manila. In these exchanges the mother tells her daughter tales about the women in their family line, women whose husbands die young, leaving them to struggle and carry on. The novel is admittedly interesting, but even now I still feel the last chapter negated much of the book's effectiveness. Still, that didn't stop me for making it the subject of a critical paper that I later wrote for Carlos Ojeda Aureus in his CL 202: Literary Theory and Criticism class. It was later published in an FEU Arts and Sciences journal.

Fast forward a few semesters later, and my next encounter with Philippine novels happened when I took up CL 250: Philippine Literature in English under Jing Hidalgo. Her required reading list was staggering: more than a dozen novels to take up, with each student assigned to report on one of them. Not only that, each student was required to submit a final critical paper on two novels by a particular author. Throughout the semester I managed to read some of them, like F. Sionil Jose's passionate but preachy Mass, NVM Gonzalez's cyclically-structured A Season of Grace, Bienvenido N. Santos's heartrending The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor, Ninotchka Rosca's terrific State of War and Erwin Castillo's dramatic The Firewalkers. And of course, for some reason or another I wasn't able to finish, or even start reading the rest of the list: Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows, Kerima Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy, Edith L. Tiempo's His Native Coast, among others. For my paper, I chose Antonio Enriquez and his novels Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh and The Living and the Dead, but I failed to complete it because I used a flawed critical framework. The result? An INC (Incomplete) mark, which I had allowed to lapse.

The following schoolyear, I took up the subject again, and with Jing as my teacher once more. This time around, I got to read more recent novels like Butch Dalisay's somber Killing Time in a Warm Place, Alfred Yuson's wonderfully postmodern The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, Arlene J. Chai's Joy Luck Club-ish The Last Time I Saw Mother and Charlson Ong's tongue-in-cheek An Embarrassment of Riches. Like before, my classmates and I were required to submit a final paper. I finally did this time around, on F.H. Batacan's Smaller and Smaller Circles and Edith L. Tiempo's The Builder, focusing on the culprit by using an Orientalist framework. I got a good grade for it, but I unfortunately--and permanently--lost the soft copy of that paper when my previous hard disk crashed last month.

I learned a lot from Jing's lectures in class, but there was one that stood out in my mind. She once lectured how Gonzalez, Joaquin and Santos determined the course of post-war Filipino fiction in English by the way they wrote in the language. She thus explained: Gonzalez structured his English (or at least tried t0) to imitate the flavor and syntax of the local dialects; Joaquin wrote in the language as though he's writing in Spanish, capturing its cadences and rhythms; Santos followed the American model. As a result, they influenced succeeding generations of Filipino fictionists in English, claiming them as their literary or spiritual children. For example: Castillo, Rosca and Yuson are considered Joaquin's "children"; Enriquez treads the path cleared by Gonzalez; and Brillantes and Dalisay (and many of the younger fictionists writing today) belong to Santos's line.

I'm reminded of that particular lecture because it poses a few questions that I must answer once I begin writing my critical essay for my thesis: Am I more like Gonzalez, or Joaquin or Santos? Where do I place myself in the whole tradition of Philippine literature in English? I refuse to even think about them at length, for I'm not yet prepared to answer them. But I will, eventually. I'm quite sure about this, and I'm also sure that someday I'll get around to read my copies of Joaquin's Cave and Shadows, Rosca's Twice Blessed, and Yuson's Voyeurs and Savages (and probably Resil Mojares's Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel), now gathering sneeze-inducing dust in one of my book shelves.

Another Fiesta in Marikina

I’ve always felt I have two hometowns. There’s Pasig, my actual hometown; I have lived here since I was born. And then there’s Marikina, my spiritual home­town, where my Mom hails from. Much as I love being a Pasigueño (and I really do, since I live 10-15 minutes away from at least three Mandaluyong malls), it’s in Marikina that my sense of community is at its strongest. I’m sure the frequent gatherings there with my Mom’s many relatives, then and now, have a lot to do with it.

I always associate Marikina with special occasions. There’s Christmas and All Saints Day. There’s also Holy Week, for my early exposure to the town proper’s Lenten processions started my enduring fascination with religious spectacle—and the hypocrisy behind it. And fiestas, of course: Santa Elena, the barangay where my Mom’s family lived, holds a Santacruzan every May 3—and, for a time, another for little girls the day before and yet another for parlor gays the day after.

Another barangay, San Roque, just celebrated its fiesta today and my Mom and I earlier had lunch with my aunt’s family there (at their invitation, of course). I was raring to go: I had cooped myself up at home for the past two days, recovering from a fever. Once there, and after doing a series of besos and manos on older relatives, we went straight for the buffet table. One thing about Marikeños: not only do they love to eat, they also love to cook. The dishes may not be too fancy, but as far as I'm concerned they taste really, really good. I never get tired of their food. Rich, full of flavor (and in some of the dishes, cholesterol). My Mom and I really stuffed ourselves.

Once done with lunch, we proceeded to the palengke: she, to buy some fruits; me, to buy a few prepaid cell phone and Internet cards from a wholesale store. It’s curiously called “Psalm 23” (its tagline: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want…”). Strange as the name is, that’s where my parents and I buy our load cards whenever we shop for meat and produce at the market. We usually get really good deals there. How good? Not too long ago, I bought a single Inter.net prepaid card there that has 65 hours, priced P500 on the card; I bought it for P180 only. Is that a good deal or what?

I should write a story set in Marikina sometime. That should be interesting.

What's Your Pizza Personality?

Now for something fun and lighthearted this time around. I'm kinda surprised that I have that kind of a pizza personality, since I neither loath nor love cheese (but I do love an occasional veggie pizza from Greenwich or almost any kind of pizza from Shakey's or Sbarro's). Oh well.

CHEESE PIZZA

Traditional and comforting. You focus on living a quality life. You're not easily impressed with novelty. Yet, you easily impress others.

What's Your Pizza Personality?

Deciding to Die with Dignity: A Discourse

Not too long ago, I got to watch two foreign-language films that have more than an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in common. The first, The Barbarian Invasions, focuses on a stock broker who struggles to mend his relationship with his philandering, terminally-ill college professor-father as their loved ones—the latter’s former mistresses included—gather around them, supporting them. The second, The Sea Inside, tells the true story of Ramon Sampedro who, after a fateful dive that rendered his body from the neck down useless, fought for the next 30 years of his life to fulfill his greatest wish: to end his life with dignity. In both films, the bedridden protagonists do get to die with dignity, without any fuss. In both films, life is also celebrated.

These films, as well as that criminally overpraised Million Dollar Baby (which I think didn’t deserve to win the Best Picture Oscar, despite its merits; Sideways should have won instead) and the controversy surrounding the Terry Schaivo case—and to a certain extent, the late Pope John Paul II’s public struggle with and eventual defeat to Parkinson’s disease—brought the issue of dying with dignity to the fore this year. The issue lingered in my head after watching The Barbarian Invasions and The Sea Inside, to the point I feel compelled to write about it.

Deciding to die with dignity, to me, is deciding to die with little or no compromise to the character or humanity of the person concerned. Of course, this crude definition can be easily dismissed, invites debate, raises questions. But it’s important that one must first understand that person—his personality, his situation. It’s also important to determine the nature of the death wish: Did he do so with a sound mind, unclouded by pain? Did he do so after much thought, after realizing that all possible measures to achieve recovery, or at least long-term relief, have failed? Once these—and several other questions, questions which I shall no longer elaborate here—have been answered could the wish to die with dignity be placed in the proper context.

True, life is sacred, but what is life if it’s not lived to its full potential, if it’s hopelessly, irreparably reduced to something less than dignified, less than sacred? What is life if it no longer contributes or impacts positively to other lives in whatever way at all? This, of course, depends on who’s answering these questions: The person concerned? His loved ones? Society ar large?

In my opinion, The Sea Inside best examines this delicate issue, presenting both sides of the argument with respect, restraint and sensitivity, and at the same time remains to be an absorbing drama. Javier Bardem performs magnificently as Sampedro; one has to applaud how effective he is, considering that he basically acts with his face. In a memorable scene, one hears Sampedro’s voice recalling his unfortunate dive, adding that at that moment he saw his life flashing before with eyes, contrasting that with his attorney flipping through pictures of him in other countries like film frames, posing, standing proud, happy.

In contrast, my main complaint with Million Dollar Baby, whose surprising but plausible twist more than midway into the film had many critics raving, is that I felt it didn’t probe into the issue as thoroughly as it should have. True, the film is more about a father-figure/daughter-figure relationship than anything else, but still one can’t just start to deal with a certain issue and treat it without the serious study it deserves. Neither Clint Eastwood’s characteristically sparse direction nor Hilary Swank’s strong performance could mask that.

But in the end, no matter what, to die with dignity remains to be an individual, private decision. I believe each of us have that right to make that decision—as long as it’s a carefully thought-out, informed one—should that time comes, and as much as possible no one should meddle with that. Agree with it or not, that decision must be respected. And whatever the consequences, one must be prepared to face it. No excuses about it.

And just in case you’re wondering, I'm not on deathwishing mode. :)

Calling all aspiring and established playwrights

10 X 10 X 10 BOOK LAUNCH: (from left) Rene O. Villanueva, Ned Trespeces, Nicolas Pichay, Layeta P. Bucoy, Alfonso I. Dacanay, Liza C. Magtoto, Vincent A. de Jesus and Rody Vera stand on stage after taking a bow during the soft launching of 10 X 10 X 10 at the Conspiracy Café.


The Writers Bloc, an independent group of playwrights, is holding regular reading sessions of new plays every other Sunday afternoon at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP). This season opens on August 7, 2005 and shall continue until November.

Plays read and discussed during this period will be considered for presentation and/or publication in the Bloc's several activities such as The Virgin Labfest (in cooperation with CCP and the Tangahlang Pilipino), as well as independent publication initiatives of the group, like the ten-minute-play anthology 10 X 10 X 10: Sampung Tigsasampung Minutong Dula ng Sampung Mandudula.

The Bloc also offers playwriting workshops to interested parties and institutions.The regular sessions, however are free of charge. Interested individuals may also apply for membership to the Bloc.

For more inquiries, please contact: Rody Vera at rodyvera@yahoo.com, or call 551-0823. For more details on the group, please click on The Writers Bloc link in this blog.