My friend Gilbert Tan alerted me to this: my post below was lifted in full and published on Page 120 of the commemorative book Cory Magic, which came out in December last year. It is pictured -- courtesy of my friend -- as it appears there. Only that contributors like me don't get to have a complimentary copy of the rather expensive tome!

An historical rupture?


The amazing thing about all this is that it's totally spontaneous; it can't be, couldn't have been, orchestrated by a mad and hideous conspiracy. It has the moral clarity and historical certainty --the pure bliss -- of an impossible dream. Those who read Gramsci for critical insight will call it a caesura, this uncoordinated but synchronized movement of people that we all hope, is already the tipping point.

Government forces should allow humanitarian convoys into evacuation centers in Maguindanao

Newsbreak magazine has featured a statement we at the Center for International Law issued over the dire condition in makeshift camps of thousands of civilians displaced by renewed fighting in Central Mindanao between government forces and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

The Danger of Words

A disciple of Wittgenstein once wrote a book about the "danger of words" (the psychiatrist M. O'C Drury, 1996, Wittgenstein studies, Thoemmes Press). This illustrates the point, if in a hilarious and instructive way, as only the masters of the Queen's English can, on the life-changing issue of what makes potato chips click, and according to the demanding and weighty craft of legal interpretation.

Poetry Month's last salvo, from Knopf


April, T.S. Eliot's cruelest month, has finally bid us goodbye. With its passing, poetry month also ended. Knopf's last feature for the month is yet another Polish master of the craft, with whom I am delighted to be acquainted for the first time:


* They Carry a Promise, the first collection in English of the poems
of the Polish master Janusz Szuber, who here ponders the duties of his
craft:

****************************************

Written Late at Night

Almost all day I sat at the table
And, swapping two pens, wrote letters.
One of them, as a joke, was in gothic script.
I tried to be honest, avoid untruth
As far as the truth about myself and events
In their general contour was accessible to me.
Then a few longer phone conversations
And a short break to read eight poems by Cavafy.
How great! Superb! Who can write like that about desire and love,
Admitting that when they burn out
And the bitter tasting of the body is taken away,
They guide the poet’s hand. In them and only in them
All future incantations.

(Translation by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough)

The Bridge Cafe, Groenburgwal, Amsterdam.


Memories of my one-year Amsterdam sojourn.

A mom's 30-year search for a son


I wonder if there was - or there ever will be -- a happy ending to this story I filed nine years ago for the Philippine Star:


A mom's 30-year search for a son by Romel Bagares Updated May 14, 2000 12:00 AM


Whenever Nina Ferrer hears the roar of jets above her small hut in San Jose, Antique, she runs to the nearby beach to wave at the aircraft.

Though she is no madwoman, Ferrer is stranded in an island of the past. Up there in the skies, she says, could be her son who, more than three decades ago, was taken away by her first husband.

"How long ago was it?" she asked. "My son must be 35 now."

As she spoke, Ferrer's face turned red with emotion. "I have cried so many times over my baby, how I want to know where he is now, whether he now has a family of his own. I just want to see him before I die."

Ferrer lost her son Virgilio in 1966 to her American husband who took the then two-year-old boy to the United States and never came back.

The last thing she heard was Virgilio had been jailed in the US for unclear reasons, and that he did not want to see his mother or know anything about her.

But Ferrer's friend, Ting Elvas, consoles her. "God is not deaf that He should not hear your cries," she tells her. "We will see your son soon."

All her life Ferrer has been singing sad songs. She lost her mother at a tender age and, being the youngest of six siblings, was given away to an aunt who resolved to turn her into a teacher.

Ferrer, however, had a different dream for herself. She wanted to be a famous singer like her idol Janet McDonald, the American who played a beautiful Indian maiden in the movie The Indian Love Call.

She still remembers every detail of that movie, particularly its theme song which she hasn't sung in years: "When I'm calling you, will you answer too... You belong to me and I belong to you."

Ferrer pursued her dream by joining, in 1959, a televised singing contest in Manila. She did not win, but was hired by the host to be part of the staff.

One day in the early 1960s, she was invited by a friend to Olongapo to meet lonely American sailors looking for female company. There she met a handsome serviceman, Herbert Waine Gill from Long Beach, California. They fell in love and soon got married.

But the marriage never produced children. Gill, as Ferrer later discovered, was impotent.

While married to Gill, Ferrer met a Filipino mestizo in the US Navy with whom she had an affair. The relationship bore her a child, a boy she christened Virgilio Luisito. Though Gill knew that the boy was not his son, he still liked him for looking very American with his brown hair and fair skin. He treated him as if he were his own child, and Ferrer thought everything would work out fine.

But she was mistaken. One day in 1966, when the boy was two years and six months old, Ferrer came home to an empty apartment. The place was in shambles, and her son was nowhere to be found.

"My husband was obviously in a hurry to leave. He brought with him everything, including our family pictures and Virgilio's baptismal certificate," she recalled. Gill also took her US green card and their marriage certificate.

Ferrer received a letter from Gill several weeks later, announcing that Virgilio had survived the trip to the US. She got another letter several years later which informed her that the boy was growing up fast and that he had been enrolled in a Catholic school.


Another joy
Distraught, Ferrer returned to her hometown in 1974 and got married to a shipping company employee, Abelardo Guillermo. A year later, she and her new husband had a son whom she named Abraham Joy.

"I named him Abraham after the great patriarch of the Bible who had longed for a son for so long until God blessed him and made him a father of many nations," she said. "I also named him Joy because somehow he eased the terrible pain within me."

Abraham Joy is now 24 and a third year business student in Sibalom town in Antique. Mother and son live in a small hut at the corner of a beach resort owned by one of Ferrer's nephews.

Although her second son is a source of happiness, still Ferrer longs for the company of her first "baby."

Ferrer said she cried in disbelief when she read a letter from the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington DC telling her that her son was in prison and "has no desire to see, hear or write his biological mother."

The letter was in response to a query Ferrer made in July 1997, asking US navy authorities if her son was in the naval service. How she got to send the inquiry is a story in itself.

Sometime in 1992, as US troops were pulling out of Clark Field, an American serviceman came to Iloilo looking for Ferrer. The man said he was helping his colleague look for his mother. His colleague's name was Louis Wayne Gill.

Ferrer learned about the American only a year later. When she looked for him, the serviceman was already gone.

"So near and yet so far," she sighed.

Ferrer then wrote the US Navy and asked about her son. But according to Navy officials, no Louis Wayne Gill ever entered the service.

The officials, however, said they had located Herbert Waine Gill, Ferrer's former husband, and that he had told them that he had divorced her for "adultery and voluntary abandonment" in 1967.

The US Navy's inconstant reply to her queries only sharpened Ferrer's feeling of loss. Now 62, she is a widow and lives through the meager pension of her late husband and the earnings of a small sari-sari (variety) store.

She says she is looking for her son not to ask for anything. "I am not interested in money or anything. I just want to see him again before I die," she said. "I am not losing hope."

Ang Huling El Bimbo

I first heard their music in a humanities class at UP. One or two of them ( I don't remember anymore) happened to be in the same class as I was. The professor was the wife of their very first manager. The man played for the sole pleasure of the class a demonstration tape (CDs were largely unknown in those analog days) of what would soon be their first big hit --"Pare Ko". Back then, I was a promdi who didn't know a thing about urban popular culture and who couldn't care any less about a band of virtual unknowns called the Eraserheads.

"Ugh," I muttered to myself, "how vulgar could a song get!"



I now hazard to say members of that humanities class were most probably among the very first ones to hear the song just before it was released in the market. But it went on to conquer the Philippine music world by storm, heralding a new gilded age for Filipino youth bands and earning for the Eraserheads the monicker the Philippines' Fab Four.

And it didn't even matter to me that one of them also stayed (or squatted) in the same dormitory as I did, the venerable Narra Residence Hall. Some mornings, I'd run into him in the hallway as I headed for my wing's common showerstalls. Often, he'd have a girlfriend's tight embrace as he made his way to the canteen.

The Eraserheads was just one of the many bands that made Narra a venue for their jamming sessions. It was the height of Narra's infamous free-wheeling decadence (a contemporary act that also made a name in the local music scene was Yano, whose members also proudly called Narra their home sweet home).

At Narra, the Eraserheads existed happily with a professor named Bading Carlos, pre-final examination week X-rated expositions, open house celebrations that featured a raffle where the top prize was a night in the company of a prostitute, fraternity rumbles, pot sessions, drinking binges, among many other adolescent excesses.

Looking back, I couldn't believe I survived the Eraserheads and all that!

Unfinished


So many drafts waiting to be finished:


12/27/08

I always seem to find myself bringing some work with me

9/2/08

That was haw-haw.


8/1/08


Catholic writers revisited


Why is it that some of the best writers around have been Roman Catholics? Tolkien was faithful to his church to the very end. You can say he was also instrumental to the conversion of his good friend C.S. Lewis to the Christian fold (albeit to the Anglo-Catholic variety). There's of course Flannery O' Connor, whose fiction on the American South was, as someone said, "Christ-haunted" (she wrote about life in the fundamentalist Bible belt from a decidedly Catholic lens, coming out with fiction that showed deep and abiding respect for a people steeped in faith, no matter how hard they try to run away from it, or bastardize it). There's Walker Percy. And yes, the British essayist and fiction writer G.K. Chesterton, another favorite source of quotable quotes for evangelicals. Graham Greene, a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism (?), whose fiction expressed the inner tensions between his own life and the faith he has embraced;

6/9/08

Bargain Books Galore Part II

Economic crisis notwithstanding, the bargain book business in the Philippines is booming, and to a bargain book bandit like me, things couldn't be happier. I'm listing some of the best spots there are in Metro Manila. I'd say Booksale is still the best place to explore as far as prices and choices are concerned.

SM Manila Booksale shop. Located at the basement of the mall, this stall offers a wide variety of choices. Right now, for those who have good money, the shop has an amazing selection of newly-issued Borders classics, with their beautifully designed covers. This is also where I ocassionally come across really good theology and philosophy titles. This is where I found the German New testament scholar Mier's excellent tome on Jesus and the theme of judgment in the Gospels. I also think this stall can give the booksale shop at Robinson's Manila a run for its money.

Booksale shop Robinson's Manila.

When it was smaller, it was the shop that offered my very first used book buy -- Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, for P45 pesos. That was 15 years ago. How time flies by.

Booksale Shop, Valero Street, near the RCBC Towers. Now, here's one spot that's hidden from public view. On a recent foray, I found Stanley Hauerwas' most recent essays on theological ethics here (his collection of essays first delivered in the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland).

3/14/08

Lord,

Why can't I seem to find poetry in my heart any

Soledad's Sister in Italian



I'm a huge fan of Filipino writer Butch Dalisay, and it's not just because he admitted me into his college creative writing class on advance prose despite my writing inexperience, or that once, with the intercession of my good friend Boojie, he jazzed up my dear old Apple Powerbook 540c at no cost (well, Boojie brought with us a case of SanMig and some pulutan); it's just that he's one of the best Filipino writers in English around. As someone who keenly follows his literary production, I'm happy to note his second novel Soledad's Sister is now being translated into Italian (the novel was shortlisted for last year's inaguaral Asia Man Prize, the Asian version of prestigious Booker Prize in the UK). In a recent piece for a column he writes for The Philippine Star, he posts an interview with his Italian translator, who wanted to know something about the milieu of his new novel. I think in the span of a few paragraphs, Dalisay manages to capture for his translator's benefit what Manila, the Philippines and the wandering Pinoys are all about:


A translator’s interview
PENMAN By Butch Dalisay
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Philippine Star


Thanks to my agent Renuka Chatterjee, my novel Soledad’s Sister has been accepted for publication sometime next year by ISBN Edizioni in Italy. First, of course, it’ll have to be translated into Italian, and the publishers have asked Clara Nubile, herself a published author, to do the job. Clara wrote me to ask me some questions about the book and the Philippines as a whole, so I sent her back my answers, which I’m excerpting here, to give readers an idea of what I’m telling people out there about us. These are, of course, just my own perceptions; I’d make a lousy ambassador of goodwill.

CLARA NUBILE: Nice to meet you through your novel, Soledad’s Sister, which has the unforgettable taste of durian — tender and ferocious at the same time. How did your novel come to life? What was the spark that ignited it?

JOSE DALISAY: Nearly one out of every 10 Filipinos is working and living abroad — that’s more than eight million out of 90 million Filipinos. This diaspora, which has been going on for many decades now, is the single most important development that will define Philippine society for a long time to come — economically, politically, culturally. One day I came across a newspaper report saying that more than 600 Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs, as we call them) come home every year as corpses. It was a chilling statistic, and it gave me the idea for this novel.

How would you describe your way of writing? How you would describe Jose Dalisay, the writer?

I’m one of probably a very few Filipinos who make a living out of writing. That’s because I write a lot, in all kinds of genres — fiction, non-fiction, journalism, drama, screenplays, some poetry — in both English and Filipino. I get the most satisfaction out of my fiction and column pieces in English, however, because I don’t have to make commercial compromises in them, the way I have to when I write screenplays, which are commercially produced, or political speeches, or commissioned work. I’m a fairly traditional writer in the realist mode, and I write about all kinds of subjects — politics, history, culture, the passing scene. I like looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some readers will find me boring, but I’m not going to write like the 25-year-old I’m not. I’m glad and lucky to be 54.

And what about the contemporary literary scene in the Philippines, both in English and Tagalog?

It’s a very vibrant scene, with new writers and books coming up every year in both English and Filipino. We have literary traditions going back to pre-Hispanic times and we have over 100 native languages, in some of which a written literature survives. Filipinos are a very expressive people, and writing and performances (in music and dance) come naturally to us. You cannot censor a Filipino! Unfortunately, literature as a market suffers from the fact that our people are largely poor and cannot afford to buy books, so our print runs are extremely small. No one here makes a living out of writing fiction in English (I earn from commissioned works, screenplays, journalism, etc.).

The influence of the colonial past, from Spain to the United States: how would you describe postcolonial Philippines?

One good description of the Philippines (provided by the essayist Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil) is that we spent 300 years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood. Many enduring traces and influences of our Spanish past remain — even in the language — but the modern Filipino is highly Westernized (i.e., Americanized). Several layers of thought and perception coexist quite comfortably in the Filipino — the pagan, the Christian, the capitalist, the Marxist. We absorb and adapt easily, as the situation demands.

Manila. A haunting place. A memory of memories. The bay. The leaden sky. The enthralling sea. The scents of street life. The beauty of daily life in a big, voracious, cannibal city. Your own Manila, just a brief description.

An aging beauty, sometimes sorrowful and languorous, maybe in the afternoons, but all dressed up and lipsticked for the evenings.

There is a huge emigration of Filipinos all over the world. What is the effect of this emigration back home? Orphaned children and psychological and emotional problems between fathers, mothers, sons and daughters?

Every departure has a price, and we don’t mean the airline ticket. Our overseas workers are buoying up the economy, keeping our heads above the water in times of global economic distress and in the absence of good, well-paying jobs at home. But those separations are tearing at the very fabric of family — the most important thing to Filipinos, and also, ironically, what our OFWs are seeking to protect and promote by working abroad. But also, we Filipinos are a vagrant people, lovers of travel, eager to see and experience new things.

And what about music, which, somehow, is another character of your novel. Karaoke bars, musical competitions. Every Filipino seems to be a potential singer.

I’ve said before that the shortest distance between two points is that between a Filipino and a microphone. Yes, we love to sing. It’s a form of relief and release, and it costs nothing. I suspect it’s a kind of poor man’s revenge — to be able to sing My Way as well as or better than the rich man down the street — so karaoke is democratizing.

In his essay “The Philippines: Born in the USA,” the journalist Pico Iyer writes that “Every Filipino dreams to be American when he/she grows up.” What is your opinion or your experience?

It’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course — but just barely so. I grew up reading American textbooks. I learned more about America than many if not most Americans. We need to demystify or demythify that idea of America as being central to our lives. We care too much about America in a way that America will never care about us. The world’s a much bigger place now; it always has been, but we just didn’t know it. Our OFWs are discovering that larger world.

Prostitution is another plague of Southeast Asia, and of Philippines as well. Is it a legacy of American colonization and the massive presence of American soldiers?

Well, the Americans didn’t invent prostitution, but their presence here didn’t discourage it, either. That said, the Americans are gone but prostitution is still here, and I suspect it always will be, until we have a society that offers people better alternatives.

Aurora and Soledad. Rory and Soli. Two sisters, so close by birth, so far by life. One is the anti-mirror of the other. How would you describe their sisterly bondage?

I’m going to say something so plainly true it’s almost stupid, but I’ve always believed — and have tried to show this in my fiction — that where people are alike, they really are alike, and where they’re different, they really are different. So these sisters share enough as sisters might, but are otherwise they’re their own persons.

The male characters in your novel seem to be hopeless, ineluctable Latin-lovers, lost in romance, sex, dreams, a need to escape. Love and loss. Love and longing. Fascinating characters. Filmic, in a way. How would you describe Filipino men and their mentality?

We’re romantics, yes; we could feel as much if not more for those we lose as for those we covet. And once we get something or someone, we take that object or person for granted. We’re creatures of desire, loss, and guilt. There’s probably a million Filipino men out there who’ll roundly and loudly disagree with me, but I suspect there’ll be a lot more who’ll say, “Yes, that’s me!”

The Filipino community in Italy is well integrated in the social and cultural structure. Why do you think it is easier for Filipinos to get integrated in other nations and cultures?

We’re great survivors, and part of that is our ability to adapt and to adjust, our resourcefulness in the face of hardship and privation. Sometimes that translates to keeping a low profile, staying out of trouble, agreeing to whatever the prevailing terms of reference are. We’re not known for making waves — which is both a good and a bad thing.

Disclosure in the global economic crunch

While we were away, stock markets the world over crashed. And the story is greed getting the best of them writ large. The trouble is, when the high and the mighty are humbled, the rest of the world suffers. It seemed only a matter of time, following the collapse of the American sub-prime mortgage market, for the domino-like effect to finally make its presence felt in the world market. The integration of many economies into a multi-layered world market only made an economic catastrophe so much easier to happen. Now it seems inevitable that we're headed for a frightening global recession.

Once again, the private is no longer so private. Deregulation in the name of the primordial interest of private capital is exposed as untenable. Thus we see the private becoming a legitimate public interest as well. Or, as the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd would put it, the private sphere has enkaptic interlacements with the public sphere. The market activities of huge transnational corporations left to their own devices have public ramifications. Governments ought to respect the internal integrity of the market; that is, give it space to function as it should. But it doesn’t mean that governments give everything up in the name of deregulation. In other words, it is not deregulation for its own sake. Some oversight is still needed, to make sure that the market does not overstep public legal bounds.

The current global economic crunch somehow demonstrates that the realms of both the transnational and the international have an integrated public sphere on which private transactions rest. It cannot be otherwise. States and transnational corporations cannot be allowed to run like Hobbesian monads with no other consideration but their own interests. This process of "disclosure" -- of the differentiation and integration of the world into a global economy, highlights the fact of such things as the global commons, of public goods that are a concern of everyone in the place, precisely because what happens to them affects everyone else, as well as of an inevitable interdependence that cannot be founded on the interest of only one state.

……………………..

Two books just off the press!

The annual book fair came and went with a nary a comment on this page. In fact, I should have, because I have two important reasons for it. But first, a disclosure that in more than one way, I have a personal stake in these two important reasons. In the case of the first, Dr. Jonathan V. Exiomo's book Interpreting the Text: Towards a Filipino Biblical Hermeneutics from a Ricouerian Perspective, I served as an editor. In the case of the second, Roderick G. Galam's The Promise of the Nation: Gender, History and Nationalism in Contemporary Ilocano Literature, I was a conspirator in some way (well, when I was an editor of the Philippine Law Journal, I published in the journal in article form what is now a chapter in the book. I was also the author's sounding board when he was completing the book). Both works break new ground in their respective author's chosen fields. The first book is published under the auspices of the Alliance Graduate School, the second, of the Ateneo University Press. And both authors are friends of mine. Mr. Galam and I go a long way; we had been friends since our college days and in fact, were residents of that infamous and late lamented Narra Residence Hall at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and fellow members of the now defunct Narra Christian Fellowship (NCF). Dr. Exiomo, president of the Alliance Graduate School, is a fellow founding member of the Alliance Book Club, a small group of like-minded friends who like to discuss ideas and their relevance to the contemporary world.

I promise to post an extended review of the two books soon.

Yes, coffee is good for your health

College certainly ruined my life for good. That's when I started drinking lots of coffee. Cramming for exams, you know. It was a natural progression from there to my years as a newspaper reporter and a law student. It's even worse working in a law office. There'll always be deadlines to beat, which means many sleepless nights and more coffee, not to mention that cafes are a rage these days. Ah, all that talk about the bad things imbibing too much coffee does to you. And now, here comes this piece from the New York Times saying more or less that yes, coffee is in fact, good for your health. If that's any consolation, consider too that spending too much time in your favorite cafe (or coffee shop, as it is called in Manila), can also be bad for your pockets!

A chronicler of the Soviet gulag writes 30

He called Stalin “the man with a moustache” and paid dearly for it. But the man would struggle on through a series of imprisonments, intimidations, censures and personal crises over a span of many decades with an uncompromising integrity very few of his contemporaries could claim as their own. His courage gave the 20th century a voice of dissent yet unmatched – one that singularly confronted the horrors of Soviet Communism with a literary account that was at once haunting as it was eloquent. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 89, stood in the best Russian literary tradition that counts Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as some of its illustrious forbears.

-----------------------------------

Will the Anglican center yet hold after this?

Having attended an Anglican Church in Amsterdam that was decidedly evangelical in orientation, I have developed a certain fondness for the Anglo-Catholic tradition. My brief but treasured encounter with Anglicanism has given me a fresh appreciation for ritual, tradition and liturgy that my broader evangelical upbringing sorely lacked. Perhaps I can say that in the Anglican community I discovered in Amsterdam, I saw that the fusion of evangelicalism (the stress on personal conversion and commitment to Christ) and Catholicism (the stress on continuity with tradition and creed) is in fact possible. The experience allowed me to view Roman Catholicism (the religion of my younger years) from a third perspective. Yet I have always wondered how evangelicals within an increasingly liberal church Communion as far as its North American brethren are concerned could choose to stay within its confines. Today, the Anglican Communion is struggling to keep the center from collapsing. It seems that it is only a matter of time before the dispute over issues of sexuality (read: ordination of homosexual bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions) rents the communion into an irreconcilable split.

Or is it just shrewd politics at work?

I accompanied the boss last night to dinner with a top honcho of the largest German political foundation who is now based in Singapore as chief of its Asia Rule of Law program. Over paella at Casa Armas in the Podium, our chit-chat gravitated towards the Thai-Cambodian border dispute after he mentioned that prior to his current posting, he did time in Cambodia. Sure, every now and then, there'd be border clashes, he said, adding that in fact, a few years ago, angry Cambodians burned down the Thai embassy, which happened to be located just across their Cambodian office. This recent tiff, however, is all for a show. Well, the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was up for re-election. And what better way to show his constituents that he's the man that's still fit for the job than by doing a little muscle-flexing? Apparently he was in cahoots with some friends over at the other side of the border. Proof of that is that Hun Sen won the elections hands down and right after that, things quieted down again at Preah Vihear, according to our interlocutor.

Oh well. Sounds like Batman and the Joker locked in a Yin-Yang embrace.

Bernard should tell this to his Thai and Cambodian friends at the International Center.


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