Penman for Monday, May 5, 2008
IF YOU'RE involved in teaching and learning English, and especially if you have anything to do with the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, you can’t miss a forthcoming lecture-discussion which is being jointly sponsored by the British Council and the English-Speaking Union of the Philippines, Inc. (of which I used to be president, now happily replaced by Ateneo Humanities Dean Marlu Vilches).
The event will deal with “A Multipurpose Approach to English Language Assessment in the BPO Industry: How Does It Work?”, and the featured speaker is one of the world’s top experts on the subject, Dr. Jane Lockwood. Dr. Lockwood heads the Centre for Language in Education at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and is also Director of Education, FuturePerfect Business English Centre in Hong Kong.
In her talk, Lockwood will focus on the need to be able to properly assess how well English is used in the BPO workplace, contending that commercially and internationally available business English tests have failed to provide reliable assessments of English in BPOs in non-native English-speaking countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.
“The BPO industry reports that apart from the steep per-head cost and the turnaround time, the results do not predict nor do they correlate with successful performance on the job,” Lockwood says in her abstract. “This presentation reports on the problems identified, and solutions reached, when consulting recently into some of the large BPOs in India and the Philippines. Specifically it describes the diverse BPO industry need for language assessment within the workplace and highlights the Business Procesing Language Assessment Scales (BUPLAS) as a solution to the need for a multipurpose and contextually sensitive assessment approach for this fast-growing industry.”
Dr. Lockwood has written and published papers on English in Asian call centers, including and especially those in the Philippines. For those of us who’ve always wondered if there was more to this job than acquiring a Midwestern American accent, the lecture should be an eye-opener, and the ensuing discussion a spirited one.
The lecture-discussion will be held next Monday, May 12, at the SGV Hall of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati. A registration fee of P500 will be charged all participants, inclusive of snacks. Registration begins at 2:00; the lecture starts at 2:30. You can also register in advance at British Council Philippines; call them at 914-1011 for details.
Alas, I’ll be arriving in Dumaguete for the Writers Workshop at that very hour, so I’m going to miss the event, but if you’re not going anywhere you could do worse (and spend P500 more forgettably) than learning something new about how we Pinoys use English to talk to the world.
(And just as an afterthought, it would have been great if the organizers had been able to present even a snippet from Chris Martinez’s hilarious 2005 Palanca Award-winning play, “Welcome to Intelstar,” about what you need to do to succeed in a call center.)
I WAS in a moviehouse a few nights ago having a blast watching Robert Downey Jr. ham it up as “Iron Man” when got a frantic text from my young but industrious research assistant, Lambert, reporting that his sister’s PC, on which he had been working, had crashed, taking his newest files with it. I’m not an easily excitable person, but I freaked out and did something I despise when other people do it: I texted him right back in the theater. “Ack!” I shrieked. “What did I teach you? Lesson No. 1: back up, back up, back up!”
I wasn’t mad because screwy things happen in the universe; they do, all the time, with far worse consequences like war and famine. I was livid because this was a preventable (well, to some extent) disaster, and the course I taught young Lambert and his classmates (“CW 198: Professional Writing”) did emphasize the dangers of living digitally—crashed hard drives and lost files being two of them. I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories about how “my computer ate my homework,” so I make sure that my students understand how important backups are—which, of course, being good undergraduates, they nod respectfully to, then promptly forget.
I teach them a few tricks I’ve learned about backing up. Let me say, first of all, that I’m a redundancy freak. Maybe it’s a bad sign of a kind of preciousness, but I stash copies of everything all over the place. I’m deathly afraid of losing a book manuscript as much as I am of getting five years’ worth of digital photographs wiped out by a virus or a power surge. (Since I use Macs, I can pretty much forget about viruses, but digital death lurks behind many masks and doors.) So I keep three or four external hard drives on which the contents of about as many computers are backed up at least once if not twice. (The piece de resistance is a 500-gigabyte Time Capsule, which backs up my Macs automatically and wirelessly every hour—ah, storage heaven! It’s a guy thing, I’m sure, to be able to say or even suggest that “My hard drive is bigger than yours.”)
Let’s agree that keeping more than a terabyte of storage around the house is a bit of overkill. Of course you can also burn your precious data onto CDs, DVDs, and USB thumb drives, but a simpler and neater solution, especially for text files like reports, manuscripts, and novels-in-progress, is to email them to yourself. I keep an unadvertised Gmail account just for this purpose—I dump all my drafts there, so I can retrieve them from anywhere at any time. And (God forbid) even if my house burns down and takes my terabyte with it, I can still work on my ongoing projects, which I’ll need even more badly than ever. (Too bad I can’t back up Chippy, but there’s hope in cloning yet.)
A last thought for the day: backups are more critical for works in progress, rather than works completed. Your published novel or epic is already on the shelf; the one you’re writing is in your mind—and on an eminently zappable wafer of silicon. Are you listening, Lambert?
Author: Pinoy Penman
More Treasures from Baguio
Penman for Monday, April 28, 2008
OUR RECENT visit to Baguio for the UP National Writers Workshop—an annual pilgrimage, really—turned up another bonus in the form of a new publication passed on to me by writer Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez, now Baguio-based: the Baguio City Yearbook 2008, which she co-edits with Jack Kintanar Cariño. Baguio City is gearing up for its centennial next year, and this yearbook is a picture- and story-rich contribution to that great city’s history.
I flipped through it quickly, and much as I’d like to say that the pictures of old Baguio alone are worth the price of the yearbook, I soon found myself engrossed by the articles, nearly all of them written by Baguio oldtimers.
The yearbook focuses on “Baguio’s Forgotten Ibaloi Heritage,” and one of its most fascinating stories (written by former UP workshopper Nonnette Bennett) is that of its cover girl, the resplendently named Eveline Chainus Guirey, who became Baguio’s first Carnival Queen in 1915 at the age of only 13. The daughter of a wealthy Igorot or baknang family, Chainus, as she was called, was said to have been known for her “golden smile and intelligence.” She wore a gold-plated tooth adornment called a shekang, and her clothes were made of green and purple silk.
Alas—in a tragedy worthy of Poe—this pretty young woman did not live long, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 18. The article reports that when Chainus died, “Schools were closed, classes suspended, and a large crowd [of VIPs] attended her funeral on Oct. 5, 1920.” One sister—Helen, born seven years after her death—is still alive and preserves the memory of Chainus Guirey.
The yearbook has many other stories of Baguio lore—for example, about women cargadores who carried rations and ammunition for American soldiers during the War, about Benguet cowboys who looked over the vast cattle holdings of the Ibaloi, and about the “haunted” Laperal House on Leonard Wood Road—but one that touched a personal chord was a report, by architect Toti Villalon, on the rehabilitation of Teachers Camp, where I spent many a summer as a high-school conference- and party-goer. Indeed, Baguio’s white-and-green, colonial cottages are as unique as the city’s pines in the Philippine landscape.
And you can’t put down the engaging piece written by Linda Grace Cariño on “English Like a Native,” which traces the way English has been indigenized by Baguio speakers. For example: “Notice how natives say ‘country club’ like it was one word? Papanam? Diay countryclub. Manila cousins like to affect the answer: the club. The climbers actually say count-ry club, as in count your blessings.”
For true Baguio sons and daughters—or even avid visitors—there’s a long list of all the things every self-respecting Baguio native should know (e.g., “The only thrift shop you knew was the Pines Thrift Shop near the Justice Hall, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Woelke (it was the first ukay).” I don’t know if I should be proud of admitting to understanding one of these “insider” factoids (“You knew what Chaparral signified”)—but that’s another story.
Baguio City Yearbook 2008 is available for P350 at National Book Store and other outlets. For more inquiries, email the editors at baguioyearbook@gmail.com.
AND SPEAKING of Baguio memories, workshopper and journalist-poet Frank Cimatu informed me that a literary anthology—a collection of essays, stories, and poems about Baguio—is now being put together for publication in time for the city’s 2009 centennial. If you’re interested in submitting your work to this anthology, please email Prof. Grace Subido of UP Baguio at miscommunication.arts@gmail.com.
TOWARD THE end of the UP Writers Workshop a couple of weeks ago, one workshopper raised a question that, I’m sure, has occurred more than once to many a young writer: “After the workshop, what?”
Writers workshops can be intoxicating, providing writers with something they’ll be hard put to find anywhere else: the company of sympathetic souls who understand what they want to do, and also how hard it is to do it. Workshops can occasionally get nasty and end in tears (or worse), but they serve, for the most part, to reaffirm and reinforce one’s commitment to the writing life.
The kind of “mid-career” workshops we now hold at UP aren’t even intended any longer to dwell on grammar and the other basics of writing; they’re meant to focus and to sharpen writers’ attitudes toward their own work and that of others. Admit it or not, entry-level workshops do a service to writing, the individual, and the environment by discouraging the unfit from wasting any more paper (and then again, I can imagine how some workshop judgments can be spectacularly wrong; workshop panelists are hardly gods, and have their own hang-ups to deal with). In the UP Writers Workshop, we don’t want people to stop writing; indeed, we want them to press on, more resolute than ever, and surer of their own voices.
But, yes, after the workshop, what?
I wanted to tell the fellow what immediately came to my mind: “Many more years of solitary confinement and hard labor.” It’s a fair summary, in many ways, of the writing life. You can drink and talk all you want, you can bask in the afterglow of Rilke and Plath and Neruda and whoever moves you, and quote them till the cows come home; but when it comes to your own work, it’ll still be just you and the blinking cursor, and maybe a tepid cup of coffee or a half-finished cigarette. No nodding readers, no owl-eyed critics, no triumphal bouquets, no one to say, “That’s good, can’t wait for the next chapter.”
But just think: a hundred years ago there were no workshops, no writing programs, not even computers (and, in many places, not even electricity). But authors churned out 300-page books. Writing is always a solitary act and solitude can get lonely, but the books get written and suddenly there’s more than you listening to your voice at 2 a.m.
OUR RECENT visit to Baguio for the UP National Writers Workshop—an annual pilgrimage, really—turned up another bonus in the form of a new publication passed on to me by writer Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez, now Baguio-based: the Baguio City Yearbook 2008, which she co-edits with Jack Kintanar Cariño. Baguio City is gearing up for its centennial next year, and this yearbook is a picture- and story-rich contribution to that great city’s history.
I flipped through it quickly, and much as I’d like to say that the pictures of old Baguio alone are worth the price of the yearbook, I soon found myself engrossed by the articles, nearly all of them written by Baguio oldtimers.
The yearbook focuses on “Baguio’s Forgotten Ibaloi Heritage,” and one of its most fascinating stories (written by former UP workshopper Nonnette Bennett) is that of its cover girl, the resplendently named Eveline Chainus Guirey, who became Baguio’s first Carnival Queen in 1915 at the age of only 13. The daughter of a wealthy Igorot or baknang family, Chainus, as she was called, was said to have been known for her “golden smile and intelligence.” She wore a gold-plated tooth adornment called a shekang, and her clothes were made of green and purple silk.
Alas—in a tragedy worthy of Poe—this pretty young woman did not live long, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 18. The article reports that when Chainus died, “Schools were closed, classes suspended, and a large crowd [of VIPs] attended her funeral on Oct. 5, 1920.” One sister—Helen, born seven years after her death—is still alive and preserves the memory of Chainus Guirey.
The yearbook has many other stories of Baguio lore—for example, about women cargadores who carried rations and ammunition for American soldiers during the War, about Benguet cowboys who looked over the vast cattle holdings of the Ibaloi, and about the “haunted” Laperal House on Leonard Wood Road—but one that touched a personal chord was a report, by architect Toti Villalon, on the rehabilitation of Teachers Camp, where I spent many a summer as a high-school conference- and party-goer. Indeed, Baguio’s white-and-green, colonial cottages are as unique as the city’s pines in the Philippine landscape.
And you can’t put down the engaging piece written by Linda Grace Cariño on “English Like a Native,” which traces the way English has been indigenized by Baguio speakers. For example: “Notice how natives say ‘country club’ like it was one word? Papanam? Diay countryclub. Manila cousins like to affect the answer: the club. The climbers actually say count-ry club, as in count your blessings.”
For true Baguio sons and daughters—or even avid visitors—there’s a long list of all the things every self-respecting Baguio native should know (e.g., “The only thrift shop you knew was the Pines Thrift Shop near the Justice Hall, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Woelke (it was the first ukay).” I don’t know if I should be proud of admitting to understanding one of these “insider” factoids (“You knew what Chaparral signified”)—but that’s another story.
Baguio City Yearbook 2008 is available for P350 at National Book Store and other outlets. For more inquiries, email the editors at baguioyearbook@gmail.com.
AND SPEAKING of Baguio memories, workshopper and journalist-poet Frank Cimatu informed me that a literary anthology—a collection of essays, stories, and poems about Baguio—is now being put together for publication in time for the city’s 2009 centennial. If you’re interested in submitting your work to this anthology, please email Prof. Grace Subido of UP Baguio at miscommunication.arts@gmail.com.
TOWARD THE end of the UP Writers Workshop a couple of weeks ago, one workshopper raised a question that, I’m sure, has occurred more than once to many a young writer: “After the workshop, what?”
Writers workshops can be intoxicating, providing writers with something they’ll be hard put to find anywhere else: the company of sympathetic souls who understand what they want to do, and also how hard it is to do it. Workshops can occasionally get nasty and end in tears (or worse), but they serve, for the most part, to reaffirm and reinforce one’s commitment to the writing life.
The kind of “mid-career” workshops we now hold at UP aren’t even intended any longer to dwell on grammar and the other basics of writing; they’re meant to focus and to sharpen writers’ attitudes toward their own work and that of others. Admit it or not, entry-level workshops do a service to writing, the individual, and the environment by discouraging the unfit from wasting any more paper (and then again, I can imagine how some workshop judgments can be spectacularly wrong; workshop panelists are hardly gods, and have their own hang-ups to deal with). In the UP Writers Workshop, we don’t want people to stop writing; indeed, we want them to press on, more resolute than ever, and surer of their own voices.
But, yes, after the workshop, what?
I wanted to tell the fellow what immediately came to my mind: “Many more years of solitary confinement and hard labor.” It’s a fair summary, in many ways, of the writing life. You can drink and talk all you want, you can bask in the afterglow of Rilke and Plath and Neruda and whoever moves you, and quote them till the cows come home; but when it comes to your own work, it’ll still be just you and the blinking cursor, and maybe a tepid cup of coffee or a half-finished cigarette. No nodding readers, no owl-eyed critics, no triumphal bouquets, no one to say, “That’s good, can’t wait for the next chapter.”
But just think: a hundred years ago there were no workshops, no writing programs, not even computers (and, in many places, not even electricity). But authors churned out 300-page books. Writing is always a solitary act and solitude can get lonely, but the books get written and suddenly there’s more than you listening to your voice at 2 a.m.
Have Plane Food, Will Travel
Barfly for Tuesday, November 5, 1996
HERE'S ANOTHER blast from the past to keep you occupied. Enjoy—I hope!
CALL IT unusual (or, to be even kinder, “charming”) if you will, but I love hospital food and plane food. They usually mean that I’m being babied by nurses with the gentleness of Mother Teresa and the persuasiveness of Madonna, or that I’m flying off someplace nice and pleasant at somebody else’s expense, away from real work. It doesn’t matter to me that the vegetables are soggy—I hate veggies, anyway (parents, keep this column away from your kids)—and that, given the usual airline choice between the chicken and the fish, you find that either one has a way of tasting like the other.
I enjoy the efficiency and the quitude of the whole process—no real decisions to make, no special etiquette to mind, no burdensome conversations to keep afloat, no tabs to deal with on the spot. (Not everyone, of course, feels the same way I do. When he was alive and on his way to another film festival abroad—he didn’t like going out of the country all that much, truth to tell—director Lino Brocka habitually brought along his own packed dinner of adobo.)
Hospitals and planes provide a unique insularity you won’t find at the office or even at home. Dining reduces itself to plain and simple sustenance, without the invasive annoyance of a waiter badgering you for your choice of salad dressing. I hate complications, and can be relied upon to focus on the essentials, and to get the essential business over and done with as quickly as possible. (I’m also the guy, by the way, who thinks of the ocean as one big bathtub; once respectably wet, I towel up and head for the shade of the nearest bar.)
Some other Pinoys, I recently remembered, enjoy the airborne cutlery even more than the food—so much so that they make it easier for the poor flight attendant who has to collect the meal trays and clean up after everyone, by not leaving her too many soiled dishes to worry about. On our flight to Kai Tak, I was savoring the last scrap of beef caught between my teeth when, from behind me, I overheard this conversation between the attendant and the nice old lady seated in Seat 29F.
Attendant: “Uh—could I have the little plastic bowls back, please?”
Woman: “Which one?”
Attendant: “The ones that had the salad, and the dessert—”
Woman: “What? We don’t have to give those back, do we?”
Attendant: “I’m, uh, I’m afraid you do.”
Woman: (Muttering an oath.) “Oh, all right, you can get them from my friend over there!”
I turn my head by this time, and see her pointing to her confederate—another well-dressed matron on her way, most likely, to a shopping spree in Mong Kok. With much grumbling and sighing, the missing samples of late 20th-century Chinese plastic art are located and returned.
A Pinay friend of ours recalls another time when, during a company conference held in Hong Kong, the hotel manager took her aside to plead for the return of the silverware (and some of the carpets) which had miraculously disappeared from the Pinoy delegates’ rooms. The manager comforted her with the reassurance that the Filipinos weren’t the worst offenders by far in this department, but rather some citizens of a South Asian country I whose people I won’t collectively malign with a positive ID, who would cart away TV sets and mirrors at check-out time.
If you think that’s less than charming, then you probably weren’t on this planet yet when--during the salad days of the turboprop—my relatives and fellow islanders routinely stuffed the PAL cutlery into their bags at the conclusion of every onboard luncheon. Am I calling them thieves? Of course not; I love these people, and they were only doing what they thought was the thing to do. Surely the ticket price included the paltry cost of a souvenir? Maybe it should.
SPEAKING OF food, “devastated” is the only word I can think of to describe my state of being upon discovering that my favorite Ma Mon Luk outlets—the old one in Cubao and the new one along Katipunan, possibly among many others—had shut down. I’d made a ritual of treating myself at Ma Mon Luk to a large bowl of noodles and a special siopao—the scrumptious one with the maalat na itlog in its flavorful heart—at least a couple of times a month for the past twenty years. I knew the Cubao waiters and they knew me; Demi wasn’t even a first-grader when I introduced her (screaming and kicking; she wanted a burger) to the place. I remember when my father took my mother and me to the Quiapo branch after, say, a movie at the Ideal Theater; they served the sweet-smelling chicken in raised aluminum platters.
My mother’s not grieving. “It was dirty,” she said when I told her the news, voicing perhaps a popular but (to my mind and palate) irrelevant suspicion. All I know is, it was old, it was good—and now it’s gone.
HERE'S ANOTHER blast from the past to keep you occupied. Enjoy—I hope!
CALL IT unusual (or, to be even kinder, “charming”) if you will, but I love hospital food and plane food. They usually mean that I’m being babied by nurses with the gentleness of Mother Teresa and the persuasiveness of Madonna, or that I’m flying off someplace nice and pleasant at somebody else’s expense, away from real work. It doesn’t matter to me that the vegetables are soggy—I hate veggies, anyway (parents, keep this column away from your kids)—and that, given the usual airline choice between the chicken and the fish, you find that either one has a way of tasting like the other.
I enjoy the efficiency and the quitude of the whole process—no real decisions to make, no special etiquette to mind, no burdensome conversations to keep afloat, no tabs to deal with on the spot. (Not everyone, of course, feels the same way I do. When he was alive and on his way to another film festival abroad—he didn’t like going out of the country all that much, truth to tell—director Lino Brocka habitually brought along his own packed dinner of adobo.)
Hospitals and planes provide a unique insularity you won’t find at the office or even at home. Dining reduces itself to plain and simple sustenance, without the invasive annoyance of a waiter badgering you for your choice of salad dressing. I hate complications, and can be relied upon to focus on the essentials, and to get the essential business over and done with as quickly as possible. (I’m also the guy, by the way, who thinks of the ocean as one big bathtub; once respectably wet, I towel up and head for the shade of the nearest bar.)
Some other Pinoys, I recently remembered, enjoy the airborne cutlery even more than the food—so much so that they make it easier for the poor flight attendant who has to collect the meal trays and clean up after everyone, by not leaving her too many soiled dishes to worry about. On our flight to Kai Tak, I was savoring the last scrap of beef caught between my teeth when, from behind me, I overheard this conversation between the attendant and the nice old lady seated in Seat 29F.
Attendant: “Uh—could I have the little plastic bowls back, please?”
Woman: “Which one?”
Attendant: “The ones that had the salad, and the dessert—”
Woman: “What? We don’t have to give those back, do we?”
Attendant: “I’m, uh, I’m afraid you do.”
Woman: (Muttering an oath.) “Oh, all right, you can get them from my friend over there!”
I turn my head by this time, and see her pointing to her confederate—another well-dressed matron on her way, most likely, to a shopping spree in Mong Kok. With much grumbling and sighing, the missing samples of late 20th-century Chinese plastic art are located and returned.
A Pinay friend of ours recalls another time when, during a company conference held in Hong Kong, the hotel manager took her aside to plead for the return of the silverware (and some of the carpets) which had miraculously disappeared from the Pinoy delegates’ rooms. The manager comforted her with the reassurance that the Filipinos weren’t the worst offenders by far in this department, but rather some citizens of a South Asian country I whose people I won’t collectively malign with a positive ID, who would cart away TV sets and mirrors at check-out time.
If you think that’s less than charming, then you probably weren’t on this planet yet when--during the salad days of the turboprop—my relatives and fellow islanders routinely stuffed the PAL cutlery into their bags at the conclusion of every onboard luncheon. Am I calling them thieves? Of course not; I love these people, and they were only doing what they thought was the thing to do. Surely the ticket price included the paltry cost of a souvenir? Maybe it should.
SPEAKING OF food, “devastated” is the only word I can think of to describe my state of being upon discovering that my favorite Ma Mon Luk outlets—the old one in Cubao and the new one along Katipunan, possibly among many others—had shut down. I’d made a ritual of treating myself at Ma Mon Luk to a large bowl of noodles and a special siopao—the scrumptious one with the maalat na itlog in its flavorful heart—at least a couple of times a month for the past twenty years. I knew the Cubao waiters and they knew me; Demi wasn’t even a first-grader when I introduced her (screaming and kicking; she wanted a burger) to the place. I remember when my father took my mother and me to the Quiapo branch after, say, a movie at the Ideal Theater; they served the sweet-smelling chicken in raised aluminum platters.
My mother’s not grieving. “It was dirty,” she said when I told her the news, voicing perhaps a popular but (to my mind and palate) irrelevant suspicion. All I know is, it was old, it was good—and now it’s gone.
Sorry About That
I put up my column piece for April 21 ("More Treasures from Baguio") here yesterday, but since it didn't make it to the Star desk in time for publication, I'm taking it down for the meanwhile and will repost it next week, thanks and so sorry!
More Treasures from Baguio
Penman for Monday, April 21, 2008
OUR RECENT visit to Baguio for the UP National Writers Workshop—an annual pilgrimage, really—turned up another bonus in the form of a new publication passed on to me by writer Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez, now Baguio-based: the Baguio City Yearbook 2008, which she co-edits with Jack Kintanar Cariño. Baguio City is gearing up for its centennial next year, and this yearbook is a picture- and story-rich contribution to that great city’s history.
I flipped through it quickly, and much as I’d like to say that the pictures of old Baguio alone are worth the price of the yearbook, I soon found myself engrossed by the articles, nearly all of them written by Baguio oldtimers.
The yearbook focuses on “Baguio’s Forgotten Ibaloi Heritage,” and one of its most fascinating stories (written by former UP workshopper Nonnette Bennett) is that of its cover girl, the resplendently named Eveline Chainus Guirey, who became Baguio’s first Carnival Queen in 1915 at the age of only 13. The daughter of a wealthy Igorot or baknang family, Chainus, as she was called, was said to have been known for her “golden smile and intelligence.” She wore a gold-plated tooth adornment called a shekang, and her clothes were made of green and purple silk.
Alas—in a tragedy worthy of Poe—this pretty young woman did not live long, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 18. The article reports that when Chainus died, “Schools were closed, classes suspended, and a large crowd [of VIPs] attended her funeral on Oct. 5, 1920.” One sister—Helen, born seven years after her death—is still alive and preserves the memory of Chainus Guirey.
The yearbook has many other stories of Baguio lore—for example, about women cargadores who carried rations and ammunition for American soldiers during the War, about Benguet cowboys who looked over the vast cattle holdings of the Ibaloi, and about the “haunted” Laperal House on Leonard Wood Road—but one that touched a personal chord was a report, by architect Toti Villalon, on the rehabilitation of Teachers Camp, where I spent many a summer as a high-school conference- and party-goer. Indeed, Baguio’s white-and-green, colonial cottages are as unique as the city’s pines in the Philippine landscape.
And you can’t put down the engaging piece written by Linda Grace Cariño on “English Like a Native,” which traces the way English has been indigenized by Baguio speakers. For example: “Notice how natives say ‘country club’ like it was one word? Papanam? Diay countryclub. Manila cousins like to affect the answer: the club. The climbers actually say count-ry club, as in count your blessings.”
For true Baguio sons and daughters—or even avid visitors—there’s a long list of all the things every self-respecting Baguio native should know (e.g., “The only thrift shop you knew was the Pines Thrift Shop near the Justice Hall, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Woelke (it was the first ukay).” I don’t know if I should be proud of admitting to understanding one of these “insider” factoids (“You knew what Chaparral signified”)—but that’s another story.
Baguio City Yearbook 2008 is available for P350 at National Book Store and other outlets. For more inquiries, email the editors at baguioyearbook@gmail.com.
AND SPEAKING of Baguio memories, workshopper and journalist-poet Frank Cimatu informed me that a literary anthology—a collection of essays, stories, and poems about Baguio—is now being put together for publication in time for the city’s 2009 centennial. If you’re interested in submitting your work to this anthology, please email Prof. Grace Subido of UP Baguio at miscommunication.arts@gmail.com.
TOWARD THE end of the UP Writers Workshop a couple of weeks ago, one workshopper raised a question that, I’m sure, has occurred more than once to many a young writer: “After the workshop, what?”
Writers workshops can be intoxicating, providing writers with something they’ll be hard put to find anywhere else: the company of sympathetic souls who understand what they want to do, and also how hard it is to do it. Workshops can occasionally get nasty and end in tears (or worse), but they serve, for the most part, to reaffirm and reinforce one’s commitment to the writing life.
The kind of “mid-career” workshops we now hold at UP aren’t even intended any longer to dwell on grammar and the other basics of writing; they’re meant to focus and to sharpen writers’ attitudes toward their own work and that of others. Admit it or not, entry-level workshops do a service to writing, the individual, and the environment by discouraging the unfit from wasting any more paper (and then again, I can imagine how some workshop judgments can be spectacularly wrong; workshop panelists are hardly gods, and have their own hang-ups to deal with). In the UP Writers Workshop, we don’t want people to stop writing; indeed, we want them to press on, more resolute than ever, and surer of their own voices.
But, yes, after the workshop, what?
I wanted to tell the fellow what immediately came to my mind: “Many more years of solitary confinement and hard labor.” It’s a fair summary, in many ways, of the writing life. You can drink and talk all you want, you can bask in the afterglow of Rilke and Plath and Neruda and whoever moves you, and quote them till the cows come home; but when it comes to your own work, it’ll still be just you and the blinking cursor, and maybe a tepid cup of coffee or a half-finished cigarette. No nodding readers, no owl-eyed critics, no triumphal bouquets, no one to say, “That’s good, can’t wait for the next chapter.”
But just think: a hundred years ago there were no workshops, no writing programs, not even computers (and, in many places, not even electricity). But authors churned out 300-page books. Writing is always a solitary act and solitude can get lonely, but the books get written and suddenly there’s more than you listening to your voice at 2 a.m.
OUR RECENT visit to Baguio for the UP National Writers Workshop—an annual pilgrimage, really—turned up another bonus in the form of a new publication passed on to me by writer Chi Balmaceda Gutierrez, now Baguio-based: the Baguio City Yearbook 2008, which she co-edits with Jack Kintanar Cariño. Baguio City is gearing up for its centennial next year, and this yearbook is a picture- and story-rich contribution to that great city’s history.
I flipped through it quickly, and much as I’d like to say that the pictures of old Baguio alone are worth the price of the yearbook, I soon found myself engrossed by the articles, nearly all of them written by Baguio oldtimers.
The yearbook focuses on “Baguio’s Forgotten Ibaloi Heritage,” and one of its most fascinating stories (written by former UP workshopper Nonnette Bennett) is that of its cover girl, the resplendently named Eveline Chainus Guirey, who became Baguio’s first Carnival Queen in 1915 at the age of only 13. The daughter of a wealthy Igorot or baknang family, Chainus, as she was called, was said to have been known for her “golden smile and intelligence.” She wore a gold-plated tooth adornment called a shekang, and her clothes were made of green and purple silk.
Alas—in a tragedy worthy of Poe—this pretty young woman did not live long, succumbing to tuberculosis at age 18. The article reports that when Chainus died, “Schools were closed, classes suspended, and a large crowd [of VIPs] attended her funeral on Oct. 5, 1920.” One sister—Helen, born seven years after her death—is still alive and preserves the memory of Chainus Guirey.
The yearbook has many other stories of Baguio lore—for example, about women cargadores who carried rations and ammunition for American soldiers during the War, about Benguet cowboys who looked over the vast cattle holdings of the Ibaloi, and about the “haunted” Laperal House on Leonard Wood Road—but one that touched a personal chord was a report, by architect Toti Villalon, on the rehabilitation of Teachers Camp, where I spent many a summer as a high-school conference- and party-goer. Indeed, Baguio’s white-and-green, colonial cottages are as unique as the city’s pines in the Philippine landscape.
And you can’t put down the engaging piece written by Linda Grace Cariño on “English Like a Native,” which traces the way English has been indigenized by Baguio speakers. For example: “Notice how natives say ‘country club’ like it was one word? Papanam? Diay countryclub. Manila cousins like to affect the answer: the club. The climbers actually say count-ry club, as in count your blessings.”
For true Baguio sons and daughters—or even avid visitors—there’s a long list of all the things every self-respecting Baguio native should know (e.g., “The only thrift shop you knew was the Pines Thrift Shop near the Justice Hall, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Woelke (it was the first ukay).” I don’t know if I should be proud of admitting to understanding one of these “insider” factoids (“You knew what Chaparral signified”)—but that’s another story.
Baguio City Yearbook 2008 is available for P350 at National Book Store and other outlets. For more inquiries, email the editors at baguioyearbook@gmail.com.
AND SPEAKING of Baguio memories, workshopper and journalist-poet Frank Cimatu informed me that a literary anthology—a collection of essays, stories, and poems about Baguio—is now being put together for publication in time for the city’s 2009 centennial. If you’re interested in submitting your work to this anthology, please email Prof. Grace Subido of UP Baguio at miscommunication.arts@gmail.com.
TOWARD THE end of the UP Writers Workshop a couple of weeks ago, one workshopper raised a question that, I’m sure, has occurred more than once to many a young writer: “After the workshop, what?”
Writers workshops can be intoxicating, providing writers with something they’ll be hard put to find anywhere else: the company of sympathetic souls who understand what they want to do, and also how hard it is to do it. Workshops can occasionally get nasty and end in tears (or worse), but they serve, for the most part, to reaffirm and reinforce one’s commitment to the writing life.
The kind of “mid-career” workshops we now hold at UP aren’t even intended any longer to dwell on grammar and the other basics of writing; they’re meant to focus and to sharpen writers’ attitudes toward their own work and that of others. Admit it or not, entry-level workshops do a service to writing, the individual, and the environment by discouraging the unfit from wasting any more paper (and then again, I can imagine how some workshop judgments can be spectacularly wrong; workshop panelists are hardly gods, and have their own hang-ups to deal with). In the UP Writers Workshop, we don’t want people to stop writing; indeed, we want them to press on, more resolute than ever, and surer of their own voices.
But, yes, after the workshop, what?
I wanted to tell the fellow what immediately came to my mind: “Many more years of solitary confinement and hard labor.” It’s a fair summary, in many ways, of the writing life. You can drink and talk all you want, you can bask in the afterglow of Rilke and Plath and Neruda and whoever moves you, and quote them till the cows come home; but when it comes to your own work, it’ll still be just you and the blinking cursor, and maybe a tepid cup of coffee or a half-finished cigarette. No nodding readers, no owl-eyed critics, no triumphal bouquets, no one to say, “That’s good, can’t wait for the next chapter.”
But just think: a hundred years ago there were no workshops, no writing programs, not even computers (and, in many places, not even electricity). But authors churned out 300-page books. Writing is always a solitary act and solitude can get lonely, but the books get written and suddenly there’s more than you listening to your voice at 2 a.m.