Author: Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, March 24, 2008


THE ASSIGNMENTS have yet to be formalized, but I’ve decided that—should I be teaching a graduate fiction workshop again next semester—I’ll devote this particular course to the writing of crime fiction. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that our fiction needs a kick in the seat of the pants to go out and deal with what millions of our people read about every morning in the tabloids, but which seldom gets into the rarefied prose of our creative writers, especially those writing in English.

I’ve always had a fascination—bordering on the morbid—with crime and death. I relax by watching new and old episodes of all three CSIs, Dexter, Wire in the Blood (my favorite of them all), and Law & Order. I’ve yet to see even one show of the youngish fantasy Heroes, although now and then I catch up on the medical mysteries on House. I’m a big fan of the “true-crime” genre, and have practically memorized the lives and misdeeds of the world’s most notorious serial killers.

I’m sure that reading all those Hardy Boys books in grade school had much to do with it, but real life took a hand in stoking this interest. Thankfully it wasn’t through any crime that I or my family fell victim to, but through my reading and, eventually, my journalistic writing. I devoured the Free Press reports on such sensational ‘60s cases as the RCA ax murders, the Lucila Lalu dismemberment case, and the Annabelle Huggins abduction case; many of these cases had been written up by Nick Joaquin as “Quijano de Manila”, so I suppose I was imbibing two things at the same time.

Not too long afterward I found myself in the center of the action, during a brief stint as a police reporter in my early days as a journalist in training with the old Philippines Herald. I was 18, a dropout, and gung-ho; my editors could have sent me to cover the goings-on in the Ninth Circle of Hell and I would have happily obliged. Instead they made me a general-assignments reporter, which was just as interesting, because it required me to make the rounds of all the beats from City Hall to sports to the Manila Police Department.

Watching the MICAA basketball tournament for free and from courtside was thrilling, but nothing could match the police beat in pumping adrenaline into the system. In just a few weeks on the beat—practically on the eve of martial law—I got a lifetime’s fill of blood and mayhem, from student demonstrations (where I was parked on the police side, for a change, and could see how they were planning to assault the demonstrators at a pre-arranged signal) to bank robberies (a private jeep oozing blood from the piled-up bodies of people who had been shot in the bank), suicides (an 18-year-old American girl shooting herself in the bathroom with a .38), and hospital fires (bodies of hapless patients thudding to the ground from a desperate leap from the rooftop).

I kept a little black diary with the phone numbers of hospitals and morgues, and learned the routine of ringing them up periodically to check if anyone had given up the ghost that morning or that afternoon—and, if so, if their departure had been spectacular enough to merit some column-inches in tomorrow’s paper. I didn’t mean to become inured to human misery, but I suppose my hide thickened a bit, which was just as well, because martial law would bring me to a long, sad train of funeral wakes for comrades whose bodies had been savaged by the enemy beyond recognition.

I’ve often wondered about this fascination, which we can ascribe to two basic and somewhat related human experiences. The first of these is catharsis, that sensation of being cleansed or purged of your foulest and darkest feelings after you’ve just seen something awful happen to somebody else (whether in a Greek tragedy or a disaster movie). The second’s Schadenfreude, that interesting German yoking of the words for “harm” and “joy”—the harm suffered by others bringing joy to you. I know, they’re terrible notions that make us look like predators or parasites of a sort, but these concepts and their effects are actually great comforts; witnessing the misfortunes and the downfall of others reminds us that we are alive and relatively well. We feel pushed to the limit, at no real risk to ourselves (thus rollercoasters).

As that list of TV programs shows, I’m hardly alone. There’s a bloodthirsty lot of us who’ve come to use the words “epithelials,” “blunt force trauma,” “blood spatter analysis” and “gunshot residue” with the same casualness we apply to talking about vegetables, prescription drugs, and coffee flavors.

So I’m not surprised that we find crime and crime stories obsessively interesting, as a mirror of our worst fears and also as a reassurance of our own well-being. What I do find surprising is the palpable absence of crime—except possibly for rape or sexual abuse, or something political—in our fiction. With few notable exceptions (such as Ichi Batacan’s novel Smaller and Smaller Circles, which began if I remember right as a story submitted to my graduate workshop years ago), characters don’t get robbed, mauled, defrauded, stalked, bilked—nor, for that matter, murdered. (They do occasionally commit suicide, after some agonizingly long “to be or not to be” aria serving the plot less than the author’s own desire to unload his or her “I hate the world” rant on the unsuspecting universe.)

I think that’s a sorry omission, not only because it denies a fundamental reality in our daily life and because it otherwise creates the illusion of a genteel, imperturbable society where people worry only about their love affairs and sexuality and whether they’re more American than Filipino. (This isn’t to put down the many great stories that have been written in this vein.) In our society, crime seems often to be a cross between personal and social imperatives, and without meaning to find easy excuses such as “Society made me do it,” crime fiction could provide us with a genre that looks both at the psychology of the criminal and the topography of his or her environment while providing Pinoy readers something truly saucy to sink their teeth into. Inevitably, it’ll also look into what passes for criminal investigation and law enforcement in this country, into issues of justice.

As usual, the most likely pitfall of genre fiction like this will be the cliché—the story with all too predictable plotting and characterization. A good crime story will demand inventiveness, plausibility, a deep understanding of human psychology—and, I think, a sense of the wicked, maybe even in a comic way.

I’m still putting a tentative syllabus together, so if anyone out there has any good crime story or reference to share, I’d much appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance for helping me walk some students down a dark and rain-soaked boulevard—or better yet, a brilliantly sunlit avenue, along a sidewalk of which something catches our eye in the gutter: the red polish on the nail of what, on closer inspection, turns out to be a severed ring finger.

(The Maltese Falcon cover courtesy of ejmd.tripod.com.)

Manileño for March 2008


I HAD an interesting if a bit overheated discussion online with some members of my Macintosh users group—not about computers but about the English language, which I realized could be a a more incendiary subject than the pros and cons of the new ultraslim MacBook Air.

I’m a pretty quiet and laidback guy who thinks he did all his shouting during the First Quarter Storm and the two EDSAs. It takes some effort to get me all worked up about anything. I don’t get white-hot angry when my students manifest laziness or ignorance, or even stupidity—they’re being what 18-year-olds (and even 54-year-olds) will occasionally be; I show displeasure and disapproval, and enforce discipline (albeit gently), but I don’t scream. I reserve that for instances of cheating or willful deception—and, in this present case, for when we let others put the Filipino down, wittingly or otherwise, with nary a whimper from ourselves.

What got me started was an innocuous-looking (and, I was sure, well-intended) blog entry by a member, apparently a foreigner who’d been in the Philippines for some time and who’d learned some Filipino—who observed that “the Filipinos’ most common grammatical error” was the expression “For a while,” which your mother and your brother and mine routinely use to answer phone calls with. This “dependent clause”, he said, was incomprehensible to foreigners, and deserved banishment from our vocabulary.

I had no problem with that observation, per se—of course “for a while” means nothing to the Americans, the British, and the Australians, in the same way that “at sixes and sevens” means nothing to us Pinoys, even those of us with PhDs in English.

The real problem was that, well, there was no real problem. “For a while”—which, to begin with, isn’t a clause (dependent or otherwise) but a phrase (a prepositional phrase, to be exact)—is perfectly understandable and useful to most English-speaking Filipinos. It’s our equivalent for “hold on” or “hold the line” or “just a minute” or some such expression in Standard American or British English. It meets the most basic purpose of language: communication. (I remember when a critic took me to task for using “Kill the light” as a direct translation for “Patayin mo ang ilaw,” until I showed him all the times Americans themselves used it in their own writing, idiomatically—go ahead, do a Google search.)

In other words, it’s not an error—grammatical or otherwise. Grammatically, it would be had someone said “a while for” or “while for a”, which goes against the way words fall into their proper slots in phrases in English grammar. What was being read as an “error” was the fact that it’s Filipino English, a local adaptation of a language we never asked to learn but had to, anyway. We’re dealing here with a matter of usage, which varies widely in time and place, and not grammar, which tends to remain fairly fixed.

Let’s get something out of the way. English today has many varieties, none of which is necessarily better than the other; they’re all useful in their own way, in their own cultures; Singlish works for Singaporeans, Chinglish for the Chinese. (Taglish isn’t Filipino English, but a kind of hybrid, which has its own usefulness, and its own limitations.) The word “limitations” is important, because this is what the language police tend to pounce on, especially with a phrase like “for a while.”

“Speak and write in Standard English,” we’re told, because otherwise, “You won’t be understood by others.” That’s right, and I absolutely agree: we should know the difference between the language we use for and among ourselves, and the language we need to know to communicate with the outside world (which we often associate with business, government, and education—the big, “official” things).

But the question is, where are we, anyway? With whom are we speaking? If it’s a foreigner calling—and most Filipinos will be able to sense that by ear—then “for a while” won’t be quite the thing to say. The thing is, even if we did, just how grievous an error (of choice of words) would that be? Why is it that we Filipinos will trip all over ourselves to understand American and British expressions in both written and spoken forms, and feel or be made to feel that we’ve committed a crime when we use our own?

And I’ll tell you what really made my blood pressure shoot up during that largely civil exchange on the message board. It wasn’t the fact that this probably well-meaning white man (going by his avatar) had chided us over a small matter of English. It was the number of fellow Filipinos who responded, “Oh, thank you for correcting us, kind sir!”, even after I’d pointed out the problems with the fellow’s reasoning, and with his own faulty grammar and spelling.

It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t take criticism. Of course we should—and we do, all the time, sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes not. “Why can’t you be like Singapore?” “Why can’t you Filipinos come to meetings on time?” “Why do you eat with your hands?” But we should know when to serve others, and when to be ourselves, even and especially in this globalized universe.

Sometimes we come down too hard on ourselves and apologize too much, thinking that there’s some white man out there watching us with beady eyes, ready to cane us for the slightest misdeed. Sometimes we think that to be “world-class” and “competitive,” we have to speak, dress, and act like the white guy.

In my earlier days as a teacher and writer of English, I used to be one of these finger waggers. I understand the need to draw the line somewhere, and that’s part of my job. I’m not saying that anything goes, certainly not. But—if we’re truly smart people—we should know what to say when, to whom, and how.

T3 Select Opinion for March 2008


THERE WAS a time, back in the ‘90s, when the thing to get for your brand-new car was a set of bumper guards. Remember those? They were fat, ribbed rubber strips, and sometimes they came in hideous pink, like some weird sex toy. Its flat underside was meant to stick to your bumper corner till kingdom come, there to absorb every thud and swipe that came your precious limo’s way.

Why am I talking cars in a corner I usually devote to digital gadgets? Because I’ve lately noticed how many users have outfitted their laptops, iPods, and mobile phones with the equivalent of bumper guards, wrapping them up in centimeter-thick skins of squidgy silicon and/or aluminum armor worthy of a battle tank. Keyboards are covered over with spill-proof, type-through membranes. Even wrist rests have acquired fuzzy felt pads, and no screen goes protector-less these days. To top it all off, when you’ve reinforced everything with a second skin, you dump the whole machine into a well-chosen bag—whether aluminum, neoprene, leather, or, in particularly acquisitive persons, all of the above.


What we’re witnessing here—and have become hostage to—is the emergence and growth of the digital accessories industry, something that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago, when most of our digital doohickeys didn’t exist, either. When the first laptops came out, nobody had a choice—you used the bag it came in (if it had one); my first portable, circa 1990, was an 18-pound behemoth that used eight C-size batteries and came in a flimsy nylon bag. Today, as I eagerly await the arrival of my new 3-pound, 0.76-inch MacBook Air, I’m already thinking about all the sexy sleeves it’s going to spawn (and which, of course, it richly deserves).

I’m a helpless collector of computer and camera bags and cases, but my flair for accessorizing stops right there. I can understand the anxiety of the new laptop or iPhone owner who wants to keep his or new toy as spotless and flawless as when it came out of the box, and I went through a phase myself of buying five different covers for the same iPod. I can’t argue that bags, cases, skins, and screens are great and even necessary for protection.

But now—perhaps with the benefit of age—I realize that I like my machines naked. As a writer, I have a very personal and tactile relationship with my keyboard. I like the feel of bare metal or plastic or glass as the case may be; there’s nothing sexier in the hand than a bare iPhone. If my machines acquire scratches, they’re just growing a bit older, like me—with purpose and, hopefully, with some grace and lots of character.

Penman for Monday, March 17, 2008


NO, THIS has nothing to do with broadband and burgers, but now that I have your attention, let me take a break this week from more ponderous topics such as Pelikans and PowerBooks to make a few announcements having to do with language and literature (how’s that for abusive alliteration?).

The first has to do with the UP Gawad Likhaan Centennial Literary Award, which is being given out by the University of the Philippines to celebrate its ongoing centennial. The UP Institute of Creative Writing, which is in charge of the competition, has decided to extend the deadline for the submission of entries by a month, to April 30, 2008. That should give people just a little more time to finish and polish their masterpieces in English and/or Filipino. There are three categories under each language (the novel/short story collection, poetry, and creative nonfiction), for each of which the sole winner will be awarded P200,000. For more details and entry forms, please visit http://www.upd.edu.ph/~icw/gawadlikhaan/index.htm.

We’ll be plugging the competition (and the deadline extension) in the media and on an electronic billboard in UP Manila—which prompted a question, in our meeting, about what message we could put on that billboard to draw public attention to the Gawad Likhaan. I had an easy answer to that one—“How about ‘Bok, may 200 ka dito?’” Not quite P200 million—but hey, at least it’s honest money.

At that same meeting, I learned that our two National-Artist colleagues—Virgilio “Rio” Almario and Bien Lumbera—were leaving together soon for a working visit to Hawaii, where I expect they’ll be properly feted by their compatriots for the literary luminaries that they are. Just out of curiosity, I asked, “Are you flying first class? Business class?” Rio made a sad face. “Hindi, e.” He didn’t mind it, of course—we writers are a scruffy, pedestrian bunch, happier with pancit than caviar—but something in me wondered if and when the day will come when we can afford our finest artists a little comfort, at least with an upgrade to business class on our flag carriers. No self-respecting senator or congressman would expect any less.


SPEAKING OF poetry in Filipino, the Filipinas Institute of Translation, Inc. (FIT) has opened a “Katext Mo sa Katotohan” (Your Textmate for Truth) contest to bring tradition and technology together in pressing for the truth, given the recent course of Filipino events. Texters are invited to send in a four-line, eight-syllable, rhymed dalit—a traditional Tagalog verse form—commenting on “the value of telling the truth.” Entries can be texted to 0915-7832810 or emailed to dalitext@yahoo.com. The weekly winners get P2,0000, with runners-up getting certificates.

Thousands of entries from as far away as Guam and Hong Kong made up the first week’s batch, which was judged by Virgilio Almario, Vim Nadera, Joey Baquiran, and Ronald Atilano. The winner was Danilo de la Cruz, who sent this in: “Noon ay bulag na pinya / Ang burukratang Lozada / At nang imulat ang mata / Pati madla'y nakakita.” My personal favorite among the runners-up was Adjani Arumpac’s sly four-liner: “Dear wala akong sikreto.
/ Tingnan mo pa ang selpon ko.
/ Naka-save dya'y puro text mo.
/ 'Wag lang buksan ang inbox 2.”

Right on—if you can’t march, at least text for the truth!


I'D LIKE to announce a change at the helm of the English Speaking Union of the Philippines, Inc., of which yours truly was president these past four years. In a recent meeting, our board elected Dr. Marlu Vilches—former chair of the Department of English and incoming dean of the School of Humanities of the Ateneo de Manila University, and a specialist in English-language education—to take over ESUPhil.

The ESU was founded in London 90 years ago to promote international understanding and friendship through the English language, with one of its first chairmen being no less than Winston Churchill. (And just to get this clear, the ESU isn’t one of those snooty, we-wannabe-Brits, English-only or English-forever clubs; we’re working on helping Filipino teachers improve their English-language skills, among other initiatives, but respect and value multilingualism in our society.)

Since its founding, the ESU has grown into a worldwide organization operating in more than 50 countries; its Philippine branch was chartered in 2005—a year after our first entrant to the ESU-sponsored International Public Speaking Competition, Patricia Evangelista, emerged world champion in London.

It’s time to prepare for that annual competition again, and as we’ve done for the past several years, we’re collaborating with the UP Debate Society in selecting this year’s Philippine representative to the 2008 IPSC, which will be held May 6-9 in London on the general theme of “New Horizons, New Frontiers.” IPSC participants—who should be no younger than 16 and no older than 20 by the date of the competition—will be expected to give a five-minute speech on the given topic.

Elimination rounds will be held by the UPDS in conjunction with the Philippine Intercollegiate Debating Championship. The finals will be held in the afternoon of April 7, Monday, at the College of Engineering Theater at UP Diliman. (He doesn’t know it yet, but since public announcements have the force of law, this goose is as good as cooked: my friend Krip Yuson is once again going to be in charge of this event from the ESU side. I’m going to be in Baguio at that time for the UP Writers Workshop.) If you’re interested in the competition and fall within the age limits, please email the UPDS at jez.magpantay@gmail.com for more details.

And to Marlu Vilches as well as to ESUPhil regulars Ambassador Cesar Bautista, Pilipinas Shell Chairman Ed Chua, and writer-artist Linda Panlilio, my best wishes for a more fruitful year ahead!


FOR THE past few years, a visionary family in Bicol has been doing what the Palancas have done for nearly six decades now on a national scale: promote literature in Bikol (that’s spelled with a “K”, when it refers to the language—or, actually, several varieties of it). The Arejolas of Camarines Sur established the Premio Tomas Arejola para sa Literaturang Bikolnon and the Juliana Arejola-Fajardo Workshop sa Pagsurat Bikol to help revive and promote creative writing in Bikol.

Open to anyone who writes in Bikol, the 2008 Premio Arejola offers prizes for the best entries in the poetry, fiction, essay, drama, and novel categories. Winners in each category will receive P3,000 and a diploma of merit; the Grand Prize winner, chosen from among them, will be given an additional P10,000.

Looking forward beyond writing to its audience, the Premio Arejola is reserving a special prize for young readers (aged 16 to 22), the Premio para sa Parabasa, given to the best 150-to-250-word review of a Bikol book (a list of eligible titles is provided).

If you’re thinking of joining, please email the organizers at premiotomasarejola@gmail.com for more details. The deadline is July 31, 2008. The names of the winners and members of the Board of Judges will be announced on or before September 18, 2008, Tomas Arejola’s 143rd birth anniversary, in awarding ceremonies to be held in Naga City.

Arejola Foundation Chairman Carlos Arejola also wrote me to share the good news about the workshop, which has been instrumental in launching new, young Bikol writers onto the national scene. “Since its launching in December 2003,” Carlos says, “the Pagsurat-Bikol Workshop has awarded about 60 writing fellowships to aspiring writers from Camarines Sur, Sorsogon, Albay, and Camarines Norte, providing them the forum to hone their craft. The workshop has, likewise, continued its pro-environmental advocacy by symbolically planting pili, a tree indigenous to Bicol, in honor of Bicolano writers and literary scholars, thus drawing attention to their contribution to the advancement of literature in the region. Almost 200 pili trees have been planted by the workshop over the past four years.”

That’s great work, Carlos. I’ve always believed that aside from seeking a larger and fairer share of national resources, regional and local cultural workers and enthusiasts could begin with what they have, tapping the vision and the goodwill of such local families as the Arejolas to get projects off the ground. Our regional literatures have always had a hard time competing for space, attention, and funding with writing in English and Filipino (not to mention Harry Potter and Tom Clancy), but thankfully the Internet has evened things up a bit, and today there are a number of literary blogs devoted to the resurgence of writing in Bikol, bannered by such young writers as Rizaldy Manrique, Jason Chancoco, and Kristian Cordero—previous winners all of the Arejola Prize.

T3 Select Opinion for February 2008


I SWEAR, the day will come, as sure as the sun shines in the morning (except where it never does, but then you and I never see that corner, either), when these glorious 7,101 islands will be blanketed by wi-fi. Wherever I go, it’ll be at least three bars strong on my Airport meter; I can catch a signal in the bathroom or on the beach; and best of all, it’ll be absolutely free, with no silly usernames and passwords to remember, and no brain-deadening bill to pay at the end of the month.

Uhhh… hello, am I awake, am I alive? Is this the Philippines? Well, I can dream, can’t I?

I know, there’s the depressing truth: while places like Macedonia (really, why Macedonia?) are racing to become the first thoroughly wireless countries in the world, we, on the other hand, are still struggling to electrify more than a few of our islands. And even presuming that we do distill enough juice from the sun to power up those boonies, the people who live there are too poor to even buy a light bulb.

But let’s think positive, and dream on, to a time when even our lowliest farmers and tricycle drivers will own wi-fi-capable laptops or at least cellphones, maybe as a result of a US$10-billion National Unity Through Wireless Connectivity project that the next administration will manage to get past everyone, on a long holiday weekend when no one’s looking. That’s it, that’s all we really need, a great big wireless national group hug to banish the rebellion, sedition, and destabilization blues. If not love, then technology will keep us together.

As dreamy visions go, there’s something about a free-wi-fi-enabled nation that excites the imagination. It means that, theoretically, all Filipinos will have to do will be to turn on their Nokias, SEs, or iPhones (sorry, Treo fans) to dialogue with one another, exchange likes and dislikes, pass on stupid jokes, harass old girlfriends and boyfriends, pester Papa for a bigger allowance to buy that new iPod touch and listen to it in Boracay, conduct steamy SOIP (Sex Over Internet Protocol) affairs, tell some poor sods they’ve won a free Mercedes if they hand over the price of a Toyota, post last year’s motel marathon on next week’s blog, and, while we’re at it, catch the latest version of the Santolan Scandal…..

Hmmm, on second thought, why fi?