does the story move from beginning to end?

Friday, November 24, 2006

Please join in the 12th Writers Night which will be held on December 8, 6pmonwards, at the Hardin ng Mga Diwata, College of Arts and Letters, U.P.Diliman. This year, the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing has preparedan engaging line up of activities, including the fund-raising for detainedpoet Axel Pinpin.

Try to attend the book launchings and have the copies signed by the authors.Watch live performances by music artists and poets; check out the book fair andthe flea market, or the fortune-telling booths. The daring can try out theskills of the invited tattoo artists. Or simply banter with seldom-seencolleagues and guests. You are also welcome to attend the 6th Madrigal-GonzalezBest First Book Award and Forum at the Pulungang Claro M. Recto from 2 to 5 pm.

Over the years, the Writers’ Night has turned into a Christmas party for writers and friends, a much-awaited event in the literary community.We hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

V.E. CARMELO D. NADERA JR.
Director

merchant of menace â¥ 10:18 PM link to post 0 comments

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Oh lord! I don't want to fail.

Err... Remember when we were assigned to do those coming of age stories? Well, I really worked hard on mine and as you can see it's really long. But I worked hard on it! I really did. After reading that article about creative writing classes, I figured that maybe I shouldn't bother anymore. But you know, I felt bad after. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to look like a dork but heck, this is my first story! Haha Oh...This is so weird. Err... You guys have read it. The format here is just different. So what do I say? Have fun reading? What? Thanks?

Radios in Paradise

...Did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the Milky Way and see the lights are faded,
That heaven is overrated...

Cynthia turned the radio up. She was hoping to drown out the rest of the world. From their small apartment she could hear the distinct sound of people, teenagers mostly, filling up the walkways of Eastwood, which were usually deserted during the day. The sun was still out and the air was light, summer was coming to an end and teenagers were rushing to make the most of their final days of freedom.

She lazily walked towards the small terrace of their condominium, which overlooked the mall, and leaned against its tarnished railing. She gazed at the girls who were roughly around her age and contemplated why she wasn't part of that swarming group of teenagers who giggled tirelessly, shopped endlessly, and partied like there was no tomorrow. They're just wasting their time. Summer's going to end and there's nothing they can do about it...

Her mom had called earlier in the afternoon to tell her that she was coming home late. "Heat the left-over sinigang from yesterday. You can have that for dinner. I have to work overtime again tonight. We could sure use the money." Her mom sounded distant, she evidently had something else on her mind. "But I had sinigang last night. Can't I just order out?" Cynthia was tired. She really didn't feel like eating. Nevertheless, she was hoping that her mom would get angry. She wanted to hear her mom scold her, as she often did when Cynthia would complain about food and clothing. She hardly did this anymore. Then again, she was never home. "Okay. Fine. Eat what you want to eat. I have to go sweetheart. Don't wait up for me." Click. Her conversation with her mother ended at that.

As she looked down at the other kids her age, who probably had mothers waiting for them to come home, she thought about her own mother, and what she was like before the separation. She always had time for me. They've been separated for almost a year. She should've been okay by now... She imagined the sun slowly retiring behind the skyline. Her thoughts wandered to happier times, when the innocence of childhood shielded her from the harsh and complicated realities of a relationship gone sour. Up until a few years ago, Cynthia couldn't tell. This changed when she was about twelve. The fights began and then became louder and more frequent. When her father left them the silence was deafening, more so than the shrill and booming voices resonating from behind the thin walls and the closed door of her parents' room. She tried then, not to think about their fights. Tomorrow they would kiss and make up. Nothing to worry about. They were provided for amply. Her dad made sure of that. Why her mom had to work her butt off, was beyond her.

"Turn it down!!"

At once, Cynthia turned to look for the voice that sidetracked her train of thought, although, she already knew who it was. It was Matthew, the only person who had the nerve to snap her out of her thoughts. She walked briskly towards the radio and turned it off.

"It's almost seven, aren't you going to eat dinner yet?" he said. "No. How did you get in here anyway?" Cynthia was a little peeved; she really didn't feel like talking to anyone today. I know you're my best friend but you can’t just waltz in here and... "The door wasn't locked." he said flatly. "Oh. Sorry." Cynthia picked up the newspapers from their couch and made room for them to sit down. "What do you want?" she asked. "Nothing, I was just wondering if you wanted to watch a movie." Matthew looked at her, hoping she'd say yes. Cynthia didn't hear him. She was still looking out the window, the sun had set and the sky was growing dark. "Hello? Is this how you treat all your guests?" At once, Cynthia looked at him and smiled. The look on his face was so amusing, that she couldn't help herself and she started laughing. "What's so funny? I'm serious! Do you want to watch a movie with me or not?" he said lightly, but deep down, he was becoming impatient with Cynthia. "I'm sorry," she regained her composure and swallowed hard. "I really don’t feel like going out tonight, maybe some other time." Matthew looked into her eyes, as if searching for some other reason why his best friend couldn't go out with him tonight. "Fine. I'll go by myself. Next time, lock your door when you don’t want anyone to bother you. Okay?" "Okay. Thanks anyway, Mat." She said to him as he stood up. "Yeah, yeah. Later." He walked towards the door and closed it behind him.

Matthew made his way to the elevator and pushed the down button. "What's wrong with her?" he asked himself. Growing up with Cynthia wasn't easy. It was a far cry from what most people experience during their first years of childhood. Most kids played on the streets, while he and Cynthia played along the halls of their units. Matthew would never forget the nights when he'd sleep over at Cynthia's when they were just eleven years old. They often heard Cynthia's parents fighting in the next room. "Well who is she?!" they would hear Cynthia's mom scream. Cynthia's dad would start cussing and throwing things against the wall. This was when Matthew would cup his hands over Cynthia's ears. He knew what those words meant and Cynthia didn't have to hear them. Ding. Matthew looked up and saw five or six people waiting for him inside the elevator. "Sorry." He mumbled, as he got on.

After Matthew left, Cynthia went into her room to get her journal. The last week of summer was coming to an end. While other teenagers spent their summer partying and having a good time, Cynthia spent her summer writing in her journal. She was proud of her journal. Since her parents got separated, she thought that keeping a journal would help her deal with all the "drama" in her life. Too much drama... She didn't have anyone else to turn to and Matthew would never understand. She went back to the terrace, turned on the light outside and sat down on the floor, which was covered by a native mat her dad bought for her when he went to Samar. The light flickered. I have to remember to change that... Above the city lights, Cynthia saw the dull light from the moon and the soft sparkle of the stars. She was captivated. There was something serene about being 40 floors from the ground, and seeing nothing but the skyline of a city that was thriving with life.

She started scribbling in her journal. Cynthia never wrote anything trivial in her journal, like, what she did that day, what made her happy, what made her sad? She never really paid much attention to these things because after all, what was the use? Instead she wrote down her observations. She loved watching people go about their day. In fact, she spent most of her summer sitting on empty chairs at the mall, watching people go about their daily lives. During Sunday afternoons, when her mom was busy sleeping, Cynthia would go down to the small park in the middle of the mall, where she'd see fathers playing with their sons and mothers playing with their daughters. Cynthia never really missed her father. He was a good man. He was righteous, hardworking, all the things a provider should be. But he was barely there when little Cynthia was growing up. She saw him around and everything, but the father-daughter relationship that was supposed to exist between them never developed. For one thing, Cynthia never experienced playing with her father in the park during Sunday afternoons. It was always her mom who would pick her up from school when there was an emergency. The only "quality time" she remembers spending with her father was when he first taught her how to ride a bike. It was hard for her because she always looked down, as her dad pointed out. "Just look up, straight ahead and pedal hard so you can gain enough speed to balance. Don't look anywhere else, or you'll fall down. All you need is focus." ...and to think, the hardest thing I had to deal with then was learning not to fall...

The first day of school had finally arrived. Cynthia felt the anxiety in the air. The girls were all yelping at the sight of their friends, whom they had spent the entire summer with. The boys were doing the same. Cynthia didn't let any of this affect her. She walked into the school as if she never left it. The only thing different about this year was that it was to be their final year in high school and Cynthia couldn't wait.

As she made her way through the swarm of teenagers, most of whom she remembered seeing at the mall only last week, she felt a hand squeeze her shoulder. She turned around and was face to face with Matthew, all sweaty and looking pretty distressed. "What happened to you?" Cynthia asked mockingly. "I can't find a locker! When I went to the one they assigned me, some girl was already loading it with books and junk." he said irritably. “AND she was Chinese and she said something like 'not talking the English'. She's a new kid, so I let it slide and went on to look for an empty one." "That's it? You worry too much." Cynthia wasn't surprised Matthew didn't have a lot of friends. He was too geeky. But she liked him because he wasn't like everyone else. That's only because I grew up with him, that's how I know he’s different... The bell rang and the large mass of students started buzzing even louder. "We better go before they start attacking." Matthew said. Cynthia smirked; it was precisely that witty attitude of Matthew that made him worth talking to. Together they walked quickly away from the crowd, not wanting to get swallowed up in a sea of perky, preppy faces.

"Oh come on." Matthew whined. He was driving home with Cynthia. "I told you we shouldn't have passed Libis. We're going to be stuck here all afternoon." she said with a hint of pride in her voice, glad that she knew enough about the city streets to suggest alternate routes to their condo. "It's not like you have anything better to do." Matthew said as he looked at Cynthia, who was looking outside her window. "Why do I even bother." He sighed and turned on the radio.
...She listens like spring
And she talks like June
Yeah, yeah, yeah...

"Hey, wasn’t this the song playing...?" "Drops of Jupiter," Cynthia cut him off. "What?" Matthew asked. “It's by Train I think," Cynthia answered. "Oh, right. So, why have you been dead lately?" he asked her. Cynthia turned to look at him, "What do you mean?" she asked. “You've been kind of...spacey," he said. "I have?" she asked him. Cynthia hadn't really noticed. But now that it was coming from Matthew, she had to believe it. He's the only person who knows her well enough to say that. She tried to remember when she started feeling like this. As if nothing in the world surprised her anymore. She concluded that this must've started when her mom first decided to go back to work. Cynthia tried to remember the night when Matthew came over and asked her if she wanted to go out. That's what he asked me, right? She couldn't remember if she answered him. "I have. I’m sorry." She looked at him and for the first time in months, she looked at him directly in the eyes. It was as if she was seeing him for the first time in weeks. Although Matthew was her "only friend", she never really saw him as anything more. He was like a brother to her. No more, no less. Matthew smiled, "Nah, forget about it. You're probably just going through a mid-teen crisis or something." "Yeah, probably. Hey, it's moving."
...Can you imagine no love, pride, deep fried chicken?
Your best friend always sticking up for you
Even if I know you’re wrong...

The radio played on as the car began to move.

They reached their condominium at around five-thirty. "And so I say to him, you're an ass. No one would ever vote for you for class president," Matthew said as they got on the elevator. "So that's it? That's how you decided to run for class president?" Cynthia asked him, amused. "Well, you never know right? I'm a good guy. Everyone likes me... maybe," he answered, after he pressed the button numbered 40. Everyone knows they can push you around, that's for sure. You're just too nice... "Yeah. But, don't you think it'll be too much? Our class is pretty unruly," she asked him. "I suppose. But it'll look good on my college application form," he answered. Typical Mat... "Then you should go for it," Cynthia answered. The elevator doors opened and they stepped out. "I guess I'll see you later Mat," she said. Their apartments were on opposite sides of the level. Cynthia's apartment was on the left side of the building and Matthew's was on the right. "And by that you mean, tomorrow morning. Right. Later!" and he went the opposite way.

When Cynthia reached the door to their apartment, she took out her keys to unlock the door. To her surprise, it was already open. Wow. She's home. Cynthia walked in, dropped her bag on the dining table and took off her shoes. "Is that you sweetheart?" she heard her mom say from inside her room. "Yeah. What are you doing in my room? You didn't come home last night, did you?" Cynthia said as she walked to her bedroom. When she got there, her eyes widened at what she saw. All her books were scattered on her bed. "What are you doing?!" she asked her mother angrily. "Nice to see you too," her mother said as she looked up and smiled at her daughter. She was wearing an old pair of jeans and a loose t-shirt and was sitting on Cynthia's bed, browsing through Cynthia’s books. "Those are mine. I fixed those already. What are you doing?" Cynthia asked her mother. "My shrink says I should read more. I'm just looking to see if you have any books I might like," her mother answered as she read the back cover of one of Cynthia's favorite novels. "I didn’t come home last night because I was too tired. I spent a quarter of my shift talking to a man who went nuts because he claimed that he was charged five thousand pesos for a refrigerator he didn't buy." "Well it’s almost six, shouldn't you be leaving for work again?" Cynthia asked her mother. She didn't care about her mom's excuses anymore. Cynthia's mom looked up at her daughter. "I don't leave for work until seven-thirty," she said, and gave her daughter a narrow look. "So how was school?" she asked. "Fine," Cynthia said as she started to rearrange her books. "Okay. And what about you? Everything okay? You seem different. Well, at least you look thinner. Boys your age aren't attracted to "jiggly bits'." If that was your attempt to make me feel closer to you, then it so did not work... "Look, would you just leave? I have a lot to do," Cynthia said crossly. She was tired of her mom always acting like leaving her own daughter at home was okay. Her mom stood up, walked over to her daughter, and gave her a hug. "I'm sorry I messed up your books. I'll go." And she walked out of her daughter's room thinking about how grown up her daughter had become.

"Check this out! The school is sponsoring a Pen-a-Province Pal Program. Do you want to sign-up?" Matthew asked Cynthia as they walked to their usual lunch table. "Where'd you get that flier? I don't see anyone else holding one," she asked him. "That's because I've been sucking up to the principal's secretary. I figured, I better start since I'm going to be president and all." "You can't be serious," Cynthia laughed. "Oh but I am," he said as he handed her a flier. "I promised her I'd distribute some. Please tell me you'll at least think about it. I have to give more of these away." Matthew stood up and started giving out fliers. "Who knows? You just might meet someone who would understand you, city slicker!!" the flier read enthusiastically. I just might. Hell, why not?

"So, are you going to sign up?" Matthew asked when he got back to their table. He gave her a sheet of paper with only three names written on it, with corresponding addresses. "Yeah, sure. It'll give me something to do," Cynthia said as she wrote down her own mailing address.
The first letter from Cynthia's pen-pal arrived on the first week of July. It was Saturday night and Cynthia's mother wasn’t home again. After eating another left-over meal for dinner alone, Cynthia went to the terrace to read the letter her pen-pal sent her.

July 7, 2006
Dear Cynthia,
Thank you for your letter. I would love to be your friend. My name is Lorna and I am from a small baryo in Pampanga. I have three sisters and two brothers. I am the eldest. Both of my parents are farmers, which means we really don’t have much. If you wish to send us some canned goods or money, we would very much appreciate it. Thank you.
Your new friend,
Lorna

After reading the letter, Cynthia looked up at the clear night sky. The moon looked fuller this time around, brighter as well. She imagined Lorna, sitting on a carabao in their field, looking up at the same moon and the same sky. Only, she thought, her sky must be ten times clearer. It's that hard down there, huh? Well sorry Lorna, I don't have much but I could sure use someone to talk to... "Looking up at your moon again, I see?" Cynthia turned around and saw Matthew standing by the door. "Hey. Come in. I got a letter from my Province Pal. I didn't write her, why did she thank me?" "The school sent a formatted letter to all the other Province Pal applicants, that's probably why," he answered as he closed the door and walked in. "Oh. Okay. She asked me for money though. I'm just going to write to her, if that's okay," Cynthia said. "No problem. So, what's with you and the moon? You're always losing yourself when you look at it," Matthew asked her. "I don't know. I just admire the fact that it can stand out in a sky full of stars," she answered. "What is that supposed to mean?" he asked, raising one of his eyebrows. "Well, the fact that early philosophers taught that it symbolized life, growth and death is pretty cool too" she said, trying to explain. "Yeah. I never knew that. Anyway, I better go. I just came by to thank you for signing up. Make sure you write back to your friend okay?" he said. "No problem. Later, Mat," Cynthia said as Matthew walked towards the door. Cynthia grabbed her journal from her room and went straight to the terrace. She sat down and started writing. Dear Lorna...

It was the third Sunday of July. After hearing mass at the mall with her mom, Cynthia told her that she would stay behind for a while. "I can stay too, you know," Cynthia's mom offered. "No. You don't have to," Cynthia quickly countered. "Are you sure?" "Yes." "Okay. Don't take too long." And she walked away.

Cynthia went over to the playground, which she hasn't visited for a while now. She sat down on one of the empty benches. She gazed intently at a father pushing his daughter on a swing. She looked at how happy the little girl was. I never had that and I turned out alright... She turned to leave the playground.

July 28, 2006
Dear Cynthia,
Thank you again for your letter. I appreciate how much you want to help me and my family. Listen, I am sorry you feel this way. For what it is worth, you are not alone. I can tell that you are a very deep person. You are a thinker, which is good. I am more of a worker. Here in the province life is simple. We have what we need to survive. And yes, the sky here is much clearer. Maybe you should come and visit me some time. My father would like you. He likes to think a lot too.
Your friend,
Lorna

Cynthia's mom walked wearily to the door of their apartment. It was eight-forty-five and the bright sun was shining on a beautiful Saturday morning. She had just finished her nightshift. She was tired and she just wanted to sleep. Cynthia's probably in school, she thought after she got in to find the apartment empty. She walked to her bed and immediately fell asleep once her head was rested on her pillow.
By the time she woke up it was already two in the afternoon. Still thinking that it was a school day, Cynthia's mom decided to surprise her daughter with merienda when she got home. "She'll love that. We can talk and catch up. Just like old times," she thought to herself. She went out to buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's Choco Fudge Ice Cream, Cynthia's favorite. At least, that used to be her favorite.

Cynthia's mom got home at around three-thirty. She decided to buy more groceries in the supermarket and so she was held back. "Cynthia?" she said as she poked her head into her daughter's room to check if she was there. "Still not here. Good. That will give me time to prepare."

At seven in the evening, Matthew rang the doorbell to Cynthia's apartment. He did not see her in school the day before, and he didn't hear from her at all today. Cynthia's mother opened the door. The worried look on her face vanished instantly when she saw Matthew. "Matthew? Where's Cynthia?" she asked him happily. She even stepped out to see if her daughter was in the hallway. No one else was there. Matthew was alone. "I thought she was sick. She wasn't in school yesterday so I came here to check up on her. Is she okay?" he asked her, with a hint of concern. "No. She's not here," Cynthia's mother answered apprehensively. Their eyes met. Matthew's heart almost stopped beating. And Cynthia's mother felt a knot tighten in her stomach. At that moment, both were silent. They both knew Cynthia well enough to know that if she wasn't in school, she'd be at home. Right now, they did not know where she was. "She's probably just at the mall," Matthew said reassuringly. Cynthia's mother breathed deeply. "I'll just wait for her to come home then. I'll tell her you passed by."
Matthew went back to their apartment. He went to their terrace to get some air. Their terrace wasn't bare. It had two wooden chairs, a table, and an old radio. Matthew sat down on one of the chairs. His heart was pounding, and he was breathing heavily. He turned on the radio; he needed something to help him relax. He did not know where Cynthia was. But he knew she was okay. It was the first week of August. The moon was out. The night was clear and peaceful. And somehow, he knew that Cynthia was looking up at the night sky, thinking the exact same thing. The radio played on.

...Did the wind sweep you off your feet?
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day and head back to the Milky Way?
Did Venus blow your mind?
Was it everything you wanted to find?
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there...

vbass â¥ 5:52 AM link to post 0 comments

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Why Literature?
By Mario Vargas Llosa

from: http://www.thenewrepublic.com/051401/llosa051401_print.html

It has often happened to me, at book fairs or in bookstores, that a gentleman approaches me and asks me for a signature. “It is for my wife, my young daughter, or my mother,” he explains. “She is a great reader and loves literature.” Immediately I ask: “And what about you? Don’t you like to read?”

The answer is almost always the same: “Of course I like to read, but I am a very busy person.” I have heard this explanation dozens of times: this man and many thousands of men like him have so many important things to do, so many obligations, so many responsibilities in life, that they cannot waste their precious time buried in a novel, a book of poetry, or a literary essay for hours and hours. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, no doubt lofty and useful for cultivating sensitivity and good manners, but essentially an entertainment, an adornment that only people with time for recreation can afford. It is something to fit in between sports, the movies, a game of bridge or chess; and it can be sacrificed without scruple when one “prioritizes” the tasks and the duties that are indispensable in the struggle of life.

It seems clear that literature has become more and more a female activity. In bookstores, at conferences or public readings by writers, and even in university departments dedicated to the humanities, the women clearly outnumber the men. The explanation traditionally given is that middle-class women read more because they work fewer hours than men, and so many of them feel that they can justify more easily than men the time that they devote to fantasy and illusion. I am somewhat allergic to explanations that divide men and women into frozen categories and attribute to each sex its characteristic virtues and shortcomings; but there is no doubt that there are fewer and fewer readers of literature, and that among the saving remnant of readers women predominate.

This is the case almost everywhere. In Spain, for example, a recent survey organized by the General Society of Spanish Writers revealed that half of that country’s population has never read a book. The survey also revealed that in the minority that does read, the number of women who admitted to reading surpasses the number of men by 6.2 percent, a difference that appears to be increasing. I am happy for these women, but I feel sorry for these men, and for the millions of human beings who could read but have decided not to read.

They earn my pity not only because they are unaware of the pleasure that they are missing, but also because I am convinced that a society without literature, or a society in which literature has been relegated—like some hidden vice—to the margins of social and personal life, and transformed into something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbaric, and even to jeopardize its freedom. I wish to offer a few arguments against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime, and in favor of viewing it as one of the most primary and necessary undertakings of the mind, an irreplaceable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern and democratic society, a society of free individuals.

We live in the era of the specialization of knowledge, thanks to the prodigious development of science and technology and to the consequent fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable parcels and compartments. This cultural trend is, if anything, likely to be accentuated in years to come. To be sure, specialization brings many benefits. It allows for deeper exploration and greater experimentation; it is the very engine of progress. Yet it also has negative consequences, for it eliminates those common intellectual and cultural traits that permit men and women to co-exist, to communicate, to feel a sense of solidarity. Specialization leads to a lack of social understanding, to the division of human beings into ghettos of technicians and specialists. The specialization of knowledge requires specialized languages and increasingly arcane codes, as information becomes more and more specific and compartmentalized. This is the particularism and the division against which an old proverb warned us: do not focus too much on the branch or the leaf, lest you forget that they are part of a tree, or too much on the tree, lest you forget that it is part of a forest. Awareness of the existence of the forest creates the feeling of generality, the feeling of belonging, that binds society together and prevents it from disintegrating into a myriad of solipsistic particularities. The solipsism of nations and individuals produces paranoia and delirium, distortions of reality that generate hatred, wars, and even genocide.

In our time, science and technology cannot play an integrating role, precisely because of the infinite richness of knowledge and the speed of its evolution, which have led to specialization and its obscurities. But literature has been, and will continue to be, as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human experience through which human beings may recognize themselves and converse with each other, no matter how different their professions, their life plans, their geographical and cultural locations, their personal circumstances. It has enabled individuals, in all the particularities of their lives, to transcend history: as readers of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tolstoy, we understand each other across space and time, and we feel ourselves to be members of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as human beings, what remains common in all of us under the broad range of differences that separate us. Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal, and that only injustice sows among them discrimination, fear, and exploitation.

Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of the human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of humanity’s multi-faceted creativity. Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure, of course; but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

This complex sum of contradictory truths—as Isaiah Berlin called them—constitutes the very substance of the human condition. In today’s world, this totalizing and living knowledge of a human being may be found only in literature. Not even the other branches of the humanities—not philosophy, history, or the arts, and certainly not the social sciences—have been able to preserve this integrating vision, this universalizing discourse. The humanities, too, have succumbed to the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, isolating themselves in increasingly segmented and technical sectors whose ideas and vocabularies lie beyond the reach of the common woman and man. Some critics and theorists would even like to change literature into a science. But this will never happen, because fiction does not exist to investigate only a single precinct of experience. It exists to enrich through the imagination the entirety of human life, which cannot be dismembered, disarticulated, or reduced to a series of schemas or formulas without disappearing. This is the meaning of Proust’s observation that “real life, at last enlightened and revealed, the only life fully lived, is literature.” He was not exaggerating, nor was he expressing only his love for his own vocation. He was advancing the particular proposition that as a result of literature life is better understood and better lived; and that living life more fully necessitates living it and sharing it with others.

The brotherly link that literature establishes among human beings, compelling them to enter into dialogue and making them conscious of a common origin and a common goal, transcends all temporal barriers. Literature transports us into the past and links us to those who in bygone eras plotted, enjoyed, and dreamed through those texts that have come down to us, texts that now allow us also to enjoy and to dream. This feeling of membership in the collective human experience across time and space is the highest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal in every generation than literature.

It always irritated Borges when he was asked, “What is the use of literature?” It seemed to him a stupid question, to which he would reply: “No one would ask what is the use of a canary’s song or a beautiful sunset.” If such beautiful things exist, and if, thanks to them, life is even for an instant less ugly and less sad, is it not petty to seek practical justifications? But the question is a good one. For novels and poems are not like the sound of birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking into the horizon, because they were not created by chance or by nature. They are human creations, and it is therefore legitimate to ask how and why they came into the world, and what is their purpose, and why they have lasted so long.

Literary works are born, as shapeless ghosts, in the intimacy of a writer’s consciousness, projected into it by the combined strength of the unconscious, and the writer’s sensitivity to the world around him, and the writer’s emotions; and it is these things to which the poet or the narrator, in a struggle with words, gradually gives form, body, movement, rhythm, harmony, and life. An artificial life, to be sure, a life imagined, a life made of language—yet men and women seek out this artificial life, some frequently, others sporadically, because real life falls short for them, and is incapable of offering them what they want. Literature does not begin to exist through the work of a single individual. It exists only when it is adopted by others and becomes a part of social life—when it becomes, thanks to reading, a shared experience.

One of its first beneficial effects takes place at the level of language. A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less richness of nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. A humanity without reading, untouched by literature, would resemble a community of deaf-mutes and aphasics, afflicted by tremendous problems of communication due to its crude and rudimentary language. This is true for individuals, too. A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-_expression.

This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and in imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words. We learn how to speak correctly—and deeply, rigorously, and subtly—from good literature, and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can substitute for literature in crafting the language that people need to communicate. To speak well, to have at one’s disposal a rich and diverse language, to be able to find the appropriate _expression for every idea and every emotion that we want to communicate, is to be better prepared to think, to teach, to learn, to converse, and also to fantasize, to dream, to feel. In a surreptitious way, words reverberate in all our actions, even in those actions that seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, and reached high levels of refinement and manners, it increased the possibility of human enjoyment.

Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts.

Nor are the audiovisual media equipped to replace literature in this task of teaching human beings to use with assurance and with skill the extraordinarily rich possibilities that language encompasses. On the contrary, the audiovisual media tend to relegate words to a secondary level with respect to images, which are the primordial language of these media, and to constrain language to its oral _expression, to its indispensable minimum, far from its written dimension. To define a film or a television program as “literary” is an elegant way of saying that it is boring. For this reason, literary programs on the radio or on television rarely capture the public. So far as I know, the only exception to this rule was Bernard Pivot’s program, Apostrophes, in France. And this leads me to think that not only is literature indispensable for a full knowledge and a full mastery of language, but its fate is linked also and indissolubly with the fate of the book, that industrial product that many are now declaring obsolete.

This brings me to Bill Gates. He was in Madrid not long ago and visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked upon a joint venture with Microsoft. Among other things, Gates assured the members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee that the letter “ñ” would never be removed from computer software—a promise that allowed four hundred million Spanish speakers on five continents to breathe a sigh of relief, since the banishment of such an essential letter from cyberspace would have created monumental problems. Immediately after making his amiable concession to the Spanish language, however, Gates, before even leaving the premises of the Academy, avowed in a press conference that he expected to accomplish his highest goal before he died. That goal, he explained, is to put an end to paper and then to books.
In his judgment, books are anachronistic objects. Gates argued that computer screens are able to replace paper in all the functions that paper has heretofore assumed. He also insisted that, in addition to being less onerous, computers take up less space, and are more easily transportable; and also that the transmission of news and literature by these electronic media, instead of by newspapers and books, will have the ecological advantage of stopping the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that is a consequence of the paper industry. People will continue to read, Gates assured his listeners, but they will read on computer screens, and consequently there will be more chlorophyll in the environment.

I was not present at Gates’s little discourse; I learned these details from the press. Had I been there I would have booed Gates for proclaiming shamelessly his intention to send me and my colleagues, the writers of books, directly to the unemployment line. And I would have vigorously disputed his analysis. Can the screen really replace the book in all its aspects? I am not so certain. I am fully aware of the enormous revolution that new technologies such as the Internet have caused in the fields of communication and the sharing of information, and I confess that the
Internet provides invaluable help to me every day in my work; but my gratitude for these extraordinary conveniences does not imply a belief that the electronic screen can replace paper, or that reading on a computer can stand in for literary reading. That is a chasm that I cannot cross. I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.

Perhaps this is a prejudice resulting from lack of practice, and from a long association of literature with books and paper. But even though I enjoy surfing the Web in search of world news, I would never go to the screen to read a poem by Gongora or a novel by Onetti or an essay by Paz, because I am certain that the effect of such a reading would not be the same. I am convinced, although I cannot prove it, that with the disappearance of the book, literature would suffer a serious blow, even a mortal one. The term “literature” would not disappear, of course. Yet it would almost certainly be used to denote a type of text as distant from what we understand as literature today as soap operas are from the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

There is still another reason to grant literature an important place in the life of nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is the real engine of historical change and the best protector of liberty, would suffer an irreparable loss. This is because all good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors’ intending it, a seditious inclination is present.

Literature says nothing to those human beings who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as they now live it. Literature is the food of the rebellious spirit, the promulgator of non-conformities, the refuge for those who have too much or too little in life. One seeks sanctuary in literature so as not to be unhappy and so as not to be incomplete. To ride alongside the scrawny Rocinante and the confused Knight on the fields of La Mancha, to sail the seas on the back of a whale with Captain Ahab, to drink arsenic with Emma Bovary, to become an insect with Gregor Samsa: these are all ways that we have invented to divest ourselves of the wrongs and the impositions of this unjust life, a life that forces us always to be the same person when we wish to be many different people, so as to satisfy the many desires that possess us.

Literature pacifies this vital dissatisfaction only momentarily—but in this miraculous instant, in this provisional suspension of life, literary illusion lifts and transports us outside of history, and we become citizens of a timeless land, and in this way immortal. We become more intense, richer, more complicated, happier, and more lucid than we are in the constrained routine of ordinary life. When we close the book and abandon literary fiction, we return to actual existence and compare it to the splendid land that we have just left. What a disappointment awaits us! Yet a tremendous realization also awaits us, namely, that the fantasized life of the novel is better—more beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect—than the life that we live while awake, a life conditioned by the limits and the tedium of our condition. In this way, good literature, genuine literature, is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious: a challenge to what exists.

How could we not feel cheated after reading War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past and returning to our world of insignificant details, of boundaries and prohibitions that lie in wait everywhere and, with each step, corrupt our illusions? Even more than the need to sustain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the greatest contribution of literature to human progress is perhaps to remind us (without intending to, in the majority of cases) that the world is badly made; and that those who pretend to the contrary, the powerful and the lucky, are lying; and that the world can be improved, and made more like the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create. A free and democratic society must have responsible and critical citizens conscious of the need continuously to examine the world that we inhabit and to try, even though it is more and more an impossible task, to make it more closely resemble the world that we would like to inhabit. And there is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.

Still, to call literature seditious because it sensitizes a reader’s consciousness to the imperfections of the world does not mean—as churches and governments seem to think it means when they establish censorship—that literary texts will provoke immediate social upheavals or accelerate revolutions. The social and political effects of a poem, a play, or a novel cannot be foreseen, because they are not collectively made or collectively experienced. They are created by individuals and they are read by individuals, who vary enormously in the conclusions that they draw from their writing and their reading. For this reason, it is difficult, or even impossible, to establish precise patterns. Moreover, the social consequences of a work of literature may have little to do with its aesthetic quality. A mediocre novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe seems to have played a decisive role in raising social and political consciousness of the horrors of slavery in the United States. The fact that these effects of literature are difficult to identify does not imply that they do not exist. The important point is that they are effects brought about by the actions of citizens whose personalities have been formed in part by books.
Good literature, while temporarily relieving human dissatisfaction, actually increases it, by developing a critical and non-conformist attitude toward life. It might even be said that literature makes human beings more likely to be unhappy. To live dissatisfied, and at war with existence, is to seek things that may not be there, to condemn oneself to fight futile battles, like the battles that Colonel Aureliano Buendía fought in One Hundred Years of Solitude, knowing full well that he would lose them all. All this may be true. Yet it is also true that without rebellion against the mediocrity and the squalor of life, we would still live in a primitive state, and history would have stopped. The autonomous individual would not have been created, science and technology would not have progressed, human rights would not have been recognized, freedom would not have existed. All these things are born of unhappiness, of acts of defiance against a life perceived as insufficient or intolerable. For this spirit that scorns life as it is—and searches with the madness of Don Quixote, whose insanity derived from the reading of chivalric novels—literature has served as a great spur.

Let us attempt a fantastic historical reconstruction. Let us imagine a world without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or novels. In this kind of atrophied civilization, with its puny lexicon in which groans and ape-like gesticulations would prevail over words, certain adjectives would not exist. Those adjectives include: quixotic, Kafkaesque, Rabelaisian, Orwellian, sadistic, and masochistic, all terms of literary origin. To be sure, we would still have insane people, and victims of paranoia and persecution complexes, and people with uncommon appetites and outrageous excesses, and bipeds who enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. But we would not have learned to see, behind these extremes of behavior that are prohibited by the norms of our culture, essential characteristics of the human condition. We would not have discovered our own traits, as only the talents of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, Orwell, de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch have revealed them to us.

When the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha appeared, its first readers made fun of this extravagant dreamer, as well as the rest of the characters in the novel. Today we know that the insistence of the caballero de la triste figura on seeing giants where there were windmills, and on acting in his seemingly absurd way, is really the highest form of generosity, and a means of protest against the misery of this world in the hope of changing it. Our very notions of the ideal, and of idealism, so redolent with a positive moral connotation, would not be what they are, would not be clear and respected values, had they not been incarnated in the protagonist of a novel through the persuasive force of Cervantes’s genius. The same can be said of that small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary, who fought with ardor to live the splendid life of passion and luxury that she came to know through novels. Like a butterfly, she came too close to the flame and was burned in the fire.

The inventions of all great literary creators open our eyes to unknown aspects of our own condition. They enable us to explore and to understand more fully the common human abyss. When we say “Borgesian,” the word immediately conjures up the separation of our minds from the rational order of reality and the entry into a fantastic universe, a rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine and arcane, and riddled with literary references and allusions, whose singularities are not foreign to us because in them we recognize hidden desires and intimate truths of our own personality that took shape only thanks to the literary creation of Jorge Luis Borges. The word “Kafkaesque” comes to mind, like the focus mechanism of those old cameras with their accordion arms, every time we feel threatened, as defenseless individuals, by the oppressive machines of power that have caused so much pain and injustice in the modern world—the authoritarian regimes, the vertical parties, the intolerant churches, the asphyxiating bureaucrats. Without the short stories and the novels of that tormented Jew from Prague who wrote in German and lived always on the lookout, we would not have been able to understand the impotent feeling of the isolated individual, or the terror of persecuted and discriminated minorities, confronted with the all-embracing powers that can smash them and eliminate them without the henchmen even showing their faces.

The adjective “Orwellian,” first cousin of “Kafkaesque,” gives a voice to the terrible anguish, the sensation of extreme absurdity, that was generated by totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, the most sophisticated, cruel, and absolute dictatorships in history, in their control of the actions and the psyches of the members of a society. In 1984, George Orwell described in cold and haunting shades a humanity subjugated to Big Brother, an absolute lord who, through an efficient combination of terror and technology, eliminated liberty, spontaneity, and equality, and transformed society into a beehive of automatons. In this nightmarish world, language also obeys power, and has been transformed into “newspeak,” purified of all invention and all subjectivity, metamorphosed into a string of platitudes that ensure the individual’s slavery to the system. It is true that the sinister prophecy of 1984 did not come to pass, and totalitarian communism in the Soviet Union went the way of totalitarian fascism in Germany and elsewhere; and soon thereafter it began to deteriorate also in China, and in anachronistic Cuba and North Korea. But the danger is never completely dispelled, and the word “Orwellian” continues to describe the danger, and to help us to understand it.

So literature’s unrealities, literature’s lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity. These monsters eager for transgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being; and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive potential that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery. A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible depths, which we urgently need to see.

Uncivilized, barbarian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech, ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely animalistic world. Basic instincts would determine the daily practices of a life characterized by the struggle for survival, and the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities. There would be no place for the spirit. In this world, moreover, the crushing monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can change it.

When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books—that is, works of literature—have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless—a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom. It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever come about. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends entirely on our vision and our will. But if we wish to avoid the impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom, then we must act. More precisely, we must read.

merchant of menace â¥ 7:25 PM link to post 0 comments

hi, here's an essay i wrote for my non-fiction class last semester. it's still unpublished. hack away

My Rock and Roll Lifestyle

I normally like the smell of adobo. A whiff of it gets me smacking my lips and ready to eat. The problem was, the smell wasn’t coming from a hot boiling pot of the dish. I smelled it when I stepped into a windowless bathroom.

It’s a hard enough task to go to the bathroom half-drunk trying not to step on anything nasty on the floor. But I was also trying to hold my breath and cover my nose and mouth with my shirt to block out that adobo smell and shoot my pee into the toilet using my hearing so that I wouldn’t have to look down into the toilet and see someone’s adobo rice dinner swimming at me.
None of this worked, of course. Urine trajectory is a tricky thing after a few beers even when you’re looking. Hence the common Filipino male’s preference of walls over toilets in these situations. Using my ears wasn’t effective, and I had the creeping feeling that I might have been peeing on my shoes, so I took a peek. This peek had me looking at the adobo chunks and grains of rice that looked like they hadn’t even been chewed; it was as if someone just decided to dump some food into the toilet (isn’t it mind-boggling that some foods look almost the same regurgitated as they do going in?). Seeing that made me gag. Because I gagged, I lost hold of my shirt, which I had to grab quickly, lest it drop into the urine stream. That meant that there was nothing covering my nose and mouth, so I got a good whiff of the adobo, making me gag again.

I held my breath again, and soon as I could finish off peeing I lunged out of the bathroom; I’d rather let everyone in the bar see me zipping up than spend an extra second in the bathroom.

Just as I got a hold of my bearings and my breath, I saw my bandmates getting ready to get onstage. They were lugging their guitars and cords, and our drummer was already up there fixing the drum kit. I rushed to our table and got my bass, then proceeded to the stage. When we started playing, I could still smell that nasty adobo as if it were lurking somewhere in the back of my throat.

Funky bathrooms are never mentioned when you read about how cool rock and roll is.
It seems, like many dreams borne of Western thought, that the dream of becoming a rock star in the Philippines is a far cry from what one in the West could expect. Reading about great rock and roll bands one gets to know of the adventures of hallucinogenic drugs, life on the road, playing to tens of thousands of people, massive orgies, crazy barroom brawls, drunken escapades, and all other kinds of crazy things.

I learned to play the guitar when I was fifteen. I only took playing seriously a few years after. Those first years of guitar playing were done under that impression that it was cool, and that it would get me chicks. These days I have learned that though it may give you a few cool points, it rarely gets the chicks, unless you look really good in the first place. And I have also learned that referring to women as chicks further lessens the probability of getting chicks.

When I was in grade school, I found that I had little proficiency for musical instruments. I did learn to play the recorder. It’s a wind instrument that has an irritatingly high pitch; most people will know the sound of the recorder because it’s that goofy flute-like thing that they sell in mall stalls, most of the time the people selling it are playing it as muzak to the tunes of boy-band songs or current bubble-gum pop hits.

After the recorder, I was put in the bell choir. By that time it was also clear that I had no singing ability so while the other kids were in the vocal choir, us rejects were taught to play the bells. For each song you would be assigned different bells, the size of each determining the bell’s register. Playing was a matter of reading the sheet music and ringing the right bell at the right time. There wasn’t much skill involved but it did help to develop a sense of rhythm. However, like the recorder, bells were never going to instruments that would be considered cool. You can’t exactly rock out to bells.

This passing interest was replaced by an interest in hip-hop music. Living in LA during the time of the rise of gangsta rap, I got caught up in the fad, as even my white classmates did, even though we were living in the suburbs. Gangsta rap relied mostly on beat-boxing (done with your mouth), turntables, and sampling. At the time I had no idea what a sampler was, so I decided that maybe I could try to play the turntables. They looked easy enough.

When I saw a rap video or performance, there would be the rappers up front, and the turntable guy at the back. He’d be wearing big headphones and scratching on the records. I decided I could do that. I pulled out my big headphones and attached them to our record player at home. Then, since I didn’t have any records of my own, I took out my dad’s 70s rock records and started trying to scratch them. Nothing happened at first, so I kept scratching. Soon enough, I got the wrist action down to get that “Wiki-Wiki” sound like you’re cleaning a windshield with a squeegee, but then my dad came home. With a, “Putang ina, anong ginagawa mo sa mga plaka ko!” he ended my dismal attempt at becoming a turntablist.

My attention shifted from music to sports then. For the next few years I would forgo MTV for ESPN, spending afternoons collecting basketball cards, memorizing stats, and playing football and street hockey.

When I moved back to the Philippines the great burning question of identity, which my cousin addressed to me to assess my character was, “Hip hop ka ba, o metál?” Take note of the emphasis on the second syllable. You cannot be metal, you are metál.

I didn’t really know how to answer this. In my last school, a public high school, I had made the mistake of wearing a San Francisco 49ers jersey (it was red) and as a result had been mistaken for a member of a rival gang and chased home. Now I was confronted with rather unusual lines for taking sides, but I did not want to make any mistakes, alienating the only person my age who had spoken to me thus far. “Um, how come our neighborhood doesn’t have sidewalks? Where are people supposed to walk?”

This stumped my cousin appropriately, leaving the musical question in the air. We decided not to answer each other’s questions; the conversation ended with, “Where’s the nearest basketball court?” and my cousin answering, “Tara.”

The next time music would pop up would be when I had started school again, first time in a Filipino school. I was a sophomore and our class had been divided into groups, each group supposed to prepare a creative presentation for something or other.

I had no talents fit for creative presentations. My knowledge of sports statistics or the X-Men’s Phoenix saga was not going to be entertaining when the other groups had homosexuals ready to burst into elaborate Spice Girls-inspired dance numbers. To this day I can’t dance or act. So the other people in my group decided they would be playing as a band, and I could probably stand in the background or something. It was up to me. Or, they said, they could give me a crash course in guitar.

Normally, I would have said, Ok, whatever. But there is one thing that never fails to motivate me. In fact, it’s the reason behind most of the ill-planned, ill-considered things I do: women.
The chance at women worked on two levels in this situation: a) first was the great rock and roll promise that if you rock then you’ll become a chick magnet; and b) there was a girl that I had a crush on who was in the group. This meant that if I was there for the practices, then I could spend time with her.

As with most situations where I fall for the female motivator, I did not wind up with the girl. She didn’t wind up with anyone from our group; I can’t even remember if she finished the school year. I did, however, gain enough motivation to start learning the guitar.

My guitar-playing started on a faulty premise: If I learned to play guitar I could get girls. There were times when playing the right songs did get the girls to gather round, but it never resulted in more than that. In time though, playing the guitar, and finally finding that I was some good at playing the bass, became good enough reason to replace that false start.

Once I’d given up on the idea that I was playing for girls and fame and was in fact playing because I liked to play, I began to progress as a musician. I joined a succession of bands, playing anything from grunge to punk to metal to hardcore and rap-metal. Music was a way to express myself; self-expression in high school was mostly about getting your angst out, and what better way to get your angst out than thrashing around wildly with a guitar and screaming?

As the years passed I found myself exploring different kinds of music. As a college undergrad I worked as a music journalist. This gave me access to new music, as well as access to local musicians. When I’d do interviews, I would ask questions for the articles I would write and also get tips on how to improve my playing, or what I could study to broaden my musical imagination.

I played in classic rock cover bands to improve my playing skills. For a few weeks, I even fell in with a showband bound for Japan. I’m not sure if it was a conscious or subconscious thing, but things didn’t pull through when I failed to learn “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

For some reason, I’ve stuck it out, nurturing that rock and roll dream. At present I seem to have hit the groove with the right band. We’ve gained some notoriety which always surprises me. I’ve been told that some of our songs have been turned into cell phone ringtones. This is surprising since we’ve yet to release our album. We’re only halfway through the recording process, but I’ve been told that bootleg copies of our performances are available online in both audio and video formats.

I still get surprised when we’re playing and people start singing along. I’d understand our friends, people who we force to watch our performances, knowing our songs. But strangers knowing our songs and singing them, that’s something.

Of course this hopeful spark of fame does not mean that we’re getting famous anytime soon. Nor does it mean that I am getting women from rocking out. The band’s stance is to offend as many people as possible, and we’re pretty good at it. This means that most of our groupies are male. There are various reasons, I suppose. But the easiest explanation for me is because you probably won’t be able to get girls to sing along to lines like, “”Wag kang sasama, kakantutin ka lang nila” or “wala ka nang inisip kundi sarili mo/ at ang vibrator na saging,” or to even just chant along to our hypnotic pop hit “Satan Rules.”

These days, even with this little crest of notoriety to ride, we are still subject to those things that they never tell you about when you start having rock and roll dreams. We’ll still be playing the same crummy bars with the same people who think it’s cool to look bored. And the bathrooms will always be detestable little portals to remind you that the rock and roll dreams are just that, dreams.

merchant of menace â¥ 6:56 PM link to post 0 comments