Twisted encounters, etc

Where to start? Jessica Zafra’s latest essay collection, Twisted 8 1/2. I wolfed this down in an hour or so. Not because of its size, but because the writer has always wielded that power to make such invested readers out of old fans and fresh converts alike.

First, allow me a moment of gloating.

I decided to get my friends “generic” gifts this Christmas. I ordered copies from the writer herself via SMS, who willingly agreed to an afternoon meetup. Gahd, Rockwell in Christmas. Everyone was hoarding sweets and pastries like crazy, and the huge cartons carted off by even the most well-meaning giftgivers crept me out a bit. Cupcakes were sold out, “rich fudge brownies” and “food for the gods” seemed to be spelled out on every forehead coming my way.

Anyway, back to The Meetup. The writer was a bit too polite for my expectations. Apologized for coming in late, albeit just a good five minutes. I was able to fish out my other Twisted books for signing before the mob of other book buyers could execute their own attack.  Handed out a copy to my boss the same afternoon, giving a blow-by-blow account.

Me: I met her this afternoon. Pretty nice for my expectations. She apologized for arriving late. She reminded us to count the books; she gets “dokleng” daw all the time.
Boss: Aww really? You should have had your photo taken with her.
Me: Nah. I want to preserve the whole thing in my memory.
Boss: How poetic.
Me: *She’s a nice Christian girl. She can’t be sarcastic, can she?*

Twisted 8 1/2 contains entries published  in Zafra’s blog (Yes, she blogs, but asserts that not one of the 16 accounts in Facebook belongs to her) and in her Philippine Star Sunday column. She officially calls herself a technology columnist in one of the essays. I had fun reading about 1 TB hard drives, Lomo, nose hair trimmers, and other technological coups and misadventures. And still the same style that will keep you going back to your old Twisted series.

The paperback is available for P100. It’s officially the best gift I ever handed out.

The Yogi, the Commissar, and the literary life

I first encountered Arthur Koestler in college, in a local anthology of creative nonfiction where he is quoted on something about the “politics of creativity.” Right then I’ve already found the guy’s ideas brilliant, but it took me a good six years to finally purchase my first Koestler book, The Yogi and the Commissar. 

Divided into three parts, this collection of essays written in the 1940s discusses literature and maps out the socio-political terrain of its time. The third part, “Explorations,” specifically lays down a “well-documented survey of the Soviet experiment with the conclusions to be derived from it.”

Koestler isn’t merely a lurker, or perhaps a dabbler in these affairs. Born in Budapest with Hungarian-Austrian roots, he studied science, engineering and psychology and, not unlike the many intellectuals of his time, joined the Communist party in 1931. Disillusioned during the height of the Stalinist purges, he left the party, was imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War, and eventually joined the British Army. His novel Darkness At Noon, set during the Moscow show trials, is said to provide a searing examination of socialism and masterfully reflect the dialectics he had written about for the better part of his life.

Then my friend and the diligent MA student Jake, after I shared with him the good news of my latest paperback acquisition, dished an intriguing – if not outright shocking – tidbit about Koestler: Arthur and his wife simultaneously committed suicide, he sick with leukemia and decisive about having that final control over his body.

In his preface, Koestler shares having violently disagreed with some of his writings in the past, considering them produced during a “state of profound ignorance.” In the very same book, however, he shows a brand of sobriety and straight, lucid thinking that even “accomplished” literary and political thinkers of our time usually fail to exhibit. Every piece brims with simplicity in style, even in its intellectual rigor. It maintains a strong conviction against rabid linguistic modes that often obscures the content (Smoke and mirrors, to put it bluntly).

I’ve seen academic grandstanding of many forms in the university. An esteemed professor, for instance, would totally have her papers orphaned without quotes from Zizek, Williams, Neo-Marxists, and many sorts of well-meaning intellectuals. Even the most deeply engaged in my crowd would ask, “So did she say a meaningful bit that is hers alone?” Koestler chooses to do away from this deceptive track and gets right down to business, presenting clean metaphors and exhortations that encourage a serious rethinking of a number of canonical literary works and accepted ways of appraising literary merit and political relations (or lack thereof) in a given text.

For posterity’s sake, I’d like to provide excerpts from the first chapter, “Meanderings.”

Defining the Commissar:

“…believes in Change from Without. He believes that all the pests of humanity, including constipation and the Oedipus complex, can and will be cured by Revolution… a radical reorganization of the system of production and distribution of goods; that this end justifies the means, including violence, ruse, treachery and poison…” (p. 9)

Defining the Yogi:

“He believes that the End is unpredictable and that the Means alone count… He believes that logical reasoning gradually loses its compass value as the mind approaches the magnetic pole of Truth or the Absolute, which alone matters.” (p. 10)

On the new outbreak he calls the French ‘Flu:

“If an English poet dares to use words like ‘my fatherland’, ‘my soul’, ‘my heart’, etc, he is done for; if a French one dispenses musical platitude about la Patrie, la France, mon cæur and mon âme, the patient begins to quiver with admiration.” (p. 21)

On well-applauded literary works with covert shortcomings:

“But there is a black market in literature, on which human sacrifice, struggle and despair are commercialized, and the spirit is turned into hooch.” (p. 27)

On novelists and ‘temptations’ such as staying in their ivory tower or doing excessive reportage:

“To yield does not necessarily involve artistic failure; but I do believe that there is a main road leading from Ulenspiegel and Don Quixote to War and Peace, The Magic Mountain, and Fontamara. And I also believe that Tristram Shandy, and Wuthering Heights, Swann’s Way, and The Waves, are masterpieces at dead ends.” (p. 31)

On professional book reviewers in newspapers and journals:

“Of course, one can’t have a fixed yard-stick to measure literary merit, nor a thermometer for emotional heat; but one does expect a critic to have a sense of proportion as to the importance of the work reviewed.” (p. 38)

On Left intellectuals during the ’30s:

“In the thirties Left intellectuals tried to masquerade as proletarians; it was a farce. They tried to write down ‘to the masses’; and it was a failure. They derided the highbrows; it was self-derision. It’s no good trying to jump over the wall; our task is to abolish it… It is, I believe, the main and ultimate task of Socialism.” (p.40)

On ‘the popular game of highbrow-bating’:

“It is a Fascist diversion; our way is to attack the wall. As long as it stands, democracy is a sham.” (p.41)

On reading:

“Never, never read with clenched teeth for reading’s sake. For what, after all, is the aim of literature and art – if not to imbue the world with feeling and meaning, to broaden and deepen our understanding of ourselves and the things around us?” (p.42)

On the ‘highbrow’ in art and literature:

“Watch carefully what you do with your resentment – it is the only historical asset of the poor; without it they would still live in serfdom. The others would like to deflect it into the wrong direction, against ‘cleverness’, culture, art; to make you spit on those values of which they deprive you. It is a subtle maneuver of diversion; the Nazis were not the first and not the last to succeed with it. Don’t fall into that trap. Your opponent is not the highbrow, but the rich.” (p.42)

On the intelligentsia and neurosis:

“…the relation between intelligentsia and neurosis is not accidental, but functional. To think and behave independently puts one automatically into opposition to the majority whose thinking and behaviour is dependent on traditional patterns: and to belong to a minority is in itself a neurosis-forming situation. From the nonconformist to the crank there is only one step; and the hostile pressure of society provides the push.” (p. 80)

“But even for the ‘real’ intelligentsia, neurosis is an almost inevitable correlate. Take sex, for example. On the one hand we know all about the anachronistic nature of our sex-regulating institutions, their thwarting influence, and the constant barrage of unhappiness they shower on society. On the other hand, individual experiments of  ‘free companionship’, marriages with mutual freedom, etc. etc., all end in pitiful failure; the very term ‘free love’ has already an embarrassingly Edwardian taint. Reasonable arrangements in an unreasonable society cannot succeed.” (p.81)

Book post-its 1

T.C. Boyle  – The Inner Circle John Milk, not so self-assured and practically sex shy, finds himself working for Alfred Kinsey, a zoology professor known in the university as Dr. Sex. Dealing with his own marital issues, Milk becomes a part of the “inner circle,” and he is initiated into a series of uninhibited sexual experiments. The novel takes on a  searing reexamination of love and carnal knowledge,and what sexual liberation can actually mean within the context of marriage and commitment.

 

T.C. Boyle – The Tortilla Curtain A scrutiny of the American Dream is always enticing to read. Boyle extends this invitation with this novel on two illegal Mexican immigrants trying to find their piece of the moon in the US. Their lives get entwined with those of American liberals Delaney and Kyra, and the two couples become unwilling players in a series of dark, comic events. I’m a fan of T.C. Boyle and stories on parallel lives and race and immigration, but there’s something amiss in the characterization. At one point you would get irate and wonder about motivation, what probably propels them toward their inaction and all. At any rate, the language and style I came to love about Boyle is a vivid element here. In the final instance, though, I still can’t decide about this book.

 

Nadine Gordimer – A Sport of Nature What does it mean to be a sport of nature, especially in apartheid-era South Africa? This novel is a political and sexual awakening spun by a fine literary hand.

 

 

 

Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes I find this more poetic than prosaic, every line brimming with the honesty of childhood emotions. Hands down, this is the best and most affective autobiography ever. RIP Frank McCourt.

A dog’s murder, and other curious readings

The voice in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is unmistakable. It is the voice of someone with Special Needs, as psychology and social labels would tell one. It is the voice of Christopher who, in his yawning impotence in the face of complicated human emotions, finds refuge in mathematics and the sciences. It is the voice of a young man who refuses to be touched, disdains metaphors and the color yellow, and spreads out his fingers in a fan to express love for his father and mother.

Christopher, who likes prime numbers and solves quadratic equations in his head out of boredom or panic, discovers the murder of Wellington, a dog in the neighborhood. He embarks on a detective work largely patterned after Sherlock Holmes’s; he interviewed strangers,  picked out a Red Herring and a prime suspect, and adopted a chain of reasoning. He puts to good use his photographic memory.

The investigation leads Christopher to a discovery of a kept truth in his life, and he is now the unwilling main character in his self-devised mystery narrative. In his confusion, fear, and hurt, he draws strength from the irrevocability of logic and intelligent thinking. During a difficult moment, he even exhibits a certain self-consciousness and imagines a deadly virus on earth, where “there is no one left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces and who don’t know what these pictures (emoticons) mean and these people are all special people like me.”

There are plenty of heartbreaking bits in this novel, and author Mark Haddon, who has worked with autistic individuals as a young man, knows how to excavate an emotional site with the use of seemingly detached pronouncements: “I couldn’t hear people talking so I felt much calmer and it was nice,” or “..or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.” With a matter-of-fact tone – a seemingly neutral treatment of the tale by the narrator himself - readers realize that Christopher’s world are not at all different from theirs, and they are let in on the many different secrets in surviving pain, bewilderment, and too many noises in the head.

The End, or how you see it

Joshua Ferris is one funny little possum, but more than the terrific humor in Then We Came To The End (2007), there’s that clear eye in describing the all-too familiar terrain called the workplace. Who else has already ventured in this? Why oh why does it take a full-time fiction writer (though an after-college stint at an advertising agency lent him the experience) to tell us that we office workers are often the “mismanaged inventory,” that there are many faces to that soul-draining corporate citizenship, but that often it all boils down to us being bored and too pampered by the establishment?

There’s the ragbag of characters, too: the Jewish raconteur, the  one who always dishes out the juicy tales even if it’s way past breaktime; the substandard copywriter who keeps coming back even while he was already “walked Spanish down the hall”; the many lovely women who are stuck with ghastly haircuts or are too beautiful or are decisive about keeping some other woman’s husband’s child. The best thing about their portrayal is that it wasn’t done in a distasteful way; there are multiple aspects to them, not merely office drones who are not seen rising up the ladder or eating their less competent coworkers for breakfast. They have lives;  these lives, though, just happen to take off from the “cubicle world” that enables them to afford their lifestyle, to exercise creativity and a brand of eccentricity, or to seek a universe apart from the weekday one.

The system is somehow “deglamourized”; the whole system’s unspared from economic crunch, violence (in the form of downright dirty gossip or otherwise), and ultimately, death of the many personal and corporate kinds. and nothing is more fitting than the “we,” that undeniably collective voice that tells us we’re all and the same, but not quite, but who knows at the end of the day, right?

I’ve had my own share of adventures (or lack thereof) in my own little office space for some time now, and it’s not a Herculean task to identify with the characters of this world Ferris imagined with an almost religious fervor. It’s like my life – and yours – summarized, and we’re let in on something we can endlessly  identify with. Like layoffs, or mid-morning coffee breaks, or maybe something more, like our own demise.

In a zone of his own

My problem is that I don’t have a bit of a problem with The Discomfort Zone: A Personal, History, Jonathan Franzen’s autobiography published in 2006. I’m a fan, to begin with. I now recall his allegedly bitter tirade against Oprah. (Remember his National Book Award-winning novel The Corrections and its ouster from the Book Club?) Guess he would never give the Queen the time of the day.

This lack of a problem begins and ends with the beauty of having read The Corrections, which I can remember now as about a conservative Midwestern family life, the contradicting feelings toward filial love, and the emergence of a radically new person. Franzen’s own life is not far from this, if not exactly identical to. To others, this kind of repetition could be seen as a vain or unnecessary venture, or as if early intimations with this individual is replicated out of the poverty in new shared discoveries; to me, it’s a testament to a kind of writing genius. A former writing prof once told us that it’s tricky to translate one’s life into fiction, as there’s always this danger: “It’s too close that you can’t see it.”

This is not to say, though, that Franzen no longer brings something new to the table in The Discomfort Zone. He makes it a point to let the self take the backseat, perhaps as a resolve against the oft-committed crime of boring, in-your-face vanity. It’s as if the self is merely given the privilege of being inserted in between the First Congregational and hippiedom; the dissection of Charlie M. Schulz’s artistic genius in Peanuts and a three-level interpretation of Franz Kafka; in the glaring reality of global warming and the lack of federal support to counter it.

Franzen says here that when you’re an adolescent, you’re stuck with that self-consciousness that tells you you’re just waiting for the real story to happen. And death, accordingly, is the real story, no matter what prank you pull off to vie for attention: art, comics, literature, even modern bureaucracy. Reading this is like falling in love all over again with The Corrections or languishing over  How To Be Alone. Glad to know that this bespectacled American liberal I admire, just like the rest, is just waiting for the real story to unfold.

Out of grace

J.M. Coetzee used to be a vague memory out of a drowsy UP classroom, where an esteemed CL prof gushed over his works. I was initially uninterested in this book, his 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace, because I’ve practically begun outgrowing the whole apartheid thing after seven or so Nadine Gordimer books I’ve devoured. But the copy was there, and it runs the length of a short novella, so I gave it a try.

David Lurie, a middle-aged, twice-divorced English professor at a technical university in Cape Town, is catapulted to shame and scandal after his steamy affair with his student is exposed to the university public. He decides to quit and to retreat to his daughter Lucy’s Eastern Cape farm, where a violent situation leads him to a reexamination of justice and punishment (or lack thereof) and the changing social and political landscapes.

The novel imparts wicked lessons on displacement and being held powerless in the face of shifting powers, without being upfront and literal in exposing the currents in a post-apartheid town. He put it so philosophically in the character of Lucy, who somehow believes that her misfortunes belong to a payback in history, a truth she accepts so absolute that she wouldn’t move a limb even while the odds are against her in the countryside. At one point, her actions lead the reader to a nagging confusion: Who, in the final instance when history and paternalism are all accounted for, is the victim?

I’ve read of Coetzee putting his characters in precarious situations to force them to explore human possibilities. Disgrace might appear as total BS to the reader uninitiated to the documented reality of apartheid (I might be wrong for those thinking politics is passe, but I think it is still the context that propels Coetzee’s writing forward), but still it is able to leave a  mark – universalist, still - on familial relations, a sense of community, and salvation. Even  the euthanized dogs are a welcome treat, a symbolic part of this memorable fast read on the whole narrative of disgrace.

Supposedly, creatively

It’s Maundy Thursday, there’s three more free days left after it. But let’s talk about creativity. I feel like a dried-up well in this department lately, although there’s no shortage in the things (banal and foreign alike) to be written about.  For one, I’m buying this “books impression” idea from Mich, one that dictates I jot down notes on novels / short stories recently read. The idea’s brilliant, really; what other way to fight a cheating memory but to immortalize ideas in print (or, in this case, in the electronic grapevine)? I return, however, to the problem of lack in focus or, to examine deeper, bad writing. Flex those creative muscles, says the inner adult, but really, how do shake off the fact that your happiness is somehow inversely proportional to your creative energy? Complacency at work, yo.

Anyway I’m on the last Susan Perabo story now (current read’s Who I Am Supposed To Be, courtesy of gorgeous Gracie). I feel like all of the characters are tight with intelligence and compassion, especially the mugged ex-husband who feigns amnesia to win ex-wife back, or the twenty-something married guy who decides he’s had enough of the fickle-minded wife refusing to let go of Princess Diana’s gown. Don’t get me wrong, though; the collection offers a wide spectrum of characters taut in their attempts to forge a connection in an unsteady world. There are the two sixth-graders confronting homicide, the Hollywood actor’s aging father who gets a kick out of stealing things, and the mother who tries really hard to introduce the concept of death to her dog. The death of her own baby, that is.

Perabo is a tenured creative writing professor, and very much so in her faithfulness to the whole concept of narrative structure and technique. I would still prefer someone who’s a little sick in the head, a little less sober (here’s your cue, Miranda July), but Who I Am Supposed To Be transports me back to my university workshop days, and I’ll probably say it’s a good thing if one is to recall all the raw discussions on imagination and the creative process and the byproduct such as these short stories. The deftness is a major factor in Perabo’s work, but it is the wide range of narrative voices that is most attractive in this collection: the believable male voice, the rich amalgam of perspectives from the young and old.

But did I just make another book impression? Props to the PLDT lineman who works diligently on a holiday and made this spur-of-the-moment blog entry possible. I was just trying it out, the DSL connection, when I suddenly remembered Eddie of the title story – his yawning helplessness in the face of adolescent pains – and felt lucky being able to be 22, with the luxury of book impressions and a sweating glass of iced tea and all.

Oscar Wow

For someone who has often wanted to become a person with no history, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a crushing tale of  the self, a heartbreaking bit on geekdom, the inescapable social unit called family, a nation’s becoming and unbecoming, US-backed dictatorships, diaspora and beyond. 

Though less so if, like in this case, it’s going to be narrated by someone who ought to be a rockstar or a pop culture journalist, or someone who can comfortably tell the tale of national amnesia without the readers actually vomiting their lunch.

I bought the book because of my friends (they have that hold on me, the literary kind), and because much has been said about this Mr. Diaz, who actually looks dapper on the back cover photo. It is beyond me now to say something useful about the book, something that would delve on its literariness, but from page one onwards I was able to taste the violence and grief and despair in my mouth.

Oscar’s sister Lola puts it so sadly yet ruthlessly, “If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.” No fuku, no supernatural Trujillo, just life as you have it.

And there’s Oscar, the kind of sensitive, well-meaning guy geek who broke my heart to smithereens yet chose to deal with the whole fuku thing until the end, who, in his moment of catharsis or something, knew there’s life as it is and life as you decide it to be.

Now I can’t wait to get my hands on Drown and be seducted by Diaz’s prose all over again.

Magical thinking

So many signs we failed/refused to heed. “Failed” and “refused” given equal prominence; maybe I still want to come clean. Others call these signs “premonitions,” a term that encapsulates all the morbidity one could ever get. There was, for instance,  Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, delivered to our house on Christmas Eve. I put off reading it for some forgotten reason. Only to rediscover it a few days after we said goodbye to him; Didion apparently lost her husband to that thing they call ventricular fibrillation. That bit in the death certificate still whirls in my head.

The best I could do is google, barter for some more information. Perhaps there’s no winning this case: no more putting the pieces together, no more finding the answers lost in the cancelled 2D-echo and abdominal ultrasound tests. One is only left to mourn the absence of the necessary answers.