Choice Cuts

And now a word from Marc Gaba, whose essay on the now defunct annual Likhaan anthologies, “Period Piece,” was discussed in class the other day (and will still be discussed next meeting, given the hyperactive discussion it triggered):

“In many ways, the term “best” is politically unsound, intellectually brutish—which is why I like it: it generates thought. Or rather, it forces anyone to whom the term corresponds to some thing, to articulate judgement arrived at a candid instant, long before the language for it appears and appears to have failed the ecstatic sensation of the judgement as it was made. Whether the anthologies of “the best” exist or not, we—or those of us who believe in (or recognize the fact of) human agency—live influenced by an idea of a supreme good, articulated or not. That it is historical, meaning not only that it’s determined by material circumstances belonging to the vague expanse called the present but also that it is in flux, excuses the naivete implicit in the act of using it, the blindnesses choice relies on to be made. The assessment of contemporary work by the future is no more valid than contemporary assessment: in either case, the moment declares what it needs. Only if the moment of the assessment occurs in a shared present, therefore, can aesthetic judgement be judged.”

Last Line Syndrome

Closure and Composure in Joel Toledo’s Chiaroscuro (UST Press, 2008)

first published in the Philippines Free Press, 11 April 2009

If there is any one hue with which all things in Joel Toledo’s Chiaroscuro are tinged, it is sepia, turning diaphanous all the birds and stones, the trees and seas, the shamans and strangers that reside in the poems, tempering the blinding light and searing heat of star or candle, firefly or lightning, transforming the hurts and losses and sorrows of the past into present occasions for tenderness, prized objects of beauty. What clings to me once I step out of Toledo’s book of poetry is atmosphere, the kind that makes you ache and pine, maybe switch off the gaudy overhead lights and switch on a couple of lamps, maybe play, volume down, a little Kind of Blue. The poems take you to your “private dark” (a Toledo phrase), your own world-weary soul now “observing the late afternoon/in cold sepia colors” (another of his), now slipping into the erratic ever-shifting terrain of memory, retrieving the many innocence-to-experience incidents of childhood (Toledo’s favored subject matters), now brimming with feeling, now touched by the indisputable tint of nostalgia, now simply touched.

There is a hypnotic quality to the work of Toledo which inspires this vulnerability—fostered, it seems, by a voice so consistently hushed and solemn and brooding that everything it touches becomes spiked with emotion, laced with meaning. In “Open Sesame,” the poem that begins the collection, Toledo writes: “And let me tell you now//why wings and doors and flowers really open, why/this wall, once non-negotiable, had let you in.//It is because all things want to open, that often/all you need to do is ask.” And so, in Chiaroscuro, a comet is “wish-heavy” (“We Have Such Solid Measures for Pain”) stars are “kind markers/of the evening” (“Light Years”) a river is “now rushing, gushing,//brimming with newfound love” (“Moisture”), and cobwebs are “dancing to wind music” (“Only Begin”). Images glow in Toledo’s poetic landscape, basking in the light of a sensibility that sides with wonder even in the face of trying times, its relentless attachment to the sublime taking the edge off what might otherwise be painful, even sinister.

Cover Update

Final cover of Carljoe Javier’s And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, for which I did the introduction. Out in May 2009.

I’m still attached to the original cover, but this one’s growing on me. Milflores covers can be, well, disappointing, so it’s quite a relief to see this one–appropriately cute and playful, all in all, likable. At first I found it too busy, but then again, that’s clearly the point. There’s a juvenile-book-report feel to it, what with the visual rundown of Carl’s preoccupations, and then there’s the schizophrenic typography–things I normally instinctively don’t like to see on covers, but this one pulls it off, and quite well; it manages to hold itself together and cohere despite all the action. I’m also happy to see Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman on the cover, just because.

In Fighting Form

Or Why the Tiger Stance Rocks in Mads Bajarias’s Pepsi Tastes Funny When it’s Christmas Eve & You’re Alone Eating Canned Tuna (CentralBooks, 2008)

first published in the Philippines Free Press, 14 March 2009

To the aspiring writer with a finished, unpublished manuscript tucked away and toted in the ubiquitous frayed knapsack or cooler-than-cool postman’s bag, ready for whipping out at the merest whiff of an impromptu poetry reading, there are few things more unthinkable than going down the route of self-publishing. If not perceived as pedestrian, that is, sans lofty literary aspirations—an option sought only by sappy sensitive souls with something to express and share with a small circle of intimates—self-publishing, which also goes by its more disparaging pet name, vanity publishing, is seen as smacking of arrogance, subject to no other standards but the writer’s own, lacking the seal of approval by designated literary authorities (possibly even a last resort resulting from their rejection), and therefore not worth serious attention.

Certainly, there are more than enough sloppy, self-indulgent books out there, but if some of them are self-published, a good number of them are not, are even adorned with reliably dazzling markers, say, the stamp of a Palanca Award or the imprint of a university press, and available at your friendly neighborhood National Bookstore (that chain which carries local books at the cost of an arm and a leg and your firstborn, something only commercial publishers can afford). Conversely, once in a while, a self-published book—one with low visibility in the marketplace, often accessible only via small bookstores or prior knowledge of the author or an undergrad class with an unusually adventurous required reading list—makes its way to a reader somehow and surprises with its peculiar synthesis of wit and candor, its unaffected approach to complexity—things I find in Pepsi Tastes Funny When it’s Christmas Eve & You’re Alone Eating Canned Tuna, Mads Bajarias’s first book of poetry, printed on demand by CentralBooks.

In “dreaming the ultimate fight to the finish,” a poem involving a confrontation over siomai in ChowKing ends with the speaker in fighting form: “Coolly, I stepped back/and assumed the tiger stance…” If Bajarias were to strike a pose to approximate the attitude of his first book, a mock-serious tiger stance seems most fitting. Many of his poems are filtered through a sensibility whose defaults oscillate from amused to spaced out to blasé rather than let-me-break-your-heart solemn, the garden-variety stance generated by poetry preoccupied, as is Bajarias’s, with alienation, heartbreak, domesticity, and death in the pop culture-infested, capitalist-consumed, rent-anxious life of the urban dweller. Sure, there is pain and pining, but with a cast of characters including girls in shampoo commercials and anchorsluts, with guest appearances by Sonny Chiba, Rick Moranis, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Jean-Luc Picard, these poems, fortunately, cannot keep a straight face for too long.

There is much tenderness in Pepsi Tastes Funny, a refreshing joyful attention to animals, particularly cats, as complex, communicative creatures (the dogs in the book are mangy, the birds differentiated—maya, frigatebird, Arctic warbler, sandpiper—but the cats, all apartment-based and cared for, reign supreme and are called by name—Scratch, Dutch, Cuervo, Spoon), and a healthily unabashed macho love for women (as in “Her face is the only face/you don’t think of/when you jerk off” in “she’s the one”) but moments most vulnerable are rarely seized upon as opportunities for poignancy and high drama (I think the few poems that go down the road of unadulterated earnestness are the clunkiest of the lot). Instead, Bajarias keeps things lighthearted, be it through downright comedy, playful irreverence, or—what I think is most difficult to do—calculated non-commentary. If, in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rainer Maria Rilke shakes us awake with the sudden appearance of a chasm of silence between most of the poem (a description of a headless sculpture) and its last line (“You must change your life.”), where one’s life is, without warning and with finality, directly and drastically implicated in the object one observes, in the hands of Bajarias, the same strategy—the sudden jolt, the chasm of silence between most of the poem and its end—makes us mindful of our sleepwalking without insisting that we wake up, the effect absurd and hilarious, as in “struggle slacker,” where a meditation over cat vomit and human vomit and rent just about due culminate in the lines “I looked at myself in the mirror./oh, call it a life.”

A master of the incidental-turned-momentarily-central, Bajarias is Richard Brautigan-like in his penchant for snapshots, sudden endings, and single statements most sexual. “Goobye” in entirety: “our pet Cuervo died/last year.//Cuervo was my/good friend.//We both hated karaoke/and car alarms in the morning.” In the poem, “there’s no telling,” a memory of the speaker’s grandmother fishing things out of a hanky juxtaposed with a girl fishing money out a Ziploc bag ends with the most unceremonious of lines: “‘What?’ she said.” And then there’s “O,” in entirety: “All the art men’ll ever need is the look of a woman with cum on her face”. There is no air of profundity here, or if there is, the profundity is tongue-in-cheek. Deadpan humor, yes, and often the sheer nerve of open-endedness, the poem hitting its final note by taking a deep breath and making that incomprehensible sound, mouth hanging open, about to say something more—only it doesn’t. The effect is a distractedness that immediately relinquishes the incident-turned-moment to the elusive yet again. In some of the lengthier poems, the open-endedness is achieved through accumulation and circularity, such as the ghazal-like “sutra in laundrytime” and sutra in shopping-mall time,” as well as the poems “marketing secrets of jesus christ revealed!” and “fateful turning points when the hero must,” where the stanzas can each function independently (I think the stanzas of the “sutras” and “fateful turning points” can even be read hopscotch, not just in sequence) yet also add up to make a whole.

In line with its sensibility (the collection is subtitled “Ramshackle Poems of Tomfoolery, Confusion & Heartbreak”), the language of Pepsi Tastes Funny is appropriately casual—at times too lax for its own good (also a Brautigan problem), resulting in some poems being either uneventful or longer than necessary—yet punctuated with images quite precise and vivid, their presence welcome and startling against the dominantly unscripted flavor of the poems. A line from “natural disasters & the smell of true love”: “In the restaurant, a nebulous waitress took my order.” Another from “some days feel like a train ran over your heart”: “The room is a thicket of belligerent trinkets.” A poem called “creamish,” in entirety: “The mammalian kiss desires whiteness within a gash of twilight tightening”. Bajarias impresses because he doesn’t try to do so; he lets the poems hang loose, allowing his lines to assume various degrees of unfinished-ness, foregoing the polish here and there. While I appreciate this quality in the individual poems, I’m not as much of a fan of the looseness when applied to the book itself. Pepsi Tastes Funny doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in arc, and while some poems, given their placement in the book, seem indicative of progression (as in the lighter poems of urban ennui at the beginning of the book as well as the string of poems on death toward the end), there is no compelling argument for the book to be read from start to end. Given the feel of the collection as a gathering of poems written over a period of time, the reading of it can also be loosely committed, not observant of the order in which the poems are arranged.

Bajarias has said he is already more than happy if friends and family read his work, the impetus to self-publish his first book (a second book of poetry, which he also intends to self-publish this year, is in the works) a consequence of his detachment from literary acclaim or even mere claims of literariness. The capacity of his poetry to yield many pleasures, however, is a clear sign that Pepsi Tastes Funny speaks to the reader interested in words, and what a loss it is if this book remains only in the shelves of a handful, whether due to the lack of machinery to get the book to readers, a problem perennially afflicting typically cash-strapped self-publishers, or to the lack of glitter in the shape of awards and blurbs by literary luminaries—audience-attracting paraphernalia which self-publishers, precisely because of their investment in autonomy, are allergic to, or in the case of Bajarias, simply detached from. But if poets like Bajarias can produce wonderful books through means that are off the beaten track, I don’t see why equally imaginative readers can’t step out of the usual channels to find and read exciting work, no matter what the award-giving bodies and literary authorities don’t say.

UltraElectroMagneticLit!

Amazing Acrobatics and Aesthetic Apprehensions in Adam David’s The El Bimbo Variations (Youth & Beauty Brigade/CentralBooks, 2008)

first published in the Philippines Free Press, 28 February 2009

Despite the abundance of that commodity called humor writing in the local literary marketplace, there is very little of contemporary writing that is genuinely lighthearted—by this I mean delightful and delighting in ways beyond the perishable haha by way of cuteness and inconsequentiality produced by the majority of creative nonfiction, capped by the requisite tenderness—whether latent, explicit, or sardonic—toward the frailty of one’s inescapably middle-class human condition. In poetry, where the typical stance is meditative, if not brooding, lightheartedness is even harder to come by, its closest incarnations limited to the poignant lyrical moment or the erudite, read-up-to-get-the-joke allusion. It seems that to have any fun, we must keep things mindless (the foundation upon which the highly successful industry of comfort reading is built) and if we are to say anything of consequence, we can’t be cracking up at same time. These are easy equations, of course, and—as with any formula imposed upon writing—lacking in imagination, if not outright untrue.

What Adam David attempts to do in his first book, The El Bimbo Variations, is put these easy equations to rest by blasting them to smithereens and hopefully, beyond resurrection. To the skeptical reader weary of stunts, however, its hyperbolic premise—to rewrite the first two lines of the Eraserheads’ “Ang Huling El Bimbo” ninety-nine times—immediately raises red flags. There is the suspiciously effortless strumming of one’s heartstrings courtesy of the book’s running reference, where attention is not earned but ripped off from everyone’s favorite pop song by everyone’s favorite band, and then there is the potentially exasperating number of rewrites, the threat of a broken record looming, the consequent anxiety of the when-will-this-end variety, similarly endured in the face of a Lav Diaz film or a performance, however short, of John Cagean, chance-driven music. David is himself a skeptic of the most impatient, grim-and-determined sort, as evident in the caustic criticism he practices and publishes in this magazine, which makes the need to walk the talk all the more imperative, and the failure to do so all the more shameful.

Having said that, I must also say that I wrote the introduction to The El Bimbo Variations (of which there are two existing versions, one printed on demand by CentralBooks and out of print, and the other, with minor revisions, available as a downloadable pdf from the author’s blog, wasaaak.blogspot.com), the mere fact already a statement of my high regard for the book. But having written the introduction more than a year ago, I think the book and my thoughts on it are ripe for revisiting, distance being a sufficient impetus, as well as the context of David’s newer work. The El Bimbo Variations, to me, remains genuinely lighthearted, delightful for its hysteria by way of excess and corresponding schizophrenia, the risk of redundancy repeatedly confronted with the obsessive imagining and re-imagining of a couple of lines. The only way to appreciate this is to see it in action. Here is “Déjà vu”: “Kamukha mo si Paraluman/nung tayo ay bata pa/Si Paraluman kamukha mo.” Here is “Forgetful”: “Kamukha mo si…” Here is: “Doubtful”: “Kamukha daw niya dati si Paraluman. Daw.” Here is “Derogatory”: “Yuck./Paraluman.” Here is “Tanaga”: “Babaeng lusog-hita/(Sa El Bimbo’y bihasa)/Sino ang ’yong kamukha?/‘Si Paraluman (nung bata)!” Here is “Acronymic”: “Exuberant loneliness:/bosoms in motion beyond observation.” Here is “Lipogram on ‘A’”: “My thoughts: persistently perturbed by memories of you.” Here is “Univocalism on ‘O’”: “‘Oh, God, no, don’t go!’ Old Boy longs for Joy, now lost to ghosts of old folks; food to frogs, to dog gods, to gross brown worms.” Here is “Tautogram on ‘U’”: “Utilizing utmost urbanity, underdog uberpoet – ultimately unloved – unbosoms unencumbered ursine upwellings; utterances unsaid, unbeknownst.”

Accumulation-over-arc at its most extreme finds a proponent in The El Bimbo Variations, the ninety-nine experiments an overall success because of a working method of constraints in which David clearly thrives, a pool of parameters ranging from descriptive (as in the variations called “Doubtful,” “Derogatory,” “Sarcastic,” “Insistent”), to traditional (as in the local “Diona,” “Tanaga,” and “Dalit,” or the foreign “Limerick” and “American Haiku”), to graphic (as in the Kenneth Koch-inspired “The Art of the Possible,” the Edward Gorey-inspired “Gashlycrumb Tiny,” or the plain and simple “Chordbook”), to genre-based (as in “Erotica,” “SpecFic,” and “True Philippine Ghost Story”), to Western-canonical (as in the variations channeling William Blake, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce), to Oulipian (as in the “Tautogram” and “Lipogram” series, constraints concocted by the French math-and-lit enthusiasts comprising the movement known as Oulipo). The variations escape monotony, hard evidence of the author’s impressively elastic vocal register. Each variation is a unique counterpoint to the Eraserheads’ original lines, and each variation, by virtue of the peculiar alchemy triggered by a change in tone, sensibility, language, available alphabet and vocabulary, syntax, etcetera, is a transformation of one particular idea. Its resistance to closure lies in its nature as a book, its hysteria most evident when read as a whole, whether in sequence or hopscotch. Being rewrites, the book’s plot doesn’t thicken, it only changes its face again and again. The entire collection delights in the multiplicity of experiences residing in the province of language; the discrepancy between the base text and each variation as well as the diversity of variations prove, again and again, that what you say is how you say it, that form and content are inextricable from each other, that every wording of an experience is itself the experience.

This, of course, is my solemn paraphrase of what transpires in The El Bimbo Variations; that the book is funny while my description of it is not only emphasizes the credibility of its theses as well as the ease with which it combines providing pleasure and provoking thought. This book will make you laugh; it is filled with jokes, puns, tricks, and parodies, turning the act of writing into a game, which it in turn plays well. Some of the constraints are ridiculously precocious and playful, demanding that the source text be rewritten using only the letters on the left or right side of the computer keyboard (see “Left-Handed” and “Right-Handed”), or the vocabulary of computer programming (see “ALGOL”), or only words beginning with the same letter (see the “Tautogram” series). They taunt, goad, and dare, challenging even the most lethargic of spectators to recognize the wordplay, maybe even turn into participants delighting in the malleability of language and bent on outwitting the game’s morphing constraints. After applauding adamantly anti-academic, avant-garde author, amateur audience—abandoning apprehensions and activating adventurous attitude—applies appealing absurd activities, attempts anaphora, acronyms, and acrostics, asserting artifice. Amateur author—also ambivalent and androgynous, avidly alleluia-allergic, anal and ambitious—acquires alphabet addiction, accumulates arrhythmic adaptations, amusing aphorisms, auditorily agreeable anthems, and amiable allegories, all-in-all above-average art. Ahaha! Ayun.

A surefire way to kill something funny is to explain it, which perhaps also accounts for the tendency to overlook the complexity of ideas embedded in casual, irreverent texts like The El Bimbo Variations. A reader who is not particularly careful or conscientious may simply pick up the book and laugh at its jokes; the more sophisticated reader, on the other hand, equally entertained, may easily dismiss the collection as an elaborate finger exercise, its author merely goofing off. Anticipating this, David provides an aggressive antidote in the form of extensive notes, ensuring the elevation of the variations—many of them one- to three-liners—into Poetry, Literature, Art. In the tradition of T.S. Eliot’s notorious “Waste Land” notes, David risks infuriating the reader by making his authorial voice present and prominent, diminishing the reader’s autonomy through an annoying habit often associated with control freaks who are also figures of authority: hovering. The corollary risk is, of course, killing the joke with explanation, and very learned explanations at that. While some of the notes are detached definitions of the many terms that certainly need defining, others are not. They are chatty and anecdotal, and at times slightly breezy explanations of literary concepts. Through the notes, David insists that the word games in the book be read in the tradition of the Oulipo, that the amusing verbal acrobatics be seen as outcomes of exacting attention to craft, that the allusions be recognizable and not possibly missed, that the book’s pedestrian-accessibility not be interpreted as a sign of shallowness, that the surface effects be read beyond their surface appeal. In case the reader fails to get it, the notes say that The El Bimbo Variations is not just funny, it’s also literary. The gesture smacks of defensiveness, which runs contradictory to the lightheartedness of the work.

I am sure David is aware of this, and—heavy-handedness and initial irksome effect arising from the didacticism aside—I actually appreciate the notes, and I am happy David made the Eliot gamble. The reader unaware of such things is certainly better off coming out of The El Bimbo Variations with new knowledge of Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, of univocalism and spoonerisms or the dalit and cento, of William Burroughs and Byron Gysin, of Finnegans Wake and Tender Buttons. Sure, these may appear as props to validate the literariness of David’s work, subtracting from the devil-may-care attitude that of course, still emanates and remains forceful in this book that undoubtedly proposes an ecstatic alternative to the timidity that infects most of creative nonfiction or the humorlessness in most poetry, but it is a small sacrifice in exchange for the education that this book—in many ways a manual of writing complete with ninety-nine examples—offers.

David has gone on to write a second book called Texticles, a collection of dagli, also downloadable from his blog, and is working on an Oulipian novel called Abecediarya, with chapters comprised of tautograms following the order of the alphabet, excerpts of which appear in the soon-to-be-released anthology, Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 4. (An advocate of self-publishing, David is a firm believer in creating alternative spaces for publication unfettered by the policing of designated literary authorities; he also happens to be a staunch critic of speculative fiction as packaged and practiced here, but these are other long stories.) Texticles and Abecediarya, among other things, are elaborate extensions of some of the experiments in The El Bimbo Variations; a constraint explored in two lines in the first book, for example, balloons into a full-length chapter in the newer work. David is certainly evolving as a writer, one who can be counted on to surprise us again and again. It looks like The El Bimbo Variations, a feat in itself, is bound to soon absorb the identity of prelude to other, more spectacular inventions.