Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
Did Espele Sales really say that novels and reading books are not educational?
By now you've probably heard of the hold-up of all imported books at the Bureau of Customs because of a new interpretation of officials such as Department of Finance Undersecretary Espele Sales. Book importers are now being levied duties by customs, which are apparently against international agreements.Anyway, recently, a new meme has started over Facebook and the blogosphere because Sales said that novels and reading books are "not educational". All references to that statement can be traced back to this story from the Philippine Star:
Sales and the BOC agreed that “only books or raw materials to be used in book publishing” are to be exempt from taxes and duties.
Critics said their interpretation has violated the 1950 Florence Agreement on the Importation of Educational, Scientific and Cultural Materials, of which the Philippines was a signatory in 1952.
The treaty has provided for duty-free importation of books to guarantee the free flow of “educational, scientific, and cultural materials” between countries and declared that imported books should be duty-free.
But Sales reportedly brushed off this argument, saying novels and reading books are “not educational.”
(Emphasis mine.)
The word "reportedly" bothers me here. Who "reported" this? Apart from the McSweeney's report, all other stories about the issue do not contain any such quote attributed to Sales. In fact, the only time the quote appears in the timeline for the issue is during the Star report itself.
So if it was not a previous report, then it must have been the author's sources who reported the quote. If that is so, then it was irresponsible for the author to (1) not indicate that this was the case; and, (2) not make an attempt to contact Sales before attributing the quote to her.
I'm not saying that Sales did not really say that, what I'm saying is that with the Star report, there really was no way to know if that really was the case.
I know I'm splitting hairs here, but this should be a big deal. I agree with the cause, and I'm a big lover of books, so it is important for me to make sure that the facts that my side is reporting is absolutely correct
As Roger Ebert wrote about Michael Moore:
The pitfall for Moore is not subjectivity, but accuracy. We expect him to hold an opinion and argue it, but we also require his facts to be correct. I was an admirer of his previous doc, the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine," until I discovered that some of his "facts" were wrong, false or fudged.
In some cases, he was guilty of making a good story better, but in other cases (such as his ambush of Charlton Heston) he was unfair, and in still others (such as the wording on the plaque under the bomber at the Air Force Academy) he was just plain wrong, as anyone can see by going to look at the plaque.
Because I agree with Moore's politics, his inaccuracies pained me, and I wrote about them in my Answer Man column. Moore wrote me that he didn't expect such attacks "from you, of all people." But I cannot ignore flaws simply because I agree with the filmmaker. In hurting his cause, he wounds mine.
(Emphasis mine.)
Labels: books, news and issues
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Really
At our team building activity last week, in the tell-everyone-about-yourself segment, I started talking about High Fidelity (which is, aptly enough, my desert-island top book of all time), and I ended up speaking to a dumbfounded audience. No one there knew anything about the book or even the movie. I guess John Cusack is not so big around these parts.Then at our company Christmas party, The Camerawalls (Clem Castro's new band) played a cover of The Cure's Just Like Heaven, so I started singing to it. The only problem was, of the 100 or so people watching, I was the only one who seemed to know the song. Not only that, but when some officemates noticed me singing along to it, they were all like, Hey, you know this song? We've never heard of it before. You're such a dork.
Which I am. Really. But still. High Fidelity, really? And Just Like Heaven? Really? What the fuck is this place and how did I get here? Hehehe.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Crap
I moved apartments a couple of weeks ago, and since the new place is much closer to work, it's been great so far. I'm sharing the place with an old buddy from GMA whose family lives in Laguna, so the apartment's all mine during weekends. The only thing is, the place is empty. I don't really have much stuff, save for a TV, a fridge, and several old monoblock chairs. My mom and my aunt kicked in a stove and a rice cooker, respectively, to the cause, but that was pretty much it. The only other furniture in use here at the ground floor is a creaky table I picked up a couple of weeks ago at Ace Hardware, and a dirty couch that the previous tenants had left.Oh, and I have a shelf full of books. As Nick Hornby pointed out, "For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there."
Books in the living room. I need to buy more shelves.
Actually, while I don't have a lot of stuff, I do have a lot of crap I'd brought in. I have this terrible habit of never throwing any stuff away, and when I moved, I kinda had to force myself to throw some of it away. So when I moved, I had boxes full of old notebooks (which contained drafts of the mushy stuff I wrote on my old blog, yuk!), old Kris Kringle presents from officemates, old ticket stubs from concerts and basketball games, tens of keychains, and lots of other crap I would probably have no use for but still keep anyway (a stuffed penguin toy, anyone?).
The shelf in my room. A few more books, and some of my crap.
My favorite crap, off the top of my head:
- a CD rack that looks like a case of Pale Pilsen
- a letter-opener from Kenya, from Howie Severino one Christmas, because I'd set up his blog
- a pair of decorative chopsticks from Thailand
- a water bottle labeled "Sugar Free: Sa Wakas" from the album launch of the band's first album
- a pen whose end is shaped like a hand flipping everyone off
- a mini-bar bottle of liquor from the Czech Republic (from Ellen)
- a silicon cellphone holder I use to keep my house keys
- a Voodoo doll from New Orleans that a reader of my old blog had sent
According to the note, it was supposed to be a charm so that I'd finally get a girlfriend. Totally didn't work.
Friday, September 26, 2008
DFW
My only exposure to the work of David Foster Wallace was a piece on Roger Federer he had written a couple of years ago, but I was still a bit shocked about his death. Mostly it was because he seemed like a very "together" writer and a great human being, in profiles I had read before (also, check out the note here by Simmons) and especially after his death.Anyway, this piece over at Salon about his death sheds some light about his death, mourning his suicide as a tragedy but not romanticizing it. It relates, in some painful detail, his battles with depression and his Sisyphean struggle to live a normal life.
It had been noted that his novel, An Infinite Jest, was an inspiration for Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. Depression (and suicide) are among themes of the book and the film. Last year, Tenenbaums co-writer Owen Wilson himself attempted suicide.
Labels: books, david foster wallace, movies
Friday, September 05, 2008
Again, books
I was actually able to finish some books over the past month, but I haven't had the chance to write about them (not that anyone would care, but still). I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story collection No One Writes to the Colonel, Andrew Sean Greer's acclaimed novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and Michael Chabon's detective thriller The Yiddish Policemen's Union.No One Writes to the Colonel picks up from where One Hundred Years of Solitude, in Marquez's Macondo and nearby towns. It's interesting to read Gabo in shorter form; the loneliness and the pathos of his characters remain, but the playfulness and the humor of his prose becomes rarer with the limited words. The result is sadder and darker, but also more poignant and heart-rending. The stories vary in length, and they all feel like drafts, or rather, drippings, little puddles of literary genius from a cup filled to the brim.
Andrew Sean Greer's book opens with the line, We are each the love of someone's life, and it is, essentially, a love story. That's perhaps the most conventional part, as the title character has an affliction that wouldn't be out of place in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's universe: he is born looking like a septugenarian and he grows younger as he ages. Set in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century, the novel revolves around Max Tivoli trying to win the affections of the love of his life, and because of his unique condition, he gets to do it three times over the course of his lifetime.
Greer's prose is lyrical and poetic, and he writes beautifully about what would have otherwise been a low-brow science fiction concept. But the tone and the mood of the novel is dark and humorless, and the ending feels a bit like a cop-out, but what a well-crafted novel. While reading the book, I was reminded of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, another love story with a sci-fi concept. That novel isn't nearly as lyrical, but as love stories go, The Time Traveler's Wife really delivers the goods.
Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union also begins with a unique concept; it's set in an alternate universe where the state of Israel collapsed soon after its inception, and instead the Sitka district in Alaska became home to European Jews after the war (the Frozen Chosen). The hero is the typical star of pulp novels, a hard-boiled detective battling alcoholism, reeling from divorce, mourning the death of a sister, and living in a run-down hotel in the seedy part of town. The whodunit starts after the death of a mysterious guest in the hotel, and Detective Meyer Landsman's investigation uncovers a trail of conspiracy, corruption, and murder. Between the rich, sweeping plot and Chabon's gift for brilliant prose, the novel approaches the depths of Chabon's Pulitzer-prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
And to add to all that, the novel was also replete with Filipino characters and Filipino culture; Chabon figured (and rightly so) that even a fictional Jewish territory in Alaska would become home to Filipino immigrants. It starts quite early in the novel, with characters talking about buying lumpia from a nearby diner called the Pearl of Manila. Later in the novel, Detective Landsman pays a visit to his informer Benito Taganes, the proprietor of the famous bicho-bicho shop Mabuhay Donuts, which is open all night abuzz with deep fryers and a boom box that wails Diomedes Maturan kundimans.
Chabon is known for his meticulous research for his work, but in the notes after the book, there were no sources cited that would give a clue where he got all those Filipino references in the novel, references that flowed so effortlessly and naturally. It's probable that Chabon has Filipino friends that would serve as his source for all of these, given that he lives in Berkeley. But his characterization of the Filipino shop owner reminds me a bit of the title character from Butch Dalisay's short story Oldtimer, which was about a Filipino immigrant who ran a diner in New York. It's a long shot, but how cool would it be that Michael Chabon not only took inspiration from Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick, but from Butch Dalisay as well?
Next up on my reading list are Michael Cunningham's The Hours (I never saw the movie), Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage, and PL Wombwell's A Battler's Laissez-Faire, which I don't know about but was a gift from my friend Kage from last Christmas (so it should be good). My last trip to Booksale a few weeks ago also yielded Andrew Sean Greer's short story collection How It Was For Me and Take the Cannoli, a collection of essays from Sarah Vowell (I'm a fan of hers from her appearances on Conan).
Labels: books
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Brits
I remember a conversation with a friend a couple of years ago about Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. She told me that she never got around to finishing the book because it was too British. I always found it odd that she said that, because I didn't think that he was too British; in fact, Hornby'd even denied so during interviews. When talking about influences, he'd always talk about American writer Anne Tyler, and he always shrugged off comparisons to contemporary British writers like Martin Amis. If anything, he said, his voice was closer to that of Martin's father, Kingsley Amis.Anyway, I bring this up because I just finished reading my first Amis novel, Yellow Dog, and now *that* is a very British novel. I'm not yet familiar with Amis' other work, but this one read like a very British Elmore Leonard, or an early Guy Ritchie film in print, with Amis' stylized prose subbing in for the visual flourish of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. It's not always a good thing; it wasn't the easiest book to read, British-ness aside, but it did tie things together neatly in the end.
Speaking of Brits, I caught this very funny interview of Russell Brand on Conan the other night. I hadn't seen any of Brand's films, but I heard he was such a phenomenon in the UK. I had seen him on Leno, and I thought that he looked so flamboyantly gay. Then I saw him on TMZ, which highlighted his womanizing; ang tulis pala ni Russell Brand. It reminds me of that old SNL skit about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "He's not gay... he's just English!"
Labels: books, television
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Books
Books I bought over the past month(From Fully Booked at Gateway)
-- The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
-- Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
-- Freakonomics, Stephen Levitt and Steven Dubner
-- Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
(From Books 4 Less at Pearl Drive)
-- The Big Love, Sarah Dunn
-- 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, Suze Orman
-- The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
I got a paperback copy for 99 bucks. I don't know if I'll end up reading it, but I'd heard great things about it especially from Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.
-- The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler
I haven't read any Anne Tyler yet, but Nick Hornby keeps selling her in his interviews, so when I saw this, I got it.
-- The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer
The book has a unique pretext, a man who lived his life in reverse, but what really got me was the opening line from the book: We are each the love of someone's life. Now that's a hook. Don't you want to read what happens next?
Books I read over the past month
-- Possession, AS Byatt
This was a long book that just came chugging along. It was about a pair of young university researchers who uncover a love affair between their Victorian-era subjects. It can be a breeze to read if you're the type who enjoys reading Ambeth Ocampo (I do) or who loves i-Witness documentaries about the secret lives of our national heroes (ditto). The love story the researchers discover unfolds like a telenovela (mala-A Love Story ni Aga at Maricel actually yung dating nung kwento), and the researchers conveniently fall in love in the end. It's interesting to note that AS Byatt was the same author who railed against Harry Potter books a couple of years ago.
-- Freakonomics, Stephen Levitt and Steven Dubner
-- Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
These were alright, but I enjoyed Gladwell's The Tipping Point better than either book.
-- Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
-- The Big Love, Sarah Dunn
I got suckered into buying this chick lit book because of the setup: a couple throws a dinner party, the guy goes out for mustard, and calls the girl from a payphone to tell her that he's in love with someone else and is not coming back (and to not wait for the mustard). It was an effortless, mindless read, with a sprinkle of chuckles here in there (although it got too cute in parts). It's a welcome respite after the last several books.
-- 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, Suze Orman
I'm a huge Suze Orman fan. I try to catch her show on weekends just for the "Can I Afford It?" segment. Tapos mag-chi-cheer ako if Suze approves. Para akong timang.
My Reading Queue (in no particular order)
-- Yellow Dog, Martin Amis
-- The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
-- No One Writes to the Colonel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-- The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer
-- The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
-- The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler
-- A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami
-- Beloved, Toni Morrison
-- The Hours, Michael Cunningham
-- A Battler's Laissez-Faire, PL Wombwell
-- Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
-- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
-- The Gift, Vladimir Nabokov
-- Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
I've had some of these books for a couple of years now, pero bili pa rin ako ng bili :p
Labels: books
Monday, June 09, 2008
I've been reading
There are many benefits of being unemployed. For example, I've gotten started on growing what will soon be a kick-ass full-grown beard. I've also been catching up on some of my reading. The last two books I read were Booker Prize-winning novels by acclaimed contemporary British authors that were turned into films: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan's Atonement. I had seen neither of the adaptations, but I had read a work of each author previously (Ishiguro's A Pale View of the Hills and McEwan's Amsterdam). I wasn't taken by either of the previous books I'd read, which was part of the reason it took me so long to get to them.The Remains of the Day employs the same narrative device as A Pale View of the Hills, which made it a breeze to read. There was a subtlety to the whole novel that disguised the emotional weight of the story, a measured, collected voice meant to provide mere glimpses of the loneliness, the sorrow, the betrayal, and the profound sense of loss scattered throughout the recollections of the narrator's life. I loved the book, but I'm not sure I want to see the movie. I might be wrong, but I have a hard time imagining the subtlety of the novel translating to the screen. There are so few pieces of literature that had dealt with heartbreak (the narrator's, and the readers' too) so calmly and coolly.
I wasn't a big fan of Ian McEwan's deep-seated, psychological prose after reading Amsterdam, and after having read, and having loved, Atonement, I still don't think I am. I had a lot of trouble getting through the first few chapters, with McEwan imbuing the most trivial matters with epic importance with his words. It's probably just a matter of taste, but I found the affectations a bit tedious.
When the plot finally got going, and with the story turning quite epic, the words finally felt right and putting the book down required a great deal of effort. I still hadn't seen the movie, but I've become quite curious to see it, having heard that the film had stayed faithful to the novel.
I'm hoping to finish off more books in the coming weeks. Next up on my queue are A.S. Byatt's Possession, another Booker Prize winner that had been turned into a film, and a book given to me by my friend Kage before I left my old job, Yellow Dog by Martin Amis, another renowned British author. Should be fun.
Labels: books
Friday, February 08, 2008
Hell
In The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, the main character's old ex-boyfriend tells her that Dante defines hell as proximity without intimacy. I've done a little digging, and I don't know if it was really Dante, or if Melissa Bank just made it all up. Still, it doesn't make it any less true. Hell *is* proximity without intimacy.Monday, December 31, 2007
Holiday reading
I had a little time to kill over the past couple of weeks, and I ended up reading a bunch of books: The Wonder Spot, Melissa Bank's second novel; a couple of books written by Phil Jackson; the Chuck Klosterman pop culture bible Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; a stupid book about American history written by Dave Barry; and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. I haven't written about books in a while, so I figured I should write about the ones that I liked.The Wonder Spot
I'd originally discovered Melissa Bank on a lark; I was browsing through Avalon.ph and ended up buying her first book, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, because of the clever title, chick-lit implications notwithstanding. It wasn't a novel so much as a series of inter-connected stories about a girl's life, and it was so funny and charming and well-written that I ended up giving a copy to a friend for Christmas that year.
A few months later, I read Speaking with an Angel, an anthology of short stories by Nick Hornby. The book included a story by Melissa Bank called The Wonder Spot, which was easily the best in the whole collection, and which was better than anything from her first book. I was delighted to find out later that the story was part of Bank's second book.
I found a copy of the book a few weeks ago, and it lived up to my expectations. Although the rest of the book wasn't really as good as the eponymous story, it was still an awesome read. No one writes about insecurities quite as well and quite as entertainingly as Melissa Bank. Like I did with Girls' Guide, I ended up giving a copy of the book to a friend. In fact, I ended up giving it to the same person I'd given the first book, a couple of years ago.
Afterwards, I was reading reviews of the book, and critics seemed to agree that the label chick-lit didn't do justice to Melissa Bank's work. While I haven't really read Bridget Jones's Diary or other books of that ilk (I just remember Richelle telling me she *hates* Helen Fielding), I'm not surprised; forget chick-lit, there just aren't many books that are as good as Melissa Bank's, period.
(I have this thing about giving books, and how I only give people books when I really, really liked the book and when I think that a person I'd give the book would like it as well. After all, giving a book carries the implicit notion that it'd be worth spending several hours of one's time, so it has to be really worth it, right? Only, no one ever reads the books that I give them. Which is kind of like all my blog entries about books.)
If you I sold you on to Bank well enough, you might want to check out a story from Girls' Guide called The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine . The first chapter from The Wonder Spot is also online, though that's probably the weakest chapter in the whole book.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
I'd been reading Chuck Klosterman for a while now, initially from his Spin Magazine columns (I used to buy lots of back issues from Book Sale), and then later from his work on ESPN's Page 2. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs was also prominently featured on The OC as part of the Seth Cohen starter kit, along with Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and records from The Shins and Bright Eyes (I don't really care much for either band, but Kavalier and Clay ranks among my all-time favorites).
Anyway, there are probably very few books that are as right up in my alley as this one. It's a collection of essays that include, among other things, an admission that no one in our generation can ever be truly satisfied because we're all held up against Lloyd Dobler, a deconstruction of Saved by the Bell, the parallels between The Empire Strikes Back and Reality Bites (they're essentially the same movie), how the Celtics-Lakers rivalry define everything that we know about the universe, plus a successful argument that "The Fonz" is a virgin.
There's also an essay about the greatness of Billy Joel, and his patent uncoolness despite his greatness, an uncoolness so plain that he can't even be considered too-uncool-that-he's-actually-cool. Klosterman explains:
To this day, women are touched by the words to Just the Way You Are, a musical love letter that says everything everybody wants to hear: You're not flawless, but you're still what I want. It was written about Joel's wife and manager Elizabeth Weber, and it outlines how he doesn't want his woman to "try some new fashion" or dye her hair blond or work on being witty. He specifically asks that she "don't go changing" in the hopes of pleasing him. The short-term analysis is that this is a criticism of perfection, but in the best possible way; it's like Billy is saying he loves Weber *because* she's not perfect, and that he could never leave her in time of trouble.
The sad irony, of course, is that Joel divorced Elizabeth three years after Just the Way You Are won a Grammy for Song of the Year. Obviously, some would say that cheapens the song and makes it irrelevant. I think the opposite is true. I think the fact that Joel divorced the woman he wrote this song about makes it his single greatest achievement.
When I hear Just the Way You Are, it never makes me think about Joel's broken marriage. It makes me think about all the perfectly scribed love letters and drunken emails I have written over the past twelve years, and about all the various women who received them. I think about how I told them they changed the way I thought about the universe, and that they made every other woman on earth unattractive, and that I would love them unconditionally even if we were never together. I hate that those letters still exist. But I don't hate them because what I said was false; I hate them because what I said was completely true. My convictions could not have been stronger when I wrote those words, and--for whatever reason--they still faded into nothingness. Three times I have been certain that I could never love anyone else, and I was wrong every time. Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies, just as Just the Way You Are undoubtedly reminds Joel of his.
Perhaps this is why I can't see Billy Joel as cool. Perhaps it's because all he makes me see is me.
Kinda how I feel about Pancit Canton.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
I once read an interview with Nick Hornby where he was talking about why he only wrote funny books. He argued that there was nothing you could write in a serious book that you couldn't write in a funny book as well, and it was much more pleasant to read funny books, so why bother with the serious? A lot of critics lump Hornby together with Douglas Coupland, for capturing the voice of their generation. They do both write about sad people with lots of issues and hang-ups, but the difference between them is that unlike Coupland, Hornby does not depress the living fuck out of his readers, or at least he makes them laugh along the way. Besides, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Milan Kundera write about pretty much the same topics, but wouldn't you rather read Gabo, if only for the funny descriptions of sex between octogenarians?
Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a funny book about a sad story. It's written from the point-of-view of Chris, a 15-year-old with autism. He fancies it as a detective novel, where he tries to figure out who stuck a fork in his neighbor's dog, but as the story unfolds, we get a tangential view of the drama surrounding the people around him, as well as their secrets.
That's really all I can say about the plot, because it's supposed to be a surprise. The novel is really quite the powder keg, and it's one of the most emotionally-charged books I'd read in a while. It never feels that way while reading though, because of the light and humorous tone throughout the novel.
I'd actually read a book with a similar approach years before, Steve Martin's (yes, the comedian) second novel The Pleasure of My Company, which also tells the story of an autistic person, and does it surprisingly well. Compared to The Curious Incident, however, that book comes off as merely adequate, while Haddon's work is simply one of the greats.
Labels: books
Friday, August 10, 2007
Stop and smell the smoke
I don't think Nick Hornby's Songbook was meant to get people to like the songs that were the topics of his essays, nor was it, I feel, intended exclusively for people who are fans of the artists that he wrote about in the book. That was the point I had been trying to get across to my officemate whose copy I'd first read, who said that she didn't finish the book because she didn't know any of the songs in it. I had since bought my own copy, and for Christmas last year, gave another copy to another friend at the office who was into loads of music as well, with hope that, since she downloaded as much music as she did, she would enjoy the collection of essays as much as I did.Rather than songs and artists, Songbook really is about experiences that would be common to music fans, from the casual to the passionate. When Hornby writes about how he can't get this pop song out of his head ("I'm Like a Bird" by Nelly Furtado), it's like that whole month when Corrine Bailey Rae's "Trouble Sleeping" was the only thing I had any desire to listen to. The obscure gig in a dingy pub featuring a singer named Marce LaCouture that turned into magic, lit up his evening and ended up on his novel High Fidelity, that was like when I took a friend to a Bayang Barrios show at Conspiracy on a whim and we enjoyed the evening so much that we ended up walking in the rain till the sun came up. Even his buddy Lee, who turned him onto new music such as Mark Mulcahy, reminded me of people like Ellen, who'd always turn me onto music that I liked that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise, or Jasper, who does the same thing for me but for books. Bruce Springsteen to him is the Eraserheads for me.
Despite all of that, however, my favorite essay in the book is one where he argues the merits of a song. In it, he relates how he has a friend who believes that all the music today is crap. He responds by picking one of his favorite songs, "Smoke" by the Ben Folds Five, and championing the hell out of it, in the process making it tough for the reader not to like the song.
"Smoke" is one of the cleverest, wisest songs about the slow death of a relationship that I know. Lots of people have assailed the thorny romantic topic of starting all over again (for example, off the top of my head, "Starting All Over Again," by Mel & Tim), and the conclusion they usually come to is that it's going to be tough, but both practicable and desirable; the heartbreaking thing about Folds's song is that it manages to simultaneously convey both the narrator's desperation and the impossibility of a happy outcome. He doesn't know about the latter, though--only Folds the songwriter, who has the benefit of music and a vantage point, can see that the relationship is doomed.
In "Smoke," the central conceit is that the relationship is a book, and so its unhappy recent history, the narrator wants to believe, can be destroyed by burning it page by page, until "all the things we've written in it never really happened." "Here's an evening dark with shame," he sings. "Throw it on the fire!" the backing vocalists tells him. "Here's the time I took the blame. (Throw it on the fire!) Here's the time we didn't speak, it seemed, for years and years..."
Wiping the slate clean is the fantasy of anyone who has ever got into a mess with a partner, and the metaphor is witty enough and rich enough to seduce us into thinking just for a moment that in this case it might be possible, but the music here, a mournful waltz, tells a different story. It doesn't sound as if the narrator's lover is terribly convinced, either. "You keep saying the past's not dead," he tells her, "Well, stop and smell the smoke." But the smoke, of course, contains precisely the opposite meaning: it's everywhere, choking them. "You keep saying... we're smoke," he concludes sadly, and we can tell that he's beginning to believe it finally; the smell of smoke, it turns out, does not symbolize hope but its opposite.
"Smoke", I think, lyrically perfect, clever and sad and neat, in a way that my friend would not credit; it's also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You can't ask much more of a song than that.
Now, after reading that, download the song and try not to like it.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
So it goes
Just read on the news that Kurt Vonnegut had passed away. The New York Times has a nice extensive story about the man and his work.I first came across his work while reading High Fidelity. In the book, the main character Rob was talking about how he's read "smart" books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, but he didn't really enjoy those books as much as Kurt Vonnegut novels.
I'd only read a couple of Vonnegut books so far (Slaughterhouse-Five and Deadeye-Dick), and each time I found myself blown away by the experience. That was it, each Vonnegut novel was an experience. You have to be there to get it.
Labels: books
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Green man
Spent the weekend reading Alan Moore's whole "Swamp Thing" run, collected in six graphic novels lent to me last week by Alekos, who couldn't stop raving about them. It was easy to see why Leks, a vegetarian and our resident green man, would resonate towards an earth elemental who controls all vegetation to defend humankind. I guess the biggest difference between them is that Swamp Thing actually has a girlfriend.As for the series, it was great, even though I'm not really a fan of the horror genre. As brilliant a writer as Allan Moore is, I feel that sometimes he just fucks things up for the sake of fucking things up, but then again, I guess that's kind of the point.
My favorite parts involved the first appearance of John Constantine, more popularly known nowadays as the Hellblazer. He really did look like Sting, and during the panels where he was present, "Every Breath You Take" kept playing in my head.
(I must say though that it's kinda weird that Sting was the basis for one of the baddest motherfuckers in comic book history, given that, and I'm saying this as one of the biggest Sting fans I know and I even have a copy of "Broken Music", Sting's pretty much the epitome of middle-aged lame-ass shit nowadays.)
The Gotham episodes were brilliant as well, with the whole thing playing out like Moore's ode to the King Kong movies. Too bad Batman's cameo in the whole deal was pretty limited.
Labels: books
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Book lust
A couple of weeks ago, I finally signed into this social networking site for books called Library Thing, which I'd discovered through an officemate. The next couple of days saw me spending an inordinate amount of time and effort keying in ISBN numbers into the system, and now I've cataloged all my books. (Well, not really all of them... I haven't cataloged books that have been borrowed and not yet returned.)Anyway, while going through my books made me realize a few things about my collection. It's not particularly big (about a hundred and twenty books or so), but I estimate I acquired about eighty of those in the last fifteen months. Of these, I've read about sixty, slowing down the past few months because I started grad school. That rounds out to about four books a month, which I'm quite proud of. I haven't read this much in my life. A book a week... yun din yung excuse ko ngayon kung bakit wala akong girlfriend.
Also, by my count, I've spent about Php20,000 on books over the same period. Kaya rin wala akong pang-date. It's not really something I feel bad about, given that if I didn't spend it on books, I'd end up blowing the cash on beerhouse visits with Alekos, so books really are a better investment (although, I have to admit, that the derived pleasure is probably a push).
Anyway, when I did my catalog, I resolved to at least rein in my spending on books. So how did I fare? Well, I got this email listing my recent purchases off Avalon:
"The Last Temptation of Christ by Kazantzakis (BANNED!!)".
The final bid price was for P400.00.
"The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman".
The final bid price was for P550.00.
"The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy".
The final bid price was for P300.00.
"Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris".
The final bid price was for P250.00.
"Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (Gaiman Chabon Hornby)".
The final bid price was for P400.00.
Total: P1,900.00
Wonderful.
Labels: books
Friday, October 06, 2006
Michael Chabon's model
I own more books by Michael Chabon than any other author save for Nick Hornby, and I just finished reading Chabon's first anthology, A Model World and Other Stories.At 24, I still haven't gotten over the delusion that I could become a writer one day. Reading Chabon's A Model World, or any other of his books, for that matter, fills me with a terrible sense of envy. He weaves such terribly beautiful words, even as he talks about doomed love, dysfunctional relationships, and people falling apart. I could only dream about such eloquence.
In the story "S Angel", which is about a young man preparing to attend his cousin's wedding, he writes:
Ira never went anywhere without expecting that when he arrived there he would meet the person with whom he was destined to fall in love.
Later on, he describes Ira's cousin, the bride:
She seemed pleased enough--smiling and flushed and mad to be wearing that dazzling dress--but she didn't look like she was in love, as he imagined love to look. Her eye was restive, vaguely troubled, as though she were trying to remember exactly who this man was with his arms around her waist, tipping her backward on one leg and planting a kiss on her throat.
Even later, we see Ira spotting a friend of his cousin's, an older woman, with whom he becomes infatuated.
And yet, it was her look of disillusion, of detachment, those stoical blue eyes in the middle of that lovely, beaten face, that most attracted him. It would be wrong to love her, he could see that; but he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.
In another story called "Ocean Avenue", about a couple who could only be happy as they made each other miserable, Chabon opens with this line:
If you can still see how you could have once have loved a person, you are still in love; an extinct love is always wholly incredible.
In another story, Chabon's hero is married to a beautiful immigrant to help her acquire citizenship:
I admired her. Initially, it was only that--a marriage of admiration and desperation, made for neither money nor love... Had I not breached our contract by actually falling in love, we would still be in Texas, counting the days, but here we are, in the capital of France, waiting for her heart, or mine, to undertake a change.
Sometimes, I try to write that way, but all I can come up are corny lines like this:
He was swamped with deadlines to beat at work and papers to write for school, and it wasn't until the end of the day that he would think about what he'd have for her desk the next morning. He was old enough and, for the most part, smart enough to know that happiness shouldn't be tied to another person. And yet, there really was no getting around the fact; thinking about her was the happiest part of his day.
Baduy.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Reads
I was just browsing through Avalon.ph tonight, and realized that I'd read and owned a lot of the books listed. So if you're looking for great reads (it's always a good time to pick a good book) and great bargains, here are my recommendations:» Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
» Broken Music by Sting (Hardbound, Autobiography)
» About A Boy by Nick Hornby (Non-Movie Cover)
» The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
» Songbook by Nick Hornby
» Bringing Down The House by Ben Mezrich
» Summerland by Michael Chabon
» The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank
» Pure Drivel by Steve Martin
» How To Be Good by Nick Hornby
» Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (HB)
» Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
» The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
» Werewolves in Their Youth: Short Stories by Michael Chabon
Labels: books
Sunday, August 27, 2006
High fidelity
The other night, my officemate Jill and I were playing this game, where we picked from a deck of cards with questions written at the back, questions like "What is your favorite childhood memory?" etc., and we had to tell each other our answers. Anyway, I got a card that asked "If you were to play a role in a movie, what role would that be?" And I figured that since High Fidelity is my favorite movie and my favorite book, and John Cusack is my favorite actor, I'd like to play Rob.(When I mentioned this to Jill, she told me she didn't remember much about the film, because it was an old movie; it's hard to argue with her, because it came out when she was a high school junior.)
Anyway, Roger Ebert wrote about the character in his review:
Rob is the movie's narrator, guiding us through his world, talking directly to the camera, soliloquizing on his plight--which is that he seems unable to connect permanently with a girl, maybe because his attention is elsewhere. But on what? He isn't obsessed with his business, he isn't as crazy about music as Dick and Barry, and he isn't thinking about his next girl--he's usually moping about the last one. He seems stuck in the role of rejected lover and never likes a girl quite as much when she's with him as after she's left.
Sounds about right.
Labels: books
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Laughter and forgetting
In light of the Reuters controversy a couple of weeks ago over doctored photos from the conflict in Lebanon, CNET News is running a gallery of some of the most remarkable doctored photographs over the years.It's all very interesting, but this particular slide struck me because it contains the photos Milan Kundera described in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Labels: books
Monday, August 07, 2006
Book club
This past couple of days happened to be UPCAT weekend, and I had the good fortune of staying home and sleeping for most of it. Perhaps, for reasons I outlined in my previous post, I also am almost through with Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran," a book about a person whose life has been touched by fiction perhaps much more so than I could imagine.Nafisi writes about her experiences in Iran as the totalitarian regime gains power and becomes increasingly oppressive towards women. After teaching literature for different universities in Tehran, she picks seven of her students to come visit her at her home every Thursday to talk about forbidden Western books. Their little book club becomes a place not only where they could "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color," but where, for several hours, they could escape reality. This escape relates not only to the government intervention in their lives, but also to each woman's innermost fears, insecurities, and emotional scars.
In the first page of the book, Nafisi repeats a warning to her students, "Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."
And yet she proceeds through an erudite discussion of some of the canons of Western literature, Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby", Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", James's "Daisy Miller", and of course, Nabokov's "Lolita", all of which are framed against the backdrop of Tehran during the Islamic revolution. Or it might be just as accurate to describe the book as her writing about being a woman of letters in a country that has just transformed itself into a dangerous place for someone like that, using fiction to amplify the intimacy of her experiences to her readers.
It works both ways. Part of the joy of reading the book is the perspective she gives on her discussion of Lolita and the other books. She makes careful note, once again, of how the novel exists in a whole other world:
A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empthaize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.
She is, however, able to draw similarities to relate to her personal circumstances, adding a depth that makes one want to pick up the books again to see what we had missed.
(Now I need to call up my friend who'd had my copy of Lolita since December. I hope she hasn't lost it.)
And then there's the story of Nafisi and her girls. They relate to the "desperate truth of Lolita's story" because they face a desperate truth everyday. Upon her return to Iran, she finds a country willing to accept only a narrow morality. She joins ultimately fruitless protests against requirements for women to wear veils in public, seeing this as a threat to her individuality as a women. Her girls go through the same ordeals, such as humiliating virginity tests and living their public lives devoid of some of the simplest joys, such as holding hands with another man.
But more than these shared experiences, it is the act of reading and discussing the literature that brings the women together. It is this "sensual experience of another world" that allows the women to imagine, to breathe, to be able to survive the insanity the world throws at them, and to display their remarkable strength. And I guess this is why, despite all of the terrible things they have to go through, the book is inspiring and never depressing, hopeful and never desperate.
Labels: books
