These are all Facebook grabs; those from the Allan-Aileen wedding last Saturday were from Ecar's, and those from my book launch last Tuesday were from Irvin's (he's the one in red, with me, in the last photo). Thanks to all who attended the launch of Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog! The novel is now available in most National Bookstore & Powerbooks branches. You can also read the transcript of Rhodge's YM interview with me, mostly about the novel, here.

1. The conclusion to The Deptford Trilogy is largely a homage to stage performances as the world was embracing the charm of the silverscreen, because “that’s what art is, as you very well know, much of the time: the transformation and glorification of the commonplace.” Here Davies assembled the most interesting characters of Fifth Business: Ramsay, Magnus Eisengrim and Liesl (no more David Staunton, thankfully) in addition to almost equally intriguing people who were making the film out of Robert-Houdin’s life, using Eisengrim’s lifestory as subtext. So now we get to know a more interesting backstory from the time when the young Paul Dempster left Deptford with the traveling World of Wonders up to the time when he first met the then monkey-like Liesl. Texts learn to adapt to the times, we are taught, as Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae and other novels were transformed, almost beyond recognition, to stage by Eisengrim’s mentors.

2. The dialogue-as-narration that did not quite work in The Manticore Davies tried to reclaim in this novel, and he had more success because Magnus Eisengrim is consciouly an egoist (not egotist, as he made clear: “An egotist is a self-absorbed creature, delighted with himself and ready to tell the world about his enthralling love affair. But an egoist… is a much more serious being, who makes himself, his instincts, yearnings, and tastes the touchstone of every experience.”), unlike David Staunton who was mostly unsure of himself, yet, quite possibly, an egotist. I believe that Davies gave this dialogue-as-narration (not monologue, because there was a dynamic exchange, and a listener could easily turn into storyteller, sharing her version of the memory being accounted for) a second chance because people are necessarily attracted to romance, which is “a mode of feeling that puts enormous emphasis—but not quite a tragic emphasis—on individual experience.” We devour gossip, and feed on stories of private lives other than our own. And so the characters in World of Wonders are eager to hear each other’s stories, as we the readers share the same, if not larger, amount of curiosity.

3. As this novel is about textual translations (from life to book to stage to film), one major thread was also Paul Dempster’s transformation into other selves—his assumption of different names, depending on other people’s needs of him. He was Cass Fletcher when he was inside Abdullah’s while assisting Willard. He became Jules LeGrande when he managed his escape to England. He had to be Mungo Fetch when he was serving as Sir John Tresize’s double. Then, finally, he turned into Magnus Eisengrim, and realized that there was no turning back, because all of who he had been in the past were “cheap people, every one of them.” In the end, this combination of nostalgia and disgust is a predicament that is Canadian’s, who “knew themselves to be strangers in their own land, without being at home anywhere else.” And, if we may add, of whoever they turn themselves to be. The loneliness that was Deptford’s was a nostalgia for long-lost Europe. It was a sad comic trilogy, but of a sadness that almost felt like necessary. ~

Every Thursday beginning January 2009, I'll try to update you of whatever's taking most of my time--be it literary consumptions other than the novel, or popular texts (film, tv, music, games, etc.), or simply musings on things quite ordinary and mundane.

• 02-05-09. Happy Man. This year's first letter to Kris.
  
• 01-29-09. Events Photos. From Allan-Aileen Wedding & Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog Book Launch.
  
• 01-22-09. Literary Updates. On Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog, 101 Filipino Icons, Pitik-Bulag, Taboan '09, "Sangkatutak, Salimbayan," and a lecture for Pinoypoets' 5th year.
  
• 01-15-09. Junk TV Addict. On 24, American Idol, Survivors, The Amazing Race and Survivor.
  
• 01-08-09. Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog Book Launch.
  
• 01-01-09. No Resolutions. On San Pablo, and TV series & Travian preoccupations, mostly.
  

1. A number of people told me that they already saw and got copies of my novel in some National Bookstore branches. I haven't checked it myself but I can't see any reason why they'd lie. Besides Ani already posted an update a week ago that copies might really be available by this week. The Ateneo launch will push through on Tuesday, January 27, 4:30 PM at SocSci Conference Rooms 1 & 2 in Ateneo. See you there!

2. Right now I am working on another set of 20 icons for the second volume of Adarna House's 101 Filipino Icons. I have a deadline to beat early next week for the first half; I'm actually already done with them, I just need to work on some revisions, fact editing, and a little proofreading. The second half looks more exciting to read (you see, I'm faced with research materials of about three inches thick): most of them I'm particularly curious about like the cattle caravans, Golden Tara of Agusan, Mangyan & Tagbanwa writing system, balitaw, and Palawan Underground River.

3. Yesterday I attended a meeting with several poets and painters for a book & exhibit project initiated by GSIS, called Pitik-Bulag. The idea is to partner a poet with a painter and have the painter do a painting of an existing poem by the poet; likewise, the poet will write a poem on an existing artwork by the painter. The project promises to be huge. We drew lots and I picked Baguio-based painter Leonardo Aguinaldo. I still haven't decided on what poem to give him; the poem will eventually be translated into English by Marne S. Kilates. Rio Alma heads the project, which, he said, if proved successful, would tour the regions late this year up to next year. That is something I'm definitely looking forward to.

4. February is a big month for the arts. This year is extra special for many writers, especially for those from the regions, because of Taboan '09 to be held on February 11 to 13. I was invited to be one of the junior fellows for NCR, and will panel in one of the discussions on Day 3 at the Cubao Shoe Expo. Days 1 & 2 will be held in UP and Ateneo campuses, respectively.

5. Late last year, I was asked for an update on the Loyola Schools Faculty Scholarly Work Grant I received three years ago for a collection of poetry tentatively called "Sangkatutak, Salimbayan." Because my creative energy was concentrated on Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog, I had to set this project aside. I'm done with a little more than a third of what I promised to be a 25-poem collection. Now I am really forced to finish the project by June 2009. I guess my second novel-in-progress, Sa Kasunod ng 909, would have to hibernate for now until I'm done with this.

6. I was invited by Pinoypoets, in celebration of their 5th year, to be part of a lecture series. I decided to give a talk on the novel's views of poetry, reading a few representative works on how poetry is seen in the eyes of those novels. It is scheduled on a Saturday afternoon, February 28. This is one of those lectures I am excited to give.

1. Not so many sequels could live up to the wonders delivered by a really good novel. I believe that The Manticore is no exception here. But being the second in The Deptford Trilogy, it might be a necessary bridge to what I hope to be a better wrap up with World of Wonders. Without the trilogy in mind, this novel could just easily have been a falter in the novelist’s otherwise admirable caliber.

The novel’s weakness lies in the choice of main protagonist: David Staunton, son of Percy Boyd Staunton, who, after his breakdown upon the death of his father in the end of Fifth Business, was pushed to ask psychoanalytic help in Switzerland. David was not the most exciting character in the earlier novel; I don’t believe he was even central to the drama that Davies was trying to build up. And now comes this novel, which is mostly a journey to his inner mind, with all the Jungian archetypes thrown in here and there, not to mention the title, to understand supposedly what his issues were. In his appointments with Dr. von Haller, David said he felt “rather like Scheherazade unfolding one of her never-ending, telescopic tales to King Schahriar,” but his remembrance was obviously not of the same league with the Arabian tales. It was like, well, most analysis of the kind: full of guilt, frustrations, realizations, and attempts to come to terms with oneself. Remarks on and references to literature abound: David comments on her sister Caroline as a “greedy novel-reader and romancer”; and The Little Lame Prince, The Republic, Jane Eyre, C. S. Lewis, Voltaire’s Candide, D. H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells’ Experiment in Autobiography, Ibsen, G. K. Chesterton, and Oliver Twist were brought up more easily than any pop culture text, and someone was even remembered as a “Dickensian freak.”

“[But] that is what these illnesses are for, you know—these mysterious ailments that take us out of life but do not kill us. They are signals that our life is going the wrong way, and intervals for reflection,” reminded Dr. von Haller. That this novel turned out to be a long reflection over one’s life is probably not an understatement. Of course, I would be biased to say that it was only all that. Davies was of course making fun of psychoanalysis itself, and made use of it to paradoxically address what we could never fully understand in a person, even in fiction, despite its pretense of self-containment and thoroughness.

2. “My Sorgenfrei Diary,” the third and last section of the novel, luckily saved the work for me. It was David’s accounts of what happened after his sessions with Dr. von Haller, when he accidentally came across Ramsay and Liesl and got to talk with them. Now these two are interesting characters: Ramsay we got to know a lot of in the earlier novel, where towards the end Liesl we also had a fantastic glimpse of. It was a weird kind of feeling as I closed the book: I didn’t really want it to end, but I wished I was spared of a lot of things I had to read to get to that point. The structure, then, is the manticore: it has parts that just don’t match up. It's a monster.

Roberto Bolaño
[b. 1953, Chile]

• The Savage Detectives (1998)
  
• 2666 (2004)

• Killing Time in a Warm Place (1993)
• Soledad's Sister (2008)
  

• Fifth Business (1970)
• The Manticore (1972)
• World of Wonders (1975)
  

Erik Fosnes Hansen
[b. 1965, Norway]

• Tales of Protection (1998)

• The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, Volume I (1605)
• The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, Volume II (1615)
  

• White Teeth (2000)

• This Earth of Mankind (1980)
  

Believe me, I'm an addict. And these series currently get me high:

1. 24 season 7 is finally here! Seeing the first four episodes of its 2-night premiere made me doubly excited of the things to come. No, I'm not gonna spoil it for you, but I'm just so so glad that Tony Almeida's back, and Chloe's still in the cast. I also heard that Kim Bauer's gonna have an appearance sometime this season. Nice, nice.

2. American Idol season 8 premiered last night, but my episode download in torrent says ETA is not until about nine hours from now. Oh, well. Anyhow, I finished all of its pilot season last week, and realized that Kelly Clarkson was not shown at all during the auditions and hollywood episodes. It was very lucky for her that her first voting performance, a rendition of "Respect," which was also her first Idol appearance, was enough to get her in the top 10. Right now I have to make do with season 2, the only other season I haven't seen yet.

3. I watched the 6-part Survivors series, an apocalyptic British series. It was interesting in a Lost (which opens next week! yey!) kind of way. The network says they're planning for a second season.

4. I finally got to watch The Amazing Race season 5, where they visited the Philippines, and Luli Aroyo welcomed the racers in the pit stop at the Coconut Palace. I wish they visit the country again for their next season, which opens next month.

5. I told you: I'm a junk TV addict. Well, in the past five days, I also got to watch the second and third seasons of Survivor (Outback & Africa). Right now, I'm waiting for season 4 (Marquesas) to finish downloading.

Oh I so love these torrents!

1. My Canadian novel reading list used to begin and end with Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, and the latter wasn’t even Canadian by birth. I am of course familiar with William Gibson, Alice Munro, Douglas Coupland, W. P. Kinsella and Mordechai Richler, among others, but I haven’t read any of their works yet, and theirs are not on the top of my to-read list as of the moment, except, perhaps, for a few of Coupland’s and Gibson’s that I already have. Last year, however, I was introduced to the works of Robertson Davies via his The Deptford Trilogy that begins with Fifth Business, and it was certainly a wonderful discovery .

2. An epigraph from Den Danske Skueplads defined the title right away: fifth business are “roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition of the dénouement.” In the novel, it was inevitably played out by the narrator (he admitted it himself), Dunstan Ramsay, who kept an enduring guilt over an accident that happened when he was ten years old and that involved his “lifelong friend and enemy,” Percy Boyd Staunton, and Mrs. Dempster and her son, Paul Dempster, who was born prematurely because of the event. Dunny, as Ramstay was fondly called, is now telling his story in the form of a letter to his successor as headmaster of Colborne College, while paradoxically giving critique to the deceptive nature of autobiography and memoir. The reason for this, he said, was so that “one man will know the truth about [him] and do [him] justice” when he is dead. But the death came to someone else in the end. Naturally, the majority of the story revolved around Deptford. It was a bittersweet remembrance of the village, its people, their different religions, the place’s “lack of aesthetic sense,” and the eventual need for some people to leave the village to be able to go on with their lives.

3. When he was young, Dunny served as under-librarian in their village library, where he devoured the “splendours [he] found in books,” the first among them were The Secrets of Stage Conjuring by Robert-Houdin, and Modern Magic and Later Magic by Professor Hoffmann, possibly Davies’s readings as well, in preparation for the writing of his trilogy. Dunny also went into religious books such as William Canton’s A Child's Book of Saints, burning his passion for “tales of wonders” that led to his being also a hagiologist. Later he would declare Mrs. Dempster a “fool-saint.” These readings were blamed by some people soon after for Dunny’s “unseated reason.” As I expected, the whole of the novel was populated with references to literary works and personalities like David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, Dante’s Inferno, Arabian Nights, the Bible, War and Peace, Scott Fitzgerald, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Kristin Lavransdatter, Oscar Wilde, Eugène Sue, and If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson, the only work I was not familiar with, but apparently a bestseller when it was released in 1922, according to The New York Times. Certainly a novel does not usually have a bibliography with it but it sure has its own way of acknowledging its inspirations, if not outright sources.

I know I've told some friends that my novel, Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog, would be available in Powerbooks by January 5. I've seen some people already posted about it in their blogs. (Thanks Karen, Panch, Didith, Nan, and Jo! I hope I didn't miss anyone.) Even the Ateneo website already had it on the SOH site, courtesy of our own dean, Dr. Vilches.) Unfortunately, Anvil was still having their inventory with Powerbooks and National Bookstore, and so I was told that it would take about another two or three weeks before the novel gets into the bookstore shelves.

The book, however, is now posted on the Anvil website, and the Kagawaran ng Filipino and AILAP are going to launch it in Ateneo on January 27, Tuesday, 4:30 PM at the SocSci Conference Rooms 1 & 2. Jun Cruz Reyes, who incidentally wrote the blurb, will come to give a few words about the novel (in short: he'll help me sell the book ha ha). If you're free on that day, I'd be very happy to see you. It's still three weeks from now, so please mark your calendar. :p Kitakits.

1. Originally published in 1998 as Beretninger om Beskyttelse, Erik Fosnes Hansen’s Tales of Protection was the first Norwegian novel I read, in translation, of course. I bought my copy at Fully Booked in Gateway, driven by a conscious desire to expand my readings on international contemporary novels. I have not encountered any Hansen prior to this one; I also don’t remember his name being mentioned in any recent studies on the novel I’ve read. The book didn’t even have a blurb by a recognizably reputable novelist whom I trust. Wikipedia and Google, I found out later, likewise did not have much to say about him, except that this was his third novel and that he had been translated in about twenty languages. (Twenty! Well, that’s certainly not bad at all.)

2. There was something in Hansen’s prose that kept me hooked in it, even if he was just talking about birds flying or bees buzzing around. Somewhere in the middle of the novel, he cautions us, however: We must stop to think. The way good artists pause to consider his piece, to reflect on the worth of his task at hand. I appreciate those breathers in Hansen, truly moments of distillation very similar to my experience of poetry.

3. The novel offers three tales separated by time and space, but of equal curiosities: the death of a scientist who left oddities that puzzled his young heir, among them a compassionate ape named Jacob and a collection of incidents from different places in history that manifest arguable synchronicity; the story of a lighthouse master and his daughter during the times of uncertainties in their relationship that culminate in the coming of a strange visitor; and the story of a Renaissance patron of the arts whose skin disease was supposedly cured by an insignificant painting that eventually led to the narrative of the artwork’s creation.

4. True to the history of the Western novel, Hansen makes his characters find time to read books. Lea, Wilhelm Bolt’s niece-heir, takes books from the shelf and tries to read, even if most of the time, she would just look “around the room, at all the books lined up stiffly in the bookcases.” Her narrative mentions, among others, The Thousand and One Nights, Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard. Kalle Jacobsson, the lighthouse master, reads Verne and it “keeps him awake.” Fiorello also would read to his master, the art patron Lorenzo del Vetro, excerpts from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

This novel attempts to understand the roles of being human in this world, in a manner that is conscious of its being a story, a story that in its wholeness is only interrupted by the superficial sectionings almost always demanded by the linearity of the novel form. It asks us: What kind of relationship do you have to the earth? and offers answers by encouraging us to look at seriality, “a constant repetition or accumulation in time and space of… similar things and events,” not unlike death, the certainty of death, which somehow connects the three tales in a brief remembrance at the end.

HAPPY 2009, EVERYONE! I'm now back here in Marikina from San Pablo where I spent my new year's eve with Lolo & Tita Ayen, who forced me to wake up a few minutes before twelve midnight so that I could join them in a humble media noche they prepared for the three of us. I was too tired to get up but I didn't go home for new year to hurt their feelings. I acted eager, and I think I overacted. Of course it was nothing like the gathering I remembered from when I was very young & we were still in our old house. This year, we had no fireworks, not even a torotot. No neighbors would come to our house to share the coming of the new year with us. We just ate by ourselves and then, a little past 12:30 am, I went back to bed.

But it's been a happy January 1. Before I left San Pablo earlier, my cousins went to our house and we talked, made fun of each other, played psp alternately. I felt home. I felt young. I felt like my real self. I also gave Tito Joven the only copy of Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog I brought home. He naturally asked for a dedication. I wrote: "Kay Tito Joven na nagturo sa aking magbasa at magsulat: Maraming salamat sa lahat!" Even before I entered kindergarten, Tito Joven would spend the late afternoons trying to teach me my abakada. He was also the one who introduced me to the novels of Lualhati Bautista--the most popular three (Gapo, Dekada '70 and Bata, Bata.. Pa'ano Ka Ginawa?) I finished reading even before I graduated from grade school. A revelation: Tito Tony in Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog is about 5% Tito Joven, but I'm not telling in what way.

o O o

The vacation made me catch up with my TV series downloads. This past week I finished watching the six-part Apparitions, and back seasons of Survivor (Borneo, season 1) and The Amazing Race (season 4; I already saw seasons 1 & 2 but had to skip season 3 which is yet to finish downloading). I'm a little slow on watching movies, however; saw only two in the past week: Ang Tanging Ina Ninyong Lahat (I just love the very subtle suggestion for the president's need to resign when things are not working for the better) and Wall-E, which I didn't really enjoy much despite the hype in its theatrical release months ago (I thought it's just too romanticized, but what could I expect from Walt Disney's?).

o O o

Can someone ask me to stop spending my internet time building a barrio called Atisan here?

o O o

I don't want any resolutions made this year for myself. I'm happy. Mostly. I only have plans. Many many plans. Right now, I'm actually already working on one of them: My house is finally partly being painted. Yesterday, I already told my high school bestfriends to visit me and see my house on my birthday. The last time I saw them was when I launched Pag-aabang sa Kundiman in 2006 and they went to Conspiracy all the way from Laguna. And this has been the most touching text message I received in recent memory, got from PM yesterday: "Langya ka mis na kta. Brtday mu ha. Andun kami n jepoy. Kamusta daw sbi ng mame."