The last of my female first cousins has just been called by her Creator. Quickly and quietly, so I heard. Without much ado. No lingering illness that would have involved lengthy and vigilant attendance of caregivers. So typical of my Atsing Puring not to burden anyone, not to have anyone fuss over her. All she cared about was to give, give, and give--love, help to anyone in need, even if it meant depriving herself of some personal need. That was the Atsing Puring I had known.
Some years ago, she visited us here in LA after so many years of losing contact wth each other. She stayed in our house for two days. and we chatted deep into the night. At one point she intimated that she just gave her money to relatives and friends in need. "What do I need it for?" She asked. Indeed what for? She was a very simple woman with very simple needs. Never used make-up except baby powder. I doubt if she ever went to the movies, to Disneyland and such, unless perhaps to accompany some nieces or nephews or grandchildren by Bernadette, her only child, who she rescued from a critical illness when still a baby and took unto her own since then with the consent of the biological mother.
When I was small, probably five or seven and thereafter for some years, she would get me to vacation in Capas where she and her mother owned the biggest grocery store in town. She was her mother's right hand person in running the store, the income of which helped in sending her young siblings to school, seeing about the journalism career of one and the medical schooling of another. The journalist rose to become a daily columnist in Manila's Evening News (or was it the Evening Mirror). The doctor went on to become a psychiatrist in the state of Missouri. She sent herself back to school last and only after much prodding from my father, their surrogate father. She had argued she was too old to go back to high school, but upon the insistence of my father who believed one is never too old to finish education, she went back to high school and afterwards to college to become a pharmacist and work in thee pharmacy department of the GSIS in Manila.
Again we lost contact with each other as my husband and I had gone to Iowa City when my husband was invited with a grant to the famed International Writing Program of the University. But the image of Atsing Puring as that woman with a heart always bursting with love, especially for children, had remained in me. In fact, I remember having I written about her when in my Teacher's exam, we were asked to write an essay on The Person I Admire Most. She was a person who never had a mean bone in her body. I can only wish I could emulate her.
Rest in peace, Atsing Puring. Your legacy of kindness, virtuous life and piety will always remain in those you had touched. We love you: three words we may have shown with our respect and caring for you albeit not expressed in loud words before.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Why Do We Repeat Prayers When We Say the Rosary?
"...why is the rosary still a stronghold in the Catholic Church? Why has the rosary stood the test of time for at least eight hundred years since it originated from Spanish theologian St. Dominic, c. 1170-1221?...
Below is from the internet It's so simply put and very much within the grasp of the human mind.
__________
To begin with, the rosary is not a prayer of words, but of meditation. When a Catholic completes praying an entire rosary of 20 mysteries, he or she has meditated upon the entire gospel; the incarnation, birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection, and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. No method of prayer is more beneficial than this. Most Catholics will pray five mysteries per day, and when saying the words, he or she must meditate upon one mystery at a time; for the duration of 10 Hail Marys, before going on to the next "mystery," or meditation. The memorized words are the vehicle by which Catholics are able to keep their minds on the gospel stories.
Secondly, why do Catholics seem to exalt Mary as they recite the Hail Mary over and over again? Actually, when we seem to be exalting Mary, what we're really doing is quoting the gospel verse Luke 1:28 when the Angel Gabriel salutes Mary, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blest are you among women!" This greeting is repeated to her a second time in Luke 1:41-42 when an expectant Mary visits her pregnant cousin Elizabeth in Judea. At Mary's approach, the unborn child within Elizabeth leaps, and she exclaims, "Blest are you among women, and blest is the fruit of your womb!" In other words, blessed is the child within you. That child is Jesus.
In the remainder of the Hail Mary prayer, Catholics ask Mary to pray for them now, and at the hour of death. Catholics often ask Mary to approach her Son Jesus for their petitions. Consider the gospel story, "The Wedding Feast at Cana," in John 2:3-11. Jesus heeds Mary's request and miraculously produces excellent wine for the wedding guests. Here, Jesus performs His first public miracle, revealing His glory through the intercession of His Mother, Mary. Being ever faithful to God in heaven, Jesus obeys the commandment that says, "Honor thy father and mother." He does so in an exemplary way.
In 1 Corinthians 11:1 Paul writes, "Imitate me, then, just as I imitate Christ." Therefore, if we are to imitate Jesus, then we too honor the woman Jesus gave to us with his dying breath when He said to John, "Behold thy mother," and to Mary, "Behold thy son," John 19: 25-27. The key word is "honor," and not "worship."
Finally, what about the statues? The simple answer is that the statues of any saint, not just Mary, are not objects of worship in themselves, but reminders for people to help them focus their minds as they pray. Think about the last time you looked at a photo of your children and said a loving, sincere prayer for their well-being. Perhaps you looked at a photo of a deceased loved one and uttered sincere words to God for their peace. You may even have requested the person himself to help you in your own difficulties. Is the photo the object of the prayer? Of course not. And neither are the statues and images Catholics may use to help them focus their minds as they pray.
The commandment, "Thou shalt not make graven images," refers to worshiping a material object or concept as if it had power unto itself, rather than the God Who created it. This not only refers to statues of false "gods", but things that don't even seem to be objects of worship. Examples of these are astrology, nature, Hollywood celebrities, money, excessive body-building and fitness, excessive "achievement" for its own sake leading to pride and arrogance, animals, the list goes on and on. While most of these things have their proper place and can be inherently good, the excessive pursuit is where the danger enters.
How many people criticize the repetitious prayers of the rosary, and yet regularly watch their favorite television show for empty-headed entertainment? Something to contemplate.
Pray the rosary for world peace while humbly meditating on its mysteries and you will see miracles happen!
Sunday, August 17, 2014
LEGION OF MARY_ACIES@De La Salle
A throwback, copy paste to google: LEGION OF MARY_ACIES@De La Salle
Sunday, August 3, 2014
The Filipino Soul in Borrowed Languages
A favorite issue, one that is in fact brewing currently in the internet among egroups of Filipinos claiming to be nationalists and purists, is the use of a foreign language in all schools in the Philippines. Should English be used as the medium of instruction? Apropos this, though not necessarily on this specific topic, is the question "Does one's nationalism diminish when one chooses a foreign language as his/her medium of writing?" Here's the intro from my old paper in linguistics ages ago: "The Filipino Soul in Borrowed Languages: An Exploration of the Language Issue as It Affects Some Selected Filipino Writers."
The paper, being rather long, however, and I having other duties urgently calling, may just see print elsewhere.
________
......
In her article, "Issues in English Teaaching," Author Sue Brindley shows the Australian framework and curriculum statement for English as emphasizing the connections between language and identity.
...She points out that "learning a language is not simply a question of acquiring ever more complex linguistics skills. ...Children are necessarily aligning themselves with the language and culture of the school," and in the case of an alien tongue, the language and culture of the foreigner. Does this mean that learning a foreign language, and more, choosing to write in a foreign language causes one to lose something of his own cultural identity? Does the whole process of aligning oneself with the language and culture of native speakers of the second language cause one to eventually, and inevitably, acculturate to the point of totally assimilating?
This paper will explore some of the writings of selected outstanding Filipino writers who wrote either in English or Spanish to determine how their sense of nationalism has been affected..
(Will continue later---have to attend a meeting.)
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Ruel
Nolledo graduating from UCLA in 1996, with a Chancellor's Award,
Bachelor of Arts with majors in Psychology and English. An A-1 student
from Prep School in San Beda (First Honors) to Ateneo Univ. High School
(in his First Year Hi, fresh from elem., he garnered First Prizes in the
Short Story, Poetry and Drama Lit. Competition and awarded Best Play
Director); was a consistent honor student in academics and graduated
with Leadership Award for Community Service). Back in the States, was
consistently in the Dean's Honor List at Los Angeles Community College,
recipient of full scholarship at UCLA. Today, he's at the prestigious
USC for a master's degree. But don't let him know you read this because
to him any achievement of his is no big deal. We never knew about these
honors until the time of the awarding. Well, some children just hate
being fussed over.HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ANAK!
A loving uncle, doting on his niece Monica and nephew Nicolo, circa 1992, I think. Sorry, Emilie, you were not born yet, so you're not in the picture.
- Gene Datuin, Lia Natasha Nolledo, Percival R. Datuin and 15 others like this.
Blanca Datuin Yes, that's probably why he never tells us until the time of awarding. Not that it would have mattered much to us whether he gets an award or not. We just want our children to be educated. My other son, a Physics graduate, is just way beyond me. A walking encyclopedia, no less. And Melissa, talented artist (she just had another exhibit in Seattle). I feel like I've been left behind.
Albert B. Casuga Bravo, Ruel. Congratulations, Blanca, for a tribe increasing in a manner they are meant to---to leave something behind to make this place a better place. And to you, Ding, wherever you are now roaming. @ The little one Ruel is cuddling is a spitting image of WDN. Ruel has your softer features. You got good gifts from the Stork, amiga.- Cesar Polvorosa Jr. The children don't usually fully appreciate this until they themselves become parents and go through the experience. In the last family "event" we had to sweet talk the youngest to pause just long enough for a picture with the dad...
- Albert B. Casuga True, Ces. Ang youngest apo ko monopolizes me sa picture-taking. Nakakatuwa. Sila ba, or tayong mga Lolo at Lola na memento-crazy? Ang unico hijo ko naman ang hindi mahilig. (You're still around, Popsy, he says.) .
Amelia Datuin Baun-Hamdan You must really be proud of him, Auntie Blanca!! He got Datuin and Nolledo's genes.- Albert B. Casuga Blanca, they do grow up and they go away. But we always maintain the vinculum---heart strings reach far. @ I would like Mimi to take a photoart pic of Ruel's baldie.
- Blanca Datuin To Mel Datuin Baun-Hamdan: No more than I am proud of his brother and sisters, for their tenacity to grow as persons. You have to take your children as they are, and love them unconditionally, with or without achievements. Ruel and Orly, who live not too far from my house, are both so loving and thoughtful as sons. I'm grateful they haven't opted to live far from me.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
The Legion of Mary Annual Acies Ceremony
Sharing the solemnity of this beautiful Annual Consecration to the Blessed Mother Mary. Click on LEGION OF MARY_ACIES@De La Salle.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
UPDATE of THROUGH THE YEARS
THROUGH THE YEARS:
RE-POSTING FROM THE ARCHIVE -
OVERCOMING THE DROUGHT
Almost two decades ago, on a cold December night, I drove to Los Angeles, telling my family I was just going to a meeting. In truth, I was going to receive an award from the Jose Rizal Memorial Organization in the U.S. for my essay, "Reaching for World Peace." It was a long drive and a courageous one at that, because I had to do the side streets since I had already stopped doing the freeway. Why the secrecy? I didn't think it should be fussed over. As my son Ruel would say of his own achievements, "No big deal."
I had kept my writing a secret as much as I could, so fearful was I of paling in comparison with my husband, a mogul in writing even while still on campus where we both met. It would hurt him that I should even feel that way, for he so much would have been supportive. But that's just it--our being so close in affinity would endanger my sense of identity and freedom. As it was, even the title of one of the few stories I had written after marriage was already influenced by our common love for Dylan Thomas: Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
When Ding (as he was known by his close friends) first left for Iowa University on a grant in 1965, I escaped from my loneliness upon being left alone in the Philippines by writing a short story, Go Gentle into that Good Night, published in the Philippines' Weekly Nation Magazine and then winning its Short Story of the Month Contest. It was my maiden name I used and the chairman of the Board of Judges, National Artist N.V.M. Gonzales, thinking that was my married surname, referred to me in his write-up as Mrs. Datuin, having seen me heavy with child when I claimed payment for the published work. (In those times, single mothers were not in vogue, so if you're pregnant, you must be married and if you're married you must be carrying the last name of your husband. I chose to separate my writing identity.)
In his comment on the decision, N.V.M. Gonazales wrote: "The tone and delicate handling of Mrs. Datuin's material are most remarkable especially considering the requirements which her subject calls for. It is for this that her story will be memorable to many readers."
Meeting NVM face to face thirty-two years after, during a parangal party for him in North Hollywood as hosted by Linda Nietes of Casa Linda Bookstore, I introduced myself as an author of a short story he had voted for as Short Story of the Month. His first question was "Have you written since then?" When I answered no, his reaction was, "Why did you stop writing?" How could I explain to him the years of childbearing and child-rearing when my husband, family and earning a living came first and ahead of any creative functioning. Ideas would come out like flashes of lightning when you're in the middle of laundering, cooking, teaching and then you cannot sit down and germinate them. It's like aborting babies that you desperately want to give birth to. Actually, I had written and published two other stories after that: Light to Last (Philippines Free Press), Bury Me in Santo Domingo (Weekend Magazine), and a few magazine articles.
Indulging in art is a selfish occupation: you tend to neglect your mundane obligations, in fact, even your own self. My husband had admitted to such as though a way of apologizing, which he didn't have to do, as I understood fully well the nature of his occupation. and his need to give that God-given talent to the outside world. I had seen him work clicky-clack on his Hermes typewriter till the wee hours of the morning, and all I could help him with was look after his health and serve tea and sympathy. Though I insisted he needed sleep, he couldn't resist that urge to put into writing those words and ideas that haunted him no end. When he had to submit his works for a literary competition, I took care of arranging the pages, putting them together with fasteners and stacking them in those big brown envelopes, making sure that the real name was in a separate sealed envelope. Authors' names were always anonymous. Receiving that long-awaited letter announcing his having won the competition was a welcome consolation for those long hours of writing.
But I digress too much. All I meant to do was share an excerpt from my essay, "Reaching for World Peace," which I would do for my next post.
 |
| Add caption |
 |
| From the MEND Monthly Bulletin |
 | |||
| Class under LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District), 2009 |
 |
| ESL Class, 2013, at Our Lady of Peace |
.JPG) |
| Legion of Mary Acies Function, 2014 |
RE-POSTING FROM THE ARCHIVE -
OVERCOMING THE DROUGHT
Almost two decades ago, on a cold December night, I drove to Los Angeles, telling my family I was just going to a meeting. In truth, I was going to receive an award from the Jose Rizal Memorial Organization in the U.S. for my essay, "Reaching for World Peace." It was a long drive and a courageous one at that, because I had to do the side streets since I had already stopped doing the freeway. Why the secrecy? I didn't think it should be fussed over. As my son Ruel would say of his own achievements, "No big deal."
I had kept my writing a secret as much as I could, so fearful was I of paling in comparison with my husband, a mogul in writing even while still on campus where we both met. It would hurt him that I should even feel that way, for he so much would have been supportive. But that's just it--our being so close in affinity would endanger my sense of identity and freedom. As it was, even the title of one of the few stories I had written after marriage was already influenced by our common love for Dylan Thomas: Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
When Ding (as he was known by his close friends) first left for Iowa University on a grant in 1965, I escaped from my loneliness upon being left alone in the Philippines by writing a short story, Go Gentle into that Good Night, published in the Philippines' Weekly Nation Magazine and then winning its Short Story of the Month Contest. It was my maiden name I used and the chairman of the Board of Judges, National Artist N.V.M. Gonzales, thinking that was my married surname, referred to me in his write-up as Mrs. Datuin, having seen me heavy with child when I claimed payment for the published work. (In those times, single mothers were not in vogue, so if you're pregnant, you must be married and if you're married you must be carrying the last name of your husband. I chose to separate my writing identity.)
In his comment on the decision, N.V.M. Gonazales wrote: "The tone and delicate handling of Mrs. Datuin's material are most remarkable especially considering the requirements which her subject calls for. It is for this that her story will be memorable to many readers."
Meeting NVM face to face thirty-two years after, during a parangal party for him in North Hollywood as hosted by Linda Nietes of Casa Linda Bookstore, I introduced myself as an author of a short story he had voted for as Short Story of the Month. His first question was "Have you written since then?" When I answered no, his reaction was, "Why did you stop writing?" How could I explain to him the years of childbearing and child-rearing when my husband, family and earning a living came first and ahead of any creative functioning. Ideas would come out like flashes of lightning when you're in the middle of laundering, cooking, teaching and then you cannot sit down and germinate them. It's like aborting babies that you desperately want to give birth to. Actually, I had written and published two other stories after that: Light to Last (Philippines Free Press), Bury Me in Santo Domingo (Weekend Magazine), and a few magazine articles.
Indulging in art is a selfish occupation: you tend to neglect your mundane obligations, in fact, even your own self. My husband had admitted to such as though a way of apologizing, which he didn't have to do, as I understood fully well the nature of his occupation. and his need to give that God-given talent to the outside world. I had seen him work clicky-clack on his Hermes typewriter till the wee hours of the morning, and all I could help him with was look after his health and serve tea and sympathy. Though I insisted he needed sleep, he couldn't resist that urge to put into writing those words and ideas that haunted him no end. When he had to submit his works for a literary competition, I took care of arranging the pages, putting them together with fasteners and stacking them in those big brown envelopes, making sure that the real name was in a separate sealed envelope. Authors' names were always anonymous. Receiving that long-awaited letter announcing his having won the competition was a welcome consolation for those long hours of writing.
But I digress too much. All I meant to do was share an excerpt from my essay, "Reaching for World Peace," which I would do for my next post.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
WILFRIDO D. NOLLEDO AMID THE ALIEN CORN
On the occasion of the 81st birthday of my late husband, Wilfrido, I'm posting here an excerpt from an article by the famous Nick Joaquin as reposted in 2011 by the equally famous poet/fictionist/essayist Albert Casuga in his blog, albertcasuga.blogspot.com.The article is a reprint from Nick Joaquin's collection of essays published more than four decades ago.
From Albert Casuga's blog:
Friday, October 21, 2011
A 1970 ESSAY BY PHILIPPINE NATIONAL ARTIST NICK JOAQUIN: WILFRIDO D. NOLLEDO AMID THE ALIEN CORN
Reposting
this article by Nick Joaquin in response to requests from FilAm
Philippine Literature students for material on the late Ding Nolledo,
By Quijano de Manila (Nick Joaquin)
October 1970
A CULT among the young writers.of the country is Wilfrido Nolledo, who is to Philippine prose what Villa is to its verse.
If Villa has heightened the language of poetry to an almost angelic incandescence, Nolledo has deepened the language of fiction to a near-apocalyptic density. For both these magi, the medium is the message. A Villa poem itself informs the clairvoyance required to behold it; every story by Nolledo recreates a reader into its reader in the same way that not everyone could see a Picasso until the body of Picasso's work had developed in the public a new eye with which to view it. It sounds incredible now, but what have become the classic Hemingway stories were found unreadable by the editors he first sent them to. Nolledo underwent a similar experience. His prose was found dazzling all right—but what the hell was the guy saying?
An original from the start, a Melchizedek sprung from no ascertainable parentage, Nolledo has baffled with his labyrinths, where a Theseus may sense not one but a herd of minotaur: Joyce and jazz and basketball and the cinema Old Spain and the kanto-boy Manila... So one might begin to tag the influences.. Godard and Antonioni and Fellini and Bergman would have to be specified; Eliot, too, and the gothic Henry James; and the rituals of Philippine folk Catholicism. The prose will sometimes bellow with beer, though the references are to wine, Spanish or rice.
But what always results from all this is Nolledo, always peculiarly himself: a method in his madness, a cunning even in his most delirious dithyrambs. The Nolledo labyrinth is baroque, but at the heart of it is a coziness of open space where at a simple table sits a man with wife and children eating supper under the stars.
A local cult within a decade after he began writing, Nolledo has now, at 37, stepped before the international audience. Out this month in New York, published by E. P. Dutton & Company, is Nolledo’s first novel, "But For The Lovers," where the young magus of language has turned the Philippine war experience into a poem. It's a beautifully printed book, running to 316 pages, and it begins with a prologue that begins with a paragraph that begins with a sentence that are like no beginning you'd ever expect of a war novel.
Listen:
"He was beginning to eat flowers and the crescent moon was in his eyes when he awoke again. One night long ago when they had intercepted a code from the enemy on the shortwave and had not needed him anymore, they pulled out their tents, mantled him with leaves and left him. They left him a rifle, a buri basket and a book of psalms, for the Major had decreed in defense of the murderer: Let the little Legionnaire lie here and die; it is written, it shall be read. But the boy went on sleeping: and did not die and when he awakened it was to see (it was to find himself alone) a bird, a white-winged maya dart in from the west, perhaps headed for the monsoon. Steadying the Springfield, he cocked the hammer with a quivering thumb, and waited. It flew away, whatever it was, and now he squinted up and remembered that it was the first time in a long spell he had seen the sky, and he thought: It is longer, lonelier and lovelier than any of my prayers. He sighted the nimbus-an eagle in captivity-and fired.
"Lord,” he said, “I am punching holes in your garret."
After that, one should quote the blurb on the book’s jacket:
"But For The Lovers marks the debut of a strongly original voice in contemporary fiction. This extraordinary novel is no less remarkable for the power and beauty of its' language than for the exotic and magical world it creates. Set in the Philippines during the Second World War, But For The Lovers depicts the survival of a group of Filipinos during the Japanese Occupation and American liberation.
The expatriate writer is still our culture hero.
DING, as family and friend call Wilfrido Nolledo, is a Manila boy, born and bred in the tough district of Balic- Balic. He high-school'd at San Beda, finished the fourth year at National University, moved on to Santo Tomas for a Lit. B. and a graduate course. His college, the Philets, was then famed as a breeding ground for writers, having produced such lights as Johnny Tuvera, Sionil Jose, Johnny Gatbonton, Rolando Tinio and Jose Flores. On the pontifical campus Ding was a shy quiet boy, a loner, but he did get to be literary editor fIrst of the Philets magazine, Blue Quill and then of the university organ, The Varsitarian. His post on Blue Quill was taken over by a slim cool girl named Blanca Datuin, whom Ding began to fancy. At 15, Ding broke into print with a report on the; Cabanela-Anduha fight for The Sporting World; at 20, emerged as a fictionist with a series of short stories-. "Sun." "Veronica" and "Carnival" in the Chronicle weekly magazine; then won the top prize in the 1954 Marian Year literary contest with "The Beginning." But the Nolledo cult actually began with his prizewinners in the Free Press short story contest: "Maria Concepcion” (second prize, 1959); "Kayumanggi, Mon Amour" (third prize, 1960); "Rice Wine" (first prize, 1961); and "The Last Caucus (first prize, 1963). In these stories the Nolledo style has already developed its characteristic density. He won three third prizes in the Palanca Contest (1960, ‘61, ‘62) and six prizes for his one-act plays, one of which, “Turn Red the Sea,” was the top winner for 1963.
In 1959, two years after her graduation, he married Blanca Datuin, they eventually set up house on an alley off Tayuman aptly named Makata: the poet lived on Poet Street. He joined the Free Press staff in 1964, turned from teetotaller into beer drinker, did the movie write-ups and such memorable articles as an expose on North Harbor and a report on Manila’s nightlife. In 1966 he left for the United States on a fellowship to the Writers Workshop of Iowa University.
This October, three years after he started it, "But For The Lovers" appeared in New York, the first book from one Filipino writer who looks to be fecund and durable.
THE NOVEL, "But For The Lovers," has the feel of the picaresque, a vagabond manner established by its prologue, where a fantastic trio-an American soldier, a native girl, a Japanese sailor-wander through the nightmare landscapes of war. Soldier and sailor are killed, the girl shoots down their killers, then is floated 'away "on a piece of house," weeping and singing: "0 Quasimoto-San, I long for your treason. . .
The novel proper, though cored round a boarding- house in Manila, likewise is ambulant with rogues and innocents "drifting around like sleepwalkers." They range a various geography.
Item: Hidalgo de Anuncio, a Castilian relic of road-show vaudeville, once a great clown, now merely the non-top banana on the burlesque stage of wartime Manila. Nolledo here amazingly recreates the atmosphere of decayed vaudeville and in the absurd figure of Hidalgo de Anuncio interweaves backstage vulgarity and well-bred nostalgia, Quiapo and Intramuros.
Item: The Hidalgo's scabrous houseboy Molave Amoran (the names in the book have an amusing grotesquerie), a "night mammal. . . bred from four generations of squatter-scavengers in Tondo," thief' and hustler and hunter of urban game: "Amoran loved Manila. It was his territory. Especially at night of full moon and scrawny cats and dogs. Those animals' habits he timed to the second, knowing exactly where to locate them at a given hour, how large a group was loose… Meat was the thing and the Chinese cooks who operated Manila’s fringe panciterias never asked questions.”
Item: Tira Colombo, landlady of the boardinghouse on Calle Ojos Verdes three times widowed, still a voracious feeder on male meat, of which she can have her fill from those of her boarders who are behind in rent and are willing to pay in kind: "The Sperm Count as of this morning was fifty-fifty. Four probables (two bachelors, two common-law husbands) were remaindered for active duty during the holidays. Qualitatively, at least one of these possessed physical assets negotiable in A-I fornication . . .Her bulbous nose could sniff out a man's genitals in a suit of armor." But it's her genteel tenant in Room 13, Hidalgo de Anuncio, that landlady Tira Colombo is most in a rut to get to her basement bed. Tira Colombo is Nolledo's earth goddess: "Her wicker chair was set down in room thirteen. Like an Ethiopian high priestess en route to the temple, the landlady had been borne up the stairs ' by her attendants ('maids in wailing') who, dusky and stolid, resembled Babylonian slaves ransomed to imperial service. Paying tenants peeled out their doors for a glimpse of their mistress (plumped up by feather cushions) . . . The Colombo runners returned, their reina gesticulating with fly-swatter. Singing with spears in their lungs, they pounced upon the wicker throne, bearing Tira the Terrible aloft . . . She was First Female, the Woman of the Seig, neur (though Hidalgo did not know it), Queen of the Scavengers, sarap-sarap!”
Item: A sick girl whom Hidalgo de Anuncio finds on Avenida Rizal and
takes back to his room at Ojos Verdes, where, on awaking from a long
sleep, she relates to an assembly the wondrous adventures of her
picaresque life. She is, it turns out, the girl in the prologue. And the
Philippine symbol? "Neither an Hidalgo nor a Shikura, given all the
time and giving back tyranny, would leave one, mark on her that she
would not somehow shed like a molting skin-being as she was that most
irreducible grade of human a snake ever turned to. "What's .her name?
"Nei ther Brooklyn's bravado nor the promise of New York will take you
out of the corn fields." But what's her name? "As long as she was a
dryad among demons on pontoon bridges, as long as she was a decibel in
the drum roll of the U.S. Cavalry, as long as she was a cricket in the
crusts of Intramuros, and as long as she was Mandarin eyes and Malayan
hair among benzedrine masks and blond cornucopia. . . " Maria Alma.
Virgin Soul.
Item: The boardinghouse: "creeping with exotica, it’s life source delineated, by somnambulistic mammalia - whose chief accent is the Scream, whose obsession is Survival at any price."
Nolledo has made that boardinghouse an image of the panic world of war-crazed Manila and the various streams of consciousness that wash through it, glinting with bits of history, swell at last into a tide of racial memory.
At book’s climax—February, the month of Aquarius-— the Liberation is thundering fatally (Boom! Boom! Boom!) over Manila and Tira Colombo has finally made it to Room 13, is trying to rape Hidalgo de Anuncio, but can't coax a hard on. "Perhaps a little loving bite? Boom! Boom! Boom!
The head carne off; a ligament stuck in her incisor left." As the boardinghouse explodes to American fire. When the ruins are dug up six months later, the clean-up detail un- earth: "one incredibly intact pair of Spanish cojones (as though left in preservatives); a soprano's dehydrated tonsils (to be mistaken for pig liver); and a woman's bacterial breast (siliconed with worms)."
As you can see, "But For The Lovers" is an outrageous book. It's very funny and savage and grim and beautiful. It has a long uproarious passage on jacking off that out-Portnoys the Complaint and an equally hilarious chapter on a. nude tango contest where the winner is the last male to come. .
The style is a sustained audacity. Though the language is heightened to the level of poetry, the narrative is readable tale, the action an excitement. A critic once said, apropos D. H. Lawrence, that realism in the modern novel should be a bush recognizably real but on fire. In Nolledo, as in Lawrence, the bushes are for real-and every bush burns.
Says Nolledo's Hidalgo de Anuncio:
"The Spanish novel in the Philippines will be commemorated in English. Everything else is posthumous."
"But For The Lovers" is the Spanish novel in the Philippines commemorated in an English that is a peaking of our culture and Wilfrido Nolledo is the link between Rizal and the "posthumous" crop of young writers in Tagalog.
WILFRIDO D. NOLLEDO
AMID THE ALIEN CORN
AMID THE ALIEN CORN
October 1970
A CULT among the young writers.of the country is Wilfrido Nolledo, who is to Philippine prose what Villa is to its verse.
If Villa has heightened the language of poetry to an almost angelic incandescence, Nolledo has deepened the language of fiction to a near-apocalyptic density. For both these magi, the medium is the message. A Villa poem itself informs the clairvoyance required to behold it; every story by Nolledo recreates a reader into its reader in the same way that not everyone could see a Picasso until the body of Picasso's work had developed in the public a new eye with which to view it. It sounds incredible now, but what have become the classic Hemingway stories were found unreadable by the editors he first sent them to. Nolledo underwent a similar experience. His prose was found dazzling all right—but what the hell was the guy saying?
An original from the start, a Melchizedek sprung from no ascertainable parentage, Nolledo has baffled with his labyrinths, where a Theseus may sense not one but a herd of minotaur: Joyce and jazz and basketball and the cinema Old Spain and the kanto-boy Manila... So one might begin to tag the influences.. Godard and Antonioni and Fellini and Bergman would have to be specified; Eliot, too, and the gothic Henry James; and the rituals of Philippine folk Catholicism. The prose will sometimes bellow with beer, though the references are to wine, Spanish or rice.
But what always results from all this is Nolledo, always peculiarly himself: a method in his madness, a cunning even in his most delirious dithyrambs. The Nolledo labyrinth is baroque, but at the heart of it is a coziness of open space where at a simple table sits a man with wife and children eating supper under the stars.
A local cult within a decade after he began writing, Nolledo has now, at 37, stepped before the international audience. Out this month in New York, published by E. P. Dutton & Company, is Nolledo’s first novel, "But For The Lovers," where the young magus of language has turned the Philippine war experience into a poem. It's a beautifully printed book, running to 316 pages, and it begins with a prologue that begins with a paragraph that begins with a sentence that are like no beginning you'd ever expect of a war novel.
Listen:
"He was beginning to eat flowers and the crescent moon was in his eyes when he awoke again. One night long ago when they had intercepted a code from the enemy on the shortwave and had not needed him anymore, they pulled out their tents, mantled him with leaves and left him. They left him a rifle, a buri basket and a book of psalms, for the Major had decreed in defense of the murderer: Let the little Legionnaire lie here and die; it is written, it shall be read. But the boy went on sleeping: and did not die and when he awakened it was to see (it was to find himself alone) a bird, a white-winged maya dart in from the west, perhaps headed for the monsoon. Steadying the Springfield, he cocked the hammer with a quivering thumb, and waited. It flew away, whatever it was, and now he squinted up and remembered that it was the first time in a long spell he had seen the sky, and he thought: It is longer, lonelier and lovelier than any of my prayers. He sighted the nimbus-an eagle in captivity-and fired.
"Lord,” he said, “I am punching holes in your garret."
After that, one should quote the blurb on the book’s jacket:
"But For The Lovers marks the debut of a strongly original voice in contemporary fiction. This extraordinary novel is no less remarkable for the power and beauty of its' language than for the exotic and magical world it creates. Set in the Philippines during the Second World War, But For The Lovers depicts the survival of a group of Filipinos during the Japanese Occupation and American liberation.
"An
old mail who used to wander the countryside entertaining children, a
young girl raped by Japanese soldiers and a ha1f-caste all huddled
together in the slums of Manila their eyes fastened on the sky and the
sea. At night guerrilla messengers bring word of the coming of the
American Army to drive, away the Japanese invaders. This is the
beginning of a new novel whose surface story only suggests the invention
and history that awaits the reader. The cast of characters is enormous,
ranging from a half-mad prisoner to a Japanese major who views the war
as the first step in the liberation of the Asian people from Western
civilization. There is an American pilot shot down by the Japanese who
falls in love with the young girl, an amazing keeper of a boardinghouse
who spends her life planning the seduction of the old man.
"Not for years has there been a novel so teeming with life, so rich and complex in language, history, mythology."
Even as blurbs go, that one is a blitz. A more objective advance opinion is offered by the trade journal Publisher's Weekly, which ran a pre-publication notice on the Nolledo novel:
"This is a strange, compelling book that has the tortuous complexity and is fraught with the labyrinthine terrors of a dream. It is difficult to convey the full flavor of this novel, its combination of the real and surreal that becomes almost hypnotic. The place is Manila during the Japanese Occupation. Everyone is waiting for the coming of the rescuing Americans. Cabals, assassinations abound. The focus is on Ojos Verdes, a boarding house 'creeping with exotica,' in which everyone seethes with collective and individual rage. The cast of characters ranges from the intellectual Japanese commander of a prison camp, to a nameless girl, a war orphan, a strange old man. The lame, the halt and the blind are all here, but grotesque as they are, they are treated with reverence. Serious review attention can be expected."
However his book may fare on the market and with the critics, Nolledo has advanced the cause of expression in the Philippines and in the classic if melancholy tradition of epochal Philippine books (the Rizal novels, the Villa poems) published in terra aliena.
"Not for years has there been a novel so teeming with life, so rich and complex in language, history, mythology."
Even as blurbs go, that one is a blitz. A more objective advance opinion is offered by the trade journal Publisher's Weekly, which ran a pre-publication notice on the Nolledo novel:
"This is a strange, compelling book that has the tortuous complexity and is fraught with the labyrinthine terrors of a dream. It is difficult to convey the full flavor of this novel, its combination of the real and surreal that becomes almost hypnotic. The place is Manila during the Japanese Occupation. Everyone is waiting for the coming of the rescuing Americans. Cabals, assassinations abound. The focus is on Ojos Verdes, a boarding house 'creeping with exotica,' in which everyone seethes with collective and individual rage. The cast of characters ranges from the intellectual Japanese commander of a prison camp, to a nameless girl, a war orphan, a strange old man. The lame, the halt and the blind are all here, but grotesque as they are, they are treated with reverence. Serious review attention can be expected."
However his book may fare on the market and with the critics, Nolledo has advanced the cause of expression in the Philippines and in the classic if melancholy tradition of epochal Philippine books (the Rizal novels, the Villa poems) published in terra aliena.
The expatriate writer is still our culture hero.
DING, as family and friend call Wilfrido Nolledo, is a Manila boy, born and bred in the tough district of Balic- Balic. He high-school'd at San Beda, finished the fourth year at National University, moved on to Santo Tomas for a Lit. B. and a graduate course. His college, the Philets, was then famed as a breeding ground for writers, having produced such lights as Johnny Tuvera, Sionil Jose, Johnny Gatbonton, Rolando Tinio and Jose Flores. On the pontifical campus Ding was a shy quiet boy, a loner, but he did get to be literary editor fIrst of the Philets magazine, Blue Quill and then of the university organ, The Varsitarian. His post on Blue Quill was taken over by a slim cool girl named Blanca Datuin, whom Ding began to fancy. At 15, Ding broke into print with a report on the; Cabanela-Anduha fight for The Sporting World; at 20, emerged as a fictionist with a series of short stories-. "Sun." "Veronica" and "Carnival" in the Chronicle weekly magazine; then won the top prize in the 1954 Marian Year literary contest with "The Beginning." But the Nolledo cult actually began with his prizewinners in the Free Press short story contest: "Maria Concepcion” (second prize, 1959); "Kayumanggi, Mon Amour" (third prize, 1960); "Rice Wine" (first prize, 1961); and "The Last Caucus (first prize, 1963). In these stories the Nolledo style has already developed its characteristic density. He won three third prizes in the Palanca Contest (1960, ‘61, ‘62) and six prizes for his one-act plays, one of which, “Turn Red the Sea,” was the top winner for 1963.
In 1959, two years after her graduation, he married Blanca Datuin, they eventually set up house on an alley off Tayuman aptly named Makata: the poet lived on Poet Street. He joined the Free Press staff in 1964, turned from teetotaller into beer drinker, did the movie write-ups and such memorable articles as an expose on North Harbor and a report on Manila’s nightlife. In 1966 he left for the United States on a fellowship to the Writers Workshop of Iowa University.
This October, three years after he started it, "But For The Lovers" appeared in New York, the first book from one Filipino writer who looks to be fecund and durable.
THE NOVEL, "But For The Lovers," has the feel of the picaresque, a vagabond manner established by its prologue, where a fantastic trio-an American soldier, a native girl, a Japanese sailor-wander through the nightmare landscapes of war. Soldier and sailor are killed, the girl shoots down their killers, then is floated 'away "on a piece of house," weeping and singing: "0 Quasimoto-San, I long for your treason. . .
The novel proper, though cored round a boarding- house in Manila, likewise is ambulant with rogues and innocents "drifting around like sleepwalkers." They range a various geography.
Item: Hidalgo de Anuncio, a Castilian relic of road-show vaudeville, once a great clown, now merely the non-top banana on the burlesque stage of wartime Manila. Nolledo here amazingly recreates the atmosphere of decayed vaudeville and in the absurd figure of Hidalgo de Anuncio interweaves backstage vulgarity and well-bred nostalgia, Quiapo and Intramuros.
Item: The Hidalgo's scabrous houseboy Molave Amoran (the names in the book have an amusing grotesquerie), a "night mammal. . . bred from four generations of squatter-scavengers in Tondo," thief' and hustler and hunter of urban game: "Amoran loved Manila. It was his territory. Especially at night of full moon and scrawny cats and dogs. Those animals' habits he timed to the second, knowing exactly where to locate them at a given hour, how large a group was loose… Meat was the thing and the Chinese cooks who operated Manila’s fringe panciterias never asked questions.”
Item: Tira Colombo, landlady of the boardinghouse on Calle Ojos Verdes three times widowed, still a voracious feeder on male meat, of which she can have her fill from those of her boarders who are behind in rent and are willing to pay in kind: "The Sperm Count as of this morning was fifty-fifty. Four probables (two bachelors, two common-law husbands) were remaindered for active duty during the holidays. Qualitatively, at least one of these possessed physical assets negotiable in A-I fornication . . .Her bulbous nose could sniff out a man's genitals in a suit of armor." But it's her genteel tenant in Room 13, Hidalgo de Anuncio, that landlady Tira Colombo is most in a rut to get to her basement bed. Tira Colombo is Nolledo's earth goddess: "Her wicker chair was set down in room thirteen. Like an Ethiopian high priestess en route to the temple, the landlady had been borne up the stairs ' by her attendants ('maids in wailing') who, dusky and stolid, resembled Babylonian slaves ransomed to imperial service. Paying tenants peeled out their doors for a glimpse of their mistress (plumped up by feather cushions) . . . The Colombo runners returned, their reina gesticulating with fly-swatter. Singing with spears in their lungs, they pounced upon the wicker throne, bearing Tira the Terrible aloft . . . She was First Female, the Woman of the Seig, neur (though Hidalgo did not know it), Queen of the Scavengers, sarap-sarap!”
Item: A sick girl whom Hidalgo de Anuncio finds on Avenida Rizal and
takes back to his room at Ojos Verdes, where, on awaking from a long
sleep, she relates to an assembly the wondrous adventures of her
picaresque life. She is, it turns out, the girl in the prologue. And the
Philippine symbol? "Neither an Hidalgo nor a Shikura, given all the
time and giving back tyranny, would leave one, mark on her that she
would not somehow shed like a molting skin-being as she was that most
irreducible grade of human a snake ever turned to. "What's .her name?
"Nei ther Brooklyn's bravado nor the promise of New York will take you
out of the corn fields." But what's her name? "As long as she was a
dryad among demons on pontoon bridges, as long as she was a decibel in
the drum roll of the U.S. Cavalry, as long as she was a cricket in the
crusts of Intramuros, and as long as she was Mandarin eyes and Malayan
hair among benzedrine masks and blond cornucopia. . . " Maria Alma.
Virgin Soul. Item: The boardinghouse: "creeping with exotica, it’s life source delineated, by somnambulistic mammalia - whose chief accent is the Scream, whose obsession is Survival at any price."
Nolledo has made that boardinghouse an image of the panic world of war-crazed Manila and the various streams of consciousness that wash through it, glinting with bits of history, swell at last into a tide of racial memory.
At book’s climax—February, the month of Aquarius-— the Liberation is thundering fatally (Boom! Boom! Boom!) over Manila and Tira Colombo has finally made it to Room 13, is trying to rape Hidalgo de Anuncio, but can't coax a hard on. "Perhaps a little loving bite? Boom! Boom! Boom!
The head carne off; a ligament stuck in her incisor left." As the boardinghouse explodes to American fire. When the ruins are dug up six months later, the clean-up detail un- earth: "one incredibly intact pair of Spanish cojones (as though left in preservatives); a soprano's dehydrated tonsils (to be mistaken for pig liver); and a woman's bacterial breast (siliconed with worms)."
As you can see, "But For The Lovers" is an outrageous book. It's very funny and savage and grim and beautiful. It has a long uproarious passage on jacking off that out-Portnoys the Complaint and an equally hilarious chapter on a. nude tango contest where the winner is the last male to come. .
The style is a sustained audacity. Though the language is heightened to the level of poetry, the narrative is readable tale, the action an excitement. A critic once said, apropos D. H. Lawrence, that realism in the modern novel should be a bush recognizably real but on fire. In Nolledo, as in Lawrence, the bushes are for real-and every bush burns.
Says Nolledo's Hidalgo de Anuncio:
"The Spanish novel in the Philippines will be commemorated in English. Everything else is posthumous."
"But For The Lovers" is the Spanish novel in the Philippines commemorated in an English that is a peaking of our culture and Wilfrido Nolledo is the link between Rizal and the "posthumous" crop of young writers in Tagalog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment