kantogirlblues

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script

2009-09-11T12:10:00.005+08:00

Josh Olson was cornered at a party by a young man and his girlfriend. The young man recently spent a year of his life writing a screenplay, and was about to submit it to a contest or whatever--but he wants a professional opinion. Is this any good? Who better to ask than someone who's been nominated for an Academny Award for his work on A History of Violence, right?

Olson knew he should have said no. He barely knew the guy but he knew the girlfriend, and so took the 2-page synopsis, read the crap, and tried to thoughtfully put down words on paper. The e-mail took him longer than several movie rewrites, and later, another mutual friend comes up to him. "I heard you pulled a dickmove on Whatshisface."

This is why Josh Olson--and any sane writing professional--will not read your fucking script:

Which brings us to an ugly truth about many aspiring screenwriters: They think that screenwriting doesn't actually require the ability to write, just the ability to come up with a cool story that would make a cool movie. Screenwriting is widely regarded as the easiest way to break into the movie business, because it doesn't require any kind of training, skill or equipment. Everybody can write, right? And because they believe that, they don't regard working screenwriters with any kind of real respect. They will hand you a piece of inept writing without a second thought, because you do not have to be a writer to be a screenwriter.

Screenwriters never really get the respect they deserve. Olson relates an anecdote about Picasso, who was approached by a guy at a party and asks Picasso to draw on a napkin and he'll pay him. Picasso does it, hands the drawing to the man and asks for a million dollars. "What, but it took you thirty seconds to do that!" Picasso shrugs, "Well, it took me fifty years to learn to do that in thirty seconds."

The anecdote underscores the fact that writers are never really perceived as professionals. Olson compares this with asking a house painter friend to paint your living room on his day off, or asking a surgeon to take out your gall bladder over coffee. Writers get paid to read someone's work and give their professional opinion on it. Nobody really just wakes up and goes to the gym, and suddenly realizes, "But, oh, I can do a triple bypass on someone right now." The same way with writers.

Elsewhere, a really bizarre internet true story by Olson: The Life and Death of Jesse James.

Campbell's Sticky Tape Soup

2009-09-10T15:18:00.007+08:00

Eddie Campbell with God: "I knew it! All of existence is held together with paper clips and sticky tape."

While waiting in the dentist's office last weekend, I realized I didn't bring any books with me. I snuck into the Powerbooks branch downstairs and went through their sale pile. And there, waiting for me was a copy of Eddie Campbell's The Fate of the Artist (New York: First Second Books, 2006). At 85% off and Php119--and a first edition at that--it's a steal and very much worth it. Managed to finish it over two dental visits.

The book's title page declares that this is "an autobiographical novel (1) , with typographical anomalies (2), in which the author does not appear as himself (3)."

What this means:

(1) The author has suffered a kind of "domestic apocalypse." He has disappeared, and what's left on the floor of his storage space was this scrawled picture of god as a smiley. We hear about Campbell's various neuroses through vignettes told by his daughter Halley, old Honeybee comic strips which portray the travails of a married couple from the last century, and other passages which portray the author as a hypochondriac, depressive, obssessive artist. But then again, which artist is not like that?

(2) The book is a collage of sorts. You have the aforementioned Honeybee strips, the interviews with Halley, the brief prose passages which are bookended with found objects, and sections which look into the tradition of comedy, humor and obscure artists, and even a comics dramatization of O. Henry's "Confessions of a Humorist" featuring Eddie Campbell who is not exactly played by Eddie Campbell.

(3) It's not Eddie Campbell because there's a guy named Richard Seigrist who appears as Eddie Campbell.

It's a very playful book. At 96 pages, it's a short one, but manages to give us a sustained meditation on "the lonely demands of art amid the realities of everyday life."

You can read an excerpt here.

The Ex-Future First Lady

2009-09-09T12:58:00.003+08:00

This comes from the Professional Heckler and reminds me so much of the stories I heard before:

Top 10 Messages Left on Korina Sanchez’ Answering Machine

No. 10: Hello ‘nak, si Nanay Cristy Fermin mo ‘to. Isaisip mo sa tuwina, ang Poong Maykapal ay hindi nagbibigay ng pagsubok na hindi kakayanin ng Kanyang nilalang. Malalampasan mo ‘yan ‘nak. Teka lang, ‘nak, ‘yong pangako mong sobre, ‘di ko pa natatanggap.

No. 9: Hi Korina, sa ABS-CBN newsroom ‘to. We’re all here! Guys, altogether now. One… two… three! Ang saya-saya!

No. 8: Hello Korina, Cynthia Villar here. I don’t expect you to believe me but… ramdam kita. Andun ka na eh! Todo-effort ka na eh! Nag-leave ka pa nga ‘di ba? ‘Tapos, biglang uurong?! Ang sakiiiiiiit! Ang sakit-sakit! Tisyu! Penge akong tisyu!

No. 7: Hi Ma’am, si Abby po ito, secretary ni Dr. Palayan. Gusto pong malaman ni Doc kung gagamitin n’yo pa ang luma n’yong pisngi. Naiwan n’yo raw kasi sa clinic last week.

No. 6: Korina, this is Mel. Yup, Mel Tiangco. Wala lang.

No. 5: Hi Korina, si Sharon ‘to. What you said about Kiko was hurtful. You were never his partner. You are not his wife! Kaya ‘di mo siya nirerespeto. Madrasta ka lang! Madrasta!

No. 4: Hi friendsheeeeeep, this is Kris. Alam mo, I heard your interview sa radio last week and in fairness to you huh, may potential ka sa drama. Promise! Sabi ko nga kay Ms Charo, i-guest ka sa MMK eh. O sige, need to go. Nangungulet na si Josh eh. Humihingi ba naman ng one gallon of ice cream. Gosh, he’s consumed two gallons already ‘noh. Ahah-ahah-ahah! Bye sis! And give my regards to Vice President Mar.

No. 3: Korina, it’s Conrad De Quiros of Inquirer. I just realized, I might have erred in saying that Mar was power hungry. He’s not. But you are!

No. 2: Hon, alam kong nandiyan ka. Alam kong nakikinig ka. Sagutin mo naman ang tawag ko oh. Bakit ba ayaw mo ‘kong kausapin? Ilang beses na ‘kong nag-sorry sa naging decision ko ‘di ba? ‘Tsaka sabi mo sa press, okay lang sa ‘yo ang nangyari. Hon, hello? Hon? Tang-ina hon, ‘pag ako napikon si Noynoy ang papakasalan ko.

And the No. 1 message left on Korina Sanchez’ answering machine…

Hello Korina! Apologies for what happened last week at Club Filipino. Nagmamadali kasi ako kaya nabundol kita. Siyanga pala, si Karma ‘to.

And from Good Times Manila, news about the "strange guttural noises" from Korina Sanchez's house.

Bibi on a Mission

2009-09-03T17:32:00.003+08:00

A bunch of stories that we took up in Creative Writing 10 recently all had to do with stories of childhood and how they handle time: Snow by Julia Alvarez, Reconnaissance by Tara Sering, Forever Overhead by David Foster Wallace (no photo), and Pet Milk by Stuart Dybek (also no photo.) So the class was divided into four groups, one for each story, and they had to figure out the story's plot and timeline and present it to class.

Since the reporting happened after the long break, I didn't really expect a spectacle, but was pleasantly surprised to find out that all the groups were huddled and ready to go. There should be four pictures, one for each story, but the kids with cameras in the class managed to "accidentally" delete the photos so these are the only ones I have.

If you're part of this class and you *do* have photos, please share with the class. Thanks.

The rest of the album is here.

Mixed Bag

2009-08-11T17:47:00.003+08:00

Since I opted to check out the Manila Design Week's Public Art exhibit at Bonifacio High Street on Saturday, was only able to make to MCC on Sunday. Got there early enough--not too many cosplayers were around yet. Went around the venue. There were too many stalls selling toys, and not enough stalls for comics. The stalls for comics were relegated to the very back of the hall, beside the pancakes and the siomai. And by 3 in the afternoon, the place was overran by people in costumes. Not that there's anything bad there, but my friend Carl and I were asking ourselves: If it weren't for the cosplay event, will there be as much people in attendance?

Here's my loot from the recently concluded Metro Comic Con held at the Megamall last August 8 and 9:

There were some reissues which I'd seen from the last two Bahay ng Alumni Komikons. "The Last Datu" by Trese team Budjette Tan and Ka-Jo Baldisimo was interesting. Also got me thinking: Is this somehow part of Trese's mythology? "Aswang Files" won the Best Indie back in 2006. They still haven't come up with Issue # 2, which is bad because I thought Issue # 1 was interesting. The manga influence was quite clear on that one: boy gets beaten up by bullies, a mystery in a tunnel under a bridge. Reminded me of the Inio Asano's Nijigahara Holograph and moody Korean horror movies.

Kill the Vampire

2009-08-06T13:52:00.003+08:00

Entertainment Weekly's Christina Amoroso asks Neil Gaiman how vampires became such a viable cultural commodity through the years, from monsters they have become anti-heroes. Gaiman thinks it has a lot to do with what vampires get to represent. Bram Stoker's vampire was more about repeated seduction in the Victorian era. The next great vampire reincarnation happened when Stephen King wanted to do a vampire story in a small town in Maine--Salem's Lot. The vampire is almost always "The Other," always about "people exiled to the fringes." This is the story of every vampire in popular culture, from Anne Rice's melancholy blood suckers to Sesame Street's The Count. "Vampires," Gaiman thinks, "should be outsiders. They should probably be sexual outsiders. They need to be charismatic. They need to be elegant. They need to be attractive in some way. But they aren’t buying nice suits and calling the shots. And if they are, the book is about something else."

Gaiman thinks that vampires in fiction arrive in waves. From the Victorians to Stephen King and Sesame Street, they have remained viable as figures in ficion because of the constantly renewed figure of the outsider. But Gaiman posits that what changed the game about vampires in fiction, and what gave them a new lease on life and death was AIDS: "You hit the early ‘80s, and suddenly you have something in the blood that is an exchange of blood that kills and is altogether fundamentally about sex. And vampirism essentially came out of the closet as a metaphor for the act of love that kills. Stephen King once said, using the Erica Jung quote, that vampirism is the ultimate zipless f—."

But now that vampires are everywhere, most notably the extreme popularity of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, Gaiman thinks that the wave reached its crest and vampires should go back and hibernate in their coffins for another 20 to 25 years. "Come out the next time as something really different, that would be cool."

The gazillions of teenage girls who find Edward Cullen cute will surely hate this, but I tend to agree with Gaiman. Someone should drive a stake on the sparkly Cullen dude with the weird hair, and come back out when he has a nice hair day. Curiously, I Googled "Kill Edward Cullen" for an image to accompany this blog post and there are 247,000 hits and 307,000 web results. So I'm not alone in this. But for the sake of diplomacy and to avoid getting flamed by the Edward & Bella fans, I opted for a classic Dracula-with-a-stake-through-the-heart pic.

How to Disappear

2009-07-31T17:57:00.000+08:00

Frank Ahearn helps people disappear. For 20 years, he had worked as a "skip tracer," a private investigator who specialises in finding people. He later realized that he could reverse his strategies and instead of finding people, he could make them vanish without a trace.

Ahearn outlines three key steps to a successful disappearance:

First, destroy old information about yourself. Call your video store or electricity company and replace your old, correct phone number with a new, invented one. Introduce spelling mistakes into your utility bills. Create a PO Box for your mail. Don’t use your credit cards and the like. Then, create bogus information to fool private investigators who might be looking for you. Go to one city and apply for an apartment. Rent a car in another one.

The next, final step is the most important one. Move from point A to point B. Create a dummy company to pay your bills. Only use prepaid mobile phones and change them every month. It is nearly impossible to find out where you are unless you make a mistake.

The rules are easier to follow if you are self-employed, but harder if you're on a payroll, like if you're a bus driver or teacher. (Drats.) Over the years, Ahearn's clientele included witnesses to a crime, women who are stalked (for this, he works free of charge), and a lot of men in their forties or fifties who want to be free of their responsibilities and start over somewhere, as an entirely new person. Ahearn explains that "There is something romantic about the idea of starting a new life and walking away into the sunset, but for most people it’s just a daydream." Of the ten people who inquire about his services, only one will seriously pursue it. And like a doctor, Ahearn cannot get attached to any of his clients. Very few them will afford Ahearn with updates of their new lives. He gets the occasional e-mail though, and always a different e-mail each time. They have learned their lessons well.

Sharks Playing Ball

2009-07-30T08:41:00.006+08:00

A team of scientists attempted to measure the pain of rejection. It has been a long held belief that such pain is unquantifiable--or perhaps something that targets emotion, ego--but this time, the scientists rigged a system that included small electronic doodads and a group of people playing ball. The ones who were "outed" from the game eventually felt "rejected" and there was a corresponding hit on the gadgets attached to them.

So now there's proof that the pain of rejection is undeniably also physical--gut being wrenched out inch by inch, the bread knife stabbed into one's back and pierced the heart and turned approximately eighteen degrees to the left.

Bonnie Kozek even has an interesting aside to the scientists' findings: "'Why' does rejection hurt? Their concluding theory is that 'rejection' affects the brain because it is deeply-rooted in our DNA. Long ago, mammals relied on social bonds to survive. Broken social bonds put survival in peril. Mammals therefore feared any diminishing of these bonds. And this congenital fear is so entrenched that today’s mammals still see any form of exclusion from social connection as a direct physical threat."

It's not just a physical manifestation of pain then. Even more scary for the mammals of today is the pain of not being part of the game being played out there to celebratory shouts in the field.

Whose Memory Is It Anyway?

2009-07-29T09:35:00.000+08:00

Karl Taro Greenfeld has a problem: "Had some of my earliest memories actually been implanted by reading my father's book about our family as a very young child?"

In writing his memoir about growing up with an autistic brother, Greenfeld kept comparing his own memory with that of the already published version--his father's books. He says: "Many of us have recollections that turn out to have been created or nurtured by family photos we have seen or stories we have been told. But most of us aren't writers setting down a life's story. One could argue that the more fortunate memoirist is the one who doesn't have another writer also weighing in on his childhood, who doesn't measure his own memories against those of some external, recorded source."

In a way, Greenfeld is writing his memoir with the conscious effort of not merely echoing the story that has already been told. Later on, he realizes that memory is a tricky thing: there's same game of catch and yet his father's account was similar and in other ways different. Then incident about a graduate student who spanked the very young Greenfeld when he threw a tantrum over dinner. This he remembers with clarity, but his parents cannot recall it ever happening. In the end, he resolves that "The memoirist's ultimate responsibility is to himself, his own version of his life, his truth and reality. If he does not stay faithful to that story, then why is he bothering to write it at all?"

Pomo: A Few Notes

2009-07-27T14:29:00.001+08:00

From Megan Fox and cars to Judd Apatow's movies, it seems like anything and everything can pass for postmodern these days. Chris Daley weighs in on the abuse of the use of the term "postmodern" in mainstream media: "When the term “postmodern” is used in major international publications, does it bear any relation to its theoretical roots, or has it been hijacked as yet another hot, empty signifier, like 'iconic' or 'staycation'?"

And Daley should know what she's talking about, as she "pays hundreds of dollars a month in student loans for a degree that certifies she has studied postmodernism extensively ." Ah, the indignation of the Comparative Lit major.

Daley gives us a few things to consider about the term postmodern:

1. It was first used as early as the 1870s, but theorists Jean-François Lyotard and Frederic Jameson are generally credited with making the term "postmodern" popular.

2. When used in an academic setting, “postmodern” usually refers to a sense of style featuring “disjunction or deliberate confusion, irony, playfulness, reflexivity, a kind of cool detachment, a deliberate foregrounding of constructedness, a suspicion concerning neat or easy conclusions.”

3. Postmodernism is more concerned with process than product. This can be seen in the meta “[blank] about [blank]” construction that often identifies the “postmodern”: art about art, writing about writing, architecture about architecture, etc.
It seems like postmodern is the go-to term when you're not sure what else to say but you want to sound smart. I.e., the actress Megan Fox describes her next project, a film written by Juno's Diablo Cody, as "really dark” because Cody’s “like a postmodern feminist or whatever.” Since nobody's really sure what it means anyway, you're free to use it. Ta-dah. Instant smartness.

Elsewhere in the L.A. Times, to ensure that you know what you're talking about when you're blinding us with jargon, they've prepared a list of 61 essential postmodern reads. It comes with a cheat sheet of qualities that pomo writing has.

The list includes David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Yep, pomo, that one) but also Shakespeare's Hamlet and Tristram Shandy, which again leads us to ask: How can a text written before the modern period ever be postmodern? (And a tangentially related question: How can anyone say that one of the things they're looking for in a date is "He must be postmodern?" But then again, maybe this is a gay guy thing.) What the hell does that mean? This is why Postmodernism (and I'm tempted to say "and everything connected with theory") is the Root of All Evil.

Lois Lane's New Boyfriend

2009-07-26T17:21:00.006+08:00

Jonathan Goldstein's story "Man Not Superman" gets the Post-It treatment. An interesting premise: If Lois Lane and Superman break up, what sort of relationship will she have with the regular guy she hooks up with after her Super Romance?

Told from the point of view of Lois Lane's new boyfriend, Stuart, who is forced to suffer the faith of all well meaning exes: Let us all be friends together, Super Friends included.

And, of course, something has to be said about that other odd couple--Batman and Robin:

Elsewhere, in his 1971 essay "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," Larry Niven asks the unsayable: "What turns on a Kryptonian?" In McSweeney's, "Superman's Fortress of Solitude."

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Fast Food Mafia

2009-07-23T16:17:00.004+08:00

O dahil ang mafia ay matatagpuan kahit saan at hindi lang sa guerrang pang-Fezbuk:

Kung matagal mo nang pinag-iisipan kung ano ba talaga si Grimace, heto ang sagot: Isa siyang hitman na nasa payola ni Ron "The Don" McDonald. Isa lamang sila sa mga fast food mascots na inimagine ni Silent Sketcher sa kanyang Deviant Art portfolio. Kasama sa pamilya sina "The Colonel" Sanders ng Kentucky Fried Creatures, si Wendy, si "Little" Caesar, at ang Hari ng mga Burger.

Keeping Out the Joneses

2009-07-22T12:37:00.001+08:00

Christian and Abrams posit that the development of cities--fortified, walled--was a matter of keeping out the Joneses. "[T]the first settlements – before bronze age, before iron age, even probably before the stone age – didn’t happen because folks liked each other’s company. As the old saying goes: there really is safety in numbers … and fortifications."

The city state was established as a common defense against invaders. When people stayed together in a permanent location, they brought their valuables with them--heads of cattle, goat, a barn of farmed grains. They needed to band together against marauders even if they weren't exactly fans of each other.

Or it can be the other way around. They loved each other so much that they didn't want to let anyone else in. Perhaps the Chinese had this idea first: They didn't set out and conquer the way the Europeans did. Maybe they were thinking, "Why pollute our fabulous gene pool with barbaric Mongol blood? Let's build the Great Wall!"

Meanwhile, in old Castilian Manila, the Chinese were being kept out of Intramuros. They stayed in their own Parian, prosperous though much discriminated against. Here's another point of development in urban areas: "But it wasn’t long before these separate city/states looked out from their battlements and discovered that instead of keeping themselves safe they were keeping their good neighbors out." Soon, Manila wouldn't just be Intramuros, it would expand and take in other neighborhoods, and on to the Metro Manila as we know it now. But back then, when one said Manila, it meant Intramuros. Just nuns and priests and Spanish dons. The Chinese stay in Parian.

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Riding the Scandinavian Crime Wave

2009-07-21T16:10:00.001+08:00

These days, it seems to me that everywhere you look (around the web, at least), people are talking about Scandinavian crime novels. In his Slate essay, Nathaniel Rich claims that the most peaceful people on earth write the greatest homicide thrillers. He offers a few reasons why the genre flourishes in the region: "The crime novel, and particularly the British crime novel, has been enormously popular in Scandinavia for decades. And the famous Nordic pragmatism is well-suited to the intricate mechanics of crime investigation plots. But the best explanation is the most mundane: Crime novels sell." Rich proceeds to list down the writers who started their careers in a more literary vein, but eventually, the poets, playwrights, novelists and translators found a bigger audience--and a bigger paycheck--in writing about crime.

If crime novels sell and the writers profit from it, there must surely be a very good reason why readers like it as well. For this, Rich points out that the allure of the Scandinavian crime novel from others is "not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness." There something a little bit troublesome about Rich's assertion. Rich fetishizes the blood on snow image as something close to the divine.

On the other hand, Larisa Kyzer of The L Magazine looks deeper into Rich's assertion that Scandinavians write the best crime novels. Kyzer believes that there is more to it than just the inherent creepiness--or even exoticism--of having blood spreading against pristine white snow. The narrative concerns of the Scandinavian crime novel do not stray too far away from those of the established literary tradition. It still finds its roots in the police procedurals and detective stories. However, "more often than not, the gruesome goings-on in Scandinavian crime novels have their root in everyday societal tensions and shortcomings: racial/ethnic/religious prejudices, the marginalization of 'outsiders,' governmental corruption, unacknowledged domestic abuse."

The Nordic countries are peaceful because of homogeneity. If everyone is like everyone else, then it would be too hard to disagree with the public sentiment. But because each of these countries started seeing more faces different from their own in the last several decades, change started to seep in. And according to Kyzer, "more often than not, [it] created quite an existential crisis for societies which have for so long been able to claim a fundamental sameness in traditions, language, and cultural outlook." They cannot sustain their unofficial motto, "Be like everyone else. Thus, this disturbance is articulated in their fiction: the rise of neo-Nazi gangs, Swedish townspeople getting all antsy because of their Sami neighbors, arson in refugee camps, shutting down child prostitution rings.

The writers of crime fiction are holding up a mirror to the welfare states' shortcomings. If so, then the uniqueness of the genre comes from its "unflinchingly honest stock of its failures. So often, these are novels of conscience and reflection. Novels which, in their own small way, take responsibility for a social system which makes earnest promises of inclusion and protection, but continues to fail so many of its constituents."

The curious question is this: the Scandinavian countries have a social system that works, the citizens are among the world's happiest even if they perceive their governments can do better. The low crime rate pushes the writers to imagine "tawdry crimes." On the other hand, the Philippines has a government that cannot be trusted to deliver even the basic services, most of the population live in dire poverty and yet steadily confesses that they are a "happy" people, and crime is so prevalent that you only have to step out of your house and see it happen to someone you know, perhaps committed by someone you know. We have seen all manners of killing people--the usual ice pick stabbing, boys playing basketball and on the way home they get riddled with bullets, a woman's body chopped into pieces, left to be discovered in several plastic bags, or a man killed and body sealed in a drum filled with cement and dropped into the river. Sometimes there is a desperation to the crime: I am thinking of that mother who cannot afford to feed her children, and so takes them in a Jollibee in the mall and then poisons them all.

Scandinavian crime fiction functions as a critique of a society that has its ills, is only starting to feel the disturbance of having a varied society. It also offers a way of escape, a different reality from their "we're all the same, modular Ikea" existence. But crime fiction is also a very straight forward kind of narrative: here is a body, thereafter lies a solution as to who did this and in what manner. Problem, solution. All is right in the world.

However, if crime is all around you, so desperate and gruesome that you want it to be something that you merely imagined, is it even possible that you would want to write about it? Of what use is fiction then for our collective imagination? Does this explain why crime fiction isn't flourishing in the country and yet we have stories about dragons and dwarves and a strong fantasy-oriented community of writers? If we have chosen our manner of escape, it seems we have favored magic over material explanations. But we must also have a venue for critique, something that forces us to consider our ills, and even if only imagined, a way to make things right in the world again.

July Reading Stack

2009-07-18T09:52:00.004+08:00

Since school started, haven't really had much time left for personal reading. I got my copy of Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man around registration period, and I'm barely a third of the novel in. However, that scant reading lead me to a curiosity about the musician Leonard Cohen and how he's just goyish. The novel has this running commentary about which things/people/habits, etc are Jewish and which are goyish. Cohen stepping into a cafe placing a very green order of soy mocha latte is goyish. It's difficult to explain if you haven't read the book. The novel is also described as "postmodern." Now there's a term which people are always hardup to explain.

Last weekend, faced with the prospect of having no book to read, I ducked into a trusty Booksale branch and got a copy of Alex Garland's The Tesseract, which is set in Manila--lots of crime, dirty little hotels with naked bulbs and blood on the sheets, weather so hot that the lead guy opted to stay inside a McDonald's and watched rich little kids have their blasted kiddie parties. The first chapter reminds me so much of the opening chapter of The Beach. It also reminds me that I still have a cling-wrapped copy of The Coma somewhere in my shelves in Manila. Maybe Garland is a writer best appreciated when you're in your early 20s and with a good head trip.

Also still in its original plastic wrap is The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki. The cover is a nice brown craft paper and orange, and the back cover features a body with the parts cut into parts and meant to look like a paper doll that you can join together with staples or something. The series tag line is "Your body is their business!" According to the blurb, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is about "five young students at a Buddhist university find there's little call for their job skills in today's Tokyo...among the living, that is! But their studies give them a direct line to the dead--the dead who are still trapped in their corpses, and can't move on to their next reincarnation! Whether you died from suicide, murder, sickness, or madness, they'll carry your body anywhere it needs to go to free your soul." Given the topic, the plastic is there to warn off those with weaker stomachs and those under 18 who can't properly appreciate this odd blend of Pushing Daisies, CSI, and maybe Conan the Kid Detective. (The undead also reminds me of Pizzeria Kamikaze, an Israeli comic book wherein all the suicides end up in a world similar to ours, except everyone there died by their own hands and given another chance at, uhm, living. First followed it in Bipolar and it's been turned to a movie: The Wristcutters. Anyway.) There are 5 stories in the volume, so the episodic nature allows you to jump and enjoy one of the adventures. The pullback is that this is just Volume 1 of 9 (as of last count) and it's not exactly as cheap as the other mangas, so following the adventures will be costly.

The last and newest one on my stack is Xiaolu Guo's 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. I read part (or most?) of it by hanging out in MPH and Borders in Kuala Lumpur last year. It's about a farm girl who tries her luck in Beijing by being a film extra. It's funny and (a lot of people will stone me for this) quite different from all the other Chinese writers I've previously read who have written about Mao era China. The book cover is rather pretty. But of course, the other attraction is that Fenfang works in the film business and that has always been interesting to me. 20 Fragments was published in Chinese eleven years ago, and only recently translated into English. Since then, Guo has written one other novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which was her first try at writing in English. Also read bits of that last year, but alas, I was too poor to buy it and now it's not available in the bookstores in KL anymore. But I'm looking forward to finishing not just 20 Fragments but all these books really, really soon.

The Cartography of Childhood

2009-07-14T14:06:00.000+08:00

In his essay "Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood," Michael Chabon writes about the importance of childhood adventures while growing up. Adventure is being allowed to explore the world to its limits. It means playing in neighbors' yards and vacant lots, riding your bike to visit classmates in their houses across town and knowing what flavor popsicle their mothers serve. These adventures, according to Chabon, provide a child with mental maps of their worlds which they can endlessly revise and refine. "Childhood is a branch of cartography," he says. And childhood is the first and ultimate adventure:

That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

But in the years since Chabon's growing up years, children have been increasingly forbidden to explore even the very street they live in. Many barriers were put up against adventures: Wear a helmet when riding a bike, don't ride to where your parent can't see you. Don't ride that bike or you break all your bones. The world has become too dangerous for adventuring.

In his essay "Coming of age in the years of living dangerously," Bill Briggs also looks back on this time of childhood daredeviltry with nostalgia. Kids growing up in the '50s, '60s and '70s inhaled second hand smoke from their chainsmoking parents, ate wildberries, were allowed to roam the fields and strange streets without fear. Kids were allowed to live. But now that adventuring--and effectively, living--has been outlawed in favor of a safe and monitored environment, a 47-year-old mortgage broker asks: "Who would have thought 30 years ago that it would be necessary to run public service announcements encouraging parents to get their kids outside playing?”

Choose Your Own Ong

2009-07-14T10:01:00.004+08:00

The Institute of Creative Writing Panayam Series hosts Charlson Ong's lecture this afternoon, 2.30 PM at the Claro M. Recto Hall in Bulwagang Rizal, UP Diliman. If you're free, please go. It'll be quite interesting to see what he has to say about novel writing, Facebook, and whether he can beat Bob Ong in a karaoke match.

Harry, Neo, Kirk and Luke: Different Hero, Same Story

2009-07-13T01:56:00.001+08:00

In class last week, we were talking about how Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and even The Matrix are actually the same movie. The journey is the same, or as Brandon Root in Spiteful Critic put it:

Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.

It's not that writers and directors of the last 40 years have not had a single fresh idea since the birth of the summer blockbuster; the similarities of the heroes' journeys, as Kottke.org pointed out, have to do with the persistence of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth.

To illustrate, here's Say No to Crack's point-by-point play of how Harry Potter and Star Wars are really just the same story:

Another interesting read, James Parker's Atlantic Online essay "Sex and the Single Wizard," on how Rowling really doesn't have any idea how to deal with the awakening of adolescent sexuality.

On a side note, I'm a bit pissed that I have acquired "premiere" tickets to HP6 on July 17th, as I learned belatedly, a day after the movie officially opens. At Php225 a pop, I feel like I've been ripped off. I bite my thumb at you, UP Stat Soc.

Facebook: The Movie

2009-07-10T08:54:00.001+08:00

Carson Reeves of Script Shadow gives us a glimpse of an Aaron Sorkin penned script about the kids who started social networking Facebook. The premise: "A look at the rise of Facebook and the effect it's had on its founders." It is also described as "an epic story that would capture the drama of late-night status updates, the power of the poke, who and who not to limit profile access to, and of course, the all important and always necessary "delete friend" feature. Okay, well, maybe it wouldn't be about those things per se. But it would be about computers and software and code and snobby rich kids."

It has to do with a kid who gets commissioned by a pair of rich brothers on the rowing team who want a website that's sort of like MySpace, but cooler. The kid teams up with a friend, works on the project and then comes up with something else as a dorm room experiment, TheFacebook. The friends will part ways later with the entrance of another web figure, Sean Parker, founder of Napster and the "informal adviser" who told Mark Zuckerberg to drop the "The" in TheFacebook.

Reeves insists that the Sorkin script is "a story about two friends - one a computer genius, the other a business expert - who began a website that became the fastest growing phenomenon in internet history. Three years later, one was suing the other for 600 million dollars (or 1/30th of Mark Zuckerberg's worth). It's a story about greed, about obsession, about our belief that all the money in the world can make us happy. But it's also unpredictable, funny, touching, and sad. It gives us that rare glimpse into the improbable world of mega-success."

So in the end, the kid who earned a bajillion dollars creating a web tool that connects people is ultimately disconnected with his friends and the rest of the world.

So who's throwing in the money to make "The Social Experiment" possible? Sony and producer Scott Rudin are supposedly attached on the project slated for release in 2011. Plus David Fincher is tagged as potential director. I loved most of the things that Fincher directed (Fight Club, Se7en, esp Zodiac) with the exception of Benjamin Button. If this turns out to be a good movie, then everything will be forgiven.

Judging the Book by its Author Photo

2009-07-09T15:00:00.005+08:00

Melanie Marquez had it wrong: Don't judge my brother, he's not a book. But what if the brother is an author whose photo appears on the dust jacket? Then he probably needs a good author photo. What's an author photo for? David Adams weighs in:

To a large degree, they satisfy the vanity of the writer; those small peephole portraits are a way for them to claim ownership, to make their long struggle at the keyboard valid (they also provide a good ID when writing a check at the bookstore). Photos are a publicity tool, of course. Something for publishers to enlarge to poster size -- depending on the author's degree of beauty -- when promoting book signings at the local bookstore (a process that would have hindered, not helped, George Eliot back in the day).

Marion Ettlinger has been taking gorgeous black and white photographs of writers since 1983, some of which were compiled into a book. My favorite is Raymond Carver's:

I have the same reaction as David Adams' when I first saw that photo of Carver's staring at me from the cover of Where I'm Calling From: "He's seated at a table, one arm slung over his chair, the other on the table, forming an L, one-half of a frame which immediately takes you up to his face. His eyes are like cigarettes burning holes in your brain. Carver stares directly at the camera --through the camera -- as if to say, 'Sit down and let me tell you a story. It may not be pretty, but it will be real.'"

But it helps to be real *and* pretty. Like this one:

where Jhumpa Lahiri is just smouldering at you from the back of cover of Interpreter of Maladies. A student of mine saw the photo and said, Wow, I didn't know Jhumpa Lahiri is hot.

If hot is impossible, then perhaps take a few serviceable ones that don't obscure your face, like this:

That's just one way to take a bad author photo. Salt Publishing offers nine other ways, none of them flattering and would never help you sell any books.

Dial up my asterisk

2009-07-08T16:58:00.004+08:00

Transient Ink educates us in typography and tart cards, a British term referring to the small advertisement cards that prostitutes leave in phone booths to garner more attention for their services. Or to put it simply: If your typeface were a prostitute, what would her card look like?

Wallpaper.com asked designers from all kinds of backgrounds to create these cards for their favorite fonts. The results range from subtle and coy

to kitschy, like this one by Emma Thorpe reminds me of some t-shirts that teenage boys wear, sometimes with bunnies

and on to the really risque, like the one below:

Are you there, God? It's me, Beckham

2009-06-19T11:51:00.004+08:00

Lemondrop reacts to the attention of a Rolling Stone cover wherein a naked girl is splashed with writing from a Stephen King novel: "In our opinion, the "naked chick covered in writing" theme is getting to be as tired as the patented "startlet with her hands over her boobs" magazine cover... we decided to turn this cliché on its head by plastering some of our favorite guys with quotes from books girls like." The result is the male body as a teen girl's notebook, like David Beckham with lines from Judy Blumes' "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret."

But if you ask me, the best male body as notebook is still Ewan McGregor in Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book.

Movie in Three Frames

2009-06-16T14:01:00.004+08:00

Your favorite movie distilled into three frames. What can I say, the three-act structure is basic and works really well. Also, this kind of reminds me of the "sweded" movies in Be Kind, Rewind, except these are "meticulously handdrawn" and rendered in animated .gifs.

via

Zim and Co.

2009-06-11T10:33:00.003+08:00

It's French Spring in Manila once more, and the 14th edition of the French Film Festival offers a selection of movies that gives us a glimpse of a France that's more than just croissants on the Rue Montparnasse.

Last Monday, I caught the evening screening of Zim and Co, which features Adrien Jolivet as Victor Zimbietrofsky, a twenty-something guy who gets a little high, spends the night playing a gig for the deaf, goes to the markets to help move boxes, gets paid, and early in the morning, his motorbike skids past a car driven by a middle-aged man.

There's a dent on the car but this man thinks it's a grave injustice. Our guy Zim gets called for it, and the judge looks in his record and finds a previous offence, which now makes Zim a two-time offender and sent to jail immediately. Unless, the deal goes, Zim can find a job that gives him a payslip (taxes for the government, yey) before the end of the month.

Zim isn't a lazy ass. He scours the ads and manages to find a job which requires a car and a driver's license, both of which he doesn't have. But Zim is a resourceful young man and enlists the help of his friends. There's Arthur, whose dad wants him to succeed in the trade of bodyworking cars and thus earn pension later on. There's Cheb, who wants to invent the next best thing to sliced bread, or at least find your mobile phone when it's ringing. There's Safia, a Muslim girl who works in her uncle's canteen.

All the young people in Pierre Jolivet's Paris are street-smart and willing to help each other get better, even through ingenuous means. They need to survive by their wits, as the system isn't exactly friendly to a young Africans, Muslims and Polish immigrants. Zim is the only white guy, and he slightly benefits from this system--after all, the bureau needs to meet the quota of having enough white guys driving in the streets. In a world like this, where people are out to rip you off, where your family doesn't quite understand why you'd quit a boring factory job, where a small mistake can cost you your future, friendship is really the only thing going for you. (The movie also reminds me a lot of the Cinemalaya film Endo.)

Director Pierre Jolivet has this to say: “At twenty most youngsters create distance between themselves and their family and find the substitution in their peers. It’s the beginning of fears yet a feeling of being indestructible. It is this battle of contrasts that we tried to portray”.

The French Film Festival is ongoing until June 14 at the Shangri-la Plaza Mall, Cinema 3. Entrance is free. Tickets are handed out two hours before the screening.

Save yourself, go online

2009-06-10T16:10:00.001+08:00

The Independent reports of a recent debate in the UK which tried to assess social responsibility in a wired world. Helen Milner, the managing director of an organisation that works to bring technology to everyone in the UK, spoke on behalf of the 25% of people who, she claimed, have no access to the internet. The unwired class has become the new lumpen proletariat in a world where cheap goods and services can be had online. Meanwhile, the general argument is that people who have no idea how to send e-mail are "Luddite losers," said to be "doomed to analogue oblivion." Technological ignorance is a sign of failure in a Darwinian digital democracry. The digital divide has turned into a chasm, and it is up to this unwired class to get online and save themselves. The network is there: in libraries, schools and townhalls. Get online and survive in this new digital democracy. However, Milner expressed a different argument: instead of a digital democracy, what the new technology culture does is to echo and replicate the unequal hierarchies of 19th century capitalism. Who has the money will prosper was the game then, and who has access to the internet--which requires money just the same--is the game now. To avoid the duplicating the same social inequalities, the wired class actually has a responsibility to help the unwired play catch up.

I can imagine that the number of the great unwired is even bigger in the Philippines, where a lot of villages across the country don't even have decent roads, regular electricity, much less telephone lines and wireless modems. It does not make sense to adopt the Keener argument: sure, wireless mobility can be had for Php1k a month, but in the countryside, who will choose wi-fi over food and electricity? It makes more sense to follow the Milner argument that narrowing the digital chasm needs social responsibility. But how to do that in a country where a broadband deal is seen as an opportunity to deepen the pockets of a few wired men?