When I am old and grey and full of sleep

and nodding by the lamp, I will take down a book from my shelf and apologize to Yeats for putting his work in vain, and pour myself a cup of tea (yes, tea, not coffee), and remember all the chilled milk teas I have consumed in my lifetime, and wonder why I had never started on the book of fairy tales I had planned my entire life to write. 

Yes, my entire life. 

The moment my dad handed me my first book of fairy tales, I knew it was what I wanted to create, too. And then, I met the Grimm brothers. Then, Cupid and Psyche, and Daphne, with Apollo at her heels. And then, real life came along, soon after, with JD Salinger, and Kafka, and company. Good thing women like George Eliot and AS Byatt were in the wings to help me keep the faith. Oh, but Nabokov, shoot.

So, here I am, paying homage to all the kings and sorcerers, and princes who had wrecked my perception of reality, but most of all, to all the dysfunctional individuals who had helped rebuild my psyche. 

Oh, who am I fooling. 

But, yes, someday I will read Finnegans Wake. I love Alice to bits, after all.

via brainpickings

At ATC National Bookstore today:

I breezed into the store and heard a chime-like sound, which turned out to be the sensors, which were strategically placed by the entrance. If a bit timidly, the guard asked me if I was carrying a book with me.

A little puzzled, but at the same time beginning to realize what it was all about, I said "yes, I do,", my right hand instinctively diving into my unabashedly pink bag for the copy of Mookie Katigbak's The Proxy Eros, which I had recently bought at Festi's National and which I have been taking with me almost anywhere I went and which still had the price tag stuck to its behind. The guard asked me to leave it at the counter and I willingly obliged. If he had shown the least bit rudeness, I would have been pissed (irritable creature that I was), but since he was very courteous about the whole thing, I simply gave a mental shrug. He was just doing his job, I realized, and preventing further mishap because if he hadn't stopped me and asked me to deposit the book, things would have been really complicated--and awkward--on my way out.

And you can add to that the fact what a monster I could become whenever I find myself in any situation where I feel that my rights and dignity are being infringed upon.

Plus, the guy at the package counter was really nice, offering to take my book to their cashier so that whatever it was that caused the sensors to react would be removed.

There are still good people in this world. What a comforting thought.
=)

Lit Geek Update #10

Last book I read: Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay

This book ended my (relatively) long reading hiatus. Poring through its first page at a bookstore roused my slumbering lust for print on paper. I finished the novel in a jiffy because putting it down without having read it to the last page was difficult. The pepper was as much the absurdity of the image of a dead woman in an erroneously labeled casket brought home aboard a plane and the numerous, similarly absurd stories it brings together to its unlikely wake, as the author's signature masterful hand at language, plot and characterization. Butch Dalisay is "old school"-- and it is a school all lovers of Philippine Literature had better keep themselves in.

For some strange reason, the book made me think briefly of George Eliot's Middlemarch, what with the seemingly random lives that really interlace, the vivid introspection of life's sad ludicrousness and the seamlessness with which the novel's junctures are brought together.

The caustic wit and humor are all Dalisay's own.




What I'm reading now: Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt

Lit geek update #8: Found in Book Sale, PAUL AUSTER for P40!

The opening paragraph goes:

"These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up." -Auster, p.1-

I love it!

Whenever I see a Paul Auster book, I always think of other books he's written that are in my possession, and of the fact that never--not once--did I fail to like his writing.

The New York Trilogy marked my initiation into Paul Auster fandom. I loved that book to death. I've since read The Invention of Solitude, Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions. The last one, perhaps, is my favorite, next to The New York Trilogy.

One of Auster's major story telling strengths is that his writing is always a perfect patchwork of the abstract and the concrete, balancing each other out and at the same time endowing the structure of each to fuse into a harmonic whole. There is a melancholic fluidity to his prose that makes the forms and the objects in his stories float to life into the reader's world.

I can't wait to get started with this latest find. The first lines look very promising.

Are you a Paul Auster fan?

Lit Geek Update #7

Hurrah pour moi!

I never thought I'd be able to go back to my books, but whaddya know, am reading again! This time, it's Ursula Hegi's short story collection Hotel of the Saints. It's a quaint little book full of quaint little people and colorful little lives (but what life is little, eh?).

I loved her in Stones From the River and even more in Intrusions and, judging by the four or so stories I've read, so far, this collection promises to be worth the while.

I just hope I'd have the diligence to see the book through until the last page, and not let it meet the same fate as Isaac Bashevis Singer's Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, half of which I read during some waiting stint in Starbucks, and the rest of the lot, well, I never really got to finish.

A half-read book (especially if it's a good one) is a sad thing.

Itching for Elsewhere

I can't wait to get my hands on Conchitina Cruz's new book, Elsewhere Held and Lingered. I keep forgetting to look it up in the bookstores.

Now, let me make a mental note to do that the next time I visit the mall, as I seem to be afflicted with short-term memory loss.

Okay, done.

Hope it doesn't get erased.

Click on this for Mabi David's words.

DARK HOURS in the Morning

Today, I woke up early, had a breakfast of tuyo, itlog na maalat and rice. Not to forget, of course, coffee. Then I went outside, sat on my favorite chair, sent a "good morning!" text message to my dad, mom and brothers, sent text messages (oh, this age of text and text and texts some more!) to my team reminding them that we had a shift tonight, skimmed the pages of a magazine, put it down, opened Conchitina Cruz's Dark Hours and read it for the next hour or so.
I've read the book a couple of times before and, like every piece of good writing, it doesn't matter how many times one has read it: going through its pages is always a cherished experience. Poetry differs from Fiction (aside from its form) in that the former would take you longer to chew on fewer lines than the latter. And yet the richness would be the same.
Anyway, I did not mean for this post to be a dissertation on Poetry vis a vis Fiction, so let me stop right here. Going back to Dark Hours, below are some of my favorite lines (the beauty of which will be more appreciated in context with the whole of the poem, of course, so go get a copy of the book, now!):

1) Inside the story, she sees nothing but darkness. She is ungrateful for the luxury of despair. (from "Geography Lesson")

2) ...and the room is flooded with the radiance of the moment, a man and a woman in the middle of a sweet misunderstanding. (from "Smile")

3) on a typewriter the stammering pulse lone comfort of the wrist the alphabet falling

like seeds the white page blooming (from "I must say this about the city")

4) Across the city, a man turns from a corner to his street. There are too many keys in his hand and not enough doors to open. (from "Now and at the hour")

5) What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace.

...Is it possible for this not to be a story of disappearance? (from "Disappear")

6) If I keep still enough inside this shadow, it is as if I'm not here. If I keep still enough, there is no proof you are not here with me. (from "Inside the Dark")

*Lines #1-6 all taken from Dark Hours by Conchitina Cruz.

Lit Geek Update #7

Last book I read: Imagining Characters (A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre)

This would have to be one of the best Literary Criticism pieces I've ever read. It's written in a dialogue form, a recorded conversation between psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre and A.S. Byatt, who has been hailed as the George Eliot of her generation. For me, though, this description doesn't at all do Byatt any justice because she, on her own, is worthy of being seen as a literary giant, right up there with Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.
The conversation being between two women, it goes without saying that the feminist undertow figures strongly on the book's pages. Nothing radical is presented, at least not the in-your-face kind, although for female readers, the seemingly innocuous ideas would rightly come across as stronger than they would to the casual (read: male--no offense meant) reader.
To put it in a nutshell, the two authors discuss books written by women, giving them a motley richness of readings--mythical, biographical, archetypal, psychoanalytic, structuralist, feminist, etc. Some of the pieces they discussed (and the ones I liked best) were George Eliot's Daniel Deronda , Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Toni Morrisson's Beloved.

Here are some insights which I found really noteworthy:

1. Coleridge's idea of life-in-death, from his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", is a recurring discussion thread in the conversations. It's not surprising for such a dark theory to be associated with the texts, as the texts' writers are women who, at some point in their lives, found themselves bound by the patriarchal social structure in which they lived, which, to some--or more--extent, must have thwarted their supposedly "ideal" (again, as expected by society) perception of how they should have lived their lives. A life strictly patterned (for the sake of conforming in order to avoid stigmatization) after the dictates of a seemingly "moral" or "correct" society would eventually prove to be a form of death, after all. Upto this very day, the emancipated woman is looked down upon; if at all admired, it is done so begrudgingly and with reservations.

2. One of the most beautiful parts of the book is where Byatt dips into Beloved for the section where Sethe, the main protagonist, arrives at the breaking point, having punished herself for so long in desperate longing for a lost child, Beloved, whom she calls "her best thing" and Paul D., her lover, corrects her, saying, "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (p. 273). I remember having been moved by the line, as well, while I was reading the novel about a year ago. One of the remarkable differences in the treatment of men-women relationships between literature written by men and those written by women, according to Byatt in the discussion of Villette, is that in the former, women are made to respond to masterfulness whereas in the latter, women respond to kindness (ch. 2). Both authors agree that Paul D's statement embodies their belief that the true literary heroes are the men who see women for what and who they are in themselves, their intrinsic make-up as opposed to their relation to the external world; that prior to being daughters, mothers or slaves (in African-American literature, especially), women are foremost women, and no one has the right to take this from them, regardless of whatever costumes get thrown their way by society.

3. Below is a passage from chapter 6, stated beautifully by Sodre:

"...however horrible the past, you can only live and be sane and integrated if you live in contact with it. The connection with beauty is important--the sense of hope and the will to create a better life are deeply connected to the ability to preserve beauty and goodness in the internal world. One of the fundamental ideas in Kleinian psychoanalytic theory is that sanity depends on the capacity to retain a good, trusting link with good figures in the internal world--the capacity to survive loss through the internalisation of the good experience." (p. 221)

Lit Geek Update #6

Last book I read: She Flew The Coop by Michael Lee West

This book is hilarious, had me hooting with laughter and kicking my heels up while reading it. The writing is candid but spiced up with color and wit. Human frailty and resilience are celebrated equally, the setting being the fictional Limoges, Louisiana, a small-town backdrop with quirky characters that just as possibly could represent any community in any part of the world. A lot of recipes, too, that made me go hungry and grab something to munch on just to satisfy the craving brought on by the raw, unembellished description of Creole fare (Gumbo, crawfish pie, jambalaya, peanut butter and bacon sandwich (!), loads of mayonnaise and chili). A light, most-of-the-time-funny-but-when-it's-sad-it's-sad read.

What I'm reading now: What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal) by Zoe Heller

Lit Geek Update #5

Last Book I Read: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I find it remarkable how Ishiguro manages to draw so much emotion with so little fanfare. The Remains of the Day put him in my list of must-read authors; but reading Never Let Me Go (the last part of which I read outdoors under a very quiet, very still, twilit sky, tinging everything a shade of orange) made me realize how much more he's capable of, not just to tug at heartstrings with such spare language.
The exposition left me quizzical, very much uncertain of the ground I was treading, but very much aware of some impending darkness that was about to unfold. And therein lies one of the strengths of this mildly eerie, wonderfully strange novel: it shows rather than tells, but inch by inch, so that the strategically-torn piece you are given leaves you hankering for the next one. And so it goes, until the middle part, where things seem to fall into place, but not just yet. The story is carefully, if not fastidiously, crafted, so that the end result is a finely-woven novel of pain and non-pain, of innocence and betrayal, of loss and acceptance, done with such breathtaking restraint.
After I put the book back on the shelf, I knew that the words carer, donor and completed would never again mean the same to me. This book taught me, made me realize how finally, we are all human and mortal, and that most of us take each day that we are alive--and free--for granted, not knowing there could be people out there who live, but are bound by painful, irrevocable destinies spelt out for them the even before they started being.

What I'm reading now: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood