¿Status Que?

First things first:

Just so we have all of these things in one easy-access post, being the nine essays that burned down more than its share of books and bridges all along the watchtower of that legendary long-legged centenary magazine the Philippines Free Press. These essays have been described by at least one person as "the main reason why I buy the magazine" but also in the same breath as like "(listening to someone) taking a shit," so really, you take from it what you can as that's how we really ultimately all seem to float in this all too precious Contemporary Literary Scene of ours. Here in my room in Cubao, at the risk of sounding like tearing out the sutures of an already scabbily-healing wound, we call it "that job that I tried doing well and on time but unfortunately neglected to pay me well and on time," but I already gave up on hoping to earn from This Thing We Call Art circa 2005 so I don't really know what I was thinking expecting stuff in exchange for stuff back in November-December 2008. Youthful Optimism, maybe? Or maybe a stir of a spell of a maelstrom of Artistic Avarice in my cooly-objective analytical intellectual heart? The Mystery endures.

The Maurice Arcache of Philippine Literature Department: I was mentioned as one of five "poets of note" in Patke and Holden's The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, which is exactly what it sounds like. The main event was a three-page rundown of Contemporary Philippine Poets writing in English. From what I can remember: a page and a quarter was about Conchitina Cruz' poetry and processes; Paolo Manalo, Neil Garcia, Angelo Suarez, and the founders of High Chair shared a longish paragraph; Jose Beduya got a paragraph for his oblique poetry; Marc Gaba got around half a page for his typographical lingual caesuran playfulness; and the five "poets of note" shared one breathless sentence laden with paranthetical descriptions of our stuff: Joel Toledo, Naya Valdellon, John Labella, Mark Cayanan, and me, described as "one of the most experimental and avant-garde poets of his generation." Naks. Not a bad assessment, all things considered, as they based it off of a book that was 60-70% in Filipino. I should probably use that to get my books published by the Mainstream Presses, I think.

The Routledge mention is pretty special for me as I pretty much cut my Pop Crit teeth with a couple of Routledge books, namely Chris Gray's the Cyborg Handbook (where I got the inkling of the idea of using Marxism/Feminism/Postcolonialism as critical framework for Philippine Speculative Fiction), and this book of essays on the Contemporary Japanese Weird with the title I can't quite remember right now and for some reason I can't find online (I'm tempted to say that it's this book, but it isn't), but I was 18-19 years old and the books had critical appraissals of William Gibson's Neuromancer and Donna Harroway's Cyborg Manifesto and Mamoru Oshii's adaptation of Masamune Shirow's Ghost In The Shell, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, etc etc etc, and really, the impression was mindblowing as that was the first time it was shown to me that these things - scifi, manga, anime, the things I was joyously wading in up to my eyelids - are actually texts worthy of highly-academic critical study, and that these studies frequently blossom with insights on the society that beget them, etc etc etc, so yeah, being mentioned in a Routledge book, however minor the mention (it was really just my name and a description of my stuff) is really fucked-up in that happy geeky way where you get to see that fanletter you sent to Strikeforce: Morituri published in the letters pages and with Gillis and Anderson even answering whatever questions you had about the Morituri Effect or whatever. It's really Something Else. And it's coming out this 30th July 2009! The book's $30, though, and money being money, I'm kinda hoping they give the Philippine printing rights to maybe UP Press so we Pinoys can have cheap copies of it in our bookshelves. I mean, it is about our literature, so, what the hell, Routledge should throw us all a bone and make it available to us in the most accessible way possible. It's all for the March of Progress of Art, dude!

What was very interesting with the rundown of Contemporary Philippine Poets was what how pretty much everyone mentioned are poets who don't deal with the usual dominant form of the Ineffectual Intellectual Romantic Artisan whose patter is dictated by the metronomey heartbeats of the Muses. As far as I know, the only poets mentioned who deal with the dominant form are Toledo and Valdellon (and maybe Garcia?). Everyone else mentioned has something or the other in their poetry that can only really be futiley described as Formal Play. Very interesting too how the three main contemporary poets discussed - Cruz, Beduya, Gaba - are all independently published, all coming from High Chair. Interesting how all three of them are absent in the just released antho of Contemporary Philippine Poetry in English Crowns and Oranges. Yeah, dude, what's up with that? Haha, intriga.

And this blog being founded on that Georgia O'Keeffe quote "Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest," I pretty much avoid posting any Life Stuff here, but I have been known to post a few here and there, which is why I'm posting this one here, as it's really Just One Of Those Things: I'm still looking for a job, been looking for one for about three months now, on and off, on and off as I keep finding racket stuff, but, you know, one can't live on that sort of thing alone, especially if you have a pretty big house to run. Hopefully, I'll find something that'll actually pay me properly. Do we still have that sort of thing here where we are floundering along the tailend of Vainglorious Arroyonomics?