I’ve always seen the book as the girl from Cubao with the awkward nose and the knobby knees and the well-thought-out proposal to achieve World Peace who will always lose out to the girl from Parañaque who marches in step while waving a baton in her two-piece bikini. Apparently, I was wrong.
The El Bimbo Variations won the 9th Annual Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award for the publication years 2007-2008, in the English-language category. It was the first self-published, the first bilingual, and the first book of poetry that ever won the award in its category. The judges were David Bayot, J Neil Garcia, and Angelo Suarez.
One of the issues that was brought up about the book was about beauty, and it being seemingly not the book’s main preoccupation, the assumption there being beauty is poetry’s main preoccupation. My answer is this: “I’ve always seen this book as the girl from Cubao with the awkward nose and the knobby knees and the well-thought-out proposal to achieve World Peace who will always lose out to the girl from Parañaque who marches in step while waving a baton in her two-piece bikini. Apparently, I was wrong.”
4 comment(s) to... “Dakota Nota”
4 comments:
I don't think this is ENTIRELY true, Adam, altho it is to an extent. I think the 1st self-published book of poetry to win the award (I believe it may also pass for bilingual, whatever "bilingual" means nowadays, given that I felt your work always worked w/in a singular idiom & despite the apparent gulf between English & Filipino I felt no code-switch ever genuinely occurred [& so maybe it's time that we begin truly examining English & Filipino as belonging to the same linguistic continuum]) is Kristian Cordero's work because -- & I may be wrong here -- there were no such divisions in the contest then as English and Filipino (w/c, as has been pointed already, is a problematic division). That doesn't make your book any less anomalous tho, hahaha.
CONGRATS na rin! Ang pogi mo talaga.
Also, the girl "with the awkward nose and the knobby knees and the well-thought-out proposal" is not necessarily the girl w/ any less beauty. I've fallen in love w/ this oddball type of book -- w/ this type of girl actually, & God knows I don't use this as a metaphor -- & maybe beauty need not be excavated from such a work because it already is there on the surface, gleaming like a cock drenched in jizm.
& I may be wrong here
you are! haha! napanood ko yung ilang madrigal awards nung nakaraan, puwera yung kina sarge at rica bolipata-santos, at me division talaga ng language, na para sa'kin ay hokey na proposition. at agree ako dun sa idiom bit na sinabi mo, kasi isa sa mga isyu ko tungkol sa mga isyu natin sa wika dito ay, well, hindi siya magiging isyu kung hindi mo siya gagawing isyu, na tingin ko ay na-achieve naman nung akda (albeit not completely, me pagkukulang pa rin siya sa lugar na yun). sana next year, wala nang isyu-isyu sa wika, sa totoo lang. me mga akda na kasi na di naman na iniisyu yun, tulad na rin nung GIRL TROUBLE, na kasama sa finalists. so alam mong me lumalabas na na ganun.
at dude: pogi talaga ako. medyo chunky, pero pogi pa rin.
at nakalimutan ko palang sabihin na yung GIRL TROUBLE ay trilingual pa.
at oo, putsa, the awkward bookish mousy types are the best, dude. agree tayo diyan. ang oblique (naks) moral of the post ko ay, yun nga, kailangang siyasatin ang notions natin ng beauty, at na kahit ako rin ay me mga sablay pa sa ganyan.
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