And it really is a Spectacle of Me with Milflores books, “creative nonfiction” seemingly used to validate literary navel-gazing, admittedly something of a mainstay in most creative writing being produced whatever the genre, although now it doesn’t have the veneer of fiction or poetry, now it’s memoir or autobiography or worse still, personal essay, now it’s “creative nonfiction,” now it’s safe to be yourself in literature, free from the fear of critical appraisal and reprisal, free from the literary rigour that we’ve come to expect from fiction and poetry, from the intellectual acuity we’ve come to expect from the essay, these valued judgments in light of the words Milflores utilizes to describe their books, words such as “funny essays with delusions of grandeur,” “funny essays and poems on various ailments and afflictions,” “zany interviews of an annulment lawyer with spouses of superheroes,” “the incredible lightness of being burgis!,” “funny essays, stories, and poems on all kinds of heartbreak,” “funny essays, etc, on insomnia by insomniacs,” “funny essays on Pinoy Life in America,” “files (funny & serious) on youthful being and nothingness,”—it reads like Milflores’ foundations are built on humour writing (their covers are certainly funny) but “funny” in these books, like “creative nonfiction,” is used more as an excuse to be friendly and safe and cute and superficial, “funny” as a disclaimer, almost an apology, and really, upon reading, very rarely is there any genuine wit or humour or even just plain comedy. There is only this stumbly bumbly slapstickhood, and not even of the Dolphy or TVJ or Bubble Gang variety, but more on how most of the books are actually written: clunkily, clumsily, often times gawkily laughing at its own incompetence. But should we even try to effort to want something more from unabashedly—and admittedly—superficial texts?

But not all of them are that superficial, as some of them—specifically two—are somehow struggling to rise above the tide in their own ways—struggling to be “funny and serious”—namely Luis Katigbak’s the King of Nothing To Do (Milflores Publishing, 2006), and Vlad Gonzales’ Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan (Milflores Publishing, 2008), two books seemingly efforting to want something more from themselves than just mere superficiality, with varying results.

The King of Nothing To Do, Katigbak’s very belated much awaited follow-up for his best-selling GenXy first book Happy Endings, is a collection of essays written between 1993 (!) and 2006, culled from his weeklies—the book title is the title of his column for the Manila Bulletin—and the very nature of that concept betrays the potential of what could have been our answer to David Sedaris and Nick Hornby. The essays in the book do not escape their being perishable ephemera as they are not made to escape perishability: the pieces here were pretty much lifted wholesale from their original sources, from their original contexts, the only real editing applied on to it categorization and proofreading and not much else in aid of it being a whole book—it’s really just a collection of articles and nothing else, which is unfortunate as periodically Katigbak struggles through the prose to say something important, but the effort falls flat on its face as just when things are starting to get interesting, the essay’s already in its last paragraph, as the constraints of the essays’ original contexts—the weekly column’s a thousand words or so per installment—more often than not only really lends itself to skimming thin-blooded writing. The ideas just aren’t threshed-out properly, aren’t meatily considered and contemplated on, the essays’ theses and antitheses are not given the time and space to bloom into big bouncy bouquets of elucidation and entertainment a la Sedaris and Hornby—I keep mentioning them as they provide the working blueprint for what Milflores’ concept of “creative nonfiction” seems to be going for: humorous elaborations on everyman things—yes, like Bob Ong, only more “literary”—mainly about weird family issues and awkward love—Katigbak’s pieces aren’t even bonsais, merely buds struggling to see the light and green-up but then hastily stunted—it really could have been quite the book, although it must be said that as far as the English-language output of this sort of thing goes, Katigbak’s are one of the best-written, in his patent postcolonial Charlie Brown conversational mode, friendly and charming in a passive-aggressive manner, nostalgia as a bleeding-heart badge of honour, a celebration of monkey-in-the-middle geekdom, certainly well within the Spectacle of Me, only warmer, and in quick cuts. Quality quickies? For my money, Katigbak shines more in his music writing, where he is meatier, more thorough and critical and not very self-centered, and I’m more excited by those than by his pieces in the King of Nothing To Do, and the prospect of a collection of that—something I know he’s been planning to do for some time now—is certainly interesting, certainly something to look forward to.

Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan, Gonzales’ third book, by far is the best from Milflores so far, probably as it’s the least affected by the publisher’s house-style, being the most polished and the most professional of their books, as any proper collection ought to do, Gonzales’ essays actually cohere solidly as a book while still retaining their anecdotal individuality—one can read it in one go, or in parts, both attempts equally effective—which is quite an achievement, considering most of the essays were culled from the author’s own blog, yet another medium for sloppy ephemera, but Gonzales’ discipline shines through. The pieces are not absolutely timeless, given to referencing Pinoy Pop Culture Icons of the past forty years—often even overexplaining his references—which utterly dates the book somewhat, utterly confines its audience to a certain crowd, a weird effect, keeping in mind the “timeless” nature of Pop Culture, but it works for the book more often than not. It’s also a book that leans towards oversentimentality, almost not wanting to escape the past—nostalgia here is not just a bleeding-heart badge of honour, it’s actually a metaphorically literal bleeding heart—but somehow managing to move forward, albeit slowly as the book also leans towards overanalysis as for Gonzales everything—everything—is of significance, and often it is hammered on to you slow and hard and deliberate. Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan is often read against Bob Ong’s output, something I think it deserves (for better or for worse) as even Milflores is quick to quip that the book (and the writer) is “better than Bob Ong,” so they’re certainly looking for a comparison between the two, and I’ve read Bob Ong, and enjoyed him, found him to be a very effective armchair intellectual—a closeted one—positing and proposing things about Filipinohood (Filipinoness?), about “Filipino” things, things that make you sit up and look up in the sky and mutter “Oo, ganyan nga ang Pinoy. Ganyan nga … ako.”, doing all this obliquely via everyman nostalgia that somehow don’t register as self-centered as, say, Gonzales’ efforts. Bob Ong’s nostalgia is calculatedly anonymous, self-centered but not. It’s really about everyone. It’s certainly something that most of his clones—more or less the entire “creative nonfiction” bibliography in and outside the high school and college classrooms of the immediate past and the coming future—have yet to pick up on, although Gonzales is closer to how Ong operates but still providing his own flavour for what could be read as the Same Old Thing, when it’s more like the Same Old Thing, Only With Extra Smarts, as Gonzales’ is a footnoted nostalgia, overanalysis of overexplained oversentimentality, which he pulls off via a cultivated friendly lucid voice pitched to the mashed-up tunes of the entire Eraserheads discography, episodes of Batibot, and readings of Rene Villanueva’s seminal books Personal and Impersonal. If Katigbak’s essays are stunted buds struggling to grow, Gonzales’ are big heaping bowls of cold green salad, straight from the fridge, tossed and sauced and ready to eat.

What Katigbak’s and Gonzales’ books have in common—besides having the same publisher—is that they’re both symptoms of a widespread contemporary malaise our current mode of production of literature seems to be absent-mindedly infected with, namely the devaluation of the Writer—and by extension the Reader—as Intellectuals. It’s not all Milflores’ fault—although they are promoting it and making money off of it—as the devaluation is only one of the effects of yet another modern campaign in contemporary literature, that is to make Reading—and by extension Writing—“friendlier” to outsiders, i. e., non-literary types, as new entertainment media—celphones, mp3 players, DVDs, ubiquitous WiFi—and New Subjectivity—YouTube, Friendster, Multiply, Twitter—emerge and encroach upon our society and culture, traditional (= print) media have found itself constantly defending itself and losing ground and instead opting to assimilate these new emerging things—or more accurately, be assimilated by these new emerging things—in order to keep hip to the times, but so far, most approaches to that end have been lukewarm cutesy harmless fluff, somehow equating those things—fluff—with “entertainment,” “entertainment” being Literature’s answer to its impending irrelevance, but they’re only leading us towards a comfy couch in a cozy café somewhere in Makati, not towards changing our minds about something, which is what new entertainment media and New Subjectivity have done and are doing, what Good Writing—and by extension Good Reading—should always be doing, be it Aldous Huxley dropping acid for the very first time or Bob Ong waxing nostalgic for the very first time, and Good Reading—and by extension Good Writing—is something Milflores Publishing is supposed to be championing, but then, why publish—support—all this fluff? Is this really what Milflores sees as Good Reading? I understand the appeal of it for the most part, of writing like a sari-sari store layabout, of reading of their exploits while contemplating lavatory buddhahood, but should it be the pinnacle of our literary aspirations? We’ve already given these things awards, for whatever that’s worth, like with Rica Santos’ momsy things that are written equivalents of noontime talkshows hosted by forty-something you-go-girl mothers who are also has-been child actresses from the Eighties. From Quijano de Manila to this? Really?

Our country’s most prolific publisher of “creative nonfiction” has already decided to establish an aesthetic founded on a blogger’s discourse of knee-jerk politicking, of desktop philosophizing, of Tuesdays with Me-Myself-&-I in a thousand words or less—the Spectacle of Me—a bibliography of transcriptions of Lifestyle Network shows, written by Palanca winners and literary trendsetters, an aesthetic so effectively maintained and sustained in our bookstores and classrooms that the only really critical assessment of the genre so far has been “Is it funny?” and if found wanting then is found lacking.

Where are our Didions, our Joaquins and our Lacabas? Where our Polotans and Sontags and Villanuevas? Where are our Vollmans, our Wallaces? Where is Daryll Delgado? Where are Jing Panganiban, Luna Sicat-Cleto, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil? Where are our works that will weigh our theses, our works that will put our notions to a test? Where are our tentative efforts, our experiments? It seems we have all already surrendered to the booksellers.

Previously published in the Philippines Free Press

And so here we are in a state of atrophy with no physical therapist to rub our shrinking curling legs for us and so every occasion to stretch our limbs is taken with excitement bordering on the abnormal, incendiary words, almost damning Ilustrado with feint praise, almost to the point of being unfair to it, a book still to be published, a book only maybe less than a hundred people have seen and read, a book that absolutely everyone who've read it—including me—loves to bits, and a lot has already been typed and hyped about the book in the (mostly online) media, all well-deserved albeit somehow a bit myopic, not taking into account the great many implications of its existence in the sometimes all too lunar local literary landscape, some of which I'll grapple with in these meager thousand words in the self-assured tones of the critic as devil’s advocate. And so here we begin a review.

Aside from being possibly the Next Great Pinoy Novel, thanks in no small part to the national and international accolades it has earned, Ilustrado could also very well be the first postmodern Pinoy novel that will enjoy international publication—that will enjoy an international readership—a monumental breakthrough any which way you cut it, not only for Syjuco the writer, but also for all of us lifers here in the Philippines. Finally, the Pinoy in the limelight! And such a good book, too.

Ilustrado is a thoroughly textbook postmodern novel: it literally begins with the death of an author, Crispin Salvador, a Pinoy expat writer—by way of Jose Rizal and Jose Garcia Villa, with degrees of James Joyce and Ambrose Bierce mixed in—whose primarily novel-length output have been praised and derided by critics and readers alike worldwide throughout a very tumultuous very productive literary career centered around a love for a country constantly kept at arm's length, and his death being a highly-suspicious matter surreptitiously-timed as Salvador was working on what was to be his ultimate book on the Philippines, a manuscript that oh-so-conveniently disappeared with the author, the Burning Bridges, a political thriller drama exposé. His protégé—postmodernly-named “Miguel Syjuco”—decides to ambiguously investigate the matter himself by piecing together Salvador's more than a half-century long life of letters.

And on the outset the book already suffers from having too many familiar postmodern blueprints for its writing. The book suffers because more or less everything happening in its pages are pretty much expected to happen—Tony Hidalgo's PR about it even offers us the terms for some of them. All the tropes, the techniques, the experiments are all seemingly blatantly borrowed from other postmodern texts—Paul Auster’s name games, Jose Luis Borges’ pseudobibliographies, Mark Danielewski’s simulated ephemera and interpersonal digressions, Jonathan Safran Foer’s quest for family meaning and history amidst the ruins of war and disaster, even bits of Richard Brautigan's macho woman-love—and made to do their usual business. There is nothing really “new” about how Ilustrado is written and how it unfolds, although it must be said that while doing its usual business, the book frequently genuinely gives way to beautiful verbal somersaults, juxtapositions, and backhands—and often there are actual moments of genuine humour that actually made me laugh—but everything is still as expected, not really deviating from the already well-trod path. It’s all very comfortable.

Ilustrado is a slow-burner, the narrative push—Syjuco the character's actual physical compiling of the disparate bits of Salvador's life—takes a backseat to the admittedly far more entertaining accumulation of “things:” loose-leaf pages from various manuscripts, a catalogue of objects found in a baul—two of the book's more prominent borrowed devices—the constant chatter of which give an illusion that the story is moving along—there is just really this surfeit of words!—when it really isn't: Syjuco the character is still in his plane thinking about his mentor and his ex, basically his whole life frequently juxtaposed and sandwiched by elements from Salvador's, quite possibly in an effort to make clear tense connections between the two, but the effect never really congeals as everything remains too ambiguous, too disjointed and yet not disjointed enough, meant to be excerpts but being too close-circled they're just not written and just don’t read as such, the vignettes too contrived, too transparently trying to make some greater sense yet too numerous and unfocussed to make any real sense, too arbitrarily arranged and ultimately lacking in narrative vitality to inform the greater-whole reading a novel demands: halfway into the book, what is only truly clear is that Salvador has written lots and lots of nationalist words wrought from life, and that Syjuco the character, after being stuck for hours inside a plane and now in a trademark Metro Manila traffic jam, is a bit of a whiner.

There are awkward turns of phrase, places where the book seemingly unconsciously overexplains its Pinoy heritage in equally annoying measures of exoticism and vilification—in one part contextualises Ateneo as “exclusive,” La Salle as “the rival (to Ateneo),” and AMA as “populist” to set up a running gag in the book, in another provides readers with a clumsy English translation of the chorus for Hotdog's “Manila:” “We keep looking for you, Manila / Your noise is delicious to our ears”—obviously for the foreigners in the audience. The book also efforts to make sociopolitical pronouncements about the Philippines, only they’re made from the tisoy upper crust to the nognog burnt bottom of the buko pie of Pinoy Society—it's a very elitista book, a very FilAm book. It seems that it’s about us Filipinos, but it’s not for us Filipinos. Foreigners will probably love this book the way they love Jessica Hagedorn’s. Filipinos will probably hate this book the way we hate Jessica Hagedorn’s. Maybe it’s the Great Pinoy Novel for Foreigners?

The narrative voice also tends to be monotonous at times, it’s just really written by one author, a glaring slight considering one of the book's main conceits is the cacophony of bibliography of at least two completely different authors of high lit, and Ilustrado itself—this you will get even from the title alone—is most definitely high lit, in the scale, really, of the other Great Pinoy Novels of our lolos, more specifically the aforementioned highly-literary-intellectual-ennui-striving-towards-nationalism-in-the-context-of-America tradition, which is all very surface, really, all very “there” as it has no real immediacy nowadays, despite its nationalist overtones, especially if read against our current social situation of first world money in a third world economy, et al, unlike, say, Jun Cruz Reyes’ Etsa-Puwera, which is, among other things, a dense rundown of the Philippines’ hundred-year struggle for liberty post-333 years of Spanish Rule only to be conquered interchangeably by the Americans and the Japanese and by the Filipinos themselves, or Katrina Tuvera's Jupiter Effect, basically a pulpy digestion of the Martial Law years, or Butch (again!?) Dalisay's recent Soledad's Sister, a detective story circling around our more modern national malaise, the service industry diaspora. I'm of course working off of the assumption that if you're meant to write—if you're meant to be—the Next Great Pinoy Novel, you have to at least talk about something immediate or contemporary or lasting for Pinoys—which America is—but Ilustrado's barebones is really thus: a writer talking about another writer who honest-to-goodness celebrated a very decadent very intellectual very “artsy” life dedicated to writing. It's really art for Art's sake. Its concerns are just too removed from today, too much into post-war territory, too fogey-ish in its naively romanticised high lit yearnings, too much about the self to be of any real social relevance.

But its literary relevance is very much quite firmly established, having won not only the domestic/ated Palanca Awards but also the international Man Asia Literary Prize, and it is in this capacity that the book really becomes a beacon of artistic achievement—and Ilustrado really is without a doubt an achievement of the highest order—the overall impression upon finishing it is really Hey, it's one of those books! as it's really One Of Those Books.

In the classification of books that stand in the shadow of tradition and of books that stand on tradition's shoulders, Ilustrado is somewhere midway between the two, clambering up for a better view of it all. I can't help but read the book's literal situation—death of the mentor, protégé working on a proper remembering of mentor's life and lifework—as the metaphorical youth's acknowledgement of the fogeys' efforts, progress' debt to tradition, the relevance of history to the future—things that constantly remain relevant in the ongoing history and production of art and lit—Ilustrado does us well being here to remind us all about these things, indebted to tradition but struggling to rise above it, struggling to give us something “new,” even if it's not really there, yet, this book, by merely existing, will help us get there, and really as far as first books go, Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado is a defiant first shout—a polysyllabic defiant first shout of a hoarse, broken stammering voice, spittle and all—to wake most of what passes for Contemporary Pinoy Fiction off of its turn-of-the-century Victorian novel of manners doldrums and into the cacophonic beat of the Late 20th Century.

Previously published in the Philippines Free Press