I admit that I should’ve been more forthcoming to the Editors – to Sarge Lacuesta – with what I was planning to do with the essays, and I suspect the Editors – specifically Lacuesta, and maybe even Erwin Romulo – were under the utterly maliciously ill-advised impression that I was just being an asshole about things.

I have no real clear idea if the past five days of marathon commentaries and responses confirmed that “Yes, Adam David is indeed an Asshole,” or dismissed it, and truth be told, I don’t really care, as for me, these things – Art, Commentary on Art – despite being utterly personal things, have always been separate from the Personal, and I suspect that for me, these things – Art, Commentary on Art – will always be separate from the Personal, as how it should be for all the poets and the artists and most especially the critics, if they – the poets, the artists, the critics – really truly have any palpably heartfelt ambition to do their jobs right, and yeah, it really is a job, a job that we will never ever really truly retire from, a job we can never ever truly quit. This is a life-long thing. All the more reason to do it with much earnestness.

Which is probably my Hallmark-Card OA roundabout way of saying that I won’t stop writing criticism, especially not right now, after all of these things, after it was actually made obvious to me that my essays are actually doing their work. Yeah, I’m not stopping, and it’s not like I actually had plans to stop writing criticism, anyway. I just won’t be writing these things for the Free Press anymore. Not out of ill will, or schadenfreude, or any of those things. It just doesn’t seem right, doing that. So, to paraphrase Chingbee, it’s time to take this party elsewhere, and I’m putting it back here on the Interweb, where these things actually began, and I’m putting it back here soonish, as in next week, so yeah, if everyone reading this is all still very interested, watch this space.

PS

One of the more pleasant things that happened in the past five days was the fact that Ser Bomen – via Vlad – read my essays (or at least the most recent one) and actually thought that they (or it) were (was) forward-worthy enough for his dad to read, and that they (it) may actually warm the cauckles of his dad’s cold cold heart (haha), his dad, of course, being Ser Gelacio “Gelly Belly G-Squared” Guillermo, and yeah, whatever he may think about those things (or again, just that one thing), in the greater scheme of things, me getting read by that guy, that’s not so bad, dude. Not so bad at all.

And yeah, I’m afraid that, even with me, it’s all about vanity, mehn.

“Who knows? This may be the beginning of a beautiful partnership.
Or maybe Luis will be right, na this might be the most controversial pairing ever.”

— Erwin Romulo, in a text message to me about the two of us working for the Philippines Free Press

And so with the past couple of issues of the Philippines Free Press (Volume 100, Numbers 36 and 37) we see the Free Press Editors (sans the globetrotting Romulo, I hasten to add) jerkily twisting their necks and flailing their legs in the wind as they backpedal hastily while covering their own butts with soft whispers of declarations of affirmation of their and their sponsors’ positions in the Status Quo, and, you know, who really actually knew that this’d happen?

I surely didn’t, as when Romulo briefed me my marching orders about striving to have the Philippines Free Press actually be the Last Word on Culture and the Arts — a la Pete Lacaba and Greg Brillantes and Nick Joaquin and Kerima Polotan before us, not only talking about Culture and the Arts but also about Politics and Society, and with such brio and insight and conviction and just this thickly palpable world-weary disappointment — they were marching orders that, after reading Jonathan Chua’s heartbreaking the Critical Villa (a book everyone supposedly serious about writing should read), were in tune with what I thought was sorely missing in our current mode of literary production, and so I accepted the job offer with equal measures of pride and humility and a little bit of wariness as Straight Literary Criticism was something I have never actually done before.

I’ve done some criticism, but it’s always been thinly-veiled ’pataphorical things like the ironic sloganeering writing manual I did back in 2007, or my first book the El Bimbo Variations as a showcase of the extralyrical potentials of Philippine Poetry, I’ve done things like that, but never Straight Literary Criticism with polysyllabic theories and kilometric footnotes and traceable references, and never before with a potential national audience that a magazine like the Philippines Free Press might have, so yeah, a bit of wariness, especially when Romulo’s decision (which he amends about four months later as actually being Sarge Lacuesta’s) to hire me was really only solely based on my sloppily slapdashedly superficial (at least compared to what I’ve done since then) criticism of Speculative Fiction, really, the type of criticism — sloppy, slapdashed, superficial — that I felt didn’t deserve a place in the Philippines Free Press, but it was the closest I’ve been to Straight Literary Criticism, so whatever approach I was going to use, it’d be coming off of that as quite quickly in the conversation with Romulo I decided to not be a wallflower about my forthcoming reviews as the last thing needed was a “smarter” Ruey de Vera: I actually decided to strive to be more intelligent than I was at that time, as intelligent as I have to be for the Philippines Free Press. And so, with those things in mind, I set about looking for the appropriate approach for my own brand of criticism as I worked on the book Romulo (and supposedly Lacuesta) actually suggested that I do my first review on.

And the deal was that I get two pesos per word, with a word limit of a thousand and a half, which means at most an instant three grand per review, and if I can do the reviews almost weekly (meaning maybe two or three reviews in a month), that’d mean around six to maybe nine grand a month, which wasn’t as good as my last job as bookdesigner, but it was good enough for what it was, which was me doing work that was potentially important not only for me, but hopefully for other people as well, or at least that was how I was planning to go about doing it, and the deal sounded pretty sweet, especially as a couple of weeks before Romulo contacted me about writing for them, my bookdesigning job got pulled from under me and I was scrambling looking for back-up, so hey, two pesos per word, a pretty sweet deal, and a promise that the magazine will actually be better in paying their contributors, which was what I was.

And just with the first review I already broke the thousand-and-a-half word limit with 1,927 words on Khavn’s Ultraviolins, and pretty subsequently hit my stride on the two-thousand-word limit — 2,183 words on Gerry Alanguilan’s Elmer, 1,744 words on Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado, 2,708 words on the Best Books of 2008, 2,129 words on Angelo Suarez’ Dissonant Umbrellas, 2,054 words on the Milflores Catalog, 2,105 words on that notorious essay on Self-Publishing, 1,705 on Ricky Lee’s Para Kay B, and finally a measly 976 words on my addenda, and that’s all of them, really, nine essays all told, the proposed tenth essay being the 13,243-word round-robin discussion about Speculative Fiction — a word limit that felt pretty perfect for the scope that I had in mind for the reviews, that scope being actual commentary/critique on the various machinations of our Current Mode of Literary Production, a scope that I felt my reviews actually managed to accommodate (but did they do their jobs as critiques? Someone else will have to write about that one).

And all these 17,531 words got published without much editing, truth be told, just a few periods and commas added wherever the Free Press Editors felt my “voluminous” sentences were too awry for comfort — “… para makapag-fit-in sa housestyle,” as Romulo put it once — but they more or less basically let me run with a lot of things, and it was really me running at top speed, in pretty much all the essays except for the last two, with the only really vaguely editorial comment made about these being 1) Please use the period every once in a while, and 2) Please try not to namedrop F Sionil Jose too much, comments that were a few months and two essays apart, all coming from Ricky Torre, the second comment being a personal request as Jose is basically Torre’s Literary Father and as we were talking about editing the 13k-word SpecFic interview, Torre made it clear that it’d be a great favour for him if I took out my references to F Sionil Jose for reasons that were really more about the fallout from an essay from Norman Wilwayco about a PEN conference on Leftist Literature (put simply, Wilwayco metaphorically shat on the conference) than my mentions of him in the two essays that did get published, and after explaining why I referred to Jose in the SpecFic interview, I still wholeheartedly agreed to delete all references to him (they were important, but they weren’t that important, and besides, I liked Torre for being accommodating enough to talk to me about these things), and I reminded him that despite all the assumptions to the contrary, I’m actually fairly agreeable to being edited, as long as 1) people tell me why, and 2) I get to argue my points first.

The only really vocal critique I’ve heard about my essays is mainly about their tone, that they’re just too angry and confrontational, “a gorilla with a stick” (or variably, “pitbull-poetics”) as its been described to me by the identity-protected DumaVirus, and yeah, I actually agree that the essays do have anger, that the essays are confrontational, only I don’t see those things as problems and more as shock-shot-to-the-arm solutions for what I think are the real problems in Mainstream Literary Criticism, those being mainly litcrit that are either dryly-academic or PR-friendly, and yes, there are those essays that are critical and yet written with graceful composure, and I love those essays, but those are already being written by Conchitina Cruz and Mabi David (among others) and I had no interest to just be another gracefully composed critic, and you can only do so much with grace when you’re writing about Ultraviolins and Dissonant Umbrellas, and add that with my yearning for the heydays of Angas Ng Kurimaw and 30s-era Jose Garcia Villa and I’ll only really settle for nothing less than what we have in these nine-or-ten essays. That’s not to say, of course, that I had no room for growth, as the observant in the audience might have somewhat noticed, ie, DumaVirus, my latest “real” review — Ricky Lee’s Para Kay B — had me dialing down the anger and angst and actually being more generous with the use of periods, and that essay was actually Part One of (thanks in no small part to Edgar Samar’s Atisan blog) what was going to be (so far in my notes) an eight-part essay on the Postmodern Pinoy (= Filipino-language) Novel, interspersed with a few dispatches on Speculative Fiction and Pinoy Komix, and the Para Kay B review — despite whatever Danton Remoto might think of that review — represents the next step for my development of a voice solely reserved for Mainstream Literary Criticism work. People may also notice that the Para Kay B review came right after the notorious essay on Self-Publishing, which I wrote as the end of the first phase of my litcrit writing, and yes, I actually had a certain vision for these things that actually spans three years of writing, basically a mapping of Postmodern Literature in the Philippines — they weren’t just one-off things as I planned to compile them in annual PDFs — and I talked about it somewhat with Romulo (among them a suggestion that the magazine ought to think about publishing Filipino-language stories and poems, and also maybe updating to wonderful full-colourdom and artistic apogee the stories’ and poems’ accompanied artstuff, but those failed to stick for reasons not mentioned to me), but for reasons that absolutely had no relation to any of the things mentioned in this essay, communications with Romulo went dramatically south and Torre had to pass me on to Lacuesta, a shift of gears that I welcomed as I felt that no matter how in tune I was with Romulo (or at least that’s how I felt it was like working with him), Lacuesta was actually someone who I thought would understand and actually know where I was coming from, being a writer himself in a pretty big way, and besides I was shifting gears with my essays anyway, but still keeping in mind the Big Issues that I started with the first nine-or-ten essays, ie, criticism of the various modes of production, developing a discourse, et al, so the changing of editors wasn’t too big a deal for me, and yeah, according to Romulo, it was Lacuesta’s idea to hire me in the first place.

But then right off the bat in an essay I wrote as an effort to both clear the air about what I feel are insipid issues people are having about my essays, ie, ad hominem weighing of my worth as a writer via the standards I actually criticize, and to smoke out any of the supposedly many desktop critics who either agree or disagree with what I’ve been saying to actually speak up and be heard to help generate actual discourse — and Torre even told me that like with the short stories and poems it publishes weekly, the Philippines Free Press actually has an open-door policy about literary critical essays (as long as they’re in English, I suppose) — I get a briefly-worded editorial note that’s actually the editorial-note-equivalent of a brief public handwashing (“Mistakes We Knew We Were Making,” the Philippines Free Press, Volume 100, Number 36), and in the week right after was what someone described as “a public reprimand” and later, “a public firing,” in the essay “Polarity Is Interesting But,” (Sarge Lacuesta, the Philippines Free Press, Volume 100, Number 37) that was initially promised as a response to my air-clearing-out-smoking essay, a response from the Free Press Editors to me personally, and it really does read like a reprimand, from the jokey punny Eggers intro to the references to the very same issues I’ve tackled in my nine-or-ten essays to the self-congratulatory ending of not ever needing to write a single pungent word wherever, and being thinly-veiled passive-aggressive ad hominem attacks, it wasn’t those things that made me shed a tear for Philippine Literature in general and Literary Criticism in particular, but the opening sentence for the nearly-penultimate paragraph in the essay, seven measly words with all the casualness of a shrug and the gravitas of a sack of bricks and just really the saddest thing ever to come from the literary editor of a hundred-and-one-year-old magazine that formerly contained the singular scintillating opinions of Villa and Lacaba and Brillantes and Joaquin and Polotan:


“Besides, I’m generally uninterested in making discourse.”


And really, how can I live with such a statement, seemingly said with much pride and mad abandon, let alone work under an editor — work under a boss — who has just confessed to being generally uninterested in the very same singular thing that I’ve been working to develop? You really can’t cut it any other way: Sarge Lacuesta, under the banner of “the Free Press Editors,” is generally uninterested in making discourse. Generally. Uninterested. In making. Discourse. Apparently, the Philippines Free Press, the pages that published the actual essays from Lacaba’s Days Of Disquiet, Nights Of Rage, the pages that published Ninoy Aquino’s correspondences from the Korean Warfront, the pages that published Quijano de Manila’s weekly dispatches, feels more confident to print dissenting opinion regarding the Government than to print dissenting opinion regarding Contemporary Literary Practices. Apparently, the Philippines Free Press is now home to a literary editor who is generally uninterested in making discourse. Who’d’ve thunk?

So yeah, between this and only really getting paid 3,600 Php (so far) for all my 17,531 words (plus the few hundred words I did for Francis M, whom I love greatly so that was a freebie), yeah, I’m quitting this gig. And I won’t even be bothering them to pay me properly, as it’s all really five months too late for that. Apparently, this is how reading a book and writing a 2,000-word essay about it and suitably-arguing its implications in the contemporary writing scene and doing all that in the span of ten days week-in week-out for about six months, ie, good work, is rewarded. Like a good friend who used to have a house in Montalban told me, I didn’t ask for this job, and the only thing that it really gave me is even more grey hairs, and that’s a lot, because I (already) got my share. And yeah, this is no real loss in the greater scheme of things, as all the Free Press Editors’ “public reprimand” did is just confirm all my sermons about the problems of the Modes of Production of Philippine Literature, and just really gave its magazine up as one proud culprit.

I thought of what happened to my nine-or-ten-essay stint in the Philippines Free Press, and instantly felt wiser. I thought of all the things I had said, or written, in all the angriest colours and tones, against all that had been done to us, or not done to us, and I was glad for having written it all, and said it all, without almost ever needing to write seven stupid words.

Instead, I wrote 17,531 of them! Hahaha! Kerplunk! This is a great moment in your literature. Word up, dudes. Peace out.

I know my essays often read like a promiscuous Pez-dispenser of acerbic witticisms that strive towards cheap and easy bon mot-hood, but rest assured that each and every text I read and write about are given every chance to prove its point, each and every pointed proclamation is calculated and well-considered, and never driven by whatever personal issues people assume I may have. I have nothing against F Sionil Jose or Krip Yuson or Marjorie Evasco. I actually appreciate their existence as, together with Dalisay and Abad and the Tiempos and the Hidalgos, etcetera etcetera etcetera, they made me possible. They planted the trees whose fruits I regularly glutton on. They set the conditions that I am currently enjoying and/or despising right this very minute, in the same way that I am right this very minute setting the conditions that people will enjoy and/or despise fifty years from now. Unlike most people, though, I don’t confuse that appreciation for blind devotion. So when I say that it’s okay to not have Krip Yuson’s breezy blurby blessings or Marjorie Evasco’s limning reaction paper introductions in our books, it’s a pataphorical burning of effigies. In case it hasn’t sunk in, yet: when I suggested we commit “patricide/matricide,” I didn’t mean it literally, ie, we actually physically kill them in their sleep. I meant it metaphorically. It was an earnest call for maturity, rendered symbolically. I criticise them for what they represent, not for who they are. If people are given the freedom to celebrate these Fogeys as icons, people should be given the freedom to burn them as such.

I am writing about Art and Literature, about Culture, its various processes of production and reproduction, the many and varied artifacts it produces, its implications and assumptions about the world at large, and that is exactly how I treat them, as implications and assumptions, as a system of production, as artifacts. It feels like a really intellectually decrepit gesture having to mention this as I’ve always felt this to be obvious in context to Literary Criticism – yes, even here in the Philippines – but I suppose it’s a gesture that bears making in a Public Forum upon which my place is being questioned along the terms of the usual achievements and affirmations, absurdly enough the very same achievements and affirmations I question in my essays. I suppose I can run down the names of whatever few people who have been vocally supportive of the essays in question, and funny that the most vocal of them are actually prominent Fogeys with their own scintillating set of achievements and affirmations, but what exactly will that prove? Do I really have to be that insecure to be seen as worthy in other people’s eyes?

To ask the question “Ano ba ang masamang ginawa sa kanya ni Frankie?” is to miss the point. To ask the question “Sino ba siya para sabihin ang mga ‘yan?” is to miss the point. To say I’m a kick-out is to miss the point (it’s also inaccurate: I’m actually AWOL). To ask “What is the point?” is to miss the point. This is not about me. This is not about you. To still not see that after everything written in all these essays of the past few months is to be really quite Ptolemaic about it. This is about improving the quality of talk around here. This is about asking ourselves brand new questions (or reminding ourselves of old ones). This is about being held accountable for the things we’ve been writing and saying and doing for the past thirty years. This is about planting a tree we will never sit under. If you still can’t see that, well, then, you’re just either too dumb, or too “into” your own hype, and really, you have no business reading these essays, as these things are simply not for you.




Previously published in the Philippines Free Press

The term itself is not new: Robert Heinlein, criticized as a writer who is “antiArt,” author of the books Starship Troopers (1959) (which had a Filipino character as protagonist) and, more importantly, Stranger In A Strange Land (1961) (a beacon of a book, especially coming from someone “antiArt”), wrote an essay called “On The Writing Of Speculative Fiction,” which he presented in a 1947 science fiction symposium that was reportedly “unabashedly concerned with markets and money.” In it, Heinlein put to paper the five “business habits” of a science fiction writer: 1) you must write; 2) you must finish what you start; 3) you must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order; 4) you must put it on the market; 5) you must keep it on the market until sold; five cardinal rules for what was then a fledgling number of working writers who were paid by the word, given to overwriting out of necessity, i.e., to not die of hunger, thus begetting the oft-criticised tendency of genre writers for purple throbbing prose, and also the prevalent “antiArt” stance.

Michael Moorcock, writer of the Eternal Champion series of books, used “Speculative Fiction” a few years later in 1964 in the British science fiction magazine he was editing called New Worlds, to label the drug-addled dystopic perverse postmodern writing that he was anthologizing in the magazine, namely works from William Burroughs and J G Ballard. The term was a part of what was then a reassessment of the genre, of its call for entertainment and the often opposite call for literary experimentation, the results of which can be seen not only through Burroughs’ Nova Express and Ballard’s the Atrocity Exhibition, but also through Philip Dick’s Ubik and Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration and Brian Aldiss’ “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” (which was the initial basis for the Spielberg-Kubrick film AI).

Forty years later here in the Philippines, Dean Alfar is pretty much the first on record to use the term. Together with Nikki Alfar and Vin Simbulan, he edits and self-publishes the aforementioned annual anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction. Alongside Alfar in the SpecFic Spotlight, however reluctant he may be about it, is Kenneth Yu, editor and publisher of the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories. Both publications have been instrumental in fanning the flames of what can be labeled as “emergent lit,” just by their sheer presence on the shelves. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Dean Alfar and Kenneth Yu are the Elderly Statesmen of SpecFic as it is practiced here.

In Part One, Dean Alfar agreed that Speculative Fiction at present is already out of the literary margins, but with lingering doubts about its sustainability outside of the support structures it is currently enjoying, the very same support structures that helped push it out of the margins. Kenneth Yu related a few truly horrific stories about some of the more myopic people he had had the misfortune of encountering both in the Academe and in SciFi/Fantasy Fandom itself, and concluded that SpecFic will always encounter marginalization in whatever form as people will always be biased against it somehow, and all that we can really do is just deal with it. I end Part One with a few questions about Speculative Fiction’s lack of a Bigger Politic, and its desire for Approval and Legitimacy and its demand to be left alone, two seemingly contradictory impulses.

The interview/discussion/debate was conducted just this March 2009, through eMail correspondence. The goal was to put to bed some of the issues surrounding the genre, i.e., the claims that SpecFic is still marginalised, and maybe effort to start new topics for further discussion and debate, i.e., the development of a functional critical framework solely for Speculative Fiction. This is Part Two of Three. Things heat up a bit towards the end.




ADAM DAVID: One of my major criticisms of Speculative Fiction as practiced here is that it lacks a Bigger Politic - I'm tempted to say that maybe it's looking for one but more often than not it actually even tries its best to not even bother looking for one - but really I think it already had one since its inception here, and that's the whole Anti-Realist, Anti-Academic stance, which I think is wholly Dean’s than Kenneth's, despite your common trauma and neurosis. But recognition of that begs a few questions: why pit Speculative Fiction against Realism? Why pit Speculative Fiction with the Academe? And while we're at it, why transact along the level of the Enemy via the Palancas and the insistence for Academic Approval - dare I say Parental Approval? Isn't engagement with the Academe a recognition of its power over you? Isn't the saner, more morally-sound approach to just do your own thing outside of the policing eyes of the Academe? I ask because all of Speculative Fiction's successes so far stemmed from that impetus - do your own thing - via both of your regular anthos and Charles Tan's and Mia Tijam's online compilation - all self-published efforts - and yet all still seemingly wanting a pat on the back from F. Sionil Jose.

KENNETH YU: You're right in saying that this is more wholly Dean's than mine, this tongue-in-cheek Anti-Realist, Anti-Academic stance, but even so, I'd like to point out that Dean is not against Realists or academics. In pointing out the differences with SpecFic it may come off as such, but in my opinion, only as tongue-in-cheek; he's close enough to those writers to mildly tease them, but I'm not close enough to do the same. I'll defend Dean further by saying that he also deals regularly, respectfully, and courteously with those from the academe; I don't deal with them as regularly, but I'm just as polite. I know Dean has a healthy respect for Realist writers and academics. We’re all storytellers. And when I say I'm not from the academe, I mean that as a matter of fact, and not for any other reason. I lack their book-knowledge and their grasp of theory, and I fully respect their intelligence for it. I think in another, parellel world, I might've been an academic myself. I'm not looking for parental approval, let's make that clear. I'm not looking for a pat on the back from F. Sionil Jose, whom I've never met, though I did approach Butch Dalisay for help, who did say many nice things about PGS, and that felt good. I am forever grateful to him (and besides, I enjoy his stories a lot). I'm putting PGS out there to get people reading, no more, no less. And when I made that clear to Sir Butch, I think that's when he took my side. It's. The. Reading. That's what binds Realists and SpecFic lovers, that binds storytellers.

I think if I were to go back in time and take that creative writing course under that same professor, even after he said what he said, I'd write to please him and get through the course (I don't want to get a failing grade!), but I wouldn't stop writing after that, unlike what I did before. I'd continue to write what I want to write, with little forays into other types of writing maybe. But I wouldn't have stopped. In fact, just to let you know, Dean and the rest of his Manila Litcritters like to tease me for being a closet “Realist.” They say it like an ultra-conservative American Republican he-man would call someone out for being a closet-homosexual. They've read a number of my first drafts, and many of them are not SpecFic at all in nature. They call me “defender of genre” with mock-derision because I have a fair number of Realist stories to match my SpecFic ones. Like I said, a story is a story is a story. Leave the labeling to publishers and bookstore owners. If it works, it works.

Must there be a bigger politic? Must one write with a theme in mind when one writes the story? Maybe that comes after the fact, after some time has passed and a large body of work has presented itself, similar to the pulps in the US. On the individual level, maybe it works for some writers, but I know for others it can strangle the writing, make it preachy. Just tell the story first. Leave the reader to glean and get what he can, given his own identity. Let him say, “Oh! I think the author was trying to say this!” rather than preaching it for all it's worth and being self-aware of it. I'm not sure one can put a bigger politic to the “SpecFic movement” (for want of a better term) when many of those writing are just writing the stories that come into their heads. Let's take Vin Simbulan. As evidenced by his anthology A Time For Dragons, he loves high fantasy. He's written so many high fantasy stories. He likes the magic, the swords, the armor, the fighting, the monsters, the dragons, the fireball explosions and what have you. When he writes his stories, he just tells his story, but I don't see a bigger politic behind his tales. He's drawing from the kid in him that still can feel the wonder, excitement, and thrill from these kinds of stories, and thus, his stories have been a hit with those who are still in this age range. What politic is in there? Hopefully, when they grow older, his readers will expand to other reading material from this, without losing or forgetting their love for this type of story also. It's kinda stifling to think about theme and politic while writing a story, when you should be thinking of your characters' motivations, the setting, and getting the tale right. There are techniques and elements in realism that work well with SpecFic, while SpecFic has its own of the same. Perhaps, it might serve to enhance a Realist story if they can try out SpecFic elements and techniques in its own telling? Granted, there are stories that run with a theme, especially if an author has a body of work (take Hemingway and his “life is nothing and we have to face it bravely” creed), but I'd like to think that the story still took precedence over some preachy theme (that Hemingway was thinking of telling his story as well as he could without preaching his theme outright, leaving it to the discerning reader to find it). If it's there, if there's a point, the sharp reader will get it. But a bigger politic as a whole for the entire local SpecFic? That's kinda hard to gather into a collective statement. Every writer will have their own themes to explore.

But I do see your point about SpecFic vs Realist. It occurs in the US too. Michael Chabon mentioned in an interview that he was a genre lover, and that was a conversation stopper in his university when he was taking up his writing course. When he would say he was writing about the artists of comics (Kavalier and Clay), everyone's unspoken question to him was, “Why?” Scifi, fantasy, etc, are no-nos, for some reason. Maybe that's why the Hugo's, Nebula's, etc are separate from the Pulitzer, the Booker, etc. Realist writers are afraid of getting labelled “SciFi” (Cormac McCarthy's The Road is not labeled as such, even if it is a post-apocalyptic type of story) in the same way that SpecFic writers don't want to be labeled “Realist” in some strange twist of reverse classification. Go figure. Funny how things turn out the way they do.

DEAN ALFAR: I honestly think that we’ll need more than one of your columns to flesh this out, and, I must admit in all candor, that my position here is conflicted. I have no neat answers or positions. Let me start by saying that, for all my protestations, I am part of, and respect (but certainly question aspects of) the creative writer process/scene. By process, I mean the perceived path that a person takes in the course of being/becoming a creative writer which runs the gamut from learning to write, to getting published, attending workshops, winning awards and so on. Let me also say that I do not think that all of these (with the exception of being published/producing books) are necessary.

What I cannot deny, as part of my “writerly” development when I was younger, is the influence the process ingrained into my bones. As a young writer, validation, for example, was very important. I needed someone of authority to tell me if what I was doing was good. My poetics – what makes a story “good” for me – is influenced also by the process (hence, my ultimate condensed answer to what makes a story a good story is “character -how the character, through the course of the text, illuminates some aspect of the human condition”) as much as by what I imbibe today. Even for SpecFic (other text elements from plot to narrative tone to the SpecFic aspect itself, these are secondary to me – though once in a while a story comes along that demolishes my notion of character’s primacy). The internal conflict for me as reader, writer and editor, is tug-of-war between what is ingrained and the DIYness of SpecFic.

Apart from the Anti-Realist, Anti-Academic stance you’ve attributed to me, I think the politics you are looking for in what is being produced will come in time. I believe in description rather than prescription and will not tell people what to write about. Writing is personal, and yes, writing is political, but it is up to each individual writer to develop/discover/advocate/recognize/advance their own issues/advocacies/beliefs and to produce those texts. We need to accept the fact that some stories are “merely” entertaining, bereft of gravity, political or otherwise – entertainment is not a bad thing (a number of these kinds of stories are those that demolish my poetics-driven sense of what’s good). Adam, is it not fair to ask for SpecFic critics to be open to the fact that they are also greatly influenced by academic discourse and literary expectations? Is it not possible to develop a critical framework specifically for SpecFic that recognizes the value of light humorous fantasy, for example?

I wanted to differentiate SpecFic from the dominant genre of Realism. To put it in very crude and overly simplistic terms, there are certain aspects of story that SpecFic prizes but which Realism does not. Also, given the problematic nature of the umbrella term, there was a need to find something in common with all the genres under the umbrella – which is that they are Non-Realist. Comparison and contrast are useful early tools to help definition, but are certainly not the only ways to define SpecFic in relation to Realism. SpecFic is an alternate to the genre of Realism. Anti-Realist sounds like I hate Realism, which I don’t. When I write SpecFic, I am conscious that I am not writing Realism (though I utilize tools from realism’s toolbox).

There should be space for writers and stories outside of academe. While it can be argued that I am a product of academe, I do not consider myself part of it (apart from the aforementioned “ingrained-into-my-bones” conflict).

Why do I transact with the workshops, the awards bodies, the academe? Why seek Parental Approval? This is complicated (or simple, depending on how you look at it): Because I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t matter. Because it helps reach out to more people. Because it exposes SpecFic. Because I cannot divorce myself from my family and operate like a pillar saint in complete isolation. Because I live in the Philippines. Because SpecFic is part of Philippine literature. Because we submit to Free Press and Philippine Graphic. Because a lot of those who read SpecFic are young and are in high school or university. Because of politics. A whole bundle of becauses, at the core of which, I think, is the belief that SpecFic deserves a place in Philippine literature.

Why not do away with all of these? Why not dismiss them? What exactly does that mean?

ADAM: The problem with description is that it often leads to prescription, like how I remember you, Dean, saying that Crime Fiction is not SpecFic as it relies too much on realism, not the genre but on the state of being real, and I thought that that proposition was a bit funny seeing as to how SpecFic is rather quickly turning into a shorthand for “genre stories” (and vice versa). I imagined you having a Geiger counter that measured a certain text’s “reality quotient” and it was quite hilarious. But it’s an opinion that I see is mostly yours as Yu’s Philippine Genre Stories makes it a point to publish Crime Fiction, to the point of having F H Batacan guest-editing an issue dedicated to Crime. How do the both of you and Yu (haha) negotiate these things, these differences in opinion? I know you’re both working towards the same goal – the development of a vibrant Literature of the Fantastic, for a lack of a better term – but I’m just interested in hearing if the two of you have come to any sort of agreement or disagreement, if you’ve put any Whoopee cushions under his seat or if he’d put any buckets of water over half-opened doors or any of those things.

DEAN: The thought of Kenneth and I pranking each other makes it quite interesting; fortunately though, we’ve had no need to do so. In a way, his remit is even broader than mine, with the word “genre” as his defining term. In this sense, he is able to embrace a large variety of stories, which includes the Crime genre. To qualify my statement earlier, I don’t think SpecFic includes Crime Fiction unless there is some SciFi element involved (say a teleporting duende from the future investigating the murder of Ninoy Aquino) or what is called a “speculative sensibility” (yes, another nebulous term thrown into the mix, along with “slipstream” and such). Generally speaking though, Crime Fiction, especially True Crime Story, relies on realism (of course, in a moment of sublime contradiction, some could argue that, given the argument that “all fiction is speculative,” that so too is Crime Fiction. And once again, the delightful fluidity of the term “SpecFic” is exposed, haha).

I love the fact that Kenneth and I have different opinions on things, even as we share overlaps. The difference allows us to publish different stories, encouraging more kinds of stories, and so on. This has the happy effect of dismantling any sense of a SpecFic “center.” As an editor, I make my choices. As an editor, Kenneth makes his. As did Charles Tan and Mia Tijam in their online “virtual” anthology. And as should every editor, anthologist and publisher today and tomorrow (I hear that a publishing house is coming out with volume specific to fantasy, science fiction and horror, separate volumes edited by separate editors: Khavn, Karl de Mesa, Emil Flores, all with points of view different from mine or Kenneth’s, I’m sure. I believe it is vital no single editor or entity make all the calls – certainly not myself (outside of the obvious choices I make for what I edit). While it is true that we influence each other to some degree, it’s important that we each develop our own editorial voices. This is the spirit of description, allowing for a broad spectrum of approaches.

And I would rather risk description that could lead to prescription, than to prescribe anything to anyone in the first place. Other editors may disagree, and that is their call. It need not be mine.

KENNETH: I enjoy not just what Dean and I agree upon, but also what we disagree upon. It's fun to see these. One difference, for example, is PSF is geared for a more adult audience. has many minors among its readers, and so I'm wary of the ever-present shadow of the “Parents and Guardians”. This leads to subtle but obvious differences in story choices, but nevertheless, the overlaps are stronger. And yes, the fact that I'm open to hard-boiled set in the real world crime stories does give PGSPGS a Realist element. Sadly, and I've lamented this before, Pinoys don't seem inclined to write crime stories. They are few and far between, and it took a special call, with FH Batacan as the guest editor even, to bring in the few submissions that came in. Again, go figure. But the differences in taste are neither right nor wrong, and make for tasty variety, I think. Readers win.

I didn't know about the other editors and those other anthologies that are going to be published, which Dean mentioned. But that's a good thing! A great thing! More stories out there, reflecting the different tastes of different editors. I look forward to reading these anthologies. And maybe this is a sign that the taste for genre fiction is growing bit by bit and becoming a commercial, mainstream, and viable part of the RP literary landscape. The various tastes, not just of Dean and myself, but all the other editors out there, can only make the choices of reading material richer for everyone. I repeat: Readers win.

It is a simple matter to eliminate prescription when a writer can write the story he wants unfettered by voices telling him that a story should go this way or that, should have this element or that. He can write what he wants to write. But that's up to the writer's own strength of will to determine the direction he really wants his story to take.

ADAM: I think I subscribe more to your use of “genre,” Kenneth, it being closer to how I understand the politics of labeling. “Genre” has been relegated to the fringes of academic discourse for so long – even in this discussion, really – that I assert the use of it as something akin to the reclamation/rehabilitation of the word “indio.” Oh yes, the conceit!

The schism between discourse/expectations and actual creation is not unique to SpecFic, it’s something that is felt by everyone who puts fingertips to keyboard keys and prints it out for a workshop. Even someone like Butch Dalisay is allergic to such things, would rather read texts up against standards that are closer to yours than mine. I also went through that phase, but things happened, and long story short, you can probably surmise to say that my seeming antagonism of SpecFic, of literary production in general, is really just my way of recreating my extracurricular education via conversation and discussion outside of the classroom, only now it’s for other people, a dusting-off of the musky trenchcoat of literary criticism, a demystification of jargon, an effort to broach a vein of practical working-class criticism that everyone can probably apply wherever, but also the fact remains that one of the more wonderful things the hundred years or so of academic discourse and literary expectations have given us is rigour, be it intellectual rigour or creative rigour, as rigour, ideally, keeps us and our production in check – it provides us with a framework on which we can drape the aforementioned “necessary skepticism” that is again much-needed in this community. And if you consider for a while how long skepticism has been on the out if not much-abandoned via regular discussions like this in a national weekly like the Philippines Free Press, you really have to give it a few more years before things start to shift from the classrooms to the streets.

I think it is possible to develop a critical framework exclusive to SpecFic, but it’s only really going to grow out off of already available critical frameworks, although the recognition of a text’s entertainment value will probably remain a personal and subjective judgment as opposed to the objectiveness that a working critical framework will afford us as entertainment value is largely dependent on personal taste, and taste is hardly rigourous or critical. Yes, it is possible to develop a critical framework that is strictly for SpecFic (SpecCrit?), but it will most definitely come from already preexisting critical frameworks. That is of course not to be confused with me saying that it’s only going to come out of the academe. It’s of course very likely, as they do these things more often than we do, and right now, there’s only really one of me (maybe the other one can be Mia Tijam?).

Literary criticism has long been in academic territory as that’s where the vocabulary and discourse for such things are developed. The notion that literary criticism – literary theory – is exclusive to academic territory is something that is high-time in need of revision, especially when you subscribe to the belief that art and culture beget reality and society beget art and culture beget reality and society in an endless loop of chicken-&-eggness paradox of creation, and part of art and culture and reality and society are concepts like Marxism and Postcolonialism, these -isms are really real world things only made abstract and academic for the purposes of understanding them and their various processes.

KENNETH: Like I said, I'm a business management graduate, so lit theory, literary criticism, all the -isms float over my head. I humbly admit to that. What I do like is when the regular reader – and I count myself one among them – finds ways to express his likes and dislikes of a story, what makes it work, what doesn't. If, as has been pointed out by others, regular readers get turned off and shy away from all this discussion precisely because it goes over their heads, I know for a fact that even “street criticism” can have the same effect. There have been a couple of instances where two who used to go to the Manila Litcritters reading group have decided to stay away because they feel their inadequacies in the ability to express what they think of the stories under discussion. They only know what they like and what they don't, and frankly, they should be allowed that. I fully agree that the right to articulate one's thoughts over a story, or not, does not belong to just one place. If the vocabulary and discourse was developed there, then I'm glad that such language exists. But just as deep stock market or chemistry jargon can only be understood by, say, analysts or chemists, there must be a way for the regular guy to understand and express his own thoughts without getting into the technicalities that a pro is accustomed to. In other words, years of study and pages and pages of theory should not be an obstacle to those who have a casual, amateur interest in finance, chemistry, or literature.

DEAN: I subscribe to the notion of “street criticism,” where regular people can engage in discussions about story and process and such without the need for some academic background. Ultimately, stories belong to the readers and the thought police should not be invoked. The LitCritters, a group of readers who write and writers who read, regularly engage in conversations about writing, taking up texts in a very informal atmosphere. The group regularly welcomes both readers and writers and encourages everyone to articulate their thoughts, without the fear of “being right” or needing jargon to “sound right.” And while the discussions we have may never reach the heights of rarified academic discourse, we enjoy ourselves and learn from each other in the process – while the act of writing itself is mostly solitary, the writer/reader do not exist in solitude. We are not unique. I’m pretty sure that there are others like us. Little reading/writing groups, who do their own thing.

ADAM: Well, then, what’s with SpecFic’s eagerness to be considered as “worthy” as any other “literary” text, if almost always whenever the very same rigour applied to other “literary” texts is applied to SpecFic texts, the standards of “literariness” is suddenly downplayed to being merely that of a reading group’s whose discussions “never reach the heights of rarified academic discourse?” I would also like to point out that this is not unique to SpecFic, as every type of writing – poetry, prose, play, English, Filipino, Realist, Fantasist, etc etc – have gone and still go through the same things over and over and over again, so this is part the process, really, and this is merely SpecFic’s turn.

My issue with the dependence on a purely purist “reader’s response” to discussions like this is that such responses often show people up as really seeing Writing and Reading somewhat as hobbies if not Half-hearted Art Things, refusing to elevate them to a more important place (as opposed to them remaining in that warm and fuzzy place where the desire for them originally hatch) and all the maturity of thought that entails. It’s just that we’ve already addressed the fanboy-reader thing, and now we’ve just finished addressing the self-publishing-and-obliquely-dictating-people’s-outputs thing, which then places us in the position to now question ourselves about the quality of what we’re putting out, about the repercussions of what we’re putting out. The both of you are not just merely “readers” or “writers” or “editors,” now. The two of you are currently setting the standards of the genre as we speak, have been for a few years, now, and that’s why it’s a bit disheartening to still hear your over-reliance to a reader’s response. I’m not asking for something along the lines of “rarified academic discourse,” it’s just I’m looking for something more than just saying that people know what “…they like and what they don't, and frankly, they should be allowed that,” because frankly, you’re not ordinary people anymore. I think it’s time that both of you make claims that aren’t just Gaimanisms, but more like with SpecFic’s definition by negation of Realism. Despite my apprehensions to it, it is so far SpecFic’s most potent tool to help facilitate discussion and debate, and like I said earlier: right now, that is actually SpecFic’s Bigger Politic.

My apprehension to it, though, is that it comes off as too underdoggy, somewhat begging for sympathy when read against the notion that Realism is an Imperialist Goliath genre, which is how it usually plays out whenever SpecFic places itself beside Realism. But now that you mentioned that comparison and contrast are useful early tools to help definition, can you give us a few new tools that you feel can help define SpecFic more, wholly separate from Realism’s rotund shadow, tools wholly exclusive to SpecFic’s toolbox?








TO BE CONTINUED

These things are Problems as these things only really justify and promote not Progress (as the cover of that issue of Free Press erroneously promises) but a Wax-On Wax-Off Maintenance of the Status Quo (at its very least), the Retardation of Literature (at its worst), an invocation of Artistic Self-Importance (at its most moderate) as even as this sort of attitude seems to promote Art as “Art,” it only really promotes and benefits the Self and nothing else.

The Wabi-Sabi analogy is largely flawed, as it denotes both a deliberate (or calculated, the wabi) and a natural (or time-elapsed, the sabi) abandon of Art to Imperfection to achieve an artfully-pleasing aesthetic best described as Flawed Perfection, which, when applied to Writing (as the essay does) implies that what can be read as Bad Work can be read as a deliberate (or calculated) decision on the part of the Author, or, as in the case of Old Work that is later found to be Bad, can be read as a natural (or time-elapsed) effect on the work, and both “imperfections” can be argued via Wabi-Sabi/’Wa-Sabi Poetics as legit approaches to achieve the artfully-pleasing aesthetic of Flawed Perfection. The analogy largely ignores the fact that the Wabi-Sabi potmakers go through a journeyman process of perfecting their Craft as they deliberately add imperfections on their work. They don't use Wabi-Sabi to justify their flaws. Wabi-Sabi is their deliberate attempt to Strive towards Perfection. Wabi-Sabi as a stringent aesthetic in itself.

Wabi-Sabi’s mutation into ’Wa-Sabi is also flawed as it roughly translates to “nothing to say” which really opens itself up to a lot of easy ridicule, not to mention its general vibe of Agree-to-Disagree really is quite the conversation stopper, only inviting people to either say nothing or say nothing of consequence, thus a very effective tool to Maintain the Status Quo, and ’Wa-Sabi's sudden synonymisation to “the ineffable” and “the unsayable” and its justification as such-and-such come across as unnecessary as it’s really just elaborately debating a fact that everyone already inherently knows.

And both points are really neither here nor there when applied to discussions on the Progress of Literature, as both points are testaments to the resistance of the very idea of Progress, ie, justifying Bad Work, debating a fact. But maybe Lacuesta was only really talking about his own output? I’m a bit cautious about this possibility as having read his first book Life Before X and other stories (UP Press, 2000), Wabi-Sabi/’Wa-Sabi Poetics doesn’t really necessarily apply to Lacuesta’s writing as Life Before X is about as close to perfect as one can get in the Brilliantes-Polotan School of Writing which is really about as close to God’s Own Writing (AKA the New Yorker School of Writing by way of Salinger and Lethem) if ever He decides to write another more contemporary book as one can get and doesn’t really need any of the haphazard justification that Wabi-Sabi/’Wa-Sabi Poetics provides, although White Elephants (Anvil, 2005), Lacuesta’s more recent collection, leaves a lot to be desired, so maybe Wabi-Sabi/’Wa-Sabi Poetics is a justification of that? Or maybe Wabi-Sabi/’Wa-Sabi Poetics is a justification of itself?

I ask as so far Wabi-Sabi/’Wa-Sabi Poetics is only really justifying a process that opens the barn doors for an artfully-aesthetic consideration of Bad Writing, and that for me is really unacceptable as in this Age of Easy-Blogging and Facebook Graffitiing—all already ’Wa-Sabi—the Writer’s Moral Obligation to be Intelligent—to say Something of Consequence—is about as important as it can be, really more important than it has been in our hundred years of modern writing, that I’d rather we all err on the side of Striving for Perfection than Waxing Poetic on Shoddy Workmanship.