not unhurt

I'm in the fringes of my two weeks off of writing. Quite refreshing, this relaxing thing. Been reading lots, shuffling between the gigantic Ballard stories collection, the new Charles Fort collection, some books of the Invisibles and Preacher, and quite ambitiously, David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. Replenishing the creative battery, as Eddie Campbell once aptly described it in Alec. Also bought Faber's Dictionary of British Sign Language, all of 1,084 pages for 75 pesos. It's for a future poetry book project.


In the middle of my two-week vacation from writing, Charles Tan finally launched the Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009. Tan read virtually every publication published last year and picked the stories he felt best represented Speculative Fiction. As someone who has probably read about a quarter of the local SF stories Charles has, and as someone who has read every story included in this book, I must say that I agree with most of his choices, and was very surprisedly impressed with some (ie Paolo Chikiamco's dragon story), although the three stories that didn't light my fire in whatever way the first time I read them, well, I still don't like them at all. But with most - aside from Chikiamco's, I should also mention Mia Tijam's weird thing, Dean Alfar's sad thing, Kit Kwe's Brillantes thing - I found really good, really satisfying.

Aside from being the writer of one of the stories chosen, I also designed and laid-out the PDF, and I am not proud to say that it was one of my most unprofessional layout jobs ever, as I was in the middle of a very very very rough month (which finally pushed me into taking this two-week break), I wasn't responding to any of his eMails (to my defense, I wasn't responding to anyone's eMails during those days). I'm really very sorry, Charles, it's not my proudest moment, but I'm happy we got this out relatively okay. Congrats to a job well done.


And also something that I feel is a job well done is High Chair Online Journal #12 the Maguindanao Issue as edited by Chingbee Cruz and Yours Truly, all three parts - here, here, and here - finally complete. I've nothing much to say about this that I haven't said already in the intros and outros and bits of commentary in Fezboobs, not to mention with the choices in what we included for the journal, but I will say this: Chingbee and I came into the editorial job each with our own unique theses for what the Journal ought to say about art and society and their interactions with one another, and we both came out of it with our theses shattered in several million brilliant splinters. I don't agree with or even believe in some of the assertions made by the pieces we included here, but I voted for including them nonetheless because this was not about reconfirming my own belief systems: this was about trying to understand what happened, and to achieve understanding, one needs to hear ideas/notions/beliefs that go against one's own ideas/notions/beliefs. We - the global "we" - were trying to understand what happened that terrible sunny morning of six months ago, what that meant to what we - the global "we" - do, ie art, and what what we do meant to that, and we're all still trying to understand what's what. The operative word is "understand," meaning to perceive and comprehend, meaning to be sympathetic, meaning to learn. I cannot stress that enough.


And to top this linkathon off, I finally made an effort to gather all my komix kriticism essays and post all of them here. The first one dates back to December 2008, and the latest to a month ago but only published yesterday. See if I'm making any sense!

- I talk about Gerry Alanguilan's Elmer
- I talk about Francisco Coching's El Indio in one, two, and three parts
- I talk about the need for komix kriticism
- I talk about Manix Abrera's 12
- I talk about Fidelis Tan's & Mary Rañises's Nailbiter and Jake Aboganda's & Gabriel Jimenez's ∴i2.0
- I talk about Macoy's Ang Maskot

Ayun po. Feel free to eMail or leave comments. I'll reply. I'm taking it easy.