Very busy, so this'll be quick:


* Fidelis Tan interviewed Carl and me about local komix where we both got a little chatty, and where I expanded on a few more things in the comments section

* the new horror eBook antho from Banzai Cat's Estranghero Press, called Demons of the New Year, where Carl and me get to hang out with a whole buncha writerly peeps - my own little contrib here is the short hypertext *snip*

* Vlad Gonzales (dear friend of mine, and yes, Carl's, too) finally uploaded his hypertext thesis called Hyper Kuwento, after a coupla years of sitting on it for some reason or another - it's a great set of hypertexts, and one section's open for contribs, too, so go do that (contribute)

* I added a few new things in yet another hypertext/eBook antho thang Cubao Postcards - you're welcome to add a few new things of your own as it's a collab antho (a coupla peeps already did, but sadly not Carl, for some reason or another)


Ayuz!

I'm moving all my PDFs to my Scribd account, which has a better download feature than the other PDF thing I've been using. The move is still in progress - I am up to my eyeballs in overdue work - so come back to it every once in a while to see what's what. Hopefully by April, every PDF I've done so far will all be there.

Birthday Week Reminiscing - just a few things:


- from Mikael Co's Facebook link-share is the very inspiring UNPhotographable, which reminded me of my own Ink Polaroids, itself inspired by Stuart David's project of the same name. As far as I know, David coined the term, even put out a zine called "Ink Polaroids" which was a collection of stuff he wrote while he was still playing bass for Belle & Sebastian. Here are more ink polaroids written by people across the net. My own collection got me into my first UP workshop, along with this Cubao story.

- I'm walking around Cubao again, writing about it again, seeing regular online publication in the POC, the first of which is here. It always feels good, walking-writing around Cubao, although I haven't done it in a while, and with the Heat Wave, I don't really know how it'll be like between 12 noon and 3PM, which is how I'm skedding it. I'm going out today, 9 March Tuesday, to walk Shopwise. The stuff I've been writing/thinking about Cubao has been generally critiques of Consumerist/Commodity Culture, our modern malaise, and Shopwise is the best place for that sort of discourse, but I think I'll toss in a few new ink polaroids into it just for the sake of.

- Kael's posting of UNPhotographable reminded me of the importance of texture and detailing in writing, and how to capture those things convincingly - from life - in the least number of words possible. More people should take ink polaroids. Maybe if people sent me enough ink polaroids, I'd make a zine out of them. It's an underused form.

- In my search for underused forms and processes, I found this and this, and this reminded me of this.

- Rocket Kapre interviewed me for the latest roundtable discussion, this time about Fiction without Speculation. As usual, I talked about art.

- Also: I feel great that I'm fulfilling a promise I made to myself last January, to write a generous amount of SpecFic texts that owe more to formal playfulness and clever writing processes than to the Realist mode of writing. I started (and finished) *snip* last month, which was my bid to write a horror story which I wanted to do in hypertext, and just last week I finished ITEM MITE EMIT TIME, which was my first novel ever, and it's scifi, and written in an assemblage of fragmentary language. Both were written either under a week or a little over a week: three days for *snip*, eight days for ITEM.

Next target text is a fantasy picture novel a la Frans Masereel that I may or may not be doing in collab with an artist more adept with sequential art than I ever will be. We'll see. It's a story I've been wanting to tell since 2003. Hopefully done in a week, too. We'll see.

You all have my good friend Mark Cayanan to blame for this: Mark brought this up a week ago as a prospective text for one of his Lit classes in Ateneo, the manuscript that got me into my second UP National Writers Workshop circa when I turned twenty-five, the very same workshop where I met Mark himself.

It's called Brief Exercises In Youthful Blasphemy, which was what I used to call this blog during those years. It was a series of essays supposedly functioning as footnotey elaborations on Instructions For The Inclined, which was the front act essay. I elaborated on its creation in yet another essay called Dazzle Them With Brilliance / Baffle Them With Bullshit! which still earns quite a few visits in this site every once in a while.

This is the first time I (sort of) reread Brief Exercises. It's funny, reading over the shoulder of the younger me as he writes about some things that had already passed and a few that was still over a few hills in the horizon. My twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old life was in progress, with all the relevant issues and whatnot. It's interesting how I seem to have fulfilled quite a few promises made in the essay, how some things measured up to what I had in mind, how I've failed in bits of it, how I've surpassed a few to get from there to here. Life takes its time to happen.

I wrote this at around November 2006 after a year-long hiatus from writerly community stuff, and felt I was being too literarily idle. I made a promise to myself that I had to do something substantial for my twenty-fifth year, and if it didn't succeed, I'd stop pursuing the Writing Thing and maybe take up Computer Science or something just as useful for the Philippines at large. It's March 2010 and I'm still writing.

I am presenting this essay untouched. Like much young adult autobio, it starts rather abruptly in the middle, and finishes just as abruptly, life lying suspended in the pages, in between, towards the start and the end. Lotsa stuff happened between Brief Exercises' final "?" and this blog entry's initial "You." I want to send my twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old self a few of my PDFs (especially the new one!) and tell him, "Hope you're not too fucken disappointed, man." My twenty-four-going-on-twenty-five-year-old self would have rapidly reliably replied "Fuck you, fatso!"

I've been very busy the past few months doing stuff that are only now making themselves felt in the ways that actually matter, ie, presence beyond my own monitor, and here are three of the most major, for your perusal:


* First: is the onlinisation of the newish Philippine Online Chronicles - I was hired way back in November 2009 in what turned out to be an effort to reformat the webzine. I wrote a few things, then stopped for a while as a few reshufflings went on behind the scenes, and now we're back. There are quite a few sections, and I'll be writing for around three or four of them, rubbing virtual elbows with Vlad Gonzales and Gelo Suarez and Daryll Delgado. I'll be writing about Cubao, literary theory, some komix reviews, some bits about how great Lost is right now. Lotsa stuff.

Carljoe Javier's intro for the Metakritiko section ought to be a good glimpse on what the newish POC's going to be about in the coming months. He used one of my photos of him as portrait for the essay, taken as if while bingeing in a beer garden looking off into the yellow fluorescent light like some sad poetic something-or-the-other, which was exactly what he was doing that night.


** Second: is the onlinisation of a life-long project I intermittently call Cubao Postcards. I realised a few months ago that I've been writing about Cubao since I was around sixteen years old, and reading through the stuff, I realised that I more or less chronicled quite a lot of changes that happened in that one place.

Unfortunately, a bulk of what I've written about Cubao I basically lost to Ondoy, and so this project - which I've opened up to the public (or at least to anyone who has a Google account) - is a reclamation of that project, and also, a reclamation of a time and place that's largely been lost to the tides of time (... and tide ... ?) and will probably continue to lose despite our best efforts to remember and commemorate and celebrate. Memory is less a recreation but more a recovery.


*** Third: is my latest book, officially my first novel, and a scifi one, at that (or maybe specfic, as known in these parts). It's called ITEM MITE EMIT TIME, a title I've been wanting to use since time immemorial, ie, sixteen (again).

It's the result of reading some Beckett, some Maso, some Markson, and more than a few Ballards, and also by the turbulent discussion here. It took me eight days to finish this. Almost a seven-day novel. Or maybe it's a novella? It's forty or so pages long.

As I was finishing this, I realised that this book was made up of what I previously believed were four completely different ideas for four completely different novels. I was proofreading it when I figured I had articulated all these four narratives and concepts and dramaturgies in this one little thing, and I took that as more from my lack of divergent ideas than the universality of same, but whatevs, dude, I finished it in eight days.

This is the cover design. Read it and tell me if you enjoyed it! Or not. I'm not picky.


**** Also: I'm turning twenty-eight soon. Oh youth and beauty.