Today's Assumptions are Tomorrow's Something-or-the-other

At the end of the day, one of the better parts about co-editing anthologies - a tentative first step with Carl Javier, an erotic one with Ken Ishikawa, a socially-conscious one (and two and three) with Chingbee Cruz, a marathon census of the New with Chingbee and Mark Cayanan, and the maybe-a-couple-of-dozen zines for UP UGAT and UP Writers Club circa 2003 to 2006 - is the conversation one has with the partner-in-crime, which is on a more macro-level basically a negotiation of aesthetics and assumptions between co-editors, which is on an even more macro-level basically an attempt to reconcile one's understanding of art and its processes with the actual continuum of art and its actual processes. And this conversation/negotiation/reconciliation is basically an education in both its most pragmatic and its most intellectual senses, where one is both a student and a teacher, where both both teach and learn at the same time, and again this process reflects itself in the macro- and even more macro-level. And ultimately, after all is said and the real actual concrete work of editing needs to get done, this conversation/negotiation/reconciliation manifests itself as the point of the anthology, its game-face, its reason for being, its agenda. Anthologies that present themselves otherwise - anthologies that deliberately choose to not have an agenda, anthologies that fail to educate, that fail to converse/negotiate/reconcile its ideas with the reader, that fail to contribute to the continuum and the process - are anthologies not worth the (actual and virtual) paper they're printed on.