Walang kalabaw sa Cubao, pero may paraan
para tumulong sa Legal Defense Fund ni Ericson Acosta.


Ano: High Chair Book Sale (P100 – 2009/2010 titles kasama reprints; P50 – 2008 at pababa)

Kailan: April 1-8 2011

Paano: Puwede kayong umorder ng High Chair books sa pamamagitan ng pag-email sa hcbookorders@gmail.com. Sa Miyerkules at Biyernes, April 6 at 8 ang pick-up. Sa email na pag-uusapan kung saan sa Cubao at kung anong oras ang pick-up.


Mapupunta sa Legal Defense Fund
ni Ericson Acosta ang lahat ng kikitain.


Mga librong P100 lang:

elsewhere held and lingered ni Conchitina Cruz
You Are Here ni Mabi David
Nouveau Bored ni Marc Gaba
Mga Tala sa Alaala ng Kagandahan ni Oliver Ortega
Libot ng Durungawan ni Allan Popa
The Collapse Of What Separates Us ni Vincenz Serrano


Mga librong P50 lang:

Hindi Man Lang Nakita ni Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles
Ilahas ni Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles
Parang ni Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles
 
 

Seem ni Jose Perez Beduya
Unto Thee ni Mabi David

Alunsina’s Wrist ni Kristine Domingo

How Sound Becomes a Name ni Marc Gaba

The Rosegun ni Alex Gregorio
Agaw-Liwanag ni Bomen Guillermo

Kundi Akala ni Allan Popa
Mula ni Rosmon Tuazon


Pakipasa po at pakibalita. Salamat!

I read the book with the same enjoyment and appreciation that I get when I listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Mother’s Milk. That is to say, I love and appreciate it, but what I really can’t wait to listen to is Blood Sugar Sex Magik.



Lourd De Veyra's third collection of poetry INSECTISSIMO! is available in National Bookstore. And through Avalon! Read a few samples here.

As a continuation of my decompression from the six months of working with Mark Cayanan and Conchitina Cruz co-editing the Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English and also as part of my countdown to its eventual release next week, here are my notes specifically on the antho's contents and just why they are worthy to be labelled as "new."


Again, the following is merely my fraction of the thinking done for the antho, specifically for the antho's intro. It helped give it initial form, but only as far as how artistic conversations in general help give our actual artistic endeavors form, what more collaborative artistic endeavors. I post them here for the people who are interested in catching a glimpse of the many intellectual, academic, and artistic engagements, compromises, considerations and reconsiderations one (or three) goes through towards building and/or improving upon a certain type of taxonomy (as however loosely deployed the term is, it is still taxonomy).


Also, of course, this is intended to be a showcase of how smart and cool and relevant I am, but that goes without saying (but something still worth saying, if you ask me). Enjoy!



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This is the New in dialogue with Tradition, with “Tradition” at this point in time largely defined as “New Criticism,” and the conversation is both additive and annihilatory.

Plenty are the works that aren’t so much as have less focus with formalist concerns and more with the theoretical as they are products of the threesome of Theory, Form, and Content where the one always dictates the other two; plenty are the work where the well-wrought urn is replaced with a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle set of a 600-dpi 64-megapixel picture of a well-wrought urn; plenty are works that second-guess the reliability of the narrator, of the authorial voice, largely a reaction to the endless spectacle of the self in the various hyper-mediated representations of reality, thus plenty too are works that attempt to mediate the various hyper-mediated representations of reality in an effort to make them represent a more honestly subjective thus a more honest perception of the world; plenty are the works that attempt to mediate the various hyper-mediated representations of reality via a plagiarism of the language, the mannerisms, and the texts themselves of the various hyper-mediated representations of reality; plenty are the works that play with the readers’ and writers’ anticipations, expectations, and perceptions of the page and thus the readers’ and writers’ anticipations, expectations, and perceptions of reading and writing.

In short, the New in this anthology exhibits a healthy and lively pairing of the creative with the critical, begetting works that are both beautiful and intelligent, fragile and articulate, well-formed and well-informed; the New in this anthology exhibits a healthy and lively critique of the author and authorship by way of problematising the persona and promoting plagiarism, effectively questioning the concepts of originality, subjectivity, and authorial intent; the New in this anthology exhibits a confidence in mixing genres and in appropriating extra-literary textual artefacts, and an admiration for the importance of process and constraint, resulting in strange self-invented forms that demand from their readers and writers a deeper engagement than with “normal” genres and forms as new forms and genres deserve new methods of writing and reading.

One cannot also help but situate the New in this anthology as being the product of the new millennium’s first decade, from 2001 to 2010, its particular cultural, technological, and socio-political conditions: from the doubting of the author as pronouncer of truths to the sustained tone of filigreed hysteria to the DIY forms cobbled together via desktop publishing tools to the viability of outright plagiarism as a form of creation, the New in this anthology would never have manifested if it wasn’t for 9/11 and piracy and call centers and komikons and copyleft and Hello Garci and Facebook and self-publishing and LangPo bloggers and flash mobs and Modest Mouse and Flarf and Emo and the Great Book Blockade and the Maguindanao Massacre and hole-in-the-wall forums for downloadable PDFs of Jenkins, Ranciere, and Zizek and your neighbour’s broadband wifi hotspot you steal bandwidth from every once in a while, if it wasn’t for all the disappointment and elation and shock and awe and terror and wonder of the first ten years of the new millennium in a Philippines up to its tits in globalisation.

It is a writer’s job to sift through all the noise of everything and come out with a pronouncement that is coherent and articulate. This is it. How can a writer be heard amidst the noise of everything? This is how.

All our hundred years of art and lit are merely degrees of elaborations on declarations of Love. What more is there to say? This is a call for Love. This is a call for a hundred more, of a hundred strokes and a hundred words, from a hundred people for a hundred more.

This is a call – send works of a hundred words or whole-page strips or one-panel gags on that perpetually pervasive pandemic, either as RTFs or JPGs both in Filipino or in English to 100loves100@gmail.com, subject heading “I LOVE YOU” on or before May 10 2011 – for Love.

Days, that is, as in the mouthful Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English, co-edited by Mark Cayanan, Conchitina Cruz, and me. It's been quite the nearly six months of thinking and talking and calling and reading and thinking and talking and reading and editing and thinking and talking and reading and editing and reading and editing and thinking and talking and in my case plus assisting design with KK resident head artist Ivery del Campo with assists from Francis Sollano and Roy Agustin and now it's nearly out.


And as with any antho worth its assault, we as editors drafted our attempt at the Mother of All Intros by way of making and gathering and consolidating our own personal takes on the various issues that we feel the antho as it is is presently discussing, specifically what's new in the New - we each had our own takes, and these takes sometimes did not jive well with one another, and so we made efforts to make them jive to come up with less than a united front but more a wider and clearer and farther vision/definition of what's new in the New, and what's new in the antho.


So in the spirit of disclosure and my desire to just let it all hang loose and low like an overripe fruit dangling over and brushing against the lips of an open and hungry mouth, here are my notes on defining the new in the New, my fraction of all the thinking generated so powerful it warmed Cubao for a week last month. I present them with only one warning: they are chummy.



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I.

The New defined as young, as saplings growing from seeds dislodged from old trees – as in art is both evolutionary and cyclical; as in art is self-perpetuating, contains everything it needs in one tight package, merely awaiting nourishing; as in art grows in the mountains and in the cities, past our heads and houses.

It may follow the old growth pattern, it may not: some trees don’t even grow past the sapling stage; some trees don’t even grow at all; some trees grow to be so tall as to dwarf their ancestors; some trees are bulldozed in favour of a parking lot.

Art grows, as in art once new grows old.


II.

The New defined as experimental in the truly scientific meaning of the word: controlled studies and tests bearing documentable results – if it doesn’t work, discard; if it works, repeat, then study the results, then publish the conclusions, conclusions that will then face scrutiny and possible revision.

It is a calculated yet messy process, but production of the New bears results: at its worst inconclusive, meaning the experiments need to be repeated; at its best disruptive, meaning it’ll change the way we understand the world.


III.

The New defined as spring cleaning, as a decluttering, as eradication of the old, a particular aspect that hearkens back to the origins of Modernism and Postmodernism: finding no use for the old clothes, they are sold, handed down, trashed and/or far more interestingly here in the Philippines, ukay culture permits a scavenging and refashioning of the old, a recodifying of meaning via DIY mix-&-match of RTW bought at thrift store prices.

This teeters towards Pavement Postmodernist Meaninglessness, held in check by Romantic Catholic New Critical Pinoy lens, alchemically turns it into Meaningful Meaninglessness, what can be seen two ways, or three, the third being a combo of both: it is a distinctly Pinoy Postmodern Literature AND it is the laying of further foundation on a Western Modernist-flavoured Pinoy tradition as began by Villa and AGA nearly one hundred years ago today.

And so it is High Modernism made to lie low and lay with its Little Brown Brothers; and so it is Postmodernism highjacked by New Criticism refusing to resort to Meaninglessness for meaninglessness’s sake; and so it is “Dead Stars” seen through the Hubble Space Telescope, Derrida tempered by LIRA; and so it is the Old reregarded with rose- and sapphire-tinted spectacles; and so it is the adamantly black sheep of the family offspring of the Romantic Tradition; and so it is New New Romanticism.


IV.

The New defined as unprecedented, as something that hasn’t been done this particular way before today, an occurrence that happens more today than yesterday: most if not all of contemporary literary innovation is a result of a reading and writing population comfortable with desktop publishing, its content/conscience born in and borne of a cautious appreciation of broadband internet’s ready and willing various and variably subjective fonts of knowledge such as Wikipedia and peer-to-peer torrenting, its attitude sharpened in snarky high-cultural debates in Facebook where everyone strives to top everyone else in sounding convincingly like Neil Garcia.

More and more people are doing formally-daring, intelligent, and new works because formal-daring and intelligence and new are now second nature to a population where a persona can be characterised with a font-choice and a colour scheme, can equate call center woes with William Blake with a hyperlink, can be changed inside-out and top to bottom with a simple click of a button: in the New, there is no governing intelligence, instead replaced by a billion pocket intelligences conversing and consuming and caught in congress; in the New, Asperger’s and schizophrenia are viable everyday fashionable philosophical choices; in the New, it is already old to be new.

At its worst, the New will be something you’ll see more of tomorrow; at its best, the New will be something you’ll never see again.