As a footnote to this and an epilogue to this and this, just a short acknowledgement for/about the KK antho. This is me speaking for co-editors Mark Cayanan and Chingbee Cruz, both of whom will be leaving Manila soon to study in the States (Mark for an MFA in the University of Wisconsin, Chingbee for a PhD in SUNY Albany [hi kina Davis at Joris!]) - I think they wouldn't mind me being their modest mouthpiece for this.

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.

The funny thing about apologies is how we only really give them when we're caught, so it's even funnier when those apologies are given with a certain arrogance that makes them not necessarily j'accuse but also not really désolé, recent cases in point being this and this.

And as much as I love both of these occasions as cultural exposés - one is about laying bare and forcibly confronting our society's fear of the gay narrative (young man macho-dancing for money), the other about plagiarism (which is one of my what-looks-to-be-lifelong pet projects) - what they're really about is sloppiness, exploitation, arrogance, and self-entitlement.

But of course as history continuously proves time and time again, the celebrity will still keep his show and the writer will still keep his column. That's just the way things go in a country where the president is shocked by rising statistics on hunger despite giving alms to the poor - it's not you; it's me.

Thanks to Petra Magno linking this short exercise of youthful artful vandalism, I'm planning on compiling a zine of visual erasures of old books, specifically of cheap books bought from Booksale. I say "visual erasures" in light of erasures that are laid out on the page as either orderly things (Crows & Rages, "Fili") or deliberately disorderly things (Alingaw). I say "visual erasures" as what I mean to say is -




- and also this little blast from the not too distant past.

Send any and all of your JPGs or GIFs or PDFs of your visual erasures and/or treated pages to juncruznaligas(at)gmail(dot)com, title heading ERASE ERASE.


Again, to review, the constraints are:

• visual erasures and/or treated pages of
• cheap book finds from
• Booksale