of mice and men literary criticism

Tragedy, the root of which was proposed by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle on his treatise Poetics, is a mimesis (imitation) of the praxis (action) lush in human interest, not of human beings (who are needed to perform the acting). With action, one refers to logically-, meaningfully-, and causally-ordered sequence of events, the imitation of which functions on faculties culminated by heightened emotion, fear (self-regarding) and pity (other-regarding) in particular. This mimesis, which springs naturally in human beings from childhood, is the vehicle to produce catharsis, which aims to generate pleasure or purgation of emotion effecting from fear and pity. With muthos (plot) to lend life-likeness in tragedy, the mimesis is best acted when peripeteia (reversal), recognition (change from ignorance to knowledge) and pathos (act involving destruction or pain) are present in it. Meanwhile, the muthos is a perfect one if it has a single issue; that is, the alteration in the hero’s fortunes goes from happiness to misery, the reason for which must be found in some hamartia (great error) on the hero’s part.
The tragedy that is Of Mice and Men is a mimesis of the praxis of George Milton and Lennie Small, two migrant laborers who are proceeding to a loading barley work at a California ranch. They agree to sleep along the Salinas riverbanks before reporting to their job the morning after.
While the two men start planning, their contrasts become obvious: George is small and quick and assumes the brain and the mouth for the pair, whereas Lennie is humongous and scatter-brained. Lennie obeys what George says and acts like a kid brother or a subservient canine.
The pair has been on the go for quite a time, and Lennie seems to trap them constantly into trouble. Lennie has a fetish for soft things, from the dead mouse George takes away from Lennie to the soft dresses of young ladies, and Lennie’s misconstrued touching of a girl’s dress leaves them no option but run away from their previous job in the town of Weed .
As they eat their supper, George lectures Lennie on their prospective jobs and enumerates rules that Lennie must follow: Lennie must not speak about anything, must prevent trouble, and must return to the riverbank, hide and anticipate for George if anything goes wrong. Then, Lennie asks George to reiterate his discussion of the reason for their difference from other migrant workers and the means by which they will acquire a farm of their own on which Lennie will take care of rabbits someday. George re-explains monotonously, yet gradually gets affected by Lennie’s enthusiasm. They go to sleep happily within a tranquil natural setting.
The next morning, the pair makes an appearance at the ranch where they are greeted by Candy and his similarly aged dog. The old man informs them about the ranch and the personalities in it. Their boss then arrives at the bunkhouse, angry because George and Lennie were not early for the morning work shift. George makes an alibi that they got lost as a result of a bus driver’s incorrect directions. He proceeds to answer all questions posed by the boss, even those asked of Lennie, making the boss grow suspicious. When Lennie imitates one of George’s comments in his moronic way, George glares at him and later gives him a scolding.
The boss’ son Curley, a mercurial bully, appears in the bunkhouse searching for his father. Curley interrogates the new men and attempts to pick trouble with Lennie. George grows nervous about the potential perils posed by Curley and forebodes Lennie to steer clear from him. He instructs him again to keep to himself in the brush along the riverbank should there be any problem.
Curley’s wife steps in, presumably looking for her partner yet really intending to greet the new men and display her beauty. George and Candy let her down, but Lennie comes to her defense. George warns Lennie to avoid her downright. Lennie likewise seems reluctant now and wishes to flee at once due to the place’s meanness. George assures him they will take a flight as soon as they earn enough to buy their own farm.
Slim, the bunkhouse’s authority man, walks in next. He takes interest in the fact that George and Lennie travel together, an unusual situation among ranch hands. Slim informs everyone that his dog has had a litter of puppies. Slim and Carlson, another ranch hand, deem the idea of slaying Candy’s old dog and offering him a new puppy. George is amenable in requesting Slim if Lennie can own one of the puppies.
As George talks to Slim in the bunkhouse later that day, he pictures his relationship with Lennie. He confesses that Lennie is not clever, but he is a good guy. Lennie gives companionship and makes George feel superior alongside him. When Lennie enters into the bunkhouse with his puppy kept under his shirt, George forebodes that Lennie’s over-prodding the pup might kill it.
While all the men converge in the bunkhouse, Carlson starts persuading Candy to let him put his dog out of its plight. He elaborates that he will shoot the dog in the back of the head so it will suffer no misery. When Slim joins in the straining, Candy ultimately concedes. Later, Candy eavesdrops on George‘s recount on Lennie about the farm and the rabbits. He pleads to partake in the venture and provides half of the money necessary to purchase the farm. In a moment, the impossible dream seems nigh. Candy reveals to George his regret over letting a stranger kill his dog, a task that he should have done himself.
Curley enters the bunkhouse, searching for his straying wife. When he sees Lennie still all smiles from his rabbits’ memory, Curley thinks that he is being ridiculed by the big man. He starts pushing Lennie around, and his taunting and hitting are never retaliated by Lennie until George urges him to do so. Then Lennie clasps Curley’s hand and eventually crushes it.
Later that night, while George and some others spend time in the town’s whorehouse, Lennie enters the room of Crooks, the Negro stable worker. Crooks initially shuns this intrusion in his privacy, but Lennie’s naïve humor gets the better of him. Crooks depicts the hardships of being a black man on the ranch, and Lennie tells of the future farm. When Candy comes in and divulges that he has offered to raise some of the money, Crooks wants to be taken in, too. Curley’s wife, searching for company, also invades Crooks’ place. Crooks and Candy debate with her, but she starts flirting Lennie. She escapes when George arrives. George is vexed to know that Lennie and Candy have shared the dream with somebody else.
The afternoon the next day, all of the trouble that George forewarned starts to arise. Lennie has toyed with his puppy too much and has its neck broken. As he skitters away to bury the animal, Curley’s wife enters the barn. She confides her life to Lennie and appears to be seducing him. When she notices that Lennie likes to pet soft things, she lures him into touching her hair. He gives in, but, as always, grabs on too tight. The woman commences to struggle and shriek, and Lennie panics, breaking her neck just as he had done to the puppy. After Lennie escapes, Candy discovers the dead woman’s body. He turns to George and begs for reassurance that the two of them can realize their dream farm, even in Lennie’s absence. However, George has already given up the vision. He requests Candy to allow him a few minutes’ headstart before divulging the incident to others. In that time, George seizes Carlson’s Luger, the similar gun that was used to put Candy’s dog out of misery. George reenters the barn with the others to come upon the body, and he attempts to persuade the men that Lennie should only be put away because he meant no danger. But Curley prevails on a lynching, and they set forth searching for Lennie.
The ultimate scene happens on the very same riverbank where the novel commenced. Lennie has remembered to return there after he got involved in trouble. Two visions assail Lennie as he ponders that he has committed something very bad this time. George finds him there. Lennie asks him to lay guilt upon him, but George chews him out only half-heartedly. They discuss the farm and rabbits one final time. George commands Lennie to look across the river and envision the farm. Then he guns down Lennie in the back of the head using Carlson’s Luger. The other men arrive and George nods to their version of a struggle between the pair that culminated to shooting. All of the men return to the ranch, some offering George sympathy, others crippled in deciding what George was so frustrated about.
For better understanding of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, it is essentially helpful to analyze the muthos-presented mimesis of important tragedy-laden characters’ praxis in the light of Aristotle’s Poetics. It is equally enlightening to arrive at the intended catharsis by virtue of zeroing in on the characters’ experience of peripeteia, recognition, and pathos and the ensuing pity and fear for these characters.
Even though Lennie is among the lead characters in the novel, he is probably the least dynamic. He comes in passing without any meaningful changes, progress or growth all through the novel and stays the same as the reader come upon him at the onset. In a nutshell, he fetishizes soft stuff, is blindly attentive to George and their envisioned farm, and possesses formidable albeit unselfconscious physical strength. Almost every scene in which Lennie is a part of attests to these and only these characteristics.
Since the tragedy depends upon the result appearing to be beyond control, the reader must know from the start that Lennie is doomed, and must feel pity for him. The author creates a protagonist who earns the reader’s sympathy due to his abject helplessness in the grip of events that unfurl. Lennie is outright defenseless against the hazards posed by Curley, Curley’s wife or the world in general. His naïveté lifts him to an echelon of untainted goodness that is more poetic and literary than realistic. His enthusiasm for their wished-for farm proves infectious as he makes George, Candy, Crooks and the reader that such an American Dream might be attainable. Nonetheless, the reader feels fear because this character is set up for destruction, a character whose innocence only seems to seal his inevitable disaster.
When Lennie accidentally renders dead his puppy and eventually, Curley’s wife, there is a reversal because only wants to handle their softness, but he pets too much them and kills them anyway. Only when he breaks the neck of the woman does he recognize that he had done a hamartia that is too bad this time, and he undergoes in a relative state of pathos for his wrongdoing, enough to make him flee to the brush as constantly reminded by George.
Like Lennie, George can be described by a few recognizable characteristics. He is quick-tempered but a doting friend whose habitual complaints against life with Lennie never untangle his duty of safeguarding his friend. George’s initial words, a severe warning to Lennie not to guzzle so much for fear that he falls ill, define the tone of their friendship. George may be terse and impatient every so often, but he never wanders away from his foremost commitment of protecting Lennie.
Unlike Lennie, however, George undergoes change while the story moves along. The reader learns that he has capability to grow during his conversation with Slim, during which he confesses that he once abused Lennie to amuse himself. From this instance, George recognizes the moral that it is wrong to take advantage of the weak. Of Mice and Men follows toward a sympathy-eliciting realization that the universe is designed to prey on the weak. In spite of his hardened, sometimes harsh exterior, he has conviction about their future farm that he counts and recounts to Lennie. He yearns for the moment when he can relish the freedom to dismiss work and enjoy a baseball match. More significant, than a baseball game, however, is the idea of getting by in security and comfort with Lennie, devoid of people like Curley and his wife, who seem to exist only to spawn trouble for them. Lennie is greatly accountable for George’s belief in this safe haven, but, fearfully and pitifully for the characters, the predatory nature of the world eventually surfaces until George has but to let go of that belief in the midst of reversal of fortune. By gunning down Lennie, George salvages his friend from the ruthless death that would be committed by Curley’s lynch party, but he also recognizes the pathetic evaporation of his dream of a perfect, fraternal world.
Candy, the old handyman, aging and left with a single hand as the outcome of a freak occurrence, worries that the boss will soon proclaim him useless and declare that he desert the ranch. Life on the ranch, especially Candy’s dog—previously a fantastic sheep herder but now toothless, stinking and brittle in decrepit condition—aggravates Candy’s fright. Former achievements and present emotional bonds matter minimally, as Carlson points out when he insists that Candy permit him to slay the dog to render it out of its misery. In such a world, Candy’s dog symbolizes a cruel recognition of the fate that befalls anyone who outlives his utility.
For a short time, nevertheless, the dream of exhausting his days with George and Lennie on their dream farm preoccupies Candy out of this harsh reminder. He considers the few acres of land they depict deserving of his hard-earned life’s savings, which proves his desperate need to imagine a world kinder than the one he actually lives in, only to be reversed by overpowering turn of events. Like George, Candy clings tenaciously albeit pathetically to the idea of having the liberty to perform work or leisure as he pleases. So incredible is his devotion to the idea that, even after he finds out that Lennie has killed Curley’s wife, he summons for himself and George to purchase the farm as planned.
Curley’s wife, whose name is not even mentioned, walks the ranch as a temptress out to bring ruin on man and drive them crazy. She seems to illustrate a contemptibly-treated troublemaker tendency—Curley’s already bad temper has only worsened when he married her.
Although purposed as the “tramp,” “tart” and “bitch” that threatens to destroy male happiness and long life, Curley’s wife recognizes to sensing a kind of shameless wanting with her life the time she confronts Lennie, Candy and Crooks in the stable. Her vulnerability at this juncture and later upon confessing to Lennie her pathos-evoking illusion of celebrity fame, makes her consummately human and much more fascinating than the boxed-up vamp in fancy red shoes. In her moment of ultimate vulnerability, Curley’s wife reinforces the novel’s grim worldview by seeking out greater weaknesses in others, attacking Lennie’s mental handicap, Candy’s debilitating age, and the tone of Crook’s skin in order to shield herself from harm. Finally, she committed a hamartia when her touch-my-soft-hair flirtation on Lennie reversed to her eventual demise.
Crooks is an animated, smart, black stable hand whose name is derived from his humped back. Like most characters, he concedes that he is terribly sad. When Lennie makes a visit as his room, his reaction manifests this: In the beginning, he shoos him away, hoping to stress that if he, a Negro, is not permitted in white men’s houses, then whites are not allowed in his, yet his want of company finally wins out and invites Lennie to sit next to him. Like Curley’s wife, Crooks is an impotent character who turns his weakness into a tool to attack on the weaker. He toys with Lennie, implying to him that George is gone permanently. Only when Lennie threatens him with physical violence does he stop. Crooks shows the corrosive outcome that loneliness wields for a person; his character evokes sympathy as the cause of his stern behavior is exhibited. Crooks probably wants belongingness more than anything else; he wishes to enjoy simple pleasures such as an access into the bunkhouse or to play cards with the other men. This wish would expound why, even though he is skeptical at George and Lennie’s dream farm, he asks if he may have a room for him to join and a patch of garden to hoe.
Man’s predatory nature. Fraternity. Impossible American Dream. Imbalanced social power structures. All these themes are central to this acclaimed novel by John Steinbeck. The story of George and Lennie’s friendship provides insights into life regarding the natural law of the strong disposing of the weak, the sense of belonging in brotherhood, the unrealistic fulfillment of a utopian world, and the ruinous tendencies of the oppression made by a weakling against a weaker fellow.
In the current world where everything is fast-paced and made artificial, it is somewhat difficult to find a room where fundamental human needs like dreaming for relatively “better” life and keeping a true friendship can be satisfied. Although in Of Mice and Men, the tragic ending of Lennie leaves his American Dream unattained and his fraternity with George interrupted for good, the ever-kindling human desire for betterment lives on, prompting the renewed faith in persisting until the dream is made true and real friendship asserts amidst impermanence and disenchantment. Of Mice and Men is an enchanting read for those who do not give up the fight, for those who are determined to win at their own expense and pursuit.
As mentioned above, there are four universal concerns present in the novel, namely man’s predatory nature, fraternity, impossible American Dream, and imbalanced social power structures. Man’s predatory nature is prevalent throughout the novel, wherein almost all the characters have felt loneliness and isolation, which makes them helpless but, despite their weakest state, they plot to annihilate people weaker than they are. Also, brotherhood prevails in the novel by virtue of the belongingness need characteristic of human nature, which need draws the men together in such a manner that they act brothers to each other, bearing in mind the friend’s best interest, protection and concern. Similarly, the novel looms with the impossibility of the American Dream, that the wish for unceasing happiness and freedom to do one’s will shall remain elusive and unfulfilled. Lastly, the damaging imbalance of social power structures wherein oppression is not only in the hands of the mighty or the influential but also in those of the weak toward the weaker can be seen in Of Mice and Men. Holistically, the novel presents the values of the inequality among men (therefore, the uniqueness), the aspiration of only the attainable, and the sense of oneness with fellow human being.
The world is thought of to be cruel to the existing creatures dwelling on it, so unkind that one tends to deem life as purposeless, what with the unfulfilled justice, dream, friendship and equality. Seen in a brighter perspective, the world just acts as instrument of destiny by hurling challenges such as predation of the weak, impossible dream, unappreciated friendship and social power imbalance so that these challenges, when overwhelmed, will make these creatures stronger and wiser. Regardless of this world’s cruelty and gift of disillusionment, the creatures remain hopeful and unfazed until they succeed.
In spite of the setbacks suffered in the pursuit of justice, dream, friendship and equality, one needs to assert himself until he gets the sense of achievement. If things are only learned to be assessed in proper perspective, everything is beautiful and is deserving of hoped-for betterment, despite life’s disenchantment and injustice, even in the world of mice and men.




Bibliography:
Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1992.
________, The interests of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1969.
Else, Gerald. Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Jones, John. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962.
Kiernan, Thomas, ed. Aristotle Dictionary. London: Peter Owen, 1962.
Russel, Donald Andrew and Winterbottom, M. Ancient Literary Criticism. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1972.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc., 1993.
Townsend, Dabney. Aesthetics: Classic Readings form the Western Tradition. Boston : Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1996.

filipinos’ inscrutability in rosario cruz lucero’s the death of fray salvador montano, conquistador of negros

Interpretative insights abound in "The Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros," but the inscrutability of the Filipinos stand out the most. While the craftsmanship and gift of language are already laudable, the 2001 Palanca Award-winning story under study deserves more praises for its empowerment of the marginalized by their writing back into the mainstream.
The story opens with Fray Salvador Montano’s mulling over the plagues that beset Pueblo Buyonan, and he decided that this horde of locusts and the previous pestilence of frog were caused by his mission village people’s having made love unconventionally like the abovementioned creatures. He summoned the natives that “there was only one position that God intended human beings to do it in,”(p.1) and so the people would confess to him about their sexual acrobatics in order to stop the plagues. Early on, Montano surmised that these people got the better of his predecessor, Fray Duertas, who “asked to be assigned elsewhere” (p.2) in order to escape the nightmare of such bizarre mating dance.
Fray Montano’s initial moments at the island rendered him “frightened to see all the indios…lining the riverbank to welcome him.” (p.2) These 31,000-strong islanders must have overwhelmed him less because of their epic chanting but more because of the fact that these were the very people he was supposed to conquer. He was told that Spanish encantos already substituted their resident divinities and that their babaylan was proven fake, so he was just left to decimating the native’s laziness, drunkenness, and lust. Believing he was destined to live up to his name, Salvador Montano was all out to civilize the savage island.
But the succeeding developments in the story proved that Montano’s first name and the illusory conquest of Negros were ironical. As a matter of fact, he failed to approximate his savior name, and it was he who was conquered by the natives, as was evident in the following turn of events:
It happened that Montano and a native, the bamboo-walking Pedro Latay, had to consult their church’s whole design in Fray Duertas’ forbidden manuscript, a violation of the sixth commandment in order to find the source of bird droppings which kept the natives from fulfilling the third commandment. Their exposure to the obscene design of the church’s bedrock—“a tightly clenched fist [gripping] a quill (p.6)”—had Montano repeatedly warning Latay that the latter would burn to hell should he divulge what was called to mind as a masturbation scene. Plied by his fellow indios with tuba, Latay would have the drunken courage to belt out a composo (ballad) replete with phallic images until all of the island would sing sexually graphic songs in the long run. This served as Montano’s first setback, as he sought the advise of the convert babaylan Estrella about what to make of the bastos songs. She admonished the friar to “[l]et [the natives] sing their epics again” (p.9), to which he reluctantly acquiesced. The night saw the shaman “commenc[ing] her magical incantation” (p.10) of the epic of Labaw Donggon—an initial triumph of the native.
Montano’s apparent lack of control of the natives had him half-heartedly agree to Estrella’s teaching of the epic chanting. The fact that he even consulted a rival in the people’s faith points to the shaman’s gaining of the upper hand over the priest. The baylan’s “smile of triumph” (p.9) was essentially that over the foiled universalizing tactic by Montano, as he, “sigh[ing] and conced[ing] defeat,” (p.9), realized the natives had to be taught their epic, their heritage. This case shows that the Filipinos are impenetrable despite the Spanish’ teaching of Gregorian and other sort of Western chants, for the natives will always return to their songs; they will always embrace their own as a way of reclaiming the identity the conquerors are trying to erase and swap their very culture with.
The next setback for Montano did not take long; he followed his superior’s advice of writing a Hiligaina-Spanish dictionary for his flock to “know its catechism, the commandments, the teachings of the church…the seven deadly sins.” (p.4) The friar just continued his predecessor’s unfinished dictionary, “insert[ing] the words he needed to add to Fray Duertas’ work.” (p.12) However, one word led to another that Montano felt “the indios’ world [beginning] to manifest itself, and what had been its daunting unpredictability became simply a matter of singular inevitability.” (p.12) His list of words, which conjured what might be deemed offensive to the bishop’s taste, had him staying all fat and alone and inattentive of his church’s handful of spiritual needs that he grew so absorbed he had to masturbate in order to forget the natives’ sensuous words. In effect, he would forget the words listed the previous day that he just repeated them, “adding old words to even older words, so that there was no end to his lexicographic task.” (p.15) Toward the last days of his life, Montano realized that his writings faded away because of the evanescent ink he used and “all that would remain…were hundreds of blank sheets of paper.” (p.20)
The very fact that Montano could not seem to complete the Hiligaina-Spanish dictionary because of words spawning into many other words tells the impossible task of straitjacketing the Filipinos, because there will always be something that escapes. The words resist enslavement within the pages of the dictionary; in the same manner, the Filipinos resist getting fitted into the disparaging cage of the conquerors. While the foreigners attempt to expunge the Filipinos’ legacy from the pages of history in order to have the people identify with the foreigners’ legacy, the empty pages symbolize the Filipinos’ readiness to rewrite history more than the people’s marginalization in it.
The ultimate blow to the conquistador came moments before his death, when he, weeping, had Estrella come for the last of his breath. The unpunctuated long final sentence gave away everything, for Fray Salvador Montano succumbed to the consummated conquest of him by the natives, symbolized by the shaman’s application of the tranquilizing herbal concoction.
“She lay beside him and cradled his head on her shoulder and he breathed in the sweet tangy scent of her hair oloroso agridulce and sampaguita these were the only words in his dictionary that he had tried desperately to efface from his memory because he knew they were the one the only true occasion fro sin but these were the only words that had clung to him as tenaciously as Fray Duertas’ goat breath and the servants’ briny smell and finally he gave in to the terror of Yawa the Consummator squatting on his chest pouring water into his nose and mouth but he could not struggle free because he could not move with Yahweh’s weight on his chest pouring water into his nose until at last he could no longer smell anything.” (p. 21)
The eventual conquest of the supposed salvador of Negros manifests the ultimate inscrutability of the Filipinos. The natives had been pacified, taught foreign cultures, reduced to subservience and credulity, generally insulted, branded inferior and barbaric, shackled into varying degrees of bondage, etc, but the endurance of the Filipinos supersedes the overbearing attitude of the foreigners. The conquerors are brought to the realization that they can never foist to the natives what they consider is best or ideal, which is necessarily their very culture and not the Filipinos’ own—a chauvinistic and false consciousness. They are minimized into helpless subjects of the Filipinos’ concoction of own unpunctuated civilization, and will never win over an identity that has come to assert itself as unmistakably, unadulteratedly Filipino.

[1]In Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros. Rosario Cruz Lucero. Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 2003.

is love all that one needs?

I Am Sam is a good drama created to try to inspire and induce change in its audience. This movie exhibits fatherly love eliciting human compassion to a love that is sustaining an indestructible spirit. This movie illustrates different-looking people and the situations they encounter in their modern day struggles we can all adapt and apply in our daily lives. Even though people usually view dramas as sad stories aimed to make us cry, the true goal of such movies does not usually finish when tears start flooding the audience’s eyes. Rather, it is something with a much deeper sense: to touch people’s lives enough for them to empathize with the characters. Ultimately, the producers of the movie are aimed at trying to make the audience better persons in their own little way by making them address sympathy concerns for certain individuals. This movie, for one, appeals to viewers that love is everything we humans need. In the case of Sam, it is sympathetic love, which he needs for people to see him in a different light—that handicapped persons like him are capable of love despite or precisely because of their imperfection.
This movie is truly gives justice to those who are sympathetic of differently-abled people because good actors were chosen to play the different characters in the movie, a condition necessary for incredulous audience to be persuaded that while others may be different for their (lack of) intelligence, they deserve recognition for their capacity to love. These actors gave their respective roles the justice needed to bring the message across to the audience without that grim and determined effort. The three main actors embodied the characters by actually “being” and not just acting intertwined lives amid a non-empathic society. Sean Penn was luminous as Sam Dawson, the father whose imbecility causes him to lose custody of his daughter but proves the court that he can assume parental responsibility. For her part, Dakota Fanning was convincing as Lucy Dawson, the daughter who would be given to another family because her father, according to the court, is unfit to take care of her. Finally, Michelle Pfeiffer was brilliant as Rita Harrison, the hard-hitting lawyer of Sam with a divided family and a marriage on the rocks. It is amazing how each of them were able to make their respective characters become them during the film.
But the best thing about this story is its fountainhead of life-altering lessons, most important of which is our necessity to feed on love. It shows us how seemingly inutile people like Sam encounter a lot of difficulties caused by our own judgments and stereotypes, without realizing that like anyone of us, he is capable of giving and receiving love. In the movie, Sam was separated from his 7-year-old daughter because discriminative people thought that differently-abled families are doomed to fail. While this is sometimes true, there are still some exceptions that prove us wrong, as is manifested in the movie. For example, Although Sam has an IQ only as high as that of his daughter, this did not stop him from loving her daughter wholeheartedly. Nothing stopped him from becoming the best father he can be. He strove to be the best—from earning from a more compensatory job to providing a bigger home for Lucy to sending his daughter to a better school—in order to provide everything that the court insists in order to get her daughter back. He kept on pushing the limits of his own self and his own approximations. As a result, he was able to show and convince his unsympathetic community of his capability as a loving father, something people around his social sphere are skeptical about only because his insufficient intellect does not warrant it.
At the end of this film, the movie has completed its attempt to inspire sympathetic love in its viewers by showing that they only need a little care to understand that even handicaps can love like the rest of humankind. The question “Is love really all that matters?” can now be answered in relation to the situations presented in the movie. In the case of Sam, we can say that love is all that one needs to become a good parent. If the court became cognizant (that is, sympathetic, a characteristic rarely displayed by an impersonal institution such as the judiciary) of Sam’s potential for parental love, then it would discover that indeed, this father is capable of loving his daughter, however idiotic he may be. It is Sam’s society’s love that shall serve as his driving force for his fatherly love to reach its full momentum by winning custody of Lucy.
I Am Sam is, indeed, a good drama movie not only because of its artistic and technical aspects but also because it succeeded in carrying across the inspirational message about an ever-loving father who is willing to beat himself to the extreme to keep his daughter to his side. This movie teaches us a lot about being human through compassion for a father and about the true meaning of love: intense, catalytic, sacrificing.

critiquing contracting colonialism

Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism (Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2000) showcases conversion and translation of language and the whole Tagalog cultural systems during the early years of Hispanic conquest, around 1565 to 1760’s. Spain has conversion of the natives for the foremost project, but this unfurled into a full colonial system. Spanish did not bloom into a legitimate Philippine vernacular, so that communication between the colonizer and the colonial was based on Spanish-Tagalog translation. Through the book, Rafael shows the interrelationship among conversion, colonialism, and translation in the country and these concepts’ relevance during the historical location in question. He points out that translation delineates the bound of conversion to a significant proportion but in the process, the transmission of meaning provided a leeway for natives’ own interpretation.
Rafael reads Hispanic missionary texts to assert that a successful conversation in Tagalog, according to the Spanish, necessitated the Tagalog language’s organization by developing a grammar and locating it in God’s hierarchy of languages, and using Spanish at the expense of baybayin, the native writing system supposed to be ambiguous. In translating, the ordering between Castillan and Tagalog was recognized but not fulfilling the missionaries’ holistic attempt at authority, since natives respond to “fished” Spanish words without them actually knowing what these meant.
Rafael argues that colonial hierarchy and conversion were spawned by translation’s misreading by both parties. For instance, the “untranslatable” Espiritu Santo gets freely interpreted as pleased the natives, and when an inevitable error in Tagalog translation happened, the natives gets the probable upsetting of the colonizing missionaries’ agenda. The following chapters saw Rafael’s continued explication of many bizarre facets of Tagalog-Spanish ties employing mutually misread facts by means of translation overview of texts in both cultures’ language. In effect, the colonial hierarchy becomes set when Tagalog translation necessities occur.
Contracting Colonialism depicts an order based on language issuing out of a colonial administration, relative to other colonial hierarchies from culture to politics. The role language assumes in a colonial mission is indispensable since the conquerors and the conquered must voice out their responses and aims, thus is translation’s necessity. Communication is tied up with language, so even as translation is defined in the book as something parallel to all culturally-assigned paradigms, linguistic translation is very important, hence tremendously stressed. The Spanish customized Tagalog to various proportions through grammar codification and promotion of its practice in order to foreground and regulate communication, but to no avail.
The linguistic order stabilizes with translation and appropriation springing from the need for communication between the Spanish and the natives. Colonial power may be gleaned from this hierarchy and its formative nature is tantamount to the colonized people’s ability to circumvent this power with the utility of their original, non-stratified native tongue and its semantics. This linguistic order is an effect of and is used to disseminate the colonial system. The translation and language appropriation spawning the hierarchy are realized through various social forces—political, cultural, and religious—that push colonialism. The repetitive translation was needed in order to accomplish the colonial directive of Tagalogs’ conversion.
To explain the bonds between colonialism, conversion and translation in the early colonial Philippines, Rafael browses through Christian text, language manuals, and secular letters authored by both Tagalogs and Spanish. His fundamental means of analysis is comprehensive, citing relatively scarce sources. In fairness to the examiner, texts from early colonial Philippine era are few, and while the author must have chosen to be silent about it, the heavy interpretation serves as an implication that the author decided rather than needed to do so.
The author is greatly concerned with how texts function–a Tagalog grammar of Spanish is read primarily for its say on native Tagalog ideas about language for evidences to the means Tagalogs triumphantly disabled the havoc wrought by colonial signifiers, and analysis of the subjects integrated in the language manual are utilized to share points why Tagalogs received such grammar as an instrument of struggle.
Rafael makes use of his analyses to exemplify a conclusion regarding the perception of Tagalogs and Spanish Christians on different cultural objects and their interaction via erroneous translation. Afterwards, he employs it as an explanation of some riddles in early colonial religious history and consequently sweeps to elaborate a portion of how the whole Spanish colonial apparatus in the archipelago gained notorious ground. This kind of method wants some belief on the part of the audience, but this proves to be full of incentive, nonetheless. The author’s analyses are riveting—to illustrate: he proceeds that unending Spaniards’ complaints of half-baked conversions by Tagalogs could be attributed to the natives’ notion of utang na loob, accepted by the Spaniards to be the translation of indebtedness to God, that in truth motivates scattered and incomplete debt repayment. These analyses, meanwhile, are somewhat unbelievable, since his interpretations seem fictionalized, without the persuasion that they are somehow operating within truth. While Contracting Colonialism is clever and possibly innovative and poignant, the book seems self-contained. Rafael seems to create the impression that the textual sources were heavily analyzed to be customized in a presupposed hypothesis than could be related or not at all with truth. Notwithstanding, the book is incandescent in its countering a narrative of universalizing by virtue of showing how the natives disarmed colonial apparatuses from boxing them up within the foreign norm and setting them in an unequal footing against the colonizers. While there are prevailing binaries that bring about religious and linguistic deformations wrought by colonial encounters, colonialism did not completely paralyzed the natives and could not be said to succeed in greatly permeating the native consciousness as to transmogrify the natives’ identity. The civilizing mission is not successful, but the colonial subjects are still humans, after all. The epistemic violence endured by colonials did not fully intrude to establish paradigmatic norms, as shown in the text at hand.
Contracting colonialism is a brilliant illustration of socio-history of language in a context where parameters of language are inherently significant and fascinating and constructs an insight into the operations of colonialism at large. Likewise, it exhibits how linguistic origins, which often persist in the structure of living languages, can be effectively harnessed for historical interpretation. This review hopes to have shown that language is a matter to reckon with along with better known ones such as race and gender, and that its qualification as a historical artifact becomes an avenue to a fertile and progressive work. In some extent, the natives might have contracted colonialism, but not without showing to the colonizer, through language, the inscrutable people that they are.

the epic hero as a symbol of national identity

The epic Iliad is replete with the exploits of mythical heroes whose deeds helped mold the Greek worldview and character. Homer’s long narrative poem on the Trojan War in Greece’s neighboring Asia Minor told not only the courage and dexterity of Greek and Trojan warriors but also their nobility and pride. These insights into the way of life, outlook and virtues of the ancient Greeks spoke of the social role heroes play as a symbol of national identity.
The Homeric epic hero manifests three requisites in order to live up to one’s title, regardless of one’s superhuman and other physical qualities. First, one should resolve that warriors must stand together in battle. Whether winning or losing, the army should not appear divided, and each member as a hero must pursue that social alliance. Second, one must be concerned with one’s comrades. Before one thinks of oneself, one thinks more of the welfare of one’s people. Finally, one must avoid extreme brutality. The last requirement is deemed crucial for one to be a real epic hero, for a true one disapproves acts of ruthlessness, denigration and injustice. An epic hero understands that slaying an enemy must be enacted fast and that any mutilation reflects the savageness of the hero and the whole community. A hero, being practically spotless, becomes a national symbol for the society to emulate. This immaculate leader is the very epitome of how members of the society imagine themselves to be.
More than his Greek counterpart Achilles, the Trojan Prince Hector is the embodiment of a true hero of the Iliad. Even as his hometown severely suffers as a consequence of the ongoing war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the citizens of Troy, Hector stands by his men in battles. Hector is fully aware of his accountabilities as his hometown’s great warrior. He understands that despite Troy’s destiny of falling into the hands of the invading Greeks, he will sustain the fight up to the bitter end. He recognizes that women and children abound behind the walls of his city, so he battles it out not only for his personal gain but also for his community’s glory. Likewise, defying his wife Andromache’s plea for him not to leave for the battle, Hector demonstrates the spirit of the Homeric hero with his justification. He said that while his family is his concern, he cannot just hide like a coward and resist fighting. That would give him shame toward facing the Trojans, and that would go against his nature of having trained to be in the frontline, hoping to reap glory.
Also, the hero in Hector shows concern for his people. When Hector runs away from Achilles, he seems to have lost his pride and bravery. However, this defining moment concretizes the true epic hero that he is. Hector is aware that he is outmatched, so he flees in an attempt to attract Achilles into the territory of the Trojan army. He is being rational in that his fall in the hands of the enemy spells the fall of Troy. Instead of foolish pride, Hector chooses logic and runs not because he is a coward but because he cared more of his city, his people and his family. He cannot be dead, for a dead hero cannot help defend his nation.
Finally, Hector did not show mercilessness or unfairness on the battlefield. Even as the idea of death for the opponents is a major concern for a nation at war, Hector articulates to Achilles his wish of being returned to Troy for proper burial in the event that he will emerge in the fight as a cold corpse. This implies that Hector himself will not find in his heart any reason to deny the same condition to Achilles should the latter gets killed. Hector must not demonstrate cruelty or injustice on the battleground because every fighter like himself deserves honor when he wins as well as when he loses.

the conscious: reflexivity in four american films

Several films call attention to themselves and defy the purpose of simulating an illusion. Instead of consummately riveting the audience in the film, the audience becomes aware of the film, its work and its technology that are supposed to be concealed. These unconventional films, which employ methods that are associated with the reflexive style, include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.
One reflexive method that is prevalent in all films is the use of camera as one of the characters.In Rear Window, the invalid Jeff (James Stewart) plays a professional photographer who gets to use his camera as a way for the audience to see what goes on in the rear windows of the apartment opposite his. Also, the director’s camera plays a voyeur, much like the character Jeff and the audience peeking through the daily lives of a woman who practices alone for a date, a lady who dances all day long and who dates men simultaneously, a newly-wed couple on an all-day honeymoon, a couple who sleeps by the balcony owing to the hot weather, and a couple who splits on a murderous note. In Being John Malkovich, a magical portal accidentally discovered by Craig Schwartz becomes a camera through which the vision of John Malkovich (John Malkovich), a real-life actor, may be projected. The director’s camera makes the audience see what goes on in John Malkovich’s mind as well as his vision. In Pleasantville, the television powered by a strange remote control shows the life of the people of fictional Pleasantville, to which the twins David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are transported and ultimately introduce a rainbow of emotions to the otherwise black-and-white boring community. The director’s camera takes the audience as witness of the chromatic transformation of Pleasantville. Lastly, the camera in Sherlock Jr. intersperses the silent film’s facts and fictions in such a manner that comedian Buster Keaton jumps onto the screen to become a legitimate part of the projected action. Keaton dreams of the case of his beloved’s missing watch, and follows it to reality onscreen.
Another reflexive method used in all four films is the disregard for the plausible, with characters becoming part of the screen of the film within the film. In Rear Window, the voyeur Jeff becomes part of the “screen” he watches his neighbors through when the murderous husband confronts him inside his home and throws him out of the window. The place he just looks outside from—his screen—takes him in as one of the characters. In Being John Malkovich, the Schwartz couple (John Cusack and Cameron Diaz), some curious people baited by the enterprising puppeteer and John Malkovich himself all get to see the outside world from the screen of John Malkovich’ mind. The characters become John Malkovich for fifteen minutes, seeing the very things the actor does, from his naked body to a dinner date to a play dialogue he memorizes a dialogue from. In Pleasantville, the twins get trapped inside the black-and-white television, where they play the characters of the kids of the TV shows’ protagonist parents. They become black-and-white as well, until such time their liberated feeling of emotions colors the world of Pleasantville. In Sherlock Jr., a sleeping Keaton disgorges his spirit and, dreaming of the kidnapped beloved and the lost pearl necklace, leaps into the screen and turns into a film-inside-the-film character. Keaton experiences an ever changing backdrop from the ocean to the lion’s den to the desert until he becomes integral to the screen, purposed at saving his lady in distress.
Being reflexive, all four films are not without references to other pieces of work. This only shows to what extent the film is conscious of itself as a work in relation to other masterpieces. For one, Rear Window is based on the short story of Cornell Woolrich entitled It Had to Be Murder. The murder the invalid believes has occurred in the film and which he would have the audience believe too is the referred murder in the short story. Meanwhile, Being John Malkovich, while a largely original work by the genius director, makes references to such works as Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard whose dialogue John Malkovich is recording when the fan who would be his girlfriend calls, and William Shakespeare’s Richard III which John Malkovich is rehearsing with other stage actors. Likewise, the puppet show Craig is performing onstreet where a furious father jabs at him alludes to the letters of Abelard and Heloise, a pre-medieval English tragic romance. On the other hand, Pleasantville is actually a black-and-white sitcom back in the 1950’s, which is itself based on works such as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Parts of the film like the court scene divided by colors and the destruction of nonconforming signs by the town mayor’s allies call to mind the racially-segregated court scene in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Bonfire of the Vanities, respectively. Finally, Sherlock Jr. is no doubt an allusion to the fictional Sherlock Holmes, the famous English detective. This is made more vivid by the film fact that Keaton, while working as a projectionist in the movie house, aspires to become a detective whose first case is the missing watch.
There are many other intertextual proofs in the films which designate them as “conscious” films. They are meant to make us, the audience, aware that we are not mere spectators but characters too of the film by way of making us think, feel and see the way all the reflexive film characters do, be them the persons or the camera.

insignificant others: a reading of "people of consequence"

Not a few stories have characters whose acquisition of possessions generates changes in their personalities, often for the worse. Such is Ines Taccad Camayyo’s award-winning “People of Consequence,” which features the lives of a couple who, as they ascend up the social strata, manifests aggravation of characters.
Both Camus and Meding are people of consequence: they pick up after their respective dealmakers. Camus worked first as a houseboy for a German landlord then as a street sweeper after an appointment by a town councilor. Meanwhile, his wife Meding served as a maid for the town mayor’s family. These connections to significant persons provide their juxtaposition as insignificant others—what wealth, power, connections and social position the German haciendero, the municipal councilor and the town mayor have, Camus and Meding lack.
However, this poverty does not stop the couple from desiring to climb a notch higher up the social hierarchy. In fact, their impoverished condition becomes their driving force to rise out of obscurity and be their rural area’s most prominent citizens. In their barrio, Camus and Meding are “the only ones who had really known and lived with people of consequence” (p. 435); a quarter-century of intense industry and perseverance has them “becoming people of consequence” (p.435) themselves.
Like the mythical Sisyphus written about by the existentialist writer from whom Camus’ name was inspired, he pushes his strength out to reach atop the mountain of social recognition (it is no accident that in his village at the foot of a tall cliff he and other men originally made a clearing out of, Camus turns out to “[own] the best house” (p. 435)—the highest-accorded, the highest-flying).
Camus works hard not only as a chicken raiser but also as a fisherman like his father before him, only better positioned since he is touted to be intelligent and, therefore, meant for big things, as he claims his German landlord envisions of him whenever told to “aspire to go to Manila to study,…because he would then cultivate further the inclination and aptitude” (p. 439).
He boasts of being the German’s confidante, and grows wistful each time the thought of being educated descends upon him—an inclination that remained over time despite the faded resolutions (p. 439). He feels he is “very much needed [by] and…useful (p. 438)” to people of relative importance, as when he dresses the chickens he has brought to the party-throwing Inspector as well as his German employer, notwithstanding an old crone’s ordering that dismays him (p. 438) and the aleman’s “punishments…for his own good” (p. 435). All these Camus has assimilated on his way to the top, to such ruinous proportion that “his stories of intimacy with the German master grew” (p. 439) and his lies await about “how pleased the good lady had been, how truly fine a gentleman the Superintendent was” (p. 442).
The events may be conspiring to imply what Camus thinks of himself, but the illusion of self-importance is one symptom of the person of consequence Camus is turning to be.
Camus’ wife Meding has the more excessive change in personality. She is the fiercer laborer of the couple: she works nonstop after having “learned the hard-driving manners of townsfolk” (p. 436), a suggestion that she should not stop short of getting to the privileged status of being a person of consequence. She crochets, peddles carabao milk, occasional fruits from the backyard and her husband’s catch, and doubles as a hard-hearted usurer. Her “determined self-denial” (p. 437) as a miser makes him “[know] her less and less” (p. 437). Also, she forces her husband to tap the necessary links for them to consummate their desire to improve their social position. For instance, she urges him to visit the superintendent, through whose influence the couple may be helped to gain more opportunity to leap away from the lower rung of the social ladder. He shows unspoken objections, but Meding “listened to him indifferently; already in her mind, she was counting the chickens which she must catch, tie up and cage in stripped baskets” (p. 441). Meding’s dream house they built for themselves is somewhat a dislocation in their barrio, for it seems built opposite the false modesty Camus tries to effect when the capacious residence becomes the center of talk. To him, Meding is “an ardent example of what hard work and frugality could bring” (p. 440). The radical changes in the wife show to what disastrous extent the necessity to enter a higher social level can get.
An upward social mobility like that sought after by Camus and Meding is admirable to a point, but not to an excess. Their transmogrified personalities as they amass the necessary possessions to become people of consequence are a reminder that they strive way too hard to be accepted in a higher social status. They may absorb the lifestyle of their bosses in the long run, but it cannot be erased that Camus and his wife, being people of consequence, have at their own cost toiled as providers of the needs of a breed of people they can never truly belong to.

the procession

Pagkahaba-haba man ng prusisyon, sa simbahan rin ang tuloy.” I repeatedly murmured that Filipino proverb on my way to Plaza San Ignacio where the play my class was required to watch and to base a reflective essay on would be staged. It was my first time in Intramuros, and while the twilight was rapidly giving in to the dark carpet of night time, I was hoping I would find the venue in no sooner moment without having to feel like a lost kid inside the mall. A few friendly exchanges with the Walled City’s modern-day guardia civiles led my church-going personal procession to an open air where men, women and children in Philippine national costumes walked unhurriedly while a choir serenaded them. Afterwards, three videos about the Philippines, the composite of Filipino people and the history of Intramuros were projected on a decaying wall. A little while and what proved to be a reenactment of the Spanish arrival in the archipelago transported everyone, including the audience, inside the Plaza ruins for “A Walk Back in Time.”
I was thinking that with an interactive audience like that, the play would have us take part in such a historic, figurative walk. After all, the audience is comprised mostly by Filipinos, and students like me at that. It was not far from me that the experience would surely be a learning experience for all of us, so I kept in mind the basis for my meditation: cultural context in time. It helped that a young native boy acted as a story teller, who was quick to point out that he, along with other natives, was not a Filipino. The label referred to the second-class Spanish nationals born in the Islands, not unlike the well-heeled peninsulares born in mother Spain. Having known that, I thought of one of the titles given to Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal, who was alluded to as The First Filipino. He must have become the first one only when he was able to awaken the mass’ consciousness into fighting for colonial independence. It took The First Filipino three centuries to get the rightful title—that’s indeed a long procession.
One cultural part of the play peeled after another like layers of a delicate flower, and as a Chinese, I took special interest in the portrayed development of the Chinese culture in the country. Tracing their humble beginnings literally from the streets where they sold their siopaos, pancits and chiongsams, they are now the Sys, the Gokongweis, the Tans, the Lims and other corporate giants. It was rather ironic that in their former historical location, the Chinese were sent compulsorily to the peripheral Parian, only to soar to the height of power when they amassed vast money through hard work and prudence. With the influence, we Chinese have become Filipinos too because not a few of us have found ourselves in many aspects of Philippine life from politics to religion to the academe. Like a procession ultimately leading to the church, we Chinese have arrived too.
When the play showed the intermarriage of the natives and of the non-natives like the Chinese and the Spanish, it came to me that the mestizo culture answers why only the isolated Filipino minorities like the Aeta brothers can claim to being pure-blooded Filipinos. Our varying shades of brown and contaminated language betray us, for even then, one Pinoy may be darker or fairer in his brownness than another, and his Tagalog-based mother tongue has Spanish for ingredients. Three hundred years of colonization created an ever-mixed Filipino identity that has gotten this far, and the procession will still take a long way to go.
Later in the play, the social divide between the educated class of the ilustrados and the popular class of the Katipuneros was blurred when the culture of the Filipinohood was born during the first nationwide Philippine Revolution. Both the ilustrados and the Katipuneros became aware of the need to be liberated from colonial oppression and sought for independence from Spain through diplomatic and armed means. The time was ripe for the Filipino culture to grow on its own, brutally interrupted by the arrival of the colonizers. The Filipino identity wills to assert itself however wounded it is.
The way things are going now tell that the church sought after by the Filipino identity is still remote from sight, for the presence of colonization is invisible but felt like the wind. What is good is that the Filipino is still moving in order to gather, desperate as it seems, the identity that is lost in time. This walk back in time shows the length to which the Filipino has traveled thus far, hoping that however distant the Filipino procession gets, it will finally reach the church.

ang postmoderno sa zsa zsa zaturnnah zee moveeh

Dalawang araw makaraan ang Pasko, nanood ako ng "Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah Zee Moveeh" na idinirehe ni Joel Lamangan at pinagbibidahan nina Zsa Zsa Padilla bilang mala-Darnang superheroine na si Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah, Rustom Padilla bilang baklang si Ada na alter-ego ng superheroine, at Pops Fernandez bilang Ingleserang Queen Femina Stellabaroux mula sa ibang daigdig. Tipikal ang banghay ng pelikula sa mga kauri nitong kuwentong Pinoy superhero: isang api-apihang tao ang makakadiskubre ng kanyang kapangyarihan at gagamitin niya ito upang ipagtanggol ang marami laban sa lupon ng kasamaan. Sa "Zsa Zsa," mapapasakamay ng binabaeng si Ada ang isang agimat na nagmula sa kalawakan at sa tulong nito, magbabagong-anyo siya upang maging tunay na babaeng superhero at ipagtatanggol ang kanyang maliit na bayan laban sa isang dambuhalang palaka, sa mga binuhay na bangkay at panghuli, sa isang grupo ng mga fashionistang babaeng dayuhang siyang dahilan ng naunang dalawang sumalakay sa bayan ni Ada.
Paghahalintulad at pagtatambis ang pangunahing dahilan kung bakit ko pinanood ang pelikula. Gusto kong makita ang pagkakahawig at kaibahan nito sa aklat na siyang pinagbasehan ng direktor ng kanyang pelikula: ang grapikong nobela ng dibuhistang si Carlo Vergara na "Ang Mga Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah." Gusto ko ring maikumpara ito sa teatrong halaw pa rin sa librong nagkamit ng National Book Award.
Ilan sa masasabi ko hinggil sa pelikula ang mga sumusunod: maraming elementong postmoderno rito. Halimbawa, may konsepto ng queer dito, dahil sa bakla ang bidang alter-ego at campy ang pagiging mala-bakla rin ng superheroine. Isa pang halimbawa ang konsepto ng simulacrum, dahil nga kopya si Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah ng konseptong Darna, ang pinakapopular na Pinoy superheroine. Napansin ko rin ang konseptong non-linear, dahil napuputol ang pagtutuluy-tuloy ng banghay kapag sumisingit ang choreographed na sayawan at kantahan pati na flashback sa buhay ni Ada noong “dalaginding” pa siya at inilulublob ng ama sa dram ng tubig para gawing tunay na lalaki. Sangkap rin sa pelikula ang pemenismo dahil bukod sa pagiging fashionista ng mga dayuhan, layunin din nilang durugin ang machismo sa daigdig matapos magtagumpay sa sarili nilang planeta. Hindi rin mapapalampas ang kulturang popular dahil binudburan ng pantasya ang kuwento upang makapagbagong-anyo ang bida, makalipad ang mga dayuhan, magkaroon ng zombies, at iba pa.
Nakaaaliw man ang pelikula, hindi ito singganda ng theater adaptation nito at milya-milya pa rin ang agwat sa ganda ng libro kaysa sa pelikulang halaw dito.

under the canopy of stars

The venue is in ruins, much like the Parthenon or the Borobudur, but that seemed just apt to the purpose of the play. There were promenading lovers in parasol, their slow walking pace somewhat oblivious to the chorus playing in the background and their elaborate dresses—Maria Clara gowns for the ladies and barong tagalog for the gentlemen—reminiscent of the colonial Philippines. The decrepit walls of Intramuros, the walled bastion of Spanish Manila, served as the screen of the audio-visual presentation of “Land of Our Birth,” “People of the Philippines,” and “Intramuros: Sanctuary of the Filipino Spirit.” These three videos prepared the audience to “A Walk Back in Time,” wherein Philippine history, marred as it was by colonization, showed what even could not be rewritten might proclaim beauty and uniqueness.
Right at the beginning, the audience was not made to feel an outsider to the unfolding play. We were like guests, primed by our hosts of the Walled City that’s the gateway to Asia, the gem of the Pacific, the new Tyre and Sidon. When the Spanish fleet literally arrived, crushing the precolonial culture in its wake, we were swept off our feet and were excitedly brought inside the ruins. We were walking back in time. There, we caught a glimpse of the colonial Philippine life, aided by a young storyteller whose real identity would be revealed toward the play’s end.
When I come to think about it, the term “Filipino” did not become a reference to colonial natives until at a much later time. Philippine-born Spanish citizens were the first Filipinos, who were looked down upon by peninsulares, or Spanish denizens who saw the first light of day in the faraway mother country in the Iberian peninsula. From the way it looked, the Philippine-style caste system carried the sting of cultural contempt, because not only were natives initially denied of their rightful Filipino identity, but also were their own country’s lowest-ranked citizens next to the second-class Filipinos of the Spanish colonial era.
The play proceeded to unfurl history as it was during the time when miscegenation effected several changes in the Philippine setting, from the empowering of the mestizo class to the blurring of skin color. The intermarriage of the colonizers and the natives was a given, but the label mestizo more popularly belonged to the interracial union of the Sangleys and the Filipinos. Far from today’s regard toward them as the wealthiest Filipino citizens, the Sangleys—the Chinese of old—were repudiated and were rendered literal outcasts when their lot was forcibly concentrated in Parian, in what would be renowned as Chinatown. While the rise to power of the Chinese was marked by their determination and hardship, they showed so by being cheerful—they even clowned on street while peddling their wares. From the lowly panaderos, trinket sellers and clothes hawkers, the Chinese catapulted above the Philippine society to become mall owners, cigarette and beer magnates and realty stockholders. Being a Chinese descendant myself, I felt so proud that tears stood in my eyes.
The abovementioned intermarriage caused an amalgam of cultures, so much so that it became hard to imagine present-day Filipinos as pure and unadulterated. While the colonization of the archipelago was hardly an event to thank for, the nation it brought about in the process makes me swell in pride because we are a friendly, festive, and valiant people. We boast of intellectual children, who wisely used their expatriate education to help champion the cause of liberation. We are also proud of our popular rebolusyonaryos, without whose courageous work the Philippines would have not attained Spanish colonial independence. We take pride in ourselves, because this is the only country we have and it has us Filipinos for its sole children.
The play provides one of the ways to answer the lingering question of who is the Filipino: The Filipino is a race whose richly-layered culture is of a rare Oriental and Western blend characterized by Spanish exuberance, Chinese industry and native congeniality (not to mention American, Japanese, Malay and Indian influences).
At the play’s end, the young narrator revealed that he was not other than the fatherland. He said this using the Intramuros ruins as backdrop, under the canopy of stars. The setting seemed to tell that it was written in stellar constellations for the Philippine Islands’ history to be disrupted violently by colonization, but no matter what impossibility of rewriting is posted by the demonizing colonial experience, its influences lay important foundations of our lush Filipino heritage.

the gay-bedeviled evil cop (a nightmare before christmas)

having had less than forty winks the night before, i warned blueseraph that i'd just sleep inside megamall’s cinema 2, letting him watch the sequel of “shaolin vs. evil dead.” we caught the unweaving plot in medias res, so when i rose back to life, i told blueseraph that we should start the chinese action movie all over again. knowing that it's not mean feat to earn enough pesos to pay for a movie pass, i decided to plod on through the film, especially when the appearance of swords and dreams seemed to me a borgesque device (i love the argentinian writer's idea of absurdity).
fate would have it that blueseraph and i won't be able to sit through the rest of the screening for the man in the lower row, claiming he and his wife were disturbed by our constant leg shifts, hissed that “…’wag n’yong ugain ang silya, nababangga ng mga paa n’yo. naiistorbo kami ng misis ko. kung ayaw n’yo magkagulo rito…kahit malaki kayong dalawa sa akin, kaya ko kayo. gusto n’yo patayin ko kayo ngayon? isang baril ko lang kayong dalawa,” and, turning to me, rather dreadfully, “lalo ka na. matuto kayong gumalang sa pulis kung gusto n’yo pang mabuhay!”
threatened that the seeming intoxicated guy (his belch—besides his body odor—stank) would produce whatever weapon he has being out of wits, i was quick to make amends even as it dawned on me never to do so if he were less unreasonable. the wife, meanwhile, planted her humongous rear on her comfortable seat five chairs away, oblivious to the scene being created by her husband. it might be that the foul-smelling husband would gun our brains out, the crowd would disperse panicking, and she would be content sitting pretty, glued at watching her vampire relatives onscreen.
being too stunned to leave the balcony at once, we transferred several rows away. i lost my interest in the movie, so i begged to blueseraph for us to sneak out of the cinema. if the situation were less tense, i would have laughed when i saw the fat “policeman” haul an usherette upstairs, presumably milking sympathy that he and his partner were being bedeviled by two men holding hands in the dark. i slipped out quietly and waited for my companion to do the same.
we gathered later on that the complaining “cop” boasted to the usherette that he’s a colonel. that was too much power-tripping, so when blueseraph decided to seek administrative mediation, i acquiesced, provided that we won’t give out our names for security reasons. after being passed on interminably from office to office, a mall officer heard us out. and his reaction? “ako na po ang humihingi ng paumanhin sa inyo kung anuman ang nangyari.” yeah right, thanks a lot that this mall occasionally gets targeted by bombers, which explains why only when there are casualties that the administration is roused to action. the officer went on to assure us that the fat movie patron’s claim that he’s a colonel could be a figment of a distant wish, for no high-ranking defense official would risk his confidential status if only to act like a king. if the claim would be taken seriously, the guy could be at least a policeman whose identification card and license have merited him to bring his gun in tow in case of public emergency. i argued that given the lack of depositing stations inside the malls, some members who had the gall to taint the already deteriorating reputation of the police authority would wield their gun as their ultimate symbol of power (not to mention macho-associated phallus). as for public emergency, the fat patron was a fine example of a “cop” who would salvage (pun intended) the public at any cost.
it’s already repulsive that this world custom-built for heterosauruses should designate people like us to the dim peripheries. gays-catering cinema raids and late-night arrests using vagrancy as pretext have often assaulted the darkness we inhabit. the cinema incident blueseraph and i figured in is a relatively new story of how much hate is sowed against the tremendously discriminated gays that we are.
the irony notwithstanding, merry christmas to all of us.

handuraw

for dear friend albert.
***
Handuraw Dance Theater—not a few times did I hear about this famous act. It was beyond my wildest imagination that one day, I’d be a part of this group. I became its member full of glee and without an inch of regret because it’s in here that I experienced the meaningful thing that life is.
Early on in my first day, hardships became my baptism of fire. I had initial misgivings about staying long, but my willingness to learn had me endure no matter what. Difficulties have come aplenty until now, when I turned into a full-pledged member. It’s no laughing matter when I come to think of the strength, endurance and willpower I invested in order to belong.
Sincerity, integrity, determination, public dedication and industry—all these are ingredients to prepare myself to become an authentic dancer. In this group, I attest that there’s more to dancing for dancing’s sake: dancers must know how to bring wonder to their audience. Rehearsals alone can extract so much sweat, blood, and tears from our battered bodies; it may cost our lives but it doesn’t matter so long as our dancing makes our spectators happy. If only for the rounds of applause and praises, our dancing experience is worth it.
I also discovered that better than the skillfulness in dancing, right attitude and outlook fare. I will stand for this group; it is here where my true and admirable personality became polished. I and my fellow dancers offer our special craft to our audience, to the people we gladden, and to the ones who show us endless and unconditional love and concern. I must thank this group for opening my eyes to the genuine nature of life that’s to communicate happiness to others.
Because of the joys and sufferings we have experienced, I and my fellow dancers learned to face the world. More importantly, I brim with pride for my beloved and one-of-a-kind Handuraw Dance Theater.

the viscera sucker (for jm, who made my halloween happy...almost)

strangers both to this place
and to each other,
we come as ourselves,
against the thematic gore and gothic.
tonight, we can be complete fools
and be witches or nightmares or ghouls
but just to be safe,
i'm a virgin while you're a whore.
given these many removals,
i ask you anything that pulls us
on common ground,
and as i recognize your hometown,
the hellish air dampens your eyebrows.
i'm aware i'm not allowed to bite
the sacrifice that you are
for you belong to some other vampire.
but i myself belong to your hometown,
and it's amazing how your alien appearance
should invoke the familiar sights and sounds,
the country matters that count.
till then, you play a fool
and say, "i've been citified so long;
our gradeschool's a distant memory."
i imagine the whore in you grow batwings,
fangs and hair teased in all directions.
you're a stranger a while ago
and as you dart away now, half-bodied,
you're an alien all the more.

transmogrifying palanggang sam in reverse

no, i'm not one of those too deluded to claim sam milby as more than just their sex object (but i got to admit he's such a yummy babe--right, piolo?). the reference is of course, my immediate past palangga, sam fuentebella, and in the case of our reunion, not my former beau any more, but my beau, period. hmm, everything comes full circle: we broke up most inappropriately during the affairs of the heart, last valentine's that is, and as the day of the dead approaches, we're reviving a homosexual love that's supposed to be long resting in peace somewhere in the dark recesses of the netherworld. last i visited him in his workplace, i asked the one life-altering question that either secures the crown in place or kicks me out of the latina-dominated final race: "so, tayo na ba uli?" to which he readily replied, "oo naman; bakit, may iba ka na ba?" complete with the lilting hiligaynon accent. i was so jubilant i almost purchased all the metal kitchenware he was selling to be thrown as confetti in the mall's glorietta. then again, i realized we're beginning all afresh. for a socio-politico-moral future so bleak between lovers of our sort, what's in store for me and my beautiful sam? we're both financially unstable, so how do we migrate to canada or anywhere same-sex domestic partnership is legally sanctioned? does being with sam mean having to revel and languish alternately over the numerous gays openly making passes at his gorgeousness? how about my extra-curricular activities--with sam as the right one, how may i resist outright the damn-hot wrong ones who can replay pavlovian experiments merely by flexing their biceps or by making their twinky eyes smile? and does seeing sam mean having to see and pine and lust over his priestly, hotter brother troy? methinks love of the homosexual kind's bound for a sisyphian-like suffering that i or any other paminta guy for that matter must endure. all together now: through the fire, to the limit, to the wall...

googling geek...ever after

I am online now. With me is my i-pod, playing Bonnie Bailey’s “Ever After” which, after having downloaded from Limewire more than a year ago, still enchants me. Fancy thinking how I need not fork in a part of my allowance to purchase an exorbitantly-priced house music compact disc containing this song as well as other chillout melodies. All I have to do is surf the net for the right sites, search by typing the title of the songs I’m obsessed with at the moment, and voila! The artist with his recurrent bass drum and crystal water effect croons before my auditory sense. I text my friends and drive them envious by boasting that I beat them into possessing the current craze first, and then urge them to check the website so they themselves may reproduce the song in their own i-pods. For those who do not have Apple pods yet, I promise to burn cd’s for them containing the music they can dance to. Talk about distributing goods. Across the global time zones, technology-savvy people likely duplicate what I’m doing for the mean time, conscious that the Internet being a cheaper source of digital information commodity, the better it is for their constrained budget. Why, the present technology merits the probability that exact copies of those contained in commercial digital products may be accessed even by the not-so-experts. I hear Bonnie Bailey whisper “You are my…twisted sunshine!” over my earphone and I recognize that this same girl is the one who rendered the original lyrics I hear in the malls, in the beaches, everywhere. I bet my dwindling peso that even the Net-accessing humans in far-flung Africa and the isolated Pacific can shake their booty to the tune of “Ever After” in their burned cd’s, as do the lower middle-class patrons of Cubao and Quiapo pirated cd’s. The pirates may have stolen the thunder of a royalty from the song copyright owners but hey, reproducing Bonnie Bailey has democratized the world at-large.
A Yahoo messenger interrupts my Youtube viewing of the hilarious Michael V. video “Hindi Ako Bakla.” My States-based classmate says hi, asking how things are going in the Philippine Islands. I’m pretty sure CNN has already informed her and the rest of the world that a miracle happened when the latest storm wandered away from the Manila just when it followed the heel of the other typhoon that battered Bicol Region. I tell her about the fugitive weather disturbance anyway, happy that everyone’s fine and would she love to send a video of her come Christmas so that the other high schoolmates may be updated on her way of spending the yuletide as an expatriate student. A little while and she is sending a bulky file of what proved to be a video. It makes me want to laugh and cry simultaneously to witness a slideshow of our old-time pictures back in high school, a product of her longing to be hanging around her reliable friends half the world away, more than of the dependability of the technology. Before chatting goodbye to one another, I request for her to inquire on the distance learning module on a certain graduate degree not for myself but for my sister who has just earned her degree from the homegrown State University. Owing to her demanding work in a giant media network, my sister laments that she can’t physically pursue graduate course offshore, so she opts to grab the next best thing: to join the growing clamor for online studies whatever Western institution offers such.
I don’t at once resume my video Googling after chatting with my trans-Pacific friend, for a buzz and a series of kissing emoticons bombard my computer screen. I am brought to chuckling when I discover that it is my male friend whom I just had class with hours ago. Not as if the kisses mean any more than a friendly gesture, but it cross my mind that the icons showing emotions make the person at the other end online seem next to me, smooching me with puckered wet lips. All the better if kisses were done online, for I don’t wanna be smothered by the saliva of the countless people sending me online kisses. The cyberspace is heaven-sent for its neither-here-nor-there space reality. The in-between-ness clips distances and, at the same time, prevents maniacal chatters from showering me with authentic goo, never mind the million times the circular yellow icon swells in the lips to deliver virtual smacks.
At the last minute, an e-mail from my teacher informs me and the rest of my Yahoogroup classmates that the deadline for our paper due the next day was moved, owing to vigorous complaints from most of the class. Thanks heavens as well as Yahoo site! Without having to bother myself rushing for the said paper, I am saved from going sleepless the night through just so I will be able to beat the arranged time. See, unlike when I have to go to school bodily, I do not have to get really dressed up to know about this class development. I imagine my teacher and the rest of the online classmates to be just like what I am in: pajamas and oversized night shirt. Funny how institutional problems get solved with people concerned not in their expected power suits, but in their lousiest clothes instead. When online, I do not have to look really immaculate with neatly combed hair and made up face under the pains of not being paid attention to by my class crushes; the grace under pressure is lax when I’m chatting while in the comfort of my home.
“__________ has tagged you!” screamed the next e-mail. That virus-infested message again, I thought. My friends desperately protested that such a mail hacked into their account, so I am rather cautious not to check on it lest I spread hate instead of love. Apparently, virus developers do not stop at trying to down virtual systems the world over, but I remember that a Filipino college dropout beat them to it. Years ago, the spread of the I Love You virus hacked into the US Pentagon, no less, among other global institutions from Japan to Scandinavia. Such mischief can only be lauded by the diabolically mad, or at least an idiot of a president. Instead of criminalizing the said malicious hacker, that would-be deposed president even tapped him as a genius worth taking care of. No law hauled the “genius” into the prison cell, and I vaguely heard he is now under computer training abroad since his expertise cannot be used hereabouts. To the people behind the guy’s training, never mind if the virus developer caused the sufferance of the soft files of parliamentary governments, banks and personal e-mail accounts. When I return to reality, I zap away the virus e-mail into the oblivion of cyberspace and proceed in Googling other hilarious videos over at Youtube.
So this is the Friendster-like testimonial of my young life as a technology-dependent geek. I’m absolutely certain that not a few geeks like me will find parallels to my experiences (even our lives are, like, duplicated if not fileshared, tsk tsk). After all, it is we who compose the information society, a society wherein people from all walks of life across the enormous world get together in one tiny global village, exchanging and accessing information all in the name of knowledge. Not many of us mind any more of the moral-ethical repercussions of having to copy the copy of the copy of the copy, ad infinitum, of the original, which is more likely to be patented for intellectual property. We are the information society delivering hi’s and hello’s and how are you’s over the cyberspace, defying time zones because we are located in different hemispheres and practically debilitating the snail mail and other slower forms of communication. Only, we have this virtual communication as a favorite substitute for genuine same-time-and-place bonding. This information technology generates not only benefits for but also menaces on the society relying on it, complicating life but whose owner is willing to negotiate if only because the advantages seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Who or what is to blame? The modernity? The Internet? The addicted users? My fast-paced time does not allow me to answer the question above, for I’m preoccupying myself watching my all-time favorite “Toxic” video by Britney Spears and her court of hot and spicy guys. Her big splashing return to the pop scene is a more pressing issue than the scapegoat thing for many geeks out there. Why not, she has filed divorce from that Fed(erline)-Ex guy and is now seen cavorting Hollywood with new “bestest” friend, pop rival Paris Hilton. The latest news, as I expect, is churned out from Yahoo.

ephemeral, or why moving on takes an entire period of species evolution

It was inevitable: he and I were bound to appear on the same birthday party. The celebrant was a common friend of ours, and at that particular moment when I set my eyes on his direction, lit by the reception house’ shimmering lanterns, I wished the ground opened up and swallowed me. Marvelous: my former boyfriend, with a forgettable girl in tow. As if the spectacle wasn’t enough, they had the gall to place themselves in a strategic spot where I could see them sucking on each other’s lips in full French glory. My divine shame collecting into a facial redness, I had felt a sudden affinity with the sacrificial virgins at the Mayan pedestals, their throbbing heart and mine being bloodily ripped out of the ribcage for the crowd to see.
It was he, all right, but it was not he all the same. It was rather difficult to reconcile the immaculate guy that my ex-flame was to the considerably wasted savage that he is lately: somewhat unkempt, rarely shaven, given to disdainful remarks peppered with unprintables. This was the guy whom I traded I love yous for years until recently—the well-heeled, well-scrubbed guy from the Chinese school for boys near the Chinese school for girls I attended until both of us moved on to college. Now that we were of the same academic institution, we ironically grew apart, farther perhaps than the distance of disenfranchised Pluto from the rest of the solar system. Actually, he was Pluto: he could no longer take his planetary place in the universe of my being, not for anything else but his choice.
I really do not gather the reason for his cold-as-a-corpse treatment. What I remember, as always, was the fullness of life I felt when I still belonged in his arms. Sulking in my otherwise dainty room, I would excavate a boxful of mementoes he left at the course of our emotional understanding. This was the hotdog pillow he used to hug as a toddler, and he gave it to me because he claimed that the mandarin-colored sleeping cushion was my precursor. Since I were around, he added, of what use to him is the item when he could already hug the real thing? Meanwhile, this was the journal on which he reflected on our moments together, affording the dream that the only girl he mentioned in the dominantly pink sheets of stationery would be his wife and the mother of his children. I used to humor him for the choice of color, insinuating that maybe, just maybe, he would be the wife and mother instead of me. That was before: the very pallid shade of red turned paler all the more after being literally watermarked—the adorable writings he said to have flown straight out his heart were washed by my nightly tears. This one here was an album of our photographs together, with enough sweetness to cause tooth decay in an hour of browsing the pictures. This was the bulk of love letters when he was still courting me. In the epistles, he was short of offering me celestial bodies and asteroids and stardust and comets just so I would answer his romantic plea, but my former beloved was already adorable as he was—well, until lately. In the papers populated by his curly pen strokes, he declared his undying passion…and now… The rest of the door-to-door-type box, I see, was a motley of stuffed animals, sprays of flowers, perfumed shirts he would take off his shivering body, all given on various occasions that we were able to meet outside our hectic curricular schedules. When the knickknacks and the rendezvous began to rival the frequency of annual solar eclipses, wonder wove a web of woes in my heart. The text messages and the calls that used to render my mobile phone operations hanging eventually dwindled, like a rioting of sunlight giving way to the deathliness of the dark, sparing just a few sparkle of starlight.
I could only surmise that the mostly incongruent schedules we maintain broke the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. He would call one afternoon, vibrating in anticipation regarding having to rush from his home in Makati to mine in Quezon City just so we might eat out on a late luncheon, only to be told over the phone that I went to this place or that, my apologies let me make it up to you next weekend sorry I have an emergency meeting Mom has set me up an appointment with the dentist ad infinitum. I would place a return call, but his interest had gone down the drain, he would complain. On my many attempts for us to sit down and talk things over, all I would hear over the speaker was a raspy voice that seemed exhausted from the journey to the ends of the galaxy. The tired voice always transmitted the bad news: it’s over.
Yes, to him, it was over. No fanfare, no bravura performance of him while a tear-jerky Maalaala Mo Kaya background music floated in the air. Just that: frozen, unfeeling, non-negotiable. What about the completeness he brought into my life, let alone the years spent investing love for one another? His retort was as enigmatic as a black hole: he has moved on while I was still stuck in my illusion. For writing this piece about him, I proved him correct about my not having trudged along yet. The first instances his it’s overs rattled my eardrum, I would embarrassingly admit to having created scenes before my Mom. I keened and wailed like a banshee, milking for sympathy from my mother whose sleeping hours I molested for weeks on end. I still thought it was unfair, this: not being able to meet halfway with my fugitive lover to settle things once and for all. Technically speaking, he decided that we have broken up without me knowing it.
The girl at the party was not even the third wheel. My ex-boyfriend’s well-meaning friends would comfort me that the so-so date would pester him for a second meeting, to no avail. Even as she would travel all of Edsa on bended knees, she would not have my ex-boyfriend make a crazy idea ever anew, they would laugh. But all his shows were not a laughing matter to me at all; he was trying to hurt me for all the pains I indirectly caused him for not allowing enough time for the two of us. To be honest, he succeeded in his mission, for often, my dead-tired body would be at the mercy of his tormenting thoughts. Yes, Celine Dion, there were nights when the wind was so cold, and I was longing for the warmth of my former beloved’s embrace.
When the passionate outbursts tempered, I already resigned to the fact that his supposed eternal love was but a piece of rhetoric. Nevertheless, that particular acceptance barely assisted me in my emotional recuperation (or the lack thereof, dare I confess). I have not moved on yet, but it was pointless to beg for another chance at love from someone not unlike a graven idol without real divine capacity to make things happen. Somebody went to the absurd extent of advising me to write my relational petition to Wish Ko Lang, but even in my most desperate mode, I would try to keep my emotional anguish away from becoming a scandalously public knowledge of national proportions.
I felt sorry that my personal compromises had met an abortive fate: I would now have a slim chance of having my first boyfriend for a husband, of building a happy life with him as father of my own family, of not having any other love except him (not allowing myself to fall in love again would be the height of my sadomasochistic streak—I was really hoping my first love would also be my last, my one and only, so to speak). At times, when I think about it, I would like to poke myself in the head for having sworn my personal commitment, because words are such a binding force, at most, for me. At the opposite bank of the river, his declaration of deathless passion seemed to pale in comparison to, say, a promise of a lifetime housekeeping service or one of a leisurely swim across shark-infested waters. Such were the worthlessness of his words that near-impossibilities were being contrasted against his bombastic oath.
Following a friend’s advice that reading is a wonderful love therapy, I found myself inside a bookstore the weird way an atheist would find himself returning to the Church’s fold. I got to browse that friend’s favorite novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who made his character of a Catalonian bookseller articulate a line worth immortalizing in my former beau’s tattoo-meriting forehead: “Even the wildest, most tenacious love is an ephemeral truth in the end.” Bingo! That fitted his love description: he deluded himself into thinking he couldn’t live without me enough for him to swear everlasting love, yet currently, it’s as if I were the most detestable criminal in the whole world. I have repeatedly swallowed my pride in order to have back everything we were before, but all I get from him was a mindless answer so lousy it made telecom staples like “The number you have dialed is not yet in service” seemed more excitable.
At the end of the bend, I indeed have yet to leave my cave of oblivion to see the colorful world out there, and so has my former boyfriend, contrary to what he claimed. The mere fact that he would go his way to condescend me by picking up a cheap date to whom I would be miserably compared means he wants to avenge for the suffering I rendered him. Likewise, the devolution he has undergone is not a telling evidence of having recovered from the heartache. Finally, the robotic manner he deals with me at present manifests the emotional grudge he still carries against our frustrated relationship. As for me, moving on takes long because all things being equal, always and forever, I still love him. My masochist mantra: love, although it hurts. I don’t agree that stupid are those who love even the beloved’s folly, for who is perfect in the midst of this humanity? I have seen beyond his imperfection—he cannot be a Hugh Jackman or a Jude Law with impeccable personal characteristics. If continuing loving him entails the extreme sacrifice of self-preservation, so be it. I need someone to love apart from myself. Brand me a moron, but I will wait for the realized hope (or delusion) of being loved again by him even at the expense of my chance at other loves. In our present world of a very few miracles, loving even the unloving or those devoid of capacity to love is one miracle not entirely removed from the manner God loves the sinners among us.

class, greek style

When at last, the Greek artists perfected the high-rank style deemed exemplary in such masterpieces as the Parthenon, the Classical Age of Greece (490-323 BC) was born. This was right after the Homeric Age, when the epics Iliad and Odyssey became the avenue for the description of athletic excellence, the means for the hero to show his virtue and attain social admiration not only for his physical strength but also for his courage, brilliance and, ultimately, virtue. Homeric values continued to influence the Greeks during the Classical Age, when the cultural excesses were moderated by classical virtues as justice, integrity, courage, temperance, decency, beauty, and balance.
One such fine example of classical bravery was demonstrated by Socrates during his defense at his trial, chronicled in The Apology (“defense”). In the Apology, Socrates alludes to the daimon (demon) inside him, that which serves as his spiritual guide, a divine and prophetic sign, a “voice.” The daimon started in Socrates’ childhood and endured his whole life through. Socrates claimed that the voice always forbade but never commanded him to do anything he was to do.
Socrates was tried for not ministering before the gods of the state and for corrupting the youth like the popular aristocrat Alcibiades who betrayed by helping the Spartans. While he could have chosen to exile himself after having been charged with such potentially capital crimes, Socrates decided to submit himself on trial. Believing Socrates would propose to be exiled so he would be rid of since none wanted him to die anyway, the prosecutor puts forth the death penalty. Manifesting great courage that epitomizes the classical climate, Socrates drinks the hemlock poison and dies and for such execution, Athens turned infamous.
On the other hand, Plato’s account of a bacchanalian feast where each guest is enjoined to make a speech on the nature of love and where the drunken gatecrasher Alcibiades joins Socrates and playwright Aristophanes is the Symposium. The classical Athenian perspectives of friendship, sex and sexuality and the social role of the all-male drinking party were tackled during the symposium.
"Justice and Power: The Language of Early Greek Tyranny," centers on dike or rightful share and its meaning with rulers from Homer. Lacking real concern for dike, Homeric kings were preoccupied with honor and vengeance; leaders contemporary with Homer and Hesiod, meanwhile, were accountable for the society’s well-being, specifically the safeguarding of justice. When these were considered to have twisted justice, a path was paved for tyranny. The oracles involving Kypselos of Corinth show that his tyranny's original purpose was to rectify the injustice of the city's leaders, a purpose shared by other tyrants. These claims founded a right to govern, but the tyrant's administration of justice could seem random itself, unjust and requiring its own correction, in the long run. The classical ideals were present, but the tyrannical excesses were way too intoxicating.
Meanwhile, the participation of women in Athenian ritual is examined by Mary Lefkowitz in "Women in the Panathenaic and Other Festivals." The roles of the arrhephoroi, the kanephoroi, and the ergastinai are investigated (their duties, training, and place in the religious life of Athens). The employment of women or young girls for these significant ceremonies hails back to the foundation myths of Athens wherein the daughters of Kekrops and Athena look after the would-be king, Erichthonios. The Eleusinian rituals were considered in light of the arrhephoroi, young girls (sisters) who care for a cast-out being. It is apparent that the classical values of compassion and selflessness may be discovered in this female participation.
While the classical virtues were being upheld as recorded in the four texts in question, the period was a violent one, extensive intellectual flowering notwithstanding (the three great philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all lived during the Classical Age). The initial year of the Classical Age saw the ferocious fighting Persians attacking Athens. The young democratic system, criticized no less by Plato himself, almost went fazed and very nearly returned to oligarchy in case decisions were slow to appear in the former, but novel martial tactics at the Battle at Marathon drove the Persians running and screaming the opposite direction, giving victory to the Athenians. 10 years later, Persia went war-freak again and fought against most of the banded Greek cities. The Battle at Thermopylae was lost, but the Battles at Salamis and Plataea brought defeat to the Persians. The united Greek cities save for Sparta contributed to create a formidable navy courtesy of Athens if ever the Persians attacked again, but the Persians did not return and so the cities backed out from sending money one after another, until excesses by Athens—using its military power to crush fellow cities which declined contribution and laundering money to build its own city—angered the other cities and triggered the Peloponnesian War.
When the hinterland north of Greece finally emerged as a powerful kingdom, Greece was conquered by Macedonian father and son leaders Philip and Alexander, and the Classical Age drew to a close. However, the classical trends were revived as the Macedonian conquerors disseminated Greek civilization across its empire running from Pakistan to Egypt. The style of Greek perfection endured history since, and when we mention the term classical today, the glory that was Greece comes to mind.

silang mga anak ng mutya ng pasig

Fran Ng, Girl Valencia , Nikki Go-Alfar, Christine Bellen, Cyan Abad-Jugo, Jena Pamintuan, Becky Bravo, Mirava Yuson, Mookie Katigbak , Frances Alcazar, Rica Bolipata-Santos, Conchitina Cruz. Mabibilang pa sa mga daliri ang mga babaeng anak na iyan ng Kasalukuyang Panitikang Pilipino. Bago nasilayan ng aking paningin ang iskrapbuk ng nasabing mga babaeng manunulat, narinig ko na ang ilan sa kanila dahil nagtuturo ang mga ito sa mga kilalang pamantasan, samantalang nabasa ko naman ang mga likhang-sining ng iba pa. Sa pagkakataon ngang mabasa ko ang iskrapbuk, namangha ako hindi dahil ilang taon lamang ang tanda nila sa akin kundi dahil mas marami pa palang manunulat sa kanilang kategorya kaysa sa inaakala ko.
Hindi naman kataka-taka kung maging bata mang gaya ng mga nabanggit ay makapagsulat nang mahusay sapagkat wala sa gulang ang pagiging henyo. Ang nakagulat sa akin, bukod pala sa mga pangalang may dating na sa akin gaya ni Cruz na kahanga-hanga ang mga prosang tula o ni Bellen na guro dito sa Ateneo o ni Ng na kumakatawan sa boses naming mga Tsinoy, may iba pang ngayon ko lang makakatagpo. Napaglimi kong kahit sa disiplina ng panitikan, maaaring mang-impluwensiya pa rin ang ideyolohiyang patriyarkal. Akala ko, sa nagdaang henerasyon pa nina Kerima Polotan at Edith Tiempo—kapwa mayoryang manunulat sa lokal na panitikan—nauso ang pagtuturing sa mahuhusay na mga babaeng manunulat bilang minorya lamang. Pati pala sa panitikan ng kontemporaryong panahon, tahimik pa ring nananalanta ang perhuwisyong pangkasariang ito. Pakiramdam ko, pinapalitaw na lalaki lamang ang makalilikha ng pinakamagagaling na sulat, ngunit bilang babae, naghihimagsik ako sa maling kaisipang ito.
Sa pagkabasa ko ng iskrapbuk, napagtanto kong maraming babae sa kapanahunan ko ang kakikitaan ng galing ngunit hindi marami ang nakapapansin nito. Bilang tugon sa kawalang-balanseng ito, naisip kong dapat kong simulan ang pagbabasa sa kanila at ang paghikayat sa iba pa na gawin ang pareho. Sa gayon, maibibigay sa mga babaeng manunulat ng kasalukuyang panahon ang pagkilalang nararapat sa kanilang henyo.