the melodramatic stance.

The tulips at that perfect place

crane their necks with liquid grace

like swans who circling, collide

within the lake this vase provides.

They stood like soldiers, stiff, before

as if they had been called to war.

In two days more, when petals fall,

I will entomb them in the hall

with trash; the morning's coffee grinds,

old newspapers, and lemon rinds.

It's bitter that such loveliness

should come to this,

could come to this.

But now their purpleness ignites

the room with incandescent lights.

Their stamens reach their yellow tongues

to lick the air into their lungs

through stems attached to whitish manes.

The pistil stains.

And even though there are no bees

about the room for them to please,

I take them in like honey dew-

and buzzing now,

I think of you...

I think of you who bought me these,

at least,

I wish you had,

as that might ease the ache

of passing hours.

A love is dying, like these flowers.

"The Tulips" by Ricky Ian Gordon.

the rhyme just heightens the melodrama. this is for larry. for some reason.

In which the gongs signaled an opening, and a family comes together.

Papa tells me that we're going to an exhibit opening. It seems the de guia's (or the tahimiks) are having a show. I nod and ask for an apple pie. 

And we went. The exhibit (of course i missed the title of the exhibit) was in a small space. nothing fancy. nothing solemn actually. nothing impenetrable. even if it did feature a large installation of a indigenous film crew making indigenous films. rattan figures woven by a blind man.  And even with the collages of Kawayan de Guia (mixtures of childhood drawings, cut-out pictures of newspapers), and the torn-up but put back together photographs of Kidlat de Guia (papa found it amusing how kidlat tahimik calls himself junior. i do too. even if he was the one who named his son kidlat. its like the whole oedipus dilemma but in reverse) these always seem like such serious brooding things.

the simplest things when rendered in art do that, no? because you always expect something lofty, to be faced with what you can name makes you doubt the names you know.

kabunyan's (the youngest and with what i must say is the most lyrical name) mosaics with photographs were funny without forcing themselves. no self-reflexive, oh look at me. 

but it was their mother, Katrin's work that just delighted me. and i mean it in the way the children find things fascinating—it is the joy in seeing the true in what is considered forgotten, unworthy, and unimportant. 

she made assemblages from pieces that she picked up from the beach and their burnt house. They were beings, coming in pairs. Like cartoons, but handdrawn ones. Like characters you met in the best fantastic children's story you've ever been read or told. i told her that they were such happy figures. she (probably trying to be nice. who tells an artist that their work is happy? it seems almost disrespectful ano?) said that they were happy to have survived. 

thank God that I've been crying the whole day (done with the ugly cry before noon) or else I would have completely gone off again at that statement. 

but what truly did make my tears brim was when father kidlat, now in bahag and bearing a gong, comes out, calls his children, his wife, and they dance around the room, around their grandmother, around a young boy tumbling over everything. it is exactly like what we've seen of tv of these dances with gongs, and nothing like it. because it is happiness, it is the belief in the ritual—certainty that we can create a sacred space—and that it is well-lit and warm and inviting. 

oh mama would have loved all of it.

The exhibit is at the Ricco Renzo Gallery, on top of Cafe Ricco Renzo. Along Reposo (or is it nicanor something now), right in front of Wine Depot. In old makati.

who love to toil over an intricate boil of language

God Bless the Experimental Writers

            for David Markson

            "One beginning and one ending for a book was a
            thing I did not agree with."

                Flann O'Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds

God bless the experimental writers.
The ones whose work is a little
difficult, built of tinkertoys
and dada, or portmanteau and
Reich. God help them as they
type away, knowing their readers
are few, only those who love to toil
over an intricate boil of language,
who think books are secret codes.
These writers will never see their names
in Publisher's Weekly. They will
never be on the talk shows. Yet,
every day they disappear into their
rooms atop their mother's houses,
or their guest houses behind some
lawyer's estate. Every day they
tack improbable word onto im-
probable word, out of love, children,
out of a desire to emend the world.

"God Bless the Experimental Writers" by Corey Mesler, from Some Identity Problems.

in which i spell moleskine properly

obviously, an attempt to win the lovely, drool-worthy moleskine from avalon.ph. but why not? With how my year's been going, the worst thing I can do is not try.

If it's a matter of gratitude, it would be that I've discovered worth in all its forms. Self-worth when you're a woman is a tricky thing—there are so many places to mistakenly rest it on. Beauty, the love of someone else, accomplishment, rebellion, etc. etc.

But this year, it was about realizing what a peso really meant, and conversely what an hour of work truly entailed. Though this merits the derision of the enlightened, when you were raised a spoiled brat and suddenly that has to stop, it surprises me just how much it feels like someone's truly pulled the rug from under you. And how a cliche, how cliche after cliche, seem to capture the awkwardness that is adulthood and how responsibility and money seems tied to that.

That it throws me off regularly, that it gives me focus (I want that and not that!), I am grateful for this awkwardness. Even if it really is so late in the game, and everyone seems to be getting into their stride.

found to be incurable!

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

"Diagnosis" by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing.

i have faith

in the heart's elasticity, that she will love better and stronger and bigger and more always, every time. except it also means that it will hold looser, be more open, and keep nothing.

it takes some time for the ego, the brain, even the body to keep up.

and hope drives everything.

Who would /have guessed/it possible/that waiting/is sustainable—/a place with/its own harvests./Or that in/time's fullness/the diamonds/of patience/couldn't be /distinguished/from the genuine/in brilliance/or hardness.

(Kay Ryan - Patience)

still on an ellipsis

Grammatical rules have always baffled
me, leaving me wondering whether my
life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the
subject or object of my life, and no one
has been able to provide words to describe
my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with
pronouns: I am unwilling to be him
and you are unable to be her, so we
will never be them~the ones talking
about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for
dinner tonight; the couple saving for a
vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a
museum tour of Europe; the two who meet
with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough
aside for their retirement~and so we will
continue to be nothing more than sentence
fragments, perfectly fine for effect,
but forever looking for the missing
part of speech we can never seem to find.

"Diagramming Won't Help This Situation" by Kevin Brown, from Exit Lines. PlainView Press, 2009

a star is time on loan, a light year being more than distance

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,

And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

Delay
Elizabeth Jennings 

love, yet again.

(1)i forgot just how much chris abani's fiction just slays me. like when the men left because the women would start telling stories, he stayed and curled under their own brilliant fire.

"you're teaching him to be a woman."

someone has to.

i'm so glad to have been given time to read this.

(2)

and there is something so hopeful about this. i swear.

love in a rum coke. heehee.

(1) chris abani's graceland

(2) by the beach in anvaya cove

i fold over, and over once more.

two women in three days        
        cried on the green bench in the park
                where i found a dollar
                folded into a boat.
 
i thought it was the crying bench and cried
        on the crying bench
                when it became available.
                               
                                i cried
by thinking of all the people
        who've never broken a shop window, not the baker's
        window, the bead-seller's,
                who sells beads for purposes
                i find hard to list: necklaces,
                        the hanging of strings of beads
        in doorways, the owning of beads
                                just in case.
 
breaking a shop window with a piece of shale
the size of my heart, a piece of shale
                on which i've drawn my heart, not my actual heart
                        but my feelings of my heart,
                                since i've never seen my heart,
        would set something free.
 
i don't know what that something is
                but it would be free.
 
and my heart would have survived its travels
        through glass, its jagged voyage
        through my reflection.
 
you see now why i cried: none of this is real.
until i can answer yes to the cop who asks, is this your heart
                among the ruins of your reflection?
                   i won't be a man, despite what my anatomy
                insists.
 
it insists
        that i overcome a sense of resistance when i move,
        that i move
as long as i am able to move, and when i am unable
                to move, that i stop.
 
it would be free and look like a bird, an actual bird
        or a dollar folded into a bird, a dollar bird
                        in a dollar boat.
 
which is to say
                i believe origami arrives
                        when we need it most.
 
i can't prove this but i can't prove
                you're a good person though i suspect
        you're a good person.
 
you who opened the door.
 
you who tipped your hat.
 
you who ran into the fire and carried
        the fire safely out.


a history of origami
bill hicok

italics mine.

the nightcrawlers ride again.

remember when we were all younger?
{click on the title}

it's october

the month of the rosary, the month that begins with the feast of the guardian angels and ends with all hallow's eve.

but more importantly, it's breast cancer awareness month. i wear and bring enough pink to last me the year, but still, check yourself. listen to your body, and take care of yourself.

*mwah mwah*

there are things to do.

a lot going on our side of the world, so we have to help each other.

GO TO ONDOY MANILA.

Wonka Redux from WeLoveYouSo.com

Wonka Redux: "

Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964. The movie starring Gene Wilder (tag line: “It’s Scrumdidilyumptious!”) came out in 1971. A second version hit theaters in 2005. Which is all to say that the story of a loony inventor revealing his sugary trade secrets to a bright young kid holds a certain perennial appeal.

Part of this allure lies with the story’s masterful structure: part mini-bildungsroman and part fairy tale, it combines adventure, supernatural phenomena, moral perils and a grand journey. Some of the story’s greatness is also due to the inventive genius of Roald Dahl. And part of it––a large part––stems from the concept of magical candy. Who doesn’t love magical candy?

Katrina Markoff is a real-life Willy Wonka of sorts, if Wonka was a globetrotting woman who trained at Le Cordon Bleu. Markoff’s company, Vosges Haut-Chocolat, specializes in exotic candy bars meant to be nibbled in the tiniest of savoring bites (no Violet Beauregards allowed.) The Black Pearl bar––speckled with ginger, wasabi and black sesame seeds––tastes like the result of Wonka running wild in a sushi restaurant. The Habana bar is crunchy with plantain chips (Wonka-Goes-To-Cuba), and the Enchanted Mushroom bar, with Reishi mushrooms and walnuts, is like a chocolatey trip to the forest floor.

If it all sounds weird––well, it is. And that’s definitely not a bad thing.

"

you know

we laugh at oprah because really she might just be a little too earnest. but when i'm tired, like mentally tired, i read an oprah magazine and instantly instantly want to say

i'm sorry, let me back into the fold.

and be gathered back into her arms.

-------

now that i think is called power.

continuing portability

We don't pay for "content," we pay for "form": "In Paul Graham's provocative 'Post-Medium Publishing,' he argues that we've rarely paid for 'content,' but rather for 'form' -- that's why a good hardcover costs the same as a bad one, and both are more expensive than paperbacks. As the newspaper and CD forms lose currency, their publishers argue that what we've been buying all along is the 'content' and demand that we 'continue' to pay for it online.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.

I think he goes off the rails in the next graf, where he talks about how writers can self-publish merely by uploading files; this commits the same error that he's upset about: confusing 'publishing' and 'printing.'

I also wonder if St McLuhan might not object here, with something about the form being the content.

Post-Medium Publishing

(via /.)

"
it really does seem like we're changing the rules of both production and consumerism. just with some new pieces of technology.

ladybug thing

i love notes. more people should be writing and leaving notes for more people.

especially when they have maps on them.

and are box tops for pies.

maybe if i post more of these, they will come.

the science of portability

Just bought a laptop, and about three days into it, realized that I have learned to live without one. My trusty four-year old mini has been enough, and really, i have one at the office too. And in a clutch, I can call someone who has access to the internet or whatnot. Pen and paper sure works well too.

As a student, even a teacher, it made sense to have one. Especially since the thesis, which is my last step before i am finally master of something, really does have its place in a portable computer. But I'm not. And though Bubba will be good to have at presentations (when I don't have a designer with me,) I have always found that scribbling on a notebook is fine.

Once at a meeting, my design manager and I were both bearing notebooks while the pr group came bearing laptops (nice, teeny tiny netbooks) and the project team was trying to figure out how to fix the projector for theirs. I found it funny that we were ready because we just needed to open our bags and set our notebooks on the table. Though it must be said that I did have to borrow a pen.

So now with portable things becoming more and more ubiquitous and chock-full with features (the new nano has a video camera!) does it really mean that we're really moving around more?

though today was Bubba's first sojourn that wasn't my room or my office, (he and i spent time in the garden) i couldn't help remembering how as a kid i would carry around a small-ish attache case bearing papers and a couple of pens around the house. definitely to mimic my parents, but also because i felt i always needed to have whatever it was i was scribbling with me. but that was around the house.

this isn't about what you want to grab when something goes wrong.

i realize that with portability comes a sense of everything instant. you want to hear a song, HERE! you want to see pictures, HERE!

and also single-serve, this is YOUR phone, YOUR iPod, YOUR laptop. Really, the time spent and money generated just personalizing these portable things. and definitely a sense of privacy. though with the internet and satellites, privacy has definitely gone through the wringer.

I'm obviously thinking out loud here. This is a blog after all. But soon it seems, we really are going to get cybernetic implants, and perhaps we'll definitely find quicker ways to 'share' things. Though even with the cautionary tales of science fiction, I don't think we realize that it really is happening. And not even as judgement (not in the mood for a materialism chorvaness, I did buy my laptop for more emotional than practical reasons), but just as matter of fact.

how will we evolve socially, emotionally and spiritually when we carry everything with us? what changes are we going to see?

the cities we create in our minds.

And on certain nights,
maybe once or twice a year,
I'd carry the baby down
and all the kids would come
all nine of us together,
and we'd build a town in the basement

from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.
And some lived under the pool table
or in the bathroom or the boiler room
or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,
and you could be a man or a woman
a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around
like a day in the village until

one of us turned off the lights, switch
by switch, and slowly it became night
and the people slept.

Our parents were upstairs with company or
not fighting, and one of us — it was usually
a boy — became the Town Crier,
and he walked around our little sleeping
population and tolled the hours with his voice,
and this was the game.

Nine o'clock and all is well, he'd say,
walking like a constable we must have seen
in a movie. And what we called an hour passed.

Ten o'clock and all is well
. And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep
or a grown up baby cried and was comforted . . .
Eleven o'clock and all is well.
Twelve o'clock. One o'clock. Two o'clock . . .

and it went on like that through the night we made up
until we could pretend it was morning.

"The Game" by Marie Howe, from What the Living Do. © W.W. Norton and Co, 1999.

i love it when good poetry always, always, always makes you stop and look at things again. the way that it reveals that beneath the veneer, there is darkness—and that always gives "look how this word shines."

ladybug things today

(1)

via: FFFOUND

(2)
hunger by kit kwe







(3)

Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles from Brent Barson on Vimeo.

let's not take ourselves seriously, yes?

from Pause for thought. there is always hope for strangeness.

everything in its place.

I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he had asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife and her fork in their proper places,
then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

"Splitting an Order" by Ted Kooser, from Valentines. © University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
from The Writer's Almanac

it's raining on a friday

and it seems like the perfect time to be reading. but am hungry too. today people seem to be thinking the same thing.

From PopMatters, a surprising argument on reading everything (well, not really) from a pop culture blog.

Reading deeply and widely -- from Stephen King to Walter Mosley to Jane Austen to James Joyce -- at the very least makes us less dull and more patient, and it happens to be the only way to make informed, qualitative judgments within and across genres

Continue it here

While on the New York Times, they talk about reading on the subway. They've even included a blog that's devoted to that.

Another nice thing to share. Now if i could just find something to eat.

years pass, not to heal, but that they do.

In Place of Emotion

120 pounds of absence weigh heavy
on the body. When they said, depression,
they meant as opposed to elevation;
not a case of psychiatry, but one

of topography. Death, they did

say, would shake, shatter the world,

yet there were only fissures, only ruptures,

as if land does not believe in endings. Only the slow

release of grief, as steam unfurling into the air.

Just sadness writing its own space, its own geography.

While beneath, blood curdles
thick, a compression of the living

that is left to be done, to its own.

and years pass, not to heal,

but that they do. A study in geology.

A map now reads new countries

in pink relief on brown, worn skin.