Last week I promised to share a few paragraphs from my first Palanca-prizewinning story, “Agcalan Point,” which I saw again recently for the first time in 35 years.

I’m going to do this not to praise myself, but precisely to show how artificial my voice was back then, and how it’s changed since, by way of talking more generally about how writers and their words change over time.

Here goes:

“Approaching Ginbulanan harbor from the west, as it is the only entry the sea leaves open short of tearing your craft apart with its sunken teeth, the traveler meets Agcalan.

“From afar you perceive a decrepit Spanish fort more than a thousand feet above the bobbing horizon, thickly overhung with clouds in the month of August. From that crown Agcalan plunges madly downwards into jagged slivers of gray sandstone into the sea, carpeted by a fine silken spray.

“Treachery lurks but a fathom below; ships passing this point must have crews of redoubtable courage. So far from the open sea, so near to land — and there the danger lies, to founder on some ill-anchored reef or be crushed against the immutable cheek of Agcalan.

“Agcalan has always been there, and you have only seen it now. It has seen everything, and you know nothing, a speck of flotsam in time and space, and you are overwhelmed. There is majesty in the primeval, some godly attribute magnified by the prism of the transparent mind, and it is here.”

Now let’s a do a little self-analysis.

Note the tone and setting of the story.

It doesn’t happen on a typical Tuesday on a city street.

It starts on the swell of the ocean, wrenching the reader from the familiar.

We are introduced to a “decrepit Spanish fort,” suggesting a bygone era, cloaking the piece in a mythic mist.

This effect is reinforced by words and phrases like “thickly overhung,” “redoubtable courage,” “ill-anchored,” “majesty in the primeval,” “godly attribute,” and that last mouthful, “the prism of the transparent mind.”

Those lines will probably get past or even be liked by an impressionable audience.

But looking at them now, as the 56-year old reader rather than the 21-year-old writer, I can sense a certain stridency, a palpable anxiety to be taken seriously, which seems easiest to achieve with the use of windy, resonant, polysyllabic words.

It’s the bane of wet-eared writers, this notion that big words and foggy settings will get you far.

It’s an understandable crutch, especially when you don’t feel too confident about your material — or haven’t found it yet; a retreat into the romantic past provides a good excuse for mock-heroic prose and a touch of melodrama.

I find myself having to tell my students to unlearn this tendency by, among others, asking them to throw their thesaurus away, especially when the only reason they turn to it is to find a fancier word for something as basic as “talk” (expostulate?) or “walk” (perambulate?).

For comparison, here’s a scene from a story I published in 2002, when I was 48: “Some Families, Very Large”:

“Finally they emerged into a street with one side lit up like a carnival and smelling like flowers. Boys Sammy’s age ran from one end of it to another, and men and women sat in chairs on the sidewalk, smoking and chatting, scratching their ankles.

Vendors sold fried bananas, jellied drinks, and duck eggs on the street. It seemed incredibly alive, this nook of the city, and Sammy soon understood why: it was a street of funeral parlors all in a row, and even Christmas saw no let-up in business here.”

Note how narrow my field of vision has become, and how much simpler the words are.

Here I try to get mileage not from my vocabulary nor from the exoticism of the setting, but from the irony of the situation — of how places of death can be so full of life, even and especially at Christmastime.

Indeed this movement from the exotic to the familiar seems to be a trajectory that many writers go through as they mature. Take a look at these lines from a poem titled “Night Music” written by the British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) in 1945, when he was 23:

Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.
And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.'

Notice anything?

Now here’s Larkin again, 13 years later, in 1958, with “Home Is So Sad”:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
…

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Not only has the language become radically simplified (note how all of the words in the first line are of just one syllable); the imagery is now pointedly domestic.

“That vase,” such a seemingly plain phrase, carries tremendous referential power, implying some experience we don’t know but whose emotional significance we can infer, in a way that “the coal of this unquickened world” just can’t manage.

Such shifts in vocabulary are, I suggest, merely the ripples on the surface of the ocean.

The real changes occur much deeper, in the writer’s growing appreciation of the complexity of seemingly simple acts, statements, and figures.

The maturing writer realizes that verbal virtuosity is the easiest and cheapest trick in the book, and that only with the genius of a Borges or a Nabokov can big words regain and reassert their grand precision.

The change may not even be in the words but in the sensibility, which can be a subtler spoor to track.

I remember a professor of mine from graduate school — a tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking Shakespeare scholar named Russell Fraser — who gave us one of the most maddeningly difficult final exams I ever came across.

He gave us two blind passages from Shakespeare — certifiably obscure, nothing like “To be or not to be” or “Friends, Romans, countrymen” — and asked us: “Which is early and which is late Shakespeare, and why?”

We had to argue our answers purely on the basis of the text and what context we could generate from it, trying to imagine what an aging bard would feel like, and how the weight of the years would convey itself in his words.

The next time you read works by the same author, look up their publication dates, and see if you can sense any change in his or her language, outlook, or style. Come to think of it, I suppose some of us actually get worse with time, but that’s for another column.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

Something very unusual happened to me a few days ago. I got hold of a story I hadn’t seen in 35 years.

I vaguely remembered what it was about and how it began, and what the climax was, but I couldn’t recall what the characters said, beyond the heroic swagger that the author gave them, thinking that it would give the piece a classic feel, as if it had been written by someone older.

That part I remember, because I was the author, and the story was the first one I ever submitted to the Palancas.

The year was 1975; I was 21, then employed as a writer at the National Economic and Development Authority in Padre Faura.

I was writing feature stories about government projects like Pantabangan Dam and the Philippine National Railways, but what I really wanted to do was to write stories and plays.

It was the time of martial law, so there wasn’t much to write for except Kerima Polotan’s Focus magazine, to which I’d submitted a rather tepid story just the year before, my first major publication in a national magazine.

I wanted then what any young, brash writer wants — a little fame and fortune, and the Palanca Awards, which I’d heard about but which seemed just beyond my reach, looked to be the ticket.

So I wrote a story I called “Agcalan Point,” pounding away at my father-in-law’s Olympia typewriter.

It went on to win a share of Second Prize — something like P2,500 — with which I bought my first car, a battered 1963 Datsun Bluebird that ended up a year later in a police garage, shot full of bullet holes; but that’s another story.

I was, of course, deliriously happy when it won, but strangely enough, after I submitted that story to the Palancas, I practically forgot about the piece — and I can’t remember exactly why.

I suspect that I realized early enough that it wasn’t that good, because I never included it in any of the three short story collections I later published; I didn’t even have a copy, although the Palanca Foundation had one in its library.

I think it won mainly because of its theme — and we’ll get to that in a minute — but the language was, well, exactly what it was: that of a 21-year-old doing his best to sound 42.

About a month ago, I received a request from Lulu Reyes, an old friend who teaches English at the Ateneo and who edits an online magazine called Kritika Kultura; they were going to publish an interview with me, but also needed an unpublished story to go with it.

I didn’t have any, I said… until I remembered “Agcalan Point,” hibernating in the Palanca Foundation files since 1975.

A request to the kind Mr. Ross Bautista at the Foundation promptly produced a Xerox copy of my original manuscript.

Seeing the familiar font of the Olympia and flipping through the pages was like taking a ride in a time machine to watch myself thinking and working back when my hair was thick and wavy and my waist size a demure 28 (and now it’s 40; tell me, how can a foot of fat grow around any man without his realizing it?).

I remembered what had inspired me to write that story: in 1974, Beng and I had to spend a couple of weeks in my seaside hometown of Alcantara, Romblon, after I’d received a tip that I might be re-arrested for continuing to work with the Left, despite my government job.

Beng was eight months pregnant, but we ran all the same, fearing for our freedom.

There in Romblon — where the old people pinned talismans on Beng’s blouse to ward off evil spirits — I looked at a hill looming over the water, and saw a story.

When I sat down to it, I would set that story in the mythic past — remembering Jose Garcia Villa’s “Mir-i-nisa” — and imbue it with all manner of dramatic flourish.

My story was about a brave young warrior who refused to believe in demons, and who — forced to fight one such demon — found himself facing the old, oppressive datu, whom he then destroyed, thereby elevating reason over superstition.

I know, it doesn’t sound too bad, but as every writer knows, a plot synopsis tells you nothing about the execution of the story, or about the quality of its language.

When I read the manuscript again last week, I couldn’t help smiling at my own turns of phrase — some of which I wouldn’t be caught dead using, today.

But then again, when you’re 21, who’s to tell you what not to do?

Next week, I’ll publish the opening paragraph of “Agcalan Point,” and discuss how a writer’s language changes over time, and why.

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There’s one more thing I need to do today: offer a heartfelt apology to the man who gave me first professional writing job.

City editor Nemesio Dacanay took a risk on an annoyingly persistent 18-year-old dropout and brought him in as a reporter for the Philippines Herald in 1972.

A few years ago, I remembered “Dac” in a piece I wrote to acknowledge my writing mentors, but inadvertently turned it into a eulogy by describing him as “the late…”

His daughter Christine Dacanay Kelley wrote in to say that her father is, in fact, very much alive and well here in Manila.

I’m sorry about that most terrible of journalistic bloopers, sir, and hope to see you again one of these days!

And finally, on a truly sadder note, my deepest condolences go the family of Engineer Patrocinio Manes, who died very recently.

It was Manong Patring and his wife, my father’s cousin, Manang Adoring, who gave Beng and me shelter in Romblon when we needed a hiding place back in 1974.

He was a great guy, the kind of man you think every father, uncle, or elder brother should be.

————————

Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

I got such encouraging responses to last week’s piece on writing for a living (or, to put it a tad more nicely, becoming a professional writer) that I thought I’d come up with a Part 2 — another set of ten tips for the writer who thinks that he or she has what it takes to write full-time and earn from it.

Consider these advanced lessons, meant for the writer who’s already taken the plunge, who has the talent and the drive, and who may already have notched some successful projects.

I know that you can find many how-to books out there that will probably tell you the same things, but let me save you a few pesos and a trip to the bookstore by drawing on my experience and that of some friends

1. Don’t just write, edit.

Many projects don’t require writers — especially when the writing of the draft is done in-house by the regular staff — but they do need editors with a sharp eye for grammatical, mechanical, and stylistic errors and problems.

Editing, of course, demands a higher level of mastery of the language. (Last week, I promised to do a full-blown piece on interviewing; today I’ll make another promise to do the same for editing.)

While we’re on the subject, prepare to be edited.

Don’t be so proud as to imagine that your prose is flawless. Even the best writers can misplace commas and apostrophes, or confuse their tenses (or worse, like I once did, their characters’ names).

2. Learn how to take pictures.

Many writing jobs — like this column — occasionally require pictures to go with the text, and without a separate budget or extra manpower for photography, it’s left to the writer to take pictures as well.

Invest in a good digital camera, and learn the basics of photography.

I may never get good enough to become a professional photographer, but on the level of snapshots meant to illustrate a story, I can probably stand toe-to-toe with my fellow fictionists and journalists.

Besides, photography is fun on its own, and can be a welcome break from working with words.

3. Understand and learn basic layout and design.

Understand press and video production.

This is the area of the graphic designer and art director, whose jobs I don’t mean for you to take on (although some gifted writers can, and do), but it’s good to know basic design principles and production processes, so you can anticipate the designer’s needs and work more closely with him or her for a cleaner product, and meet production deadlines.

4. Learn to work with other professionals.

If possible, learn to work with the best. Learn and practice teamwork. Prima donnas don’t last. I’ve been fortunate to work with excellent photographers, designers, publishers, and fellow writers.

Knowing them not only expanded my network of contacts, and brought me into theirs; I also observed and picked up work habits and attitudes that served me in good stead.

It’s fascinating to see a master craftsman at work; many years ago, working on a ten-volume history of the Philippines which I edited and Nik Ricio designed, I watched as Nik labored on his own initiative to remove unsightly “rivers” that ran through blocks of text; imagine doing that to ten volumes! (And if you don’t know what these rivers are, you can begin your self-education right now.)

5. Be prepared to travel.

Okay, let’s be honest and admit that travel is more often a perk than a pain, especially when your ticket says “Paris” or “Boracay.”

But do it often enough — or slog into the muddy hinterlands in a rickety tricycle — and you’ll be singing a different tune.

Be ready for all kinds of trips, rides, and destinations.

Make sure your passport is valid and your visas are current — you just might get lucky (or otherwise).

6. Back up your work.

I can’t say this often enough, but there’s nothing worse than entrusting a major project to a single computer — then, when it’s halfway or nearly finished, losing it all to a virus, a sudden brownout, or some other disaster, and only then realizing that it hasn’t been backed up anywhere.

This is why I prefer to work on a laptop — if the power fails, as it often does in these benighted isles, the battery will give you some time to save your work.

I’m a redundancy freak and keep multiple copies of ongoing and completed projects on USB drives and external hard drives.

I also email copies of ongoing work to myself, so I can retrieve them anywhere online.

7. Register as a professional, and keep proper accounts.

If you’re going to undertake major projects with lots of zeroes on the check, your client will very likely require an official receipt.

You can do that — as I did — by registering as a professional with the BIR. (Oddly enough, writers are classified — according to my certificate of registration — under “Other Entertainment Activities, Dance Instruction.” Hmmm, I think that merits yet another column.)

Get familiar with contracts and conformés.

On this note, write down your Taxpayer Identification Number and your cedula details on a card you can keep in your wallet, or encode them on your phone.

Of course, ORs mean that you’ll be paying or at least be liable for taxes, so make sure you keep track of everything, or better yet, hire a professional bookkeeper. Believe me, it’s well worth the peace of mind.

8. Learn how to deal with failure.

Not everything you do will turn out right. Sometimes it will be your fault, sometimes not.

Take your losses, learn from them, lick your wounds, and move on.

I’ve had a couple of sad experiences with clients who — after agreeing to how the job should be done — realized later that they wanted something else.

You can save a lot of grief by getting things mutually clear right at the beginning.

When dealing with agencies or corporations, ask to liaise with just one or two persons with the authority to speak and decide for that organization; the last thing you want is to defend or explain yourself before a board of directors. (NGOs, I have to say, can be the most difficult clients; their management style encourages everyone to have a say in things, from texts to logos to titles, resulting in excruciating delays.)

9. Give yourself an incentive for doing well.

In my deepest moments of anxiety or depression — when I’m facing a deadline but would rather be playing poker or pecking away at my next novel — I offer myself a little prize to keep me going: a weekend dash to Tagaytay for the repose and the bulalo, or a new digital toy, or yet another 1930s Parker Vacumatic in a rare color or configuration. Create your own carrot.

10. Give credit and give thanks to others.

Again, whether it’s God, family, friends, co-workers, or people who were perfect strangers before you met them on the project — or all of the above — don’t forget to thank them for making your work possible.

Writing is a lonely business, and you might think you’re so good to have done it all alone.

But in fact, you’re hardly ever truly alone.

The spouse who brings you coffee and puts up with your tantrums, the research and editorial assistants who scurry to come up with what you need, the colleague who covers for you in emergencies so you can finish a job — all of them deserve a word of thanks, or better yet, a share of No. 9, above.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

I was supposed to give a short lecture at the Taboan Writers Festival in Cebu a couple of weeks ago on the subject of “Writing for a Living” —something in which I’ve had to acquire some practical expertise, having nothing else to fall back on but the pauper’s wages we get from teaching.

For lack of time, however, my fellow panelists and I (Tibo Fernandez of MSU-Iligan and Jigs Arquiza of the Sun-Star) chose to dispense with the talks and went straight to the open forum, so I had to leave quite a few things out of my responses.

So here’s what I would have said.

This partly recaps some previous columns I’ve already written on the same general topic (remember my letters to readers Jewel and Reggie?), but I’m adding a few more points for the uninitiated to ponder.

I’m actually glad to be doing this again, because it allows me to respond to some recent inquiries from readers anxious to know if they have what it takes to be a successful writer.

“Success” is, of course, a highly relative term, especially in this country.

Do you mean critical success or commercial success?

Whose critical evaluation do you value, and where are the critics, anyway? (One quick answer: not here, not me. I keep having to repeat this — and I do so with sincere regrets — but I just don’t have time to read and to critique all the novels, stories, and poems people send me, outside of class. If you saw my workload — nine book projects running simultaneously, mapped out on a whiteboard in my home office — you’d understand why. But that’s another story.)

One point often raised at Taboan was how sorely we lack serious, full-time literary critics, even in our newspapers, so you’d have to go to school or attend a workshop to get some feedback on your work.

If you mean commercial or financial success, it’s possible, although highly unlikely for most writers, not for want of talent but because of the lack of a market and of opportunities.

I can tell you now that, in all probability, your fortune’s not going to come from that book of poems or short stories or even the novel that took you ten years to put together, no matter if they won you a raft of literary prizes and trophies.

There are some genres that might make you some decent money — screenwriting, komiks writing, and what we might call coffeetable-book writing come to mind — but it isn’t easy to get these jobs, which require some special knowledge and, almost just as importantly, the right contacts.

So rather than fuss over what “success” means, I’m going to address these remarks to people who want to become professional writers, by which I mean people who depend on their writing to support themselves and their families.

Journalists naturally fall into this category and already know pretty much what I’ll be saying here; it’s the creative writer and the academic who may need a bit of a reorientation, since I’ve found that it’s this person who often doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the market needs.

1. For starters, master the language.

This seems obvious enough, but I’m always surprised by how many people want to become writers or even editors without knowing how language works, or why rules of grammar and conventions of usage exist.

Language is your stock in trade.

Even the best of us make the occasional mistake with language (especially with a borrowed language like English), but pros should make very few of them.

I’d be very worried if I spotted more than a couple of grammatical or spelling errors on a page.


2. Be versatile.

Learn how to write a variety of texts — speeches, brochures, audio-visual presentations, press releases, annual reports, advertising copy.

These are the kinds of writing most clients need.

None of these should be beneath you to do, and to do well.

While you may believe you weren’t born to write about the virtues of a bar of soap, if you had to do exactly that, you’d better know how — and do it with a smile.

3. Learn to write bilingually.

Many clients — NGOs, government and international agencies—need material in more than one language, especially when they’re reaching out to local communities. Also, you may need to conduct interviews in Filipino or other non-English languages.

4. Leave the juvenile angst at the door.

Drop the literary and philosophical airs, and quit complaining about the job especially if it gets in the way of getting things done.

Some kvetching over beer with the boys or the girls might help you decompress, but remember that no one put a gun to your head to take the job on. The world owes you nothing; deal with it.

5. Cultivate an interest and some expertise in fields beyond literature and art — particularly economics, politics, and history.

Again, most clients aren’t interested in your lyric poetry.

They do expect you to be interested in business and industry, in the intricacies of politics, and in what they have to say as experts in their own fields, which could be anything from feedmilling to steel fabrication to central banking. Have a head for figures, and keep a sense of wonder about the way things work.

6. Be a good listener, and learn how to ask the right questions.

Learn and master the art of interviewing.

Come prepared, come on time, and make sure you record everything. (I’ll write a separate piece one of these days on how to conduct good interviews.)

7. Establish a network of contacts.

Make yourself and your skills visible.

Unfortunately, you won’t get any jobs unless people know you and what you can do.

As a pro, you can’t afford to be too shy or too modest to make yourself available or even to chase after jobs.

I don’t mean that you should take every job that comes along, but it might help not to be too choosy, especially at the beginning, because you need experience and you need professional credits to move ahead.

I’ve even taken on some special jobs for free or for very little because the connections they opened were far more valuable than whatever I would have charged.

8. Think, look, and act like a professional.

Prepare solid, neat, polished proposals; treat your clients with the same respect you should expect from them.

Dress appropriately for client meetings, and don’t be late.

And, yes, charge what you believe your services are worth.

9. Deliver quality work, on time.

In the end, it’s all about your output.

Keep your standards high, and stick to them.

I have to confess that I don’t always hit the mark — sometimes, fatigue and the distractions of life will take their toll, no matter what — but I try to make up for the slack as soon as I can.

A bad rep travels fast, and since your byline is your equity in this business, make sure you keep it clean and shiny.

10. Don’t forget what you’re doing all of this for.

Whether it’s for God, country, family, fame, or just the chance to get some paid time off to write that novel, or for that down payment on a new apartment or a new car, you have to remember why it’s important to keep writing, and to write well.

Good writing can be its own reason for being, and provide its own satisfaction — but it’s even better if it means that much to somebody else.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

I’m in Cebu as I write is, attending the second edition of Taboan, the Philippine International Writers Festival which was first held in Manila at about this same time last year, February being National Arts Month.

Taboan will be making the rounds of the regions from year to year before returning to Manila, so this moveable feast (poet and NCCA commissioner Ricky de Ungria beat me to the metaphor) will see many places yet.

The Arts Council of Cebu under the very gracious festival director Mayen Tan and presidenta Petite Garcia is in charge of Taboan ’10, a project of the Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

The festival got off to a lively start with a keynote speech by Cebu’s own Dr. Resil Mojares — a formidable, internationally recognized scholar of Philippine literature, history, and society — who chose a deliberately provocative subject and title for his talk: “Will Magdalena Jalandoni Ever Be a National Artist?”

For those who don’t know Jalandoni (and — perhaps to prove Resil’s point — 99.99 percent of us don’t), the Iloilo-born Jalandoni (1891-1978) was a prolific writer in Hiligaynon of fiction, poems, and plays, her novels alone totaling an astounding 36.

Resil made it clear that he wasn’t making a brief for Jalandoni’s selection as a National Artist; with typical scholarly modesty, he said that he simply didn’t know her work well enough to make that judgment.

Rather, he was using Jalandoni’s case to draw attention to the gross disadvantage at which Filipino writers working in languages other than English and Filipino lie, particularly when it comes to recognition on a national or international level.

While they may have achieved much in their own literature in, say, Cebuano, Bikol, or Hiligaynon, they remain obscure elsewhere, because their work has been little translated, little critically reviewed, and therefore little seriously considered for national or international awards.

Jalandoni is hardly alone in this predicament; the Philippine literary landscape is littered with the skeletons of mute inglorious Miltons whom most Filipinos will have never heard of, much less read.

Critiquing the NA selection process — of which he himself was occasionally a part, one of the expert “peers” who sift through the nominees at the first level — Mojares noted that “In the discussion of the nominees of Jalandoni last year, all the 10 or 12 members of the ‘Council of Elders’ (except perhaps for one or two) had not read Jalandoni’s works, either due to language, unavailability of texts or translations, or simply because Jalandoni did not fall within their area of expertise.

This has been the problem in the three or four times in which she was nominated.

“This is abetted by a procedural constraint. Because of confidentiality rules, members of the Council of Experts know who the candidates are only on the day of deliberation itself. Hence, they have no time to prepare for the deliberations by way of reading, research, or consultations with those knowledgeable about particular candidates. Although brief research reports are prepared by the Secretariat for reference by Council members, these reports are made available only on the day of the deliberation and are not of much help.”

Again, Resil was really much less concerned about awards than by the inequality (and, therefore, the injustice) of popular perceptions.

“The politics of national recognition” he went on to say, “is such that it matters where you are read, in what language, and by whom.

Someone who publishes in Hiligaynon (or Cebuano, Waray, or Iluko) in a periodical with a circulation of 50,000 is a ‘regional writer.’

A writer in Manila who publishes a 500-copy of English poems is a ‘national writer.’” (Interestingly enough, we’re holding our sessions at the Casino Español de Cebu, a social and architectural tribute to a language we’ve almost entirely lost, literarily.)

The marginalization of writing from the regions has been a long-festering sore in the body of Philippine cultural politics, and Taboan’s discussions following Resil’s speech revived some of those familiar issues.

To the Antique-born poet and playwright John Iremil Teodoro, the common practice of denoting any writing outside Manila as “regional” literature merely reinforced “Manila-centrism,” according, by implication, a superior quality to products coming out of the capital.

However, to Carlo Arejola from Bicol, the regional badge was a challenge rather than a hindrance.

“You don’t need to look to Manila for approval or affirmation,” Carlo said. “You can create a readership among yourselves. We created our own awards, our own workshop.”

Indeed, as other delegates and Resil himself echoed, the question to ask was “What can the regions do for themselves?”

I offered the opinion that, while some form of affirmative action or intervention may be required to level the playing field, there’s a point at which the national/regional or national/local dichotomy becomes patronizing and ultimately more destructive than constructive.

It’s not as if a Cebuano writer can or will only think of Cebuano, and not national or global, ideas; one’s local roots and experiences may provide strong, unique material, but that’s still only raw material, yet to be refined.

And the world out there couldn’t care less: it doesn’t see us as Tagalog, Iluko, or Bikol writers — we’re just all Filipino writers, period, and perhaps we should think as such.

Resil Mojares’ conclusion put it succinctly: “The greater challenge lies outside the awards. We need to address inequalities in conditions of literary and cultural production by investing more heavily (by the regions themselves ad not just Manila) in more effective and strategic initiatives in scholarship, literary education, translation, publishing, dissemination, and promotion. We need to build the national in the National [Artist] Awards.”

I’ve always suspected that a great work will manifest that greatness in whatever language it’s written in or translated into. (Of course, you need to have that translation first.) Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Clearly, before we can begin recognizing good and great Filipino writers from all parts of the country, we should lay the critical groundwork and first develop and support translators and critics who can give literary judges a fairer basis for their evaluations.

Curious about how the Nobel Prize committee in charge of literature managed to choose a laureate from hundreds of nominees writing in a dozen languages, I Googled the subject and discovered the following exchange at nobelprize.org between Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, and a reader who sent in the same question I had in mind.

Question: Are Nobel Prizes in literature based on the assessment of the writings in its original language, translations, or both? If assessed in the original language, how does one remove nationalistic interests, if any, from the nomination process? Unlike physics, chemistry, etc., where the symbolism/equations/conventions are clearly agreed upon globally, I would imagine that language and its interpretation would pose an additional challenge.

Answer: Whenever possible, the Nobel committee and the Academy will read the works of the candidates in the original language. Obviously, we often have to rely on translations, but in those cases, we make an effort to read several versions of the same book, e.g. one French and one German translation. It is true that literature, unlike science, is rooted in a cultural code with language as its most important expression, but a great work of literature should have the power to reveal the universal meaning of local symbols and conventions.

Re-read that last sentence; I couldn’t have said it better.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

Friends and readers have been asking me what I thought of Apple’s new digital product, the iPad, a tablet computer that — like the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone before it — has been touted by Apple’s angels as humankind’s next greatest invention.

I, of course, am a hard-core Apple and Mac freak, a guy who still counts going to Macworld in San Francisco and standing within ten feet of Steve Jobs (well within SJ’s fabled “reality distortion field”) as one of the highlights of his life, who still keeps a stable of aging Macs and PowerBooks going back to the Classic and the PowerBook 100 in his study and beneath his bed, and whose sometime chairmanship of the Philippine Macintosh Users Group he looks back on with more pride than most of his trivial, professional titles.

And unlike even most Apple fans, I’ve never waited for the so-called “Rev B”, or improved version, of a new product to run to the store to get one.

Here in Pinoylandia, I was among the first, if not the very first, to get a Titanium PowerBook, a 12-inch Aluminum PowerBook, an iPod shuffle, an iPhone, and a MacBook Air.

This usually meant waiting up all night for the Macworld extravaganza and for that inevitable announcement from Steve Jobs about “one more thing” — and making a beeline for the Internet to order or pre-order whatever that new gizmo was, sight unseen.

I feel a need to say all that because — for the first time in a very long time — Apple came out with something that actually had me asking “Do I need this? Or even if I don’t, why should I want one?”

Unlike that mind-blowing moment a couple of years ago when Steve Jobs pulled a MacBook Air out of an office envelope to introduce the world’s thinnest laptop, the iPad’s stage debut left me underwhelmed, maybe because I was too busy figuring out where, in my lifestyle, the gadget would fit.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPad, from what I see, is still a neat, beautifully designed device embodying the seamless integration of hardware and software that’s been Apple’s calling card since the very beginning.

It should do a good if not a great job as a browser, a media viewer, an e-book reader, a gaming console, a repository of a zillion iPhone apps, and, in a pinch, a mini-workstation running a modified office suite (in this case, iWork).

But my MacBook and my iPhone can already do 90 percent of that, so why should I want one more thing to carry — and something I’ll need to hold in one hand while the other one works?

I’m sure there will be many Mac users — and yes, new converts — for whom the iPad will be the perfect convergence device or digital accessory.

Just because I don’t need it now doesn’t mean others don’t, or that I wont.

The thing about Apple is that it’s gotten ahead not just by meeting needs, but by creating them.

Heck, nobody needed an iPod before Apple made one.

As TIME’s Josh Quittner puts it, Steve Jobs is “a veritable Innovator Bunny: while competitors scramble to follow him, Jobs races ahead to invent the next thing.”

Here’s my theory about my initial reluctance to embrace the iPad like the Mosaic tablets, which I’ve been telling anyone willing to listen: another tectonic division is upon us — that between those who need keyboards and those who don’t.

We already got a glimpse of this when the iPhone arrived three years ago.

Like many others, I grabbed one and pronounced myself in love with it — until I realized how much I missed the tactile pleasure of typing on a physical keypad; and so, like many others, I took to using a BlackBerry, and haven’t let go of it since.

Of course the iPad will allow typing on a fairly large virtual keyboard on its multitouch screen.

That should do well enough for email, but I doubt that it’ll be as good for heavy-duty, long-distance typing.

A physical keyboard’s virtues don’t consist just in the audible confirmation — in the reassuring click — of a keypress. The key travels downward and springs back, cushioning the impact of thousands of strokes.

When I think of typing for long stretches on the iPad’s glassine surface, I imagine my fingers falling like heavy rain on hard concrete.

But then again, maybe that’s just me and my romantic notions about the physicality of writing; the farther away we move from ink, the more ephemeral things get.

I’m beginning to wonder if my natural age (56) is finally catching up with me.

I’ve been arguing these past several years — some of which I’ve spent writing product reviews and columns for techie magazines — that what I love about being on the cutting edge of new technology is how it allows me to cheat time, to experience now what people will be taking for granted ten years hence. I still believe that.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed myself slipping way behind the curve.

When I took serious stock of things, I realized that my interest in newness for newness’ sake has begun to wane, to the point that I should probably be surrendering my techie credentials soon, if I were to be honest about walking the walk instead of just talking the talk.

For example:

1) I don’t play games. I’ve never even tried World of Warcraft, or the Sims, or Grand Theft Auto. My mom bowls on Wii and can give my brother-in-law Eddie a run for his money. I’ve never even touched a Wii, or a PSP, or a Nintendo.

2) I don’t do social networking. I don’t do Facebook. I don’t Tweet. Nor have I ever accepted any of the hundreds of invitations I must’ve received to Hi-5, Multiply, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, and what have you.

3) I haven’t bought a new tech toy in ages. And it isn’t just because poker’s sucked up all my loose change, along with the Christmas bonus. Strangely enough, I’ve been very happy with the computer (a MacBook Air) and cell phone (a Blackberry Bold) that I’ve been using for over a year now; the MBA’s going on two — an eternity in digital time. Where I used to dress up my gear like they were blushing debutantes, my MacBook’s hard shell has acquired all sorts of battle scars; even my desktop pictures have been banished in favor of blank gray screens, the better for me to focus on the work I need to do. My iPod and iPhone — both one or two generations behind — have been languishing in the drawer.

So — will I eventually get an iPad? Knowing me, probably, yes. I’d be too curious not to.

But at least you can’t say I didn’t stop to think about it.

Just let me make these noises about not needing it, and valiantly saying no, for the time being, while the reality distortion field works its magic on me.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

As I mentioned last week in my piece on our overnight trip to Corregidor, Beng and I took pictures of the sites we visited, just like any other pair of tourists out for a weekend of exploration and reflection on an island drenched in history.

The rugged beauty of many corners of Corregidor — its serenity even — stands in sharp, ironic contrast to the savage fighting that went on there, albeit for a noble cause.

Inescapably, death and suffering pervade the place, their pallor relieved only by the sterling courage and endurance of those who lived and died there.

There’s something more than vaguely disquieting about the notion of looking for thrills and spills in a hallowed graveyard, and the tours do try their best to preserve the sanctity of the place with constant reminders — as if they needed to be said — of what happened in those fire-blackened bunkers and ammunition depots.

“The Japanese refused to evacuate these tunnels,” noted a guide, “and the Americans who were retaking the island poured gasoline through these vents and set them on fire.”

But also because of such horrific stories, visitors who believe in ghosts can’t help looking for them, and even those who don’t sometimes come away from the island with their skepticism somewhat shaken.

I belong to the latter category of staunch “rationalists,” as I think they call them in India, where debunking and demystifying the tricks of swamis and spiritualists have become nearly as fascinating as the tricks themselves.

Unfortunately (or otherwise), I married a believer, a practicing Theosophist who believes in souls, reincarnation, third eyes, and the virtues of vegetarianism, so we’ve had a philosophical truce of sorts around the house going on 36 years, enabling me to eat my medium-rare steak in peace, and her to commune — telepathically or astrally — with my chief rival for her affections, a long-dead (but presumably since reincarnated) fellow by the name of Paramahansa Yogananda.

As you can imagine, this has led to some interesting differences in our lifestyles and expectations.

Her lifelong dream is to spend a week of abstinence and meditation in Tibet; I’d like to spend that week playing poker, guzzling free beer, and ogling half-clad women in Las Vegas.

When we get up in the morning, she mumbles mantras for a solid half-hour; I grab my bedside laptop to check my overnight e-mail and my eBay standings.

So it was that we went to Corregidor in search of different experiences.

I wanted to see big guns; she wanted to discover (or be discovered by) ghosts. I can now report that we found both, although the artillery was a tangible certainty, seen by everybody else; the apparitions played favorites, who included Beng but excluded me.

(This wouldn’t have been the first time for me to have been studiously ignored by the dear departed. Many years ago, I went on a writing fellowship to Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, a 16th century structure on a cliffside near the Rosslyn Chapel made famous by The Da Vinci Code. A couple of other Pinoy fellows who preceded me at the castle swore that they’d been visited in their rooms by ghosts — one of them seizing the poet by his ankles — but the only thing that seized me there over the four weeks was an acute longing for Nissin’s Ramen and Ligo Sardines.)

Beng’s alleged (that’s the objective journalist talking) encounter came when our tour bus swung by Battery Hearn, a shrapnel-studded gun emplacement behind which stood a bunker that had been carved into the hillside.

There — said our tour guide Stella — three comfort women had been kept and probably killed by the Japanese.

Stella also told us even before we entered the bunker that many previous visitors had reported capturing “orbs” with their cameras in that particular place — whitish circles that seemed to float in the air, suggesting ethereal presences.

Our group of about 15 tourists filed into the bunker, which was dark and clammy but not, for me, necessarily spooky, my courage bolstered by all the warm bodies around.

I, of course, was on the trail of artifacts, not apparitions, and clicked away with my Nikon at the military hardware, like the rusted hooks lining the concrete wall.

Beng, with her Lumix, was taking pictures of the darkness itself.

When we all stepped out back into the light and reviewed our shots, a great cry came up around Beng and her viewfinder.

“Orbs!” she exclaimed to the huddle. “I found orbs!” She pressed the magnification knob and an even bigger gasp arose. “I can see a face! Look, there’s a face in this orb!”

Instantly the crowd swelled around Beng like traffic around a U-turn.

Naturally, this skeptic stayed away from the oohs and aahs, stubbornly refusing to be suckered into a sighting; I knew that I’d get a private viewing afterward, anyway, whether I liked it or not.

Sure enough, as soon as we got back on the bus, Beng thrust her images into my face, silently but pointedly demanding that I confirm that I was looking at a cluster of orbs, floating in the darkness like talahib blossoms in the wind.

Yes — I reluctantly agreed — I could see a lot of cloudy round things.

But did I see the face — the two eyes, the nose, the mouth? Well… if I were a ghost, why would I want to return as a blur?

Now, the Panasonic Lumix is a nifty little camera, a virtual copy of my other camera, a Leica D-Lux, whose exact same lens it has, minus the hefty price tag and the trademark red dot (Panasonic makes these digital Leicas as well as their own Lumixes, those “like a Leicas”).

I knew I could trust Beng’s camera; heck, it used to be mine (a tip for husbands: upgrade yours, pass the old one on to the missus). But could I trust my eyes?

I’ve since Googled all I can about “orbs + Corregidor + ghosts” and all the search terms to go with them, and have turned up a pile of predictable, even plausible explanations for them — atmospheric conditions, the curvature of lenses, static electricity, etc.

But after all that, all I can say for sure is, I can’t be sure, which is as scientific a conclusion as they come.

Unfortunately for comparison’s sake, I was using the Nikon instead of the Leica inside the bunker, where my shots of the dark remained just that.

I suspect, though, that even if I’d grabbed the Lumix from Beng’s hands and taken the next shot, mine would’ve turned up a complete blank in the orb department.

Like I said, these spirits — if they exist — don’t only play tricks; they play favorites.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what Beng saw, you can click on this link to my Flickr page, where I’ve put up Beng’s shot (for non-commercial use only; all prospective royalties — whether from Scientific American or The Fortean Times — go to me).

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

Wanting to celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary a couple of weekends ago — but without the budget to hie off to our favorite haunts (a foggy town called London comes to mind) — we decided to look for some fun closer to home.

I took this as an opportunity to revive an earlier plan, a destination I’d been suggesting to Beng since two of our American friends went there during a recent visit: Corregidor.

I know, you don’t normally think of Corregidor as a romantic getaway. It’s a place steeped in history but also in blood, albeit heroic blood.

When I first broached the idea to Beng of going to the island and staying overnight, she cringed, thinking that we would be making a date with ghosts that went all the way back to the Spanish-American War. (There’s something that needs to be made clear here, something that 36 years together hasn’t changed: she believes in spirits, I don’t — or at least I don’t think I do.)

But persistence prevailed, and I happily made a booking with the tour operator, Sun Cruises, which also runs the ferry and the only big hotel on the island, Corregidor Inn.

Most people take just the day trip to Corregidor, which costs about P1,900; few know that, for not too much more — just P900 more per person, in our case, going by double occupancy — you can get a very nice room at the very nice inn, a terrific bargain, considering that the whole package of P2,800 won’t even be enough for a night in an upscale metropolitan hotel.

But we’re getting ahead of the story.

We assembled at 7 am at the ferry terminal near the CCP; with us were a good number of both foreign and local tourists, and while it meant that every one of more than a hundred seats on the boat was taken, I was glad to see that Corregidor still held that kind of attraction for people, especially the young, to whom war these days is a video game.

The ferry itself was sleek and modern, manned by a smart, efficient crew, and blessed with such amenities as air conditioning and an on-board convenience store.

The ride took about 90 minutes over generally smooth water, and before we knew it we were being met dockside by tourist buses gaily decked out as prewar tranvias.

Each bus had a tour guide, and we were lucky to have, on Bus No. 3, a smart and sassy lady named Stella Cordoba to introduce us to Corregidor’s unique charms.

Thus began a day of forays into tunnels, batteries, ruins, and promontories, each one of them informed by some story of conflict and courage.

The 30-minute light-and-sound show at the Malinta Tunnel, written and directed by no less than the late National Artist Lamberto Avellana, was deeply affecting — and to me, a student of the craft, good proof of what a difference a literate script makes to such productions, too often smothered these days by silly and self-indulgent effects.

The Spanish-themed Corregidor Inn, where the tour paused for a generous buffet lunch, was a pleasant surprise.

For the price we paid, I was frankly expecting some spartan dump evocative of a POW camp, but the inn turned out to be a clean, well-appointed place, with a restaurant that offered spectacular views of the bay on both the Cavite and Bataan sides. (The only things I notably missed were a TV in the room and an Internet connection.)

One good reason for taking the overnight option is that a day is simply too short to visit and appreciate all the sites the island has to offer.

I suppose red-blooded males like me will never have enough of the big guns and the battlegrounds, but in truth the Corregidor experience is most moving at its quietest.

The night tour begins with a viewing of the sunset from Battery Grubbs, then moves on to “ghost hunting” at the ruins of a hospital once used as a barracks by the victims of the infamous “Jabidah Massacre” of 1968, whose graffiti still marks the rooms they stayed in.

It ends with an hour-long march into the lateral tunnels of Malinta. I’m claustrophobic, but I survived, and am glad I went; this is as close as one gets to what the war must have felt for the thousands trapped in those tunnels. (A tip for the tourist: bring a flashlight. They hand out some on the night tour, but there won’t be enough for everyone, and you’ll want a flashlight in your hand or pocket should the unthinkable happen and you stray from the group into dark oblivion.)

The next morning, Beng and I went beachcombing, taking a long, leisurely walk at the South Dock, exploring the rugged cliffside, picking up the island’s red-tainted pebbles and observing how, strangely enough, the beach was strewn with the sandals of children and the shoes of women.

The one eyesore that stuck out in certain coves was Manila Bay’s garbage, collected and deposited by the current.

The most valuable souvenir we brought home was a piece of the The Rock — indeed, a rock itself, a fist-sized panghilod that should remind us every day of a weekend well spent in the bosom of history. (So did we encounter any ghosts? Beng says she did, and has pictures to prove it in strange “orbs” that appeared in her shots but not mine. More on this next week.)

You can find more pictures from that visit on my Flickr page.

Lastly, a small but important correction to last week’s piece on my “Syrian cousins.” It was Alfredo Zuraek, not his brother Nicholas, who stayed on in the Philippines, married Maria Panganiban, and thereby made my Bayombong friends possible.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

I know I said something a couple of weeks ago about how stressful holidays are — to the extent that you need to take a holiday from the holidays — but one great thing about Christmas, beyond the material gifts, is how it manages to bring people together and people home.

For most of us Pinoys, there’s nothing lonelier than Christmas away from family and away from home, so we make an effort to reconnect with loved ones over the season, especially those we haven’t seen for ages.

It’s strange and funny how some of the unlikeliest reunions happen.

Two months ago, I was due to give a talk before a professional association, and needed to ask the friend who invited me — UP music professor Dr. Maurie Borromeo — exactly what time and place the talk had been set for.

Unknown to me, at that very moment I was calling, she was with another friend of hers from the same hometown — Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya — who overheard the conversation, and who asked which “Butch” it was that Maurie was speaking to.

The next thing I heard from Maurie was, “There’s someone who wants to talk to you,” and then I found myself listening to a woman who introduced herself as “Dollie Gutierrez.”

She’d been looking for me, she said, for the longest time, and now here I was on the other end of the line, delivered by serendipity.

And as soon as I heard her name, a 50-year-old curtain lifted suddenly, and I was back to being a boy in Bayombong, visiting the young Gutierrezes whom I called “cousins,” and who indeed felt closer to me than my blood relatives.

In fact, I called them my “Syrian cousins,” and you’ll see why.

The odd thing was, we had nothing to do with Bayombong or anything up north or certainly anything Syrian, otherwise.

My family came from down south, in the island province of Romblon.

But a young man named Pat Gutierrez was born there as well, and he came to know and to work with another Romblon fellow named Joe Dalisay at the Department of Public Works, Transportation and Communication. (I used to park myself there as a boy, in the old Post Office building, rocking in my dad’s swivel chair, doodling with his pencils that were red on one end and blue on the other, and pecking away at his typewriter, which to me was the most majestic of all machines.)

I gather that Joe gave Pat a leg up in the latter’s career, and they became fast friends.

But Pat now lived and worked in Bayombong, where he had met and married a Syrian mestiza named Lorice Zuraek.

So how did Syrians end up in Nueva Vizcaya?

As it turned out, early in the last century, a young man named Nicholas Zuraek followed his brother to the Philippines, both of them Christians fleeing religious persecution in Damascus.

The brother eventually went back home, but Nicholas stayed on, and married a Filipina named Maria Panganiban, and they settled in Bayombong, where they had several children, among them Lorice.

Pat and Lorice Gutierrez themselves would have ten children, Dollie being the eldest.

And these were the “cousins” I played with during idyllic summers I would spend in Bayombong, when my father Joe came over to visit his good friend Pat, bringing me along for the ride.

And what a ride it was, back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, on those Rural Transit buses we would take overnight over the dustiest and bumpiest of roads, stopping for a chilly breakfast at the junction in Sta. Fe.

Even today, as an older man, I trace the romance of travel back to those bus rides, which were laced with the fear (perhaps unreasonably, with more informed hindsight) of being ambushed by headhunters, who were supposed to jump out of the bushes when the fire trees bloomed.

I was five years old when these summer sorties began, and around 11 or 12 when they ended — and at that age a boy’s senses are wetted paper, with every experience an inkblot spreading like a glorious stain into one’s fibers.

I remember the cacao and the balimbing in the large and leafy Gutierrez yard, the fresh corn and the bales of dalandan from a gathering in a neighbor’s house, the sweet-sour flesh of rattan fruit sold in cords on the street.

I remember going up Bangan Hill, a Bayombong landmark. I remember the pretty girls in nearby Solano, where I tagged along to teenage parties I was tragically too young for.

But most of all I remember the delicious cakes that Aunt Lorice used to bake — chocolate upside-down cake best of all — moist and quivering with yummy goodness, filling the air with an aroma that I haven’t been able to shake off in 50 years.

What a joy it was when Dollie told me that Aunt Lorice and Uncle Pat — who now live in Canada — were coming home for Christmas.

I quickly asked them out to lunch (at Abe in Trinoma, which has become one of my favorite restaurants for its bamboo rice and calamares en su tinta, among other unique offerings).

Meeting them again after so many decades brought out a boy, a smiling boy, I myself hadn’t seen in a long time. Uncle Pat, now approaching 90, was slower of walk, but as tall and as handsome as ever; Aunt Lorice remained everyone’s ideal of a surrogate mom — kind, generous, brimming with stories about her children and grandchildren.

Dollie, now a mother of two and who came with her husband Bong Basa, was still the ate to me and to the Gutierrez boys — especially Russell and Walter, now white-haired gentlemen in the pictures Aunt Lorice showed off.

Before we knew it, three hours of happy reminiscences had passed.

Over lunch, Maurie gave Dollie a book that reminded us of another Bayombong connection.

Its author was the poet and novelist Edith Lopez Tiempo, one of our National Artists for Literature, and a literary mother to many writers such as myself, who first met her and her husband Ed as a fellow in their famous Silliman Writers Workshop in 1981.

Without the gentle nudging of Ed and Edith in Dumaguete, I might not have gone back to school and on to a lifetime of writing and teaching.

And yet another Bayombong connection turned up when Maurie mentioned another beloved professor, this time from our own UP, who came from that place — the late, lamented Concepcion “Ching” Dadufalza, mentor to generations of students and future teachers.

Not only was I one of those students; when Ching moved in with her sister seven years ago, she left her house on the UP campus to a younger faculty member — none other than that boy who spent a few summers in Bayombong.

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.

My recent piece on hats drew appreciative responses from quite a few readers, so apparently I'm not the only hat-wearer around town. (But of course I knew that: National Artist for Literature Rio Almario fancies fedoras; his fellow NA Frankie Sionil Jose favors berets; and poet Teo Antonio and artist Danny Dalena have been wearing hats for the longest time, although Teo — like me — has more urgent reasons to protect his pate, having to do with endangered follicles.)

Reader HRV — who, I imagine, is as elegant an octogenarian as they come — calls them “joys in my golden years,” something to grace her “silver profusing” hair.

Reader Rolando Perez shared not only my passion for Tilley Endurables but also a picture of himself wearing one.

My globetrotting friend Julie Hill, writing from her home in Southern California, shared her favorite: “cost 99 cents and is the best; I bought it at a nursery; it is made 100 percent from paper! Of course made in China — you crush it, no problem, it retains its shape.”

But the hat story that I found the funniest came from theater director and Penman suki Freddie Santos, who recalled how he came to own and wear a solitary cap you could've traded for a full outfit, from shirt to shoes, with change to spare.

I asked Freddie for permission to excerpt his story (which he'd intriguingly titled "Hat and cold"), promising to do my best not to make him look foolish. I should’ve expected this trouper’s answer, which was “You couldn’t possibly make me look any more foolish than I already did!” So thanks, Freddie, and here goes.

“Hi, Mr. D, top of the season to you! Oh, what painful memories you churned up within me with your article this week. Two weeks ago, I was in Hong Kong directing an event. Temperatures were dropping all over the place so rather than walk around, I decided to ‘chill’ indoors at the hoity-toity Pacific Place mall. Considering the general pricing in this place, I had no intention of buying anything; I just wanted to window shop until my rehearsals that afternoon.

“Well, however cold it was outside on Hennessy Road, it was even cooler inside the mall and, with my pate clean-shaven (by choice!), it didn't take long before the aircon draft started affecting me. Gotta get me some head covering, I thought. I hadn't brought my favorite Russian farmer leather cap which I keep in my car for emergency headcover, so I decided to buy a cap before my slight coughing started to resemble something of the swine flu.

“I looked around, saw the Lane Crawford store, and walked straight into their jeans and casual wear area. I spotted a fatigue military cap, tried it on, found it fit wonderfully, and handed my credit card immediately to the salesperson... all without checking what the price tag was. I mean, this was a cap! Fifty Hong Kong dollars from any hole-in-the-wall grocer on Nathan Road! Granted, this was Lane Crawford, I figured 200, maybe 300 HK$ at the ridiculous most.

“Then the credit card printouts were given for me to sign. One thousand bloody effing HK dollars!!!! Roughly seven thousand pesos... for a cap, not even a hat, a cap the imitation of which could have been accomplished by any supplier of any stall in the Greenhills tiangge!

“But because...grrrr ...my body fat is superseded only by my arrogance, I signed away, doing my darndest best to keep my hand from shaking. I immediately went outside and lit a cigarette, fuming literally and otherwise, all the while staring at my capped reflection in the Lane Crawford window wondering how... just how... could I possibly maximize this situation?

“Reselling the cap was out of the question since no one in his right mind, at least not in the Philippines, will pay anywhere near that kind of money for a second-hand military cap. Throughout the latter half of that cigarette, in between very short puffs, I just kept whispering to myself: you look really good in that cap! You look like, wow, at least ten thousand bucks! In that cap. That is now yours. Forever. And when I put out that cigarette, I swore... I would be the best-looking capped person on both Hong Kong and Kowloon sides! Passersby of all nationalities would glance and think: oh man, who is that great-looking no-makeover-needed dude...with the cap?! It fits him like... like... like hair! Is it bespoke?! Has to be, just has to be!! A bespoke cap, yeah!!!

“Only after I had pushed myself onto that level of self-delusion did I muster the wherewithal to continue with the rest of my life. And for the next three days, in my hotel room, at my worktable, in the bathroom (!), all the way till I got back to Manila, I wore that cap.

“This coming January, I'm scheduled to go back to Hong Kong. Guess what I am sooooo bringing with me! Sigh.”

I had a good laugh over that story, but I suddenly remembered my own brush with the costs of ignorance, many years ago, when I went to the USA for the first time, on the first foreign trip of my life.

I landed in Washington, DC, and not knowing anything but the grumbling of my stomach, I stepped into the nearest restaurant next to my hotel to assuage my hunger.

Having been to DC many times since, I know now what DC means — “dining costs”! I ordered something like a chicken sandwich — and got a bill for $10. That’s par for the course today, but this was 1980, folks, when you could still take an airconditioned Love Bus from Manila to Makati for P1.50.

When I told a cook in the fellowship center about my first American meal, she laughed (while making me a $2 lunch) and said, “You shoulda framed that chicken!”

Don’t lose that cap to the harbor wind, Freddie. Better yet, frame it!

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Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.