I have a thing for hats, and — given the parlous state of my thinning crown — I probably should. Over the years and from all the places I’ve been to, I’ve built up a collection of hats and caps, which now adorn a hat tree in our room like pendulous fruit.

I’ve always wondered why we don’t wear hats more often in this country, which has perfect hat weather — not rain or shine, but rain and shine, in both of which cases some headgear would come in handy. We Pinoys used to be a hat-wearing people. Look at any picture from prewar Manila and you’ll find most men happily hatted, while the women are draped in native scarves and shawls.

You might agree with the American satirist P. J. O’Rourke, whose blunt opinion was that “Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.” Indeed, I can imagine some people foreswearing them, in the same way that I know men who will obstinately refuse to carry umbrellas, no matter the downpour brewing above their heads.

But the hat — or headgear in general — has enjoyed something of a resurgence, thanks to the likes of Justin Timberlake, whose trucker hats (since replaced by fedoras) caused a shortage at 7-11, where he got them from, when he came out with his first solo video in 2002. Earlier than that, the Blues Brothers matched their short-brim fedoras with classic Wayfarers for that “Men in Black” look that turned ‘60s-austere into ‘80s-cool.

Of course, baseball-type caps never left the scene. I remember being a kid and wearing the itchy (because woven straw) version of one, plastered with squiggly red felt letters that read “Souvenir of Tagaytay.”

Today they come in distinctly more fashionable fabrics and designs, and you can even have yours custom-made at the mall, if you want your moniker (whether it’s RHONDA, RHETT, or RHOMMEL) emblazoned on the crown for the world to either marvel or snicker at.

Our cousin Lando has a collection of these caps, coming from all over the world, presents from our travels and from friends and relatives. Lando’s a simple man with simple pleasures, but it must give him a lift to pay a visit to his favorite off-track betting station every Friday evening with a new cap to toss into the air when his winning horse comes in.

In the poker rooms I now inhabit, caps and hats — as well as hoodies — are de rigueur. The rooms can get arctic-chilly, first of all, but more to the pokerfaced point, those brims can be useful in shading your eyes, so no one can see them glimmer when the nut flush you’ve gambled your mother’s earrings on hits the table.

For poker duty, my hat of choice is my bone-white Tilley Endurable, beloved of field archeologists such as UP’s Vic Paz, and modestly self-advertised as “the best outdoor hat in the world”, made of “ten-ounce, USA-treated cotton duck, solid British brass hardware, sewn with Canadian persnickitiness.” (I suppose that tells you how seriously I take Texas Hold’em, as though I were marching off to Assyria to do battle with heathen armies.)

No hat, however, was more lethal than Oddjob’s. Who he? Boomers like me will remember Auric Goldfinger’s Korean bowler-hatted Korean henchman in Goldfinger, whose specialized in decapitating statues and people by throwing his razor-edged hat like a Frisbee.

My hats are of the decidedly gentler sort, utterly kind to my tender noggin and some of them quite happy to be sat on and scrunched any which way.

Every summer, for the Baguio writers’ workshop, I dust off a tobacco-colored fedora that I picked up as a graduate student in Milwaukee 20 years ago.

I have fancier hats – another fedora from a flea market in Amsterdam, and a gorgeous wide-brimmed Akubra from Australia that would’ve done Indiana Jones proud — but it’s this plain-jane $19 felt hat from Walgreen’s that I have the most affection for, having come so far with me. It’s one of those hats you can crumple into a ball and stuff into your bag and forget; you take it out and it pops back into perfect shape like a flower.

In late April, just when the sunflowers bloom on University Avenue signaling the graduation season, I put on a barong, the sablay that’s become UP’s sash of honor, and a straw Panama hat that goes best with the mellowing of the summer and the yellowing of the hour. This would be one of two hats I picked up during the Pahiyas in Lucban some years ago, each of them going for the outrageously cheap price of just P150 — worlds apart from the superfine and hyper-expensive top-of-the-line Panamas that can cost upwards of $5,000, and reputedly take their makers 1,000 hours to create.

Mine’s a hat I can afford to lose to the wind on a gloriously happy day — but I’d rather not.

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

As a decidedly amateur poker player, I've been buying up a rack of poker shirts and caps designed to make me look more formidable and fearsome than I really am.

They have things like “World Series of Poker 2008” and “The Sands Poker Room” emblazoned on them, as if I’d actually been to those places and cleaned out a roomful of dismayed and disgusted competitors.

Of course, no one at my table takes that seriously; indeed, coming into a poker room dressed up as, say, Phil Hellmuth, with "PokerStars.com" or "Full Tilt Poker" written all over you, will almost certainly tag you as the eager amateur or "the fish" in a tank of grizzled, toothpick-nibbling sharks.

But we amateurs, of course, like to advertise our availability for disaster, choosing to see it as a bold foray into the unknown.

As any two-bit golfer or badminton player knows, that kind of boldness deserves appropriate livery: the right shirt, the right shoes, the right bag, the right studied smirk.

It was like that when I became addicted to badminton three years ago: since it was easier to do, I paid a lot more attention to my shoes—Yonex SHB 99 Power Cushion shoes, if you must know — than to my footwork.

Not surprisingly, my game never got beyond Class F, although my shoes were A+.

Such sporting fashions came to mind recently, when I saw, advertised on eBay.ph, a T-shirt featuring none other than the familiar figure of Jose Rizal hunched over a poker table, fingering a stack of chips, as if wondering whether to call or raise Señor Cabron. I thought it was brilliant — or unique, in the least.

Apparently, it wasn’t only me who saw the ad, because another member of the local poker players’ forum I frequent (www.pokermanila.com) took exception to the shirt, seeing it as a travesty of our national hero’s image.

But was it?

I happen to think that while there may be a theoretical limit to poor taste, heroes and luminaries — especially long-dead ones — actually benefit by being brought into the present, albeit through parody or caricature, as the thousands of (often uncivil) liberties taken over the centuries with the likes of William Shakespeare, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln can attest to.

Neither Will’s, George’s, nor Abe’s reputation has suffered by their unceremonious appearance on countless cartoons, coffee mugs, winking-eye stickers, TV commercials, and, yes, T-shirts.

I choose to see these as signs of affection, of a presumed familiarity with someone who could just as easily have been forgotten. I mean, when was the last time you saw a Millard Fillmore T-shirt? (Who he? Google time.)

But to get back to Pepe and poker. I don’t know if Rizal ever played poker, or if he was a gambling man — probably not. We do know that he played the lottery, and even won a considerable amount while in exile in Dapitan.

As Philippine studies scholar Ari Ngaseo puts it, "Rizal was constantly railing against what he perceived to be the debauchery — drinking, gambling, and whoring — of his fellow Filipinos in Madrid.

Rizal himself drank in moderation, bought lottery tickets, and according to Maximo Viola, once drank from ‘the cup of mundane pleasure’.” Whoops, that last remark is intriguing, but let’s not go there for now.

In “The Indolence of the Filipino,” Rizal gives us some idea of how he sees gambling as a recourse for the desperate.

He writes of the dispossessed Filipino that “without defense and without security he is reduced to inaction and abandons his field, his work, and takes to gambling as the best means of securing a livelihood.”

Historians like Gregorio Zaide tell us that Rizal was appalled by reports of excessive gambling among his fellow ilustrados in Spain, and so he “wrote to M. H. Del Pilar on May 28, 1890 to remind the Filipinos in Madrid that they did not come to Europe to gamble, but to work for their fatherland’s freedom.” That didn’t sit very well with the Pinoy expats, who took to calling him “Papa” (or Pope) instead of Pepe for what they took to be his moralizing.

Still, that didn’t mean that Rizal was immune to the charms of Lady Luck.

In September 1892, while in exile in Dapitan, he won a share of second prize in the Manila lottery (think of it as today’s lotto) worth P6,200 — no mean amount in those days.

His biographer Wenceslao Retana is quoted as saying that the lottery was Pepe’s “only vice.”

And unlike many of us, Rizal didn’t throw his winnings back into the pit, reportedly giving P2,000 of the windfall to his father, sending P200 to a friend in Hong Kong, and investing the rest in agricultural land. I suppose that’s why heroes are heroes.

Interestingly enough, the term “hero” also occurs in poker. It’s what you call the guy (usually you yourself) whose action you’re following in a hand. (His most relevant opponent — let’s say that hooded, sunglassed face across the table trying to look bored to disguise his pocket aces — is naturally called the “villain.”)

And that in a sense is what poker (which its diehards will swear isn’t gambling but a sport) is about: a showdown across a green table between hero and villain, not over politics or morals or the fortunes of others, but over one’s ability (or otherwise) to read the other.

As poker’s wise men put it, “You don’t play the cards, you play the player.”
I wish I had that kind of gritty, steely-eyed ability to sum up another individual’s whole worth in a minute by muttering just one of two words: “call” or “raise.” (“Check” and “fold” are also options — which the sagest and bravest of players know when and how to take, but which often seem too wimpy for frisky beginners.)

As one of those rank amateurs, I don’t; I have neither composure nor wisdom, only a compulsive excitement to get in there and literally pay whatever it takes to see the “flop” — the first three of five shared “community” cards laid out on the table (in Texas Hold’em, you hold two cards in your hand, and mix them up with the five cards on the board to make up the best possible combination of five.)

Some of the most important betting in poker takes place pre-flop, to separate those with truly strong cards from the merely or pathologically curious, which I am.

That’s why I’m fated to lose more than I’ll ever win, and why I’m wearing a PokerStars shirt instead of, well, being one.

On the other hand, with all his coolness and his astute grasp of human character and behavior, Jose Rizal would have made a great poker player, aside from already being a great writer.

“I die without seeing the dawn,” my hero and tocayo writes magnificently in the Noli.

For this poker donkey, the most trivially tragic thing I’ll probably ever get to say is, “I die without seeing the flop!”

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

A reader named Monching Romano — who runs www.divisoria.com and www.dilimanrepublic.com — wrote in to ask for some help in looking for new Philippine fiction in Filipino for libraries in the United States.

“We've been selling Philippine books online since 2000,” Monching says. “Aside from our overseas Pinoy customers, we also have US libraries ordering from us for their Asian/Philippine sections. Our latest inquiry is an order for 50 titles of Philippine Fiction in Tagalog published from 2005 and above. We've contacted the usual suppliers — National Bookstore and University presses — but we can't seem to fill-up the list for 50 titles. We also have an inquiry for 30 titles of Children's Fiction also in Tagalog. Would you be able to suggest other publishers/suppliers where we can probably get more titles? Maraming salamat po.”

I have a feeling that this shouldn’t be a problem — seeing all those new titles coming out of the annual Manila book fair, for example, and knowing how many new young authors in Filipino have been getting published recently — but to speed things up for Monching, let me ask readers and publishers who may have titles to contribute to write Monching Romano directly at monching@divisoria.com.

This should be a great break for writers in Filipino, considering that it’s the writers in English who’ve very often gotten all the international exposure, through fellowships, grants, and invitations to writers’ festivals.

As one of the latter beneficiaries, I can’t complain, but I point out whenever I can in these international venues that our literature is much more diverse than our offerings in English would seem to suggest, and that we have exciting new writing being done in Filipino and other Philippines languages.

What’s been sorely lacking is a systematic, adequately funded program of translation, from our own languages into English and other international languages.

I’ve often been asked — by the well-intentioned but unknowing — why writers don’t translate their own work.

A very few (such as poets Marne Kilates and Mikael de Lara Co, who’ve performed the service for others) might be able to, but most can’t — or even shouldn’t — because translation is an art unto its own, requiring not only a mastery of both languages but also an acute sensitivity to how ideas, emotions, and cultural nuances carry over (or don’t) from one language to the other.

Working at a certain distance from the subject (unlike an author whose nose practically scrapes his or her own words on the page), a good translator might even be able to see and to accentuate things the author can’t.

Not only is translation an art; it’s a professional skill that people train for, people who might not be master poets or fictionists themselves, but who possess a literary sensibility that allows them to see and respect the author’s design, and the linguistic ability to reinterpret that in another tongue.

In some cases, author and translator become almost inseparable, a kind of literary love team: Pablo Neruda and W. S. Merwin; Italo Calvino and William Weaver; Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gregory Rabassa.

Translators free the text from what could be the prison of one’s own language.

Not all authors may want or need to be read abroad, and indeed I would suggest that most of us would rather be read by own people first than by foreigners, but literature, like the other arts, will seek to rise above borders and boundaries.

I’ve always thought that if it’s any good, then it deserves to be shared. Unfortunately, you can’t do that without being translated, if you don’t write in one of the global languages.

There are some efforts underway — in the NCCA, for example — to remedy that situation.

We hope to be able to support and to recognize translators, especially those who can translate novels that we can sell or promote abroad, through such means as the Man Asia Literary Prize and editors and agents willing to look at our manuscripts.

But over the long term, we need more than that — for example, courses, even degrees, in translation in our premier universities.

Unless we invest in this enterprise, many of our finest works will never be appreciated abroad — a double tragedy, since we hardly appreciate them even here at home.

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Speaking of language, let me turn over the rest of this week’s column to one of our finest poets and critics, Dr. Gemino Abad, who had this to say about “new writing” in a recent meeting of Philippine PEN, the writers’ organization. This is just an excerpt from his brief remarks, but they bring another way of seeing to an old subject. Jimmy says:

“None, I should think; or, less emphatically, only very rarely. There are only new writers. Each one in contention primarily with himself. Each one a subject of his own times — that is, the fluid history and culture of his own people — and perhaps, sometimes, a rebel in his own right or without cause.

“It can be shown, from the other side of my own argument now, that every writing is somehow new. But for the writer himself to claim that his writing is new is hubris.

“Every writer only finds his own path through language, and after a time, discovers his own distinctive subject.

“He finds his language within the given natural language that he employs, that he works, as a farmer works the soil for his crop. He writes from a given natural language that he has mastered, and may invent words and phrases, perhaps even an individual grammar or syntax, from the language’s own incremental store and resources, and from ways of thinking and figures of thought in his own culture.

“Any given natural language has its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax: those are the fountainhead of its communicative power, and one transgresses them at his own peril. But any language too has inner resources from the infinite possibilities of its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, their figures and rhetoric: those are the fountainhead of its expressive or evocative power, and one is circumscribed only by his imagination by which, sometimes, by assiduously working the language, he might transcend its inadequacies or limitations

“So then, after a time — a long, persevering time — the writer’s language becomes essentially his alone, both its matter — and its manner, by which its matter is endowed with its interpretative form.”

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

First of all, a reminder: Writers’ Night will be held this Friday, December 11, at Balay Kalinaw in UP Diliman, starting at 5 pm and ending at 10 pm. See you all there!

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A few weeks ago, I joined a group of fellow administrators and professors from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of the Philippines-Diliman on a weekend sortie to San Luis, Batangas.

Our new dean, Art Studies professor Elena Mirano, thought that it would be a good idea to get her assistants and department chairs together, out of town, to map out the college’s directions for the next few years — and it was.

We meet often enough in school and could have done this exercise in the office, but the new environment refreshed our minds and spurred new ideas (and besides, it cost us just the gas, because Dr. Mirano’s family owned the compound we stayed in for free).

I must say I’d never heard of San Luis before, although I’ve been to Batangas often enough — at least, to the usual tourist and business destinations. I looked it up on a map, and there it was, facing Balayan Bay, right next to Taal.

We took the long route that passed through Sto. Tomas, Cuenca, and Alitagtag — under the shadow of Mt. Maculot and zipping past one lomi stand after another (note to self: must go back there one of these days to find out what Batangas lomi is all about).

There seemed to be nothing too special about San Luis itself, but the ocean view from our beachfront quarters was, as always, a pleasant relief. I’ve often remarked how strongly the sea shapes Filipino lives (and, more darkly, also takes them with impunity) and yet how little the sea has figured in our literary imagination.

Perhaps it’s a reflection of how city-bound and housebound we’ve become. (My most powerful dreams have been of the sea. In one of them, I skim, gull-like, over transparent blue-green waters, and meet up on the horizon with a pair of angel’s wings rising out of the waves against the orange sky. In another, I travel to a far shore where I enter a hut or a shack, and a woman opens her cupped palms to present me with a gift of seashells. More often I dream of dark, rolling waves, and I am standing right next to them, but I am not afraid, seemingly, strangely, prepared to be overcome and claimed by them.)

So we went to San Luis for work, but it was hard not to think of the panorama changing and unfolding at my back, even as I stared at the PowerPoint presentations and tried very hard to focus on enrollment figures and such. Finally I could resist no more, and snuck out — for just five minutes, I promised myself — to catch the sea at sunset, another of those deathlessly romantic images we Pinoys just can’t seem to get enough of, and have memorialized in Mabini art as well as in less pedestrian poetry (Carlos Angeles’s Landscape II, for example: “Sun the knifed horizon bleeds the sky / Spilling a peacock stain upon the sands….”)

My truancy was well rewarded.

As I hurried to the waterfront, the sun was quickly slipping behind a finger of land on the other side of the bay, throwing up spasms of vermilion and purple.

I took out my camera and fired off a flurry of shots to record the moment (and add to hundreds of other seascapes and sunsets in my iPhoto folder). I remembered that when my father died, I looked up at the sky, and somehow felt comforted by its suggestion of infinity.

I’m not a particularly religious person, and there was no reason to think that spirits — if they exist — should go skyward instead of, say, underground; but horizons ground the sky, especially at sunset, and reassure us that something lies beyond the edge of eyesight.

That evening, I had some beer with two fellow professors (of Spanish, both — department chair Wystan de la Peña, and “Señor” Teodoro Maranan), who indulged all my questions about a beautiful language I wished I had studied more seriously as an undergraduate — something difficult to do when we are all hot under the collar over such issues as feudalism and neocolonialism.

They regaled me with stories about their days in Madrid as grad students, and patiently explained the difference between, say, Mexican and Madrileño Spanish, not to mention South American.

We discovered that we were one in our adulation of Spanish and Latin music, although I had the disadvantage of not understanding most of the lyrics I was mumbling and in all likelihood massacring.

Early the next morning, as the sun arose from the other side of Batangas, I turned my laptop on, clicked on iTunes, and began playing one of my favorite songs, which I happen to have in eight versions.

Someone came up with thick native chocolate and biko as a pre-breakfast treat.

That, and “Sabor a Mi” by the Mexican Luis Miguel. Some days, things just come perfectly together.

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On our way back, we decided to spend some time in nearby Taal, to see the old houses, visit the Basilica, and buy some pasalubongs at the public market. All three proved to be absolute must-do’s when you come to this part of Batangas.

The Leon Apacible house (now also a museum and library administered by the National Historical Institute) is a charming repository of 19th century and later Art-Deco furniture and design.

Jose Rizal, Mariano Ponce, and other figures of the Revolution used to meet here; Leon Apacible was Gen. Malvar’s right-hand man. It’s open most hours and visits are free, although donations, of course, are welcome.

The Taal Basilica de San Martin de Tours was first built in 1775 and rebuilt in 1878 after an earthquake.

Here, P20 will get you a trio of votive candles that you can light up at a side altar to pray and to wish on.

Finally — after satisfying mind and spirit — a stop at the market, just a stone’s throw away from the basilica, yielded us some treasures for the palate: a kilo or two of tapa and longaniza, balls of chocolate, and bags of Batangas coffee.

I love the acacia groves of Diliman, but now and then I wouldn’t mind running to Batangas for another meeting.

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

Our work at the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing is fairly routine – we run the annual writers’ workshop in Baguio, publish the Likhaan Journal, and sponsor lectures on and readings of contemporary Philippine literature – but now and then something special comes our way that just calls out for some equally special attention.

One such addition to the roster of our services and facilities is the newly-completed Gonzalo Gonzalez Reading Room in the library of the New CAL Building.

The GGRR used to be a small room in UP Diliman's Faculty Center, but a generous donation from our benefactor, Atty. Gizela M. Gonzalez-Montinola, enabled us to upgrade the reading room and its offerings toward achieving its goal of being the country's best repository of contemporary Philippine and Southeast Asian literature. The room is named after Ging’s father, the late Gonzalo Gonzalez, a former member of the UP Board of Regents.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Ging herself writes exquisite prose, and has had a deep and abiding interest in writing and literature, explaining her commitment to its promotion through the GGRR and another project I’ll bring up shortly, the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award.

We expect the GGRR to become a major resource for anyone interested in the best of new writing from the Philippines and around the region. It’s a not a lending library, but it’s open to all UP students, faculty, and serious researchers.

We’ve begun the collection by soliciting donations from the present and past fellows and associates of the UPICW – our own books as well as contributions from our personal libraries. I’d like to see it expand to contain, in the very least, a complete collection of works by all our National Artists in Literature.

Let me take this occasion to invite all Filipino writers in all languages – especially former fellows of the UP Writers’ Workshop – to donate copies of their books as well to the GGRR. That way you can always be sure to find them in a safe place (long after you’ve lost or lent out your own last copy), and in pretty good company, too.

Just bring or send them over to the UPICW, and we’ll take care of putting them on the GGRR shelves.

I’m also happy to say that we’ll soon be announcing the winner of this year’s Madrigal Gonzalez Award for the best first book by a Filipino author over the past two years.

We alternate this between books in English and Filipino, thus the two-year span. This year it’s English’s turn, and the finalists are The El Bimbo Variations by Adam David, The Proxy Eros by Mookie Katigbak, Girl Trouble by Alan Navarra, and Antisipasyon by Victor Dennis T. Nierva.

The El Bimbo Variations is a collection of 99 retellings of the first line from the lyrics of the song “Ang Huling El Bimbo” by the Eraserheads. David studied in the University of the Philippines, lives in Cubao, Quezon City and has been a bookmaker by trade since 1999. The El Bimbo Variations was published by The Youth & Beauty Brigade in 2008.

The Proxy Eros is a collection of poems on love, desire, and the act of making. Katigbak resides in Quezon City and is currently taking her PhD at the University of the Philippines. She holds degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University and New School University New York. The Proxy Eros was published by Anvil Publishing, Inc. in 2008.

Antisipasyon asin iba pang rawitdawit sa Bikol asin Ingles is a collection of poems in Bicol with selected translations into English by Marne Kilates and H. Francisco Peñones Jr. Nierva resides in Camarines Sur and was born in Naga City. He is finishing his MA at the University of the Philippines and teaches at Ateneo de Naga. Antisipasyon was published by Goldprint Publishing House in 2007.

Girl Trouble is a story told in various forms, from short stories and koans to print and billboard layouts and advertising storyboards. Navarra is a graduate of the University of St. La Salle, Bacolod City. Girl Trouble was published by Visual Print Enterprises in 2007.

The P50,000 prize, sponsored by the Madrigal-Gonzalez family, will be given out on the afternoon of Writers’ Night on December 11.

The awarding will be accompanied by a forum on the shortlisted works and on the contemporary literary scene featuring this year’s judges, namely UP ICW Fellow and UP Professor J. Neil Garcia, De La Salle University Professor David Bayot, and award-winning poet Angelo Suarez.

Established in 2001, the MGA has been given out to an impressive roster of writers: Angelo Lacuesta for Life after X and Other Stories, Elen Sicat for Paghuhunos, Ma. Felisa Batacan for Smaller and Smaller Circles, Luna Sicat-Cleto for Makinilyang Altar, Vicente Groyon for The Sky over Dimas, English, Kristian Cordero for Mga Tulang Tulala, Rica Bolipata Santos for Love, Desire, Children, etc., and Zosimo Quibilan, Jr. for Pagluwas.

Three years ago, when I first wrote about the MGA, I noted that “A first book is the writer’s announcement of his or her presence, and a great one often presages even more wonderful things. T.S. Eliot’s first book was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917); Ian Fleming’s was Casino Royale (1953). In the early ‘70s, an alcoholic teaching high-school English started his first novel, only to toss it into the garbage; his wife retrieved the manuscript and urged him to get back to work. The book became Carrie, and the author was Stephen King. And it was only in 1997, can you believe it, when an unknown writer named J. K. Rowling got her first book – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – published by Bloomsbury, which turned out an edition of a measly 300 copies (any one of which is now worth at least 10,000 pounds to collectors – that’s a million pesos to you and me).”

Also to be launched that afternoon will be the third annual issue of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, featuring the best original, previously unpublished work by Filipino authors.

This issue – edited by Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo – will have stories, poems, and nonfiction by Mikael De Lara Co, Kristian Sendon Cordero, Carlomar A. Daoana, Karl R. De Mesa, Zosimo Quibilan, Rica B. Santos, Joel M. Toledo, Edgardo B. Maranan, Anna Maria L. Harper, Dustin Edward D. Celestino, Franklin Cimatu, Ma. Josephine Barrios, Vladimeir Gonzales, Jose Claudio Guerrero, Sharon Ann Briones Pangilinan, Pedro Cruz Reyes, Rommel B. Rodriguez, Ricardo M. de Ungria, Eugene Y. Evasco, and Bienvenido Lumbera.

Writers’ Night and these related activities will be held this year at Balay Kalinaw in UP Diliman, so plan on being there from about 4 pm onwards on December 11 to enjoy the full program. See you there!

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

Speaking of nice old things, I found myself in the middle of an antiques show at the Greenhills tiangge a couple of months ago, while Beng took a friend who was visiting from the States, Julie Hill, to the pearl booths.

Now, Greenhills is a place that people associate more often with the new and the fake (or the “replica,” as it’s more stylishly called) than with the old and the authentic.

But many years ago, I’d stumbled on one of my most fabulous vintage pen finds in this same place – a huge mid-1920s Swan Eternal in terrific condition, a steal at P500 – so I was hoping to spot another sleeper in a tin cup or cigar box (in my fantasies, a Parker “snake” or Senior Maxima, for a princely P1,000).

As it happened, no collectible pens were about that day – which was just as well, because I could relax and enjoy the objects that were there.

Next to pens and other writing instruments, I’m drawn to what collectors call ephemera – odd bits and pieces of paper that, as the word suggests, may once have served some short-lived purpose: a flyer for a show (say, the July 4, 1964 Beatles show at the Rizal Coliseum), an issue of a bygone publication (A. V. Hartendorp’s pre-war Philippine Magazine, near-mint copies of which can still be found in a book shop in Intramuros), postcards of old Baguio, and the ubiquitous studio shots of Carnival Queens from the 1930s.

I’ve picked up some such pieces from antique shops (the term should arguably be “antiques shops,” since the shops themselves are fairly new, but common usage has gone the other way) and also on eBay, where I chanced upon a 1922 Christmas issue of the Philippine Collegian (which told me, among others, that nothing has changed much in nearly nine decades as far as university funding is concerned).

The charm of ephemera for me lies less in the official record they provide of long-forgotten events, which a historian might look for, than in the way they revivify lost voices and suggest deeply personal stories behind the signatures and faces.

When I came out with my first book in 1984 and had to decide on a book cover, I chose to use the photograph of a pretty Filipina, something I’d picked up from a tray in an Ermita antique shop for probably 50 centavos; I knew nothing about her, except that her name was “Charing,” which she signed the back of the photograph with in 1925.

I’ve always wondered what was on her mind that day she had the picture taken – an impending marriage? A lost love? A summer vacation in some town in Pampanga or Iloilo? Might she have been the kind of woman that inspired Paz Marquez Benitez’ Julia in “Dead Stars?”

That afternoon in Greenhills, undistracted by pens and similarly familiar objects, I let my eyes roam among the stalls of old bottles, medallions, chinaware, and ancient textbooks, and they landed on a small collection of what seemed to be legal documents written by hand.

I was attracted both by the penmanship and the fine, swirly strokes that only old flexible pen nibs could produce, and by the elaborate documentary seals that harked back to Spanish times.

The texts were all in old Tagalog, of the kind I’d found in old almanacs and prayer books, where the k’s were still c’s and the apostrophes still commas.

Again, being no historian, I had little idea of the context behind these documents, which mostly had to do with the sale of land and the settlement of debts.

Typically, one of them began thus, with a self-introduction: “Aco,i si Martin Carpio, asauang caisang catauan ni Petrona Roque…” I pause on that phrase, “asauang caisang catauan” – “the spouse of one body with” – and dwell on what marriage might have meant to such people as Martin and Petrona more than a century past.

It’s very hard to make out the rest of the script with my untrained eye, but I do spot another phrase, “sa aming caguipitan ay aming ipinagbibiling muli,” “in our hour of need,” leading to the sale of another plot of land for eight pesos.

The historian will do one thing with that bit of knowledge, and the fictionist (or creative nonfictionist) something else.

I might imagine the kind of life Martin and Petrona lived – what they had for supper, what he did to amuse himself, what she suffered to keep him beside her, what the view was from the kitchen when she looked up from stirring the pot of guava-laced fish stew he favored. A distant mountain, perhaps, or just another soot-covered wall with an eye-slit for the smoke and the sadness to seep through?

What would she have thought that day – the 6th of May, in the year 1885 – when he came home with the eight pesos in his pocket?

She looks him in the eye but he can’t look back, consumed by a restlessness she’s seen before, and now recognizes with a terrible shudder: she will sup alone that evening; he will be out there where the roosters keep the dust down with their own blood, swearing to win it all back with one or two well-studied choices.

My apologies to the real Martin Carpio and Petrona Roque – and to their descendants – for this fevered digression.

The reality may well have been much happier and more prosaic, leading to healthy children, a flourishing business, and more land than all of them could live on.

But the other possibilities were engaging enough for me to offer the dealer a fair price for the whole lot of hand-lettered deeds. Beng and Julie got their pearls; I got my stories, albeit some yet to be written.

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

More (and last) from San Francisco: since my son-in-law Jerry was driving us into the city from the airport in a rented hybrid (another new experience for me: these things don’t go vroom-vroom at startup), and since Jerry and I share the same passion for old mechanical objects (vintage pens for me, vintage radios and aeronautical books for him), we decided to stop over first at the San Francisco Antique and Design Mall, which was on the way.

I was giddy with eagerness, and as soon as we stepped into the place, an ancient beauty caught my eye – no, not a pen this time, but another writing instrument of yore, a typewriter.

It sat on top of a glass case near the store manager’s desk, where it shouldn’t have been, suggesting that it had just come in and was probably still being inventoried.

I don’t think it will surprise anyone who knows what a pack rat I am to be told that, yes, I also collect old typewriters (and old Macintosh computers), albeit in a much more modest and haphazard way than I amass fountain pens.

While my pens now number in the shameful hundreds, I have only four or five typewriters tucked beneath some bed or into some drawer.

My affection for typewriters goes back to a sad story.

My father was a clerk, and I often hung out in his office, entranced by the majesty of it all: the large wooden desk, the swivel chair, the red-blue pencils, the desk pen, and yes, the heavy typewriter whose signature clackety-clack announced important business in the making.

Early in high school, when I began nursing fantasies of becoming a writer, my father had gifted me with a Singer typewriter, the virgin newness of which I could hardly bear to disturb or to mar with carbon smudges and eraser chaff.

I loved that Singer, and slept with it by my side.

And then one day it was gone, repossessed by the installment people in one of those dark swings of fortune we’d learned to live with, but this one hit me particularly hard, and I swore, like some raving Scarlett O’Hara, that “As God is my witness, I’ll never be typewriterless again!”

And so it happened that I bought a used typewriter as soon as I was able to, and churned out dozens of stories and scripts on one battered Royal or Underwood, then another.

In the 1980s, when one of my employers and mentors – the kind Dr. Gerry Sicat – resigned from his post and prepared to leave for work abroad, I found the gumption to ask him for a parting present I spotted in a corner of his library: an Olympia portable typewriter, which accompanied me to graduate school in Michigan, even as my American classmates were already beginning to use Macs and PCs, which I stubbornly resisted.

This one in San Francisco was truly special, both in its design and its condition.

It was a Corona portable, still in its open carrying case, which also contained the original manual and cleaning accessories. It had been well used, as the indentations of thousands of keystrokes on the platen or hard rubber roller testified, but it had also been very well kept.

The black enamel gleamed on the machine; its stainless steel ribs and ligaments were bright and fragrant with oil; a perfect decal marked the paper table behind the platen, the roseate glow behind the white dove still intense despite its age.

I was smitten, but like a young man stricken by but slightly dubious of overwhelming pulchritude, I had to move and look away for a while, and I spent the next hour reconnoitering the stalls and shelves, trying to interest myself in this old leather bag and that old book, my restlessness mounting by the minute.

I found and picked up a Parker 51 Vacumatic pen in near-mint condition, a steal at $10, but even that failed to stop the quickening that I felt every time I glanced in the direction of the Corona, just to make sure it was still there, and still no one else’s.

Finally I could resist no longer and returned to the manager’s counter. I asked him if I could handle the machine.

“This just came in,” he said, smelling a sale. “You’re only the second one to ask.” He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter; I pecked out some letters: “The quick brown fox….”

They all came out crisply, and something in me groaned.

Perhaps I had been hoping that something would go horribly wrong – like the letters would come out broken, like buck teeth, or not register at all.

This one even had a fresh ribbon – and the ribbon reverse worked.

I sighed in surrender and asked, hoarse with hopelessness, “How much?”

“One hundred twenty five dollars,” the man said. “Any discount?”

It was Beng, who had drifted into the transaction in a vain attempt to forestall the inevitable.

“Nope,” said the man, knowing a goner when he saw one.

I tried pulling the lid over the Corona, in a last-ditch effort to locate some mortal flaw – aha, it wouldn’t close!

The machine was simply too big for the box – I knew there had to be a catch somewhere!

Indeed there was; the manager seized the platen and just bent the whole thing over on itself, and the machine collapsed compliantly, fitting neatly into its case, and I went over the edge of stupefaction at the mechanical genius of the thing: a collapsible, therefore portable, typewriter, the clamshell notebook of its time.

“Sold!” said my speechless smile. (Thankfully, my daughter Demi picked up the tab – an advance Christmas present for her daffy dad.)

I would later establish that I was looking at a collectible classic, the “Corona 3,” made between 1916 and 1941 by the Corona Typewriter Co. in Groton, NY; a check on its serial number told me that this one had come out of the factory in 1922.

That was almost 50 years after the first Scholes and Glidden typewriter – the first truly useful and commercially successful model – was sold. The price in 1873? $125.

Sometimes I forget – or am rudely reminded – that not only are there kids these days who have never written with a fountain pen; some of them have never touched a typewriter, much less composed a story or written a book on one.

The only keyboard they know is that whose keys travel mere millimeters, with the barest of clicks and whispers to announce the deed.

“Ay, Tatay! Why will you even lug this home to Manila,” Demi kidded me, “when you’ll be leaving it to me anyway when you finally go, along with all your pens and Macs and watches?”

Because, I should’ve told her, I just want to look at it for a while, and to feel the keys, and maybe listen to how they clackety-clack. I hope she does, too, when the time comes.

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

I was going to write this column a few months ago, when a cosmic confluence of events (of the “moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars” variety) suggested it, but I’m glad I held off a bit, because our recent visit to San Francisco added immeasurably to the experience I’m about to describe.

The events I mentioned are landmarks that any child of the Sixties would recognize with a smile and maybe a lump in the throat: the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock festival last August, the release of the digitally remastered complete Beatles albums last September 9, and the death of Mary Travers last September 16.

Of course we were too young, too far away, and maybe too stuffy to be at Woodstock when it happened on Max Yasgur’s farm that balmy mid-August.

I was 14 in 1969, a high-school sophomore with the un-coolest crew-cut and a rash of pimples on both cheeks, but I was already — indeed acutely — aware of the fact that some people out there led more interesting lives than I did in Barrio Malinao, Pasig, Rizal.

Mostly we got that from the movies we watched (the truly interesting ones had titles like “Bedroom Mazurka”) and the music we listened to on our ‘60s iPods, those plastic transistor radios with the mushroom earbuds.

We knew the Beatles by heart, and could name any Beatles tune in three notes, from “Love Me Do” to “Come Together”; we dreamed chastely of our crushes to the accompaniment of “If I Fell” and bemoaned the passing of a “Yesterday” that we hadn’t even gone through yet.

Not only could we sing the Beatles; back in those days, it was crime to be a teenager and not to be able to play the guitar, albeit with the aid of a chord chart that we memorized better than we did the Periodic Table. (Which reminds me, I’d be happy to pay a small fortune for a copy of an obscure songbook titled The Book of NUDES, which had the most esoteric chords and featured classics like “Yellow Days.”)

We snuck out of school to take a bus trip to Quiapo and Raon to blow our savings on Lumanog guitars — and maybe indulge our budding, uhm, literary sensibilities with a bootleg copy of Fanny Hill from nearby Recto.

But compared to what was a-borning in places like San Francisco, the Beatles and their kind (the Dave Clark Five, Freddie and the Dreamers, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the Monkees) were cute and clean-cut; even the Rolling Stones were a tad too uncouth for most of us, although we did groove to “Satisfaction” and got moony over “As Tears Go By.”

The inner hippie had yet to be released in us — imagine how my swishy bell-bottoms went with my military hairdo — and for some, it took a Woodstock to push them over the edge.

Without cable TV, the Internet (which was busy getting born that year), and YouTube, we had to settle for a screening of “Woodstock,” the movie, many months after the event.

I remember standing in a packed Galaxy Theater on Rizal Avenue to marvel at how singers like Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin — who looked like they’d either just woken up or hadn’t slept for five days — could get thousands of people all worked up.

I still preferred sweet to sour, lapping up Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young when they launched into “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” and a cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.”

And who could be sweeter on the ear than Peter, Paul and Mary, whose “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” might well have been the decade’s anthems, paeans to a lost innocence and to the inconstancy of life?

They were clean enough to be sung in church (“Five Hundred Miles”) and yet ambiguous enough to be accused — almost certainly unfairly — of pushing mind-altering substances through a song like “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

When they harmonized on a piece like “Early Morning Rain,” they made even loneliness sound good.

And all over PPM’s work was Mary’s signature alto, clear as a bell, soaring above the raucous confusion of the age.

All these came back to me in San Francisco, where — with a rental car to use and a morning to while away — I answered the question “So where should we go?” with something I’d never done in three or four previous visits to that city.

There’s no streetcorner more revered in the history of American counter-culture than that spot where Haight meets Ashbury, and that’s where we went.

Home to 1967’s famous “Summer of Love,” Haight-Ashbury would come to epitomize the best and the worst of the Age of Aquarius: the free love, the pacifism, the hallucinogens, the grime and grit, the long, languorous drifting away into another realm of thinking and being, at a time when B-52s (flying out of our own Clark AFB) were pulverizing much of Vietnam, when other Americans were walking on the moon, when Barack Obama was a young boy and it was still illegal for blacks or Asians to marry whites in 16 American states, when even the Beatles themselves had traded in their suits for Nehru jackets and Pancho Villa moustaches.

Haight-Ashbury attracted the genius and the lunatic, the earnest and the curious, the divine and the drifter.

For a time, the district went through a steep period of decline and decay, until its rehabilitation into the present neighborhood, one as welcoming of bug-eyed tourists as any other San Francisco locale, dotted with shops selling distressed-fabric T-shirts, silver jewelry, Tibetan imports, and the inevitable bong (if you don’t know what a bong is, you’re too young to need one).

Psychedelia still hallmarks the place, in the fruit-cocktail colors and the swirly scripts, but gentrification has also set in, in the neatly restored Victorian homes and the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream store, even in the cheeky exhibitionism of hosed and posed legs popping out of a window, among other signals of mid-life mellowing.

I didn’t meet anyone wearing flowers in her hair, nor was I offered anything more mind-blowing than Coke with a capital C, but as we drove away from Haight-Ashbury to explore nearby Castro with Beng, our daughter Demi, and her husband Jerry, I couldn’t help humming a tune in my head, something that spoke about “You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by…. And so become yourself, because the past is just a goodbye…”

A goodbye, indeed, and sometimes a welcome back.

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

I know there are probably 2,000 other topics worthier of being written about, but let me brag shamelessly about a victory I posted last week – not in a literary competition or anything so noble, but in what we’ll call a battle of wits, plus a little bit of luck.

I’ll start by confessing to a childhood longing for medals, honors, and prizes – baubles that my classmates seemed to be winning right and left, but which had a way of zipping past me for one reason or other.

If you look at my CV – which I burnish to keep my mother happy and to attract prospective employers of fat, balding men – you’d think that I was one of those despicable high achievers who must’ve gotten the Best Baby award and went on to become class valedictorian, basketball team captain, ROTC corps commander, and student council chairman, but no.

I kept joining declamation contests in grade school, entranced by the gold, silver, and bronze medals that glowed at me from their boxes on the judges’ table.

But for all my throaty, heartfelt renditions of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Carlos P. Romulo’s “I Am a Filipino,” I never won a thing.

Indeed, I got out of elementary school with nothing more to show for my competitive prowess than a candy bar I won for shoving someone smaller off the balance beam in intramurals.

Of course, my report card was strewn with stars (in our school, green stars and purple stars were given for high marks) for excellence in such nerdy subjects as Reading and Spelling, but what I really yearned for was the adulation for my peers for excellence in some guy thing.

I couldn’t hit a softball even if it came at me like a soap bubble, and my flat feet doomed any chances of my becoming a track star, so I was fated for more sedate undertakings like writing for the school paper. Instead of becoming a jock, I learned big words like “adumbrate” and swung them like a bespectacled Babe Ruth.

I got into the Philippine Science High School as my batch’s topnotcher (only to nearly flunk out after my first year with a 5.0 in Math – still another story); got into UP and somehow graduated cum laude 14 years after becoming a freshman; won a raft of Palancas, CCPs, and other prizes they give you for stringing up words in certain ways.

But I remained hungry for another kind of victory, one that was more fun than work.

Flash forward to late October 2009.

I’ve been playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker for more than three years now, and have learned to play decently enough to win a couple of small tournaments in Manila (never mind how much tuition I’ve had to pay for that kind of education, where my PhD in English means, as Hemingway himself would have put it, absolutely nada nada nada).

For all that, I’m still what they call a “donkey” in poker parlance – someone curious and dumb enough to call big bets with a pair of deuces.

I’m so curious about poker that Daniel Negreanu has replaced Daniel Defoe on my reading list, and I don’t fantasize about winning the Nobel or the Booker half as much as I dream of winning the World Series of Poker in a heads-up showdown with Phil Ivey (edging out his aces full of kings with my baby straight flush).

And now I’m vacationing with my wife, my mother, and my sister in the poker capital of the world – Las Vegas, Nevada.

The women are here to gaze and gape at the dancing fountains of the Bellagio.

Me, I’m like that Chevy Chase character in 1997’s Vegas Vacation – wide-eyed, open-mouthed, ready to hit the tables even before I’ve unfastened my seat belt. I’ve played blackjack here before, but never poker, and I’m eager to join – perchance to win – my first Las Vegas poker tournament.

I’ve done my Google homework, and of all the tournaments in town, I’ve chosen the 8 pm one at the Imperial Palace, which has an affordable entry fee and is closest to my shuttle stop, so I can be sure to get home even if I lose my shirt.

The Imperial Palace looks anything but. Its driveway is cluttered not with Rolls Royces but with big old taxis whose drivers are puffing away, waiting for drunken tourists to tumble out. Its “poker room” is a corral of six tables covered in a disturbingly flesh-colored felt that you almost expect to bleed if scratched badly; the poker chips look as battered and shiny as ancient Roman coins.

When I step in to sign up for the tournament, only one table is active, playing 2/4 limit poker, a game guaranteed to minimize your losses. I could kill some time there, but I remind myself that I’m here to take risks, not to pose before the gondolas at the Venetian for souvenir pictures.

Of course, with my floppy hat and my camera bag, I look every bit the tourist, but all that’s camouflage for the killer within – at least that’s what I tell myself to calm my nerves.

The tournament begins with 18 players at two tables – all men save one; a few locals, mostly visitors like myself, some conventioneers, an Australian, another guy I spot immediately to be a fellow Pinoy. I win my first hand at my table, checking my paired ace at the flop, or the first three table cards.

It’s a good sign, and I go on to become chip leader – the guy with the most chips – after a streak of two pairs and an open-ended straight. (Never mind the poker lingo; all it means is I got lucky – in fact, those of you who don’t play poker can go straight to the end of this piece, and skip the table drama below.)

After an hour, I move to the final table – not a herculean feat, when all you have is two tables to begin with.

I’m still chip leader, but I quickly run into trouble and lose most of my stack when, with me going all in with top-pair ace-kicker, my opponent sucks out his second pair on the river (translation: I thought I was going to win it all, but nearly lost it all when someone got luckier at the very last card).

But I recover and become chip leader again when I call an A-Q all-in with my A-10; I flop the 10 and it’s enough to win and to double up.

We’re down to four; the other Pinoy, a billiards player named Sonny visiting from San Francisco, busts out in fourth place. After more skirmishes and a lot of safe plays, the short-stack small blind goes all in; the big blind, with a stack just a little smaller than mine, also goes all in! My hole cards are K-J suited. Tempting fate, I call.

Show cards: SB has A-Q suited, diamonds like mine! BB has pocket jacks! I’m done for, I tell myself. The flop comes out 9-K-5 rainbow; turn 10, river K! My three kings win, and I’m one happy boy who feels like he’s made up for all those bad beats at the declamation podium. I feel like singing the Philippine National Anthem, the NHI-sanctioned way.

But don’t do this at home, my young friends; if you’re going down the path of poker perdition, I strongly suggest that you learn a few useful things on the side –like editing the school paper.

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

No, I don’t mean that Palace by the Pasig that many Pinoys would rather have nothing to do with, but the venerable Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry took Beng and me last week for a weekend treat.

First opened in 1875 but destroyed in the great earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees in 1906, the Palace was rebuilt and inaugurated anew in December 1909, for which centennial it’s preparing to celebrate grandly.

The hotel is an imposing structure at the corner of Market and New Montgomery Streets downtown.

When you step in, what immediately strikes you is the glass-roofed atrium, called the Garden Court, that serves as the main restaurant and which must have witnessed the entrance of many a distinguished personage beneath its Austrian chandeliers.

But what impressed me most about the Palace was its unusual Filipino connection, beginning with the large number of Pinoys on the staff, starting with the general manager, Clem Esmail, to the executive chef, Jesse Llapitan, and Amado Benin, one of the senior waiters who attended to us at breakfast with that extra solicitude that comes naturally to Filipinos.

The front desk was manned almost entirely by Filipinos; many of the bellhops and the housekeepers were Filipinos.

And while the likes of Lea Salonga have checked in to the Palace, the most celebrated Filipino on its guest list was none other than Jose Rizal.

Until Amado reminded me of that fact – and of the presence of a brass marker honoring Rizal on the hotel’s wall around the corner – I’d forgotten that I’d actually written about Rizal’s visit to San Francisco a few years ago, in a long essay on the complex history of Philippine-American relations (in Portraits of a Tangled Relationship: The Philippines and the United States, published by Ars Mundi Philippinae, Manila, 2008). [See GMANews.TV’s feature about the book here.]

Drawing on other sources, I noted that “… In late April 1888, a ship arrived in San Francisco and was quarantined for seven days to guard against smallpox.

One impatient passenger, a Filipino, indignantly affixed his name to a letter of protest. When he got off the boat, he checked into the Palace Hotel, took a stroll, and seemed impressed by Market Street.

But he would later write his friend Mariano Ponce that ‘I visited the largest cities of America with their big buildings, electric lights, and magnificent conceptions. Undoubtedly America is a great country, but still has many defects. There is no real civil liberty.’ That letter was signed ‘Jose Rizal.’”

The marker at the street corner reads thus: “Dr. Jose P. Rizal, Philippine national hero and martyr, stayed at the Palace Hotel from May 4 to 6, 1888, in the course of his only visit to the United States.

"Imbued with a superior intellect and an intense love for his country, Dr. Rizal sought to gain freedom for the Filipino people from centuries of Spanish domination through peaceful means.

"His writings, foremost of which were the novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, dared to expose the cancer of colonial rule and agitated for reforms.

"For this he was arrested, tried and executed by a firing squad on December 30, 1896.

"With his martyrdom, the man of peace fanned the flames of the Revolution of 1896, the first successful uprising in Asia against a Western colonial power.

"Installed on December 30, 1996 in commemoration of the first centennial of his martyrdom.”

We can argue, as many scholars and critics have done, about Rizal’s exact contribution to the revolution and the stature he enjoys, but you can’t look at that marker without feeling a surge of pride in your connection, however tenuous, to this remarkable man who went around the world before the rest of us did.

On that trip early in 1888, harassed by the Spanish authorities after the publication of the Noli, Rizal had gone to America from Manila via Hong Kong and Japan.

(“I left my country in order to give my relatives peace,” he would later write Pastor Ullmer in London. He ends it by vowing, “Nevertheless I will go back!”)

From San Francisco, he would go on to Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Illinois, and New York.

On May 16 he left New York for Liverpool, England, crossing the Atlantic in nine days.

Looking back, he would reflect that “I visited the larger cities of America, where I saw splendid buildings. The Americans have magnificent ideals. America is a homeland for the poor who are willing to work. I traveled across America, and saw the majestic cascade of Niagara. I was in New York, the great city, but there everything is new. I went to see some relics of Washington, that great man whom I fear has not his equal in this century.”

Many Filipinos – or those who imagine that only with the coming of the Americans in 1898 did we learn English –forget that Rizal could speak and write in English.

A gifted polyglot, he had been offered work in Japan after learning Japanese, and those who traveled with him marveled that “I could speak to every one in his own language and understand what he said.”

In London, he wrote the chief librarian of the British Museum in perfect English: “Sir, As I wish to become a reader and to copy sculpture at the British Museum, I herewith forward the necessary letter of introduction from a house-holder and I shall be glad to hear from you. I am sincerely your obedient servant, José Rizal.

As the critic E. San Juan Jr. reminds us, Rizal foresaw America’s role in Asia, but curiously missed out on that country’s imperial designs.

In “The Philippines a Century Hence,” Rizal writes: “Perhaps the great American Republic, whose interests lie in the Pacific…may some day dream of foreign possession. This is not impossible, for the example is contagious, covetousness and ambition are among the strongest vices… the European powers would not allow her to proceed… North America would be quite a troublesome rival, if she should once get into the business. Furthermore, this is contrary to her traditions.”

Speaking of Rizal in California, I was reminded by the Palace marker of a bust of Rizal that I saw in National City in San Diego during a previous visit, right in front of a mall where you can get anything Pinoy, from Goldilocks cakes to Chow King siopao, which hordes of Filipino-Americans line up for.

Nothing quite so grand as the Palace Hotel’s Victorian opulence, but I’m sure Pepe himself would have appreciated the gesture of standing where most of the passersby actually knew who he was.

(With many thanks to Dr. Robert Yoder’s website at http://joserizal.info and to http://www.joserizal.ph for many of these quotations.)

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

I ended the first part of this column-piece last week by mentioning how government propaganda typically burnishes the image of The Boss Almighty, to make him or her larger than life. A recent item on the Palace website demonstrates this penchant for melodramatic mythologizing.

(Before I go any further, take note that I’m reproducing these messages verbatim, with all the hurried grammatical and mechanical errors you can expect especially from email and SMS, so let’s dispense with the sic’s. At the same time and on the other hand, if I were the propagandist, I’d probably make sure that the item was as close to letter-perfect as it could be before sending it off, shouldn’t I?)

“GABALDON, Nueva Ecija - More than 5,000 residents warmly welcomed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as she visits Gabaldon Municipal Hall here today to further enhance the administration's social services program.

“Residents brought placards thanking the President for her social programs in the province of Nueva Ecija that uplifts the lives of the poor citizens.

“Some of the placards have inscriptions extolling President Arroyo as ‘dakilang ina’ (great mother) while others thank the Chief Executive for the implementation of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) that benefits most of the residents….

“Licab resident Filipina Manuel stood up and went on the stage and expressed her profound thanks to the President for the said program.

“Manuel said that she started receiving the cash grant from the 4Ps program since August 2008 stressing that the money she received was spent for the needs of her family, especially to the education and health of her children.

“Manuel tearfully told the President that meeting her onstage is a dream come true because she never imagined that she will be able to meet the country's leader despite her status in life.”

Now, I don’t doubt that melodrama sells, especially in this land of the telenovela, and I can even believe that the fortuitously named Filipina Manuel was moved to tears by presidential charity.

But the medium for this message – a news story, online, in eminently editable English – only emphasizes its contrivance.

To be fair, it’s still a long way from the “Malakas at Maganda” fantasy of Marcosian times, but the article reminds me that, within certain institutions like presidential palaces – where employees feel much less accountable to vague abstractions like “the people” or “the truth” than to The Boss – propagandists often find themselves writing not to persuade the masses out there but to please The Reader up there.

It’s the office culture, not the writer, that produces these confections.

The flip side of canonization is, of course, demonization, and in a 180-degree turn from the above, here’s an emailed message I got from another reader, ominously titled “The Truth Regarding the Bondage of Gloria Arroyo with the Devil”:

“As our people struggle amidst one of the worst calamity our country has experienced, we learn that Gloria Arroyo's net worth ballooned from P6.7 million to P143.5 million between 1992 to 2008 – and that she spend P2.7 billion in foreign travels since 2003 – including the Calamity Fund which our suffering people needs so badly today.

We have come to the conclusion that Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is possessed by a demon!

A person can be a graduate of a Catholic school, a believer in Jesus Christ, will go to church and have her picture taken as she received Holy Communion which is the most disgusting picture of her (to use the most sacred mystery of our faith for her evil purpose is beyond our understanding), but still be in bondage to Satan and demons.

To be more accurate, we state that she has been invaded by Satan! We believe that she cannot commit all her nefarious activities unless she is bond with Satan!

It is essential to look at what the Bible has to say about the devil.”

As most of you know, I’m no fan of the little lady, but this example illustrates another aspect of poor propaganda: too much can backfire and become too little.

The only people who will buy demonic possession here are the same ones who already believed it to be begin with.

But never mind the patently incredible or hyperbolic.

It’s even worse when I find myself in fundamental sympathy with certain views and positions, but see them articulated so poorly or so awkwardly that my toes curl.

Here’s an account by an activist group of a recent assault on demonstrators marching to the Palace:

“What happened at the Malacañang gates is an exaggerated use of force against the youth and students. At the moment we reached Gate 7 of Malacañang, elements of the PSG and PNP immediately welcomed us with blows and nightsticks. Some of them were not even in uniform.

Negotiations went underway only after they have arrested 20 of our fellow students and 17 of us have suffered mild to serious physical injuries.

They were like rabid dogs hitting many of our fellow students in the face, abdomen, some even pinning them to the ground like common criminals.

Those who have fallen were stepped on by the perpetrators like they were putting off cigarette butts.

Female students were harassed by un-uniformed elements which held and pulled their clothes off, almost getting them undressed.

“Our message is clear: we are enraged over Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s corrupt practices and tyrannical rule. Shame on this government who has the gall of lavishing millions for foreign trips and banquets while raking millions in corruption, one after another ever since she came into power.”

The potential power of the indignation in this case is sapped by the clumsiness of the prose, often a result of righteous anger bubbling over.

These young comrades might consider that, when handling explosive material or strong emotion, ironic understatement and restraint will often produce a more profound impact on the reader than thunderous bombast.

And sometimes I get messages that simply leave me dumbfounded, not knowing where or how to even begin understanding what I’m being told.

Take this from a tireless proselytizer for – well, something to do with conscience, since it’s mentioned half a dozen times.

Perhaps this propagandist needs to be reminded that repetition can be more tedious than persuasive:

“This particular pastoral care to our COMMISSION ON ELECTION through the Chairman on Comelec in the Office of the Municipality of Balayan in the name of MR. NOLASCO MABUTAS in this coming NATIONAL & LOCAL ELECTION year 2010 to the homily of REV. FR. FROILAN CARREON, JR., this 24th day of September through the intercessions of our Mother BLESSED VIRGIN MARY is important on October 7, 2009 to all of us Filipinos about our MORAL CONSCIENCE.

“Sincere gratitude that it was timely about the homily through the GOSPEL today September 24, 2009 that we should now to start to examine our own conscience. It is truly sad that we see into our lives from political point of view, social point of view, cultural point of view, economic point of view and even to our religious point of view etc., that what the homily says about erroneous, scrupulous an delicate conscience are truly what we should or be careful to determine through our examination of conscience of what level of conscience doe we have and do we follow. For what is happening around us and even around the world of the reason SINS are rampant is because we are not truly know of how to listen to our true conscience.”

Angels and demons, demons and angels, indeed!

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