Tugon sa pag-tag sa isang FB stat tungkol sa sanaysay ni Ortega

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Itong pagpapayaso ni Goldsmith ang kasong naiuugnay ko sa kasalukuyang isyu. Bukod dito, naaalala ko ang isang workshop night sa QC. Nakasalang ang isa kong akda, naka-set sa nudist camp, may Bly intertext, at kung kailangan ng social valency ay sige, may kung anong tinatalakay sa kasarian. Anything goes naman noon at walang hinihiling na tema. Tas bigla akong hinanapan ng mga ganito ng isang kasama, inilista pa sa amin ang mga ipinaglalaban ng kanyang mga drama, ang kanyang mga goals and objectives. Hindi ko magawang makalimutan dahil cute ang tono niyang profound.

Naaalala ko rin dito yung pinunupunto mo dati sa isang (deleted?) BBM-related status post tungkol sa original sin bilang analohiya o walang pinagkaiba sa historical culpability (kung gayon, mukhang Judeo-Christian ang frame ng paniningil mo rito). Kung dito magsisimula, mapapansin nga ang bleach effect ng othering na nagaganap. Hindi naman ang self-awareness ang maghuhugas ng kamay kundi ang praktis. Kaya’t mahalagang malaman kung naive ba o pa-naive ang mga bitaw na gaya nito: “In other words, the novel is about a world that has nothing to do at all with me or my tribe.”

Mahalaga pa ring buuin ang proyektong ito, ngunit bago ilathala, maaaring pag-isipan kung majujustify bang talaga ng discursive provocation (na posibleng spurious solidarity na maaaring maging ambag sa sistemiko na nga’t pang-araw-araw na karahasan sa antas ng representasyon, identidad) ang projected na kikitaing symbolic capital ng may-akda.

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Salamat, at natagpuan ko uli itong BBM post! Oo sa lahat ng punto, dagdag lang na kapag hindi iginitna ang historical culpability (gaya ng iyong payo) ay tuluyang mawa-whitewash ang patuloy na pakikinabang ng mga next generation at the expense ng mga nirerepresent. At hindi simpleng commercial/monetary lamang ang form ng pakikinabang ng isa na siyang kaugnay sa “paglalapastangan” sa kabila (Foucauldian asymmetry of/as power).

Kailangang makita na isang worthy (at inherently fictional, literary) project ang pagkilala sa mga kaiba sa atin. Step into shoes, by all means, but without stepping on toes. Cautious lang tayo rito. Kaso, kahit lang sa limitadong espasyo ng sanaysay ni Ortega ay tunay namang makapaglalatag na ng kritik dahil may ilan na ngang problema. Bukod pa ito (kahit kaugnay) sa pagbabasa sa ipinapangakong nobela.

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Matindi ang ambition at peril. Matutuwa ako kung lalabas na maganda at talagang mapagpalaya ang nobela (at kung poproblemahin nito ang mga kasalukuyang paraan ng pagtimbang ng “emancipatory”). Kaso sobrang letdown (wow, understatement ang letdown) kung idadagdag lang ito sa lista ni Ortega ng mga nagawaran ng mga award at mention at grant (symbolic capital) KUNG wala namang magaganap na pag-usad ng diskurso maliban dito sa I’m as other as could be from this other but so are the Americans aaiight? My novel won’t block future novelists. My novel won’t hurt.

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Notes on Mark Strand's "My Life"

The huge doll of my body
refuses to rise.
I am the toy of women.
My mother

would prop me up for her friends.
"Talk, talk," she would beg.
I moved my mouth
but words did not come.

My wife took me down from the shelf.
I lay in her arms. "We suffer
the sickness of self," she would whisper.
And I lay there dumb.

Now my daughter
gives me a plastic nurser
filled with water.
"You are my real baby," she says.

Poor child!
I look into the brown
mirrors of her eyes
and see myself

diminishing, sinking down
to a depth she does not know is there.
Out of breath,
I will not rise again.

I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.

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A— would love to read your take, as well as those of our fellows. this doll/man regresses in at least three ways. first, bodily position: from being propped up to lying down and finally, sinking. muteness differs too, in the first instance, there's an attempt to speak (active, but futile), in the second, no attempt at all, perhaps silencing the self, and in the last, shut up by the daughter, plugged with a nurser. his language regresses as well, his sentences simplest at the last stanza. in the third to the last stanza, it sounds like "Poor child!" could refer either to himself or to his daughter. in the penultimate, that "to a depth she does not know is there" is particularly striking. is it a depth not yet known to her? because of age? maybe never to be known to her, because of gender, because she is not her father (or this man in particular), or because she is not a poet, or because of other reasons? and what seems to me, at the outset, both off-tangent and the most depressing line on the page: "The world is green."

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A— have been wondering about that "sickness of the self" and at first glance, it seems to me that the woman's so intensely inward-looking (struggling, or finding herself in a "depth" she knows all-too well) that her husband is oblivious to her. possibly beyond her as well: the daughter. maybe that's why the daughter resorts to calling her father her real doll, as opposed to her mother (which could be something else, something even less maybe)

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D— Thanks for these notes. Some of these directly correspond to the man's lines as well (and not just his wife's "sickness of self"). We find despair of defiance in the lips attempting to move, that deep sense of futility in the  line "I grow into my death."

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D— Norman Fairclough called that kind of "we" by a special phrase: spurious solidarity. And I fully agree that this "we" could be as you described it, adding only that her reassurance was futile, falling flat in terms of her intention (which yet contains some mystery to me) and the husband's situation.

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A— hi! checked out the history and found no connection between bookstore and poet. the founder "named his bookstore after the London street where avant-garde writers like Thackeray, Dickens and Mill once gathered and interesting book publishers thrived."

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D— This article gets me to thinking about the activity of the verbs in Strand's poem. The first are the women's transitives: mother / wife / daughter +  props him up / takes him / gives him a nurser. These are reinforced by their speech: beg, whisper, say.

In terms of level of activity, agency or external effect, some of the I's verbs would have match these: refuses, moves, grows. But the rest of the situation reduce the power of these "acts": the body only betrays its self. Yes it refuses, but that refusal is against rising; when it moves its lips, that proves futile (unable to answer or question those who beg, whisper, and speak to him); and when it grows, it only ever approaches diminishment.

And then there's the inherent static quality of of linking verbs he uses when referring to himself and to the world. Those, plus the passivity of lying down, looking at those who act upon his person.

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D— If indeed passive aggressive, I'm very interested with a nice accounting of the "aggressive" part as (I believe) it's the part from which the poem itself "grows".

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A— been wondering about his "acts" and also about the parts where he sort of takes things lying down. thinking of the poem as a whole as an act, w/c we are free to qualify if affirmative or not, if pessimistic or not, (or, as I think you're doing,) if passive-aggressive or not

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D— This kind of attention is instructive, so I thought to look for a line that could use such focus.

"You are my real baby," she says.

The "my" and "real" jump out. As if there was another (mother maybe) who was less hers (the daughter's). As if there were other babies available to her, but less real. Candidates: dolls, other people, mother again, or a child that's all grown up and less needy of attention?

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D— Playing out a possibility where the daughter is old enough to "mother" her father. A scenario would be a now-adult daughter taking care of a father too old to look after himself.

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D— I agree. And that's still my main take. Just poking around, as there seems to be something fascinatingly unnatural with: "You are my real baby," she says. Can't put my finger on it. What is it about him? Why's it so easy to make an object (or baby) of him?

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A— how apt

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On Spurious Solidarity

This day is dedicated to Quezon, the recognized "Ama ng Wika" or father of the Filipino language. I remember this because back in my elementary days, we had "Linggo ng Wika," a whole week with essay-writing contests, declamation jousts, and morning assembly speeches by Filipino teachers. Most of all, the fines were suspended and we could speak in Tagalog, my beloved mother tongue, without paying a peso for every word we didn't deliver in English.

Although, I don't want to dedicate this piece to Quezon, I'd love to write more about language. I hope my readers will forgive a few more meta discussions, more writing about writing.

The previous article notwithstanding, I confess I've trimmed down on the use of the theoretical "Man." Sometimes, the tendency of presenting and encountering the construct is the feel of abstractness, of imagining the collective embodied as an individual, homogenous throughout its parts.

Using "she" as the pronoun at least removes the phallus from the embodiment or repopulates the embodiment with the identities of the marginalized genders. One could see that it is also more faithful since the population is quantitatively more female.

But I still find the theoretical man construct a bit intrusive to the process of stimulating critical thought. Upon viewing the embodiment floating above us, sometimes our minds also fly with it and leave on the ground the diversities and contradictions inherent in humanity.

After my thesis, I've found that I lean more on the use of "we," "us," and "ours" and (since the the work was entirely in Filipino) "tayo," "atin," and "natin." At least here, the reader is free to check if the statement really applies to her and her own experience.

The guiding text for the thesis was Norman Fairclough's seminal work entitled "Language and Power." Here, he encourages the researcher and writer to put themselves in their work. I agree that the scientists' traditional omission of the "I" in their technical ouevres is questionable. I don't think they need to gloss over the fact that there was a human being behind their empirical presentations for the sake of appearing more "objective."

Nope. I'd like to see more of those I-me-mines, especially so that the accent on responsibility for findings could be more audible. I believe this is especially necessary in the social sciences where the readers must be made aware of where the author is coming from.

After warning the reader that he will write in the first person, Fariclough proceeds to discuss his use of "we." Here's a clipping from his note on style:

"...I have operated with an image of the reader as not just someone to whom I am telling things (though sometimes I am!), but also as a partner in a collaborative venture. This is why I have sometimes used the pronoun 'we' inclusively, to refer to the reader and myself. But... this use of 'we' can be manipulative; it can claim spurious solidarity, for instance when a politician uses it to convince people that she is 'one of them'. I hope that readers will not feel similarly dragooned into partnership: obviously, some readers will not see themselves as partners... but... I have found it easier to write as if they did."

I guess that's a mouthful. In typing that, an eyebrow reflexively cocked with Fairclough's use of 'she' as a pronoun for the theoretical politician. Then, remembering recent speeches especially of the state-of-the-nation variety, a naughty grin followed.

Not Elsewhere

Tinig's volumes 17 and 18 are out. I've got SONA articles left and right, but I'm thinking of submitting literary pieces for a change. Jol, I never thought I'd say this but I miss the Adarna workshops.

I miss too, the man behind the finer points of my thesis, Prof. Monico Atienza. I make sure not too mention him too much because I dread to disgrace his legacy. But that stricture can't be allowed here because he lent me his Fairclough and Mao. Also, I want to direct friends to his poem in the same way that Alex tipped me in the forums.

Thank you Sir Monico, for believing in my work and still signing the recommendation to the Asian Center despite every inconvenience. It is my honor that you peruse of my thesis to instruct your classes, while all errata there reflected my stubborn affront to your diligence in evaluating it. Someday, maybe, I will catch up with it and teach in my own fashion.

Still Not Elsewhere

Well, workers, students, and inhabitants of Quezon City, have a nice day! I'm going there this afternoon to claim some loose pages I had bound at the university shopping center. And of course, I'll meet my angas team mates there to gather around the birthday kantogirl!