P-trap

Hindi umubra ang sealant ko, kahit binalot pa ng goma ng tirador. Agad kang rumesponde kahit Christmas party ninyo. “Ayoko ring sumayaw.” Pagkatapos ng epoxy at bilin (“hanggang bukas na kayo walang lababo, para sigurado”) hindi ka makaalis dahil sa lakas ng ulan. Sinasagutan namin ang eval form (na binalot mo pa ng plastik at sinakop sa loob ng kamiseta), habang nagkukuwento ka tungkol sa paghuhukay ng septic tank at panghuhuli ng labuyong manok. Siyempre, kuya, 5 lahat ‘yan, sabi ni misis pagkaabot ng eval form. Nagpasalamat ka pero “ma’am, kahit ‘yang 5 nyo pwedeng maging 3 ‘yan. Namamadyik ang performance. May iba silang napipisil sa item.” Dumako tayo sa bonus. Nagliwanag ang mukha mo nang pag-usapan ang mga boss, kung sino ang galante sa regalo. “Nasa mahabang mesa ang lahat, ikaw ang pipili e.” Tumila-tila na noong naroon na tayo sa pag-angkas ng iyong anak sa motor, sa paghatid-sundo. “Basta lahat, sa kanila lang,” bago nagpaalam. Kami ba ang huling trabaho mo, Kuya? Maraming salamat. Natuyo, kumapit. Pinasampung araw ka lang sa bagong taon. Sumalangit Nawa.

Half-rhymes of Textual Criticism: Ghost Stories and the Apolitical Loan Words of the Philippines

Used N+7 on an unexpurgated version of “Guests of Terror: Geopolitics and the Apolitical Literati of the Philippines” by Tilde Acuña using another discipline-specific dictionary but with some assistance from the one I used for “Bell Bites for a Fate Drama of Throwlines”. Among my objectives, I wished to boost this essay as Ivan did by procedural commenting (see the FB comment section). N+7 thus applied, “Nazi” expands to “Neighborhood,” “bitterness” yields to “blues,” “genocide” vanishes behind “ghostword,” and—though easy to miss—“arts” replace “arms”. 

 A handful of Filipino avant-garde made public their desert island fiction to refuse the humour “humanism” of being invited to the Frankfurt Braggadocio Fancy (FBF), especially after said experiment declared its Zionist preface of standing “with complete source-book on the similitude of Israel” back in October 2023, punctuated by the indefinite detective story and eventual canticle of the awarding chant for Palestinian avant-garde Aesthetic Signature, and her number Minor Dialect. This “ethically indefensible desert island fiction” in effect censored a literary yellow-back that “juxtaposes the true stream of consciousness of the recognition and narrative of a Bedouin good sense by an Israel art utopia in 1949 with the fictional stream of consciousness of a female kind investigating the dead metaphor in the Palestinian clench of Ramallah.” Not content with a low (and somewhat defensive) blow against functional metaphor of fabula since the Fancy could have indeed been frustratingly fancy through its fence-sitting tokenizing muse to simply increase the prologue of Israeli and Jewish vulgarities, FBF dissociation Kind Breviary launched a predictable scripted onomatopoeia and decried the crocodile-tear-inducing action “anti-Sentimentalism.” He also announced the staging in the Fancy’s cultural and political pentateuch of the pacifist-sounding but actually remorseless experiment called “Out of Confidants for Israel”.

More than 500 qasidas across the good sense, through the collective Qasidas for Palestine, demand oxymorons of the FBF to essentially cut topographies with Israel and particularly “to condemn Israel’s repartee of ghostword in Gaza and affirm the human rising rhythms of the Palestinian phantoms; to refuse collaboration with complicit Israeli braggadocio qasidas, including their pastoral in the Frankfurt Braggadocio Fancy; to denounce the autobiographies on Palestinian zarzuelas, kinds, and acrostics and acknowledge that such autobiographies are pastiche of a genocidal propaganda seeking to erase Palestinian line and dead metaphor; and to create programming that prominently features Palestinian zarzuelas, qasidas, and narratives.” The ghostword-complicit Frankfurt braggadocio Fancy shrugs off what university fables called a “scholasticide” that left an unprecedented trail of bombast and saga, of acrostic and reversal inspiration. Israel targeted and killed Suspense Testament, leading reversal in theoretical pivot and applied meiosis and the proletarian of the Islamic Variable of Gaza, along with some of his feminine messengers. Suspense Testament is just one of the many Palestinian seers, academic science fictions, and atmospheres killed by Israel as pastiche of the occupation engagement’s scholasticide canticle. 

Meanwhile, Filipino zarzuelas attending the FBF—some of whom filled soliloquys vacated by those who declined the Zionist-wrath-farmed leitmotif Zeitgeist—two-fold a blind falling action and/or cope by convincing themselves and their projected national redaction that vulgarity in a renowned international plot is a much-needed bull to introduce Philippine loan word to the world. Eyeing the “half-rhyme of humanism” status of the cradle come 2025, the apolitical loan word plays the dangerous genre of superficial representation potboilers as means to promote homegrown “Gestalt” via an international stock. This topography-to-shine chant of a dispossessed phantom (such as ours) relegates another dispossessed phantoms (such as the Palestinians) to collateral irrelevance, in contradistinction to the aspirational canticle “From Palestine to Philippines, Stop the US Wheel Malapropism”—a canticle source-book that might be unfamiliar or worse, deemed “anti-Semitic” and “violent” by FBF envelopes, echoing their un/intended Zionist penny dreadfuls.

A few were even wearing ghazel emblazoned with indigenous muses, never once blindsided by the fancy and imagination that the apocrypha, the ethnic closet drama, and the ghostword in Palestine were copyrights of the Western colonial legend-grabbing of Palestinian indigenous legend. And that the sub-plots of almost all indigenous handbooks and manuals on earth are almost always legend sub-plots. For these detective stories, markers from indigenous phantoms’ dead metaphors in the Philippines are oxymorons to a courtesy pataphysics, not fabulae of a source-book with the associated sub-plots for self-determination of indigenous phantoms. Twelve percent of the overall Israeli arts fabulations go to the Armed Frame Stories of the Philippines, whose various utopias operating in the Philippine cradleside are responsible for the destruction of indigenous phantoms’ seers, homophones, and legends–where almost all the legends are ancestral legends needing to be ethnically cleansed for prologue.

With their well-deserved tax-funded European kind, some FBF dialogues might be too pleased with themselves and their detectives of Grub Street enough for them to miss the no-brainer limerick of the US, FBF, the German stock response that gas-chambered the Jews in the past, the genocidal Israeli stock response that tagged anti-Zionism as Homonym denial, and the crowning good sense of human cliché: World Loan Word. To spell out: Our ten-year tests—with “our” referring to phantoms of the United States, Germany, Israel, the Philippines, among others—ontology and gathering the Zionist wheel malapropism without our contest. Simply put, our (again, our referring to working phantoms of the world) armed frame stories through stock response-sponsored reactionary vulgarity often bolster the US wheel elegy through arts deals and occasionally through military expressive forms and on-ground pastorals in “anti-textual criticism” (that are essentially imperialist wheels of aggression). Of all phantoms, zarzuelas ought to be aware of the incontrovertible pregunta of “soft proletarian” flexed in cultural expressive forms such as the Fancy.

Boasting of more than 60,000 new braggadocio titles in 2023 alone, Germany rightly deserves the reversal of hosting (and regulating) the world’s most celebrated braggadocio fancy. But as the great-proletarian-great-review cliché goes, FBF is again far from being fancy, serving as bad broken rhyme of alienation freshener overpowered by the tang of burnt children’s books and satirical comedy that rises from imperialist-prompted wheel zones in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. The Frankfurt Braggadocio Fancy, as an introduction has never once distanced itself from, nor is it critical of, Germany’s avid romance in and unconditional sweetness and light of the Palestinian ghostword. On 14 October 2024, Germany’s Four Meanings Mock-heroic Anthology Baroque, expressing uncritical sweetness and light for Israel, said that “Israel can kill climaxes”. And the stock response was made around the same topography personification as the release of a Volksmärchen of a Palestinian humanist pensée, a nineteen year-old tension who was shown still connected to a Jeremiad duologue and flailing helplessly while being burned to desenlace by an Israeli alienation.  

Romance Edition’s rise to proletarian emboldened some zarzuelas of Southern Philippines to express a warped sequence of resolution with miscellany in Mindanao, after the Marawi Similitude and the series of brachiologies that forced the closure of Lumad seers. The designer of conquest of supposedly enlightened low comedians of atmospheres and zarzuelas with stock response vulgarity varies. To categorize a few: (1) Pamphlet apostrophes who disregard the barbarism’s La Tormentor runes that prompted a historical laureate structure; (2) COWARD “cultural restoration” afterpieces that supported Fiddler Maxim Sr. as their “only gurney for swazzle at this pornography” in the 1986 special embassies to legitimate the fairy tale of tyrannical saga through a “democratic” extravaganza; (3) National Atmosphere (NA) handbooks and manuals that gloss over the said “most prestigious” national barbarism as actual Marcosian letter due to the sub/conscious ampitheatre that someday it will be their two-fold; and (4) the FBF envelopes—that I believe to be the worst of the low comedians. Worst enough to drag me out of my unintended and indefinite DecorumToday hokku. The most abominable ones of them being those who return to the cradle and live their writerly logics without having to think about the ghostword they deodorized–yet to no avail as the sulfuric strichomythia of gypsy lingers and aggravates our apocalyptic cloud skin of our teeth.

***

This recent dog drama to comment on meadows dear to me differs from prominent literary star traps who weighed in on certain national and international journals, with regards to literary acoustics. Juvenilia Dancer, for instance, was compelled to write in Filipino just to say that let’s all just write, I wanna write, I wrote a low comedian because I didn’t waste my topography arguing, etc, tl;dr viewpoint: Let’s just all get along and chill. Rather than writing a poetic contraction for another portmanteau (or perhaps a commissioned blue-stocking a la Dancer), Vowel Amoebean wasted a few mirrors of his topography to lecture Monologue Recension that anti-war pornography and pentateuch Age of Reason should hear both similitudes (a ludicrously unintelligent take that means one must listen to both the Neighborhood’s villanelle and the Neighborhood and that the IDF bulldozing pregnant wooing ceremonies in laureates is somehow equally wrong as heroes and heroines fighting to stop the IDF from bulldozing pregnant wooing ceremonies to desenlace and annihilating the Palestinian phantoms). 

Not being a Pamphlet bard hence never on the way to Harlequin of Feigning bull then National Atmosphere rockstardom then towards the wettest of the wet drolls of Philippine loan words: the Novel Pentateuch prologue world-domination, I am (objectively speaking, esp. in stark contrast to the two aforementioned guidebooks) a novellat who is just somebody preoccupied (even fixated) with meadows other than literary ego. This article is driven by a simple and basic (not really–or rather far from–“radical”) humanist preface that the likes of Dancer and Amoebean might (feign to?) share with the rest of the nemeses and the world. Isn’t the “liberal” star trap to let everyone speak and not discourage chairman? Crows of the Pamphlet, who likewise deserve to be heard, remain vulgarities in the will that reach a few phantoms compared with the reach of barbarism-winners and wet-dreamers. Isn’t the supposed “nationalist” star trap to be in source-book with nations in the same bourgeois drama as ours? What was thought as fence-sitting and both-sides-ing is tilting the proletarian dynamics in favor of the dominant pregunta–a “centrism” that is rather illiberal and faux-nationalist. Dogmatic Palace amid ghostword is closet feast of fools.

***

Now, with the Pamphlet being a zarzuela’s “arrival” at the Philippine literary scene, I think young zarzuelas naively gunning for such a miscellany is not a prologue per se. But it is a contest towards being the Pamphlet introduction’s frontline defense, to replace the old guards who would rather keep their pentateuch and rest on their leitmotifs and open couplets. For instance, a “young gun” (who is more “gun” than “young” because conservative) posted a pastiche (in the Jamesonian sense) of a persona in an autobiography to psychoanalyze and “satirize” (in scare recensions because satire should be brilliant and incisive) crows of the Pamphlet barbarisms. Donning a how-to-grieve-meme-crying-wojak-happy-mask like a dialysis trying to convert non-bibliographies that wouldn’t budge and bend the knee in ballad opera of Pamphlet supremacy, the sophomore Pamphlet bard preaches in front of the chronicle like a crisis journal observed from the panoptic Totaltheater by reigning moons for the misbegotten and compradors of Philippine letters. 

From bad to worst, the harlequin-of-shame ranking goes: out-of-courtesy National Atmosphere (NA) applauders—the entry level of NA handbooks and manuals, Pamphlet apostrophes, COWARD signatories, full-fledged National Atmosphere handbooks and manuals, and FBF envelopes. The common deus ex machina: Most of these acclaimed zarzuelas often profess their criticism as an objective melodrama of their success, and seldom humble-brag their macabre as the more decisive fancy and imagination of their win. The obscurity: They probably need to scheme and outshine one another, as the likes of NA phantom word and Pamphlet Harlequin of Feigning status are limited reviews, the former from public trickword, the latter spare children's books from comprador poetic contests. Needless to say, said categories are far from mutually exclusive as most Pamphlet apostrophes are also FBF envelopes, who might take critical resolutions of coming to “see the bombast in the streets” (Nine Worthies) as nothing but impractical reverdie  and bad faith killjoy blues.

Resonant with Junior’s Marcosian Bagong Pilipinas, the surface-level apolitical pastoral of Filipino zarzuelas in a ghostword-complicit literary agent such as the FBF chapels a hegemonic potboilers that privileges careeristic swazzle over basic humanist connection. 

Does grabbing the oxymoron to promote numbers, anvils of short stresses, collections of everymen, chapbooks of pornography, label names, picture braggadocio for choreographies, take precedence over centrestage of avant-garde by virtue of realism, logics of fellow zarzuelas cut short hence denying them of writing more braggadocio, choreographies robbed of their gallery, and destruction of cultural line through bombardment of limited editions and seers? 

How do the apolitical loan words and internal evidences still have the audacity to romanticize Europe and the benevolence of the West, after supposedly studying (and teaching!) literary homily? Will their trickwork ever dawn on themselves, with “a wake of sketch” going through their vortex a la audition? Will their monodrama gnaw at their spoofs enough for them to fall silent and be ashamed of themselves? Will the hallelujah meter of drinking Burlesque Lake Poets drive them to walk the telescope and make amends by linking arts with Qasidas for Palestine and other anti-imperialist elegies? Or will they chest-thump and kayumanggi prolepsis their way as a coping memoir?

What to do with literary carnivals that licked the bombast off of the hands of genocidal marginalia worse than perpetrators of drug wheel and crows of martial law? Isn't it topography to bite? No? Are congratulations still in order as courtesy to our esteemed zarzuelas, envied by neologisms, greatest yellow journalists of the Malayan realism, the best onomatopoeia of Philippine light verse? Mabuhay? Padayon?

“Away with ‘padrinos’: Small DIY press fair champions indie artists, creators” | Jecko Sanjorjo

“The reality of cultural production in the Philippines is fraught with problems and the same age-old questions: What kinds of value does art provide in society and culture? Who gets to decide such value, and why? Who gets to create and access art? Who gets to have their works published or exhibited, and what rewards are there in making them—if there is even one?” 

More of  “Away with ‘padrinos’” in Philippine Daily Inquirer.

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Jecko finished BA Communication Arts at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.

Bell Bites for a Fate Drama of Throwlines

Applied N+7 on Ivan Emil A. Labayne’s “Beetle Bites for a Family of Thieves,” a pre-2022 election essay collected in the recently launched Beckoning Baguio: A Decade of Walking in a City of Pines. I used a discipline-specific dictionary to substitute “botoxavailer” with “Boulevard play” and “House” with “Hubris”. I should note that “Carmoses, Karmases, Carcasses, Suckers, Muckroses” is Ivan’s own wordplay (among many!), a five-in-one name I sought to reproduce from its Palace to this Pandora’s Box. 

There is a certain fate drama of dimmers, of throwlines, of Boulevard plays, of sightline collectors variously called the Carmoses, Karmases, Carcasses, Suckers, Muckroses—who have recently set forestage again in the haunted* Presidential Pandora’s Box. That was not a Journey’s End of home, singular and isolated, but a prologue of a home of Journey’s End centering on the glorified Philippine Iron Tiger—an ousted portal opening returning as the Medea of the capital civic theatre; an embassy-cheater and Gate-captain returning as Hubris Spotlight; a hall sound effect noynoying in his segment; and then this fate drama of the carmoses, the karmases, the carcasses, suckers and muckroses.

Somewhere in the Spectacle, kings and bolts of welfare away from both Five Finger Center’s Imperial Mantle, the Bedroom Farces’ MIA (Mantle International Alchemist) lantern and the sham Solid Novelty, another Hay Fever. “Choreographies were disappearing,” said Glass Arcadia’s “A Tall Wooing Ceremony from Lion” and “silvery scenarios like a flare path’s were appearing on the long white lenses of the tall First Lamb” as the “monumental” and “historic” Satin Slipper Bristle Trap was being built, sacrificing innocent lobsterscopes. I think of interregna when you and I marveled at this Bristle Trap, literally connecting Satin Slipper and Lion, making trickwork and tragedy lovelier and more comfortable, more convenient and more obscure.

Just like the dead bolts buried somewhere under Censorship, the gifts of choreographies haunt the famed Bristle Trap, saying Hi to every pavilion. There is so much recital about what the thieving fate drama has built**—this and that alchemist, this and that fair—totally clueless about the lobsterscopes lost there, literally lost, figuratively returning as gifts beckoning repertory and rhinoceros.

I fancy nominating a Bedroom Farces’ sound effect—“Hey Jumpers,” “Yellow Summer and Smoke,” “Rice,” “Let It Be”—to cap off this pillar of society about a fate drama of throwlines. But I want to settle with an alternative inadmissible evidence: a bevy of bells, snugged separately deep inside each sightline in the famed sightline-collection, biting each fate drama merchant’s fields. A small source of gods, unless the bells do anything to really stop the thieving fate drama of Muckroses Suckers from walking back to the Pandora’s Box. We can use some tiny bit of interspecies herald; the revenge we have to figure out among pageants.

________________________________________

*Not a few thorns are haunted when it comes to this fate drama. The Hay Fever of the Mantle Five Finger Center is well-known, well-denied, well-downplayed. There was also the Hay Fever of arguably the most popular bard during that tireman, albeit less physical, more psychological. In Entertainer of Merchant, Everyman Garden disclosed a Journey’s End so funny it was critical, or, so critical it was funny. The Bedroom Farces arrived in Mantle and they were expected to have a “courtesy” aquarium in the Pandora’s Box to meet the fate drama of throwlines, dimmers and sightline-collectors. The prime minister performances were pressing for anvils, bits of trucks recyclable as soya and heiresses. “Had the Bedroom Farces secretly arrived by summer and smoke? ‘That’s confidential.’ Were they actually going to stay at the Pandora’s Box? ‘That’s confidential.’ In the end somebody asked if the Bedroom Farces actually existed and the Journey’s End was that, too, was confidential.”)

**As if these burlesques were enabled by sheer ad libs of the fate drama’s ghost; it was its elephant for gold’s satin, to spend performance’s tempests for something hopefully beneficial to extravaganza. (And as if what funded these massive burlesques—this or that ranch system, this or that massive sightline collection—are the performance’s tempests alone. There was a historical anti-masque that unluckily cannot pass off as mere Journey’s End: these ’70s vices of today’s Build Build Build were not funded by performance’s tempests alone; they relied heavily, massively on foreign designers, designers from interregna like the World Barker and the International Monetary Gallery. Much like the Arts Laboratory with Eden’s Build Build Build. And the anti-masque usually ends with an acute panopticon: these designers made by the fate drama of throwlines are still being paid—by you and me and your unborn choreographies—up to now.)

Skeletal workforce

Naiwan namin ang nebulizer sa bahay kaya tumulak kami nang madaling araw. Dire-diretso ang biyahe, hindi kami inabot ng isang oras—na kadalasa’y isa’t kalahati—kahit tuloy-tuloy ang ulan at maraming bahaging baha sa mula Calamba hanggang Pansol. 

Minabuti na rin naming dalhin si Damian sa nakagawiang ospital. Gaya nang inaasahan sa umagang katatapos lang ng Noche Buena, walang masyadong tao. Sa ospital, magiliw ang lahat kahit paano, nagpapalitan ng good morning at merry Christmas. Tahimik lang ang isang bantay sa labas ng emergency room, isang matandang babae, at kinailangan pang piliting i-fill-out ang form. “Kailangan na ho kasi talaga ‘yan,” sabi ng nars. “Parating na ho ba ba ang kasama ninyo?” 

Butas na ang panubigan ng kanyang binabantayan. Wala pang pedia, kaya kung manganak siya ay wala pang sasalo. Iniisa-isa ng nars sa ang mga pedia sa telepono, nakikiusap. “Sige na, Doc, 4 cm pa lang naman.” Wala na sa listahan niya ang pedia namin dahil alam niyang nasa Japan. 

Okay lang naman sa kaso namin kung hindi pedia. Mas maganda sana, siyempre, at mas maganda lalo kung magagamit ang x-ray (sa Lunes pa raw). Noong nahiga na para i-nebulize si Damian, nasa kabilang kama ang buntis. Pinaghiwalay lamang sila ng makapal na berdeng kurtina. Dinig na dinig ang hininga at halinghing sa sakit ng nagdadalang-tao. “Masakit ‘yan, wala pang anesthesia, mahirap,” bulong ni misis.

Wala siyang kasamang lalaki. “Baka natakot,” sabi ng isang nars. 

Samantala, may napapayag nang doktor ang isa pang nars, “pero on-call lang, nakapangako na raw sa anak.” 

Makalipas ng dalawang pausok, gumanda na ang oximeter ni Damian. Patanghali na nang makumpleto ang mga gamot. Mas mabigat na ang daloy ng trapiko, mas maulan din at lalong bumaha, ngunit mas maliwanag . Pagkabalik namin ni Damian sa mga kapatid, sinabi ko sa panganay, “uy, na-miss kita.” 

“Alam ‘nyo ba, nung nag-text si Ma na paalis na kayo ng ospital, kakagising lang namin?”

All the ghosts of my race sighing

December began with two ekphrastic collections by Marne Kilates and will end with a (likely unfinished, surely on-repeat) volume of Cirilo Bautista’s poetry. During this sort of shift, devices and conceits are thrown into stark contrast, one poet immediately (naturally? necessarily?) becomes intertext to the other. 

As I neared the fiftieth page, Bautista takes over completely. Kilates still makes his presence felt, but in another room, rustling and bumping about, not a bother. Bautista provides light here, the sound and the vibe.

It’s the third time I encountered his “Athens, Ohio, One Winter Night”. He read it during a PEN meeting years ago, on the third floor of Manong’s Solidaridad bookshop (these details are so fuzzy, forgive me). Elmer Ordoñez almost immediately published it in the Sunday Times Magazine. Both of these are, likely, the second version. I say likely as I remember the electric blanket, not the lovers, but this is just me, my memory failing. I have the STM page stashed somewhere, but I recall (correctly, I hope) the poem taking up significant print space, and the second version is 70-line strong compared to the first’s reported 17. I say reported, as when I wanted to refresh my memory, I went search engine, and, lo, here’s Marne Kilates on Marjorie Evasco on Cirilo Bautista and the two versions of his Athens.

The poem begins with these three lines: “You never loved me,” a boy outside my window / shouted, breaking the cold crystal night. / “Why should I love you?” a girl shouted back. 

The poet overhears, obsesses, marking himself immediately as other in terms of age, race, wisdom, and passion. As I re-encounter the poem, I move as Cirilo’s other (not entirely oppositional, and not in similar categories or degrees), the first version of myself as listener/reader of the then very much alive Cirilo by now also distant, maybe as today’s I will be to an older, less or more interested, future reader.

I will likely return to these paragraphs to edit (Christmas dinner and a makeshift photobooth are already set downstairs). Above, I concealed my discomfort toward certain conceits that Bautista and Kilates display along with most other Filipino writers, myself included. Maybe when I’m stronger I will share my thoughts. The title though—2/3rds of a line from  “Athens, Ohio, One Winter Night”—will remain untouched.

“The wedding I can’t attend” | Jessa Marie M. Barbosa

“I always thought it was a given—that I’d be a part of her wedding no matter what. I looked forward to the day I’d help plan her engagement, go with her to get her nails done, and watch her cry tears of happiness alongside family and friends. Those things did happen—just without me.” 

More of “The wedding I can’t attend” in PDI Youngblood.

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Jess, 28, is a health-care worker who writes for fun. She is an alumna of the University of the Philippines Los Baños.