Your Face Tomorrow

How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?…All these things can be noticed, observed, smelled and even, on occasions, felt, the chill shock of condensing sweat. At the very least you sense them. You know or should know. Or perhaps once these things have happened, we do not realise that we knew they were going to happen, and that this was precisely how it would turn out. And isn’t it true that, deep down, we are not as surprised as we pretend to others and, above all, to ourselves, and that we then see the logic of it all and recognise and even remember the unheeded warnings that some layer of our unconscious mind did, nevertheless, pick up? Perhaps we want to convince ourselves of our own astonishment, as if we might find in it a specious consolation and various pointless excuses that really do not work…Yet hardly anyone ever feels such astonishment. Not deep down, not in the knowledge that dares not speak or declare itself or even allow itself to be known or to become conscious, not in that knowledge which so fears itself that it hates and denies and hides from itself, or looks at itself only out of the corner of one eye and with its face half-hidden.

JAVIER MARÍAS, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear

You’ll Never Have to Guess at What Jealousy Means Again

The terrible truth is that feeling really does have to be learned. It comes spontaneously when one is in love, or when somebody important dies; but people like you and me – interpretative artists – have to learn also to recapture those feelings, and transform them into something we can offer to the world in our performances. You know what Heine says…”Out of my great sorrows I make my little songs.”…And what we make out of the feelings like brings us is something a little different, something not quite so shattering but very much more polished and perhaps also more poignant, than the feelings themselves. Your jealousy – it hurts now, but…you’ll never have to guess at what jealousy means again, when you meet with it in music…Everybody claims to have been in love, but to love so that you can afterward distill something from it which makes other people know what love is or reminds them forcibly – that takes an artist.

ROBERTSON DAVIES, A Mixture of Frailties

Wisdom May Be Rented

Wisdom may be rented, so to speak, on the experience of other people, but we buy it an an inordinate price before we make it our own forever.

ROBERTSON DAVIES, Leaves of Malice

Always That Hum

And in that moment, the longing he’d felt for Sasha at last assumed a clear shape: Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still there — his young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet [...] Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.

JENNIFER EGAN, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Updates

There’s nothing like getting a story acceptance (or rejection for that matter) in your inbox first thing in the morning. A short story of mine  titled “Trichophagia” was accepted by The Other Room for publication!

Also, I just received news that the anthology The Dragon and the Stars (DAW), which had been nominated for Canada’s 2011 Prix Aurora Award and includes my short story “The Man on the Moon”, won in the category of Best Related Work – English! Congratulations to editors Derwin Mak and Eric Choi and the other writers!

Derwin Mak, Eric Choi, and Tony Pi accepting the award at the SFContario in Toronto, image courtesy of Eric

And to round up the day, a short fiction piece of mine got rejected by a literary journal but had made it to the second round. This piece has previously been a near-hit in another venue so it looks promising! I’ve generally been making it to a lot of second rounds lately, which is more than what I can say about last year, so it’s quite encouraging.

Finally, a HUGE thank you to the intrepid Charles Tan for getting Junot Diaz to sign a copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I had read two years ago (just found out it won the Pulitzer in 2008), to me. TO ME. There’s a part of my mind going Oh my lord, Junot Diaz WROTE MY NAME.

Junot Diaz was in Manila for the Manila International Literary Festival 2011. (He was in Hong Kong too for the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival last year, which I had missed for a reason I can’t remember now but I hope had been a good one.) Charles has the interviews with Mr. Diaz up in his blog so check them out!

Alessandro Baricco and Without Blood

I’m a big admirer of Alessandro Baricco‘s prose. Sometimes his plotting gets a bit questionable but I enjoy the journey anyway because his lines are worth it:

Jun Rail’s mouth did not leave you in peace. It simply bored a hole in your imagination. It muddled up your thoughts. ‘One day God drew Jun Rail’s mouth. That’s what gave him that strange idea called sin.’

Lands of Glass

He can describe something without having to really describe it, not even by what I think is conventional figurative language (the slacker in me rejoices), and he achieves this by establishing a very strong, very confident and trustworthy narrative voice that speaks in a consistently economical style. Considering that I read his works in translation, his use of language is a triumph. Strong openings, for one:

Only seldom, and in a way that some people, in those moments, when they saw her, were heard to whisper

“She’ll die of it”

or

“She’ll die of it”

or perhaps

“She’ll die of it”

or even

“She’ll die of it.”

All around, hills.

My land, thought Baron Carewall.

Ocean Sea

Futhermore, his narrators all have a tendency to very directly have the reader learn Something About Life but they never come off as preachy because he writes so plainly.

No matter how you try to live just one single life, others will see inside it a thousand more, and this is the reason that you cannot avoid getting hurt.

Without Blood

I read Without Blood last night and I was thinking of how it reminded me of Sandor Marai‘s Embers.  It’s been a couple of years back since I read that book (which is why I have a separate tab with a blow-by-blow account of the plot because I’m terrible at remembering that sort of thing) but they’re similar in that they’re short so you’re always anticipating the punch around the corner and they’re both reluctant cat-and-mouse games over the wrongs committed in a bygone era, reluctant because a crucial part of these books is whether or not it still matters to exact revenge when things have already changed so much.

I was very caught up in Embers’ psychological build-up and irony but was a little let down by the ending. Literally handing it to the metaphysical made sense in answering the questions in the character’s heads, but as the final, physical act that tied up a very dramatic and vivid journey, it felt a bit like a cop-out. I remembering thinking, You write a story like that now and end it that way, you’d be poleaxed by the editors (granted, Embers was written in 1942 so that’s a moot point). On the other hand, with a build-up like that, you’d be hard-pressed to find a payoff equal in emotional intensity without resorting to melodrama.

While reading, I wondered if Without Blood was going to end up in the same place because the build-up is even more involving – it makes Embers look very First World Problems (which it actually sort of is, now that I think about it). The viscerality of Without Blood is spartan and efficient.

Salinas placed the gun against one of Roca’s knees. Then he fired. The knee exploded like a piece of fruit.

 

El Gurre responded instinctively. The machine-gun burst lifted the child up off the floor and hurled him at the wall, in a mess of lead, bone, and blood. Like a bird shot in mid-flight, Tito thought.

Then they set the house on fire with a little girl inside. She survives and spends her life taking revenge on each of the murderers until she meets the last one, who is by now a seventy-year-old man selling newspapers at a kiosk and herself only ten years younger.

The ending is certainly unpredictable, with just enough foreshadowing to keep it from being entirely incredulous, although I think the last two sentences pushed it just a tad too much. Still, the ending can’t match the tension of the first act of the story, although I’m a little less let down here than in Embers. But again I’m made to think, well, what ending could be possibly satisfying to a build-up like that? and I can’t think of any. For a story like that, there’s usually just two options of ending it, but the first option was already looking to be unlikely toward the end, and the second one would only be stopping short of really disenfranchising the reader.

A friend of mine, who admits he’s one to prefer big dramatic flourishes in the end, read one of my short story drafts and said it was well-crafted and well-executed but needed a bit more oomph. According to him, everyone in the story was both a hero and a villain and it was all just too human and dignified. That made me chuckle because in a way that’s what I had been going for in writing that story,  though to the detriment of giving the reader a satisfying, punchy end. I think that’s also what Baricco might possibly have been going for as well.

Then she thought that however incomprehensible life is, probably we move through it with the single desire to return to the hell that created us, to live beside whoever, once, saved us from the inferno. She tried to ask herself where that absurd faithfulness to horror came from but found that she had no answers. She understood only that nothing is stronger than the instinct to return, to where they broke us, and to replicate that moment forever. Only thinking that the one who saved us once can do it forever. In a long hell identical to the one from which we came.

Without Blood

Philippine Speculative Fiction 6 Line-up

From editor Kate Osias’ blog:

Alternative Histories by Ian Rosales Casocot
Strange Adventures in Procreation by Andrew Drilon
Lament of the Counselor by Jay Anyong
The Grim Malkin by Vincent Michael Simbulan
A Smell of Mothballs by Mailin Paterno
Ashland by Elyss G. Punsalan
Carpaccio (or, Repentance as a Meat Recipe) by Arlynn Despi
Eternal Winter by Maria Pia Vibar Benosa
From the Book of Names My Mother Did Not Give Me by Christine V. Lao
Hollowbody by Crystal Koo
Offerings to Aman Sinaya by Andrei Tupaz
On Wooden Wings by Paolo Chikiamco
Prisoner 2501 by Philip Corpuz
Resurrection by Victor Ocampo
Simon’s Replica by Dean Alfar
Break in at Batay Street by Francis Gabriel Concepcion
The Big Man by Asterio Gutierrez
The Bookshelves of Mrs. Go by Charles Tan
The Impossible and the R.S.C. Gregorio del Pilar by Alex Osias
The Kiddie Pool by Kenneth Yu
The Storyteller’s Curse by Eliza Victoria
Villainoguing by Joseph Montecillo

Congrats to everyone!

Madness In Great Ones ( + Some Book Reviews)

The title’s so because I can’t think of anything else. It’s what I’m listening to right now, a track from Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder.

Right, publication updates: I can’t quite remember when I last did one of these or what I’d said, and I didn’t get much writing done toward the latter end of 2010 anyway, so I’ll just leave it with the latest one – “Hollowbody” for Philippine Speculative 6. Roar.

OK, how about recent books I’ve read then? I think I’m having an early onset of crabbiness and general just-can’t-be-pleased. I’ve been feeling uncharitable toward the last few books I’ve read; it’s getting really hard to find something I was really satisfied with at the end, let alone had me blown away. I think the last  one I was comprehensively happy with (i.e. fully engaged with from beginning to end) was Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End and that was quite a while back.

 

Beatrice and Virgil – Yann Martel

You know how using idol-worship as a basis for having the hots for someone is a bad thing because it’ll fizzle out quickly enough when he disappoints you? That someone is Yann Martel. Context: like many people, I had loved Life of Pi, which was absolute Shiver-Down-the-Spine material. Now I know about the curse of sophomore slumps so I set the bar lower for this one, but that didn’t help.  It started with huge, metafictional parallels between the protagonist and Martel himself about (well, whaddya know) sophomore slumps, which I really should have taken as a warning sign, except I was still too smitten with Martel and the fact that I had a crisp copy of his newest book. When the action started, I thought triumphantly, yup, Martel in full form and figure. Then it began to wane. The awesome factor, I mean. The initial clue-dropping regarding the key metaphor of the book started off as interesting because it felt like a quiz about how much you know of the Holocaust, but when it turned out that the Holocaust = animal extermination, I wasn’t quite buying it. But let’s say I did and wasn’t offended by the analogy, I still wouldn’t have been too happy about how it was executed.  Sledgehammering, cheap sentiments, and desperate melodrama so the story could end with a bang (quite literally) were involved, and I think a serious treatment of the Holocaust, which I do believe the book was aiming for anyway, could have used a lot more finesse.

Outside the Dog Museum – Jonathan Carroll

I  love this man’s blog and the book really wasn’t bad (or as grave as the cover is). It’s strange, inventive, surreal, and feels relevant. (Despite of or because of that?) I grew to care and sympathize with the main character, Harry Radcliffe, (something I’ve been doing less and less with protagonists of other books and movies lately) and the supporting characters were great fun. (Hassenhuttl entertained me a great deal, for some reason.)   My scruple is with the first third of the book, which was composed of a lot of cut-away scenes that didn’t feel like they had much direction and got me wondering if I wanted to stay along for the ride. I understood it as an introduction of Radcliffe, but I thought it ran too long before the action started happening and didn’t seem as necessary. Once it started, though, the story got a lot more enjoyable and had a climax that paid off. I think the first part was supposed to establish the douchebaggery of Harry Radcliffe to contrast with his later redemption, but incidentally I can’t say I was quite feeling it – probably because I got distracted with my impatience or I just have a pretty high tolerance of douchebaggery.

All miracles need an audience. One that’ll appreciate them. Frank Sinatra’s not such a hit in front of deaf people.

Remember Me – Melvyn Bragg

This was rather painful. Admittedly, this probably wasn’t the best book to start reading Melvyn Bragg with; it’s one of those types written when the author is so up there already that he can get away with unabashed autobiography or self-references (I was hit with the same thing with Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, but that was mercifully short). Still though, look at all those adjectives on the front cover. I didn’t think that halfway through I’d be dying for the book to finish already. And it’s a massive one. Full of awfully good prose though, to Bragg’s credit, and almost Dostoevskian insight and perception into human behavior. But there can be too much of a good thing. The sheer length of the thing. You know when the temperature drops so low it doesn’t matter if it drops any lower because the pain’s all the same anyway? I’d say the same for the reader’s immersion into the thoughts and feelings of  Joe and Natasha, which are just on rinse and repeat for the greater half of the (have I said it’s massive?) book. I don’t think the length was justified at all, given how homogeneous the content was. Which could have been the point of the book, Life being protracted and repetitive and all, but I don’t think it had to be demonstrated so fully for us to get it.

…He did not have long to wait for the train. As he heard it come closer through the tunnel it was as if a massive magnetic force began to pull him towards the edge of the platform, drawing him towards the tracks, overwhelming his resistance, and as the noise grew louder the strength of the pull grew and he found himself swaying, helpless, about to be taken fatally forward by it and then the train broke out of the tunnel and charged towards him.

That’s it for today. Saving the others for later.

Some Banalities of Life Today

As I type this, Hong Kong is plunged in the middle of a ghastly 8 degrees Celsius. Which would be nothing but balmy weather in the context of Beijing, but in a place like Hong Kong, where heaters are not à la mode in apartments, it is simply bewildering, if not rather irritating, the way the temperature insists on going down a tad bit more everyday. Makes rather good small-talk fodder, though.

How goeth the flat-hunting in HK, you ask? Bit hard to tell when one recommended real estate agent is still on holiday leave, and the other’s contact numbers lead to a call center that claims the numbers aren’t in use. All this waiting (and not being able to do anything about it) is driving me a bit nuts. Till Saturday, then. Meanwhile I’ll have to content myself with browsing real estate sites to get a solid knowledge of prices in different areas right now and taking a look at potential neighborhoods. You don’t want to charge right into unrecommended agents here; they can be downright pushy and nasty sometimes.

Read Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance to Punctuation. I learned that I truly and categorically read nonfiction a lot faster than fiction, but then it is a small book. Enjoyed it. The humor was so addicting that I read it to and fro campuses on the trains  – though admittedly a rather small feat for today since the times I was on the train allowed for seats. ( The other time I was trying to read a book on the train rather unwisely during rush hour – Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, which I still haven’t finished yet because I noticed I’m getting a little annoyed with Misha Vainberg’s character, and yes I know it’s supposed to be satire, but still- I was pretzeled in with other human pretzels with my brave paperback sprouting out – insert a workable simile for me here, it’s 12:30AM and I had a full day of work – in barely the right angle for me to read it.)

Yes, the book. It comes with a Punctuation Repair Kit (stickers of a variety of punctuation marks that one can easily apply to signs in public areas if needed), which should tell you how serious and tongue-in-cheek the book is. I particularly liked the bit about how the period/full stop is the father of the family, the comma the mother, the semicolon the daughter playing the piano with crossed hands, and the exclamation point the big attention-deficit brother who breaks things and laughs too loudly. Recommended for a quick, relaxed read.

And tomorrow is another day.

A Poem I Loved When I Was Seventeen

Escapist’s Song

“The first woman I loved,” he said-
“Her skin was satin and gold.”
“The next woman I loved,” he said-
“Her skin was satin and gold.”
“The third woman I loved,” he said-
“Was made in a different mold.
She was deeper than me, and said so;
She was stronger than me, and said so;
She was wiser than me, and proved it;
I shivered, and grew cold.
“The fourth woman I loved,” he said-
“Her skin was satin and gold.”

- Theodore Spencer