In The American West In The Dumpster

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

…

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

…

These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of the photographer.

(Richard Avedon, Foreword, In the American West, New York, Harry N. Abrahams, 2005)

 

Break, Blow, Burn: Paglia Reads Plath

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face

(from Daddy by Sylvia Plath)

30 June 2009. Briefly back in Houston to take stock of stuff I had slowly been sending over in anticipation of finishing my degree and leaving Gainesville at the end of Fall. I did not realize it will take a couple more terms to finally get everything done and find myself another job situation. Needless to say, it has been a long-drawn-out move. My stuff–especially my books–have become what I feared: a ball-and-chain. How liberating it was to have lost all my stuff in a fire five years ago. (Was it that long ago?)

I need to do some long delayed spring cleaning, and kick the habit of desperately hoarding books. Back home, it was rare to find even the likes of Tolkien, Rilke, and Neruda at National Bookstore while I was still in school. Here, there is no reason to hoard; books are a mouse-click away, or, if you live in Houston, they will be at Half-Price Books. My latest haul there: Amy Clampitt’s What The Light Was Like; Seamus Heaney’s Station Island; Goethe’s Faust, Part One (trans. Randall Jarrell); Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante; Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn.

I was surprised that when I was editing the stack of books I wished to bring to Illinois, I stayed away from my stock male poets like Edward Hirsch, Mark Strand, Mark Doty, and Adam Zagajewski, and went for Amy Clampitt (The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure) and Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Supernatural Love)–women poets of dense, complex language. What does this forebode?

In Break, Blow, Burn, “America’s premier intellectual provocateur” Camille Paglia gives “close readings” of 43 poems from her experience as a classroom teacher. (These reviewers make it appear there is a dearth of intellectuals here in the US.) The voice of the text is thus off of a freshman English class–i.e., approachable by a general audience who seek help in appreciating the classics–but also brings to bear the author’s scholarly erudition. The book also appeals to the teacher of poetry, as a superb example of how to make the text come alive in a classroom of even the most indifferent non-literature/-humanities majors. Paglia uses the politically agnostic tools of New Criticism in her readings, but avoids their “genteel sentimentality” with generous helpings of Freud.

 

New Wave Nostalgia

I just realized that 2007 passed by without me noticing that it has 20 been years since I graduated high school. Wow. When I returned home to the Philippines last December, I met up with Carl, a former high school classmate I have not seen in more than 20 years. He moved to the US after sophomore high school, and went to UC Berkeley for college and PhD. We kept in touch, on and off, through the years, by letters in long hand, and then by email. We connected through our interests in literature and contemporary music. Carl introduced me to both Pessoa and Messiaen.

Even when I relocated to the US for graduate school, I never got the opportunity to meet up with Carl. He was living in Minnesota, while I was studying in Houston. Last year, he quit his job to go traveling in Canada, and to spend time writing. Between the two of us, the idea came up of him going back to the Philippines to teach for a term in order find time to write. I seized that opportunity for him to teach in Ateneo, and helped him find his way in applying for a position there. It was thus fortuitous (and circuitous!) for us to be finally meeting, after all these years, back home in the Philippines.

All this nostalgia over high school brings back to mind the New Wave music we used to listen to in the 80’s. A lot of them sound pretty dated nowadays–a radio station here started playing the 80’s as part of their oldies repertoire–but there are a few that I still find endearing. I used to record Tears for Fears’ video Mad World and replay it over and over again to mimic Roland Orzabal’s cool dance moves, and mess up my hair to channel the goth edginess of The Cure’s Robert Smith.

These five songs are my top picks from the New Wave era. They bring back memories I was most fond of in high school, without the wincing nor cringing.

 

The Burbs

“Here it is, where the common people live,” J. said as we entered a suburban neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses and close-cropped lawns. Where are the people? I wondered. They must be cooped up inside their climate-controlled spaces. It was the end of July after all. In my journal, I had scrawled only one line: Arrived in Houston. I would live for a couple of weeks at J. and T.’s until I got my own place. T. was a nurse, like most Filipinos I would later meet here, in one of those big hospitals that form the conglomerate called the Texas Medical Center. A Philippine presidential candidate had once come here for treatment. He had been a strong contender until abruptly dropping out of the campaign trail. He is now dead. Seeing these prodigious facilities for every imaginable disease makes one think, if for anything, Houston must be the place to get sick in and die. J. was an officer of the Harris County Sheriff’s Department. He escorted inmates on medical treatment. I imagined her installing drips on shooting victims as he handcuffed them on the bed railings. She’d get flustered and miss the vein. He’d inadvertently tighten the cuffs. Kinky.

 

Lonely in the Lone Star State

Some of the things I brought with me when I relocated to the US were fabrics from different tribes of the Philippines–the Igorot, Kankanay, Maranaw, Tausug, Yakan–as palpable signs of home. It is strange to feel a kinship with them when I am, perhaps, culturally much closer to the Americans and Europeans. Yet the more I stay here in the US, the more I realize how differently I see the world, or perhaps more correctly, how differently I feel about the world than they (the Americans) do. I remember my friend, the poet Beni Santos, telling me about her trip to England, and her discovery of Shakespeare’s roots. What she found was not an affinity for England’s greatest poet, but a sense of alterity: Shakespeare and the English are totally and strangely different. “Iba talaga sila sa atin,” she said. No matter how anglicized our literary education had been, there remained a continental rift between us.

Other things I brought with me were books I knew I could depend on to reconnect with my country: Kung Baga sa Bigas (Pete Lacaba), Old Timer (Butch Dalisay), Alipato (Beni Santos), Mga Sinaunang Griyego (Roque Ferriols, SJ), Pasyon and Revolution (Reynaldo Ileto). Recently, I frequent the blogsite of my friend and poet Rofel Brion. There he writes simply about work, friends, family, in the Tagalog of Laguna, in a language so whittled down it glints with the clarity of water. There is a purity of feeling: it is not just writing in Filipino, it feels thoroughly Filipino.