Notes from the 4th summer of the 3rd millennium

NJ passing away just four days before the 2004 Dumaguete Summer Writers Workshop would begin naturally made my mind flash back, foggily, to Dumaguete 1962. That was the year of the very first writers workshop in the country (though UP Diliman was doing this thing already sort of informally). NJ attended that workshop as one of the panelists, along with Franz Arcellana and the Tiempos. He was loud gold indeed – or is it golden loud – and the literary youngsters were lucky to be seated next to him. When young Willy Sanchez spoke NJ almost immediately exclaimed: "Franz he must be a writer!"

The month was April, too. The first workshop was an April, not May, affair.

The great NJ after lunch somehow found his way, Willie Sanchez and I in tow, to North Pole, then Dumaguete’s premier watering hole (now only a legend). Since the workshop session would start at 3 p.m., we had over two hours of beer and drunken singing for, as luck would have it, we happened to be the only customers then.

The original North Pole, then on Alfonso XIII (now Perdices St.), was an incredible heven of a place for writers like NJ and Willy to drink and sing and carouse in. Nick sang the songs from South Pacific, apparently just recently shown in Manila that year. The South Pacific at the North Pole! Come to think of it. He sang well. He sang very well. And since of the generations of writers that followed Nick’s it is Erwin Castillo who can sing at entry level, I guess that’s a good indication that Castillo is his heir apparent. "To remember and to sing, that is my vocation," – A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, remember?

I remember saying, for sheer lack of anything to say, that Nolledo was my idol. NJ protested in mock hurt and I quickly added, hoping to make amends, that I had not really read him – the great Nick Joaquin – yet. "That makes it worse!" NJ said, Willy laughing exactly the same way he still laughs now (though the last time I heard him laugh was on the phone nine years ago).

* * *

The 2004 Dumaguete Summer Writers Workshop panelists for the first week were Edith Tiempo, Jimmy Abad, Krip Yuson, Butch Perez and myself. Let me just cull a moment from that first week. We were reading a story that had a sex scene. I ventured to say that a writer ought to really brace himself for the writing of a sex scene, that to "do" such a scene is always a challenge. I was implying of course that the scene in question left much to be desired. Butch Perez said that pretty much the same thing holds true for the filmmaker – a still to be shot sex scene or sequence is for the filmmaker always a challenge.

Edith joined this line of discussion by recalling a scene from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the two youngsters are lying still in bed, clad to reveal, with a classical piece of music in the background. The music of the spheres?

Somehow I found myself alluding to Thomas Aquinas’ (was it his?) "All animals are sad after sex."

Three weeks later I texted Butch P. to ask how he found the scene in Peque Gallaga’s Oro Plata Mata. The one with Cherie Gil, eyes shut, poised like a lotus astride Ronnie Lazaro The Beatles singing No Reply somewhere.

John and George gone. And now Nick is gone. With his passing the coming to the surface of the new old men of Philippine letters.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

* * *

To get to Cebu by speedboat you sort of ricochet from Bohol, which is east and slightly north of Dumaguete. To get back to Dumaguete, you sort of retrace the ricochet. The Supercat stays in port for only a few minutes. I went to Cebu on the 12th and traced the ricochet on the 14th. On the 13th, I spent almost the whole day at RSO Bookstore on Jones Ave., where the books are laid out not only wall to wall but sprawling on the floor. I bought a new, maybe the latest, William Kotzwinkle novel, The Bear Came Over The Mountain, and a new age book, Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm.

WILA has been helping keep the literary scene alive in Cebu the past 11 years or so. The launch of my book Checkmeta in Cebu, which they sponsored was held at Waterfront Cebu City Hotel, which therefore, at some point or two, made me feel a bit like Marlon Brando of Last Tango fame. Or maybe Julius Caesar. I came, I saw, WILA conquered. Sawila. Just ask the guy who shot the picture that appears on my book’s cover, Bob Lim ( the Freddie Aguilar of Cebu photography) – or better yet the Hilario Davide Jr. of Cebu poetry, Simeon Dumdum, Jr.

There was so much wine that evening I swear I’ll never be able to drink wine again without remembering Annabelle Amor, WILA’s present chair. Vino rojo she had texted, and vino rojo it was on Twelfth Night. Nothing promised that was not performed.

In my story "The Reader" ("story" is really not the word for it – the crazy prose piece is better off with the term "narrative"), I invented Mr. MW, a British novelist based in the Philippines who, in two decades of exile writing, put literary matters askew in the country when it was apparent he had become also, albeit only arguably, a Filipino writer. Who would have dreamed this tongue-in-cheek invention would become true and my narrative prophetic? Certainly not me. But lo and behold, a British novelist has been with us for over a decade now writing novels set in the Philippines with Filipino characters in the cast! He is Timothy Mo, a three-time Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Shakespeare’s country, nominee.

Jun Dumdum came in looking, as he always does in my mind’s eye, like Solzhenitsyn with a smile, and said, "Sar – si Tim." I pretended to recognize the man with a nod and quickly looked elsewhere. But there he still stood and I, ever the handicapped conversationalist (except on occasions) politely groped for a word to fill the void with. I asked, in Cebuano, if his candidate whoever it was won. Unperturbed the bloke replied in English and I mean English – English accent! I blurted: "Tim! I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you! God! You look so Filipino!"

Timothy Mo is half-Asian and with the deep tan and medium height, he looks as Pinoy as, say, Joe Cordero, the Silliman stage actor whom he resembles.

He seems elusive if not reclusive, though, a la Castaneda or Pynchon with the photographers. Look at the photo of him. Needless to say, that’s him trying to mask his face with his master novelist’s hand. That he came to the launch at all is because the only male WILA, Jun Dumdum, is his close friend.

* * *

A disappointment waited for me in Dumaguete. Willy Arsena texted from Zamboanga that my projected launch of the self-same Checkmeta in Dipolog was off. The launch had been scheduled for the first of June, which is Araw ng Zamboanga del Norte. The reason: The politician who was supportive of cultural happenings in Dipolog had just lost in the elections and the art group in Dipolog/Dapitan were now uncertain of their plans.

One of the winners is Cesar Jalosjos, for congressman.

And my mind flashes back foggily to 1969 when I taught for the first time, at the Ateneo de Zamboanga. The just elected congressman, a namesake, was my student in English then. Try as I might I cannot visualize him except as the teen-ager he was then, tall and lean and boyish and very quiet.

Anyway there goes my plan of possibly sleeping a night or two in the house of Jose Rizal.

Some other time perhaps. Perhaps in the fifth summer of the new millennium. When we are not angry with one another.