Meeting Oscar

Last week I said goodbye to my job as vice president for Public Affairs of the University of the Philippines System. It was a job I never sought, and it was coterminous with that of my boss Dodong Nemenzo to begin with, so leaving in itself was no problem; it was, in fact, a welcome relief, and turning the job over to my successor – my good friend and fellow writer Jing Hidalgo – was smooth and eas

The best thing about that job was that it allowed me to visit practically all of UP’s campuses – about a dozen of them, three in the Visayas alone – and to meet all the good people who were working for paupers’ wages to give our brightest young students the best education they could get, and to give the country itself a fighting chance in this increasingly hostile world.

The worst part of it, I can say now, was playing the university’s lobbyist and having to deal with the execrable vanity and pomposity of some of our most visible and shrillest lawmakers. In the course of our campaign to secure a new charter for UP so it could serve our people better and compete with the region’s best, we had to endure countless hours in the chilly sidelines of the Senate over these past two years, waiting for our turn to be heard, only to be rebuffed by the arrogance, the ignorance, and the indifference of a few senators who obviously believed their personal plaints and causes to be more important than the nation’s intellectual future.

I did get to know and admire the quiet competence and sincerity of some lawmakers and their staff – among them our chief sponsor, Senator Kiko Pangilinan. But time and again we heard self-serving lectures from the same few blowhards about what a great privilege it was to be elected a Senator of the Republic – albeit of limited tenure – and therefore how perilously we stood at their mercy, given their power to shred our budget (and, while they were at it, to eviscerate our charter). We successfully fought off the worst of these tyrants, but others have stepped in to fill this puzzling need to bash UP while suffering larger and more obvious sources of shame and scandal in government.

This is not to suggest that the university itself is not without its faults and its peculiar vanities. I have always been and will remain a critic of the kind of small-mindedness that afflicts people who know little else but their books and the latest gossip over coffee at the faculty lounge. I have been nearly as dismayed by academic politics as I have been by my involuntary education in legislative bombast. But while no one can despise a professor with more vehemence than a fellow professor, at the end of the day we still share our knowledge and steal no one’s money. Our tenure – which we hold for the duration of our professional lives – emanates from people who know better and not less than ourselves.

Thankfully I have an option that most people don’t, the best form of revenge against life’s many aggravations: I can always write about them, immortalize their follies and foibles (alongside mine) in a story or novel that will survive all of us. This is one thing that fiction does much better than journalism, the headlines of which tend to be forgotten within days while characters like Rizal’s Padre Damaso or Doña Victorina remain in our collective memory, more vividly and imperishably than most other people who truly lived. I look forward to fleshing out such characters in my forthcoming fiction.

So for at least the next three years, I am eschewing any new or alternative administrative appointments, and to complete my re-immersion into full-time teaching, I’ve asked not to be assigned any graduate classes this next semester, and instead will boldly go to the frontlines and trenches of undergraduate education. I’ll be introducing a freshman class to what I hope they’ll see as the wonders of literature, as well as handling classes in Philippine literature in English, the world’s greatest short stories, and an introduction to fiction writing. It’ll be a pain, in a way, to be holding forth on iambic pentameter at three in the afternoon, when I would have been having coffee with some university constituent or other, but I have no doubt that teaching in the classroom will beat loitering in the hallways of Congress any old time.

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I didn’t get to see any of the movies that figured in this year’s Oscar Awards, but watching the awards ceremonies on TV suddenly revived a memory I’d tucked away in some drawer of my mind for, oh, 18 years. That was when I actually saw and held an Oscar statuette – not in Hollywood, and not in a museum, but atop the kitchen cabinet of a very laid-back and very quiet film producer-director named David Goodman, somewhere in the leafy outskirts of Philadelphia. It was a real Oscar, which David had won in 1985 (a year otherwise distinguished by The Color Purple, Out of Africa, and Kiss of the Spider Woman – good Lord, has it been that long?) for a documentary titled Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements, a movie about a doctor in El Salvador that I’d never heard of until he told me about it, and still have yet to see. David was a most unlikely Oscar winner, a tall, lanky, hippie-ish kind of guy who wore a chambray shirt and corduroy jeans.

I can’t even remember exactly how or why I went down to Philadelphia to see him, from my graduate school in Michigan. I think he was interested in doing a film on the Philippines, and a Filipino friend who knew some Quakers – David was probably a Quaker – told him that she knew a Filipino scriptwriter in the US, namely me. I met him at the Philadelphia office of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers to you), and we took a long train ride to the end of the line in Lansdowne – a pretty, tree-lined suburb where his large, ramshackle house stood.

I fictionalized that encounter in a curious story titled "Storyline," which I had to look at again for the first time in about a decade just to refresh my memory of my encounter with David and his Oscar. His living room, I wrote, was "a wistful description of a combat zone. Newspapers, books, solitary sneakers, old clothes, receipts, a playhorse, and a galaxy of plastic stars and moons cluttered the floor of the cavernous room, along a wall of which there stood a graying fireplace. A sedate sofa was flanked by a pair of lounging chairs that had clearly been requisitioned from other parts of the house, or from other houses. White patches of fluff could be seen at the armrests, and the fabric’s colors shifted from an ancient plush in the corners to a cheap sheen in the bulges."

The Oscar on the mantelpiece had already acquired a coppery patina when I saw it. It exuded no special brilliance, and David himself said nothing about it. But for that moment – a fleeting one, as it turned out – I was aware of being in the presence of some grand achievement, as if some strange exotic bird had perched outside my window on an otherwise ordinary day, looked me in the eye, then flew away.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.