Sizzling similes
August 8, 2005 | 12:00am
It was during a recent classroom discussion of Ernest Hemingway’s classic short story "Hills Like White Elephants" that I brought up the fact that Hemingway had been an ambulance driver in France during World War I. All by itself, it was a factoid that I wouldn’t have given much further thought to, except that I remembered that Hemingway wasn’t alone – among subsequently famous men – in that unusual occupation.
Somewhere in that same forlorn theater of war, a couple of other future celebrities were sitting behind the wheel of an ambulance: The cartoonist Walt Disney and the composer Cole Porter. (The actual extent of Porter’s wartime engagement now seems to be in question, but I recall how gallantly he came off in Hollywood’s 1950s rendition of his life, Night and Day, countless reruns of which I watched as a boy on my neighbor’s TV in the ’60s, with no less than Cary Grant standing in for the homely musician.)
I probably pay more attention to these biographical details than I should – and, like a proper formalist, I try to keep them out of our appreciation of the work itself – but if a writer can’t care about another writer’s life, who will? The personal circumstances of writers and artists fascinate me, if only because they often tend to prove how little formal training in literature many of the best writers had, although they later made major contributions not only to its creative corpus but to poetics and theory as well.
William Carlos Williams – like many others such as François Rabelais, Anton Chekhov, and William Somerset Maugham (and in our time, Michael Crichton and Oliver Sacks) – was a physician, a pediatrician. O. Henry – back when he was still William Sidney Porter – was a convicted embezzler who made good use of his prison time to reinvent himself and to think about the feel-good stories he would become famous for. T. S. Eliot was, for a time, a bank clerk at Lloyd’s; Wallace Stevens was a lawyer who became a successful insurance executive. A little closer to home, Virginia Woolf supplemented the family income (and underwent therapy) by printing books by hand. The early feminist American writer Kate Chopin ran a general store and a plantation before turning to fiction. (Our own brilliant Angela Manalang Gloria, on the other hand, forsook poetry for running a rice mill and investing in stocks and real estate.)
It isn’t just the extra income that another job gives the writer or the artist; it’s the raw experience and the perspective you can’t get even if you camped out in the library for a month and read all of Shakespeare. Outside of the hard sciences, I tend to be wary of PhD’s and summa cum laudes who haven’t done a day’s work outside of school. I think it was Pablo Neruda who once said, "Poetry should get its hands dirty." Of course, he was speaking about how poetry should engage in matters mundane and even disturbing, beyond Matthew Arnold’s "sweetness and light," but he may as well have meant the poet himself or herself, and the necessity for steeping oneself in the bare, sometimes tawdry, realities of the common life.
True, you don’t see much of the horrors of war in the work of Walt Disney and Cole Porter. But that’s not naiveté of the kind that afflicts the stubbornly timid artist or writer; rather, it’s an artist’s perfectly valid reaction to an early brush with brutality – a willful celebration of the transcendentally beautiful. Hemingway took the other path and went on to write unabashedly masculine prose, lean and luminous in its own way.
When a bright young student – one with an obvious gift and passion for writing – asks me if he or she should take up creative writing, I more often than not say no. (I say yes only when it’s clear that that talent would be wasted otherwise.) I advise the student to consider history, anthropology, biology, mathematics, or physics if they are also so inclined – something to exercise the imagination in other directions – believing that this will enrich their writing more than reading another novel about the discomforts of the middle class. Perhaps I should add ambulance driving to that list.
Don’t you just love it every time this feeling-gwapo Cabinet secretary opens his mouth – his shifty eyes either looking at some creeping insect or at his manicured nails, but never really into the camera – and says something infernally offensive? Your first instinct is to grab an industrial-grade washcloth and wipe that smirk off his mouth – something you suspect he practices before a mirror in the hapless notion that it actually makes him look good – until you realize that anything he says can only make things worse for his beleaguered boss.
The most recent object of his sidelong scrutiny was my home turf, the University of the Philippines, which he suggested was undeserving of government funding since it kept producing rebellious ingrates whose only talent seemed to lie in sticking needles into the side of honest, hardworking government officials such as himself and his superior. He prescribes reviewing the UP charter to correct this rank injustice, presumably by making UP pay for its cavalier attitude toward authority.
Go right ahead, Mr. Secretary, be our guest. Kindly slash 50 percent of the UP budget; please take over UP’s land, and hand it away in leafy parcels to your fellow politicians; speedily arrest and banish to Iwahig professors and students who sprinkle their lunchtime conversation, never mind their lectures, with words like "revolutionary" and "impeach"; replace the board of regents with a choice selection of the president’s faithful servants and their next of kin; and while you’re at it, commission the creation of a new Oblation statue – a kneeling one, crafted in your obsequious likeness.
Do these, and let’s see if the number of seditious scholars in UP doesn’t double or triple overnight, thanks to your thoughtful intervention.
I’m swiping much of this from the online edition of CNN, but it’s too good (or too bad) to let pass, and it’s just the kind of story that’s bound to be ignored by the mainstream media, so let me share it with my readers, especially those who value fine fiction.
CNN reports that a computer analyst from North Dakota named Dan McKay was this year’s winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an annual competition held by San Jose State University to recognize the worst line of prose submitted by a participant. (Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton was an early 19th century writer who famously began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night.")
This year’s $250 first prize for atrocious writing went to McKay’s inspired comparison of a woman’s, uhm, frontage with a classic motorcycle. "As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire." Her breasts, he said, were like the "small knurled caps of the oil dampeners." The quotation ends there, but I suspect that relationship didn’t travel very far.
Second prize went to Lester Guyse, a retired fraud investigator from Oregon, who formulated this sizzling simile: "The rising sun crawled over the ridge and slithered across the hot barren terrain into every nook and cranny like grease on a Denny’s grill in the morning rush, but only until eleven o’clock when they switch to the lunch menu."
Hmm, maybe I should take back what I said about writers taking unwriterly jobs to liven up their prose.
Folks, take a break from the foul air of political scandal by enjoying an evening of innovative Filipino theater in the form of Tanghalang Pilipino’s 19th season opener, R’meo Luvs Dew-lhiett, "a very modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s immortal love story loosely based on National Artist Rolando Tinio’s Filipino translation… set in the slums of Manila (Barangay Verona) where the jologs culture thrives." It opened last weekend at the CCP’s Little Theater and will be showing for several more weekends at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. I will have gone to see it last Friday, so expect a report from me sometime soon.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
Somewhere in that same forlorn theater of war, a couple of other future celebrities were sitting behind the wheel of an ambulance: The cartoonist Walt Disney and the composer Cole Porter. (The actual extent of Porter’s wartime engagement now seems to be in question, but I recall how gallantly he came off in Hollywood’s 1950s rendition of his life, Night and Day, countless reruns of which I watched as a boy on my neighbor’s TV in the ’60s, with no less than Cary Grant standing in for the homely musician.)
I probably pay more attention to these biographical details than I should – and, like a proper formalist, I try to keep them out of our appreciation of the work itself – but if a writer can’t care about another writer’s life, who will? The personal circumstances of writers and artists fascinate me, if only because they often tend to prove how little formal training in literature many of the best writers had, although they later made major contributions not only to its creative corpus but to poetics and theory as well.
William Carlos Williams – like many others such as François Rabelais, Anton Chekhov, and William Somerset Maugham (and in our time, Michael Crichton and Oliver Sacks) – was a physician, a pediatrician. O. Henry – back when he was still William Sidney Porter – was a convicted embezzler who made good use of his prison time to reinvent himself and to think about the feel-good stories he would become famous for. T. S. Eliot was, for a time, a bank clerk at Lloyd’s; Wallace Stevens was a lawyer who became a successful insurance executive. A little closer to home, Virginia Woolf supplemented the family income (and underwent therapy) by printing books by hand. The early feminist American writer Kate Chopin ran a general store and a plantation before turning to fiction. (Our own brilliant Angela Manalang Gloria, on the other hand, forsook poetry for running a rice mill and investing in stocks and real estate.)
It isn’t just the extra income that another job gives the writer or the artist; it’s the raw experience and the perspective you can’t get even if you camped out in the library for a month and read all of Shakespeare. Outside of the hard sciences, I tend to be wary of PhD’s and summa cum laudes who haven’t done a day’s work outside of school. I think it was Pablo Neruda who once said, "Poetry should get its hands dirty." Of course, he was speaking about how poetry should engage in matters mundane and even disturbing, beyond Matthew Arnold’s "sweetness and light," but he may as well have meant the poet himself or herself, and the necessity for steeping oneself in the bare, sometimes tawdry, realities of the common life.
True, you don’t see much of the horrors of war in the work of Walt Disney and Cole Porter. But that’s not naiveté of the kind that afflicts the stubbornly timid artist or writer; rather, it’s an artist’s perfectly valid reaction to an early brush with brutality – a willful celebration of the transcendentally beautiful. Hemingway took the other path and went on to write unabashedly masculine prose, lean and luminous in its own way.
When a bright young student – one with an obvious gift and passion for writing – asks me if he or she should take up creative writing, I more often than not say no. (I say yes only when it’s clear that that talent would be wasted otherwise.) I advise the student to consider history, anthropology, biology, mathematics, or physics if they are also so inclined – something to exercise the imagination in other directions – believing that this will enrich their writing more than reading another novel about the discomforts of the middle class. Perhaps I should add ambulance driving to that list.
The most recent object of his sidelong scrutiny was my home turf, the University of the Philippines, which he suggested was undeserving of government funding since it kept producing rebellious ingrates whose only talent seemed to lie in sticking needles into the side of honest, hardworking government officials such as himself and his superior. He prescribes reviewing the UP charter to correct this rank injustice, presumably by making UP pay for its cavalier attitude toward authority.
Go right ahead, Mr. Secretary, be our guest. Kindly slash 50 percent of the UP budget; please take over UP’s land, and hand it away in leafy parcels to your fellow politicians; speedily arrest and banish to Iwahig professors and students who sprinkle their lunchtime conversation, never mind their lectures, with words like "revolutionary" and "impeach"; replace the board of regents with a choice selection of the president’s faithful servants and their next of kin; and while you’re at it, commission the creation of a new Oblation statue – a kneeling one, crafted in your obsequious likeness.
Do these, and let’s see if the number of seditious scholars in UP doesn’t double or triple overnight, thanks to your thoughtful intervention.
CNN reports that a computer analyst from North Dakota named Dan McKay was this year’s winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an annual competition held by San Jose State University to recognize the worst line of prose submitted by a participant. (Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton was an early 19th century writer who famously began a novel with "It was a dark and stormy night.")
This year’s $250 first prize for atrocious writing went to McKay’s inspired comparison of a woman’s, uhm, frontage with a classic motorcycle. "As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire." Her breasts, he said, were like the "small knurled caps of the oil dampeners." The quotation ends there, but I suspect that relationship didn’t travel very far.
Second prize went to Lester Guyse, a retired fraud investigator from Oregon, who formulated this sizzling simile: "The rising sun crawled over the ridge and slithered across the hot barren terrain into every nook and cranny like grease on a Denny’s grill in the morning rush, but only until eleven o’clock when they switch to the lunch menu."
Hmm, maybe I should take back what I said about writers taking unwriterly jobs to liven up their prose.
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