Milestones

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the kin and friends of Othoniel Jimenez, Bedan teacher once upon a time so long ago, who passed away last week. I managed to drop in at the wake last Wednesday, and spoke to his older brother Jimmy who also taught at San Beda.

We reminisced on the old days, of course, mainly about how Otto was much loved by all his students. A nephew asked why. He was different, I said. Besides knowing his stuff, he was effective, because he performed in class, and he was passionate, thus highly inspiring.

Only a Sunday ago his name was mentioned among the stalwarts of the so-called Light A Fire Movement during martial law, appearing as it does in someone’s memoirs about the group and those times. No need to mention the memoirist’s own name, as I find him rather weird and egoistic, if the grammar/syntax-challenged draft manuscript I browsed through early this year is any basis.

In any case, I had heard decades ago of how Otto had been detained then for his radical involvement. But I heard it from his own lips only last March when he joined our SBC Class ’60 reunion at the Villamor clubhouse. He and I and a couple of other guys who hadn’t given up smoking held our own mini-caucus outside the politically correct pavilion, to admire the night sky and puff at good memories.

Your lead role in the faculty presentation of Brother Orchid stays in the mind, I told him. He smiled, but couldn’t remember having shown us the burnt spots on his chest after he was fired upon directly – even with a pistol’s blanks – by a malicious fellow-teacher in a climactic scene.

The rest of the faculty envied his rapport with us high school students, so that he didn’t last long in Mendiola. Despite that, our get-togethers this year always featured recollections of how we all admired, and were amused by, Otto’s classroom techniques, which included "knocking" (rapping noggins with knuckles) and mock threats of bodily casting any dunce out the window. His favorite "sample" was the tiniest guy in class, who was called "Kuto."

Maybe that’s how the faculty got him thrown out, someone would say. Poor Kuto, he’d tremble so, half his body out of that third-floor window. And we’d laugh over old times, but not as much as we now mourn Otto aka Brother Orchid, who excited us with his shock gambits, and certainly drove into our heads how valuable literature was.

As his brother Jimmy recalled, another Otto gimmick was to pretend he was reading from a book when he’d start out on a long poem by Tennyson, before closing the pages, and his eyes, for dramatic effect while droning on with the rest of the lines, which he had memorized.

I’ve always told interviewers that my first memorable exposure to poetry came courtesy of my Literature teacher in junior high. And that it was because of him, Otto Jimenez, and eventually my fortunate dalliance in college with other literary mentors – Rolando Tinio and Emmanuel Torres in Ateneo, and Virginia Moreno and Franz Arcellana in UP – that I resolved to become a poet and writer.

Long live Otto! Mabuhay ka, Sir!

Congratulations to Barbara Jane Reyes, Fil-Am poet in San Francisco, for bagging a significant American award in poetry for her new collection, Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press).

Last year I reviewed her first book, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books) in these pages. I’m glad to hear that she’s made another significant mark with her poetry, one that has the Fil-Am literary community all overjoyed and abuzz with pride, especially since it’s a whopper of a prize Barbara Jane has gifted all of us with.

It’s from no less than the Academy of American Poets, which made the announcement last week on the conferment of three major awards for poetry, to wit:

"The winners are Gerald Stern (Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry, $100,000), Claudia Rankine (Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement at mid-career, $25,000), and Barbara Jane Reyes (James Laughlin Award for a second book, $5,000)."

Here’s sharing more of the great good news:

"…The James Laughlin Award is given to commend and support a poet’s second book of poetry. The award was established by a gift to the Academy from the Drue Heinz Trust in honor of the poet and publisher James Laughlin (1914—1997). Ms. Reyes will receive a cash prize of $5,000, and the Academy will purchase copies of Poeta en San Francisco for distribution to its members. This year’s judges were James Longenbach, Susan Stewart, and Elizabeth Alexander.

"Ms. Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at the University of California Berkeley and her MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) at San Francisco State University.

"Her work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and appears or is forthcoming in Asian Pacific American Journal, Chain, Interlope, Nocturnes (Re)view, North American Review, Tinfish, Versal, in the anthologies Babaylan (Aunt Lute, 2000), Eros Pinoy (Anvil, 2001), Going Home to a Landscape (Calyx, 2003), Not Home But Here (Anvil, 2003), Pinoy Poetics (Meritage, 2004)….

"From the judge’s citation for the James Laughlin Award:

"‘If William Blake were alive and well and sitting on a eucalyptus branch in the hills above the bay, this is the poetry he would aspire to write.’ –James Longenbach"

Wow.

One of the anthologies mentioned above, Eros Pinoy: An Anthology of Contemporary Erotica in Philippine Art & Poetry (Anvil), which we co-edited with Bencab and Pandy Aviado, was an early recipient of a contribution from Reyes. We met her in the flesh early last year, in Chicago where her long black tresses did scintillating justice to the Windy City. Here’s that early poem, tiled "Ritual," by Barbara Jane, who then went by the byline of Barbara J. Pulmano Reyes:

"8 AM: you read the newspaper// 9 AM: we sleep// 11 AM: we bathe together and then we make love// It’s Saturday morning/ So we take our time// Your freshly scrubbed skin/ Smells like lavender// My hair drips cool water/ Down my neck and shoulders// Through open windows/ Summer sun warms us// On a morning this perfect/ I no longer worry/ That the neighbors may hear us"

Speaking of Eros, last Thursday may have been another red-letter day (read: milestone) for Philippine art and letters, what with the launching of A Treasury of Philippine Nudes (Onion & Chives Inc.) at the Passion Arts Gallery in Metrowalk.

Authored by Gino Dormiendo, the coffee-table book features 130 full-color plates of artworks by over 50 Filipino artists, from the early masters – such as Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo to Fernando Amorsolo and Juan Arellano – to contemporary and emerging artists, including too many notables to mention here.

What the artworks have in common, besides exemplifying the art of the nude in excellent, variegated manner, is their provenance. Most are from the staggering art collection of Carlos "Chuckie" Arellano. I’ve gorged over these nude portraits (and there are infinitely more of them) whenever I visited the "Padrino" for a night of whisky and caviar, and only secondarily to discuss high art with this kuya of my boyhood crushes in San Juan: Honey (now the distinguished author and public speaker Dr. Ma. Lourdes Carandang), Citas (bless her soul), and Agnes (now an esteemed sculptor and the doting stage mom of jazz wiz Mishka Arellano Adams).

Their younger brother Deo, the darned brat, used to come up stealthily from behind to whack me hard on the posterior, knowing I couldn’t as much as yelp in the presence of the three graces, muses, diwatas in that Arellano compound facing the Ejercito manse across Tuberias (since renamed J Arellano St. for Juan, the great one).

I’m relieved to note that the bad boy Deogracias Arellano has since come into his own not only as a fine musician, but also as a digital artist and designer, as witness this splendid book.

Of course it also couldn’t have come about without the efforts of Chuckie’s buddy Pompeyo Pineda, who served as publishing director, and book project coordinator Sugar Masigan, who roped in the artists without herself having to pose in the buff. It was she, too, who conceived of the title as a first volume in a series billed as "A Collection of Ageless Art."

I understand that the next will be a treasury of mother and child portraits – and it’s not meant to salve anyone’s conscience over having unloaded this recent pulchritudinous collection. You name the genre or theme, and Chuckie’s sure to have loads of it, such is his vast private treasure of Philippine art.

Gino Dormiendo writes:

"The main bulk of this collector’s trove of nudes has originated from painting and live sketching sessions that Carlos ‘Chuckie’ Arellano himself has sponsored and patronized, in his effort to popularize the artist’s domain of activities. Other pieces, needless to say, came with the artist who just wanted to share his work with the collector. As with other avid collectors of our time, Arellano, art patron and collector, has developed a continuing appreciation of nudes, accumulating in time an impressively large body of works that he has acquired from various artists, be they established and emerging, masters or novatos alike. (The man is widely known to support artists of all persuasions, notwithstanding their style or stature.) A good number of these works have eventually found their way into his homes and offices, as well as other business establishments he has been involved in."

Elsewhere in the book, the author makes a case for the exalted genre:

"Every artist who has duly earned his keep from the dogged pursuit of art has a secret treasury of nudes. Stashed somewhere among his folio of works are images of the female body that have been drawn or painted (or, in other cases, sculpted) in some sketching session with a group of fellow artists involving a live model. These works are, in all likelihood, the product of the artist’s own imagining on how to delineate that most formidable of subjects, which, since the beginning of time, has always posed the greatest challenge."

This collection shows how the Filipino painter has risen to that challenge, and more than met up with it. I hope that after "Vol. 2: Mother & Child," the series goes back to another exquisite set of nudes from Arellano’s collection. May the likes of Ara Mina et al. – in such figurative (and how) renderings – see the light of day, if only between elegant covers.