Noble prizes
August 14, 2006 | 12:00am
I kid you not: the day after I published last week’s column on "Novel Prizes" – inspired by an accidental visitor to my blog who was looking for a "Filipino scientist who won novel prize" – I peeked into my visitors’ list again, and found someone else (or maybe the same fellow, chastised and mindfully correcting himself) looking for a "Filipino chemist who won noble prize."
This suggested to me that there was some malevolently grinning teacher out there, sending out his or her class on a wild-goose chase, a pursuit made even more futile by the witless student’s choice of the wrong search term. (Lesson No. 1: If you don’t know what you’re looking for, boys and girls, you’ll never find it.)
It reminded me of similar sorties in graduate school, well before the Internet and the Google era, when the balding Dr. Kuist, my professor in Bibliography, would ask something like "If I were a member of the Royal Society in 1662, what books would I likely have in my personal library?" That sent us rushing to and through the stacks, poring not just over books but lists of books, and imbibing a jolting dose of 17th century history on the side. And I, especially (being what some would call a "brown-noser" when it came to making my English professors happy), loved ferreting out the most obscure details and serving them up to our academic master, tail furiously wagging.
Today Google and Wikipedia have taken most of the effort and much of the masochistic fun out of library work, and the day can’t be too far off when we’ll be able to carry the contents of whole libraries on a chip in our wallet, a day that will probably come sooner than a Filipino scientist winning a Nobel Prize.
But this new reference to a "noble prize" got me thinking as well about what such a distinction might be like: an award that would exercise and prove one’s nobility of spirit. For example, you, an ordinary citizen, could be puttering around in the garden one day and receive a telegram or a text message announcing your selection as a "Noble Prizewinner," the prize being a voucher entitling you to build three Gawad Kalinga houses with your own hands, with the voucher ready for pickup at the summit of Mt. Mayon. Another Noble Prize might consist of the opportunity to donate 10 gallons of one’s own blood to a children’s hospital, requiring the donor to forgo the consumption of alcohol and engaging in questionable sex for at least one year. Yet another might be a visa – not to the US or Europe, or anywhere with snow and Krispy Kreme – but to the world’s poorest and nastiest places, where you can have the honor of cleaning up the local sanitation system and the judiciary along with it, bringing warring parties to the negotiating table, getting the rich to pay their taxes, training ten-year-olds to become software developers, and turning animal poachers into an endangered species.
But why even go abroad? If you’re very lucky – and, of course, exceedingly noble – you could also be designated congressman of your district for one term, during which you will attend every session, speak only when you have something sensible to say (in straight English or flawless Filipino), craft laws that will produce more wealth for the poor than they will cost to enforce, reject any invitation to boost Manny Pacquiao’s morale by sitting at ringside on his next fight abroad, vote your conscience on the next impeachment measure that will surely come along, resist the urge to sponsor the creation of a state college or university named after your warlord-father, look at young women (and young men) as constituents to be served rather than servants to be bedded, and ride in (and maybe even drive) a car smaller and quieter than a firetruck with no more than a tricycle for an escort.
But then of course, in this country, to be noble is often to be stupid, and who wants that?
I was writing checks to pay off bills one morning last week – a loathsome but necessary task – when I realized that check-writing was just about all the handwriting I did these days. And while it doesn’t take too many words to fill a check, even the act of penning the payee’s name and the amount was a literal pain, forcing my fingers into unaccustomed positions and resulting in a barely legible scrawl.
The culprit, of course, is the computer and what it has gotten us to do these past two decades, practically without thinking: depend on the keyboard and the word processor for nearly all our writing. In my case, as a professional for whom not a day goes by without at least five to 10 pages of writing and editing, returning to working in longhand with one of my vintage fountain pens has become a romantic fantasy, and perhaps the very reason why I collect fountain pens – as mementos of an irretrievable loss.
That loss is penmanship, the fine art of making a veritable garden out of an ordinary page of prose through one’s handwriting – not an unkempt, weedy garden, but a well-tended one, with the hedges rising just so (strangely, I’ve often thought of Thai script this way). I remember when, as a boy, we had Penmanship as a graded course, and were taught to write our Fs, Gs, Ps, and Ts in what would now seem to be some outlandish fashion. Some private schools still do that, as much I suppose for the cachet the distinctive penmanship bestows on the user as for the sake of art and clarity. I tried my best, but never got that good, and I embraced the typewriter as soon as I could get my hands on one, never mind that I still type today with the fingers of one hand crossing over the others, like a pair of famished chickens.
There are two people I know whose penmanship is so graceful that it’s worth reading and keeping anything they might send you in longhand: the poet and playwright (and now London-based) Ed Maranan, and the scholar-professor Benjie Abellera. Curiously (or maybe not), both have Baguio backgrounds. I wish each of them would write me a check (one with lots of zeroes) – just as a handwriting specimen, of course, fit to be framed.
I made a terrible boo-boo last week by announcing the showing "tonight" (meaning last Monday) of a Filipino Noh performance in UP – when, as it turned out, the show was for Friday, Aug. 11. My apologies to anyone who turned up at the UP Theater, only to find sophomores necking in the shadows. At least I got the weekend matinees right. Of these next two announcements, however, I’m positively sure.
Continuing the celebration of 50 years of friendship between Japan and the Philippines, the Japan Foundation is sponsoring a free demonstration of "Budo: Classical Martial Arts of Japan" on Aug. 19 (4 p.m. at the Podium in Ortigas), Aug. 20 (Mall of Asia, Main Entrance, 3 p.m.) and Aug. 21 (University of Baguio, 2 p.m.). I don’t fly in the air or break stacks of bricks with my palm, but I took karate lessons in high school ages ago, at the height of the current craze over ninjas and blind samurais and one-armed swordsmen; my ignominiously brief experience as a self-defender should be worthy of another column, one of these days.
And it can’t be too soon to announce the 32nd National Congress of the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas (Umpil) on Aug. 26 at the Intellectual Property Office on 351 Buendia Ave. Atty. Adrian Cristobal Jr. will speak on "Writers’ Rights and Responsibilities" at a forum on IPR in the morning, and the ageless Gilda Cordero-Fernando speaking at the 20th Gawad Umpil ceremonies in the afternoon.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html
This suggested to me that there was some malevolently grinning teacher out there, sending out his or her class on a wild-goose chase, a pursuit made even more futile by the witless student’s choice of the wrong search term. (Lesson No. 1: If you don’t know what you’re looking for, boys and girls, you’ll never find it.)
It reminded me of similar sorties in graduate school, well before the Internet and the Google era, when the balding Dr. Kuist, my professor in Bibliography, would ask something like "If I were a member of the Royal Society in 1662, what books would I likely have in my personal library?" That sent us rushing to and through the stacks, poring not just over books but lists of books, and imbibing a jolting dose of 17th century history on the side. And I, especially (being what some would call a "brown-noser" when it came to making my English professors happy), loved ferreting out the most obscure details and serving them up to our academic master, tail furiously wagging.
Today Google and Wikipedia have taken most of the effort and much of the masochistic fun out of library work, and the day can’t be too far off when we’ll be able to carry the contents of whole libraries on a chip in our wallet, a day that will probably come sooner than a Filipino scientist winning a Nobel Prize.
But this new reference to a "noble prize" got me thinking as well about what such a distinction might be like: an award that would exercise and prove one’s nobility of spirit. For example, you, an ordinary citizen, could be puttering around in the garden one day and receive a telegram or a text message announcing your selection as a "Noble Prizewinner," the prize being a voucher entitling you to build three Gawad Kalinga houses with your own hands, with the voucher ready for pickup at the summit of Mt. Mayon. Another Noble Prize might consist of the opportunity to donate 10 gallons of one’s own blood to a children’s hospital, requiring the donor to forgo the consumption of alcohol and engaging in questionable sex for at least one year. Yet another might be a visa – not to the US or Europe, or anywhere with snow and Krispy Kreme – but to the world’s poorest and nastiest places, where you can have the honor of cleaning up the local sanitation system and the judiciary along with it, bringing warring parties to the negotiating table, getting the rich to pay their taxes, training ten-year-olds to become software developers, and turning animal poachers into an endangered species.
But why even go abroad? If you’re very lucky – and, of course, exceedingly noble – you could also be designated congressman of your district for one term, during which you will attend every session, speak only when you have something sensible to say (in straight English or flawless Filipino), craft laws that will produce more wealth for the poor than they will cost to enforce, reject any invitation to boost Manny Pacquiao’s morale by sitting at ringside on his next fight abroad, vote your conscience on the next impeachment measure that will surely come along, resist the urge to sponsor the creation of a state college or university named after your warlord-father, look at young women (and young men) as constituents to be served rather than servants to be bedded, and ride in (and maybe even drive) a car smaller and quieter than a firetruck with no more than a tricycle for an escort.
But then of course, in this country, to be noble is often to be stupid, and who wants that?
The culprit, of course, is the computer and what it has gotten us to do these past two decades, practically without thinking: depend on the keyboard and the word processor for nearly all our writing. In my case, as a professional for whom not a day goes by without at least five to 10 pages of writing and editing, returning to working in longhand with one of my vintage fountain pens has become a romantic fantasy, and perhaps the very reason why I collect fountain pens – as mementos of an irretrievable loss.
That loss is penmanship, the fine art of making a veritable garden out of an ordinary page of prose through one’s handwriting – not an unkempt, weedy garden, but a well-tended one, with the hedges rising just so (strangely, I’ve often thought of Thai script this way). I remember when, as a boy, we had Penmanship as a graded course, and were taught to write our Fs, Gs, Ps, and Ts in what would now seem to be some outlandish fashion. Some private schools still do that, as much I suppose for the cachet the distinctive penmanship bestows on the user as for the sake of art and clarity. I tried my best, but never got that good, and I embraced the typewriter as soon as I could get my hands on one, never mind that I still type today with the fingers of one hand crossing over the others, like a pair of famished chickens.
There are two people I know whose penmanship is so graceful that it’s worth reading and keeping anything they might send you in longhand: the poet and playwright (and now London-based) Ed Maranan, and the scholar-professor Benjie Abellera. Curiously (or maybe not), both have Baguio backgrounds. I wish each of them would write me a check (one with lots of zeroes) – just as a handwriting specimen, of course, fit to be framed.
Continuing the celebration of 50 years of friendship between Japan and the Philippines, the Japan Foundation is sponsoring a free demonstration of "Budo: Classical Martial Arts of Japan" on Aug. 19 (4 p.m. at the Podium in Ortigas), Aug. 20 (Mall of Asia, Main Entrance, 3 p.m.) and Aug. 21 (University of Baguio, 2 p.m.). I don’t fly in the air or break stacks of bricks with my palm, but I took karate lessons in high school ages ago, at the height of the current craze over ninjas and blind samurais and one-armed swordsmen; my ignominiously brief experience as a self-defender should be worthy of another column, one of these days.
And it can’t be too soon to announce the 32nd National Congress of the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas (Umpil) on Aug. 26 at the Intellectual Property Office on 351 Buendia Ave. Atty. Adrian Cristobal Jr. will speak on "Writers’ Rights and Responsibilities" at a forum on IPR in the morning, and the ageless Gilda Cordero-Fernando speaking at the 20th Gawad Umpil ceremonies in the afternoon.
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