Covering the Manila beat

What can we write that will still draw attention amid the swirl of Facebook posts and filtered Instagram pictures? How can our writing originate from the ground up, taking everything in?

One journalist who has not lost his footing on the ground is Joel Pablo Salud, current editor in chief for Philippine Graphics magazine, who has long explored the Philippines from top to bottom.

Thanks to journalist/poet and former office mate Alma Anonas-Carpio for sending me a copy of Salud’s latest, which goes to show there’s still reason to carve out a place — and a pace — in our lives for reading essays. His latest collection, Blood Republic, compiles pieces from that magazine from 2009-2013.

Who still bothers to cover the well-worn streets of Malate and Manila like this? It’s a world Victor Hugo might have envisioned in Les Miserables, and Salud pens in all the details. Magazine-length pieces have one advantage over our daily news digestible diet: Salud can take his time, crafting essays that spill over into profile pieces, capturing more of the nuances and ephemera that make up Metro Manila life.

This ain’t the Makati beat, friends: it’s places we’ve come to recognize on weekday nights, places on Mabini with dark corners and bursts of harsh light illuminating underage flesh; or the daytime ambience surrounding the iconic Solidaridad bookstore still run by National Artist F. Sionil Jose. (Salud captures the inside of that store, and more interestingly the upstairs office of this great Filipino writer; then he takes us to one or two of Mang Frankie’s favorite local food haunts. It’s like being there in the neighborhood.)

The subject of Salud’s profile on Jose expands to include a party attended by no less than US Ambassador to the Philippines Harry Thomas and Charlson Ong, gathered around a piano belting out The Nearness of You with Tagalog lyrics. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

One thing books like Blood Republic remind me of is how interrelated the literary scene in Manila is. It’s a beat that relies on camaraderie, both male and female, because writers — it goes without saying — just can’t shut up; they need to share their views, mostly with one another, often over bottles of San Miguel or shots of Ballantine’s. (God knows locating the mythical “reader” out there is a task as daunting as Don Quiote tilting at windmills.)

Salud is as apt to begin an essay on the summer rituals of applying sunblock as he is to talk about his daughter’s quadricentennial graduation. This particular subject leads to comical parental concern over why his girl is not returning her father’s urgent texts at midnight. “Images floated in my head as the minutes passed: my daughter having one too many drinks with an egg-head partygoer; a halfwit trying to fool his way into my daughter’s pants; Rachel drooling over a really gorgeous, six-packed closet bading, and being hauled into a sleazy motel by a macabre version of Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita…” If any father has never troubled himself with such concerns over his daughter, then he’s just not a very good father.

Salud can step into the role of reporter onsite at Jerusalem to give firsthand dispatches on the Lord’s resurrection (as he does in “Gospel According to Joel” in the second part of Blood Republic, titled “Soulspeak”), or he can stage an imaginary interview with Jose Rizal on the occasion of his 150th birthday, peppering him with questions about the current state of the Philippine nation.

But the real deal is the journalism: recalling his father’s leaving for the US during the Marcos reign in “Memories of Martial Law,” he reflects that his plight was less difficult than that of others. But losing your father for close to two decades has to qualify as a life-forming development.

So it is. Pieces on the recent legislation curbing press freedom and criminalizing libel show a keen distaste for the vestiges of Marcosian influence (“Tyrant’s Wet Dream”) and where it leads the country. A reflection on the Maguindanao Massacre, a year later (“Genius of Secrecy”), takes to task a court ruling banning live coverage of the trial, citing “equal protection” from prejudicial reporting. “The government’s sense of justice is often encumbered by the need to satisfy state interests, and speaks volumes about where the country’s final destination lies: to the dogs,” Salud writes.

There are political pieces here, humorous essays, and profiles that resonate because they are well outlined and highly detailed. Just the type of writing the Philippines still needs to see things more clearly.

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Another volume that came into my hands recently is The Other View: Literature, Culture and Society (UP Press), a collection of columns and essays from The Manila Times by Elmer A. Ordoñez. Mr. Ordoñez has long been a fixture on the local academic scene, winner of the SEAWrite Literary Award in 2008, and well known as a Joseph Conrad scholar. As the book title implies, Filipino literature is his concern here, tackling the subject, not from the ground up, but from various angles: expatriate writing, regional writing, the Filipino novel in English, the importance of strong local theater, postcolonial literature, and the writer in society. Mr. Ordoñez is as likely to touch on The Da Vinci Code flap as he is F. Sionil Jose’s Rosales saga; his is a reasoned voice, one accustomed to taking the time to encounter and evaluate literature on its own merits. We could all learn a little bit from his kind of literary patience.