The god of small things

At the back of Luis Katigbak’s first book collecting his non-fiction, The King of Nothing to Do, there’s a relief from the usual blurbs; instead, there’s a modest if somewhat self-deprecating write-up printed there. The last sentence sums it up: “Nevertheless, the collection is an unfailingly pleasant and entertaining conversation with a brilliant young mind.”  The use of “nevertheless” to start the sentence and the adjective “unfailingly” is telling, but it’s Katigbak’s “pleasant and entertaining conversation” that really rings true in his essays.  (The fact that the author possesses a “brilliant young mind” is beyond doubt. No? Buy the book and read, you mesocephalic cretin.)

Culled from a plethora of publications over the course of the past several years, the pieces are eminently readable — not as common a trait in the writing community as it should be — and funny. Take this for example:

“I had to wonder: do I have good-looking hands? Are neatly clipped nails a definite plus, or a warning of latent homosexuality that might drive away any women who might be interested? Do my fingertips hint at the depths of my sensual genius? Or do they hint, rather, that I have been eating cheese curls again?”

Or: “One must not forget that it’s all just words, words, words. Of course, I once had a Comparative Literature teacher who would be appalled by the nonchalance in that statement; he was very big on the significance of words. He liked to tell us, again and again, that ‘Words are stones.’ He only stopped doing it when I showed up one day with a word scribbled on a piece of paper in my right hand and a big rock in my left, and asked him if it was all the same to him whether he got hit by one or the other. That was not a true story, by the way.”

In many ways, the pleasure in reading Katigbak’s writing is that there is always a shock of recognition in almost every one of these essays. By tackling seemingly inane topics such as deciding to cut your own hair to watching violent movies alone he finds familiarity in everyone’s idiosyncrasies. In many ways, reading Katigbak is like listening to Morrissey, in the sense that you find comfort in knowing that someone else — someone with a background perhaps very different from your own — has actually thought the same things. Of course, the author isn’t enough of a drama queen (nor a sexually ambiguous pop star from Manchester for that matter) to write melodrama like, “If a double-decker bus/crashes into us/To die by your side/is such a heavenly way to die.” But Moz himself never had to write anything as existential as the MTV Pilipinas Awards, did he?  (He did have Johnny Marr; Katigbak manages only Champ.)

Lighthearted but not at all fluff in any way, the tone of Katigbak’s writing never smothers the subject or the reader, allowing his acute observations to gradually reveal their subtle lessons. To single out one piece, “Snapshots of the City” is probably the best piece of writing about Metro Manila — the sadness and pleasures of living in a city with the longest short-term memory loss in modern history — and its unique contradictions.  In fact, the true genius of The King of Nothing to Do is that he manages to set down in clear, lucid prose those crepuscular epiphanies that yield elusive truths that seem silly in the cold light of Monday morning. Essential for every library.