Cross-words
Manila, Philippines - ‘YS’ introduces you to the new writer’s block: young people who are spreading the written word in exciting ways.
Was only right we got them to write about one another.
The burden upon anyone who reveals their pursuit to be putting pen to paper or the more modern goading of fingertips onto keyboard is to have to defend their art. The value of words varies constantly, and often, people whose occupation (or preoccupation) is writing have to deal with a practical world that deems the literary as unnecessary; or even those who wield their pens as swords, contending their form of writing is nobler than others’.
In a realm that’s supposed to be freeing, there’s always that constricting proclamation of what real writing is. There are some who’ll say it needs the quill feather mark of Carlos Palanca Sr.; some who believe that you have to have starved for your art rather than been nourished by the free lunches of lifestyle writing. But whether it’s a poem published in an anthology or a blog entry unleashed with the click of a “Publish” button, what’s important is that the writing is read and that a reader is enthralled, entertained, enlightened, or has even experienced a combination of these.
Whatever style or structure words come in, they fall into place because there is always something to share. Whether to express emotion or communicate ideas, the commune of reader and writer is most essential.
It’s what’s led Young Star to gather a new class of writers adept at making word into flesh for people hungry to know, learn, or feel something. And since they understand the empathy every writer needs to carry out such a task, we asked them to read into and “exchange words” with one another. So consider this hope for a world that reads less and less. Trust us when we say: their word is good.
Cholo Mercado and Reg Bautista
Manipulators of the word
By New Slang’s Duffie Osental
“Mildly pretentious” is how he is described on New Slang’s Contributor page, and yes, his pieces tend to skew towards the deep end. Cholo’s references from Freud to Guattarri; from obscure art movements to Greek terminologies create this image of someone who is perfectly content living in his head like some 40-year-old grad student sipping Czech beer at the corner of a bar, peering at Jean Genet treatises from behind coke-bottled eyes. He, in his own words, does not like “large groups, cameras, and other writers.” Cholo is precocious a brilliant and sensitive writer we’re proud to have as a contributor.
You can find Reg, on the other hand, on a table somewhere doodling on anything she can get her hands on. Napkins, placemats, and the like all bow to this consummate illustrator. She even turned her life into doodles, regularly posted on her website, www.cerealsaturday.com. Oh, and she loves comics. She loves comics.
After this shoot, we linger around Cubao X taking in the scene while gingerly sipping on Red Horses and she prattles on about her love affair with sequential art. How it’s a unique form that is very different from the books that predate it or the movies that are based on it. Alan Moore, Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelmanthey are her heroes, she states before the booze gets the best of her.
I won’t be surprised if that moment somehow ends up on her website. Or New Slang.
Miro Capili
Essayist
By Nicolas Lacson
Two girls enter the room, one taller than the other, and the taller one, who turns out to work in public relations, introduces me to her “talent,” Miro Capili, decked out in tan leather boots and a printed floral dress. The first thought that enters my head, considering this is an assembly of writers of all sorts, is this: Miro Capili, style blogger?
But I stand corrected. Like me, it will probably take someone to whisper to you that Miro’s an eloquent essayist who’s already nabbed a trio of Palancas for her work, two of them earned last year via her essays “Vinyl,” which took first place in the main competition, and “The Nature of Nurture,” which earned top plum in the kabataan division. Two. In the same year. And she’s still under 20, playing the role of child prodigy to the hilt, reminding me earnestly that she is only in college, an incoming junior at UP Diliman studying political science, planning to become a diplomat. And then she wanders off, intrigued by the hipster music blaring in the background, a Zooey Deschanel-like curiosity or enchantment in her voice, when she asks what’s on the playlist.
The fact is, she may be young and stylish; but the truth is that Miro’s is a big voice, one of an old, wise soul that has perhaps been transplanted into her petite frame. Her writing is classically honed, a kingdom where beautiful language reigns supreme, her words steering away from the cheap, glib modernisms of today, asking, exploring, and illuminating in prose on the verge of becoming poetry. Take this nugget: “How difficult it is to still the imperative of bodily experience, of wanderlust, of energy and movement, as you develop with age a skill for ordinary life” a comment on how it is in our nature to reach for the extraordinary despite the banality of the everyday. Did I mention she was not even 20? These are words that belong, in the most rightful sense, to the page, the words of a real writer. It’s stuff that hacks like myself can only dream of stringing together the kind of thing we read about in the works of those really special ones. Like Miro.
Petra Magno
Poet
By New Slang’s Marla Cabanban
It’s those big, bright eyes that will ensnare you first. Then it will be all about how much bigger they get when she tells you about something she just did or saw. From her eyes, you will make your way to her smile and her warm voice.
As words come out of her mouth, you will secure your place firm in front of her, hoping you won’t lose your balance. From your peripheral vision, you will see a flash of her neon stockings and maybe a detail from her flouncy skirt.
She will make you want to stick around and you will prod her to keep talking, looking. These elements, especially the ensnaring, are crucial for being introduced to Petra as a poet.
In the language of rhythm and beats, she uses her words carefully. She ushers you into her head to be able to view a scene she has chosen and, without even realizing it, she’ll subtly move behind you so it will now be you in the scene. The scene becomes yours and so does the internal dialogue that accompanies talking to a lover or looking out to the sky after a long day.
Petra’s strengths lie in her accessibility and her restraint. She pieces one constituent after the other using her memories, through her imaginings; and it is from here that she creates her scenes.
Try to remember this spell she casts when you’re in a room with her. She may be dancing and spinning, taking everything in with her. Should you make eye contact, she will give a twinkling wave and raise her glass. She might even pass the glass to you.
You take a sip and, in two shakes, before you can even say thanks, she’s gone.
Nico Lacson
The Profiler
By Miro Capili
He extends a hand the moment we’re introduced, and I have no idea with the calculated strides, the obstinate creases lining his slacks, the expression closed off to any instance of slovenliness how he manages to appear at the same time both artful and artless. He asks whether he heard my name right, then proceeds to ask, “What are you here for?”
Inquiry seems to come easy for Nico Lacson. Easy comes easy for Nico Lacson and how unnerving this is, watching the concerted effort of his every visible faculty to listen. One shoulder dips, the gleaming point of a shoe configures itself to follow the direction of the story. The fabric of his slacks stretches over the jutting of knuckles, of hands tucked patiently in pockets. The eyes hear details. The outline of a fine beard listens, the carefully folded sleeves.
All of which make Rogue a damn privileged publication to have him on board as profiler, as well as any beauty he happens to be interviewing for the cover story. He admits to being granted much creative freedom by the job, which he uses to eavesdrop into silences, to prowl for the purpose behind the pouted lips, as the magazine itself directs its readers. Class over crass, Rogue insists, and Nico Lacson delivers. His stories and they do read like stories on cover girls Georgia Schulze (August 2010) and Val Weigmann (April 2010) are everything they should be: the tone accessible; the vision lucid and probing, humbly welcoming wonder and insight, and exhibiting a desire to engage both reader and subject in the exposition.
And so it brings little surprise that he isn’t limited by “any complicated, overwrought poetics when it comes to writing.” “That stuff’s messy and not worth sweating over,” he smiles. “Just as long as the words are fun and interesting, I reckon!” So this is how Rogue reels in its 50,000-strong circulation. This is how Nico Lacson that stately banker-turned-insurance-company-guy, humanities magna cum laude graduate from Ateneo de Manila University, and Rogue magazine contributor and profiler listens, and why his literary voice should be listened to with the same steely openness and attention.
New Slang
The new editors/raconteurs
By Petra Magno
New Slang is a blog-but-better of “eloquent oversharing” created and curated by bright-eyed twentysomethings with big vocabularies, college degrees, and day jobs. Witty, candid, and above all, articulate, the essays on New Slang take on the world’s wealth of topics, from religion to rom-coms, surfacing gleefully with rough gems of insight to be polished by the young and smart-tongued.
True to the best aspect of quality essays, i.e. relevance, the raconteurs of New Slang don’t actually gaze into their navels, but they do cast interested glances at them from time to time. The recent relationship-themed issue, for example, dealt with an outpouring of emotion rivaled only by Bright Eyes’ discography. Unlike Mister Oberst, however, New Slang’s voice rings steady and clear, whether steely or sentimental. Outside their 1,200-word thought bubbles, New Slang also shares themed mixtapes, assuming the role of the cool older brother that lets you rifle through his vinyl collection when you’re especially down in the dumps. There’s also Grade School for Yuppies, an every-now-and-then event where they take the oversharing off the Internet and into metaspace, playing Show and Tell but with PowerPoint presentations and minimum pants-wetting.
Personal essays sound easy, especially in the age of the Internet where everybody blogs as if everybody cared. It’s true that pruning reality for content has its pitfalls, and the worst thing anybody could say about your essay is, “So?” But God bless the Internet anyway, for it hath brought us New Slang, and New Slang hath showed us what we didn’t know we cared about: other people.
Douglas Candano & Anne Lagamayo
Fictionists
12 tweets on their work by book tweeter @Ldrin:
“A Visit to the Exhibition of the International Committee on Children’s Rights”
*Douglas Candano’s long-titled but not long-winded story affords its reader an experience not unlike what its characters are subjected to.
*It’s a multisensory experience, a peek into the Cartesian theater of harsh realities endured by the helpless and ignored by the oblivious.
*A Visit to the Exhibition is an unflinching reminder of a most terrible crime, one we can’t afford to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to.
“An Epistle and Testimony from June 13, 1604”
*Candano’s Epistle and Testimony is a revisionist refraction of the events surrounding the uprising of Chinese Sangleys in Manila in 1603.
*It eventually unfolds into a rather prolix retelling of the Passion, focused on a stigmatic Sangley, the indicatively named Lazaro de Chino.
*But it’s framed within an interesting proposition: that the supernatural and the historical are perpetually entwined.
“Mr and Mrs Reyes and the Polka-dotted Sofa”
*This Palanca Award-winning story reads like a rarefied version of Rabbit Hole, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire.
*As in Rabbit Hole, the central couple in Anne Lagamayo’s Mr and Mrs Reyes and the Polka-dotted Sofa are enfeebled by grief.
*In coming to terms with reality following their child’s untimely death, Mr. and Mrs. Reyes struggle. In channeling realism, Lagamayo doesn’t.
“Inventory”
*Anne Lagamayo’s Inventory is a harmonic succession of vignettes written by a woman recounting half-truths and half remembered dreams.
*Dropping pins on Ongpin and Ohio and skipping to Paris from Baguio, this travelogue of sorts maps the intersections between memory and fact.
*In its narrator’s invention of lying, Lagamayo’s short work gradually, if a bit befuddlingly, reveals a topography of longing.
@Ldrin
Book Tweeter
By Petra Magno
A few things we’ve learned from Twitter: how Kanye West decorates his bathroom, what Demi Moore wears while steaming Ashton Kutcher’s suits, and what Katy Perry looks like without makeup. Twitter, however, is a democracy of voices, and that’s great, because the culture vultures are earning celebrity status as well.
Twitter is frills-free, making it an A+ stomping ground for wordsmiths of all kinds. Your thought must be whittled down to its purest form, and you find yourself backspacing and rewording in order to please the 140-character limit. Understandably, Twitter is the playground of copywriters and quote-mongers and those who take unnatural joy in mass messaging things like “Gud nayt p0h….”
But what about the blogger, accustomed to 550px x infinity px of white space real estate in which one can ramble freely? Beyond that, what about the book blogger, bowed beneath the necessary aspects of a well-rounded book review: summaries, expositions, recommendations, and decisions? Not to mention intertextuality, the sexy name for links between things you can read, be they HTML links or otherwise?
Ask @ldrin, the chatty Twitter presence with over 400 followers tuning into his steady stream of cheerful geekery. Listed by Harper Books’ account as a book blogger they love, Aldrin proves that the most interesting people are the interested, as he redirects books and movies his followers’ way. The ultimate cool thing about Aldrin is that his bookishness is backed up by his blog (http://aldr.in), where he gets to write at length about his current reads, which span from Neil Gaiman to Raymond Queneau. He also lends his critical eye and lucid diction to Pelikula, a local blog publishing quality movie reviews. Aldrin’s taste is impeccable and his opinions clear and calm, and because he’s generous with his @-replies when answering queries from fellow bookworms, his online steez is exactly what Twitter is at its best: inviting.
