On Yvette Tan's Work of Fiction

I don't remember the last time I read something so freakishly scary since I'm not big on horror stories. I have been, however, in a situation of being dragged to a movie house to watch a horror flick. It happened a lot of times. The number of times it incurred series of nightmares would've been enough to put me off another horror film. But there is just something about these films that, despite the obvious "damage" it caused me (I am not kidding, there were nightmares that seem to appear as a sequel to a horror film that I just saw that I nearly wet my bed and there was an incident where I lost a toenail after kicking the wall out of fright from watching Phobia 2) that had me biting on them like a nasty bait. Perhaps it had something to prove about me being a masochist. But hey, I digress.

I came across Yvette Tan's "Waking the Dead and Other Horror Stories" more than once in the Philippine Literature section of National Bookstore yet I have never been tempted to even pore over it's content, even if it screams "from the terrifying imagination of award-winning fictionist Yvette Tan". It's blurb was fetching, but nada. I've never heard of Yvette Tan before. So why bother? It was only when a friend of mine, a huge reader if I may add, made a mention of her and her book. The thing about me is that  it wouldn't take you too much whipping to egg me on, especially when it comes to books and movies. He agreed to lend me his copy and I was of course ready to isolate myself and read even just one story.

"They say that a person knows that she's reached Quiapo by the way it smells. My grandmother-- my Lola -- described the scent as tentative, as if the air itself is constantly waiting for something to happen. The scent of it underlies everything in this city, be it the rich, barbeque odor of isaw cooking in the dingiest of areas, to the clean, sweet scent of Pasig river -- the Ilog Pasig --itself."-- Yvette Tan, The Child Abandoned  

So starts the first out of 10 entries. I breezed through each dark tale that has its own horrific thread to unfurl. Her stories are unpredictable, gripping, it had me at the edge of my seat, yet there is, of course, an aspect of truly Filipino in them as each story features hellish characters that peopled ghoulish stories that spread by word of mouth. Yes, these characters are marked in the Filipino psyche the same way the legends or the alamats do. The cast from hell: tianaks, kapres, duendes, nuno sa punso, encantadas, tikbalangs, I am no stranger to these supernatural beings as I have had endless nights of trying to fend off the idea of them breathing on my neck or hiding underneath my bed, or right outside my bedroom window, waiting till I drift to sleep before taking me for a light meal. Miss Tan weaves her own version of scare that promises cold sweat, no matter how old you are. Aside from well known cthonic cast there were also thought provoking stories that tell about human sufferings; insecurities and insatiable wants, the alcoholics and devotees of faith and drugs to complete what is already a mephistophilean broth.

Never will one look at the dark same way again.

Rock and roll will never die

In homage to the late grunge band lead singer Kurt Cobain (Nirvana) who celebrated what could've been his 45th year of existence last February 20, 2012 had it not been that a bullet penetrated his cranium and left him an unflattering hole in the head, cold dead in his apartment last in April 5, 1994, I took on Gus Van Sant's "Last Days" to ummm bemoan the guy who, I think, has the sole right to sing stoned on stage. The movie is a fictionalized account of Kurt Cobain's last days, thus, the movie is aptly titled.  

Asia, you forgot to wear something. 

Happy Birthday Tito Didi, Art Teacher & Life Mentor

Happy Birthday to my art teacher and life mentor, Tito “Didi” Romano! Thank you for teaching me that an apple is not merely red, that yellow is among all the most important colour in a canvas, that light is an important element to consider when painting even the dullest of an inanimate object and so is perspective, the value of patience and not forcing one’s self to finish a canvas in one day, in one sitting, of different brush strokes, of sufficient amount of water, of mixing what colour to come up with which colour that will breathe life into an orange. Thank you for helping me come up with my very first artwork on a canvas which turned out to be the most fitting gift for my mother. Those days of art lessons and life lessons will never be forgotten. May you continue to touch lives through your art and may the good Lord bless you and your family. 

these photos of ME were taken by Miracle Romano, Dipolog 2007 

Artworks by Tito Didi: Pray Without Ceasing, Tita Lak-Lak (Wife) and Misha (Youngest Son) 


 MORE OF HIS ARTWORKS HERE! http://meewa.multiply.com/photos/album/7/7

from La Princesse de Cleves

"Je crus que si quelque chose pouvait rallumer les sentiment que vous aviez eus pour moi, c'etait de vous faire voir que les miens etaient changes; mais de vous le faire voir en feignant de vous le cacher, et comme si je n'eusse pas eu la force de vous l'avouer."

(I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to wish to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you.)


I came across this passage while reading Andre Aciman's "Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere". This passage was extracted from a French novel published anonymously in 1678. Madame de La Fayette was said to have authored "La Princesse de Cleves", one of the very first historical novels in literature.

His "Alibis"

I've been reading Andre Aciman's "Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere" and enjoying it immensely. On reading the first essay entitled "Lavender" I was dead certain to love the rest of the entries on this book. It started:

Life begins somewhere with the scent of lavender. My father is standing in front of a mirror. He has just showered and shaved and is about to put on a suit. I watch him tighten the knot of his necktie, flip down his shirt collar, and button it up. Suddenly, there it is, as always: lavender. 

Remembrances. That's what this book is all about. Beautiful crumbs written by someone who looks into childhood, scents, travels, language, books, artists, writers and the mundane and brings out a collection of fragrant memories written in master care and style. Proustian, if I must say. 

"   The search for ideal lavender was like the search for that part of me that needed nothing more than a fragrance to emerge from the sleep of thousands. I searched for it the way I searched for my personal color, or for a brand of cigarettes, or for my favorite composer. 

   And yet, even as I criticized each fragrance, I found myself growing attached to it, as though something that had less to do with the fragrances themselves than with that part of me that had sought them out and been seduced by them and finally blossomed because of them should never be allowed to perish. Sometimes the history of provisional attachments means more to us than the attachment themselves, the way the history of a love affair stirs more love than the affair itself. Sometimes it is in blind ritual and not in faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit not character that makes us who we are. Sometimes the clothes and scents we wear have more of us in them than we do ourselves." 

from Lavender

"   I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome: not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways everywhere but also by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me already than on the pages themselves. I knew that my way of reading books might be aberrant, just as I knew that figuring my way around Rome as I did would shock the fussiest of tourists.  

   I was after something intimate and I learned to spot it in the first alley, in the first verse of a poem, on the first glance of a stranger. Great books, like great cities, always let us find things we think are only in us and couldn't possibly belong elsewhere but that turned out to be the broadcast everywhere we look. Great artists are those who give us what we think was already ours. Never mind that we've never seen, felt, or loved through anything remotely similar. The artist converts us; he steals and refashions our past, and like songs from our adolescence, gives us the picture of our youth as we wished it to be back then - never as it really was. He gives us our secret wishfilm back. 

   Suddenly, the insights nursed by strangers belong, against all odds, to us as well. We know what an author desires, what he resembles; we even know why. The better a writer, the he erases his footprints -- yet the better the writer, the more he wants to intuit and put back those parts he chose to hide. With the right hunch, you could read the inflection of an author's soul on a single comma, in one sentence, and from that one sentence seize the whole book, his life work. "

earmarked from Intimacy 

"   Indeed, the disconnect, the hiatus, the tiny synapse -- call it once again the spread between us and time, between who we are and wish we might have been -- is all we have to understand our place in life. Once measures time not in units of experience but in increments of hope and anticipated regret."

from Temporizing