When did your heart go missing?

Forgive me. I have my weaknesses. One of them is music that sounds like British Invasion Rock.

This is one of my favorite bands, Rooney. You might remember them if you watched that episode of The OC (best episode evarrr, the tween in me wants to type). My favorite of their songs is "I'm a Terrible Person" and "When did your heart go missing?" Here are some of their most popular videos (though they're better listened to than watched; the videos aren't, you know, terribly brilliant. I'm just going to... embed away, aren't I.

And I just want to comment that the hair was *theirs* long before the Jonas Brothers came into the scene.

It occurs to me, you might recognize this first song from "The Princess Diaries." Yeah yeah, the vocalist is that guy.




I love "I'm a Terrible Person" because it sounds exactly, exactly like a young man I once knew. No, really. Hi mom! This is a live version since I don't think there's an official video.


It's gonna be a bad day, come Sunday... it's gonna be a bad day, come Sunday...

What belongs to eternity

The hardest thing about this Christmas is trying to be happy when, only a few hours ago, I overheard that a former friend of mine (a practicing Catholic... at least on the surface) performed an "abortion" on herself by giving herself abortifacients. Mga "bote-bote" daw. And to see you still in Church, receiving the sacraments as usual. You were not lacking in doctrinal education--you went to the same Catholic schools I did growing up and we were in the same class--to decide that what you did was wrong, and that to receive communion now is sacrilege. Unless you confessed it. Which of course I wouldn't know.

I'm trying to be compassionate. Trying to understand your circumstances. But the first instinct is not to feel sad for you. The first instinct is to think of that poor child, and to be so angry that I want to scream at you. You, a victim? Yes (though not really, because everything you did was of your own free will--you were never coerced and it was a lifestyle you'd created for yourself), but it was never said that a victim could not also be the perpetrator of a different crime.

I have one thing to say to pro-abortionists and to those who would kill for their own convenience or reputation. It sounds like something an old puritan would say and it sounds terrible, as if I were the kind of person who would go around saying things like "Anathema! Anathema!" But if you stop to think about it... well.

The sinful man has his day? Yes, and God his eternity!

Hands Down

{Photo source}
Because, you know, despite myself I still remember.

On second thought

We spent the day discreetly (or perhaps not so discreetly) making origami flowers for a fund-raising activity for the class. I remember when I was little and origami was a regular part of life, along with white shoes (for inside the classroom) and black shoes (for outside), songs in Nihongo, and learning to drink tea and make sukiyaki. I studied in a school run by Japanese nuns, and aside from learning how to read and write in Japanese, we learned to make paper cranes and were given colorful squares of paper as a reward for jobs well done. I was never much good at art that needed to be made by hand. I'd get the creases wrong and would often have to start again, to the consternation of my favorite nun, Sr Monica.

And even when I got it right after a laborious stretch of time (and repeated gentle instructions from the presiding sister), there were still marks on the paper where there weren't supposed to be any. I could never erase them, like indelible marks on my saggy paper cranes.

They're kind of like mistakes that way.

I wrote that last entry (and how come we can't say "I wrote the below" as a reverse to "I wrote the above"? I digress) before I had any idea of the proceedings that went into revoking the title. Before finding them out, I was okay; after that, it was as though someone tugged the rug out from under my feet and I was left gasping and reeling, unable to believe the sheer amount of (I'm sorry.) stupidity that is responsible for hurting the feelings of about 300 people.

I feel like I should just write about it and I'll feel better afterwards, and then be able to work, so here I go.

If maturity were graded and if the last week was a test, I would be in the bottom half of the class--probably even rock bottom of 160 or so students. I don't know anyone who has handled the disappointment as badly as I have. Not disappointment in our final loss, but extreme dissatisfaction with the way things were handled. I should have handled things with more humility. I don't understand why I felt so angry, and for such a long time, because had we lost on TRP night itself, I would have mourned for a few hours and then moved on. I could never begrudge anything of 2013, the upper batch and the final winning class for TRP 2010, because I have a handful of friends there--among them, friends I know I will have for life. It also isn't knowing that our song was better, because it wasn't; I mean of course I liked it more, having gone through each step of the "Detox" we described in our song's lyrics with as much gusto as the next person, but it wasn't necessarily better. In terms of performance, I have to give the thumbs up to 2013 as well, because theirs was cleaner than ours. My attachment to our song is a strictly sentimental one, and were I one of the judges needing to exercise a professional eye (or ear), I know it'd have been a toss-up for me too.

So why does it hurt so much? Is it because I've wanted to win TRP since I wanted to be in UPCM which is, en effet, forever? I keep joking with anyone who will listen that I am not, I will never ever ever, return the TRP trophy, which is sitting in the same position now as it was that night--previously a sign of victory and a source of fond memories, now like a gaping wound my roommate and I can hardly look at.

The truth is that at this moment I want to go up to our unit, pluck the trophy from the kitchen counter, whisk it downstairs, and plonk it in the middle of the MSS tambayan, no questions asked, because it hurts to look at it. Unlike some of my classmates who adamantly maintain that we are still the winners--as of course they have every right to feel--I could never believe in it myself, and the trophy, with that sad, gaudy piece of Christmas tinsel wrapped around it, is just a nasty reminder.

Bad events have a way of bringing out the best and the worst in people. The best, in some classmates who unexpectedly maintained their cool and kept a level head throughout the whole thing; congratulations to you, because you are better men and women than me. The worst, in me--and in a select few (some of them my very own classmates) who treat 2014's anger, which is very much deserved, with disdain. And the thing is, it's all right. We all have the right to feel the way we feel about things. Class 2013 has the right to celebrate, and the right to post celebratory status messages on facebook--a right taken from them for a few sad days--and class 2014 has the right to moan about the unfairness of the world. Everyone has the right to be angry for a few days, and then to be forgiven afterwards.

It's just--I expected better of myself.

That is all.

In te Domine speravi. (TRP chapitre trois)

In you I have hoped!

So we were wrong. But, to be totally and brutally sincere, though I did feel a bit of regret... I was never, not even for a moment, sad that it turns out that we lost this year's TRP. There are bigger, more important things in this world than winning TRP, and one of them is the building of character to be good, valiant people who can take disappointments well and who can be detached from their feelings.

Tandaan natin kung sino talaga ang bida, 2014, and then we won't be sad anymore. :)

Sometimes poetry says it better.

O you,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing,
Why did you not strangle me before speaking
Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words
And then leave me to the mercy
Of the forest bees?

Tao rin pala, chapitre deux

This photo is of one of my favorite reredos in the whole wide world. It belongs to a humble little chapel somewhere in San Juan, in a small conference center that holds a special meaning for me. In that little oratory I learned what I was made for, and I'll never forget it. Over the break, when I was there, I sat constantly in the first row of pews for no other reason than to keep looking at the reredo and to imagine myself part of the scene. Whenever I was distracted during prayer I would wrench myself back by imagining that I was the one holding up the Baby Jesus' head. (I mean if you think about it, I don't think an infant this young should have been able to hold his head up so tensely yet.) You move me, my Lord, broken beneath the rod--but I also like to see you as an infant, because, like a saint once said, I can fool myself into thinking that you need me.

So what does this image of the Blessed Virgin Mary have to do with the Tao Rin Pala? Moments before we went backstage for our performance in the chorale competition, I realized that we hadn't prayed as a class, something we used always to do before any Big Thing. I mouthed this to Dane, our conductor, who mouthed back something to the effect of "I know--wait!" But the prayer didn't happen, because we had to go in right away. So backstage, I squared my shoulders and said a Memorare. In fact I said all the memorares I could fit into that brief period while class 2015 was finishing their song. Part of me was amazed at my daring. You know that rhyme--when she was good, she was very, very good; when she was bad, she was very very bad? Well, this week, I was very very bad indeed. No presence of God, no interior recollection, no spirit of penance--and so much ego, so much bad behavior and lack of charity and all-around kasungitan.

And here I was, on a Very Important Night, asking with all temerity for a favor: that we might win. It seems a very conceited thing to ask. In fact, the better, humbler, more loving plea would be: Lord, through the interecession of the Blessed Virgin, please help us to do our best but to accept Your Will whatever it may be! But I also know that, like a child asking her father for the moon, a father (or a mother) will love you for asking for even the most ridiculous things, because he knows you trust him enough to ask.

Of course there was some quick rectifying to be done moments before we crept on stage--Lord, scratch that; whether we win or not, I'll be happy because for a Christian, there is no reason to be sad!--but my point is that the Memorare is one prayer that comes spontaneously, and that it has never, ever failed me. All it takes is a sincere act of will and a looking back to that beautiful reredo, and all sadness, all fear evaporates. I prayed to win, sure; but I prayed for a good disposition too, which was more important.

Mama, I entrusted TRP to you (and I'm sure some of my classmates did too). And we won, and that victory is yours too. Let it be my (and Dane's) small rose for you, during this novena to your Immaculate Conception, and thank you, Mama, for hearing me, despite how terrible I've been to you and to my father.



For me, Mama, ikaw ang bida!

Move On

It's not Bernadette Peters. Surprisingly I like this more than the video I saw of her and Mandy Patinkin performing the same song (heresy I know). I'm a sucker for clean harmonies.

What fresh hell is this?

People use this quote a lot--I heard it on The Big Bang Theory once--and think that it's Shakespeare, not knowing that it's from American Poet and satirist Dorothy Parker. Apparently she said it whenever she was interrupted by the telephone, and took to using it in place of "hello" whenever someone rang.

This picture of her, to the left, is very pretty--and also gives you no idea of what a pessimistic person she must have been. As a teenager I took to the sarcasm, man-bashing, and blatant self-deprecation in her poetry. She was famous for short, poetic witticisms like "Men never make passes / at girls who wear glasses." Her poetry was sometimes irreverent, sometimes uneven in quality, but always interesting. I remember picking up Marion Meade's biography of her (called--guess what?--"What Fresh Hell is This?") and thinking excitedly that her life must have been as interesting as her poetry. I was, in a sense, disappointed--not because her life was uninteresting, because it was (and very bohemian too), but because Dorothy Parker's dim view of life was almost palpable in every page. You can always take poems as a joke, and assume in poems like this--

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying--
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

--that the author is merely making fun of the world and can't really mean it. But reading the biography, I think she kind of did. She died of a heart attack in 1967, having had an unhappy childhood, a string of affairs, three marriages (twice to the same man), and an increasing dependence on alcohol.

I'll always be fond of her poetry, anyway. She was famous for her wisecracks, but some of her poetry on love and friendship is actually really painfully spot-on and sincere and beauitful. Here are some that I either really like or could relate to at one point in time. My emo friends will like them.

But Not Forgotten
I think, no matter where you stray,
That I shall go with you a way.
Though you may wander sweeter lands,
You will not soon forget my hands,
Nor yet the way I held my head,
Nor all the tremulous things I said.
You still will see me, small and white
And smiling, in the secret night,
And feel my arms about you when
The day comes fluttering back again.
I think, no matter where you be,
You'll hold me in your memory
And keep my image, there without me,
By telling later loves about me.

Distance
Were you to cross the world, my dear,
To work or love or fight,
I could be calm and wistful here,
And close my eyes at night.

It were a sweet and gallant pain
To be a sea apart;
But, oh, to have you down the lane
Is bitter to my heart.

Anecdote
So silent I when Love was by
He yawned, and turned away;
But Sorrow clings to my apron-strings,
I have so much to say.

The False Friends
hey laid their hands upon my head,
They stroked my cheek and brow;
And time could heal a hurt, they said,
And time could dim a vow.

And they were pitiful and mild
Who whispered to me then,
"The heart that breaks in April, child,
Will mend in May again."

Oh, many a mended heart they knew.
So old they were, and wise.
And little did they have to do
To come to me with lies!

Who flings me silly talk of May
Shall meet a bitter soul;
For June was nearly spent away
Before my heart was whole.

The Lady's Reward
Lady, lady, never start
Conversation toward your heart;
Keep your pretty words serene;
Never murmur what you mean.
Show yourself, by word and look,
Swift and shallow as a brook.
Be as cool and quick to go
As a drop of April snow;
Be as delicate and gay
As a cherry flower in May.
Lady, lady, never speak
Of the tears that burn your cheek-
She will never win him, whose
Words had shown she feared to lose.
Be you wise and never sad,
You will get your lovely lad.
Never serious be, nor true,
And your wish will come to you-
And if that makes you happy, kid,
You'll be the first it ever did.

Intellectual Honesty

Reposted from my comment to a friend's link:

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20101126-305535/Becoming-human

Much as I hate it when RH bill opponents spout outdated evidence about the harmfulness of contraceptives (cancer etc. Modern contraceptives [except abortifacients] are just about as biologically harmful as any other kind of drug....), the whole premise of the article is dangerously silly. Pope BXVI quote taken horrendously out of context. 'the Pope now says using condoms can, in some cases, be “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility"' --> refers to male prostitutes with HIV who are *deliberately* infecting their clients without full disclosure, plus those incidents where the use of a condom is intended to protect against disease (but, always in the context that sex for Catholics is only correct and moral whenever it's 1) within marriage and 2) with one partner of the opposite sex). There is no "titanic shift" in "his thinking" and to say that is just plain ridiculous.

I don't know if you're pro or anti or whatever (I'm anti myself), so I don't know your intent in posting this link, pero maaaan, nakakairita ang articles na walang intellectual honesty to completely ignore the context of the people it's quoting. It further muddies the issue of the RH bill and makes intelligent debate impossible.

"I'll take a whack at it!"

Closure

I never really understood
What they mean by it.
Nothing has been left ajar. A door
Has been closed, and irrevocably.
The veil drawn between us allows

Nothing.

Tao rin pala!

The happiest times of my whole week are when we get together in the SSWC and sit down (or kneel down or lean against the wall or whatever) and practice our TRP song. Time just flies by and before you know it, it's seven o'clock and you have to go home. But those two hours are glorious. I love singing now as much as I did when I was this small:


(I know I don't look much like her. But I do know that little kid in the sailor dress could rock Basia's "Time and Tide" like there was no tomorrow.)

And I'm always happiest when singing. Which is why, when I discovered I had a laryngeal nodule in November 2008, I was devastated. The doctors--now my teachers--were cautious. I convinced myself that I could still recover, that it could spontaneously regress. Well, it didn't. And what followed was a year that was like being in a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end. It wasn't merely the vanity of having a talent taken away from you, but the sharp sting of having to find another way to express yourself, and to know that things that had once been easy are now impossible.

My speech therapist said that an operation was out of the question, because to wound my vocal cords to take out the nodule would be harming my voice even more. So I despaired. Goodbye, dreams of live performances! Good-bye, Tahilan Christmas carolling and singing in the June 26 choir. Good-bye, performing for birthdays, and good-bye, singing to Sondheimian musicals in the shower ("We DO NOT beloooooong to-GE-ther...."). But then, in late 2009, we broached the idea of an operation with my long-suffering ENT doctor, and he agreed and set-up an appointment for the last week of 2009. (This webpage has a cool video on the kind of operation performed on me; it's called a micro-direct laryngoscopy with micro-flap mass excision).

And after not speaking for three weeks... there it was. I woke up the day after my doctor told me it was okay to speak, and I started singing songs from Jason Robert Brown's "Songs for a New World," and there it was. I remember bouncing into Dane's bedroom in Tahilan to wake her up for mass, so happy and ecstatic that I could sing again. Sometimes God giveth, and He taketh away--then He giveth it back!

And this is why, dear TRP, I'm giving you my all this year. Last year I was morose and couldn't even be bothered to memorize the piece, and I took offence at the well-meaning advice of this classmate of mine when she'd give me pointers on how to sing (My ego was swimming in a soup of indignation: You're teaching me how to sing? How dare you?), and mostly it was a terrible experience. But now, this year, I can actually sing, and I'll never take that for granted again. Maybe one day I'll join a choir again--who knows?--but for now, I just want to say, get ready for us, college of Medicine, 'cause you ain't seen nothing yet.

Through a glass darkly

Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum.

There are things that, even when you bring them to prayer, you can't understand. The only solution is to bow your head and say, fiat voluntas tua. But Most Esteemed Lord Father, when I finally see you face to face, I will spend a long time asking you questions about these things I do not understand--the weakness of my nature, the funny nature of "coincidence," the vicissitudes of my own heart. I shall cease to wonder why--for Christ will explain each separate anguish in the schoolroom of the sky.
And I want to ask you lots of questions about why we hurt the people we care for the most.

You--not my esteemed Lord Father, but another person--probably don't even remember this incident. Or maybe you do, but because you're just so nice, you've chosen to forget it in a way that I'd find hard to do. But I read something today that reminded me about it quite forcefully--it felt like a blow to the stomach. I will apologize to you, probably over Christmas, because despite my ham-handed way of dealing with you and my all-around b*tchiness, I do count you as a great friend, one of the best, and I promise to never do that again. And I will keep doing nice things for you so that, one day, you can look back on that incident (because I didn't mean what I said, honest...), and not feel even a pang of resentment. So that one day, you'll forgive this stupid misanthropic idiot who always says the first thing she thinks and has "no filter" (words you used to refer to someone else, 2009). So that, one day I can be even half the friend you have been to me.

Dancing Shoes

This evening, in between bouts of working on our group thesis, I want to burden my few but dedicated readers (Hi mom!) with a book review.

On my birthday, my mom and I finally did something we've been longing to do forever: to relive that scene in You've Got Mail, when Meg Ryan's Kathleen Kelly, feeling bereft because her bookstore shut down, wanders into the competition's store, Fox Books. She sits in the children's section and watches the customers move around in this "homogenize-the-world mochaccino land"--this airconditioned monster of a bookstore--so different from her quaint little shop, which was "valuable, but small" (a metaphor for her life, really). She hears a customer ask a salesperson:

"Do you have the Shoe Books?"

She continues, "My friend told me my daughter has to read the Shoe Books."

The salesperson is obviously clueless, so Meg Ryan, half in tears, butts in: "Noel Streatfeild. [...] Noel Streatfeild wrote Skating Shoes, and Ballet Shoes, and Dancing Shoes... I'd start with Ballet Shoes first, it's my favorite. Though Skating Shoes is completely wonderful--" (and here her voice breaks) "--but it's out of print."

So my mom and I, with a sense of schoolgirl mischief not befitting our respective ages, wandered into Fully Booked and asked the girl in Customer's service: "Do you have the shoe books?"

Well, after a few faux pas (she bought us a collection of fashion books on SHOES. As my generation likes to say... FAIL!), she presented us with this book:

My mom and I were both a little stunned--we never expected the store to actually have any of the Shoe Books--and so, after the fuss we'd both made and the salesperson's repeated trips to the shelves, we both felt a little forced into buying the book. Not that we weren't excited. Kathleen Kelly, we knew, had "excellent taste--she's famous for it"--so we had pretty high expectations.

They weren't disappointed. This is hard to believe about a children's book, but I never knew what to expect next. In the story, two girls--Rachel and her adopted sister Hilary--are sent to live with their Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom after the death of their mother. Aunt Cora is the famous Mrs Wintle, who runs a dancing school and produces row upon row of Wintle's Wonders, little girls who find jobs as dancers for shows, musicals, troupes, you name it. It ought to be the perfect fit for Hilary, who's a dancer who was being groomed to go to the Royal Academy of Ballet, but Rachel (who isn't a dancer herself--not at all!) knows that what Mrs Wintle teaches is the wrong kind of dancing! How will she ever arrange for Hilary to get to go to the Royal Academy, and how will she avoid becoming a Wintle's Wonder herself?

Children's books, we all know, tend to be a bit one-dimensional on the character front. Usually rather plain characters are dressed up with capabilities or super powers and thrust into a wonderful plot. (The first Harry Potter book comes to mind. Harry himself, if we're to trust the narrator, has the personality of a paper bag--it's his situation that gains our sympathy; Dumbledore is all good, and Petunia and Vernon are all bad.) Noel Streatfeild reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' better books, because each character has a set of flaws and perfections. Rachel and Hilary are not all goodness and sweetness, though you love them because they are really a figure of sympathy; Rachel can be headstrong and stubborn and self-centered, while Hilary can be spectacularly lazy and self-centered too.

The adults--Cora Wintle, Uncle Tom, Pursey who is like a matron figure, Mrs Storm who runs the classroom and gives the lessons--are written solidly and beautifully; Cora Wintle whose devotion to her daughter Dulcie makes her pretty awful, but at the same time sympathetic; Uncle Tom, who may be praised for the way he handles Rachel and Hilary with affection and genuine respect, but who may be faulted for the poor way that he's bringing up his spoiled daughter, queen of Mrs Wintle's school, Dulcie; Pursey, who listens to Rachel and Hilary and who loves them, but who never really takes a firm stand on anything; and Mrs Storm, who loves Rachel but who doesn't understand dancing well enough to know why her ambition is what it is. You just want so much for Rachel and Hilary to be loved and for their dreams to be supported, and sometimes you don't get that consolation because the adults can be sympathetic in this aspect and completely obtuse the next, but these little disappointments are what make the book realistic and substantial. You know, like real life.

I would love to read the other Shoe Books. Including Skating Shoes though, as Kathleen Kelly says with a catch in her throat, "It's out of print!"

O you, who came upon me once: Today, in three acts

ACT I.
Detachment. How hard it is! Oh, to be fastened by nothing but three nails and to have no more feeling in my flesh than the Cross!
151, The Way

ACT II.
You give me the impression that you are carrying your heart in your hands, as if you were offering goods for sale. Who wants it? If it takes no creature's fancy, you will come and give it to God.

Do you think that is how the saints acted?
146, The Way

ACT III.
The heart! From time to time, without your being able to help it, your all too human memory casts a crude, unhappy, “uncouth” shadow on your mind.

Go to the tabernacle immediately, at least in spirit, and you will return to light, happiness and Life.
817, Furrow

So in the end, mea culpa, but that's no reason to walk about with a long face. I'm sorry, and next time, when you catch me unawares, I will behave better and with more genuine charity.

Slowly

(I always feign an indifference to poetry, because the truth is that it was my first love. I wanted to be a modern-day Sylvia Plath without the philandering husband and the oven. I wanted to be Amy Lowell. Dorothy Parker was my idol. I fell asleep at night chanting Matthew Arnold to myself. I fought with anyone who might listen that it's not "e. e. cummings" but, also legitimately, "E. E. Cummings." Too bad I don't have any talent. All I can do is admire poetry like this--honest and sharp--from afar.)


Slowly
Donna Masini

I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit.
Fourth grade, the reptile zoo
the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,

its head clenched in the wide
jaws of the snake, the snake
sucking it down its long throat.

All throat that snake—I couldn't tell
where the throat ended, the body
began. I remember the glass

case, the way that snake
took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking
but weren’t we amazed, fascinated,

saying we couldn’t look, but looking, weren’t we
held there, weren’t we
imagining—what were we imaging?)

Mrs. Paterson urged us to move on girls,
but we couldn’t move. It was like
watching a fern unfurl, a minute

hand move across a clock. I didn’t know why
that snake didn’t choke, the rabbit never
moved, how the jaws kept opening

wider, sucking it down, just so
I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:

this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.
You are never coming back.

The Best Slow Dancer

by David Wagoner


Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper
By the second string of teachers and wallflowers
In the school gym across the key through the glitter
Of mirrored light three-second rule forever
Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer
Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn't there
In your arms like music she knew just how to answer
The question mark of your spine your hand in hers
The other touching that place between her shoulders
Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure
To move as they wished wherever you might stagger
Without her she turned in time she knew where you were
In time she turned her body into yours
As you moved from thigh to secrets yet never
Where you could be for all time never closer
Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under
Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her
You weren't the worst one not the boy whose mother
Had taught him to count to murmur over and over
One slide two slide three slide now no longer
The one in the hallway after class the scuffler
The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather
With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her
But see her dancing off with someone or other
Older more clever smoother dreamier
Not waving a sister somebody else's partner
Lover while you went floating home through the air
To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer
Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

A10 Nerve Clips.

My brain is fried. I shouldn't do this again. One of my favorite, favorite things to do is to hunt down memories from childhood media--songs, TV shows, cartoons. Earlier this week I tracked down the shows that used to be on ABS-CBN in the mornings and in the afternoons after school; apparently most of them were from World Masterpiece Theatre (世界名作劇場, Sekai Meisaku Gekijō) like "Little Prince Cedie" (here called "Cedie: Ang Munting Prinsipe"), Remi: Nobody's Girl, and so forth. (And was I the only one who thought Remi was a guy?) I also made the interesting discovery that "Julio at Julia", one of the earlier cartoons, was not in fact Japanese but of French/Belgian origin. It was called "Les jumeaux du bout du monde" (or "Twins of Destiny" in English-speaking countries). I'd feel jologs about it all, before reminding myself that nearly all of the kids in my generation watched this stuff since it was on free TV, and it was some of the best entertainment that could be had back then. (Though you have to wonder what enterprising minds thought it was appropriate to put "Neon Genesis Evangelion" on ABS-CBN in the afternoons. I'm twenty-two and I still feel too young for it. It was hardly to be grouped with "Adventures of Peter Pan" and "Swiss Family Robinson.")

Interestingly, here's a Wiki list of the shows aired by ABS-CBN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shows_previously_aired_by_ABS-CBN#Anime_and_Tokusatsu) and the anime aired by AXN-Asia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AXN_Asia). I feel obliged to mention that I am not now, nor have I ever been, what is called an "otaku"; this was all mainstream back then, and like as not, your seatmate in Grade 1 probably knew the mangled lyrics to the Grander Musashi ending theme as well as you. As anime seemed to me to get more stupid and shallow, and less wholesome, I gravitated away from it. But it doesn't make those memories any less sweet. Oh to come home in the afternoon and be greeted by Tenchi Muyo on AXN, and to watch it while eating merienda and while refusing to remove your white ankle-high socks!

To add to this, for the whole weekend I've been remembering a song that I was certain was from an AXN-Asia show. It went "dararum, daramum, ready, oooh-oooh." Then "DUAL!" That was my big clue, and from there I tracked down the show. It's called "Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure" and is about an awkward high school boy, Kazuki, who ends up in a parallel world. I always identified with one of the other characters, a certain Mitsuki, who (Asuka Langley-style) cared deeply about Kazuki but hid it by treating him abrasively. I found where the episodes can be downloaded (Veoh, in case you're interested) and even found the ending and opening themes. All right, I downloaded the entire OST here) just because I was curious! And the curious thing is, I still really remember the opening and closing themes really well. When I played them, I could sing along with the lyrics, despite hardly understanding any of it. My favorite is the song called "Real", Dual's ending theme.

And there's no one I can talk to this about, because even if I could find someone who watched this show, a) they probably wouldn't remember or b) they wouldn't want to talk about it or c) they'd be my brother. So I post here out of a desire to send this cosmic message "out into the void" (Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail).

Now the last memory I'm hunting down, before I promise I'll give up this habit entirely, is this: I'm sure it was on AXN and I'm sure it was dubbed. It was also a mecha series (you know, the kind that was so popular back then, with the protagonists operating fighting robots) and in one of the episodes, the lead character, a young girl, had taken an anti-heroine with her to have pancakes at home. This anti-heroine was the cold, unwanted-as-a-little-child type, and the whole memory is tinged with the anti-heroine's bitterness at the protagonist taking for granted the warmth of a home, the experience of making pancakes with her mother, and the ease of self-confidence--in short, everything she herself lacked. I was a melancholic little kid so I never forgot the emotional impact of that moment; however, in retrospect, I also blame it for the fact that I never took pancakes for granted either, and the reason they're my favorite carb.

Oh unnamed show that I can't find on the above lists, where are you? I just want to find you then I'll rest easy.

Home from my seminar

"In the world of emoticons, I was colon capital D."

:D

(from my favorite show, The Big Bang Theory.)

Introducing Gilbert Keith

I can't stop thinking about GK Chesterton these days. Some friends of mine were studying a book of his on St Thomas Aquinas, and while I also plan to read that, I skimmed over some of GKC's other books that I already had on my hard drive, among them the Father Brown stories and some essays of his. These essays discussed the hard-hitting issues of his time, and while some people may consider them obsolete (he wrote about the dangers to be faced by a society which entertained abortion and contraception, for example. And guess what! All of the things he predicted/reasoned would happen have now come true!), but his arguments will always, always be valid. I'm planning to post a lot of blogs about his work, so I suppose I'd better start with a good introduction.

There is a short, and sufficiently juicy, introduction of him at the American Chesterton Society's website: http://www.chesterton.org/discover/who.html. My favorite part is when you scroll down a bit and read what follows. I've pasted it here: (I don't think the Society would mind me posting this, since they're just as rabid as I am to make GKC known to the general populace.)

Why haven’t you heard of him?

There are three answers to this question:

I don’t know.
You’ve been cheated.
Chesterton is the most unjustly neglected writer of our time. Perhaps it is proof that education is too important to be left to educators and that publishing is too important to be left to publishers, but there is no excuse why Chesterton is no longer taught in our schools and why his writing is not more widely reprinted and especially included in college anthologies. Well, there is an excuse. It seems that Chesterton is tough to pigeonhole, and if a writer cannot be quickly consigned to a category, or to one-word description, he risks falling through the cracks. Even if he weighs three hundred pounds.
But there is another problem. Modern thinkers and commentators and critics have found it much more convenient to ignore Chesterton rather than to engage him in an argument, because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.

Chesterton argued eloquently against all the trends that eventually took over the 20th century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism, and spineless agnosticism. He also argued against both socialism and capitalism and showed why they have both been the enemies of freedom and justice in modern society.

And what did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended "the common man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He defended the family. He defended beauty. And he defended Christianity and the Catholic Faith. These don’t play well in the classroom, in the media, or in the public arena. And that is probably why he is neglected. The modern world prefers writers who are snobs, who have exotic and bizarre ideas, who glorify decadence, who scoff at Christianity, who deny the dignity of the poor, and who think freedom means no responsibility.

But even though Chesterton is no longer taught in schools, you cannot consider yourself educated until you have thoroughly read Chesterton. And furthermore, thoroughly reading Chesterton is almost a complete education in itself. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He doesn’t merely astonish you. He doesn’t just perform the wonder of making you think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.

Authors' ghosts

I think that authors' ghosts creep back
Nightly to haunt the sleeping shelves
And find the books they wrote.
Those authors put final, semi-final touches,
Sometimes whole paragraphs.

Whole pages are added, rewritten, revised,
So deeply by night those authors employ
Themselves with those old books of theirs.

How otherwise
Explain the fact that maybe after years
Have passed, the reader
Picks up the book - But was it like that?
I don't remember this...Where
Did this ending come from?
I recall quite another.

Oh yes, it has been tampered with
No doubt about it -
The author's very touch is here, there and there,
Where it wasn't before, and
What's more, something's missing -
I could have sworn...

--Muriel Spark
(In: Litt, Toby and Ali Smith [eds]: 13. New Writing. London: Picador and BAC, 2005.)


(When I reread Muriel Sparks' "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" about three years ago, it totally wasn't the same.)

Bookworm manifesto (or, some snobbery if you care to read it)

There's a cliche about bookworms, and I come across it every once in a while: that they're the type to read anything they can get their hands on. I don't know about you, anonymous reader, and I have no idea if you consider yourself a bookworm or not, but I submit for your inspection the opinion that this cliche is really not true. (I've found it annoying enough to go and spend a full hour to write a short treatise on a useless cliché.)

Think of yourself as you go into a bookstore, whether it's the corner booksale beside the grocer's inside Robinson's Ermita, or a posh one in Serendra, or the Solidaridad along Padre Faura. Maybe even--if you care more for the books themselves than for the covers, like me--the dingy little booksale along Pedro Gil St., which holds a lot of treasures: it was there I bought most of my Inspector Maigret books in English, since the originals are harder to find. My first was Maigret hésite (Maigret hesitates). I also found a book I've been looking for, for many years, but which I hadn't seen at any bookseller's for the last eight years: A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, first read in high school care of my best friend, Michelle Calsado. Rereading the story was like reacquainting myself with my best friend--all over again. And who would have thought that this rat's hole of a bookstore would be the place to find many Dorothy L Sayersssss, which aren't sold (except by overseas book order) in National Bookstore or Powerbooks? And which, once found in Fully Booked, will cost you 600php apiece, while one may cost 95php here?

My purpose isn't to catalogue all of my booksale purchases or spectacular bargains, but to underline the fact that when a true bookworm goes into a store, there is a specific section to which he gravitates. I again submit for your inspection this anonymous, masculinized person, the True Bookworm. He may like Science Fiction and Fantasy; he might like the Mystery Genre best of all; he may have a penchant for biographies; he may enjoy most those thrillers that are always the second most numerous (never outnumbering the romance pocketbooks of the Mills and Boon/Harlequin variety). He may go through the bookstore through a circuitous route: first glancing at the bestsellers, hardbound and shiny; then browsing casually through the thrillers and young adult fiction; before concentrating more fully on science fiction and fantasy, saving his best for last. Or, pressed for time, he might go to his favorite section first.

As a True Bookworm he does not choose books based on how they will look, sitting with him and sharing his latté in a coffee shop, or propped on his backpack on a long bus ride. As a True Bookworm he hardly pays attention to what is popular--but unlike the snobby elitist (with all the redundancy this entails), he doesn't balk at reading something just because everyone else is. (How silly it would be, for example, to eschew Tolkien just because he's popular.) As a True Bookworm he knows what he loves, and there is a kind of program in his head for finding the specific books he's looking for. His eyes merely slide over titles and authors' names that he finds uninteresting or which provoke that lukewarm response, "I must get round to reading this author sometime" (for me: Robert Parker, CJ Cherryh and Sara Paretsky); his mind is programmed to stop and squeal with glee upon sighting a familiar and beloved book, whether or not a copy is already in his possession. (For me it's always The Beekeeper's Apprentice, of which I already have three copies; it doesn't matter that I already have it, but encountering it here is like meeting an old friend.)

Most importantly, his mind is also programmed to spot names of books that he doesn't already have, and wants badly to possess. (For me this is anything by Julian Symons. It was a victory for me to find his book, "Death's Darkest Face," at a sale years ago, but I'm still in search for the holy grail among crime aficionados, the seminal study called "Bloody Murder.")

Whatever genre it is, he does not, like the indiscriminate reader of the cliché, devour everything. The very point of becoming a bookworm is that you cultivate your taste, so that at the end of years--after accumulated experience of reading books both enjoyed and hated--you can choose your books more carefully. You can tell by looking at the cover or its blurbs if it is the kind of book you will probably enjoy. (That other cliché that is hardly ever true is that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover; apart from the Internet at home, the True Bookworm stranded in the familiar strangeness of a bookstore has no better tool with which to decide to buy a book.) For every bookworm may be all right with reading any given book if asked, but in his heart, there is a genre (or two, or three) that has made a home, and which will always spell out to this bookworm the things he most desires from the reading experience: comfort, or distraction, or escapism, or consolation, or stimulation. (For me it is all these.) So a bookworm is defined not by the diversity of the books that he reads (though diversity wouldn't really go amiss), but by the intensity, the voraciousness with which he hunts for the books that he wants and his enjoyment of them, and by the sheer ability, honed by experience, to know what he will like and what he will not.

Berthe Morisot, La lecture, 1869-1870.

The Divided Heart

I was listening to this song on my "Random Musicals" playlist:

All that I ask for
Is one little corner
One private room
At the back of my heart.
--Jason Robert Brown, "Nobody Needs to Know" (from L5Y)

And the musical ends with the lead couple (the only couple. Actually they're the only cast in this two-person play) splitting up because of a myriad problems and because, ultimately, the man singing the above song cheated on his wife. This isn't me playing pot, kettle, black. This is me reminding myself and the small circle of people who read this blog: He has no use for divided hearts.

I see this all the time in Facebook. "I am Catholic. But I support the Reproductive Health Bill." Sometimes we even drop the "but" as though the two could be in any way compatible. All of this... is an attempt at cafeteria Catholicism. We pick and choose. Oh, being a Catholic's nice and all, I love our devotions to the saints and to the Blessed Virgin Mary and I love Mass songs ladidah. I love Jesus. But when it comes to those hard solid issues that the Church is so adamant about, like homosexual marriages and the use of contraceptives and the use of abortifacients--when it comes to commandments five onwards, especially the sixth and the ninth--I pick and choose.

When you're in school, you dream of a 1.0. How is that we're satisfied with the bare minimum of a 3.0--mass on Sundays and an occasional confession, maybe even some charismatic prayer meetings if our friends are going--when it comes to what should be the most important thing in our lives?

When you're a Catholic, there should be no BUT. Let's not put conditions on a faith that we propose to have. He said He has no use for divided hearts. You can't say you love Him if you don't love His bride the church and His clergy. They are just incompatible (and if you say this isn't true, we can talk about why). We live in a world where everyone is so cautious to say things absolutely. Moral relativism is the theme of the century. But let's call a spade a spade. Let's get past all of the politics surrounding the bill and actually read it. Read it in the light of the Constitution that we hold sacred as Filipinos. Read it in the light of true statistics. Read it in the light of comparisons to other countries (ie contraceptives have been legal and affordable in the US since the early 1900s; has the abortion rate dropped even when changes in their population have been taken into consideration?). And if you're a Catholic, read this in the light of the faith you say you have and the moral code that should follow.

If you have questions, don't just rant on facebook. Don't call people bigots when you don't have a correct understanding of what they stand for. Grant us the respect you would grant an opponent on the other side of a proper debate, and don't assume that just because we oppose the bill, we are being "blindly obedient," or we are simply ignorant, or we haven't read the bill. Because we have, because there are fewer of us and we have to be sure about what we're going to say when we're up against so many. You have things to say, I know, and you have good points. So do we. And they don't necessarily begin with "Because the Church says so."

Talk to me here. And since everyone's battle cry is respect--let's go with that. Respect. I'm trying to detach myself from my fear of being persecuted for my beliefs, because I've been there and done that and the experience wasn't pretty, but sometimes--all the time--standing up for what you believe in is necessary (and isn't that UP's long-held battle cry?). Try to detach yourself from your anticlericalism or your anger, or both. And let's talk.

Whisper of the Heart

(Because it's always easiest to write a blog the night before an exam!)


Consider: it is a summer evening in 1994, in a suburb in Tokyo, and Shizuku Tsukushima, a junior high school girl, looks through the checkout cards of her library books and is amazed by a pattern: each book was previously checked out by a person called "Seiji Amasawa." The name burns into her mind, along with a muddle of other worries and concerns. High school entrance exams are coming up and everyone is in cram school except her. She's restless and doesn't know what to do about her future; the only thing to excite her is the prospect of borrowing a new book (and doesn't that sound familiar!), and even this excitement has paled. Still, she makes her way to the library and borrows a new book of Fairy Tales--she's the first one to borrow it--and is pleased and astonished to find the name "Amasawa" stamped onto the book, probably the name of a previous owner.

Later in the day she leaves the book behind on a bench in front of the baseball field. She comes back to get it. Enter a curiously good-looking but sardonic boy, who looks to be about her age, and who is sitting at the same bench and looking through the same book. He calls Shizuku by name--her name is on the library card after all--and refers mockingly to a translation of a song, "Concrete Roads", on a piece of paper folded into the book. "Forget 'Concrete Roads'," he says, and leaves Shizuku fuming. "Baka!" she says as she storms home.

This is the first of a handful of encounters--either spotting each other at school, by the public library, or at the curious antique shop that Shizuku has discovered by following a nomadic fat, gray cat from the train and through the city.

Shizuku and the cat-of-many-names aboard the train.

One day, after a terrible time after school, she goes to the shop again finds the same boy, who turns out to be the grandson of the shop owner. He takes her inside the house and the shop and when she learns that he's studying to be a luthier, she's awestruck by the ambition and purpose she never expected to find in someone her age.

Shizuku and a mysterious boy, whose name she doesn't know--but she feels like she's known him for years...

It comes as no surprise to the audience that the boy turns out to be Seiji Amasawa, and that he knows perfectly well who she is. "I had to read all sorts of books so I could check them out before you, and you would see my name," he tells her later on, when they are alone. "I even sat with you once, but you didn't notice."

The movie goes on--about two hours of it--and follows Seiji as he wins the battle with his parents to go to Cremona for an apprenticeship to be a luthier, and follows Shizuku as she lingers restlessly at home, hating her lack of purpose and perceived lack of talent. A conversation with Seiji's grandfather convinces her that she has just as much potential as Seiji--she just has to find what she's good at and to polish herself, as one would purify a beryl ore. She makes the decision to start writing a story--to finish it, to work on it day and night, even to the detriment of her studies, because she has to test herself, to see what she's got. Her parents are supportive but cautious. "It's not easy when you walk a different road," her father tells her, after she blurts out that she's working on something more important than even school, and that if this means compromising her chances at high school, so be it.

The morning after Shizuku finishes her story and accepts that it's not enough to want--one must do, she looks out the window and finds Seiji standing outside. And the reunion is really too beautiful to be written down--you have to see it for yourself.

---

This is Hayao Miyazaki's 1995 film Whisper of the Heart or Mimi o Sumaseba. I am not a big fan of everything Hayao Miyazaki does--part of me still can't forgive him for the travesty that was "Howl's Moving Castle"--but I remember watching "Mon voisin Totoro" (My Neighbor Totoro) and Kiki's Delivery Service when I was little, and was so pleased when I gave this one a try two summers ago. Miyazaki has a beautiful way of portraying children. He sees into their secret world and understands, and never trivializes, their worries and feelings. And as always the animation is beautiful, the details are incredible, and the music is simple and appropriate and dear.

Mimi o Sumaseba has the advantage of being perhaps the clearest, most coherent of Hayao Miyazaki's plotlines. It doesn't try to be more than what it is--it's a coming of age story if there ever was one--and it actually makes sense, which is more than I can say for other films! But my favorite part about it was how it wasn't just a story of a romance, though it is that. Shizuku was surprised and pleased and flattered and enchanted, but her affection for Seiji Amasawa didn't turn her into a moonstruck idiot--it made her confront things about herself, and made her force herself to grow, when she had been fighting this growth for so long. It made her understand that she had to step up, not only to be worthy of the love and admiration that she wanted, but to have, too, the ability to stand before the person she loved and know that she was a whole person with or without him--completed by love rather than diminished by it.

Doesn't it make you wish Bella Swann, and her ilk (of irritatingly lampa damsels in distress), had taken a cue from a high school bookworm with short messy hair, and an awkward way with boys? Sometimes young children know more about true love than their elders.

Glass bones

There's no point in being oversensitive. No matter where you are or what job you take up, the experience will always be abrasive, and even if you ran away from one job or one school to another, it would still be the same. Your only other option would be to live as a hermit, like that man with the bones as fragile as glass, and you wouldn't last a day in that kind of life.

So just suck it up! Long faces never attracted anybody. Particularly on old Yorick here.

Le fabuleux destin

I saw Amelie when it first came out. I remember seeing the ad in the paper, saying it was going to be shown in the Ayala cinemas only, and I think (I don't know if I remember correctly) that I'd already been waiting for the release for some time. I forgot how I found out about it--only that I was highly interested in French films because I was just starting to learn the language. But I remember how, getting started in livejournal, the background I used was a screencap of one of the last scenes--the one when Hipolito, the writer, turns and sees on the wall an excerpt from his own writing: Sans toi, les émotions d'aujourd hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d'autrefois. My very first icons were from Amelie. The one I use on livejournal is still from Amelie, a shot of the little girl taking a picture of the sky, where there are clouds shaped like a big teddy bear.

Seeing the movie through an adult's eyes, I saw more than I did when I was younger. I think the movie is admired for all the right reasons; the cinematography is beautiful, the story is simple but so accessible and familiar, like real life, and the music is incredible even when you take it out of the context of the soundtrack. And... maybe everyone saw this but me. Or maybe I saw it before but I just forgot. But I can't stop thinking about how sometimes I'm like that man with the bones as fragile as glass, who sits at home with the padded furniture and carpeted floor, because he's so much at risk of getting hurt. Am I the only one who wishes she had such an excuse? Maybe not. I'm sure not. It's just, wouldn't it be so much easier to stay at home? To quit med school, to move out of my apartment, to stop taking risks. To bury myself somewhere that I wouldn't have to be hurt by the small hurtful things that other people do and say, and to stop forcing myself through the torture that is med school, which isn't hard because of the academics, if you know what I mean. Why does the human experience have to be so abrasive?


Monsieur Dufayel, je pense que je deviendrai comme vous. :-/

Asperger's. Or misanthropy at least

Do you ever feel... defective? Like the one inadequate product in a long line of toys that were made perfect, or at least fully functioning.

Was there some manual I didn't get a hold of? Was there some memo I missed?

Lily's Eyes

The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books. I can't really explain why I was attracted, from page one, to Mary Lennox, irritable and knowitallish and (as the song goes) really, really quite contrary. I saw myself in her I suppose. When I was little there used to be a Japanese cartoon on ABS-CBN--it was dubbed into Filipino and had the title of Maria at ang Lihim na Hardin--and that was where I met her first; but there isn't really any kind of substitute for reading Mary Lennox on the page, or seeing Kate Maberley (see photo) play her in the most faithful (at least in spirit) adaptation of The Secret Garden ever made.


Look at her! I love her here, irritable in hot weather and dressed in more skirts than she can play around in.

This is Mary with Dickon and Colin. I loved the unquestioning loyalty of the other two--how they took her, temperament and all, and loved her. I loved how Dickon was with the two of them, easily the poorest and most uneducated, but the wisest, simply because he was the most loved.


This is Mary and Colin. I suppose at the time it was legal to marry your first cousin; I loved the two of them together so much that I didn't particularly care as a child.

When I first read the book, I was charmed by the characters--how uniquely flawed they all were, how miserable, how much drawn into themselves, and how Mary's being catapulted into a life in Misselthwaite manor drew them out--and the tiny details about flowers and gardening, about taking care of things, about building things from scratch and caring for them and loving them. When I grew older and watched the movie (one of my family's favorites; we've memorized the script) and read the book over and over again, I realized that Mary, Colin and Archibald Craven are all like the garden... neglected, and in need of love and sunlight.

There is no real point to this blog. Tonight, the night before my pulmo OSCE, I just kept listening to this song, Lily's Eyes, which is the only song I know from the musical version of the Secret Garden:



The Snape/Lily parallels notwithstanding (eww), I really love this song. It gets better when you think that so much misery is made better when Mary comes along, an unknowing knight errant, sent by God to save the inhabitants of Misselthwaite from dwindling into despair.

The thing is, we can all dwindle into despair if we want--we can all let our spirits become neglected gardens. The movie is so atmospheric, so much rural England (it sounds like Scotland but the original inspiration is English) in the winter, so much snow and dark hallways and walled-in gardens. It fills you with a sort of claustrophobia, and fear, and a sense of despair. What I'm trying to say, in my own feeble distracted-medical-student way, is that everyone has that kind of garden inside us--in hibernation, as though it were winter, snowed under with memories and grudges, and attachment. Archibald Craven had grown too much attached to his wife that he couldn't see that his son and his niece were right in front of him, starving for affection and approval; like a garden in dire need of pruning, Misselthwaite was left to be strangled (as by overgrown branches) by the memory of Lily, Archibald's wife. (In the musical it takes a more sinister turn--Colin's doctor and Archibald's brother was in love with her, too.). We can let ourselves become like that. It's easy. You can exist without living--letting one day after another go by, going through the motions, growing comfortable, never giving yourself entirely.

Or you can choose to embark on the new adventure of falling in love. With life; with your family; with the God who demands but who gives back a hundredfold. And the beauty of a blossoming soul is a thousand times more beautiful than any garden that could grow under Dickon's expert hands.

In between pulmo exams, I give you: this essay by Brian Doyle.

Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (GET A GRIP), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleaginous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), etc.

On the other hand, what if my lovely and mysterious spouse issued me a rejection slip on the wind-whipped afternoon when I knelt, creaky even then, on a high hill over the wine-dark sea, and stammered would would would will will will you you marry me? What if she had leaned down (well, not quite leaned down, she’s the size of a heron) and handed me a lovely engraved card that said WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT WE CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSAL, DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS MERITS? But she didn’t. She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse. Anyway, there I was on my knees for a while, wondering if my lovely and mysterious paramour had actually said yes, while she railed and wailed into the wind, and finally I said, um, is that an affirmative? because my knees are killing me here, and she said, clearly, yes.

Um, I promise that's not the best part. It was just the easiest to quote out of context. The entire thing is here: No, by Brian Doyle.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

There seems to be a preponderance of little-girl detective geniuses in the modern mystery genre.

First and most controversial (most unlikeable really!) of all: Miss Mary Russell, aged fifteen, future wife to Sherlock Holmes (at least in the imagination of Laurie R. King, and in the imagination of her thousands of followers); brilliant with a “mind like a diamond” as the Great Detective himself would describe her; tall, blonde, and beautiful; a highly strong and accurate throwing arm; with myopic eyes nonetheless well-trained in the Science of Deduction, and a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Judaism, theology, chemistry, and the various marks and signs that will distinguish individuals of various occupations across the countryside. She speaks manifold languages and can easily learn new ones, and studies in Oxford, where she is reading (if I remember correctly) both theology and chemistry. Her greatest accomplishment of all, nonetheless, may be to have won the heart of the Beekeeper himself; at the tender age of fifteen and with an IQ that’s off the charts, she was in the perfect position to be groomed, and later to be fallen in love with, a la Professor Higgins with his guttersnipe. She’s caustic, generally irritable, and much too aware of her intellectual superiority.

Second, perhaps less prestigious but no less astute: enter Blue van Meer of Special Topics in Calamity Physics fame, daughter of Gareth van Meer, all-around genius, fond of quoting and annotating. It’s hard to describe her as being particularly interested in anything, when she seems to be fascinated by all things and to know, well, pretty much everything. In her teens she manages to uncover the existence of a secret society, long thought to be a myth; solve the murder of her teacher, Hannah Schneider (or at least I think she did solve it); and give every single reader of Marisha Pessl’s debut novel a headache, given her penchant for writing stupid, awkward-sounding metaphors and inserting the title, author, publisher and year of random books and publications into the text of the story.

Third, and most recently: Flavia de Luce, third daughter of Colonel de Luce of the once-grand Buckshaw manor; eleven years old (it is 1950), accomplished and extensively-read chemistry student, now the star of two mysteries by Alan Bradley. Unfortunately for Mary Russell and Blue van Meer—and I say this as one of Laurie R. King’s most dedicated fans, and as someone who’s written Mary Russell fanfiction—Flavia de Luce is the best of them all, the most likeable, the most genuine, the most believable.
All three are: geniuses, motherless, moneyed, unaccountably clever, and with a complicated relationship with their fathers. Best of all, all of them, at very young ages, can compete with the very best minds of their time, and possess the guts and drive to see a mystery to its conclusion. But for me, Flavia de Luce, heroine and narrator of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, is just the most entrancing of them all, and the most sympathetic. Of course no eleven year old can be that precocious, but given that the other two have leveled the playing field (ie if you can suspend disbelief for Mary Russell or Blue van Meer, you can do the same for Flavia), perhaps we can leave that criticism aside.

What to say about Flavia? Where the other two are, quite frankly, Mary Sues, Flavia is nowhere near one; in fact in all things except her intelligence, she is just like any other eleven year old, curious and energetic and sometimes acerbic. Despite herself she bursts into tears when afraid, and despite her best efforts she still would like even the scraps of affection from her distant father. She argues with her sisters Daphne and Ophelia (Daffy and Feely for short) and plays the nastiest tricks on them; she rides a bicycle and yodels songs with childlike glee; she gets dirty often enough to earn a reputation for being generally grotty (as she says to Ophelia in the opening pages, “If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene isn’t up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes”); she’s self-sufficient like most neglected children learn to be, and finds her fun in strange places, like in the abandoned chemistry laboratory (belonging to an old de Luce) or with the gardener, Dogger.

She’s named her bicycle Gladys and is conducting an experiment on her sister Ophelia, into whose lipstick Flavia has mixed a quantity of poison ivy. Her knowledge is by no means encyclopedic—all she knows is the stuff in the old textbooks upstairs; she knows bugger-all about stamps (her Father’s passion and the theme of the book), cooking, most literature, and music. She’s not at all a smooth operator—more than once she’s interrupted by authority while she tracks down clues, even being captured by the police while she’s trespassing. She’s no Mary Sue, and I hate to confess this, but she’s just lovely.

All the while, as I was finishing the book—and it’s a terribly quick read, much too quick really!—I kept thinking, I have to write this down, or what a beautiful description (Marisha Pessl’s clumsy metaphors suddenly seem like so much rubbish). I kept my book dog-eared and kept marked some gems like this one:

Leaving Gladys to graze in a bicycle stand that was more than half-full of official-looking black Raleighs, I went up the worn steps and in the front door.

Leaving Gladys! The bicycle! To graze, like you would a horse! Brilliant, and so simple and commonplace, I likely wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t taken a liking to the bicycle, that faithful companion.

I’m so excited to find the next book—and excited to think that the book’s Inspector (because every British detective novel has to have one, whether or not he actually does any detectorin’), Inspector Hewitt, might appear again, the one true audience to Flavia’s brilliance, courage, and adorably ham-handed way of sleuthing. It struck me, as the book was winding down, that I might like to read a story where Flavia grows into a young lady that, say, an inspector might come to love, to court and to marry; two sentences later Hewitt throws out an anecdote about his wife, the implausibly-named Antigone. Oh, well! I’m sure that even without a romantic counterpart, Flavia will keep me glued to the next book, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag.

As is repeated so often throughout the book… Vale!

To Love and be Wise

Every time I open and finish a Josephine Tey, I’m convinced it’s my favorite—until I read another, and by then I’m not so sure. Though in retrospect Daughter of Time, my first Tey, was something of a pointless read—the detective was dissecting a historical mystery that had already been solved!—I have to admit that I fell in love with the author when I picked up Brat Farrar. It is the perfect book and I couldn’t think of a way to better it, and now, years later, I still can’t. I still think it’s one of the holies of holies of mysteries.

Then there’s Miss Pym Disposes, so beautifully and sympathetically written that I could forgive Josephine Tey the strange quality of her mystery (both the crime and its solution are in the last third of the book—the first two thirds being merely setting). People can argue all the day long about whether Josephine Tey was a good detective novelist, but I don’t think anyone can deny that she was a true novelist—a really, really good one. She builds her characters—their choice of words and clothing, their mannerisms and predilections and flaws—so clearly, draws them so lovingly, that at the end of each book you are sorry to be saying goodbye, even to the perpetrator.
Finally, my most recent read, finished in between classes and during daily trips to and from Manila: To Love and be Wise.

Leslie Searle, the enigmatic photographer, is missing, and the household that had welcomed him—that of Lavinia Fitch, a romance novelist; Walter Whitmore, BBC commentator and household name; and Walter’s all-too-loveable fiancée, Elizabeth—is under suspicion. It’s up to Alan Grant of Scotland Yard to figure out whether Walter Whitmore—who had quarreled with him the night he died and who might have pushed Leslie Searle into the massive and unforgiving River, the Rushmore, beside their campsite—was responsible. Query: the river has been dragged and there is no body; where could it be? Query: if Leslie Searle is in fact not dead, and had left the site of his own free will, why would he do it, and why would he leave behind all of his belongings?

I kept guessing who had done it, thinking myself clever, but then a few pages later I would be presented with clues that made my hypotheses untenable. Since I don’t really make it a habit to guess whodunit—I prefer to just watch things unfold—this was a uniquely frustrating experience. The frustration, however, was worth it if only for the denouement. Brilliant detectorin’ worthy of the Great Detective himself, and a brilliant adversary worthy of James Moriarty’s highest praises. Five stars!

Next on the list: A Shilling for Candles.

The Last Time

If I had the green,
I would build a time machine.
I could quit the daily grind
And I would leave this awful time.

I would go to Victorian England
To have lunch with Oscar Wilde.
Maybe warn him of the future
So he might have stayed alive.

I'd wanna be friends
With my mom in her twenties
And with Warhol and his pals,
New York City in the seventies.

And when I'm old and gray,
I'll return to see it through, and
I'd spend the last of my time
Right here with you.

I would hug my grandpa
Go be a cowgirl for a while
I don't think I'd miss the Internet
But I sure would miss your smile.

And when I'm old and gray,
I'll return to see it through, and
I'd spend the last of my time
Right here with you.
--Lucy Knisley

Men as pure abstractions

One of the things that I think ultimately stopped me from pursuing a writing career (not that I believe I would have made a very good writer. But it was worth a try) was this confusion I had about how to write a man. To explain more fully: my favorite book, Brideshead Revisited, written by Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, is truly one of the best books of the previous century, both in style and content. But I can see how critics like Edmund Wilson would criticize the religious dimension in the novel—because up until my own conversion to the Catholic church, it had never occurred to me to write “religion” into a story. Always it had been about the plot, the character development, how to get from point A to B or—in the case of my more juvenile imaginings—how to make surly reclusive SS fall in love with the ingénue HG.



But when I became Catholic, I realized, do I really want to write a story about characters who don’t go to Church on Sundays? Must I mention that they go to Church? Will that put anybody off? Would I really like a character who doesn’t pray the rosary everyday? And so the questions snowballed on until I could hardly even wrest a first chapter from myself, on any kind of plot.

I wanted to write a story about marriage, and I did, and I made the wedding a Catholic one (and the two protagonists Catholic also) because for me only a Catholic wedding is a real and true sacrament, and I got all kinds of flak from it. The criticism I got was always something along the lines of, why did I introduce such an unnecessary aspect into my story? It got to the point that I never had the heart to continue the story. I was paralyzed. I had grown incapable of seeing a man or a woman divorced from his relationship with God. We talk about character development in stories; but in real life, what is character development but the slow and winding journey of a soul to rejoin and ultimately love his Maker? To me being a Catholic is an inescapable part of life, something that permeates all of its aspects and which gives a person his humanity and dignity; how am I supposed to write about a character and divorce him from that which makes him truly human?

I was delighted to find, later on, that Evelyn Waugh had written his novel not necessarily to wave the flag of proselytism, but because he had come to the same conclusions as mine. (I was conceited enough to feel the connection between this great mind and my own tiny intellect because, though I may not be right or clever about a lot of things, I knew with a certainty that I had a leg to stand on here.) “He was outraged (quite legitimately by his standards) at finding God introduced into my story,” Waugh said on Edmund’s scathing review. “I believe that you can only leave God out by making you characters pure abstractions.”

Modern novelists, he added, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character – that of being God’s creature with a defined purpose. So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which to me means only one thing, man in his relation to God.”

I think of Rex Mottram, one of the characters in Brideshead—an incomplete man, a caricature of a man that can only be produced by this and the last century, who seemed on the surface to be normal and intelligent, but who was lacking in many things that make us human—a true curiosity, any genuine piety, the capacity to love, an understanding of the supernatural plane that is above but not contradictory to reason. To me that’s what novelists’ characters have become—pure abstractions, in Waugh’s words—if they are written divorced from their relationship to the God who made them. Everything, every object has a purpose: a glass for drinking, a spoon for eating, a telephone for calling; man has a purpose also, which is to come to know God and to correspond to His Will; of what interest can it be to me to write about a man if it doesn’t help him fulfill that purpose? I might as well start writing about a spoon that dreamt it could do the job of a colander, or a frying pan.

Other Catholic writers have found a way round this stumbling block. GK Chesterton resolved the idea by making his most famous character a priest, so that the religious (I say this only to avoid the word “spiritual,” which has become riddled with so many new-agey connotations, but I do actually mean spiritual rather than religious) aspect will be there and taken for granted as necessary. JRR Tolkien wrote an allegory—a marvelously complete one, and that’s the least that can be said of it. CS Lewis (though not a Catholic, bless him) did much of the same. Evelyn Waugh wrote one of the best, probably the best, novels on conversion so that it would become the matter of the book, its defining character and ultimate purpose. Dorothy L Sayers wrote about this dimension more obliquely, making Lord Peter Wimsey a more-or-less lukewarm High Church Anglican (I think; sometimes it’s hard to tell); the matter was never implicitly drawn out, but it was there, taken for granted and part of the tapestry that was LPW’s character, in the same way that you would expect the local squire to be there on the pew every Sunday with his family. A member of Opus Dei wrote Junia and its sequel, both about the first Christians, and both are about persecution and conversion. There are more—Diary of a Country Priest, Quo Vadis?, The Keys to the Kingdom…

I haven’t thought about writing about any of these things. (Though there was that one time, on a long bus journey, that I conceived the idea of a first novel called Augustine about a young Filipino girl who would be converted; it would have very obvious esoteric parallels with the story of St Augustine, I decided; it wasn’t until the journey from the other direction that I realized I’d never find a publisher, so I never wrote it.) I still haven’t solved the problem completely. How am I supposed to write about, say, Dr. Hopper (the name of the amateur detective I’d made up years ago) and his entire personhood, without making the work sound like a sermon or a sentimentally preachy thing?

But it’s reassuring to think that others came before me, and triumphed—reflecting in their own subcreation a tiny glimpse of that creation, the full glory of Christ.


(ETA. I read only recently that Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, had the same sentiments. She said she only learned to be a true novelist when she became Catholic, because it allowed her to see a human being as a whole.)