Thursday, January 18, 2024

ON THE YA BOOKS I’M READING

As Brave as You by Jason Reynolds  – I picked this book in the young adult section of FULLY BOOKED because, from the blurb, it seemed like a book about family relationships. The protagonists are 9 and 11 years old with a grandfather who has dementia. He lost his son in some war, and the boys learn about his sadness later on. To me, it does not register much except for some parts where the dialogue succeeded in making me read it up to the end. For young boys maybe, this is a wonderful adventure book, but I wasn’t into it that much.

Merci Suarez Changes Gears by Meg Medina was a New York Times Bestseller – and I learned of this book from that list. The blurb was by R.J. Palacio who was the author of that YA Book turned into a movie – Wonder. About a girl in her pre-teen discoveries, this too, has a sub-story about a grandfather who has dementia. I found this a better read than Judy Blume’s “Dear God, It’s Me Margaret”. Merci Suarez is braver, more adventurous, and less self-conscious.

I didn’t enjoy The Giver that much. I have confirmed that I prefer realistic settings to dystopian narratives. However, I can understand how this book resonated with so many young people. I believe that young people prefer structured and probably predictable narratives.

I have to read Human Acts by Han Kang again. This one, has too much reality, the bitter reality. The human body is so thrown out there literally and metaphorically, and the question of the soul separated from the body becomes too depressing to contemplate. Of my December reads, this one really could not even make me cry, but I cringed and felt some similar pain somehow.

The e-books that I finished reading are both enjoyable reads. Freewater by Amina Luoman Dawson is another story about black slaves. Young heroes in this book discover a route to freedom and take it, but in the process, they leave someone behind. The tale is about courage and how this was both an inevitable and a necessary choice even for the young who knew that freedom isn’t something that can be had without a sacrifice and worse, death. The language is unsentimental, I get to see the scenes as if I am watching a film, yet I am not told how to feel. However, whatever feelings I have truly encompassed my deepened understanding of the desperate situation the young characters are in.

Maizy Chen’s Last Chance by Lisa Yee is a narrative of diaspora. The young girl Maizy learns about her roots through a story told by her grandfather’s friend. Incidentally, the friendship is somehow scarred that the girl tries to connect the dots and discovers how her race negotiated the challenges of displacements via migration.

Among these books, I rank Freewater no 1, followed by Human Acts, then Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. I am reading books for Young People to listen to how they respond to real-life situations. I just heard Neil Gaiman say in “Masterclass” that honesty is what makes him go on as a writer – that to be a writer, one must be honest.

In my mid-twenties when I wrote and submitted some poems, I had some friends read the poems first to hear what they thought about them. One of them said that I reveal too much about myself in my writing. Maybe it is both the crafting and the telling. The crafting was juvenile, therefore listless and without direction. The telling almost always established a beginning and an end and I was afraid to get lost in the self-conscious progression. Therefore they were coming out from a bad liar. The fiction wasn’t fictional enough, the poems didn’t have cadence and the voice was generic.

Listening to Neil Gaiman, I thought, well, all writers start that way. However, how writers graduate from journaling personal revelations to crafting a reality to give it a larger-than-life status, is what writing is all about.

 

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

ON BUILDING A WEBSITE


For my book project THINGS, the task today according to my year plan is to blog about a new-year discovery as this is the 9th month of my 60th year. But since April in 2023 when I officially acquired a senior citizen status, my routine has stayed the same. If there were any new discoveries, I didn't have a record of those experiences. The major culprit was my lack of consistent writing. My last diary entry was dated 2021!

Well, early last year, I installed a loft bed with a stair cabinet and moved my Molave desk from the living room to the space under my bed. I made sure that I would be able to sit and stand underneath so I was happy about having created a 'writing space for myself'. This was necessary since my sister and her son have taken over the entire living room, and now, there is a study table for my nephew and a work desk for my sister. Both are folding tables by the way, and my nephew's is right down the stairs of the double bed, while my sister's rests right beside the door of the unit. I have been thinking about retrieving my Narra desk from my brother's resort in Batangas, where I moved it back when my sister wanted me to remove furniture in my mother's house to give space to possible renters. I acquired that desk from OMF, when they gave it to me after letting me work from home when my mother got sick. That table had deep drawers that my nephew could use for his clothes. Right now, most of his garments are in plastic boxes stacked under his round, blue, folding table.

I installed a double bed in the living room, so that part of the condo isn't anymore mine. Whatever mess they make now with the living room-turned-bedroom-for-two is fine with me as long as the mess doesn't get into my newly created space.

To cheer me up, I bought a new chair more for its aesthetic fit in my under-the-bed office than for its usefulness as a writing chair. And now I have been regretting the purchase because it's difficult to write sitting on that beautiful cozy chair. I am grateful that I have kept my blue folding metal chair from the time I was a boarder in Palanan in 2011, so I use that when writing. Meanwhile, the old, rotating, desk chair now belongs to my sister, who has been using it since the time they moved in with me.

Currently, all my positive experiences have to do with the luxury of sleeping on the 'loft bed' in my 35 sq meter condo. Up on my bunk, I am no longer bothered by the traffic of my sister and her son coming and going in and out of the bathroom. I can now rest in peace without Joseph jumping on the bed every time he goes to the window to look at children playing in the garden of Gateway Regency only one floor below. When I had a proper bed, it was also a sofa, and my nephew was hardly in the living room but was always lingering on my bed while he played, painted, or simply watched other children play from the bedside window. His mom has now installed for him a wall fan, and lately, he's loving the independence of watching Netflix on his tablet on his bed, with all his stuffed toys and 'dippers' beside. However, the child still asks me occasionally if he could sleep with me- which I let him sometimes because he is really a sweet boy. But more and more, I have been rejecting his request because he's nine and has grown taller. Cuddling him on my bed has become less cozy and comfortable, but I cherish his little head popping up the loft stairs every morning when he goes up to say, 'Good morning Ninang.'

Today, instead of blogging about any new discovery [because I really don't have one], I went to YouTube for guidance on productive blogging. Half of this day was spent googling and then watching videos on how to create a new website. At this age, I probably need more time to research on these technicalities before I plunge to the actual 'business' of blogging. I found Hostinger Academy which gave me a list of 'no-code' web-builders. I wondered why 'Wordpress' wasn't on that list, however, if I use Hostinger for web hosting, it directs me to 'Wordpress'. So since I already have this Wordpress blog, on impulse, I upgraded my confidantesite. blog, but then I canceled my purchase immediately because I realized that I still didn't understand the process. I had changed the domain name to 'auntiedote.com' but when I searched for the domain name after an upgrade, I didn't know where it went and was lost as to how to proceed to Hostinger. Confused even after three tutorial videos, I have now spent almost four hours of 'learning' how to build a website, yet I haven't learned anything.

I miss Sitesell, the web hosting I used from 2004 to 2021. It really was convenient for old people like me with its full tutorials. Even when you get lost, you can always go back and repeat at Sitesell and there are tons of easy help available which took only a little time to discover.

After cancelling my purchase, I got this email from Wordpress:

The following upgrades have been cancelled and ฿3,348.00 refunded:

Your refund has been sent to the method of payment that you used for your original purchase. You will receive it in 7-10 business days. If you paid with a credit card, this may appear as a credit/refund on your statement, or the original charge will show as reversed, which would simply remove the original charge from your statement - depending on your bank. If you paid via PayPal, you’ll see the refund in your transaction history.

If you have any questions or don't receive the refund, please contact support

Did I lose all of my previous blogs now? Wordpress says that my domain confidantesite.blog has been deleted, and as a result, I might not be able to regain that same domain name.

I should look for copies of my previous blogs - hopefully, I emailed copies of those to myself. This is a bit sad, but well, maybe this is also an adventure, although a sad one. So much for a new website.

 

Monday, December 25, 2023

ONCE-A-MONTH GOALS

 


Hopefully, this time, because I am desperate, I will accomplish everything I will jot down here:

1. I should be able to plot at least one chapter [or two] a month for Bianca's Diary (tentative title) and finish writing by April, in time for Editing and Layout in May. The plan is to finish it in time to get a writing grant in June and publish the YA novel in September 2024.

2. I should be able to blog at least three essays on my '60s journey -- aiming to develop a community of readers for the "Things Book."

3. I should be able to blog a review of any book I am reading -- aiming to develop a community of readers and friends for the YA novel I am writing. I should be able to read all the books I've listed in October of this year.

4. I should be able to read a novel by a Filipino author -- also to upgrade my grasp of Philippine Literature. 

5. I should be able to read and do some ART hobby, maybe painting -- aiming to help me build a new skill -- perhaps toward illustrations of Children's books. 

FOR NUMBER 1 -  Right now, I have eight chapters that aren't yet ordered the way they should [this organization will happen once I've determined all the chapters.] I have been learning that I am not a plotter, that is, my story happens as I write them, and so thinking and writing are always simultaneous -- that is, I can never plot or plan my chapters, and the stories seem to be lodged somewhere in my system and are only waiting to be tapped. Writing then is really slow and kind of forced in the beginning, until every thought has landed on paper and is ready for placement in the yet incoherent narrative.

FOR NUMBER 2 - This is the first blog on the '60s journey thing, however, I wanted to keep this blog more formal and still in the THINGS mode of essaying, so I need to focus on more objects around me, This is difficult only because I am not sure about what other mundane objects will yield some deep meditations. Later thoughts on the THINGS project involve planning and research of an end product, that is 'initially,' BAGS because I like them, after all, in the schema of everyday commute, this is a most necessary accessory. They will be manufactured and sold eventually. What pops up as a brand name is 'BAGAY'. I should look more into how to manufacture bags, and maybe I could also ask Ramon Rocha, former CEO of OMF, who had bag manufacturing as his first business. [This makes me consider the MAI meet in Bangkok come April of 2024, since I need to meet up with people and establish myself in a community of global peers. Why not?]

FOR NUMBER 3  -- Right now, I have been reading two books highlighted in the October list of YA books to read, but I have not been enjoying those books, although I have been learning much from how 'unsentimentality' figures in a narrative. So far, these YA books which are in the realist mode aren't the best reads for me, maybe because I am old, and for somebody wanting to write to Young People, I have to say I am so ancient that I don't yet fully appreciate the ticks of this genre. Then in the process, I think I need to somehow delve into reading fantasy, which, for a long time, except for Lord of the Rings, are books I have avoided for sheer dislike of unreal things.

FOR NUMBER 4 - I should read Biblioepsy to complete reading all of Gina Apostol's books. I have La Tercera in my Kindle App here on my phone, and It wasn't a satisfying read. I have yet to identify what I really enjoy in her books, but with The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, it was just the novelty of it all -- that is, it was a new experience for me reading such a style so I enjoyed it. After a while, this style becomes tedious and demanding and not at all engrossing - which I think is something needed for one to keep on reading.

FOR NUMBER 5 -- Oh when oh when will I get down to this? So today, I should probably decide to think of this hobby smartly - so if I am going to study drawing, I might as well try getting to a point of illustrating children's books in the future. I have always enjoyed children's book illustrations. I will look at my ART BOOKS collection to see if there's anything at all that will teach me this. Or, there is always YOUTUBE, although I have to really clear this forest of information to be able to spend my time smartly only on the videos that matter.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

BOOKED FOR THE FISCAL YEAR [SEPT 2023-202F SEPT]


1. THE WAY I USED TO BE 
2. WE WERE LIARS 
3. THEY BOTH DIE IN THE END 
4. THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET 
5. THE MAGIC FISH 

 6. DIARY OF A TOKYO TEEN 
7. XOXO 
8. PATRON SAINTS OF NOTHING 
9. A STEP FROM HEAVEN 
10. THROWBACK 
 
11. KAY'S LUCKY COIN VARIETY 
12. THE SURPRISING POWER OF A GOOD DUMPLING 
13. HOUSE OF GLASS HEARTS 
14. SING TO THE DAWN 
15. LAST NIGHT AT THE TELEGRAPH CLUB 
 
16. MY HEART UNDERWATER 
17. WHEN THE RAINBOW GODDESS WEPT 
18. FROM TWINKLE WITH LOVE 
19. FORESHADOW 
20. GRACELING 

21. DAVID TUNG CAN'T HAVE A GIRLFRIEND UNTIL HE GETS INTO AN IV LEAGUE 
22. PICTURE US IN THE LIGHT 
23. FREEWATER 
24. MAIZY CHEN'S LAST CHANCE 
25. THAT CHILDREN'S BOOK BY NICK JOAQUIN

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Jessica Zafra's The Age of Umbrage


Jessica Zafra’s The Age of Umbrage is exploring a time when everything is taken as an offense when you didn’t know any better, because, even if you believed you were smart, in reality, you were naïve, but you cared so much that you felt every arrow poisoned and aimed in your direction, even if those arrows existed only in your mind.

Offense is easily taken by the young, and this could be against one’s clique or isolation, status or upbringing, physicality or nerdiness, religion or lack of it. The young are often offended by old people telling them how they know nothing at all. There is that admonition to remain where they are, to not venture into paths they aren’t familiar with because that path could lead to disaster as their elders would attest it would. And who else but the most immediate family members could scare the young people away from pursuing their interests, or inclinations, or creative imaginations?

When the very young exhibit maturity, the very old are threatened. The young have no business knowing-it-all. Only the old have the right to be wise.

But it is not just the old, who offends, but also those who think they will be forever young, who believe that age should always be lived 'at the moment’ no matter how. They go by every trend within the circumference of expectations. They feel untouchable and are determined to show everybody how crossing them could lead to an incognito status. By their judgment is how ‘different’ is defined – to what extent can one be ‘different.’ They are fierce, authoritarian bullies.

A young person is also offended, even if she barely knows how to articulate the offense, by the corruption at home, school, and the community. She will try to cope as much as she can, via the gadgets and paraphernalia of her age, but there is no escaping the consequences of corruption, seeping into the stealthiest of homes, and eventually crushing dreams.

And then, there is that offense which the young do not expect at their age  –  death.

In Jessica Zafra’s Novel How ‘Offensive’ are the Events and Issues?

Umbrage – a word meaning “to feel offended, insulted or upset by”. How ‘offensive’ events and issues are, seem understated in Jessica Zafra’s novel. Satire dominates sentiment in the tone of this novel while a backdrop of the most unsettling political events of the 90s appends an inner turmoil. Guadalupe takes umbrage at everything the young are naturally confused about. Although she acts impermeable, encased in some uppity-class bubble, she is very much aware of her otherness. Her mom Asuncion had her when she was thirty-two, but Guadalupe’s coming-of-age seems to have begun since she was barely three, when she fluently started asking the most basic of questions: What is your name?

Guadalupe is named after one of the Virgin’s apparitions. The novel situates her being ‘in between.’ Home in Ms. Zafra’s narrative is an abstract location, desired and dreamed of, never owned or claimed. This is an unforgivable offense beyond Guadalupe’s control.

And as sharp as these are in the novel as in life, these upsetting threats to one’s moral and physical well-being are most often denied or ignored. The young have gotten immune to the cold-shoulder treatment of the elders.

Jessica Zafra takes umbrage at the nonchalance accorded to the youth. Spot on, her novel delves into the deep, dark recesses of being young and clueless.      

Tuesday, January 05, 2021

Reading ACH's Anx, an Appreciation


 "ANX is a collection of fifty poems that explores the tensions between stillness and motion, solicitude and disquiet, harmony and discord arising from and/or in response to anxiety vis-a -vis the poetic space." The collection is divided into five parts of "poetic exploration of anxiety as image, where the page becomes an intersection and intermingling of sense, sound, and shape to generate order and meaning." (from the Introduction)

1: In Tales of Trauma and Tears, the lyrical expressions of anxiety and longing are most poignant, leaving us with images of nuanced sadness. The first poem in this chapter “State of Being” seems to declare the magnitude of anxiety that pulsates in each poem. There is a lyrical progression of this state of self that is conscious of its distortion and dreams the impossible. One seeks for a “Reprieve”, longs for peaceful silence, a calmness after the storm, peace following mundane daily battles, but no, there isn’t a chance this will ever happen, since this is what is constant in life, this palpable disquiet, and thus: ‘we keep holding our breaths…’

The last stanza from “One Day I Come Home and Where is Silence” resonates because it’s not a feeling when one is young and untouchable. But at a certain age, such pounding ache is like the fatal threat of a stroke:  

So they ask what to do with the silences


that numb when unaccompanied by voices?

Music for killing time? Does solipsism sting?

Does gossiping with one’s conscience prove

 

too much of a guilty pleasure? How does one

enter this reformed house? Does one cover

one’s ears? Does one sing along? Where’s

 

that guide for adapting? Or the manual for

singing? How to deal with a case like this—

this life insisting on pushing out the longing?

How true. While just about every minute of longing can’t be denied, a time is set for a declaration that one has perhaps arrived. Passion, mission, profession, the desired business of living converged in a center, and nothing follows. But how this merely pushes a fresh anxiety, professing it to be a negative attitude that can be made subservient to our numbered days.

Then the poet asks in “The Encoder,”

What if time ceased to be? No six o’clock,

Just news. No hands ticking, just your fingers

Typing away. Encoding data feels eternal

When your day finds no pleasure. Time

Or, will there still be time? Other things follow. Regrets. Memories which aren’t simply nostalgic beleaguer and blight what remains in both mind and spirit. Our hope is “Another Life That Afford Us Do-Overs” since nobody can go back. Maybe, this is the eternity promised in the Holy Scriptures, this other life which needs us to cross over. Our anxiety for deliverance place us in cognizance of the fact of our lostness.  

And in the last three poems of this chapter “Cake,” “Pater Noster,” and “The Romance of the Dogs” the poet laments the magnitude of such depravities.

2: In The Architecture of Muffled Woe the first poem delays grief through a ritual of acceptable deception: Light them candles…Set them flowers//Let them candles and flowers be,/Let us put on a show to their show./Let us stop the pretense only upon their withering.//

But in “Mourning Song” grief persists in a dream blasting denial into acceptance. “I’m hovering—out of my dreams I’m lingering, /calling out your name at dawn, unable to let go, /your face etched in my recall. But my eyes/now are shutting, waking me up at long last. //

In “All Pains are Asymmetrical” death is something to grapple with, an abnormality that can’t be helped. Same normal for everyone at some point in time, but not everyone will at once be open to receive it. Having lost someone, one will always ask why, or opine the meaning of it all, or pry a legacy out of a permanent departure:

The world appeared to me tilted

like a misplaced apparition

the day my sister passed on.

I had slept absent-mindedly

with my glasses on and I awoke

to things all bent. The shadows,

the stance of lilies, the charisma

of rain. It was a slant so slight, yet

it bragged of permanence, proclaiming

things would never be the same.

So, what is the color of grief? What is its architecture? How does one expunge the pain of loss of a loved one?  How does it happen at once? There must be an answer, and in fact, every possible unsatisfactory answer is laid down in verse. Lyrics philosophize, offer antidotes, and theorizes on ”How to Administer Relief” to muffled “Woe”.

3In Resist the Quiet’s Creeping the poet begins by facing an “Affliction,” the curse of the muse insisting indulgence. Art is never one to simply wait and see. Art needs the cuddle and caress of memories, even the most passing ones:

Take for instance, this memory: during the Feast Day

of San Dionisio many years back, this marching band

ignited the festivities in my hometown with only a lone

trumpeter among a sea of drummers. His quacks

 

took center stage as he blustered with all his power

the grit in his gut, trumping all percussions poised

to drown out all other sounds. What he had on

was white. What music he had in him was whiter

Art doesn’t offer a mere lovely view, but rather invites one to gaze. In “The Art of Framing” pre-judgment is admittedly careless and based on what one has not fully seen.

In “Language Game,” the poet writes to meet the demands of his own art as he grapples with “power is precisely this: it sings/the language only strangers speak.//

Finally, in “Smoke Fragments” the dynamic structure of the poem encapsulates the rigor of his poetry, his art.

4: In The Mum Knocking on Your Door, woman, mother, mum, wife – the unnerving questions of and about this human beleaguer the poet.  Is she a construct? Is she the passive recipient of history’s conditioning? Is she always the martyr and victim? Does she always offer the ultimate sacrifice?

In “Momsense” and “Hand on Hand,” she is the wisest in this poet’s estimate, the ultimate philosopher of life, the perennial questioner of meanings.

5: In Let’s Make Parables of Trees the desire to live life to the fullest is often dulled and frustrated by life itself being difficult to live. In “Daylight” this desire is like grasping a “blazing fire”:

The pursuit gives us nothing to feast on but                                          the tease,

Never the full illumination of day. We labor,                                         stretching

Our fortitude for the flash of awe                                                        and beholding.

Our pursuit never wavers however, even as we presume we have acquiesced to monotony or as the poet imagines it in “Settling” when 

‘our hands turn restless,

fraught 

in their need to wipe the dust

off its claimed residence, ever aiming

 for movement, for resolve, always

untamable, never hushed.’

Almost always, we are left with “Antipathy” as we begrudge what must have been or as we belabor pointless, empty wasting of moments. But the poet invites us to gaze and to take note of what we see – ‘notice the clouds…notice resplendence…notice gratitude…notice loss.’

Our ears kept attuned to the “Sounds of Wonder,” we hear the poet sing an affirmation of our state of being, that we are capable of long, stable, duration albeit a lifelong struggle for life itself. In "Let’s Make Parable of Trees," the poet coaxes us:

we ought to make parables that exudes light.

                         Or vessels through which spirits pass. Breeze,

                rainwater, the brown translucency of honey.


Adrian Crisostomo Ho received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada and completed his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at De La Salle University. His essays, poems, fiction and plays have appeared in Rappler, Tomas, Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry, Philippine Graphic, Montage Literary Journal and Sunday Times Magazine. ANX is his first book. 

ON THE YA BOOKS I’M READING

As Brave as You by Jason Reynolds  – I picked this book in the young adult section of FULLY BOOKED because, from the blurb, it seemed like a...