twosday

10 Oct 2008, 7:18am
silliness
by marites
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he will cut your hair when you’re gone

i awoke early this morning to get some reading done, to find markets in disarray and continuing general financial chaos. and then i read this:

“A legal suit in 1856, involving a woman servant who claimed that Baltazar had cut her hair for reasons that are not clear, sent the poet to jail for four years.”

best biographical side note ever.

25 Sep 2008, 6:14pm
lingual academic wax
by marites
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lend me your ear, move that mouth

early this summer i met an uncle of mine for the first time. he stopped in LA on the way back to chicago from the philippines. this very learned, rather mayabang uncle said at one point, ‘my kids regret not learning tagalog when they were little. and they should. language is culture.’

—

it’s frustrating to come across folks who can’t pronounce ‘ethnic’ names (like my own), because from one angle it appears that the mispronunciations are almost purposeful or done out of spite. surely, people must hear that their iterations of my name place the accent in the wrong place, or that the ‘A’ is short and not long, or — at the very least — that the last two syllables aren’t to be run into each other in an ugly car weck.

before this scorn reaches its peak, though, it’s reined in by an understanding that perhaps people don’t hear it, or maybe their mouths just don’t move that way. it’s the same understanding i have for people who can’t reproduce musical pitches, even along with the pitch as it plays. it’s the same slack i cut myself for not being able to move my body parts the way i’d like when i ‘dance.’

[still, for the sake of life-long learning, one would hope that with enough practice and attentiveness, pitches can be reached, body-parts can gain flexibility and rhythm, mouths and tongues can do the necessary gymnastics.]

—

in tagalog class and when i practice with my parents (who provide rather explicit, ungentle criticism), i’m surprised by my inability to move my mouth and reproduce sounds that i very clearly hear. i can reproduce musical pitches, so why shouldn’t i be able to make those glottal stops? the rhythm of speech isn’t there either; instead the sound is an ugly stop-and-go, in part from a frantic search for words but also from an uncertainty of where to put those filler particles that would make the words move more like a steady stream than a bout of sideways rain. that the language isn’t completely foreign to me, and that i can acknowledge where my speech doesn’t sound right, makes this state a little more pathetic. the block, i suppose, is also psychological.

—

i know, i know. kailangan ko magsanay. i need to practice.

15 Sep 2008, 11:51am
meta
by marites
2 comments

it’s changed

because white is right, and i’m tired of my words being in the dark.

15 Sep 2008, 3:20am
academic wax
by marites
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summer’s ends, loose and otherwise

in the laziness and semi-malaise of the precious last week before the start of the quarter, i offer some bullets, to be exchanged for whole posts if time and my mind grapes permit.

the most prominent emergence out of this summer’s work: rationality — its valuation, stylization, separation from style and experience, how it even relates to experience, its intertwining with but disavowal of emotion.
debt — social, political, personal — and how it’s not so great, especially when enfolded with other emotions.
style or discourse. a theoretical fork i’ll resolve this quarter — habermas (and his discontented children) or foucault (and his smug self-righteous children).
the alignment of: rational/modern/depersonal versus emotional/personal/non-modern.
and still, a frustrating failure to know the philippines.

the onward trudge.

21 Aug 2008, 5:53am
music concert-going
by marites
1 comment

summer’s summit

second encore, penultimate song

20 Aug 2008, 1:47am
real people i don't know distraction academic wax
by marites
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visions of december

it’s raining in seattle, at a chilly [for summer] 69 degrees. the dampness and gloom remind me of december, as does this essay i’m working on that was due that month last year. i hope i can put both behind me soon.

in the meantime, some procrastinatory notes.

today i ended a stint at childrens hospital [no article needed. that’s how good it is.], in a department that offers support, spiritual and social, for families whose children have serious and/or terminal illness but have decided to continue treatment. the unit was tight-knit, so as a temp i was very often on the outs, which was ok; they let me read on the job. on the whole, it wasn’t very exciting, and was often sort of sad reading about the patients. the consultants in my department, unlike the doctors, needed to know such things as ‘tommy likes toys and spending time with his brother steve.’ the reports that contained such details were sandwiched in the medical records in between the long lists of medications and doctors visits.

the woman i covered for was the most interesting person i met, and sadly i only saw her my first day. she moved to seattle from new orleans after katrina, selecting UW out of a long list of schools that tulane had given her the week after the hurricane. the time she took off this month was devoted to her husband, who just got called for deployment [his second tour!!] to iraq.

despite this, she was perhaps the most cheerful person in the hospital. the emails she left always contained at least two exclamation points. when she laughed, it pierced the air at a high but not shrill pitch, and lasted a good three or four long undulations. it made you want to hear again whatever it was that could elicit such a response.

today, more laughter. my office, i think, is next to rehab. at first i thought i heard the soft wails of a few three-year-olds crying, but as it got louder and patters of running started to accompany it, i realized it was gusts of laughter — the kind you’d hear from kids when they’re being tickled and can’t control themselves. it’s probably the best thing you can hear at a hospital.

—

for this essay i’m working on i’m pretty much devouring stanley karnow’s in our image, a pop history text on the US colonial period in the philippines. it’s not the most meticulously researched, at least not by scholarly standards, and it’s shamelessly pro-US. the man has an odd attachment to osmena [he practically sanctifies him], and knocks quezon at every opportunity. but it’s hard not to get drawn in by such gems as ‘ambling along to an insouciant drumbeat.’ that is, until you realize that he’s talking about your people.

18 Aug 2008, 1:40am
travel people known and loved
by marites
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smells like abroad

the returns of my people are starting, the first coming unexpectedly today with a phone call from D. her travels took her to egypt, with forays into tunisia and somewhere else, i forget where. over a sushi dinner at a restaurant with quite possibly the worst service in seattle and most overpriced menu, D regaled me with stories of living in cairo suburbs (a lot like parisian streets), holding other people’s purses and children on the metro, sharing water with strangers, sexual harassment in the market, and korean tourist sing-a-longs during a 230a pilgrimage up mt. sinai (’it was hard to feel like moses with that going on’). on her trip to tunisia, the child of the tourguide gifted her this:

that’s right, a headless camel on a magnet. it’s a pretty good parting gift.

D hadn’t unpacked her shoulder bag, and so she pulled out goody after goody, including the camel magnet (and eventually the camel’s head), so that it seemed like there was a little part of egypt right at our table.

at one point she handed to me a worn book of postcards from tunisia. the whole night i had been trying to get a sense of what her environs were like for two months — what exactly a cairo suburb was, how it felt to walk around, what the heat was like — but it was only until i flipped through the photos of immaculate tunisian tourist spots that i got a whiff of what it must be like to live there, at least as a foreigner. really, it was the smell that gave her trip another dimension to me. the insides of cabs, the markets, the scarves of women she stood next to on the metro — i imagine their scent wafted into her purse, latched onto the small tchochkes she was pulling out onto the table in a sushi restaurant in seattle.

12 Aug 2008, 3:18am
sonic morsels
by marites
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what i’m dreaming of

the dodos aren’t the most innovative band; the animal collective-ish sound comes about six years too late, and even then the most one could say about the comparison is that the dodos are a very safe version of the collective. in fact, their songs have a tendency to sound the same. to be more tactful, i’d say they have a very recognizable pattern of energetic percussion underneath lovely melodies and a guitar rhythm favoring dotted eighth notes. their penchant for the latter makes for lilting melodies, the aural equivalent of being on a canoe in the ocean, subject to the gentle back-and-forth motion of the waves.

still, i’m drawn to the dodos [as my last.fm will attest..] in part because their set was one of the most enjoyable at a music festival i went to a few weeks back. they play the hell out of their instruments. i was mesmerized by the trashed trash can their third member was giving a beating to: it was torn and bent in several places, looking like a major tetanus threat. i hope they weren’t traveling with it. the guitarist sat while he played, but he was equally energetic, which manifested itself [aside from the sound] in drops of sweat flying from his hair as he shook his head sort of crazily.

listening to the dodos in the privacy of my own apartment or car, i appreciate in particular the moments in their music when dark [minor or diminished key?] harmonies intertwine with the upward march of the melody. the bridge in the song “ashley” for instance, made ominous by a creeping, sometimes wailing counterpart.

2 Aug 2008, 11:06am
academic wax
by marites
1 comment

thursdays with jose

loreto paras-sulit, my new literary hero.

[i’ve been pursuing a regimen of philippine english-language literature [~1900-1950] with the help of one my exam committee members; together we are a super tutorial/book club.]

after three weeks of garcia villa’s bombast; arguilla’s, daguio’s and laya’s praise of the chaste and noble philippine dalaga or maiden who exists to facilitate a productive life for the filipino man; and rotor’s poor experiments in style that dress up the philippine coast in the guise of the eastern seaboard, i didn’t know what to expect from their female counterparts. something flowery perhaps, or with dorothy parker-like dialogue as leopoldo yabes led me to believe — that is, a chatty style along the lines of those wry characters from the OC or gilmore girls. please, no.

where arguilla’s provincials are noble in their simplicity and innocence, paras’ are hungry and consider selling their heritage in exchange for a bit of food. laya’s dalagas are too unknowing to scheme, and in their ignorance make faithful and fitting wives; paras’ wives and fiancees scheme painfully to themselves for the mental ease of their partners. the male writers set their stories very firmly in the provinces in a timeless fashion: the action happens over there, some time ago that is not now. paras starts in media res, in the middle of a heated conversation about physical hunger, in the middle of a battle in the mountains. her women have to be persuaded to love, and struggle to hold to it for various blocks: intractable and proud partners, constraints of and ambivalence about the body. there’s no nobility in poverty and war — there are sneers and unfair economies of knowledge. and her writing is beautiful! uncategorizable to yabes. [k and i wonder, intellectually but also as recreational readers, ‘why bother assigning these writers in some kind of aesthetic warfare, to teams led by western writers sherwood anderson, hemingway, poe, saroyan, parker?’]

in my [one!] secondary source on filipino women writers in english, paras looks in her portrait to be around 19 years old — too young to write something like “the bolo” or “the song of the arrow.” unlike the other matriarchs of english-language philippine lit, she doesn’t wear that fancy dress [what is that called? ye phil-studs scholars, help me out] with the showy sleeves and neck. she could be one of the vacant and modest dalagas in a villa or arguilla story. i thought i’d find simple sketches or bad poetry to her name. instead i pleasantly came across a vigor not to be found in the men’s work, to confirm that life for the poor is not simple or simply beautiful.

12 Jul 2008, 2:44am
travel
by marites
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if i could be its lover

my first money-making gig for the summer is a three-day stint at spl. as in the koolhaas/ramus-designed spl. any excitement that might elicit will probably be tempered by the nature of the gig: i man the administrative reception desk. it’s a good fit for the skills i’m building as a phd student. but whatever. when i say i’m ‘going to the office,’ it’s this:

spl photo by mraaronmorris on flickr
[photo by mraaronmorris]

which is cool, except that my view for seven hours of the days is actually something like this:

spl elevator photo by vsz
[photo by vsz]

… except instead of red, the walls on the top floor foyer are a gentle pink.

the nerd that i am, i was pretty excited about being privy to spl’s underbelly, or at least its innards, or brains i guess — operations and collections people are on floor 2. this meant/included getting a badge to open doors like the discreet staff side entrance, using the staff elevator, and just generally masquerading as a member of the spl army. and, working in a koolhaas-designed building. NEAT!

i’ve basically been getting paid to simply warm the seat and keep the crazies out, of which there have been one. i mostly relish walking around like i work there while hoping no one asks me a question believing i actually do. i also relish walking around downtown in my dress down professional garb, finally using the briefcase-y thing my parents gifted me, as if i’m a productive member of society. i can now cross two things off of my life goals checklist.

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