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.
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.
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.
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.