For Art's Sake

The late poet Sylvia Plath once said, “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing…I don’t have a pure motive… I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.”
She must have agonized over short stories that kept coming back, like ghosts, haunting her.

On my bookshelf is an assortment of self help books on writing. Writing for Dummies, How to Get Rich in the Writing Business, Be Obscenely Rich by Writing, and so on, you get the drift…

I was a tad euphoric to find out in a book called How to Write Romance and Get Published that even a popular writer, Danielle Steel was not exempted from the harsh realities of book writing. For five years, her three completed works were rejected one after the other. Imagine that. It must have caused her a lot of disappointment, tears and postage stamps. She nearly quit if one publisher had not taken a chance on her. She found a niche for her style and the rest was, as we say, history.

I’m not saying that I’m happy for her obvious setback. It just proved that no matter how long it takes, one has to hold on to hope. In the meantime, enjoy the ride (or the write).

42nd Ballet Season of Ballet Philippines

Faces of Eve

• Schedule of Performances

• Encantada August 2011 CCP Main Theater

• Inamorata September 2011 CCP Main Theater

• The Sleeping Beauty December 2011 CCP Main Theater

• Womb February 2011 CCP Main Theater

Book Review: Sightings by SusanTrott

This book which I fished out of a bargain bin in a nondescript bookshop in Paranaque I consider the find of the decade. Ms.Susan Trott’s inventiveness and insouciance has made me an aficionado. It is a sad fact that she is not well known. Her book deserves a larger readership.

Sightings

by Susan Trott

Sunny, the heroine of this unusual novel is a quirky, flaxen haired girl who happens to find her spy lover, Masefield in the streets of Paris. Her father, Muir Scott, decides to disappear from the limelight of the literati where he has reigned for sometime. Friend to none other than Ernest Hemingway, Muir runs away with Sunny’s childhood friend Chris, which starts the complex situation that our heroine finds herself in. To top it all, Sunny is now in a quandary, whether to choose Masefield, the man she just met a week ago and loves forever, or Buster, the man she has known forever but only loves as a good friend.

Trott crosses the boundary from reality to fantasy, and takes the reader into a surreal journey. She uses first person subjective for all characters effectively that in each chapter, the character is revealed by his/her perspective and choice of words. It is refreshing that each time the reader can peek into a character’s innermost thoughts and feelings in a slow satisfying way.

The real test that I have for a book’s immortality is not only how many people read it but also how one can go back to these pages, perhaps to linger over a few lines, to mull over the meanings of each experience.

I can safely say that this is a book which I can read a few times more, just to taste the saltiness of each page and remember the feel of the wind on my face.



The story begins with the image of a woman sailing a long, slender, silver bay, her mystical blue eyes sweeping the waters over and over for the body of her small son who drowned fifteen years ago…



Quotes:
Maybe it is when you are feeling intensely alive that you are most intensely aware of death.

Masefield: All my life I have been looking for a superior human, a person who possesses intelligence, strength, and soul to a high degree. Naively, I even had a list of names of people to seek out because I thought they might fit the bill.

I was surprised because he( Buster) turned out to be such a human human, which was something I somehow hadn’t expected.

To Write or not to Write

I used to astonish people whenever I told them I was a writer. Many of them went catatonic for a millisecond not really grasping whether it was a gag or if I had been taking Valium (the local version of Prozac). The word writer does have a mystical ring to it.

Of course I was young then, a teenager. I had that self-important look on my face when I uttered those words. Some of those poor people stared at me, mouth agape, as if the earth were ready to devour me anytime.

I was proud of my poems, crude as they were. I had an early fan base you might say. My weepy love poems were a hit among friends and classmates who harassed me for copies, whether to give as a gift to their inamorata or to use as a target practice I really do not know.

My poetic career fizzled out once I learned I couldn’t really make money out of it. I wrote on the side though, hoping and wishing, that maybe, the Muse would tap me on my shoulder once more and say, “Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.” with a Lou Rawls totally cool boom voice.

I switched to writing romances for a while. After a few titles, (which I know in my heart had become hard to find books collected by my fans) , I decided that it was time to move on and become “serious”, so I wrote a World Literature textbook.As of this moment I'm waiting for it to come out. Until it has seen the light of day,I would confine myself to blogging. So there.

Still Life

Years have sliced me

Into little squares.

Flat, shiny jewels

So exact and so still

Quaint, noiseless frames

Captured and hoarded

To fill my book.



It is a known fact

That people have traded everything

For just about anything

But I have never known anyone

Give up photos for something else.

Life in a capsule

Some bitter, some limited

Others contained and coated

With saccharine smiles.

It really depends on

How one wants to be remembered.



They say there comes a time

When one questions and despairs,

Like asking a prestidigitator

To pull out a rabbit from a hat

Or to agitate ancient moss at the bottom

Of a pond. Anything.





When I, a lover of words

Could never make heads nor tails

Out of rhymes

That used to give me chills.



Baby pictures seem to be a favorite.

The first smile, the teeth nonexistent and guilt free.

The wedding picture, execution style.

A façade, bricked off by the layer of lies

We try so hard to believe.

We bleach everything

From pillows to blankets,

Repair the damage good as new

Iron the edges (take no hostages!)

There’s nothing we can’t do

To make everything perfect in a photo.

After all, it’s just about lighting.



At night I’d flip

Through my treasure

Eyes growing sharper

Memory growing dim

The sharp edges cutting my finger

Until it bleeds.
-army granada

Ballet:Fire Onstage (Don Quixote-a Journey)

As the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, a wisp of a girl dressed in flaming red not unlike the feisty señoritas of La Mancha began tiptoeing and twirling amidst a fabulous setting onstage at the main theater of the CCP. Thus Kitri, the female lead character (played by Candice Adea) of Don Quixote was introduced to the audience.

I was privileged to have watched the splendor of Candice, who has won so many accolades here and abroad and is hailed as the brightest star of Philippine ballet scene today. She danced Kitri in the last performance of the final production of Ballet Philippines’ 41st season.

Not to be outdone was the male counterpart Basilio (played by Jean Mark Cordero). I was captivated by his powerful leaps and dazzling stage presence.

Over the years, the Philippines’ foremost dance company, Ballet Philippines has presented to the public such memorable ballets as Peter Pan, Darna and the Nutcracker to name a few.

I have always relished the joy of viewing performance movies, knowing for a fact that that the actors/danseurs have pauses allowing for perfect takes of each dance scene. But onstage- it is a test of endurance. Blessed with artistic and athletic prowess, the dancers can maintain the rigor of dancing almost without let in front of a live audience for hours.

And to quote Candice Adea, “The challenge now is to be able to sustain the same fire…for the whole ballet.”

Kudos to the dancers who all did well in the very satisfying rendition of Don Quixote, the gentleman who dreamed the impossible.