Footnotes On Wasaaak!!!

...in the prom...

2008-10-04T11:32:00.000+08:00

“…you’re in the prom now!”

At least you’re invited. Most Filipino-language writers are relegated to the patio that just happens to also be the smoking area standing around in their barongs and saya drinking lukewarm beer and talking about showbiz tsismis and smelling like ashtrays. Me, I’m bilingual, but really, I don’t care much for the prom. Yeah, I’m one of those kids.

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...already in...

2008-10-04T11:31:00.000+08:00

“It is already in the center!”

But I ask again: why bother with the center?

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...the Palancas...

2008-10-04T11:30:00.000+08:00

“…the Palancas…”

But really: why bother with the Palancas?

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...intellectual stutterings...

2008-10-04T11:25:00.001+08:00

“…intellectual stutterings…”

A more friendly variation of one of my Dad’s many priceless expressions: “ngongo ang utak”.

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...pilfering...

2008-10-01T12:05:00.002+08:00

“…retroactive imperialist orientalist pilfering…”

Which is a bit like Kael’s colonization of thought, but instead of forgetting the native in favour of the foreign, it’s more how the foreign informs the native, and vice versa.

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...the pervasive presence...

2008-10-01T12:03:00.002+08:00

“…because of the pervasive presence and aggro PR campaign of the term.”

Even the most pedestrian, ie rude, critics of “speculative fiction” are reaping the benefits of the near-pervasive PR campaign: Karl De Mesa got UP Press to publish his book Damaged People: Tales Of The Gothic-Punk and with it proves once more that the hype should never overtake the fact.

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...are getting published...

2008-10-01T12:01:00.001+08:00

“…are getting published in Story Philippines, in the Free Press, in Philippine Genre Stories…”

Alfar mentioned this in the September 24 talk, that there were only five regular outlets for publication – the other two being his annual antho, and Philippine Graphic - for writers in the Philippines and made it out to be a rather depressing thing, and it is, don’t get me wrong, but Alfar neglected/forgot to point out that they were outlets for the English-language writers in the Philippines. When you start to think about enumerating the regular outlets for publication for Filipino-language writers in the Philippines, it’s even more depressing: zero. Kael rightly pointed out the implications and possible ripple-effect of “speculative fiction’s” primarily English-language focus and touched upon very interesting and very depressing ideas in my head that deserve a different far lengthier post than a mere footnote to a text. But for now, I’ll give you this: I really do think that if we had a regular outlet for Filipino-language texts, and fuck how I’ve tried to provide this even for just a few of us, great things will happen. W/r/t “speculative fiction”, I think if Alfar, et al, actually went out of their way to read and study Filipino-language texts in general – Pinoy “specfic” specifically – they’ll have more answers for their issues with Filipinoness in “speculative fiction”.

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...an act of communication...

2008-10-01T12:00:00.001+08:00

“…an act of communication…”

And you really just to have to feed the Society Culture Machine Cycle.

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...where things actually get exciting...

2008-10-01T11:58:00.002+08:00

“…and that’s where things actually get exciting for me.”

Like in the nonissue of Art vs Commerce, which people will continue to masochistically insist exists all the while texts like Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen or Ennis’ Punisher or Nolan’s The Dark Knight or fuck even my own The El Bimbo Variations are all happily furthering Art and addressing Commerce, thus proofs that even between Art and Commerce an exciting and excitable middleground exists. People just aren’t problematising it enough... which I will do in a more in-depth post.

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...catch-all definition...

2008-10-01T11:55:00.004+08:00

“Right now, the catch-all definition is veering towards universality to the point of careening towards nothingness.”

My issue actually here is more the impetus for this catch-all term, which is really to penetrate the center. Why even bother penetrating the center?

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...old writers...

2008-10-01T11:55:00.003+08:00

“…than old writers, ie, like Carl and me.”

Not in age, of course, but in familiarity. I’ve been writing for quite a few years now, but this will be the first time I’ll be associated with “speculative fiction”. As for Carl, he edited an antho once for PSICOM of what he called “speculative fiction”, a book entitled Pinoy Amazing Adventures.

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...morally-unsound...

2008-10-01T11:53:00.001+08:00

“…morally-unsound…”

Because it was the Palancas.

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...the creative in tandem with the critical...

2008-10-01T11:50:00.001+08:00

“…ought to be producing the creative in tandem with the critical work that our respective campaigns demand…”

In my eMail, Alfar replied that he acknowledges the need for critical discourse, but in his totem pole of priority it was only tertiary, and he’s correct to put criticism third to the actual writing and publishing of the works. My point was that us as writers should at least effort to think first before writing, and before you actually get to think about it, you have to be critical at the onset.

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...navel-gazing literary bullshit...

2008-10-01T11:46:00.000+08:00

"...90% of it is meandering navel-gazing literary bullshit absent of any real politics whatsoever..."

My original point was more about genre fiction being hijacked by the literati than the actual writers consciously seeing "speculative fiction" as another means to further literary dreck. I wouldn't presume to know what a relatively big group of writers were thinking when they wrote their respective texts, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't any conspiratorial monthly meeting thing where they all planned to write "speculative fiction". It was more Alfar maybe seeing all this work generated that had similar traits and wanting to provide a platform for these works to be seen and read and discussed, but I do think that it was Alfar's aesthetics that did dictate the initial salvo - and the immediate work generated right after - of "speculative fiction", and that salvo generally had the literary college-writing vibe, what I disparagingly described as "meandering navel-gazing literary bullshit", because more or less that was what most of the writers had as a framework to build their works upon. Three years on, my point isn't that accurate anymore, but it's still as good a description as any, seeing as really, most of them were only incidentally "scifi" or "fantasy", being middle-class ennui, ie meandering navel-gazing literary bullshit, with only holograms and spaceships and dragons and nymphs instead of TV and BMWs and drug addicts and prostitutes. They were still complaining about not getting the girl, and in the usual way. No discussion of the noveau norms a future society might have. No discussion of the sexual politics of a world with donkey-cocked centaurs in it. They weren't inherently "scifi" or "fantasy". They were literary contempo "realist" texts in "speculative fiction's" clothing.

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...in shaping society and culture...

2008-10-01T11:45:00.002+08:00

“…the writer’s/artist’s role in shaping society and culture.”

The Society Culture Machine Cycle is thus: society informs the culture produced by the society which then informs the society that produced it, ad infinitum, until we all die when the sun finally inflates into a giant and deflates into a singularity. And even then, maybe we’d already colonized a few planets here and there and somewhere out there in the Small Magellanic Cloud is a printout of this very sentence, still living on a billion years after the fact. And of course, it’s not just the writers and artists who produce and is informed by culture. Everyone produces and informs culture.

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...the transgressive politics...

2008-10-01T11:44:00.001+08:00

“…the transgressive politics of popular fiction…”

It’s actually well-documented if people actually bother to read up on it, and really, you only have to have eyes to see it. Two brief examples, as this is one topic I want to pursue in other more comprehensive posts: (1) Beverly Siy - she of quite a few Filipino-language ghost-horror anthologies – and her MA classmates once did a study about haunted houses in a nearby rural area, Bulacan or Batangas, I forget which, for a class in UP and their research unearthed the distinct notion of the haunted house phenomenon as a manifestation of class struggle, what with all the haunted houses we know of always being these big mansions isolated from the town proper by sheer walls and it’s always the townspeople around the mansion creating the various ghost narratives about the house. Two of the key questions in the paper was “Bakit lagi na lang haunted house? Bakit walang haunted kubo?” One of the PSICOM horror anthos was based on this research. I think it was Haunted Philippines. (2) The zombie narrative cycle in pop culture as reflection of society’s anxieties: it started out as a by-product of White America’s anxieties over African/Haitian culture, ie voodoo, informing the Mainland’s primarily Christian society, mashed-up with Richard Matheson’s postBlitzkrieg novel I Am Legend, reportedly the first scifi-horror novel, which I contest by saying maybe it should be Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, evolving into George Romero’s initial reflection of antiCommunist America (The Night Of The Living Dead), to the onset of Consumerist America (Dawn Of The Dead), the paranoia of the Reagan years of Iran Contra (Day Of The Dead), to the reaction to 9/11 and the subsequent military mobilization (Land Of The Dead), and New Subjectivism in media studies (Diary Of The Dead), and now there’s Max Brooks’ novel World War Z, which is primarily a response to the American global antiTerrorism campaign, New Subjectivism, and the current meme of China as a sleeping dragon. And that’s just me talking about various texts’ inherent politics. The potentials of writing popular fiction as an actual act of transgression is, haha, well, that’s for a whole other post. But my point is, is that all of these things are layered and complex. George Romero is very vocal about his movies being more than movies. They are never merely for entertainment. They are also for social awareness.

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...I was not impressed...

2008-10-01T11:42:00.002+08:00

“…I was not impressed.”

Even when I didn’t actually articulate much of my critique of Alfar’s campaign, ie wrote about it in blogs or eMailed people about it or whatever, somehow the most impossible people knew of it, like Kit Kwe asking me once in conversation if I was behind a certain antiDean Alfar blog being regularly maintained at that time. Kit and I are not that close. We’re okay, but we’re not that close, and actually, that was one of the first times we actually spoke to one another. Maybe she was just making conversation? Very likely. And I wasn’t behind the antiDean Alfar blog. My initial critique of his campaign may have been flippant, but it was never petty or bitter. It was merely mainly as a disappointed fan of genre fiction.

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...car-salesmannish crossed with messiah/pariah...

2008-10-01T11:39:00.002+08:00

“…by Alfar’s car-salesmannish crossed with messiah/pariah tones…”

In hindsight, it was understandable, as like what I’ve said in the main text, no one else will do these things for us, and fuckin-eh I know I do it myself w/r/t “potential literature”, only I lean more towards the messiah/pariah than the car-salesman. The problem was, the hype was way way way better than the fact. It’s only in recent years that the fact started catching up with the hype. It’s not there, yet, not even halfway, but it’s getting there.

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...how Pinoys distinctly wrote them...

2008-10-01T11:35:00.003+08:00

“…science fiction and fantasy stories as how Pinoys distinctly wrote them…”

I felt at the time – and I still feel today, albeit it’s not that strong of a feeling anymore – that the term got/gets in the way of the writers actually writing truly scifi and/or fantasy texts, to the detriment of the movement. I’m not being purist. The term just gave/gives too much leeway for texts that only merely incidentally have scifi/fantasy (and now any other genre fiction) elements, which isn’t how I see these things ought to be written.

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