How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife, MEA
This might be my second read of How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife but this is definitely the first I’ve tried to digest the beauty of the prose as an experience in itself. However, unlike more fortunate literature buffs who have their own copy of How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife (And Other Stories), I had to rely on Baul to give me a similar fantastic ride to Nagrebcan, Bauang, La Union.
Shame! Manuel Viloria says the collection was only twenty pesos.
The story, like most of Arguilla’s prose, transpires in Barrio Nagrebcan in La Union, the birthplace of Manuel E. Arguilla himself. You’ll immediately realize how the writer loves his hometown by the vivid imagery and sensuality that he offers on the plate. From the shapes and the sounds to even the scent of the air, Arguilla spares no detail to prove that beauty exists in Nagrebcan.
Footnote to Youth, JGV
Before the first semester of the school year ended, I made sure to borrow Khalleen’s copy of Baul: A Collection of Philippine Literature for College Readers by Leoncio P. Deriada and Isidoro M. Cruz. I had heard of it through other students, it being used as a medium of instruction in literature, but I’ve never had the chance to be formally introduced. When I heard that my fiancée had a copy, I immediately pounced on the idea of studying the whole thing.
Baul has a collection of culturally distinct literature in different forms — short story, poetry, drama and essay. Most pieces I’ve heard of, few I’ve read and studied wholeheartedly and all very Filipino.
The first category was the short story and the first piece featured was Jose Garcia Villa’s Footnote to Youth.
NaNoWriMo Crash!
This is a personal update instead of the promised literature one. I just noticed NaNoWriMo officially starts tomorrow, by my country’s time, so I need all the motivation and concentration I can muster. I’ve always loved November, mostly because of Halloween. I’m in love with horror. What else can I say?
Last year, I tried writing a psychological thriller entitled, “Mirrorbound”. It revolved around this girl who has been having nightmares. She thinks it might run her off the deep end so she goes to see this psychiatrist. Little did she know, things were going to end a lot worse than she had expected.
Obviously, I didn’t make it. I wanted to rewrite the novel this year but I had a change of heart. Not to mention that my laptop got reprogrammed and I lost all data on it. This year, though, I plan to write a crime thriller entitled, “Kusanagi: Grass Cutter”. I know. I need to change the title.
Litventures 01: Stainless Sino
Bob Ong's Stainless Longganisa
Last October 20, 2009, Khalleen and I went to Iloilo City to have our first-ever out of town trip as a couple. We left Kalibo at around 7:30 am and returned a few minutes after seven or eight in the evening on the same day.
The whole thing wasn’t planned. The day before our departure, I made a passing comment on our failed plan to spend two days in the city to watch the In My Life movie, which was basically about gay lovers and one of their moms, and Khalleen suggested that we should leave the next day to compensate albeit it’ll just be for a day. The next morning, she arrived late and we missed the air-conditioned bus so we had to make do with the regular one.
Aside from spending a few hours cuddling with my soul mate in the bus, including both trips to and out of Iloilo City, I also bought Bob Ong’s Stainless Longganisa and Kapitan Sino (Captain Who), completing my collection of the author. Two birds with one stone.
A Postmodernist Critique of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As far as I know, the Latin American writers were the ones who greatly expanded the scope of the novel. Ironically, I can’t remember much of the great novels I’ve read that were written by such writers, if I even had the chance to partake in their genius.
To be honest, I don’t believe that this critique of mine will be as accurate and comprehensive and less than an ignorant insult to the novel. As much as I want to give justice to the literature, I don’t think I will be able to give it a decent analysis, mainly because I wasn’t able to read the whole thing. Taking out facts from excerpts is like sampling a good coffee by its froth – not really essentially anything.
Postmodernists strike me as people who survived the two World Wars, with enough experience to give them the ability to write something that relates to that period in time. Shallow as that may be, it still lingers in the back of my head. That time, when we discussed that certain theory in class, and when I was writing my report on the subject that was actually owned by another classmate, I could only think of The Piano as an example. The Diary of Anne Frank comes to mind as well but mostly because the Holocaust just reads World War II and, as I mentioned beforehand, anything related to the Wars remind me of Postmodernism.
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