Résumé for fishballs

I always relish an opportunity to go some place I’ve never been – even and especially if it’s just somewhere around these islands, of which I can never get enough – so I jumped at the invitation of an art conservators’ group to join them on a working visit to Misamis Occidental a few months ago.

The Art Conservation and Restoration Specialists, Inc. (ACES) had been contracted by the National Museum and the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA) to take a look at a church in a town called Jimenez and to assess and document its unique ceiling paintings. Apparently, these 110-year-old canvas paintings covered practically the entire ceiling of St. John the Baptist Church, but were now in such a state of disrepair that radical intervention was needed to save them – thus the interest of the National Museum and the NCCA in them. My job was to help ACES – first-rate professionals and among the best in their field – do an audio-visual script on the state of the ceiling paintings – and, while I was at it, to narrate the script as well. (No need for you to know how ACES got me so easily and so cheaply; let’s just say that there’s a family connection somewhere, and that if I refused, I would have tasted soap in my morning coffee for the next three years.)

The city nearest to Jimenez, just half an hour away, is Ozamis – but Ozamis’ airport has been shut down for some time now, and no one felt like taking a slow boat to Northern Mindanao, so we had to take a plane to Dipolog two hours to the east. I’d been to other parts of Mindanao before – Zamboanga, Davao, Cagayan de Oro, the usual destinations – but Northern Mindanao was a mystery to me; I’d never been to Dapitan or Dakak (so many D places!)

We rented a van at the airport and rode past groves of coconut through towns with names like Calamba, Rizal, and Lopez Jaena, marveling at how computer-supply shops could sprout amidst the greenery. Just past sunset and about halfway to Jimenez, a tire blew out, and as the driver fixed the flat we stood on the roadside, munching peanuts and watching the waxing moon rise over Misamis.

We tumbled into Jimenez at well past eight, greeted by the hulking silhouettes of ancient acacias. Some ACES members who had arrived earlier met and led us to our hostel, where the airconditioned rooms cost something like P550 a night – a fortune in a place where you could rent the top floor of a large, breeze-cooled house for P1,500 – per month.

The next morning we realized that Jimenez was a town of churches, with at least two more within spitting distance of the St. John the Baptist Church and yet another one rising along the main road across the plaza. They’re all of different denominations, of course, presenting Jimenez’s folk with a plethora of paths to salvation. Earlier on the day we arrived, 42 couples had been wed at a mass wedding in St. John – so seniority still counts for something.

But the Church’s influence ends at the river, where scores of residents bathe themselves, their carabaos, and their motorcycles in the shade of a supposedly enchanted tree which is said to always sport the fruit of the season, whatever it may be.

An old trading center, Jimenez makes its money from less won-drous ways than avocados on schedule. It hosts three oil depots on the waterfront, and many have left for foreign shores; one popular OFW reportedly brings home $10,000 on every inward trip.

Jimenez may yet realize that its true wealth – both materially and spiritually – lies in those ceiling paintings, eleven canvas panels featuring geometric designs done in the 1890s by a Spanish painter from Bilbao named Julio Sanz. Water, dust, and the ravages of time have taken their toll on these unique treasures, which will be lost forever unless the government and perhaps some private sponsors take a hand. But any rescue begins with a scientific study of the problem, and as I wound up my visit to Misamis (taking a slow boat to Cebu, but that’s another story), I was glad to have helped the ACES team along in giving Filipinos another idea of just how rich our culture is.

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It was a visiting friend – translator and academic Ubaldo Stecconi – who pointed the sign out to me at the UP Shopping Center, Ubaldo’s favorite spot, he says, in the whole UP campus: WANTED: FISHBALL AND QUIKIAM VENDOR. BRING BIO-DATA AND PICTURE. CALL 433-XXXX.

Had fishball and quikiam vending become so professionalized, Ubaldo mused, that it now required a c.v. to join the trade? More interestingly, what kinds of entries and references would go into a winning fishball résumé?

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I’m going to turn over the rest of this week’s column to an appeal by one of our foremost writers and publishers, the US-based Alberto Florentino, who wrote what would become landmark plays in English five decades ago, and then did his fellow writers a signal service by publishing a series of inexpensive but important collections of works. These so-called Peso Books, now collectibles in themselves, picked out and assembled the best of Philippine writing in English up to that point, and they became many a budding writer’s introduction (including mine) to a tradition of writing excellence. They were also among the first local efforts to organize material thematically – war poems, love sonnets, and such.

Today Bert needs the help of his fellow littérateurs. He wants to put together what you might call an anthology of anthologies (there’s already a book by that title, unfortunately), and he wants people to send him what they know of our literary production in terms of anthologies and single-author collections, toward the making of something we could always have more of – an honest-to-goodness literary history. Here’s what Bert sent me:

Spurred by the recent spate of anthologies, I am trying to make a bibliography of anthologies, collections, etc. of books/literary works (short story, poetry, essay, etc.) written in English by Filipinos from 1905 [onward].

My wife and I have been in a small unit in a senior home in Manhattan with very little space.

All my books (Filipiniana and non-Filipiniana) are distributed in several locations – Manila, Portland OR, Manhattan, in DLSU archives and UP Filipiniana archives, both in Manila, in bookshelves, boxes, piles on the floor, those in Manhattan packed in boxes and ready for rental storage or shipment to Filipino libraries in RP or US as donations.

With that state of my residence and library, I am unable to use the books in my library; the problem is compounded by my failing eyes.

I am making a bibliography of 100 anthologies in Philippine literature in English – from the earliest (from the ‘20s) to the latest – in the Philippines and the United States.

Our literature in English is so young there could be just a little more than 100 and less than 150 such titles. In my 1963 Midcentury Guide to Philippine Literature in English (right here before me) I have some data derived from [Prof. Leopoldo] Yabes’ bibliography from 1900 to the time he published it in a humanities review in UP.

I would like to appeal to writers, editors, anthologists, librarians, teachers of literature and institutions to help me by making a complete bibliographic entry of your anthology (different authors), collection (single-author compilation) for a single category or various categories.

Please start by giving your own books you edited or anthologized. This will take only a few words (less than 25 words). Title, author, publisher, country of publication, copyright year and ownership, number of pages, size of pages, nature of binding, etc. It need not be very complete. Most essential: author’s name, book’s title, year of publication, number and size of pages.

I could do this alone, now, if I were not 72 years old, if I had 20/20 vision, good legs and feet to go up the stairs/elevators/escalators of big libraries in NY (and in Manila: I have no access to libraries in RP whenever I visit because I have no library ID; in UP there are no elevators or escalators; the archives are on the 5th floor. The last time I was there was several decades ago (the ‘70s).

After this bibliography I will make out the story of our efforts to make the beginnings of a literary history of the Philippines (in English only).

Bert Florentino can be reached at 510 W. 46th St. (Unit# 501) cor. 10th Ave., New York City NY 10036 USA, tel. no. 212-265-6761, and e-mail bertflorentino@aol.com.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.