Desperately seeking permissions
My friend (and former professor) the poet Gemino “Jimmy” Abad is one of those rare people whose lives are almost completely devoted to pursuits of the mind. For someone like me who’s more at home with trench warfare, Jimmy’s ability to blithely tune out of the here and now and to dwell instead on the implications of the Latin root word for “vernacular” is an admirable talent. The sort of problems that vex Jimmy — like using the ATM, or dealing with spam e-mail — are not like yours and mine.
It isn’t very often that I get to outsmart Dr. Abad on anything vaguely scholarly; indeed, I can recall only one such instance, when we were talking about old songs and the chatter came around to that Cole Porter showstopper C’est Magnifique. (If you don’t know or can’t remember the song — no great reason why you should; it was first sung in 1953, in the musical Can-can — it’s the one that begins with “When love comes in, and takes you for a spin, ooh-la-la-la, c’est magnifique!”) The song, I reminded Jimmy, climaxes with the line “But when once more she whispers Je t’adore”— at which point Jimmy frowned as if to ask, “She whispered what?” Je t’adore, I repeated — “I adore you,” a somewhat more emphatic version of “I love you” in French. Then Jimmy smiled sheepishly and said, “Darn it, kaibigan, I always thought she was saying ‘Shut the door!’”
While he may occasionally garble his lyrics, Jimmy’s a perfectionist when he comes to something else he does exceptionally well, aside from his own poetry (which, not incidentally, just won him Italy’s coveted Feronia Prize) — putting together anthologies of the country’s best poetry and fiction in English. His poetry compilations — Man of Earth, A Native Clearing, and A Habit of Shores — are landmark studies of the form. He has since turned his attention to the Filipino short story in English, following through on what the late Leopoldo Yabes began in his three-volume anthology that covered the years between 1925 and 1955. Jimmy has now completed work on the second part of his own project, spanning 1973 to 1989.
Titled Underground Spirit, the two-volume work covers more than 80 stories culled from the many hundred written and published during that period — the dark days of martial law, followed by an explosion of new work post-EDSA. I myself produced most of my short fiction then, and remember it as an exhilarating time — before computers and before the Internet, for most of us — when I wrote my stories longhand on yellow pad paper before pecking away at the final manuscript on a Royal typewriter. It’s a wonder to me now how, with all the technology at my fingertips, I’m writing a lot less than I did back when all I had was a leaky Bic.
But back to Jimmy Abad. He wrote me last week to ask for a bit of help, specifically with securing permissions for republishing some short stories he’s chosen for the anthology. There are about 20 stories he still needs permissions for, so I’m providing their titles and authors below, hoping that the authors (or, in the case of the deceased, their heirs or copyright holders) will read this and can write Dr. Abad to give him their blessings at gemino_eugenio@yahoo.com.
“The Boarding House” by D. Paulo Dizon
“Agua de Mayo” by Jose San Luis
“Gift to the Earth” by Lina Espina-Moore
“Night Music” by Alfredo O. Cuenca Jr.
“The Children” by Jose Ma. Espino Jr.
“Gargoyles” by Mario G. Lim
“The Song of Eulalia” by Freda Jayme
“The Traveling Salesman and the Split Woman” by Nick Joaquin
“The Party-Hopper“ by Luning Bonifacio-Ira
“In Hog Heaven” by Jessie B. Garcia
“But Not Too Gently into the Night” by Letty Salanga
“Where the Blossoms Fall” by Maria Aurora Agustines
“Angiyátolan” by Fanny Haydee B. Llego
“A Nobel Prize for Jorge Luis Borges” by Eli Ang Barroso
“Crossfire” by Dennis Arroyo
“Thirteen Chestnuts on Fifth Avenue” by Mary Agnes P. Guerrero Levin
“Of Stings and Kings” by Hermel A. Nuyda
“The Wall” by Armando R. Ravanzo
“Our Lady of the Arts and Letters” by Eli Ang Barroso
“The Guest Who Came to Dinner” by B. S. Agbayani Pastor
“Islanders” by Clovis L. Nazareno
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Beng and I marked her birthday last week by attending the exhibit opening of a dear artist-friend, Katrina “Kim” Bello, whose “Drawing Encounters from the Turnpike and a Light from a Distant World” opened at the Mag:Net Gallery at The Columns on Ayala cor. Gil Puyat Ave. in Makati.
The US-based Kim (she works for the Conde Nast publishing group in New York) comes home every now and then to present new work, and each exhibit explores and reveals another facet of her artistry. This time, Kim evokes a city in both decay and rebirth, using strong geometrical shapes and lines in what she calls “paintings on paper” (a graphic artist, she’s more used to leaning over the work than to painting on canvas).
As the exhibit notes observe, “This process of continual diminishment or rather perpetual construction is evinced through the recurring lattice patterns swathed by broad pale washes of intermittent shades of gray. The polyhedrons, drawn predominantly as skeletal frames, are reminiscent of American architect Lebbeus Woods’ rendering of his Locus Memory Plan for the WTC memorial in NY. Where Woods’ lines are precisely scratched over a dense layer of ink wash, Bello’s lines are similarly drafted with such exactness, forming polyhedrons that are bisected and intersected by milky drips and lacey cobweb mesh. The color used in some paintings seems to underscore the ghostliness of these empty structures.”
It was good to meet up with Kim and another mutual friend, the photographer Dominique James, on our last visit to New York, and even better to see her here, against the backdrop of her most recent work. The show’s on until July 6.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
