New Filipiniana titles (Part One)

The following titles are all worthy additions to everyone’s Filipiniana shelves. We start off with Showbiz Lengua by Jose “Pete” Lacaba, our only certified word maven, a multi-lingual one at that, since he dwells with much expertise and panache not only with English word usage but, as shown in this collection of columns done for the monthly entertainment Yes! Magazine which he helps edit, mostly with new additions to our Filipino and regional languages, plus a lot of chuvaspeak. 

Published by Anvil, the book’s full title is Showbiz Lengua: Chika & Chismax about Chuvachuchu. And there’s no one else who can give us the rundown on such chic chump change of lilting language (possibly patois) than Ka Pete, who sagely scours dictionaries, interrogates area experts (as part of cultural research), and indulges in his own educated guesswork to fill us in on delightful new additions to our Pinoyspeak:

“I asked some Pinoyspeak-watchers what they understood chuvachuchu to mean. Bibeth Orteza: ‘Roughly, ‘whatever, et cetera.’ Blaise Gacoscos: ‘Anything. It’s a filler. Kung ang artista e di alam ang isang salita sa isang phrase, sasabihing chuvachuchu. Example: Si Pedro ay nag-aral sa Mababang Paaralan ng Chuvachuchu.’ Marra PL. Lanot: ‘Blah-blah-blah. Related to ‘Achu?!’ and ‘Achuchu!’, expressions of disbelief, which you say when you think the other person is dishing out bola.’

“Now, I don’t know where the chuva comes from, although I suspect it’s a General Patronage version of the cheap and vulgar chupa. As for chuchu, my educated guess is that it comes from the same sound effects that gave birth to tsutsuwa, tsuwariwariwap, and tsuwap.

“Remember when the Platters sang Remember When? If you’re nearing senior citizenship, you do remember, unless you’re going through a premature senior moment at this very moment. The Platters’ backup singers were always crooning some variation of tsutsuwa, which is why tagatsutsuwa came to mean a yes-man or a yes-person, if you want gender-free language. The relatively innocent tagatsutsuwa soon evolved into the repulsive tsutsu, meaning, sycophant, toady, ass-licker.

“Don’t ask me for lexicographic proof. My assertions here are based purely on chika, chismax, and chukchak....”

Here’s one more excerpt as an example of the delectations of language play conducted by the man who also gives us the Salinawit series of Tagalized music standards from the West (which perhaps should also be presented in book form soon):

“Ukay-ukay, writes columnist Rina Jimenez-David, is ‘a Visayan term that means ‘dig through,’ for that is what customers have to do to find the best bargain.’ Reporter Gerald G. Lacuarta notes that it ‘comes from the Cebuano word ukay, which means to rummage.’

“The ukay-ukay trade apparently began when boxes and boxes of what was once known as relief used clothes from abroad, donated to the poor and to disaster victims found their way into market stalls. Some of the clothes had designer labels and were slightly used, which made them attractive even to middle-class bargain hunters.

“In Baguio, where the ukay-ukay business thrives, these same used clothes are also referred to as wagwag, ‘to dust off’ (this must be the Ilocano equivalent of the Tagalog pagpag), and the store that sells them is a wagwagan.

“But if you want to sound trendy, you say your classy black leather jacket is Made in U.K. (short for ukay-ukay, what else?) and you bought it at SM (short for Segunda Mano, of course).”

It makes for thoroughly enjoyable reading, this book. Trust Pete to entertain and enlighten you to the chuva max.

Mondo Marcos: Writings on Martial Law and the Marcos Babies, edited by Frank Cimatu and Rolando B. Tolentino (also published by Anvil), collects short fiction, personal essays, and poetry mostly from “Martial law babies” that theme up on the Marcos world.

Contributors for fiction are R. Zamora Linmark, Paula Angeles, Cyan Abad-Jugo, David Hontiveros, Robert J.A. Basilio Jr., and Cesar Ruiz Aquino, whose meta-fiction piece titled “The Diaries of Mojud Remontado: 55 Days in Dumaguete” is certainly worth more than the price of this volume alone.

Essays are by Wilfredo Pascual, Jr. (who has two), Ige Ramos (three), Sandra Roldan, Apol Lejano-Massebieu, Oscar Atadero, Grace Celeste T. Subido, Johanns Fernandez, Gabe Mercado, Pete Rajon, and Shubert Lazaro Ciencia.

Poetry is contributed by US-based Pinoy poets Eileen Tabios, Luisa A. Igloria, Vince Gotera, and R. Zamora Linmark, as well as co-editor Frank Cimatu, Alma Anonas-Carpio, Padmapani L. Perez, BJ Patiño, G. Mae Aquino, and one bashful Anonymous. 

It seems Mondo Marcos is a two-volume collection, with one in Filipino, also of essays, poetry and fiction but I don’t have that copy.

In his Epilog, co-editor Tolentino writes: “The writers are from the generation of young people who have grown up, lived through, and generated their consciousness and being primarily during the martial law period. Forced into singing the New Society theme song, gardening vegetable patches, and deprived of a chunk of the Voltes V series, these ‘martial law’ babies had little choice than to involve themselves in materially and symbolically slaying the Marcos-father.... 

“...There was no language outside the Marcos dictatorship. On the other hand, the world given unto them, the officialdom of the conjugal dictatorship’s nation-building is engaged, critiqued and re-worlded. Even as there can be no language other than those uttered by the Marcoses, the idioms for rearticulating the language are retransformed by this generation of writers....

“... The Mondo Marcos volumes seek to memorialize the generation’s coming of age with the legacy of the Marcos era, whose utmost legacy may be surmised in the slogan, ‘never again.’”

Twenty-One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire by Maria Isabel Garcia, our fellow columnist in The Philippine STAR (the Science section on Thursdays), takes its title from the alleged weight of the “soul” as claimed by a 1907 scientist “who wanted to prove that the ‘soul’ was a physical reality” and a 2006 finding by Palatin Technologies Inc. that a seven-ounce spray of a sunless tanning substance originally for men could cause desire to flare up.

The first one involved “a poorly designed experiment” that has since been hooted down by more sober scientists, albeit it inspired a movie, while the second appeared to have had serendipitous results.

“The drug (bremelanotide, an ingredient in the tanning substance) reportedly comes from a new class of drugs called ‘melanocortin agonists’ which means it can carry a ‘happy’ kind of ‘agonia’ the type of pleasure that will cause the writhing of your limbs, not through the bloodstream like Viagra does but through the information highway in your nervous system! In other words, the fire of desire will be transmitted to the main headquarters in your brain and not to your southern field station.”

That is the kind of writing that has won Maribel Garcia, director of the upcoming The Mind Museum in The Fort, Taguig, a National Book Award for the Essay for her first book, Science Solitaire: Essays on Science, Nature and Becoming Human, which came out in 2006, also from the Ateneo de Manila University Press like this one.

This new collection contains 64 pieces from her weekly Science columns in the Star, divvied up into three sections: “The Three-Meter Inheritance”; “The Sway of the World”; and “The Tug-o-War.”

The first part is composed of essays “that show the power of the three-meter molecular chain which contains all the codes that make up our biological identity.” Part Two is on “the influence of nature on us, as captured by its denizens: plants, animals, light, fossil fuels, food, even vitamins and of course, this very planet that bred us.” Then “The Tug-o-War” has 35 pieces “that map out the various arenas where we live out this story of light and shadow, nature and nurture, made alive by both the measured tangibles and the immeasurable ocean of the human spirit.”

Not by any “stuffit-ing” of the imagination can Maribel be simply billed as a writer who popularizes science, although that can be a happy spin-off. The primal reality is that she’s a top-class thinker and writer who takes the merry trouble of assigning insights bred by science into myriad avenues of appreciation, by way of furthering eureka commentary as well as personally integrating poetry and spirited, sportive discourse.

The title essay rounds up the collection. I share more nuggets of prose from the author:

“When science attempts to measure the intangibles like the soul, and emotions such as joy, happiness or desire traditionally cradled by the intricate net of religion and the arts science seems more like the Meralco meter reader, the census counter or the municipal surveyor....

“Men’s southern parts have been known to take off without so much as a whistle from their brains, but women do require a clear coordination between the brain and Venus’s southern fire. I bet it did not even take a corporate huddle for the marketing analysts of Palatin Technologies to figure out that bremelanotide could also target the launching of desires not just in men but in women as well. It was difficult to keep a straight face reading all the historical accounts of this drug that included generous statements of praise from anonymous human ‘sprayers’ of desire in clinical trials as well as accounts of ‘desire counters’ looking for ‘hard’ evidence of passion in unsuspecting male rats that were being periodically sprayed with bremelanotide....”

Then she applies benign closure with rhetorical whimsy maybe as in “Down, boy. There, there, now.”

“How do we measure the worth of our lives? I guess by living and loving with all that we are by defeating math with the very weight of life.”

Hmm, ang galing nitong chicang ito, ah.