Category: I FLIP PAGES

Various Writers, Edited by Lillian Ross

This has served as my toilet-side book for years.

192 essays written by various authors like EB White (of White & Strunk fame), Lillian Ross, John Updike, and even Jacqueline Onassis. Not just commentaries on slices of life, but also the most ingenious ways of disguising 5W reporting.

Lifted from The Talk of the Town column of The New Yorker magazine, the collection starts in the 1920s and spans 9 decades of crisp yet descriptive writing. Each essay is concise – a thousand words or less. Perfect for toilet-reading. 1 piece a visit.

One of the last pieces I read , Intensive Care by Susan Orlean who talked about her brief talking part in “All My Children” and The Smell by John Seasbrook, had me smiling. I was sad when I finished the book and had to finally put it back in the shelf.”

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What these are are travel journals. You know how it is when you travel, and you collect the ephemera like tickets, cafe napkins and the like, and then you take a gazillion of photos. All these with the lofty ambition of creating a scrapbook when you get back. Then you get back and reality bites and you have to make up for your absence by working on a backlog of personal and job tasks. Scrapbooking dreams forgotten relegated to the chest of broken dreams. Well, this is the solution. Bring your journal with you. Paste your mementos and postcards while you’re in the airport waiting lounge. Draw sketches. Write down your observations and ooh-ahh musings. All you have to do when you get back is to paste on your photos. Or if you’re too lazy to even do that, just save your electronic pics into a cd and store that in the attached envelop. Your memories are saved. You minimize the self harassment. Your ephemera’s organized. And you feel like a real scrapbooking and journaling diva.

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“I don’t think you can explain how Christian faith works either. It is a mystery. And I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.”

I wish I had read this book sooner in my Christian walk. It would have spared me so much guilt and anxiety for thinking the way I thought, feeling the way I felt, as somebody who was still working out how this faith thing works out.

“The goofy thing about Christian Faith is that you believe it and don’t believe it at the same time. It isn’t unlike having an imaginary friend. I believe in Jesus; I believe He is the Son of God, but every time I sit down and explain this to somebody I feel like a palm reader, like somebody who works at a circus or a kid who is always making things up or somebody at a Star Trek convention who hasn’t figured out the show isn’t real.”

Blue Like Jazz is the coolest Christian book I’ve read; and it didn’t have to use edgy fonts; skate and surf jargon; and Bono to make it cool. It’s not religious. It’s not fire and brimstone. It is not hard sell. Not like how I could be when trying to “sell” the idea of my faith, as if I were selling Amway. I want to be like Miller’s friend, Nadine.

“The thing I loved about Nadine was that I never felt like she was selling anything. She would talk about God as if she knew Him, as if she had talked to Him on the phone that day. She was never ashamed, which is the thing with some Christians I had encountered. They felt like they had to sell God, as if He were soap or a vacuum cleaner, and it’s like they really weren’t listening to me; they didn’t care, they just wanted me to buy their product… To Nadine, God was a being with which she interacted, and even more, Nadine believed that God likes her. I thought that was beautiful. And more than that, her faith was a spiritual thing that produced a humanitarianism that was convincing.”

Miller is not a theologian so this book offers no dissection of the faith or deep biblical analysis. What it has to say about the Word is just a description of Miller’s own experience:

“I would lie on my bedroom floor, reading my Bible, going at the words for hours, all of them strong like arms wrapped tightly around my chest. It seems as though the words were alive with minds and motions of their own, as though God were crawling thoughts inside my head for guidance, comfort, and strength… The truths of the Bible were magic, like messages from heaven, like enchanting codes that offered power over life, a sort of power that turned sorrow to joy, hardship to challenge, and trial to opportunity… I seemed to have been provided answers to questions I had yet to ask, questions that God sensed or had even instilled in the lower reaches of my soul.”

This book has the feel of Catcher in the Rye when it talks about weird Christians with their bigotry, their parroted slogans, God infomercials, and Democrat-bashing ways that incite anger among and outside the church. He offers alternatives to these attitudes: First to pray that God shows you a church filled with people who share your interests and values, then to go to the church God shows you, and then not to hold grudges against any other churches because God loves those churches almost as much as He loves yours. In other words, Miller endorses God’s message of loving others, taking God as our model of love.

“To be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously.”

Miller talks about life, purpose, persecution, salvation, Savior:

“I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thoughts into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife. I understand that I am temporary, in this shell of a thing on this dirt of an earth. I am being tempted by Satan, we are all being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and Redeemer. This is why Paul had no question. This is why he could be beaten one day, imprisoned the next, and released only to be beaten again and never ask God why. He understood the earth was fallen. He understood the rules of Rome could not save mankind, that mankind could not save itself; rather it must be rescued.”

Of evangelism:

“I could feel God’s love for him. I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s, that my part was just to communicate love and approval.”

Of God’s love:

“Jesus didn’t love me out of principle; He didn’t just love me because it was the right thing to do. Rather, there was something inside me that caused Him to love me.”

But with this caveat:

“God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.”

Don says of our love for God:

“I think the most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.”

Of faith:
“My belief in Jesus does not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief.”

Why Jazz?

“Christian spirituality is like jazz music. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful. The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. And that is the closest thing to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom.”

Miller talks about a decision that the human heart needs to make. It’s a decision that would determine how the rest of one’s story turns out. I think this book, in the hands of somebody with an open mind and ready heart, can help people make that decision.

“Your life is not your own, but you have been bought with a price.”

For the holy week, I had planned to read something that was not required reading. Nothing that was remotely related to my line of work. Nothing that everybody else was reading that I had to read so as not to feel out of place in dinner conversations. Nothing life-changing, mind-boggling, or gut-wrenching. In other words, I was in serious need of fluff.

And fluff was had.

Simon & Schuster’s Style, by designer cum author kate spade, is the perfect no-brainer book to decompress after one of the most stressful months of my 40-year life. No IQ cells were disturbed in the delightful process of reading. No brows knit. No thoughts provoked. No worldviews challenged. No words looked up at dictionary.com. And there were pretty pictures too!

Reading all 109 pages of this book felt like those ditzy gab-fests with girlfriends talking about feminine products, childhood crushes, and favorite Oprah episodes.

Kate writes about her style influences – Diana Vreeland, Bjork; Jane Austen, Dr. Seuss; Picasso, Andy Warhol; movies like Annie Hall, The Royal Tenenbaums. She doesn’t really try to teach anyone about style, since she (and husband Andy; and language masters Strunk and White) thinks that style is achieved by affecting none. So, instead, she just shares her own style – what she packs for a trip to Mexico or Kansas; her favorite colors, and with what she pairs them with; what she wears to work, to play, to a party, in winter, spring; her favorite accessories. The last chapter shares practical tips for organizing closets and caring for clothes and jewelry.

People don’t normally believe it when I say I’m not into brands. Yet it’s true. I’m no fashion victim, wanting to have the latest must-have brands. I’m not going to spend one month’s salary (or my husband’s salary) for a monogrammed Louis Vuitton. Jimmy Choos won’t exactly make me squeal with delight if the fit is bad on my farmer-proportioned feet and the styling does not make me feel, “me.” I’ll be equally happy with a tiangge-find no-brand plastic tote as with a Coach original. Okay, that’s not true. But what I’m trying to say is the brand is not the main thing. Brands, to me, are merely clues to good buys. They just make shopping a bit easier as they lead me to stores where I can find certain types of items at the required level of quality.

I’m no brand junkie, yet, I have this healthy obsession with Kate Spade. She is, to a degree, my style icon. I like what she represents – a lifestyle of enjoying what is beautiful, expressive, distinct, stylish.

Kate’s style is far from mine. She does not wear t-shirts; I live in them. She can wear yellow; the only time I wore yellow was to our high school reunion and only because that was the theme. Kate’s favorite fonts are baskerville and futura; mine is trebuchet. She likes full skirts; I have child-bearing hips that forever preclude such items from my wardrobe. But this book inspires me to define my own style. Not by plagiarizing other people’s style, but by opening myself to the world around me – to books, movies, art, travel, people that move me.

After reading this book, I conclude that sometimes, fluff is good for the soul.

P.S. Thanks, Sana, for giving me this book.

Edited by Cristina Pantajo Hidalgo

I stupidly thought I could check out the new bookstore in Galleria – Bestsellers by National Book Store – without giving in to the shopping monster in me. Then I saw this book. On insomnia by insomniacs. Of course, I had to have it.

The back cover says that 10-15% of the world’s population have severe chronic insomnia, and an additional 25-30% have transient or occasional insomnia. I don’t know which category I belong to. Doesn’t matter. The book is about me. I can’t sleep when I’m supposed to sleep, meaning at night on the bed. Though if you put me in any moving vehicle – car, bus, train, boat, calesa, I can sleep in a matter of seconds. In planes, I can even sleep before take-off. Maybe I was deprived of motherly baby-rocking; but I digress too much.

I am halfway through the book. Not the best time to write a review on it. But I’ve had it happen often enough. I would be reading a book and I would nurture the ambition of posting a review on it. Then when I’m done reading I put the book close to the computer so I’ll remember to write the review. Then tinginingnginingngining… that’s the sound effect to represent a long time lapse, the cinematic ellipse… 6 months later I have to clear the book(s) away from the computer table to give me elbow space. By then, I would have forgotten what about the book I wanted to share with the world wide who-cares. Countless book reviews have jumped from my to-do list to my forget-it-it-will-never-get-done-you-pathetic-procrastinator-you list. Again, I digress.

Most of the essays, poems, factoids, short stories in the collection were probably written during the dreaded insomniac hours. Except for the piece written by Vince Groyon, whose name is on my top ten list of reasons why I am too insecure to write for a living. He says insomniac writing produces for him “jumbled, incoherent mass of words that just gets folded away deep in the pages of a notebook.” I can relate. My insomniac hours enable me to copiously produce PowerPoint slides so I can conduct corporate training for a living. But rarely do they help me write anything of show-off value.

The piece I can relate to the most is the one I finished minutes ago. Alex Almario contemplates doing away with the useless bed. The floor would serve a better purpose for pacing back and forth. I cannot do that, of course, because getting rid of the bed would mean divorce from my husband. Besides, when I do get to sleep I enjoy deep, long ones. But I get exactly what he means.

In Alex’s hours of restlessness, all his insecurities turn up and decide to hold a convention in his head. I know that feeling of random, uncontrollable ideas deciding to hold powwows in my head. It’s not always about insecurities though. Sometimes I obsess visualizing my dream house and the pantone color swatches, various pieces of furniture, facades of Frank Lloyd Wright houses just march in and out of my brain. Or I play out in my head all the things I have to do that overwhelm me. All the big pending projects. I try to break them down into manageable chunks like they teach you how to do in time management classes, but then I do such a good job of breaking them down into little pieces and then the many details overwhelm me and I can’t sleep. Sometimes the thoughts are similar to rudderless, 25-year-old Alex’s musings: what will I do with the rest of my life; is it pointless to dream; how can I impress my classmates in the next high school reunion; when will I ever wear size 6 jeans again?

Aha, now I get why my book reviews never get written. I don’t know squat about book reviews. This piece is turning out to be an indulgent, all-about-me blog entry. It’s noontime. I had 9 hours of sleep. I don’t have an excuse for this drivel.

Let me just end with Alex’s last 2 paragraphs, which struck a chord in me:

“I’ve been trying too hard to fight this problem, to no avail. The logical next step is to quit fighting it. Embracing this sleeping disorder is a very new-age, self-help-guru thing to do. When life gives you a lemon… (all together now, in a dorky, math-club-president voice) make lemonade! Those who can sleep have no time for greatness. While they’re wasting away hours of their lives buried under their pillows, I will be wide-eyed and restless making history. I will write the Great Filipino Novel. I will find the cure for cancer. I will find an alternative energy source. I will figure out the meaning of life.

‘I really need to get some sleep.”

I’m not being trite when I say this book is fabulous. Life of Pi is a fable – the story of a Bengal tiger, a mean hyena ugly without redemption, a feisty orangutan, a short-lived zebra, and the most dangerous animal of all – a 16 year old human. All of them hungry.

The author was hungry when he wrote the tale and he attempted to nourish himself and his readers with lessons in faith, survival, animal instinct and human emotions. 227 days in a 26 foot boat with the barest of supplies, the fiercest of animals, overcoming the most challenging circumstances, Piscine Patel, Pi, learned not just to survive but to find good in bad, hope where there seems to be none.

Where the story falls short is in its bodacious promise to change the way we believe in God. It’s just too fantastic to be taken as a challenge or affirmation of beliefs. But maybe that’s just me – I didn’t buy the spiritual undertones of Lord of the Rings either.

At best, it is an entertaining gem crafted by a skilled, albeit sometimes gimmicky, storyteller with a fearless imagination. If you do not take this too seriously, if you can enjoy the occasional humor, if you just appreciate this for what it is – a fantastic piece of fiction, then it is worth the read. Don’t look for anything faith shaking, life-changing, or mind-altering.

Still high after attending a reading group meeting for the first time, I felt drawn to buy the book. (It doesn’t take much to convince me to buy, believe me.)

Everything about the book screams chick lit – the tagline above the title (where the books end, the stories begin), the blurb (This is a real female-bonding novel in the very best sense; it’s witty and immediately engaging. – Glamour UK.), and the teal cover with the charming graphic. Well, it is chick lit; not always a bad thing. It is Desperate Housewives meets Hallmark Channel, the British version. 5 women, the usual suspects with the usual womanly problems – the philandering husband, the perfect but too-perfect husband, children, not being able to have children, divorce, marital boredom, you know the usual. Okay, the perfect husband is not the usual, but you know what I mean.

The Wisteria Lane women meet for gin rummy, but Harriet, Nicole, Polly, Susan, and Clare meet every month to discuss a book they take turns choosing. 12 chapters. 12 books to be discussed in 12 months. In January relative strangers meet to discuss Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. By December, when they discuss Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, their friendships have grown deeper. The book review meetings are not necessarily the highlight of this novel; rather they serve as a backdrop for the narration of these women’s lives, which interestingly enough, move parallel to the plots of the books they review.

As a housewife, sometimes desperate, and as a woman, I can certainly relate to their emotional issues. I especially like Harriet, who is far from the Nigella Lawson vision of perfection, whose all-purpose cure for every problem is chocolate, who has a husband whose heart of service can sometimes be a trigger for emotions of guilt and inadequacy. I feel Clare’s aching for a child. I root for Polly as she overcomes life’s mistakes and takes second chances.

Except for a few slight surprises, the book is utterly predictable. At the end, each character finds resolution. That is usually the case for most novels, but in this book, the endings are a bit too neatly, too conveniently wrapped up, and not all that convincing.

Good, light reading for my girl-alone-on-a-holiday jaunt. But not quite meaty enough as a reading group choice.

Mention the name Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the term magical realism is soon to follow. One would imagine then that his autobiography would employ that style. Even the title, Living to Tell the Tale conjures spellbinding narration heavy on mystical language, with the line between fact and fiction blurred. But such is the not the case.

For his autobiography, Marquez relied on his journalistic skills – acquired through his early years as a paid writer – to recount the events, people, and places, the 5 Ws of his life. More real, than magical. More reportage than editorial. Facts more than fiction. Probably why some reviewers found this book boring with its seemingly endless inventory of places –- Aracataca, Baranquilla, Bogota, Cartagena, Sucre; and people –- family members, teachers, classmates, co-writers, political figures, lovers, mentors, tormentors, and dozens and dozens of people named Guillermo, figuring in events that may or may not contribute to the whole narrative.

You will be awed at the painstakingly detailed accounts. He did not mention if he kept a journal or if he just pulled all these memories from his head. If it’s the latter, then he has an astonishing, functioning memory bank. These are not an old man’s ramblings, tinted with sentimentality. These are vivid, well-preserved memories of a man who lived an amazing life and lived to tell the tale in amazing detail.

This is not to say that this work is devoid of magic. The magic comes from the clarity of writing, this from a man who acknowledges that his style is convoluted and ethereal. Good writing so clear and fresh you can imagine traveling the Cienaga swamps, and looking at his old house in Aracataca with a mix of pain and nostalgia. You’re there living Marquez’s life as a student at the colegio and the liceo, experiencing Colombia’s tumultuous politics. You feel his desperation, living on the edge of poverty, finding shelter in parks, brothels, cafes, wherever his measly pesos can buy him a bed, hammock, or chair to lie on. You feel his hunger pangs as he starves his body while his mind is being enriched by his interactions with intellectuals and the most fascinating personalities.

The magic is not contrived, not produced by hypnotic literary manipulation. Yet it’s literature that enchants, sparks the imagination of the reader. With matter-of-fact writing, Marquez recounts a life, the telling of which requires the telling of two previous generations’ tales. A life markedly influenced by an eccentric family, the daily challenge of survival, a culture of poetry. A life accented with drama, romance, crime, passion. Reading it, you can almost see the movie adaptation, almost feel the dusty heat, and hear the soundtrack, which will be marvelous because Marquez’ life is filled with music, because he loves music almost as much as he loves writing.

His writing. His writing about his writing. That’s what I loved best about this book. To discover that he has an inferiority complex about his spelling. To know who influenced him in his writing – Borges, Neruda, Woolfe, Faulkner, among many others. He talks about his aversion to adverbs ending in –mente, and having two proximate words that rhyme. He talks about the life stories that inspired his written stories. Love in the Time of Cholera, for example, was based on his parents’ forbidden relationship. It is surprising, and it makes this writing legend seem very human, to know that his natural bashfulness extends to his writing, that he is afraid to write and afraid to share what he has written. On page 393 (Vintage edition), he says “that the terror of writing can be as intolerable as the terror of not writing.”

Except for a flashback or two, the story follows a mostly linear, chronological account from his birth in 1927 to some point in the late 50s when he proposed to his wife through a letter. The book closes without saying whether his proposal is accepted or not. A cliffhanger of sorts, leaving the readers hanging on, anticipating the next installation. Dear Lord, I hope Gabriel Garcia Marquez lives on and on so he can continue to tell his tale.

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

I have heard of the term literary masturbation a few times before but I never really understood it until I read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Maybe this is what people refer to when they say “writing for writing’s sake.”

Beautiful, melodic prose. Wonderful weaving of words. A melee of metaphysical metaphors. Dizzying, dazzling details. Vivid imagery. Descriptions beyond the ordinary man’s ability to describe. Magical. Moving. But sadly, all these leaving me scratching my head thinking, what the fafaya is this guy talking about? Reading it, I had the feeling that someone somewhere is enjoying all these. But I’m not part of the fun. Hence, now I get what literary masturbation looks and uhm, feels like.

“The city that they speak of has much of what it needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on it site, exists less.”

In this novel, if you could call it that, the very thin and loose plot revolves around the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Some exchanges are amusing. Silly, even. But mostly, it is about the cities. About the most fantastic ways anyone can ever describe cities.

The invisible cities Calvino talks about is really just one city: Venice. But he describes Venice in the most interesting, peculiar, perplexing of ways. He never calls Venice Venice. Instead he assigns dozens of exotic names. Each name presents a different aspect of the city. He describes the city through its architecture and structures; through its culture; its inhabitants – dead, alive, imaginary, human or otherwise; through objects, mundane or extraordinary; through its daily activities of commerce and human drama; through nature and its elements; through demarcation lines distinct or blurred; through dreams; through entrances and exits; through myths; through events; through seasons; through its pathways. If there is a way of describing a city, Calvino has used it.

“Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transperence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows. the jam of past, present, future that blocks existence calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would feel at the end of your journey.”

Eventually, I warmed up to the story by the sheer beauty of language. By the time I got to the end, I felt like I had traveled a thousand miles, but still scratching my head with an ending as vague and confounding as the whole story itself. I still didn’t get it, but it sure was an amazing ride. To paraphrase a line from the book, “I regret having to leave the city when I barely graze it with my glance.”

In the brave new world that Huxley describes, human beings are decanted out of test tubes and demijohns that go through an assembly line in a place called a hatchery. From embryo to adulthood, people are divided by castes.

In our reading group that discussed Brave New World, there were divisions as well. The Alpha intellectuals, the Epsilon shallows, the in-betweens, the undecideds, and the posers (posing as shallows, not intellectuals). We were divided into sci-fi fans, and those who would never pick up this book in normal circumstances. Those who loved the book, those who hated it, and one who “luved it so much.” The optimists versus the pessimists. Those who read the book, and those who scanned spark notes the night before.

The reactions to the book and the ideas it sparked ran a very wide gamut. We certainly didn’t agree on much, but we agreed it was a great choice in inciting impassioned debate. The book is a minefield of topics for discussions on science, free will, religion, gods in lower case g, happiness, Malthusian economy, media propaganda, determinism, feminism, capitalism, consumerism, individualism and many other isms. Noses bled.

As for me, I bought the book early this year only because someone recommended it. And well, uhm, it was on sale, which is usually a good enough reason to buy anything. It was destined to stay in my TBR pile ever after. Until it was chosen as June’s reading group book. (That’s what you get when you force a molecular biologist to moderate.) So I had no choice but to actually read it. I almost thought I would not be able to get through the convoluted foreword written many years after the original novel was published. I suspect that the foreword was just a way for the author to say, “hey, my writing has improved.”

If you look at the novel as a literary piece, then you’ll be disappointed at the sophomoric writing and the one-dimensional characters. But if you lower your expectations and see it as an amusing satire on man’s burning desire to play God and control the world, then it is not all that bad. As one of the reading group members said, “I’ve read worse.”

To be fair, the book made me think, especially close to the end when Mustapha Mond explained a lot about the brave new world and the rationale for the way its creators made it to be. And the discussions that followed illuminated to me not so much what others think of the world, but what I want the world to be. But that’s for another discussion. Maybe over soma, er coffee.