Butch Dalisay for Write Or Die
You are all invited to attend a talk on “Creative Non-Fiction” by Professor Butch Dalisay on February 2, 2008 (Saturday) from 2PM to 4PM in Powerbooks Trinoma. The talk is part of the Write or Die Writers Write series promoting the UP Gawad Likhaan.
Professor Dalisay is an award-winning writer whose latest novel “Soledad’s Sister” was shortlisted for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. He also writes a regular column in the Philippine Star.
The talk is free and you don’t need to register. Just drop by and bring your friends. See you there~
Write Or Die: Butch Dalisay (Notice)
We’ve already sent an emailed update about this but please note again that Butch Dalisay’s talk will not push through today. It has been moved to February 2 (Saturday) and will take place in Powerbooks Trinoma from 2PM to 4PM.
Poetry schedule will be posted later. Thank you.
Some kind of updates
We’ve been so busy–and on my part sick (again)–that it’s just been one press release after another. Sorry, one of my resolutions for this year is to blog more frequently. I used to write regularly before but have fallen behind on a lot of things c/o a rather insane schedule.
Dr. Isagani Cruz’s talk went really well last Sunday. I’ll upload the recording as well as some pictures. It was the most quotable WoD session ever. Instead of literary criticism, he went and talked about how to win literary contests. Hehe. “The majority of judges for literary awards are usually over 50 and think that the Beatles are still performing and that Elvis is still missing.” LOL.
Write Or Die Features Isagani Cruz
The UP Institute of Creative Writing in cooperation with Powerbooks and Read Or Die present the second series of Write Or Die: Writers Write lecture-workshops. The discussions will be held every weekend from November 2007 to February 2008 in different Powerbooks branches and will be moderated by some of the best writers in the country. The purpose of the workshops is to promote the Gawad Likhaan: The University of the Philippines Centennial Literary Prize.
The workshops will have four areas: Fiction (November 2007-December 2007), Non-Fiction (January 2008), and Poetry (February 2008).
Isagani Cruz will be speaking on literary criticism on January 20 (Sunday), 2008 (Saturday) in Powerbooks Greenbelt from 2PM to 4PM. The talk is free and open to the public.
Isagani Cruz is an award-winning writer, educator, playwright and critic. He is also a co-founder and chairman of the Manila Critics Circle which gives out the annual National Book Awards.
For more information please contact us at readordie.ph@gmail.com.
Write Or Die: Non Fiction Series (January 2008)
FYI the complete schedule (will update website in a bit):
January 12 (Saturday): Maribel Garcia
Science Writing
Powerbooks Greenbelt, 2-4PM
January 20 (Sunday): Isagani Cruz
Writing Literary Criticism
Powerbooks Greenbelt, 2-4PM
January 26 (Saturday): Butch Dalisay
Creative Non-Fiction
Powerbooks Megamall, 2-4PM
Write Or Die: Writing Non-Fiction feat. Maria Isabel Garcia of “Science Solitaire”
Just in case you’re new to this weblog:
Where Read Or Die promotes reading and a greater awareness of literature–especially Filipino literature–in the Philippines, Write Or Die initiates and supports on projects designed to foster good writing skills in English and in the Philippine languages among both young people and adults. Write Or Die is an advocacy. We believe that writing is an essential aspect of literacy and that writing can transform lives, build communities, and enable individuals to express and find themselves.
The Write Or Die website can be found at http://write-or-die.org.
As for the name – well, we had obviously run out of original ideas. Think Or Die, anyone?
Write Or Die’s launching event is a series of workshops organized with the UP Institute of Creative Writing and Powerbooks to promote the UP Gawad Likhaan (the UP Centennial Literary Awards). The competition is part of the official celebrations of UP’s centennial. There are six awards, each one worth P200,000, for original, book-length works in 3 genres in either English or Filipino: the novel or short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction or sanaysay. Only one prize per genre in either language will be awarded.
There are six awards, each one worth P200,000, for original, book-length works in 3 genres in either English or Filipino: the novel or short story, poetry, and creative nonfiction or sanaysay. Only one prize per genre in either language will be awarded.
The complete rules are available at the UP-ICW office in UP Diliman. They are also available on the UP-ICW website at http://www.upd.edu.ph/~icw and on http://www.panitikan.com.ph, the literary portal hosted by the UP-ICW. Again, more on the prize later.
The workshops—called Writers Write—kicked off with a series on novel writing on November 2007 in Powerbooks and will continue every Saturday until February 2008. Writers Write features some of the best writers in the country. The Fiction series was conducted by award-winning novelists Dean Alfar, Jun Cruz Reyes and Charlson Ong.
We would like to encourage people who are not professional or academe-based writers to attend the workshops and submit their works for consideration to the Gawad Likhaan. Teachers are welcome bring their class members to talks. No reservations are needed.
Writers Write has four areas: Fiction (November 2007-December 2007), Non-Fiction (January 2008), and Poetry (February 2008).
Maria Isabel Garcia, winner of the 2007 National Book Awards for Essay for her groundbreaking book “Science Solitaire” (Ateneo Press) and noted science columnist for the Philippine Star, will kickstart the Non-Fiction series on January 12, 2008 (Saturday) in Powerbooks Greenbelt from 2PM to 4PM.
Please come! Ms. Garcia is one of the most fluent writers I’ve had the pleasure of reading. She’ll be talking about science writing, an interesting and—in the Philippines—a fairly novel genre of creative non-fiction. Science teachers are especially invited to attend and to invite their students along. There’s more to writing about science than dry equations and abstruse observations about the world around you.
Much thanks to Dr. Vim Nadera, Dr. Gemino Abad, Professor Joey Baquiran and Ms. Amy Colanta of the UP Institute of Creative Writing for supporting this endeavor. We’d also like to acknowledge our sponsors Powerbooks and WikiPilipinas for their generous help. Watch out for Writers Write updates in this space!
The Readers #2: Reading 2.0
Er, Happy Holidays? Sorry for the really long radio silence throughout the Christmas season. Members were either out of town, in hibernation, drunk everyday, or–in my case–horribly sick (again).
I don’t think I’m up to the task of writing an entire entry just now so am posting the latest installment of our Manila Bulletin column instead. The Youth and Campus section was on break during the holidays–thank god–but now that it’s back to work for everyone, the column should appear regularly again.
If you sent us press releases/event announcements — Sorry we weren’t able to reply. We’ll put everything in the next column.
Since it’s pretty official already: The club also now has a quarterly print publication called, well, Read Or Die, which is published by National Bookstore. It’s primarily a reader-oriented magazine though I’m swinging for some literary content. It’s free and the first issue should come out in March. “Read Or Die” will be distributed in all NBS outlets nationwide. Watch out for updates in this space.
A radio program is also in the offing. Haha. I’m hoping other members will keep on blogging as we’re spending more and more of our time ‘offline,’ if you know what I mean.
But seriously, this is really exciting and fun. Thanks to everyone who helped us out in the past year. I’m writing a special post just for you guys.
On with the column…
Reading 2.0 (January 5, 2008)
The Rules of
The way we read certain books and certain authors influences to a certain extent the way we understand them That is, we read books according to what they are supposed to be. It may not always be a critical process, but it’s nonetheless very conscious. On a rarefied level, we have the extremely complex genealogy of Talmudic readings, dating from the fifth and sixth centuries BC in
On a more basic level, we read books according to what the author or publisher or–that most discerning of personages–another reader says about them. Your elementary school teacher says “Pilgrim’s Progress” is a religious allegory so you read it expecting to be preached at. “Noli Me Tangere” is supposed to be a nationalistic manifesto so you come away from it thinking that Jose Rizal should be read simply because he’s an eminent patriot and you forget the fact–because it is non-existent to you–that he is also a pretty good novelist.
There are epistemological rules for reading and all of them are contained in this multiplicity. Readers create their readings and their readings create stories. There’s an interesting theory by the scholar Wolfgang Kayser as to how literary genres may have been derived from the three persons that exist in every known language: I, You, He/She/It. A not implausible extension of this theory is how readers invent genres to situate stories based on how these stories address them, based on what they think the author is addressing, based on what they think should be addressed.
On the other hand, one might also say that books create their readers, and in the case of some books, there’s something almost fateful in this dialectic. Was it Jorge Luis Borges who speculated about the existence of a perfect reader? The sort of reader who, upon first reading a book, immediately penetrates its core, for whom any notion of criticism is replaced by a mystical understanding of the book’s contents in a way that even the author cannot hope to intuit. It sounds slightly ridiculous, doesn’t it? You will have to breed–or invent–a perfect reader since I don’t believe the skill can be acquired even through the most rigorous of apprenticeships. It’s a fun prospect, though. Imagine applying for tenure as a literary reviewer armed with a certificate stating that you are genetically programmed to be a Perfect Reader (especially wired in the ways of postmodern theory).
Until such time that these literary messiahs decide to make their presence known, though, the most we can all aspire to is to be great–if flawed–readers. I think that James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is one of those works with such a vocational quality, I mean in terms of challenging its readership.
Continuing Sagas
I wrote about how Read Or Die started out as a club in the previous column. From being a bunch of girls (mostly) who had pretty romantic and grandiose ideas about spreading the love for books and literature in a presumably unreceptive society, we suddenly found ourselves knee-deep in unglamorous and all too mundane tasks as we started to prepare for the Read Or Die Convention. There were six of us who planned the event from start to finish, with support coming in from friends and—later on—other interested organizations. A lot of hard work went into brainstorming RodCon, but all our ideas were based on idealized notions of how such an event ought to be staged instead of any grounded practical knowledge, and we were very much insulated from what was going on in the publishing industry. We were newbies, to put it more bluntly, who had no background in publishing, few connections to the literary community, and absolutely no idea of how things were done in this particular area of business. A few of us had already organized events but these were for a totally different community and with a different set of operational procedures, so to speak. What fueled RodCon in the end was a mixture of gut instinct, overzealous idealism, misguided expectations, and hardheaded determination. And there was something a little fated about it, too, that I should end up working with people who—instead of shrieking “Stop! Brake!
So we did it, and a very messy, frustrating, and anguished business it was. There were also moments of inspiration—touched with a little bit of insanity, I must admit—and I can’t remember feeling as alive and exhilarated as I was during those long months of preparation. I was also never more exhausted. We all had day jobs so time spent contacting partners and sponsors was time spent sneaking away to use the office phone when the boss was not looking. I would arrive home from work to type letters and pack them in envelopes. I’d then drop off the letters at a courier service—Air 21 because they were the cheapest—on the way to or from work the next day. Another member—either M or Lora—would call or fax follow-up letters to our sponsors the day after.
Looking back on it now, I wonder that we actually managed to pull it off. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we somehow blundered into it, as if RodCon had already been existing before we even thought about it, an ideally imagined and perfectly executed event tailored just so for readers floating about in some celestial emporium of ideas, before we barreled across it and knocked it off its perch. The fall to earth was a long, bumpy, and interference-ridden process. The end result bore little resemblance to the original product.
There was the fact that nobody really believed us, for one, which could be sourced mostly to a problem in terminology. For instance, “convention” was understood by most sponsors as a business affair, complete with plenary speeches, hotel packages, and champagne by the buckets, whereas on our part we had in mind the informal fan-based conventions organized by fans to celebrate their love for, well, whatever it is they’re a fan of—comics, anime and manga, toys, costumes, games, cars, the Victorian era. These conventions are non-profit and are run by volunteers, which is a model we instinctively adopted for RodCon since we had also taken part in similar conventions and for pretty much the same purposes. In RodCon, we had simply shifted our focus of interest to books. That is, as readers, we considered ourselves fans of books, so if we could spend time, money and effort helping out in conventions for the benefit of exulting in our love for Japanese schoolgirls and rampaging robots, then we could certainly do the same for something less harmful to the state of our immortal souls, i.e., literature.
Or so we reasoned. The algorithm was clear to us but was understandably opaque to the people whom we were asking for sponsorship involving rather large amounts of money (remember what I said about misguided expectations?). Let me get this straight, was the usual response. You want us to help you fund an event called Do or Die..? It’s Read or Die, sir. Well, yes, but what is it, exactly? It’s a gathering for readers. Right, and what will you be doing there? …
Unfortunately, reading does not have the same titillating element as kissing, which is where the analogy with Lovapaloozah ends. I mean, let’s be honest here: The sight of hundreds of people reading does not exactly make one’s pulse race compared to watching couples kissing. It’s a sport for anthropologists but not exactly the stuff which world-breaking records are made of.
There was a definite disconnect between what we wanted and what the people whose support we needed the most thought we were doing. The next few months were spent re-adjusting learning curves. Ours, for the most part.
Speaking of connectivity, I’m compiling material for a feature article on gadgets for the wired reader, mostly out of curiosity, since I’m not very enabled in that respect. I don’t have a Palm Pilot or ebook reader and my phone is not connected to the Internet. This is not to say that I’m averse to online applications or techie things. Far from it, in fact, but when it comes to reading, I’m as old-fashioned as they come. I only need the book, additional furniture (like a chair) is optional.
Of course it’s different for other people. My boss told me that he, on the other hand, hardly buys books and instead gets his daily dose of reading material from his various RSS feeds—connected to sites as varied as news portals, blogs, and Project Gutenberg—which are all plugged into his Blackberry and laptop and which he can access at will. He’s probably one of the most well-informed and cleverest people I know so I’m not knocking the prospect of digital technology trumping the bulky interface of books in their physical form.
Furthermore I’ve never really subscribed to the perceived incompatibility between using the Internet and reading books. Media is a hybrid and chimerical beast. It can assume unpredictable forms and mate with unlikely partners. I wouldn’t be surprised if an alliance between the Internet and traditional print literature would produce some very interesting children—if they haven’t already.
That being said, gadgets like the much-hyped Amazon Kindle and various ebook readers are simply accessories to reading. They make the act of reading easier in the same way that credit cards facilitate more streamlined financial transactions without actually making an impact on the product being transacted. Owning a Kindle means that I won’t have to suffer bruised shoulders and a strained back due to having to tote around ten books at a time. It won’t make a difference to my reading habits, though. I’ll still be reading the same books, only this time they’re compressed in a single little machine. It’s the eponymous Centrum-based approach to reading. “I want to be complete!” Why carry dozens of bottles of vitamin supplements when you can have them all in one capsule?
I think that the true impact of the Internet on reading doesn’t really lie in the ubiquity of ebook applications or in the digitalization of libraries. Instead I find them in the creation of so-called social networking websites which cater specifically to readers.
Most Filipinos will already have heard of Friendster. Let me rephrase that: Most Filipinos probably have accounts in Friendster. Given the number of Friendster users in the
These digitally enabled connections are collectively referred to in the context of the Internet as social networks. They are not meant to replace networks already existing between people established through other mediums—family, friendships, penpal columns (do these still exist?)—but to extend and enrich them. While the first wave of social networking sites such as Friendster, Multiply and MySpace can in theory accommodate a limitless number of users connected to each other through infinitely extensible friends lists, they are also circumscribed by the fact that human beings will just as soon settle in a common niche or create their own customized ecosystem as venture out into the unknown. Very soon, other websites emerged which catered to this penchant for niches, i.e., which networked a specific demographic united by a shared habit or area of interest.
Some would argue based on outdated stereotypes that readers are not a very adventurous lot (ha!) especially when it comes to the Internet, but the fact is there’s not just one, but three major networking sites which reach out to and house readers the world over. Furthermore, while these sites share some common features, they address different needs and appeal to a wide range of preferences when it comes to structuring something as elemental as a reading list or one’s bookshelf.
LibraryThing (http://librarything.com) is the pioneer among these sites. It was created in 2005 by Tim Spalding . LibraryThing enables users to create virtual catalogs of their libraries. In order to ensure that the users can make their catalogs as comprehensive as possible, LibraryThing stores the catalog of the Library of Congress, the respective inventories of all five national Amazon.com sites, and the bibliographic databases of about eighty libraries in the entire world. This means that a user will have the capacity to accurately re-create his or her library in the Internet without all the back-breaking effort which cataloging entails. LibraryThing pulls the necessary data—book covers, ISBN numbers, publisher information, product descriptions—and supplies them to the user who only has to click a book to add it to the catalog. LibaryThing also gives users the capacity to comment to and cross-reference each other’s catalogs. Individual libraries are shared. Instead of being viewed in isolation as in the case of physical libraries, they become community hubs, where curious users can come together to talk about each other’s books.
Creating an account in LibraryThing is free though if you want to build a catalog containing more than 200 books, you will have to buy a paid subscription.
Where Library Thing concentrates on building catalogs, Shelfari (http://shelfari.com) gives primacy to—as its name suggests—the bookshelf. LibraryThing’s layout is bare and streamlined while Shelfari relies on the use of widgets and visual bling to attract users.
For readers who are more concerned with tabulating and indexing the contents of their libraries, Shelfari will probably not compare favorably with LibraryThing. However, Shelfari’s primary purpose is to display and enumerate books, not describe them. If looking at a website cannot replicate the feeling of holding and touching books, viewing one’s shelf in Shelfari can at least simulate the excitement of seeing them. Shelfari also appeals to the exhibitionist streak in readers. You can choose to display your bookshelf photographically, that is, as it would look in your own room or study, or you can choose to create an idealized version thereof since Shelfari also enables you to pick different book covers and editions for a single title. I’ve seen shelves which display the entire classic Penguin line—based on Marber’s designs—and have no idea whether the users actually own these Penguins or whether the books that do exist in their ‘real’ libraries are but threadbare shadows of the glories displayed on their Shelfari shelves.
Better yet—since readers are also natural voyeurs—you can view other people’s bookshelves and how they arrange and structure their books. In a way, while Library Thing is quite literally an archive of different libraries, Shelfari is a museum of book displays. Shelfari does have the option of commenting on other people’s bookshelves
Founded by software engineer and bibliophile Otis Chandler in 2006, Good Reads (http://goodreads.com) takes a different tack from LibraryThing and Shelfari while at the same time coming closest to integrating LibraryThing’s functionality and Shelfari’s intuitive interface. However, though Library Thing claims to be a ‘Facebook’ for readers, GoodReads relies explicitly on a community-powered platform to keep it going. If LibraryThing enables its users to build virtual libraries, and Shelfari virtual bookshelves, GoodReads goes one step further and generates reading lists, which in most cases usually translates to to-buy lists. A user can instantly see new books added by friends along with reviews by other users in both his or her immediate network and in related Good Reads networks. Books are rated and ranked according to preference. Through a Good Reads network, a reader can be appraised of what trusted friends are reading and what he or she in turn would be interested in reading without having to go through the bother of plowing through the reams of consumer reviews in Amazon.com.
In a way, GoodReads has more in common with other metadata-based sites like Metacritic which aggregates product reviews and offers them to users as standards for judgment than Library Thing or Shelfari. GoodReads syndicates book reviews and commentaries and feeds them to already interested consumers who just need that extra nudge. GoodReads has 650,000 users and over 10,000,000 book reviews.
Postscripts
Read Or Die has a Shelfari account at http://www.shelfari.com/readordiephilippines/shelf. Read or Die member Marianne Suba also wrote about Shelfari in this blog post: . We also have a GoodReads account at http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/366356. I’ll be talking about the Filipino communities in these websites—and in other communities online—in another column. In the meantime, feel free to add us and we’ll add you back.
I find it a bit curious that while we almost instantly had friends in Shelfari–which means that several people in our address book also had Shelfari accounts–Good Reads sadly informed me that none of our contacts had accounts in their system. Well, aside from Vim Nadera—director of the UP Institute of Creative Writing—who invited us to join early on, and whose friends list is composed almost exclusively of UMPIL writers.
I’ve been reading an interesting book by Paul Theroux about his long and complex friendship with V.S. Naipul. In one chapter which recounts his early attempts at writing while he was a young university lecturer in
I had a point here. Oh yes–but isn’t displaying one’s bookshelves an unduly revelatory act as well? For readers like us, a Shelfari account is merely a point for reference, a casual attempt to figure out what our members are reading and to embark on a shared club catalog. It’s a little different for writers though, isn’t it? The Guardian (http://guardian.co.uk) has a special feature called “Writers’ Rooms” where they take photographs of, well, writers’ rooms and post them online along with short write-ups by the writers describing the contents of their rooms (The descriptions range from rambly itemizations to historical accounts and philosophical treatises). The entire exercise hardly qualifies for the de-mythologization which Theorux speaks of but it does make for a rather tantalizing de-mystification of that which is purportedly sacred and private. If writers are priests, then their holy of holies will be the place where they practice the act of demiurge, i.e., writing, and the books they read are their arcana. Social networking sites like Shelfari display the arcana, while a service like Good Reads could even provide us with the appropriate commentary and glosses, assuming the writer-priest is feeling particularly accommodating.
I’m not trying to make a hard and fast distinction between writers and readers since I’m well aware that writers are readers (most of them anyway) and it’s not as if they can’t catalog their own collections. It’s very soothing, making lists, and far be it from me to deprive anyone of the right to order their world and feel nice and smug about it. My curiosity here is a bit on the metaphysical side, something to do with the creative process and its more secretive components, in the context of Web 2.0. I’ll get back to this.
Coming Up
The year of reading dangerously…
For comments please email us at readordie.ph@gmail.com or visit our website at http://read-or-die.org
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It’s really hard to set aside time to read these days. Sometimes people are too busy that they only scan...
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@ jon - hahah you and your friends rocked! my dad always used to brag that he used up more UP diliman library...
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