MIBF: Notes on the Last Day

My busy schedule kept me from attending the Manila International Book Fair until today, and I’m glad that I managed to get enough sleep to show up and be mostly functional from start to finish. Since it’s a Sunday, the place was swarming with parents and their respective ~~little monsters~~ children such that going from booth to booth resembled dodging speeding cars more than it did walking. But I’m not really one to complain since I spent more time attending the various activities rather than book shopping.

I was stationed at the WikiPilipinas booth where I was able witness two demonstrations - one for people in general and one for kids - on how to use WikiPilipinas. It’s so simple that even my technologically-impaired self can list down how one can participate in WikiPilipinas:

1) Create an account
2) Start a new entry that doesn’t exist yet. It can be about anything Filipino so long as it involves major knowledge areas such as media and entertainment, people and society, sports, science and technology, and history.
3) Edit an entry that already exists by adding new information to it

Check out the WikiPilipinas site for more information! I highly encourage anyone who’s an authority on any one subject to sign up and add to their growing database of knowledge.

After the demonstrations, there was the launch of Filipiniana.net’s microsite, the Top 100 Pinoy Komiks. The project is spearheaded by Gaspar Vibal, who aims to revive the tradition of Filipino komiks through multimedia. Their list of Pinoy komiks has links to several WikiPilipinas entries, and some of the more obscure titles even have scans of the cover art. All komiks fans and enthusiasts might want to take a look at this and perhaps contribute information or scanned copies of old komiks to the project.

After a while, nobody was telling me to do anything and I felt kind of useless just standing there in a WikiPilipinas shirt. So I wandered over to Function Room A where Pistang Panitik was holding a forum on the works and literary style of National Artist Dr. Edith Tiempo. I am ashamed to admit that I have never heard of Dr. Tiempo until today, but the talks of Professor Lito Zulueta and Professor Ralph Galan were very illuminating. Professor Galan’s analysis of her most famous poem, Bonsai, was particularly enlightening because he explained how it epitomizes emotional restraint and poetic control. Now I’m no expert, but I notice that most female writers tend to become either overly sentimental or overly rigid in their poetry or prose. It would be very refreshing to read something by a woman from the Romantic tradition who can strike a balance between the intellectual and the emotional.

Read Or Die’s own Pamela Punzalan and Mia Marci spoke afterwards on their reading of Dr. Tiempo’s works, and were even invited to join the question and answer portion afterwards. I loved that they tackled the issue of a Filipino writing in English. When Dr. Tiempo was asked in an interview to justify writing in English, she said that there is absolutely nothing to justify. Choosing English over Tagalog as a medium is a “happy accident”; she just happened to be born during a time where English was the medium of instruction anywhere. To attempt to write in the vernacular would mean starting from scratch, and trying to deal with writing in two languages could even lead the deterioration of her mastery of English. As an English-speaker and a writer who uses English as a medium, I think I’ve found a new role model in Dr. Tiempo. I meant to grab a copy of her works somewhere, but my wallet already bled more money than it had.

The rest of the day was spent folding t-shirts at the Read or Die booth and taking photos of the Cosplay contestants at Function Room B. My camera died soon after the ten finalists walked the stage, but the dude in the knightly outfit (I’m sorry, I forgot his character name and the book where he came from) won the competition. And rightfully so! The detail on his costume was amazing, and it was 100% hand-painted too!

You can view more photos of the last day’s activities at my Picasa account. I had a great time helping out (if I was even much help to begin with, haha) and I’m really looking forward to Read or Die’s activities next year’s Book Fair.

September 2, 2007 | Filed Under Events | 2 Comments

A Long Way Down

The weeks that followed my college graduation were marked with bouts of existential angst that soon turned into a series of serious depressive episodes. My waking hours were spent in a self-centered funk, the primary question running around my head being What is the Least Painful Way To End It All? As though alerted by fatherly spider-senses, my dad gave me a hardcover copy of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down on an evening where I was feeling as cheerful as a My Chemical Romance song. I’m not sure if my dad gave me that because he saw a Nick Hornby book in my room or if he really did sense that I was stuck in a deep pit of angst and despair. Little did he know that by giving me that book, he gave a rope I could use to crawl back into the surface of the world.

A Long Way Down is the story of four strangers whose accidental meeting at a famous suicide spot makes them realize that suicide isn’t exactly the private, individual act they thought it would be. Drawn together by the unusual experience of being around others during what they thought would be the last moments of their lives, the four agreed to live for six more weeks before they attempt suicide again. What happens next is a series of unusual events that force the characters to confront big questions on life, death, love, friendship, and whether or not four losers with no real reason to live can help each other see a way around the dead end of their lives.

After every few pages, I would get this urge to jump and down and scream, “That’s me! That’s me!” This book was able to articulate every single depressive thought I had using everyday language, complete with British slang and the liberal use of the F word. I was shocked out of my shell to find that this paragraph from page 119 summed up the overall sense of hopelessness I felt:

“You’re fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow painful death, or a quick merciful one.”

Damn, did I want to put the book down and take a razor blade to my wrists right then and there. But I figured that A Long Way Down would get less depressing as the plot unfurled, so I read on. And it did get better in the sense that I had epiphany after epiphany about suicide, death, and life. I half-expected the book to end with a cheesy inspirational message about how life is too good to waste, etc. etc. The last few pages, however, are realistically ambiguous and aimless, leading up to an ending that opens more avenues for questions and reflection.

Overall, what I picked up from A Long Way Down is not a cheap, sentimental reason to keep on living. There’s no formula to patch up lives and no instant solutions to existential crises. It did help me see that while life is generally full of meaningless accidents and responsibilities you can’t escape from, it’s the bright sparks of happiness that makes life worth living. At least, for a while.

August 5, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 3 Comments

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