I can has database
We’re revamping Libro.ph (internally, that is) in terms of farming out content to form separate websites. We stopped updating in November 2007 as planned to evaluate the beta phase of the site and we scrapped sections which we feel weren’t working or were duplicating existing information. So the main site should henceforth function as something like an aggregated literary broadsheet, with sub-sites devoted to hosting other literary groups (like UMPIL, PEN, etc) and focusing on different literary genres (i.e., Pambata).
In the meantime we’ve also started to build our author/book database, which we had initially planned to host in the main directory but our concern is that content organization might end up getting too unwieldy. I’ve had several arguments about this already. As readers/potential visitors, would you guys prefer that author directories and Filipino book catalogs be hosted in another website (or a Libro.ph sub-site, at least)? Just curious.
Loading …Traditionalism, Newness and Plain Out Common Sense.
Working on definitions, setting boundaries and establishing purposes for art has always been a messy business. In her work A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman vividly describes sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing — she also emphasizes the fact that no matter what we may think, no one person can sense things or experience the world the same way. This may be the reason why art and the artistic experience is so difficult to encapsulate — all artists and writers seem to make a conscious attempt portraying different aspects of life on canvas, paper and the like for others to see. They are always out to show us how the particular way in which they see and experience the world, and they make use of a great many mediums to do so.
If we’re to follow that line of thought, it’s easy to see how certain artistic traditions, trends and philosophies developed. Romantics devoted themselves to trumpeting the beauty of life and feeling. Realists were obsessed with details, as they sought to to portray “reality” as accurately as possible through their fiction. It doesn’t take much effort to see patterns behind some of the movements, and critics have worked long and hard to group these together even if definitions tend to be unwieldy and self-defeating. They also struggle to do the same for defining a medium and its different components. The end result is always the same — a name, a vague definition and a list of very general characteristics. Frustrating? Maybe. But necessary. We can always harp on why we bother with it, but at the end of the day I think it’s a rhetorical question. Without definitions, nothing would make sense, and everything can be regarded the same way. And that’s impossible, because it’s been proven time and again that all works of art have some sort of logic to it, and that all trends and traditions may share a FEW similarities but are ultimately separate from each other.
What am I basically saying here? Let me put it this way: you and I both know that apples and oranges are fruits, but we wouldn’t even consider calling apples “oranges” or oranges “apples” — or at least, on a normal day, we wouldn’t. 
Anyway, it’s commonly understood that apples and oranges are two different fruits, just in the same way that a Romantic work is NOT a Realist work, or that a poem is NOT a work of prose, and so on. You can’t define them in the same fashion, just as you can’t appreciate them in the same fashion, or — heaven forbid — critique them in the same fashion.
Many people insist that traditionalists always thoughtlessly reject “avant-garde” works: they move on to lament over how traditionalists fail to understand what newness contributes to the world of art, and how they refuse to let art evolve because they are being “too close-minded” about it. I will be the first to admit that there may be times when this really is the case, but if you carefully study their reasons for “rejecting” some of the newer contributions, it’s because these so-called “new works of genius” haven’t done anything more than compromise the medium in question. It’s a classic case of shooting in the dark: they’re firing their guns, but they don’t know where they’re aiming, or what they’re shooting at. Sometimes, they don’t even know why.
Let’s zone in on something a bit more specific. A particularly hot issue in pop culture is the idea of comics and sequential art. Sequential art is pretty much self-explanatory: it is a body of works that put visual ideas in sequence to describe a process or tell a story. Comics, then, is a type of sequential art. Not all sequential art, however, can be regarded as comics. If that was the case, then even ancient cave paintings in French caves would be comics. The printing manual that I have sitting on the desk beside me would be a comic. My 2-year-old niece’s picture books would be comics. Cave paintings, Printing manuals and picture books tell stories, one may argue, but I challenge that same person to explain to me how they could be regarded the same way we regard those three-panel funnies in Sunday newspapers. or on a larger scale, works from companies like DC, Marvel and Vertigo.
Some of you may think that I’m being too conservative when I describe it like this, but I beg to differ. If there’s one thing I learned as a major in Literature, a reader (and lover) of books and as a self-styled fictionist, it’s that there is a subtle but extremely important difference between “expanding” a medium or art tradition and compromising what it is or what it stands for. Yes, it’s important to introduce new elements to art so that it will evolve. Yes, it’s important to push the limits and explore different possibilities. But if one does not understand what they’re working with in the first place, one may find it rather difficult to know exactly what they are doing, much less receive acclaim or acceptance from a general audience. As my Creative Writing professors always tell budding young writers: “It’s good to experiment and try new things, but you have to know what you’re breaking before you break it.”
Spotting something different in PasKom
Today I checked out the Pasko ng Komiks Komiksibit in U.P. which is part of an event co-organized by our group. Along with prints of artwork by icons of Filipino comic art like Nestor Redondo, the exhibit also features a lot of great talent from up and coming local artists.
However I did notice several pieces which particularly struck me because they were so different from everything else in the exhibit, whether classic or contemporary. These pieces were a set of photographs, which, taken together, looked closer to a fashion spread than a comic. I was wondering if it was a CLAMP homage of sorts. It turned out to be something else altogether–images from the gallery of a virtual band named Mistula. The images were very pretty, make no mistake about it. However, I can’t help but think about the photographs’ collective significance as a comic. That is: Is it really a comic or a photo story? In an effort to understand, I checked their website and found more photo stories rather than what I would consider to be traditional comics.
This essay does not dismiss the exhibit of Mistula on Pasko ng Komiks. Professor Vim Nadera has his reasons why these images were placed there. What I want to focus on is an exploration of the possibilities of comics, the boundaries that many follow and the creative freedom that people may sometimes abuse. On one hand, we have comics such as Gerry Alanguilan’s Elmer. On the other end, you have photographs that come with what might be considered dialog, and, for lack of examples, we have this from Mistula.
It is interesting how digital media has transformed the comic art form in different ways. In fact I do find this process interesting, using different media to make an unconventional comic.
Maybe this shot by Mistula would definitely qualify as a comic spread as defined by more traditionalist perspectives. Digitally drawn and colored illustrations have become ubiquitous in the field of graphic arts and design. Comics is in the process of evolution, both as an art and a literary form. I am not quite sure if the combination of graphic design, composition, digital photography, and mascots would constitute a comic, however, or that people who practice this sort of art–and I do believe it is art–would qualify as comic artists, at least not in the way that I think Carlo Vergara and Andrew Drilon are comic artists.
Maybe it’s because I’m a purist. Maybe it’s because having read and listened to many stories of my favorite mangaka and artist friends, I’ve come to internalize the belief that a comic will always be governed by a cohesive and solid narrative, bound by the geography of panels, colors, ink, illustration, and the corresponding limits the confluence of these elements necessarily impose. Tezuka could have just photographed a boy wearing a cone on his head and placed a caption in his photo saying “Hi! I’m Atom”. But Tezuka did it differently. He drew his story of a robot boy with human feelings within the universe of a storyboard.
I think I may be placing undue importance on the intersection between story and illustration and how they fit together in a panel. Without a story, without something resembling an illustration, a comic is not a comic but simply a photo story, or what in Japan would be considered as a light novel. I mean, there must be a valid reason why a light novel in Japan would never receive a Tezuka award despite being gorgeously illustrated. Light novels also contain images that support the narrative, right? What makes the likes of Griffin and Sabine not a comic but an art book? So here’s me trying to understand — what makes Mistula’s work a comic when it’s closer to a photo story? Are graphic design and fashion photography now to be considered as valid forms of comic art? Would you consider a family album that contains artistically executed shots taken in sequence and then placed with captions in flickr as a valid comic?
Scott McCloud defined comic as a “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.1 “. With the wealth of sequential images online that produces responses from viewers (just check flickr!), anything could already be the comic that McCloud has defined. I mean, if Mistula did it, why shouldn’t other art forms based on similar premises be considered as comics?
I have a feeling that Pasko ng Komiks and our exhibit have inadvertently run headlong into an old debate regarding the definition of comics. These are my two cents about it, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on what you think. Do you think storybooks or photo stories should be part of a general definition of comics?
This post was done for the regular Comics/Graphic Novel feature of Read or Die. If you have any suggestions on titles to feature, or if you just want me to post about a particular title or topic regarding comics, feel free to contact me at punkednoodle@gmail.com, or visit my manga website, Otaku Champloo.
- Understanding Comics. New York: Kitchen Sink Press. 1993. Page 9. [back]
Philippine PEN 50th Anniversary
I’ve updated the PEN website — http://libro.ph/pen/ — with book covers of and information about the special edition Philippine PEN anthologies. There are actually four of them and it seems that all of them will be launched during the conference.
At Home in Unhomeliness: An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry in English edited by J. Neil Garcia
Featuring 82 poems by 29 of the Philippines’ best young poets in English.
From the Introduction: By subtitling this collection “An Anthology of Philippine Postcolonial Poetry, this is precisely what I wish to editorially endorse, what I wish the prospective reader (local or translocal) to remember, what I intend to announce at the outset: these poems, like the rest of Philippine literature in English, will in fact be largely incomprehensible when decontextualized from the histories that engendered them–particularly the violent histories of colonization that the Philippines, as a geopolitical and indeed national reality, has endured.
A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers edited by Vicente Groyon
Published in the year of the 50th anniversary of Philippine PEN, this anthology gathers together twenty new pieces of fiction by Filipino writers born after 1962. It presents a composite image of contemporary Philippine fiction in English and suggests what the future of Philippine fiction in English could be.
Stage Presence: The Philippine PEN Anthology of Drama edited by Jose Victor Torres.
The playwrights in this collection are a mix of budding and veteran writers of the stage. They each have their own political and cultural beliefs so different from another but common in the way of portraying them in the medium of the performing art of theater. The plays published here have also gathered awards or had been read and performed onstage with theater companies. They are befitting to be part of this anthology of drama in celebration of the 50th anniversary of PEN.
Past and Present: The Philippine PEN Anthology, Volume 1 edited by Elmer Ordonez and Marjorie Evasco
Reader’s Quirks (Sorta)
I like hardbound books more than paperback books. I can’t help it – hardbound books are easier to carry around because you don’t ever have to worry about their covers getting bent at every slight movement, and you don’t have to fear them splitting at the spines like with paperbacks. Course, they’re heavier, thrice as bulky, and more difficult to stuff in your bag, but they’re hardy enough that you don’t need to.
By this time, you can tell that I’m the kind of person who’d rather endure pain than damage her books. It’s mostly true, though I’ve also been known to dog-ear a few favorites here and there. It’s more like: I want my books to live a long life, so I want to preserve them in their best condition as much as possible. You should see my old shelf – I had my books covered with a towel plus the glass just to keep the dust out. On that same note, it’s also obvious that I’m not the type to eat while reading, or the type to read outdoors unless desperate. I don’t use bulky bookmarks, either; instead I use plain paper (I don’t fold it, goodness, no).
The thing is, I don’t really particularly mind if my books get damaged. I think I may have an obsession for trying to keep them looking new, but when I damage them, I get over it fairly quickly (two minutes). It might be because I used to lend books to classmates as a kid, and they always returned to me all bent and ratty, and they always told me that I gave the books to them in that condition. Excuse me? No way! Hence, the obsession.
I think if I had a reader’s quirk, this would be it, the manic obsession for trying to protect my books. You probably have some, too, like reading your books upside down or something. Share and explain!
If you have articles to submit, please to be e-mailing me at yukitsuyk@yahoo.com .
Ang Bagong Libro exhibit: site remix
Just finished updating the Ang Bagong Libro exhibit site with a few page edits and a snazzy red template. We likes red, we does. Over the next few days the site will be updated with a new blog post, a gallery of book photos (!), and other interesting things.
This exhibit will be pretty exciting as it features book covers as works of art in themselves, not just colored pictures with a few lines of text slapped on. Something like theme interpretation meets book cover design meets l337 imagery. There’s a book wishlist on the site featuring a few recommended books. My favorites from the list are Ermita by F. Sionil Jose and El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal; for books not on the list, I’d also like to see re-imagined covers for The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquin and Empire of Memory by Eric Gamalinda.
I reworked the previous Submission Guidelines page into two separate pages: Submissions, detailing the procedure for people who want to participate in the exhibit; and Artwork Guidelines, which deals with the artwork proper. Please note that we’re having “semi-open” submissions: we’re inviting some people to submit their work, but anyone who’s interested can send us an e-mail with a link to a portfolio/dA/art site and we may send you an invite as well.
I posted a couple of important dates on the site as well. December 14, 2007 is the deadline for all query submissions (calling all interested artists~!) while the deadliest deadline of all is January 11, 2008, which is when we hope to receive all artwork submissions for the exhibit. I’ll be sending out artist invitations this week.
Suggestions (re: people to invite, books for the wishlist, etc) are very welcome, and so are book photos. We’re coming up with a gallery not only of book covers, but of the books themselves in assorted settings — whether on a table in a cafe, half-buried in pillows and blankets, or propped up against other books on a library shelf. Please send any and all photos to ephemere@gmail.com (.jpg format, please, filesize less than 1MB).
Adventurous Me
Admittedly, I’m not a very wide reader, and I haven’t really read many different books in my life. I’m not very adventurous with what I read. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most adventurous, I’d be on a pathetic three.
Anyway, my point is, I’m not widely read, and when I go to bookstores, I seriously don’t know what to buy. Well, I buy it if it’s on sale, or if it’s gay, or it has something to do with main male characters, and if it has as little romance as possible. I’m very loyal to authors. If I know that this so and so author has a book that I’ve liked, I’ll buy his other books, but I’m not the type to pick up a book that’s not familiar to me. (I’ve done so a few times and they mostly all nice, though, like Geisha of Gion, and I think it would be nice if I buy stuff that I choose on my own once in a while, so I can also recommend things to my friends, among other things.)
So anyway, the books that I read are usually recommendations by my friends, Lyn and Pam in particular. I trust their judgment, and they know what I like (crack, main males, crack, crack). I also pick up books that I hear my other friends gush about all the time, or whatever’s familiar. As long as I’ve heard of it before, I have no qualms about buying it, but otherwise, they have to be on sale or very attractive (which means that half of the contents of my book shelf are stuff that you can also find in my friend’s shelves). It usually takes me a very long time to decide if I want to buy something on my own, especially if they’re books that even my very widely read friends are not familiar with. The good thing about it is, my friends are, as I have said, very widely read, which means that I DO get to buy and borrow and read books of different themes. I suppose it’s a vicarious wideness, if I may label it as such.
I don’t know why, exactly, I’m such a chicken about picking up a random book and just reading it. Is it because I don’t want to waste time and money reading a story that I don’t like? I read to enjoy myself, and not really for anything else. I know some of you here read to write, or read to learn. I… just simply do it for entertainment. Of course, there have been many books that I read to gain knowledge from, but mostly it’s just because it’s a good story and I like immersing myself in it. That’s not to say that the way I read is shallow, but it’s more of, I first enjoy it the way I think it should be enjoyed, and breaking the elements down come after I’m done with that (if I want to study it further). Some of you may find my approach very naïve or… dare I say, dumb? though.
If you want your article to be published in this blog, please email me at yukitsuyk@yahoo.com
React or Die: (1)
If, today, someone asked you to write your biography in Filipino, how would you react?
–don’t chase me out with torches and pitchforks just yet, I didn’t post this here by mistake instead of say, write or die.
I’m supposing that the most common reaction to this sudden request would be reeling in horror. (cue: DO NOT WANT! Incidentally, I also got responses like: die, run away screaming, and panic.) And that would come from either the thought of being asked to write your life’s story out of the blue, or worse, write it in the vernacular. (I’m thinking of Ron Weasley’s line here. The one about getting Hermione’s priorities straight.)
A friend of mine was complaining about the scenario a few weeks back, just before the sembreak started. I asked her what was so bad about it, and she replied that she wasn’t so good at writing in Filipino. (–and as for me, I’d be more concerned about the biography part. Write my life? No way. I haven’t had one yet. Seriously, these assignments are a pain–but, ah, okay, back to–) To encourage her to get over that hurdle, I told her to write it in the vernacular. By this, I meant that she could use common or “low” Filipino rather than “high” Filipino, aka. what students usually expect professors want in biographies in Filipino outputs.
We already know how different written language is from spoken language, so I don’t even need to stress on it. We can all say “pa-no” for how but how do we spell it when we write it down? Paano? Pano? Pa’no? Pno? The first one doesn’t sound like how we’d say it, the second one seems more likely, the third one seems like a good compromise, but there’s one more keystroke there, so why not eliminate it–whichever is easier ’s the rule, right?–and I don’t even know if people really shorten it to that in SMS speek.
What I’m really concerned about here, I suppose I have to explain before I go off tangent even more, is where this notion, although I doubt it is just a local thing, of a stiff or rigid written language comes from.
Ano bang meron sa Filipino na takot tayong magsulat gamit ‘to?
Ano ba ang mayroon sa Filipino na may takot tayong nadarama kapag pinapagamit sa atin ito sa pagsusulat?
The reader creates the writer, yeah? Reader first, writer maybe next? My first theory came from this idea.
See, I happen to remember gradual progress in my early studies into reading and comprehension in English. We start with A is for apple, move onto See Bantay/ See Bantay run and before you know it, you’re getting acquainted with one Holden Caulfield, maybe.
It goes that way for learning Filipino too, although it might be rather awkward for many that someone’s trying to teach us something we already know (ah, youth).
Ah, but not as far as Holden. Where was that image of youth hiding? I think this was around then–high school, right?–that we started groaning about having to read Noli Me Tangere. And you know how angry high school kids can be. I’ve seen the wiki article on Rizal vandalized because of this. Teenage anger, I mean.
I wonder if this is a case of having a choice: between English and Filipino at a too early stage; or on the other hand, a case of not having much of a choice: as far as reading materials in Filipino is concerned. A friend of mine said that because we were forced to read Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo then, we somehow picked up that there were the only type of reading materials–novels–in Filipino.
The seeming lack of gradual progression might be the aggressor here. It’s what scared us of our language. From the language that we speak everyday, something we also might take for granted, there’s that feeling of alienation when information does not come as instant anymore. I mean, we’re supposedly reading something in the language we use, but why is it that we “can’t understand it as much as we want to? It’s too much!” and then hands raised, we give up on it. There are other stuff to read. Easier stuff to understand. Not everyone has the luxury of time. And then we can keep on thinking: “why does this language have to be so heavy anyway?” or “old language is oooooooooold and therefore for the ooooooooold.”
And from here we get the rebel attitude. “I don’t understand you! You don’t understand me at all!” Then everything is left behind until the issue resolves itself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always.
Funny how much our teenage years affects our perceptions, eh?
Sid is thinking of making ‘Read or Die’ a regular segment from now on because otherwise Kapitan will chase Sid with a Bolo. While this is the case, Sid sometimes walks the metro as a brain dead zombie and may then run out of things to react to for the lack of brains devoured. Sid would appreciate if you sent your e-brain (in this case, thoughts, ideas, etc.) in the form of an email to sindapa[at]gmail.com
P.S. Although belatedly, in the spirit of Caturday, I am leaving you with a message from one of our sponsors.
Name! That! Shakespeare! LOLCAT!
Our Kapitan is in Bacolod and w’ere holding the fort by… killing grammar? In the venerable spirit of Caturday, I give you Lolshakespeare with a twist. I’m challenging RoD Blog readers to guess the character and the play each one is based on. The prize for anyone who gets all the answers right: a cheezeburger. Read or Die has the budget for that, srsly. So, are people up for the challenge? Please play, for I iz dork and lonely. @_@
Abridged or Unabridged?
So here’s a question that popped out in my head when I was looking at my copy of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: Abridged or Unabridged?
When a book has been ‘abridged,’ it basically means that it has been shortened and parts of it have been cut out. Of course, ‘unabridged’ means that nothing significantly lengthy has taken out of the book.
Personally, I prefer the unabridged version unless the book is something that I have to read for school. I’d rather read the book in its complete form rather than miss out on anything. People can edit and translate and make the book more readable, sure, but I don’t like it when whole chunks or chapters of it are removed, no matter how unnecessary people say these parts are. I just—I feel cheated! It’s like eating oreos without the middle, or ending up having to sit with just half your butt on the jeepney seat.
My opinion may be because of past experiences. I first read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, as well as Dumas’ The Man in the Iron Mask abridged. I didn’t quite enjoy it as much, given that I thought some of the chapters didn’t connect well enough and I was pretty confused when the characters referred to something that just wasn’t in any part of the book. Don’t get me started on the abridged version of Sherlock Holmes – detective stories with missing parts? Blasphemy!
Since then, I’ve tried my best to keep away from abridged books. I find that their book covers aren’t as pretty, anyway. Of course, I still don’t know if a book is unabridged or abridged if it doesn’t say so anywhere on the book cover in big letters, but here’s to hoping that I didn’t get any abridged books last book fair.
What about you?
If you want to submit articles to the RoD blog, just email me or any of the members so we can put it up for you~ My email address is yukitsuyk@yahoo.com.
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