Happy Christ-mas to all!

In our part of the world, it is already Christmas Eve. As I am writing this, it is exactly 4 hours and 23 minutes to Christmas day. Although history tells us that December 25 isn’t really the real birth day of Jesus Christ, we still celebrate that joyous and glorious occasion when hope arrived on earth in human flesh. On that day, reconciliation between God and man was finally at hand!

I will now proceed to join the Yuletide merrymaking, but before I do, I leave you with words from my favorite Christmas Carol:

Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was born;
O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!
O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!

May you all have a joyous Christ-filled Christmas!

5 Ws, 1 H

Ilia Uy is a Communication Arts graduate from University of the Philippines, Los Baños, and is now working in the Public Relations industry. Still currently frustrated by her present inability to write fiction.

I’ve been in a long blogging hiatus not just here in Words but also in my personal blogs. I felt I didn’t have anything to say or anything of value to share so why write at all? I’d forgotten one of the most important functions of writing: asking questions. When I first started writing, that had been my primary motivation — to make sense of life — and somewhere along the way, I turned into a grown-up who thought she had to know all before putting pen to paper, or in this case, finger to keypad.

2009 has been a rather horrible year for the Philippines. Storms, massacres, death of a rare good person. Someone, something — most probably myself — put this weighty pressure on me to have a stand, to have an opinion about everything happening all around me. But in truth, I don’t really understand anything. And that hurts. It makes you feel useless, it makes words (whether read or written) meaningless. When there are no answers in sight, I turn to resignation. It will always be like this.

You’re not being fair to the crabs.

Hi. One of my secondary characters asked me to post his monologue. He’ll throw a fit if I don’t do what he says, so here it is. Mind you, it’s a totally raw take on Casipit’s monologue, but I hope you like it nonetheless.

Magat Casipit, On Crabs Pulling Each Other Down

A sixteenth century Tagalog Maginoo couple as depicted in The Boxer Codex

It only looks that way in the beginning. When the crabs are all at the bottom of the basket you can tell they’re clambering over one another in their effort to get out. Of course they are. They’re confused.

But just because they’re confused at first doesn’t mean they’re not intelligent.

Come back an hour later and I tell you – if that basket had no cover, all the crabs would be gone. Sooner or later, one will climb up the wall of the basket instead of over his fellows, and then another will follow, and then another. There’s a reason those baskets need to be covered.

You’re not being fair to the crabs.

-30-

“The Spectre of Writer’s Block”

• Until recently, RE de Leon was an Assistant Professor of Development Communication at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. He has since resigned to pursue new creative directions and is now a freelance writer based in Agoo, La Union. He can be reached via email at alternativity@yahoo.com

National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo) is a creative writing project held annually in November in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.

Despite the event’s name, the project is now international in scope, and there are a sizeable number of participants from the Philippines.  Last time I checked, NaNoWrimo participants – “PinoyWrimos” – have collectively written more than any other country in Asia. (Check out the official PinoyWrimos website by clicking on this link.)

This is my second year doing NaNoWriMo.  I’m using it as a means of encouraging myself to force out as many words of the novel as I can.

This is RE de Leon's second year participating in NaNoWriMo.

Who knows, I might just reach my original intent of finishing the Novel this year, despite the fact that I’ve also decided to use NaNoWriMo ‘09 as a chance to start rewriting the novel from the very first word of the first chapter.

Anyway, each country participating in NaNoWriMo is assigned a coordinator to encourage participants along as they write, and to organize activities. The Philippine country coordinator  goes by the handle Tinamats, and this year, she asked me to write one of the weekly pep talks for NaNoWriMo participants.

Long story short, here’s a slightly revised copy of the Pep Talk, which came out for PinoyWrimos today.

If you’re a writer, I hope it’ll be useful for you whether or not you’re participating in NaNoWriMo.

[The article's original title was "NaNoWriMo and The Spectre of Writer's Block"]

Hello Wrimos!

When our dear [country coordinator] Tina first asked me to come up with this week’s pep talk, I had a completely different article in mind, but I was unable to write it. I’d come up against the bane of writers everywhere.  And since the best way to deal with a problem is to face it head on, I’d like to talk about it for this week’s pep talk: writer’s block.

By now, you’re a couple of days into writing your novel, and writer’s block probably feels like a cloud lingering on the horizon – if you haven’t experienced the occasional bout already.

Good news though, your NaNoWriMo experience is probably a good way of learning to get over writer’s block, either because the “thirty days of literary abandon” that is NaNoWriMo is specifically designed set your creativity free, or because the pressure to write a certain amount of words in a certain amount of time helps you develop “sustainable writing habits.”

Writer’s block may generically refer to a writer’s inability to write, but there are many causes of writer’s block, and the key to conquering it is to understand the cause behind your particular case.

Here are 5 common types of writer’s block, and the ways your NaNoWriMo 2009 experience can help you to overcome them.

Weighing in on the National Artists Controversy

• R.E. de Leon is a first time novelist and freelance writer who was once a Professor of Communication for Social Change at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.  His column for Words from The Land of Juan has been coming out on the wrong day of the week lately, but he tries his best to be able to keep up.

As promised last week, my post this week on the Land of Juan weighs in on the National Artists Controversy, of which I highlighted the details in my last piece.

At this point, of course, almost anyone who has anything to say about Philippine art has already had his or her say. So let me just get it out of the way, and state my position: I hope some way can be found to reverse the proclamation.  I suspect the vast majority of my readers feel that way as well, and I am going to write this post with that assumption in mind.

However, my position on the controversy isn’t the point of this post.  I feel that another blog adding its voice to the protest would be superfluous. Instead, I’d like to take a close look at the arguments springing from the controversy and see what insight we might find about the role of art in the life of the Filipino.

Since my last post, there have been a few updates to the situation, but only a few of them substantial.  In essence, everyone has entrenched themselves even more deeply into their respective positions.  Malacañang, the artists under protest, and their various supporters are still defending the proclamation, and the rest of us are all waiting to see if Bienvenido Lumbera and the Concerned Artists of the Philippines do indeed manage to file an injunction at the supreme court so that the formal announcement of the new National Artists can be stopped.  Protesters can also hope House Resolution 1305, proposed by Akbayan Representatives Risa Hontiveros and Walden Bello to seek an investigation into the matter, will prosper.

On top of that, I daresay some of us are eagerly waiting to see if more protests are ahead, since the previous protests have become a gathering of the who’s who Philippine art community, and a chance to gawk at folk like F.Sionil Jose, Benedicto “BenCab” Cabrera, Lourd de Veyra, Jim Paredes, and the like.

It’s amazing how the controversy has brought the Philippines’ art literati together – from teenage ballerinas to virtually all the living National Artists.   We have heard from from bloggers, newspaper columnists,  and rock stars.  Why, even the relatives of the dead National Artists have spoken out — Celeste Lagaspi speaking on behalf of her father Cesar (Visual Arts) and Raul Locsin speaking on behalf of his late brother Leandro (Architecture).

Among my favorite voices in this fray is that of the rising Philippine Comic Book industry, as represented by graphic artist Gerry Alanguilan. From the very moment he heard that Malacañang had proclaimed Caparas and the others as new National Artists, Gerry came out roaring in protest on his site, Komikero Comics Journal.  And now he has put all his posts and tweets and together and come up with a time capsule of sorts for the events as they happened.  Someday historians will look at this particular moment in the history of Philippine culture, and Komikero Comics Journal will be a primary source.  The historian in Gerry will be very glad of it, I’m sure.

I hope to talk more about Gerry later, and how this controversy has suddenly given this professional architect-turned-graphic-novelist a much more prominent voice in the Philippine Art Scene.  But for now, let’s move on.

Two Core Issues
Much of the discussion regarding the controversy is muddled because there are two distinct but hopelessly intertwined issues behind it. The first is the question of how the persons ought to be elevated to the Order of National Artist; the second is the question of whether the four artists added by GMA to the 2009 lineup are qualified and/or worthy to be recognized as National Artists.