The dog who would be a reader

I just went through my digicam to check what's stored and found these pictures taken by my grandchild Kai. They're of Satchi and her master Rolly Fernandez lounging in the library where she loves to scoot over once released from the balcony that she has for her home. She loves Rolly's bed, rolls all over it before lying on her belly. She even likes to look at the books. When she wags her long, bushy tail, she knocks over Rolly's assorted knickknacks, including a framed bulletin of Bandilang Pula, a publication of the seven-day Diliman Commune, or our kids' snapshots. Once, and only once, did Satchi gnaw the spine of my book, Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story. What a scolding she received, but I doubt if she understood any word said. Something must have sunk in because there has been no repetition of the incident. She has maintained her respectful distance from the books. However, she still sniffs at them, her eyes glancing longingly over the titles. Somebody said Satchi must've been a reader in a former life. If she was, then she has found the right home.

A month of Sundays

"It feels like a lot of Sundays! And isn't that nice. (sort of) (not really) STILL MUCH TO DO- but yay, alive." ~ Gang Badoy Capati in her FB status

When I got out of bed, I had to declare to my siblings who were still in various states of sleep and semi-wakefulness, "It's Sunday!" I felt that I had to tell them as though the fact had to be declared loudly after our near-languish in this eternity of days that has the stupor of Sundays, that we shouldn't be in a great hurry to waken.

With daylight flooding the room, we had to get up even before eight, stand up, prepare brekkie (tuna salad with bread so it also felt like a Lenten Friday), talk again about the invisible war the world is waging against COVID-19, where to get a piece of palm to commemorate Palm Sunday.

I suggested a banana leaf since we had banana plants a-plenty. The suggestion was laughed off the table. I returned to sipping my Sunquick juice and munching my tuna sandwich and thinking how I'd creatively "waste" my day.

I skipped exercising and headed straight to my "office" space to check on my mail, deluding myself that there were still urgent messages that needed a response from me. But there was nothing but forwarded mail about staying healthy during this period. Nothing that I hadn't read in various permutations in other people's FB status. We're already being told to be wary of such generalized attribution of sources as "According to a Viber source I belong to" or "A doctor I know shared this. Please copy and paste."

Thank goodness for sites like Interlude and ParisReview.Org wherein I could bone up on the lives of my favorite artists like Maria João Pires, the Portuguese pianist and masterful interpreter of Mozart and Schumann, and Vita Sackville West who we shouldn't simply remember for her relationship with Virginia Woolf or the fabulous garden she tended. Sackville West was an author in her own right--by age 18 she had written eight novels and five plays.

But let me not get ahead of her narrative. The site I mentioned can be visited here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/…/the-fabulous-forgotten-li…/

As for Pires, you can follow what I want for my funeral music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

And you can sail my mortal remains down Bohol's Loboc River in a barge with palmeras covering my coffin. Photo gives a small glimpse of the river through the interstices of a palm.

Ahh, such Sunday thoughts and dreams when one is not sufficiently caffeinated!

A despedida for Gabo

Yes, we were close in a thick way. Thanks very much to his books. It was my late journalism professor Raul Rafael Ingles who lent me his copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the late '70s when I was newly graduated. It was from my editor Rosario A. Garcellano that I was able to borrow her copy of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I remember her miming that scene where the target of assassins walked stoically, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his deadly wound with his hands and to find a place where he could bleed to death with some dignity.

As for the periodic sentences in Autumn of the Patriarch, they intimidated me so, but I'll pick up where I left off one of these days.

But it was Living to Tell the Tale, a secondhand copy of which I bought either at Book Sale or Mt Cloud that made me fully appreciate Gabo (or Tito Gabo, as fictionist Geraldine C. Maayo and I secretly call him).

In it he tells of how his long stint in the burrows of journalism gave him all the materials he needed for his fiction. He was present at civilian uprisings, he covered crime and politics, was at the scene immediately after a massacre, interviewed the mighty and the lowly, reviewed books and film, put out supplements, wrote editorials, filled up space when advertisements were pulled out at the last minute, missed some deadlines, got berated by editors. He experienced all these everyday stuff in the life of a journeyman. In between he learned how to listen to music attentively and to read the masters from Dostoevsky to Faulkner.

I emerged from that book with a realization that all the training a writer needed could be found in old-fashioned journalism.

Here are some of Gabo's words, excerpts from "The Art of Fiction," an interview Peter H. Stone did for The Paris Review.

Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) Photo from Esquire


INTERVIEWER

Do you think the novel can do certain things that journalism can’t?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Nothing. I don’t think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.

INTERVIEWER

Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

INTERVIEWER

In interviews a few years ago, you seemed to look back on being a journalist with awe at how much faster you were then.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I do find it harder to write now than before, both novels and journalism. When I worked for newspapers, I wasn’t very conscious of every word I wrote, whereas now I am. When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small. On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.

Paris Review - The Art of Journalism No. 1, Hunter S. Thompson

Paris Review - The Art of Journalism No. 1, Hunter S. Thompson