I haven't the vaguest idea

"Interviewers and students of literature like to ask poets to reveal the secrets of their trade, as if they were famous chefs on television cooking shows eager to share their recipes, and say something like: Buy an Oxford English Dictionary, featuring 600,000 words and 3 million quotations at a reputable bookstore. Have your butcher trim a 4-5 pound roast from its pages and place it in a roasting pan, etc… And are disappointed and visibly annoyed when informed by the poet that he hasn’t the vaguest idea how or why his poems were written." - Charles Simic in "Short Days and Long Nights," http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jan/21/short-days-and-long-nights/

It was a choice between a banana and a fried bangus with some rice this breakfast. But I espied a can of 555 sardines, spicy and hot, and decided to pound a few pieces of garlic that I later fried in virgin coconut oil. After I poured the whole simmering red glob into a bowl, I squeezed two pieces of calamansi over it.

I relished everything as though it were again a last meal and thought of the manuscript I had to mend, the students' compositions I had to check.

The world is constructed that way. It is equipped to interrupt at certain times one's inner equilibrium with its demands on one's time. But I heed the world's voice because how am I to pay my share of the bills, how am I to keep myself in the style I am accustomed to (hearty ha ha ha there)?

I haven't the vaguest idea why I do this. It's enough that I still haven't run out of something to fill the box of a blog, and the blankness of a page doesn't intimidate me as much anymore. Maybe because I'm heeding Julia Child, too, who I love as a writer and character (I draw the line on signing up for French cooking lessons though).

Let me just say there's joy in doing this although Mr. Simic may not exactly agree to my typing out words while a Korean lyric soprano sings a heart-rending "Once Upon a Dream" from Jekyll and Hyde.

This blog is brought to you by Charles Simic, Julia Child and Sumi Jo in that happiness-is-a-Wednesday-with-some-music order.

In the same essay I quoted earlier, Sumic wrote: "I’m always scribbling something in secret. Once my wife caught me chewing the end of my pencil and said to me: 'I hope you’re not writing more of that boring doggerel you call poetry?' 'No, sweetie,' I replied, 'I’m just balancing our check book and getting ready to write you a little love note after that.'" Photo©Richard Drew

Here's how I visualize operatic and crossover superstar Sumi Jo flying down to Manila next week for her Feb. 1 concert at Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premiere.

A David Levine in our midst

I think his wife Chit Roces already issued a warning in print to beware when her husband Vergel Santos is invited to socials. I saw why a few evenings ago. After he cased the joint, he sat himself comfortably at the farthest end of the room, then spent the rest of the evening sketching away in his palm-size notebook. 

My own husband Rolly was an unwilling victim when he and Vergel sat across a table at a media summit. Rolly thought Vergel was taking copious notes as a panel of speakers went on and on. He was so admiring of Vergel's diligence. Later, Vergel went up to him and showed a pen and ink portrait of Rolly. That portrait used to hang in a prominent corner in our bedroom until our grandchild moved in and the room's design was rearranged, and anything as disturbing as Vergel's portrait of Rolly was moved elsewhere.

At the end of Friday evening last week, I think I was Vergel's last subject for his quick portraits after he was done with the party-goers and waiters. While I watched him work swiftly, I was looking at his notebook from upside down so I had to ask, "Are you sketching me or my husband from memory?" Jeez! That was when I had one of those Joycean ephiphanies. It's true what the old married folk say--after awhile couples start looking like one another.

What Vergel captures is not the exact likeness of the person. Nor does he do a flattering interpretation of the subject. Like David Levine of The New York Review of Books (I think only Solidaridad Bookshop carries occasional issues of it), he gets the person's essence and distills it. Not unlike what Vergel's late buddy, Onib Olmedo, used to do.

Some people just have it all. Vergel can write, edit, lecture, sing (he was one of our "wedding singers" when Rolly and I marked our 25th jubilee as a couple). And draw with a pen. No erasures there which is what drawing from life is all about.

So I know exactly what to get Vergel the artist this Christmas. And he better not pout, he better not cry.

Photos by Babeth Lolarga

The North West London Blues by Zadie Smith | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Novelist Zadie Smith argues why libraries must continue to exist and their existence not questioned by politicians or even educators. Despite the possibility of putting an iPad in every child's hand in the future or some degree of universal accessibility to knowledge online in these times, libraries must remain. Libraries, like love, must be here to stay.
The North West London Blues by Zadie Smith | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books