(Please stand by. A nasty Trojan attacked my PC, making me unable to save the Palanca-award-worthy flash fiction I wrote under this title. I am reconstructing my brilliant thoughts right now.)
It is with profound amusement and a pinch of schadenfreude that I look at the heated exchange rocking the snobbish world of Philippine literati of late. The blogosphere meme (you could say) has been sparked by children's writer Carla Pacis' open letter which she wrote in reaction to a certain choice of winner in the latest National Book Awards. This letter Yuson chooses to publish in his Philstar column, with his comment thrown in for good measure. This exchange of, um, missives, in turn circulates in some egroups naturally attracted to such, um, threads.
I remember it is Libay Cantor who forwards it to the PinoyWriters maling list. Plaridel Papers, where many US-based Filipino writers/journalists are members, also picks the thing up.
The headline news reaches writer/musician? Lille Bose (Baguio artist Santi Bose's daughter) in the US (Chicago?) where she bristles at certain statement(s) of Pacis's: "'Chick lit' is not literature," Pacis is quoted elsewhere as saying, "and Tara Sering's Almost Married is certainly not a YA novel."
Lille defends her friend Sering, whom she feels has been offended, and hails Sering's "chick lit" oeuvre, if not Sering herself, as a savior of Philippine literature. Summit Books' (?) Lisa Gokongwei takes notice and applauds Lille, who appears to have worked with Summit in her former life as Philippine resident.
In his blog, Paolo Manalo cut-n-pastes the salient points in Lille's blog. Down south, Ian Casocot of Silliman U, Dumaguete, hears the news and notices with some pleasure that people are being "serious" at all about what they read.
Meanwhile, someone who goes by the pen name Spin (a.k.a. Angas ng Kurimaw) issues an incendiary statement in his blog and in PinoyWriters disses Krip Yuson's formalist poetry aesthetic as somewhat... peremptory?
"The nerve! The gumption!" not a few exclaim, by which they actually mean "Brilliant!"
"Offensive!" not a few protest.
The Kurimaw is noticed by Paolo Manalo. He is likewise given the thumbs-up across the geographic divide and time zones by US-based poet Barbara Jane. Elsewhere, nameless people and namedroppables add their two cents -- ex-workshoppers, bookworms/silverfishes, academics, poets, writer-wannabes, bloggers, all issue their pros and cons.
This controversy, it turns out, is nothing new. It has been raised up in various attempts in the past to question what's legit lit and what's not. Are comicbooks/"grafiction" and Tagalog romance novels, for instance, valid literary genres? Read Dean Alfar's post on it.
Let it not be said that the Expectorants didn't blog about it. (I'm too busy to make the proper links.) What is art and who says which is art and which is not? Isn't the very question amusing and/or annoying depending on which side of the fence you're in?
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1 comments:
I say that the players in Philippine Lit in English would do well to support one another, regardless of whatever genres in which they write. What the country needs are a few more (a few, good) novelists. Only then will the literary agents who have the power to push our manuscripts outward and mainstream take notice.
And that's what matters now. :)
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