JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

by Nawel Louerrad, translated by Canan Marasligil

Read this graphic novel in Words Without Borders.

The EDSA writing assignment reminded us of Tony Perez’s Cubao stories, some of which happen right on EDSA. Our favorites books in the series are Cubao: Pagkagat Ng Dilim, Cubao Midnight Express and Eros, Thanatos, Cubao.

A couple of years ago we translated one of Tony’s more recent stories into Tagalog. Pork Empanada takes place on Katipunan Avenue.

Katipunan Avenue

PORK EMPANADA
by Tony Perez
Translated into English by Jessica Zafra

Do you go to Katipunan often?

You’ve probably seen Frankie’s Steaks and Burgers, beside the new Cravings, near Lily of the Valley Beauty & Grooming Salon. If you’ve seen it, then you’ve probably seen Bototoy.

Monday through Saturday Bototoy climbs the winding path from Barangka to the service gate behind Ateneo Grade School, along with his father who works as a maintenance man at the school, and his playmates Nono, Itoc, and Radny. Most of the kids who climb the path stop at the wide covered court of the College, beside Our School, near the Observatory, where they wait for the badminton and tennis players to call for ballboys. Bototoy doesn’t stop there. He walks to Gate 2, which is quite far, and crosses Katipunan Avenue to sit on the concrete island in front of Frankie’s Steaks and Burgers.

Do you remember him?

(more…)

EDSA, 7 February 2012

The winner of the Weekly LitWit Challenge 8.4: Which is better, the book or the movie? is——Nobody. Nobody wins. Not just because all the entries gave perfunctory answers, but because they didn’t really talk about the book or the movie, they talked about themselves.

So last week’s prizes will be added to this week’s contest.

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Almost forgot: If there are no other claimants in our Roger-Rafa prediction contest, the winner is Poli. Poli, please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published). We’ll alert you when your copy of Bossypants by Tina Fey has been delivered to National Bookstore in Rockwell.

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We’ve been covering Boysen KNOxOUT’s Project Edsa, the world’s first large-scale public art project using paints that can clean noxious air pollutants. The third wall in the series, by the filmmaker and architect, Tapio Snellman, was unveiled last week at the Cubao underpass.

For the Weekly LitWit Challenge 8.5 we’re focusing on Metro Manila’s main artery, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. In 1,000 words or less, write a story that takes place right on Edsa. It can be a science-fiction tale, a melodrama, a horror story, a romance, a comedy, anything, as long as it happens on Edsa.

Apart from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo poster and a copy of The Boy in the Suitcase, this week’s winner will receive a tote bag featuring the Project Edsa artwork on Ortigas by Baby and Coco Anne, and two paperbacks: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.

Finalists will receive movie posters and tote bags. Thanks to Boysen KNOxOUT for the bags.

We’ll accept submissions until Tuesday, 14 February 2012.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

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By the way the Yucch-meter is on board for this one so the over-sensitive need not apply.

The Yucch-meter’s reactions in Comments.

Still vital at 200.

Listen to Hugh Laurie reading an excerpt from Great Expectations.

Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

Something Sigmund Freud says in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s stupendous film on the birth of psychoanalysis, caused us to sit up straight in the slouch chair. He tells Sabina Spielrein, the patient, then lover, then student of his estranged disciple Carl Jung: “We’re Jews, and Jews we will always be.” Jung, whom she was still fascinated with, is an Aryan who is interested in mysticism and talks about helping people “become what they were born to be.” Jews, Freud reminds Spielrein, have seen what people really are.

The fates of the protagonists, summarized dispassionately at the film’s end, attest to the truth of Freud’s statement.

(In our own heads Freud is telling us, “We are nerds. They tolerate us now because we are clever, but someday the Sardaukar will come after us.”)

Cronenberg’s deceptively pretty movie based on the play by Christopher Hampton is itself a form of psychoanalysis: it dredges up the dark impulses under the bright surfaces. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung consults his intellectual father figure, the Austrian Sigmund Freud, who sees their relationship in Oedipal terms naturally: the son attempting to kill the father.

Jung has a beautiful house paid for by his rich wife; he sails in the tranquil blue lake in a boat paid for by his rich wife. But his great love and intellectual match may be Spielrein, who enters the movie kicking and screaming literally. He cures her of her symptoms, and then gets her off by spanking her.

Keira Knightley as the hysteric Sabina Spielrein

The alien in Alien. Hmmm. Michael Fassbender is starring in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which is “set in the universe of Alien.” Freud believed there are no accidents…

As the hysteric Keira Knightley contorts her face and extends her already prodigious jaw so far she looks like the alien mother getting ready to bite off someone’s head. Her acting is almost risible because her costars don’t seem to be acting at all (Vincent Cassel expresses volumes by raising one corner of his mouth very slightly). However, the director has stated in interviews that this is exactly how the historical Sabina behaved. However one regards Knightley’s performance it is certainly brave.

Fassbender caps his amazing year by playing Jung as a very proper man consumed by terrible agonies. (His visions will result in the theory of the collective unconscious.) Mortensen’s Freud is playful, paranoid, magisterial, a man who sees complexes everywhere. His expression on the ocean liner as his disciple goes off to first class says everything we need to know about the outsider who is suddenly reminded of his true status. Don’t get too comfortable.

Sigmund Freud’s couch by Annie Leibovitz

Get a copy of Linamnam by Claude Tayag and Mary Ann Quioc.

Linamnam, Php395 at National Bookstores

Proceed to eat your way around the Philippines. This culinary travel guide is arranged by region for easy reference: now you know exactly where to go and what to order. What! You’ve never had the Crispy Itik and Peking Duck at Tindahan ng Itlog ni Kuya in Laguna?? You call yourself a foodie but you’ve never tried the Chupaculo at Ermin Ray Lim Saavedra Home Suite Home Hotel in Zamboanga?? You need this book.

This one we’re saving for Roland Garros

The Map and The Territory, hardcover, Php995 at National Bookstores.

Perfect for those clay court rallies in which one player stands in the 17th arrondisement and the other stands in the 15th, and the ball goes slowly back and forth until one of them dozes off. Kidding. We have to go.

We’re still not sure whether we like Houellebecq but for some reason we can’t not read him.

The Ermine of Czernopol, Php600-something at National Bookstores

Design is the second thing we love about NYRB Books; the novels are the first. We’ve loved Gregor von Rezzori since we happened upon the NYRB reissue of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite; with the return of The Ermine of Czernopol a nearly-forgotten European genius reclaims his place in literature.