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The winner of the Historical Figure-Mythical Monster Mash-Up is Tandang Sora, palabang lola by johnbristol6. It’s inventive, bizarre, witty, and (high compliment) it made coffee shoot out of my nose. (Budjette, let’s make it a comic book!)

The prize:

We enjoyed the entries that futzed with the Hero vs Monster formula, so we decided to award consolation prizes to

Jose Rizal: the man, the legend, the aswang by hypnerotomato
Revisionist History—Now Na! by stellalehua
Love and Diversity by kindler
Agaw-Dilim, Agaw-Liwanag: Mga Itinagong Kwento ng Rebolusyon by Grafton Uranus

If you haven’t read their stories, they’re here.

Hypnerotomato gets The Once and Future King by T.H. White, stellalehua gets The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage, Kindler gets Uther by Jack Whyte, and Grafton Uranus gets A Nation Rising: Untold Tales of Flawed Founders, Fallen Heroes, and Forgotten Fighters from America’s Hidden History.

Congratulations! You may pick up your prizes any day starting today, 16 July 2010 at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati. Go to the Customer Service counter. Your prize is listed under your username and the email address you used to register on this site. Yes, you may send someone to pick up your prize as long as he/she has the information.

Thanks to our friends at National Bookstore for the prizes. The Weekly LitWit Challenge returns soon.

The publishing industry is convinced that its salvation lies in the undead.

Among the most-touted books of the season are The Fall, the sequel to The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, out in the fall (where there is fall); and The Passage by Justin Cronin.

The success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has spawned a host of literary/historical mash-ups, including Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter.

Vampires, demons, and zombies are all very interesting, of course, but for true weirdness I prefer manananggal, tiyanak, and other creatures of the Filipino darkness.

Let’s make some mash-ups!

The rules:

1. The protagonist has to be a Philippine historical figure.

2. The monster has to be a creature out of Philippine mythology: manananggal, aswang, tikbalang, kapre, tiktik, tiyanak, mambabarang, etc. Yes, it’s tempting to cast a politician; no, we want a more attractive monster.

3. The setting has to be somewhere in the Philippines.

4. The tale has to be told in less than 1,000 words. It doesn’t have to be a short story, it can be a concept paper, movie treatment, or synopsis for a novel.

5. The entry has to be posted in Comments by noon of Thursday, 15 July 2010.

6. The prize: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter.

Thanks to our friends at National Bookstore for the freebies!

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ATTENTION: WINNERS

enajie, swanoepel, overnitesensation, gilbertjohngarcia, irvin mclovin: Upon swanoepel’s suggestion I’ve asked Budjette Tan to sign your copies of Alexandra Trese. You can pick them up starting Monday, 12 July 2010 at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.

epaloids: You said July, right? You can claim your copy of PostSecret at National Bookstore in Rockwell any day starting Saturday, 10 July 2010.

Alrey and Richelle: When are you going to pick up your watches from the Prince of Persia contest?

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Entries received so far:
Apolinario Mabini: Manananggal Killer by rinabanana
Lapu-Lapu: Vampire Hunter by e@rl_hickey
Jose Rizal: the man, the legend, the aswang by hypnerotomato
Tandang Sora: Palabang Lola ni johnbristol6
Revisionist History—Now na! (or, OMG, ang anak ni K!) by stellalehua
Francisco Dagohoy, Imortal ni jeffwar314
Jose Rizal, Doppelganger Slayer by wickedmouth
Love and Diversity by kindler
Agaw-Dilim, Agaw-Liwanag: Mga Itinagong Kwento ng Rebolusyon by Grafton Uranus
Tooth and Nail: The Declaration of War and Martial Law by banzai cat
The Real Treaty of Paris by virgoan
Apolinario Mabini: Child of Prophecy, The Last Bruha Slayer by blahblah
The Aswang Trilogy by flipflopstore

Click on Comments to read the contestants.

With buckets of blood, brains and gore, and plenty of belly laughs. Zombieland opens in Metro Manila theatres on Friday, January 8, hopefully not too late to save you from gouging your eyes out over the Metro Manila Film Festival.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland stars Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, plus a major star we won’t name because it would ruin the surprise, as some of the last survivors of a zombie outbreak. They ride across the desolate American landscape, blowing away the undead and searching for a certain snack food that Woody wants, because Woody is all about appetites.

Until 28 Days Later zombie movies were regarded as silly B-movie fun: Zombieland keeps “silly” and “fun” and adds “clever”.

Of course next to the MMFF entries it is Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Why do we love zombie movies? Why our delight at seeing a zombie’s head burst open like an overripe melon? These were people after all, with a claim to our sympathy. Or do we enjoy watching zombies get blown away precisely because they were people, and better them than us?

Supplemental reading: Susan Sontag on disaster movies.

Seems like every other movie produced these days is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Filmmakers are in an end-times state of mind; coming up are movies in which Viggo Mortensen and Denzel Washington are walking, walking, walking across the rubble of our world.

What if the apocalypse has already happened, and we were too busy looking forward to it to notice?

For a long time, the field (of cannibalism studies) was dominated by a curious variety of négationnisme, most famously spelled out by William Arens in his 1980 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. According to Arens, cannibalism is nothing more than a projection of fear-induced fantasies upon unknown others, and in the past 500 years this projection has served as part of the ideological soundtrack to the European conquest of the rest of the world. As the incident on the Greyhound reminds us, however, sometimes people really do eat people…

A review of Cătălin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, in n+1.

How does Joey Gosiengfiao’s Temptation Island fit into this discussion?

The first thing you notice about the Wild Things is that they’re all mixed up. One has a lion’s head and webbed feet; another, a cockatiel’s head and lion’s body; yet another shows scaly, reptilian legs, horns, and a shaggy mane. They recall the hybridized monsters of the Ancient Greek world, complicated in appearance and lineage, who harassed the heroes of myth and bedeviled contemporary taxonomists. For example, the Chimera, a fire-breathing cross between a goat, a snake, and a lion, was said to be the daughter of Typhon (a winged giant with a dragon’s tail) and Echidna (a woman with the body of a serpent) as well as the sister of Cerberus, a three-headed dog. Like the Wild Things, the monsters of classical myth were neither fish nor fowl, but they were always somebody’s relatives.

Monsters ink: How Maurice Sendak made the world safe for monsters, and vice-versa, by Roger White in the Boston Globe.

Some ancestors of the Wild Things: Goya’s Los Caprichos.

In the Examiner: How to make a Where The Wild Things Are Halloween mask. Then again, Halloween came to Metro Manila a month early.

“For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed. But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that (the Nazi doctor, “Angel of Death” Josef) Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.”

An Argentine historian claims that Josef Mengele is responsible for the astonishing number of twins in a small Brazilian town.