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In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel Diary of A Bad Year, the old protagonist is in lust with a Filipina named Anya. From the New York Times book review:

“At 72, Señor C has Parkinson’s disease; his eyesight is failing him; his typing isn’t what it used to be. But his lust is intact, at least as expressed by “a metaphysical ache.” In the laundry room of his apartment building, he encounters a young woman with “a derrière so near to perfect as to be angelic,” and soon he has hired the owner of this apparition, a Filipina whose name is Anya and who lives upstairs, to type the manuscript of his opinions, which he dictates to her. These make up the first of the novel’s narratives and appear at the top of each page. Beneath them are Señor C’s accounts of his transactions with Anya, who (like Marijana, the Croatian nurse who cares for Paul Rayment in “Slow Man”) provides at least as much psychic as physical assistance. In contrast to her employer, Anya is body first and intellect second. Her less lofty point of view inhabits, fittingly, the nether portion of the page. . .”

treeofsmokefellapart2.JPG, originally uploaded by 160507.

This is not the prize, I just wanted to show you this book. Butch passed me his copy of Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. He bought it new, a first edition, from Powerbooks about a month ago, and it literally fell apart while he was reading it. (Correction on previous post on Tree of Smoke: Johnson was not a consultant on Apocalypse Now, but he’s spent time in the Philippines. By the way, does anyone know if William Boyd actually came here to research The Blue Afternoon?) Maybe the good people of Farrar Straus Giroux need to check their binding. I don’t mind having the book in pieces, though—this way I don’t have to lug the entire doorstop-sized volume around, just the chunks I’m reading.

Now the contest. The prize is. . .a copy of Stars and Bars by William Boyd, which was adapted for film in the 90s. Mediocre, but it stars Daniel Day-Lewis. The book goes to the first person who answers all these questions correctly. Thanks to Chus and Ricky for thinking up the items.

1. In which movie does Rita Gomez tell her daughter in her distinct Rita Gomez enunciation: “Why don’t you traahvel? Go to Yooh-rope.”
2. Name the movie in which Ricky has one line: “O, tapos?”
3. Noel and I suspect we are the only people who have seen all the movies by this American writer-director whose first movie contains an extended argument about Mansfield Park.
4. What movie contains this bit of dialogue:
- Mag-ko-confrontation scene ba tayo?
- Wag na, nakakapagod.
5. Stefania Sandrelli and Dominique Sanda do the tango in which movie?

10.52am. Ha! No entries yet, and in this instance googling will not help you! Okay, item 2 is too specialized, as in only Ricky’s friends would know, so here’s a clue: Sharon Cuneta stars in it.

21.21. Ha! Only one entry posted, with a score of 2/5. The answers:  1) Ina, Kasusuklaman Ba Kita? 2) Crying Ladies by Mark Meilly 3) Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan; his other movies are Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco 4) Salawahan by Ishmael Bernal, a treasure trove of great lines, and 5) The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci.

No one wins Contest #3. The prize will be given out in Contest #4.

Chapter 5 of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is set in Manila. The Pakistani narrator and his fair-haired, light-eyed American colleagues are in Manila on a business trip. He finds himself attempting to act and speak like an American because the Filipinos they work with seem to look up to his American colleagues. One day, on a busy street:

“I was riding with my colleagues in a limousine. We were mired in traffic, unable to move, and I glanced out the window to see, only a few feet away, the driver of a jeepney returning my gaze. There was an undisguised hostility in his expression; I had no idea why. We had not met before—of that I was virtually certain—and in a few minutes we would probably never see each other again. But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin. I stared back at him, getting angry myself—you will have noticed in your time here that glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously—and I maintained eye contact until he was obliged by the movement of the car in front to return his attention to the road.

“Afterwards, I tried to understand why he acted as he did. Perhaps, I thought, his wife had just left him; perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans. I remained preoccupied with this matter far longer than I should have, pursuing several possibilities that all assumed—as their unconscious starting point—that he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility. Then one of my colleagues asked me a question, and when I turned to answer him, something rather strange took place. I looked at him—at his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work—and thought, you are so foreign. I felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to him; I felt I was play-acting when in reality I ought to be making my way home, like the people on the street outside.”

So why was the jeepney driver glaring at the narrator?

#17 on the New York Times Bestseller List (trade fiction) on September 30: Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos (Plume). “A cafe manager falls for a Cary Grant-like charmer, then learns he has an 11-year-old daughter.” I googled Marisa de los Santos, and I was right: she’s Filipino-American, based in Delaware. I’m guessing this makes her the highest-ranking author of Filipino descent ever on the NYT Bestseller list, though I have to check the stats for Dogeaters, Fixer Chao, Umbrella Country. Reviewers have described Love Walked In as a smart contemporary romance, or at least chick lit of the non-nauseating variety. The film rights have been acquired by Sarah Jessica Parker. I saw the book in hardcover in National Bookstore: there’s a half-Filipino half-Swedish character in it named Teo. One of the blurbs is by David Schickler, author of that lovely book Kissing In Manhattan. Here’s the Bookslut review of Love Walked In.

Tree of Smoke, the new novel by Denis Johnson, opens in the Philippines on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

“Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. . .”

According to Butch, Johnson was in the think tank brought in to advise Francis Ford Coppola on the Apocalypse Now script when the shoot was in trouble. Another adviser was Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator in his Maoist period.

A description of the Philippines: “The setting sun lowered from the clouds and struck up at them in such a way that suddenly the entire town throbbed with a scarlet light.” The central metaphor of the tree of smoke: “”And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon come to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (from the Book of Joel)

“On the question of pedophilia, The White Book was unequivocal: it formally advised against Thailand, which no longer had anything to recommend it, if indeed it ever had. It was much better to go to the Philippines or, better still, to Cambodia—the journey might be dangerous, but it was worth the effort.” – from Platform by Michel Houellebecq

The movie 8mm refers to the Philippines as a source of snuff movies.

Patis dissed: “The nuoc mam from Phu Quoc Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste. . .But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.” – from the story Love by Robert Olen Butler

In the movie Constantine, the possessed girl hisses at Keanu Reeves: “PapaTAYin natin siya!” So Hollywood has established that Tagalog is the language spoken in hell.