JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo: Lucban Girls Recharging Their Brains, 1978 by Uro de la Cruz.

Your assignment this week is to write us a story in 1,000 words or less from the point of view of one of the little girls.

Deadline: Sunday, 3 July 2011 at 11.59 pm.

The Prize: Three books. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore: Human falls in love with chimpanzee. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner): Human falls in love with clone. Global Warming Survival Handbook: How to be less of an asshole in these difficult times.

We accept all genres. Make it riveting.

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

Casts of my ears by Leo Abaya

David Foster Wallace wrote, “Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.” Excellent point: all of Blue Velvet took off from the discovery of a human ear, while in Reservoir Dogs the ear-slicing was just part of a torture scene done to the tune of Stuck In The Middle With You.

In last week’s LitWit Challenge we presented readers with a pair of human ears, a tree, a gravestone and a stadium and asked them to make up a story.
(more…)

Our Philippine rugby archive is here.

A blip in eternity
Emotional Weather Report
Philippine Star, 26 June 2011

Film is a language, we often forget, with its own grammar and vocabulary. To watch The Tree of Life, the new film by Terrence Malick, is to visit a strange and marvelous country. It is almost lost to us, shouted down by a market that demands the familiar and reassuring.
(more…)

All right, you’ve seen the Bench underwear ad with the members of the Philippine rugby team, you have the behind-the-scenes video on a loop, now you know what we’ve had to put up with all year—trudging after these troglodytes in different countries when we could’ve been watching the extended edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz or reading the collected works of Thomas Pynchon while listening to Gesualdo’s Tenebrae. Oh the humanity. But in the words of Uncle Ben Parker—that’s Spider-Man’s uncle, try to keep up—with great power comes great responsibility, so we shall bear this burden without. . .with minimal. . .with comparatively little complaint.

Rightmost in the print ad, wearing white, a scowl, and a retro ‘stache, is Chris Everingham. You may have seen him recently in a magazine fashion spread. Here he is at last year’s Borneo 7s tournament with fellow Bench model Ned Stephenson (who looks about 12 in this picture; in the layout you’d better hope he’s not 12).

It’s beastly out, you’re stuck at home, what do you do? You listen to Chris Everingham’s playlist.

“When I’m a bit a down and out and can’t go outside I break out into a bit of dancing and listen to classics like these.”
(more…)

After I bought the cockroach traps in the supermarket I went up to National Bookstore to see what was new. I was there on Wednesday, but stocks change fast. A few days earlier there was a stack of hardcover copies of Moondogs, a novel set in the Philippines, written by Alexander Yates who’d gone to IS Manila; now I couldn’t find any.

Bingo: the trade paperback of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which wasn’t there two days earlier.
(more…)