Wisemen

There goes my attempt to update this blog daily. Was busier than usual, obviously. Nonetheless, here's these last few weeks' top 10 things that incited (no) pop culture-slash-literary-slash-personal madness in me:

10.

After all the brouhaha over Wendy's attitude inside the PBB house, season 2 ended with Bea emerging as the Big Winner with more than 1.5 million votes. If one vote is equivalent to PhP 2.50, then Bea's votes alone amounted to almost PhP 5 million. ABS-CBN ends up being the Biggest Winner, after all, and with their Mega Manila primetime ratings now giving GMA Telebabad's some headaches (see their full page newspaper ads last weekend below), the momentum is definitely now theirs. How can you go wrong when you have Judy Anne, Kris & Claudine one after the other to begin your weeknight viewing? Right now, however, my junkTV includes only May Minamahal, which is about to end this week, and am now badly on the lookout for the post-chapter 32 episodes of Death Note.

09.

Mama was furiously texting me about their need to move house, after, what, 27 years. I would have gotten really angry with Papa, but right now I choose to be positive and face the extra challenge of being the eldest son. Good thing Jordan found a new job, and Brian's now in college. (My co-faculty Jelson's getting married this year, and sometimes, I think of marriage as my only way out of all my responsibilities with my family. But, um, well, that happens only sometimes.)

08.

Finished reading Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. The latter, which I certainly enjoyed, occasioned a conversation initiated by Allen, a BS Pychology freshman, when he saw me holding a copy of the book while riding a jeepney going to UP. I promised to lend him the book.

Had to discontinue Barnes' Nightwood, for I was, well, getting really bored with it. Am now enjoying Horacio Quiroga's The Decapitated Chicken & Other Stories, almost a century late. Besides Quiroga's I also bought the following books recently, all of them secondhand: Michael Cunningham, The Hours (my original copy was borrowed by Kumpareng AJ and I don't think I'll get it anytime soon); Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies, Patrick McCabe's Call Me The Breeze, John Rechy's Bodies and Souls, William Gibson's Burning Chrome, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, Mihail Lermontov's A Hero of our Time, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (my third copy of the book; I lost the first 2, in different occasions, somewhere), Arthur C. Clarke's The Promise of Space, and Julian Barnes' The Porcupine.

07.

I bought a new bookshelf & a new mattress, thanks to an upgrade on my SIP credit, and they'll be delivered tomorrow. I seriously consider buying a linoleum, at least for my first floor room. This pushed me to do some general cleaning last Sunday. Some furnitures I also decided to move to different corners of the house. It was tiring & refreshing at the same time. I decided to do this more often.

06.

I gave a lecture on traditional forms from outside the Philippines for LIRA last June 24. Last June 27, I attended the Tralala reunion/poetry reading in Conspiracy where I badly read two of my new poems. Had to leave early after two bottles of beer.

05.

Finally got my copy of Dapitan Prose from Mark. Eric's intro wrote this about my story: "Edgar Calabia Samar pulls off the ambitious Project: EYOD, where the concept of dreams shuttles between two simultaneous existences in parallel universes--steeped in linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, this is sci-fi not meant for those who stroke Jar Jar Binks figurines as they nod off to sleep."

Adam wrote a "fiction" out of the prose pieces in that issue of Dapitan, my "Project: EYOD" included. Here's the link.

04.

Bought an external SONY DVD writer, and transferred by InCD all the classical movies I downloaded so far. It unloaded my hard drive of more than 13 GB of files. Obviously, music downloads have to give way to these movie downloads. At the moment, I'm downloading Luis Bunuel's Les Hurdes. However, everyday's still a after a song, and today echoes James Blunt's "Wisemen."

03.

I decided to accept the position of Creative Writing Associate for the AILAP. I am now officially handling the workshop this year, under the direct supervision of our director, Sir Marx Lopez. And that makes me real busy, especially now that I'm still coordinating with Yol regarding a possible change of venue.

Meanwhile, the Heights EB are trying their best to follow my instructions on some matters, which is a good thing, and we're now also preparing for the workshop, which will be held in Sacred Heart Novitiate on July 28-30. I'll be meeting them on Friday to follow-up on some projects, new and old. And if you--Ateneans, Ateneo faculty, fellows to previous Ateneo workshops, alumni, or anyone who could establish a reasonable connection with Ateneo--have new works, please do consider submitting them to Heights. Please, please.

02.

I am currently working on my novel number 2, and a short story collection. I went over my stories (published and unpublished) and I think I can have about 7 or 8 reasonably good ones, worthy of revisions & some very minor finishings, that might make up a collection. Let's see.

01.

A fiction: I just realized I am easily attracted to a person. For the past 3 weeks, I had initial attractions, physically, naturally, to about 12 individuals. I dared reveal my feelings to about 5 of them who all reciprocated my emotion, one or two for slightly longer days than the rest, but all ended with me falling, differently, easily, out of what I thought I felt for them. Right now, I'm trying to hold on with what I'm sharing with R. I wonder if I am blessed or cursed.