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Essay

The pajama games

I think, if President Duterte’s attendance at international summits is to be guaranteed, whoever is hosting should consider holding sleepovers instead of boring old meetings.  Meetings are boring—only grown-ups go to them to do, ugh, Business. A pajama party, now, that’s a different...

British author in Manila: A conversation in Solidaridad

  James Hamilton-Paterson, if National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose’s word is to be taken as it is meant, is one of the few non-Filipino authors who has written about the Philippines with a very level view of our people and this archipelago...

The sisterhood of the childbearing scrubs

Are women doing it for themselves or are they doing it to themselves? Nothing sets a movement back like heresy among its members, so when women themselves act contrary to what feminism considers in the best interest of other women, there is a jarring...

Four Sundays and a funeral

What is the proper term for someone who is taking the bar exam? I was going to suggest barista but I re-thought the thought after realizing that law graduates might take offense at being associated with slinging lattés, which are scrumptious, at a Starbucks. Not...

Boo

Damn Filipino parents and their lack of imagination. And patriotism. Hex me all you want, but I will maintain till I inhale my last that Halloween is the most un-Filipino of holidays and that the Philippines has no business celebrating the day.  It...

Lolo

The essay was written four days before the author succumbed to a massive stroke. This story, about his grandfather, is his last essay Before sunrise, he would do the rounds of his small sugarcane farm on the east side of his house. He would...

Random Pickings

On that night I died and woke up the next day

And I have done it again. The days counted revert to none. And just like that, I go by zero day after day. Every...

Ces Buenavista: Queen of the barracks

She was one of the thousands of college students stranded in their campuses when the Enhanced Community Quarantine was imposed throughout Luzon.  “Sir, it was...

Ladies who protest too much

Two peckers are being measured against each other, and loath as I am to extend the shelf life of this non-story, extend I must...

A poetics of the literary work

Let me begin with a general perspective on the mind, language, and the literary work, and end on our country’s literature. MIND The human person...