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Seniors and their stories

by Butch Dalisay - December 10, 2024 - 12:00am

I had the privilege of attending the private launch of a book in Makati recently, a book titled Bridges of Memory produced by a group of seniors who had each contributed their poems, stories and essays to the c...

A San Diego sojourn

by Butch Dalisay - November 6, 2022 - 12:00am

A taste of home and history during a trip that felt so liberating after three years of being landbound

A hairy experiment

by Butch Dalisay - October 2, 2022 - 12:00am

For the first time in my 68 years, I tried something new these past two months: I grew a mustache and a beard. It began when Beng caught COVID thankfully the rather benign Omicron variety and I followed suit, which...

A provinciano comes home

by Butch Dalisay - October 25, 2021 - 12:00am

When Leo Virata died, hundreds of townsfolk and schoolchildren lined the road leading to his grave in his hometown, which considered him a hero.This Thursday, Oct. 28, a small and socially-distanced book launch will...

From poetry to treason

by Butch Dalisay - September 13, 2021 - 12:00am

As a collector of old books and other objects of interest more ancient than me, I sometimes stumble across manuscripts and documents that turn out to be a bit more private than the usual accounts of travels to Sulu...

Vision 2020: An artist responds to COVID

by Butch Dalisay - September 28, 2020 - 12:00am

While she was undergoing therapy for depression, the celebrated American poet Anne Sexton explained why she kept doing what she did: “Poetry, after all, is the opposite of suicide.”

A playwright for our time

by Butch Dalisay - September 14, 2020 - 12:00am

Boy Noriega taught me about Chekhov and indirection, the art of saying something by saying something else.

Missing the magazine

by Butch Dalisay - August 31, 2020 - 12:00am

Few of us might have noticed, but one of the casualties of the internet age has been the magazine as we knew it the general-interest magazine, which usually came out on weekends, often as a newspaper supplement...

Zoom-time

by Butch Dalisay - August 17, 2020 - 12:00am

If there’s anything that this COVID pandemic will leave in its wake aside from a long, deep trail of sorrow and suffering it will be Zoom, the app that’s become the boon and bane of billions of people...

Room without a window

by Butch Dalisay - August 3, 2020 - 12:00am

At the desk where I work at home in my library-cum-man-cave I face a wall without open windows, which can be confining and depressing, except that it’s the way I like things to be, if I want to get anything...

Viber on wheels

by Butch Dalisay - July 20, 2020 - 12:00am

Being a certified pack rat, I was rummaging through some boxes last week when I turned up a bunch of papers from 30 to 40 years ago.

Trouble in literary wolf-land

by Butch Dalisay - July 6, 2020 - 12:00am

It’s not every day that an old guy like me learns something almost totally new about what’s happening in my literary backyard, but your attention tends to wander over a long lockdown, and one day my eyes...

Faulkner in Manila

by Butch Dalisay - June 22, 2020 - 12:00am

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the visit to Manila in 1951 of the American writer Wallace Stegner, mentioning that 10 years earlier, he had been preceded by the even more celebrated Ernest Hemingway.

Buboy-proofing

by Butch Dalisay - June 8, 2020 - 12:00am

For some people, getting stuck in COVID lockdown with loved ones has turned out to be a test of just how “loved” one can remain after months of social non-distancing.

To fall in love with the world, again

by Butch Dalisay - May 25, 2020 - 12:00am

I mourn the loss of intimacy not the bond between two people who sleep together, but the more casual kind between friends at a table in a restaurant or even strangers on a train.

Wallace Stegner in Manila

by Butch Dalisay - May 11, 2020 - 12:00am

Like many of you, I’ve spent much of the lockdown opening boxes and sorting out files I haven’t touched in years.

History and hysteria

by Butch Dalisay - April 27, 2020 - 12:00am

History sadly provides little comfort in that respect. Awful things do happen in awful times, chiefly thievery and murder, although not always by the people you’d expect.

Energems of wisdom

by Butch Dalisay - April 13, 2020 - 12:00am

Like anyone with access to a TV, mobile phone, and computer these lockdown days, I’ve acquired a new vocabulary associated with “coronavirus” and “COVID-19,” peppered with such words...

Seeing the ‘we’

by Butch Dalisay - March 30, 2020 - 12:00am

There are things worse than COVID, things worse than quarantine, like the loss of memory, and of our connections to one another beyond the physical and the digital.

Crash landing on me

by Butch Dalisay - March 16, 2020 - 12:00am

I should have better things to do and Lord knows I do but I have to admit to splurging an inordinate amount of time and attention last week to a Korean confection strangely titled Crash Landing on You.

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