Coffee with artists

This Saturday, Sept. 1, the 57th Palanca Awards for Literature will be handed out at the Manila Peninsula, bringing together many of the country’s best writers — at least for this year, and according to some people empaneled as experts in their field. The winners know who they are; the letters have been sent out (Does anyone still get telegrams these days?), and informal lists of winners have already been circulating on the Internet. To whomever these fortunate few may be, my congratulations.

At the same time, I was prompted by an e-mailed letter from a former student to think again about the Palancas and some of their unintended effects. Could it be, my student asked, that there’s a connection between these awards (and others like them) and our inability to produce global blockbusters like Harry Potter?

I had to do a double-take, because if there’s anything the Palancas set out to do, it was to encourage the writing of bright new works. Even granting that J. K. Rowling isn’t Dostoevsky, I can’t imagine any Filipino writer who wouldn’t want to be in her shoes, or to write something — anything — that could reach so many. So why haven’t we come up with something as obviously compelling?

My student’s intriguing hypothesis is that we can’t write big because we’ve gotten used to thinking small, and that awards like the Palancas contribute to that mentality. I don’t think he was against the awards themselves, or the idea of encouraging writers with monetary prizes; rather, he was worried that many young writers seem quite happy to win a few awards — to make their mark, so to speak — and then write no more, or write nothing larger.

I’m not prepared to come to that conclusion, but I’m aware of its possibility. I do see the palpable hunger of many writers for a Palanca, to the point that they can hardly breathe come mid-August, in anticipation of the results. I can understand that hunger, having felt it myself acutely when I actively competed between my 20s and 40s. I’ve been among the staunchest defenders of the awards against ignorant or sourgraping critics. There’s nothing like the incredulous joy on a first-timer’s face, or the boost they give people writing in penury and obscurity, to justify the need for them.

I do share my correspondent’s concern about how, like creative-writing diplomas and workshops, literary awards can become so deep and familiar a groove that they become a rut. At some point, writers should be writing books, not 20-page contest entries; and they should write because they feel compelled by an idea — quietly, at home or in a café like Rowling did — and not by a deadline.

Ironically, I’m saying this after having been pushed by another deadline of another competition to finish a novel I’d been sitting on for seven years. This reminds me how I and many writers of my generation used to crank out overnight wonders just to beat the Palanca deadline; one writer supposedly even brought his typewriter to the street outside the old Palanca office on Echague, there to complete his opus before the door closed at midnight. Could it be that in a society and economy with few other rewards or incentives for the producers of literature, we respond only to the artificial pressures and blandishments of such deadlines?

Our young Palanca winners — once they’ve savored their victory, nibbled the canapés, and drank the champagne — might do well to start thinking about their first and second books, and to write them with an ambition and a desire larger than any award can conjure up. There are bigger prizes out there — perhaps, at this point, none bigger than the book itself.

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I ran into an old friend the other week, someone I used to shoot a few rounds of pool with in a Murphy dive called Pancho’s, years ago when Friday nights meant driving up to strange bars and swimming in frothy beer. (That’s since been replaced by relatively sober rounds of poker with lawyers and journalists.)

The last time I met Eric Duldulao, he was running an art gallery in a mall, but he’s since moved on to something even more exciting — a book about artists and their work. Over the past many months, Eric’s been sitting down with several dozen of the country’s most accomplished modernists — people who work on the bleeding edge of art — and has chatted them up, getting them to talk about themselves and their work.

Of course, we’ll say, that’s been done before. Indeed many books have been written and published about artists and their pieces. The difference — the way Eric told me about his project, over beer in his Cubao apartment and surrounded by some of the very works he was telling me about — was that these artists opened up to him in casual conversation, yielding the kind of deeply personal insights you won’t get from the critics and academics. Having grown up with many of these artists in a world and a family that was never too far away from art — his father happens to be the art book writer and publisher Manny Duldulao — Eric knew which questions to ask, which buttons to press, knowing (as I do) how artists can be or choose to be taciturn in the company of others.

Eric showed me a life-size mockup of the book — a big one, at 11 x 17 inches and 240 pages, sumptuously illustrated with some of contemporary Philippine art’s most impressive and interesting pieces, from such artists as Kiko Escora, Lindslee, Ronaldo Ruiz, CJ Tañedo, Eghai Roxas, and Jeho Bitancor. I have to admit that I didn’t know many of these artists myself, but looking over their work — many of them towering pieces — I could see how far Philippine art had come from Luna and Amorsolo and even the early modernists. Some of them, Eric said, were even better known abroad than here at home.

His book Coffee with Artists will be a bold attempt to capture this period of growth and change; the interviews should make for engrossing reading, while the featured artworks will become bookpieces, landmarks in their creators’ careers. At the moment, Eric is in search of a partner who will shoulder the cost of the project in exchange for very generous terms. I have little doubt that once our patrons hear of those terms and see the artworks and the book, Eric’s dream of an art book worthy of circulation in the world’s capitals of fine art will materialize.

Maybe then we can go back to shooting pool with friends in Pancho’s, or whatever has taken its place in the Friday nightscape.

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Correction, please: In last week’s column, I mentioned that writer Johnny Gatbonton brought up the name of Spanish novelist Ana Prieto Nadal during a dinner he recently hosted. Actually, it was the Mexican journalist Alma Guillermo Prieto he was referring to. Something must be impacted in my ears.

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Having championed some charity causes in this corner, I can’t say no to this appeal for help from another old friend, writer Babeth Lolarga, who wrote me on behalf of fellow Baguio-based journalist Nap Javier, former general manager of DZEQ, Radyo ng Bayan. Babeth says:

“Three weeks ago he was felled by a stroke and has been at the intensive care unit of the Notre Dame Hospital on Gen. Luna St., Baguio City, since then. A few days ago his vital signs started to stabilize, but he’s not yet out of danger. Meanwhile, his hospital bills are mounting and his daily medicines amount to almost P10,000 a day.

“Nap is a friend of artists and writers. He helped organize the visual artists’ group Tahong Bundok and is a founding member of the Baguio Writers Group (BWG) along with Cirilo Bautista, Luisa Igloria, Butch Macansantos and Gabriel Keith. When the BWG was revived last year, he took it upon himself to organize a poetry reading on the air over DZWT which he co-hosted. He used to read poetry, too, in his former radio program ‘Nightfall.’

 “Your kindhearted readers may want to assist Nap and his family. Donations may be deposited in the account of his wife Erlinda A. Javier, Banco de Oro savings account no. 940056623.”

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.