Farewell to the bookmaker
I’m very sorry that certain events in the past few weeks delayed this particular column, where I hope to render a modest tribute to our friend Ronnie Alejandro, who passed away in New York City last month.
Ronnie or Ronois (as he styled himself on e-mail) was a great friend to many, and the perfect host when any of us visited the Big Apple without being a congressman attached to a presidential party, thus privy to a stay at the Waldorf and other such putting-on-the-Ritz affairs, including fancy dinners.
With Ronnie, it was a spare set of keys handed with a mustachioed smile soon after he’s welcomed you to his modest digs, an apartment on Bleecker St. in Greenwich Village. You had to inch your way sideways against the tiny foyer’s wall to get past his bike when you came home late at night. You could fix yourself up something from whatever contents were in his large ref, as large as his heart.
If you were lucky and he was still up and heard you rummaging about, he’d step out of his bedroom and ask how your day was, then share his own chronology of whirlwind derring-do around Manhattan. He seemed always to be gushing, though peppering his funny anecdotes with “Ay, naku!” and “Kakaloka!” and “O, di ba?” You laughed along with him, and wondered where he got all the energy for the multi-tasking activities that took up his entire day from 6 a.m. onward, the breaks accommodating phone calls with which he still pursued all his projects.
When you finally said goodnight, you walked past the largest room, which ironically spared no space except for a path to the makeshift loft that ennobled a cubicle, where you climbed up a ladder for your bedspace with a view. The “living room” had no space for anything else because it was filled wall to wall with boxes of abubots surrounded by towering piles of magazines, periodicals and books.
Above all, Ronnie the orig librarian became a bookmaker, an indefatigable one who was always overseeing various stages of book production and thinking up yet another one while close to completing a title, one after the other. He was a bookmaker and a social networker, way before the Net allowed egress to sites and chatrooms and what-have-you. The networking allowed him to produce book after book, whether it was funded by some entity or from his own pocket, with a little help from friends.
I was privileged to have been drawn into that circle when he asked me to help conceptualize, edit and follow through on at least two titles for Unilever Philippines: Pasig: River of Life and Manila Bay: Crossroads of Asia. For the last, he suddenly rang up, saying he was in Manila, and staying with Bobby Caballero, his usual host, and said I should drag myself off, pronto, to Raymond Fuentes for measurements for a stylized barong Tagalog that would be standard attire for the book’s co-editors at the launch.
No, wait, that was for the Pasig book launch, held at a rampart in Fort Santiago. For the next, Raymond said we’d have to be at Manila Hotel sporting sports suits that would make us look like gentlemen mariners. It came with a ship captain’s hat, in white with gold gewgaws. Only Ronnie could make me play along and agree to look and feel sheepish or silly or both, for an evening in otherwise elegant company, while halfway managing to repress the cosmic giggles.
We will certainly miss him. Over the past weeks I’ve heard from fellow writers who had also basked in Ronnie’s inimitable electric aura — Luis Francia and Dominique Gallego in NY, Marla Yotoko Chorengel and Nancy Reyes-Lumen in Manila — with the last two providing first a digital file then a hardcopy (to be treasured) of Ronnie’s final giveaway: a printed six-page pamphlet with the title “In Memoriam” between his photograph and full name, Reynaldo Washington Gamboa Alejandro.
He had prepared it himself, knowing he would leave us at any given day after his struggle with an illness. It contained tribute quotes and blurbs from many friends, beginning with Maniya Barredo’s “I am rich as a recipient of his love.” It also listed 38 Filipiniana titles he had authored, edited and/or published, plus the last two that were still works-in-progress, in collaboration with Vicente Roman S. Santos and Tess Z. Lopez: Buglas: Oriental Negros the Beautiful and Estilo Ilonggo.
Another common friend, Maryland-based theater artist Remé-Antonia Grefalda who also edits the e-journ Our Own Voice, informed us that OOV’s latest edition also paid tribute with a “Bibliographical Memorial to Ronnie Alejandro, a visionary proponent of the best of Filipiniana.”
You may check it out at http://www.ourownvoice.com, where you’ll be impressed and gratified by a cache of photos showing Ronnie’s publications on display at the Asian Reading Room in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. — another tribute that was quickly mounted for the period of Aug. 20 to 28, 2009.
Grefalda writes to introduce this bibliographic memorial:
“Ronnie’s choice of publication was the ubiquitous coffee-table art book, often in limited edition. Most of us knew Ronnie as a choreographer but he was also a librarian who lived his bliss as a creative dancer-turned-author and in time became a Pinoy gourmand who gave expression to his childhood nostalgia with many a publication on Filipino dishes, Filipino hospitality, special foods, delicacies, etc. But his beautifully designed art books also offered forays into regional lore, history and travel to familiar places which some of us have never set foot on, but just heard about. Ronnie passed away in early August. He was 68.”
Among Alejandro, Reynaldo G.’s books listed are the following: Sayaw Silangan: The Dance in the Philippines (New York, Dance Perspectives Foundation, 1972); Philippine Dance: Mainstream and Crosscurrents (Vera Reyes, 1978); The Philippine Cookbook (New York, N.Y. : Putnam, 1985); Philippine Hospitality: A Gracious Tradition of the East (with Lily Gamboa O’Boyle, New York : Acacia Corp., 1988); Pasko!: The Philippine Christmas (with Marla Yotoko Chorengel, 1998); Lamesa: The Filipino Table (with Josephine Labrador Hermano, 1999); Selyo: Philippine History in Postage Stamps (with Rosa Menguito Vallejo and Arminda Vallejo Santiago, 2000); Flowers of Baguio (National Book Store and Anvil Pub., 2001); Sayaw: Philippine Dances (with Amanda Abad Santos-Gana, Anvil, 2002); Laguna de Bay: The Living Lake (Unilever Philippines, 2002); Tahanan: A House Reborn (with Vicente Roman S. Santos, Duende Pub., 2003); The Adobo Book: Traditional & Jazzed-up Recipes (with Nancy Reyes-Lumen — Manila: Anvil, 2004); Wow! Ang Sarap!: The Best of Philippine Regional Cuisine (Unilever Phil./ Dept. of Tourism, 2004); Authentic Recipes from the Philippines (Singapore: Periplus; 2005); The Beautiful Filipina (2007); and Fiesta! Fiesta!: Festival Foods of the Philippines (with Millie Albano Reyes and Vicente Roman S. Santos, 2008).
Quite a collection. Farewell to our dear friend, the bookmaker.
* * *
Our young friend and colleague Larry Ypil, multi-awarded poet and Ateneo professor, launches his first collection of poetry, The Highest Hiding Place, published by AdMU Press, this evening at Mag:net Katipunan.
The book puts together poems that have won Carlos Palanca Awards and Free Press Awards, among others, for Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, thus charting the author’s over 10 years of exploring the intersections of desire, displacement, and voice.
Born and raised in Cebu, Ypil teaches literature and creative writing at the Ateneo de Manila University, while writing a bi-monthly column in Sun Star Weekend, titled “Dog-ears in the Wrong Notebook.”
The book launch begins with a book signing and cocktails at 6:30 p.m., followed by a reading of poems from the collection from 7:30 p.m. onwards, as part of the 60th installment of the bi-weekly Happy Mondays Poetry Nights. Hosting the event are Daryll Delgado and Andrea Teran, while joining in the celebration of Larry’s book are contemporary Filipino writers and young poets from the Ateneo.
The book will also be launched in Cebu City on Oct. 23. RTC judge in Cebu and its foremost essayist and premier poet Simeon Dumdum, Jr. writes of Ypil’s poetry in his introduction:
“Most of these poems have to do with the house in which the poet grew up and which he now sees from his imaginary loft ... the poet’s highest hiding place. And the best — because when they (... the rest of humanity...) know that he is there, they would not think that the poet, despite being in evidence at first glance, is hiding at all, and because they so take him for granted that in effect they do not see him, or just look at him without seeing.
“... And yet one hides in the loft only to uncover oneself, and in the process the poet discovers how the outside world betrays his emotions....”
Here’s one of the poems in the outstanding collection, titled “The Discovery of Poetry”: “When the deed is done./ When the light is lit.// At the end of the day,/ when Carlo keeps// what the dark night/ did not want to say// at the end of the story—// I think of the long nights/ without sleep.// What the bright day/ does not reap.// What the young boy/ who wants to hide// reeks.// What the wrong man says to him/ the whole night:// Do not speak.// Because let me tell you something.”
Bravo, Sir Larry of the lauds to silence.
