"Killing Our Literary Daddies And Mommies"
From An Exercise In Youthful Blasphemy, this post: Better Living Through Xeroxography. He shares his opinions about what he thinks should be done to generate more readers in the Philippines, how the current setup is not effective, and that those who are in charge, those he calls our "Literary Daddies and Mommies", should be put out to pasture. Some excerpts:
I just lived through the first annual Taboan Writers Fest, a three-day mostly national but actually international (made “inter” by the presence of a Vietnamese writer and a Thai filmmaker) summit of writers, mostly under forty years old, set to talk about the various issues that surround the cultivation of one's literary existence in this quite flippity-floppity literary world of luckers and losers and lousy lolo layabouts. I was chosen to talk about one of my major worries, Self-Publishing, and one of my minor preoccupations, Criticism of Speculative Fiction. Those three days were in turns uplifting and exhausting—sometimes both at the same time—like a marathon orgy of what most of us felt as exuberant virility. It was great. “I came five times,” I would’ve said if I was six years younger. This essay is a putting to print some of the things I said in the panels—specifically my thoughts on the Small Independent Press, and why it’s the Future of Philippine Literature.
My general poetics can pretty much be summed up as such: Literary Patricide. From claiming that the Future of Philippine Literature is in the Small Independent Press to proposing for the Obliteration of Genres—pretty much every single thing tossed into these essays—are my various How-To’s on killing our Literary Daddies and Mommies, and yes, these are things that I truly believe in, the rules I’ve lived my literary life by, causes that I truly rally behind: they really have to die various deaths—and by our hands—because really, things need to change, for the better, for the greater whole, as the current state of affairs in literary production is thus: it is intellectually bankrupt, and idiots can only really do idiotic things.
One of the many things our Daddies and Mommies have choke holds on is Publishing, be it as minor as seeking the Silliman Tiempos for approval of having our poems printed on the Philippines Free Press or as major as having Ophelia Dimalanta and Cirilo Bautista police—excuse me, referee—the books we give to the Mainstream Presses. They have been doing this constantly for thirty years now, some even for fifty years, and most of the time the people who did it in the Beginning are still the same people who are doing it Today, all in the name of Setting the Standards when it’s really just to pass on their Literary DNA without regard of what we really want to do in our writing lives. The sadder thing is that most of us have been led to believe that this is the only way to live our writing lives: we’re all brought up to be Mama’s Boys with Daddy Issues, always seeking for Parental Approval (I’m looking straight at you, SpecFickers!!!), dogs being fed yesterday’s table scraps. If this isn’t reason enough for us to rethink the things we have been taught—the things we have been led to believe for so long, now—you should all just stop reading this essay and move on to writing about growing up as a temperamental sensitive misunderstood artiste and calling it creative nonfiction.
The contemporary average Pinoy reader is not Ester in a duster eating crackers by the shower. The contemporary average Pinoy reader is a twenty-something undergrad reading Twilight in the dark, with enough foundation in grammar (in English, at that) to read and understand and be absorbed by a novel-length elaboration of undersexed teenage angst filtered through post-Victorian emo goth vampire horror (after all, market hype can only go as far as making people buy the book; they have to read it, too). If they read and love Bob Ong, they understand the basics of satire, of sarcasm, of parody. The contemporary average Pinoy reader is not an idiot. They just don't know any better, having a limited choice in reading material. What ought to happen is that we stop giving them idiotic things.
We can't expect Mainstream Publishers to change the present condition for us, because the present condition is a condition that benefits their bank accounts. The present condition is a condition that benefits their egos. Mainstream Publishers will publish anything as long as there is money to be earned in it, if it maintains patronage, quality of thought and writing distant second and third concerns.
What we should be focussing on is creating and providing new venues for alternative attitudes in Reading and Writing, creating and providing new venues for ourselves and our “unmarketable” material, for our “unrefereed” efforts. What we should be focussing on is developing and cultivating an audience that will read and understand and actively seek our work. We should stop writing down to Mainstream Publishers’ standards of marketability and literariness and start writing up to raising the quality of available reading material, and the only way to do those things and remain untarnished—remain honest to ourselves and to our art—is to do the publishing ourselves.
But all of these things will only be possible once we make that initial step of deciding it’s okay not to earn big money, if at all, that it’s okay to not have Krip Yuson’s breezy blurby blessings or Marjorie Evasco’s limning reaction paper introductions in our books, if it means we get to have our way, untarnished and honest and true.
The old ideas do not work anymore. The old machines are in the back yard, rusting in the rain. We need to think new thoughts if we want things to change. We need to build new machines. We should all move our parents to retirement homes by the Silliman beach where they can play volleyball in their geriatric pace, if not kill them outright in their drooly siestas. We only owe them as far as we can throw them down an empty well of nostalgia that we often mistake for respect.
Click here to read the whole blog entry.
I just lived through the first annual Taboan Writers Fest, a three-day mostly national but actually international (made “inter” by the presence of a Vietnamese writer and a Thai filmmaker) summit of writers, mostly under forty years old, set to talk about the various issues that surround the cultivation of one's literary existence in this quite flippity-floppity literary world of luckers and losers and lousy lolo layabouts. I was chosen to talk about one of my major worries, Self-Publishing, and one of my minor preoccupations, Criticism of Speculative Fiction. Those three days were in turns uplifting and exhausting—sometimes both at the same time—like a marathon orgy of what most of us felt as exuberant virility. It was great. “I came five times,” I would’ve said if I was six years younger. This essay is a putting to print some of the things I said in the panels—specifically my thoughts on the Small Independent Press, and why it’s the Future of Philippine Literature.
My general poetics can pretty much be summed up as such: Literary Patricide. From claiming that the Future of Philippine Literature is in the Small Independent Press to proposing for the Obliteration of Genres—pretty much every single thing tossed into these essays—are my various How-To’s on killing our Literary Daddies and Mommies, and yes, these are things that I truly believe in, the rules I’ve lived my literary life by, causes that I truly rally behind: they really have to die various deaths—and by our hands—because really, things need to change, for the better, for the greater whole, as the current state of affairs in literary production is thus: it is intellectually bankrupt, and idiots can only really do idiotic things.
One of the many things our Daddies and Mommies have choke holds on is Publishing, be it as minor as seeking the Silliman Tiempos for approval of having our poems printed on the Philippines Free Press or as major as having Ophelia Dimalanta and Cirilo Bautista police—excuse me, referee—the books we give to the Mainstream Presses. They have been doing this constantly for thirty years now, some even for fifty years, and most of the time the people who did it in the Beginning are still the same people who are doing it Today, all in the name of Setting the Standards when it’s really just to pass on their Literary DNA without regard of what we really want to do in our writing lives. The sadder thing is that most of us have been led to believe that this is the only way to live our writing lives: we’re all brought up to be Mama’s Boys with Daddy Issues, always seeking for Parental Approval (I’m looking straight at you, SpecFickers!!!), dogs being fed yesterday’s table scraps. If this isn’t reason enough for us to rethink the things we have been taught—the things we have been led to believe for so long, now—you should all just stop reading this essay and move on to writing about growing up as a temperamental sensitive misunderstood artiste and calling it creative nonfiction.
The contemporary average Pinoy reader is not Ester in a duster eating crackers by the shower. The contemporary average Pinoy reader is a twenty-something undergrad reading Twilight in the dark, with enough foundation in grammar (in English, at that) to read and understand and be absorbed by a novel-length elaboration of undersexed teenage angst filtered through post-Victorian emo goth vampire horror (after all, market hype can only go as far as making people buy the book; they have to read it, too). If they read and love Bob Ong, they understand the basics of satire, of sarcasm, of parody. The contemporary average Pinoy reader is not an idiot. They just don't know any better, having a limited choice in reading material. What ought to happen is that we stop giving them idiotic things.
We can't expect Mainstream Publishers to change the present condition for us, because the present condition is a condition that benefits their bank accounts. The present condition is a condition that benefits their egos. Mainstream Publishers will publish anything as long as there is money to be earned in it, if it maintains patronage, quality of thought and writing distant second and third concerns.
What we should be focussing on is creating and providing new venues for alternative attitudes in Reading and Writing, creating and providing new venues for ourselves and our “unmarketable” material, for our “unrefereed” efforts. What we should be focussing on is developing and cultivating an audience that will read and understand and actively seek our work. We should stop writing down to Mainstream Publishers’ standards of marketability and literariness and start writing up to raising the quality of available reading material, and the only way to do those things and remain untarnished—remain honest to ourselves and to our art—is to do the publishing ourselves.
But all of these things will only be possible once we make that initial step of deciding it’s okay not to earn big money, if at all, that it’s okay to not have Krip Yuson’s breezy blurby blessings or Marjorie Evasco’s limning reaction paper introductions in our books, if it means we get to have our way, untarnished and honest and true.
The old ideas do not work anymore. The old machines are in the back yard, rusting in the rain. We need to think new thoughts if we want things to change. We need to build new machines. We should all move our parents to retirement homes by the Silliman beach where they can play volleyball in their geriatric pace, if not kill them outright in their drooly siestas. We only owe them as far as we can throw them down an empty well of nostalgia that we often mistake for respect.
Click here to read the whole blog entry.
posted by pgenrestories at 6:53 AM
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