french kiss

- one mouth depositing the truth of saliva * unto the other
(*notes from senhor jose)

did you swear
by the virus of this spit
that the passion was prevalent
the lust, augmented?...
where any ordinary mouth could not
have endured the intricacies
of this tres tres cultured kiss?
lap, lap, lap, lap, lap
hey, that's not the sound of thirst
quenched by the unethics of my horny dog
don't lie, that is the acoustics coming,
echoing, from the cavernous portal
of this truthful smoocher
spilling the french facts,
conveying the french rectitude -
the floor's the messenger
the roof, the receiver
teeth to teeth, gums to gums
each square millimeter
of one's tonsil
unwarrantly searched
by the gendarmous tongue
of the other -
so be careful
be prudent
the sweet breath
may represent
the split tongue
of the
innocuous
reptile
kisser.

mwah!
mwah!

cbsreview: BIG FISH

The movie marked a double-first for my moviewatching: it was the first time I went out to see a movie right on Christmas Day, and the first time I went to see a movie without the vaguest idea of what it was all about. That it was directed by Tim Burton was a quiet motivator, (though served with a pinch of reluctance after the awful memories of Sleepy Hollow; for a moment it cast a shadow of doubt as to Mr. Burton's ability to rekindle the flame of a great Beetlejuice experience.) But being a movie adventurer, I rolled my moviewatcher's dice. And with Burton's penchance for surprises and unique sense of aesthetics, I knew Big Fish to be worthy of optimism.

Turned out, the odds were on my side. A quarter through the movie, I had my epiphany, glaring brightly (even though all the reviews I read thereafter never mentioned what I perceived): Big Fish has strong and effective parallelisms to James Joyce's Ulysses and (of course), to the myths of The Oddysey, that after the movie I felt as if I hit a jackpot.

Big Fish, like the twin pillars of literature, carries the theme of centrality of family, with emphasis on the relationship between father and son. The haunt of Homer's epic is wonderfully carried by Telemachus' valiant search for his father Odysseus which, many, many years later, was transplanted in Joyce's Ulysses, via the encounter by and between Stephen Dedalus and his surrogate father Leopold Bloom.

In Big Fish, the father's name became the first hint: Edward Bloom. But unlike the way the episodes of Ulysses are in rhythmic pattern with the Odyssey, the analogies presented in the movie are not in the same episodic fashion. In fact, sometimes the contrasts are the very analogies themselves.

The movie opens up with a mythical scene, a big fish plying the waters of a big river. That is a sign of things to come - the myth that Edward Bloom created for his son, that he, Edward Bloom, in his youth was a big fish. As the movie progresses with flashbacks to narrate the myths, so do the myths themselves, so does the son William himself, growing up from childhood to adolescence looking at his father from a mythological perspective (while we moviewathers shared the kids wide eyes watching scene after scene, episode after episode, of fabulous tales told by a fabulist father).

There are four episodes in the father's life which he tells his son (and shown to us), that serve to highlight his mythology. The first is when he and three other friends go to the house of the old witch with a glass eye, and he confronts the witch in order to look directly at her glass eye just so he could, as folktales have it, find out how he is going to die. (When the young William asks the father what he saw, he answers, "but that will be the end of the story"); Second is his encounter with the gentle giant Karl, a humongous monster as tall as a building but with the purity of a baby. Third is his entry at Specter, a quaint beauty of a town with an unforgettable "welcome arch" of hanging shoes and turfed streets, and equally unforgettable inhabitants. And fourth is his pursuit of his future wife (portrayed by a most ravishing Alison Lohman), and his funny escapades to win her over. (When she asks how he could propose to marry her when he doesn't even know her, he responds "but I have a whole lifetime to find out". Cute.)

In Odyssey, the meeting between Odysseus and Telemachus are time and time again averted by the former's great adventures and struggles with the heavies: the Cyclopes, Calypso, Circe. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are shown to be missing their initial encounter by a nick of time, a few moments: at the newspaper office and at the National Library, until they meet later and foretold in an episode known as The Pandemonium, where they experience the "truth" before their eyes. But in Big Fish, there are no missed encounters between father and son in the physical sense but ostensibly on a much deeper scale, in the "perceptive" or even "intellectual" sense. What happens is that when William Bloom grows up and develops a mind outside of his father's myths, he comes to realize he does not know his father after all; the mythical tales dislodge Edward Bloom's reality and William's need of a real vision of him, thus resulting to their estrangement.

But like all love stories, there has got to be a comeback, a moment of reconciliation. The father, now old and dying (portrayed by Albert Finney, an Oscar must-nominee), summons his son to his deathbed and which the son agrees to, not to say 'get well pops' but, on a more significant reason, to know him finally, hopefully. A dying man tells no (tall) tales, they say, and the son dreams so. Alas towards the end of the movie when the fabulist and the realist meet, with a haunting episode reminiscent of the tenderest moments of, say, Alice In Wonderland, or like a curtain call in a great stage show, with all memorable characters giving a final bow, collectively telling us, in silence or body language, in a simple greeting or a great narrative, that like Ulysses, the episodes of Big Fish are not, repeat NOT, an attempt to show slice of life but, on a grander scale, interpretations of life. Which delivers the concluding episode as nothing nobler than a proclamation of truth, the moment we all wait for when William Bloom gets to know his father and find the truth behind his tales.

By way of celluloid, the magical Big Fish should teach this blog what it cries shamelessly: casting the spell of life and literature. Danny de Vito, playing a circus impressario, speaks these words when introducing a circus act - and which could have referred to the movie in its entirety: You will never see anything like this. For like great minds in great literature, Big Fish shows to all and sundry: The Myth Is real, Go Fish!

MY WORLD OF 5 ILLUMINATING THINGS

Senhor Jose wondered if we could be called half-silly if we cut our silliness in half. I'll take the challenge as blog guinea pig and hereby cut by one-half my previous illluminating silliness just so we could wrap all these crap and move on to find my moron, not so much to find if I am half-silly, really, because I'd rather be full, say fool.

5 Proofs Of My Athleticism:
- In 5th grade, I was timed 12 secs. in the 100m sprint and 1:08 in the 400m dash.
- Still in 5th grade, I was the star of the school in this local sport called alalandoy.
- I played organized basketball thru college; in one backyard league I even earned the nickname NBA because of flashy moves.
- I occasionally ice skate, rockclimb (belaying), kayak and snowboard.
- I recently beat a neighbor in a singles match of tennis. The kid was the top seed of their school's tennis team.

5 Proofs Of My Athletefootesism: the preceding are misleading because I cannot:
- layup a basketball with my left coming from a dribble with my left;
- tread on water;
- toss a voleyball;
- finish a bowling game without a canal;
- properly hold a billiard cue.

5 Stupidest Things I Did When I Was Young & Stupid:
- I was in 4th grade when I tried to look at the scorching sun through a magnifying glass. Half the world heard me scream;
- I was in 5th grade, it was a Sunday, and waiting for my 1st trip to the beach when I decided to prepare myself against my friends' advise that I can't open my eyes underwater. I put a good amount of rocksalt in my right eye. Result: the miserable eye got swollen, I did not go to the beach, and my Dad hit me in the head;
- Summer vacation after my 5th grade, the whole family went to my dad's province up north. One day I was biking when I heard this group of local kids singing an uppitty song in their dialect. I easily caught the tune and the lyrics and I was singing the song on my way home. At the dinner table that night, I proudly burst into song with my newly-learned song. All hell broke loose; the lyrics of the song turned out to be "your shit sucks, la-la-la, your shit sucks!"
- In 6th grade, I tried to test my toughness by jumping into the swimming pool chest first. If I had 9 lives, I left the pool with 8 more;
- I was wooing two girls in 1st yr. college and one day in February I sent each of them a Valentine card. Both got the card intended for the other. Those cards were my curse. I did not get either of them, nor any other girl my entire 1st yr in college.

5 Books I Will Add To My Bookshelf Collection
- Gargantua & Pantagruel by F. Rabelais
- History Of The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
- Balthasar And Blimunda by Senhor Jose Saramago
- Confessions by St. Augustine
- Sakura, Johansson and Wilson, editors

5 CD Tracks I Last Listened To, Intently
- Oh!, by Dave Matthews
- The Green Groves of Erin, by YoYo Ma
- Ribbons In The Sky, by Stevie wonder
- One, by U2
- Livin' On A Prayer, (new arrangement), by Bon Jovi featuring Olivia d' Abo

MY WORLD OF 10 ILLUMINATING THINGS

Man has an unending love affair with things grouped in tens, not just in a femalebod depicted con carta dies or Bo Derek10. Thus, even in a world of crazed indulgences we see a certain regard reserved for people ranked as top ten, places rated as most popular ten, or events established as most memorable ten.

I have no problem with Bo but if my life were to revolve in her 10 I'd rather say No; in my world of crazed indulgences I set my own little tens delineating my littleself ten little times, so in this lifeblog let us meet and I'll raise my two arms, let's do two high fives, yo man that makes it a ten!

10 Inanimate Things I'll Bring To A Deserted Island:
- Bartlett's Book Of Familiar Quotations, 17th ed.
- Hunting Knife
- Water Purifier
- Pen
- Writing Pad
- Sleeping Bag
- Guitar
- Jacket
- Rope
- Rosary

10 Things On The Menu For An EB With Jobert, Jet, Belle & Ghost, My Host:
- Pork Sinigang with Lemon Grass
- Waldorff Salad
- Lamb Chops
- Rice Pilaff
- Marinated Mozzarella
- Pancit Palabok
- Syrah, for the girls
- Stout, for the boys
- Eclair
- Peruvian Coffee

10 Things Constituting My Pancit Palabok:
- Fat Palabok Noodles
- Maggi Instant Palabok Sauce
- Tiger Shrimps
- Squid Heads
- Squid Balls
- Anchovies
- Roasted Garlic
- Ground Pork Rinds
- Chopped Boiled Eggs
- Chopped Scallions

10 Websites I Frequently Visit:
- Jobert's Confusion
- Jet's Life
- Freude's Frauds
- Angela's Crystals
- Belle's Journal
- Dennis Da Bopis
- INQ7's
- NYTimes'
- Columbia University's
- Ploughshares'

10 Personal Characteristics Uncharacteristic Of My Person; They Say I have:
- A Child's Voice
- A Woman's Handwriting
- An Adolescent's Attention Span
- A Mother's Patience
- A Father's Vulnerability To A Daughter's Request
- A Grandfather's Memory
- A Gardener's Green Thumb
- A Lamb's Meekness
- A Sprinter's Quickness
- An Italian's Sentimentality

10 Things I Find Hauntingly Beautiful:
- James Joyce's Chiasms and Epiphanies
- Jose Saramago's Prose
- Cumulus Over Blue Skies
- Rainforests
- Eagles' Flight
- Women's Gymnastics
- Lighthouses
- Rustic Fields Of Green
- Sunrise And Sunsets
- Special Olympics

10 Sounds I Always Longed To Hear
- My Cellphone Ringing At 7:20 AM And 6:30 PM
- Angela's Speaking Voice
- Rain, While I Sleep
- YoYo Ma's and Maurice Gendron's Cellos
- My Nieces' And Nephews' Laughter
- Mrs. Jones, Counting Crows, Live
- Church Bells
- My Dad's Whistles
- Dolphins' Ik-Ik-Iks
- Filipino Lenten/Passion Songs

Last 10 Things I Bought:
- Speed-Read Thermometer
- Nyquil Cough Syrup
- Chicken Combo Meal
- Tazo Chai Black Tea
- Shoe Laces
- Prince Tennis Balls
- Potting Soil
- Pure Ice Linen Spray
- JM Coetzee's Disgrace
- Bon Jovi's This Left Feels Right

10 Best Films I've Seen In 2003 (In Order Of Preference):
- Big Fish
- American Splendor
- 21 Grams
- Mystic River
- Finding Nemo
- Cold Mountain
- Matchstick Men
- Swimming Pool
- 28 Days After
- The Magdalene Sisters

10 MustThings To Do In A Lifetime:
- Plant A Tree
- Teach A Class
- Publish A Book
- Nurture A Charity (With Time And/Or Money)
- Write A Song
- Learn To Dance
- Scubadive
- Speak French
- Experience Venice
- Appreciate Shakespeare

BOOKLIST, READING LIST, WISHLIST

Collecting a writer's work is a way
of owning the artist you admire.
- John Baxter
A Pound of Paper

I love books. I own hundreds of books and I intend to own hundreds more. In my place where dogs are not allowed, books are my best friend and the consequence of a disguised blessing: they don't howl, they don't bite, they don't cause allergies. But like their canine challengers to our undiffused attention, books provide us with one transcending quality: they make us interesting.

(Don't tell this to my non-reading friends, though. To them I am a boring companion of the most yawnable kind, a prototype dweeb deprived of true life. I certainly drive them nuts with my inputs on topics of utmost concerns: when they talk about the wives of societal celebrities, I retort back with the erotic qualities of the Wife of Bath; when they discuss the realism of Reality TV, I give my own discussion on the fantastic quality of Magical Realism; when they find horror in the dissolution of Ben/Jen's planned wedding, I narrate the horror of the dissolution of the Compson family.)

Books, like dust, in my flat abound. They're seen and unseen, above and beneath, covered and exposed: under my bed, in hampers, inside closets and cabinets, atop shelves and tables, and of course - in the livingroom Bookshelf.

This Bookshelf, in essence, for all intents and purposes, is my library, my centerpiece not inaccurately my soul, the one and only thing in my entire unit that I wanted people to notice and comment on, good or bad. And my Bookshelf's Books, bestfriends they are to me and us, rarely disappoint.

My Bookshelf, like a true library, is divided into sections - without the bureaucratic machination of catalogues and indexes. I arranged them into categories for easier elucidation, each accompanied here by a description and a wish.

(I, too, have readership shortcomings. I have not read all my books, not even half of what's in the Bookshelf. And there are a lot of good books which I am embarassed to admit I have not owned nor read: Tolstoy's War and Peace, Rand's Atlas Shrugged, any of Charles Dickens'. My knowledge of Cervantes' and Dante's and Milton's works are limited to those taken up in school. I also do not have a book by a Filipino author - but for a reason. I donated what I had to the county library where, through the efforts of our compatriots here, a Filipiniana section had been put up, with my donated books - from F. Sionil Jose to Jessica Zafra to Bob Ong - all catalogued. Likewise, I do not have the titles I already owned back in the Philippines: Huxley's A Brave New World, Wright's Native Son, Orwell's 1984, Lord Jim and other stories by Conrad, and many more; the reasons were practical, financial. Finally, my list does not include the Holy Bible which I do not consider a book but a life element, like air and sunshine.)

And so with no further ado, fellow book readers and prospective borrowers, here are My Bookshelf's Booklist, divided into five sections, the five levels of my literary heaven, books I consider - with certain exceptions - yours as much as mine.

Section 1 - Limited/Special edition: due to their special printing or binding or difficulty in procuring, these books occupy the top tier of my Shelf, books which even the most persistent book robbers cannot take away and most unfriendly fire cannot eat up, or Shakespeare be damned, because they are the ones to come with me at the first sign of hostility, and always, I wish, to remain in my possession until the end of my time.

- The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
- The Complete Works of Mark Twain
- The Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran
- The Tale of Genji (Unabridged)/Lady Murasaki
- The Heritage Club Edition of The Brothers Karamazov/Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Great Documents Of The World - Milestones of Human Thought/Friedrich Heer
- The Impressionists-A retrospective/Martha Kapos, Editor
- The Louvre Collection (anthology)/Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux

Section 2 - My favorite tier, these are bonafide classics, part of those which Italo Calvino said - ouch I was hit - we always refer to as something we are rereading (but never said 'we are reading...', out of embarassment, what hypocrisy!); these are the books I wish I could commit to memory so that in the horrible event all books in the world are destroyed I will be there to tell my masters' stories, verbatim, word for word, their thought, my voice.

- The Origin Of Species/Charles Darwin
- Ulysses/James Joyce
- A Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Man/Joyce
- Dubliners/Joyce
- The Lost Steps/Alejo Carpentier
- The Kingdom Of This World/Carpentier
- Explosion In A Cathedral/Carpentier
- Middlemarch/George Elliot
- Book Of Disquiet/Fernando Pessoa
- Animal Farm/George Orwell
- The Trial/Franz Kafka
- The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman/Laurence Sterne
- The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
- Swann's Way/Marcel Proust
- Moby Dick/Herman Melville
- The Catcher In The Rye/JD Salinger
- Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges
- Catch 22/Joseph Heller
- A Separate Peace/John Knowles
- The Turn Of The Screw And Other Short Novels/Henry James
- The Power And The Glory/Graham Greene
- The Way Of All Flesh/Samuel Butler

Section 3 - Most of these books could have been part of the prior section but for one qualifying thing, reverential in itself, these books are the works of Nobel Prize Winners in Literature, making this section sui generis, a class in itself. These are the books I wish to give to the first Extra Terrestrial I will meet, books that represent the quality of Earth's literary masters and literary critics.

- The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- For Whom The Bell Tolls/Hemingway
- A Farewell To Arms/Hemingway
- The Sound And The Fury/William Faulkner
- Soul Mountain/Gao Xingjian
- Hundred Years Of Solitude/Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- All The Names/Jose Saramago
- Stone Raft/Saramago
- Blindness/Saramago
- The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis/Saramago
- Among The Believers/VS Naipaul
- Shosha/Isaac Beshevis Singer
- The Magic Mountain/Thomas Mann
- Labyrinth of Solitude/Octavio Paz

Section 4 - The Modern Classics, these are the books I wish to give to arrogant non-readers, those who do not see any life in my person, those who I wanted converted overnight, for these are the books with the power to convert: easy to read, and in their own rights award-winning, in their own sense breathing.

- Billy Bathgate/EL Doctorow
- Angela's Ashes/Frank McCourt
-'Tis/McCourt
- Anil's Ghost/Michael Ondaatje (autographed copy)
- Liar's Club/Mary Karr
- The House On The Lagoon/Rosario Ferre
- Eccentric Neighborhoods/Ferre
- How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents/Julia Alvarez
- The Corrections/Jonathan Frenzen
- Sabbath's Day/Philip Roth
- Old Gringo/Carlos Fuentes
- The Years With Laura Diaz/Fuentes
- Atonement/Ian McEwan
- Martin Dressler/Steven Milhauser
- Kingdom Of Shadows/Alan Furst
- The Tesseract/Alex Garland
- The Beach/Garland
- Independence Day/Richard Ford
- Empire Falls/Richard Russo
- The Root And The Flowers/LH Myers
- The Ends Of The Earth/Robert D. Kaplan
- A Walk In The Woods/Bill Bryson
- A Thousand Acres/Jane Smiley
- Moo/Smiley
- The Battle For God/Karen Armstrong
- The God Of Small Things/Arundhati Roy
- Prisoners Of Honor/David Levering Lewis
- The Poisonwood Bible/Barbara Kingsolver
- The Things They Carried/Tim O'Brien
- Shipping News/Annie Proulx
- For The Time Being/Annie Dillard
- Waiting/Ha Jin
- For The Relief Of Unbearable Urges/Nathan Englander
- Creek Walk and Other Stories/Molly Giles
- If On A Winter's Night A Traveler/Italo Calvino
- God, A Biography/Jack Miles
- Four Complete Novels/Frank Herbert
- A Good Man In Africa/William Boyd
- Bombay Ice/Leslie Forbes
- Indian Killer/Sherman Alexie
- A heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius/Dave Eggers
- Cold Mountain/Charles Frazier
- Black Mountain/Les Sandiford (autographed copy)

Section 5 - Last but not the least, this level contains anthologies, poetry books and books on literary criticism - the ones I spend most time but least money on; these are the literary forms I am most interested in, and these are the books I mainly received as gifts; these, too, are the type of books I wish to present to friends-readers who, by some reasons and unfortune, do not seem to appreciate the beauty of poems, essays and short stories.

- The 100 Greatest American Short Stories Of The Century/John Updike, editor
- The 2003 Pushcart Prize
- The 2002 Pushcart Prize
- 2001 New Stories From The South/Ravenel, editor
- Contemporary LatAm Short Stories/Pat McNees, editor
- Short Stories By LatAm Women, Celia C. de Zapata, editor
- Sudden Fiction/Shapard and Thomas, editors
- You've got To Read This/Hansen & Shepard, editors
- NYPL's Books Of The Century/Elizabeth Diefendorf, editor
- The Seven Ages/Louise Gluck
- The Dreamsongs/John Berryman
- The World Of The Ten Thounsand Things/Charles Wright
- Selected Poems/Antonio Machado
- Selected Poems/Robert Frost
- The Vintage Book Of Contemporary World Poetry/JD McClatchy, editor
- Eight American Poets/Joel Conarroe, editor
- Cinnamon Peeler/Ondaatje
- Postmodern American Fiction/Geyh, Lebron & Levy, editors

There you go, so now let's read on. "Once upon a time when the world was flat..."