Ridiculous Convolutions

1. I have begun reading John Berger’s Booker Prize winning novel G. It is written in a manner that I find quite strange and I really don’t know what to make of it as of now.

2. Since all beginnings also mark an ending, allow me to jot down a few things on the month that was. I remember sitting in one of those huge chairs in the lobby of one of those prominent hotels in Makati sometime in the middle of September. I was two hours and a half early, waiting for some important activity to begin.

It was one of those times when my mind freely wandered around the edges of all the fictions that I’ve been reading recently. Everything melted into one potage, the different ingredients being the characters and the plots and the settings of all those dreams that seemed close but faraway at the same time. They joined together into one confounded narrative which I began with a conversation with the old count.

He complained of the limitations conferred by the text upon him: the child-brain that sets him running home on a sail boat while his adversaries rode trains and steam boats. How unfortunate too that he can only enter homes when invited, he added.

The other, who was a paranoid and a sneak, joined in with his gripes on how better the book he inhabited would have been if he followed the course of Irtenev in The Devil. To the devil with redemption! he cried (how he envied Svidrigailov).

And more chimed in, displacing the morning activities around me, creating even more convolutions to whatever I had in mind.

3. Two days later I found myself in a cafe with Tanizaki’s The Key while waiting for both the mall to open and my friend Dada to arrive. Its narrative alternates between the diary entries penned by a middle-aged man and that of his younger wife. These delve on their sexuality and the text can be somewhat erotic.

What I like about the novel is how one must tiptoe around the embellished certainty of both accounts to find the key to the “actual” events.

4. I’ve also begun with Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. I am expecting this to be a long-drawn affair, like my reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace last June and July.

War and Peace was lengthier at over a thousand and four hundred pages but I was done with it more quickly than I projected. I’m not into 19th Century English Classics as much as I am into Russian literature. Hence I expect this to last relatively longer.

There are 64 chapters and if I read three chapters a day, I’ll finish David Copperfield in around twenty days.

5. I am saddened by the disappearance of sanchospanza.com.

6. Also reading another one from my parent’s shelf: Damage Control: Why Everything You know About Crisis Management is Wrong by Eric Deenhall and John Weber.

7. Failed to make enough fuss on the commemoration of Ferdinand Marcos’ declaration of Martial Law in 1972 except for a repost of a MIDWEEK article on the Lina Brocka classic Orapronobis.

I am making up by referring everyone to Indolent Indio’s efforts to dig up on the present whereabouts of the late dictator’s corrupt cronies who never got the punishments they deserved.

I am fulminating with indignation. Down with bureaucrat capitalism!

8. On September 12, 2008, a literary suicide. The verdict is harsh but I at least will make it a point to get myself one of his books in the future:

Although we could argue that everything is anachronistic, that we live in an epoch with no sense of itself, and that we occupy a dislocated era, an age out of its proper time, an age Foster Wallace predicted, from a literary perspective, the suicide of David Foster Wallace, or for that matter, the suicide of any writer in the 21st century, is of no importance. ■