now boarding
I'm in the airport now--- using the computer terminal to while away the time. Even if I have easily four or five things that I've lugged over back to Cebu for this supposed vacation and finish by tomorrow. I guess this is payback time for the past few days of pretty much not doing anything. There's a thesis I need to check, an article I need to write on Ateneo Poetry, there are some poems I need to write for the exhibit that I just found out yesterday was going to be set up on monday na di-ay for the show that's going to be on wednesday na pala .
I've been reading Czeslaw Milosz for the past week. It's probably taken four serious attempts on his poems in the past four years for me to finally like him. I can't get enough of him. Last night, in the middle of galleria with Ina, and with the background music of some band singing John Mayer through a terrible sound system, I was reading one of his essays on exile. I know that much has been said about the state of the writer-in-exile and the nature of writing AS exile and I can't help but remember how I used to go nuts over this topic in college but reading about it again has made me realize just how much I am shaped by these concepts of distance, space, time, nostalgia and memory (because these two are different), exile and travel, movement and stasis, translation, translation, translation.
More entries on this as I spend the next three weeks in Cebu trying not to be a brat and finish what needs to be done, and start on what needs to be begun.
bon voyage!
posted by slowmotion @ 10:56 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Good luck in Cebu! And yes, exile is very formative. I remember tuloy one of the question you asked me before about where I find my otherness (/exile) as a heterosexual writer.
And lately, I'm beginning to change my mind about my previous answer, which was my penchant for loving unconventional knowledge, but now I think it's more of my obesity. Hahahaha!
hi dear. hope you enjoy cebu (you usually do anyway, right?). when are we seeing each other again? :)
useless tidbit: i bought that milosz book on my first date with e. last year, when we spent an hour at fully booked and i felt compelled to buy something intelligent. ahahaha
Beach! And Milosz! He's one of my sembreak companions too.
My latest read:
A Confession
by Czeslaw Milosz
My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress's neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.
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