Been to places, but this is what i write about

By the second set when Murray had changed shirts I was close to believing there’d be a five-set magic to this match. In Tagalog folklore when you’re lost you turn your shirt inside out. The charm didn’t work on Murray, who was tight as the Queen’s upper lip when Princess Diana died. So in the end Federer had an English breakfast, and Murray was essentially bland cucumber sandwich.

Wa-haaaat, just when I thought my Federer love had been tamed by age on both sides, mine and his, he goes ahead to win a 16th. This doesn’t seem fair, until I realize I haven’t watched an actual grand slam final of his live. So he has no right to retire or be mediocre until I do so.

I was watching him against Frenchman Tsonga from the lobby of Hotel Manhattan in Bangkok. And now, seeing him against Andy Murray, moving so well around the court, neither rickety nor unbalanced at any point, but playing with a newfound wisdom that can only come from fatherhood or the peace of mind from breaking all those records, then I can’t imagine idolizing another player just yet (but who else is there, really).

What Andy Murray needs: his own country. Must be horrid to be nagged by the English.

Legitimising the illegitimate rants

WARNING : coloured, incoherent and bratty.

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As you start giving the 20-peso bill a kiss at the end of the day for having taken you home, and as you feel the pinch of the food equivalents of Php 150 (%#$#$#%$&&*%&^%&@@ that’s sandwich and coffee!) surrendered to villainous cabbies every morning, then you’re running back and forth the broadside of being at a loss of disposable income.

You’re partly toeing the poverty line because immediate spending is painfully deferred (and you have shame, so you don’t run to mum and dad), but you’re still middle class because you can afford to have savings, which you’re not supposed to touch because…you’re middle class, and the future is middle ground of lucky stars and black holes. The liminality of being middle class is a dizzying situation of shuttling these poles.

Personally, such sentiment is not necessarily borne on a tendency towards conspicuous consumption (see Thorstein Veblen, pls.), and the perpetual dissatisfaction it brings about. It’s a forward-looking conditioning that’s convenient to invoke when you’re (sorry for being such a nag) middle class with confusing prospects and questionable assets, whichever mood you’re coming from. To illustrate, the liminality approximates the feeling of disenfranchisement at being broke until the next paycheck (which further confuses your already confused state). Yeah, life’s not fair but you’re the whiner. (and why do you whine? etc. etc.)

Now, in the spirit of being schooled in the social sciences, one has to take to heart the social and psychological costs of being grease droplet for the GDP. This task should not have to call forth scholarly traditions anymore; one feels the economic squeeze right down to the soul if one ever had so much as a concern for not dying young and haplessly unaccomplished, or if one indulges in existentialist crises with materialist framings, always with the luxury of the project of self-fashioning. And yet one can not curse one’s lucky stars.

So, due to the (seemingly unjustified) disaffected constructs of that state of being, the contradictions of being middle class need to be addressed for posterity’s sake, just as scores of clueless college graduates are being carted off to the workplace without the good measure of raising their heads to the how and the why of stressful employment. I don’t have to guess that economic independence had been built up among them as the next logical step to education. There’s always the option to be financially parasitic, but that won’t transmit well in the next alumni homecoming, for one, and the crying need for consumption and full control.

This leads me to conclude thus, in careless metaphors: middle class education is the wraith-like thingie (downsizing intended, for lack of word and feeling) that stalks your worker bee conscience. It is simultaneously the seat of pride and obligation, of ethics and excessive self-interest. It is your passport to grander horizons, but it roots you to a single paradigm, and worse comes to worst, to overzealous one-track aspirations. I am led to believe that (quality) education is the comeuppance of being middle class, but education as we know and have it in this demographic region could be both so interesting and illusory.

Consider the attendant exposures and socializations in the full availment of this costly fundamental right. As lucky stars would have it, responsible parentage and a growing preference for retail transactions in the market for education, at the very least, give the middle class student real chances to study in what they call “exclusive schools”.

By definition these are usually privately owned and run institutions that automatically target the financially capable market. But aside from being magnets for the affluent, these institutions, propelled by profit and expansion, adjust their payment schemes to accommodate the large midsection of the economic landscape. Regular employees of government and private companies, through the good graces of educational plans, can now afford to send their children to exclusive schools, even without making a killing with the sale of office supplies. As tuition payments also come in tranches, spending space for mid-income families expands, and the household budget need not be so strangulated all the time. But my hypothesis is that these installments do not really sweeten the costs of sending children to school, especially if one thinks of the number of payments made in the stretch of thirteen years or more, excluding allowance and other miscellaneous expenses. The lapse of time further adds to anxiety over the investment; and I suppose middle-income spenders are more prone to lose sleep over the returns.

That the class and financial questions set up the disconnect between cultivated aspirations and possibilities with regard to future lifestyle choices and more relevantly, self-images is the basic premise. For what does exclusive schooling give a middle class student but the romanticized view of a future easily conquerable, at the least, by skill, talent and industry? “Exclusive schools” are self-groomed to be elitist without an outright declaration of their class-ist orientations. By connotation they’re quite solemn about demographic filters such as sex and religion, but all these ideological exclusions could very well be transmuted to performance. The student is constantly made to believe, by unabashed declaration of the school’s well-dispersed marketeers, that he/she is studying in one of the best institutions of the land. Moreover, her socializations within hardly help in the grounding to austerity — she is likely to stare economic disparities in the face with well-heeled schoolmates.

Alas, pride built up on educational background impacts most tragically after all requisites for future formal employment have been turned in. Self-misplacement is the deferred cost of betting on “elite” education. There is harshness in the “real world” cliche that only its banality can subdue. The middle class graduate from “one of the best” is more likely to meet this shattering reality more spot on than her affluent schoolmates, and she is also less likely to be accepting of obstructions to self-improvement than her underprivileged counterparts. She has the unsure confidence of being furnished with some bankable knowledge, but is tethered to her going rates in the job market. Such is a result of the messy dovetails of the obligations to deliver decent returns on a costly education by ensuring lifelong security, and what i presume to be an aversion to boredom, regiment and self-commodification in the desire for leisure and the absence of chances to feel so deprived — without reasonable cause.

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And this is Prof. Sarah Raymundo’s reaction to this:

This theme that is petit-bourgeois suffering has never failed to hurt me. There’s nothing sadder than what is almost always the case about the pb: they measure themselves not in terms of their capacity but always in terms of their aspirations. These aspirations are never legiitmate for they were never formed out of a desire for actual freedom but were, unquestionably, institutionalized mechanisms of containment. And when i say they and them, i also mean me. And this is why as i grow older and poorer– (much poorer than my highshcool days, because those were bongga days but were of course inauthentic:not faithful to my class’ capacity it’s just that i have had the fortune of having parents who until retirement mistook themselves for horses, and they were tired, i tell you, so tired–i’ve come to be more sensitive to this suffering. i know it’s probably a quarter of the peasant or working class suffering , but that’s what ’s been eating me precisely! they say that 70% of Asia’s population are farmers and majority of the world is comprised by working people dispossessed of the means of production. Now if the middle class is also subjected to suffering, who benefits from this system? I’d be happy to know that somebody’s actually happy. I don’t think Bush is happy, because more than anything else, he is just mad. The royal families in different nations, with varying degrees of diminished influence are anxious, not happy. Gloria Arroyo is not happy, she’s guilty. Local icons of wealth like gina lopez, kris aquino and ting-ting cojuanco are anxiety-ridden women for whom even a marxist like me would definitely smash patriarchy in their name (but only upon request)!

Cuba has modestly began to cut the crap but there was never a day that it was not demonized. Activists here in our very own country never falter in their stubborn quest for justice. But there has not been a month that has passed that not one of them was killed or abducted.

Jesus! this blog entry is sad. But maybe the holidays (with all its distaste for christian humanity, compassion and asceticism as seen in its flagrant display of fetishes) deserve some realist smashing. Thank you.

In a parallel universe…

Abbie had eased away her phobia for germs for the opportunity to work in a medium-sized law firm, the sole proprietorship of an ageing attorney who once made a name in Remedial Law. The proportions in a medium-sized law firm are faithful to description, although its label is quite the misnomer.

The firm operates in a rather bleak, dust-ridden, two-storey house, the domicile of inert members of the strictly intellectual classes who, despite the convenience of having maids, could just not be bothered by the offensive blow of domestic concerns to mental functions.  Moreover, everything else is shaped according to the company’s nature : the salary is average, it is staffed by nondescript, neutered robots, information technology is in the painful transitional stage and the big boss has been cut to size by a shrinking, decrepit frame, a slight hobble and a diminishing reputation, making him smaller than the portly arrogance of his youth, which left its imprint through a decided, incongruous double chin.

Abbie was a smart girl, though bereft of the titles that mattered. She only had her law degree stilted rather precariously on a mathematics undergraduate degree. She had no use for maths, and in fact had resented it in favor of carefree campus life. When her grades had started falling she realized she could not pounce freely on the subject matter like a national science high school graduate could, and it eventually followed that after ho-hum semesters of clinging to the threads of near-failure she needed to introduce words into her severely concussed linguistic mindscape.

Law was, by turns, an escape and a reality, and where, at least, the modicum of ambition was clear : pass the bar, enter a law firm, and be either filthy rich or bourgeois bohemian. The enticements were enough inducements. Her speech flowed; her people skills bound her to a network of fraternal decadence and endogamous conversation. Legalese even permitted her some authority over her elders. Soon enough she was advising friends mired in debts, workplace injustice and conjugal contestations over property and informal child custody.

By the time she took the bar exams she had memorized the mucky by-ways en route to a legal profession, such as a general solicitousness that charmed everyone but unforgiving bar examiners, and of course, her socialist grandfather, who had enough irreverence for established jurisprudence that he did not bother throwing a fit upon finding out his birth certificate was nowhere to be found in the archives of the National Statistics Office. He had contempt for the necessary legal route to defend his rights, and in the end, it was a personal relief to be technically non-existent. He was fully supportive and phlegmatic about Abbie entering the profession.

Patriarchal politics did not much dissuade Abbie when, as a jittery underbar in August, she had staked a non-contractual stint in Atty. L______’s musty law firm. By that time, the conservatism she suspected she had had blown itself into a practice, and she was not very put off when she overheard the old guy haggling fees worth millions with a client over the phone. It had been her first day as the legal assistant who had no salary,nor a contract, and apparently, even not even a shadow, for she was ghosting with a mere allowance of 20k and doggedly following orders like a sold slave. To be fair, Atty. L_____ was either avuncular or diplomatically lecherous — he addressed Abbie at eye-level and did not condescend the legal pleadings he had asked him to write. He brought her to client meetings during which he heaped her inordinate amounts of steak to the point she suspected she was working at the subsistence level determined by the price of choice meat cuts.

Needless to say they got along in a rather egalitarian manner. The old man knew everyone; she wasn’t about to spite her own connections by flubbing fatally in any given task. She swallowed his crankyness, trained as she was by the moods of her own Grandpa Grouchy Marx. She sincerely found his irony and tactlessness funny, and we can suppose he was as fond of her as he was affectionately beholden to his own lawyer daughter, who in turn condemned his reputation as a philanderer and who had, at one time, excoriated him for his indiscretions in flagrante. Atty. L_____, junior co-managed the family law firm with a moral hand and a firm suspension of habeas corpus for any of her father’s rumoured bad behaviour. She was also an unflappable cross-examiner to Abbie, who, on her very first day, was recipient to a scandalised, salutary remark of, “Oh. I thought you would be older.”

(To be continued…)

Intermezzo 1

There was something neither funny nor clever with the way he said it, but I took it to mean I should man up and piss my emotions uprightly astride a bowl. There was an option to shave my head — which wasn’t really an option; I was much too vain,— or hobble home drunk, which wouldn’t amount to any resolution, just a dreadful whitewash of death wishes, injured pride and maybe a few unconscious moments of homage to the ‘Ol Failed One that invariably leads to hiccupping hopelessness.

But what I did in the ensuing occasions, and I was smarter for it and credited by my own silly triumphant grin, was to tell my perpetually annoying colleague to bug off one day at work, and to finally refuse the offhanded propositions that prey on the sordid vulnerabilities of my situation, and to get messed up over trifles with everyone. Being generally angsty for a week was eventful, and succeeded in segregating the characters of my immediate environment into good egg vs bad egg baskets, to the end that i’ve inadvertently established a scheme of human relations that I found easy. It was a matter of deleting a friend or ignoring a friend request, as the commonplace dismissal of tact in facebook goes, and in its stead, an internal uprising over the lack of feeling with which people engage with each other these days.

Then someone would wake me up in time for lunch, and i would crawl astir in curious recollection of the morning I bolted by shutting off the alarm. Someone would feed me an omelette sandwich, or a similar normalized novelty that could pique my interest little by little until I get to the point of hearty laughs. Those things — and then you find that you could be cruel and negative in your description of the ‘Ol Failed One, like a bitter rock star who wasted most of his intellectual moments eking out an idea that occurred to him while he was inebriated. And give or take a few crow’s feet, it’s how you move on and become decent again.

Aftermath part 4

Juris was, for the most part, a cigarette smuggler. For a month now I had trooped around company ______ like a ritual initiate. When we ran out of things to do in the office he’d summon me companionably to the death row, an excess of the building’s lobby downstairs devoted to compulsive employees who, at the pretext of failed vocabularies, chain-smoked. Then I’d make an elabrate show of arranging my desk, or closing that MS Word window with the blank document, or shutting folders I’ve barely perused, and, successfully feeding the fatigue that sprang from doing nothing, I conjured the entitlement for leisure cigarettes.

At this point it would have been a downward career cascade; obviously I wasn’t of much use in a quantifiable, productive sense. I copied and recopied and handed over without expectation of feedback, while the lassitude of Juris’ habits wore on me comfortably. If you looked around well enough Juris wouldn’t be the boss, because he doddered past me everyday without a single comment, just a rueful impression of introspection that suggested his abstract mind. For a week I anticipated the arrival of an overall Nazi who would send me spilling and scrambling. There was much talk about a certain Big Boss, as if I haven’t met enough of them in my swinging career that now flattened out into this little loafer’s den. But I trooped along and smoked and loitered with the rest, from time to time aching over a word or two that I might consider the day’s output. I wasn’t about to complain.

In the lounge area that had the strong rusty odor of cheap tobacco I began to stare cluelessly at Juris in tentative den postures that didn’t offer much by way of icebreakers. His initial cheerfulness over a novice’s rapt attention, I guess, had been switched off, and I was now officially part of routine. Then he’d ask me a series of questions about my research and writing experience but I’d answer like a mere encoder of sorts being dictated upon by little blips of factual input in my head. He seemed generally alright with the dead conversation, so I didn’t labor for substance in my relationship to his vague authority. All I knew was I had a job, and yes, fuck the rest of them, I’m about to be paid handsomely. Pardon the description, I had not seen money in a long time. Besides, I more than exceeded coffee-making skills. Any regular day I actually held the right to have papers photocopied by a clerk, and reserving some intellectual burden for myself by gratifying the accomplishment of a dirty task without lifting my butt.

Naturally, for my lack of innovation in an environment that went along without urgency I couldn’t dream of being the indispensable apprentice. Ange’s part of the moral, it turned out, had to be aligned with certain people who actually did something with their hours, and Ange being the model assistant, all she had to do was stake in 24 of hers daily in a wilful grind, and for that she entered into tacit mutual backscratching with her own Nazi that also soothed other itches covering head to toe — egoistic flirtations, vice and maybe whimsical day-offs for pedicures. A week into the job I rang her up to report failure of seduction. Indeed, I wasn’t even amusement, and for the first time I contemplated learning magic tricks through card decks to keep my colleagues transfixed over the breaks, or maybe still impress Juris, because I never mastered circular smoke rings or knotting a cherry stalk through some weird contortion of the tongue.  There really was a performative occasion for the latter, when he treated me out the night of my first foray into the job with some of the employees whose voices I hadn’t heard yet. He had asked if I had other talents. Then someone from the group popped the cherry stalk trivia as if it were an urban legend needing confirmation. I certainly tried, and after spitting out the mangled, violated stalk Juris answered a cellphone call and walked over the bar, and the rest of us solicited each other’s names anew. Until now I can’t remember how the night went without the arbitration of hobbies and other substantive points of interest to push the awkward party through a good-natured conclusion. By midnight we were all sober, but very much forgetful of the overall emptiness of conversation.

Malcolm in the middle

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html

Malcolm Gladwell doubles as a pet peeve and a genius for me, like those Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics guys (Levitt and Dubner). This article by a Harvard psychology professor dissects his claims so acutely, giving flesh to my own incredulities. Sadly, I still don’t know what Gladwell tries to make of himself. Maybe a type of innovator of thoughts, but as Pinker points out, he is a well-read dillettante who is dependent on lessons from experts without being an expert himself. And now I’m convinced that the problem with guys who dip their noses into social phenomena and isolate them as variables floating in correlation to others is that they get caught thinking like amateurs.

So, I argue that we musn’t put excess faith in socsci bric-a-brac, the way we avoid professionalizing mere hobbies. They’re probably fun when the textbooks aren’t anymore.  Besides, it insults those who spend years amassing knowledge on singular interests, and corollarily, those who spend months and years writing thick dissertations with special focus. (That includes me)

First date with Hillary

Because I don’t enjoy the same journalistic privilege and reputation as Jessica Zafra, I gawked Madame US Secretary of State as an unembedded blogger, which means I observed the diplomatic exercise from the site of Jessica Zafra the embedded blogger, and of course, the papers, and I’m blogging about it.

Honestly thought her campaign for democratic nomination would have addressed all curiosities by now, but Chris Tiu the all around guy cleverly reminds us we still didn’t know her favorite basketball team. And then I hear there were other first-date variety questions—would you converse about VFA on your first date? I don’t assume.

So the cocktail pleasantries were not interrupted by a harangue of boos and loud protests against American military presence and the stranglehold of US foreign policy, but we definitely found ourselves a softer public face for Hillary. I hear coffee with Sarah Palin might be in her cards, so we can agree enough that she’s a rather forthcoming stateswoman.

My mom named her new laptop Hillary. She called her previous laptop (the one I’m using right now) Scarlett, after Scarlett O’ Hara of Gone with the Wind, and you can tell she likes them strong women. I can imagine both taking over the White House, Scarlett running it like Tara and teaming up with mobsters in the Rhett Butler make, and Hillary putting the men before her out to pasture.

Back in 2oo6 I read a book called The Truth About Hillary by Edward Klein, which depicted Clinton, then Senator, as what I take to be Imelda Marcos in the spirit of taking over the Presidency by being wife to the President, but without the same fashion sense, or the slightest coquettish complex (on the contrary). In the appended photos we are treated to black and white images of Hillary in dowdy college wear and geeky, oversized specs, and Bill Clinton sporting a rather unruly mane, and together their HillBilly Yale countenance foreshadowed an odd White House tandem.

Edward Klein the author wasn’t very coy about his accusations. The words soulless, liar, unbelievable actress and performance are in bold-faced letters on the cover. Hillary wasn’t spared the awkwardness of her youth : Klein billed her a misfit during her college days, counting on testimonies from Bill’s former lovers who went on to be extramarital lovers. He further likened her to Bill’s mother, an “enabler”, he calls it (p.85), so Bill the adulterer turns out a bit Oedipal too.  And most damning of all, Klein stacked up evidence that Hillary knew and condoned Bill’s long-running affair with Monica Lewinsky all along, and essentially dismissed her marriage to the former President her first White House campaign. (p.128)

But I gossip about our guest. She enjoyed the party anyhow.

 

Scarlett and Hillary on my tabletop

 

 

Halloween Post

New Masters, New Servants

New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development and Women Workers in China

By Yan Hairong
2008: Duke University Press, USA

Reading about the plight of baomu (women rural migrant workers employed as domestic help in urban centres in China) from the vantage point of a Filipina reviewer is a morally compelling exercise. On the one hand, the baomu has her homologue in the Philippines in the identity of the kasambahay, which literally translates to a domestic helper living under the fold of her employer. Like the baomu, she usually hails from the rural areas, and is likely to fall within the same demographic brackets as Hairong’s research subjects. She will also most likely be crushed by historical, cultural and socio-political forces that will undermine her rural roots, and it is highly probable that she will be caught in the swirl of consumerist cultures and pop fanfare that are supposed to be the fringe attractions of working in the city.

I thought Hairong’s reflections and analysis of the lives of baomu or the dagongmei (women migrant workers) in general would be a simple exercise of discovering how these women who suffer the same fate across unequal rural and urban developments might find themselves real identities. Hairong starts tracing the migration of rural women from Wuwei county in Anhui province with a flashback of life there during the Mao era. Collective labour then was instituted, “with women’s labor contribution publicly recognized and compensated in terms of work points, which gave women some standing in the public arena.” (p.29)

This would be the turning point and start of exodus for the baomu, as she brings the Mao era value for her labour in the 1970s to the city, toward which she had been pushed by food shortages in her native town. During these initial chapters Hairong extends valuable analysis to the sense of shame that afflicted migrant women (p.33), as they straddled ideological conceptions that discredit domestic service in the context of the Cultural Revolution. The baomu came to represent the incongruous dregs of “the bourgeois lifestyle of high-rank officials” during this period.

As the book progressed I was swept by the ideological transitions that accost the baomu in reclaiming dignity. Hairong’s research methodology is comprised of well-articulated ideas from both Chinese history and her ethnographic methods in the form of sustained correspondence with her dagongmei informants. Both these areas of her study feed into each other and nourish her main reading of the fate of her compatriots: that the experience of being a baomu or dagongmei is inscribed within official, Postsocialist discourses of the Communist Party.

What might seem like an analytical long shot — relating the agency of dagongmei to shifting structures of Chinese society — had been defended by Hairong so well. Letters of informants to her are particularly enlightening and suggest China’s own misreading of its migrant workers and new value systems among middle class intellectuals that neglect the nuances of domestic labour. What Hairong does so elegantly is to take these misshapen notions of rural-urban dichotomy and politics of the body and commit them to a historical reading that spans the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping’s free market love.

This way, the image of Chinese leadership that emerges is crass, infantile and undeniably dangerous for the state’s five million rural immigrants. Hairong saucily reels back to Deng Xiaoping’s call for Chinese citizens to “let a few people get rich first” (p.140). At the same time, she reveals Chinese leadership as a master manipulator of human subjectivity, first interpellating a desire for suzhi improvement among rural migrant women and encoding them within the ploys of “neohumanism” (p.136). “With the ‘capitalization of the human life,’” Hairong argues, quoting Gordon (1991:44), “one encounters this unprecedented attention to, and exaltation of, human subjectivity as the most important agent for market growth and development.”

Suzhi is a Chinese term that resists exact definition for that quality of an individual or population that, under my reading, approximates the term “cultured” and all the neoliberal prejudice it carries. The baomu are often taught and encouraged to uproot themselves from their “impoverished” rural provenance and worldviews, pick up some suzhi in the cities, and transport it back home. Hairong devotes considerable discussion to the term and the manner it is hammered into the consciousness of the baomu, who in turn learns it by living in the household of her intellectual, middle- and upper middle class employers who can not be bothered by the physical exertions of household chores, and whose suzhi spoils them with special state attention to ensure that they never have to waste precious time in acquiring more suzhi doing menial labour. Hairong frames this situation in Foucauldian terms (p.98), involving “one class speaking to another ‘which has neither the same ideas as it nor even the same words’ (Foucault, 1979,276).”

This is the exact contradiction that would plague the ordinary baomu, who finds herself in the land of urbanity, modernity, and a real opportunity to transform her low suzhi into a higher one, to the effect that she’s both learning and unlearning in the city, as she is constrained to exhausting menial conditions. In the end, too, the state’s desire to improve the quality of its population and make them agents of Development is undermined by basic inequalities between rural and urban, lower and upper classes, and even men and women. Hairong’s class analysis based on the exchange of suzhi makes her ethnography even more compelling because it complements very well the fatigue, disenchantment and vulnerabilities as told by her informants in their letters.

Yao Hairong’s book might inspire other cultures where development discourses strive to make humans better neoliberal subjects than actually give them better life options. Governments like China’s that resort to tampering with people’s consciousness through all sorts of discursive devices, from neohumanism to vulgar Marxism, in the end, can not expect better quality citizens as it endlessly foments inequalities.

In a sense, the identity of the kasambahay is stuck in the same ideological quagmire as that of the baomu, who, at the most, “not being able or desiring to return, yet unable to cohere as subjects of Development in the city, (they) remain stuck as struggling liminal subjects.” (p.224) This position echoes the work of Filomeno V. Aguilar (1991), whom Hairong cites in the same page, describing the “transitional stage” of migrancy “during which the migrant, like a ritual initiate, is a liminal subject separated from the community and suspended from his or her pre-ritual habits of thinking and action. After undergoing a ritual self-transformation, the migrant rejoins the community as a post-ritual subject with a new personhood and an elevated cosmopolitan status.” Hairong’s work should be read by development scholars and neoliberal advocates obsessed with the “good graces” of labour export.

Reviewed by:

Frances Mae Carolina Ramos
Department of Anthropology
University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

Funny, messed up men PART 1

Last month was a real reading treat, partly due to both intellectual bias and underemployment. The rest of the time my reading was endowed with so much decadence, and the books I chose were like characters from A Bedful of Foreigners. They were all so deceptively simple, but you go off to sleep feeling like you spent the day losing all your punchlines, and that you’ve been laughing at the oddest jokes, and most of the time, not getting even the plainest cracks at all.

I was short-circuited again, back to my readings, by the arguments against reading too much. Some 8 to 5 people had some insights about how novel ideas might develop without the help of reading, and to my horror Albert Einstein had agreed with them, but I carried on, nevertheless, ignoring the wisdom embedded in:

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. (Einstein, and I’m not enough of a history buff to know the proper citation date of a forwarded quote)

That didn’t stop me from attending the Book fair at SMX, where I bought humor in RJ Ledesma’s “I do or I die”, and other compilations of Nick Hornby’s articles for The Believer magazine.

After Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, and disappointment over About a Boy, I could now safely assume that Hornby’s 100% human because he buys several books a month and fails to read them all, and he’s capable of underachieving his second novel. That should not be taken to mean I wasn’t the slightest bit amused. He is lightweight in every sense of the word; you could sneak the Polysyllabic Spree into the office and roll under your desk to hide your chuckles. You almost never laugh out loud, not because he’s not funny, but because he’s not your average drugged or drunken British snob treating the rest of humanity like a social buffoon.

You could sense Hornby might be a sympathetic person in general, just barely avoiding cheese. For one, he had been pretty vocal (and repetitive) about the plight of readers oppressed by lengthy biographies, although due to his indulgence of Dickens as probably the GOAT among English novelists he unfairly exonerated the boredom inflicted on me by The Pickwick Papers (honestly couldn’t get past half).  Then he takes fondness for books that speak of authentic human condition, like a mother caring for her two autistic children in Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam, from which he lifted a rather funny excerpt. Then there’s the David Copperfield that doesn’t die, lumped with the rest of Dickens’ greats like Great Expectations, read with an encore. So I was expecting About a Boy to be tearful, heart-wrenching and above all, hilarious. It turned out to be none of the above, so I swore this would be the last time I’m judging an author by the books he reads and how he critiques them.

I went on a Nick Hornby spree thanks to How to Talk to a Widower by Jonathan Tropper, whom critics were warmly praising for bringing the British author’s humor, or something like it, in tackling America’s dysfunctional suburbs. At the center of it all is a widower mourning (not much else you can do when you’re one, I suppose) the death of his cougar wife, Hailey, and struggling to raise the disturbed adolescent kid she left behind. I guess like the rest of us weaklings he mourns her by whining, getting drunk and pissing off other people a lot. He also skips work and sleeps with married women who make mean meatloafs (nice alliteration going there), gets shot by her husband during his sister’s wedding—the run-up to which wasn’t spared by his angsty shit—gets repeatedly beaten up by Hailey’s ex, and nagged by an alcoholic mom, and so forth until the reader gets a more-than-bargained-for share of humanity’s bleakness. The most pitiable characters in the novel were the doors, because they get banged and knocked down more than once, and the loitering rabbits on the lawn, who get dangerous stuff thrown at them out of mad testosterone drama. Summarily I was flat-out tired after putting the book down, and it certainly didn’t help that at turns it had been hilarious. Laughter and violence against helpless objects like doors and rabbits don’t comprise a formula for sanity.

By contrast, About a Boy had been so…tame. And diplomatic. I expected more from a freeloading perv like Will, and I doubt very much Hornby intended him to be crass, while the book is really about adults getting along nicely to save the kids. Then my cheap paperback copy has the motion picture cover, with Hugh Grant playing another variation of a British bloke. Hugh Grant strikes me as the ideal type for talkish screenplays, and I can’t be sure there’s another way of getting around About a Boy the movie but to make a talkish, reflective version of it, especially since nothing much happens. I need cataclysm sometimes to be engaged, and the book was off to a fine start with Marcus’ mom’s suicide attempt, and a duck getting killed, and the latter being a serious OFFENCE in Britain. It might have been interesting that all of the characters were walking disasters, but suddenly they were all spending Christmas together, and they never unknowingly walk off a cliff, except for Ellie, the puzzling, Kurt Cobain obsessed rebel who befriends Marcus, who lands him in a police station. But in the end, the victims of their dysfunction — ducks, shop windows, Joni Mitchell — were forgotten, and I was bored when they started going on regular Saturday outings.

To be continued; I’m late.