2nd of three installments.
Pol Medina leaves his mainstream pugad. And finds another mainstream pugad really, that thought it wonderful that you could choose-your-own-punchline on comic strips. But that’s getting ahead of the story. First was a Pugad Baboy strip that was submitted by Medina in April of this year, which was rejected by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It would then be published in June to public social media outcry. (more…)
in undergrad in 1990’s University of the Philippines, i was taking a required Filipino 50 class that was teaching us all to spell in the prescribed Filipino. prescribed, which means that it was up to a Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino, to tell me how to spell my English. that is how to spell English words like engineer into injinir. i asked then why could we not leave English words alone, if only because the need to spell all these English words our way, just really fucks with our sense of those English words.
you do not only spell it in a new and unfamiliar Filipino way, you also end up teaching students how to wrongly spell the word “engineer.”
in 2013, we are being told by the same Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF) that we must now call nation Filipinas. not Pilipinas. not Philippines. but FILIPINAS. (more…)
What the UP Administration and the governments who have supported that 300% tuition fee increase have created here are the conditions for the poor’s discomfort and embarrassment, in a space that should be the bastion of equality and sameness.
In the 90’s, paying at most a P5,400 tuition fee, one of us was not better than another, and in fact, discomfiture was for the rich who were even there at all. In the 90’s, the best and the brightest from the public schools and provinces outdid all of us middle class and rich in the classroom: they were in the State U for reasons that had everything to do with their skills and intelligence. The rest of us were statistics, the smaller number of students who paid full tuition, because we could.
In 2013, you can only imagine the kind of stigma attached to a student being told by a teacher that she has to step out of the classroom because she has yet to pay her tuition fees or student loans.
Imagine what goes through a student’s head, faced with the fact of unpaid fees, but wanting to learn and thinking the world still of education, and of the State University in particular. Imagine what it is like to go to school for five months, with only the desire to learn fueling you, the empty stomach and pocket things you can ignore.
Imagine a context within which you are the strange one having a difficult time, if not the one who has nowhere to run. Imagine a University whose bureaucracy is most unkind, and which instead of being source of comfort and identity, becomes stark reminder of how hopeless one’s poverty is.
don’t know about the depths of non-fiction ha. baka the narrative lang that surrounds our notions of depth. see you UP Baguio!
may simple akong tugon sa usapin ng paggamit ng jargon at teorya para sa pagsusulat tungkol sa sining at kultura: sino ang audience mo?
this is not to say that i don’t think theory’s important, in fact i think there is nothing but theory, every critical piece has a theoretical backbone, a framework against which it falls. and this is not to say that i don’t believe in knowing from where we speak, being clear about our own biases, and our own limitations as we write about texts, as we write at all, period. this is not to say that we shouldn’t be reading reading reading, because writing is about knowing where what you say stands in the grand history of thought and thinking that we’d like to think exists in these shores. (more…)