Category Archive for: panitikan

15 from 2015: kultura

I wasn’t very good at doing arts and culture in the country the past year. But here’s a list of the strange, the good, the surprising in culture for 2015, not at all a best or worst list because … see the first sentence.

First a critical aside: having worked as dramaturg for Kleptomaniacs and a bit with Tanghalang Pilipino in 2014 meant keeping the theater reviews to a minimum in 2015. I needed that time to let go of the little inside stories that I know, if not to forget the petty tsismis. Distance is a good thing, and one is glad when it is given.

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You’ve got until midnight tonight (Sunday) to download “It Will Be The Same But Not Quite The Same” for free over here. —

http://www.mediafire.com/…/adam_david_-_IWBTSBNQTS_-_single…

And to play with HiMaamSir. — http://himaamsir.blogspot.com/.

Very sad and dismayed and angry that these sites will be going down by the end of today, because of the use of the law (and lawyers!) without consideration for appropriation, transformation, and derivative work, not to mention critical-creative engagement. These are sad times for Philippine literature, when a publishing house like Anvil and editors like Noelle de Jesus and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta cannot see beyond the terms “copyright infringement,” will not even engage in a discussion about it, and instead demand that we do not see this site and PDF anymore.

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Here’s to the friendship
that could have been ours:
wife of my lover,
lover of my husband,
lover of my lover.

For women at both ends
are always rivals:
smiling for points
at a beauty contest,
icing the cake
at a cooking competition,
sprinting for the gold
as they race to a man’s heart. (more…)

Six months since she’s arrived
And yet she does not speak.
She must have been chained;
This I guess from the bruises
On her wrists. But she will not
Let me touch them.
She trembles at the sight
Of tall men, more so at those
With shadows on their lips. (more…)

Ginahasa ako ng mga salita,
Paulit-ulit,
Paulit-ulit,
Hanggang magutay ang diwa.
Buntis ang alaala
Sa mga alimura,
Pasa-pasa ang puso’t
Lama’y salanta.

— Ruth Elynia Mabanglo, 1992. (more…)