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…)
since this Rogue piece on the literati and mainstream literary system went online, what has infinitely been interesting is how it has revealed the kind of thinking that we have about literature and culture, including but not limited to: (a) “Why write about this at all? What a waste of time!” (b) “bakit hindi ka na lang magsulat?” (c) writing is a solitary enterprise anyway (d) you just moved from one house to the next (e) there is no talking about literature without literary jargon (f) it’s the same everywhere, deal with it (g) you are not being attacked, your work is being engaged in (h) let’s have a conference on this! (i) you are not free. (more…)
Ricky de Ungria: “<…> perhaps because we have not shaken off our feudal cast of mind and psyche that inhibits us from critiquing the ideas of the “elder statesmen” in our fields as a result of a kind misplaced measure of deference or respect for elders, and that allows us to accept conveniently their word as “law” so we don’t have to bother with it anymore as we go on quietly with our own desperate lives?” (more…)
when my friend TJ Dimacali asked if i had seen this rappler piece, my response was a resounding “no” just because i keep from going to rappler when i can. in the past month or so though, people have been alerting me about certain articles and kinds of writing that point precisely to its, uh, identity crisis? or just its biases (kayo na ang nagtitinda ng magnum at coke at naglalagay ng obvious PR pieces under “lifestyle” and “business” instead of just having them put ads, and you put the bs in bias, really).
this piece though is not so much about biases, as it is about spin. about a slant that might have seemed acceptable, but is actually quite irresponsible. read the source material here and here and you will find that none of these talk about the rainbow (the physics for which may be read about here). but this rappler piece claims that scientists “have created new rainbow colors” and as such we can now let go of the ROYGBIV to remind us of the colors of the rainbow. TJ says (boldface mine):
In fairness to Rappler, I think they have the right idea trying to make science more popular.
But they really need to get their facts straight, and should be more careful before they blurt out something as outrageous as “Scientists make new rainbow colors.”
That kind of misreporting serves only to confuse lay readers and further adds to their misunderstanding of scientific concepts.
Just because an atom emits previously unseen frequencies doesn’t mean that these don’t already exist (or are unknown to exist) in the rainbow. All the scientists are saying is that they made an atom produce “colors” that it wasn’t able to before.
But it’s not as if these “colors” (frequencies) were heretofore unknown! It’s just that this particular kind of atom was never known to emit those frequencies before.
In short, the scientists simply meant that the frequencies were “previously unseen” from an excited atom PER SE, not from the entire known visible spectrum
To suddenly jump to the conclusion that these are “new rainbow colors” is just preposterous. It’s bad science and bad science journalism.
What worries me is that the article is gaining circulation in social media —spreading laughably false information to people along the way— and Rappler hasn’t even bothered to correct it.
and just so it’s clear, TJ did alert them about the gross misreading of the source material (those words are all mine), but rappler didn’t respond. or have yet to correct the piece as of this writing.