radikalchick.lit

ingress

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. on the last 24 hours we didn’t have yet, before a flight was cancelled and rebooked, before you try and fit in seven months of self into bags, i watched not with wonder but distance: your back was turned to me as you washed the dishes, 10 beers between us, you tell me to stay put. your word upon word upon word become a slow reveal, weighing heavier and heavier because it took long enough, though it wasn’t the length of time at all, as it was the time it took. to wrap our heads around the weight of us on the bed, at the tables between us, at the photos that captured distance. when you finally sit beside me, it’s a coming out of sorts, in a restaurant with no love, where you insist: a camera would gaze at us and know romance from the beginning. i don’t tell you why i can’t believe that, there’s just no time. instead there’s last night, when we breached distance, in the darkness, the digital clock the bright light counting down, the words: premature / presumptuous / continue / stay the night. we sleep with the discomfort of the following day’s doom, we wake and buy another day. we wonder about promises. it was over soon enough.

komentaryo

poverty ain’t a blessing

The Church and reproductive health
by Juan Miguel Luz

When RH is portrayed as a great evil and when women and men who choose to pursue RH measures, notably contraception, are deemed to be sinners by Church leaders, this is neither fair nor informed.

The greater sin would be to bring any number of children into a world of poverty.When parents do so with no means to provide adequately for them nor provide them a chance at a decent quality of life, they do themselves and their children a great wrong by placing the family at great risk. (I consider poverty a great risk and not a blessing despite what the Church might think.)

A government that does not provide the means by which families of any income group (but especially the poor) can help plan family size and expectations would thus be an irresponsible one.

Read the rest of it here!

kultura

do something

<…> Enjoy the stories, admire the craft. Then put it in your backpack and go. As far as you can, for as long as you can afford it. Preferably someplace where you have to think in one language and buy groceries in another. Get a job there. Rent a room. Stick around. Do something. If it doesn’t work out, do something else. Whatever it is, you will be able to use it in the stories you will write later. And if that story turns out to be about grungy sex in an East Coast dorm room with an emotionally withholding semiotics major, that’s okay. It will be a better story for the fact that you have been somewhere and carried part of it home with you in your soul. — Geraldine Brooks, Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011.

radikalchick.lit

considerations

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. over those introductory cups of coffee it was a lesson in first meetings: (1) choose a quiet(er) place, (2) remember to pee before it begins, the better to (3) prepare for a four-hour conversation. measure the time spent sitting across each other, compare it to the time spent in each others arms. get a ruler: how far is the distance between us as we walk the streets? how many minutes to walk from your building to the hole in the wall next door, the convenience store further down, the squatters area accessible on the other side of this street. how many minutes before they are comfortable with the image of us, distant but together, an arm’s length away, a table between us, chairs beside each other but apart, i settle on the couch for one. count the times the waiter gives us a sly a smile, the deaf-mute screams his high-five, the manongs we pass grin ear-to-ear, the guard at your building counts 24 hours. how many seconds does it take for the good friend to tease you about me, out of earshot, more of the pinoy macho thing, you say. more a measure of the distance we choose to keep: i sleep against your shoulder, you put your hand on my thigh. you look down the length of our arms as you hold my hand for the first time. absolutely ridiculous you say. i wonder about coffee as the sun streams into the room i am seeing for the last time.

kultura

on naming Ballet Philippines as the Phil Nat’l Ballet Company

and questions on national and cultural, and the crisis that is Philippine dance, that can only resonate for the rest of culture industry in this country. excerpt from the piece by Myra Beltran:

<…this> greatly changed environment <…> also signals that the bill can be examined in terms of its assumptions about the “national” and “culture” (Philippine culture). These are the discourses which inform the bill. These discourses summoned by the bill then imply that a deeper discussion on this bill apart from the one centered on who is “more deserving” or not, can be made and that it is no easy labelling of being “for” or “against” the bill. It does not seem to be as simple as saying or implying that that those who oppose this bill would probably not oppose if they had been the beneficiary or implementor of this bill – rather, part of those who are being dismissed as simply “against” truly mean to have a sincere inquiry as to who is speaking for whom in this bill, what is being spoken in behalf of the “whom,” and whether the answer to this should be enacted into law as a republic act. [5] I suppose those are also topics which also concern the entire arts community as all precedents do have a subsequent ripple effect.

A case in point is that one of the reasons cited by Ballet Philippines in seeking the status of “national” is the precedent set by the naming of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company as the “national folk dance company” (R.A. 8626 by the 10th Congress) with the contention that others who oppose this current bill would do well to seek the same for themselves, “to work for it”, [6] as the Bayanihan bill itself provides. On this count, and if one were to proceed to “work for it,” the proposed bill also summons the notion and the distinction between a “national folk dance company” and a “national ballet company” as both representative of “Philippine culture.” And then after, if one indeed were to “work for it,” what kind of “national” entity would one be? The same question would be posed to one working for a “national theatre company” or “national orchestra” in the future.

click here for the rest of it.