…Which, if we think about it, actually makes sense. Its subject matter is Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesian novelist, jailed by the Suharto regime for his writings, the closest a Southeast Asian has come to being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (more…)
been doing reviews of the Virgin Labfest 9 plays for GMA News Online. it’s the first time in three years that i’ve made the effort to see all three sets of new one-act plays within the first week, and the full-length play early in the second week. (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…)
it seemed portentous, or maybe just convenient, that a website like Rappler would have one of its “thought leaders” — a most pretentious if not laughable label to begin with (a leader of thoughts? whut.) — writing about her shift from print to online journalism on the same day as Rappler’s more recent foibles.
on June 19 a Rappler news article takes a Facebook status and tears it apart like it’s an interview, while doing some good old fashioned red baiting that endangers the lives of high profile activists. on the same day, its “thought leader” Marites Dañguilan Vitug makes excuses for the kind of news writing that is online, and in the end, that is on Rappler. (more…)
i think Spinbusters does a pretty fantastic job of keeping track of Rappler.com’s foibles, and where my tendency is to generally refuse to even click on any link that leads to that site, in the past year or so, i’ve been clicking more and more. they’ve been messing up.
and no, i don’t even mean the bad writing, or the ungrammatical mood meter — or the mood meter itself as a measure of how people feel about issues (susmiyo, what are we 10 years old?). let me not begin about crowdsourcing, and the-one-thing-worse-than-censoring Pol Medina — making him do choose-your-own-punchline strips. the better to render his commentary toothless, yeah. (more…)