on with the fun - i am back to 'hurried' writing,  enjoying  it while i've got free time and getting responses from friends in flips-land, i'm telling you, this is the best part of my day, after being poo-poo'ed and strained by patients. in my working hours, i lift people while keeping  my temper down - oh boy - keeping my temper is the hardest to do - especially with the types of patients i have  - sometimes it just gets into me - imagine treating retired new yorkers. there's a joke in florida that when "i retire, i'm gonna settle in manhattan and drive really slow and be nice to everybody."
    talking about retired men and women, nick joaquin( i'm sure) is retired now and has probably mellowed a bit. but there was a time...
      it is said you never submit  mediocre writing to nick joaquin, if you do, he'd tear your paper and soul apart.
     teodoro locsin calls him the first literary artist of the philippines; no filipino now writing matches his stories in power and beauty... and when i imagine nick joaquin, i see a fatherly  figure  sitting quietly in a corner enjoying  beer  with hemingway and you DO NOT approach him unless you've got an important thing to say.  i hope i'm wrong with my impression of joaquin but you can't blame people like me who never have seen him, I see his picture alright but gawd, in person he is more aloof than greta garbo, which  prods me to ask sometimes, is he still around? he is no better than the poet jose garcia villa who never stayed around while the town clamored for his presence. or maybe I was the one who wasn't around.
     but this i can tell -  after i read nick joaquin during my highschool, i knew i wanted to become a writer.  it was in his short stories i learned a parasol is a type of umbrella.
     years have passed and i found that  i couldn't and i wouldn't be able to write like him; the only thing i could do now is to write a  review like this one; nick joaquin's writing  requires a lot of painstaking hours because he is after pure beauty and for him to achieve ultimate beauty he must  penetrate the ultimate  evil in one's soul, the ultimate nakedness of one's desires, the most freightening emotions in the deepest crevices of one's heart. and all these are found in the summer solstice
     only nick hoaquin can get away with a paragraph like this:
     Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already burning with the immense intense fever of noon.
imagine these: a house as a furnace
                              windows dilating
                              air burning
                              fever of noon
that's the reason i love the man! he comes up with word combinations that never in my life i could imagine possible;  a house as a furnace to me remains an oven, hell. a dilating window may belong to the field of salvador dali; air burning reminds me of atomic bomb; and fever of noon? well, i dunno, i'd probably look for a thermometer.
     but analyzing it more, and converting it into tagalog(although I heard it's more appropriate to convert it in Spanish), one will understand why joaquin's paragraphs are this way:
     Kahit a las siyete pa lamang nang umaga, ang bahay ay isa nang pugon, ang mga  bintana'y nakadilat na sa mabagsik na liwanag ng araw at ang hangin ay nagliliyab na sa gitna ng matinding sinat ng tanghaling tapat.

     I think joaquin's beauty in writing stems from his being a tagalog and the way he converts/interprets tagalog into  english. another writing  similar to this is bino realuyo's umbrella country - and bino admits his novel's english is direct from his native tongue's being interpreted, and in doing so they both come up with phrases unencountered before, very poetic because tagalog is poetic, and deserving of a unique place in  world literature. they speak an english  language that comes from the soil of the Philippines...and perhaps the reason why those who're used to the western english find their writings hard to read.
     but let me go on with the story, let me dissect it.

     summer solstice reveals the complexity of joaquin's writing: in one stroke, he covers topics ranging from women subjugation to feminism, form sexual slavery to domination, to attempted adultery to foot licking, to civility degrading to  bestiality, to  reversal of roles...and not one of these words was written in the story.
     the story begins with heat, as suggested by the above parapgraph and we're talking of tropical heat, brown skins in sweat, burning heat in the middle of a plantation, a plantation ruled by don paeng of spanish extraction and his beautiful wife dona lupeng.
      the moment dona lupeng notices that amada, the cook, isn't cooking breakfast, she knows something is wrong.
       she finds amada in the servant's quarter writhing and howling like a beast, half-naked. according to entoy(amada's husband and the family dirver), amada is possessed by the spirit of tadtarin, the god of earth, river, animals etcetera, whose day is being celebrated that day with the feast of saint john. (blending of animist cult and catholic tradition)
       the whole family  proceeds to the celebration of the feast of st john: dominated by men; quite offensive to the sensibilities of dona lupeng - a concourse of young men clad only in soggy trousers were carrying aloft the image of the Precursor... st john - a fine, blond, heroic st john...erect and goldly virile above the prone and female earth  (whoa!); She did...defy those rude creatures flaunting their manhood in the sun. And she wondered peevishly what the braggarts were being so cocky about?
     then the young guido who belongs the - young men were all going to europe and bringing back with them, not the age of victoria, but the age of byron. the young guido knew nothing of darwin and evolution; he knew everything about napoleon and revolutiion....- follows dona lupeng all over, talks with her with such embarrassing vulgarity and suggestiveness that she has to  leave him promptly.
     that night she is restless; she decides to attend the night celebration of the cult of Tadtarin. don paeng forbids her -- to no avail.
     at this point, it seems all things are getting in reverse; read this:
     behind her, a group of girls bore aloft a little black image of the Baptist - a crude primitive, grotesque image, its big-eyed head too big for its puny naked torso, bobbing swaying above the hysterical female horde (ain't this phallic enough?) and looking at once so comical and so pathetic that don paeng, watching with his wife on the sidewalk, was outraged.
      this time, its the male that gets offended.
      dona lupeng becomes wild and runs to the cult group, don paeng follows her, but because he doesn't wear any female accessory(not necessarily in a drag way but males  need to carry or wear any woman accessory in order to be allowed in the group) he is shoved and is beaten by the amazon-like women of the tadtarin cult.
      when they return home, don paeng decides to give dona lupeng a whipping.
      and here comes some of the famous lines only a pinay woman can utter:
       "What are you going to do Rafael?"
       "I am going to give you a whipping."
       "But why?"
       "Because you have behaved tonight like a lewd woman."
       "How I behaved tonight is what I am. If you call that lewd, then I was always a lewd woman and a whipping will not change me - though you whipped me till I die."
       "I want this madness to die in you."
       "No, you want me to pay for your bruises."
       He flushed darkly. "How can you say that Lupe?"
       "Because it is true, You have been whipped by the women and now you think to avenge yourself by whipping me."
       His shoulders sagged and his face dulled. "If you can think that of me."
       "You could think me a lewd woman!"
       and then later....
       "I adore you Lupe," he said tonelessly.
       She strained forward avidly. "What? What did you say?" she screamed.
        And he, in his dead voice: "That I adore you. That I worship you. That the air you breathe and the ground you tread is holy to me. That I am your dog, your slave..."
       But it was still not enough. Her fists were still clenched, and she cried "Then come, crawl on the floor, and kiss my feet!" (whoa!)

       the issue being raised dwells on the perennial battle of the two sexes;  the story presumes that women were of higher stature than men in the philippines pre-colonial times - the tadtarin cult is the embodiment of that ancient fact. the manner by which joaquin degrades his characters from being decent, aristocratic lot into beast-like can't be matched by many short stories i've read... etcetera...etcetera...
     it's sunday and i'm sleepy and my mind can't shift gears anymore...i don't wanna  intellectualize the summer solstice, i'm here to enjoy reading nick joaquin for the mere joy of reading him - i don't wanna go into some genius rendition of book analysis, or getting some freudian interpretation of the work,  heck, who cares! all i know is this - joaquin is a hell of pinoy writer, so boys and girls... read him.

      something funny happened to me two  weeks ago, i asked the permission of  ambeth ocampo, the author of looking back (philippine history series: from a different point of view of course), to feature his book cover beside the Alex Maskara Pinoy Authors title...he e-mailed me back affirmatively. I remember now, i wrote him something like (you know, just to get his attention): Hey Ambeth, I got a very nice book, it details the discovery of the philippines based on the diary of sebastian el cano!

      man i was so proud of my  sense of history - unfortunately, the dairy was written NOT by sebastian el cano...

      it was by antonio pigafetta! 

      ain't that embarassing? 

      well,  

MAGELLAN'S VOYAGE (a narrative account of the first circumnavigation) by ANTONIO PIGAFETTA will be featured next.

 i've been updating this website almost daily now.... since i'd be getting back to school tomorrow, i'd slow down my output a little bit, i also need to update my other websites.... my nocturnal free times are over waaaaaaaaa!

       if you've got anything to contribute (wa 'pay' nga lang hijos y hijas) send it to me, otherwise...you'd hear me again and again and again...

Alex Maskara