Dean Alfar talks about “Six from Downtown”

Awesome author Dean Alfar took time out from his busy schedule to spend a Saturday morning chatting with me. The products are two episodes, first this one on his own fiction, and then a lengthy geek out session about Locke & Key (which I’ll be posting soon).

You can listen to Dean talk about “Six from Downtown” here at the podcast page. Feel free to stream, download, and share.

Dean is an engaging speaker, as anyone who has met him knows. And those who haven’t yet will want to after hearing his great ideas about writing, the fantastic, and attempts at capturing the Filipino urban experience. This is a fun half hour where I pick his brain about this great story which has won awards and been anthologised.

If you’re interested in the story or Dean’s other work, you can find his stuff on Amazon here.

You can also get the collection at Flipreads here.

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please tell your friends if you liked it, and if you’d like to help me keep the lights on and keep this thing going, please feel free to click that donation button and leave however much you want.

Vincenz Serrano on New Order

Hey welcome back everybody!

Been gone for about a month, but here we are rolling on and bringing you a lot of new episodes for the new year. We start off talking music with poet, teacher, and music fan Vincenz Serrano.

We talk about a few New Order songs, trying to understand why we love the band and its music.

You can download the episode here.

You can listen to the songs we talk about in the videos below.

Thanks for dropping by and we hope that you’ll listen to the fun episodes that are lined up this year.

Francis Quina on Morning Glories

This was the second recorded episode, but with special events and the like the publishing was delayed. Nonetheless, it’s my pleasure to have writer, comic book aficionado, and my roommate at the UP Faculty Center, Francis Quina, talking about Morning Glories.

Definitely one of the most compelling ongoing series at present, Morning Glories tells the story of a mysterious school, where powers, the supernatural, and science fiction all collide. It’s a comic book that takes your breath away with its breakneck speed, plot twists, and jaw-dropping revelations. Francis and I pick it apart, trying to understand what makes it work so well, and talk about why we enjoy the comic book so much.

You can check out the podcast here.

If you’re interested in the book, here’s the official site.

And if you want to go pick it up in digital, you can find it on comixology here.

As always, thanks for listening to the podcast, please share and drop us a comment or whatever if you are enjoying it.

Next week, Vincenz Serrano talks about New Order!

Gerry Alanguilan and Eliza Victoria at the 3rd Readercon

The 3rd Filipino ReadeCon was held this Saturday, Dec. 7, at the Rizal Library in Ateneo. It was a great even celebrating readers and reading. I was fortunate enough to moderate one of the Writers as Readers panels.

Comics creator Gerry Alanguilan and writer Eliza Victoria talked about the books that they love. Afterwards the audience and I got to ask them some questions.

Give it a listen if you’re looking for reading recommendations, as these are in abundance through the talk. You’ll hear some great essential comics titles and a lot of horror novels and page turners.

You can listen to the podcast here.

You can visit Gerry Alanguilan’s blog here.

You can visit Eliza Victoria’s blog here.

Thanks for listening!

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Episode with Gabriela Lee: The Lumpen Culturati Podcast

In this week’s podcast we invite Prof. Gabriela Lee to geek out about Doctor Who. I know it says this episode is supposed to be about the 50th anniversary episode, but we go in all kinds of directions here. It’s a double length special because we were talking about so much Doctor lovin’ timey-wimey stuff.

We invite comments (please don’t kill me for all my flubs and lapses in Doctor mythos) and suggestions and also if you want to tell your friends and help promote please do so.

Not too much to put on this companion post since the discussion is pretty long. But we promise that we’ll also talk about the Five-ish Doctors soon too.

I’m trying out a new podcast hosting site (still working out the kinks and seeing where we work best), so I hope you’ll visit this new episode here. You can listen to it or download it from there. Enjoy guys!

Also, I’m going to need your help to keep this podcast running. As such, I’ve put a new donation button here on the blog, and anything you can give is much appreciated. I’ll use it to pay for podcasting space so that I can keep this show going. Thanks guys!

The Lumpen Culturati Podcast! Episode 1!

Starting from this post, the Lumpen Culturati blog transforms from the spot for the stuff I couldn’t have published in other places (and a sadly ignored blog for the last few months) into the companion blog for the new Lumpen Culturati podcast.

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts, and I love them all. But they have mostly been review podcasts and I am hoping to fill a niche by discussing work on a more analytical (one hopes) level. I am hoping to bring forward smart conversation about cultural content in all its various forms.

I’ve also been part of a few attempts at podcasting, as well as some radio work. What I’ve found is that logistics and getting people together (and my own problematic schedule) have made it difficult for me to maintain those things. Now, I’ve got a nifty podcast app and I will be tracking down one or two guests for each episode.

The episodes will have me interviewing someone about a specific text (or set of texts in the case of comic book series). We want to turn people onto stuff that they might not be into yet, we want to show love for things that we love, and we want to talk about them in a deeper manner that encourages further discourse.

For the first episode I talk to Prof. Mikey Atienza about “Sink” by Isabel Yap. In discussing the story we question aspects of Filipino science fiction, look at a story set in the future that gives us  a  glimpse at the Greenhills we once knew, and question our humanity as we look at a little robot kid.

You can listen to the episode on soundcloud here.

If you’re interested in the story, you can get The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction in print from the UP Press here.

If you want it in digital, it’s available at Flipreads here, or Amazon here. Or if you’re using other storefronts, I’m sure they will be available there too.

I hope you enjoy this first discussion, please listen and tell your friends.  Thanks everybody!

Fixing the Fixers

This is the start of a series of posts that I hope to write which will look at specific problems that we need to address. I support the general call to end corruption. But I find it a motherhood statement. When we say reforms, I think we should we can look at particular cases, see how these reflect larger social problems, and question how we might solve them.

We begin with the problem of fixers.

The thing is they aren’t fixing anything, are they? They really work to help perpetuate a culture of corruption. And as is the problem of many aspects of this culture of corruption, we accept that it as part of the system.

According to a cabbie, he had to pay P500 to get his papers processed. The cost should have been P300, but he had to pay a fixer P200. This was so that his papers would get processed within the day. Otherwise, they would keep pushing his paper back and it would take him two to three days to get the papers he needed. I will talk in a later post about our willingness to pay for expediting of government services. Here I just want to talk about the role of the fixer.

The fixer serves as middle man between the person trying to get government services and the government employee. So between client and service, there is this intermediary who serves to supposedly expedite papers. But what he actually does is forward the threat of your paper being set aside because it does not have someone backing it, making sure that attention is paid to it.

The seemingly easy solution is just to get rid of the fixers. But then I wind up thinking about how these fixers are actually part of an underground economy. Obviously this underground economy is detrimental to our society. You have these people tampering with the proper flow of the delivery of government services. You have to spend more than you should to receive those services. And you have transactions happening that are outside of proper procedures, so these people have income that is not taxed. (well of course not, the work itself is illegal.)

Think though, what do these people do? They have been entrenched in the system of government services since, well, most of us can remember. What are we supposed to do with them?

I did a study once on underground economies. I was surprised that one of the women who I interviewed, who was selling toys and similar items on the Philcoa underpass, was a college graduate. She said she earned more sitting there all day selling than she did when she was working an office job. So it could be more financially rewarding to work in an underground economy.

We have to consider that these fixers have families, and there is a major disruption that could occur with their abrupt removal. So even before the total dissolution of this system is attempted, we should have a clear plan of what to do so that engaging in this system becomes unattractive.

I figure, and I could be wrong, that what the fixer does is essentially run papers back and forth. They serve as our lobbyists in line, and what they do is cut in and jump ahead of the line for us (god I hate people who cut in line).

What we see here, and the reason why they can offer the services that they do, is that there is a scare resource. This resource is the attention of the government worker who has to process the papers. You have to pay the fixer, and the fixer in turn has to grab the government worker’s attention (also with money), so that you can get the attention of the government worker, which you are supposed to have in the first place because you have paid for those services with your taxes and the processing fees.

So the limited resources that allows for this system is the attention of the government official. So if we could increase that, then we could better address this problem. Then why not put the fixers to work also processing papers? Put them behind those desks and utilize that manpower to process those papers.

I know that these people are unqualified to process papers at the moment.

And I know that the fixers probably aren’t properly trained to do this processing. But they know the systems of the government institutions they are working with. What if we trained them to process papers?

Can you imagine how many more papers would be processed if you got all those fixers and employed them and put them to the task of helping to provide government service, rather than condoning the practice and letting them subvert the system of service delivery?

Proper training, proper employment, more efficient government service because you have taken that chunk of the underground economy and found a way to refocus it. You don’t just remove or dismantle. These people aren’t a cancer. But they are enabled by the cancer of corruption. Provided with the proper training and systems, they could be assets to our system of services.

American sf Reading List

This semester, I’ve been given the privilege of teaching a class on American Science Fiction, ENG 146. I spent a good part of the summer writing and revising my syllabus and trying to create a reading list that is a good balance and mix of different kinds of texts, that show the range and major movements of sf.

Here’s my reading/viewing list:

Short Stories

“The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke

“The Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

“It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Leguin

Novels

I, Robot

The Martian Chronicles

Ender’s Game

Neuromancer

Ready Player One 

Novellas

Flowers for Algernon

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Comics

Action Comics #1

Captain America #1

Fantastic Four #1

Amazing Fantasy #15

The Incredible Hulk #1

Ex Machina Issues #1-5

The Manhattan Projects #1-5

Films

Alien

Back to the Future

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The Matrix

Looper

TV Series Episodes

“The Shelter” from The Twilight Zone

“The City on the Edge of Forever” from Star Trek

 

That is what I plan to teach this semester. My worry now is how willing my students will be to engage what I believe is a fantastic set of texts. I have some apprehensions as a good number of students have displayed indifference to the material. I know that if I were a student, my brain would explode with the awesomeness of this reading list. But that’s me and I’m a nerd. I just hope that the students do come around, and start seeing how much fun these texts can be, rather than trying to deconstruct them and strip them of their merits just to point out whatever it is that contemporary has taught them to see.

Shooting First: A New Year’s Resolution

When I used to play basketball regularly, I was a terrible shooter. I could make maybe 5% of 3s, if I ever tried to shoot any. My medium range shot was iffy. Though I did have an okay inside game and was pretty spot on for lay-ups. But this limited shooting ability had me develop my passing game. I was never going to be a spot up shooter, nor was I going to blaze past people with crossovers. I could handle the ball and dish to the right players, set picks, and maybe find myself spots on the floor.

I enjoyed the thrill of the assist, of zipping a bounce pass between defenders, of hitting a cutter in stride for a lay-up, of drawing defenders and then kicking to the man spotting up in the corner. Ball movement, unselfish play, getting everyone involved, that’s what I played for.

And as a pass first player, defenders were a lot looser on me. They were not expecting me to take shots. Since they knew I preferred to flip the ball to a teammate, or to pass up a shot, they thought they did not need to defend me. Which meant that once I saw them slacking off, then I would drive into the lane, surprising them with an open lay-up they were not expecting. Or finding a spot I could make a shot from while they were off double teaming a better shooter. It’s always easier to sink a shot when you’re all by your lonesome.

I get to thinking about this kind of mentality now that I am thinking about how I plan to spend the coming year. I realize that I have largely tried to adopt this pass first mentality with a lot of work that I’ve done. As an editor, I’ve always chosen to assign big stories to my writers, rather than taking them myself. I’ve always been reluctant to step up and take responsibility for things. Rather than do something myself, I will pull a team together and distribute tasks. Only when I’ve got no other choice, only when no one else is open and I am, do I like to take the shot.

Which is well and good I guess in certain situations. But the thing is, this year looks like I will be doing some things which do not allow for me to pass off. Which will necessitate my stepping up and taking the shot. To use an easily recognizable basketball reference (and not to compare my talent level in any way to these two, because really, that would be insane), I have to shift from being a playmaking Lebron, and turn into a take-over-the-game Kobe. I have reached a point in my career where I have to elevate, have to escalate what I do. It’s time for me to step up.

You can’t pass off in the classroom. You can distribute the discussion, you can involve the whole class in activities and that whole thing. But when it comes time for lectures, for presentations, there’s no passing off. You are the teacher, no matter what you do, you have to control the classroom and the activity therein. That sounds like mostly playmaker work, but when the moment comes to step up and take over, I cannot be reluctant to launch into lectures when they are needed.

And in writing, well, there is no one to pass off to. I have been struggling with this. I keep wondering if the lack in one’s writing is indicative of the lack of one’s moral fortitude. I think of whether it displays the wanting qualities of one’s character. Or if one can write through those things, in the same way that, when the fourth quarter’s winding down and the other team’s in the lead, you can push everything out of your mind, can push out all of the messes that you’ve made in your life, all the bad decisions and wrong turns, and you can just focus on that moment, take over, and at least in that one aspect, overcome and win the game.

I hope that, for all the mistakes and failures and limitations that I observe so acutely in myself, and which help to inform and enrich my writing, that I can similarly get through all that and finish the work and get it out there.

I plan to work on more films this year. I am dreaming of directing my first feature. I am deathly scared that it will be shit. I want to pass off. I do not want to be responsible, for I would be responsible for a failure if I mess it up. If it’s crap, then I will have wasted the time and efforts of everyone who will work on it. But I have already passed off. I’ve already allowed other people to attempt to execute my vision. It’s time that I did this, time that I stepped up and took the shot.

I have been teaching myself that failure is important. I have launched into a lot of bad writing, some of it I was able to stop, some of it got out into the world. But each failure teaches us something.

Similarly, I have to get used to the idea that we have to take shots. We have to miss shots. We have to work our way out of shooting slumps. Again I use Kobe Bryant as a model here. Sometimes he has terrible shooting nights. But he keeps shooting even when the shots aren’t going down. He shoots until he finds his rhythm. It’s a simple thing to understand, you can’t find your rhythm if you aren’t taking the shot.

I will say it again for my own benefit, so that I can take heart and hold onto the idea: You can’t find your  rhythm if you aren’t taking shots.

I have to accept that once I do this, once I adopt the shoot first policy, then I will be expecting other people to feed me the ball, to pass it to me. It’s on me to make it. I have to accept that there will be off nights, nights when shots don’t go down. But unlike the depressive person that I have been, the one that wallows in shit and flays himself for each aspect of failure, I have to accept that there will be missed shots, that there will be off nights. I have to move on from the last shot, move on from the last night, move on from the last failure, and be ready to take the shot the next time that I get a pass. And not only that, but I have to learn how to create my shot. I have to learn to understand my skills and abilities better so that I can execute, create, move, score.

Allowing for off nights, this means that there will be big nights too that offset it. Those nights when it feels like everything is going down, it’s all flowing, and I can do no wrong. When this happens, I have to ride that crest and keep shooting. It won’t happen every night, but once I start shooting first, there is a chance that I might have that magical 81 point game, or those consistent 40 point performances. The only way to get better is to step up, to take risks.

2013 gimme the ball. It’s on me.

 

reaching a point where i have to take a shot. and i have to keep shooting

2012 in Review: Teaching/Academic Life

I quit yet another job this year. I served as the Deputy Director for Marketing and Operations of the UP Press until October 31st, but I feel that my heart had gone out of it sometime mid-year. It was a number of factors, but among them was the realization that I am pretty good at teaching, and I am more of an asset in the classroom than as an administrator. Put the demanding nature of admin work against the drive to write and do research, and it was clear that I would be much happier as a straight up academic than an academic and administrator.

This might sound pretentious, or as if I am speaking from some ivory tower; any talk of the academic life is precariously perched and always ready to fall into such pretentiousness. But then as I chronicle 2012, as I count the hours down to 2013, I have to really admit that this was the year when I sat down and thought, hell dude, you can probably teach for the rest of your life. I had been resistant to the idea of deciding on a career for any prolonged period of time.

I remember when I was in high school my English teacher said, “You know, Javier, you would make a good teacher.”

And what I said, under my breath, though I don’t know if she was able to hear it, was, “God, why would I ever want to be like one of you people?”

I obviously did not think much of the teaching profession. I remember most of my elementary and junior high teachers fondly. But my high school in Cubao, well, it was a mixed bag, if I’m being kind. There were some terrible teachers, and some with a terrible meanness to them. You could see they were frustrated, tired, only going through the motions. There were some that were inspired, and those I gravitated towards. But hell, I was in high school, I had issues with authority, I thought I was smarter than everyone else. And thus I looked at the teaching profession with disdain.

The first time I tried teaching, fresh out of undergrad, I didn’t make the cut. A few years later, I find myself teaching at Miriam. Then I jump to UP. Terrible things happen in my first year, petty admin BS and things that I felt were grounds for me to leave. I vow never to teach again. Ondoy hits and all my books and other teaching materials are wiped out, and I take that as a sign that I should not be a teacher. It’s the universe literally washing out all vestiges of my teaching career.

I bounce around a few years, and here I am, back in the university. But much more experienced, with a better sense of things (at least I like to think), and I feel a sense of confidence and control. It’s like I was able to overcome a lot of my personal shit, a lot of the things that hampered me from improving as a teacher.

I have had to rebuild my teaching library. It’s still an ongoing process. I have been lucky enough to have received a lot of help from colleagues who generously help me with books.

But more than books, I can say that my colleagues in the department, especially the junior faculty, help to inspire me to go into the classroom every day. It’s wonderful in that there’s not so much a sense of competition as it is a sense of esprit de corps, of everyone pitching in to help everyone else out. It’s not just in teaching or syllabus design either, it’s when someone just needs a drink, needs to hang back and let loose. This is, perhaps, one of the most productive times in my life, and I attribute a good deal of that to the way that the people around me make me better.

When I was teaching in Miriam I carried around a hip flask. For all that the students were wonderful, so many other things hindered teaching and development, and I found myself having to take swigs just to get through the days. Now, that is a bad memory, and I don’t think I will ever find myself doing that again.

Rather, even when the days get tough, even when the kids are working as hard as I would wish, and the classroom isn’t clicking, I feel like I can find ways to keep at it.

Further, I got to attend my first international conference as a scholar. Last year I attended the Fil-American bookfest in San Francisco, but that was as a writer and independent publisher. This year, along with MIc Chua and Emil Flores, I got to deliver a paper in Oxford. that’s insane. Sometimes I say it and I have trouble believing it. And it was thanks to, well, pretty much every friend I’ve had. Some helped out in big ways, donating artwork, money, time, or whatever in our fundraising efforts. We pulled together an incredibly fun gig that helped us raise money for the trip. Just thinking back on it now I feel my chest swell, it was this wonderful time when I could not deny that the people I have been lucky to be around and to know not only make me better, but allow me to do things that I could never have imagined.

Towards the end of the year I got published in the Philippine Journal for American Studies. I got to write about the Punisher storyline in Civil War. At the time of writing and submission, I didn’t think much of what I was doing, but once it came out, I got a true sense of fulfillment.

It’s odd to think that I now have a sense of what I want to do. I have avoided committing to things for so long. Now, well, here it is. I am hoping that this career and this decision takes. I am hoping that the coming years will prove productive and that I can make contributions as both teacher and scholar.