ReaderCon Filipino Friday Week 1: Introduce Yourself

(In which one’s colors are proudly shown.)

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This weekly meme hosted by the First Filipino ReaderCon site five weeks before the event gathers Filipino book bloggers to unite. As it’s the opening week, participating bloggers are invited to introduce themselves. Write an introduction about yourself and link up here! Or better yet, come to the First Filipino ReaderCon event! Please check the website for the details.

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I am Funandfearless. Not that the pseudonym really reflects a fierce and outgoing personality. The choice is more driven by the cool sounding title from a magazine than reality. This blog, The Bibliophilic Night Owl, however, is more realistically connected to me, as the only serene time for me to read is late evening, or early morning, depending on what time I got home from work.
My library is the self-same room I sleep in and inhabit when I’m at home. I just pile the mostly secondhand books I acquire in my weekend wanderings on one corner and let them fill the space. I group them according to my own weird categorization. I actually have two TBR piles – one for the not-so-interesting-so-no-rush books and the I-can’t-wait-to-read pile. Then I’ve got the already-read pile.
I don’t have a lot of books since I have just restarted reading last year, or was that two years ago? Anyway, I am a terribly slow reader. I usually spend a month on regular books. When I say regular books I mean the ones whose pages range from 300 – 400. So it takes 2 months for 800+paged books, and so on. See? I’m really slow.
The books I read are not the ones favored by the majority. I enjoy historical fiction. But not all types of historical fiction. My book piles generally include art and music fiction, or those about famous people (as long as I know them) and recently, I began to collect novels about courtesans. My favorite authors are Susan Vreeland, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Arabella Edge, Sarah Dunant as well as Michel Faber, who was nowthe most unforgettable in my list of authors for providing me my best read for this year – The Crimson Petal and the White.
I haven’t read a lot of books yet. And I haven’t explored every literary genre there is. But I’m taking my time. Besides, I still have a lot of nighttime to read.

Mt. Mayon by Simeon Dumdum Jr.

(In which I got the chance to see it again . . . in someone else's eyes.)

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Mt. Mayon
(From the airport in Legaspi City)
Simeon Dumdum Jr.
As to this jacketed, hunting-cappedAnd skippered man following me as thoughAfraid I might ogle his daughter,Perhaps he is really just a tricycle driverStalking a fare, but beast enough to standWide-eyed, watching this mountain tooAs it goes déshabillé, while the windShoos away the clouds of sheep untilnothing remainsBut a lamb sucking the blue nipple.

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At first read, or even at the second or third, a reader will simply find a scenario typical of provincial mountainside life in Simeon Dumdum Jr.'s Mt. Mayon. It is just a fleeting moment, a scene captured through the lens of a camera and could even be an abstract emotional memories of one's first visit to a province. But the structural brevity and simplicity of the poem actually exude beauty and love for it.

I have been to Bicol only once and was granted a visit to a mountain where we got a better look at Mt. Mayon. Some of the memories I had from that trip include children running barefoot after our vehicle while shouting greetings of welcome, and old men and women smiling toothlessly at the sight of local tourists. It was so heartwarming, light and human. Yet those adjectives always fell short of full description. So when I read how Dumdum described the man he encountered at the airport, I was amazed both by the simplicity and the weight of words he used.

As to this jacketed, hunting-capped
And skippered man following me as though
Afraid I might ogle his daughter,
Perhaps he is really just a tricycle driver
Stalking a fare . . .

And then the sight of the mountain. It had been a long time since it was branded for it conical perfection. But I dare say that at time, I, the amateur self-proclaimed connoisseur of beauty that I am, saw no apparent disgrace to its name, based on postcards from which my judgment emanated. It was no wonder why the man was,

. . . but beast enough to stand
Wide-eyed, watching this mountain too . . .

It was just a moment, a fleeting moment when wind and mist of evaporated water waltzed to uncover a beauty capable of putting other beauties to shame. The excitement one experiences while watching the mountain come into clearer view is akin to the expectation of a gallery spectator for a celebrated masterpiece to be unveiled. As the clouds, which Dumdum referred to as "clouds of sheep", moved away, what remains is the perfect mound of earth, déshabillé. At the peak of it was "a lamb sucking the blue nipple", the tip of the cone kissing the blue sky.

As it goes déshabillé, while the wind
Shoos away the clouds of sheep until
nothing remains
But a lamb sucking the blue nipple.

Poetry, in its purest and most perfect state, is a reproduction of ephemeral beauty with the hope of making it last for posterity. In Mt. Mayon, Simeon Dumdum Jr.'s artistic play of words was a gift to people who love nature as well as verses. It could even be a call, a reminder for people to look around and marvel at how wonderful the world is, and perhaps ruminate on the fact that serenity could be sometimes found in a glance at a beautiful mound of earth.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

(In which everything is surprising.)

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“Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them”, goes the introductory warning in Michel Faber’s novel about a nineteen-year-old prostitute named Sugar and his patron, the future owner of Rackham Perfumeries, William. The speaker of this warning leads the reader down to dark alleys slimy with muck and noisy with yells of mongers and pathetic pleas and offers of beggars and prostitutes competing for the attention of passers-by. This is where the 895-page tour starts.
The first itinerary is Church Lane, St. Giles, in the house where Caroline, Sugar’s friend and also a prostitute, lives. It only needs several minutes of being guided through all the external and internal filth of the place for the reader to realize that this is not the place one wants to stay in. Luckily, Caroline takes us to a more decent (compared to St. Giles, of course) Silver Street where Sugar is to be met. Sugar then takes the visitor to Mrs. Castaway’s house of ill repute and to The Fireside, a tavern Sugar frequents in search for customers. From here, the course of an unusual romance between a man who had been refusing to manage a perfume empire and therefore has been suffering an increasingly unbearable financial torture from his father, and a whore whose only dream is (well, apart from publishing her rather gory novel which depicts her desire to be the female version of Jack the Ripper) to escape the embarrassing and disgusting life in a whorehouse run by her own mother, begins to take shape.
The affair started out of William’s curiosity regarding a very inviting article from More Sprees in London – Hints for Men About Town, with advice for greenhorns which features Sugar as the most sought-after girl in Mrs. Castaway’s. After a night of being with her, William decides that Sugar is to be his and only his. And for that to materialize, he needs to elevate from a distressed husband with a blurry future to a man of great consequence. He eventually becomes able to afford exclusive patronage of Sugar, and later on, a luxurious lodging at Priory Close as their love nest. Their dangerously clandestine relationship takes the visitor to omnibus and carriage rides to William’s mansion at Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill to his vast lavender farms; to the shabby house of William’s brother Henry to the Catholic church that Agnes, William’s sickly wife, thinks was miraculous as well as to her own delusional Convent of Health and to the secluded quarters of their daughter Sophie. In fear of losing William, Sugar armors herself not only with facts about perfume-making through painstaking determination but with intimate knowledge of the Rackhams and goes as far as stalking them to parties and theaters. It is an enjoyable trip – intriguing and amusing and stressful all at the same time. But, of course, the novel doesn’t start with a warning for nothing.
The Crimson Petal and the White is unique in the boldness of using the subjects of sex and filth with such a smooth artistic refinement. The scenes he painted are not the usual places one reads in historical novels. Instead of massive, grand hallways where wealth reigns and ladies in fashionable clothes speak in hushed voices, he describes pathetic makeshift houses with pathetic inhabitants compared to a mansion teeming with servants but holds a young girl captive in fear of a superstitious mother. The characters are not noblemen but mere businessmen and a prostitute. The peripheral characters include a doctor, a clergyman and widows and widowers. And the picture of poverty! The novel taps the social and religious state of the era so hard one would thank the novelist cum tour guide for the cautionary introduction of this novel within a novel.
Dark, sexy, dirty and mysterious with all the comparisons and contrasts and the fearless blending of all those, The Crimson Petal and the White proves any reader initially daunted by its weight wrong. In fact, its dimensions are designed to make one scream for more. For after reading a tale of only a hundred and five pages short of a thousand, the tourist will be caught stranded in the same street where the journey started, watching Caroline disappear in the darkness amidst the sound of a carriage leaving, with the guide ending the trip with this:
“But now, it’s time to let me go.”
Currently reading:

The Wayward Muse by Elizabeth Hickey




Photo Source:
Crimson Petal and the White
The Wayward Muse