JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Photo: What I’m looking at this very minute. The lighter blue is the pool, darker blue is the sea. I don’t swim.

So I’m in a quaint, rustic, retro hideout. . .with wi-fi. It’s time for a write-in contest! 

The question is: If the Filipinos in the Philippines could vote in the US elections, would they cast their votes for Obama or McCain? Why? Post your answers in Comments—no length requirements, as always, knock yourselves out. The winner picked by our board of judges gets this:

The Top 10 of Everything, as spotted in the National Bookstore in NAIA Terminal 3 (Cavernous! Not crammed with humans!). The deadline for entries is 12 noon on November 4, Election Day. Vote now!

Meanwhile: How Simon Cowell saved American democracy, in TNR. “. . .as much as some might scoff at the deleterious effects of “Idol” on our culture, it has created a culture of voting among our young people. . .”

Also: Red State, Blue State: Why do so many evangelical teenagers become pregnant?

Several times at a Cinemanila screening of Serbis I was ready to bolt from my seat. The very first scene, in which a naked teenage girl preens in front of mirror as if she were starring in a porno. Undue attention was paid to her genitalia, I thought. What for? Cheap exploitation in the guise of art?

Shortly afterwards, a young man is bandaging a boil on his derriere. Do I really need to see a purulent sore on someone’s ass? Is this an excuse to show the actor’s derriere? When another young man is shown masturbating I thought I had become inured to the director’s shock tactics, but then there is the scene of the overflowing toilet, inviting viewers to disgorge their dinners.

It struck me as I looked around for the nearest exit that the movie was daring me to walk out. The filmmakers were calling me a wimp, a delicate coward who cannot look directly at the decay and squalor around her. Because that is the subject of Brillante Mendoza’s movie: Ugliness. He is aiming his camera at the rotten core of society, the sleaze that surrounds us, the filth we refuse to see. We pretend that it’s not there, and the more we pretend, the more it spreads and festers. We take refuge in illusion and artifice, the gloss and prettiness of the movies. 

But the movies have failed us.

My review of Serbis in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

This is where I’ll be living for the next three days. It’s a 1930s house from the town of Piddig in Ilocos Norte that was taken apart and rebuilt in Sitio Remedios, a heritage resort in Currimao, by the South China Sea. 

The sala has a daybed, so if your guests are boring, you can fall asleep on them.

The piano, in case one is possessed by the spirit of Franz Liszt. Or by the urge to remake Huwag Mong Buhayin Ang Bangkay! in which the corpse of a pianist played by Jestoni Alarcon is reanimated by his scheming mother Charito Solis through a pact with the devil. The pianist spends the rest of the movie decomposing. Rimshot.

Someone went to a lot of trouble to spell out the names in petals.

It’s vewy, vewy quiet. I can hear all the voices in my head, and they can hear all the voices in your heads.

Timothy Garton Ash on the US elections:

“From my observation perch in Stanford, California, an English European turned 24/7-cablenews-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don’t they understand? This is our election. The world’s election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do. All we lack is the vote.

“The world may not have a vote, but it has a candidate. A BBC World Service poll, conducted across twenty-two countries this summer, found Barack Obama was preferred to John McCain by a margin of four to one. Nearly half those asked said an Obama victory would “fundamentally change” their perception of the United States. And it certainly needs changing. Over the two terms of President George W. Bush, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a series of worldwide public opinion surveys, has documented what anyone who travels around the world knows: a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States. . .”

A Fateful Election: Russell Baker, David Bromwich, Darryl Pinckney, Joan Didion, Garry Wills and others on the election in which so much is at stake. In the New York Review of Books.

I’m off to Sitio Remedios in Currimao to listen to the pounding waves and read Vasily Grossman’s doorstop, Life and Fate, in the lighthouse. In the daytime I will stay out of the frizzling sun, read the novel I finished writing in May, and decide whether to shred it or rewrite chunks of it, assuming I can bear the sight of it. In the nighttime I will take walks, assuming the mosquitoes let me, look at the sky, and figure out once and for all where the blasted Big Dipper is. We might put up a white sheet on the beach and watch movies—any time is the right time for Preston Sturges. If I am not too lazy I will look at the contestants for the best grave, maybe visit some haunted houses. I’ve never actually seen a ghost; they avoid me, and for good reason.

In The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr asks: “Is Google making us stupid?”

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

“I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Carr recounts how, when Nietzsche started using a typewriter, his prose became tighter and more “telegraphic”. Nietzsche said, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

I know this to be true. The stuff I write with pen and paper sounds different from the stuff I type directly onto a computer. You literally feel more—the texture of the paper, the way the ink flows onto the paper, the bump on your middle finger where you rest your pen—and it soaks into what you’re writing. This isn’t romantic hooey, I’ve been on a 1,000 words a day regimen for over a decade and have empirical data. Also, I don’t really think when I’m typing, it’s like being on automatic pilot. What works for me is composing a story in my notebook, longhand, and then typing it onto my computer, editing (usually tightening the sentences and removing some of the digressions) in the process.

Page written by Honore de Balzac, who kept a lot of cats, drank a lot of coffee, and cranked out about a novel a week.

I knew a guy who claimed he knew a guy who stole a painting from the Louvre in the early 1970s. This was before the current security systems were installed, and before the tourist hordes clutching copies of the Da Vinci Code had descended on the place. My source claims that as teenagers, he and his friends would go jogging in the museum.

The thief was a very quiet, nondescript, angry man who frequented the Louvre. He was particularly fond of a certain painting, which he visited at least once a week. The painting (not in the photo) was small, the size of a book (A Vermeer?! My source couldn’t remember); it could be tucked into someone’s coat and carried out without attracting attention. One day the angry man decided that his weekly visits were not enough. He needed to have the painting by him at all times. So he walked up to a female museum guard and said, “What would happen if I grabbed a painting and ran out?”

“What?” the guard said, and laughed. Whereupon the man seized the painting and ran out of the Louvre. By the time the stunned guard could react to the theft, he was halfway out of the building. No one stopped him at the exit. He took the painting home and put it in a desk drawer where he could look at it as long and as often as he wanted. He had no intention of selling it; he just wanted to look at it.

The police conducted a search for the missing painting but they had no leads: the guard’s description of the thief applied to half the male population of Paris, and the fences knew nothing of the stolen art. The painting remained in the thief’s possession for a decade. The decision to return it came as quickly as the decision to take it. He phoned in an anonymous tip to the police and left the painting in a shopping bag on a chair in a crowded cafe. The identity of the thief was never established.

Of course, my source could’ve made up this story.

In the New Yorker, Dutch Master, the story of the man who forged Vermeers, sold one to Hermann Goering, and became a folk hero.

Time Management for Anarchists by Jim Munroe (via Boing Boing). How to be productive without having, or being, a boss. Starring Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin.

If anarchosyndicalism is not for you, what about hereditary monarchy by divine right? Read the first chapter of Cintra Wilson’s Caligula for President, in Boing Boing.

My earbuds—those tiny plugs you stick in your ear to listen to an iPod—have taken as much abuse as a piece of equipment can take and endured it without complaint. Though widely derided when the first iPods came out—the technical term was “piece of crap”—the plain white earbuds have served me well. Admittedly I’m not finicky about sound quality. If I were, I wouldn’t be listening to my music library on an iPod, with the earbuds that came in the box, while walking around a mall where every store has its own music playing, volume turned up to compete with the neighbor’s music, the mall’s muzak, and the pianist pounding out show tunes in the food court. Purist audiophiles shudder at the idea of portable personal mp3 players, super-compressed music files being, to them, an abomination. The apostates who have embraced new technology say that at the very least, one must ignore the iPod earbuds and get a proper pair of noise-canceling cushioned headphones, the kind you clap on like earmuffs in the dead of winter. . .

In the land of “What?” in Emotional Weather Report - Gadgets, today in the Star.

I’ve been using Moleskine notebooks for a couple of years, they’re the perfect companion on trips, and they’ve put up with heavy-but-reasonable use without complaint. Until now.

This carnet fell apart for no good reason. The binding on the second to the last page before the pocket came apart. The pocket contained two business cards, a concert ticket and a folded receipt, so it wasn’t exactly full to bursting. 

I take obsessive care of my notebooks—one of the vestiges of my Theresian upbringing—I don’t like dog-eared pages and I especially don’t bend the spine back (shudder). The only explanation I can think of for this disintegrated notebook is that the glue can’t withstand high humidity. Which doesn’t explain why its fellows are in perfect condition.

I still love Moleskines, I’m just a little disgruntled.

*****

A Czech weekly called Respekt released details from police records in 1950 which suggest that the writer Milan Kundera denounced a person suspected of espionage. The suspected spy was sentenced to 22 years in jail. Was Milan Kundera a rat? Does The Unbearable Lightness of Being ring true if it was written by an informer?

Samuel Abraham says, “the manner of reporting this tragic case represent another substantial drop in the level of decency and professionalism in journalism.” Bernard-Henri Levy reprimands the media and defends Kundera, saying, “”My thoughts are with Milan Kundera. I am thinking about this literary war which has been choreographed with the precision of a ballet, where the first blow leaves the enduring mark and a newspaper, which has the audacity to call itself Respekt, takes it upon itself to destroy you, and all you can do is sit out the beating, bend over double and live out the rest of your days with an infamous shadow which is not your own.”

Painting: “Red on Maroon” by Mark Rothko (from www.artchive.com)

I saw a dead body by the sidewalk. I was in a cab on the corner of Ayala and Makati Avenues, waiting for the light to change. The cabbie was listening to the radio broadcast of the Senate hearing on the euro-happy police visiting Russia. Suddenly a reporter interrupted the broadcast to say that a woman had jumped from the 15th floor of the PLDT Building and landed on the driveway.

The light turned green and the cab crossed Ayala, only to be caught in a jam. As the cab crawled along Makati Avenue I saw her. She was lying face-down on the concrete, surrounded by police and gawkers. I got to thinking, Did she fall or was she pushed? Why’d she do it? If a mass of about 60 kg falls from a height of about 40 m at 9.8 m/s/s, what is the impact? What is the splatter pattern? Did she mean to do at lunchtime when everyone would see? Given the temperature and humidity, how long before. . .Was this truly her choice? Did her life pass before her eyes? How many lives in how many parallel universes will be altered because of this one death?

When I left the area three hours later the crowd was still there, so presumably the body had not been taken away. I hope someone put a blanket over her.

“The small village of Nawakille (pop. few thousand) outside the frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan boasts something that no other in the world can. Over the last half century, the village that does not have a single squash court, has produced six world number ones in the sport. In fact, since 1950 the six between them have won 29 British Opens (the Wimbledon of squash) and 14 World Opens (which started only in 1975). . .”

Nawakille: A Squash Town in All Things Pakistan, via 3Quarks Daily.