JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

A procession of publicans and a beggar following the coffin of Madam Geneva; attacking the Act preventing distillers from retailing or selling gin to unlicensed premises. Engraving, 1751 from the Wellcome Collection.

The temperature in the early afternoon was 36 degrees Celsius; the heat index was 45 degrees. As Ige would say, if the weather were a person it would be a corpse. Some of us are already spending lockdown doing passable impressions of corpses.
Read the rest of this entry →

I don’t like phone calls because I prefer to talk face to face, in the same way I refuse to use “friend” as a verb online because before we get to the noun we have to have a shared history. I like video calls even less because they feel like an invasion. But the age of social distancing has arrived, and one must adapt or disappear, so two weeks ago I downloaded Zoom on my phone. It’s been an education.
Read the rest of this entry →

If I lived at the Metropolitan Museum in NY, my cats would have their birthday parties in the Temple of Dendur.

I’ve kept it together for 6 weeks by following a schedule. I’ve never been so disciplined in my life. If I’d been like this in high school and college, who knows what I might have achieved? I might have satisfied my parents’ ambitions, become rich and powerful, have people at my beck and call…

I wouldn’t be writing today.
Read the rest of this entry →

Photo from amazon.com.

Yesterday the airconditioner in the living room was whirring and blowing air, but not getting cold. The average temperature round noon is 36 degrees, but feels like 42. May has just begun, and meteorologists expect this to be the hottest year in history. Where would I find an aircon repairman in lockdown? I couldn’t complain: I have food, books, and cats. Shut up and write.
Read the rest of this entry →

Photos by Ricky Villabona

Ricky who lives in a high-rise has been taking photos of the city in lockdown: eerily beautiful shots of cityscapes without people, skies so clear you can see the fires of Mordor, or alien spaceships hovering. They look like science-fiction stories waiting to be told. Where did everyone go? Why did they leave? What terrors lurk in the silent spaces?
Read the rest of this entry →

You can watch the recorded reading and talk at Mt Cloud’s Facebook page.

Every year Gabe Mercado and Lissa Romero-de Guia do a dramatic reading of Nick Joaquin’s story May Day Eve on May Day Eve (April 30) at Mt Cloud Bookshop in Baguio. As we are all indoors this year, they will do the performance online and Fifi of Mt Cloud has asked me to provide commentary. I am happy to play Waldorf and Statler of The Muppet Show, and to provide trivia (Traditionally April 30 is Walpurgisnacht, when witches supposedly walk the earth, and War Pigs by Black Sabbath was originally titled Walpurgisnacht, so there’s your Black Sabbath-Quijano de Manila connection. Also I don’t know of a film version of May Day Eve, but there is a very bad one of Joaquin’s Summer Solstice).
Read the rest of this entry →