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#17 on the New York Times Bestseller List (trade fiction) on September 30: Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos (Plume). “A cafe manager falls for a Cary Grant-like charmer, then learns he has an 11-year-old daughter.” I googled Marisa de los Santos, and I was right: she’s Filipino-American, based in Delaware. I’m guessing this makes her the highest-ranking author of Filipino descent ever on the NYT Bestseller list, though I have to check the stats for Dogeaters, Fixer Chao, Umbrella Country. Reviewers have described Love Walked In as a smart contemporary romance, or at least chick lit of the non-nauseating variety. The film rights have been acquired by Sarah Jessica Parker. I saw the book in hardcover in National Bookstore: there’s a half-Filipino half-Swedish character in it named Teo. One of the blurbs is by David Schickler, author of that lovely book Kissing In Manhattan. Here’s the Bookslut review of Love Walked In.

Tree of Smoke, the new novel by Denis Johnson, opens in the Philippines on the day John F. Kennedy was shot.

“Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed. Seaman Houston and the other two recruits slept while the first reports traveled around the world. There was one small nightspot on the island, a dilapidated club with big revolving fans in the ceiling and one bar and one pinball game; the two marines who ran the club had come by to wake them up and tell them what had happened to the President. The two marines sat with the three sailors on the bunks in the Quonset hut for transient enlisted men, watching the air conditioner drip water into a coffee can and drinking beer. The Armed Forces Network from Subic Bay stayed on through the night, broadcasting bulletins about the unfathomable murder. . .”

According to Butch, Johnson was in the think tank brought in to advise Francis Ford Coppola on the Apocalypse Now script when the shoot was in trouble. Another adviser was Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard’s collaborator in his Maoist period.

A description of the Philippines: “The setting sun lowered from the clouds and struck up at them in such a way that suddenly the entire town throbbed with a scarlet light.” The central metaphor of the tree of smoke: “”And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon come to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (from the Book of Joel)

“On the question of pedophilia, The White Book was unequivocal: it formally advised against Thailand, which no longer had anything to recommend it, if indeed it ever had. It was much better to go to the Philippines or, better still, to Cambodia—the journey might be dangerous, but it was worth the effort.” – from Platform by Michel Houellebecq

The movie 8mm refers to the Philippines as a source of snuff movies.

Patis dissed: “The nuoc mam from Phu Quoc Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste. . .But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.” – from the story Love by Robert Olen Butler

In the movie Constantine, the possessed girl hisses at Keanu Reeves: “PapaTAYin natin siya!” So Hollywood has established that Tagalog is the language spoken in hell.

This just in from Budj.
IF: Illegal Facilitator, a criminal whose crimes facilitated the crimes of others.
…
“He’d looked, Milgrim thought, like an ethnic version of a younger Johnny Depp. Brown had once referred to the IF and his family as Cuban-Chinese, but Milgrim would have been unable to make an ethnic identification. Filipino, in a pinch, but that wasn’t it either. And they spoke Russian. Or texted in an approximation of it.” —Spook Country by William Gibson

To recap:
Novels by foreigners set in the Philippines

1. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
2. The Tesseract by Alex Garland – made into a movie set in Bangkok; too bad as Ige points out there was a great Eddie Garcia part in there
3. Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson
4. The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd – doesn’t read like he was actually here.
5. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard by Timothy Mo
6. And Now You Can Go by Vendela Vida
7. Someone alerted me to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro—Thanks, I’ll look it up.
8. Biggest Elvis by P.F. Kluge, who reportedly got his ass kicked at Scrabble by a madame in Malate
9. Ay, almost forgot Fires On The Plain by Shohei Ooka (Thanks for the reminder), a strange and wonderful novel about the Japanese soldiers trapped in Leyte towards the end of the Japanese Occupation.

Filipino characters in novels set elsewhere

1. The hero in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Who else would know how to deal with alien cockroaches. By the time the book was adapted for the screen, the Pinoy had mutated into Casper Van Dien.
2. Eugenio Martinez in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
3. Filipino nanny in A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe
4. Pinguez in Thomas Pynchon’s V
5. Conchita the maid in Fragrant Harbor by John Lanchester
6. Tatsuo’s parents in Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Songs with titles alluding to the Philippines: Filipino Box Spring Hog by Tom Waits; Bebot by the Black-Eyed Peas.
Movies set partly or completely in the Philippines (the Phils as the Phils, not Vietnam or Indonesia): An Officer and A Gentleman (don’t think they actually shot here), No Way Out (signifier: bananas), that Claire Danes one, and Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-Wai, who makes casual reference to Manila in all his movies. And Kon Ichikawa’s masterwork Nobi (Fires On The Plain), which is set in Leyte but was actually shot in Japan. (Really minor quibble: The Filipino cast members should’ve been speaking Visayan.)

Tagalog heard in movies: The Rock, Constantine, Her Alibi, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

Does anyone know the title of that French spy novel with an episode at the Hobbit House?

Tina notes that several of the novels set in the Philippines are of an apocalyptic nature. It’s only fitting that Apocalypse Now was shot here, even if it’s set in Vietnam. Apocalypses R Us.

In 30 Rock, network honcho Alec Baldwin tells jeans-clad comedy show producer Tina Fey to dress up for a business lunch with a comedian they want to recruit. Wardrobe finds her an outfit, then he tells her, “That’s the way you should dress, by the way.” “Yeah,” she snarls back, “If I was president of the Philippines!” Tina Fey is the long-time headwriter of Saturday Night Live, and is the writer and producer of both 30 Rock and the TV comedy it’s about.