Readers’ Bloc 2010: Quick, repeat this 3x. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Uro de la Cruz is a director for television (Bubble Gang, Show Me the Manny) and movies (Bahay Ni Lola, Buko Pandan), photographer (RangeFinder Filipinas), screenwriter (Scorpio Nights), and fictionist (Antyng Antyng). A conversation with Uro sounds like this:
– What are you doing now?
– Nothing.
– No Bubble Gang?!
– That, but nothing else.
– No more Manny Pacquiao sitcom?
– Well yes, but really nothing else. . .
Uro’s list:
1. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, the Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1
2. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks. About the restoration of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of earliest illuminated Hebrew books.
3. A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong. A thriller about the disappearance of a Red Chinese dancer. US Marshall Rohn and Inspector Chen investigate.
4. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. A “scholastic” thriller about 2 Princeton students solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a puzzling Renaissance text.
5. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, which led me to also read
6. The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. The concept of God viewed through the prism of archaeology, theology, history, and evolutionary psychology.
7. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
8. A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines by Mary Helen Fee. The memoirs of an American school teacher who came to the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century and worked alongside the Thomasites. She arrived a week before the USS Thomas and prepared the accommodations of the new teachers. She was assigned in Capiz. Some of her observations about the Filipino still ring true today. Funny, amusing, informative and ultimately tragic.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
December 11th, 2010 at 19:26
I found and to my utter amazement that book No. 8 is available online, yay! Here it is >>> http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13392/pg13392.txt
December 11th, 2010 at 19:49
Ha! How true even to this day. And this was written at the turn of the 20th Century?!
“…at the present time I do feel warranted in stating that the mass of intelligent Filipinos fail to distinguish between critical or appreciative ability and real creative ability, and that what they are acquiring in huge doses just now is the critical and not the creative. Moreover, of the great body
of persons who make the demand for the best, only a very few have any
idea of what is the best except in book learning and social polish. The
prominent men among the Filipinos to-day are those who were educated
in Europe or in Filipino schools modelled on European patterns. Their
idea of education is a social one–an education which fits a man to
be considered a gentleman and to be an adornment to the society of
his peers. They have no conception of the American specialization
idea in education which grants a doctor’s degree to a man who says
“would have went” and “He come to my house yesterday.””
December 15th, 2010 at 13:29
I have a copy of “The Rule of Four” sitting in my bookshelf for a year now. I started reading it in December last year, but failed to finish it because of Agassi’s “Open”.