In his acceptance speech for The Sense of an Ending, Barnes said that he felt a kinship with another long-time literary loser, Jorge Luis Borges, who was overlooked for the Nobel Prize year after year.
“When asked, as he constantly was, why he had never won the Nobel Prize, Borges used to reply that there was a cottage industry devoted to not giving Borges the Nobel Prize. Over the last years, in occasional moments of mild paranoia, I have wondered whether there wasn’t some similar, sinister organisation operating over here,” Barnes told the audience at the Guildhall.
“I would like to thank the judges – who I won’t hear a word against – for their wisdom, and the sponsors for their cheque.”
Join our Reading Group? The Sense of an Ending is only 150 pages long. We will provide the copies. Sign up in Comments. Please note that if you are invited to the Reading Group you will be asked to sign a pledge that you will finish the book and submit a report. We assure you that non-compliance will be painful. When the book is available you will be asked to pick up your copy at National Bookstore in Rockwell.
The Jessica Rules Reading Group is sponsored by National Bookstore.
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Too many volunteers, not enough books. We’ll pick eight readers and announce their names late next week when the copies arrive. Or you could go ahead and buy a copy. We’ll alert you.
Don’t ask us why we always end up in the company of jocks—it’s not entirely by choice (Think Fremen encountering Sardaukar) but we’re not complaining. Our friend Jay Lozada was doing make-up for the Due/Collezione fashion show at the Peninsula Manila yesterday. We needed a place to sit and write a column so we invited ourselves to Rhett Eala’s suite.
James and Phil Younghusband of the Philippine national football team the Azkals are the endorsers of Collezione C2. “They’re wonderful endorsers,” says Due/Collezione designer Rhett Eala, “very supportive of the brand.”
We noticed from his running commentary while the Chevy Chase movie Fletch was on TV that James knows a lot about movies. He is watching the TV series Walking Dead. Phil was pleased at his Meralco team’s 15-1 victory over Team Socceroo. He made 7 goals. (When Jay mentioned that the Azkals were playing the Brazilians we fell out of our seats. What he meant was that Meralco, whose lineup includes Azkals, was playing Socceroo, whose lineup includes Brazilian models. Ah.)
According to Rhett the Collezione C2 Holiday Collection is inspired by the Himalayas. They’ve been on his mind since his friends went trekking in Bhutan. And recently he saw the Michael Palin TV series Himalaya again. (No, he has not seen Lost Horizon recently. Last Song Syndrome: Living together, growing together…)
The result of the Himalayan fixation: plenty of outfits in olive and neutral colors, with bursts of orange. They look like clothes for cold weather, but they’re in light fabrics like cotton and linen.
Guest models Anton del Rosario and Nathan Burkey of the Azkals walked the ramp in dropped crotch pants. During the preparations there was some discussion over whether they were supposed to smile or look serious (Blue Steel/Le Tigre). During the show my seatmate noted that all the male models looked like it was a terrific hassle and all the female models looked like they were angry at us. Ah, fashion.
Will the average Filipino guy take to dropped crotch pants? We’d like to know. We can tell you they’re more aesthetically pleasing than huge baggy pants worn so low you see butt cracks. These pants look like a cross between skinny jeans and the harem pants of the M.C. Hammer era. (LSS: Dun dun dun dun can’t touch this.)
James looks like a schoolboy who’s wandered off during a class field trip in Tibet.
Phil’s trousers would not work on a guy with hips.
Good work, Rhett and the Due/Collezione team, and thanks for the vodka! The Holiday Collection is now available at the Due stores in Rockwell, Eastwood and Greenbelt 5, and at the many Collezione C2 outlets.
You have to see Black Narcissus, the 1947 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger about British nuns in the Himalayas.
We used to scour book sale bins for back issues of the New Yorker so we could read Pauline Kael’s movie reviews. She was hilarious, knowledgeable, extremely opionated, inconsistent, verbose, and her admiration for some movies bordered on the irrational. We loved her madly. We wanted to be Pauline Kael.
Congratulations, bookstothesky! Please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published) and we’ll alert you when you can pick up your Limited Edition Star Wars Moleskine notebook at National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell, Makati.
The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.
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bookstothesky, you can pick up your Moleskine notebook at the Customer Service counter of National Bookstore in Power Plant Mall, Rockwell any day starting Friday the 21st. Enjoy!
Writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity, even for those who were once taught the rigorous rules of penmanship in grade school and hardly saw a day go by without jotting down a telephone number or a list of food items to buy at the market on the way home, and for that purpose carried with them something to write with and something to write on. In an emergency, lacking pen or notebook, they might even approach a complete stranger to ask for assistance. For instance, on a cold January morning, I once asked a fashionably dressed middle-aged woman, standing outside a building on Madison Avenue smoking a cigarette and shivering, whether she had a pen I could use. She didn’t think this was an odd request and was happy to oblige me. After she extracted a pencil not much bigger than a matchstick from her purse, I took out a little notebook I carried in my pocket, and not trusting the reliability of my memory, wrote down some lines of poetry I had been mulling over for the previous hour, roaming the streets. Today, she’d probably be staring at an iPhone or a blackberry while puffing away on her cigarette and it would not cross my mind to bother her by asking for a pencil.
The kind of notebooks I’m describing are still available in stationery stores (the ones made by an outfit called Moleskine come in a variety of sizes and colors), so someone must still be scribbling in them—unless they are bought purely out of nostalgia for another time and remain unused now that they have so much competition. No question, one can use a smart phone as an aid to memory, and I do use one myself for that purpose. But I don’t find them a congenial repository for anything more complicated than reminding myself to pick up a pair of pants from the cleaners or make an appointment with the cat doctor. If one has the urge to write down a complete thought, a handsome notebook gives it more class. Even a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought…
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Long-overdue thanks to Rio for the Moleskine folio. No we don’t think it’s bonkers at all, but our sanity standards are a bit different.
Eyeglasses by Maria Nella Sarabia, O.D.
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