JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Of course.

It’s 3:23am, a British player has won the Wimbledon men’s final for the first time in 77 years, our British friends have shed more tears than Andy Murray, and we’re not in the mood to pick one entry. We have two winners: Alma by murakamibaby, a science-fiction take on the Yaya Theory of World Domination, and noelz’s multiplicity comedy.

Congratulations, murakamibaby and noelz! We have your full names from your site registration; we’ll email you when your prizes are ready (We’re going to get more books). This LitWit Challenge was brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Here are the winning entries. Enjoy.

Illustration by Anna Kavehmehr

ALMA by murakamibaby

If you don’t shine you are darkness
The future is merciless
– Tomorrow, Charles Wright

Saka humakbang si Alma ng kanyang unang hakbang paakyat ng barko.

Being John Malkovich movie poster

Barbecue by noelz

You know how, in those movies, something horrible happens to the lead characters — say, an EMP takes out all power for weeks in a major city and all life as you know it is disrupted and everybody ends up starving and turning into cannibals? Or a zombie apocalypse forces a band of survivors to hole up in a deserted mansion or something like that— and everybody Just. Loses. Their. Shit. It is in people’s nature to get paranoid and start throwing accusations against each other: “I saw him sneak into the tent and steal the last two cans of sardines.” Whatever. And everybody just starts killing everybody else. And while you’re watching the events unfold you’re going, “Fuck, this is too unrealistic. The screenwriters just put in all these mentally unstable character types to ratchet up the tension. Come on guys. Have a timeout. Freaking out’s never led to anything good in these types of tales. Everybody knows that.” And that’s when somebody snaps and takes out a gun or hunting knife or something and everybody but the lead guy and girl gets slaughtered? Well, something a bit like that happened to me six months ago and apparently, well, you can’t help but freak out. I am ashamed to admit it, but in the heat of the moment, I might have killed a bit. I might’ve tortured a bit. When times got tough and you’re surrounded by people who’ve gotten as paranoid as you have, one has a tendency to murder. Who knew?
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Manananggal Terrorizes Manila and other stories. The first edition has the black and red Rorschach bats cover art (uma-Eye of Sauron) by P.T. Martin, Raya’s dad. The second edition has the tabloid cover art by Joanne de Leon. The book was published by Anvil in 1992 and 97 and is now out of print.

If our books are our descendants, then our eldest spawn has just graduated from college. Ayyyyyyy we’re ancient.

All we ever really wanted to do was write short stories. And novels, essays, maybe plays, but mostly short stories. We’ve been scribbling since we were 8 and publishing since we were 12. First we wrote pretentious movie reviews for the school paper (We imitated Pauline Kael), then pretentious editorials, and the summer after high school we started doing features and interviews for local magazines (We read Rolling Stone a lot). We could actually pay for our college tuition with the money we earned from writing. (You can’t do that anymore. Tuition fees at UP have rocketed but magazine fees have not changed appreciably in the last quarter-century.)

The advantage of freelancing from an early age is that you learn to view writing as a profession and not a romantic fancy. (In the Philippines, where writing is one of the “Walang pera diyan” fields, writers are often viewed as romantic martyr-idiots. Unless they’re in the pay of politicians, in which they are admired and reviled as cunning hacks.) Hey, Shakespeare wrote for money.

The disadvantage of freelancing from an early age is that you learn to view writing as a job and forget why you love it. Ideally, we write for ourselves. In order to make a living, we have to write for a paying audience. When you’re hammering out a thousand words a day in order to pay the bills, it’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm. Hey, Shakespeare wrote for money, but he could be as Shakespeare as he wanted. (The owner of the Globe Theatre didn’t tell him to use smaller words or go easy on that iambic pentameter.)

We learned to write stories by reading stories; our early models were J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey), John Cheever (the fat red book), Irwin Shaw (the fat blue book), Scott Fitzgerald (The Rich Boy, etc), W. Somerset Maugham and Woody Allen (The Kugelmass Episode and The Whore of Mensa). After starting and abandoning hundreds of stories, we finally finished a short story in our second year of college. It was based on our high school experience, and we called it “Through A Time Warp, With A Paddle”. The title, which is probably the only good thing about it, references two of our obsessions of the time: science-fiction and The Great Gatsby (the last line).

Having gotten over that first story hump, we spent the rest of college writing uncontrollably. We wrote during class, outside class, in the library; every conversation we had was material. It was like being possessed. All but four of the 15 stories in our first book, Manananggal Terrorizes Manila, were written when we were in college. We wish that would explain why they’re so awful but no, they’re just awful.

Nearly all the characters in those stories started out as people we know and ended up being us. We typed the drafts, had them photocopied, then carried the copies around in a fat yellow folder that we asked our classmates to read. Our classmates were our first readers and they were very kind, even when we were clearly bonkers.

Being read by other people is a terrible experience: you are completely exposed and defenseless. There’s no way around this. It should be a terrible experience. You should feel exposed and defenseless. If you think you’re brilliant from the get-go, you’re probably delusional. If you don’t feel exposed and defenseless, then you haven’t put yourself out there. You’ve risked nothing.

Later, one is capable of feeling like a genius and a cretin at the same time. Life is full of contradictions.

After college we put the folder of stories away and went to work. We continued to write stories. The year 1991 had an apocalyptic feel to it: it was just after a major earthquake, war was looming in the Middle East, Mt Pinatubo erupted, we had moved into our first apartment. We wrote a story about that time and submitted it to a foreign magazine. It was rejected. The returned manuscript was sitting on our desk when we saw a call for entries to the Palanca Awards. What the hell, we said, no one will know. But we got amazingly lucky. Never underestimate the role of randomness in human affairs.

So we had 15 stories and one Palanca Award. Okay, we laugh at awards whores and people whose profiles begin with “multi-awarded” (and “world-class”), but that one prize was really useful. Because of it, Karina Bolasco of Anvil Publishing discovered our existence and asked us if we wanted to publish a book.

Manananggal Terrorizes Manila was published in 1992 as part of the Contemporary Philippine Fiction line, along with new works by Butch Dalisay and Charlson Ong. The book launch was held at National Bookstore in Shangri-La Mall (was it September?). We were over an hour late to our own launch because there was a shoot-out somewhere that caused a massive traffic jam on Edsa. Oddly enough we have no memory of the launch itself.

Manananggal is no longer in print, which is a relief because 95 percent of those stories are atrocious. We’re very fond of the book, but we know what it is: Juvenilia. Stuff you have to expel from your system so you can get on with the good stuff. But what is the good stuff? We’re working on it. We think. And we’re writing short stories again, which is all we ever really wanted to do.

When F Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was, in the words of his biographer Matthew J Bruccoli, “an unemployed screenwriter”, whose fiction was largely ignored, if not entirely forgotten. The Great Gatsby had sold only seven copies in the last year of his life, and his complete works had earned him a grand total of $13.13 in royalties. Not long before his death, Fitzgerald scrawled a list of sources for each of Gatsby’s nine chapters, in the back of a book by André Malraux. Some of these notes are slightly mysterious: decades of digging by Fitzgerald scholars has not revealed who exactly “Mary” was, or what precisely the phrase “the day in New York” might mean. Others are readily comprehensible, such as “Gt Neck” – Great Neck being the real-life version of West Egg, the location of Gatsby’s Long Island mansion and the narrator Nick Carraway’s rented cottage.

Read the review of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell at the Guardian.

The good cop, bad cop routine

The Heat is hilarious. Sandra Bullock has always been great at physical comedy, and she’s abandoned many of her “adorable” romcom mannerisms (such as the facepalm and grimace combo). Melissa McCarthy is genius—check out her rant in the closing credits of Judd Apatow’s This is 40, where Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann have collapsed in laughter but she keeps going. Bullock and McCarthy play a stuck-up FBI agent and a maverick Boston cop who have to work together to take down a drug syndicate. Yes, you’ve seen that movie ten thousand times, but this one works on charm. Paul Feig’s (Bridesmaids) directorial approach is to stand back and let the ladies do the work—many comic opportunities slip by casually, and The Heat often feels too loose and formless. The result leaves us wondering what a Bullock and McCarthy movie might’ve been if the filmmakers had ambition.

4. Manhattan by Woody Allen

We must’ve been 10 or 11 when we saw a Woody Allen movie for the first time, on the old Channel 9. It was the crime mockumentary Take the Money and Run, in which he plays an incompetent bank robber. He goes to the bank teller and hands her a note saying “I have a gun”, but his handwriting is so bad, she reads “I have a gub”. For some reason we thought this was hilarious so we watched Take the Money and Run every time it was on and memorized many of the lines (like the one about his father having a brilliant 30-year career in the military which catapulted him to the rank of corporal).

We saw it again a few years ago, and it’s not that funny, but we decided as a child that we wanted to sound just like the typical Woody Allen character: a neurotic Jew from New York. Who the hell knows how kids make these decisions? Our 6-year-old niece loves pink glitter and wants to be a Disney princess, and we’re absolutely certain she didn’t get the idea from us or her mother. Couldn’t we choose to model ourself on a happy, well-adjusted, socially-skilled character, or at least someone closer to our culture? We didn’t even know any neurotic Jewish man from New York, but when we met some they said, “You sound like a neurotic Jewish man from New York.”

Our favorite Woody Allen movies are Manhattan, Annie Hall, Love and Death, and The Purple Rose of Cairo. In Manhattan Woody plays Isaac, a TV comedy writer who quits his lucrative job because he wants to be a serious writer. He’s dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) who is waaay too young for him (This would come back to haunt him in his real-life scandal). In this scene at the Metropolitan Museum they run into his best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) and Yale’s mistress Mary (Diane Keaton). Mary proceeds to tear down the artists Isaac loves. Later he sees her at the MoMA and she rips apart his other idols, and by the time they dash into the Museum of Natural History to get out of the rain, he’s in love with her. That’s a lot of museums.

We were maybe 14 when we saw this movie and it completely screwed us up because we thought the point of falling in love was to have someone to argue about Scott Fitzgerald and Fellini with.

5. Bringing Up Baby by Howard Hawks

Cary Grant is the absent-minded paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn is the ditzy heiress who nearly ruins his life in this screwball comedy co-starring a leopard. We love Cary Grant, and he made some of his best movies with Katharine Hepburn, but she always played characters we wanted to punch in the face.

6. Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock

Here’s a column we wrote last year when Vertigo topped the BFI list of greatest movies: Love Makes Suckers Of Us All.

Whenever I watch Vertigo I come away disturbed and disoriented, as if I’d expected a different ending from the one I’d seen before. This is of course the definition of insanity. (I don’t see why we should put spoiler alerts for 64-year-old movies, but here it is.)

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