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For lines like, “C was supposed to meet someone else here, but if he was reduced to a letter, the other party didn’t even reach the alphabet”, and the hilarious use of The Forbidden Beginning.

Congratulations, Ejia! Please post your full name in Comments (It won’t be published) and let us know what book you want for your prize.

The LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

Read all the entries here.

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The Regulators
by Ejia

I like the rain. Somehow it makes the city at night feel more real. Helps with the crime rate, too – well, most crimes.

“I’m afraid that isn’t written in the stars. Not tonight.” Her smile vanished. She pulled the trigger, and the world followed suit.

Mat is reading Burning the Days, the memoir by James Salter from which this excerpt was taken.

The war I had survived was the Korean War. I had returned from it two years before, rich with memories of flying as a fighter pilot. I had kept a journal. I had written before: stories and poems as a schoolboy, and later, in the Air Force, a novel, which was sent to a publisher and turned down. The fateful letter, however, offered encouragement. If I wrote another book, the publishers would like to see it. And so, on an iron cot in a Georgia barracks one afternoon, seemingly without effort, I wrote the outline of a novel, and on weekends and at night over the next two or three years completed the book. It was called “The Hunters” and was immediately accepted. That was 1957.

The hour had come. I resigned from the Air Force, probably the single most difficult act I had ever performed, with the idea of becoming a writer. I had been in the military for twelve years. I had a wife and two small children. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down in despair and tried to write. A few years later, a second novel was published. It was more ambitious but also more derivative, and it disappeared without a trace. But I was, despite that, a writer, and could be introduced, at least for a while, as such. The problem was that I had no way to support myself. Then, almost as if on cue, a door opened to another world.

Read Passionate Falsehoods at The New Yorker.

Elevator to the cinema. Watch OTSO at Shang on Friday.

If you missed the Sineng Pambansa All-Masters National Film Festival Festival last month, here’s your chance to get in on the discussion. All ten movies will be screened at the Shangrila Mall Cinema starting on Friday. Each film will have a whole day’s screenings.

October 11 (Friday) – Otso by Elwood Perez
October 12 (Saturday) – Lihis by Joel Lamangan
October 13 (Sunday) – Sonata by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes

October 18 (Friday) – Ang Tag-Araw Ni Twinkle by Gil M. Portes
October 19 (Saturday) – Tinik by Romy Suzara
October 20 (Sunday) – Bamboo Flowers by Maryo J. Delos Reyes

October 24 (Thursday) – Bahay ng Lagim by Celso Ad Castillo
October 25 (Friday) – Badil by Chito Roño
October 26 (Saturday) – Lauriana by Mel Chionglo
October 27 (Sunday) – Ano ang kulay ng mga nakalimutang pangarap? by Joey Javier Reyes

Life goes on, and a large chunk of our life is movies.

Last Wednesday we saw the opening film of Pelikula, the 12th annual Spanish Film Festival, ongoing at Greenbelt 3 Cinema 1. Blancanieves, Pablo Berger’s adaptation of Snow White, is Los Hermanos Grimmer: a silent period film in exquisite black and white, lushly scored and brilliantly acted. There were two competing Hollywood versions of Snow White last year—forget them. The silent period film The Artist won the Oscar for Best Picture—forget that. They all pale next to Blancanieves, a retelling that captures the beauty, terror, joy and sadness of the fairy tale. Except that it happens in the real world.

In Berger’s adaptation, the heroine is Carmencita, an orphan deprived of her father’s love by her wicked stepmother (Maribel Verdu from Y Tu Mama Tambien). The setting is Spain in the 1920s, and the absent father is the king…of bullfighters. Yes, there are dwarves. And poisoned apples.

Blancanieves is rated PG-13. The last screening is on Friday, 11 October at 9:30pm.

NASA vet weighs in on Gravity: Spectacular realism

Gravity by Alfonso Cuaron is every bit as awesome as we hoped it would be. It’s been seven years since Cuaron’s last film, the brilliant and criminally underrated Children of Men; from the opening shot of Gravity, we could see why the follow-up took so long. Stunning in its detail, magnificent in its evocation of the cold, silent vastness of space, Gravity is a movie that grabs you by the neck and doesn’t let go.

As kids growing up in the era of the Apollo space missions, we dreamed of walking through that immensity. Gravity reawakens us to that possibility.

For all its technical achievements, the real strength of Gravity lies in its human characters. With his reassuring presence, George Clooney is the wise mentor—the Obi-Wan—in this space drama. Playing the astronaut who is violently separated from her craft and set adrift in space, Sandra Bullock reminds us of her star-making performance in Speed as the girl driving the doomed bus—except that the girl is now a rocket scientist. It’s an amazingly empathic performance that comes with considerable physical challenges, and she is completely believable in it. We feel her terror and desperation, and her strength. Cuaron and Bullock have taken us to space. (We especially like the images of birth and evolution.)

We saw Gravity twice in two days, first on a regular screen, then in IMAX 3D. Our cat had just died so we thought, “Based on the trailer, everyone in Gravity is likely to die. We feel like death, so we might as well see it.” The underlying philosophy being: When in the depths, try to hit rock-bottom, see if you will bounce. The strangest thing happened. The film brought us to the brink of hopelessness and utter despair, and it made us want to live. And reserve seats on the commercial space shuttle flight. Space is vast. Life is huge. Never fear.

[Gravity in IMAX 3D is extraordinary but not essential. The 3D glasses at SM Aura IMAX fit better than other theatres’ 3D glasses, but there was a distracting blue glow at the bottom of the screen. It turned out to be the reflection from the blue lights on the floor. Could you fix that, please?]

Koosalagoopagoop Galadriel Ivanisevic O’Brien, a.k.a. Koosi, a.k.a. The Mighty Goddess Bast

Koosi died this morning. She had celebrated 14 birthdays with us, but was probably closer to 15. She must’ve been about 6 months old when she adopted us in 1999. That’s not an error, as we often point out—she picked us and decided to move in. Our household quickly adjusted to her requirements, for this was a cat who had to have things done exactly her way.

Two weeks ago we noticed that Koosi’s appetite was poor and she would complain every time we touched her sides. At first we thought she was annoyed at the arrival of the new cat (Drogon) and was defending her territory by laying a massive guilt trip on us (She was a master at this). But she had been fine with his presence the previous week. Then she became lethargic. After we had ruled out various ailments, we requested our vet to send their mobile clinic to our neighborhood. Our vet said Koosi had symptoms of pneumonia and possible kidney trouble, and would need to be confined at the clinic.

After a few days days, the vet said Koosi was doing better and more air was getting into her lungs. She was back to her feisty, mataray self, but she still wasn’t eating or peeing. The vet, who knows that our cats are ornery creatures, thought Koosi might be refusing to eat because she was in an unfamiliar place. Maybe if we took her home, she would recover her appetite.

So we picked Koosi up last night (pouring rain, lightning, the works) and brought her home. We were supposed to observe her food intake and peeing frequency, and if there was no improvement the mobile clinic would pick her up on Saturday.

When we got to our house Koosi was so weak she couldn’t even stand up. We offered her kibble, wet cat food, milk, catnip, but her head would droop over the feeding bowl and she drank only a little water. Drogon came over and groomed her—she didn’t mind, so they were fine. Except for a couple of colds Koosi had never been sick in her life, so it was scary to see her so frail. This is a very proud cat: if she leapt from the table to the top of the shelf and missed, and we laughed, she would come over and smack us. She did not like to be seen at a disadvantage.

We wrapped her up in a blanket and put her to bed. Saffy and Mat huddled with us. Koosi’s breathing was regular, but she could barely lift her head. Such was our belief in her powers of recovery that we expected her to leap out of bed in the morning and have a huge breakfast. But Koosi never had much patience with being hugged—she would endure it for a minute or so, then swat us away. She allowed us to hug her all night. We slept maybe an hour in total.

At 9:30 this morning she started gasping for breath. We carried her into the kitchen, where we boiled water to produce steam to help her breathe. She continued gasping, and then she went limp and peed all over our shirt. Koosi had lost consciousness. We tried to revive her, but she was not responsive. At 10:15 or so we had to admit to ourself that Koosi was dead. We didn’t let her go for the next half hour. At 11 we broke the news to our sister, who has just given birth. She got out of bed and came over with our brother-in-law to see Koosi for the last time.

Koosi was our first real pet (we’ve always fed stray cats but they didn’t live with us). This building was her turf, so we buried her in the backyard.

In human years she would be about 84 years old. While we are destroyed by the loss, we’re glad she was able to spend her last night at home with us. We had a proper goodbye. If you’re going to get anthropomorphic about it, you could say that she managed to convince the vet that she was well enough to go home so she could be with us for the last time.

We will never forget Koosi; we’ll always see her out of the corner of our eye, a fat golden blur, leaping onto shelves or attacking string. Not for nothing did we call her the Mighty Goddess Bast. It’s kind of terrifying to love another creature so much, a non-human, but amazing to discover that capacity in one’s self. Koosi had an excellent life, and as you know, cats regret nothing. We should be so lucky.

We asked Jay Lozada to design the cover of our new book of short stories.

First he took a paper bag. Because he knows that we often wish we could wear a paper bag over our head.

Then he added text.

Then he added the full title, and our glasses so readers would know it’s us.

Design by Jay Lozada, Photography by Jo Ann Bitagcol.

The Stories So Far, new short stories by Jessica Zafra, will be out in November on our online store.