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The World Domination shirts have arrived, and will soon be available at our online store. The first edition says “You can’t rule the world if you can’t decide what to order”, and is dedicated to highly opinionated people who don’t understand “option paralysis”.

Our shirts are manufactured right in the nexus of World Domination, the Philippines. Made of durable, stretchable, color-fast 100 percent cotton with satin or mesh accents, they are understated but unmistakable.

World Domination shirts come in three colors: black with green satin accent, neon fuchsia with navy satin, and blue-violet with beige mesh. We have them in girls’ sizes, Small, Medium and Large.

Each shirt costs Php299, and there’s a charge of about Php60 (we’ll check) for deliveries.

Be the first to stand up for World Domination. Pre-order your shirts today by emailing saffron.safin@gmail.com with your details: color/s, size/s, and delivery address. Our elves will get back to you as soon as the online store opens.

Technically not related to this post, but Game of Thrones is related to everything.

For our workshop participants (and anyone interested in reading along): Some books you could look up for research, comparison and direction. Excuse the oversimplified descriptions of your works in progress.

Crime thriller set in 19th Century Manila
– For style, the psychological thrillers (romans durs) of Georges Simenon, especially Dirty Snow, The Engagement, The Widow.
– Blair and Robertson’s massive The Philippine Islands is available at Project Gutenberg
– Accounts of foreign visitors to the Philippines, inc. Schadenburg and Jean Mallat

Science-fiction: Alternate history
– The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
– The Alteration, Kingsley Amis
– The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
– The Separation, Christopher Priest
– Watchmen, Alan Moore

Urban chaos short stories with gay themes
– Patty Diphusa, Pedro Almodovar
– A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund White
– Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin
– The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

A social comedy set in the film industry
– Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West
– Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, Steven Bach
– Watch Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
– Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

A social comedy about relationships and marriage
– Jane Austen and her descendants
– Anything by Laurie Colwin
– The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy
– After Claude, Iris Owens

Science-fiction: Cyberpunk, Dystopian future
– Neuromancer, William Gibson
– Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
– Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban

An existential crisis/search for meaning novel
– Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
– The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoevsky
– Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
– My Dark Places, James Ellroy

A coming-of-age novel of ideas and clashing philosophies
– Black Dogs, Ian McEwan
– Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Seymour, J.D. Salinger
– The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

Science-fiction: Future society with individuals who possess unusual gifts
– Dune, Frank Herbert
– The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
– The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick

Comic meta-novel about fame and social media, told by a writer who can’t finish anything
– Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer
– The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh
– The Comforters, Muriel Spark

A coming-of-age novel about love, sex, responsibility
– The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
– I Conquer the Castle, Dodie Smith
– The Hotel New Hampshire/The World According to Garp, John Irving

A novel about family, the past, and the instability of memory
– The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes
– The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
– A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr

A novel about friendship, betrayal, memory
– A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
– The Old School, Tobias Wolff
– The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
– Atonement, Ian McEwan

A novel about travel and sexual awakening
– Platform, Michel Houellebecq
– A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
– Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer

A coming-of-age novel set in a small town populated with eccentrics
– Dubliners, James Joyce
– Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
– Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
– There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
– The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart

A fantasy novel about aswang and an alternate history of the Philippines
– The Philippine Islands, Blair and Robertson (Search the Index)
– The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson
– America’s Boy, James Hamilton-Paterson

Dante’s Inferno transposed to Metro Manila
– Obviously
– Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
– Vermilion Sands, J.G. Ballard

Filipino translation of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
– Read the Sherlock stories over and over till you get their rhythm.
– Interviews on translation with Pevear/Volokhonsky

Reader Alenette in Miami sent us some organically-grown Colombian coffee, espresso (1 cup = 10 cups of cafe Americano) and a cafetera. Thank you! If this is the caffeine you live on, you will surely ace your exams.

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The World Domination T-shirts have finally arrived and will soon be available on our online store! We’ll take pictures today and post them tonight.

Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy, the latest collaboration from the ruling box-office king and queen Vice Ganda and director Wenn Deramas (think of him as the Luciano “Chaning” Carlos of the 21st century), is a movie that bypasses the viewer’s conscious mind and connects directly to the laugh reflex. We laughed and laughed and laughed, knowing full well that the film is politically incorrect, racially insensitive (A child actress in blackface is the butt of jokes of the “Iniwan ka ng nanay mo sa ashtray” variety), bizarre and stupid. In fact the more idiotic and pointless the gags get, the harder we laugh; clearly Vice Ganda and Wenn Deramas understand the audience on some primal, non-rational level movie critics don’t even know exists.

Why do we laugh when the four title characters, all played by Vice Ganda, encounter each other for the first time as adults, and begin circling a chair in a random game of Trip to Jerusalem? Why do we scream with laughter when Girlie the quadruplet says her father dumped his girlfriend Marie (Ruffa Gutierrez, whom Vice Ganda’s blonde seems to be parodying) because “Araw-gabi, wala siyang panty?” (This makes no sense whatsoever. It is a rhyme from childhood that goes “1-2-3, asawa ni Marie, araw-gabi, etc.”) Why does popcorn shoot out of our nose when a beauty mark turns out be kulangot—all the more amazing because we weren’t eating popcorn?

Girl, Boy, Bakla, Tomboy is already the biggest box-office hit in Philippine movie history, reportedly grossing over 400 million pesos, beating the former record-holder Sisterakas—also a Vice Ganda-Wenn Deramas project, which beat the former record-holder Praybeyt Benjamin, also a Vice-Deramas project. When people wonder why Vice Ganda is the biggest box-office draw in the country, they are being disingenuous. Vice Ganda is funny as hell. Proper old ladies love her. Try arguing with that.

On Saturday we had the first session of Write Here, Write Now, our practical writing workshop at the Ayala Museum. Twenty-one participants were selected from among the applicants who submitted their book proposals and writing samples last year. In December we required everyone to turn in their general outlines and timetables; starting this month they have to submit chapters every week.

One participant dropped out by email, citing time constraints. Tell you what: No one has time. We’re all swamped. Either you invent a time machine, or you find a chunk of time to write every day. The words of our house are: We have no excuses.

One had to take her husband to the hospital. Too late for our advice: Don’t get married or spawn haha.

One had a cold, possibly anxiety-induced. The writing life is fraught with anxiety, build up your resistance.

Two just didn’t show up. If you intend to appear in subsequent sessions, you had better write a heart-wrenching letter to the class because they’ll decide whether you’re still in.

For the first session we had a writing exercise, then we discussed practical matters including the all-important Writing longhand vs Writing on a computer question, and the advantages of writing in noisy public places. Each participant gave an overview of the book they’re writing, and some read samples of work done so far. We quizzed them about their methods and made suggestions which they are free to ignore, provided they know exactly what they want to do.

A large part of our job is to determine what each of them needs to hear, and to say it out loud.

Good work, class. See you in two weeks.

On Sunday we shot a scene for Elwood Perez’s movie, Esoterica. We played an author named Jessica Zafra who was doing a book-signing at Solidaridad Bookshop in Manila; our readers played readers who wanted their books signed. For added authenticity, they brought their own books—some of which we signed over and over again because Elwood had very specific images in mind, requiring many takes. (“Hijo, masyado kang matangkad, masisira ang composition, doon ka sa likod. Feel beautiful! Feel gorgeous!”) Plus we’re terrible at taking direction and ask too many impertinent questions (but NOT “What’s my motivation?”).

After a while we got tired of signing our name and took to signing “Fyodor Dostoevsky”, “Joseph Conrad”, “Edith Wharton” and some others. Many, many, many thanks to the readers who volunteered as extras, remembered their blocking, and did their own slow-motion effects (!). They even got to do a bit of acting (Cue mild outrage!) when two of the movie’s stars, Ronnie Liang and Tessa Celdran, “interrupted” the signing. We’ll post the video as soon as we get it (and they may need you for other scenes so get your imdb pages ready). In the meantime, roll credits:

Zim de la Peña
Christian Paul Ramos
Tyrelle Castillo
Liezle Vasallo
Raquel Isabelle de Guzman
Carlos Enriquez, Jr
Allan Gundran
Ronald Tabalada
Joseph Kua
Edrie Alcanzare
as the readers at the book signing

Jay Lozada, make-up artist

Thanks to F. Sionil Jose and the wonderful staff of Solidaridad (Our monthly visit: done!).

The World As I Found It by Bruce Duffy does the very thing Laurent Binet said he would not do in HHhH: turn historical figures into characters, presume to know what’s going through their minds, and put words in their mouths. But Duffy does it so well, we completely buy the idea that these characters are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G.E. Moore. It’s a brilliant performance: a history of the early 20th century, a group biography, and an “autobiographical” novel that investigates its own language in relation to the world.

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First paragraphs:

Duck-Wabbit

No, no—A quick up-down look, amazed that a young man could be so removed as not to know this. Not Donald—Daffy.

In Greek mythology Cronos (Saturn) was the father of the gods who, fearing that one of his children would dethrone him, took to swallowing them all. In astrology, Saturn is the brooding taskmaster who puts you through tests to toughen you up. To be born under Saturn is to be melancholic, and Aristotle—who had something to say about everything, including stuff of which he knew nothing—maintained that “All extraordinary men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts are evidently melancholic”, thus creating the melancholy artist stereotype a.k.a. The Tortured Artist Effect.

This 1963 book by the esteemed art scholars the Wittkowers traces the evolution of the idea that artists are mad, or at least eccentric. (It’s certainly very useful for one’s image.) In the process they’ve written a fascinating history of the development of Art as a career—from the wandering artisans, to the guilds, to the proteges of kings, to celebrity artists. Born Under Saturn is crammed with wonderful stories about the private lives of the artists—it’s like a very tasteful tabloid. We haven’t finished it yet, but we can tell you: Pay Michelangelo in full in advance or you’ll never hear the end of it, and never go to a tennis match with Caravaggio.

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First paragraphs:

Twice in the history of the western world can we observe the phenomenon that practitioners of the visual arts were elevated from the rank of mere craftsmen to the level of inspired artists: first in fourth century Greece and again in fifteenth century Italy.

There is no connection between the two events, although writers and artists of the Renaissance recalled the glorious days of antiquity when, in their view, artists were the favourites of kings and enjoyed the veneration of the people. The archetypal case stimulated imitation. Not a few artists of the Renaissance saw themselves in the role of Apelles, while their patrons wanted to rival Alexander the Great. Imitation, however, resulted from the change; it was not its cause.