JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

So far we’ve heard only two types of comments:

“Robb Stark’s pants!!!”

“Cate Blanchett’s clothes!!!”

And nothing about the movie itself. Do you recommend it? How is the niece from Downton Abbey, is she sufferable? Do the stepsisters…alter…their shoe sizes?

We do owe Kenneth Branagh, who’s brought us Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, and now Richard Madden (on Game of Thrones he was muddy).

Supposedly all women turn into their mothers, and we thought we were spared because we don’t have children (never liked them, even as a child), but we live with cats and the youngest, Drogon, can be a pain. He’s extremely affectionate and hyperactive, and the other night while jumping from our desk he upset a cup of coffee over the papers we were reading and we found ourself uttering an oath we haven’t heard since childhood, when our mother said it.

Lilintianan! That’s Bicolano for “Lightning strike”. She also said Babagratan a lot—that means “Thunder!” (Our ancestors came from the volcano; that’s all the Bicolano we have left.) Which is like saying “By Jove!” or “By Toutatis!” Basically it’s “Hala, kukunin ka ni Thor!” (Yes, please.)

Blue Kitchen was all out of Arrowroot (a.k.a. uraro) cookies. We were a little relieved, because once we start eating them we cannot stop. For snacking carbs, we bought a bag of thin square biscuits called Jacobina. They were a childhood merienda treat, like otap or rosquillos, but we never knew they were called jacobina. We just referred to them as biscuits.

Why are these biscuits called Jacobina? Jacobina, like Jacobin. What did they have to do with the Jacobins, Robespierre, the Terror which followed the French Revolution? Is it because they resemble blades and remind people of guillotines? The jacobina we bought are the exact size of a razor blade. Or were they simply named after a person?

So we asked a historian where Jacobina biscuits got their name. After all, he’s written about local bakeries and we always have a giggle over the bread known as pampam. He was no help at all: he said maybe they had something to do with Jacob’s crackers. But that’s probably why he’s a historian and we write fiction.

Belatedly it occurred to us to google, although we think one should always figure out an answer first before going to the Internet. We learned that Jacobina is a trademark of a bakery in Cavite (so we should’ve asked Ige). Their website doesn’t explain the name, either. For now we will eat our biscuits and imagine the screams of the aristocracy losing their heads.

The Buried Giant is now available at National Bookstores, Php799. Ishiguro’s previous genre-ish novel Never Let Me Go, Php315.

Ooh, major writers fighting. Well, Ursula Le Guin attacking and Kazuo Ishiguro defending.

It started with this interview in the New York Times, in which the author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go said

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

The author of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, whom we think should win a Nobel Prize because she’s brilliant and because recognition for science-fiction is way overdue, was not amused.

Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?

It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.

To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response.

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

‘Surface elements,’ by which I take it he means ogres, dragons, Arthurian knights, mysterious boatmen, etc., which occur in certain works of great literary merit such as Beowulf, the Morte d’Arthur, and The Lord of the Rings, are also much imitated in contemporary commercial hackwork. Their presence or absence is not what constitutes a fantasy. Literary fantasy is the result of a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story, such as those mentioned, or The Odyssey, or Alice in Wonderland.

To which Ishiguro replied:

“I think she wants me to be the new Margaret Atwood,” he said, referring to the criticism the Canadian author and poet has received from Le Guin for distinguishing her writing as “speculative fiction” and for saying science fiction was about “talking squids in outer space”.

“If there is some sort of battle line being drawn for and against ogres and pixies appearing in books, I am on the side of ogres and pixies,” he said. “I had no idea this was going to be such an issue. Everything I read about [The Buried Giant], it’s all ‘Oh, he’s got a dragon in his book’ or ‘I so liked his previous books but I don’t know if I’ll like this one’.

“[Le Guin]’s entitled to like my book or not like my book, but as far as I am concerned, she’s got the wrong person. I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons.”

What do you think? Weigh in on the “argument” and our favorite comment wins a copy of The Buried Giant.

* * * * *

Thanks, commenters, for the good points. We’ll give the book to the nerdiest personal perspective. balqis, it’s yours.

Hugh Grant’s new movie The Rewrite isn’t terrible, we just wish it didn’t exist. It makes us feel old. Hugh Grant has always played adorable losers—in Four Weddings and A Funeral he was the friend who couldn’t find love, in Notting Hill he was the average guy who fell in love with the most famous actress on earth. The joke was that he wasn’t really a loser—he could find love if he looked outside his social circle, and he was really not average. He was merely condescending to us viewers, but he did it so charmingly that we bought it. Plus we suspected that his self-deprecating air was not put-on and that he had depths of self-loathing which made him far more interesting than the happily successful.

But in order to play adorable losers one must be adorable, and past a certain age the adjective has to be dropped. Oh, Hughie. Perhaps it’s time to specialize not in floppy-haired nice people, but in cads and bounders horrible jerks, as you did so well in About A Boy and in Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s too bad Cloud Atlas was savaged by the critics because we liked it very much, and you were good at playing various evil creatures.

Also we think part of Hugh Grant’s success was that he was selling an idea of London and should therefore be surrounded by eccentric British characters. Which of his American movies work?

In The Rewrite, Hugh Grant plays a wash-up Hollywood screenwriter who accepts a job teaching at a college in upstate New York. The fish-out-of-water plot hasn’t worked in ages. Hugh is still charming but the movie is so bland, it should only be shown to patients recuperating from gastroenteritis.

The Rewrite is directed by Marc Lawrence, who also did Music and Lyrics. That one had a better hook—Hugh plays a washed-up pop star who accepts gigs in theme parks and school reunions. His character seems to have been based on Andrew Ridgeley. Remember Ridgeley, the other guy in Wham? George Michael’s partner? We’ll never forget the review of his solo album: It sounds like the work of an evil back-up singer who erased all the main vocal tracks. That movie was also bland, but has-been Hugh did not look so has-been, and it began with this brilliant parody of British New Wave Band music videos, which we watch when we need to cheer up.