JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Illustration by Richard Baron Reyes in ArtStation.

There’s a Voltes V exhibition at UP Bulwagan ng Dangal. I will drop by on Saturday after visiting my optometrist. In the meantime, here’s a repost of an essay I wrote for Kasaysayan: The Story of the Filipino People, a ten-volume collection published by the Reader’s Digest on the occasion of the Centennial of Philippine Independence in 1998. The essay was based on a column I’d written years earlier, which in turn was based on one of those meandering conversations with Roby Alampay that turned into material. (Disclosure: I never watched Voltes V because everyone was so ga-ga about it. That is how I misspelled “Boazanians”. Much later, I met the voice actor who did the English dubbing for Prince Zardoz.)

Click on image to enlarge.

To keep from running amok at boarding gates, I read this poem to myself. Of course if you always fly first or business class, you may not know what we’re going on about.

Thank You for Waiting
by Simon Armitage

At this moment in time we’d like to invite
First Class passengers only to board the
aircraft.

Thank you for waiting. We now extend our
invitation
to Exclusive, Superior, Privilege and
Excelsior members,
followed by Triple, Double and Single
Platinum members,
followed by Gold and Silver Card
members,
followed by Pearl and Coral Club members.
Military personnel in uniform may also
board at this time.

Thank you for waiting. We now invite
Bronze Alliance members and passengers
enrolled
in our Rare Earth Metals Points and
Reward Scheme
to come forward, and thank you for
waiting.

Thank you for waiting. Accredited
Beautiful People
may now board, plus any gentleman
carrying a copy
of this month’s Cigar Aficionado magazine,
plus subscribers
to our Red Diamond, Black Opal or Blue
Garnet promotion.
We also welcome Sapphire, Ruby and
Emerald members
at this time, followed by Amethyst, Onyx,
Obsidian, Jet,
Topaz, and Quartz members. Priority Lane
customers,
Fast Track customers, Chosen Elite customers,
Preferred Access customers, and First
Among Equals customers
may also now board.

On production of a valid receipt travelers of
elegance and style
wearing designer and/or hand-tailored
clothing
to a minimum value of ten thousand U.S.
dollars may now board;
passengers in possession of items of
jewelry
(including wristwatches) with a retail
purchase price
greater than the average annual salary
of a mid-career high school teacher are also
welcome to board.
Also welcome at this time are passengers
talking loudly
into cellphone headsets about recently
completed share deals,
property acquisitions, and aggressive
takeovers,
plus hedge fund managers with proven
track records
in the undermining of small-to-medium-sized ambitions.
Passengers in classes Loam, Chalk, Marl,
and Clay
may also board. Customers who have
purchased
our Dignity or Morning Orchid packages
may now collect their sanitized shell suits
prior to boarding.

Thank you for waiting.
Mediocre passengers are now invited to
board,
followed by passengers lacking business
acumen
or genuine leadership potential, followed by
people
of little or no consequence, followed by
people
operating at a net fiscal loss as people.
Those holding tickets for zones Rust,
Mulch, Cardboard,
Puddle, and Sand might now want to begin
gathering
their tissues and crumbs prior to
embarkation.

Passengers either partially or wholly
dependent on welfare
or kindness: please have your travel
coupons validated
at the Quarantine Desk.

Sweat, Dust, Shoddy, Scurf, Feces, Chaff,
Remnant,
Ash, Pus, Sludge, Clinker, Splinter, and
Soot:
all you people are now free to board.

Photo from Harper’s.

From the Paris Review, 1984

INTERVIEWER

How do you get started on a new book?

PHILIP ROTH

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

INTERVIEWER

How much of a book is in your mind before you start?

ROTH

What matters most isn’t there at all. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

INTERVIEWER

Must you have a beginning? Would you ever begin with an ending?

ROTH

For all I know I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it’s still even around.

INTERVIEWER

What happens to those hundred or so pages that you have left over? Do you save them up?

ROTH

I generally prefer never to see them again.

Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85.

Soiree by Jason Moss

I’m in Poland on a research trip for a couple of weeks. The schedule is packed, so I don’t know how often I can blog, but I will document the trip on my cats’ Instagram. Quick, follow @jessicazafrascats!

Photo from Catster

I love tarot cards—the symbols, the myths, the far-out designs. In Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies they communicate using the tarot, and it’s so arcane and esoteric I can’t find my damn copy. I enjoy consulting tarot card readers and distinguishing between the bullshit artists who are only trying to sell you stuff, and the truly gifted who are not bound by regular time (Like Dr Strange and his 14,600,000 possible outcomes). There are a couple of tarot decks in my house, but I cannot read them to save my life—the rational part of my brain starts mocking me and I cannot take it seriously. I have no faith in my tarot interpretation abilities, but I have faith in the movies.

Noel, who is now based in Singapore, gave me these Criterion Collection movie postcard sets. I like them so much that like my Penguin Books and New Yorker postcards, they will never be mailed out. However, it’s occurred to me that each movie poster summarizes an entire cinematic universe with its own language, characters, stories, and could therefore be used for divination. Or as I prefer to think of it, studying the themes that surround an issue.

First I had to pick out the postcards of the movies I had seen and remember well, so I had to leave out Carnival of Souls, Cameraperson, Lady Snowblood and others. This left me with 28 cards, whose meanings can change according to the context. These include

You are ambitious and will go far in life, but nobody likes you because you’re a busybody and a teacher’s pet, and your EQ is low.

What you have is not love, but co-dependency and addiction. Get out of that relationship before you kill each other!

Self-explanatory.

Bitch, stop popping those pills, you’re an addict.

Your plan is idiotic. You think you’re going to solve your problem, but your dumbass strategy is only going to make things worse. Just stop.

So you think you should abandon your successful career and try to be a “normal” woman with a husband and brats, bake cupcakes and do home improvement projects. Hah. Hahahahah, you’ll be dead of boredom in a week.

Okay, who wants a reading?

* * * * *
Question from Ronigurl: I just went paragliding last weekend, and I found it as sedate as my Lola’s rocking chair. Conversely, I hate sliding down playground slides, and will never ride Anchors Away in this lifetime. Is there something wrong with me?

Rumble Fish is about a disaffected teen abandoned by his mother and living with his alcoholic father, who wants to be badass like his brother, a gang member. His brother says gang life is not as exciting as he thinks it is, and wants to be free and see the ocean. They break into a store and set the Siamese “rumble fish” free. In the end the protagonist gets to see the ocean.

Reading: The thrills you expected turned out to be duds. Go see the ocean.

The flap over that excerpt from Issa Rae’s book—which was published in 2015, and apparently read only last week—reminds me of this scene from a fondly-remembered 90s movie, The Commitments. Say it once, and say it loud.