JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Persona, one of the most influential films of all time, is widely regarded as Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece. It contains some of the most memorable images in cinema, notably the shot of a child touching a woman’s face projected onto a screen, and the shot of two women looking into a mirror then folding into each other and overlapping. It has inspired a host of parodies about depression and psychoanalysis, so to the first-time viewer it may seem oddly familiar. We tend to forget that when Persona premiered in 1966, it was so new and obscure that critics did not know what to make of it.
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Our podcast is baaaack!

My guests and I talk about books, movies, travel, and in this episode, cats. We love cats. I live with three former street cats. This city is full of stray cats who depend on the kindness of people.

When Serendra mall complex in BGC announced that they would fine their shop tenants and residents Php10,000 if they fed the many stray cats in that area, two questions came up.

First, why would I set foot in that place, then?

And more importantly, how do we deal with the huge population of stray cats—and dogs—in this city? What is the serious, long-term, sustainable solution? The sad truth is that we cannot adopt every stray cat and dog out there—the math is not on our side. What then? How do we keep homeless cats and dogs from being rounded up and taken to the city pound, where they will almost certainly be killed?

My guest is Anna Cabrera, Executive Director of the Philippine Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). If you have questions for Anna and PAWS, post them in Comments, or send my cats a message on Instagram, @jessicazafrascats.

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Thanks to Nexus Technologies for supporting the return of our podcast! Our next episodes should be available on iTunes. (The next episodes will be better, I promise, I learned Garage Band five minutes ago.)

Thanks, too, to Nella Sarabia for lending us a quiet spot in her optical shop to record our conversation.

PETA’s Ang Buhay Ni Galileo (The Life of Galileo)
by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Alan Glinoga
Directed by Rody Vera

Galileo the great astronomer and physicist redefined earth’s (and thus humanity’s) place in the cosmos (not central as the Church decreed). He barely escaped torture and execution at the hands of the Inquisition, to live out his days under house arrest, but able to write. By refusing to be a martyr for science, he deprived us of a noble hero, but freed our minds. What good would it have done for him to burn at the stake like Giordano Bruno? Science was not his religion, but its opposite: he would not die for science, he would live for it.
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Winning a Palanca Award changed my life. After college I was a freelance writer contributing feature articles to magazines like Metro (where I met my lovely future editor, the late, much-missed Abe Florendo) or churning out ten versions of the same press release for PR agencies (The rent must be paid), but dreaming of writing short stories and novels. There were very few places where you could get fiction published, but if you had a Palanca Award you would be taken seriously.

I remember it was an apocalyptic time, ashfall from Mt Pinatubo, the earthquake that leveled much of Baguio, war in Iraq, people having strange visions, and me feeling scared and anxious that the world was going to break apart and I hadn’t even started living yet. I sat in the dinky apartment I shared with two friends and wrote a short story called Portents. Then I thought, What the hell, submit it to the Palanca Awards.
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Last Saturday our Reading Group had its monthly meeting at Tin-Aw Art Gallery over wine and popcorn. For a host of reasons ranging from being in Shanghai to vertigo to garage sales, only six of us were able to appear for the discussion, but this gave us more time for digression, speculation, and chismis. As our September selection was Ian McEwan’s first book First Love, Last Rites, whose themes are Sex and Death, our conversation included these questions:

1. Are you supposed to like the characters in stories, and approve of their behavior? If so, why bother reading? McEwan’s stories allow us into the minds of his fictional people, whom we would not want to know in real life (pedophiles, murderers, assorted sociopaths), and lets us wonder at the complexity of human beings.
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