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We’re giving away a round-trip ticket to any Tigerair domestic destination in this month’s Tiger Traveller: Heritage Sites of the Philippines photo contest. Here are the earliest entries. To join the contest, read the rules.

Photographer: Raphael Angielo Castellano
Description: Calle Real, Iloilo
While in Iloilo for the holidays, I ended up in the old part of the city because jeepney routes have apparently changed or I simply forgot which jeep goes where. Walking around, I had to stop and take a picture of this building with my iPhone because it looked like Main Street in Disneyland.

A quick Google search revealed that the entire area is being restored and preserved under the supervision of the Iloilo City Cultural Heritage Conservation Council.

Photographer: Janis Mae Narvas (taken using a Lenovo A516)
Place: Monumento, Caloocan City, January 21, 2014
Commuters going to and fro the Camanava and Bulacan areas must be surprised to know that it’s actually possible to observe the famed Bonifacio Monument up close. On a whim, I went there to see Guillermo Tolentino’s magnum opus, only to be met by the scorn of jeepney drivers coursing the busy thoroughfare and the mockery of the traffic aides. Nonetheless, the awesome view was worth the danger I faced in crossing that crazy rotonda.

Keep sending your photos. The next set of finalists will be posted on Tuesday.

This contest is sponsored by Tigerair Philippines. To find out more about Tigerair deals and promos, follow TigerAir Philippines on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

This is Miag-ao Church in Iloilo, one of scores of heritage sites in the Philippines. You can win a round-trip ticket to Iloilo or any other Tigerair domestic destination by joining our Heritage Tourism Photo Contest.

Here’s how to join our Heritage Site Photo contest.

1. Pick the best photos you have personally taken of heritage sites—places that have been designated by municipal governments as significant to their cultural heritage (Usually they have a plaque out front explaining why they’re important)—anywhere in the Philippines. These could be fortresses, churches, houses, monuments, etc.

2. Email them in jpeg files of not larger than 1MB each to koosi.obrien@gmail.com. Include your full name, a brief description of what’s in the picture, when and where you took it, and with what camera or phone.

3. You can submit up to ten photo entries, but send only one photo per email. (So ten photos would require ten emails.)

4. Entries will be accepted until 11:59pm on 31 January 2014.

5. Finalists will be posted here on Tuesdays and Thursdays until the deadline.

6. The winner will be announced here on 5 February 2014. The prize is a Tigerair domestic travel voucher covering one round trip to Iloilo, Cebu, Puerto Princesa, Kalibo, Bacolod, Tacloban, or other Tigerair domestic destinations.

This contest is sponsored by Tigerair Philippines. To find out more about Tigerair deals and promos, follow TigerAir Philippines on Facebook and Twitter.

Group portrait of the 19th century Ilustrados at the NHCP.

We’re starting our own publishing imprint this year. Yesterday our friend and book designer Ige accompanied us to the National Library of the Philippines on T.M. Kalaw in Manila to get the ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) for our first two books.

When people describe their experience of getting permits and other documents from government agencies, their accounts range from the aggravating to the Kafkaesque. Ige told us that the process of securing an ISBN would take all of 20 minutes.

It took 15 minutes. The staff was brisk and efficient, and she patiently pointed out the errors on our application form.

Have you been to the National Library? The building is being retrofitted, but the library is open to the public from 8am to 7pm, Mondays through Saturdays. Get a library card and hang out there. There’s something about sitting in a big room with high ceilings, surrounded by bookshelves, that makes you want to write.

For information on ISBN registration, library collections, readers’ cards and others, visit the National Library website.

Afterwards we went next door to the National Historical Commission to check out their publications.

Someone must have borrowed our copy of The Memoirs of Artemio Ricarte, the Revolutionary general known as El Vibora and one of the most intriguing characters of his era. (He always referred to himself in the third person, hmmm.) We found this more recent edition of the memoirs, selling for Php200.

The NHCP also published Apolinario Mabini’s La Revolucion Filipina, his account of the Philippine Revolution of 1898. There are so many questions we want to ask Apolinario Mabini, not the least of which is ‘How do you feel about being called The Sublime Paralytic?’ Seriously, the man is a hero, and that’s his honorific?

The NHCP edition of La Revolucion Filipina retails for Php160. Mr. Willy Bas of the publications office reminded us that on July 23 we celebrate Mabini’s 150th birthday. He gave us a copy of ‘Mabini’s Letters to the President’—the text of a lecture by Adrian Cristobal, and a postcard of the Mabini Shrine in Pandacan. We’re ashamed to admit that we’ve never been to the Mabini Shrine or the Nakpil-Bautista house in Quiapo where Gregoria de Jesus-Bonifacio-Nakpil lived, and we have no memory of a trip to the Rizal house in Calamba when we were little.

The full list of NHCP publications is here. Plenty of interesting titles, including Angry days in Mindanao: The Philippine revolution and the war against the U.S. in East and Northeast Mindanao, 1897-1908; Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas; The Diary of a French Officer on the War in the Philippines; and The Cattle Caravans of Ancient Caboloan.

Our mission accomplished, we introduced Ige to one of our favorite spots in the city of Manila, the Sky Deck of the Bayleaf Hotel in Intramuros. We had coffee and their eevil ensaymada pudding while enjoying the cold air,

the amazing views,

and the glorious sunset.

We bitch constantly about Manila, but it is beautiful if you know where to look.

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.

* * * * *
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.

* * * * *
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.

It hit us while we were watching American Hustle, which is based on events that occurred in the 1970s: What if we, the Filipinos who were born during the Marcos regime, stop calling ourselves ‘Martial Law Babies’, which is a terrible legacy we don’t enjoy being associated with, and instead, call ourselves ‘Disco Babies’, after the popular music of our childhood?

We thought of it again when we received an invitation to the UP Third World Studies Center forum entitled ‘Marcos Pa Rin! Ang mga Pamana at Sumpa ng Rehimeng Marcos’. Why must we be shackled to the Marcos regime for the rest of our lives? Are we to be defined in perpetuity by 3,000 pairs of shoes? We were children then. There are enough reminders of the martial law era (Though the public is oblivious); our generation doesn’t have to carry the label.

We hated disco when it was the only thing we could hear, but decades after its heyday we love the big-ness of it: the beats, the hair, the overtly sexual fashions. One might argue that under martial law, disco dancing was a form of protest: the oppressed asserting their freedom, on the dance floor at least.

This year we’re going to list every book we read, and hot damn this is a great beginning.

We don’t even know how to say the title, an abbreviation of Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich (“Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), but from the very first page we know we are in for something original and funny. Later it is quite moving. HHhH (Ash Ash ash Ash?) by Laurent Binet, English translation by Sam Taylor, is a book about the Nazi general Reinhard Heydrich’s rise to power, about the plan by the Czech government-in-exile to assassinate him, and about the process of writing such a book.

Binet grapples with the oxymoron that is historical fiction, with the inherent fakery of putting words in the mouths of dead people (to say nothing of the disrespect), with truth and knowability, with the inadequacy of words. How can you do justice to heroism? What can you say to people who give up their lives to fight evil? How can you turn historical persons into characters for your own literary purposes?

HHhH is probably too clever by half, and many readers will be annoyed by the frequent authorial intrusions, but it is undeniably a thrilling and audacious work. Binet doesn’t just blow the dust off history, he blasts it off.

* * * * *

First paragraphs:

Gabcik—that’s his name—really did exist. Lying alone on a little iron bed, did he hear, from outside, beyond the shutters of a darkened apartment, the unmistakable creaking of the Prague tramways? I want to believe so. I know Prague well, so I can imagine the tram’s number (but perhaps it’s changed?), its route, and the place where Gabcik waits, thinking and listening. We are at the corner of Vysehradska and Trojicka. The number 18 tram (or the number 22) has stopped in front of the Botanical Gardens. We are, most important, in 1942. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera implies that he feels a bit ashamed at having to name his characters. And although this shame is hardly perceptible in his novels, which are full of Tomases, Tominas, and Terezas, we can intuit the obvious meaning: what could be more vulgar than to arbitrarily give—from a childish desire for verisimilitude or, at best, mere convenience—an invented name to an invented character? In my opinion, Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?

So, Gabcik existed, and it was to this name that he answered (although not always). His story is as true as it is extraordinary. He and his comrades are, in my eyes, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history, and without doubt the greatest of the Second World War…