JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

From Michael P: I was watching Dr. Who today and there was a reference to the Philippines. The year is 2059 and the Doctor shows up at the first Mars colony Bowie Base One. Nobody knows who the Doctor is, and one of the crew speculates he may be from the Philippines since it is rumored the Philippines was building a Mars rocket.

The Waters of Mars on Dr. Who

Volcanic bumpy boulder on Mars from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.

Remember that movie Lukas Moodysson shot in the Philippines, starring Gael Garcia Bernal? Mammoth. It just opened in New York. Manohla Dargis’s review in the NYT.

“There is a real sense in which we are what we are called, at least from the Old Testament onwards, when God renamed Jacob Israel, which means that he struggled with God. Tolstoy, with his usual practicality, wrote an early draft of War and Peace in which Count Rostov was simply named Count Prostoy: prostoy means ‘simple, honest’ in Russian. So we have Becky Sharpe (in Vanity Fair) and Miss Temple (in Jane Eyre) and Felicite (in A Simple Heart) and scores of characters in Dickens like Crook and Pecksniff. . .Fiction is not being very fictional, really, when it resorts to such tricks. After all, in life people do seem uncannily to have become the names they have, or to be the opposite of those names (but still in some strange relation to the import of their names): Wordsworth is surely worth his words, and Kierkegaard means churchyard in Danish, and the late Cardinal Sin was Archbishop of Manila. . .”

From How Fiction Works by James Wood, a very practical guide to the novel. 

My name means “God is watching the sugar harvest” or “Behold muck” or “Clairvoyant drip-jar”. (Jessica is Shakespeare’s variation on the Hebrew Iscah, Abraham’s niece; zafra is a Cuban agricultural term).

In my continuing search for post-Soviet novels written by Russians (Victor Pelevin!), I chanced upon Ghostwritten by David Mitchell. Its blurb mentions that part of the book happens in St Petersburg. So I started on Ghostwritten, which is every bit as exhilarating as the later Cloud Atlas. The novel consists of nine parts featuring nine characters who are oblivious of each other. The narrator of the Tokyo section is 19-year-old Satoru, a half-Filipino, half-Japanese clerk at a jazz record store.

“I wondered about my real mother. Not hankeringly. It’s pointless to hanker. Mama-san said she’d been deported back to the Philippines afterwards, and would never be allowed back into Japan. I can’t help but wonder, just sometimes, who she is now, what she’s doing, and whether she ever thinks about me.”

He turns up again in the later sections. I peeked. I like Mitchell’s novels because something actually happens in them (I’m old school, I like plot), and they’re big. Too many contemporary novels suffer from a lack of ambition. Look, if you’re going to aim so low, why bother to write it?

In The Honourable Schoolboy, the spy Westerby goes to the races in Hong Kong to observe his quarry, Drake Ko. He spots one of Ko’s associates in the owners’ box.

“Shading his eyes and wishing he had brought binoculars, he made out one fat, hard-looking man in a suit and dark glasses, accompanied by a young and very pretty girl. He looked half Chinese, and half Latin, and Jerry put him down as Filipino. The girl was the best that money could buy. . .

“”That’s Arpego,” said Grant, in Jerry’s ear and indicating the fat Filipino. “He owns Manila and most of the out-islands.”

“Arpego’s paunch sat forward over his belt like a rock stuffed inside his shirt.”

Incidences of the word “Filipino” in recent American literature:

In Patricia Marx’s novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him, the romantic interest’s name is Eugene Obello and the unnamed heroine’s friend says “obello” is a Filipino word for machete. I don’t know which Filipino dialect or language is referred to. Marx’s novel is hilarious until the halfway point, when it begins to resemble a Daily Show segment that’s gone on too long. Yes, smart women do stupid things for love, we got it in the first ten pages. Marx was a former writer on the Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live–if she’d written for The Simpsons she’d have the same career track as Conan O’Brien.

In Tobias Wolff’s story Benefit Of The Doubt, the protagonist takes the bus in Rome and notes that most of the passengers are Filipino. Benefit Of The Doubt is one of the new stories in Our Story Begins, my favorite story collection of the year even if half its contents appeared in his earlier books.

In The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich, the Dominican character Alvaro has an affair with a Filipino nurse named Betty. Just started reading the book. Someone else is obsessed with Jan Morris’s book about Trieste!