i’m the last person who will look down on what people enjoy reading, nor will i insist that you must read certain books in order for you to be called “literary”. i will insist though that anyone who decides to diss any form of literature, particularly philippine lit, even more so literature in our vernaculars, has better sense than just his or her superficial notions of taste and literature, and in this case, language.

this is exactly what connie veneracion did in her column last Tuesday, where she complained about the difficult Tagalog of Amado V. Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit, and in the end questioned its inclusion in her daughter’s school curriculum. she was obviously exasperated that neither she nor her husband could read this Filipino classic that she went on and on about literature and creativity, about writers making things more difficult on purpose, about the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and how it was so easy to understand, and how there are Filipino writers like Jay David who do write in a Filipino that’s easy to read. in the end, she blamed Ka Amado – and i imagine any other writer – for the difficult writing she had, and failed, to endure. (more…)

chanced upon Korina Today, with Samantha Echavez, Carljoe Javier and Dean Francis Alfar, talking about their works included in what seems to be the anthology on tales of enchantment and fantasy, which is really beside the point of this critique.

the point being this: Alfar says that having readers isn’t a matter of length or short attention spans, as with the blog and its accessibility in terms of form, but that it’s a matter of, and i quote, “the story”. he says he doesn’t think it’s true that there’s a problem with readership, and that readers will be lost to new media, because the Filipino reader wants a good story. he then of course, talks about himself, and his experiment with Salamanca, which he says, he had published in parts on his blog for 30 consecutive days, and he got a lot of comments, and he won the palanca and got published by ateneo press. (more…)