Author: elizavictoria

drunk on peanut butter

Several friends have recommended the awesomeness of Peanut Butter Co. I’ve mentioned the restaurant to Jake once or twice, especially when we pass by a branch inside SM North Edsa. It took us this long to finally try it because 1) we’re lazy; and 2) I thought my friends were exaggerating – certainly a sandwich can’t be that good.

We had our lunch there on Friday before I went home to Bulacan. Jake said, “This sandwich will haunt me for the days to come.” I concur. I’m craving for PB Co. right now. :D

We had: (2) White Choco PB Milkshake, (1) Roast beef sandwich (cardamon PB, roast beef, gravy), (1) chili fried chicken sandwich (chili PB, fried chicken fillet, corn), (2)  Cherry 7-Up.

Ang sarap shet.

On Saturday we had PB Co. for dinner. I had (1) Elvis sandwich (crunchy PB, bacon, bananas), (1) Black Forest sandwich (dark choco PB, vanilla cream cheese, cherries), (1) Box of chips. Jaykie had (1) White Chocolate Orange sandwich (white choco PB, vanilla cream cheese, oranges), (1) Box of chips, and (1) Classic Spaghetti. Everything, even the spaghetti, has peanut butter. I’ll have to admit that having two PB Co. sandwiches for dinner is not a good idea (too heavy!) but the food is just so good.

YUM. I WANT MOAR.

Try it. They deliver via City Delivery. (Thanks to Kate and Rissa and Lizzy and Phil for the tip, hehe.)

Also, I wasn’t paid to write this stuff. ;)

state of reading address

I read a few more pages of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (I began reading it before I dove into Clash of Kings) before completely giving up. Come on, man, I gave you a chance. The emotion is there. The book is about the aftermath of 9/11, after the towers fell, so it is impossible to write a book with no horror, no misery. But no matter how raw the sadness, DeLillo’s writing style just couldn’t hold my attention. I didn’t find the pages engaging at all. It would have been my first DeLillo book. Le sigh.

Thank goodness I bought this copy for less than 90 pesos. Anyone wants it?

Right now I’m reading William Nicholson’s The Society of Others. I don’t know if it’s any good. I hope it is. On the side I’ll be reading Volume 2 of The Swamp Thing and the Philippine Speculative Fiction V anthology. I aim to finish PSF V soon so I can review it along with PSF IV.

I am seeing the end of my TBR pile. And I thought this day would never come. Next steps would be:

1) borrow the next two books in Martin’s epic saga and anything beyond Genshiken Volume 5 (which I just finished);

2) read LOTR. I have Jaykie’s volume sitting on my bed, but! D: It is HUGE AND SCARY; and

3) book shop! :D Or borrow more, haha. To save money and space, yes.

rain, obama, victory

It rained on our way to UP on Friday. I was both scared and delighted: scared because it was actually starting to flood; delighted because I’d rather have rain than the scorching summer heat. Before heading to AS to hang out with the HGC boys, we passed by CASAA and had lunch. My meal cost 39 pesos, plus 12 pesos for turon with langka. Then Jaykie took me to “Antasbucks”, this coffee stall inside Antas. (Jaykie wants to call it “Frappe House”. We call dibs on that name.)

Consider:

A frappe named Obama.

What in the world.

So of course Jaykie had to try it. (I ordered Black Forest.)

He said it was okay.

I spent several hours reading a book, perched on a step on the second floor of AS. Oh, my college life. At one point I took off my flip-flops. The floor was really cold, and a breeze was blowing through the corridor. Best thing ever.

I also noticed a poster announcing that DUP will re-stage Floy Quintos’s Shock Value (though this link says it’s a sequel?) and Isang Panaginip na Fili. I enjoyed those plays immensely. Will definitely watch again. (I also made Jaykie promise he’d come with, hehe.)

Then off to Makati to Whistlestop for the Polyhedral finale. Cute restaurant, found it without getting lost.

Food is good (just on the pricey side, but then they serve big dishes) and I dig the decor.

I see a typewriter, a coat/hat rack, and a lamppost in this picture:

Jaykie had to point out the centerpiece to me. Royal Tru-Orange! Clever!

Anyway, Guiz, Erwin, Patrick, and Jaykie are fighting each other for minis. My Girlfriend is a DM‘s Matthew Arcilla DMs.

And Jaykie emerged victorious! (LOL, Matthew I did not see that ending coming.)

* * *

Jaykie taught me a workout routine using weights that I could carry out on my own. He also lent me two two-pound weights. I would have taken the four-pound weights he offered, but I was afraid my bag straps would fail. Anyway, I tried the routine with him, and my abs hurt like hell. I enjoyed it. It was exactly the pain I needed.

all over but the shoutin’

Some people’s memoirs you just don’t want to read, but if I ever get to meet Rick Bragg I will thank him forever. How generous of him to share these stories. A journalist by profession, Bragg talks about the death of strangers: those that get shot standing behind counters in New York City, the peeled faces of Haitians, the riots in Miami. The bombing of a daycare center in Oklahoma City, the Susan Smith case regarding a mother that drowned her own children. About his personal life, Bragg bares all: his life of squalor and pain in Alabama, his mother’s back-breaking work, his absent father’s death, the many girls he has had in his life due to his inability to commit, his days in Harvard as a Nieman fellow in 1992, his rise to fame in 1996 when he won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while working for the New York Times, and his belief, in his heart of hearts, that he is like his father – cold and mean, and ultimately lonely. I marvel both at his honesty and his way with words. This is one of my favorite moments (and one that got me teary-eyed).

I thanked him and made to leave, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm and said wait, that ain’t all, that he had some other things for me. He motioned to three big cardboard egg cartons stacked against one wall.

Inside was the only treasure I truly have ever known.

I had grown up in a house in which there were only two books, the King James Bible and the spring seed catalog. But here, in these boxes, were dozens of hardback copies of everything from Mark Twain to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There was a water-damaged Faulkner, and the nearly complete set of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. There was poetry and trash, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and a paperback with two naked women on the cover. There was a tiny, old copy of Arabian Nights, threadbare Hardy Boys, and one Hemingway. He had bought most of them at a yard sale, by the box or pound, and some at a flea market. He did not even know what he was giving me, did not recognize most of the writers. “Your momma said you still liked to read,” he said.

There was Shakespeare. My father did not know who he was, exactly, but he had heard the name. He wanted them because they were pretty, because they were wrapped in fake leather, because they looked like rich folks’ books. I do not love Shakespeare, but I still have those books. I would not trade them for a gold monkey.

copyright© 1997 by Rick Bragg

Source.

inception

(Contains spoilers.)

The use of dreams – of the subconscious – as narrative setting, is not an entirely novel idea. Consider Kaufman’s elegant Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Lynch’s mind-bending Mulholland Drive. Even Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come. The Matrix can be considered a dreamscape, and let’s not forget the entryway to Malkovich’s mind in Being John Malkovich. Synecdoche, New York, with all its beauty and nightmare, can be read as an extended dream, and The Cell features a psychologist entering a serial killer’s mind to solve a crime.

And so on and so forth.

Lucky for us, Christopher Nolan doesn’t do a rehash, and steers away from surreal imagery and symbolism and focuses on the action. After directing the wildly successful The Dark Knight, we know – and he knows – that this is what he does best.

In fact, for a film dealing with dreams and the dark monsters that lurk in troubled minds, Inception is quite literal: important information that we dare not share are found in safes protected with codes (obvious, really), the subconscious are shown as people who stare and attack an intruding consciousness, painful/dangerous memories are kept in “jails” or static environments, etc. In order to wake up, one only has to die, or to fall.

Anyone who wishes to enter a shared dream has to carry a Totem, which can be anything at all. A die, a pawn, a top. It is used to check if you are in someone else’s dream. A top, for example, will continue spinning in dreams; in reality, it will eventually stop and fall over.

The plot is simple enough, as simple as any heist film: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is hired by a big bad businessman (Ken Watanabe) to infiltrate the mind of a rival business’s heir. Cobb usually does Extractions, or the removal of important/confidential information (from safes, inside the mark’s subconscious). But what the big bad businessman wants is an Inception, an operation wherein Cobb has to plant the seed of an idea in the mark’s mind – in this case, “I will break up my father’s empire”.

(I actually wondered if Nolan intended to show Cobb planting an actual seed in some field while in dreamscape. I mean, there are safes, so why not go that extra mile in literal storytelling?)

So Cobb, like Danny Ocean, assembles his team: he hires a Forger, an Architect, and a Chemist. They devise three levels of dreams to do their job: the first level will last for a week, the second level for six months, and the last level for ten years. In dream-time that is, which as we all know is slower than real-time. While Cobb’s team navigates through several dreams for years and years, they are in fact just on a plane, asleep, waiting for touchdown on LA soil.

Or are they? What if everything that has been presented to us is a dream? What if Cobb is the mark of the Inception? What if there has not been an Inception at all?

Cobb’s team emerges from the job successful. He comes home from exile, hugs his kids. On the table the top spins, and keeps on spinning, until the screen fades to black. When I saw the film I believed the top fell, and that Mr. Nolan was just messing with us with that fadeout. Cobb is a tortured character (played beautifully by DiCaprio), and I want him to be happy. Like in that scene where the Architect folds the dream-city unto itself, we can wish to see what we want to see.

(Not satisfied? Check out the links here, with articles featuring discussions about the ending.)

poses and prostitutes: beneath ceaseless skies 46 review

If you find yourself in the mood for an adventure, you might want to read an issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, an online magazine dedicated to publishing the best in literary adventure fantasy. The magazine, which publishes two stories per issue and releases a new issue every two weeks, publishes “traditional adventure fantasy, including classics from the pulp era and the new wave of post-Tolkien fantasy” from interested writers, but Scott Andrews (publisher and editor in chief) and Kate Marshall (assistant editor) say they also “love how the recent influence of literary writing on fantasy short fiction has expanded the genre, allowing writers the freedom to use literary devices such as tight points-of-view, round characters, unreliable narrators, discontinuous narratives, and others. This sophisticated level of craft has made fantasy short fiction more powerful than ever before.” You can see for yourselves the expression of this editorial vision in their magazine. Today, let’s review BCS’s Issue # 46: (now archived, the stories are still available online. The issue is also available as a PDF, mobi, epub file, and at the Kindle store.) Spoiler Warning starts here, so go read the issue first, then come right back, you hear?

Read more.

video: stories

Indian writer  Meera Nair writes with such emotional and descriptive precision that her fiction are surefooted, affecting, immersive, transportive. She writes with fluid prose, but I was more impressed with her collection’s wide range of characters: the husband who yearns for a blow-job (his first!), the poor delivery boy enchanted with a customer, the teenager watching as his grandfather loses his land to the Communists, three advertising professionals on a tense vacation in a town developed by the British, a female journalist and her sick father now withering away, an editor and his wife living with both their mothers, the town folks ecstatic over the reported arrival of the President of the United States. So many worlds here. My favorite stories: “Video”, “Sixteen Days in Summer”, “My Grandfather Dreams of Fences”, “A Certain Sense of Place”, and “Vishnukumar’s Valentine’s Day”.