Asides

coming soon from visprint: a bottle of storm clouds by eliza victoria

VISPRINT, Inc., publisher of Manix Abrera’s Kikomachine Komix series, the National Book Award-winning Trese series, and Bob Ong’s numerous books, has released a list of their upcoming titles. Exciting times ahead!

  • Tomb Keeper by G. M. Coronel (The prequel and sequel to his first horror novel, “Tragic Theater”.)
  • It’s Not That Complicated Bakit hindi pa sasakupin ng mga alien ang daigdig sa 2012 ni Eros Atalia
  • Kikomachine Komix Blg. 8 by Manix Abrera (Official release will be on this year’s Summer Komikon.)
  • A Bottle of Storm Clouds stories by Eliza Victoria
  • Mga Angst ng Isang Di-Mahapayang-Gatang ni Resty Cena

My poem, “Elegy for the corridors“, can now be read online on the Philippines Free Press website.

Also, Paolo Chikiamco links us to this review of Alternative Alamat by Jaymee Goh:

ALTERNATIVE ALAMAT
OK, if you only read one anthology all year, please let this one be it. I’d like to have this one in hardcopy, actually. Anyway. There’re a few appendices talking about mythology and researching / recording mythology in the Philippines. I wish there also had been a glossary of the deities featured in the stories, but they’re major deities, and it really is a “For Flipinos” sort of anthology in this way.

“Ana’s Little Pawnshop On Makiling St.”
This story is about Anagolay, now called Ana, told from the perspective of Eric, who finds himself employed by Ana in her little pawnshop, which she now runs, and sells the unclaimed things that appear in her closet. It’s a delightful magical realist sort of story, where the gods mingle with mortals, and Ana’s pawnshop is in the middle of a block owned by Mariang Makiling, another local goddess, who is now a stockholder. Ana doesn’t really need Eric around, but she gets a bit lonely, as gods probably would do, and so through Eric we get a glimpse into how the extraordinary meets the ordinary in different ways. Things come to a head when development happens. The story doesn’t really resolve itself, but there’s a bittersweet farewell, a gift that was foreshadowed. I just find this story utterly charming (“I’ve poured the nebulae here. They’ve been busy. Look how many stars they’ve made!”) and a wonderful start to the anthology in general. Re-reading it makes me smile.

Thank you for the kind words, Jaymee. :)  Read more.

Usually, when I review prose, I review anthologies, full issues (if a magazine), or a novel. But I’m making an exception for  Ken Liu’s brilliant novella, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”. It appeared in Panverse Three and is available as a PDF download here.

It is a time-travel story, but it has the most unique, most intriguing premise among all the time-travel stories I have encountered so far: Chinese-American Dr. Evan Wei, along with his wife, Japanese-American experimental physicist Dr. Akemi Kirino, develop a controversial technique that will allow people to travel back in time and experience history firsthand. Wei demonstrates this by traveling back to 1940 Harbin, to witness the atrocities committed inside Unit 731. Unit 731 is a research facility of the Japanese Army responsible for fatal human experimentation during World War II. Wei gets hit by critics for bringing relatives of the Unit 731 victims instead of professional historians. The critics contend: How effective is a firsthand historical record if the events are witnessed behind an explosively emotional screen?

In any event, the relatives, being untrained observers, did not make great witnesses. They failed to correctly answer observational questions posed by skeptics (“Did the Japanese doctors wear uniforms with breast pockets?” “How many prisoners in total were in the compound at that time?”). They did not understand the Japanese they heard on their trips.

Read more.

Online Finds. 1 2

In Awake, police detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) survives a car crash. In the car with him were his wife, Hannah, and his son, Rex. After the accident, Britten realizes that he is now living in two parallel worlds. In one reality, his wife Hannah survived the crash, but Rex is dead. He goes to sleep, and he wakes up in another reality, where Hannah is dead, but Rex is still alive. To help him “remember”, he wears a red rubber band when he is with his wife (and consequently the scenes in this reality have summer colors: warm reds and yellows) and a green rubber band when he is with Rex (the scenes here have cool colors: blue and green, like they’re underwater). In both realities, he is seeing a psychiatrist; in both realities, he is solving a crime. Britten still cannot tell which world is real, especially when certain details start to cross over from one parallel world to the other.

Read more.

New on bleepthisblank!

Jaykie talks about Jeremy Lin.

…getting assigned to defend Lin pales in comparison to getting assigned to write about him, because there’s very little one can say about him that hasn’t already been said.

You know all about that, right? Odds are you’ve followed the Linsanity, the SNL skit, the missteps regarding race, et cetera. Otherwise you would have likely bolted as soon as statistics came up. So, since you’re still here, bear in mind that I won’t be writing about any of that stuff (nor will I be engaging in Lin puns, of which there are several). Rather, I’ll be taking a look at Jeremy Lin’s rise to success from a fan’s perspective.

And our regular Online Finds.

In defense of Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey received a lot of flak after her “disastrous” Saturday Night Live performance, but hell, bad publicity is still publicity. I have not heard of Lana Del Rey before news spread about what happened over at SNL, but it got me curious. I watched her SNL performances on YouTube and checked out her other live performances as well. I didn’t think the performances were as horrible as other people have described online, but when I finally got the chance to listen to her album, I saw what the critics meant. You can’t help but compare. Compared to her recorded songs, she sings at a lower register and drops notes she should be sustaining when she performs live. She also appears to be very nervous.

Read more on bleepthisblank (“Ear Candy”).

And check out: Online Finds.