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Bernice is a literary fiction and Filipiniana turón (she/her) writing #ManilaBelow — fastidiously millennial

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Re-Read: Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol, read with Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture by Caroline Hau

“I am a coward. I do not have the imagination to possess affection. To be honest, I have never been able to envision society as a creature with genuine warmth or pumping heart.”

On the romanticism of the colonization of the Philippines, brought forth by Magellan’s arrival:

“A charming romance. Fancy dress-up for the evils that occurred in the colonizer’s name.”

Reeling, still, from the return of another Marcos to Malacañang, I decided to re-read Apostol. I read it once before, in a fugue state, too caught up in the language and the imagery of a pretty patient boarded up in New York (like the wife in the conjugal dictatorship) to really linger. I first read it as a sophomore in the same university as Sol and Jed and Soli, too like the narrator to surface something genuine. It didn’t take.

Now, though. With Hau in the margins and my own pencil marks, I am gutted. The amnesiac telling the same story, over and over, is told to forget it to make room for new memories. Is told to tell stories in the present tense. Everyone else, her doctor says, has already forgotten. How cruel. “It’s horrible,” the artist says, “how we forget the past, just like that—we forget how war has killed the best of us.”

Apostol is a master story-teller, that rare Twitter invention: someone who can write write. Her language repeats because it’s what the tongue remembers. It cuts like an accusation. It is accented with the inflections of this burgis girl who cannot pay attention during EDs in huts for all the roaches there, who retches at the funeral of those killed in protests. Apostol writes pointedly, “You are who survived.” Caroline Hau, academic-historian, herself a writer, rephrases it more plainly: the non-elite is the victim of the elite, killed off by two rich kids hatching an assassination plot. So what now?

It’s terrifying and comforting both that this is a story familiar in the now. Apostol tells it with grace.

— bookstagram

[metamorphesque]

  ― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

[text ID: To love someone is firstly to confess: I'm prepared to be devastated by you.]

[catie-does-things]

IDK sometimes this website makes me feel like “death of the author” is soon to be followed by “death of the text”, where subjective interpretation and wish fulfillment is all that matters, and readings with the right political capital gain acceptance on that merit alone, even totally unsupported by the work itself.

[rneliflua]

see also: rewriting the movie as critiquing the movie. the whole ‘how it should have ended’ concept. no one cares about the story actually being told anymore. everyone just wants to be told the story they want to hear. and they will either ignore or distort the text to make it fit or they will cite the fact that it doesn’t fit their expectations as a flaw (x)

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Karl Marx is most famous as a critic of capitalism, but at the heart of his critique can be found a desperate plea for the transformation of work. People, he argues, express themselves and create the world through creative and collective activity. This natural tendency is twisted into something unrecognisable in work under capitalism. He didn’t just think work around him was bad because it took place in noisy and dangerous conditions, or for low wages and long hours. The problem of work was a fundamental one: under capitalism, work takes something human and turns it into something monstrous. The forces of capital become ravenous, eating up all that is human, sucking on the very lifeblood of society.”

— Amelia Horgan, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism

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Day 15 #NaNoWriMo x #ManilaBelow

Based on this prompt:

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Trading lines with myself in therapy, my doctor thought to interrupt the monologue with, “That’s because you don’t think yourself valuable.” And with the Hemsworthian face that launched a thousand memes, I said, “Is that true?” “Yes.” (If this were a play, or a poem, I’d know how to format it, to account for how quickly she answered.) “You think you don’t have value as a person in any given situation.”

This came as a surprise. I always thought I had an overblown sense of self (though given my borderline personality, I dance a pas chassé across a spectrum.) The name they call me is a prophecy that I’ve brought to pass, “bringer of victory” and I’ve the trauma to prove it. I know what I bring to the table, and I constructed my personality on that same figurative piece of furniture, Victor Frankenstein creating his monster.

Writing that just now, Dr Q’s statement makes sense to me. The person, after all, is not the personality. “You like your ideas too much.”

It’s still a shock to me to be told things about myself. It takes me out of the fiction, out of my myth-making. I’ve always fancied myself somehow separate, despite my waxing poetic about being a part of society. Like my decisions and my thoughts and my self affect nothing. I’m Jack’s card up their sleeve serving no purpose but to be there, an ace to play. (The more I write, the more her statement makes sense.) Therapy’s taken a hammer to the two-way mirror and I’m revealed in the aftermath. Surprise.

Whether this will change anything moving forward is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I have this blog again.

[capulets]

i have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. in the dark, i have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.

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I finished If We Were Villains yesterday and my feelings on the book have changed since. Immediately after reading it, I thought, well, that’s that. But it’s grown on me. Maybe I will get a hardcopy.

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“What about you? Did you love him or hate him?”

“Usually both at once.”

If We Were Villains, M.L. Rio

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I’m currently reading (or trying to, anyway) If We Were Villains, and, well, it’s definitely a book. It’s a disservice to both novels that it’s being compared to The Secret History because now I can’t shake the comparison, the biases my mind has formed. When Gwendolyn broke Meredith down until she revealed what she believed her flaw was, it was the ghostly countenance of Camilla I held her against. There’s no winning.

I found myself drawn to Richard because I like my assholes both capable of and willing to enact violence. (It’s telling, perhaps, that Bunny was my favorite character from TSH. But what that says, I leave to you.) I’m about halfway and that hasn’t changed. I’ve a feeling, I told Frankie, that James will wow me but he hasn’t yet. Has remained peripheral. (I’ve been told he and our narrator truly love each other, but I haven’t borne witness to it. Just seen glimpses. I love Villains’ language best when Oliver talks of him.)

For all that people have said it’s pretentious, I find it lacking. I was surrounded by thespians and writers all through university, and Rio could’ve pushed it further. The more I read it, the more I grow aware that this wasn’t written by that elusive Twitter creation, a writer writer. It’s fine, I’ll be fine. I’m enjoying it anyway, though I don’t think it’s a book for the re-reading. Maybe the ending will change my mind.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

I unironically love the character names in the Hunger Games series.

Haymitch, Peeta, Hazelle, Leevy, Maysilee, Finnick and Greasy Sae look bizarre when you first see them written down, but then if you think about how they look and/or sound it's pretty clear that they're meant to be modern names, only modern names that have changed spelling and pronounciation over time— as you would have expected them to have done so over how ever many hundreds of years it's been since our modern day.

(Remember, though The Hunger Games themselves have only been going on for 75 years, the universe they're in is canonically post-apocalyptic— the reason nobody ever mentions what's happening in the rest of the world is that everywhere except America was destroyed in a nuclear war. We're not given much of an indication how long it's been since then.)

Peeta is Peter, Haymitch is Hamish, and Hazelle is Hazel, Maysilee is Maisie— the changes in pronunciation are slight (Peeta and Peter are already virtually identical in my accent), and the spelling has changed to match.

Leevy is either a corruption of Lily, or more likely I suspect 'Livvy', a common nickname for Olivia; Finnick is probably from Finnegan (shorten in to 'Finneg' and then say it over and over very fast); Sae could be short for Sarah, or Sally or even Susan— it's not uncommon for nicknames to become real names in their own right (look at Harry or Molly as examples).

I also love the trend of having District 1 parents give their kids names relating to the luxury items their district produces— Glimmer, Marvel, Gloss, Cashmere, Velvereen (presumably a corruption of 'velveteen'), Facet— because those things are all a) objectively pretty/nice (like naming a kid 'Diamond' or 'Star' today) and presumably status symbols in their district.

Meanwhile District 3 does the same thing, but all the pronunciations are corrupted. You've got technical names to do with the manufacture of electronics— Wiress (wireless), Circ (circuit)— but you've also got what I'm pretty sure are meant to be corruptions of modern brand names— Beetee (BT), Teslee (Tesla).

To me this kind of suggests that District 3 is less conscious of this influence than District 1. Like, parents in 1 are more likely to deliberately think "I'll name my kid Glimmer, because things that glimmer are pretty" whereas 3 as a culture might have genuinely forgotten that those names used to mean something, in the same way that most of us don't think much about how the name 'Arthur' comes from the old word for 'Bear'.

And of course, then you've got the Capitol leaning hard into those ancient Roman vibes with names like Fulvia, Plutarch, Seneca, Tigris… but still using the European/American personal name+family name format, which the Romans didn't really do. Like it's very clear that this is a future society fetishising the classical era, rather than an actual resurgence of Roman culture.

It's just such a cool world-building detail. So many dystopian novels just go for modern names (and there's nothing wrong with that, especially if you're only looking a couple of hundred years into the future) but thinking about how names might have evolved over the centuries and the different naming traditions that might have developed in different areas really adds a whole new dimension to the culture of Panem.

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Day 11 #NaNoWriMo x #ManilaBelow

[hellshee]

Carol Mavor, from “A Blue Fawn’s Eye”, Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour // Joe Bousquet — ‘My wound existed before; I was born to embody it.’ // Warsan Shire, from “The House,” Her Blue Body // Langston Hughes, from ‘Tired’ featured in Selected Poems // Underbelly, Nicole Homer

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Am I back here because Twitter is imploding? You could say that, yes.

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— magdalena lying there

Buy me a coffee?

[duncansheiks]

She’s not used to the quiet. After all those years, living with others and picking out their voices—their inflections, the lives their languages betrayed—the sound of teacups clink, clink, clinking—the sirens overhead—the silence is unkind, is all. She’d put music on if she could afford it, if it didn’t remind her too much of dancing. Flashes of her bent wrist over a pale hand, an arc tracing farewell. As it is, she has to make do with pitter-patter, the constant reminder she’s above-ground.

She could imagine it all too clearly, “come here,” two words slurred into one. Alfred had always known of this simmering sadness, this residual grief—not hers, really, just inherited. “Come here,” he would say—c'mere—dragging her to his warmth and then that complicated tangle of hands, touching like they’d found they were now allowed to. Like the very act could shoo the sadness away. If he were here, he would sway her to humming under their breaths, a melody she can now barely recall, so sweet as to be from a dream. If he were here, perhaps she could stand her own mind.

too tender for talk (this dream now) | quote send me a prompt! | buy me a coffee?