away from canberra

jose wendell p. capili

[wendellcapili]

𝐏𝐨𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐜𝐤

The poems came back smelling faintly of salt, paper, and rain-dark wood.

I wrote them when I was young, after the 28th Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 1989, when Dumaguete entered the body as heat, dust, tricycle smoke, acacia shade, and the sea at the end of nearly every walk. Thirty-seven years later, two of those poems appear in 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝐶𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝐼𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑑: 𝐴𝑛 𝐴𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑊𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑠 𝐴𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝐷𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑢𝑒𝑡𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑁𝑒𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑠 𝑂𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙, compiled and edited by Ian Rosales Casocot and published by the Vibal Foundation.

I missed the July 17, 2026 launch. It was my sister’s birthday, and I stayed where family had called me. From a distance I pictured the room: books open on a table, names read aloud, pages stirred by the air-conditioning, a hand adjusting the microphone. Outside, I imagined the city going on without me—heat, shade, motorcycles, the sea close to the road.

The anthology holds many writers whose work carries Dumaguete and Negros Oriental. I leave most of those names to the book itself and return here to the circle that first made the city vivid to me: the 28th Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In that circle were the founders, Edith Lopez Tiempo and Edilberto K. Tiempo; Merlie Alunan, who served as workshop coordinator and her research assistant, Eva Washburn-Repollo; panelists Gemino H Abad, Cesar Aquino, Marjorie Evasco, Francis Macansantos, Anthony L. Tan, Bobby Flores Villasis, and Ernesto Superal Yee; and my batchmates Christine Godinez Ortega, Timothy Montes (who also wrote the foreword), D.M. Reyes, and Lakambini Sitoy. Their names bring back that season: rooms of listening, pages warm from the hand, the silence before a sentence was read aloud.

One poem, “Hugging the Shore,” began during a last hour at Chin Loong, along Rizal Boulevard, at the corner of San Jose Street. The boulevard in 1989 was not yet the bright promenade it would become. It was darker, rougher, more weathered: Sans Rival Cakes & Pastries and Cuernos, North Pole, old hotels and ancestral houses, Silliman Hall at the northern end, the port exhaling cargo and diesel, the first food stalls smoking near the water. I remember the table after the meal, the wet ring left by a glass, the clink of utensils, sauce drying on a plate, the sea beyond the street, and the waiting trip to Dumaguete Airport. The poem began in that divided hour, when the body still wanted the shore and the day had already begun to leave.

Back then, a poem could seem slight at first: a page folded into a folder, a line revised before dinner, a voice trying not to tremble. Years pass. Paper yellows. Buildings change names. A road becomes cleaner, brighter, less haunted. What remains is not what the young person thought would last, but the trace of an hour that refused to disappear.

Dumaguete belonged to literature long before UNESCO named what writers already knew. It had the workshop, the teachers, the folios, the long walks near the water, the talk after class and over coffee, the young writers carrying their pages through the heat, careful not to crease them.

I am grateful the poems entered this book. I am more grateful they returned through Dumaguete. Some cities recede. Others stay in the mouth and hand: drift after the meal, ink on the thumb, damp paper under the palm, late light on a page, the low dark sea breathing beside the road, as if the shore were still keeping watch 🙏

📷 Ian Rosales Casocot

F Jordan Carnice

Rio Brigino-Lim

[wendellcapili]

𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

The auditorium is humid. On the riser, we sit in starched barongs and sashes, an image of a settled, permanent institution. Students are dressed for a rite that suggests we have a home to offer them.

Before us stands 𝐵𝑎𝑘𝑤𝑖𝑡, the bamboo installation by John Carlo Pagunaling. It is a mobile structure—a skeletal map of the ten years we have spent in transit since the fire gutted our Faculty Center.

I watch the students cross the stage. I recognize the faces I have met in stairwells and coffee shops. A student catches her hem on a bamboo joint. I remember the morning we spent at a street corner drafting the appeal that kept her in school.

By the exits, the staff lean against the pillars. When the back rows erupt—not for the honors, but for the names that were red-lined and then reinstated—the applause is sharp.

The student representatives take the mic. The university seal on the backdrop is replaced by: 𝐴𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎 𝑛𝑔 𝑏𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑛, 𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑘𝑜𝑑 𝑠𝑎 𝑠𝑎𝑚𝑏𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑛!

The chairs scrape against the floor as the crowd breaks toward the lobby. I stay on the riser. The bamboo frame is exposed now, stark and portable. In a few minutes, the photos will circulate online, and we will look like a college. Then the doors open. We gather our things and scatter into the afternoon, leaving the stage to be dismantled.

[wendellcapili]

𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐭

In the photograph, I am standing against a plain wall, swallowed by the heavy, smalt-blue folds of an academic gown from the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University. It is the garment of my highest degree. Yet, during graduation ceremonies at the University of the Philippines, it stays in the closet.

Our commencement rituals require the sablay—a woven sash draped across the shoulder. It is meant to be a great equalizer, a visual reminder that our primary allegiance is to the public. However, it also functions as a quiet erasure of where else we have been. Not long ago, my colleague Marlon James Sales—who directs the UP College of Arts and Letters Graduate Studies Office and holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Monash—and I joked about a minor mutiny. We threatened to pull our foreign doctoral robes out for the ceremonies, curious to see how the community would react to the sudden intrusion of Canberra or Melbourne into the strict sea of maroon and green.

We knew it would be viewed as eccentric, or worse, misread as an ostentatious display of foreign pedigree in a culture that can sometimes be deeply suspicious of the outside world. For those of us who left to study abroad, returning was rarely a triumphant homecoming. There were colleagues who did not believe in us, who viewed our departure with cynicism, or who used the bureaucracy to make the path back as narrow as possible. Institutions overseas had offered climate-controlled offices, vast research endowments, and a comfortable predictability that would have been immensely easy to stay for.

Instead, we returned to a campus that made staying difficult. In 2016, a fire gutted the UP Faculty Center, reducing our departments, our personal libraries, and our archives to ash. Ten years later, we still do not have proper offices. We have become nomadic academics, grading papers in noisy coffee shops and conducting research in whatever makeshift corners we can find. We work through the literal rain leaking through aging campus roofs, continuing our work inside a system that regularly asks its faculty to substitute pure grit for basic infrastructure.

The robe stays in the closet.

[wendellcapili]

At the 64th Silliman University National Writers Workshop 🌻

[wendellcapili]

𝐁𝐚𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐨 𝐂𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐥 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝟑𝟒𝟑

On April 27, 2026, the Baguio City Council passed Resolution Number 343. Introduced by Councilor Betty Lourdes F. Tabanda and signed by Acting Vice-Mayor Edison R. Bilog and Mayor Benjamin B. Magalong, the document recognizes my inclusion in the roster of Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas recipients from the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL). The ceremony took place on April 25 during UMPIL's 52nd Congress at the University of the Philippines Baguio, where I served as the Baccalaureate Speaker a year earlier.

The resolution’s presentation at City Hall was on May 25. I was absent. An invite arrived late, coinciding with the monthly UP College of Arts and Letters Executive Committee meeting in Diliman. I stayed in Diliman.

These documents are snapshots of a longer history. That history resides in the coordinates occupied over four decades. It began in the early 1980s with workshops at Teachers Camp and drafts abandoned at sundown on the mosaic tables near the old UP Baguio High School, now the site of the College of Social Sciences. Many poems in "A Madness of Birds" (1998) emerged in the silence of those semester breaks. By October 2008, my workspace had moved to Cordillera Coffee, a now-defunct spot at SM City Baguio. The shop stood empty during the day, offering the quiet needed to revise the dissertation that became "Migrations and Mediations: The Emergence of Southeast Asian Diaspora Writers in Australia" (2016). After 5:00 p.m., the cafe filled with local journalists, including Franklin Y. Cimatu, who received his own commendation under Resolution Number 344. "The Colonial Sugar Industry in Indonesia and the Philippines" (2023) and "The Emergence of Creative Writing in Asia" (2026) took shape between lunch and dinner at Hill Station during my 2023–2024 sabbatical.

The students who passed through my classrooms often carried their origins with them. The rosters of my first Communication I and II classes, from 1988 to 1990, were anchored by those from Baguio: Judd Peñera Olea, nephew of jazz artist Bong Peñera; Armand Po Liggayu, one of the founding members of the University of the Philippines Alumni Association in Edmonton; and Jennifer Raroque, now an internist in Nevada.

Decades later, the pattern holds, with some of the most rigorous minds in my recent classes again emerging from the same city. Roland Erwin P. Rabang is now the Director of the Office of Public Affairs at UP Baguio. Io Jularbal leads the College of Arts and Communication as Dean. Ruth M. Tindaan, educated in London, divides her time between the Department of Language, Literature, and the Arts (DLLA) and the pioneering PhD in Indigenous Studies program, after serving as DLLA Chairperson, College Secretary, and Director of the Cordillera StudiesCenter. Celeste Grace Subido edited "The Baguio We Know" and co-edited "Iskulumbing: Reading Delfin Tolentino Jr." (with Ben Tapang). Jose Kervin Cesar B. Calabias, also educated in Hong Kong, shapes ecocritical discourse at De La Salle University as an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies.

The council cites Baguio's UNESCO Creative Cities status as the cornerstone for these honors. For me, the record is more personal. It lives in the classrooms of Teachers Camp, the worn mosaic tables, the afternoon light at Hill Station, and the hurried text messages coordinating the commute between the mountains and Diliman 🌻

[wendellcapili]

𝐄𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐥

The wood-paneled silence of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute in 2005 offered a particular clarity. It was there, in conversation with Wang Gungwu—ANU Professor Emeritus and NUS University Professor—that the true cost of "Professional Communication" became clear. Wang reminds us that running a university begins with immersing oneself in books. Before becoming the Vice-Chancellor (CEO) of the University of Hong Kong in 1986—leading it for nearly a decade—he was a young man in 1950s Manila attending a creative writing workshop led by the novelist N.V.M. Gonzalez. He spoke of poet Virginia R. Moreno and a generation that thrived because their teachers had been trained by Tom Inglis Moore at the University of the Philippines.

Oxford and Sydney-educated, Moore was no transient academic. As the founding adviser of the UP Writers Club and co-adviser of the Philippine Collegian from 1928 to 1931, he did not come to Manila to teach "Expression" or the utilitarian maneuvers of the modern office. He came to facilitate a period of self-discovery for a nation using a new language to find its soul. Moore famously criticized the "adolescent" sentimentalism of local writing and challenged essayists to move toward literary maturity. He introduced the workshop method used at Iowa, transforming the university into a space for intellectual labor rather than polite recitation. These figures weren’t merely learning to "communicate." They were learning how to be.

The Commission on Higher Education (CHED) now proposes a draft to cut mandatory General Education (GE) from 36 to 18 units. It is an administrative decision to treat communication as a mechanistic skill, collapsing the humanities into a job-skills clinic. The memo rests on the dangerous assumption that tertiary-level literature is unnecessary "content" already covered in high school. By stripping the curriculum, CHED effectively demotes the university from a place of higher learning to a site of technical training, defined by "audience-appropriate messages" and "responsible AI use." These are narrow, perishable competencies that mistake software proficiency for intellectual depth.

I have watched the "professional" become a mask for the procedural. When we replace literature with "Purposive Communication," we lose the student’s agency to question the why behind the what. Communication becomes a series of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)—a dry rattle of empty syntax where the goal is merely to avoid friction rather than to speak truth. Without the ethical nuance provided by the humanities, "professionalism" is reduced to compliance. It prepares students to follow a template, but leaves them defenseless against the subtle violence of institutional language or the actual mechanics of power.

The NUS has redesigned its curriculum to better align with the future of work, but they moved in the opposite direction of the CHED proposal. As of 2026, the maturity of their "Critique and Expression" pillar demonstrates that a top-tier university views literature not as a basic skill to be discarded, but as a critical competency for survival in an automated world. In the NUS model, literature is a framework for analysis. Students use "enduring works of the literary and artistic imagination" to develop interpretations that require a level of maturity simply not found in secondary education.

The evolution at NUS suggests that professional communication was never meant to replace literature but to be fueled by it. Their journey from remedial English in the 1970s to the current framework reflects a shift from basic proficiency to high-level readiness. Engineering students now take modules that combine critique with communication, recognizing that a technical graduate who cannot navigate global narratives is fundamentally incomplete. Literature provides the complex human data—the fuel—that prepares graduates for a diverse workforce. CHED’s move to isolate "expression" from its literary source strips students of the emotional intelligence that "digital literacy" alone cannot provide.

When the UP College of Arts and Letters Faculty Center burned down in 2016, we lost more than a building. We lost the smell of damp blueprints and the shared memory of a generation. When we teach students to write about that fire, we are not just teaching them to "apply tools." We are teaching them to map out their own history and grief. The Reframed GE goals include "Ethical Responsibility" and "National Identity." These cannot be taught through a module on AI disclosure. Disclosure is a rule. Ethical weight is a struggle. It comes from reading the unedited words of Jose Rizal, where the tension between being a nation and being a colony is a lived contradiction, not a multiple-choice question.

We owe it to students who were let down by their earlier schooling to treat them as citizens who can think. If our GE program does not use literature as the basis for that thought, we are not improving education. We are simply making it easier for our graduates to become obsolete. From Moore’s Manila in 1930 to NUS in 2026, the world’s leading educational models have used literature to bridge the gap between simple speech and true critique. Removing it is a regression into the adolescent state Moore warned us about nearly a century ago. In the quiet rooms of 1950s Manila, future National Artist NVM Gonzalez understood something the current memo does not. He knew that for a student like Wang Gungwu to eventually write a memo that matters, they must first understand a world that does not yet exist 🌻

𝑊𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑊𝑎𝑛𝑔 𝐺𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑤𝑢 𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑁𝑈𝑆 𝐸𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝐴𝑠𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝐼𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑡𝑒 𝑖𝑛 2005, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑢𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑠.

[wendellcapili]

𝐑𝐞-𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐆𝐄

A circulating CHED memorandum, dated April 16, 2026, is a document of logistical surrender. It treats the university as a bottleneck, an inconvenience of time to be managed by declaring the humanities a "redundancy" already solved in secondary school. By gutting the General Education (GE) core to 18 units, the Commission satisfies a bureaucratic hunger for a faster conveyor belt. Technical throughput has been mistaken for intellectual maturation.

Maturation is not a throughput problem.

Under "Constructive Alignment," the lecture has become a factory inspection. Every reading is audited against a "Course Outcome." One no longer wrestles with a text to see the world. One reads it to tick a box on a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is clean, but it is the cleanliness of a morgue. It stifles the unpredictable collision of ideas that defines a world-class education.

Preparation is a map of privilege. My nearly four decades in the university classroom confirm that high school is not a universal equalizer. The elite private graduate arrives with a vocabulary the public school student is still struggling to assemble. Foundational writing courses such as UP Diliman's English 13 (Writing as Thinking) were the only leveling ground—a brief, democratic parity. Stripping them away ensures the gap never closes. It is class advantage rebranded as efficiency.

The Commission expects "innovation" overnight. It is an order barked at a faculty that has spent a decade in the cold. April also marks ten years since the UP College of Arts and Letters Faculty Center burned to the ground. You cannot decree a digital renaissance when the basic infrastructure for thought—a faculty office, a bookshelf, a quiet place to sit—remains a pile of charred rebar.

The 2026 framework is a map of the marketplace, not the mind. It abandons the rigor that distinguishes a university from a vocational school. Singapore and Japan do not sacrifice the foundation for the sake of the clock. They know a university is not a vocational shortcut. CHED has found a way to hasten the graduation walk.

A student stands at the exit with a degree in one hand and a checklist in the other, perfectly aligned for a job that does not require them to think🌻

[wendellcapili]

The UP Computer Center's new lobby is a rare admission that the university should be a service rather than a hierarchy. The Help Desk is right there—not a destination for a pilgrimage, but a counter where things get fixed.

For those of us from the UP College of Arts and Letters still squatting in the borrowed rooms of Palma Hall, the internet is the only real coordinate left. A decade after the Faculty Center went up in flames, the university exists mostly as a login screen. When my access to Dilnet and eduroam died for a fortnight, I was not just offline. I was evicted. There is no "college" without the signal.

The fix lacked the usual bureaucratic friction. The Help Desk's Jeeno Sayago, Nel Comia, Nicholle Torres, and Kyle Reyes, with security staff Raquel Legaspi overseeing the floor, simply did the work. No paperwork, no performance of institutional hurdle-jumping. It was a sharp, technical correction—the invisible maintenance that keeps the ruins habitable. We only notice this labor when the screen stays black.

Efficiency, however, is not a substitute for stability. Their workstations are state-of-the-art, but the people behind them cannot be treated like seasonal hardware. Praising "dedication" is often just a polite way to avoid talking about the precariousness of contractual labor. If the university expects this team to sustain its infrastructure, it must move past the commendation. Institutional care means ending contractualization and providing the pay and benefits that reflect the weight of the job. You cannot run a modern network on a legacy of job insecurity 🌻

[wendellcapili]

𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐯𝐬. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐔𝐏

(Based on the QS World University Rankings by Subject, released 25 March 2026)

Ten years ago, a fire destroyed the UP Faculty Center. Since then, the UP College of Arts and Letters has functioned without permanent faculty, staff, and student offices, or dedicated facilities.

Despite this sustained displacement, the latest global rankings place the UPD Department of English and Comparative Literature in the 151–200 bracket—the highest in the Philippines ( https://www.topuniversities.com/university-subject-rankings/english-language-literature?search=Philippines ). This performance outranks most other units in the UP system—the majority of which occupy modern, intact infrastructure.

Across the broader Arts and Humanities, the university also maintains its No. 1 domestic ranking, placing 257th worldwide ( https://www.topuniversities.com/university-subject-rankings/arts-humanities?search=Philippines ).

These results were achieved from temporary desks and dismal shared spaces. They confirm that while a building provides necessary support, the intellectual work of the humanities has managed to lead the university even in its absence 🌻

#kalbaryo

[wendellcapili]

𝐀𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧

The peak of any organization is frequently misread as a site of terminal isolation. We are conditioned to view the front rows of high-ceilinged halls through a Darwinian lens, assuming that the climb requires a calculated coldness—the systematic pruning of rivals and a mercenary devotion to the self.

This model of ascendancy, however, is a relic of a closed system. It belongs to an era of captive talent and locked doors, where authority was enforced by the desk one occupied rather than the value one generated. In contemporary, high-pressure environments, this transactional ruthlessness is not a strength. It is a structural flaw. When a more accomplished figure operates by sidelining peers, they incur a silent social debt that eventually bankrupts the ecosystem. True institutional longevity does not rely on raw ambition, but on the accumulation of social trust. When the most agile minds begin to seek more stable orbits elsewhere, the figure at the center may retain their title, but they lose the gravity required to align a room toward a common purpose. The result is not a sudden collapse, but a quiet, terminal fragmentation.

Enduring influence belongs instead to those who map the movement of people and ideas across borders rather than guarding a single gate. In an intellectual economy defined by transit, power is found at the crossroads. By tracking the flow of talent from the margins to the center, an effective figure transforms the institution into a site of synthesis. They do not see a boundary to be defended, but a geography to be understood. This mastery of movement is complemented by a deep commitment to memory. To persist, one must become a repository of the unwritten narratives—the sedimented history of a place that no policy manual can capture. This renders a person fundamentally integrated into the culture. It is nearly impossible to unseat a presence that has become woven into the primary story of the institution itself. They do not just inhabit the culture. They define its continuity.

The most resilient formations are those that maintain the perspective of an outsider even while occupying the very center of the room. They reject the suffocating comforts of sycophantic inner circles, viewing peers not as threats to be neutralized, but as the necessary friction that prevents stagnation. This distance allows for a clearer view of the work’s integrity, favoring the health of the collective over the fragile demands of the ego. At this level, stature is not a product of dominance. It is the result of understanding the room’s history, its movement, and its people better than anyone else within it. The peak is never a state of isolation. It is a position of such profound utility that the organization becomes unrecognizable without that specific, grounding presence 🦚

[wendellcapili]

𝐀𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫

The laptop lid clicks shut, but the workday merely changes state.

For a certain class of professionals, the real shift begins under the low, orange hum of a bar across some street. This is the unrecorded overtime—a space where professional standing is measured by the pint and the seating chart at the booth invariably predicts the next promotion list.

The pitch is always the same: out here, the hierarchy dissolves. But the laughter still moves in one direction—upward.

There is a quiet, persistent tax on those who cannot attend. We call it "culture fit," but it is often just proximity bias. When a manager spends hours in the unstructured company of a specific few, those faces become the default setting for the next lead role or stretch assignment. It is rarely a conscious conspiracy. It is simply that familiarity is frequently mistaken for competence.

The data is cold: employees who share social habits with their superiors are fast-tracked not because their work is better, but because they are known.

This social capital is stripped from the most reliable. It excludes the parent with a hard deadline at a school gate, the worker whose autoimmune illness mandates sobriety, and the person whose faith makes the pub an exclusion zone.

It devalues the "horizontal" colleague—the one who offers genuine kindness to the contractual staff and the security guard with the same sincerity they offer the director. When the path to the corner office is paved with after-hours drinks, kindness becomes a performance, and diligence becomes a footnote.

We have a biological urge toward "homosocial reproduction"—the instinct to promote those who mirror our own rhythms and jokes. But an organization built on shared nights out becomes a closed circuit. We stop looking for the best ideas and start looking for the most familiar faces.

Excellence, by contrast, is usually a quiet, solitary pursuit. It is found in the steady, repetitive work of a Tuesday morning. In the specialist who stays late to fix a colleague’s error when no one is watching. That effort lacks the performative heat of a midnight toast, yet it is the actual engine of the firm.

There is a particular exhaustion in having to perform a friendship to secure a livelihood. If warmth is reserved only for those who can grant a raise, it is not kindness. It becomes a transaction. It turns the workplace into a theater of strategic loyalty.

A healthy culture is judged by the light of day. It is found in the clarity of the work, the reliability of the result, and the basic decency shown to those who can do absolutely nothing for one’s career.

When the barstool decides who moves up, a workplace does not just lose its best talent. It loses its integrity.

[wendellcapili]

𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

Lately, my correspondence with colleagues abroad has taken on a shared, resentful frequency. Across various time zones, the story is the same: a quiet disillusionment with the places they once helped build. Some have chosen to remain in the friction, while others are quietly negotiating their retirements, planning a return to their native countries as a final act of decoupling. These are not merely stories of burnout. They are accounts of the systemic cooling of once-vibrant entities in the Global North.

Institutional decline is rarely a percussive event. It is a quiet, cumulative loss of resolution. It begins when the structure of a leadership shifts from the expansive to the defensive. There is silence that settles over a headquarters or a historic hall when the executive decides that the friction of the governed is a liability to be managed rather than a pulse to be monitored. This is the act of insulation: the deliberate thickening of the skin between the center and the reality of the work.

It starts as an aesthetic of comfort. A leader, fatigued by the abrasive transparency that a healthy body demands, begins to pull the furniture closer. They surround themselves with a circle of the "known"—associates whose standing is rooted not in a professional mandate, but in a private history. These are individuals bound by the unspoken pacts of shared pedigree and social shorthand. This is the birth of the inner circle. It is not an advisory body. It is a human filter. Within this space, the primary requirement for entry is no longer the sharp edge of expertise, but the soft touch of alignment.

When a leader is insulated, the truth is redacted before it arrives. Information that once flowed from the periphery to the center is scrubbed by a layer of enablers. Warnings are transmuted into suggestions. Dissent is recast as "unhelpful noise." In this thin atmosphere, the leadership begins to mistake the echo of its own voice for a mandate. Decisions of immense consequence—the transfer of collective resources to spectral partners, the execution of agreements with entities that lack a legal footprint at the moment of signing—are made with a speed that is mistaken for efficiency. In reality, it is a flight from the inconvenience of being seen.

The most precise indicator of this pathology is the quiet exit of the traditionalists. Every historic unit has its "keepers of the house"—more senior professionals who carry the memory and the ethical baseline of the enterprise. They are the ones who remember why the rules were written and what the original promise was. When the insulation hardens, these individuals are the first to decouple. They do not issue manifestos. They simply return to their core disciplines, leaving a structural hollow behind them. The administration frames these departures as a "natural transition," but the vacuum is catastrophic. When keepers of memory are pushed to the margins to make room for the broker, the enterprise loses its moral gravity.

The change manifests in the mundane: a door that used to be open is now locked. A signature that used to take an hour now takes a month. A more seasoned colleague who once mentored everyone is suddenly, quietly, gone. Eventually, the insulation becomes a tomb. By protecting the leader from the dissent of the stakeholders, the inner circle cuts off the feedback required for survival. The legal counsel and the governing boards, once meant to be the conscience of the body, are repurposed as its defense. They stop asking if an action is right and begin asking if it is "defensible." The constituents—the employees, the members, the public—are relegated to the status of an audience, watching a play they no longer recognize.

The tragedy of insulation is that it eventually suffocates the authority it was meant to preserve. Trust, a currency built over generations, is spent to secure the silence of the few. When the walls are finally breached—whether by an external auditor or the sheer weight of internal rot—what remains is a hollowed-out shell. It turns out that the cost of being protected from the truth is the loss of the right to lead it.

[wendellcapili]

𝐎𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

The screening rooms at Queens’ College, Cambridge, in the mid-nineties were drafty, smelling of damp wool and the faint, stale drift of tobacco. My closest friends were a dissonant circle of Social Anthropology majors—Bhaskar Chakrabarti (from India), Mihailo Jojic (Montenegro), Toomas Gross (Estonia), Aivita Putnina (Latvia), and Remigijus Juozaitis (Lithuania). For several evenings, we did not gather to dissect the European avant-garde. We were performing a clinical autopsy on a very specific eighteen-month window of American cinema.

Between October 1961 and March 1962, Hollywood released three films that functioned as a collective obituary for mid-century optimism: Splendor in the Grass, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and Sweet Bird of Youth. Viewed together, they provide a record of human obsolescence—what happens when the social market no longer has a use for a person’s beauty or their soul.

The erosion began in the Kansas dirt. In Splendor in the Grass, the "goodness" of the protagonists, played by Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, is a structural trap. They follow every rule the mid-century consensus demands, and the result is a total psychological breakdown. The film’s conclusion is notably devoid of catharsis. It ends on a muddy farm with a conversation so polite it feels hollowed out. They have survived, but only by becoming strangers to their own impulses. For those of us watching from the former Eastern Bloc, this was not a period piece. It was a study of the cost of assimilation into a failing system.

In Sweet Bird of Youth, the repression of the plains gave way to the humid, predatory economy of the Gulf Coast. Warren Beatty is now Chance Wayne, a man frantically trying to monetize his youth before the clock runs out. But the film’s center of gravity is Geraldine Page. As the fading, vodka-soaked star Alexandra Del Lago, she offers a masterclass in desperate leverage. She understands the market better than Chance ever will, using him as a temporary ladder back to relevance. It depicts a world where people are treated as raw materials, extracted for their vitality and discarded once they lose their decorative value.

The fire finally goes out in the indifferent marble of The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. Vivien Leigh—the definitive survivor of Gone with the Wind—plays a woman who has achieved the wealth and status the other characters would have traded their lives for, only to find herself in a vacuum. The film ends with a gesture of total divestment: she throws her house keys to a stranger in the street. It is not an act of romance. It is a recognition that there is nothing left in her life worth the effort of protection.

There is a measurable trajectory in these films, visible in the arc of Beatty’s face. In just over a year of production, he moves from a boy crushed by his family’s expectations to a man attempting to exploit his own image, and finally—in the shadows of Rome—to the cold predator waiting for his own victim.

Thirty years later, the distance between those screens and our lived reality has narrowed. We are no longer the students in the dark, theorizing about the end of splendor. We have reached beyond the age the protagonists were then. For me, the films remain relevant because they refuse the comfort of the happy ending or the lie that love is an adequate defense against time. They offer only the hard mechanics of what happens when the pressure of expectation becomes unsustainable and the silence settles in.

[wendellcapili]

𝐉𝐞𝐞𝐧𝐚 𝐑𝐚𝐧𝐢 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐳-𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐨𝐢𝐬

(1974-2026)

The death of Jeena Rani Marquez-Manaois leaves a specific silence in Philippine literary and cultural studies. Her work, situated between the University of the Philippines and University College London, was an attempt to map the intersections of language, geography, and disaster. Jeena did not merely observe culture. She tracked the way meaning survives the physical shifts of the land.

In her Palanca-winning essay, The River of Gold (2011), Jeena examined the Cagayan de Oro River not as a backdrop, but as a living record. She moved between the folklore of her childhood—the subterranean myths of Mindanao—and the literal silt of a changing climate. In Sikwateng Uwan (Chocolate Rain), written after the devastation caused by Typhoon Sendong especially around the areas surrounding Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, she documented the floodwaters as a materialist history. Here, the mud is stripped of its sweetness. It is the debris of a warming world, a form of "slow violence" that buries the myths of the past under the weight of a turbulent present.

Her linguistic research was equally focused on the physical. In her exploration of lambing, Jeena dealt with the problem of the "untranslatable". By asserting that this specific Filipino register of tenderness has no direct English equivalent, she was engaged in an act of semantic sovereignty. She argued that certain emotions are rooted in the specific humidity and history of the islands—a refusal to be flattened by the hegemony of global English. This was not a sentimental project. It was a rigorous defense of a local reality.

This intellectual rigor was inseparable from her life as an actress. As a member of the The UP Repertory Company, Jeena inhabited the very narratives she studied. Her friendship with Professor Tuting Hernandez grew from this shared space, fueled by late-night discussions on language. Jeena’s curiosity was expansive. She was drawn to diachronic and ethnolinguistic practices, often expressing a desire to leave the classroom behind for the grit of fieldwork. This theatricality informed her scholarly presence, most notably in 2010 when she joined the cast of Anton Juan’s adaptation of Information for Foreigners. Staged for the centenary of the UPD Department of English and Comparative Literature (DECL), the play used collaborative devices to portray social injustice, requiring Jeena to bridge the parallel histories of Argentina and the Philippines.

At University College London, Jeena’s Ph.D. research into Dagayday Sa Sugilanon (The Flow of Stories) challenged the continental bias of Anglo-Celtic and Eurocentric scholarship. She proposed an "Archipelagic Narrative" where the sea is not a void between landmasses, but a space of transit. She used the Cebuano concept of dagayday—a current or a continuous flow—to describe how stories migrate across water.

Jeena understood that the scholar’s work is a performance of presence. Whether on the stage or in the archive, she sought to show that meaning is something practiced and lived. While her research at UCL remains a project interrupted, her existing work offers a coherent philosophy of the archipelago: a place where stories, like water, provide the connective tissue of survival. She reminded us that to name a river, or to define a gesture of affection, is an act of reclamation against the silence of history 🌷

[wendellcapili]

#AustraliaDay2026, hosted by His Excellency, Marc Innes-Brown, Ambassador of Australia to the Philippines.

[wendellcapili]

The 2026 AD Scientific Index results—ranking our work at the University of the Philippines at the forefront of global research—provide a quiet moment for reflection on the nature of scholarship.

To be ranked No. 1 globally in Creative Writing Studies is a significant milestone for a discipline often overshadowed by the "hard" sciences. That this was achieved in the decade following the 2016 Faculty Center fire adds a layer of bittersweet irony.

For years, the work has continued without a physical college home, a private office, or a dedicated workstation. The "office" has often been a laptop in coffee shops across the city, squeezed into the hours after meetings and classes. We have proven that scholarly output need not be interrupted by the loss of four walls.

However, while creativity, inquiry, and public service can endure the "deterritorialization" of those who produce it, a true academic community requires more than just individual resilience to flourish. The study of the Filipino experience—our migration, our memory, and our cultural mediation—deserves a consecrated space.

At the UP College of Arts and Letters, we have shown that our vitality is not bound by infrastructure. Yet, the merit of our work should not be a justification for neglect.

I look forward to the day when the global standing of CAL's teachers, artists, and researchers is finally matched by the restoration of the spaces they inhabit.

[wendellcapili]

With writer Ren Aguila (R) and veteran Filipino-Australian actor Alfred Nicdao, whose career spans over four decades.

A pioneer for Southeast Asian representation in the Australian entertainment industry, Alf is one of the first Filipino actors to appear on Australian television. He made his professional screen debut in 1979 as a Sumatran fisherman in the classic drama The Sullivans. Since then, he has become a familiar face in Australian households through recurring roles and guest appearances in some of the country’s most iconic series.

On television, he is known for his work in Neighbours, where he played Bradley Satchwell (2016–2017) and Howard Lane (2006). His extensive TV credits include Blue Heelers, Sea Patrol, City Homicide, Stingers, The Elephant Princess, and Bali 2002.

On film, he appeared in the Hollywood production The Great Raid (2005) and the Australian action-drama Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010). He has also worked frequently with filmmaker Matthew Victor Pastor, starring in independent features like The Neon Across the Ocean (2020).

Outside Australia, he has appeared in BBC productions such as The Bite and Bootleg.

Throughout his career, Alf has been a vocal advocate for diversity and "color-blind casting," often breaking stereotypes by portraying a wide range of Asian ethnicities in a landscape that was historically slow to diversify.

Beyond his own acting, Alf is a mentor within the Filipino-Australian creative community and the co-convenor of Project Kultura, an organization dedicated to celebrating Filipino heritage and arts.

Alf is the father of actress Charlotte Nicdao, who has achieved international acclaim for her role in the Apple TV+ series Mythic Quest.