This Feature presents readers sharing some love about the talent of Filipino writers and artists. We would welcome your participation. This section is for readers. You don't have to write "like a professional," "like a critic," "like an intellectual," "like a well-rounded reader," etc. Just write honestly about how you were moved. Live writers and artists (let alone the dead) don't get to hear enough from others who engage with their works (some may not even know all who comprise their audience). To know someone read their stories and poems or appreciated their artistry is to receive a gift. Just share from your heart. It will be more than enough. DEADLINE: Nov. 15, 2024 for Issue #18. Duplications of authors/artists and more than one testimonial are fine.
Mangozine's Issue #17 Presents
Eileen Tabios on Paul Pfeiffer
Eileen Tabios on Maryanne Moll
Patty Enrado on Beverly Parayno
Eileen Tabios on Randy Gonzales
Teddy Griarte Espela on Jim Pascual Agustin
Eileen Tabios on Elaine Castillo
Elizabeth Ann Quirino on Beverly Parayno
Leny M. Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios
Eileen Tabios on Paul Pfeiffer
Richard Serra generated a lot of writings, and it’s also been interesting to see what others write as obits following his death. I would say—and against some of what I’ve seen written—that I don’t think his sculptures are massive if you go beyond ego (which I don't think was part of his aesthetics) and not position them against the human body. Serra was sculpting space. As regards space, if you consider how the planet Earth is but a dot in the universe, then Serra’s largest sculptures are not massive.
I’m moved to write the above after watching this video on Paul Pfeiffer’s work which also addresses scale. My first and only in-person sighting of a Paul Pfeiffer artwork was through an almost pin-sized hole he’d integrated into a wall in the early St. Marks (NYC) office of the Asian American Writers Workshop (we were all beautiful as emerging artists, I digress fondly to say). You had to put your eye against that hole to see the artwork. What I remember about the experience is the bodily action of integrating my body, my eye, into experiencing the art. Pfeiffer has always been on the periphery of my attention as my attention could not slow down enough to focus and give his work the respect they deserve. Maybe it’s age, and the attendant prioritizing of attention, that’s finally turned me into a viewer of his work. I recommend THIS VIDEO.
I also admire how he's integrated his Filipino roots (for examples, his religious upbringing and his brilliant "Vitruvian Figure," made in Manila, is on the March cover of Artforum)--his way testifies against the reductive and objective definitions applied to "Asian American" art.
He’s a genius with how he’s transformed digital media into art. I so admire his contemporaneity, something I would find impossible to achieve… because I don’t desire it but that may be an excuse. Against some things, one should concede inability and I concede such against the contemporary. (Plus I’m a luddite.) Paul Pfeiffer not only faces the digital age but he questions it from the inside in a charismatic way. I envy him in a good way because his works make me expand what I consider possible, and thus expands my own vision of the world. Belatedly, but most assuredly, towards Paul Pfeiffer I bow with a smile.
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Eileen Tabios on Maryanne Moll
This is why I love creatives. So Maryanne Moll filmed herself reading Wilfrido D. Nolledo's classic novel BUT FOR THE LOVERS. The nearly five-hour video (combining reading periods over five days) is just that—no talking during the reading and just the reading of the book. So the visual is simply of this woman seated at her desk reading the book. I didn't expect to become enthralled. I alternated between laughing and marveling and just watching. I was amazed that I was charmed into giving so much attention to watching the act of reading which, like the act of writing, is actually visually non-charismatic, but apparently unless Maryanne is doing it. Perhaps this is as close as I'll get--allow myself to get--to a John Cage-ish experience, but with a tropical flavor courtesy of the housedress and what sounds like a fan in the background. Maryanne says she did this partly to test whether her computer had the technical capacity for doing such a lengthy video. But I think she ended up making fabulous performance Art! And when she does speak in the Intro and Outro, oh my that is one enchanting voice! She also said she filmed the reading without talking because she likes the sound of "the quiet." Well, this viewer ends up liking that sound, too. As well, the video begins with matcha green tea ice cream--Yum! Check out the video HERE.
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Patty Enrado on Beverly Parayno
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Eileen Tabios on Randy Gonzales
Despite contributions by various scholars and historians, the time when Filipinos settled into Louisiana to form the largest Filipino population in the U.S. can still use attention and I am grateful that Randy Gonzales has created a compelling record of this 19th-20th century period through poetry. Settling St. Malo is a needed account of Filipino Louisiana that’s movingly informed by oral histories, letters, government documents and diaries. A native New Orleanian as well as poet-historian, Randy clearly knows of what he speaks since his family’s history is a direct example of Filipino Louisiana. In fact, he discovered the only known photo of his great-grandfather Miguel Guillera (see image below) while reading articles about the first Filipino sailors who, among other things, were hailed by Pres. Teddy Roosevelt. The book is elevated by its combination of images and verse.
Randy certainly could have addressed his subject through prose in the way of scholars and historians. But it’s just as well his project unfolded through verse—poetry after all is an art of intimacy and I also gleaned how the topic was so *BIG* for him to address that (per his Acknowledgments) his interest in the project temporarily “waned” until the Philippine Louisiana Historical Society stressed the importance of his story (pun: history). In this sense, I’m also heartened to read Settling St. Malo because it exemplifies what I know about Poetry—that Poetry is an opening.
Settling St. Malo is not just important but lovely work—kudos to Randy Gonzales, a community activist who thankfully is not just a historian but also a poet. Here is another excerpt from one of the book's poems:
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Teddy Griarte Espela on Jim Pascual Agustin
A surprise find for me yesterday at Solidaridad. Jim Pascual Agustin's poetry is a perpetual drift towards wonderment and sublimity, a visceral, almost stoic way of looking at the natural world and human condition. This collection he calls WAKING UP TO THE PATTERN LEFT BY A SNAIL OVERNIGHT, published locally [in the Philippines] by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, is the Winner of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.
His opening poem, "My Mother Had A Concrete Garden" shares commonality of space and concern to my own homage to my mother in the poem "A Monday With Mother" that also opens the collection of my book The Broken Places.
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Eileen Tabios on Elaine Castillo
In a Duh moment for me, I hadn't realized that Elaine Castillo’s America is Not The Heart has little to do with the Manongs, notwithstanding its title that references Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In The Heart. But it offers its own compelling story of a Philippine activist who relocated to the Bay Area. A particular detail makes this book special for me: its handling of sex (and not just due to the primary protagonist's bisexuality). Specifically, it's unique in presenting the point of view of a sexually experienced protagonist who, at one point, becomes reluctant to sexually engage someone else. It's a bit of a unique altruism on this protagonist's part since, as she puts it, she "rarely says No." I found these moments to be unforgettable in part because it's an antidote to the rom-coms (especially C- and K-drama rom coms) that's seemingly taken over the world.
I come late to this 2018 book because it got lost amidst my huge To-Read stacks. But I’m glad I got to it. I also recommend this book, and specifically to other writers as an example of how one might delete quote marks in dialogue. Elaine does this so well that her code switching between 3 -4 languages is still effective and her placement of periods effectively encourage desired reading pauses. Good writing always transcends grammar.
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Elizabeth Ann Quirino on Beverly Parayno
Wildflowers by Beverly Parayno is a powerful fiction anthology … The stories are intense, thought-provoking, sometimes bittersweet, but all of them beautifully written as only Beverly Parano can. I couldn’t get enough. We need a Part 2.
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Leny M. Strobel on Eileen R. Tabios
I suppose if I had enough worldly and sophisticated exposure to abstract art and poetry, I could say something worth being paid attention to by the bar patrons at “One”—this bar where you have to enter, drink, and leave alone. The bar patrons include some characters I haven't met in real life either—people who dabble in NFTs, spies, adoptive parents, perfume connoisseur, vodka drinkers, philosopher, etc. But I enjoyed the short fiction pieces in Getting to One (with art by harry k stammer). In particular, I enjoyed the story about dolphins sleeping with one eye open. And who wouldn't agree that “humans are the planet's most dangerous species”? But even at a bar like One, there's always a pretender—someone who claims to prefer being alone but “needs company to listen to his animal stories.” Don't we all want to be heard?
Well, this was a pleasant distraction from all the destruction going on out there in the world. And there are ruminations that break out in between the lines that makes for a sleepless night. Ceasefire Now. End genocides. End all wars.
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