trapped: Updike's Brazil is the escape

Dec. 16: trapped at SM since heaven was peeing damn hard. Got no choice but to run at the nearest bookshop and that is RSO and got Updike’s Brazil for myself. (My usual tote will never run out of novels inside but I was not using the usual one!)

But why Updike? Since I had already read one of his novels and his words are pretty delicious and elegant. And he is a Pulitzer awardee for crying out loud:D

Encountered QUOTESon for my head (so far):

The world itself is stolen goods. All property is theft, and those who have stolen most of it make the laws for the rest of us.

Marx says that sickly philanthropy is worse than blunt, healthy oppression, which at least alerts the working class to the war that exists.

Reality is, more and more, statistics, and in a country as big as Brazil we are very small statistics

The man who betrays his own brother deserves to die

She was not death but her whiteness had death's purity

The city seems to float on emptiness like a constellation, and then to tilt, as if wheeling toward takeoff past your own stationary position in space

Brazil has few leaders; Portuguese did not bring to the new world the discipline and austerity that the Spanish did. If we were not as cruel as they were, merely brutal, it was because we were too lazy to have an ideology. The church was too lenient; even the convents were brothels.

Roads are progress, and the man who can drive them is a man of the future

He bestowed upon each of her cheeks and then her lips a kiss whose coolness had since childhood seemed to her tinged, like luggage stored in the unheated hold of an airplane, with the extra-terrestrial cold of the stratosphere.

Everything can be forgiven of a woman but awkwardness; that clings to the mind.

He knew so many other languages that his mind was always translating; his tongue had no home

She would not cause Tristao’s death and held him in her heart like a prisoner safe in a locked cell

It takes a sad childhood to make us eager to be adult

How frightening, she thought, that one does not merely grow and enlarge one’s experience, but one loses earlier selves. We move forward into darkness and darkness closes behind

To die is not the worst thing man can do. To live defeated, that is the worst. Life without Isabel to me is no life

Better a short life than none. Even the longest life feels too short on the deathbed.

Love was everywhere, he perceived, and it solved no problems. In fact, it created problems.

Sartre is a one-eyed clown and pedophile.

The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot afford to have its subject be human---it must have robots on the bottom, and monster on top

Anarchy means for you doing away with the feeble restraints to exploitation and pillage that already exist; if there is one nation on earth that does not need an ideal of anarchy, it is anarchic Brazil, whose national flag so wistfully inscribes order and progress across the southern sky

Marx himself is a romantic fool. He thinks the proletariat is one big superman when in fact it is a collection of sniveling, petty-minded connivers and freeloaders. Like the capitalists, the Communists seek to paper over the oppressions and cruelties of their societies with glamorous myths.

Brazil is a happy country. It has deep pockets and a short memory.

The bits of gold are like lice in mother earth’s tangled hair---they hide, they wriggle away

“My love is like Mother Gold, immutable, though it momentarily hides” Tristao said.

“Gold has become not just your mother but your wife”, Isabel retorted. :D

When the brain was enough dulled, a luminous cave opened in life’s implacable cliff, and one could crawl in.

Romanticism is what brings a couple together, but realism is what sees them through.

ang badlungon nga babaye

by Jona Branzuela Bering

“Hoy asa imong sapatos?” Kuya Eleccion, one of the guards feigned anger upon seeing me comfortably sporting on loafers for the nth times.

“Nag-una K’ya. Tu-a na sa office.” I grinningly coaxed and gave him the peace sign.

He bartered a smile yet had a disapproving look on his face.

Others may take this as a radical action but nah, for some clumsy health issues I have to shun away from high-heeled shoes. A frail apology for not wearing shoes, nonetheless.

But indeed, Dr. Sol Gallon labeled me as badlungon nga babaye. He once reprimanded me since I had not passed the necessary papers for my teaching apprenticeship (two-month late by the way) and he learned from his colleagues that I didn’t attend my classes regularly. (I was wrong with my calculations then, I thought my professors were absent. My bad :C)

I was not proud of my person.

I know am not a good student but I know I am a good learner. I learned I am not a good student.

Don’t get me wrong.

I am not aiming for some encyclopedic wisdom: understanding puzzling algebraic equations; memorizing dates like when did Napoleon exiled at Alba (I loved my history teacher though, since he never dealt with such unnecessary dates); feeding my neurons with who’s who in the literary circle were my four-year food that sometimes I forgot to chew. The outcome---my grades suffered from indigestion.

Junasis, our Filipino Ed noted that I will be wearing my toga soon.

“Hopefully!” I beamed.

He heartily laughed with Karina, the future Feature Ed.

Hey, did I say something wrong or funny perhaps?

Ugh, I was not joking. I haven’t passed my application for graduation yet while my classmates already had. Much more, my prospectus screamed that I have a no-grade

subject course.

Oh com’on, don’t give me that look. I already said that I am not a good student, didn’t I?

Academically, I sucked, among other things.

I got a cebuano-visayan subject yet Kevin Lagunda, our literary ed served as my mentor since I was busy with my thoughts when my professor discussed the equivalent word for essay in cebuano.

I doubted if my linguistic skills made a difference.

And yes, Junasis was right. I can smell March right under my nose like a rotten canal rat.

And if the one peeping above will allow it; I will march at the hallway of the Social Hall with stupid grin planted on my lips. And my toga will surely dance with the talisay-breezed air.

PS. This was written on December 17, 2007. The badlungon nga babaye will not be gone yet. She will take her MA here, in case she will acquire a grade on Principles on Teaching. Not lower than flat-nosed three for that matter.