My piece, Learning Early, won this week’s If My Life Were a Book essay writing contest held by National Book Store, The Philippine Star, and Globe Telecom. You can read it at today’s Sunday Lifestyle section (1st of 6 sections, page 2).
It was a pleasant surprise, because I just submitted then forgot about it (as I’ve been engrossed in balancing my time between work and Tagalog poetry, which I’m beefing up for several upcoming contests).
sat a park.
Humble at sixty letters across, fourteen lines
from north to south, immaculate
with nary a smudge nor mote
of ambition.
Unclaimed by the Builder’s pen, a virgin land.
Who had been there? No one,
not even the VIPs of the Builder’s towers
nor the littlest fly
of imagination.
But at 16th Page, it was prime
property.
A day after Valentine’s, the Builder
came, set up a discreet motel, a late
investment called
The Little Park in the Notebook
and the erstwhile haven
vanished.
12:03 AM
February 15, 2007
*As featured in Moleskinerie.com.
[First fiction piece I wrote on the moleskine. A few lines in, it turned out to be far from serious. Pseudo-sarcastic?]
Nothing was working. He had tried having sex before writing. He had tried eating chocolates to put him in the mood. He had tried watching soap operas to put him in the mood. Neither sweets nor salty tears worked. He had tried sharpening pencils, as Hemingway was supposedly wont to do, even though he did his writing with a laptop computer.
Still, the words didn’t come…but the ideas did. Hell, he had a ton of ideas dumped upon him every hour by his muse perched on the ceiling of his room. He had ideas for poetry, plays, fantasy, mystery, horror, sagas, novelettes, flash fiction. He was absolutely sure that his ideas were inimitable, that they were guaranteed bestsellers and prizewinners — once they were actually put into words, stanzas, chapters. The problem was his muse didn’t want to be bothered with a menial task such as “word-mongeringâ€, as she had put it in her harsh whispers to him. He had to do it on his own.
Then his muse, exasperated by the impotency of her master, hinted to him in a fit of anger, “You’re not a writer, you’re a typer!†With this, he shunned the keyboard for true pen and paper. He managed to satisfy his muse with a few works, but he soon proved inconsistent. The ink from his pen would come in sputters rather than in flows, and his stamina would falter after a few minutes of writing. His muse began to complain again, causing him to scramble for a solution — this and that combination of ballpoint pen, ruled paper, pencil, Post-it note, fountain pen, tissue paper — all to no avail.
The muse reached her breaking point. “What, are you only good for quickies?†Then came the ultimatum. “If you can’t give me the satisfaction I need, I’ll find someone else who will. Even if it’s a girl.â€
If you think about it, Sic parvis magna merely states the obvious…which is, “Men don’t know the obvious, and it takes some wise guy to concoct some wise line for them to be wisely reminded.”
“And preferably in Latin.”
With that in mind, I wanted to write something brutally terse for the first page of my new Moleskine. What I came up with on December 26 was far from a “lit piece”.
All the inaugural page declares is Phillip Kimpo / Ang Korsaryo, written in both Alibata and the Latin alphabet.
Was the European moleskine meant to dance with the Alibata script? No, and that made my “first page” all the more mystical memorable for me. (Of course, you know that this is just an excuse for such hasty work).
In any case, once I got over the hump, the writings on the black notebook (sounds dramatic!) came like a deluge. Deluge, as in four works in the span of two weeks. Anyway, I’ll be posting some of my “Made on Moleskine” pieces here from time to time. I do hope that in my case, something great will actually sprout from the small!
Don’t forget to check out the new Moleskine page.
Phillip Kimpo Jr.
The Corsarius
Red is his color,
9 is his number,
writing is his mistress.
