About this site

Tumbang Preso (meaning, knock down the jail) is a game of arrests and escapes where each player's life
chances depends on the toppling of a tin can watched by a tag who plays guard.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Little girl blue

I have not even read my second book for this year. Susan Sontag waits. And Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark. And The Second Plowing. And a dozen others now in the care of Nico. The books that I lost. The texts that I miss. That I remember them distinctly is perhaps an indication that they are not really lost to me. They have served me, and have remained with me, textually. Nadz lost to the typhoon Monico Atienza’s translation into Filipino of Arundhati Roy. It went with their house. How angry I was for a little while. But what is a book to a house? I did miss it, but it’s Monico Atienza I miss more. It’s Rosa Luxemburg I miss more, more than her little book Reform or Revolution, which can be accessed in the net, anyway. It is Switzerland I miss  more than the stories about Swiss watches and the Swiss army’s compulsory draft. Lol, they trained all their citizens that they may shoot at those who want them on their side? Is that what defending neutrality means? Marge Piercy’s  He She It I have thoroughly absorbed I live some of it while Piercy only wrote it. That was my last word to her: Oh, I thought you live what you write. 

What will Douglas think if they found out I quarreled with Marge Piercy over permit to publish? Hahaha. That I dragged Marge Piercy down to their level or that I upped them? They are just like Marge Piercy. Petty like kitchen wives always complaining about the costs of things and the hardscrabble life of the hardworking writer. They work long and hard without recognition, said she. When it was her poem we were negotiating about, not some other obscure poet’s! Lecture galore. To tell me that. 

When you write to writers they always assume that they are the writer, not you. We are all like that, except Sawi.

But I am not a writer. I am just me little girl blue.

No comments:

Post a Comment