A Conversation with My Dog (MD)

Tumbang Preso: You were saying something like my story not story enough.

My Dog (MD): I said do away with the “I” narrative. It’s limiting. Use third-person POV.

TP: Which one.

MD: Notice the presence of milk?

TP: Yo. Harvey Milk?

MD: Milk, infant milk, not harvey milk. The presence of milk formulas in your office. Which figures how family, how domesticity erodes the revolutionary values your comrades were once fighting for.

TP: Oh. That.

MD: Shows how insidious the invasion of middle-class values is. It’s in your first sentence, you didn’t notice it? It says, we didn’t notice it right away but people suddenly just stopped clasping hands.

TP: My short takes on life go straight to the trash bin, anyway, or thereabouts. Is it awe or unspeakable contempt?

MD: You didn’t mention indifference. It’s not that people are afraid of you. They just don’t want you, they don’t care. It’s not awe, sorry. You’re nothing to them. Why do you write anyway? First, because you think it matters. The rest, having readers or publishers, you leave that to luck or to circumstances.

TP: You a critic or a teach?

MD: If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet, may I suggest that you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets. Pauline Kael.

TP: Have we met before?

MD: She calls The Sound of Music the sound of money and got fired for it.

TP: Watched that in my late teens. Thought it was subversive. Nuns to the succor of runaways. Mother, I have sinned.

MD: Would you feel insulted if you make someone read or watch something you feel so passionate about and he didn’t?

TP: Say McFadden?

MD: Who’s McFadden?

TP: Zambibian thug. Wrote Why Men Shouldn’t Be in Women’s Spaces. Stole Ford funds disguised as a scholar. Attacked Ford. Of course, I’d be furious. I shared that to a boyfriend who thought himself a gift to feminism, McFadden. The moron pissed on it. Picked at it like he was picking lice. Wished I didn’t have to show things I know to very competitive men like that. Lab mo Jane Fox?

MD: Who’s Jane Fox?

TP: Crouching Tiger.

MD: The yaya! Yes!

TP: Where did you send manadik? It’s not in my eudora.

MD: Be reasonable: Demand the impossible. A slogan in the student protest movement in Paris in 1968.

TP: You’re editing it. It’s Be realistic: Demand the impossible.

MD: Peacekeepers are far more harmful than really evil people. Comment.

TP: True. They’re the great muffler. And everyone including God and the state police is on their side. Can you trust people who have no enemies?

MD: I die everyday by the sheer lack of categorical imperatives of others. And their lack of taste. No. People who have no enemies are people with no convictions. Mga bagag nawong. Heartless. They will leave you to do the dirty work for them. Often obliterating all the work that you’ve done but partaking of your triumphs.

TP: Are you still mad at me?

MD: I feel some. Sore.

MD: Can Archie slaughter lambs and roast them, too?

MD: Archie is a survivalist. The jungle kind. Disguising as a pragmatist.

TP: Does Dennis have a disguise?

MD: Plays cute, plays sweet, to hide her fangs. Dennis is femininity as weapon of choice. Archie’s wit is crazier and more on-target. Ruel annoys his audience at times because you can sense that he’s begging for the applause.

TP: Suppose there was only two choices left: to be loved or to be hated, which one would it be?

MD: To be hated.

TP: No obligation?

MD: The level of mediocrity in these parts would make me choose unpopularity anyday. To be popular would mean being populist in these times. Why this probe?

TP: ‘Cuz I’m grounded on my feet, I have no one to meet. How do you fill your void?

MD: Reading, drinking, watching films and observing people and feeling superior about them. Listening to others and thinking there goes another mediocre.

TP: Rich sez her emotional companion has got to be an intellectual companion, too. Can’t love someone who can’t follow her drift. Is it anti-romance? Are you?

MD: I have this affinity with Woody: too old and too weary to be good at it. One second I see a lover, the next the devil.

TP: The difference between lovers and friends?

MD: Lovers entertain delusions about each other more than friends do with each other. But you watch out for friends who are your inferiors, what a vicious lot. Do not make me elaborate.

TP: And comrades entertain delusions about the world?

MD: Comrades? Alliances are so fragile. What with the next paradigm just around the corner. Example: feminisms. Also think of the CCP/NPA purging. Purging was a manifestation of extreme loyalty to a “delusion” threatened by the spectre of DPAs.

TP: Genderism is backlash, reaction, not feminism’s mutation.

MD: A school of thought this. In a very contentious university.

TP: Invented, cultured like kargasok tea, by those who think feminism will get in the way of their enjoying their shopping rights.

MD: Think of the purging. The road to hell paved with good intentions.

TP: Not at all. Revolution can’t be road to hell. It’s not about choices. I believe Rosa. It’s a historical necessity, not about choosing good side and rejecting the bad. No such thing as post-feminism. That’s a lie posing as school of thought.

MD: War of wars. The discourse widening like Yeat’s gyre. We hope to see a larger context before realizing that we might be supporting the beast.

TP: Lab mo Yeats? He has a poem To a friend whose work has come to naught. Be secret about your defeat, exult. Something like that.

MD: Di ko Yeats expert but The Second Coming is prophetic. The good lack conviction while evil has passionate intensity.

TP: I don’t understand The Second Coming but my Greek professor who thinks me brilliant for a Filipino student was aghast at me for thinking Yeats is not a contemporary poet. He said no poet is more contemporary than Yeats. I got this notion that contemporary is my contemporary, you know, someone I see around making coffee or winking at me.

MD: Like who?

TP: I don’t know. Not Sawi. He would not wink at me. And he's John Keat's contemporary, I heard, or Cervantes'. Maybe Beowulf's. You don’t write poems. Momo is more of a catatonic than a poet.

MD: Ian, then. His poems made it to the shortlist. That should make him a poet. And he's gay, too. Just like you!

TP: I think of Ian as a fashion model. Handsome boy in a most unremarkable way. Can’t associate him with Literature.

MD: How witty you are! Just like Ian!

TP: Thank you. I think he is more of a career diplomat. He should be speaking French and translating for the gawddamn UN. I wouldn’t be surprised if he and KC know each other.

BC: He probably knows Gabby, not KC.

TP: He doesn’t stink like you and I. Or like Viktor and Sawi. What I wouldn’t give to smell like him. I wish when you talk about false humility you will think of someone else, instead of me. It hurts, you know. I only try to humble myself when I needed to, say for a loaf of bread that will see me through the day. I think there’s no stealing someone else’s literary career.

BC: But the torture that comes with it. Your friends making caricatures out of you. Ako kay mura kog nahimong clown. Curiosity. Novelty. Is the crazy one writing? Nagasulat ang buang?

TP: They’re watching for your rise or fall?

BC: Rise or fall? Unsa ko, chart?

TP: Not a chart. A comet, Stupid. Just when you think you have fallen from grace, the worse is actually true. Remember that. Maningning Miclat. I think the way to win a Palanca is to follow the ben stiller box-office hit formula in doing comedies. You know that the audience will love it if it offends nobody.

BC: I still think your education is poor if you haven’t watched Funny Girl, All About Eve, Himala, For the Boys, Singing in the Rain.

TP: You can extend the list, actually. I watched Relasyon uy. Ug Boys Don’t Cry. Am taking an M.A. in Scavenging, minor in Prostitution. Not sorry I lost my way and got spayed in the Marxist academy. And who are you to determine what I lack oh you bourgeois swine? Movies so Hollywood, so middle-class, so upstate new york!

MD: I know whereof I speak, you discombobulated hag. If you think mainstream, that’s what film is: business. But the industry is also full of gritty warriors. Scarred and scared, but still shooting.