Thursday, April 15th, 2010
a version of this was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 14 2010.
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil’s first books of poems has many things going against it, including the fact that it is poetry and that it is in English, both of which limit it to a particular audience. More importantly, it comes at a time when the kind of Philippine poetry in English that’s celebrated – if publication and recent award-winning collections are any indication – has been about going beyond the person and the personal in the poem, almost a poem-for-and-of-the-world, where the nation is missed/missing/ disappeared, the text existing beyond the page and into a realm of learnedness and influences that it requires the reader to inhabit. This, at a time when people continue to think poetry too difficult, and Filipino poetry too removed from the conditions that are real to us. In this sense, the debate has become too simple: the easy/ confessional/personal poem, or the difficult/conceptual/landless poem?
The Highest Hiding Place (Ateneo de Manila Press, 2009) by Ypil lands right smack in the middle of this debate, not falling clearly on either side of it. There is a refusal to be easily about personal confessions here, even as these poems seem to refuse difficulty. It experiments with forms, yes, and necessarily does with content too, but it does both without refusing the reader entry into the poem. (more…)
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Jessica Zafra posted this in her blog, thank goodness for her, as I had been putting it off, even when it has been in my public Facebook account since yesterday morning.
here is the list of three speeches and their sources that’s been going around, with an additional one — the first one — which hasn’t been posted before.
1. at the ateneo family congress, 2009 – MVP’s speech, original 1, original 2
2. at the opening of the new Ateneo lib, 2010 – MVP speech, original
3. post-Ondoy speech on corporate social responsibility, 2009 – MVP speech, original 1, original 2, original 3
4. commencement speech in Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan, 2007 – MVP speech, original 1, original 2, original 3
why did i think twice about posting it here? i didn’t, still don’t, want it to seem like 1) i’m out to do MVP in and 2) i’m being a hypocrite here.
the hypocrisy, I’m told, comes from my own personal knowledge of how plagiarism happens all the time, in the academe in particular, maybe within the walls of the institutions that I have served as student/researcher/writer in U.P. Diliman, and teacher/writer in the AdMU. hypocrisy has to do with this: to make MVP resign, tell him at this point to leave Ateneo, is to pretend that we — the academic community — are clean.
I beg to disagree. I don’t understand why we can’t work from the big fish that’s caught and let the smaller fish freak out and come out, of their own volition, about their own intellectual dishonesties.
i do not doubt this truth: the moment MVP’s plagiarized speeches are proven to matter because the academe kicks him out despite all his money, then every other academic and scholar will be scared shitless about his or her own intellectual dishonesties. MVP himself says it:
The challenge of leadership precisely is to create an environment where honesty is paramount, where integrity emanates from the top and builds success from the ground.
i think at this point, what would be hypocritical is to deny that money is talking pretty loudly in this case of plagiarism versus MVP. and please, read these speeches, read the originals. you will find that it isn’t true that what he was reading/saying was essentially about him. some of the more emotional/personal/beautiful lines weren’t his at all.
and now for other lessons in citing your sources, Abs-cbnnews.com, when your source quotes another source, then please revert to the primary source, i.e., me. Jessica had the grace to say that her source about the MVP speeches was my public FB note. the least you could’ve done was to cite me the way she did, diba? if not find that original site where the information first appeared.
as with MVP’s plagiarized speeches, all you needed to do was Google me.