Now that July is limping along to its end, and there will be no more of it until next year, self thinks this would be a good time to evaluate how the past few weeks have gone.
This month, self received excellent news about various Filipino writers:
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An early review of Luisa Igloria’s Juan Luna’s Revolver was posted on livejournal.com
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JoAnn Balingit, it was announced in Filipinas Magazine, became Delaware’s first Filipino American poet laureate.
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Luisa Igloria’s panel proposal for the Chicago AWP was accepted (”Archipelagos of Dust”), and self learned that she will be presenting along with Luisa, Karen Llagas, Grace Talusan, Reine Melvin, and Angela Narciso Torres.
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Paolo Javier launched LMFAO, published by OMG! press.
Self read: at the annual Foothill Writers Conference.
Self discovered a writer named Anis Shivani in Flyway.
Self was more than usually surprised this month:
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Elisabeth Hasselbeck broke down and cried on “The View.”
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Hubby belatedly informed self that his office was moving from Mountain View to south Fremont.
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Dearest Mum informed self that there are “no plain mistresses in Manila.”
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Self actually enjoyed seeing “Wanted.”
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Dearest Mum scared self exceedingly with tales of how “depressed and weak” Ying was, but each time self called Ying, self found her feeling “up” and perky.
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And, just this morning, self awoke to hear news of a Qantas jet landing in Manila with a gaping hole in its fuselage (thereby putting self’s feverish imagination in mind of “The Twilight Zone” movie in which John Lithgow goes absolutely bananas because no one will believe that he’s seen a gremlin on the wing of his plane)
As for books self read:
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The whole world knows already about self’s exceeding admiration for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
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Self read another good book: Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind, an account of how the Beaufort Wind Scale came into existence.
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Self re-discovered the philosophical writings of Mencius.
Most important of all, self discovered that in spite of everything, she is still able to write. Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
