The Construct

I was supposed to pick out my overdue birthday and Christmas gift yesterday. Failed miserably yet again. You see, rewarding myself is an idea that’s foreign. Blame childhood issues, perhaps. Oftentimes, I get what I need and not what I really want. In those times when I do get what I want, I pine over expense for months defeating the whole idea of rewarding oneself.

I wanted to pick out a podcast kit so that I can finally start working on a few projects that I’ve been meaning to do since a couple of years back. Too bad audio stores just don’t carry decent podcast kits. Behringer offers the components of the package individually but it’d still set me back twenty grand. My second choice was a brand new acoustic guitar but kuripot struck me again and just decided to get me some new strings for my electric guitar.

A bit frustrated, I just settled to get some books. And it’s not like they’re for leisure reads either. God knows when was the last time I’ve read something just for kicks. All of them are somehow related to current and future writing projects. And boy books are just so expensive these days. Any paperback will set you back Php 500 easy. Can’t wait for my credit card bill next month.

PS. Oh, any idea where I can order these books? Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis [2009], Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis and Text, Discourse and Corpora. Forgot to ask Fully Booked if they can. For some reason, I don’t want to risk Amazon.

I’ve been continuously writing about my frustrations with the state of English language scholarship here in our country. I’ve already raised the lack of profitability of English Studies as a field of study. At times, I’ve also touched on the lack of collaboration amongst scholars.

I was talking to my mentor about the difficulties I was having with my research. Apparently, fellow graduate students were also struggling with their theses. Quite ironic, since when it comes to our own students, we’re quite sharp in critiquing their studies.

There are a number of local English language teaching and research groups. However, these groups do foster a sense of exclusivity that students are oftentimes left uninterested with the prospect of joining these groups. In fact, I only became aware of the existence of such groups years after graduating.

Hence, I created this website that would cater to all English language and literature scholars here in the Philippines – The English Studies Forum.

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These had been around the web for quite sometime and now that the book is out, they now have a use.

You got to love subliminal messages.

Via Harry Potter Book Jackets

If killing people isn’t a crime, I would have a good scalp count by now. While it’s pretty easy for me to give myself reason to kill, handing out unsolicited spoilers would be a crime against me that warrants death. And I guess for a lot of people too. Just read on the feel the sheer murderous rage flowing through this person‘s veins.

Oh yes, this could apply to the dozens of people who had their whole Harry Potter experience smothered by uncouth people handing out unsolicited spoilers. Talk about having loud mouths and total disrespect to fiction. I can really care less about this Harry Potter thing since I am not too big a fan to actually care, but the thought of that moment of suspended disbelief shattered by loudmouths makes by blood boil. But, say, if someone gave out the ending to Prison Break without me getting to watch it first, now I’m definitely going medieval on that person’s ass.

These people should have bullets popped in the back of their skulls. No judge. No jury (Heck, we don’t have juries anyway). Straight to execution.

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Sir Butch Dalisay wrote a few things about blogging in his column in the Philippine Star yesterday. He discussed a few points on what attracts people to blogs and blogging. These points include democracy, audience reach, anonymity and flexibility of blogs and blogging.

But what I particularly liked about what he wrote is this passage:

The question some people might raise is, yes, it’s a blog, but is it literature? Of course it is; it’s writing; you just can’t find it on a paper page. Whether it’s good or bad literature depends on what standards have yet to arise for this kind of literature, but I have a gut feeling that bloggers don’t particularly care; 90 percent of blogs may be a digital form of navel-gazing, but hey, it’s my navel. Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine, and that’s all there is to it, at least for now.

I delivered a paper on the same topic in our colloquium class this past semester though mine was more of a cursory look on blogging and literature. My conclusions with that paper is a question on how the Filipino creative writer exploit a flexible tool such as a blog to develop newer forms of writing. But Sir Butch puts it a lot more eloquently in his navel-gazing analogy.

Just sharing.