“If you have any doubts to the kind of music – it’s not rock music, it’s not alternative music, it’s not pop music – it is opera,” he said, in between songs, and the crowd cheered even louder. And it’s true. There was no doubt as to where we were or what we were watching. It was, from the very start all the way to the finish, a Morrissey show. There was never any mistaking his energy or his strange clarity. It’s that clarity that shines through the most, when you look at him in performing in front of you. He loves to perform, and when you watch him, you understand, finally, just how much and why. The stage is where he is most theatrical, most heavy-handed and most honest. On stage, last night, he asked for our voices, tested and commanded our love. We gave it gladly, in the form of crazed singing or non-stop tears or even silent but rapturous thanks to whatever powers that allowed Morrissey in Manila, even for just one night.

When he finished I had tears in my eyes. I asked him if he knew any more. Oh, yes, he answered, plenty. He knew stories from all over the world and beyond, more stories that can ever be told in a lifetime or two. He would gladly tell me these stories, he added, but only if I ran away with him. And with an unmistakable gleam in his strange eye, he held out his hand to me. He smiled too, for he already knew what my answer would be.

So somewhere, out there, in a garden by a palace in the land of dreams, stands a young prince, lovely and sweet and quite princely in his princely garbs, scratching his head, wondering why his wedding hasn’t taken place and where his young bride has gone. And you can be sure, from the puzzled look on his face, that he didn’t see this coming. I wish him the best of luck and hope that his next betrothed isn’t as easily distracted by stars who fall from the sky and other such tales.

Somebody please call the caterer.

Because I need to read more short stories. I really do. There are days when I feel like all I need is a good short story. Just one. You sit down, read it, live in it for a little while and then bam, before you know it, your day is better. Some of the best things I’ve ever read are short stories: Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker, Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff, Foreign Shores by James Salter, I Bought a Little City by Donald Barthelme, and let’s not forget Superfrog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami (a story that need only be mentioned and my heart starts to palpitate and my eyes start to tear, that’s how much I love it, remind me talk about this later). These stories are no less complex or powerful because of the brevity. But these are only a few I can name off the top of my head and even fewer in the rich, long history of short stories. I need to read more short stories, I really do.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say “I don’t like short stories”, but I feel like I’ve heard them say it often enough for me to find it puzzling. I don’t like short stories – as if by virtue of being the same short form they are all the same and all inadequate. And I’m not talking about people who say they don’t like reading. They like or even love to read – just not short stories. The length, or lack of it, is viewed as weakness, and some readers are afraid that there isn’t enough space to build a world and fill it with characters or, as I often hear it put, that “the story will end just as we’re getting into it”. Yet even a cursory glance at the history of the short story will tell you that there are worlds of promise waiting for the curious. Plenty of our greatest writers wrote short stories. And the odds that your favorite novelist has at least a collection or two is telling; there are stories that are better explored in the short form. The shortness is not a limit but a kind of discipline. When you read a novel, you might skip a boring chapter or even two. A short story doesn’t have that luxury. A novel might ask the reader for commitment, but in the end it allows you to be more forgiving.

What are some of your favorite short stories? Any short story collections you’d like to recommend? Because I need to read more stories. I really do.

photos taken by Phil

The crowd is small but attentive. They’re quiet, but there’s no mistaking their enthusiasm as they all sit down to listen to Junot Diaz talk about his books and his experiences. There were a lot of very good questions. Diaz is very comfortable answering everyone. He would sometimes asks questions back. At one point he asks the crowd, “Does anyone remember the audience in Lolita?” and looks around for a raised hand. It’s clear that he’s been teaching for a long time. He talked about many things. Here are some of them:

On writing about the Dominican experience: “I write about the Dominican experience because America doesn’t need my help.” Being Dominican is at the very center of his being a writer and he sees no benefit in ignoring it. When asked if he could’ve written Oscar Wao had he and his family not left the Dominican Republic, he says, jokingly, “There’s no way to tell. Let me run a beta test life and see how things turn out.”

On readers and writing a book like Oscar Wao: “I read a book, I go right through it. But there are readers who are hardcore. They want the extended package. They want the weapons, the accessories, they want to keep going back in.” He wanted to make sure it was the kind of story that offered something to every kind of reader, after all, the reader, he says, does most of the work. “Look, I just write the damn book.”

On whether Oscar is a hero: “Yeah, Oscar is kind of a dumbass…I love Oscar. He has a naivete that is very American…I find that charming, but I had to kill him for it.”

On working: “I was always the guy with five jobs.” He says it’s just what happens when you grow up poor in the Dominican Republic. He’s been a caterer, a diversity trainer and many other things. He’s always had teaching jobs. “Teaching is great. You help young people, they make fun of you a little bit, and you make some money.”

On how we are made: “You can say something like, “Pacquiao is Pacquiao because he grew up poor.” We love that. Writers love that kind of thing because it is a way of explaining what we are and what we become. But it isn’t that simple.”

On coming to the Philippines: He’s been waiting forever to get the chance. “I grew up in Jersey, just south of Pinoyland, you know? It was overrun with Yllagans!”

On family and being a (Pulitzer Prize winning) writer: “In the Dominican Republic, we say there are people who might win a menta, you know, a mint and they would talk about that for the next twenty years, you know? They’d be like, yeah, I won that shit! On the other hand, there are people who might win something really big but won’t talk about it. They’ll be like, I don’t care, I just have to keep working…I think I’m like that because of my evil militaristic father.” And his mother? “She says to me, ‘You used to be smart’. How do you answer that? I’m like, thanks, ma.”

He signs my book and I thank him. “No, no, thank you so much for being here,” he answers, takes my hand and then makes beso again. I make a silent plea to my germs, do not infect Junot Diaz, please. Leave him alone and you can stay with me for another week. Junot Diaz will be participating in the 2nd Manila International Literary Festival. Could you go and make sure he hasn’t caught my sniffles?

He wrote a lot of books. Fourteen novels. Ten collections of short stories and essays. Two of those published posthumously. I think it’s weird that things can be published posthumously. Weird but wonderful. Some of his books are more well-known than others. Some of them, he felt, are much better written than others. He once gave Slaughterhouse Five an A. And then he gave Breakfast of Champions a C. He once said that he felt lousy about that book, but that he felt lousy about a lot of books he wrote. The first book by him I ever read was ‘Breakfast of Champions’ and I don’t think it should have gotten a C. For me, it is one of those great books that makes you wish you were friends with the author so you could call him up and just spend time with him. Above all, it made me wish I knew him so I could have called him up and told him that his book, Breakfast of Champions, was the only thing that kept me sane throughout high school. All of you who have been to high school know what I mean. It’s a terrible place and a terrible time. I think he would have appreciated that. I certainly hope it would have made him reconsider the C.

Breakfast of Champions also includes Vonnegut’s drawing of his own asshole. You can find it in the preface, where he tries to “clear his head”. When I first read it, I found it uproariously funny. I still do whenever I go back to read it. A lot of his stories tried to show us the things we had in common, despite how different we think we are. One of the most obvious things we have in common is that we all have assholes. There are a lot of other drawings in Breakfast of Champions, but probably none as well-known. You might’ve seen it before. This is what it looks like:

He was 51 years old when the book was published. 51 is not that old, especially not now. But 84 is still pretty old in our standards today. So I guess I can’t say that he was taken too soon or that we didn’t have him for long enough. We did. We are out of a considerable amount of Pall Malls because he was around long enough to smoke so many of them. He tried for a brief time to quit, but I guess you can’t keep a serious smoker down. He was around long enough to have written 24 books and to see 22 of them published. I still want more but that’s just me being selfish. He once wrote: “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” There has been no other writer who has been able to make me laugh the way he did. I think that’s what helped keep me sane and why I always go back to many of his books.

In another one of them, Deadeye Dick, he wrote these words: “You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven’t ended yet.” That is how he ended that book. I think he would have been a great pessimist, maybe the greatest, except he believed too much in people. Despite the terrible things they did to each other he saw that they could do really great things for each other too. I think that is also why he kept on living for so long.

To celebrate his birthday, I thought smoking a Pall Mall cigarette might be appropriate, but I am not a smoker. I used to be but after a year I quit so I guess I was never serious about it. Neither am I suicidal. I don’t want to die because there are plenty of other things I’d still like to do. Not the least of them read more books. Whatever else happens in my life, I am certain that by the end of it I will be glad for these three things: that I got to know my sister, that I met a nice boy who likes plenty of the same food I like, and that I read all of Kurt Vonnegut’s books. Well almost all anyway. I’ve just managed to get my hands on the newest one. Published posthumously. I’m excited to read it.

So instead I propose we give tribute by drawing our assholes. Here I will go first.

Okay. Your turn.

First we have the primate monsters, vampires, werewolves and ghouls – but everyone knows about those. Now pay attention: A vampire and a werewolf would produce a werevamp. A werewolf and a ghoul would produce a weregoo. A vamire and a ghoul would produce a vamgoo. A weregoo and a werevamp would produce a shaddy. A weregoo and a vamgoo would produce a maddy. A werevamp and a vamgoo would produce a raddy. If a shaddy were to mate with a raddy or a maddy, it would result in a mock (which frankly, is just a polite name for a mongrel). Just remember the basic rules of monsterdom: Vampires suck, werewolves hunt and ghouls tear. Shaddies lick, maddies yawn and mocks blow. Oh but a Shadmock, which is the result if a mock were to mate with any other hybrid, whistles – and they don’t do it very often. Now the humegoo, which is a cross between a ghoul and a human being, don’t really do anything interesting but they do have an unfortunate appetite for carrion (which they get, of course, from the ghoul side of the family). It must be noted that although monsters can mate with human beings, the results are almost always disastrous. Any questions?

I think you should know that I am genuinely offended that you show so much shock when I quote scripture right back at you. Yes, of course, I know the bible – I didn’t reject it without reading it first. I will never understand why you are so quick to label non-religious people “close-minded”. After all, they’re not the ones beholden to a single interpretation of everything. It just so happens that “He moves in mysterious ways” isn’t enough of an explanation for everyone. That is all.

Frustratedly yours,
Lizzy

And now a memory: I’m 14 years old and I’m having dinner with the immediate family and relatives. My (least favorite) aunt turns to my mother and asks (in that way that aunts do when they speak of you as if you were not present in the same room), “Why must she always be so glum? And why all the black?” My mom answers, as a matter of factly, “Well, you know, she listens to The Smiths.” True story.

So here’s to The Queen is Dead, which turns 25 this week. Oh that I could thank it for being the closest thing I could ever have to a religious experience, and for lending me an identity when I didn’t have one of my own.

o2 My mother has a beautiful voice. She loves to sing, but she has never had much gift at remembering lyrics and as a result when she sings, she often skips an entire line or ends up humming the melody of a song. If she can sing a song in its entirety that means it is a song she loves very much and probably had an old vinyl of it when she was a young girl.

o3 My mother, god love her, has no taste in movies. She’ll watch anything that’s on if she hasn’t seen it yet, but she won’t abide by anything that has too much nudity or too much swearing. She won’t sit through a foreign film because she doesn’t want to read the subtitles; they hurt her eyes. She is not the type to see a movie again, even if she liked it the first time. “I’ve seen that,” she’ll say, “no point in watching it again.” There is only really one film she has seen many times over. That’s Sleepless in Seattle. She has a copy of it already but she’ll watch it again whenever one of the movie channels is airing it, especially waiting for the part where Tom Hanks comes back to retrieve something his son had forgotten to find that Meg Ryan has picked it up. She loves that part to pieces, because it makes her think of forces at work in the universe, pushing us towards the people and places we are destined to find. She has a copy of the film’s soundtrack, which actually isn’t a bad soundtrack at all. She can sing all of the songs there in their entirety.

o4 My mother is a religious woman. She always has been. She’s belonged to only two different religions in her life and each time she was completely faithful in observing the beliefs of the religion she belonged. She sees the hands of God at work everywhere and she says to me, time and time again, that this brings her much comfort. This is one of the greatest differences between us. I have never been much of a believer. I can see that it hurts her tremendously and that she’s frightened for me. For her, hell is a real thing and if I don’t change that’s where I’m going. Can you imagine living with that kind of fear – that someone you love will perish in the fires of eternal punishment? I do not know how she keeps sane.

o5 My mother is tired. She is 54 years old and is not retired. She has raised two daughters (one more difficult than the other), for some years even on her own. There were times that she had no one to turn to. My father had left us, for a good six or seven years, and many nights during those years, my mother would wait until both my sister and I were asleep, go downstairs and cry. Sometimes, she wouldn’t even make it past the stairs or her own bed. She would sit up all night long and cry. I know because I wasn’t always asleep. Sometimes I would find the courage to interrupt her; to break into her private weeping and hold her hand. Often, I did not. I wish now that I had done so more. I wish now that I had done it every night she cried.

o6 My mother likes her junk food. She knows that she’s supposed to be watching what she eats, but if you offer her a bag of chips or french fries or a slice of pizza she’ll take it every time. My father constantly reminds her to eat healthy. She tells him she will and then buys potato chips and hides them in our room and sneaks out late at night to come eat with us.

o7 My mother found it in her heart to forgive my father. He tried to come back two times. The first time, it didn’t take. He went back to his old ways. The second time, he was a changed man, and even when my sister and I were skeptical my mother knew it was going to be different.

o8 My mother and father are a really good match. It took me years to really see this, but I know now that it is true. My father is a man of few words, only speaking when he needs to or to tell a joke to lighten up a conversation. When he is upset about something he thinks about it and mostly keeps it to himself unless the time comes to really address the problem out loud. My mother is the exact opposite. She needs to talk about her feelings. She needs to talk about what is bothering her or it weighs on her heavily, robbing her of her sleep or even proper breathing. I see them talk each other down or up, whatever the case may be. It has taken years, but my mother and father seem to have become the best of friends.

o9 My mother, sometimes, it seems the kind of person put on earth to be a mother. From the very beginning she knew that she wanted a family. She wanted a child. A daughter, if we’re really being honest, but if I had turned out to be a son I’m sure she would have loved me all the same. She wasn’t sure that she wanted another but when I had asked her for a sister she agreed. She thought it best that I didn’t grow up alone. Where someone gets the strength to decide to have a child, much less two, I am never going to understand. This is just another one of those great differences she and I have. She was two years younger than me (I am 28 years old) when she had me. I, on the other hand, am terrified of children.

10 Despite all this, my mother and I have more in common than we think. I have yet to really think of ways that we are similar; it’s taking me years. But this I believe. Maybe it is because with every passing year I begin to look more and more like her.

11 My mother does not know how to talk to me, although this isn’t from a lack of trying. She tries very hard to reach me. I, on the other hand, do not know how to reach back. I do not know how we lost the words to communicate with each other. I do not remember when we started settling for civility.

12 My mother will not always be around. I know that someday she will die, like everything must. But it is hard to imagine that day coming, just as hard it is to imagine someday the day will come when the sun will no longer rise. It is hard to think of such a constant thing in the world dying. It is hard to accept that even such strength will someday lie down. When that day happens, I will be the most struck, and may be each day after it will be a little less bright and warm.