Book Review: Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay

    I decided to read more Filipino literature this year, and this was the first novel I read that wasn’t because of a requirement for school. I chose this since I’m already a fan of Jose Dalisay’s Facebook posts (I highly suggest you give him a follow if you want a reprieve amidst the endless video ads.) I find them to be endearing snapshots into his everyday life, and I’m enamored by his prose. It’s fluid but has a sense of rigid structure at the same time.

    This novel centers around three characters. Aurora is a bar singer in a small town called Paez and she’s joined by Walter, a world-weary cop who treats this far-flung place as his personal limbo. However, the story starts off with neither of them. We begin with the third character, a dead body arriving in NAIA’s cargo bay. The corpse is tagged as Aurora but we quickly find out that this is Soledad, her sister who left home to work as an OFW in Saudi.

    One might think that this would turn into a mystery novel, but it is nothing of the sort and I don’t think it pretends to be that. It’s not an action-packed story and Walter’s gun remains holstered the entire time. We are treated to a road trip instead as Aurora and Walter leave their sleepy seaside town and descend into the madness of Manila to pick up her sister’s body. Dalisay’s writing style has a hint of nostalgia, and as their van moves forward we inversely work backwards and catch glimpses of their past lives that tie the story together. The real mystery is not a whodunnit for the characters to solve, but a puzzle for the readers to put together.

    Another thing I liked about this book was how familiar it was for me. I finally got to read a story where the setting and nuances were things I’ve encountered in real life. At the same time, his writing is slightly reminiscent of Western authors that I admit I’ve spent more time reading. You would be surprised to find that joining two familiar elements together does not immediately make for a boring story. The novel is still very much a stranger that you can get acquainted with as you go along reading.

    Overall I felt like the novel was able to get its message across despite being quite a short story. In many ways, we are all a faceless speck in a sea of so many. We can be nothing more than a statistic in the grand scheme of things, but to our loved ones we are their whole lives. This novel takes these two sisters from being just a number and brings them up close, right under our noses, and asks us to take a good look. It demands that we don’t shy away from the harshness and vagueness of a reality that might not be ours but is very close to home.

How the Arctic Monkeys Amuses us to Death

      This whole thing starts with a vinyl record and ends with answers. When the Arctic Monkeys released Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino I was transfixed and teleported to a musical narrative whose world building could be compared to that of JK Rowling’s. I’m well aware of the purists who felt that the space age lounge music was a far departure (really a thousand lightyears away) from their AM album, but to compare both of them is pointless. One is for blasting during your road trips here on earth and the other for easy listening as you glide through space.

Four Stars Out of Five music video

     I’m not here to fangirl in 1,000 words or less, although I could certainly do that. I’m just trying to set the scene for a typical Sunday morning spent listening to records. As Alex Turner’s voice plastered itself on my living room walls, I wondered what strong influences could mold such a stylized album. A quick google search conjured up the answers and one of them was Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman. Naturally I also wanted to be under the influence of whatever struck Alex Turner so I downloaded a copy on my Kindle. I’ll have what he’s having as they say, or in this case I’ll read what he’s reading.

I’m no good with book reviews. I feel like these things should have structure and meet certain requirements. Meanwhile my post-reading reflex is a heaving desire to turn to the nearest person and word vomit. Luckily I have my sisters who humor me as I spit out “Oh my god this book I’m reading is so cool so this dude says that-“ and “so anyway the book I was telling you about this also happened.” But these ramblings wouldn’t stop and I decided they needed a permanent home so now we find ourselves here on the first post of my new blog.

Amusing Ourselves to Death inspired me to start typing away because it answered a lot of my recurring shower thoughts. This is pretty much the point I’ve been trying to get to for the last 3 paragraphs but like I said I have a tendency to ramble. Anyway, presenting for your entertainment some of my shampoo-induced questions and the corresponding answers that I found between the book’s pages (or Kindle swipe-to-the-lefts):

Shower Thought #1: We’re constantly receiving a huge amount of unnecessary information so what do we even do with it?

A movie still from Blade Runner (1982)

     I personally think this is one of the major problems of the modern world. In just 5 minutes after waking up and picking up the phone, one is sensationalized with a dozen breakfast spreads on IG story, devastating news from 7 different countries, 5 optimized ads, and a long rant about Monday morning. This is unique to our current time whereas previously one would wake up and only have to take in the sun and the damn crowing of the roosters.

Here’s a relevant quote from the book:

I do not mean that things like fires, wars, murders and love affairs did not, ever and always, happen in places all over the world. I mean that lacking a technology to advertise them, people could not attend to them, could not include them in their daily business.

And he further explains why this is so:

We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversations.

     Postman says that our medium of communication dictates the type of conversations that we have. For example, when we were limited to smoke signals we could only share important events. There wasn’t enough firewood to tweet out 280 characters, or you could try but I’m pretty sure the rest of the tribe would hate you.

He uses the invention of the telegraph to prove this point:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Main and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

He grasped that the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas.

     Postman coins the term “information-action ratio”* to show the relationship between information and its possibilities of action. He asks the reader how often it actually happens that what they get from the morning television (replace this now with all our online channels) causes one to completely change their plans for the day or take some action that they weren’t planning to do. Of course some of the info will be relevant, but most will just be things to talk about or cram into our brains without ever being transformed into useful action. And this gap between information and action has only gotten wider since Postman published this in 1985.

*Side note: I find it cool that the term information-action ratio is also used in the Arctic Monkeys’ album. Ok bye.

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Shower Thought #2: Why are we so tired?

I can’t find the source for this pic, obviously got it from Pinterest.

Why are we all burned out? Why are we tired of work at such a young age? Why do we dream of moving to the countryside/beach and setting up a quaint B&B where we bake and paint all day?

Besides the abnormal amount of information we receive, we’ve also conditioned ourselves to an abnormal amount of entertainment. In the chapter Teaching as an Amusing Activity, Postman uses Sesame Street to point out how the medium of television has altered our expectations of education. Television doesn’t just teach the content, it teaches the consumer that “anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment.”

Toiling over boring textbooks and traditional lesson plans don’t stand a chance against the appeal of Big Bird. It’s now a matter of asking the viewer to choose between broccoli and a lollipop, and the vegetable has no choice but to adapt to this shiny new medium. Teachers now have to incorporate song and dance routines into their history lessons and do all sorts of things to capture their audience. But Postman isn’t referring to just education, the student’s expectation to be entertained will extend to other facets of life. The viewer “will be well prepared to receive their politics, their religion, their news, and their commerce in the same delightful way.” Politics becomes a matter of social media marketing, religion a race to garner the most subscribers, and news a game of creating the most click-able titles. Television’s nature is entertainment and a disconnect between content and medium arises when it becomes our main platform for serious discourse.

And now that all discourse is entertaining, everything else will be a drag. When being entertained becomes our normal state of happiness, then working, studying, chores, etc. become a means to an end. The mundane is now dreadfully boring and we count down the minutes until we can be entertained again.

I don’t want to come off as simplistic, instead I’m just pointing out that this is one of the factors that contributes to society’s general feeling of malaise.

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Shower Thought #3: Was there a tipping point where technology stopped being helpful?

Living is easy but it seems like we’ve overcomplicated it. You don’t need me to tell you that technology has made our lives faster and busier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely grateful for plumbing and modern medicine but there are some technologies that we could do without. One of the things I remember from my economics professor was his story about how back when he was in college they would only have one paper for the whole semester since research took so long. But now that we have Google, we’re able to finish a paper in a few weeks. In theory this should lighten our load but instead they’ve added more requirements since we’re able to do them faster. Instead of just one paper we get three and much more.

This applies to work as well. Previously we would have to wait days for a reply but now we get it in a few seconds, increasing our input and output to astronomic heights. Robots don’t need to replace us, we’ve turned ourselves into faster and more productive machines.

I was just as happy then with my Tamagotchi as I am now with my phone. And I think I would be just as happy with a book if I was unaware of other technologies that could exist. While our threshold for happiness has stayed the same, we’ve unknowingly added more stressors. We’ve strapped ourselves to a hedonic treadmill and increased the speed.

This quote sums it all up:

“Years from now, when it will be noticed that this massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

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As with Postman, I don’t have a fatalistic view of television or our reality. Even he agrees that the medium is good for something, “Television, as I have implied earlier, serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse — news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion — and turns them into entertainment packages.”

But we can’t keep deluding ourselves into thinking that technology is neutral. Whatever we create causes social changes and alters how we live, which is why we invent in the first place.

So what do we do now and what technologies should we have next? Postman offers a few solutions in the book but the first step is to ask. Questioning our reality breaks the spell and points out the cracks society needs to fix. This also works on a personal level. Ask yourself how you want Instagram to serve you, what you want to talk about on Twitter, and how much information you want to drink in with your morning smoothie.

Or you could download the Arctic Monkeys’ album on Spotify and we can fangirl over them online, which is how Postman would have wanted us to use social media.

Weardo Writes: Partly

Partly

If I bare but my soul to you I know that you would listen. Rolling plains of yester dew Are a breeze to take in.

If I unravel but my mind to you A warm bed you could sleep in. Blankets weaved from common truths Shroud dreams unworthy of reliving.

My own is a bittersweet sight Of roses and of thorns. It treads on the edge of day and night Between the ecstatic and forlorn.

Jagged rocks and plunging waters might Wholly swallow you, I warn! So the gates of this kingdom I close tight And I'll keep you at the length of an arm.

Weardo Paints: A Room With A View

      A Room With A View is now one of my favorite romance movies. And yet the romantic formula I'm familiar with is not there. They barely see each other, much less talk. What's there are impassioned kisses that shouldn't exist given the period that they were in. 

      I found the romance in the unsaid. I imagined that there were invisible conversations drifting between the two of them. Or maybe that the brevity of their dialogue was enough to convey to each other who the other one was. George had so much character in him and yet he hardly spoke, as compared to Cecil who babbled on and on and yet seemed so flat and lacking in depth.

     One of the scenes really caught my attention. It was when the main character, Lucy, ended up on a barley field scattered with poppies. George was there and once he saw her, they shared a breathtaking kiss. Of course the fact that Puccini was playing in the background probably helped a lot with the mood.

    So once I actually got to buy some oil paint after the empty promises that I made to myself, I decided to paint that scene: the kiss in a barley field with poppies. I don't have a background in art and just dabble with various mediums, but creating art for myself has always been something I loved doing so I guess I just wanted to materialize this fascination that I had with the movie. I hope you give the movie a go and love it as much as I do!