Torn and frayed in Manila

Why we blog

Although George Orwell’s essay “Why I write” pre-dated blogging by over half a century, I haven’t heard a better explanation of why millions of bloggers in all types of societies make the seemingly irrational decision to spend long periods of time in an activity that brings them no financial reward, nor any other type of reward for that matter. Here is George on why people write.

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

I can’t argue with any of that, but, to show how clever I am, persuade you to quote me in your own blogs, and inspire you to grieve for me after my passing, I can’t resist adding a few items to Orwell’s list, some of which relate specifically to blogging.

(v) Support for another career. Very, very few people make a living from blogging, but quite a few pundits write a blog as a sort of side-bar to a more remunerative activity, such as writing a newspaper column, or appearing as an expert on TV shows. The most prominent local example is Manuel Quezon III, whose blog is a springboard to a host of related activities; columns in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Arab News, a TV series (the “Explainer”), numerous seminar and conference presentations, and a certain amount of political activity (the Black and White Movement). It would be interesting to know from Manolo where he places his blog in the hierarchy of his many activities; is it a bedrock from which the other streams spring, is it a diversion, or a ball and chain? Howie Severino and Carlos Celdran are other Manila-based bloggers who use their blogs to support and promote their other activities, and why not?

(vi) Satisfying a creative itch. This is close to Orwell’s second reason (aesthetic enthusiasm), but reflects a reaction to an upbringing in which any impulse towards artistic or creative activity has been squashed (which certainly accounts for my education and yours too probably. Not everyone can be a good artist, but everyone has within him or herself a little volcano of creativity. Blogs can open fissures in minds overlain by decades of dull and formulaic education, and tedious and repetitive work, allowing little farts of creative energy.

(vii) Anger. Sometimes the stupidity of the world becomes too much to bear and blogging is one way to kick back. Pinay in Barnsley would fit into this category, I think.

(viii) Connecting with like minded people. It is nice to get comments on a blog, especially from strangers, and to feel that you are not just a lone wolf howling in the wilderness. Some bloggers take this a stage further and, consciously or subconsciously, use their blogs to attract lovers (a well known example is Petite Anglaise, the blog of an English girl in Paris whose romance with a commenter was recorded in detail on her blog).

(ix) Record a deep emotion. In my own case this has usually meant responding to a death, whether of a friend, or of someone who meant a lot to me, such as the suicide of Spalding Gray.

That’s more than enough from me – what about you? Why do you think people lock themselves to their computers for hours to fashion a blog?

And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you though

Like most people, I favour a positive approach to life, even if I can’t always adopt one myself. Still, let’s face it, sometimes only negativity can pull you through. Here is the opening post of a new blog by the unfortunate “Pinay in Barnsley”:

I think I'm gonna start off by painting a picture of this northern town that is Barnsley through the eyes of someone like me. And I will try my best to present it in the fairest light possible.

Barnsley is a shithole. I know that's harsh but there is no other way I can describe it. It gets a very bad press simply because it's got no good press to offer. It has been my home for the last five years, no let me rephrase that - it is where I've lived for the past five years and my desire to leave and never ever set foot on it again gets stronger everyday. Five years is a loong time man.

Terrific.

Barbie

I was alerted to the splendid ranting of "Barbie doesn't suck" by Sassy, who in turn found out about the site from "backwash" ("the internet organized by personality", a great site). What can I add to this?

Hello? It’s a fucking doll! And if my parenting skills cannot outdo the slightly negative self-image that comes from wishing to be model-perfect with tits big enough to drag you down…then what kind of a mother am I? And is withholding a doll really going to protect my child from this viewpoint society is both victim of and party to?

I had Barbie shit when I was a little girl. I don’t think it hurt me any…I would hate my lopsided breasts no less then I do now if I had not played pretend with my perfect plastic family. I don’t think I look at my mother with scorn because she drives a truck…something Barbie would/could never do. I don’t feel guilt over my divorces because Barbie made me think that Ken (yes, actually) and I were supposed to live happily ever after.

The anti-Barbie movement is silliness and crap. An excuse for bad parenting. Blame the doll! Blame Mattel!

“Math is hard,” she said. And femi-Nazi mothers everywhere lost it. Oh no…it will teach my daughter that math is hard. It will teach my slowly blossoming Noble Peace Prize winner that math is to be avoided! Gasp! Guess what? News flash! Math IS hard. Math DOES suck. Barbie didn’t teach me that. I just know.

Do weblogs confirm male and female stereotypes?

Looking at the five weblogs I recently recommended, you’d have to say that they seem to reinforce the widely held view that men are happier with the big picture, the public domain, while women are more interested in exploring the smaller world around them, the personal world. One looks in vain for descriptions of the homes, loves, or daily routines of the authors of walk this way, frisko dude, or, for that matter, torn and frayed. Likewise, tsunamis, national politics, or the price of oil are not the primary concern of the bee box, gigi goes gaga, or pinay expat.

A staunch feminist might conclude that this demonstrates that male webloggers use their blogs to satisfy their master of the universe cravings. A chauvinist might argue that it proves what he has said all along, women are happiest in the home.

Perhaps it just shows that men are happiest when analysing more abstract analytical issues and that, for better or worse, they seem less inclined to question their position in the cosmos. And of course the best women bloggers do not simply describe their love affairs (or lack of them), household chores, or kids; they use them to examine wider truths about the human condition.

[There are plenty of exceptions to my little rule. The leading political blog in the Philippines, the sassy lawyer, is written by a woman. No doubt there are blogs written by men that open up the male psyche for inspection, though off the bat I can’t think of one. Can you?]

the bee box, gigi goes gaga, pinay expat

Today it is the girls’ turn. All three of these Philippines-based or related blogs are written by women who are on their way in life, with various combinations of husbands, kids and jobs. And blogs of course. All are good writers, with distinctive outlooks, and they lavish much motherly love on their sites. Blogging is important to all of them and may even have changed their lives. So, in alphabetical order, please put your hands together and give a big welcome to:

The Bee Box. Melissa is a working single mum in Cebu. She doesn’t have a car—we know that because of many her taxi stories, which endear her site to me. She has separate blogs for her poetry (she’s a Sylvia Plath fan) and her two sons (aged four years and four months). Four months old and he has his own blog—I told you these people were serious. She has a nice way of holding together a story and her posts tend to have a beginning, middle, and an end. The Bee Box is a nice looking site too — clean and fresh looking.

I’ve been a visitor to Gigi goes gaga ever since it opened for business last year. It is the most personal of the three, and it has the longest posts, almost mini-essays. They are well crafted and frank ruminations on life and love—although she lives in California, Gigi’s perspective is rooted in her experience as a Filipino (as can be seen from the current top story on her site, a thoughtful description of a meeting with a beauty queen).

In Pinay Expat the author casts her unsparing critical eye on her host country, Germany; the Philippines; and herself. She describes herself as “type a” and this shows through in her writing. She has been called “notorious” apparently, but I think candid or brutally honest is closer to the mark (as this funny description of a “friend” shows). Because she’s bright and analytical, Pinay Expat opens up the Philippine overseas experience in interesting ways (although as an educated wife of a foreigner, her experience is not typical I suppose).

"Frisko dude" and "walk this way"

Here are a couple of blogs I think you'd like.

Frisko Dude is a wonderful site that surveys the Asia blogsphere with wit, understanding and sensitivity. Carl Parkes, the travel guide writer who maintains the site, comes up with the best links in Asia—every time I visit I find something to amaze or excite me. The design of the blog is pleasant too, clean and open.

Walk this way is new blog by Carlos Celdran (occupation: streetwalker). I knew Carlos was a good writer, but his new blog is even better than I anticipated. No-one remotely interested in the history or current affairs of the Philippines should miss his take on them, enlivened with a characteristic twist of dark humour.

While I’m at it, I’ve got to plug Carlos’s walking tours of Intramuros (for which he dresses in Spanish garb), the CCP (1970s loons), and Quiapo (not sure what he wears for that). They are unmissable; more events than tours. I’ve recommended them to many people over the years and everyone seems to love them. In a city not overburdened with options for the tourist or interested resident, you have make time for one or more of these. You can find details here (please scroll down).

Pinoy blog of the week

Of course I am delighted to have been selected as “pinoy blog of the week" (talagang pinoy na ako) and with the generous and beautifully written summary of torn and frayed that came with the nomination. Mark Twain once said he was always embarrassed by compliments because he felt they had never said enough, but the reverse is true in my case. Thanks Connie!

The only part of the description to set off a slight trembling in my hands was when she compared me to "an alcoholic who would tip the bottle upside down to catch the last drop" —you know, I could have sworn there was no-one else in the kitchen on Friday night, but you never can tell these days.

While on the subject of blogs, and before everyone has forgotten about it, let me make a few comments about the Asia Blog Awards, which finished last week.

I was quite happy with my own showing, a rather poor fourth behind the Sassy Lawyer, Pinoy Blog and Manuel Quezon. My only slight quibble would be whether “Pinoy Blog” is really a blog, being a compendium of comments from other Philippine weblogs, but that’s OK, it’s good that’s the main thing. The Sassy Lawyer in Philippine Suburbia is obviously the best blog here and Manolo Quezon has the authority and historical perspective that some of the rest of us lack, so it was an honour be defeated by them. And of course they are both Filipinos which is as it should be for the winners of the Philippine category.

However, I did have a problem with the omission of some blogs from the Philippines, notably Caffeine Sparks. It would have been nice if the awards could have given some recognition to the many excellent young Filipino bloggers, rather than to worn-out ex pat hacks like me. The same applies to the nominations from India, which left out my favourite “Under the fire star”.

I was amused to see how the ferocity of the competition mirrored certain national characteristics. In Korea, for example, the bitchiness reflected the fierce competitiveness of the Korean personality and the slightly uneasy relations between locals and ex pats (I don’t know whether it is still true, but there have been several recorded instances of Korean girls being attacked merely for going out with a foreigner).

I was amazed to hear that some supporters of certain Hong Kong blogs had taken the competition so seriously that they had left derogatory comments on competing blogs. Then I remembered that I lived on planet earth and that is how some people here like to do things.

In the Philippines, on the other hand, the competition was, to my knowledge, very collegial. The best woman won and I haven’t heard any complaints. Come to think of it, the fact that a blog obviously kept by a foreigner would be selected as “Pinoy blog of the week” says a lot about why it is so pleasant to live here — so far as I can tell, that would be very unlikely to happen in, say, Korea.

Are such competitions a good thing? I don’t find it easy to answer that. On the one hand, anything that gives blogs some publicity is valuable, and I certainly discovered some fantastic blogs I’d never heard of (including “Simon World”, the blog that ran the competition). On the other hand, blogs are so dissimilar that the competition did end up being apples and oranges in many cases. Perhaps it’s just the old hippy in me, but I do have some unease about making such a contemplative activity competitive. Take my friend Gigi’s site, just added to the list on the right. Can her voyages of self-discovery really be compared with, say, Sassy’s sharp political analysis?

Having a "blog of the week" seems as good at promoting blogs as awards, without getting the competitive juices flowing quite as strongly. I think the blog of the week is a splendid thing and I'm going to have a drink to celebrate. Cheers!

Obsessive blogging

Maud Newton has a very good literary blogblog. In a recent article she talks about her obsessive blogging.

Among bloggers of my acquaintance, it was fashionable to ridicule the Times article [on obsessive bloggers]. The piece was another scrap on the heap of evidence demonstrating that the media remain clueless about blogging and the impulses behind it. At a Manhattan bar a week and a half later, bloggers were still mocking the article. “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna go home and blog,” a friend said. “I’ll post about being here with you guys.” Everyone laughed, and I pretended to join in.

I bought a round of drinks and tried to stop thinking about the twelve links I’d emailed myself earlier but hadn’t posted. After all, we were at a bar. Our songs had started to play on the jukebox. We were carefree and intoxicated and could not have cared less about blogging. Except that, unlike my friends, I went home at midnight and posted about books until 5 am. I might have stayed up longer, but my husband emerged from the bedroom and gave me the raised-eyebrow look that means, “Maybe you really should consider that Paxil prescription your therapist keeps recommending."

I awoke three hours later and hustled off to my day job. Scanning the news sites and Web logs to see what I’d missed, I slapped up three more posts and read through sixty new email messages before my boss appeared at the door.

“Do you have that article for me yet?” she asked.

In a single motion, I minimized Internet Explorer, opened the appropriate database and rooted around for the case she’d assigned me the previous afternoon. I hadn’t even looked at it. “Almost,” I said, “but not quite. It’s more complicated than I thought.”

My distinguished readers

One of the features of Typepad is that you can check how your visitors found your site (I believe most blog hosts offer this service). Thus I know whether someone searched for "Nick Joaquin" on Google and then visited torn and frayed.

It's quite fun to trace your visitors in this way and I check quite often. Most of the searches that lead here are fairly logical -- people looking for "Philippine elections", that sort of thing -- but every once in a while there's a weird one. Last week someone arrived via a search for "Manila sex" and this morning I was rather startled to find that a search for "Beirut hostages AND buggery" on Yahoo had led straight to my innocent little site. Torn and frayed was even the first site on Yahoo's list. Wow. (I had mentioned "Beirut hostages" in my post on the returning Japanese hostages and linked to a site called "Buggery.org" in an earlier post.) Well, that's another reason not to buy Google shares.

It's the AND that I like.