LA NOCHE DE LAS ALMAS

LA NOCHE DE LAS ALMAS*

Chloe had an angel costume, and Louis was disguised as a hamburger. --- Halloween Night 

She was dressed like an angel.

She did not have to, and could

have gone trick or treating in

her pink pyjamas, sleep marks

all wrinkled up on her gentle

face, like the blanket creases

tightly wound over her head

to rid the night of bogeymen. 

Last year, he was Chewbacca,

why not a hamburger this time?

I said, any which way you go,

my boy, they will see your face,

and leave their Halloween

doors swearing they’ve seen

a King Burger angel wagging,

lettuce and bacon sagging,

cooing rather tremulously:  

Trick or Treat, give me

something good to eat!  

Roaming the cul-de-sac, my

cherubic tandem would have

looked too good to anyone,  but

they’d have to eat their hearts out.

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-31-11

*All Souls Night

A WAILING WALL

A WAILING WALL 

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant --- Tacitus*

Either way, distance finds me

looking up or down this cliff,

an unlikely sanctuary I escape

into aching for scarce solitude. 

How can one be alone among

the darting seagulls? Or silent

with lost memories jarred by

blasts of breaking waves below? 

Here, gods revel in their haven

of whistling winds and clouds,

down there fishermen cackle,

chewing sargasso, guzzling gin, 

while their thrown nets fill up

with flotsam floating around

moss-gowned boulders staring

at the sky like dark green eyes. 

Is it this vast and empty space

between that scares me now,

when I should be murmuring

secrets to messenger winds? 

I would scream unbearable

pain, holler down bitter anger;

I must share muffled grief,

loosen taut shackles of despair. 

Either way, I find wailing walls

in air, water, rocks, and wind;

like Job I weep for peace, hope

to gently fall in the cup of palms 

waiting to catch my carrion

now carved out of a shattered

world of faithlessness and fear,

unable to hold on to life or love. 

On this piece of jutting rock,

have I not found the little place

where I could reach His Hand

quickly were I to fall, either way?

---Albert B. Casuga

10-28-11

* (Where they create desolation, they call it peace)

(The quote from Tacitus was used earlier by Simeon Dumdum Jr., a Filipino barrister and a poet, in his Facebook post. Poet and university professor Mila Aguilar posted the cliff picture in her Facebook entry.)

CONTEMPT(LATIONS)

CONTEMPT(LATIONS)

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant --- Tacitus*

Talking about an old song. This has got to be the (c)oldest."When I get jolted by some call to arms, (alarm clocks, thank you), I prepare charms for the day:

"One: to guard against my yelling a profane greeting at my next-door peon---still at it after a night of screaming for Omigod who never seems to come.

"Two: to keep me from using my morning paper to start a fire that would finally rid this dump of its mealy mouthed, foul smelling, vomit reeking, country bumpkin cousins.

"A third: a prayer to deaf heaven to keep me on even keel that I may finally have courage, the kind that would make me sane enough to do myself in.”

*(Where they create a desolation, they call it peace)

10-27-11

PLANNING FOR A TREEHOUSE (Voices From Three Generations)

PLANNING FOR A TREEHOUSE

(Voices from Three Generations)

(For my Grandchildren)

We will see so/ little of the world that it is/ important for you to see this/ tree, to envision rooms and/ stairs where there is only air/ and leaves, to place the first/ board against the bark. --- From “Treehouse for God” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 10-25-11 

1.

Come summer, we will build

another treehouse on an oak

overlooking the creek, there

is more of you now to gather

remnants we can put together. 

Nothing bigger, but higher,

maybe closer to the clouds,

nearer to the stars, away from

the giggling girls next door.

We will see less of the world. 

2.

Or more of it below: yelping

dogs lining up for the lift-leg

tree astride our river bank,

are easy slingshot targets off

stouter, steadier branches. 

O, and there is soldier-boy

doing it with the wife round

the clock since he came back

wounded from Iraq, Libya,

and all on the eastern crack. 

3.

Shush, buddyboy, that’s not

what treehouses are for. What

are they for, gramps? To espy

on sparrows, robins, jays, owls

talk to each other on sundowns. 

So, if we build it a bit higher,

we can also build a treehouse

for God, can we not, gramps?

Why ever for, laddie? He is

everywhere. But nowhere near? 

4.

Cool. A treehouse for God on

the river bend. Then, maybe,

just maybe, we can visit him

anytime, gramps, ask for help

for starving kids in Somalia. 

Hook him up on a telephone

line, strings and cans and all,

and maybe Dad can provide

Him with a Bell internet link,

alert Him on the Facebook! 

5.

So he can stop all killings and all

and punish priests who molest

altar boys and girls, and...Whoa!

Whoa, boys, we are building a

treehouse, not His jailhouse. 

Could we build one for God,

anyway, gramps? We got boards

and plywood and shingles and

nails, and...borrow mom’s cross,

to protect Him in his treehouse. 

6.

Winter is almost here, boys,

we need to firm things up here

so it would not fall off. We will

build another come summer

on that oak bent over the creek. 

(He wipes clammy sweat off his

forehead, winces at a strange jab

of pain on his chest, tingling on

his arms.) Time to climb down,

boys, before we nail Him down,

again.

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-26-11

THE TURN OF A SEASON

THE TURN OF A SEASON

 
That dead oak leaning on the towering pinetree
is a postcard image for the season’s turn. Dead
things are cradled still in the limbs of the living. 

There is not much of this anymore, anyway, in the woods
or in the occupied streets of New York, where the withering
would rather take down what stays green. Green as money. 

This is the way things end: crash crack crawl curse or cry,
no one will open the windows for you. You might just be
the ghetto prowler robbed of his savings, body and soul, 

his mortgaged house foreclosed, his drugs in mob market,
his kids in foster homes, his wife back on striptease poles,
his fingers itching to squeeze a trigger, to put some holes 

into the temples of “others” who revel at dinner tables
over glazed Thanksgiving ham and turkey, bright homes
heated cozily on winters, instead of his throbbing temple. 

The mumbled dread of class wars in the city is not yet here
in the woods where dead oak trunks still lean on limbs
of towering pinetrees whose leaves remain green as money. 

On my porch, while I sip my tea, I feel it is too late to pray. 

— Albert B. Casuga
10-25-11 

Cool air, bright sun and silence, save for the rustling of cattails and the creaking of one dead oak cradled in the limbs of its neighbor.--- Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 10-25-11

DON'T OPEN WINDOWS HERE!

NO ONE OPENS WINDOWS HERE

Something, somehow, has gone away
from a place we call home: windows,
doors to open to collect homing kin
at sundown, like perching birdlings,
have more bolts added, some boarded
up, children hectored into staying away
from doors. Keep those doors shut!
Some n—hs (racial epithet) have guns
blazing. It does not take much these days.
It does not even take a country’s revolt
to crack those pistols of thieving thugs;
here, they might as well be toothbrushes.
So, stay indoors, lock your doors, you
don’t have to plead like Khaddafi: Don’t!
No, don’t even think about Occupy! Don’t! 

---Albert B. Casuga 10-24-11

Reports are mixed— Drug bust, car chase; one caught, one still on the loose; or all of them now in jail. Your wild agitation diminishes, but never really the fear; and the sorrow as well for a world where no one opens windows to let in the night air anymore.--- Luisa A. Igloria on a home invasion near her home in Norfolk, Virginia, posted in Via Negativa, 10-23-11

COME AWAY: POEMS ON WHERE AWAY IS

A Photo by Bobby Wong Jr.

COME AWAY: THREE POEMS 

Throw it away, / we say, but where/ does this directive/ lead. Where is/ away. We know it/ suggests distance/ and removal, that/ the thrown thing/is no longer visible/ or retrievable. --- From “Away” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 1—20-11

1. Away

It does haunt one’s reverie

like an old melody’s refrain,

it is a way but not away. But

where is away? A memory,

perchance a lingering pain? 

Distance-given right to know

erases world’s away, rebuilds

them only as far as a pebble

skips and skims over eddies

on roiled water: See old faces? 

Etched on beach sand, away

is a heart pierced through

by an arrant arrow called Luv

and a spray of trickling angst

named Will or blood bubbles. 

Or a nodding gran chanting

on her beads wishing shadows

on her walls at sundown might

jump out where they grow tall

and call out: Granny, I’m back! 

Maybe an unreachable land,

then, endlessly dark, no sun

creating rainbows, no showers

lads and lasses run through

naked and free, cold but happy.

2. Monologues

When are you coming back

from the front, son? Sometime

soon, before mom fades away?

Where is this Viet Nam? Iraq?

Afghanistan, Pakistan? Somalia? 

Will you take the midnight train,

Betty, and be home Christmas?

Me and the gang, we will throw

a party at the Metro, wait for you,

gulp suds for every train whistle. 

I guess he will not be around

for my umpteenth birthday, mom.

You invited him, did you not, he

and that woman in Denver? I

just have to wait by the window. 

Is grandpa going fishing with me?

Like last summer, he will drive in

on his old Studebaker, clanking

with a loose tail pipe over cobbles

on our street. Will he? Won’t he? 

I will not be away for a long time,

not too long. Before you know it,

some 10,000 sleeps from now, we

will be bowling again in St. Peter’s

Alley, cracking lightning and thunder.

3. Overture

Come away then, come away, while

we can, let’s run through valleys,

swim the rivers with the catfish,

slalom down those snowbound hills.

Come away, Love, to some place away.

--- Albert B. Casuga

10-24-11

CANONS FOR THE CIPHER

CANONS FOR THE CIPHER

(Poems for my Father)

(For Francisco F. Casuga+) 

O, Father. Time overtakes us, and/ We cower in our darkened rooms. 

RETURNING TO THE ROOT

“Will courage Redeem stupidity?” -- Nick Joaquin 

There is a manner of returning to the root

that explains the virtue of a hole,

its quietness the petering circle:

the canon of the cipher indicts us all. 

And you, rocking yourself to an eddy,

drown the death wish: O that grief

on sons’ faces could tell you all.

“Will courage be visited upon my children?” 

It is this cut whittles the tree down,

not of consumption but of fright

that bereaving is one’s splintering

of children’s bones. Death is our betrayal. 

They are sons gaping as grandfathers die

shapes the gloom of the breaking circle.

They who knew the frenzy of the bloodcry

must never return to find sons become spittle. 

ONCE UPON A SUMMER SOLSTICE


There is a scampering of grace in the dry woods
and a pulse upon some soliloquy:
it is the rain come as a smooth and forbidding lace
upon the cup of the dead and dying weather.

It is past the season of the grub.
The flirt of the monsoon upon the arid lap of Nara
is caked on the thick napes of children
dancing naked in the mire of the fields,
gaping to catch the fingers of the rain,
slithering like parched serpents guzzling raindrops
cupped in the hollow of gnarled father’s palms.

There will be no songs, for the ritual is not of birth
but of death as summer dies in Nara
and with it every titter bursting from a child’s mouth.

The rain becomes a bloody plot.

A HOMECOMING

Tanqui’s supreme conceit is its dread
of withering grass in the month of the frogs
when rain, like fingers in the night, tread
the lesions gangrened on a hillock’s carrion,
carcass of a season mourned
as the briefest of them all.

“The rain is on the hill, the dry pond
is red with clay, the gods are back!
And so must I --- shadow of a past long gone ---
weeping, running through these deserted streets,
crouching now in mud pools of childhood fun
when songs were chanted as songs for the dance.
A dance for the grass! My limbs for the grass!
I must dance for Tanqui’s singed grass!”

He dances hard, his body clean and gleaming,
but Tanqui’s rain is on the ashen hill.
Neither his dancing nor his lusty screaming
will stop this dreaded withering.
Tanqui’s conceit is stranger still
when songs are sung not for her lads and lasses
but for this stranger who, dying, has come back
to dance for black grass, dance naked
for Tanqui’s withered pantheon grass.

THE NIGHTMARE

1.

Halfway, between this river stone and many rocks
after, Nara shall have gone from our echoes-call.
We have wandered into a sunken mangrove

and wonder: Is it as silent there? Are there crabs there?
What quiet mood is pinching bloodless our spleens?
This is another pool –-- navel upon the earth.
Always, always, we cannot be grown men here. 

After the white rocks, after the riverbend,

Nara becomes the dreaded dream.

We have put off many plans of soulful revisiting ---

we will go on re-stepping beyond the white stones,

each step becoming the startled rising

into a darkened city farther downstream

where we once resolved never to die in.

2.

Do we wake up then afraid of Nara?

But rising here is the nightmare come so soon,

treason in the daytime, maelstrom at night: 

The nightmare was of cackling frogs

and serpents rending skulls and cerebrae

of kitemakers who sing while termite logs

burn and children, chanting the Dies Irae,

mush brainmatter, pulling out allegory

like unwanted white hair, stuffing black grass

where brain was, casting tired similes

into dirty tin cans where earthworm wastage was: 

River swells drown us where, surfacing,

we wake up knowing our days have become

termite nights and decaying metaphors. 

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

Revised October 22, 2011, Mississauga

A 1970 ESSAY BY PHILIPPINE NATIONAL ARTIST NICK JOAQUIN: WILFRIDO D. NOLLEDO AMID THE ALIEN CORN

Reposting this article by Nick Joaquin in response to requests from FilAm Philippine Literature students for material on the late Ding Nolledo,

WILFRIDO D. NOLLEDO
AMID THE ALIEN CORN

By Quijano de Manila (Nick Joaquin)

October 1970

A CULT among the young writers.of the country is Wilfrido Nolledo, who is to Philippine prose what Villa is to its verse.

If Villa has heightened the language of poetry to an almost angelic incandescence, Nolledo has deepened the language of fiction to a near-apocalyptic density. For both these magi, the medium is the message. A Villa poem itself informs the clairvoyance required to behold it; every story by Nolledo recreates a reader into its reader in the same way that not everyone could see a Picasso until the body of Picasso's work had developed in the public a new eye with which to view it. It sounds incredible now, but what have become the classic Hemingway stories were found unreadable by the editors he first sent them to. Nolledo underwent a similar experience. His prose was found dazzling all right—but what the hell was the guy saying?

An original from the start, a Melchizedek sprung from no ascertainable parentage, Nolledo has baffled with his labyrinths, where a Theseus may sense not one but a herd of minotaur: Joyce and jazz and basketball and the cinema Old Spain and the kanto-boy Manila... So one might begin to tag the influences.. Godard and Antonioni and Fellini and Bergman would have to be specified; Eliot, too, and the gothic Henry James; and the rituals of Philippine folk Catholicism. The prose will sometimes bellow with beer, though the references are to wine, Spanish or rice.

But what always results from all this is Nolledo, always peculiarly himself: a method in his madness, a cunning even in his most delirious dithyrambs. The Nolledo labyrinth is baroque, but at the heart of it is a coziness of open space where at a simple table sits a man with wife and children eating supper under the stars.

A local cult within a decade after he began writing, Nolledo has now, at 37, stepped before the international audience. Out this month in New York, published by E. P. Dutton & Company, is Nolledo’s first novel, "But For The Lovers," where the young magus of language has turned the Philippine war experience into a poem. It's a beautifully printed book, running to 316 pages, and it begins with a prologue that begins with a paragraph that begins with a sentence that are like no beginning you'd ever expect of a war novel.

Listen:

"He was beginning to eat flowers and the crescent moon was in his eyes when he awoke again. One night long ago when they had intercepted a code from the enemy on the shortwave and had not needed him anymore, they pulled out their tents, mantled him with leaves and left him. They left him a rifle, a buri basket and a book of psalms, for the Major had decreed in defense of the murderer: Let the little Legionnaire lie here and die; it is written, it shall be read. But the boy went on sleeping: and did not die and when he awakened it was to see (it was to find himself alone) a bird, a white-winged maya dart in from the west, perhaps headed for the monsoon. Steadying the Springfield, he cocked the hammer with a quivering thumb, and waited. It flew away, whatever it was, and now he squinted up and remembered that it was the first time in a long spell he had seen the sky, and he thought: It is longer, lonelier and lovelier than any of my prayers. He sighted the nimbus-an eagle in captivity-and fired.

"Lord,” he said, “I am punching holes in your garret."

After that, one should quote the blurb on the book’s jacket:

"But For The Lovers marks the debut of a strongly original voice in contemporary fiction. This extraordinary novel is no less remarkable for the power and beauty of its' language than for the exotic and magical world it creates. Set in the Philippines during the Second World War, But For The Lovers depicts the survival of a group of Filipinos during the Japanese Occupation and American liberation.

"An old mail who used to wander the countryside entertaining children, a young girl raped by Japanese soldiers and a ha1f-caste all huddled together in the slums of Manila their eyes fastened on the sky and the sea. At night guerrilla messengers bring word of the coming of the American Army to drive, away the Japanese invaders. This is the beginning of a new novel whose surface story only suggests the invention and history that awaits the reader. The cast of characters is enormous, ranging from a half-mad prisoner to a Japanese major who views the war as the first step in the liberation of the Asian people from Western civilization. There is an American pilot shot down by the Japanese who falls in love with the young girl, an amazing keeper of a boardinghouse who spends her life planning the seduction of the old man.

"Not for years has there been a novel so teeming with life, so rich and complex in language, history, mythology."

Even as blurbs go, that one is a blitz. A more objective advance opinion is offered by the trade journal Publisher's Weekly, which ran a pre-publication notice on the Nolledo novel:

"This is a strange, compelling book that has the tortuous complexity and is fraught with the labyrinthine terrors of a dream. It is difficult to convey the full flavor of this novel, its combination of the real and surreal that becomes almost hypnotic. The place is Manila during the Japanese Occupation. Everyone is waiting for the coming of the rescuing Americans. Cabals, assassinations abound. The focus is on Ojos Verdes, a boarding house 'creeping with exotica,' in which everyone seethes with collective and individual rage. The cast of characters ranges from the intellectual Japanese commander of a prison camp, to a nameless girl, a war orphan, a strange old man. The lame, the halt and the blind are all here, but grotesque as they are, they are treated with reverence. Serious review attention can be expected."

However his book may fare on the market and with the critics, Nolledo has advanced the cause of expression in the Philippines and in the classic if melancholy tradition of epochal Philippine books (the Rizal novels, the Villa poems) published in terra aliena.

The expatriate writer is still our culture hero.

DING, as family and friend call Wilfrido Nolledo, is a Manila boy, born and bred in the tough district of Balic- Balic. He high-school'd at San Beda, finished the fourth year at National University, moved on to Santo Tomas for a Lit. B. and a graduate course. His college, the Philets, was then famed as a breeding ground for writers, having produced such lights as Johnny Tuvera, Sionil Jose, Johnny Gatbonton, Rolando Tinio and Jose Flores. On the pontifical campus Ding was a shy quiet boy, a loner, but he did get to be literary editor fIrst of the Philets magazine, Blue Quill and then of the university organ, The Varsitarian. His post on Blue Quill was taken over by a slim cool girl named Blanca Datuin, whom Ding began to fancy. At 15, Ding broke into print with a report on the; Cabanela-Anduha fight for The Sporting World; at 20, emerged as a fictionist with a series of short stories-. "Sun." "Veronica" and "Carnival" in the Chronicle weekly magazine; then won the top prize in the 1954 Marian Year literary contest with "The Beginning." But the Nolledo cult actually began with his prizewinners in the Free Press short story contest: "Maria Concepcion” (second prize, 1959); "Kayumanggi, Mon Amour" (third prize, 1960); "Rice Wine" (first prize, 1961); and "The Last Caucus (first prize, 1963). In these stories the Nolledo style has already developed its characteristic density. He won three third prizes in the Palanca Contest (1960, ‘61, ‘62) and six prizes for his one-act plays, one of which, “Turn Red the Sea,” was the top winner for 1963.

In 1959, two years after her graduation, he married Blanca Datuin, they eventually set up house on an alley off Tayuman aptly named Makata: the poet lived on Poet Street. He joined the Free Press staff in 1964, turned from teetotaller into beer drinker, did the movie write-ups and such memorable articles as an expose on North Harbor and a report on Manila’s nightlife. In 1966 he left for the United States on a fellowship to the Writers Workshop of Iowa University.

This October, three years after he started it, "But For The Lovers" appeared in New York, the first book from one Filipino writer who looks to be fecund and durable.

THE NOVEL, "But For The Lovers," has the feel of the picaresque, a vagabond manner established by its prologue, where a fantastic trio-an American soldier, a native girl, a Japanese sailor-wander through the nightmare landscapes of war. Soldier and sailor are killed, the girl shoots down their killers, then is floated 'away "on a piece of house," weeping and singing: "0 Quasimoto-San, I long for your treason. . .

The novel proper, though cored round a boarding- house in Manila, likewise is ambulant with rogues and innocents "drifting around like sleepwalkers." They range a various geography.

Item: Hidalgo de Anuncio, a Castilian relic of road-show vaudeville, once a great clown, now merely the non-top banana on the burlesque stage of wartime Manila. Nolledo here amazingly recreates the atmosphere of decayed vaudeville and in the absurd figure of Hidalgo de Anuncio interweaves backstage vulgarity and well-bred nostalgia, Quiapo and Intramuros.

Item: The Hidalgo's scabrous houseboy Molave Amoran (the names in the book have an amusing grotesquerie), a "night mammal. . . bred from four generations of squatter-scavengers in Tondo," thief' and hustler and hunter of urban game: "Amoran loved Manila. It was his territory. Especially at night of full moon and scrawny cats and dogs. Those animals' habits he timed to the second, knowing exactly where to locate them at a given hour, how large a group was loose… Meat was the thing and the Chinese cooks who operated Manila’s fringe panciterias never asked questions.”

Item: Tira Colombo, landlady of the boardinghouse on Calle Ojos Verdes three times widowed, still a voracious feeder on male meat, of which she can have her fill from those of her boarders who are behind in rent and are willing to pay in kind: "The Sperm Count as of this morning was fifty-fifty. Four probables (two bachelors, two common-law husbands) were remaindered for active duty during the holidays. Qualitatively, at least one of these possessed physical assets negotiable in A-I fornication . . .Her bulbous nose could sniff out a man's genitals in a suit of armor." But it's her genteel tenant in Room 13, Hidalgo de Anuncio, that landlady Tira Colombo is most in a rut to get to her basement bed. Tira Colombo is Nolledo's earth goddess: "Her wicker chair was set down in room thirteen. Like an Ethiopian high priestess en route to the temple, the landlady had been borne up the stairs ' by her attendants ('maids in wailing') who, dusky and stolid, resembled Babylonian slaves ransomed to imperial service. Paying tenants peeled out their doors for a glimpse of their mistress (plumped up by feather cushions) . . . The Colombo runners returned, their reina gesticulating with fly-swatter. Singing with spears in their lungs, they pounced upon the wicker throne, bearing Tira the Terrible aloft . . . She was First Female, the Woman of the Seig, neur (though Hidalgo did not know it), Queen of the Scavengers, sarap-sarap!”

Item: A sick girl whom Hidalgo de Anuncio finds on Avenida Rizal and takes back to his room at Ojos Verdes, where, on awaking from a long sleep, she relates to an assembly the wondrous adventures of her picaresque life. She is, it turns out, the girl in the prologue. And the Philippine symbol? "Neither an Hidalgo nor a Shikura, given all the time and giving back tyranny, would leave one, mark on her that she would not somehow shed like a molting skin-being as she was that most irreducible grade of human a snake ever turned to. "What's .her name? "Nei ther Brooklyn's bravado nor the promise of New York will take you out of the corn fields." But what's her name? "As long as she was a dryad among demons on pontoon bridges, as long as she was a decibel in the drum roll of the U.S. Cavalry, as long as she was a cricket in the crusts of Intramuros, and as long as she was Mandarin eyes and Malayan hair among benzedrine masks and blond cornucopia. . . " Maria Alma. Virgin Soul.

Item: The boardinghouse: "creeping with exotica, it’s life source delineated, by somnambulistic mammalia - whose chief accent is the Scream, whose obsession is Survival at any price."

Nolledo has made that boardinghouse an image of the panic world of war-crazed Manila and the various streams of consciousness that wash through it, glinting with bits of history, swell at last into a tide of racial memory.

At book’s climax—February, the month of Aquarius-— the Liberation is thundering fatally (Boom! Boom! Boom!) over Manila and Tira Colombo has finally made it to Room 13, is trying to rape Hidalgo de Anuncio, but can't coax a hard on. "Perhaps a little loving bite? Boom! Boom! Boom!

The head carne off; a ligament stuck in her incisor left." As the boardinghouse explodes to American fire. When the ruins are dug up six months later, the clean-up detail un- earth: "one incredibly intact pair of Spanish cojones (as though left in preservatives); a soprano's dehydrated tonsils (to be mistaken for pig liver); and a woman's bacterial breast (siliconed with worms)."

As you can see, "But For The Lovers" is an outrageous book. It's very funny and savage and grim and beautiful. It has a long uproarious passage on jacking off that out-Portnoys the Complaint and an equally hilarious chapter on a. nude tango contest where the winner is the last male to come. .

The style is a sustained audacity. Though the language is heightened to the level of poetry, the narrative is readable tale, the action an excitement. A critic once said, apropos D. H. Lawrence, that realism in the modern novel should be a bush recognizably real but on fire. In Nolledo, as in Lawrence, the bushes are for real-and every bush burns.

Says Nolledo's Hidalgo de Anuncio:

"The Spanish novel in the Philippines will be commemorated in English. Everything else is posthumous."

"But For The Lovers" is the Spanish novel in the Philippines commemorated in an English that is a peaking of our culture and Wilfrido Nolledo is the link between Rizal and the "posthumous" crop of young writers in Tagalog.