The shots, were mostly taken in art galleries or museums, with some taken in familiar or familial settings, I thought perhaps it might be easier to capture this sense of distraction or being elsewhere in such places. However this wasn’t necessarily the case as there is a  visual difference between being intensely interested in something and being distracted or elsewhere.

Here’s a few contact sheets with some of the original shots, some would become contenders for my final set and some, for reasons you will see, others would not…

Unedited initial colour shots on various days and locations In March and April 2013 – Natural History Museum London, Manchester Gallery, Nantwich, Manchester.

Unedited initial colour shots on various days and locations in March and April 2013  - Natural History Museum London, Manchester Gallery, Nantwich, Manchester.

Unedited initial colour shots on various days and locations in March and April 2013 – Natural History Museum London, Manchester Gallery, Nantwich, Manchester.

Unedited initial colour shots on various days and locations in March and April 2013 – Natural History Museum London, Manchester Gallery, Nantwich, Manchester.

 I took around 100 shots in total and after a simple process of elimination to disregard any that didn’t fit the brief I honed this down to around 66 or so workable images, far too many for this assignment which required 4 to 8 images. No choice had been made yet as to whether I was to use colour or Black & white as my palette, my main priority was seeking the best images for the brief.

To get this figure down to a more reasonable level, I had to be more discerning when selecting images that would define and represent what I wanted to achieve with this assignment as a consequence I rejected some good images. For instance…

My subjects gaze is held by some disturbance rather than being ‘elsewhere’

The above image, demonstrates that some hard choices need to be made even at this stage of the editing, as much as I like this image it really doesn’t capture the essence of the brief. Sure, there is a sense of a distraction, because of where my subject gazes but the image lacks a look of distraction or of being elsewhere so I felt I could not use this image as a consequence.

Intently interested…and yet, there’s almost a sense they are elsewhere.

The image here, above is another example of an image that nearly captured what I was looking for. However in this case I’ve caught my subject  this time my mother, listening raptly to a conversation she isn’t taking part in. There is almost a sense that she is thinking about what is being said, but the fact her expression shows empathy for the situation being described rather than one of far away thought, so unfortunately, I could not use it.

It was this process of elimination that eventually got my selection down to 40 and it was at this point I decided a choice needed to be made about whether I was going to stay with colour for my images or convert and edit them to Black & White. I had started to play with this already, as you see in the images above, it helped me see if the images evoked what I was looking for. More on this process in my next post.

Tense day, thinking about the manhunt in Boston. No real connections there, just imagining what that would look like in our suburban area. And as the breaking story shows, it really does pay to pay attention to your surroundings. So, although I hope my ability to note subtle changes in my environment will never be of life-and-death importance, I like to think I’d be alert enough to spot something amiss in such a situation.

Before I get to bugs and birds, just want to link to this one of many thoughtful articles written after the bombing attack on the Boston Marathon: Boston Marathon Bombing (And the Lives We Lead) by Eric Turkewitz.

Today was rainy, warm, humid. Now it’s raining again and windy.
The squirrels are wreaking havoc in the yard — grass, mulch, garden beds. I don’t recall this much activity and destruction in past years, or maybe my timing is different. I think I started planting earlier this year.

Pulled five dandelions. You know you’re making progress in the fight against weeds when you have so few that you can keep track!

Lettuce is sprouting in the two places I planted it recently. Not seeing much from the beets. Radish sprouts appeared last week, but I don’t see much progress. Maybe something is eating them.

So far, so good with my indoor plants. I worry that they’ll outgrow their containers before I have a chance to plant them. This coming week might be the week.

And look who’s back:

Obviously, not a return visit (I read that soldier flies live only eight days in this final stage of life). But I feel oddly fond of this little bugger, having spent time with his cousins all winter.

View of Tasso Square from our hotel balcony

Sorrento is the perfect base for exploring the region.  The local Circumvesuviana train line starts in Naples and passes through Herculaneum, Pompeii, and a string of other charming little towns before arriving in Sorrento two hours later.  Every hour or so buses depart the city to wind along the gorgeous Amalfi coast road to Positano, Amalfi, and Ravello.  And you can catch a ferry for a day trip to Capri at Sorrento’s Piccolo Marina (we didn’t, but you could).

This is me and Father Guido Sarducci in Amalfi. Can you tell we love it here?

The history of the region has many layers.  First there were the Osci.  Then the ancient Greeks took over and apparently found the place captivating: the name Sorrento (Surrentum in ancient times) comes from the word for Siren, as in the lovely ladies who tried to lure both Jason and Odysseus with their songs.  The actual island of the Sirens, according to some traditions, is a group of three rocks just off Capri (visible from the coast near Sorrento).

Then there were the Romans, of course, and the whole business with Vesuvius in 79 A.D. (or C.E., whatever – I’m showing my age).  Spain ruled the region in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, which is when those interesting medieval-style Easter processions got started.  Sorrento has been a prosperous place for a long time. It was protected by deep gorges from land invasions but pirates and Saracens regularly invaded from the sea.

Il vallone dei mulino – valley of the mills, in one of the gorges surrounding Sorrento

The central square is named for Torquato Tasso, a native Sorrentino and poet of the 1600s; his most famous work, “Jerusalem Delivered,” was informed by those Saracen invasions.  Richard Wagner and Henrik Ibsen both lived in Sorrento in the 19^th century and Maxim Gorky in the 20^th.

Hey Henrik – mind if I call you Enrico while you’re here?

Here are some more views.  You can see how artists might find it inspirational.

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Getaway to Cincinnati: this roundup includes Park+Vine in Over-the-Rhine and the Charley Harper mosaic mural downtown.

Miniature Rooms: a crazy-cool Cincinnati-based company that makes, wait for it… miniature rooms.

MoMA to Demolish Williams and Tsien Folk Art Museum: wow, bad news about a really interesting museum building in NYC.

New iPad App: Urban World: I don’t have an iPad, but I want this.

Abandoned, Ctd.: No Such Thing as Was shares beautiful photos of an old railroad bridge in DeKalb, IL.

New York Biotopes: just watch this lovely animation right now.

I leave for Las Vegas in exactly 10 days (it hasn’t really hit me yet, but today I payed off my Visa and realized that my wallet is truly going to suffer through this experience but it is going to be completely worth it!) Tomorrow is my last final, so in the ten day span before I leave I intend to get at least one more restaurant post in.  I’m thinking either New Westminster’s Burger Heaven or the new and extremely popular Mexican eatery in downtown Vancouver called Chipotle, which has some other chains in the States as well. Opinions and input are definitely welcome, since both my wallet and bikini body will likely only be able to handle one before I hit Nevada. Burgers and Mexican food are 2 of my favourite foods (the third is Greek food if you were wondering, love me some souvlaki), so naturally they will be extremely detailed posts with lots of pictures for you to drool over.

On the Vegas front, Zoey has agreed to accompany myself -I will likely be in a giddy and childlike state- for a few dinners on the strip… When I say dinners on the strip, I mean serious DINNER ON THE STRIP, as in, eating at the restaurants of some of my IDOLS. Conveniently, Guy Fieri’s got the spots on the Vegas Strip from his Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives episode posted on their own page called “All Vegas, All the Time“, bless his bleach blonde extremely clogged heart. Here are some of the places I hope to eat, and why:

1. Mesa Grill, Caesar’s Palace. Because it’s one of Bobby Flay’s restaurants. If you don’t know who Bobby Flay is… Just… Watch Iron Chef America, its for your health.
2. B&B Ristorante, The Venetian. Because it’s Mario Batali’s Italian restaurant, and he’s Italian, and I’m Italian, and it will probably just all taste really good, especially with him being an Iron Chef at all.
3. Naked City Pizza, 3240 S. Arville St. Because, who doesn’t like pizza? I often find myself smiling and thinking, why want the D, when you can have the P(izza)?
4. Forte European Tapas Bar & Bistro, 4180 S. Rainbow, Ste. 806. Mainly because Guy told me to, and Guy Fieri’s wish is my command. 
5. UNLV, 4505 S. Maryland Pkwy. Because of the Meatball Marinara Sub, need I say more?… Yes actually I do need to say more. University of Nevada Las Vegas. University. Boys. COLLEGE. BOYS. SUMMER. ok ok ok ok. 

Those are just some ideas, though we will have to re-evaluate the likelihood of getting to all of them, and their distance from where we will be staying. Hopefully the amount I’m going to eat while I am away is enough to satisfy me. I’ve really been trying to hold back, and been squatting my life away (today is day 17!), so that I can justify what is going to happen while I’m gone.

On that note, I have to study two more plays, but I am welcoming good detox suggestions for my return. I also have added another category for my excursions in Vegas, which will not all be food-related, but hopefully will have some fun pictures and posts about my first Vegas experience as an adult, the category is “the vegas trip”, I’m going to try and put together a cool video of the trip if I can, so that I can improve my video skills. Throw a comment out here, or tweet me down at the bottom of this page! (@alyciasundar)

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In the world at sand sculptures. Yes, this is John Gowdy and he’s creating a masterpiece on the beach in Atlantic City. I stood a bit of a distance away as per the security guards directives. There was quite a scene as John created this masterpiece. Even with a clear line drawn in the sand people were getting much to close and disturbing John’s concentration.

You can see the detail that this concentration was able to produce in the next photo. Amazing!

I wanted to hang around to see the finished product but I was out exploring for quite some time and was getting pretty hungry from all the walking. One of the guards told me there was going to be a news crew and a magazine interview scheduled for later that afternoon.

I recommend clicking each photo to get a real good look at the details. You can also check out John’s website here.

Everyone knows something about Pompeii, if only from that pathetic (I mean that in a good way) “Dog of Pompeii” story they make you read in middle school.  The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. is one of the fixed points in history that Doctor #10 goes on about. It’s also an existential wake-up call.  One day, everybody’s baking bread and buying beer, when next thing you know, blam! Wiped off the face of the earth. This could happen to you.  But of course the best part is how everything going on that day was preserved under the ashes for future generations to dig up and puzzle out.

I knew all that, but it’s not the same as being there.

Andreas and I found ourselves comparing Pompeii to Jordan’s Petra, where we spent a few days just over a year ago. Petra is another ancient ghost town.  But the magic of Petra is that it feels so oversized, the monumental home of an ancient race of giant gods.  Nothing remains of everyday life there, only empty tombs and wind-worn temples of metaphysical belief.

And camels.  Camels always make a place more mysterious. Petra, Jordan: February 2012

Pompeii is more down-to-earth. There you will see graffiti on the walls, a “beware of dog” notice, grape vines in the gardens, and dirty pictures in the bath house. You can imagine yourself walking the streets in the year 79, using the raised crosswalks to stay clear of the muck. You’d meet your friends at the forum, grab lunch at a small sidestreet café, maybe catch a show at one of the theaters, then go home to a colorful house with a fountain in the courtyard.

One of our hosts at the hotel told us we could see Pompeii in a couple of hours. She didn’t know us well enough.  We wandered around, enthralled, for more than six hours.  The guard had to kick us out well after closing time.

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Thatcher might be dead but her toxic legacy lives on… Most of the people at the Thatcher death party in Trafalgar Square on Saturday April 13th were only too well aware of this. However, as austerity really starts to bite this year, there’s a rising mood of anger and defiance. Despite the pouring rain, a week of vilification from the right wing press and the hyped up threat of trouble, up to 3000 people came out not just to cheer Thatcher’s demise but to lay down a marker for the fight for a radical politics that can take on a system that despite a brave facade, is slowly starting to buckle…

On an unrelated note, enjoy a picture of my spirit animal deceased mentor: Andy Warhol.

“Drugs in the Air”

I will say I did enjoy some nice breathing in Sorrento and Rome, for whatever reason.  It is a little depressing to be back to this.

View of Addis from Entoto mountains, where I went a couple of weeks ago with ICS visiting performance artists Michelle and Carney from Poetry Alive!

But I guess we should be grateful that it’s not worse.

Our last visiting artist at ICS, children’s author Bruce Coville, tweeted this from Nouakchott, Mauritania:

Least favorite sentence of the day:”The air in this city has the third highest fecal content of any city in the world.”

— Bruce Coville (@brucecoville) February 20, 2013

Ew.

So, despite all of my best attempts at becoming a stodgy stuffed shirt, someone thinks I’m funny. Or at least they think one of my stories is. I’m delighted because this story is completely inappropriate, highly pear-shaped, and was a lot of fun to write.

UFO2 is, like its predecessor, Unidentified Funny Objects, a collection of humorous science fiction and fantasy stories. UFO2 will feature Robert Silverberg, Esther Freisner, Mike Resnick, Ken Liu, Tim Pratt, Jody Lynn Nye, Jim Hines, me, and many more*.

Hey, do you write funny? *Because you could be in this anthology too. The open reading period is May 1 – 31 and submission guidelines are here.

UFO2 is a kickstarter-funded anthology. I’m not going to tell you that you should help back it, because I’m obviously biased. But if you like backing highly entertaining and suspiciously funny anthologies, I’d say this is a good place to start. Plus, then you’ll get to read about the care and feeding of pyrokinetic toddlers. You know, in case that should ever become a thing.

In the Underground space, our bodies walk through clinical corridors illuminated by violent white-light.  Comparisons with a psychiatric hospital are obvious, emphasized by the faïence tiles on walls, which create a sterile atmosphere. The flow of people is constant; everybody tries to avoid contact with strangers’ bodies so as not to increase the already- disturbing feeling of this confined environment.  Violence emanates from everywhere: light blinds us and the sound of signals shakes us to activate our body mechanically. As a Londoner, I have spent on average 1/8 of my waking hours in the Underground space and it appears to me to be an interesting place as it can assist me in understanding both modern society and human beings’ behavior.

This is another shot taken in Thorndon Country Park. While it was still on the cool and breezy side, there was something in the air that suggested the arrival of spring. Okay, I know the calendar says we are in spring but…it hasn’t exactly felt like it. After a winter that has dragged on for over four months, any sign of a change in the weather to something more seasonal is welcome…

This was taken on a walk through Thorndon Country Park near Brentwood in Essex. In amongst the woods are scattered a number of oak trees that are centuries old. Sadly, many of them have seen better days as you can clearly see from the image… They bear silent testament to the passing centuries and the massive changes that have taken place in society since they were mere saplings. If only they could talk…

One of my favorite places in Greensboro!

Historic Jackson Brewery to Become Performing Arts Complex: interesting news about an OTR icon.

4 Neighborhoods Take Lead in Building a Better Business District: elsewhere in Cincinnati, neighborhoods look to replicate OTR’s transformation.

Pay Phones in New York City Take You Back in Time: “A project designed to promote an art exhibit has turned 5,000 Manhattan pay phones into time machines that take callers back to 1993.”

If the US Were a High School, Which Type of Kid Would Each State (or City) Be?: so silly.

Modern Gothic: Astley Castle: rustic Modernism coexists within the 12th century ruins of a castle

Cranbrook — Bloomfield Hills, MI: pretty Springtime eye candy from my alma mater.

I sat down and drew up an outline for an 80-minute introduction to folklore and folkloristics.  I was happily surprised to find it all coming back to me.  The best part was, as I was planning for (and fretting about) my presentation, I started not only seeing folklore everywhere – that tendency has never quite left me – but also thinking about what it all means.  Structuralists, Freudians, functionalists, behaviorists, text analysts, Marxists, feminists: I miss you.  I almost want to finish that dissertation (I said almost).

The Holy Week processions in Sorrento gave me plenty of material to illustrate different ways of interpreting folklore.  Check out this video of the White Procession, which takes place from 3 a.m. until dawn on Good Friday.

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I’m happy to report that my little talk went over pretty well.  Thanks are due to my friend Sukey, professor of folklore and popular culture and all-around awesome human being, who provided me with an excellent opening activity.  It was so much fun, I hope I get invited to do it again.

Here are some more pictures from the Holy Week events in Sorrento and surrounding towns.

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• I’m not particularly interested in debating the pros and cons of climate science, but this piece by Ross McKitrick provides for an interesting poke around some of the stuff that appeares to go on behind the scenes in academia and at scientific journals. It also shows how new media (in this case, bloggers) have succeeded in undermining the illusion of we’ve-got-it-all-figured-out, our-way-is-the-best-way correctness being promoted by our elite class. Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit.org is hated by climate scientists, and with good reason, but it really looks like he’s doing a better job of turning over rocks and asking hard questions than anyone in the dinosaur media. But isn’t that the case in general these days?
• Related. (H/T Glynn Marshes)
• Kicks just keep getting harder to find. (H/T Advocatus Diaboli)
• RIP Bigas Luna. I’ve admired a lot of things about the Luna-directed films I’ve seen. (Spanish filmmakers are often really cheeky, clever, and wild, aren’t they?) Luna’s 1987 “Anguish” is a really smart riff on the experience of watching movies, and it strikes me as a work that deserves to have a devoted cult following. It’s available on DVD.
• “Good evening.”
• Movie blogger Jeffrey Wells on his experience dating actresses.
• I’ve been saying for years that Warner Brothers, which has the deepest and best film catalog around, should start a streaming service. Glad to see they’ve finally done it. The list of available titles is still sparse, but there are some good ones in there. Off the top of my head, I’ll recommend the beautifully shot women-in-prison drama “Caged,” Ford’s “Wagon Master,” and Sjostrom’s great “The Scarlet Letter.” The last stars Lillian Gish in one of her greatest roles, and I don’t think it’s ever been available on DVD.
• I guess this isn’t surprising. But if you’re anything like me, you saw it and wondered how common this sort of thing is. Surely, a lot of politicos are doing similar things and simply not getting caught. Right? Right?
• Go here in order to embarrass yourself make a big show of your support of women. I’m sure it will get you laid.
• Science proves that chicks dig big wangs.
• Foseti links to some heretical thoughts on democracy. Some good comments too, especially those by Handle.
• Related.

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Leaving—and its twin attendants: staying away, and the tease of return—is the damnably rich near-imperative of Filipino life. One that, unfortunately, has been mined only to raise high the Filipino immigrant experience as social commentary—as both battle-cry for our ilk and a take-it-or-leave-it message against the rest of the world—and almost always a sentimental capturing of a truth of the Filipino way of life. I leave/left/will leave the Philippines for a better life for me and for my family—this is the new tenet of the provider pulling luggage in his wake. I will always straddle two identities: that of the land that bore me and of my adopted country—this is the old standby of the expatriates in stories, who tend to gaze at their own navels darker in sheen than the rest of the country they’ve shuttled themselves into.

Lysley Tenorio, then, is godsend to this latest literary preoccupation. His debut collection of short stories Monstress—well received far and wide for its startling storytelling and its insight into a subset of immigrant America—proves that debates about the necessity of Filipino-ness in Filipino literature can rightly be rendered moot, so long as story is king. The usual clincher—What makes you and your story Filipino?—does not take precedence over the immediacy of the story one needs to tell well; the kerfuffle that does nothing but distract is, at last, duly sacrificed before the altar of good fiction.

The noticeable ambivalence to questions of nationality is what allows Tenorio’s short stories to freely focus on the outliers that people his stories. Race and sense of place, the politics of leaving and of staying gone-too-long—are relegated to simply being among the many circumstances that make life a pain in the ass to live. The country one was born in is simply an inherent part of one’s character—one that, via Tenorio, willfully shuns preeminence. Yes, itt’s the color of one’s hair, the tinge one’s skin takes in high summer, the hardness of one’s consonants—the fact that, at a certain era, one couldn’t enter a bar through the front door. And it’s up there alongside figuring how to kiss someone onscreen for the first time, after a career of having “gouged, bitten, clawed, stabbed”; alongside watching one’s grandfather scoop chicken liver from the sidewalk, glimpsing the white on the crown amid the haphazardly applied dye; alongside learning how to make a habit of hiding in the garage as a child, waiting for one’s too-young, too-beautiful sister to return from her date with a no-good asshole.

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Q: It’s fairly natural to have the culture—or your family’s memories of it—rub off on you. How was the dynamic within your family?

TENORIO: We left the Philippines when I was seven months old, and I grew up mostly in San Diego, Southern California. I don’t know if I could have done what they did, packed up in your late thirties or mid-forties and just start over. My parents were brave and smart and gutsy; and they were wildly successful at it. We helped them in certain ways, but they made their own lives here—there.

Q: I’m generalizing, but a big reason why people go to the States, or anywhere, is to have “a better life.” And when you suddenly announce to your parents, “By the way, I’m going into the arts!”—that’s not exactly textbook “better life” around these parts.

TENORIO: I’m really lucky with my family. I knew, growing up, that a lot of parents of Filipino kids were really invested in their education. But mine were really laid back. I think they figured if I wasn’t getting in trouble, then I was okay. They let me do what I want. I don’t think I would have been a writer if they hadn’t been as hands-off. My father would have loved for me to go to law school, I know that. But they didn’t pressure me. But I have to say I never made that announcement. So that’s probably why I got away with it. [Laughs.] But, you know, had my father been alive—because by the time I started writing seriously, my father had passed away—maybe he would’ve been concerned. Especially since I was just moving around the country, going from fellowship to fellowship, wherever I could get support for my writing. He might have been a little worried. But my mother—even if she was worried, I think she knew that I was okay.

Q: (That’s because you’re the bunso [youngest].) So, how many times have you been back?

TENORIO: Well, we came back when I was seven years old, for about a month; then I came back when I was twenty-seven—and then now. (I haven’t been back very much.) Yeah, I’m the youngest of five, and I feel like a lot of the culture or maybe some of the personality of the Philippines—I think I got a lot of that from my family.

Q: I think this kind of passing-on also lends to how subtle and almost deliberately downplayed whatever message on Filipino-ness there is in your stories. Nationality seems almost incidental to your characters. It’s something that concerns them when they think about it, sure—but they’re still, primarily, human beings trying to deal with all the crazy, curveball things you have to deal with as human beings.

TENORIO: That was my hope for it. I appreciate anyone who reads the book, and I appreciate anyone who might read the book will see it as a group portrait of Filipinos or Filipino-Americans. For me, it’s not. I mean, I don’t mean for the book to be anthropology or sociology. It’s impossible. How can eight stories about lepers and faith healers and The Beatles represent a group? So, to me, they’re individuals who are just trying to make their way into the world, while caught in some very strange circumstances. A lot of those circumstances are rooted in the tangle between the Philippines and the West.

Q: Those strange circumstances—I think you tend to double-damn your characters. Which is a gutsy thing. Sure, they’re strangers in an even stranger land, which poses its own set of challenges—but they also have to deal with, say, being a leper, or taking care of Mom when she goes on one of her benders. And it’s the latter bits you focus on, have the characters focus on. In many ways, that’s what seems to matter to you, to your characters.

TENORIO: Hey, thanks, I appreciate that. And I understand how fiction—how writing—can be overtly political, and be useful and be very meaningful that way. But although that’s one of my interests, too, I don’t think it would be one of my strengths. So I’d rather have that message just be yet another one of the givens of their lives that sometimes comes to the foreground, sometimes not. They have other things to deal with, like the new American patient in the leper colony or the opportunity to make it big in Hollywood. For a writer, for me, that’s material that’s more fun. And I have to keep myself entertained to write.

Q: And otherwise, it’s just social commentary hiding under the guise of fiction.

TENORIO: Yes, and that’s what I was doing when I started writing in college. It was literally like Immigrant of the Week Tragedies. This week, I’ll talk about the Mexican experience; next week, I’ll try the Chinese experience.

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Immigrant-of-the-Week stories, the tales in Lysley’s debut Monstress are not. Which is enough to ensure that Monstress is on its way to being competent, if conscientious, literature. But Monstress is damn-good literature because it takes care to pause for silences, nestled as they are in the minute pockets between sensationalism. One of the strongest, most haunting scenes in the collection involves one mother, firmly of the old world, binding her dead transsexual son’s breasts—the son who had debuted his new identity on television a la Jerry Springer, parading himself for all the world to see. And all while her other son, the one alive, the one still truly a son to a mother’s thinking—cradles his brother’s corpse in assistance, and in apology. The mother she chants, winding elastic around her dead son’s strange new torso, “Ang bunso ko.”

These are stories that respect the craft; respect the truth about people and their foibles, even within the slow and careful revelations. Monstress succeeds because of poignancy amid a strangeness that is nonetheless familiar or comforting to all its outcasts and outliers, immigrants or otherwise; the stories are earnest, they’ve got a tenderness that disarms the reader in the best possible way. It’s just damn good writing, is what it is—the kind that can have you slowly shaking your head and muttering “Jesus, Mary, and all the saints” under your breath.

Arguably the hippest story in the collection is “The Help,” about a group of ragtag adolescent boys, charged by an airport terminal guard all but obsessed by the Grand Dame of Philippine Politics to beat up The Beatles. Beyond the doomed-from-the-start planning (as one may surmise, it doesn’t bode well to have one’s mastermind have a house tattooed with images of The Beauteous Mrs. Marcos) and its madcap execution—not to mention the story’s near-overwhelming nod to kitsch—“The Help” shines because it, too, takes care to find the quiet within its characters. Our narrator gazes at his nominal uncle mooning over a poster of Imelda and goes, “I thought that this might be love, that if something could change you so much, then maybe, in the end, it was worth fighting for, even if your weren’t going to be loved back.” And, much later, our narrator sets loose what just might encapsulate the reverse side of the diaspora experience—that of those left behind: One’s mother going away, meaning: She left us. “I thought leaving,” says the narrator, “was a terrible thing, the saddest of acts, something you do to the people you love.” And there’s the turn, you’ve got to tell yourself, that sweet necessary turn.

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Q: There’s a tenderness to your stories that disarms. On the one hand, you have all these sensational characters, caught in the grip of melodrama—and true to the martyr role in every soap opera, they suffer quietly and with dignity. And then the story—it turns.

TENORIO: I definitely think that’s something I’m going for. I think these moments of dramatic pause, or where characters do something that on the surface may be shocking against a backdrop of relative quiet—I think that helps generate, for the sake of the story, good tension. But I also think it’s true. For all the melodrama of the Philippine culture, it’s not melodramatic to us. It feels like the ordinary and the everyday. To contextualize something this way, though—I think that makes it more real, more true.

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Ask Lysley how and why he began writing, on what drew him into the craft in the first place, and he’ll say, matter-of-factly: “Because I felt like it was something I’d be good at.” And later, “I realized that a Creative Writing class was the only thing I cared about.” Later still, with a verbal nudge, Lysley Tenorio will almost sheepishly say that he is working on a novel—Lysley, on the expansiveness, on the luxury of the new form: “The thing that is most liberating is also the most daunting”—and Lysley will say that he “always thought that the stories in [Monstress] are a little strange. I’m hoping I have that same kind of strangeness.”

Strangeness comes in different forms. There are faith healers and charlatans plying their trade, struggling in a time of waning belief. There are young boys, tasked to care for their flawed mothers, as they construct an elaborate life of fantasy. There are lepers who roam freely in an island, though one turns her face away before a stranger who refuses to accept the undoing of his own skin. And then there’s simply being two men, refusing to dwell on the distance between themselves and home—two men in a land that’s tolerant at best and hostile at worst—men who attempt to figure out how to remain whole, how to love and how to love secretly and what to do when a little of that love seeps out and refuses to remain anonymous, how to battle the loneliness and at the same time use it as a protective mantle.

“Save the I-Hotel”—the most accomplished, most finely tuned, and most in-possession-of-gravitas story in the collection tells us at one point: “Fortunado had never struck a person before—but there were ties in his life he wondered what it might be like, and now he knew: the force of everything you are in a single gesture at a single moment; the hope that it will be enough and the fear that it won’t. No different from a kiss.”

6

Over lunch—before the questions—Lysley Tenorio tells his host that he was born in Olongapo. The city in his mouth compels you to think, Balikbayan. He dabs at his mouth after a bite from his sandwich and he asks his host, “Have you ever been there?” It’s a simple, un-weighted conversational gambit, something to break the stillness of a cavernous room prepared for a half-hour with a magazine. His lunchtime companion answers in the negative, offers that he’s been in Tarlac, which is not a ways off. After his meal, Lysley Tenorio stands up and asks, “Is it okay if I brush my teeth first? I just—” And the two other people in the room with him, relieved, wave him off, assure him, “Yes, of course,” in chorus.

7

Things not to ask the writer-expatriate (one touted, in seeming threat, as the New Voice of the Filipino Immigrant Experience): What do you think of “sense of place,” and have you lost yours, and did you have one to being with, and are you trying to find it in your fiction? Where is home? Why are the lepers in you story driven to touch one another? Should your firm handshake recall the old-world (the this world) fathers with their rough hands? Should your unerringly polite questions, offered to keep the ball rolling, mirror chirpy mothers who croon bunso to all and sundry? Will you ever come back? Why does the star of many a B-movie Reva Gogo allow herself to be used as a cash cow by the near-deluded, too-hopeful man she loves? What’s the ratio, among your characters who have left, of those who wish to return and those who want to keep on going? Are you partial to adobo? Do you believe “adobo” or “sinigang” or “taho” or “balut” should be italicized in text? What did your home in San Diego smell like, growing up? Do you recognize smells from your childhood walk-up in the streets of Manila? Ditd you live in a walk-up, are there walk-ups in San Diego? Can you spot a Filipino in an unspeaking crowd? Do you realize that your clear, heavy baritone will make everyone you meet in this country stutter, eloquent or no, reminding them that unlike you, English will never be their first language?

You can, however, ask the writer-expatriate when he left the Philippines—Lysley Tenorio was seven months old—and you ask the writer-expatriate how many times he’s been back. “I haven’t been back very much,” Lysley Tenorio will tell you—and you nod in encouragement, and you do not look for regret or apology or self-censure in his voice.

(You will, however, find comfort at the oddness of this man’s name: Lysley, or Leslie to the rest of the world. There’s a Filipino spelling, if there ever was one. “It’s a strange name,” Lysley will acknowledge when you ask him about it—and there’s the apology in his voice. “My siblings did it, they named me. It’s kind of a cruel joke.”)

Do not, most of all, ask if he wishes that the line from “L’Amour, CA” could distill the politics of departure and remaining—if it could serve as a literary credo in place of the trend of social commentary that manages to be self-aggrandizing and empty at the same time—the line that goes: “Somewhere, Isa is fine without us; here, we are fine without Isa. And this is the truth I don’t want to know: that the ones who leave and the ones who get left keep living their lives, whatever the distance between.”

A fly :

and that :

The woman on these pictures used to be my girlfriend.

Next us, there was other guys. Some of them made this.

When I was there, I also played drums. It was the instrument of her, Valentina Desideri. A dancer.

She made this :

Valentina Desideri – The Human Puppet from Ready Steady Studio on Vimeo.

There was also a guy who made songs. Here it is one them.

Just before to leave PAF, I also made a video where I said I would like to change the world. Unfortunately, I lost it.

I don’t know why I’m writing all this.