Three Full Pages Devoted to Snogging

Reading and Reviewing while Daddying (I read this book two months ago, when my first kid was born.)

The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis. There were Martin Amis books on the bargain and that got me to thinking how there must have been something flawed with literature that got dumped to the discounted shelf. But the truth is – there are a lot of gold mines hidden in that septic tank: Graham Greene, James Joyce, Dante, et.al., waiting to be picked like low-hanging fruits.

The decision-making involved in buying this book was easy because of two major influences.

(a) I browsed through the first few pages and read the phrase, “a chartreuse caterpillar of glinting phlegm.” I flipped through it some more and found the phrase “Dionysian bathroom sex.” I generalize that what those phrases hinted this book as wildly thought-of (to describe phlegm like that) and I’m going to be delighted with either sexual or toilet humor that’s eloquently written.
(b) I never heard of Martin Amis, but Vintage published him in a collection that included Irvine Welsh, Philip Roth, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. And this quite-decent edition only costs 99 pesos. Gold mine.

Before reading the book, I googled some reviews on The Rachel Papers and the New York Times (by Grace Glueck) went:

What's lacking is the ability to animate the other characters so that they become more than mere projections of Charles, and to provide the kind of plot invention that would make the book more than an easy-reading, mildly funny series of bed-and-bathroom observations. In the end, I'm afraid, even Charles comes off as too much of a type. I'm sure he'll grow up to work for The Times Literary Supplement.

After having read the book, I was largely against the stand of the review I found in the New York Times.


This was Martin Amis’ first novel and very early on he was armed with a powerful vocabulary, along with the ability to put words well and together. More importantly, he had a grand, accurate notion of how it is to be Nineteen Years Old. Aside from the natural self-obsession of teenagers on zits and things, here are three more things to describe the protagonist, Charles Highway:

(a) "the big thing about me is that I wank a devil of a lot."
(b) He can make a girl bleed out “all dignity in a series of hot, fetid squirts.”
(c) He does research and notes for dates (e.g., sees movies the day before he goes out on a date to see the same movie).

Forgive the misogynist quip, but the NY Times reviewer probably lacked male hormones (i.e., balls) and the resulting similar experiences of embarrassment that came with having a load of those hormones. And it all comes out perfectly funny and entertainingly sexual. To highlight: in pages One Hundred to One Hundred Two, he devotes a full account of snogging. In page Ninety Three he lists Certainties & Absurdities: Anxiety Top Ten. This book is too smart to be the male version of chic-lit.

One of my all-time-favorite movies, The History Boys, comes close to this book. Well, they’re all English teenagers trying to get into Oxford. Except that none of the History Boys employed their intelligence to score. Compared to Charles Highway, the History Boys are all gay and bloody gutless.

Make Out Music Nowadays

It's the end of an era. College kids no longer make out to chillout.

I spotted the band doing a huddle before a set in Saguijo. Their shoulders were and arms were interlocked. Their heads bowed as if in prayer, mumbling something and motivating themselves as though they’re the first five in an Ateneo-La Salle encounter.

There’s not one of them looking like a hipster and when they straightened up, they had that unmistakable, lanky teenage built. Whether it's the tight-fit Lacoste polo shirts or lose-cut pants, whether it’s the skin-pounder’s haircut, the vocalist’s big curly hair, they all end up looking like they can eat double cheeseburgers everyday for breakfast without gaining so much as a pound. And they must be channeling all that lanky teenager, double-cheeseburger energy somewhere. They must be getting a lot. I’m spelling it out, but it could have been the same reason why they call themselves Musical O.

There’s an obvious suggestion in the band’s name, which wonderfully enough – they don’t blatantly cry out in their music. The suggestion they make in their music is fine-tuned and artfully coiled. It’s one that takes some, in Schopenhauerian sense of the phrase - aesthetic contemplation.

Young as they are (and this being their debut album), it sounds parallel to a first experience of, or of a series of memories of the first time of something. This is what I figured out when I aesthetically contemplated Musical O.

Those guitar strings and faint voice start off like the soft bubbles of saliva, simmering in the summer heat, slowly exchanged in the couch. Although the music is clean and the message is clear. They are trying to appear experienced although they obviously don’t have it yet. And that can only be good: music from impressionable young kids with a musical experience that is either untouched or undiluted yet nonetheless talented. It’s honest creativity experimenting, and in a teenage world where everything was exclusively real and good. In itself, the rawness of their real talent is innovating.

This didn't come out in their sucky lyrics (which is all there is to say about it), but in the secret language of very young people, you either understand now, or once understood, what it’s thinly suggesting. It reminds you of your own nature of unsuppressed urges, and when those urges are no longer suppressed something good’s coming out. It’s the suggestive, yet subtle O of this music. Whatever the fuck that means, it made us fumble for something in the bedside and later made us squirt in sensitive places.

If this is a by-product teenage angst, well or unwell, I hope it never pays off. It’s positive. Musical O – may you never get bored and old.

Boring and old me, less my face. The Musical O album is encircled in red.
(This was taken around May this year after we bought the Album at Music One GB3, and stopped for chocolate and cold coffee in a sunny afternoon at the GB5 Max Brenner.)

Writing Unregretful

Only when we have sought it out can we write what is true.

The only time we can write without regret is when we've isolated and reevaluated the impressions we initially construed. Brain waves, if you imagine, are as powerful and loud as thunder and lightning. Writing is a habit of confining the thuds in a quiet zone, where you can have armors dismantled to see what's inside, to hush all that loudness and contemplate it, and then resurrect that sound in writing form.

History was never a matter of reporting the facts and telling the story as-is. Historians have already pre-pondered upon how to weave or treat the fabric of time, distinguish love from infatuation, differentiate a shallow disturbance from a genuine dilemma, and generally account for how an event or a person should be remembered. In looking at what happened in the past, we should be able to explain what we are now. Now that's what's going to happen.



I will not regret what I am about to write now.

If I told this story as-is it would have come out all gooey and chummy like all the parents gushing over their babies. Or maybe even worse. See, I'm more sappy than all the blossoms combined in the garden.

Only that I will not regret writing this now because in the future - I will say it very rarely, if at all, and probably restraining myself at all times. Like my own parents before - this is something that is meant to be demonstrated as opposed to being said.

But you've got to at least say it once, before you may never be able to say it again. We love you, I.

You are your parents' inequitable joy. You're only between 11-12 pounds and around 63 cm in length right now, but you won't be like that for long. Quicker than our heartbeats, you'll grow up and we won't be able to carry you as we do now - like a feather in our arms. Soon enough we we won't be able to hush you too easily when you wail out loud with those quivering lips.

So here we are, in the fifty-fifth day of watching you grow with an out-of-this-world bliss that's countless and unquantifiable. Your mother, quite literally, has never left you, breastfeeding you exclusively and giving you the kind of love that's even more beautiful than romance.

Only in a few months time, you won't be as small. In a year's time, you'll stand on your own. In a few years time, we may not even have the time to write as we busy ourselves with parenting.

The world spins and every thing's transforming and moving so fast so let's remember how it is now. However life transpires, know this: you are our son and will not love you any less than how much we love you now.

However this story goes, we will be home bound.