Geronimo Cristobal

  • Constantin Brancusi exhibition at the Pompidou

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    Constantin Brancusi, born in Romania in 1876, in a village in the foothills of the Carpathians, had left his homeland in 1904 and had come to Paris via Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Zurich. He was a gifted sculptor, even before he arrived in the artists’ colony on Montparnasse. Auguste Rodin became aware of him and…

  • The dialectic of creative renewal

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    Under the motto: “Burning Down The House”, the 10th Gwangju Biennale manages the balancing act between memory and the future Men and women in white dresses and black blindfolds are crossing a public square. They carry dark-veiled boxes with the bones of their relatives. Silently they deposit the mortal remains in two rusty steel containers…

  • The disappearance of the future from pop culture

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    About Mark Fisher’s essay collection “Ghosts of my Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures “This is nowhere, and it’s forever.” The sentence quoted by British cultural journalist and theorist Mark Fisher on the first pages of his essay collection Ghosts of my Life from a BBC science fiction series describes the perspective of…

  • Maria Ressa temporarily arrested, again

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    Journalist Maria Ressa reports critically on the drug war of President Rodrigo Duterte. The authorities accuse her of slander as specified. The government-critical Filipino journalist Maria Ressa has been temporarily arrested six weeks after her release. “I’m being treated like a criminal, even though my only crime is to be an independent journalist,” Ressa told…

  • Romero Barragan: Beyond Representation

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    Traces of the everyday On the surface of the series Destinations, a red line on the black-and-white copy of a city map runs through several streets on the bottom right. Which city is it? Is this the documentation of a mental walk or was the path actually taken? If yes, in a rush or during a leisurely…

  • A New Prince Must Rise

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    Review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s ‘Assembly’ It’s all a question of assembly: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri know how really productive work can break the common good. Yes, they did it again: after “Empire”, “Multitude” and “Common Wealth”, now comes “Assembly”, the latest delivery in the series of subversive feel-good books from H…

  • Elena Ferrante’s Naples Tetralogy

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    From the chaos of history (n) and of life, literature extracts its own world – a formed, an ordered world? And what does this world have to do with that life? An old question that has always been answered, weighted and interpreted again and again. In Elena Ferrante’s “saga” about the narrator Elena Greco, who…

  • The Young T.S. Eliot and Alien Cultures: His Philippine Interactions

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    Tatsushi Narita Article originally published in The Review of English Studies, Vol. 45, No. 180 (Nov., 1994), pp. 523-525 IN recent years, cross-cultural matters have been rapidly increasing in importance as one of the new key concepts for interpreting the socio-cultural complex. It would be worth while accordingly to seek to re-evaluate one of the…

  • Sweet Caress (William Boyd, 2016)

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    British author William Boyd writes about the fictive photographer Amory Clay. She manages a photo agency in Paris during the Second World War and moves to Germany with the Allies. But what the heroine thinks about her profession does not go beyond truisms. The British writer William Boyd is a prolific writer. His 15 novels…

  • Gramsci and Bordieu on the critique of power

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    Similarities and Differences in the Critiques of Power by Gramsci and Bourdieu The following text examines the convergences and divergences in the thinking of Antonio Gramsci and another major theorist of power: the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who died on January 23, 2002. Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu “If Gramsci was too optimistic about questioning…

  • The Buru Quartet (Pramoedya Ananta Toer 1980-1988)

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    The Buru Quartet refers to the the volumes Bumi Manusia (“This Earth of Mankind”, 1980) , Anak Semua Bangsa (“Child of All Nations”, 1980), Jejak Langkah (“Footsteps”, 1985) and Rumah Kaca (“Glass House “, 1988). The books were banned by the regime of long time Indonesian president Suharto and his successor B.J. Habibie. The ban…

  • Literate Gangsters

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    “BY NIGHT IN CHILE” is another novel discovery by the great Chilean author Roberto Bolaño A mediocre Chilean poet, far more famous as a literary critic and priest, is dying. All his life he had been alone, Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix writes. He then proceeds to a monolithic paragraph of his laborious justification, in which it…

  • Sister Stella L. (Mike De Leon, 1984)

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    Enlightenment is not a badge, but a wound. Mike De Leon tells of the transformation of a charity worker nun into a politically active front-line soldier. Mike De Leon is next to Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal in the line of master directors of the second golden age of Filipino cinema. Compared to his colleagues,…

  • Borlonganesque

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    Elmer Borlongan’s Extraordinary Eye for the Ordinary Elmer Borlongan’s mid-career retrospective held on his 50th birthday at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila establishes him as the essential post-EDSA artist: an artist painting in the veristic sociocritical vein of the 90s, but who, with the downfall of the Marcoses, finds himself with no one to rebel…

  • La Mujer Filipina allegedly by Felix Hidalgo

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    Some doubts have been casts on the authenticity of a Felix Hidalgo painting which was sold by auction recently. FÉLIX RESURRECCIÓN HIDALGO Y PADILLA (Filipinas, 1855 – España, 1913). “Nativa Filipina”. Óleo sobre lienzo. The most common misgivings are that the painting did not seem to conform to the fashion style of the period when…

  • Protected: Illustrado (Miguel Syjuco 2008)

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  • Protected: Overview of four novels by Lazaro Francisco

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  • Protected: Noli me tangere (Jose Rizal, Penguin 2015)

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  • Protected: Shorelands (Marc Gaba, 2016)

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  • Protected: This Craft, as with a Woman Loved: Selected Poems (Artemio Tadena, 2016)

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  • Protected: A Bruise of Ashes (Carlos Angeles, 1993)

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  • Protected: Galaw ng Asoge (Cirilo Bautisa, 2005)

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  • Protected: Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Jacques Ranciere, 2013)

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  • Unknown University (Roberto Bolaño, 2013)

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    Roberto Bolaño, in several interviews, confesses that his entrance to literature was through writing opoetry. In his books of pose and in his novels we find recurrent lyrical figures, who plot below the main story a pictorial, sensitive substory, which woul condense in the image of the Unknown University, a nightmare enclosure frozen in the…

  • Beauty is a wound (Eka Kurniawan, 2015)

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    Hi style is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and William Faulkner, says the New York Times Book Review. “Beauty is a Wound” by Eka Kurniawan is a wild and rousing nightmare about Indonesia’s recent history. Eka Kurniawan, born 1975 in West Java, is not only novelist, screenwriter and blogger, but also comic artist. And you…

  • The Kingdom of this World (Alejo Carpentier, 2007)

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    The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) tells of the slave revolts in the Antilles during the French Revolution. Led by Macandal, a black man who can take the form of various animals, the slaves, headed by the bird-man Ti Noel, fight for their freedom; they pit their their belief on miracles and magic against the…

  • Culture of Death in Yukio Mishima’s Novels

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    Portrait of a Japanese eccentric and poet and suicide victim, Yukio Mishima In the morning of November 25, 1970, dressed in a theatrical fantasy uniform and accompanied by four cadets of his theatrical fantasy private army, he captured the Commander of Japanese Civil Defense. He ordered that the soldiers of the 32nd Regiment should sit in…

  • TRANSLATION: Ang Makina ni Mang Turing (Ramon Guillermo, 2013)

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      The following is an excerpt of an unauthorized translation into English of the first few pages of the debut novel by esteemed Filipino professor and writer Ramon Guillermo. A full translation of the novel was proposed for the American Literary Translators Association Conference in 2015. The Machine of Mang Turing A Novel by Ramon…

  • Ilaw Sa Hilaga (Lazaro Francisco, 1980)

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    The novel, Ilaw sa Hilaga (Northern Lights) was originally published  as “Bayang Nagpatiwakal” in 1931. It depicts the 1920s, during the American colonial period in the Philippines. By this time, the war for independence which started in 1896 had already subsided and the colony had entered into a delicate period of peace time. There is…

  • Piercing (Ryu Murakami, 2009)

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    A novel about the interactions of sex that is powerfully repulsive and captivating at the same time In Japan and the English-speaking world, Ryu Murakami first became known with his novel “Coin Locker Babies” (1980). In it he describes the life of two boys who were exposed in locker rooms in infancy and grew up…