AT THE STOA

by Marc Oliver Pasco      This is a story about a goat named Ram.  One day, Ram was walking along a field when he met another goat.      He asked the goat, "Hey. What's your name?"        The other goat replied, "My name is Nick.  Are you a goat?"        Ram was confused. He said, "No, I'm Ram. What's a goat?"      "Well," Nick said, "I'm a goat. And you look like me.  So you must also be a goat."      "No, I'm Ram," Ram said. "And I'm white.  You're brown.  So I can't be a goat."      "Where do you live?" Nick asked Ram. "I haven't seen you around here before."      "I live on the other side of the road," Ram replied. "I came here because I was hungry."      "Oh, okay." Nick said. "Maybe we can look for some grass to eat."       So off they walked to find food.  They found ...

I love Tuesdays for the simple reason that during them I have neither work nor class.  Granted that being a university lecturer makes you take home some of the work, during most Tuesdays I am neither a student nor a lecturer.  The entire day is mine, and entirely at my lazy mercy.  I can walk around the house with just knickers and fluffy slippers on, and go the entire day without wearing glasses or eating proper food or brushing my teeth until I fall asleep from the sheer effort of being unemployed for a day.  Tuesdays are priceless. Recently I have taken to making a pig of myself and a piggery of the bedroom in front of the technological sty that is the television, but sometimes I spend it in the other room, which for lack of a better word and better furniture I will call the "den with a work space in at the other end." My appreciation for Tuesday starts on the Monday afternoon, after leaving work, and I proceed to appreciate the vacancy of my remaining thir...

Friday.  My sister texted me that she was in Taguig, so off we went, in a cab.  She wanted company while waiting for my brother-in-law to finish a two-hour meeting, I think.  And so, according to how these things go in this mega-city, of course the trip took two hours. So all four of us just went to a rooftop bar and looked at the mall's giant dandelion installations, those that light up in time with music.  The effect was beautiful; and it's really something to see at night. I imagine that during daytime it'll just look like protruding lollipops made of plastic bottles littered around grass.  We traded stories over beer (and one mango shake with no milk, please), watched the giant dandelions some more, and went our separate ways.  It was a good night: my sister and I haven't seen each other in a while, and we went to Fully Booked after saying goodbye and bought the absurdly thick paperback of Batman Eternal . Come Sunday and at the invitation of our de...

When I read The Killing Joke  last year (I am quite new to the comic book genre, yes), I appreciated how writers, like Alan Moore, can substantiate a character who, up until then, I didn't give a second thought about.  That was partly because I didn't take reading comics seriously, and partly because I didn't read comics. Fast forward to a year later and I was well into reading some of the more well-known collected story arcs released by DC within the last decade.  There was no system to my reading, however: I just picked up stand-alone works I found lying around the house, or I just downloaded something people would recommend.  To lend a sort of system to my reading, I did what any novice, who just happened to be undergoing some sort of mid-life crisis, would do: search the internet for the Top Ten Batman and Joker anything.  The anachronism of my reading was not lost to me, and half of the time I spent searching through stuff I already downloaded in ...

I was in my second year in high school when someone from I forgot where delivered a lecture about Wasted by Gerry Alanguilan for something I forgot.  Apparently, the only thing that stuck with me was this comic, which I purchased shortly after this person talked about it.  I'm sorry I don't remember her, I would have thanked her for the recommendation. I was very impressed with the thing.  The entire thing - the drawings, the lines, the characters, the story - all these impressed me.  I'd like to think that being an impressionable and inevitably miserable teenager didn't have anything to do with it, although that was arguable.  At any rate,  it was vastly different from the Archie  and the  Funny Komiks  I grew up reading (though I was reading mostly prose in those days, and I was still wondering whether any book can match To Kill a Mockingbird ).  Now and then I could borrow Pugad Baboy  from one of my schoolmates or ...

We went to the mall in the middle of the day, not really expecting the number of people pressed along an extremely long line going from the venue entrance to the mall stairwell about fifty feet away. Having given up on the ridiculous queue, we wandered around to where, like pockets of colorful, geographically-misplaced surprises, some individuals were displaying their cosplay costumes.  According to the event  site , the Philippine ToyCon "is Asia's biggest and longest running convention for collectibles, toys, anime, comics, cosplay, gaming and anything and everything related to hobbies and collections."  It seems that anime costumes at a toy convention makes some sort of sense, to the convention-starved middle classes of the Philippines. The lower classes are just starving, and the upper classes hold toy conventions.  I did not have time to pursue this line of speculation, however, since I was busy trying to imagine myself in a Sephiroth costume.  I had to ...

Perhaps I am reading the wrong sort of books. Only a less sane person can even contemplate that, and a far lesser one to actually see the sense of that contemplation.  I, however, am the sort of person who sees the same thing in the books that I read, who lays over them a veneer of my own character, stifling them even before they can truly teach  me anything.  But then what it is that they can truly teach me would have been lost to me.  I will still be laying that veneer if I attempted to answer that question, anyway.  It is perhaps creditable to my dominance over anything I come across, a dominance built on instability and misplaced passion, like a youth overcompensating for his awkwardness by being too passionate, too loud, in the perfectly wrong circumstance.  I seem to be doomed to be this awkward youth, regardless of how many books I – rightly or wrongly – read. Give me an Irving, or more recently, a Bellow; give me Camus or a Pratchett, it is...

It's the second time that I will have read this book, having underappreciated it the first time.  I find that there are some books which takes a while to lovingly thwack you in the face, sometimes waiting for a precise moment in your life to do it.  And, having done that, these books stay with you for a long, long time. Vanishing and Other Stories  by Deborah Willis is very aptly titled, and leaves you with a  slightly haunted feeling of having lost something solid of yourself in its pages.  You feel you are all of the characters inside these stories, while denying that same confession to the world, lest you lose more.  Among other things, the book speaks of a writer whose vanishing from his blameless family becomes, inexplicably, the cleverest thing he ever did.  A city girl who will no longer sleep over her only friend's house after, again quite inexplicably, sleeping with her aging cowboy of a father.  A recent widower whose life, and that of...

It was a windy day, with the sun out and the rains happily blessing places somewhere else.  They tell me Lake Caliraya is a man-made lake, and, being inept at both geology and engineering I could only gulp amazement.  We noticed the soil was moist and rich, keeping with the story that the Americans dammed an existing river somewhere in the area and allowed the water - and the seeded fish population - to flourish. Run by very hospitable people and a happily energetic dog (that grew larger than its city-dwelling brothers), the resort in which our party stayed sits atop a slope spotted with a curious mix of trees.  There were cypresses, and pine trees - the kind which grow in Baguio, and a host of other trees I cannot identify.  Some of them are flowering, even - what I thought was an overfed giant of a beetle turned out to be a bumblebee enjoying blooms, or perhaps terrorizing small birds.    The resort also offered water sports activities and...

I chose to pursue graduate studies at this time for several reasons.  First, having spent more or less a decade teaching, I realize that the learning I get from attending seminars and updating my reading materials is to a large extent different from the breadth and depth I would get should I return to being a student.  We are all perpetual students should we so choose, yes, but the learning you acquire on your own (or even with a mentor) is limited to what you have been trained to accept as credible or acceptable – at most times you fit what you learn and read into the suit of your own understanding, being a mild Procrustes of sorts; whereas learning in a classroom environment, with a full-blooded instructor in front of you propelled by the winds of discourse trains the mind to stretch itself in its own framework and standards of acceptance – you learn that the suit of your own understanding is part of a bigger wardrobe.   I need to learn, and learn as a student, not as ...

It's good to get away from the heat during this here summer, although it is only during summer that the light can be like this.  It reminds me of golden melting things, if only because I am drenched with sweat while walking through everywhere. Even strange subjects take on a particularly bright, sinister, or otherwise surreal light - making an uncertain smile play along the corner of my lips, which later on evaporates from my face as the temperature gets the best of me.  Neither the smile nor the slight irritation takes much. We go up to Baguio for the second year in a row, feeling a bit of respite from the heat and blinding light, to see sights and places lit up differently, though no less brightly. I could go on and on about the difference, and the sameness, but at the end of the day, it's always good to be back home. Home always has a different light -  We played games, and celebrated friends.  It was a happy...

As you see, the past three posts before this one have been sketches.  Well, I call them "sketches," but they're really papers for my graduate courses.  I post them for two reasons: one, to help those who are cramming for their own papers, and two, this is the nearest I can get to a vanity publication. Because I have been in Baguio for a week, I will resort to writing and posting pictures of what happened to Pasco and me there; but since it is dawn I will do that tomorrow.

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr...