Current mood:

busy

Excuse.
Writers - budding, middle-class, city-based, and reasonably talented - often fall to the trap of what Edel Garcellano calls "individualistic excess and atavistic rhetorics of transcendentalism" precisely because of the allure of the establishment. Akin to the art for art's sake versus social relevance debate which reverberated in the UP College of Arts and Letters during the time of SP Lopez, such can be traceable to the dismantlement of the Soviet empire after the end of the Cold War and the ascension of a new US-led global order and by condition Western liberal democracy.

The ensuing cultural imperialism, or soft imperialism as termed by more mainstream historians, resulted in the normalization of otherwise stupefying acts - this author writing better English than Filipino, for instance. The triumph of American-style monopoly capitalism has, in fact, raised generation upon generation of writers that readily succumbed to producing literature that Garcellano posits as merely "an affirmation of the world outside the orthodox determination of class."

It is easy to understand, therefore, how the Palanca winners throughout the years reverberate with such petite bourgeoisie thematic because - let's face it - it is so much easier and much more convenient to just dwell on such safe and agonizingly middle-class topics: family, commuting, existential angst, teenage boredom, alongside a token mention of a number of relevant social issues to dodge any bullets from so-called nationalist critics.

In short, hindi ako nakapag-submit ng Palanca entry this year. Sorry, Maro.