Tag: Ricardo de Ungria

Editor's Note on "Jonathan"

Editor's Note by | January 17, 2010

In the June 28, 2009 issue, a short story titled “Jonathan” by Jeff Javier was published in DAGMAY by editor Vanessa Doctor. Then on Dec. 13, 2009, I also published a slightly different version of “Jonathan” but credited to Laverne de la Cruz. I asked the two authors for clarification but only Mr. Javier replied.

It is now clear to me that

(1) the story “Jonathan” is authored by Mr. Javier;

(2) the June 9 version is the second version while the Dec. 13 version was the first draft, as explained by Mr. Javier;

(3) the story is a “spinoff” from “Christine” by Lilledeshan Bose (which begins, “Everybody has a girlfriend named Christine. Kris, Christy, Tin-Tin/ Ina Christina, Tina, Kat, Trina.”) which is the second part of her “Break-Up Stories”;

(4) Mr. Javier had sent me almost a year ago the first version together with a poem written “after Laverne de la Cruz”; and

(5) somehow in my previous shuffling of pieces while doing editorial work for DAGMAY, the byline of Ms. de la Cruz got appended to that “Jonathan” version in my file that I inadvertently published in December last year as a work by Laverne de la Cruz.

No wonder she has not replied to my email—there was no need to reply. The error was wholly mine and it was unintended and not meant to malign the reputations of Mr. Javier and Ms. de la Cruz. My apologies therefore to Jeff and Laverne for the mistake. Ricardo de Ungria

The Book, the True, and the Beautiful

Nonfiction by | October 5, 2008

(Excerpt from Keynote Speech delivered during the Gintong Aklat Awards 2008, SMEX Convention Center, Bay Area, Pasay City)

Recent events in our history, specifically in the past twenty years or so, have more than less convinced me that ours is a culture not of ideas and intellection but of emotions, hints, and suspicions. Our predilection is for the unsaid or the merely implied, the shadowy and adumbrated, the peripheral and the underground as appropriate instruments to counter what has been perceived as the given brutality of power and force exercised by the few oligarchs and pseudo-monarchs in appropriate political positions. The dynamics in our culture is such that there seems to be always an agon between the outer and the inner, between the overt and the secret, the official and the unofficial, mainstream and underground—with the outer and overt and official conceived of as tyrannically powerful and repressive, and the inner and secret and unofficial wielded as a submissive and abiding force whose time will eventually come. Continue reading The Book, the True, and the Beautiful