Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 13

Journal of a Lockdown, 15 March 2020

The Milkmaid by Vermeer. Reason to live: to see all the Vermeers in museums around the world. (There aren’t many.) On Friday morning I expected silence, but my neighborhood sounded the way it always does—cars and buses, tricycles, voices, music. I looked out the window and people were standing close to each other. Good luck […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 12 March 2020

This is the novel coronavirus, the microorganism that is fucking everything up right now. And this is an illustration of the earth’s internal fires from Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century polymath who is a character in Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll. We knew it was coming. We sensed it in the air that might […]

What I learned from reading about 100 applications to the Fr Irwin Writing Workshop*

*which has been postponed while the Ateneo campus is in lockdown as a COVID-19 prevention measure. NO, WE ARE NOT ACCEPTING MORE APPLICATIONS. 1. People love romantic stories. No problem with that, except that they want to write the same stories over and over and over. I suppose it’s therapy: everyone wants to get over […]

Book review: Deacon King Kong as seen by Girl Leche Flan

Book review by Paula Abjelina It may be strange to find James McBride’s Deacon King Kong comforting. Set in the Cause Houses of 1969 Brooklyn, the novel begins when the local drunk named Sportcoat shoots a teenage drug dealer at close range. Sportcoat, sardonically referred to as Deacon King Kong after the homegrown booze he […]

COVID-19: Don’t panic, but be alert

“Don’t panic” is not the same as “Don’t think about COVID-19.” There’s a good chance that we will all get it. What happens then? From what I understand, it’s like a bad flu and cold. If you’re healthy, it will pass. If you’re not healthy, it could develop into pneumonia or something worse. If you […]

My story for February: Genius and Garbage

Photo by Julius Drost Genius and Garbage: A Testament by Jessica Zafra Venerando Palacios, the Mad Maestro, only made two kinds of movies. The first, works of insane and utter genius, inspired orgasms in asexual cinephiles and baffled moviegoers who tried to make sense of the non-linear narrative. The second united cinephiles and philistines who […]

Greta Gerwig’s vibrant Little Women redeems the novel from romantic triangle hell

I’m giving the Fr Irwin Memorial Lecture at Ateneo on March 3

Chair, get it? Thank you to the Ateneo for this honor. The Department of English, School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University invite you to the Fr. Henry Lee Irwin, SJ Memorial Lecture on March 3, 2020, 5-6:30 p.m., at the Escaler Hall. This year’s lecture is “Manananggal Terrorizes the Ateneo: Fiction vs. the Apocalypse” […]

A visit to the 1900s: The old Tuason house on Arlegui Street

On our way to Divisoria, my friend Tracy, Mother of Cats, took me to see her grandfather’s house on Arlegui Street in Quiapo. The house, built at the turn of the 20th century, sits like a time machine (a very elegant TARDIS) on a crowded street. “Crowded” as in “the Coco Martin TV series Ang […]

Our Bibliophibians book club selection for February is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Our Bibliophibians book club selection for February is The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, a melancholy novel set on an island where things disappear and people are required to forget they ever existed. It’s science-fiction, or is it? The next book club meeting is at 4pm on Saturday, Feb 29 at Tilde Cafe on Matilde […]