MQR Blog

Summer Reading: Filipino and Filipino American Fiction

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by Nathan Go

If you’re compiling your list of books to read this summer, below are a few titles by Filipino or Filipino American writers that I heartily recommend. Many of these touch upon the historic relations to Spain and the U.S., and the rather strange amalgam of colonial influences that resulted – as the saying goes, the Philippines spent “three hundred years in the convent and fifty years in Hollywood.”

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Everybody Hates Tourists

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by A.L. Major

I never want to seem like a tourist. I would rather ride the 3 train from 145th street in Manhattan down to Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn before glancing at a subway map or asking for directions from a grim-faced New Yorker who wants nothing to do with me. The first time I went to New York city in twelfth grade, I blushed (as much as my dark skin would permit) when I noticed that my starch-pressed khaki skort and aqua-blue flip flops signaled to New Yorkers my obvious tourist status. I avoided Times Square because tourists congested the sidewalks and snapped photos of the brightly lit billboards. In Ireland, I was the worst tourist I could be: me and forty raucous Vassar College Rugby players. At all hours of the night, we squawked drunkenly, bellowed, jogged through Dublin side streets as if the city was our playground. When I say I dislike being a tourist, I don’t mean to suggest people shouldn’t travel. We should just travel better than we do.

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Dear Claire: One Pen Pal’s Attempt to Reconnect

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by Nathan Go

“When you have pen friends you always feel there are boys and girls abroad who consider you a true friend,” the brochure stated. “In addition to letters, you can also exchange your own drawings, photos, postage stamps, records, etc. Maybe someday you can also visit your long-time pen friend.” I probably convinced my parents that same night (likely by crying) that I, too, needed this service, needed to find this true friend in my life.

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Going To Watch Junkanoo

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by A.L. Major

Every year around Christmas time Bahamians are divided by the Junkanoo groups they support. I was born into a family of Valley Boy supporters, but in theory I could support any of the main competing groups—Valley Boys, One Family, Roots, Saxons, The Music Makers or The Prodigal Sons. These groups practice all year for the Boxing Day and New Year competitive parades. Those used to be the only mornings there were Junkanoo parades, but now there are performances called rush outs every week in Marina Village on Paradise Island and routinely throughout the summer at the Fish Fry, a once cultural landmark now overrun by restaurants that sell syrupy-sweet strawberry daiquiris and bland peas n’rice on Fiestaware. I do want to be, nor do I try to be a cultural snob, but sometimes I do wonder if anything can belong to a country that shares and bends its land and people so often for the benefit of others. I wonder at one point does the culture become something else entirely, simply a shadow of its former self.

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Future Dreaming: Mariko Mori Rebirth at the Royal Academy

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by Nicholas Johnson

Mariko Mori’s multifaceted body of work stems from a yet more expansive imagination. Mori strives to show us a glimpse of a world that could have been transmitted from a distant future. Mori showed in London, 14 years ago and her vision aligned with video games, escapist manga culture and the digital aesthetic of an emerging generation. Today her work imagines a world where science and spirituality fuse with biology and technology. We get a rickety draft of future possibilities from an iridescent, alien world.

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Thaw

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by Claire Skinner

How hard it’s been, winter. Putting on our hats and coats and long-johns and gloves and scarves and mittens. Paying the heating bill. Slipping on black ice. Trudging to work before the half-hearted sun comes up. Of course, there have been some pleasures (full moons over snow, red wine), but, by March, aren’t we through with all that? Aren’t we ready for something else entirely: some softening, some respite, some real warmth?

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An Aggregated Equality

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by Greg Schutz

Thomas Jefferson, remix artist? Well, yes. Fragmentation and recombination are natural features—and unavoidable consequences—of language use, and the Declaration of Independence is a remarkable remix of ideas, a crosshatch of interconnected and often competing influences. What might an investigation of the Declaration tell us about the internet, Reality Hunger, and collage as a literary form?

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You Are How You Think

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by Greg Schutz

“Character is action.” “You are what you do.” These adages are behaviorist: they imply that identity is reducible to externally observable data. They argue that the question of who we are—always the topic, in some sense, of literary fiction—is answerable in terms of the impact our actions have on the world around us. Like the ubiquitous Show, don’t tell, they take a common problem and offers an overcorrection. They advise us to steer into the skid of interiority, bringing the story out of a character’s mind and into the external narrative world. Furthermore, such thinking is corrosive to the very moments in literature I find most compelling, moving, and meaningful. They repress the particular species of felt experience I hunger for as a reader, and which I seek to capture in my own work.

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