Arts and Letters and Calligraphy
October 25, 2008
[note from YLB: before anything else, would like to make three observations, in no particular order: first, kudos to the posts made by YoungShi the last few days (entitled Insignificance and Extended Family) not only for their literary and aesthetic value (which are not mutually exclusive) but also for the feedback they generate. In themselves they are no mean feat, for they are "significant" (to use his word) slices of his inner self, his family life, and his worldview. Each of which, alone, would take a huge enough effort and guts, let alone three.
Secondly I am currently using a PC that has, after a very amateurish virus scan, defrag, and decreased resolution, still let me down as regards speed and efficiency. Not one to mince words, I will go so far as to label this beast of burden as alternatively suffering paranoid schizophrenia episodes or mulitple personality issues. Sometimes it allows me to run multiple sites at a time (Yahoo!, Y!M, Chikka and dizzler.com, dazzling me with multi-tasking frenzy) other times, its ONE WORD A MINUTE, literally driving me to tears ("Papa, bakit ang bagal mo magreply, naglalaba ka ba??").
Our IT stalwarts (led by YoungShi and Cathy V) offer invaluable advice, but sadly, Totoy Compaq may have to go under the knife soon. Lastly ( haaay... dba 3 observations nga?? ) i would like to go off-tangent on Kuya D's previous post and comment on how two individuals chose to make themselves "significant" and try to make our beautiful world even better , and have become icons of our time. It's just too bad, in the case of John Lennon & Michael Jackson, that their imperfections have become very public and, for normal persons, very abnormal. It would not be so tragic if their flaws did not fall so far "left field" from their public personas of kindness, advocacy for universal peace, and love for children (no irony lost there). I for one, only last month, would have kept the preeminent Beatle as my Top Five Most Admired of our generation, if not for those latest revelations made re his personal life. If we could reduce their situations into a sound bite, probably it would be a little like this: we can choose to be significant in the face we show publicly, but this significance (and necessarily decency) should extend to our private life too. ]
Previously we mentioned that sometimes a scent or odor randomly experienced is enough to generate a flood of memories. In this case its not a very pleasant smell, but a little wheat soaked for a few days was enough to remind us of mo zhi. Does anyone remember that? it was usually stored in small lite blue bottles with black caps, into which we would dip our mao pi, often frayed and overused and with which we would write on ta khai for our weekly calligraphy assignments.
Often, our submissions were mediocre, but very rarely, a chamba of one or two cutely written words would bring a small smile (from pursed lips) from Lin Lao Shi, probably the only Chinese teacher who was crush material . We think the teacher would recognize degrees of difficulty or give extra marks for more complicated words, and only the batchmates who were already recognized for superior calligraphy were allowed to evolve their own styles, like Toto, Henry Ty or Feli. In all, it was easy to conclude that Shu Fa was, far from being an exact science, often an art form , depending on the discerning eye of the beholder.
Also memorable was the inevitable scene of catchup from procrastination over the weekend, with classmates using the cabinet counters (at the far end of the classroom) as writing surfaces Monday mornings with hurriedly produced mao pis, inks, and ta khai,
dali na, patutuyuin pa sila 
Ho vs bo ho vs ya ho
Which brought us back even further to the time when we wrote Chinese words stroke by stroke on writing notebooks in preschool. This we did religiously as homework, supervised by our kuya or yaya, and for which we would be rewarded by hao and hen hao rubber stamp marks. For the fair and awful work , we would get pu hen hao, pu hao and pu ta hao rebukes, sometimes supplemented with exclamation points and crying faces. Needless to say, we often saw tearful smileys and pu ta haos on our dog-eared kuaderno.
In K1 or K2, we remember a classmate named Benedict who despite all the efforts to correct it, held the pencil with a fist, and insisted that such a writing technique was normal to him.
Our own writing style was less than classic, to Ms Ylagan's dismay. Instead of holding the pencil between the fingers we wedged the pencil between the ring finger and the thumb. To this day we have the callus on the wrong finger to show our grandkids as a bad example.
Are those what the red lines are for?
Until Grade four, we normally wrote shaky script, which was probably the result of efforts to copy the models on top of the black board; we also took a little more time to realize that the red line between the two blue lines was more than to make the color scheme prettier, and never bothered to fit the lower case letters below the red line; this was also why we welcomed the all blue "intermediate" notebooks and pads; admittedly, our handwriting has always been larger than average.
Between Grades 3 and 5 we remember a classmate (who will remain unnamed) who wrote irregularly shaped letters, extremely close to each other. All his lines of writing also slanted to the left instead of right, which was the normal direction. So we counted ourselves lucky with our handwriting.
Batchmates with beautiful handwriting:
YoungTang, Kat Woman, Jo Nolasco, Kathy Ang, Cathy Lim (hmmm... 3 Cathys) and
Queen Hedy. Im sure there were many others. The only two male kabatch we remember with flowing script are
Henry and
Toto. Well, on the bare stats we can see that by their nature and personality, girls' writing is easier on the eyes than those of their counterparts. ( Easier to copy, for sure.
)
Life Imitates Art Imitates Life
In Gr. 1, we remember Xu (Pinyin of Co) Lao Shi pleasantly surprised by our use of a variety of crayons in our drawing. probably to hide our lack of aptitude, we used all colors of the rainbow to draw the square-and-triangle house, and probably more out of encouragement than anything, gave us an 80% for our very first art grade. That was to be the high point of our artistic career.
In later grades, we always started our mei shu hour with unbridled optimism: the Oslo paper, Staedtler HB6 pencil, and the confidence in the teacher's attitude that we assumed would be enough for us to draw, with nuances of light and shadow, symmetery and form, the perfect dish of fruit.
Well, before the hour ended, we would have done better if we just had stick figures and smiley faces to draw art with, heh, heh. It didnt help that our artistically inclined classmates, like Amado Cobankiat, Feli Tan were drawing Rennaissance like likenesses of the fruit dish. But it we always marveled on how a lead pencil and a talented hand could create so much beauty in 60 mins.
We vaguely remember using water-color and pastel inks in occasional art classes sometime in Grades 4 to 6, but as we all know, in Ycaza, academics was king (or queen). It was probably the rarest situation where creativity in whatever form would be encouraged.
Thanks for the memories.
(PS. "Arts and Letters" refers more properly to the "soft sciences" like the Humanities and Languages; "Letters" particularly to Literature and related stuff. I just thought it would be a nice title. What are your arts and letters memories?)