Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, cultural politics, film, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, and related subjects.

Movie Times by Isagani R. Cruz is an analysis of films in the Philippines. The TU Library owns a number of books about the cinema of the Philippines.

Dr. Isagani R. Cruz is Professor Emeritus of Literature in the College of Liberal Arts, De La Salle University (DLSU) a private Catholic research university located on Taft Avenue, Malate, Manila, Philippines.

Born in 1945, Dr. Cruz has served as President of The Manila Times College, the first mass media institution in the Philippines to support a three-year baccalaureate program of higher education. He has also served as Undersecretary (Deputy Minister) of Education in the Philippines.

Dr. Cruz earned his undergraduate degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he completed a bachelor of science degree in Physics. He later enrolled at the Ateneo de Manila University to earn a master of arts in English Literature. He also earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Maryland, the United States of America (USA).

Dr. Cruz has published more than thirty books which are available to TU students from the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service. Dr. Cruz is also well known as a reviewer of film and drama.

Interesting publications

Among interesting research articles by Dr. Cruz is a study of the fiction of Arturo B. Rotor (1907 –1988), a Filipino medical doctor, civil servant, musician, and writer. Also shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library is another book donated by Ajarn Charnvit and Professor Benedict Anderson, of Philippine Short Stories 1925-1940.

This book contains a story by Arturo B. Rotor, who attended the University of the Philippines for musical and medical studies before pursuing further training at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

In addition to his other interests, Dr. Rotor was an orchid breeder and longtime member of the Philippine Orchid Society. An orchid species was named in his honor, Vanda merillii var. rotorii.

Dr. Cruz’s article, Illusion and the Inner Cell: A Critical Analysis of the Later Stories of Arturo B. Rotor, was published in Philippine Studies in October 1970. As its website indicates,

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints is an internationally refereed journal that publishes scholarly articles and other materials on the history of the Philippines and its peoples, both in the homeland and overseas. It believes the past is illuminated by historians as well as scholars from other disciplines; at the same time, it prefers ethnographic approaches to the history of the present. It welcomes works that are theoretically informed but not encumbered by jargon. It promotes a comparative and transnational sensibility, and seeks to engage scholars who may not be specialists on the Philippines. Founded in 1953 as Philippine Studies, the journal is published quarterly by the Ateneo de Manila University.

Dr. Cruz writes about the conflict between a medical career and literary aspirations in the life of Dr. Rotor:

Rotor did not stop writing for lack of talent nor for lack of opportunity. He stopped writing because he wanted to, because he could not reconcile in himself the artist and the doctor, the man looking and the man experiencing. “When I entered the practice of medicine,” he wrote Alejandro R. Roces in 1957, “I discovered suddenly that I did not possess the vocabulary to record or describe what I saw. I could write vividly enough about characters which existed in my imagination. But when I saw them in my clinic and noted the caught breath or measured the quickening pulse, I found myself inarticulate. I knew then that what I had written before was written neither with understanding nor with compassion.” The practice of medicine, which in the Commonwealth period helped Rotor achieve what A. E. Litiatco described as “not only. . .more individuality in technique but more freshness in material” thus ironically starved the very urge it used to feed. Fortunately for Philippine literature, however, Rotor’s self-evaluation of his stories is, from the point of view of objective critical norms, quite inaccurate. Rotor achieved, in his pre-war stories, something which can be described as good, if not great, literature. And as good literature, Rotor’s stories contain valuable insights into humanity, insights which stem from deep understanding and deep compassion. From a critical examination of his later stories, I shall try to show some of the qualities of Rotor that indicate the depth of the wound he inflicted on Philippine literature when he decided to be silent after his songs.

Thoughts on poetry

In a blog entry from 2007, Dr. Cruz expressed some ideas about poetry in the digital age:

In a digital age (which we still do not know will be labelled by future historians as iron, gold, silver, or brass), is poetry or literature a digital immigrant?…

It is true that many poets are still very much fixated in the 20th century, if not earlier. We still see poetry books published, despite the very low sales of poetry books. We still see poets reciting or performing in poetry jams, in small cafés, in school auditoriums, and places like that.

There are, however, poets that have one foot in the 20th and the other in the 21st: they have blogs, but their blogs feature poems that can be printed out and read, the predigital way.

More important, not all poets today still live in the 20th century. Many poets are very much digital natives, or behave like digital natives. As early as the early 1990s, in Singapore, George P. Landow identified the literary trend that we now call hyperliterature. Hyperliterature now has its own organization (the Electronic Literature Organization), its own scholarly apparatus such as bibliographies (see Landow’s National University of Singapore website), its own journals, conferences, courses, jargon, and so on. It has become, in the predigital sense, established…

What is the virtual universe without poetry? I mean by the word poetry, of course, what the word originally meant in Aristotle’s Poetics, namely, literature, or as it is more fashionably called these days, as popularized by British literature teacher John McRae in his 1991 book, “literature with a small l.”

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)