By Rommel C. Lontayao, Reporter The Manila Times www.manilatimes.net Vice President Noli de Castro topped the latest survey of likely presidential candidates for the 2010 elections, but former Senate President Manuel Villar Jr. narrowed the gap. In a poll conducted by Pulse Asia from October 14 to 27, some 18 percent of the respondents said de Castro is their first choice as president in the next elections. Villar and former President Joseph Estrada were tied for second, with 17 percent each. And in a bittersweet development for Villar, who resigned as Senate president on Monday (see related front-page story), his popularity surged five percentage points from the last Pulse Asia survey that gave him only 12 percent. Senator Francis Escudero was the fourth-most popular choice with 15 percent, followed by Senator Loren Legarda with 14 percent. The other names picked by respondents include Senator Panfilo Lacson with 7 percent; Senator Manuel Roxas 2nd, 6 percent; and Makati City Mayor J...

Ma'am Liling is right. Every other Tom, Dick and Harry (or Tomasa, Dikya, and Henrietta) has activated his or her youth arm, composed mostly of Sangguniang Kabataan runners. The want to woo the youth vote, but know not what this voting bloc wants, or wishes to have. Barack Obama won because he started a grassroots movement. He thought hard what he wanted to do, and wrote them down in two well-received books. His is a bright mind distilled into wisdom; hope flamed into action. There is no Filipino Barack Obama in sight. None yet. They have to go out of their houses, their cars, their shells, and roam the countryside, talk to the people, there in the grassroots -- where votes cannot be bought, and hopes have been shattered, and the longing for change is keenest. Good luck to us all. *** BY Leonor-Magtolis-Briones The Business of Governance www.abs-cbnNEWS.com The entire world is enthralled with Obama’s victory, including the Philippines. It is reported that in France, the search is ...

BY Danton Remoto Planet English The Business Mirror Front Page November 17, 2008 Doveglion. That was the pseudonym of Jose Garcia Villa, our first National Artist for Literature, who wrote luminous poems in English in the first half of the 20th century. The qualities of the three animals he conflated into one word – Doveglion – and blazoned his poetry as among the century’s best. Penguin Classics has just published the Collected Poems of Garcia Villa, to commemorate his birth centennial. The Pope of Greenwich Village, as Villa was known, belonged to the modern literary giants of the 1950s. This global poet set the standards for fiction and poetry in English in the Philippines, through his yearly list of the best and the worst works, notable for the acidic wit of his annotations. Such iconic American poets like Marianne Moore only had awe “for the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems.” For her part, the grande dame of English poetry, Dame Edit...

BY Danton Remoto Philippines Free Press Magazine On the first day of April, we moved to a row house in a subdivision carved out of the Antipolo hills. A row house is a nice word for houses that somehow managed to fit into 120-square-meter lots. They looked like matchboxes, really, built near the riverbank. The larger houses, of course, stood grandly at the center of the village, in front of the chapel. We’d be renting the house from the mayor’s mistress, one of three houses she owned there. The living room of the house spilled over into the kitchen. The house only had two tiny rooms, but it was enough for us. The owner of the apartment we had been renting in Project 4 wrote to us (in pink stationery with the letterhead “Dr. Antonina Raquiza, Ph. D.”) to say that she’d raise the monthly rent to five thousand. If we couldn’t agree to her new terms, we’d have two months to leave. Mama glared at the letter, then said something obscene about our landlady’s father. A day later, she began ...

Jubilation fills my heart. I just read this news. Chuck Syjuco was in my creative writing classes many moons ago. He just returned from Canada, came from a well-off clan, wanted to know about writing -- and about his country. I fed him books, which he read ravenously, and workshopped his stories over and over and over again. Now he is on the brink of a global writing career. Hooray!!! *** Agence France-Presse First Posted 11:32:00 11/14/2008 www.abs-cbnNEWS.com HONG KONG -- A novel by Filipino author Miguel Syjuco, which touches on 150 years of often turbulent Philippines history, has won a major Asian literary prize, organizers said. Syjuco's "Ilustrado" was awarded the second annual Man Asian Literary Prize, which is open to novels from the region not yet published in English. "Ilustrado seems to us to possess formal ambition, linguistic inventiveness and socio-political insight in the most satisfying measure," the panel of three judges said in a statement, af...

The Senate hearing on Jocjoc Bolante yesterday officially opened the campaign season for the elections of May 2010. Miriam is running for re-election as senator, and has wisely begun to cut off her links with the Arroyo administration -- a sinking ship by any reckoning. She said Bolante's horrible lies almost made her suffer a heart attack. Pia was there too, and shrewdly jogged our memory that she, too, is ever-present and would most certainly run for the senatorial elections. Check out those Downey ads for fabric conditioners. Who funded these ads? Hmmmm. The presidentials were in full fettle and finest form -- media covered Loren Legarda, in a cool, soft blue suit, head tilted at the right camera angle; and Mar Roxas in a well-cut, dark-blue suit, finally asking the tough questions -- in Tagalog. And there were Ping Lacson and also Manny Villar, and the frenzied media that rushed and broke through a glass door in the Senate, and the NGO activists in front of St Luke's Hospit...

I was a Legal Management major who shifted to Interdisciplinary Studies in my third year at the Ateneo. I could not balance the accounting books even if my whole life depended on it. The only thing I wanted to do was to go to the Rizal Library every afternoon, stand in front of the books in the PS 9991 category, and read the books of the best Philippine writers. One day, I told myself, I will also publish my own book. One book would be enough. That semester, I enrolled in a class on Modern Poetry. Our room was on the third floor of Bellarmine Building, 4:30-7:30. The teacher arrived in a brown jacket, his hair tousled by the wind. He was Professor Emmanuel Torres. Before this class, I had read books of essays and fiction, but rarely poetry. I found poems impenetrable. But Professor Torres simply made me see. He had that quality that many English teachers lacked – passion. He was brilliant, of course, but he also had passion for the subject that he was teaching. It was the kind of passi...