Sunday, October 05, 2008 Covington: Looking and learning By Gary Covington Looking in
DID you see the ads in the press the other day for grandparents' day? Truth to tell I didn't realize there was a grandparents' day, or maybe it's just an adman's ploy to sell more stuff. Coming soon: second cousins' day, absent uncles' day, half brothers' day and here's something else I didn't know -- Barack Obama has a half brother living in sunny Nairobi, Kenya.
I learnt this from a feature in Sun.Star Weekend. Barack's dad obviously got around, sowing a few wild oats, but the article didn't tell us much more as God stepped in at around paragraph six and out went an interesting feature and in came the weekend's Godbothering. Next feature please.
Sunday is also Dagmay day, a page from the city's literati introducing Dabawenyo writing talent and, I suspect, an attempt to educate literary thugs like myself.
I always read Dagmay's page and usually, generally, harrumph into my beard and move on to something more digestible. Lately though Dagmay has become a tad more accessible by offering more down to earth fare.
The first piece to catch my eye, some weeks ago, was "Davao - A view" written by Liu Bao, a foreign student at the Ateneo de Davao University. We're not told which bit of foreign Liu comes from -- Vietnam -- nor if Liu is a he or she and nor does the author's gender come across in the writing. But look at the faultless English -- probably a second or third language -- and look at the style.
Liu is writing about one of my favorite topics -- life on the roads -- and yet I couldn't have written Liu's piece. Mine would have ended up as a negative, sarcastic, look-at-these-fools screed. Liu has taken a positive view and turned in a light-hearted, informative and, above all, entertaining piece; a piece we'd find (with like illustrations) in an airline or traveler's mag.
Gentle humor is exceedingly difficult to write, far harder than the laugh out loud variety. I can't do it; I wish I could.
The next week Dagmay again veered off course and gave us a short item about "An English painter in Davao, 1934" written by Aussi artist Tony Twigg.
I love shorts like this. Not long enough to bore; just the right length to pique the interest. I'll generally go off to learn a little more -- a looking and learning which is addictive and the reason why, at used-book sales, I'll come away with an armful of annuals -- hardback collections of articles and features culled from this or that magazine.
Much of the content, especially in the North American mags, will be tales of the huntin' and fishin' variety and the style, by today's standards, pedestrian. Press on though as I have recently with a 1950s selection from the Denver Post's Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine (They don't name them like that anymore!).
I thought about skipping through my favorite pieces -- parachuting firefighters, a new to me Western novelist (Bill Raine) -- but instead leave it to Palmer Hoyt, the then publisher of the Denver Post, who wrote in his 1950 introduction, "Here is the story of one of the West's most dramatic train bandits who is now peacefully operating a Wyoming tourist resort. There are tales of a tiny narrow-gauge locomotive which should have hit the scrap heap in 1900 but lasted long enough to haul material for the atom bomb; the strange legend of the last of the Texas longhorns; a trip with today's diesel giants hauling freight over the Continental Divide where wolves chase the trucks at an altitude of twelve thousand feet."
You folks who play with your cellphones all day don't know what you're missing.
