Maniolas

Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez on Monday admitted that his government found it difficult to explain what a storm surge was to his constituents before Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) ravaged through their area last month. During a post-disaster assessment at the Senate, Romualdez said PAGASA informed the local government of the possibility of massive storm surge due to Yolanda before the typhoon made landfall. He, however, said that local government officials could not explain the storm surge to the public, since they were only used to tsunami warnings. “There was a difficulty in explaining to the public what a storm surge is. We were aware of the height, but not the strength,” Romualdez said. He added that his government was unaware how far the storm surge will go inland. “I just saw that there was no more peninsula. It was already part of the ocean,” he said. Romualdez also turned emotional as he recalled his ordeal during Yolanda’s onslaught. Close to 6,000 individuals have been confirmed dead after Yolanda ripped through central Philippines last month. Tacloban City in Leyte was among the areas worst hit by the typhoon. Some 2.6 million families were affected, and P35.5 billion worth of properties were damaged by the weather disturbance, based on latest government records. — RSJ, GMA News

Now and then I walk my students in Creative Writing through a lesson in description, which — as I’ve often noted in this corner — is at best always more than a rendition of the physical setting and the people and things in it. In the hands of a skilled or a gifted writer, a plain object can acquire a strange and memorable luminosity. Sometimes all it takes is the uncommon but logical and precise choice of a word, such as when William Faulkner describes a campfire as being “shrewd,” struggling and managing to keep alive despite the wind. At other times good description requires the writer to step back and to set things in a larger context, balancing fine detail with the broader sweep of memory and understanding. I don’t even need to draw on the likes of Faulkner or Greg Brillantes or Kerima Polotan to demonstrate what I mean. Take this passage from a story submitted to my fiction class a couple of semesters ago by a young student named Katrina del Rosario, part of a story titled “Paying Respects.” Rather quiet in class, she more than made up for her reticence with this outpouring of brilliant prose: The first Dayaos had been very successful farmers, and the land burst with green and trees and stalks and vines heavy with bright fruit; now only one or two Dayaos farmed the land, with the most magnificent of trees cut down to build houses. The elders remembered entire lives lived Read More …