Jose Rizal's 147th Birthday--Singapore Style

I posted this somewhere else weeks ago with the intention of reposting it here right away. But you know how things sometimes happen and one gets caught up and forgets about what she's supposed to do. Here it is, anyway--a couple of weeks later:
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Ok, a disclaimer before I begin: I don't normally celebrate Jose Rizal's birthday. (Nothing wrong in celebrating it, but I just didn't get around to doing it, I suppose. Hehe.) The title is too good to pass up, however, because the day, 19 June, Rizal's birthday, actually began with a lecture about Jose Rizal (delivered by foremost Rizal historian Ambeth Ocampo) and his trips to Singapore. It was followed by the unveiling of a Jose Rizal Marker by the Singapore River in honor of these trips.



The lecture was both fun and insightful and taught me a number of new things about Jose Rizal, the most interesting of which for me was how he visited the Botanic Gardens every time he set foot in Singapore. (I say 'set foot' because in his last visit here, he was a prisoner already meant for execution in Manila, so he wasn't able to get off the ship.) I found it interesting in the sense that the Botanic Gardens is still very much around, and I haven't been there. I suppose knowing Rizal went back to visit it several times has given me an incentive to finally visit and walk the very same path Rizal did--and maybe see for myself what it was about the place that had so captivated Rizal. The unveiling was uneventful, though I thought it was a bit of a thrill to see the President of Singapore, S.R. Nathan, there.


It was a really nice day for an unveiling. It was sunny and breezy. I also thought the location of the marker was perfect. I could imagine Rizal sitting in that same spot by the river, either lost in thought or writing compulsively.






Originally, the lecture/unveiling was supposed to be followed by a night-out with friends, but they couldn't make it, because they couldn't get out of work (again! hmph!). Not to be deterred, Fama and I decided to go ahead with our plans. Reservations had been made, and it was, after all, Jose Rizal's birthday. :) We had a(n unexpectedly) good (even great) pizza and pasta dinner at Pasta Fresca Da Salvatore at Boat Quay. The four cheese pizza with parma harma was absolutely delicious, and so was the pasta marinara in white wine.



Not sure about the other stuff in the menu, but these two were good. It was a bit of a surprise for us, because many of the Italian places we'd tried here weren't really that good. Or at least, what they offered didn't really match our expectations.

After dinner, we walked around the area and took lots of pictures. We needed to walk off all the carbo we ingested in preparation for what was to come.





Next stop was what I'd been dreaming of for some while now: the chocolate buffet at The Courtyard of the Fullerton Hotel. Upon seeing the chocolate fountain, I knew I was in chocolate heaven.




I totally enjoyed the Fullerton chocolate cake and the chocolate-coated strawberries. There were lots of goodies, of course, but these two were the best. Well, there was also the cranberry pudding with chocolate cream sauce. And the chocolate and vanilla creme brulee. And the... Oh, ok, you get my drift.


I know it seemed like at this point we had forgotten about Jose Rizal, but not really. Because when we tasted the hot chocolate that capped off our chocolate feast, we immediately started talking about Rizal and his 'tsokolate eh' and 'tsokolate ah'. We definitely had 'tsokolate eh' that night and ended the day with Rizal in mind.

Remembering Robert and his 7 standards of textuality

I found out tonight that Robert de Beaugrande passed away a few days ago. I don't know him personally, of course, and he's not exactly one of the critics/theorists whose works I've been reading (and going crazy over, both in a good and/or bad way) for the past few years. He, however, holds a special place in my linguistic education.

I suppose I owe my knowledge of de Beaugrande first and foremost to Ubaldo Stecconi, the teacher who introduced de Beaugrande's work to me. I have to admit, I didn't quite understand what it was about at that time. I remember getting a photocopy of some text, which seemed more like an outline to me than an essay. It was talking about the seven standards of textuality. (If you clicked on the link and went as far as Chapter 1, which was the chapter given to us, then you can see what I mean. I believe the online copy is exactly the same as my photocopy; only it was reformatted for online consumption.) All I knew was I liked the notion of 'intertextuality', the seventh and the last standard, a lot, though I'm quite sure I didn't quite grasp what it really meant.

I thought part of the reason I couldn't get it was the text itself. It didn't seem reader-friendly. Another reason could be that I was perhaps too distracted by our teacher, Ubaldo Stecconi, who would go to class with shirt unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up, complaining of the heat in this strange yet charming Italian accent, and who would look at your face so intently you'd forget he was your teacher. Or I thought it had to do with my not getting Ferdinand de Saussure. Before de Beaugrande, Stecconi made us read parts of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. I read about the train arriving at the same time every day on that same platform. To the passenger, it was the same train, but really, it was not the same train. I read about the chain of signification and binary oppositions, and the world tilted a little bit and I was lost. (Little did I know back then that things were bound to become even more complicated. Had I known, I wouldn't have complained so much.)

Much later, when I had discovered discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, when discourse had begun to hold such fascination for me, I realized the reason I couldn't get de Beaugrande before was simple: I wasn't ready. It was the first semester of my sophomore year. During my first year, I did all GE courses. The only core course I had taken was English 100, and I took it during the summer. And English 100 was an introductory course. It was basically a smorgasbord of linguistic theories and things ranging from phonology to morphology to syntax to semantics--but never really reaching discourse. Back then, there was no discourse analysis class, and discourse didn't really mean anything much.

Of course, many of the issues that de Beaugrande raised in his text linguistics are problematic in today's context. (As I said, things just become more and more complicated as you go along.) But to me, his work remains a very good introduction to the study of discourse and will be useful to anyone who's interested in studying it. I remember the fun my students and I had, when in teaching de Beaugrande's standards of textuality, I made them analyze Jose Garcia Villa's 'The Emperor's New Clothes' and 'The Bashful One' using these standards. Imagine a blank page with only the title 'The Emperor's New Clothes' or some squiggly mark hiding on the page and proclaiming itself a poem called 'The Bashful One'. It doesn't even have to be literary. It can be a commonplace sign, just like what de Beaugrande used:

SLOW
CHILDREN
AT PLAY

According to his obituary, de Beaugrande had a flamboyant personality. Of course, I didn't know that about him. What I know though is this: his is the first work that made me realize language can be analyzed as discourse--as one whole chunk of something--and in a way that is somewhat systematic and according to certain criteria. Yes, I'd been doing it long before, in literature classes, for one. I'd been doing it with friends and loved ones, even strangers, deciphering meanings from one conversation to the next. But within linguistics, then it would have to be him.