Long may your galaxies explode

Early in the morning of April Fools Day 10 years ago, the Faculty Center on the UP Diliman campus burned down. It was a tragedy of no small measure: years, even decades of notes, books, paintings, annotations in long-forgotten bluebooks in the rooms of university professors lost to the blaze, drawing a crowd of nearby residents and insomniacs to stare at the fire as if their whole education was passing before their eyes like so much ember.

Before the smoke could disperse, tributes and requiems were already being written for the FC, as Diliman students called it then, the three-story white sandwich building resembling an inipit and on whose walkway leading to the former College of Arts and Sciences building witnessed many a eureka moment for those waiting for class cards, a book launch, or quick rendezvous or reunion with the old barakada.

And rightfully so, because the memory of that dawn fire on campus still smolders a decade later, and little did the upstart publishing house Exploding Galaxies know that their initial catalogue of reprinting lost classics of Philippine literature effectively tries to retrieve some books lost to the fire, including an adjunct library of the National Artist Franz Arcellana donated just months prior in an effort to clear the old homestead: US army pocketbooks bought in PX stores during teaching stints at the bases, some original first edition copies from writer friends and students, prints and drawings and sundry artworks that inhabited his former room 1074 where in the desk’s bottom drawer there was always a bottle of brandy for sustenance.

That’s just a fraction of what went up in smoke, but in truth whatever was lost might be found again courtesy of Exploding Galaxies’ reprints and repackaging such cult favorites as Wilfrido Nolledo’s But For the Lovers, Linda Ty-Casper’s Three-Cornered Sun, Erwin Castillo’s The Firewalkers with the novella The Watch of La Diane, Doreen Fernandez’s culinary tour of Filipino culture Lasa and Sarap, the latter with her fellow literary chronicler Edilberto Alegre. Forthcoming is a reprint of Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, with introductions by the kumpadres Franz Arcellana and Nick Joaquin, and it was in fact in room 1074 where Yuson dropped by one morning to ask his former humanities professor if he would like to do the intro to his first novel.

As if that weren’t enough, Exploding Galaxies has come up with side projects, i.e. the e.g. journal, described as “off-cuts, miscellany, and explorations,” the first number of which features the works of novelist Glenn Diaz and artist Lesley-Anne Cao and bearing the theme Neighborhoods; also the anthology launched just last March with works including but not limited to Angelo Lacuesta and Charlie Samuya Veric.

e.g. journal and e.g. anthology in particular are welcome additions in the current literary landscape that has lately suffered a dearth of publications in which writers can show their stuff, this time augmented by artwork by another up-and-coming painter, illustrator, or conceptual installation artist; you can’t box them, neither the art nor the sample prose. They may well represent what could have been the natural progression of Philippine literature had the conflagration not forced a detour, but here you are with the next generation fine as ever, what doesn’t burn you can only make you stronger.