Rizal

Happy birthday to Jose Rizal, Philippine national hero, whose brief, passionate, and ultimately tragic narrative still lives on 147 years after his birth.

Above are a few Rizal themed events.* And below is a glimpse of indie filmmaker Khavn de la Cruz's Rizal-steeped Ultimo.

Rizal -- whom in death still remains the life of the party.

*Thanks to erasmusa for links to the Philippine events!

Inverted telescope

"I did not find a good name for this experience till almost a quarter of a century later, when I was in the Philippines and teaching myself to read Spanish by stumbling through Jose Rizal's extraordinary nationalist novel Noli Me Tangere. There is a dizzying moment early in the narrative when the young mestizo hero, recently returned to the colonial Manila of the 1880s from a long sojourn in Europe, looks out of his carriage window at the municipal botanical gardens, and finds that he too is, so to speak, at the end of an inverted telescope. These gardens are shadowed automatically -- Rizal says maquinalmente -- and inescapably by images of their sister gardens in Europe. 

"He can no longer matter-of-factly experience them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar. The novelist arrestingly names the agent of this incurable doubled vision el demonio de las comparaciones...the spectre of comparisons."

-- Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons (1998: 2)