11 May 2003

Lunch was pho from Pho-Hoa Noodle Soup. I think it's a chain restaurant originating from Southern California. The #17 pho was excellent. Good beef broth. The noodles and soup were piping hot. It had the right mix of spices/salt. The exciting part was the tripe that was thinkly sliced to form a netlike structure. The cartilage was nice and tender but had texture. You can feel your teeth sink into the cartilage but you did not have to fight the cartilage so that pieces of it went between your teeth.

A bonus side was the blended avocado with tapioca pearls. The pearls are soft and very pliable in texture. Not like the Filipino sago which is firm and hard like a nut. The other way in which tapioca pearls are served is by adding the pearls in a milk base with some powder to taste. Thus, you can have almond tapioca pearls, strawberry, etc, etc.

I just bought a book by Eileen Tabios. By the way, I don't think I ever mentioned who the HermitQueen is. That's Eileen. And King Porcupine is her husband Tom. The porcupine refers to the porcupine perched on the top of the front doors of Galatea estate.

I always found HermitQueen's poems a little bit inaccessible. Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole is the first book of poetry I read from HQ and it is not the best one to start with if you are a rank amateur like me. I believe that it's been two years since I first saw HQ's poetry and it is only in the last six months that I have attempted once more to examine the content.

A great help however was the book Ecstatic Mutations. Specifically, the introduction by Leny Strobel was excellent in helping address the question of "How does a Filipino find a connection with a Filipina-American writing non-narrative poetry, and non-Filipino subjects?" This is the kernel that I have been wrestling with the last two months. After all, HermitQueen is the quintessential role model for Pin@ys. Yet, her work remains like smoke. You know it is present, but you can not grasp it.

Since our dear reader will most likely go to a bookstore and buy Eileen's book, I will not belabor the point. Suffice it to say that Lenny has thrown me a salbadida so that I can now seek and search for my connection with HermitQueen's poetry.