Creative and diverse through the years
If it were a dish, ‘Anatomy of a Crazy Book’ by Jesus Saplala would be a buffet of different cuisines
Several months ago, I received a text message from an old advertising colleague requesting me to be one of the endorsers for his forthcoming book. Knowing his outstanding credentials (he was a former English professor and newspaper columnist), I readily said yes, but when I asked him for the general topic of his book, he said he would just send me the final manuscript because the book contained different topics and was not easy to describe. To add to my curiosity, its title was “Anatomy of a Crazy Book.”
When I received the manuscript via email, I immediately realized that it was indeed a challenge to write an appropriate “blurb” in a few concise phrases.
Having known Jesus “Jess” Saplala for many years, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the wide diversity of topics he tackled in his book. His was a long and checkered career both as a professional and an entrepreneur, having ventured into unrelated fields, as long as they posed a challenge to his creative drive. A brief look at his diverse ventures gives a clue to his motivation to write a “crazy” book.
After earning his BA in English, he set out for a career in journalism and promptly got his first job as cub reporter-proofreader for a major afternoon daily. But a traumatic, nearly fatal experience on the street on his way home from his nightly graveyard shift made him resign from the paper. We see him next as a sales representative of an oil company. This too was cut short when he got the “pink slip” for organizing a labor union for his fellow salespersons.
Personally meaningful
He then entered the world of advertising, where he worked his way up in various positions, the last one as vice president in my then start-up ad agency. But somewhere in between jobs, he was also attracted to the food industry, and he put up a restaurant and a bread distribution business, which he confesses he knew nothing about initially, but in which he was successful for a spell.
Saplala then returned to the world of advertising, but this time as the founder of Well Advertising and Marketing Agency Inc. It was through this company that he put up the first overseas office of a Filipino ad agency in the US territory of Guam. The Guam office operated successfully for many years.
Interestingly, during his long career in business, Saplala did not abandon his love for English, his major in college. He taught English for nine years at a Manila university, and found time to write weekly columns for the former Daily Express (“Ad Infinitum”) and the Cebu Sun Star (“The Grammar Cop”). To cap it off, he continued to hone his English writing and speaking skills as a member, and later president, of a local chapter of Toastmasters International.
Throughout all these professional and business undertakings and up to the present, Saplala’s focus on profound spirituality and religious commitment never took a backseat. This is why a large part of his book delves deeply into this personally meaningful topic for him. A noteworthy example of his religious devotion was his vow, as an accomplished violinist, to play his musical instrument every Good Friday at the “Stabat Mater” Holy Week procession in his hometown of Sta. Rita in Pampanga. He did this for 57 straight years.
I thought that it was only through some familiarity with the author’s diverse background that one can fully appreciate the multifarious topics in his “crazy” book, which I have referred to as “strange bedfellows” in my endorsement statement or blurb. The book itself actually reflects the breadth and depth of author Saplala’s interest in specific aspects of the human journey which have significantly influenced his own life.
Wealth of experience
What ties the book together is the author’s accumulated wealth of experience—expressed in learnings, insights and curated literary pieces (both prose and verse) and more than a dash of humor—which has stimulated and spurred his creativity over many years.
The resulting output ranges from the humanly inspirational to the spiritually edifying, from essential management principles and practices to the idiosyncrasies of the English language, from humorous anecdotes and one-liners to the sharing of wisdom by great spiritual and historical figures. All these virtually make the book a portable mini-library which the author has intentionally designed to inform, inspire and entertain the reader in a variety of interesting ways any time as he goes through his day.
To give an idea of the book’s “strange bedfellows,” here are the titles of the 13 widely diverse chapters, the contents of which I will leave to the prospective reader to discover for himself/herself: “Inspirationals,” “Laughter is Still the Cheapest Medicine,” “Causerie with the Author,” “Memory Bank,” “Websterian Scramble,” “One-liners,” “Management,” “Grammar Trivia,” “Crazy English Language,” “From the Phrase Collector’s Trove,” “Selected Posts by the Author,” “Beyond Earthly Life” and “Miracles of the Galilean Messiah.”
As I said in the beginning, this work defies description in the usual fashion. The best way I can categorize it, in culinary terms, is that it is not a single dish but a sumptuous buffet—of different cuisines at that. If this has sufficiently confused you or piqued your interest, it will be launched on Aug. 11 and will be available thereafter.
And as the exclamation point to this unusual undertaking, the author says that all the sales proceeds of the book— from its launch to the last copy sold—will be donated to two religious congregations as part of his spiritual advocacy: the Missionaries of Jesus and the Trimtarian Nuns.
It should be great fun dissecting the “Anatomy of a Crazy Book.”