Van Choojitarom’s blog entries aren’t reportage or opinions. They also aren’t really flash fiction, lyric essays, good-idea graveyards (though he once documented his best ideas and informed us why they never caught on), or alternative models for publishing. They aren’t even steps up from dining-room-table publication.
In fact, I have to ask: what are they? I’ve never read anything else online quite like their weird mishmash: their sense of a variety of busy fictional lives, grand conceptions, fussy analyses, and horror stories half-related in haste.
Adding to the writerly myth is Choojitarom’s repeated pulling up of stakes. His first internet tent was The Encouraging Voice of the Labyrinth, which began as the production blog for his never-completed movie (El Minotaur Blanco, “a Godardian Western with a breakdancing robot”), but which turned into lies “from the fifth word onwards.” He’s sequentially kept four blogs and now writes from Thailand (see below), where he’s studying to ordain as a Buddhist monk.
So, today I’m a blogger talking to a blogger. We chatted over email; our edited conversation, interrupted by links to his work, will be spread over my next two posts.
If “fiction,” “blog,” or “lyric essay” are insufficient (and they are) to contain your work, invent a genre that can.
My parents love EPCOT center so much, I basically grew up there. The reason I enjoyed these trips, and the reason I still do, is I would sort of daydream in my head using all the rides as different sets and then try and tie them together in a grand narrative: “We flew a rocket to Mars“ and it looked just like the canals in Venice where we had lunch. Then we went to the robot dinosaur park.”
I really wish there were a super genre, some overarching plan that linked my jokey essays, Poe pastiches, Spinozist detective stories, Kantian science fiction stories, attempts to get laid and make a movie, French homework and extremely short werewolf narratives into a cohesive whole. I would simply nominate the whole as some new genre, only I suspect there is a difference between a genre and that warehouse on the edge of town run by that guy with the necklace of human ears that when they shut it down they had to call the Park Service, Customs, NASA, the FBI and the EPA.
So my work is basically “Dadaist Realism.”
Celebrity on the 10^-6 Scale
It Is Impossible to Become Enlightened in Bangkok
So after you started your blog, why move three times?
After keeping The Encouraging Voice for nearly two years, I finally had a chance to return to the University of Chicago (a great school, particularly for students that excel when there is someone to shoot at them every minute of their lives) to complete my undergraduate degree. I had no idea how much time I would have to write about something other than Wittgenstein, so I freed my minotaur and started a new blog, La Phoenix Rouge. That blog barely squeaked by and I ended up posting my French homework to keep it going. I started At the Sign of the Yellow Sphinx after I graduated; it was always intended to cover exactly one year, the period I was living as an upasaka or lay volunteer at a Buddhist monastery.
This month, I started a new blog, Naak Leuuap, to cover another one-year period, this one during my first year living in Thailand, after which I will ordain as a Buddhist monk (the word for naga or serpent, naak, is also a term for someone who’s about to ordain, and leuuap, can mean the color metallic blue or a glance to the side). One of the inconveniences of being alive is it is relatively more difficult to say where one’s breaks and periods begin and end.
Major Gif: His Adventures in the Public Domain
More Death on the Installment Plan
If you fled after tomorrow’s tragic fire, what books would you either snatch from your shelf and stuff in your bag or express-mail to yourself to stuff in a bag?
The answer is, of course, Philosophical Investigations and is Mr. Bear a book?
The funny thing about this question is that it’s fun to think about, because it has symbolic meaning for you, but the actual answer in practice turns out to be completely different. This is one of the reasons the end of the world will be extremely disappointing and confusing to a lot of people. After moving to Thailand, it turns out the book I really need is Expression and the Inner by David Finkelstein.
El Minotaur Blanco: The Wrap Party
What I Did This Summer (N.B. for the faint of heart: “I” is not Van Choojitarom)
What’s the last fiction you read and loved?
Last summer I picked up Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors. It’s a delicately lurid and grotesque little book with about as much plausibility and logic as a copy of Penthouse Forum, and enjoyable in about the same way. No one will ever be any better for having read it and that makes it really lovable.
Since moving to Thailand I also discovered Chart Korbjitti. An Ordinary Story explains a lot of Bangkok and aspects of the Thai people pretty well.
Is the short story a form that an author can use to precisely describe the world? Or is it an artificial thing which it’s worthwhile to make more artificial? Or both?
This question really gets at the heart of my conflicts as a writer. Which is interesting, because it’s not a problem for me philosophically, but rather as a person who has been trying to figure out the dialectic between imagination and reality lifelong.
I’ve never been one to write about things as a journalist. A lot of my pleasure in writing consists in making stuff up. Most of my life I daydreamed nearly constantly; not only did I have to keep playing until the story got where it was supposed to go, I couldn’t stop playing until the end credits and music had finished. I always resist putting away all these pleasing things in favor of having to take in some external hostile reality, whose only appeal lies in the fact it’s actually there.
At the same time, the imagination is as much as a trap. It doesn’t want to let you go either.
Fiction is a system of representation: a picture. Our pictures are things in the world. They do not have any kind of magical mimetic relationship with other things in the world, any more than a shoe print has a magical mimetic relationship to a shoe. In other words, there is no invisible occult process by which our pictures approximate the world; in order for them to do this, they would have to have some privileged access to the world from outside it, but they don’t: they are just objects inside it.
We, of course, made these pictures, and what makes them a good or bad picture, aesthetically, isn’t separate from the world in which they were created or what they are pictures of.
So. More from my conversation with Van Choojitarom next week. Readers: find Van Choojitarom (and me) a friend. Who else blogs literature online? Have you come across other writers working in this fiction-project-strange-non-expository-prose-essay milieu? Leave a comment!