The Kobayashi Maru of Love for the broken-hearted

Pop quiz: Your girlfriend of two years dumps you. What do you do? A. Retreat to your room for three months, emerging occasionally to play Rock Band and drink at your safe haven where there's no risk of running into anyone you'd have to put on a happy facade for. B. Attempt to meet girls at the bookstore, where you can "filter through the girls, not only by looks, but by the kind of books that they like." C. Write like the Energizer bunny and come up with words enough to fill a book, which you then publish under a title that appeals to Trekkies and saps alike, though the two aren't mutually exclusive. The cliche, of course, would be to hole up in bed for a while, a box of tissues, chocolate, or both at hand. Eventually someone better comes along and you repeat the whole relationship cycle - or maybe you find "the one" and end up at the altar, end credits roll. But this is real life, and in real life Carljoe Javier, 29, did all of the above. Of course, Carl is not your usual post-breakup specimen. After all, he's an editor for the Metakritiko section of the Philippine Online Chronicles - and being a critic in this country is not easily brushed aside. Carljoe calls himself a literary mercenary, which means he makes a living from writing and researching for commissioned books. But Carljoe is an accomplished writer himself, a fellow of the Dumaguete National Writers' Workshop (2003), UP National Writers' Workshop (2005), and the UP Advanced Writers' Workshop (2009). Although he's still trying to finish his MA in Creative Writing from UP, he's been busy. His first book, And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, was published by Milflores in 2009. His second book, Geek Tragedies, will be published by the UP Press. In the meantime, Carljoe has successfully self-published his latest work, The Kobayashi Maru of Love.

I learned about the book launch on Facebook, as my news feed informed me that several of my friends would be attending. I had just seen Carljoe give a presentation at Pecha Kucha Night, and I was intrigued by what he had said in his less than seven-minute presentation. "My girlfriend dumped me, so I started dating and tried to figure things out. Over the course of 8 months or so I managed to write so many words about it," he said. I was also charmed by his t-shirt design, which was based on the very popular and probably misunderstood Che Guevarra design. "Maybe they'll wear a shirt of me even if they don't know who I am," he said. I'd complained about the shirt a few times myself, but I'd never have the guts to parody it. I'd heard of Carl before, in my Creative Non-Fiction classes, though we were never classmates. For the confused, or curious, the term Creative Non-Fiction is a slippery term. In terms of tone, it distinguishes the work as personal rather than academic, thus giving the reader an idea of what or what not to expect. In any case, the collection of essays that became And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth falls rather neatly into the category, and was cited several times as an example of good creative non-fiction. As for The Kobayashi Maru of Love, it's evidently non-fiction, and as Carl himself puts it, he wrote it because he felt bad about things. "The Kobayashi Maru was the test that no one was meant to pass in Star Trek. I recently went through a bad break-up and I thought, if there’s something that geeks are supposed to be bad at, it’s the whole love game," Carljoe said in an interview by Avalon.ph. While I was trying to find the venue Ilyong's, I pondered why the invite claimed the event was non-pretentious. I arrived a bit late, worried about having missed something. It turned out there was nothing to worry about - being a non-pretentious book launch, there was no program. A table was set up with copies of Carljoe's books and merchandise (a pixel art tote bag and t-shirt), and a few posters were plastered on the windows. Other than that, the only telltale sign that this was a book launch was the fact that, as Joel Toledo observed, practically everyone in the literary scene under 50 was there. "You go to a book launch, and you'll have a program, and the people sitting near the stage, they'll be listening and everybody else will be talking and ignoring the program," explained Carljoe, who just bypassed the whole ignoring thing and got people together. "It's a grand party," he concludes, as fellow writer Rafael San Diego begins singing Sweet Child of Mine from inside. The levels of conversation are directly proportional to the free-flowing alcohol, and every corner of the room is filled with energy that's usually reserved for weekends. It's late and Carljoe has to mingle, but he sits down for a while to answer my questions, none of which I'm quite sure of. The Kobayashi Maru of Love began simply enough. While the rest of the nation was mourning Cory, Carljoe was mourning something else, and writing what became the book's middle section. Ending it was a different story though. "It wasn't actually a situation where I felt okay tapos na," he said. He had been giving the work as it came along to Adam David, the book designer and his writing buddy. "(Adam) said, 'Dude, umabot na ng 20,000 pages 'yun.' And I was still holding out for like, an ending, something to complete that arc, girlfriend na bago," Carljoe said. "That, you know, didn't happen. And I got around to just thinking that that's not really what the ending should be anyway. And then I read over it after Adam said so and I said, 'Oo nga 'no, this works as it is.'" And what about the middle? Apart from being able to get it all out, The Kobayashi Maru of Love was also fulfilling for Carljoe in terms of his career. He tells me that he had always wanted to self-publish, but there was the stereotype of vanity publishing. The assumption, as he put it, is that "you're publishing yourself ‘cause no one else will publish you 'cause you suck." He says that although he loves Milflores, his first publisher, there is the paradigm of publishers not really paying that well. Also, he felt there were certain markets that weren't being reached. "They were reaching big bookstores - National, Powerbooks. They had that. But the smaller bookstores were where my possible readers were going. So I thought maybe there's an opportunity to explore that." While having a publisher means a lot less work, he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the process. He tells me that he's selling the book out of his backpack, and it was really nice to have a hand in the design. "This is my first work where I get to decide everything. I love the cover of my first book by Electrolychee, but Adam and I have been working together for years," he said, recalling how they sat around thinking of different ideas for the art before finally settling on the design. "And then (Adam) says 'I think I've got it and you will like it and it's weird that I didn't think of it sooner' and I opened up my Facebook cause he's tagged it and this is it, it's the one. It's exactly what we're going for." From time to time people arrive, or leave, and the interview transcript begins to include things like "Sorry, tape recorder!" and "Oooohh, what's that for?" It's almost midnight but no one is drunk, not quite yet, but everyone is happily intoxicated. It's a great party, indeed, and it's strange to think that this was the same place Carljoe retreated to months before. Ilyong's, which is two doors away from Adam's house, became his safe haven in the last year, when he got broken up with, quit his job, and kind of locked himself in his room for three months. "It's a nice respite, because you know, if I go to Cubao X, or Magnet, if I wanna be like, crappy and sad I can do it with my friends. But if you run into people na gigimik lang, they don’t wanna hang out with a crappy sad dude." He seems to have done rather well, and if his life plan goes accordingly, we can expect to see him come out with a book every year for five years. His second book, Geek Tragedies is a short story collection, and he plans a book of criticism for his fourth book. The Kobayashi Maru of Love is an attempt to express something that "a lot of guys don't really say, but they feel or think." He tells me that Katrina Santiago, who wrote the afterword, said the general feeling of the book is natatawa o napapailing. "So, may emotional effect, which I'm happy for," he says. Carljoe, who grew up in Glendale, California and moved to the Philippines as a 14-year old, tells me he wants to chronicle the immigrant experience, only in reverse. "All these people documenting the immigrant experience to America, I want to write something about being in America then coming back," he says. He tells me he has no plans of leaving. "So much crap happens here but I'm not leaving this country as long as I can survive, kasi pinag-aral ako ng UP at may utang ako sa bayan." I ask him if writing is his way of paying that debt, and though he says it isn't, not really, his books are a pretty great contribution to Filipiniana shelves. I ask him to answer the question he wishes someone would ask him, and after a while he tells me he doesn't really get asked where he is in his writing career. "Everyone assumes that I'm fine. My answer is I don't know and I like not knowing," he says. He rattles off some writers he admires -- his mentors Sir Butch Dalisay, Ma'am Jing Hidalgo, Sir Jimmy Abad. "I would like to reach that kind of stature. I really want to write something like Michael Chabon or Dave Eggers, and Jonathan Safran Foer and Jonathan Lethem," he says. It doesn't seem unlikely that he will, someday. Until then, readers can pick up a copy of And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth at bookstores, or The Kobayashi Maru of Love at http://www.avalon.ph, or through the author's Facebook account. Whether or not you'll read it, he wants people to buy it because it's still a form of support. He says, "If they read it, great. I mean, first step they buy it, yay! Second step, they read it, yay! Third step, they... like it?" - YA, GMANews.TV