Villages and Cities

Hello again.

Sorry it's been so long--nearly a month--since I last posted.

Before I get to today's posting, I offer a plug for my sister's recently published book. It Takes The Whole Damn Village by Sandra Barnhouse offers her views on the best way to raise children in our semi-post-industrial society (my term, not hers). I've read a draft copy, and it makes a lot of sense. Her premise: instead of warehousing children in obsolete buildings called "schools," which by and large are a relic of the Industrial Revolution, let's re-integrate them into human society. In her system, every adult in a community is responsible for raising that community's children in such a way that they emerge into adulthood as more fully-realized complete persons than the typical high school graduate is today. People with specialized knowledge or talents would become mentors. Children would still be taught the basics of reading, writing, history, etc., but by adolescence--when their attention is most easily diverted from the task at hand in the current educational system--they'd begin to specialize in what mosts interests them. As a result, they'd naturally be more interested and involved with their own destiny. The transition to adulthood would be far more smooth--people in colleges would no longer behave like 13-year-olds, as they do now (I'm getting really tired of hearing about drinking problems on our college campuses, because it's such an unnecessary waste of human potential). So buy it!

Here's a link: http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=28094

It's cheap at $13.40 (paper only), and with shipping it comes to about twenty bucks.

* * * * * *

Where have I been, you ask? I've been too busy. I've re-discovered my creative muse, in the form of a novel I began writing about seven years ago. For those of you who don't know this work, it began in 1995 (I know, that's ten years ago) as a short story. I was in a creative writing class in college, and the main comment from the instructor was that it was not a short story at all--it was too novelistic. I put it away after that semester, but her comment stayed in my mind.

A few years later, during the summer of 1998, I found myself pulling out that story and trying to figure out what the central character was going to do with his life (not that I could ever relate to that dilemma!). It didn't come easily. His name is Steven Travis Brown, and at the beginning of the story he's two months away from high school graduation. He's gay, and a virgin (this is 1983, light years away from "gay/straight alliances" in schools, XY magazine, etc.--many, perhaps most, gay men of my generation were still virgins at the end of high school). His best friend, Troy, is straight, and Jewish. They live in Houston, and as their parents are well-off, they live in the Memorial neighborhood, a land of tall pine trees and large houses. They attend a school that is based on Kincaid Academy, a prestigious private school (this school is, I'm certain, also the basis for Rushmore Academy, in the film Rushmore--but I had the idea for this school in 1998).

But how trite is that? Very. Gay coming-of-age novels are a dimeadozen. So one summer morning while listening to Broadway showtunes and drinking lots of coffee in front of the computer, it came to me: Steven is an Innocent. He must explore the world, just as that naive Westphalian youth Candide (more like the character in the Leonard Bernstein musical than in the original satire by Voltaire) did. So it became a much larger book: how Steven grows into adulthood over a couple of decades, and bad things befall him, but how he remains ever optimistic even as he learns and suffers.

To make the connection with Candide apparent, I'm setting the story in various locales: Houston/Galveston, Provincetown, New York, Tokyo, London, and New York (and a garden in Montclair, NJ) again at the end.

Just as Candide endures the tribulations of seeing his beloved Cunegonde raped by the Bulgarian army (into which he himself is conscripted); of living through the terrible Lisbon earthquake; of seeing his mentor Dr. Pangloss hanged by the Inquisition; of being reunited with Cunegonde only to discover that she's become a concubine, shared between the Grand Inquisitor and an extremely rich Jew (both of whom he accidentally kills); of being appointed Governor of Montevideo even as the locals rise up in rebellion; of discovering Eldorado, only to be robbed of the riches he brings back by scoundrels he trusts; of pursuing Cunegonde back to Europe--so too must Steven endure having his heart broken by his best friend and by his first love in quick succession; of being sundered from his true love by family politics and Japanese tradition; of seeing his almost-true love killed in front of his eyes in an accident involving London Transport; and of being reunited with childhood friends--including his former best friend Troy--only to see him die in an act of terrorism (yes, that one, and no, I'm not being gratuitous--if and when I ever get this written you'll see that I'm not).

There's a lot more too it, of course--this isn't the Lives and Romances of Steven T. Brown (in fact I don't yet have a title). I'm trying to create a complete portrait of our decadent, affluent, angst-and-anomie-ridden society, just as Voltaire satirized Enlightenment Europe (mine isn't a satire--that's a rare talent). Many characters will suffer and learn, not just the hero.

I hope I'm on the right track now--I threw out much of what I had written in 1998 through 2000 (where I stopped writing until this year, for the most part), and my new prose is much better than the turgid mess of those days, I hope. That there's a new movie called Protocols of Zion that I heard about after I conceived of Troy being killed in the WTC is a good sign. This movie, which is currently just on the coasts (and maybe just NYC), is a documentary about the book Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that famous anti-Semitic forgery that people read to this day and still use to justify their fear and hatred. More importantly, it explores the myth that no Jews died on 9/11--that they had all been warned not to go to work that day--which is utter nonsense. My fictional Troy dies that day, and the final scene of his novel is a memorial service in a garden, bringing the New Candide story to a suitable ending.

If this all sounds like utter nonsense, please tell me. There are times when I feel like I'm no more of an artist than public television's Bob Ross, with his "happy little trees" that he paints faster than Rachael Ray puts together a complete meal. But at other times I cling to the illusion that I'm onto something.

Reminder: do buy my sister's book!