Projects for the new year
This coming June will be the 60th anniversary of my Harvard graduating class. There, at our reunion in Cambridge MA, Susana and I hope to see f2f and embrace classmates that I have seen recently only by Zoom, including in our weekly gatherings hosted and organized by classmate Kent Garrett, author of a very good book about our class, The Last Negroes ar Harvard. Here is what I’ve written for the 60th anniversary report, which may serve as a notice of what I intend for the new year.
In my essay for our 50th anniversary report, I wrote: “Now that I’m operating from an ideal place to work, with good collegial relations and greater experience and confidence in my skills, I expect to have more works worth reading to share with you before our Sixtieth Class Reunion.”
And indeed, I recently completed and saw published my latest novel, Rabble! A Story of the Paris Commune (Troubador Publishing, U.K., 2021). This was the culmination of a project that I had been thinking and writing about since my Harvard years. It is my attempt to understand, through fiction, the origin and development of a social movement to transform society, and how their involvement in it transforms the actors, here (in Rabble!) two teenage workers, a boy and a girl, committed to the struggle to the point of risking their lives to make the world more just.
And now, still pursuing my exploration of this revolutionary dynamic and to better understand how we got to where we are now, a multipolar world with class, national, racial, and religious conflicts constantly generating rebel movements, I will be writing about the post Paris Commune stage of revolutionary struggle centered in the German-speaking world.
As for that “ideal place to work,” it continues to be our home designed by my long-time life-partner, architect Susana Torre, in southeastern Spain on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. We hope some of you may visit us here.
Previous New Year’s reflections:
2020.01.18 What sort of poem? This sort.
2019.01.01 The journey continues
2018.01.01 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
2017.01.03 Stepping back to charge forward
2016.01.29 Where I’m going and why: progress report
2015.12.31 Shazam! for the New Year
2015.01.06 Historical fiction: impossible and necessary
2014.01.05 Wien, auf wiedersehen!
2013.12.20 Happy holidays! Feeling sad and depressed?
2012.12.17 Momentous minutiae
2012.01.04 War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
2011.01.08 Olives for breakfast, rockin’ in Syntagma, reading in Istanbul