(Welcome, cont.)
In Soliloquies of My Old Man..., the meaning of what we call "history" is examined in a rather lengthy set of soliloquies about a little green book entitled "A Child's History of England". You'll find it interesting mainly because of the attention it calls to indistinction between what is commonly taken as fact and our often lofty opinions about it; and because the protagonist accuses most recorded history of suffering the taint of deliberate propaganda, it offers an explaination of sorts for why there will (or ought always to be) a crowned head in England, something no other writer has dared explain.
The God gene (of Jean) is really a spoof on the old arguments about who and what is God! Through the medium of an omniscient narration, we discover an intuitive "blitzkrieg" - the storm of an idea - in this case, the very idea of God. Jean comes to her astounding conclusion that God is a gene in the human Genome while soaking in a bathtub full of tepid water. It brings her to her feet, so to speak. And then, in sharing this peculiar insight with her boss, a computer guru at Harvard, she discovers far more about human nature than she'd ever imagined. In his own wisdom, her boss decides to escalate - that God merely "communicates" through this gene, hence Jean's God gene acquires ambiguity. I dearly love my oldest daughter, upon whom this character is modelled, odd ideas and all. I hope you like it.
The fourth story is called a A Rotten Catholic, and was originally drafted as the core of my new novel, "At The End Of Things" (which I expected to publish next year. I think instead I'm going to serialize it, right here, in my "webworks".) Forgetting the title, the main thing about it is that it invents a bit of history about Ernest Hemingway's maternal grandfather (and my own.)
But speaking of that, as we go on I will be working here too on a libretto for a musical drama based on Hemingway's first novel, "The Sun Also Rises". Can this be done? Wait and see.
