I’ve already decided on the title for my next novel, which I haven’t started writing yet. I’m going to think out loud about it first by writing this preface. I’m still waiting for the “Muse to descend,” by which I mean I’m waiting to hear the voice that I’m going to use to write this one. The literal translation of the Latin Locus Amœnus is “pleasant locale,” but in poetry it refers to that safe haven in the pastoral garden, the center at which everything is beautiful and nothing bad can ever happen. In Ovid and others, however, it is a place of unexpected violence, and maybe, disillusionment. My novel is going to be about life in 21st century U.S.
It will be set in Amenia, a small town in NY whose pastoral beauty is astonishing, as you can see in the “American naive” painting by Tarryl Gabel called Silo Ridge. The locals in this pleasant locale are doing as much as they can to destroy nature as quickly as possible. They work hard at two, and sometimes three, jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of stuff they don’t need, get themselves into debt, and pay their taxes with what’s left over, taxes that go to support foreign undeclared wars and bail out banksters. They don’t hike the gorgeous hills that surround the valley; and they prefer trucked in junk food in the school cafeteria over locally grown vegetables. They encourage their girls to take in as much Disney screen time as possible while their boys train with videos games that make slaughter a form of entertainment.
Not all the locals have traded their souls for conveniences and distractions. I also have friends who are small farmers whose families have been in the valley forever and who labor from sun up to sun down for pennies and haven’t had time to watch television in decades. There is Ingram, who has a leathery face permanently set in a sun-squint grin, and who sells me hay at half the price he does to the weekend equestrians, and Brigit who sells me raw milk, even though farms like hers get raided at gunpoint elsewhere in the country for violating state regulations. The librarian, the postmistress, the man that runs the local coffee shop, and lots of others make living in a small town perfectly Rockwellian, even with its faults.
There is a sometimes scenic, sometimes shady, but always lovely “rail trail” that runs up the valley. It’s owned and maintained by an outside non-profit group. The locals decline to use it, so it’s mostly used by cyclists who come up from the city or Westchester county or by the few who have weekend homes overlooking the pretty valley. The locals hate these people whom they call “citiots,” exhibiting an otherwise unprecedented stroke of cleverness. The local Sheriff’s department acquired two pimped-up ATVs courtesy of the Homeland Security budget to patrol the rail trail, to scare moms behind baby joggers and to harass the slower-moving cyclists.
Second-homeowners employ a good percentage of the people in town–landscapers, carpenters, lawn mowers, snow plowers, pool cleaners, pest control people, window washers, housekeepers, horse trainers, caterers, and tutors–whose own lawns, homes, and families are left unattended. The grand estates wait in pristine readiness for their owners to return while the landscaper’s own vegetable garden is overrun with weeds. There isn’t a local in town who can afford to hire himself. The carpenter’s doors are sagging; tutor’s children are in daycare.
Sometimes I am invited to parties at Dr. S’s house, where I watch my fellow townsmen scurry about with trays and dishes, offering me hors d’oeuvres with a sarcastic smile. Dr. S is a liberal Democrat, owns a 4-million dollar weekend home, used by him and his family about 2 weeks out of the year. Despite Dr. S’s distrust of everyone in government except Barack Obama, he gets all creeped out at the mere suggestion that a few people in, or closely associated with, the government might have done something very wrong on September 11. “No, no, no,” he says waving me away when I talk of the three WTC high rises’ debris falling through steel and concrete as if it were soft butter. ”I don’t want to talk about at that.” He, like many otherwise intelligent Democrats, allow themselves to be fooled by the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. What came before (planes) does not necessarily cause what came after (total, symmetrical collapse at near free-fall speed).
It’s all so absurd this novel ought to be a whopper of a comedy. But I haven’t figured out how to laugh about it yet. There are plenty of inspirational real characters in my town, whose histories bring all the thematic threads together. The VP of the school board got his obscenely obese wife a position in the school making decisions about what the children should eat. He works in Manhattan as a bomb expert, protecting people from imaginary terrorist threats with money from Homeland Security. The PTA President runs a “shopping bazaar” (with cheap items made in China) at the school during Christmas time, teaching the children real meaning of that holy holiday.
When my areospace propulsion engineer friend attended a school board meeting and made a comment about science literacy, the President sarcastically asked him, “So do you think you’re some sort of rock scientist?” He had moved to Amenia after a forced retirement from his University. He had submitted a parodic paper to a science journal suggesting that Southwest Airline’s old commercial airliners, which were about to be retired, might be purchased by the government and used as highly effective weapons to pulverize high-rise structures (and nearby buildings not actually hit by the planes) into dust. In the paper, he demonstrates that the events on 9/11 prove this to be possible, and he concludes that we can stop building conventional bombs altogether, saving tax payers millions of dollars. The paper was accepted and published. He revealed the parody later, but two DARPA-funded scientists wrote articles rejecting his claim that the article was a parody and supporting the old airliner weapon argument in theory, though they both admitted that it was economically impractical.
Okay, although most of the above is true, I am starting to fictionalize a tiny bit. That means the Muse is on her way. Periodically, I will be posting on topics relating to my theme under the category “politics,” and hopefully soon, I’ll start writing.
