The Lost Blog of Don Juan

Would Don Juan be sentenced to death?

Recently when I was in Sevilla showing journalists the world of Don Juan’s Golden Age Spain, we visited one of the most beautiful and dangerous rooms I have seen.  When I was researching the novel, I came across a scholar from the 1800s (the legend of Don Juan has been seducing us for 400 years) who said that Don Juan was an actual man who had lived in Seville, Spain and had been murdered to put an end to his scandalous affairs.  As I traveled to the birthplace of the legend—and possibly the man—I felt like a detective exhuming clues that increasingly revealed who Don Juan really might have been and what really may have happened to him.  My investigation led me to the Real Alcazar and eventually to the Salón de Embajadores (Hall of the Ambassadors), where the King received visitors.

Casanova vs. Don Juan

Who was the greatest lover?  Casanova or Don Juan?  Many people may wonder what was the difference between these two, whose names have become synonymous with seduction and passion?  The difference is simply between life and myth.  Casanova was an actual man whose life sprawled across the eighteenth century as he enjoyed life and women throughout Europe. He was not just a lover, but also a diplomat, a courtier, a writer, a prisoner, and much more.  His life is as interesting for his meetings with Catherine the Great and Rousseau, as much as for his seductions.  His massive multi-volume “History of My Life,” which I cannot claim to have done more than taste, recounts all of his adventures, but in the end it is still the chronicle of one man’s life.  A real life is always limited by the confines and mortality of any human life.  In the case of Don Juan, we do not know if he even existed?  Or whether he was born from the head of Tirso de Molina, the playwright monk, who gave us our first extent story about Don Juan Tenorio.  Even at the time the play was written, there were rumors that it was based on an actual man, and indeed it was an age of Don Juans, so Tirso had many real life galanteadores (seducers) to model his character on.  But Don Juan is not just a man or even just a fictional character.

Six hairs per page & the secret of psychology

Running off to an amusement park with my family this morning, I was told that my mug was on street corners throughout Santa Cruz—not wanted posters fortunately—but on the cover of our local weekly, The Good Times [link].  I knew this was in the works, even jumped a fence with the photographer into the old Santa Cruz mission to get the photo, but I was not quite prepared for the experience of seeing myself staring back at me.  "It’s the Doug Times,” my seven-year-old daughter, who already has a wry sense of humor, announced seeing her father staring back at her, brandishing a sword.

The article announced, “We’ve all heard of the Spanish lover—the man no woman could resist.  But how about Doug Abrams? Heard of him? Find him irresistible?  Maybe you will after reading his sizzling new novel about the great Don Juan.”  Oh, God!  What is this, a personal ad?  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this "sell yourself" stuff—let alone the look at the camera stuff.

Don Juan Travels to Distant Lands

I’ve been working on the website and the foreign editions today. To my amazement The Lost Diary of Don Juan is now being published in twenty-five languages. The embrace of the novel by cultures from Finland to Taiwan and Brazil to Bulgaria has been thrilling. It is no doubt every author’s dream. Getting to meet many of my publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October of 2006 was certainly one of the highlights of my life. (As I stood there at the party looking out at the crowded room I looked back at my journey from a kid with glasses and a reading disability [It was Pepperidge Farm cookies that taught me to read, but that’s another story] to standing in a room with publishers from around the world thanking me for writing the book for the people of Finland, Brazil, etc. It was surreal, and I had to swallow my feelings more than once with a swig of Rioja.

The Cuban Connection: A Don Juan-Grade Hunger for Life

I met with Ariel Coro today, a Cuban internet guru, a Cadillac-sized lost brother, with a Don Juan-grade hunger for life. He reminded me about why America’s greatness depends on our ability to serve as a magnate for those, like him, who are willing to build rafts to come here, to flee the locked door of tyranny, and devour their dreams with a knife and fork. Years ago I went to Stuyvesant High School in New York, and it was there—surrounded by kids getting their families out of Chinatown and Harlem—that I learned what a privilege learning is (after that experience I resented my class mates at Stanford who drank their way through four years of their parents’ money, knowing who else could have taken their seat). When the bell would ring at Stuyvesant, kids would race to the front of the room to sit in desks that had inkwells they were so old. None of it mattered—not the desks, not the pillars in the middle of the gym, not the fact that many kids had to travel for hours each way from the five boroughs to get there (my hour-and-a-half commute by bus and two trains was one of the shorter ones). Sometimes it didn’t matter how burned out the teachers were—although we had some incredible door-openers of the mind, like Frank McCourt (who thank God thought I wrote a decent book; I cried when I read his words about the Lost Diary, thinking that the decades of writing in stolen midnight hours might not have been wasted). Ken Tewel, a great principal said, “At Stuyvesant, we open the door, and get out of the way.” Ariel Coro reminded me of my friends at Stuyvesant—brilliant, incredibly motivated, and growing up fast out of necessity. His stories about getting his mother and himself out of Cuba were moving and inspiring. A man who can build a satellite dish out of rebar and make a raft out of oil drums and a Buick car engine can do anything he wants in life.

Second Post... Testing video

   

So it begins...

This is my first entry for The Lost Blog—a blog devoted to the publication of the The Lost Diary of Don Juan and to exploring this compelling mythic character as well as his Arts of Passion and Arts of Love.

I’m told that blogs must be done daily, but I’m not sure I can do anything daily—I’ve never been able to meditate every day, or exercise every day, or even remember to tell my wife that I love her every day—some of the best relationship advice that I got from a man who had been happily married for over sixty years. He also told me to do one nice thing every day for my wife—I definitely have not been able to do that every day, but I’ve tried. Every other day? Once a week?

This blog will be devoted to the adventure of publishing a book in the 21st century about a mythic character from the turn of the 16th. It’s also about why I wrote it—which was to discover how I could stay passionately and happily married to my wife for the rest of my life, and what I learned from Don Juan about endless passion and ultimately enduring passion.

In my next post, I will start to explain some of what I learned from Don Juan about fidelity. I’ll also talk about my trip to Sevilla with twenty journalists from ten countries to show them Don Juan’s Sevilla and my sojourn into the strange Don Quixote-like world of book promotion. Yesterday, I was photographed for the cover of the Santa Cruz weekly publication (The Good Times) while brandishing a sword. Learning how to sword fight in Spanish form was just one of the fun and exacting things I had to learn to write this novel.