The Lost Blog of Don Juan

How Young is Too Young

I was recently in  Portland —what an amazing book city.  There were tons of bookstores, Powell’s of course being the most famous, but it seemed like stores were everywhere and the booksellers smart and engaged.  One bookseller bought a book while I was telling her about it for her grandson who is on his way to college.  I inscribed it for her right there.  What a perfect time to read The Lost Diary.  So many of us learn about passion groping in the dark in our culture.  How much better to have the world of passion and pleasure opened up by a master who understands the holiness of pleasure.  Another bookseller who worked in Young Adult was interested and said you’d be amazed what teens are reading these days.  Honestly, I wrote the book for adults, but it is not so explicit that it is not appropriate for teens, who no doubt are being exposed to a far more debasing sexuality through the Internet.  Newsflash: I just received an e-mail from one reader who said that her 12 year old son read it from cover to cover in two days only begrudgingly stopping for school.  Now that is a real complement.  My son is twelve as well, and while that might be a little young for most kids, having written other books about sexuality and love, I am a firm believer that kids will only be drawn to what they are ready to know.  (Unless of course, it’s flashed into their memories on the TV screen or Internet.)   We ask our children what they want to know about sexuality, and they are very clear when they are not interested. 

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.