Actor, Lover, Priest, Spy: Reading Back Pages...The Famous And The Near Famous...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor of The Tribune

AUSTIN, Texas - There's a linchpin somewhere in all this, so bear with us as we mow the morning mental lawn at a time when perhaps we should be wondering and writing about something a bit more serious - like Libya and a woman's right to an abortion, that stuff.

But its Tuesday, after a long, holiday weekend under a high sky in Austin and a hot sun generally everywhere south of the North Pole. We've toasted on our way into and out of local restaurants, and we've waited on rain that looked to be up there, but just beyond our lot. My daughter called to say it was 84 degrees in New York. Lucky, was all I could think to say. Still, it is the times we live in, despite what the non-Global Warming believers say. The polar cap can melt and these guys will still deny it. You can gurgle underwater, but not for long. We'll see about that.

In any case, I'm reading this book titled Casanova: Actor, Lover, Priest, Spy. Yes, that Casanova, the one whose name is associated first with excitable sexual escapades. He wrote about them, as did others, so they exist in the legend of Giacomo. I'm halfway through it, so I've drawn no conclusion on whether I buy its promise of finaling revealing the many talents of this Renaissance Italian from the 17th Century. We'll see, although there have been some interesting tidbits to do with his talent as a painter and a bit actor on the French stage. I suppose his sexual prowess comes in the middle of the book.

Casanova did as much as he could with his life in a world that yielded little opportunity of the sort one has these days. He might have been a wilder man today. Casanova, according to this book by English writer Ian Kelly, invented the lottery, a successful one at that that became the overwhelming rage of his time. "I was never attractive," Casanova is said to have said about himself. "I simply had an unbridled belief that I was capable of anything."

That brings me to the new blogging effort of my ally, Jerry McHale, who has birthed his http://www.browntownnews.com/ as the fountain of all that semingly is good in his adopted hometown of Brownsville, Texas. First, as an early assessment of his offering, I'd say McHale wishes for another time - perhaps 1911. Like Casanova, he, however, does his life impulse with what's before him. Brownsville is not an attractive town, yet McHale wants to write about it as it was a beautiful community, full of gaiety, pomp, counts and countesses, harps and jesters, the spirit of Casanova's Venice. Brownsville is the petrie dish of trouble, most of which is bad, of darkened streets and shuttered doors. The only Brownsvillians having fun are the criminals, the corrupt politicians and the gendarmes. Perhaps that is why his previous online efort - El Rocinante - was so successful. For that effort, McHale mined the gutters and dumpsters as if addicted to the worst of news.

When McHale can write this about Brownsvile, then shall he be able to make factual headway: "By the Eighteenth Century, Venice had become the city of pleasure. The convents boasted their salons, where nuns in low dresses with pearls in their hair received the advances of nobles and gallant abbes. And everyone, from patricians to gondoliers, who were given free entry, was imersed in theatre."

Brownsville knows theatre as street and alley crime. Its hardly-creative plots are printed in newspaper crime stories and obituaries. Brownsville is a beggar of art, forever dreaming and wishing and pining, but rarely getting its dessert. One more comparison, from the past: "The man fit to make his fortune in Brownsville must be a chameleon...he must be insinuating, impenetrable, obliging, often base, ostensibly sincere, always pretending to know less than he does, in complete control of his countenance, and as cold as ice. If he loathes the pretence he should leave Brownsville and seek his fortune in Harlingen."

Early-on in his new Journey, McHale too-easily reverts to his old style. He bashes the same people he's bashed before, the novice mayor, the lady commissioner fond of posing for photos with local men, the usuals. Between those familiar jabs, he is leaving the trusted path and writing about some interesting, yet not so-interesting local buildings, historical figures and God-damned cantinas. That's the Brownsville we have all come to know. No news there.

It would be a better trip if McHale, in the spirit of Casanova, would not merely kill the snake by slicing off its head, but study it a bit more, ripping off its hide and reaching for and grabbing its innards, the real ones. We are sure that Brownsville counts a few thousand residents no one has ever written - or cared - about. Those are the new stories at hand for him, his new cast of characters.

"These are the handsomest moments in my lifestory," Casanova wrote in one of his many journals. "These happy, unexpected, unforeseeable and purely fortuitous remeetings...and, hence, all the more precious."

It's a choice, this life.

And it is true that, given the task, two people would do the same job successfully in different ways. Another Blogger out to do what McHale is doing might do something else altogether different, might actually create either a spectacular novel writing trend or maybe birth and deliver a new local superstar. It's not easy, but that's the reward.

Creativity also allows for taking the long way home, so...

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