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The Soul
Institute |
Revision | Synopsis | Background | MS. Info | Contents | Fragment
Soul Institute Images | Writing InventoryThe novel, The Soul Institute, and all writing on this page copyright 2010 by Michael D. Smith
In October 2009 I decided I needed to revise this work, and after planning a major restructuring, I began in December. I finished Draft 4 in May 2010. It cuts 217 pages and 58,000 words from the original 1999 version, and changes the focus and mood of the novel considerably. The three parts of the novel are:
- Moolka’s Party
- The Slanted Mirror
- Tying the Directions
Which is due for an update!
At Writer-in-Residence Moolka Waxtor's going away party in the English Department office, Derrick recalls in shock their out of control lovemaking in a closet half an hour earlier. How can he handle an affair with his flirty cousin? How can he escape from the Soul Institute as Moolka is doing? How can he deal with his wife Jipo, TSI's ruthless administratrix? As Director Alfred Moid Burlcron announces that a replacement has already been hired to take Moolka's place, Moolka tearfully declares she's decided to stay.
Himal Steina pilots his battered Porsche from Chicago to coastal Texas to become the new Writer-in-Residence at the Soul Institute. He meets Moolka in the foggy morning and is instantly in love with her.
Alfred Burlcron, who founded TSI on royalties from his bestselling novel, tours Himal through The Soul Institute. Neither he nor anyone else can bring himself to pronounce the obscene title of Himal's book, which TSI has contracted to publish. Burlcron's fourteen year-old son Mitar is the JFK Assassination Librarian. Naming Himal one of the secret, powerful Overcrons, Burlcron promises Moolka to him.
Derrick takes over Fall Play class and foolishly offers his own rough draft play Linstar for the students to revise to their liking.
Director Burlcron's eighteen year-old daughter Lisa enters the Soul Institute as a freshman, but the feared Inner Circle of dope-smoking Overcrons discovers her and her boyfriend Dorrington Caldwell naked in the North Fields.
To ninth grader Mitar Burlcron’s shame, the pregnant girl in Mrs. Plollio's art class rescues him from bully Tom Kaiser, then leads him to the Paint Sniffing Gang. Mitar sniffs paint outrageously at the storm sewer under the eye of brutal, charismatic gang leader Angent Tunn, and is taken in as a Paint Snigger.
Inebriated Art Department Chairman Fannin Richardson realizes that his secret desire for Burlcron's wife Debbie has been a painful five-year fantasy.
Blasted by days of inhalant highs, Mitar leads the Paint Sniggers on a raid to vandalize the Glouair Library. Back at the storm sewer, Mitar gets intimate with fellow Snigger Rhea Secovenge as new members Rod Admallan and Tom Kaiser die.
Fannin makes love to Felicia, wife of Milton expert Greg McKinnon. Tunn commits suicide. Mitar consolidates command of the Paint Sniggers. Himal and Moolka open to each other in his Porsche at lunch. Meanwhile Derrick realizes that the only thing that will save him is eighteen year-old Lisa Burlcron.
Uncle Solis returns from exile to take nephew Derrick and daughter Moolka to dinner. To their horror, he blesses their heretofore secret union. Solis describes his years in Africa as a soldier of fortune as Derrick moodily assesses the scars from his past as a quasi-orphan. Despite having rebelled against Solis and his fascist Waxtor Carnationist College years ago, Derrick is still in thrall to his whiny, manipulative uncle. Moolka graphically reveals to the entire restaurant that she and Himal are now lovers.
Mitar brings five year-old Urside Charmouth along in an attack on his own house, where he discovers father Alfred and Derrick's wife Jipo having passionate, tasteless, dope-fueled sex. Mitar heads to Mexico with his girlfriend Rhea.
McKinnon doses Fannin with LSD in payment for his adultery. At a surreal but transcendent shopping mall, Fannin prepares himself to be wheeled upstairs to the puma surgeons. He and Lisa are kidnapped by the Kaiser Death Gang.
Vice president Jipo Jarg seduces the bitter, rejected Dorrington Caldwell at his new library job. Himal chairs the Local Arrangements Committee for National Soul Day. Burlcron hires the Kaiser Death Gang to protect his disintegrating kingdom, and forces Derrick into the gang.
Derrick and Moolka escape to Chicago and their childhood estate, now turned into Waxtor Carnationist College. Although fantasy romance is blocked by bleak winter reality, they stumble across a greenhouse where a gardener marries them.
Souls in disarray--some armed with machine guns--prowl the college town in the early hours of National Soul Day. The Kaiser Death gang burns down Lisa's entire apartment complex in an attempt to kill her. The 4 AM National Soul Day press conference breaks up in revolution and panic as the potted Vice President for Coordination, Holcombe Charmouth, finally turns feral on his master.
The Kaiser Death Gang kidnaps the five year-old Urside. The petroleum-filled sewer snaking through town blows all at once. Mitar has to shoot child terrorist Leon Mesquite and library director Milton Raeynold Glouair.
Alfred Burlcron takes over the TSI web site, but Uncle Solis in turn hacks it as Burlcron is arrested. Mitar publishes Chapter One of his novel Deathometer Rising! and Lisa, who lost everything in her apartment fire, is ready to move on with a final comment.
The novel describes a chaotic November at the Soul Institute, a small Texas university founded on royalties from the Director’s bestselling novel. The novel came from my recurring dream of a return to Rice University--not the common anxiety dream about getting behind in classes, but the urge to explore some vast, stupendous, mystic Source, the Other World, the sanctuary of Himal Steina’s foggy university of Soul. See also the painting, Recurring Dream - The Soul Institute, from 1997.
There is also a page, Soul Institute Images, with various paintings and pastels of Soul Institute characters:
Several sets of characters build their own stories, all eventually interrelating:
- The TSI administrators and faculty perusing complex, farcical love affairs, power struggles and fantasy life in an attempt to ignore TSI’s eccentric, hateful, and increasingly bizarre bureaucracy.
- The TSI students who came to live the life of Soul as advertised in the TSI catalog and are dismayed to discover the underlying chaos.
- The ninth graders at Faller Junior High with their separate world of inhalant abuse and gang violence.
- Members of a past paradise, Waxtor Carnationist College in Chicago, with its deep genealogical ties to TSI. Considered by some to be merely a “rough draft” of the Soul Institute, for others Waxtor is the Other World they must return to.
The Soul Institute was probably the most problematic of my novels to write, but apparently needed to be. Not until the end of a second draft did a central emotional concept become clear. At times during five years of the novel I considered abandoning it, taking a years-long vacation from all writing, or abandoning writing entirely in favor of visual art. Throughout the first draft there was something frustratingly unmelted, unfused, unintegrated, even as some fascinating events and characters kept emerging. Finally in the last year of the first version (1998-1999) a major plot reorganization brought out a central vision based on those characters.
Upon its December 1999 completion, I found I really didn't know what to do with the novel, and it sat in a drawer for ten years as I concentrated on shorter works, figuring that the long novel couldn't be published until after some shorter ones found an audience. Amusingly, all these years I'd assumed that this extremely long novel was so well-done that it might just need a little light editing. So I was surprised to reread it last year and find it needed a thorough revision. The "central vision" of 1999 was quite wrong-headed in many ways.
Written 1994-1999, Draft 4 2010 Draft 4 Chapters 83 Draft 4 847 pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced) Words 212,000 Currently input in Word 2000 Previously published No parts yet published
Part 1. Moolka's Party
1. Goodbye Moolka
2. The Dim Warning
3. Paradise and Depression, or, The Sneer
4. We Seem to Be Facing an Oceanic Meadow
5. In Fact, He May Originally Have Contacted TSI for Publishing Purposes
6. The Head Monk Is Thoroughly Charming
7. The JFK Assassination Librarian
8. In the Chapel
9. The First Party
10. Self-Circuit Test
11. Welcome to the Soul Institute's Fall Play Social Networking Page!
12. Getting Mystically Drunk Over a Map of Chicago
13. Cubic Miles of Buried Light = Darkness
14. Poison Laminate
15. Across the Fields With Sandra
16. Angent Tunn
17. Yet "Overcron" Soon Does Inspire Fear A
18. Yet "Overcron" Soon Does Inspire Fear B
19. The Slight to His Career and His Reaction
20. Administrator In Over His Head
21. Lisa's Inner Life, or, Welcome to the Soul Institute's Hall of Shame!
22. Hanging Numerous Paintings in a Space
23. Nada Crater
24. Sharing Secret Evil
25. Initiation
26. Cheating at Solitaire
27. The Nude Debutante
28. New Members
29. In the CulvertPart 2. The Slanted Mirror
30. The Doomboat Tolls in the Harbor
31. The Slanted Mirror, or, Burlcron's Promise
32. Overcron Versus Doomboat--and Derrick's Confession
33. The Power Books
34. Priest Monsters of Ortang
35. Problems of Photographic Exposure
36. The Remaining Sniggers
37. Fannin's Other Studio
38. Building a Universe
39. The Ortang Lunch, or, Moolka Resists, But Abruptly Feels Sensual
40. Nynth
41. Properly Exposed
42. How May I Be of Surface to You?
43. I Didn't Expect ... That
44. The Storm Sewer
45. There's Never Enough Pain to Force Any Sort of Awareness
46. A Visit from Uncle Solis
47. Boots and Scars
48. The Blond Woman from His Dream
49. To Their Mutual Horror
50. National Soul Day is Coming!
51. The Crackadon
52. A Woman's Voice
53. Betrayal of the Meticulous Plan
54. Two Cups
55. Dosed!
56. Teachers
57. Where are the Puma Surgeons?
58. Asteroid HospitalPart 3. Tying the Directions
59. The Cruel Math of Freshman and Senior Girls
60. Can I Borrow Dorrington up in Friends?
61. Progress of the Non-Self
62. Mitar’s Call (Evidence of Treason File 1)
63. Miscarriage through The Cadillac is Gone
64. Deathometer Rising!
65. The Counter-Realization
66. Local Arrangements Committee (Evidence of Treason File 2)
67. Bureaucrats Stake Out Their Turf (Evidence of Treason File 3)
68. Hasslestorm! (Evidence of Treason File 4)
69. Stoned on the Way to the Command Post
70. She Admits She’s an Overcron
71. Who is the Real Mate?
72. That Moolka is a Force
73. The Chainsaw
74. I Have Never Given Up, But I Have Halted, Dazed and Confused, at Various Hazardous Intersections Where I Could Have Been Taken Out By Snipers
75. Rhea
76. My Final Statements Concerning Librarianship: The Full Text of the Farewell Address, Complete and Uncensored
77. The Harvest of What's Been Happening
78. The Thoughts of Stain Caruck
79. Gorgeous Mental Illness
80. The Sewer at Soul Hour
81. Liberation of the Themes
82. Welcome to The Soul Institute!
83. Welcome to The Soul Institute Again!
I found this fragment in old notes. It sums up the initial urge to write TSI:
But Derrick was immersed in the dream. A dream of wandering with Felicia and several others on the rugged hillside by a huge lake--an endless park that seemed related to the Waxtor Summer Refuge but wasn't WSR. They'd been searching for something in the dusk, but it had gotten too dark and they'd decided to leave. But Derrick had lost his boots and needed to go back alone, in the dark and barefoot, to retrieve them. There he'd found two long-haired young men eagerly digging up a box containing five thousand dollars in cash. Evidently some acquaintance of theirs had committed suicide and had left a note telling where the treasure was. Derrick had come up to them and said: "Excuse me, but I think that's my handwriting on that note--" Bored, they'd let him look at the note. Yes, some of it was his handwriting, and some of it was his mother's, but that was only on the back, and their handwriting was just part of a photocopy that the suicide writer had used as scratch paper for his real note on the other side. "Don't worry, I'm not here to try to claim the money," Derrick had said, backing away--to spend the entire night until dawn walking barefoot, looking for his boots--and meanwhile Felicia was waiting for him, with the others, all night long, they'd returned to the city and were worried about him ...
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