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Acknowledgments
SOL LUCKMAN
First, I would like to thank my dear mother for her intense labor of love in delivering yours truly safe and sound into the world. I apologize for the pain I caused you, mother, on my rather late arrival. As you know better than anyone, I’m a slow learner—always running behind.
I would also like to thank my father for sparing his precious seed to co-create me. Let me take this opportunity to remind you, father, you still owe me for the not inconsiderable pleasure I afforded you on the glorious occasion of my conception. I’m prepared to accept cash, credit card, personal check, travelers cheque, money order, gold bullion, real estate or a sizable inheritance.
I would also like to thank the Academy. You guys don’t know me, but I think you’re really great. Keep up the good work!
Next, I would like to extend a special expression of gratitude to all my family, friends, lovers, teachers, employers and coworkers who one way or another, overtly or covertly, through thick and thin, encouraged me to keep writing this imaginary life. There aren’t many of you, which makes my appreciation all the greater.
I would also like to take this opportunity to recognize all my family, friends, lovers, teachers, employers and coworkers who one way or another, overtly or covertly, through thick and thin, attempted to derail my creative aspirations and mire me in the quotidian mediocrity to which you—you know who you are—have become hopelessly inured. There are a lot of you, more than I could count, which makes this, the Moment of penning my Acknowledgments, all the more satisfying.
Finally, I must say a word about the places where substantial parts of this work (play?) were composed. I mean specifically the Cafés of the World where I’ve whiled away so much of my time (and yours!) in the vain but amusing pursuit of capturing an ineffable existence: mine.
If I learned anything writing BEGINNER’S LUKE, it was that contrary to myth, heaven is filled with cool little cafés with Leonard Cohen over hidden speakers, groovy abstract expressionist art on the walls and superior Java from obscure South American countries. I was born to sit out on the terrasses of such glorious establishments of leisure on such splendid afternoons, chain-sipping specialty caffeinated beverages while daydreaming impossible episodes in impossible places—
Excuse me, my cappuccino just arrived. I can’t tell you how thankful I am. I’d like to acknowledge this cappuccino. I sweeten it liberally with three sparkling sugar cubes, stir the tan frothing brew with the tiny silver spoon, hoist the cup with trembling anticipation to my lips and, smelling Italy, visions of panforte and biscotti dancing in my head, take a sip.
Ecstasy! The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well. I’m so thankful for this ability that has taken me an entire imaginary lifetime to perfect.
I’m also thankful for the fine pair of legs strutting by just now on the sidewalk. You have to feel good knowing there are thighs like that in the world. A toast to the miniskirt’s inventor!
I raise my eyes and lock gazes with the proud owner of these exquisite limbs—and it’s almost like making love in this instant. The passion, though invisible, is nearly palpable beneath her stoic façade and my whole body tingles with glimpses of erotic encounters that could theoretically, but will probably never, occur.
There—it just happened again, with another set of eyes: the riveting glance, oxymoronic perhaps but with a rush like spontaneous combustion, then the looking away and the tragic vanishing forever. How I adore you, whoever you are!
By way of closing these Acknowledgments, I shall paraphrase one of my personal heroes, the great flâneur Baudelaire:
O you I could have loved!
O you who knew it!
O we who blew it!
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of comic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
Manifesto for a New Fiction
SOL LUCKMAN
The problem with much contemporary American—some would say, world—fiction is twofold. If we understand many commercial novels these days to fall somewhere on the spectrum between literary and visionary, with much in the middle that scarcely deserves mentioning, it’s hard to ignore the fact we’re living a classic Catch-22. Literary novels are just not that visionary, which is another way of saying they’re often boring and unimaginative, slaves to a dogged realism—whereas visionary novels are, typically, none too literary, which is another way of saying often poorly, if not execrably, written, cobbled together with their narrative machinery clanking and clunking.
Historically, the exceptions confirm the rule. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS are indeed consummately both literary and visionary. These classics have also been imitated so many times—unsuccessfully, even laughably—it beggars belief. Here and there a contemporary novel pops up on the radar in this magical Twilight Zone where craft and invention seem indissolubly wedded—Robert Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING comes to mind—but those of us literary-visionary hybrids who scour today’s fictional landscape in search of inspiration usually come up empty.
The fly in the ointment is that old bugger, realism. Nearly two centuries after Stendhal’s novel-as-mirror traveled the tedious highway of fiction, and despite the influences of modernism and postmodernism, the majority of today’s novel readers, like Coca-Cola addicts, still want the Real Thing. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will.
I don’t mean any of this theoretically. Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.
We must, then, for them to be of any worth whatsoever, live our theories practically. For writers this means, inevitably, doing the deed—not just having the idea but putting it on paper, writing down not just the bones of our dreams but their flesh and blood as well. Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals. The current twin foci on theory and realism conspire to dry up the spirit and wither the soul, blind the eye and deafen the ear, broil the brain and microwave the heart—and perhaps most disturbingly for us radical wordsmiths who still haven’t sold out to the Man, brown the nose and pucker the rectum.
If we’re to avoid becoming fiction robots in a corporate world, we must stop adding to our educational excesses, eschew the assembly line of MFAs and bottom-line publishing houses, commit ourselves to a way of writing that engages in a valiant struggle to push the limits of plot and language so as to awaken, not anesthetize, the reader. Anything rather than live in the dead world of those cold people, the Intellectuals. Anything rather than subject ourselves to the fusty chain of academic command, the savage petty politics where the arguments are so heated because the stakes, as someone once astutely quipped, are so small.
We must lay our ears back and push on into the literary fourth dimension, realm of feminine chaos and infinite possibility, forego regionalism and play with farce—and, especially, always appreciate the bizarre. Love for the bizarre is, itself, transformational. When you welcome the bizarre into the fiction of your life, anything and anybody can be transformed from dogsh*t into gold.
Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves. Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality. There can be no turning back, for readers or writers, after our historical strokes of madcap genius. Or so my story goes.
Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.
In so doing, maybe, over time, our inherited and mostly dysfunctional posterity urge based on ego will gradually give way to something more stable, healthier, that might be called simply the urge to be. To have been versus to be. Product versus process. In the face of a literature of monoliths and petroglyphs, we have the choice to opt for incompletion. May our new writing shine with the protean power of now. May imagination become the new faith.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of comic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
The Twenty Most Likely Reasons Last Week’s Mother Ship Space Picnic Was Cancelled
Sol Luckman
1. It rained.
2. After a few too many the night before, everyone was so spacey the next morning they simply forgot to meet the levitating limousine.
3. It was a psy-op to discredit those channeling the incoming Golden Age, Ascension, and Disclosure. (Note: it worked.)
4. It snowed.
5. Midterms were due.
6. The plan behind the scenes by the Galactic Federation was to increase sales of tinfoil hats, but these particular ETs happen to be allergic to metal.
7. The Orion Group destroyed the Mother Ship.
8. Life’s a bitch.
9. They channeled it; it must be true. (Wait—that’s not a reason!)
10. It was all just a big misunderstanding.
11. The ETs, realizing their appearance would result in more people “investing” in NESARA, bailed.
12. Worse, they suspected the money would go to stockpiling makeup for Blossom Goodchild.
13. It was feared that David Wilcock would cry in public again if Disclosure happened without him.
14. Sh*t happened.
15. It hailed.
16. The B52s got there and boarded first.
17. The ETs’ pulling out at the last minute was a “teaching” to make us question why only bad channeling becomes popular.
18. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they just didn’t like Greg Giles’ hair.
19. There was lightning.
20. Unfortunately, the ETs got lost inside Uranus, and have yet to be found.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
Share the Adventure of an Imaginary Lifetime--FREE!
Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? You can! Luke Soloman will show you how.
While titillating in the tradition of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Tom Robbins, Sol Luckman’s critically acclaimed visionary novel BEGINNER’S LUKE equally impresses as a work of literary art. Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent ourselves and our world. Download your FREE copy of BEGINNER'S LUKE at ...http://beginnersluke.com/beginners-luke REVIEWS “BEGINNER’S LUKE is a welcome start to what promises to be a mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.” —Apex Reviews “A modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND, where anything can come alive when you start with a blank page … [Luckman] shows the reader that as individuals, we, too, have choices and potentials. There are no boundaries or rules to limit us.” —Reader Views “BEGINNER’S LUKE is a truly an experience that cannot adequately be described except to say that it is extraordinary and grabs one from the first word of the first chapter and never lets one go. Definitely a spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” —Niama Williams, Ph.D. “Sol Luckman’s writing makes BEGINNER’S LUKE a rewarding romp from start to finish. This is the sort of book that could easily have self-destructed in a lesser author’s hands, but Luckman makes it sing.” —Burt Kempner, Sarasota, Florida “The self-seeking Adventure of Luke, a man groping his way around the confusingly metaphorical ‘New Age,’ is, in a way, the story of every enlightened soul finding their way around these confounding metaphysical times.” —Yael Lewis, Tel Aviv, Israel “BEGINNER’S LUKE is an inspirational and darkly fun novel that is a ‘cannot put down’ book and definite movie material. I loved every minute of it.” —Robynn Bridgett, Cape Town, South Africa “Luke’s story has a mighty moral: we’re making it all up! Our imagination is both seed and soil, water and sun. It’s how we cultivate our circumstances and fashion our future. Luke takes us on a tour of time and quaintly confuses the quantity and quality of something we’ve all come to take for granted, the timeline that creates cause and effect.” —Roseann Gabrys, Wyandotte, Michigan “Some theories say we only use a small portion of our minds, that we have come as far (or as short) as we have while utilizing a relatively tiny amount of our intellect. If this is true, what could possibly be a catalyst to inspire further use of our untapped potential? One possible avenue for further expansion is the melding of what we perceive to be ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ and what we perceive to be ‘fantasy’ or ‘fallacy.’ BEGINNER’S LUKE weaves these two poles together to help the reader see the cage of conformity that we all, to some degree, dwell in.” —M. E. Bradley, Grand Rapids, Michigan “Provocatively rich with vivid characters and descriptive emotion, BEGINNER’S LUKE is a flavorful page-turner that not only satisfies the hunger for poetic intellectual stimulation, but also introspective humor.” —Michelle Lawrence, Tempe, Arizona
Introducing BEGINNER'S LUKE: Manifesto for a New Fiction
What is BEGINNER’S LUKE?
Quite simply, like nothing you’ve ever experienced before!
Characterized by Reader Views as a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND” and by Apex Reviews as a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast,” BEGINNER’S LUKE is also, as literature professor Niama Williams has written, a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.”
Download your free copy today.
But maybe these responses from internationally acclaimed author Sol Luckman’s six-volume novel series’ “cult following” say even more ...
“I felt as if I was way back when and reading Tom Robbins for the first time!”
“Greetings! I salute the master. I have learned by reading this book I know nothing about writing.”
“All I can say is you are a genius in the making, a master storyteller and a hell of a lot of fun.”
“Fabulous. So different from anything I’ve read, but it kept me enthralled the whole time.”
“A very polished, original take on the comic coming-of-age story.”
“Exhilarating stuff. This book needs to be up there in the charts. Period.”
“Very special, very funny, weird, crazy, delicious.”
Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world.
Be sure to enjoy the numerous BEGINNER’S LUKE videos available free online at the official BEGINNER’S LUKE website.
THE TOY BUDDHA II: Downstairs, the Party Rages
What would you do if the Buddha suddenly reappeared? What would you do if he suddenly didn’t?
In this seriocomic adaptation from THE TOY BUDDHA, Book II of the critically acclaimed BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, Luke Soloman’s Adventure of an imaginary lifetime soars to mock-epic proportions in an enlightening spoof of all things held sacred in American culture.
“A modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND.” —Reader Views
“A mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.” —Apex Reviews
“Definitely a spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” —Niama Williams, Ph.D.
WARNING: THE TOY BUDDHA may cause vertigo, euphoria, lunatic laughter. May fundamentally alter you so the old rules no longer apply, so it’s okay if clothes become optional, okay to make love not war, okay to set fire to your country club, dig up your neighborhood golf course, plant an organic garden and build your new community one puff at a time …Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world.
Visit the official BEGINNER'S LUKE website at www.beginnersluke.com.
THE TOY BUDDHA I: Say Goodbye to Kansas
What would you do if the Buddha suddenly reappeared? What would you do if he suddenly didn’t?
In this seriocomic adaptation from THE TOY BUDDHA, Book II of the critically acclaimed BEGINNER’S LUKE Series, Luke Soloman’s Adventure of an imaginary lifetime soars to mock-epic proportions in an enlightening spoof of all things held sacred in American culture.
“A modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND.” —Reader Views
“A mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.” —Apex Reviews
“Definitely a spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” —Niama Williams, Ph.D.
WARNING: THE TOY BUDDHA may cause vertigo, euphoria, lunatic laughter. May fundamentally alter you so the old rules no longer apply, so it’s okay if clothes become optional, okay to make love not war, okay to set fire to your country club, dig up your neighborhood golf course, plant an organic garden and build your new community one puff at a time …Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world.
Visit the official BEGINNER'S LUKE website at www.beginnersluke.com.
BEGINNER'S LUKE IV: From New Age to Stone Age
“A modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND.” —Reader Views
“A mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.” —Apex Reviews
“Definitely a spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” —Niama Williams, Ph.D.
From the acclaimed novel series BEGINNER’S LUKE, by bestselling author Sol Luckman, this short cinematic adaptation from the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime is like eating a birthday cake laced with acid. You think it’s just cake—but then your mind is altered!
Luke’s signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: CONSCIOUSNESS CREATES. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination—for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world.
Visit the official BEGINNER’S LUKE website at www.beginnersluke.com.
Introducing the New Crow Rising!
Dear Reader,
Finally, after several months of dedicated work, I’m truly excited to announce my brand-new personal website featuring many of my original paintings, as well as my unique offerings in fiction and nonfiction.
Please check out the new and improved Crow Rising Transformational Media today at www.CrowRising.com.
In addition to browsing my expressionistic artwork, you can download your complimentary copy of my literary-visionary novel BEGINNER’S LUKE (called by Apex Reviews a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND”) and enjoy a lot of other paradigm-altering free content.
Thanks for flying high with Crow Rising today!
Sol Luckman
Artist, Author, Alchemist
