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Totally Incredible Praise for BEGINNER'S LUKE

Posted on Oct 22nd, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke

The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime begins. Request your FREE copy today!

“A rollicking rollercoaster of a romp. In Luke Soloman, Sol Luckman has minted a Walter Mitty for the millennium.” —James Thurber

“Three thumbs up!” —Eugène Ionesco

“Curious. Very curious.” —Mark Twain

“Curiouser and curioser.” —Lewis Carroll

“Luke Soloman does what all of us secretly desire: he throws up everything, vomits cell, capillary, marrow, tissue, organ, thought and belief, cleanses himself of all the toxins that have numbed him into sleepwalking through someone else’s life. And he does it cold turkey—no Prozac, no patch, no inhaler, no gum. That stuff’s for sissies.” —Samuel Beckett

“Marvelously irreverent and irrelevant.” —Allen Ginsberg

“Mythical!” —Joseph Campbell

“A tour de farce!” —Oscar Wilde

“Most people are only young once, but in these pages Sol Luckman clearly experiences a second adolescence.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“One can certainly appreciate the author’s libidinous minuteness, if nothing else.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“No one knows better than Luke Soloman that fictional characters are living creatures. Perhaps they’re less real than us, but they’re far more true. All that matters is that they live, truly live in their imaginations—which is to say, in ours—committing as much of their nonexistence to paper as possible.” —Luigi Pirandello

“There was a time when novelists’ lives were more intriguing than their novels. Then for a while neither the novels nor the lives was very intriguing. And now with Luke Soloman, we seem to be entering a phase where the novel is the life. But is it art?” —Charles Bukowski

Beginner’s Luke, what immoral hand or eye did frame thy wacky asymmetry?” —William Blake

“You call this a life? I call it a nightmare!” —William Makepeace Thackeray

“By contrast, Tom Jones seems a dignified man.” —Henry Fielding

“A quarter memoir, a quarter ars poetica, a quarter social satire, a quarter self-parody, a quarter mind-expanding hallucinogen, a quarter pornography … Beginner’s Luke is more than the sum of its parts—and much more than the reader has bargained for. Fasten your seatbelt, brave soul!” —Hunter S. Thompson

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

***

Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? Well, you can! Luke Soloman will show you how.

BEGINNER'S LUKE is the first novel in a series of six madcap adventures that, collectively, make up the imaginary life of this lovably irreverent modern-day Walter Mitty. 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.

A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist in addition to dozens of prestigious award winners, offered the author a contract (subsequently declined in favor of an experiment in self-publishing) for the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series, which made it out of a yearly "slush pile" of nearly 8,000 manuscriptsa rare and wonderful feat these days.

To take advantage of this totally FREE offer, click here.
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In Progress: Book Two on the Regenetics Method

Posted on Oct 5th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke


Crow Rising News & Notes
October, 2009

Dear Reader,


Greetings and blessings to you and yours! This fall is proving to be a creative one for me, and on that note, I wanted to share several exciting pieces of news.

In Progress: Book Two on the Regenetics Method

I am thrilled to announce that I am well into the writing of Book Two on the Regenetics Method, which I hope to release this coming year. So far this has been a deeply inspiring project, one that greatly expands on the philosophical, scientific and practical aspects of Regenetics, and I very much look forward to sharing it with readers. Stay tuned!

Going on Sabbatical

In order to finish this demanding writing project in a timely manner, I am "going on sabbatical," which means I will not be publishing another issue of DNA Monthly until April. As always, you can read current and back issues of this unique ezine, "your FREE online resource for cutting-edge news about who you truly are," at http://www.potentiation.net/page13.html. The October issue features an excellent article by Bruce Lipton.

November Seminar Deadline

In other news ... The sign-up deadline for our upcoming Regenetics Seminar to be held November 6-9 in the Southwestern United States in Taos, New Mexico, is October 31. Availability is limited, so reserved your place today!



For detailed information on Facilitator Training in the Regenetics Method, visit http://www.phoenixregenetics.org/page15.html.


Extended: Free Paperback Special

Response to our offer of a free paperback of Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method has been so enthusiastic that we have decided to extend this special through the month of October.


For the remainder of this month, those choosing to experience the "revolutionary healing science" (Nexus) of the Regenetics Method with the Developers will receive a complimentary copy of Conscious Healing--a $27.99 value or more (including shipping costs).


http://www.potentiation.net/freeCH2offer.jpg

You also can simply order your copy of this empowering book that marries leading-edge philosophical and scientific content today at http://www.phoenixregenetics.org/page9.html, where you can browse the entire text online.


For detailed information on healing at the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels, visit the Phoenix Center for Regenetics at http://www.phoenixregenetics.org.

Thanks for flying high with Crow Rising Transformational Media today!

Sol
http://www.crowrising.com


"Be willing to walk your talk, speak your truth, know your life's mission, and balance past, present, and future in the now," we read of Crow in Medicine Cards. "Shape-shift that old reality and become your future self. Allow the bending of physical laws to aid in creating the shape-shifted world of peace."
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Posted on Aug 23rd, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke
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Postmodern Politics

Posted on Aug 11th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke

The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime begins. Request your FREE copy today!


One of the most influential critical assumptions in the poststructuralist era is that linguistic theory since the Enlightenment can be divided into three distinct periods: 1) a nomenclatural or Aristotelian phase corresponding to realism, in which objects and concepts were thought to enter language as preconstituted or nonlinguistic facts; 2) a second structuralist phase corresponding to modernism inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model in which the sign was severed from its referent; and 3) the current phase corresponding to poststructuralism and postmodernism in which signifier and signified have been separated, giving rise to contemporary notions of semantic slippage and différance. Terry Eagleton neatly summarizes this standard chronology when he writes, “If structuralism divided the sign from the referent, post-structuralism goes a step further: it divides the signifier from the signified.”

My theory of postmodernism follows from the realization that this neat chronology, however useful as a conceptual framework, is critically flawed. To claim that structuralism severs all ties between sign and referent is to ignore that the referent exists as an embarrassing surplus in Saussure’s linguistic model. We glimpse the referent’s posthumous existence toward the beginning of the second part of the COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GENERALE, where Saussure undertakes a brief recapitulation of his theory of the signifier-signified binary. Reiterating that “[l]’entité linguistique n’existe que par l’association du signifiant et du signfié,” he explains how “[u]ne suite de sons n’est linguistique que si elle est le support d’une idée.” In parallel fashion: “Il en est de même du signifié, dès qu’on le sépare de son signifiant. Des concepts tels que ‘maison,’ ‘blanc,’ ‘voir,’ etc., considérés en eux-mêmes, appartiennent à la psychologie; ils ne deviennent entités linguistiques que par association avec des images acoustiques.”

The very fact that Saussure could affirm the possibility of concepts existing outside their expression in language–“concepts … considérés en eux-mêmes”–distinguishes his theory from that of the poststructuralists (for whom discourse, while historically contextualized, is all-encompassing). In other words, Saussure’s theory incorporates a latent strain of transcendental phenomenology which attempts to keep certain unadulterated experiences free from linguistic taint.

Perhaps this phenomenology, this residual belief in “essence” haunting the periphery of Saussure’s otherwise purely semiological model has been responsible for the many contradictory labels attached to his theory: psychologizing and scientific, idealist and positivist, bourgeois spiritualist and Marxist materialist. In any case I interpret Saussure’s simultaneous rejection of the real and unadmitted attachment to it as very much in keeping with the contradictions of his historical moment.

Such an internally conflicted relation to the real, I propose, is the classic modernist gesture: a rejection of realism that nevertheless aims at a kind of mimesis. Despite modernism’s rhetoric of breaking free of the past and waking up from the nightmare of history, modernist writers consistently travel back in time in search of the lost “real.” “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Thomas Wolfe’s anthologized lament from LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL is exemplary, transforming into poetic nostalgia the incongruous desire to gain back that which is always already a figment or “ghost.” Similarly, William Faulkner, for all his investment in textuality, in the loom of language on which we’re simultaneously woven and entangled, never completely abandons his quest for the “real” that is blood, the transcendental and originary “central I-Am’s private own.”

The consequences of this “residual realism” for postmodernism have been dismal. I define postmodernism as that literature which once and for all rejects realist epistemology in favor of a theoretical framework which considers the real a product of discourse, not the other way around. In the best of cases, postmodernism’s thoroughgoing (con)textualization of reality has led to a view of it as superficial, ludic and, ultimately, frivolous. In the worst of scenarios, critics like Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Charles Newman have identified the postmodern with bad faith, the murder of the subject, self-defeating irony and a retreat from history.

In one of the seminal essays of the postmodern debate, Jameson has written of postmodernism that in “faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.” For Jameson, this process of historical (con)textualization–accompanied by the fragmentation of the subject–is entirely negative, representing a “waning of affect” symptomatic of pandemic cultural apathy. One of postmodernism’s principal characteristics, according to Jameson, is “intertextuality,” defined as “a deliberate, built-in feature of the [postmodern] aesthetic effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history.”

In such passages Jameson clearly betrays his materialist bias, as well as his belief in a historical or factual real existing independent of its expression in language. Like Saussure, Jameson assumes that essence comes first, and that the signifier naturally follows. But it’s just as plausible–in fact, more so–to turn the tables and assume that language in a profound sense creates the reality it describes. Roland Barthes has written, “Le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique,” a maxim used by Hayden White as the epigraph to his groundbreaking study of historiographic narrative (THE CONTENT OF THE FORM) which, in my opinion, definitively explodes the “natural” boundaries between fact and fiction.

I’m far from implying that White denies the existence of history. To the contrary, history remains just as real as it ever was, people are born and die, make love and war just as they always have. My point is that the only way we can know about these activities is through discourse–there’s no unmediated experience of “reality,” not even of our own. Contrary, then, to the opinions of the majority of postmodernism’s detractors (and even of many of its apologists), history did not suddenly vanish in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Instead, history began being rethought as a human construct, but this makes it no less “real” and the issues faced by and informing the subject no less matters of life and death.

For liberal humanists, the “illusions” of postmodernism, to borrow Eagleton’s phrase, begin with a confusion between effective political action and empty theoretical discourse. Today many theorists are challenging this conventional binary which relegates anything short of full-scale revolution to the ivory tower. Judith Butler is one such theorist. Combining Foucault’s genealogical approach with the postmodern critique of liberal humanism, Butler’s model (outlined in GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY) articulates a new kind of radical feminist politics.

This “postmodern feminism,” to use Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson’s expression, directs its polemic not only against obviously patriarchal structures, but also against traditional feminist identity politics which locates resistance in the gendered female body. Butler argues that the “foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. My argument is that there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed,’ but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed.” It requires little imagination to understand why such a theory of subjectivity would be troubling not only to a certain kind of feminism, but also to Marxist thinkers, whose “revolution” depends on a coherent world historical subject.

And yet Butler’s model is at once resolutely antifoundational and overtly political. This point needs to be stressed. For Butler, the subject cannot preexist because “signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects.” Butler views agency not as the possession or expression of an ontologically stable “self,” but as a subversive modification of naturalized discursive practices.

Revolution is replaced by subversion, a subversion (in this case, of hierarchical gender “norms”) which occurs within and as signification. In Butler’s words: “There is no self … who maintains ‘integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there.”

Play is the form resistance takes, a performance on the surface (exemplified by cross-dressing) which exposes not only gender, but sex itself as “constructed,” “unnatural.” Agency “happens” by bending the rules of existing discourse–not by creating alternative or radically new discursive strategies (the impossible goal of both Marxism and liberal feminism). Thus Butler’s focus on the “subversive laughter” of pastiche and parody “in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects.” Explicit in this theory is the very postmodern injunction to attend to the particular, to think globally perhaps, but to act locally.

Butler’s critics have persisted in misreading her theory as an example of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, vapid performativity, or cynical resignation. It is, I would argue, none of these. Such interpretations ignore the fact, explicitly stated, that maintaining a discursive subjectivity can be a very fatiguing (as well as dangerous) business–especially if your subjectivity happens to run counter to society’s dominant identity codes. Reversing Noam Chomsky’s metaphor, we might speak of subversion as the grueling “manufacture of dissent.”

Butler’s redefinition of subversive parody as political action flies in the face of a theorist like Jameson, for whom postmodern pastiche is merely a degraded avatar of modernist irony and which he calls “blank parody,” likened to “a statue with blind eyeballs” that criticizes nothing in particular. For my purposes, the most important ramifications of Butler’s theory can be summarized as follows:

1) Categories are created;
2) Despite their ontological status as fictions, categories operate as socially determinant forces; and
3) Categories cannot be escaped, but they can be modified.

While subjectivity, functioning within or in opposition to these dominant categories, does display a certain degree of discursive freedom, it’s equally true that some performances are more coercive than others. Consider Robert Coover’s “Rosenbergs,” whose moving rendition of themselves is topped only by the spectacle of the cold war feeding frenzy that is the Sam Slick Show. The point is that categories can kill: the fictional Rosenbergs, like their historical counterparts, are duly electrocuted, while Uncle Sam incarnates himself in “Nixon,” whose real world original was less than a decade away from ascending to the presidency of the United States.

Butler’s notion of subversive parody, like Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING, has many affinities with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, a genre which he likens to Rabelais’ Gargantua in its wholesale consumption and appropriation of all other genres into its heteroclite body: “The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates them into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them.”

This is a perfect description of what happens in many postmodern novels, which appropriate everything from newspaper clippings to advertising copy, historical documents to political speeches in order to “re-accentuate” them as non-naturalized discourse. In this way the formalist technique of defamiliarization is employed in the service of sociopolitical critique. Just as novelistic laughter, for Bakhtin, destroys epic’s “hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance,” the postmodern novel deflates and denaturalizes official political ideology (the “official story” which might be considered a contemporary distanced and valorized “epic”).

Postmodernism, like Butler’s new feminism, is structured on an epistemology in which the historical and the fictional are neither mutually exclusive nor dialectically entwined: they are one and the same. The emphasis is no longer on mimesis, but on paraphrasis. In other words: discourse. The postmodern aesthetic follows from the assumption that historiography and fiction are both forms of narrative, and as such neither can be privileged over, or neatly differentiated from, the other. E. L. Doctorow puts it this way: “a visitor from another planet could not by study of the techniques of discourse distinguish composed fiction from composed history.” This kind of increasingly widespread thinking signals a decisive break from modernism, a postmodern rupture empowered by the liquidation of the referent and the reconfiguration of the real as discourse.

At present, the nature of this rupture is far from being universally understood. Even Linda Hutcheon, whose concept of “historiographic metafiction” is based on a discursive model similar to the one I’ve been articulating, refuses to admit that postmodernism constitutes a true break from modernism. Hutcheon maintains that in postmodernism the referent is posited only to be taken away, which is indeed the case, but I’d like to point out that such give and take in postmodernist fiction is always already rhetorical. There’s no lingering suspicion that an unmediated reality might be “out there.” Historiographic metafiction’s rhetoric of the referent is a self-conscious strategy designed precisely to demonstrate that the “real” never existed, cannot exist outside its expression in and as discourse.

Postmodernism’s conflation of the historical and the fictional betrays an ironic self-consciousness in a way that much modernist fiction, equally self-contradictory but for different reasons, does not. Postmodern “reference” distinguishes itself from its modernist precursor to the extent that it has relinquished all legitimated or legitimizing claims to referentiality. The postmodern paradox is, of course, that in doing so, contemporary fiction has become a great deal more historically minded than modernism ever was–witness the meteoric rise over the past four decades of the new historical novel.

In the United States, a leading proponent of this new type of fiction is E. L. Doctorow. Not surprisingly, Doctorow is Jameson’s primary target when the latter seeks to illustrate postmodernism’s purportedly ahistorical historicism. Jameson’s criticism boils down to the fact that Doctorow, despite his Leftist leanings, has consistently problematized the past, suggesting that the past is ineluctably a matter of interpretation, whereas Jameson longs for historical grounding in the factual real, for the old “solid historiographic formation on the reader’s part.”

Doctorow–whose fiction is nothing if not about history–is thus far from being “the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past,” as Jameson claims. Instead, he might be thought of as a (typical if singularly eloquent) postmodern exponent of the past-existing-in-and-through-discourse. Jameson correctly perceives, however, that the expansion of culture into the social, resulting in the postmodern erasure of “critical distance,” negates traditional Marxist political resistance. Whereas Marxism, much like the modernist avant-garde, depends for its social critique on a hypothetical “autonomous” position outside the social, postmodernism recognizes that such autonomy is an illusion: there is no outside, only a choice among figurative or signifying devices.

Postmodern novels foreground–indeed, depend on–the very discursive strategies formulated by postmodern feminists like Judith Butler. In these novels the real is transformed into narrative, the self is shown to be constructed through discursive forces, and political resistance necessarily occurs as a disruptive performance inscribed within the very discourse(s) under critique.

Such strategies are often ambivalent, and even paradoxical, but never quietistic. As I hope to demonstrate in readings of Doctorow’s THE BOOK OF DANIEL and the Brazilian novelist Ivan Ângelo’s A FESTA, calling attention to the instrinsically performative nature of what we call reality and the ways categories are produced and maintained is itself a political act.

Doctorow summarizes this point beautifully when he argues that the “imagination obviously imposes itself on the world, composes a world which, in turn, affects what is imagined … [A] book can affect consciousness–affect the way people think and therefore the way they act. Books create constituencies that have their own effect on history.”

Postmodern fiction, far from being irresponsible, takes on the very serious task of urging the reader to avoid the mindless replication of sometimes empowering but often pernicious categories–categories which have no basis in objective reality precisely because reality is never objective. Until we as a people become conscious of this fundamental truth, postmodernism maintains, the nightmare of history will most assuredly continue.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

[Sol Luckman is author of the bestselling nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the critically acclaimed Beginner's Luke Series of novels. 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. Currently, the author is giving away Books I-III of the Beginner's Luke Series. To take advantage of this free offer, click here.]

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BEGINNER'S LUKE--Read It Here!

Posted on Jul 8th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke
Frontluke
Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? Well, you can! Luke Soloman will show you how. Luke is more than merely self-conscious. He is sui generis, literally believing himself into being. BEGINNER'S LUKE is the first novel in a series of six madcap adventures that, collectively, make up the imaginary life of this lovably irreverent modern-day Walter Mitty. While titillating in the rambunctious tradition of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Tom Robbins, this visionary debut 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. “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
 
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Dear Editor ...

Posted on Jun 29th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke

Dear Editor,

Please find here, in its entirety, my novel Beginner’s Luke for your consideration.

Beginner’s Luke is the first in a series of six already finished novels of approximately the same length that relate the often hilarious, sometimes irreverent “imaginary life” of my eponymous narrator.

Luke Soloman is more than merely self-conscious. He is sui generis, literally believing himself into being. While titillating in the rambunctious tradition of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Tom Robbins, 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.

In 2005 a respected New York publishing house, with a reputation as one of America’s best independent presses, offered me a publishing contract for the Beginner’s Luke Series. After much soul searching, I declined and embarked on an experiment in self-publishing that has yielded thousands of online readers and a number of encouraging professional reviews.

Apex Reviews called Beginner’s Luke a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.” Reader Views described it as a “modern-day Alice in Wonderland.” And literary scholar Niama Williams, Ph.D., host of “Poetry & Prose & Anything Goes,” called Beginner’s Luke a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.”

It is worth noting I am an accomplished writer of nonfiction. In just over three years, my self-published Conscious Healing, which Australia’s Nexus New Times called “revolutionary” and a “paradigm-reworking book,” has sold thousands of copies and been translated into multiple languages.

My goal is for Beginner’s Luke to reach a mainstream audience as a successful series, and I have ample reason to believe this is not only possible but inevitable.

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,
 
Sol Luckman
http://www.beginnersluke.com


The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime begins. Request your FREE copy today!

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Song of Soloman (from BEGINNER'S LUKE)

Posted on Jun 10th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke

The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime begins. Request your FREE copy today!

“BEGINNER'S LUKE to a conventional novel is what an animated film is to a documentary. It is creative, imaginative, humorous and very distinctive.” –Reader Views

Sol Luckman


okay so i guess i’m supposed to write something let’s see i’ll write about hell i’ll write about sitting here on the balcony a friday evening just me & my smith-corona listening to pink floyd through headphones friday evening & still warm out still sultry still hazy but not too warm hot to melt your eyeballs no simply & elegantly perfect an evening for smoking great bowls of ganja & lolling about in an aquatic environment enfin a pond evening glorious as those of yore spent weightless on inner tubes the earth slowly spinning under our skins but now a breeze scratches me with long fingernails as night encroaches with high-heel strides erasing the clouds that have danced like angels so much beauty & to be so alone ah twilight at last seeing-feeling-hearing dark come on stars peering down the smell of cut grass wafting katydids singing fall’s nostalgia grips me as i long for my mountains & now blue-gray-pigeon-dark the almost full moon winking awake i drink in the moment perched here on the prow of my little life’s ship lonely yes but unless i walk many miles in soloman’s shoes how can i possibly become everyman & now the streetlamps sputter i type in their strobe visualizing these imaginary scenes from my former & future incarnations that’s to say my existence before & after i became me when the luke of today was but an embryo & an afterthought tonight i just feel like writing rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat letters clips & clops horse steps i have this urge to finger away at the keys & watch the letters pop up like pop-tarts devoid of meaning but extremely tasty or not like pop-tarts but fireflies yes reverse fireflies black against the pale background permanent reverse fireflies stuck like an expression in a photo fireflies that can’t unfix themselves from their intrinsic flash isn’t it amazing how each year the fireflies come i’ve been having flashbacks sort of if you’re reading this you know what i mean & if you’re not you don’t matter it’s the same every june a minor miracle they seem to happen for the very first time appearing out of nowhere amalgam of recall & anticipation streaking like words through the dusk cars on a distant road evoking bittersweet memories white silhouettes of these letters that even as i compose them bring themselves to mind this sentence has no zing to it but this one oh this one’s a beauty hear it begin smoothly then quicken its steps with pitterpattery feet & in a single bound mount the stairs to the landing curling into a ball & finishing with playful swishings of a bushy tail i’ve always wanted to write the music not just write & use the music for background no write the music write with the music be the music have words = notes sit naked with the music washing through me & when i sing it’s the music but also the words how many times do i have to say it before i bring it into being if you want to be a writer said kerouac get a job fuck that fuck the slaves the grists for the mill the bricks in the wall fuck america enough said me i was meant for greatness as long as the limb holds & now i’m coming home in whatever land that may be i glimpse lightning & hear thunder a latesummer storm the wall was so high can’t you see i wish my words were a silent background blue so cool like miles davis a blue & simple play over the notes d dd dd dd d ddd so beautiful so sweet i could cry but that would break the magic & every new listen would be a false tear je prendrai le train pour sexe-en-provence got a bag a paintbrush a comb back in chetaube they’d hate this music ask why i was listening to such depressing stuff & i’d say you don’t know you can’t know they can’t know i’ve got ink stains on my fingers this is to certify i remember dante would know perhaps grin his toothy grin & say yes i’ll have another jell-o pudding what has become of you he’d snicker above his fat little retarded girl knees & ask how goes it are you feeling okay i could write a poem to the social hierarchy all those who would make my decisions for me choose me or throw me back to the gaping mouths of lions too often i’ve glimpsed the coy smile of a player holding a full house with nails long & slick & sharp red will i buck the system will i feed myself & then offer food & drink to others will i say i will not be denied will i push the chair from the table & scream no more oatmeal for me or will i become comfortably numb the night is red like my lips like my heart & the starred covers on my bed i wonder if i’m just seeing red where’s the feeling gone where the time that invisibly works its design do watches ever grow tired but in the end when the cat-footed rain wraps the campus & i pause for rest i throw away the day i throw it far away but do i dare do i dare there will be time yes for revisions & decisions which a minute how perverse do i dare disturb the universe i’ll squeeze it into a ball & so amaze them all there’s a nausea that festers in me even now as i run run run what lazy ways these days do haze our eyes when risings to surprise are whispers in a maze i’m no prophet & here’s no gray matter only my head on a silver platter i remember i imagine i create the smells of sweat & grass juice a towheaded boy trailing a tractor through the fields the plow cutting furrows through oceans of red clay ground spilling up away behind the blades like a boat’s wake earthworms sliced in half wiggling in the damp soil & occasionally an arrowhead chipped or whole freshly unearthed with the dirt still glistening on it bonjour worm your honor you caught me showing feelings of a nearly human nature i don’t belong here i’ve suspected this for a while i’m on the wrong planet indeed at the wrong time what do i tell the voices that say i’m not what i am not worthy not ready when i am here here here exploding like firecrackers here as i’ve never been before true because imagined know things in my marrow feel the blisters on my fingers taste the oatmeal i ate for breakfast there’s a wayward soul in me

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.


Who would you be if you could be anyone? go anywhere? do anything? Well, you can! Luke Soloman will show you how.

BEGINNER'S LUKE is the first novel in a series of six madcap adventures that, collectively, make up the imaginary life of this lovably irreverent modern-day Walter Mitty. 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.

A respected New York publisher, whose authors feature a National Book Award finalist in addition to dozens of prestigious award winners, offered the author a contract (subsequently declined in favor of an experiment in self-publishing) for the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series, which made it out of a yearly "slush pile" of nearly 8,000 manuscripts--a rare and wonderful feat these days. One early reader confided, ”I've had quite a journey ever since you shared BEGINNER'S LUKE with me. I'm more careful, these days, when someone gives me a book. I haven't been the same since reading it, as if I contracted the disease of restlessness and have spent months reconsidering every facet of my life. Your novel changed me forever and I blame you for it.”

To take advantage of this totally FREE offer, click here.

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New 2nd Edition of CONSCIOUS HEALING

Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke

Crow Rising News & Notes
May, 2009
 
Announcing the Updated & Expanded 2nd Edition of CONSCIOUS HEALING!

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure to announce the second edition of my bestselling and internationally acclaimed Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method.

Updated and expanded with a wealth of empowering new information, now more than ever Conscious Healing is far more than the inspiring story of the development of a "revolutionary healing science that's expanding the boundaries of being" (Nexus).

An ambitious  synthesis of modern and ancient healing wisdom, this leading-edge text is for anyone interested in alternative medicine, energy healing, consciousness research, quantum biology, human evolution, personal enlightenment, 2012, or the Mayan calendar.

Read It FREE Online!

I have made the entire text available in an eye-friendly, online reading version at http://www.phoenixregenetics.org/page9.html. To your potential!

Preorder the Paperback!

For a limited time, preorder the paperback and save $3. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.

http://www.potentiation.net/CH2nd.jpg

You can also download the ebook for your offline reading enjoyment, and save $3, here.

Thanks for flying high with Crow Rising Transformational Media today!

Sol
http://www.crowrising.com

"Be willing to walk your talk, speak your truth, know your life's mission, and balance past, present, and future in the now," we read of Crow in Medicine Cards. "Shape-shift that old reality and become your future self. Allow the bending of physical laws to aid in creating the shape-shifted world of peace."
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Creative Writing 101

Posted on Apr 15th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke

"Journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast" (Apex Reviews). Download your FREE copies of Books I-III of the Beginner's Luke Series today!

Sol Luckman

With the notable exception of Intermediate French, which I recall chiefly because the instructor was a to-die-for Parisian grad student named Emmanuelle whose haute couture hips maintained a constant motion like an Olympic slalom skier’s as she copied dizzying conjugations across the blackboard—I say, not counting French the only class I remember taking my first (and technically, only) semester in Pulpit Hill was Creative Writing 101.
 
Actually, that’s pure fiction. I just told a complete lie in a shameless attempt to streamline the opening of this transitional chapter that has, in all honesty, given me stress ulcers …

That’s another lie. I really just wanted to grab your attention, lure you in with a gratuitous image of exotic sexuality, seduce you into a comfortable narrative rhythm so as to take advantage of your aroused credulity. When the simple fact is I distinctly remember a third class that fall: Sociology of the Imaginary.

Taught by a twitchy little bird-faced Canadian professor named Jean-Michel Possy, Sociology of the Imaginary had fifteen students including yours truly, required no formal coursework other than a final and used a single textbook, Extraterrestrials in Our Lives, written by the professor. Many of the students were, in fact, extraterrestrials.

We spent most of our time watching ET, Close Encounters, Alien, Cocoon and Roswell documentaries, then discussing them in detail—the idea being, according to the syllabus, “to explore humanity by examining our imaginative conception of the Other.” I kept wanting to stand up and tell everybody I was the imagined Other, big as life right there in front of them, and they should be studying me instead of ET. But I was a freshman and still rather shy.

To return, though, to Creative Writing 101. This was an introductory fiction workshop taught by the venerable Department Chair, who wasn’t actually a chair but a slightly senile, possibly alcoholic novelist by the name of Bertha McGough from whom I gained a sobering perspective on the art (for lack of a better word) of writing pedestrian but eminently marketable prose with a distinctly Southern flavor concerned with the ordinary lives of ordinary characters and the ordinary human spirit’s triumph over ordinary adversity and all that Harper Lee crap.

That first afternoon we found ourselves seated around a huge round table, a literary Camelot, twenty or so of us aspiring eighteen-year-old geniuses with helium in our brains, in one of the seminar rooms in Lovelace Hall, home to the English Department. Mrs. McGough arrived fashionably late and, taking her place at the table, launched into a carefully rehearsed, impromptu lecture about how this was a serious course, and we were all expected to turn in our manuscripts on time, and we were to give and receive constructive criticism, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

The class is designed for no more than twelve students and, since there are twenty of us, the non-registered students are kindly asked to look elsewhere. I’ve already pre-registered, so I’m only giving Mrs. McGough half an ear. It turns out there’s one spot left for a non-registered student that has just been snagged by one William Morocco, a.k.a. Billy, presently engaged across the table in extracting an especially recalcitrant bugger from his aquiline nose.

Billy was, in a word … ugly. I mean that literally. The boy was as ugly as your grandmother bent over reaching for the soap in the shower. I’m quite confident Billy, wherever (and for that matter, whoever) he is, would agree with me good-naturedly. We used to joke about how ugly he was, after we became friends.

You’d think I’d have been accustomed to the sight of an ugly person, having hung out for so long with Egbert and Dante and having, moreover, grown up in Lipton Hill. But Billy was in a class by himself.

Maybe it was the way he always seemed to stoop (he could stoop lying down); or the way his hands, feet and ears looked half a dozen sizes overgrown; or the albino skin mottled with raspberry freckles and the occasional juicy zit; or the shoulder-length, neon red hair that looked like a cheap theatrical wig but that really was his hair … Whatever the case, there was one thing (technically, two things) about him that wasn’t ugly: his eyes.

Don’t panic. I have no intention of blithering on about one of my character’s eyes like some indulgent romance novelist. The eyes are the most overrated of the visible aspects of human anatomy. I myself prefer the earlobes and ankles. But I will say Billy had the most mesmerizing set of peepers I’ve ever stared into.

I can’t even remember what color they were. They could have been hot pink or lemon yellow, that’s how much I was drawn into them, mesmerized, blinded like a deer in headlights, bowled over and taken for a ride. Only much later did I finally break the spell of his eyes and realize how crazy the son-of-a-bitch was.

Long before that I came to love him as you can only love a best friend: totally, utterly, soul-to-marrow. I’d have followed him to the bottom of the ocean, the dark side of the moon, on a Himalayan expedition. And I practically did.



So all the non-registered students are obliged to leave, Billy casually flips the bugger over his shoulder, and the first lesson gets underway. As an ice-breaker Mrs. McGough asked us to go around the table and introduce ourselves. I recall counting only eleven students, including myself, four of whom, in addition to Billy, played at least a minor role in my brief tenure as an undergrad in Pulpit Hill:

Penny Genet. Related through an obscure genealogy to the French playwright, Penny Genet (for some reason nobody ever called her just “Penny”) could talk a mean Shakespeare and was the most naturally talented writer among us. She had a plump, pretty exterior, especially on the rare occasions when she permitted herself to smile, but underneath was a heart harder than marble and liquid nitrogen sluicing through her veins.

“I like eating better than sex because no one is sharing it with me,” she once told the class proudly. Gifted with a razor-sharp wit and microscopic critical eye, Penny Genet was more outwardly pleasant than inwardly kind. While remaining cordial toward one another, she and I both realized, privately, we disagreed about everything.

Tamara Love. A wan, hypersensitive girl who wore ankle-length, earth-tone, hemp dresses with no shoes or stockings (even in winter) and wrote tear-jerking stories about endangered wildlife. Plainly sweet and sweetly plain, Tamara didn’t look like other coeds with her bushy Slavic eyebrows and knotty body. There was something rather beautiful in her ugliness, and something else altogether unattractive in her beauty. She had a strange habit of giving her fellow classmates deep-tissue massages with the pointed end of a yam.

Once, at a party, finding herself alone with me on someone’s porch, she confided that in high school she’d had three abortions and two STDs. That was shortly before she fell to waxing eloquent about how nice my ass was (she’d enticed me to the floor and started in with the yam) and how I was so good-looking (she was stoned) and how we should definitely get together and have sex or something.

I think I hurt her feelings when I politely declined to accompany her back to her room. I never could figure out whether Tamara was stupid or just confused. She went on to become editor of Queue (which Billy and I referred to as Cul, from the French), the student literary magazine.

Reginald Washington. A skinny, animated guy from the Fourth Dimension (so we surmised) who was the spitting image of Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing. Reginald liked to discourse at great length and in tremendous detail on the Bible as science fiction. His stories never had characters—at least none any of us could identify—though he did produce one interesting piece of work: “The Undiscovered Country,” a sketch for a story (presumably with characters) about the discovery, in 1986, of a seventh continent the size of Australia located just a few miles east of the Florida Keys. The somewhat obvious theme being the hubris of science exposed by the mystery of the unknown universe.

It was impossible to tell whether Reginald was on drugs or Foucault. He’d get wound up and suddenly take off like a UFO into some extraordinarily abstruse topic completely off the subject, something like: “What I fail to understand is the contradictory textual situation because of the fact that the narrator is but isn’t, you dig, and also that whole antihero thing, and I was reminded again of the sociolibinal nature of narrative, which translates into a kind of triviality belying a tremendous though hidden and oft-denied importance, like the Crazy Glue cementing this world together whose center just can’t seem to hold otherwise, to paraphrase Shelley and Yeats and, yes, Achebe, a brother, dig, and I felt a vast existential loneliness inherent in the seemingly glib dialogue and compelling descriptions of the wasteland that society has become which came across as pure poetry, lyrical even, dig, and that reminded me of something Nietzsche once said—”

Then there was Tristan. Tristan Dykes. The funny thing was—she really was a dike. “Queer as a tennis helmet,” Billy used to say. Tristan had the droopy hound-dog face of certain Irish women, sported cropped flaming red hair to match her molten Gaelic temperament and was a damned good writer—if you liked stories about arson, gang rape and child molestation.

She wrote like a serial killer. She’d grown up as an army brat in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which she referred to with smoldering odium as “Fayettenam.” I’ll never forget the first sentence of the first story she submitted: “The only serious fire I ever set, aside from a few minor dumpster and trashcan fires, was when I doused my parents’ doublewide with gasoline, threw a lit match on it and walked away without looking back.” Fact or fiction? The shared suspicion was it was unembellished fact, but we never found out for sure.

Tristan carried a chip on her shoulder the size of the Rosetta Stone. She hated men in general, me in particular. She took especial umbrage at my satirical sketch of the feminist writer (cleverly named Kristen Sykes) who, after losing her memory in a near-fatal lesbian sexual accident, hears her own story (which she has absolutely no memory of writing) being read at a workshop by a male colleague and proceeds to attack his “typically myopic, bigoted, phallogocentric point of view.”

Last but not least, there was Billy. Besides being eye-popping ugly, Billy was the official Resident Enigma of the University of North Carolina at Pulpit Hill. A kind of collegiate Gatsby for the 80s, the guy was nobody and everybody, either full of shit or full of gold depending on the source.

Some said he was the estranged (possibly bastard) son of wealthy East Coast aristocrats, the Browns or the Rockefellers or even the Kennedys. And he did vaguely resemble—with that mop of red hair, blueblood nose and equine teeth—Bobby Kennedy as a young man. Others said he was related to Lily Tomlin, that he was descended from George Orwell, that he was Lyle Lovett’s half brother, that he was the son of Ed Sullivan or Jack Palance or even, according to a vocal minority, Buddy Holly.

Whether with plotting purpose or out of unconcerned innocence, Billy added to the intrigue by maintaining a serene, detached silence that had the effect of stirring up more rumors. That he was a heroin smuggler. That he was a KGB spy. That there were secret caves on the coast of Brittany where he’d hosted month-long orgies. All that was known with certainty about him was he was loaded—enough to drive a mint condition orange Ferrari Spider and own (not rent) the sumptuous three-story antebellum manor he resided in on a cul-de-sac off Mephisto Street.

Billy’s silence extended into the classroom, where unless I missed it during one of my daydreams, he never uttered a syllable beyond that first meeting when we all introduced ourselves … That’s not true either. I’m full of lies today! He did speak one afternoon in class when, ordered by Mrs. McGough (who was at her wit’s end) to produce at least the idea for a story, he looked directly at me as if staring into my heart of hearts and outlined the following scenario:

A writer in his early thirties kept sending off his stories to various magazines, contests, agents and editors—without success. The writer became more and more depressed, and at times even a little suicidal, facing all that rejection. But one day he had a brilliant idea: he decided to transform himself and go back to college. But not just any college. He applied to the University of Iowa and enrolled as a freshman in its famous writing program. Of course, he told everybody he was just eighteen, which made his professors (among them John Irving) think he was some kind of prodigy because he wrote so well for his age. So they used their influence to get him a lucrative publishing contract and, presto, despite his actually mediocre talent, he was hailed as the next Tom Robbins.

But other than this singular outburst, Billy’s lips remained tightly sealed. To the best of my knowledge he never even turned in a writing assignment. Yet he never skipped class, was always the first to arrive and last to leave. He even took notes occasionally, scribbling with a Waterman pen in a leather-bound, gold-leafed notebook he carried in the inside pocket of his Harris tweed jacket.

Mrs. McGough eventually stopped making his blatant lack of participation an issue—though she later flunked him. Little by little Billy passed from being one of us aspiring geniuses, to a curious if not altogether engaged onlooker, and finally to nothing more than a specter that haunted our classroom, a friendly apparition more figmentary than real, a regular Boo Radley gone away to college and enrolled in Creative Writing 101.



After introductions Mrs. McGough handed out copies of the syllabus and discussed its particulars, then went on to pose general questions about the nature and purpose of fiction.

“What is a story?” she began, surveying the room over the top of her horn-rimmed bifocals, which she always wore on the tip of her nose when not chewing an earpiece in a polished writerly gesture. “Tell me, what is a story?” An embarrassed silence ensued. No one had an answer.

To this day I’m not sure I’m any closer to answering Mrs. McGough’s question. I’m tempted to say either everything is a story, or nothing is. Maybe it’s simply a matter of semantics. Maybe there’s really no difference between story and non-story. After all, the Word was made Flesh. And certainly Flesh is made Word every day. Take my imaginary life. I used to be a real person, but now I’m just words.

Or am I?

Rule #1: Always believe everything you read, however absurd or implausible it may strike you, because you just never know.

Believe this:

That first class possessed an undeniable fatality. Aside from providing the context for my initial encounter with Billy (an event that was to have immense personal and, to a certain degree, metaphysical and even historical implications), that first class was where I fell madly, desperately, head-over-heels in lust with Vanessa Hope.

Sweet Vanessa! Nymphomaniacal muse! In Life, as in Art, one typically falls for at least one femme fatale. I still get a hard-on when I think about her.

I’d met her briefly a few days earlier at the reception for the incoming Skidmore scholars at the Skidmore Terrarium. A posh event, I’d never felt more like the wide-eyed, slack-jawed, clueless hick I’d chosen to be, surrounded by such stunning Old Money opulence—the shiny brass doorknobs, gleaming crystal chandeliers, period furniture, Turkish rugs, oriental vases and gilt-framed oil paintings; the waiters in black tie serving artisanal hors-d’oeuvres and expensive champagne; the stuffy trustees making the rounds getting to know the new scholars; the scholars themselves, sixty or so, an up-and-coming jet set of Americans, Canadians, Brits and Aussies from Andover, Hotchkiss and Wycombe Abbey destined for executive positions with such philanthropic and spiritually uplifting corporations as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, trying their prep school best to appear suave, witty, urbane and wise beyond their years; and presiding over it all the vast oil portrait of Richard Smedley Skidmore VI, rubber baron, patron of the arts but mostly the sciences whose seven-figure endowment was royally financing not only our educations but the artisanal hors-d’oeuvres and expensive champagne to boot. (The fact every scholar present was underage was casually and, I say with certainty, safely ignored.) Yes, there he was: good old Uncle Skidmark himself.

And there she was—Vanessa, sweet Vanessa, conversing in fluent French with one of the trustees, delicately sipping her champagne with impeccable grace. To look at her, to listen to her, you’d have thought she was untouchable, inviolable, a creature not of this world, a fair-skinned Norse goddess who, unlike her swarthy and promiscuous Greek counterparts, would never deign to be caressed by mortal hands.

Not that she was haughty; to the contrary, her conversation flowed with animation and sincerity. I noticed she had big gums, and the effect was anything but negative, and I returned to my dorm room later that evening still thinking about her, drunkenly aroused and mildly troubled in a sexual way. Imagine my surprise when she waltzed in the door twenty-five minutes late for Mrs. McGough’s Creative Writing 101.

“I’m Vanessa Hope. Sorry I’m late. I had trouble finding the building.”

“Have a seat,” said Mrs. McGough. “Tell us, Vanessa, where are you from? You don’t sound like a Southerner.”

“Boston,” she replied, squeezing into the vacant seat beside Billy, the bastard.

I’d never been to Boston, but the way Vanessa said it, the way the word dripped out of her mouth like fresh maple syrup oozing from a tap, filled me with an intense desire to go there. Immediately.

From that instant, for the duration of the class, I completely forgot about Billy. I forgot he even existed. I forgot I existed. I became an impassioned spirit drifting limpidly, languidly through the streets of an imaginary Boston, lost in Vanessa’s petulant breasts and slender neck, the chiseled line of her jaw, her sparkling emerald eyes that kept boring hot little holes in me.



The sounds of notebooks closing, chairs scooting back and people standing up rudely interrupted my reverie. Class was over. I’d managed to fantasize away the second half of my first lesson.

As we filed out of the room, I tapped Billy on the shoulder. “What’s the assignment?” I whispered.

He looked at me knowingly with his lucid mad eyes and said simply, matter-of-factly, “I haven’t the vaguest idea.” Then, turning to watch Vanessa sashay down the hall: “She’ll go far on that ass.”

I reread the syllabus later for the assignment: a one-thousand-word free association sentence without punctuation or capitalization to be written spontaneously in one sitting. We were also supposed to begin a writer’s notebook like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s to be filled with story ideas, character sketches, dialogue, descriptions, jokes, poems, recyclable tidbits, et cetera.

Meanwhile, I followed my classmates out of Lovelace Hall into a sizzling August afternoon. There wasn’t a hint of fall yet in the flatlands; the bright sunlight was still as hot as a crematorium. I watched furtively, longingly, as Vanessa disappeared around the corner in the opposite direction I was headed.

Parting is especially sweet sorrow when it’s unilateral. I felt empty walking back across campus to my dorm. As I made my way past the Hole, the university’s social epicenter and forum for a variety of lunatics, I overheard a street preacher reading from his King James Bible, voice raised, as if to a circus tent full of revival-goers.

“And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets, that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts. Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the LORD. They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The LORD saith it; albeit I have not spoken? Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye have spoken vanity, and seen lies, therefore, behold, I am against you, saith the Lord GOD.”

When I looked back I saw Billy, heinously ugly Billy in his Harris tweed jacket, sitting alone on the steps munching a bag of Ruffles, attentively accompanying the preacher’s sermon.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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Blame It on Rio

Posted on Mar 11th, 2009 by Luke : Fictional Persona Luke
Morphametosis


Have you ever finished something, only to begin it all over again? Have you ever stared death in the face, only to realize it was actually life? Follow our protean Hero's epic, but no less comical, Adventure of being human to the ends of the earth in Book VI of the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series in whose conclusion nothing is really concluded--which is precisely the point.


(from Book VI, Morphametosis)

Life as an imaginary author named Sol Luckman carried on much the same as when I was an imaginary character named Luke Soloman—with a handful of noteworthy exceptions. First, as a native of South America, I developed an instinctual craving for tapioca. Second, I noticed my Portuguese sounded more clipped, more “Spanish,” an equatorial sotaque with subtle Amazonian intonations. Third, I remarked my posture improved, that I tended to hold myself more erect as my overall bearing became more—for lack of a better word—noble. Fourth and finally, I began to pick up on a marked difference in people’s attitudes toward me.

No longer “white,” I came to realize I wasn’t just dispossessed in the first impressions of the ruling class, wasn’t just another human being temporarily out of luck maybe but a fellow Homo sapiens all the same. I was another species entirely, a distant genetic cousin, one measurably lower on the evolutionary ladder—an inequality not even money, which I now had enough of to last me a while, could erase.

But fortunately, dinheiro did have a way of opening closed doors. I was able to move into a furnished penthouse (third-floor) apartment in a quaint little building in Gávea with picturesque views of the jungle out my bedroom and study windows and a landlord willing to overlook the fact I was indigenous (as opposed to indigent)—for three months’ rent in advance plus my security deposit.

And so it was with Luke Soloman steadily becoming a figment of the past that I, Sol Luckman, a figment of the present, took up independent residence for the first time. Like any pseudonym worth his salt, I focused my new existence on writing. I bought a used laptop with a printer and picked up where I’d left off when distrações got the best of me: Chapter Three of Book IV, “Le Dépanneur,” for now writing as Sol writing about Luke, though knowing I’d eventually be writing as Sol writing about Sol, even though I’d still be author and protagonist of the Beginner’s Luke Series ...

It may sound confusing, but in reality it was childishly simple: as author of my authorial self, I was merely drawing a circle.



If I could have designed my ideal workspace, it would have been my study. The natural lighting, the white stucco walls, the gentle whirring of the ceiling fan, the antique roller chair, the little brazil-wood desk facing the large French window opening outward onto the mata from where I could peer out over my laptop at diminutive furry-faced monkeys called micos playing, where for a refresher I could drift away from the digitized  screen and admire the rolling and frothing in swell after swell of dense tropical vegetation complete with enormous humanoid sunflowers bowing and swaying. I often fancied myself a latter-day Hemingway scribbling stories on safari, and was always a little dépaysé emerging from my remote African bungalow into the chic hustle and bustle of Rio.

I soon began to entertain hopes of a more sustained, more focused life in letters. Not counting Carnaval week and, later, several days when I was ill, I entered a period of unparalleled productivity that lasted through April during which I finished Book IV, capping it off with “The Last Métro,” and forged ahead into Book V, The Accidental Gringo—transitioning Luke from France to Brazil, staging his farce in emigration, then landing him in the Sasquema household with its multiple layers of intrigue. Initially, I wasn’t sure how to extract him from such a fix. But I had faith if I just kept writing, I’d figure out a way to construct an appropriate dénouement.

Speaking of the Sasquema household, Rita found me before January was out, showing up early one morning as I was slicing a pineapple for breakfast, clutching a tattered suitcase in one bony hand and the boom-box I’d given her for Christmas in the other.

Meu filho, you’ve changed!” she said tearfully as we embraced.

“How do I look?”

“Better.”

“Your timing, Rita, if not your tact, is impecavel. Por favor, won’t you join me for breakfast?”

“I couldn’t possibly do that, Senhor Luckman.”

“Por favor, call me Sol.”

“I couldn’t possibly do that, Sol.”

I finally prevailed on her to be my guest, which didn’t stop her from trying to wait on me hand and foot. But I’d already made up my mind Rita’s indentured servant days were over. She was getting frail and, though she never complained, you could tell she had a bad back by the way she held her hand over her hip as if her sacrum would fold like an accordion otherwise.

After much lobbying over the course of several days, I succeeded in persuading her to move out of the little dependência (where she’d already set up her shrine to Juscelino, which stayed put) into the spare bedroom. I even offered to hire a maid, a maid for the maid, but that was where Rita drew the line. I think I actually hurt her pride.

“This old bird can still pull her weight, Senhor Luckman.”

Por favor, call me Sol.”

“This old bird can still pull her weight, Sol.”

In the end we settled on a compromise: I would do the bulk of the shopping and help her clean the apartment every other week, and she would do the cooking, washing and laundry. “But no excessive ironing,” I insisted. “I don’t need my underwear or socks ironed, entendeu?

Entendi, Senhor Luckman.”

Por favor, Rita, call me Sol.”

Entendi, Sol.”



Not counting the inherent debauchery of Carnaval week with its institutionalized strategies for decadence, which I must say I enjoyed firsthand (even though in more sober moments I agree with those who contend Carnaval is just a big smokescreen designed to hide Brazil’s misery behind a drunken, orgiastic haze of “alegria”)—I say, the mayhem of Carnaval aside, while making major strides on my novel I also came to feel more “balanced” as Sol Luckman than I ever had as Luke Soloman.

I purchased a membership to the Clube do Flamengo with its complex of outdoor Olympic pools and started exercising again, stroking back and forth under the crisp azure sky, emerging from the meditative waters to behold the Cristo Redentor atop Corcovado above the amendoeiras, arms outstretched poised for a spectacular high dive, then reclining exhausted and remade all chiseled and tan on the bleachers in the sunshine admiring the occasional toffee-colored Brasileira dripping wet fresh from her own swim.

When I didn’t feel like swimming, I went running around Lagoa, nearly ten kilometers in a circle door-to-door from my building over the course of which I often traveled back in my mind’s eye to Pulpit Hill, to all the times I, or rather Luke, went running from himself that fall when he was just beginning to connect with his lonely calling, crunching the dry leaves as he zipped around the Gargoyle Castle Loop in the chill fall afternoons ...

But filled with bittersweet nostalgia, delicious saudade as such memories were, I liked it better when it rained and washed away Luke’s past, when I, Sol, became temporarily immersed in my own vibrant present—braving the lightning, cool rain feathering down on my hot skin, running with mounting excitement through an exotic landscape peopled with thousands of strangers I longed to befriend.

Rain, even the facsimile thereof, always had that kind of energizing effect on me. I could be sitting on my bed reading, for instance, as a hard rain came pelting down outside on the mata, and suddenly, inexplicably, I’d feel breathtakingly alive. Or I could be woken up in the middle of the night by the rain and experience a massive adrenaline rush of that same wild, lyrical, hedonistic, nose-following energy characteristic of my imaginary life from the outset—only to realize it wasn’t rain but merely the sound of wind in the palms or newspapers blowing across someone’s tile balcony ... It never ceased to amaze me how many things can sound for all the world just like rain.

But back to balance. My newfound sense of equilibrium had something to do with my unfolding relationship with time. Before, as Luke, it had always seemed there was never enough time. Time was a sore spot with me, I was always running out of it.

But now, as Sol—I guess this was another difference between us—I seemed to have an abundance of time, a plethora, enough to do all the things I wanted and more: sleep late, eat well, do my chores, write, exercise, take walks, pay strict attention to ritual by slipping on my Speedo and heading to the beach. I usually grabbed a book and walked down to Posto 9 in Ipanema, a beach that sizzled with enough well-oiled flesh to fulfill even the hungriest carnivore.

Not that I was feeling particularly carnivorous. I typically had more pressing things than chasing tail on my mind. Still, lounging on the soft sand under the hot sun, the world comfortably spinning, I occasionally put down my book and spent the afternoon daydreaming sex—pushed over the edge of desire by a magnificent set of seios, one fine brown bunda too many. I always wished I could bottle the essence of a few of those beauties to take back home and enjoy at my leisure, without all the trouble and interruption of having a real woman in the house.

Most evenings I went out for a nightcap, sometimes in my neighborhood to a placed called the Skipper, sometimes walking back down to Ipanema or even occasionally as far as Copacabana before settling in somewhere and unwinding over a few chopps. Usually, I kept to myself. But every now and then, I’d strike up a conversation with someone. It was easy to tell when a Carioca was making moves on you. The way her words cut simultaneously in both directions, the way her generalizations suggested the particular Moment.

I’m not being vain—just honest. You’d be amazed how many women are tired of the standard macho fare and will practically throw themselves at someone with a little sensitivity. I rarely responded in kind to such advances, but I did come up with many interesting observations on my nights out. I often noticed, for example, how the average Brazilian man was constantly playing with his crotch in public. Did he mean to call attention to it, I wondered, or was he reaching for it like a wallet he feared had been stolen?

I always looked forward to the walk back along the beach, illuminated at intervals by floodlights, making the ocean appear green and unfathomable, liquid emerald. In many ways this was the best part of my day, better even than the morning spent writing, the part where I reconnected with the other half of myself, the half born not of words but of motion.

Even at midnight the beach was packed—a sensory overload of cars, taxis, pedestrians, joggers, bikers, Rollerbladers, tourists, whores, pimps, vendors, dealers, soccer jocks and, of course, your occasional wayward mariner. Feasting on the sights, sounds and smells, catching glimpses of the Redentor floating on a magic carpet of underlit clouds high overhead, listening to snippets of distant pagode as the waves crashed close by, enjoying the mingled scents of caramelo, cigarro and cerveja, I plugged back into the part of me that was and would always be a wanderer, a drifter, a stranger in a strange land, a flâneur strolling through life’s crowded cities.

Meu coração vagabundo ...” Caetano Veloso’s lyrics often found their way into my thoughts during those pleasantly buzzed strolls. I did have a vagabondish heart, a heart filled with wanderlust—and also just plain lust. My signature desire for Experience, to be a pilgrim on the Experience Trail, to follow the twisted, mapless, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet path my soul had called me to, had never been greater. Becoming Sol had revived my passionate inner explorer, reawoken the Bunyanesque traveler in me, injected my spirit again with dreams both wet and dry.

Even after so many changes and challenges, I still longed for the Adventure, I still yearned to play in the Magic. That was the romantic in me. I was twenty-seven and it was almost too easy to get caught up in romance with oneself in Rio.

There were times, hardly rare, when it seemed I’d never grow old, never tire, never die. And though romance be illusory, a construct that has nothing to do with reality per se, I vowed to maintain it alive and well in me, vowed to preserve that one fragment of wholeness even as wholeness, in a world falling apart at the seams, was itself fragmented. This was my Keatsian project for my new incarnation, my own Negative Capability. Amid the slings and arrows of the steady decline of Western “civilization,” I would insist on dreaming myself whole until, like Adam, I awoke to find my dream come true.



But to be fair, my dreams (sometimes cleverly disguised as nightmares) had always had a way of coming true—mostly because I was stubborn enough to keep dreaming, but at least in part because the universe was generally willing to lend a hand. Thus it was that yet another dream of mine came true when I least expected it.

Starting around Carnaval, I began running into this one particular fellow on a regular basis. In most ways he was utterly nondescript—so nondescript, in fact, he was altogether remarkable.

He was probably, I don’t know, in his forties, though he could have been decades older or decades younger. His build was somewhere between average and—depending on the lighting—slightly stout or somewhat slight. His hair wasn’t especially short or long. His facial features were both highly distinctive and belonging to no one. In fact, he didn’t seem to possess the defining characteristics of any race and stood out in my mind as a sort of unique gray.

There was something of the chameleon in his nature with which I identified when I thought about it—which I didn’t until I started encountering him everywhere: dancing in the Sambódromo during one of Carnaval’s big desfiles when he handed me a handkerchief dipped in a mild hallucinogen for sniffing called lança perfume ... coming to my senses on the beach in Leme the following sunrise beside a buxom mulatta to find him, whoever he was, asleep beside another mulatta nearby ... hanging out drinking a chilled coco recharging my dead batteries in preparation for another evening of fun that Fat Tuesday at a barraca in Arpoador when life had temporarily grown calm again like a wave that had crashed and fantailed out across the sand ... at the appetizer table during a ritzy post-Carnaval birthday party in Botafogo I’d been invited to by a stranger when I spent the evening chatting with a female veterinarian with an ugly face but a killer body, about dogs ... dining alone a couple weeks later on a Candomblé night (when Rita didn’t cook) at my favorite restaurant, Bozo, in Leblon, when I discovered him (also by himself) seated at an adjacent table having exactly the same meal I was having: baked badejo, quiabo casserole and ice-cold chopp.

The last time I ran into him, and the only time we ever actually spoke, was at a strip joint in my old stomping ground, Avenida Prado Júnior in Copacabana. This was in late April a good two months after Carnaval. That very day I’d completed the final chapter of Book V, “The Vendetta,” and begun this the first chapter of Book VI, tentatively entitled Morphametosis.

There was some kind of kinky black-leather orgy thing happening onstage that had me gripped with a morbid fascination. All of a sudden, this same nondescript guy shows up, sits down at my table grinning like he could be anybody and we could be any old friends, and introduces himself as none other than the author-protagonist, the eponymous Ralfo, of my all-time favorite novel, As Confissões de Ralfo.

“Or if you like, ‘Sol,’ you can call me Sérgio.”

“Sérgio? As in Sant’Anna?

“As in.”

“Are you for real?” I blurted out, somewhere between incredulous and star-struck like a teenage boy whose life revolves around basketball watching Michael Jordan casually stroll through the door.

“No. That’s precisely the point.”

I admit it was strange—but then what about my imaginary life isn’t strange? Strange and filled with impossible Magic, with absurdly profound stories taking place in the written world true as only fiction can be.

“You’re, like, my hero!” I gushed.

“No, Sol, you’re, like, mine.”

This was almost too much. My hero was actually calling me his hero. For an aspiring writer, it was like having Jack Kerouac come up and awkwardly beg for your autograph. I pinched myself to verify it was really happening. It wasn’t, of course, but its impact on me was no less validating.

“Or should I call you Luke?”

“It doesn’t matter. Call me whatever you like. It’s all the same.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Yes, I imagine you do.”

“I just wanted to give you my personal parabéns on your masterpiece-in-progress before you move on.”

“Before I—move on?”

“As you’re going to be doing any day now.”

“I see.”

“And please forgive me for kibitzing in the middle of your narrative, but I especially enjoyed ‘Doutor Soloman Enters Brazil.’ I was quite flattered, in fact. It was so obviously a takeoff of that chapter in my novel where Ralfo is interrogated by the Goddamn City police. No one has ever paid me homage like that.”

“Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.”

“Well said.”

“Really, when it comes right down to it, there are only copies.”

“Indeed.”

We ordered the first of many rounds of coqueteis and spent the rest of the evening talking literature, or rather lamenting the sorry state of it, commiserating the way realism had bedded down with capitalism and pseudo-science to relegate the likes of fictitious entities such as ourselves to the status (or lack thereof) of marginal figures, curiosities at best.

“But the times are changing, Sol. Mark my words. The day will soon come when people wake up to the fact that the only true reality lies in the imagination.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“I am. Trust me.”

We were both bombed when, hours later, we parted with a hug and a fraternal “Boa sorte” on the sidewalk. It must have been four in the morning. I watched him wobble into a taxi headed for his home in Laranjeiras, then turned and strolled up Prado Júnior, hanging a right onto Nossa Senhora de Copacabana with the heat lightning flickering silently in the reddish sky in a way that struck me as—somehow—already a poignant reminder of itself, a mnemonic device with which someday to recall my time in Rio.

No, it didn’t make sense—but the feeling things were about to change was almost palpable. I imagined I could hear the Voice of the Road calling my name as I crossed a strangely deserted Avenida Atlântica and, removing my shoes, walked close along the empty shoreline contemplating, in the wake of my tête-à-tête with Sérgio/Ralfo, my own dual career as a writer and fictional human being.

I realized there was actually precious little that separated the two, that as a human being I was learning to be a writer, and as a writer I was learning to be a human being ... And then it occurred to me, approaching Ponta de Arpoador, I’d spent my entire imaginary life learning how to take a walk.

This is a metaphor, of course. The beauty of a metaphor, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. When I say I’d spent my whole life learning how to take a walk, I’m aiming at something a little larger than putting the leash on Fido and taking him out for his daily spin. I really mean I’d been learning how to take a walk. I still wasn’t very good at it. As Luke I’d become such an expert at doing I’d never truly learned how to go about being.

Now, as Sol, I was working on—or playing at—just being. The next morning, undoubtedly, I would return to doing—but when I did, I hoped I wouldn’t forget how to be, hoped I might find a way to marry the doing with the being, transcend dialectics, combine Art and Life in the singular act of existing.

I lit a cigarette, a clove I happened to have in my pocket, and walked in the water smoking it, thinking how I was indeed extremely happy with this person I’d become, thinking how if I died right then and there, if thieves murdered me in cold blood and my body bobbed trailing red ink out to sea, it had been a terrific imaginary life. Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

A waning gibbous was sailing in and out of sparse clouds, a swollen ruby banana of a moon like a strobe in the heat lightning radiating the limitless possibilities of the Moment, a coagulated spheroid like a living cell under a microscope teeming with enzymes, ribosomes and DNA hovering above the dark brooding ocean. Every time I gazed up at it, my own blood coursed faster through my veins, as if I’d just stuck my finger into the socket of the world, into the Magic of it all. Electric Luke. Rather: electric Sol.

I seemed to have lost none of my receptive powers, not even an inch off the old internal antennae that had so many times before put me in contact with the Adventure, the sparkling effervescent stuff of life itself: in a word, in my dear dead friend Malcolm’s word, with It.

If anything, It now played a larger role than It ever had—if only because I’d allowed myself to experience It’s underside, the dark subterranean complement to the shiny happy semisphere above. Again, to borrow a Malcolmism, I’d permitted myself to C the Big Picture. For better or for worse, for better and for worse, I’d been C-ing the Big Picture through a combination of self-motivated eye-opening and seemingly random events spawned by chaos itself that had slapped me into consciousness like a newborn receiving his first cruel whack across the bottom.

Of course, the biggest slap had been Malcolm himself. No whimpers there—he’d gone out with a bang. I was just glad I could remember him now without so much pain, though every now and then I got to thinking, for one reason or another, he’d never died, that it was getting time I should visit him again in the Funhouse ... Then all of a sudden it was as if he’d fallen off that ledge only yesterday ... Then I realized he actually lived on in me, that I’d not only internalized but externalized him, emulating not only his attitudes but his very person.

And what would Malcolm have done on such a glorious night but precisely what I did? What would he have done, feeling It enter him like one of Zeus’s thunderbolts, suddenly feeling at one with It, feeling so far out there, so in the middle of nowhere, yet at the same time so at the center of It all, so now here—I say, what would Malcolm have done but spontaneously strip off his clothes, streak naked across the cool night sand, and jump like a madman into the unseen ocean?

Resurfacing, I stood lit up like a Christmas tree in the middle of the surging waves, gazing up at that miracle of a moon, vowing to take some of It with me, inside, so I could nibble on It whenever I was especially in need of an upper, whenever I found myself drowning like Davie Jones in the seaweed of monotony and tedium.

Inspired, I breathed in the Moment and was breathed by it, by It, Tonight, tonight on my lips, a wayward mariner on the wave-washed prow of my little life’s ship navigating the cosmos ... Feeling something like sandpaper brush against my thigh, I instinctively reached down and fished up a huge curling starfish out of the sea.

When I finally struggled up onto the beach with my starfish, I discovered the current had taken me down a ways from where I’d abandoned my clothes. I was standing in my birthday suit beside the hump of a makeshift sand altar to Iemanjá—flowers, shells, extinguished candles and burnt incense precisely arranged on a manmade dune. Having no other offering, there with the moon flickering down showering the scene with mystical dust, I knelt beside the altar and, with a simple prayer of thanks, placed the starfish exactly in the middle.



The following afternoon, having slept late and written little, I ventured down to Posto 9. While I was there, a giant stingray came swimming along close to shore, an enormous silent shadow gliding by just beneath the water’s surface, and everybody stood up to watch.

At first people thought it was a shark or maybe a whale. But then up and down the beach you could hear the shouting: “Raia! Raia!” All the surfers and favela kids went crazy and started swimming after it and throwing empty coconuts at it.

But I just stood there at the crossroads of the Moment, conscious It was about to propel me back into motion and onto the road again—conscious that the dark figure wasn’t a shark or a whale or really even, truth be known, a stingray. It was Iemanjá showing up to wish her protégé a boa viagem. And até logo.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.



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