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Print: $14.99 Download: $8.88 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 and Jack Kerouac, this visionary début 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.
“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
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Print: $14.99 Download: $8.88 The Adventure of an imaginary lifetime began with BEGINNER’S LUKE, which has fast become an “underground classic” that has met with rave reviews worldwide. Now Luke is back and better than ever in this stand-alone, mock-epic, enlightening spoof of all things held sacred in American culture. 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 … "An enriching sequel to BEGINNER'S LUKE." --Apex Reviews
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Sol's Blog
2008 Mar 28 "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 “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 "BEGINNER'S LUKE is 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., Host, "Poetry & Prose & Anything Goes" APEX REVIEWS: Sol, thanks for joining us for this interview. We're looking forward to learning more about your books. Your writing style is very original and unique. Who have been some of your chief literary influences? SOL LUCKMAN: My main influences, as they apply to the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series, in addition to the "towering figures" of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, are a whole line of "metafictionalists" running from modern writers like Sergio Sant'Anna, Julio Cortazar, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino back in time to writers like Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Diderot, and Cervantes. APEX REVIEWS: What is the original inspiration behind the BEGINNER'S LUKE Series? SOL LUCKMAN: About a decade ago, when I started the Series, I was very sick with a mysterious autoimmune illness and thought I was dying. Luke came to me, so to speak, as a friend and teacher showing me how I might literally imagine a different life for myself. Sure enough, I eventually healed and made a drastic change from the soul-withering constraints of academics and literary theory to a "brave new world," for me anyway, of play and experimentation. APEX REVIEWS: What kinds of reactions have the books in the Series generated thus far? SOL LUCKMAN: So far, the first three books in the Series have generated a number of enthusiastic reviews, such as the following one of Book I from Reader Views, which called BEGINNER'S LUKE 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." My all-time favorite review, however, came from a friend and early reader of BEGINNER'S LUKE, who completely changed her life after reading a very rough version of Book I and wrote, "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." APEX REVIEWS: What are your ultimate hopes for what you'd like the Series to accomplish? SOL LUCKMAN: It needs to be translated into a dozen languages and made into a Series of three movies. I believe BEGINNER'S LUKE can play a significant positive role in the planetary awakening into higher consciousness--in which imagination is the new faith--that's currently occurring. APEX REVIEWS: You've mentioned that you'd like to start a new literary movement. In what direction would you like to see the movement proceed, and what elements would you like to incorporate in order to define it? SOL LUCKMAN: I actually mentioned that I'd like to be part of a new literary movement, not start one all by myself. The new literary movement, which I believe is already happening, is a maverick movement of independent self-published writers who abandon myopic realism, slavery to book markets and the publishing industry, MFA book assembly lines and the foolish hobgoblins of plot and genre, in favor of experimentation and exploration of the only thing that matters, since it creates everything: consciousness. Or if you prefer, imagination. APEX REVIEWS: In keeping with that theme, you also mentioned your desire to create a veritable literary "Drummond light." Please share with our readers precisely what a Drummond light is, as well as how it applies in this context. SOL LUCKMAN: In response to this question, I prefer to quote from the Source, my "Manifesto for a New Fiction," and let it speak for itself: "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." APEX REVIEWS: Please explain for our readers the significance of "sprezzatura." SOL LUCKMAN: Through the mouth of the character Billy, I define "sprezzatura" in Book II, THE TOY BUDDHA, as "a Renaissance term for nonchalant creative spontaneity." Sprazzatura is the essence of a life well lived. Either you have it and you're "quick," or you don't and you're "dead." APEX REVIEWS: Out of curiosity, do porcupines really masturbate? SOL LUCKMAN: According to Trivial Pursuit, yes. I've never actually witnessed a porcupine in the act. APEX REVIEWS: What are your future writing/publishing aspirations? SOL LUCKMAN: I'm currently working on a nonfiction book, the sequel to my internationally acclaimed and bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD, which has been translated into Turkish and, more recently, Spanish. APEX REVIEWS: How can people learn more about your writings and other efforts? SOL LUCKMAN: I invite those interested to visit one or more of my content-rich websites: http://www.beginnersluke.comhttp://www.phoenixregenetics.orghttp://sol.gaia.comhttp://consciousartistry.ning.comAPEX REVIEWS: Any final thoughts you'd like to share with our readers? SOL LUCKMAN: Enjoy the Adventure! APEX REVIEWS: Thanks again, Sol, and best of continued success to you in all your endeavors! 2007 Jul 17 Dear Friend, The past several months truly have been a prolific time for me and my work. First, I wish to announce the creation of Crow Rising Transformational Media. Please check it out and consider joining! In addition to being a showcase for my writing, Crow Rising includes Discussion Boards where you can promote your own or someone else's new-paradigm offerings as well as share upcoming new-paradigm teaching and learning opportunities worldwide. For those of you involved or familiar with the wildly successful MFA on Zaadz, Crow Rising, with over 3,000 Members and growing fast, represents an expansion of my Aquarian, consortium marketing model to include both free and paid goods and services. You can also subscribe to my irregular Crow Rising News & Notes (of which this blog version is a pale reflection) delivered using Zaadz's amazing new zPro technology! In other news … Beginner's Luke is continuing to elicit enthusiastic reviews. Thomas Gabrielli of Reader Views likened the highly experimental yet eminently readable Book I of the Beginner's Luke Series to a “modern-day Alice in Wonderland … This book to a conventional novel is what an animated film is to a documentary. It is creative, imaginative, humorous and very distinctive.” Request your FREE ebook copy. And please, join the Beginner's Luke Book Club today! Finally, the internationally acclaimed Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method, having been published in Turkish this past fall, is currently being translated into Spanish. Nexus New Times called Conscious Healing “a paradigm-reworking book” that introduces “a revolutionary healing science that's expanding the boundaries of being.” Thanks for reading! Sol “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.”  2007 Feb 14 (from Beginner's Luke)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 anaesthetize, 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 dogshit 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 (c) 2007 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved. [ Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious 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.]
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