Tales Of The Tinkertoy

While writing Tales Of The Tinkertoy, I paid short shrift to political correctness and presentism, defined by Webster as An attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences or, as pundit Bill Maher puts it, Judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. I found it difficult to filter my experience through a set of informal guidelines that smother creativity and distort reality. Better to rely on the good judgment of readers to understand things were different back then.

Tales Of The Tinkertoy tells it like it was. It’s a story set in its own time—the 1960s. If nothing else, it serves as a historical reference, allowing readers to compare the present to the not-so-long-ago past and to appreciate the ways we’ve progressed and the ways we haven’t.

It's in this context that we meet Gus Mazur, a young man who’s making the same mistakes you and I made when we were twenty-something. It’s the sexual revolution, a time when the uptight standards of the 1950s were turned upside down. Gus deludes himself into believing sex with liberated women will ease his frustrations about the compromises he’s forced to make at work. 

Ambitious, Gus has the brains to rise to the top of network television. Yet, as the only non-white producer at WBN, he’s ambivalent about an industry that values money over narrative, politics over truth. He chafes at being obliged to run civil rights and Vietnam stories that hide the truth from the American people. But the money is good and there aren’t that many opportunities “for someone like him.”

He tries everything short of a sex change in a frantic search for love. One woman is determined to set him straight. She gets her chance after Gus is waylaid in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention helping him piece his life back together.

I might write something stupid like, Don’t read Tales of the Tinkertoy if you’re looking for spiritual guidance or tips on meditation—as if I didn’t want you to make the journey, and make no mistake, kundalini is a journey. And Tales of the Tinkertoy is a chronicle of that journy.

Whether you relate to nonfictional or fictional forms, check out the six books I wrote on activating and living with kundalini.

 Tales of the Tinkertoy is different; it's a case study in gradual awareness. When you finish Tales of the Tinkertoy, you can always dig into my six books full of useful information about kundalini.

Right now, however, here’s an opportunity to follow a young man as he moves from the profane to the sacred, experimenting. The answers are not always in plain sight; so he learns to read between the lines. He backslides. His awakening hangs by a thread: will he find the Way? Will he take the path untrodden or will he remain tied to a life of materialism? Will he follow the breadcrumbs as the path widens?

I’ve been asked if it’s a kundalini book. I always reply it’s a kundalini inspired book.

The Saga: A Forgtten Genre

“I walk into the store. I cruise around grasping my cart as I do the remnants of my life—with desperation. I nod self-consciously to a half dozen doppelgängers who nod back as I pass by. Old men like me with bearded faces and faded dreams, inwardly tearful that life turned out the way it has. They’re good at keeping their resentments under wraps. Better than I am.”

The preceding paragraph has the stuff of a saga. Regret and yearning. There’s a past but not much of a future. It could be the start of a flashback. Or perhaps a new generation issues forth, the progeny of the family's lost sheep, a secretive sea captain last seen ferrying supplies to Chinese guerillas at the outbreak of WWII. Five hundred pages of a Bildungsroman whose defining characteristics I’ve patched together from various sources on the Internet. It’s defined as the kind of novel that shows a young protagonist's journey from childhood to adulthood at the same time it traces the character’s spiritual, moral, psychological, and social development and growth. The bildungsroman traditionally ends on a positive note, though its action may be tempered by trials and misfortunes as well as resignation and nostalgia. If the grandiose dreams of the hero’s youth are over, so are many foolish mistakes and painful disappointments.

The genre has fallen out of favor. Why? It just has—for several reasons:

• Attention span, evolving reader habits
  
• Page count: 80 somethings are used to longer books (sagas),
  
• A fascination with the dystopian,
  
• The favorable acceptance of eBook and audiobook versions, and yet traditional publishers and self-publishers like Amazon favor only a small subset of genres,
  
• The hairsplitting dissection of genres into a never-ending profusion of sub-genres,
• Subject matter.

There’s no point in lamenting, no point in trying to persuade younger generations that they should be reading Tolstoi, Dreiser, or Henry James, let alone Henry Fielding, Alexandre Dumas, or Thomas Hardy. That they might thrill to the fits and foibles of characters like Becky Sharp or Tom Jones is, for them, a non-starter. Those authors and their books are too far removed from the random access thought processes of the young. Sagas are too much like Romance novels with gout. They have a dulling effect on the quick minds of younger generations.

Where are the books from the spiritual progeny of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and John Fowles? They're here, all around us. They're alive and they're writing. But publishers are overwhelmed and they're only looking at certain genres.

Much better not to wonder and instead put out the call to those 60-80-year-olds who still read and are looking for books they can feel comfortable with. That’s the role of this blog: finding readers and writers who like to discover and discuss.

There is a solution; Books For 80 Somethings has found it and we will announce it in a future post...

Stay tuned. 

Sex In Books

It’s clear to me there’s a difference between books that are only about sex and books that contain titillating passages that contribute to or add to the narrative.

And yet, when some of my books that contain such passages are reviewed, they are criticized for too much sex. Which begs the question: What is too much sex? I cannot answer that question if only to note that the criticisms always use the same language. Coincidence? Hardly…

It’s like the word goes out and overnight opinion shapers are saying the same thing in the same way—sort of like the thought police setting the standards for what’s allowed and what's not. Reminiscent, no doubt, of a political party whose members go to bed after a day spent articulating very different opinions on a topic, only to wake the next morning espousing a word-for-word single opinion on the matter.

Funny how the word gratuitous always makes its way into the deliberations on sex in books. Just a coincidence? Why that one word and not one of its dictionary equivalences such as “lacking good reason?”

Why not plenty of good reasons? Why should a writer be so frightened of the norms, as laid out by the opinion shapers (the regulators), that they make it a point to avoid having their writing labeled gratuitous by watering it down? If writing is meant to stir emotions, why should stirring the libido from time to time be frowned upon, especially while the reader watches the arc of the various characters evolve because if it? It would seem that sex and the attitudes towards it would shape a character’s being as much as any other factor.

Oh, I know. In school, they taught you that a writer’s ability to stir emotions without being explicit is a writer’s greatest achievement. How come a book about a brain operation or a battle that contains explicit details might bring me close to upchucking is allowed, but sex between consenting partners is not? I’m not into rape, but one of my characters might be, which is to say that there are moments when graphic descriptions are in bad taste.

Where and when did the gratuitous label originate? In schools and universities, of course, in master’s level creative writing programs. And the attitudes learned in classes influenced publishers and agents who attended these programs. It’s the natural result of the hair-splitting effect of contiuously dissecting a subject instead of allowing free rein to explore it. In short, by not having enough substantive material to offer students, teachers have had to manufacture norms that actually steer students in the opposite direction. Want another example?

The lowly comma spice. Defined as “a grammatical error that occurs when a comma is used to join two independent clauses,” the comma splice is a favorite target of reviewers, even though there are times when a conjunction or a semicolon doesn’t work as well as a comma splice. I’ve been in writers groups where members love nothing better than to call out one another over a comma slice.

If Salman Rushdie or Stephen King submitted a book with lots of comma splices and so-called gratuitous sex, you wouldn’t hear a peep. The demigods of literature are above the norms.

Think sex in books is overdone? What about movies? They have moving images, sound effects, music, as well as words. Writers only have words, which seem to frighten the “regulators” more than anything else.

It’s just one of the obstacles an unknown writer must overcome.