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 If nothing else, it serves as a historical reference, allowing readers to compare the present to the not-so-long-ago past and to appreciate the ways we’ve progressed and the ways we haven’t.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.