i think king is interesting. i think his entertainment weekly column, his book "on writing," his claims to soon retire (completely false, remember michael jordan?), the schlocky horror novels, the few truly interesting stories, the stacks of cash to which he dedicates a good part of his introductions, his claim to be on the very cutting edge of all media technology...all these point to a very public and sometimes humiliating moral quandary. he seems driven by fame and money in a way that does not align him with the struggling writer (even the struggling writer who is driven by dreams of money and fame still often pretends to be concerned with art over material goods) - so his championing of them seems patronizing and foolish.
he's conflicted, i think. he wants so badly to be relevant. and sometimes he is. in this article, he tries. but he's like that guy in class who won't shut the fuck up - that guy who sometimes says the most important things - more important than the teacher or the smartest kids in the room, even - but he's got it so wrong in so many other ways that the important things get buried.
he can't be quiet, delicate, soothing. even in his books, he's like: IT'S SO QUIET! YOU HEAR THAT? ME EITHER!
i recently went to half price books and bought a couple of his books - i was jonesing for king. there's no other way to put it. when i got home from ireland, for some reason i was overwhelmed for weeks with this weird nostalgia. so i truly loved "children of the corn" and the story about being a door, and "the bachman books" when i was coming up. and i read all the other ones too, like everyone else, but i stood behind those few stories when king's name would pop up in random conversation.
so, at half price, i bought "it" and "everything's eventual," which is a collection of short stories. the introduction is so self-congratulatory and self-referential that i almost stopped reading. and then the first couple of stories were so incredibly bad that i did stop reading. there is no heart, there is no openness that he's talking about. nothing glorious, nothing even pretty on the surface, and i didn't have the heart to try anymore. i still don't.
he gets under my skin, his writing, his persona, his comments, his fight for the little writer. but i don't let him go. i keep my eyes trained for him, and sometimes pick up his books in stores to see how he will piss me off next, to see if he will delight the part of me that knows both centaurs and axe murderers are walking around me all the time. bianca reported to her sister in boston that i was making my way through "everything's eventual," and i was mortified. so embarrassed. i do not know what this means. any of it.
this was a comment, but it was too long. so now it's a post.
in other news, i want to recommend caitlyn cary to everyone. she plays the fiddle, and sings a song called "sorry for my shame," and you should hear it.
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6 comments:
She's good. Remember the Whiskeytown day? Ahhhh.
i thought about you the other day, bearden - there was a whiskeytown festival at emo's! or ego's? or champs? i don't remember. a bunch of local musicians got together to celebrate the fucked up music of ryan adams and his whiskeytown days. i wanted to go, but we had the boys.
i'll bet there were a lot of tight shirts and shaggy dos.
I'm confused.
That's why I haven't posted anything on either of the threads about the Kingster.
It seems like we are talking about what King said in the article about Best American SS 007 and whether we think King is cool. And methinks the later is influencing the former. Who cares that King has a bad rep in Literati land? From the posts I've read, he's the fat kid in the cafeteria in grade school. He is tainted. He's contagious.
I confess--I'm not a fan of his fiction. But I agree with what he said. I want more life in the fiction I read. I want mags that I don't skim half of. I want some new headliners. I want a beating heart. I want a little more spontaniety. I want some broken rules. I'll take a side of genre. I don't keep up with articles about the state of fiction as much as I should though.
His argument is confusing to me, is all. It seems like:
1. Short-story artists are destined for relative obscurity?
2. Only writers read literary magazines (hack writers read to emulate, who knows what the artists are doing at this point)
3. Stories getting published (by non short-story artists?) are airless/self-referential
4. This is not the fault of the true artists, who are toiling in relative obscurity
5. Who's fault is it? It is a mystery
I agree with your sentiment, Abby, and I bet King would too, but what's to be done? He had the chance to call some editors out and say that Gulf Coast should be half as long and that this or that specific aesthetic sucks, naming names, and he blew his chance.
It was soft. If the man wrote this essay in the same state in which he wrote Cujo, shit would be different. There would be a rending of garments. Editors weeping in shallow ditches they dug themselves. Serious.
i don't know. i think that if someone other than king wrote this piece, i'd have completely disregarded it. like - say, rick moody, or rick bass, or ron carlson - any of the golden boys running the literary scene these days. i'm with carmen - i've read this a million times. it's an idea that has become a truth i've come to take for granted. i kind of live with this. we all kind of live with this, because we're the ones sending out to these journals.
but the fact that it was/is king, complicated the whole thing for me. who is he, writing about lit mags? who is he, getting a story in my favorite mcsweeney's anthology? who is he, seriously publishing a novel about another fucking madman who lives on the blurry side of your water glass? who is he, writing a column for EW?
i don't mean this in any kind of judgy way. he's obviously wildly popular and successful. i just mean, who is he?
I feel like King's trying a little too much to ingratiate himself to/with the literati. Probably it raised some eyebrows that King was even chosen to edit BASS. I think I want to believe his humility, but I don't. It feels like a ploy.
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