Posted by: aldrich @ 12:09 am
“Edgar Allan Poe exerts a noticeable influence over King’s writing as well. In The Shining, the phrase ‘And the red death held sway over all’ hearkens back to Poe’s ‘And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all’ from ‘The Masque of the Red Death.’ The short story ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ has a theme almost identical to Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ including a paraphrase of Fortunato’s famous plea, ‘For the love of God, Montresor!’ In The Shining, King refers to Poe as ‘The Great American Hack.’”
— wiki“Stephen King’s writing is securely rooted in the great American tradition that glorifies spirit-of-place and the abiding power of narrative. He crafts stylish, mind-bending page-turners that contain profound moral truths – some beautiful, some harrowing – about our inner lives. This Award commemorates Mr. King’s well-earned place of distinction in the wide world of readers and book lovers of all ages.”
— National Book Foundation“THE DECISION to give the National Book Foundation’s annual award for ‘distinguished contribution’ to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.”
— Harold Bloom, literary critic“Others in the writing community expressed their contempt of the slight towards King. When Richard Snyder, the former CEO of Simon & Schuster, described King’s work as ‘non-literature,’ Orson Scott Card responded: ‘Let me assure you that King’s work most definitely is literature, because it was written to be published and is read with admiration. What Snyder really means is that it is not the literature preferred by the academic-literary elite.’”
— wiki“A lot of people were outraged that he [King] was honored at the National Book Awards, as if a popular writer could not be taken seriously. But after finding that his book On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, I have gotten over my own snobbery.”
— Roger Ebert, film critic
Stephen King’s Official Web Page
The Stephen & Tabitha King Foundation
Poe Forward’s POE INFLUENCED page
“And it’s true! It’s true! He sure is aquired a
cool and inspired sorta jazz when he walk
Where’s his jacket and his old blue jeans?
If this ain’t healthy is it some kinda clean?
I think Chuck E’s in love”
- Rickie Lee Jones
Dead now these 140 years, poet, critic, and translator Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867) became Poe’s greatest fan. If he were female, I’d compare his enthusiasm to that of Annie Wilkes. While learning English, Charley became absorbed in the Gothic Novel and eventually discovered Edgar Allan Poe. This changed his life. He’d found a soul brother in the best way. Studying and translating Poe helped Charles define his own path. He would have been 186 years old if he had lived.
Baudelaire’s POSTHUMOUS REMORSE at PoeForward.com
She is a compiler of feminist meta-narrative renderings and she renders feminist meta-narratives. British Marina Warner writes novels and short stories, but her work in criticism and history has grabbed my attention. After realizing I had missed her exhibit (“Medieval Beasts”) at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, I became intrigued by her recent publication:Mythography: A mythographer, or a mythologist, according to a strict dictionary definition, is a compiler of myths. Mythography is then the rendering of myths in the arts.”
- wikipedia
Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media
Published by Oxford University Press
Autumn 2006“Phantasmagoria adduces 10 vehicles or categories of imagery through which people have tried to depict the spiritual. Broadly speaking, these might be labeled wax, air, clouds, light, shadow, mirror, ghost, ether, ectoplasm and film. Through each of these, artists and thinkers have tried to explore “the borderland between animation and lifelessness” or attempted (and failed) to reproduce warm, vital human life…Any page of Warner offers an argument, a tidbit from history, an original thought. She reminds us that, according to Christian theology, “the devil’s medium was enigma, illusion, darkling sight. . . . He is a mimic, an actor, a performance artist, and he imitates the wonders of nature and the divine work of creation. But unlike God . . . the devil cannot perform real miracles or alter real phenomena. He is merely the ape of God, the master of lies, of imitating and simulating and pretending — impotent when it comes to really altering substance and matter (the waxwork, that perfect replica, remains inanimate).” Thus, because Satan deals in make-believe, the theater has always been suspect and stagecraft often judged little better than witchcraft.”
- From The Washington Post’s Book World
(Artists and thinkers trying) “to depict the spiritual” is the key concept I’ve locked on to here. How have the creative and wise (as well as the phony and criminal) of mankind used a particular medium to not only portray the sublime, the transcendent, but to allow us to get it, to feel it, to understand it, and at that same moment we experience their work?
As a voracious teenage reader, I found the biographies of Harry Houdini fascinating. I did so, not for his magic or even his escape tricks (although I once let my high school history teacher tie me up in ropes and watch me get out of them and I did escape handcuffed from a “metamorphosis” box at a PTA meeting), but for his showmanship. Ehrich Weiss became the best that was vaudeville by his skill, his genius, and his years of practice. Certainly, P.T. Barnum could be considered his spiritual godfather, for both mastered the art of seducing audiences into their reality, and for a price. Ironically, Houdini would later use his skills and experience to expose fraudulent “spirit mediums” who would use similar “magic” stage techniques to defraud their clients. The honestly false magician exposes the dishonest and false psychics. (Two negatives sometimes make a positive, but only abstractly and in this sentence.)
Whether it’s Moses bedazzling the populace with tales of a burning bush to convince them to behave, or a crooked psychic blaring Jazz Age trumpets to fool their clients, or another TV evangelist weeping tears of contrition to illicit forgiveness and regain access to the purses of his flock, or P.T. Barnum enthusiastically escorting his customers through the door to the “egress” (the great unknown = the “exit”) to fool them into repaying for their admission, or Houdini stalling his miraculous and magical escape until his audience becomes near hysterical, or a politician waving the bible and the flag to fool you in believing him, or the world of marketing and advertising convincing you to buy things you can’t afford and don’t need, or even, the honest shopkeeper who stacks his goods in a pleasant fashion, the curator who decides where best to hang the artist’s painting, the filmmaker who projects ecstasy upon a silver screen, the therapist who reveals a truth from your own words, or even during the intimate and personal moment of meditation and prayer, showmanship lies at the heart of all historical and artistic transcendence. Perhaps, the sublime moment occurs when, at the same time, we are both deceived and illuminated. Perhaps, it’s like the moment of orgasm when we release ourselves to the experience.
(But when we are both deceived and then deceived again, is it like a bad fuck? When our politicians wave the flag in one hand as well as the bible in the other and lie to us to kill our children and hand over the American bounty to the super rich, is that like the soulless intercourse of midnight’s past?)
Marina Warner’s book intrigues me for the combo of feminist theory, history, stagecraft, showmanship and meta-narrative definition. Would somebody please buy it for me?
Postmodern Note:
“Mythography is the study of the study of myths (the study of myths itself being mythology), as well.”
– wikipedia
Poe Note:
“While the objects around me - while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy - while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this - I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up.”
- The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe