November 19, 2003

• If they were basing the award on sales then it's an appropriate award. But much as I enjoy King's books, I wouldn't call them literature - that would be like calling "Predator" an art film.
• Mind you, I don't know if any of the above authors are literary in that sense, because I'm too lowbrow to have read them.
• I read The Shining when I was 14. It was so scary, I couldn't sleep with the book on the nightstand next to me. I had to get up and put the book across the room. Still, I couldn't stop reading it. I don't think they're aiming at "literature" with this award. Oprah got it in 1999 for her book club (link). He's a very talented writer and a commercial success, and IMHO they're honoring both.
• Tracicle, I've read several books by Welty and enjoyed all of them. I read many King books up until I was about 14, then they all just started sounding the same. Creepy and wigged out, but the same nontheless. Mickey, I'd say King is talented (as in, he writes well), and he is certainly very successful commercially. But he's not what I would call a "creative" writer, despite his choice of genre.
• Yeah, I realised as I was responding that there's nothing about this award to imply literature in that sense. And I personally think The Stand is the scariest book ever. I love/hate books that involve being the only living person on earth.
• I can't tell you how many times I've seen this precise topic debated. Speaking as a graduated non-conforming Lit major, I do not understand why people want to define literature as things like Dickens and Austen and Hemingway without embracing contemporary works that are not only widely popular, but have enduring stories and images in them. Dickens was the Stephen King in his day. Not in terms of genre of course, but because he was prolific, extremely popular, and wrote stories that non-academics loved and related to. Many of Dickens' works were first published as serials in the penny papers. Stephen King has changed and helped shape modern fiction, and I don't think there should be any doubt that he deserves a lifetime achievement award. Granted, he's turned out some real schlop, but he's also turned out storytelling that I'll put up against anything from Dickens or Austen or Hemingway (et al). As to him not being creative I think that is in the eye of the beholder. In any case, I don't think that using the same writing style and exploring the same kinds of themes necessarily excludes creativity. [ puts away soapbox, breathes deeply, looks at shiny things ]
• Also, The (abridged) Stand is my favorite Stephen King book by far and The Shining (especially that scene where the topiary was chasing the little kid) made me too afraid to go to sleep when I was a kid.
• Ugh, you just reminded me of the director's cut of The Stand. *shudders*
• Indeed. A hundred bonus pages of the trash can man and enough pop culture references (e.g. Madonna) to knock you unconscious.
• It's getting too darn agreeable here, so I'll jump in and be a voice of [slight] dissent here... I don't know much about this award King's been given, but it does seem to me that there should be a distinction between selling a lot of books and really moving the art of writing forward a notch (or 1/100th of a notch) through your work. I'm not sure that I'd agree that King has done the latter. (Just went back and took another look at the link and it seems pretty obvious to me why he's getting the award, and why Oprah did — it's a prize given out by a consortium of book publishing groups — so, in other words, the award is a big thanks for selling all those books and keeping us in business.)
• Ah, certainsome1, I tried to find a link explaining exactly what the prerequisites for receiving the award were, but couldn't. That seems a fair indication, I admit. I guess I'm a bit of a wanabe book snob, mainly because I can't keep up with trends and assume that if everyone's talking about it, it's probably arty-farty lit. :( I enjoy early King but some of his later books seem bland and not-scary to me, such as Bag of Bones and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I think his earlier work probably influenced a lot of writers (which would mean moving the industry forward) and so he'd be deserving in that respect.
• Just for discussion purposes (and to play devil's advocate here for a bit), how would you define moving the art of writing forward?
• the Board of Directors of the Foundation also presents a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which comes with $10,000. The recipient is a person who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.
• I think it's comparable to a language evolving: you need new blood, new words, new styles, new ideas to prevent stagnation. If a writer, by his works, can inspire a reader to write then he/she is aiding the supply of new ideas and words. It could be a sort of circle of life, Disney-style. At the same time, there are so very many authors out there that publishers claim write "in the style of Stephen King" that maybe we have hit a sort of stagnation and need a new generation of original horror writers.
• Oh, Mickey, you mean that big-ass link right in the middle of the page? I need a coffee.
• Are they worth re-reading? Because when I pick up, say, Borges or Baudelaire for the umpteenth time, I find joy in the form and music in the language. I just don't get this kind of dimensionality out of Steven King. Nor do I find much in the way of ideas, although thanks to him I *do* know not to build my house over an Indian burial ground.
• Now now people, this conversation is entirely too polite. Where's the snarkiness? The call-outs? The smackdowns? If we want to hit the ground running if/when we get to real MeFi, we've got to condition ourselves properly!
• In my teens I was a Stephen King fanatic and read every single book. I still own The Bachman Books (80s series of novellas under a pseudonym) and reread them occasionally. I don't know whether I've changed or his style has, but I find his writing style more...crude, for want of a better word. I think it was Dark Half where he wrote from the point of view of a guy who was interrupted in the middle of (for want of a better term) a crap, and the feelings the guy was having related to that. Then in Dreamcatcher there's a scene where a guy "gives birth" to an alien while sitting on the toilet, with graphic description. Maybe I'm getting old, but that was too disgusting for me. I'd say there's one book and two novellas worth re-reading: The Stand, Rage, and The Long Walk. I actually preferred the original movie of The Shining to the book.
• Dave, why do you hate America?
• I'm sick and tired of your constant attacks on me, tracicle. I've tried time and time again to settle things with you, bury the hatchet so to speak, but you just keep hounding me. Always there with a sly comment, a personal attack.. AND you defaced my blog! It took me... MINUTES, whole MINUTES to delete that comment! You harlot.
• Tracicle, I know what you mean about the "crap" stuff. In one of his novels he talks about a guy going into a public restroom to take a crap and has thousands of tiny red spiders come out his rear end instead. Like, ew. What is this fecal fascination? I read one of the Bachman books and actually groaned when I came across the following line: "It was horrible, like something out of a Stephen King novel." PUH LEEZE. Dave, you're an asshat. (Is that better?)
• Coriolanus.
• *watches his butt slowly spin backwards*
• *watches rarely-performed Shakespeare adaptation of Plutarch* Incidentally, Dave, why is your bottom rotating backwards? Is it in a different hemisphere to your head?
• One day I'm going to Ecuador, where I'm going to take a bath on the equator, making sure the plughole is right on the invisible line. I think I could cause enough of a paradox to destroy the universe.
• This just in: London Book Fair has decided that it needs to discover the next Clay Aiken of the literary world. (Or, to make this relate to the FPP it's posted under, the next Stephen King?) Next step: competitive novel writing! (Which I've been waiting for since I first heard Monty Python when I was a pimply-faced anti-social 13 year-old.)
• Damn it! The smackdown started when I was busy doing other things! I'd like to state, for the record, that you all suck! Whew. I feel better. I think you guys make some really good points, namely, the newer King horror stories suck for the most part. He went for the gore instead of the story and characterization. That I agree with. Thank GOD I didn't read the spiders out the ass story. EEEEK! I think he's just guilty of not knowing when to stop. I've read his early books over and over again (full disclosure: I read most of my books over and over), and I know that when I want to completely block out the world for several hours, I can pick up one of my old favs and dig in. To reiterate: I'm right and you're wrong!! WRONG I TELL YOU!!
• What, they haven't dragged enough sales out of JK Rowling? Sheesh. Competitive writing sounds really interesting. Entry rules are here.
• awww, how cute - our first smackdown.
• This place has gone downhill. I remember when we could have civilized conversations without resorting to all these smackdown. Disgusting.
• Loser.
• More on this at MeFi actually. "In his National Book Award acceptance speech, King criticizes and condemns the divisive clash between highbrow and lowbrow literary cultures."
• Damn, does this mean I can't claim to be lowbrow any more?
• You'll always be lowbrow to me, tracicle.
• Nicest compliment I've ever had. :)
• Kimberly — re-reading this conversation, looking for MoFi formatting clues, I only now saw your question: Just for discussion purposes (and to play devil's advocate here for a bit), how would you define moving the art of writing forward? I guess I have a pretty vague answer. I think moving the art of writing forward can be many things, not the least of which is inspiring other writers (which King has done, I'm sure) but the greatest of which is stretching the boundaries of what writing can do — in terms of structure, language, or subject. I just finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex which I enjoyed and which does some really fantastic narrative hopscotching, using narration to fast-forward and rewind the story, and deals with an unusual topic (hermaphriditism, if that's the word, or a word at all) — and would argue that this does it's little bit to "move the art of writing forward."
• Ooh, I wanted to read Middlesex ages ago and forgot all about it - thanks for the reminder. I re-thought about how a writer can move writing forward and thought about the medium as opposed to the content: SK was the first novelist to publish a book in an online format (Riding the Bullet was the title, IIRC) before printing it. He reintroduced the serial novel with The Green Mile and The Plant. I feel like there's something else unusual that he's done in this sense that I've forgotten.
• tracicle — those two examples sound more like moving the marketing and selling of writing forward, than adding something to the art. (Which, as I said at the top of this discussion — I don't know how to link internally — is why he was getting the award, I'm convinced: as a thank you for being such a good "unit shifter.")
• A slight derail... this is kind of an admin issue, and since I'm not sure if it warrants its own post (and because we lack a MeTa) I'm gonna post it in the relevant thread. Sorry. Kimberly notes above that this has been discussed on MeFi (a couple of times, actually). I'm not slamming the post, Sooooz, it's an interesting one that has generated some entertaining conversation... but I'd like to raise a couple of MetaTalk-ish questions: How much are we, as a community modeled upon MeFi and yet distinct from it, going to deal with the "double-post-from Metafilter" issue? Should we obsessively search MeFi each time prior to posting on "The Monkey" to ensure that we're not echoing a previous MeFi thread? Should we treat MoFi as its own island, entire of itself, and gleefully disregard whether or not a topic might have been previously covered on MeFi? My gut feeling is that there is a reasonable compromise. Again, I'm really not trying to slam the post (I liked it) or start the feces-slinging, but would like some ground rules (if only for my own guidance as I submit links).
• Personally, the_bone, I don't think we should be concerned about double posts in reference to MeFi, only to MoFi. Now that I have the privilege of being a member of this site, I would rather spend my time here, posting and commenting, then continuing to lurk on MeFi, where I'm unable to post even if I wanted to. A compromise would be to link to the MeFi post on MoFi to extend the discussion to MoFi members.
• I second Sooooz: I have checked for double posts on mefi when I've been posting something that would probably have provoked major debate originally, or when it's just a silly flash thing that wouldn't generate any discussion anyway. Otherwise if I think it's interesting enough to generate discussion, or I'd like to hear the mofi take on something, I'll willingly double-post. That's my personal take and I think any mofi member should be able to do what they want, common sense prevailing.
• Sooooz and Tracicle: fair enough!
• Yeah,yeah yeah. Stevenking blahblahblah.
• I'm still contemplating the "Predator as art film" implications.
• And I'm still contemplating them, in case you're wondering, but at this point 3 days ago, I hadn't realised what nick was up to.
• m
• GIVE ME BACK MY FUNCTIONAL SIDEBAR, DAMMIT.