Stephen King and Hearts of Atlantis

So effective a compendium of a few related (and maybe connected) stories that I remembered one of them over 15 years later. I wanted to re-read a first-person account of regret, and I remembered the one here of a college student in the 60s who barely made it to college, on a scholarship, only to learn that passing his classes and staying in college was literally a matter of life and death. Fail out, and he'd be drafted into Vietnam. Stay, and he'd live.

The bulk of the story was the Freudian death-drive of this character, and of the many around him. It was sick and depressing but very real. Anyone with a college degree may remember his own college days, and how his friends dropped like flies around him as they were unable to make the transition to self-responsibility and maturity. That, and not intelligence, I assure you, separated those who stayed and got a degree and those who didn't. You would think that since failing out could be deadly that these men would go to classes and pass out of basic necessity. But that's not the way it was when I went to college, and I doubt that the added stress would help them do better. It would make them fail out all the more, as most people that age simply cannot handle that much stress, while being on their own and education in college are stressful enough. Hearts, and the Queen of Spades, did these guys in.

The narrator of this part, surprisingly, is the only character not of importance in the other parts.

The book starts off with the story that led to the movie with Anthony Hopkins. It's very good, and also memorable, but it stops abruptly after a few hundred pages. It's long enough to be a full novel in itself, and it's got that nostalgic, past / childhood / innocence vibe that he did so well in IT. In fact, I feel that King stopped this one where he did because it was becoming another IT, and he didn't want it to go there. I'll bet he intended the other parts to all tie in solidly together in a long opus like IT, but then kept them apart when he realized he had something so close to IT that he had to make it markedly different. That's just a guess, and the interconnections later I think show me right, but that's up to you. There's a Beverly Marsh figure named Carol, and a Stuttering Bill, too. Pick up IT and fast-forward everyone about 12-15 years, so that IT's crew would be facing the Vietnam War in the face when they were of college age, and you've about got it. It takes place in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on the Housatonic--where Stephen King did spend a few years of his childhood--rather than in Derry, NH, but it's essentially the same.

The Willie Shearman section connects the least with everything, except there's a glove, and a theme of shame and penance. I kept waiting for it to strongly connect, or to be an important part of one of the other sections, but that never quite happened. The action he's ashamed of happens in the beginning story, and it's referred to in the last one, but Willie wasn't a huge part in that action, and he's a minor part in the Vietnam War section (and there's a strange joining of two characters from the first story that hits more as coincidence than connection; or, what's the chance of two characters from the same town coming together in the same platoon in Vietnam?), so the very small story with him as the sole character feels more like a character study than anything else. And it's a disconnected mystery about how the glove makes it from this section to the last.

But all in all this is a tremendous achievement in Stephen King's non-horror canon. Because surviving Vietnam was undoubtedly a horror, and the terror of surviving college to avoid the draft must have been a horror of a different sort. Both involved better men than me. This book is an off-shoot of the Tower, but you don't have to read that series to appreciate this. It worked for me like Bag of Bones did, and like some of the others of this time. And these were a helluva lot better than the drivel he's producing now, that's for sure.

His newest comes out in a few days, and I'll buy it and read it, but...well, what a drop-off there's been. I used to rue that so much of his stuff was tinged with the Tower, but I now see that his work has suffered since he's veered from the Beam. He needs to get back on it, and see where his literary legacy has gone, and get back to serving whatever Tower he'd been faithful to before.

It's A Different Time: Today's Disrespect of Intelligence

Concord Days is an interesting little book, if you're interested in the Alcott family, or the Transcendentalists, or about how an intellectual thought in New England circa 1870, and a little before. It was originally published in 1872. The one I read is a reprint of the original, and therefore a little hard on the eyes, since the original wasn't perfectly printed to begin with. It's got pages that were unnecessarily bolded and overinked, and other pages where the print is slim, and under-inked. Some pages were in the middle. Alcott was not as heavily published as were his popular daughters, and this shows. He was highly influential, especially in education, and highly respected by his Transcendentalist peers, but this does not necessarily translate into sales.

You would probably have to have an interest in one of the above things to get something out of this, but it's a quaint little hardcover book, and it's an honest writing of the thoughts of a smart, influential guy in Concord, MA and environs, including Harvard, southern to central NH, and...well, that's about it.

Amos Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. They had an interesting family and a curious dynamic. The family lived in poverty for a long time, until Louisa May started writing every single thing she could think of and the money started pouring in. (She wrote a lot more than Little Women. She wrote under many different names, fiction and nonfiction, and her first big successes were with novels of passion and of heaving bosoms, and the like. Picture a woman writing Harlequin Romances who one day wrote a classic about smart, independent young women and a quaint family life, and that's her.) Even after that, the family was more than happy to have their patriarch remain essentially unemployed, which allowed him to become a man of letters and thought, and to be respected as such. As I mentioned, this does not always translate to books sold, or to profitable lectures. But this was an altruistic family, and the mother and daughters were seriously happy to be the breadwinners as the father wrote letters in his study, and education tracts to pop-up education and lifestyle start-ups, all of which failed.

Maybe it was the time. In his journal you would see a lot of ideas about Pliny, Aristotle, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Goethe, Greeley, Plato and others. He writes about people you may not know, such as Phillips, Berkeley, Boehme, Carlyle, Landor, Pythagoras and Plutarch, and Swedenborg. He was known amongst his contemporaries, so his portrait of Hawthorne is correct. (He was as nervous and depressed as others say he was. Hawthorne would literally run away from a conversation.) He was spot on about Thoreau, who was apparently a bit of a respected drifter who didn't actually drift, but looked and acted like he did. Thoreau tested his friends, but he was not short of them. He seems to have been the type of guy who you respected for being so independent, so non-9 to 5, but whom you also wanted to tell to stop being such a bum and to get a damn job.

Alcott had the ability (and the time) to just read and write and think, without anyone telling him to get a damn job you bum, which makes me jealous as hell, though I wouldn't necessarily want to write about what he wrote about. He was amongst the last of the wave of privileged guys who would write about Ideas, with a capital I. He wrote about Morality, Virtue, Ideals, and the importance of one to be able to lecture well, and to be talented at smart conversation. This simply doesn't happen anymore, and it got me to wondering why.

I decided it was because my generation, and certainly the one after mine, has grown up with the idea that something is how it seems to me, but I understand it may not have the same seeming to someone else. In other words, we don't believe in universals anymore. (I know that's a universal, but let's accept the paradox and move on.) It also seems to me that nobody is renowned or respected for his intelligence anymore. Outside of luminaries like Hawking and Spielberg, who are extremely well-respected, if you are an extremely intelligent and intellectual person, but work 9-5, you'd better keep your mouth shut about it, lest people roll their eyes about you and say out loud that they don't have as much time to be smart as you do--the insinuation being that you're apparently smarter, but still somehow lesser, than they. Pointing out their latent insecurity does not help the matter any.

Sounds like personal, bitter experience, doesn't it?

Alcott was apparently one of those guys, but was well-respected, sought after, and appreciated for it. Such is simply not the case anymore. Period. He would not be so treated today; I guarantee it.

But I would also feel uncomfortable writing about Virtue and Morality these days. It is a different time. It's not the fault of political-correctness, exactly, as much as it is an ingrained understanding of the fallacy of universals. Morality for me, in suburban-hell New England, and Morality for the poverty-stricken of Ferguson, Missouri, for example, are probably two different things. Or, in other words, Yes, it's wrong to steal, but when you're starving and nobody's hiring you, you break a few universal rules every now and then. What's more Moral: to watch your children starve, or to steal some food for them?

And, yes, you have to be a man of leisure to have the time to contemplate Morality and Virtue and to write about it. I'd love to have that time, and I don't fault those who have it. For me, when I come home from work, I'm exhausted, mentally and psychologically, if not physically, and it's all I can do to write my short stories and novels and to send them out. I don't have a household of daughters supporting me financially and emotionally, and I'm not sure I'd let them if I did.

It's a different time.

Does it have to be? I don't know. I'm assuming I have more time (though it sure as hell doesn't seem it) to simply read as often as I do, and to write as many book reviews and blog entries as I do, and to write everything else that I do, and I've been told more than once (always with bitterness) that it's because I don't have a large family to support. I acknowledge this, as it's not wrong, though I could do without the tone that often comes with it. Not having a huge family is of course a choice as well.

And here we come back to Alcott. It's a different time. For the better, or not, I don't know.

Plague Tidbits

Photo: A boundary stone marking the border of the village of Eyam, England.  The high sheriff would leave food at this rock for the entire village, since the village itself voted to not let anyone in or out until the plague passed.  For a bit of this remarkable story, see my blog entry here.


A few things I thought were interesting as I continue to write and research my WIP (trilogy?) re: the same in our time--and through all time.  You'll see.  Some of the info. culled from Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders and Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Years.  They're both fiction, though the former is infamously researched and realistic and the latter is fact masquerading as fiction, masquerading as fact.  Check it out to see what I mean.  They are both well-written and highly recommended.

--Two watchmen had to guard a plague house, so that nobody went in and nobody went out.  In many areas, they did this in eight-hour shifts, per house.  Roughly, from 10 pm to 6 am; from 6 am to 2 pm; from 2 pm to 10 pm.

--Stories abound about attempted escapes from such houses.  One I see frequently is that the trapped would lower a noose from a window, somehow get it around a guard's neck, and either strangle him, or otherwise keep him occupied until someone successfully escaped. 

--As is the usual about stories like these, you wonder about a few things, like: What about the other guard?  How would you get the rope around his neck?  How would you keep it there while he struggled?  And why wouldn't the guards confiscate things, like rope, before they guard the place?  And where would they get, and sustain, enough men so that six of them could guard each and every plague house?

--At first, you went to the wakes and funerals of the deceased.  But, after the plague hit and so many people died so quickly, it was impossible to do this.  By then, open pits were dug and bodies just thrown in, like you see in the movies about wars, the Holocaust, etc.

--The sick and despondent would at times throw themselves in these pits, and die there.  Some would lay there as dirt got thrown over them, and die suffocating.

--Until the plague hit, the depth of graves was not uniform.  But the authorities insisted on six feet separating the dead from the living; that is, there had to be at least six feet separating the body from the people walking over it.  The grave wasn't six feet deep, as is the common misconception; it must've been a little deeper than that.  There's six feet between the top of the body and the dirt that marks the grave.  Hence the phrase "six feet under" today.  And the practice still continues.

--The authorities would openly lie about the death count, vastly underestimating it to avoid panic (or for whatever reason).  The real numbers came from the gravediggers at the chapel, at the church's graveyard, or at the massive pits.  And so these people were the ones you went to for accurate information.  (Hence the title of my MS.)

--Speaking of graveyards, it was common practice in England and New England (and probably Europe) to bury most of the dead in their church's graveyard.  When this became impossible, because either they ran out of room, or because nobody from the parish was left alive to bury them, they were buried wherever, often in a family plot next to the house.  This then became a common practice, whether the dead died from the plague or not.  (This is especially true with the TB outbreak in New England, esp. RI and NH, from my research.) 

--In Boston and parts of RI, some took the separation of Church and State seriously enough that the dead were buried in the Common Ground, not near the churches.  (Some of the very rich and famous early New Englanders are buried in Boston's Commons.)  The practice of burying the dead in one large community graveyard didn't hit America until the later 1800s.

Well, there's much more, but that's it for now.

Writing Because of Music

I finished a pivotal chapter, in which my main antagonist arrives in the area.  Kept it short, too--just 2 double-spaced pages.  This WIP is movin' along.

I thought I'd write quickly on images music evokes for me before I've created something for them to go with.  In fact, the creation starts with the music that, unbidden, just jolts me into scenes and images.  They come out of nowhere.  Apocalypse came to me very suddenly when I was 14, when I heard Ravel's Bolero and Tchiakovsky's 1812 Overture (with the Russian male voices in the beginning) in the same half hour.  Tons of images flooded my head that day, I still remember it, and they haven't left me since.  I can't explain it, except you have to go with it.  I'm not yet ready to write those chapters, as they need an expertise greater than what I have right now, but they still flutter around in my consciousness every day--and with the music attached.  (If there came a day when they didn't flutter around in there, I'd write all the scenes and images immediately, calling out of work if necessary.)

So for this new novel, I have music that invokes images fit for the book, and I couldn't begin to tell you why.  A mixture of the NH mountains and Brandi Carlile bring to mind fields and mountains (or hills, or even forests) of isolation and loneliness.  I play her stuff every day and the same images and gestalt flood in.  The WIP wouldn't be the same without her.  Her melodious, strong and sad voice, with a sometimes slight or strong tinge of country, bring all this to me.

Then, more recently, I heard Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" at the end of the movie Zodiac, and each time I get visions of evil, especially when the lyrics mention that times of horror bring the Hurdy Gurdy Man and he brings times of love.  But what if it just looks that way?  I see huge fires and Death dancing in slo-mo when I hear that song, God knows why.  And the rest of Donovan doesn't work for me like all of Brandi Carlile does.

There are many more examples.  I can't explain it.  I just go with it.  I can work very well to Prince songs, don't know why.