|
‘Geritol-drinking, Lawrence Welk-watching Americans over thirty’ he claims are hungering for
‘cheapie game shows of their own’ to match the TV networks then current obsession for under-30
shows such as The Dating Game. Among his suggestions are The Middle-Aged Game (contestants try
to tie their shoelaces without bending their knees and prizes include a trip to ‘the Betty Crocker bake-
off’); The Brutality Game (‘forty Chicago policemen against a happy studio audience full of pacifists,
hippies, college professors’), hosted by ‘Dick Daley’, still Chicago mayor the year following the
riotous Democratic Convention of 1968; The Divorce Game (‘hosted by Zsa Zsa Gabor’); The Wife-
Swapping Game (‘a weekly mass orgy...opportunity for audience participation there’); ‘And finally
the living end— The Burial Game...hosted by Vincent Price.’ Rather sophomoric humor but
entertaining nonetheless. Collings12 suggests this column ‘reads almost like an early sketch of ideas
for’ The Running Man, in which ‘the true villain is the Network’ but that seems a stretch.
March 13, 1969. Still in a satiric mood, King launches a defense of mediocrity (!) claiming it
has been given a bad name and there is a ‘Plot afoot’ to do away with it. ‘In view of this grave
emergency I am hereby taking it upon myself to declare National Mediocrity Week’, he writes, asking
all to ‘do your part to help give mediocrity a good name.’ Among King’s recommendations to assist is
attending the cinema to see ‘ Born Wild, from American-International, those fun-loving guys that
brought you Attack of the Giant Leeches, Dementia 13, and The Young Animals.’ King would speak
with admiration of this production house and their product in both Danse Macabre and On Writing.
Having given the game away by stating Born Wild ‘is pretty good’ with ‘a refreshingly honest eye’ he
goes on to recommend Tammy Wynette’s new album, Stand By Your Man (‘You’ll like it. You’ll
probably hate yourself, but you’ll like it.’); and ‘now that your mind is hopelessly rotted...a mediocre
novel... Boys and Girls Together by William Goldman.’ A fine novelist, dual Academy Award
recipient Goldman is one of the great post-war screenwriters, responsible for Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, A Bridge Too Far, The Ghost and the Darkness, The
Princess Bride (from his own novel) and The General’s Daughter. He has also penned a remarkable
three screenplays of King novels— Misery, Hearts in Atlantis and Dreamcatcher.
This technique of reviewing movies, music and books together (as well as with television)
would repeat itself throughout King’s career, most notably in The Pop of King columns in the
Entertainment Weekly of the early- to mid- 2000s. His wide knowledge of all these forms of
entertainment would feature in (indeed trademark, along with the ubiquitous use of brand name) his
fiction forever.
March 20, 1969. This week King plays the nostalgia card, asking readers if they remember not
silly things (‘how to factor a quadratic’) but ‘important things—like for instance, what was playing
the first time you took a girl out on a real bona-fide date....’ Instantly, we see the King who captured
our imaginations in such classic tales as The Body and It—invoking visceral memories of our (in this
case his generation’s) childhood, as he remembers, among others, American Bandstand (‘when the
girls wore bobby-sox and danced with each other’); and ‘ At the Hop by Danny and the Juniors (I
kissed my first not-aunt-or-mother female while that song was on the radio—she had beautiful blonde
hair and M&Ms on her chin. She was nine and I was ten).’ ‘Those were the days’ when you had to
have a Davy Crockett hat, a waffle ball and a hula-hoop (‘I think the bitterest moment of my tenth year
came when my hula-hoop rolled out into the street and got squashed by an unfeeling oil-truck’), King
says, ‘You must be able to remember the things that turned you on back in the good old days before
pot...and Jimmi (sic) Hendrix.’ He then called for those with such memories to send them to him care
of the newspaper.
March 27, 1969. From this issue of The Maine Campus David Bright13 had been elected editor
(according to the paper ‘a formal orgy was held in celebration’). King would create an eponymous
journalist character for The Dead Zone and The Tommyknockers as a nod to his former colleague.
The previous week had been ‘very good’, according to King: ‘It restores your faith in human nature to
realize how many people remember Chubby Checker, the Dovells and Annette Funicello....’ he says,
referring to his request in the previous week’s column for nostalgic memories from his readers.
Among those he received were of music, lyrics, ‘groovy clothes’ (‘crinoline petticoats...saddle
shoes’), radio serials and Saturday matinee movies. Of particular interest to King fans is this: ‘Or, as
Miss Smith says, “…best of all, those old horror programs you were sometimes allowed to listen to
[on the radio].” Can you remember the sound of the creaking door that started Inner Sanctum? I Love
A Mystery? Or how about that graveyard voice that told you you were about to listen to “another story
calculated to keep you in... Suspense!”’ King would revisit this point in the elegiac chapter, Radio
and the Set of Reality, of his non-fiction study of horror, Danse Macabre. This column concludes,
‘Somehow everything seems to get just a little dirtier and more selfish as we get older. It’s good to
remember other times, once in a while.’ Classic King (both Collings14 and Spignesi15 relate this last directly to King’s novel It).
April 10, 1969. Having started the previous column (a fortnight earlier) with, ‘This was a pretty
good week’, this piece begins, ‘You say it’s been a bad week?’ If so, Doctor King prescribes a new
movie, where ‘everybody hates everybody’, The Lions in Winter (sic, in fact ‘Lion’). Of this now
classic movie, starring Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins 16 in but his third
movie role, King says, ‘The dialogue is lusciously biting, and the acting is poisonously perfect.’
While stating the ‘cast do excellent justice to James Goldman’s juicy screenplay’ he says it ‘peters
out without resolution and seems rather pointless’, saying it is not as good as ‘Zifferilli’s (sic) Romeo
and Juliet’, or Rachael, Rachael, two other nominees that year for the ‘annual tool’s clambake, the
Academy Awards’. 17 He also recommends The Riot, a prison movie from Frank Elli’s book, which
King had read, saying it was ‘a tough, hard novel and a good one’. Although Gene Hackman had a
role King preferred ‘the inmates better. They just stood around and looked like inmates’, whereas
King felt Hackman was simply reprising his role in Bonnie and Clyde.
King makes a number of errors of fact in these columns, some minor, some not. In this case
minor—the movie was actually titled Riot, although the novel was indeed The Riot; he misidentifies
the key character as Cully Bristow, rather than Briston; and another movie as I Was A Fugitive From
the Chain Gang, rather than I Am A Fugitive etc. This is excusable if we consider that King’s role at
the time was to pass his UMO courses and entertain his readers, rather than act as researcher for
Leonard Maltin. So as not to distract readers we will keep the balance of such errors to the footnotes!
April 17, 1969. The previous weekend King had been in New York City, ‘courtesy of United
Artists’ who’d invited writers from ‘perhaps forty college publications’ to visit the city and see two
of their new offerings, Popi and If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. He notes this was his first
visit to ‘Fun City’ in four years, ‘and it’s a strange scene for a country boy who grew up in a small
Maine town where there are more graveyards than people.’18 Of the movies he says, ‘They both
almost work. Almost.’ Popi is said to be the better of the two, starring Alan Arkin (‘probably the best
American actor now working’), although King finds it lacking (‘the disquieting moral of the story
seems to be that poverty and squalor can be fun’). Of It’s Tuesday etc. King says it ‘is a sleazy little
farce...It has its moments, but too damn few of them.’ We guess the kind people at United Artists did
not invite the humble Maine Campus correspondent back!
Gotham did not come off well either: ‘As for New York City itself, well, as New Yorkers
would undoubtedly say about Orono, it’s a nice place to visit, but I’d think I’d go crazy if I had to live
there...You can get seven TV channels, but the air smells bad. At the risk of sounding hopelessly
rustic, I like it better up here.’
King’s Ubris is the Best Ever was also published in this edition (see the Book Reviews
chapter).
April 24, 1969. In this column King revisits his invention, the Nitty Gritty Up Tight Society for a
Campus with More Cools, of which he had now risen to ‘President Emeritus’. This ‘group’ had first
appeared in his 22 February 1968 letter to The Maine Campus, From the Nitty-Gritty (see our
Letters to the Editor, Guest Columns chapter), when King was but ‘Secretary’. Back in satiric style
King claims the group now demands, among other things, courses on such minority areas as plumbing,
‘Mandarin Fingernail Growing, and an eight-week seminar on Why Macy’s Doesn’t Tell Gimbles’;
‘birth control vending machines in every dorm’; ‘a full-time limousine service on duty at all the girl’s
dorms’; the closing of the bookstore; and—the ‘nitty gritty’—the abolition of the University. On this
point, ‘we realize this sounds a little sweeping at first’, the NGUTSCMC argues, ‘there could be no
student strikes if there was no university’ and so, if abolished, no one would have to worry about it,
including the fact that it ‘is a contributing cause of inflation, air pollution and eye disease.’
May 1, 1969. Interesting biographical information comes to light in this column, in which King
talks about the liveliness of the poetry scene at UMO. He claims to have been lucky to attend a
Contemporary Poetry course during the ’68 Fall semester—lucky to have been taught by Burton
Hatlen and Jim Bishop (‘a couple of the brightest men the English department here has’) and ‘because
it was an opportunity to read poetry by a group of writers who aren’t dust yet.’ King said the course
was a real ‘learning experience’, compared to the normal ‘confusing welter of requirements, survey
courses, and plain old tommyrot....’ Of the poets read in the course King says ‘one of the best’ is Ron
Lowenstein, ‘a juicy poet, real and alive, with guts and energy enough to be optimistic in a society
that may not deserve such feelings’ and recommends his upcoming reading at the Union.
King has published a small amount of poetry19 (as has Tabitha King, most in their university
years) but perhaps the greatest discovery in this milieu was his future wife. Hatlen (a noted King
critic) and Bishop also strongly encouraged King’s writing, for which we are all eternally grateful.
May 8, 1969. This column begins in classic horror tones, ‘Want me to tell you a bad thing?’ He
sees students and faculty on campuses worldwide devoid of purpose, many of them under excessive
stress (‘Some riot. Most don’t. We just get a little more desperate’). He is haunted after seeing a girl
at dinner burst into tears and run from the room, then ‘everyone started talking again’ and someone
grabbed her dessert. But it’s not the ‘pressure-cooker’ that scares King, it’s the fear that the ‘effect
doesn’t stop with graduation.’ He then lampoons ‘Sally Socialite’, a girl who will marry, have three
kids and join the suburban grind (‘one morning she will wake up forty, wondering whether she did it
all on her own’); and ‘Henry Harried’, the studious type who will end up in a profession and ‘have
his first mild heart-attack at thirty-seven.’ The sudden realization of a teenager or twenty-something
that the future may not be the stuff of dreams is not original by any means, but we see it here strike
King with some force.
In a reflection of his lifelong fascination with the man in a high place with a gun (appearing in
fiction in one instance as Cain Rose Up, first published in the UMO magazine, Ubris for Spring,
1968) he speculates on how one might handle this angst: ‘Maybe you get loaded on Thursday
afternoon. You might develop a decided hostility in class. You might drop out. You might even start
looking at the Stevens Hall tower and wondering—just wondering, mind you—how nice it might be
to climb up there and pick a few people off.’ But, if you are like our columnist, you put on Dylan,
singing Ballad of a Thin Man and listen closely.
May 15, 1969. In this powerful column King reports his thoughts and reactions during a campus
anti-Vietnam War march, which took place on May 8 (the march is covered extensively in this issue
of The Maine Campus). Among other marchers is the aforementioned Campus editor, David Bright
(he also spoke at the following rally). King’s first word is ‘Ugly’ and that word is repeated four more
times (it is literally the last word), each time in larger and bolder print. There was much antagonism
towards the marchers (from townsfolk, fraternity members and other students20) and King reports,
‘Somebody belts me in the gut. It surprises me more than hurts me. I want to weep. I wonder what is
happening to me.’ The most powerful section of this column reads: ‘[The march] halts. There is a
brief confrontation. I don’t know what is said. All I see are fraternity sweatshirts. Behind them I see
Gestapo figures burning books and Jews. I do not see political belief. I see only a terrible amoral
castration.’ Before the final ‘Ugly’ King writes (Constant Readers will recognize a biblical name,
also a real small town in Maine, which now represents a lost place of light and legend): ‘A uniform
means training in the art of murder. Will my son have to kill somebody in the name of national pride?
It is a sentimental thought, perhaps; there may still be balm in Gilead. But somebody punched me in
the belly....’
Clearly, the socially conscious, liberal King has now emerged, if utilizing the flowery prose of
an undergrad (compare these and later sentiments with King’s Opinion column in the 16 November
1967 issue of this same newspaper21). Of course, his Hearts in Atlantis novella springs from this
very period.
May 22, 1969. One of the least important of these columns, this is an (admitted) diatribe against
a student nominee for the Board of Trustees of the University of Maine. King’s objection to the
nomination relates to the particular gentleman’s refusal to accept the result of not one, but two votes
at a meeting of the campus Coalition for Peace in Viet Nam. Threatening to withdraw from the
Coalition the offender managed to overturn the majority vote on the third attempt, which King saw as
‘blackmail of the most vulgar sort. ’22 We also learn that another march (‘the orderly march’) was
held on May 15th, with King in attendance.
June 12, 1969. Taking the beginning of summer as key to a lighter tone King gives a preview of
the ‘coming attractions, here are some of the things you can look forward to—or not look forward to
—in the Garbage Truck this summer....’ These were to include a ‘review of the new Johnny Cash
show. An article on what the Fogler Library has in the way of pornography—and it has a plenty good
supply’, movie reviews, ‘an article on the controversial direction pop music is heading in, a direction
pointed out pretty clearly by the Beatles’ and other groups.
June 20, 1969. During the summer months the university newspaper was re-titled The Maine
Summer Campus, and subsequent Garbage Truck columns up to, and including, 8 August 1969
appeared under this masthead.
In this first of the summer break columns King returns to satiric mode, claiming to deal in a Dear
Abby manner with letters sent to him by certain women (‘When girls look at some male faces they
wonder about motel rates. When they look at my face, they wonder how much I charge for
consultation.’) While marginally funny, and other than as example of the dry humor for which the man
is known, this piece adds little to our understanding of King or his work.
June 27, 1969. In this column King suggests beating the summer heat by turning on a fan, getting
a cold drink (‘lemonade, or even better, a nice cold Bud’), waiting for the afternoon thunderstorm and
then diving into one of four books he recommends. Three of these are important to a study of King
— The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch (King would dedicate Danse Macabre to this outstanding writer,
and pen what was effectively an obituary on his death23); The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
(this is one of the ten important horror books from the period 1950-80 King covers in Danse
Macabre); and, wait for it... Dracula (selling at the time in a Dell paperback for the princely sum of
75 cents). Of this last (and only a half dozen years before King’s homage, ‘Salem’s Lot would hit the
bookstores) he writes: ‘This book still remains the piece to read if you go for this sort of thing. One
might go so far as to call it a monster piece.’ The remaining book was The Coffin Things by Michael
Avallone (‘the summit of Mr. Avallone’s rather checkered career as a hack writer for the paperback
market.’)
The prescient of Garbage Truck’s readers may have sensed in this column a trend in King’s
reading interests. It closes in what would become classic King style when addressing his ‘Constant
Readers’: ‘So now you know how to beat the heat. Curl up beside your favorite headstone and cool it.
Just get home before dark.’
July 4, 1969. On 12 June King had promised a column on the ‘controversial direction pop music
is heading in’ and he delivers here, crediting the Beatles (‘only spottily good musical artists’) for
having ‘changed it all’—‘They have revolutionized hair styles, yanked the average girl’s hem-line up
a foot since 1957, become a moving symbol in the new drug culture, and have even been part of the
wedge that has been breaking ground for a new morality that would have seemed science-fictiony ten
years ago.’ King argues that ‘only recently’ had the Fab Four ‘begun to revolutionize their own field
—pop music’, re-introducing the blues-rock beat from the original rock-and-roll and evolving to
more interesting lyrics (‘obviously John Lennon is as mad as hell’). In the process of making his
argument he reveals an extensive and incisive knowledge of 60’s rock, ranging through its trends and
both its popular and more obscure bands and byways.
Here we see King in a mode he would follow for the next three plus decades—interested in,
analyzing and delivering pop culture. He ends, ‘Rock has come back home, and maybe this time it
really has grown up.’
July 11, 1969. When talking about inspiration for his tales King often mentions the ‘What if’
factor—‘A lady under the canopy was on her cell phone and the doorman was getting someone a cab.
I thought, what if she got this message on her cell phone that she could not deny and she had to attack
everyone she saw—and she started with the doorman, she ripped his throat out’24, was the inspiration
for Cell, for example. And there it was, plain as day in the hectic, wonderful heyday of change we
now view with such nostalgia—‘The man’s name is Neil Armstrong. If all goes well, by the end of
this month he and Buzz Aldrin will have walked where no man has walked before—on the surface of
the moon...But what if—/ And right here, a voice from the attic of my mind speaks up.’
In classic King fiction style he relates his ‘what if’ was ‘a strange dream’ he’d had: ‘I was
sitting in my living-room in this dream, smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer...and watching the first
live TV transmission from Apollo 11.../ Then it all changes. Fear grips me. Fear is reflected in the
faces of the men out there, beyond the point where anyone can possibly offer succor. All rationalism
is gone from that face. Only madness is left. And I know—somehow I know—what it is they fear in
this dream. Not little green men. A huge tideless wind has swept down on them and their puny ship, a
cyclopean gale from no place that is sweeping them in to the gaping, germless maw of deep space
itself.../ This is where the dream ends. I wake up....’
King puts this fear down as the same as those living in the time of Columbus—fear of the
unknown, but ‘… I only hope there is nothing waiting for us in the dark.’ For forty years King has
taken his ‘what ifs’, his dreams, and individual visions and used them as inspiration to build a mighty
catalog of fictions, for which we say thankya.
July 18, 1969. The Nitty Gritty Society (see the column for April 24, 1969) returns in this piece,
to hand ‘out its awards for the coolest movies of the last twenty-five years’ or so. This is a favorite
pastime in King’s non-fiction (see our chapter, Opinion—Radio, Music, Film and Television for
more examples). The Gritty Awards (or ‘Gritties’) include: ‘ Best line delivered by a male actor:’ a
tie between Mickey Rooney in The Last Mile, for “Looks like I just shot a priest”; and Warren Beatty
in Bonnie and Clyde after knocking back Faye Dunaway’s advances: “I don’t like boys, if that’s what
you think!” The same award for female actors: “Is something the matter, John?” by Marla English to
Lon Chaney, Jr., in The Werewolf, as he begins the change.
Now the sarcasm really cuts in—Donald O’Connor for Best Actor in the Francis the Talking
Mule movies; Barbara Stanwyck as Best Actress for her ability to fall downstairs in every picture
she ever made; and Elizabeth Taylor for ‘ Most Nauseating Actress’, she looks like ‘she just crawled
back in to the land of the living after spending two weeks with a sex-crazed python’ (no Michael
Jackson jokes please!). For King and Dark Tower fans this entry will hold great interest: ‘ Best Lousy
Movie: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967)25, mostly for Clint Eastwood’s cigar, which would
have given a lesser man cancer of the lip two Italian Westerns before. Also for director Sergio
Leone, who has a talent for finding more ugly extras than anyone on the face of the earth—and zeroing
his wide-screen lens in on their beard-speckled faces for long, loving, drooly close-ups.’
On the ‘serious side’ the ten best movies of the period were, in the opinion of the Nitty Grittys:
Romeo and Juliet26, Point Blank, The Hustler, Psycho (‘Hitchcock’s best comedy of terrors’), TheLast Mile, Picnic27, Rebel Without a Cause, High Noon and Mildred Pierce. After listing these nine King left the tenth to the reader, suggesting they drop him a line—‘We’ll do a column on it. Might be
interesting.’
July 25, 1969. Freshman Orientation reminds King of his own first days at UMO (in 1966),
although he now feels ‘like a dinosaur—a large hairy dinosaur that may have out-lived its time’. He
recalls, ‘There I was, all alone in Room 203 of Gannett Hall, clean-shaven, neatly dressed, as green
as apples in August...I was sure my roommate would turn out to be a freako, or even worse,
hopelessly more With It than I...Those were the days, all right. You could wake up in the morning
without having your mouth taste like the bottom of a birdcage....’ and continues to reminisce on the
lost days of respect for convention, along with the misconceptions of freshmen. ‘I remember my first
date up here. I shaved three times in twenty minutes, and that was just to call her up and ask her.’
August 1, 1969. Uniquely for Garbage Truck this column was reprinted in the newspaper (in
that case reverting to the academic year title of The Maine Campus), in the September 25, 1969
issue.
The column features a diatribe against the Pope (Paul VI) and, at first glance, birth control. King
says the Pope is the last person on earth he would want to be (he could even stand being Richard
Nixon—which, considering King’s withering opinion of that particular President is saying something
—as ‘anyone who eats meatloaf with catsup every Thursday night can’t have too much on his mind.’)
According to King’s Methodist turned campus liberal worldview, ‘Nobody likes the Pope; not even
his own priests like him much.../...the main reason I’d hate to be Pope isn’t because he’s unpopular.
It’s because I think he’s probably right. I think birth control demeans the act of sex and makes it
fundamentally purposeless. Sterilized sex is a little like jumping in your car...and driving like hell in
neutral....’ Leaving religion aside King questions the ‘moral unfairness’ of who exactly is using the
pill—not poor women with large families, but the middle-class—he goes on to agree (tongue
possibly, but not obviously, in cheek) with Norman Mailer (‘a writer for who I have a great deal of
respect’) who is for legalized, no-holds barred abortion but not birth control. King appears to argue
this is a matter of morality—‘In the last analysis, it seems to me that birth control is a little gutless.
Babies are serious business. It doesn’t seem right to laugh them away with a little round plastic case.
So, if the population must be controlled, it seems to me that legal murder—abortion—is the only
really moral way it can be done. If nothing else, it would force the person involved to come to a
serious decision about birth control—and death control.’ It is probably columns like this that have
made King determined not to allow reprints of the Garbage Truck columns for a wider audience.
This one is a hot potato, and can be read from different perspectives, making it dangerous, especially
in today’s America—near fatally divided as it is on ethical fault-lines, abortion the San Andreas of
them all.
August 8, 1969. The previous weekend King had read his columns in previous issues of the
Campus and formed the view some ‘of the stuff is good; some bad; a great deal seems to be rather
indifferent’, but notes he has been gratified by the general response—‘so many people seem to like
the column.’ He then decides to thank people he owes ‘an awful lot to’ for ‘things in general.’ These
include Maureen Babicki (King’s high school girlfriend—‘the most beautiful girl in the world’);
‘Carroll F. Terrell of the English department, who is an excellent critic’; Caroline Dodge, ‘who
turned me on to Tolkien’ (Dark Tower fans say thankya to Caroline); James Bishop of the English
Department (‘the most human and the most vital faculty member I have ever met’), and of whom he
argues proves ‘something good could come out of Old Town’ (also Tabitha King’s home); Dave
Bright (‘with whom I may some day share a cell in Leavenworth’—Bright announced at one anti-war
rally he’d rather serve there than in Vietnam); and Burt Hatlen (‘who challenges the intellect with
strength, vigor, and enthusiasm’). He closes, ‘Somebody told me the other day that he found this
column interesting but overly cynical. Well, I never meant it to be overly cynical—anyone who likes
the Pope can’t be all bad—right? If it has seemed that way, I’m sorry. I’ve got lots of reasons to be
anything but cynical. You just read through a lot of them.’
September 18, 1969. King returns after a six-week break with a light-hearted piece addressed
to that year’s freshman intake and which is one of the least important here. King advises that students
are now out on their own, in a position to test their judgment and about to suffer the stresses of
campus life, as a result of which they will likely change greatly. The following week’s column was a
reprint of the August 1st piece.
October 3, 1969. This week King explores campus student groups, finding members of All-
Maine Women, when ‘en masse’, to be ‘a little frightening’, projecting as they did ‘an aggressive air
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 36 | Нарушение авторских прав
<== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |