TiVo Lady

Suckered by Stephen King, Again

He may be the Most Successful Boomer Author of all time, but Stephen King makes me feel like a sucker.

See, his writing is hypnotic, mesmerizing.  It draws you in, even though you know it is silly and preposterous and manipulative.  But he's such a master of the written word, that he draws you in, and it's as if you are powerless to stop reading.  You can't help it, you read deeper and deeper into the night, just like one of his spirit-possessed characters, who can't stop fighting the supernatural power that's trying to destroy the world.  Or something.

King's latest book, Duma Key, is 607 pages long, at least 300 of which you will be reading deep into the night.  Even though you know the characters and the plot are absurd.  But you won't be able to prevent yourself from reading to the bitter and ridiculous end.  It's the story of Edgar Freemantle, a former construction guy from Minnesota (not Maine, for a change), who gets smashed on the head by a construction vehicle, loses an arm and his mind, for a while, and moves to the Florida Keys to recover.  It's there that he is possessed by an ancient, ocean-based spirit who makes him draw and paint amazing works of art while also trying to kill off his loved ones.  Plus, he sees dead people.

See, it's so dumb I'm embarrassed to even try to summarize the plot, which may not actually be possible.  But that's not the point.  The point is that King has perfected his writing so, that I'm powerless to stop reading whatever he writes.  The sections of the book that deal with Edgar's recovery from traumatic injury are superb--probably because King lived through such a time after he was hit by a car a few years ago.  I love his writing when he skirts the supernatural, and writes about what's real, and being middle-aged and afraid of dying.  But he's gotten to the point, I guess, where all of that fear has to be masked and camouflaged by the tricks of the horror trade:  ghosts and spirits and ancient revenges and hauntings and possessions. 

If you've got a few days to kill--on a beach maybe, or a really long airplane trip--you could maybe read this book.  It's really heavy though.

Read My Book Stephen King!

I suffered through Drive, but trust me, it was torture, Nathan Fillion notwithstanding.  I read that a writer for his old show, Firefly, is involved in Drive.  My theory is that Fox Broadcasting was stricken with a severe case of Corporate Regret and Major Guilt, over the cancellation of Firefly.  Thus, they invented Drive.  Unfortunately, there are way too many characters, none remotely as charming or intense or interesting as the ones who peopled Firefly.  Mostly, they seem like knock-offs of the more famous.  Fillion's apparent driving partner, for instance, is a dead ringer for Uma Thurman, in her Kill BIll years.  A young girl, driving with her dad, looks eerily similar to Lindsay Lohan.  Only not.  Blech.  That said, I may have to keep watching, just to make sure that the show stays as ridiculous as it seems at the moment.

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski, is the book that Stephen King raved about in Entertainment Weekly a while back.  I trust him completely, so I read it last week. It's an incredibly exotic read, set in remote parts of Thailand so strange and alien as to seem otherworldly.  And it focuses on a Boomer, albeit a dead one, who is infinitely smart and sharp and a murderer, too.  I love the anthropology angle, too, since she is a serious student of culture who ends up being completely assimilated into the tribe that she's studying.  So, it's an enjoyable, fun and provocative read.  Thanks Steve.  More important for an author, though, is this.  Before King wrote his ode to this book, it's sales rank on Amazon was 24,571.  Afterward, it shot up to 402. 

Hey, Mr. King?  Wanna read a book about empty nest moms?  It's called BEYOND THE MOMMY YEARS, and I hear it's really good!  (Coincidentally, I also wrote it.)

Bottom of the TiVo Barrel

So desperate am I for TiVo, any TiVo, that I am reduced to watching old black and white movies and more recent dregs, with current Hollywood stars.  I got through about half of Forbidden, a 1932 Frank Capra movie starring Barbara Stanwyck as a librarian who gets fed up with her dull, country life and spends her life savings (about $1,200) on a cruise to Cuba.  (It would take a clever librarian indeed to take such a trip today!)  She meets cute the slimy, moustachioed Adolphe Menjou, and they fall in love.  Suddenly, she's back home, but no longer a librarian, she is magically employed in a city newspaper office.  No explanation is offered for this radical life change, but she seems to be seeing a lot of old Adolphe.  What's not clear, though, is if they ever do anything other than press lips and hug enthusiastically.  Just as I was beginning to develop a theory that this was a different, pre-sexual era when grownups who weren't married didn't have sex, he confesses that he's already married and she's in the hospital having his baby.  Whoops!  Wrong theory.

Then I watched The Portrait of a Lady, Jane Campion's 1996 adaptation of the Henry James novel.   Yikes, was this a cinematic mistake!  There's a wan-looking Nicole Kidman, who reads her lines as if she's reading aloud to a deaf person, and looking amazingly awkward in her frizzy updoish poufy hair and bustle-bottomed dresses.  Even the usually cute-as-a-button Mary-Louise Parker is awful, shrill and uncomfortable.  Viggo Mortensen's dimpled chin makes an appearance, as does the rest of him, but he's a spurned suitor (dammit) so he's not around enough.  Martin Donovan plays the sickly cousin who's also besotted with Isabel Archer.  (Now, ten years on, he's playing the creepy federal agent who married Mary-Louise in the ever-terrific Showtime series Weeds.)  Take a look at these terrible pictures:  I am not making this up.

The reason I have so much time to watch not-great movies while waiting for my TiVo to come to life again is that my children have been gone for most of Christmas break.  As a Boomer mom, this is what happens.  One is spending two weeks in Rio, and the other is in Israel for 10 days, on an all-expenses paid Birthright trip.  So much leisure time have I, in fact, that I've also nearly finished Lisey's Story, Stephen King's latest book.  I had thought I was reading a novel, not something in the horror genre.  Ha!  King has written a book imaging life and his world going on after his death, a great notion.  But his world always contains imaginary worlds just beyond this one, called "Boo'ya Moon," here, and other-worldly terrifying creatures, this one known as "the long boy."  But I find all of this oddly comforting, as does King, I bet.  The real world, the one with only this place, containing all that's living and ending with death, is much scarier than the alternate versions King conjures up.  I'd take his imaginary universe over this one any time.