The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

A lot of people who talk about Stephen King tend to qualify their statements with a “well, it’s not real literature or anything, but at least it’s entertaining.” There is something very self-conscious about this. It’s like saying, “I’m not a pig-faced consumer of mass media like them other folk, or anything, but they were fresh out of French existentialism at the library, so…”

Pleasure, as we all know, is sinful – and reading for pleasure is practically a 9th circle of hell type of offense, considering the fact that every time you crack open a Stephen King book, a Fairy of Aesthetic Analysis drops dead somewhere. Hardy har har.

Actually, I firmly believe that King, of all people, will be remembered as a great writer, perhaps in the same way that Alexander Dumas (who makes a humorous linguistic cameo in the film version of “The Shawshank Redemption,” of course) is remembered, perhaps in a different way altogether. But remembered, folks, nonetheless.

For all the sneering or, worse, plain cold-shouldering (yes, I just made up that verb) that King’s work elicits, his work continues to have deep reverberations throughout our culture.

By that I don’t just mean the dreaded chimera of “popular culture,” the monster that lies in wait among the dust bunnies and dog-eared volumes on modernism under the beds of the fundamentalist followers of High Art.

the girl who loved tom gordon

Like it or not, King is an Important Writer. He needs no champions in the academia, and he sells books by the bus-load… no, by the Boeing 787-load, which automatically makes him suspect if you happen to have a discerning taste in literature.

Then again, I’ve always thought that if you have a problem with reading a books that Other People (otherwise known as Hell, at least according to Sartre) read, this may not necessarily be the author’s problem. I don’t extend this thinking to everyone (Dean Koontz certainly comes to mind, for example), but I definitely do it with King (my God, why does this last phrase suddenly make me fee so dirty and disgusting? When will I learn to think like an innocent again?).

I’ll tell you why I like this guy , and, to spare you the suspense: it’s not just because Harold Bloom (who can always be counted on to dump a bucket of bile on any number of popular writers, sometimes rightfully so, sometimes in a rather cranky and bizarre manner that does him no justice) loathes him.

Call me the Girl Who Loved Stephen King, baby. Continue reading “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”

My City the year before I was born

… With a whole lot less billboards and cars. Still the same City though. The home of Bulgakov like he would never see it – except that something about his descriptions of it is still tattooed on every stone, old and new.

“Як тебе не любити, Києве мій?”

The seeming benevolence of the City as seen from above is something I’m contemplating on this very bad day. Video therapy is where it’s at, my lovelies.

Blood on the Snow

There once was a man who left his home after trying, and failing, to win the love of a married woman. He travelled for weeks, sometimes on foot, sometimes hitching a ride here and there. Sometimes his body ached with weariness, and sometimes the nights of the waning summer got cold, but he pressed on.

One autumn evening, just as it began to grow dark where the lonely road yielded no inns or fellow travelers, the man saw a winking light on a hill in the distance. The light looked just like the light in the married woman’s house late at night, or so he recalled.

madonna of the rocks detail

When he came closer, he realized that the light was emanating from the entrance to a cave. Though this struck him as strange, he pressed on and saw a deep cavern, dimly lit by a small fire. A girl in rags, no more than thirteen by the looks of her, sat by the fire and stirred something in a copper pot with a long white spoon. She was humming a tune he couldn’t place, except for the fact that it may have been sung by his mother to him.

The girl jumped when she saw him, but he reassured her with calm words and what he hoped was a warm smile. She told him that she had been banished from her village on suspicion of dark magic.

“And are you?” He asked.

“And am I what?”

“An evil witch.”

“No,” she smiled back at him. “I am a good one.”Continue reading “Blood on the Snow”