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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.206.235
Posted on Saturday, August 03, 2019 - 10:53 am:   

I was never keen on this book. It felt like three or four moments strung out. The films (the first better than the second) supported this. But last week I found a grubby ex library first edition and found myself alone with it. Maybe that helped.
Reading a book again you are not in a hurry. You are looking for other things. And this is when you find the real book.
Yes, it's about death...But it's also about *death*. I can't explain the difference, but there it is. It might become my favourite King book; Outsider was professional, polished, but the King I'm reading now was the real King, searching out his feelings, opening up to us. It's why we loved him and always will.
Hey ho.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.206.235
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2019 - 06:28 pm:   

No-one gives a shite!
Hey ho. Way off the world I guess.
Am drunk, does it show? It's how seventies tv programmes used to end, interviews on telly, some drunk sad actor lurching across the stage punching Parky or introducing emu or somebody, making an embarrassment of themselves. How we laughed, and what great deal times they were, no cockheads looking into their phones or blogging about it or some such shit. We live in the turd times, everyone's a fuckinG weird arseole with vague tastes and big paintins of empty bags or some such in a gallery next to something good, or a photo of Tibetan tea or a new cheese cube resting on a chaffinch on a massive plate, that kind of visual gag actually being really old now.
Hilarious to think this is being archived, in some dark echoey brown hall up Ramsey's butt I imagine.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.206.235
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2019 - 06:30 pm:   

I should get drunk loads more often. It's ace. I feel great even though I want to kill my neighbours who have cut down every one of their beautiful old trees.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.206.235
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2019 - 06:30 pm:   

I really want.to kill them. It's not a joke.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.206.235
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2019 - 06:31 pm:   

DICKHEADS.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.233.150.120
Posted on Friday, August 09, 2019 - 11:11 pm:   

I hope you feel better, Tony. I do worry about you sometimes, in a nice way.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 172.112.29.83
Posted on Tuesday, February 25, 2020 - 09:05 pm:   

What I remember of the novel is, that all that fantastic horror that he was building all bled right away the moment we saw the flashback of the resurrected guy - it was King violating his own Prime Directive: he opened the door wide, too soon.

I had an idea for a story/novel, with the rather bland (probably used) title "The Angry Dead." The concept was that - in this world's reality - everyone who's ever died is in the beyond, just boiling with near mindless rage - an eternity of rage at Volume 11, whether you're a horrendous killer that died, or Mother Theresa. In the course of the story, the dead are of course released into our own world, and they're much like the resurrected dead from RE-ANIMATOR - just boiling frantic explosive killing rage-machines. Probably why I never wrote it - nowhere to go with much depth, or originality.

There's these wonderfully horror-inducing moments in Fulci's THE BLACK CAT, where the protagonist is listening in to the dead, in their graves, through a machine he invented. It never goes anywhere in the movie (which is actually not all that great), but those scenes have secured themselves in my mind as being quite disturbing....
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 172.112.29.83
Posted on Tuesday, March 03, 2020 - 07:53 am:   

I believe King was plucked from the tree, and planted and told to produce much fruit. Way back when in the mists of time, in the mid-1970s (with CARRIE). He may have only had a few years in him for all they knew - by a stroke of luck (to the publishers), he was an orchard unto himself. Long after the genre he single-handedly kept alive - horror fiction - has gone to its grave, he's still on top, still producing viable work. Who will ever replace him?

He's like - love him or hate him or feel indifference towards him - Rush Limbaugh, to radio. Rush re-invented the form, talk radio, to be as we know it now; and long after it's gone to seed, long after other players rose and fell, he's still going strong. (Howard Stern left the scene too long ago to be considered a major influence there, though he's a close 2nd; his passing to satellite in the late 90's I believe, then finally TV, rendered him essentially irrelevant.)

These giants who come along, create themselves and the world they inhabit; and then they're the only ones really left doing it after the also-rans have come and gone. For daytime American TV it might be Oprah, who outlived them all, the only one anyone really remembers. Music is too ephemeral, too age (i.e., human age) dependent, to create such generation-spanning monuments. Film, too, too demanding and draining, to sustain single figures (except maybe Hitchcock?); even the best actors only get their moments in the sun - if they stick around too long, they inevitably become self-parody.

Poets fade, enfeeble; you'll get a Wordsworth or Eliot, who get to smash everything to pieces (so do a Beatles and Nirvana in music) - but they don't get to be the resulting world and its aftermath. That's for the very few.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.179.250.140
Posted on Tuesday, March 03, 2020 - 12:33 pm:   

A poem, anonymous, I read today;
"Who am I?
Was I ever anything?
Did I ever exist at all?"
A wave that breaks on the shore
Once a million years ago

I have been musing on anonymity. I saw an old dog paw print in concrete, gone green with moss. It made me think of every dog that ever lived. I think anonymity connects us, in the end.
Going back to the geeks, I think they are the opposite of this understanding.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 172.112.29.83
Posted on Wednesday, March 04, 2020 - 01:36 am:   

That's quite insightful, Tony - the geeks that we thought of as the underdogs having their day, actually being less empathic. We humanized the geeks, but we did it to the exclusion of the "normies." Dangerous. I do think its' a healthy rebellion against dominant, top-down culture, or at least the tyranny of same that became the prevailing culture. As much as I like "Friends," it feels like the apogee of top-down cultural role-designation tyranny.

Nietzsche writes (in Zarathustra) that all weeping is a complaining - and all complaining, on some level, is an accusing. But sorrow requires a response, and if you won't weep, then you must sing (Zarathustra chooses to sing). Elsewhere he spins a wonderful fable where "Life" is a headstrong & fickle woman to his Zarathustra, who admits she loves him and hates him at once - and he must love and hate her in return to live rightly. Much is murky and outrageous and excessively exuberant in Z; but I'm finding in my rereading so many cold tonics to so many lukewarm bromides.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.179.250.140
Posted on Wednesday, March 04, 2020 - 10:11 am:   

I just think geeks and fantasy fans like things a little filed away and ordered, reality a little frowned on. I might be being a touch broad. I think the poetic, the silent or anonymous might be too "blank" to them. But the normies are a dying breed, often have a lot of labels thrown at them at the first display of any kind of stand-out character trait, like a film showing evidence of some noted director or writer. Like the way a younger generation attacks the previous one.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 89.19.67.84
Posted on Wednesday, March 04, 2020 - 12:08 pm:   

"As much as I like "Friends," it feels like the apogee of top-down cultural role-designation tyranny."

What do you mean by this, Craig? Is it the eye-rolling when Ross tried to explain anything?

About normies and overlooked people, I think you Tony quoted Melvyn Bragg saying that niceness is an under-rated quality in people. So true.

We assume that things like magnanimity in victory (look at sport today) are inherent properties, but they're not, they were evolved and cultivated in some societies over a long time.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 172.112.29.83
Posted on Wednesday, March 04, 2020 - 05:27 pm:   

I guess, Proto, I mean that - from my mind-blurring of "Friends" - there is an overall saturation of "normal" culture: traditional arrangements for the main characters (hetero-bonding); an absence of "woke" preaching even for that time; and, an absolute expunging of true "geek" culture (playing table-hockey isn't "geek"). Not to mention the blinding whiteness of it all, until Ross briefly got his token black girlfriend late in the series. It saw everyone as types of dominant hetero-white Western culture - the fringes were being "dumb" or "new-agey" - but the cogs didn't deviate from their assigned placements.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.190.65.102
Posted on Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - 08:02 am:   

I did enjoy reading Pet Sematary again.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.11.24.167
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - 07:38 pm:   

I stopped reading The Stand. It's very well written but a tad, well, long, and it was always a kind of gloomy journey. Difficult to say goodbye to it though, like a faded friendship.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 2.102.1.107
Posted on Wednesday, March 03, 2021 - 12:35 am:   

Time Past and Time Present by Deirdre Madden. One of the best books I've read.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 108.221.136.29
Posted on Monday, May 17, 2021 - 07:30 pm:   

God I sound brilliant up there!

I'm sorry, sometimes you read your own words back and you're very impressed you reached such depth and insight! Such profundity!

Hey! No one else is gonna f**king say it, so I might as well!!!

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