Deep Friared

Not Exactly? Exactly!

2012-01-27T21:56:00.000-06:00

One way to point out flaws in a proposal is to describe it as "vague," meaning that the proposer hasn't really spelled out what he or she wants to do. In those cases, "vague" is not a term of approval.

But coming from University of Aberdeen professor Kees Van Deemter, it just might be. The subtitle of his 2010 book Not Exactly is "In Praise of Vaguenes," and Van Deemter suggests vagueness is actually an important part of our world and one we can't really function very well without. Van Deemter has quite a bit of interest in the subject, since his area of specialty is artificial intelligence. In order to help computers think like people think, they have to be able to handle vague concepts and terms, as well as questions and situations which have more than two possible answers.

The first section covers physical measurements, an area where we may think precision rules. As Van Deemter points out, though, the scale at which you measure determines the amount of precision you have available to you. For most measurements people do in their ordinary lives, things like rulers, tape measures and yardsticks work just fine in giving them the precision they need. If something matches the ruler mark at, say, two feet three and three sixteenths inches, then that's how long or wide or deep it is for just about any everyday use you or I could think of.

But if someone is doing something that needs a greater degree of precision, they may be thrown off by something as small as the actual width of the mark at two feet three and three sixteenths inches. The same way someone using a saw needs to take the width of the saw blade into account when making a cut, precision measurement needs to take in the width of the mark. Van Deemter uses the famed "metre bar" as an example. You can find an excerpt from Not Exactly telling this story here. Developed by international standards in the 19th century, the bar is one of platinum-iridium alloy that was measured to be exactly 1/40,000,000 of the distance between the north and south poles as measured along the specific longitudinal meridian that contained the Pantheon in Paris. Anyone who wanted to create an exact meter measurement petitioned to have their measuring device matched to the meter bar, kept in a vault in Paris.

Set aside why that meridian should be chosen over others, and you still have the problem that measurements in the 20th century showed that the bar was actually off by .00005 meters. No problem for most everyday work, but a big problem for some of the incredibly tiny distances with which scientists were beginning to work and the precision which that work required. The standard was changed to the wavelengths of certain kinds of radiation, and then in 1983 to the distance traveled by light through a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Van Deemter leaves out the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which tells us there is a level of precision we can't reach no matter how much we refine our equipment. But since he's shown the imprecision or vagueness that's a part of the universe on a much larger scale than Heisenberg worked with, he doesn't really need to explore it. Plus, Heisenberg's principle is actually a case of ambiguity, which differs from vagueness. Ambiguity, Van Deemter says, happens when we can't determine which of two or more equally clear cases or situations is true. Heisenberg showed that we can know either the spin or the position of a subatomic particle, but not both at the same time, so his principle describes ambiguity rather than vagueness, because vagueness means we aren't all that clear about what the cases or situations are.

The next sections get into areas that start to affect Van Deemter's own work with artificial intelligence -- language and logic. We might think our language describes things in the real world, which is why we use it. But our language actually makes a whole host of assumptions in order to describe things; without the assumptions the words themselves are vague. What, for example, do we mean when we say something is "tall?" If we look at that statement, we know we don't have a specific measurement in mind. A tall person is not the same height as a tall tree, and a tall tree is not the same height as a tall building. We mean "comparatively" or "relatively" tall. A six-footer is tall compared to me, but short compared to a redwood. So then, Van Deemter asks, at what height does the adjective need to change so that instead of calling someone "short," we call them "tall?" The answer will depend on the group of people being measured. Obviously "short" on an NBA team is different than "short" on a middle-school basketball team.

Because their meanings depend on their surroundings, "tall" and other words like it are actually vague, rather than precise (Van Deemter uses the word "crisp"). In order for computers to begin to think like people think, they have to be able to use those vague words and the concepts they represent.

Most computers today use a different system, based on classical logic that has just two values: true and not-true. A two-valued logic system corresponds nicely with the binary numbering system that can be used to write computer programs. A computer is told that if a certain thing is true, then it should take one action. But if it is not true, then it should take a different action. Each step in a program involves the computer making an either/or choice and taking the step it's told to take. Obviously doing something according to this process would take a long time. Computers can make such decisions so quickly, though, that they can do in seconds what you or I would need hours to finish.

On the other hand, they can't easily do what you and I can do, which is use vague concepts like "tall" in our reasoning. They run into what's called the "sorites paradox," named after the Greek word soros, or "heap" in English. It goes like this: Do you call one grain of wheat (or of sand, or one stone, or one of anything) a heap? Do you call two grains a heap? How about three? Most folks say no to those and probably for awhile longer, but at some point you've got a heap. What is that point? If you stick with the truth/not-truth or "yes/no" binary kind of logic computers use, you can't name it with any clarity. Nor can we define words like heap, tall, short, fat or others that we use all the time.

Van Deemter uses a great deal of "symbolic logic" in this chapter to explore alternative systems of logic and how they might or might not handle vagueness. The symbolic part itself takes getting used to, because it uses shorthand for certain expressions the way that math equations use shorthand like "+" to show "is added to" or "-" to show "is subtracted from." Once you get to where you can keep the symbols straight, though, you can follow the ideas. The problem is that he spends a lot of time with them before throwing them out and moving towards the idea that seems to him best suited to handling a world that includes vagueness. That idea, which he refers to as "degrees of truth," allows for a logical system that can include context -- like designating someone as tall who is still shorter than an NBA player because they're among people who are mostly shorter than they.

The linguistics section also seems overly extensive and unfocused -- Van Deemter seems to want to show that vagueness is a part of language at its deepest levels and thus underlies most if not all languages. I don't know much about linguistics, but I'm leery of anything that relies this heavily on Noam Chomsky and cites Chomsky's political bushwah as proof of his perceptive abilities. The inclusion of a Tony Blair slam by way of demonstrating a malicious use of vagueness in political discourse seems a little forced as well. Whether or not language is vague seems to rely less on its inherent structure and more on the fact that the world deals in vagueness just as often if not more often than it deals in precision.

These missteps don't harm a wonderful book exploring an amazing subject. For me, mired as I am in my traditional Christian theism, it's absolutely fascinating to see that some of the assumptions that people have made which seem to exclude my way of thinking may not be as warranted as previously believed. We've been told that the universe can be completely and precisely explained by descriptions of its physical processes, leaving no room for God -- or at least, no room for a God who mattered. But we find imprecision at all levels of our measurement. We find yes/no logic leaving great paradoxical gaps in our ability to reason, unless we assume (or "take on faith," as it were) certain things to be true.

Van Deemter doesn't really follow the religious implications of his work, and I have no idea if he'd consider the questions I believe it raises to be legitimate so I won't put them in his mouth. And vagueness by itself or combined with other uncertain aspects of the universe's existence do not make the case that God must exist. A vague universe could be without a God as easily as could a crisp and precise one.

On the other hand, it means that the supposedly open and shut case against God may not be wrapped up as tightly as has been thought either. Which is just fine with me.

Moping Towards Bethlehem

2011-06-06T17:20:00.003-05:00

And what glum beast, its hour come round at last,
Mopes towards Bethlehem to be born?

With apologies to W. B. Yeats

Song Sung, Blue

I'd had in mind to read George R. R. Martin's sweeping fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire (SoIaF) and write the same kind of reader's diary that I did for Stephen King's The Dark Tower. And here's what happened. Beware, even though there is no play-by-play recap as in those earlier entries, spoilery things are ahead!

I'd heard a great deal about the series; a lot of blogs I read referred to it as "fantasy for adults." Usually, that's the kind of thing people say when they like something but they figure they'd have a hard time defending the genre or style of writing, art or music it belongs to. So the particular piece they like becomes music "for thinking people." Or art "for the discerning viewer." Or fantasy "for adults."

But I had read and enjoyed a good deal of the Martin-edited "Wild Cards" series, in which he and several other authors wrote about comic book-styled heroes in a kind of shared-world anthology format. Their stated goal was to translate those heroes into a more sophisticated kind of environment -- not at all strange even in the regular comic-book world these days, but definitely different in the mid-80s when the series began. Whatever the stated idea, the effect was superheroes + violence + sex, the latter two a pretty common equation whenever we get into stories labeled "more sophisticated" or "more adult." The sex and the way it's written may owe a lot more to the fantasies of early adolescent boys than actual adult activity, but that's rarely a good way to market them.

So I purchased A Game of Thrones, the first in the series, and dove in. Halfway through the book, I could see why people found themselves enmeshed in the world Martin created. Yes, it was typically gloomy Martin. Nobody's happy for very long when they come out of his keyboard; they're either evil, angsty or forlorn. But still! Many different characters, skullduggery and plotting in the background, in the foreground and pretty much all around, vivid descriptions, a fascinating world, and so on. Then I realized something. I was halfway through the first book. I was four hundred pages into the shortest book of this originally-three-now-up-to-five-supposed-to-be-finished-in-seven series, and we were still pretty much scene-setting. Although the pacing of the novel was fine, the pace of story advancement was glacial. The four in-print volumes of the series total almost 3,900 pages and Martin's manuscript for the fifth, scheduled for publication in July, was itself more than 1,500 pages long. For comparison, Game's manuscript was nearly 1,100 pages long and produced an 800-page paperback.

Well, that's not necessarily a deal-breaker, although it definitely banks one's passions. And they cool a little bit more when reading a forum post Martin made in 1998 about the series owing a lot to the historical Wars of the Roses period of English history, about how it would now be four books instead of three. It had, he said, "grown," which is not the kind of thing that makes a reader optimistic about authorly discipline. I forged on, though, because around that point in the book things do start to happen a little, even though what they mostly do is start other things happening.

But by the end of Game of Thrones, I was completely unhooked from a desire to read the rest of the series, however many books it turns out to be. One of the things Martin said fairly often about this series was that readers should be prepared to see anyone die, and he very clearly meant what he said when he killed Eddard or "Ned" Stark, the knight whose agreement to serve as Hand of the King plays a large part in getting things going. Ned has been our focal point for most of the book -- other storylines branch from his. His illegitimate son Jon Snow joins the Night's Watch at the great northern Wall, his wife Catelyn seeks out the murderer of the previous Hand and suspects Tyrion Lannister, his daughters Sansa and Arya become a part of the palace life and intrigues at King's Landing, and so on. Only the story of Daenerys Targaryn stands completely separate (and it's a dispute over King Robert's desire to kill her than forces a break between Ned and the King and makes both vulnerable to their enemies).

Moreover, Ned has been the character has displayed morality and decency throughout his appearances. Even his wife Catelyn, a mostly admirable person, shows ugliness towards the illegitimate Jon Snow despite Jon's complete lack of threat to her own children under the laws and customs of the kingdom. Most every other adult character is either rotten from the start, like Robert's wife Cersei Lannister or their son Joffrey, or shows deceit and treachery when probed a little further. In short, by the end of Game of Thrones I was willing to stick with this slow-moving and expanding story in order to see what happened to Ned. He's beheaded by order of Joffrey after Robert dies -- convicted of treason on trumped-up charges, but promised his life if he goes north to join the Night's Watch in order to spare the feelings of Sansa, Ned's daughter and Joffrey's betrothed. But Joffrey is sadistic. and probably unbalanced, as he is not King Robert's son but is actually the product of an incestuous relationship between Queen Cersei and her fraternal twin brother Jaime Lannister. So he orders Ned beheaded in front of Sansa and spends random joyful afternoons dragging her to where the head is mounted on spike and having her beaten if she doesn't accompany him happily and willingly.

So when my reason for sticking with SoIaF got killed, so did my desire to stick with the series. And according to synopses of the later books, Martin's been no less reluctant to kill or damage most of the rest of his decent characters as well -- Robb Stark will die after asking forgiveness for breaking a promise and believing it to have been granted. Arya Stark will escape King's Landing after her father's death, but her thirst for revenge will lead the young girl to join a band of assassins before Martin decides to blind her. He may be trying to create a redemption arc for Jaime Lannister, but who knows if he'll just kill him instead?

There's nothing wrong with not knowing what will happen next in a book; in fact it's the preferred way of telling some stories. And there's nothing wrong with the idea of a very long story either. But if I'm following a very long story and I never know if the author will bump off someone I like and leave me with some skulking schemer, I for one am not drawn in. I may still want to know what happens in the end -- which means if Martin finishes this series I'll find spoilers somewhere to learn how he wraps things up -- but I'm not really invested in the journey (My guess is he brings Daenerys back to the throne and hooks her up with Jon Snow or Bran Stark, or we find out Jon is an illegitimate Targaryn and thus takes the Westeros throne for his own after defeating or throwing back the Others. Or, considering the Targaryn acceptance of incestuous unions within their royal line, he and Daenerys marry. Or everybody dies, gloomily). Someday, if I feel a little differently about these things, I may pick up the thousands of pages Martin will have written about Westeros. But not today, and likely not ever.

Some might argue that a world in which the good guys don't always win is a world more like the real one. In the real world, stubbornly clinging to honor and principle may cause you trouble. In the real world, strong and cruel people take advantage of weak people. So, Martin's defenders might say to me, he's simply placing the fantasy novel into a more realistic realm. I don't argue, but I do ask why I'd want to read that kind of fiction when I can read that kind of news every day.

Other folks say they appreciate the SoIaF novels for their subversion of familiar fantasy tropes. They take the genre's standards and flip them on their heads. Again, swell if that's what you want to read but it seems to me that the subversions -- which are less "subversion" than "adolescent contrarianism" -- become the new tropes and the story, rather than replacing old ruts with new ideas instead replaces them with new ruts.

The Never-Ending Story?

Martin is, by most accounts, one of the more accessible best-seller authors working these days. He frequently attends gatherings of his fan club and regularly interacts with readers via blog, fan forums and science fiction conventions. It's a double-edged sword for him, though, because it leaves him open to a lot of the complaints some of those fans lodge against him for what they perceive as the slow development of a story they love very much. When you read this profile from The New Yorker, you can see how the differently writers and readers approach the same thing: The novel that one of them created and the other one reads.

From the writer's point of view, a novel is a completed work -- he or she may write from love or driving compulsion, but at the end of the day the manuscript is the product of a job. We can hope writers want everything they create to be their best efforts, but the basic outline of their job is completing a contract by submitting a manuscript to a publisher.

We readers see things differently -- as the consumers of this work, we are invested in the story itself. We fall in love with the world the author's imagination reveals or the characters with which he or she peoples it. We develop appreciation for other worlds the author may create and other journeys upon which he or she may lead us. So when we are swept up in a story, we want to complete our journey with it. Surely such a wondrous beginning or wondrous journey must have an equally wondrous end! Surely this great tale to which we have become devoted, this magic spell into which we have been woven, this grand intoxicating story will have a finish as satisfying as it is!

But of course, it might not be. Our readerly satisfaction may not mirror the writer's authorly satisfaction. We may believe the proper ending is for everyone to live happily ever after. Except for the villain, of course, who will be messily but justly dispatched at the end. The author, however, might have something different in mind. The questions we think the author has raised in the story may not be answered, because the author may have an entirely different set of questions and resolutions in mind. Martin's version of this is that he's writing the SoIaF novels, not us, and we don't get to write our own endings.

Again, fair enough, although Martin's own public dissatisfaction with the way the television show Lost ended would seem to suggest that he knows the reader's (or watcher's) side of the contract as well.

Martin has been quite firm that he will continue to work on other projects and he will finish SoIaF when it's finished. He won't rush out substandard work just to get to the finish line. Considering the rate at which some popular authors churn out words just to get the pages into print, that's a refreshing position to hear. The only problem is that the question of "Well, does it really have an end?" has taken on more weight than it would otherwise. SoIaF was to be a trilogy. Then four books. Then the fourth book turned into two books by itself; one published now and the other one to be completed soon. Then a little later. Then a little later. Then, six years later, the second volume of what should have been the fourth book finally hits print (maybe; it's scheduled for July but who knows), coming from a manuscript 1,500 pages long. And there yet remain two more books in the series as Martin now sees it, fifteen years after it began. Even people who believe he does know where he's going with the story can still harbor doubts that he has the discipline to get there, and discipline won't be imposed on him by a publisher that knows the more pieces of paper bearing Martin's name it squeezes between two covers, the more pieces of paper bearing presidential portraits it can remove from SoIaF's devoted fanbase.

SoIaF labors in the long shadow of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time (WoT) series, which the New Yorker profile refers to. James Rigney, Jordan's real name, and Martin were friends before the former's death of cardiac amyloidosis in 2007. In 1990, Rigney published The Eye of the World, the first volume of his fantasy series that first aimed to explore what it was like to be a world's savior at the ultimate battle. It too was seen as a three-book series when Rigney first started writing it, back in 1984, but quickly ballooned until it will finish with a full fifteen books (including a prequel) sometime next year. Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson is doing the actual writing of the final three books based on Rigney's outline, fragments and rough drafts. And, not unexpectedly, what Rigney had said would be the final book in the series, A Memory of Light, will actually be printed as three books instead.

The New Yorker profile recounts a conversation between Martin and a fan who both remark over how cruel people are for being upset that Rigney died with his story unfinished, as though those people were mad at him for getting sick and dying. There probably are some folks who feel that way, but I wonder if there are not plenty more who would point out that WoT wouldn't have outlasted Rigney if he hadn't spent time adapting the 1998 WoT prequel novella New Spring into a full-length novel in 2004, itself the first volume of a projected trilogy. Or the 1997 "reference book" The World of Robert Jordan's the Wheel of Time, with Teresa Patterson. Or that the pace of the story slowed from gripping to adequate to stately to glacial to cosmic as the series progressed. Rigney's illness and death didn't leave the fate of WoT up in the air; by most accounts he worked as hard as his health allowed during his final years. It was his inability to rein in his own story or to get his publisher to do it for him.

When people refer to Martin "pulling a Jordan," I imagine most of them refer to what begins as a great story moving forward ever more slowly until it lurches to "The End" long after its magic has drowned in the bestseller's bloat in which it's been wallowing for years. Rigney's three volumes became fifteen and might have been more if New Spring had sold better when it was released. Martin's three volumes have become -- so far -- seven, so he's just past Rigney's halfway point.

Long stories sometimes take a long time to get finished. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LotR) started in 1937 but wasn't finished until 1949. Tolkien planned it as a one-volume story combined with The Silmarillion, his "prequel" history of Middle-Earth. But the publishers didn't see a market for The Silmarillion, and realized that wartime paper shortages would make the longer version too expensive, so LotR became three volumes. The Silmarillion wasn't pubilshed until 1977, four years after Tolkien's death. Tolkien's journals and letters from the LotR writing period show quite a bit of frustrated correspondence with readers awaiting news of Frodo's fate. But LotR didn't jump from three books to seven or fifteen, and it would have stayed one longer book if it hadn't faced real-world concerns like the paper shortage. It didn't grind to a halt while its author indulged his "world-building" jones by describing every character's every outfit or constantly introducing new characters and storylines and moving the story forward just barely faster than light escapes from a black hole (trick metaphor there: Light never escapes from a black hole). And Tolkien wrote in longhand to boot.

Like I said, I'm sure that whenever SoIaF finally finishes, I'll check into some online synopsis somewhere to see how it finally wraps up, and see what kind of morose finish Martin creates for his morose world and its people. I'm curious enough to want to see what glum beast does mope into Bethlehem at the long-awaited hour come round at last.

Just not curious enough to mope along with it while we're waiting.

Who Killed the Radio Star?

2011-03-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

Of course, according to the Buggles, it was video, but former hair-rocker Jon Bon Jovi offered a different idea recently.

In an interview, Mr. Bon Jovi says that Steve Jobs single-handedly killed the music industry, referring to the rise of iTunes under the banner of Mr. Jobs' company, Apple. Gone, he says, is the "magic" of buying an album based on what the cover looked like and imagining what the music might be inside. With iTunes (and several other digital music services), the listener can sample several songs or even all the songs on an album before deciding whether or not to buy it. They may even be able to play the whole album in a lower-resolution format before buying it in a high-bitrate version.

I've said elsewhere that the demise of recorded music in physical format leaves me feeling disconnected from the music's creator or creators. Of course the artists didn't touch the CD I bought, but it represents a discrete physical or embodied product of their work with which I can connect via the rest of my senses, not just my ears. I stand by that, but I think that's different than what Mr. Bon Jovi was saying.

Although I sympathize with the feeling of loss Mr. Bon Jovi expresses, I think he's wrong about two things: 1) What exactly has been lost and 2) Who exactly is responsible for the losing.

1) Obviously, Mr. Bon Jovi was probably a more obsessive music buyer than I was, given his desire to perform music for the public -- at the life-stage he describes, probably a powerful if largely unformed dream. So when he brought his allowance money to the record store he probably had a different viewpoint about what he bought than I did (he's a couple of years older than me, so we probably would have been shopping in the same overall musical culture). But the reasons I remember for laying out ten bucks for an album were that it was by a band that I knew or I had heard a great song from it on the radio or a friend had told me about it or I had read about it in a music magazine. I can't remember ever spending money on an album just because of the cover (OK, maybe this one. But that's about it); I just didn't have that amount of money to spend (this was in the olden days, youngsters, when ten-dollar bills might indeed buy a whole record album, but were generally obtained through a couple of weeks of household chores).

I frankly didn't start getting experimental with my music buying until much later, when used CDs offered the chance for a scratch-free yet inexpensive listening experience. When the cover of a $10-album looked intriguing, I might have tried to find a review of the record someplace to see if I wanted to buy it. But when the cover or title or song selection on a 97-cent used CD looks intriguing, I'll risk the buck.

Although I don't know for sure, I think Mr. Bon Jovi is lamenting some of the mystery and romance, for lack of a better word, that may have been a part of music-buying in the past. Because the truth is, whether you bought an album based on the cover picture or a couple of songs you heard on the radio, much of the actual album was unknown until you brought it home and fired up the turntable. More than a few albums had one high-quality tune and eight or nine tracks of filler (today, that "eight or nine" can be replaced with "thirteen or fourteen" -- CDs may hold more music than vinyl albums do, but filler is filler). So either way, you had a sense of exploration as you listened to each new song unfold. With one or two exceptions, these songs were unknown to you before you started playing the album, and hearing them was a journey into unknown lands.

Sometimes that journey was rewarded, as a musician might experiment with a different style or include a great pop gem that just somehow wouldn't work as a single. And sometimes, as mentioned above, it wasn't.

It's certainly true that the ability to sample some of each song before buying replaces the exploration of the unknown with a sense of a mapped-out trip through well-known territory. But I don't see such a downside to that, to be honest, because so much of the music available for purchase is dreck. I don't know that we put up with more or less dreck now than we did during the era Mr. Bon Jovi nostalgizes. Plenty more choices, plenty more dreck, but the percentage may be about the same. There are now as there were then bands that have one good song in them and that's it. Maybe they have two, if they're lucky. Would I rather know that and spend a buck on their one good song than spend ten bucks or more on their album and find it out? I believe so.

2) Although I might partially agree with him on what I see as his first point, here I don't think Mr. Bon Jovi is right at all. Steve Jobs and iTunes may have piggy-backed on people's tendency to like and buy single songs more than albums, but they didn't create it. For most of the history of recorded music, the single song has been the mainstay of the medium. Even the word "album" comes from the early practice of combining several 78 revolutions per minute (RPM) records into several sleeves in a book, like a picture album. Technological advances in recording, such as the capability to "microgroove" a surface, led to the 45 RPM and 33⅓ RPM formats. The former offered a smaller, more durable product and the latter the option of having several songs in a much less bulky edition.

For much of the early rock and roll era, the single was the dominant musical format and albums were often collections of singles with little or no new music. Nearly all of the songs on Elvis Presley's debut album were released as singles for example. Albums built around themes or concepts, with the entire album being seen as an artistic unit rather than a collection of songs, would begin to take hold in the late 1950s and this idea moved more fully into the rock and roll, soul and other popular music formats over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.

During much of this time, many of the most influential FM stations playing rock music were more or less freeform -- either disc jockeys or station music directors made most of the decisions about what music they played, and they frequently did not stop after playing an album's hit single. Programmers began to tighten this practice through the 1970s, leading to what became called Album-Oriented Rock (AOR) formats. Playlists were limited to singles and some other cuts from an album, although nighttime DJs seemed to have more freedom. Still, a regular listener to an AOR station might hear between 60 and 80 percent of a new album in the month or so following its release, judging by what I remember hearing on KMOD (The Rainbow Station) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And long after that, the playlist would include several songs from an album besides whatever hit singles it had released.

Singles continued to be a mainstay of the music business, even as vinyl sales dropped and the 45 RPM format was phased out. CD singles could still be sold more inexpensively than albums, and the popularity of the music video kept a heavy emphasis on the hit single release.

By the late 1980s, the rise of nostalgia-based classic rock stations had more or less crowded out the AOR format. Most radio stations today are based one form or another of heavily rotating hit singles -- whether current hits or hits from earlier in the rock era depends on the format. "Classic rock" stations are usually just as limited as are current Top 40 stations -- that's why you'll hear "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" on the radio but not "Silver Train," even though both are from the same Rolling Stones album, Goats Head Soup. Same thing with hearing "You Give Love a Bad Name" but not "Social Disease," both from Mr. Bon Jovi's own Slippery When Wet. Or "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" but not "Insider," though both are collaborations between Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. "Stop Draggin'" was a hit from Nicks' Bella Donna, but "Insider" wasn't released as a single from Petty's Hard Promises.

If digital music formats spur the purchase of individual songs over entire albums, pop music will be more or less returning to its roots and the dominance of the long-playing album will have been temporary. Again, there is an upside to this -- some performers have only one good song, as mentioned before, or maybe one good song per album. In an environment where it's so easy to find ways to acquire music for free, the music business would do well to remove incentives to go searching for free, albeit illegal, product. Enabling someone who wants to buy just one song from an artist -- and has no interest in whatever else that artist may ever release (see for example this author's purchase of "Mambo No. 5" by Lou Bega or "Bust a Move" by Young MC) -- to do so is far more likely to help than hurt.

I've got no special knowledge or crystal ball to see what's coming in recorded music, although I think that predictions of an all-digital industry are still far-fetched. I think we'll see a lot more single releases, and a lot more of them in primarily digital format. Considering the ephemeral quality of much of this music -- I'm talking to you, Lady Gaga -- its release in a format that can vanish with a single electronic hiccup seems fitting. But I also think we'll see artists with larger visions that can't be fully realized with just a single song who continue to produce albums. I think it's very likely we'll have more choices, not the fewer choices the supposed death of the music business might seem to suggest.

Given that more and more radio stations opt against experimenting or taking any kind of chance with songs and playlists that haven't been focus-tested to death, it's good to hope we'll have a choice somewhere.

The Dark Tower: Coda

2010-06-23T22:32:00.000-05:00

Stephen King took around 30 years to complete the seven-volume story of Roland, the last gunslinger in a world that's moved on, and his quest for the Dark Tower, a mystical building that is one of the hubs of reality for the entire multiverse.

By the time he'd finished, he'd become a husband, a father, a successful author, a brand-name franchise writer and even a grandfather. Obviously, over time his perspectives and thoughts changed. King himself observes the length of the journey in an author's note to volume four, Wizard and Glass, when he points out that a very young man, much more like the boy Roland was at the time, wrote the scene just before a door opens at a particular point. A much more mature and presumably wiser one, who is a lot more like Roland's father Stephen, wrote the scene just after the door opens.

At a million-plus words, the Dark Tower saga is justifiably knocked for being something on the puffy side. As early as the second book, though, King said the whole thing was very likely to be six or seven books long.. But I'm going to guess that the six or seven books he projected when writing The Drawing of the Three in the mid-1980s were not exactly the seven that wrapped up with The Dark Tower in 2004. I think at some point in the series, King's vision of what he was trying to do with this long work, inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," changed dramatically. At some point in this process, the Dark Tower saga became something entirely different than it was when he started -- and not, to be honest, for the better.

1. The Good

Before we get to that, there are a wealth of fascinating concepts at work in the series. When we first meet Roland, he's pursuing the Man in Black across a vast desert in a world that has, we're told, "moved on." Although it'll be awhile before we get a clearer picture of the causes of this moving on, we see it seems to feature a lot of abandonment, a loss of vibrancy and color and a breakdown of some kind of the natural laws we depend on. I noted that the mall where I originally purchased Drawing has lost its anchor stores and most of its retailers; to walk around in it now, nearly alone, past empty windows and storefronts, it to get a sense of something that has moved on.

Abandoned malls and shuttered factories aren't the only things that can project this air of moving on. Even though our culture seems to be speedier, brighter and flashier than ever, we can see a loss of connection among families and in our communities brought about by greater mobility and self-sufficiency. It's a fascinating idea about how a culture or even a world may come to an end -- not by fire or by ice, not from bang or from whimper, but with the simple sign "Closed," or even no sign at all, just an empty window.

The end of Roland's quest, which turns out to be the beginning of yet another cycle of endlessly repeating his search for the Tower, is another intriguing idea. My post on Book 7 compares the idea with C.S. Lewis's vision of hell in The Great Divorce. The damned receive exactly what they've dedicated their lives to winning, only to learn that without the presence of God, everything is damnation. I've read some commentary that suggests the sentence to a potentially endless repetition of the quest is unjust. Yes, Roland sacrificed relationships and even people, sometimes without much compassion or regret, in order to continue his journey to the Tower. But he was trying to reach it to stop the Crimson King from destroying it and plunging the multiverse into chaos, the argument goes, so he had to make some hard choices. Roland and Eddie make this idea more or less explicit to Jake in The Waste Lands when the boy wonders if they can't stay a little at River Crossing and help the old people there before traveling on. If they allow themselves to be distracted by the real needs these people have, they'll wind up distracted by so much they'll never reach the Tower.

Except that when we first meet Roland, he does not yet know about the danger facing all the worlds, including his own. His goal, we learn in The Gunslinger, is to reach the Dark Tower, climb to its top and question "whatever god may dwell there." There's no agenda of saving anything, and it's in service to that quest he sacrifices Susan Delgado in Wizard and Glass and Jake Chambers in Gunslinger. It's while on that quest that he kills Allie, the bartender in Tull with whom he shares a bed -- and in the original version of Gunslinger, he kills her when she's been grabbed as a human shield, not because she's been driven insane by the Man in Black and begs for the mercy of death as happens in the revised edition. Though the ka-tet that surrounds Roland later in the series humanizes him and he learns his quest was not for his own satisfaction, things don't start that way and Roland has earned his journey through the purgatory of repetition.

2. The Bad

So what about the series is bad? The smart-aleck answer is, "About four-fifths of everything that comes after The Drawing of the Three." The Kingophile Tower-head answer is, "It needed to keep going."

My own pet peeves about the later volumes of the Tower saga relate to its length, but they have more to do with its bloatedness -- even properly edited, this would still be a long work so the length is less of a problem than the sprawling mess. But that's been covered here before, so not much else needs to be said about it.

For my money, the real fatal flaw of this series comes in Wizard and Glass, which I've already said I see as its lowest point. Brief recap: The ka-tet outsmarts the murderous monorail Blaine but finds themselves in a world without a Beam to follow to the Tower. Now in the Kansas of this world, most probably the world of King's The Stand, they walk towards an odd-looking city of green glass astride Interstate 70. After a loooong flashback describing Roland's first love and first glimpse of the Tower in a magical seeing-stone, the ka-tet faces down the Man in Black in this faux-Emerald City and returns to Roland's world, where they can see the Beam again and renew their journey.

The Emerald City vs. Kansas setup is an obvious nod to the movie The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Gale's words when she wakes up in Oz -- "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore" -- are a catch-phrase cliché and King seems to mean them to have a large impact on how the latter half of the Tower saga will run. It's in the books following Wizard that he begins to emphasize certain things, like the recurring presence of the number 19. It's also where he starts to make the sources of some of his authorly ideas more explicit, like the Doctor-Doom inspired, light-saber wielding Wolves in Wolves of the Calla or the explosive sneetches that are patterned after the golden snitch of Harry Potter's Quidditch game. Writers draw their inspirations from all kinds of places, and the fun some fans have with their books is trying to figure out what those inspirations were, as well as how their use may convey meanings the author wants to communicate. Pre-Wizard, King talks about those inspirations in interviews about the Dark Tower books. Post-Wizard, King talks about them in the books themselves -- sometimes directly, since he shows up in person in the last two.

It seems to me that the first three books of the Tower saga, as well as the long Meijis flashback in the fourth, are all stories about Roland's quest for and journey towards the Dark Tower. The last three are stories about the story about Roland's quest for and journey towards the Dark Tower. When we enter the faux-Emerald City with Roland and the ka-tet, we're still inside a narrative, in other words. When we leave it, we're now inside a kind of meta-narrative that will have our original story as a feature rather than the centerpiece. I have a friend who's a devoted Kingophile who says that after he read Wizard and Glass, he started thinking that King really had no idea where he was going with the Tower saga. I think that's partly true.

I think that from the beginning, King knew Roland's quest for the Tower began with Roland alone and would end the same way. Others who would join him might die like Eddie and Jake or they might leave like Susannah, but they wouldn't reach the Tower with him, even if King himself didn't know from the start the details of their entries, exits and travels in between. I think that early on in the series, King probably thought that the tale would end with Roland at the Tower door. I don't think he envisioned anything afterwards until maybe the middle books, when the idea of the endless quest took shape.

But at some point between The Waste Lands and Wizard and Glass, King's vision of the Tower saga changed from a narrative vision to this meta-narrative-styled one. And while he sort of knew how the narrative should finish, it took until well after Wizard and Glass before he could figure out how the meta-narrative would carry it there. On the one hand, the idea that Roland returns to an earlier stage in his quest is really the only way for the last gunslinger's story to end. I can't imagine that more than a small slice of the true-blue Tower-head fanbase would have been happy leaving Roland at the door of the Tower and not seeing what was inside it. Witness how many fans of the TV show Lost complained that the show's finale never really said what the island was or why it was important or something similar. I don't think King believed he could get away with that kind of a finish, even though I think it probably would have been a good one. And King has sometimes struggled with ending his stories as well as he's told them. Even if he hadn't, what in the world could have been inside that Tower that would have been a fitting prize for the quest that's preceded it? My imagination's pretty good and I can't even begin to answer what Roland might have found that would live up to what I think should have been there after seven books and more than 30 years worth of work.

On the other hand, Roland's return to an earlier point of his quest is a nice fit with the idea that the Tower saga has become a meta-narrative on how the imaginations of artists or writers relate to the works they create. The story has been told; the work completed, the door into this imaginary world closes. What's next? Well, for artists and writers, the only real "next" possible is another creation, another story, another world to explore via their imaginations and visions. So Roland returns to where we first meet him, setting out across the Mohaine Desert after the Man in Black. Both the story and the process by which it is told begin anew.

The meta-narrative idea shapes other parts of the story as well. Rather than the Man in Black being of a similar villainous type as The Stand's Randall Flagg, the two characters became one. In 1987's The Eyes of the Dragon, King hints that Flagg has lived in more than one world, which may be one of the earliest signs he's started to re-think the Tower saga along meta-narrative lines.

Other characters and ideas from the Tower saga doffed their other-novelish outer clothing and became overt representations of their Tower-world identities. Ralph Roberts and Lois Chasse battle the Crimson King's agents in Insomnia in order to save Patrick Danville, who will help Roland defeat the King in The Dark Tower. Breakers Dinky Earnshaw and Ted Brautigan show up in the "Everything's Eventual" short story and "Low Men in Yellow Coats" novella, respectively. 'Salem's Lot's disgraced priest Don Callahan travels through the worlds of King's multiverse, slaying and fleeing from vampires until those same Low Men chase him into Roland's world at Calla Bryn Sturgis. Stephen King himself becomes a character in Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower as an author whose writing of the Dark Tower saga is vital to the completion of the ka-tet's Dark Tower quest.

These and other connections all serve to make an obvious statement: One guy, Stephen King made these characters up and wrote their stories. Well, duh. That's whose name is on the covers and whose picture is on the dust jackets. That's who talks about them with interviewers and persistent fans. But for some reason, it seems King chose to tell the last half of the Tower saga in a way that, as I said above, makes it a story about the story instead of a story itself. As much as I dislike the Meijis flashback in Wizard, it's just about the last sustained burst of pure narrative in the series. Even the superior Wolves of the Calla starts to show symptoms of meta-narrative-stisizing; It's where where the number 19, which was previously not at all a factor but which started to be important after King was seriously injured in a van-pedestrian accident on June 19, 1999, starts to recur. It's where Callahan shows up, where King's earlier novels appear within his own books both as novels and as descriptions of what the characters see as actual events, where his authorly in-jokes disdain any subtlety and proudly show off their own punchlines, and so on.

When we leave the faux-Emerald City and return to Roland's world, we make dual shifts. By leaving The Stand's Kansas, we leave the scene of one of King's earlier, straight-up, tell-the-story novels for what will become a journey through this meta-narrative stuff that makes the second half of the Tower saga seem like one long Little Jack Horner self-analysis. But at the same time, we also leave behind the flight-of-fancy Emerald City of a conceit that novels are their own stories and their characters command their own destinies through the writer's keyboard, and we enter the Kansas-styled prosaic reality that novelists write novels using their own imaginations, experiences, memories and ideas. The last book has a good example.

Dandelo, the psychic vampire, threatens to kill Roland and Susannah by feeding on their emotions before they're aware of their danger when they stop to stay at his cabin in the land of Empathica. The author Stephen King has the character of the author Stephen King leave Susannah a note warning them about Dandelo so she can kill him. It is, the character/author says, the only overt, deus ex machina-style salvation he will provide for his characters. Which seems kind of suicidal of him, considering that the Crimson King's plot to break the worlds would plunge his world into chaos as well and his novels are somehow vital to the success of Roland's quest. But let us not strain logic overmuch when we've already taken a ride on an insane supersonic train named Blaine. Because King the author is about to drop a much bigger deus into the story.

Roland and Susannah find that Dandelo has been keeping Patrick Danville, the boy saved in Insomnia, a prisoner in his basement. Now a young man, Patrick has the ability to make his drawings real. He will use this ability to draw and then erase the invulnerable spirit-being of the Crimson King, so that the major antagonist of the series, the one behind more evil machinations than one could shake a very discreet stick at and who nearly took over Susannah Dean's mind when she merely stepped into a sightline of his castle a book or so ago, will simply vanish, destroyed by a character who's been in less than one percent of this seven-book series and who disappears himself soon after. We're told Dandelo removed his tongue to keep him silent, and perhaps that's because Patrick's an honest enough fellow he would have said, "Stop reading here unless you want to feel really hornswoggled by this whole thing."

The move from story to story about story seems to leave King out of gas as he brings Roland nearer the tower. I suggested that Song of Susannah is most notable for having not much of note happen. You might say The Dark Tower is notable for how much happens instead of what ought to happen. Yes, Roland and the ka-tet destroy the means that the King is using to break the Beams and scatter the Breakers. Yes, they escape the Dixie Pig, buy the lot containing the mystic rose and save Stephen King's life. But as noted above, the Crimson King more or less disappears from the story and then literally disappears to end his threat. The Man in Black, Randall Flagg, dies without ever confronting his enemy Roland. Roland's half-demon son Mordred, after two books or so of buildup, manages to trip over Oy long enough to get killed.

Most of Roland, Susannah and Oy's final journey from the Breaker facility at Devar-Toi to the Tower itself is a long, cold slog through a bleak, blank wasteland, kind of like driving through downstate Illinois in the winter. Or reading books 6 and 7 of the Tower saga. After King got Roland's ka-tet together and ready to go, he seems to have lost inspiration for getting them anywhere, even though he started toying with the concept of the meta-narrative instead of just plain old story. He's like the tour guide at a theme park on the last run of the day: He's seen this stuff and been talking about it for his whole shift and he doesn't have the energy to put a spark in it one last time, even if the tourists visiting for the first time haven't seen any of it before and would like a little bit more than "Please keep your hands and feet inside the tram at all times."

Unreasonable expectations cause part of the Tower saga's problems. Many Kingophiles seized upon it as King's contribution to serious literary work, and indeed it begins with an elegaic quality that books like Christine never tried to match. One frequent poster at one Dark Tower forum has as his signature, "Thus ends the greatest story ever told, and I say thankya," imitating the speech of the people of Calla Bryn Sturgis. Obviously a guy with my job appends that "greatest story" title to another Book entirely, but I'd find it just as laughable if I sold shoes. Those are the readers' problems, though, not King's.

Writing a story about story didn't have to cripple it, but King's skills weren't by themselves up to achieving that task well. My opinion that editors have long since stopped reining him in means that he had no real external ear to say, "Why don't you try this?" or "That's kind of fuzzy, Steve. What do you want me to get from this bit right here?" or "So why didn't Patrick draw Susannah some legs?" or "Why didn't the Crimson King throw the whole box of sneetches at Roland and overwhelm his gun?"

If I were to ever run a marathon, I wouldn't win, either in my division or in one for people twice my age. But if I finished, I figure I should get some credit for that. King has earned kudos for sticking with the Tower saga over 30-plus years and actually finishing it, rather than twiddling his thumbs with prequels and atlases and leaving his major work undone on his deathbed to be finished by another author (I'm talking to you, Robert Jordan). He deserves kudos for a series with one great book, one really good book and a host of good scenes even in some of the stinkers, as well as some fascinating themes, only a few of which I sketched above.

And so we can leave it at that, I think. Maybe not three cheers, maybe not two, maybe not even one and half, but just under that, to be fair. Something like, 1.459 cheers. Why that precise? Well, if you look closely, you'll see the digits add up to...19.

Thankee-sai, hope I have spoken true.

3. The Ugly

Dave McKean's photo-collage illustrations in Wizard and Glass. Man, I hate that book.

The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower

2010-06-18T22:43:00.000-05:00

After an almost 30-year journey that started in the pages of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Roland Deschain's quest for the Dark Tower would close in 2004. Just a few months after Song of Susannah was released, the seventh and at the time final novel of the series was published on Sept. 21, author Stephen King's birthday.

The Dark Tower begins pretty much where the placeholder book Susannah left off. Jake and Callahan are preparing to assault The Dixie Pig, a restaurant that the vampires, Low Men and other servants of the Crimson King use as their base in New York City. They're trying to rescue Susannah Dean, who's been possessed by the demon Mia and driven to the New York reality in order to give birth to her demon-child, sired by Roland himself. The Crimson King has plans for this child, called Mordred.

Deep within the Dixie Pig are tunnels that cross into some of the other realities that have some bearing on Roland's quest for the Tower. Susannah has been brought through them and is now fully separate from the Mia, whose now-physical body gives birth to Mordred. The demon-child's first act is to morph into a spider form and eat his mother. Susannah tries to kill him, but he escapes. She kills the other agents of the Crimson King who've been holding her, though.

Only Jake survived the attack on the Dixie Pig, as Callahan sacrificed himself so that the boy could reach Susannah. He and Susannah are reunited, and Roland, Eddie and Oy the billy-bumbler catch up to them there after leaving 1977 Maine. They've purchased the lot containing the mystic rose that represents the Tower in that hub-world, making it safe from the Crimson King's agents that wanted to buy the lot and destroy the rose. Whole again, the ka-tet sets out through the ancient ruins of the high-tech city of Fedic to reach Devar-Toi, where psychics employed by the Crimson King are breaking the Beams that hold the worlds together and anchor the Tower. Brain material from the stolen children of Calla Bryn Sturgis was used to augment the psychics' abilities but even without that help, the group is close to breaking the last two Beams.

The psychic Breakers are held captive by the Crimson King's agents and would stop their work if they could; the story of one's escape attempt is the focal point of the novella "Low Men in Yellow Coats" from Hearts in Atlantis. With his aid, the ka-tet frees the Breakers from their captors and stops the breaking of the Beams, ending the Tower's immediate danger. But Eddie is mortally wounded during the battle and dies several hours later. Roland and Jake leave Susannah to mourn her husband and jump to the hub-world holding the mystic rose, but in 1999. They're going to try to save Stephen King, the author whose Dark Tower novel series is vitally important to the success of their quest for the Tower. A news item showed King dying after being hit by a van, but if he dies they believe the quest will fail. Jake pushes King enough out of the way so that he is merely injured but is fatally wounded himself. King, of course, was seriously injured in a real-life accident like the one he describes in the book. The ka-tet is down to Roland, Susannah and Oy, and Roland returns alone to the other two after gathering information from allies they had made in the rose-world that most resembles ours.

The trio now begins the final leg of their journey to the Tower, traveling across a cold wasteland for many weeks. Along the way they learn that the Crimson King, believing Roland will now kill him, has killed himself so that he can survive as an invulnerable spirit-being. The psychic vampire Dandelo tries to lure them into a trap, but the author King drops a literal note from the author into the book in time for Susannah to recognize the danger and save them. They discover the vampire has been holding a young man named Patrick Danville prisoner and when they release him, they find that he has the power to draw things that become real. When he heals a potentially fatal sore on Susannah's mouth by erasing it from the drawing he made of her, they learn he can un-make things as well.

Susannah and Roland decide that she should leave and Patrick draws a door for her to another world. In this world, Eddie and Jake are both still alive and are in fact brothers. Susannah meets them as she enters their world and although the story leaves them there, we're led to believe they all live happily ever after.

Mordred has been tracking Roland since they left Devar-Toi and finally makes his move after Susannah leaves. But Oy's ferocious defense delays the demon-child, now mostly grown and still capable of changing into a spider, and Roland is able to kill him. Oy is also fatally wounded in this battle. Roland and Patrick find their way to the Tower blocked by the Crimson King, an invulnerable spirit armed with what seems like an endless supply of the explosive sneetches used by the Wolves of the Calla. Although Roland's gun prevents any sneetches from reaching the pair, he knows that he can't keep that up forever, and besides, the Tower's call is so strong he must fight the urge to simply walk towards it and allow the King to kill him. Patrick draws a picture of the Crimson King and erases it, destroying him. Roland at last comes to the Tower after setting Patrick back on a path towards populated areas. There, he shouts the names of his companions and others as he had promised to do and he enters the Tower.

In an afterword, King suggests that the reader stop there, with everyone at the end of their respective quests. But for those who don't want to, he offers the end of Roland's story. Which, as it turns out, is also the beginning -- after climbing several levels of the Tower and encountering reminders of different stages of his life, he reaches the top and sees a door like the others below, only this one has his name on it. Opening it, he finds himself drawn back into the desert where we first met him. He realizes he has reached the Tower many times before, but his memories of his quest vanish and he is once again pursuing the fleeing man in black.

There are several ways The Dark Tower is an end for the Dark Tower series, and some of them work better than others. On the one hand, the idea that Roland is somehow sentenced to an eternal quest seems fitting. And, interestingly enough, not too far off many Christian ideas of evil and hell. C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, offers a Hell that each person in it creates for themselves by trying to make their own paradise, only without God. Roland, having made his quest for the Tower the center of his life, is given that quest, repeated endlessly until he might one time learn that there are more important things. There's some hint that he's slowly progressing each time, gaining understanding until he might reach that point, so this would be more of a Purgatory than Hell, but the parallel is interesting.

King probably does better at characterizing Roland in The Dark Tower than at any other point in the series. I'll confess I read the ending of the book when it was released, several years before I read the actual book itself. So, knowing what was coming for Roland offered a real aura of pathos as one by one his ka-tet is taken from him by death or by leaving.

But as an ending to the overall story, The Dark Tower carries a lot of flaws. For one, remember the Man in Black? The guy we started out chasing, the guy who we later learned had an affair with Roland's mother and tricked the gunslinger into killing her? The guy who we eventually learn is none other than Randall Flagg, a bad dude from several of King's novels, most notably The Stand? The guy who killed Roland's childhood friend Cuthbert Allgood? He gets dispatched pretty early in this book, almost offstage and certainly without any real confrontation with Roland, when he is mind-controlled and eaten by Mordred. Morded himself, after three books and a ret-conned conception's worth of buildup, lurks in the background for most of the story, makes one scream-and-leap stab at his pops and fails epically. The Crimson King is the last obstacle between Roland and the Tower, but he disappears when Patrick Danville draws him on a pad and erases him. Susannah gets sent to another world for a reunion with an Eddie and Jake like the one she knew when Patrick draws a door to that world. But why, when Patrick's magical drawings can create doorways that never existed and cure medical illnesses, does the author King not have him DRAW SUSANNAH SOME FRICKIN' LEGS?

The Dark Tower, like a lot of the last half of The Dark Tower series, suffers from lazy storytelling that undercuts its good qualities. Some of it's just some undisciplined yarning that needs to be reined in. Some of it's some plot holes that a little bit of thinking through could help cover up. And some of it's a possible change in approach that King took during the creation of the series that will be the subject of the next post.

PS -- The Dark Tower saga may not end with book 7. King said in several interviews in 2009 that he's been considering the idea of another novel, or series of connected novellas, set in Roland's Mid-World, although Roland himself may or may not be the focus of the book. Tentatively titled The Wind Through the Keyhole, it has a possible publication date of 2011 or 2012 and is either A) set in the time between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla or B) involve a younger Roland while his friend Cuthbert Allgood is still alive.

The Dark Tower VI: The Song of Susannah

2010-06-13T12:53:00.000-05:00

When last we saw our group of traveling heroes, they had saved the children of the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis from abduction by raiders called Wolves. We had also seen a decided rebound of the Dark Tower series, as Wolves of the Calla was easily its strongest entry since The Drawing of the Three, way back at volume two.

We dared to hope that this monumental meta-work that spanned most of Stephen King's imagination was back on track after the lackluster The Waste Lands and the awful Wizard and Glass. But just as the heroic quartet find their joy short-lived when they learn Susannah Dean has given herself over to the former demon Mia so the supernatural being can bear a child, the reader finds his or her hopes equally brief. Song is King back giving in to every undisciplined authorial impulse and chaseable rabbit he can find.

Although Susannah has taken the world-traveling mystic talisman Black Thirteen through the doorway with her into a world like ours, Roland, Eddie and Jake, joined by Father Don Callahan (originally of 'Salem's Lot, Maine and 'Salem's Lot, King's second book) use the combined magic of the Manni to open it again and make an attempt to rescue her.

Eddie and Roland will track Susannah to New York City in 1999. Jake and Callahan will travel to Maine in 1977 to secure the purchase of a vacant NYC corner lot from a man named Calvin Tower. Tower's lot holds a single magical rose that links to the Dark Tower itself in some important way, and if the group can purchase it before agents of the Crimson King do, they still have some chance at stopping his plan to break the worlds. But the magic goes awry, and each pair goes to the other team's destination: Jake and Callahan will have to face the Crimson King's lieutenant, the Man in Black and rescue Susannah, while Roland and Eddie have to track Tower.

We also pick up Susannah's story, seeing her struggle with Mia and with her own multiple personalities as she waits word from the King's minions.

And as mentioned before, we see the author King revert to his more recent habits of slathering his story over meandering pages better measured in acreage than word count. After 40,000-plus words, for example, Susannah/Mia has...answered a phone call. Sure, she showed up in our world, but we already knew that's where she was headed so I'm not spotting King that one. The rest of the time Susannah fights Mia and takes control, then Mia fights Susannah and her old alter Detta Walker and takes control, and then Susannah/Detta fight Mia and then they journey to a faux-Mordor (the land of the Crimson King, to be precise) for their expository palaver that explains everything that's happening to her via retconning several earlier incidents and blah blah blah.

The upshot is that the coming baby is also Roland's child because the demon with which Susannah had to couple when Jake was brought back into the group in The Waste Lands was the same demon with which Roland coupled in The Gunslinger. Mia was an incorporeal being desperate to bear a child. Walter, the Man in Black, promised her she could if she gave up her bodiless state and became mortal. As the birth of her baby or "chap" approaches, she begins to exert more and more control over Susannah's body and comes closer to separating herself physically from Susannah.

Mia also tells us that the trouble in Roland's world, its "moving on" that's wrecked so much, is part of the loss of magic in the world. People turned away from magic and faith and belief, relying instead on pure reason and technology to give the world its meaning. The problem was that such things break down, and when they are gone there will be neither the ancient magic nor technology to order things leaving everything in the chaos sought by the Crimson King.

We'll deal with Eddie and Roland in a minute, but first we pick up Jake and Callahan. Along with Oy the billy-bumbler, they've appeared in 1999 New York City and they have to take on the role of rescuing Susannah even though Eddie and Roland would have been the better fighters to do so. They have a brief encounter with a street preacher -- one of those slightly or more-than-slightly off religious folks who populate King's novels on the fringes -- who also met Susannah/Mia and learn where she has been. They retrieve the Black Thirteen glass and store it in a locker at the World Trade Center, where it will presumably be destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Then they ready themselves to attack a restaurant called The Dixie Pig, a front for the forces the Crimson King is using for his work in the world and where they know Susannah is being held. That's it for them in this book.

Eddie and Roland show up in Maine in 1977, only to find themselves under attack as soon as they arrive. Mia, it seems, revealed their plans to Walter who moved against them using mobsters he had also been working with to push Calvin Tower to sell his vacant lot containing the mystic rose we've mentioned before. In a furious gun-battle, Roland and Eddie wipe out most of the mobsters, some of whom Eddie knows because during his time in the world, in the 1980s, he will run drugs for this same outfit. Eddie's wounded and some bystanders are killed, but a man named John Cullum helps them escape. He also tells them of strange happenings in the area, of people who seem to appear from nowhere, dressed strangely and speaking unknown languages, before disappearing just as quickly. These "walk-ins" seem to be concentrated around a town nearby and have increased in frequency since an author named Stephen King moved into a house there. The pair have seen a book King wrote called 'Salem's Lot which features the exact story Father Callahan told them about his own past, so they resolve to visit King after they've seen Calvin Tower.

Tower is eventually convinced to sell them the vacant lot containing the mystic rose, although he is a weak man and demurs even when Eddie reminds him of the dangers posed to him by the mobsters who were pushing him to sell the lot to their employers, where it would fall under the control of Walter and the Crimson King. We spend a couple thousand words dancing through Eddie getting angry at Tower and Tower being petulant. Then the gunslingers visit Stephen King and learn that not only did he write about Father Callahan, whom they know as a real person, but he also wrote a story about Roland's quest for the Dark Tower itself. He's only finished the volume we know as The Gunslinger by this time in his life, so he doesn't know Eddie. But he does know Roland, and that knowledge allows him to believe their story and to tell them how he feels that some force is pushing against his completing it. Eddie and Roland believe that force to be the Crimson King, using a bad childhood memory of the author's to scare him out of writing the full Dark Tower story. Roland hypnotizes King so that he will finish the story as he is able.

That's pretty much it for the action -- Song vies with Wizard and Glass for the least amount of forward movement in the overall story. We start with Susannah/Mia about to bear a child that somehow combines Roland's essence with demonic forces and we end the same way. We start with the gunslingers needing to purchase Calvin Tower's empty lot containing the mystic, tower-connected rose and they do. Wizard bears the burden of thousands of words of clunky rambling backstory that is in itself longer than the whole Song of Susannah, but Song counters with one of the most egregious authorial pretensions available to the modern best-selling writer: The placement of himself or herself in the story in a pivotal role. Obviously, no story happens without the writer, but King chooses to make certain we get that by incorporating that reality into the Dark Tower saga. That takes an ego almost as big as one of these books, which is saying something.

It's also a clue as to one of the things that drags so much on the later Dark Tower novels and much of King's own output since he published It back in 1986. He quite simply can't get out of the way. In the bloated best-sellers that he's been churning out since then, his lack of storytelling discipline and his publisher's unwillingness to edit him into smaller and less profitable chunks clots the narrative arteries and prevents clear streaming of the story's arc. In Song, he goes a step further and shows up as a crucial factor in the quest for the Tower.

He's also part of the cliffhanger -- a coda excerpts the journals of the Song version of King that shows him publishing the first four volumes of the Tower saga before being killed when hit by a van in 1999 -- the same day in which the real-life King was seriously injured in exactly that kind of accident. But we know from Roland and Eddie that King must finish the story in order to help the quest succeed, so what will happen now that he's dead? Moreover, we understand that the alternate world where the gunslingers meet King is a sort of hub to the multiverse accessible through the Dark Tower -- one in which time flows only one way and can't be reversed. They can't undo King's death as they have changed other incidents during the story.

Even though Song of Susannah is the shortest Dark Tower book since the second one, it desperately needs compression. Book V, Wolves of the Calla, is mostly a self-contained story that wouldn't be well-served with Song's events tacked onto it. And the series' final book, The Dark Tower, was published at almost 290,000 words, which means it surely didn't need any more and which leaves us thinking that maybe Song did indeed have to be a stand-alone.

But that assumes that The Dark Tower -- both the saga as a whole and the upcoming book 7 -- don't need a stout pruning, and I'm betting that's an assumption that won't stand.

The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla

2010-06-07T12:16:00.001-05:00

It would take Stephen King six years to return to Roland, Eddie, Susannah and Jake after they escaped plague-ridden Topeka and Randall Flagg's Emerald City trap. It took me an even dozen.

The sprawling mess of Wizard and Glass simply made me less and less concerned with what King was doing in The Dark Tower. The rest of his work had begun to disappoint as well. His publisher seemed to operate almost like a vanity press, doing a simultaneous release of a Desperation by Stephen King and The Regulators by Richard Bachman, King's long-exposed pen name. The "unexpurgated" version of The Stand, a re-release of that early King novel including several thousand words cut from the first edition, demonstrated that editors do have value and that more is not always more. Bag of Bones was a wandering trip to -- and through -- nowhere.

Despite occasional bright spots like The Colorado Kid and The Green Mile, I'd lost enough interest to not even care how the whole saga of the Dark Tower ended. I greeted Wolves of the Calla with a shrug and a pass.

It's probably good that I did, because Wolves is good enough I might have given King another chance and inflicted Hearts In Atlantis, Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8 or Black House on myself.

The quartet of gunslingers and Oy the billy-bumbler continue following the Beam towards the Dark Tower. They travel through some settled country and eventually they encounter people, in the form of a delegation from the town Calla Bryn Sturgis. The folk of this town face a horrible affliction. Once every generation, a group of raiders called Wolves attack the town and carry away one of every pair of twin children. The stolen children return sometime later, with diminished mental capacity and destined to grow into giants who will die very young. Andy, a wandering robot left over from a more technological era, has warned them that the Wolves are coming and will be at Calla Bryn Sturgis in about a month. Their terrible weapons make it impossible to fight them and they always find the children, no matter how well hidden they may be.

Although hundreds of years seem to have passed since Roland's day, the people of the Calla remember gunslingers and approach the group, alerted to their presence in a dream. Roland agrees to listen to their problem and see if he can help, even if it takes time away from his quest for the Tower. Providing such aid is part and parcel of being a gunslinger; he can do nothing else and remain true to himself.

In Calla, Eddie, Jake and Susannah find another traveler from their own world, Father Frank Callahan. Fr. Callahan was last seen in 'Salem's Lot, King's 1975 vampire novel. His shaky faith led him to fall victim to the vampire Barlow and he was forced to drink Barlow's blood, rendering him unclean. Callahan spent years in an alcoholic stupor before drying out and working at a homeless shelter in Manhattan, where he found himself able to see certain kinds of vampires. He began killing them, but this brought him to the attention of other vampires as well as a group of hunters called the Low Men. Callahan stays on the run from the Low Men for many years, sometimes switching between parallel worlds, before being trapped by them and the vampires. Rather than be infected by AIDS-carrying vampires, Callahan kills himself and finds that he has crossed over into Roland's world near Calla Bryn Sturgis. There he resumes his duties as a priest.

Callahan also crossed over with a seeing stone called the Black Thirteen, similar to the Maerlyn's Grapefruit stone Roland found in Wizard and Glass but even more evil. Its presence allows the gunslingers a chance to return to the other world and protect a mystic rose growing in a vacant New York City lot. That rose has some connection to the Tower and if it is destroyed, the consequences could be dire.

Over the course of the month, the quartet grows close to the townspeople. Jake especially, given the chance to be with children like himself, enjoys the time. But as the Wolves' attack grows closer, opposition to Roland's plan intensifies, and Jake learns his friend's father is a traitor working with whomever controls the Wolves themselves. Andy the robot is found to be their ally as well, so the gunslingers must plan ways to defeat him and the treachery they have uncovered.

In a final battle, the gunslingers and some women of Calla Bryn Sturgis, adept at throwing sharp metal discs that look like plates, defeat and utterly destroy the wolves. But Jake's friend dies, killed by the wolves' advanced weapons.

And following the battle, Susannah becomes completely possessed by an alternate personality named Mia. When she coupled with the demon in The Waste Lands, she became pregnant with its child and the supernatural being growing within her causes her to revert to her multiple personality disorder. Mia has been taking Susannah part of the time at night, as first Roland, then Jake and then Eddie and Susannah herself learn. After the battle, Mia slips away and uses the Black Thirteen to open a door to her world. She takes it with her, trapping the others in Roland's world so they cannot follow. Wolves closes with Eddie insisting the remaining gunslingers find a way to get to her and rescue her. Father Callahan will join them.

Wolves puts Roland in the most classic Western setting of the series. King said he drew from The Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven movies, as well as Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" westerns. King's gift for storytelling really details the people of the Calla and shows them clinging to the hope Roland represents.

There are some false touches. The Wolves are robots, dressed like Marvel Comics' Doctor Doom. They wield Star Wars-style lightsabers and explosive versions of Harry Potter's sneetches. On the surface these inclusions seem like King being silly, but they may have to do with a possible "narrative behind the narrative" that we'll get to in another post. Quality-wise, Wolves almost reaches the level of The Drawing of the Three. The use of Fr. Callahan reflects the self-indulgence that weighs down most of King's work since the late 1980s, but even though most of his backstory is an extra, it's not a story-killer.

King-o-philes and Tower-heads love it, of course, but since their main complaint is that this immensely long series (somewhere north of 1.3 million words) isn't longer, their judgment can be questioned.

We learn more about Roland than we did in the whole Meijis episode from Wizard, and we begin to see the work done by whoever is behind some of the initial villains Roland and the others encounter, like Flagg. Some of the shadowy plans concerned with the Tower's destruction begin to take shape. Eddie's leadership abilities come to the fore, as Roland realizes he would continue the quest if Roland himself was killed. Jake also begins to develop over the course of the story, rather than being the simple Sidekick the Boy Wonder/Hostage he was in Gunslinger and The Waste Lands.

Wolves of the Calla can give a reader, especially a former Tower-head like myself, a reason to hold out hope for the rest of the series. The pessimistic reader (raises hand) might be pretty sure none of the subsequent volumes will match the heights of Drawing of the Three, but considering the buzzkill of Wizard and Glass, any hope at all is kind of a miracle.

Long Live the Legion!

2010-06-03T14:37:00.002-05:00

A trip to the comic shop last month brought a pleasant surprise. On the shelves I found the return of the superpowered team of the future, the Legion of Super-Heroes. During the long droughts between issues of some other titles, like Kurt Busiek's Astro City, I was still a regular visitor in order to be sure I picked up the latest chapter in the story of the 30th (later 31st) Century's greatest heroes.

The Legion began in the pages of Adventure Comics in the late 1950s. They were a group of teens who, inspired by the example of Superboy, the greatest teen hero of the 20th century, gathered to help the citizens of the far-flung United Planets and fight its enemies. Superboy himself was made an honorary member and frequently traveled through time to fight alongside those who follow in his footsteps.

During the 1960s and 70s, the Legion shifted to eventually be the headline feature of its own book. Aging with the slowness of comic book time, the teens of the Legion gradually became young adults. In the 1980s, some paired up and began families. Then, after a brief hiatus, they came back as a more grizzled, smaller set of heroes no longer-as-beloved by the United Planets government. Writer Keith Giffen was faced with a number of obstacles: The Legion's inspiration, Superboy, had been retroactively erased from history in order to match with the official history of Superman. Over the course of three or four of the first issues of the new series, Giffen re-created the Legion's history so that the Legionnaire Mon-El became the time-displaced hero Valor, the new inspiration of the hero team. Later, he added a group called the "SW6 Batch" of teenage Legionnaires alongside their 30-something counterparts.

Despite some very interesting storylines and some great artwork from Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, as well as Stuart Immonen and Ron Boyd, the learning curve for new readers remained very steep, and the paired Legion of Super-Heroes/Legionnaires titles were wound down during DC Comics Zero Hour event. A new series told the team's story from the beginning. It continued in the two titles for a few years. Interest never got high enough to maintain two books, even with stunts like sending half the team back to the 20th century for awhile. I lost some interest when the writers decided to split the team again by sending half of them to unimaginably distant space to end the paired books. I skipped the subsequent Legion Lost/Legion Worlds books, as well as the re-started Legion series. One of the selling points of the Legion books for me had been great, interesting artwork, and newcomer Oliver Coipel's pencils were way too often just plain ugly.

Yet another rebooted series began in 2004, which paired comics über-writer Mark Waid with the excellent art of Barry Kitson. In a nod to the old Legion's partnership with Superboy, the recently restored Supergirl was sent forward to join the team midway through this version. Waid and Kitson created a largely bland and restrictive society in which the teens of the Legion banded together to help change their world as much as save it. Their example inspired hundreds of thousands of young people across the United Planets to become their fans, or Legionnaires. After a few years, Waid and Kitson moved on, turning the title over first to writer Tony Bedard and then to 1960s Legion writer Jim Shooter. Shooter had been a wunderkind of sorts, writing Legion of Super-Heroes stories before he was even in high school when it was in Adventure Comics. Unfortunately, his return to a series he first wrote when he was 14 seemed to bring about the kind of writing a 14-year-old would do, and the 2000's were not the 1960's. The mix of baby-boomer juvenilia, Gen-Y sniggering and Frances Manapul's distorted-yet-crude cheesecake art quickly doomed the already not-so-robustly-selling title to another cancellation.

And now we're back -- literally, in one sense. This version of the Legion appeared in a Justice League/Justice Society arc in 2007, in the Action Comics arc "Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes" and then as a backup feature in Adventure in 2009 before returning to its own book just last month. According to DC Comics editors, this is the original Legion that started in Adventure, without the story contortions forced on the continuity by the 1986 Infinite Crisis series. So it's got a Superboy connection, even if it's not exactly the same one we'd seen before, as well as some other tweaks that make it kind of interesting.

Paul Levitz, a Legion writer off and on between 1974 and 1989, writes the Legion's new tales, and Turkish artist Yildiray Çinar makes them visible. As an unabashed Legion fanboy since I was nine (Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #200, "The Legionnaire Bride of Starfinger," to be precise. No, I don't still own a copy. You think I'm some kind of geek?), I have high hopes that the title will do well. Çinar's work with Jay Faerber on Noble Causes shows he can handle a large cast and he has made a good-looking first issue, even though the "L"-decorated flight ring shown on the cover is apparently being worn upside-down. I'm glad there's a Legion series around, even though its up-and-down history has got to irritate publishers no end. Because no matter how many times bad writing, bad art or ill-advised creative team changes kill it, it seems like someone wants it back to try again. I'll be crossing my fingers for luck for volume six.

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

2010-05-30T13:24:00.002-05:00

This and the companion pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. What follows will be some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-)

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

In any series of seven items, the fourth item is the middle. Three precede, three follow. And for Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, this fourth novel is easily the nadir of the seven -- a sprawling rotten scrambled egg of a book that runs more than 260,000 words and spends nearly 175,000 of them on a flashback.

King published Wizard and Glass in 1997, well after any editor stopped imposing any storytelling discipline on him. By contrast, the third volume of the series, 1991's The Waste Lands runs nearly 90,000 words less. The first two volumes, published in the 1980s, total 55,000 and 128,000 words respectively.

We begin where we left The Waste Lands, with Roland, the last gunslinger, trapped inside a speeding monorail controlled by an ancient artificial intelligence that has gone insane. Roland and his companions, Eddie, Susannah and Jake, must pose riddles that the AI, named Blaine, can't solve, or else their train will crash full-speed into the endpoint of its track and kill them all.

King's ability to build tension is on fine display in this scene. Roland tries riddle after riddle, but Blaine knows them all. Jake's last-ditch use of a book of riddles is no good, and Susannah has no help to offer. Eventually Eddie is able to defeat the ruthlessly logical mind of Blaine by posing nonsense riddles that overload its circuitry. Its brain fried, the train stops at the town of Topeka, but it is not a place that any of the travelers know. Although Jake, Susannah and Eddie are all from a world like ours that has a Topeka, they don't recognize this one. It's empty, peopled only with desiccated corpses. Only from a newspaper do they realize that they're in a world where most people have died from a genetically enhanced flu virus and that world is headed for its own moment of truth.

Roland understands they've passed through a "thinny," or place where the barrier between alternate worlds has grown so thin no special effort is needed to move from one to another. King readers know that Roland's group is in the world of his novel The Stand. The problem is that in this world, they can no longer see the Beam that will lead them to the Dark Tower. They have to return to Roland's world or their quest for the tower is lost. Ahead is another thinny, as well as a strange glass building sitting on I-70 in eastern Kansas.

BUT...before we can get to that strange building, Roland's encounter with this thinny has reminded him of the first one he ever saw, back when he was just 14. Those events form a large part of beginning Roland's quest for the Tower, and the reader will spend the next 175,000-plus words learning about it.

Roland learns, after having passed his trial of manhood and earned the right to a gunslinger's weapons, that he has been manipulated by those who want to bring down his family. His father sends him away to the Barony of Meijis to keep him out of harm's way and to learn what he can about Meijis' connection to John Farson, a man trying to overthrow The Affiliation, the loose group of governments the gunslingers serve. Roland's friends Alain and Cuthbert accompany him. At Hambry, a town in Meijis, Roland meets Susan Delgado, a 16-year-old girl engaged to be the consort of Hambry's mayor.

The three young men learn that Farson is indeed connected to Hambry, which intends to supply his war machines with the oil they need to attack the gunslingers. Roland, Alain and Cuthbert have been framed for the murder of Hambry's mayor and are in jail, but Susan helps them escape, as she and Roland have fallen in love. The trio destroys the oil supplies and lures many of Farson's forces to their deaths when they ride into a thinny near Hambry. But Susan's role is discovered and she is burned at the stake.

Roland discovers this when he sees it in a Wizard's Glass known as Maerlyn's Grapefruit he captured from Farson -- and he realizes that when he chose a path that would take him towards the Dark Tower he abandoned Susan to her death. Like J.R.R. Tolkien's palantíri seeing stones that it closely resembles, this wizard's glass exacts a price for its visions and Roland is comatose. Alain and Cuthbert have to carry him back to his home in Gilead.

And then finally we return to Roland, Susannah, Eddie and Jake outside a dead Topeka. As they approach the glass building, which resembles the wizard's palace in The Wizard of Oz movie, they find blood-red shoes for each of them, including the billy-bumbler animal Oy that has attached itself to Jake. Tapping them together as Dorothy did in the movie, they are taken inside the palace, where they confront what at first appears to be a resurrected Blaine but turns out to be a disfigured Tick-Tock Man, rescued from death by Roland's nemesis Marten Broadcloak. Broadcloak is also The Ageless Stranger, Richard Fannin, and at his roots he is none other other than Randall Flagg, a villain not only from The Stand, but from a number of King's other books.

The Tick-Tock Man is killed and Flagg flees when Roland confronts him, not with his own guns that Flagg can enchant, but with a gun from Eddie's world that is beyond the wizard's power. The group leaves the glass palace and finds themselves back in a world with a visible Beam, able to continue their quest for the Tower. But as they go, Roland reveals that, deceived by another vision he saw in the Wizard's Glass, he shot and killed his mother. Flagg taunts Eddie, Susannah and Jake that everyone who befriends or tries to help Roland has died in the gunslinger's quest for the Tower. Despite this, the others choose not to leave Roland but now consider his quest theirs as well.

I came to Wizard and Glass a Kingophile and a devoted Tower-head. I even ordered the Donald M. Grant limited edition through Amazon, the first Amazon order I'd ever placed and the second of the Dark Tower books I owned in Grant editions. I'd waited for six years for King to move this fascinating story along, six years with the cliffhanger of Roland's group stuck inside the insane and suicidal Blaine the monorail.

I left Wizard and Glass completely disinterested in the story and feeling a real disenchantment with King's work that's had only intermittent lulls. Yes, we do meet some of the people arrayed against Roland's quest for the Tower when the quartet encounters Broadcloak/Flagg. Yes, we do get a hint that the Tower is a sort of axis of many parallel worlds, not only those of Roland and of Jake, Susannah and Eddie. And yes, we do learn that Roland's single-minded quest will cause him to sacrifice much and that he will not be the only one to pay the price for it.

But it takes so frickin' long, much longer than it needs to. Is the story of Roland and Susan a necessary one to show us something about the gunslinger? Perhaps, but essentially it's a kind of love/adventure story that writers like L'Amour, Burroughs or Sabatini did many times over. Those old adventure writers, though, had a focus that kept the story on a laser-straight line from "Once upon a time" to "The End" and kept their readers hooked. King drags the story of Roland and Susan everywhere he can think of it going and doesn't hurry on the way.

Maybe it is important to learn about the Baronies of Mid-World and Farson's rebellion against them. Maybe it is important to learn about Susan Delgado as Roland's "one true love" and his scary willingness to sacrifice anything and maybe even anyone in his quest for the Tower. But it's almost impossible to justify the effort expended on them here. A six-year wait to learn how the ka-tet escaped Blaine's insane suicide run and renewed its search for the tower, and almost immediately that story grinds to a halt for a flashback that all by itself is as long as the first two books of the series.

The resolution to the quartet being stranded in The Stand's world feels rushed and cramped. It's almost as if it's tacked on to prevent the reader mutiny that might have followed if the immense detour to Hambry kept us from learning whether or not the ka-tet escaped that world and returned to Roland's. During the six years it took before Wolves of the Calla, the next volume of the series, was published, most of the charity this reader extended towards someone who was once one of his favorite authors dried up and blew away.

Wizard and Glass made me unwilling to indulge King's indulgences. Editors had long since stopped reining him in, apparently careful to avoid a potentially publisher-changing dispute by telling their cash machine to spend some more time mining for the storytelling diamonds in the dust. Publishers make more money selling immense books than they do small ones. An author like King, whose hardcore fan base seemed never to balk at his longer and longer books, will find no enemies among them.

There was It: Long, as well as a little creepy in the not-good way. Then a second edition of The Stand, restoring thousands of words edited out of the original. It was about as necessary as sunblock for Noah, but it did offer a broader view of King's vision of that novel. The Desperation/Regulators two-fer, with one book published under King's Richard Bachman pseudonym, was pretty clearly a case of a publisher stroking its cash cow. But at least gave us one good novel (Desperation) and some interesting meditations on God from an author who's never been shy about taking religion seriously.

Wizard and Glass, though, did me in. It came to my house sometime in late November of 1997 and I finished it in early December of that year. It took King six years to return to the world of the Dark Tower; it would take me a dozen.

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands

2010-05-23T16:55:00.000-05:00

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

A few weeks after the end of Drawing of the Three, Roland, Eddie and Susannah move inland from the Western Sea where Roland first met the pair from our world and drew them to his. They meet a great cyborg bear called Shardik, which has deteriorated and gone mad over the course of its long life. Roland tells Eddie and Susan that the bear was one of the twelve animal totems that guarded the ends of the mystical Beams that hold the world together. Hax the cook had told him that he thought the Beams, Guardians and even the Tower itself had been made by people, specifically the Great Old Ones. Later we will learn that the Guardians, at least, had their origins as supernatural beings even though the Old Ones had later created mechanical replicas of them.

They begin to follow the Beam, visible as a sort of loose but definite ordered pattern in the sky, clouds and tree leaves. Where the six Beams converge, Roland knows he will find the Dark Tower itself. During their journey, Eddie and Susannah train as gunslingers, honing their skills with Roland's guns and with the one Roland took from the other world. Although they don't go through the entire training sequence that helped shape Roland himself, they do learn that being a gunslinger is more than simply pointing and pulling the trigger. Lessons like the "Gunslinger's Litany" impress on them some of the worldview that Roland has. King concludes this litany with the sentences: "I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart." It's an interesting echo of Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, in which he contrasts the observance of the letter of the law with a failure to observe its spirit by equating even anger against someone with murder. King grew up a regular church attender with his mother and evidence of that background shows up more than once in his work.

Unfortunately, even as they start this new phase of their quest for the Tower, Roland is steadily losing his mind. When he entered the body of Jack Mort, the man who had pushed Jake Chambers in front of a car in our New York City in 1977, Roland prevented the murder and kept Jake from crossing into his world and dying beneath the mountains as described in The Gunslinger. But Roland's encounter with Jake happened in the gunslinger's past, meaning that Jake had died and he had entered Roland's world. The dual timelines Roland's action creates are destroying his mind. In the 1977 New York City, the same thing is happening to Jake's mind. The only way to save both Roland and Jake from complete insanity is to draw Jake into the Roland's world and fuse the two timelines. Jake's portal is in a haunted house in New York City; the exit portal is a speaking ring in Roland's world. The demon that haunts this speaking ring must be held captive during the ritual that will bring Jake across, and like a similar demon in The Gunslinger, the way to do this is through a mortal human being having sex with it. This time, Susannah couples with the demon and keeps both Eddie and Jake safe while Roland brings Jake across. At the time no one knows that this is actually the same demon, and that by having sex with it, Susannah has actually been impregnated with a child that is part human, from Roland, and part demon as well.

The group also gains Oy the "billy-bumbler," a kind of semi-intelligent dog-raccoon-badger cross that attaches itself to Jake. Now whole, the ka-tet of Roland sets out again to follow the Path of the Beam that will lead them to the Tower. They pass through River Crossing, the first village or town we've come to in Roland's world since he killed everyone in Tull in The Gunslinger. The elderly people of River Crossing remember gunslingers, although such a great length of time has passed that we realize Roland's meeting with The Man in Black may have taken many many years, and that his world has been moving on even faster than it had when first we met him. Talitha Unwin gives Roland a cross to be taken to the Tower and laid there while her name is spoken. King also begins to outline connections between the deteriorated Shardik and the moving on of Roland's world.

The group next reaches the great city of Lud, mostly abandoned and nearly destroyed many centuries ago. A bridge, which the visitors from our world note looks a lot like New York City's George Washington Bridge, reaches across a great river canyon to it, and the Path of the Beam follows that way. But as they cross the bridge, a near disaster gives Gasher, one of the remaining people living in Lud, the chance to capture Jake. Lud's residents have been so physically damaged, probably by radiation, that they have very few children and they hope to bring new blood to their tribe with the boy. Roland and Oy track Jake through Lud to free him from Gasher's tribe of Grays, led by Andrew Quick, the Tick-Tock Man.

Jake shoots Quick, leaving him for dead. But the Ageless Stranger, who may very well be Randall Flagg, finds him, saves him and uses him to prepare a trap for Roland. The ka-tet is reunited at the Cradle of Lud, a sort of train station where they find the city's working artificial intelligence, Blaine. They learn that Lud is surrounded by impassible, deadly country that becomes the Waste Lands of the title. They can't cross on their own, but there is a way out. They use Blaine to escape Lud via a monorail train, even though the intelligent train reminds Jake of a weird kids' book he read in which a live train was said to carry children around in play but which looked like it was actually holding them as terrified prisoners in the illustrations. These fears prove out, as Blaine challenges the group to a riddle contest -- if they can tell a riddle he has never heard or can't answer, then he will stop at the train's last station and let them off. If they can't, he will crash the train into the end of the track at top speed -- apparently near 900 miles an hour -- and kill them all. The Waste Lands ends with the ka-tet ready to begin to riddle the deranged artificial mind.

And that's where King would leave The Dark Tower fans for six years; wondering what would happen to the group trapped aboard a sentient but suicidally insane train. Five years and four years, respectively, had passed between the earlier installments of the story, but neither the first nor the second books ended with this kind of cliffhanger. King didn't earn a lot of brownie points with his fans; having delved deeper into the history of Roland's world and what was actually happening there than he ever had before he had whetted their appetites for the real meat of the Dark Tower tale to begin. Gunslinger set the stage, Drawing cast the characters and now the curtain had gone up, only to drop again and stay down for a very long time.

As far as we can tell, the Great Old Ones were people who lived in a world not very different from ours but with technology somewhat advanced over our own in some areas, especially robotics. They also had a great deal of mystical knowledge, understanding not simply science but also the magical forces behind the Beams and the Dark Tower itself. In later volumes, we will see how their knowledge led them to arrogantly try to use their technology to harness the forces of the Beams to cross between worlds. Some kind of conflict arose that devastated much of Roland's world and left behind the Baronies of Mid-World -- the nations of his youth -- as well as wrecked cities like Lud and the Waste Lands themselves.

King sets Roland in a post-apocalyptic land, but the apocalypse he creates is not simply a nuclear war or other natural conflict -- supernatural forces and supernatural damage have also been at work here. Some earlier interviews suggest that King first thought of Roland's world as one that had survived some kind of nuclear holocaust when he first began it, but his vision broadens considerably over time. The danger of a direct missile-for-missile conflict between superpowers had lessened considerably since he started the series. He also explored how technology and spirituality or faith can relate to one another, and how if the former replaces the latter, the people who depend on it may find themselves seriously adrift if it ever fails them as the Great Old Ones' technology failed them and is now failing their descendants.

The Waste Lands is probably the first of the Dark Tower series to suffer from the bloating that was affecting much of King's other work. It's minor at this point. Waste Lands is long, but things still happen and it's not nearly as much of a puffed-up wheel-spinning session as some later books will be. The main problem it presents isn't its fault, because that major problem is the six-year gap between it and Wizard and Glass. And Wizard and Glass will go wrong in enough ways to make the six-year gap seem not nearly long enough.

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three

2010-05-18T15:57:00.000-05:00

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

By the time The Drawing of the Three was published in 1987, the reputation of the Dark Tower series had grown among Stephen King fans. Since The Gunslinger was, at that point, available only in the limited-edition Donald M. Grant edition or as serial chapters in nine-year-old copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, its scarcity prompted a hunger for subsequent chapters of Roland's story. I found Three on sale at a modeling/collectibles/hobby shop in the now mostly-abandoned Crossroads Mall. I happened to visit that mall about a year ago when one of its last anchor stores closed, looking for some shirt bargains, and the nearly empty mall can give a very good impression of being a place that's "moved on," like the world in which we first meet Roland. I paid about $40 for it; not overwhelming in today's market (King's most recent, Under the Dome, runs $35 retail) but a very good chunk of change for a book in 1987.

Three picks up just a few hours after the apocalyptic "palaver" between Roland and the Man in Black at the shores of the Western Sea that closed out Gunslinger. Before he has much time to consider what he has learned or what may have been the fate of the Man in Black, Roland is attacked by the creatures of the sea that he calls "lobstrosities." His hand and foot are maimed, leaving him able to use only one of his deadly guns and suffering from a potentially lethal infection.

As he heads north along the shore, he encounters a door, labeled "The Prisoner." Opening it, Roland finds himself in our world -- or one very much like it -- in 1987, somehow living in the body of Eddie Dean, a heroin addict who has agreed to mule drugs into New York City for a low-level mobster. Though he is still Roland in his mind, he has Eddie's body and can access some of Eddie's knowledge. Eddie and Roland use the dimension-crossing aspects of the door to allow Eddie to escape detection by the police, as Roland's odd actions draw the attention of the flight attendant and law enforcement. Seeing no alternative to either worse addiction, imprisonment by the law or death at the hands of the mob that is very curious about where its cocaine went, Eddie reluctantly crosses into Roland's world and joins him on his quest for the Tower. The relationship does not begin smoothly, as Roland is feverish from his infected wounds and Eddie suffers from heroin withdrawal. They manage to get antibiotics that begin to fight Roland's infection, but he is still weak.

The second door is called "Lady of the Shadows," and it leads into the mind of Odetta Holmes, a civil rights activist in 1964 New York City. Odetta is confined to a wheelchair, as she was attacked several years ago by a man named Jack Mort, who pushed her in front of a subway train and caused her to lose her legs. She also has an alter personality, a borderline psychotic who calls herself Detta Walker and who is nothing like the refined Odetta Holmes. Detta seems to be the result of a head injury that Odetta suffered when she was a child -- an injury again at the hands of Jack Mort. Roland and Eddie bring Odetta/Detta into Roland's world but have to deal with the evil and potentially harmful Detta instead.

The third door is labeled "The Pusher," and it is one that Roland has no desire to enter. He remembers that Jake, his companion from The Gunslinger, died when a man pushed him in front of a car and he knows exactly where this door will lead. And in fact it does enter the mind of the man who killed Jake, the same Jack Mort who caused Odetta so much harm and misery. Roland has to call upon the diplomacy he learned as the son of Gilead's leader in order to finesse Mort into playing his role in the quest while not allowing him to harm any of the members of the group. He even manages to save Jake, so that Mort never causes the boy's death and never sends him into Roland's world, exposing him to death under the mountains as Roland and Jake chase the Man in Black. The act will have dangerous consequences for Roland and Jake in The Waste Lands, the third book in the series.

By the end of the book, Roland has helped Eddie sweat out his addiction and has begun a full recovery from his injuries. Odetta successfully merges her personality with Detta and gives herself the name Susannah to signify she is a new person, and she and Eddie fall in love. Roland has drawn the "three" of his group (Susannah counts twice; as her original self of Odetta Holmes, and as her merged self of Susannah Dean), or ka-tet, which will help him quest for the tower.

Three is easily the strongest book of the seven that make up The Dark Tower. Written after King had several other books under his belt, it lacked some of the rough and raw edges that slowed The Gunslinger. But it comes early enough in his career that the bestseller's bloat which will plague most of his work past the middle 1980's isn't yet apparent. As we watch Roland try to interact with our world (a drink of Pepsi nearly sends him into a sugar euphoria that might almost usurp his quest for the Tower) we can get a much better sense of who he is than we were able to see through the haphazard flashbackery of Gunslinger. Although Eddie arrives as a whiny addict who seems far too weak to be of any help in Roland's quest, he starts to show hints of the substance that will later make Roland feel confident Eddie could continue the quest for the tower were Roland to die. Odetta is rather sketchy, as King spends a slightly uncomfortable amount of time detailing the dysfunctions, sexual and otherwise, of her alter-ego Detta. But the merged Susannah offers some interesting hints of her character as well, and considering that King used tween-aged group sex as an important plot point in 1986's It, Detta's quirks were hardly the queasiest thing he'd done in that realm by that point.

Jack Mort is somehow disappointing, as what seems to be a pivotal source of evil faced by the ka-tet gets relegated to a "thanks for playing, here are some lovely parting gifts" status by the time Three is finished. But in an intriguing development, we see King begin to draw connections between the Man in Black, who may not be as dead as Roland thought, and the evil Flagg of The Stand and Eyes of the Dragon. By today, of course, the idea that King was threading similar thoughts and ideas among several of his stories is common knowledge to Dark Tower readers, but in 1987 it was still a new concept for him.

Phil Hale's illustrations really cemented the visual aspects of the characters in my mind; Michael Whelan's version of Roland from The Gunslinger and The Dark Tower always seemed far too young and too much of a buff superhero; Ned Dameron's and Berni Wrightson's work from The Waste Lands and Wolves of the Calla, respectively, was not all that memorable; Darrell Anderson did mostly landscapes and some murky, weird colorized sketches in Song of Susannah and Dave McKean's acid-trip/grunge-deconstruction photo illustrations are fit companions for the awfulness of Wizard and Glass. Whether Hale was simply better able to envision Roland's world or whether King's ability to focus and communicate that vision would never be better than it was in Drawing of the Three is hard to say.

Three remains the best of the seven books that make up The Dark Tower. It's imperfect, and there have been moments before it and there will be moments after it that when King matches or exceeds what he does here. But he will not string them together in such a consistent whole at any time while he explores Roland's world and follows his quest, and he will rarely do so again even outside of the Dark Tower arena.

The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

2010-05-11T17:28:00.003-05:00

This and the following pieces are less reviews than they are a sort of reader's diary of my experiences encountering Stephen King's monumental fantasy/western/science fiction tale The Dark Tower. It's made up of seven books, each of which I read at different times in my life. What follows will be some reflections on the separate volumes, and I will be assuming that the reader has already read them or does not care if what he or she reads spoils the books or their endings. That is, of course, assuming that these little exercises have readers to begin with ;-)

Again, and I will stress this so that no one may find the experience of learning Roland's story and reading The Dark Tower lessened by knowing what comes next, THERE BE SPOILERS HERE.

You've been alerted.

Three versions of this book exist. The earliest published format is five stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning in February 1978 and running through November 1981. King polished them and stitched them together for a limited edition printed by Donald M. Grant in 1982. Slightly worn copies of this edition on the ABE Books website start at $100; good condition signed copies will go for as much as $5,000. Plume published a trade paperback of this edition in 1988. When King finished the entire Dark Tower series, he revised The Gunslinger and published that edition in 2003. He wanted to correct some continuity errors and help this volume mesh better with the others of the series. His vision of Roland the gunslinger's world had developed over the course of the thirty-plus years he had been writing it and he wanted the reader's first meeting with Roland to better match his later ones.

King also said he intended to polish the writing and tighten the story; only Stephen King could set out to tighten a story and wind up with one 9,000 words longer.

I read the Plume edition, which would technically be the middle version of the story. It opens with its iconic sentence: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." We learn a little about Roland's world, which resembles ours but has significant differences, and we gain some background on his quest. Roland's ultimate goal is to reach The Dark Tower, a kind of world-nexus he has seen in visions, and to "question whatever gods might dwell there." He journeys into the desert and stops at a hut, where he tells a man who lives there about the last place he stopped, the town of Tull. The man in black had stopped in Tull as well, and Roland learns about his visit through a woman named Allie, with whom he begins a relationship. But the town's preacher, a woman named Sylvia, has been affected by the Man in Black and stirs Tull's people against Roland. He is forced to kill all fifty-plus people in town, including Allie, whom he shoots while she is being used as human shield and begging for her life. King's revised Roland shoots an Allie who has been driven mad like her neighbors and who asks for death in her last lucid moments.

As Roland continues through the desert, he is nearly dead from thirst and exposure by the time he reaches a way station, where he is rescued by a boy named Jake. Jake is from our world, and he is in Roland's because he was pushed in front of a car and killed. Jake himself doesn't really know this, and Roland must learn it by hypnotizing him. The presence of the boy sparks some of Roland's own memories, such as his gunslinger training under the teacher Cort and his exposure of the poisoning plot hatched by the cook Hax. Under the way station, the pair encounter a demon that speaks to them from a hidden skeleton, and Roland takes the demon's jawbone with him when they leave to continue the journey.

Finally they leave the desert for some hill country, but Jake is endangered by an Oracle, a kind of prophesying succubus that threatens to drain his life energy via sex. Although the revised edition makes Jake about 11, rather than the nine years old of the original, this is still a rather squicky scene, especially considering King's detailed description of the seduction and abuse of Jessie Burlingame by her father in Gerald's Game. In any event, Roland saves Jake and has sex with the Oracle demon himself. He learns he will gain allies in his quest, Eddie Dean and Odetta Holmes. But he does not know that this demon will later impregnate Odetta with seed it keeps from him and thus create his evil son Mordred. When they reach the mountains, they are taunted by the Man in Black, who says that he and Roland will have some things to discuss on the other side of the peaks. Roland asks Jake if he wants to keep going, since the Man in Black's words imply that the boy will not make it across the mountains. Jake agrees.

They enter the mountains through a mine shaft, in an atomic-powered mine car. Roland tells Jake some more about his earlier life; how his discovery of his mother's affair with a wizard named Marten Broadcloak (who might be the Man in Black) prompted him to take his test of manhood earlier than was planned. He survived this test, but found out he had been tricked by Marten as a part of a plot to discredit his family, have him sent away, and remove a problem for the rebel leader John Farson and the evil Beast to whom Broadcloak swore allegiance. The revised edition changes the Beast to the Crimson King, the villain against whom Roland must ultimately battle in the final volume. Roland and Jake, fleeing from an attack by Slow Mutants, run along a dangerous ledge and Jake slips. Though Roland catches him, he faces the choice of pulling Jake to safety or continuing his quest for the man in black and the Dark Tower. He chooses the quest and allows Jake to fall to his death, the boy himself saying, "Go, then. There are other worlds than these" and implying a future meeting of the two.

Through the mountains, Roland and the Man in Black have their palaver, or council. The Man in Black deals from a deck of Tarot-like cards to show Roland more about his future allies and to imply that the gift of death will not be given to Roland. He says he is a servant of Roland's true enemy, the one in control of the Dark Tower, and shows Roland a representation of the entire universe and of Roland's insignificance within it. Roland refuses the suggestion that he abandon his quest and falls into a deep sleep. Years have passed by the time he awakes, and next to him is a skeleton he presumes is the Man in Black. We will later learn it isn't, though. The Gunslinger closes with Roland meditating on how he will bring his allies into his world from their own and on his quest for the Tower.

Gunslinger was actually the second book of the series that I read, even though it was the first written. I'd already read its sequel, The Drawing of the Three, so I more or less knew how some of its events turned out.

As mentioned above, King says he revised it to help smooth transitions and correct some discontinuity with later parts of the series. He also felt the tone of the book as a whole was dry and a hard way to really get into the story of Roland. He has a point; the five chapters were probably stronger separately than they are as a unit. Three of them center on flashbacks and another two on prophecies; combined they put a lot of the action in the rearview mirror or in strange visions.

The earlier version has a lot more of our world littering Roland's. He recalls people and places identical to some we know, but King revises those to distance Roland's world from ours. Interviews about the project earlier in his career seem to link the Dark Tower saga with a kind of post-apocalyptic world that followed a global war and a nuclear holocaust. King's vision of the story expanded over time, and the Cold War scenario that dominated people's thinking about the future when he began it was long gone by the time he finished.

And it's certainly more roughly written. To put it in perspective, the Stephen King who sold the Gunslinger stories to F&SF had published four books and a collection of short stories under his own name and one book under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. Although The Stand showed that he had found a good deal of his authorial voice, he had quite a few areas to work on and the individual chapters of The Gunslinger demonstrate that as well.

Even though it is rougher, less composed and a tougher read than some of what follows, The Gunslinger represents the work of a writer with a monumental story in mind. By the time we get to the more polished sections of that story, our writer has become a brand name and a cash machine for his publisher. His story will get buried in weird meta-statements about the process of creation and ridiculous plot turns like his appearance in his own novel both as a character and its writer. So it's hard to judge this first step on a long journey without being affected by knowing where things will come out.

But based on its own vision, as well as the depth of story and character it offers, The Gunslinger takes its place as one of the top books of the seven main novels in The Dark Tower sequence and certainly outranks the related novels like Hearts in Atlantis or Insomnia. It sets a reader up well for the next step, The Drawing of the Three, in which we'll meet the others of the ka-tet who will aid Roland on his quest and begin to understand how his world relates to ours, as well as others, and what kind of role the Tower itself plays in those connections.

A Very Very Bad Idea

2010-04-23T20:27:00.000-05:00

The former governor of Illinois would like the former junior senator from Illinois to talk to some friends of his. Specifically, ousted governor Rod Blagojevich would like President Barack Obama to testify in his upcoming corruption trial, and is asking the court to subpoena him. The former gov says the former sen could testify about the credibility of some of the witnesses against him.

This is, as the post title suggests, a very very bad idea. Now, is a trial in which the inside dealings of Chicago politics -- Blagojevich was a Chicago pol before he ran for governor -- get discussed in open court a lot of fun? Indeed it is; fun for all. Would it also be fun to watch President Obama reveal a little of how his own time working things the Chicago way demonstrates that a good deal of his high oratory about being a different kind of politician who doesn't play the old-style games was just the emperor's new rhetoric? Indeed it would be, although probably not nearly as many people would agree with me there.

But this is still a very very bad idea and the trial court should not grant permission to Blagojevich's attorneys to subpoena the president. If that decision is appealed, higher courts should not overturn the trial court's ruling. Blagojevich is on trial because while he was still governor, he was smart enough to see that his power to appoint a successor to President Obama's senate seat could be a windfall for him, financially as well as otherwise. But he was dumb enough to discuss that windfall on a phone which was also being listened to by agents of law enforcement. Thus, he was indicted, and thus, he became a former governor. The president has maintained that neither he nor any of his staff ever spoke with Blagojevich about these matters.

His testimony might prove exactly that -- that he had no hand in any of this, nor did anyone acting on his behalf. That would, it might seem, be the end of it all and there's no real harm done. Except...

Way back in 1997, lawyers for Paula Jones wanted to subpoena President Bill Clinton to testify in her lawsuit against him that alleged sexual harassment. President Clinton said that the lawsuit should wait until after he was out of office and that sitting presidents shouldn't be subject to subpoena, because it takes attention away from being president. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against him, and the lawsuit proceeded. After the president was questioned, a judge dismissed Jones' lawsuit, saying she didn't have enough evidence of her claim to warrant a trial. Jones appealed, and Clinton eventually settled. All over, no harm done. Except...

During his deposition, the President denied having sexual relations with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. That, as it happened, was not true. Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, investigating possible corruption in an old land deal that involved the president and his wife, decided to switch his attack to perjury allegations, which he could prove and which eventually resulted in impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Although Clinton was impeached, he was not convicted and served out his term.

But as anyone who remembers the late 90s can tell you, the intensity of the partisan venom that swirled around these events was devastating. Political opponents were no longer honorable people with whom one might disagree or think misguided -- they were the embodiment of evil and the sum total of all that was stupid in the known universe. Some of this may have come from the fact that Clinton's political gifts kept many people on his side even though he was a man who cheated on his wife with a woman half his age and lied under oath about it. Such a circumstance frustrated opponents, and the thin-skinned leadership of the Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich didn't help cool things down.

Whatever its cause, the venom didn't drain away when Clinton left office -- it switched targets and sources. Now President George W. Bush was the worst thing to happen to the world since it cooled and his opponents spoke not of disagreeing with him, but hating him.

Clinton was tripped up by a matter completely unrelated to the actual deposition he gave. And if a man who can parse a definition like he could and skate on ice so thin you could breathe through it can get tripped up on some unrelated matter, President Obama does not stand a chance. Someone, somewhere, will seize on something he says and create from it some kind of complaint. The people who still say he wasn't born on U.S. soil, for example, will haul out a legion of fine-toothed combs to find something that they can use, and there will be a lawyer willing to handle their claim. Such a lawsuit would undoubtedly fail, but its mere existence in our current swamp of political acrimony would cause damage enough. Even worse, should some kind of impeachable offense be found in a potential deposition and a claim based on it succeed in removing President Obama from office, we will face the gory reality of the phrase "Joseph Biden, President of the United States" being real somewhere outside Joltin's Joe's r.e.m. sleep.

So please, if you are a praying person, offer up some that U.S. District Judge James Zagel kicks this request to the litigational curb, or that U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts shows the wisdom that uncharacteristically deserted his predecessor William Rehnquist in 1997. The Rehnquist court's go-ahead on Paula Jones' lawsuit is a contender for the worst Supreme Court ruling that doesn't have "Dred Scott" in its title, and Lord knows it doesn't need a partner.

And I'm only sort of kidding about the praying thing.

Oh, to Be in Cleveland

2009-09-27T12:14:00.007-05:00

That's the location of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, and this week the nominees for the Hall's Class of 2010 were announced.

A group of music historians takes a look at musicians who've had "a significant impact on the evolution, development and perpetuation of rock and roll" who released their first music at least 25 years ago. The categories are performers, which is the spotlight area, as well as sidemen -- the session and concert performers who often made headliners look better than they might have otherwise.

The Hall also honors non-musicians, such as producers, DJs, promoters and journalists, who've had that significant impact, as well as "early influences," or musicians whose careers predate the rock era but who had their own significant impact. People like Jelly Roll Morton make it in as "early influences." Morton died when Elvis Presley was in the second grade and "Rock Around the Clock" performer Bill Haley was a teenager trying to make it as a yodeling country singer, but his influence on jazz and blues music influenced some of the post-WWII blues that would cross over into rock and roll on the bridge of Chuck Berry's guitar.

Of course, Oklahoma rockabilly gal Wanda Jackson also makes it in as an "early influence," even though probably 95% of her recorded output takes place during the "rock era" that followed "Rock Around the Clock"'s no. 1 charting in 1955. Early apparently means different things to different people.

After the nominees are picked, a voting body made up of about 500 rock experts -- which does not include people who merely listen to and buy the music, of course -- cast their ballots. The top five or so who get more than 50% of the vote are in.

When the Hall began 25 years ago, it was nominating and electing people like Presley, Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, James Brown and so on; musicians whose impact on rock's birth and initial growth was obvious. To this day I know people who say you should never trust a guitarist who can't play Chuck Berry music, and I am one of those people. But check out this year's list of potential inductees at that first link.

OK, Kiss makes some sense. They are indeed a rock band and their Halloween made-up faces were pretty much everywhere between about 1975 and 1979. David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Gary Glitter probably had more influence in creating the glam-rock genre that Kiss worked in, but they'll do because of how large they were on the scene during their time.

Genesis fits even better. Although in their 1980s video-friendly phase they were pretty much the backing band for Phil Collins' pop albums, they began as a full-fledged "progressive rock" band. Along with prog-rockers like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Jethro Tull and Rush, Genesis ushered in the use of a variety of instruments in rock songs and expanded the roles of others, including electronic instruments like synthesizers. They moved away from the three-minute format and often included extended instrumental breaks instead of short solos.

Some of the others, though -- ABBA? Really? The Swedish foursome may have sung some nice songs and harmonized well, but rock music? That'd be like calling someone an early influence who was actually contemporary with some of the people they were supposedly influencing...oh. Never mind. And truthfully, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is no longer about rock and roll anyway. But their 1976 song "Money Money Money" does at least let us know why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is in neither Memphis (home of Sun Studios), Chicago (home of the Chicago blues), St. Louis (home of Chuck Berry), New Orleans (home of the Delta blues) or New York City (home of most everything else) but in Cleveland, Ohio (home of $65 million).

Although many inductees were better known in rock-related genres like R&B, blues, soul and reggae, the HoF pretty much kicked down the genre boundaries in 2006 with Miles Davis' induction. The immensely talented Davis was really in no way a rock musucian, working entirely in the jazz arena. Madonna's induction in 2008 confirmed that the phrase "rock and roll" was descriptive of the museum, not the artists enshrined therein. Madonna is a pop and dance music star -- some good and some bad, but she's not a rock and roll musician. But the name's already on the museum and calling it the "Pop Music Hall of Fame" makes it sound less serious than "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," and the last thing you want to do to music buffs is somehow insinuate that their subject matter is not deadly serious. Plus, "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame" still has an aura of decadence about it that "Pop Music" doesn't. "I'm a rocker" sounds cool. "I'm a popper" sounds like you're a fan of one of those generic colas that discount stores sell in place of the real thing like Dr. Pepper.

Heck, even the Beatles straddle the fence -- while they were obviously a rock act in their pre-moptop days and their first releases, they morphed into a pop/psychedelic band that sometimes did rock songs. Noted rock despiser Frank Sinatra covered George Harrison's "Something" and called it "the greatest love song ever written." "Let It Be" is not a rock song. Neither are "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da," "A Day in the Life," and so on (As an aside: Nat "King" Cole is an "early influence" but Sinatra isn't? Can we check with someone on this? And maybe take a look at why Little Walter is in only as a sideman but Willie Dixon is an early influence and John Lee Hooker is a performer?)

Add a subjective standard like "Hall of Fame"-level greatness to a subjective field of artistry like music and you get something that's pretty much The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because it calls itself that.

If I believed in the concept of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I kind of join the Sex Pistols in not doing, I would suggest that the criteria would be trying to imagine the modern music industry without the artist under consideration. So, try to picture what modern music would be like if there had been no Elvis. Would it look at all like it does now? Probably not. Same thing with the Beatles. Or the Who, or Muddy Waters, Ray Charles and so on.

But how would modern music be all that different if Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anna-Frid hadn't told us that we could dance, we could jive, having the time of our lives? Sure, there'd have been no Mamma Mia Broadway show and movie, but I don't know if that's a bad thing.

By that criterion, we can pitch a bunch of inductees. Say goodbye to the Dave Clark Five, the Lovin' Spoonful and Billy Joel. We can bar people we shouldn't be talking about; whether talented or not, they weren't that influential. Obviously, this being the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the idea of some kind of morals component like the one that keeps Pete Rose out of the baseball Hall of Fame doesn't apply. So uber-creep John Phillips with the Mamas and the Papas gets to stay. And we pretty much start to close the doors on new inductees starting right about this year. Beginning with the mid-80s, the idea of a band or performer that has a major, art-form-altering impact kind of goes away. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and maybe Pearl Jam get in, but we should be ready to face years of no inductees (but since that would mean no $25,000-per-table banquet, we can't have that).

Of course the whole "things would be different if this person hadn't done this" is a high bar. My own CD collection would shrink considerably if I applied it there, but I'm not purporting to run a Hall of Fame.

Does the Arcade Fire rate? Tell ya in 2029. How about indie darling My Morning Jacket? Ask me again in 2024. Radiohead? Hmmm...we might learn that starting in 2018. Coldplay? I'll pretend you didn't ask.

Sure, you could say, Britney Spears had that define-the-form change effect on pop music. But any little pop tart who could halfway sing would have had the same impact; there was nothing special about Spears that meant if she hadn't done it, nobody would have. Same goes for the boy bands of the 1990s and early 2000s.

A Hall of Fame implies links to traditions and roots in a past. Rock and roll works almost the exact opposite way. When I was a kid, so-called oldies stations played Berry, Charles, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and so on. Then younger baby boomers hit their 30s and became nostalgic for the music from their teens and early 20s, but they didn't like the idea of their music or themselves being old, so they invented the label "classic rock."

Now classic rock includes music 20 years newer than the 1960s rock and soul that it originally meant, and "oldies" has dropped its 1950s-era artists and much of its 1960s catalogue for stuff that had its heyday during the bicentennial. Bob Seger may have sung that "Rock and roll never forgets," but his 2006 single "Wait for Me" didn't crack the top 50 in the US country charts and stalled at 16 on the adult contemporary charts. It didn't make the overall Top 40 at all.

As much as I love quite a bit of rock (and pop) music, I recognize that it's always been kind of ephemeral. And if fame indeed is as fleeting as we've been told, the concept of fame layered onto the Memento-short memory of modern music turns a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame from an institution that honors important contributions to a significant modern art form into just another thing rock fans can argue about.

Which may have been a better idea anyway.

Where Now the News?

2009-08-10T12:15:00.002-05:00

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather, a man with more than 40 years in the news biz, would like President Obama to convene a blue-ribbon panel to study the industry's current problems and recommend solutions. He made that call in a speech last month, and then repeated it in a column in Sunday's Washington Post.

Rather notes the increasing financial problems faced by newspapers and major television networks. Newspapers face dropping circulation and ad revenues. Network newscast viewership shrinks along with overall network audience losses. He's pretty persuasive that a big share of the problems of what he calls "the news infrastructure" can be traced to the collapse of the newspaper industry. Classified ads have almost disappeared, and other local ads also have migrated to the internet in large numbers. That's a revenue stream newspapers have to have in order to survive; subscriptions have never come close to paying for running a paper.

I think he's also accurate that most of the other news sources that are replacing newspapers in people's lives still depend on newspapers for a lot of the newsgathering they do. For example, the bloggers that people read are often commenting on or passing on information they picked up from a paper (like now, f'rinstance). Newspapers are often the only outfits assigning reporters to things like city councils, county commissions or school boards every time they meet, not just when a video-friendly confrontation breaks out.

Of course, Rather's call for help is a little ironic, given that his journalism career was spent mostly in television. The ad revenue-driven profit motive he complains about invaded news gathering through the TV screen and then began affecting other areas. The tiny attention spans of many folks and their disinterest in stories that don't directly affect them right now stems from television news.

And the call for some sort of panel of experts to diagnose the problem and recommend treatment brings a chuckle. For one, that kind of plan is also dinosaur thinking. By the time such a commission met, hashed out the problems and came up with solutions, the situation they addressed would be over. For another, we already have a panel in place that's identifying problems and offering solutions and new ways of doing things: The public.

Let's take classified advertising, for example. Does the current model of "junk for sale," arranged in eye-blurring echelons of tiny type work? I don't know what a commission of experts would say, but the fact that people aren't buying those kinds of ads suggests that it doesn't. What does work? Things like Craigslist and appearances in search engines, which people use to get the word out about businesses or individual things they may have to sell. Could newspapers set up a new Craigslist that did the same thing but which paid them a profit? Probably not, but they might be able to work with the people established in the field to find arrangements that helped them out as well.

How about the way newspapers present information -- does that work? Well, since people don't buy or read them as much as they have in the past, I'd guess no. What does seem to work? Well, people will read information online when it's free, so maybe there's a way to promote reading the news for free but somehow link it to page views and create an attraction for sponsors that would cover costs of producing news.

I used to be a journalist, and one of the things I remember about my attitudes of that time is reflected in Rather's suggestion of a panel of experts to study the issue, supported by the President. Despite our well-developed and eternally cultivated skepticism, we trust institutions and systems. Maybe not the way they're working now, but we imagine them the way we think they're supposed to work. In fact, we might see our work of reporting on them as a help towards that ideal. If there's a panel of experts involved, they will develop a new system that will solve the problems, or at least tell us how to solve them.

But institutions and systems can't react with the speed necessary to work in a digital world. Right now, it looks like the arena we call the free market is the only one that can process information fast enough to monitor the changes that are happening and the responses they require. Newspapers, for example, used to base their share of the news game on the twin pillars of speed and accuracy. A newspaper got information out quickly and got it right, or else it didn't survive. The internet means papers are rarely quick enough for people any more. Their own websites will update stories that the paper itself published, and do so often enough that the story in print might be out of date by noon.

As for accuracy, demagogues on left and right have spent enough time assailing media bias that most folks take what they read with several grains of salt and we all know we're supposed to reduce our salt intake. Media people themselves have done plenty to help that image -- when the New York Times has to run seven corrections to the Walter Cronkite obit, then who knows what other kinds of boo-boos slip through?

I love reading a paper. I love sitting down with one, unfolding it, scanning headlines, digging into a story, taking some time to process it along with a sip of beverage, flipping the pages and wrestling with them to fold right again, setting it aside knowing I can pick it up later any time I want, learning stuff I didn't know about places or people I'd never heard of, comics, the rattling sound paper makes when you move it or turn pages, the way I learned when I was young to use one finger as a fulcrum to fold it in half and tuck under my arm, the image I get of Al Bundy doing exactly that with a smile on his face as he heads upstairs to reclaim his bathroom...

And I love how they provide a depth of information and context that TV can't match (and which anchor personalities Chip Cappedteeth and Brenda Botox most likely wouldn't understand anyway). Time has changed, the calendar pages have turned and some of those things I love about newspapers are probably going to become part of the past. Rather's right that this situation can be seen as a crisis. There are important dimensions of news we won't get if newspapers leave. But he's also wrong, because they're far too important to leave up to a panel of experts picked by the same kind of people who run the Post Office or Department of Motor Vehicles.

Grumbly 100th, Nelson!

2009-03-28T17:25:00.002-05:00

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of writer Nelson Algren, author of The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, two of the 20th century's top noir novels (Clicking on the above link will take you to the page of the Nelson Algren Committee, which features a booking photo of the author. That's not a guy who has a "happy" birthday).

Though born in Detroit, Algren grew up in Chicago and set Golden Arm in the seedy neighborhoods and taverns amongst which he grew up. His book Chicago: City on the Make also explored those areas and the people who lived there in ways that made no friends at the Chamber of Commerce. Golden Arm told the story of Frankie Machine, a morphine addict who was also an amazing poker dealer. The movie version, directed by Otto Preminger, earned Frank Sinatra an Oscar nomination. Algren hated it and sued Preminger for changing the story.

Walk, published in 1956, follows drifter Dove Linkhorn from Texas to New Orleans and back, wading through a sea of pimps, hookers and other assorted undesirables. It opens with a description of Dove's father Fitz, a man whose belief that someone somewhere was cheating him was so ingrained that he "felt that every daybreak duped him into waking and every evening conned him into sleep." An apter description of some people who feel the world owes them something that it's not giving them I've yet to read.

What often fascinated Algren was how people who had little or nothing -- and for whom a whole lot of what they had was poisoned -- tried to retain some sense of their own humanity as they scratched and fought for the means to continue their spare and even sordid existence. He seemed much less interested in why folks with everything sometimes went bad and far more interested in why folks with nothing sometimes kept trying to be good, and he used his novels to try to call attention to the attempts, shredded or otherwise, of those living in what he called "the neon wilderness" to live with some level of dignity, compassion and love. More than one Old Testament prophet might have been able to read Algren with understanding. And us folks who also use the New Testament of our Bibles might find frequent mentions of a fella who kept reminding us that the least, the last and the lost have a place in God's heart as well.

Unfortunately for Algren, Walk was a close look at things that lots of people of the time didn't want to take much of a close look at. Reviews bashed the novel and the adoration that came to him following Golden Arm turned to disgust and then oblivion. He kept writing, but without much impact. An affair with Simone de Beauvoir led to repeated frustration and loneliness, as earlier affiliations with the Communist Party prevented Algren from getting a passport and living with her in France as he wished. After moving to New Jersey in 1975 and Long Island in 1980, Algren died of a heart attack in 1981. This was well before a re-examination of his work gained him some approval and before the trend of "anniversary editions" of books could have offered him some renewed approval.

But it's likely that he wouldn't have found a lot of approval in a society that gushes oceans of ink, virtual and otherwise, over the lives and loves of actors, actresses and their bizarre homunculi, "reality show" stars. Or that folks who spend hours talking, writing and reading about people who've done nothing more than be the result of successful fertilization by properly wealthy sperm and ova and whose behavior would shame a cat in heat would care much about people who make less money, show less skin and have more sense.

Though the Nelson Algren Committee has been successful in getting his apartment named as an historical site, having the Nelson Algren Fountain built and in seeing all of his novels and short story collections come back into print, one of the honors the city of Chicago tried to give Algren didn't pan out. Evergreen Street was re-named Algren Street in his memory in 1981, but when the residents complained, the city changed the name back. Algren would probably have appreciated the fuss.

This Is the Way the Show Ends...

2009-03-21T15:50:00.000-05:00

Not with a bang or a whimper -- more like a clunk. We'll be reviewing the series finale of Battlestar Galactica here, so anyone who hasn't seen it and doesn't want to be spoiled should stop reading now.

Starting with a miniseries in 2003, Ronald Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica grabbed and repelled fans of the original series and science fiction in general. The 1978-79 show starring Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict sometimes made it to the level of entertaining camp, but spent a lot of time being silly without seeming to realize it. Moore, not saddled with the original's need to milk the Star Wars crowd for viewers, got rid of the flashing lasers, evil emperor-styled thrones and cute furry robot-dog and went for a good deal more realism in terms of the military angle. He also added quite a bit of philosophical layering to the show, which raised questions about what it meant to be human. And he used his different characters to explore a range of theological issues unusual for television, not to mention unusual for the Sci-Fi Channel, home of "Sci-Fi Original" movies like Flu Bird Horror and Alien Apocalypse.

Moore used the basic story from the earlier series. A scientist named Baltar betrayed humanity to the Cylons, artificial life forms who then nearly wiped out humanity in a sneak attack on its Twelve Colonies. The last warship, the battlestar Galactica, collects a few other ships and about forty thousand people and seeks a way to escape the Cylons. They search for a mythical lost planet, home to the 13th tribe of humanity, known as Earth.

But Moore added some touches to give the story depth. Humans had created the Cylons, who rebelled against their makers in an earlier war. The Cylons had also developed models that duplicated human beings down to the cellular level, who moved among the human population unsuspected by their enemies. He gave Galactica much more of a submarine claustrophobia atmosphere than the shiny Star Wars set it resembled in 1978.

Over the course of the show, human beings tried to learn the location of Kobol, the ancient origin world, to see how to find Earth. The civilian government, led by President Laura Roslin, was at times on the side of as well as opposed to the military leadership of Commander and later Admiral William Adama. Fighter pilots like Lee "Apollo" Adama and Kara "Starbuck" Thrace played roles in both the military story and character and plot development of the show. Cylons were found in the very midst of the ship's crew -- no one could assume they were safe. And in the middle of all this was Gaius Baltar, the scientist who had given defense computer codes to a woman he thought was a corporate spy but who turned out to be a Cylon. Baltar's treachery was never discovered, and at times he was a political and religious leader while almost constantly haunted by a vision of the Cylon lover to whom he had given the key to humanity's defenses.

Recently, Galactica found Earth, but realized it had been destroyed many years ago. Humans found themselves actually allied with Cylons, some of whom had split from their main group following a civil war. The search for a permanent home was complicated by distrust of the new allies, an abortive mutiny and political coup, and the mystery surrounding Starbuck, who had disappeared while exploring a mysterious planet and then reappeared with the directions to Earth.

So we wind down to the last episode. I've read some responses that suggest it was brilliant and others that it stunk. I personally think it was not bad, but it had a lot of things that go clunk! in it.

The "rag-tag fugitive fleet" finds the planet we call Earth, only we learn that the entire series has taken place about a 150,000 years ago. The humans on the Earth they find are primitive, barely able to use tools. At first they plan on settling and living like they did on their own worlds, but Lee Adama argues they should leave all of their technological trappings behind and make a new start in this new world. Everyone agrees, and we see the characters start to settle in on this new world, which they will call Earth because it represents the dream they have had since the beginning. Laura Roslin, suffering from cancer since the show began, finally dies while flying with the man who has come to love her, Admiral Adama. Starbuck, now knowing she was some kind of ghost or angelic messenger of the god the show frequently refers to, disappears, leaving Lee Adama talking to himself. Baltar and the resurrected version of the Cylon to whom he betrayed all of humanity plan to begin a life of farming together. And so on. The angelic messenger version of this Cylon and Baltar himself show up again to tsk-tsk how human beings some 150,000 years later (our day) are once again trying to create artificial life and intelligence.

We do get a great money shot of the fleet moving slowly towards its destruction in the sun, arranged the way they were in the opening credits of the original series, with Glen Larson's original theme in the background.

So five years of show winds up as an eco-fable, which is silly but doesn't take away all of the great work that Moore, his writers and his cast have done. At least the dumb idea of getting rid of all the technology comes from Lee Adama, easily one of the least likable characters on the show other than Baltar and the chief Cylon villain, Cavil.

Plan to move in with a human population that has its own indigenous diseases and such without taking your modern immunization with you to protect them and you? Clunk!

Figure on developing agriculture all over again without benefit of modern tools or anything to make the agricultural implements needed to do that? Clunk!

Tory Foster's airlocking of Cally Henderson earns her a broken neck at the hands of Henderson's husband Galen Tyrol, but Baltar's complete betrayal of humanity, selling out the humans to the Cylons on the attempted settlement at New Caprica and collaboration with the Cylon regime that included signing execution warrants earns him...happily ever after with his Cylon babe? Clunk!

Human/Cylon hybrid child Hera is the potential savior of the human race as well as the Cylons, but she ends up being nothing special to the immediate survivors who settle on Earth. The Baltar and Cylon angelic messengers suggest that a news story about finding a genetic ancestor to all human beings, who is sometimes called "Mitochondrial Eve" or MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestor) refers to Hera. Unfortunately, since the theory of the MRCA debuted in the late 1980s, developments in molecular science and DNA research have called it into question. Clunk!

In any event, though the show ending didn't live up to the promise of the first two or three seasons, I've had a whole lot of fun watching it and thinking about it. I've appreciated the fact that a TV show didn't shy away from asking questions about God and depicting characters whose religious faith strengthened them and fueled their hope, rather than some sort of serial killer psychosis. So safe voyage, Galactica. Thanks for the ride.