All your favorites are there … the “It” clown, little Drew Barry more starting the fire, The Gunslinger, the creepy little monkey with his cymbals.
I’m not sure if the pix here were meant to be some sort of ironic counterpoint to the message that I’m trying to spread here in Bulgaria — that despite the travails of the Traditional Media in the developed world, All Is Not Lost, and working journalists are not trapped in an unending horror show from which there is no exit.
Which is pretty much the prevailing mind-set amongst my friends who still work at newspapers and in the publishing game.
This is quite a nice little space, as you can see – a sort of American cultural outreach center, where they are touting the works of Stephen King. I’ve always felt that King, when he bends his back to the work, can capture something truly essential about the American character that few other authors working in the late 20th century were capable of. When I read The Dead Zone in my mid-teens, I discovered a voice that was writing about the kinds of blue collar, but not clueless hickabillies, that I had grown up with. Some deeply flawed and dangerous … others sad and lost … others (too few, really) quietly courageous and steadfast in their core human decency. His deep distrust of authority and ability to see through the post-Watergate b.s. was like a bucket of cold water to the face. I’ll always love him for that, even if in subsequent years, his discovery of the coca alkaloids tinged his writing with a lazy streak, and he rarely approached the kinds of insight and characterization that marked his work in the 70s.