Stephen King

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“Ben Carson Is The Worst”

November 1, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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It’s no secret that avuncular cryptkeeper Stephen King is on the left politically, feeling the greatest horror of all is opportunists cloaked in faux religion and patriotism. As you might imagine, the current Halloween parade of GOP candidates has left him dismayed. From Angela S. Allan’s Los Angeles Review of Books Q&A with the author:

Question:

You’ve also been very outspoken in your nonfiction on issues like gun control and taxation. Do you think of your novels as making political statements?

Stephen King:

I always get some letters from some people who are disgruntled because they feel like the right wing has been dissed and that’s probably true. I’ve been left of center my entire life. Well, not entirely. My wife will tell you that I voted for Richard Nixon in 1968 in the first election I could vote in, because Richard Nixon said he planned to get us out of Vietnam. Tabby will say, “And Steve believed him!” Well, I did! Nixon would say, “Yes, I have this plan, but it wouldn’t be proper to say anything before the election.” So, I voted for him and his plan was to escalate things further.

I got more and more radicalized. My politics have described a course of being somewhere on the right. Because I grew up in Maine, all my folks were Republicans. They swore by the Republican Party and they swore at the Democrats. Vietnam radicalized me. It radicalized a lot of kids. Never to the point where I joined SDS or burned buildings or anything like that, but I understood the people who did. And I’m still left of center. There are still things on the right-wing side that make me crazy. You know, especially the people who profess to be Christians. I just can’t understand the double standard.

What makes me particularly crazy is that you’ll see these Republican candidates, and Ben Carson is the worst. He talks about the national debt and he talks about how our grandchildren are going to inherit this debt. All of these guys talk about their grandchildren when it’s about money. None of them talk about them when it comes to the environment and how their grandchildren are all going to be wearing fucking gas masks. That makes me crazy.•

 

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“POW! Two Unrelated Ideas, Adolescent Cruelty And Telekinesis, Came Together, And I Had An Idea …”

April 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In a Guardian piece, Stephen King recalls how two disparate thoughts crashed together in his head, allowing him to create his first novel, Carrie, 40 years ago. The opening:

“While he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High. For part of one summer I worked there, too. One day I was supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached.

This memory came back to me one day while I was working in the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls – grossed out, horrified, amused – start pelting her with sanitary napkins … The girl begins to scream. All that blood!

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena – telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first —

POW! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea …”

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Stephen King: E-Books Vs. Physical Books

November 1, 2010 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back." (Image by Michael Femia.)

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal interviewed author Stephen King on the future of e-books and physical books. A few excerpts:

“The Wall Street Journal: Do we get the same reading experience with e-books?

Stephen King: I don’t know. I think it changes the reading experience, that it’s a little more ephemeral. And it’s tougher if you misplace a character. But I downloaded one 700-page book onto my Kindle that I was using for research. It didn’t have an index, but I was able to search by key words. And that’s something no physical book can do.

•••••

The Wall Street Journal: What about people who love physical books?

Stephen King: I’m one of them. I have thousands of books in my house. In a weird way, it’s embarrassing. I recently downloaded Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants,” but I also bought a copy to put on the shelf. I want books as objects. It’s crazy, but there are people who collect stamps, too.

•••••

The Wall Street Journal: How much time do you spend reading digitally?

Stephen King: It’s approaching half of what I read. I recently bought a print edition of Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers and the type was too small. A paper book is an object with a nice cover. You can swat flies with it, you can put it on the shelf. Do you remember the days when people got up to manually turn the channels on their TVs? Nobody does that any more, and nobody would want to go back. This is just something that is going to happen.

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