KASHWAK=NOFO

Stephen King

I suppose I need to explain the title. If you had read Stephen King's The Cell, like I told you to do, you would know already what is meant, and we could move along briskly. But, no. You wanted to read Picketty's weighty tome on the economic inequities and other stuff.

"Kashwak" is an area in Maine where there are no microwave towers to feed cellphones, hence, "Nofo" = "no phone". It was the signal transmitted through cellphones that brought the mighty to their knees, and left the country in mortal combat between two groups. (Hmmmm...)

Makes one misty eyed and come over all sort of  Sic Transit Gloria, eh? ...

... and renders us mindful of poems of decline and decay:

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said - 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure dome decree...' "

All antique notions of foreign empires that did not punch their time cards in on that last era of recorded time...

Anyway, so I think Kashwak is sort of like old Xanadu, and Xanadu itself is a sort of TAZ. Now I know I am disclosing my age referring to a TAZ, a Temporary Autonomous Zone, but it is an idea too rich to let sit on the shelf.

A TAZ is that secret garden where we can go to escape whatever demons are pursuing us.

I think we'll need some TAZes soon, some strong Kashwaks to escape into, but where they will be...? Who knows?
As the old proverb says,

"The only thing uncertain is death (the time and place thereof) and TAZes."

--

Stephen King's "The Cell"

I am always surprised what I see in books and what other people see, particularly reviewers. When the book "The Cell" came out - "cell" means "cellular telephone" - most people saw it as a dark, technophobic story:  a pusle sent via cell phones changes everyone using a cell phone into a new type of human, unthinking, telepathic, and dead to emotions.
(Kashwak=NoFo plays an important part in this novel.)

It was - and is - obvious to me that the story describes the division of a society into two antagonistic divisions... two inevitably warring factions. The technology is window dressing. In this way, "The Cell" is like "The Stand" in which a super-flu decimates the world. (I have already gone on record as saying that "The Stand" will be read by future ages when 99% of our writing is consigned to the atomic disruptors.)
I suppose reviewers might have said at the time that "The Stand" was plague-ophobic.

Stephen King is telling us - and has always told us - something important about ourselves, and it is about time we read his work in a deeper and more critical manner... if we are still capable of it.

--
pix: http://mattersofopinion.net/

Stephen King Sees It Through

Stephen King has written some really bad stuff. However, he has also written some masterpieces. The Stand comes to mind, as well as The Shining. I always liked Dolores Claiborne, but more as a book on tape experience and the film was rather poor. I believe The Stand will be read by future generations just as we now read Dickens. It is that good that it does transcend the ordinary run of good Lit. The early works were very good and they lead to the climax of his genius in The Stand. He has done well since, but has not come near his Dante-esque heights of The Stand. Sometimes I wonder if Mr. King possesses some of the clairvoyance ascribed to some of his characters. The novel Dreamcatcher was published in 2001. Hence, it was probably written in 2000. Yet, does not his depiction of the Government and Military frighteningly coincide with future reality in Iraq? Within his writing, a startling precog weaves in and out of the story line, sometimes disturbing, for it thrusts the writer boldly into his work, disrupting our reading experience. Yet, it is a bit of the awesome. I do not know whether people will agree with me. I certainly do not agree with people. I recall a fellow who wrote that Kurt Vonnegut has passed on and , although he summed up the experiences of a generation, in the future no one would read him. I wrote to him saying that if someone actually did sum up so well, we would always read him. I picked up Schlachthof Funf and read him again. It was true. It was different. It was even better than before. In the generation of destruction, we wish to read of the ornaments of disaster. With Stephen King, however, we read of the coming tragedy.