THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
Robert Whelan
******Spoilers for THE STAND************
# 1.
I have never reread THE STAND, but recently I splurged on two
used paperbacks, for $2 a piece. I love the older paperback. It's in
new condition, printed on that really fine thin paper to make it look
shorter than it really is, with the blue cover of the melding man/raven
face with the red eyes. I am reading the "Uncut" version, referring
to the older version only when I notice something.
I'm not sure about the new introduction. I can't tell if it
is older, restored material or added. It feels added, however. The uncut
version adds the word "baby" to the dying man's first mention of "Lavon"
to the guys at the gas station. This would seem to be to make it
fit better with the new introductory material, in which the kid
is referred to as "Baby Lavon" all the time. In the original, there
was a moment of realistic uncertainty as to who he meant when he
first said "Is Lavon all right". I liked this feeling of connectedness
to events outside of the present moment, the "in media res" feeling.
The new introduction spoils this quite a bit. (or the old one, if it
was the old one). My feeling is that this introduction is newly
written, not old reincorporated material. Personally, I think it
has the feel of "new King"...overexplaining, excessively talky.
Personally, as I remember "The Stand" as beginning with the
peaceful gas station, I prefer it the old way. This new introduction
explains too much, right away, and doesn't really add to the pathos
of the dying man asking about his dead wife and daughter.
as they exit the house. Sometimes it is better to leave things less
than completely explained. How Campion escaped the compound is explained
in a later chapter, and waiting for that explanation whets the
readers appetite. The material in the beginning spoils that
anticipation, and makes the later revelatory material redundant.
What's with King and adolescent humor? Couldn't he have resisted
having Charlie running around with bras and slips in his hands?
Ha ha.
Noticed the change of "Disco" to "Rap" with Larry Underwood's Mom.
No big deal. Works better, in this day.
Chapter 6.
Additional material is added, and I believe it is King
actively ADDING material, since it seems to be more topical than
the novel would have been when he first wrote it, in the scene
where Frannie talks with her Dad. The beautifully spare
portrait of her father, and the summer sun on the garden, and
her listening to him talk and tell stories is marred by King
actually writing in some of the stories that the old man is telling.
The old man is described as a wonderful story teller, in the old
version, and in this, but the stories told aren't that wonderful,
or that well told. They would have been better left to the
imagination. Especially silly was the word "frig", which can
hardly be considered an expletive, and Fran's delight in her
father's foulmouthedness. A portrait of affection is cheapened
by this amplification of the relationship between Fran and
her dad, and the filling-in makes the relationship seem more
immature and goofy than in the original version, a shared love
of cursing being the basis for their affection.
Also, King doesn't leave it up to the reader to figure out
that the old man is against abortion. He adds to the old
dialogue, in which the old man relates his opposition to
it to the death of his son Fred, with a heavier handed
statement about it being "infanticide". Now, at the same time
as I totally understand what King adds in here about "true
logic proceeding from irrationality" it is a bit clumsy in
the mouth of an old man surprised by his daughter's pregnancy,
and not sure what to say to her. The dialogue from the older
version was more in keeping with this portrait, even if it
didn't quite deliver the message King wants to as clearly.
Also, he seems to have deliberately changed it so that
when Fran asks him about the abortion, her father wisely suggests
that it was what she REALLY came to him to talk about, making
the entire conversation ABOUT abortion, not about surprising
her dad with her pregnancy. Dad becomes more didactic, a mouth
puppet for the author, rather than the more hesitant and human
character he was before. Also, his super wise "knowing" that
that was what she "really" came to talk to him about takes
away from the moment of silence, that, in the original, seemed
a moment in which he collected his thoughts about the subject.
If he "knew" she "really" came to talk about abortion, then
why the need for a pregnant pause?
Robert Whelan
Newsgroups: alt.books.stephen-king,rec.arts.books,alt.fan.authors.stephen-king
Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
References: <Pine.SUN.3.96.980211222307.12196B-100000@amanda>
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy
Followup-To:
2.
In the Chapter where Larry Underwood wakes up with Maria, why did King
feel it necessary to add in lines to make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that
his references to Maria being really "oral", and the line that
refers to the events that lead up the the nights "frantic gobbling
finale" are connected? He adds a line where Larry remembers
"being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick" for those out there who
didn't get the more subtle (and not that subtle either) reference to
oral sex in the older version. Whether or not the writing was
subtle or not, at least it was spare. There is something irritating
about overuse of the same words. Twice in a few lines the word
"gobbling" gets used, and it's clumsy. The feel I get is that King
found the previous, spare wording too ambiguous (at least to his eyes
today, or his idea of his audiences intelligence) and he feels it needs
more explication. I think it's a bit embarrassing that he focuses on
this to amplify and make clear, and sad that his previous good judgement
that it had been made clear enough has been replaced by something cruder,
that doesn't mind a repetitious use of words, or thinks a pun on
"gobbling" is funny enough to interrupt the flow of a scene with.
There was a line that I immediately winced at, when he is remembering
his mom's food buying (for him) which listed a bunch of things she
had bought for him, ending with (in the original) the item "a
gallon of chocolate cheesecake ice cream in the fridge". The rhythm
of this line is fine, in the original. But King screws with it for
the superficial sake of topicality (I assume) by changing it to
"Baskin Robbins Peach Delight ice cream in the fridge. Along with
a Sara Lee cheesecake. The kind with strawberries on top." The
focus is supposed to be on how his mom is buying things she can't
afford for her son. This added line about the Sara Lee cheesecake
struck me as wrong as soon as I read it, and when I went back to
the original, I found that, yes, it had not been there before. What's
wrong about it is that it adds on to a sentence that, rhythmically, had
already concluded. The two short sentences added on seems to be for
emphasis...and what is being emphasized? "Sara Lee". It sounds like a product
endorsement, whereas the previous passing reference to Baskin Robbins
and other foods seemed like mere versimilitude. So what if Baskin
Robbins no longer makes that flavor? Why screw up the feel of the
passage? Why has King lost his sense of poetry, for even his own work?
Also, King "improves" the passage, feeling perhaps that he hasn't quite
made it clear enough that Larry's mom loves him, by adding on, in Larry's
flashback to the food in the fridge, his memory of going into the bathroom
AFTER the fridge, seeing new toothpaste, toothbrushes, and cologne,
including in this excessive flashback his mom's opinion on Old Spice
cologne, and Larry's thoughts about how "real love is silent as well as
blind" just in case his audience didn't get that Larry's mom loved him,
in her own way. This extra passage ends with Larry brushing his teeth,
"wondering if there might not be a song in that someplace." King has
now immersed us so far in what was supposed to be a brief flashback
recollection of the events that led to the "frantic gobbling finale"
mentioned at the beginning, that when the next line comes.."The oral
hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else"
For a moment we think we are still in the flashback to Larry in his
mom's apartment. This is because the flashback has gone overboard
in accomplishing what had been described as a mere attempt to "retrace
yesterday from it's innocuous beginnings to it's frantic gobbling
finale". King makes attempts to keep the tense past, but screw up
when Larry "began brushing his teeth" instead of "had begun brushing
his teeth" making the oral hygienist entry confusing. There was no
such confusion in the previous version, which ended with the list of
food his mom had bought, all contained within a single paragraph,
allowing the paragraph split to be a natural switch back to his present
ordeal with the girl his just slept with, and allowing the contrast
in tenses (his mom "had gone out and stocked up" vs. "The oral hygienist
came in" to smoothly indicate the return from flashback. I don't know
if King cut this new material out of the first draft, or wrote it new
for this version, but his previous instincts seemed to be better.
Robert Whelan
Robert Whelan
Newsgroups: alt.books.stephen-king,rec.arts.books,alt.fan.authors.stephen-king
Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy
Followup-To:
3.
In the Introduction, King mentions Fran's relationship with her mother
as one of the elements of the story that truly enhances the "Uncut"
version. I'm afraid it enhances in the most clumsy and overwritten
way, shoving in tons of background to Fran's life, and compulsively
overdescribing the parlor. At one point, to emphasize what a bitch
Fran's mom is, parentheses are inserted during the description of
the grandfather clock like this "(it had originally come into being
in the Buffalo, New York, workshop of Tobias, a place which had
undoubtedly been as smoky and nasty as Peter's workshop, although
such a comment would have struck Carla as completely irrelevant)"
This sort of enhancement we could have done without. King claims that
the included material is like the "bread crumbs" in Hansel & Gretel,
not essential to plot, but wonderful pieces of detail. Tobias' workshop
is not analagous to the breadcrumbs at all, which in the original tale,
enhanced it by adding detail to the essential story, which involved
Hansel and Gretel's struggle to survive. The breadcrumbs were a failed
attempt of theirs to find their way. The workshop of Tobias is just
stupid. It's a rude and boorish author barging into his own story to
make a POINT absolutely clear....Carla is a bitch, and she hates Peter's
dark and smoky workroom, and Fran loves it. Carla vs. Fran and Peter.
Yeah, we get it! Got it already when you hammered it into us with the
flashbacks to Carla's screaming voice as she tells little Fran to
get out of that filthy workroom, and with that saccharine sweet
reference to Fran's childish imaginings about hobbits and Alice in
Wonderland.
His portrait of Fran's mother Carla is horrible. She's a hysterical
one note harpie, who plays the devil to Peter's God, at least in this
new improved version. Everything is made obvious in this version.
(Assume Caveman impression) Ugh! Carla bad! Mean Mommy! Peter good,
Fran Good! Peter slap stupid bitch about! Him Real Man!
I don't know if this material was really all original, because a lot
of it seems awfully "Rose Madder" like, in it's broad simple cartoon
brush strokes in developing Carla. I would suspect that it was
rewritten for this version, for I can't believe that even the unedited
King of the original version was quite as unashamed of indulging in
such B-movie caricatures as the present day King seems to be. I doubt
the younger King could have indulged in such blatant and embarassing
male chauvinism originally, a chauvinism that seems to infantilize
Fran, who had seemed much more impressive in the original version,
because she wasn't playing to the condescending paternalism of
the new, "improved" Peter.
The worst thing about this new chapter is that it tries to jam in
a lifelong family problem, and resolve it, in one chapter, including
all the background, the childhood trauma, (unbelievable..Fran remembers
peeing on a rug from 3 years old?) Peter's habit of leaving
Carla to have her say, and turns it all around in a few short pages.
In the original, Peter was a hesitant old man, who didn't believe in
abortion, but wasn't preaching about it, and Carla was not seen, but
was pretty well described in absentia, and was thus a sympathetic
character. In a later chapter, where Fran is feeling guilty about
the (in the original) undescribed conference with her mom, because
she feels the upset has made her mother ill, our knowledge of the
true cause of her mom's illness (the plague) allows us to know that
Fran's guilt is unnecessary, but still allows us to feel for Fran
as she worries about a cared for relative. With this cartoon monster
version of created for this improved version, we cannot empathize
with Fran's guilt and fear for her mom in the slightest. In the
new version, Fran loves her mom JUST BECAUSE, not for any reason
we, as readers can see or imagine. Had this chapter been left out,
we could have imagined Carla as a person worthy of love. Filled in,
we can't.
Robert Whelan
4.
Was the extra chapter with Larry's mom necessary? We know his mom worked
a difficult cleaning lady job, but why is it necessary for Larry to go to
her workplace? Nothing new is advanced, beyond what was revealed during
Larry's homecoming. All that happens is that the difficult (but very
effective) homecoming scene is pointlessly rehashed. And, as seems to be
the effect of these filled in scenes, they ruin their effect when
missing...the feeling that the novel is larger than what we have been
shown...that things are going on between chapters, that the novel was
alive.
King states that this isn't his favorite
book, but that it seems to be the fan's favorite. He produced this "uncut"
version in answer to fan demand. They wanted more, and so he gave it
to them. The trouble is, the reason it was so popular was because of
this feeling it created, this feeling that there WAS more. This is what
made it such an immersive and involving experience....the missing
material was not necessary, and by it's absence mimicked reality.
By "filling in the details" King has screwed up what makes the book so
good, what makes it "real". He shows too much, and by his excess
makes what is shown seem fake, by it's very completeness. If a
painter takes a well recieved painting and adds canvas to it's edges
to show what was only hinted at partially in the original, he had
better make sure the additions also hint at further detail beyond their
borders. And they had better be as detailed as the original focused on
painting, and support it rather than distract from it.
The Lord of the Rings created a world too large for the story, and
didn't try to show it all, though it hinted at stories and events
occurring all around the edges of the main character's adventures.
The litmus test that made it all seem real was it's incompleteness. In
"The Hobbit" we get hints of a struggle with the "Necromancer" that occurs
outside the main story, but in which Gandalf is involved. It is a
tantalizing hint of things occurring outside, and makes the main story
that much more real because of the awareness of peripheral action. What
King does, in an attention-deficit-disorder style, is pay attention to
every peripheral distraction that comes into his mind. His editing
process, back when he took it on himself to cut down the novel, rather
than let others do it, produced something that HINTED at other events
going on in the background, of feelings occurring inside people's heads
that weren't necessary to detail.
Reinstating this material, as clumsily as he seems to be doing, destroys
that. I am surprised that he seems so unaware of WHY this novel
captivated his audience, and by publishing this "unedited" version, he
is killing that very quality. Sadly, since he claims he did not want
to edit it down, this quality was apparently the accidental byproduct of
reluctant self-enforced discipline, and so it is not surprising that he
stupidly destroys it in his eagerness to give his fans more, or in his
eagerness to indulge in vomitous side tracking. How could his fans
possibly not want to know what stories Fran's dad tells? Won't they
be fascinated by the "Fran's mom is a hysterical psycho" portrait he
paints for us? Oh, and they MUST know the name of the guy who made
the grandfather clock in Fran's mom's parlor, even though Fran hates
the clock and would not take it if offered her. Moronic.
Ultimately, including too much material destroys "suspension of disbelief"
because it's inclusion becomes obviously AUTHOR insertions, TELLING,
not SHOWING. It makes the audience aware of the "guy behind the curtain"
to reference Oz.
All right. Back to griping at the novel itself...
(cont.)
JGM
Robert Whelan wrote (edited):
> In the Chapter where Larry Underwood wakes up with Maria, why did King
> feel it necessary to add in lines to make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that
(snip)
> The feel I get is that King
> found the previous, spare wording too ambiguous (at least to his eyes
> today, or his idea of his audiences intelligence) and he feels it needs
> more explication. I think it's a bit embarrassing that he focuses on
> this to amplify and make clear, and sad that his previous good judgement
> that it had been made clear enough has been replaced by something cruder,
(snip)
I tend to mostly agree with Robert about the superiority of the sparer
versions (although I'm feeling contentious enough to point out that I
have a very hard time reading all his monolithic paragraphs filled with
quotations, which is a bit ironic given the subject matter, my own
propensity towards the odd comma-splice notwithstanding).
But, I wonder whether the idea that King re-wrote these parts in an
unsuccessful attempt to "improve" upon the original version isn't
exactly backwards. The implication I got from reading the introduction
and/or some of the publicity that surrounded Uncut's release was that
the original version had to be shortened at the publisher's demand, and
that some combination of King and his editor(s) did the dirty work. So,
with Uncut, we are supposed to be reading the work as originally
submitted for publication (with a few small touch-ups with regards to
dates etc.). This would seem to mean that we're not so much seeing a
degradation in artistic judgement over time but a change from an
externally-edited style to an un-edited style (which is of course
exactly what the "Complete and Uncut" edition promises).
Now, it's very possible that, in meeting the publisher's demands for a
shorter manuscript back in '78, King or his editor(s), in addition to
removing entire subplots, took the opportunity to tighten up some of the
prose -- to the positive effect Robert outlines. (I also suspect that
issues like usage of brand names posed a bit more of a potential problem
back when King was only a 150-pound gorrilla). In reverting to the old
manuscript, King may have thrown these stylistic babies out with the
contentual bathwater.
So, while I agree that comparing the two versions is interesting and
that a case can be made for the tauter prose in a given section of the
older version, I can't condone using such comparisons as fodder for the
"has King lost it?" debate, at least without some authoritative
information about what was written, re-written, or edited out when and
by whom.
Jim
Robert Whelan
In article <34E884...@bcrvm1.vnet.ibm.com>, JGM wrote:
>Robert Whelan wrote (edited):
> I tend to mostly agree with Robert about the superiority of the sparer
>versions (although I'm feeling contentious enough to point out that I
>have a very hard time reading all his monolithic paragraphs filled with
>quotations, which is a bit ironic given the subject matter, my own
>propensity towards the odd comma-splice notwithstanding).
Sorry. There is only so much time I can devote to it...I'll try
to "edit it down" to make it more readable.
> But, I wonder whether the idea that King re-wrote these parts in an
>unsuccessful attempt to "improve" upon the original version isn't
>exactly backwards. The implication I got from reading the introduction
>and/or some of the publicity that surrounded Uncut's release was that
>the original version had to be shortened at the publisher's demand, and
>that some combination of King and his editor(s) did the dirty work. So,
>with Uncut, we are supposed to be reading the work as originally
>submitted for publication (with a few small touch-ups with regards to
>dates etc.). This would seem to mean that we're not so much seeing a
>degradation in artistic judgement over time but a change from an
>externally-edited style to an un-edited style (which is of course
>exactly what the "Complete and Uncut" edition promises).
According to King in his introduction, he had a choice of accepting
other editors' help, or doing it himself. He chose to take on that
task himself. But he has also stated that he had rewritten quite
a bit during the preparation of the "uncut" version. The trouble is,
the "edited" style, is King's own. Contrasting his own "edited" and
"unedited" styles is basically what I, and most everyone who claims
King has degraded over the years, point to.
<SNIP>
> So, while I agree that comparing the two versions is interesting and
>that a case can be made for the tauter prose in a given section of the
>older version, I can't condone using such comparisons as fodder for the
>"has King lost it?" debate, at least without some authoritative
>information about what was written, re-written, or edited out when and
>by whom.
Absolutely. It isn't really possible to claim that King has "lost it"
based solely on the differences between the old Stand and the Uncut.
What is more likely is that King has stopped editing his work, even
though I, as an appreciator of the tighter prose in his older novels,
am dismayed at the thought that had he not had external pressure placed
on him, those older novels I admire might have been pretty awful. As
an admirer of his work, I tend to assume he edits himself when he cares
about his work, and if the story isn't working, he indulges himself.
And, of course, if the story wasn't one he cared about, he never feels
like going back to edit it. Thus, "Rose Madder", "Gerald's Game".
I would like to point out that the last reasonably "tight" novel of
his was "Misery", which, coincidentally, would have been the last
true "Bachman" book, that is, the last book written by King for
himself, not for his market. Well, not quite the last. "Desperation"
for me, felt like it had some passion in it again.
R.
Fiona Webster
"Edited" vs. "Unedited" isn't an accurate characterization. They're
both highly edited. The first version is missing large chunks from
King's original manuscript. The second version has restored most
of those chunks, but alters the text in numerous other, new, ways.
Such as moving the dates for the story a decade forward, without
changing the cultural references, which introduces numerous
anachronisms.
For what it's worth, there are also differences in the text between
the 1978 hardback and the 1980 paperback versions of the *first*
version of _The Stand_.
--Fiona Webster
http://www.oceanstar.com/horror
JGM
Fiona Webster wrote:
> For what it's worth, there are also differences in the text between
> the 1978 hardback and the 1980 paperback versions of the *first*
> version of _The Stand_.
Beyond just fixing typos or other errors? Really? I don't think I've
ever seen the original hardcover of The Stand. Can you provide
details?
Jim
Fiona Webster
I wrote:
> For what it's worth, there are also differences in the text between
> the 1978 hardback and the 1980 paperback versions of the *first*
> version of _The Stand_.
Jim replied:
> Beyond just fixing typos or other errors? Really? I don't think I've
> ever seen the original hardcover of The Stand. Can you provide
> details?
Sorry--I can't. I tried to find my notes on this last night, but couldn't
find them. What happened was, when I got the 1990 (revised) version,
I sat down with it and with my 1978 hardcover, and started comparing
notes. In the first 100 pages, I found so many (mostly small) changes,
I got overwhelmed by the prospect of documenting them and all, and
gave up. Somewhere in there I did find one or two places where the
wording was different between the '78 HC and '80 pb.
I did, however, find my notes on changes for the 1990 version. In
addition to the obvious part about the dates being changed and the
added portions, they include the following:
-- "Jesus" changed to "Moses in the bullrushes"
-- "reddish" to "reddish-purple"
-- "naked as a jay" to "naked as a nuthatch"
-- "Roman Meal" to "pumpernickel"
-- "You got a name, boy?" to "You got a name, Babalugah?"
and so on.
It's obvious that SK went over the text with a fine-toothed comb,
but even so, there are hundreds of anachronisms due to the change
in dates. For example, what was once "a BankAmerica card that
was issued in 1976" becomes an anachronism when changed to
"a BankAmerican card that was issued in 1986."
One way to get a quick dose of the anachronisms is to read
Chapter 5, about Larry Underwood's music biz success, and
ask yourself, "Is this 1980 or 1990?" Do you really think
Larry would've been fantasizing about "balling Racquel Welch"
in 1990? Or would've been asked to record a remake of the
McCoy's "Hang On, Sloopy?" Or, for that matter, have had
"Baby Can You Dig Your Man?" derided by some as "nigger
music"?
I know, I know... perhaps it's nitpicking. But why did he
have to change the dates? The whole story makes so much
more sense, coming after the bleakness of the end of the
'70s, then after the Reagan-era '80s.
--Fiona W.
David J. Loftus
I'm not much of a King fan, but I liked _The Stand_ quite a bit.
Unfortunately, in the edition I read, the text misspelled the name of
Eric Clapton's late 1960s power trio.
Not quite as appalling at misquoting T.S. Eliot in _Thinner_, but
still....
David Loftus
Robert Whelan
In article <6cbnk5$osn$3...@news.smart.net>, Fiona Webster wrote:
>"Edited" vs. "Unedited" isn't an accurate characterization. They're
>both highly edited. The first version is missing large chunks from
>King's original manuscript. The second version has restored most
>of those chunks, but alters the text in numerous other, new, ways.
>Such as moving the dates for the story a decade forward, without
>changing the cultural references, which introduces numerous
>anachronisms.
This is what King says he has done (changed the text in numerous ways).
What worries me is the the new King's "editing" is a lot less subtle...
>For what it's worth, there are also differences in the text between
>the 1978 hardback and the 1980 paperback versions of the *first*
>version of _The Stand_.
>
> --Fiona Webster
> http://www.oceanstar.com/horror
>
>
Robert Whelan
In article <6cbnk5$osn$3...@news.smart.net>, Fiona Webster wrote:
>"Edited" vs. "Unedited" isn't an accurate characterization. They're
>both highly edited. The first version is missing large chunks from
>King's original manuscript. The second version has restored most
>of those chunks, but alters the text in numerous other, new, ways.
>Such as moving the dates for the story a decade forward, without
>changing the cultural references, which introduces numerous
>anachronisms.
That's true. But I believe that they are editing in different
directions...one to create a tighter working version, and the other
as a fun way of playing around. From what I can see, almost all
the changes in the new version bloat, "clumsify", and overexplain, so
to call the new version "unedited" is merely my way of expressing
disgust with what seems to be King's preferred style nowadays.
I doubt, for instance, that King went over the added chapters
and tightened them up, to make their style consistent with the
older material.
>For what it's worth, there are also differences in the text between
>the 1978 hardback and the 1980 paperback versions of the *first*
>version of _The Stand_.
But no significant plot or character changes such as is done to Fran
and her father?
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
5.
A note about the change to Fran's character in the new "Uncut" version,
which I believe MAY be added material, not reinstated material. In the
original version, Fran's reason for not wanting to marry Jess was that
she "thought he was weak" and that she "didn't trust him." That was
it. Her reason for keeping the baby was a short, strong statement.
"It's partly me."
In the new version, she expands on it. Her reasons for not trusting
him are that SHE "gets the giggles" and he doesn't understand. Apparently
she needs someone who will understand her giggles and goofiness, whereas
previously the issue seemed to be that JESS was the one who lacked
maturity. The new version seems to twist Fran's maturity level around,
emphasizing her giggles, and her love of hobbits, Alice in wonderland,
her father's cursing. I know that King has made a point of pointing out
the importance of preserving "innocent" qualities, keeping the child
alive... But I don't like what is done to Fran. The sparer, maturer
portrait of Fran in the old version was much more impressive. I wish
I knew if the immaturity of Fran in this was due to King embellishing
or if it's the way it was originally.
I also think it's a bit odd that Fran's statement "It's partly me" is
clarified so much. It's changed to "The baby is partly me" and then
"If that's ego, I don't care". Almost as if King, seperated from this
character for a while, found her statement of egoism surprising, and
had to have the character comment on it herself, apologizing for it,
almost. I prefer the straight simple version, even if the "It" is
a bit ambiguous. But really, what other "it" could it be other than
the baby? Had I suggested a change, it would have been "it's part of
me", and left it at that.
Robert W.
Augustine
SPOILERS FOR THE STAND
Wow! This is a big, long thread. I couldn't even read through the
whole of most of the posts, so I'll just make a few comments.
First of all, I never read the original Stand so my view is sort of
myopic. Now, I don't think changing "LaVon" to "Baby Lavon" makes much
of a difference. This observation by Robert, like a lot of his other
ones, seem to refer to something subconscious, like if the reader is
blatantly told something (Uncut) or the reader infers it (Original).
And I don't think the few changes, including time differences,
really affect the book either. I actually preferred reading an
"updated" version, set in 1990 rather than 1980.
Overall, I favor the UnCut, newer version. And I think the biggest
reason for this is the sub-plot of the relationship between The Trashcan
Man and the Kid. I found this chapter quite interesting. And it
exhibited an important point: that Flagg was willing to use his powers
and kill to get the Trashcan man on his side, it showed how important
Trash was to Flagg. What does everyone else think of this additional
chapter?
So, in conclusion, I just want to say that of all the books I've
read, The Stand (Uncut or original, since the difference seems to be
minimal) is my favorite. Also I hope I have not offended anyone because
this is just my opinion.
Chris Augustine
Robert Whelan
Newsgroups: alt.books.stephen-king,rec.arts.books,alt.fan.authors.stephen-king
Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy
Followup-To:
In article <6ccso2$t0s$1...@news.smart.net>, Fiona Webster wrote:
>I wrote:
>> For what it's worth, there are also differences in the text between
>> the 1978 hardback and the 1980 paperback versions of the *first*
>> version of _The Stand_.
>
>Jim replied:
>> Beyond just fixing typos or other errors? Really? I don't think I've
>> ever seen the original hardcover of The Stand. Can you provide
>> details?
>
>Sorry--I can't. I tried to find my notes on this last night, but couldn't
>find them. What happened was, when I got the 1990 (revised) version,
>I sat down with it and with my 1978 hardcover, and started comparing
>notes. In the first 100 pages, I found so many (mostly small) changes,
>I got overwhelmed by the prospect of documenting them and all, and
>gave up. Somewhere in there I did find one or two places where the
>wording was different between the '78 HC and '80 pb.
>
>I did, however, find my notes on changes for the 1990 version. In
>addition to the obvious part about the dates being changed and the
>added portions, they include the following:
> -- "Jesus" changed to "Moses in the bullrushes"
> -- "reddish" to "reddish-purple"
> -- "naked as a jay" to "naked as a nuthatch"
> -- "Roman Meal" to "pumpernickel"
> -- "You got a name, boy?" to "You got a name, Babalugah?"
>and so on.
Notice the trend, though...it's always towards bloating it up.
Every significant change, even minor, is more of a mouthful. I
would argue "jay" to be more economical than "nutchatch", as well
as being more naturally colloquial (I've heard that phrase, but never
the "nuthatch" version...why change it? The only reason seems to be
that "nuthatch" sounds FUNNIER...which is a bad thing in a novel that
with a largely serious tone.
I noticed "You got a name, Babalugah" right away. It seems a pointless
change. The only thing going for it is that it's a Funnier sounding
name than "boy" and also sounds less threatening. Perhaps King
felt that his Gruff/Kind portrait of Sherriff Baker wasn't quite
clear enough on the "kind" portion, and a goofy, funny name like
"Babalugah" would make it more clear. This, to me, indicates a
sensibility that has become deafer to his own prose. I found the
original "boy" to be rather threatening, but Nick's own assessment
of the "canned speech" nature of the Sheriff's tough talk minimizes
this quite enough. Noticed that he changed "What, you can't talk?"
to "What. Cain't talk?" I presume he is trying to make the Sheriff's
written speech READ friendlier than it did in the original, bringing
it in line with the way he was actually portraying him. However,
since Nick could not read "inflections", as is pointed out, I thought
it just fine that we the reader feel a little threatened by "boy"
just as Nick feels, and let the Sheriff's behavior slowly put us
at ease over time. "Babalugah" stinks. It jolted me out of the
story to wonder "What's a babalugah? Do real people say it? Is it
an insult or friendly?" There was no such confusion with "boy".
Oh! Wait! Perhaps King is being racially sensitive. Unless
Babalugah is an even more insensitive way of addressing black people.
>It's obvious that SK went over the text with a fine-toothed comb,
>but even so, there are hundreds of anachronisms due to the change
>in dates. For example, what was once "a BankAmerica card that
>was issued in 1976" becomes an anachronism when changed to
>"a BankAmerican card that was issued in 1986."
>
>One way to get a quick dose of the anachronisms is to read
>Chapter 5, about Larry Underwood's music biz success, and
>ask yourself, "Is this 1980 or 1990?" Do you really think
>Larry would've been fantasizing about "balling Racquel Welch"
>in 1990? Or would've been asked to record a remake of the
>McCoy's "Hang On, Sloopy?" Or, for that matter, have had
>"Baby Can You Dig Your Man?" derided by some as "nigger
>music"?
>
>I know, I know... perhaps it's nitpicking. But why did he
>have to change the dates? The whole story makes so much
>more sense, coming after the bleakness of the end of the
>'70s, then after the Reagan-era '80s.
I agree. Changing the dates was stupid. The novel begins at
a gas station, which gets smashed up. Just about as 70's as
you can get, with the oil crisis on everyone's mind.. There is a
character, later, who exults about a brand new gas guzzler he is driving,
and how with everyone dead, worrying about gas is stupid. Makes very
little sense in the 80's.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
6.
Uh...just in case you didn't guess...SPOILERS. No need for extra lines
here. The thread is one big spoiler, and will continue to be so.
Chapter 7, in the Uncut version, is added, of course. The reason
it was cut is pretty obvious, since the "delirium" of Vic Palfrey
in the lab hospital room is handled much better in other death scenes,
particularly that of Larry's mother. It has the wierdly echoing
quality of truly bad King. I hope I am not just ascribing bad
qualities to passages that my memory identifies as "new", but there
is definitely a change in "feel" to this passage, which follows
the Fran and Peter conference about the baby.
I think I may dislike this passage because it pretty much
violates the general habit of the older version to view death from
the POV of the well. This was the POV of a sick person, and a not
very well known sick person. Vic wasn't developed as a character
prior to this.. he was the least viewed character at the gas station.
So King tries to insert background via delirium, and wastes Vic's
lucidity on making pointless observations of the steel walls he's
in, the tubes coming out of him, all in the space of one brief moment
of lucidity in an illness that has supposedly been going on for a
while. If this was older material, it could have been left out. Vic
was a boring character, and his death would have been better left
"off screen". Also, the seriousness of his situation is violated by
Stephen King goofy humor, inserted with the man's "delirium" as the
excuse. His focus on the tube connected to his urine, his noticing
something jammed up his ass "What in God's name could that one be...
shit Radar?" seems to be in violation of the portrait of a really
sick man. Humor requires a certain...health.
Following the "shit radar" joke, we are treated to this passage.
"`Hey!'
He had intended a resonant indignant shout. What he produced was the
humble whisper of a very sick man..."
This appears to be King the author, catching the problem that I just
noticed...that old Vic is thinking too fiestily for his state of
illness...I just find such an odd discrepancy between mental state
and health to be really wierd. King seemed to think so too, and tried
to fix it by having Vic find out that he isn't as healthy as he thinks.
What a clumsy fix, though. This entire chapter should have been left
on the cutting room floor. "Jordy Verrill" type humor seems out of
place in this novel, particularly to a person who read it without
that kind of humor. (See the movie "Creepshow" if you don't know what
I'm talking about.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
From rwh...@dorsai.org Wed Feb 18 01:42:55 1998
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 01:27:19 -0500 (est)
From: Robert Whelan <rwh...@dorsai.org>
To: Augustine <augu...@telenet.net>
Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Augustine wrote:
> SPOILERS FOR THE STAND
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Wow! This is a big, long thread. I couldn't even read through the
> whole of most of the posts, so I'll just make a few comments.
>
> First of all, I never read the original Stand so my view is sort of
> myopic. Now, I don't think changing "LaVon" to "Baby Lavon" makes much
> of a difference. This observation by Robert, like a lot of his other
> ones, seem to refer to something subconscious, like if the reader is
> blatantly told something (Uncut) or the reader infers it (Original).
Right. That's basically my point. The reader understanding by
inference was an element of the original that added an element of
reality..that the novel was larger than we were seeing. Changing
Lavon to "Baby Lavon" is no big deal, true, but it had that element
of "reality" where you don't know quite what the guy means for a bit
until he actually says "Baby Lavon" later. The original removes the
ambiguity from even his first mention of "Lavon", which I thought (when I
originally read it) to be a technique, not a flaw...something to
draw the reader in.
> And I don't think the few changes, including time differences,
> really affect the book either. I actually preferred reading an
> "updated" version, set in 1990 rather than 1980.
Time differences weren't a big deal. I remember Larry's mom bad
mouthing "rap music" which read a lot better than when she
bad mouthed "disco" in the original.
> Overall, I favor the UnCut, newer version. And I think the biggest
> reason for this is the sub-plot of the relationship between The Trashcan
> Man and the Kid. I found this chapter quite interesting. And it
> exhibited an important point: that Flagg was willing to use his powers
> and kill to get the Trashcan man on his side, it showed how important
> Trash was to Flagg. What does everyone else think of this additional
> chapter?
Haven't read it yet, but my biggest problem with the original Stand
was that the ending seemed to come out of the blue. I expect that
additional Trashcan Man material would make a big difference in that
department. So without having read it yet, I have positive expectations.
King himself said that he was pleased with the original version, as he
had edited it, except for the Trashcan Man material that he had to
cut.
> So, in conclusion, I just want to say that of all the books I've
> read, The Stand (Uncut or original, since the difference seems to be
> minimal) is my favorite. Also I hope I have not offended anyone because
> this is just my opinion.
Well, the Stand was almost MY favorite, even though I was disappointed
by the ending. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, despite my griping.
Robert W.
Jon R.
Robert Whelan wrote:
(snipped _long_ speech against the chapter dealing with Fran's mom)
> Had this chapter been left out,
> we could have imagined Carla as a person worthy of love. Filled in,
> we can't.
I know I'm in a slight minority, but I really didn't like Frannie.
This chapter shows me a possible reason why she is such a bitch.
That's a good enough reason as any to include it.
Jon R.
Mid-World Girl
In article <34EAA4...@nor.uib.noXXX>, "Jon R." <Jon.R...@nor.uib.noXXX> wrote:
>> Had this chapter been left out,
>> we could have imagined Carla as a person worthy of love. Filled in,
>> we can't.
>
>I know I'm in a slight minority, but I really didn't like Frannie.
>This chapter shows me a possible reason why she is such a bitch.
>That's a good enough reason as any to include it.
>
>Jon R.
Frannie might've been a bitch, I certainly agree she was hard. But I think
she was softer at the start in the original edition and became hard.
Circumstances pending, I can't really blame her for it... but I think King
should've have fiddled with her too much either in the uncut (though I prefer
this version) -- simply because he knew what she would become so he took some
of her becoming away -- do you get what I mean?
I feel like I'm rambling, but I hope you get the point.
From a fan who has begun the transition from Casual to Serious,
Maggie the Mid-World Girl
JGM
Fiona Webster wrote:
> It's obvious that SK went over the text with a fine-toothed comb,
> but even so, there are hundreds of anachronisms due to the change
> in dates. For example, what was once "a BankAmerica card that
> was issued in 1976" becomes an anachronism when changed to
> "a BankAmerican card that was issued in 1986."
>
> One way to get a quick dose of the anachronisms is to read
> Chapter 5, about Larry Underwood's music biz success, and
> ask yourself, "Is this 1980 or 1990?"
Absolutely. This, more than any changes in the writing *style*, is
what bugged me about the Uncut. I had probably read the original Stand
three times before I first saw Uncut, and other than the section with
the Kid and the new prologe and epilogue, I didn't really recognize
anything strikingly new and different other than the lame attempts at
updating.
> I know, I know... perhaps it's nitpicking. But why did he
> have to change the dates? The whole story makes so much
> more sense, coming after the bleakness of the end of the
> '70s, then after the Reagan-era '80s.
I don't think it's nitpicking at all. If you are going to reset a
story a decade later, you have to do more than change a few cultural
references (and Uncut even botched that). I do think that we as
Constant Readers tend to look beyond the plot (which we already knew
going into Uncut) more than the casual reader would, so such
incongruities stand out much more.
Perhaps it just goes to show what an instinctual writer King is.
Fiona's observation about the original release fitting perfectly into
the end of the '70s is, well, right on. But it doesn't appear to me
that there was any conscious attempt at commentary on the times going on
(as compared to something like, say, Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the
Vanities").
Jim
Jean Graham
Robert Whelan wrote:
> 5.
> A note about the change to Fran's character in the new "Uncut"
> version,
> which I believe MAY be added material, not reinstated material. In
> the
> original version, Fran's reason for not wanting to marry Jess was that
>
> she "thought he was weak" and that she "didn't trust him." That was
> it. Her reason for keeping the baby was a short, strong statement.
> "It's partly me."
> In the new version, she expands on it. Her reasons for not
> trusting
> him are that SHE "gets the giggles" and he doesn't understand.
> Apparently
> she needs someone who will understand her giggles and goofiness,
Don't we all? I liked the changes to Fran, mostly because I found her
rather
two-dimensional in the first version. Jess is caught up in his own
seriousness,
and I'm sure we all know people like that. People get the giggles.
Mature people
get the giggles -- and even those of us verging on 40 get goofy
sometimes.
> whereas
> previously the issue seemed to be that JESS was the one who lacked
> maturity.
He's lacking maturity, sure -- but part of that is he's also lacking a
certain amountof ability to accept the less than perfect in others; in
Fran and presumably in the
child-to-be.
> The new version seems to twist Fran's maturity level around,
> emphasizing her giggles, and her love of hobbits, Alice in wonderland,
>
> her father's cursing. I know that King has made a point of pointing
> out
> the importance of preserving "innocent" qualities, keeping the child
> alive... But I don't like what is done to Fran.
I do. This fleshes her out more, making her more like the women I know.
> The sparer, maturer
> portrait of Fran in the old version was much more impressive. I wish
> I knew if the immaturity of Fran in this was due to King embellishing
> or if it's the way it was originally.
I really don't think she's immature -- just fleshed out more and, as I
said,more real. I assumed this was embellished because I've noticed
King's
female characters growing over the decades. I re-read Gerald's Game this
weekend after reading your criticism over the past couple of weeks, and
decided to stick with my original impression -- that this was too real,
that it
gave me an enormous case of the chills because for a lot of the book I
was
that woman -- and no, I've never been abused, handcuffed, etc.
> I also think it's a bit odd that Fran's statement "It's partly me"
> is
> clarified so much. It's changed to "The baby is partly me" and then
> "If that's ego, I don't care". Almost as if King, seperated from this
>
> character for a while, found her statement of egoism surprising, and
> had to have the character comment on it herself, apologizing for it,
> almost.
Or as if his character, raised in a world where women and girls
aren'tsupposed to have, let alone voice, such feelings is attempting to
soften the impact of her statement.
> I prefer the straight simple version, even if the "It" is
> a bit ambiguous. But really, what other "it" could it be other than
> the baby? Had I suggested a change, it would have been "it's part of
> me", and left it at that.
>
Don't take this personally, but I'm glad you weren't consulted...
Jeano
> Robert W.
Robert Whelan
In article <6ceods$g...@news.logicworld.com.au>, Mid-World Girl wrote:
>In article <34EAA4...@nor.uib.noXXX>, "Jon R." <Jon.R...@nor.uib.noXXX> wrote:
>
>>> Had this chapter been left out,
>>> we could have imagined Carla as a person worthy of love. Filled in,
>>> we can't.
>>
>>I know I'm in a slight minority, but I really didn't like Frannie.
>>This chapter shows me a possible reason why she is such a bitch.
>>That's a good enough reason as any to include it.
>>
>>Jon R.
>
>Frannie might've been a bitch, I certainly agree she was hard. But I think
>she was softer at the start in the original edition and became hard.
>Circumstances pending, I can't really blame her for it... but I think King
>should've have fiddled with her too much either in the uncut (though I prefer
>this version) -- simply because he knew what she would become so he took some
>of her becoming away -- do you get what I mean?
I'm not sure. You mean he knew she would become harder, so he emphasized
her softness in the uncut version, to increase the contrast?
Dow Fairbanks
Howdy Robert,
Did you read the Hansel and Grettle story in the begging? it said more
than enough. I can see your POV though. I still felt there was more
hinted at, and I have always enjoyed King for that very reason. I still
think that there was plenty left unsaid in the uncut, and I didn't enjoy
the edited near as much. The scene with Larry's mom just adds depth of
character which is something alot of movies and alot of books miss. Did you
enjoy The Stand as a movie? I didn't cause I felt to much was "left out"
it is a similar feeling between the cut and uncut versions. Have you ever
seen any movie and just felt shorted because they left out certain scenes?
Have you seen Good Will Hunting? If you get the chance do. Its a great
movie. You can watch it and just say "Okay, why did he do that? What was
the point of this scene?" I know one of the things that bothered me about
it were the jump cuts the lack of camera movement.......But then I sat back
and watched it, and felt it reveal itself to me and I loved everything
about it.
Just my thoughts, I loved the uncut and didn't feel any of what you felt,
then of course I didn't like Lord of the Rings much.....but I know the
feeling you are talking about. If you have ever read Brooks, he has a
similar feel, especially in the second Shanara book and I loved it there
but...... oh well.
Cheers
Dow.
Augustine
Robert Whelan wrote:
> >SPOILERS FOR THE STAND
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> Time differences weren't a big deal. I remember Larry's mom bad
> mouthing "rap music" which read a lot better than when she
> bad mouthed "disco" in the original.
>
I agree with you there, I hate rap, although I'm not real fond of disco,
either :) .
> > Overall, I favor the UnCut, newer version. And I think the
> biggest
> > reason for this is the sub-plot of the relationship between The
> Trashcan
> > Man and the Kid. I found this chapter quite interesting. And it
> > exhibited an important point: that Flagg was willing to use his
> powers
> > and kill to get the Trashcan man on his side, it showed how
> important
> > Trash was to Flagg. What does everyone else think of this
> additional
> > chapter?
>
> Haven't read it yet, but my biggest problem with the original Stand
> was that the ending seemed to come out of the blue. I expect that
> additional Trashcan Man material would make a big difference in that
> department. So without having read it yet, I have positive
> expectations.
> King himself said that he was pleased with the original version, as he
>
> had edited it, except for the Trashcan Man material that he had to
> cut.
Yeah, it does sort of help with the ending.
> > So, in conclusion, I just want to say that of all the books I've
>
> > read, The Stand (Uncut or original, since the difference seems to be
>
> > minimal) is my favorite. Also I hope I have not offended anyone
> because
> > this is just my opinion.
>
> Well, the Stand was almost MY favorite, even though I was disappointed
>
> by the ending. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, despite my griping.
>
> Robert W.
I'm just curious, but what exactly did you not like about the ending? I
liked it a lot, the way The Hand of God saved the good people of
Boulder, but only after a sufficient sacrifice had been made. It made a
statement about God (As Stu put it: "God requires a sacrifrice, his
hands are bloody with it.", which is one of my favorite lines in the
book). What, exactly, do you think "came out of the blue"? Because
Mother Abigail kept saying that in the end, God woud save them. Anyway,
I loved the ending. It was just a different way to end it, a little
unexpected. Although, I guess its what you'd call a deux au machine,
right? (like all of a sudden having supernatural forces come in and save
the day, but those supernautral forces were hinted at throughout the
book) So, I was just curious.
Chris Augustine
William Grosso
Augustine wrote:
>
> I'm just curious, but what exactly did you not like about the ending?
>
Exactly ? It was the third semi-colon on page 1043 that
got to me.
--
William Grosso Phone 650-498-4255 [daytime]
http://www.smi.stanford.edu/people/grosso/
Vegard
Augustine wrote:
>> I'm just curious, but what exactly did you not like about the ending?
William Grosso replied:
>Exactly ? It was the third semi-colon on page 1043 that
>got to me.
I actually stopped reading a book once because of excessive use of
semi-colons. The author was Tim Willocks, I believe. Of course, the
book didn't have much else going for it, but it was the semi-colons
that did it.
Vegard
Robert Whelan
In article <34ECA56A...@telenet.net>, Augustine wrote:
>Robert Whelan wrote:
>
>
>
>> >SPOILERS FOR THE STAND
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>
>> > read, The Stand (Uncut or original, since the difference seems to be
>> > minimal) is my favorite. Also I hope I have not offended anyone
>> because this is just my opinion.
>> Well, the Stand was almost MY favorite, even though I was disappointed
>> by the ending. I'm enjoying it quite a lot, despite my griping.
>>
>> Robert W.
>
>I'm just curious, but what exactly did you not like about the ending? I
>liked it a lot, the way The Hand of God saved the good people of
>Boulder, but only after a sufficient sacrifice had been made. It made a
>statement about God (As Stu put it: "God requires a sacrifrice, his
>hands are bloody with it.", which is one of my favorite lines in the
>book). What, exactly, do you think "came out of the blue"? Because
>Mother Abigail kept saying that in the end, God woud save them. Anyway,
>I loved the ending. It was just a different way to end it, a little
>unexpected. Although, I guess its what you'd call a deux au machine,
>right? (like all of a sudden having supernatural forces come in and save
>the day, but those supernautral forces were hinted at throughout the
>book) So, I was just curious.
I'll find out when I get through it again. It was partly the fact that
Trashcan Man showed up pretty much out of the blue...I don't remember
how much the original foreshadowed the use of nuclear weapons (I know
that Bateman (the guy who owns Kojak, the dog) foreshadows this strongly
in the Uncut, but I haven't looked at the original to see if it is
foreshadowed there. Trashcan's part in the ending definitely needed
more buildup. Without it, it felt like it had been hastily cobbled
together. In the original, by the time he showed up again (after his
first appearance) I had forgotten about him, pretty much. Both he
and God seemed like a Deus Ex machina contrivance. We'll see.
R.
Robert Whelan
In article <34EAA4...@nor.uib.noXXX>, "Jon R." wrote:
>Robert Whelan wrote:
>(snipped _long_ speech against the chapter dealing with Fran's mom)
>
>> we could have imagined Carla as a person worthy of love. Filled in,
>> we can't.
>
>I know I'm in a slight minority, but I really didn't like Frannie.
>This chapter shows me a possible reason why she is such a bitch.
>That's a good enough reason as any to include it.
Why didn't you like Frannie?
R.
Robert Whelan
7.
I have to jump back a bit.
Chapter 8. This is the chapter in which King describes the spread of
the disease from person to person, in a fairly terrifying manner.
I noticed some wrong notes, all expansions. Here is one passage,
likely newly added, not reinstated.
"Under the California sun, and subsidized by the taxpayer's money,
someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A
very lethal chain letter".
I don't like this because it seems preachy (pointing out what we already
know, that military research started the plague) and too distanced from
the horror of the spread of the disease by the use of the "chain letter"
simile. The original spared us wise ass commentary, and concentrated on
the horror of the disease's spread.
Minor change to the sentence that lists all the people the insurance
salesman infects.
"In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers
in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, the man who came
in to change the records on the juke, and the sweet thang who waited his
table. He left her a dollar tip that was crawling with death."
This is changed to shorten the first sentence .."and the man who
came in to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that
waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death."
This second version seems to be focusing on the irony of the
guy leaving a deadly tip. It's more humorous. But I thought the
previous version had a better flow. And I don't like the new humorous
tone.
Original:
"That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court.
Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley and Hector,
infected the kids they played with on the tourist court's playground -
kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee."
Uncut adds..
"...Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes
at the laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel
corridor to get some ice, infected the fellow he passed in the hallway.
Everybody got into the act."
The first paragraph quite chillingly, by focusing on the DESK CLERK
and the kids in the playground, indicated how badly they were
spreading it around. The desk clerk would contact everyone in the
motel. Focusing on Ed infecting someone in the hallway is
totally unnecessary. He's already infected the person most likely
to spread the disease. Alas, these few lines seem to be added to
lead to the humorous line "Everybody got into the act". Seems to
be EC comics humor inserted by the author to "yuck it up" a little.
I don't know why he needed to do this. It was better before...more
elegant, and more seriously frightening.
Also, by expanding on Ed Norris's character, turning him into an
asshole, distracts from the main point of the passage...the horror
of the spread of this disease to innocent people. This horror is
reduced by focusing on one guy who "deserves" to get the disease.
It also seems to stupidly focus on the "joke" that this guy thinks
he's a great parent, meanwhile all his kids have just caught the
plague. Ha. Ha. The original version was much tighter, much scarier,
and Ed Norris's family getting infected seemed horrible because he
and his family seemed nice. Oh well.
A diatribe against chain letter scams is included here, further
diluting and distracting from the power of the original. Also is
added a "humorous" extension of the Bridge club infections, to
include Sarah's daughter Samantha, in this horrible "humorous"
passage...
"Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of clap from
her boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she had. As a *further* matter
of fact, she had nothing to worry about; next to what her mother
had given her, a good working dose of the clap was every bit as
serious as a little eczema of the eyebrows." Ha. Ha.
This feels like recent King, to me, like the ironic humor in "Needful
Things". It clashes with the previous serious tone. It's entirely
possible that the early draft had this sort of thing in it, and King
edited it out...but I don't think so. King may have been excessive,
and tightened his prose to produce the original, but I doubt he
goofed on his own creation as much at the time he was writing it.
BTW, thanks, Jon R. for reminding me to use the concept of "irony" in
these recent observations.
R.
Robert Whelan
8. In the first encounter with Nick, I noticed something that may
be an addition or part of the original manuscript, that got deleted
for the original edition.
Nick is being savagely beaten...
"Consciousness would not quite desert him. The only sounds were their
out of breath gasps as they postoned their fists into him and the
liquid twitter of a nightjar in the deep stand of pine near by".
Some conversation and a resumption of the beating...
"Consciousness was down to a narrow pencil-beam. His mouth dropped open
and he scooped the night air. The nightjar sang again, sweet and solus."
Personally, I found the contrast of the beating to the beauty of the
nightjar's call to be chilling. It meant Nick was completely alone...
The Uncut adds this line (or the original subtracted it).
"Nick heard it this time no more than he did the last."
I understand what King was trying to fix. Nick is supposed to be deaf,
so this poetic description of sounds, including the nightjar's song
can't be heard by him, even though the POV seems to be his. This
extra line, in the Uncut version, unfortunately draws attention to
the flaw. I actually was more impressed by the nightjar imagery
and felt it more a God POV, even though it might be a bit confusing,
and thought to be Nick's, and in need of a fix. The extra "fix" line
is clumsy, though, and deserved to be edited out. I'm not sure if it
is added deliberately, or simply got overlooked when King was working
from the original manuscript. It reads better the old way, despite the
possible POV confusion.
I hope that I am not making an idiot of myself by assuming that a lot
of changes are "additions". In his introduction King does not say
he added material, but the introductory blurb says it "includes
500 pages of material deleted, along with new material that King
added as he reworded the manuscript for a new generation." and "it
has a new beginning and a new ending" These sound like active
additions to me.
R.
Robert Whelan
William Grosso (gro...@smi.stanford.edu) wrote:
: Augustine wrote:
: >
: > I'm just curious, but what exactly did you not like about the ending?
: >
: Exactly ? It was the third semi-colon on page 1043 that
: got to me.
Hmmm! Could have been...sarcasm?
R.
Robert Whelan
7.1 (more thoughts from 7.)
In chapter 8., which describes the disease spreading, the Uncut has
a "chain letter" which recaps the spread of the disease as a chain
letter, of the type we see on the internet all the time. It does
so by recapping the obvious, that this thing is spreading at a horribly
fast rate, and that the death toll will be tremendous. But something
about the line about "flinging bodies into oceans" strikes me as familiar.
Was this line in the original 78 hardcover, and removed from the
paperback? I'm glad it was removed from the paperback, but it still
has a ring of familiarity.
R.
Jon R.
Robert Whelan wrote:
(snip)
> Why didn't you like Frannie?
Note: I've only read the Uncut version.
I symphatized heavily with Jessie (?), her boyfriend, in the scene
in the early chapters dealing with her pregnancy. While I buy
her behaviour as completely believable, I didn't like it much.
Later on, I was intrigued by Harold's resourcefulness, and annoyed
with Frannie's lack of acknowledgement of this. Again, this is
completely in character, so I don't object to it. I just didn't like
her very much. Harold Lauder, however, constituted a great "dark
Ben Hanscomb".
Jon R.
Robert Whelan
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Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 19:00:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Robert Whelan <rwh...@tam.dorsai.org>
To: 34EB9CC6...@thezone.net
Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
sai.org> <34EB9CC6...@thezone.net>
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy
[This message has also been posted.]
In article <34EB9CC6...@thezone.net>, Jean Graham wrote:
>Robert Whelan wrote:
>
About Fran getting the giggles:
>
>Don't we all? I liked the changes to Fran, mostly because I found her
>rather
>two-dimensional in the first version. Jess is caught up in his own
>seriousness,
>and I'm sure we all know people like that. People get the giggles.
>Mature people
>get the giggles -- and even those of us verging on 40 get goofy
>sometimes.
Actually, I don't think that Fran's succumbing to giggles was what
bothered me...it was the "show don't tell" rule. She was Telling her
father (and the readers) about her giggling tendencies, and it got
awfully precious. Peter goes "Frannie got the giggles", and "When
King Laugh comes knocking..." I preferred the sparer portrait of their
affection in the original...the expanded version was embarrassing. Had
I seen Fran, as the adult woman she is portrayed as, giving in to a fit
of giggles (as she does at one point with Jess, in the beginning) it
would be fine. Just seeing her struggle with a fit of giggles was
enough, for me. I didn't really question her decision that she didn't
trust Jess. It was obvious to me he was quite a bit untrustworthy, and
selfish.
I DIDN'T find Fran two dimensional in the first version. Thus, her
fleshing out seemed totally unnecessary. And Jess's lack of a sense of
humor, in the face of Fran's giggles on the beach pretty much showed me
that he was an uptight ass. This is why I found the added explanations
superfluous. Fran was TELLING what had already been shown. I guess
enough people complained about how they didn't like Fran, and King felt
the need to add explanations for them.
Go back and reread the section beginning with Fran putting her hands on
Jess's shoulders, to the point where she bites her tongue and sticks
it out for Jess to see..."expecting a smile as a reward, but he frowned."
This entire portrait of them talking back and forth SHOWED his
humorlessness. All before she told him she was pregnant. The fact
that King emphasizes that Fran definitely feels she loves him, before
his humorless response to her tongue, is letting us know that there
is definitely something wrong with him.
>> whereas
>> previously the issue seemed to be that JESS was the one who lacked
>> maturity.
>
>He's lacking maturity, sure -- but part of that is he's also lacking a
>certain amountof ability to accept the less than perfect in others; in
>Fran and presumably in the
>child-to-be.
>
>> The new version seems to twist Fran's maturity level around,
>> emphasizing her giggles, and her love of hobbits, Alice in wonderland,
>>
>> her father's cursing. I know that King has made a point of pointing
>> out
>> the importance of preserving "innocent" qualities, keeping the child
>> alive... But I don't like what is done to Fran.
>
>I do. This fleshes her out more, making her more like the women I know.
Like I said, she didn't *need* to be fleshed out. All those qualities
you say the Uncut adds, were there in the original.
>> The sparer, maturer
>> portrait of Fran in the old version was much more impressive. I wish
>
>> I knew if the immaturity of Fran in this was due to King embellishing
>> or if it's the way it was originally.
>
>I really don't think she's immature -- just fleshed out more and, as I
>said,more real. I assumed this was embellished because I've noticed
>King's
>female characters growing over the decades. I re-read Gerald's Game this
>weekend after reading your criticism over the past couple of weeks, and
>decided to stick with my original impression -- that this was too real,
>that it
>gave me an enormous case of the chills because for a lot of the book I
>was
>that woman -- and no, I've never been abused, handcuffed, etc.
My problem with Gerald's Game was NOT that the woman was unreal, or that
her conflicting voices were unreal. I just objected to the device of
separating them in such an unnatural way, by naming them. Had she merely
struggles with conflicting thoughts, I would have been right there with
her. But the cartoon Goody and Ruth, like bad and good angels on her
shoulder, were a bit too obvious for me.
>> I also think it's a bit odd that Fran's statement "It's partly me"
>> is
>> clarified so much. It's changed to "The baby is partly me" and then
>> "If that's ego, I don't care". Almost as if King, seperated from this
>>
>> character for a while, found her statement of egoism surprising, and
>> had to have the character comment on it herself, apologizing for it,
>> almost.
>
>Or as if his character, raised in a world where women and girls
>aren'tsupposed to have, let alone voice, such feelings is attempting to
>soften the impact of her statement.
But doesn't she "lift her chin slightly" in defiance, as if expecting her
expression of egoism to be challenged? That was enough for me. "If that's
egoism, I don't care" seems almost a footnote inserted for the hoi polloi.
King saying "Okay, the reason she is lifting her chin is because she is
feeling defensive about her egoism. Understand now, folks?" You are
right about what those lines mean, but the spare desription of her merely
lifting her chin meant the same thing, with fewer words. It is true
that the previous lines were a bit ambiguous.
>> I prefer the straight simple version, even if the "It" is
>> a bit ambiguous. But really, what other "it" could it be other than
>> the baby? Had I suggested a change, it would have been "it's part of
>> me", and left it at that.
>>
>
>Don't take this personally, but I'm glad you weren't consulted...
King didn't need to consult me, he pared it down himself, in the
original. Presumably he liked the way he had set it down. Why he
adds more explanations in the uncut is something I'm not sure of...my
charitable explanation is that he may have found his sparer, "showing" way
of doing things just didn't get through to people, and felt he had to add
explanations. Is the general impression that Fran was a bitch?
I never thought so. And so I resent further explanations that "soften"
her. She was fine the way she was.
R.
Augustine
> I'll find out when I get through it again. It was partly the fact
> that
> Trashcan Man showed up pretty much out of the blue...I don't remember
> how much the original foreshadowed the use of nuclear weapons (I know
> that Bateman (the guy who owns Kojak, the dog) foreshadows this
> strongly
> in the Uncut, but I haven't looked at the original to see if it is
> foreshadowed there. Trashcan's part in the ending definitely needed
> more buildup. Without it, it felt like it had been hastily cobbled
> together. In the original, by the time he showed up again (after his
> first appearance) I had forgotten about him, pretty much. Both he
> and God seemed like a Deus Ex machina contrivance. We'll see.
>
> R.
In the original, did it explain Trash's trip out to the nulcear
storage facility? If it didn't, I could defintley udnertnad your
distaste for the ending. I didn't read it so I don't know, but in the
uncut version, there are several sections devoted to Trash driving out
to the desert, breaking into the facility and finally carting an A-bomb
out of there. As soon as I saw him read the sign at the entrance to the
storage facility, I knew that Trash, his pyromaniac quality and a
nuclear weapon would have something to do with the ending, although I
never thought divine inertvention would have ANYTHING to do with it and
I was actually quite surprised by the way it turned out. That's why I
liked it.
Ruth J
Augustine wrote:
>
> Robert Whelan wrote:
>
> > >SPOILERS FOR THE STAND
>
>
> > > So, in conclusion, I just want to say that of all the books I've
> >
> > > read, The Stand (Uncut or original, since the difference seems to be
> >
> > > minimal) is my favorite. Also I hope I have not offended anyone
> > because
> > > this is just my opinion.
I just have to jump in here and say *The difference seems to be
minimal*? Hope your kidding 'cause the Un-Cut version is about 300+
pages longer. I don't call that minimal. That's 1/4th more storyline.
There were any number of differences beside the The Kid storyline that
made the Un-Cut version far superior.<IMHO, of course>
Ruth
--
Corduroy pillows: They're making headlines!
Robert Whelan
In article <34EE3F64...@telenet.net>, Augustine wrote:
>
> In the original, did it explain Trash's trip out to the nulcear
>storage facility? If it didn't, I could defintley udnertnad your
>distaste for the ending. I didn't read it so I don't know, but in the
>uncut version, there are several sections devoted to Trash driving out
>to the desert, breaking into the facility and finally carting an A-bomb
>out of there. As soon as I saw him read the sign at the entrance to the
>storage facility, I knew that Trash, his pyromaniac quality and a
>nuclear weapon would have something to do with the ending, although I
>never thought divine inertvention would have ANYTHING to do with it and
>I was actually quite surprised by the way it turned out. That's why I
>liked it.
I believe the original did explain Trash's trip to the storage facility,
but I don't remember. Now that I've thought about it, it may have been
a number of things, but the "Hand of God" totally annoyed me... I have
had reactions like that to King endings before...I didn't like the ending
to Pet Sematary.. it seemed cliche. My brother read it and said "How
else could it have ended?" and I reread it and realized he was right. I
may have a similar reaction to "The Stand". I think my biggest problem
was not that a supernatural Good force intervened, but that it actually
LOOKED like a hand. That really bugged me. Maybe that stylistic problem
was the only thing about THE STAND that bothered me...and perhaps the fact
that I had a habit of reading King novels in marathon sittings. The length
of THE STAND probably exhausted me at the time.
R.
Robert Whelan
I would like to comment here that I have found quite a few
improvements. The last paragraph to Flagg's first chapter, for
instance, and Uncut's chapter 20, (involving Fran) which I assumed, when
reading, MUST have been part of the original, because it was so good.
Haven't got to the Trashcan Man and the Kid yet.
R.
Robert Whelan
.10
Chapter 16 in the "Uncut" (chapter 12 in the original) is about
a pair of asshole killers who run around killing and robbing. In
both versions I found it a hard chapter because the characters are
pretty unsympathetic, even though Lloyd is dumb evil, and not that
into the killing, which makes him a more human character than Poke.
The Uncut adds the adjective "smarmy" to describe the daughter of
the owner of the Continental they are driving, both who they killed.
I'm not sure why this change was made. Like the disease-spread chapter,
it seems to change the POV to that of the killers, to allow the audience
to identify with them. Why kill the daughter? She was "smarmy". In
the original she was just a "daughter" not deserving it in any way,
even from the POV of killers. And as is often the case, King's POV
is often unclear. Was the girl actually smarmy, or was that just the
killer's perception? It's not a big deal, but I feel uncomfortable
with the change. The original didn't seem to give the audience any
reason to vicariously participate in the "fun" of a kill spree, not
even the possible guilty pleasure of blowing away the smarmy. More
"new King" I'm afraid.
Both versions contain the line "I believe that man would just as
soon killed me as as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon."
which I automatically thought should have been edited out of both
versions. Not New King, but a bit clumsy.
After Poke blows away a woman in the aisle of the convenience store, he
yells (in the original) "She'll never watch Lawrence Welk again". This
is changed to "Jerry Falwell" in the "Uncut" version. Maybe King hates
both Lawrence Welk and Jerry Falwell, but Jerry Falwell seems
more hateful, and that seems to be the reason for the change. To make
the killing more "fun" for the audience. This lady deserved to die!
We can understand the killer's POV. I get the feeling King would have
if he could have, had this lady actually WATCHING Jerry Falwell, and
perhaps screaming at her kids before Poke blew her away, just as he
demonized Ed Norris as he and his family get infected by plague.
Bad change to the description of Poke's injury.
Original:
"....He was a mess. His right eye blazed like a vengeful sapphire. His
left was gone....""....his shirt was soaked in blood".
Uncut:
"...He was a mess.." etc."....his shirt was soaked in blood. When you got
right down to it, Poke was sort of a mess."
It redundantly repeats the information that Lloyd thinks Poke is a mess.
It seems to do this to detach the audience from the horror of the
shootout, and make a wry, dry comment.
The shop owner jumps from behind the counter, with a shotgun.
Original:
"`Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels.
Uncut:
"Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He
went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit."
If King HAD to add the detail about "his face being a worse mess
than ever" he could have left out the "not caring a bit" detail. How
frigging obvious. The original was the best. gettin "both barrels" pretty
effectively told us that he was dead, and would not longer care
about his torn up face. This is one mark of "new King". Pointing out
the deadly obvious in humorous asides. This passage also redundantly
repeats that his face is a "mess" again.
Lloyd is handcuffed by a state trooper:
Original: "In the back of the cruiser, sonny"
Uncut: "In the back of the cruiser, Sunny Jim."
The other trooper, justifiably pissed at Lloyd, whacks him with a
pistol, after exclaiming...
Original: "You got this coming out of the store, you hairbag."
Uncut: "You got this coming out of the store, Sunny Jim."
This is the sort of thing that you would think would have been
changed from the unedited manuscript to produce the original.
It's possible that I may be wrong, and that King IS working from
the unedited manuscript, not making changes to the original
published version. If they are changes, they are changes for the
worse. "Sunny Jim" is too goofy, especially since it appears
that BOTH troopers are using it. (the one who handcuffed him
saying it to him, and the one holding the pistol to his head
saying it before whacking him.)
On the other hand, the use of "Sunny Jim" is consistent with
New King's unrestricted goofiness. Ironic commentary on Lloyd's
bloodthirstiness, that is wrong in the mouths of the troopers.
Let me take a break from negative commentary, and comment on the
Cowboy that they shoot it out with. Even though he ended up dead,
he was a pretty cool figure. I was rooting for him to get those
pair of "hairbags".
R.
Robert Whelan
11.
Chapter 18 in the "Uncut" introduces a ridiculous subplot about the
military trying to "cover up" the fact that they are responsible for
spreading the plague. Starkey ruminates on the sound "ronk" in
typical "New King" manner (it had to have been mentioned 4 or 5
times in the chapter). As far as "missing material" goes, we
didn't really need to know what finally happened to the centrifuge.
I *am* reading the uncut version first, depending only on a long
ago memory and my sense of changing style to tell me which sections
were not in the original, before checking with the original.
King seems, in this chapter, to be goofing on military procedure,
as when someone uses the code "Flowerpot" and is yelled at "I know
what the fuck `Flowerpot' is."
I don't like this new subplot, because it seems to be (badly)
explaining the military mindset. Protecting the military from being
blamed seems to be INCREDIBLY petty, in the face of such an
enormous disaster. Even military people have relatives and friends
in civilian life. No cover up in such a situation would be possible.
The military itself would be leaking it right and left to anyone
they cared about. And they KNOW how dangerous the disease is.
Who, exactly, do they think will be left to blame them? I would
have preferred the panicked scramblings of the people responsible to
be left to the imagination than to see this silly "Dr. Strangelove"
type stuff. We had already seen that the compound where Stu is
held has been infected. This indicates that most everyplace else,
including the entire military, are going to die. Why assassinate
and cover up?
Maybe King was worried that, in fact, even a superflu
wouldn't wipe everyone out if there was enough warning. A reasonable
flaw in a superflu story...I'm ambivalent about this fix though.
It draws attention to the flaw more than it fixes it. The possibility
that the flu would not have wiped the world as clean without "help"
never occurred to me before I encountered this added material. It's
more impressive if the flu does it (as the original seems to let it) on
it's own, though with deliberate neglect, rather than active, evil,
assassinations.
R.
Augustine
Ruth J wrote:
> Augustine wrote:
> >
> > Robert Whelan wrote:
> >
> > > >SPOILERS FOR THE STAND
> >
>
> >
> > > > So, in conclusion, I just want to say that of all the books
> I've
> > >
> > > > read, The Stand (Uncut or original, since the difference seems
> to be
> > >
> > > > minimal) is my favorite. Also I hope I have not offended anyone
>
> > > because
> > > > this is just my opinion.
>
> I just have to jump in here and say *The difference seems to be
> minimal*? Hope your kidding 'cause the Un-Cut version is about 300+
> pages longer. I don't call that minimal. That's 1/4th more
> storyline.
> There were any number of differences beside the The Kid storyline that
>
> made the Un-Cut version far superior.<IMHO, of course>
>
> Ruth
>
The book is longer, but how much of the story actually changes? Not
much. The beginning is still the same, the end is still the same and a
lot of the middle is still the same. There's more description, more
storytelling and several more sub-plots, but the essential story is not
changed a whole lot.
Chris Augustine
Jack T Thornton
In article <slrn6etoa6....@amanda.dorsai.org>
rwh...@dorsai.org (Robert Whelan) writes:
Even though Lucas will come after me for this, have you considered that
"the hand of God" was not the climax of the story? Rather, it is epilogue.
The story hit its high note when the "travelers" understood that their
journey recharged them spiritually, thereby placing "Good" over "Evil."
The rest of the story was just cleaning up the plot.
Jack
(remove 'unicorn.')
Jean Graham
Robert Whelan wrote:
> 11.
>
> Chapter 18 in the "Uncut" introduces a ridiculous subplot about the
> military trying to "cover up" the fact that they are responsible for
> spreading the plague.
Robert,What is "ridiculous" about this? Sure, it's not necessary to the
story
perhaps, but it is darn interesting. I enjoyed it. Covering up is what
militaries do when they are in the wrong -- or try to do. Witness the
recent Somalia affair in Canada.
Stephen King has (apparently) a deep-rooted mistrust of the military
and government. See The Tommyknockers and Firestarter for
obvious examples, but it permeates a lot of his work.
> Starkey ruminates on the sound "ronk" in
> typical "New King" manner (it had to have been mentioned 4 or 5
> times in the chapter). As far as "missing material" goes, we
> didn't really need to know what finally happened to the centrifuge.
>
No, we don't "need" to know, but the image is a good one.
> I *am* reading the uncut version first, depending only on a long
> ago memory and my sense of changing style to tell me which sections
> were not in the original, before checking with the original.
> King seems, in this chapter, to be goofing on military procedure,
> as when someone uses the code "Flowerpot" and is yelled at "I know
> what the fuck `Flowerpot' is."
>
Goofing? How so? This segment of the book reflects pretty well amachine
in disintegration, a useless machine that continues to work
as it always has despite the complete senselessness of it doing so.
Oh, I think I just got the deeper meaning of the centrifuge image.
> I don't like this new subplot, because it seems to be (badly)
> explaining the military mindset. Protecting the military from being
> blamed seems to be INCREDIBLY petty, in the face of such an
> enormous disaster.
Yes, but it's what happens. I found it all rather chillingly
realistic.Petty, yes; senseless, yes -- but realistic.
> Even military people have relatives and friends
> in civilian life. No cover up in such a situation would be possible.
> The military itself would be leaking it right and left to anyone
> they cared about.
Some of them were, some of them just went hogwild, some blind drunkwith
power.
> And they KNOW how dangerous the disease is.
> Who, exactly, do they think will be left to blame them? I would
> have preferred the panicked scramblings of the people responsible to
> be left to the imagination than to see this silly "Dr. Strangelove"
> type stuff.
Robert, if you prefer things to be left to the imagination, maybe
youshould be reading an author other than King. He is many wonderful
things in his writing, but spare is not one of them.
> We had already seen that the compound where Stu is
> held has been infected. This indicates that most everyplace else,
> including the entire military, are going to die. Why assassinate
> and cover up?
Why not? I enjoyed this section and would be really interested infinding
out whether it's "new" or "edited out in the first version." It
portrays very well the madness of the machine that invented the
virus in the first place. And they had to be figuring that at least one
reporter
would survive: witness the retaliations against the newspapers that
did dare to print the truth about the superflu.
> Maybe King was worried that, in fact, even a superflu
> wouldn't wipe everyone out if there was enough warning. A reasonable
> flaw in a superflu story...I'm ambivalent about this fix though.
> It draws attention to the flaw more than it fixes it. The possibility
> that the flu would not have wiped the world as clean without "help"
> never occurred to me before I encountered this added material. It's
> more impressive if the flu does it (as the original seems to let it)
> on
> it's own, though with deliberate neglect, rather than active, evil,
> assassinations.
Are you sure this is an added section? It seems so natural, but I'llbow
to your obvious hard work and studiousness.
Don't let pictures of flood relief scenes deceive you -- a military
exists for making war. Otherwise, they'd be called the "disaster
relief force" or something. In the setting of The Stand, there is
still an "us and them" -- USA and the pinker parts of the world.
Surely, if the superflu had not spread to other countries, there
was a possibility that the USSR, China, Libya, or any of a hundred
other countries could have invaded the sacred American soil. Not
right away, but eventually. This was, I guess, a pre-emptive strike.
> R.
Jeano, who kind of likes wordy books, especially if they hint
at conspiracy and cover-ups.
Joe E. Humphrey
interesting observations, well thought out post...
I believe I shall retort.
> 2.
> In the Chapter where Larry Underwood wakes up with Maria, why did King
> feel it necessary to add in lines to make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that
> his references to Maria being really "oral", and the line that
> refers to the events that lead up the the nights "frantic gobbling
> finale" are connected? I think it's a bit embarrassing that he focuses on
> this to amplify and make clear, and sad that his previous good judgement
> that it had been made clear enough has been replaced by something cruder,
> that doesn't mind a repetitious use of words, or thinks a pun on
> "gobbling" is funny enough to interrupt the flow of a scene with.
>
Stephen King works hard (ESPECIALLY in The Stand, It and The Body) to make the
characters relatable. To make them people as much as you and I are people. If you
keep that in mind, and then consider who Larry Underwood is, I think it makes
sense.
Larry Underwood is little more (at that point in the book at least) than a stupid
hoodlum who got lucky... with the mentality of a stupid hoodlum. When getting to
know Larry Underwood, we are forced to lower our range of intelligence to his
level, as did King when he wrote him... or at least he put up that front. That's
one of the things that i like most about King's story telling... he doesn't
attempt to build characterization by looking at what a person does or says, but by
letting us look at that person from their own perspective, with out it being a
stupid narrative. I don't think it's out of place for Larry to think to himself
(cause that's what it was, Larry's thought process, not King's) about the previous
night's oral company and use the word gobble more than once in a paragraph. Larry
isn't a good writer, he's just talking to himself. I know I don't perfectly craft
my own personal pondering.
> There was a line that I immediately winced at, when he is remembering
> his mom's food buying (for him) which listed a bunch of things she
> had bought for him, ending with (in the original) the item "a
> gallon of chocolate cheesecake ice cream in the fridge".
> The two short sentences added on seems to be for
> emphasis...and what is being emphasized? "Sara Lee". It sounds like a product
> endorsement, whereas the previous passing reference to Baskin Robbins
> and other foods seemed like mere versimilitude. So what if Baskin
> Robbins no longer makes that flavor? Why screw up the feel of the
> passage? Why has King lost his sense of poetry, for even his own work?
>
Here's something similar to the last point, but with a different writing trick.As
well as using what we talked about earlier (adapting writing styles to a
character's mentality) King often (VERY often in his last few years) throws brand
names into his books. He's done it his whole span of writing, but never so much as
he has in his last few books. King believes (and for the most part i think he's
right) that the more "at home" you can put into situations, the scarier it is when
bad things start to happen. (Kevin Smith, the writer\director of Clerks, Mallrats
and Chasing Amy, does the same thing with humor). King's strongest point isn't the
terror he puts into books, but the leading up to the terror. Product placement is
one of the many tricks King uses to force us to relate to the people in his
stories. When Jack Torrence uses specifically a Polaroid Camera instead of just a
standard, run of the mill instamatic, we are able to connect just a little more,
because King knows that most of us have a Polaroid camera (especially in the late
seventies) and we would probably use that very camera to take pictures of little
Danny's wasp stings.
When Roland, the last Gunslinger, takes his first drink of Pepsi, it's not just
generic brand cola, it's delicious and refreshing Pepsi, and later Roland and his
party visit the world after the ravaging effects of the super flu Captain Trips,
and they don't see posters for a stand up comic and a rock band, but they see
posters for Adam Sandler and Pearl Jam. King works hard (too hard at times) to
give us pieces of the real world to help support his stories... to help make them
real as well. To make you forget that you are reading about false events in a
false place.
> Also, King "improves" the passage, feeling perhaps that he hasn't quite
> made it clear enough that Larry's mom loves him, by adding on, in Larry's
> flashback to the food in the fridge, his memory of going into the bathroom
> AFTER the fridge, seeing new toothpaste, toothbrushes, and cologne,
> including in this excessive flashback his mom's opinion on Old Spice
> cologne, and Larry's thoughts about how "real love is silent as well as
> blind" just in case his audience didn't get that Larry's mom loved him,
> in her own way. This extra passage ends with Larry brushing his teeth,
> "wondering if there might not be a song in that someplace." King has
> now immersed us so far in what was supposed to be a brief flashback
> recollection of the events that led to the "frantic gobbling finale"
> mentioned at the beginning, that when the next line comes.."The oral
> hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else"
> For a moment we think we are still in the flashback to Larry in his
> mom's apartment. This is because the flashback has gone overboard
> in accomplishing what had been described as a mere attempt to "retrace
> yesterday from it's innocuous beginnings to it's frantic gobbling
> finale". King makes attempts to keep the tense past, but screw up
> when Larry "began brushing his teeth" instead of "had begun brushing
> his teeth" making the oral hygienist entry confusing. There was no
> such confusion in the previous version, which ended with the list of
> food his mom had bought, all contained within a single paragraph,
> allowing the paragraph split to be a natural switch back to his present
> ordeal with the girl his just slept with, and allowing the contrast
> in tenses (his mom "had gone out and stocked up" vs. "The oral hygienist
> came in" to smoothly indicate the return from flashback. I don't know
> if King cut this new material out of the first draft, or wrote it new
> for this version, but his previous instincts seemed to be better.
i think for this, King simply tried to make the death of Larry's mother more
tragic and sad, and ended up jumbling around his sentences. i pretty much agree on
this one
anyway
those are just my views
later
joe
Joe E. Humphrey
Following the "shit radar" joke, we are treated to this passage.
> "`Hey!'
> He had intended a resonant indignant shout. What he produced was the
> humble whisper of a very sick man..."
>
> This appears to be King the author, catching the problem that I just
> noticed...that old Vic is thinking too fiestily for his state of
> illness...I just find such an odd discrepancy between mental state
> and health to be really wierd. King seemed to think so too, and tried
> to fix it by having Vic find out that he isn't as healthy as he thinks.
> What a clumsy fix, though. This entire chapter should have been left
> on the cutting room floor. "Jordy Verrill" type humor seems out of
> place in this novel, particularly to a person who read it without
> that kind of humor. (See the movie "Creepshow" if you don't know what
> I'm talking about.
>
> Robert W.
I am afraid I will have to totally disagree on this one.
It comes back to the relatability of the story. Everyone that the book
focus's on for the most part is involved with this whole Blues
Brother-esque mission from god. All these people are having these visions
in a corn field. People are seein' god and the devil (Goooo Walkin' Dude!)
and that right there takes away a lot of their relatable characteristics.
King wants to show us what it would be like for US to get afflicted with
Cap'n Tripps and how it would be like for US to go through that process. We
see lots of people die from it from other's perspective (I.E. Larry
watching his mother die, Franny with her father, Nick with the whole town,
you get the idea) but never do we really see a regular guy go through
this... a regular guy who would react in a Jordey Verril fashion. Most of
the people who we see deal with actually dying from this disease (keep in
mind that i read the book quite a while ago) are not really characters that
we can relate to. We have that general who shoots himself, but he's got
quite a different situation on his hands than any of us would have (I
should hope at least)... he's dealing with the guilt of killing the whole
world. By brining Vic into the stew, we get to just watch it take someone
that we can be comfortable with. We can see how the working class man (a
good lot of us) deals with and understands what's happening to him.
Sure, the Stand was a very serious book dealing with serious issues, but
it's insane to suggest that humor won't perceiver through that...
ESPECIALLY in a Stephen King book. That's real. That's how it goes. No
matter how serious any situation is, there will be people who find humor in
it, and to ignore that is bad writing.
later
Joe
Robert Whelan
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy
Followup-To:
In article <34F026B7...@thezone.net>, Jean Graham wrote:
>Robert Whelan wrote:
>
>> 11.
>>
>> Chapter 18 in the "Uncut" introduces a ridiculous subplot about the
>> military trying to "cover up" the fact that they are responsible for
>> spreading the plague.
>
>Robert,What is "ridiculous" about this? Sure, it's not necessary to the
>story
>perhaps, but it is darn interesting. I enjoyed it. Covering up is what
>militaries do when they are in the wrong -- or try to do. Witness the
>recent Somalia affair in Canada.
Of course the military would try to cover up their involvement. It's just
that I found the psychology rather unbelievable. Not that I don't agree
that a cover up would not have occurred, just that I don't like these
extra bits because they are badly written, compared with the orginal.
The image of the centrifuge, which kept on spinning, was an effective
one in the original version. Chapter 18 focuses on it incessantly.
"ronk ronk ronk", whereas the previous mention was a spare hint that
Starkey's control over the situation was so tenuous that all he could
focus on was that centrifuge.
>Stephen King has (apparently) a deep-rooted mistrust of the military
>and government. See The Tommyknockers and Firestarter for
>obvious examples, but it permeates a lot of his work.
Firestarter is the book I would compare it to. But Firestarter, once the
"shit hit the fan" had the employees of the shop, quite humanly and
realistically, RUNNING AWAY. We had only one truly insane character,
Rainbird (right name?) who continued his "mission" in the face of
disaster. This reinstated, or added, material has whole battalions
of idiots acting like Rainbird, in the obvious face of death among
their ranks. It's hard to imagine insane "loyalty" to the military
under such circumstances, particularly when both the military you
are being loyal to, and the population you are hiding it from, are
being destroyed by it, making the point of a cover up moot. The
sparer original Stand suggested the continuation of Military attempts
to "control" the situation, but left their failure and breakdown more
to the imagination....we are allowed to project ourselves into the
feet of the soldiers in that situation, and pretty much guessing how
quickly the situation would deteriorate. This added material is
unsatisfying because the characters are inhuman, their motivations
poorly explained, and thus much less satisfying than imagination.
>> Starkey ruminates on the sound "ronk" in
>> typical "New King" manner (it had to have been mentioned 4 or 5
>> times in the chapter). As far as "missing material" goes, we
>> didn't really need to know what finally happened to the centrifuge.
>>
>
>No, we don't "need" to know, but the image is a good one.
The image of the uselessly spinning centrifuge was a good one...but it
was good the first time it was mentioned, earlier in the book. Seeing
it again is repetitious, and it is USED repetitively in this second
appearance.
>> I *am* reading the uncut version first, depending only on a long
>> ago memory and my sense of changing style to tell me which sections
>> were not in the original, before checking with the original.
>> King seems, in this chapter, to be goofing on military procedure,
>> as when someone uses the code "Flowerpot" and is yelled at "I know
>> what the fuck `Flowerpot' is."
>>
>
>Goofing? How so? This segment of the book reflects pretty well amachine
>in disintegration, a useless machine that continues to work
>as it always has despite the complete senselessness of it doing so.
>Oh, I think I just got the deeper meaning of the centrifuge image.
"Remember that, Starkey said, as his caller began to beep urgently
behind him. The sound of burning bearings in the final stage of
collapse is *ronk-ronk-ronk*" I suppose so.
>> I don't like this new subplot, because it seems to be (badly)
>> explaining the military mindset. Protecting the military from being
>> blamed seems to be INCREDIBLY petty, in the face of such an
>> enormous disaster.
>
>Yes, but it's what happens. I found it all rather chillingly
>realistic.Petty, yes; senseless, yes -- but realistic.
It's not that the IDEA of them doing so was unrealistic, but I found the
particulary psychology of the individuals portrayed to be unrealistic.
I didn't believe in them as people, even as insane people, in the way
I believed in the Shop employees in "Firestarter".
>> Even military people have relatives and friends
>> in civilian life. No cover up in such a situation would be possible.
>> The military itself would be leaking it right and left to anyone
>> they cared about.
>
>Some of them were, some of them just went hogwild, some blind drunkwith
>power.
>
>> And they KNOW how dangerous the disease is.
>> Who, exactly, do they think will be left to blame them? I would
>> have preferred the panicked scramblings of the people responsible to
>> be left to the imagination than to see this silly "Dr. Strangelove"
>> type stuff.
>Robert, if you prefer things to be left to the imagination, maybe
>youshould be reading an author other than King. He is many wonderful
>things in his writing, but spare is not one of them.
He CAN be spare, witness the original version of THE STAND. And it
wasn't mere force that produced it. Quite a bit of care obviously went
into making the spare Stand work (and work even better) than the Uncut.
(though there are some improvements I have already noticed, Chapter
20 particularly.)
>> We had already seen that the compound where Stu is
>> held has been infected. This indicates that most everyplace else,
>> including the entire military, are going to die. Why assassinate
>> and cover up?
>
>Why not? I enjoyed this section and would be really interested infinding
>out whether it's "new" or "edited out in the first version." It
>portrays very well the madness of the machine that invented the
>virus in the first place. And they had to be figuring that at least one
>reporter
>would survive: witness the retaliations against the newspapers that
>did dare to print the truth about the superflu.
The descriptions of retaliations against the newspapers were not part
of the original. The only incident described in the original was the
killing of a disk jockey by a military unit, in which an immediate
rebellion among ranks ends with the death of the sergeant.
>> Maybe King was worried that, in fact, even a superflu
>> wouldn't wipe everyone out if there was enough warning. A reasonable
>> flaw in a superflu story...I'm ambivalent about this fix though.
>> It draws attention to the flaw more than it fixes it. The possibility
>> that the flu would not have wiped the world as clean without "help"
>> never occurred to me before I encountered this added material. It's
>> more impressive if the flu does it (as the original seems to let it)
>> on
>> it's own, though with deliberate neglect, rather than active, evil,
>> assassinations.
>
>Are you sure this is an added section? It seems so natural, but I'llbow
>to your obvious hard work and studiousness.
I can't be really sure. But it has the feel of New, either because it
was entirely added, or parts of it were rewritten. It wasn't in the
original published version, though. My feelings about it may be that
it is simply unedited, or simply that I recognize it as being extra
to my reading of the original long ago.
The stuff about releasing the virus overseas IS in the original. I guess
this makes more sense, because it is done BEFORE the rumors get out
locally, so there is some logic (twisted, but still) to the idea.
As Starkey says "We are sure Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the end".
>Don't let pictures of flood relief scenes deceive you -- a military
>exists for making war. Otherwise, they'd be called the "disaster
>relief force" or something. In the setting of The Stand, there is
>still an "us and them" -- USA and the pinker parts of the world.
Right. And it takes quite a bit to take a force indoctrinated to attack
a foreign threat and convincing them to suddenly attack their own
population. King deals with this (in the original) with a
single "scragging" scene.
>Surely, if the superflu had not spread to other countries, there
>was a possibility that the USSR, China, Libya, or any of a hundred
>other countries could have invaded the sacred American soil. Not
>right away, but eventually. This was, I guess, a pre-emptive strike.
Right. This WAS in the original. And it does make sense in the original.
But the assassination of the reporters was not. Infecting our cold war
enemies makes sense from a military mindset....The reporter assassinations
I found a bit silly.
R.
Mid-World Girl
In article <slrn6enfoj....@amanda.dorsai.org>, rwh...@dorsai.org
(Robert Whelan) wrote:
>>Frannie might've been a bitch, I certainly agree she was hard. But I think
>>she was softer at the start in the original edition and became hard.
>>Circumstances pending, I can't really blame her for it... but I think King
>>should've have fiddled with her too much either in the uncut (though I prefer
>>this version) -- simply because he knew what she would become so he took some
>>of her becoming away -- do you get what I mean?
>
>I'm not sure. You mean he knew she would become harder, so he emphasized
>her softness in the uncut version, to increase the contrast?
Exactly that Robert, I think he took the natural becoming away from her and
made it look like some huge step. I think it was a little forced and I'm sure
he had his mind set on what she was like at the end and remembers her as 'a
silly little girl' at the start -- which I think she wasn't. She was always
practical and always 'set', and set people do become hard.
So, all in all, I admire her for being a bitch due to the infamous words in
DC, "because sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hang onto."
And gawd, didn't they overuse THAT in the movie?
Maggie the Mid-World Girl
Robert Whelan
*****THIS THREAD STILL CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS!*********
Though the ones in this post are kinda obvious...
.13
Chapter 20 (Uncut) is a truly effective addition to the original.
(Yes, I finally found something that I liked!). In the original the
last we saw of Fran was prior to her conference with her mom, and
the next time we saw her she was in shock after her father's death.
What was missing was any reference to the death of her
mother, and that always struck me as a bit wrong, even in the
original. Even if her mother remained off screen, Frannie would
have been affected by her death. This chapter fills in her mother
becoming sick (largely dealt with over the phone with her dad) and
further conversations with Jessie. This chapter is so natural, with
the rainstorm outside melding with the previous chapter where Larry's
mom is also sick, also during a rainstorm, that I assumed it
had been part of the original until I went back and checked. I
suspect it may have been something King really wanted to be part
of the original but let go of when he found he was still some pages
over the limit set by his publishers.
Stuff here that seems added, though, are Peter's over assurances
that Fran didn't cause her mother's sickness, and the stuff at the
end of the chapter where Fran goes "eat your pie, Frannie, eat it,
every bite" which is very reminiscent of "Thinner", and seems to
go with the "Pie in the fridge" in the next chapter in which we
see Fran, when she is in shock over her father's death. It seems like
an added "meaningful connection" that is not a natural part of the
story's original flow, or of this restored chapter, which on
the whole DOES seem to seamlessly blend with the original.
Anyone else like this addition?
Hmmm. I just checked the original, and in the original Fran's mom's
death IS dealt with in the "Frannie in shock" chapter, in a sparse
line about dying in the hospital. Though I usually prefer sparseness,
I liked MOST of this added chapter, especially her conversation with
Jess.
Notice the reoccurring mentioning of strawberries? The Uncut mentions
Sara Lee cheesecake with strawberries on top (not in the original though)
in Larry's mom's fridge; Larry makes strawberry-rhubarb pie for Rita
after he first meets her in central park; Frannie, in shock after he
dad's death, cuts herself a piece of Strawberry pie; Nick, at dinner
with the Sheriff and his wife, has strawberry shortcake for dessert.
I don't know what it means, but it's interesting. Hey! Maybe that's
the answer! All the survivors of the plague eat strawberries! That
was the cure!
R.
Robert Whelan
14.
Chapter 21 in the Uncut is not too different from Chapter 15 in the
"cut".
Original: "..and Stu Redman would cease to exist."
Uncut: "..and Stu Redman would become a Golden Oldie."
Blech!
Original: "...first hand research on the virus they had been studying.
Uncut: "...first hand research on the virus they called A-Prime or
the superflu."
This is better in the original, as more accurate from Stu's uninformed
POV. At the end of the chapter he worries about "catching It, whatever
It was." Hopefully NOT an addition but rightly deleted from the
manuscript.
Original: "If they were just going through the motions now, then he had
become expendable. He was under detention."
Uncut: "If they were just going though the motions now, then he had
become expendable. Being under detention was bad. Being
under detention and being expendable...that was *very*
bad."
Yuck! Hopefully this is manuscript, pre original material, not added.
Clarification of the original could have been accomplished by the use
of the word "And" ..."And he was under detention." Oh dear. I'm beginning
to think it IS newly added clarification.
Stu watches a newscast...
Original: "In the meantime.." etc "..get lots of rest, drink fluids, and
take aspirin for the fever."
Uncut: "In the meantime.." etc "..take aspirin for the fever".
The newscaster smiled reassuringly...and off camera someone
sneezed.
Again, I hope this is pre published material that got edited out for
the original, as it is too frigging obvious. Not realistic, anyhow.
A studio capable of cutting off a news guy's words in mid broadcast
is capable of suppressing sneezes off camera. Normal studios don't
allow "off camera" noises into broadcasts.
R.
Jon R.
Robert Whelan wrote:
> Chapter 16 in the "Uncut" (chapter 12 in the original) is about
> a pair of asshole killers who run around killing and robbing. In
> both versions I found it a hard chapter because the characters are
> pretty unsympathetic, even though Lloyd is dumb evil, and not that
> into the killing, which makes him a more human character than Poke.
>
> The Uncut adds the adjective "smarmy" to describe the daughter of
> the owner of the Continental they are driving, both who they killed.
> I'm not sure why this change was made. Like the disease-spread chapter,
> it seems to change the POV to that of the killers, to allow the audience
> to identify with them. Why kill the daughter? She was "smarmy". In
> the original she was just a "daughter" not deserving it in any way,
> even from the POV of killers. And as is often the case, King's POV
> is often unclear. Was the girl actually smarmy, or was that just the
> killer's perception?
Oh no! The readers will have to decide, because it isn't obvious
what SK meant! <eg>
(snip)
> The shop owner jumps from behind the counter, with a shotgun.
> Original:
> "`Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels.
>
> Uncut:
> "Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He
> went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit."
>
> If King HAD to add the detail about "his face being a worse mess
> than ever" he could have left out the "not caring a bit" detail. How
> frigging obvious.(snip)
But _bloody_ funny. Sorry, I just like black humour.
Jon R.
Robert Whelan
Joe E. Humphrey (thewal...@geocities.com> wrote:
In response to this passage by me,
Following the "shit radar" joke, we are treated to this passage.
> "`Hey!'
> He had intended a resonant indignant shout. What he produced was the
> humble whisper of a very sick man..."
>
> This appears to be King the author, catching the problem that I just
> noticed...that old Vic is thinking too fiestily for his state of
> illness...I just find such an odd discrepancy between mental state
> and health to be really wierd. King seemed to think so too, and tried
> to fix it by having Vic find out that he isn't as healthy as he thinks.
> What a clumsy fix, though. This entire chapter should have been left
> on the cutting room floor. "Jordy Verrill" type humor seems out of
> place in this novel, particularly to a person who read it without
> that kind of humor. (See the movie "Creepshow" if you don't know what
> I'm talking about.
>
> Robert W.
<Humphrey responds:>
<I respond>
Well, it is one thing to create a character who has a wise ass sense of
humor, and have them react this way to bad situations. (A lot of King's
*writer* characters, like Jack Torrance, and Paul Sheldon do this).
The "shit radar" joke in this passage is a little odd, because it
seems like typical King goofiness in the mouth of a character that
hasn't been developed much. I don't mind this wise ass King personality
in a character who resembles King, but in a poor working class guy, it's
not really very respectful of the character AS a character. I guess
that this is "New King" because it resemble his character work in
Rose Madder (Rose spouted King wise cracks) and in Gerald's Game.
I see it as poor character work, as King, instead of developing and
imagining another real person, projects himself into the situation
and reacting as he would (which is typically like a wise ass goofball).
It worked in "The Shining" and in "Misery", but Vic Palfrey in that
chapter is just King with the Flu. Like Jordey Verrill was King
with moss growing on him.
R.
Robert Whelan
: > 11.
: >
: > Chapter 18 in the "Uncut" introduces a ridiculous subplot about the
: > military trying to "cover up" the fact that they are responsible for
: > spreading the plague.
: Robert,What is "ridiculous" about this? Sure, it's not necessary to the
: story
: perhaps, but it is darn interesting. I enjoyed it. Covering up is what
: militaries do when they are in the wrong -- or try to do. Witness the
: recent Somalia affair in Canada.
Jean, I have thought about it and have changed my mind. It isn't THAT
ridiculous, though I am not as comfortable with conspiracy stories as
I used to be. Basically, I can accept the military attempt at control
of panic and anti - government hysteria in the population, whether
part of a cover up or not, and the assassinations aren't too much
of a stretch. I think my reaction to these section is probably an
allergy to my sense of their being new to the story...having read
the story without those elements.
: Stephen King has (apparently) a deep-rooted mistrust of the military
: and government. See The Tommyknockers and Firestarter for
: obvious examples, but it permeates a lot of his work.
True.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
>interesting observations, well thought out post...
>I believe I shall retort.
Thank you, my good man!
>>2.
(Mr. Humphrey says)
Stephen King works hard (ESPECIALLY in The Stand, It and The Body) to make the
characters relatable. To make them people as much as you and I are people. If y
ou keep that in mind, and then consider who Larry Underwood is, I think it
makes sense.
Larry Underwood is little more (at that point in the book at least) than a stup
id hoodlum who got lucky... with the mentality of a stupid hoodlum. When
getting to know Larry Underwood, we are forced to lower our range of
intelligence to his level, as did King when he wrote him... or at least he
put up that front. That's one of the things that i like most about King's
story telling... he doesn't attempt to build characterization by looking
at what a person does or says, but by letting us look at that person from
their own perspective, with out it being a stupid narrative. I don't
think it's out of place for Larry to think to himself
(cause that's what it was, Larry's thought process, not King's) about the previ
ous night's oral company and use the word gobble more than once in a
paragraph. Larry isn't a good writer, he's just talking to himself. I know
I don't perfectly craft my own personal pondering.
(I respond)
Well, it is King telling us Larry's internal thoughts. The style King
is using is a mix of narrative/personal POV, but in order to show that
Larry was, repetitively using the word "gobble" in his thoughts, he
ought to have switched to his interior thoughts exclusively. I felt
that the "gobbled like a Perdue drumstick" to be too wry and jokey...
not a Larry the hoodlum's voice, but King's jokey voice. As such
I thought it intrusive. Is it really in Larry's hoodlum character to
be making detached puns in his head? No, that is King's fondness for
silliness. It was well removed from the pre published manuscript, if
it was there previously.
> There was a line that I immediately winced at, when he is remembering
> his mom's food buying (for him) which listed a bunch of things she
> had bought for him, ending with (in the original) the item "a
> gallon of chocolate cheesecake ice cream in the fridge".
> The two short sentences added on seems to be for
> emphasis...and what is being emphasized? "Sara Lee". It sounds like a product
> endorsement, whereas the previous passing reference to Baskin Robbins
> and other foods seemed like mere versimilitude. So what if Baskin
> Robbins no longer makes that flavor? Why screw up the feel of the
> passage? Why has King lost his sense of poetry, for even his own work?
>
(I want to correct my quote. The original line was "gallon of Baskin
Robbins chocolate cheesecake ice cream in the fridge")
.Here's something similar to the last point, but with a different writing
.trick
.As well as using what we talked about earlier (adapting writing styles to
.a character's mentality) King often (VERY often in his last few years)
.throws brand names into his books. He's done it his whole span of
.writing,
.but never so much as he has in his last few books. King believes (and for
the most part i think he's right) that the more "at home" you can put
into
situations, the scarier it is when bad things start to happen. (Kevin
Smith, the writer\director of Clerks, Mallrats and Chasing Amy, does the
same thing with humor). King's strongest point isn't the terror he puts
into books, but the leading up to the terror. Product placement is
one of the many tricks King uses to force us to relate to the people in his
stories. When Jack Torrence uses specifically a Polaroid Camera instead of
just a standard, run of the mill instamatic, we are able to connect just
a little more, because King knows that most of us have a Polaroid camera
(especially in the late seventies) and we would probably use that very
camera to take pictures of little Danny's wasp stings.
When Roland, the last Gunslinger, takes his first drink of Pepsi, it's not just
generic brand cola, it's delicious and refreshing Pepsi, and later Roland and h
is party visit the world after the ravaging effects of the super flu
Captain Trips, and they don't see posters for a stand up comic and a rock
band, but they see posters for Adam Sandler and Pearl Jam. King works hard
(too hard at times) to give us pieces of the real world to help support
his stories... to help make them real as well. To make you forget that you
are reading about false events in a false place.
(I respond)
Ok. I wasn't objecting to his use of brand names in that passage, but
the clumsy change to "Baskin Robbins Peach delight ice cream." followed
by "Sarah Lee cheesecake in the fridge. The kind with Strawberries on
top." I think his use of common brand names is fine. Just that the
feel of the "Uncut" passage is more clunky...
R.
Robert Whelan
Chapter 22 in the "Uncut" , compared to 16 in the "original" is really
not an improvement, in my humble opinion.
The Original simply portrayed Starkey's misery at his failure to contain the
situation, and his breakdown to tears, and his partner, Creighton's
sympathy for his pain. The "Uncut" cheapens this by making Starkey commit
suicide. The uncut's version is almost a cliche. Starkey, as portrayed by
the "uncut" is a Strangelove-like maniac, who dispatches hit squads,
ponders "ronk ronk ronk", and, like all honorable evil people, kills
himself when things go wrong. The original "cut" version, without the
sections describing Starkey's dispatching of the hit squads, allows the
chapter to merely describe Starkey's misery. The Uncut, by displaying him
as a wacked out maniac, dilutes the power of this scene where Starkey
talks with Creighton.
By itself, this scene is truly effective, and quite
poetically emphasizes that things really have gone all to hell, Starkey's
reflections on the Yeat's lines "The center does not hold" effectively
doing the job that the "Uncut" clumsily did with the "ronk ronk ronk"
focus on the failing centrifuge. In the "Uncut" this is diluted by the
presence of this redundant material involving the centrifuge, in a prior
"Uncut" chapter, and by Starkey's pointless tour of the compound before
blowing his brains out. The "Uncut" extension to this chapter, redundantly
shows Creighton repeating the role Starkey had in a previous chapter,
obsessing on the soup stuck to a dead guy's face the way Starkey had
focused on the centrifuge at the very beginning of the novel (I'm
talking about the original focus on the centrifuge, not the "uncut"s
unneccessary "ronk ronk" focus. The focus on the soup on the dead
guy's face by Creighton also redundantly repeats Starkey's focus
on the same guy with his face in the soup in chapter 4.
If all of this new material (the "ronk ronk" chapter, and the suicide)
were actually part of the pre published manuscript, it would appear
that King incorporated the best aspects of them into the sections
he saved... the focus on the centrifuge by Starkey (in chapter 4
of both versions) and Starkey's recitation of Yeat's "center does
not hold" (as opposed to the clumsy "ronk ronk"). Also, by eliminating the
assassination angle, it allows Starkey to emerge as a real human being,
not a villain who deserves to blow his brains out. I truly appreciate
King's instincts in allowing this aspect to come forward in the original
version.
Concerning the Uncut's added suicide section...
"There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator.
Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy
hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him want to
scream, and he most definitely didn't want to do that. You didn't
want to scream in a tomb, because the sound of it might drive you mad,
and that's exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looke like a well
financed scientific research project, but what it really was now
was a tomb."
Can we say the word "tomb" just a few more times?
Then, contradicting Starkey's strange reluctance to step on or trip
over legs and hands, he resists an urge to touch a dead naked woman's
breast, to "see if it is hard or flaccid", and casually lifts
a dead man's head to see what he has written beneath it.
He then tries to clean jelled soup off of Private Bruces face
in macabre comedy more typical of "New King", trying to gross
us out. Or it could be Old King mercifully edited out.
Creighton's concern with the soup in Bruce's eyebrows, as opposed
to a good friend of his just killing himself, is another reason why
the Original's sparer portrait was superior.
Robert W.
Tworibbles
I have to disagree with your last point - "...and off camera someone sneezed".
Having worked in radio and tv, I can tell you that it is certainly true, an
offscreen noise would not be heard. But, I think that is King's point here.
The entire working of this station is falling apart - including offscreen crew
that would be responsible for editing out such a noise. Then, of course,
there's the irony inherent in the line itself. It's been great reading all
this and I've agreed with alot of the points you've made, but not this one.
Cindy (new to the room and have not yet introduced myself)
Robert Whelan
Tworibbles (twori...@aol.com) wrote:
: I have to disagree with your last point - "...and off camera someone sneezed".
Well, the same passage indicates that an announcer, in the middle of
saying something, has his voice cut off (suggesting active censorship, BY
an off screen crew). I guess if King had indicated that the broadcast
looked sloppy, as if the show was no longer running smoothly (letting
in lots of off camera noises) then a sneeze would not seem out of place.
But the "irony" depends on the contrast between the reassuring
announcer (who we assume will be more reassuring if the broadcast seems
professional) and the sneeze. Take that element away, to make the
sneeze realistic, and the irony falls apart. Irony tends to interfere
with suspension of disbelief, if crudely used JUST as a joke. Had
the announcer had a cold himself, but cheerily continued to reassure,
it would have ironic, but not unrealistic, or seeming "irony ex machina",
as the timing of that sneeze seems to be.
: Cindy (new to the room and have not yet introduced myself)
Hi Cindy!
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
16.
The Appearance of Randall Flagg (23 Uncut, 17 Original)
Original:
"From Nevada, he might go anywhere. It was his country and none knew
or loved it better. He knew where all the roads went, and he walked
them at night."
Uncut:
"From Nevada he might go anywhere. From New Orleans to Nogales, from
Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, it was his country, and none
knew or loved it better. He knew where all the roads went and he
walked them at night."
No real difference, but the Original says the same thing with fewer
words, and is thus superior, in my humble opinion. "Anywhere" suggests,
well, anywhere. No examples are needed, and they are, in fact,
distracting and redundant. The "Uncut" again is probably pre-published
manuscript.
Original:
"Now an hour before dawn, he was somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle,
west of Twin Falls, still north of the Duck Valley Reservation that
spreads across two states."
Uncut adds: "And wasn't it fine?"
The identification with the POV of Flagg seems to change the emphasis of
the reader's sympathies. It indicates that King, and his readers, are
supposed to identify WITH Flagg, as opposed to the Original version,
which, by keeping a distance from Flagg, lets him be mysterious and
frightening.
Original: "He would read as his supper cooked over a small, smokeless
campfire, it didn't matter what. Words from some battered and coverless
paperback novel."
Uncut:.."Words from some battered and coverless paperback porno novel,
or maybe *Mein Kampf*, or one of the baying reactionary position papers
from the America Firsters, or the Sons of the Patriots. When it came
to the printed word, Flagg was an equal opportunity reader."
Ugh. The "Uncut" makes it horribly obvious that FLAGG IS EVIL. I
hope this wasn't added to make this clear, but deleted to make
Flagg more interesting. I keep tending to believe it is added,
however, because I find it hard to believe that King only discovered
the spooky threat of the Original's Flagg upon editing the
manuscript. This is my emotional reaction, though. I would like
to believe this is pre-published material. But..."equal opportunity"?
Is that a phrase what was common in the late 70's?
Original: ...would see that he had a clean car.
Uncut: ...would see that he had a clean car and some clean papers.
Original: "With a car the country would come alive with all its glorious
possibilities, a body politic with roads imbedded in its skin like
marvellous capillaries, ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign
matter, anywhere."
Uncut: "....ready to take him, the dark speck of foreign matter,
anywhere or everywhere - heart, liver, lights, brain. He was a clot
looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone looking for an
organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they
would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant
tumor."
The goofiness of the "cozy little malignant tumor" is something I don't
like. I call it "New King" because it so resembles the humor of "Needful
Things" but it could be pre-published goofiness that King edited out
as he discovered the power of his own work, and the distraction this sort
of thing was causing.
In reference to Bradenton.....
Original: "...poetry was an unquiet corpse."
Uncut: "...poetry was still alive - narcoleptic to be sure, but
still possessed of a certain hideous vitality."
Neither line is bad, though the original is more concise, and much
easier to understand than "narcoleptic" and "possessed of a hideous
vitality". I mean, what are we supposed to imagine "poetry" as, a
zombie from a cheap horror flick? Again, my guess is "New King"
goofiness. Note: Bradenton's age is changed from forty five to
fifty five...why I don't know.
Original: "a fiery grin that made mothers grab up their children
and pull them into the house"
Uncut adds: "..., a grin that made pregnant mothers feel premature labor
pains."
Probably pre-published. "Premature labor pains" aren't particularly
scary. Line works better without them.
Original "And later, when the scattered remnants of the group were
swept up, all they knew was that there had been someone else associated
with the group, maybe someone important, maybe just a hanger on, a
man of no age, a man who was sometimes called the Walkin Dude."
Uncut: "...a man who was sometimes called the Walkin Dude, or sometimes
the Boogeyman."
The "Walkin Dude" was cool and mysterious by itself. "The Boogeyman"
seems overly explanatory. I saw this as wrong as soon as I read it
in the "Uncut", probably cos my memory of the original so clearly
emphasized "Walkin Dude" without any distracting "boogeyman" references.
Original:
"He had been born when times changed, and times were
going to change again. It was in the wind, the wind of this soft Idaho
evening.
It was almost time to be reborn. He knew. Why else could he
suddenly do magic?"
This ends the chapter for the original. I remember that it totally
flummoxed me when I first read this book. What the hell did he mean,
he could suddenly do magic? It tantalized and tortured me while I waited
for the next Flagg chapter. I didn't know what or who he was, or what
kind of magic he could do. So I have really mixed feelings about the
Uncut's extra material.
Uncut: "He closed his eyes, his hot face turning up slightly to the
dark sky, which was prepared to recieve the dawn. He concentrated.
Smiled. The dusty, rundown heels of his boots began to rise off the
road. An inch. Two. Three inches. The smile broadened into a
grin. Now he was a foot up. And two feet off the ground, he hung
steadily over the road with a little dust blowing beneath him.
Then he felt the first inches of the dawn stain the sky, and
he lowered himself down again. The time was not yet.
But the time was soon.
He began to walk again, grinning, now looking for a place to lay
up for the day. The time was soon, and that was enough to know for
now."
What I like about this was the line "he hung steadily over the road
with a little dust blowing beneath him." This image is so spooky
and cool that I would not have minded being treated to it in the
original. However, this Uncut material answers, for those annoyed
by suspense, exactly what is meant by "magic". We are gratified
immediately, and I miss the original's suspense. However, I
found his "smiling" as he rises to be right, and fit with the
mood of the original, and I loved the line "He closed his eyes,
his hot face turning up slightly to the dark sky, which was
prepared to recieve the dawn. He smiled." This sounds so
right, that I believe it had to have been original material.
However, the "grinning" that Flagg does is awful, and I don't
like it. Previously in the chapter he is described as "smiling"
as he walks along, and he is described as "smiling" here, as he
starts to rise. But his smile changing to a "grin" is something I don't
like. It makes the portrait cruder...FLAGG IS EVIL, it says.
Hubristically, I'll say that the rising, and the smiling is original,
but the grinning is Added. Also added, I feel, are the clumsy
closing lines which redundantly repeat "The time was not yet",
"But the time was soon." and again "The time was soon." I would
also have preferred the reference to Flagg "looking for a place
to lay up for the day" making him vampiric, be left out. This is a crude
addition to the previously sparer and mysterious portrait.
As far as the grin goes, Flagg WAS described as having a "fiery grin"
that scared mothers, but I still think the "grin" here disrupts the
calm and peaceful, and mysterious portrait in the description of him
merely walking and smiling, or merely smiling as he rises.
I would accept this change though, as long as it ended with the line
"with a little dust blowing beneath him". I still have fondness for
the original's mystery about Flagg's magic, though. And this ability
to float makes Flagg's need for a car seem a unnecessary, a problem
that the original published version didn't have.
Could this extra portrait of Flagg be with a film in mind? A movie
would require a bit more overt showing of Flagg's supernatural aspects,
and the levitation would accomplish this.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Jack T Thornton (jt...@unicorn.psu.edu) wrote:
: In article <slrn6etoa6....@amanda.dorsai.org>
: Even though Lucas will come after me for this, have you considered that
: "the hand of God" was not the climax of the story? Rather, it is epilogue.
: The story hit its high note when the "travelers" understood that their
: journey recharged them spiritually, thereby placing "Good" over "Evil."
: The rest of the story was just cleaning up the plot.
: Jack
Jack.. I think you are right. I remember part of my impatience with
the story was the fact that it left Mother Abigail behind. I was just
tapping my toes, as a reader, and this may have been because of a
"wrapping up the plot" feeling. You are probably right about this not
being the true climax of the story. Still, it was a horribly final
way of wrapping up the plot.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Jon R. (Jon.R...@nor.uib.noXXX) wrote:
: Robert Whelan wrote:
: (snip)
: > Why didn't you like Frannie?
: Note: I've only read the Uncut version.
: I symphatized heavily with Jessie (?), her boyfriend, in the scene
: in the early chapters dealing with her pregnancy. While I buy
: her behaviour as completely believable, I didn't like it much.
: Later on, I was intrigued by Harold's resourcefulness, and annoyed
: with Frannie's lack of acknowledgement of this. Again, this is
: completely in character, so I don't object to it. I just didn't like
: her very much. Harold Lauder, however, constituted a great "dark
: Ben Hanscomb".
I replied to this ages ago, but I used "slnr" which on my reader
claims to have posted, but fails innumerable times. Thus my reply
got lost.
I'm still rereading it, but I do remember feeling the same way you
did, and sympathizing with Jess as well. When I read it now, though,
I get a larger moral issue being touched on...that Jess's motivations,
though they seem noble, are purely selfish. He didn't make love to
her because he loved her, and wanted the consequences of sex, which
is obvious in his instinctive reactions to the news, before he pulls
himself together to act the way he "ought". I don't think Fran
was wrong to want a real relationship, and a real husband, who
WANTED her as a girl who *could* get pregnant, and was glad when she
did. And who liked her as she was, for who she was, giggles and all.
But I understand the sympathy with Jess. King made it ambiguous enough
that both points of view were expessed, and we were capable of
sympathizing with both. I certainly did, in both this, and my
original reading.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Jon R. (Jon.R...@nor.uib.noXXX) wrote:
: Robert Whelan wrote:
: > Chapter 16 in the "Uncut" (chapter 12 in the original) is about
: > a pair of asshole killers who run around killing and robbing. In
: > both versions I found it a hard chapter because the characters are
: > pretty unsympathetic, even though Lloyd is dumb evil, and not that
: > into the killing, which makes him a more human character than Poke.
: >
: > The Uncut adds the adjective "smarmy" to describe the daughter of
: > the owner of the Continental they are driving, both who they killed.
: > I'm not sure why this change was made. Like the disease-spread chapter,
: > it seems to change the POV to that of the killers, to allow the audience
: > to identify with them. Why kill the daughter? She was "smarmy". In
: > the original she was just a "daughter" not deserving it in any way,
: > even from the POV of killers. And as is often the case, King's POV
: > is often unclear. Was the girl actually smarmy, or was that just the
: > killer's perception?
: Oh no! The readers will have to decide, because it isn't obvious
: what SK meant! <eg>
Yeah, yeah. But King apparently intended the "smarminess" of the girl
to be an issue, where it wasn't before. That much is certain. (or
he intended it before, and then decided not to for the original version).
: (snip)
: > The shop owner jumps from behind the counter, with a shotgun.
: > Original:
: > "`Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels.
: >
: > Uncut:
: > "Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He
: > went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit."
: >
: > If King HAD to add the detail about "his face being a worse mess
: > than ever" he could have left out the "not caring a bit" detail. How
: > frigging obvious.(snip)
: But _bloody_ funny. Sorry, I just like black humour.
As much as you like it, you have to admit it is intrusive.
R.
Robert Whelan
Mid-World Girl (n...@grantcreek.NOSPAM.com) wrote:
: In article <slrn6enfoj....@amanda.dorsai.org>, rwh...@dorsai.org
: (Robert Whelan) wrote:
The Original's Frannie somehow reminded me of King's portrait of his
mother in "Danse Macabre", a lady who was abandoned by her husband and
had to raise her kids alone. The "Uncut" portrait of Frannie seems to
be marred by a sentimental fatherly perspective towards a woman of that
age (perhaps King's own relationship to his daughter).
R.
Scott Padulsky
Basically, I have two problems with the Uncute version (which make me
recommend the original version when asked), The prologue and the
Epilogue.
Spoilers (just in case):
One of the things i enjoyed about the original book was that for an
epic world (or at least nation)-encompassing story, it has a humble
beginning in a middle of nowhere town in Texas. The story opens with
Stu, who is the focus of the book for the most part, and gives you a
feeling of Americana, that is until a mysterious car crashes and all
hell breaks lose.
Starting the story with Campions escape from the Military base works
fine for the movie (well miniseries version) but for the novel, the
original opening was close to perfect.
The new epilogue added to the uncut version very nearly ruined the
entire book for me. The original novel ended with hope but
uncertainty which, for me, seemed right. With the epilogue and its
description of the return of Flagg, the entire novel and the
sacrifices made by the chracters become meaningless. I grant you
that even the original version implies that Flagg doesn't die in Las
Vegas but I chose this to mean that he knew his cause was lost on this
world and he moved on to stir up trouble somewhere else. Having him
rise up elsewhere in that same world basically says that the last
1,000 + pages were a waste of time and "Here we go again!"
Scott
Robert Whelan
17.1 (part one)
Lloyd in Jail (Chapter 24 Uncut, 18 Original)
Lloyd, escorted by two guards, one with a runny nose, is being congrat-
ulated by his fellow inmates:
Original: (shouts of congratulations) "`Right on, brother!
Rightonrightonrighton!'
Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wasn't
much like Brownsville had been. When you got to be a heavy hitter, you
got some respect."
Uncut: (shouts of congratulations) "`Right on, brother!
Rightonrightonrighton!
`Cheap mouthy bastards' the guard with the runny nose muttered,
and then sneezed.
Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wan't
much like Brownsville had been. Even the food was better. When you
got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect. He imagined that Tom
Cruise must feel something like this at a world premiere."
Somehow, the "sneeze" seems to be pre-published, or newly added heavy
handedness, telling folks THIS GUY HAS THE PLAGUE, just in case they
didn't get the spare mention of his runny nose in the previous paragraph.
The line "Cheap mouthy bastards" seems out of character from a prison
guard who is likely used to and bored by prisoner taunts. I'm guessing
this is added...because the "Tom Cruise" line that follows shortly is
indubitably added. This, sadly, belies any theories that King has reverted
to pre-published, unedited material, but is actively screwing up
previously tight storytelling. The "sneeze", which has been used
ironically in previous uncut sections (one of the assassins sneezes,
and a newscaster, who had not in the original, sneezes), is repeatedly
overemphasizing the obvious. We know that the plague is spreading!
This emphasis, sadly, seems to be cheap black humor. Ha Ha!. The guard
is going to die! This active insertion (I'm almost positive) also
breaks up the flow of the narrative. Lloyd's response to the praise,
which follows the praise immediately in the original, is seperated from
the praise by this useless extra material.
Also inserted is the phrase "Even the food was better" which seems to
interrupt the logic of the original. In the original, the phrase "It sure
wasn't like Brownsville had been." referred ONLY to Lloyd's simpleminded
enjoyment of his new found respect in maximum security. "Even the food was
better" makes it seem like he is comparing the food of both places at a
time when there is nothing to remind him of food. This line makes the
following line "When you got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect"
seem to refer to having better food, as well as to the praise of his
fellow prisoners. Is King trying to insert commentary on how well
murderers are treated? Its clumsy and stupid, and it is obviously
added in. Chalk this one up to the "King has lost it" side of the debate.
Or perhaps to the "Editing with a word processor is a bad idea" argument.
A lot of changes like this seem as if they were done by simply placing a
cursor between two points and adding stuff on a whim, and then never going
back to see if the change was a good idea.
Why did King think it was a a good idea to make his readers think about
"Tom Cruise at a world premiere", when he was trying to make them think
about Lloyd in prison, being cheered by his fellow prisoners? And why
would Lloyd think about it? It's a "New King" moment of the most
annoying kind... a simile that distracts rather than colors the picture.
Is Lloyd a Tom Cruise fan? Has Lloyd been to lots of premieres? The
original version was just about Lloyd, not about stupid Tom Cruise.
My most uncharitable theory about changes like this is that King has
adopted the habit, like Jack Torrance in "The Shining" of writing, and
editing while sipping on beer. This would explain the dulling of
imagination that would find the previous portrait of Lloyd too spare,
and in need of a crude injection of imagery supplied by the movies.
Original: "Then they walked him through a metal detector, probably
to make sure he had nothing jammed up his ass."
Uncut: "....probably to make sure he had nothing jammed up his ass,
like that guy Papillon in the movies."
Not an improvement. Not horrible, but another movie reference that wasn't
needed.
Uncut adds: "It was very quiet in here; the only sounds were the
guards' clicking footfalls (Lloyd himself was wearing paper slippers)
and the asthmatic wheeze from Lloyd's right."
Redundantly repeats and focuses on the guard's cold. Seems to be
added ONLY to focus on this. Previously that guard was desribed
merely as "breathing heavily through his mouth as if he had just
run up a flight of stairs", which was a natural thing for Lloyd to
notice because the guard was frisking him at the time. Thus the
"asthmatic" reference is redundant.
Lloyd smart mouths the door-guard:
Original: "You're gonna lose a tooth for that." the door guard said.
"Hey now, listen, you can't - "
"Would you like to try for two teeth?"
Lloyd was silent.
Uncut: "You're gonna lose a tooth for that." the door guard said.
"Exactly one, count it, one tooth."
"Hey now, listen, you can't - "
"Yes I can. There are guys on the yard that would kill their
mothers for two cartons of Chesterfields. Would you like to
try for two teeth?"
Lloyd was silent.
The pissed off and laconic door guard in the Original becomes a talky
wise guy, who overexplains in a way the other guards do not. He
gloats over his threat "Exactly one, count it, one tooth."
In the original, when Lloyd gets attacked later, the attacker is
seen being thrown a pack of cigarettes by the door guard. This sufficed to
explain why Lloyd had been attacked. This overexplains it, and makes the
door guard seem cartoony. Why does he feel the need to convince, with
words, that his threats are believable? Does he explain the facts of
prison life to every prisoner he threatens? This explanation seems less a
realistic piece of dialogue than King using the guard as a mouth puppet to
explain the situation to the dumber members of his audience.
As dialogue, it clashes with the curt exchanges between Lloyd and
his escorts.
The original's short dialogue was a lot scarier, suggesting the
brutality of prison life, and it's reality was emphasized by its matter
of fact nature. Real guards don't need to explain their threats. They
just carry them out. As happened in the original. A really horrible
and unnecessary change.
(next I'll deal briefly with the added conference with his lawyer).
Robert W.
Jon R.
Robert Whelan wrote:
>
> Jon R. (Jon.R...@nor.uib.noXXX) wrote:
> : Robert Whelan wrote:
> : > The shop owner jumps from behind the counter, with a shotgun.
> : > Original:
> : > "`Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels.
> : >
> : > Uncut:
> : > "Huh?' Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He
> : > went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit."
> : >
> : > If King HAD to add the detail about "his face being a worse mess
> : > than ever" he could have left out the "not caring a bit" detail. How
> : > frigging obvious.(snip)
>
> : But _bloody_ funny. Sorry, I just like black humour.
>
> As much as you like it, you have to admit it is intrusive.
Well, no. Not really. I like the authoral POV fine in The Stand. For
me, goofy/black humour is a natural way to talk about something
truly horrible, and I think this POV is good for that purpose.
I see what you mean, though. Some will be reminded that this is a
story by these authoral comments spread throughout the text, and
lose the suspensJon of disbelief. Then it's a bad thing for them,
of course. I guess it has to do with what you're used to reading,
at least to a certain extent.
Jon R.
Robert Whelan
Scott Padulsky (qui...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: Basically, I have two problems with the Uncute version (which make me
: recommend the original version when asked), The prologue and the
: Epilogue.
: Spoilers (just in case):
: One of the things i enjoyed about the original book was that for an
: epic world (or at least nation)-encompassing story, it has a humble
: beginning in a middle of nowhere town in Texas. The story opens with
: Stu, who is the focus of the book for the most part, and gives you a
: feeling of Americana, that is until a mysterious car crashes and all
: hell breaks lose.
: Starting the story with Campions escape from the Military base works
: fine for the movie (well miniseries version) but for the novel, the
: original opening was close to perfect.
The original opening was perfect. King even focuses on it in "Danse
Macbre" as containing a moment of "Dionysian intrusion" into a peaceful
world. The opening disrupts this by immediately giving the impression
of things gone wrong, totally spoiling the peaceful gas station scene
AS a peaceful scene.
The purpose of the new opening and ending seems to be purely
commercial. It encourages people who have already bought the book
to think "Oh, that's new! Maybe I should buy this book after all!"
And if such people flip to the end, they are treated to something
else new. Its an add for "Uncut material", even though it seems to
have been written entirely new for this edition.
: The new epilogue added to the uncut version very nearly ruined the
: entire book for me. The original novel ended with hope but
: uncertainty which, for me, seemed right. With the epilogue and its
: description of the return of Flagg, the entire novel and the
: sacrifices made by the chracters become meaningless. I grant you
: that even the original version implies that Flagg doesn't die in Las
: Vegas but I chose this to mean that he knew his cause was lost on this
: world and he moved on to stir up trouble somewhere else. Having him
: rise up elsewhere in that same world basically says that the last
: 1,000 + pages were a waste of time and "Here we go again!"
It was commercial in motivation, and thus insincere. And, as is typical
when King is under commercial pressure, rather than writing from
personal passion, he goofs it up, and reverts to horror movie cliche's.
Flagg becomes another "Jason" from Friday the 13th type shockers.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Jon R. (Jon.R...@nor.uib.noXXX) wrote:
: Robert Whelan wrote:
Well, you have read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" haven't you?
The God/Author POV is dominant throughout thpse books, but is overt, and
constantly present. My objection to the King insertions in the "Uncut
Stand" is the way they clash with a more neutral God POV, which merely
relates rather than comments in funny asides to the audience.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
17.2
(Chapter 23 Uncut, 18 Original)
Original: "Do you guys maybe do it in the corners?"
Uncut: "Do you guys maybe do your wee wees in the corners?"
No need for me to elaborate, is there? I can't believe this is
pre-original manuscript. It's New King silliness added in.
The door guard that threatened Lloyd lies about it to Lloyd's lawyer.
Original: "I keep my opinions to myself" the guard said stonily.
Uncut: "I keep my opinions to myself" the guard said, and gave Lloyd
a stony stare.
The Original painted the door guard as a better liar. I mean, if you are
going to deny something, why ruin your lie by giving "stony stares" to
the person who is accusing you, while answering the lawyer who is
questioning you on his behalf? This change makes the door guard stupider,
and the lawyer less sharp, since it doesn't take a rocket scientist to
realize that guys who stare stonily at your client don't mean him any
good.
These amplifications perhaps are added because the Original's transition
from Lloyd's optimistic anticipation of his lawyer's help, to his unhappy
treatment later at the hands of another prisoner, is broken up by the
Uncut's inclusion of the actual conference with the lawyer, and perhaps
King felt that the guard's threats would be forgotten by the reader
unless heavier emphasis were placed on them by the "Yes I can..." lines,
and the stony stare.
The original ended the meeting with the lawyer before it begins, thus:
"But maybe this guy could get him a straight ten, armed robbery. Maybe
even time served.
It was with such pleasant thoughts dancing in his head like sugarplums
that Lloyd sat down to conference with his lawyer."
And then the novel goes STRAIGHT to Lloyd's being beaten up in the
exercise yard, as fulfilment of the door guard's threat. The Uncut
eliminates the sugarplums line, and continues straight on into the
conference. The conference was apparently part of the original
manuscript, because a line the lawyer speaks in this added section
"It's a tough old world, especially for mad dog killers" is referred to
in the Original, after Lloyd gets beaten up ("the lawyer's words echoed
in his brain").
My guesses as to which are added new for the Uncut, and which is
older, original manuscript are as follows.
Added: The lawyer insultingly calling Lloyd "Syvester" and Lloyd's
ridiculous fantasy of the cartoon Sylvester being put in an electric
chair by Tweety. I would also guess that almost all the conversation
between Lloyd and Devins is written new, because of the didactic
material on the death penalty. It seems an excessive focus
on contemporary issues in a novel that was originally focused on a
PLAGUE and how all these petty issues were to be wiped away by it.
Also, as seems to be the tendency whenever characters new to the
Original appear, his lawyer cuts it up, talking and wisecracking in
precisely the same way as Vince Hogan (also added) did in his
hospital bed. My bet is that almost all the lawyer's dialogue is
added or heavily rewritten.
Pre-original: The only section here I can peg as seeming to be original,
is this one, because it fits well with the tone of the original, and
because it ends with the line "tough old world" which the Original refers
to. It is also the only section in which his lawyer refers to him as
"Lloyd", as opposed to the goofy "Sylvester" he uses throughout
the rest.
"You're going to trial in four days," Devins said. The state has such
a strong case that they can afford to empanel the first twelve men and
women that get called to the box. I'll drag it out as long as I can, but
we'll have a jury on the first day. The state will present its case on
the second day. I'll try to take up three days, and I'll fillibuster on my
opening and closing statements until the judge cuts me off, but three
days is really tops. We'll be lucky to get that. The jury will retire
and find you guilty in about three minutes unless a goddamn miracle
happens. Nine days from today you'll be sentenced to death, and a week
later, you'll be dead as dogmeat. The people of Arizona will love it, and
so will the Supreme Court. Because quicker makes everybody happier. I
can stretch the week - maybe - but only a little."
"Jesus Christ, that's not fair!" Lloyd cried.
"It's a tough old world, Lloyd." Devins said. "Especially for mad dog
killers."
This is a spare summation of the situation, that was worthy of the
original. So I am fairly confident that this short section is
pre-original, while the majority of the rest is added, or heavily
rewritten, in "New King" style.
Again, the majority of the added section is not an improvement, as it
focuses too heavily on contemporary issues, something that distracts from
the reality of the novel, in which such things are all going to become
moot, since a plague is about to kill everyone. I'm afraid that this is
the result of an author who is bored with his own material, amusing
himself at its expense.
Robert W.
Tworibbles
I've been meaning to tell you for awhile now, that while I haven't agreed with
every point you've made, I've very much enjoyed your comments on The Stand:
Edited vs. Unedited. In fact, I posted, disagreeing with a point you made.
However, I believe that you've stated your "opinions" (oh, dear) in a concise
manner, and supported your arguements very well. I respect what you're doing,
even though it's my favorite book you're "criticizing". Such a refreshing
change from the charming Michael. Sometimes I wonder if he and I even read the
same book. Anyway, thanks. I've really enjoyed it!
Cindy
Robert Whelan
Final notes on the lawyer conference. The section I described as being
recognizably pre-original ("You'll be going to trial in four days..."
thru "....mad dog killers") I consider pre-original because, if
it had been added to the original, by itself, it would have merely
underlined Lloyd's desperate situation as a mad dog killer facing the
death penalty, without much of a chance. The Uncut writes around this
to paint a cartoony portrait of the scheming lawyer, who is only using
this pre-original material to "scare" Lloyd, to give him a better chance
in court. The Uncut insists that Lloyd has a chance, and makes Lloyd's
subsequent entrapment in a plague devastated prison more of a blackly
humorous turning of tables. "He thought he was going to get off scot
free, but now he's starving in prison! Hee hee!" Lloyd's horrible
situation while starving in prison, so horrible that it was worthy of
sympathy in the Original, now becomes merely the "pie in the face" that
he gets for being so optimistic about getting a light sentence. In fact,
one of the changes to the chapter, Lloyd's thinking that "Even the food
was better" seems designed to anticipate Lloyd's starvation in a humorous
fashion that the Original published version did not. Without the lawyer
conference, and other "enhancements" that distract from Lloyd's humanity,
the "starvation in prison" section becomes much more excruciating and
effective. Also, the Plague itself, in the Original an awesome force that
was more awesome for its seeming indifference, becomes a trivial tool to
play a macabre joke on Lloyd.
Also, the effect of the brutality Lloyd suffers at the hands of the
guards later is undermined by the hope the lawyer offers him. In the
original, and in the material I feel is pre-original, Lloyd's situation,
even before the plague hits, is painted as terrible, the brutality he
suffers emphasizing this. In the Uncut, it seems to be a mere painful
inconvenience he suffers, divorced from the hopeful situation painted
by the lawyer (though not hopeful in the pre-original section, if taken by
itself).
In the Original, the plague was a demonic rescuer of Lloyd, though the
price is terrible. In the Uncut the emphasis is on the plague as a dasher
of Lloyd's hopes, trapping him IN jail when he had hopes of getting out.
Ha Ha?
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Thanks Cindy! I hope my criticisms come off as from someone who actually
likes the (original) book immensely as well. Otherwise I wouldn't be
doing this. As for Michael, I suspect that he is deliberately attempting
to be a refreshingly demented change from ME!
Robert.
Robert Whelan
Robert Whelan
itself). Also, Lloyd's reflection on the words "Tough old world" makes
more sense if related ONLY to the pre-original material, which was
very pessimistic about Lloyd's chances.
In the Original, the plague was a demonic rescuer of Lloyd, though the
price is terrible. In the Uncut the emphasis is on the plague as a dasher
of Lloyd's hopes, trapping him IN jail when he had hopes of
getting out. Ha Ha?
One final note about the pre-original section. It doesn't feel totally
original due to the mention of the Supreme Court, and "quicker makes
everyone happier". This didactic and judgemental focus on the court
system is new to the Uncut, and conflicts with the Original's focus on
Lloyd's desperate situation.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Really, thanks for the encouragement. The general silence in response
on a ng like this usually means approval, but the occasional kudos is
appreciated.
Robert.
Robert Whelan
19.
*****Warning! This post is Gigantic**********
Nick and the Prisoners (Chapter 13 Original, 18 Uncut)
Nick and Mike Childress (Chapter 19 Original, 25 Uncut)
The Return of Ray Booth (Chapter 33 Uncut)
Even though I commented on the earlier chapter already, I was not reading
as carefully, and had to go back to see how King changed Nick's
interaction with Vince, Mike and Billy.
Chapter 13 Original, 18 Uncut: Nick has put the finger on the good ole
boys who beat him up, and they are in jail, razzing him.
Original: "Hey Dummy!" Childress called. "Hey, you fuckin dummy! What's
gonna happen to you when we get outta here. Huh? Answer me that. What the
fuck you think's gonna happen to you?"
Uncut: "Hey Dummy!" Childress called. "Hey, you fuckin dummy! What's gonna
happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? What the fuck's gonna happen to
you?"
Notice that the change, though subtle, makes the Uncut's Mike Childress
angrier. His sentences are shorter, and he doesn't say "Answer me that."
The feel of the Original dialogue made Mike seem pissed off, but
calm...amazed that Nick would bring extra trouble on himself this way. He
seemed to be talking to Nick, as opposed to mindlessly threatening him,
which is the impression given by the "Uncut".
Original: "Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince, and ole Vince had spilled
his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against
these boys....."
Uncut: "Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince, and Vince had spilled his
yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these
ole boys....."
A subtle change, but significant. Vince is no longer "ole Vince" which
suggests a humorous affection for the guy, and the plain "boys"
is changed to "ole boys" in the aggregate...kinda lumping them all
together in a derisive way, whereas the Original's "boys" is neutral,
and even has overtones of affection. "Ole boys" isn't necessarily
unaffectionate either...but it feels less casual in a conversation with
a town outsider.
Nick and Sheriff Baker drive out to pick up Vince (in flashback).
Uncut Adds: "There was a shotgun under the dash. (Always locked up and
always loaded," Baker said)"
This adds an element of danger to the Uncut that wasn't present in the
Original. In the Original Baker was liked and respected by his
constituents, and the Original did not give any impression that Baker
considered himself in big danger from the people in his town, even from
the guys who had beaten up Nick. The Uncut prepares the reader to think of
these guys as dangerous lunatics who might be in need of a shotgun.
They encounter Vince...
Original:" His eyes flicked nervously to Nick standing by the Sheriff and
he gave Baker a nervous smile. "Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the
workin folk?"
Uncut: "He gave John Baker a nervous smile and his eyes flicked uneasily
to Nick standing beside the Sheriff. Nick's face was thin and battered,
and still too pale."
"Hi, Big John,..." etc.
The focus is shifted from Vince as an interesting character, to relating
to him ONLY in terms of his guilt in his beating of Nick. In fact, the
Uncut seems to focus this encounter on Nick, not on Vince.
Original: "The other men were watching, their eyes shifting from Nick
to Vince to Baker in a continuous triple play"
Uncut: "The other men in the crew were watching all this, their
eyes shifting gravely from Nick to Vince to Baker and then back the
other way like men watching some complicated new version of tennis."
The Original merely described. The Uncut goofs it up, turning the watching
men into a comic sight. Note: Someone spits tobacco, and the brand is
changed from "Red Man" to "Honey Cut". Why, I don't know. Is King trying
to be sensitive to Native Americans?
Original: "Baker grabbed Vince by one flabby sunburned arm and dragged
him forward.
`Hey," Vince said nervously, `Why you pullin on me, Big John?'"
Uncut: "Baker grabbed Vince Hogan by one flabby sunburned arm and dragged
him forward.
`Hey! What's the idea, Big John?'"
The difference is the sympathetic focus on Vince in the Original. The
Uncut is much more unforgiving. The Original calls him "Vince" while
the Uncut distances with the formal "Vince Hogan". The Original focuses
on Vinces nervousness and fear..The Uncut makes him protest righteously.
Also, the Original indicates a respectful attitude for the Sheriff that is
absent in the Uncut.
Original: "Nick nodded firmly and pointed at Vince.
`Hey,' Vince protested. `I don't know this dummy from Adam'
`Then how you so sure he's a dummy? Come on, Vince. You can send
one of these ole boys for your toothbrush. March.'
Uncut: "Nick nodded firmly and pointed at Vince for good measure.
`What *is* this?' Vince protested again. `I don't know this
dummy from Adam.'
`Then how come you know he's a dummy? Come on, Vince. You are
going to the cooler. Toot sweet. You can send one of these
boys to get your toothbrush."
The Sheriff is nicer to Vince in the Original, mentioning his toothbrush
right off. Also, in this context, "ole boys" is more friendly as
conversation, and mere "boys" seems curt. The Uncut focuses on
emphasizing the "cooler". I prefer the Original's firm "march" to
the silly "Toot sweet". Vince is described as as being more self righteous.
Also, the Uncut adds "Protested again" as the beginning of a humorous
focus on Vince's protests, a focus absent in the Original.
Original: "Protesting, Vince was led to the cruiser, and deposited
inside. He was taken back to Shoyo, locked up, and left to stew for a
couple of hours. When Baker came back in around noon, Vince was hungry
and scared. He had spilled everything.
Uncut: "Protesting, Vince was led to the Power Wagon, and deposited
inside. Protesting, he was taken back to town. Protesting, he was locked
up and left to stew for a couple of hours. Baker didn't bother with
reading him his rights. `Damn fool'd just get confused," he told Nick.
When Baker went back around noon, Vince was too hungry and too scared to
do any more protesting. He just spilled everything."
This stupidly focuses on the humor of Vince "protesting" mindlessly. It
dehumanizes and caricatures him. The line about the "Damn fool'd just
get confused" emphasizes this. I much prefer the Original's respect
for the humanity of Vince. The "Uncut' has a contempt for the character
that is typical of "New King". Again, my assumption that it is "New King"
is suspect...it may be simply raw, pre-original King, before he reworked
it and discovered an affection for the character in the process. I hate
the thought that this unforgiving contempt is a permanent part of King's
writing now.
An entire new section is present in the Uncut. It begins with a wierd
piece of dialogue that sounds clumsily added.
"As he went out, Billy called after him `Ray's going to be back, you know.
And when he catches you you are going to wish you were *blind* as well
as deaf and dumb!'
Nick, his back turned, missed most of this."
All this does is foreshadow the Uncut's RETURN OF RAY scene, in which
Ray tries to gouge out Nick's eyes. It foreshadows it badly, though. What
is Billy thinking about? Is Ray going to show Nick wierd things that he
won't want to see? If Billy is referring to Ray's eye gouging, how does
Billy know? Can Billy see the future? And having Nick miss it, because
his back is turned, is also clumsy.
As far as this added section goes, I like, in general, the added banter
between Mike, Billy, and Nick, and all three's concern for the sick
Vince. It allows both Mike and Billy to be human beings, with the
exception of the wierd "wish you were *blind*" line.
I have already mentioned that I don't like the added didactic material
involving Doc Soames, who is apparently dragging himself around
town superhumanly, just so that Nick can find him and have him overexplain
the source of the epidemic. The Original allowed the mystery of the
town's death to intrude on Nick without any such overexplanations, and
let him come to his own conclusions from Television broadcasts.
This Uncut section also ruins the Original's telling of Vince Hogan's
death, by pre-telling it, and then letting that later chapter tell it
all over again.
Uncut & Original: "but she knocked it to the floor with a hollow
bonging sound which he also couldn't hear".
(Original 19, Uncut 25)
The biggest change in tone in the Uncut version of this chapter seems to
be an emphasis on the danger that Mike Childress poses Nick. to the
detriment of the feeling of forgiveness that seemed to dominate the
Original. This, I suppose, is to prepare the reader for the Uncut's RETURN
OF RAY scene, which the Original did not contain.
Nick is in charge of the jail, and of the prisoners who had beaten him
up earlier, while the Sheriff is sick. He is tending Jane Baker, who
is dying, and regrets his inability to offer words of comfort. He
flashes back to the events of the last few days, particularly his
interaction with the prisoners, especially to relate his tending of
the sick Vince Hogan, and how his muteness prevented him from comforting
Vince. The flashback, in the Original, existed primarily to focus
on Nick's feelings of responsibility for Jane and for his prisoners.
Original & Uncut: "...Vince Hogan hadn't been able to eat. He was
delirious. Mike Childress and Billy Warner wanted out, but Nick couldn't
bring himself to let them out. It wasn't fear; he didn't think they would
waste any time working him over to settle their greivance, they would
want to make fast tracks away from Shoyo, like the others...." "....But
he had a responsibility. He had made a promise..." "...Surely sooner or
later the State Patrol would get things in hand and come to take them
away."
---This passage does not paint the prisoners as panicking. Yet.
Still in flashback...
Original & Uncut: "He had opened Vince's cell on the afternoon of the
23rd, and had put makeshift icepacks on the man's forehead, chest, and
neck. Vince had opened his eyes and looked at Nick with such silent,
miserable appeal that Nick wished he could say anything - as he wished
it now, two days later, with Mrs. Baker - anything that would give the man
a moment's comfort. Just *You'll be okay* or *I think the fever's
breaking* would be enough."
The original goes straight to describing how Nick had shuttled back and
forth between Jane and Vince, taking care of them both...but the
Uncut, before going to this, inserts
Uncut: "All the time he was tending to Vince, Billy and Mike were yelling
at him. While he was bent over the sick man they didn't matter, but he
saw their scared faces every time he looked up, their lips forming words
that all came down to the same thing: *Please let us out*. Nick was
careful to keep away from them. He wasn't grown, but he was old enough to
know that panic makes men dangerous."
This doesn't really add anything to the story. We've already been told
that they've been asking to be let out. But it changes the tone of the
story from a gradual development of panic, to a situation where the
prisoners seem to have been in constant panic and fear. This passage
clashes with the Original material, in which the prisoners were more
collected, and only gradually became panicky. Their "lips forming words"
meaning "*Please let us out*" is redundant when we later encounter actual
dialogue that conveys this, and it's redundant because of the earlier
passage which mentioned them asking to be let out. The only purpose of
these added lines is to increase the feeling of danger, in contradiction
to the earlier passage which insisted that Nick felt no fear of letting
these guys out any longer. It also detracts from Mike's later panic after
Vince dies, and Nick STILL refuses to let them out.
There is a minor change in the scene where Mike has a tantrum. In the
Uncut his eyes are described as "bulging at Nick" which they did not
do in the Original. It makes Mike seem a bit comical. Also, the
Uncut has Nick wait "until Mike gets tired" before putting food into
his cell, whereupon Mike suddenly, despite being tired, jumps all over
his food. The Original simply let Nick put the food into the cell while
Mike was having his tantrum, letting his food throwing be a natural part
of the tantrum. The Uncut's addition of the "waiting til he gets tired"
line seems to distance the readers sympathy for Mike, who, in the
original, is quite easy to identify with, despite his part in Nick's
beating. After all, even assholes can by sympathized with when they are
faced with catching a disease which just killed one of their buddies.
Mike's tantrum, when Nick refuses to let him out, is quite understandable,
at least in the Original. The Uncut seems to find his tantrum and panic
funny. Ha Ha! Serves him right! It conflicts with the Originals focus on
Nick's guilt when all his prisoners get sick, and the feeling of
forgiveness when he finally releases Mike.
Original: "He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear
wall of his cell, and one of them stuck grotesquely in a splat of
mustard, ketchup, and relish."
Uncut: "He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear wall
of his cell. One of them stuck in a splat of mustard, ketchup and relish
that was grotequely cheery, like a Jackson Pollock painting."
This change also distracts the reader from sympathy with Mike's plight,
and makes his tantrum funnier. I prefer the Original's focus on the horror
of the plague...after all, one of Mike's friends had just died, and he was
in terror for his life. I found the joking inappropriate...a New King EC
comics gloating moment. "Mike is an asshole, and he's going to catch the
plague! Ha Ha!." I hate the tendency to lighten everything up.
One of my favorite moments in the Original was Nick's release of Mike, and
their peaceful parting of ways, though we know that Mike is likely doomed.
I also appreciated Nick's guilt and concern for the welfare of Vince,
Billy, and Mike, even as he was afraid of them, and the Original let their
humanity show through better, so we, the reader, could appreciate this.
The Uncut doesn't spoil this completely, but it isn't as respectful of it.
I'm jumping ahead to...
Chapter 33 Uncut. The Return of Ray Booth.
Even though this chapter gives a better explanation for Nick's serious
sickness (which in the Original came from falling off a bike), I don't
quite like it. It detracts from the peaceful ending of Nick's
association with the good ole boys, with the forgiving release of the
dying Mike. This chapter allows Nick to get his "revenge" in the
horror movie style return of Ray Booth to attack Nick and gouge his
eyes.
This chapter jarringly focuses on Ray Booth's inner thoughts, which are
mean, petty, cartoony, in a way that was not done with any of the other
good ole boys. It also seems to be a way of injecting cheap horror into
the novel. A deaf and dumb person in danger of losing his eyes is a
real scary thing, thus the eye gouging. The battle is oddly told from
Ray Booth's POV more than from Nick's, clashing with the Original's focus
on Nick's POV alone. This may have been pre-original material, but I
don't really like its addition too much. The worst thing about it is
that it ends his association with the "good ole boys" on a nasty, vengeful
note, as he kicks Ray's dead body, as opposed to the good parting of
Nick and Mike, and the way the Original focused on the humanity of the
"good ole boys". Ray is just a Friday the 13th Monster...with no
humanity at all.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
They encounter Vince...
(Original 19, Uncut 25)
Augustine
Robert Whelan wrote:
I may be wrong about this, but the way he says it in the original, with
"Answer me that" added in there, it sounds like he is stressing more
that he is better than Nick; he's demanding that Nick answer his
questions, instead of just asking the questions, as in the Uncut
version.
I can't believe you've still got this thread going. You must be going
through both books with a FINE tooth comb to notice these subtle
differences. I would never notice them.
Chris Augustine
Robert Whelan
19.2 Nick and the death of Jane Baker (Chapter 19 original, 25 Uncut)
Original "...and he couldn't say a word to comfort her.
Nick put his forehead against the glass of the window that looked
out on the deserted, sunstruck town, and cried his tears of fear
and sorrow. He was afraid to look behind him, because her harsh
struggle to breathe had ended.
Now, except for the beat of his own heart, not head but felt in his
temples, this bedroom was as silent as the rest of Shoyo, Arkansas.
This is how the Original ends the chapter. As in some chapters where it
seems pre-original material was deleted (as in the first Flagg chapter)
there is a feeling of abruptness to it. "He was afraid to look behind him
because her harsh struggle to breathe had ended" is a bit unclear...what
is meant, perhaps, is "because he knew her harsh struggle to breathe had
ended" or "because he was sure her struggle to breathe had ended". Or
"He didn't want to look behind him, because he was afraid her harsh
struggle to breathe had ended."
The Uncut continues, with a mawkish sentimental deathbed scene, with Jane
telling her life story, begging to be buried in her wedding dress. It
has the feel of being rewritten, particularly with the use of italics to
indicate Nick's inner thoughts...never used prior to this section. I
think deathbed scenes tend to be cliche, and in a novel in which deathbed
scenes have so far been handled well, I found this one grating.
In italics: *All you can do is have sort of a slow leak* Rudy once told
him *but in a soap opera world that can come in handy*
Why would Nick need someone else to tell him about his own capacity for
grief? The soap opera reference distracts. Instead of empathizing with
Nick's grief, we are suddenly thinking how like a soap opera person he
looks. New King. I would guess that if any of this was pre-original
(as Jane's delirious lines about driving a stick shift seem to be) the
majority of it is added new.
Sorry to be redundant, but I liked the Original's spare and poetic ending
to that chapter better, and the way it associated Jane's death with the
emptiness and silence of the town. I find myeslf completely unmoved by
the Uncut's ending, with Nick carrying Jane's body "like a bridegroom
crossing an endless threshold with his beloved in his arms". Nick liked
Jane Baker, but this poetic portrait seems overblown for Nick, who has
known the woman a few short days.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
News Time. (Chapter 20 Original, 26 Uncut)
The Original's Chapter 20 contained only two "news from around the
country" pieces.
1. The placard carrier in Duluth, beaten by panicky hoodlums for "scaring
people"
2. The disc jockey Ray Flowers, his silencing by a group of soldiers, and
the fragging of the lieutenant by his own soldiers when the lieutenant
executed Ray.
The Uncut adds.
1. ditto flyers at the University of Kentucky, telling everyone the "true
story".
2. WBZ-tv's rebellion and overthrow of military control, to release the
"true story".
3. Hogliss, of the Town Clarion, delivering his last issue of the paper
containing the "true story". References are made to a "Project Blue"
source for the story, who was likely Starkey in the pre-original, but
is some other general now that The Uncut has made Starkey kill himself.
4. The Los Angeles times flyer snuck into a large number of papers,
despite attempted government suppression, telling the "true story".
5. A secret communique announcing the blockading of New York City,
redundantly informing us ahead of time what Larry discovers for
himself in the Holland Tunnel.
6. The Boulder, Colorado exodus, based on a rumor that a weather testing
center was a biological warfare installation.
7. Secret communique involving the apprehension and execution of some
radical truth teller named Brodsky.
8. Military confinement of a college campus, and brutal suppression of
the students who try to get out of quarantine.
9. A transcription of some guy talking to Len Creighton, about being
attacked by his own men. Ends with a dying scream into the microphone.
10. A goofy comedy involving the taking, and retaking of a radio station
by radical militants and regular army.
11. An Incredibly goofy "Needful Things" style gorefest, involving a
televised exectution of white soldiers by black ones, and a final
firefight between the renegades and regular army.
12. An old Buick in Des Moines, Idaho, after a riot, cruising the
wrecked streets playing "Keep on the Sunny Side" and "The Old
Rugged Cross".
13. An announcement from the President, whose reassuring announcement is
constantly interrupted by his own coughing and sneezing (ha ha.)
Of all these additions, only the "Boulder Exodus" and the Buick playing
the records were worth adding. Even the Boulder Exodus is unnecessary,
as it is represented in the Original by what happens to Shoyo Arkansas,
as seen by Nick Andros. But it is a spare portrait of a large event,
that would not have hurt if added to the Original. It gives, in fact,
in macrocosm, the futility of government attempts to control the
population, making the bloodily enforced quarantine of a college campus
seem ludicrous.
I especially dislike the additions of the News articles, which seem
designed to inform the reader, than to be part of a picture of a
devastated land. We are forced to pay attention to flyers, and newspaper
articles that were apparently written by people who had nothing better
to do...who had no friends or relatives sick with the flu, who aren't
sick with it themselves. It distracts from the sense that the Original
gave, that the flu was so devastating that it didn't need help from
a "Government cover up". Whether this sense is scientifically plausible
is besides the point. The massive military "cover up" and the useless
tirades from the rebellious press about it, is not particularly believable
either, from a logistical standpoint. There simply would not be enough
manpower to even make an attempt at suppression worth trying, even though
an attempt to control panicking populations might be attempted in the
early stages.
I just find the idea of cartoony dedicated newpaper reporters, revealing
the "truth" as a plague descends, as ludicrous as dedicated army personnel
mindlessly suppressing it as the plague descends. Most of the
newspaper articles seem didactic, overexplaining material for those
readers whose imagination cannot abstract the larger picture from the
small.
The worst additions are what seem to be "New King" humor, in the firefight
at a radio station, described by on air sounds, with cartoony cliche'd
announcements by the opposing sides as they take control, and the TV
station battle, with people's legs being cut away by machine gun fire,
people's guts slopping out of them, and a stereotypical grey haired
general standing up and yelling "STAWWWP" to be humorously machinegunned
by both sides. Both the radio station firefight and the TV station
firefight I am guessing to be newly written idiocy. I may be totally
wrong, and this is just typical King goofiness that he edited out of the
Original, but I find that hard to believe. The TV station battle, in
particular, seems designed as cinematic slapstick, an indulgence to which
New King is much more prone.
And, of course, it is SUCH an improvement to know that the President of
the United States got the plague as well! Wasn't it terrible not to
know what happened to the President in the Original? Now we know. And
it's so funny that he is coughing and sneezing with the plague as he
lies to the American People! What irony! What justice! Hee hee.
By goofing it up, the Uncut lets the reader know, reassuringly, that
"it's not real, folks..." Of course, I thought the Original, which
took its own premise seriously, to be superior. Why King decided to
screw up his own creation in this manner, I don't know. One of my
guesses is that he, like Paul Sheldon in "Misery", is trying to kill
off his own creation, because he's sick of it. Deliberately ruining
the suspension of disbelief, with humor, is one way of doing this.
He did the same thing with "Castle Rock" in Needful Things. Can
anyone think of "Castle Rock" as a real place again after "Needful
Things"? Can anyone think of the Stand as a sincere story when it
becomes stuffed with goofball slapstick?
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Can anyone point me to interviews, and/or publicity material about The
Uncut Stand, and the rewriting that was involved? Is there any
material making clear which portions were written new, or rewritten
for the new release?
I keep vacillating between the idea that King's original manuscript was
a fully goofy as the Uncut seems to be, and the idea that he has
deliberately MADE the Uncut goofier than the even the pre-published
manuscript could have been.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
I would like to make a minor bash of the Original... Chapter 20 of the
Original has the Disc Jockey Ray Flowers killed by a lieutenant. The
soldiers frag their lieutenant when the lieutenant shoots Ray. However,
the more likely fragging scene should have occurred earlier, when two
of their own were shot for refusing to obey orders. I believe that
even the Original could have been improved by editing out the
refence to two soldiers being "shot on the spot" when they refused to
go stop Ray's broadcast. I don't like the overblown "government
conspiracy" of the Uncut, and am glad that only small remnants of it
remain in the Original.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
My apologies. I mistakenly referred to the "Boulder Exodus" as being
an Uncut addition. It is not. It is Original, and it deserves to be.
This leaves only The record-playing-Buick in Duluth as the only
Uncut addition I had any liking for.
As it is, the Boulder Exodus ending of the Original chapter had a
powerful effect, that of the unstoppability of the disease and its
spread. The Uncut's focus on the military attempts to control it
are distracting, as there are too many of them. The Original's
juxtaposition of the killing of a disc jockey to the
Boulder Exodus, puts a coda on attempts by the government to control
the situation. Details about their attempts are unnecessary. The
Original's Chapter 20 was much more powerful in its focus on the
disease and its unstoppable spread. The amusing "events" the Uncut
adds distract from this.
Robert W.
Scott Padulsky
On 21 Mar 1998 12:11:23 GMT, rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org (Robert Whelan)
wrote:
>6. The Boulder, Colorado exodus, based on a rumor that a weather testing
> center was a biological warfare installation.
>Robert W.
Great posts Robert, but here i think you may have made a mistake... I
am 99% certain that the Boulder Exodus is mentioned in the original
version. Thats why the city was so empty when the "good guys" took
refuge there.
Scott
Robert Whelan
Scott Padulsky (qui...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: On 21 Mar 1998 12:11:23 GMT, rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org (Robert Whelan)
: wrote:
: >6. The Boulder, Colorado exodus, based on a rumor that a weather testing
: > center was a biological warfare installation.
: >Robert W.
: Great posts Robert, but here i think you may have made a mistake... I
: am 99% certain that the Boulder Exodus is mentioned in the original
: version. Thats why the city was so empty when the "good guys" took
: refuge there.
Yes, I know. I caught it after I posted.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
21.
Larry in the Park (Chapter 21 Original, 27 Uncut)
Re: The Monster Shouter
Original: He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went
sprawling on one of the bike paths, his glasses flying off
but not shattering.
Uncut: ...went sprawling on one of the bike paths with a loud
comic *thwap*! sound, his glasses flying off....
I beg you, someone with inside knowledge, please tell me if this was
pre-original manuscript, or Added new to the Uncut. The tendency is
still to lighten everything up with comedy. This change is the same sort
of thing that detracted from the Uncut's description of Mike Childress's
tantrum, and the portrait of Vince Hogan. Sympathy for these characters is
replaced by derision. What I need to know is, is King destroying his
previously sympathetic portraits, or are these the cartoons that he
began with before fleshing them out to produce the originals?
Uncut changes "Big fire on fifth avenue" to "inferno on fifth avenue".
No big deal, only this is in the context of conversations with other
people. "inferno" is less indicative of normal speech, from people
telling each other the news. A nitpick, I know. I just don't know why
it was changed, unless it's pre-published material that was improved
for the Original version.
Original: "They had worked their way across the country, and for a while
they worked on a farm.....
Uncut: "They had started across the country in a wheezy old 1968
Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there
on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchike a couple of
weeks, then hitchkike some more. For a while they worked on
a farm....
No real difference here. The Original simply gets to the reason Larry
and Rudy fell out of friendship with eachother more quickly than the
Uncut. I am tempted to label the Uncut's version as superior, though,
since it elaborates on their journey together, and their freindship more.
But the sparsity of the Original is good too. It tells Why Larry fell out
with Rudy without the unnecessary story of the Mercury. Actually, now that
I think about it, the Mercury changes the element of their friendship.
Deliberately setting out to hitchhike across the country with a friend
indicates a closer friendship than one in which you hitchhike out of mere
necessity because the car got busted. This difference makes me prefer the
Original's focus on the closeness of Larry and Rudy's friendship, over
the Uncut's version, which seems to be focused on Yvonne, a girl Larry
met AFTER he broke up his friendship with Rudy.
The difference between the Original and the Uncut in Larry's flashback
is really interesting. It seems that the Original is referring to
missing material, and seems a bit clumsy because of it, but the Uncut's
restoration of the material detracts from the power the Original seems
gain from the deletion.
The Original and Uncut start Larry's flashback thus:
"Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago.
It was good to remember that......that was the last time he had been
completely happy, his physical condition tip top, his mind resting
easily and not working against itself.
That had been just after he and Rudy split."
Both Original and Uncut, instead of going immediately to the "good time"
of the World series, instead go to the bad breakup with Rudy, just
prior to this good time that his mind is supposed to be going back to.
Once the breakup with Rudy is detailed, the Uncut continues to
describe the "good time" with Yvonne, something which was cut out
of the Original, though the Original did not eliminate the introductory
and concluding lines that refer to this missing material.
Once the Original finishes with the Rudy breakup, it goes straight
to the lines "He realized he was crying a little" and goes on to
describe the death of Larry's mother, and ends the with him
grieving for "that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the World
series, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy.
Most of all he grieved for Rudy...."
The "bed and love later" refers to the missing material about Yvonne.
The difference in feel is that in the Uncut the lines "He realized he
was crying a little" occur AFTER the passage describing his living
with Yvonne, and seem to refer to it, rather than the way the Original
made it seem to be mostly about his friend Rudy. His rumination about
his fault in Rudy's breakup "*Let's have no more discussion about the
matter* And no more there had been" were followed, in the Original,
didectly by the lines "He realized he was crying a little bit", and
his crying seems to be sincerely about Rudy. The Uncut, including
the lines about his crying only after the added Yvonne part, makes
the lines seem to be about that time when he was enjoying the sex and
coddling of a girl he didn't really like that much. The added Yvonne
part doesn't really seem like such a wonderful time. So I preferred his
tears be about Rudy, not his selfish relationship with Yvonne. The
Yvonne section seems to merely focus on Larry as a selfish user of
women, distracting from his human sorrow for Rudy. We already got
a taste of Larry's nasty women using behavior with the girl from
the Bronx earlier. I really don't think the Added material was
worth reinstating, though it seems to be hinted at by the Original's
lines. When reading the Original's lines, though, I believe the
tendency is to feel we are following Larry's thoughts from a glancing
thought of a good time, distracted by a more focused thought of a
loss, the loss of Rudy. Expansion of the "good time" robs the more
powerful "loss" section.
I had hoped to say that the Addition of Yvonne is a good thing, because
if fills in material that the Original seemed to intend to elaborate
on and then ignored. However, the breakup with Rudy is so much better,
so much more compelling, than the Yvonne section (which I suppose had
been the original focus of the passage in the pre-published manuscript)
that it deserved the extra focus that eliminating the Yvonne section
accomplishes.
I believe that may be one of those fortuitous discoveries that King
made when editing the pre-original manuscript, trying to cut it down.
He found the Yvonne section distracting, and found that eliminating
it improved the poignancy of the passage, since the Rudy material
outshone the Yvonne material anyway, whether he had originally intended
that to happen or not.
Now..the Yvonne section.
Not that Larry has been painted as a saint, so far. His treatment of the
girl from the Bronx, "You ain't no nice guy!" indicates
he's a severe cad, though he does seem troubled by his own nastiness.
This Uncut Yvonne section seems much more distanced from Larry, in
narrative tone, conflicting with the personal Larry POV that
seemed to be adopted in the Rudy flashback. After all, this IS Larry's
flashback, and should not morph into God Author, Stephen King's moral
condemnation of the character. But this is what happens in this section.
...He had no friends, hadn't even attempted to make any at the cafe on
Encino where he worked.....he believed everyone who worked there, from
the evil tempered head cook, to the ass-wiggling, gum chewing waitresses,
had been a dipstick. Yes, he had really believed everyone at Tony's Feed
Bag was a dipstick, the sainted, soon to succeed (and you better believe
it) Larry Underwood. Alone in a world of dipsticks, he felt as achy
as a whipped dog, and as homesick as a man marooned on a desert island."
"Yvonne said that she'd treat. Larry, that great prince, had been pretty
sure she would."
The extent of this condemnation of Larry's personality seems excessive
from his POV, which was never as harsh in the Original, in any of
the previous sections, even in the Rudy section just prior to this.
Larry seems more cartoony here, mindlessly hating, cynically manipulating
Yvonnne. There is definitely a feel of harshness towards Larry's character
that seems cruder than previously. I got the feeling that the King of the
Original allowed us to see things from Larry's POV, including his
awareness of his own asshole behavior. These
descriptions are distance the reader, making it clear LARRY IS AN ASS.
Sympathy is reduced. Empathy is made impossible. I feel that this section
shows the rewriting of an older, more conservative man, who hasn't the
energy to feel sympathy for a younger, more callow person.
21.2
Chapter 21 Original, 27 Uncut.
Larry meets Rita Blakemoor in the Park.
This section has not been changed in the slightest, that I can see.
However, this is the first appearance of a character that I was
puzzled by in the Original, and felt was clumsily handled. The
ending of this chapter, with Larry cooking steak for this older
lady, was an oddly flat conclusion to a chapter that seemed to be
about Larry's feelings of grief and loss. Rita Blakemoor is a wierd
character...one of the peripheral ones who we only see through a
main character's eyes. She seems to fill Larry's mother's role,
for Larry, but it gets mixed up in later chapters when Larry is
apparently her lover. I don't know if King was comfortable with the
character of Rita. I remember her split up with Larry at the Holland
tunnel seemed pretty final, only to have her reappear in the dark
of the tunnel later. Only to have her drop dead from an overdose.
By the time King had written her out of the story a second time, I got the
feeling that he really didn't know what to do with the character,
and had resurrected her because the tension in the tunnel required
her reappearance. I was turned off by the shock of Larry's having
slept next to a dead woman, and felt it was tastelessly exploited,
even in the Original. Somehow, I felt cheated that King had invested
so much in the Rita character, and had simply given up on her.
She was a tiringly whiny person, and not very interesting. I just
wish she had been left alive in Manhattan, instead of used as cheap
scare tactics in the tunnel, necessitating a more nasty elimination
later, from the drug overdose.
My thoughts on Rita Blakemoor aren't clear, yet. I know that the
Uncut includes a long nasty chapter about people who are too stupid
to survive on their own, despite surviving the plague (which was
not in the Original). Rita Blakemoor may have served as a representative
of that Uncut material, in the Original. And the mythical drive of
THE STAND may have needed to establish that almost all the loose
ends were being wrapped up....people without purpose, like Rita, were
going to be eliminated, leaving only those with Dark or Light destinies.
We'll see.
Robert W.
Robert W.
Kieron Dunbar
Once upon a time, Robert Whelan wrote thus:
>Re: The Monster Shouter
>replaced by derision. What I need to know is, is King destroying his
>previously sympathetic portraits, or are these the cartoons that he
>began with before fleshing them out to produce the originals?
Or is the description in the 1978 version simply an attempt to retain as
much of the original feeling as possible in a shorter space? That
description is the most obviously trimmable feature of the description of
the monster shouter. It doesn't tell you anything about the character of
Larry, or of the monster shouter himself, it just lightens the tone a
little.
>Uncut changes "Big fire on fifth avenue" to "inferno on fifth avenue".
>No big deal, only this is in the context of conversations with other
>people. "inferno" is less indicative of normal speech, from people
>telling each other the news. A nitpick, I know. I just don't know why
But, if someone decides that `big fire' doesn't have enough gravitas and
decides to call it an Inferno, an Inferno it'll remain. Either can work in
the context. I don't know why it would be different in one version to the
other, though.
>Original: "They had worked their way across the country, and for a while
> they worked on a farm.....
>Uncut: "They had started across the country in a wheezy old 1968
> Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there
> on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchike a couple of
> weeks, then hitchkike some more. For a while they worked on
> a farm....
>No real difference here. The Original simply gets to the reason Larry
>and Rudy fell out of friendship with eachother more quickly than the
But then, if you wanted a quicker read, it's fairly obvious which you'd
choose. I think the most likely reason for the version in the 1978 edition
is simply one of length.
>part doesn't really seem like such a wonderful time. So I preferred his
>tears be about Rudy, not his selfish relationship with Yvonne. The
I don't think Larry would ever have cried in public over someone he broke
up with. Instead, I read it as him crying over what he had lost, including
Rudy, Johnny McCall, Yvonne, and his whole way of life as described in that
chapter. Remember, we never learn when Larry started crying, only that he
noticed it at the end of that reminiscence.
>I believe that may be one of those fortuitous discoveries that King
>made when editing the pre-original manuscript, trying to cut it down.
If he believed it was not worth including, it wouldn't be there. That it is
there suggests that he believes that is was.
kwaheri, Kieron For mail address, rotate the username
Robert Whelan
Kieron Dunbar (nor...@dimetrodon.demon.co.uk) wrote:
: Once upon a time, Robert Whelan wrote thus:
: >Re: The Monster Shouter
: >replaced by derision. What I need to know is, is King destroying his
: >previously sympathetic portraits, or are these the cartoons that he
: >began with before fleshing them out to produce the originals?
: Or is the description in the 1978 version simply an attempt to retain as
: much of the original feeling as possible in a shorter space? That
: description is the most obviously trimmable feature of the description of
: the monster shouter. It doesn't tell you anything about the character of
: Larry, or of the monster shouter himself, it just lightens the tone a
: little.
Which is why I think it may have been Added new, not pre-original
material. It's similar to the scene of Mike Childress's tantrum,
where the Uncut includes what look like clumsy insertions which Lighten
The Mood. I don't know why the King of the Original would have WANTED to
lighten the mood, but apparently the King who wrote "Needful Things" is
much more into slapstick comedy (albeit bloody) than older King was.
I could be wrong. King might have ALWAYS been into slapstick comedy, but
had his hands slapped by his editors in the past, who, quite rightly,
saw it as distracting.
: >Uncut changes "Big fire on fifth avenue" to "inferno on fifth avenue".
: >No big deal, only this is in the context of conversations with other
: >people. "inferno" is less indicative of normal speech, from people
: >telling each other the news. A nitpick, I know. I just don't know why
: But, if someone decides that `big fire' doesn't have enough gravitas and
: decides to call it an Inferno, an Inferno it'll remain. Either can work in
: the context. I don't know why it would be different in one version to the
: other, though.
I'm not sure. In the original the passage that contains that refers to the
stories Larry was hearing from other people..
"They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same...there had been
shooting in the streets, there had been the big fire on Fifth Avenue...
Since this is about other people's stories, "the big fire" works better.
Surely they all weren't saying "an inferno". And "the big fire" is a
better way of referring to something that would be news. "An inferno"
is a bit contradictory. "Infernos" sound worse than "big fires" but
to preface it by "an" makes it sound ordinary. "the" gives "big fire on
Fifth Avenue" more clout, and makes it more like news since the "the"
makes it feel like an event. It is definitely an improvement over
"an inferno". But still, why was it changed, and when? Is it
pre-original, that was improved for the Original, or Added new, to
the Uncut?
: >Original: "They had worked their way across the country, and for a while
: > they worked on a farm.....
: >Uncut: "They had started across the country in a wheezy old 1968
: > Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there
: > on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchike a couple of
: > weeks, then hitchkike some more. For a while they worked on
: > a farm....
: >No real difference here. The Original simply gets to the reason Larry
: >and Rudy fell out of friendship with eachother more quickly than the
: But then, if you wanted a quicker read, it's fairly obvious which you'd
: choose. I think the most likely reason for the version in the 1978 edition
: is simply one of length.
: >part doesn't really seem like such a wonderful time. So I preferred his
: >tears be about Rudy, not his selfish relationship with Yvonne. The
: I don't think Larry would ever have cried in public over someone he broke
: up with. Instead, I read it as him crying over what he had lost, including
: Rudy, Johnny McCall, Yvonne, and his whole way of life as described in that
: chapter. Remember, we never learn when Larry started crying, only that he
: noticed it at the end of that reminiscence.
: >I believe that may be one of those fortuitous discoveries that King
: >made when editing the pre-original manuscript, trying to cut it down.
: If he believed it was not worth including, it wouldn't be there. That it is
: there suggests that he believes that is was.
But why? Yvonne was not described well, nor was the "time of the world
series...when his mind was resting easy..." An easy fix would have been to
make the "time his mind was resting easy" be about the hitchiking with
Rudy, making that passage less clumsy, and completely about Rudy.
This is from someone who read the Original, and prefers the Original's
focus.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
: >Re: The Monster Shouter
: >replaced by derision. What I need to know is, is King destroying his
: >previously sympathetic portraits, or are these the cartoons that he
: >began with before fleshing them out to produce the originals?
: Or is the description in the 1978 version simply an attempt to retain as
: much of the original feeling as possible in a shorter space? That
: description is the most obviously trimmable feature of the description of
: the monster shouter. It doesn't tell you anything about the character of
: Larry, or of the monster shouter himself, it just lightens the tone a
: little.
It didn't trim it *much*. As seems to be the tendency in the "Uncut"
King seems to be trying to lighten everything up. Since I find it hard
to believe that he was doing "light" stuff originally, I can only
conclude that slapstick touches are New, added during the rewriting for
the "Uncut".
: >part doesn't really seem like such a wonderful time. So I preferred his
: >tears be about Rudy, not his selfish relationship with Yvonne. The
: I don't think Larry would ever have cried in public over someone he broke
: up with. Instead, I read it as him crying over what he had lost, including
: Rudy, Johnny McCall, Yvonne, and his whole way of life as described in that
: chapter. Remember, we never learn when Larry started crying, only that he
: noticed it at the end of that reminiscence.
Yes, but normally people don't cry over "generalities", even though a
whole series of events and losses may contribute to their sadness.
Generally tears are triggered by focus on one particular loss. The
Original, by making that focus be Rudy, seems more effective than
the Uncut, which makes his tears seem to be "general", about the
time with Yvonne, even though the Uncut includes the lines "but
mostly he cried about Rudy". But in the Uncut this line about the
crying "Mostly being about Rudy" isn't as supportive of the Rudy
material as the Original's was.
: >I believe that may be one of those fortuitous discoveries that King
: >made when editing the pre-original manuscript, trying to cut it down.
: If he believed it was not worth including, it wouldn't be there. That it is
: there suggests that he believes that is was.
He was wrong. I'm sure Larry lost a hell of a lot more than just that
time of the World Series, Yvonne, and Rudy, but would an exhaustive
biography of all his sweethearts and "good times" be instructive?
You can cut it down to Rudy, and Yvonne, and even further down to
just Rudy. Just Rudy gets the same message across with even more
power. In my humble opinion, of course.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
Some more thoughts on the "Yvonne" vs. the "Rudy" sections.
I think that my biggest problem with the Uncut's reincorporation of
"Yvonne & the World Series" is not its inclusion, but the way its
inclusion distracts from the Rudy section, and the focus on Larry's
grief about the Rudy section. It occurs to me, however, that it needn't
have been so. The Yvonne section could have been included in a way
that supported the flashback to Rudy.
In order to do this, the order of presentation of the sections would have
had to be reversed. Larry's mind going back to "when his mind was
resting easy" should have been followed directly by the Yvonne section,
only glancingly mentioning the Rudy breakup that preceded it, but
referring to Rudy more and more throughout the reminiscence, until it
collapses into a full remembrance of how he broke up with Rudy, which
would THEN have gone to his breaking down in tears. It would have been a
more natural way of following a person's stream of consciousness. This
IS, in effect, what the Original accomplishes, by only glancingly
mentioning his flashback to the good time, and then going straight to the
Rudy breakup.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
From luna4...@aol.com Sun Apr 12 15:03:03 1998
Date: 11 Apr 1998 16:47:11 GMT
From: Luna457954 <luna4...@aol.com>
To: Robert Whelan <rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org>
Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
Newsgroups: alt.books.stephen-king
I wrote:
.I don't know if King was comfortable with the
.character of Rita. I remember her split up with Larry at the Holland
.tunnel seemed pretty final, only to have her reappear in the dark
.of the tunnel later. Only to have her drop dead from an overdose.
.By the time King had written her out of the story a second time, I
.got the feeling that he really didn't know what to do with the character,
.and had resurrected her because the tension in the tunnel required
.her reappearance.
you wrote:
..I'm wondering if this is why SK chose to combine Rita's character with
..Nadine's in the miniseries. I thought the book much better than the
..series, although I liked the series well enough to buy it, but I didn't
..care for Rita. Having Larry share the experiences in New York and the
..Tunnel with Nadine added to the character of their relationship, IMO.
Kelly
I'm glad your feelings about this character echo mine. If Larry and Nadine
had a stronger relationship, it seems that it would have worked better
if Nadine had been there from the beginning. I'm glad you pointed out
that the TV minseries eliminated Rita and replaced her with someone who
DOESN'T commmit suicide, but sticks around. It validates my feeling that
King got stuck with the Rita character, and so just wrote her out,
because he couldn't stand her, even though he wanted a companion for
Larry.
Robert W.
Scott Padulsky
On 12 Apr 1998 19:45:29 GMT, rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org (Robert Whelan)
wrote:
>
>
See, I always thought that the purpose of Rita was to give Larry a
"failure" guilt complex early in the story. Its seems to me that King
wanted to give him a burden to make him a contrast to Harold Lauder.
Both chracters thought they just weren't good enough but Larry
overcame his self-doubt while Harold let his self-doubt consume and
destroy him. I liked the chracter of Rita. Before King added that
chapter in the expanded edition of the accidental deaths, she was a
good example of a weak willed survivor.
Scott
The Doom That Came To Usenet
>>See, I always thought that the purpose of Rita was to give Larry a
>>"failure" guilt complex early in the story. Its seems to me that King
>>wanted to give him a burden to make him a contrast to Harold Lauder.
>>Both chracters thought they just weren't good enough but Larry
>>overcame his self-doubt while Harold let his self-doubt consume and
>>destroy him. I liked the chracter of Rita. Before King added that
>>chapter in the expanded edition of the accidental deaths, she was a
>>good example of a weak willed survivor.
>>
>>Scott
I was overwhelmed by the irony of her having survived the flu, then
living alone in a dying city until Larry found her, only to die at her own
hand afterwards.
-el
--
Diplomacy: the fine art of saying "nice doggie" while you're looking for a rock.
"You further a terrible reputation for Macintosh loyalists everywhere."
- Tom Vilot (tjv at indra dot com)
Robert Whelan
Scott Padulsky (qui...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: On 12 Apr 1998 19:45:29 GMT, rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org (Robert Whelan)
: wrote:
: >
: >
: >From luna4...@aol.com Sun Apr 12 15:03:03 1998
: >Date: 11 Apr 1998 16:47:11 GMT
: >From: Luna457954 <luna4...@aol.com>
: >To: Robert Whelan <rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org>
: >Subject: Re: THE STAND: Edited vs. Unedited
: >Newsgroups: alt.books.stephen-king
: >
: >I wrote:
: >
: >I'm glad your feelings about this character echo mine. If Larry and Nadine
: >had a stronger relationship, it seems that it would have worked better
: >if Nadine had been there from the beginning. I'm glad you pointed out
: >that the TV minseries eliminated Rita and replaced her with someone who
: >DOESN'T commmit suicide, but sticks around. It validates my feeling that
: >King got stuck with the Rita character, and so just wrote her out,
: >because he couldn't stand her, even though he wanted a companion for
: >Larry.
: >
: >
: >Robert W.
: See, I always thought that the purpose of Rita was to give Larry a
: "failure" guilt complex early in the story. Its seems to me that King
: wanted to give him a burden to make him a contrast to Harold Lauder.
: Both chracters thought they just weren't good enough but Larry
: overcame his self-doubt while Harold let his self-doubt consume and
: destroy him. I liked the chracter of Rita. Before King added that
: chapter in the expanded edition of the accidental deaths, she was a
: good example of a weak willed survivor.
: Scott
Well, that did occur to me. I much prefer the one example of Rita
to the plethora of examples in the Uncut's "accidental deaths"
chapter. However, I still found her break up with Larry prior
to the tunnel served to emphasize Larry's failure to "save"
Rita...his guilt as he tries to find her is quite clear, and
effectively conveyed. But there was something clumsy about her
"reappearance" and Larry's redemption by her reappearance, only to
get rid of her AGAIN, in a more shocking way, to hammer home
Larry's guilt, or failure complex. But really, did Larry's failure
complex NEED to be hammered home? He had already failed to save his
own mother, for christ's sakes. Rita seemed to be a mother substitute,
(she wears his mother's perfume, and is an older woman). I just
thought that her disappearance, reappearance, and death were too
sudden. If she was just brought back because King thought she would
be scary in the tunnel, that's cheap. If she was brought back to be
used as an example of weak survivors, that's also cheap. I don't
like characters that are used as "examples" of anything, anyway,
though, like you, I prefer ONE example to the endless list in the
"Uncut".
Robert W.
Kieron Dunbar
Once upon a time, Robert Whelan wrote thus:
>Kieron Dunbar (nor...@dimetrodon.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>: Once upon a time, Robert Whelan wrote thus:
>: >Re: The Monster Shouter
>: >replaced by derision. What I need to know is, is King destroying his
>: >previously sympathetic portraits, or are these the cartoons that he
>: >began with before fleshing them out to produce the originals?
>: Or is the description in the 1978 version simply an attempt to retain as
>: much of the original feeling as possible in a shorter space? That
>: description is the most obviously trimmable feature of the description of
>: the monster shouter. It doesn't tell you anything about the character of
>: Larry, or of the monster shouter himself, it just lightens the tone a
>: little.
>Which is why I think it may have been Added new, not pre-original
>material. It's similar to the scene of Mike Childress's tantrum,
It's also why I think it's material which could be lost by someone cutting
for length. Funny old world, isn't it?
I still don't think the monster shouter is a character who would be used by
someone who didn't see a need to lighten the mood. His purpose is to be
someone who runs away from Larry in fear. It would have taken a couple of
lines to make that fear something we can understand. With the monster
shouter, Stephen King makes it one we cannot, making it less horrific, and
the mood slightly lighter.
Of course, we could both be reading far more into what is only four words
of description. Just because it describes it as a comic sound, it doesn't
mean it is comedy.
>: >Uncut changes "Big fire on fifth avenue" to "inferno on fifth avenue".
>: But, if someone decides that `big fire' doesn't have enough gravitas and
>: decides to call it an Inferno, an Inferno it'll remain. Either can work in
>I'm not sure. In the original the passage that contains that refers to the
>stories Larry was hearing from other people..
The people who talk to Larry are probably also the people who'd talk to
each other. It wouldn't take long for that label to spread.
>: >part doesn't really seem like such a wonderful time. So I preferred his
>: >tears be about Rudy, not his selfish relationship with Yvonne. The
> But why? Yvonne was not described well, nor was the "time of the world
>series...when his mind was resting easy..." An easy fix would have been to
>make the "time his mind was resting easy" be about the hitchiking with
>Rudy, making that passage less clumsy, and completely about Rudy.
Perhaps because it gives more background to Larry's character. I don't know
how much of that account isn't repeated elsewhere, but you would have lost
something by that much abbreviation. And how would you have linked it to
his breaking up his friendship with Rudy, or to the World Series?
>This is from someone who read the Original, and prefers the Original's
>focus.
I've only read the Uncut version, so I'm only going by what you write with
regard to how the other version is written.
Out of interest, do you think the word `Original' is particularly
appropriate, given that it is further from the version Stephen King
originally gave to his publisher than the uncut one?
kirk elkins
It was always my opinion that King created the Rita character so that
Larry could seek redemption during the story. The fact that he ain't
no nice guy has to sink in deep. It seemed, in retrospect, that King
had her leave, and then return to not make it obvious that she was
fated (or slated, perhaps) to die. If you notice, she has less
expansive a back story than the others.
On 12 Apr 1998 19:45:29 GMT, rwh...@amanda.dorsai.org (Robert Whelan)
wrote:
> It validates my feeling that
>King got stuck with the Rita character, and so just wrote her out,
>because he couldn't stand her, even though he wanted a companion for
>Larry.
>
>
>Robert W.
Kirk Elkins
I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration
Socrates in Plato's Apology
Robert Whelan
: >: Once upon a time, Robert Whelan wrote thus:
: >: >Re: The Monster Shouter
: >: >replaced by derision. What I need to know is, is King destroying his
: >: >previously sympathetic portraits, or are these the cartoons that he
: >: >began with before fleshing them out to produce the originals?
: >: Or is the description in the 1978 version simply an attempt to retain as
: >: much of the original feeling as possible in a shorter space? That
: >: description is the most obviously trimmable feature of the description of
: >: the monster shouter. It doesn't tell you anything about the character of
: >: Larry, or of the monster shouter himself, it just lightens the tone a
: >: little.
: >Which is why I think it may have been Added new, not pre-original
: >material. It's similar to the scene of Mike Childress's tantrum,
: It's also why I think it's material which could be lost by someone cutting
: for length. Funny old world, isn't it?
But if you are cutting for length, you tend to look for large passages
that can be eliminated. Eliminating the "comic *thwap sound" has such
a miniscule effect that it is more likely to be editorial, in the sense
that the passage works better without it. King *is* a good writer, and
he *can* make changes that have more to do with improving the feel of a
story than with merely shortening it. I seem to repeatedly return to the
idea that a lot of the comedy in the "Uncut" is Added. It could merely
be reinstated...I just find it incredible that King WOULD reinstate
material that *I* think he eliminated to make the passages sound better,
not JUST to cut down length.
: I still don't think the monster shouter is a character who would be used by
: someone who didn't see a need to lighten the mood. His purpose is to be
: someone who runs away from Larry in fear. It would have taken a couple of
: lines to make that fear something we can understand. With the monster
: shouter, Stephen King makes it one we cannot, making it less horrific, and
: the mood slightly lighter.
: Of course, we could both be reading far more into what is only four words
: of description. Just because it describes it as a comic sound, it doesn't
: mean it is comedy.
Actually, I think I understand the "Comic *thwap* sound"'s purpose. Later
in that passage Larry finds that the fear that the "monster shouter"
inspired in him has changed to annoyance. The "comic *thwap* was probably
supposed to support that change of feeling in Larry. What's wrong with it
is that it seems to describe from the narrator's POV, not just Larry's.
The sound IS a comic *thwap* sound, not just one that "Larry found oddly
comic" or something that would tie it firmly to Larry's POV.
Besides, the fear that was aroused by the Monster Shouter earlier
conflicts with the "comic thwap" even if it IS considered Larry's POV.
Larry, on his first encounter with this dreaded unseen presence, would
simply be observing his actions, not automatically assigning "comic"
adjectives to actions and events that he has no control over. Had he,
in reflection, laughed at it, it might have been fine, but the "comic
thwap" sounds more like a direction to a sound editor on a film. "When
he falls, make it sound really funny...THWAAAP! Hee Hee!
All right. Despite my ramblings, I suppose that the "comic thwap" was
a rough draft idea of one of the ways he might get across Larry's loss of
respect and fear of the Monster Shouter. But since he describes Larry's
loss of respect for him a few sentences later, it isn't necessary.
: >: >Uncut changes "Big fire on fifth avenue" to "inferno on fifth avenue".
: >: But, if someone decides that `big fire' doesn't have enough gravitas and
: >: decides to call it an Inferno, an Inferno it'll remain. Either can work in
: >I'm not sure. In the original the passage that contains that refers to the
: >stories Larry was hearing from other people..
: The people who talk to Larry are probably also the people who'd talk to
: each other. It wouldn't take long for that label to spread.
Well, the real difference was "the big fire on fifth" and "an inferno on
fifth"
Had it been*"*a* big fire on fifth" vs. "*the* inferno on fifth" I
probably would have preferred the "inferno". I placed too much emphasis on the
terms used to describe the fire, rather than the context that defines
their importance.
"a" or "an" suggests other "infernos". "The" suggest only one important
one, whether described by the word "inferno" or "big fire".
: >: >part doesn't really seem like such a wonderful time. So I preferred his
: >: >tears be about Rudy, not his selfish relationship with Yvonne. The
: > But why? Yvonne was not described well, nor was the "time of the world
: >series...when his mind was resting easy..." An easy fix would have been to
: >make the "time his mind was resting easy" be about the hitchiking with
: >Rudy, making that passage less clumsy, and completely about Rudy.
: Perhaps because it gives more background to Larry's character. I don't know
: how much of that account isn't repeated elsewhere, but you would have lost
: something by that much abbreviation. And how would you have linked it to
: his breaking up his friendship with Rudy, or to the World Series?
Well, the Original version IS clumsy because of lines that refer to his
missing material without elaborating on it. As for the background, it
doesn't really support the crying jag he goes on as well and the Rudy
section does....so perhaps, when reincorporated, King should have
presented that section first, and THEN moved on to the Rudy section.
: >This is from someone who read the Original, and prefers the Original's
: >focus.
: I've only read the Uncut version, so I'm only going by what you write with
: regard to how the other version is written.
: Out of interest, do you think the word `Original' is particularly
: appropriate, given that it is further from the version Stephen King
: originally gave to his publisher than the uncut one?
Well, it's what King SAYS is closer to the one he originally gave his
publishers, but it seems to me that the Original published version is
in fact THE Original, in the sense that it is the only version on which
King's energy was spent in revising, tightening, and generally improving
the impact the story had on the reader. A shapeless lump of clay is
the true "original" form of a sculpture, but it isn't a final polished
product. The "Uncut" Stand is full of ugly, distracting bumps and
irregularities that magically vanish in the Original published version,
which takes on a much more vivid life without their distracting
presence.
Using the "comic thwap" as an example....Without the "comic thwap",
the Monster Shouter's tripping and falling allows we, the reader, to
identify with the MS as a human being, and allows us to understand
Larry as he tries to go the man's aid. Larry's annoyance with the
man is expressed after the guy gets up and runs away from him,
rejecting his first impulse of concern for his fall. The "comic Thwap!"
distracts the reader from this.
I was trying to give credit to the idea that the "comic thwap" was a
way of supporting Larry's loss of respect for the MS, but I'm afraid
it doesn't wash. It violates, too heavily, the mood of the Original.
I still think its added, for whatever mood destroying reason.
Because I think that King DELIBERATELY ADDED comic distractions when he
rewrote THE STAND, I cannot believe that it IS truly closer to even
the pre-published manuscript in tone. The "Original" published
version, because of its closeness in time to the writing of the
pre-published manuscript, is much more likely to preserve the "original"
intent and feel of the story. So I am going to continue to refer to
the "cut" version as The Original, because I'm quite sure it
deserves it more than this updated...thing...does.
Robert W.
Robert Whelan
22.1 (pt. 1)
Fran Buries Her Father. Meets Harold.
(Chapter 22 Original, 28 Uncut)
Just in case anyone is confused about the train of thought Frannie's
mind follows in the original, it goes roughly like this....
*SUN* gleaming off knives in rack that FATHER made.
Phrase "remove the beam in thine own". What kind of beam?
*SUN*beam, moonbeam, roofbeam, Mayor Beame?
*FLY* on her piece of pie.
FATHER dead upstairs
My dog has FLEAS they BITE his knees... (Fleas/Flies)
Noise of ICECUBES in fridge (ice cubes...summer)
Beautiful summers day/ Father is Dead.
You can't leave a corpse in the house in high summer!
The emphasis that King makes on the sun is very subtle at first. He casually
mentions the sun gleaming off the knives, not making the SUN be the obvious
thing that Fran is focusing on, since Fran isn't aware of it either. None of
the connections are obvious until we get to the end of the passage, in the
Original, at which point we, the reader, prompted by these subconcious cues
that King has been slipping by us, approach Frannie's realization at the same
time as she does, with a gut horror that isn't quite spelled out for us, but
is there subconsciously. I think that this is a brilliant passage in its
effect on the reader...The sun on the knives, the "beam"s, the Fleas/Flies
that bite (bite knees, and corpses), the ice cube reminder of the summer, and
the final overt conscious realization of what 80 degrees weather means to a
corpse.
(There is a connection that seems to be glossed over...Fran cuts a slice of
pie, and then her glance happens to fall on the knife rack...King never
makes the reader connect her pie cutting with the knife rack...but it
would have been a natural connection, unless she has a pie knife in the
fridge. It would have been a natural tie in, even though
King doesn't seem to make her pie cutting relate to the knife rack at all.)
In the middle of cutting the pie, Fran sees the knife rack, and drifts off
for 15 minutes, until she tries to remember what she was doing.
Original:
"...remembered she had been in the middle of something. What? A line
of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: *Before
removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend to the one in thine own*
She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered
her. What sort of beam? Sunbeam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also
flashlight beams, and beaming faces, and there had been a New York mayor
named Abe Beam---
*before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye*---
But it wasn't an eye; it was a pie. She waved a hand at it. Bye, bye, Mr.
Fly, say so long to Frannie's pie."
Uncut:
"...Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of
beam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces
and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beam, not to mention a song she
had learned in Vacation Bible School--"I'll be A Sunbeam for Him." ....
Alas..whenever King uses a phrase such as "not to mention...." or
"But so and so didn't notice it a bit..." or "But this didn't occur to
her at all" it is because he is trying to, clumsily slam something home
to the reader, while still attempting to maintain character integrity.
This "not to mention....I'll be a Sunbeam for Him..." tries to
answer for the reader the question, "Which beam?" by answering SUNBEAM,
you Idiots! SUNBEAM!.
The difference in effect is that the Original finesses the connection of
the sunbeam by making it the first in string of possible "beams", letting
it be, for the reader, a subconscious thing, as it was for Fran. The
Uncut, less subtly, seperates it from the pack and singles it out, while
clumsily denying that it is doing so. The "not to mention" is King's way of
insisting that Fran is unaware of "Sunbeam" being *THE* connection, while
pointing out to the Reader that it IS *THE* connection.
I personally prefer the Original's subtlety, despite the fact that *I*
did not consciously "get" the connection prior to this . Perhaps King got a
little tired of people NOT getting it, and decided to make it more obvious in
this "Uncut" addition. He could have written it this way in the pre-original
manuscript, and improved it when he prepared the original, but somehow I
feel that a writer capable of noticing a severe clumsiness, and changing
it for the Original, is also capable of writing it well in the first place.
This leaves me with the impression that this change is actually an Added,
rewritten line, didactically explaining for the readers what he was actually
trying to go for, and, coincidentally, marring the Original's effect.
I don't understand, though, why King would WANT to destroy the subtle,
subconscious effect of the Original, just for the sake of being UNDERSTOOD
consciously by the reader. Is being UNDERSTOOD more important than actually
having a powerful effect ? I would posit that even dense readers
(I count myself among them, prior to this analysis) still pick up the
effect of the passage, subconsciously, and this should be more important
to a writer. This is another instance where I would LOVE to know whether it
was pre-original material, or New, Added material.
A possibility...As in the "Lloyd in Jail" chapter, where King increases the
obvioiusness of the door guard's threat to Lloyd, possibly to compensate
for the distracting added Talk with the Lawyer, this extra emphasis on
the Sunbeam may be to compensate for the extra inserted material about
a TV show and the Town Barricades.
Fran's train of thought, in both Original and Uncut stays the same,
from the sun on the knives, to the rhyme "My dog has fleas, they bite
his knees". At this point they take off in violently different
directions.
THE ORIGINAL: "She sat there for almost an hour..." a...thought began
to surface in her mind_two thoughts actually.." "her father was
dead.." "It was a beautiful summer's day..'
The Original gives the feeling. because of the "dog has fleas" rhyme,
that her thoughts, during this hour, are just as disjointed.
THE UNCUT is amazing. After "My dog has fleas" it interrupts her train of
thought with the smell of smoke...apparently she left french fries on the
stove, and they are burning. She takes the smoking pan outside, which
apparently was put on the fire BEFORE she took a slice of pie.
The crisis with the burning pan wakes her up and she is "..acutely frightened.
Frightened? No_ in a state of low grade terror, only a pace away from panic."
The Original did not describe her as being in a state of suppressed panic,
prior to her first realization of what the summer day will do to her father's
body. And her self conscious analysis of her own state of terror "Frightened?
No..in a low grad of terror..." seems out of character. If she's frightened,
she's frightened. If she's capable of pondering the relative categories of
fright, and which one she's feeling, she isn't that frightened, in my opinion.
And I don't like the idea of Fran being turned into a panicky idiot. The
Original described her as being in shock, but not "suppressing" something
that she was "in a low grade of terror" over. The Uncut Fran seems to be a
helplessly ditzy victim. Understandable, perhaps, but the Original's Fran,
while still believably in shock, didn't seem so scatterbrained and on the edge
of falling to pieces.
She then ponders her train of thought SINCE she put the pan on the
fire, minutes, apparently, before the chapter started. (So why didn't
the chapter start with her putting on french fries?)
"she tried to remember what her train of thought had been after she put
the french fries on to cook. It had seemed very important."
she remembers thinking...
French Fries aren't nutritious...
French Fries reminded her of McDonalds, and French Fries and Quarter
Pounders. "Undoubtedly unhealthy, indubitably comforting. Besides,
pregnant women get strange cravings".
"Thoughts of strange cravings brought her to the next link.,..the
strawberry pie in the fridge.."
She had seen the knife rack, and "her mind had just short circuited
..Motes...beams.... flies....."
The only thing this rehashing has done is paint a
completely ridiculous explanation for this extra material being
inserted. The Uncut Word association game is pretty far fetched and
unbelievable. Quarter Pounders are considered "strange cravings"?
Strawberry pies are considered "strange cravings? Why would any
woman use pregnancy as an excuse for craving McDonalds or a
Strawberry pie? Why would someone who is hungry for greasy, salty
French Fries and Hamburgers choose Strawberry pie as a substitute?
After pointlessly rehashing the train of thought for the Reader, to make
SURE they Get it, that motes, beams and flies are part of a surfacing
realization, Fran bursts in tears. After she cries, she feels better,
and wonders is she's having a nervous breakdown. Again, people capable
of pondering their own sanity, aren't that badly off, though I think
this is *supposed* to emphasize how badly off Fran is.
"Since her father had died at half past eight the night before, her
ability to focus mentally seems to have gotten fragmented. She would
forget things that she had been doing, her mind would go off on some
dreamy tangent, or she would simply sit, not thinking of anything at
all, no more aware of the world than a head of cabbage."
I love the way this Uncut material emphasizes how imbecilic Fran is. I
know she has an Excuse, but compared to the Original, in which she had
the same excuse, THIS portrait of Fran is a lot dumber. This particular
Uncut paragraph, which follows the Uncut's rehashing of the "French
Fries" train of thought, serves as an excuse to include what I believe
strongly to be Added, New material in the TV show Fran watches.
"After he father had died she had sat on his bed for a long time. At
last she had gone downstairs and turned on the TV."
What TV show does Fran watch? Remember the ludicrously gory slapstick of
the Black soldiers vs. the White soldiers in the Uncut's Chapter 26
two chapters before this? That was televised, and so Fran gets to watch
it uncomprehendingly. Apparently Fran is so in shock that she mindlessly
watches the whole thing, stupidly assuming the gore is all fake.
"It had to be fake, of course -- they didn't show things like that on
TV if they were real, but it hadn't *looked* like pretend. It reminded
her crazily of Alice in Wonderland..."
This makes Fran REALLY dumb. She also ponders whether the "beef in the
loincloth" looks like Prince or not.
She watches some more, allowing King to describe that goofy firefight
some more...
"She saw men, nearly decapitated by heavy caliber bullets thrown backward
with blood bursting from their shredded necks in gaudy arterial pumps."
Stephen King was so proud of this earlier Newly Written addition to the
Uncut that he HAD to dumb Fran down so he could have an excuse to write
a little more about it.
"She remembered thinking in her disorganized way that they should have
put one of those signs on the screen from time to time, the ones that
warned parent to put kiddies to bed, or change the channel. She also
remembered thinking that WCSH might get their license to broadcast lifted
all the same. It really had been an *awfully* bloody program."
This marks this as Newly Added, because of the anachronistic focus on
"content warnings" I truly doubt that TV standards were so loose in the
late 70's when this was first written that this would be a natural
thought for a person of that time. This is a 90's thought written into
the novel. It also confirms my feeling that this, and the TV station
firefight from earlier are Newly Written, not restored.
This paragraph makes Fran REALLY dumb. Not only did she think the show
was "fake" at the time she saw it, but she's THINKING BACK on it, and
has no further insight on it. Fran is turned into a moron so King can
shove more goofy gore at the Reader through her stupefied eyes.
She remembers having fallen asleep AFTER the program, and so she is
half convinced she dreamed it all. This does Fix the problem of her
stupidity a little.
The Uncut then flashes back to material that was not in the Original.
It describes events in Fran's home town prior to her father's death.
Included are a Town meeting where people discuss throwing out sick
people, discuss throwing out sick summer visitors, and decide to
blockade the town from outsiders. Even though this material feels to
me like it was pre-original (whereas the TV show is definitely Newly
Added) it doesn't REALLY have much to do with Fran's problem with
her father's death...it distracts from it. If it had to be inserted, a
better place to do it would have been after her realization of the need
to bury her father. As it is, it isn't a very interesting passage,
though I can imagine it being fleshed out more, perhaps as a story
totally seperate from Fran. Whether this was pre-original material,
or newly added, it seems to be clumsy as part of a flashback that is
supposed to be focused mainly on her father's death, and the only
connection it has is the loose mention of her father's opposition to
the barricading of the town, mentioned as an afterthought after the
events have already been described. I don't mind this extra material
IN ITSELF, because it seems like an interesting aspect of the plague
to explore...the attempt of small communities to protect from it
by cutting themselves off. However, as it interrupts Fran and her
problem with what to do with her dead father, and seems to have
been an even that neither her or her father had much to do with, I
suspect it of being material that, if pre-original, wasn't particularly
natural to this section, and if it actually WAS written as part of
this section, this section benefitted immensely by dropping it and
focusing on Fran and her uninterrupted train of thought. If it had to
be included, it should have waited until AFTER Fran had come to her
realization about her need to bury her father, not distracted from it
in a strained and unnatural flashback.
After The Uncut's description of the Barricade defense of the town, and
Gus Dinsmore's theories on why traffic from the highway has dried up,
the Uncut finally allows Fran to continue her interrupted thoughts
about flies, pies, motes and beams, and returns to Original material
which begins "She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her..."
until the final realization
My guesses as to the creation of this Uncut material is as follows.
Pre-original:
The Town Barricades, though it isn't necessarily original to this
particular section.
Newly Added. The French Fries, and McDonalds..."besides, pregnant
women get strange cravings", the gory TV show. The redundant "French
Fry" flashback is an echo of the "strawberry pie" association that
worked well in the original, and is used here, clumsliy, to justify
the inclusion of both the TV firefight and the Town Barricades material.
This post has become too long. I'll deal with the meeting with Harold,
and Frans' burial of her father in the next post. It looks like the
Harold sections are identical, but her burial of Dad has some severely
unpleasant embellishments, including a further degradation of Fran's
character.
Robert W.
JGM
Robert Whelan wrote (edited):
> Fran Buries Her Father. Meets Harold.
> (Chapter 22 Original, 28 Uncut)
> Original:
> "...remembered she had been in the middle of something. What? A line
> of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: *Before
> removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend to the one in thine own*
> She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered
> her. What sort of beam? Sunbeam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also
> flashlight beams, and beaming faces, and there had been a New York mayor
> named Abe Beam---
> Uncut:
> "...Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of
> beam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces
> and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beam, not to mention a song she
> had learned in Vacation Bible School--"I'll be A Sunbeam for Him." ....
> Alas..whenever King uses a phrase such as "not to mention...." or
> "But so and so didn't notice it a bit..." or "But this didn't occur to
> her at all" it is because he is trying to, clumsily slam something home
> to the reader, while still attempting to maintain character integrity.
> This "not to mention....I'll be a Sunbeam for Him..." tries to
> answer for the reader the question, "Which beam?" by answering SUNBEAM,
> you Idiots! SUNBEAM!.
> The difference in effect is that the Original finesses the connection of
> the sunbeam by making it the first in string of possible "beams", letting
> it be, for the reader, a subconscious thing, as it was for Fran. The
> Uncut, less subtly, seperates it from the pack and singles it out, while
> clumsily denying that it is doing so.
I agree wholeheartedly that this is an amazing bit of writing in the
original; I've commented before on the tremendous intuitive streak that
King was on during this period -- this being able to *convincingly*
place himself in the mind of a badly damaged character is simply
phenomenal, and King did it consistently throughout this period (see
also Arnie's descent into obsession in Christine, and Andy McGee's
reaction to discovering his wife in Firestarter).
In the particular paragraph in point, though, I can easily imagine that
King originally wrote the bit about "'I'll be a Sunbeam for Him'", and
decided during a re-write for length, or perhaps prodded by an editor,
to remove it, moving just the "sunbeam" term to the previous line.
While I don't really put the weight on the change that Robert has -- it
doesn't really make Frannie any stupider for me -- I agree that the
Uncut version is fairly awkward, and expect that it might have been
blue-penciled as such by an editor.
> I personally prefer the Original's subtlety, despite the fact that *I*
> did not consciously "get" the connection prior to this .
Agreed, and me neither. But, as Robert touches on below, you don't have
to consciously "get" every subtle pattern and resonance used in a story
to recognize a deep and satisfying read when you are having one.
> Perhaps King got a
> little tired of people NOT getting it, and decided to make it more obvious in
> this "Uncut" addition.
But how in the world would he *know* whether anybody is "getting it"?
If anything, King's assumptions about his audience, or his willingness
to write down to what he assumes is his audience's level, is what has
changed. Now, where does an author form his assumptions about an
audience? I have no idea, but I suspect that it is near impossible for
a writer of King's celebrity to ever get a fair idea of who "we" really
are. Maybe his perception is formed by "fan" mail (seemingly possible
considering the themes of Misery and The Dark Half), or, even worse,
blathering behavior at book signings and the like.
> I don't understand, though, why King would WANT to destroy the subtle,
> subconscious effect of the Original, just for the sake of being UNDERSTOOD
> consciously by the reader. Is being UNDERSTOOD more important than actually
> having a powerful effect ? I would posit that even dense readers
> (I count myself among them, prior to this analysis) still pick up the
> effect of the passage, subconsciously, and this should be more important
> to a writer. This is another instance where I would LOVE to know whether it
> was pre-original material, or New, Added material.
Me too, and not least because it would make the incredible effort
Robert is putting into this project add up to something more than a long
speculation. But even without this knowledge, Robert has come a long way
towards selling me on his thesis on the "old King" vs. the "new King".
Whether the ugly material was written in the '70s and King had the sense
and instincts to edit/rewrite it and/or listen to someone else's
recommendations, or it was added clumsily in the '90s, the basic
conclusion is the same.
Jim
Robert Whelan
JGM (mcl...@bcrvm1.vnet.ibm.com) wrote:
re: Fran's train of thought from "strawberry pie" to "can't leave
a corpse in the house..."
: I agree wholeheartedly that this is an amazing bit of writing in the
: original; I've commented before on the tremendous intuitive streak that
: King was on during this period -- this being able to *convincingly*
: place himself in the mind of a badly damaged character is simply
: phenomenal, and King did it consistently throughout this period (see
: also Arnie's descent into obsession in Christine, and Andy McGee's
: reaction to discovering his wife in Firestarter).
I have been wondering a lot, lately, HOW he does that? Does he write out
rough drafts in which he "apes" the characters he is portraying, in
a derisive way, in order to get inside their heads, his own distaste
for them included in his rough notes, and upon editing removing all
authorial commentary and letting their thoughts stand alone? I had
*believed* that King was actively *imagining* what a person like that
would think, and just letting the person think and act through his pen.
: In the particular paragraph in point, though, I can easily imagine that
: King originally wrote the bit about "'I'll be a Sunbeam for Him'", and
: decided during a re-write for length, or perhaps prodded by an editor,
: to remove it, moving just the "sunbeam" term to the previous line.
: While I don't really put the weight on the change that Robert has -- it
: doesn't really make Frannie any stupider for me -- I agree that the
: Uncut version is fairly awkward, and expect that it might have been
: blue-penciled as such by an editor.
Hmm. However, in the "Uncut" the portions that correspond to the Original
are identical, except for that one change, and you have to admit that the
Original passage, unmuddied by the Uncut material that breaks it up, is
pretty tight, spare, and powerful. I would guess that the Original's
passage was the result of rewriting for the Original, so any changes
made to it for the Uncut would probably be Added, not restored.
However, in favor of your argument, the "Larry remembers Rudy" section,
though (in my opinion) more powerful in the original, obviously is
restored to its pre-original version in the Uncut, even though the
restored sequence is clumsy. So it is quite possible that you are right,
and the clumsiness we see here is simply pre-edited. However, I
refuse to believe that about Fran watching TV. THAT is added, and
if King is capable of adding that, he's capable of changing a
subtle line to a clumsy one as well.
: > Perhaps King got a
: > little tired of people NOT getting it, and decided to make it more obvious in
: > this "Uncut" addition.
: But how in the world would he *know* whether anybody is "getting it"?
: If anything, King's assumptions about his audience, or his willingness
: to write down to what he assumes is his audience's level, is what has
: changed. Now, where does an author form his assumptions about an
: audience? I have no idea, but I suspect that it is near impossible for
: a writer of King's celebrity to ever get a fair idea of who "we" really
: are. Maybe his perception is formed by "fan" mail (seemingly possible
: considering the themes of Misery and The Dark Half), or, even worse,
: blathering behavior at book signings and the like.
Fan mail, blathering behavior at book signings, what Tabitha King reports
to him about the opinions on this newsgroup. Or merely the fact that the
man's books just SELL, whether or not they have been edited. Someone on
this newsgroup mentioned that in one of King's essays about the time of
CHRISTINE he commented on a "UFO" story he felt was "unpublishable".
This story subsequently got published as "THE TOMMYKNOCKERS". The
feedback is likely not from direct contact with fans, but from the
marketplace...the Fans buy his stuff, edited or not, clumsy or not.
Personally, I find King's insistence that the book was cut down for
"financial reasons, not editorial ones" to be self deluding. It's possible
that King's editors at that time had become so enamored of their star
author that they dared not say that the thing was horrible. Had it
been a masterpiece, I'm sure that something could have been done...
It could have been broken up into parts, as the Lord of the Rings was.
Had it truly been worth it, they would have published it as is. Their
apologetic "it will cost too much to publish", if King's account can
be believed, was simply their way of saying "Cut out all the crap,
Stevie, or we WON'T publish it!" I'm still waiting for any major
plot that actually enhances the Original...the only thing SO far has
been the Uncut's Chapter 20, and the additional conversations between
Jess and Fran. I won't be sure until I read the entire thing.
: > I don't understand, though, why King would WANT to destroy the subtle,
: > subconscious effect of the Original, just for the sake of being UNDERSTOOD
: > consciously by the reader. Is being UNDERSTOOD more important than actually
: > having a powerful effect ? I would posit that even dense readers
: > (I count myself among them, prior to this analysis) still pick up the
: > effect of the passage, subconsciously, and this should be more important
: > to a writer. This is another instance where I would LOVE to know whether it
: > was pre-original material, or New, Added material.
: Me too, and not least because it would make the incredible effort
: Robert is putting into this project add up to something more than a long
: speculation. But even without this knowledge, Robert has come a long way
: towards selling me on his thesis on the "old King" vs. the "new King".
: Whether the ugly material was written in the '70s and King had the sense
: and instincts to edit/rewrite it and/or listen to someone else's
: recommendations, or it was added clumsily in the '90s, the basic
: conclusion is the same.
Thanks. Of course, the incredible thing will be if I actually complete
the project!
Robert W.
Robert Lancaster
Robert Whelan wrote in message <6hccf9$6...@enews4.newsguy.com>...
>JGM (mcl...@bcrvm1.vnet.ibm.com) wrote:
>
>re: Fran's train of thought from "strawberry pie" to "can't leave
>a corpse in the house..."
>
>: I agree wholeheartedly that this is an amazing bit of writing in the
>: original; I've commented before on the tremendous intuitive streak that
>: King was on during this period -- this being able to *convincingly*
>: place himself in the mind of a badly damaged character is simply
>: phenomenal, and King did it consistently throughout this period (see
>: also Arnie's descent into obsession in Christine, and Andy McGee's
>: reaction to discovering his wife in Firestarter).
>
Not to mention Bart in Roadwork (Best of the Bachman books, IMHO), and Louis
justifying his actions to himself in the latter half of Pet Sematary.
Rob.