Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to try and remotivate myself and content-up dorkclub.com, seeing as how this is basically my Quarter From Hell. I probably shouldn’t have capitalized that.

You see, kids, I’ll be graduating in June with a lovely (and useful?) degree in English. However, before that happens I need to make it through this fun filled quarter of last minute requirements ranging from a fantastically dumb 18th century literature class to a surprisingly easy (but still maddeningly difficult) James Joyce seminar in which we are reading Ulysses. In related news, I’ve found I can quote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from memory even though it’s been over a year since I first read the book. That probably proves what an astoundingly brilliant writer Joyce is, but I like to think it’s because I’m an idiot and boy oh boy this update sure is messy so far. And it gets messier!

Things I’ve been doing that I probably should have dedicated an entire update to but actually it’s probably better that I didn’t. A list.

I played a lot of Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires, though I still haven’t quite conquered all of China. Considering the only time I’d ever spent with a Dynasty Warriors game was on a demo kiosk in CompUSA in 2001, I’ve found the experience pretty radly. I just mash buttons and hundreds of Chinese soldiers die. Then I tell my advisers to shutup and invade another kingdom, murdering folks as I go. It’s pretty much the shallowest thing ever, but it’s a lot fun. If it had (online) coop play, I’d pretty much play it forever.

I also boughtened and playened Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, which is the PC expansion to Doom 3 and not the XBox port. It’s pretty good, but nowhere as good as Doom 3 (which, if you remember correctly, I actually liked a great deal). It’s way too short, most of the weapons beyond the machine gun and the new double barreled shotgun and “grabber” don’t see much use, and the new time slowing/ass kicking super powers are virtually useless. Well, they’re useless in the way that they’re super useful, but they’re rarely required so I never really used them.

Then! Also! Guild Wars. I’ve been finding World of Warcraft really, really boring lately (but eagerly await battlegrounds) so I bought Guild Wars to keep me entertained. It’s incredibly boring to play alone, but becomes a lot of fun when playing with a group. It’s primarily PvP focused, but not in a MMO gankathon sort of way, as PvP encounters are instanced, between balanced teams, and actually interesting. The game as a whole is sort of like a mix between Diablo 3, Phantasy Star Online, and Magic: The Gathering, which is what I think Penny Arcade described it as, but maybe not style. Also, the graphics are really, really bad. I remember the game being really pretty last May, but I guess after playing Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and World of Warcraft in the inbetween time in I’ve become spoiled in.

Spoiled like a fox!

I was going to watch a DVD on my Playstation 2 but it’s hooked up through a VCR so I can’t. The DVD? Pawel Majewski!

Sometimes I just use the names of INTERNET CELEBRITIES because they’re, like, my heroes and stuff. I also like to draw.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, it’s going to be one of those updates, only one where those is italicized. For fun! Copy and paste that last sentence into an HTML file, add italic tags to the first “those” and then upload it somewhere/someplace! Don’t tell me about it, though.

Other things!

Oh, so there’s this kid/dude in my English 101 class who’s probably the biggest asshat I’ve ever met. I’ve had to start sitting with my back to him (we’re in a computer lab room) just so he can’t see the horrible faces (disgustion, sadness, pain, LOVE) I make when he talks. My professor hates him too, so that makes things fun!

I kinda want to play Metal Gear Solid 2 a little bit. I have no schoolwork this weekend, see. I think I’m going to go play vector_black’s copy and yell at the screen and stuff because nobody else is home. EDIT: I can’t find his copy of the game! My life is nothing if not a waste.

First, though, I’ll leave you with a random bit of text copy-pasted from fifty pages up in this text document in which I am now writing which makes the title totally relevant and stuff, though this text will soon get shat into WordPress and then HTMLed and then you’ll see it through your browser of choice on your operating system of choice at the place you’re at (of choice). Only none of that might be of choice, and then where will we be.

!

Oh!

I got a great idea!

So, this update is pretty much a disaster of a mess thus far, I think we can agree on that pretty conspicuously, so, what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy-paste this thing I half-wrote on Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series, only like I said it’s half-written and completely unorganized and just an attempt to crap my ideas down on paper TO BE ORGANIZED LATER (which I did not). You probably shouldn’t read it if you ever have the slightest chance you might read The Dark Tower books at some point in your life. Actually, I think you can read up until the point where I start talking about the books themselves. (Actually I already labeled it with spoilers and stuff all those months ago!) AFTER that it’s nothing but massive spoilers, including a spoiling of THE VERY THING THE SERIES IS ABOUT!. I’ve read the fifth book since starting writing this, and it agrees.

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I am a selective fan of Stephen King. On the one hand, I greatly respect the man for his work ethic and unquestionable love for his craft. On the other, I find nearly every television and film adaptation of his work, whether he’s involved with the project or not, to range from merely uninteresting to downright bad (The Shawshank Redemption and the film version of The Shining being the only exceptions). I’ve never been particularly interested in any of the man’s short stories and I find what little I have read of his novels (Needful Things) to be entirely unable to hold my interest. However, I rank IT as one of my favorite books ever written and count The Stand (which I started reading before discovering there was a revised, longer edition and haven’t got back to actually finishing) as a truly remarkable literary achievement.

My mother, a huge Stephen King, she is, considers Mr. King a “wordy” writer. There’s a lot of truth in that statement. One of the most common complaints brought up against any of his books is that they’re just too damn long. IT is often harshly criticized for taking too long to amount to too little. Many people write it off as two poorly edited books crammed into a single binding. There’s a twenty page sequence near the beginning of IT in which readers are blessed with a ridiculously long account of a character’s entire life history. Then this same character goes up stairs, discovers her dead husband, and is never even mentioned again for the rest of the book. Stephen King has a way of making even the shortest of his novels seem incredibly epic, if for no other reason than their insane page counts.

If books like IT and The Stand are epic and King’s other novels are just really, really long, then no words exist to accurately describe the length or scope of The Dark Tower series. I suppose really fucking long just about grabs it. The entire thing clocks in at roughly 4,500 manuscript pages. That’s long, kids. But like I said, a good portion of that length comes from King’s writing style. He’s the sort of writer who rarely provides his readers with a “two weeks later” or an “early the next morning.” Instead he writes, and we read, about every single event of even marginal importance down to the last detail from one moment to the next. If something’s happening then King’s going to write about it, and he’s going to write about it from six different angles and he’s going to use a tremendous amount of adjectives and adverbs. King loves his adjectives and adverbs. But The Dark Tower series is epic for more reasons than its unprecedented length. At its heart stands what is very easily the largest of issues: the very safety of not just one world, but all worlds. The Dark Tower itself is still a rather vague construct, even after the fourth book in the series, but this much is certain: something, whether it’s a dark spire of enormous girth height or a single red rose stands at the center of all worlds acting as the lynchpin for size, time, and reality. And something’s poisoned it.

Heavy stuff, to say the least, but King is a writer of popular fiction not because he’s fond of words, but because even though it takes him a long time to get anywhere, the reading on the way is one hell of an easy going. He writes with liberal use of what I’ve always heard referred to as the Uncle Charles Principle. That is to say, when the narrative focuses in on a specific character, the language itself slightly shifts to reflect that character’s own thoughts and feelings. Stuff is generally described using the character’s own words. Partially because of this, King is an extremely crude writer. He has no problem using “bad” words, even when they stand in stark contradiction to the rest of his prose, or describing the most lurid sex act or violent mutilation down to the last detail. He’ll often refer to his characters using inappropriate slang, usually while the narrative streams through another character’s head, but sometimes when the words are coming from no source at all.

If King’s writing style has any real downside, it stems from the cumulative effect of all these things. The wordiness, the Uncle Charles Principle, and the crudeness of the writing combine to form a sort of overarching bluntness which often insults the reader, and in no place is this clearer than in the Dark Tower series. Because every detail of every event is transcribed for the reader, and because these events are often shot through the perspective of various characters and the language itself is hardly “high” (even when characters employ the high speech of the Dark Tower’s world) or “artsy,” very little is left to the reader’s imagination. Should you happen to notice an interesting way in which the relationship between two characters echoes another relationship between two others, King did too and he’s about to directly point it out to you. If you were wondering what King’s alluding to in a certain line or passage, he’ll tell you in the next. If you’re starting to consider a character or object as a larger symbol in the text, King’s going to fully explain it to you two sentences from now. The end result doesn’t really hurt the series in any real way, though it might have an impact on the books’ longevity a century from now. As it stands, it’s merely unfortunate, and often insults the readers who picked up on any of the story’s nuances (and is merely glossed over by those who didn’t).

As of this writing, I’ve only read the first four books (of seven) in the Dark Tower series, but I feel this is a perfect time to stop and write about them. King began work on the first book in the series in 1970 and finished the fourth in 1996. While the first half of the series was written over the course of sixteen years and released as they were finished, the second half of the series was written at the same time and released six months apart over a year and a half. Though the entire series is related and one book flows into the next, at no other point in the series (except perhaps after the very first novel) is there a better breaking off point. Besides, if I didn’t stop and write down all this stuff now I’d probably explode trying to keep it all inside me through three more (2,500 manuscript pages!) novels.

So, let’s get to it.

The Dark Tower 1: The Last Gunslinger

The first book in the series has the unique disposition of being almost nothing like the remainder of the books that follow it. It’s certainly tightly connected to the other six novels, especially after King’s extensive revisions following his completion of book seven, but The Last Gunslinger stands on its own like no other Dark Tower title.

The Last Gunslinger quite literally follows Roland Deschain of Gilead as he follows the mysterious Man in Black across an impossibly harsh desert landscape. As a gunslinger, Roland stands as a proud symbol of the world before it “moved on.” He is a one man army – judge, jury, and executioner – and a highly trained diplomat. He is just as deadly with words as he is with his six shooters. As he draws ever closer to the mysterious Man in Black, the gunslinger faces a town turned against him by the power of religion, a sex-hungry demon, and a band of mutants that dwell along the railroad tracks beneath a forgotten mountain.

The novel is largely a western adventure right down to the saloon with batwing doors. However, King complicates things with constant flashbacks to Roland’s youth and the interesting character of Jake Chambers, a young boy who died in 1970s New York and finds himself in the world of the Dark Tower, and who ultimately plays a pivotal role in the series.

The novel asks a lot of questions and yet doesn’t provide a single answer. In fact, the events of the entire book could easily be summarized as, “there’s this dude named Roland who wants to go to this dark tower for some reason.” It is a beginning in every sense of the word. Though largely self-contained as an adventure through the possibly post-apocalyptic desert of a world that resembles our own, any questions which may arise from looking beyond the plot events only leads to dead ends. The novel seems to exist as a simple bookend, one whose events merely hint at what’s to come.

The Dark Tower 2: The Binding of the Three

If The Last Gunslinger is western genre fiction then The Binding of the Three is a dark, twisted version of Being John Malkovitch, which wasn’t exactly all lollipops and handjobs to begin with. Beginning immediately where the first book in the series left off, The Binding of the Three opens on a beach populated with deadly lobstrocities as Roland sets out on his quest to draw the prisoner, the lady of shadows, and the pusher. Apparently drawing is a lot like walking through doors and into people’s heads.

The novel takes place almost entirely in New York City at various points in the twentieth century. Whereas The Last Gunslinger is largely an exercise in introducing and developing a single character, The Binding of the Three King introduces three more (though really a lot more than that) major players. If book one is simply a beginning, then I’d call book two more beginning. King sets the stage with the Last Gunslinger, but he populates it in The Binding of the Three.

Gone are the constant flashbacks to the Roland’s youth as the narrative flows in a strictly linear (though not that strict) fashion. The book is divided into three roughly equal sized sections, each of which deals heavily with one of the three which Roland draws. Interestingly, the presence of other characters (who aren’t little boys or advisories) and Roland’s mutilation at the beginning of the book (BUT HOW? STILL SPOILER FREE!), as well as the absence of any of Roland’s ‘though youth’ narratives, greatly softens the character of the Gunslinger. In fact, over the course of these three books Roland becomes less and less like a stone figure carved from legend and more and more like an actual human being. This obviously has a great deal to do with our old friend Character Development, but the very shifting of the genre and the end of Roland’s solitude has a lot to do with this too. Make someone talk and they won’t seem quite so alien. Or something.

The Drawing of the Three’s greatest weakness is that it seems so completely disconnected from the first book. Readers may wonder if their favoritest Gunslinger in the very wild west might have wandered into another series entirely sometime between book one and two. As mentioned earlier, very little of the book actually takes place in Roland’s world, and the little bits that do very rarely involve Roland and are all contained on the same beach. It’s not necessarily bad, just not at all what you’ll likely expect, but as the next book in the series shows, that’s about par for the course for The Dark Tower.

The Dark Tower 3: The Wastelands

This book should have received a different title. Ignoring any grand ideas which the wastelands may come to symbolize (like uh… nothing), the titular wastelands have all of twenty pages of air time in the novel. They are not a goal the protagonists are striving for. They are not a grand obstacle in the protagonists’ path. They just kinda are, and allow King to show off some creepy creatures and generally sick the reader out before finally closing the book.

Instead of having anything to do with any Wastelands, the book is divided into two noticeable chunks. The first half focuses on (now the major spoilers start, turn back now if you value your Dark Tower virginity) Roland and his ka-tet (watch me not explain a term) as they struggle to return Jake Chambers to the world of the Dark Tower. Once again, a great deal of the story takes place in New York, and once again King takes it in interesting new directions the readers (stupid, stupid readers) weren’t expecting. During this first half we also learn that all the problems of the last book seem to have magically disappeared (huh?) and that robotic bears are a blessing in disguise.

The second chunk of the novel then takes place in and around the ruins of the New York-esque city of Lud. Interestingly, King tries to finally provide the series with not one but two antagonists here, only to simply leave them hanging in the air as the book ends. One is simply mentioned as a future threat (and who later turns out to be anything but). A conflict begins with the other but then the book abruptly ends with the ka-tet in certain danger and a dramatic showdown about to begin.

The Wastelands is easily the weakest link of the Dark Tower series, which is a shame because so much of it so excellent. The interesting complications arising from Jake Chambers and his adventures in New York are downright fun to read and the ka-tet’s later perils in Lud are exhilarating to no end. However, the sudden love between Eddie and Susannah and their ability to quickly learn the skills of the gunslinger is completely unbelievable. Similarly the ending of the novel, as well as the title itself, seem like half-assed attempts for an author who is known as being anything but. However, the book is still good, it merely doesn’t hold up to the standards of the previous two novels. Luckily for it, the fourth book completely knocks all three out of the water.

The Dark Tower 4: Wizard and Glass.

The fourth entry in the Dark Tower series is easily the most interesting of the series thus far. Though there are some strange problems with the actual plot of the novel, the book’s structure and the themes it addresses not only in itself but in the previous entries in the series as well are extraordinarily interesting and worth looking at.

The book’s beginning starts literally right where the previous book left off. King even goes so far as to include the last few pages of The Wastelands just to help readers make sense of things. However, the book has a definite ending and is in many ways an ending to the first four books of the series as a whole. The vast, vast majority of the book is actually a direct sequel to the B-plot of Roland’s past from the first book as told by Roland to the other members of his ka-tet. So, we have a beginning which is directly connected to another novel, an ending which ends not only one book but three other books as well, and a middle which is a sequel to a sub-plot in a book at the very beginning of the series. Perhaps I should also mention that the beginning and ending of the book take place in the very same world as The Stand. Yes, things are very interesting indeed.

Wizard and Glass brings to light things about the previous three books which can easily be overlooked or simply dismissed outright at first glance. Here is my thesis which I’m about to attempt to prove using only the most vague of arguments. I’m going to remain rather conservative in my ideas for now, because there are still three books just waiting to prove me horribly wrong. Here goes: The Dark Tower stands not at the center of all realities or at the center of all of Stephen King’s stories, though King himself writes that he sees the Dark Tower universe as containing not only the story of Roland but all his stories as well. No, the universe of the Dark Tower is the universe of all stories, rather written by Stephen King, my mom, or your dad. At its center stands the Dark Tower. And still, something has poisoned it.

King’s series is inspired by Robert Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns of the 1960s, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Before even being brought to paper, the Dark Tower series was already infused with the ghostly inspirations of other stories. But what story isn’t? And what author can live in a storyless vacuum before creating stories of his or her own? The fact that The Dark Tower was born of other stories is simply one of many signs (albeit a lesser one) pointing to a story about stories taking place in the world of stories.

The first book in the series, The Last Gunslinger, is comprised almost entirely of people telling stories to one another, only the first time through it’s too easy to get too caught up in the adventure to notice. Roland tells the story of Tull to the man with a raven. In his story the female bartender with a scar across her forehead tells Roland a story about her own experience with the Man in Black. When Roland meets Jake Chambers at the waystation, Jake tells him the story of his own death and his own experience with the Man in Black. Later, Roland tells Jake of own his childhood and the events leading up to his claiming his guns. And finally, when the gunslinger finally meets the Man in Black, the moment the entire novel has been building towards, what do they do? They hold palaver. The Man in Black tells Roland the story of his own future in the form of a tarot reading and then tells him about the creation of the world, this world of stories, and of the Dark Tower itself.

The second book, The Binding of the Three, is similarly comprised of a series of stories. The doors which Roland finds on the beach each lead to New York City in different wheres and whens, and what’s a story if not a doorway to a where and when? These doors are literal representations of stories titled The Prisoner, The Lady of Shadows, and The Pusher. Eddie Dean thinks of these doorways in terms of film, a medium for stories, likening looking through the door to watching a POV shot from The Shining. However, what this book is really about is the stories which people tell themselves. Though other stories are told throughout the novel, as Eddie tells airport security his story in a dingy interrogation room, Roland mutters pieces of his story while recovering from infection by a campfire, or a gunslinger-possessed Pusher weaves a tale for two police officers in Terminator-esque style, the majority of the stories within the novels are stories told by characters to themselves. Odetta/Detta Walker makes up stories for the lapses in her memory when her other personality takes hold. She tells herself about her past, about her father, her accident, and a certain forespecial plate. She later tells Eddie and Roland. Eddie tells himself the stories of his own past as well, the stories of his mother and his brother Henry and the ways in which he controlled him and the way he feels about his death. He later tells Susannah and Roland.

It is also in this second book that we further learn of the connection between Roland’s world and others. In The Last Gunslinger we learn of Jake’s passage into Roland’s world following his death. Then, when Jake dies again in the world of the Dark Tower he tells Roland that “there are other worlds than these.” Though the world of the Dark Tower is certainly related to other worlds, its exact relation is only reinforced, though not quite explained, during the second novel. Keep this in mind, as I’ll return to it later.

The third book in the series, The Wastelands, is (surprise, surprise) once again comprised of a series of stories. Both Eddie and Susannah are blessed with a gift to see certain things in Roland’s world. Susannah can see the world’s past, the daily mundane events of people going about living their lives. Eddie, on the other hand, sees a rose and key in a campfire. Both end up telling the stories of what they see to the ka-tet.

The first half of the book takes place almost entirely in New York, as Jake Chambers tries desperately to come to terms with the fact that he has lived two lives and he remembers both of them. The telling of stories and be further stretched to unbelievable limits and I could discuss how Jake tells himself stories of these alternate lives or tells his parents and their housekeeper stories to cover up his experience with the rose. I could talk about the dreams that Eddie and Jake share, treating them as stories. But I won’t. There’s a much more obvious story in Jake’s life.

Jake buys two books from a Mr. Tower, a book of riddles and another titled Charlie The Choo-Choo. The latter book holds a special significance to the third book (and both play a major role in the fourth). When Jake reads the book we read it with him, reading the exact words Jake reads as he reads them. This story within a story bears a striking similarity to Roland’s world of the Dark Tower. The world of Charlie The Choo-Choo is just as related to Roland’s world as the world of Eddie Dean, Susannah Walker, and Jake Chambers (which may or may not be different worlds). Within the book, Jake finds names of characters and locations from the Dark Tower series. The fact that this story within a story contains these connections to the larger world of King’s story seems to suggest that both, though not identical, are shades of each other. It is but another story in this world of stories.

Additionally, when Roland’s ka-tet meets with the elders of the small village outside Lud, the characters once again tell stories to another other. Most importantly, the ka-tet is told a story of Blaine the Mono.

Finally, in Wizard and Glass we hear Roland’s story. Throughout The Wastelands and the beginning of Wizard and Glass the other characters constantly beg Roland to tell them his story. They want to know about Susan and about events which were hinted at in the first novel. In many ways, the story which Roland tells is the point to which the entire series has been building up to. Or more accurately, it’s the less obvious point the series has been building up to. Obviously, the drive of the characters and the motion of the novels have been heading toward the Dark Tower, but the mysterious references to Roland’s past and the very themes of the series have been leading to Roland’s tale.

He ends it now.