King's Highway pt. 49: The Shining (novel)

You will remember what your father forgot - Tony.

And that, my friends, is all that remains of my original blog entry.

I published my finished-blog for this earlier today, and then - as usually happens with blogger - noticed the spacing/ formatting came out completely (and inexplicably) differently than how it looked in edit-mode. So, I went in to tidy things up, somehow hit "revert to draft," then as I tried to ctrl-Z backwards, it erased the entire blog, then auto-saved before I could do anything else.

I tried a bunch of different things to recover it, but to no avail. Seems to be gone forever. After whimpering helplessly for about twenty minutes, (the horror of all those hours of work receding into oblivion was perhaps the worst, though replacing that hard-won sense of "job well done"ness with the blank-screen of blogger-glitch was a close second) I posted a s.o.s. to the Google Groups board; maybe someone can tell me how to find it.

If so, well, see you then. But, to hang all my hopes on that is too much, so I'm just going to move on.

Rather than attempt to re-create it - because I think the attempt would be so discouraging that I'd give up the entire King's Highway project altogether - I can only say... well, I guess the Overlook got this one. Subsumed into the unholy terror of Room 217, or something. Add "King's Highway pt. 49" to the scrapbook in the boiler room.

(If it was the film, I'd say "Add me to the picture of the July 4th Ball at the end," but since that doesn't appear in the novel, it wouldn't be jake to mention here.)

I thought about trying to piece it all back together from my notes, but... it's just too much. Not only time-wise, but emotional-investment-wise. Also, I rarely keep my handwritten notes once I start saving the blog-in-question to Blogger, so I don't even have the particular passages from the text that I marked as noteworthy, nor my general outline. Too bad.

Here's a laundry list of what I remember, but it of course is not the same: I wrote about child abuse, cultural-colonization of adult over child a la Inventing the Child by Zornado, Disney, and Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Torrance family drama as classic dark mythology/ perfect symbolic representation of America in the 20th century, and what I considered a pretty good argument for The Shining as King's best novel. I talked briefly on the forthcoming Doctor Sleep and King's relationship with the book, then and now, how he psychoanalyzes himself and externalizes his fears in print, what it means to tell this tale when you're a young man with small children vs. as a grandfather with his own boiler-in-the-basement well-tempered and trials endured/ bested.

I focused only on the novel. The film will be next time; that one is still saved, thankfully, just got to finish it. If that one gets erased, I will take this as proof of the hotel not wanting me to write about it. Anyway, I didn't like how every review of the book I read mentioned the film. Understandable, of course, but I wanted to write one focusing only on the book.

Anyway, the labels - slim as they are - still exist from the lost version, and here now are the pics I used, robbed of context and caption, but as a mysterious road-map to a world taken unfairly from us. Look at them as the King's Highway equivalent "Croatoan" written in the trees. RIP, entry 49, Lost At Sea.

NEXT:

If the blog-gods be willing, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining