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Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Short Review)

A number of television shows and movies have commemorated the anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy. PBS recently broadcast a new documentary in its American Experience series, JFK. The two-part examination of Kennedy’s life featured some new footage and it brought new understanding about Kennedy’s health problems. CNN’s The Assassination of President Kennedy is a fascinating portrayal of the events around the killing using a lot of archival footage I had never seen before (see video below). Meanwhile, the National Geographic Channel presented a dramatization of the period leading up to the assassination with its TV-movie version of Bill O’Reilly’s book, Killing Kennedy, which one might find superficial but still entertaining. While some have wondered if popular culture is overdoing the commemoration of the national tragedy of our president’s death, I found a quiet way to contemplate the anniversary by reading a novel related to the event: Stephen King‘s 11/22/63.

The novel explores a famous what-if question about “what if you could go back and time and prevent a horrible event from happening?” In 11/22/63, the narrator is Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in Maine who learns from his friend Al about a time portal that will take him back to 1958. With some experimentation, Jake and Al discuss whether one may change the past and how the world might have been different had Lee Harvey Oswald not killed Kennedy. What happens if history is changed? Can it be changed? And what if Oswald was not the person who killed Kennedy?

As King explains in his “Afterword,” he did a significant amount of research about Oswald, and the book is informative about the main players we associate with the events leading up to the assassination. But the book is more than a novel about a killing. King provides an interesting portrayal of life in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The protagonist of the novel is not Oswald or Kennedy but Jake Epping, and it is his life that fascinates us. Epping becomes the focal point in the context of major world events while King meditates on the fragility of both life and history. The book is long, but it is fast reading, and it is Jake’s story that makes it a page-turner that you cannot put down.

Conclusion? 11/22/63 is a fun read that also asks some big questions. And while enjoying the book you might learn a little bit along the way. Earlier this year it was reported that the novel may be made into a TV series or miniseries, but the book is so fun you should read it. In the meantime, below you may check out part one and part two of CNN’s The Assassination of President Kennedy.

The Assassination of President Kennedy CNN… by VidsnMore

What is your favorite historical novel? Leave your two cents in the comments.

Trailer for “11.22.63” Stephen King Miniseries

John F. Kennedy Inauguration and Robert Frost

Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend John?

Dylan Releases “Murder Most Foul”

RFK (and Aeschylus) on MLK Assassination

Harry Shearer’s New Series on Richard Nixon

Hey Jack Kerouac, Happy Birthday

On March 12, 1922, novelist and poet Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. After showing early promise as a scholar and football player, Kerouac attended Columbia University but then dropped out. He was later kicked out of the Navy on psychiatric grounds.

On the Road

By the late 1940s, Kerouac was finding some promise with his writing. But it would be the 1957 publication of his book based on his travels, On the Road, that would make him famous as an important figure of the Beat Generation.

Surprisingly, a year earlier in 1956, Kerouac threatened to never publish the book. But even after gaining fame from On the Road, Kerouac had trouble finding peace and happiness. He died from an abdominal hemorrhage in 1969 at the age of 47.

In this clip from The Steve Allen Plymouth Show, Allen interviews Kerouac in 1959. And Kerouac reads from his book while Allen and the band plays jazzy music in the background. Check it out.

On the Road was made into a 2012 film directed by Walter Salles and starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart in 2012. But one seems more likely to run into Kerouac in songs rather than in films.

“Hey Jack Kerouac”

There are several Kerouac-inspired songs, as listed by Raditaz. Probably the most famous creative work that is about Kerouac is the 10,000 Maniacs song, “Hey Jack Kerouac.” The song first appeared on the band’s 1987 album In My Tribe.

When the group appeared on MTV Unplugged on April 21, 1993, one of the songs they performed was “Hey Jack Kerouac.” Merchant introduced the song for the 10,000 Maniacs by reading about Kerouac. Her reading apparently was from the introduction in her copy of On the Road.

The song portrays Kerouac as a misunderstood artistic soul (“little boy lost in our little world that hated/ and that dared to drag him down”). And the song also mentions other of the Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg (“Allen baby, why so jaded?”) and William S. Burroughs (“Billy, what a saint they’ve made you”). Still, others have pointed out that the song complains about the effects of the over popularization of the Beats.

Lead singer Natalie Merchant wrote the song with the band’s guitarist Rob Buck who passed away in December 2000. You may easily tell they try to capture Kerouac’s writing style in the chorus:

You chose your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls
In Harlem howling at night.
What a tear-stained shock of the world,
You’ve gone away without saying goodbye.

I do not know what Jack Kerouac would have thought of the song or if he would have agreed with the sentiments. But it would have been cool if he would have stuck around to tell us with his clever use of language. Happy birthday Jack.

What is your favorite work inspired by Jack Kerouac? Leave your two cents in the comments.

The Cowboy Philosopher Will Rogers

Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Short Review)

Richard III and Guy Clark: Out in the Parking Lot

The Search for Missing WWII Pilot Billie Harris

(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

Richard III and Guy Clark: Out in the Parking Lot

DNA tests revealed that the body of King Richard III had been found last year in a municipal parking lot in the English city of Leicester. Richard, who Shakespeare portrayed in a less than flattering light, was the last English King to die in battle, dying at the Battle of Bosworth Field. After his death in August 1485, his body was put on display and then he was quickly buried near a church without much fanfare.

Since the discovery, scientists have used the body to make a 3D model of the way Richard might have looked. But Richard’s days of being involved in battles are not over. While Leicester plans to give Richard a new burial more fitting of his life’s station, the city of York, where Richard was from, is arguing that it should take charge of Richard’s burial. Richard belonged to the House of York, which was part of the the ruling Plantagenets.

Shakespeare and others have painted Richard III as a villain who murdered his two nephews. That version of Richard has been played by many stellar actors, including Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, and Al Pacino. Some historians, though, have argued that history has treated Richard unfairly. While the new discovery will not end the debate, it did resolve one issue, showing that Richard’s curved spine did not create a hunchback as described by the Bard of Avon in the play written in 1592. At the end of Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, we see Richard exclaiming, “A horse! a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” before he is killed. Interestingly, he would end up spending decades not with horses, but with cars out in a parking lot.

Singer-songwriter Guy Clark wrote “Out in the Parking Lot” with Darrell Scott, who has penned a few hits himself. While I have loved the music of other Texas songwriters from the Clark’s era like Townes Van Zandt, it is only recently where I have started to appreciate Clark’s body of work. One of the songs I have been listening to during the last several months is Clark’s “Out in the Parking Lot,” which appears on several Clark albums including Songs & Stories (2011).

As Clark explains in this performance in a bar in Homer, Alaska from 2003, he wrote the song about the parking lot of a bar in West Texas. But the song strikes universal themes, and anyone who has been in a parking lot outside a bar late at night recognizes the scene. There have been many songs about honky tonks, bars, and pubs, but nobody else has captured the mixed emotions ranging from anger to joy to pathos that stirs just outside the action of the drinking establishment, out in the parking lot. There, “Some have given up, some have given in / Looks like everybody’s lookin’ for a friend / Out in the parking lot.”

While Guy Clark has never had the mainstream popularity of big Nashville artists, there are some folks in Nashville that have good taste, such as Brad Paisley, who covered “Out in the Parking Lot” on his Time Well Wasted album from 2005. Alan Jackson joined Paisley in bringing this excellent song to a wider audience.

While I like Paisley’s work and I am glad he brought the song to a wider audience, I hope it ended up bringing some fans to Guy Clark’s great body of work too. While I cannot guess as to which version Richard III might prefer, I suspect his body saw many of the same scenes in his parking lot.

“Now everybody’s gone, they’ve shut out all the lights / The dust begins to settle and it’s never been so quiet / Out in the parking lot.”

Do you know any other songs about parking lots? Leave your two cents in the comments.