Right now The Fourth Kind has dropped to sixth place in only its second week of release and has a gross over 20 million dollars. With the DVD sales and foreign grosses taken into account, the movie probably won’t lose money, but neither will it be a success story? Why. There’s the Highlander theory, there can only be one viral critical darling passing itself off as a chronicle of real events, and this year that was Paranormal Activity. The Fourth Kind released later only looked like a bad copycat.

Then there’s the independence factor. The Fourth Kind was made by a buddy of Joe Carnahan and starred people who are not exactly obscure like Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton. By Hollywood standards that might be considered indy, but by audience standards, it made The Fourth Kind into just another Hollywood project, even if it was ranked a bit lower on the old totem pole. What it amounted to was Hollywood actors recreating imaginary scenes and announcing that they are recreating them. Which basically made The Fourth Kind into a much worse version of America’s Most Wanted, if AMW was dedicated to chasing aliens, instead of criminals.

Finally, and this is the slightly odd part, The Fourth Kind managed to piss off most of Alaska, which apparently decided that being portrayed as a bunch of hicks who keep being abducted by UFO’s was not good for tourism. After several lawsuits, The Fourth Kind’s production would up settling with a few Alaskan media outlets, everyone knew that the movie was a fraud.

The Kindle was smaller and neater than I expected. The text was clear and very readable when compared to a laptop or a media player. But imagining myself with a Kindle still held no appeal. Sure I could in theory load every single book I could ever want on it and carry it with me anywhere, and still for all that even the thought of reading lost all its appeal. The Kindle isn’t ugly. It didn’t look clunky. It was flat and thin, and so is the idea of reading books on it.

Once out of the bus I stopped by a bookstore, just to compare the experience, and there is a real magic to seeing the tangible volumes all around you. Hardcovers and softcovers. New and used. Plain covers and big tacky and splashy covers. The Kindle and ebook readers turn books into something intangible and unreal. They break them up into a page of electronic text. And somehow by doing that they also kill the appeal of reading. Reading Lord of the Rings on a Kindle feels as appealing as reading a tech manual, practical but joyless. There is nothing alive in an eBook. It’s dead and broken down into bits for your convenience. Thank you Amazon, but no, I’ll stick to the magic of the printed word.

But Driving Blind is for the most part more concerned with nostalgia, with old school classmates and ex-girlfriends, with looking into the other end of the telescope at adulthood and with growing old and seeing that all disappear, and while such ideas have always been present in Ray Bradbury’s work, in Driving Blind they seem to predominate and dominate the old Bradbury who looked at far horizons that were beyond himself, rather than only looking inward.

When you drive blind, you go to the destination you know best, like a horse with blinders on, because in the dark we can really only see ourselves. And Driving Blind is that one single destination arrived at over and over again, sometimes with talent, sometimes aimlessly, always with depth of emotion, but having read Driving Blind, I can admire Bradbury as a stylist, while finding little there to draw from beyond the shallow wading pool of memoir fiction. The Bradbury whose work I loved looked at the world and the world beyond with fresh eyes. The Ray Bradbury of Driving Blind is more comfortable with the romance of nostalgia and memory than with anything larger or vaster and while he still writes with love, it is a love so narrow as to be self-love.

Stephen has given me permission to pass along that he has an idea for a new Dark Tower book, the working title of which will be THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. He has not yet started this book and anticipates that it will be a minimum of eight months before he is able to begin writing it.

Considering the mess that Stephen King made of the last two books of the Dark Tower saga, the idea of him coming back to the table is a little unclear. The Wind Through the Keyhole seems to suggest more world bending adventures in store, but with King having ended the series by (Spoiler alert) killing of all the main characters and dooming Roland to repeat the same cycle over and over until he gets it right… whatever that means, hopefully this is King’s attempt to fix that ending, an ending that his own insert seemed to understand was bad, rather than an attempt to insert more story somewhere in between, or do a Sisters of Illuria type of story set in the Dark Tower world, but not involving Roland and his Ka Tet.