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Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command
by apollinaire
I produced CC0 ebook compilations of Poe’s short fiction and poetry for Standard Ebooks if anyone is interested in diving deeper into his writing: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe
(I’d also recommend Leonid Andreyev’s short fiction; he’s often referred to as Russia’s Poe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/leonid-andreyev/short-fict... )
Many thanks to each of you editors for the sterling work!
I was recently inspired to embark on a project to mirror the Standard Ebooks library, starting with a book that you produced, which happens to be my favorite:
https://flowery.app/books/edgar-allan-poe/short-fiction
Once the business achieves ramen profitability, the next milestone will be to give back with a corporate sponsorship.
Looks good! One minor point: it looks like some of your conversion isn’t keeping accurate styling. For example, if you look at the letter in https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict... that starts with “In conformity with an order” you’ll see (in Firefox and Chrome, Safari’s in the process of adding the styling) that the address is 90º as per the original scans. The same in https://flowery.app/books/edgar-allan-poe/short-fiction/thou... falls back to normal display, which is fine but perhaps a little bit of a shame.
Good catch! I am still fleshing out the EPUB parser, so loading of CSS and images (other than the SE logo) is not yet supported. I hard-coded the styling for now, which works well enough thanks to the books’ consistent markup.
I also overlooked the diary styling of “Mellonta Tauta.”
thanks for your work! i was just thinking the other day it had been a while (since university days) since i read his work and i happen to be taking a long-haul flight this week, so need something to read.
Very cool. Are the cover images made with AI or classic paintings?
Classic paintings: everything used on Standard Ebooks productions is old enough to be in the US public domain. The artists are in the colophons if you want to find out more.
Odilon Redon, Melancholy, and Robert Delaunay, Saint-Séverin No. 3.
https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=Redon - I see he also made a series of prints, "To Edgar Poe"!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Delaunay
...and some seascape with a ship in it, wasn't fussed about that one.
I do love Odilon Redon, there was an excellent exhibition of his work in Copenhagen a few years ago that I managed to catch: https://www.glyptoteket.com/exhibition/odilon-redon-into-the... . Unfortunately etchings aren’t house style for covers, we typically go for oil or watercolour-indistinguishable-from-oil.
Nice work, thanks to you and your fellow editors.
Is there a back story to the Gormenghast collection not being available: https://standardebooks.org/collections/gormenghast
The comment given was:
This book was published in 1946, and will therefore enter the U.S. public domain in 17 years on January 1, 2042.
No great drama, it just caught my attention, I like the series and wanted to check the art and the copy against what I have here in book form.
* https://standardebooks.org/about/standard-ebooks-and-the-pub...
Some placeholders like this one exist because they are part of other collections for which we have more items. So when the reader is viewing the other collection, they can see which items we have and which we don't.
tysm for contributing to standard ebooks, one of my favorite things on the whole internet
[dead]
He was also into cryptography: https://www.cs.trincoll.edu/~crypto/historical/poe.html
He also had a theory pretty close to the big bang in Eureka. It offended a lot of people at the time
Here’s a great reading of The Masque of the Red Death:
https://youtu.be/FskFXD-SQpI?si=UYapck6_51LcAi9y
The Simpsons did a famous rendition of The Raven read by James Earl Jones:
Alternatively, his life was exactly what it had to be for him to do what he was supposed to.
I wonder what he would choose if he knew? A comfortable long life and happiness or to be remembered forever?
I don’t remember where I read it but I heard David Lynch recounting a conversation with his doctor in which he asked if being prescribed antidepressants could interfere with his creativity. The doctor said he couldn’t rule it out, so Lynch decided he’d rather deal with the symptoms of depression.
On the other hand, Lynch also went on record saying that an artist doesn't need to suffer to produce great art. And that depression is the enemy of creativity.
Those aren’t necessarily in conflict with each other, though.
As an often-depressed creative person, I find that depression is absolutely the enemy of creativity, but my creativity is often fueled by the same things that cause my depression.
Meeting my creative goals is often about managing the depression. But without the depression, my creative output would likely be very different.
Taken further - Art can be created as a response to seeing or experiencing suffering, but it is important to manage your own response to suffering.
In On Writing, Stephen King has this lovely quote about his journey to get off of drugs: “The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.”
Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was a groundbreaking novel and wouldn't have been so if it weren't for LSD. Of Course, that was Kesey's first and only criticaly acclaimed novel and he has said later in life that too much acid screwed him up, I certainly wouldn't argue it's sustainable over a career. LSD also changed pop music in a pretty major way.
A lot of people liked "Sometimes A Great Notion". I personally prefer it to "Cuckoo". It doesn't read like something written by someone whacked out on acid.
Lifestyle choices and an individual’s work product should be acknowledged to be uncorrelated. The practical reality is never that simple but attributing your own success, or that of anyone else, to external factors does a disservice to the originator of the work and to society at large.
David Lynch is not making a very convincing argument here.
Just because Van Gogh was (presumably) happy while doing his painting, doesn’t mean that the suffering previous wasn’t an important component in portraying it in his art.
One of my favourite novellas is Dostoyevskys White Nights, which portrays a young man in love.
His portrayal is so vivid that I doubt it could have been written by anyone who hasn’t experienced heartbreak.
I chatted with Christopher hitchens about a month before he was diagnosed with the cancer that took him out, and he was adamant that cigarettes and whisky were vital to his writing process. He said he could consider cutting out liquor, but the cigarettes had to stay if he was going to be productive at all.
I just rewatched David Lynch: The Art Life last night on Max. It's so freaking good. If anyone reading this hasn't seen it, I really recommend it.
> Lynch decided he’d rather deal with the symptoms of depression
... through meditation.
"long life" is geologically just wishful thinking. We all have the same quality of life outcome when compared against the vastness of time.
What is a billionaire's lavish life to the toil of an artist, inventor, or revolutionary? We all wind up rotting in the blink of an eye. Luxury, pleasure, and dopamine are as fleeting as youth.
It's better to do something of note.
If you lived twice as long, you could do two things of note. Twice as better.
A lot of masterpieces are done by 30, whether it's founding FAANG, the theory of relativity, Bohemian Rhapsody, etc. I've always found it interesting that these people do so much with so few resources, then when people like Einstein had the freedom to do what they like, they couldn't outdo what they did in their earlier years. You'd think that with more experience, money, and connections, they'd be besting themselves again and again.
The candle that burns twice as bright only burns half as long.
Unless you make the candle out of better materials.
Eh, I’ll go ahead and trust that life is about as long as it needs to be. Any “things of note” apart from genuinely helping someone else out on their journey when you had a shot is totally irrelevant from the broader perspective.
The part where "you have a shot" is crucially important. Otherwise, if all people do is help others to help others, you have a circular system where nothing is done.
"long life" is quantically super dope. You get to live 10^8 times longer than a meson so you have ample time to profit feom luxury, pleasure and dopamine.
And you have time to avoid philosophical discussions that distract you from the above.
This sounds like some serious copium, we don’t live in the vastness of time, we live now. Not to mention that I can assure you in the vastness of time his work will also be forgotten in an almost as small a “blink of the eye” in geological time.
You could just as easily say “we’ll all end up rotting in the blink of an eye, so better to be happy and enjoy it than waste your time trying pointlessly to do something of note that will be forgotten”.
Your enjoyment is a machine responding to neural stimuli that evolved to follow gradients in order to propagate genes. This enjoyment is infinitesimal no matter how much you generate in your short lifespan. None of it will be enjoyed when you perish. Even more damning: the pleasure you had ten minutes ago cannot be enjoyed now. Sex, fine meals, belongings from years ago can't bring you anything. It's just ephemeral chemical flux. Saturating those pathways is malinvestment into entropy.
Thought and actions have much more meaning to time than our tiny, worthless genes. Or the neurotransmitters dancing in our brains. Or the decaying weights that hold thoughts just briefly. Brains carry a simulation of the world for a short time. They cannot be shared or replicated or extended. Their pleasure has no value to anyone but yourself, and like the hedonic treadmill on which they run, it doesn't provide enduring value. Just an endless appetite that calls to be satiated. Thoughts and actions, however, pay civilizational dividends. They endure beyond our short lives and carry our world's evolution into the vast future.
We're all already practically dead. It won't be long. The years tick by in the blink of an eye. Everyone you know is growing old. You can make your finite choices and optimize for a few good trips, and a sports car if you want, but that's all meaningless. When you get Alzheimer's you won't remember. When you get cancer, it'll bring you little comfort. And when you die, it'll all be annihilated.
Accolades and remembrance and legacy don't matter either. Just your actions and how they shape the future live on.
That isn't to say you should live an entirely ascetic lifestyle devoid of pleasure and friends and family. We need some comfort to maintain our happiness and sanity. But to make it life's sole purpose seems like the greatest waste in the majestic algorithm of the cosmos. We're each the universe alive for the blink of an eye, and to only pleasure and tickle ourselves is such a shallow thing to spend such an invaluable thing on.
I know lots of folks that live for the next vacation or the next big purchase, and they're spending their careers writing plumbing or glue, or shuffling paper. That's something I can't wrap my head around. It's not cope. It's recognition of our place in time.
I agree with most of what you said, but to be frank: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j95kNwZw8YY
Depending on your perspective, life can be amazing and full of wonders, or it could be drudgery where the only thing which makes you happy is a moment of respite. Someone could easily strawman your argument by saying that everything you do is worthless because we're infinitesimal beings on a tiny rock orbiting a star in a corner of the universe. The Sun is going to explode eventually, humans might destroy the planet no matter what you do, or an asteroid might take us all out like the dinosaurs, rendering your life of actions and purposeful existence useless in the end.
All of this is to say, do what makes you happy and dont worry about others so much.
Well okay. But what if you're impoverished and must work every day simply to make enough food to survive the winter. That's as much a life "for pleasure". It's not sportscars and caviar, but it's the same drive to acquire, accumulate, thrive, gain wealth (survival). These people are also working for the good of the civilization. How do you know that the big spender dedicating their time to redistributing wealth they generate isn't contributing anything? Surely civilization does not live on ideas alone. We can't all be depressed pontificators, and i for one believe there's nothing wrong with not wanting to live the ideas you're stating here. Sure, there are hard truths, but there's also ways to state them with beauty and not brutalism and disdain.
Many lives of talented poets and artists were a mess. Many died young. I still don't know whether living a life of misery leads to artistic mastery or not.
I feel like the main problem is it pays terribly. Most of the best ones were basically broke. But movie stars and pop stars are the opposite. They live in mansions and end up dying young anyway.
Maybe great art just requires being deep in flow to the point you neglect everything around you.
I was introduced to Poe via "The Cask of Amontillado". After that, I binge-watched The Fall of the House of Usher when it released, which is a mash-up of a lot of Poe's stories (the show didn't have the subtlety of the original work, but was a lot of fun). Now I'm reading all his short stories.
His work is really cool, and I wish I read him earlier.
The cask was my introduction to him as well. Then straight into Arthur Gordon Pym. It is still my favorite book, forever.
Someone should summarize for Poe fans who don't support WaPo.
Maybe just read the article through the archive link instead?
I was mildly interested in poetry as an adolescent, and "discovering" Poe in the English original (I was only aware of bad translations) had quite an impact on my young, impressionable brain. I still have large parts of "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" memorized, 20 years later. After Poe, it was hard for me to take writers seriously who just inserted line breaks into prose texts and called it poetry.
Was just reading about Churchill's alcoholism in a bio and looks like Poe was right there with him on that front. My favorite Poe visual is the The Masque of the Red Death. Probably wrote it blasted out of his mind.
> Through all his binges and bankruptcies, through every setback and depressive spell, he kept making art because he knew that’s where the best of him lay.
This hits really close to home.
From Epic Rap Battles of History:
Masque of the Red Death? Barely blood curdling.
Pit and the Pendulum? Not even unnerving.
Perving on your first cousin when she's thirteen years old? Now that's disturbing!
It's important to remember that ERB is comedy and not actual history. Poe loved his cousin like a daughter.
Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0486-4), The Dollop ep.1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueyw-pACTM8), ep.2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGo53U2csMI)
Hard to read his work now without thinking about how much of a douche he was
Although Edgar Allan Poe is well known, I think his influence is under appreciated. He pretty much invented the detective story genre with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his "Eureka: A Prose Poem" was early sci-fi that more or less invented the idea of the Big Bang.
There is a Sci-Fi Noir TV show "Altered Carbon" (based on a book) featuring an AI using Edgar Allan Poe as their persona.
That Edgar Allan Poe is seminal in both genres makes me appreciate an already amazing character that much more! I would 10/10 recommend anyone watch season one of the series.
This thread now has me tempted to finally get into reading Poe himself, (among Lovecraft and the Altered Carbon books for more Poe influenced writing).
You might also enjoy Flow Like Poe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Z0VynTR84
I took a detective fiction course in college and Rue Morgue was indeed the first story we read.
He was also the primary influence on HP Lovecraft
Absolutely. I think that's more well known though, he wrote that Poe was his "God of fiction". His influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H G Wells is probably less well know. He was also a big influence on Alfred Hitchcock who wrote "It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films".
"democracy dies in darkness"
Crafted by Rajat
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