Of Course You Already Know

that today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, as well as the sweet "Fin de Regime"-perfumed last day of the Fiery Wreck Administration

But you might not know that today is also the 200th Birthday of one of America's greatest authors: Edgar Allan Poe.

He's one of those writers about whom I know way too much. His life, death and the pain in between. The crap he wrote. The great stuff he wrote. His work as an editor. The time in 1843 that a fan of his -- Robert Tyler, son of President John Tyler –- got him invited to the White House to meet the President, at which time he blew an opportunity to gain valuable support and status by showing up drunk and trying to sell Tyler a magazine subscription.

The women in his life who died horribly.

His fame and poverty.

“On January 29, 1845, his poem "The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation. Though it made Poe a household name almost instantly, he was paid only $9 for its publication.”

In 2006, I wrote about Poe as the Ur-Blogger.

And in 2005, I couldn’t help availing myself of “The Raven” to make a little mock…

Once upon a bender bleary, while I pondered, weak and beery,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,


With my nod on, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
(Actually more like a serious bitch-slapping),

...smacking at my chamber door.
”WTF," I mumbled, "I’m on vacation! Ask Dick; he runs the nation.
Get off my ass and let Karl do it," I loud and soddenly swore.

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak September,
And every fucktard, camp-following member had been given his sinecure.

Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
Chinese cash or some “Aw Shucks” Charisma from the the lost Gipp-er,.
For the Smilin’, Beguilin’ Monster who could sell our Republican Manure,
Dead and gone forevermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each voting booth curtain
Thrilled me---filled me electoral delirium tremens throughout all of 2004;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood bleating,
" 'Tis some Pioneer Contributor, or Halliburtoning Corporate whore
Or another dimwit frat rat trollop sporting a Santorum coiffure
...This it is, and nothing more."

...

And today, since I am 700 miles too far away from Baltimore for the traditional cognac and roses, I offer the first few paragraphs of an as-yet-unsold short story about time travel, murder, alternate history and the real circumstances behind Poe’s mysterious death, all written in a Faux Poe voice using a pastiche of as many borrowed bits and parts from actual stories and poems as the plot of a 4,000 word story would bear without breaking.

I wrote it as an exercise and for fun, which is good because it turns out that the market for alternate history/time travel/murder-mysteries stories written in a Faux Poe voice is somewhat limited :-)

The Despairing Posture of His Fall

by driftglass

It’s true that I have been unnerved. And yes, I am terribly disturbed, dreadfully agitated, but I am not mad. You tell me that you have known me all my life. You believe that since you have long known me, seeing me now, like this, you may call me mad. You know nothing. You who know me so well, you also do not know me at all. We have dined together many times, and yet we have never met. Madmen are dull and preoccupied with trivial things. My disease, if you must call it such, had honed my senses. My sight and my hearing are painfully acute, and with the precision -– the genius -- vouchsafed me by my new awareness, I destroyed a world. An entire world. No one else in all the Earth can say that.

No one else can hear the screams of the world that I tipped into oblivion, like a rat squealing out its mortal terror in the jaws of a cat.

All around, lapped over existence like an oily skin, I can see that other time -– that alternative universe -- scrambling for purchase like a drowning man. Everywhere it is so, and I perceive it all with searing clarity, but above all I can hear him. He exists now nowhere else but in my thoughts and the gore you gape at in such horror, the blood that oozes from my eyes and my mouth and my ears, that is his vengeance. It is this; it is the primal power of his screams as he is negated piece by piece that is liquefying my brain.

But what I did I would do again, and I am not mad. Watch how calmly and without rancor I can relate the whole of the story, and then judge.

Imagine it. To travel back against the raging currents of time. To murder with impunity and without the possibility of detection. Unspeakably evil, you might say, but understand, I have nothing but love for the man himself. I have studied him all my life. I pity him the conditions of his early years; truly he suffered the agonies of the damned, but that gave him no right to smother my world.

Clearly you do not understand. In this world you cannot understand his...ubiquity.

In his world...

In his world he has affixed his stamp to everything. His ideas on the nature of time and evolution and machine intelligence are still referenced in every institute of higher learning. His methods for the treatment of the disorders of the mind are still practiced. Do you see? The Friends of Edgar began with his revelation that the opium addict and the alcoholic are ravaged by disease and not moral defect. By his influence even the War of Southron Independence was muscled onto a very different course than the one you know, and these are simple footnotes of his true calling. He was, above all, the Author. Mr. Mark Twain himself has said that he was our American Tolstoy.

Do you see how I bleed! Do you see how the dying of that other world is manifest!

Blood, as the man once wrote of another red death, is its Seal and its Avatar. I say again I loved the man and never begrudged him becoming a legend; I hated him for becoming a God. He left no room for the rest of us. He would have buried us all alive beneath his overwhelming presence, and I could not allow that to happen.

I can tell you exactly the moment when the idea came into my consciousness. It was aboard the short rocket flight to Chicago.
…

For an extra-special bonus, Lou Reed re-interprets "The Raven" here:

(As read by by Willem Dafoe.)