Review: Bringing Home the Dharma

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Jack Kornfield is someone I’ve known about for over a decade, which is a sentence that makes me feel very old. Mindfulness is something I’ve studied a lot, academically and personally, and I think Bringing Home the Dharma is possibly the most comprehensive collection of answered questions for western Buddhism that I’ve come across. I listened to it as an audiobook and took my time to chew through it, and I truly think it was remarkable.


It may be a bit of an undertaking for someone casually trying to learn about Buddhism because the book is very detailed but for a beginner or someone like me who phases in and out of the scene, it is an excellent resource. Kornfield is, as always, a very gentle but assertive teacher.

I’d definitely prefer having a written copy to the audiobook I listened to because it’s such a great resource; it’s definitely something to reference back to and to cherry pick which areas resonate most.

Review: A Primate’s Memoir

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Earlier I reviewed Why Don’t Zebra’s Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky as a part of my mental health month and I already have Behave sitting in my pile; Robert Sapolsky, either through listened to lectures or his books, has been a subject I’ve no doubt my friends are getting tired of hearing about.


A Primate’s Memoir, however, is not the same breed of popular science book as Sapolsky’s other work, but rather a straightforward memoir about his experiences as a field researcher in Africa.


Sapolsky details his twenty-plus years living with a troop of baboons, their culture, and the conflicts in the scientific community of speaking about animal culture in human terms. He also details cultural shocks living among and interacting with different tribes and in different African countries and often his own fumbling unpreparedness as he adapts (including a notable horrifying first experience with tamarind).


The memoir includes harrowing stories of being taken captive, having guns held to his head, being mistaken for a mercenary, and in general the sort of adventures that come to a certain breed of guy™ with an irreverence and compelling story telling style.


He’s the sort of unassuming person that the vanilla masses probably believe just sits in a lab and wouldn’t expect to have spent a time traveling with a caravan of Somalis plundering locals, and yet.


The book is a compelling, engaging, very intelligently and thoughtfully written account. Sapolsky brings an honesty and no-bullshit narrative voice to his time in Africa while offering the perspective that he is just one researcher who has dealt with corruption, with cultural shocks, with various international blocks and that there is so much more to field research and medicine than most people realize.

Review: Honeycomb by Joanne M Harris

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I’ve been sitting on writing this review because I’m not sure how I want to structure it. Structure is fundamental to Honeycomb by Joanne Harris and this is my second contender for my favorite book that I’ve read in 2023.

In fact, the reliance on bees within the story is, I’m sure, a direct reference to the importance of structure to the novel.

I want to be assured that I do it justice.

Honeycomb is presented as a series of short chapters introducing interlocking stories and continuations of earlier chapters and characters, chiefly following The Lacewing King. Characters are, importantly, not named but given honorifics as the book utilizes traditional fae myths. As a person with ….an unkindly level of entomophobia, you’d think that this book would be near impossible for me to read as the many factions and clans of fae are all based on different insect species. However, I persevered and I actually really enjoyed the way the insects and the affectations of each fae were discussed.

Anyone who may remember the horrific katydid incident last year where I blew up discord channels and texts demanding to know how I got rid of the beast that had flown into my window (it took me four hours to work up the nerve to trap him between the screen and sliding glass door) should be very proud of me!

Not only did I push through, but this book has stuck with me incredibly. I love the very arch yet traditional approach to fae stories. It was nostalgic, reminiscent of reading collected fairy tales and brother’s Grimm compilations, but with an interconnecting thread that built and drove you deeper into the world that Ms. Harris was creating. It had an atmosphere similar to Susanna Clarke’s fae. The characterization both holds you at a distance as a reader and is engrossing, drawing you in to learn more about the various flawed characters and is reminiscent of old school fantasy like George MacDonald.

I recommend it highly.



Review: Norm Macdonald: Based on a True Story

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Woof.


Now that probably doesn’t seem like a great opener, but I do find myself with things to say both good and bad. Woof is mostly an exclamation related to some sort of exasperation or tension and release, and that’s what a humor book should be. Tension and release.


I don’t know I’d recommend this book to just anyone. Or rather, I would recommend it if I knew you well enough and I knew that you knew what was what.


Humor books aren’t for just everybody.


You’ve got to appreciate the craft and look past some of the murk. Some people can’t, and that’s okay. Some people are offended, and that’s okay. You have a right to be. Some of the offensive bits just aren’t funny, and using ‘funny’ to deflect culpability is a real problem.

Humor is built on tension and release, if the release doesn’t land then it’s not funny.


So here’s what’s important for you to hear: Norm Macdonald was a good writer. Norm Macdonald was someone skilled with words and inflection and story telling. He set word after word with an ease in an inevitable domino. Norm Macdonald was also someone who liked to take the piss and pull the rug out at the last minute, so as to skewer whatever sentimental turn he might have accidentally taken, instead assuring himself of maintaining his tone and humor and not tumbling accidentally into vulnerability.


That’s not an insult. He was a damn good writer, he knew what he was doing, and he did it. Unapologetically in most cases.


There are occasional themes in his humor that I can’t get behind–which is why if I was gonna recommend this book I’d want it to be to people who I knew knew what was to be known, as it were. There’s mentioned transphobia (which he apologized for in his comedy later in life), a few feckless mentions of rape, suicide, over the top misogyny, all intended to be humor —but the fear is how people take it; either as endorsement or insult. Satire is all risk if people can co-opt it.


The narrative takes this arc that begins very strong and then leans hard into revisiting old bits and Norm Macdonald characters from SNL. If you weren’t familiar with Norm Macdonald already you could say: my god, what risky and original content. Unfortunately if you know who Norm Macdonald is, and you probably do if you read this book, you probably have heard a lot of these jokes before. They’re given some new life and framing, I even liked the bit where the book is randomly interrupted by a suffering ghost writer who inserts his own thoughts (hatred) about Norm Macdonald.


I would have loved, fucking loved, to have read a completely original Norm Macdonald novel. The first few chapters in which he describes his fictional childhood are absolutely beautiful. They’re compelling, well written, full of Mark Twain-esque charms and then Norm Macdonald gut punches. It’s a bit, of course, but it also shows a skill with words and narrative framing that honestly I would have been happy to see extended into a whole damn book if not several. But then the rehashed bits come in, and the SNL characters, and you wish someone had sat the man down and said, ‘Look, you don’t have to rely on that.’

That’s condescending. Yeah, well.

What I’m saying is: the original content is amazing and you’re left feeling you only ever scratched the surface of how talented he was.


The book is strong for the things Norm Macdonald’s comedy was strong for: careful word choice, narrative framing, and clever turns. It’s also weak for the things Norm Macdonald’s comedy was weak for: punching down, no matter how good naturedly, and leaning into his want to be one of the boys.


I can’t tell you, honest, how much I liked those opening, original chapters. How I laughed at them, screenshot things to friends, and actually cared about the characters he’d made up to populate his childhood.


I also loved that you can see just what he’s doing: he’s telling you outright, you aren’t going to get to see the real me, fuckers.


Norm Macdonald, who I’m led to believe cut a quiet figure in life, and apparently didn’t drive despite living in LA, creates a purposely overly misogynistic character, detached from reality, shamelessly plotting to either fuck the world or take his own life. The character Norm chronically wears his own merch, at one point handling a man recognizing him by pointing at hat, shirt, etc., as the man says ‘what do I know you from?’ He pokes fun at his gambling addiction by taking the joke to its extreme, he overstates everything.


The book is in many ways overlapping framing devices, which Macdonald was the master of, sandwiching bits.


Particularly I’m fond of his sure fire answering machine bit which he repeatedly touts as being the best joke he’s ever written, and each time it’s told it never lands. He presents it again and again, straight faced, in new situations; pulling out his guaranteed winner, to stunning failure. His faith to the bit never wavers.


That might be this book in a sentence.

After he passed, I had heard an anecdote that I hope and kind of bet was true. It seems like it must be true because there’s no punchline and if Norm or one of his ilk had come up with it, he’d have pulled out the rug before it got too sentimental.

He was getting heckled and rather than clap back, the way we praise a comedian for being able to do, he paused his routine and asked the man if he’d be willing to meet with him after the show. After the show the man sort of sheepishly came back stage and Norm asked him what was going on with him and if he was all right. The man ended up breaking down crying and Norm Macdonald took him out to dinner. They spent the night bullshitting and Norm left him better off.

Every story I’ve heard about the man on his own, quiet and not seeking attention, is about something kind he did.

If you like his comedy, you’ll like the book; it’s like an in-club, a well tested group of inside jokes among a global mass of friends. I have a friend who when I said I was reading it kept saying ‘Oh, Norm’ in the same way we talk about one of our own friends who has passed.

If you don’t like his comedy, or the group of comedians he buzzed around and tried to keep the approval of, you might not like it. That’s totally fine, there’s shit not to like.

I just sort of hope he knew how good a writer he was.

Review: Poison for Breakfast

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I would call it atmospheric.

The atmosphere is both circular logic and literary nonsense, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense and not the dismissive way which we say ‘nonsense’ casually.
Poison for Breakfast is not a novel. It’s a meditation on the nature of storytelling in the guise of a story.


Sort of, kind of, ‘Poison for Breakfast’ is about consuming poison and trying to work backwards to figure out how you’d gotten to the point of being poisoned. Snicket is given a note informing him that he has been poisoned and now he, as a reliably known mystery solver, must solve the mystery of this suddenly appeared note, his poisoning, and therefore his apparent murder.


He doesn’t actually tell you very much at all, buried in convoluted Lemony Snicket-ism upon Lemony Snicket-ism, meditating on the nature of storytelling. He tells various non sequiturs that he initially frames as action then admits are really just things he’s thinking about but that probably did occur at some point and therefore are still true.


Handler, as Snicket of course, talks about the nature of story structure, the importance of inspiring bewilderment, what details are and are not important to include, and the need to cause the reader to buy in to the side of the narrator. At one juncture he tells a story of a bad lesson given by an ornery writer which sounded remarkably familiar and which I paused in reading and laughed…. because I read that book this year.


Handler, as Snicket, talks about the evolution of writing advice as well, his ideas of the rules of writing changing in real time as he discusses Lemony Snicket moving about his fictional morning uncovering his potential imminent death and therefore murder.


He also very, very carefully discusses various ways to make eggs—a nod, I’d say, to the rule Lemony Snicket gives that you should only tell information relevant to the story. Handler, as Snicket, tells you many, many irrelevant things in the course of telling you the story, the story where he may presumably die at the end, without sharing other necessary information.


The true theme appears to be rules and breaking them.
Like cracking many eggs.


It is also a meditation on safety. The way in which safety can be so suddenly and irreversibly taken out from under us, “we have poisoned ourselves”.


We read to identify with bewilderment, explore our bewilderment, and we throw ourselves into imagination to find solutions to our bewilderment.


I encourage you to read this short, under 200 pages, meta narrative disguised writing advice. Slowly.


It’s in many ways life advice, too.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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If “You take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is the second to the left” sounds at all similar to “second to the right and straight on till morning”, it could be because the latter was written by JM Barrie as the instructions to Never-neverland, and the former was the instructions Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Barrie while trying to coax him to visit Stevenson in Samoa.


Robert Louis Stevenson initiated a correspondence with JM Barrie, which some infer inspired a number of themes in Barrie’s masterpiece Peter Pan. By that time, however, Stevenson was already an accomplished, established literary force having published Treasure Island. His interest in Barrie seems to have been perfectly friendly and admiring, as he was the much more famous of the two at the time and had nothing to be cloying about.


Stevenson had initially reached out to Barrie and Barrie in turn smothered Stevenson with adoration. They frequently plotted meeting but Barrie’s devotion to his ill mother kept him from heading to Samoa, and Stevenson’s poor health (which initiated his move from Scotland in the first place) prevented him from visiting Barrie.


They never, technically, met.


Barrie often fantasized in his letters that they were secretly related in some way, stemming from the same ancient clans in Scotland, and now-infamously wrote in his letters “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman ….” A sentence which Barrie did not finish.
The confession didn’t impact their correspondences negatively at all and they continued to be pen pals until Stevenson’s death. Stevenson’s half of their correspondences were published posthumously by Barrie. At the time Barrie suspected that his letters to Stevenson had been destroyed and that his half of their relationship would remain a secret.


Dr. Michael Shaw, a scholar in Scottish literature who discovered the ‘lost’ Barrie letters, published “A Friendship in Letters”. He notes the impact Stevenson had on Barrie and his development of Peter Pan, not just in his references to Treasure Island in script but allusions directly to Stevenson and their correspondences.
Stevenson, like Peter Pan, was the proverbial outsider to English society.


First, Scottish. Bad start to get ahead in England.
Robert Louis Stevenson grew up ill, often bullied, rebelling intensely against the strict Presbyterian upbringing of his parents who once regarded him and themselves as failures after Stevenson was found to be an atheist and participating in socialist societies. Stevenson was a conservative later in life and never fully reconciled his conflicting beliefs or his conflicting religious and irreligious beliefs.


Much of Stevenson’s mercurial fight with morality and political allegiance seems to be mirrored in arguably his seminal work, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.
The most annoying thing that comes with talking about Dr Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, personally, is when people allege that the potion which Dr. Jekyll takes transforms him into Hyde. Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but the literary theme of Jekyll and Hyde is that they are one in the same man, that the potion gives Jekyll permission to be Hyde, not that Hyde is an invention of some drug. Hyde is the invention of Jekyll. He is, already, wicked.


The Body Snatcher, a short story inspired by Burke and Hare’s crimes which were contemporary to it’s publication, follows a man employed by a surgeon to procure bodies who comes to suspect that his partner is supplying bodies in more ways than one. Again and again, Fettes is talked out of implicating MacFarlane in any of the suspected murders and keeps his silence.


Kidnapped, which details the young, orphaned David Balfour discovering that he may be the rightful heir to an estate, with his uncle promising to explain the story of his father to him in the morning, only to arrange for Balfour to be kidnapped with the intention to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas that night. Much as with Jekyll and Hyde and with the Body Snatcher, ‘what is moral’ is the central theme. Balfour is concerned primarily with pursuing his version of justice against his uncle and nothing else, namely, getting his inheritance.


He doesn’t even want to kill the guy for selling him into slavery. When they finally trick Uncle Ebenezer into admitting he arranged for Balfour to be sold, Balfour immediately uses it to blackmail him and receive a salary to be paid so long as Uncle Ebenezer lives.


Stevenson’s characters, overall, are not concerned with morality but with the pursuit of a personal goal. Jekyll seeks permission to be Hyde and experience the immortality that he denies himself; Fettes is complicit in multiple murders to assure his own financial stability; Balfour doesn’t seem to care about anything except getting his money.


Literary critic Leslie Fiedler refers to Stevenson’s heroes as “the Beloved Scoundrel”, characters to which personal justice is the only morality.


Which brings us at last to Long John Silver.


Barrie quipped that the only man Long John Silver feared was Captain Hook and often intimated that Peter Pan took place in the same literary world as Treasure Island.


Greatly impacting the modern image of a pirate, Long John Silver is technically the main antagonist of Treasure Island. I say ‘technically’ because Long John Silver is genuinely fond of Jim Hawkins and based on Stevenson’s mentor William Ernest Henley (Henley’s daughter, Margaret, influenced Barrie to use the name ‘Wendy’ in Peter Pan.)


Like many of Stevenson’s characters, Long John Silver has a great deal of duality. He is charismatic, hardworking, likeable, and gradually revealed to be a villain as well–his earlier qualities aren’t fully negated by his conspiring.


Much of Stevenson’s work asks the reader if they’re able to forgive or find likeable someone who does wicked things if it’s also true that they are not wicked all of the time.


Whatever that makes you think of Stevenson, he puts back on you.

Going overboard, I fear,

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I decided to learn things about Jane Austen because I don’t know things about Jane Austen and people seem to find issue with the fact that I don’t know things about Jane Austen—Let’s go!

So first I read Pride and Prejudice because that seemed like a thing I should do at some point in my life and now I can say I have. Then I read Emma and then Sense and Sensibility. I’m also pretty familiar with the large dearth of adaptations. I watched two separate Pride and Prejudices, Emma (2020), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and also Mansfield Park (1999). Then I looked up biographical things about Jane Austen, listened to a very nice antique bookseller who’s voice made me tired —so now I know things about Jane Austen for the people who said I should know things about Jane Austen.

Austen’s characters are likable for being unrealistic yet ringing true to certain archetypes. My least favorite character is likely Mrs. Bennett for that very reason.

Austen’s characters are awkward and often mistaken, making proud assumptions and then baffled when they find out they’re wrong. They’re very certain of their world view based in their regency propriety, and then often proven wrong—but not so wrong as to upend society. It’s a comfortable wrong that can be solved happily.

Ongoing themes of marriage and the importance of marriage and being pressured toward marriage and also marriage pervade the books which act satirically –especially considering that Jane Austen herself never married, made her own fortune, and was highly independent. Her heroines are often portrayed as witty, clever, kind spirited—arguably virtues which Austen felt she herself had or wished were more prominent.

Quick aside! I tried to watch Persuasion (2022). No.

Anyway, for the most part all of Austen’s characters are deeply embroiled in the values of their society despite that that would limit their independence. Acknowledging this is one of the ways which Austen stands apart from other romantic authors of the era who leaned in more heavily to the romantic aspect itself; while Austen is regarded as romance by many people it is important to note that the heroines are considered strong because they are not female characters who swoon. Many of Austen’s female characters, or at least her protagonists, are rational. This itself is groundbreaking. Sadly.

Austen’s books were, of course, initially published anonymously due to the very, very rampant sexism in the society. It’s important to note, Austen belonged to the social class and circles which she satirized.

I found surprisingly little about Ms. Austen herself. There are fictionalized versions her life, or course, but as for intimate details they are surprisingly harder to come by. Often, instead, there are fictional accounts of her which paint her as one of her heroines. They are mostly very romantic in nature while missing the ship on what Austen had done differently in romance as a genre. People seem to think love plus witty equals Austen, rather than logic plus culture.

My favorite character was of course Mr. Knightley who is the only character in any of the titles I became familiar with who at any point acknowledged classism as a bad thing. He still lives within and supports the class system, but he is consistently kind to people who could be seen as his lesser. He scolds Emma and rebukes her when she insults a spinster, he tries to protect the courtship between Mr. Martin and Harriet. He’s often considered the hardest working of Austen’s heroes, a prominent landowner but with little liquid asset, and in marrying Emma who has more money, their relationship is seen as one of the most egalitarian in Austen’s works.

Austen lasts and gets adapted again and again, I think, because of the parallels in story structure and archetypes to Shakespeare. Much like with Shakespeare, it can all be in the eye of the beholder.

…and now it can be said I know a decent amount about Jane Austen.

Mark Twain

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TW: discussion of race, safety

Mark Twain was so …low born? I guess is a nice way to say it. He had to seriously convince his wife and her family to consider him as a suitor. Eventually her family said they would consider him if he provided character witnesses. Which he did. And everyone vouched that he would be a terrible husband, to which his prospective father in law sat him down and said “Why does no one like you?”


That’s one of my favorite Mark Twain stories.


Mark Twain, or Samuel Longhorn Clemens, went by a variety of pseudonyms before Mark Twain stuck. He convinced people that it was something to do with riverboats, but actually the name ‘Mark Twain’ most likely comes from his drinking habits, informing barkeeps to mark his tab for two at a time.


Today Mark Twain is thought of as a prolific author and humorist but really, if you look at him within the time he lived, Mark Twain was probably best described as the first successful stand up comedian. He made his name playing to auditoriums: monologuing, telling hairy dog stories, and providing political commentary. In his 60s he completed a world tour, the first of it’s kind for this sort of act, and it was an act. Mark Twain was a performance character.


Later in life the lines apparently blurred. After his wife died he took to wearing collegiate robes as everyday wear because he was proud of his honorary degrees, as well as his famous all-white suits. Wife’s dead, need a costume, always disappear into a bit.


Apparently Mark Twain could be pretty insufferable, embarrassing his daughters by bursting into songs, especially minstrel songs, and 20 minute monologues, performing sets whenever company came over.


He grew up in the deep south, fled west to avoid conscription in the rebel army, and became a very sympathetic voice for the Chinese immigrant population in San Francisco where he first began performing as a public speaker. He stated that as a youth he had never considered if racism even existed as slavery and white supremacy had been so ingratiated into southern society; it wasn’t until moving west and seeing the treatment of the Asian population there that he was able to remove himself from the idea and view racism as an outsider.
So, all this to introduce, I reread The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.


I believe it was Toni Morrison, in an introduction she wrote to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, who said that the book’s importance as a way of peering through the curtains into the historical view, the treatment of black folks in American society, the sheer fact that this book was considered remarkably sympathetic and funny at the time, makes it worth teaching.


But perhaps not to a class of predominantly white children, and not by a white instructor.


I spoke with a few people who discussed their discomfort with reading Huckleberry Finn at school under just those conditions, with a small white woman encouraging white kids to say the n-word and telling them that it was censorship if they didn’t. As an adult that sounds bizarre to me, but as a sixteen year old I seem to remember that experience pretty well myself.


Huckleberry Finn isn’t a great book. Plot wise. It’s not that interesting. Huck is a deeply abused, neglected child who runs away with an escaped slave who he has sympathy for—Huck has been so disabused that he figures he’s disliked and going to hell anyway, so there’s no harm in doing something that the other white folks disapprove of if he feels it’s right.


The most important piece of Huck’s character development, and the story arguably, is when he decides to trick Jim, sees that he’s hurt Jim’s feelings, and apologizes to him.


Apologizing would have been unheard of and including that bit, which has no plot value, gives the book all of its moral value.


Huck and Jim interact with teams of white randos who they have to protect Jim from, and then by chance Tom Sawyer turns up, puts poor Jim through some more hell, then laughingly calls it all off because Jim has apparently been freed the whole time and Tom thought it was more fun not to mention it.


Tom hasn’t got any character development in the book that’s from Huck’s point of view, in fact he is a much worse person here than he was at the end of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer.


Each person that Huck interacts with thinks they’re more clever and smart than everyone else, from the woman who calls him out when he dresses as a girl to the King and the Duke, and all of them are consistently wrong and bad at what they do. The humor is in Huck just affably moseying through situations where he should be caught but he isn’t because everyone else trips over themselves to prove that they’re more clever than he is. They underestimate him because of his poverty, his homelessness, his lack of education, and he is quietly the most intelligent character in the book.


I’m not black, I haven’t got any right to teach or preach on this, but I’d just make the observation that Huckleberry Finn is about safety. Perceptions of safety, true safety, and safety’s disregard. It is about escaping abuse, both Huck and Jim. The story ends fine supposedly because they are safe, Jim was allegedly safe all along—but the whole of the plot tells you that Huck was the one who was safe all along; his father was dead and no one was hunting him. Jim never was safe and he still isn’t.


There’s even mention of a freed slave who Pap hates and how he can’t believe no one’s picked him up and sold him yet, apparently needing to wait a time period before it’s legal to kidnap a freed slave.


Tom has no qualms lying, obviously, and it’s him who announces that Jim has been freed. We’re just meant to believe him when he’s done nothing good or helpful the whole book. We’re meant to believe that being freed will do something to change Jim’s traumas or the risk he’s under when the whole book tells us that that isn’t reality.
There is no safety for Jim, ever, at any point; only brief illusions of safety that can be undercut at any time if the white folks feel like it.


Huck declines to go back to being adopted and living in that ingratiated southern society, keeping on the river instead, because he is the only character who learns anything. He won’t backslide into that comfortable society where he could be safe but his friend can’t.


That’s his heroic journey.


I don’t remember my teacher in highschool ever putting it to us like that. Instead we were swept up in talking about what you can and can’t say, with her insisting that we shouldn’t even have that many qualms.


If you can’t teach the book right, you shouldn’t be the one to do it.

Look at that, I got through that whole thing without even mentioning The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. That’s probably why it isn’t the one we teach in schools.

Edgar Allan Poe was a feminist,

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Among the many reasons to love him.

Hello, it’s another theme month. This month I’ve decided to hook my claws into a different author each week, beginning as I ought with dear Edgar.

A million years ago now when I was in middle school I did a project on Edgar Allan Poe and every time I went to write about him the power went out, computers broke, lightning struck; it all felt very clandestine. I was amused and spooked enough I considered telling my teacher that he didn’t approve.

I recently saw some artwork of Ligeia and decided to reread it, which took me elsewhere with Poe since I’ve always had a thing for him. I wrote a short story ten years ago now which got some movement and consideration where I put a fictional Poe on the day of his death, stumbling about. He had a sad death. I think from time to time I ought to rewrite it.

Speaking of Ligeia, a short story of two dead wives and will power over death, Ligeia is given credit for composing ‘The Conquering Worm’ which has long been one of my favorite poems. 

Poe’s famous for his morbidity, but his greatest contribution to fiction is the detective story. Poe wrote C Auguste Dupin, the first layman applying considerable intellect and imagination to solving crime as a private individual, first appearing in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Dupin was a huge inspiration toward later private detectives, namely Sherlock Holmes.

But I called this ‘Edgar Allan Poe was a feminist’ for a reason. Poe wrote repeatedly morbid stories about death, will power over death, and the romanticism of women dying of tuberculosis not because he was someone who fetishized tuberculosis—as was very common at the time—but because he had experienced so much loss of the women in his life. 

Poe was raised by his adoptive family, the Allan’s, after his mother’s death from tuberculosis when he was three years old.

 When Mrs. Allan also contracted tuberculosis and Mr. Allan began overt efforts to remarry before his wife had died, Edgar Poe viciously fought with him for the respect and rights of his foster mother to the point of being disowned and consequential financial ruin.

Poe continued to lose. Often financially in dire conditions, he struggled, joined the military, took various names and aliases. His first sweetheart married another; his wife (and cousin) Virginia Clemm died aged twenty-four after eleven years of marriage (yikes) of …yes , more tuberculosis. Worse yet, Virginia took five years to succumb to the illness, leaving Poe to watch her struggle and wax and wane in health. His optimism and pessimism hinging on Virginia’s well being, much of his writing and fixation on death in fiction mirror descriptions he wrote of Virginia’s illness in letters to friends and family. 

Virginia also was said to resemble many of his female heroines, particularly Ligeia—the much loved wife of the unnamed narrator who possesses the body of the next, less loved wife. Indeed, implying that remarrying would have just been a poor attempt at rekindling feelings that had died with Virginia.

In life, Poe never remarried.

He was known in his lifetime primarily as a critic rather than as a writer, his writing becoming more popular after his death, and he was also known as responsible for several hoaxes. (The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, a short story about, yep, resisting natural death through mesmerism and willpower, was so convincingly written that many people at the time mistook it for a medical paper, requiring Poe to publicly declare it as a hoax). While known for the horror it’s encased in, a prevailing theme of his work, outside of death itself, was the reverence he had had for the women he’d lost. 

Self Awareness and Neil Gaiman

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The Neil Gaiman at the End of the Universe  by Arvind Ethan David is a half hour long audio play available as an Audible Original, –so not technically a book review, — narrated by Neil Gaiman and Jewel Staite, and it is absolutely delightful. It kicked my ass out of a rut I was in.

In it, Gaiman awakes on a space station to life support systems failing, and is able to repair it—discovering that he must therefore be an astronaut. He is isolated with only his AI computer and no memories.  He is able to determine from the AI that he is named Neil Gaiman and upon searching who that person is he discovers a prolific fantasy author from centuries before who has an apparent fascination with Gods and ‘seemingly unending comic book series’. Gaiman questions if he is this Gaiman somehow hundreds of years old or a contemporary person named for this Gaiman, to which the AI responds that it would rather not say.

Gaiman spends some time depressed about the apparent space mission he is on, which he has no memory of, discovering that he has had some brain damage resulting from the prior issues with life support systems.

Several weeks go by with the Neil Gaiman at the end of the universe in a depression, growing a beard and eating cheese out of a tube.

Then, after some time, he is compelled to start reading the books of this supposed Neil Gaiman fellow, not to try and determine who he is but to pass the time. (He is not a fan of Morpheus trapped in his bubble).

Gaiman, space-Gaiman, concludes that the point of Gaiman, the writer-Gaiman’s books, are the characters. Not the plots. After a few weeks of reading, emerging himself in characters, he finds himself no longer depressed or alone. He begins to repair the space station.

I won’t tell you act III.

Gaiman’s vocal performance as Gaiman is compelling; clearly he’s a man who reads aloud quite a lot but he’s a competent actor for which I don’t think he gets enough recognition. He also doesn’t flinch or cringe away from anything he might have to do in the service of telling a story. 

Which is perfect—as this is a story about self awareness and the importance of identity, self, and stories.

If you can find your way to it, it’s a great half hour to spend. Arvind Ethan David constructed a wonderful, meta story on the psychology of self.