Edgar Allan Poe
Literary Zen XIV
Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?
— from The Black Cat
MORE LITERARY ZEN
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Poe[try] in Motion
I’m a big Poe fan (Who isn’t, am I right? I mean, does anyone even know anyone who isn’t a Poe fan? or anyone who knows someone who was told once a long time ago about someone who isn’t a Poe fan? Exactly.), so when I got the latest book recommendation from Amazon for yet another collection of Poe’s greatest works, this one illustrated by Edward Gorey no less, I was all over it.
But then I saw it was a Kindle in Motion book and my heart sank.
Yeah, I’ve been seeing these types of newfangled in-motion titles pop up every now and then and my initial reaction to them was pretty much the same as was my initial reaction to the dawn of Kindle books.
Not in my library, no way. They would have to pry the r-book (real book) out of my cold dead hands before I would ever take hold of an e-book.
But then of course, with way leading on to way, I came to love e-books and they have become indispensable to my well-being and I no longer feel guilty when walking past my long-ignored bookshelves only annoyance because they are so damn dusty..
I mean, back to Kindle in Motion books, if I had the desire to watch pictures that move, then I would watch either a motion picture or get up early on a Saturday and watch animation/cartoons (are there still such a thing as Saturday morning cartoons?).
Anyway, long story short, since I’m no Luddite (stay tuned for my upcoming AI confessional post, btw) and since it has Gorey as the illustrator I checked out the Poe in motion book post-haste – figuratively and literally since as part of the Prime Reading offerings it has to be checked out, and found it to be pretty frikkin’ awesome.
Okay, of course it isn’t illustrated by Edward Gorey, how could it be since he’s been residing in weird genius illustrator heaven for nearly 2.5 decades. It was only wishful thinking on my part and my eyes saw what they wanted to see.
The actual illustrator’s name is Corley, M. S. Corely to be precise, and by the looks of his resume he’s had a pretty good career cranking out book covers.
And I must admit, Mr. Corely did a bang-up job on the Poe book. The pictures in motion are very cool with the likes of swinging pendulums and ravens flying ominously across the page.
So yeah, check it out. The good news is if you have an Amazon Prime account (and who doesn’t, right?) it’s free.
No More
I finished a new book last summer and, in an inexplicable fit of delusion, I decided to try to have it published traditionally and submitted it to several independent publishers.
Yeah, guess how that’s gone so far…
Anyway, in the interim since finishing that presently wayward and unwelcomed novel, I have been unable to home in on a new story to which I would be willing to commit a year or so of intellectual effort/struggle.
I don’t know how it goes for you, but for yours truly, writing does not come easy and it is one long angst-ridden struggle. Hence my saying, which occasionally serves here as a tag line but at present is on the bench:
Writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime.
Lately, to nourish the parched creative side of my brain, I have taken to music – no, I still cannot play any instrument beyond my ability to torture three unfortunate chords or so on an acoustic guitar.
By music, I mean the garageband app on my iPad.
I decided to would try to reimagine my novels, their themes, or perhaps even scenes within them, as songs. The first novel I choose to contemplate rhythmically was Rainy Season.
Love hurts, as they* say, and Rainy Season makes every effort to live up to the truth of this wellworn saying.
So I wrote a sad, desperate song to express how the sad, desperate novel strikes me.
To help further express this sad, depressing Expressionistic Rainy Season vision of mine, I decided to include a visual element to it.
So I turned to French director Jean Epstein’s haunting 1928 silent film “La chute de la maison Usher,” which itself is a filmic expression of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic masterpiece “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and which, conveniently for me, recently entered the public domain – the film, I mean, because surely all of Poe’s work has been in the public domain for many, many o’ moons.
For you nerds who like to know, to edit and adapt the film to the song, I used DaVinci Resolve, also for the iPad (the free version of course).
So, are there more music/videos to come?
Maybe, at least until I come up with an idea for a new novel (redundancy intended).
Apologies in advance…
*non-gender specific
Fake News is so Poe-thetic
I read an Edgar Allan Poe story today entitled The Angel of the Odd.
It’s a fun, fast, Kafka-meets-Twain, easy to forget kind of read.
But what is most memorable to me about the story is that it is entirely set up around the protagonists drunken dismay over what we would call the “fake news” of the day…