Sunset, Saturday, 5 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

Not necessarily recommended: Reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” at midnight, by an open bedroom window, with a full moon, while coyotes start yipping madly just a mile away in the woods, like Shakespeare’s witches, and underneath those spectral sounds an owl begins calling, nearby, over and over, one of those with a long descending trill like a whippoorwill in reverse – and Lily, our 17-year-old blind cat, starts howling on the back porch.

It’s not even Halloween ...

In the story, I kept going back over a passage that made me think for a moment maybe Poe had anticipated hip hop, or at least the talking blues. Here the narrator speaks of the weird music Usher makes playing his guitar; I’ve added the italics:

... the fantastic character of his performances ... the fervid facility of his impromptus ... must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration ... observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement.

Then I thought – wait a minute. What about “I Am The Walrus”?

The author anticipated, in 1839, the nature of the very song in which he’s mentioned!

Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe

I was going to say I hope bats don’t fly out of the sunset for you, but actually we get them here a lot at twilight and they’re good to have around. And I think they’d be nice to Edgar, too.