Decorating with Edgar Allen Poe

What? This surprises you?

But in fact, the man who gave us "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and that classic verbatim on the dysfunctional family, "The Fall of the House of Usher,"--to say nothing of the literally teeth-chattering (oh, and I mean that--literally teeth-chattering) "Berenice"--held quite strong views on interior decorating.

Just to sample a few phrases in the opening paragraph of "The Philosophy of Furniture" might amuse you: "The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are all curtains--a nation of hangman. The Russians do not furnish. The Hottentots and Kickapps are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous."

Let it be said that Poe would not have shopped at IKEA. Or Anthropologie. Or West Elm. In fact, he was kind of against most things.And he felt that Americans furnished their homes exactly against what he thought was tasteful. And he was painstakingly tasteful. (Not that Poe, himself, had the kind of digs we might associate with Henry James, prig that he was. I'm sorry, James, but must those sentences be so damn long? At least when Poe wrote his long sentences, there was blood and gore and aberrant dental work--cf "Berenice"--to add some spice.)

Poe in "The Philosophy of Furniture," published in an 1840 issue of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine" (what I imagine as the GQ of its day), opined against people who thought they knew something about carpets: "A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of carpet must be a genius. Yet we have heard discoursing of carpets, with the air 'd'un moutaon qui reve,' fellows who should not and could not be entrusted with the management of their own moustaches."

Point is, he had strong feelings about carpets and I suspect those that shield my floors would violate his sense of what was an appropriate floor covering.

He also didn't like what he called "glare:" "Glare is a leading error in the philosophy of American household decoration." By this he means he doesn't like gaslight and he doesn't like glass. Of gas he says, "No one having both brains and eyes will use it." Okay, point made.

For Poe, glass equates to glitter. And glitter is bad. As he notes, "Flickering, unquiet lights are sometimes pleasing--to children and idiots always so--but in the embellishment of a room they should be scrupulously avoided. In truth, even strong steady lights are inadmissable."

And, he adds, "Female loveliness, in especial, is more than one-half disenchanted beneath its evil eye." Poe, I surmise, was not a morning sex kind of guy, perhaps not even with his first-cousin, thirteen-year-old wife. Before she died.

And he had a particular disregard for mirrors: "Considered as a reflector, it is potent in producing a monstrous and odious uniformity...if we add to this evil the attendant glitter upon glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing effects. The veriest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bidizzened, would be instantly aware of something wrong."

Anthropologie

But WHY am I telling you all this? I love Edgar Allen Poe. He's kinda my Home-boy. (But not really, because nobody wants Edgar Allen Poe as their Home-boy.) No, I'm telling you this because Poe was brilliant at writing short stories that still scare the pants off the toughest of us, if we are willing to muck through his long (though not James-eon-long) sentences. He's cool, he's scary. Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and a host of other good writers are in his debt. Or perhaps his karmic bequest.

But he lacks chops when it comes to interior to design. Moral of my story: as my daughter always says, eat cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory. Eat Pasta at The Pasta Factory. Eat seafood at Legal Seafood.

And when you go to Anthropologie to look for ways to spruce up your living room, plop Poe in the Husband's Chair at the entrance (even if he wasn't such a great husband, either).

Awash in Puddles

The rain is raining all around.

It falls on field and tree.

It rains on the umbrellas here

And on the ships at sea.

                 --Robert Louis Stevenson,                

                    A Child’s Garden of Verses

           

You know how good that feeling is when you’re just too grumpy to want to feel good? That’s how I thought I had made an uneasy peace with this endless rain.

My laptop is by the window and I watched while three little kids in yellow slickers and Wellington boots splashed in all the puddles up and down the street. Then they stopped in my front yard where there is not supposed to be a pond, but because of all this rain there is what kids would call--and grown-ups dispute--a pond.

The kids jumped up and down in the pond, over and over, like little human Superballs. One of them fell on her bottom, naturally unfazed. Another squatted down to bathe his face like next he was going to pull out his Playschool razor. They were soaked well beyond their skins.

Their mother watched, standing off to the side. Immediately I thought she must be a good mother, a patient mother, the kind who does projects with her kids and who would somehow be able to get them to actually practice the clarinet when they were old enough to be taking music lessons.

I was not that kind of mother. I sold the clarinet. The trombone we still have, entombed in its case and lying at rest in Linnea’s closet. As for projects, I never liked them. They required a level of spatial reasoning my SATs had proved I never had:  ‘Where can I set the piles of laundry so that little Madeleine will have some room to build the wind-powered generator for her Barbie habitat?’

And while my girls would have loved to become so muddy, so messy, so deliciously rain-drenched, I was much too curmudgeonly a mom to have let my kids puddle jump so egregiously (and almost subversively) on every neighbor’s lawn up and down the street.

No, that’s why God made irregular French verbs—for schoolchildren to keep busy on rainy days.

  

But as I sat at my computer, watching the rain-soaked urchins, I started thinking that they looked like illustrations from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses come to life. Of course, if they had been illustrations from A Child’s Garden of Verses, the very last place they would want to be is upstate New York in this convulsive dreariness.

Yet somehow, as I watched them, my grumpiness began to abandon me. This felt like betrayal. I had been safe and warm inside my grumpiness. I didn’t want to think of those lovely times when I had gone boldly and uncovered into the weather.

Like when I was in my twenties, too much in love, too young to know the consequences of climate, and had moved to Washington state just south of the rain forest. Yes, the rain forest. We had lived amidst flowers that bloomed while we slept—while it continued to rain. Mornings, before I could drive to work, I had to scrape the camellias from the windshield.

My beloved had lived in dry lands and the rain had seemed to enchant him. We found washed away roads, the brittle edges of their blacktop softened; we found bridges that had been built to allow for a change of course. And all the while the rain kept a swath of cloud like gauze around Gray’s Harbor. This wasn’t Brigadoon because it was real and from it real souls emerged. But still it seems as far away as that.

Which may be why there was a strange and wordless comfort in the night-black walk my daughter, Linnea, and I took last summer. When the rain seemed neither to threaten nor stop, we left our tidy bed-and-breakfast and made our way to the edge of a tiny harbor. There we stood, wet as clams, watching anonymous sail boats find their shelter where they could.

Their mast-lights were all that showed, gleaming like fireflies, but heaving in the waves like kids with sparklers on the Fourth of July.

Heidi Caswell Zander

We stood unseen on shore, the sea drawing away beneath our feet with each receding wave. We were barefoot, except for our CVS flipflops, and we had brought no umbrellas. The rain was warm. We had planned on getting wet and knew we would not get lost.

The harbor was tiny; the sheltered crafts were small. And I was not Matthew Arnold standing on the cliffs of Dover writing poetry anybody might ever remember or decide to forget. I was simply a mother with a blooming daughter by my side watching the pitch and shift of insecure vessels in a rainstorm. There was nothing—not even as yet our skins--at stake.

But in the blackness, the pitching lights atop the smallcrafts’ masts reminded us that terra firma is nothing more than a cloud in our minds. Maybe we spend our lives in a shifting search for safety--in a random harbor, or in a neighbor’s grassy front yard, a neighbor who will bless our puddle-jumping and splashing and say, let it be.

           

           

           

                         

50 Banned Words?

Don Herold, The New Yorker

But I simply couldn't believe anybody would try to ban words.

I simply couldn't take it in when someone I know posted a Facebook link to a site called Staten Island Alive or silive.com. (Admittedly, this story ran in March of 2012. But just because something happened in the past doesn't make it untrue). Anyway, in reading the article to which the link sent me, I discovered that "the [New York] city Department of Education is aiming to get 50 words removed from some city-issued standardized tests, and some of them are real head-scratchers."

"Head-scratchers" here has nothing to do with how these problematic words might challenge juvenile spellers or contribute to a rise in juvenile head-lice. It's meant more like the way a dog cocks its head when hearing an inexplicable sound, in this case the sound of a banned word.

I know the "n" word is more or less a banned word and I won't get started on that. Okay, maybe I will, just a little: words can be ill-used, or used to hurt or alienate. But any word itself is merely a signifier; it is not really what is signified. And attitudes of hurtfulness or prejudice can be signified with any number of words (or gestures) that don't employ the use of--in the case of the "n" word--the "n" word. So it's not as if words qua words are bad. But they can be used to cause bad hurt. And banning them won't stem that.

And now--back to the fifty banned words. Apparently the thinking is that these words will cause the test-taking students to feel excluded, threatened or victimized and that would distract them from being able to perform to their highest ability on these standardized measurements.

Harrumph, indeed. I remember a word problem from my 9th-grade Regents math test in which we had to calculate some kind of data about how the Martians performed a task as compared to the Venusians. I've spent the next few decades wondering who the hell the Venusians are. I mean, they're not from Venice, of course, because those are Venetians, like Marco Polo and Casanova and Peggy Guggenheim and the pastries. But we all learned in science class that Venus is uninhabited. Are math and science incompatible? Do mathemeticians not know what astronomers know? Shouldn't they be talking? Was I distracted on my math Regents? Sure was! (Did I pass? Yes, with an A.)

So why do the educators in the New York City Department of Education think students will be distracted--and bow to the corollary argument that distraction is necessarily a bad thing--by the following selection from their list of fifty banned words? Let's sample:

abuse - perhaps the issue here is that if we don't say the word, it won't happen;
birthdays - perhaps it's that for those of us past age thirty, if we don't say the word, we won't get older;
bodily functions - perhaps if we don't say the word, they will continue to function just fine--no matter what;
divorce - perhaps if we don't say it, it won't happen;
Hallowe'en - perhaps if we don't say it, we won't get egged;
junk food - perhaps if we don't say, we will not actually have eaten it
poverty - perhaps if we don't say it, it will go away;
sex - perhaps if we don't say it, teen pregnancies will simply disappear--pouff!;
slavery - perhaps if we don't say the word, it will not have happened/be happening;
weapons - perhaps if we don't say the word, we will not have to confront the question of gun control.

Tomorrow: a geography lesson about a very, very long river in river in Egypt. You know the one.

The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

I'm not one of these people who can tell you what I'd take if I were to be stranded on a desert island (duh, a basketball named Wilson, maybe?). Nor am I a list-maker in the sense that I have a Top Ten of This or That. It's true that probably "The Haunting" (Robert Wise's version), "L.A. Story" and "Diary of a Country Priest" would rank up there on a favorite films list. And I can't imagine wanting to live in a house that didn't have copies of books by Edith Wharton, Dorothy Sayers and Wallace Stegner--and books by writers who are friends of mine.

But I can probably say with some certainty that, apart from Shakespeare, the best collection of poetry I know is The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, edited with great heart by Paul Auster on a shoestring budget in 1982.

It's just a great collection. It's got French and English on facing pages, so you have the pleasure of reading aloud the original language--and the opportunity to quibble with the translator's take on any given poem, if you're feeling sassy. (I have a little bone to pick with John Ashbery's translation of Pierre Riverdy's "Encore L'Amour.")

Who's here? Oh, everybody is here: The Rumanian, Tristan Tzara, is who fought in the Spanish Civil War and then later, in the Resistance. Another Resistance fighter, Robert Desnos,  is here (and you can visit his grave in the Montparnasse Cemetery if you happen to be in Paris). The big names are here: Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Prevert. The lesser-known ones are here, too, and rightly: Raymond Queneau, Jean Follain, Rene Char, Yves Bonnefoy, the marvelous Jean-Paul de Dadelsen. There are a bunch of others, as well.

The whole thing is a treat for the ears and the word-painting is so vivid, it's a treat for the eyes of the imagination, as well.

I'll just leave you with a little sample. Here it is, by Tristian Tzara:

                                                     Way

what is this road that separates us
across which I hold out the hands of my thoughts
a flower is written at the end of each finger
and the end of the road is a flower that walks with you

"Provide, Provide"

It's one of Frost's best poems, that one about Abishag (in Frost's words, " the picture pride of Hollywood") sent in to seduce King David late in his life when the kingdom needed more sons and his own wives didn't turn him on anymore. Yet even Abishag grows old. You can't always be a winner. And Frost writes about it. He writes about it succinctly.

His poem is slim--seven three-lined rhyming stanzas. It's pithy. It's biblical. And spot-on. I'm sure Frost knew. He wanted Abishag--and all of us who lose our beauty, to know the score:

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

Apparently science is once more validating what the heart and the Hebrew scriptures already knew:  "it is not good that the man (by which we can assume "the woman" also) should be alone." In Genesis this leads to the creation of Eve and thence to the fall and all that--let's save that for another bone-cold, rainy May day.

But in the May 13th issue of The Nation, science writer, Judith Shulevitz cites psychologist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's ground-breaking 1959 essay "On Loneliness" in support of what current medical research has revealed. As she puts it in her article: "Over the past half-century, academic psychologists have largely abandoned psychoanalysis and made themselves over as biologists. And as they delve deeper into the workings of cells and nerves, they are confirming that loneliness is as monstrous as Fromm-Reichmann said it was."

Look, nobody is reading this blog because they want to hear about loneliness. On the other hand, most of us know something--to a greater or lesser degree--about loneliness. After all there are those of us--and I number myself among them--who enjoy being alone. I mean, we're okay with those rare, long stretches where we are, simply, alone. But that kind of alone-ness depends on there being a period at the end of those sentences about how happy we are to be alone. I took a writing sojourn away from my daughters--and my job--ten years ago and spent the first four days in a kind of slap-happy writer's trance. No lunches to make! No laundry to do! (No parishioners to visit! No meetings to attend! No sermon to write!) But by day five I was thrilled when close friends of mine arrived in my hidden little hamlet and took me out to dinner. After that I knew enough to limit the length of my solo vision quests. Because I had gotten--so slightly--truly lonely.

Well, Shulevitz quotes a ton of studies and doctors and reports that give us all reason to feel glum. To keep it from getting too heavy, I'll summarize: lonely people get sicker more often and die younger. Lonely older people die sooner than less lonely ones. Women are lonelier than men (and men happen to be less lonely than married women). Loneliness can be hereditary. Isolated communities, such as gay men at the height of the AIDS epidemic tended to feel more lonely and more isolated than the general population. The less educated are more lonely, as are the poor. And then Shulevitz cites statistics about the vast numbers of Romanian orphans--in a country in which abortion had been outlawed--whose amygdalas and pre-frontal cortexes had simply not developed normally, as a result of--no other way to say it--a complete lack of significant parental nurturing.

She ends her piece with what I hope is some kind of grace note, though I'm not sure I buy it: "At a deeper level," she says, "loneliness research forces us to acknowledge our own extraordinary malleability in the face of social forces.... Put an orphan in foster care, and his brain will repair its missing connections. Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and get less sick from them. Care for a pet or start believing in a supernatural being and your score on the UCLA Loneliness Scale will go down. Even an act as simple as joining an athletic team or a church can lead to what Cole calls “molecular remodeling.”

Or we can take a page from Robert Frost, if we have the means:

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

 

The Wild New England Shore

I had to chuckle. Okay, maybe it was more of a snarl. But it was some form of an amused sound I made when I read The Massachusetts Review's rejection of my submission:

Dear Writer:
Though your work has been declined by our editors, we thank you for allowing us to consider it. 

Sincerely,
The Editors of The Massachusetts Review

I was struck by a couple of things: the anonymity of the rejection, of course. But also by how that anonymity was somehow amplified by the inconsistent logic in the use of the upper and lower case. I mean, I never think of myself as a Writer. But if I did think of myself that way, I'd think that what I wrote was Work. And--no offense, I don't think of the editors of The Massachusetts Review as Editors, either, but as people who have names. Same as I have. A name, not an upper case letter appended to what I or they may or may not be.

Anyway, it's nothing personal about Massachusetts, the state (or should I say The State?) to which I one day hope to emigrate in order to cleave more closely to the shore (and ironically, the story I submitted to them was one set on Massachusetts' brilliant Cape Ann). It's just that the irony of such an impersonal rejection was in stark contrast to the warm acceptance I got for a story which will be forthcoming this fall in the print edition of Prick of the Spindle journal. I had an earlier piece in the September, '09 online edition of that magazine, which you can see at http://www.prickofthespindle.com/pages/vol.3.3/nonfiction_reviews.htm. It's called "Lent."

Okay, no hard feelings, dear Editors of The Massachusetts Review (or maybe a tiny few) and just to prove that I'm going to quote, as a paean to the Bay State, from a Felicia Hemans' poem I used to recite as a child (strange child!) at the drop of a hat for any occasion. My family didn't like it, but I was a Pilgrim to my core:

 The Landing of the Pilgrims

The breaking waves dashed high

Pilgrims mooring their bark

on a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky
their giant branches tossed.

And the heavy night hung dark
the hills and waters o'er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
on the wild New England shore.

(Just imagine all the nouns and adjectives you could turn into Words of Substance in this little snippet of the poem.)

And don't forget to check out Prick of the Spindle!
http://www.prickofthespindle.com/pages/vol.3.3/nonfiction_reviews.htm.

Little Girl Lost

It’s not news that parents of prodigiously talented children can be ruthlessly ambitious and even abusive to them.

Bobby Fischer’s mother, who wrote newspaper ads to find competent chess partners for him when he was as young as eight years-old-old, abandoned him at age seventeen. Beethoven’s father, in pushing his son to be a Mozart-styled child pianist, abused and neglected both Beethoven and his brothers. (Indeed, by the time Beethoven was nineteen, he filed and won a legal order against his father, making him the de facto head of the household.)

Barbara Follett

The long-forgotten, but once famous math prodigy, Zerah Colburn wowed the American public with his feats. Cashing in on his fame, his father brought him to Europe. But when the father died, penniless Colburn was left to fend for himself, returning twelve years later, at age nineteen, to a mother who did not recognize him.

But surely one of the most heart-rending stories of a child’s prodigious talent and a parent’s narcissistic interest in it is that of Barbara Follett’s.

As early as age eight, Barbara Follett believed in herself as a writer and when her father, the critic and editor, Wilson Follett, bought her a typewriter, she closeted herself in her bedroom and began work on her first novel.

It was to be a tale, written, revised and re-written, of a girl who ventures into the woods and vanishes into nature. Friends, when needed, could always be imagined. “I pretend,” she once explained, “that Beethoven, the two Strausses, Wagner, and the rest of the composers are still living, and they go skating with me.”

Her father, Wilson Follett, having already written about his three-year-old daughter in Harper’s, contacted Knopf.  Barbara’s novel, The House Without Windows, came out to  overwhelming praise in 1927.  Barbara was twelve.

The Voyage of the Norman D followed. The Times Literary Supplement lauded it. The Saturday Review featured it alongside Dorothy Parker. She was no longer just a childish anomaly; she was an author.

But just a week before the book came out, Wilson Follett announced to Barbara and his wife that he, having just turned forty, was leaving them for a younger woman. And he did, leaving them in dire financial straits on the eve of the Depression. At sixteen, Barbara was taking subway into New York to work as a secretary.

Without the support of her father, Barbara, remarkably, continued to write, creating two other manuscripts. But eventually her writing stopped. She married and for a while they were happy, hiking and backpacking between her secretarial jobs. Barbara briefly traveled to Mills College where she studied dance. But on returning to her home in Boston, she discovered that her husband had been seeing someone else. They soldiered on, but within a few months they quarreled, Barbara left. And was never seen again.

For reasons never to be known, her husband waited two weeks to go to the police and four months before requesting a missing persons bulletin.

Betrayed first by her father and then by her husband, Barbara Follett was never found, her prodigious talent unrealized. All that remains of her work today is in six archival boxes in the Columbia University library.

And both the irony and tragedy of the loss of Barbara Follett is encaptured in an anonymous essay Wilson Follett wrote for The Atlantic. With muted guilt Wilson Follett asks: “Could Helen Hayes be lost for ten days without a trace? Could Thomas Mann? Could Churchill? And now it is getting on toward forty times ten days…” The father, having left the daughter, never found her.

And I would one day love to write the biography of a child writer about whose life we know next to nothing. But that wouldn’t be a biography, really. It  would be fiction