'Tis The Season

  

17 years ago, during the darkest depths of the Bush administration, I penned this riff on Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem to try to capture what the world felt like at that specific moment in history. 

The "iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart".

And seeing how Halloween season is again hard upon us, and keeping with the No Fair Remembering Stuff leitmotif of this ancient blog,  it seemed like an opportune time to run down to the catacombs for a quick nip of Amontillado and haul it out of storage.  So once again I present...

Quoth the Hammer 

 

Nevermore.

With all respect to Edgar Poe, who's work I love and admire without reserve...

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."

The Stoli shooters grew stronger; and hesitating no longer,

"Dicky?" said I, "Condi? Or is that Turdblossom? I recognize the spoor...

But the fact is, I was drinkin’, getting good and stinkin’

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you." Here I opened wide the door;---

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, snarling, sneering

Jerking off to Armageddon dreams no one ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken –- no Condi or other token --

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "2004?",

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word," 2004!"

Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into my bottle turning, all the Jim Beam I’d guzzled burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping, something louder than before,

"Surely," said I, "surely, that is Rumsfled with a briefing.

That will disassemble that bitch Sheehan’s beefing.

Let my heart stop Cheneying a moment, and this mystery explore.

" 'Tis just old crazy Rummy, and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a hiss and splutter,

In there stepped a mangy Hammer, of the Mandate days of yore.

Not an ounce of sense made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But with Death Skull grimace, perched above my chamber door.

Shat upon a bust of Nixon, just above my chamber door,

Shat, and sat, and nothing more.

This Sugarland turd was so badly freaking, into my pants I went leaking,

Shocked by the deranged and murderousness of the countenance it wore,

"Though thy Majorityhood be shorn and shave," I said, "you are still craven,

Ghastly, grim, and wretched Hammer, rampaging like a rabid boar.

What the fuck do I do now that my assassin's been shown the door?"

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore."

Much I marveled as this insanely ranting Dale Gribble spoke so plainly,

Though it’s answer little meaning, little veracity bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Would not projectile hurl upon seeing this two-legged offal above his chamber door,

A Christopathic beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

That can’t say shit but "Nevermore."

But the Hammer, a skulking minor demon, spoke only of his venom

Hissing that one word, as if his soul were stabbed with skewers.

Nothing further then he uttered; his heart was tightly shuttered;

Til I scarcely more than muttered, "How can I enjoy this Dewars?

Who shall ram my mandate now, through Congress' sewers?"

To which DeLay said, "Nevermore."

Like the thousand promises I’d broken, his word was oily spoken,

"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store."

Bred from drooling Texas losers, friend of low-wattage crooks and boozers

Partied fast and kneecapped faster, till his lies one burden bore ---

Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore

Of "Never---nevermore."

But the Hammer still berserking looked into my dank soul smirking,

So Karl broke it down for me in little words of two syllables, no more.

”Your polls are a’sinking, on ice your lies are stinking

Iraq and Katrina the public are finally a’linking, and now comes this loony Texas hoor -

This grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous Sugarland hoor

So guess what he means by "Nevermore"?”

And the media scrum grew denser, now fueled by a Grand Jury’s censure

Wrought by a righteous prosecutor who ain’t taking this shit no more.

"Wretch," I cried, "now it’s all for nothing. For nothing I cheated Albert Gore.

So get me three fingers of two-cents-plain that I may forget by apotheotic 2004!

Drink and drink and puke and drink and forget my apotheotic 2004!

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore!"

"You For-Profit, agenda-killing jag off" said I, "Faith-based pimp of Abramoff!

By that Dobson that bends us over -- by that God we both abhor--

Is there in the cushions where we shine our asses, even one dime of my political assets?

A whiff of my miracle Mandate year, which Pope Gregor named 2004 ---

My moment on the Mountain, COBOL programmers call Y2K-plus-four?

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore."

"Shut up you fucking loser!" I shrieked, upstarting --

"Go back to offing roaches you salad tossing, Albatrossing spore!

Leave no poo stripe as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my binginess unbroken! Leave me a political Debtor!

Take thy dick from out my mouth, and take thy form from off my door!"

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore."

But the Hammer, never quitting, still is sitting, still is shitting

Down the throat of my Dead Mandate, my ghost of 2004;

And his eyes still have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.

And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; 

And my Mandate from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted---nevermore!

Pay The Writer

Watching The Detectives

The very capable Chris Ryan at Grantland (a publication which should definitely hire me) gets it almost right:

...

True Detective needs the signifiers of our world, but not the rules. It needs the corruption, the graft, the institutions, the laws, and the crime, but that’s it. Characters on this show don’t talk like us, and they don’t act like us. They are of this world but not in this world. This is “Los Angeles,” not Los Angeles.

Once you accept this, True Detective becomes a different kind of show, and it makes a certain kind of sense...

The first part, yes; the second part, no.  So almost, but not quite.

Because right now, HBO's True Detective does not make sense.  Not yet, anyway.  Right now, it is failing on its own terms.  Which doesn't mean it will, in the end, be a failure, but at this moment it is not delivering on what it promised.

And here's why.

This is not a heist story, so there are no plans to draw or teams of expert misfits to recruit.  It isn't a crime-gone-wrong story either, or a buddy flick, or a road picture.  It isn't Elmore Leonard mesmerizing us with the folkways and conversations of C-list criminals.  It isn't Ian Fleming or John Le Carre or Graham Greene navigating the world of James Bond or George Smiley or Alden Pyle.  It isn't a Mario Puzo parade across three bloody generations of America's most infamous fictional crime family, and it isn't Arthur Conan Doyle letting us peer at the world through the cool, logical mind of the world's only consulting detective.

So if the list of all the things which True Detective is not could go on for days, then what is it exactly?

Ah.  Glad you asked.

It is a dream.  A very intense dream.  And stories which aspire to take you up into a dream -- which don't merely ask you to suspend disbelief in the way all fiction does, but which requires that you to take up the local language and rules of a dream world -- take on a very special and delicate burden.

My future colleague at Grantland points quite correctly to the work of David Lynch as the scaffolding on which Nic Pizzolatto is hanging these eight hours of television --

In the absence of the singular vision of Fukanaga and the interview gimmick, the show’s directors (so far, Justin Lin for the first two episodes and Danish filmmaker Janus Metz Pedersen for Episode 3) have turned, consciously or not, to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as a central text. Lynch’s 2001 film looked at Los Angeles — from the Hollywood Hills mansions to the sun-baked parking lots outside of doughnut shops — and saw a city that could contain infinite possibilities, horrors, timelines, and realities.

Nic Pizzolatto’s story is following suit. Those overhead shots of freeway interchanges are overused and serve mostly to transition from one scene to another, but when viewed as part of the dizzying narrative that is being assembled, they make sense. These roads are Carrie Mathison’s or Lester Freamon’s cork boards — they indicate the interconnectedness of the evil that lurks in the light.

-- but I'd like to push a little deeper for today's lesson in How To Watch Teevee Like A Snob and suggest the proper template is Franz Kafka or, better yet, Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe's, The Fall of the House of Usher, for example, is ridiculous from the point of view of a linear, plot-driven story.  No one in it is a normal human who gets up and goes to work on Wall Street or at Arby's.  Around these surreal characters, apparitions come and go, maybe.  Someone dies, maybe.  Their body is going to be kept in the house for weeks, stored for mysterious reasons in a screwed-shut coffin, in a locked copper-lined crypt below the house.  The sun never shines. A wild storm whips up out of nowhere,  The dead rise, maybe, and tear doors off their hinges, And our narrator escapes just in time to see the the House of Usher split in two by a bolt from Heaven and collapse into a dead black lake.

As a conventional work of fiction, it makes No. Damn. Sense. at all,  But as a dream it works amazingly well, because Poe was a poet who cared much more about navigating his readers from one emotion to another by carefully crafting the atmospherics to move them implacably towards a specific psychological outcome.  And so from the very start, Poe piles the adjectives relentlessly on to let you know that you are not only are in a dream, but exactly what sort of dream you are having.

In Usher, you are immediately told through imagery and interior emotional states you are headed into a very bad dream, where horrible things are likely to happen:

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain -- upon the bleak walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into everyday life -- the hideous dropping off of the veil.

And if the specific vintage of nightmare on the menu wasn't clear enough, Poe makes sure to drive the point home:

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall.

And for all of his long sentences, Poe moves his readers along through all of his horror stories at an incredibly brisk pace.   Usher is a hair over 7,000 words.  Sixteen pages.  And that's long by Poe horror standards. The Tell-Tale Heart is 2,200 words and The Masque of the Red Death just over 2,400 -- figure five pages each, give or take.  Poe could and did plot with great care when he was pioneering the consulting detective genre, for example, but his horror fiction was a different beast entirely.  Those were constructed to draw you in and move you along fast, fast, fast.  No time to slow down and admire the carpet or go through the drawers, because while his detective fiction were clever puzzles that invited readers to poke and scrutinize and solve, his horror fiction was designed as intense, immersive dreams.  And dreams unravel when you give your readers time to stop and handle the fiddle faddle on the knick-knack shelf.

(As an aside, let me underscore that the magic of this is in the words.  Which, by themselves are just...words.  Same stuff you and I use every day.  But in his stories Poe the poet selects and fits each one into place with enormous care so that, together, they drag you along towards your inexorable fate like a team of Percherons.)

The first season of True Detective got this balance between pacing and carefully deployed weirdness just right: using a few words and pictures they constructed a dream which swallows you up and bears you away towards something terrible; something which you could almost-but-never-quite feel rushing towards you because it was made out of the vocabulary of human nightmares.  

And those are the two element at which this season of True Detective is failing so far.  The pacing is arrhythmic, leaving us lingering in the wrong places (like the Sylvia Plath Bar & Grill) for too long.  And the visual and verbal cues are off:  with more than 1/3 of the story told, I still can't tell if we are observing the melancholy House of Usher from across the fields, or if we are on the causeway to the house or if we have passed through the Gothic archway and into the heart of the nightmare.  

There are still five chapters of story to tell, and I have not given up on it yet.  But we are three chapters in, and so far our storytellers have failed to create that delicate alchemy of real and surreal, inevitability and surprise. weird and mundane, out of which captivating dreams are made.  

And time is running out.

The Original Baltimore Raven

Capitalism screws over Edgar Allan Poe (from Wikipedia):

Poe first brought "The Raven" to his friend and former employer George Rex Graham of Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia. Graham declined the poem, which may not have been in its final version, though he gave Poe $15 as charity. Poe then sold the poem to The American Review, which paid him $9 for it, and printed "The Raven" in its February 1845 issue under the pseudonym "Quarles"...

In part due to its dual printing, "The Raven" made Edgar Allan Poe a household name almost immediately, and turned Poe into a national celebrity. Readers began to identify poem with poet, earning Poe the nickname "The Raven". The poem was soon widely reprinted, imitated, and parodied. Though it made Poe popular in his day, it did not bring him significant financial success. As he later lamented, "I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life – except in hope, which is by no means bankable"

Again (from Salon):

Are the Ravens responsible for the fall of the house of Edgar Allan Poe?

The city of Baltimore — and the Ravens — rely on their most famous writer's legacy. And they're letting it crumble

BY A.N. DEVERS

From the look of it, even book nerds are being drawn to this year’s Super Bowl, with the second-time appearance of the Ravens, America’s only football team named after a poem, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” For many in the literary crowd, there may be no better team to root for, because there’s nothing more surprising than an American sports team paying homage to a literary icon.

There are many layers to the Ravens’ literary allusion. There’s the fact that the team’s mascot is a collective of three black ravens respectively named Edgar, Allan and Poe. There’s the fact that the Ravens play less than a mile down the street from where Edgar Allan Poe is buried at Westminster Burial Ground. Then there’s the uncomfortable knowledge that the Ravens’ star player, Ray Lewis, was implicated in a double murder. Not to make light of murder, but on a team named after America’s first star horror writer, in a city where they peddle little Eddie Poe dolls next to Ravens’ jerseys in gift shops, it seems apro-Poe.

At first, my response as a voracious reader and Edgar Allan Poe fan with absolutely no interest in football is to join others in delight of this piece of barely literary trivia. But this year there is something unsettling in the Ravens’ appropriation of Poe and his poem for what has been a surprisingly strong and fast brand building of a football empire. This year, Edgar Allan Poe’s own association with Baltimore is threatened: The city unceremoniously closed the Edgar Allan Poe House at the end of September 2012 and laid off the Poe house’s longtime director, Jeff Jerome, who has successfully operated the house on a shoestring budget, in a dangerous part of town, keeping it open and safe to visitors for decades. Not long after the Poe House closed, it was vandalized.

...

The Ravens’ lack of interest thus far in supporting the city’s literary legacy is a travesty. But the City of Baltimore’s privatization of the Poe House is even more so, particularly when considering the investment it made in bringing a national football team to town. The city afforded the Ravens, but it can’t seem to afford to properly staff and run a small house that draws several thousand new tourists to Baltimore a year?

...

Through incompetence and malignant neglect, the City of Baltimore is now doing to the little row house where Poe began his literary career exactly what Rufus Griswold tried to do to Poe's literary legacy.

Then again, while it is true that Poe created some of the finest and most enduring fiction in American literature, helped refined the short story to an art form, wrote one of the English language's the most famous poems and framed out what we now know as the detective genre, it is also true that he can't pump fake the defense out of its shoes and then hit a receiver running a quick slant.  So fuck him.

'Tis The Season

I wrote this seven years ago and seeing as how the Halloween season is hard upon us,  it seemed like a good time to run down to the catacombs for a quick nip of Amontillado and haul it out of storage.

Quoth the Hammer 

Nevermore.

With all respect to Edgar Poe, who's work I love and admire without reserve...

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."

The Stoli shooters grew stronger; and hesitating no longer,

"Dicky?" said I, "Condi? Or is that Turdblossom? I recognize the spoor...

But the fact is, I was drinkin’, getting good and stinkin’

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you." Here I opened wide the door;---

Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, snarling, sneering

Jerking off to Armageddon dreams no one ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken –- no Condi or other token --

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "2004?",

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word," 2004!"

Merely this, and nothing more.

Back into my bottle turning, all the Jim Beam I’d guzzled burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping, something louder than before,

"Surely," said I, "surely, that is Rumsfled with a briefing.

That will disassemble that bitch Sheehan’s beefing.

Let my heart stop Cheneying a moment, and this mystery explore.

" 'Tis just old crazy Rummy, and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a hiss and splutter,

In there stepped a mangy Hammer, of the Mandate days of yore.

Not an ounce of sense made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But with Death Skull grimance, perched above my chamber door.

Shat upon a bust of Nixon, just above my chamber door,

Shat, and sat, and nothing more.

This Sugarland turd was so badly freaking, into my pants I went leaking,

Shocked by the deranged and murderousness of the countenance it wore,

"Though thy Majorityhood be shorn and shave," I said, "you are still craven,

Ghastly, grim, and wretched Hammer, rampaging like a rabid boar.

What the fuck do I do now that my assassin's been shown the door?"

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore."

Much I marveled as this insanely ranting Dale Gribble spoke so plainly,

Though it’s answer little meaning, little veracity bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Would not projectile hurl upon seeing this two-legged offal above his chamber door,

A Christopathic beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

That can’t say shit but "Nevermore."

But the Hammer, a skulking minor demon, spoke only of his venom

Hissing that one word, as if his soul were stabbed with skewers.

Nothing further then he uttered; his heart was tightly shuttered;

Til I scarcely more than muttered, "How can I enjoy this Dewars?

Who shall ram my mandate now, through Congress' sewers?"

To which DeLay said, "Nevermore."

Like the thousand promises I’d broken, his word was oily spoken,

"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store."

Bred from drooling Texas losers, friend of low-wattage crooks and boozers

Partied fast and kneecapped faster, till his lies one burden bore ---

Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore

Of "Never---nevermore."

But the Hammer still berserking looked into my dank soul smirking,

So Karl broke it down for me in little words of two syllables, no more.

”Your polls are a’sinking, on ice your lies are stinking

Iraq and Katrina the public are finally a’linking, and now comes this loony Texas hoor -

This grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous Sugarland hoor

So guess what he means by "Nevermore"?”

And the media scrum grew denser, now fueled by a Grand Jury’s censure

Wrought by a righteous prosecutor who ain’t taking this shit no more.

"Wretch," I cried, "now it’s all for nothing. For nothing I cheated Albert Gore.

So get me three fingers of two-cents-plain that I may forget by apotheotic 2004!

Drink and drink and puke and drink and forget my apotheotic 2004!

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore!"

"You For-Profit, agenda-killing jag off" said I, "Faith-based pimp of Abramoff!

By that Dobson that bends us over -- by that God we both abhor--

Is there in the cushions where we shine our asses, even one dime of my political assets?

A whiff of my miracle Mandate year, which Pope Gregor named 2004 ---

My moment on the Mountain, COBOL programmers call Y2K-plus-four?

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore."

"Shut up you fucking loser!" I shrieked, upstarting --

"Go back to offing roaches you salad tossing, Albatrossing spore!

Leave no poo stripe as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my binginess unbroken! Leave me a political Debtor!

Take thy dick from out my mouth, and take thy form from off my door!"

Quoth the Hammer, "Nevermore."

But the Hammer, never quitting, still is sitting, still is shitting

Down the throat of my Dead Mandate, my ghost of 2004;

And his eyes still have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming.

And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my Mandate from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted---nevermore!

Halloween 2020

By 2020, America's new All Hallows Eve tradition will have citizens gathering in town squares around bonfires of Chinese-made junk to tell scary stories about the bad old days when a loose NeoConfederation of vampire bankers, Bible-clutching demons, sheet-wearing bigots and zombie politicians came thiiiiiis close to destroying the country.

"But didn't the people see the monsters coming?" the children will ask.

"Some did. Saw them coming clear as day from miles and miles away." the grownups will explain.

"Then why didn't they warn people about the monsters?" the children will ask.

"Some tried. Tried for years and years." the grownups will reply.

"Then why didn't the grownups stop them?"

"The monsters had lots of very, very rich friends who owned newspapers and radio stations and teevee networks. The friends of the monsters used their teevee and radio and newspapers to call everyone who disagreed with them a traitors."

"But once the monsters started to fuck everything up, why didn't they stop them them?" (Thanks to the Triumph of the Hippies, the word "fuck" had long since been welcomed into the public square.)

"The friends of the monsters used their teevee and radio and newspapers to tell the people that a better way to deal with the monsters would be to give them everything they wanted, and throw bags of money at them whenever they asked. They called it "Centrism"."

"Seems pretty fucking stupid."

"It was pretty fucking stupid, and after awhile all kinds of people from all over the place got sick and tired of the monsters fucking everything up, And they got really sick and tired of the monster's friends telling them to the only solution to every problem to keep giving the monsters everything they wanted, and keep throwing bags of money at them no matter what."

"And that's when the people made them stop?"

"Yes, that's when the people made them stop."

Then the children will hurry back home to dress up in the holiday's tradition horror costumes -- Fox News reporters, Wall Street bankers and New York Times op-ed columnists -- before scattering into the night to extort the traditional Flat Tax Cookies and candy-coated credit default swaps from the happy, unforclosed-upon homes of their friends and neighbors.

Until then, enjoy Edgar Allan Poe's "The Valley Of Unrest" as read by Elizabeth Ashley reading Lou Reed's "The Raven".

And have a happy and peaceful Halloween.

The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part VI

Part I here.
Part II here.
Part III here,
Part IV here.
Part V here.

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part VI

...
“Enough. The cough is a mere nothing,” I said, improvising quickly, alluding to one of his own works with a sly smile while holding my nose firmly and tilting my head back. “It will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough.”

He laughed at that. He had a good laugh and I was genuinely enjoying his company. It seemed almost a pity to kill him.

"True —- true," he replied in kind, "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily —- but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps."

With that we made our way to the next tavern where we sat and sipped whiskey and I listened to him talk of many things -- how many drafts it took to get the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart” just so, for example, and what it was like to write “The Raven” as his wife lay dying in the next room. All the things I had ever dreamed of asking, and all the while I smiled and listened and slowly slipped him poison when his back was turned.

Half of me simply reveled in hearing him speak, vouchsafing to me tiny details unknown to any historian, and half of me, to my eternal shame and damnation, took sadistic delight in playing the cat to his unsuspecting mouse. As such, I did not want our evening together to end too soon so I made the doses small and took the risk of his discovering me, perhaps half hoping that he would.

But he was merrily intoxicated and happy to find a friend of similar temperament with whom to share his burdens, and he suspected nothing.

The chemicals I had brought were to be used in combination. They would bring about the collapse of his nervous system a few hours after the final dose was administered. Less than a lethal dosage would bring about a deep coma in the same period of time.

We were leaving another waterfront tavern, reeling arm-in-arm down a nearly empty street when he turned to me and looked around, this way and that, to see if anyone was approaching.

“Let me tell you something,” he said, winking at me. His speech was slurred, but his gaze was steady. I smiled at him and nodded and, after a long, thoughtful pause, he continued in a much more serious tone.

“Let me tell you something that I have never told another living soul,” he whispered.

At that moment, the world seemed to explode in light. A small, black thunderhead boiled up from nowhere and stood in the street between us, and my clothing was suddenly alive with whipping arcs of blue fire.

In my drunkenness, in my awe at being taken into his confidence and, I admit, in my delight at toying with my prey, I had lost track of the time, and the hour I had set for my departure had suddenly come.

The crash of sound and light utterly unnerved me. I screamed and leapt to grab hold of a streetlamp. When I regained my senses I saw Edgar, his face a mask of horrifying recognition, backing away from me, hand outstretched, pointing.

“You,” he screamed. “It’s you!”

“Edgar…” I began, and stepped towards him.

“Demon,” he shrieked, turning on his heel and tearing away into the night. “Demon!”

I almost began to run after him, but his screams were raising an alarm, and people were beginning to open their windows or step into the street. He was lost to me, and with nothing left to do, I hastened back through time.

As I jumped back through the portal, I had fleeting hopes of making one last journey –- of tracing his steps yet again and intercepting him at one, last moment, but the opportunity was lost to me. When I returned, the machine was gone as were the vials in my vest pocket, the chemicals they contained, and the aluminum control device. In this universe the laboratory was just a reference library and the great man was only a writer of fiction who came to a tragic end a long time ago.

Things are now just as you believe them to be, except here, in my head, where that other universe flickers like a thin scrim pulled over this world.

What I did I had to do, and would do again, but I would not let him end like that. No one deserves to end his days on this Earth as I know he did.

I know the poisons I gave him were not enough to kill him, but the coma that surely overtook him would have been so accurate a counterfeit of death that only the most scrupulous investigation would have found out the truth.

I know with certainty that he must have gone into the cold ground while still alive, and I believe it is no coincidence that this was his own cardinal terror.

We are attached now, he and I.

In my mind I can see him. He is in his coffin now, shredding his fingers to bony splinters and pulp trying to get out, mouth locked in a rictus as he screams pointlessly for help.

And may God have pity on his poor soul, he knows how it will end. He who wrote of “… the rigid embrace of the narrow house – the blackness of the absolute Night – the silence like a sea that overwhelms – the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm,” he above all others knows exactly how it will end.

And as the reality of that other universe ebbs away, I slowly bleed out and die. And if you believe, as I now do, in a fearsome God, a sadistic God, in a God of cruel ironies, then you must see clearly that events could never have ended in any way other than this.

THE END

The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part V

Part I here.
Part II here.
Part III here.
Part IV here.

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part V

...
Unbidden, that scrap of verse came to me and I had to ask, “Was it me?” Oh God, could your plan be so malign as to shape me towards an end this perverse? Was it I who sent him down another road? Had my apparition at that moment pushed him, somehow, to become the man I hated?

I had plotted carefully to take my time and exercise my plan over many snowbound nights. Now, in a fury I cannot describe other than demoniacal, I resolved to accomplish it all before dawn.

I threw myself into the next step.

Hurriedly I changed into the shapeless, workingman’s clothing of the period, thankfully not very different from my own. I tidied up my appearance and it was then I noticed blood flowing rather freely from my nose. A handkerchief and a bit of snow snatched from outside put an end to that. I stuffed the chemicals I had selected for my task deep into my vest, and then transferred from the pockets of my modern clothes into the pockets of my vintage wear the little bit of gold coinage I had managed to collect. I slipped my knife into my boot and began to work on the machine.

This time I was perfectly precise in my calculations and landed exactly where and when I intended. As further insurance against accident, I set the return mechanism to five hours: whatever strait I may find myself in, this would afford me ample time to succeed in my mission, should I find him, and an automatic means of escape should I, for some unforeseeable reason, be unable to activate the emergency return mechanism.

He would be forty, just on the verge of his greatest work, and traveling alone.

He would disappear for several days to visit Baltimore and walk again down the streets he had shared with his beloved wife. He would move anonymously through the places of his past and reflect on his life and here, historians agree, is where he took the first, tiny steps towards cleansing his hag-ridden soul.

Except I knew precisely where he would be.

I caught up with him at a tavern where he sat quietly, alone, in a corner. I knew he did not want to be recognized so I slipped up to his table.

I told him that I was a great admirer and asked if I might have the honor of buying my favorite author a drink. He did not object. We sipped our ales and after some initial shyness (which I did not expect), I began to speak with equal parts passion and eloquence of both his poetry and his prose. He was impressed and flattered, and after a time, and several drinks, we moved on to another tavern.

He noticed en route that I had begun bleeding again and made a fuss of it, suggesting that we make an appointment for some other time, although he allowed as how he did enjoy such grand conversation.

Knowing of his terrible fear of blood, especially of consumption, I explained that I had recently been in a scrape and had been bleeding at the nose for a day or two. He still expressed concern.

“Enough. The cough is a mere nothing,” I said, improvising quickly, alluding to one of his own works with a sly smile while holding my nose firmly and tilting my head back. “It will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough.”
...

The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part IV

Part I here.
Part II here.
Part III here.

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part IV

...
But I had to, don’t you see?

I had to catch a glimpse of him, as he was then; young and innocent and full of promise. It seems that he has been a part of me for as long as I can remember, and I felt sharply that this was something I simply had to do. This was, at least, my intent. What I may have actually done instead haunts me terribly.

I expected to step out onto the far edge of a field in the heart of a beautiful summer day. The sky was blue and limitless and the boy was alone. All according to plan, except that I stepped out to a blast of lightening and was engulfed in tiny swirl of furious black clouds. More alarming still were the long, blue, electrical tendrils that appeared from nowhere and now seemed to dance all over my body and set my hair on end.

I now believe the effect to have something to do with the discharge of excess energies and the differences in the atmospheres between the two times and places. I stepped clear of the tiny maelstrom -- the whole of my body still alive with a coruscating display of crackling energies -- to see the boy, much closer than I had expected, looking directly at me with an expression of pure horror. But rather than fleeing –- which one might expect -- he was approaching me, hand outstretched, pointing, mouth agape but silent.

I stood utterly still in a daze until he had nearly crossed the field to reach me. It was then I seemed to awaken from a brief dream, pushed the button on the aluminum rod marked Emergency Return, and I leaped back through the hole in time, back to the safety of the lab. Behind me the rift resealed itself, and the same gaudy display of light and sound attended my return.

After my shock over the events had subsided I checked myself and discovered that the great volleys of electricity had, in fact, done me no harm whatsoever. I further noted that no time at all had passed on the clock, confirming one theory about such travel that most of the scientists seemed to agree upon: you may age on your journey, but upon your return, no time will have passed at your point of departure.

Still more proof that I was in God’s hands! The Divine and the Scientific, both in partnership to see that His will be done.

I began to shout in celebration of this further revelation when a terrible thought formed in my mind. I was suddenly remembering lines from a poem of his called "Alone".

It is about an incident from his childhood that affected him all his life. He wrote of it as “the mystery which binds me still.”

The last of the poem reads –

“From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by —
From the thunder and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
When the rest of Heaven was blue
Of a demon in my view.”

Unbidden, that scrap of verse came to me and I had to ask, “Was it me?”

Oh God, could your plan be so malign as to shape me towards an end this perverse? Was it I who sent him down another road? Had my apparition at that moment pushed him, somehow, to become the man I hated?
...

The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part III

As a few of you know, as part of an Order of Protection I took out against the publishing industry 19 years ago, they agreed to stop harassing me with politely-worded rejection letters and to stay 50 feet away from me at all times, while I agreed to never sell anything I wrote again.

I thought that was the end of it -- that we had parted firmly and finally -- but recently things have changed.

You see [insert Very Expensive Flashback Effects here] two decades ago the publishing industry was a very different beast than it is today...

Back then, there used to be sky-scraping pyramids made of diamonds and cocaine called "publishing house" that would produce things called "magazines" and "books" which, as was the custom of the day, were use as delivery systems to transmit the "work" of "writers" -- even very bad writers -- to the "reading public".

In exchange for their labors, writers were often paid in "money" so that they would not "starve" like "lab rats in some abandoned government bio-weapon research facility in the Utah desert".

Mind you, I missed the heyday of this Golden Age of Not Starving To Death by the same, crucial few years/miles that have separated many of us from many Vital Boomer Nostalgia Moments, but compared to the industry of today (hollow-eyed, overcaffinated children living in empty remaindered "Going Rogue" book bins, fighting over abandoned government bio-weapon research facility rat-jerky with Blackberries honed to a razor's edge) publishers 19 years ago were practically crisscrossing this great nation in fleets of C-5 Galaxy aircraft large enough to blot out the Sun.

Each crammed with bales of "money" that they more-or-less randomly heaved out the back -- a strategy which would be used years later to try to carpet-bomb American democracy into the sands of Iraq.

No surprise, then, that while many of us have moved on to going broke in many other professions altogether, the publishing industry has instead slowly retreated into the kind of fetid, paranoid, hallucinogenic cul-de-sac rarely seen outside of fetid, paranoid, hallucinogenic movies about Vietnam...


Which I think explains the following very disturbing voice mail I found on my answering machine this morning:

“Good morning Driftglass, it’s the publishing industry. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with our business model.

"So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did.

"O.K., have a good day.”

I have tried to lead a quiet life away from the madness of the 1990s, publishing industry, but now you have gone too far. And so, as a part of my week-long fundraiser...

...in addition to whatever regular posts I do between now and 10.30.10, I will also be carving up the rest of my award-ready Poe story like yummy-yummy abandoned government bio-weapon research facility lab rat cutlets and serving one a day every day until I run out of story.

Part I and Part II are already up.

Here is Part III

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part III

...
It came again, louder, more insistent. I called out, ‘Who is there? Give your name!’ to no answer.

Workmen had left a small pile of steel re-bar in the corner when they reinforced the floor beneath the time machine. I grabbed up a piece from the pile and made my way to the door.

‘Who is there!’ I demanded again. ‘What do you want!’

And again there was no answer but the ghostly whistle of the icy wind through the cracks.

I opened the door slightly and a gust blew it out of my hand. I shrieked in terror and flung myself back as a huge, bony fist hurled itself down at me. I flailed at it with my steel cudgel, screaming to drown out the wind, until I recovered myself enough to see that it was no specter at all. The sleet had heavily glazed the trees up and down the boulevard, and the weight of the ice plus the wind had been too much for the old willow that stood by the door.

A large branch had snapped almost entirely free. It was the slapping of the branch against the door and not some dark visitor that had created the hideous pounding sound, multiplied I now realized, by the silence of the building and my acute concentration on the time.

Laughing now as loudly as I had been screeching a moment before, I clubbed at the small strip of brittle bark that was all that kept the broken limb bound to the tree. Within moments the bark gave way, and I tossed the branch behind the evergreen hedges that formed a line beneath the windows of the building.

When I returned to the lab, the clock stood at 1:15. I laughed again and began my work.

My first journey was to be a test. I had chosen a moment in the past long before he began his career, but after the death of his mother and after he had been taken in by the Allan family. The biographies all put him in a certain place, alone and at an age when he would be unlikely to remember any detail of importance.

I set the machine accordingly. I then took up the small aluminum rod that controlled the return phase of the journey, set it for five minutes, and stepped through the pale door. In retrospect, it was an almost insanely foolish risk. I should have pointed the device at almost any other location. I should have stepped out in the dead of night in New York, stolen a newspaper to verify the machine’s accuracy with dates and locations, and slipped back to my own time unnoticed by any but the drunkard or the prostitute.

But I had to, don’t you see?
...

And Now For Something

Completely Different.

Once upon a time, some number of years ago, I had an informal but clear understanding with the publishing industry: I would send them an original short story or novella every couple of months, and they would send me cheery letters explaining how they could not use that particular story at that time. Or how they liked the story, but it wasn't quite in their wheelhouse. Or that they really, really liked the story, but they didn't publish 'genre' pieces. Or that they had gone out of business and that future correspondence should be sent to a Kinney Shoe store in Orlando.

True, it wasn't optimal, but at least there was a system, and using that system I finally amassed a collection of such letters large enough to build that guest cottage for the castle

I'd been planning for years.

I also built up a small reserve of short stories which I still enjoy disinterring and reading from time to time but which -- given the general "Holy Fuck, we're all doooooomed!" state into which the publishing industry has fallen since the days when were doing our quaint pas de deux -- are unlikely to ever see the light of day again.

This one I did on a flight from Baltimore to Chicago. I set myself the goal of writing an original science fiction/murder mystery that would:

1. Explain the very strange circumstance surrounding the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and,
2. Be executed entirely in an authentic Poe-style voice.

I posted Part One last year here.


Here is Part Two

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part Two

...
I can tell you exactly the moment when the idea came into my consciousness.

It was aboard the short rocket flight to Chicago. In the children's section, an attendant was reading one of his stories -- "The Incredible Tale of the Fantastic Prince Mothbury" -- to a crowd of rapt faces. Even adults were taking pauses from their work to lean back and listen to the old, familiar tale being quietly related to the youngsters in the back.

It was at that moment that I resolved to kill him.

I could see, all in a flash, how much like the remorseless murderers of his later works he really was. No one escaped him. I could also see how the idea of his obliteration had always been there, building gradually, by degrees, but had been hiding and waiting for some moment of divine inspiration. After all, since I am not mad, what would be the point of dwelling on avenging myself upon a man who had been dead for more than a century?

As you know -- or rather as you could not know --“Mothbury” is the tale wherein are mentioned the first inklings of the author’s great insights about the nature of time itself. It is here, in this children’s fable, where he first writes of both the “rubbery skein of the real” and the “soap-bubbles of time.” These humble beginnings were the starting point for a journey that led at last to his final masterpiece – “The Helical River of Chronos.” Until the day he died he vowed that the premise of “Chronos” was simple fact (or would be) and that the traversing of time by men would one day be as common as the traversing of seas.

It took a century, but again he was proven right.

Upon hearing those famous phrases again, at that moment, the plan came to me, unfolding itself into my mind, fully formed and complete in every detail. I threw my head back and roared with laughter at the perfection and symmetry of it. Through his smallest work the Great Man had delivered to me the means to eradicate him!

I was astonished by the change that had come over me.

I had been, I might fairly say, a sullen sort of fellow, prone to nervous affectations and halting speech. As I disembarked the flight, I could feel a physical change sweep over me. My step was confident and sure. I smiled and nodded to all. Instead of heading off to attend to business, I made my way to the University, to the building that had been named in the Great Man’s honor and to the very laboratory where work progressed on the methods of moving men through the veil of time and safely back again.

My means of gaining regular access to the lab and thence, uninterrupted, to the machinery itself is a matter that, no doubt, you would find incredible even if you were inclined to believe the rest of my story. And yet I tell you that this above all is the easiest to believe.

To begin with, in my world, science is not so closely guarded a trade as it is here.

Scientists are classed somewhere among the artists and professorial class, much lower than, say, a captain of industry. Entrée into even the most prestigious lab would not present an insurmountable problem, especially as I offered myself as an educated man who would work the lowliest position for pennies.

It was so very simple! Even you can no doubt call to mind a dozen occasions where a man of a certain temperament with a mind properly focused on a single task and inflamed by God has performed amazing feats, and my cause, I assure you, was every bit as infused with divine fire as any have ever been. The clarity of my thoughts, my absolute focus on a single object, made straight the path to my objective and, in no time, I found myself as a trusted assistant in the Temporal Studies Laboratory at the University.

That I had made it past all obstacles with such ease only strengthened my belief that my mission was directed from some divine source. That I had been given such zeal and glibness of tongue as I had never experience before was beyond doubt. What further proof did I require that the Almighty Himself had taken a hand!

My first journey was almost my last.

I had earned the confidence of the staff to such an extent that they left me to secure the facilities on nights when they all left to dine at local establishments. I waited for such a night all through the Fall, waiting for the solid, heavy Chicago winter to ensure that, once out and away on their own affairs, they would likely not brave the streets again to return to the lab whatever the cause. Snow and sleet began falling on just such a night and as I locked the door behind the last of the scientists, I began to prepare.

I had studied the steps involved well, if indirectly. I had asked many, many questions (scientists do so love to talk), but in small bunches and never of one person too often. All was prepared, but first I had to wait: thus far no one had ever returned to the laboratory after midnight, so I resolved to wait until one a.m. to begin the first step.

The hands of the large clock that dominated the far wall crawled by interminably. I checked the accuracy of the device against my pocket watch three times, and once, certain that it had stopped, I clambered up the filing cabinet to press my ear against the machine. It dully ticked off the seconds oblivious to my anxiety.

As the moment approached I began cursing the slow passage of time aloud. ‘Why,’ I shouted, ‘must this damned night limp along like a dying dog?’ Especially, I wondered, when I was about to leap a span of over a century!

I was then startled almost to death by a sudden, rapid tapping on the front door. The hour stood at five minutes before one. How could this be!
...