February | 2013 | pastpersistent

The Facebook Mystique

Betty Friedan, American feminist and writer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s funny that the origins of Facebook now seem historical. The fun of The Social Network was the wink-and-a-nod of knowing how it all turns out since audiences were already living in a world that had been transformed by friend requests and status updates. By the time the movie came out in 2010, “to facebook” had already entered the English language as a verb and in 2009 “unfriend” had won the vocab equivalent of an Oscar by being named Word of the Year. By now, the pre-Facebook period is practically the Pleistecene.

Time flies faster in the digital era. Facebook is now one of the world’s largest companies and its executives some of the world’s wealthiest people. This has ensured that the press rollout for the soon to be published book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (who was responsible for making the company profitable) has gotten some attention. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead wants women to learn to lead by joining “lean in circles” for self-empowerment.

Sandberg’s book just happens to be coming on the heels of another publishing milestone in women’s history: the fiftieth anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. 1963 sure was another era. Noreen Malone points out in Slate that when Friedan wrote about the long, boring days of the housebound hausfrau in Mystique, she definitely didn’t have Wi-Fi. If she’d had, she might have re-connected with her Smith classmates not at a reunion but via Facebook and the book might have been a blog. Instead, it became a social movement. She had to leave the house to get that going.

Although Friedan became an active part of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s, Feminine Mystique got a lot of criticism for saying it was about women but actually being about white, middle to upper-class women. Sandberg’s got it even tougher of course since she’s in the yet tinier demographic of self-made billionaire women. And so Friedan’s fiftieth and Sandberg’s first coming within a few weeks of each other has generated a lot of discussion of what feminism was, is, and should be. Friedan’s flaws might now be forgiven since hers was a historic moment but Sandberg is getting a lot of push back as an out of touch self-promoter. It may well be that her advice is more pragmatic than idealist and might only work for women who are also CEOs, but it’s worth noticing that she’s using her position to point out that there’s still some glass at the ceiling. Some of the criticisms of Sandberg echo those that the HBO show Girls has gotten for being about affluent, well-educated white young women. In a New Yorker review of the show, Emily Nussbaum questions this fretting over privilege and concludes that, “when there’s a tiny aperture for women’s stories. . . when almost no women are Hollywood directors, when few women write TV shows, of course it’s the privileged ones who get traction.” And even being Hollywood insiders doesn’t spare them the industry’s mockery–just ask Seth MacFarlane.

Which brings us back to The Social Network. Although more fiction than fact, it offered a nice little origin myth about the company’s founder as a smarty pants jerk who couldn’t figure out how to get people, especially girls, to like him. So he creates Facebook as a means of revenge against all the slights and snubs of the Harvard hotties and their frat boy hookups by offering an anonymous means of rating them hot, or not. It succeeds wildly and soon the character-based-on-Zuckerberg and his good friend Eduardo (before he’s viciously unfriended) are getting it on with two Asian American fangirls in a bar bathroom. The kindlier Eduardo manages to convert one of these women into a girlfriend. She later turns out to be a psycho Tiger Mom who hasn’t had kids yet, but that’s another story. (Note from Hollywood to model minorities: no matter how model, we’ll find a way to put you in your place.) Facebook’s founder remains sadly alone through the end of the movie when he gets some tough love advice from an über-competent female lawyer. This character seems like a proto-Sandberg. And so the movie begins with the practical, but common, woman who dumps him and ends with the practical and super-successful woman in a man’s world who just deals with it. In between, it’s pretty much girls, girls, girls even if they are all students at the nation’s most elite universities. These two scenes don’t quite save the movie from perpetuating stereotypes of women as bimbos just as Sandberg’s book fails to speak to the problems that women from outside the Ivy League are likely to face. But if the book puts another crack in the glass, well, that would be something.

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February 22, 2013

Mrs. Lincoln’s Dress: Material Made History

Mary Todd Lincoln
Photo Credit: Library of Congress

There’s a reason that costume designers are nominated for Academy Awards. It takes nothing away from Sally Fields’ performance to say that Mrs. Lincoln’s dress animated Lincoln almost as much as its wearer. The dress—ok, the dresses—nearly had a life of their own. In the receiving line at the White House, Mrs. Lincoln’s ball gown makes her a force of nature not to be ignored and when she sinks to the floor to plead with Lincoln the way her everyday dress nearly engulfs her suggests exactly how her emotional mess threatens to swamp him. While designer Joanna Johnston certainly deserves credit for her thoughtful attention to Lincoln’s love for his shawl, just as the hairdresser did for Thaddeus Stevens’ wig, Mary Todd Lincoln’s dresses stole the show. Fields, as the Mrs., seems at times to be a daguerreotype come straight to life. Lincoln’s dramatic dresses surely owe something to the fact that the script was partly based on the book Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker. Elizabeth Keckley was Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker and friend but you’ve probably already heard the news that her career as a powerful business woman and powerbroker in the African American community of Washington D.C. didn’t quite make it into the movie. In defense of these and other omissions of black people (cf: post on Frederick Douglass below), the film’s makers point out that the movie is a work of historical fiction.

And so it is. How, after all, can one make a satisfying movie about a man whose voice was never recorded nor moving image ever filmed? This is the conundrum of the past: some of the things we most want to know are unknowable. Imagination helps to fill that void even as it insists on authenticity. That Johnston prohibited the use of plastic buttons even where invisible for any of the film’s 140 or so cast members’ costumes speaks to this. Abraham Lincoln looms too large in the American imagination for anything less to be acceptable. And since the movie is so very talky, we have plenty of time to look at the details and wonder at how vividly real it all seems. The truth about the 13^th Amendment and how it came to pass surely lies elsewhere; the emotional satisfaction of seeing and hearing a convincing illusion of 1865 makes even two hours and thirty minutes seem short.

In this, Lincoln’s love of accuracy in all things material calls to mind hardcore Civil War reenactors. These often misunderstood enthusiasts first came to the attention of the wider world with the publication of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic (1998). Robert Lee Hodge, dressed as a Confederate soldier and photographed with period technology, graced the cover of the book. Hodge took Horwitz on a tour of the hardcore underground where reenactors eschewed the least anachronism. They slept on the ground and spooned together for warmth, ate semi-rancid food out of common pots, and endured the blisters brought on by long marches in ill-fitting boots made to match a time period that did not distinguish left feet from right. Most memorably, Hodge so immersed himself in his quest for authenticity that he developed a marketable specialization: imitating the rigor mortis and bloating typical of dead soldiers in Civil War battlefield photographs.

People often find this level of obsession a little freakish, so much so that one recently engaged woman felt driven to write a light-hearted but also heartfelt explanation of the subculture titled, “So I’m Marrying a Reenactor.” The freak factor was still sufficient for National Geographic to do a one-off reality show titled “Extreme Civil War Reenactors.” (The word “hardcore” presumably sounded a little too much like the adult film industry.) The reenacting community remains divided on whether the hardcores are ruining or saving the pastime, but they march on regardless of mainstream ridicule. So it’s ironic that Daniel Day-Lewis is revered for his rigorous insistence on method acting that has led him to sleep out in the fields of Alabama and survive only on what he shot to prepare for Last of the Mohicans or to have fellow cast members spoon feed him while he played a disabled man in My Left Foot. And hardcores might teach Johnston a thing or two about buttons: they get just the right patina on their uniform buttons by peeing on them.

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February 20, 2013

It’s a Downton, Downton, Downton World

Highclere (Photo credit: neilalderney123)

What’s a Downton fan to do in the absence of the Abbey? Season three has ended and with it Sybil and Matthew, never to return. Oh yes, season four is in production but the only truly kind sister and the heir to the earl have signed off for good—unless of course Downton takes a turn towards the undead. If previously we suggested that Downton: Empire Edition might be a good idea, Downton: Vampire Edition sounds even better. Then the show could run for eternity and all that English pallor would be put to good use. At Donegal, most of the downstairs cast wouldn’t even need any new makeup or costuming.

But while awaiting these developments, we’ll need some interim entertainment. The obvious place to start is with an English aristocracy movie and TV marathon. Sure you’ve seen it all before, but it will fill up some of those empty hours. Go to Gosford Park, return to The Remains of the Day, slink on back to Brideshead Revisited. If your conscience doesn’t trouble you too much, take a tour of Upstairs, Downstairs. Some say Downton ripped it off and then resented its revival, but what’s another fox hunt or two between friends? After that, you’ll have to go a little farther afield. Bleak House beckons, and every Jane Austen movie ever.

You could try getting creative. Follow those plot leads and read Jane Eyre for another inconvenient married-man-with-a-mad-wife romantic complication. It must be Lady Edith’s bad luck to only get recycled love stories. Her earlier suitor, the disfigured amnesiac with a Canadian accent, sure did remind one of The English Patient, except of course for the fact that Ralph Fiennes didn’t whine about having a mummy’s head. Maybe it’s just that some Downton scriptwriter has a thing for movies with Juliet Binoche—Matthew’s last drive looked an awful lot like the final minute of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

If that’s too far afield, find yourself some Downton fanfiction: with two thousand plus entries and counting, you’ll have plenty to read. Prefer professional writing? Never fear: the Fellowes’s are here. Jessica and Julian have helpfully penned The World of Downton Abbey and The Chronicles of Downton Abbey. Don’t think the actual inhabitants of Highclere are just renting it out for sets either. The Countess of Carnarvon would very much like you to read Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle. In case your taste runs more to the downstairs, Margaret Powell’s Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid’s Memoir That Inspired “Upstairs, Downstairs” and “Downton Abbey” has been conveniently re-issued and re-titled.

For the less literal minded, Downton as metaphor might work. Downton’s depiction of a hierarchical social structure under pressure has inspired some reflections on contemporary Catholicism. On the secular side, it turns out that Downton confronts us with questions of free will and individual agency. It might seem a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to point out that Downton’s popularity can be pegged to current concerns about rising income inequality, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Too many words, not enough pictures? Let’s take a look at the lamps of Downton Abbey. We could consider the clothes as Downton struts the runway. But you don’t have to drop that many dimes to dress Downton with these outfits for under a hundred. Don’t forget our crafty friends at Etsy: handmade Downton, anyone? Once you’re all decked out, you might as well go on the road. There are all inclusive season three tours and DIY budget vacays. For those stuck stateside, a tour of the mansions of Newport might do as the next best thing. By the time you’re back, season four might be ready to roll. Finally, don’t forget to cook up some Downton dainties. They’ll come in handy in case you get the Downton d.t.’s.

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February 14, 2013

A Valentine for Frederick Douglass

Daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As of this writing, Frederick Douglass still does not appear in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Spielberg has gotten a lot of grief for this, as has his screenwriter Tony Kushner who started with a script that included Douglass but then left him out. The black characters who did make it into the film are mostly kindly, grateful, and token. Sure, there’s one angry black man at the start who’s intent on holding Mr. Lincoln accountable, but he isn’t Frederick Douglass and the other black soldier who is with him keeps laughing at Lincoln’s jokes. Spielberg’s Lincoln is in good company at this year’s Oscars though—Argo and Zero Dark Thirty have also been raked over the historical accuracy coals for what they left in, left out, or just plain made up. And in far off Chile, film director Pablo Larrain recently invoked Spielberg in defense of his Oscar nominated movie No in which a complicated social movement that led to a national referendum to oust dictator Augusto Pinochet is told primarily as the story of a single man and his ad campaign. Worse, many of the people who were actually involved are very much among the living and not all have had kind words for the film.

Frederick Douglass, we hope, is resting in peace. And since he will not be on screen this year and nor will any actor portraying him be on the red carpet at the Oscars next week, let’s remember him on this his birthday. Douglass chose Valentine’s Day to celebrate the day of his birth because his mother, who he saw only a handful of times during his childhood in slavery, called him her “little valentine.” He didn’t know his own birth date because, as he writes in his autobiography, no slave ever did. Even as a child he wondered why he was deprived of this privilege. It’s fitting that Douglass’s chosen birthday falls between that of Lincoln and Washington. There is a considerable distance between the two on the question of slavery and Douglass as much as anyone and more than most helped to move the country in the right direction. If this isn’t in the movie, well, Hollywood history has always left a lot on the cutting room floor and Spielberg is not a documentarian. Douglass is not in Lincoln. So here’s a thought: how about next year a movie titled Douglass for Best Picture?

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February 13, 2013

Carnival is Over and Other Sinking Feelings

English: Pieter II Brueghel (the Younger) (1564-1638). The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Copy of a painting by Pieter I Brueghel (the Elder). Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium. Detail (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday’s Fat Tuesday is today’s Ash Wednesday and a time for sober reflection. It’s been a rough week for ancient traditions. A pope stepped down for the first time since 1294. In Venice, where carnival has been celebrated since even before that time, revelers had to wade through high waters and melting snow in the sinking city. In Brazil, a carnival float caught fire and killed four too soon after that country’s deadly nightclub fire earlier this month. And somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, a ship by the name of Carnival Triumph continues to drift after an engine room fire left it without power. Its four thousand plus passengers now face conditions remarkably like those of eighteenth and nineteenth century steerage class. The stench and filth below has driven some to sleep in tents on deck. Passengers report scarce food, long lines, and bad behavior. There are fears of disease and worries about the health of the elderly and handicapped. It’s no doubt a blessing for the cruise company that the lack of power has left people largely unable to use their cellphones and other such devices: so far, most of these reports are not accompanied by pictures. With luck, the beleaguered travelers will be towed to port in Alabama by today. They can, at least, be thankful they didn’t meet the fate of the passengers of the Costa Concordia—another ship belonging to the Carnival company. After running it aground, the captain decided to get off before his passengers had been rescued. What’s next? Women and children last? Yes, that too. Not even on our beloved Titanic where the captain did indeed go down with his ship were the male passengers quite as self-sacrificing as they have often been portrayed. While women and children mostly survived from first and second class, in steerage the rates were reversed. At least on the Titanic the captain gave the order to save women and children first. In most maritime disasters, survival rates were highest for the crew, followed by the captains (!), then women, and children dead last. Turns out that the real rule has been every man for himself. It seems unlikely that the Carnival line will re-name itself Lent any time soon, but it’s a thought.

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February 12, 2013

Happy Birthday Mr. Lincoln-Lewis

Abraham Lincoln (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)

Given that Daniel Day-Lewis is known to inhabit his roles deeply—even texting Sally Fields as Abe—one wonders whether he feels like today is his birthday, too. It would be a well-deserved celebration. His Lincoln seems a daguerreotype come so to life that it is uncanny. Nor is this all. In Lincoln there are ghosts of other films and shades of other performances. With Daniel Day-Lewis as the lead these haunt the imagination. He has inhabited other roles and been especially at home in movies about the past.

Given the Civil War setting, his Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York most immediately comes to mind. Bill was no Lincoln fan and the scene in which he throws a knife at a Lincoln poster seems mostly funny in retrospect. More striking is the other Lincoln in Gangs: the costumed actor from the cast of Uncle Tom’s Cabin who is suspended above the stage and directs the actions of the characters. As he proclaims, “And Topsy, dear little Topsy, cradle Uncle Tom’s head,” the Lincoln performer nervously eyes the audience. And with good reason—the play doesn’t so much end as erupt when the very tough crowd starts pelting the stage with rotten fruit. This, truly, is a performance of Lincoln in extremis. It’s this other Lincoln, this vaudeville hack who points to the greatness of Day-Lewis’s performances. The rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Gangs is supposed to be bad theater and audiences of the time generally were that rowdy. But it’s the faux-Lincoln’s declamation that steals the scene because it’s so marvelously bad. Sometimes it takes a dose of bad acting to set the real thing in relief.

In Gangs, one such moment comes when Bill rejects the notion that the Irish immigrants can become a part of America. He doffs his stovepipe hat—tall as Lincoln’s, but a good bit filthier—to reveal the greasiest case of hat head imaginable and explains that his father gave his life for this country, “murdered by the British with all of his men on the twenty-fifth of July, anno domini, 1814.” In another echo, and another reversal, a father murdered by the British also steps out of the past from Day-Lewis’s early role as Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father. Day-Lewis, as Conlon, must come to terms with his relationship to his father who is unjustly convicted for a role in an IRA bombing and dies while both are in a British prison. In Gangs, Leo DiCaprio seeks to understand his Irish father’s death at Bill’s hand. Got that? Day Lewis has played a Lincoln hater and Lincoln, an Irish victim and an Irish persecutor. Yet the role of the father, and of the son, resonates across each of these films. It’s Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln as a father who has lost one son, and who refuses to lose another, that makes the man real. That the father is then martyred makes it transcendent. Hats off to Lincoln-Lewis.

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February 10, 2013

Royal Reliquaries, or Who Do You Think You Are?

Richard III Royal Collection (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Richard III’s bones were found under a car park, Henri IV’s head was kept in a jar, Louis XVI’s blood was soaked into a decorative gourd. All of these remains were recently proved real by DNA testing and publicized with splashy press releases. Each had met a violent end: Richard hit over the head on Bosworth Field by a pretender to the throne, Henri stabbed to death by a religious fanatic, Louis guillotined by revolutionaries. None of those stories were ever in doubt yet the positive identification of these relics has made international news. One wonders why. Ghoulish fascination? Henri’s head was, after all, mummified. Perhaps it’s related to the rise of the royals as pop culture icons. Even more than her wedding, Lady Di’s funeral brought the world to a standstill. It might be all those forensic science shows. What’s been called the “CSI effect”—or our television induced belief that we know our way around a crime scene—has proved strong enough that it’s changing not only the behavior of jurors (who now expect evidence to be DNA tested) but also that of criminals (who have learned how to destroy crime scene DNA traces). A mixed blessing to say the least.

Our relationship with DNA testing is fraught. The CSI effect has also tended to make people believe in the infallibility of the process when, in reality, genetic matches are based on probabilities and not certainties. Belief, in other words, hinges on faith even now. Reliquaries always relied on magical thinking for their power. The image on the Shroud of Turin can be proved a fake over and over and yet its power persists: the image is miraculous. With bodily relics, the science and the magic come together. Royalty, after all, can only be maintained by a belief in bloodlines. In a world where royals exist outside of real political power, we can trade skepticism for escapism with little harm.

Yet if forensic science can ratify the fame of the named, it can do the same for the nameless. While the power of DNA evidence in popular culture feeds our fairytale fantasies, it also fuels our desire for justice. It goes far beyond the wrongly convicted who are freed by the analysis of a decades old crime scene sample or the coldest of cold cases that finally comes to a conclusion. Ordinary people have bloodlines, too. Ancestry.com has made a fortune off of this insight and its ingenious infomercial series, Who Do You Think You Are?, managed to sprinkle star dust on genealogical research. Ancestry, of course, is record and not DNA-driven, but when African Americans Blair Underwood and Emmitt Smith guest starred on the show their ancestral searches took inevitable turns toward genetic science. For some people, the paper trails stop cold. After the Middle Passage, the enslaved lost their connections to their homelands and only the rise of DNA databases has been able to bridge that gap. Smith located part of his ancestry in Benin, while Underwood got to meet a (very) distant cousin in Cameroon who seemed a little confused by the premise of the show but threw a party anyway.

These DNA matches aren’t perfect. But they’re also close enough to the truth that no one can deny what they reveal. Witness the recent announcements about Michelle Obama’s mixed race ancestry and the discomfort it has caused for what it says about the American past. DNA-based revelations about Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings certainly helped lead to the recent statement by a well-known scholar that Jefferson was “one of the most deeply creepy people in American history.” Skeletons just don’t stay in the closet anymore. Even now archaeologists are exhuming the bodies of the mistreated and forgotten at a Florida reform school. In Pennsylvania, at a site called Duffy’s Cut, a team of dedicated historians, students, and scientists have dug up the remains of Irish railroad workers believed to have died of cholera in 1832 and revealed that they were murder victims. One was identified as John Ruddy in part by an abnormality in his teeth that matched that of living descendants. They hope to repatriate the body to Ireland. If so, Ruddy will be like Richard. Both king and commoner can rest in peace at last.

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February 8, 2013

Three and a Half Weddings and a Funeral

British Female Munitions Worker (Photo credit: Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library Archives)

The leading ladies of Downton have almost caught up with Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell. Sybil, Mary, and Anna (yes, she’s a shadow sister) are all married. Edith got halfway married. And now Sybil is buried. So that makes three and a half plus one. One wonders of course whether the other half will be the forthcoming happy ending of season three, but since there’s only a little over a week to wait we can be patient. For the moment, Lady Edith remains unmarried and on the verge of turning into a career girl. For once, the historical reference for this plot line is both subtle and resonant. If Ernest Hemingway’s lost generation was mostly men, the other half of the sun that also rises was the generation of women who came of age with them. Back in Lady E’s day, poet and novelist Vera Brittain helpfully coined the term “superfluous woman” for all the single ladies left unwed by the war. Just a few years ago, Virginia Nicholson wrote a book titled Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men after the First World War. If Edith represents the high end of the trend—an educated woman of means who becomes (just guessing here) a crusading journalist—then kitchen maids Daisy and Ivy (btw: what’s up with the plant names?) represent the low—service workers who scrabble over the footmen. It’s a pity the scriptwriters didn’t think to come up with the third option: emigration. If we usually think of first world men importing third world women as picture brides, apparently British women were encouraged to take advantage of their vast imperial holdings and set out for India to husband hunt. Hmmm…a Downton Abbey: Empire Edition has real possibilities.

For now though, Edith remains tethered to the island. Her travails might be historically accurate but they are also notably of the moment. It’s been hard not to notice the full slate of “sex-marriage-mommy” magazine pieces that have made a big splash in the past year or two. If the lack of intellectual coherence in the genre that ranges from “Marry Him!” to “The End of Men” has made Pamela Erens in the L.A. Review of Books ask whether The Atlantic is making us stupid, its salience reminds us why Downton has done so well. As a group, its ladies and their domestics confront the modern girl’s every trial, tragedy and tribulation. As this post’s title suggests, most of these are by now resolved. Only Lady E’s fate remains to be seen. If one suspects—due to relentless conditioning over three seasons—that it will be a happy one, a word of caution. While Erens main point is that the recent high profile writings on the state of modern womanhood lack a crucial historical sense of feminism, one of the kickers in the piece is the news on how outnumbered women writers are at serious magazines and journals. So let’s cheer on Edith and her newspaper column. The world could use another woman writing.

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February 6, 2013

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I

Richard III, Act 5, scene 3: Richard, played by David Garrick, awakens after a nightmare visit by the ghosts of his victims. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Richard III, it turns out, may have been not only a halfway decent guy, but probably hot to boot. That’s quite a turnabout for a man formerly known as a villainous child murderer whose twisted back mirrored his twisted soul. This particular reversal of fortune took more than five hundred years but it has set the twitter sphere a flutter. Since archaeological discoveries don’t usually make front page news, the University of Leicester clearly has learned the art of the reveal. The press conference managed to be interesting enough that several academics felt the need to weigh in and point out that none of this really changed history. Be that as it may, it sure was fun to see the mock-up of his head. Archaeologists have turned up stories more gruesome and bizarre than this one but even the mass grave of headless Vikings and the murder victims of the bog people lack that certain je ne sais quoi. Richard III’s got it. He’s played a cunning game—his biggest fangirl insists that Richard wanted to be found. Just in time, too: his genetic descendants apparently don’t have children and a few years hence their DNA wouldn’t have been around to identify him. That’s the thing. Those dead Vikings? The bog people? They didn’t have names. The gossip columnists didn’t pick up the poison pens for their stories. Lawrence Olivier, David Carradine, and Ian McKellen never played them. Were Richard around now, the Murdochs would have hacked his phone. The paparazzi would have tailed him through the Chunnel. He isn’t just a dead guy found in a ditch. He’s a dead guy with a fan club. Shakespeare might have done him wrong, but he knew Richard’s story had legs:

Death makes no conquest of this conqueror;
For now he lives in fame, though not in life.

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February 3, 2013

Quoth the Raven

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

We seem to be having a Poe-ment. Between the premiere of The Following and the Ravens in the Superbowl, it looks like Edgar Allan is making a comeback. Poe could use a little love. He’s the patron saint of the down and out after all and Baltimore certainly qualifies on this count. They’ve had to fight for their Poe legacy. A couple of years ago an English professor threatened to mount a grave robbing expedition to retrieve Poe’s body. No, it wasn’t Joe Carroll, the fictional prof turned serial killer who gives Kevin Bacon’s telltale heart a run for the money, but a real life scholar from Philadelphia. After all, Poe spent a lot more time in Philly then Baltimore. Although it’s not known whether he wrote “The Raven” in Philadelphia or New York, he composed most of his major works in the city of brotherly love. (But hey, Philadelphia named its team after a different bird.) Baltimore has the distinction of being the city where Poe dropped dead after being found wandering the streets in a delirium. For their part, the citizens of Bodymore—a nickname that combines the best of Poe and the worst of The Wire—plan on turning out in force should anyone try to bodysnatch their mascot. (Actually, the team has three: Edgar, Allan, and Poe.) It will be a historic contest this evening, pitting one bay city against another, east coast against west, poets versus gold diggers. Poe wrote a poem titled “Eldorado”

But he grew old–
This knight so bold–
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

He finished it the spring of the gold rush year, but Poe never made it to Eldorado. In early October of ’49, he died and was buried in Baltimore.

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Month: February, 2013

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