Edgar Allan Poe's America | Hacker News Reader

Edgar Allan Poe's America

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64 pointsbenbreen43 comments

If you're a Poe fan, be sure to check out Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Alan Parsons Project:

https://open.spotify.com/album/1Z4oBiD0q8rTwWIYrDwsys

And Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix

I started this last night and quickly lashed through 2 episodes - really enjoying it. Very it's got a good Succession horror vibe to it.

I had dismissed it based on its trailer but maybe that was too rash. I’ll definitely give it a chance based on your recommend here. Thanks!

Flanagan's stuff is (IMHO) some of the best horror TV there is at the moment.

If you haven't seen the Haunting of Hill House, I definitely recommend it. If you're into that sort of thing.

Haven't watched The Fall of the House of Usher yet, but I'm very much looking forward to it.

I thought Midnight Mass was his best - very cool original premise, though unfortunately didn't stay consistent to the invented framework.

I really enjoyed it, but it didn't have as much brooding, dark terror as Hill House.

But it's a matter of degree, I've liked all of his TV stuff so far. I must go back and watch some of his movies.

> Haunting of Hill House

A PG-13ish horror show with big themes that it exposes and employs with taste and skill. Was pleasantly surprised to get a lot more than a decent ghost story out of this one—not many folks aim that high, and fewer hit their mark.

I was lately disappointed with quality of movies/shows on NF. But The Fall off the House of Usher was decently good, especially if you know Poe's stories/poetry. Highly recommended, nice classic horror with modern twist.

I would say Fall of the House of Usher is at best surface-level related to Poe's writing. It mostly references character names, a few poem lyrics, and some plot points. But it doesn't have anything of the actual soul of his work, the way guilt or desperation push his characters into insanity.

It's not a bad series, but it's definitely lacking in actually adapting what is most memorable in Poe's works. The parts that reference The Black Cat and The Raven are particularly weak, with the Tell-tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado being close seconds.

Disagree. The way the utter depravity of the Usher family leads to their ultimate doom is the spirit of Poe, even if the details differ. And using an opioid-pushing empire as the framing device is the cherry on top that modernizes the whole thing.

I think that's still a very surface-level element. Nothing of the details or the actual tone of the stories generally survives. The atmosphere is rarely oppressive in the show, it's typically clinical. The Ushers themselves are generally content, calm and collected throughout, up until the moment of their final murder. The oldest brother is the only exception, and is by far the most interesting character for it; his is the only story that really seemed to catch more than the surface level.

I saw the whole show, and while it's not bad, it had nothing to do with Poe. They could have taken every reference of Poe out of the show, and it would have been exactly the same. It's like the guy running it wanted everyone to know he read Poe in high-school, and it was more of an awkward, forced "wink wink" to the audience.

And Peter Hammill's opera of "The fall of the house of Usher". Here's part of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dHsQekNB64

(According to one of the comments it's the 1999 recording. Probably I'd heard the 1991 recording previously. It did seem a bit different.)

It's a great gateway drug into prog rock. APP did lots of concept albums and I love the conceit.

Note that there are two masterings of Tales and I find the harder-to-find 1976 version is cleaner than the punchy 1987 version.

A recent Netflix mini-series based on EAP's writing has just been released [0] which might explain his work surfacing due to SEO.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Ush...

It's very, very good. It's one of the best Netflix-sponsored things I've seen. Most of Poe's work has been incorporated -- not just the title story.

FotHoU is possibly the best love letter to Poe since Alan Parsons made his album in the 1970s.

Indeed it is very good! I finished watching it last night and thoroughly enjoyed the dark ominous atmosphere.

Poe was very much loved here in Eastern Europe. I know he was loved in Romania, from where I'm from, my dad had a couple of his translated volumes in our library, in fact The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is one of the first books I've read as a kid (the title seemed interesting, that's why I had chosen it).

At a quick search I found this blog-post detailing Poe's influence on Russian literature [1], apparently he had been translated in Russian since pretty early on, in the 1840s (via the French translation, not directly from English). Found this part pretty interesting:

> ”Edgar Poe—the underground stream in Russia.” So the Russian Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok noted in his journal for November 6, 1911, a topic for a future critical study.

[1] https://simonbeattie.co.uk/blog/archives/2151/

Poe benefited from having translators with a great deal of literary talent of their own. For example, Charles Baudelaire was one of his translators.

Same in NL: one of his translators was Simon Vestdijk, a prolific author and poet himself. In a way, his translations ruined Dutch literature for me: the fantastic imagery of Poe and the lyrical translations of Vestdijk produced a combination that not many home-grown writers could match.

As a Romanian as well, I was quite surprised to find out that Mihai Eminescu was one of the people who translated Poe's work in Romanian. This was especially surprising given how much more modern Poe's work felt compared to Eminescu's, and yet Eminescu was born one year after Poe died...

Poe's letters (a full collection available from the EAP Society of Baltimore, https://eapoe.org/works/letters/index.htm), while for the most part very mundane, provide a unique insight into a most stormy life.

He was an interesting person. Poe's death remains a mystery. He was found on the streets of Baltimore in a delirious state, wearing clothes that weren't his. He died a few days later, and the exact cause of his death remains unknown. There have been numerous theories, from alcohol poisoning to rabies.

Interesting, I always associated Poe with Baltimore.

This article has a very different tone to the Wikipedia article on Poe. Wikipedia makes a lot of references to alcohol abuse. Also see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1336506/pdf/cma...

I enjoyed this interview with the author of a recent Poe biography when it first aired earlier this year. I haven't read his book. https://kansaspublicradio.org/podcast/conversations/2023-02-...

He makes the point - which the article you posted also alludes to - that Poe was not a habitual drinker but would get very drunk on very little liquor when he drank.

Another thing I learned from it was that Poe wrote a lot more than his most famous stories - the complete works have been published as 17 volumes. https://www.eapoe.org/works/harrison/jahinfo.htm

Isn't that web site eapoe.org brilliant? Nice old-school design, amazingly thorough bibliographies, multiple versions of each text, ...

(Is there anything like it for any other author?)

Seems disproportionately many writers of the 19th and 20th century lived tough (and often short) lives, or at least endured hardship of some kind e.g. Wilde, Orwell, Poe. Wonder if it's true of writers generally?

Many artists in general were probably not very successful and/or otherwise had a lot of hardships in their lifetimes. Some of them became more recognized later. They're the ones you've heard of.

Suffering can produce some awesome art.

Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason for the US having far more success in exporting media worldwide compared to (Western) Europe is the relatively greater amount of suffering caused by libertarian-ish capitalism and oppression of minorities. Certainly it's hard to see American hip hop being the same kind of thing -- and thus achieving the same kind of sales -- without those two factors.

I'd bet more on English being the lingua franca, and the sheer size of the States.

Probably also first mover advantage - the early years of Hollywood giving an edge that has lasted.

If sheer size had anything to do with it, we’d be speaking Russian or Chinese…unless you are referring to the American Empire and not just the States…

comparing populationXdisposable income. Russia is only a third the size of the US, and until quite recently there was no Chinese middle class.

Those both help, as does US prosperity.

On the other hand, South Korea has recently had a big boom in its TV show/movie popularity despite being a lot smaller and also having their shows in, y'know, Korean.

Yeah, when the Nigerian movie industry doesn’t have the same worldwide appeal as Hollywood, surely it is because the Nigerians are just living too comfy lives.

Seriously, there are multiple reasons for the cultural dominance of the US, but I dont think “more suffering” is one of them. Historically, cultural influence seem to largely correlate with economic wealth and political power.

That's why I said "part of".

Obviously English is a factor. So is being a relatively wealthy country, hence the comparison to Europe.

Expand the thought to general lives, and it is probably the same? Many lives were tough. In ways that we can and, in my opinion, should prevent.

Lots of people suffered hardship or died young during the last few centuries. But writers were the only ones writing about it!

EAP was incest and a pedophile. Interesting to see him continue to roller-coaster in popularity and gain a fan-base that supports different theories as to why marrying his 12-13 year old cousin was okay.

It's almost like events from hundreds of years ago adhered to norms that are not the same as today's, trippy.

I personally don't think pedophilia is normal regardless of how acceptable it is in any social circle or period in time.

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