Good morning, Thursday.

from www.newyorker.com

Herman Melville's 1856 U.S. Passport application

"Back then, it was on you to tell the authorities what you looked like. How a person could self-diagnose “Forehead: medium” or “Face: oval” eludes me (what were the other options?), but that might just be one of those things that people knew back then. Another thing they knew, judging by documents related to the Melville application available at Footnote.com, was how to cut through the red tape and go right to the top. Melville addresses William L. Marcy, then the U.S. Secretary of State. The body of the letter is brief: “I am about to visit Europe. Will you be good enough to supply me with a passport? I sail four days hence.” It seemed to work: Melville made it to Europe."
-from this blog, via The New Yorker.

In Loving Memory of Edgar

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."

I just finished reading Jill Lepore's "The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror" over at NewYorker.com. As it turns out, 2009 marks Poe's 200th anniversary (damn, he's old!), so, a fitting time to read about him.

"Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor."

He was born January 19th and he was a Capricorn.

You might say he's been some kind of a fixture in my life--my dad has been mentioning him to me since grade school, telling me to "read Edgar Allan Poe" at least once a year, I might say. "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" were familiar stories to me, thanks to an old, tattered, browning book my dad gave me to read when I was, I think, in fifth grade. Soon, High School found me listening to more than half of my classmates reciting "Annabel Lee," with the requisite gestures (how on earth is one supposed to "gesture-ize" that poem? but then again, it was required, so they didn't have much choice) in front of a hard-to-please teacher. I, ever the deviant, chose Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" for the precise reason that less than a handful of us chose said poem. Plus, yeah, I've always adored Longfellow. Have you read his "The Day Is Done"? It kicks ass!

Back to Poe.

"And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before..."

My undergraduate thesis, too, was unable to escape from this drunken writer of horror, whose own life was painted brown and gray and dreary by squalor and poverty. My topic being Strange Fiction, he inevitably found his way on the pages I was writing.

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before..."

It is, therefore, not difficult for me to understand why, between Margaret Talbot's "Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs", where I didn't even get to finish page 2, and the feature on Poe, I had more patience--make that "interest," even "eagerness" (okay, okay, so making up my mind over which word to use has always been a challenge for me!)--to devour the latter.

And, yeah, according to the text, it is to his Dupin character that we can trace the Sherlock Holmeses, the Nancy Drews, the Hardy Boys, and all the sleuths--and wanna-be-sleuths--of this world.

Hah.

I had second thoughts about posting his picture, such a sour, sad-looking fellow he was. But what the heck, genius lies behind that dark visage!

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

*all poem fragments taken from Poe's "The Raven"-

Found:

Sasha Frere-Jones contemplates the timelessness of U2's music in this New Yorker post.

Some interesting bits:

"The band’s first (but not its sole) legacy is its sound, easily identified within a few bars: a high, chiming guitar figure, usually simple in structure but fleshed out by the ringing of open strings and the doubling effect of a delay unit; a charging, near-military beat and bass line stretched out with a little extra swing; and singing that is defiant and loud and slightly weird."

and:

"Yes, the band’s most famous member is the least technically gifted, and the most influential, the guitarist David Evans, a.k.a. the Edge, is the least likely to pipe up in public."

Her article further cements my belief that the band's detractors are wrong to judge “No Line on the Horizon” the way they are doing. Hmp.

(photo from TheNewYorker.com)

Is he or isn't he?

It seems that a fairly significant number of people perceive Obama's candidacy to be a question of whether or not he is "black enough" to represent the USA's black community.

On account of the fact that one particular blog post of his has generated some colorful (pun not intended) reactions, a former teacher of mine suggested that I google the phrase "Obama not black enough" to see just how out-of-bounds this "problem" has become.

So, I typed in the phrase and had to scratch my head at what I saw (or read). Clearly, far more people than necessary seem to be concerned about the "authenticity" of Obama's "blackness." Many are questioning this and have made it the weapon with which to attack both his credibility and his candidacy.

I was browsing through newyorker.com last night and found a consequential article on Obama. This particular portion caught my attention:

"The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks."

The question, I believe, is not whether Obama is representative enough of America's black community (and its rich history) for him to deserve the country's votes; this should not be the measure of his character--as a person and as a leader--and his capability to be president. As in any election, a candidate's experience in command and reform, the good intention behind every well-laid plan and strategy for his country's progress and welfare--these should be the yardstick with which competence should be gauged.

And the beauty of his being "a man of mixed ethnicity" is that Obama does not merely stand for the African-Americans, but the whole diversity of cultures making up "twenty-first century America," as well.

That his rise to the ranks stands for man's ideology of true freedom and equality is an event that is just as important.



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On Barack Obama and James Baldwin:
Click here to read.

Found!

If you're following the developments in the U.S. financial crisis, you might want to go over this interesting article by James Surowiecki in newyorker.com.

And, while you're there, go ahead and check out Deborah Treisman's piece on David Foster Wallace.

Treisman ends the article with a really strong, lingering paragraph:

"Great literature, Wallace once said, made him feel “unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.” He was one of the few satirists able to avoid meanness; he was moral without being judgmental. He took on the absurdities of modern life in an attempt to understand or to parse them, not to mock them. Debating the tone of the title of “Good People,” he noted, “My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?” Gleefully compacted as his language could be, it was designed to be unwrapped—and there was always a gift inside for those who took the trouble. Wallace, who had moved to California in 2002, purposely stayed away from the noise of New York City publishing, but, even in his absence, he had a definite, gracious presence in the world of letters. This new absence will be far harder to bear."

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