Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 70 posts

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#31

Post by card_zero »

robin_reala wrote: post #23
glimshe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool. Are the cover images made with AI or classic paintings?

Classic paintings: everything used on Standard Ebooks productions is old enough to be in the US public domain. The artists are in the colophons if you want to find out more.

Odilon Redon, Melancholy, and Robert Delaunay, Saint-Séverin No. 3.

https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=Redon - I see he also made a series of prints, "To Edgar Poe"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Delaunay

...and some seascape with a ship in it, wasn't fussed about that one.

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#32

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #27
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #7

Although Edgar Allan Poe is well known, I think his influence is under appreciated. He pretty much invented the detective story genre with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his "Eureka: A Prose Poem" was early sci-fi that more or less invented the idea of the Big Bang.

He was also the primary influence on HP Lovecraft

Absolutely. I think that's more well known though, he wrote that Poe was his "God of fiction". His influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H G Wells is probably less well know. He was also a big influence on Alfred Hitchcock who wrote "It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films".

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#34

Post by er4hn »

haswell wrote: post #26
Trasmatta wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Lynch also went on record saying that an artist doesn't need to suffer to produce great art. And that depression is the enemy of creativity. https://youtu.be/UljZmbgK_sI

Those aren’t necessarily in conflict with each other, though. As an often-depressed creative person, I find that depression is absolutely the enemy of creativity, but my creativity is often fueled by the same things that cause my depression. Meeting my creative goals is often about managing the depression. But without the depression, my creative output would likely be very different.

Taken further - Art can be created as a response to seeing or experiencing suffering, but it is important to manage your own response to suffering.

In On Writing, Stephen King has this lovely quote about his journey to get off of drugs: “The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.”

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#36

Post by sudoshred »

er4hn wrote: post #34
haswell wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren’t necessarily in conflict with each other, though. As an often-depressed creative person, I find that depression is absolutely the enemy of creativity, but my creativity is often fueled by the same things that cause my depression. Meeting my creative goals is often about managing the depression. But without the depression, my creative output would likely be very different.

Taken further - Art can be created as a response to seeing or experiencing suffering, but it is important to manage your own response to suffering. In On Writing, Stephen King has this lovely quote about his journey to get off of drugs: “The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance…

Lifestyle choices and an individual’s work product should be acknowledged to be uncorrelated. The practical reality is never that simple but attributing your own success, or that of anyone else, to external factors does a disservice to the originator of the work and to society at large.

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#37

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Poe, insanity, and containing the feminine monstrous (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0486-4), The Dollop ep.1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueyw-pACTM8), ep.2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGo53U2csMI)

Hard to read his work now without thinking about how much of a douche he was

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#38

Post by lqet »

I was mildly interested in poetry as an adolescent, and "discovering" Poe in the English original (I was only aware of bad translations) had quite an impact on my young, impressionable brain. I still have large parts of "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" memorized, 20 years later. After Poe, it was hard for me to take writers seriously who just inserted line breaks into prose texts and called it poetry.

Re: Edgar Allan Poe's life was a mess. But his work was in his command

#40

Post by echelon »

jama211 wrote: post #17
echelon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"long life" is geologically just wishful thinking. We all have the same quality of life outcome when compared against the vastness of time. What is a billionaire's lavish life to the toil of an artist, inventor, or revolutionary? We all wind up rotting in the blink of an eye. Luxury, pleasure, and dopamine are as fleeting as youth. It's better to do something of note.

This sounds like some serious copium, we don’t live in the vastness of time, we live now. Not to mention that I can assure you in the vastness of time his work will also be forgotten in an almost as small a “blink of the eye” in geological time. You could just as easily say “we’ll all end up rotting in the blink of an eye, so better to be happy and enjoy it than waste your time trying pointlessly to do something of n…

Your enjoyment is a machine responding to neural stimuli that evolved to follow gradients in order to propagate genes. This enjoyment is infinitesimal no matter how much you generate in your short lifespan. None of it will be enjoyed when you perish. Even more damning: the pleasure you had ten minutes ago cannot be enjoyed now. Sex, fine meals, belongings from years ago can't bring you anything. It's just ephemeral chemical flux. Saturating those pathways is malinvestment into entropy.

Thought and actions have much more meaning to time than our tiny, worthless genes. Or the neurotransmitters dancing in our brains. Or the decaying weights that hold thoughts just briefly. Brains carry a simulation of the world for a short time. They cannot be shared or replicated or extended. Their pleasure has no value to anyone but yourself, and like the hedonic treadmill on which they run, it doesn't provide enduring value. Just an endless appetite that calls to be satiated. Thoughts and actions, however, pay civilizational dividends. They endure beyond our short lives and carry our world's evolution into the vast future.

We're all already practically dead. It won't be long. The years tick by in the blink of an eye. Everyone you know is growing old. You can make your finite choices and optimize for a few good trips, and a sports car if you want, but that's all meaningless. When you get Alzheimer's you won't remember. When you get cancer, it'll bring you little comfort. And when you die, it'll all be annihilated.

Accolades and remembrance and legacy don't matter either. Just your actions and how they shape the future live on.

That isn't to say you should live an entirely ascetic lifestyle devoid of pleasure and friends and family. We need some comfort to maintain our happiness and sanity. But to make it life's sole purpose seems like the greatest waste in the majestic algorithm of the cosmos. We're each the universe alive for the blink of an eye, and to only pleasure and tickle ourselves is such a shallow thing to spend such an invaluable thing on.

I know lots of folks that live for the next vacation or the next big purchase, and they're spending their careers writing plumbing or glue, or shuffling paper. That's something I can't wrap my head around. It's not cope. It's recognition of our place in time.

Post reply on HN