Edgar Allan Poe – Short stories (three pages of random unorganised thoughts)

So, this review is about Edgar Allan Poe. Although, it won’t be a review of any one specific book or short story, it will be a review of my thoughts on Edgar Allan Poe so far as I read ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’. (Ignore this entire paragraph. This review becomes about everything other than Edgar Allan Poe).

So I have in the past read some of the short stories in this book, but not all of them. ‘The Assignation’ used to be my favourite short story because of the style of the writing, but now my favourite one is ‘Gold Bug’. (Let me just mention that when I first read this title I couldn’t help but picture a 1963 Volkswagen Beetle in sleek Gold. I know it couldn’t have been about a car, but even throughout reading this short story this mental image kept coming back. I should also mention that this is my favourite thus far and I’m not yet halfway through). I love the humour in this short story; it is so different to the sexual innuendos and inappropriate humour we’re now accustomed to.

But anyway, so I was reading this book which compiles Poe’s short stories and I was asked how I could read such ‘a miserable book’ on such an occasion (the occasion being a dinner). I couldn’t help but differ in opinion with this view. Although, this person insisted that Poe’s work was miserable and told me to read specifically ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, which granted I haven’t yet read but I am still not finding Poe miserable.

This just brings me to a point about psychology before I go into the details of how or why I don’t find Poe miserable. My psychological analysis so far of the situation is that we all have different levels of what we deem as ‘miserable’ or ‘happy’ or ‘interesting’. Where this guy obviously thought it ‘miserable’ to read about schizophrenics and lost loved-ones I thought it was just incredibly interesting to get some sort of insight into how the mind can deceive, how it can be so ridiculously ruled by emotion, and how a person from another era saw to cure these things. Really, where this guy seems to (according to what I’ve derived) feel the pain he is reading, I think perhaps I can just look at these books and think ‘huh, at least that’s not me. And how would I cope if that was me?’ That’s what I’m thinking. I’m not at all emotional though, so for me to feel that the book is ‘miserable’ is pretty impossible.

I recognise that Poe’s topics are deeply complicated lattices of emotion and dreary experiences but I don’t find it miserable to read. Does it make me sadistic that when I read these short stories I’m just extremely engrossed and excited by what the outcome will be? I don’t know, maybe it does. Maybe my complete lack of compassion when it comes to books or films makes me sadistic.

Or maybe it just makes me a product of my society, a totalitarian society that is hell-bent on desensitising and numbing human emotions so that when they go around killing people in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine etc. we can look, not have to turn a blind eye and still not care.

If I’m halfway there to not caring by not being able to care when I read something that is sad, then maybe this should be a warning sign of the generations to come? I mean when we look at the youth they are so riled up to help those suffering in the world, so maybe it hasn’t worked. Maybe people haven’t been completely numbed.

But then there’s another side of that argument that won’t leave my mind. What if that’s what totalitarianism wants us to think? I mean you can’t strip someone completely of thinking for themselves without them waking up to the fact that they are being brainwashed into not caring. So maybe them pushing youngsters to stand up for rights and injustice by raising money and giving it to a charity is just their way of creating a complacent generation who will never really achieve much change. How does anyone know where their money is going, if it will really help anyone? How many people ask themselves this question more than a few times before blindly giving to any charity?

But anyway, I don’t know how I got to this topic. This is something I should really discuss in another essay. I’ll have to go back now and see where I was…

Oh yes, does it make me sadistic that I don’t care when I read Poe’s books?

Well I don’t think so. And this is why – because when I am reading I am able to realise that this book is not a reality, well not my reality anyway. When it comes to Poe especially, I find that he is so consumed with emotions to the point of hysteria. I don’t know if he does this purposefully or if people have the same reaction as me when reading some of his short stories, but I find myself laughing at how ludicrously hysterical some of these are.

I will give ‘Eleonora’ as an example. The narrator is supposed to be in love with Eleonora and vows his undying love and commitment to her at around the age of 15-20 when she is about to die. This was hilarious enough in itself, but then as he wallows in self-pity and the whole world seems to revolve around his love and the fact that he’s lost it, the whole thing becomes painfully pathetic. When it becomes really hilarious is when he falls at the feet of another woman because of his worship of her beauty and his love. This is a recurring theme by the way for anyone who hasn’t read Poe. The men seem to worship their loved-ones like a sacred temple. In ‘The Assignation’ the guy kills himself – almost a replication of Romeo and Juliet – and in Ligeia he is driven to insanity by the loss of his wife etc.

Basically, I don’t find this to be ‘miserable’ or I don’t find that it brings me any feelings of misery. I just laugh and find this whole emotional commitment quite pathetic. How anyone can completely devote and invest their happy emotions and love in another person is quite frankly weird and stupid, and indicates tremendous emotional immaturity as well as a serious case of low self-esteem.

I don’t get how or why human beings are so self-destructive. And to feel the same misery as a fictional character for me personally is incredible. I could never completely be taken by words in that way, to feel them as some people obviously do. This is making me question my humanity and whether my insensitivity has gone too far. Has it? I don’t know. I am unable to answer that question myself.

All I know is that so far, I am thoroughly enjoying this collection of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The fact that people are dying or are suffering some serious mental tortures is just a reality to me. There’s nothing miserable about it. Or maybe it is miserable, but I don’t feel that misery. Yes, that’s more accurate. Because I can’t discard the fact that Poe’s works are generally ‘miserable’. They are. They are dark, and claustrophobic and intense. The difference is that we all think differently, and we all take things in and process things differently.

Where I understand that this is ‘miserable’, I don’t feel the misery. So I can read it wherever I am and it won’t affect me. But others will not only recognise that this is ‘miserable’ but they’ll also feel that misery and let it affect their mood, they will also let the emotions prevailed influence where or when they’ll read the book. What  I think I am trying to say is this; Poe’s work is miserable and I recognise that but I am not affected by the misery.

That is the conclusion I have come up with for now. I haven’t thought about this enough to be fully satisfied with this essay or rant or review (I no longer know what to class this as). This is more of a psycho-analysis of the people reading these short stories rather than of the short stories themselves.

I will do a review/essay of every short story I have a lot to say about (there are two or three so far that I really want to have an in-depth analysis of in terms of writing, contextual understanding etc.) and I will do those when I finish the entire book. Or maybe there are three or four stories so far. Either way the number of reviews I might want to do will increase due to the fact that I am not even halfway through this book and there are still like 29 short stories left in my book.

Anyway, I’ll leave this review here…before I write any more. I’ll have to read through the nonsense I’ve written too, but I’ll do that at a later time.

Consumerism Confusions

What is consumerism? Well, it’s simple really. It’s when one consumes.Consumption doesn’t only occur in the eating of food. It is also the buying of products, the usage of electricity etc.

And so we are labelled as a ‘consumerist society’. It is said that our lives revolve around this. Well, people’s lives have always depended on consumerism. Otherwise we would not eat, we would not buy the materials to build a house, and we would not have businesses.

Consumerism is a necessary foundation for building any society, it’s vital for the survival of any person.

So I would not say consumerism is an issue. The issue is excessiveness and fanaticism. People excessively consume. They keep lights on, straighten their hair five times a day, buy inordinate amounts of food. People want and buy things they don’t need.

No one needs a superman figure on their nightstand. No one needs three different mobile phones. No one needs a television in their room. No one needs the Playstations or Nintendos or Xbox games. No one needs twenty pairs of shoes. No one needs a whole wardrobe full of clothes. No one needs to eat a metre-long pizza or a 12 inch sub stuffed to the max. No one needs to drive ten minutes down the road.

People can walk down the road. People can survive on a six inch sub or a couple of slices of pizza. People can survive without a ridiculous amount of shoes or clothes. People can find other creative ways of having fun other than spending hours attached to a piece of technology that's sucking their brains and creativity out of their systems. A family can survive with one television in the house. Ten year olds have no real use for an IPhone (look at all the problems Snapchat and the internet are causing anyway (naked photos? open doorways to pornography?))

But people are greedy, and people are lazy and people are shallow. That’s the problem with society. People are not willing to let go of their desire to live simply, to live lavishly, to look beautiful. They don't care about helping the earth which provides them with all these resources in the first place.They just want what they want.

So when people tell me they refuse to be a part of a consumerist society what do they mean? Are they being hypocritical?

Are they aware that in fact consumerism is essential to the basic survival of any human being – we need to consume food, we need to buy clothes to keep a rudimentary level of our dignity, we need gas and electricity to eat and keep warm. This automatically renders everyone consumerist anyway.

Or do these people mean that they refuse to be among those who consume excessively? Is that the consumerist society they oppose? Because if so then I wholeheartedly agree.

People are too absorbed in the meaningless, material mainstream world which does nothing but potentially put a huge dent in ones purse. And the destruction of the Earth and its beautiful resources which we are quickly destroying is also another consequence of our gluttony.

But who cares as long as we stay content in our laziness and life increases to become easier?Let us accept this 'consumerist society' as we call it and move on.

Or you can get off your lazy behind and go do something productive and try an make the world a better place.

Either way, stop saying that you refuse to be a 'consumerist'. We all do it. If you refuse to be an excessive 'consumerist' and refuse to indulge in material objects then fine. But make that clear. Get off your high horse, and stop thinking that just because you've decided to stop being like everyone else that makes you superior.

You're not superior, you're just slightly different.

Some Reasons why the Hunger Games Trilogy is a joke

So I ask myself – What world have we come to when Bella Swan is voted the best feminist heroine in literature? Well, the same world where the Hunger Games is praised by men and women aged between 20 and 30 and Katniss Everdeen is voted a female heroine.

I should have known as soon as I saw the review on the cover by Stephenie Meyer saying that the trilogy was good that it was going to be three long books of a completely pathetic plot. Of course, I couldn’t be more right.

Now before I go on to complain about the plot itself I would like to bring the blurb to light. Usually I find that the blurb never does a story justice but in this book’s case I find that things have reversed. The blurb promised me a girl who was ‘forced’ to enter the Hunger Games. Well, I didn’t see anyone put a knife to her throat or drag her to the stage by the hair and pull the words out of her mouth. No, she volunteered. She willingly took her sister’s place. Furthermore, it said that Katniss ‘had been close to death before and survival was second nature’ when the most dangerous thing she did was climb over gates that weren’t charged with electricity when they should have been and go hunting with her closest friend Gale Hawthorne.

I was truly happy when I read the blurb. I mean seriously, it finally looked like the world was going to see a female heroine who wasn’t completely pathetic. It finally looked like there was going to be an absence of female dependency on ridiculous overall male dominance which was heavily advertised in the 50’s and is commonly seen in the world’s favourite classics .

I thought another plus to this book was that it was a female writer. I personally thought it was finally happening. There was finally going to be a female character truly worthy of looking up to for all girls out there who is better than some stupid image of female stupidity and desperation for love.

Well, I thought that until I saw Stephenie Meyer’s review and my hopes died down instantly. I mean you only write what you enjoy. Trust me, I would know. And only a mind idiotic enough to plagiarize every well-renowned romance novel and series in this world would be ‘obsessed’ with a plot just as stupid as her own plot, but for now I should stop my rant on Stephenie Meyer. I have a whole review just for her and her saga.

Anyway, this gripping blurb also promised that the ‘Hunger Games’ was a story ‘set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present’ which is just a fancy way of saying there are similarities between this future and us. This point though brings me to my first issue with this book. I get that this is fiction – the whole ‘Hunger Games’ reality T.V show proves that – but what really irritates me is that these people are just as human as we are hence the whole similarity to our present. It’s the one thing the author (Suzanne Collins) emphasizes on numerous times. They are just as emotionally vulnerable, they bleed easily, they make completely idiotic decisions, they follow a set of oppressive laws because they have no other choice, they are ruled by a bourgeoisie (higher class), they barely scrape by for food and live in constant starvation and people die in the harsh winters, from diseases which they do not have the means to cure which is a close replica to the modern day third world country or a country ruled by dictatorship. The key though, the thing that makes them most like us is their ability to die, or their mortality if you will.

This enforcement of death in the book is a recurring theme. Everyone dies, very easily. A life lost is a common thing, death occurs every day, it can happen quickly, slowly, unexpectedly, brutally or even nicely. My point is, it can happen anywhere anyhow. And Suzanne Collins is sure to get her point across in the Hunger Games trilogy as it seems to be the one thing everyone awaits, whether they are in the Hunger Games or not. But somehow (and it is inevitable that I mention this) Peeta manages to survive. He survives a deep wound, a broken leg and hypothermia even though he stays for days under cold wet mud.

Remember what I said about them being the same as us in that they die in the same ways or just as easily? Well, hypothermia kills you in hours if you don’t seek warmth straight away but somehow this idiotic pansy managed to survive days. The Baker from district ‘who cares’ survived. This complete and utter fool who doesn’t know the first thing about having guts since he couldn’t even bring himself to tell Katniss that he liked her when they were kids survived. I really wasn’t impressed.

Not only that, but throughout the trilogy we are constantly reminded that he purposefully burnt bread from his parent’s bakery when he was little so that Katniss and her family would have food to eat which therefore somehow makes Katniss forever indebted to him.

The only good thing I can say about Peeta is that he is one good manipulative bastard. I mean he effectively got the girl of his dreams by convincing Haymitch, (their coach) that the only way both he and Katniss could survive the games was to create a little romance. Now, this is where the author decides to make our little protagonist heroine even stupider. All authors do this, no matter where you go, so I don’t know how far I can go in blaming her for following the ‘crowd’ if you will. All writers have this annoying need to make all characters ridiculously oblivious to all things that do concern them or somehow involve them. For instance, Gale clearly likes Katniss, all the characters are aware of this as well as the readers upon first reading about him. It is also very clear that Peeta likes her and that Katniss’s little sister Prim or whatever is intelligent and a lot stronger than anyone gives her credit for. These are all important facts to Katniss yet somehow she manages to miss all of these things around her.

Why? Well, because it makes for a ‘good’ story. That way Katniss is blissfully unaware of the love triangle she is stuck in so that we have more complications later on and so that she can nominate herself in a Game that is supposed to secure her death.

I haven’t quite finished with Peeta. He was supposed to die in that first book so that I wouldn’t have to deal with seeing him in the next two as he wagged his tail and tried to impress everyone with his one trick – loving Katniss. It’s really not a great trick when you look at it this way really. But no, he didn’t die because it seems the only thing powerful enough to cause a revolution is true love. *eye roll*

What no one seems to realise is that the little sister Prim could have caused a revolution too by saving that girl Ruth whom Katniss gave a proper little ceremony in her honour to as her first act of rebellion. Which of course she didn’t really realise was an act of rebellion as she just did it in spite for the Capitol. At least her little sister would have been intelligent enough to understand what she was doing and why, had she had the chance to go instead. Though, if Prim had gone instead, keeping Ruth alive would have been a good act of rebellion in itself. That however, would not have pleased anyone. There would be no great romance between Katniss and Peeta and the book wouldn’t have been as successful, because really that’s all hormonal teenagers are looking for and apparently hormonal adults like Stephenie Meyer too. Come on, we all know that if there was no relationship the book wouldn’t have gotten so big. It would have made for a better book, a better female heroine. Even feminists would have worshipped her, but not for more sales.

But instead we’re stuck with a puppet, a girl who follows all instructions with complete ignorance to the significance of her every move. The world gets another representation of female stupidity as society perceives it to be. We get a young woman who is emotionally dependent on a man.

In this case I also think Suzanne Collins has gone too far in her trilogy. You’d think a girl would be repulsed or at least scared by the guy who’s been brainwashed into killing her. Katniss, the girl who came out of her first Hunger Games a completely changed person and then out of her second completely scarred was not at all phased by the guy who has no other motive other than to kill her.

I thought it couldn’t get worse. I knew reading the Epilogue would be a bad idea. I hadn’t wanted to read it, but my friend had convinced me that I should just get it over with. So I did. I mean I had gone through all three books, I might as well have read the last few irrelevant pages.

And all I wanted to do when I was finished was burn every copy of Hunger Games ever printed and in stock all over the planet. Because who the hell in their right mind marries someone who has random urges to kill them?!?! Someone please answer that because I can’t come up with a good enough answer. And don’t you dare tell me that Katniss just loves him that much that she is being blinded by her irrational love for him. Let me tell you, she does not love him that much. Sure she was being all retardedly Bella Swan depressed when she thought he was dead but she wasn’t that upset.

The Epilogue also tells us about Katniss’s dumbass worries about how she would have to explain to her children what happened. Yeah, I can see how hard it would be to say to your children ‘Hey guys, I know dad might sometimes come at me with a knife or start strangling me from time to time but it’s not his fault. See when we were seventeen he was brainwashed into killing me after we went to our second Hunger Games – which is a game where a whole bunch of people from different districts are put together in one place to kill one another (yeah I know, we were put in there twice and that’s why I’m an emotional wreck) – and we tried to reverse it but it didn’t completely work. It’s okay though, he won’t hurt you’. Yeah, that would be a great conversation, but then she would ruin it by breaking down and crying because of course she’s been completely traumatized.

God, I’d hate to see what the rest of the rebellions are like after going through so much more as she resides in her big house in her district. Yes, that’s right. Katniss retires from being a rebellion to go back to her district and live in peace – well as much as she can get with Peeta who occasionally tries to kill her – while everyone else deals with the mess she helped create.

Yep, because the one thing that really pushes Katniss over the edge is her sister dying. For that I can’t really blame her. I had a fit myself when I saw that Prim died. Why bother making Katniss go to the Hunger Games to save her sister’s life only to kill her in the end anyway? The author has defied the point. She might as well have let Prim play in the Hunger Games, cause a rebellion and then let her die honourably in the process as she created an uproar in all the oppressed districts.  She could have died as a respectable martyr the way she should have. What was Suzanne Collin’s point?

I was discussing this with a girl in my English class and she suggested the idea that maybe it was to show that no one can escape death. I argued that that can’t be it. Otherwise Peeta would have died in the first or at least the second book, but he didn’t even bloody well die in the third. He stayed alive, after having faced death more times than the average person.

Was it done to show irony? Because it’s not effective to show what became an insignificant character (by the third book anyway) die. It would have been more ironic to have had Katniss die in that blast – the face of the rebellion going up in flames – which was basically her image after her costume designer made her a costume that literally went up in flames.

But then there’s the money making issue right there. I feel like this plot was compromised to make money, because of course every love sick reader across the world would have had a coronary if Peeta died. And if Katniss died it would have caused everyone to get angry and recommend others not to read it. So I guess next came Prim, someone who was liked but not enough for anyone to have a care. Besides, it did a good job of throwing Katniss over the rails once and for all. A character who had so much potential became just as stupid as all the others.

Well done Suzanne Collins, you managed to make a book that is nothing more than a complete waste of time and that represents your own gender as inferior, stupid, idiotic, fragile and just overall incompetent.