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.