How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Edgar Allan Poe

(Edgar Allan) Poe-etry in motion, Our Flag Means Death, Vincent Price and various phantasmagorical miasmas

View this email online by Glen Weldon Hey all. It was the week we got 20 new entries in the genus "Genius." It was the week that the people who make lists of Best Things because they want you to engage with their lists of Best Things made another list of Best Things. And it was the week a surprising number of middle-aged heterosexual white men of your acquaintance descended on Las Vegas and flooded your social media feed with images from inside a giant golf ball on molly. Let's get to it. Opening Argument Edgar Allan Poe. The Bard of Baltimore. You know him, and you know his work. Admit it: Back in high school, you couldn't get enough of the guy. His whole haunted, hollow-eyed vibe perfectly matched your hormonal, moody, indoor-kid energy. He was goth before Dracula, he was emo before Philips. You devoured his stuff, carefully tucking away his musty-dusty vocabulary words for that longed-for day when you could bust them out, all at once in a raging torrent, to show your bullies and detractors just how smart and dark and cool you were. You kept those words of his – words like fervid and miasma and inhume and surcease – on a low, steady boil inside your head, waiting. Waiting. You thrilled to his tales of the macabre and mysterious, you pretended to understand all the Classical references in his poetry. He was the perfect companion throughout your teenage years; whenever you'd slam your bedroom door or performatively fling yourself across the furniture or let out one of your long, wet sighs of disaffection and self-pity, he was there to say, Yes, exactly, I get it, you're special, you're different, they don't understand you and they never will. And then you went away to college, and Poe, suddenly, wasn't cool anymore. Who knows why it happened. Maybe it was your jerk of a Freshman English professor, who sniffily dismissed his prose as overripe and purple and – most woundingly – fervid. Or maybe it was that time you read one of his poems aloud and realized that the rigid rhyme schemes you'd previously savored for their steady, inexorable drumbeat now made his poetry sound weirdly simplistic, like so many bouncy commercial jingles commissioned by Despar itself. Maybe it was how everyone around you had now moved on to the lurid, gore-flecked immediacy of Stephen King and Clive Barker to get their literary willies, and only rolled their eyes at Poe's baroque and comparatively prim diversions. Or maybe it was the whole "married his 13-year-old cousin" thing. Hulton Archive/Getty Images I was thinking about all this as I watched writer/director Mike Flanagan's pretty terrific The Fall of the House of Usher, all eight episodes of which drop on Netflix next Thursday. Like some of Flanagan's other Netflix work (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Midnight Club), Usher takes several works by a given author (in the aforementioned examples, Shirley Jackson, Henry James and uh … Christopher Pike, respectively), tosses them into a narrative blender and presses liquefy. The result is a spooky, darkly funny tale made to get gobbled up over a crisp and chilly October weekend. It follows the rough outline of the Poe short story it's named for (doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher, an old house, a cursed bloodline, etc.). But Flanagan stuffs every episode with references to other Poe-etical works. A priest delivers a sermon that turns out to be a mashup of several Poe grief poems (which has the knock-on effect of making Catholicism sound … even gothier than usual, if you can imagine). Characters turn up with names like Tamerlane and Prospero and Annabel Lee and – wait for it – Lenore. There's a deadly masquerade and a black cat and a tell-tale heart and an immurement (which is the walling up of someone in an enclosed space – but you knew that already, having read Poe as a kid). We big-time professional TV critics have a specific term of art that we reserve for shows like The Fall of the House of Usher, thusly: Hoot and a half. This show is a hoot and a half. It made me remember how much I love Poe and always have, though I spent far too many years nervously disavowing him. But life's too short to pretend not to love the things you love. Look, there's a time and place for the spare, flinty, minimalist, you-can-bounce-a-quarter-off-it prose of your Raymond Carvers and your Lydia Davises. But there's also a time and place for phantasmagorical miasmas hanging low over the sullen waters of a black and lurid tarn, you know? (A tarn is a small lake.) (But again: You knew that.) It's October. Treat yourself. Get some apples, walnuts and Stilton cheese, the stinkier the better. Pour yourself a sherry – you can get your hands on a bottle of Amontillado for like 13 bucks. Then grab a cider donut and curl up on the couch to watch The Fall of the House of Usher and then, as the light just beyond your chamber door starts going all crepuscular (read: around twilight), dive headfirst into one of Poe's more quaint and curious volumes. You can do that. You may have cruelly and faithlessly ghosted him in college, but he's still there, waiting for you. Waiting. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend Lookit, Linda's on vacation and I'm writing the newsletter so all the recommendations this week are gonna be Poe-related. Viva la Poeissance! First up: Mike Flanagan isn't the first creator to use Poe's work as a jumping-off point. There's a slew of Roger Corman films starring Vincent Price you can find streaming that deliver Poe-y chills on a budget: The Pit and the Pendulum (on PlutoTV), The Tomb of Ligeia (on Vudu), Tales of Terror (on PlutoTV), the weirdly gorgeous The Masque of the Red Death (on PlutoTV) and my personal favorite, The Raven (on Prime)*, which is the campiest of them all, featuring Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff as a trio of queer-coded wizards bickering with each other. Think Edgar Allan Poe: Untucked. Austria's entry in this year's Eurovision Song Contest was "Who the Hell is Edgar?," a total banger sung from the point of view of someone possessed by Edgar Allan Poe's spirit, which causes them to crank out hit tunes like … "Who the Hell is Edgar?" Key lyric: "Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe/Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe/Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe/Edgar Allen, Edgar Allen/(repeat)." It came in 15th. Lots of the world's most gifted thespians have read Poe's "The Raven," over the years. Christopher Lee. Vincent Price. James Earl Jones. Basil Rathbone. But The Simpsons tackled it in the very first Treehouse of Horror episode (Season 2, Episode 3), and you haven't lived until you've heard the spin Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) puts on "QUAFF, OH QUAFF THIS KIND NEPENTHE AND FORGET THIS LOST LENORE!" Remember Poe? Her 1995 debut album featured several charting singles, including "Angry Johnny" and the title track "Hello." "Hello" holds up, gotta say! Musically at least. Lyrically, it holds up as well as any song that includes the line, "I'm cut off … like a disconnected modem" could reasonably be expected to. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Apple TV+ On Tuesday, I chatted with Joelle Monique, an ardent devotee of Ahsoka (the beloved Star Wars character) about Ahsoka (the new Disney+ show). On Wednesday we encored my discussion with Tasha Robinson about the hilarious and hella queer Our Flag Means Death, which is back for a second season on Prime. On Thursday, Aisha talked with Mark Blankenship and Ayesha Rascoe about the AppleTV+ horror series The Changeling. On Friday, Stephen, Marc Rivers, Jordan Crucchiola and Reanna Cruz got possessed by The Exorcist: Believer, and shared What's Making Them Happy. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Reanna: How It’s Made, streaming on Tubi Jordan: The Americans, streaming on Hulu Marc: The Underground Railroad, streaming on Prime* Stephen: Omar Apollo’s new EP Live for Me, and the song “Ice Slippin’” *Amazon supports NPR and pays to distribute some of our content. Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. 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