17 April 2008

I hate Edgar Allan Poe so much. I hate Mark Twain too. In fact, I hate the American 19th Century in general. I hate cowboys and Thomas Edison and every Little House that Laura Ingalls Wilder ever lived in. I hate that demeaning wide-rule Great White Christian Schoolhouse notebook paper that the Office of Indian Affairs gave to the Sioux so they could sketch out the Battle of Little Bighorn in four crayons. I hate the fact that you can't actually see George Custer getting killed in any of those pictures. I hate Presidents with moustaches, non-consecutive terms, and a "practical attitude toward the issue of slavery." As a matter of fact, I hate all nineteenth-century moustaches, and I despise all nineteenth-century political cureos (including vicious cane beatings on the floor of the Senate) . And I think we should remove from our currency any President who, despite pressure from abolitionists, took a "practical attitude toward the issue of slavery" --I say, in fact, we ought to dig up their corpses, put them on trial in a deliberately farcical kangaroo court, and hang what remains of them, as a mere symbol, desecration, and token.

I hate people from the American Nineteenth Century. I hate cholera and the Civil War, even though they did indeed rid the world of many thousands of nineteenth-century people. Mercifully, I was born just around when the very, very last Nineteenth-Century American people were dying off anyway, so I owe nothing to cholera or to the Civil War, even if the latter did wipe from the face of the earth two idiotic, peculiarly nineteenth-century American names: "Jeb" and "Ambrose." (All Jebs died fighting for the Confederacy, all Ambroses died fighting for the Union.)

I hate the idea that it might once have been called "New Fashioned Peanut Brittle," even though I know it never was. I hate peanut brittle, and licorice, and what I imagine nineteenth-century root beer tasted like (uncarbonated, to begin with, and warm).

But for today I had my students read "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe, whom I hate. And, reluctantly, I have to admit: it was a good story. But I hate Edgar Allan Poe, or at least all the hackneyed drivel that he's so popular for, the sing-songey poems, and the forlorn photographs we all know so well from 9th grade textbooks called "Adventures in Literature." (The ones where we discovered, in chapter one, that we had actually been enjoying literature all of our lives, we just didn't know it. Because we're fucking idiots who only read the outdated comic strips that illustrate Chapter 1, like Garfield and Family Circus, and we're such fucking idiots that we didn't dare think these could be construed or misconstrued as "literature." ...which they are in Chapter 1, though they are never, ever mentioned again--as they shouldn't be--in that or any other literature textbook.)

So now I am going to call him Edgar Poe. That's the author who wrote the neat story I read today. He's much better than Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote crappy poetry that's still got the French totally fooled.

I really do like Edgar Poe, though.