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Notorious

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

As part of my Halloween reading, I am reading Penguin Books’ The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. After having read numerous popular editions of Poe, I decided to concentrate on an edition that took him seriously as one of the greatest literary figures of the young Republic.

There is little doubt in my mind that Poe is a genius. At the same time, there is little doubt in my mind that Poe was anything but warm and fuzzy as a person. He admitted as much in his story “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1832): “Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other.”

Later in the same paragraph:

I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious.

Looking back at Poe’s life, one can see him constantly produce brilliant stories and poems, yet struggle to earn a living or find happiness in marriage or family. He was orphaned at the age of two and had a tempestuous relationship with his stepfather John Allan, whose last name he adopted as his middle name.

Over and over again, we find that the characters in life died young of consumption. Poe did not react well: He took to the bottle. In fact, he died of alcohol poisoning at the age of forty, though the newspapers of the time blamed “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation.”

It requires some extra discipline for me to forget Poe’s unhappy life and concentrate on his works. Let’s face it: some very unhappy people have created works of such vivid imagination that made him ever so much more than the lunatic that critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold described as walking “the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned).”

Poe’s life is a closed book, but his works will live on forever.

Influencers on the Road

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Have Camera, Will Travel

Since I am planning for a possible trip to Isla Mujeres in Mexico, I have been watching dozens of videos posted on YouTube by mostly young influencers. They have proven to be helpful in one way: I have a pretty good idea what Isla Mujeres looks like.

On the other hand, I have never seen so many mispronunciations and errors of fact. I don’t get the feeling that many of these influencers ever did their research before picking up their camera and buying a plane ticket. Fortunately, there are exceptions, such as this eminently useful post on how to avoid the “shark tank” at the Cancun International Airport, with its ravenous timeshare condo salespersons.

One unfortunate tendency is for most of these influencers to get sloshed on cocktails with every meal and between meals. Many of the travel videos for Isla Mujeres are 50% taken up with drinking sessions. Talk about Ugly Americans!

Also, it becomes very evident that these influencers are selling their recommendations of hotels, destinations, restaurants, and bars—presumably for free or heavily discounted products or services.

I will still consult many of these videos because they do give me some ideas. One simply has to learn to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Cries in the Streets

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Tents of the L.A. Homeless

In our 21st Century city of Los Angeles, there are tens of thousands of people who are living in scattered Medieval tent cities. Even though the city has banned tents from across the street from my apartment, there are a number of bums who “sleep rough” on the sidewalk. Martine and I can hear them when they raise their voices in anger in the middle of the night, particularly if they are competing for the attentions of a homeless woman.

I am very happy that I am not a politician, because then I would have to pretend as they do they these homeless are all poor unfortunates who need to be placed in public housing. That’ll work for some of them, the roughly 50% who really just need a place to bed down and are willing to follow the rules about drink, drugs, and violence. Except a very large percentage don’t want to follow any rules whatsoever. When they are offered housing, they will get drunk or stoned and smear their feces on the wall—whereupon they find themselves in the street again.

America is full of raggedy men who do not give a tinker’s damn about THE RULES. What they want is the freedom to live as they want to, even if they are burying the city of their residence in piles of fetid garbage. They don’t particularly care if their pursuit of freedom is toxic to others.

It’s kind of like American politics as a whole, which can best be summarized by who can say EFF YOU the loudest and longest. We used to have two political parties with platforms. Now we have one party that has a platform, and the rest have EFF YOU as their platform.

The homeless who don’t want to be homeless I can understand. The ones who want to spend all night drinking, shouting, getting high and meth and Fentanyl, and whoring with female ratbags do not have my sympathies.

The People Under the Bridge

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The Homeless Encampment Under the I-10 Bridge Over Centinela Avenue in West L.A.

There is no monolithic group which falls under the term “homeless.” It includes a wide variety of people, some of whom are in transition to a better life, some of whom are out of their gourds, some of whom want to be able to take drugs and drink excessively without police interference, and some of whom are psychotic criminals.

In Los Angeles, they are begging for “spare change” by every freeway onramp and in front of virtually every convenience store. Many of them have sad stories to tell, some of which are partially true. They stretch out on bus seats and commuter trains and ride back and forth all day, occasionally hassling the other riders. The police are reluctant to deal with them because so many are vectors of communicable diseases. (I once worked with a secretary who was married to a U.S. Marshal who contracted tuberculosis from escorting a prisoner.)

Unlike the terminally Woke, my attitude toward the homeless is not: “Oh, the poor homeless!” In my mind, I separate the ones who are capable of being re-housed and following rules regarding behavior, booze, and drugs from those who actually prefer to live and die on the streets. It is my belief that most of the homeless fall into this latter category. I regard them as intractable bums who should be locked up.

Most bum encampments are surrounded by piles of trash of no earthly use to anyone. Martine and I have seen some bums emptying trash cans into the street or even setting fire to them. I am not inclined to be gentle with such rapscallions. Unless these sociopathic types are incarcerated, setting up a tent on the sidewalk will become an attractive alternative to anyone who is not interested in anything but destroying their minds and bodies.

America as Seen from the “Fremont Experience”

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The Fremont Experience at Night

I fully expected that our trip to Las Vegas last week would make for some great people watching. That it did, in spades. We were in the downtown area at the Plaza Hotel, which is at the west end of Fremont Street and of the four-block Fremont Experience. Even though we were in town on a Monday through Thursday after a three-day weekend, the Fremont Experience was crowded. I attribute this partly to the cold temperatures and biting winds, which made the enclosed space a particularly desirable destination.

Here’s what I noticed about the tourists in downtown Vegas:

  1. Most of the tourists were obese. Those who were proud of their fat congregated in large numbers at the Heart Attack Café, where they sat in wheelchairs wearing hospital gowns and being waited upon by sexy “nurses.” By the way, the restaurants went in for quantity more than quality of food.
  2. Among the men, a large percentage had beards and frequently extensive tattoos—and not a Maori in sight!
  3. Many of the older tourists (and some of the younger ones) were in fancy motorized wheelchairs. Some of these disabled visitors (or did they just get tired of walking any more?) were grotesquely obese.
  4. It seemed to be de rigeur for most of the males and some of the women to be always clutching super-sized cocktails as they walked around. In fact, I was surprised how much drinking was going on at all times.
  5. Very few tourists were to be seen even one block north or south of the Fremont Experience. Martine, who did not like the Experience, was happy to walk around it to get to our destinations.
  6. There was loud pop music everywhere, mostly of the “Wall of Sound” variety, which gets on one’s nerves after a while.

Probably the tourists we saw were not representative of most Americans. If they were, I think I would feel even more isolated than I usually do.

Fortunately, Martine and I enjoyed ourselves even though we were not obese lushes tattooed liked escapees from a carnival.