Poe Collage --Serving Art and Commerce

GO HERE  Poe gets under your skin and on your skin (see evening gown image).

Big Read - 2011 Comes to a Close and a Beginning

Fascinating isn’t it how often someone or some thing you haven’t seen or thought of for years, even decades, comes to mind and cracks open the dam of the forgotten?  Connections in the mind, in conversations, in what you see and read in your normal rounds of life pour through this crack.  And then, magically, the debris of fading references, the flotsam of vague images, take concrete form. You’re delighted and surprised.  Parts of the past float into view and take on momentary (or, if you’re lucky, lasting) significance.  History may be a river and you may not be allowed to put your foot into the same part of that river more than once, but it seems the abandoned and the forgotten flowing on the current may come by again if you are watching. 

Reading Poe during this year’s Big Read had this effect. The great Mexican poet-novelist  Roberto Bolaño works this territory in his writing.  It was startling and satisfying to see the two streams-- memory traces reestablished/Poe-Bolano-- come together in Roberto Bolaño’s essay, “Who Would Dare?”  Here’s an excerpt:

. . . I don’t remember ever seeing lonelier bookstores. I didn’t steal any books in Santiago. They were cheap and I bought them. At the last bookstore I visited, as I was going through a row of old French novels, the bookseller, a tall, thin man of about forty, suddenly asked whether I thought it was right for an author to recommend his own works to a man who’s been sentenced to death.

The bookseller was standing in a corner, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and he had a prominent Adam’s apple that quivered as he spoke. I said it didn’t seem right. What condemned men are we talking about? I asked. The bookseller looked at me and said that he knew for certain of more than one novelist capable of recommending his own books to a man on the verge of death. Then he said that we were talking about desperate readers. I’m hardly qualified to judge, he said, but if I don’t, no one will.

What book would you give to a condemned man? he asked me. I don’t know, I said. I don’t know either, said the bookseller, and I think it’s terrible. What books do desperate men read? What books do they like? How do you imagine the reading room of a condemned man? he asked. I have no idea, I said. You’re young, I’m not surprised, he said. And then: it’s like Antarctica. Not like the North Pole, but like Antarctica. I was reminded of the last days of [Edgar Allan Poe’s] Arthur Gordon Pym, but I decided not to say anything. Let’s see, said the bookseller, what brave man would drop this novel on the lap of a man sentenced to death? He picked up a book that had done fairly well and then he tossed it on a pile. I paid him and left. When I turned to leave, the bookseller might have laughed or sobbed. As I stepped out I heard him say: What kind of arrogant bastard would dare to do such a thing? And then he said something else, but I couldn’t hear what it was.