Poe's closing argument
Since the current U.S. president called his city a rodent infested mess where human beings wouldn't want to live, Edgar Allan Poe has been having a bit of a moment. In a song on his latest album, Bob Dylan confesses to having a "tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe and skeletons in the walls of people you know." Saturday Night Live's cold open gives viewers Jim Carrey's Joe Biden reading from Poe's The Raven, corrected and updated for Hillary Clinton's electoral college loss to and Lil Wayne's support for Trump. Once upon a midnight dreary while Trump retweeted QAnon theories.... But it's Poe's The Masque Of The Red Death that is required reading in this historical moment. Masque as homonym for mask. Red as suggestive of Orange. Death being in and on the air in this pandemic. And that's just the suggestive work of the title. "The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country" is how the short story begins. You don't need a d...