The Poe Trail, Volume 0
A Prelude
I can’t escape Edgar Allan Poe, Traveler. It’s my theory that none of us really can.
The man is seen as one of, if not the most influential writers in the history of the world. Throw a dart at a literary genre, 19th-century writer, or even a scientific theory, and chances are that Poe had some influence there, be it positive or negative. Poe even had a hand in the scientific discovery of all things!
As such, his work remains engrained and popularized into even the modern zeitgeist of the 21st century (yes, I’m being purposely verbose in this essay.) The singer Anne Decatur Danielewski takes her stage name from The Masque of Red Death, a brilliant Poe story about the certainty of death to all of us.
Funny enough, her brother, Mark Danielewski, redefined the horror genre in the 90s with the seminal work House of Leaves.
The Baltimore Ravens football team took direct inspiration from the famous poem. Halloween revolves around Poe in the North East, and I’ve seen a resurgence in interest in the writer. The penultimate thing about Poe that intrigues me is, of course, his mysterious death.
My favorite writers have either died mysteriously or have never been found, Traveler. Charlie Kaufman wrote a theme into his film Synecdoche, New York, about a character who buys a perpetually on-fire house. The quote the real estate agent uses is, “It’s a big decision, how one prefers to die.” I bring this up because if I get to choose my death, and hopefully that’s way down the line, I hope sincerely that it’s under mysterious circumstances, that I’m never found, or that both of those are the case.
There is genuinely no more romantic way for an adventurer to die than to never die at all. I can only hope that in my own death someday, it’ll be scrutinized to the degree of trying to find a solution in the lack of a corpse.
But the reason I chose to create an adventure around Poe goes right back to the first line of this article, Traveler. I can’t escape the man, though he died over 140 years before my birth. He’s everywhere, from murals to exhibits and in between. Above, I posted a link to a new pop-up speakeasy that a friend of mine on Facebook posted (I posted her channel, by the way. Go check it out). While I’m all for the speakeasy, it made me realize something.
There are bars you can drink at right now that the man himself drank at during his life. And all of those bars have a few stories to tell.
One of them even has a curse.
So it’s time I get back to what I do best: give tours. Every month, I will cover a place where Poe lived (England excluded; I can’t get over there), what he did, what he wrote, and the legacy he left.
And yes, Poe was problematic, too, and yes, I will talk about it. You get it all with me, Traveler. That’s why I’m the best tour guide there is.
So pack up, Traveler! I have to fix the radiator in the Antelope, but we will start where Edgar Allan Poe began in September.
We’re shipping up to Boston.
Safe Travels,
Vic
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