The Daily Stoic - Author Catherine Baab-Muguira on Creating Lasting Work and Edgar Allen Poe

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to Catherine Baab-Muguira about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, the difference between fleeting fads and sustained appreciation, how to find the balance between accepting feedback and being impervious to criticism, and more.Catherine Baab-Muguira is a writer and journalist who has contributed to, among others, Slate, Quartz, CNBC and NBC News. A frequent podcast and radio guest, with appearances on NPR and Lifehacker’s Upgrade. She has a M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Auckland, New Zealand she lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and baby son. Her new book Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru came out in September. GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $250 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org and pick podcast and enter DAILY STOIC at checkout.Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.Competitive Cyclist is THE online specialty retailer of road and mountain bikes, components, apparel, and accessories. Go to competitivecyclist.com/DAILYSTOIC and enter promo code DAILYSTOIC to get fifteen percent off your first full-priced purchase plus FREE SHIPPING on orders of $50 or more. Some exclusions apply.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Catherine Baab-Muguira: Homepage, Instagram, Twitter See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wanderie's podcast business wars, and in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Be that word or sign of parting bird or fiend I shrieked upstarting. Get the back into the tempest, and the night's plutonian shore. Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul had spoken. Leave my loneliness unbroken, quit the bust above my door, take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door."

So Raven, never more. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting on the pallid bust of palace just above my chamber door. And his eyes have all the semen of a demon's that is dreaming. And the lamp light or him streaming throws his shadow on the floor, and my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted. Never more.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. You hopefully maybe just a quiver of recognition of those last two stanzas of Edgar Alan posed the raven, which is one of them. We're talking about a little bit in today's episode. My guest, Catherine or cat, Bab, Mijera is the author of a really funny, awesome, illustrative new book called Poe for Your Problems,mon advice from history's least likely self-help guru, Edgar Allen Poe. It's a fascinating book. It draws on Poe's work and life.

What he can teach us, both to do and not to do, if you might have heard his life was a bit of a mess and how we can use like the tough situations, the tough breaks, the bad luck, all the things that Poe experienced, all the things we all experience, to make great work and to hopefully carve out an interesting life for ourselves. Cat is a great writer. She's written everywhere from Slate Courts, CNBC, NBC News. She's appeared on NPR and many, many other places. She has an MA in Creative Writing

from the University of Uckland, New Zealand. She lives in Richmond, Virginia with her husband and a new baby. I really like this book. I almost never blur books. I have a rule against it and this was a place I made an exception for a friend. I said that books about people's successes are common books where you can learn from someone's painful demons and failures are rare but far more meaningful and this

writing on Poe is insightful, and important. It was a fun book to read. It was a fun conversation to have. And my first interactions with Poe go back to, I remember reading the great illustrated classics as a kid, and they had a collection of Poe stories. And I remember, as we talk about in the thing, in the interview, the story of the guy, they seal up in the wall.

But I think the one that haunted me the most was the tell-tale heart. Poe was just a complete master of the short story and of the poem. I personally like Ambrose Beers a little bit better, slightly, I guess, more modern than and feels accessible than Poe, but but but going through this book gave me a deeper appreciation of Poe and then of course nerding out about it on this episode was great. Click the show notes for her homepage, follow her

on Instagram and Twitter, sign up for her email list. And of course, check out her new book, Poe for your problems and enjoy this interview. I saw this funny meme the other day that was, it was like this hole in a brick wall. And I was saying like, we need someone to help us, like find out what's back here. And it was like, you must be small, willing to get dirty and not have read the story, the cast of Amantilato.

Right. I thought it was so funny. And I thought it was funny just that like, how many writers from that era can people make memes about that most people would get? Right, I mean, the sheer amount of Tumblr posts about Poe on real. I remember Vox doing a story on the cast of a Monte Atomium a couple of years ago. And why did he cross over? Like, I mean, I guess maybe there's like some Moby Dick jokes or whatever, but like,

almost no writers crossed over the way that Poe has crossed over, nor had the staying power that she's had. That's true, and it's hardly the case that he was the only person writing gothic short fiction. It was a very popular forum, especially in the decades before he came along. So he grew up reading it, but then as an adult

sort of perfected it to the point where the, I mean, that's a big question, but I think the psychological insight, the the amount of levels that are in a single story and the way that you can, like, a child can read them and academics are kept busy by them and the fact that one writer is able to do both those things, I don't know, I think it probably comes down to the psychological insight of the stories. There's also a great being of humor and poetry people just don't tend to talk about too much.

Is it that he's actually a genius, or is it like a freak of circumstances that, I don't know, like nobody looks at EL James and goes like the 50s grade is so good because it's such a work of genius. We sort of it's it's weird right like sometimes something is very popular. We use that as an indicator that the creator is not particularly talented and that the work is not of particular significance or seriousness. And then it's like if they're popular over a really long period of time, then the exact opposite is true. Yeah, people call Poe a bad writer, which I mean all the time, a lot of academics have that

opinion of him. And it's not that he wasn't, he wrote some bad stuff. Some of his sentences just make you wints. But when he was good, he was really good. I don't think he was just the EL James of his era that ended up getting so much publicity. In a way, you could almost say that it's kind of the case that as a writer, his books ended up getting a ton of promo beyond his reputation in his own era just because

of the controversy that resulted almost immediately from his death that continues to this day. Right. So in a way, he has benefited from that, but I don't think you could have had an empty product to begin with that could have had that kind of staying power. Yeah, and he wasn't super appreciated in his own time, right? It's not like Agatha Christie or, you know, James, where you're like wildly successful in your own life and then sort of like as the years pass, the shine wears off with the Melville's and the pose and you know, other writers, it's more of a like we're almost making up for their lack of appreciation and so the popularity is

making up for their lack of appreciation. And so the popularity isn't a fad. It's probably more a result of sustained appreciation for the quality of the work. I think that's true. I mean, he didn't have a, he wasn't really a book writer in his own time, but he didn't have a single book go into a second edition, except for this one

about seashells that was essentially a scam and wasn't his real creative work. So how does someone deal with being massively underappreciated? That would, like, that feels like it would crush a lesser person, right? You work so hard on something. I mean, you're just going through this, not at this scale. I'm not saying there are books of failure. What I'm saying is like, you put so much into a creative work or a company or a business or a play or, you know, whatever the thing you do is.

And then, even though you know it's really good, people are like, man, you know, how does that not crush a person? Right. I mean, I think this is where you kind of come into like the perverse life of his life and that having a gigantic ego that almost can't be reached from the outside can be useful. Because if I had been sensitive to criticism, he would have given up. He would have just crawled in a sewer line or something, but he was impervious to it to a very great degree and almost pathological degree,

convinced of the greatness of his own work, and he wasn't wrong either. So, well, this could have bad manifestations, you could have someone with an utterly impervious ego who was producing bad work, this was the rare circumstance where the work was both great. And the ego was strong enough to give them the wherewithal and fortitude to keep going. Yeah, I remember when I was working in Hollywood, I was talking to this sort of very experienced agent manager type. And he was like, look, the reason ego exists in Hollywood

is you have to understand where like an actress is at the beginning of her career, which is that they go to leave each one of these meetings convinced the world wants to hear my name. So it's this paradox of like the mechanism that allows you to succeed in this irrational, insane, often wrong industry is also like a nightmarish set of personality traits. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it can work for a year. I mean, to the extent that I've learned from post-life, I'm not a person who comes to the playing field that way. I tend to be very self-quest self questioning and maybe too open to criticism.

But picking up just 10% from Paul in that way, it can be enormously useful as a person in any line of creative person. How does one get the right balance of it? Where you're sort of impervious to the criticism that would make you stop, but then not deaf to the feedback that would make you better? I mean, I know in my own life, it's like if my husband tells me something's not working, then I tend to you believe him because he knows me and he has my best interest at heart.

So maybe it's just listening to the right people. Whereas if someone just says something, mean to me on Twitter, then I'm less inclined to believe them. I mean, sometimes you look at the motivations of people who are saying things to you, right? And try to judge whether this is criticism that's coming from a place that could be helpful or not. But like, I think about your book, which I read and I think is awesome. The paradox of your book in all books is that like the vast majority of agents and editors that

saw it passed on it. Like by definition. Yeah. Like like like every project, even the ones that go into like a bidding war, there were still a bunch of people that were like, no, that's not good, that won't work. So it's this, like, the people who are supposedly the experts on the thing that you're trying to do, you are having to defy a majority of them and the all creative work that's successful had to defy that. It's kind of, it's like, if you think about it too much, I think it gets you back to that line from the screenwriter William Goldman where it's basically,

it's like, nobody knows anything. I mean, I can think of an example that, okay, so the first round of submissions with my book, I was with a different agent and she had this kind of high-fuly envision for the book that we were going to go to a big imprint somewhere prestigious and this was going to be a very literary title. And one of the things we heard, so all 16 of those folks that we approached rejected at, that was the first set of rejections. Anyway, one of the people you, oh amazing, definitely it was good for my mental health. They, I don't want to say which precedent, someone who is in a very powerful position over like a legacy set of blocks at Viking said about my idea. Simply that's not legitimate. It's not legitimate to see

Poe's an existential hero. And I'm sorry that's just ignorant. The French have seen him this way for 150 years. So in some cases you're able to be impervious to it because you know that I mean it's historically inaccurate. That view has not been poor forward in America and as America, necessarily, certainly not in a pop cell hellbuck, but it's been around since both Lair was writing a biturized account. Right. Yeah, it's, I think it's like, if this is just something that you pulled out of your ass and you're like, that's why I think, and then everyone tells you

you're wrong, you should probably stop and reconsider. But it's like, when you've really done the work and it's based on something, I think then you can be a little bit more confident about it. And the thing I always think about is like, what am I trying to do? So when the person says, like, oh, that won't work or what about this or, you know, they give you all this, you're like, but are we trying to get to the same place you know and sometimes the feedback obviously rejections are a little bit different than feedback but like when you really know what you're trying to do and you have a really good theory as to why you think it can work,

you realize like a lot of the people who are rejecting you are giving you feedback it's because they're they're holding you to a totally different standard and saying, you're not gonna meet that. And you're like, well, I wasn't trying to do that to begin with. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing I ran into again and again, was trying to articulate the degree to which the book is

satire and yet serious. And I kept hitting people who were willing to see it as one or the other, but not both. Which is funny because that's like the tension and pose on work. And maybe you just spend enough time with him and you pick up the traits. But the thing about his stories are you can't often tell like how satirical he's being versus how serious he's being. But I like that tension. It keeps me coming back to him. It keeps me rereading.

Maybe it's not for everyone, but trying to file it in a single slot. You're just mistaking the whole enterprise. That was my point into it. I remember when I was writing my book in Spiracy, like my editor and I kept sort of going back and forth. And I finally had to go like, look, let's put all this aside. I'm going to tell you the book that I am going to write, right? Like this is what the book will be.

This is what my goal is for it, right? So when you get me notes, they better get me closer to this thing or like I don't need them, right? And that can feel, I probably felt a little, you get to school and I know it's like hard for me to get to a place where I felt confident enough saying that. But I was like, you know what, I've done this enough times. I know why I agreed to take on this project. And I also know this is more humility.

I won't be able to get there if, like, I'm having a hard time remembering the directions already, if somebody shouting out conflicting or incorrect directions on top of that, I'm definitely gonna get lost. So I think what sounds like you were trying to do is something that not a lot of people understood. And then you had to, when you're doing that as Poe did as well,

you have to remember what that is always because the people who don't understand don't keep quiet about it, and then they sort of mess you up by going like, well, what about this or this isn't working or, it's too, and you're like, I'm trying to do something that's a little contradictory by definition, so you pointing out

that I contradict myself here or that or whatever, like that's a feature not above. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I admire that stance in the face of the issue you were having with your editor. I haven't always been like clear in my resolve. I was when the final product was happening earlier when we were more in the proposal stage, I was being swayed, kind of I feel back that I was getting and trying to take it in various directions. And I think one reason it didn't sell and it didn't work is because it wasn't really true to my vision of the project, but it's hard

to insist on that when it doesn't exist. I mean, in a sense, it's a tough creative brief too. Right. And that's saying that it's better for that reason. But it's a tough creative brief to write a self-help at this, and someone who's famously perverse in a drunk and kind of a horrible person at moments. And not particularly successful. No, certainly not in his moments. And not particularly successful. No, certainly not in his lifetime. You know, but I also think that that's precisely the meat of

the project. That's where you start to hit gold when you are turning over stones that folks maybe have and at least not in the U.S. I mean, the question of whether you can harness your perversity and make it work for you on some level. That's a question I want to hear more about. That's worth a buck to me. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellissi. And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wonder East's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us?

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parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Britney. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. Yeah, right. And look, I think there's also something about creative projects that maybe goes a little bit undiscussed,

but there's a certain amount, Stephen Pressfield believes in the muses, and I think Elizabeth Gilbert calls it the big magic or whatever. But there is kind of like a mystical, like, miss two it where it's like, look, I didn't choose this. This is what it, this is what came to me. I can't really do anything else. Like, you know, like it might be more commercially viable to do a takedown of Poe or to do a total celebration of Poe or a different author, but this is the one that hit you over the head when you're walking down the street and for better or for worse, you're stuck with it.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes the sheer amount of intellectual energy you feel in response to an idea is a really good gauge, not just of like the viability of the project altogether, but whether you can stick with that. I mean, every, like, so I first experienced this in my own life that Poe was cheering me up, and then I was trying to understand my reaction to why it was happening and I was having trouble articulating it myself and To kind of steer into that skin proved really useful to That's kind of like driving when you don't know exactly where you're going or how exactly you're going to get there

I don't know that's so much more intriguing to me and such a more enjoyable process than that. Like it hits paint by numbers. What's the point? At least for me. Sure. Oh, so I don't know. Maybe found it's I don't know. Go ahead. I was going to say, do you find that if you're given and if you're probably not often given assignments these days, but if you're given an assignment and someone says to execute on their idea, you just find it almost impossible or at least not a joy to do, ways of you're executing on your own. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think the whole point of the creative life is that you're trying to get to some kind of autonomy where you're sort of in control of what you do and say and think.

Very few of us get there, but like if we were good at taking directions, we'd probably be textbook writers or advertising executives or something, right? Like this is part of why we got into this is because we really can't do it any other way. I definitely think that's true. It's kind of both the barrier to get permission to do those things is very tough, but then without it, where are you? Well, that's one of the things I liked in the book is you sort of go into the idea that, like, look, post just like a freelance

or grinding it out like the rest of us. And, you know, you see these, even like when you read Walter Isaacson's biography of DaVinci, you're like, the greatest artist of all time is like being bossed around by these patrons, it's like finding subtle ways to spite them or assert his independence. And he feels like he's underpaid and he feels like they're rushing him. You're just like, this is a very old journey that we're on.

The like, I'm trying to make ends meet do work that doesn't make me want to kill myself. And you know, also survive. I think that's in a sense. I'm not glad that folks have suffered, not at all. It's not fair that they had such difficult life, but also the fact that it is a very old struggle and maybe this has kind of always been the territory. I find that enormously comforting.

It means you're not alone in it. It means you're not necessarily going about it the wrong way. Maybe this is just what it's like. And I also think that one of the lessons of post life for me, and especially his freelance career, was that sometimes responding to the market or just simply getting information from the marketplace

can be enormously valuable. Whether you follow it or not, whether you act on it in a straightforward way or you don't. It's this entire source of information and feedback that a lot of artists tend to ignore or try to ignore, say if you're a trust funder, you can't ignore it. But if you're struggling freelance or like Poe was, you're not allowed to divorce yourself from the market and it ends up shaping you and you end up shaping it back. But why are so many incredibly talented people? Why do they seem to just generally be super bad at the politics and details and like logistics of their profession?

like logistics of their profession. I mean, people are described as well rounded on a fairly regular basis, but there are very few people I've ever met who truly are and who also have a kind of superpower, you know, where you have developed your craft to the level of like a power or a melville, it puts you out of balance. The hours that you have to put in to be good, the kind of dedication and obsession that often goes into that to reach like a true genius level.

And I'm not claiming at all to be there or near there, but having read a lot of literary biographies, you do kind of see what goes into it. And it's not at all characterized by well-rounded functional personalities or a lot of work-life balance. It's just that how the passage gets paid. Yeah, like I wonder if you met like Fitzgerald or Poe or whatever, you just be like, come on, man, this isn't that hard. You know, like you just see, like historically it feels like the the decks were stacked against them or they had their demons or whatever. I wonder if you were like friends with them, like if you read some of like Hemingway's correspondence with Fitzgeralds, he's just like, you can just feel him just like putting his hand over his face, just like so frustrated that his friend has all the talent in the world and just like keeps sabotaging himself.

Yeah, I mean a lot of, I'm not giving folks a pass for being nightmares, even if they're geniuses, but the rate at which people are also nightmares and Austin geniuses, like it tends to coincide and you do notice that without necessarily endorsing it. Yeah, well, I think people go like, oh, pose a nightmare and a genius. Therefore, if I want to be a genius, I should be a nightmare. And it's like, first off, there were a lot of nightmares

who didn't become geniuses. Right. And also, and this is what I like about your book, but, but also sort of hovers along the lives of all of these people, whether we're talking about a Kanye West or a S.C.A.P. challenge, you're just sort of like, what work it costs them, you know, like if they weren't like grinding themselves into dust, making constant enemies, drinking themselves into oblivion or whatever, like could there have been another great Gatsby or you know, could there have been another the raven like what work, in the way that

you know Steve Jobs lost control of Apple and almost didn't get it back, right? Like the whole future of humanity would have turned out differently. Like it is, it is, it's kind of harrowing to think about like what got lost or left on the table with some of these talents. Yeah, I mean, I think I thought of dying at 40 when in 1849 he was doing some of his most incredible work. I think that's the year, but dream within a dream, it's Annabelle Lee. You know, some of the masterful mature works

where he's, where they function on so many levels, they've sued a popular audience, they see the critical audience. You could spend, you know, a decade with each of them. So, if there had been more of those, that would be amazing. I have this recurring dream where I find post journals that don't actually exist, but I constantly imagine that I've been going to discover more. But also, I don't know the shape of his life now. It's hard to divorce what work we do have from the way things went, like the horrible death,

the horrible loss and tragedy that went into it. So let's talk about that. For people who don't know what is, how does Poe go out? It's sort of almost fitting for a post story. Yeah, I mean, people who refer to that as like the greater mystery than any thing he came up with in text. So the last year of his life is very troubled.

His wife died in early 1847 and Poe kind of went off a cliff for a good year. And by time 1849 rolled around, he's in these strange relationships with various women that aren't really, they're not sexual, they're bizarre, romantic, and tanglements where no one's really available emotionally or otherwise. But he's in these and he's drinking a lot and he's leaving at home and he never really did well when he was on the road. So anyway, it's a train of bizarre behavior that whole year. And then in early October, he leaves Richmond where he's been hanging out

with people who knew him and his youth. And he, the next thing we know, he shows up in Baltimore and he's found by someone who knows him. He's wearing someone else's clothes. He's in a ditch outside of Tavard. And he's not coherent. It's not clear that he was necessarily drunk at that stage. He definitely seems to be ill. And he never recovers consciousness to the point where he can explain what's happened to him, where he's been in the last few days,

how he came to be wearing someone else's clothes. You know, what's wrong, essentially? And then he dies just a few days later, he died October 7th. And he was being cared for by doctors and nurses, but all of them changed their story so many times about what exactly seemed to be going on. Plus, it's hard to parse the 19th century science. So basically, clacks. Right. Once I asked a neuroscientist, like, what did brain fever mean in the 19th century?

And he said it was applied to so many things that you couldn't possibly figure out what it might have been. Right. Yeah. They were probably talking about bleeding him or, you know, like the tools that their disposal were probably preposterously bad. Right, and to the degree to which people have read into bad information that we've got about the death,

I mean, people have supposed it was rabies or gas poisoning or alcoholism or epilepsy or I mean, it kind of just goes on and on. People have assumed that he was, it was called cooping, where people were, got very, they were made very drunk, and then made to vote many times. There was an election going on about the time,

poke collapsed. That's one theory that's, right? I don't know if I buy it, but I see how they got there. What is your guess? I think he was ill with some kind of disease that was that figured mentally and physically from the very beginning of 1849.

I don't know what it was, but I don't think that it was necessarily induced by alcohol. I think kind of too much is made. Sometimes a post-drinking, which was more episodic than study. I don't know that we can know either, which is, it's not the most satisfying answer, but I also think it's better than supposing some, like coming up with some bullshit and pasting it in the spot. My, I think that's my second favorite literary death story.

My first is do you know the story about who's a similar writer, sort of both brilliant, underappreciated, famous, not famous enough? Do you know about the death of Ambrose Beers? No, but I won't come. Oh, he's incredible. So Ambrose Beers, again, similar thing towards the end of his life, although he lives to be much older, sort of becomes bitter and more bitter than he already was, disillusioned, irrational.

He sells all of his possessions. He goes through a tour of the Southern United States visiting all the Civil War battlefields that he fought on. Then he sends a letter to his, and he tells people he's going to go meet Pancho Vía and write about it, who is like at the time sort of ravaging the Southern border. And his like last known communication is a letter to his niece or his daughter-in-law or something like that that basically just goes like, I don't know what's going to happen to me. I could get lost, I could get stood up against a wall and shot somewhere, who knows, but if I make it all, let you know. And then that's the last he's communicated that anyone ever hears from him again. And there is, from what I've read,

significant evidence that he may have been captured and executed by Poncho Fia. So you have this sort of guy notorious for like twists and unexpected surprises in his short stories. in his short stories. Also stories about executions accidentally or deliberately predicting his own death and then no one ever finds the body or hears from him ever again. That's an amazing, amazing story. It makes me worry that what you're into is a kind of destiny, which I hope isn't true for my own life. But I don't know, both Poe and Barry seem to have this in common. And it says that the death is emblematic of the work and the life. I think so. I mean, I've read a lot more about Beers than Poe,

but one of the things that I heard about beers, and I wonder if it applies to Poe, I'd be curious to retake, but they basically said, you take these people who, I mean, beers' nickname is bitter beers, right? They think it's a sort of bitter, disaffected, angry person, and that that means he's like cynical and negative. And they said the people who knew him said it was actually the opposite. He was very idealistic, very hopeful, had very high standards for himself and other people. And it was the constant disappointment of these standards that eventually sort of drives him, not insane, but drives him down this dark place. So it's like he, it wasn't that he was cynical, it's that he had impossible expectations

that were constantly going unmet, that made him ultimately seem very cynical. And I wonder how much of that is a result of, I wonder how much that sort of sensitive thing that artists bring into the world. Did Poe have that? Is that what made him drink and, you know, sort of go to this egotistical place like as a form of self-protection? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that was one of the ways it functioned in his life. I mean, I think a, people often underestimate the role of initial earnestness and as a, I mean, John the Swift was incredibly earnest and he meant his satires in some

senses. I mean, it was driven by his anger, the conditions in the world, and finding it so far a field from what he thought it should be. I mean, how else would people get there? Of course that's how they get there. We've posed specifically, I think, all right, trauma might be a word that we use too much now. But if you look at the specific timeline, especially of post-early childhood,

so when he was between two and three years old, he likely witnessed his mother's decline and death from tuberculosis, which is a horrible drawn out death where you are gasping and gasping for air over a period of time and then you essentially just drown in your own body. So for someone between two and three to witness this, he's already born sensitive. It's a time in child development where you're able to perceive so much more than you're able to say, because you're not really able to say much of anything. And then you have post-career, which is, he said, mournful and never-ending remembrance

was his great subject. So mourning and grief. I don't think it's a coincidence that he had this early, almost pre-language experience, and then he spends his whole life articulating grief, writing some of the greatest, like colored trees, like the Raven and the refrain of never more.

I don't think those things are unrelated. Yeah, it's like once you have, you sort of read some of these things as a kid or as a creator and then you have kids and you're just like, no one should go through that. Of course that would screw you up so terribly. How did you even get out of bed? Like it's insane.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I read about this child development theory, you know, this is, I started the project before I had my own CAD at my little ones now, 16 months old, and I can see it. I can observe it in him that he is able to perceive and absorb and take on so much color that he's not able to articulate. And it makes me angry, frankly, at how often people

underestimate children, especially very young children. You know, psychology has stopped for a hundred years that children couldn't grieve, which is so ludicrous to me. If anything, they're probably grieving harder because they don't have any precedent or, you know, adult balance to somehow address it within themselves and grace themselves. Yeah, or what's that idea that like, I forget with the age, but you know what object impermanence is?

Right. It's like, imagine if you didn't know where stuff disappeared when stuff disappeared, where it went. You would be grieving constantly. Like, I thought about this to go to the point of like, where some of the terror thing goes from. It's like, let's say you're 16 months, right? And not to freak you out about your son, but like you put your son down for a nap or for bed. You're holding him, singing him to sleep. It's this peaceful, wonderful, wonderful thing.

You lay him down in the crib, turn off the lights, they go to sleep. And then they just wake up. All their senses have been deprived. It's pitch black. They don't know that they were asleep. They don't know where the hell you went. They don't know if they're still alive or like, they don't know anything. That would be the most ungodly terrifying thing in the entire world. And we just like, we just brush over it. Like it's, Like it's nothing.

Yeah, the way we expect them to have some grip on things that they have no sense of. It's unreal. It's almost, I mean, in some cases, like, boring on cruelty. I mean, particularly, I don't know. I just don't think that we give them that all enough credit. I think they have way more self control than they're allowed, you know,

just in popular discourse or whatever. Yeah, no, we go like, oh, this kid cries a lot. And then you're like, no, they, if they should be crying, like if you think about how terrifying and uncertain and inexplicable life was, it's kind of a, it's, it's kind of impressive that they're not crying literally every second of their way. We shouldn't give them shit about tantrums or occasionally screaming with something like light tears. It's an awful thing to do. I mean, you see there are limits of sleepless parents sympathy, but I think we ought to have more sympathy for them.

Well, I was thinking it does seem like we should with time begin to go back. As we're sort of rewriting history with our better understanding of race and sort of this idea of white supremacy, it also seems like we should rewrite history with a better understanding of trauma as we begin to understand it. I was thinking about this with Marcus really specifically. So Marcus really has like 11 children and eight of them died.

Eight children. Like if somebody lost one child and then they became an alcoholic, we'd be like, of course, like obviously wouldn't excuse the alcoholism, but we'd be like, you became an alcoholic because you lost your child. That must have been very hard, right? Like, there's almost nothing like no life change or event that would not be

explained or rationalized by the loss of a child, right? And then you're like, oh, he lost eight, eight children. He, he buried eight of his children, you know, like how, how did you, How did you wake up? Like how did you get up, not give up entirely on other people in the world. And I mean, it's unfathomable, like to think about the trauma that people went through not that long ago and just had to accept as a function of existence. And then of course we're also shocked they're like they treated other people horribly.

Imagine if you watched eight children, what that would do for your empathy or your ability to just give a shit about what anyone else is going through at any moment as you're walking through the world. Right. I mean, I can't imagine the degree to which you would have to be like, to become hard and even to survive. But one thing that occurs to me and it is,

the sheer awfulness of those things makes, at least to me, makes the achievements more impressive. Like for Paul, that he went on to articulate his grief and the way he did and these works that have survived time. Now, you know, 17 decades after his death, Marcus, really is for that matter that he went on to become this very effective and admirable leader. Wow, it's all the more an achievement because you've survived those things. Yeah. Somehow Manage do incorporate them in any kind of existence that is productive in any way. Yeah, like so people go like, what happened with Communists? Mark Sirrealist's son, and it's like

maybe it was his dad and mom losing their children, or maybe it was just him losing eight brothers and sisters. Like that would fuck a person up a little bit. Yeah, I can't believe that anybody managed that. I really can't, I don't know that I have that kind of wherewithal at all. I mean, you know, you're a pain. No, it's unfathomable to me. Like it's unfathomable.

I even think there's part of this. We're veering a little bit into political incorrect territory. But we sometimes will look at slavery or some of the stuff, the terrible stuff of history. We're like, you know, we judge Thomas Jefferson very harshly. As we should. But we don't put it in the context, not of like everyone was doing it,

but we don't put it in the context of like, okay, here's a fact about Thomas Jefferson. When Thomas Jefferson was president, someone gave him a pet goat like as an official gift, and it was kept at the White House, and it just killed a kid. Like a kid was walking around the White House grounds and just killed by a

goat. And you're just like, oh, they just didn't value human life like much at all. Like the world was just a cruel, awful place, you know? And so I think sometimes when we look at something and we try to understand how like a human could own another human, I think we sometimes miss what's staring us right in the face, which is that life was generally awful. And when people are themselves victims of a cruel, unjust, difficult world, they also become victimizers. And I think like, I think we sometimes lose the context of like, what it must have, like, you're like, oh, it could for Poe. It could have been that he was just walking down the street and someone drugged him,

beat him senseless. And then he died from it a few days later. Because that was a relatively common thing just like happening. And we just like, that just recedes into the past as like a thing that wouldn't have colored his existence day to day. Yeah, it's a question that I've like his perception of the cruelty. I mean, group test cruelty of his time. I've wondered about it.

I mean, you know, from the book that one of his first jobs was in a building in Richmond that it was right by the slave market. So like, couple scenes of, you know, family separation and so on. Like the overseers at the lot did try to keep the drama out of it. Yeah, you would hear it.

You would see it. Like people being dragged around in chains. And Poe wrote so much about horror. You know, body horror, horror at the societal level, Tilly is more concerned with it than most people realize. And yet it doesn't appear. most people realize and yet it doesn't appear. I mean, his treatments of race are not what we would how it would be. And that's like, how do you miss those things? But I also think that we're often, let me look at history.

When we have no stake in it and it doesn't cost us anything, we're able to like kind of get on a moral high or something like, oh I would have done things so differently. When people act like that about it's a kind of sending attitude toward it. And I want to say like, well show me the moral stance that you're taking up right now that's really costing you something. I believe me, I'm not endorsing hose and ability to recognize those things at all. It's horrifying, but people just treat it so easily. Right, it's easy to be very glib about slavery as you sit there in clothes made in a week or a sweatshop in China that, you know, you could buy for 30% more. It don't involve that, but you don't.

Right? Like, we sort of forget just the way in which we just accept what's happening in the world around us. Yeah, you're walking on the street, you hear a slave market and a human being can just become a tune to it, but I think what Poe does is clearly that affects him in some way because it gets sort of channeled. The darkness gets channeled into into the stories and that's why they're so haunting and challenging. Yeah, I think it's probably true. He wasn't a guy who was routinely cruel. People report that he was pretty polite and gentlemanly

and he seems to have cared for people. You can tell it in his letters. I think he loved his wife very deep, but he had friends that were very close. But I also say, like, kind of sympathy was the one way street for him, kind of flowed toward him, maybe because of the awfulness of Mr. Childhood, maybe he just couldn't kind of direct it elsewhere, except that himself. No, and I think when we understand the context of the world, it also, as you said, it allows you to appreciate the greatness. So like, I think about Lincoln, when you read about like Lincoln's childhood, just how like horrendously

awful it was, right? And then you're like, and he's still managed to despite, like, despite all that, you know, as a drunk father, as a loser, and, and this hard-scrabble existence, this, is this ugly gangly guy, all the stuff that he has against him. And then he's still, I mean, he's not perfect, but he still does more than the people around him care about what's happening to these other people, right? And what, not just how rare that was, but that must have taken work, right? Because it would have been so easy to just be consumed with your own struggle and your own difficulties.

Right, and God knows it wasn't politically expedient for him to care about this thing. Sorry, I didn't work that agenda. I don't know, I know it's trendy or kind of against the grain, but I actually believe greatness is a thing. I don't know that it can be achieved, but it doesn't mean that we can't emulate it or try to. Like the habits of people who do those things. I don't know. I think that you have to think that Lincoln was a bigger, stronger personality than the ones around him.

Well, look, it would be weird if you didn't believe in greatness for you to have fritten this book. Right. I know it goes against the grade a little bit. We're kind of moving away from the big man's area of history, which I'm not saying that's a bad thing. And yet I'm careful saying that's a bad thing. And yet I'm a character of this thing. BDR? Yeah, of course. I mean, like, obviously, it shouldn't

be called the Great Man of History Theory, because history's been changed just as much by women. But it strikes me as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't believe that an individual can change the world, it certainly won't be changed by you. But like, we look at, like, it's ironic people, like the same people who will go like, oh, like, oh, it would be cynical and make fun of people who think that they can like change things for the better, or also the people who are very indignant about the terrible things that bad people are doing.

But it cuts both ways. Like if a terrible person can change the world for the worse, why can a good person change the world for the better? Right. And if you want people to disrupt systems that are racist or whatever, you have to believe in the power of the individual to do those things, if individuals are disempowered, how do we create change?

I mean, I know people talk about change of the systemic level, I'm certainly not a post to that, but how does the system get changed? I think that's totally right. And I think often, like, as a weird sort of minor political example, I think people in Austin are like, we have a huge traffic infrastructure problem. So every time someone goes,

let's expand the freeway. They go, we don't need more freeways. We need systemic change. And it's like, cool, but that's not going to happen. So you're actually choosing your belief in the need for systemic change is actually preventing incremental change, which is only making it systemically worse. And so I think when people don't And so I think when people don't believe that an individual can make a difference or that minor small term things matter, it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but by your idealism,

you are creating the seeds of your own cynicism to go back to beers. Right. I mean, it's not, I don't, my own feelings are just more pragmatic than that. And it's also a historical to think that these things don't come about by a series of kind of shitty imperfect compromises, like any major change, that's how they happened. Totally, totally. And it's like there are people alive who, like there was just a guy who died, I'm forgetting his name, but there was one democratic politician who personally, I think, proposed and passed two of three different constitutional amendments.

And you're just like, oh, yeah, that feels like it was a really long time ago, but it wasn't, you know, and that it's still like just one person changed the change or nearly changed the constitution to supposedly permanent document like three times. And it's only because you're looking at it with a longer review that it seems possible, but it's when we zoom in, we go like, oh, an individual can't make a difference. Right. And it probably, I mean, there were probably years of horse trading that went into any one of those changes. Yes. And it probably wasn't even executed in the form the guy hoped for in the beginning,

because things just don't tend to be. No, that's totally right. Or just that like, I don't know, there's still people alive who met Winston Churchill. There is an individual who changed the world. Both in positive ways, if you live in America or England, you know, negative ways, if you live in India or, you know, other countries, right? Like, like, of course, an individual can change the world. Like, there's, it's, it seems, it seems like all the evidence contradicts that assertion. I agree, and I just add to you that and of course that person is

deeply flawed right? It wasn't church I like a pretty sorry father all things considered. I mean third whole this is true of two like the genius was a company and by some serious misbehavior as well and a lot of attitudes that were not what we would hope they would be. Totally, totally. I'm trying to think, is there anything else people should know about Edgar Allen Poe or that you have learned in the course of writing this book? There he's a hopeful figure. He's not about, I mean, there's the kind of goth dark side of the poem, but when you

consider the tragedy of his life and the context of his accomplishment within the tragedy of his life, it's a tremendously hopeful story. I think it's actually quite positive. It's not our typical association with poem, but I'm not the first person to read it this way. The French have, per a while, both Lera wrote the first person to read it this way. The French have her a while, both layer of the book, seriously, 150 years ago. So it's not even new.

Other people have realized this too. Well, my favorite joke in your book is the idea that a writer can become so famous that they name an NFL franchise after you. I mean, who can you say that of? The fact that, right, there's not a single other example. I can't think of anything even outside the NFL. Like, what other sports team in any line of, has sort of a connection to literature of all things.

You think of these things as opposed, but the power of Paul, and posing as personality on the world have shown that they can be related, which is amazing. I mean, that's greatness. Although the Cleveland Browns are the only NFL team named after like a regular person. Really who's tonight, should I know who Brown is?

Yeah, Paul Brown, like the founder of the team, he just named him out. Oh, I say, I say, oh, okay, yeah, you know, when I talk about professional sports, I'm really wondering what is from my area of expertise such as it is. So no, no, it is, it is funny. Go until I read that in your book, I was, I just,

it was like, yeah, of course, they're just named after the bird, but you're not like, Oh, no, Poe Baltimore, like, like, that, they didn't just pick the bird out of nowhere. It's like, right. Came from something. Yeah, this amazing poem got great. It was written in 1845 and it's one of the few poems on us, anyone knows. Right. Yeah, no, just that it there, I mean, just that there's a football team named after a poem, like is, is pretty unreal as well. And I'm sure almost nobody knows that.

You wouldn't think it would happen in the US if all places were not a nation that really value its poetry, but I know this is kind of the miracle of foe to my mind that he has that kind of vast influence. I think so and uh and he didn't live to see any of it which is sort of the track the the the perfect Po irony. I don't know if he could have handled success any better than he handled and success though to be honest with you. So that is uh that is that is the perfect way to end this. I love the book. I'm so glad we got connected and we'll talk soon. Thanks. This has been great. Ryan really enjoyed it. Hey it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at

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