I just read that Dostoevsky said E.A. Poe was “an enormously talented writer” and based his detective in Crime and Punishment on Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know this:

Poe wrote most of his greatest works while living in Philadelphia. Tell-Tale Heart. Fall of the House of Usher. Black Cat. Murders in the Rue Morgue. Mystery of Marie Roget. Masque of Red Death. Gold Bug. Pit and the Pendulum. It was the city that transformed his genius into the greatness we all know and love. And I’m not talking about all that Liberty Bell, Birthplace of Independence crap. It was Philly’s gothic, chaotic environment in the early 19th century that had an indelible impact on the style and content of Poe’s work.

The doomed family of the House of Usher was conjured by Poe in Philadelphia. William Wilson and his evil doppelganger took form there. The madman of “The Tell-Tale Heart” made his murderous confession under the dark skies of the Quaker City. C. Auguste Dupin, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes and all fictional detectives to follow, sprung from Poe’s fertile pen while the author was reading the daily criminal mysteries that plagued the city. The detective/mystery story was invented in Philadelphia! (Why a mystery writer convention is held in any city but the one that invented the genre is beyond me, too.)

What did they teach me in school?

Nate Larkin says he had to drop his religiosity to find real love from his Father in heaven. Working to please God simply didn’t work and wasn’t what He wanted anyway. Nate is second in his life to the Lord and the author of the book, Samson and the Pirate Monks: Calling Men to Authentic Brotherhood, which has his testimony and a description of a men’s discipleship group called The Samson Society.

Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius (Thanks to Omie for the link)

Author Stephen King understands the appeal of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, but he thinks she “can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” (via Big Hollywood)

The New Yorker’s blog has posted over the last few days many words from notable authors on John Updike. Mary Hawthorne said, “In keeping with his intense curiosity was a corresponding generosity toward anyone who dared to grapple with, for lack of a better word, the human condition. He had ideas about what book reviewing should be.” Ideas like this:

“1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.”

Author John Updike, 76, has passed away. I remember a college friend reading the Run, Rabbit, Run and having conflict with himself over whether to recommend it to any of us. He liked so much but hated so much of it that he could only talk about it in a tongue-tied fashion. Updike is certainly an important author, but I wonder if his work exemplifies one of the major problem with modern literature. He wrote realistically and too much about sex.

But I should stop talking about this. Bloomberg has the facts.

On January 19, the day before our government stepped up the pace on taking away the earnings of the disfavored, Edgar Allan Poe was born–200 years early. Today, three cities are fighting over his legacy. “For a poet and short-story writer devoted to elegy and horror, a man whose great subject was death, such posthumous popularity is rich in irony,” writes Julia Klein for Obit Magazine.

Let us quote Poe’s own words to apply to this situation: “… it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince’s indefinite decorum.”