Word: poe
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Skvorecky's alter ego is Danny Smiricky, 48, a Czech émigré professor at a college very like Skvorecky's academic home for some 15 years, the University of Toronto. Danny teaches dark Old World lessons from Poe, Hawthorne and Stephen Crane to nice Canadian boys and girls whose idea of horror is derived from Stephen King movies. As for The Red Badge of Courage, Danny's students read it not as a commentary on war but as one more case study of a young man's identity crisis...
...folklore and literature of nearly every tribe and climate are riddled with riddles. Enigmas abounded in ancient Rome, in Sanskrit hymns and the sagas of the Norse. Galileo composed some, so did Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the last century, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll experimented with trick questions; in this century, J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit offered a few original puzzles: "A box without hinges, key or lid. Yet golden treasure inside is hid." Answer: An egg. The sport trickled down to Gotham City, home of Batman and Robin; in a recent comic-book adventure, the Riddler...
...more literary than historical, but even here he falters. Lewis Carroll's dream books of Alice are justly represented, but James Joyce's monumental portrait of the unconscious, Finnegans Wake, is accorded two lines. Joseph Heller (Catch-22) is indulgently granted six entries; the great dreamer Poe is given...
...cover on a new LP album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a photomontage of a crowd gathered round a grave. And a curious crowd it is: Marilyn Monroe is there, so are Karl Marx, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein, Lawrence of Arabia, Mae West, Sonny Listen and eight Beatles...
...rivals. Kinship bonds are strong; encounters between unrelated groups can be bloody, and sometimes fatal to the young. Indeed infanticide occurs often enough to constitute a serious problem for the ape image. For in the end, gorillas are usually judged not as other animals but as near humans. From Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue to King Kong, we have projected our own fears, sentimentality and monstrous selves on these hapless beasts and punished them accordingly...