What happens to dead writers

Everyone tends to remember the past with greater fervor as the present gains greater importance.— Italo Svevo, born in 1861

Robert Frost wrote this masterpiece in about 20 minutes; it belongs to all of us now | News | sentinelsource.com


What happens to dead writers at the hands of exegetes or executors? It's a question of estate management, archival avarice, popular renown, and inheritance law  

The search engine, initially an attempt to map human meaning, now defines human meaning. It controls, rather than simply catalogs or indexes, human thought MEdia Dragon  


🐉 Poe was tuned to the modern age and its rejection of religious taboos against exploring the realms of horror and death. There sits the imp of the perverse with the most entertaining ghastly tales ever told. But he is also the perfect fit for our postmodern age, when each person makes of the daemon of mystery and fright what he or she will. “Annabel Lee,” Poe’s ode to a woman loved so intensely the angels grew envious and killed her, is suggested as a reading at weddings, while on YouTube, “Goth Girl,” her eyelids the green of grave rot, reads the same tale aloud in a cemetery.

Poe has long had a reputation as a drunken mad genius, and bohemians, tormented artists, struggling writers and even drug addicts embrace him as their own. More recently, though, the 2017 PBS American Masters film, Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive, downplayed the tortured image. “He comes off instead as a smart guy who wanted to become famous, changed jobs all the time and was fascinated with technology,” the HuffPost wrote. “Maybe Edgar Allan Poe was the first millennial.” 

Poe, Storyteller

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• Via Kevin Roberts
• I know I am a Radical Optimist and see hope and dreams everywhere, but Philip Collins in The Times sums it up factually.
  
  
  We end 2018 healthier, safer, freer, better educated and cleaner than ever before.
  
  
  We have never been better off – extreme poverty is at its lowest ever level.
  
  
  1.2 billion people have gained the power of electricity in the 18 years of the new century.  The villages of India are lighting up.
  
  
  Education is the driving force behind our increasing global prosperity.  The world literary rate is an unprecedented 85%.  The number of girls enrolled in primary school reached 90% this year.
  
  
  Human beings have never been so healthy (and IQ’s are increasing 3 IQ points per decade) as diets become more and more effective.
  
  
  Global life expectancy is at an all-time high and child mortality has never been lower – largely because of the staggering increases in the number of one-year-olds immunized.
  
  
  The battle against vicious diseases is being won.  Bye-bye malaria and polio – cholera should be beaten in the next decade.  Aids deaths have halved in the last 10 years, leprosy deaths have fallen 97% since 1985.  We can expect cures for heart disease and cirrhosis in the next decade.
  
  
  And (amazingly!) we are cleaner.  The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica shrank to its lowest in 20 years; population in the developed world has increased by 50% since 1970 but water use has not increased.  In 2018 more than 90% of the world’s population had access to safe water.
  
  
  Crime rates are falling and deaths from terrorism have fallen by 20% since their 2014 peak.
  
  
  Mr Collins says “Prosperity, education, health, cleanliness and security are the components of a life lived at liberty”.
  
  
  This is the formula for freedom.  And it’s working.
  
  
  Let Freedom Ring.
  
  
  Happy New Year.