Today, dear reader, we’re diving into a shadowy corner of American literary history that’s as haunting as the tales it inspired. On May 16, 1931—yep, you read that right, though I suspect the date might be a typo for 1836, since Poe passed in 1849—Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the macabre, married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm.

By today’s standards, this marriage raises every red flag in the book. A 27-year-old man tying the knot with a 13-year-old girl—his own cousin, no less—was a bold defiance of social norms, even in the 1830s. Back then, marrying young wasn’t unheard of, and cousin marriages weren’t as taboo as they are now, but this union still turned heads. Poe and Virginia’s relationship was a middle finger to convention, a theme that bled into every chilling tale and mournful poem he penned. The controversy alone could’ve made headlines, but Poe wasn’t one to shy away from the dark and forbidden—his life mirrored the eerie worlds he created.

Virginia, often described as delicate and ethereal, became Poe’s muse in the most haunting way. Works like The Raven and Annabel Lee are steeped in her influence, their melancholic beauty reflecting her frail health and early death at just 24 from tuberculosis in 1847. Poe’s obsession with death, loss, and the supernatural wasn’t just artistic flair—it was deeply personal. Virginia’s decline and passing shattered him, fueling the raw, anguished emotion that makes his writing so timeless. You can almost feel the weight of his grief in lines like “Nevermore” or the aching longing of Annabel Lee’s “kingdom by the sea.” Their marriage, though troubled by her illness and Poe’s own struggles with alcoholism and poverty, gave his gothic legacy a visceral, lived-in edge.

But let’s not romanticize this too much. The age gap and familial ties make this a hard pill to swallow, even for the most diehard Poe fans. Some scholars argue Poe saw Virginia more as a sisterly figure than a wife, at least initially, and that their bond was more platonic than passionate. Others point to the cultural context of the time, where such arrangements weren’t as shocking. Either way, it’s a stark reminder of how Poe’s life was as turbulent and unconventional as his stories—always teetering on the edge of societal acceptance, much like the crumbling houses and unhinged narrators he wrote about.

This marriage not only shaped Poe’s work, but also helped redefine American literature. Poe’s fearless embrace of the dark, the taboo, and the deeply personal carved out a space for the gothic tradition to flourish. He wasn’t afraid to plumb the depths of human despair, and his union with Virginia gave him a front-row seat to tragedy. So, the next time you’re shivering through The Tell-Tale Heart or whispering The Raven’s refrain, remember the real-life heartbreak behind the words—a love story as doomed and defiant as any Poe ever dreamed up.

Switch gears now…I hear from the hippies that today is ostensibly Endangered Species Day.  So, on this Endangered Species Day, May 16, 2025, permit me to eschew the lachrymose dirges for some benighted amphibian or ichthyic obscurity and instead hoist a tumbler—Jack Daniels, no ice, thank you—to the most critically endangered taxon of our epoch: Scriptor Americanus Badassus, the Badass American Writer. This isn’t your milquetoast MFA drone or some clickbait-churning digital serf. Nay, this is a whiskey-guzzling, iron-packing, censor-defying, chaos-conjuring literary berserker, teetering on oblivion’s brink, harried by the dual hydras of governmental overreach and social media’s sanctimonious inquisition. Strap in, dear reader, for I shall delineate, with Friday’s typical verbosity (resulting from consumption of a Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee and no fewer than four (4) Dunkin’ donuts) and a certain outlaw panache, why this species merits veneration and preservation above all others on the endangered roster.

Dig, if you will, the Badass American Writer in their primordial milieu: a dive bar redolent of stale Marlboros, a manual typewriter hammering like an M-16 on full auto, a fifth of bourbon perspiring profusely beside a dog-eared Moleskine, and a snub-nose .38 nestled in the small of the back, lest some apparatchik or algorithmically empowered prude dare intrude. Their phenotypic markers? They imbibe with the fervor of a desert prophet, curse with the baroque flourish of a Elizabethan cutthroat, and brook precisely zero nonsense from any quarter—be it federal, corporate, or the perpetually aggrieved Twitterati. These are the scribes who craft narratives that flay the epidermis from polite fictions, who hurl verities like grenades into the complacent agora. They don’t dabble in ephemeral “threads”; they etch tomes in blood and brimstone. And, alas, they are vanishing, extirpated with ruthless efficiency.

Whence this peril? The etiology is multifarious yet depressingly banal. The state, that Leviathan of bureaucratic cupidity, slathers “disinformation” warnings on anything with a pulse, its tentacles probing every syllable for subversive intent. Social media, those panopticons of performative virtue, exile dissenters to the shadowlands with a keystroke, their terms of service a guillotine for the insufficiently meek. And then there’s the cultural clerisy, those pursed-lipped arbiters who recoil at a well-placed expletive or the whiff of unfiltered Camels in a public space. Scriptor Americanus Badassus does not genuflect to such pieties. They’d sooner torch their oeuvre than submit to the red pen of a content moderator. But this intransigence exacts a toll. Publishers, craven as ever, shun them. Platforms throttle their reach into oblivion. The mob, wielding hashtags like pitchforks, brands them “toxic.” Extinction looms, and it’s clutching a fucking style guide.

Now, to the crux: why does this species outstrip all others—your pandas, your rhinos, your esoteric mollusks—in deserving salvation? Pandas, for all their photogenic charm, are evolutionary cul-de-sacs, too indolent to procreate sans human intervention. Rhinos, while formidable, aren’t out here penning jeremiads that recalibrate the national conscience. But the Badass American Writer? They are the sine qua non of a free polity, the final bulwark against a world hellbent on muzzling truth and planing down anything with an edge. Their prose is an arsenal of ideation, each paragraph a claymore detonated in the face of orthodoxy. They safeguard the republic’s soul, a task no other species can claim. Without them, we’re doomed to a monochrome dystopia of approved narratives and content warnings.

How, then, to stave off their demise? First, dismantle the censorial apparatus—let these writers breathe, blaspheme, and provoke without fear of digital crucifixion. Second, patronize their work; seek out the tomes banished by school boards or algorithmically consigned to obscurity, and buy them in bulk. Third, amplify their defiance. When some platform immolates a writer for “violating community standards” (read: daring to exist), raise a clamor louder than a Harley at full throttle. And finally, the area I’m attempting to support,  cultivate successors. Inculcate in the young an appetite for strong spirits, straight shooting, and prose that doesn’t flinch. Breed Scriptor Americanus Badassus, not another cohort of screen-addled supplicants.

So here’s to the Badass American Writer, the most endangered and indispensable of creatures. They fight not merely for their own survival but for the survival of a world worth inhabiting. Raise your glass, chamber a round, and join the insurgency. For if we let them perish, we surrender the fire that keeps this nation from dissolving into a tepid, sanitized abyss. Long may Scriptor Americanus Badassus reign. Let’s ensure their saga doesn’t end in a footnote.

—One of the Few Badass American Writers, still out there, raging against the dying of the light.

N.P.: “Magic (Macy’s Theme)” – Stimulator

“Well, I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer,
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”
~ Jim Morrison

Good lord, dear reader…I don’t know about where you live, but here in California, chaos swirls and The Angst is once again upon me.  But it’s not just me: not that I presently know a ton of Californians, but those I do know seem to be in varying states of personal disarray and uncertainty about What’s Next, whatever that means to them.  Any contact with the State government is fraught with a sort of tension amongst the state workers…very much a Fall of Saigon vibe…as if everyone is having to reappraise their situations every 15 minutes or so, seemingly trying to figure out if they should continuing doing their jobs or grab their shit and get the hell out while the gettin’s good.

I was born in this rotten state, and things were a lot better then.  The most noticeable difference is the number of other people I have to deal with here.  There were barely 20 million people here when I was born.  Now there are over 40 million residents.  And their unpleasant presence is felt every time I walk out my front door: there they are – people just goddamn everywhere.   Then there’s another million illegals whose health care we’ve been funding, bankrupting the entire state.  The governor’s an idiot sociopath, and most of the leadership is made up of cowardly dolts and pathetic panderers.  I dunno, dear reader…I’ve tried to leave, but I keep getting pulled back, for one reason or another.  The good news is that for the last few years, California has been losing residents faster than its gaining them.  The bad news is only the smart ones are leaving.  The idiots are staying in droves.  And I’m stuck with ’em.

I’m starting to get depressed.  Let’s shift gears from the profane to the sacred.

Today in literary history, in 1859 specifically, Charles Dickens, the indefatigable titan of Victorian letters, began his serialization of A Tale of Two Cities (not to be confused with yrs. truly’s The Sale of Two Titties) in the pages of his literary periodical All the Year Round.  To truly appreciate this high-wire act of storytelling audacity sort of requires that you be (or have been) a writer with heavy deadlines.  With its weekly installments, Dickens – already a towering figure in the literary firmament – fashioned a saga that gripped readers like a vice, its raw, unflinching depiction of the French Revolution’s chaos serving as both a mirror and a crucible for the era’s moral and existential convulsions.  The novel’s opening line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” remains a clarion call of literary iconicity.   Through its gritty portrayal of social upheaval and personal struggle, A Tale of Two Cities solidified Dickens’ reputation as a master storyteller, a narrative alchemist (like that, dear reader?) capable of blending heart, history, and rebellion into a tapestry of indelible power.

Dickens, at the time of this undertaking, was no stranger to the machinations of serialized fiction, a medium he had all but perfected through earlier works like Bleak House and Oliver Twist.  But A Tale of Two Cities marked a departure, a pivot toward the historical epic that demanded a new kind of rigor.  Set against the sanguinary backdrop of the French Revolution, the novel spans London and Paris – the two cities of which this is a tale – chronicling the intertwined fates of characters like the noble Charles Darnay, the dissolute Sydney Carton, and the resolute Lucie, Manette.  Dickens engineered each installment to grip readers, balancing the guillotine’s grim metronome with intimate dramas of love and betrayal.  That iconic opening line mentioned supra mirrors the story’s dialectic – hope against despair, light against shadow – while reflecting Dickens’ own struggles with poverty and personal turmoil.
Since 1859, A Tale of Two Cities has sold over 200 million copies, its influence spanning adaptations and generations.  Dickens’ ability to render history through human struggle remains a beacon for writers navigating turbulent times.  On that April day, he unleashed a monument, a testament to storytelling’s power to illuminate humanity’s enduring spirit, even in the darkest of times.

How am I supposed to go from this literary pleasantry to a marathon review of The Human Centipedes?  Not soberly, that is for sure.  And yet, I shall.  Soon.

In more temporally local literary news, I’m writing faster than I usually do, trying to artfully cope with the absolutely ludicrous deadlines imposed on me by Mgmt.  I’ve also extended my working hours, starting earlier in the day and ending later in the night.  That “later in the night” shit is going over so well with certain people at The Safe House, so effective tonight I’m now required to take some vintage of tranquilizers/sleeping pills at a certain time so that it becomes physically and mentally impossible for me to write, or even remain vertical, too far into the night, and I am thus forced to get a reasonable amount of nightly sleep.  We’ll see how long that lasts.

N.P.: “How Soon Is Now” – The Crying Spell

Hello, goddammit.  That’s how I answered the phone this morning at 07:00 when it rang.  I knew who it was.  Only one person on the planet is abjectly stupid enough to call me at such an unholy hour on the Lord’s Day.  It was, of course, Mgmt.

Mgmt: Well I wouldn’t have to call you on “the Lord’s Day” if you’d send me my pages when you’re supposed to.
Me: Easy, cheesy…these are not “your” pages…they are mine, and I’ll send them when I’m damn well good and ready.
Mgmt: Relax…you need to relax.  You shouldn’t be this tense so early on a weekend day.
Me: I swear to Christ the next time I see you, I will throttle you!  Do you hear me?  Throttled!  Have you ever been throttled before?
Mgmt: Well, if I…
Me: Shut up.  It doesn’t matter. Don’t call me at 7 in the goddamn morning, give me some low-rent shit about my writing, and then tell me to relax!  You relax.  Why the fuck are you even so awake now?  Shouldn’t you be recovering from last night?
Mgmt: What happened last night?
Me: You tell me!  You’re at least 30 years younger than me…you’re supposed to me out drinking beer and watching movies and writhing to suggestive music, not worrying about what I’m writing or being awake to call me at 7 in the morning!

This went on, dear reader, for a good 15 minutes before I was able to convince him to call me back once he calmed down so we could have a reasonable conversation like reasonable adults. That was my morning.  Now on to more pleasant business.

Today we’ll roll back to 1667, when John Milton, blind as a bat and broke as hell, sold Paradise Lost to a publisher for a measly £10—£10, man, for one of the most gut-wrenching, mind-bending epics ever scrawled by human hand. That’s not bad for a poem, freshmen will say, to which I can only reply Ha!  This wasn’t “a poem,” you nebbish; it’s a 12-book, cosmic-level brawl, a literary grenade of rebellion, Satan, and the whole damn fall of man. Milton, with his puritanical fire and a brain that could out-think God Himself, poured every ounce of his defiant soul into this beast, redefining literary ambition while staring down the political heat of Restoration England. He died before the second edition dropped, but not before he’d flipped a double-barreled middle finger to the universe, daring anyone to underestimate the sheer, unadulterated ferocity of the underdog. That second edition? Another £10 promised, like a cosmic IOU for a work that’d echo through the ages.  Milton built a monument to the human spirit’s refusal to bow down.

Paradise Lost is Milton at his most feral, a blind poet channeling the Almighty’s own wrath and heartbreak into a sprawling, 10,000-line odyssey that makes you feel the weight of eternity in your bones. Satan’s the star here, and Milton gives him all kinds of swagger—a rebel angel who’d rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, spitting in God’s eye with every fiery monologue. But don’t get it twisted; this isn’t just a devil’s joyride. Milton’s got Adam and Eve, the Garden, the Fall, all of it woven with a theological ferocity that hits like a freight train. The man was writing from the edge—politically hunted, physically broken, yet still swinging for the fences with a vision so vast it redefines what poetry can do. Every line drips with the kind of desperate, electric energy you feel when you’re staring down the abyss and decide to jump in anyway. Milton threw down a gauntlet, daring every writer since to match his unhinged, celestial audacity. And that, dear reader, is why John Milton is a charter member of the Dead Poets Society.

N.P.: “Pump Up The Jam” – Death in Rome

Happy World Book Day, dear reader.

This from the D.P.S.: Today we wish a very Happy Birthday to Vladimir Nabokov! On this day, April 23, 1899, the world got a whole lot sharper, darker, and infinitely more brilliant with the birth of Nabokov in Saint Petersburg, Russia.  For you uncultured heathen’s under the age of 40, Nabokov gave us Lolita (1955), a masterpiece so provocative it’s almost a dirty bomb in book form, diving fearlessly into the mind of a predator with prose so breathtakingly beautiful it’s almost criminal.  His sentences are precise, blending beauty with the grotesque in a way that makes your skin crawl and your heart race all at once.

He wrote in both Russian and English, mastering two languages with a dexterity that would most writers weep.  He had a habit of obliterating boundaries, fleeing the chaos of the Russian Revolution, dodging the horrors of Nazi  Europe, and somehow still finding the fire to churn out works that spit in the face of convention.  The upheaval he lived through would have broken lesser spirits, but he turned every exile, every struggle, into fuel for his unrelenting creativity.  From Pale Fire to Ada, Nabokov played with structure, language, and morality like a chess grandmaster, always ten moved ahead of the rest of us.  Here’s to the man who taught us that literature can be dangerous, dazzling, and utterly unforgettable.  #NabokovTurns126 #LiteraryLegend #GeniusUnleashed

In local news, I am technically behind schedule, but I’m having to write a chapter I was not planning on writing, so I’m coming at it cold…never realistically thought I’d write about it, but here we are.  The subject matter is exceptionally difficult for me: I usually stick to the lighter topics, things that are actually fun to write about.  I tend toward the humorous, which usually isn’t much of a limitation because I can find humor in just about anything.  But not this.  It’s unfunny and uncomfortable and I have no idea how it will turn out…I suppose you, dear reader, will eventually be the ultimate judge.

N.P.: “Come to Papa” – Bob Seger

Today, dear reader, we’re cracking open the whiskey and howling at the moon to honor Charlotte Brontë, the fiercest writer to ever rise from Yorkshire’s windswept moors (where else will you read “Yorkshire’s windswept moors” today?  That’s right…only here, baby.  Anyway.).  Born on April 21st, 1816, this tiny dynamo penned Jane Eyre and unleashed a firestorm of raw female fury on the stuffy Victorian elite.

Charlotte wasn’t some dainty damsel sipping tea and playing nice with society’s rules.  Hell no!  She was a literary renegade, a five-foot-nothing whirlwind of rebellion who looked the sexist gatekeepers of her time dead in the eye and sneered, “I’ll write what I goddamn please.”  Jane Eyre roars with defiance, its heroine a plain, poor governess who spits in the face of societal norms, refusing to bend to the chauvinist pricks who’d have her on her knees.  Charlotte, with her sisters Emily and Anne, had to hide behind male pseudonyms to get past the era’s misogynistic bouncers, but once inside, they proved women could wield words with a savage precision that would leave any man quaking.

Let’s not romanticize the grind, though.  Charlotte’s life was a brutal slog through the muck.  She married late, got pregnant, and then died in 1855, likely from vicious morning sickness that hit harder than a tank.  She didn’t live to see her legacy ignite, but when it did, it burned bright and fierce.  Charlotte showed the world that women could write with relentless, unapologetic power – her prose a razor blade slicing through the lace of Victorian decorum.

So here we are, on Charlotte Brontë’s birthday, saluting the hell-raising queen of the moors.  We celebrate the woman who shattered the mold and laughed in the face of convention.  She’s the patron saint of every writer who’s ever been told to sit down and shut up, every misfit who’s carved their own jagged path through the wilderness.  Raise your glass, turn your inner rebel up to eleven, and toast to the legend: Happy birthday, Charlotte!

In more temporally local news, I am officially behind schedule with the writing.  I’ve got maybe two days to get back on track before Mgmt figures out what’s up and descends into dark states of piss-off and they resume their daily harangues.  Which is why I’ll be brief here and get back to it.

N.P.: “Beat on the Brat” – Daniel Hjálmtýsson, Mortiis

Good day, dear reader.  Today in badass literary history, in 1816, to be exact, Lord Byron signed a deed of separation from his wife, Lady Annabella Milbanke.  I can tell by the nonplussed expressions on your jaded faces that you lack historical perspective and/or proper appreciation for this event, so let me help you out.  Your first issue is you don’t know how badass Byron was.   Byron was the rockstar poet of the Romantic era…all fiery passion and scandal.  Maybe the most efficient explanation of Byron’s badassedness comes courtesy of Lady Caroline Lamb, a British aristocrat and novelist, who described Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”  She wrote this in her diary in 1812 after meeting him at a ball, following the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron a literary sensation.  Lamb, who later had a tumultuous affair with him, captured his notorious reputation as a charismatic yet scandalous figure – prone to reckless behavior, defiance of social norms, and a string of controversial relationships.  His split from Lady Milbanke would have made your great-grandmama’s corset pop.  It wasn’t some limp divorce of tea and crumpets…’twas a full-throated, middle-finger war cry against the suffocating chains of societal decorum and bourgeois bullshit.

Picture it, man: 1816, a year absolutely drowning in gloom, Europe’s skies choked with Tambora’s ash, crops rotting, famine creeping, the whole deal.  Without warning, into this mess storms George Gordon Byron, a swaggering badass who’d rather fistfight a hurricane than kiss the ring of convention, signing off on  year-long marriage to math-nerd Christian Lady Annabella Milbanke.  Byron was all fire – his latest publication had hearts thumping.  Annabella was a prim little saint who thought she could tame his wild soul.  Their clash was a trainwreck – her rules versus his chaos – ending with her hurling accusations: infidelity, incest with his half-sister Augusta, even sodomy – charges extreme enough to get him hanged.

Did Byron grovel?  Hell no!  He bolted to Switzerland, hit the Alps with Shelly and Mary, and partied like a rockstar, birthing Frankenstein in a stormy, booze-soaked summer.  The balls!

While Annabella clutched her Bible, Byron turned exile into a roaring middle finger to the prigs, penning verses that still echo.  So cheers to Lord Byron.

In local news, the schedule is more demanding than ever, and I’m struggling to meet these fairly ridiculous deadlines.  Fortunately Mgmt did give me a couple of “buffer days” on some of the more demanding aspects of the current book.  I will definitely be using those days.  I’ve been frustrated, because I’ve been getting words on the page, but there hasn’t been “magic.”  But that’s starting to change…glimmers of the magic have been appearing more frequently.  I shall keep at it.

N.P.: “Für Elise” – Marcin Jakubek

I’ve been up since 04:00, trying to get a jump on today’s writing.  So far, so good.  I’ve grown to like these pre-dawn hours: all decent people are asleep, so lots of quiet and no interruptions.  Even those weenies on the east coast are still sleepily stumbling around their lofts looking for caffeine and trying to find a clean shirt to wear today.  Ha!  I’ve already put down 500 words.  Indeed.

In other badass literary news, on this day in 1859, a young Samuel Langhorne Clemens—better known as Mark Twain—earned his steamboat pilot’s license, a gritty milestone that would shape one of America’s literary giants.  This might seem like a trivial event to the uninitiated, but it was anything but.  At 23, Clemens had been apprenticing on the Mississippi River since 1857, learning the treacherous currents and hidden snags of the waterway while working on comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post.  This wasn’t simply another day job for an aspiring writer – it was a baptism by fire into a rough-and-tumble world of river men, gamblers, and hustlers—a world that would later fuel the raw, unfiltered voice of classics like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Twain’s time as a pilot gave him an ear for the dialects and tall tales of the American South, grounding his work in a realism that cut through the era’s sentimental fluff.  He navigated a river that could kill you in a heartbeat, lived among hard-drinking, hard-living folks, and later used that lens to skewer hypocrisy, racism, and human folly with a pen as sharp as my newest switchblade. His steamboat days ended with the Civil War, but the swagger and insight he gained on April 9, 1859, informed the bulk of his work.

Damn…it’s now 06:30, that wretched sun is rising, and I just hit the first of what will probably many walls today.  A day like this, starting as early as it did, may warrant a Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee with an extra shot of espresso, or cocaine…whatever they have on hand.

N.P.: “Dayman” – RMB