Month: November 2014

On the morning of Edgar Allen Poe’s funeral in 1849 a long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune slandering the deceased. The obituary, signed Ludwig, claimed that Poe was a drunk, opium addict, and womanizer. Ludwig wrote, Poe “Walked the streets in madness…lips moving in indistinct curses.” His “heart gnawed with anguish, his face shrouded in gloom.” As Poe’s body was being lowered into the earth, Ludwig was beginning a massive, calculated deception that involved altering documents relating to Poe’s life, deliberately lying and misquoting Poe, a fraud so strong that to this day Poe’s personality is associated with drunkeness, madness, drug addiction, and perversity.

The myth of a harlot named Thais goes back at least to Alexander the Great. She supposedly got Alexander and his officers drunk one night and persuaded them to torch King Xerxes palace to avenge Athens. The tale is probably untrue but celebrated in Dryden’s Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day in which he compares Thais with Helen of Troy. Handel made an oratorio of it. The Roman playwright Terence, whose six plays feature pimps, prostitutes, and parasites—the essentials of opera—presents the beautiful Thais in his most popular play The Eunuch (161BC). Terence, a former North African slave, was sympathetic to marginal people, and the courtesan Thais is the play’s most sincere and admirable character.

Lake Forest and Forest Lake, Forest Park and Park Forest, the names of four Chicago suburbs. There isn’t a forest in all of Illinois. Another dozen Chicago suburbs are called hills or heights Harwood Heights, Glendale Heights, Hickory Hills, Vernon Hills. You can’t see a hill for a hundred miles around Chicago. The highest peak in Mount Prospect (not to be confused with Prospect Heights) is an overpass.

The Indians knew how to name this country. They used original, bold sounds to describe the land‑‑Waukegan, Mettawa, Winnetka‑‑unmistakable names of substance and meaning. Chicago, for example, means the land of the onion, and the name evoked for the Prairie Indians the onion smell. We took their land, and now we’re crowding it with Highlake–neither high nor near a lake–Bridgeview–without either a bridge or a view–and Valley View–since there are no mountains neither are there valleys.