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Member: roomraven

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Favorite authorsErnest Bramah, Angela Carter, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, F. Marion Crawford, Daniel Defoe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Graves, Barry Hughart, Henry James, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, R. A. Lafferty, Herman Melville, Richard Mitchell, Patrick O'Brian, Flann O'Brien, George Orwell, Ovid, T.R. Pearson, Georges Perec, Edward Payson Roe, Bruno Schulz, Sir Walter Scott, Nevil Shute, Frank R. Stockton, Booth Tarkington, James Thurber, Louis Tracy, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Charlotte Mary Yonge (Shared favorites)

Favorite bookstoresAfter Word Books, Bookie's Paperbacks and More, Bookman's Alley, Myopic Books, Renaissance Book Shop

About meAnother system of mine, which truly straight-arms sleep, is to rewrite, or paraphrase, Poe's "The Raven" from the viewpoint of the bird instead of that of the man.

Once upon a daybreak dreary,
While I fluttered sleek and cheery
Over many a granule of ungarnered corn,
Suddenly there came a moaning, as of someone loudly groaning,
Groaning at the thought of morn.

This version ends up with the raven trapped on the pallid bust of Pallas just above the chamber door. In other words, the unfortunate bird, lured into the sleepless scholar's chamber, has become a room raven. It was but the mental work of half an hour to figure -- nay, to prove -- that the raven speaks English with a foreign accent, and you can find this out for yourself by simply spelling "room raven" backward, beginning with the second word. This, to be sure, gets neither you nor me (nor Poe and the raven) anywhere except into the bad habit of mental left-reading in bed at night, and I guess I'm sorry I brought it up. (If Poe had rewritten "The Raven" in order to retract something, the result would have been a palinode, I thought you might want to know.)

James Thurber, "The Watchers of the Night"

Real nameArianne

LocationChicago, IL

Account typepublic, lifetime

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Member sinceOct 19, 2008