lovecraft:

rip adrienne rich.

(via imperilled)

fybooksandwine:

Natalie Maclean is one of America’s leading wine writers and here are her recommended book and wine pairings:

Classic Book and Wine Pairings - 

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte with California chardonnay
• The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne with red burgundy (pinot noir)
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy with vintage port
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte with British sparkling wine
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens with New Zealand and Oregon pinot noir
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen with Chilean chardonnay
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck with California zinfandel
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald with Washington merlot
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger with cognac (or rye whisky)
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck with New York riesling

Get it together, Baltimore. Step-up and make people want to visit this museum. 

BALTIMORE — Even now, 162 years after his death here, Edgar Allan Poe seems to be suffering from the kind of bad luck that haunted his life.

For a second year, city leaders won’t subsidize a museum in the tiny house where the impoverished Mr. Poe lived from about 1833 to 1835, a decision that means it may have to close soon.

Since the city cut off its $85,000 in annual support last year, the house has been running on reserve funds, which are expected to run out as early as next summer.

Consultants hired by the city will try to devise a business plan to make the Edgar Allan Poe House financially self-sufficient, possibly by updating its exhibits to draw more visitors. But the museum sits amid a housing project far off the city’s tourist track and attracts only 5,000 visitors a year.

“It would be ironic, after all these years of aggressively and actively promoting the Poe House and the Poe grave, to have it close,” Jeff Jerome, the house’s curator for more than 30 years, said.

He said that to switch suddenly to a self-supporting model was impractical, given that the house generates only a small amount of revenue from admissions, special events, and the sale of books and T-shirts.

The chief of Baltimore’s planning department, Thomas Stosur, said that because of the city’s budget gap last year, the cut was unavoidable. “Everybody was under the gun to focus more on core services,” he said.

The city continues to provide a $55,500 grant to the Babe Ruth Birthplace Museum, which is more centrally situtated and draws six times more visitors a year than the Poe House.

For decades, Baltimore has prized its association with Mr. Poe, a master of the macabre who inspired the name for the city’s National Football League team, the Ravens.

It is here that he nurtured his fledgling career as a writer and where he died, in 1849 at age 40, after he was found in a tavern delirious and in distress, two years after his young wife and cousin, Virginia, died of tuberculosis. They lived at 203 North Amity St., having married in 1836, when she was 13 and he was 27.

The Poe House, owned by the Baltimore City Housing Authority, is designated a landmark, so it’s in no danger of being torn down even if it closes as a museum.

It is about a mile from Mr. Poe’s grave in the Westminster Burying Ground, where for decades a mysterious visitor left a half-filled bottle of cognac and three roses every year on his birthday, Jan. 19.

Because of who Mr. Poe was and what he wrote about, his presence seems stronger in this house than, say, somewhere that George Washington once slept. Writers including Stephen King visit, and tourists try to spook each other. People often ask whether the house is haunted. The official answer is a soft no.

But the final verdict may fall to Vincent Price, the actor who visited the house some years ago before his death in 1993. Mr. Jerome said Mr. Price, who played roles in many macabre films, paid it perhaps its highest compliment. “This house,” Mr. Price said, “gives me the creeps.”

(Source: quote-book)