It's a real pleasure to be here tonight.
And I just want to thank Literacy Connects.
Everything you folks do is just amazing work in the community,
and Tyler for just setting up an event like this.
And the beautiful Poetry Center, it's just such a nice place
to kind of spend an open evening and get a chance
to really hear about some words that kind of are exciting.
So it's my job to introduce my fabulous colleague, Paul.
And I felt like I should do it a little differently than, say,
I would do it in a more academic setting.
And I thought-- I was thinking about a well, kind
of an anecdote about something that
happened to me many years ago that was
brought to mind by this event.
When I was in grad school, I had a good friend named Josie,
Josie Saldaña, who was one of the brightest,
most kind of capacious thinkers that I knew.
Just incredibly sort of careful reasoner.
And one evening a bunch of us made plans
to watch a movie together.
We didn't really have anything definite in mind.
And lo and behold, what does Josie bring over to my house,
but a copy of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
And I was like, this isn't Josie.
Josie watches these kinds of horror movies?
She's such a careful thinker, she's such a rationalist.
But no, that was what she wanted to watch.
That was what she loved, and we sat down.
And Josie sat on the floor and we started watching the movie.
And as the dramatic tension in that movie built,
Josie kind of began to sort of rock and I was like,
what is going on?
And the scarier the movie got, the harder
she rocked, back and forth, 30 degrees,
45 degrees, 60 degrees.
So for years later, we would refer to the Josie meter
as a way of measuring the scariness of a movie.
And I never really understood why
someone as rational as her would be so emotionally invested
in terrorizing herself, but as it turned out
my colleague, Paul, is better at explaining that than anyone I
know.
He's a specialist in 19th century American literature.
He got his degree at UC Berkeley.
And he's in particular a specialist
of the work of that grand American creep-artist
that we're all so obsessed with this year, Edgar Allan Poe.
He's published widely in the field.
But I just wanted to mention that his book has just come out
this summer, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking
in Edwards, Poe, and Melville from Stanford Press.
And in some sense, I would say that what Paul does in that
book is he asks the same question of America,
American literature and culture, that I was wondering about
Josie all those years.
Why does a country that claims to be based
on rational enlightenment ideals and to be
sort of precise in its thought in every way
have a literature that has so much darkness and so much
terror?
So what is it about Americans that
makes them want to be scared and what
is this feeling, this strange feeling we
have about our own thoughts that is so gloomy?
Does this date back to some Puritan fear of God?
Does it just have to do with some kind of love
of the Gothic tradition?
And what Paul's book says is no.
Its brilliance is in a sense to suggest that there's
a kind of coldness in American reason, a sort of feeling
that's associated with rational thought itself
that's distressing.
That there's something distressing
about the scientific mind.
There's a kind of a level of understanding
that doubles back to infect our sense of reason
with this kind of low grade terror.
So Paul's been doing a lot of work
since then, where he's in some ways I think,
expanding in entirely new directions,
thinking about the relevance of science and cosmology
in 19th century American literature.
He thinks about Poe, I think, from the perspective
of what he calls astronomical aesthetics,
or the sublime scale of outer space.
But you know outer space is kind of creepy too.
And I think that there's a way that there's
a hanging on to concerns with terror
that you really can't leave behind entirely
when you're dealing with the master of American darkness,
when you're dealing with Poe.
So with that thought, because there are many directions to go
and it's fun to think about Poe together this evening
with Paul, but you might head home later and have
a moment of panic when you open your front door
and it's a little dark.
And so with that in mind, let me just welcome and thank
someone who has so much to say about these kinds of phenomena,
Paul Hurh.
[APPLAUSE]