by Mark Dery
2 Mel Gussow, “At Home with Edward Gorey: A Little Blood Goes a Long Way,” New York Times, April 21, 1994, C4.
3 Ron Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000,” Mystery! website, http://23.21.192.150/mystery/gorey.html.
4 My speculations about Gorey’s heart condition, here and throughout this chapter, are based on an extensive conversation with Dr. David A. Brogno, a cardiovascular-disease physician who has taught clinical medicine at Columbia University and been an attending physician in interventional cardiology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.
5 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, February 7, 2012.
6 Kevin McDermott, “The Bathroom,” in Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2003), n.p.
7 Morton, e-mail message, February 7, 2012.
8 Alexander Theroux, The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 45.
9 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, August 26, 2016.
10 Again, this assertion is based directly on my conversation with the cardiovascular surgeon Dr. David A. Brogno. Briefed on Gorey’s medical history and provided with a copy of his death certificate, Dr. Brogno was unequivocal about the life-prolonging benefits, in Gorey’s case, of an implantable defibrillator.
11 Miller, “Edward Gorey, 1925–2000.”
12 Henry Allen, “For Years, G Was for Gorey,” Washington Post, April 19, 2000, C1.
13 Ibid.
14 Quoted in David Langford, “Obituary: Edward Gorey,” The Guardian, April 20, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/apr/20/guardianobituaries.books.
15 Probate of Will for Edward Gorey, docket number 00P0672EP-1, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Trial Court, Probate, and Family Court Department, Barnstable Division, May 24, 2000, n.p.
16 Petition to Amend Charitable Trust Under Will, docket number 00P-672EP1, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Trial Court, Probate, and Family Court Department, Barnstable Division, May 11, 2005, 3.
17 McDermott, preface to Elephant House, n.p.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 “Ever-increasing pile of debris”: Mary McNamara, “Dead Letter Writer: Edward Gorey’s Macabre Wit Comes to Life in a Westside Stage Show and Exhibition,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/29/entertainment/ca-37314.
21 Mel Gussow, “Master of the Macabre, Both Prolific and Dead,” New York Times, October 16, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/16/arts/16GORE.html.
22 Affidavit in Support of Approval of the First Intermediate Account of Trustees, docket number COP-0672-EP1, NYC 138813v3 62778-4, May 11, 2005, 3.
23 Richard Dyer, “The Poison Penman,” in Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey, ed. Karen Wilkin (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 125.
24 “A lovely sunny warm day”: Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, August 16, 2016. “Overcast and gray”: Theroux, Strange Case, 67.
25 Morton, e-mail message, August 16, 2016.
26 Edward Gorey, letter to Peter Neumeyer, in Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, ed. Peter F. Neumeyer (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2011), 7.
27 Skee Morton, e-mail message to the author, October 31, 2016.
28 Stephen Schiff, “Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense,” New Yorker, November 9, 1992, 89.
29 Gorey, letter to Neumeyer, Floating Worlds, 7.
30 Edward Gorey, “Edward Gorey: Proust Questionnaire,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 182.
31 Annie Nocenti, “Writing The Black Doll: A Talk with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 199.
32 Lisa Solod, “Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 102.
33 Ibid., 105.
34 Ibid., 101.
35 Lisa Solod, “The Boston Magazine Interview: Edward Gorey,” Boston, September 1980, 90.
36 Ibid., 91.
37 Ibid.
38 Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 1.
39 Solod, “The Boston Magazine Interview,” 91.
40 White, City Boy, 119.
41 Guy Trebay, e-mail message to the author, February 8, 2011.
42 Oscar Wilde, The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, ed. Alvin Redman (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1959), 54.
43 Dick Cavett, “The Dick Cavett Show with Edward Gorey,” in Ascending Peculiarity, 59–60.
44 Christopher Seufert interviewed by Mindy Todd on The Point for the Cape Cod–based NPR affiliate WCAI, February 27, 2014, http://capeandislands.org/post/edward-gorey-lives-documentary#stream/0.
About the Author
MARK DERY is a journalist and cultural critic. He coined the term “Afrofuturism,” popularized the concept of “culture jamming,” taught at Yale and NYU, and publishes widely on pop culture, art, and American life. His books include Flame Wars (1994), a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture; Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996), which has been translated into eight languages; and two studies of American mythologies and pathologies, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (2012). Like Gorey, he aspires “to make everybody as uneasy as possible.”
Also by Mark Dery
I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium
Escape Velocity
Culture Jamming
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