Uncle Morty: Five Favorite Genres

Five Favorite Genres 

​by Uncle Morty 

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Your Uncle Morty has been tasked with listing his five favorite genres for a blog post.  These genres will be meaningless to the living in all likelihood, however, never let it be said I don’t help out when I’m asked. I do read some of the same genres as the skin-covered, but I tend to stick to books that deal more strictly with my current condition.

​Just last week – in your understanding of time – I was at a branch of the Netherworld Library, the closest one, the one on Liminal Road just between the Valley of Life and Death and the Sweet Hereafter Villas, and I thought about which sections I haunt more than others.
 
Most of my favorite genres fall under the umbrella of Metaphysics.  I’m always checking out books on Esoteric Cosmology.  One of my favorites is a long treatise on what Edgar Allan Poe accidentally got right about the after life, by Talmaius Smudge, who discovered Poe’s works in his six or seven hundredth death year while he was on an assignment similar to mine.  Fascinating stuff really. 
 
Another branch of metaphysics I’ve found appealing is Ontology, a quest to understand the nature of being and reality. I do not question my own reality so much as I question the thickness of living creatures’ responses to it. Of course, the living often immediately think of St. Anselm’s ontological argument, his bizarre need to assume a level of existence he could never hope to experience or understand and discuss it with the idea that he’d settled something. While embodied, I read it too and found it interesting. Oh well…it was pre-television. We had to amuse ourselves somehow.  Now, I’m into more next world ontologies like The Existential Memory: Are You Weighing Down Your Afterlife with Former Realities? and A Well Examined Death: Becoming Real in the Sixth Dimension.
 
I also love to read any kind of narrative philosophy. It’s way more important on this side than you would think.  Stories stretch beyond any particular life and even reach their tentacles past the threshold of and deep into the afterlife. In fact, I don’t want to throw out spoilers, but narrative connections are even more important over there.
 
Finally – I know this is only four categories, not five, but that’s plenty for what they pay me – I have been reading Deathographies. This is more in the nature of research since I’m considering writing my own. If you ever get over here, I have a suggestion to make.  Don’t base which deathographies you read on who was famous on the living side. How you live and how you die are two different things.  So far, one of the best I’ve read was by a Mrs. Edna Brown from a little town called Whistlestop.
 
Anyway, I now consider my job done, although I’m not sure how meaningful it is. Happy reading here and beyond!
 

Bio:
Mortimer Richard Wolcott is, quite frankly, not very forthcoming with his bio. We're not even sure if that's his real name. His work during his previous embodiments is not something he'll willingly share.  He also won't explain why he's currently assigned to the world of the living. His deathography only somewhat clear from the point at which he showed up at Sacred Chickens Farm for a Halloween Party and never left.  He is occasionally pressed into service to help write the blog and you can search the archives here for his wisdom.  He enjoys hanging out with cats, the occasional cocktail, and dispensing sarcastic remarks to the living.

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