Rebecca and The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe's reburial and new monument,
Oct. 1, 1875. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was going to write this right after we got back from the movies, but one thing led to another, and I didn't get to it until now.  I learned a lot about Edgar Allan Poe while Rebecca and I were talking about The Raven on the way home (for the record, we both enjoyed it.  A lot.).  For one thing, I found out that she likes to play a Poe video game (you can play it for free at Pogo) that is about Poe's mysterious death, which the movie explains in an interesting way.  Reb says that there is no good explanation anymore, because everyone who might have known went to the grave without talking.  According to her, Poe's drinking problem was not that he drank too much; it was that he became very drunk on very small amounts of liquor, so alcohol poisoning (one of the popular solutions to the mystery) won't fly. 
She cracked up during the pit and the pendulum murder in the movie, because the victim was Rufus Griswold, whom she says is the big villain in Poe's life.  Griswold was a critic who managed somehow to get the rights to Poe's works after he died, and cheated Poe's aunt along with writing a variety of untrue and nasty things about Poe (according to Reb).  She thought it was pretty funny that the filmmakers killed him (and that they killed him that way).  She had a lot more to say about Poe's life, but I need to stop for now.

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