15,000$... For A Room.

Edgar Allan Poe's dorm room - illustrated! AP/Zinie Chen Sampson

And no - it is not some lucky winner who won that much of a budget on some "America's Home" or "House of Dreams" type of reality show...! (Admittedly, I made up those two titles because I simply cannot remember the damn shows themselves - but you know which shows I am talking about!)

A hefty sum of money was award, officially as a very serious-sounding grant, to refurbish that room in which Poe spent ten months as one of the 177 original students ever to enroll at the University of Virginia founded by Thomas Jefferson himself. There, apparently, in that tiny room, Poe had delirious concepts coming to him that spawned, eventually, The Raven and... evermore! (My way to say: etcetera!)

Now, couldn't that money have been put to much better use? I mean, sheesh, if Carl Anderson dared ask Ted Neeley if the money spent for his hair and feet would have served a greater cause being used to feed the poor... Couldn't the U.VA Alumni have thought of a greater cause, scholarly or community-related, as well...? Isn't there a flood or something going down as we type, in your area, boys...?!?

Are we so deeply in need of recognition that we hold on with all our might to the memory of the one most creative soul ever to have graced your walls with his presence...?

He probably wasn't even all that popular in the first place either - unlike some accounts have it (some describe Poe as an involved student, part of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society and entertaining friends in his room with "dramatic readings" - right. Nowadays, his type would be typecast and ostracized as the geek of service; the nerd, the gamer perhaps. No, I do not attempt a veiled funny here, as Poe was indeed a gambler. But his type, nowadays, would play Dungeons & Dragons; that is a gamer and that, in U.Va or on any other campus, is quite simply nerdy! So forget about being Mr. Social Gatherings right there... Unless things were vastly different back in the late 1820s...!)

All that talk about a ROOM, though, makes me think of something else from modern times that I am sssssssure that Poe would have adored: the music, not the images below:



Oh yeah - Poe would LOVE Marjorie Fair's music - especially this track, "Empty Room".

This don't matter much anymore to him either - talking about the room, here...

I am sure that he would despise Twilight though; not his kind of dramatic readings, you know...

;)