Short #HistoricalFiction Audiobook for #Summerween: Rhapsody in Blood

Stream "Rhapsody in Blood" now on Spotify.

For fans of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, this vampire fantasy features fictional versions of blues singer Bessie Smith and composer George Gershwin. 

ZombieBoy

August 1, 2018: 32-year-old Canadian model, artist, and actor Rick Genest, known as Zombie Boy for his numerous bone- and viscera-themed tattoos, dies from an accidental fall from an icy balcony where he has apparently gone to smoke a cigarette. (Bummer August)

My screen capture, fair use

Stream 'Eminent Domain' Now on Spotify

A young couple buys the waterfront home of their dreams. After years of rehab to their home, they find it was all in vain. The government is going to take it from them. Feeling robbed of his liberty, Jeff is left hopeless and is willing to lose it all.

Stream the Eminent Domain audiobook by Tit Elingtin and Erin O'Riordan, narrated by Michael E., now on Spotify.

Eminent Domain is also available for Kobo on Rakuten and at Barnes and Noble for the Nook e-reader.

Get the 'Eminent Domain' Audiobook Free with B&N Audiobooks Subscription

Do you have an audiobooks subscription with Barnes and Noble? If so, you can listen to the Eminent Domain audiobook for free.

Listen to a sample here. 

Don't have Barnes and Noble's Nook app? Download it for free from Apple or Google Play to hear this suspenseful crime novel on iOS or Android device.

You can also find Eminent Domain at Rakuten and listen to it on your Kobo app. If you have a Kobo Plus Listen subscription, it's one of the thousands of books included in your subscription.

Look for Eminent Domain on Spotify soon. You can stream Cut, a Pulp Fiction-style thriller, right now.

Amazon Prime Days: More Ideas to Spark Creativity

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Bummer July

 This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer July post with the update.

July 1, 1996: Model/actress Margaux Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, is found dead inside her home in Santa Monica, California. She has died by suicide after overdosing on the barbiturate medication Luminal.

July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. 

July 3, 1999: Musician/artist Mark Sandman, perhaps best known as a member of the band Morphine, collapses while playing a Morphine show in Palestrina, Lazio, Italy. He is pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The 46-year-old’s fatal heart attack is thought to have been triggered, in part, by the extreme heat of the day.

July 5, 1932: Z. Smith Reynolds, an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, dies of a gunshot wound. Three other people are inside the house with Reynolds at the time: Reynolds’s wife Libby Holman (a noted Broadway singer/actor), Holman’s personal assistant Ab Walker, and friend Blanche Yurka. A party has taken place at the home earlier and all of the witnesses are drunk when the shooting occurs. It’s unclear if Reynolds died by suicide, accident, or murder. Holman maintains she was too drunk to remember what happened that night. She and Walker are indicted on murder charges, but the Reynolds family insists that the charges be dropped.

July 6, 1819: Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon as a professional balloonist, dies in a hot air ballooning accident. Performing balloon ascents for a crowd at Tivoli Gardens, the Parisian amusement park, she included fireworks in her show. The fireworks ignited the helium in her balloon. Blanchard became entangled in the balloon’s net and subsequently falls to her death.

July 6, 1944: A fire at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, kills an estimated 167 people.

July 6, 1962: Author William Faulkner dies of a heart attack.

July 6, 1971: Louis Armstrong dies of a heart attack.

July 6, 1983: Model/actor Tammy Lynn Leppert, 18 years old at the time, is seen for the last confirmed time getting out of a friend’s car in a parking lot in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The friend confirms he and Leppert argued and that he dropped her off in a parking lot; Leppert has never contacted her friends or family since then. Leppert appears briefly in the movie Scarface. 

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July 6, 1988: An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland kills 165 oil workers and two rescue workers. Although no one from the platform’s owner,  Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Limited, was ever charged with a crime, neglected maintenance and inadequate safety procedures contributed to the disaster.

The platform collapses and sinks. 61 survivors are rescued.

July 7, 1930: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies of a heart attack at age 71. Reportedly, his last words were to his wife Jean: “You are wonderful.”

July 8, 1822: Poet Percy Shelley drowns while out sailing with a friend. He is 29 years old.

July 8, 1918: Ernest Hemingway is wounded while serving as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I.

July 10, 1861: After asking for a cup of coffee, Frances “Fanny” Appleton Longfellow dies of burn injuries she sustained the day before. Fanny’s dress caught on fire when either a spark or hot wax made contact with her dress as she melted sealing wax to seal an envelope containing locks of her children’s hair. 

Her husband, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was napping when he heard her screams and attempted to smother the flames with a rug. Longfellow also sustained burns to his arms and face to the extent that he was too injured to attend Fanny’s funeral. He wore a beard for the rest of his life to conceal his facial scars.

July 10, 1873: French poet Paul Verlaine shoots his inappropriately younger lover/fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist, wounding him, although the injury is not serious.

July 11, 1807: Vice President Aaron Burr shoots U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel in New Jersey. Hamilton dies the next day.

July 11, 1906: Pregnant, 20-year-old Grace Brown, a worker in the Gillette Skirt Factory, is intentionally drowned and murdered by her boyfriend Chester Gillette, nephew of the factory owner. Gillette is subsequently executed in the electric chair.

The murder inspires Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which in turn inspires the 1951 film A Place In the Sun. The character based on Brown is played by Shelley Winters.

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July 12, 1562: Bishop Diego de Landa orders the burning of Maya codices of the Yucatán, to the utter horror of the Maya people who witness the act. Only three manuscripts are known to have survived into the 21st century.

July 12, 1979: Singer Minnie Riperton dies of breast cancer. She’s 31 years old.

July 12, 1996: Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Melvoin, at the time touring with the Smashing Pumpkins as a keyboardist, dies of a heroin overdose. He’s 34 years old.

July 12, 1997: The bodies of Lela and Raymond Howard, a couple from Texas who’ve been missing for over two weeks, are found in their Oldsmobile about 350 miles away from their home. The couple had been making their annual visit to the Pioneer Days fiddle festival on June 28th when they apparently become disoriented and lose their way, ending up near Hot Springs, Arkansas. No foul play is suspected; their deaths are apparently accidental. The Oldsmobile is found at the bottom of a ravine with Lela at the wheel.

Raymond was 88; Lela was 83. They’d married 11 years earlier after each had lost their previous spouse. The incident inspired the Fastball song “The Way.”

July 12, 2014: 30-year-old John Christopher Wallace, who went by Chris, dies after running deliberately into a burning wooden effigy at the Element 11 festival in Utah. The effigy was formed in the shape of one of the monster characters from the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Volunteers attempted to stop Wallace before he got too close to the fire, but were unable to prevent the suicide.

July 14, 2015: Arthur Cave, the 15-year-old son of Australian musician Nick Cave and English fashion model and designer Susie Bick, dies after sustaining a brain injury in an accidental fall from a cliff in the family’s home of Brighton, U.K. Arthur has used LSD before the accident. He’s survived by his twin brother Earl.

July 14, 2017: Stunt performer John Bernecker dies from injuries he sustained the previous day. While filming stunt footage for the TV show The Walking Dead, Bernecker had fallen 20 feet off a balcony onto a concrete floor.

July 15, 1958: John Lennon’s mother Julia Lennon is struck and killed by a car while walking home.

July 15, 1974: During a live broadcast of the digest news program on which she appeared, 29-year-old journalist Christine Chubbuck pulls a loaded handgun from her purse, places it behind her left ear, and shoots herself in the head. She dies at Sarasota (Florida) Memorial Hospital fourteen hours later. Her family gets a court order to keep the tape of the broadcast from ever being aired again.

July 17, 1935: Cudjoe Lewis dies. The formerly enslaved man’s story of being kidnapped from his home in what is now Benin is the subject of Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon. 

July 17, 1959: At 3:10 a.m., Billie Holiday passes away under arrest in her hospital bed. Her death comes from heart failure and fluid in her lungs brought about by a failing liver. She’s 44 years old.

July 17, 1967: 40-year-old jazz saxophonist John Coltrane dies of liver cancer. Although he has been sober for the last 10 years of his life, earlier struggles with heroin and alcohol use may have contributed to his cancer.

July 18, 1817: Jane Austen dies, aged 41. Her death is speculated to have been from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

July 18, 1988: Christa Päffgen, the model and singer who performed under the mononym Nico, dies in Ibiza at age 49 from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered from a fall off her bicycle.

July 19, 1374: Tuscan poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) dies on the eve of his 70th birthday.

July 19, 1850: Journalist Margaret Fuller returns, with her husband and child, from assignment as the New York Tribune’s European correspondent aboard the merchant ship Elizabeth. The vessel’s captain has died of smallpox during the 5-week voyage. The Elizabeth, being piloted by her less-experienced first mate, strikes a sandbar off of Fire Island and is run aground. Many of the crew abandon ship and are able to swim to shore, but Fuller and her husband are never found and are presumed to have drowned. Their son’s body is found washed up on the shore.

July 21, 1796: The poet Robert Burns dies at the age of 37, leaving behind his wife and five children.

July 22, 1934: Criminal John Dillinger is shot dead by FBI agent Melvin Purvis outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago. 

July 23, 1846: Henry David Thoreau is put in jail for refusing to pay a $1 poll tax. He’s protesting the poll tax on the grounds that it supports slavery. 

July 23, 2011: English jazz singer Amy Winehouse passes away, having recently completed rehabilitation for a severe alcohol addiction. 

July 25, 1966: Poet Frank O’Hara dies from a ruptured liver. The previous night he had been struck by a dune buggy on Fire Island while standing near a beach taxi that had broken down.

July 25, 1984: Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, the first artist to record “Hound Dog,” dies of a heart attack and liver disease at age 57 in Los Angeles.

July 26, 2015: Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown, the daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, dies in a hospice care facility at the age of 22. She had been in a coma for the previous six months after being found unresponsive in her Georgia home by her fiancé, Nick Gordon. Brown was discovered face-down in her bathtub less than three years after her mother died in a bathtub at a hotel in Los Angeles. Eerily similar to her mother’s passing, Brown was found to have been intoxicated with alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, and other substances when she apparently drowned in her bathtub.

July 28, 1841: Either the police or a pair of fisherman (accounts vary) discover the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. Rogers, who was 20 or 21 years old and worked as a cigar seller in New York City, was last seen by her family on the 25th. Although the case is officially unsolved, it’s suspected she was either murdered by her boyfriend Daniel Payne or perhaps died as a result of an illegal abortion. 

Payne killed himself by overdosing on alcohol and laudanum on October 7, 1841. The discover of Rogers’s body inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”

July 29, 1974: Cass Elliot dies of a heart attack. Years of heroin abuse and cycles of rapidly gaining and losing weight have weakened her body. Cruelly, urban legend will afterwards contend that she died by choking to death on a ham sandwich. 

July 30, 1918: American author Joyce Kilmer is killed in action, shot by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne in the First World War.

July 31, 1703: Daniel Defoe is locked in a pillory as a punishment after being found guilty of seditious libel. He has criticized church officials in a pamphlet.

The Cut audiobook is now available to stream on Spotify! Add it to your audiobook library today.

CUT by Erin O'Riordan and Tit Elingtin Now Available to Stream on Spotify

The Cut audiobook is now available to stream on Spotify! Add it to your audiobook library today.

Don't have Spotify? Don't worry; you can also download the audiobook as an mp3 from Etsy. 

Bummer June

This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer June post with the update.

June 1, 1981: A mob of Sinhalese people in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, burns the Jaffna Public Library. The mob formed in protest of the killing of three Sinhalese police officers the night before, at a rally held by a Tamil pro-democracy political party. The burning of the library, which destroyed an estimated 97,000 books and manuscripts, came as part of clashes between the Sinhalese, who make up about three quarters of the population of Sri Lanka, and the Tamil minority.

June 2, 2013: Grizelda Kristiņa dies at the age of 103. She was the last fluent native speaker of Livonian, a Uralic language closely related to Estonian.

June 7, 1984: On or around this date, the Indian Army burns the Sikh Reference Library building in Punjab, India, to the ground. The library held approximately 20,000 materials, including irreplaceable handwritten manuscripts. The status of these materials is unknown and considered classified by the Indian government; they may have been destroyed, sold off into private collections, or held in an undisclosed archive somewhere.

June 7, 1993: NBA player Dražen Petrović is killed in a road accident while riding on the German Autobahn highway system in Bavaria. Petrović is not wearing a safety belt and is ejected from the vehicle, which is driven by his girlfriend.

June 8, 1971: J.I. Rodale, an early advocate of sustainable and organic farming and founder of Rodale Press, appears as a guest on a pre-taped episode of The Dick Cavett Show. In his interview for the show, Rodale states that he’s never felt better and intends to live to be 100 years old. Unfortunately, he suffers a fatal heart attack at the age of 72 that evening, as he’s sitting in a chair on the Cavett Show set listening to another guest being interviewed. Rodale is pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital; the episode is never aired.

June 9, 1865: Charles Dickens and his friend/perhaps lover Ellen Lawless Ternan are riding in a train on a voyage home from Paris. The train is near the village of Staplehurst, Kent, when it crosses a bridge. The engineer is unaware, until it's too late, that the bridge is closed for repairs and about 42 feet of track have been removed.

Dickens and Ternan, riding in the first-class car near the front of the train, are carried over the gap by the momentum of the engine. Their car lands on its side, but although they're shaken, they don’t have any serious injuries.

The center and rear cars of the train fall into the river below. Ten passengers are killed. Approximately 50 others are injured. Dickens helps render aid to the victims at the scene; some of them die in front of him. For the rest of his life he suffers flashbacks; in modern terms he could probably be said to suffer from PTSD.

June 9, 1870: Charles Dickens dies after suffering a stroke the previous day.

June 10, 1898: The last-known native speaker of the Dalmatian language, Tuone Udaina, dies. Udaina is killed in an explosion caused by road work.

June 12, 2015: Musician Dave Grohl falls from the stage, breaking his leg, while performing with the Foo Fighters in Gothenburg, Sweden.

June 14, 1949: 19-year-old typist Ruth Ann Steinhagen shoots and almost kills Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in one of the earliest recorded cases of what comes to be known as stalking. Steinhagen, a resident of Cicero, Illinois, has been obsessed with Waitkus since she sees him playing for the Chicago Cubs in 1946. She even leaves an empty plate at the dinner table for him when eating with her family. Steinhagen was seeing a psychiatrist, but this didn’t stop her from traveling to Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel, leaving a note with Waitkus’s roommate asking to meet, then shooting the baseball player with a .22 caliber rifle when he came to see her. She shot him in the chest, puncturing one of his lungs.

After shooting Waitkus, Steinhagen allegedly looked for a second bullet with which to shoot herself, but was unable to find one. Instead she called the police and told them, “I just shot a man,” allowing Waitkus to reach medical care before his injury killed him. He had to sit out the rest of the ‘49 baseball season, but returned in 1950. Eddie Waitkus developed a drinking problem and died in 1972 of esophageal cancer.

This incident was partially the inspiration for the 1952 Bernard Malamud book, then the 1984 Robert Redford film, both called The Natural. Which is partially the inspiration for the Simpsons episode “Homer at the Bat” (original air date February 20, 1992). 

June 16, 1994: Kristen Pfaff, bassist for the band Hole, dies of a heroin overdose. She is 27 years old.

June 18, 1984: Jewish talk show host Alan Berg is gunned down by two members of a white supremacist terror group in Denver. He is 50 years old.

June 19, 1999: Stephen King suffers a broken leg, a broken hip, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated scalp when he’s struck and thrown 14 feet by a Dodge minivan driven by Bryan Edwin Smith. Smith, who was distracted by the movements of his unrestrained dog in the back of the vehicle, pleads guilty to a moving violation and receives a six-month suspended sentence.

June 21, 1858: Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens’s brother Henry dies of wounds he received on June 13th as a crew member on the steamboat Pennsylvania when the boat’s boiler explodes. Mark Twain, at the time working as a crew member on the riverboat A.B. Chambers, felt guilt for the rest of his life for convincing his younger brother to work aboard a riverboat.

June 24, 2006: Three men in Pretzien, eastern Germany, burn copies of Anne Frank’s diary and the American flag in apparent support of the Nazis. The members of a far-right-wing group are charged with incitement of racial hatred.

June 24, 2023: Hikers in the San Gabriel Mountains of San Bernardino County, California, discover human remains. These turn out to be the remains of actor Julian Sands, age 65, who had been reported missing after failing to return from a hike on January 13, 2023. Winter storms, avalanches, and record snowfall in the area had hindered the search for him, although eight official searches were conducted during the five months he was missing.

June 28, 2018: A gunman attacks the offices of Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper The Capital. The assailant became enraged at the newspaper after it published a story about his arrest for harassing an acquaintance through social media. Reporter Wendi Winters, sports reporter John McNamara, columnist Gerald Fischman, editor Rob Hiaasen, and sales assistant Rebecca Smith are killed.

June 29, 1950: Ring Lardner reports to prison to begin his 1-year sentence for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He’ll serve nine months. 

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June 30, 1995: 45-year-old jazz singer and Broadway actress Phyllis Hyman dies in the hospital after having been found unresponsive in her home. She has overdosed on prescription barbiturate medication and alcohol.

Happy Birthday, Janet Jackson!

May 16th, in addition to being St. Brendan the Navigator's feast day, is also the birthday of one Ms. Janet Damito Jo Jackson, born in Gary, Indiana. In honor of my fellow Hoosier lady, here are a few of my favorite Janet Jackson videos. Today she turns 59.

All-time fave: "If," from janet, the first album I ever bought in CD format. It samples Diana Ross & The Supremes' 1969 hit "Someday We'll Be Together."

In "Alright," the choreography and video styling allude to classic musicals of the 1960s and earlier. It premiered in 1990. In the long-form mv, Black musical pioneers the Nicholas Brothers and Cab Calloway appear. The video also features legendary dancer-actor Cyd Charisse (one of my people, a white Jewish woman). 

Another classic that contains some interesting pop culture cameos is "Nasty," from 1986. It features Paula Abdul and Dennis Franz*. The video was directed by Mary Lambert, who directed several of Madonna's iconic 1980s music videos as well as feature films including Pet Sematary (1989).

*Dennis Franz was also in City of Angels with Andre Braugher.

Jackson's 1989 smash hit album Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 spun off many hit singles, including "Love Will Never Do (Without You)." 

The video features Beninese-American actor Djimon Hounsou. In addition to videos by Jackson, Madonna, Tina Turner, Paula Abdul, and En Vogue, he's also starred in many hit feature films and played Caliban in Julie Taymor's The Tempest (2010). 

Prior to 2012, when the film was scrapped, Hounsou was signed on to play John Milton's self-insert character, the seraph Abdiel, in the Bradley Cooper adaptation of Paradise Lost. (Cooper would have played Lucifer.) 

Jackson's single "Again" from 1993's janet was used in her film with Tupac Shakur, Poetic Justice*, also starring the poetry of Maya Angelou.

*And Clifton Collins Jr., just a little bit.

This is another fun one from janet: "You Want This." It's a playful tease.

"Got 'Til It's Gone," featuring rapper QTip and interpolating Joni Mitchell's rock classic "Big Yellow Taxi," was one of the big hits off of Jackson's 1997 album The Velvet Rope.

Jackson's 2001 hit "Son of a Gun (I Betcha Think This Song Is About You)" does for Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" what "Got 'Til It's Gone" did for "Big Yellow Taxi." These tracks were done with the cooperation of Mitchell and Simon respectively. 

I could go on and on. The Velvet Rope alone has many good singles. "Go Deep" is one; the video was directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who also directed the "1979" video for The Smashing Pumpkins. The song is a super-infectious earworm. I love it.

Janet Jackson is an iconic female singer/songwriter/rock star who uplifts and upholds other women in the music industry. If you like this kind of music, I am once again recommending that you read She’s A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (Expanded Second Edition) by Gillian G. Gaar.

We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 3

"We Didn't Start the Fire," again, but this time the links are to the blog of author Julie S. Howlin. She's covered many of these topics in depth in the form of Top Ten lists.

[Verse 1]

Harry Truman, Doris Day

Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific

Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon

Studebaker, television

North Korea, South Korea

Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb

Sugar Ray, Panmunjom

Brando, The King And I,

And The Catcher In The Rye

Eisenhower, vaccine

England's got a new queen

Marciano, Liberace

Santayana goodbye

[Chorus]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

[Verse 2]

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov

Nasser and Prokofiev

Rockefeller, Campanella

Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron

Toscanini, Dacron

Dien Bien Phu Falls, "Rock Around the Clock"

Einstein, James Dean

Brooklyn's got a winning team

Davy Crockett, Peter Pan

Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev

Princess Grace, Peyton Place

Trouble in the Suez

[Chorus]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

[Verse 3]

Little Rock, Pasternak

Mickey Mantle, Kerouac

Sputnik, Zhou En-lai

Bridge On The River Kwai

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle

California baseball

Starkweather homicide

Children of Thalidomide

Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur

Space Monkey, Mafia

Hula Hoops, Castro

Edsel is a no-go

U-2, Syngman Rhee

Payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, Psycho

Belgians in the Congo

[Chorus]

[Verse 4]

Hemingway, Eichmann

Stranger in a Strange Land

Dylan, Berlin

Bay of Pigs invasion

Lawrence of Arabia

British Beatlemania

Ole Miss, John Glenn

Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X

British Politician sex

J.F.K. blown away

What else do I have to say?

[Chorus]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

[Verse 5]

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh

Richard Nixon back again

Moonshot, Woodstock

Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine

Terror on the airline

Ayatollahs in Iran

Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride

Heavy metal suicide

Foreign debts, homeless vets

AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shores

China's under martial law

Rock and Roller cola wars

I can't take it anymore

[Chorus]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

But when we are gone

It will still burn on, and on

And on, and on

[Outro]

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

We didn't start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it

But we tried to fight it

Bummer May

This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer May post with the update.

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May 2, 1981: Antiques dealer Jim Williams shoots 21-year-old Danny Hansford at Williams’s historical home, Mercer House (formerly owned by composer Johnny Mercer), in Savannah, Georgia. The lovers had been in an argument; Williams argued the killing was self-defense. After four trials, Williams was acquitted. The homicide is the basis of John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. 

May 4, 1897: On the second day of a charity bazaar set up by Catholic charitable organizations in Paris, aristocratic women shop in a wooden warehouse set up to look like a Medieval market. Decorations of cardboard, cloth, papier-mache, and wood help achieve this effect. As an extra attraction, an early movie projector called a cinematograph is set up with ether lamps as a light source.

The projection equipment catches fire. With flammable materials all around and little to no signage marking the exits, the largely female crowd is trapped inside. 126 people die; 200 more are injured. Many of the dead were so badly burned that they could only be identified by their clothing, jewelry, or expensive dental work. 

May 5, 1994: American Michael Fay, age 18, receives four lashes with a bamboo cane after being convicted of vandalism in Singapore. Fay attended the Singapore American School and lived with his American mother and Singaporean stepfather. This is believed to be the first time an American was sentenced to corporal punishment in another country.

May 7, 1896: Serial killer H.H. Holmes (real name: Herman Webster Mudgett) is executed by hanging at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia after his conviction for 27 murders and attempted murder of six other people. His neck does not break when his body is dropped, and it takes over 15 minutes for Holmes to strangle to death. 

Erik Larson's book about H.H. Holmes. Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3VRiS7s

May 8, 2012: Children’s book illustrator and author Maurice Sendak dies in the hospital of complications from a stroke.

May 9, 1914: Cereal manufacturer Charles William (C.W.) Post, recovering from emergency surgery for what was believed to be appendicitis, dies by self-inflicted gunshot wound when he can longer stand his severe abdominal pain. 

His death leaves the Post cereal fortune to his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post, who uses some of it to build her mansion, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida.

May 9, 1977: American novelist James Jones dies at age 55 from congestive heart failure. 

May 10, 1933: Led by Joseph Goebbels, a crowd of 40,000 Germans gathers at the State Opera building in Berlin to watch the German Student Union burn approximately 25,000 books that they’ve decided are “un-German.”

May 10, 1943: Fire destroys the grounds of the National Library of Peru in Lima, taking it with numerous irreplaceable historical artifacts.

May 12, 2010: Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 leaves Johannesburg, South Africa, bound for Libya. A series of errors by the flight crew causes the aircraft to crash into low terrain, killing 103 of the aircraft’s 104 occupants. Among the dead is novelist Bree O’Mara, an Irish and South African dual citizen. 

The sole survivor is a 9-year-old boy from the Netherlands. Both of his legs are broken, but he sustains no life-threatening injuries. His parents were killed in the crash, so he is adopted by his aunt and uncle. 

May 13, 1988: American jazz musician Chet Baker dies of an apparently accidental fall from a window in Amsterdam, Netherlands. If you're like me, you recently heard this story on the "Sunflowers" episode of Ted Lasso.

May 14, 1998: Frank Sinatra dies of a heart attack. He's 82 years old.

May 15, 1886: Poet Emily Dickinson dies of kidney disease at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She’s 55 years old. Dickinson has not left the home since 1865.

May 15, 1953: Chester “Chet” Miller dies in a car crash during practice for the 1953 Indianapolis 500. He is 50 years old. 

May 16, 1940: During World War II, the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, rebuilt after German troops burned it down in the First World War, is shelled by the Nazis. The rebuilt library catches fire again, and approximately one million books and other materials are lost.

May 16, 1955: Writer/activist James Agee has a heart attack and dies in the back of a taxi cab in New York City. He’s 45 years old. 

May 17, 2012: Singer Donna Summer dies of lung cancer. She's 63 years old.

May 19, 1935: Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia,” dies of his wounds six days after a motorcycle crash. He is 46 years old. 

This is an affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3VUD0pm

May 21, 1703: Under the reign of Queen Anne, novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe is sent to prison for seditious libel on the basis of his satirical writings. He’ll spend six months in prison before the Earl of Oxford helps get him released in exchange for Defoe supplying the Earl with intelligence about his political rivals.

May 21, 1956: Léo Valentin attempts a dive using a wing suit at an air show in Liverpool. Among the 100,000-person crowd that day are George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and 3-year-old Clive Barker. Valentin’s wing suit malfunctions after it makes contact with the plane as he jumps. He attempts to land using a backup parachute, but it fails, and he falls to the ground to his death.

May 25, 1895: Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and taken to Newgate Prison for processing. He is later transferred to Pentonville Prison, where he is sentenced to hard labor, is malnourished, and is only allowed to read either the Bible or The Pilgrim’s Progress. 

May 25, 1979: American Airlines Flight 19, bound from Chicago to Los Angeles, loses an engine shortly after takeoff due to improper maintenance. It crashes less than a mile from the end of the runway. All 271 people on board are killed, as are two people on the ground. 

Author’s note: My mother’s first cousin, James Zielinski, was one of the passengers killed in this incident.  

May 26, 1991: Lauda Air Flight 004, flying from Bangkok to Vienna, breaks apart mid-flight and crashes into a national park in Thailand. All 223 people on board are killed. The bodies of victims who could be recovered were taken to a hospital in Bangkok, where they were stored without refrigeration; as a result of decomposition, 27 victims were never able to be identified. 

Lauda Air belonged to Austrian Formula One driver Andreas “Niki” Lauda, who himself had suffered severe burn injuries and almost died in a racing accident on August 1, 1976, at the German Grand Prix. 

May 29, 1997: 30-year-old musician Jeff Buckley drowns in the Wolf River in Tennessee.

May 30, 1955: William John Vukovich Sr., who won the 1953 and 1954 Indianapolis 500s, dies in a car crash during the 1955 Indy 500. Vukovich’s car went over a wall, sailed through the air, flipped several times, and struck a low bridge. Vukovich is partially decapitated and dies instantly when his car struck the bridge. His grandson, William Vukovich III, will die during racing practice in 1990. Metal roll bars installed in vehicles and safety-certified driver helmets were mandated starting with the 1956 Indy 500. 

May 30, 1958: Pat O’Connor is killed during the last lap of the Indy 500 amidst a 15-car pile-up. O’Connor’s car strikes Jimmy Reece’s car, sails through the air, lands upside-down, and catches fire. His death is due to head trauma from the car’s upside-down landing.

We Didn't Start the Fire, Part 2: British Beatlemania

As you'll surely recall from Part 1, I've had a tremendous amount to say about Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan. Same deal with the Beatles, so they get their own post. 

Naturally, all four Beatles are on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Blog Posts:
September 1, 2022: Walden and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
May 1, 2023: Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Mays
December 1, 2023: Unfortunate (Mostly Literary) Happenings of Past Decembers
July 1, 2024: More Unfortunate Happenings of Past Julys
November 2, 2024: More Unfortunate Happenings of Past Novembers
December 11, 2024: My Top 100 Songs of 2024: Top 20
April 2, 2025: Bummer April

A 1964 photo of Harrison, McCartney, and Lennon in the Netherlands. Public domain.

Almanac Entries:

January 9 
January 9, 1968: Look Magazine publishes Richard Avedon’s photographs of The Beatles.

January 12
January 12, 1963: The Beatles release their second single, “Please Please Me,” which goes on to be their first #1 single in the U.K. My Baby Boomer parents are each 10 years old on this date.

January 19
January 19, 1971: During Charles Manson’s murder trial, Manson’s defense attorneys introduce the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” into evidence. According to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, one of Manson’s delusion beliefs was that the song, written by Paul McCartney, referred to a coming race war. In reality, the lyrics refer to the literal meaning of a helter skelter, an English amusement ride consisting of a tower with a slide curling around it.

January 21
Friday, January 21, 1966: George Harrison and Pattie Boyd get married.

January 30
January 30, 1969: The Beatles perform a 42-minute concert on the roof of their Apple Corporation record company building in London, as documented in the concert film Let It Be. It will be their last public performance together.

January 31
January 31, 1967: On Johnny Rotten’s 11th birthday, John Lennon is shopping at an antiques store in Sevenoaks in the English county of Kent. He finds and purchases a vintage circus poster, the text of which becomes the basis for the Beatles song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

February 1
February 1, 1964: The #1 single in the U.S. is The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

February 9
February 9, 1964: The Beatles play five songs on The Ed Sullivan Show.

February 12
February 12, 1964: The Beatles perform a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.

February 18
February 18, 1933: Yoko Ono is born.

“I saw nothing was permanent. You don’t want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.” - Yoko Ono

February 18, 1971: For her 38th birthday, John Lennon Ono gifts his wife a snow-white Steinway piano.

February 20
February 20, 1994, South Bend: My brother and I went to the Main Library. I checked out some books I needed for a research project, and also some Beatles CDs.

February 26
Sunday, February 26, 1995, South Bend: I went to the Morris Performing Arts Center and saw 1964: The Tribute, a Beatles tribute band. I recognized three people in the audience: a pair of sisters who went to the same grade school as me, and Mr. Thomas Gerencher.

February 26, 1997: At the 39th Annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden, The Beatles won a Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal Grammy for “Free As a Bird.” Other winners included Tony Bennett, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, the Dave Matthews Band, and The Smashing Pumpkins.

February 29
February 29, 1968: At the 10th annual Grammy Awards, the Beatles win Album of the Year for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles are not in attendance in Los Angeles that evening, as they are in India learning at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, along with Mia Farrow, her sister Prudence, Scottish folk singer Donovan Leitch, and Mike Love of The Beach Boys.

March 5
March 5, 1963: The Beatles record “From Me to You” at Abbey Road.

Sunday, March 5, 1995, South Bend: Having read The Plague, I turned to a library book titled The Worst Rock and Roll Records Ever Made: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell [ISBN 0806512318 9780806512310].

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1019658

Here’s a list of some of the songs and bands Guterman and O’Donnell love to hate:
1. “Dancing in the Street” by Mick Jagger and David Bowie
2. “Eve of Destruction”
3. “American Pie”
4. The Doors
5. Mick Jagger’s brother Chris
6. The U2 album The Unforgettable Fire (which includes “Pride (In the Name of Love);” see April 4)
7. Ringo Starr’s albums Stop and Smell the Roses and Old Wave
8. Really anything done by Ringo Starr and (especially) Paul McCartney after the Beatles
9. The 1981 live Rolling Stones album Still Life
10. Duran Duran

March 11
March 11, 1997: Paul McCartney becomes Sir Paul McCartney when he is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

March 13
March 13, 1965: “Eight Days A Week” by The Beatles hits #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

March 20
March 20, 1969: As chronicled in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono get married in the then-British territory of Gibraltar, near Spain.

March 29
March 29, 1994, South Bend: I drove my neighbors Jay and Ryan to school this morning. We heard Aerosmith’s “Come Together” on the radio. They knew the Beatles original but had never heard the Aerosmith cover before.

March 30
March 30, 1967: The Beatles photograph the album cover photo of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Artists Jann Haworth and Peter Blake have designed the image, which portrays the group in colorful pseudo-military uniforms, surrounded by wax sculptures of themselves and numerous cardboard cutouts of famous people. Among those depicted by the cutouts are Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Stephen Crane, Bob Dylan, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Carl Jung, Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, H.G. Wells, Mae West, and Oscar Wilde.

April 2
April 2, 1974: Barbra Streisand wins an Oscar for her song “The Way We Were,” beating out Paul McCartney’s James Bond theme “Live and Let Die.”

April 8
April 8, 1963: John and Cynthia Lennon’s son John Charles Julian Lennon is born in Liverpool, U.K.

April 9
April 9, 1965: The Beatles release “Ticket to Ride” as a single.

April 9, 1969: Bob Dylan releases his Nashville Skyline album, featuring Johnny Cash on “Girl From the North Country.” On the same day, Bruce McBroom photographs the Beatles in their second-to-last photo shoot as a group.

April 11
April 11, 1964: The Beatles have 14 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart hits, including “Can’t Buy Me Love” at #1 and “Twist & Shout” at #2.

April 14
April 14, 1963: The Beatles and the Rolling Stones meet for the first time. The Beatles are in Richmond, England, to film a TV appearance. The Rolling Stones are performing at a Richmond club; the two groups meet backstage.

April 16
April 16, 1971: Ringo Starr releases his single “It Don’t Come Easy.”

April 16, 1973: ABC broadcasts the tv special James Paul McCartney, on which McCartney debuts “Live and Let Die.”

April 19
April 19, 1998, South Bend: Mom, Stephanie, and I saw City of Angels at University Park Mall. I liked it because it was a celebration of why it’s good to be human. Afterward we went to Denny’s and had pie and coffee. Later, sitting in my room reading a People magazine with Tammy Wynette on the cover, I heard on the radio that Linda McCartney had died. She and Paul had been together for the past 30 years. 

April 26
Sunday, April 26, 1998, St. Mary’s College: I spent most of the day writing papers and working on a Sculpture project. In the evening I saw the 200th Simpsons episode, “Trash of the Titans” (production code 5F09). Bart and Homer crashed a U2 concert; best guest voices ever. The episode was dedicated to another previous guest voice, Linda McCartney.

May 9
May 9, 1964: Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly” becomes the #1 song on the U.S. popular music charts, ending the Beatles’ 14-week streak of having the #1 single. Three Beatles songs (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “She Loves You”) contributed to the streak.

May 13
May 13, 1970: The Beatles documentary Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, premieres in New York.

May 14
May 14, 1968: John Lennon and Paul McCartney appear on The Tonight Show to talk about the newly-formed Apple business venture. While Johnny Carson is on vacation, the show is co-hosted by Tallulah Bankhead and pro baseball catcher-turned-tv personality Joe Garagiola. (Neat guy, Joe Garagiola. He was an honorary member of the Akimel O’otham tribal community because he helped bring badly-needed resources to the deeply impoverished Gila River Indian Reservation.) 

May 22
May 22, 1965: The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” hits #1 on the singles chart.

May 27
May 27, 1967: Tit Elingtin is born in Pontiac, Michigan, one day after the Beatles had released their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (in the U.K.; its U.S. release date was June 2nd).

June 4
June 4, 1969: The Beatles release “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in the U.S. In the U.K. it came out on May 30th.

June 16

June 16, 2001, South Bend: Once upon a time, South Bend had a summer festival called the Ethnic Festival. Tit and I, living in a downtown apartment near where the festival took place, visited it both yesterday and today. On this day we ate lunch while listening to a reggae band named Indika. 

We went home for a while, but came back out after dinner to have a funnel cake and listen to a Beatles tribute band. They wore the full Beatles suits and wigs even in the heat. They played many lesser-known songs such as “Boys” and “Taxman.” For a free concert on a beautiful night in the park, it was great. We watched the fireworks afterward.

June 17
June 17, 1974: John Lennon is in a New York recording studio working on his album Walls and Bridges when Elton John pays him a visit. Elton John hears the potential in the track “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and agrees to play piano on the song.

June 18
June 18, 1942: Paul McCartney and Roger Ebert are born.

June 18, 1973: John Lennon-Ono and Yoko Ono-Lennon attend the Watergate court hearings and hear John Dean testify. They sit beside Nixon adviser Elvin Bell in the second row, behind Dean’s wife Maureen.

July 1
July 1, 1968: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s collaborative art exhibit You Are Here (To Yoko from John Lennon, With Love) opens in London.

July 18
July 18, 1995, South Bend: I dropped Mom off at work. When I came home, I turned on the tv to see Yoko Ono and beautiful, 19-year-old Sean Lennon on the Today show.

July 25

I had stuffed crust pizza for supper. Ringo Starr stars in those commercials. He says, “I’d do it in a second. The fans will dig it. They’ve been waiting long enough. I think I can convince them. I’ll say, ‘Lads, the time has come...to eat our pizza crust-first!” And then The Monkees show up and Ringo says, “Wrong lads.”

August 15
August 15, 1965: The Beatles perform at Shea Stadium, home field of the New York Mets, in front of a crowd of 56,000.

August 26
August 26, 1968: The Beatles release their single “Hey Jude” in the United States. The B-side track is “Revolution.” Between September and November 1968, it will be the #1 single in the U.S. for nine straight weeks.

August 29
August 29, 1966: The Beatles play their last public performance together at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

August 30
August 30, 1968: The Beatles single with “Hey Jude” on one side and “Revolution” on the reverse is released in the U.K.

September 9
September 9, 1971: John Lennon releases the single “Imagine” in the U.S. 

September 20
September 20, 1974: David Bowie and John Lennon meet for the first time at Dean Martin’s 21st birthday party for Martin’s son Ricci. Ringo Starr, Elton John, and Elizabeth Taylor are also there.  

September 24
September 24, 1941: Linda McCartney is born, as Linda Eastman, in Scarsdale, New York. Her Jewish family’s name is Epstein before her father Anglicizes it to Eastman, but she’s not related to Beatles manager Brian Epstein. It’s entirely coincidental that the eventual Sir Paul marries this beautiful, talented photographer who happens to be an Epstein. She was the first woman to shoot the cover photograph for Rolling Stone magazine.

September 26
September 26, 1969: The Beatles release Abbey Road.

September 27
September 27, 1967: George Martin oversees the recording of the orchestral score of The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” The Mike Sammes Singers record their backing vocals for the track.

October 9
October 9, 1940: John Winston Lennon is born in Liverpool, England, U.K. at Liverpool Maternity Hospital.

October 9, 1971: On her husband’s 31st birthday, Yoko Ono Lennon’s solo art exhibition This Is Not Here opens in New York City. Among the guests who attend opening night is Allen Ginsberg.

October 24
October 24, 1975: Apple Records releases Shaved Fish, a compilation album by John Lennon with the Plastic Ono Band, in the U.S. 

October 31
October 31, 1994, South Bend: I went to school dressed all in black. In the hall before classes, Kristen gave me a lemon Pez from a witch Pez dispenser. In Media we began learning about the Beatles. After school, I watched a lot of TV, including the Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode (7F04), with “The Raven” read by James Earl Jones. 

November 1
November 1, 1968: George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, the first solo album by any of the Beatles.

November 2
November 2, 1994, South Bend: In our continuing exploration of the Beatles in Media, I learned that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is not about LSD at all, but rather about a drawing that Julian Lennon drew when he was quite small.

November 2, 1973: John Lennon releases his fourth solo album, Mind Games, and Ringo Starr releases (in the U.S.) his third solo album, Ringo. Ringo features songs written with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Studio musicians on Ringo include Marc Bolan and Billy Preston.

November 2, 1987: George Harrison releases his final album, Cloud Nine. 

November 16
November 16, 1974: The #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart is “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” from John Lennon’s fifth solo album, Walls and Bridges.

November 17

November 17, 1980: Yoko Ono and John Lennon Ono release their Double Fantasy album, the second album ever released on Geffen Records. 

November 24
November 24, 1993, South Bend: American Literature class began with one of classmates (Jessica or Nicole) asking Mr. Gerencher “Who is the other Beatle in this picture with John Lennon?” It was Yoko Ono. We then got around to discussing Edgar Allan Poe.

December 10

December 10, 1995, St. Mary’s: I read three stories from my soon-to-be-returned literature book: Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Donald Barthelme’s “The Sandman,” and Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilých.”

At 8 p.m. I went to Lessons and Carols in the Church of Loretto. Sister Jean read “Christmas Calls a Community,” which was Lesson #8. I liked it, because the music was great and it had dancing. This is a Roman Catholic community, so we don’t usually have liturgical dancing. 

After the service, I made hot chocolate and watched the classic ‘80s movie Space Camp with Charmaine and some of the other women from our floor. While we were watching it, Kara came by and asked me if I had the Beatles’ White Album, because she wanted to listen to “Rocky Raccoon,” but that’s not one I have.

December 20
December 20, 1980: Twelve days after the artist’s death, “(Just Like) Starting Over” by John Lennon becomes the first #1 hit for Lennon as a solo artist.

December 26
December 26, 1963: The first Beatles singles to be released in the U.S., “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” are...released...in the U.S. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a more clever way to word this clearly.

December 31
December 31, 2010: Tit and I celebrated the New Year at Tom and Melissa’s house again. We ate, drank some mixed drinks, and hung out, talking. Melissa’s brother Andrew and I played Beatles Rock Band together. After midnight, I switched to drinking soda so I could be our designated driver.