Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
August 4, 1875: Hans Christian Andersen dies, possibly suffering from liver cancer and never having recovered from injuries from falling out of his bed.
August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home by an assailant with a hatchet. Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter Elizabeth, called Lizzie, is the primary suspect in the murders. She is tried for the crime and acquitted.
August 4, 1962: Marilyn Monroe dies, apparently by suicide, of an overdose of prescription sleeping medicine.
In August 2022, I saw Jordan Peele's Nope and had the idea for a spin-off almanac of just the bad stuff. As a preview of my work in progress, I've been bringing you, the reader, posts about the most unpleasant historical happenings I come across, with a literary focus.
The following is additional material that's gone into the August entries since last year. In other words, there are some of the things I missed in last August's post.
August 1, 1994: An electrical fault sparks a fire at Norwich Central Library in Norwich, England, that destroys an estimated 100,000 books and historical papers.
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.
August 3, 1924: Author Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack at age 66.
August 3, 1966: 40-year-old comedian Lenny Bruce is found dead of an apparently accidental morphine overdose.
August 4, 1875: Hans Christian Andersen dies, possibly suffering from liver cancer and never having recovered from injuries from falling out of his bed.
August 4, 1962: Marilyn Monroe dies, apparently by suicide, of an overdose of prescription sleeping medicine.
August 8, 1965: American author Shirley Jackson dies at age 48 of cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by her alcoholism and use of a variety of prescription medicines.
August 12, 2022: Indian-British author Salman Rushdie is stabbed ten times at an event in Chautauqua, New York, allegedly by a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. Rushdie suffers nerve damage to one arm, one eye, and his liver. The attacker was apparently motivated by a late Iranian religious leader’s description of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as blasphemous since it depicted the prophet Muhammad as a fictional character.
Rushdie is an atheist. The attacker had not read The Satanic Verses.
August 16, 1949: Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell dies in the hospital of injuries she sustained on August 11th when she was struck by a speeding car with an intoxicated driver. The driver was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and served 11 months in jail.
August 18, 1992: On or around this date, 24-year-old adventurer Christopher McCandless dies of apparent starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. The story of his nomadic, short life is the basis of the book and film Into the Wild.
August 19, 1936: According to LitHub, “Federico García Lorca—the Spanish avant-garde poet, playwright, and ardent socialist—was shot and killed by Nationalist militia before being buried in an unmarked mass grave somewhere outside Granada, where he remains to this day.”
Lorca had predicted his manner of death in his 1929 poem “The Fable And Round of the Three Friends:”
“Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
August 23, 1981: East German comedic actor Rolf Herricht suffers a heart attack and dies while performing in Kiss Me Kate at Berlin’s Metropol theatre.
August 25, 1914: During World War I, German troops occupying Leuven, Belgium, set fire to the city and destroying almost half of it. 300 civilians die. Included in the burning and destruction is the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, which loses approximately 230,000 materials, including priceless medieval manuscripts.
August 25, 1992: The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina is destroyed by Serbian bombing during the Siege of Sarajevo.
If you haven't already, you can still go to Kelly Walker's Jaded Stone post for a chance to win $50 in either Amazon.com gift cards or Paypal cash. You'll want to come back tomorrow (November 22) as well for another giveaway.
That giveaway will have to do with Susan Hayes' novel Riptide, a male/male/female erotic romance featuring two brothers who are selkie shape shifters. What exactly are selkies? They're similar to mermaids, but not exactly the same. For the best answer, let's turn to Barbara Sjoholm's oceanic folklore-logue The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O'Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea.
Sjoholm writes:
"Like tales of mermaids who take off their scaly nether parts and walk on land, the better to lure unwitting men to their watery kingdoms, transformative stories of the seal folk abound in the northern islands [of Scotland, namely the Shetlands and the Orkneys]. But seals embody an old animism, when animals were regarded as powerful and numinous, and when humans would mimic them and wear their skins to take on their power. So many stories of the seal folk, selkies or silkies in the local tongue, seem to be about humans trying to capture the spirit of the selkie. One common version begins when a man spies a group of girls sunbathing naked on a beach or a rocky shore.
"When he approaches, most of the girls get away, but one doesn't, for he steals her spotted skin and hides it somewhere secret in his house. He takes her home, and she tries to be a good wife to him. But always in the story comes a time when she finds, or one of her children tells her where to find, the box or the chest with the skin inside. As soon as she finds it, she's gone. Although the tales often seem to be about love, they are never about renunciation. The choice of [Hans Christian] Andersen's Little Mermaid, to become human and to suffer, is not for the selkie wife. No, she's tricked into living in a human body for a time, but she always escapes back to her true element at the end.
"The many stories of seal folk aren't all about capturing seals for wives. Some are about seal men seducing women (an explanation for out-of-wedlock pregnancy, perhaps) and about crossing a boundary between human and animal, about understanding the connection across species. Sometimes men who are great hunters of seals are taken below and shown the wounds of their prey, after which the hunters hunt no more. But many of the stories are about shape shifting, about changing from animal to human and back. The appeal of the selkie, and indeed the seal, is its amphibious nature. That possibility of living in both worlds is what humans hold to, especially seafarers, fishers, coast dwellers. What if drowning were only a dream from which you woke into a beautiful marine world filled with lavish meals and luxurious houses? What if the fathers and brothers who never came back from fishing were safe and sound under the waves? What if the large gray seal lifting his curious head from the sea to look at you were a relative? How comforting that would be."
So the selkies are the seal men and seal women of Northern European folklore (although I'm sure such creatures exist in the folklore of many coastal dwellers, under different names). Now you're up to speed for tomorrow's post.
I know, I know, I know - the women in Disney cartoons, except possibly Mulan, are losers. They're passive damsels in distress who get by mostly on their sex appeal. The case against Disney princesses as role models for your daughters is laid out by Erik Wecks in Great Geek Debates: Disney Princesses vs. Hayao Miyazaki.
Guffaw if you must, but like Twilight, the Disney cartoons deliver on the classic romance novel formula. Walk with me for a moment on the cartoon characters who, in a fictional Disnified world, would be my baby daddies. CCILFs, you could call them.
5. Eric in The Little Mermaid. The prince in the 1989 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's beloved fairy tale is a feminist nightmare - his ideal woman is one with, literally, no voice at all. On a symbolic level, that's awful, although in real life, a woman with mutism would learn sign language and get on with her life.
But with Eric, you get this, among the most romantic of Disney tunes:
4. Aladdin. A thief and a liar, Aladdin was perfectly willing to live his life as the fraudulent Prince Ali if it would get him Princess Jasmine. He's a scoundrel. Yet we still root for him to get together with Jasmine.
The story of Aladdin comes from the Arabian Nights, but it doesn't seem to have been added to the book until circa 1709, when a French author included it. (Disney makes no reference to any of the translators or compilers of The Arabian Nights in the film's credits.) In the original folk tale, Aladdin is Chinese. Later storytellers located his home in Baghdad (the capital of modern Iran, but historically part of a number of different empires, including Genghis Khan's Mongol empire and the Ottoman Turkish empire), which Disney transformed into the fictional city of Agraba, but Aladdin and Jasmine are most likely Arabic or Persian. There are plenty of hot Persian dudes; just ask Bodazey Magazine.
3. Prince Naveen of The Princess and the Frog. Voiced by hunky Brazilian Bruce Campos, Naveen is prince of an undetermined country. (His name is from India.) A misbehaving brat, he gets turned into a frog and takes hard-working, would-be restauranteur Tiana down into the swamp with him. Only true love saves them from a lifetime of amphibian-ness. Once you get past Eric, do you sense a theme? Disney princesses love them some bad boys.
Of course, in the Brothers Grimm version, the princess refuses to kiss the nasty, slimy frog and turns him into a prince by slamming him into the wall of her bejeweled bedroom when the persistent little critter insists on sleeping in her bed.
2. Flinn Rider, a.k.a. Eugene Fitzherbert, of Tangled. I just watched this the other day, which is what inspired this blog post. I like to think that Flinn, voiced by Zachary Levi (who also played Chuck on Chuck), is the first Jewish Disney prince. Sure, his name is super Anglo, but there is that running joke about the wanted posters making his nose look so big. I feel like this is a nod and a wink to the audience. Jewish on his mother's side, Anglo-Saxon on his father's, I say. Of course, the actor who voiced Aladdin, Scott Weinger, is also Jewish, but Aladdin himself seems to be Persian or Arab.
The Brothers Grimm, terrible with names, gave names to neither the prince in "Rapunzel" nor the princess in "The Princess and the Frog." Flinn is only a prince by marrying Rapunzel anyway; taking a page out of Aladdin's book, he begins as an orphan and a thief. Depending on the rules of Rapunzel's fictional kingdom, he may be considered a consort rather than an actual prince, since he's a commoner.
(As of this writing, the above Brothers Grimm e-book is free!)
1. Thomas from Pocahontas. Right now you're probably thinking, "Who?" Thomas is the young redhead who falls off the ship early in the cartoon. Later, his overzealous use of firearms nearly causes a war between the English and Pocahontas' tribe, the Algonquian people. But he's careless and naive, not intentionally bad. Most importantly, though, he's voiced by Christian Bale. He's no Wizard Howl, but for a Disney dude, Thomas is all right.
Note that I don't particularly enjoy this film. Not only does it have Mel Gibson cooties, but (hopefully embarrassed for the racist portrayal of American First Nations people in Peter Pan), the script goes way overboard on Pocahontas' tree-hugging nobility - and I say this with a healthy respect both for Mother Earth and for indigenous spirituality. Plus, it plays very fast and loose with a real, historical woman's life story. For one thing, she was approximately 12 years old the first time she met John Smith.
This is a naughty artist's rendition of the ginger Thomas, not the blond John Smith.
If you want to see the whole gallery of 20 sexy Disney dudes, visit the source: AcidCow.com.
Official book blurb of Phantom Lives: Collier (Book One): Abigail Black, an heiress from Memphis is on the run from her abusive boyfriend, Dallas. In the process she finds out that there she is being pulled towards something, and someone, that she thought only existed in her dreams. Another page-turning adventure from Elizabeth Loraine. Phantom Lives intertwines the modern world with the post Civil War world of Collier, a plantation Abigail had dreamt about her entire life. Now she is about to find out why. Another fantasy world of spirits and immortals is built in a way which fans of Ms Loraine’s will again thoroughly enjoy. Find out who Abigail was in the past and how it changes everything.
Acclaimed author Elizabeth Loraine is the author of the Royal Blood Chronicles, the saga of the noble protectors and the evil Dark Vampires, set in the 1800s. The young adult series features a quintet of teenage female protagonists. Elizabeth's latest book is available on Amazon Kindle for the limited-time price of $.99 this week only.
Here are some more fascinating facts about Elizabeth Loraine:
*She's from Minnesota.
*Earlier in her career, she was a decorative painter.
*She turned to writing after raising her children.
*She loves fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen.
*Another one of her favorite authors is Anne Rice.
*She writes every day.
*She loved Twilight, but thinks that too many female characters in paranormal YA novels are weak.
*She prefers her fictional females to be strong leading characters.
*To research The Royal Blood Chronicles, she studied the royal lines of Germany and Austria.
*When Elizabeth isn't writing, she loves to cook and take care of her garden.
Earlier this week, I wrote an article for SexIs about Scarleteen and some of the other websites young adults can turn to for accurate sexuality advice. Today my writing mission, should I choose to accept it, is to start a scholarly-humorous piece about the association between fish and female genitalia. One of the research materials I've gathered is A Mermaid's Tale: A Personal Search For Love and Lore by Amanda Adams.
I've had this book from the library before, and I recall that it contains several versions of the European fairy tale of Melusina. I first heard of Melusina in 1999, when I was a college student taking a course on women and religion. One of the texts I read was Sexes and Geneologies by the French feminist Luce Irigaray, which introduced me to the half-fairy princess considered to be the mother of some prominent French families and the architect of a number of castles. (I'm thinking she's associated with Brittany, but that could be wrong.)
Melusina, whom I remember best as Melusine, was cursed by her fairy mother for the crime of imprisoning her human father. Once a month she turned into, depending on your source, either a mermaid or a snake-creature. Like the bean-sidhe (Gailge for "woman of the fairy mounds," appropriated by the English language as banshee), Melusine's cries can be heard to foretell the deaths of her descendants.
I found this fairy tale fascinating and stored it away in my brain for a decade. (Writers, in case you didn't know, are like walking encyclopedias.) Finally I wrote my own version, "Melusine's Secret," which appears in the Hearts of Tomorrow anthology from Melange Books. In my version, Melusine's transformation has less to do with fish or serpents...but I won't spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say there's magic and sexual exploration.
In the Disney version of the The Little Mermaid, Ariel loses her voice in exchange for legs to walk around on land. In the Hans Christian Andersen version, the mermaid gets her legs but must suffer terrible pain when she walks. In the midst of my dual crush on Indiana Pacers Reggie Miller and Rik Smits (see "Pairs of Really Big Ones"), I remembered this aspect of the fairy tale at the tail end of Rik's career, when he was having ongoing foot problems. Putting two and two together, I determined that the big, blond Netherlander was, in fact, a merman.
That's what I know about men and fish tails. Now I must be off to discover the secret behind women's tails and fishes. P.S. "Popsicles and Icicles" is an oldie pop hit for a singing group called The Murmaids, in case ya didn't know.
If you're anything like me, you can't resist a good book of carefully-selected, well-crafted short stories. I especially can't resist a good book of fantasy or speculative short stories...haven't been able to since I was a kid. What if you could create your own anthology, hand-picking each of the stories yourself?
You can do just that at Anthology Builder. You can also browse anthologies crafted by other editors.
Some of the world's greatest English-language short story writers are here: Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and more. There are also contemporary writers, from Shanna Germain to your humble blogger here.
Erin O'Riordan stories and essays available for your use on Anthology Builder are:
by the French feminist Luce Irigaray, which introduced me to the half-fairy princess considered to be the mother of some prominent French families and the architect of a number of castles. (I'm thinking she's associated with Brittany, but that could be wrong.)
