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.
February 16, 1957: Actor and reading enthusiast LeVar Burton is born in Landstuhl, West Germany. His father Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Sr. was serving as a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer at the time. Burton’s mother Erma Gene was a teacher and social worker.
These are some of my favorite episodes of the podcast LeVar Burton Reads.
Previous Installment in the "Bummer" Series: Bummer New Year
February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.
February 2, 2014: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Truman Capote in Capote, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of prescription medicine and heroin.
February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971.
February 7, 1497: On Shrove Tuesday in Florence, followers of the monk Girolamo Savonarola burn art, books, their cosmetics, fancy clothes, playing cards, and other cultural objects they associate with sin in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, irreplaceable ancient art and manuscripts were lost to this religiously-fueled war on anything that represented luxury.
Ironically, Savonarola will later be excommunicated and convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. As punishment, he is hanged and his body burned in the same plaza where the Bonfire of the Vanities occurred. It will be forbidden for any Christian to possess copies of Savonarola’s writings.
February 10, 2005: Playwright Arthur Miller dies of bladder cancer.
February 11, 1963: Poet Sylvia Plath, who struggles with clinical depression, dies by suicide, inhaling gas by placing her head inside an unlit gas stove. She is 30 years old.
February 11, 2012: 48-year-old singer/actress Whitney Houston is found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Paramedics attempted CPR but are unable to revive her. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office attributes her death to atherosclerotic heart disease, cocaine use, and drowning. (Ok, this one's not really "literary." I'll allow it.)
February 12, 1980: Two days after 34-year-old Patricia Frazier of Texas saw a CBS network TV broadcast of the movie The Exorcist, Frazier kills her 4-year-old daughter Khunji and cuts out her heart. According to Dr. Leon Morris, a psychologist who spoke with Frazier after the crime, Frazier believed Khunji was possessed by demons and trying to harm her (Patricia). A jury of her peers finds Patricia Frazier not guilty by reason of insanity.
February 13, 1945: U.S. and U.K. forces drop incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, causing fires with the intention of destroying munitions factories in that city. A second round of bombs are dropped in the early hours of February 14th, calculated to hamper the efforts of rescuers on the scene of the first round of bombings and fires. It’s estimated that between 22,000 and 25,000 Germans are killed, almost all of them civilians.
Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is there as an American prisoner of war being held by the German army. The experience forms the basis of his science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
February 14, 1929: In what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone’s gangsters line up seven members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang and machine gun them to death. Police arrive in time to find one survivor, Frank Gusenberg, suffering from 14 bullet wounds. They ask Gusenberg to name his killer, but Gusenberg refuses before he succumbs to his injuries.
February 14, 1989: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issues a pronouncement urging faithful Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses depicts a fictional version of the Prophet Mohammad as a character, which the Ayatollah considers blasphemous.
February 15, 1998: 89-year-old war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, struggling with ovarian and liver cancer and failing eyesight, chooses to end her own life by swallowing cyanide.
February 17, 1673: French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote under the pen name Molière, suffers a tuberculosis-induced pulmonary embolism while performing in his own play The Invalid. He finished out the show, but was carried immediately home afterward, where he died.
February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.
February 19, 2013: The body of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam is discovered in the water tower atop the Stay on Main hotel in Los Angeles, California. Lam is believed to have entered the tank of her own volition and accidentally drowned, possibly while experiencing the effects of withdrawal from her psychiatric medications.
February 25, 1983: Playwright Tennessee Williams dies of an apparently accidental overdose of the barbiturate medication Seconal.
February 26, 2015: Australian author Jessica Ainscough, age 29, dies of a rare cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. In 2008, her doctors suggested amputating her affected left arm at the shoulder, which would have given her a greater than 50% chance of surviving for ten years or more. Ainscough chose to treat her cancer with alternative therapies rather than having the amputation. She used the alternative treatments for six years, only returning to conventional medical treatments near the end of her life when she developed a tumor that bled continuously for ten months.
February 28, 1916: The Turn of the Screw author Henry James dies of pneumonia.
February 29, 1960: Melvin Purvis II, the FBI agent who shot and killed John Dillinger (and who was played by Christian Bale in Public Enemies), dies by suicide.
Now, after all that bad news, if you want to take a little Public Enemies sidebar and learn about the song "Blue Moon," read here.
Host Rob Harvilla begins the episode by talking about how one of Erykah Badu's songs that samples a Kool & The Gang song reminds him of Ron Harper's Basketball Camp. Ron Harper reminds me of the Chicago Bulls, so I said this.
To me, a salient fact about Ron Harper is that he and Toni Kukoč have matching shark tattoos. But that's just me. My thing about Toni Kukoč is, I love him.
P.S. My brother and his family gave me a gift card for the winter holidays. I picked out these books:
One is Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951)-adjacent. The other is a book about British witches written by Juno Dawson, a trans woman, one of America's most-banned authors, and definitely not transphobic.
And now, because I happen to be in between day jobs at the moment, please enjoy the following affiliate audiobook link.
January 3, 2014: Islamist extremists burn the Christian books of Al-Saʼe Library in Tripoli, Lebanon.
January 5, 2015: Danish martial artist/model/actor Khan Bonfils is rehearsing for a London stage production of Dante’s Inferno when he collapses suddenly. Paramedics are unable to revive him, and the 42-year-old is pronounced dead at the scene.
January 7, 2015: Two Islamist extremists target the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Twelve people are killed, including five cartoonists and two editors.
January 8, 1970: Actor George Ostroska, playing the lead role in a St. Paul, Minnesota, production of Macbeth, dies of a heart attack at the beginning of the play’s second act. Ostroska is 32 years old.
January 9, 1946: Poet Countee Cullen dies at age 42 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning (kidney failure).
January 11, 1879: The Birmingham Central Library in England catches fire and loses about 49,000 of its 50,000 books and other circulating materials.
January 12, 1965: Author Lorraine Hansberry dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.
January 14, 1898: Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia while suffering from influenza.
January 19, 1729: Restoration-era playwright William Congreve dies of complications from internal injuries he suffered in a September 1728 carriage accident.
January 23, 1943: Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who regularly performed on the radio, appeared in a panel discussion about Adolph Hitler on CBS Radio. Listeners noticed he was uncharacteristically quiet during the discussion.
In fact, Woollcott was having a heart attack. He wrote “I am sick” on a pad to paper to let the other participants know he needed medical attention. He died in the hospital a few hours later.
January 28, 1960: African-American folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston dies from heart disease after suffering a stroke.
January 29, 1933: Poet Sara Teasdale overdoses on sleeping pills, an apparent suicide. She is 48 years old.
January 30, 2006: 55-year-old playwright Wendy Wasserstein dies of lymphoma.
Illustration for "The Children's Dickens: Stories selected from various tales" (1909) London: Henry Frowde and Hodder and Stoughton by Gilbert Scott Wright (24 July 1880 – 1958). This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1928.
December 16, 1913: Ambrose Bierce writes to his literary secretary, “I am going to Mexico with a pretty definite purpose which is not at present discloseable. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia!”
Neither Bierce’s literary secretary nor any of his other acquaintances ever heard from him again after this letter.
