Bummer April

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

April 8, 1994, South Bend: On my last real day of spring break, I woke up rather late in the morning, then had some leftover Taco Bell for breakfast. I took Maggie the dog for a walk without incident, which was a shame because I was hoping there would be incident. When I got back I turned on MTV and involuntarily learned that Kurt Cobain had been found dead at his home in Seattle. Very sad, not only that he left behind a wife and a very young daughter but also that Nirvana only had time to record four albums. 

April 8, 1997: 49-year-old singer/songwriter Laura Nyro dies of ovarian cancer. Nyro’s mother Gilda Mirsky Nigro had also died of ovarian cancer at the age of 49.

April 10, 1931: Lebanese-American novelist Kahlil Gibran dies at age 48 of cirrhosis and tuberculosis.

April 10, 1962: Stu Sutcliffe, the 21-year-old Scottish musician and original Beatles bass player, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage. This internal injury, a ruptured aneurysm, may have been related to a head injury Sutcliffe suffered in 1961 as a result of a street fight in which John Lennon also suffered minor injuries.

April 10, 2003: When the United States invades the Iraqi capital of Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein, officials at the Iraqi National Library and Archives fear that its archives of papers related to Hussein and his Ba’athist Party will incriminate them. They hire local people, many of them poor and likely motivated by the money, to loot and set fire to the library. These acts destroy about 60% of the archives and 25% of the library materials, including one of the oldest known copies of the Koran.

April 12, 1204: Christian Crusaders turn on the Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, in three days of looting and burning. The rampage destroys the Library of Constantinople and other priceless works of art and ancient artifacts.

April 14, 1865: U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth.

April 14, 1922: Shortly after she hears a radio program on which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes his Spiritualist beliefs, a New Jersey woman named Maude Fancher decides she wants to live in the spirit world with her 2-year-old son Cecil. She kills Cecil, then attempts to kill herself by drinking a bottle of Lysol cleaning solution. Maude Fancher survives.

April 14, 1965: Perry Edward Smith and Dick Hickok are executed by hanging by the state of Kansas for the murders of the Clutter family on November 15, 1959.

April 15, 1865: After being in a coma for eight hours, Abraham Lincoln dies from the bullet wound inflicted on him by John Wilkes Booth.

April 15, 1888: English poet Matthew Arnold dies. He has suffered a heart attack while chasing after a streetcar.

April 16, 1689: Playwright Aphra Behn dies. She is 48 years old.

April 17, 1998: Linda McCartney dies of breast cancer that has spread to her liver. She’s 56 years old.

April 18, 1906: The Great San Francisco Earthquake strikes Northern California. About 80% of the city is destroyed. The collapse of so many buildings and subsequent fires are responsible for around 3,000 deaths. Fire chief Dennis T. Sullivan was among the victims of the earthquake, so the interim fire chief requested help from the U.S. military. Both psychologist Henry James and writer H.G. Wells (on his first visit to the United States) remarked on the positive attitude and general helpfulness of the survivors in the rebuilding effort.

April 18, 1966: A fire at the Jewish Theological Seminary library in Manhattan destroys 70,000 books. Fortunately, most of these were additional copies of books housed on the ground floor of the library, which was not damaged in the fire. The library’s collection of rare manuscripts is also unharmed.

April 19, 1824: George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron, dies of malaria while fighting in Greece for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. He is 36 years old.

April 21, 1910: Mark Twain dies in Redding, Connecticut, as Jill Badonsky writes in The Awe-manac, “just one day after Halley’s Comet’s perihelion.” The author born Samuel Langhorne Clemens is quoted as having said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it.”

April 21, 1978: English folk-rock singer Sandy (Alexandria) Denny dies at age 31 from head injuries sustained from a fall down some stairs at her home. Denny, who had bipolar disorder, was known to use falls as a form of self-harm and had sustained a previous head injury from another fall down the stairs. Denny was being treated for headaches with a medication known to mix poorly with alcohol, so it’s unclear if Denny’s ultimate fall was an act of self-harm or an accident precipitated by mixing her medication with alcohol. 

April 21, 2016: The musician who performs as Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson) is found dead in an elevator inside his home. He has apparently passed away from taking pills of the opioid medication hydrocodone, to which he was addicted, which were counterfeit and laced with fentanyl. He is 57 years old.

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On the same day, true crime writer Michelle McNamara dies in her sleep of an accidental overdose of street drugs and prescription medication. McNamara’s husband, actor Patton Oswalt, has acknowledged that McNamara was addicted to opioids. Her health condition was caused, in part, by her harrowing research on her book I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (this is an affiliate link). The book tells the story of a serial rapist and murderer who was not caught until 2018, two years after McNamara’s death.

April 22, 1915: 27-year-old poet Rupert Brooks dies of sepsis due to wounds he received fighting for the British Royal Navy during the First World War.

April 22, 1987: 52-year-old Ruthie Mae McCoy, who lives in the Grace Abbott Homes public housing project in Chicago, called the police to report that, “...some people next door are totally tearing this down, you know–” When the dispatcher pressed her for clarification, McCoy said, “Yeah, they throwed the cabinet down...I’m in the projects, I’m on the other side. You can reach—can reach my bathroom, they want to come through the bathroom.” 

What the dispatcher didn’t know was that in the Grace Abbott Homes, the contractors who built the building had left the apartments’ back-to-back bathrooms connected by a narrow tunnel, which had made access easier for the plumbers. Neighborhood residents intent on burglary had discovered that by removing the bathroom mirror of one apartment, they could crawl through the narrow tunnel and reach the bathroom of the apartment on the opposite side.

This is what happened to McCoy: would-be burglars came through the space where her bathroom mirror had been and shot her to death. A second 911 call from a neighbor reported the sound of gunshots coming from McCoy’s apartment. Police knocked on McCoy’s door that night, but when they received no answer, they left without entering the apartment. Apparently they were unwilling to break down the door due to the prospect of being sued. 

McCoy’s lifeless body is found the next day; she has been shot four times. The tragic story of urban neglect and the intruders who entered the apartment through a bathroom mirror inspired the movie Candyman. 

April 22, 2000: Playing Judas in an Easter play in Rome, Renato Di Paolo dies by accidental hanging. His death is caught on film by a member of the audience.

April 22, 2012: Brazilian actor Tiago Klimeck is taken off life support and dies. He has been in a coma since accidentally hanging himself while performing as Judas Iscariot in an Easter passion play in Itarare, Brazil. Klimeck is 27 years old. He may have accidentally gotten some of his clothes tangled in the safety harness meant to give him the illusion of hanging by his neck.

April 22, 2021: 57-year-old Gregory Jacobs, the musician who rapped under the name Shock G and other aliases, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of fentanyl, alcohol, and methamphetamine. 

April 25, 2002: Rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes is driving an SUV in La Cieba, Honduras, where she’s filming a documentary while on a spiritual retreat with her two siblings. She swerves to avoid an oncoming vehicle, only to swerve into the path of another vehicle, causing her to swerve sharply to the left. She strikes two trees, throwing her and three passengers from the SUV. Lopes, who is only 30 years old, dies instantly of severe head trauma. Her passengers are injured, but survive.

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April 27, 1932: Poet Hart Crane, age 32, dies by suicide by drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. He jumps off the steam ship on which he’s traveling from Mexico to New York. Crane is believed to be heavily intoxicated when he jumps and had recently been badly beaten when he made advances on a male crew member. His body is never recovered.

April 27, 2000: Broadway actress and dance music singer Vicki Sue Robinson dies of cancer at the age of 45.

April 29, 1986: A fire at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library destroys 400,000 books and other circulating materials.

"April" by Linda Pastan

 

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A whole new freshman class
of leaves has arrived

on the dark twisted branches
we call our woods, turning

green now--color of
anticipation. In my 76th year,

I know what time and weather
will do to every leaf.

But the camellia swells
to ivory in the window,

and the bleeding heart bleeds
only beauty.

Bummer March

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

March 2, 1978: Two thieves steal the coffin containing the body of actor Charlie Chaplin, which was interred in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. They hope to gain $600,000 in ransom, but Chaplin’s widow Oona (the daughter of American playwright Eugene O’Neill) refused to pay. The two men, auto mechanisms from Poland and Bulgaria, were instead forced to show police the corn field in which they’d reburied the coffin. Chaplin’s family took the precaution of burying the coffin in concrete when it was returned to the cemetery. The English actor had died at age 88 on December 25, 1977.

March 2, 1982: Science fiction author Philip K. Dick is taken off life support. He has suffered two strokes, with brain death following the second stroke. 

Before My Ken, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

March 5, 1963: Musicians Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins perish when their Piper PA-24 Comanche aircraft crashes in a forest in Tennessee during stormy weather. The pilot is also killed. Cline’s epitaph reads, “Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies: Love.”

March 5, 1977: In an unfortunate accident at the South African Grand Prix, English driver Tom Pryce struck and killed 19-year-old race marshall Frederik "Frikkie" Jansen van Vuuren, whom he couldn’t have seen in time. Jansen van Vuuren had run across the track with a fire extinguisher to rescue Italian driver Renzo Zorzi. Zorzi was trapped in his burning car while trying to remove the oxygen pipe from his helmet. 

The 40-pound fire extinguisher struck Pryce’s car and came through his windshield, striking Pryce in the head, forcing his helmet upward at a sharp angle, causing severe head and neck injuries that killed him instantly. Pryce’s car struck Jacques-Henri Laffite’s car and both vehicles struck the barrier and came to a stop.

Zorzi was not injured. The eventual winner of the 1977 South African Grand Prix was Austrian driver Niki Lauda, who had almost burned to death in the 1976 German Grand Prix. 

March 5, 1982: Albanian-American comedian John Belushi dies of a drug overdose.

March 8, 1941: American author Sherwood Anderson dies of peritonitis in Colón, Panama. He and his wife Eleanor, who were frequent travelers, had been taking a cruise to South America when Anderson began having abdominal discomfort. An autopsy revealed internal injuries caused by swallowing a toothpick.

March 8, 1989: Iran breaks diplomatic ties with the U.K. since the U.K. will not denounce Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.

Portrait of Sherwood Anderson by Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

March 10, 1948: Zelda Fitzgerald, by then the widow of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, has checked herself into Highland Hospital in what is now Montford Area Historic District in Asheville, North Carolina for treatment of her severe depression. She is awaiting an electroconvulsive therapy treatment in a locked room when a fire breaks out in the hospital kitchen. With no way to escape the locked room, she is killed by the fire.

March 11, 1918: Private Albert Gitchell, stationed in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas, is discovered to have the first-recorded case of influenza in what becomes the influenza pandemic of 1918. An estimated 50 million to 100 million people die of influenza during the pandemic worldwide.

In the Disaster Area Podcast episode on the Bazar de la Charite fire of May 4, 1897 in Paris, Jennifer Matarese loosely outlines how that tragic fire that killed 126 people indirectly related to the events that started World War I and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. To wit:

- The fire kills Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, Duchess of Alençon.

- Sophie's sister, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, is inconsolable at the death of her favorite sister. Empress Elisabeth was already having a pretty rough time.

- Elisabeth's only son (of her four children), Crown Prince Rudolph, had died in an apparent murder-suicide, killing his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera and himself, in 1889. Crown Prince Rudolph, who was to inherit the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dies without leaving a legitimate male heir.

- In 1898, Empress Elisabeth is assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist, who stabs her with a thin needle-file as she walks between her hotel and a steamship.

- When Empress Elisabeth is assassinated with no son or male grandson to inherit the throne, rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire passes to Elisabeth's husband's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig.

- Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria dies of natural causes (typhoid) in 1896, passing the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

- Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated by a Serbian anarchist on June 28, 1914, leading directly to the Great War when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

- Fort Riley is one of the major training grounds for the American Expeditionary Forces who will fight in the Western Front of the Great War. As American troops are moved into Europe, they are among those who spread the H1N1 influenza A virus. 

- The virus kills an estimated 25 million to 50 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920, with some estimates going as high as 100 million people.

March 12, 2015: Author Terry Pratchett dies of Alzheimer’s disease. 

March 15, 1937: H.P. Lovecraft dies of cancer of the small intestine at age 46.

H.P. Lovecraft. Amateur Publishing Association, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

March 16, 2009: Nicholas Hughes, the 46-year-old son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, dies by suicide. According to his sister Frieda, Hughes struggled with depression. Frieda was two years old and Nicholas one year old when their mother died by suicide. 

March 20, 1964: Poet, novelist, and folk hero Brendan Behan, considered one of the all-time greatest Irish literary talents, dies at the age of 41 after collapsing into a diabetic coma in the street.

Brendan Behan drinking. Eeipmde, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

March 22, 1950: Convicted child sexual predator Frank La Salle is arrested for the kidnapping of Florence Sally Horner, whom he has abducted from her home in New Jersey 21 months earlier. Horner is ten years old at the time of the kidnapping. La Salle is sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison.

Although he denied it during his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov almost certainly based some of his narrative in his book Lolita on Horner’s story. In her 2018 book The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman describes how literary scholars know this.

March 23, 1969: Assia Wevill, an advertising copywriter and poetry translator who escaped the Nazis as a young woman, drinks a glass of water laced with sleeping pills, drinks a glass of whisky, and turns on the gas in her apartment. She lies down on a mattress with her 4-year-old daughter Alexandria (nicknamed Shura) and they both die of asphyxiation. Shura’s father was English poet Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Wevill (married to a Canadian poet) allegedly began their affair before Plath’s suicide. 

March 26, 1664: Samuel Pepys celebrates his Stone Feast, commemorating the day he had a kidney stone removed by the horrific, pre-anesthesia 17th century surgical method. He writes in his famous diary:

“This being my solemn feast for my cutting of the stone, it being now, blessed be God! this day six years since the time; and I bless God I do in all respects find myself free from that disease or any signs of it, more than that upon the least cold I continue to have pain in making water, by gathering of wind and growing costive, till which be removed I am at no ease, but without that I am very well.”

March 27, 2004: Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted scholar of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is found dead in his home at the age of 50. His sister, who worries when he doesn’t answer his phone, finds him face-down on this bed, garotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. In his last days, Green has been observed acting erratically and complaining that an unnamed American was following him and that his apartment was bugged. Green’s paranoia seemed to stem from his actions in trying to stop an auction of Doyle’s papers, which Green believed were part of a collection Doyle’s daughter had intended to be donated to the British Museum rather than auctioned to the public. It remains unclear whether Green was murdered or staged his suicide to seem like a murder, as a character had done in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf, knowing that another bout of severe mental illness is coming on, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse. She is 59 years old. Most likely, her illness was bipolar disorder. 

March 29, 1911: The New York State Library, located inside the State Capitol building in Albany at the time, is badly damaged in a fire at the Capitol building. The fire destroys an estimated 450,000 books and 270,000 manuscripts, including many historical documents relating to early Dutch settlers in New York state.

March 31, 1855: Charlotte Brontë and her unborn child die, most likely due to hyperemesis gravidarum. In modern times, their lives could have been saved by something as simple as an IV injection of fluids and electrolytes.

March 31, 1931: While flying to participate in a movie called The Spirit of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame head football coach Knute Rockne is killed when his Transcontinental & Western Air airliner crashes near Bazaar, Kansas. Seven other people are killed in the crash. Rockne is 43 years old.

March 31, 1995: Singer/fashion designer Selena (in full, Selena Quintanilla Pérez) is murdered by her hanger-on Yolanda Saldívar when it appears Selena is about to confront Saldívar about financial misdeeds. At a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, Saldívar shoots Pérez once in the right shoulder as Pérez walks away. Pérez is rushed into emergency surgery but is pronounced dead on the operating table.

March 31, 2019: Roman Catholic priests in Gdansk, Poland, perform a “spring cleaning” that includes burning books and other objects they consider “harmful to our faithful.” These include Harry Potter books, books from the Twilight series, an African-style face mask, and a Hello Kitty umbrella. Exactly how Hello Kitty was thought to be attacking the Catholic faith is unclear.

"I Feel Drunk All the Time" by Utah Phillips (as performed by Rosalie Sorrels)

The following is another track I can listen to on Spotify, but not find the words to on the Googles. Since this is a spoken word track, I feel pretty confident in transcribing it correctly.

Fair use.

The poem:

I feel drunk all the time.

Jesus, it's beautiful.

Great mother of big apples, it is a pretty world.

You're a bastard, Mr. Death, and I wish you didn't have no look-in here.

I don't know how the rest of you feel,

But I feel drunk all the time

And I wish to hell I didn't have to die.

Oh, you're a lousy bastard, Mr. Death,

And I wish you didn't have no hand in this game,

Because it's too damn beautiful for anyone to die.

Rosalie Sorrels, 1933-2017
Bruce (Utah) Phillips, 1935-2008

38 Short Poems Inspired by Bath and Body Works Scents

1)
A beautiful day.
The world in red, green, and blue.
You, too, could see it.

2)
An almond croissant:
Butter, sugar, flaky dough
And everything nice.

3)
A thousand wishes
Would make all my dreams come true–
Too many cake candles.

4)
At the beach, the salt
Scent clings to my skin. A bath
In nature’s perfume.

5)
Baked goods on a plate
Eaten beneath gentle yew trees.
Garden tea cookie.

6)
Black cherry merlot
Let me plumb your depths, searching
Your purple ink murk.

7)
Bourbon maple fizz
Makes a long, dreary winter
Evening pass faster.

8)
Chasing daydreams leads
To bright flights of happiness
And peaceful evenings.

9)
Coffee and whiskey
Make my mind race and calm me
Both at the same time.

10)
Dark night, Ohio.
Nothing to see but the stars.
Pure wonder above.

11)
Dressed in white, her name
Is Emily Dickinson.
Massachusetts.

12)
Drink a champagne toast
To anything you cannot,
Can NOT live without.

13)
Eucalyptus rain--
The smell of husband's shower
In our first shared flat.

14)
Fresh sheets, a new start.
Bedtime now smells wonderful.
A simple comfort.

15)
In the summer rain,
The vegetable garden and
I alike are cleansed.

16)
Midnight addiction:
Strung out on the cold moonlight
And dark miasma.

17)
My moonlit goddess,
White hips shine in pale moonlight
Streaming through curtains

18)
Nicholas Flannel:
Sorceror's Stone discovered,
Also cozy shirts.

19)
Once in the book loft,
I've found where I need to be.
Never coming down.

20)
On the horizon
But we could keep going till
We find the beyond.

21)
On the moonlight path,
Faint light hits the park fountain.
Look! Halloween skulls.

(Story time at Irving Circle Park, Oct. 24, 2024)

22)
Platinum daydream
Engraved wedding invitations
Happily ever after

23)
Rouge rebel don't care
About their reputation,
Living life out loud.

24)
Sour lemonade
Sweetness of watermelon.
Marriage of true minds.

25)
Springtime greenhouse, so
Damp, fresh, and full of plant life.
Forest primeval.

26)
Sprinklers, despite rain.
The hissing of summer lawns.
Raindrop and violet.

27)
Strawberry soda,
Scoop of vanilla ice cream.
Nineteen fifties treat.

28)
Sunshine and lemons:
Two bright places to boost mood
When the world seems dark.

29)
Sweetheart cherry, pink
Soda pop, bubble gum, stick
Of candy, gum drop

30)
Sweet honey almond
Baklava awaiting me
After tabouli.

31)
The twilight pink sky
Descends over lavender.
I sip espresso.

32) This crisp morning air
Is too cold for yours truly.
Let me back inside.

33)
This pink apple punch
Is lovely in the drinking.
Afterward, pink haze.

34)
Waterlily pe-
Tals drop into the koi pond.
Pink sinks into blue.

35)
White faces peeking
Up over the garden fence.
Raccoons after dark.

36)
White t-shirt, black boots,
Black jeans, heavy belt buckle,
Classic cause for thirst.

37)
Winter, and the sky
Will not stop being stone gray.
Let me take a nap.

38)
Written in the stars
No mix-up in these hot suns
No avoiding fate.

Bummer February

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

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 2, 2022: A pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, holds a burning of books he deems “demonic.” According to his loosely-organized, conspiratorial beliefs, a book counted as “demonic” if it was “anything tied to the Masonic Lodge.” It’s unclear whether these actions were influenced more by religious fanaticism or by mental illness.

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 6, 1998: Austrian “Rock Me Amadeus” rocker Falco (Johann Hölzel) dies in a traffic accident while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He is 40 years old.

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 9, 1963: In a racially-charged incident captured in song by Bob Dylan, 51-year-old Hattie Carroll is working as a bar server at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. The hotel is hosting an event called the Spinster’s Ball. One of the guests, Billy Zantzinger, who is white, is excessively drunk and physically and verbally abusing both his wife Jane and the African-American wait staff at the event.

Zantziger hurls racial slurs and other verbal abuse at Carroll, then strikes her in the neck/upper shoulder region with his cane. Carroll immediate begins feeling numbness in her arm, and her co-workers notice her speech is slurred. She’s taken to the hospital, where Carroll dies of a brain hemorrhage. Zantziger is convicted of manslaughter for Carroll’s death, but his sentence is a paltry six months in prison and a $500 fine, plus a fine of $125 for assaulting the other wait staff.

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. 

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.

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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 24, 1809: London’s Drury Lane Theatre burns down. No one is injured, but the loss of the building is a financial disaster for its owner, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

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, 1909: Actor Irene Muza (a stage name) dies when her hairdresser accidentally sets her on fire. According to a Perth, Australia, newspaper account published March 30, 1909, “Before taking part in a charitable performance on Tuesday she sent for her hairdresser to come and dress her hair. The hairdresser had applied a petrol lotion, when a few drops of it fell upon the kitchen stove. The stuff, ignited in an instant, and the flames caught the actress's hair and her dressing-gown and the clothing of the hairdresser. [...] In a moment she was a mass of flame. A friend who was in an adjoining room tried to save her by tearing away the burning gown, but before this could be accomplished she had sustained terrible injuries. She was conveyed to the hospital, where she expired. Her hairdresser, who was also badly injured, lies in a precarious condition.”

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.

Updates for January 2025

Before we close out the first awful, Los Angeles-burning, Trump reinstating, American government-ruining month of 2025, let's look back at past blog posts and make a few updates.

First off, let’s start by acknowledging that Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are absolutely garbage human beings. 

What song did I get obsessed with right after the cutoff for Spotify Wrapped 2024? Hozier's song inspired by Dante's Inferno, "Hymn to Virgil." I made a Destiel meme for that one, too. 

https://thatwritererinoriordan.tumblr.com/post/769533420409896960

What song am I obsessed with right now? "Devil In Me" by Gin Wigmore.

In “More Unfortunate Happenings of Past Decembers,” I mentioned the Comet Ping Pong shooter. According to a BBC Washington article posted on January 9, 2025, the man is now deceased. Pulled over on suspicion of being wanted on a warrant while driving in Kannapolis, North Carolina, the man is alleged to have pulled out a gun. Two police officers then fatally shot him. He died later at the hospital. 

On Saturday, January 25th, Mr. Elingtin and I went to Dream Palace Books for an author's reading. The author, Jaclyn Youhana Garver, mentioned Julie Powell. Garver's novel Then, Again uses parallel storytelling of the kind that Powell's memoir Julia & Julie also used. We haven't forgotten about you, Julie. You're still on our minds and in our hearts.

https://thatwritererinoriordan.tumblr.com/post/773749924165779456/thank-you-jacyln-youhana-garver-for-coming-to

On a recent episode of the podcast History of the 90s, I learned that Sarah McLachlan wrote "Angel" about Jonathan Melvoin.

The blog post that mentions Jonathan Melvoin, "More Unfortunate Happenings of Past Julys," also mentions Billie Holiday's death on July 17, 1959. Here's a random fact: There were 120 days between Billie Holiday's death and the events of In Cold Blood.