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.
Today's Observance: Fathers Day, First day of summer (Northern Hemisphere)
Artist Birthday: Marcella Detroit, a.k.a. Marcy Levy, co-writer of the Eric Clapton hit "Lay Down, Sally," and the American half of Shakespears Sister
Bummer June 21st
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 exploded. 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 21, 1964: Young civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner are murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan for registering African-American voters in Mississippi.
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And now, for something completely different, an affiliate link to a Gumroad creative product you may enjoy: Werewolf Lawyer audiobook
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.
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. The book tells the story of a serial rapist and murderer who was not caught until 2018, two years after McNamara’s death.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ICYMI, this post is the latest in a series highlighting one of my two current books in process,The Almanac of Bad Days(tentative title). Past installments:
Trigger Warnings: Antisemitism, car accidents, death, drug overdose, Nazi mention, train crash
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 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 16, 1994: Kristen Pfaff, bassist for the band Hole, dies of a heroin overdose. She is 27 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 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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This is the latest preview of a work in progress tentatively titled Almanac of Bad Days. For the origin of the project, see this post. Past installments:
If you'd rather read something cheerful and literary rather than historical bummers, please visit my Ko-Fi feed.
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, 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, 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.
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.
“From Here to Eternity is on page 131. I'm pretty sure I read this section before, but I didn't mean as much to me before I finished FHTE…I also learned that the book FHTE beat out when it won the National Book Award was The Catcher in the Rye.
“Catcher in the Rye is a favorite subject of the conspiracy theory bloggers, by the way. See this post at MK Culture, for example, or this post at Pseudo-Occult Media implicating the cartoon ‘Family Guy’ (a cartoon I personally dislike, for the record). The Wikipedia entry on the book mentions that it's been linked to John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon, and Robert John Bardo's shooting of Rebecca Shaeffer.”
The Wikipedia article doesn’t go into any great detail, and for these past three years I haven’t really strongly understood the connection between the book I read as a teen and real-life incidents of violence. Then I stumbled across this video:
In these videos, Joseph Atwill discusses a blog post he’s written about Holden’s relationship with his younger sister and other post called "The Freemason in the Rye." In the articles and subsequently in the video, he attempts to explain how he interprets some of the more cryptic passages in J.D. Salinger’s text.
Who is Joseph Atwill? If you search for Joseph Atwill within Wikipedia, you’ll find two relevant results. One is the entry for “Christ myth theory,” and the other is the entry for Emilia Lanier. Atwill’s 2013 book Caesar’s Messiah is cited as a source for the former. In the latter, he is credited along with John Hudson as having discovered that Emilie Lanier, the first English woman to publish a book of poetry, was possibly the identity of the “Dark Lady” to whom William Shakespeare’s poems were addressed. The citation there is Atwill’s 2014 self-published bookShakespeare’s Secret Messiah.
In the videos, Atwill summarizes his interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye, basically, as follows:
•In the novel, Holden Caulfield (Salinger’s protagonist) mentions being in a secret fraternity.
•Atwill connects that fraternity to the Freemasons because Holden mentions studying the Egyptians (for a test) for 28 days, elements of Freemasonic initiation rituals.
•Holden lying down on Eli’s bed is mentioned three times, which Atwill takes to be a Freemasonic signal.
•The most obvious reason why CITR is connected with various assassinations is that Holden calls his deer-hunting hat a people-shooting hat. Atwill connects the hat with the traditional hoodwink of Freemasonic initiation.
•The titular allusion of CITR is a mishearing of the Robert Burns poem “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” Atwill says a different word ("fuck") is used in the original Robert Burns poem in place of “meet” a body coming through the rye. Thus, it has an explicit sexual connotation. Wikipedia agrees that there is an explicit version:
•Atwill contends passages where the 10-year-old sister, Phoebe, is described as being in states of undress are intended to imply an inappropriate relationship between brother and sister. I suppose it makes sense, then, that Holden was studying the Egyptians, since among ancient Egyptian royalty, brother-sister marriages were common.
•He says the last paragraph of the book is the warning that anyone who tells the secret will be killed. He says Mark Twain put the same warning into the end of Tom Sawyer.
•Boys are supposed to identify with Holden and girls are supposed to identify with Phoebe. Thus, boys are being conditioned to be violent abusers and girls are being conditioned to be victims.
•Atwill’s call to action in this interview is the request for people who have children in the school systems to bring up these issues with the school boards, ultimately to get books that serve as “weaponized anthropology” out of the schools.
Atwill did not invent the term “weaponized anthropology” to describe cultural artifacts intended to have psychological effects upon those who consume them. He refers to a book by David H. Price called Weaponizing Anthropology published in 2011. Price is an anthropology professor whose scholarly works examine the history of the intersection between military intelligence and ethnography/anthropology. Atwill contends that J.D. Salinger worked on military intelligence during World War II.
(There is another university professor/author named David H. Price who is a historian, but they are not the same person.)
If you want to read further into the connection between military intelligence and Mark David Chapman, you can do so with our old friend Visup. (You may remember him from the Buddy Holly human sacrifice conspiracy post.) Atwill’s Freemason article also provides the following link:
But basically, Atwill is saying that CITR is a military experiment explicitly written by Salinger to be morally destructive to U.S. culture.
On a slightly different subject, in one of the videos Atwill calls Lewis Carroll a “Freemasonic monster” and refers to an analysis of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Along with Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, the article discusses the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus.” Atwill contends the poem is about the Biblical book of Revelation (Lewis Carroll was a clergyman, after all) and that Lennon’s song lyrics are about genocide.
So, are the critics right when they want to ban CITR? Should we ban Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass from schools also?
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The thesis of Bright-Sided is the U.S. residents tend, as a people, to subscribe to an optimistic outlook on life that isn’t so much based in fact as it is in wishful thinking. Sometimes this wishful thinking is presented to us with the best of intentions. At other times, it’s presented to us as a cynical ploy to make a fast buck with a minimal output of effort, since one of the tenets of positive thinking is often, “If it’s not working for you, you must not be trying hard enough.”
Sometimes, corporations use this mindset to try to increase productivity as much as possible while laying out as few benefits as they can get away with. Haven’t gotten a raise in five years? You’re probably just not working hard enough! Envision success and use positivity to attract a raise to you! At worst, this can be used as an excuse to pay people poverty wages for working long, hard hours at unpalatable jobs.
The problem, as Ehrenreich explains, is that very little scientific evidence shows that positive people fare significantly better than their less-positive peers. At the same time, individuals can experience real-world consequences, including loss of their jobs, simply for being perceived as not having a positive attitude.
As Ehrenreich shows, however, the economic sphere is not the only one in which people can find themselves blamed and shamed for not being cheerful enough. Oddly, one of them is the cancer support group sphere, as Ehrenreich found out during her bout with breast cancer. Women suffering from the disease will sometimes repeat the mantra that positivity strengthens their immune system and thus helps them fight the disease. The problem is that physicians don’t think there is much of a link between the immune system and breast cancer. Think about what the immune system does – it fights foreign “invaders” in the body, namely bacteria and viruses. Cancer cells are the body’s own cells, not recognized by the immune system as “foreign.” Women who get sicker and blame themselves for being too negative are expending their precious energy over something irrelevant.
The chapter on the religious aspect of positive thinking is also very interesting. In this chapter, I learned about the New Thought movement of the 1800s and its founder, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If a 21st-century person believes human thought can affect atoms and molecules in the real world, that person can likely trace their thoughts back to Quimby. Followers of the so-called Prosperity Gospel as exemplified by Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer, adherents of Oprah Winfrey, and readers of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret may not seem to have much in common on the surface, but all can trace their philosophical roots back to New Thought. Quimby’s most direct influence may have been on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.
The origin of Quimby’s “heal thyself” philosophy? He had tuberculosis. He was born in 1808, and when he was a young man, doctors could do next to nothing for the bacterial infection. His doctors gave him a remedy that did little to abate his breathing problems, but did make his teeth start to fall out. Fed up with the institutional medicine of his day (with good reason), he decided to study hypnotism. He eventually came to believe that all diseases were caused by the way one thinks about one’s body.
The scientific evidence that beliefs affect the human body is scant to nonexistent, but Quimby and Baker Eddy weren’t really interested in scientific evidence. I read a little bit more about Mary Baker Eddy in Wikipedia, and it seems she had something of a kerfuffle with Mark Twain in the first decade of the 1900s. Twain wrote an article criticizing Christian Science, which Harper’s magazine refused to publish. Twain then accused the publication of bowing down to pressure from high-profile Christian Scientists and of not being objective. He later published – elsewhere, one presumes – a lengthy critical essay on the subject of Mary Baker Eddy herself.
Touched on in this chapter, and quite possibly worth addressing in greater detail elsewhere, are John Marks Templeton Sr. and Jr. The senior John M. Templeton created the Templeton Foundation, which supports a large variety of both religious and scientific research endeavors. It has been accused of supporting unscientific theories such as “intelligent design” creationism and other dubious sciences. Ehrenreich herself has publicly accused the Templeton Foundation of a conservative political bias, which the Foundation has answered by saying that it stays within the guidelines set forth by its founder, which are designed to be unbiased and apolitical.
Dr. John Marks Templeton Jr., popularly known as Jack Templeton, was well known for donating vast sums of his personal wealth to Republican political causes. He and his wife are estimated to have personally donated a million dollars to opposing same-sex marriage. Having died of a brain tumor in May of this year, he didn’t quite live long enough to see marriage equality become the law of the land on June 26th.
Economics, politics, religion, medicine…areas of life in which people need to be at their most clear-eyed. Optimism and a positive outlook can make life more bearable, especially when one is ill or under stress, but it’s also important to be armed with objective fact. This is the point Barbara Ehrenreich makes in Bright-Sided, and it’s a good one.
I purchased this title as a CD audiobook with my own funds from a library used media sale. I wasn't obligated in any way to review it. This review represents my own honest opinion.
The winner of a signed paperback copy of my Evernight Press anthology title, Indecent Encounters, as randomly selected by Random.org, is Laurie. Congratulations! I'll be e-mailing you for your mailing address. If you didn't win my prize, don't worry - you're still entered in the grand prize drawing. Good luck!
Now enjoy these frisky felines. This fancy lil guy cracks me so consistently up.
Kitten in a man's shoe.
Jack Kerouac and a cat.
Allen Ginsberg had a cat named Howl.
"Taco cat" is a palindrome.
Doing her impression of Mark Twain.
If you like bookish cats, perhaps you will enjoy The Literary Cat on Tumblr. It has featured my own lil guy, James.
I'm back from my long weekend in Manhattan - not the fun Manhattan, but the one in Kansas - where my nephew got married. When leaving Kansas, I felt obliged to say, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." While we never got around to visiting the Wizard of Oz museum in nearby Wamego, I chose to associate Kansas with the L. Frank Baum classic. The other literary work I associate with Kansas is In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, which is rather less pleasant.
We did drive through Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, but we didn't stop there.
The paperback I carried with me on my trip of Patricia Bosworth's biography of Montgomery Clift, a cheap paperback I purchased from Better World Books. Look how neatly its yellow edges match my manicure (and the dress I wore to the wedding reception.)
In Aggieville (the quaint shopping and pub-crawling neighborhood in the vicinity of Kansas State University), I visited The Dusty Bookshelf. There I bought my great-niece a Mickey Mouse coloring book and a picture book based on the Disney version of Peter Pan. For myself, I purchased The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight.
But now that I'm back in the Great Lakes region, I'm back to reading the books I left behind, including The Thin Red Line. I'm about halfway through The Thin Red Line, the second book in James Jones' trilogy. Since I kind of cheated, in that I watched the movie before I read the book, and I've now read and watched From Here to Eternity, I feel somewhat prepared to compare the characters of Robert E. Lee Prewitt and his counterpart in the second book, Bob Witt.
You know what might be even more fun, though? Comparing the actors who portrayed Prewitt and Witt, respectively Montgomery Clift and Jim Caviezel. They have stuff in common, other than playing essentially the same character in adaptations of James Jones novels. (In fact, I now know that some of Witt's monologue in the Thin Red Line movie comes from the book version of From Here to Eternity, further fusing two fictional characters who are already essentially the same. Not exactly the same, though: Prew is 22 years old in 1941, while Witt is 21 in 1943, to name just one example of how their biographies differ. Obviously, Prewitt is dead at the end of FHTE - he never makes it to Guadalcanal.)
They both modeled during their early acting careers, for example. Clift modeled for Arrow shirts and Steinway pianos, among other gigs. Caviezel modeled clothes for The Gap. This is not a great picture, but you get the idea.
Clift appeared in a Gap khakis ad posthumously, via a still from his film I Confess.
(P.S. The nephew who got married? Also a former model, and so is his brother.)
They were both called upon to learn the trumpet, or at least to look as if they knew what they were doing with one. Clift's scene is the emotional climax of the From Here to Eternity movie: Prew's brokenhearted rendition of TAPS in Maggio's honor.
Caviezel's scene is in the romantic drama Angel Eyes. The music is forcing his character to remember a past he'd done his best to try to forget.
The other things they have in common? A perpetual tan. Intense eyes. Long, dark eyelashes that women envy; prettiness that at times verges on androgyny, but also the ability to rock a sexy beard. They're both part Irish, too.
I warn you not to stare too long, or you may end up pregnant.
There is a shared culture
when it comes to growing up in America, there is no doubt about that. Our
country is a country that has a respect and fondness for the past, even as we
keep moving forward and doing things that in the past were unthinkable. One of
those shared cultural experiences happens in elementary school, in which most
kids throughout the country are taught to read the same books. Everyone knows
who Dr. Seuss is, who Rudyard Kipling is, who Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are and
who Shel Silverstein is. These are all things we become accustomed to as
children, and it gives us a shared language. The process continues throughout
the rest of schooling as well, as we all get older we begin reading
Shakespeare, George Orwell, Frederick Douglass, Kurt Vonnegut, Oscar Wilde,
John Steinbeck and dozens of others.
These books, as well as
many others that are both newer and older, are considered the classics. They
are considered the books that every person should read because it will shape
how they look at the world, and how they act and think within that world. But,
an unfortunate thing occurs when we get out of school, we stop reading. There
are tons of classics out there, but we read only a few in school, and then stop
doing it altogether. It is a shame because there is a lot more we can share
with each other through our experiences with these classics. Learning does not
stop with school, it should continue throughout life, and so should reading the
classics. There are more classics out there than you can imagine, and you can
spend a lifetime reading them, without reading them all. Here are some reasons
why you should read the classics:
Cherish the mind
With the decrease in
reading there has been a huge increase in health club memberships. In some way,
this is a roundabout argument, in which humans have begun to be more obsessed
with their bodies than they are with their minds. After all, when you walk down
the street or step into a bar, a potential mate can not see your mind, but they
can see your muscles. The mind is the key to living a long, fulfilled life, not
the body. That is not to say that you should neglect the body, but rather that
you should not do so in sacrifice of cultivating your mind. That is why you
should read the classics.
You get a better
vocabulary
In today’s text crazy
world, in which vocabulary has been slaughtered at the altar, reading the
classics can curb those tendencies toward monotony and the destruction of
language.
About the Guest Author: William is a freelance writer for numerous publications, both online and in print, in article form and in blog form. He writes on numerous subjects, including pop culture, history and even car insurance.
On Mondays I hook up with Pinning! at A Night Owl Blog/Baxtron{Life}. On Wednesday, it's Oh, How Pinteresting! at The Vintage Apple. This is the clever song, a parody of Jay-Z and Kanye West's "N****s in Paris," as performed by LaShea Delaney and Annabelle Quezada.
THIS is the Pinterest board I built around it. These are the lyrics: Read so hard librarians tryin'a' fine me
They can't identify me
Checked in with a pseudonym so I guess you can say I'm Mark Twaining
