July 5– Thomas Disch
Gay American science fiction writer, dystopianist, suicide victim.
Mallarmé drowning
Chatterton coughing up his lungs
Auden frozen in a cottage
Byron expiring at Missolonghi
and Hart Crane visiting Missolonghi and dying there too
The little boot of Sylvia Plath wedged in its fatal stirrup
Tasso poisoned
Crabbe poisoned
T.S. Eliot raving for months in a Genoa hospital before he died
Pope disappearing like a barge in a twilight of drugs
The execution of Marianne Moore
Pablo Neruda spattered against the Mississippi
Hofmannsthal’s electrocution
The quiet painless death of Robert Lowell
Alvarez bashing his bicycle into an oak
The Brownings lost at sea
The premature burial of Thomas Gray
The baffling murder of Stephen Vincent Benét
Stevenson dying of dysentery
and Catullus of a broken heart
JULY 5, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
*Tomar, Portugal: Fiesta do Tapuleiros begins. An elaborate harvest fiesta, featuring 600 girls wearing 30-pound headresses made of bread, as tall as the girls and decorated with flowers, with Maltese crosses on top.
ALSO ON JULY 5 IN HISTORY…
645 — Flint-Sky-God K accedes to Mayan throne of Dos Pilas.
1857 — German radical feminist Clara Zetkin born, Widerau, Saxony.
1861 — Lincoln suspends habeus corpus, leading to 18,000 “subversive” arrests.
1889 — French surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau born, Maisons-Lafitte.
1894 — Pullman Strike starts in Chicago; federal troops will kill 34 unionists.
1932 — First prisoners arrive at Bolshevik prison-labor camp, Kolyma, Siberia.
2008 — Dystopian American science fiction writer Thomas Disch dies, New York City.
Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective
Arthur Magazine 