“Watching the early Keystone flicks today, their weaknesses are as apparent as their strengths. Plots are vaporous and repeatedly recycled. Acting can veer into wild pantomime. Racial and ethnic stereotypes abound. Much screen time is merely filler before the next round of mayhem. Still, you wait for the infectious moment when the uppity heiress lands in the lake or the Keystone Kops give chase in cars, bicycles, and shoes but can’t quite catch the crook. Or when, again and again, a fat man falls.”
― Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood
― Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood
“turned the corner, and Frank saw bloody smears on the carpet. He knew Dave Sanders had gone down there. He had not anticipated the stains. “You could see the knuckle prints,” he said. “He actually was on all fours and there were his knuckle prints—he was struggling. It tore me up.” A trail of blood traced Dave’s path around the corner and down the hall. Detectives led Frank DeAngelis to Science Room 3. Nothing had been disturbed. “They took me into where Dave died,” Frank recalled. “And there were sweatshirts there full of blood. That got to me.” In the science room, Frank broke down again. He turned to Fuselier. “I was glad he was here,” DeAngelis said later. “Most FBI guys wouldn’t have done anything. Dwayne gave me a hug.”
― Columbine
― Columbine
“Heightened emotion potentially posed another threat more serious than bad skin: hysteria. Doctors diagnosed the condition as a woman’s disease, believed to originate in the womb and to demonstrate female frailty and fallibility. Girls around puberty were particularly susceptible, doctors worried, to the fits and seizures hysteria could induce. How important it was, then, for a young woman to exercise self-restraint and to remain in a limited arena: the home.”
― Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
― Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
“Overnight our place was busting its seams with idiotics. Anything went, and every fool thing you might think of under the influence of hashish or a hangover went big. We were awash with pretty women, clowns, and storytellers who couldn’t write. We made a million dollars so fast my fingers ached from trying to count.”
― Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood
― Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, the Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood
“Death was a constant fact of life. The reaper struck with fire and drowning; typhus, malaria, yellow fever, and a host of other diseases; accidents that ranged from the swift shock of a horse’s kick to a slow-spreading infection from a cut finger; and suicide and murder. More than one-fifth of the children born died before their first birthday; at birth the average life expectancy for an adult was little more than forty.6 Medicine at best could offer a patient little help and at worst was lethal, an excruciating matter of bleeding, blistering, and purging with potions such as laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol.”
― Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
― Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
Kim’s 2025 Year in Books
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