Bookishness

ragbag:

• sherwood anderson: choked to death on a toothpick.
• arnold bennett: drank water from a carafe in a paris restaurant in an attempt to show that the city’s water was safe to drink, but he caught typhoid from it and died two months later.
• molière: was playing the lead role of the hypochondriac in his play the imaginary invalid when he died.
• aeschylus: is alleged to have died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.
• emile zola: asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes from a fire in his bedroom (it had a defective chimney)
• pietro aretino: this italian saritist poet literally laughed himself to death at the theater one night in 1556: he fell off his seat and fatally banged his head on the floor.
• thomas merton: the prolific cistercian monk was electrocuted by a faulty fan while attending a conference on buddhism in bangkok.
• francis bacon: killed a chicken one day and stuffed its carcass with snow in an effort to discover if chilled meat could be preserved in this fashion. an innovative idear for the time..but the chicken fared better than him, as he caught a fatal chill while stuffing it.
• ranier maria rilke: died at the age of 51 of blood poisoning, after he had been cut by the thorn of a rose he had picked for a woman he knew.
• tennessee williams: choked to death on the plastic top of a nasal spray in a new york hotel room in 1983.

from stranger than ficiton by aubrey mallone (2000).