Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
This has become a passion and a time-suck all in one.
We started by reading The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox
. That lead to Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism
, another take on the Fox Sisters.
We went back to read Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits and finally understood some of the passion we previously misinterpreted to be a strident, arrogant tone.
Read in context with the Spiritualism movement, Houdni’s A Magician Among the Spirits is the perfect, logical balance to the incredible claims of spiritualists.
All of this led to our reading Maggie Fox’s The Death Blow to Spiritualism.
While she later recanted her recantation, it is a sombering experience to hear the side of the woman (along with her younger sister, Katie, and older sister, Leah) started Spiritualism and all that it produced.
Now, we find ourselves with an irrational crush on Maggie Fox and an even greater sense of awe of Harry Houdini.
More about this investigation later but for now, check out the downloadable PDF of A Magician Among the Spirits, by Houdini.
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Tags:
Fox Sisters,
Houdini,
Spiritualism
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Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 8:12 am
We are easily distracted from one obsession to another.
We don’t just flit from shiny thing to more shiny thing. Nay, we focus on some topic — usually obscure and without any real-world value to anyone — and intensify our focus until there is no other stimuli within our view.
That is a good thing for our other profession, proof reading M&Ms, but can be disconcerting for just about every other aspect of our world.
We noticed yesterday that we had not updated Inside Magic with a new story or article since last week. What were we doing? How could this happen?
We fell hopelessly in love with a dead woman, Maggie Fox Kane of the famous or infamous Fox Sisters.
We’ll provide our complete review of two recent books on Maggie and her medium sisters, Katie and Leah, later today.
You can read Houdini’s take on the rise of Spiritualism in his fantastic 1924 book, A Magician Among the Spirits.
We uploaded a PDF version of the book complete with our OCR, search functions and hyperlinked cross-references. Houdini’s book and Maggie Fox Kane’s Death Blow to Spiritualism, are both available at the Inside Magic Library.
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Tags:
Fox Sisters,
Houdini,
Spiritualism
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Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 3:22 pm
There scattered reports earlier this year that Summit Entertainment purchased the film rights to William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s biography, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero, to make “an action thriller featuring a character who is part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes.”
Entertainment web site IGN opined Summit’s decision to stray from the bio-pic format was to build a franchise on Houdini’s fame; not necessarily his life.
The studio announced in March 2009, it was looking for a writer to craft the story and build the super-hero character.
They apparently found their writer and his credits fit the need for a super-hero take on Houdini.
Jeff Nathanson, writer of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will write the script. Mr. Nathanson worked with Steven Spielberg on Catch Me if You Can and the horrible waste of celluloid The Terminal. His action credits also include Rush Hour 2 and Speed 2: Cruise Control.
IGN was not able to receive confirmation of the writing assignment from Mr. Nathanson’s Hollywood agents, CAA.
Summit was apparently excited by the book’s suggestion that Houdini was a spy for Britain, and possibly murdered by spiritualists in retribution for his very effective debunking of their craft. The book certainly made the suggestions but offered very little support for either the spy or murder claim.
News of this potential deal brings up a sore subject for us here at Inside Magic.
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Tags:
Houdini,
Magic History
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