Found: Golden State Speller

A couple of weeks ago, while unpacking one of the last boxes of books and miscellany left in my parents' garage, I came across this old grade school spelling primer I bought when I was still a college student living in Santa Cruz. I remember buying this on a whim, for super cheap, at a weird old used and antique books store in Moss Landing. In the back, there were boxes full of old text books that had been used by area public schools. I only bought the one; I probably picked it because I liked the cover. I regret not picking up a couple others, especially now that the bookstore's gone. 

This one little artifact is pretty neat, though. I love the Viola Swamp/Big Brother tone of the notice stamped on the inside front cover. Also, note that this particular book was only in use for four years. WHAT.  Those were the good old days, I guess, when the state was somehow flush with cash devoted to education funding. In the middle of the Great Depression. It actually makes me really sad to think about how priorities have changed in this state and the country as a whole. 

How super neat is this? I'm assuming that the "Laurel School" is now the Louden Nelson Community Center in downtown Santa Cruz.

Here's a nice peek at what fourth graders in California public schools were given in order to learn how to spell: 

Trying to come to terms with the fact that people once used the plural of beef -- beeves -- in any way, shape, or form is kind of breaking my brain. 

Similarly, thinking of teaching children vocabulary useful for serving, specifically, good foods really tickles me.

My favorite part about the book, by far, is that it came with a couple pages of notes that a school teacher had written up hidden in the very back. He or she (she? ladies handwriting, or did everybody have lovely penmanship in the '30s?) must have been preparing their lesson plan at the last minute. I WOULD KNOW. 

They look like notes for an American history or regional studies lesson. I'm especially curious about the "demographic" groups listed on the sheet on the left -- antebellum society of the rural South? How many large plantations survived the American civil war? I WILL NOT LET THIS BECOME A NEW PROCRASTINATION INVESTIGATION.

Rooms (and a beach chair) With A View

I really do love my little office on campus. It has crazy blue retro carpeting, a matching blue filing cabinet (locked, and missing the keys, unfortunately... it's purely decorative now), and has, what seems like, all the original furniture and shelving from when the building was first built in the late 1960s.

The best part, though, is the big plate glass window running along the outer wall, just below the ceiling.  I took the photo above last Friday, looking up while seated in front of my laptop at my desk. What a view, right? Redwoods and a bright patch of sky right outside the window. This is Santa Cruz (and the university campus) at its best.

Last Friday was, of course, every campus educator and employee's least favorite holiday: 

4/20. 

This year, it formed part of a trifecta of awesome (or awful, depending on how you see it, of course): 

1. 4/20

2. Friday

3. The first day of absolutely gorgeous, high 70s, clear skies of the spring

This is a recipe for lots and lots and lots of tourists from out of town, both on campus at the university,  and downtown and at the boardwalk and beaches. Which brings a lot of traffic, people driving poorly, and young people wandering in and out of the street, super high and super stupid. I see it as awful. I also sound like an old person. 

I'm not that old. I'm just over it.

I wasn't going to let the stoned tourists ruin it for me completely, though, so a friend and I went out for a post-work drink at the only place we could think of that wouldn't be over-run by out-of-towners and students. The bar of the super fancy hotel at the foot of the wharf. Nice view, as you can see. 

The following day was brighter and shinier and warmer, and Santa Cruz was just clogged to capacity with people from over the hill. I drove into town with Roscoe to go to the dog beach, but ended up driving north out of town on highway 1. I drove until I saw the first beach with space for a dog to run and play, over the county line, past Año Nuevo State Park. I drove all the way to Bean Hollow. 

We spent a lovely afternoon on the beach. I took this photo right before we left, just as the fog was rolling in from the sea. Perfect Brontë beach weather at the end of a visit to my favorite California Gothic beach. I got to drive the extra 5 minutes north to Pescadero and pick up a loaf of Arcangeli Grocery's famous artichoke bread, too. A successful Saturday drive to the dog beach.  

Enriqueta Martí Part II: The Nature of the Monster

"Mucho hay que chupar"
Goya, Caprichos plate 45

I love monsters. Well, yes and no -- better put: I find monsters to be compelling subjects of both scholarly and personal interest. Monsters are pretty thrilling to think about in and of themselves, but I find their backstories to be just as interesting. Ken Gelder, in his text The Horror Reader, reminds us that: "the word monster is linked to the word demonstrate: to show, to reveal. This link reminds us that monsters signify, that they function as meaningful signs."* Monsters, and the monstrous, take up a lot of space in my working imagination. Where do monsters come from? How are they created? Why do they take the form that they do? What are they indicative of? Can we make them go away? These are the kinds of BIG THOUGHTS that I chew over on a regular basis. 

One of my main research and writing interests within the subject of monsters and the monstrous is the Monstrous Feminine: female representations of the monstrous, in all the myriad of forms. Old crones; strange girls; Jezebels, Lolitas, and other women and girls with abnormal/threatening sexual appetites;** vampiresses; witches; sirens; banshees; bad mothers;  cat ladies; insane women in the attic... the list goes on and on. If we were to reduce the feminine to its most basic/base (and I don't mean this to be complimentary) biological function, the vagina dentata joins the gang as well. These lady monsters thrill and frighten in ways that set them apart from (gentle?)man -- or masculine -- monsters, and this is tied directly to their abnormal*** -- or even total lack of -- (perceived) femininity. 

Any and all female subjects that fail to meet normative feminine representations are fair game. In the spooky world of magical creatures, included are the aforementioned witches and vampiresses, but in our own day-to-day realities, apart from the aforementioned Jezebels, Lolitas, bad mothers, and cat ladies, there are other pejoratives that we, sadly, hear too often: ice queens, bitches, sluts, dykes, cunts. These are all "subjects" that are dangerous, taboo -- either "too much" or "too little", or even "not at all". They are threatening because they transgress the very gender norms set in place to define them. 

Martí at the time of her arrest, 1912.

Enriqueta Martí was not just a child abductor, a pimp, a serial killer. She was a Woman child abductor, a Woman pimp, a Woman serial killer. Her behavior went against everything that "womanhood" entails: piety, purity, submissiveness, domesticity. She was the opposite of nurturing, the opposite of fertility, abundance, life, and love. Through her chosen profession, she became the anti-mother, the feminine turned inside out: a monster. Martí never had/kept children of her own. She was married, but estranged from a husband she showed no interest in making a life with. At the time of her arrest, she was 43 years old and living alone, made wealthy by her various enterprises. She rejected normative femininity -- bourgeois "womanhood" -- completely. Perhaps these things also lead to her infamy, as they do for so many mothers who kill their children and housewives who kill their husbands. 

In the eyes of the press, she was a vampire:**** preying on the weak (children), exsanguinating their bodies. This classification has always seemed strange to me, as I see her wealthy clients -- those who actually paid to abuse these children, and later to benefit from "healing" and "rejuvenating" tinctures and poultices made of their bodily parts -- to be the true vampires. Martí was an opportunist, a person who abused and took advantage of others (both the children she abducted and the wealthy who patronized her) due to her own avarice. Ultimately, she was more an evil witch than any other kind of monster. The two young girls rescued from her apartment in the winter of 1912 recounted for the press the rooms and closets locking away bags of children's clothing, bones, and hair, jars and vats filled with coagulated blood, bodily fats, and organs. During her interrogation she referred to herself as a "healer", a curandera. The police reported finding black books filled with potions and recipes, client lists and accounts. The story is a strange, urban retelling of the Grimms' "Hansel and Gretel", the witch guarding recipes and ingredients for macabre human "dishes".

"Cooking Witches"
Source: Geschichte Österreichs. Author unknown.

The worst of it was that these "dishes" were not made for her own consumption, but for a market of complicit, elite benefactors protected by Barcelona's plutocracy. After her arrest, Martí languished in the women's jail waiting for a trial that was forever being postponed. She was killed by her fellow inmates one year and three months after her arrest, and all her black books and client lists mysteriously disappeared shortly after.  Enriqueta Martí is not the only monster in this story, and it's a shame that we forget it even until this day. We'll never know how many clients she had over her twenty year long career, how many conspirators she had, that never had to pay for their actions. 

Next in the final installment: "Enriqueta Martí: Her Time and Place"

Read the first installment, too: "Enriqueta Martí: Vampire, Serial Killer, Sack Lady"

* Gelder, Ken. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. 81.

** Let's get real,  any sexual appetite in women/girls is regarded as abnormal and threatening.

*** By abnormal, of course, I mean anything that falls beyond the realm of the normal or the normative. 

**** She became known as the Vampiress of the Carrer Ponent (the street on which her last victims were found, in one of her many apartments scattered throughout the city).

Cuchi Time: Bandid@s!

I went scrounging around in my bandana collection for neckwear to dress up Roscoe and BFF Leila with and almost died of cuchi overload once I wrangled them into these. Here they are in my two favorite bandanas from the good old hippie days. CUCHI EXPLOSION.

If you could follow their laser-like gaze off to the upper left-hand corner of the photograph, you would see my hand waving a Thinkers dog snack stick. PURE GOLD. I bought a bag at the Mountain Feed & Farm a couple of days ago and the dogs are obsessed. Made with whole foods, minimally processed, and made in the USA, and I think that's great. Auntie Arantxa brings the best treats, duh.

Septic Woes

Oh, so sad. The house's septic system is troubled. There's a blockage between the septic tank and the leach fields, and we need to find it. Here's Jason digging a trench to nowhere. This picture was taken pretty early on. He dug another five feet after this was taken, which took another day and a half due to the insane network of ancient oak tree roots that he had to cut up and take out. All for nought, we subsequently learned that the pipe we were trying to expose had been abandoned nearly 20 years ago. We had to find the new pipe. So we started digging in the opposite direction. 

See that terrible cave underneath the concrete that we dug out? I had to crawl in there to search for the elusive new pipe. Just me, a trowel, and a tiny flashlight. And dirt and roots and dirt. But I found it. Guess which direction it was going in? 

That's right, it's going directly for the center of the cement patio, right where I've marked with blue chalk. A construction crew's coming tomorrow to cut a hole into the patio and search for the mythical distribution box that we think has been taken over by oak tree roots. Hopefully, everything will be fixed by tomorrow afternoon and we can get back to normal water/toilet/shower usage.

If you ever want to really come face-to-face with your finite resource consumption (specifically that of water for household use), try living in a mountain home with an out-of-commission septic system. We generally try to conserve water -- and gas, and electricity -- at home on a day-to-day basis, but this is ridiculous. Because we need for the pipe between the tank and the leach field to be empty in order to fix the system, we emptied the tank a week ago, and we need to keep it from filling up all the way to the pipe-line in the mean time. We're using as little water as possible when we do dishes, flushing infrequently (GROSS), and not using the shower at all. I've been showering at the gym, Jason's even resorted to "showering" in the yard with the garden house (don't laugh it wasn't funny yes it was okay I laughed). It's a good thing our washing machine is hooked up to a grey water system, if not I'd be washing laundry in a bucket in the yard. MOUNTAIN LIVING. 


If we're to look on the bright side, it's so far been an incredible learning experience. I know all kinds of things about double-chamber septic tanks and distribution boxes and leach fields and aerobic vs. anaerobic systems and etc. etc. etc. One evening, as I was gazing down on the sinister cement hatch covering the septic tank's output from the kitchen, I had a single, perfect Murder She Wrote realization:

The best place to rid oneself of a dead body? A septic tank. A terrible, stinky, watery grave, with loads of anaerobic bacteria to speedily reduce the corpse to sludge. You're welcome. And, of course, the best time to dump a body in a septic tank is when the outlet's already been dug up for maintenance reasons. It's the only way to not arouse suspicions. Jason is not amused.

Wish us luck. 

Enriqueta Martí: Vampire, Serial Killer, Sack Lady

Enriqueta Martí, source unknown.

Following up on my popular Sack Man post, I introduce to you, readers, Enriqueta Martí, an early 20th century Catalan child abductor, pimp, hack witch doctor. She's also the most (in)famous lady Sack Man Sack Lady in Spain and--judging from the mind-boggling number of internet search engine results--cyberspace. She's inspired the worst kind of screamy, unintelligible hardcore music posted to YouTube, countless creepy "tribute" blog posts,* entries in a dozen cheapo paperbacks on serial killers, a handful of well-written and well-researched newspaper articles, and a movie (to be released sometime this year) with a pretty schlocky trailer. 

And, yes, she even has her own facebook page.**

A full profile is only a Google search away, so I won't get into the details. *** A quick caveat: If you want to be able to fall asleep tonight without special aids, I recommend avoiding an image search as quite a few scary postmortem photos pop up on the first page of results. What I find especially compelling about this Sack Lady case, and what I aim to focus on here, are: the nature of the monster, and the socio-political climate of her time and place--or rather, the outside forces contributing to the intense amount of popular interest in her macabre case. 

I admit that the distinction of Sack Lady is what originally drew my attention to Enriqueta Martí's story. And, as already illustrated, I'm clearly not the only one. There's something that sets female serial killers (or, female killers in general) apart from their male counterparts: a whole other set of anxieties and fears that trace back directly to the Monstrous Feminine. But I digress... since this post in its original form was already much too long to hold the attention of the casual blog reader, I've decided to break it up into two or three installments. 

Read the second isntallment, "Enriqueta Martí: The Nature of the Monster," here. 

Read the third installment, "Enriqueta Martí: Her Time and Place," here. 

*Oh my god, I'm toeing a fine line here, I know... 

**The page (its contents are excerpted directly from her wikipedia page) has 28 "Likes". I came close to clicking the "Like" button myself but refrained at the last minute because, really, who am I? Some kind of creep?

***Pedro Costa's 2006 article in El País is, I think, especially good. 

Humor for aficionados of the Gothic

I like to think of this as the "alternative" opening to every Gothic-novel-of-a-certain-type, and it makes me laugh. If only we could rewrite Rebecca or Frankenstein or Jane Eyre or The Castle of Otranto to start out this way... there really isn't anything stopping us, is there?

This and much more at Married To The Sea.com

Sand Dogs

Yesterday, I drove Roscoe and his BFF Leila to the dog beach in Santa Cruz for an hour of extended horse (doggie) play. 

These two get along ridiculously well. All they want to do when they're together is rough-house and chase each other and bite each other's tails and wrestle and bark and snarl and bare their teeth and chew on each other's necks and ears and basically act like rabid, wild beasts. I used to kind of poop myself every time they'd mess around like this on the beach back in the day, but I now understand that it's all fun and games. It's a little embarrassing when there's a crowd on the beach and they look on, mortified. I just roll my eyes and shrug and walk away. These two are just crazy sand dogs. 

Oh, hey, what's up?

Checking out the beach.

It was a beautiful, stormy day out on the beach. Prime Brontë weather. We got caught in a light sprinkle just as a new storm system rolled in.

Sand dogs in action.

Roscoe, especially, gets pretty crazy looking. It's the feral canine within, I guess.

Phew. Time to take a break and oggle the other dogs on the beach, clearly. 

I love all the sand art etched in to the cliffs along this beach. There's all kinds of bizarro goodness left behind by winter birds, junkies, kids, and weirdos. Here's a nice example on the northern-most cliffs. 

I decided to take a portrait of the dogs in front of it. I don't have very good voice-command with Leila, but I was able to put Roscoe into a sit-stay as I backed up to take the shot. 

That lasted just about as long as it took Leila to wander off... 

Sand dogs will be sand dogs, after all.

Introducing Mr. Coe

Roscoe indulges my Spaghetti Western fantasy by wearing this Western-themed dog collar.

Meet Mr. Coe. Mr. Ross Coe. Or just Roscoe, as named by Animal Control employees when he was originally picked up in the summer of 2010. He was rescued from a terrible hoarding situation in Arizona, and the lovely people at the AFRP drove out to claim him and two others when their time was up at the Yavapai Humane Society. I adopted him a couple of months later. 

When Roscoe first came home, he was a feral animal. Now, over a year and a half later, he's still pretty "spooky" but slowly and steadily getting better. In fact, I'd even call him a "real dog" now. Roscoe is a sneak, a weasel, and a cad. He is a treat burglar, a butter bandit, and aficionado of Ultimate Comfort. He's jealous and under-handed, but also absurdly affectionate and gentle, goofy and endearing. We love him super amounts. With a mug like the one below, it's clear he gets by with his good looks, no?

Roscoe enjoying the lower Haight, San Francisco, spring 2011