Walking with mr. Coe: sociopath and/or werewolf edition

Jason and I started walking Roscoe together on a regular basis recently. I love the three of us walking into town together. I love waving hello to our neighbors as we pass. I love that Roscoe waits attentively for us at the door of the store, and that the owner gives him treats as we leave. I love that, like the store owner, the winos and drunks on the park benches in town are literally delighted when they see Roscoe (it's weird, we're used to it and it's harmless).* I love that I get to walk with the two of them, though I have to admit that I don't think either of them care as much about the group walks as I do. Jason, at least, does it because he knows it makes me happy, but the dog couldn't care less who's doing the walking or how many of us there are.

Look at that dog go, full speed ahead! Roscoe has this home-store-home, Glen Arbor Drive circuit memorized.

Here he is at his favorite ivy patch on Glen Arbor.

Take a look at that insanely happy face above. A walk a day keeps the neurosis at bay.

On this afternoon's walk, I was able to snap some photos of the missing cat flyers that have been popping up in Ben Lomond over the past couple of months. These are just the two on our Glen Arbor circuit; there are tons of others (of other cats) tacked up around town.

The one above has been up for quite some time -- three months. The one below is "more fresh." SAD.

Oddly, I wasn't the one to take notice of all the missing cat flyers, Jason was. It may be because I'm just not that into cats** -- and Jason is -- but, in any case, I'm jealous that Jason made the Jessica Fletcher-esque old lady detective observation and not me. 

A couple of weeks ago, Jason said that he was concerned about the amount of missing cat flyers. When I asked why (because I'm a jerk who doesn't care for cats), he told me that he suspected that there must be teenaged boys in the neighborhood abducting and killing neighborhood cats. And then I said: THAT'S CRAZY. 

Once again, I'm jealous that Jason's having the weird old lady thoughts and not me. 

Rather than blame the missing cats on burgeoning young sociopaths, I actually think that it's coyotes. OR WEREWOLVES. I CAN PLAY THIS GAME JUST AS WELL AS HE CAN. 

But, no, really, I think it's coyotes.*** Which isn't any less scary! We've been having a lot of late night/early morning coyote pack action in the neighborhood lately. Few night-scares are scarier than waking up in the dark to the sounds of a yipping coyote pack. They sound like horrible old screaming crones. SPOOKY. 

I'll keep you updated. Or, actually, Jason might. This seems to be his crusade. 

* MOUNTAIN LIVING. 

** It isn't that I actively dislike them -- except for maybe one in particular whose name starts with an H and ends in a Y SARAH T KNOWS. 

*** Or a mountain lion! It's been a while since we've had a mountain lion prowling around, though, and word travels pretty fast if there's a new one so it's unlikely.

Sack Man: NYC Specimen

"El Señor del Saco," Clo Blanco

Clo posted this amazing photograph onto her instagram over the weekend and then sent me a copy so I could post it here as evidence of an NYC, street performer, gold-painted Sack Man specimen. Do note the small, gold victim's foot sticking out of his Sack Man sack as he snoozes on the subway platform in the Times Square station. Nefarious!

Weekend Update: Hello, friends/springtime edition

Greetings from the Monster Menagerie: new addition, Kachina ("Hillilli") doll, on the right.

It smells like spring out there! And with summer-time temperatures, to boot. This is the second day of a five-day streak of temperatures in the mid to high-eighties in Ben Lomond, and we have the house on heat lockdown. Early every morning, I'll open all the doors and windows to let in what's left of the cool night-time air, and then I'll close everything up and draw all of the blinds on the west-side of the house at around 9am to lock the cool temperatures in for as long as possible. This can usually get us through most of the afternoon, and then we'll open everything up and maybe even get the hurricane fan going once it starts cooling down outside again. 

The winter quarter ended with a bang. So much so that I embarked on a three-week mental Spring Break sometime in the final week of teaching. Once the vacation-fog cleared from my brain, since I'm not teaching this spring quarter, I've turned my attentions to everything that had been neglected due to my teaching load in the previous quarters -- namely, the house. 

Jason and I have been doing some gnarly spring cleaning around here. Organizing closets, bookshelves, climbing things up into the attic, scrubbing cabinets and baseboards, vacuuming cobwebs and dust tundras, etc. etc. It's amazing how easy it is to ignore the fact that you live in the Munster's family home (cobwebs on candlesticks -- no irony, no hyperbole, true!). But once I got the heavy-duty cleaning out of the way (12 buckets of soapy hot water to mop the entire house) I couldn't stop dusting and scrubbing and throwing things away (selling books and other stuffs at Logos and online). My parents came to visit last weekend and we extended the work outdoors -- repairing the irrigation system demolished by this winter's septic system repairs, planting and pruning in the front yard. It 's all looking GOOD. We even have the hammock back up, too.

This should also mean that there will be more activity on the blog as well (how many times have you heard that one before?). Since I'm not teaching right now, I'm actually quite hopeful that it will be the case since I'll need something to keep my brain energies exercising. It's amazing how much "healthy" brainpower* gets sucked into teaching and how much of a surplus you have once you aren't teaching anymore. I want to read books and watch foreign films for which I must read subtitles and write big thoughts. I want to start producing things other than letter grades and essay evaluations again.

Speaking of the blog itself, yesterday I was looking through its pageview statistics and saw that a good deal of traffic was coming in from the blog Barcelone Experimental. Look! They took some of my filtered images from my third Enriqueta Martí post! Reading through the article, I was finally able to find the link they put in for my blog. My French may be rusty (and it certainly is), but it looks like they're attributing my Enriqueta Martí posts to Elsa Plaza. That gives me a chuckle (see the Editor's Note and comments at the bottom of the post for why). I briefly considered writing the author (or better yet: leaving a comment) but then decided against it. It's flattering enough that my weird Sack Lady posts have become source material for others -- and, if we wait long enough, Elsa Plaza will take care of the misattribution eventually.  So, thanks, anonymous author of Barcelone Experimental!

* as opposed to "junky" brainpower -- that thing I use to watch shitty television and waste time on the internet. 

Cuchi Time: Turkeys at Dusk

I've been waiting for weeks -- weeks! -- for the opportunity to photograph these local wild turkeys. I first heard about them in early July, when my visiting parents saw them walking up my street one morning. A couple of weeks later, Roscoe and I ran into them two blocks from the house on a walk around the neighborhood. It was creepy yet fascinating: when I first saw them, I thought they were plastic yard statues. Even though there were twenty of them. TWENTY. I stood staring for a couple of minutes before my neighbor cracked open her front door to warn me that yes, they were real, and, yes, they moved in unison like horrible feathered dinosaurs. Since then, I've occasionally glimpsed their ghostly, weird turkey silhouettes slowly passing just beyond the front yard fence, but never had enough time to grab the camera. 

Over the weekend, I finally had the opportunity to take some photos when they flew onto our roof and invaded our yard. Flew onto our roof and invaded our yard.

A few caveats:

These photos don't do the turkeys justice. One: they look a lot smaller than they really are. The males were pretty humongous, at least twenty pounds, the hens only a little smaller. Two: they blend in with the scenery all too well (I guess that's the point). Three: there were so many of them, it was impossible to capture them all in the same photograph frame.

Would you have noticed the two turkeys in the oak tree over the studio if I hadn't pointed them out?
I don't think I would have. 

Having these wild turkeys flock in the yard was simultaneously awesome -- cuchi! -- and actually kind of scary. We kept Roscoe inside the house as a precautionary measure, and tried to wait them out. They spent a good hour making their rounds through the front yard, scratching and pecking in the lawn and garden beds. I eventually started to get worried that they'd completely rip up the garden and stood at the front door clapping and yelling at them until they moseyed on over to the fence and flew over it.

I see nine turkeys in this photo. There were at least five more on the other side of the hammock.
(I took this photo through my bedroom window because I'm a SCAREDY CAT)

I would be lying if I said that were the only thing I was worried about. They made me nervous, duh. Don't laugh! If they were a hoard of raccoons or skunks, anyone would have freaked. Just because they're poultry doesn't mean they aren't a threat, especially in large numbers. Have you heard of the horrible Martha's Vineyard Tom Turkey case?* Don't you remember The Birds? (I'm only a little bit joking here) These two avian horror stories spliced and bounced around in my brain the entire time they were creepily pecking and scratching away in my yard. I was relieved that I didn't have to actually chase them out of the yard, though now I have to worry about whether or not my neighbors are feeding them -- one more thing to be a crazy old lady about!

Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963)

***
* The This American Life episode on which I originally heard the story, "Poultry Slam 2011", is fantastic and funny. Listen to it here.

Fourth Postcard of the Summer

So this completely terrifying mondo-postcard came in the mail today. 

Why doesn't the Virgin have eyebrows? WHY?? (Isn't it terrible that
the Virgin and Roscoe are looking at you at the same time? )

It was sent by my friend Shulie, you see. She drove up from LA with a friend for a super quick visit a couple of weeks ago, which was wonderful. We ate tacos and drank kosher Spanish wine, and then had brunch the next morning and napped and took a quick drive down Love Creek Road, the most famous road in Ben Lomond.*

Wasn't Jean Paul Gaultier the one who had the super embarrassing drunken, anti-Semitic meltdown at a Paris café?
And was fired from his fashion house and had to go to French court? And looks like a pirate? EXCELLENT. 
UPDATE 8/01/12: NO! It was John Galliano -- thanks for spoiling my fantasy, Shulie! 

Shulie took some photos** at the toy box memorial I alluded to in a previous post, and a couple more further down the creek. She's promised to share them with me (HINT HINT SHULIE), and I'm just dying of curiosity and anticipation.

Thanks for the monstrous Virgin, Shulie! It's already up on the fridge, right next to Eva Perón and Ché!

***

* I'm seriously starting to think that Love Creek Road needs its own tag. Okay, done.
** Did you know that Shulie is a very talented photographer? And that she has a photo blog? Go and see!

Weekend Update: Fear, the Sublime, and Roscoe at the Dog Beach

It's another beautiful weekend here in Santa Cruz -- sunny, mild weather, with a nice breeze. This generally isn't the best dog beach weather (it's so perfect that it brings out all the sun bathers and small children; neither of these things go well with active dogs), but we found a nice strip of Its Beach untouched by the sunbathing masses. It's true, there were lots of gnats and smelled like poop; we made due. 

Roscoe made a new friend who likes to chase as much as Roscoe likes to be chased. EXCELLENT. All in all, a successful outing without any knocked over children or invasive sunbather sniffing (at least not by my dog).

TAIL TWINS. 

In totally unrelated news, I've been working on a new syllabus for my teaching portfolio and it is, sincerely, awesome. I have stacks of monster and horror theory books all over, and I'm having too much fun crafting a monsters curriculum for a course that doesn't even exist (yet; let's keep our fingers crossed and work a little woo-woo magic).

Later today I'll be skyping with Emily and K over a bottle of vinho verde rosé, a bowl of spaghetti and clams (!!!), and stack of Emmanuel Kant and Edmund Burke. SUPER. Good food, good company, good philosophy of fear and the sublime. 

Second Postcard of the Summer

This postcard from my sister came in the mail for me and Jason earlier in the week. 

mmmm Icelandic fleece.

She's in Iceland right now, taking part in a graduate field institute program and scaling glaciers, crawling through lava tubes and ice tunnels, inspecting mineral hot springs, visiting the mid-Atlantic ridge, being interviewed on Iceland's national television news broadcast... you know, totally awesome stuff.

She's been updating us almost daily with photos and emails about her trip, her international cohort of earth science grad students, the group's geothermal research and excursions, etc. and and it sounds amazing. Elena's also been indulging me, personally, with wacky and wonderful anecdotes about "Troll Tours" and the night her group ate a "traditional Viking Dinner" at a place that I imagine to be the Icelandic version of Medieval Times. She said they ate rotten shark, that it's an Icelandic delicacy, and that it was awful. I just laughed and laughed... 

photo taken by my sister, Elena

Elena took this photo for me a couple of days into her trip, in the capital, Reykjavik. We're pretty sure that's a yarn store. I am so pleased by the succession of "wares and attractions" advertised: elves, excursions, trolls, wool, northern lights, ghosts. YOU KNOW, JUST A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS. I really, really love that so much of Iceland's tourism is wrapped up in monsters, ghosts, and folklore. I want to travel to Iceland, just to visit this yarn store and go on a Troll Tour. 

Ever since she started planning for the trip, Elena and I would occasionally sing to each other "Welcome to Icelaaaaaand...", the opening line from the mock-Björk song from that one Kristen Wiig SNL sketch. The more I learn about that country, the more sense Björk makes. Both are equally delightful!

Procrastination Investigation: Medicinal Cannibalism and the Dogged Return of the Sack Man

I thought that I was done with the Sack Man after my handful of posts from earlier this year (it really was a full six months of Sack People, wasn't it? how depressiiiing). I find this kind of spooky, sinister, historically based folk-stuff absorbing and exciting, but even I have my limits. It eventually starts to get tired and depressing and macabre -- not the fun kind of macabre, but the truly sordid, disturbing kind of macabre -- especially when what was once all fun and fantastical games turns out to be all too real. It's sobering. When I finished my final Enriqueta Martí post in June, I thought that I had "exorcised" the fascination once and for all. But just like any other kind of unfinished business, the specter of the Sack Man popped up into my imagination yet again. Even Procrastination Investigations can haunt and spook. 

Egyptians embalming a corpse, source.

Enter the Smithsonian Magazine's May 7 article "The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine."*

The article, written by Maria Dolan, highlights the recent work of Dr. Louise Noble of the University of New England, Australia, and Dr. Richard Sugg of Durham University, England. In their most recent books, they (separately, they aren't collaborators) explain that for centuries -- peaking in the 16th and 17th c. -- many Europeans ingested wildly popular "remedies" containing human bone, fat, and blood for ailments running from headaches to epilepsy. BOOM, THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR. These medicaments were frequently used by royals, priests, and scientists, and lead to the desecration of ancient burial grounds in both Egypt (powdered mummy was quite popular) and Ireland (ancient powdered skull, too).** The proles made due stealing from local graveyards and gathering free blood and body parts at public executions. Dolan writes:

"... consuming human remains fit with the leading medical theories of the day. 'It emerged from homeopathic ideas,' says Noble. 'It's "like cures like." So you eat ground up skull for pains of the head.' Or drink blood for diseases of the blood."

AHORA TODO TIENE SENTIDOOO. "Like cures like." In the case of the consumptive (tubercular) patient in the late 19th/early 20th centuries -- whose illness mainly manifested itself in malaise, dwindling body weight, and the coughing up of blood -- "new" blood cures "bad" blood. These folk-remedies -- poultices made with bodily fats, drinking the blood of children -- bound-up in the Sack Man folk-mythology make quite a bit more sense now that we can "read" them as part of a long-standing, European medicinal tradition. What at the turn of the century were "old-wives"/witches' cures, or "home-remedies", had previously been the status quo -- medicaments favored by the rich and powerful -- for millennia. 

The execution of Charles I of England. Note spectators sopping up the beheaded king's blood,
presumably for consumption. Source: National Galleries of Scotland

The article goes on to reference other academics working on the history of European corpse medicine, detailing the eventual discrediting of medicinal cannibalism by the European medical elite -- and the sway it still held over the common people even centuries later -- in this way:

"As science strode forward, however, cannibal remedies died out. The practice dwindled in the 18th century... But Sugg found some late examples of corpse medicine: In 1847, an Englishman was advised to mix the skull of a young woman with treacle (molasses) and feed it to his daughter to cure her epilepsy... A belief that a magical candle made from human fat, called a 'thieves candle,' could stupefy and paralyze a person lasted into the 1880s. Mummy was sold as medicine in a German medical catalogue at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold."

I read the above passage and just yelled at my computer screen: "Helloooo! Sack People! In Spain! Until 100 years ago!!! That was happening too and at the same time!!!" The Sack Man is just part of a larger story. 

Dolan goes on to make other excellent points, highlighting the hypocrisy of the European Imperialist that reviled the cannibalism encountered in the New World, and ends the article exposing the hypocrisies underlying our own current day revulsions by deftly connecting the corpse medicine/medicinal cannibalism of yesteryear with present-day medical practices and research (namely, blood transfusions, organ transplants, skin grafts, stem-cell research). But, of course, I'm still too fixated on the Sack People to even start considering all these new (post)colonial connections (though they are compelling).

At the very end, she touches on the global black market trade in body parts/organs, and my synapses immediately start firing at top speed.

Sack People: they're still out there, adapting and evolving just like the rest of us.***

In true PI form, I diligently researched and scrounged up a handful of publications examining the subject further. If you're interested, Noble's 2011 text is here. Sugg's more recent 2012 text is here. I love both their titles.

Other web articles and scholarly texts (not mentioned in the Smithsonian article) are here, here, and here (and I'm throwing in this Daily Mail article because it references one of my favorite disturbing-movies-I-watched-too-young, Alive). Of course, we fall even further down the rabbit hole with these other texts that, instead of considering corpse medicine, deal with out-right cannibalism perpetuated by Europeans in times of war and famine (equally as fascinating, by the way). You're welcome.

Cannibalism in Russia and Lithuania, 1571. Source.

All these publications attest to the popularity of the study of Western cannibalism in the academe right now (it's a thing, okay? just like how the zombie apocalypse is a thing? I'm actually getting to be so over the zombie apocalypse and bath salts and all the rest of it...) and it seems as if there's only more to come. 


The more I learn, the more normal the abnormal becomes. Or is it that the more abnormal the normal becomes? Oh, Sack Man. And again, the things we forget. 

***

* I would be remiss to not mention that I found said Smithsonian Mag article through the blog of The Order of the Good Death, an arts and science collective (founded in 2011 by Los Angeles-based mortician Caitlin Doughty) that examines mortality, death, and how we currently face them (and fear them) in our the modern (Western) world. See the post with the link to the Smithsonian Mag here, and a second OGD blog post on corpse medicine here. I think their work is wonderful and fascinating and it's given me nightmares and I just can't get enough of it. Have you seen Doughty's "Ask a Mortician" webseries? Oh my god, go and be amazed!
** Let's not even get into the fetishistic/Imperialistic implications of the consumption of ground up skull taken from ancient Egyptian tombs and Irish burial grounds because it's so repulsive that it makes my brain turn to goo. 

*** I know, I sound like an X-File. I don't care.

Enriqueta Martí Part III: Her Time and Place

1/24/2013 Editor's Note: A comment left on this post last week brought to my attention further sources that I would like acknowledge. 

But before I do, I would like to share a brief reflection in relation to sources generally and the overall character of this blog. This personal blog is an eclectic space for personal reflection and sharing of current interests (academic or otherwise); it isn't formatted with a formal bibliography, nor does it attempt to be or simulate a peer-reviewed journal. It is my hope that readers who are especially interested in any given post subject do investigative research of their own. The links I do provide to my sources are only an initial lily pad jump in the direction of that exciting work -- they are often secondary sources that lead back to primary sources, opening doors to new and diverse scholarship, references, sources, citations. All-inclusivity is an impossibility, especially in an informal blog space such as this one, and I do not pretend otherwise. 

That said, there is quite a difference between not referencing and inadvertently misattributing a source, as is the case here. An interview with historian and novelist Elsa Plaza was the primary source of the historical background and social critique for Catalina Gayá's journalistic piece on el Raval, and Plaza is the true source of some statements and statistics I inadvertently attributed to Gayá in this post originally. I've made edits in the body of this post in order to correct these misattributions. 

I'm a historicist at heart -- all stories (and this is a "story," after all) have a time and place. No story has ever been created/told/perpetuated in a socio-historical vacuum. Stories live and breath, they grow and redirect themselves. They fill in gaps, grow up and over themselves and others. They feed off of their environments. Their environments feed off of them. I had a professor in undergrad who would correct me when I would argue that stories -- that literature -- acted as a mirror for any given culture: literature does not mirror, he would state, it creates culture and culture begets it in return.

Somewhere between yellow journalism and prensa rosa. "Crónica gráfica", publisher unknown. 1912.

Enriqueta Martí's story is no different. It was no coincidence that Enriqueta Martí devastated Barcelona's cultural imaginary at the time of her arrest in 1912. It means something that her case made big news in international newspapers, that she skyrocketed to a level of infamy that put her face on the front pages of both la prensa rosa* and seedy tabloids alike. The two girls rescued from her apartment became instant media darlings, their families enjoying certain celebrity (albeit briefly) as well.  It is important to note that this macabre spectacle occurred in Barcelona in the early teens. It's important to understand that Martí's time and place matter(ed).

Victim Teresita Guitart posing for the press with her family and the policemen who rescued her. 1912. 

Census figures show that, in 1912, Barcelona's population pushed over 587,000; in 1860, there were 140,000. The population practically tripled in 40 years, the majority of these new Barcelonans finding themselves in el Chino, the Fifth District. Waves of immigration brought peasants and proles to "The Pearl of the Mediterranean", but what many of them found, as Catalina Gayá writes in her 2012 article on el Chino, now el Raval**, was "The City of Death": the average life expectancy in Barcelona was 41 years; the infant mortality rate topped 17%. Mothers would frequently hide their sons' births from city authorities; if typhus or tuberculosis didn't finish them off as children, they would only be sent to fight for a foreign occupation in Morocco.

This city saw the worst of the War (Disaster) of 1898***, being the Spanish port that sent -- and later received -- the most Spanish soldiers called to war. As already mentioned, after the turn of the century, Barcelona sent even more young men to fight and die in Morocco. In the summer of 1909, the city suffered through an explosive, week-long, episode of civil unrest --La setmana trágica started out as a general strike of the city proletariat, and later spiraled out of control, resulting in free-for-all street fights with city police and the eventual occupation of the port city by national troops.

General Strike, Setmana Tragica July 1909

According to Gayá's article, of the 6,000+ homes found in Barcelona at the time, a little over 2,000 were in the Fifth District. Journalist Josep Maria Huertas wrote that "it was common for forty to fifty people to live in one house." Due to the district's close proximity to the port, hostels and boarding houses abounded, seedy taverns were converted into flophouses and bordellos to better serve those coming through. Morphine use was rampant in the district, as was alcohol abuse. There were frequent knife fights, a large population of teenaged prostitutes, and an estimated 8,000-10,000 street urchins and child thieves in the streets.

Urban warfare, Setmana Tragica July 1909

This is the neighborhood in which Enriqueta Martí operated. This is the neighborhood from which she stole away the two girls found in her apartment in the winter of 1912.

Barcelona burning, Setmana Tragica July 1909

Barcelona was a city filled with illiterate and poor immigrants, and -- much like 1920's Berlin -- disfigured and unemployed war veterans and military deserters: invisible people circulating in a city filled with what Gayá calls "la misma miseria de siempre".****

Barcelona was/is an international port city. Anything could/can (and did/does) happen. Barcelona is said to have been, at the time, the pornography capitol of Europe, exporting pornographic films and postcards to foreign capitols throughout Europe and the New World. It was also the European port most frequently used to traffic underaged prostitutes to major American capitols such as New York, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Children of the Fifth District who evaded forced prostitution and sex trafficking were often kidnapped and enslaved in sweatshops and ramshackle factories located within the district itself. Let us not forget that this was the city lauded as "The Pearl of the Mediterranean"; the city enjoys a very similar reputation today. One has to wonder how much has changed. 

This was (is?) Enriqueta Martí's world. For an angry, disempowered, politicized (and, in some cases, militarized) proletariat, she represented a very real boogie monster: a vampiress/witch preying on her own people -- operating in the margins, a direct threat to them and their families.

Catalina Gayá's article on Enriqueta Martí dares to posit a very different thesis from what we see so often in the annals of cyber space. Gayá interviews historian Elsa Plaza for her piece, who argues that Martí was set up, that she was a "straw (wo)man" -- representative of decades of misery and abuse in the eyes of the proletariat suffering in the Fifth District, just the last straw to break the long-suffering camel's back, and demonized by the city government and print media as well. Martí took the fall for so many others.***** Plaza reminds Gayá's readers that Martí never confessed to murdering those many children she kidnapped, nor did she ever confess to selling their bodily parts as potions and elixirs. According to Plaza, Martí was never formally accused of murder, nor was any child's cadaver actually found in her home. The second child found in her home with Teresita -- a girl named Angela -- was proven to really, actually, truly be her neice, as Martí always claimed the girl to be.

Elsa Plaza argues that Martí wasn't a vampire at all. She was just another pimp, another Sack Lady/Man in a city filled with many. If she were a monster, she would have been in good company -- living in a monstrous place, as Giorgio Agamben would say, operating in a state of exception, the abnormal made normal. 

She also argues that Martí, rather than being brutally killed by her fellow inmates, died of uterine cancer after eight months of waiting for her trial date, that the other women in the jail insisted on washing her body, holding a vigil, and giving her a proper funeral. 

She argues that Martí's story has always been told by men. This blogger argues that it has always been told for men as well. 

One of the final photographs taken of Martí after her arrest. 1912.
Hauntingly familiar, we all recognize the iconic image of the
celebrity shielding their face from the cameras. 

What does this mean for us, devotees of the urban legend of the Vampiress of the Carrer Ponent? Does any of this really matter? That she may not have been a vampire, a serial killer, after all? Does that really matter? Does it change the story? Are we disappointed (in ourselves)? Do we feel sheepish? I could spell it out for you, but I won't. We're all thinking the same thing. Though, this is only a story after all. 

Remember, monsters operate as meaningful signs. Ghosts do, too.

In his 1993 text The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Jacques Derrida reminds us that:

"The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, but its essence, is not seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition."******

***

Further reading:

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

       Read the second installment, "Enriqueta Martí Part II: The Nature of the Monster", here.

       Read the Sack Man post that started it all here.  

* "Periodismo del corazón", journalism dedicated to high society, lifestyles of the rich and famous, media and entertainment. 

** Read Catalina Gayá's excellent 2011 article for elPeriódico.com -- that so informed this post -- here. 

*** Known in the United States as the Spanish American War. 

****Anyone who has seen Alejandro González Iñárritu's devastating 2010 film Biutiful -- or has had direct access to the most marginalized communities throughout Barcelona -- would recognize that very little has changed in the port city in the past 100 years. 

***** Remember: if Enriqueta Martí is the urban witch from "Hansel and Gretel", who play the roles of the mother and father who abandoned their children in woods at the beginning of the fairy tale? How many parents in Barcelona sold their children into slavery, sexual and otherwise? Many, unfortunately, tragically, horrifically.

****** Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. 101.

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).

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. 

Procrastination Investigation: The unfortunate historical basis of the Sack Man.

"Que biene el Coco"
Goya, Caprichos plate 3

Last summer, tooling around on the internet and generally procrastinating my time away, I fell down the wikipedia rabbit hole and, much to my delight, came across an entry in which some of my favorite things met: serial killers, monsters, old wives tales, and historical fact.

I'm a sucker for weirdo historical tidbits. I love spooky superstitions, fabrications, fairy tales, and "widely distributed untruths". I get particularly excited when I come across historical traces to urban myths and folk tales, and am particularly interested in investigating the grey spaces where fact and fiction converge.

El hombre del saco, or, Sack Man (also known as El Señor Sacamantecas, or, Mr. Lard Remover)* is the Spanish equivalent of the Boogie Man, and may be the most popular monster used by parents to scare their children into submission in the Spanish speaking world.**

This is how the story goes. There is a man, with a sack, who wanders through the city streets, village alleys, or country lanes (all depending on where you live, of course) at dusk. He abducts children loitering outside the home, sneaking them away in his sack. Those children are never seen again. Mr. Lard Remover, specifically, takes those children, kills them, reduces their body fat to lard, and then sells that lard back to the unsuspecting parents of the abducted children. Really, what could be more terrifying then the image of your own family sitting down to a dinner cooked with your own reduced body fat? Telling this story to kids is the perfect way to make sure they come home before sundown.

I always thought that there was some kind of hidden truth to this urban(/rural?) legend, but assumed that whatever historical fact there was to the story had been buried under centuries (if not millennia!) of intergenerational memory, slowly erased by Oblivion.

Not so! The accounts are out there, and fresh! There are a handful of documented cases of Sack Men (and women!) operating in both rural and urban areas all over Spain throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most famous examples of such, sometimes serial, infanticidal killer boogie (wo)men are: Manuel Blanco Romasanta, killing women and children and making human lard in early 19th century Galicia (he was also a werewolf!); Enriqueta Martí, the 'Vampiress of the Carrer Ponent', pimping out children and then extracting their bodily fluids and grinding their bones to dust to make home-made medicinal remedies in early 20th century Barcelona; and Francisco Ortega, Francisco Leona, and El tonto Rodríguez (vampire, witch doctor, and village idiot, respectively!), abducting, exsanguinating (is this a verb?), and removing the bodily fat from a young boy in early 20th century Almería.

Why the exsanguination? Why the extraction of bodily fat? Sadly (horrifically), the consumption of children's blood and application of hot poultices made of the body fat of children to the chest were considered by many in 19th and 20th century Spain to be effective "home remedies" for tuberculosis. The remedies were incredibly pricey (and, of course, difficult to come by), really only available to the white collar class and the wealthy. Is it ironic that such folk medicine should only be economically accessible to the bourgeoisie and social elite? The rate of child abduction skyrocketed throughout the country during this time.

What is so disturbing? tragic? just sad? to me is that this happened so recently (historically, relatively). I can negotiate and reconcile these occurances if they were to have happened in the middle ages, even the relatively dark days of the 16th and 17th centuries.*** But these atrocities were, in some cases, being committed less than 100 years ago. Worse yet, they were being FORGOTTEN in less time than that. These killers, who started out as werewolves and vampires, have very quickly become mere bedtime boogies and meanies.

It's remarkable how quickly Oblivion can work to transform some thing(s) too horrible to live with into much more benign apparitions.

Is Spain the only country with such a ghastly folk mythology pertaining to the tuberculosis epidemic of yesteryear? Is it possible that the Sack Men of other Spanish-speaking countries were also hack folk doctors, werewolves, vampires, and village idiots? And what of those boogie monsters in the rest of the world?

Quickly running through my mental pop culture backlog, the Boogie Woogie Man from Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas is particularly compelling, what with his burlap construction, ripped at the seams, spilling maggots and worms...

We never truly believe in the Boogie Man. But maybe we should (and believe in much more).

***

Read the first installment of my Enriqueta Martí: Sack Lady series here.

Read my follow-up post on medicinal cannibalism/corpse medicine and the Sack Man here.

*Excuse my ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment translation.
**Other names include El Coco, El Tío Saín, El Silbón. Translate them yourselves!!!
***There are, certainly, accounts of Sack Men operating throughout Spain during these centuries as well, travelers who adopted? abducted? enslaved? war orphans and street urchins by the handful.