Anthropodermic Bibliopegy – A Flay on Words

Yep. Anthropodermic bibliopegy. That’s the technical term for books bound in human skin.

I decided to write this article after I stumbled across five mentions of anthropodermic bibliopegy in a 48 hour period. I took that as a sign that books bound in human skin was a topic I needed to discuss here – synchronicity isn’t something I really put much faith in but I wager that the average person might think it a sign if she just happened upon several references to such an arcane subject. It didn’t hurt that I found books bound in human skin extremely interesting. Also, as I read about these books, I found myself wishing there was a master list and discussion of the more famous examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy, and who better to compile a long, wordy list than me? And here we are!

Because of my interest in true crime, I knew that there were instances wherein court records were bound in the skin of executed criminals. I was also familiar with a few examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy in pop culture, notably the Evil Dead films. But given the morbidity of the subject, I was surprised at how little I knew about these books, real or fictional. Books, creepy things, unsettling representations of the dead – you’d think I would have been all over this topic by now.

As I read about books bound in human skin I noticed that there was a surge of articles on the subject in the spring and summer of 2014. Harvard University tested three suspected examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy in their collections and only one was genuinely bound in human skin, the skin from a woman who spent her life in a mental asylum. Those tests spurred a media interest in anthropodermic bibliopegy, and an interest I am deeply appreciative for because otherwise I don’t think research into the topic would have been so easy. Though several sources I read insisted that the practice of binding books in human skin was once an accepted practice, it was not a common practice and more or less ended in the late 19th century. There are very few of these books that remain in museums and libraries.

Though the bulk of the remaining examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy are from the 18th and 19th centuries and primarily from Europe, claims that skin was used for book bindings date at least as far back as the 13th century. Prior to the development of precise scientific testing to determine skin origin, experts determined origin of skins via microscopic analysis. Physicians and museum curators observed patterns in cuticles and tiny hair remnants left in pores after the tanning process and used those patterns to determine the animal that provided the skin. Many books claimed to be bound in human skin were identified as such by using microscopic analysis – not many have been subjected to more modern tests. One of best tests for animal origin of tanned skin is peptide mass fingerprinting, which analyzes the proteins left in tanned skin. Those proteins point to the animal the skin was taken from and though at times the protein markers show simply that the skin was taken from primates, it can be assumed that those primates were humans. Monkeys were not thick on the ground in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. At least one book, which I will discuss, that was considered one of the best examples of a book bound in human skin, was proved to be bound in sheep or cow hide after peptide mass fingerprinting. I suspect that a significant number of books authenticated as human skin using older, microscopic methods would not be authenticated as human if tested using peptide mass fingerprinting (and that method cannot determine who specifically donated skin as the tanning process destroys DNA).

The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia currently has the largest collection of books bound in human skin in the USA, counting five total volumes, three of which were bound in skin from a single donor. All five have been tested according to modern standards and the bindings have been proven to be of human origin. The Mütter Museum has formed a team to try to create a comprehensive list of all the examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy, encouraging institutions to test all the books in their collections that are alleged to be bound in human skin:

Most institutions the team has worked with are keeping quiet, however. During her presentation at Death Salon, Rosenbloom did share the aggregate results so far: Out of the 22 books the group has tested, 12 have been found to be made out of human skin. According to one of Rosenbloom’s slides, the remainder were found to have been bound with “an assortment of sheep, cow, and faux (!) leather.” The team has also identified an additional 16 books that they have not yet tested—and is working to locate more.

I have to think that there are likely some undiscovered examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy in private collections, but I think that if one of the largest known collections of books bound in human skin has only five books, perhaps the custom of binding books in human skin was indeed less common than some of the sources I consulted seem to think it was.

As I read about anthropodermic bibliopegy, the topic fell neatly into several categories: criminals whose skin was harvested after their executions; skin used from people who could not or did not give meaningful consent to have their skin used after their deaths; voluntary skin donors; books proven not to be bound in human skin after peptide mass fingerprinting; and representations of human skin-bound books in pop culture.

I found interesting a lot of the squeamishness and revulsion people feel for books bound in human skin. Often it seemed as if this revulsion was rather selective, given some of the truly macabre museum exhibits that exist, from the entirety of the Mütter Museum to the visually disturbing but excellently bizarre flayed Musee Fragonard exhibits. It seems strange to be upset about a book bound in human skin when you can see dissected bodies on display in medical museums, bodies that were often curated without the consent of the person when he or she was alive. However, the longer I read about this topic, the more I found myself feeling a bit uneasy about some of the examples of books bound in human flesh. I am unsure if this is a 21st century mentality. Perhaps it is because I am accustomed to patient/family consent in medical and funeral procedures. Or maybe my discomfort is linked with my identification with the underclasses who ended up providing most of the skins used to bind books. I wonder if others who immerse themselves in this topic find themselves growing a bit indignant about the fates of some of the people who provided their skins.

Please note that I exercised some discretion that may seem offensive since I am not an antiquarian, book binder or scientist, but you will find that there are some “authentic books” that I think are unlikely to be bound in human skin. Sometimes I left the books with questionable authenticity in the “real” sections and sometimes I put them in the “fake” section. Generally the “authentic” examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy that I place in the hoaxes or disproved section are pretty egregious fakes.

Things that are really scary

My plans to post often before Halloween took a left turn this morning.

I had planned to head out to take pictures in La Grange and Columbus today. I read a short book about an old, really appalling murder that happened near or in Schulenberg, which is just outside of La Grange. The murder site is under water now but the killer’s home still stands and I wanted to just go an have a look around. After that I wanted to swing twenty miles west and head into Columbus and take pictures at the Columbus City Cemetery.

However, Bastrop County is on fire again. One of the worst-hit areas is Smithville, and I would have had to drive right through it. It’s bad. Bad like evacuating the area, get the hell off the highway, it’s a disaster area, there are burning embers shooting through the air threatening homes.

I was thinking about instead going to the very historic Dessau Lutheran Cemetery and taking pictures there, but no dice. The wind shifted and began to blow north and brought the pine smoke with it. Outside the house smells like burning rubber and there is a haze that I am picking up with each picture I take. Like lots of dust particles that ghost hunters would call “orbs.”

I have several other entries going but won’t have one ready in time for Thursday. Sorry about that – picture posts are easy to put together in a way that my wordy book discussions are not.

Central Texas began this summer with fatal floods and is going into autumn burning down. Bastrop had only just begun to recover from the 2011 fires so hopefully this won’t be as devastating. My little slice of paradise is unlikely to be affected outside of scratchy throats from smoky wind and cars with a thin coat of soot but I remember that over 1500 homes burned to the ground in Bastrop in 2011 and a couple of people were killed. I sincerely hope that the fires can be contained before anything that bad happens now.

The Mom Ghost

I’ve linked to this story around Halloween before but I’m going to post the entire story here. I’ve written about this experience on a couple of online venues but recent events in my life (trying to collect all the stories I’ve had published online and realizing not even the Wayback Machine could help me) have shown me that having all my content in one place under my control is a good thing.

So if you haven’t read my account of the Mom Ghost, you’ll find it under the cut. If you have, tune in tomorrow. I’ll have fresh creepiness up then.

Blood by Mark Ryden

Book: Blood: Miniature Paintings of Sorrow and Fear

Artist: Mark Ryden

Type of Book: Non-fiction, pop art

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Lincoln’s head.

Availability: Published by Porterhouse in 2011, you can get a copy here:
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Comments: I am not a particularly visual person, though I do have preferred aesthetics. When left to my own devices I prefer Scandinavian home decor styles because they are easy to clean and I like my art bright, pretty and sort of creepy. The latter explains my affection for Mark Ryden, and hopefully will explain my complete lack of artistic vocabulary when I discuss art. I’m only at more of a loss when I try to discuss architecture or any form of math. I one day hope to be a Mark Ryden completist, book-wise. I want to accomplish the same thing with Edward Gorey – his works and works about him – and Henry Darger. It occurs to me that all three of these artists share similar themes – children in potential peril and unsettling situations, pretty illustrations, macabre content, elaborate styles, and just creepiness in general.

Mark Ryden’s paintings feed directly into the part of my psyche that loves nightmarish beauty without consequence, the surrealist nature of dark dreams. There is a catharsis for me when I view most of Ryden’s paintings. My interest in extremity leads me into some dark places – my love for Peter Sotos is an excellent example. But sometimes the impact of horror is hard to stomach. Not so with Ryden’s paintings.

Sometimes his subjects show sadness, such as the girl on the cover of this book. She is weeping blood and looks very somber. But even when his paintings, typically pictures of little girls, encounter the frightening, the gory, the miserably surreal, they seldom show fear. At worst the girls show morbid curiosity, maybe some trepidation, but there is no fear in Ryden’s work. The introduction to this book describes these paintings as showing a loss of innocence and that may be true. But if there is a loss of innocence, it is one that is expected, one that is not miserable to those losing their innocence because the children maintain their wide-eyed beauty even as they are confronted with the dreadful and disgusting. I can look upon lovely, big-eyed children covered in blood or encountering slabs of bloody meat and enjoy them for the absolute beauty in the image, for Ryden’s paintings are always lovely. They are always sumptuous, in colors that are so vivid that they almost evoke the sense of taste for me. This is interesting to me because even though much of Ryden’s work is associated with blood and meat, the bright pinks and various pastels evoke old fashioned, boiled-sugar candy. Taffy. Cotton candy. Not fetid, iron stink of meat. For whatever reason, I don’t experience the loss of innocence the way that I suspect others do when I look at Ryden’s work. (You see the intense use of pastels most especially in Ryden’s The Meat Show collection.)

Blood is a tiny book, a fitting size because the paintings are all miniatures, and I selected it to discuss during my Halloween post-a-thon because this book contains an explanation for why Ryden engages in such morbidity, almost a defensive apology for what makes him tick and his explanations, in the introduction as well as a quote later in the book, show in action one of the warnings I often give writers: once you create, the creation is out of your hands and you have no control over what your work will mean to others. By his own words, Ryden would likely find my inability to find his works alarming, especially those in Blood, somewhat alarming itself. Ryden says:

Blood is very powerful. While meat is the substance that keeps our living souls in this physical reality, blood keeps our meat alive. Blood is liquid life. When blood escapes our bodies we are alarmed to the very core of our brains. It is life leaking out of us. It is frightening and makes red a profoundly intense color.

It is here that I think shows the chasm between Ryden’s intent and my experience with his work. If blood is liquid life, seeing children interacting with blood is alarming but it is also a transformative experience. But girls are used to blood in a way boys aren’t. We literally see our blood escaping our body several days each month. It’s less a loss of innocence than a symbol of coming-of-age. There are biblical instructions about the corruptibility and disgusting nature of menstrual blood but for many women seeing blood outside the body is not alarming and when it happens it is simply a sign of growing up. Perhaps this is why I am not appalled by the loss of innocence seen in the paintings in this collection. Blood is liquid life, but in some respects blood is a liquid proving-ground, a symbol of a trial endured, of obtaining a certain type of wisdom. Sometimes the wisdom that comes from corruption is more valuable than white, unblemished inexperience.

Regardless of the ins and outs of meaning and intent, the paintings in this collection are remarkable in content and execution.

I love this painting, titled simply enough, Lincoln’s Head. There’s a lot going on with this painting, and it can be tempting to write it off as kitsch. I’m not the least bit startled by the blood or gore, and it’s not startling to me how meaningful this painting is to me. Ryden often paints Abraham Lincoln, with Lincoln performing an assortment of duties, like juggling with meat, birthing a baby from a tree, as well as serving as the focus in scenes not as easily summarized. In this painting, his head at the foot of the bed is reminiscent of the horse head in The Godfather, a sort of warning to the little girl. Yet Lincoln, as bastardized as he has become by pop culture, is an enduring image of freedom and sacrifice for most Americans.

This child is one of the more shocked-looking Ryden children, and even so she is not terrorized by Lincoln’s head. She exhibits morbid curiosity but she is not afraid – just surprised to see him there. She is clearly a little girl, in her pink pajamas, but note the austerity of the room. No paintings on the wall, no bedside table, no stuffed animals, no patterns on the sheets. This is the room of an adult, white sheets stained with the blood of an American redeemer. Lincoln is a warning to her, that adulthood encroaches – red blood on white sheets is most definitely an image associated with loss of virginity. I almost feel like she is dreaming, that she fell asleep and has drifted down onto Lincoln’s bed, his severed head warning of impeding womanhood and the many sacrifices that are made one becomes an adult. This is a loss of innocence, certainly, but it is inevitable. Children grow up. It’s not a tragedy but the little girl’s face shows the alarm that genuine freedom as an adult can bring.

Or it’s a gory, fanciful picture of a little girl in a Shaker-style bedroom confronting a giant severed head. You make the call. In fact, I would love to hear other interpretations.

The Baptism of Jajo is my favorite painting from the Blood collection. Interestingly I have far less explanation for this painting than I do Lincoln’s Head and what little interpretation I have may suggest that I have not shucked away my Southern Baptist upbringing as much as I would like to think I have. Jajo is a baby exhibiting superlative innocence. He is plump, white, with a big round head, a large forehead and widely-spaced blue eyes. The hand of Christ is bleeding upon him and my first impulse upon seeing this painting was to think that the child was being protected by the blood of Christ, often represented as a lamb in Christian iconography, one of the most universal symbols of innocence. And that creepy clown toy looking on at the scene makes me think this baby really needs all the protection he can get (though later that is disproved by another Ryden painting).

Even as I read Ryden’s explanations for these paintings – he was in a very dark place when he painted the Blood collection and really wanted to paint bloody and disturbing scenes – I have such a hard time seeing the menace or fear. A fat baby in a field of flowers receiving a literal blessing from God. Many, myself included, find the very notion of Christian transubstantiation disgusting – the idea of drinking the literal blood and eating the literal flesh of Christ as a form of sacrament is disturbing. But this child is not drinking the blood but is rather receiving it in a sort of pagan/Episcopalian affusion baptism, on the top of his little head, the most fragile place on a baby’s body. It’s comforting even as it is relatively grotesque. Clearly I am not as divorced from faith as I thought, or at least from the feelings one experiences when seeing Christian symbols of salvation and protection. But I also marry the Christianity in this painting with my interest in other forms of metaphysics. The hand of Christ is palm out, so detailed you can almost read His future. There is a pretty strong life line on that palm, almost suggesting that Jajo will have a nice, long, protected life. That life line certainly can’t indicate Jesus’ own life span, so I think this is Jajo’s future spelled out on the hand. Additionally, Mr OTC noted how placidly Jajo is staring at the viewer, almost Buddha-like in composure. And why is the baby’s cheek red where the clown is staring yet white nearer the bleeding hand? Again, there’s a lot going on in this painting and I don’t know how to assign meaning to it all.

If you want to see all the paintings in the Blood series, visit Mark Ryden’s site. Dig around and have a look at some of his other collections. Jajo makes another appearance in The Meat Show in Jajo, Patron Saint of Clowns.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the art I prefer is pop or low brow, or created by mentally unstable hermits. I’m not particularly well-trained to see beauty and truth in a visual format. I’m much better at interpreting words. So it’s all the more likely that I have absorbed these images in a manner that doesn’t honor artistic intent. But as with literature, I don’t think anyone needs to have a handle on absolute meaning to read Shakespeare or Stephen King or to enjoy paintings from Leonardo or Ryden. Sometimes all that matters is if you love something and I love the juxtaposition of seemingly unharmed children confronted with blood and horror. These paintings bring to me a sort of hope that the miseries of life are endured with a child-like resilience and that beauty remains in the face of the nastiest experience. That in the midst of the rot you smell the flowers and taste the pastel saltwater taffy.

In a way, despite the title of the book, this was the least Halloween-y book I could discuss but I didn’t really understand that until I wrote this entry. Here’s hoping my next entry is creepier.

Musical influence of Art Bell

I’m going to do my best to post a lot before Halloween because indulging in creepiness is one of the things I do best. I have so many creepy books, favorite creepy movies, and creepy sites to share that it would be a shame not to take advantage of this time of the year and write about all the eerie weirdness rattling around in my head.

This entry came about in my typical circuitous “getting lost on the Internet” method of gathering information. I wanted to discuss some really disturbing, dark songs about child predators, and had a specific song in mind, two songs, actually, about a predator assaulting a child and the child seeking revenge, but couldn’t remember the name of the songs or the band that performed them. In my attempts to run the song to ground, I fell into a YouTube hole that completely distracted me from my original goal. I’ll eventually discuss songs about child predation but not today because I found mystery wondering how many songs there are that are inspired by Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. (By the way, the band I was originally searching for is G.G.F.H. and the songs are “Little Missy” and “Missy’s Revenge” and while the songs are still outre and upsetting, they aren’t as viscerally disgusting as they were to me when I heard them years ago. I fear I am becoming jaded…)

Discussing Art Bell’s influence on music is really apropos for me this time of year because I always listen to his Ghost to Ghost episodes right before Halloween. I was putting together a playlist earlier this month but when I was searching for G.G.F.H.’s body of work, I found a title that piqued my interest and it turned out to have an Art Bell sample (the Venetian Snares song I discuss below – that is the song that linked me from child exploitation to Art Bell). After listening to the song with the Coast to Coast AM sample, I decided to see how many songs I could find that were influenced by Art Bell in some manner. Art Bell is interesting and somewhat weird in his own right, a man whose life has taken several unexpected turns, and he has been a personal hero of mine ever since he sued Ted Gunderson (who is hopefully right this very minute encountering the Satan he insisted was lurking in every daycare and influencing every politician since Washington) for slandering him as a pedophile.

Art no longer hosts Coast to Coast AM (and while George Noory is okay enough, he lacks a certain edge, I think, that Art brought to the table) but his long tenure on the AM and online radio program featured many bizarre and memorable shows. One of the most memorable was the night a man who claimed he was a former Area 51 employee called into the show in a panic, revealing that the US government was being duped by inhuman creatures posing as aliens from outer space, and that these creatures meant mankind harm. He claimed to be on the run from the federal government and sounded to be completely unhinged by the gravity of his discovery. In the middle of the phone call, something happened to the satellite and at least 50 separate radio stations went dead for around half an hour. Understandably, this caused Art and his listeners to freak out, assuming that indeed the feds were tracking the frightened caller and had interfered with his attempt to share his story. The man behind the Area 51 call eventually called back to Coast to Coast and explained it was indeed a hoax but that he had no idea what had happened in regards to the satellite failure. That, evidently, was just a coincidence. There are some who still believe the Area 51 caller was real and that the later call revealing the hoax is the real hoax, but that is the nature of conspiracy. This episode is called either the “Area 51 Caller” or “The Frantic Caller.”

However real or fake the Area 51 call may have been, it’s now a part of Area 51 lore and anyone who has much interest in fringe or conspiracy culture has likely heard of it. It’s definitely influenced some musicians, famous and obscure. One of the more famous bands to sample the Area 51 call is Tool, in the song “Faaip de Oiad” from the album, Lateralus Faaip de Oiad means “the voice of God” in “Enochian” (the supposed angelic language recorded and likely invented by John Dee and Edward Kelley) – Maynard Keenan is a sort of Renaissance man of the weird and I think he runs a winery now, of all things.

“Faaip de Oiad” doesn’t freak me out the way it does many Tool fans. I think that’s because I’ve heard the source material too many times, and had heard it many times before ever hearing this song. But I can see how this would be jarring or alarming to someone who might not know the source of the jangled, frightened man talking in the middle of the song. I link to this particular video because it has the “lyrics” in the upload notes section.

Joe Hill and the Lady of the Dunes

On July 26, 1974, the remains of a woman were found in the Race Point Dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her name is still unknown today, despite many efforts to identify her, efforts that included multiple exhumations of her remains. She was found with her jeans and a green towel folded under her head. Her hands had been removed, as well as some of her teeth, and she was nearly decapitated. She had long auburn or red hair, and was probably between 25-40 years of age. For true crime hounds, hers is a story we’ve all heard but for me her case gets lost among all the missing women found throughout the United States, all the more recent Does and unknown victims clamoring for attention, but for many online sleuths, the case of the Lady of the Dunes is still very compelling.

Though cases colder than the Lady of the Dunes murder have been solved, as time passed it seemed more and more unlikely the Lady of the Dunes would ever be identified and her killed brought to justice. Serial killer Hadden Clark confessed to her murder but that confession didn’t hold water (and Hadden is a paranoid schizophrenic who has a history of pathological lying). There has also been speculation that Whitey Bulger may have been responsible for her murder – details of the damage done to her body corresponds to some of Bulger’s methods of rendering bodies unidentifiable – but it seems very difficult for me to see how it is anyone would ever be able to prove that theory now short of Bulger confessing.

Horror writer Joe Hill (I adored his short story collection 20th Century Ghosts) recently finished reading The Skeleton Crew, a book discussing cold cases, and the Lady of the Dunes is the centerpiece of that book. Hill also was able to see his favorite film of all time, Jaws, on the big screen when it was re-released into theaters to celebrate the film’s 40th anniversary, and the wheels began turning in his head. He wondered if the film could in any way help him identify the Lady of the Dunes, and he wrote a fascinating blog entry about his efforts. Have a look – it’s a quick read.

As unlikely as it seems that this could be the first steps to identifying the Lady of the Dunes, there have been recent cases wherein amateur sleuths have solved decades-long missing persons/murder cases by seeing clues that were in front of everyone but were overlooked, the most notable being the possible identification of the young man known as “Grateful Doe.” Life is sometimes stranger than fiction, no?

Biblio-sentimentality – Marginalia

Before IROB died a not entirely unexpected death, I had started discussing a concept I have labeled “biblio-sentimentality.” Biblio-sentimentality is the emotional attraction to books that have inscriptions, notes or items inside them that causes me to purchase such books, even when the content of the book may not be meaningful to me. I divide the items that inspire biblio-sentimentality into three categories: ephemera, or items left in books that have nothing to do with the book itself (which I discussed in this entry); inscriptions, which can be from the author or messages to a gift recipient; and marginalia, which includes notations in margins in books as well as highlighting and underlining. We often see books with particularly compelling items that tug at our biblio-sentimentality and we have to buy the book. We worry that the book is sad or lonely. We feel we need to rescue it.

(Mr OTC and I are well-matched in our near-animist capability of seeing emotions in inanimate objects. We see a well-loved book and think it is miserable because it was parted from its reader. We finally bought a new car after driving a 17-year-old Honda until the wheels nearly fell off and when we left it at the dealership I was afraid the car, a she-car, would be bereft because we abandoned her for a shinier and more reliable replacement. We frequently try to appease our home, which has eldritch elements that at times seem threatening but can be tamped down if we keep our complaints to ourselves.)

This entry will show a couple my favorite examples of marginalia in my collection.

The first is actually a hybrid of sorts, an excellent example of marginalia and book customization. This edition of Liber Kaos is Mr OTC’s book and he bought it because it just seemed nuts that someone who took this much time to reinforce a book binding would willingly get rid of it.

The book just seemed too personalized to have been left at the used book store for anything other than a very dire reason. Someone carefully measured out near-equidistant spots for holes, took an awl and carefully punctured the cover and pages, and laced waxed twine through the holes. I’ve never seen a book customized this way and it points to a reader who, at some point, felt this book to be very important.

I don’t think we have too many examples of customized books but I also have swathes of books that I haven’t examined in a while and sometimes Mr OTC slides books into shelves before I am able to inspect and inventory them. But in all my time in book accumulation, I haven’t seen this sort of careful alteration.

God speed, Wes Craven

Wes Craven died this evening. Evidently he had brain cancer. He was 76, which still seems far too young for him to die.

Everyone knows him from the Nightmare on Elm Street films. The first in the series was quite good, but eventually Freddy Krueger became too campy, the intensity of the horror lost among cringe-inducing puns.

Less acclaimed but, in my opinion, far superior to the Elm Street series was People Under the Stairs. That film managed to include just about every hot button that comes up in horror films – sick secluded family, racist abuse, incest, child abuse, among them – and combined them all into a film so creepy that, were it not for the fashions involved, still seems very modern in its approach to real horror.

Mostly I will remember Wes Craven for being the architect of a film that absolutely destroyed me when I first saw it. In Last House on the Left, an update of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, Mari and Phyllis are waylaid during their attempts to find drugs before a concert. Their abductors take them into the woods to torture, rape and eventually murder them. Their murderers end up needing assistance from Mari’s family and Mari’s parents realize the people in their home killed their child and seek violent revenge.

There is a scene in this film where Mari, after she has been raped and mutilated, walks into a lake to clean herself. Once she is out into the lake, her captors shoot her to death and she begins to float, her long hair clinging to the surface of the water, spreading out in a corona around her. Of all the horrible images and acts in this film, that image of Mari in the water is the one that stays with me and there’s no wonder why. Young women floating dead in water is an image that has been with us for centuries. Ophelia instantly comes to mind. So does the Lady of Shallot, though she was in a boat. Most relevant for me is L’Inconnue de la Seine, a beautiful young woman found dead in the Seine in the late 1880s. Her death mask became a collector’s piece and her image now graces all Resusci Annie mannequins used to train people to perform CPR. She was considered an example of perfect female beauty. Her story was told over and over in literature and art and I’ve linked her with Mari in my mind, two lost young girls, killed vilely but washed clean.

Though dubbed an exploitation film, Last House on the Left appalled 1972 moviegoers with its audacious and all-too-real violence, but the movie was far more than just a vehicle for splatter and gore. It tugged at the primal needs of mankind to protect the young and vulnerable among us, and reminded us how quickly the suburban family can become atavistic killers when their own are threatened or harmed. It taps into the very fairy tales that make up our earliest introductions to literature, telling us of little children lured into the woods and those foolhardy enough to walk into danger on their own. In so many ways the film harked back to the gruesome violence of the early, unsanitized Grimm tales that we’d forgotten after so many Disney reinterpretations, tropes that we glossed over because we felt we were far too civilized to share with our children the real danger of following breadcrumbs, or, in Mari and Phyllis’s case, knocking on the witch’s door.

Wes Craven was a genius who understood the primal violence that threatens us and how easily we shed our modernity and squeamishness when we need to protect those we love or seek vengeance against those who harm us.

Wes was also a man who understood so well the tropes of the genre he helped create that he seamlessly subverted them in the Scream series, an almost intolerably self-aware and clever look at how we again all learned the danger of going into the woods – horror movies showed us the danger – but we end up in the woods nonetheless. Knowing rules saved few from the knife.

There is so much more that can be said about Wes Craven but I am going to leave it alone now, and perhaps watch The Serpent and the Rainbow again this week. God speed, Mr Craven.

“Praise Abort,” Christopher Walken and Bodil Joensen

This entire entry is NSFW. And in some regards, NSFL, but if you’re reading here you’re probably made of stern stuff. But be warned – most of this entry could get you fired if your IT team at work is on the ball.

Peter Tägtgren (of Hypocrisy and Pain fame) teamed up with Til Lindemann from Rammstein in a project called Lindemann and the first single, at first listen, was a paean to sexual frustration and complete misanthropy. I’m always up for that which is sexually uncomfortable and I sort of loathe most of humanity, so “Praise Abort” was up my alley. It was also deeply funny and we need more humor in music, I think. God knows “Praise Abort” would be a complete mental massacre without some humor.

I’ve not followed Peter Tägtgren’s career that closely. When I was but a wee lass, I listened to Hypocrisy from time to time. I checked out Pain on YouTube and the first video that came up was for a song called “Shut Your Mouth.” Tägtgren is obviously not a dude adverse to humor in his music, and the video for “Shut Your Mouth” verges into silliness. But whether or not you like humor in your metal, how can you not like a song with a chorus like “Just wipe your own ass and shut your mouth!”

And because I am a hopelessly shallow woman, I can say that now that I know that Peter Tägtgren is no longer a metallic ringer for Johnny Depp

and is transforming into Christopher Walken, I find him far more interesting and can see myself checking out more Pain once this discussion is completed.

Welcome to Odd Things Considered!

Welcome to my new site!

This change was a long time coming. Over the years I’ve maintained a “conspiracy theory” blog, a regular book blog, a LiveJournal with tons of pictures of my strange travels and trips to creepy places, and my odd books blog, the latter being how most people came to know me. I now have most of that old content here on this site. What ultimately spurred the change-over is that the database on I Read Odd Books became corrupted. Mr OTC (formerly Mr Oddbooks) could have fixed it, in the fullness of time, but it would have taken a while. Combining all the sites with a new back end seemed a far better option than continuing to finesse a site that was, in my expert, technical opinion, electronically haunted.

The best part is that I will be able to write here far more than I did in the past. Having content scattered hither and yon was in a way very tiresome. Now I have one place to write about odd books, strange cinema, bizarre music, and strange travels, and that will result in a site that is updated far more regularly.

The other sites will redirect here indefinitely, but will eventually come offline. All the old IROB links will eventually automatically redirect here, too. Bear with us as we iron out any wrinkles and if you see any issues, please let me know. Some of the Conspiracy Theory entries are borked as the images didn’t make it over with them but that will be fixed soon.

Right now we are working with the bare basics but we will be tarting up the site as the spirit moves us. I’ll be adding new content as we fix up the site. This week I’m itching to discuss the new Lindemann video and have an excellent book to kick off Odd Things Considered – Shane Hinton’s Pinkies.

So welcome to Odd Things Considered! Stick around – I think we’ll have more to talk about in this new e-neck of the woods.