The New Inquiry Magazine thenewinquiry.com Volume 21 • October, 2013 the new inquiry magazine is licensed under a creative commons license [cc-by-nc-nd 3.0] De Natura animalium, Cambrai ca. 1270 Lampadaire funéraire, Cabaret du Néant Sergius Hruby, Die Muskete, 1933 Ellsworth Kelly, Avocado, 1967 Witchcraft ’70, 1970 Blood on Satan’s Claw, 1971 Night of Dark Shadows, 1971 Virgin Witch, 1972 Editor-in-Chief Rachel Rosenfelt

Creative Director Imp Kerr

Executive Editor Rob Horning

Senior Editors Emily Cooke, Malcolm Harris

Managing Editor Joseph Barkeley

Editors Atossa A. Abrahamian, Adrian Chen, Max Fox, Samantha Hinds, Sarah Leonard, Willie Osterweil

Associate Editors Tim Barker, Erwin Montgomery

Editors at Large Aaron Bady, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Laurie Penny

Contributing Editors Elizabeth Greenwood, Nathan Jurgenson, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Ayesha A. Siddiqi

Arts Editor at Large Jesse Darling

A/V Editor Michelle Groskopf

Special Projects Natasha Lennard, John McElwee

Business and Development Will Canine

Reader and Advisor Michael Seidenberg

Founding Editors Rachel Rosenfelt, Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Borkowski Celluloid Coven edited by Fiona Duncan, 8

Why Witches Can’t Have It All by Durga Chew-Bose, 16 Devils in Red Dress by Moira Weigel, 21

Haunted House by Nic Cavell, 30 Portrait of an Iranian Witch by Alireza Doostdar, 36 The Dark Art of Glamour by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, 44 Hex Before Marriage by Christine Baumgarthurber, 49 Storefront Supernatural by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, 54 The Last Witch Hunterby Colin Dickey, 59

News From Nowhere A review of Laura van den Berg’s The Isle of Youth by Stephanie Bernhard, 66

Crossword Puzzle by Jonathan Zalman, 70

Unsolicited Advice for Living in the End Times by Michael Seidenberg, 71 A FRENCH PAMPHLET called “The Caliban and the Witch, pointed out the Rioter and the Witch,” composed in the thread linking the witch and her sisters, wake of the 2005 unrest, reminds us that “the heretic, the healer, the disobedi- “like every magic ritual, a riot is a fleeting ent wife, the woman who dared to live moment of perception of the invisible.” alone, the obeah woman who poisoned The opposite is equally true: Every magic the master’s food and inspired the slaves ritual is a fleeting moment of perception of to revolt,” to the grand sorcerer, capital. the invisible riot. Which is to say the witch Though the witching hour of history may is also an Amazon, a figure of female war. have passed, there is always the promise The war continues. Silvia Federici, in of another midnight. In a male-supremacist society, female ardor for four outcast girls who trans- power must logically appear illogical, form the slights of high school into Wic- mysterious, intimate, threatening. “Witch” can supremacy. Moira Weigel watches stands for all those unnameable shadow women in China hunted and punished acts of disappearance and withdrawal, as shengnü, a name for “leftover women” self-cultivation and self-medication that that originated in horror stories of maid- elude the social and sexual order. ens melting into bone-white crones. Co- In serving as an effigy of everything lin Dickey acquaints us with Montague that must burn, the witch takes on a Summers, the last great defender of Eu- dizzying number of meanings: She is ac- rope’s witch hunts. tion at a distance and she is an addict; Black magic also now finds a home in she is ambition or enchantment but also the gray market. Witches in today’s econo- incantation and melancholic attachment; my bill their clients for medical or financial she is both a Mercedes Elegance and arti- consultation, albeit unlicensed and ver- sanal production. She is beauty itself, and nacular. Alireza Doostdar discovers that in she is left over. She is resourceful, cunning, Iran, nothing limits one upwardly aspirant practical, and she stands for excess, ob- Tehrani witch, whose penned grimoires scenity, and repetition compulsion. She is take cues from self-help classic The Secret female friendship and solidarity, but also in order to satisfy government-backed inscrutable solitude, banishment, and ex- dreams of social mobility. Nic Cavell ile. She is a succubus but a withered crone. writes of Witch House, the ­circa-2010 She is such a woman that she isn’t. music genre that “made a subject of the These days, of course, safely banished, Internet’s emotional implications.” And the witch pops up again deep in domes- Karla Cornejo Villavicencio outlines how ticity: kitchen magic, beauty magic, bed- botanicas—the community pharmacies, room magic, parenting magic. Autumn repositories of syncretic Christianity, and Whitefield-Madrano finds kinship with primary-care facilities for some of the 50 witchcraft in the word glamour, with its et- million Latinos who live in the U.S.—will ymological links to both grammar and gri- be impacted by Obamacare. Botanicas’ moire, and the rules beauty magazines lay popularity “points to the failure of the down for the occult arts of physical charm. church to properly provide for its own, Durga Chew-Bose sees spells demoted to highlighting its postcolonial fractures,” success recipes in Nicole Kidman’s Holly- she writes. wood witch vehicles, Practical Magic and Is magic a route to the radical imagina- Bewitched. Whether brazen or calculating, tion, or simply a shortcut to conventional her witches pour their power into snag- acquisitions, commercial and domestic? ging men and modern housewares—on What separates the witch’s foretelling from credit, no less. the capitalist’s risk analysis, her spellbind- Domesticity isn’t solely the social ing from public relations? “Are you a good control of women, though. Through the witch, or a bad witch?” domestic, women can also assert con- But ultimately it’s beside the point to trol over the social. The hearth is her question the morality of a witch’s exis- harp before even becoming hausfrau. tence. A witch summons hidden forces Christine Baumgarthuber traces slum- to castrate the social order, poison the ber-party covens back to virginal rites of hearth, and fly above her “natural” station. man-trap baking in Hex Before Marriage. She presides over irrepressible antago- And Fiona­ Duncan collects an oral his- nisms, drawing on the bottomless caldron tory of The Craft, and of our adolescent of resistance. Her power is real. n 8 Celluloid Coven

edited by FIONA DUNCAN

An oral history of watching the 1996 teen-witch movie The Craft

THE CRAFT HIT theatres in May 1996, wanted learning, money, independence, and summer blockbuster season. It was like many maybe other girls’ attention—The Craft was Hollywood youth movies of its time, the last a holy text. teenage fin-de-siècle, only this one starred girl Its heroine is Sarah (Robin Tunney), the weirdos: sluts, cutters, orphans, white trash, new girl at a Catholic high school in suburban and other marked bodies—a burn victim, a Los Angeles. On her first day, Sarah is befriend- black girl. The Craft was a makeover movie, ed by three aspiring witches. These girls— but more than the new-look ­montages, its Bonnie (Neve Campbell), Nancy (Fairuza makeover was spiritual. Balk), and Rochelle (Rachel True)—are out- Like all makeover movies, The Craft was casts. They’re not bad students but impious: about accessing power. From Funny Face to They worship a different deity, Manon (“Man She’s All That, chick flicks have been teaching invented God, this is older than that”). With girls to wield power through good groom- the arrival of Sarah, a “natural witch,” the girls’ ing and boys. The Craft offered an alterna- coven is complete. They start practicing mag- tive point of access: through books, through ic, casting spells to right wrongs they feel have nature, through one another. For girls who been done to them: back-burned Bonnie casts wanted more than boys’ attention—who a spell of beauty; Sarah puts a love spell on a

9 CELLULOID COVEN sleazy jock (Skeet Ulrich); Rochelle incants revenge against a racist, Marcia Brady–like bully; and Nancy, teen angst incarnate (poor, slut-shamed, abused by her alcoholic mother and leering stepfather), calls for all the power of Manon. At first, it’s all games and giggles, but then “the power starts to go to their heads,” and the good witch Sarah finds herself fighting against the evil of the other three. An oral history of The Craft compels me because I’ve heard it already—in the whis- pers, Ouija magic, and love spells of inspired sleepovers. The Craft was a major pop phe- nomenon that trended, in a time before “on- line,” through clothes, books, and other RL rituals. For well over a year, from 1997–98, my First Avenue Public School in Ottawa was filled with little witches. I suspect that girls all over North America experience Craft-catalyzed “witch phases,” but the spell was atomized, the thousands of local his- tories held only in the minds of those who were bewitched. Recently, I had a vision of a kind of Mag- ing the rites of passage of the Catholic Church ic: The Gathering. I wanted to commune with while simultaneously in the process of defecting. the hemispheric coven. So I did my post- This was my time to create a separate personal- millennial research: I emailed, tweeted, and ity from my parents and form my own thoughts status-updated my way into the memories and opinions. Watching movies they would dis- of friends and friends of friends. Seventeen approve of was the way to rebel. —Miranda years after its release,The Craft is coming of King-Andrews, born 1987, raised in Ottawa age. Here is its herstory. I, like most girls I knew, didn’t see the film until the next year, when my local video store’s new- IF THE CRAFT came out in ’96, I wouldn’t release racks were decorated with handfuls of have been able to see it until the following year, palm-size schoolgirls strutting in pleated skirts when it came out on VHS. I would have been hemmed so short that, as my teacher Mme. a 10-year-old and newly confirmed, follow- Patridge used to say, “if you bend from the hips

10 FIONA DUNCAN

instead of the knees, you won’t be pleased.” I able to me. I was sure, though, like with this begged my parents to let me take them home. weird inordinate self-confidence, that eventual- —Fiona Duncan, born 1987, raised in Mon- ly I would find all of it when I had left home. It treal and Ottawa also confirmed what I had already experienced and knew—that groups of girls, good or not, were evil. —Jackie Linton, b. 1985, raised in Kitchener, Ontario

The first time I sawThe Craft, I was probably 9 or 10. I was at a sleepover birthday party with I was sure, with girls that were one or two years older than me, this inordinate self- which at that age means so much. I remember confidence, that two of the gifts the birthday girl received: one eventually I would find was a create-your-own-perfume set from the all of it. It confirmed Gap in “Dream” scent and the other was one what I had already of those metal jeweled chokers that stretched experienced and knew— somehow. I was very jealous of these gifts and that groups of girls, also embarrassed about mine. This was general- good or not, were evil ly the feeling I had about the whole evening and about The Craft: being just a little bit younger and less experienced than everyone, feeling ex- cited but uncertain of myself, full of yearning, I remember seeing the VHS box in the video covetous of the fashion, yearning to fuck, all store a million times before growing the balls to of that. —Rosa Aiello, born 1987, raised in ask my parents if I could rent it. I remember that Hamilton, Ontario the front cover, with the four girls in schoolgirl outfits in a row, gave me that really particular I remember watching The Craft on one of my tweeny feeling of being really confused by and first sleepovers ever with my neighborhood BFF attracted to sex and sexual bodies.Tess — back in Woodbridge land. We pretended we were ­Edmonson, born 1987, raised in Calgary the characters and stayed up well into the night afterward acting it out. We went to the library I can’t say when exactly I saw it, but when I did after that and read “spell books” like we were the it affirmed what I expected: There are cool girls only ones who knew they existed and pretended out there in the world with their grungy floral not even the librarian knew about them. She dresses, awesomely layered hair, cool sunglass- was probs a witch though too. —Lauren Festa, es, being independent—all that shit I wished I b. 1987, raised in Woodbridge, Ontario, and could find for myself, but assumed wasn’t avail- Salem, Massachusetts

11 CELLULOID COVEN

Still from The Craft (1996)

The Craft hit my schoolyard like the Spice concepts of justice, very unforgiving. I think that’s Girls and Sailor Moon, the latest thing. Wiki- a relationship that most teenage girls have, with a pedia calls the movie a “sleeper hit”; I’d amend tiny dictator who wants to direct the world as they that to sleepover. That’s where we’d watch and see fit. And it’s appealing because then you don’t rewatch the film’s 101 minutes. I had four best really have to think about anything, someone else friends at the time, and just as we’d assign each can decide who you hate or like, where you’re going other Spices or Sailors to play, we’d assign each to direct your energy. I was always so consumed other characters from The Craft. I was a Nan- with doing the wrong thing that it was definitely cy—scrawny with a big chip on my shoulder. a relief to have someone just tell me exactly who, —Fiona Duncan where, and what I was supposed to be in order to be friends with her. Haley— Mlotek, born 1986, I did have friendships like in the movie, friendships raised in North York, Ontario based on being outcasts together or having one very specific thing in common. Friendships with girls Trampoline. Peacock Gap. 1999. I’m at my best like Nancy, who were usually justifiably warped friend’s house with another friend from middle by life and very mean, very into black-and-white school. There are three of us, maybe four. We want

12 FIONA DUNCAN

Still from The Craft (1996)

to be bad, we want to take some kind of risk that and I just watched how the blood coagulated in equals experience. But we only find ourselves in a the water. It became something decidedly non- rich suburb of San Francisco, in a house stocked cinematic. But we sat on that trampoline and we with wholesome foods, and a beautiful garden tried to create a ritual that would bind us togeth- backyard and hot tub. Our lives, in that moment, er in a way we couldn’t consciously guarantee, are not terribly dangerous. With a head full of being 13, 14, not yet having entered high school, The Craft and some implicit knowledge that we not yet knowing who we’d become. On the tram- are weird outsiders, we decide, dramatically, to poline, I guess we wanted, in some way, to belong drink each other’s blood. (This, of course, being to each other. —Mary Borkowski, born 1986, a recreation of the scene when Rochelle, Nancy, raised in San Francisco Sarah, and Bonnie take their “we are the weir- dos” bus ride out into some pasture and drink Trying to emulate the freedom and tenacity of each other’s pinpricks of blood in a magnificent the Craft women, we would set off on Saturdays goblet of underage red wine.) I remember it being and Sundays with a spell book and random arti- kind of gross. We didn’t have wine, so my friends facts to use: our parent’s wine, daggers, crystals,

13 CELLULOID COVEN satchels, candles, matches. We were banking on some form of bra, but we would happily construct windstorms and levitation, rising dead frogs, a bra out of an old undershirt for any members and moving things with our mind; after all,The too frightened to ask their mothers. We mostly Craft is a true story, right? So we stabbed a cou- played Ouija, drew on each others’ bodies, acted ple water beetles, chanted in circles under little out very disturbing sex scenes with dolls, played cement underpasses, and every now and again with beads and candles, made slightly alcoholic someone would imagine that they levitated. Was drinks with cherry juice. Now that I’m answer- it true? Potentially, sure? We all cut each other’s ing these questions, I’m realizing that these girl fingers, so I guess that means I have a lot of blood groups coincided with my discovering mastur- sisters, and we took vows with one another and bation for real, and with my first having serious the occult gods that have long since been broken sexual thoughts and urges, but those things are and forgotten. Monique— Palma Whittaker, much too complex to trace. —Rosa Aiello born 1986, raised in Guelph, Ontario My long-lost friend Miranda (also a Fairuza) After watching the movie four times in a row, I tells me that I served her red wine in my parents’ tried to take some books on Wicca and the oc- kitchen as a means of initiation in playtime ca- cult at the North Shore Library, the Lynn Valley bal; I have no recollection of this. Listening to branch. However, they were in the reference sec- Miranda, I am hit with an image, a memory tion and could not be signed out. So I just alter- buried, of us and this girl Anna, the same cohort nated between reading them crossed legged on that would re-enact The Craft, playing a game the floor and sneaking to the Adult Fiction sec- we called “lesbians,” which involved rubbing up tion to read sexy bits from VC Andrews novels. against each other fully clothed under the covers. I became obsessed with “love spells” despite the —Fiona Duncan hard lesson learned by Sarah, and have contin- ued to seek them out. Everything from old Rus- My friend got this black magic book, and there sian spells of putting a coin into a piece of bread was this one chapter that piqued my interest and reading some poetry out loud to the Sicilian most. It was about spells cast with the male practice of mixing in some of your period blood witch’s penis inside the woman witch’s vagina. in pasta sauce to charm a man. —Sofia Gas- You would sit and rock back and forth while sieva, born 1983, raised in Vancouver saying the spell in unison until the cast was completed. Then something magical happened. I had two girl groups in my youth, both com- I don’t recall what the spell was about, proba- pletely centered around being horny and having bly because I didn’t care and I would’ve wanted “seances.” The first group was called PTSCC to know what boning felt like more than what (Preteen Sensation Club Club). In this club, you a spell could do, so in a way The Craft led to had to have read certain books and seen certain my sexual curiosity. I began to see sex as a movies, including The Craft. You also had to own chemical equation; something that happened

14 FIONA DUNCAN between two people which would result in One of the scenes I find disquieting, disturbing, new form of energy or existence. —Monique along with the entire second half of the film ­really, ­Palma Whittaker­ is the invocation scene on the beach, when each girl brings her specific contribution and prayer I was a weird girl. I was the weird girl for most to Manon. The scene is violent and ugly in unex- of my childhood. The thing I love the most about pected ways. There’s something ugly about each The Craft is that it’s about a group of girls who girl, under the guise of empowerment and some are leading very average, shitty, teenage girl lives, spiritual awakening, really just asking for some and they decide to do something about it. Why petty materialistic favor. It’s the climax and also should a sixteen-year-old girl have to put up with the anticlimax: when things “go too far” and af- a gross abusive step dad, or racism, or bad be- ter getting drunk with the spirit they communally havior from teenage boys, or feeling shitty about invoked, they wake up the next morning, sand their bodies? This was a movie about girls who in their mouths, sun beating down on them. The were experiencing very similar things as me and movie changes after that. —Mary Borkowski my friends, but instead of just waiting to grow out of it, these characters were doing something When I watch The Craft now, the scenes I love the to make it better now. Instead of being ridiculed, most are the ones where they’re enjoying magic. they were feared; instead of being victims, they As a child, it didn’t really occur to how moralis- were sexual aggressors. —Haley Mlotek tic the whole story is—the girls are punished for experimenting with a force larger than themselves. Watching the movie again at 26, I realized I love the scenes where the magic is working for I had blocked the second half of it from my them, when they’re taking pleasure in the power memory, the part where the girls get drunk on they get from scaring other people instead of being power and are punished for it. I remember how ashamed of it. I wish there was another way to end uncomfortable I’d been with this turn since a movie geared at teenagers that didn’t end with my very earliest viewings. I remember wish- the girls seeing the error of their ways and going ing I could perform some magic so that the back to high school without powers, or locked up film ended at the middle, in laughter, wealth, in a mental institution. Isn’t there some option in and sisterhood, instead of with white magic between the two? —Haley Mlotek versus black magic. The lesson of The Craft should be like my favorite super­hero Bildung- For me, The Craft represents a tonal existence sromans. But in ’90s Hollywood, girls didn’t that I wish I could settle into more often, even get to be heroes. We could be enchanting, an today. It’s dark yet elegant, it’s dark yet femi- object of dangerous allure, but never a subject nine, it’s dark but it’s fucking hot, and I feel like who learns that with great power comes great it makes my dark-sidedness a little bit more responsibility. Given great power, we were sexy. I like the power these women take back. taught we would fall. —Fiona Duncan —Monique Palma Whittakern

15 16 Why Witches Can’t Have It All

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

The Hollywood witch’s real oath isn’t to the goddess or Satan—it’s to have and to hold

TWICE NOW, NICOLE Kidman has played her New York Times pan, categorizing it as a a witch. First in Griffin Dunne’s 1998 adapta- movie in which women discuss hand lotion. tion of Alice Hoffman’s sister-sister toil-and- And Bewitched was the sort of big failure that trouble novel, Practical Magic, and again in gets footnoted as speedy sparring trivia in a 2005, in Nora Ephron’s meta-movie-update Gilmore Girls episode. Still, with Kidman as of the beloved ’60s and ’70s sitcom, Be- their common denominator, these movies witched, co-written with her sister, Delia. Un- sketch a spectrum for Hollywood’s fixation wieldy, both films hinge on gimmick, wane with witches: At one end there’s the domestic at the halfway mark, and include just enough witch wife who is proficient at brunch, screw- disposable scenes as if they were made to be ball timing, and benign brouhaha. At the oth- shortened for TV and air in the afternoon on er end, the seductive sorceress misfit with a the Oxygen Network. crew she considers her coven and an itch for Practical Magic is “liable to work as es- revenge. One wears pink cardigans, paisley, capism for anyone who thinks Little Women and Lily Pulitzer; the other sees the world has too much grit,” Janet Maslin wrote in through oxblood-colored glasses. Ephron’s­

17 WHY WITCHES CAN’T HAVE IT ALL

Bewitched and the ’90s cult hit The Craft Ruscha parking lots. Later, we land on Isabel’s bookend the scale (coincidently they share a white-picket-fenced cottage in the Valley. producer, Douglas Wick) while The Witches Spreading her thumb and index finger away of Eastwick, Practical Magic, and Hocus Pocus from each other as if enlarging content on a rank in ascending order. touchscreen, Isabel places a for rent sign In Kidman’s case, the disparities between outside the cottage, and just like that, it’s hers. her two roles—employing her powers to But as Ephron notes, Isabel is an addict. prank a man vs. to kill a man, for example— Each materialized thing, like the for rent go on and on. sign or a beige VW bug that magically ap- Bewitched is the story of Isabel Bigelow pears in Isabel’s new garage, generates guilt. (Kidman), a witch who is desperate to quit She pays for her purchases at Bed Bath & the craft in favor of a normal life in Los Ange- Beyond by swiping a tarot card instead of a les. As it happens, she gets cast as Samantha credit card, immediately shaking her head (Elizabeth Montgomery’s role in the original and vowing this is the last time. As Roger Eb- show) in a television remake of the fantasy ert wrote in his review of the movie, Isabel’s sitcom—essentially, a vehicle for failed ac- one-last-time mien “makes witchcraft seem tor and solipsist Jack Wyatt (Will Ferrell) to like a bad habit rather than a cosmic force.” jump-start his career. Isabel’s charm—and It would be interesting to see a director spot-on Samantha nose twitch—outshines like Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Doll- Jack, and soon the show belongs to her. The house, Palindromes) approach the character movie’s main conceit has less to do with of an “addict witch.” In his world, comedy is magic powers so much as a question Ephron an expression of darkness and suburban mo- poses in the DVD’s directory commentary: notony is a façade for domestic disquiet. In “How powerful can you be in a relationship a Solondz incarnation of Bewitched, Isabel’s with a man and not lose his love?” In this near counterfeit pep and puckish smile, and case, the Hollywood workplace romantic her preference for overstuffed couches and comedy is appended: career, marriage, and fresh flowers, would imply pretense and, lat- coven. Witches too, struggle to have to all. er, sickness. However in Ephron’s version, In this decidedly Ephron world, a meet- Isabel’s persona and Kidman’s performance cute occurs in the Self-Help section of a book- of it seem entirely based on an impression store, the men are for the most part total dolts, of femininity. Witchcraft is a bag of hidden and L.A. landmarks are as adoringly mapped Oreos under the bed or that last cigarette. In as the Upper West Side was in her 1998 rom- one scene, dissatisfied at work, Isabel reas- com You’ve Got Mail. Dipping and swooping sures her girlfriends that she is in fact, “Fine.” on broom as we descend toward the city, Be- She adds, as if satirizing rom-com heroines, witched begins with an aerial grid that is dis- “Last night I ate three burritos and smashed tinctly L.A.: Hockney swimming pools and every dish in my house.” In a Solondz film,

18 DURGA CHEW-BOSE nothing is lampoon. We would witness Isa- Though far less peachy,Practical Magic is bel eat every last bite of that burrito on a similarly preoccupied with the idea of finding half-broken plate. a perfect man. (He can flip pancakes; he has But that’s a different movie. In this one, one blue eye and one green eye.) Sisters Sally she quits witchcraft. First, she runs through and Gillian Owens (Sandra Bullock and Kid- a sudden rainstorm without summoning an man) are women whose powers come with umbrella—essentially, the cinematic mark a curse—the men they fall in love with are of a free woman. Later at home, she con- destined to die. Witchcraft, as the title sug- tinues her discovery of mere mortal life by gests, is used rationally and rarely to subvert. popping a bag of popcorn. Nobody has ever Whereas the women in Bewitched are looked more proud punching buttons on a meant to appear otherworldly (in a glossy- microwave. Kidman’s naïve witch is largely a sheen sense of the word), the women in Prac- Meg Ryan pantomime: that sort of smiling, tical Magic seem rooted in something more clownish stomp that makes her look like an earthly. Or maybe that’s simply the effect of optimist walking at a steep incline. their home—an East Coast Victorian, picket- Ephron, whose sharply funny essays of- fenced no less, but overgrown and weather- ten draw attention to the general upkeep and worn. Sisters who whisper under bed sheets regimen women are expected to follow, was and ask questions like, “Do you forgive our obviously awake to the movie’s Twilight Zone mother?” are instinctively relatable. tenor. “I want to have days when my hair is af- Kidman as Gillian is the wild-child sorcer- fected by the weather,” Isabel laments to her ess who climbs down trellises and runs away father (Michael Caine). Famously known from home to live in California. She makes for having her hair professionally blow-dried blood pacts, empties potions into cheap te- twice weekly, Ephron once advocated— quila, and likens falling in love to spinning with her patently punch-line wit—that it really fast: You can’t see what’s happening to was “cheaper by far than psychoanalysis and the people around you. You can’t see that you’re much more uplifting.” about to fall. She crashes Sally’s PTA meeting Positioned highest on Isabel’s pyramid of in a crop top, no bra, and belly chain, and an- so-called ordinary, everyday life is finding a nounces to the classroom of uptight moms, man who “needs” her “because he is a com- “That’s right I’m back—hang on to your hus- plete and total mess.” Reformed Witch Seeking bands, girls.” Warlock Man Who (as Isabel puts it) “Seems Gillian is Hollywood’s Lilith Fair witch. Very Sweet and Unkept and Troubled.” For her, She keeps her bedroom at a constant flicker- nothing is more desirable than quotidian tasks ing glow, lighting candles as she sings along and compromises, and normal is personified to Joni Mitchell or Stevie Nicks. (Isabel, of by the couple who wheels past her in the towel course, listens to Frank Sinatra’s “Witch- aisle at Bed Bath debating paint colors. craft.”) HadPractical Magic been made in the

19 WHY WITCHES CAN’T HAVE IT ALL past few years, Florence Welch would have In Ephron’s essay about the 1972 Demo- scored it, maybe even starred. cratic Convention in Miami where the Na- Barefoot in black jeans, Gillian perches tional Women’s Political Caucus was pur- herself on counters or windowsills. She is posed, as she puts it, to simply “put on a a cat who walks down stairs as if balancing good show,” she typifies the feud between one paw in front of the other, narrowing her Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan by rival- eyes as if readied to purr. In Bewitched, Kid- ing them as good witch and bad witch. “It man’s skin is fondant. In Practical Magic: is probably too easy to go on about the two porcelain. One witch’s cookie jar is another of them this way: Betty as Wicked Witch of witch’s bell jar. the West, Gloria as Ozma, Glinda, Dorothy – But more so, Gillian would never fall for take your pick,” she says. “To talk this way ig- a guy named Jack Wyatt. She would slice his nores the subtleties, right? Gloria is not, after name in two and pronounce it as if it were all, uninterested in power.” If the spectrum of a question—Why-It? Instead, she meets witchcraft fits between Steinem and Friedan, Jimmy Angelov, whom she describes to Sally there’s no wonder it collapses. as having “this whole Dracula cowboy thing When the good witch and bad witch are about him.” But Jimmy is abusive, and Sally, one witch named Nicole, the moral coordi- in her witchy synchronistic sister way, can nates take a back seat to the Hollywood nar- sense Gillian is in trouble. She rescues her rative. The good witch shrewdly obtains what and accidentally kills Jimmy. “You have the she wants, while shying away from too much worst taste in men,” Sally grumbles as they power. (Isabel recoils when Jack—under the bury Jimmy’s body. influence of hex—suggests to the network Dissatisfaction ties these two Kidman executives that she be promoted, “Make this witches together. In both cases, the craft is a woman a CEO of a multinational corpora- short cut or a revenge ploy, while a normal tion!”) Meanwhile the bad witch is repre- relationship with a man is the ultimate goal. sented as sensitive, steering through life in a Domesticity means safety for both of Kid- slip dress and caressing a black cat when she’s man’s archetypal hetero witches. Neither one feeling extra vulnerable. Complexities do ex- is too dangerous; one just chooses a Jimmy ist, but they serve only to shrink the witches instead of a Jack. When Jimmy is killed, Gil- down to size, small enough to fit in the home. lian prays to God, begging his forgiveness. Both movies end with images of domestic- She promises to tame herself and have kids, ity: Gillian raking leaves and Isabel carry- and even attend PTA meetings. A woman’s ing boxes into her new house with her new powers, it would seem, are only good for one hubby. Kidman’s witches aren’t humanized, thing. The proper use of witchcraft, like the they’re womanized. Any oath to goddess or proper use of a woman’s sexuality, is to locate devil is just training for the oath to have and and snag the right guy. to hold. n

20 21 Devils in Red Dress

by MOIRA WEIGEL

Though males vastly outnumber females in China, shengnü—“leftover women”—haunt the country’s imagination

“As soon as a man has money, he turns bad; nese BBC podcast that I listen to during my as soon as a woman turns bad, she has money.” commute is focused on a grimmer subject: a demographic that the host warns is swarming Chinese cities. Shengnü, “leftover women.” AUGUST 13, 2013: on the steps of the sub- The preoccupation with leftover women way station near where I have been living all has been around for a while. In 2007, the femi- summer, a hawker has appeared selling bou- nist organization of the Communist Party is- quets of miniature teddy bears. It is Qixi Fes- sued a proclamation on the growing numbers tival, Chinese Valentine’s Day, and the state- of women delaying or foregoing marriage in programmed television screens in my train car favor of focusing on their education and ca- report that 35,000 single people have showed reers. They coined a term, and the Ministry of up for a speed-dating event organized by a Education added it to their official lexicon: municipal committee. One male speed dater is shown grinning as he lifts his cell phone to Leftover women are modern urban women, most take data from a barcode sticker affixed to a of whom have high education, high income, and high IQ. They are nice-looking, but they are rela- woman’s sleeve. She, in turn, bats a smile back. tively demanding in choosing spouses, so they Love seems to be in the air. But the Chi- haven’t found ideal partners for marriage.

22 MOIRA WEIGEL

The Ministry further explains that “the why has this proved such a compelling story majority of leftover women are not unwill- to Americans? ing to marry; rather, they cannot marry. They have diligently perfected themselves, IT IS NOT immediately obvious why, or how, they have made every effort to improve, but anyone becomes a leftover woman in China. in the end these efforts have turned into There are many more young men than young a golden collar, because they do not put women, thanks to the family planning laws [women] in an advantageous position on Deng Xiaoping’s government introduced in the marriage market.” The online diction- the late 1970s and the persistence of the tra- ary of Xinhua, the state news agency, notes ditional preference for sons, which has led to that leftover word here, sheng, is the same mass selective abortion and abandonment word used for spoiled food (shengcai), for of female children. The 2010 national census the adjective superfluous (shengyu), and for suggested that there were 12 million bachelors the expression canshan-shengshui, which between the ages 30 to 39, for only 6 million roughly translates as “damaged mountains, bachelorettes. In 2012, 118 boys were born for remnants of water” and describes lands rav- every 100 girls. aged by war. Women who move to China’s boom cit- By the first time I went to China, alone, in ies are taking advantage of unprecedented the spring of 2012, the shengnü had become educational and career opportunities, which a national obsession. Every other cabdriver you’d think would make them more desir- with whom I struck up a halting conversation able than ever. Yet the traditional bias that ribbed me that I was on the verge. One of my women must “marry up in four ways”— teachers at Tsinghua University, where I re- height, age, education level, and income— turned for a few months this past summer, re- has persisted. If the Chinese New Woman is assured me that if you have a nice boyfriend, not too old to be desired by the time she has as I now do, you do not need to worry until earned her graduate degree, that degree and 30. Their remarks send a quiver through my the earning potential that it gives her price stomach. I felt silly for feeling it. her out of the market. Xinhua says we spoil sooner. In 2010 The shengnü has been exploited as a rich the agency published a questionnaire called source of entertainment. In 2010, CCTV-8 “See What Category of Leftover You Belong created a sitcom about a family trying to marry To.” The youngest category into which a girl off their 30-year-old. The title,Danü dang jia, might fall is 25 to 27 years old. The oldest, at could be translated either My Eldest Daughter 35, “has a luxury apartment, private car, and Should Marry or Aging Women Should Marry. a company, so why did she become a leftover In 2012, the Taiwanese network GTV created woman?” As a foreigner, what I want to know a weekly show also broadcast on the mainland is, Why has she become such a fixation? And that puns on the character sheng, “leftover,”

23 DEVILS IN RED DRESS with another character sheng that sounds iden- show on Jiangsu Satellite TV called If You Are tical and means “victorious”: The Price of Being the One. Featuring one man and 24 women a Victorious (Leftover) Woman. whom he tries to win over, the show was one Clearly, the term sells. And something of the most popular of the about two dozen of about it sticks, even when its speaker purports its kind. to be speaking up for this maligned group. When a contestant asked Ma on a date Baihe, China’s largest dating website (which riding his bicycle she quipped that she would promises help at the same time that it stands “rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh to profit from their nerves) claims that there on the back of a bicycle,” and flipped on her are more than 500,000 women who identify No thanks switch. The comment went viral on as “leftovers” in Beijing alone. Weibo, and Ma became infamous. The Shang- hai edition of the official party newspaper, BEFORE THE CPC made shengnü shengnü, People’s Daily, reported in June: women who had gone bad were called bai- gujing, “white bone spirits,” after a demoness There’s a popular saying among young Chinese women who are seeking Mr. Right: “I’d rather from the classic 16th century novel Journey cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle.” to the West. When the hero, Monkey King, These words also swirl about on the Internet, show up on T-shirts and on TV dating shows meets Baigujing on the road, she has assumed where they stir controversy about today’s grasp- a youthful appearance. After he realizes that ing, material girls. she is playing tricks, he knocks her out with a cudgel and she reverts to her true form: After describing the Ma brouhaha,Shang - hai Daily notes that “netizens were generally With temples white as withered snow… enraged, heaping scorn on her, labeling her Her face was like a withered leaf of cabbage… Her face was like a pleated bag. the ‘BMW Lady,’ and saying she shamed the post-1980s generation. Ma quit the show in Whether or not she is a baigujing, the New discomfort. But,” it continues acidly, “that’s Chinese Woman also seems to shape-shift. all okay. Now she’s a star. Her modeling career Blink and the naive striver who went bad took off and she’s a hot item on TV talk shows while she was too busy getting her doctorate and entertainment programs. On a Star TV to notice turns into another kind of bad girl, talk show, Ma repeated her requirements for who is apparently just as ubiquitous: the gold a man and also talked openly about her first digger. Shortly after the shengnü campaign, the sexual encounter.” CPC began a push to reform her too. The BMW Lady became shorthand for the It started with a real woman named Ma selfishness and loose morals of the generation Nuo. In April 2010, Ma, then in her early that has grown up since Tiananmen—with 20s and working as a model for a few region- no memory of either Maoism or the heroic al magazines,­ appeared on a reality dating struggles of the 1980s, depending on who’s

24 MOIRA WEIGEL doing the criticizing. So, troubled by her ap- of the foreign men they meet have any interest parent influence, the State Administration of in dating them. Radio, Film, and Television, the department A former Navy officer tells me about an Ivy of the Ministry of Propaganda that oversees League graduate with a Master’s degree who those media, resolved to cut the BMW ladies disappeared from their dinner date to take a off from their platform. SARFT enacted one call from work. When she returned, she said of the most dramatic media crackdowns in de- her boss needed her back in the office. But cades, halving the number of “entertainment when she asked him to pass her her Céline shows” on the air and taking stricter control bag, it fell open, spilling lingerie and a copy of over their content. The agency also mandated her résumé onto their table. that each satellite network in China develop at An affable thirtyish year old in bedraggled least one show that specifically promotes “so- plaid shorts who studies at Tsinghua shows cialist values” and that women appearing on me the text messages from another student all programs wear at least knee-length skirts. whom he took out for two cuddly tea dates. A Around the same time, official media contact saved as Misty Plum indeed is joking- conducted and began aggressively publiciz- not-joking over WeChat about when she will ing a study. The results proclaimed that ma- get her green card. terialistic women made too high demands A female friend of a friend reports that the on their potential partners: supposedly, 70 large American corporation that she works at percent of Chinese women surveyed would makes married male employees sign contracts not consider dating a man who did not own when they relocate to Beijing, promising that his own car and apartment. In 2012, a second if they abandon their families for a Chinese study on the subject claimed that the real fig- colleague, they will not hold the company fi- ure was 75 percent. nancially responsible for moving their wives The Chinese Supreme Court made a rul- and children back to the U.S.: It has paid too ing ostensibly targeted at such gold diggers. much already packing such victims of Asian The new law stated that after a divorce, the femmes fatales back home. person whose name is on the deed to the fam- A soft-spoken consultant recalls how a girl ily home owns it solely. In China, that is al- with whom he thought he was having a one- most always the man. The BMW—or at least, off hookup showed up at his front door the the garage that it stood in—would henceforth next day, suitcase in hand, and screamed until be safe from scrabbling hands. he let her move in, rent-free. A banker guffaws. The girls at his favorite IN BEIJING, I keep hearing urban legends club are “dry cleaners: just looking to pick about BMW Ladies—mostly repeated by up suits!” male expats set on dating Chinese women, or Such anecdotes resonate with legends female ones who profess frustration that none about cunning Oriental women at least as old

25 DEVILS IN RED DRESS as Cleopatra. But what starts to sound suspi- growth—and on young family members to cious is how so many Chinese women could provide social services to the grandparents conform to two archetypes that so directly who now outnumber them four to one. contradict each other. Where the shengnü is Then there are the leftover men. While one hapless, the BMW Lady is ruthless. Where in three Chinese women from the ages of 25 to the pitiable shengnü fails to adapt to the new 40 is unmarried, one in two of her male coun- realities of capitalist China (recall: “gold col- terparts is; in the countryside, these numbers lared leftovers” fail to recognize that their are higher. Census projections suggest that by attainments “have no value on the marriage 2020, 20 percent of Chinese men will not be market”), her wicked stepsister the gold dig- able to find a spouse. The rise of a large class ger must be restrained from leveraging her of sexually frustrated and humiliated young sexual capital too well. men—an increasing number of whom cannot find work, or work commensurate with their THERE MAY OR may not have ever been an levels of education—would worry any govern- actual example of either one of these women. ment. It particularly worries a party mindful What both reflect, as cultural types, is the un- that rural rebellions by masses of young men evenness of China’s development. People talk- brought down every previous Chinese regime ing about them seek to explain and, insofar as from the Ming Dynasty to the KMT. the terms may sway real women, manage con- In a series of articles for the New York Times, tradictions that threaten the Chinese experi- Dissent, and Ms. Magazine, the American soci- ment in maintaining the fastest growing mar- ologist Leta Hong Fincher has distilled bril- kets in history without undergoing significant liantly what the party’s shengnü campaign is political liberalization. about: terrorizing educated, upwardly mobile The Communist Party has good reasons to women into helping solve this bundle of prob- worry about the love lives of its people. In the lems by settling down. At the same time, the decades since they introduced the “one fam- specter of the BMW Lady has served as a pre- ily, one child” law, shifts in the age and gender text to roll back equal property rights granted of the Chinese population has created what to married women during the Mao era. the Health and Population Ministry calls “un- It stands to reason that if a country needs precedented pressures.” Birth rates in the rich- to improve what the Family Planning Bureau est cities have declined to Western European calls its “population quality” (renkou suzhi)— levels. At the same time, improved nutrition to make sure that the right kind of people have and health care have increased life expectancy. the right number of kids at the right time— Developed countries may be able to bear this convincing rich women that they need to hur- kind of “graying.” But it threatens to devas- ry up and breed is a good tactic. Threatening tate an emerging economy that still depends to leave a bad wife without anywhere to live largely on its inexpensive labor force to drive in cities with skyrocketing real estate prices

26 MOIRA WEIGEL offers further insurance against her defecting things; sentiment is secondary.” if she becomes unhappy. She might. A recent Several months later, a follow-up piece re- international study by the PR firm Fleish- ported that “For Many Chinese Men, No Deed man and Hillard suggests that Chinese wives Means No Date.” It opens with a vignette of a are the least contented in the world: only 37 sympathetic young man: percent of the 600 women surveyed agreed with the statement “I am fortunate to have my In the realm of eligible bachelors, Wang Lin has a lot to recommend him. A 28-year-old spouse/partner in my life.” college-educated insurance salesman, Mr. The campaigns against both kinds of bad Wang has a flawless set of white teeth, a tol- erable karaoke voice, and a three-year-old women both share one purpose, then. Both Nissan with furry blue seat covers. aim to manipulate women into sacrificing “My friends tell me I’m quite handsome,” he said in confident English one recent eve- their interests in order to preserve the stabil- ning, fingering his car keys as if they were a ity of a society that first Communism and talisman. But by the exacting standards of single Chi- then economic liberalization shattered—and nese women, it seems, Mr. Wang lacks that to do their part to make sure that the growth bankable attribute known as real property. on which party rule depends continues. The question of what would happen if enough “China’s New Wealth Spurs a Market Chinese women truly went bad and had for Mistresses.” “Dating in China is Largely money is one that the Communist Party can- a Commercial Transaction.” “The Price of not afford to countenance. A good woman’s Marriage in China.” This is just theNew work is to ensure that the existing order can York Times. Stories in Time, Foreign Af- reproduce itself. fairs, NPR, the Economist, the Telegraph, extensively poached from and reblogged, IN RECENT YEARS, the American press has ensconced the BMW Lady as fact. They of- extensively, even obsessively, covered both the fer the same half-prurient, half-moralizing shengnü and the gold digger. Starting around thrill as the urban legends of girls leaving 2010, a stream of articles in English reiterated nice dates to screw their supervisors. (Like official statistics and stereotypes about greedy them, they also tend to lean heavily on Chinese women. hard-to-verify anecdotes and conversations In November, the New York Times report- carried out in English.) ed that “In China, Money Often Can Buy Though somewhat more slowly, the Love.” “Money really can buy you love in shengnü also started showing up in American China,” it opens. “Or at least that seems to be publications. Googling, now, I find that just a common belief in this increasingly materi- in August the Los Angeles Times has reported alistic country. Many personal stories seem that “China’s shengnü, or ‘leftover women,’ face to confirm that the ideal mate is the one who intense pressure to marry,” Reuters concurs can deliver a home and a car, among other that “China’s Leftover Women Face Tough

27 DEVILS IN RED DRESS

Choices Looking for Love.” CNN’s “On izing China roughly as Chinese propaganda ­China” show has talked about leftover women characterizes women: as either hapless or for a whole week. “Chinese Women Caught in ruthless. The “marriage markets” that have ‘Epic Clash.’” “Chinese Women Fight to Shake sprung up across the country seem like proof Off the Leftover Label.” “Chinese Women of native backwardness. Parents and chil- Choosing to Stay Single.” dren frankly considering material questions In general, American coverage has tend- before marriage appear old fashioned, signs ed to be less misogynistic than the Commu- of a lag in the march toward modernity that nist Party propaganda. In April, the New York economic liberalization started. At the same Times published Leta Hong Fincher’s article, time, extreme cases like the BMW Lady “Rejecting the Leftover Women Label,” the evoke a frighteningly liberated future, where facts of which Jezebel reprised with a funnier the last protocols tying sex to permanent headline, “Chinese ‘Leftover’ Women Fight commitment, via romance, have disappeared Bullshit With Humor.” In the same month, along with the last soft-hearted protections Joy Chen, a Chinese American, published a against inequality, environmental crisis, food bilingual self-help manifesto, Do Not Marry contamination, etc. Until You Are Thirty, and it quickly became a In fact, Chinese women fascinate Ameri- best seller. can editors and readers not because they are But even as they offer affirmation, it is foreign, but because their story sounds fa- hard for feminists to avoid playing to the miliar. For New York Times readers, the only same fears that the Communist Party pro- sexier click-bait than sex may be the idea paganda mongers. When ABC invited Joy that everything is measurable, a market, and Chen on Good Morning America to speak China is the biggest of all. Few stories seem about her campaign to empower Chinese more most-emailable, therefore, than those women, they ran the story with the headline about the peculiar mating habits of newly china’s ‘leftover women’ desperate rich Chinese. to find ‘mr. right.’ As it happens, report- ing on this Chinese problem is compatible Dozens of high-end matchmaking ­services with one of the most time-tested methods of have sprung up in China in the last five years, charging big fees to find and to vet selling things in America: Tell women that prospective spouses for wealthy clients. Their something they did not know was wrong methods can turn into gaudy spectacle. One firm transported 200 would-be trophy wives with them is wrong with them, then tell them to a resort town in southwestern China for that for a small price, they can know the cure. the perusal of one powerful magnate. An- other organized a caravan of BMWs for rich businessmen to find young wives in Sichuan EVERY ARTICLE THAT I have read in Province. Diamond Love, among the largest love-hunting services, sponsored a match- English treats the leftovers and gold diggers making event in 2009 where 21 men each as peculiarly Chinese phenomena, character- paid a $15,000 entrance fee.

28 MOIRA WEIGEL

Such prose allows the Western reader vi- What the dazzle of such stories deflects cariously to enjoy the thrills of rising Asian is the vague apprehension that rising Asia is wealth while also continuing to feel morally outdoing us at practices that we pioneered. superior to its owners. Although any reader Mass consumerism is nothing new. Are the must respect China as an economic might aims of Chinese mass matchmaking markets (its “high end,” “big fees,” “caravan of BMWs,” so different from those of OkCupid? Chi- etc.), vacuous diction makes it sound soulless. nese reality shows like the one that Ma Nuo, Chinese love looks like love only inasmuch as BMW Lady, appeared on frankly copy the Baidu looks like Google. Chinese feelings are format of American successes like The Bach- knock-off Chanel. elor. The American stories on shengnü take Bad Chinese women provide a way to turn up forms of sexism that are all too familiar to statistics about the Chinese market into a nar- educated women here and dress them up in rative. I recall a long New York magazine article a red pantsuit. about the growth of Chinese retail that opened In China, American readers see what with an anecdote about a mistress whisking they fear about themselves made strange. her boyfriend into the Louis Vuitton flagship The problems that the shengnü and the in Beijing Sanlitun three minutes before clos- BMW Lady are used to highlight are ex- ing to snap up handbags. Kevin Kwan’s recent treme. Everything in China is. China is a novel, Crazy Rich Asians, extends this conceit country of extremes that all point to the fi- for 400 pages. nal superlative: its scale. It has an appealing premise. A wholesome The mirroring and misapprehension Chinese-American professor innocently ac- that make the shengnü and BMW Lady seem companies her boyfriend, whom she did exotic are typical of how the two 21st cen- not realize was “crazy rich,” home to Singa- tury superpowers misperceive each other. pore, only to find herself besieged by status-­ In Beijing, I often hear people talk about obsessed aunties and bitches determined to the zhongguomeng, or “Chinese dream.” The steal her man. (One leaves a gutted fish in word, which entered the official lexicon the heroine’s private hut at a Malaysian resort after Xi Jinping used it in his inauguration where they have flown for the weekend in a speech last November, simply substitutes private jet outfitted with a heated-floor yoga “Chinese” for “American” to conjure a fu- studio.) Kwan’s set pieces are as addictive as an ture of limitless personal and national prog- old-school society rag. Every few pages burst ress whose time has come. For Americans out another litany of luxury brand names. Yet, anxious to maintain their global supremacy, he keeps up an arch tone that lets the reader and nervous that the rival whose exploited have it both ways. In the end, we are glad that labor has allowed them to live so flush so the nice girl wins and that marriage will make long will soon call in our debts, the ultimate her, too, a crazy rich Asian. bad woman may be China herself. n

29 30 Haunted House

by NIC CAVELL

The short-lived electronic subgenre witch house lingered in the emotional crawlspace beneath contemporary pop

IT’S BEEN CALLED “drag,” because it re- From the beginning, witch house as lies heavily on attenuated beats and rhythm. a scene was beleaguered. Its chief artists, After that it was “haunted house.” The songs, though collected under labels like Disaro Re- though electronically produced, don’t re- cords in Houston, were atomized geographi- call techno but qualities bewitchingly hu- cally and divergently inspired. All were tech- man—as if the tracks themselves are haunt- nically in thrall to hip-hop’s “chopped and ed. And then, in 2009, two artists—Travis screwed” rhythms, and the same stream of Egedy of Pictureplane and Jonathan Coward adjectives—“dusky,” “slinky,” “overdosed”— of Shams—branded themselves as “Witch flowed to describe them on the scene’s mu- House” artists. Egedy’s music was covered sic blogs like XXJFG (20 Jazz Funk Greats, in Pitchfork, and the term acquired social which eventually morphed into its own mu- currency. Someone went around to various sic label). But the bands tooled with different music sites to tag a group of bands under the subject matter: White Ring and Salem with same moniker, including Salem, White Ring, fatalism and obscure, occult mythologies, and Chris Greenspan’s act, oOoOO. and oOoOO with distorted pop music. Each

31 HAUNTED HOUSE artist responded to the others’ music online, its tone. They are impossible to untie from but when asked, they chafed at the name questions of gender. witch house. Still, they cohered to shine for a Consider, for instance, Nocera’s “Sum- brief moment in 2010. mertime, Summertime” and Greenspan’s By March of that year, the gnats and flies mix of the track side by side. The original were already buzzing. Live performances, re- is a freestyle pop tune. Its cardiac beats are liant upon dark atmosphere, smoke screens, relentless, its electronic brass buoyant, and and extensive vocal modification, were a Nocera’s blistering vocals shine and pirou- sham. Not even Jack Donoghue’s hair could ette on pointe. The word summertime is used save Salem, by then the most publicly visible maybe a hundred times. On the cover of Over of the witch-house bands, from being booed the Rainbow, the album on which the song off the SXSW stage. The music, in party appears, Nocera smiles coyly in a sailor’s cap terms, was not good. Witch house slunk back and red patent-leather jacket. “Take me to underground. the water,” she intones, and you can already But if these are the facts, there is another see it sparkling. history of the subgenre that remembers why Greenspan’s version (“NoSummr4u”) anyone liked it in the first place. It points to slows the track considerably, and Nocera’s the most interesting acts—the subterranean vocals—buried in a heavy admixture of ones who linger with pop and hip-hop tracks synth—shrug the weight of sunshine they to shade in the longing gathered beneath carried in the first mix. But the sunshine isn’t their slick surfaces. Far from seeing witch- abandoned; instead it’s mottled, recycled, house artists’ reliance on the Internet as an and diffused through a synthesizer, which obstacle, this alternate history highlights the adds a scale of twinkling notes that rise and acts who have made a subject of the Inter- fall in pitch and places lingering emphasis net’s emotional implications. on words like “maybe.” At its best, the effect Witch house may belong in the lineage creates a new space for those powerful vocals of similarly moody, involved electronic that, under Greenspan’s touch, would not subgenres. If syrup was the backdrop for only speak slower but say something differ- “chopped and screwed” in the early ’90s, and ent about “summertime.” rave culture was the backdrop for movements In “Summertime, Summertime,” Nocera like ambient house—then specters of infor- sings: mation-age sex and relationships are that for witch house, and Greenspan’s oOoOO in I listen to the rain outside Please come and take me for a ride particular. The name witch house has stuck to I really want you to come and take me far away these artists because their tracks are impos- I want to say… sible to imagine without the starved female vocals that bespeak loss and give the music She passes from reflection (“I listen”) to

32 NIC CAVELL entreaty (“Please come and take me”) to re- tionalism, is a shallow vessel for memory. It peated emphasis (“I really want you to come lives in a continuous present, making it dif- and take me”) without missing a beat. In mo- ficult to recall the shape of the loss deplored ments, she freewheels into more of the cho- in so many songs of breakup and pursuit, rus (“Take me to the water”) and the song whether it be Nocera’s summer romance or presses on. Lady Gaga’s poker hand. To drag, to edit— In Greenspan’s take, the vocals stutter and to haunt, to linger—these are witch house’s each line echoes for effect: tools. Their aim is not to sear pop’s sentiment with intellectual insight but to read into that I listen to the rain outside emotion slowly. Feel like I almost have to die— I really want you [pause] to come and take me Witchy tools can be applied to more far away than just pop music. In the original version I want to say… of Three 6 Mafia’s “Late Night Tip,” the rap crew’s only woman, Gangsta Boo, is cast in In the revision, reflection threatens to two roles. In the first, she’s the female foil halt the singer’s voice at each juncture. When on hand to pout, “I need a Coach bag … I she reaches for what she “wants to say,” the need my hair done,” so DJ Paul can throw words aren’t at hand. As she misses her cue, back “Playas like me can’t be savin’ you mottled sun pours through the synthesizer, rags.” But in a later verse that involves hard and it’s nearly 20 seconds before she rejoins. liquor, Victoria’s Secret, and a reference And when she does, instead of a beach, she to Ginuwine’s “Pony,” Boo plainly embar- seeks a nowhere—anywhere—somewhere rasses Paul and the others’ insistence that outside the grid spelled out in the earlier pop they’re “not the type that get involved in song: “Let’s go away, let’s get away….” long relationships.” In daily life, feelings of alienation like Greenspan’s usual trick is to blur empow- those displayed here might be assuaged erment so it blends explicitly with longing, by pop music’s empowered female sexual- but here it would seem that Boo—with full ity—by Beyoncé and Kylie Minogue, who intentionality or not—has already joined the Greenspan, in an interview with the French two in the first take. Instead of shifting the magazine Wow, described as “like a magical personality of Boo’s two vocal tracks, then, thread running through the banality of life Greenspan’s “CoachBagg” lays them side by on community college campuses and at free- side in the same dreamscape of attenuated way off-ramps in Toyota Corollas. Like slave beats. Twinned like this and absent their male songs for a world where everyone thinks slav- counterparts, they paint a hazy picture of du- ery is abolished but the people don’t know plicity. But more important, that both can be they’re slaves.” sewed into one song gestures at the depth But pop music, with its emotional sensa- Greenspan threads across his repertoire.

33 HAUNTED HOUSE

This depth is evident in Greenspan’s wider songs can be said to linger in case after case, influences. Take “Mouchette,” for instance— “Mouchette” also seems to make a choice— so named for the French director Robert to invest in Mouchette’s political, physical, Bresson’s 1967 film about a girl who comes and ghostly identity over Bresson’s. of age in a rural French village. Mouchette, The percussion is also lined with what traced in black and white, proceeds from en- sounds like mouse clicks. Ticking restlessly counters with an abusive father to those with as they do, they recall tropes of the internet, an abusive piano teacher, from a flirtatious of online relationships and their representa- round of bumper cars to a slap from said fa- tion. “Mouchette,” French for “little fly,” is ther who won’t let her pursue another man the same name used by Martine Neddam when she’s out at the carnival. for her internet art project, Mouchette.org, After her rape, the death of her mother, where themes of sex and death spin from the and her own suicide, you can feel Mouchette’s dark fantasies of a girl who, since the site’s pain bodily, in your ribs and in your shoulder creation in 1996, has been “nearly 13 years blades—or you might, if it weren’t for Bres- old.” A number of forms littered across the son’s deflationary film techniques. The scene Web page ask for an email address, to which where Mouchette takes her life is typical: “Mouchette” might send solicitous messages. Clutching a torn white dress, she rolls down Taken as a whole, it’s a strangely compelling a hill and out of the frame, then into another gallery of provocations that seems to cross shot and out of that one. We hear her splash the thin line between information-age loss in the pond, but the camera doesn’t shift un- and hysteria—a reminder of what the iden- til she’s beneath the surface, and then, it’s tification Greenspan proposes with his song conspicuously stationary. Monteverdi plays. can easily turn into. Mouchette is a symbol. In “Crossed Wires,” Greenspan flies free of Greenspan’s track collapses this dis- the bass lines that sustain his most character- tance, bringing it back to the body. His istic tracks, and it’s here—on the edge of his “Mouchette” announces itself with strong repertoire—that things get the most “witchy.” elements of percussion that don’t land but A single female vocal sweeps back and forth, pulse—they aren’t isolated so much as suf- picking through bars of static before it is fused through more inscrutable female vo- joined by the rich hum of entire populations cals, which might belong to a child. And of mismatched conversations. Stark piano while it responds to Bresson’s deflations, chords prick the hum with loneliness, and the it also responds to conceptions of the sub- trail of the original vocal, bereft, remains. genre. If witch house is easily described as There’s something similar in a movie ghostly, the percussion of “Mouchette” is script by Marguerite Duras called Le Navire an attempt to reconstitute its parts so they Night. When the female narrator’s phone line seem more present. While Greenspan’s accidentally crosses with that of an unknown

34 NIC CAVELL man, a romance ensues over a series of simi- of a laptop, searching for things to relate to lar “crossed wires.” She has a voice to which after a long day of alienation in an emotion- one loves to listen, he says. And then one day, less workspace. he is gone and she is wounded. But as witch house lingers, that loss also The emotional universe of Greenspan’s congeals into a gender. Beyoncé will always music has a particular gravity, a particular be the soundtrack for Friday night: friends grief that refuses to evaporate like the ob- and roommates getting together for drinks, ject of its loss has. Witch house lingers with picking out clothes for the night, and so on. that loss as it congeals into a place—some- Witch house suggests how to navigate the where to return to at 2 a.m., alone in front feelings sewn in between. n

35 36 Portrait of an Iranian Witch

by ALIREZA DOOSTDAR

The aspiration for middle-class life in Tehran can become an occult pursuit

IN NOVEMBER 2008, I received a les- sedeh there in as many months. Café man- son in witchcraft. At a hole-in-the-wall café agement had changed, but she still liked to in Ariashahr, a young and populous district meet her customers there to read their coffee in western Tehran, my tutor, a 24-year-old grounds, interpret their tarot cards, and per- woman named Mersedeh, sat with me at a haps schedule an appointment at her suite table near the window, not far from two men for further work. After she made a remark smoking and playing backgammon. I peered about the proper place of the bismillah (the over the pricey menu while she lit a candle Muslim incantation, “In the Name of God”) and told me mournfully of her breakup with on magic squares, I asked if she had written her boyfriend, a former national footballer any new spells to win back her boyfriend. and aspiring pop star. Then she edged her Last time, we had written one together on a chair closer to mine, leaned forward with a piece of paper torn out of my field notebook, pen in her hand, and we resumed discussing setting it aflame inside the bathroom of her the symbols of Islamic talismanic magic. suite. She said she had not tried anything This was my second time meeting Mer- new, but she had teased the ex-beau about

37 PORTRAIT OF AN IRANIAN WITCH the possibility: A few days earlier, she had sent him a text message claiming she was dig- ging around in the graveyard of a local saint’s shrine, about to unearth some locks she had buried to “bind” him. Then she texted him again to say she could not find them. Over the next hour of our lesson, Mer- sedeh explained, among other things, the nu- merological procedure for determining com- patibility between two lovers, the effect of ingested prayers on dogs, and some historical accounts drawn from a Persian translation of Kurt Seligman’s 1948 The History of Magic. In- terspersed between the teachings were anec- dotes of her own magical practice and reflec- tions on her development as a fortune-teller and witch. As an anthropologist researching Iranians’ encounters with the supernatural, I was especially interested in these. She told me Above: Copy of a talisman Mersedeh and the author of her business advice and relationship coun- burned. The spell was meant to create financial problems seling, of love magic and break-up magic, and for her boyfriend and render him unattractive to other women. This copy omits a crucial initializing incantation of training to control jinn and ordering hits that would have been written across the top. on adversaries. More than anything, she told Cover page: A brass amulet to render its bearer more me of her strategies—both magical and ordi- attractive and help her capture and subdue a lover. The nary—for winning the hearts of wealthy men lover is symbolized here as a beast of burden. and for acquiring expensive cars. Then, as if struck by an epiphany, Mer- sedeh turned to me with an amused grin: “You know what? You and I are a witchcraft metaphysical, psychological, and sociological couple. If we have a son together, he will need explanations. For public intellectuals worried eyeglasses like you, and he’ll have my kind of about a resurgence of superstition, witchcraft hair. He will be Harry Potter!” has been explicable in terms of everything from the failure of modernization to ignorant AS A CONVERSATION topic, witchcraft attempts at assuaging economic anxieties can elicit all sorts of reactions in Iran: incre- and social uncertainties, to governmental in- dulity, fascination, humor, dread, ridicule, doctrination, to foreign schemes for corrupt- curiosity, indignation, and a full gamut of ing public piety. More often than not, these

38 ALIREZA DOOSTDAR accounts are gendered, identifying “gullible and dirty, its only memorable feature a larg- women and girls” as the hapless victims of er-than-life portrait of himself that he kept in charlatans, sexual predators, and drug dealers his small audience chamber, as if to double who sell them chimerical dreams for the price his menacing presence. of their wealth, health, and chastity. Rare is By contrast, Mersedeh worked out of a the analysis that places modern witchcraft in gleaming suite decorated in bright and gar- the context of individualistic aspiration, set ish pinks and yellows: a heart-shaped pil- against more than two decades of economic low here, a lip-shaped telephone there. (“I privatization and the increasing valorization have a strange taste, don’t I?” she asked me of personal responsibility and agency. playfully.) Her state-of-the-art stereo system In the course of my research, I found this pulsated with the soulful nostalgia of Lady issue of individual aspiration—often barely Hayedeh, a prerevolutionary diva. She kept concealed economic ambition—to be funda- a bamboo plant and a bowl full of miniature mental to understanding the allure that witch- Singapore turtles on a bed of yellow pebbles. craft commands among some members of the She cleaned the tiny reptiles every day, she middle classes. The centuries-old storehouse assured me, with water and antifungal medi- of Islamic occult science and folk practices of cine applied with an eyedropper. healing and magic now furnish techniques, Mersedeh’s appearance was also strikingly modulated by pop-psychology seminars, self- different from anyone else I had encountered help literature, and a heavy dose of New Age in her line of work. She was of medium height, spirituality, for the attainment of consumerist with a round face and large brown eyes accen- desires and dreams of social mobility. tuated by a heavy layer of mascara and smoky eye shadow that extended to her temples. She MERSEDEH WAS THE youngest, most wore light-pink lip gloss, orange blush, and red educated, and most self-consciously stylish nail polish. Her hair was cut short, dyed a light of the occult specialists I met in Iran. Be- shade of brown, and hairsprayed straight. The fore I got to know her, I was used to meeting two times I met her in public, she had draped a middle-aged and elderly men who operated thin, black shawl over her head, its ends hang- out of cluttered, ramshackle quarters on the ing loosely down the sides of her face and over city’s fringes. One of these older men, a so- her chest. Her manteau, also black, looked a called Arab-Pakistani from a notorious fam- size too small, most likely a deliberate choice ily of prayer writers and exorcists, looked ev- to show off her figure. When I met her at her ery bit a worn-out opium addict—or, I pre- suite for our first lesson, she was wearing the ferred to imagine, a defeated Saruman after same amount of makeup but far fewer articles the fall of Isengard: hair dirty and disheveled, of clothing, settling for a low-cut tank top and cheeks hollowed, jaws missing a few rotted very short denim shorts. teeth. The old wizard’s house was rundown Mersedeh had told me that her decora-

39 PORTRAIT OF AN IRANIAN WITCH tive choices in her suite were deliber- ately “strange”: She wanted to empha- size a chic modern style but was not afraid to express a sense of youthful mischief and—this is my interpreta- tion—sexual en- ergy. This “strange- ness,” as Mersedeh explained, was crucial in creating an air of charisma The witch’s suite. On the floor is a copy of the Jaami‘ al-Fawaa’id, an occult manual she around her persona used to write the talisman pictured earlier as a witch, much in the same way that the Arab-Pakistani ex- have been threatening merely because she orcist’s harrowing features and dilapidated was a woman with too much makeup. It was quarters would have helped convince clients threatening because she was a lower-middle that he knew what he was doing. To me, Mer- class woman with too much ambition. sedeh’s carefully-crafted personal appearance Understood in this way, Mersedeh was was likewise intended to signal a propensity a true denizen of Ariashahr, a largely resi- for sexual-cum-metaphysical mischief that dential district where middle-class migrants had the power to unleash terrible forces. from other cities and southern neighbor- If this charisma could instill confidence hoods of Tehran have settled over the past in her customers, it could also fill them with two decades as business opportunities ex- dread. My research assistant, a male sociol- panded in the capital. A young uptown Teh- ogy student, told me that he felt the sting of rani may have judged her, based solely on Mersedeh’s “Satanic” eyes and that I should appearance, to be a daaf-e ariashahri, an “Ari- avoid seeing her alone, lest she create prob- ashahri chick.” Such “chicks” (and their male lems for me later on (and here he was ambig- counterparts) are distinguished negatively uous as to whether these “problems” would from other youth by their overzealous—and be caused by witchcraft or something like a therefore unsuccessful—attempts to meet sexual scandal, although his tone hinted at the ever-shifting standards of style upheld both). But Mersedeh’s appearance may not and judged by Tehran’s hippest denizens.

40 ALIREZA DOOSTDAR

Too exhaustive a makeup application, too uptown Tehrani native they are telltale signs exaggerated a coiffure, two short (or bright of cultural inferiority worthy of snobbish or tight or transparent) a manteau—the “too dismissal. Mix in the intrepidness of a figure much” here measured against the hip “just like Mersedeh the witch, however, and the right”—are enough to invite critical scrutiny. uptown Tehrani may no longer sneer at the This is fundamentally an expression of class Ariashahri but tremble. privilege, or, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, an articulation of a gap in cultural capital. The FOR MERSEDEH, WITCHCRAFT was a one who “tries too hard,” as the Ariashahri vehicle for arriving at multiple destinations. With her parents living 20 miles west of the capital in Karaj, it was the means for financial independence in Tehran. It was a tool for se- ducing and maintaining desirable high-status “I realized soon that the men. It secured some prestige for her among time I was devoting to friends and strangers alike as a problem solv- talking to this guy on er and healer. It shielded her from the ill will the phone, and going of others by functioning as a warning sign. It out with him so that even seemed to have brought her small bits of he’d support me, I could cultural capital in the form of knowledge and have used that time learning; for example, she told me that she to work myself. Why had learned to read and understand the Ko- shouldn’t I do that?” ran not in public school (where she horsed around during Koran class) but through her education in witchcraft. If witchcraft was all these things for Mer- sedeh, its condition of possibility lay in par- chick invariably does, aims to climb the so- ticular economic circumstances and a specific cial ladder by accumulating cultural points cultural and intellectual milieu. By 2008, Ira- along with other advantages—like moving nian society had undergone almost 20 years to Tehran and starting a business—but fails of haphazard economic liberalization, as well to fully claim these points because she lacks as progressive commercialization of various the virtuosity of the Tehrani natives who aspects of urban life, all initiated at the end embody their capital through extended so- of the 1980–88 war with Iraq. Mirroring the cialization. state’s attempts to strengthen private enter- Living in Ariashahr, like applying too prise was the emerging “success” industry, much makeup, may signify to the Ariashahri which marketed mostly translated self-help that she has “arrived” in Tehran, but to the and prosperity literature and seminars. Some

41 PORTRAIT OF AN IRANIAN WITCH of the most popular authors and motivation- ter of what Byrne calls “creative visualization.” al speakers were those who blended busi- Mersedeh offered, “If you stare at a picture of ness and financial advice with a spiritual cum a Mercedes Elegance long enough and imag- mystical ethos inspired by American speak- ine that it belongs to you, you emit the proper ers like Wayne Dyer, whose translated works kinds of frequencies to the cosmos, and the are widely available. cosmos will eventually give you the car.” The spirit of this moment was most bril- Repetition is crucial for the efficacy of such liantly captured by Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 images and symbols. “Whenever something is film The Secret and the series of books that it repeated,” she went on, “its power increases in spawned, all of which found an eager audi- the cosmos. It’s like if, from afar, I keep saying ence among an Iranian middle class looking ‘Alireza I love you, I do I do I do.’ This even- to tie together their desire for business success tually affects your heart. Now, the more I say and consumer goods with their more spiritual this, the more it infiltrates your unconscious.” yearnings. In Mersedeh’s apt if idiosyncratic Mersedeh knows a thing or two about the formulation, The Secret was the foundation of unconscious: At the time of our interview, she prayer and witchcraft: “To explain it in very was a master’s student in clinical psychology simple terms,” she said, “all the world around at Azad University. When she was not writ- us is energy. Witchcraft and prayer writing and ing spells, reading tarot cards, or performing talismans are all energies. Even the body con- Reiki, she sometimes counseled families and sists of compressed energy.” The energies that young people at a community center nearby. humans emit can be either positive or nega- The two lines of work shared a concern with tive. And they remain in the world forever. helping people succeed and heal, but also, for Every prayer, every wish and desire, every Mersedeh, an emphasis on generating con- feeling, has its own frequency. “Say you want fidence to serve their efficacy—except that a Mercedes Elegance. There is a wavelength prayer writing was more successful. She illus- to your desire that wells up from within you. trated her argument with an example: This is what the cosmos hears.” These are fre- On any given day a girl might come to coun- quencies that already exist in the cosmos. Yet seling and say: “I want to slash my wrist, I by making a wish, expressing a desire, feeling feel awful.” This person’s mind is a collection of negative frequencies and thoughts. Now a certain way, we make the relevant frequen- I tell her, look, don’t think negatively, your cies resonate. When a certain prayer has reso- life will be fixed up, go do this or that. I offer her some strategies. But these words won’t nated frequently enough through a specific change her beliefs. She’ll try to think as I tell channel—a word, a written sign, or an image her, but it won’t work. Now for the same person, I do counseling like those talismanic symbols we had been and I also do prayer writing. But my prayer discussing—it becomes all the more likely for writing is much more successful than my counseling. Because even though the girl that particular channel to materialize the spe- comes in and gets counseling, she doesn’t cific prayer or wish. Sometimes this is a mat- come to believe. From her point of view, I’ve

42 ALIREZA DOOSTDAR

shown her a strategy. But sometimes I’ll say, I know how to do prayers, and I’m telling you: tal’s lofty standards. Although the uptown Go off, and take this prayer with you, and do Tehrani might—with fear and trembling— this or that to it for 40 days, and this issue of yours will be sorted out. The person leaves, visit a practicing witch like Mersedeh in se- and holding fast to the belief that it will work, cret to help solve a problem of love, health, or she discards all those negative thoughts, and all those negative frequencies go away and wealth, she would prefer to keep witchcraft her soul is purified. And during this time, ei- at arm’s length, something better appreciated ther her lover returns to her, or her issue is sorted out, or she gets some money, or some for its aesthetic value rather than its meta- new opportunity presents itself to her and physical efficacy: as literature (the magical her life changes for the better. realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Pau- lo Coelho) or as jewelry (talismanic motifs The self-confidence that came with faith have recently come into vogue). in the magical power of creative visualiza- Mersedeh, I sensed, was painfully aware tion had, perhaps unexpectedly, strength- of this difference. She went to great lengths to ened Mersedeh’s avowedly feminist perspec- distinguish the “physics, chemistry, psychol- tives on love and work. Love often got in the ogy, and metaphysics” of witchcraft from the way of work, she told me, and it jeopardized superstitions of illiterates and junkies like the women’s independence: aforementioned Arab-Pakistani. Her zeal for witchcraft was, in her own estimation, a mat- One time a client asked me, why don’t you try to gain the financial support of a man? ter of youthful mischief. It had served her I said, you’re right! Let me try to do that. I well in business, in love, and in her own pe- have the looks, so why don’t I get a man to support me, rather than supporting myself culiar spiritual journey. Still, it could take her all the time. So I got a boyfriend. I looked only so far. At this point in her life, nothing for a super rich person. And it doesn’t take me that long to find someone. I wanted to could go further, as she starkly put it, than find someone with a Mercedes Elegance. her own confident voice and hard currency I asked some friends who worked in a car dealership to let me know if they ever had a in her pocket. “Maybe witchcraft belonged young customer who wanted to buy an ex- to a time,” she told me, “when, if someone pensive, recent model Mercedes Elegance, so that I could get him. They did, and I got wouldn’t come to me, I would have had to re- him. But I realized soon that the time I sort to it to bring him toward me somehow. was devoting to talking to this guy on the phone, and going out with him so that he’d But right now there are telephones. For ev- support me, I could have used that time to ery person there’s a point, a word, a need, or work myself. Why shouldn’t I do that? a weak spot that you can use to tame them, calm them. If you put your finger on that and Living in Ariashahr, wearing a lot of use it to get to them, it’s the best witchcraft. make-up, and practicing witchcraft were When I know that everything is only one step three things that had helped make Mersedeh away from my grasp, and that we ourselves are a Tehrani. But all were signs to uptown Teh- the greatest power, why do I need to waste my rani “natives” that she is not up to the capi- time with this sort of thing?” n

43 44 The Dark Art of Glamour

by AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO

Looking your best is never just about you. Glamour is a spell and a grammar

GLAMOUR IS AN illusion, and an allusion either. Glamour is both postmodern and too. Glamour is a performance, a creation, yesterday. Glamour is an accomplishment. a recipe, but one with give. Glamour is ele- Glamour is magic. gance minus restraint, romance plus distance, In fact, glamour began quite literally with sparkle sans naivete. Glamour is Grace Kelly, magic. Growing from the Scottish gramar- Harlow, Jean (picture of a beauty queen). ye around 1720, glamer was a sort of spell that Glamour is $3.99 on U.S. newsstands, $4.99 would affect the eyesight of those afflicted, so Canada. Glamour is artifice. Glamour is red that objects appear different than they actu- lipstick, Marcel waves, a pause before speak- ally are. Sir Walter Scott anglicized the word ing, and artfully placed yet seemingly casual and brought it into popular use in his poems references to time spent in Capri. Glam- (“You may bethink you of the spell / Of that our is—let’s face it—a cigarette. Glamour sly urchin page / This to his lord did impart is Jessica Rabbitt, and it’s Miss Piggy too. / And made him seem, by glamour art / A Glamour is adult. Glamour cannot be pur- knight from Hermitage”); not long after his chased, but it can’t be created out of thin air death in 1832 the word began to be used to

45 THE DARK ART OF GLAMOUR describe the metaphoric spell we cast upon into glamour; we create it, even if we don’t re- one another by being particularly beautiful alize that’s what we’re doing. Call glamour a or fascinating. It wasn’t necessarily a compli- performance if you wish. It’s equally accurate ment (“There was little doubt that he meant to call it an accomplishment. to bring his magnetism and his glamour, and In 1939, glamour—rather, Glamour— all his other diabolical properties, to mar- took on an additional definition. In 1932, ket here,” from an 1878 novel) but by the publishing company Condé Nast launched 1920s—not coincidentally, the time women a new series of sewing pattern books fea- started developing the styles that we now turing cheaper garments more readily ac- recognize as glamorous—the meaning had cessible to the downtrodden seamstresses shed much of its air of suspicion. of the Depression; its more elite Vogue pat- Not that we’re wholly unsuspicious of tern line hadn’t been doing well. Seven years glamour. Female villains in films are often later, Condé Nast spun off a magazine from impossibly glamorous, for as fascinated as this Hollywood Pattern Book called Glam- we are with the artifice of glamour, we’re also our of Hollywood, which promised readers a tad wary of it. Glamour keeps its holder at the “Hollywood way to fashion, beauty, and a distance, and it needs that distance in or- charm.” By 1941 it had shed “of Hollywood” der to work; watch the magician’s hands too and had already toned down its coverage of closely and you’ll spoil the trick. It’s unkind Hollywood in order to focus on the life of to glamour to call it strictly a trick, but nei- the newfound career girl; by 1949 its subtitle ther is it inaccurate: On a person, glamour was “For the girl with a job.” That is, Glam- is a series of reference points that form its il- our wasn’t about film or Hollywood or unat- lusory quality. We perceive red lipstick and tainable ideals; Glamour was about you. That hair cascading over one shoulder as glam- ethos continues to this day: Glamour might orous because we understand it’s referenc- have a $12,000 bracelet on its cover but will ing something we’ve collectively decided is have a $19 miniskirt inside, and its editorial glamorous. The same is true of glamorous tone squarely targets plucky but thoughtful looks with less direct artifice—say, a world young women who want to “have it all.” traveler in a pith helmet and white linen— Glamour isn’t downmarket any longer; but in becoming a reference point, anything it’s more aimed at the middle market—or, we code as glamour becomes artifice, even as a marketing poster once floating around if it’s not about smoke and mirrors. It’s not the office read, “masstige.” It’s all too fitting hard to get glamour “right,” but since glam- that the once-downmarket sister of Vogue is our is a set of references—a creation instead titled Glamour. To the eyes of a nation of a state of being—you do have to get it right emerging from a depression, the concept of in order to be seen as glamorous as opposed glamour might have seemed faraway—but to pretty, polished, or chic. We don’t stumble it also seemed accessible in ways that the

46 AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO gilt-edged Vogue wasn’t. The “girl with a job” grammarians to be sorceresses. The route is knew that with the right sleight-of-hand, she fairly straightforward: Gramarye at one time could purchase aspects of glamour found on simply meant learning, including learning of the magazine’s pages, pick up a tip or two the occult, and it’s this variant that went on to about home economy (if one must be both- be glamour. Grammar stayed magic-free and ered with the terribly unglamorous domestic pertained to the rules of learning, eventually life, why not make it economical?), and find becoming particular to the rules of language. out how to enchant her suitors or husband— But the two are linked more than just etymo- and she wouldn’t necessarily need money or logically: Both grammar and glamour func- social status to do any of those things. She tion as a set of rules that help people articu- just needed the know-how of glamour. Glam- late themselves and allow us to understand our magazine doesn’t target the highest end of one another. I understand you are telling the market, nor does it assume that its read- me of the future by the use of words like will ers have the cultural capital of the modern- and going to; I understand you are telling me day gentry (“How to do Anything Better” about your vision of yourself with red lipstick is one of its more popular features; readers and a wiggle dress. might learn how to make a proper introduc- Some may argue that the rules and ar- tion or throw a dinner party). At first glance ticulations of glamour are confining. They this might seem counterintuitive to the spirit can be, when taken as feminine dictates, of its namesake, yet it’s anything but: With but they also make glamour democratic. It’s these specific moves, Glamour reinforces the easy to aim for class or sophistication and notion of glamour as something actionable. miss the mark, for there are so many ways In knowing that most of its readers, however we can make unknowing missteps. But be- stylish, aren’t among the cultural illumina- cause glamour relies upon references and ti, Glamour acknowledges that maybe they images, with a bit of thought and creativity have need of casting the occasional spell— almost anyone can conjure its magic—and which, of course, Glamour is happy to supply. unlike fashion, glamour doesn’t go in and out I should say here that I worked for Glam- of style, so you needn’t reinvest every sea- our magazine for several years as a copy edi- son. You can be fat and glamorous, bald and tor. I share that not only to disclose my rela- glamorous, poor and glamorous, short and tionship with the magazine, but also because glamorous, nerdy and glamorous, a man and my specific post there—as a professional glamorous. Perhaps most important, you grammarian—was tethered to the concept of can be old and glamorous. In fact, age helps. glamour more than I realized. For gramarye, (Children are never glamorous; neither are the root word of glamour, also gave birth to the naive.) Glamour’s illusion doesn’t make the word grammar. Given the dual etymolo- old people look younger; it makes them look gy, I think it’s only fair to declare all Glamour exactly their age, without apology. Glamour

47 THE DARK ART OF GLAMOUR can channel the things we may attribute to see me, and yet you don’t. That is, you see the youth—sex appeal, flirtation, vitality—but nods to the past, and you see how they look it also requires things that come more easily on my particular form; you see what I bring with age, like mystery and a past. Think of the to the image, or how I create my own. Yet be- trappings of adult femininity little girls reach cause I’m not necessarily attempting to show for in play: not bras and sanitary pads, but you my authentic self—whatever that might high heels and lipstick, those two most glam- be—but rather a highly coded self, I control orous things whose entire point is to create how much you’re actually witness to. an illusion. A five-year-old knows that with womanhood can come glamour, if she wish- es. She also knows it’s not yet hers to assume. In case it’s not yet clear: I am a champi- on of glamour. That’s not to say I’m always glamorous; few can be, and certainly I’m not Both grammar and one of them. I like comfort far too much to glamour function as be consistently glamorous. But I’m firmly in glamour’s thrall. When I am walking down a set of rules that help the street (particularly 44th Street, in the people articulate general direction of an excellent martini) in themselves and something I feel glamorous in—say, a cer- tain navy-blue bias-cut polka-dot dress with understand one another a draped neckline, clip-clip heels, a small hat, and the reddest lipstick I own—I feel a vari- ety of confidence that I can’t channel using any other means. It’s not a confidence that’s Now, that’s part of the whole problem we superior to other forms of assurance, but it’s feminists have with the visual construction inherently different. It’s the feeling of pretti- of femininity: The codes speak for us and we ness, yes, and femininity and looking appro- have to fight all that much harder to have our priate for the occasion. It’s all of those things, words heard over the din our appearance cre- but the overriding feeling is this: When I am ates. But within those codes also lies a poten- feeling and looking glamorous, I am slip- tial for relief, for our own construction, for ping into an inchoate yet immensely satis- play, for casting our own little spells. That’s fying spot between the public and private true of all fashion and beauty, but it’s particu- spheres. You see me in my polka-dotted larly true of the magic of glamour. ‘40s-style dress, small hat, and lipstick, and I promise not to play tricks on anyone. you may think I look glamorous—which is But forgive me if, every so often, I might want the goal. But here’s the trick of glamour: You to use a little magic. n

48 49 Hex Before Marriage

by CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER

Turning on the charm used to mean something quite different

WHATEVER LONELINESS OR boredom achieve such exquisite beauty fascinated him. the workers of Salzburg’s famous salt mines Ever an astute and imaginative observer of endured they eased with an unusual pastime. life, he came to regard it as a metaphor for They would find a tree branch, strip away its love’s mysterious processes. “By the mecha- leaves, and toss it in an unused pit. Two or nism of the diamond-covered bough in the three months later they would haul it out Salzburg,” he concluded, “everything which and delight in its transformation. Every one is beautiful and sublime in the world forms of its twigs bejeweled with salt crystals, it ap- part of the person we love.” peared more a scepter of some elf king than Like the diamond-covered bough, the be- any piece of forest litter. It and others like it loved never fails to delight. “It is as though the miners would hand to tourists, who mar- by some strange freak of the heart,” Stendhal veled at the splendid gifts. writes, “the woman one loves communicates When in the summer of 1818 the French more charms than she herself possesses.” writer Stendhal visited the mines he too was Everything occasions thoughts of her exqui- captivated. That so ordinary an object could site, enduring perfection—the way she bites

50 CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER

Illustrations from The First Nantucket Tea Party (1907).

an apple (those eye-teeth!), the way her her used them, as did scullery maids and postal cheek reddens, the way her chin dimples. clerks. These charms were uniformly bizarre, But where passion grows, so does risk. The involving apple pips pasted to foreheads beloved threatens always to withdraw, to and garters tied in knots as the wearer sang leave her lover adrift. What then for the heart light verse while mincing freshly killed turtle seized by crystallized affection? “Apart from doves and toads for stuffing in sheepskin. ridicule,” Stendhal warns, “love is always Hopeful admirers hid daisy roots under pil- haunted by the despair of being abandoned lows and hung shoes out of windows. They by the beloved and of being left nothing but danced under full moons and hid trinkets in a dead blank for the remainder of life.” the sand. They summoned spirits, skinned It comes as no surprise then that against bats, and pounded teeth and bone to powder. such devastating abandonment lovers took No incantation, elixir or ritual went untried if certain measures. History tells of love charms it promised success. and philters, all promising to corral way- Trying these charms often required great ward objects of affection. Kings and queens fortitude. On St. Valentine’s Eve, 1754, a young

51 HEX BEFORE MARRIAGE

servant girl hard-boiled an egg, scooped out They pushed these bits through the wedding the yolk, and filled the hollow with salt before ring of a woman who had been married ex- eating it, shell and all. Another girl, just as actly seven years. Then they slipped off their love-struck, carried in her coat pocket all day clothes, ate the cake, and cried out: “O’, good the peels of two lemons. At sunset she used St. Faith, be kind tonight, and bring to me them to polish her bed’s four posts in hope my future husband view, and be my visions that the object of her affection might appear chaste and true!” Satisfied they had done all in her dreams as altogether more willing than they could to win their swains, they went to he showed himself in waking life. sleep, all in the same bed. When virginal young ladies of northern Even kale, that vegetable today beloved of England wished to dream of love they gath- the diet-minded, had a place in the romantic’s ered on moonlit nights in groups of three to arsenal of charms. When the young women bake a cake from batter consisting of flour, of Craven found themselves enamored they salt and spring water. This confection they would perch upon a rock, holding a pot of divided in three, and each third again in nine. kale soup, and sing:

52 CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER

to common belief than occult forces. The Hot kale, or cold kale, I drink thee, If ever I marry a man, or a man marry me, objects of such charms and rituals certainly I wish this night I may him see, to-morrow may did complain of falling under their influence, him ken blaming them for everything from disap- In church, fair, or market above all other men. pointing marriages to illegitimate children. A dalliance had as its cause a strand of hair They would then sip this broth nine times, left on a pillow; an unexpected pregnancy, walk backward to bed, and go to sleep. a lavender sachet. Such hexes people saw as Darker charms existed for those who matter-of-fact events. To disbelieve them would punish inconstancy. An embittered they thought unwise. suitor might wake at midnight to plunge pins into a bird’s heart or wrap a lump of dragon’s blood (a resin aromatic and crimson-col- ored) in paper for burning along with a hast- ily stitched effigy of his beloved. This immo- An embittered suitor lation he hoped would cause her pain—or at might wake at midnight least a pang of regret. to plunge pins into a Such elaborate gestures could be said to belong more to the category of ritual than bird’s heart or wrap charm. Indeed, love charms were as often a lump of “dragon’s as not small, unassuming things—neck- blood” in paper for laces and rings and small vials of unfamiliar burning along with an powders. Many people favored love packets, which they could easily fashion and secret effigy of his beloved away. The Irish adorned theirs with suns and moons and magic squares. Into them they stuffed toenail pairings and underwear frag- Reports of love magic now occasion only ments. Amorous Turks similarly fashioned laughter. And the charms themselves seem pouches to stuff with even stranger items: a much ado about nothing. Why bother pry- man’s molar and a particular bone in the left ing a molar loose from an unsuspecting wing of a hoopoe (the bird sent by Solomon mans’s jaw when innumerable lovers lie a to the Queen of Sheba), among other things. mere mouse-click away? Instead of the crys- Under the pillows of pretty women these tallized bough, it’s the liquid crystal display parcels would go, put there in the hope of that serves as the vehicle for romantic meta- stoking passion for the bearer. phors. And that “dead blank” that struck fear Any increase in attraction as a conse- in Stendhal’s heart? It’s just another failed quence of such doo-dads likely owed more page load in a browser. n

53 54 Storefront Supernatural

by KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

The popularity of botanicas point to the failures of the Catholic Church to properly provide for its own

BEFORE I MIGRATED to the United States, animal skulls. The shops vary in size and con- meaning shortly before I turned five years old, tent, but they’re everywhere in immigrant my father’s sister decided I had been given the neighborhoods. The Bronx, for example, is evil eye and needed a cleansing. She took me home to Original Products Co., reportedly to see a healer who ran a small botanica out of the largest botanica in the Northeast. For- her home in Cotopaxi, Ecuador. My aunt was merly an A&P supermarket, it is the size of a fervently Catholic at the time, but she walked warehouse but has the intimate feel of a small into the botanica like it was a church, and head shop. Upstairs, rent-free, is The Pagan looked on stoically as the healer rubbed a live Center, run by a lesbian Wiccan couple. Lady guinea pig all over my body and spit alcohol Rhea, a high priestess, and Lady Zoradia have into my face to ward off evil spirits. their own small section in the store called the Botanica means botany or botanist, so Magickal Realms Enchanted Candle shop. named for the medicinal herbs sold inside There are books Cunningham’s( Encyclopedia the shops that also stock oils, soaps, sprays, of Magical Herbs) and oils (Better Business washes, statues, rosaries, amulets, books, and Oil, Break Up Oil). I searched for something

55 STOREFRONT SUPERNATURAL to do with long-distance relationships but ly condone Santería but typically adopts a found only the Mile and Distance Oil, which laissez-faire attitude toward the varied influ- promises to keep my enemies far away. The ences that have seeped into local practices of powder version comes in one-ounce, half- Catholicism in Latin American countries, es- pound and one-pound packages. pecially ones with large Afro-Caribbean pop- A portion of the store is dedicated to ulations. Protestant groups, even evangeli- Santería, an oft-misunderstood religion that cal ones, are much more aggressive in their dates back centuries and has its roots among denouncement of idolatry (the statues, the the Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria. candles, the prayers) and the occult, so they For centuries, thousands of Yoruba were traf- openly frown upon places like botanicas. But ficked to the New World. When the Iberians like my aunt, who kept both the holy water forced them to convert to Catholicism, many and the red thread bracelets, many newly found a way to continue practicing their ritu- converted evangelicals keep vestiges of their als by combining them with Catholic cus- past syncretic worship. Some continue to fre- toms. They assigned each Catholic saint a quent the botanicas even as they continue to corresponding orisha, or natural spirit, and worship in their disapproving churches. The worshipped them as they normally would historical syncretism of Latin American Ca- according to their customs. There are some tholicism as it is practiced by millions carves 2 million practicing Santería followers today, out a space of casual permissibility if not out- 50,000 of them in the U.S. alone. Some have right approval of churchgoers’ extracurricu- rejected the syncretic nature of Santería’s de- lar spiritual activities. Frequenting botanicas velopment, tracing and returning to its West is a complementary aspect to many people’s African roots; others navigate a happy me- spirituality, not a replacement for it. dium by belonging to the Catholic Church Catholic converts bring with them this while still practicing Santería. worshipping framework to their new evan- My aunt, who took me to the botanica in gelical churches: 68 percent of Latinos in Cotopaxi, eventually joined an evangelical the U.S. identify as Roman Catholic, but church after becoming disillusioned with her many are leaving the church in favor of local church and began to deny my “healing” evangelical faiths. Four-fifths of practicing ever took place. Her new church cautioned evangelicals are former Catholics. There are against spiritism and false idols—guinea pigs doctrinal differences that explain the conver- included. But although she stopped going to sions, but driving the shift is also a broader the shops, some remainders of her formerly socio­economic issue: Evangelical churches syncretic Catholicism lingered—rosaries, provide a social safety net that is especially holy water, red string bracelets to protect us attractive to immigrants who lack the sup- against the evil eye. port systems and networks they had in their Mainstream Catholicism does not open- home countries. And botanicas, too, serve

56 KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO as spaces of support and community for im- that would apply should they be registered as migrants who would otherwise have limited anything clinical. Some botanicas have heal- social networks to rely on when faced with ers or Santeria priests on-site, and others re- unemployment or the need to find the best fer clients to healers outside the practice. But dance hall in which to throw a baby shower. since botanicas are not registered as medical Botanicas thus recreate and satisfy the practices, they toe a careful line on what heal- same needs of the new evangelical ­churches, ers can and cannot promise or sell, lest they many of them popping up in storefronts and face the wrath of medical-licensing laws. The former factories, offering charismatic pastors, potential danger of botanicas becoming the services that encourage audience participa- only or primary health care source for Latinos in the U.S. is very real. Latino unemployment is two points above the national average and a quarter of the 50 million Latinos in the U.S. currently live in poverty. Historically poor One study found access to health care has led many Latinos, that 33 percent many of them undocumented immigrants, in dire straits and many resort to botanicas for of undocumented serious medical treatment. immigrants used the Undocumented immigrants are rou- botanica as their primary tinely villainized in the U.S. as burdens on the national healthcare system because it is health-care source assumed that they cannot pay for their care. Studies have found, however, that they are actually less likely to seek health-care pro- tion, song and dance, books and pamphlets, fessionals than their documented counter- preaching and canvassing, movies and books, parts or other Americans. A small recent concerts. Because of immigration, a third of study found that while some immigrants Catholics in the U.S. are now Latino, a coali- used the botanica as a complementary treat- tion that brings with it the syncretic nature of ment alongside biomedical care, others—33 Afro-Caribbean and Mesoamerican home- percent of their study sample—were using land practices, convergences that have found it as a primary source of health care. They a welcoming space outside churches and in- weren’t only seeking care for folk illnesses ei- side the botanicas of their new home. ther: 71 percent of study participants sought It is difficult to know how many botanicas care for somatic ailments like asthma, cough, there are in the U.S. because they are common- digestive problems, swollen legs, and ner- ly registered as religious or herbal stores and vous system problems. Typical obstacles to are thus not subject to the staunch regulations obtaining health-care for Latinos such as

57 STOREFRONT SUPERNATURAL

­language, transportation, ­legal status, lack of citizens or permanent residents to purchase insurance, and inconvenient operating hours insurance while excluding undocumented are overcome in the botanicas. People can re- immigrants from non-emergency programs. ceive treatment in Spanish, they are open lat- The repercussions could be devastating to er and on weekends, health insurance doesn’t immigrant communities that already have a matter, and legal status is immaterial. fraught relationship with healthcare. Further But botanicas are not merely as indepen- alienation from conventional medical cover- dent shops that sell good luck charms and age may push Latino immigrants to rely more love potion oils, but as places through which on alternative medicine that’s offered in plac- to access other goods and services, like medi- es like the botanica, which is able to access a cal information and referrals, that perhaps segment of the population that is not easily would not have reached clients. In Lawrence, reached by typical biomedical channels be- Massachusetts, botanica owners were paid cause of patients’ fear, positions of precarity, to take an HIV/AIDS workshop where they and lack of awareness. learned basic information about protection, The popularity of botanicas today thus transmission, and testing. After the workshop, points to the failures of the church to prop- one store owner referred nine out of 53 high- erly provide for its own, highlighting its risk individuals tested within three months of postcolonial fracture, the failed missions of initial training, which was deemed a success. conversion, and its inability to keep believers The reliance on botanicas for medical from converting and leaving. It also points to treatment can be dangerous. A lag in diagnos- neoliberalism’s inability to care for its most ing and treating communicable diseases may vulnerable populations. lead to an outbreak, delaying the visit to an For many disenfranchised groups, the emergency room can be fatal, and the unsu- botanica serves as safety net and important pervised dispensation of antibiotics can lead social network, a destination and a portal for to unusually resistant strains of bacteria. Pow- services offered both in this world and the ders used in treatment of infant colic have been next, and above all a space of casual dissent, found to contain high quantities of lead. Stud- where religious men and women openly and ies have shown newly arrived Latin American publicly reject the counsel from the pulpit immigrants to slowly develop the same kinds that warns against the occult and Santería. of illnesses endemic in the U.S. such as obe- The space of dissent embodies these signifi- sity, diabetes, asthma, and high cholesterol, cant protests against church and state while all conditions meriting medical treatment, yet still making room for the occasional love po- one in six undocumented male immigrants tion or enemy dispeller—a sense of safety, have never seen a doctor. home, and God, dispensed in powder form, This will be only get worse under the in one-ounce, half-pound and one-pound Affordable Care Act, which calls for U.S. quantities. n

58 59 The Last Witch Hunter

by COLIN DICKEY

In his History of Witchcraft and Demonology, Montague Summers uses history to try to deny the evolution of human morality

IN THE 1920s, two very different histories en stormed the streets of Paris in protest, of witchcraft appeared: the 1922 Danish incensed that modern Catholicism be com- filmHäxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, and pared to a barbaric episode of its past that it the Reverend Montague Summers’s History had largely forgotten. of Witchcraft and Demonology, published in Summers, on the other hand, neither England in 1926. Both were instant sensa- criticized nor apologized for Christianity’s tions and instantly controversial. Benjamin persecution of witches—he embraced it. Christensen’s film, which included nudity He believed that the church was infallible and scenes of torture, was a scathing cri- and that men and women were capable tique of Catholicism, arguing that those of knowingly giving themselves to Satan: accused of witchcraft had perhaps been suf- “There has invariably been an open avowal ferers of “modern” diseases like hysteria and of intentional evil-doing on the part of the kleptomania. On its release the film caused devotees of the witch-cult,” he wrote with riots: By one account, 8,000 Catholic wom- fervent orthodoxy. Critics found the book

60 COLIN DICKEY compulsively readable, but were aghast it “the nadir of corrupt and corrupting lit- at Summers’s argument that the Catholic erature”; friends noted that any corrupting Church had been just and right in trying influence was somewhat mitigated by its ob- and executing untold thousands of witches. tuse tone and low quality. The book faded In Summers’s mind, the church had been into obscurity. if anything too lenient: “The Church dealt Summers’s early life was marked by an os- very gently with the rebel and the heretic, cillation between two opposing poles: an ap- whom she might have executed wholesale petite for controversy and taboo at one end, with the greatest ease.” and for religious orthodoxy at the other. In 1908, he abruptly entered the seminary: That THE EARLY 20TH century saw a renewed year he was ordained as an Anglican deacon, interest in the history of witchcraft, after first in Bath, then in the Bristol suburb of Bit- years of neglect and denial by historians who ton, where he spent his days studying Satan- preferred not to engage with such a disgrace- ism. It was during this time that he became ful episode. In many ways, the Reverend convinced that his church was haunted, ex- Montague Summers was the perfect avatar hibiting, according to one friend, “a morbid for this resurgence. A cartoonish figure with a fascination with evil which, even if partly a broad, moon-shaped face, a black shovel hat, pose, was shocking in a clergyman.” and a flowing cape, he seemed to come from His life as an Anglican deacon was short- some other era. He had a high-pitched voice lived, however, and he left pursued not by and a strange chuckle; friends and colleagues ghosts or devils, but by accusations of ho- wondered if he was, in fact, in league with the mosexuality. In 1910 Summers and another devil, or had participated in a Black Mass; clergyman were accused of pederasty, and one family who moved into a residence pre- though they were ultimately acquitted of viously owned by Summers complained that the charges, Summers quickly left both Bris- he’d left it haunted and went so far as to per- tol and the faith. Within a few years, he had form an exorcism. converted to Catholicism. In later years Sum- Born in 1880, son of a banker and the mers would claim that he’d been ordained as youngest of seven children, Summers grew a priest and wear corresponding vestments, up surrounded by the well-educated and the but there is no record of the ordainment. literary. He was educated at Trinity College, Summers never headed a parish, nor did Oxford, and in 1907, shortly after he gradu- he enter a religious order. In lieu of a religious ated with honors, he published a “distinctly occupation, he turned back to writing, and decadent book of verse,” Antinous and Other in the years after the war he became known Poems. The poetry featured sexual innuendo as a scholar of Restoration Theater. A few buried beneath layers of Roman and Greek years later, he was contacted by publisher mythological allusions. One reviewer labeled­ C. K. Ogden, who was at the time editing

61 THE LAST WITCH HUNTER a multivolume­ history of civilization. Og- tortured into confession and then executed. den had been hoping Summers would offer What is noteworthy about Duncan’s trial something about English drama, but Sum- is that news of it soon found its way to the mers responded instead with a proposal for a King of Scotland, soon to be king of Eng- study of witchcraft. land, James I. James was terrified of politi- cal assassination by witchcraft, and, having SUMMERS ULTIMATELY PRODUCED recently sailed through a storm that he was two separate books: The History of Witchcraft sure had been engineered by magic, he took and Demonology and, a year later, a compan- an active interest in the trials surrounding ion volume, The Geography of Witchcraft. In Duncan, going so far as to personally inter- them he presented testimonies, trials, ver- view one of the accused, a midwife named dicts, confessions, and other primary docu- Agnes Sampson. James’s fear wasn’t entirely ments describing the witch persecutions of paranoia; real plots were afoot, including one the Middle Ages—many of them appearing concocted by his cousin Francis Stewart, for the first time in English. who himself blurred the line between the The primary documents accounted for real and imaginary threat, employing curses much of the History’s success. For too long, and wax dolls as well as swords and armies. even serious historians had tended to gloss In laying the occult alongside the po- over this tragic aspect of Europe’s matura- litical, Summers’s account of these events tion, treating it as an aberration best ignored. helps to remind us that history—even royal Summers recognized that witch trials were at ­history—doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the very heart of European history, and that that even a local witch trial of a poor servant a “history of civilization” such as Ogden had girl can reverberate throughout a kingdom. envisioned required not just its triumphs, His contemporary readers were reminded but also its horrors. History, Summers saw, that for centuries the witch persecutions consists not only in what is done by great had been central to Europe’s cultural and men but also what is done by midlevel bu- economic landscape. reaucrats and illiterate midwives. But the book was singular for another Perhaps the best example of this was reason: Summers believed with every fiber the trial of the servant girl Gellis Duncan in of his being that witchcraft was real. “Faith, Scotland in 1590. As Summers relays, Dun- the Bible, actual experience,” he writes in A can’s employer became suspicious when he History, “all taught that witchcraft had ex- discovered her sneaking out at night, and in isted and existed still. There could be and short order she was accused of witchcraft, there is no sort of doubt concerning this.” tried, and tortured. During her torture, she Summers found support for his convic- confessed and implicated half a dozen oth- tion in the views of the great men of his- er individuals, many of whom in turn were tory, from popes to scholars. He also argued

62 COLIN DICKEY strenuously for the power and efficacy of ot, were, as often as not, afflicted by demons; bureaucracy itself. His book’s strength, he the raving maniac was assuredly possessed”). contended, lay in its demonstration “by For all its fidelity to history, Summers’s a number of citations how in the past this work is a confrontation with the various ele- enormous wickedness had been impartially ments of modern life he’d come to detest. He investigated, had been argued, and proven had, as one reviewer later noted, “a flatteringly by the keenest minds of the centuries.” poor opinion of anthropologists,” and he saw Deluded as to the nature of evil, he was anarchists and Communists (groups he reg- similarly deluded as to the nature of his own ularly conflated) as direct descendents from success, which he took as proof of the cor- the witches of the Medieval world. Witches rectness of his attitude. The History was pop- were “avowed enemies of law and order, red- ular, he explained, because it alerted people hot anarchists who would stop at nothing “to the danger still energizing and active to gain their ends.” When his patron, Lady in their midst”: “The evil which many had Cunard, introduced him to her husband, hardly suspected, deeming it either a mere Lord Balfour—who expressed disbelief in historical question, long dead and gone, of the existence of people who craved evil for no interest save to the antiquarian, or else al- evil’s sake—Summers produced a political together fabled, was shown to be very much analogy: “Well, Lord Balfour, you have only alive, potent in politics, potent in society, to think of the views of some of your oppo- corrupting the arts, a festering, leprous dis- nents.” Liberals, socialists, and anarchists, he ease and decay.” told Balfour, all bore “the witch philosophy.” Summers believed in the power of the Scholars and critics immediately at- written word and in the historical record. tacked him for this kind of hysteria. Theo- His work is the 20th century’s last gasp of a dore Hornberger disparaged Summers’s sort of history that refused to recognize the “alarmist themes”: “It is just about time, evolution of human character, morality, and thinks Mr. Summers, for legislation, a bit thought. His rhetoric at times struggles to ac- more severe, if possible, than the famous commodate modern psychology (“It is not statute of James I. The political implications denied that in some cases hallucination and of this logic are indeed alarming, but per- self-deception played a large part”), but re- haps not always with the effect intended by peatedly falls back on the infallibility of the the author.” In a similarly scathing review, church (“such examples are comparatively H. G. Wells noted that Summers “hates few in number, and these, moreover, were witches as soundly and sincerely as the Brit- carefully investigated and most frequently ish county families hate the ‘Reds.’” Wells, recognized by the judges and divines”), and anticipating Shirley Jackson’s story “The his own surprisingly anachronistic views Lottery,” saw in Summers’s work a “stand- (“The silly body, the blind, the dumb, the idi- ing need” of mankind “for somebody to

63 THE LAST WITCH HUNTER

tar, feather, and burn. Perhaps if there was libility, while, on the other, offer the kind of no devil, men would have to invent one. In apologetic backtracking that characterized a more perfect world we may have to draw 20th century Church thought. The 1914 en- lots to find who shall be the witch or the try on witchcraft in the Catholic Encyclope- ‘Red,’ or the heretic or the nigger, in order dia (written by Herbert Thurston), attempt- that one may suffer for the people.” ing to thread the needle between the church’s Other reviewers castigated Summers for past and its future, is reduced to equivoca- not “judging between different kinds of evi- tions: “In the face of Holy Scripture and the dence,” and for his “odd mixture of learning teaching of the Fathers and theologians the and almost childish credulity.” But Summers abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil maintained that a religion cannot on the one and of a diabolical interference in human af- hand assert an unbroken line of pious infal- fairs can hardly be denied, but no one can

64 COLIN DICKEY read the literature of the subject without re- the supernatural—churning out books on alizing the awful cruelties to which this belief vampires, ghosts, and werewolves—his work and without being convinced that in 99 cases became increasingly sensational and marred out of 100 the allegations rest upon nothing by increasingly sloppy scholarship. Gradually better than pure delusion.” he faded into obscurity, and, horrified by the Summers’s attitude was vile, perhaps in- savageries of World War II—the Blitz, the defensible, but at least it was consistent. As atrocities in mainland Europe, Hiroshima, the Church lumbered towards Vatican II, it Nagasaki—he retreated to the English coun- found itself caught between the demands tryside and died in 1948. of a tradition and a need for modernization. Just as historians for decades tried to ig- Despite what apologists like Thurston might nore the history of witchcraft, preferring to have you believe, exorcism was then (and minimize the impact of such a blight on Eu- is still today) a sacrament; Summers’s work rope’s cultural history, historians these days brought this history out of the Latin and into have preferred to downplay Summers him- the light. self. Because he was never a formally trained scholar, it was easy for academic historians to IN THE EIGHTY years since its release, write him out of the historiography of witch- Häxan has entered the annals of film history, craft—even though his translation of the a major milestone that remains celebrated Malleus Malefaricum remained the only Eng- despite (or perhaps because of) its salubrious lish edition until 2006. content and suspect diagnoses. As a history By necessity a figure of contradiction, of witchcraft it is dubious, but as a cinematic he managed to be, according to one friend, experience it remains arresting. Something “both near-blasphemous and obscene in his similar can be said of Summers’s work: Taken conversation” while at the same time being as history, it is flawed at best—yet his books “a genuine believer, with a sincere desire to on witchcraft remain milestones in their own serve the Church.” The strange triumph of right, and continue to offer a compelling (if his writing on witchcraft writings is in their unsettling) reading experience. synthesis of the two halves of his personality, And yet the years have not been kind to the devout and the unconventional. These either Summers or his work. After The His- impulses had once been distinctly at odds, tory’s popular success and critical dismissal, but as the landscape around him changed, Summers continued to present himself as a and modern culture began to abandon the serious scholar, producing in 1928 the first church, being as religious as he was became English translation of the Malleus Malefari- itself irregular. Emphatically ill-fitted for the cum (“The Hammer of Witches,” the noto- 20th century, Summers was yet its inevitable rious medieval manual for investigating and by-product: an unstable atom spun loose by trying witches), but as he delved further into cultural fission.n

65 News From Nowhere

By STEPHANIE BERNHARD

RICHMOND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT was a horrible place to start reading Laura Van den Berg’s intricately van den Berg’s second collection, The Isle plotted stories are narrative of Youth, whose opening story begins: “The first thing that went wrong was the emergen- nonplaces, glutted with cy landing.” I am a nervous flyer and almost information and drift closed the book in an act of self-mercy. But the sign at the gate was already posting a one- hour delay, and waiting with a terrifying dis- traction was better than no distraction at all. Besides, I wanted to know the second thing that went wrong, and the third. Van den Berg drew me in. As daylight faded and the one-hour delay stretched to three, I began to appreciate the airport as an ideal atmosphere for reading The Isle of Youth. The terminal’s jittery mood matched the book’s, and not just because many of van den Berg’s stories take place on airplanes, in hotel rooms, in cars, in conve- nience stores, those transitory “sleas” of con- temporary life, as the French anthropologist Marc Augé calls them, but because van den Berg’s stories are, in a sense, narrative non- places. They spin tense, elaborate plots but end before they reach a destination, before it is possible for us to make meaning of them. When this narrative malaise isn’t paired with sufficient intricacy, it can feel unearned, but in Laura van den Berg The Isle of Youth van den Berg’s best and most complexly plot- FSG Originals, 256 pages ted stories, this evasive strategy beautifully

66 NEWS FROM NOWHERE exposes the difficulty ofsustaining ­ connec- nonplaces most of all. The inhabitants of tion in an era when it is bizarrely easy to place ­Augé’s nonplaces are too inundated with several thousand miles between ourselves and information to perceive their surroundings our spouses, our siblings, our homes. coherently; van den Berg’s characters are too Van den Berg excels at complexity, ec- full of their own histories to perceive them- centricity, maximalism of plot. Some incred- selves coherently. They do not seem to asso- ible, massive books require only a sentence ciate their actions with their consciousness; of plot summary: “A man wanders around they move through their days expecting the Dublin for a day;” “A crazed captain seeks a world’s illusion to fade and their real lives white whale.” Their ingeniousness emerges to start; they cannot holistically integrate in the telling of the story, in the lushness of the fragments of event and observation that their prose. Van den Berg’s best stories don’t nonetheless shape them. work like this. Her prose is bare, not lush; The book’s epigraph is a sentence from what subtlety she achieves is inherent in her Yoko Tawada’s Naked Eye: “I felt I was playing stories’ finely wrought structures. The more a part in a movie with a plot unknown to me.” words required to describe one, the better it In “I Looked for You, I Called Your Name,” the is. Her emphases on elaborate plot and inten- narrator feels always “half-present and half- tional loose ends are a refreshing departure absent” due to the death of her twin sister in from the contemporary taste for tidy, mini- infancy. The main character of the eponymous mal plot paired with maximal voices. last story agrees to switch identities with her Van den Berg’s prose is not maximal, not (living) twin sister because she is desperate to gorgeous—nor does it want to be. The sto- escape her own life. These young (or relatively ries studiously avoid beauty, and when it ap- young) women lack self-knowledge, and it pears uninvited, as in Patagonia and Paris, makes them disastrously unhappy. But they it is just another concept whose meaning tend to ask few questions of themselves. In- eludes characters. Cities and landscapes stead, to learn about their own lives, they seek are described most often by visitors seeing meaning by questioning the painful presence them for the first time, by people who don’t (and even more painful absences) of the peo- know enough to interpret them adequately ple who matter to them. or aren’t happy enough to appreciate their In the traits they share, these narrators beauty. Even the “places” here act like non- are rather typical of contemporary American places: Cruddy apartments and dim houses fictional characters. They perform boldness are occupied by characters who want to be and moxie to mask a lack of self-identity and elsewhere, who use their homes as stepping- assurance. They turn to crime—some petty, stones to futures unlikely to arrive, who want some grand—to achieve the emotional highs to escape a present suddenly gone sour. that are missing from the rest of their lives. At But the characters themselves resemble times, van den Berg’s dips into the lacuna of

67 STEPHANIE BERNHARD lost identity freshen her prose and illuminate based dialect—again, she doesn’t want her her characters; at other times, they nudge her prose to shine—but in this case the similar- to the brink of cliché. Stories start just before ity of voice highlights the fundamental differ- the characters hit their lowest of low points ence in the narrators’ mode of relating to oth- and end before they’ve had a chance to pick ers. I suppose I am saying that van den Berg’s themselves up again. And their lives can be work would not lose much in translation. For so bleak, so unrelentingly miserable—due to in a way, van den Berg has already translated internal or external circumstance—that they her characters by giving words to thoughts are hard to believe. Even the worst depres- that they would never verbalize in speech or sive, we feel, occasionally stumbles into hope. writing. (She does not write writers.) These characters don’t. On the rare occasion In the excellent “I Looked for You, I Called they dare conceive of future happiness—a Your Name,” we meet a youngish, newlywed teenage girl imagines attending magic school, lawyer trudging through her not-so-happy for example—their dreams are quickly, bru- honeymoon in Patagonia (the plane makes tally quashed. These stories make readers re- its emergency landing in South America). luctant voyeurs, if not masochists. Uncomfortable in her new marriage, the This bizarre bleakness stems primarily bride has reservations about her attentive from the characters’ inability to communicate but cartoonishly boorish husband that swell with others. Their relationships are destroyed, into full-fledged doubts. She describes her or en route to destruction, or at least incredi- feelings for him as an “attachment certain- bly damaged. Husbands misunderstand wives, ly”: “though I was never sure it was love. But and vice versa; fathers skip town; mothers what did it mean to be in love? Maybe all the keep coldly aloof from their affection-starved things people said about falling in love, about daughters. Even siblings—who seem to share the initial torrent of joy, were a lie.” the strongest bonds—betray and abandon I underlined these words. I remember and ignore each other. The various iterations thinking them, too often, in every romantic of dysfunction read less like an encyclopedia relationship I had—until I finally fell in love. of antisociality, which might provide an inter- It is a relief to see them so plainly in print. esting commentary on human behavior, than The following story, “Opa-Locka,” is told dull repetition with an occasional difference. by a youngish, recently divorced, probably But the two strongest stories display a lower-middle-class private investigator living careful attention to character development. with her sister in southern Florida, van den The voices of these stories’ unnamed narra- Berg’s native territory. The narrator of “Opa- tors don’t differ much: van den Berg writes Locka” describes her relationship with her ex- characters from many areas of the country husband very differently: “I met my husband and diverse social classes but doesn’t mark while working at a watch store in Pinecrest. their speech with traces of regional or class- He brought a Swiss Army in for repair. He’d

68 NEWS FROM NOWHERE had it for a decade; he said he liked to hold on “Opa-Locka,” one of the missing father to things. We married a year later, in the Mi- stories, ends up taking a tack completely ami courthouse. I loved him, but I didn’t al- different from the one it promises. We think ways understand how to be honest.” The first we are reading a story about two private in- woman spends the better part of a page fail- vestigators—sisters—searching for a man ing to understand what love is and the whole named Mr. Defonte who mysteriously van- story realizing she doesn’t love her husband. ishes, only to learn later that we are really The second one tosses off the declaration “I reading a story about the sisters’ vanished loved him” without a second thought. father. The father is not the same man as The first story depicts a universe in which Mr. Defonte—that setup would be too con- romantic relationships are troubled because venient. And Mr. Defonte disappears as a the emotions associated with them are nebu- character as soon as the story line involving lous, unstable, and mysterious. The second the father becomes important; neither the story jolts us into another subjective world readers nor the sisters learn what happens to altogether, in which emotions like love can him. It’s a fascinating, true turn: Life really be concrete and nameable but in which other is unsatisfying in that particular way. “Acro- factors (like the inability to be honest) can bat” and “Antarctica,” also good, don’t leave still destroy relationships. so many questions unanswered but also get There is even a neat symmetrical structure their narrative energy from unexpected plot to the arrangement of The Isle of Youth. The turns. first and last stories involve twin sisters; but After “Opa-Locka,” it was hard to get ex- in the first the sister is absent, whereas in the cited about reading the other missing father last she appears. The second and sixth stories story, “The Greatest Escape.” By the time I deal with sleazy missing fathers: In one he started it, I had boarded my plane and was lives too long; in the other he dies too soon. flying north over a black Atlantic, skirting The third and fifth stories trace a sister’s love a vivid line of thunderstorms—the cause for her brother: In one, the brother is about of the delay—whose forked lightning occa- to be lost at the story’s end; in the other, he is sionally brightened the windows on the left lost just before the story starts. In the fourth side of the plane. I read it again later, on the and central story, the narrator is left all alone ground, to make sure that my sense of vague in a foreign city. Beyond noting the emphasis dread and looming disaster couldn’t be at- on sisterly love in “Lessons,” I can summarize tributed to a fear of stormy flying. It couldn’t: it adequately with the sentence “Runaway Like most of van den Berg’s work, the story teenaged cousins rob banks.” I can’t do the makes you feel that something important and same for the better stories, for which a sum- terrible is about to happen. In “The Greatest mary would require exactly as many words as Escape” that something does happen. But it’s the stories themselves. exactly what I expected. n

69 Exorcism Crossword puzzle by JONATHAN ZALMAN

70 LET ME SAY right up front, black is the new Politicians are especially vulnerable, as black, and if I had my way, it would always be. they are already poll-trained to jump on any We live in a time that seems too aware bandwagon they can find a seat on. Recently, of trending, and as a result we can easily Democratic Senator Bob Menendez declared become a victim of any societal shift com- that after reading Vladimir Putin’s op-ed piece ing around the corner. While I’m a big fan about Syria in the New York Times, he “almost of ­remote-control television, I would have to wanted to vomit.” This proclivity to announce say that most trends are not to be trusted. intentions to upchuck then crossed the aisle, We’re hungry for whatever flavor of the when New Jersey’s Republican Governor month is being served, and it’s so easy to Chris Christie, upon hearing of the board- swallow the wrong thing. walk burning down in Seaside Heights after

71 recently being rebuilt, said, “I feel like I want Stone said it best: “Thank you (falettinme be to throw up, and that’s me.” mice elf agin).” But it’s not just him: This fad has also en- If what they say is true, that everything tered the more cultured parts of our society. On old is new again, then it stands to reason that a popular social networking site, an esteemed many of these fresh ideas will get stale. We member of our intelligentsia remarked that af- don’t want new directions if they take us to ter seeing the finale of Breaking Bad, “he was the wrong destination. disgusted and might puke a little”—­certainly a If you think I make too much of a fuss more thoughtful and tempered entry into this about the danger of these trends, I have one new communication style, but this doesn’t word for you: dirndl. The dirndl dress is now bode well for a clear-headed end of times. I, the fastest growing fashion craze in Munich. for one, do not want a nausea-driven meme You know what they say: “Today the Rhine- driving me through my life. land, tomorrow the world.” If we allow trends The little things we love will be ever so to go unchecked, it won’t be long before a important as our days dwindle away. For me, bevy of Bavarian-clad beauties are goose- radio is a necessary part of my life, and I like stepping down the runways of the world. my radio public. I prefer my airwaves com- Dirndls are a gateway. Before long, black- mercial free and not traveling in every new shirts are the new black. n direction that groupthink takes us. Unfortu- nately, WNYC, my local station seems far too eager to follow. They have altered their pro- gramming, banishing less au courant shows while replaying Jian Ghomeshi interview- ing Jad Abumrad about their mutual love for local host Soterios Johnson over and over again. Then we are invited to follow them on Twitter and visit them online to watch vid- eos. It seems that attempting to follow the latest trends has ultimately led radio to be- come television. We must be vigilant. It’s a short road from selfies to selfabusies, and if our donuts can so easily become cronuts, then it won’t be long before we’re all eating blue-crystal- meth-frosted snacks. It’s easy for the new to be groovy, but it’s always more rewarding to do your own thing, I think Sly and the Family

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