Midsommar

Books, Travel and and the Longest Day

For the last few weeks, your freak show guide has been running around Europe, from Rome to Izmir to Lesvos to Athens to Stockholm and now, chilling on an island in the Gothenburg archipelago. Beyond lace curtains, contented cows graze on a meadow where yesterday floral-crowned Scandinavians sang nonsensical songs while dancing around a birch-leaf decked pole. (I haven’t yet got the vibe that I’m about to be sacrificed to the fertility gods per the 2019 movie with Florence Pugh, but I’ll be here for a few more hours, so there’s always time.)

Whenever I leave the USA, I am reminded that America looks scarier from the outside than it does on the inside. We like to joke that Canada is the apartment above the meth lab but the rest of the world is too. I often find myself trying to soothe freaked out observers who worry about those Congressional Christmas cards with mom dad and kids posing in reindeer sweaters with AR15s. It’s just the pendulum swinging, I say. But I know when they hear my accent they see an emissary from the land of bloodlettings at malls and schools and Stone Age women’s health care.

The Euros have their own problems, of course. Migrants from the Middle East and Africa are desperate to get to the land of milk and money, Seven-hundred-fifty men women and children who paid 6000 Euros each to get here capsized without life jackets into the deepest part of the Mediterranean. Five hundred souls are are at the bottom of the wine-dark sea. As has been noted, they got less attention than the billionaires in the imploding sub. Greek and Italian coast guards often fail to assist these people, or actively endanger them by swamping them with wakes. They send them back out to sea in dingies without motors in “pushbacks.” In Greece, activists who work with the migrants have been labeled “Satanists.” (In a future Freakshow I will examine the remarkably enduring global political utility of the specter of the devil for fascists from Vlad Putin to Steve Bannon, Marje Taylor Greene and anti-immigrant movements in Greece.)

I was in Greece to speak on American democracy at a small conference. One of the European speakers talked about how 20 percent of the EU’s 27 nations are considered to be “autocratizing” - measured by reduced freedom of expression, restraints on free elections and other markers. As in the USA, national leaders ignore this slow slide. The speaker advised “pay attention.” But it’s hard to keep paying attention. Sometimes we must turn away from the madness.

Right now, I’m looking out a window that framed a 4:30 a.m. sunrise that looked like this:

Sunrise on Musön. Happy midsommar!

I’m looking out the window, but real escapism for me is in books. I’ve heard other readers say the pandemic x TFG made them unable to finish books the way they used to. Too anxious, too hard to focus. This I cannot understand. I’ve always read my way out of misery. And on the road, as I have been, a good book allows one to bear delays with good cheer. Heading into our own national midsummer weekend, here are some of the books that have edified and distracted me during the last month on the road. Listing them, I notice a gaslighting trend — overdue reaction to a long season of real-life hoaxing and deluding.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I spotted this classic-I-never-got-around-to in an English bookstore on a quiet street in Izmir. Alternately classified as a ghost story and a novel of psychological terror and breakdown, the tale hints with late Victorian delicacy and Jamesian discursiveness at child sexual abuse and unbridled adult lust. It revolves around a governess who is either being driven mad by her repressed id or a victim of ghostly gaslighting. It kept me engrossed standing in a two hour customs line at the ferry dock in Mitilene, on the island of Lesvos.

The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic, by Wade Davis.

I cracked into this book after reading Davis’ newer book on Colombia, while down on the Panama/Colombia border last month. I didn’t think I’d be interested in voodoo, but I got into Wade’s hallucinatory peregrinations. As a young anthropology student, Wade’s professors dispatched him to Haiti in the early 1980s to try to determine what drugs voodoo sorcerers used to mimic death and create zombies. Such a drug could have applications in Western medicine, they thought. Davis spent months in Haiti, attending ceremonies in which spirits or “loas” mount and possess believers so that, for example, a tiny woman could eat glass or lift a man twice her weight and throw him across the room. Davis eventually decided the dried venom of toads and puffer fish probably created the appearance of death that led to living people being buried and resurrected in zombification. But he became convinced that the sorcerer’s power was a matter of mind over matter. “No scientist would believe that there is a direct causal relationship between the death of the victim and for example the physical act of [a sorcerer] pointing a bone,” he wrote. “Clearly it is the victim’s mind that mediates the sorcerer’s curse and the fatal outcome.” Wade’s ethnography reminded me of something I first understood while living in Perugia, Italy, writing about the Amanda Knox trial. In communities where many people believe, for example, in witches, uncanny things do happen. I write about some of these uncanniness in my own book. I learned yet another related, weird fact in Davis’ book: In Haitian religion, the spirit of the dead is called Guede. In the Knox case, Meredith Kercher’s killer’s last name is Guede.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune, by Alexander Stille.

I never met a case study of a psycho I didn’t like (projection, no doubt). I devoured the first half of this book in airport security, waiting gates and a four-hour flight from Athens to Stockholm a few days ago. This Manhattan cult, part Marx, part Freud, all sex, deeply influenced the high culture of midcentury modern America, especially the abstract artists (Pollack, Noland, critic Clement Greenberg). The experiment aimed to create a new generation of humans free from the damage the nuclear family and mothers, specifically, inflict on their children. The Sullivanians forced women who wanted to get pregnant to have sex with multiple men, so that parenthood was never certain, then sent the children off to boarding schools as early as age three so mommies and daddies could continue to bed hop and shed hangups. As the children reached adulthood, lawsuits started flying. Stille makes great use of legal documents and interviews with surviving members and kids. The cult’s obsession with bad mommies reminds us how misogyny is a thread that connects right and left.

A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs

British writer Biggs, an editor at Harpers, started strolling to Mary Wolllstonecraft’s grave during her divorce, and then read her letters. Wollstonecraft tried to kill herself over a dashing American, before turning out some of her best writing (before dying of childbirth). Biggs also profiles Sylvia Plath’s emotional descent during and after her marriage to Ted Hughes, during which Plath produced some of her greatest poetry. These vignettes reveal how female creativity is ground and polished by internalized reactions to misogyny, thwarted lust, unrequited love, that also paralyze or make women crazy.

The Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. I spotted this book on a shelf at Open Door Books in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere. I recognized her name because a few years back, I made a tour of Italian sites prominent in English gothic literature. Radcliffe was the originator of the gothic novel - books set in or near a desiccated castle with a woman in peril, haunted by her own repressed sexual desire, or threatened by bad husbands or fathers, or spooked by ghosts. Radcliffe was wildly popular in her time, the 18th Century version of Stephen King crossed with Nora Roberts, until she went into seclusion at the height of her fame and stopped writing. She lived to see herself scorned by male literary giants like Samuel Johnson and was erased from the canon in the following years. The author, an American academic, ably investigates and disputes claims that she died a madwoman.

Links

EU “autocratizing”

Midsommar movie trailer

Turn of the Screw

Joanna Biggs

Ann Radcliffe

Wade Davis

Sullivanians by Alexander Stille

Burleigh on Gothic Italy and Knox case