Where have you gone, James DiMaggio?

A slightly interesting bit of name gamery going on in the case of the California teenager (Hannah Anderson) found this week in Idaho, recovered unharmed after her abductor James DiMaggio was shot and killed.

The area:  Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.  Indeed.

Weird thing is this obscure area of the country was in the news a few months ago.  A Twin Falls (Twin Peaks) animal shelter counts 34 dogs missing in February and March in the area an hour or so south of where DiMaggio, Joltin' James, took his victim.  All of the dogs vanished without a trace.

The area:  Magic Valley.

On March 12th, the body of a German Shepherd was found covered in a purple sheet, its head smashed to bits with a lump of concrete found at the scene.  The possibility of ritual killing and/or animal sacrifice was entertained.  This was in a place called Devil's Corral....

All Dogs Go to Hell.

Apparently, there's some doubt as to whether the number of missing dogs is in fact higher than the amount of missing dogs in previous years.

Still, we loves us them evocative names and when I saw the report about Anderson, the missing dogs immediately came to mind because well, usually all we hear about Idaho involves potatoes and survivalists.

Still, this is pure Baader-Meinhof.  Reminds me of a paragraph in the article I wrote about in my last post: 

One way to illustrate this [the filter theory of selective attention] to yourself is to experiment with a magical technique described by William S. Burroughs called, “Walking on Color.”  Pick a color and take a walk in an area that is familiar to you, choosing to only allow objects of that color to draw your attention.  You will quickly find yourself noticing things you’ve never paid attention to before.  Those things were always there, but your consciousness was editing them out, because it deemed them unimportant.

A few words by Burroughs himself can be found here.

But wait, what the hell, DiMaggio was killed 18 years to the day that his father, James Sr., committed suicide, not long after he'd held another girl, also 16, hostage.  Twin falls....

In another odd but as of yet inconclusive tidbit: 

The riders who spotted Hannah with DiMaggio earlier in the week said she appeared healthy and safe at the time, leading Sheriff Gore to conclude: 'As far as we know, it didn't appear she was being held against her will.'

The area has also been rife with alleged cattle mutilations. Since the 70's, a biggish wave has hit the state every 5 or 6 years. To the south-east of Magic Valley, 30 cattle were mutilated in 1989-90. In 2007, two bulls had their sexual organs removed. This was a bit farther north, in Clark County. (source)

A string of mutilations and shootings took place in 2010 on the other end of the valley in Gem County.

In any event, there's been no more news about the dogs since March.

BTW, Anderson is a name meaning son of Andrew, a name derived from the Greek for "man". Son of Man?  Baader-Meinhof nourishes my own suffering little girl/Jesus narrative.

This is a bit about how I interpret the "news" and construct poetic narratives out of random facts (alleged).

And everything seemed to be going "so well"....

The California Inspector General has just released a "blistering" report (.PDF) which faults state parole agents, the department of corrections and law enforcement for gross negligence in supervising--or not, as the case may be--Philip Garrido. Apparently he was only supervised 12 of the 123 months he was supposed to be closely monitored. A list of bungled opportunities is cited and the conclusion is that "Despite numerous clues and opportunities, the department, as well as federal and local law enforcement, failed to detect Garrido's criminal conduct, resulting in the continued confinement and victimization of Jaycee and her two daughters...." (Summary here).


Meanwhile, over in Cleave-land, people are wondering how ex-Marine Anthony Sowell could have gotten away with murder for so long. Police only got interested in him a month ago after he was accused of rape and assault. Even then, when a naked woman fell from his window on October 20, firefighters came but no police. Another neighbor, the owner a chicken joint across the way, claims that some time ago he reported seeing Sowell naked, standing over a bloodied and naked woman in the bushes outside the infamous "horror house." Nothing came of it. Parole officers apparently last visited Sowell on September 22; despite reports of the overwhelming stench of rotting flesh dating back to 2007, so bad that it caused a local sausage factory to change its sewer line and grease trap--which did not alleviate the stench--no one thought about entering the home!

The bodies were finally discovered by the cops on October 27, and Sowell was arrested on Halloween. Cue theremin!

Incidentally, the police were responding to another attempted rape which occurred hours after Sowell was visited by parole officers on September 22. This attack took place nearly a month before they declined to show up after the naked woman took a tumble from his house....

The link between Sowell and Garrido is that they were both sexual offenders who'd been convicted, served time and upon release were insufficiently monitored. In one case a man got away with imprisoning a woman for at least ten years while he was being "supervised." Another murdered at least 11 women!

We're not the first to make the link. Here and here you can find articles wondering what went wrong.

We would propose that the problem is a mix of indifference and, in the case of Sowell, racism and class prejudice. Who gives a damn about poor, black crackheads? More to the point, however, is that the system is severely overburdened. Who has time to check up on all these convicted rapists when there are potheads to hassle? It is said that America has the highest per capita prison population on the planet after China. That means an awful lot of parolees.

Of course the easy response will be to call for more cops, more laws, tougher sentencing and tougher enforcement. We would replace the word "tougher" with "better." Ditto for the word "more."

Now, this would be loony tunes territory if not for the fact that we are simply making a poetic riff rather than a serious conspiratorial narrative.

Obviously, that Sowell was arrested on Halloween is a resonant fact. It's a time when we dress up as monsters, ghosts, killers, dead people. Tombstones and fake blood abound. The skeleton is ubiquitous.

The most commonly accepted theory of Halloween is that it derives from the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an). Samhain marks the point at which the line between our world and the world of the living is blurred, allowing spirits to pass through. It was also a kind of temporal tessellation--regarded as a kind of "New Year as it separated the divide between the "light" and "dark" halves of the year. Black and white, yo.

Hallowe'en, from "All Hallows Even", or "All Saints Eve" is the Christian holiday grafted onto the pre-existing traditions. All Saints Day itself (in Mexico literally the "Day of the Dead"), is celebrated differently in various in Catholic countries including visiting the graves of deceased loved ones and leaving offerings and lighting candles or flowers.

The Sowell "horror house" (shades of Halloween) was located on Imperial Avenue. It's almost a cliché these days that America is like a new Rome: 200 or so years of Republic followed by a slide into Empire. In Sexual Personae Camille Paglia writes: "Our cold white Federal architecture is Roman. Banks and government buildings are vast temples of state, tombs and fortresses....Rome rediscovered the hieratic Egyptian funeralism latent in Greek Apollonian style....Egypt and Rome defined themselves by death-rituals of preparation or commemoration." (Italics added)

Terrible and commonplace as the crimes of Sowell and Garrido seem, fact is that most of us will never be touched by these things, even indirectly. The potency of the event however, is enough to give one pause, even fear the world around us. Hence, if America is slipping into something less than a democratic Republic, these are just the kinds of events that will push it in the "right" direction. More cops, more laws, more surveillance. Whatever keeps the kids safe.

Interesting in that the conspiracy theorist thinks this slide into Empire is not a natural phenomenon but one aided and abetted by an unseen had, elite figures such as those to be found as members of Yale's infamous Skull and Bones, perhaps. Figures such as dueling presidential 2004 candidates John Kerry and George Bush. The "Bonesmen" have a headquarters known as the "Tomb," where their basement initiations are said to involve members dressed à la Halloween in garish costumes, including robes, priestly vestments, Don Quixote, the devil, skeletons....Incidentally, Bonesmen assume fanciful names upon initiation and George Bush (Senior) was known as Magog.

The group has also been accused of having the stolen skulls of Geronimo and Sancho Panza hidden in the Tomb. One of the macabre details of the Sowell case is that he kept one his victim's skull in a bucket in his basement. Talk about your New World Odor.

Regarding the Sowell case and what the it evokes, we here at LoS are not proposing any intentional twilight language or conspiracy theory but a case of interesting poetic resonance. Finally, though we hate to "play the race card," we concur with Black Voices in asking: "If this were a white neighborhood, I wonder if more extensive efforts wouldn't have been taken to identify the odor."

Then again, we don't want to contradict ourselves; we've already said the negligence may stem from agencies spread too thin or over-burdened. Garrido's crime went undetected for years, and he was a white dude. But one crime doesn't necessarily negate the other; Garrido's race doesn't necessarily disprove the racial context of the Sowell murders.


Perhaps these cases are a matter of the "class card." Perhaps it's all these things and more. Hundreds of girls in Juarez, Mexico have turned up dead, beaten and raped in the past 13 years and, after a "lull," at least twenty this year have simply disappeared. The American media deigns to cover it every once and a while. The Mexican government hasn't been very effective. Maybe it's indifference. Maybe it's helplessness. All pretty much par for the course.

Just stumbled across this article from Times Online by one Richard Bone!

d.a.levy their city is a fucking mess. Giving it back was the wisest move you could have made....

The dog is a domesticated form of the Gray Wolf

Seems like I bungled my post on the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping.... unable to see the forest for the trees, so focused on synchromystic jibba-jabba that I neglected to note the obvious.

When I spent so much time on the name Dugard--"from the garden"--and thinking only of Jesus' night of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane, how could I have missed the Garden of Eden? Probably because I'm currently involved in a dispute with neighbors which has in fact left me sleepless and anguished. Although it is a matter of beams and nails, my crucifixion doesn't seem to be imminent.

If I could see beyond my own nose I might have noticed that Dugard's story can be seen in the terms of the Eden myth. Sexuality and the loss of innocence. It was the Gid who pointed this out to me so I leave it there, as a challenge to the Gid to lay it all out for us. Let the preacher's kid untangle it!

The second (at least!) point of neglect is the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. I warbled on about St. Thérèse and Anne Frank and forgot to go into this gem of a tale. Worst of all, I'd thought of it and then decided, nah, fuggit. Then this morning I awoke to read a story about Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell, a young woman of 19 who was killed by coyotes while walking in the woods and then after thinking "holy shit that's horrible," I remembered the tale.

So, here goes. Apparently the tale was told in the 14th c. by peasants in both France and Italy and may have roots in Eastern or "Oriental" tales with similar themes. There are many versions; sometimes the girl is eaten and sometimes she escapes; sometimes involuntary cannibalism occurs. Sometimes the wolf is a werewolf or an ogre. Sexual overtones abound.

The first written version was published by Frenchman Charles Perrault in 1697. In his version the girl is eaten and there the story ends. A moral tacked onto the end explains that the story is a warning to "good girls" to resist the sexual advances of men.

Since Perrault, many variations have appeared but most know the version as told by the Brothers Grimm.

The Grimm version is almost certainly a re-telling of Perault's except in the end, where a hunter after the wolf's skin saves the girl and her grandmother. In this version the grandmother and the girl are swallowed whole by the wolf, but emerge unharmed after the hunstman cuts the beast open. This ending sees to have been taken from yet another tale. The Grimms also wrote a sequel in which grandmother and the girl trap and kill another wolf with a cunning ruse: they drown him after luring him with a pot of water which had been used to cook sausages.

Many interpretations have been made of the fairy tale, only a few of which I'll mention here. Obviously, wolf attacks were a serious problem in the Middle Ages, so it may have simply began as a cautionary tale to young kids, much like stories of La Llorona are thought to have begun as a way to scare kids away from dangerous waterways.

Alan Dundes has analyzed the tale and interpreted it as the story of a girl who leaves home and in various actions crosses a threshold; she emerges from the belly of the beast as a woman. In another Freudian analysis, Bruno Bettelheim sees it as a rebirth; the child is reborn coming from the wolf, her emotions liberated.

Yet another interpretation sees the story as a warning against falling into the trap of prostitution; supporters of this theory note that the red cloak was a common symbol of hookers in 17th c. France. Less pernicious perhaps is the idea that the story represents sexual awakening. "In this interpretation, the red cloak symbolizes the blood of the menstrual cycle, braving the "dark forest" of womanhood. Or the cloak could symbolize the hymen....In this case, the wolf threatens the girl's virginity. The anthropomorphic wolf symbolizes a man, who could be a lover, seducer or sexual predator...."

We would argue that the pedophile and the kid-snatcher has replaced the Big Bad Wolf as the ultimate danger of our time, lurking in the forest after the sun goes down, ready to pounce; the former is the metaphor for the latter. Indeed the wolf has always had a connotation of sexual aggressiveness. The leering wolf-whistle as the statuesque blond walks past the construction site, Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf (I'm on the hunt I'm after you....) All of these sexual wolf metaphors may derive from this very tale or others like it; the wolf and sexual danger have become intrinsically linked. Wikipedia offers a brief summary of modern adaptations, such as popular songs, cartoons and fiction in which the sexuality of the tale is explored.

Blatant eroticism has been a trope of the vampire tale since Bram Stoker. Less so perhaps for the werewolf but nonetheless, there is clearly a brute sexuality to the lycanthrope. A normal man goes about his everyday business until the full moon appears. In the maiden-mother-crone cycle of pagan moon-lore, the full moon represents the point when the woman is most fertile, full, bountiful. "Mother" may be the appellation but the implication is fertility and thus sexuality. An in the presence of the full woman our mild-mannered lycanthrope turns into an uncontrollable beast with an immense hunger for flesh. While not universally true, the werewolf in European cultures is usually a man.

According to NASA, however, neither June 10, 1991 (Dugard kidnapping) nor November 22, 1976 (Callaway kidnapping) were full moons; though certainly a beast, we can rule out lycanthropy in Garrido's case!

Wikipedia again makes the point that certain modern interpretations of the tale resemble "animal bridegroom" stories such as The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. This latter is perhaps even more telling than the tale of Riding Hood. In the popular Disney film, the Beast first holds young Belle's father as a prisoner but agrees to free him if Belle agrees to take his place. Although coarse and full of anger, the Beast treats Belle kindly, slowly revealing a more sensitive side. Given her freedom, Belle returns of her own volition to save the Beast from his tormentors. She has fallen in love with the Beast, and her tears transforms him back into a handsome young Prince. Cue the dancing candelabra; they live happily ever after.

One might reasonably construe this as a glorification of the Stockholm syndrome. Given the prevalence of the fairy tale in our culture, it shouldn't be so surprising that Dugard never seemed to try and escape her captor. We speak of her as being imprisoned, but it seems she had some degree of freedom, working in Garrido's printshop, interacting with the public. Her children have been described as fairly well-adjusted and clever. Not exactly feral kids locked in a cage for years. Disney's celebrated version of the film was released on November 13, 1991. A week and a day before the Dugard kidnapping!

In both Little Red Riding Hood and the Beauty and the Beast, there is an explicit danger in the forest. Folklorists tell us that this is a trope dating back to the Middle Ages where the forest--place of darkness and danger--is juxtaposed against the village as a place of safety. Put in other words, between the wild and the domesticated, the savage and the tame. In French we can speak of the dusk, or at times the dawn, as "entre chien et loup," literally "between dog and wolf." The night and all its attendant dangers versus the safety of the light of day. These liminal periods put in stark contrast the nature of the wild and the domesticated; they are transitions between states of being. The Wolf in Riding Hood you will recall, dresses itself in Grandma's nightdress and bonnet in order to fool Little Red. And what is the Beast but a lycanthrope stuck in his animal state?

Hunter Thompson brought the following quote by Samuel Johnson to many peoples' attention: "He who makes a beast of himself avoids the pain of being a man." I always thought Thompson was explaining, even advocating, his particular kind of behavior. Now I'm not sure that it isn't merely scorn, or an impersonal observation. Men are dogs, they say. And they are right.

Half past three in the Garden of Good and Evil

We've been grappling with this one for a while and we're not sure if any of this means anything outside the fishbowl of idiosyncratic free-association.

On June 10, 1991 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped and was missing for over 18 years. In August 2009 she reappeared and her alleged kidnappers Philip and Nancy Garrido (née Bocanegra) were arrested. The pair are currently awaiting trial and Ms. Dugard seems to be adjusting to her new life--back with her family, including the two daughters she bore while living in a complex of tents and sheds in Garrido's backyard.

The details of this case are indeed remarkable and fascinating. But what is it about this case which drew our attention for LoS?

Let's start with the names. "Dugard" is a French place name meaning "from" or "of the garden." Dugard was born in Garden City, California and the family went to Antioch, where the crime took place, not long after. After her abduction, Jaycee Dugard lived in a backyard, or garden prison.

The name Jaycee is also unusual. According to some baby-name websites Jaycee is merely a name coming from the initials J.C. One even points out that it's an acronym for Jesus Christ. As if necessary. Hardly anyone in the English (or Spanish and French) speaking world could hear those initials and not think of Jesus.

Jaycee is also considered a variant of the name Jayce, itself short for Jason, a name of Greek origin meaning "healer." Jason also appears in the Bible as a possible variation of Joshua.

This brings us back to Jesus. Wikipedia:

The English name Joshua is a rendering of the Hebrew: יהושע‎ "Yehoshua," meaning "YHWH is Salvation," "YHWH delivers," or "YHWH rescues" from the Hebrew root ישע, "salvation," "to deliver/be liberated," or "to be victorious". It often lacks a Hebrew letter vav (ו) after the shin (ש), allowing a reading of the vocalization of the name as Hoshea (הוֹשֵׁעַ) - the name is described in the Torah as having been originally Hoshea before being changed to Yehoshua by Moses (Numbers 13:16).

"Jesus" is the Anglicized transliteration of the Hellenized transliteration of "Yehoshua". In the Septuagint, all instances of "Yehoshua" are rendered as "ιησου" (Iesou/Jesus), the closest Greek pronunciation of the Hebrew.

Jesus, of course, spent his own time of anguish in a garden--the Garden of Gethsemane (lit. "oil-press"), where "being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." Luke 22:43–44. This was of course on the eve of his crucifixion.

Jaycee (J.C.) in the garden. By process of association we can link one little girl's captivity with one of the cornerstone myths of the Western edifice. In so doing Jaycee Dugard follows in the footsteps of a whole series of suffering little girls, now sanctified.

France, in particular, loves its little-girl martyrs. In the region of Toulouse, for example, every church has a shrine to Saints Jeanne D'Arc, Germaine of Pibrac, Thérèse de Lisieux and Bernadette Soubiros. These count among the most popular Saints in France.

Western literature has pitched in, giving us the sufferings of Alice and Dorothy. Anne Frank may as well be a saint in her own right.

Jesus never went to Antioch, but the city was an important center of early Christianity. Jews there were evangelized by no less figures than Peter and Paul and the converts were the first to be known as Christians. Antioch, California was founded by brothers William and Joseph Smith (not the Mormon prophet!) in 1850. As such it is one of the oldest cities of California.

Not surprisingly, Jaycee's liberation has been hailed as a miracle. Garrido believed he communicated with God, controlled sound with his mind (and vice versa) and kept a blog called Voices Revealed. Posts just before his arrest include: THE U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOURCE OF MIND CONTROL, A POWER THAT HAS BEEN KEPT HIDDEN, CULTURAL TRANCE....

How all this ties into the Jaycees remains a mystery. I'm sure we could we could somehow tie it all up to a revelation of the method, of mind control with sound, of a cultural trance woven into us via media overload and sympathy for the little children...."suffer the little children"....sympathy for the Jaycees, Proto-Gymnasium for New World Orderism. Etc.

But that would just be crazy....