wordpress stat funnies, meta, werewolves
I posted an entry in 2007, sharing my imaginary Tale of Sir Marrok, this poor guy who gets one line of airtime in Malory, in which we are told that his wife betrayed him and turned him into a werewolf. Unfortunately, there is no Tale of Sir Marrok, and I made up every word that I wrote (cribbing structurally from Marie de France). The only problem is that, if you stumble upon this via Google, you could spend an awful lot of time reading this garbage that was written as a graduate student’s smart-ass response to a writing prompt. What’s even worse is that you might think it’s got any scholarly value whatsoever. I can just hope that people use the bibliography (and realize way before I did that undergraduates can use Interlibrary Loan. I never even tried, I don’t think, until my first semester in grad school; I just let what was available locally shape my research prior to that. That’s very sad.).
The Sir Marrok bit gets hits several times a week. I check my wordpress stats every once in a while for shits and giggles, and this Marrok interest is continuous. It worries me a bit, but it keeps on surprising me. I think the world is hungry for more info on medieval werewolves.* I wish everybody who was assigned Malory and gets interested in Marrok and werewolves would go read Marie de France’s “Bisclavret.” And then go on to read Egils saga. Because everybody should read Egils saga. It has werewolves. Really. Go ahead.
But my main reason for looking at wordpress stats is because I always get a kick out of the search terms that bring people to this little corner of the internet; I like to imagine what they were looking for and, in some cases, how disgusted they may have been with what they actually found. Amusing search terms in the past have included “Brad Pitt” and “container housing.” How many pages of hits on container housing must you plow through to end up *here*? The mind, it boggles.
Recent searches that have landed people at Slouching Towards Extimacy:
marrok
sir marrok
dr.gaál györgy
fandom “william gibson”
extimate lacan
personification in Beowulf
werewolf knight arthur
donestre manuscript
husband into a wolf
spancel
weland
old english scriptures
That’s the sort of list that makes me feel like I’m falling down on the blog job. Nevermind that I don’t really know what that job is; I have never had any central mission or even theme with this blog. I mostly just started it as a place to stow thoughts and notes as I wrote my thesis, and then as a place to whinge about grad school, and then as a place to store links for my study of Old English. There’s still a good bit of whinging, though. But people keep coming here for werewolf tales, and I never did do anything else with werewolf tales.
But now I have to go figure out who or what a “dr.gaál györgy” is.
* My daughter likes to watch the same episodes of television shows over and over and over again. Today, she busted out an old Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD and watched the episode where the werewolf boyfriend of one of the main (non-werewolf) characters meets a werewolf girl and has to have some emotionally fraught Thing with both of them, involving reflections on the nature of monstrousness — in this particular case, the matter of a rational human being reflecting on what it means to regularly turn into an animal. My daughter cheered when werewolf-boy used the final moments of his transformation, his occupation of that liminal space/time/skin in between human and animal, to deploy both reason and emotion (and presumably ethics) in choosing the human girl over the werewolf girl (who was incidentally trying to kill the human girl and convince the werewolf boy that he should learn to enjoy the slaughter and stop with the self-restraint). Of course, werewolf boy had to be shot in the ass with a tranquilizer gun right after that, as his transformation was complete and he started going after the human girl, who’d suddenly become nothing more than food to his wolf-self, and my daughter didn’t know quite what to do with that, other than to be reassured that Buffy always knows what weapon to use. She didnt’ fast forward through the part where werewolf-boy kills werewolf-girl, but she did fast forward through the part where people in human skin were kissing. She’s at that age where “tearing out of throats” bothers her less than “that gross kissy stuff grownups do.” My daughter couldn’t care less about medieval werewolves as such, but she’s awfully interested in the idea that a werewolf could act like a human even while in werewolf form. Joss Whedon didn’t give us much on that, but Malory sure did.
William Gibson on 12th century heresy and the speed of trauma
Well, everybody’s reading Dinshaw these days, and as much as I want to be on that wagon, I’m neck-deep in Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in an effort to save my disaster of a Crashaw draft from oblivion before the semester begins.
For a mental break, I started William Gibson’s Spook Country last night as I waited for my Benadryl to kick in. I’ve been a big Gibson fan since I read Neuromancer in ‘86 or ‘87. I had these long periods as an adolescent writer where everything I wrote was just mimicry, because I couldn’t get the voice of a poet out of my head. I had Dylan Thomas mimicry, an early, short and horrid period of Poe mimicry, Plath mimicry (which earned me ten bucks once), Sexton mimicry. Gibson may have been one of the earliest prose writers to get stuck in my poet-head (“poet” is not a label I’m comfy sticking on myself, really, but…). Not until Margaret Atwood, I think, did I get so utterly ruined, as a poet, by a novelist. Prior to Gibson, my fiction hero was probably Frank Herbert, whose Dune series I’d finished reading by about ‘86 (though Herbert had my adolescent brain kicking long-term on Sufism, the role of chemicals in religion, temporal loops and trans-galactic trauma, and how to move the tiniest muscle in the little toe of my left foot).
Gibson changed everything.
In any case, here’s an excerpt from Chapter 23, “Two Moors,” from Gibson’s new Spook Country:
As he ate, he thought about the twelfth-century heresy of the Free Spirit. Either God was everything, believed the brethren of the Free Spirit, or God was nothing. And God, to them, was very definitely everything. [...]
And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those were most in touch with Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn’t yet gotten the Free Spirit message. [...] Someone like Manson, for instance, simply wouldn’t have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would’ve hated it. What good it would be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists… ? [...]
But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ration, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal. (116-117)
This is a very good book. I’ve been in grad school for an embarrassingly long time, college an even more embarrassingly long time, but the past few years, as happens to us all at points, I’ve spent more time reading journal articles and books about other books than I have actually reading stuff that someone created as art, to tell a story (of course the best books about books manage to be art and to tell a story too, but I digress). I’d kind of forgotten how a book that has nothing to do with one’s own research can suspend time and reality for an entire weekend, if it’s well-written and one allows it ingress. This is probably the first “not for research” thing I’ve read in years, and the only “not for research” thing I’ll manage to read this summer, but I’m glad this is what it happened to be.
This coming fall, I’ll be taking an(other) Arthurian Traditions class, which is going to involve a lot of Marion Zimmer Bradley (much to my dismay), so I am supremely grateful for a chance to read good fiction before I have to read Zimmer Bradley (shudder). Unfortunately, when one is reading The Mists of Avalon, the speed of trauma is agonizingly slow.
***
Gibson, William. Spook Country. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007.
Sea Monster in Montauk! Call MEARCSTAPA!
Emblem of anxieties re. rising gas prices?
(Scroll down so you don’t miss Altman’s “Ode to Richard’s Monster”)
