The Gecko Awakes

I keep returning, like a restless dog, to the oft-sucked bone of strange search terms. I claim a literary interest (the procrastinater’s habitual excuse), but it is probably a mere thirst for the absurd, or the simply silly, that draws me back to this peculiar well. And why not assuage this chaotic thirst of mine? Especially when there are so many bizarre search terms shuffling around the ruffled fringes of this blog.

To explain. Someone has found their way to this site by typing the words ‘gecko waking up’ into a search engine. Why they have done this I cannot say. How they found themselves here, well, I can only guess. I suppose it must have been this rather ancient post on the subject of Art Gecko. This, as far as I can recall, is the only occasion on which I have evoked the name of the famous sticky-toed lizard. I don’t remember, all the same, ever dealing with the issue of a gecko emerging from a somnolent state. And why would I?

Perhaps I am missing something. Perhaps the sight of a newly waking gecko would overturn the old bucket of my tiresome life. Perhaps it would tear a hole in the dirty blanket of my existence. Perhaps it would offer a bloody kick to the rough shins of my most cherished traditions.

Or perhaps it would amuse me, briefly – to be forgotten, gladly.

Tiny Pieces

It has, I think, been some time since I brought your worthy attention to a favourite ‘search term‘, perhaps because so few of the recent examples I have come across have caught my elegant fancy. Either that, or my mind has been on other things. In any case, a suitably strange term has just emerged. And this, if you will, is it:

‘animals breaking a rock into tiny pieces’

Is any further comment required? I can only hope that my humble blog offered this particular internet-surfer what they wanted. Somehow I doubt it, but one cannot be so hasty as to assume that one has a hold on the expectations of the contemporary web-wanderer. Perhaps this site is just the place for someone seeking information on/footage of/poems about rock-breaking animals. On the other hand…

As doth the pissing dog

Sometime over the last week, someone was drawn to this blog by the following search-term: “active reading without damaging books”

I am, as ever, intrigued. Is this person seriously seeking a way of reading actively without damaging books? You might as well desire to travel to the North Pole without having to see or touch snow. Damage is an inevitable outcome of active reading, just as it is an inevitable outcome of living. It is not the purpose of it and, on rare occasions, books may emerge relatively unscathed. But to openly try to avoid damage would be a dangerous thing indeed. The pristine book is something to be feared. A book without scratches, like a face without wrinkles, is something to be highly suspicious of. As doth the pissing dog, so life will leave its mark.

Unless the text becomes completely unreadable, one should not worry about the physical damage a book suffers. One should care only about the relationship between the book and the reader. Only if this is damaged is there cause for concern.

Time and Underpants (or What Is It All About?)

To be typed into a search engine one day: Why do people insist on asking search engines questions they can’t possibly answer?

As long-time readers will be aware, search-terms fascinate me. There is a tendency for them to be either eccentric, banal, or both. Here, for instance, is a recent example:

what was the european novel about?

I can’t help thinking that this particular web-surfer has unrealistically high expectations. Like any tool, the internet will help you get a job done. It may provide the nails for you to build a cabinet – what it won’t do is assemble the cabinet all on its own.

Having said that, I am a kindly soul in a kindly mood, so here – for your immediate edification – is a brief answer to the question above:

Apes, abstinence, adventure, amorality, baguettes, bathos, bathrobes, Belgium, coiffure, coffee, combat, death, delinquents, delicatessens, eugenics, eternity, equivocation, France, farce, families, gigolos, Germany, glamour, hagiography, hesitation, heretics, Iceland, indoctrination, infants, jam, jounalism, jurisdiction, kissing, kleptomania, knives, light, life, love, machinery, masculinity, marmalade, nihilism, nostalgia, nouveau riche, old wives tales, oligopoly, onanism, paradise, pretence, politics, quarrels, quarantine, quattrocentro, rats, relics, retribution, sex, Scandanavia, seafaring, tea, testoterone, time, underpants, unification, uprooting, valuation, variation, vegetables, women, weaponry, weakness, xenophobia, xylophones, x-rays, yesterday, yogurt, Yugoslavia (former federal republic of), Zionism, zoophytes and zealots.

Overrun by Wolverines

After mentioning Tomas Lurgsy’s pet wolverine a week or so ago (here and here) this blog has been inundated by those desiring a wolverine of their own. ‘Buy skunk juice’ used to be a highly popular search term around here; ‘buy pet wolverine’ is clearly the new kid in town. Barely a day goes by without a potential pet wolverine buyer ending up at this site, only to leave (no doubt) with disappointment written all over their strange little faces. The idea that people should wish to purchase skunk juice used to concern me deeply; the concept of someone wanting to buy a wolverine – an animal primarily celebrated for its violent streak – is equally disturbing. Lurgsy’s experience should not be setting a precedent: he was a half-crazed Bulgarian poet – not someone whose behaviour we should be wilfully imitating. Indeed, Pyetr Turgidovsky aside, I can think of few less worthy role models.

In short, allow me to be blunt with you, dear deluded readers. If you want to buy a wolverine, this is not the place. Perhaps other places are (or claim they are) ‘the place’. Should that be the case, however, I implore you to stop for a minute, take a deep breath, and exercise that damp, pulsing, slimy grey stuff that sits within your skull. Consider your options carefully. Do you really want an animal nicknamed ‘glutton’ or ‘skunk bear’ to share a house with you, or would you prefer something a little more docile (a cat, perhaps)? A wolverine, remember, is not only an endangered species, but an animal likely to put in its owner in no small danger. Examine this image, if you will. Replace the rock with your living room sofa. Now, answer me carefully: do you still want to buy a wolverine?

Oh, I see. Well, have it your way then…

[Whilst we're on the subject of wolverines, this came up a few weeks ago. Visit ye, visit ye..]

On Sertin’s Terms

Last night at The Crippled Bee, Jean-Pierre Sertin and I, after a drink or five, got down to the business of discussing search terms. I say ‘got down to the business’: this sounds as though our discussion was pre-ordained. It wasn’t, of course. Sertin’s mind, and mine, move along uncertain channels of wind. Our thoughts flutter like flakes of late winter snow. Down the weird stream of fancy we flow. Through the tides of…

Anyhow. Where was I? Yes: search terms. This is the subject to which we turned, apres much meandering. Sertin had, I fancy, read this post and it had, as well it might, turned on a switch in his creative mind. He was, as ever, full of ideas. And one idea bobbed to the surface more than all the others. And it was this:

To create a work of fiction directed solely by search terms. One starts – on a blog, perhaps – with a story. In time, restless web-adventurers find themselves paddling in the sea of your story. The search term that has brought them there offers for you, the writer, a new departure. You leave by the route by which people came to you. The reader directs the writer, but without knowing it.

There are all sorts of implications, no doubt, though one (i.e. ‘I’) would need to see how such a thing worked out in practice before offering full judgement. Which brings us, I guess, to the tricky part. Sertin is already notorious for working on twenty or so projects at once. His creative pockets are overflowing. He has more ideas than he knows what to do with. Will he, can he follow this particular one up?

Google Knows Your Grandmother

It’s been some time, I fancy, since I last lowered my hairless hand into the lucky dip of search terms (last september, as it turns out). One would expect a sea of strangeness waiting to engulf me – and one would be right, for strangeness is certainly never far away when it comes to search terms. The world is simply jam-packed full of people typing peculiar things into search engines, only to arrive, for one reason or another, at my battered old door. Today I have picked just four of the many weird and wonderful lines I found lurking on my search term list. Trust me when I say that there were many more.

The first is ‘it becomes difficult not to fall in love with death’: an unsurprisingly mournful statement – one which must have led, I imagine, to one of the many articles on everybody’s favourite miser Pyetr Turgidovsky. But who might have written this, and what exactly were they looking for? Consolation? Like-minded nihilists? Or is it the title of an early Turgidovsky short story?

The aim of our second searcher seems more obvious. One doesn’t type ‘bapless burger’ unless one is, well, after a bapless burger. The question remains (and it is, I think, one of the big questions of our age): why is one after a bapless burger? To what extent would a recipe for a bapless burger differ from a regular burger recipe, save the absence of the bap? And how did this phrase link to my website? (is this, too, a title of a short story by the young Turgidovsky; the bapless burger being a symbol of his empty adolescent life perhaps?)

From the profane to the sacred. ‘Sunday of last judgement simplified’ is our third term (and here’s the article, I fancy, towards which it led). Now this one moves my mind in all sorts of ways. People do yearn for simplicity, and who am I to roadblock their highway of desires? Having said that, the Last Judgement (one of those strange historical things that is nonetheless yet to happen) is one of those things that, I would say, tends to resist simplicity. Here is someone, however, who clearly wishes to have the whole thing not only cut down to size, but timetabled. Maybe their Sundays tend to be busy, and they’d rather the Last Judgement didn’t encroach too heavily. Would it be possible to be judged after lunch, since I was planning to invite the vicar? How long do you reckon the judgement will take? Will there be toilet breaks?

Talking of last things: ‘conclusion on my grandmother’ is our last term (this the destination, I presume). Yet another case, it seems, of using the internet to seek the answers to purely personal questions. Someone is perplexed by the behaviour of a grandparent. They seek elucidation. Options abound. They could use their own mind. They could ask the help of other people: family, friends or professional counsellors. Or they could, of course, just see what google says. Google knows your grandmother like nobody does. This, as we well know, is nothing short of a fact.

Extra-marital Protocol

It’s been a while since I last buried my old ostrich head into the strange sands of ‘search terms’, so here’s a little something that has for some days been bouncing about like some misshapen rubber ball in the playground of my mind. Sometime over the last month, an anonymous web surfer entered a sentence into a search engine, and ended up at a page in Underneath the Bunker. This was the page – and this was the search term: Does a man love his mistress?

Let’s not throw any time away relating the term to the page. Though the issue in hand may not be explicitly answered in Heidi Kohlenberg’s review of Stephen Harringer’s biography of George Forthwith-James, one can see easily enough why a search engine might think the article relevant to anyone posing what is, at heart, a rather bizarre sort of question. Does a man love his mistress? What kind of answer might our anonymous ponderer be expecting? Is it right for a man to love his mistress? Could there possibly be some sort of consensus regarding the duty of a man who is, essentially, not doing his duty? The question is so beautifully general; so stunningly free of specifics. Does whatman love his mistress? Perhaps our unknown searcher has a mistress, or desires one, or desires love, or desires… what? It’s hard to say what he/she desires; what he/she is after. The internet is a wide, weird world, but it is no oracle, and can no more stand peculiar queries than any of us. And yet it’s nice to see someone put these questions forward; these unfathomable, unanswerable, inexplicable musings, tossed into the air like rare goose feathers, like fine grain, like paper snow, like dry grass in a stiff summer wind.

In honour of this, allow me to answer the unanswerable. If art is a man’s wife, and a man’s wife is his mistress, why then he loves his mistress.

Being an Open Letter to Crop Circle Junkies

Like a whole host of silly things (tin-foil swallowing babies, for instance, or skunk juice) my recent reference to crop-circles appears to be bringing a new audience to these noble pages of mine. The question is: do I want this site to be flooded with crop-circle junkies? At the risk of causing offence, I am tempted to say ‘no’. Here follows an open letter to all such souls:

Dear Crop Circle Junkies,

A part of me admires you. You devote a fair portion of your lives to the pursuit of a truth that most probably doesn’t exist. There’s a certain charm in that. But let us be honest with ourselves – your particular conspiracy theory hasn’t the legs it once had. In fact, the legs it has now have grown hairy and unattractive. Anybody in their right mind would cover those legs up. The idea that aliens have the time and/or desire to descend upon our earth every now and again and cut shapes in the fields of English farmers has, over the years, grown stale. Most of us came to the conclusion long long ago that crop circles are cut by men in the midst of mid-life crises, masquerading as citizens of Pluto. Their patterns are perfectly pretty, I admit, but there is really no need for you to be so over-keen. Your time could be better spent.

How, you ask? Here’s an idea. Instead of traipsing around Wiltshire on the lookout for extra-terrestial life-forms, why not spend a day or two charting the history of the realist novel in Hungary? Or how about an afternoon spent discussing space and structure in postmodern Prussian poetry with a group of friends? Or if you simply can’t leave those corn fields behind, why not indulge in a spot of Active Reading whilst you’re at it? You could always combine your crop-circle viewing with a bit of Fernando Aloisi? No?

If none of those activities tick your funny little box, you might consider helping me out with my own crop-circle quandary. It’s more of a translation issue than anything else (I’m beginning to seriously doubt that the reference is to actual crop-circles) but still: the story in question does have something to do with people waking up in the morning and finding pretty patterns where once there were none. In your case, fields. In this case, a man’s hands. What possible meaning could one derive from this? And don’t say aliens, please….

May the treacle of culture continue to drip upon your faces,

Georgy Riecke

The Source of Modern Misery

I had something to say about Fjona Uu – something significant, no doubt – but I’ve forgotten what it was, so in the meantime I’ll slink back with a sorry frown to what is strangely becoming this blog’s favourite subject.

What is it about Pyetr Turgidovsky that keeps us coming back to him? I’d never have thought that unrelenting misery was so captivating. And yet it’s hard to keep the big Russian brute out of one’s mind. He holds so many of the answers to those questions we can’t help but ask. Not pretty answers, mind you – but fabulously frank and fascinating ones.

Consider the following question, certainly one of the more beguiling search terms to have appeared in connection with this blog in recent weeks: ‘What makes the twenty first century miserable?’

One yearns to know what possessed someone to type these words into their computer (clearly not someone hoping for a comfy evening in). One wonders, then, whether the question is asked on the understanding that our century is especially miserable, or whether the curious searcher is looking to compare contemporary misery with misery of the past. Perhaps the person is question is anxious to see how misery may progress over the course of this century – in what wonderful ways it will continue to manifest itself.  Will twenty-first century misery outdo twentieth century misery? If so, how? In what way will our brand of modern misery prove itself more miserable than the great brands of medieval misery? Is there any more we could do to ratchet up the misery rating? Are we miserable enough?

I can’t profess to know the answer to any of these questions. But trust me when I say that Turgidovsky almost certainly does. And he’s gone some way to providing them in his most recent novel, Delicious Air of Life (or the Ugly God-damned Wife).

As for those he hasn’t yet tackled, rest assured he’s working on them as we speak. So fear not: this writer will leave no miserable stone unturned.

Baboon Face Tor

As I have already established (and others are consistently proving) search terms are an endless source of fascination; all the more so since the majority of those I encounter seem to correspond to no clear logic, offering an immediate portal into the scrambled brains of some anonymous web-weevil. I could understand it if readers flocked to my gates in search of ‘obscure European fiction’ -  instead I get people on the lookout for ‘consumption rate of pomegranates in Greece’, ‘square-like bruises’ and, last week, ‘baboon face tor’. Obviously I will take whatever reader comes my way, but I cannot help but think that these strange souls aren’t the people I had in mind when I first took up literary criticism.

Still, they never cease to inspire me, in their weird little way. They’ve even begun to weave themselves into my dreams. Last night, for instance, I dreamt of taking a pilgramage to Glastonbury Tor, only to discover on reaching my destination that someone had painted a massive baboon’s face on the southern slope of the famous small hill. Around this face stood a circle of naked revellers, their bottoms painted red, dancing to the whisper of the West Country wind. When I approached they started jumping up and down and reciting passages from James Joyce (at least that’s what it sounded like – it might have just been gobbledygook). Needless to say I didn’t hang around for long.

I wonder what Tor Borsen would make of all this? It was his name, after all, that acted as the vital bait for our curious visitor. But alas, I know not where the man with the name-that-means-conical-hill-in-Celtic is (as explained here).

…And a Pint of Skunk Juice, Please

It has been said before, but search terms frequently reveal worrying trends, offering us a curious view into the strange web-searching habits of some of the world’s more sinister citizens.

Two days ago, for instance, a web-wanderer found his or herself at the gates of this site, armed with the search term ‘purchase skunk juice’. Whilst it is not a great surprise that they should have washed up here - this, naturally, was the bait that lured them in - I am nevertheless disturbed by the idea that someone is actively seeking to ‘purchase skunk juice’. To what end, might we ask? The excitable trouble-maker in all of us can probably think of half a dozen ways in which a pint of skunk juice might be employed, though few of us (I fancy) would go so far as to submit to these fantasies.

Unless, of course, our skunk-juice-seeker was thinking of stealing Turgidovsky’s idea of soaking books in the repellant liquid – in which case I confess that I am intrigued, and would love to hear the results of their experiment.

Vincent at Ninety

About a month ago I published the first of what aims to be a long and fruitful series of posts (to be collected here) exploring the relationship between Underneath the Bunker (that great online journal) and ‘google search terms’ (sweet source of so many alluring mysteries).

In the first piece, you may remember, I drew attention to the term ‘baby swallowed tin foil by mistake’ - a phrase that allowed me to ponder the possibilities of frantic fathers turning to contemporary European fiction to solve baby bodily crises. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this blog has since been raided, almost daily, by yet more ‘baby tin foil’ fans – all of whom, I fear, have been brought here in vain. I am beginning to feel that it is my duty to supply actual information to cool these frantic brows – but, alas, I am no doctor. In my humble experience, however, I have never considered it wise to let a baby loose on the mince, apple or beef and ale pies.

Enough of that. Today I will move onto another term entirely: one that may seem obscure and strange to the outsider, but which stands much closer to the journal’s content than you might have known. Here is the term, searched for by god knows which stranger, in which country, and on whose time:

‘gogh faked death – clearly relates the Van Gogh controversy’

And here, of course, is the article it must have led to: The End, The End, The End (of Lucas de Boer)

More on this later, I imagine.

Loose Leaves

Continuing in the spirit of an earlier post, allow me to dive once more into the swampy pond of ‘google search terms’: the ever eccentric means by which web surfers find themselves stranded on my strange and stony shores.

Pure absurdity is usually the name of the game, especially when phrases such as ‘a game that involves an olive and beard’ turn up (I can’t say what the seeker wanted in this case, but they undoubtedly found themselves at the feet of Alexis Pathenikolides). The subject of today’s discussion, however, is to be a much abrupter term: something short and sweet, though nonetheless stimulating .

The inviting ‘foliage novel’ is the term to which I refer. And the questions, as always, abound. What could be lurking behind such a query? Is someone, somewhere, yearning for fiction that contains rather more foliage than your average book? Has someone hit upon the idea that what modern literature is missing, above all things, is a proper sense of foliage? And if so – to which author might they be instructed to turn?

Funnily enough, google’s fourth suggestion (at time of writing) mirrors my own thoughts, putting forward Y Yippo’s novel Why The Fig Leaves Fall as a possible example of a contemporary novel in which foliage could be said to feature highly. As you probably know, Yippo’s enterprising work imagines a futuristic world run by toucans, in which two humans (coincidentally ex-lovers) are thrown together (in zoo conditions) in order to create a child (read a review here).

What you may not know (unless you have actually read the book in question) is that, beyond its surreal depiction of a toucanitarian state, Why The Fig Leaves Fall contains some of the best description, intelligent utilisation, and deep understanding of foliage to be found in modern european fiction. Under the shade of its words, any foliage lover may shelter, safe in the knowledge that the flowers of foliage-related thought will surely blossom forth.

In short, this book leaves nothing to the imagination.

The November Tin Foil Disaster

Having said that this week will be devoted to Alexis Pathenikolides, I rapidly find myself swerving into the nearest layby to secretly indulge myself in another subject entirely. Allow me to lay the blame on this blogger - without which I should never have been diverted from that other, ineffably worthy task of mine.

As Mr Elberry reminds us, ‘google referrals’ can, at the best of times, yield especially peculiar results. When I have the time to peruse the long list of ‘web search terms’ collected in the exhaustive statistics from Underneath the Bunker, I am consistently surprised by the strangeness of many of the phrases found therein (and, indeed, of their relationship to my site). In fact, I have of late taken to making a list of the most intriguing entries – one of which (the beguiling ‘crocodile poo dung made counterfeit’) I put forward as an example in the comments to the aforementioned post.

Whilst I should love to throw the remainder of this list in your face in a single elegant fling, I think it would be better to draw them out over a much longer period, particularly as many of them have, I believe, an elusive charm, on which I should like to dwell.

Today, then, I shall consider the following: ‘baby swallowed tin foil by mistake’.

What it lacks in sheer absurdity, this one certainly gains in poignancy. It is, in one sense, a short story contained in a phrase. One is drawn into the drama of the sentence immediately, imagining a well-meaning but mildly negligent parent (or better still, babysitter) using google to alleviate the panic caused by their baby’s ingestion of a corner of mince pie casing. Why ring a doctor? The internet will solve it all: of course it will! Somewhere, surely, someone will have written something on the subject of babies swallowing tin foil – and everything will be all right.

Or will it? It worries me somewhat that such an anxious baby-carer, in the search for a calming answer to a possible medical dilemma, found themselves on a website devoted to obscure European literature. How did it happen? Where do I – or one of my reviewers – ever refer to tin-foil eating babes? I cannot recall. But I can almost guarantee that we didn’t provide the answer this person was looking for (though it’s nice to think that we might have converted them to the joys of Bulgarian literature in the meantime)