Whale bone doll. Greyhound vs. great dane.
WTF?
I get a regular report from WordPress, the outfit that hosts this blog, which tells me the search terms used every day to find my site.
I love to read these oddly linked words and imagine the people that typed them into a search box and, even more, wonder about how those phrases got to me. It’s a little of what’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, as Hamlet says (and you haven’t heard the plaintive, flummoxed quality of these lines unless you’ve experienced Paul Giametti’s turn with Hamlet at Yale Repertory Theater, as I did recently). What is the algorithm? Where do they come from, these disjointed, nonsensical idioms, and what do they have to do with yours truly?
Curvy passion. Another search that landed someone on my site.
Anna karenina dresses.
Well, okay, that is conceivably something you’d find in my blog. But:
Alligator tails?
Knock knock. I’m at your door. Do you have anything on your site that can respond to that?
Horse gilding furry porn.
Embroidery on plywood.
Kids in grass winter.
They’re interesting, but as far as I know, I haven’t yet filed a post related to these phrases.
Peacock one to one correspondence.
Sorry.
Now, there are some crazy-sounding terms that beat an understandable trail to jeanzimmerman.com.
Wooden cowboy roadside, for instance. Recently, from Arizona, I described a series of handmade wooden signs posted mysteriously along a highway in Scottsdale, one of them featuring, yes, a cowboy. I like hand-painted signs, and this was one of the finest.
Sweet old world meaning. Last month, I tried to get at the feeling Lucinda William’s rhapsodic song gave me, when Gil’s mother lay in the cocoon of her dying, and it struck a chord in some readers.
More music. Sweet milk and peaches tuning. I’m no musician, I barely even sing in the car, but I watched a fiddler play country songs from the rural south circa the beginning of the 20th century, and it carried me off in a square dance time machine.
I want to do to you what spring does to the cherry trees. Someone actually typed that in a search box. The achingly erotic verse of Pablo Neruda, who I profiled the other day when word emerged that his remains were being disinterred (to the strains of a string quartet) so the authorities could check if he had been poisoned.
Tiny silver spoons. Well, yes, that would be my mother’s collection of family cutlery.
Prickly pear babies. My quest to find the infant spawn of the saguaro.
Mark Wyse 17 parked cars. I talked about Wyse’s book 17 Parked Cars in my review of Ed Ruscha’s exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan.
Faviken. A rave-up of the brilliant Scandinavian chef/restauranteur Magnus Nilsson, who likes more than anything to cook with lichen.
But perhaps the searches I get most of all have to do with witika or wendigo or native american monsters, which all point to the beast in The Orphanmaster, nine feet tall with putrid green skin, razor-sharp fangs and claws good for slashing.
P.S. The witika finds human beings pretty tasty. Apparently there’s a healthy coterie of witika enthusiasts out there, and on this site I have an essay with some fantastic pictures about the monster.
So I’m not seeing any searches for Lindsay Lohan here. Nor anyone leaning in to find Sheryl Sandberg. Nor to find the dope on Louis CK, though I plan to write something about the genius comic one of these days.
One of these days…Some of these days… Sophie Tucker, my favorite jazz era nightclub singer, known to her fans as The Last of the Red Hot Mamas, did a hit song called “Some of these days.” I wrote about her and Etta James in the same post – two singers who wow me.
Now go do some searching, and we’ll see if you circle back my way. And if there’s something you’d like to see me write about that I haven’t already — or even if I have — just leave me a comment and let me know. We aim to please.
Jean Zimmerman 