Found something odd yesterday when I was looking for the link to the story I wrote last year, “Daphne Alluvia.” It’s an odd title, and although “alluvia” is a real word (geological, having to do with sediment), the combination of words is unique enough that if I search for the exact phrase, everything that comes up is probably related to my story.
Except for this:
Not sure what it is — looks like a blog site, except that it’s all nonsense. The words are real, or at least derived from real words (“nakedish”, “overgloominess” which I kind of like). A cryptic sidebar implies that it might be a computer-generated page, which makes sense. But the weird part, highlighted, is that my story’s title appears as part of all the babble.
(The date on the post was August 2012, three months before my story was published.)
Just a coincidence, obviously, but my kind of coincidence. Combines two of my favorite ideas — that names have potency in and of themselves (thinking of Pynchon, and Delaney’s Dhalgren, and LeGuin’s Earthsea books, and even my favorite Vonnegut passage ever, when Unk finds his own scrawled name at the bottom of the journal he’s been reading), and that we’re always looking for signals amid the noise. Lot 49 was really all about the signal/noise question, and so was Crowley’s Aegypt series, although Crowley opted for transcendence instead of despair as his angle of approach. (Actually Oedipa’s despair was kind of transcendent, too.)
