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January 7, 2002

In search of universal impulses
Posted by Teresa at 01:00 PM *

I nearly did myself an injury laughing at Lore Fitzgerald Sjf6berg’s appallingly accurate Geek Hierarchy. When I could breathe again, I observed to Scraps and Velma and Lydy that Sjöberg had left comics fans and the SCA out of the hierarchy; whereupon Scraps pointed out the link I’d missed to the extended version of the chart — which, by golly, locates comics fans and SCA members in the great scheme of things. Sjöberg’s helpfully supplemented the charts with answers to some Frequently Paraphrased Question:

As a Ren Faire person, am I more or less geeky than someone who writes fanfic?

This sort of conundrum is the very essence of the complex web of status and discarded candy wrappers that is the Geek Hierarchy. Your position as a fan of science fiction literature (a category which includes nearly all geeks to some extent or another) puts you above fanfic writers, but fanfic writers can say the same to you. Embracing this paradox will lead to understanding of the Geek Nature.

Who died and left you boss?

Isaac Asimov.

Does erotic fanfiction rank higher if it’s more than a century old and uses a classic as its starting point? I’ve been meaning for some time now to blog The Venetian Carnival, a nineteenth-century work of erotic fanfiction: Being an Erotic Preamble to Miss Austen’s Pride & Prejudice as recounted by Dr. Christopher Hart with illustrations by the late Herr Georg Emmanuel Opitz.

Note: Don’t click that link if you’re allergic to naughty pictures, though the one involving the Italian acrobats on the tightrope is quite something. Puts me in mind of some of Thomas Rowlandson’s work, though I won’t link to any just now on account of having not quite enough excuse for the additional indecency.

I expect that if we only knew, erotic fanfic’s been written all along. People will fantasize about anyone who makes a strong impression on them — and if you don’t believe me, here’s a series of very naughty lithographs from around 1840 featuring Napoleon and His Generals. (Mom, don’t look at that one either.)

I’m fascinated by stuff that recurs for no reason. My theory is that the collective unconscious, if it exists, isn’t made up of powerful, dignified archetypal images; rather, it’s a ragbag collection of odd tropes whose archetypal status we can infer only by their inexplicable recurrence, like jackalopes, and drinking vessels in the shape of a boot or shoe, and postcards showing hoked-up pictures of giant fruits and vegetables or fish, and people doing bunny-ears behind each other’s heads when they’re having their picture taken.

It’s mildly unnerving to think that the collective unconscious (if it exists) is full of random nonsense, but much worse to think this stuff was all part of some meaningful pattern.

More on jackalopes: I grew up along the postcard-rich shores of Route 66, so I’ve been mindful of the natural history of the jackalope since the 1960s; but I only recently learned (courtesy of Prof. Chuck Holliday, Dept. of Biology, Lafayette College, Easton PA) that the existence of the jackalope was first recorded by one Joris Hoefnagel around 1575. Moreover, P. Gaspar Schott’s Physica Curiosa (1667) distinctly shows horned rabbits — Lepores cornuti — in its frontispiece and again in the text. Worse, in the Shurangama Sutra, Volume 1, Part Two, Sutra text, pages 157-160, the Buddha himself makes reference to them, albeit slightingly.

Professor Holliday has suggested the possibility that jackalopes are related to the raurackl, or “stag-hare,” legendary among Bavarian hunters. A search on raurackl led me to an article, “Vom Osterhasen und dessen seltsamen Verwandten,” that I didn’t entirely understand. It nevertheless (this is starting to feel like a burlesque version of an H. P. Lovecraft story) provided me with several more names, and hinted at further meanings. Here’s a slightly tidied-up version of the Google translation of part of it:

With antlers, reisszaehnen, wings or also swimming skins armed, “Meister Lampe” is on the way, in order to float as “Raurackl” or “Wolpertinger” its nuisance. Antler-equipped hares are landlaeufig well-known as “Raurackl” in eastern Austria. Some stuffed copies of this rare [species?], by the way, are in the Grottenbahn of the Linzer Poestlingbergs. In the border area too, and particularly in Bavaria, a particularly wild kind is resident: the Wolpertinger.

The Wolpertinger - a fabulous creature

The Diorama of the Wolpertinger in the German Hunting and Fishery Museum in Munich represents a special point of attraction. However, many visitors do not even seem to question the existence of this strange Getiers. Even in the first expenditure of Brehm’s Animal Life stands a horned kind of hare with Latin name “lepus cornutus” registered. Likewise, horned hares were shown in old woodcuts and engravings. Admits is the Wolpertinger at the latest since that 16. Century, a nature, which exists only in the heads, but nevertheless reality to be seems. It is also older thereby than its brother, the Osterhase [Easter Bunny].

The Wolpertinger — or the group of closely related species referred to as Wolpertingers; I can’t tell — turned out to be more than a little disturbing. Mr. Potter’s Museum of Curiosity (a splendidly creepy place; I visited it a few years ago) has nothing on wolpertingers. Neither does the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog; so it’s just as well that wolpertingers are so closely related to the Easter Bunny.

But back to the jackalope, and Professor Holliday. I don’t know how to say this, so let me put it bluntly: He says they exist. Really. Scroll about halfway down his page and keep reading.

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