Random Thursday: A Peculiar Sort of Intellectual Immortality

[hrj]

I must start here with the dreadful confession that part of my regular routine is to Google my full name (which is, if not unique, at least distinctive) for new recent hits. Mostly I'm looking for reviews and other book publicity items. I don't have an agent to monitor my literary career, so I have to strap down the ego and monitor it myself. There are authors who will tell you that what I do is bad Bad BAD, but we each have to find our own path.

But this post isn't about my books. It's about other stuff that gets caught up in the net when I run those searches. So what are the topics in which my name gets bandied about on a regular basis? My article on constructional sewing techniques as extracted from surviving textiles. My article on the Mammen embroideries. Those make a fair amount of sense. They're practical how-to articles with illustrative diagrams, on topics of interest to a lot of historical hobbyists.

The third most common non-literary Google "hit" is a bit more peculiar, and it's the one that inspired today's post. It's a Pinterest pin of one of the 14th c. manuscript images of bathhouse attendants from the Wenceslas Bible. And underneath the image is a text that reads, in part, "I think...Heather Rose Jones is entirely incorrect in assuming these were not corset-like undergarments." (The text then goes into further discussion of details of this specific image.) So...there's that.

This isn't a post about the construction and purpose of the garments depicted on 14th century Bohemian bathhouse attendants. There are a lot of theories. There may well be a variety of garment styles involved. That's not what I'm interested in here. What I find curious is that this pin (which has been re-pinned several hundred times, if Google is accurate) carefully identifies me by name (both real name and SCA name) in order to refute an opinion attributed to me. An opinion that--based on the topic--I almost certainly expressed well over 20 years ago.

To be honest, I find it unlikely that I "assumed" anything, though I very probably did present an opinion on the construction of this class of garment. But neither that opinion nor any evidence or argumentation I may have presented is at hand. Only a triumphant refutation of it. My name is invoked, not so that people are invited to engage with my analysis (which is neither presented nor pointed to), but evidently because there is some value attributed to the act of refuting me. Me, specifically. By name.

Now there is intellectual immortality. For as long as Pinterest endures, I will live on as The Person Who Was Wrong About the Bathhouse Dress. (Whether I was wrong or not.) It's quite possible that there are people for whom that is the sum total of their knowledge about me: that I was Wrong About the Bathhouse Dress. And given the nature of Pinterest, it may no longer be possible to retrieve the identity of the person who first proclaimed my wrongness. (I haven't tried. What would be the point?) You, too, may live on in some corner of the internet as the dragon that someone else is proud of having slain.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Yow, that's some really inscrutable fame, and it makes me wonder if I have a similar thing (I also google myself for similar reasons though I'm not a fraction as professional about it as you)

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I am not in the habit of googling my own name, but your post got me curious enough to do so. I am pretty certain my name is totally unique, and the first page of hits are all things like linked in, research gate, and even my entry on the luxurious flowing hair club for scientists--in short things that I put out there about myself. No one seems to be talking about me enough for google to notice (and I am totally fine with that).

[lifeofglamour.livejournal.com]

I'm immortal as the person in the vizard mask in the photo meme about them, but nobody knows it's me. It pops up every year or two and people who know me tag me and I'm like, "I know, I know, I had nothing to do with this!"

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I occasionally google for 'uckelman', and recently found a couple of religious forum threads that had picked up a paper of mine, where I discussed a medieval treatise presenting a syllogism for reasoning about the trinity, where pretty much everyone in the thread missed the fact that I was simply reporting on a 14th C anonymous author's views and instead attributed all his views and concluded from this that I was AN AWFUL HERETIC PREACHING HERESY!

It was terribly amusing, I think I have the threads bookmarked somewhere still.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

The luxurious flowing hair club for scientists? OH DO TELL!

[patoadam]

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
Poems that last a thousand years, no less,
But ape the immortality of this
Ms. Jones, so Wrong About the Bathhouse Dress.

(after Vladimir Nabokov)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

*snort*

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Well, but *was* it heresy?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

At least you could disavow it if you wanted to! What with the whole "wearing a mask" thing.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I confess that one of the reasons I self-google is a deep-seated insecurity about not knowing things that might be going on relevant to my life. I try my best to "not know" things that I turn up by accident that I shouldn't know.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

See, I don't think it was. It was pointing out that OF COURSE one gets into paralogisms when reasoning according to Aristotelian syllogistics, because Aristotle designed it to deal with the created world, not the divine world, so OF COURSE you'll need to use a different logic to reason about the trinity. In creation, there is only ever formal predications, but in divine matter, you can also have personal and essential predications. So while the Father is essentially the Son, he is not personally the Son, and a lot of people took from this that I was saying that the Father and the Son were not the same thing, and got all up in arms. But the whole point is that they can be essentially the same without being personally the same.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

http://www.improbable.com/hair/

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I do occasionally google my name, but it's so common that it rarely shows anything actually connected with me. For example I am not:

... a rock memorabilia and film memorabilia expert, an appraiser and auctioneer. A former Vice-President at Christie's.

..CHEK Running Practitioner, coach & injury specialist

... a pre-made Sim living in Moonlight Falls with several ghosts of the Goth family.

... a library.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Yet another reason for me to eschew Pinterest. I really do not WANT to know what sort of messes are being made in my name, with my name or with my stuff.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

This makes me so happy.

[irina (from livejournal.com)]

I still get hits for the pregnancy stat adjustments for roleplaying games I posted somewhere, well, 20 years ago or so, when I was pregnant.