Finding Newer New Goddesses (and how I name them)

Although

Finding New Goddesses was published a decade ago, I started writing
it before the turn of the century. This was shortly after I read the truly
ovular (a feminist book cannot be “seminal”) book,

Found Goddesses: Asphalta to Viscera , by Morgan Grey and Julia
Penelope. Surely you remember the invocation to Asphalta:


          Hail, Asphalta,
full of grace:


          Help me find a
parking place.




Grey and Penelope invented the term “Found Goddesses.” In the introduction
to their book, they write that they know “something momentous when it happens
right under [their] noses. The concept of a modern parking goddess was
practical, immediate, and obvious. Why, after all, would Artemis or Demeter
wander so far from their ancient spheres of influence to materialize parking
spaces” (p. 1)? Their book is filled with puns. Never in my life have I
been able to resist a pun. So guess what? Punny goddesses started showing
up in my imagination. I was helpless before them. I started writing them
down. And still am.




Because I was working on a Y2K project in 1998–99, the first new goddesses
I Found (I capitalize this word in the
Mary Daly fashion to show its singular meaning) were the computer
goddesses. That was, of course, several computer generations ago. One of
my buddies on the project was Andy, who carried three-inch disks in his
pockets and taught me how to do email attachments. When I asked him one
day if he was a silicone-based life form, he said yes. I wish he’d taught
the project’s two engineers as much as he taught me. One day they decided
to give us a new server. They didn’t bother to do a test run.
Boom! Sixteen computers crashed. The project was down for two days.




Thanks partly to the Y2K project, the first computer goddesses I Found
were Compuquia and Nerdix. Compuquia is obviously the goddess of technological
nincompoops like me. I wrote Nerdix for my friend Sandra, a self-confessed
Mac addict who was forever installing and uninstalling and reinstalling
stuff. Our phone conversations sometimes turned into epic accounts of the
work she was doing on her computer. Today, alas, her health is declining,
so she leaves her motherboard alone.




Lately I’ve been thinking about newer new goddesses. My original computer
goddesses have names like the Queen of Disks, Mr. Floppy, the Silicon Man,
and Whizziwig (pronounced WYSIWYG), goddess of the Internet and the World
Wide Web, who is “the true Great Cosmic Mother, and Her domain is the High
AltaVista, where She tends the Great Green Fields of Baud, planting and
tending Her vast crops of kilobytes and gigabytes and coaxing each golden
url and pixel to bloom.” But I wonder if this is still funny to people
who may have never heard the acronym WYSIWYG and who sleep with their iPhones.
And who uses AltaVista anymore? It got Googled practically out of existence.
In those long-ago days, I also Found Dot Compost (who eats spam—you’ll
recognize a certain Pythonesque influence) and Linker Belle, the search
engine fairy. Those goddesses seem pretty old fashioned today. The goddesses
I’m Finding now must be their granddaughters.




Who’s marching around in my head these days? Henny-Penny, the Twittering
Goddess. Omnivoria, Goddess of Social Media. She’ll eat up all your time
and energy. Seamy, Goddess of Facebook. “See me!” she cries. “Pay attention
to me!” Rude’n’Stoopid, Evil Godmothers of People Who Don’t Turn Off Their
Mobile Devices in Theaters and Movies. Texticulotta, Goddess of Text Messaging.
I’m going to have to get a friend who actually texts, though, to help me
spell her messages right. Spl hr msgs rite?




Maybe you’d like to know a bit about my process. Don’t believe it for
a minute when I say they appear before me, fully formed and named, like
when Athena sprang out of Zeus’s head. I only say that for dramatic effect.
Writing is hard work. I edit myself (as I’m doing right now) more than
I do any of the authors who send me their work to edit.




I start when I spot something I want to satirize, like the so-called cyberuniverse
and modern computing devices. Next, I spend a few days running word associations
through my mind, often while I’m washing dishes or watching the Eyewitless
News…well, you know the equation: busy hands + idle brain = creativity.
As I’m falling asleep at night, I wander through literature and history.
But I have to be careful not to get too obscure. Not everyone is familiar
with, say,
Cymbeline or
The Magic Flute or
The Mikado, not to mention the English Wars of the Roses (which I’m
currently reading historical novels about) or details of the history of
musical theater. I need to be careful with allusions.

Fairy tales and pop culture are nearly always accessible. That’s where
I started when I was looking for a Twitter goddess. Tweety-Bird? Too obvious.
Though she might tweet
thot i saw a pssyct. How about bird sounds? Cluckie? Chirpie? Squawkie?
These are not only too obvious, but they’re also neither mellifluous nor
funny. Names of birds? Vultura? Crowetta? Little Sparrow? (Nope—I don’t
want to insult Edith Piaf.) I saw Henny-Penny in a newspaper headline the
day the meteor exploded over southern Russia: "Henny-Penny was right: the
sky was falling."

What I often do is find a word and then twist it into knots or add a feminine
ending, like Omnivoria, from “omnivore.” Or I work with pronunciation (Seamy)
and immediately write the line that opens up the pun and that the reader
can hear. That’s because puns are often oral, and even when we’re silently
reading, we hear a voice in our head reading out loud. (I tell my authors
to remember this when they’re writing dialogue.)




I play with spelling (Rude’n’Stoopid), too. It’s a means of emphasis.
The double O in “stoopid” is stupider than just stupid (get it?) and shows
my opinion of people who text during plays and movies. Then it occurred
to me that the ’n’ means there are two evil godmothers. Can you just see
them? Are they Disneyesque evil queens or are they dressed for success?




I’m not altogether sure how my brain dredged up Texticulotta. I was brushing
my teeth and “testicular” came into my head. Why? I dunno. But it was a
start. The words “testimony” and “testify” are cognates. (It’s said that
men used to hold their hand to those sacred body parts for the same reason
we lay a hand on the Bible.) But this is the goddess of texting, so “tes”
turned to “tex.” The “-lar” had to be magnified; we’re familiar with “–lotta,”
meaning “a lot of,” which is also the necessary feminine ending. And that
“ticu” bit in the middle might echo “tickle” and/or “tick you off.” See
how these things grow like amoebas? This goddess—like some people I know—texts
way too much. To add to her sins, she’s also verbizing nouns.




So there we have it, or at least a start. Now all I have to do is actually
write a paragraph or two about each of these newer new goddesses. Later!




P.S. Housekeeping report. I finally worked my way up to dusting my collection
of 346 witches (not counting me and the babe in the back seat of my car)
yesterday. At least the ones (plus the Blessed Bees) in the living room.
One Swiffer will handle about sixty-five dusty witches and tchotches. And,
contrary to the suggestion in the commercials, you still have to move things
to dust around them. I guess I need to invoke the
Queen of Clean, who occasionally works with Yuckrootie (a shadow goddess
of cleaning).