Sooo … name change!

As one observant reader has already observed, I have indeed changed the name of this blog. The contents shall remain the same and the old URL still works, but, it turns out, “Gethe and Goth” was a very weird joke that was really only funny if you were in Heidelberg in a certain cafe on a certain day, listening to two different tourist guides and having an apprechiation for the multi-perspectivity hidden behind the mispronounciation of the name of a dead white German male author … so, not really/you had to be there/explaining it got kind of tedious around year three.

A conversation I have had slightly too often:

1. most folks, on learning the name of my blog, seek to assure me that they think goths are cool, nothing wrong with being a goth, and that it’s great that I am being so unsubtle about it (“even though you don’t look like one, really”).
2. Cue my explanation that, no, haha, thanks, but it’s not about goths, the name of the blog is just a nerdy in-joke about the manifold ways in which one can (mis-)pronounce ‘Goethe’.
3. “Oh, you blog about Goethe? That’s interesting. Which is your favourite play? Do you write on him academically?” … “No…No, you see, the blog’s name is a riff on Goethe, yes, but I don’t blog about him … at all”.
4. Silence. “Oh?” More silence.
5. “Why the name then?” “Well … (anecdote about tourist guides in Heidelberg) … you see, I just had had this encounter when I started the blog and it’s a kind of a parable about human existence being all about relativism and Foucault’s Pendulum and the place you hang that from and points of view and perspectivity and …”
6.  … … …
7. “Oh…”.

Yeah. I still think that once you’ve gone through this whole spiel Gethe-and-Goth is a cool name and that it expressed and still expresses what I wanted it to … but the spiel was kinda long. Also, it’s been four years, and if I haven’t started blogging about relativism and Foucault’s Pendulum and multiperspectivity and different solutions to the same problem yet, I don’t think I will start doing so at length any time soon.

So, Sibyllogy?

Well, still a geeky joke, but this time a riff on my first name in combination with one of my favorite academic subjects – narratology*. And, if I ever release an album, it will absolutely be called Sibyllogy (yeah … like that will happen). (Anthology, narratology, symbology, analogy, soliloquy, sibyllogy, etc :-) ).

—
*(and no I didn’t want sibology or sibyllology, even though the last two syllables would have matched better).