God, hes left as on aur oun.
Thrown for a to the wolves.
I’ve always been fond of the phrase “loop the lupine.” —As I recall(ed), I’d first seen it in a blurb on the cover of a Gene Wolfe paperback: “Gene Wolfe is the master of loop-the-lupine writing,” or some such, from Philip José Farmer, I was pretty sure. It caught my eye, and my imagination, as you might expect of someone so drawn to the practice of talking outside the glass.
Some time ago, I tried to nail down the origin of the phrase—none of the Gene Wolfe books in the house were thusly blurbed, not Castleview or any of the Severians, or the Suns of various shapes, not The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, not Free Live Free or Peace, and so I turned to Google, which was better then than it is now, but still: I couldn’t find the actual origin of the phrase. Just a handful of quotes, and echoes, enough to somehow leave me with the notion that it was maybe coined by Algis Budrys, in one of his review columns for F&SF, that, yes, may well have been mined for a blurb, and thus, and so—but, though this was some (considerable) time after, it was still quite some time ago, and I didn’t, at the time, bother to take any notes, or bookmark any finds, and so here and now I couldn’t tell you what it was that led me to that notion, or why.
Just recently, I was seized for whatever reason by the urge to dig into the lupine loop again, to see if I couldn’t this time nail down the circumstances of its coinage. I mean, it’s an evocative phrase. Somebody else might’ve noticed. So off I went to Google again (DuckDuckGo, for all its advantages, yet lacks some critical juice; it turns up no results for the phrase), and Google came back with, well, just one (1) hit, out of all the billions of pages out there: an entry in a Wolfe wiki that features the phrase “loop-the-lupine loop sense of things,” an obvious allusion that nonetheless misses the point in overly elaborating it. —I tried the same search in Google Books (which, yes, you’d expect would appear with the others when you’ve asked it for all results, but often for whatever reason just don’t), and got another lone hit: the same malappropriate phrase, “loop-the-lupine loop,” in a somewhat different context.
And that was it.
Which is maddening, for a number of reasons—websits dissipate, disappear, are deleted every day from the Akashic record, and thus our various search engines—but, I mean, that phrase, “loop the lupine,” it’s here, on the pier, and should ought to have also come up in the results. —Google, it must be said, in this benighted age, now frequently returns additional new and different results as you add search terms to your query—an entirely counterintuitive means of refining one’s searches, but here we are. So I added “budrys” to my search—and there I was—but also, Google offered up, well, this:
Which, I mean: no.
—I should note these searches were performed on my usual home browser, which is never logged in to Google in any capacity. (Fruitless, I know, but a man’s got to have a code.) At the office I’ve got a browser logged in to Google, for office reasons, and so on a break, I tried that initial search again, “loop the lupine”—
And got eight (8!) hits: my site, and the Wolfe wiki, as well as a smattering of fortuitous phrase- and sentence-breaks (“include the Lower Loop, the Lupine trails”; “then over the collar loop. The Lupine, you just hold the snap”; and another one, about, well, lupins)—and, and! These two additional hits: one for a copy of (aha!) There Are Doors, which quotes the various blurbs in its copy, and one for (oho!) the Official Philip José Farmer Web Page, listing blurbs he’d given throughout his career, including the one I’d obviously remembered from oh so long ago:
THERE ARE DOORS is another splendid example of what I call the Loop-the-Lupine school of writing. Gene Wolfe is its originator and sole practitioner. His works are always singular and brilliant, the rare kind you read until you’re at the end, everything else going to hell while you read.
So here we are, and you’d think I’d be happy, to’ve finally run this down, to be vindicated, even, so many years later. Instead, I’m dispirited, I’m evervated, I’m mildly appalled, even—it’s one thing to sigh along with your morning reading of the latest enshittification tirade, to nod along with a chorus of Google sucks!; it’s another entirely to have your face rubbed quite so thoroughly in the fact of it. —I tried the search once more when I got home; there, and then, that evening, it returned zero results. None whatsoever. Not a webpage in the whole wide indexed world to be found, where someone had entered those lexemes in that particular order, “loop the lupine,” despite what had been found at the office, despite what had been found that very morning with this selfsame browser, despite what I know to be true.
All I’ve got left is something akin to the bewildered tone in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice when he says to Robert De Niro, “Your ass used to be beautiful.”
(Since then, results for the search have settled down both at home and the office to the same basic nine [9] results, which now also includes another indirect reference to the blurb itself, from the archive of a thirty-year-old Long Sun mailing list. —Which is somehow even more pathetically unsettling.)
