Jewcy Site Traffic: Dirty Words and Secret Blogs

When you scan Jewcy traffic statistics, you learn some alarming things. Example: last month 42 visitors found their way to us by Googling “autofellatio.” In the interest of innocent metaphor Michael and I had thusly tagged a few of our shvitz posts. Unintended consequences are a bitch: Jewcy is now on the second page of links when you Google this rarest and most impressively acrobatic form of onanism.

But our traffic stats also have more edifying stories to tell. In the past several days we’ve received a trickle of visitors from a new blog named “Call me Ishmael.” A quick visit reveals that Ishmael is none other than Jewcy’s own Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s and Rolling Stone and a member of our editorial board. Jeff introduced the blog last week, saying

I'm…a reader, a nerd, a bookworm, a bibliophile, a text fetishist, a book groper. And this, "Call Me Ishmael," is where I get to indulge my obsession. And, if I'm lucky, spark some conversations with those likewise afflicted. My title might seem grandiose, but remember what happens to Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He gets overwhelmed by genius — Queequeg's, Ahab's, the whale's. Same principle here.

He began posting last Thursday, but apparently told no one about it; how else do you explain the fact that the blog of arguably the best religion journalist in the country has yet to receive a single comment?

A highlight thus far: in one post Jeff reports on his sneak peek at the galleys of A Tranquil Star, a forthcoming collection of Primo Levi stories. Before long we’ll all be treated to an avalanche of breathless superlatives about the new collection—it’s sure to be just as extraordinary, transformative, and life-affirming as everything else pumped out by the Holocaust publishing biz. But Jeff’s just not feeling it. In fact, he's so not feeling it that he gives Holocaust lit skeptic and Jewcy contributor Hal Niedzviecki–recently savaged so thoroughly by our own beloved in-house literary hellion Elisa and other Jewcers–a well-earned nod of approval. Jeff reads the Levi collection’s title story as

[A] fable about Holocaust fables – a…response to the infantilism with which the Holocaust is too often described by those who would turn it not into theology, but into a set of dark (or worse, inspiring) fairy tales. As novelist Hal Niedzviecki writes, "Nothing is Illuminated" by bad Holocaust fiction.

Jeff’s a heretic, not a monk. We Jewcy people should get over to Call me Ishmael and put an end to his monastic solitude.