Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler

Googling the Grail

“The power of the Grail, even today, comes from its obscurity.” —dean Jacques, chivalrynow.net/grail “The birkin is the holy grail of handbags.” —unusualthreads.com “The Grail is an empty signifier.” —Marty Shichtman “It’s only a cup.” —urban dictionary ur quest, to Google “The Holy Grail” and see what popped up, proved to be a more arduous and daunting undertaking than we had anticipated.1 What “popped up” was more than fourteen million hits, and we found ourselves adrift in a chaotic and alien environment, forced to blunder about in a Perilous Forest littered with cultural junk, signs without signification, the detritus of an abandoned allegory: vintage motorcycles, baseball cards, and fishing lures, slasher flicks, designer grunge, invisibility cloaks, booze bottles, severed fingertips, genuine titanium sporks, iPhones, and the Holy Handbag of bottega veneta. We also experienced a series of bewildering encounters with a variety of indigenous creatures, some beneficent, some obsessed, others representing a range of threats to our pocketbooks, our self-esteem, or, indeed, our very sanity: on the one hand, serious scientists grappling with cutting-edge developments in physics and neurobiology or hackers and professional techies proposing ingenious solutions to problems we never knew existed; on the other, hawkers shamelessly peddling the secret of infinite wealth for a mere pittance, madmen serving up what we might call a psychedelic/schizophrenic stew of pseudoscience and Googling the Grail Donald L. Hoffman and Elizabeth S. Sklar o 111 dan brown, and creepy alchemical revelations of Satan’s plan for derailing the Second Coming. like King Arthur’s knights of old, we had no map to guide us through this surrealistic terrain (and nary a Handy Hermit in sight). because the objective of our quest was to explore the ways in which the Holy Grail has been appropriated by contemporary culture outside the academy, we chose to limit our investigation to the areas of science, technology, business (broadly construed), and marketing. We deliberately excluded academic sites and their scions,medievalist or Arthurian enthusiast sites that replicate, in however imperfect or abridged form, canonical accounts of the Grail Quest. of necessity, because they are so prolific and quirky, we also eschew detailed discussion of those sites devoted to spiritualism, alternate religion, and alternate history.2 defining the Googled Grail Contemporary concepts of the Grail in what passes for the “real world” are easy enough to come by. Many sites such as “The Straight dope” and numerous fantasy , alternative-religion, and SCA-related pages predictably present a potted canonical history of the Grail for popular consumption, while others like “Your dictionary.com” provide a simple definition that seems to encapsulate popular understandings of the term: the Grail is “any ultimate, but elusive, goal pursued as in a quest.” A similar, albeit fuzzier, rendition is found on wordreference.com: “a ‘holy grail’ is the ultimate goal of someone”—lots of wiggle room here. That these reference sites provide a reasonable approximation of common understanding of nontraditional grails is affirmed by definitions on websites devoted to specialized fields, such as marketing or technology, where we find “grail” defined as something “greatly desired, often sought after, but not attainable” (sandhill.com) or as “a very desired object or outcome that borders on a sacred quest” (techweb.com). numerous nonce-definitions are available as well: “The Holy Grail of business application development is to be able to develop application code once and reuse it for many different . . . applications” (Bill Clementson’s Blog, bc.tech.coop/blog); “FeatureServer+AreSde data Store=Holy Grail”(spatiallyadjustedl.com); “I suppose all css developers . . . have already stumbled upon ‘the perfect layout’ dubbed the holy grail” (dnevnikeklektika.com); the hydrogen-powered automobile is “the holy grail for automakers, environmentalists, political leaders” (rd.com); “For some years now bringing down the cost per kWh of photovoltaics to a more manageable level has been the holy grail of the solar power industry”(dailyack.com). We must confess at the outset that this particular episode of our grail adventure was not without its whimsical moments. Who would have guessed, for example, that “‘Holy Grail’ is a song performed by the Australian band Hunters and Collectors” (Wikipedia), or that “the cup or chalice which Jesus used at the 112 donald l. Hoffman and elizabeth S. Sklar last Supper . . . was made from the stone which fell from lucifer’s crown as he plunged to earth” (experiencefestival.com)? The sassy “urban dictionary” is notable...