Thursday, 29 December 2005

MLA: Who Is Anybody Really?

People I don't know know me.  I met someone who didn't feel comfortable revealing her online handle to me but she's obviously familiar with my work.  I don't think she's lying either, since she introduced herself to me.  It also brings up an interesting question:

Are some ordinary names actually handles?  Is "Adam Kotsko" really Adam Kotsko?  Is he actually Tom Smith or Jason Jones?  I ask because as I tried to coordinate the conversation I was currently having with ones I've had in comment sections past it occured to me that real-sounding names are neither more nor less likely to be real than obvious pseudonyms.  So whoever you are online, Early Afternoon Interlocutor, know that you have blown the stitches of my world.  (Not that it didn't need it.)

Dec 29, 2005 3:07:02 PM | MLA 2005

6 Comments

ben wolfson

"ben wolfson", as I've stated more than a few times at unfogged, is a pseudonym.

Real-sounding names make much better pseudonyms than fake-sounding names, because you never get morons telling you to put your real name to your words if you really believe them.

Posted by: ben wolfson | Thursday, 29 December 2005 at 04:52 PM

Kevin Andre Elliott

My online name is my real name. Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of using my real name online. When it comes down to it, though, I feel comfortable attaching my real name to my words, even when I'm being bitchy and irrational (which unfortunately occurs more than I'd like).

Oh, I also use "Tripmaster" occasionally as a handle (on forums and such), but it would take all of five minutes to trace the name back to me.

Posted by: Kevin Andre Elliott | Thursday, 29 December 2005 at 05:22 PM

eb

Sometimes initials can be pseudonyms, too.

Posted by: eb | Friday, 30 December 2005 at 04:12 AM

Ray Davis

I was adopted, so I have a built-in pseudonym.

Posted by: Ray Davis | Friday, 30 December 2005 at 05:55 PM

MT

I think it's dishonest to go by a seemingly real name that isn't, unless you're careful to make sure everybody who reads you knows it. Typically it's an unintentional and innoccuous dishonesty, but it's still dishonest because it misleads and in particular because you ought to know it misleads.

Posted by: MT | Friday, 30 December 2005 at 06:07 PM

MT

You seem to be running into and attending talks by bloggers. How largely does the blogosphere loom at the MLA? And is it a sort of inside secret of those who blog and read blogs, or is it something that pretty much anybody is liable to mention?

Posted by: MT | Friday, 30 December 2005 at 06:15 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
MLA: Book Browsing and Bird/Bat Shit I wandered the halls of the Marriott Wardman Park alone for the first time in three days today. I felt like a dead man wading through a sea of ostensibly impressive conversations about books Borges never even reviewed. I'm not sure what the official ontological status of an imaginary book neither reviewed nor written is but I'd believe in parsley first. Case closed. Very wonderfully good conversations everyone but me is having. (Anyone else suppose MLA makes English professors not to speak English good? Or think for that matter?) I stumbled through the Grove Press stand and leave it with two Robbe-Grillet and one more Tristan Egolf novel than I'd entered it with . . . but I was only out six dollars. So I turned around and made a beeline for the ATM. I understood why they require security passes to enter these dens of inexpensive brilliance. I needed was more money. The line at the ATM snaked around the former homes of pay phones. I stood there patiently . . . like a toddler with a Big Gulp and an undersized bladder. At that point I ran into fellow UCI future-alum Peter Byrne. He looked sharp. I don't want to knock his typical attire but I had never seen him with clean lines and a complementary trench coat. He took one look at what Sean called my "blog hipster" look and correctly sussed that I was not on the market. We talked for a couple of minutes then he went to search for "his" suite. I haven't seen him since but I can spy the gutter from my window so I'm sure it wasn't a disaster. So I played ATM and returned to the killing fields. I noted the New York Review of Books booth and made a blood oath to never enter it. Two minutes later and two gallons paler I entered the booth and spent fourteen dollars on seven books. The woman at the counter performed admirably. Her small talk consisted of giggling (sure to surge the Philip Roths out there to untidy ends) and the "confession" that she had read all the books she displayed. I grilled her on the three books up there I remembered well enough to grill someone on and she passed with flying colors. Then the guy manning the Louisiana State University Press box across the pavement from the NYRB booth joined in the festivities. She did not, however, know much about the wetlands or for that matter any of the books LSU press thought important. I asked her how she knew so much about the books she sold. She informed me that she gets so bored sometimes she has nothing better to do than read the merchandise. If only all students displayed such admirable laziness. Enough about the books I bought. Because if the wife asks I didn't buy a single book. I don't even know what a book is. But I did eventually find myself before the Inside Higher...
PREVIOUS POST
MLA: "I Can't Believe I'm Telling You This" My decision to shed my anonymity has some consequences for how I think about the MLA and how I write about it. "Imagine" I went to a panel in which I heard the following statements in this order: I didn't have time to think about this. This goes way beyond dialectic. I'm talking paradox here! I wish I had 15 minutes to talk about zero. How do I represent this in words? I can't. But I brought lots of examples. What? What is that? I had to think really really hard about that. Dare I say it? "Everybody gets it wrong." Not that I get it right. We need to have a BREAKOUT! As an atheist, I have a thing. I have (holds up three sheets of paper) one paragraph left. I shouldn't say anything about this because I haven't thought about it yet. (trying to recall the title of a book) The [place] something something something and [place] something or whatever. I can't believe I'm telling you this. I am BREAKING OUT! Really there's nothing really there but I think it's important. I had to alter a few of those (and excise some of the best) because then the victim would be able to recognize him or herself. Were I still anonymous this post would have been far funnier. I don't recount this for its sheer entertainment value. (Though I could.) What strikes me about this "imaginary" performance is its breathtaking unprofessionalism. Now you could complain that I'm unfair because written language works differently than spoken language. (There's an old story in linguistic circles about Noam Chomsky being the only person ever who speaks in paragraphs. But I digress.) Every journalist knows how terrible transcriptions of the spoken word read. For this reason I find mocking of a political speech for its grammatical infelicities a cheap tactic. The mocker would fare no better than the mockee did. So you may have read the above and thought it absolutely unfair. The problem with that (otherwise legitimate) criticism would be that about half of those statements were not asides. They were written into the essay being read. That still might seem like a cheap shot. I know when I write a conference paper I include potential and planned asides in the body of the text. But those asides are substantive and said in a slightly different timbre than the rest of the presentation. This panelist delivered his/her asides with the same authority with which he/she delievered his/her thesis. What would possess someone to incorporate "As an atheist, I have a thing" into the body of his/her presentation? What point could that statement possibly further? Why yell "BREAKING OUT!" not once but twice? What does that even mean? (Full disclosure: I couldn't tell if he/she scripted "BREAKING OUT!" or it it was an actual BREAKING OUT! of something something something and something or whatever.)

Scott Eric Kaufman

The Typepad Team

Search

Become a Fan

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments