Guy

On Pseudonymity

/ Texts

Bad Duplicate

A decade ago, before the rise of the Web, there wasn't a lot of scholarly research on pseudonymity. Almost none. I know this because I dealt with journalistic pseudonymity in some detail in my dissertation, and when in the early 1990s I went looking for stuff on the history of pseudonymity, I really didn't find much at all.

Strange, I thought, since pseudonymy was so central to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere. I needed to understand the historical context of newspaper pseudonymity as background to some literary questions, so I went hunting and spent a godawfully long time trying to piece together some information and make painfully simple inferences from primary sources. I thought I had some publishable surmises. Then by the time the Internet became popular, every senior scholar and his sister published a book on the topic within a year. Okay, not every senior scholar. But I got scooped and I'm bitter.

Here are a few random tidbits about 18c pseudonymity, gleaned from my rusty and resentful memory. . . .

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On What Financial Bill from Russia?

/ Fish

Fish

Strangely, neither in school nor at the University I have not met Ivanov or Petrov or Sidorov. This, incidentally, I was amazed even then. Still, I went to seven schools. People with the most common surnames never done in the circle of friends at the Institute where I worked for many years, and then later, in modern times, there was no such entrepreneurs in our little area of technology. Around ran Kuznetsov, Alexandrova, Sergeeva, Vladimirova, Borisova, various others, but no Ivanov was not observed ... The turning point came in the year 2000: now on what financial bill from Russia will not look - everywhere Ivanov signs, in any newspaper in the news at least one Ivanov-Petrov-Sidorov, as noted. Where are they hiding so many years?

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Drama Withdrawal

/ Great Britain, Theater, Weblogs

Drama Withdrawal

Some time ago Rick decided that he was suffering from drama withdrawal and went and joined Orpington Rep, one of the local amdram societies. They welcomed him with open arms and within a few months he had played a murderer and a hero. The second was in The Woman in White, for which he enlisted me as a wardrobe mistress. They're fitting in another show before he goes off to university - three comedy one-acters - and I was invited to the read-through. I pointed out that I'm a musician, not an actress. "Come on, it'll be a laugh," said Rick. So I came, and it was. And I found myself cast as a Wicked Stepmother. How did that happen?

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The Age of Uncertainty

/ Great Britain, Texts, Weblogs

The Age of Uncertainty

To sit over a foolish or even a wise novel when the daily duties of life demand our attention is absolutely wicked. We have seen, in our own life, the mother of a family devote herself to novel reading.

The father was at sea in the merchant service. A boy, a girl, and the house demanded the wife's attention. The children were neglected, dirty, ragged, untaught, running about the roads; the house was dirty beyound description, for there was but one servant, who naturally, followed her mistress's example.

The wife could not make her income suffice her, because no one watched against waste or dishonesty in the kitchen, and her husband, when he came home from sea, was arrested for her debts.

The son, utterly ruined, ran away from school, and finally disappeared in Australia. The daughter, trained only in the unreal folly of novels, married secretly a man much below her father's station - he was also an hereditary madman!

When the mother of the boy and girl married, she had been a lovely, clever girl. But novel reading, like intoxication, bought misery on her and on two following generations.

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Close the Eye-Lid and Save the Eye

/ Work

Repeated experience has shown that the eye closes so quickly that where the lens is broken and pieces of glass fly from it, the eye-lid is almost invariably shut; if any cut is received it is on the outside of the lid, and superficial in character. The goggles "give" somewhat under the impact of a blow, and the fraction of a second's time thus saved is sufficient to close the eye-lid and save the eye. Where the force of a flying chip is so great as to break a heavy lens of this kind, it is obvious that the eye-ball would be shattered, even though the eye-lid were closed, if no goggle were used.

Welder

At a recent safety exposition one of the goggle manufacturers gave a graphic demonstration of the resistive power of good lenses. Repeated blows from a plunger actuated by a strong spring often failed to even crack the glass. Many workmen have been reassured in this way, where they were at first afraid to wear goggles lest they should get particles of broken glass in their eyes.

-- David Stewart Beyer, Industrial Accident Prevention (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 373-4.

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Tony Judt

/ History, New York, People

Tony Judt

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

-- Tony Judt, "Words," The New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010.

Tony Judt, Chronicler of History, Is Dead at 62

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