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At the time I started this blog, I decided to be as anonymous as possible. You have to understand that I was at a state of pretty heightened paranoia. I despised the new owner of the company I worked for and I was fully convinced he was tapping my phone, reading my mail, and looking for any excuse to fire me. Even though I had no intention of writing about him or the situation, I decided to write this blog under a pseudonym because I had no idea where it would go and It felt like it would be easier to be unknown at a specific level rather than being known and possibly losing my job.
I lost my job anyway (thank goodness). Since then things have gotten a lot better, but I still wouldn't dream of using my real name, or posting pictures of myself or my family or my awesome cats. I like the pseudonym and whatever differences in my writing it brings to this. What I'm not sure of is why.
The history of anonymous authorship has a lot of different motivations. People historically have remained anonymous for reasons of security or to minimize preconceptions about their message based on who they are. My favorite fictional anonymous authors are Demosthenes and Locke, pseudonyms used by Ender's two siblings in Ender's Game. They used pseudonyms because they were both shockingly brilliant and shockingly young, and they knew nobody would take them seriously if their true identities were revealed.
A real-life version of this is Alice Sheldon, who, posing as the man James Tiptree, Jr., wrote celebrated science fiction for twenty years before anyone outed her as a woman.
Perhaps the most amazing anonymous celebrity of the last ten years is Subcommandante Marcos, whose anonymity is preserved for his safety and to minimize his alienation from the people he wishes to help (by all accounts Marcos is a well educated middle class Mexican of Spanish ancestry; his first cause, however, was fighting for the rights of the indigenous peoples in the jungles of Tamaulipas).
Now, Marcos is wanted by any number of nasty people in Mexico, including the government. He kinda needs to keep it close to the chest. Sheldon was writing science fiction in an almost entirely male-dominated culture that was extremely chauvinistic, so she had good reasons to pose as a man in order to be taken seriously.
But I'm a white male who writes a blog that maybe twenty people read. There's no target on my back. Nobody is going to struggle to take me seriously. Besides, my identity in those broad strokes is well known. Hell, my PSEUDONYM tells you all kinds of stuff about me, like my ethnic and religous ancestry. What's my excuse? Why am I hiding? I just don't know. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Well. Until it is clearer I'll stay incognito. I am enjoying the experiment, whatever it is. I also think that many of the friends I know in "meatspace" who read this like the pseudonyms they get (with the exception of my poor fiance, who tells me in retrospect that she wanted to be known as Nidia, not Angie).Current Mood: melancholy Current Music: "Secret Agent Man", Blues Traveller |
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schlomoseamus's journal