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Durham native urges Durham Tech grads to use talents to help their communities
The Durham of Kennon Briggs' boyhood is much different than the one graduates of Durham Technical Community College know today.
When Briggs was a boy in the 1960s, his mother could drop him off at the old Durham Athletic Park where $2.50 bought a game ticket, a drink and a hot dog.
"Carl Yastrzemski, Joe Morgan, Rod Carew and Johnny Bench ran the bases while the aroma of curing tobacco wafted all through the stadium and filled your nostrils and permeated your clothes," Briggs said during his keynote address to hundreds of graduates and several thousand friends and family members who jammed the Durham Performing Arts Center on Wednesday.
The local economy during Briggs' boyhood was driven largely by Liggett & Myers and American Tobacco companies, where even those residents without a high school diploma could go to work and earn a good living.
But Briggs, a former vice president and chief of staff of the N.C. Community College System before retiring in 2012 and who now works as a higher education consultant, said IBM, Burroughs-Welcome and the Research Triangle Park came to the region and changed everything.
"The skills demands of employers began to increase and Durham evolved into a City of Medicine with the growth and expansion of Duke Medical Center," Briggs said. "Better jobs, better pay, more skills, more education."
He said Durham Tech has been the "constant" that has embraced radical economic change while being at the forefront of helping to prepare residents for those better jobs.
"While traditional industries have gone by the wayside, replaced by healthcare, entrepreneurship, technology and advanced manufacturing, Durham Tech has been here to prepare your predecessors and you 2014 graduates for hope, prosperity and jobs," Briggs said.
He urged graduates to go into Durham and surrounding communities and to use their gifts and talents for the greater good.
"We need you to be productive, contributory and responsible," Briggs said. "We need you to be an ethical, proud and caring people. And we need you to be leaders, mentors and volunteers in Durham and Orange counties."
Graduates and their supporters were in a festive mood, with families and friends shouting out to the graduates as they crossed the stage to receive diploma and certificates.
Afterward, they gathered in the lobby of the Performing Arts Center to share hugs and laughs and to take photographs of the new graduates.
Arthur Romero, 48, stopped just outside of the Performing Arts Center to take photos with his family.
The Army veteran had just earned credentials to become a paralegal.
"It was challenging," said Romero, the father of three. "It was a lot of work, time and effort."
Romero said he now has his sights on earning a bachelor's degree.
"I'm not done," Romero said, thanking his wife for her support while he earned his associate's degree.
Christina Harford, 18, also earned an associates degree and will enroll in UNC Chapel Hill in the fall.
Harford, who was home-schooled before enrolling at Durham Tech, said she thoroughly enjoyed the experience at the community college.
"I wanted to save money and it seemed like a really good option," Harford said. "I really enjoyed my time here."
Crystal Jones, 30, earned an associate's degree in medical office administration, said her next move is to find a job in her chosen field.
"It's a big accomplishment," Jones said. "I'm the first in my family to go to college."
The mother of two said it wasn't always easy juggling the books, kids and a husband.
"It was hard at times," Jones said.
Mary Ann Black, chairwoman of Durham Tech's Board of Trustees, reminded the graduates of the many sacrifices they made and those made by their families in support of their efforts to earn degrees and credentials.
"We ask you to thank your families," Black said.
Durham Tech President Bill Ingram also urged the graduates to thank those who supported them.
"Their success is your is your success as well," Ingram said of friends and family members who supported the graduates.
Of the nearly 950 graduates, 661earned associates degrees or career certificates, while 278 were recognized for completing General Equivalency Diploma (GED) or Gateway to College Adult High School Diploma programs.


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English Instructor
State Class Code UG70
Vacancy # 13016
Piedmont Technical College invites applications for the position of English Instructor. The successful candidate will be responsible for English instruction on all campuses of Piedmont Technical College. Additional duties include student advisement, curriculum development, community and college service, and professional development. A master's degree in English or a master's with 18 hours in English is required. Preference will be given to candidates based upon the following selection criteria:
1. Teaching experience, especially at the community and technical college level.
2. Commitment to creating multiple learning options to serve a diverse student body with diverse learning styles and learning needs.
3. Commitment to improving student learning by the integration of new technology and other innovative approaches to classroom instruction and curriculum design.
4. Understanding and commitment to the educational philosophy of the public two-year college system.
5. Willingness to work within a flexible teaching schedule (i.e., day, evening), at varied sites (i.e., on-campus, off-campus), to various populations (i.e., traditional, returning students, Dual Enrollment/OnDeck) and in distance learning formats.
6. Commitment to interact with students outside a classroom setting as an instructor and an academic advisor.
Position will be open until May 1, 2013, with an anticipated starting date of August 10, 2013. Salary will be commensurate with experience and qualifications. Qualified applicants meeting minimum requirements must apply online and attach a letter of interest (3 pages or less) describing how the applicant meets the stated selection criteria, a current resume, and copies of transcripts (graduate and undergraduate course work) to the State of SC Employment Application at www.jobs.sc.gov [1]. All requested information must be received before candidate's application will be reviewed. Resumes will not be accepted in lieu of application. Paper, faxed or emailed applications/resumes will not be accepted, reviewed or responded to. Applicants selected for interview must provide transcript copies at interview. AA/EOE

subset: commoncrawl


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Joyce Carol Oates has published works under a number of pseudonyms including stories by "Rae Jolene Smith" and "Fernandes." Later, she would write psychological suspense novels featuring twins and doubles under the names "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."
"It was a new birth. I was renewing myself. Everything was being given me one more time."
So Romain Gary said in his posthumously published The Life and Death of Emile Ajar, which appeared in France in 1981, the year after Gary's suicide. The book created a literary sensation in Paris since in it Gary acknowledged that he was the author of four popular novels published under the pseudonym "Emile Ajar." (The first "Ajar" novel, GrosCalin, had been a best-seller in 1974; the second, La Vie devant soi, was named winner of the Prix Goncourt for 1975, but, because one of the rules of the Goncourt is that a writer can win it only once, and Gary had already won, he was forced to decline the prize.) The publishing strategy for the "Ajar" books was artful: manuscripts were mailed to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, and a surrogate "Ajar," a cousin of Gary's, allowed himself to be interviewed and photographed. Explaining his motives in the posthumous memoir, Gary claimed he was tired of being "the famous Romain Gary"; he wanted to be someone else. By the age of fifty-nine he had written thirty-three books, had won numerous prizes, and was one of the most successful and admired of French writers. "I have always been someone else," he said. And: "I wanted to be a spectator at my own second life." And, quoting the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz: "There comes a day when a writer is held prisoner by 'la gueule qu'on lui a fait' ('the mug which the critics have given him")—an appearance which has nothing to do with his work or himself."
In 1984 the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters awarded one of its distinguished fiction prizes to a new and presumably young Chicano writer named Danny Santiago, for his first novel, Famous All Over Town. Subsequent to the award it was revealed, with some embarrassment, that the newly discovered Chicano writer was not Chicano at all: "Danny Santiago" turned out to be the pseudonym of seventy-three-year-old Daniel James, author of several previously published books, and better known as a playwright and screenwriter; and a former Communist Party member who had been blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s. By his account, James wrote Famous All Over Town as a consequence of his experience doing volunteer social work in Mexican-American districts of Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s, and chose to publish it under a Hispanic pseudonym because he had lost confidence in his own writing ability. Yet it is plausible to assume that he chose "Santiago" over "James" because, while writing the novel—which is narrated by the fourteen-year-old Chicano boy—he felt closer to "Santiago" than to "James."
(Though Famous All Over Town alone should have been the issue, and not its author's identity, the awards committee confessed that they might have had second thoughts about giving the novel their prize, had they known its author was "Anglo" and not "Chicano.")
It may be that, after a certain age, our instinct for anonymity is as powerful as that for identity; or, more precisely, for an erasure of the primary self in that another (hitherto undiscovered?) self may be released. Romain Gary, writing as the unknown "Emile Ajar," is no longer writing as Gary, but as Gary-through-"Ajar"; the Danish noblewoman, Baroness Karen Blixen, choosing "Isak Dinesen" ("Isak": one who laughs) as a pseudonym, is writing as Blixen-through-"Isak Dinesen," thereby evoking an ancestral, magisterial, and certainly unfeminine self. Jonathan Swift, behind the mask of "Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq." in the deadpan satire of 17081709 known as the Bickerstaff Papers, is Swift-through"Bickerstaff"—and should one doubt the existence of "Bickerstaff," his thought-tormented likeness is reproduced in The Tatler in 1710. For a woman to write under a male or a male-sounding pseudonym—"Currer Bell," for instance, instead of Charlotte Bronte; "George Sand" instead of Amandine Aurore-Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant—may be a decision based upon practical expediency in a male-dominated culture; but it may also stimulate the imagination in unanticipated ways. Daniel Defoe's "true histories" of such adventurers as "Robinson Crusoe," "Moll Flanders," and "Captain Singleton," recounted in their own words, ingeniously blurred the line between fiction and what the credulous reading public might call outright hoax, as did the ancient Gaelic epic by a Scottish poet named "Ossian" which was allegedly discovered and translated by one James Macpherson, a contemporary of Samuel Johnson's whom Johnson publicly accused of imposture in 1775, and, in the 1760s, the "medieval" Rowley sequence by Thomas Chatterton. (Romain Gary compared his "doubling" with "Ajar" in terms of Macpherson's with "Ossian.") When the now-famous Karen Blixen/"Isak Dinesen" published a parablelike novel called The Angelic Avengers in 1944 under the pseudonym "Pierre Andrezel," she arranged for her longtime secretary-companion Clara Svendsen to be named on the title page as the translator. Here we have Blixen-through-"Isak Dinesen"through-"Pierre Andrezel"-through-"Clara Svendsen, translator." Not even Vladimir Nabokov's catoptric imagination can take us further.
And there is the mysterious relationship between the Oxford clergyman and mathematics lecturer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the author of the Alice books, "Lewis Carroll." "Lewis Carroll" was created to accommodate Dodgson's extraordinary storytelling imagination and as a means by which a series of remarkable photographs was taken—photographs of theatrically posed little girls, sometimes nude, more often costumed and caught in moments of dramatic intensity, suggestively "erotic" yet more disturbing, perhaps, to contemporary eyes than they were to Victorian. Without the scrim of "Lewis Carroll" and the inspired brilliance of "Carroll's" art, to what end the genius of Dodgson?
Though the imagination delights in freedom and play, and it is arguable that, in its earliest manifestations, in childhood, art is play, the professionalism that overtakes writers like Romain Gary often has very little that is playful about it. The more successful the writer, the more secure his "international reputation," the greater the temptation to consider oneself in the third person; which is not so very different from the posthumous. Each work of fiction or poetry, unique to its creator, requiring, certainly, a unique expenditure of effort, is nonetheless judged as part of the oeuvre—"oeuvre": that soul-numbing word!—or, if not judged, assumed to possess a tactical position in it, an inevitable part of the design. Radical departures from what has come to seem one's métier may be met with disapproval, disappointment—to quote Nietzsche, "When we must change our minds about someone, we charge the inconvenience he causes us heavily to his account." (Isak Dinesen's most fervent admirers were angry with her, for instance, for her deviation as "Pierre Andrezel," though one might have thought the pseudonym-atop-the-pseudonym might have protected her.) Who, having created an identity in the world's eyes, an indestructible persona, has not subsequently wished to escape from it!—for such is the perversity, the instinct for freedom and newness, in the human psyche.
When not for such interior motives, or for political reasons, or for reasons of scandal, or as the brimming-over of sheer energy (Georges Simenon, for instance, author as Simenon of hundreds of mystery novels, also publishes under "Christian Brulls," "Jean Du Perry," and "Georges Sim"), pseudonymous works are often playful; experimental; "entertainments," as Graham Greene rather disarmingly called certain of his novels. Or, like Dinesen's elegantly artificial narratives, they may reflect a transpersonal, even transcendental consciousness, not to be linked with or explained by the merely personal. When Walter Whitman, aged thirty-five, renamed himself "Walt Whitman," the gesture had the effect of cutting his life in two. (The first edition of Leaves of Grass, issued on 4 July 1855, contained no author's name on the title page: "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,/ Disorderly fleshy and sensual" was not announced until page twenty-nine.) Young David Henry Thoreau became "Henry David Thoreau" as if to declare not only self-dependence but self-genesis. Marie Henri Beyle into "Stendhal"; Marian Evans into "George Eliot"; Sidonie Gabrielle Colette into "Colette Willy" and finally "Colette"; Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski into "Joseph Conrad"; Andrei Codrescu into "Tristan Tzara"; Giorgos Stylianous Seferiades into "George Seferis"; Reyes Basoalto into "Pablo Neruda"; Hector Hugh Munro into "Saki" each suggests an interior and not merely an outward transformation, a conspicuous redefining of the self. Though Eric Blair, prior to the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, allowed his publisher to choose his pseudonym from several names Blair provided, "George Orwell" shortly became the name by which he was known, even by friends: thus, George Orwell the man, "Eric Blair" an early and outgrown identity. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a young humorist and newspaperman, baptized his writing self with the riverboat leadsman's exuberant cry "Mark Twain": by that gesture assuring an irrevocable split in his life, if not in his conception of himself, suggested by the title of Justin Kaplan's excellent biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. More practicably, Ford Madox Hueffer became "Ford Madox Ford" (and, upon occasion, "Daniel Chaucer" and "Fenil Haig") at a time when the Germanic ring of "Hueffer" sounded discordantly in English ears.
Like the experience of first authorship, writing under a pseudonym gives one the sense of discovering oneself by way of redefining oneself, even if it is only for the space of a single book. There is the possibility, however quixotic, of making a fresh start—in Romain Gary's words, "renewing" oneself—and not being held to severe account for it. Trollope, that indefatigable master craftsman of the English novel, chose to publish one book under a pseudonym; it aroused no particular attention, sales were poor, and Trollope quietly returned to "Trollope." Though Doris Lessing's publicly acknowledged motives for publishing two novels in the early 1980s, The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could . . . as "Jane Somers" ("the pseudonym of a well-known British journalist," as the dust jacket noted), were to test the integrity of the publishing industries of England and the United States, which she believed would have honored the "Somers" novels with major reviews had they been issued under the name "Lessing," it is probable that, like Romain Gary, she too hoped to make a fresh start; to return to realism of a scaled-down, human dimension in the style of her short fiction and not that of her more vatic utterances; to be rediscovered, perhaps, as a writer of talent, and accorded the kind of excited attention "Emile Ajar" received in the French press. Had the "Somers" novels been as radically different from Lessing's realistic fiction as her science-fiction sequence has been, or as The Golden Notebook seemed in the context of British fiction of the 1960s, the venture would have taken an entirely different course. As it is, Doris Lessing's curious experiment, though idealistic in outline, failed to prove anything of significance for at least two reasons: each season, there are first novels that do receive a good deal of attention, presumably because they deserve it; and novels by many previously published writers are often reviewed with less interest and respect than the unknown "Jane Somers" received.
When, for instance, Gore Vidal published several mystery-thrillers in the 1950s under the name "Edgar Box," the novels were praised as successes of their genre by the very publications that were, at the time, ignoring Vidal's serious fiction. (By Vidal's account, the American literary establishment was so offended by his third novel, The City and the Pillar, for its "perverted"—i.e., homosexual—subject matter, that his next five books were boycotted by major reviewing publications. In order to support himself he wrote the "Box" novels, each in eight days. And though they were well received when issued under the name "Edgar Box" they were conspicuously less well received when reissued under "Gore Vidal" some years later.) Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, following the prodigious critical and commercial success of his first novel The Naked and The Dead, would surely have fared better under pseudonyms since, given the nature of the intemperate feelings the author seems to have aroused in reviewers at that time, they could scarcely have done worse.
John Updike has not, to my knowledge, published under a pseudonym—"Updike" is a name bankable in ways too sweet to relinquish—but he has created in the person of comically beleaguered Henry Bech an alter ego who clearly speaks for Updike, masking his hurt in ironic tones.
It was his fault; he had wanted to be noticed, to be praised. He had wanted to be a man in the world, a "writer." For his punishment they had made from the sticks and mud of his words a coarse large doll to question and torment, which would not have mattered except that he was trapped inside the doll, shared a name and a bank account with it. He was, for all his brave talk . . . too alone.
("Bech Swings?" from Bech: A Book)
It was his fault; he had wanted to be noticed, to be praised. He had wanted to be a man in the world, a "writer." For his punishment they had made from the sticks and mud of his words a coarse large doll to question and torment, which would not have mattered except that he was trapped inside the doll, shared a name and a bank account with it. He was, for all his brave talk . . . too alone.
("Bech Swings?" from Bech: A Book)
Why punish a writer for writing?—a reviewer recently asked, beginning a review of a book of mine. The tantalizing question hovered in the air, unanswered.
The advantages of publishing under a male or a male-sounding pseudonym, for a woman writer, have always been self-evident. As Robert Southey, then the Poet Laureate of England, explained to young Charlotte Bronte: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." Consequently the Bronte sisters chose androgynous pseudonyms: "Currer Bell" (Charlotte Bronte), "Ellis Bell" (Emily Bronte), "Acton Bell" (Anne Bronte) for Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, respectively. When Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 it was an immediate success—"Currer Bell" became famous overnight—and much speculation raged concerning the probable sex of the author. The intelligence, vigor, and passion of the work argued for its having been written by a man, commentators noted; at the same time, its sensitivity, and, of course, its point of view in the heroine Jane, argued for its having been written by a woman. Harriet Martineau shrewdly saw that the author must be a woman because of the way Grace Poole, mad Bertha's caretaker, is depicted sewing rings onto curtains. When it was revealed that "Currer Bell" was in fact a woman, the tone of criticism changed and became more pejorative. Now, the (female) author was charged with "coarseness" and an "unseemly knowledge of passion." As Elaine Showalter suggests in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Bronte to Lessing, the fantasy of male personae, as well as the depiction of male protagonists, was a part of the Bronte sisters' lives long before they considered sending their work out to publishers. In the Angrian chronicles the Brontes had a dozen male alter egos; Charlotte used several male aliases as a child, among them "Captain Thunder," "Charles Townsend," and "Captain Tree." Charlotte's "maleness" was very likely identified with the active, creative side of her personality, her "femaleness" with the more passive.
Alert to the dangers of publishing under a woman's name, Marian Evans, with the counsel and support of her common-law husband, George Henry Lewes, made the decision to use the pseudonym "George Eliot" for Scenes of Clerical Life, her first book, which appeared in 1856. It was a considerable success, like the more ambitious Adam Bede two years later, and the author's secret was generally intact until the publication of The Mill on the Floss, in 1860, when exposure of "Eliot's" identity as Marian Evans adversely affected the novel's fortunes. George Eliot's feminist sympathies were strong yet ambivalent; she freely conceded the prejudices of the era, asking, in 18S5, that a writer-friend not reveal the fact that she was the author of an essay in the Westminster: "The article appears to have produced a strong impression, and that impression would be a little counteracted if the author were known to be a woman."
An impressive number of British women writers have used male pseudonyms, among them Harriet Parr ("Holme Lee"), Mary Molesworth ("Ennis Graham"), Mary Dunne ("George Egerton"), Violet Page ("Vernon Lee"), Margaret Barber ("Michael Fairless"), Olive Schreiner ("Ralph Iron"), Gillian Freeman ("Eliot George"). Others have used names of dubious gender: Storm Jameson, Radclyffe Hall, I. Compton-Burnett, V. Sackville-West, A. S. Byatt. The American Hilda Doolittle followed the advice of her friend Ezra Pound and published her poetry under the neuter, if rather diminutive, "H.D."; Janet Flanner became "Genet"; Florence Margaret Smith became "Stevie Smith"; Lula Mae Smith became "Carson McCullers"; Janet Taylor Caldwell published as "Taylor Caldwell" (and as the yet more virile "Max Reiner").
Conversely, the mid-nineteenth-century American writer Sara Payson Willis Parton, novelist and first woman newspaper columnist in the United States, chose the pseudonym "Fanny Fern": a name that, for all its satirical intent, has had a detrimental effect upon this gifted, and largely unknown, writer's reputation.
Among the plethora of entries in the Pseudonyms and Nicknames Dictionary—627 densely printed triple-columned pages that take us from "A. A." (Anthony Armstrong Willis, Canadian author, 1897-1976) to "Z. Y. X." (Arthur Alkin Sykes, British author, 1861-?)—are hundreds of women writers, most of them unknown today, who elected to write under male or androgynous pseudonyms. Some mix male and female names, as do a number of male writers, but William Butler Yeats's Scottish poet-friend William Sharp, who published as "Fiona Macleod," is a rare example of a man who disguised his writing self as a woman. (And underwent what seems to have been a schizoid breakdown of a kind, of which "Fiona Macleod" must have been more consequence than cause.) Yeats's celebrated use of his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees as a medium to whom spirit-"communicators" dictated answers to his questions for A Vision might be seen as an ingenious variation on the female-pseudonym/ persona phenomenon. Without Mrs. Yeats, the poet insisted, no "vision" would have been possible.
Of course, motives for writing under a pseudonym are likely to be as varied and idiosyncratic as there are pseudonymous writers, though some decisions, in the contexts of their authors' lives, are clearly more explicable than others. When, in 1963, the year of her suicide, thirty-year-old Sylvia Plath published her first, transparently autobiographical, novel, The Bell Jar, it was under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas": Plath feared, and with justification, that her harsh satirical portrait of her protagonist's mother would deeply wound her own mother. (Which of course it did.) It seems likely that W. S. Snodgrass, whose Heart's Needle was one of the early and conspicuously successful examples of "confessional" poetry, chose to write under the pseudonym S. S. Gardens, for some time in the late 1960s, for much the same reason.
Karen Blixen, forty-eight years old when her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was completed, chose to publish it under a pseudonym in the hope of avoiding the excessive attention, some of it malicious, she did in fact receive when the Danish press finally tracked her down. Ezra Pound, that most ambitious of poets and poet-theorists, published occasional music and art criticism under the names "William Atheling" and "Alfred Venison"; twenty-two-year-old James Joyce, later to consign to Leopold Bloom the banal nom de plume "Henry Flower," published early versions of three Dubliners stories in the Irish Homestead under the distinctly un-Irish pseudonym "Stephen Dedalus"—Joyce's reason for disguise being that he was ashamed of publishing "in the pigs' paper." While living in Berlin, as a Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov published several novels in his native Russian between 1925 and 1940 under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin" or "V. Sirin" (funnily misprinted in the Pseudonyms and Nicknames Dictionary as "V. Siren," a superb Nabokovian pun). "Sirin" is only the best-known of Nabokov's Russian pseudonyms; he had others, among them "Vaseli Shiskov" and "Vivian Calmbrood" (precursor of the author "Vivian Darkbloom" of Lolita?), and in Nabokov's fiction generally there is a virtuoso's delight in the willful shifting of identities: the masquerade of Lolita's deadpan foreword, for instance, in which "Humbert Humbert" is revealed as the pseudonymous creation of one "John Ray, Jr., Ph.D." (John Ray was a seventeenth-century English naturalist and taxonomist); the mad but inspired commentary of "Charles Kinbote" on the long poem "Pale Fire" by "John Francis Shade"; the eerie monologue of "Hugh Person" ("You Person") of Transparent Things. Jonathan Swift commonly employed not pseudonyms precisely but personae, by way of which his satire acquired its particular dramatic resonance. The doggedly sincere narrator of "A Modest Proposal," like "Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq." of the Bickerstaff Papers, and "M.B.," the Dublin linen drapier of The Drapier's Letters, is himself a brilliant literary creation. Swift illuminated religious and political polemics with the imagination of genius but his writing, with the exception of Gulliver's Travels, was usually for specific and limited purposes; the narrating self is an aspect of the satire, and not a mask or voice of the author himself. Charles Lamb's much-imitated "Ella" essays, published as the observations of an Italian clerk named Elia, whom Lamb had known slightly, allowed him enough aesthetic distance from his subject, and from himself, to transform the merely personal and whimsical into art of a kind enormously admired in its day though rather dated in our own.
By far the great majority of writers who use pseudonyms, of course, are genre writers; there are eleven hundred listings for writers of mystery-detective fiction alone. (The record would seem to belong to a contemporary British science fiction writer named Robert Lionel Fanthorpe, who publishes under twenty-eight pseudonyms, all male.) Multiple-name writers tend to publish their quality work under their own names but may have a descending order of quality among their pseudonyms: Erle Stanley Gardner, for instance, has written under seven pseudonyms in addition to his own name, with "A. A. Fair" at the top of his list: John Creasey has published under thirteen pseudonyms, in addition to his own name, with "J. J. Marric" at the top of his. Evan Hunter, whose baptismal name is Salvatore A. Lombino, also publishes under the names Hunt Collins, Richard Marsten, and, most prominently, Ed McBain. Isaac Asimov, a rival of Simenon's in terms of sheer writerly abundance, has also published under the name "Paul French." "Ellery Queen" and "Ellery Queen, Jr." ( joint pseudonyms of Daniel Nathan and Manfred Lepofsky) have published dozens of books, and Stephen King, our most prodigiously successful writer of horror stories, has recently sired a sort of sorcerer's apprentice in "Richard Bachman"—a pseudonym so little a secret that King's name is listed with "Bachman" in advertisements. No less prolific are science fiction writers Robert Heinlein, who published under four pseudonyms in addition to his own, and Barry Malzberg, who has also published under the name "K. M. O'Donnell." Highly regarded as masters of their mystery-genre are "John Le Carre" (David Cornwall) and "P. D. James" (Phyllis James White). Perhaps because most genre fiction is gamesmanship of a writerly sort, the author's intention being to outmaneuver the reader—to plunge forward into "plot" while at the same time impeding "plot" at every plausible turn— such writers employ pseudonyms as a matter of course. However serious, if not frankly obsessive, the underlying motives for writing of death as a component in a puzzle, the act can be passed off casually: it is only "entertainment" after all.
There endures an old aristocratic tradition, in any case, of not taking authorship seriously; or not allowing oneself to be charged with thinking so: as if the natural impulse is to shrink from seeming to suggest we might have something to say of interest or value to others. For all its strategies, art is an offensive maneuver from this perspective; it moves into another's private space, demands his attention if not his respect and admiration. To bring it off is so daring, so arrogant, so fraught with peril, the most ingenious defenses are required. It is appropriate that Nabokov, our most knottily "defensive" writer, anxious to hide his sentimental nature behind a shell of glittering artifice and hauteur, wrote an early novel, as "V. Sirin," titled The Defense.
In the end, it is probable that the cultivation of a pseudonym is not so very different from the cultivation in vivo of the narrative voice that sustains any work of words, making it unique and inimitable. Choosing a pseudonym as the work's formal author simply takes the mysterious process a step or two further, erasing the author's social identity and supplanting it with the pseudonymous identity. For who among us, identified with such confidence by others, has not felt uneasy, if not an impostor, knowing that, whatever they know of us, we do not somehow share in that knowledge? Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.


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Dwight Garner
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Review: Max Beerbohm, 'The Prince of Minor Writers' and a Gentle Contrarian
Phillip Lopate has assembled a new collection of essays by Beerbohm, who ranged from theater criticism to satire to social commentary.
July 16, 2015, Thursday
Review: 'Oreo,' a Sandwich-Cookie of a Feminist Comic Novel
Readers have a chance to enjoy this culture-hopping novel by Fran Ross, being reissued 40 years after most of the world ignored it.
July 15, 2015, Wednesday
MORE ON: Books and Literature , Ross, Fran (1935-85) , Oreo (Book)
Review: Rebecca Makkai's 'Music for Wartime,' Stories With Echoes of Loss
More than a decade in the making, this is the first short-story collection by the author of the novels "The Borrower" and "The Hundred-Year House."
July 8, 2015, Wednesday
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Review: 'Multitudinous Heart,' Newly Translated Poetry by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
The book, with translations by Richard Zenith, includes samples from every phase of the revered Brazilian poet's career.
July 3, 2015, Friday
Review: Sarah Hepola's 'Blackout,' on the Darkness That Took Over Her Life
This new memoir by Ms. Hepola, an editor at Salon, explores the causes and consequences of her addiction to alcohol, especially beer.
July 1, 2015, Wednesday
Review: In 'The Oregon Trail,' Two Brothers Take an 1800s-Style Road Trip
Rinker Buck chronicles the adventures he and his brother had in traveling 2,000 miles across six states in a mule-drawn covered wagon.
June 24, 2015, Wednesday
The End of Cuisine
Nathan Myhrvold, the Mad Hatter of modernist cooking, invited the movement's leading chef, Ferran Adrià, over for a 50-course, lab-prepared meal. It was a lot to digest, sure, but what does a feast like this mean for the future of eating?
Shock Value
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An Interview With Jennifer Egan Interactive Feature
The author of "The Keep" talked with Sam Tanenhaus and Dwight Garner from the Book Review.
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text:
Yvette I. Laforest
LINCOLN- Yvette I. Laforest, 91, of Sayles Hill Road, died Wednesday, December 28, at the Holiday Retirement Home, Manville.
Born in the Manville section of Lincoln, a daughter of the late Alphonse and Ida (Guevremont) Laforest, she had lived in Manville and Cumberland.
Miss Laforest was a File Clerk for Providence Washington Insurance Co.
She was a member of the Riverside Village Tenants Association and a communicant of St. James Church, Manville.
The family wishes to extend heartfelt thanks to the staff of the Holiday Retirement Home for their excellent care.
She is survived by one sister, Germaine Christo, and her husband Joseph, of Manville; and several nieces and nephews. She was the sister of the late Roger Laforest, Leo Laforest, and Beatrice Roberts.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be held Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. in St. James Church, 33 Division Street, Manville. Relatives and friends are invited. Burial will be private. Visiting hours are respectfully omitted. In lieu of flowers, contributions in her memory to the Holiday Retirement Home, 30 Sayles Hill Road, Manville, R.I. 02838, would be appreciated. For directions and guestbook, please visit
www.bellowsfh.com [1]. Arrangements by Bellows-Falso Funeral Chapel, 160 River Road, Lincoln.
[1] http://www.bellowsfh.com


text:
Kane County sheriff's police are investigating an accidental shooting early Sunday morning in unincorporated Elgin Township.
The shooting occurred at 12:30 a.m. Sunday when two brothers reportedly were handling a revolver inside their home on Woodcliff Drive near South Elgin, according to a news release from the sheriff's office.
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The revolver accidentally went off and one of the subjects shot the other in the abdomen. He is being treated for injuries at Provena St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin, according to the sheriff's office. Sheriff's police did not immediately disclose the age of the siblings involved.
No charges have been filed.


text:
Floodwaters strand more than 30 drivers on Southern State Parkway after overnight rainfall
The Southern State Parkway was brought to a standstill Wednesday morning after record-breaking overnight rainfalls.
More than 30 drivers were stuck in the rising water in North Babylon during the morning commute. Motorists say deep water at the Exit 39 overpass in the westbound lane made commuting a problem.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said there's only so much water the storm...
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text: Tweet photo by Andrew Barclay (electropod on Flickr Creative Commons) Despite the recent economic downturn, the green energy market has grown to the point of eclipsing fossil fuel – at least in terms of the creation of new power capacity in Europe and the United States. In 2009 renewables accounted for over 50% of new power capacity in the US and 60% in the Europe. Green power also grew globally. From an article in Red Herring magazine: Nearly 80 GW of renewable power capacity was added globally, including 31 GW of hydro and 48 GW of non-hydro capacity. Wind power and solar PV additions totaled a record high of 38 GW and 7 GW, mostly due to a large drop in the costs of solar PV. This decline was offset by high investments in smaller scale solar installments. Wind energy was a strong investment. This information comes from a report by The United Nations Environment Program and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century. Though global investment in renewable power sources fell by $11bn from 2008, installation increased. Wind and biomass investment actually increased, while biofuel and solar went down. Overall investment soared in Asia by $10bn, swelling in China by a whopping 53%. From a CNN report: According to the U.N., wind power received record investment in 2009 — $67 billion in 2009 compared with $59 billion in 2008 — with a total of 38 GW of new energy installed worldwide. Wind power is experiencing huge growth in China and the UK's North Sea. SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER Thank you, your sign-up request was successful! Please check your e-mail inbox. Given email address is already subscribed, thank you! Please provide a valid email address. Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later.