Sunday, August 5, 2012

I continue to be a bit baffled by Kent Johnson's appearing upset that his name has been used, by Craig Dworkin, as part of a naming experiment, as part of a riffing on authorship.  With his interest in heteronyms, secret groups, forged authors, it strikes me as fitting that Dworkin should then author a book by Johnson.  In the current Claudius App, the two have an xchange, and I can't help but wondering if it's a spoof: Dworkin's explanation of the genesis of the book makes some sense--it's a funny story in which he encourages a student of his to write in a different style and publish under a different name.  I love that the name settled on is Kent Johnson's!  From what I see, it appears that KJ is against appropriating the names of people who are, in the "contemporary" "moment," alive, and that he views CD's experiment as libelous; but their xchange is so, well, politely stagey as opposed to overtly angry; am I really supposed to believe this isn't a self-conscious experiment on behalf of Dworkin and Johnson?  Because I am a fan of Johnson, I choose to believe that he knows that this occurance is, darn near, necessary for the life of his name games and that this in fact is exactly the sort of screwiness which he had hoped to see.  Now that real live names are involved, it's delicious; the experiment is "in the world at-large" and on the page: the experiment has become vascular, part of circulation! 

Lastly--for a second or two one can be fooled by the CD as KJ BlazeVox book, but it, at least for me, was easy to then realize that one's looking at a kind of joke.

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