The Name Game
Sometime back in the 1980s I was in a bookshop on Longacre. For some reason I started flicking through one of the literary magazines there, either the LRB or the TSP I’m not sure which. Suddenly I stopped, because there was my name. Not in a review, but in the headline for an ad!
Not long before, I’d reviewed a novel by Tim Winton for, I think, The Fiction Magazine. In the course of that review I apparently made some passing general remark about the state of Australian fiction, and that remark had been pulled out as the headline for an ad featuring novels by several young Australian writers, including Winton and three or four others I’d never heard of. And they hadn’t ascribed the quote to The Fiction Magazine, the usual practice, but to me. My name was as big as the rest of the headline, as if it would mean anything to the readers.
My first response was elation: hey, I’m famous (as if!). Then my feelings became darker, more ambiguous. The name didn’t actually mean me any more, it had been appropriated for things I knew nothing about. Indeed, if I hadn’t happened to open that issue of that magazine, I’d never have known about it.
I’ve had brushes with a certain sort of fame occasionally since then, and my reaction is always the same: an initial but usually very brief pleasure followed by something much more ambiguous. It happened again last night, when I arrived home and found a paperback copy of The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer waiting for me. I’d somehow missed this book when it first came out, so I had a quick look inside and suddenly found myself quoted in the introduction. And I find myself thinking: is that me? Do I want to be there? I am not misquoted (at least, I don’t think I am, I haven’t checked the source), I’m not quoted out of context, I agree with the thrust of Hartwell’s comments at that point. But there is still that odd sense of appropriation. You’d think I’d have got used to it by now.
Not long before, I’d reviewed a novel by Tim Winton for, I think, The Fiction Magazine. In the course of that review I apparently made some passing general remark about the state of Australian fiction, and that remark had been pulled out as the headline for an ad featuring novels by several young Australian writers, including Winton and three or four others I’d never heard of. And they hadn’t ascribed the quote to The Fiction Magazine, the usual practice, but to me. My name was as big as the rest of the headline, as if it would mean anything to the readers.
My first response was elation: hey, I’m famous (as if!). Then my feelings became darker, more ambiguous. The name didn’t actually mean me any more, it had been appropriated for things I knew nothing about. Indeed, if I hadn’t happened to open that issue of that magazine, I’d never have known about it.
I’ve had brushes with a certain sort of fame occasionally since then, and my reaction is always the same: an initial but usually very brief pleasure followed by something much more ambiguous. It happened again last night, when I arrived home and found a paperback copy of The Space Opera Renaissance edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer waiting for me. I’d somehow missed this book when it first came out, so I had a quick look inside and suddenly found myself quoted in the introduction. And I find myself thinking: is that me? Do I want to be there? I am not misquoted (at least, I don’t think I am, I haven’t checked the source), I’m not quoted out of context, I agree with the thrust of Hartwell’s comments at that point. But there is still that odd sense of appropriation. You’d think I’d have got used to it by now.