Rubard pseudonyms 11/27/2022

[Jeffrey Rubard]

I’m sorry, if I “wrote these things”... I wrote these things? (A logical, if not legal, tautology?)

(A selection of) writing pseudonyms used by Jeffrey Rubard, US, during a period from the 1990s to the 2020s: some names were shared with another individual, or a group of people.

Fiction:

Jacques Roubaud (does not correspond to known French national)
Paul Auster (less *Country of Last Things*, attributed to deceased individual not in Auster YouTube videos etc.)
John Wray
Jeffrey Lent
Jeff Noon
Andy Weir
Cixin Liu
Tom Rob Smith
Jamie Ford
Martin Solares
David Leavitt
Adam Rapp (shared)
John A. Heldt
Russell Rowland
Edward Rutherfurd (shared)
Abdelrahman Munif (backdated to Intifada times)
Laszlo Krasznahorkai (novel list shared w/European philosopher)
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Richard Russo (less *Mohawk*, attributed to deceased individual)
Richard Flanagan
Nick Hornby
Jonathan Littell (Prix Goncourt winner)
Mark Z. Danielewski
Arturo Perez-Reverte
Brendan Mathews
Yann Martel
Roddy Doyle (less first three novels)
Douglas Stuart
W.G. Sebald (backdated)
Stieg Larssen
Anthony Doerr
Tom Drury
Keith Waldrop
M.T. Anderson
Garth Greenwell
John Green
Antonio Scurati (English texts original, Italian translations by Italian national “of some repute”)
Mark Helprin
Joshua Cohen (fiction)
Cormac McCarthy (“general Western life”)

History:

Gordon S. Wood
Alan Taylor
John Ferling (shared, 70s-80s books by another hand)
David Hackett Fischer
Jon Meacham
Ted Widmer
Scott Reynolds Nelson
David W. Blight (shared)
David Priestland
Ian Bell
Michael Dobbs (not *House of Cards* and related series, by a Canadian national)
Robert W. Merry
Richard White
Stephen Greenblatt (not the literary criticism)
Matthew Stewart
RJ Smith
Michael Azerrad
Nelson Lichtenstein
Timothy Egan
Tracy Daugherty
Greg Grandin
Bryan Burrough
Peter Hall
Louis Menand (imitations of Wallace Shawn’s knowledge-base, etc.)
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Arthur Kempton

Sociology:

Mark Fisher
Craig Calhoun (as in Calhoun County, MI)
William Rasch
Randall Collins (group)
Göran Therborn (group of writers?)
John Roberts (not John Roberts, US)
Don Ross
Derrick Jensen
Gerd Baumann
Enzo Traverso
John Bellamy Foster
Richard A. Lanham (shared)
Joseph Carroll
Gerd Baumann
Jens Rubart
Hans-Georg Moeller
Michael Bentley
Jeffrey Alexander (less *Theoretical Logic in Sociology*)
John Roemer
Mark Fisher
Jan-Werner Müller
Oliver Zunz

Philosophy:

Tyler Burge (some material backdated)
Joshua Cohen (Rousseau)
Tim van Gelder
Peter Carruthers
Jeff Malpas (group)
Manuel Delanda
John Heil
Kojin Karatani (group)
R.J. Lipton
Patrick J. Hurley
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Huw Price
Evan Thompson
Kevin Lynch
Alexander Stern
Stephen Houlgate (one volume by another hand)
Ian Hacking
Gerard LeBrun
Alain Badiou
Ted Sider
Axel Honneth
Detlev Claussen
Gilles Dowek
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Joseph LeDoux
Eric Baum
Murray Clarke
Paul Guyer (shared)
Karl Ameriks
Quentin Meillassoux

Jeffrey Rubard (*The Torso of Humanity: A Reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time*, 2019, etext)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Or not? Maybe your claims are substantially false?"

[Jeffrey Rubard]

I guess you could look into "falsifying" them, studying how they are poorly coherent, etc.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Maybe it just makes no sense at all?"
A little too optimistic a thought (this era is a bit "soft in the head"), since we ordinarily reckon "no sense at all" as "some sense" in an oblique way.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Could they be the work of *other* people, for example? Could you think of who that *could be*?
"Nuh-uh."
Better not ask for so much from people, then.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"I just choose not to think about this."
That would be, uh, normal.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

But this is really much more how that works than "See, I have a thought, and the thought is..."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Try these:

Dave Hickey
Francis Spufford
Peter Hall
John Roemer

Quick Check: "Nah, man. One of those is strictly impossible to have been your work, or so it would seem."
A: Do you hear yourself talk? This is one of those observations that would "go as far as it did", right?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"This is such bullshit. How could you even be, like, 'Ian Hacking'? You're just high and your brain is destroyed."
Ans: By writing some, if not all, of the works attributed to the "pen-name"? "I don't get it like that." What's
with your all-importance? You understand what I just said, right? The "truth-conditions" the claim would sketch
out?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Perhaps: "Works by "Ian Hacking" up to *The Taming of Chance* have some origin other than the "offices" of Jeffrey Rubard,
who at under ten years of age would have not been quite equal to the material presented. After *Rewriting the Soul* Rubard
becomes plausible of the author of most of the 'Hacking' works then appearing, if not actually all of the one in the 'new series'."
"That's crazy. I hate it."
"People often have that reaction to the works of Hacking. But can you, too, see the arguments of those who wonder
which QWERTY keyboard was manned by fingers that typed the manuscript of this, or this, or this text?"
"Maybe it was a Dvorak keyboard."
"I see you. Perhaps you do not see much."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Or maybe... just maybe... Ian Hacking's work was done by another figure, *not you*."
Sure.
"Huh? Excuse me?"
Yeah, you guys kind of do forget the flourishes you put in like "just maybe"...

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"What's that supposed to mean?"
You can't cash in the words of these artificers at 'face value'. The 'face value' of "just maybe" here would be...
"Um, the normal *prima facie* assumption of work done by someone like 'Ian Hacking' is that none of it would be attributable to a non-Canadian hipster lumpenproletarian 'native' to the US West Coast. Those sorts of assumptions are usually things to 'roll with'." Unfortunately, the actual rejoinder: "Sure, sure it's weird. Apparently it's the objective fact of the matter about the post-1990 work, though... or why would it matter 'where someone's head was at', anyone's, as regards that objective fact of the matter?" is something like *nicht so* -- "just not a good topic" -- (not a quantity we previously dealt with in American society much, or dealt with so much in the Anglophone world beyond that.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"And I'm sorry, Cormac McCarthy is an eightysomething man from Texas. Sorry."
"About 'sorry'... maybe he just 'looks' and acts that way?"

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, please. How could that be at all possible?"
"Do you suppose Cormac McCarthy is the 'man at the other end of the lens' in author photographs?"
"I do, yes."
"What if that man were really in his early forties?"

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, who else are we to try this 'thought experiment' with? Eduardo Galeano? Snort."
Well, hmm. What is the Uruguayan memory of Galeano like?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, how am I supposed to figure a thing like that out?"
Um... ask someone from Uruguay?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"About Cormac McCarthy?"
Well, do you think it's an important enough nom de plume? (I guess they might be interested.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"No, Paul Auster."
That Sunset Park thing, man... I kind of think "Frank P. James" has to be a pseudonym, though.
(How can it be? But historically Frank P. James he was "The Littlest Rebel", a brigand "embedded" with the CSA, and I think it might read through to the day.)
"I'll ask Siri Hustvedt about it."
I wish you wouldn't.
"Why, is she your wife?"
Um... no. No, that's not my wife.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"I don't get it. How can you assert that this is at all possible?"
Because, in reality, there was a device or devices that effected it? The claims are, at least in large part, "actual"?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh yeah, like you wrote the science-fiction novels of Andy Weir 'so obviously'."
Is there another physical person you'd likelier credit with composition of the manuscripts?
("Click" on the other end of line, etc.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

A voice from the shadows:
"I know how these things work, and I've had enough. Okay, guy. Assuming 'for the sake of the argument' that some substantial part of your claims are true, what do you think is a real, genuine problem with the oeuvre?"

"Appropriation". Among my "author-functions" is an Asian-American identity, a couple of Asian identities, noms des plumes which present me as Jewish, Arab, a "gay" version of me, and European and "Latinoamerican" pseudonyms. I'm really... none of these things, and it would "go hard" with many people who want to communicate the valuable insights of their group to the world. (There's not a Black or an Indian one.)

"Yeah, I guess! OMFG."

Basically... the easiest slide is with Asianness (there's a word like "smart otaku", get it?) but yeah, honestly it wouldn't "go down smooth" under normal circumstances. Some background: in my "descent into authorship", it seemed that Forrest/Asa Carter of *The Education of Little Tree* had been very harshly treated (the book is not too wide of the mark for my "home environment", and many people who are not ethnically Native have a great fondness for the scenes in the book). The curtains were "ripped back" to reveal a racist white man caricaturing Natives, but the problem is that the "genuine article" would really be turns out to be... Forrest/Asa Carter, who would "not be perfect" as a person but roughly totally congruent with the verisimilitude of the book. "Nothing Was Delivered".

So there is some genuine question when "authenticity" and "appropriation" are being discussed of what is really at stake.

"I am... not buying it. And I'm just not that 'multi-cultural', even."
The "metatheory" beyond that is that the themes addressed by these "avatars" would be turned over to more authentic, modern figures actually solidly part of the group; to the extent this was not possible, "version control" would remain with activists from the group itself. (My writing on Black history works like this; you'd ask a Black person first and most of all what they thought of Frederick Douglass, James Brown et al.) I was also tired of the "Great White Hero" who, "ironically" or no, peopled the fiction of the turn of the century and it was a way to avoid this.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Are there personae that are more-or-less literally, actually *you*?"
In novels: Jeffrey Lent is "the person I am", to a pretty close approximation. He is also one of the less appealing "author-functions".

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, it just seems like insane wishful thinking. Perhaps the German sociologist Ulrich Beck was... a German sociologist?"
Sure, that seems like a good "initial hypothesis". But you types (and you are quite funny about this) really do possess the concept of "author"
as the person who wrote the manuscript of a book, and if it "so happened" to be me for, say, *Risk Society* this might seem... incredibly improbable,
but "in all probability" we primarily are being directed to admire games of "3-card monte" by you forever. (Additionally, if the "author's photograph"
is a picture of my unique physical face, that'd be a little... weird, too.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Wow... what would Dan Sperber say about this?"
(Yeah, like that.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, dude. We've gone 'evolutionary'! Why don't you ring Joseph Carroll while you're at it?"
Oh, um, uh...

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"I don't think Sperber and Carroll would agree about much."
Hmm.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"They both believe in Social Darwinism, don't they?"
Not as a life plan, exactly?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"What's that mean?"
The point is frequently made -- the biological reality of phylogenetic evolution would not contain an imperative "do it to it".
It would be a scientific fact "orthogonal" to voluntary action and things of that order.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Still, it's a reality."
Well, "Social Darwinism" might be about as real as "literary theory", the dynamics of fame, currency, etc. in written works.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Dude, there are usually problems when you try to 'jack' the reputation of someone like W.G. Sebald for 'lulz' screwing with people, get it?"
Yeah, yeah, I see how that would be.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"And hey, I'm sorry, but isn't Jamie Ford Asian?"
I guess... you could ask an Asian about whether he was some kind of "fanboy" copping the style?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"You just can't fake things like that. The next thing you are to tell me, then, is that a Booker Prize winner like Richard Flanagan isn't a real Aussie?"
(The Man Booker Prize isn't an Australian prize, dude. "Stay focused.")

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Why wouldn't you just use your real name?"
Because it sounds both low-class and pretentious, something like "Russell Rowland".
(Or you don't. You use a pen-name. But that's something "minders" like to keep from people.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"He is, plainly put, a regional author perhaps of interest to 'deeply dyed' Northwesterners."
It would be a thing.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Funny names are a thing, too. Sorry."
Tell it to "Michael Azerrad" and "Greg Kot", honey.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Okay, okay, I'll bite. Which of these 'names' are you secretly the most proud of?"
The philosophy of mind of Evan Thompson? (I'm not really a Buddhist, though, like the book says.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Knowingly: "They work different sides of the street."
Correctively: "Oh no, they're not prostitutes, that's a confusion."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Perhaps I prefer Joseph Carroll, working off Christmas and all. Ha ha."
I guess "working off Christmas" is an idea people have, then...

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Michel Houellebecq?
Philip Kitcher?

"Like you could be proud, even if..."
Not every book is the best, it's true.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, could you tell us more about Francis Spufford?"
Ah, I'm glad you've gotten into the spirit of the thing.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

*Red Plenty* is secretly "not that high" on the Russian 60s, actually.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"That's not enough for me."
For people familiar with the subject-matter, it wouldn't be.
But that is not "these people".

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, let's keep going. How about Adam Levin? Where's Adam Levin?"
I really do get confused about these things; looking at the guy's picture on the Internet, it looked like he was black or something.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Well, that's ironic... because what if Adam Levin the novelist was you? I'm going somewhere with this."
Yeah, about this sort of thing. The problem is that it's perhaps the case the place you think you are "going" with a circular reasoning ruse isn't there to go to,
that Adam Levin is really just a white person with vaguely "black" features and I either *am* or *am not* the person on the other end of the camera/who was at the keyboard typing the manuscript, etc.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"That's even better than Joshua Cohen."
Which Joshua Cohen do you mean?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, my goodness. The novelist, or the scholar of Rousseau. Maybe they're even the same person."
Some people think like that sometimes, but hey, apparently people don't feel the "limits" of that anymore.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Furthermore, it *really* is the case that the non-fake practice of bibliography works something like this:
"Had anyone ever heard of John Roemer before the B-52s song 'Roam'?"
"I don't remember him."
"Oh, like that matters."
"I would be the person to know about an 'analytic Marxist' in those fields, and I hadn't heard of him at all."
"Which record was that on?"
"Cosmic Thing, in 1989."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"He doesn't look like he would be 77."
"He looks like shit."
"I think it might be one of those old routines... 'Don't I look just like Talcott Parsons'?"
"Who's Talcott Parsons?"
"Someone people would have heard of at that time."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Are you saying he's 'in' with the B-52s, like he wrote the lyrics for 'Funplex' or something?"
"It's an orthogonal issue, and I wouldn't want to disturb the B-52s. It's just that he apparently wasn't 'known of' to anyone before the 1990s."
"Pretty much just at all, guys. Am I supposed to get you in a time machine to the 80s to prove it to you, or something?"

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"A lot of these are 'minor' figures, like Gilles Dowek and R.J. Lipton in formal logic. That's... non-grandiose in a way, but..."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"And of the ones that aren't... Jean-Luc Nancy was supposed to be, like, eighty when he died."
He was "old", that's for sure.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"What's with John A. Heldt?"
Maybe he's A. Hero, I don't know? ("You know, you can talk the way you want, but...)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Did he know Russell Banks?"
"Maybe there's video of them together?"

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Oh, if we only had Eugene Vodolazkin to judge this contest..."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Maybe we should stay away from the topic of his work for now."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Do you mean to imply he was not somehow the age he is presented as?"
Not exactly. It seems "pushy" to say (and it does seem this way) that
perhaps you should be ready for a French philosopher to be a "construct"
of some sort, but really I think you could look at Jean-Luc Nancy this way.
Perhaps he was some sort of "amalgam" of two fairly different attitudes.

"How's this work?"
Poorly, but this is the point. In truth, Nancy's "secular mysticism" represents
attitudes highly characteristic of "The Greatest Generation" in the US, particularly
combat-fatigued men. Yet they were loath to share these attitudes in public,
and even to some extent with their families. To a large extent they had interestingly
been internalized by the early radical gay-rights activists in the US. So Nancy
reads something like "Larry Kramer as a guide to masculinity".

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"How could that be the same person as, say, the 'enactivist' philosopher of mind Evan Thompson? It's scarcely conceivable."
By the individual's own kind of deceit, plus 'bending the rules' of nom de plume publication? I dunno.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Anybody ever read anything by "Pascal Mercier"?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Like *Last Train to Lisbon*, or *Perlmann's Silence*?

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"I prefer Paulo Coelho."
Hmm.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

He seems like he might be kind of "mainstream" for sophisticated tastes.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Taylor Branch?
"It's not topical anymore."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Also, Paulo Coelho? Yeah. It's not like he's Roberto Bolaño, after all."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Meek Non-Mill: "What was the thinking behind setting out on the 'megalith' project?"
"Um... usually, I guess usually when those are put together, well..."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"The idea of a 'zine of books' is relatively self-explanatory, even, compared to the various
'controversies' around certain noms des plumes."

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Update: "James Sullivan"?
"You're not too sure, here?"
Somehow not.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

This other book about James Brown, *The One*... "RJ Smith" is just somehow not a very 'expressive' name.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

As pseudonyms, "Michael Azerrad" and "Greg Kot" cover "broader notes" in US music.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Really a dream to be able to write about Nirvana and Wilco like they deserved a "wide audience".

[Jeffrey Rubard]

(Dude, the Staple Singers and 80s punk already had a "wide audience".)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Any fans of Abdelrahman Munif's writing?
"It's Abdel Rahman Munif."
That'd be a different name, actually. (Look at a book cover if you're confused.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"I like Aziz Ansari better."

I guess you could!

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"He seems realer."
I guess he could be!

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Do you think Reif Larsen and Aziz would get along?"
Maybe not, Mr. Ansari seems "realer" than Reif Larsen.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Brief discussion of the work of "Louis Menand", today.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Was Lenni Brenner related to Robert Brenner?"
No.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Not even a little bit?"
I think we're going to have to give up the "game of pseuds", people, no, really.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Why's that?"
You can't really talk about noms des plumes the way *I* talk about them, much
less the way "defamers" do.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"What are the different problems, here?"
The "defamer" is coaching you about the history of the product (it "just couldn't be" the way it was, and so forth);
The "truth-teller" gives you an inaccurate picture of the social niceties around the issue, which matter.
(It really "looks the opposite way" from the outside.)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"What was with the Simon Critchley pseudonym?"
Um, you know, me and the New York Times don't get along so well...

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Well, did you really write The Stone columns?"
Other people wrote The Stone's articles? #hahanoseriously

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Critchley actually isn't a very good philosopher."
You could sure think that, if you liked.

[Jeffrey Rubard]

"Um, could you ask him to stop sucking for me?"
I don't think he 'sucks' for you specifically, really.