Home | Away

Sunday sockpuppet postscript

I know I should take it easy on poor Lee Siegel.  The guy has undergone the singular misfortune of making himself a laughingstock just before his book of collected reviews and essays was published, and that can’t be pleasant. 

So I understand why he’s had to make the rounds of the New York print media and answer embarrassing questions about his sprezzatural alter ego.  It’s got to be a painful exercise, because even as Siegel tries to blame his fatuousness and self-regard on the blogosphere in the most remarkably fatuous and self-regarding ways (“I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn’t want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level”), he has to do so in articles that inform people—especially those people who don’t read “web” “logs”—that he’d spent a few months of his life praising himself as brave and brilliant and handsome and witty and charming and talented and also really brilliant.  Even the New York Observer profile, in the course of hailing him (oddly) as “an increasingly rare breed—a combative intellectual generalist” (quoi?—there are entire neighborhoods in New York zoned CIG-1 specifically for combative intellectual generalists), had to let its readers in on the back story:

Mr. Siegel was first drawn into Internet anonymity last February, after his condescending column offering advice to Jon Stewart before he hosted the Oscars inspired dozens of nasty comments in response. Under the heading “Siegel is my hero,” the first of 15 posts by “sprezzatura” read: “How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn’t like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos …. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” It followed later with: “Groupthink from a mob of bullies cowering behind their user-name aliases. Groupthink! Groupthink! Naaa naaa naaa-naaa naaa!”

So for a moment, I had a soupçon of sympathy for the guy.  Really, I did.

And then this morning I find that I’m cheek-by-jowl with him in the Sunday Times Magazine.  That’s me in “The Way We Live Now,” and that’s him in the“Questions For” feature.  Quelle surprise!  C’est bizarre!  Et quelle coincidence!

All right, just one thing.  I actually don’t want to get on Mr. Siegel’s case—there are far greater evils in the world, like smooth jazz.  But this one thing vexed me mightily:

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried the headline “Siegel Is My Hero”?

Every man is a hero to his alias.

Now, come on already with the attempt at light-wit cleverness. People!  Citizens!  Stop him before he alludes again!

Because the allusion here is to the phrase “no man is a hero to his valet.” We got that.  But, of course, that line suggests that the valet sees the clay feet underneath the heroic dress, whereas Siegel slyly (but not that slyly) suggests that all of us have heroic self-images that we’d indulge if only we could get away with it.  “Come, come,” Siegel’s repartee says, “we would all name our sockpuppets ‘sprezzatura’ if given the opportunity, would we not?”

Er, no.  I’m afraid you’re alone on this one, Mr. Siegel.  My own personal sockpuppet is called “Cyberpunk Composite Entities,” and I invented it on this sinuous thread last February.  When I asked people to stop calling U. No. D. Ho., Rich Puchalsky wrote in to say,

Can I still keep calling him “Horowitz” and speculating about him as a sort of cyberpunk composite entity?

To which Cyberpunk Composite Entities replied,

We really wish you wouldn’t pawn him off on us.  What did we do to deserve this?

CCE then mysteriously appeared this past May in this twisted thread over at The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony, in which a commenter named “nobody” wrote, rather nastily,

Oh man, I truly do hope Dr Bérubé sees fit to kick Siegel’s sorry pompous ass.

To which I replied, in my own name,

You know, I’ve long believed that nobody reads my archives.

To which a person now calling himself “dr nobody” said,

Now that’s what I call service! And with an eerily prescient post too. Thank you, sir. Your archives are truly incomparable.

Well, that degree of synchronicity, combined with praise for my incomparable archives, must’ve smelled a bit funny, so a commenter named “Thomas Nephew” appeared a couple of hours later to demand an explanation:

Admit it, Berube—you’re nobody.

To which I replied, under the name “Cyberpunk Composite Entities,”

I admit it three or four times a day, Thomas, but I’d never choose it as a blog comment name. Nobody would.

I signed that comment with my own url, though.  And everybody left the room happy.

OK, so now you know.  For every man is a cyberpunk composite entity to his . . . uh . . . to his . . . oh, never mind.

Posted by on 09/17 at 07:05 PM

  1. Siegel’s line *is* witty, in its appallingly embarrassing way—but the embarrassment is his own devising, so he’s brazen-ing it out.  The question is, is Siegel *still* a hero to his pseudonym?

    Walt Whitman was certainly a hero to *his* pseudonyms.

    Smooth jazz forever! 

    capcha:  person

    Posted by Transhistorical Kenny G Hegemony  on  09/17  at  08:25 PM

  2. While it is too often suggested that we can all be our own heroes in our own dreams (day dreams? waking dreams? night terrors?), those who choose to make others suffer their nightmares in civilized social forums, need some sort of cyber-lobotomy.  Herr Doktor Cyberpunk Composite Entities has performed a successful surgery. This is great (captcha) public service, thank you.

    Posted by  on  09/17  at  09:06 PM

  3. TKGH:

    Love that handle!

    Posted by Randy Paul  on  09/17  at  09:11 PM

  4. nobody is mine.

    Posted by e. e. cummings  on  09/17  at  09:41 PM

  5. Think about Siegel as falconer, the sock puppet as falcon:

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

    Siegel, sitting there wondering about the blogofascists:

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem…

    His world is ending… and there will be no second coming.

    Posted by Aaron Barlow  on  09/17  at  09:49 PM

  6. Siegel, in the NY Times interview, pinpoints the reason I blog:

    The pain!  The pain of being unacknowledged!

    Posted by Nameless and Emotionally Naked Character Assassin  on  09/17  at  10:09 PM

  7. "For every man is a cyberpunk composite entity to his . . . uh . . . to his . . . oh, never mind.”

    And for every woman?

    Posted by Roxanne  on  09/17  at  11:16 PM

  8. Well, one of the cool things about cyberpunk composite entities, Roxanne, is that they’re so post-gender.  And they don’t care what female bloggers wear when they go to meet ex-presidents, either.  They’re really OK that way.

    Posted by Michael  on  09/17  at  11:39 PM

  9. I predict that Michael will write a post about his sockpuppet and fail to acknowledge all my hard work on his behalf, much of which involved performing a difficult task brilliantly and with no apparent effort.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  12:18 AM

  10. That Siegel Q&A is transcendentally toolish.  Do you suppose the NYT hired him to interview himself?

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  03:25 AM

  11. Central Content Publisher is far more heroic than the man behind it. Perhaps the sockpuppetmaster could learn from my example, and find an alias that exceeds him in virtues.

    Posted by Central Content Publisher needs no embellishment  on  09/18  at  04:58 AM

  12. Consider the sockpuppets of the blogosphere. They toil not to perfect a logical argument, neither do they factcheck.

    What blather of bobbleheads came up with “combative intellectual generalist” as a euphemism for an obnoxious twit with a raging case of blogorrhea?

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  06:29 AM

  13. I overheard some scruffy guy at a bar say this about Siegel:
    Yes, I wish that for just one time
    Lee could stand inside my shoes
    He’d know what a drag it is
    To read him

    I’m with you on the smooth jazz thing.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  07:31 AM

  14. Oh, and another thing. I’m not sure I agree with Lee’s hero-to-our-alias premise.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  07:52 AM

  15. God, Ed, you’re such an asshole.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  07:54 AM

  16. I believe the allusion is to the phrase:

    “Every man is a hero to his dog”

    Pretty straightforward wry humour I’d think.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  08:09 AM

  17. I always thought is was, “No man is a gyro to his sandwich.”

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  10:12 AM

  18. yeah Andrew, but on the internet, no one knows you’re a [hero to your] dog.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  10:19 AM

  19. Vance Maverick, or whoever you are, I had the same thought.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  10:31 AM

  20. I believe the phrase is “every man is a hoagie to his dog.”

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  10:50 AM

  21. How about “every man’s leg is a surrogate inflatable doll to his dog.”

    Q. When does Siegel sign his book deal for a 6-figure advance and when’s he confess all to Mama Oprah?

    Posted by Bill Benzon  on  09/18  at  11:27 AM

  22. C: So did you get any responses to your post?
    A: Lots of them, Nobody wrote the first response.
    C: How can there be a response, if nobody wrote it?
    C: Because he posted it after he wrote it.
    A: Who posted it?
    C: No. Who posted a response to Nobody.
    A: How should I know? And what’s more, if nobody wrote a comment it’s impossible to post a response to it.
    C: But Who did it.
    A: I don’t know, who did what?
    C: Responded to Nobody.
    ...
    ...
    ...

    If you keep it going long enough, you get comments from Arutazzerps, Cortegiano , Cool Dad, Mister Toad, B1FF, Fitz and Gene Simmons.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  11:38 AM

  23. Well, at least Hoagie Carmichael didn’t write smooth jazz.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  01:32 PM

  24. Cyberpunk Composite Entities is/are braver & wittier than you’ll ever be, you abusive electric sheep.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  02:44 PM

  25. I’ve tried voting for Nobody when s/he ran for president, then governor, and even the local city council.  But even nobody didn’t vote for nobody and left us without an informed and knowledgeable elected official.  I suppose that is what you get for having waves in your gravy and a thunder machine trying to propel a bus further on down the road.  I would even vote for Cyberpunk Composite Entities should all of them happen to co-mingle and re-intergrate into some less than corpulent form. You see i am driven to make political decisions solely by body image.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  03:55 PM

  26. Nobody knows, the trouble I’ve seen
    Nobody knows, but Jesus . . .

    Somebody had to do it.

    Posted by Bill Benzon  on  09/18  at  04:02 PM

  27. And remember, You’re Nobody Til Somebody Loves You.

    Posted by  on  09/18  at  05:21 PM

  28. Lee Siegel is an embarrassment to the Patriarchy!!!

    Posted by Hattie  on  09/18  at  06:22 PM

  29. But the laws of genre require that any mysterious, anonymous cyberpunk entity have its identity revealed by a strangely idealistic yet ineffectual hacker.  You can’t just out yourself as the Composite Cyberpunk Entities.

    Therefore, this post must have been made by Patterico.

    Posted by  on  09/19  at  02:58 PM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Next entry: Over the weekend

Previous entry: ABF Friday: Mordant Celebration edition!

<< Back to main