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What we pretend to be
This didn’t fit in the article I’m writing about attribution rights, but I was thinking about Stephen King as Richard Bachman. In his intro to the collected Bachman Books in 1985, King identified a number of motives for writing as Bachman, including:
“to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King”
“I didn’t think I was overpublishing the market … but my publishers did…. My ‘Stephen King’ publishers were like a frigid wifey who only wants to put out once or twice a year, encouraging her endlessly horny hubby to find a call girl.”
“Writing something that was not horror as Stephen King would be perfectly easy, but answering the questions about why I did it would be a pain in the ass.”
Over the years, King has changed his position – he’s written non-horror like The Kid and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as King. (Is this connected to his still-marginal but increasing status in the “literary” world? Is it cause, consequence, or something in between?)
He’s also experimented with the Bachman persona as an overt performance, a “hat” rather than a hidden identity, publishing novels that from the start are labeled Bachman but are acknowledged to be King’s, most notably the twinned books Desperation (published as King) and The Regulators (published as Bachman) with their overlapping character names, themes, and cover designs. I can’t quite get at it, but there’s something here about the meaning of authorship, and the liberating power of games even when acknowledged as such by everyone in sight. Like we’re all agreeing consciously with the formulation Freud attributes to our unconscious minds: I know quite well that Stephen King is Richard Bachman, but all the same …
Not unrelatedly, media fandom needs a documentary like this:
“to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King”
“I didn’t think I was overpublishing the market … but my publishers did…. My ‘Stephen King’ publishers were like a frigid wifey who only wants to put out once or twice a year, encouraging her endlessly horny hubby to find a call girl.”
“Writing something that was not horror as Stephen King would be perfectly easy, but answering the questions about why I did it would be a pain in the ass.”
Over the years, King has changed his position – he’s written non-horror like The Kid and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as King. (Is this connected to his still-marginal but increasing status in the “literary” world? Is it cause, consequence, or something in between?)
He’s also experimented with the Bachman persona as an overt performance, a “hat” rather than a hidden identity, publishing novels that from the start are labeled Bachman but are acknowledged to be King’s, most notably the twinned books Desperation (published as King) and The Regulators (published as Bachman) with their overlapping character names, themes, and cover designs. I can’t quite get at it, but there’s something here about the meaning of authorship, and the liberating power of games even when acknowledged as such by everyone in sight. Like we’re all agreeing consciously with the formulation Freud attributes to our unconscious minds: I know quite well that Stephen King is Richard Bachman, but all the same …
Not unrelatedly, media fandom needs a documentary like this:
"When I first got into this hobby, I was a teenager and it was an escape from the stresses and angst of high school," he says. "But over time Darkon helped me hone my leadership skills." His parents rave about its beneficial effects, and now Wells is a vice president at a large IT consulting company.
"When we originally started cooperating with the filmmakers, we were concerned with exposing this hobby—which is relatively dorky, all things considered—to the public," Wells says. Lipman adds: "There's still debate over whether the events that took place in the documentary are part of official Darkon history or was it all a dream scenario, because there's a feeling that the camera was a motivational factor. But I feel that they captured Darkon at its best."
….
Play is as necessary to civic health as dreaming is to mental health, but playing makes Americans suspicious. We measure our worth by our jobs, but what happens when there are fewer and fewer meaningful jobs? Many of the Darkon players are trapped in the classic nerd conundrum: They don't find the corporate track fulfilling, and so they wind up working as Starbucks baristas and office administrators. At the same time, they're smart enough to know that being called a Starbucks "team member" is just a nicer way of being called a Starbucks slave. ….
But no matter how many people it helps to get laid, Americans will always be suspicious of adults playing a game of make-believe as gloriously and goofily unself-conscious as Darkon. Maybe if it used a ball or a racquet people could accept it but, as it is, Darkon makes outsiders cringe. So, why do these weird people in Maryland and Virginia keep playing it? "The game isn't an escape," Wells says. "It's a hobby and a sport. If other people had the guts to try it, they would love it."
Darkon players are social creatures by necessity—they can't play their game alone—and in a country where socializing is endangered, that's a sterling recommendation. But there's something else at work, too. In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut writes: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Darkon is made up of hundreds of people who spend the majority of their lives pretending to be high-school students, soldiers back from Iraq, administrative assistants, waiters, project managers, probate lawyers, retail clerks, and textile buyers. But Darkon shows them for who they really are: warriors, princesses, magicians, kings and queens. They're hacking reality, creating a social system where the part of their lives that matters isn't the part that stresses over a PowerPoint presentation, but the part that charges into battle and does great things.