Pseudonyms

 

A while back, I ran an item about Allen Smithee, the name directors once used on films they thought had been butchered. Daniel Dern knew Harlan Ellison did something similar:

Ellison on occasion used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert members of the public to situations in which he felt his creative contribution to a project had been mangled by others, beyond repair, typically Hollywood producers or studios (see also Alan Smithee). The first such work to which he signed the name was The Price of Doom, an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (though it was misspelled as Cord Wainer Bird in the credits). An episode of Burke's Law (Who Killed Alex Debbs?) credited to Ellison contains a character given this name, played by Sammy Davis Jr.

The "Cordwainer Bird" moniker is a tribute to fellow SF writer Paul M. A. Linebarger, better known by his pen name, Cordwainer Smith. The origin of the word "cordwainer" is shoemaker (from working with cordovan leather for shoes). The term used by Linebarger was meant to imply the industriousness of the pulp author. Ellison said, in interviews and in his writing, that his version of the pseudonym was meant to mean "a shoemaker for birds.” Since he used the pseudonym mainly for works he wanted to distance himself from, it may be understood to mean that ‘this work is for the birds’ or that it is of as much use as shoes to a bird. Stephen King once said he thought that it meant that Ellison was giving people who mangled his work a literary version of ‘the bird’ (given credence by Ellison himself in his own essay titled Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto, describing his experience with the Starlost television series).

And then of course, there were mine: Gene Paul (KLIQ. The Tech), Paul St. John (KVAN), Gary S. Paul (AdWeek) and Reginald A. Stuart-Smythe (The Tech). Air names were because that’s what people used to do in radio; Gary S. Paul because I wasn’t supposed to be free-lancing at the time, and The Tech because of a rule prohibiting the use of the same byline twice on a single page. And another radio name (see the bottom of the right hand column on this page), Eugene Oregon.

Comments

[Clark Smith]

I love Kurt Vonnegut's invented pseudonym for Theodore Sturgeon. Kilgore Trout.

[Clark Smith]

How could you leave out of you list Eugene Oregon? Most Bostonians didn't get the joke. [Ed. note: oversight corrected]