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Exposing Gypsyman
Richard Marcus
Anonymity has always been the biggest attraction of the Internet. Everyone, from pedophiles, to politicians, and movie stars has taken advantage of the opportunities provided by being faceless and unidentifiable.
You can participate in conversations about yourself or send out trial balloons about new policies without ever having to commit to anything. Unfortunately, it has also allowed predators to find easy pickings by assuming an innocent guise to trap unwary victims.
For most of us who use the Internet, our aliases have been a chance to play again. To dress ourselves in the clothes of a pretend character and assume characteristics that are amusing to us and others. It's akin to playing a giant role-playing game where the only adventures we participate in are the ones we can invent the rules to as we go along.
There's an incredible amount of freedom that you get from wearing a mask. When nobody can see your face, they aren't going to judge you by your appearance only by what thoughts you're willing to reveal. We all wear masks most days of the week anyway whether we know it or not.
There's who we are at work, whether working, or hanging out of the water cooler with our co-workers, or the way in which we are with our superiors. We slip in and out of masks so many times in a day from necessity, that it shouldn't be any surprise that the first thing we do when signing up on the Internet is create a new one.
How many sites ask you to create an identity? When I first started playing around on the Internet back in 2000, I came to computer stuff late; I would create a new identity for each site that asked for them. Of course, that meant trying to keep track of who was on which site.
After a year or two of this, I eventually calmed down and began to settle on one persona and one persona only. The first name to pop into my head that stuck and felt appropriate was gypsyman. Aside form the romantic (notice the root word of romantic is very similar to the name that gypsy's have for themselves "Roma") connotations I had a few other reasons for finding that name attractive.
My mother's family name, which I've adopted, is Marcus. Marcus is a name of Romanian Jewish descent. What's interesting about the name is that when I was doing some research on it, before I took it for my last name, was that I discovered there was a good chance it was a Sephardic Jewish name.
Sephardic Jews are those people who lived in Spain during the time of its occupation by the Moorish empire. While most of the rest of Europe was making life absolutely miserable for Jews, the moors of Spain allowed them to live in peace and with full freedom to practice their beliefs. They had to pay an additional tax for the privilege, but that was far less onerous than the continual threat of death that their brethren in the rest of Europe lived under.
But all good things seem to come an end when you're talking about Jewish history, and eventually the Christian armies began the re-conquest of Spain. In some cities Jewish people and gypsies managed to flee together and set up shelters in the caves surrounding the cities.
My mother and I like to think that her family was one of those who continued east from the caves, retreating with the Moorish empire, until they came to Romania. Perhaps they were tired of running by then, or through their new friends they were able to blend in with the gypsies until thing began to settle down.
Taking the name gypsyman as a nom de plume was my way of offering up remembrance to those brave folk who sang and danced in the caves of Catalonia in defiance of death and torture at the hands of the Inquisition. Who knows for sure if any of them made it to Romania, or even survived to get out of Spain?
I had another, more metaphysical reason for selecting gypsyman, as my appellate for the Internet. I have had to do a lot of internal wandering over the years, dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome brought on by being sexually abused as a child.
I have wandered the paths of oblivion that were offered by drug and alcohol abuse. Then I had to find my way back out of that fog into clarity. Those were fairly easy when compared to the task of wandering through the darker parts of my memory banks. Finding my way through a maze of self-loathing created out of memories of the mistreatment of friends and loved ones took all of the path finding skills that I had at my disposal.
But as the years have passed I've been discovering more and more about myself, and with help from my wife and some good doctors, I've started to discover parts of myself that I actually like. Once that happened, I realized it was only a matter of time until it I would put the old guy out to pasture.
I'm going to have to get used to it anyway, because sooner or later I'm going to be published and those books will have been written by me, not gypsyman. In fact gypsyman really doesn't do very much except hang out and look mysterious anyway, I'm the one who's done all the hard slogging to improve my writing and he's just been along for the ride trying to pick up chicks.
All right, that's an exaggeration, but the truth of the matter is that he's been getting all the recognition while I've done all the work. I'm beginning to feel like a ghostwriter for myself. As of today, that's history, gypsyman is history, and I will be taking over the writing of this space. So if I may take a second of your time and introduce myself I will let you return to your regularly scheduled programming.
My name is Richard Marcus; I'm forty-five years old and live in Ontario, Canada. I'm married and have four cats and no children and am on a disability pension. There, that should be plenty of personal detail for you to be getting on with for now. Don't worry we'll be seeing a lot more of each other from now on.
Photographs by Eriana Marcus
Richard Marcus is a long - haired Canadian iconoclast who writes reviews and opines on the world as he sees it at Leap In The Dark and Blogcritics
Sujatha
URL
March 19, 2006
08:40 AM
Richard,
Very nice to meet you. Enchantee.
deepti lamba
URL
March 19, 2006
09:03 AM
Hi Richard, gypsyman sure did impress swingingpuss with his enigmatic ways ;)
I continue to use the pseudonym- swingingpuss for my erotica writings and on BC though out of sheer lazyness and as people there know me as S.P
But I find much truth in your post. My pseudonym has been filched and used on sites I would never visit. Initially I was bugged but then realized that there was no patent to save my pseudonym and I was being held hostage by my own creation.
mrinalini
March 19, 2006
09:05 AM
do you know, I was wondering what our writers on Desicritics looked like -
drpolitics like alok nath, sakshi like moushumi chatterjee, saira like sharmila tagore, temporal like tabu, nachiketa like rahul bose, sujatha like kajol, aaman like abhishek bachchan, trooper D like mohan agashe, I get these pictures in my mind..
Aaman
URL
March 19, 2006
09:06 AM
Richard,
We're truly glad to have the pleasure of your company at whichever level of identity:)
Will you be changing your byline, or will we continue to see the gypsy's ramblings?
gypsyman
URL
March 19, 2006
09:21 AM
i'll take these in reverse order Aaman I want to be changing to Richard as the byline as well, do I just need to change my user name in profile section or is there anything else I need to do?
Mrinalini, I notice you didn't say who or what you though I would look like, or whether I look anything at like you thought I would.
Yeah I like the old guy too Deepti, but he needed to start backing off, I'm sure I won't have heard the last of him, he's a persistant bugger.
And a healthy Namste to everyone here as well, aside from the man who seems to edit 90% of my posts Sujatha, that's got to paying off a lot of karmic debt if you have any you're worrying about.
Richard Marcus
mrinalini
March 19, 2006
09:41 AM
gypsyman is a lovely pseudonym
pseudonyms show our secret desires
this one is romantic
a wanderer, cannot be pinned down, drawn to the beauty in life
in india there is a word bindaas
it means uninhibited, free, unafraid
I like that
you look like gypsyman, except with your glasseson
then you look like my brother-in-law
he is an expert in choosing wine
mrinalini
March 19, 2006
09:41 AM
gypsyman is a lovely pseudonym
pseudonyms show our secret desires
this one is romantic
a wanderer, cannot be pinned down, drawn to the beauty in life
in india there is a word bindaas
it means uninhibited, free, unafraid
I like that
you look like gypsyman, except with your glasses on
then you look like my brother-in-law
he is an expert in choosing wine
Aaman
URL
March 19, 2006
09:53 AM
G-man, just change it from your profile - and edit your bio
Rohan Venkat
URL
March 19, 2006
10:30 AM
All New Name,
Same Great Writing?
temporal
URL
March 19, 2006
12:19 PM
Richard: wonderful narration...another step to find nirvana :)
dee: no patent?....hmmmm...well, no big deal:) ... am sure there are copyright laws...besides...you are temporal, i am temporal...who isn't?:)
mrinalini: bindaas?... i thought a closer word would be banjaara
sunday morning digressions
there was once a soul...has been divided and re-divided since time immemorial...karma?
we use words...words dress us and undress us ... images are created in the mind of the reader...through them we reveal and camouflage
names are created to put a nomenclature on soul...a lazy convenience
when this moment is sufficiently past we would be dead...maybe forgotten too...six over or six under...dust or ash...and in history's maze we will be one more spec of dust on her vast shoreline
but words will live...it is their destiny
me?...have no desire to publish...maybe am not good enough...no, that is not true...khair, whatever...
temporal came into existence when some web site asked for a nick...not a name!...and have been a variation of temporal since then...have stuck to it and now it comes naturally...
more digressions On Life and Death if anyone feels like it
salaams and namaste
Richard Marcus
URL
March 19, 2006
02:06 PM
Cool thanks Aaman will do that.
Rohan, I hope so, therewise the G-man is coming right back and this idiot's fired.
Temporal, A rose by any other name is a rose, but so is cow dung and monkey urine. So what is in a name. Sometimes a descriptive item to describe contents, other times just something somebody liked at the time.
My wife no longer has any of the names she was given by her parents. She didn't like them, including her "family name" and so chose her own, the ones she wanted to be called, the ones that suited her.
A name given us in infancy really has nothing to do with us, a name we take later in life defines us as we see ourselves for as long as people remember us.
My first two names Richard Raphael are variations on the same Hebrew namd Rafool (more or less how it would be spelt and said in English I think) The first I was given by my parents at birth, and since it still works for me I've kept it, I've changed the rest to better reflect who I've turned out to be.
Of course others have thought of plenty of names to call me at various times, some of them exceedingly colourful and descriptive, but that's a entirly different kettle of fish. Perhaps at that moment I was deserving of them, in their eyes I was anyway.
Ah well, names and words truely are wonderous things.
Richard Marcus
Amrita
URL
March 19, 2006
02:11 PM
Nice to meet you, Richard.
I did the anonymous thing for about two mins myself but by the time I'd closed the browser and opened it again, I wanted my name back.
And having read this post, I'm glad you do too.
gazelle
URL
March 19, 2006
05:12 PM
hi
i'm gazelle. the identity is part of me and and brings to focus some of my writing activities
gazelle is still rolling in the wind unlike gypsyman who seems to have settled roots. congratulations.
best
Sujatha
URL
March 19, 2006
09:07 PM
Hi Richard, about the karmic debt - that's a wonderful thought and I wish it were true, but you exaggerate. Your essays are a pleasure to read through and having read many of them, any corrections that need to be made are made on autopilot at this point! Plus, you are fantastic with all the other stuff - the categories, the sub-cats, the ASIN numbers.... Having said that, thank you for your thought and you're welcome!
Finally, a minor detail - I am of the female gender.:) With Indian names the last letter of the name is usually a clue. If it ends in "a" (as in mine, Amrita), "i" (as in Deepti, Mrinalini), etc. it's usually a feminine name.
Cheers!
Deepak Sarvate
March 19, 2006
09:47 PM
Hey, why post at a South Asian blog?
Sorry, had to ask.
deepti lamba
URL
March 19, 2006
09:55 PM
Why not?
Anyone is welcome to write for Desicritics and there is much in common between Canada and South Asia, and all of us enjoy Richard's writing
Kush Tandon
URL
March 19, 2006
09:58 PM
I second Deepti, Why not?
Deepak
March 19, 2006
10:07 PM
No offense, but you are far more inclusive (or at least are eager to appear so) than white people are in the Western countries..
They give us the silent snub there, if we were to make our voice heard in their forums, in the name of their individual-freedom ..
Here we publicly debate tolerance...
BTW, my question was out of mere curiosity...why post at a South Asian blog? Do you like our chicken-tikka-masala...? just curious.
Aaman
URL
March 19, 2006
10:22 PM
Deepak, your personal experiences are not generalizable as most people who've lived in the 'West' can affirm. This seems to be in your mind, perhaps borne out of your own perceptions/experiences. Desicritics is not JUST for South Asians- and topics like books, films, culture are pretty universal. Incidentally, Richard is an ardent fan of authors like Ashok Banker, etc. so he knows more about South Asia than 'chicken tikka masala'
Further, I'll posit that tolerance discussions and racist ideologues are found everywhere, not just in the West or East - it's a Flat World after all:)
Pratyush
URL
March 19, 2006
10:24 PM
it's a Flat World after all:)
Nice.
Anil Menon
URL
March 19, 2006
10:39 PM
Hey Richard,
Great piece.
The gypsies may have been southasian. So you've another reason to be here. According to Isabel Fonseca, Indira Gandhi sent a representative to grant them official recognition as an Indian ethnic group at the Geneva Congress of the International Romani Union in 1978.
Blog on.
Deepak Sarvate
March 19, 2006
11:05 PM
Sure, Aaman, this is a forum of tolerance - I agree. And I am not a rascist - I merely see and comment, and my personal experiences are all I have.
I would still posit, it is uncommon, for a Canadian to have an interest in South Asia - not the other way around.
Tolerance discussions have started fairly recently in the US - and only on the liberal coasts. Whereas, we've tolerated them for 200 years.
If you want to discuss how Indians are perceived in the West, do a search on Google Video, do some research...if you honestly confront the mixed picture - you will see a lot of good - but also some bad
This discussion has become about race, I was merely curious.
Richard Marcus
URL
March 20, 2006
12:29 AM
Deepak:
That too me is a fair question, why would a non-Desi post at a site called Desicritics? Hell I can't even tell the gender of a person by their name: sorry Sujatha I'm on a really slow learning curve here.
I don't know what chicken-tikki-massala is, although I have a vague understanding of what massala is. But somehow or other 2/3ds of my web presence is now hosted through India. My blog is hosted via Ashok Banker's web portal epicindia, and I post at Desicritics.
When Aaman asked me to start posting here when the site opened, I did wonder what I would have to say of interest to South Asian people, I joked that since I was from South Eastern Ontario that explained everything, but I don't very much about anything to do with Desi history, culture, or whatever.
Even my connection to gypsies is tenuous at best, so that link strains the limits of credulity.
On the other hand my posts don't fit at blogcritics very well either, because so much of what I write is in direct opposition to what so many of the people I share a continent with believe. I tend to write without borders, as much as that is possible because obviously I can't help but be influenced by where I've been born and bred anymore than the next person, and even when I write about my home continent it usually feels like from an outsiders point of view.
Personaly it's all about broadening my horizons, I don't comment very much here or at Ashok Banker's group forum, but I "listen" and ask questions. I try and raise points in my posts that will provoke the same reactions.
A lot of the stuff I do are reviews of books and music that are available to everyone, and I give my opinion, within my cultural context, of what I think of it. Sure some of my subject matter may not be of much interest to everyone, but it's not in North America either, so that's no different here then anywhere else.
Although I think, perhaps, here it might be for different reasons. North Americans, if I may make a pegerotive statment, have a hard time with a mirror that is a little too accurate and so don't want to be bothered to read about certain things, or dismiss them out of hand.
Here that same subject matter might be of little interest because the foibles of North Americans are so damned obvious that it's probably boring to read about after a while.
None of that really answers your question does it, but I don't think I can. Why does anyone read or write anything, anywhere, anyway. I was led to South Asia over a year ago, because I happened to pick up a book by Ashok Banker, and get hooked on his retelling of The Ramayana.
At the time Dharma was the name of a character in a bad sit com as far as I knew (okay that's an exageration, but you get the gist) and I still can't tell the difference between Holi and Holly.
To be totally honest I would probably post anywhere they let me, I'm a writer, I want people to read what I write. I've seen my stuff show up on pages on the web where I can't read the text because I don't have the character set intstalled and I think that's cool.
I'd post anywhere anybody let me quite frankly, when my book is ready to be published, if the publisher I find is in outer Mongolia I won't care, as long as somebody is willing to publish it.
Yep that's the real truth, I'm a publishing slut, have words will publish, anywhere, anytime, anyplace, hell you don't evern have to pay me. Screw this philospophy stuff and cross cultural sharing: all that matters is that you read me...
Well maybe it falls somewhere between the two, I'll leave it up to you to figure out. It's nice to be an enigma after all.
cheers
Richad Marcus
Aaman
URL
March 20, 2006
12:33 AM
Love that bit: I'm a publishing slut, have words will publish, anywhere, anytime, anyplace, hell you don't evern have to pay me. Screw this philospophy stuff and cross cultural sharing: all that matters is that you read me..
Very glad to have you, and every writer/prospective writer. Interestingly, Deepti was just saying today how honored we are to be able to read all the writers who one could never read before the Internet, blogs, Blogcritics, and Desicritics:)
Sujatha
URL
March 20, 2006
12:49 AM
I heartily second Aaman's comment.
Richard, :)
Michael
URL
March 20, 2006
12:57 AM
Good Thoughts, good written. It seems all of us had this experience had with pseudonyms. I also begun this way, but soon changed to my real name. Why? Cause Internet is, as Richard wrote, the chance to be what we are, not what people believe we are when they see us. And, believe it or not, i am just michael, not more, not less. Thats me. But it was interesting experience, cause nobody expected some "as real as possible" person behind some nick.
@Aman: it's a Flat World after all:)
good said.
Deepak
March 20, 2006
07:09 AM
Thank you. You are welcome to post here as often as you wish...
I think we all learn something when someone asks an 'odd' question. Maybe it is precisely because the question is odd.
temporal
URL
March 20, 2006
09:34 AM
richard #23:
may the reader be with you:)
Sujatha
URL
March 31, 2006
03:16 AM
Richard, I've linked to this post in my article on Identity (http://desicritics.org/2006/03/31/002013.php).
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