Umberto Eco. (Wikipedia)
This morning is a morning of cascading ironies. One of my favorite writers is Umberto Eco. I love about half of his fiction enormously. I like his writings on semiotics, and his essays are all gems – especially the collection “Travels in Hyperreality” which includes a semiotic critique of the Madonna Inn – considered a cultural treasure in my home town which was just down the road from there. So I am reading this morning “Chronicles of a Liquid Society” a collection of Eco’s posthumous articles that he wrote for newspapers – he is noted for his humorous analysis of popular culture in that realm. There is on page 47, a discussion about email doubles and people who have registered email accounts using his name. He says the same thing has happened to Salman Rushdie and even, Dante Alighieri! He lists a few of Dante’s literary dopple-gangers. One of the addresses that he published was one of my own! I have used DanteSB@yahoo.com since the mid-90s
as a spam dump or throw-away email address. The cascading ironies around this is how I sometimes used this email address – for instance, I ran a Nomic game for instance that was based on secret societies that were definitely influenced by his book “Foucault’s Pendulum.” I created the DanteSB (which stood for “Dante, Santa Barbara”) in case I needed to put an email address on the net. Dante has always been a favorite writer as well. At the time, I saw the internet and its layers of access (gopher space, WAIS, MUDs, MUSHes, etc.) as circles of hell. So I adopted that name. Occasionally I would get email from people who thought it meant “Dante’s Beatrice” but they were to be sorely disappointed. I always wanted to meet Umberto Eco – I even emailed him in Milan on my first trip to Italy to let him know that I was in town. I can’t remember what email address I used for that. I invited him out for a coffee like he was supposed to know who I was. But at least, most finally, I made my way into one of his books posthumously, through the nether regions of the web.
