liz penn v dana stevens

Recommended: The High Sign, the movie crit site of one Liz Penn. Normally, she writes straight (if slightly more literate than the norm) movie reviews. But here she veers into the personal, writing about a date with a man she nicknames Polevault. Why “Polevault”?
If you must know, the image springs from that moment at the height of a pole-vaulter’s jump when it looks like the athlete could go either way, suspended midway between falling and flying on that weirdly springy stick, and you just know he’s thinking, “How did this ever become a sport?” I’ve spent most of my dating career at that mid-vault moment, flexing indecisively in midair before falling backwards, and I thought this might be the guy who finally sent me sailing forward into that nice soft sandbox.
I’m feelin’ ya, Liz.
Liz Penn claims that her name is, well, Liz Penn. But is it really? A little detective work may hold the answer. First, an examination of the available evidence.
Her web site bio: “Liz Penn has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York City and writes on television for Slate.com under the name Dana Stevens.”
Her Slate stories have this tagline: “Dana Stevens, aka Liz Penn, lives in New York and writes on film and culture for the High Sign.”
In November, she wrote this at the end of a column: “Note to readers: For those of you who haven’t gotten quite enough for the week, I just published a TV review on Slate.com, under the bland WASP pseudonym Dana Stevens.”
In this review, she writes: “So some bitch named Dana Stevens is going around claiming she’s me, giving interviews on the radio and writing on television for Slate.com. It would be one thing if she was just laying claim to my intellectual property — this is the Internet, after all — but since the New Year began, jockeying for space with this WASP no-goodnik has taken up so much of my time that I’ve taken to posting the High Sign late or (in last week’s sad case) not at all.”
In the comments to that entry, she writes: “dana stevens is me, or possibly vice versa. that’s the pseudonym under which i review television at slate.com. the playful joke about the ethnicity of the name was more a comment on my (again, playful) jewish self-hatred than anything else.”
So…what’s her name? Is it Dana Stevens or Liz Penn? Some points to consider:
– She claims to have chosen Dana Stevens because it is so stereotypically WASPy, as opposed to the playful Jewish self-hatred she associated with Liz Penn.
Now, I’m not Jewish (although I’ve always secretly wished it), but is “Liz Penn” such a stereotypically Jewish name? I suppose Sean Penn is from a half-Jewish home. But William Penn was a Quaker, right?
In a pinch, I can buy “Dana Stevens” as WASPy (if only because it sounds like the name of Elizabeth Montgomery’s sister-in-law on Bewitched). But I don’t immediately think “Jewish!” when I see the name Liz Penn. So it’s a strange choice to use the pseudonym.
(A guy I knew in college did something similar — he didn’t want to appear Jewish in his articles for the school newspaper, so he used a pseudonym. [Why this was needed at a school that’s one-third Jewish has always been beyond me.] But in any case, his last name was Weinberger — a clearly Semitic surname if ever there was one.)
– Liz Penn, by its very nature, is an excellent choice for a pen name. (Get it — pen name, Penn name? Good.)
– The phone book says there are three Dana Stevenses living in New York City. Is there an Elizabeth Penn or a Liz Penn? Nope.
– In whose name is the thehighsign.net domain name registered? Dana Stevens. And the address in the domain registry matches one of the Dana Stevenses in the phone book. Giving a fake name to a domain registrar isn’t hard at all, but this would seem to indicate D.S. is the name she used with the phone company. And the telecommunications industry generally likes to see some I.D., no?
– If she really is Liz Penn and really has a Ph.D. from Berkeley, there’s probably a Google trail from her time there, right? Nope — not a hit.
How about for Dana Stevens? Tons of hits! We learn that she was winning poetry prizes as Dana, writing scholarly articles as Dana, leading discussions on Portugal’s role in modernity as Dana, translating Portuguese poetry as Dana, speaking about cinema as Dana, and getting published in The Atlantic as Dana. I doubt someone would use a pseudonym on all her academic and literary work and then write movie criticism under her own name.
– Finally, until recently, this image was her author photo on the site. What’s the file name? DanaPortrait.jpg. If she’s really Liz Penn and just uses the Dana name on non-High Sign projects, that’s an interesting choice for a file name.
I wouldn’t say the case is yet cinched. But the evidence is quite strong that it’s Dana pretending to be Liz rather than the other way around.
Why do I care? Well, I think issues of pseudonyms and anonymity are extremely interesting, particularly In These Internet Days. Why choose an alter-ego? And what of the ethnic/religious issue — why does she consider her given name too WASP? Particularly if, as she mentions elsewhere on the site, she’s Jewish?
No, really, why do I care? Well, other than the fact I have an ever so slight blog crush on Dana/Liz? Um…I’m not sure.