Luther Blissett

I really hate that it's supposedly this name that anyone can take on and it's kind of anonymous but it's A MALE NAME and I hardly ever see this commented on. It's bad enough that people so often assume you must be a man if you did something (eg some kind of artistic endeavor) unless your name is unambiguously female

oh, is he the new alan smithee?

This made me remember about a concept I like called "amalgammed identity". Basically it is when 2 or more people gets together to write as a single fictional character online or whatever. Kind of like when the power rangers combine their vehicles together to get in the Megazord mode. Wich ILXors would you like to see combined as an amalgammed identity and what would be their new name? Under wich circumstances such alliances would spring into action?

Apparently Luther Blissett has recently committed suicide in Italy for political reasons, while at the same time holding religious artifacts for ransom money to be given to the poor in the Phillipines. He has also just released a new book in Portugal.

Spectra - Don't let that get you down. How many times has the name 'Ashley' changed gender?

at the beginning a football player hired by inter fc and completely unable to score goals(real one) then a post-situationist movement with a collective name, every one could embrace it, the thing is alittle bit disappeared now best bit: luther blisset public football match with three nets and the book q which is a metaphor of the political movement of the 70`s more than an historical fiction on protestant movement in north europe.

"Luther Blissett"'s gender is incidental, S. Everyone who knows anything about it knows the original was a male soccer player, so the use of the name doesn't have a lot to do w/his orig. identity/gender. It says something, obv, that this RANDOM figure is male, but its use later, I think, doesn't.

It doesn't make any difference to my problem with it if it had been chosen at random - how does it not impact on it's use now, because the name is male-associated (yes, I realise names often change their gender identification, B, but you yrself have just referred to this supposedly neutral Luther as He). Hamish says "this debate is boring" and that I (spectra) should "get a life", because I am paying in an internet place to write this.

I was relaying what i had read, and they had used 'he.' And that was also my point about the changing gender of names. What would you use if you saw the name ashley? But I do admit, I have been somewhat brainwashed into making the gender assumption, much like most everyone I know. Spectra - 1 B - 0

is the actual Luther Blissett aware of all this?

and i was under the assumption that blissett wasnt picked at random, that there was a specific reason why he was picked, i'm sure there was something odd going on when he was in italy?

I think I'll be Luther Blissett for a while...just for kicks.

Anybody up for a pint?

Yes he is. He was interviewed in - I think - the Guardian (though I can't find it on their website) a few months back and seemed a bit baffled by it all, but took it with good humour. (Can I repeat my anecdote of how LB presented me and my team-mates with our trophy when our classic late 70s Stevenage Colts team conquered all-comers to take the Stevenage Minor League 5-a-side tournament in 1979? I used to have a big a2 poster of us lot and Luther which looks to have been lost forever)

I'm pretty sure it wasn't the Guardian (or any other national paper - I've just done an archive search). However, from the Mail only a week ago....

"FOR Jeff Powell's information, Luther Blissett is alive and kicking, as coach at my beloved York City FC. He's doing a good job, as York are a point off the play- off positions, rather than in their usual place near the bottom. M. A. TIPLADY, Haxby, York."

The Sunday Times
18 May 2003

LUTHER BLISSETT PLAYS IT AGAIN AS ANARCHIST ICON

Not even a chaos theorist could have predicted it. Luther Blissett, one time wonder of Watford football club, has become a worldwide icon of dissent, protest and revolution.

The former striker, who in 1982 became one of the first black footballers to play for England, was until recently enjoying a quiet life. Now, however, he has become the unwitting subject of a global personality cult in which his name is a byword for anarchy.

Hundreds of websites around the globe already pay homage to his name. But matters have been made worse by the publication in Britain of Q, a subversive novel written under the name of Luther Blissett.

The book, which chronicles the battles of a fictional 16th century theology student who adopts the cause of heretics, has become a bestseller in Europe.

Blissett's star shone in the early 1980s when as Watford's most prolific goal scorer he won 14 caps for England, marking his national debut with a hat-trick against Luxembourg. However, a move to AC Milan in 1983 ended in acrimony, with Italian fans taunting him with racial abuse and dubbing him "Luther Missit".

After a long decline in his career, Blissett, 45, has made a living for the past 10 years at lower division English clubs. He now scouts for Watford and Queens Park Rangers.

Friends say he is not the "anarchist type" and not amused by his new-found fame.

"He won't talk to anyone about it," said a spokesman for Watford football club.

"That would give it credence and he doesn't want any part of it."

The Blissett cult sprang to public prominence with the arrest in 1997 of four young Italians travelling without tickets on a tram in Rome. When asked for their identities, they heard the footballer's name on a radio and insisted they were all called Luther Blissett. They later (unsuccessfully) claimed in court that "a collective identity does not need a ticket".

Since then, Blissett's name has spread via the internet, graffiti and word of mouth to become an international symbol for protest and rebellion.

"He got treated in an unfair way and became a target for racism when he was in Milan, so the movement around his name was a kind of avenging thing," said Roberto Bui, one of the authors of Q last week.

The Blissett movement's successes have included prank news stories picked up by the European media. One was the "revelation" that the model Naomi Campbell was suffering from cellulite. In another move, Blissett adherents invented a three-sided version of football played on a hexagonal pitch.

Thousands of Europeans and Latin Americans have used the pseudonym to express non-conformist, collective identities on the internet. In Brazil there is even a group of radical architects called Luther Blissett.

Q, published this month by Heinemann, concerns the efforts of the Catholic authorities - including a spy codenamed Q - to infiltrate and destroy revolutionary Protestant movements in 16th century Europe. The book's hero takes on Q "in a game in which no moves are forbidden".

The book is sprinkled with gory scenes of battle and torture and is illustrated with contemporary pictures of peasants being disembowelled. Bui, 33, a former hospital porter from Bologna, explained that the novelists saw themselves as a band of authors. They used Blissett's name to express their artistic identity as a collective.

Blissett's ill-fated season at the San Siro in Milan ended in 1984 and the group that wrote Q dissolved itself in 1999. It now works under the name Wu Ming, Chinese for anonymous.

There are no signs, however, that the Blissett cult is fading. A pirate radio station in Madrid has recently adopted his name.

The book's authors insist they are not trying to embarrass Blissett. They expressed their support for him in an e-mail sent to Watford's official website.

They say of his time at AC Milan: "He was never allowed to get used to Italy. The club was a dreadful rabble of weirdos and the owner, Giuseppe Farina, was a crook."

Farina, who absconded with much of the club's money in 1986, was succeeded as owner by Silvio Berlusconi, now prime minister of Italy.

Blissett, born in Jamaica, has not spoken publicly about the movement named after him since 1999, when he was quoted as saying: "I am not pleased, but what can you do about it?"

my surname is blissett and people inevitably call me luther.

does this count?

yes, yes it does.

yay! my very existence degausses your life

fyi, there is also the "free name" Karen Eliott, which is kind of the neoist female counterpart of Blissett; though there still aren't any widely used non-gendered names..