Why The Capital N, DaN?

Why The Capital N, DaN?

Since the publication of Authentic Democracy many people have asked me why the book spells my name with a capitalised N in my first name so it reads "DaN" instead of "Dan"? I forget that there are many people who know me who will neither know the rationale behind the use of the capital letter or have ever seen me use it before, and others who have seen me use it for years but either thought it was a strange but persistent typo or never dared to ask.

It began in the late nineties, around 1998, where two things happened at once. First I started using email (yeah, that’s right, I once lived in a world without it) and therefore was typing my name more frequently than I ever had before: and second, I discovered the work of bell hooks in a sociology class and became fascinated with her use of all lower-case letters in her name. I wanted there to be some amazing activist reason for her refusal to capitalise her name but was somehow even more impressed to discover that there wasn’t, and it was just a way of differentiating her name from that of an elder family member from whom she borrowed the pen name.

As a lifelong McKee, I had always enjoyed the strange privilege of being able to add an extra capital letter into my surname when others could not, and around the same time I started signing my name to emails I was also handwriting my signature a lot in the snail mail responses to fans of my band and my ‘zine columns who wrote to me. I wanted to make my signature look “cool” (because I was a teenager and concerned with such things) so started drawing an anarchy “A” in a circle for the middle A of Dan to reflect my growing interest in anarchism. Realising I couldn’t do the same on email, but still wanting a distinct e-signature, I had seen a few anarchists using the @ sign as a replacement but it was becoming too common even then. I wanted something different and unique (because, again, I was a teenager. More: I was a punk rock teenager rebelling against anything, including traditional spelling!) so I thought why not add an extra capital letter to my first name like the one I have in my surname? It would make the lowercase “a” standout just as much as capitalising it and putting it in a circle did by hand. It would no longer be the anarchy symbol, but it would represent it and avoid being just another boring @. Plus the Crass fan in me liked the theme of “big A little a” when comparing my two sign offs. I also liked the way it looked - DaN instead of Dan - like an “a” sandwich between two interesting slices of bread. And next to the McKee, the anarchist in me also liked the symbolism of the disrupted pattern my full name now expressed: Capital letter, lower case letter, capital, lower case, capital, lower case…lower case!?!? It was simultaneously a profound symbol of my anarchist sympathies and a completely meaningless extension of the thought “what if my first name used an extra capital letter just like my surname does?”

Dan is a fairly common name. I enjoyed knowing that you would know an email or online article was by me because it would be my unique digital signature with the capital N to distinguish me from all the other Dans out there.

It didn’t quite work out as I intended. Most people just assumed it was a typo, including ‘zine editors. My long-running column in Scanner, my guest columns for Maximumrocknroll, my regular contributions to Fracture, Mass Movement, and Artcore…they would usually be printed with the traditional spelling, my obtuse N dismissed most likely as a mistake. Maybe something wrong with my computer keyboard? Even a few of my band’s releases - if I wasn’t doing the artwork myself - would be annoyingly “corrected” by most graphic designers. But it remained a staple of my typed personal communications, including text messages as digital chat evolved from desktop to phone (I have a completely unnecessary tendency to still “sign” text messages, even if part of a long chain of texts which are clearly from me), and it became almost a secret test to judge whether the people I communicated with were my kind of people or not. If they realised after one or two messages from me that it wasn’t a mistake and started spelling it DaN the right way in their responses, they got it; a sign of good character! If they didn’t…well, nothing happened but they certainly lost points in my esteem. I still remember the buzz I got when my university lecturers began using it, or unlikely elder family members.

But when I started working as a teacher, in that stuffiest of institutions, the British school, I got sick of the capital N constantly being ignored. Though I still use the anarchy A as my middle initial to this day when signing student work, letters home to parents, formal documents - your book if we ever get back to a world where people go to book shops and get things signed - professionally I, rather boringly, became “Dan” again. At first not in my non-work life, where DaN still reigned despite social media sites like Facebook not allowing the capitalisation (at least in the early days when I joined...it may be different now. I'll look after writing this...), but in the day-to-day emailing of colleagues I became "Dan"…and that soon became the norm when talking to other new people too. Old friends still got the DaN, but most new people who have known me digitally in the last eight years or so, since I finally gave in to the mundanity of normal spelling, have probably known me as Dan.

I don’t know why I signed off an early email to Paul from Tippermuir Books the old way - with the capital N? But I'm glad I did. Maybe it was just a slip of the finger on a day where I was tired? Maybe it was because we were talking about anarchism and it felt natural? But I noticed in his next reply he was using it too. I remembered that he had probably seen it on my original PhD thesis, which is how he found out about me and my work on anarchism long before he tracked me down. I had ensured it was written the right way there, before teaching crushed it out of me. So as we continued to email back and forth, we continued, without ever mentioning it once, to use the DaN spelling. When I saw it on the early proofs of the manuscript, and on the first drafts of the cover design, without my asking, I knew this was the publisher for me.

To this day we have still never spoken about the spelling and the use of the capital N in the book, but I am almost as proud of that official spelling being out there in the world again as I am of the book itself. Seeing it look so right on that beautiful cover has given me the courage to bring the capital N out of retirement even in those settings where I had formerly banished it. I’ve not written a single work email since the publication of the book without it, and don’t intend to stop using it anytime soon.

So whether it represents anarchy, fondness for a Crass song, an affinity for bell hooks, teenage experimentation, linguistic playfulness, semiotic stupidity, digital individualism, or a minor OCD trying to find some small symmetry with my lumpy, double-capitalised surname, I’m not sure anymore and I don’t even care. What it ultimately represents is me: DaN McKee. So that’s why the capital N.