Oh my God, people, get this: I never used Google Scholar because I always suspected that nobody ever cited my research and didn’t want to have my feelings hurt by being reminded of that. But I just put my name through Google Scholar and it turns out that I’m cited all over the place. OK, maybe not all over the place, but still. People are using my research.

It’s totally cool to see people write things like “American literary scholars such as [ME, ME, ME] have analyzed [THIS AND THAT AND SOMETHING ELSE].”

I’m like seriously important now.

Reader Stille left a link to a really great article on aggressive policing that goes on in blogging communities. Here is an excerpt:

What aroused my concern was the fact that there are too many people, in the trans community alone, who feel like they are unable to call it their community and find shelter there because the tenor of discourse is so corrosive as to be just as stressful and antagonistic as the outside world. I hear this from a number of people who are close to me and have contributed mightily to activist communities with labour, art, and struggle– and I hear it from neophytes and outsiders who wish to join but find themselves put off by the rancour they hear from within.

This talented blogger is talking about the trans community but the passage works just as well if you substitute “trans” for “academic” or “feminist”, just to name the two blogging communities I’m most familiar with. I’m sure there are others.

The moment I smell even the teensiest whiff of a self-righteous tone in a comment by somebody who staggered into my blog by accident and decided that it’s a good idea to tell me to “check my privilege” or use some other equally idiotic platitude on me, I kick that loser off my blog. I’ve seen many good blogs turn into veritable cesspools where a badgered blogger keeps apologizing profusely for hurting the imaginary sensibilities of some unhinged busybody. The need to belong is so intense for many people that they can’t even conceive of telling the policing losers to stuff it.

This happens all the time on the Liberal side of the blogosphere where many people are terrified of offending the Gods of political correctness while others appoint themselves to be the enforcers of the “correct” way to worship the jealous deities. I don’t know if the same happens on conservative websites or if people feel more entitled to shut up the defenders of The Only True Way to Opine.

I have written 6, 182 posts over the years. Some of them are quite good but they were not very famous at the time I wrote them and have been relegated to oblivion since then. This is why I decided to institute a new series titled “Old Post Rescue” where these good old posts will be brought back to light. I’m sounding very lofty this morning and I have no idea why. But you get my meaning.

Here are some random posts I think deserve being revived:

1. “How Horrible, Mean Americans Destroyed the Soviet Poultry” – my response to a very offensive article about the Soviet Union’s collapse.

2. Not to be outmatched by an American colleague, a journalist in Toronto wrote this really “Stupid Article on Ukraine in Toronto Sun.”

3. Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 wasn’t nearly as popular as it deserved to be, and neither was my review of it.

4. Twitter is the best place for people to engage in extremely bad writing. In this post I made fun of horrible tweets. And here I made even more fun.

5. And, finally, “Clarissa Speak“, one of my favorite posts where I listed the peculiarities of my blogging style.

 

I have a big box of extra-long matches lying by my bed. I’m addicted to scented candles and use the matches to light them.

Recently, I noticed that holding the box in my hands and shaking it to hear the matches rustle inside makes me feel very comforted, secure, and safe. I had no idea why that was until I remembered “The Girl With Matches,” a tale by Hans Christian Andersen. In the story, a little girl freezes to death because she doesn’t have enough matches. It terrified me when I was little, and obviously the trauma is still there.

Andersen was a severely depressed fellow who wrote these really sick fairy-tales that have traumatized several generations of kids. I’m deeply convinced that Andersen’s books should be kept far away from children.