This really cool Stats page that WordPress provides has revealed to me that a reader is busily searching the Internet to discover what my real name is. (“Professor Clarissa Spanish literature real name” Google search tipped me off, in case anybody is wondering.)
I have no idea why anybody would have this kind of curiosity. I now follow almost 300 blogs in my Google Reader. Many of them are by anonymous bloggers. I have, however, done absolutely nothing to research what the authors’ real names are. Maybe it’s because of autism but I don’t see how it is going to benefit me to figure out that somebody I know as “Blogger John” is called “Stephen Smith” in real life.
If anybody is really dying to know what my actual name is, shoot me an email and I’ll relieve your suffering. Now that everybody at my university seems to be aware of the blog and read it, the point of the anonymity is mostly to prevent students from alighting on it by Googling my name. As I said, I don’t want my strong political opinions to impede students’s free expression in the classroom.
When / if this book of mine finally comes out, I will, of course, place it on the blog and extol its virtues, so the anonymity will be shot to hell anyways.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, the blogs I like best are pseudonymous and I like this characteristic in them. But you’ve revealed your first name, if I remember right, and your institution, so it wouldn’t be hard to figure it out. But it would slay some of the magic, so why?
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I did not reveal either of these things, actually. My university has never been named here.
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I gathered, for example, that for you, Z, remaining anonymous is important. So even though you are in my field, I will never take any steps to figure out your real name.
I, for one, don’t care, so if you know who I am, that’s fine.
If you decide to approach me at a conference one day, that’s entirely up to you. 🙂
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🙂 Just because Clarissa’s pseudonym’s a name doesn’t mean it’s her real name.
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It’s my grandmother’s name.
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When you named the part of the state where your institution is, I got excited and thought you were at the same university as me. The region does not have many universities. I couldn’t believe that I might bump into you on campus.
It turns out that you are at a university about a hundred miles away but with nearly the same name as mine. I was able to find you in under five minutes.
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This makes me sound like a movie-star. 🙂 Thank you!
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