A Short Illustrated History of Clarissa’s Blog, Part I

~ Clarissa

I have been getting many great new readers recently, so I thought it would be a good idea to acquaint them with some of the important posts that marked this blog’s glorious journey.

The first thing I did as a blogger was to set down (in really horrible writing that was my defining characteristic at that time) my reasons for starting a blog. This was pretty much a conversation that I was having with myself in the absence of any readers.

Less than a month into blogging, I shared with my yet non-existent readers a secret that I’d been hiding even from my closest friends. I felt free to do that because I knew nobody was reading the blog anyways. 🙂

In the first months of blogging, I had a regular feature that ridiculed Ross Douthat’s weekly columns in the New York Times. I eventually abandoned that series because Douthat is supremely repetitive. It was fun to laugh at him at the time, though.

And this is a post that got me banned from several blogging directories for spreading pornography. This post brought many readers who search for porn to my blog.

This post made me very famous and brought crowds of very irate folks to my blog just two months into my blogging career. Little did I know at that time that having crowds of irate consumers of weird identities will become a regular occurrence of my blogging life. Now I’m used to it but then it was a revelation. Because of this post, my blog’s obscurity only lasted a little over two months.

This early post on how to survive grad school still brings me regular grateful emails.

Yes, my writing style was very clumsy when I was a beginning blogger. This post, for example, still makes my husband laugh whenever he remembers it. I didn’t change the clumsy bits because I find that retroactive editing would be dishonest. I like to make fun of myself, too.

And with this post I became quoted on many film review websites. Which I never wanted because I’m a lousy film critic.

(To be continued. . .)

Published by Clarissa

8 thoughts on “A Short Illustrated History of Clarissa’s Blog, Part I”

  1. Thanks for this! The one on grad school was informative and reassuring (“just get the thesis done!”), and I agree completely with your assessment of American Beauty and the “andropause” genre (I’m sure everyone here is dying to know: what do you think of Fight Club?).

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  2. Don’t forget to mention homeschooling! That’s how I came here. I was in a rage over homeschooling one day and that led me to your blog! 🙂

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  3. I enjoyed the posts, thanks. But I didn’t notice any bad writing, but maybe because I am not a writer? Now I am self-conscious about my own posts. 😦

    What can I say, I am very right-brained.

    I liked the ceramics a lot, but what were most of those objects? They seemed to have handles on them, but it was hard to tell the scale.

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    1. Thank you so much, Isabel! You are very kind.

      The early posts are short and kind of stilted. I had to think over each one for hours. Now I just churn them out like crazy. 🙂

      I think the ceramics are supposed to be some kind of receptacles for liquids, but I’m not sure. I once brought my students to the Met and there was an exhibition of this kind of objects that I had been unaware of. Many of the objects were human-sized. My students had a blast while I kept imagining what their parents would do to me if they found out about that. 🙂

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      1. “Many of the objects were human-sized. ”

        Interesting. I was picturing them as very small and thought they might hold essential oils.

        In any case your students must have loved them! I remember seeing my first clear depiction of mature male genitalia on a life-size statue at the Met during an elementary school field trip. We were impressed although your ceramics are a lot more um, “impressive” 🙂

        I just had fun trying to figure out what the sculpture was using google; it was very David-like. I think this may be it (the top photo). Except that I remember his genitals as being more impressive and more erect, but maybe because we were small children (and it is actually bigger than life-size) it just seemed more impressive!

        http://rickleephoto.blogspot.com/2008/10/life-imitates-art.html

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