I don’t know why everybody says that blogging is dying. My readership grows every year even though I stopped promoting my blog anywhere and almost never comment on other people’s blogs. (There is simply no time for that any longer). Really amazing new readers have joined the blog in 2013.
The greatest change that has taken place on my blog is that the readership has consolidated, retaining only the people of exceptional intellectual caliber whose every comment is valuable. It took a few years (and some banning) but we now don’t have anybody here who is not on our shared wavelength. We disagree but in a way that enriches us all and creates priceless discussion threads.
Quite a few people visit this blog not so much to read my posts as to follow the comments of their favorite commenters. I don’t mind that in the least even if it takes the form of “OMG, that scarily smart woman from Zimbabwe / the funny American guy in Poland / the brilliant English prof / the talented Canadian physicist / the hilarious British lady / that cool dude from South Africa, etc. is THE BEST THING ABOUT YOUR BLOG!”
I honestly have never come across a blog with such uniformly great readers. When I first started blogging, I was sure nobody would want to read this blog, so I’m obviously happy about how things developed. Altogether, there have been about 2,000,000 hits on the blog since it was founded on April 1, 2009.
Here is a report WordPress prepared for us (disregard the number of comments by individual readers. WordPress always attributes anonymous comments to random people it happens to like):
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 650,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 28 days for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
Clarissa's Blog 
Wow! In almost ten years my blog has had six human readers of which two are my parents.
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🙂
Yours a seriously amazing blog. You have probably been too busy to promote it.
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No, I actually have spent a lot of time trying to promote it in the last decade. Nothing I do has increased its readership.
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Well, at least you now have 7 human readers. 🙂
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Let’s keep discussing the literary genres, and start with talking about postmodernism.
Also, let’s discuss Ukrainian literature – maybe not modern literature but Ukrainian classics.
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The problem is that there is almost no Ukrainian literature available in translation, so any post I write on the subject will have to be along the lines of, “I can’t prove it but I promise it’s great.” 🙂
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It turns out that there is a class on Ukrainian literature in translation at UofT: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~tarn/courses/228-read.html
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I trust your good taste and I am fascinated by the politics of translation. I would like to read a list of Ukranian novels that should be translated, and why.
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I would LOVE to hear more about Ukranian classics.
Your views on US academia are always well pondered. I obviously look forward to reading more of them.
I am also sure that you will have lots of insightful comments on Russia and the FSU this year.
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I especially appreciate the posts in which you comment on customs, language, practices, ideas, etc. you encounter there, from the point of view of someone who has lived in different countries, cultures, and languages.
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Sorry, I’m a little slow today. Where is “there”?
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Happy 2014!
The biggest wish for the blog is for you not be afraid to voice your thoughts, no matter how controversial and unpopular they may be. Not shy away from any interesting subject, except the ones that are too private or could harm you in “the real world.”
Of course, I always love to read your posts about Middle East, life in USSR, feminist issues or reviews of interesting books, especially on the above topics. 🙂
Lately, I have been thinking about today’s Jews in Europe. In one academic article, which I don’t have here, was described a case of a German Jew, who immigrated to Israel in (~) 2000, because German Neo-Nazis and muslim immigrants left excrements near his shop. I tried to search and found so far only a quite good interview:
“Germany is flat-out ignoring the threat of neo-Nazism, argues author and journalist David Crossland. With his debut novel, a gripping and violent political thriller, he hopes to shake the country awake.”
http://www.dw.de/germany-must-wake-up-to-neo-nazi-threat/a-17100205
AND
“Journalists and info centers believe the number of those killed by right-wing extremists is double the official figure. After the shocking mistakes of the NSU murder investigations, old cases are now being re-examined.”
I don’t know enough about the topic, and would love to hear your opinion and information, if you have any.
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“The biggest wish for the blog is for you not be afraid to voice your thoughts, no matter how controversial and unpopular they may be. Not shy away from any interesting subject, except the ones that are too private or could harm you in “the real world.””
– Amen to that, sister! 🙂
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I’m sure your blog will continue to be awesome in 2014. I don’t really comment all that much, but I read all your posts and I love them all in ways that may not be healthy. If your blog posts were men I would TOTALLY MARRY all of them. Even the one with the personality test about trees.
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“If your blog posts were men I would TOTALLY MARRY all of them.”
– THIS IS THE BEST COMPLIMENT I HAVE GOT IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Thank you.
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Congrats on your great success! I started my blog same year, 2009, and hAve accrued 56,000 views, compared to your 2 million. I think a lot of people are interested in your opinionated posts about academia, and also in your unusually international perspective. Keep going!
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Thank you, John! Do consider promoting your posts in my self-promotion threads. people need to hear what you have to say!
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Not a content suggestion, but I very much miss the ‘Older Posts’ link on the bottom of the page. Easier to click on it when you’re catching up on a bunch of posts at a time (as is the case with me these days) rather than going to the side bar and clicking on the calendar.
Happy New Year!
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Right above “16 thoughts on “2013 in Review and Blogging Suggestions” there is an arrow and a title of the previous post. That might be helpful.
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Found your blog early last year when one of your “link encyclopedia” posts linked (negatively!) to a blog post in which I had a hand and I followed the pingback. I glanced over the blog, enough for the fact that you had some posts about autism to lodge in my brain, which is why I came back to it this fall when I had a student who I suspected was autistic and I came looking for insight. I found lots of other interesting stuff and started following the blog more regularly. I pretty much always agree whole-heartedly with the teaching posts (and enjoy reading about your methods), disagree with about 50% of your views on the state of academia, and find the multilingual international perspective invariably thought provoking. Even when I profoundly disagree with you, I learn a lot from thinking through my disagreeement. Keep on keeping on!
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It totally pays off to bark at posts aggressively! I got some of my best readers this way. 🙂
Thank you, my friend. We don’t have anybody here who is in complete agreement with anybody else. That would make for a boring blog!
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How sweet. 🙂
I’m not so much inspired to write very much these days, or to engage deeply in intellectual activity, until I have opened up a new project and have found a way to become fully involved in it. Christmas and New Year were kind of deadening for me. All my family seem way more financially successful than I, although I do not envy their lives. I’m kind of very, very stuck, it now seems to me, although this realization has been quite new and comes as a result of having finally and definitively resolved some issues. I have all the answers I want now, which means no more of the intellectual hunger, at least for the time being. One of the discoveries I have made is that I simply don’t like modernity too much — which is to say I recoil from anything too polished and smooth. I don’t like being able to anticipate what is coming before it arrives. But that is, in a way, the modern ideal, to be able to plan and prepare for anything to the point that there are simply no surprises, or no earth-shattering ones. But other people’s instincts — including those of my family — have been developed on the basis of a need for stability. Consequently, there will always be misunderstandings and talking at cross-purposes until I can get myself into a stream that is really wild indeed.
In the mean time, I seem to have learned to defend myself quite a bit by means of Socratic dialogue. I can keep people at arms’ length this way, which does and doesn’t suit me. I like that method as I don’t need anything from anybody modern,, but it also feels a little cold at times. Then again, it is what most people are used to, I think, in the sense of being cold-handled and treated like machines. As an aside, one of my many failures has been in trying to find what is “in” people in the sense of an adventurous spirit, and not finding anything there. I should have learned the first time about this absence, but I kept repeating the experiment, because I couldn’t really believe that such differences existed between them and me. And, don’t get me wrong, I have found a few shamanic types through my online communicaton, and hopefully enough to seed a new project as a historical trend. I can always hope for that.
But actually I am really bored now, or as the Japanese would say, because they confuse active and passive tenses, “boring”. And I feel a bit annoying.
It’s like all my likes and dislikes have become more sharply defined. And the sun flipped over too, for another eleven years, which may or may not be relevant, but I feel that something happened to my mind. I’m maybe joking at this point.
In any case…
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This is kind of unrelated. But, what is your opinion of Shimmer Chinodya? I just purchased his Harvest of Thorns yesterday.
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Never read him. But so far as I am concerned there are two camps of writers in the world. I am oversimplifying a little but I think this helps to clarify what seems to happen. There are those who write from the perspective of the assumption that identities are good, that they are consistent and morally defined in almost an apriori way. One has ideals, which may be disappointed, but one battles through. Then there are those who write as if they don’t know what their identities are; they feel themselves to be just an open eye looking out onto the world. This affords them a very wide perspective on ethical and political issues.
I find it very hard to read books from the perspective of those who have a closed identity, because they alienate me politically. I see what they are saying, and yes, lives are tough and the world is harsh, and people are manipulative and awful and do the wrong thing. But I also feel that my own life has been in many ways unnecessarly tough and manipulated. So I can’t produce the reaction that may be expected — that colonials are/were evil and non-settlers automatically authentic or good.
I think the better writers avoid making us think in overly simplistic terms. Their writing is harder to read, certainly more painful, but it’s more real. If I want to know how it felt to be on the other side of the war, growing up, I read Marechera’s HOUSE OF HUNGER. Self-righteous people disparage the writer for his madness and his wildness, but the truth is they want a docile, Christian nigger whom they can poke and prod at: “show us your wounds!”
Marechera, rather, makes you feel his wounds, as does the writer of WHITE MAN, BLACK WAR. This gets beyond the narrow moralizing tendency that satisfies superficial people as it bolsters their sense of identity and so gives them something cheap at the writer’s expense.
If you want to know what the war meant for the people in it, you would do well to try to understand these more complicated writers. But this is exactly what Ango-Saxon readers do not want to do, as it spoils their nice view of there being good and evil in the world, along lines of well-delineated identities.
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Detailed review of the steam pod please 😉
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Happy New Year Clarissa and congrats on 2 million hits! Very well deserved.
It’s all due to your engaging lack of fear about saying what you think and your eclectic range of topics and interests. Plenty of bloggers don’t stray beyond their immediate, confined enthusiasms – this includes me!
Can’t exactly say what I’d like to see more of, it’s the variety which keeps me coming back. I comment when I have time/space in my brain. I don’t always agree with you, but where I don’t agree your argument often make me consider my position a bit more carefully.
Your discussions on use of and difference between languages – English, Spanish, Ukrainian etc – have been particularly interesting. Here’s more power to your elbow! (that’s a toast in the UK, I don’t know if it’s used on the other side of the pond!)
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Thank you! And thank you again for the beautiful elbow toast. 🙂
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I would be interested in your take on this article?
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303997604579240022857012920
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The interview was either transcribed incorrectly or this woman doesn’t have all her marbles together. Women should be more womanly by wearing androgynous jackets and slacks? That just makes no sense. And it’s all like that. Every sentence contradicts the one right before it. Weirdness.
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