From November and December 2011:

This was a great post about Leo Tolstoy’s most passionate affair that almost destroyed his 48-year-long marriage.

And this one is about a very funny exchange at the library.

From May 2011:

A very short post on the hilarious problem my students had with analyzing Ortega y Gasset’s text.

And from March 2012:

A post where I poke fun at a stupid blog titled “Reasons not to go to Grad School.” For a normal person, the only reason not to go to grad school (or anywhere else) is not feeling like it, so a blog by this name had to be priceless. And it was.

In May of 2012:

I discovered why academics whine so much. That was quite a revelation.

The global used to belong to the elites while the masses had to content themselves with the local. Jet-setting all over the world, flying in oysters and caviar from across the globe, admiring Garcia Marquez if you are not Latin America and hating him if you are – those were the marks of identity of the select few. It used to be expensive and exceptional to have access to the global.

Today, the global belongs to the masses while the elites consider it chic to cultivate the local. The most expensive restaurants in the world serve only the food grown within 30 miles of them. The richer you are, the greater is your network of local artisans who provide your candles, soaps, bath salts, bed linens, writing supplies, etc. The height of chic is to be able to say, “Yes, this jewelry (dress, suit, brief-case) is by this great local designer – you won’t find it anywhere else.” It is now expensive and exceptional to have access to the local.

 

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.

I don’t even understand why we need to have a discussion about whether job interviews at the MLA make sense. The moment Skype was invented, the definitive answer to this question was given.

The MLA interviews inconvenience and disturb the lives of everybody except maybe a couple of exceptionally rich, lazy and completely lonely folks. Nobody else wants to sacrifice the last week before the beginning of a new semester to being stuck in a hotel room (even a really fantastic and free one) doing something completely useless. Several people who interviewed candidates at the MLA complained to me that there were conference talks they really wanted to attend but couldn’t do so because they had interviews scheduled back-to-back all day long. When scholars attend a scholarly conference and don’t get to engage in any scholarship, something has gone seriously wrong.

I have interviewed people through Skype as part of a search committee and at no point did I think, “Gosh, I so wish I were sitting in an enormous, loud ballroom somewhere in LA or Cincinnati surrounded by 100 tables with hundreds of interviewers and a crowd of terrified interviewees. I totally hate it that after this Skype interview is over I will go home to spend time with my husband, work on my new article, and sleep in my own bed.”

Notice that I have only addressed the suffering of the interviewers here without even touching on the much more major suffering of the interviewees.

Has anybody heard a single argument anywhere as to why interviewing cannot be conducted through Skype?

People, I know you mean well and I love you for trying to promote my wisdom among the masses. However, there is a group of people out there in the blogging world who kind of scare me. I once participated on one of their blogs, got accused of being a man, and was banished with undeserved derision. Since then, I never went back. Still, years later, people would lash out at me at completely unrelated blogs in extreme rage over that insignificant little discussion at a blog I only visited once in my life.

Another one of them (this blogger will not be named because I really, really don’t want to bring her or them here) blogs under a double name (or maybe there are two of them) and is a very angry, really disturbed individual who sometimes comes to this blog with absolutely no provocation on my part to leave scary, unhinged comments that terrify me. I’m seriously fearful of this person and really hope she (or they?) will eventually forget about my existence. I will never understand what can possess a person to keep reading a blog that enrages her to this extent. This kind of self-torture is incomprehensible to me.

These people hang out together at their blogs where I never go, and I avoid all of them like the plague. If I participate in a comment thread and see one of them there, I leave immediately and never come back. They scare me not because they write angrily or passionately (I’m obviously in no position to criticize anybody’s anger) but because I don’t understand what provokes it. In order to disagree, you need to speak the same language and share a frame of reference. With these people, though, I can never guess what provokes them and why.

I am not suggesting, of course, that people are only entitled to the kind of  rage that I can understand. Far be it from me to dictate to anybody what should or should not make them angry. All I want is not to be part of a dialogue that confuses and scares me. If I and these bloggers exist in vastly different universes, then the best thing for us is not to intersect. Nobody here is better than anybody else. We are simply too different, that’s all.

This is why I’m asking everybody to do me a favor and not link to me or mention me in any way in the presence of these people and on their blogs. I most sincerely wish them the absolute best in all of their undertakings and encourage everybody to read their blogs and discuss things with them if that’s what they want to do. I just want never to be brought to their notice, if possible.