the parodist
‘Who has not heard at Paris of her that caused her face to be flayed only for the fresher complexion of a new skin?’
— Michel de Montaigne, ‘That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends on the Opinion we Have of Either’ (1580)
When we asked what brought her to the internet in the first instance, she could only reply that it had always been there. At six, her parents had been the ones who helped her to set up her first profile on a social network for kids. She immediately linked herself to her entire class at school. The links were reciprocated, but even at that age she was selective about those with whom she would exchange messages. Later she archived that profile, as with everything she created, but she would not respond to our questions about it. ‘I have not looked at any of those old things in years,’ she said to us, ‘and I have no intention of ever doing so. It is all in me anyway so what do I care,’ she said.
At thirteen, she created another blog named after her dog (a Chow Chow named Cardashian because she preferred the letter C to K) and there she uploaded low quality photographs of herself and her friends at the mall, in class at school, at the food court. She thought it very amusing to take candid photos of people unaware and post them on the internet. Since she could not resist telling the other kids at school whenever she took a particularly funny photo, the blog became notorious in their little circle. When her teachers found out, they were not happy. The school threatened to suspend her if she did not take the blog down. But her parents were not angry. Secretly, they were delighted. They saw this as an early manifestation of an entrepreneurial creativity which had marked out those who they regarded as the most talented (and wealthy) of their generation.
When we asked her why she thought taking photographs of people and posting them on the internet without their permission was a good idea, she said: ‘I saw something different in people when they didn’t know I was watching.’
She did not take Cardashian offline. She set it to Private, so that it could only be seen by her. This, too, was archived. But it was not long after she made it inaccessible that she began keeping a video blog on another website. She had recently acquired a laptop with a built-in camera, and every evening she would sit with it in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, dictating her thoughts and hopes and fears in video clips which would often last up to half an hour. Watching these now is not a task for the impatient; her sentences run on and merge into one another, forgoing grammar and sense, and her explanations are often entirely composed of irrelevant details, non sequiturs and opaque, incredible metaphors.
She was at an awkward age. She told us that speaking had felt easier for her than writing. She never edited nor reviewed her clips once they had been filmed – she simply uploaded them to the website and fell asleep with her computer stowed under her pillow. ‘And the next day I would forget everything,’ she said.
It surprised her to learn that people she did not know had found her videos on the internet. Some had posted appreciative comments, while others were rude about her voice or her looks (mainly her looks). Somebody posted a remix of her which made it look like she was saying some very unpleasant things about herself. She would not tell us what things she appeared to say in the video (which we have been unable to find online). She only said they were ‘unrepeatable’.
Again, word got back to school about her video blog. A boy with unrequited affections for her had found it while doing a deep search on her internet presence. When she rejected him, he sent a link to the blog around the school with a cruel and entirely invented comment about her sexual preferences. Again, she was forced to render all her entries inaccessible. Socially, she did not recover until she left school for college.
She told us that though she wasn’t aware of this at the time, her parents had always known about the video blog. It was not unusual for her mother to sit up late in bed with her tablet, listening intently to her daughter’s quiet voice through earbuds while her husband slept alongside her. They did not ask her about it for fear that she would stop posting.
When she left home for college she found herself spending a lot more of her time at a computer. She wanted to write something and put it on the internet, but she was no longer interested in blogging about her own life. It was, she thought, not very exciting compared to the lives of others. Most days she spent working indoors and looking out of the window.
One night she set up a blog called Parisian Walkways. We asked her why she had called it that but she said she couldn’t remember. It purported to be the blog of Estelle, an English exchange student living with her French boyfriend in the city of the same name. It was mostly text, garnished with the occasional photograph culled from an obscure corner of somebody’s long-forgotten photoblog. Since she could not write much about the city without betraying her lack of knowledge, she settled instead for describing Estelle’s daily routines in minute detail.
She had very particular ideas about what made Paris special as a city. A lot of black coffee was drunk and a lot of pain au chocolat consumed. There were stories about how she had met her boyfriend (romantic and incorrigible) in a bistro, how he had seduced her between glasses of Prosecco and phrases picked out on his classical guitar, how they walked by the Seine, rode the Metro to Montmartre and Notre Dame, and took the last elevator of the day to the top of ‘La Tour Eiffel’ to view the city by the light of ‘La Lune’.
Nobody much wanted to read this. She lost interest in writing Estelle when she ran out of ways to describe a life that became precisely as dull as she imagined it to be. Estelle left her boyfriend – apparently, like all Frenchmen, he could not be trusted with the opposite sex – left Paris, and went back to somewhere called ‘Middlesboro’. The blog remained online and only attracted a certain small fame in later years when the identity of the author became common knowledge. Would-be detectives visited the dead site in their hundreds and left comments discussing the implications of Estelle’s actions, advancing theories as to how they might relate to the true events of the author’s life. Many claimed that the characters she’d created were portraits of people she’d known at college, but she refused to comment on or verify these claims for us.
Her next experiment in blogging coincided with her first full-time job out of college. She worked late shifts as a sub-editor at a local paper, a dull occupation which mainly involved pulling stories off the press wires and sifting them into something resembling a house style.
We suspect that it was while ‘surfing the blogosphere’ at work that she came up with the idea for Claudia. Nobody knows where she got the photographs from that became such a part of her appeal. No-one ever stepped forward to claim that they were the original of Claudia, and image searches turned up no results for the photo copied out of context. Some suggested that the author paid a girl she knew in real life to send her pictures of herself in various poses, but no records of any such transactions can be found. We have asked many times and she refuses to be drawn on this point.
It is now generally agreed that the photos were a major part of Claudia’s appeal. ‘People on the internet, they like looking at pictures of people they don’t know,’ said Internet Expert Dr Smorgenstern, in his recent TV documentary on the subject. ‘And what has always surprised me about this is that these people who are internet famous don’t even have to be attractive. In many cases it’s better if they’re not attractive. Because women, you know, even though they spend a lot of time looking at really beautiful women – they do not always like this! It makes them uneasy about themselves. Better if they see somebody who has a habit of picturing themselves as other women do – which is to say, sometimes they are gorgeous, sometimes they are a little disheveled, sometimes they just want to hide their face altogether. But always they are worth a photo. If you are a woman, there’s no state in which you can’t be photographed on the internet and score a hit, or ten thousand. Except maybe when you’re on the can. And even then! And even then.’
Claudia, while not (in Smorgenstern’s words) a ‘classic beauty’, did at least have ‘the advantage of being much more attractive than the author of her blog!’ The question of whether the photographs of Claudia sitting or standing or reclining in various poses and states of undress in front of the camera came before or after the accompanying written entries remains to be answered. Some have gone so far as to question whether the same author wrote Claudia’s words at all; given that she plagiarised the body of a woman to take her place in over two hundred JPEGs, why not steal somebody else’s writing too?
Most of Claudia’s early posts revolved around things that had happened to her as a child or in her adolescence. There were stories of her childhood in an unnamed midwestern state, of kindly aunts and weekend boyfriends, of old pets and how they died, of high school friends and what happened to them, of her body and how it changed. A close textual reading reveals that most of her entries were centered around anecdotes which contained at least one moment of epiphany, three thoroughly self-critical descriptions, two little inside jokes, and a faintly self-congratulatory conclusion. It was formulaic, but there was an impulsive flourish in her style, reminiscent of the Beat writers, that her readers found appealing; especially when combined with a dramatic, flirtatious image, such as the much-copied one which found Claudia leaning in the doorway of a suburban house at night, part-obscured behind a screen door, her shoulders given an otherworldly glow by the dim light from the hallway behind her.
Though Claudia had developed a small following of regular readers, the author was again running out of ideas for new posts. There could only be so many anecdotes to tell, and since nothing was happening in the author’s life, she could not conceive of much more happening in Claudia’s life. It was for this reason, she told us, that she had to introduce James. In what was perhaps her most honest and coherent statement on the matter, she said: ‘People have to believe in their own deliverance.’
James first appeared in a public comment (posting as ‘J’) on an entry in which Claudia described a night of driving to see her cousin one night the previous week. She had driven for half an hour in deep snow before realising she’d left the house still wearing her pyjamas under her outdoor clothes (‘but whatever’). An encounter with a gas station attendant with an unusually roving gaze prompted a meditation on the nature of authority in public space and her right to security from such unpleasantness. The author then took the step (borrowed, some argued, from the conceits of certain TV soap operas) of introducing James as an antagonist critical of our heroine’s firmly-held conceits about gender relations. James wrote:
Hi, this is J. Long time reader first time commenter. I just thought you should know I know the guy you mentioned a little. He’s an ok guy. You shouldn’t assume those things you said about him. even if he does seem like a creeper. He’s bored, he’s single, he works nights. You’re a looker. Have a little empathy.
Having said that I will be happy to drop by one night and kick his ass.
You’re welcome.J.
This comment provoked a storm of discussion as to whether the particularities of any man’s circumstances gave him the ‘right’ to look at a woman in a way that made her uncomfortable. There was no consensus reached, but James did at least end up apologising in a way that avoided any real admission of guilt on his part.
Claudia’s posts began to reference him obliquely as ‘my local correspondent’, suggesting that he lived in a neighbouring town without ever venturing into specificities of location. The first her readers saw of him was in a photo posted without comment of her sitting alongside a young man in the window booth of a roadside diner. Both were sipping milkshakes from straws, her strawberry, him chocolate. He was good-looking, perhaps a little older than her. Some of her readers were surprised by the colour of his skin and expressed their incredulity in the comments, none of which she deleted. She told us she thought they made him seem more real to her.
(Later, a more critical readership would cite this photo as evidence of a conspiracy between the author and her two characters. They pointed out that the angle of the photo suggested that a third party had to have been sitting in the booth opposite and holding the camera across the table for it to have been possible. She has never addressed these claims to our satisfaction.)
Claudia’s relationship with James bloomed in public. Their photos became more intimate: here they were walking through the woods near her home, the sunlight through the trees casting them in a romantic fantasy of the author’s own making; there they are sharing fruit loops and black coffee on the couch, him reading the New Yorker, she in boy shorts with her hair in bangs and her legs crossed across his lap. He was rarely mentioned by name in her writing, but he became a presence, usually referred to as ‘bf’ or ‘him’, or by his nickname, ‘the dog’.
For a while, they seemed happy. Claudia posted less frequently, and when she did she only posted photographs of her with James. As she explained in one of her lengthier missives, they were busy together all the time, and his near-constant presence meant that writing ‘a daily emotional weather report’ just became an impossible chore. She told him everything, and so to tell the internet all that and more would feel like a betrayal of sorts because there was nothing she wanted ‘you’ to know that ‘he’ hadn’t already heard. Once or twice she did write something stark and unexpected, perhaps to give the impression they’d had a fight, but for the most part this was a happy time in the tone of her blogging.
The tip jar appeared on the site shortly after Claudia announced that she was leaving home to be with James. In a post entitled ‘the rent’s still too damn high!’ she announced she was moving to his apartment in a neighbouring town, which meant she’d have to give up her job as a teaching assistant in the local primary school. ‘And basically, we could use a buck or two,’ she wrote, adding that she hated to ‘beg’ but she spent a lot of ‘unpaid’ time on this site ‘to bring you my love’. She urged her readers to show their appreciation by making a small ‘donation’.
And, while the author of Claudia was still make a comfortable income from her sub-editing work, still living alone in the same quiet condominium as she always had, the ‘donations’ began to roll in. Most were only a few dollars, but one or two were much larger – one anonymous benefactor gave her $500. She expressed her effusive thanks in one entry even while warning in another that she wasn’t promising anything in return for said money (‘no nudie pics!!’).
It was around this time that the parody blog appeared. ‘Deconstructing Claudia’ took each of her posts and subjected it to a merciless dissection. Both her style of writing and of living were taken apart and put back together in a grotesque register. But as its anonymous author made clear, the intention wasn’t only to mock her – from early on Claudia was branded ‘a liar’ and ‘a thief’. At this point there was no implication that Claudia was herself the invention of another writer. It seemed like the ‘Deconstructor’ had an obscure grudge of their own to play out, but it was impossible to detect a motivation from the fragments written outside of parody.
Claudia’s fans tried without success to trace the parodist back to a real individual. Claudia herself claimed not to be troubled by it. Her blog was experiencing a surge in traffic, and she seemed to ignore even the most offensive comments left by the trolls who now frequented her threads. She and James had moved in together, and she’d found a regular job as a nanny for the young child of a local couple. Photos of her with a charming, wide-eyed baby boy followed. She wrote that she was happier than she’d ever been. Breathless, she wrote: ‘I am no longer a small town girl but a grown woman and I believe I am so much the better for that.’
It was then that Deconstructing Claudia began to post a series of photographs of the principal subject with a man who was not James. She and her unidentified companion were pictured together waiting in line at a movie theatre, eating fast food in the darkened parking lot of a drive-thru restaurant, and leaving a fashionable bar, their arms laden with bags of shopping from designer stores. The parodist gave no explanation for these images, which appeared to have been taken with a powerful DSLR from within a stationary car.
Some of Claudia’s readers did not believe it could be her, arguing that the image was too blurry, or that it had been doctored to add her face or replace James with another man. Others, self-proclaimed experts, studied the photos and asserted that they were unmodified. At first Claudia refused to write about it, until the level of comments about it on her blog became (in her words) ‘ridiculous’ and ‘offensive’. After a long preamble to the affair, in which she announced that she was only writing this because James (‘who totally trusts me’) had asked her to, she gave her answer to the parodist’s supposed scoop: a webcam photo of herself pulling a face while slurping a slushie from one hand and giving the finger with the other. James could be seen standing in the room behind her: he too was slurping a slushie, flipping the bird.
Needless to say, many of Claudia’s regular readers were not completely reassured by this show of solidarity, especially since the photos of her and the mysterious stranger kept appearing on the parody blog. Finally, a group of her fans decided to establish once and for all the truth behind the allegations. They began by cross-referencing the timestamp on the parodist’s photographs of Claudia with her mentions of what she had done and where she had been on or around those same days. They found that for the most part, Claudia had no other alibi for the exact times at which she’d been pictured with the stranger. But given that her posts had been fewer and further apart since moving in with James, this was hardly surprising, and ultimately inconclusive.
They began to dig further. They managed to locate online most of the places pictured both on Claudia’s blog and on the parodist’s site, and they marked these on a map. Then one of the group, who happened to live in the same state, offered to drive down to the town for a weekend to ‘scout out’ these locations, in case Claudia appeared. None of the group asked the scout what they would do if they saw Claudia. Perhaps it was taken as given that they would not approach her.
Despite making a tour of all Claudia’s favourite haunts, including the building which the group had pinpointed as her probable home (a deduction made by guesstimating the distance to and bearing from the spire of a local church, visible from a window in an old photograph on her blog) the scout could not find Claudia. The group found this surprising. They decided to do a little more digging and found more which surprised them: the account into which the tip jar paid was registered to a bank in another state, in the same region which sometimes routed her IP address.
The group wrote to Claudia with these and other findings. They asked politely if they might meet with her in a public place to ‘discuss their concerns’. Claudia did not respond for a week, then Replied To All with a curt, one-word response: ‘no.’
Still they did not give up. They contacted the parodist. Some in the group felt this to be a betrayal of Claudia, but they were outvoted by the rest. Most already felt like Claudia showed no affection for them. They emailed the parodist with their evidence and theories. The parodist’s response was swift and unexpected – the address of a house in another state. The state of the IP address, the bank account. The home address of the author.
What happened next was told and retold in the mainstream media for the next month. Given how unpopular the author was for that brief time, we find it astonishing how quickly the internet forgot about her again. A picture of the author leaving her house in tears, trying to shield her face with a newspaper which also bore her face, was published internationally across hundreds of outlets. After she repaid all the money ‘Claudia‘ had taken in ‘tips’, the group dropped all charges of fraud.
Claudia and her Deconstruction remain online, for the curious. One theory is that the author of Claudia was also the parodist; no evidence of this has yet emerged, but then neither has any explanation of how the parodist would have come by her home address. We asked her about this. She said: ‘I got sloppy.’
Some have argued that there is a continuous, semi-conscious narrative thread woven through all of her writing. They say that even across all the different blogs she inhabited, she was expressing a deeper truth about herself, even while she actively misled her audience as to her real identity. But no watertight thesis has yet emerged as to what this secret story might be — nor, might we add, does anything resembling a ‘real identity’ transpire from the tale as commonly told.
We asked her whether she thought that the ubiquity and anonymity of the internet meant that establishing the true self of any given individual had been made more difficult than ever before in human history. She said: ‘I wasn’t exceptional. I was just lucky.’
