Speaking of hard-to-find customer service phone numbers, I've finally tracked down the number for the Houghton, Michigan Greyhound bus station:

(906)-483-0093

I'd almost given up hope. No one at Greyhound Customer Assistance or my local Chicago station was answering the phone — I'm tempted to call the Chicago station again while I'm there, just to see what they do when the phone rings — and the two Houghton Greyhound numbers I found on the Internet, (906)-483-2370 and (906)-337-5515, were both disconnected.

Did I give up? Nay.

I did what I thought I'd done already and navigated my way through the menus at 1-800-231-2222 until I found a living, breathing human being to talk to. She gave me the local number, and the guy at Houghton confirmed that the Greyhound bus is rarely if ever delayed coming into town.

Which is to be expected. Houghton can deal with snow, the highway will be ready for me. It boggles my mind whenever I read about a few inches of snow shutting down some huge metropolis.

I ship out next Friday for Matt's pseudo-graduation from Michigan Tech (they have a week of school to go after the ceremony) and from there to Xmas break.

And everything will be done by then, yes...

This bread I made out of old fruit cups and some cranberry juice from my emergency Sex on the Beach supply is not all I'd hoped.

Today's lesson: be patient when trying to clabber pasteurized milk with lemon juice. If you don't understand the word "clabber," carry on.

Part of being a good cook seems to be knowing when things taste bad, and my sense of taste is terrible. There have been a few occasions, when, incredibly hungry, I've tasted something spectacular and marveled at what my taste buds are capable of — I once had something close to a religious experience with a Burger King chicken sandwich — but most of the time I'll eat just about anything.

Only my hearing and my sense of smell seem to be any good. My kinesthetic sense isn't so much great as enjoyable. I've got a dull sense of touch (my mom says I burned myself on a heater when I was a child) and vision poor enough to be lucrative. Colors and measurements are largely a mystery to me. As much as I'd like one, I don't have a writerly eye.

Do I have a writerly anything anymore? I worry that the program here has destroyed my confidence in my writing; maybe it's even ruined my writing itself.

That's not to say, of course, that I don't think the advice they've been giving is good. It's just that the whole 'breaking me down to the level of an infant' thing that was supposed to prepare me for a new, more analytic writing style took so long that, here at the end of the term, there's still a lot of building back up to be done.

I can't tell when I'm writing a good essay anymore. I've been warned against narrating and summarizing so often that my essays have become abrupt, choppy, and disordered. It's actually vaguely reassuring for me when an essay seems like the worst thing I've ever written, because I know I'm still tied to the old claim-support-explanation system I learned in high school, used all throughout college, taught to other students as a tutor...

Prof. Weiner has given me a packet on these new standards to read through. I don't doubt that this mindset is useful after seeing how it applies to biography, but if I'm going to learn this, I'd like to learn it and get back to making my writing something I can actually be proud of.

Really it's just good to be done with the last of them for now.

I thought I'd have more to write but there isn't much to be said about this Thanksgiving break. It was a bit boring, though Thursday night I hung out with Jenna and Adam and Adam's girlfriend. I'm pretty sure we decided that we liked her a while ago. We played pool on the snooker table and I was terrible.

I used to be good at pool, I swear. Or at least luckier.

One thing I realized is that all of my friends from Brainerd seem to be in relationships now, have been for months, actually.

It's probably happened before when I was out of touch or didn't notice. I guess should be having some sort of crisis but I'm too tired and too apathetic to get worked up. It makes me feel young, is all. Do I need to be more mature? Would that make a relationship a higher priority?

Too easily contented. I'm complacent; it's very relaxing.

Friday and Saturday seem like a waste, in retrospect. I could have started my Creative Nonfiction assignment or that final essay instead of watching TiVoed episodes of Law and Order. I can't watch reruns of that show, it's good to know that someday I'll be done with it.

Matt and I spent many hours researching the divide between naive camp and deliberate camp on TBS. They seem to pair the movies up that way.

Taking full advantage of my parents' cable, I also watched the terrible Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. My dad was under the impression that few kids our age have heard of the original, much better movie, which I think we saw several times in school. For my part, I was amazed to find him crediting my factitious speculation that the book was a novelization of the first movie.

I also saw the new Harry Potter movie at the Brainerd theater with my mom. I've never read any of the books straight through, and it was very weird seeing the ten pages I once read in a dentist's office on screen. It was a pretty good movie, actually.

Getting back was a bit of an odyssey, mainly because I refused to take a cab and... I haven't gotten a good night's sleep since Friday, it's time to catch up.

So this essay isn't too bad. The paragraph I've written so far, anyways. I had two very long train rides during which to think about my topic, which might be why I feel more prepared than usual.

Of course, my confidence is predicated on the assumption that there's a typo in the question I'm answering. If there isn't, I'm in serious trouble. So the working thesis is that Jandace are lying to me for some reason.

I forsee a procrastination-induced late night.

How is that the writers of increasingly interesting series Invasion can use the word "necropsy" correctly but haven't done the ten minutes of research it would take to make Russell's paranoid brother Dave sound like an actual blogger?

Dave might be television's first audioblogger, but his isn't the first blog on television. Grampa Simpson and Homer and Arrested Development's Uncle Oscar have all had webpages that might be referred to as "blogs," and there might be even more blatant blogging on some show I've never seen.

Did the Lone Gunmen ever turn to a webpage to get their information out?

In 2005, blogging is not a startlingly new concept, and Dave's blogging is a major part of his character and not merely some one-shot joke as in the comedies mentioned above. So why does he talk like he doesn't have a clue what he's doing?

He just told Larkin he was "getting his blog out." That gave me a moment's pause.

More irritating is his habit of referring to his audience as "bloggers." As in, "Hey bloggers, it's Dave." That's how he begins every audioblog, with the assumption that everyone with Internet access is a blogger.

It's what Susan Sontag would have called "camp." I read and recommend her short essay Notes on "Camp", which I was forced to read for class. An attempt by ignorant writers to speaka the 'net, Dave's blogging is naive camp, the more enjoyable form.

Sontag also thinks you can intend to make camp; I'm still trying to figure out to what extent deliberate camp (e.g. the movie Josie and the Pussycats, the Fettes Brot song "Nordish by Nature," or my decision to title this webpage "Dan's Webpage") is synonomous with satire.

Also: the menu on the train had a "soft beverages" section, and the Amtrak toilet encouraged me to toss my "refuse" elsewhere. Who says these crazy things?

We're supposed to write a memo for sociology on the "bobos" aspects of our Thanksgivings, on the assumption that David Brooks is right.

My Thanksgiving was thoroughly traditional. Cranberries, stuffing, turkey, family. Watched the end of Meet the Fockers afterward. I'm not sure there's a memo in it, and I don't really buy Brooks' best-selling generalizations in any case.

Time for a night on the town. Comments on the history of television and blogging are especially welcome, I'm genuinely curious.

Looking through one of my old journals this weekend, I was reminded of the essay prompt for my application to Cornell five years ago. It begins:

On rereading his personal journals in the last few years of his life, E.B. White, author, journalist, and Cornell graduate (1921) wrote: "Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. They are loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally, they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them."

For a long time I really did think I would end up burning my journals. It just seemed like such an appealing idea; a dramatic way to break with the past.

I remember the day, too, when I knew that this was the moment, that I had to do it then and be done with them. I couldn't do it. They were just paper, and they'd put up with me for so long that I felt indebted. The idea of burning them didn't seem grand and dramatic anymore.

My journal writing dropped off when I started blogging after high school, though for a while I tried to make time for both. From time to time, in Freiburg for example, I would find myself without a computer and take up journaling seriously again.

(The entries from both of my stays in Germany are in German, for the most part. Symptomatic of my devotion to the spectre of "total immersion." Needless to say, they took forever to write and I'm not sure I'll be able to read them in a few years, if I can even read them now.)

The journals I looked at this weekend were written in my senior year of high school, back when I wrote every day with few exceptions. I'd forgotten much about journaling that was immediately obvious: the way my usually miniscule handwriting got larger and sloppier right before I dozed off, and the letters I saved between the pages (many of them now hopelessly misplaced, I'm afraid).

Specifically, I wanted to look up September of 2000, around the time of our last high school Homecoming, in order to embellish on Graham's final, somewhat anticlimactic embarrassing story. There wasn't anything about that.

I mean, anything. Although in general the journal is a good record of daily events: I'd forgotten about things like the hubbub over our senior T-shirts, singing along to the radio with Henrik, and Meghan Thurlow's suppressed underage drinking pictures.

The line "Ah, finally, the satisfaction only proof that Thurlow is a phony can give" cracks me up every time I read it.

The memories don't come flooding back. I can't picture the T-shirt (presumably I still have it at home) or recall any gossipy conversations about Thurlow. Still, there's a satisfaction in having the facts, especially if I'm the one reporting them.

It's my experience that an overly nostalgic temperament can be a curse if you're trying to live in the present. The present (not to be confused with "the moment") is always the tricky part.

More than anything else, this journal, like all the rest, is a chronicle of emotions. Reading about all those frustrations and hopes and fears makes me feel disaffected.

And I am disaffected. Back then I could hate a half dozen people, deeply and truly, in the space of a month. Now there's maybe, what, one person I hate?

Distance and time seem to wipe hate away so easily. There was a time when I wouldn't accept that. I would keep hating, on principle if for no other reason. I'm probably better off now, I suppose.

(Part of me wonders if Patton Oswalt is right. Maybe, in a far more profound way than his joke ever intended, your life really does go better when you have an archnemesis.)

I don't know if I can even access the intensity of emotion I seem to have had back then. That was always my theory, too. That adults didn't realize, didn't remember, how strong the emotions of children and teenagers can be.

I also swore never to dismiss an opinion because of the age of the speaker, good advice for anyone. My dad had this idea that ignorance on all subjects decreases naturally as you age. Whereas I believed that just-living teaches you some good lessons, but nothing you should be able to win an argument with.

Reading the journal I can remember the dizzying emotional landscape of that September, even if the events themselves remain hazy. That's something.

I don't think I could ever actually sit down and read through my journals. Too embarrassing, too solipsistic (this from a diarist blogger), too repetitive. And then there's the nagging, illogical worry — the same feeling I get when I look back at some of my first blog posts — that my writing is constantly degenerating.

I used to worry that I would get amnesia, and forget everything about who I am, becoming a completely different person. The journals, so the plan went, would be there to bring me back.

"I feel like Lauren Berlant assaulted me."

So noted the Sophisticate as we waited in the hall before biography class, offering perhaps the most memorable formulation of an opinion I heard again and again after Prof. Berlant's lecture this afternoon.

It was a torrent of words. I was sitting among a whole group of compulsive notetakers, next to the Medievalist — who stops just short of transcribing the entire lecture — and it was amusing to watch them try, and fail, to keep up with Berlant's stemwinder.

I think the Medievalist is actually broken now, in some critical way. She was one of the last holdouts, still trying to get it all down half an hour into the lecture, but she soon cracked, as we all cracked under the weight of the many adjectives, the evolving and invariably crucial-seeming observations. The words.

The last page of her notes for today has an elaborate drawing of some flowers.

My notes were less ambitious, but then again they always are. They're mostly a collection of sentences too long to write down before I forgot them, some garbled definitions of key terms like "cruel optimism" and "fantasy," observations to blog later (cleverly coded "tb"), and some notions that for one reason or another stood out from the intellectual white noise of the lecture as a whole.

"A personality is a commitment to being reliable for others" really speaks to me. It could easily be the epigraph for some chapter in the story of my life.

Oh, and boxes. My notes these days are covered with tiny boxes.

Prof. Berlant, if you don't know, is (apparently) a professor of some stature in the English department here. She's got a knack for using pop culture in an academic, (yet) not at all shallow way: today's lecture was ostensibly about her essay "Unfeeling Kerry," which has my respect if not my complete agreement. I praised her Simpsons essay in a post earlier this week, with a similar qualification.

Another fragment: "voting for the idea of the political."

In addition to her official webpage and a write-up in the Chronicle (with a more recent photo), Berlant even has a predictably mediocre Wikipedia page, which signals to netizens that she has well and truly arrived.

So why would such an experienced educator talk so quickly?

The lecture struck me as designed to impress and inform rather than teach, but that's not necessarily the best explanation. It could be that (as she admitted up front) Prof. Berlant isn't used to reading from a prepared text. It could be that it was more important to her that we listen — and we were all certainly listening by the end, even if we didn't quite grasp it all — instead of trying to get it all down.

Our Bold Hero even hinted at a Lacanian motive lurking behind the lecture, lessons hidden in what Berlant wasn't doing. I'm not sure if he was joking.

The first snow today. Just a bit of a dusting, like coarse salt.

I biked to the school where I work wearing naught but a few layers, and as usual the Chicago weather decided to spite me for my optimism. After spending the last half hour of my shift in the computer lab — where both air conditioners are still running, inexplicably — I was surprised to see my breath once I got outside.

There might be something wrong with laser-cut keys. Or with me. I almost abandoned my bike after five minutes of fumbling with the lock.

Since half of my coat is still at home, I've been especially nervous about the coming winter. I don't have many sweaters or sweatshirts really, mainly because that coat is warm enough that I could wear practically anything underneath it for my short excursions outside at college.

I'm not completely unprepared. I have the ridiculous fuzzy jacket that comprised the inner lining of my misplaced coat, and a series of progressively more ludicrous jackets should it get even colder before Thanksgiving.

Frankly, the whole situation is a bit embarrassing. As a northern Minnesotan it galls me that I'm giving in to this weather (bundling up, thinking about riding the bus) when it's a point of pride that I've suffered through far worse, presumably if not always actually with a certain amount of stoicism.

When I'm an old man, I suppose I'll tell stories about the weather.

Shaved my head all by myself for the first time this weekend.

I know, it's a tragedy, everyone likes me better with long hair, etc. It's just so much easier this way: I even feel better. Smarter. Faster.

(As always.)

There are some lingering doubts that I've somehow messed up the hair on the back of my head — I was using a mirror, and no one here has mentioned anything, but even with other people shaving my head I ended up with a bald spot back there more than once.

I haven't had my head shaved since my parents visited at the end of August, and timewise this is probably the longest I've let it grow out in years. So far though, the only reaction I've noticed was some bemused looks from this guy in my biography class who also shaves his head — no one here has seen my hair like this so he probably thinks I'm copying him.

Oh, and with this haircut I've officially started saving money by owning my own haircut kit. Or put more concisely:

And it was free. Freeeeeeeee!

The ongoing question this year is whether or not I'm planning to try for a Ph.D. sometime in the future. As I think I've told you before, this program is both a means of preparing for grad school and a sort of test to see if I actually like it.

So far, I think I do. Three things I like about grad school at the UChicago:

1. General unconcern for the amorphous high/low art distinction. One of the essays I had to read for today, Lauren Berlant's "The Theory of Infantile Citizenship," revolved around the author's reading of the third-season Simpsons episode "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington." I don't necessarily agree with all her points, but I was impressed by her ability to combine scholarly focus with the critical eye of a fanboy.

The lecture on her today brought in the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Meanwhile in my Culture and Politics class, students are writing about hip-hop, popular movies, etc. My own paper proposal � a comparison of the distribution of A-list bloggers with the geographical distribution of tech-focused cities described in "Technology and Tolerance" (.pdf) � met with approval after a brief discussion about statistics and sources.

(In hindsight I wish I'd taken AP stats instead of calculus in high school. If economics � or was it geometry? � was Graham's blind spot, this is mine.)

2. UChicago undergraduates. I've got classes with 19-year-olds and 26-year-olds, and I've given up trying to tell the difference at this point. Some of the best comments in my classes come from students who on closer inspection turn out to be undergraduates.

The only difference I've found so far (extrapolating from two or three cases) is that the ungrads here seem to have a certain earnestness about them that the rest of us lack.

3. Lastly, I like the intellectual atmosphere in general. The fact that one of the funniest things I heard last week was a fellow preceptee's mock-incredulous comment "So there's a real world after all?"

Or the communal gasp in Writing Biography when we realized that Prof. Weiner had hoaxed us with The Education of Little Tree and "What the Cytoscope Said," both of which she'd presented as autobiographies when she assigned them.

Or learning about J.L Austin from another student, just because a few of us were interested. There's slightly less dumbing-down here than I'm used to.

This is just half the story, of course...

Skipped this week's play-reading, the last one this term.

I don't know why I'm being so antisocial, asocial, whatever. Part of it — as I've noted before — is that I don't really like the actual reading of the plays. The people are good, I suppose it's even a good time, but it feels like I'm predicating my evening on a lie.

I know what you're thinking. Sometimes we do things we don't want to just to spend time with the people we like. But do we really? Maybe we're that way with the people we love, but feigning an interest in something in the hopes of getting to know some acquaintances a little bit better?

I don't think I've ever done that before, to my knowledge. Which might explain why I can count the number of people who are really my "friends" on two hands, but hey, they're quality. And I'm an introvert, I'll cope.

The Strategist, one of the movers behind the MAPH Roundtable Reading Series, found the whole "predicating my evening on a lie" explanation hilarious.

Yes, I told her. Ever since ninth grade, when I realized I'd been completely full of myself for almost the entire schoolyear, I've tried to undercut and second-guess myself in conversations, to the point where it's prettymuch become a habit. This can backfire socially — a few of the dimmer Lawrentians took it as just another aspect of my awkwardness — but I'd like to think it keeps me somewhat humble. At the very least, it gives others the ammunition to keep my ego in check.

If you think I'm one of those smug atheists (the so-called "brights") now, just imagine how abrasive I'd be if I thought I was better and not simply correct.

Not that I don't think I'm better than some people, but at least my cynicism is a two-way street.

So this wasn't the first all-too-candid comment the Strategist has heard. I guess I should hope that she thinks at least some of those comments are intentional and not the alcohol-induced ramblings of a fool. I've met more than a few Maphiosi with shockingly low alcohol tolerances.

The Medievalist and her boyfriend make Our Bold Hero and Amelia II, my longtime rival in the lightweight drinker division at Lawrence, look like professional boozehounds.

Also at social hour: I was awarded the "What the F***" award, a copy of the NYT, for my attempt at a Halloween costume. Apparently I was one of the easy ones to decide on, vote wise, which comes as no surprise. After realizing I looked more like a transvestite tramp than the newspaper of record, I cheerfully voted for myself.

Winner for "Best Overall" was the Pharaoh, who dressed and acted like Hunter S. Thompson. Uncanny.

Social issues notwithstanding, it's been an enjoyable weekend; the state of my room has once again turned me into a slacker through the power of sympathetic magic. At some point I'm going to have to stop reading Sandman Mystery Theatre and, say, come up with a thesis for my Culture and Politics paper.

Just heard that Fox has cut back its order for Arrested Development from 13 to 22 episodes and pulled the show from November sweeps. Most commentators are interpreting this, rightly in my mind, as a prelude to cancellation at the end of the season.

There were two episodes of Arrested Development this week, the latter of which ("Mr. F") was the best I've seen this fall. Of course, as with episodes of Lost and Invasion, you're either watching them all or hopelessly behind — much of this show's humor comes from the gradual buildup of running gags, musical cues, and character histories — so there's not much point in my telling you a given episode was the "best of the season."

Still, after four uneven attempts it seemed like the show could be great again. I guess I'll find out in December.

There are so few good comedies on television right now. The Simpsons is sucking again despite last season's apparent promise. Malcolm in the Middle is good every now and then, but there've been too many Jessica episodes lately: she's such an irritating character that I stop watching when I see her. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia had some potential but it's off the air for now.

Which leaves only My Name Is Earl as far as reliable comedies are concerned.

(I usually end up laughing at some completely inappropriate/overwrought moment while watching House and Law and Order, but it's my understanding that those shows are dramas of a sort.)

There's one potential silver lining here: if Arrested Development is really going to get cancelled, the writers will know well in advance and have five or six episodes to prepare to the series finale.

I'm all for letting continuity-reliant shows go out gracefully instead of limping to a close like The X-Files or Twin Peaks, trying to settle all the show's problems in one episode like Star Trek: Voyager, or just abruptly ending with most of the plotlines unresolved like Firefly.

As long as there's a possibility that NBC or ABC could poach Arrested Development, I wouldn't count on that kind of ending. In fact, I predict that the graceful exit will become much less common as new technology (e.g. ordering television on iTunes, once they up the resolution) makes it easier for shows to support themselves with smaller audiences.

Whee-ow. I've been crazy busy lately, or at least it seems that way.

Hung out with Jubb and Jinx this weekend, which just was as totally high school as I'd predicted. Not that I ever drank cheap liquor in a friend's hotel room in high school — but as someone who was once forced to break up just such a party, I was aware of their existence.

So anyways, we were super-lame and didn't go anywhere except to the liquor store and back for some beer and cheap champagne. Very festive. If I remember correctly, there was also a fair deal of haterating.

Jubb has strangely creepy long hair now.

Another reminder that I need to shave my head again before it gets really cold out. Chicago weather is a jerk. It'll be nice and warm in the morning, when I'm getting dressed to go to work, and then freezing cold when I'm biking to and from my classes.

I wore a T-shirt under my gray hoodie today and had to battle both the cold and Chicago's trademark gusting winds on my way to class. A lot of the parks in my neighborhood have huge black metal gates on them, and the wind had literally swung said gates open, turning the sidewalk into an obstacle course.

In the summer those same sidewalks were fair game for sprinklers. Only Chicago drivers seem to respect bikers, oddly enough. Homeowners don't even know I exist. Pedestrians fear me. There's no good way to bike up behind someone on the sidewalk at night when you don't have a bell. Even "excuse me ma'am, I'm coming up behind you on your left" seems to terrify your average pedestrian.

After my harrowing ride to class, it turned out that only one person had had any time to read the revised version of my latest nonfiction essay and earn my respect forever. I felt like Joyce writing it, in the sense that I was unwilling to submit a completed version until the very last minute.

The obsessive will explain his priorities now. I had three essays due Monday, which meant the one I wasn't getting a grade for got pushed back to Tuesday, which is the day I decided to read through every PVP comic, which is why I was still making changes at 4:30 today, an hour before I had to leave for class.

I muttered something about "stupid Chicago weather" on my way back to the bike rack, actually offending a girl in a White Sox hat who was walking in front of me. There's something wrong with a city where people take observations about the weather personally.

Bittorrent and I are trying to write a paper together and it's just not working.

Also, it's looking like the giant Symphony bar in the freezer won't be becoming baked goods after all.

Heard perhaps the most poorly-remembered Simpsons quote of all time today in "Culture and Politics." The only true elements remaining after the teaching assistant was finished were that the quote came from the episode "Homerpalooza" and that someone had said they didn't know if they were being ironic.

I resisted my inner geek and stayed silent. I'd already countered Prof. Clark's assertion last week that the Texan is the only character we see on the plane in Dr. Strangelove. I'm probably becoming "that guy," if that's a guy.

Our Simpsons-misquoting teaching assistant, incidentally, has claimed that Slim Pickens didn't realize Dr. Strangelove was a comedy. In the commentary on my DVD, at least, there's no such claim, and given that some of his lines seem inescapably comedic I'd like to know where this rumor is originating.

Lastly, today my professor said one of the strangest things I've heard in academia. I wrote it down immediately afterwards, so struck was I by how much it sounded like the words of an alien replicant new to our American cultural heritage:

"And Moses, as you all know, was the guy who discovered the Ten Commandments when they were given to him in the Sermon on the Mount."

That's sociology for you, I guess.

Meanwhile, my quixotic struggle to stop "safen up" from becoming an official member of the List of Neologisms on the Simpsons on Wikipedia continues. My guess is that there are only two dozen or so words actually coined by the Simpsons but I have neither the time nor (and this turns out to be the most important factor of all) the energy to fight for the purity of this list.

In any case, the list also includes words The Simpsons has "popularized" as well as a few snowclones and some words notable only for their mispronunciation, presumably to stop would-be nitpickers/fact-checkers like myself. My disillusionment with Wikipedia grows every stronger.

Finally, one last bit of news. My latest nonfiction essay, the one I was incredibly nervous about, was generally well-received tonight. And I got a lot of good, albeit slightly contradictory, feedback. It seems like everyone did tonight: this was one of the better workshops I've attended.

(Odd sidenote: I was thrown for a loop upon discovering that a bisexual girl in our class had described herself in her essay as "queer," and confused most of us, because she feels that "bisexual" implies a two-sexuality system or something like that. This seems ridiculous to me. The word "bilingual" doesn't restrict the number of languages, after all.)

Theoretically they could all have been patronizing me, just as we occasionally patronized some of the lesser writers in Fiction Writing when they made any sort of progress... but for once I've decided to be satisfied and not suspicious. The revision is due next week; I think I could really have something if I work at this.

Excited about writing. This is all part of their plan to crush my spirit forever.

So I switched my biographical subject at the last minute. I was going to write about Jubb, I was totally enamored of the idea: a lot of good stories there, a lot of apparent contradictions to explore.

Multiple living sources. Firsthand knowledge.

In fact, I wrote about one of his b-day invitations, you know, the ones he sends to forty or fifty people, for an assignment this term. But that didn't go over too well, and I decided not to risk my grade trying to convince my class of my former roommate's biographic importance.

(He's coming this weekend, incidentally. Very exciting.)

So now I'm writing about Haruki Murakami, who's in the running to be one of my favorite writers. I've read four or five of his novels, but it's his short stories that really grab me; I think it's because they don't give me time to get bored with his bland protagonists.

Anyways, here's a successful bit of biography, my less ambitious version of the true story of a meeting between Murakami and a man who certainly is one of my favorite writers — Raymond Carver. Enjoy:

Like the younger readers who made him famous, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has never made much of the distinction between high and low culture; he�s translated Stephen King and John Irving, Fitzgerald and Capote — anything he likes, really. There�s a charm to his haphazard interests — for years he would read only hard-boiled detective fiction — but one gets the disturbing sense that his exposure to a given writer is merely a matter of chance.

In 1982 Murakami stumbled upon �So Much Water So Close to Home,� a Raymond Carver story published five years earlier. Murakami was impressed, but he probably doubted that someone few Japanese had ever heard of was worth translating. It took the appearance of �Where I�m Calling From� in the March 12th New Yorker to convince Murakami of the minimalist�s potential. He began collecting and translating Carver�s works, and as Jay Rubin notes, the response in Japan was �overwhelming.�

Two years later Murakami and Carver met for the first time at Sky House, a secluded place on the Olympic Peninsula that belonged to Carver�s wife, Tess Gallagher. The summer of 1984 was near the height of Carver�s career, and he�d fled to the isolated community of Port Angeles to get out of the public eye and continue writing. Murakami, on the other hand, though a rising star in Japan since the publication of Wild Sheep Chase in 1982, was still unknown in America, and as Gallagher tells it, he presented himself to Carver as nothing more than an enthusiastic translator. (Which he was: Rubin reports that Murakami eventually translated all of Carver�s work, including unpublished manuscripts and letters.) Excepting a short visit to Hawaii a few years earlier, this was Murakami�s first visit to America, and it�s telling that Sky House was the first place he went.

There seems to have been some anxiety on both sides leading up to the meeting. Murakami idolized Carver, and the author likely had reservations about his rusty speaking-English � Gallagher reports that he was often silent, though �obviously very moved to be in Ray�s presence.� For his part, Carver was immersed in a writing project and even a few hours seemed like a sacrifice. He had also only recently quit drinking. As Murakami recalls:

In the waning of that quiet afternoon, I remember with what distaste he was sipping black tea. Holding the teacup in his hand, he looked as though he was doing the wrong thing in the wrong place. Sometimes he would get up from his seat and go outside to smoke.

The two authors became friends that day, however, sitting on the deck in the cool summer air. They had few pretentions between them � Carver would have been wearing one of his fisherman�s shirts, and Murakami, who rarely wears suits, probably came wearing jeans, some T-shirt he liked, worn sneakers and a plastic watch. Lunch was simple: crackers and smoked salmon to go with the tea. They talked about Carver�s stories, and bits of Carver�s childhood, and the birds that kept hitting the window. Canada was visible across Puget Sound, and while Carver smoked a cigarette, Murakami, who�d resolved to live a healthier life years earlier, sat and watched a ferryboat on its way to Victoria.

After their brief meeting Carver wrote a poem, �The Projectile,� touching on the events of that day, and dedicated it to Murakami. The two kept up a correspondence and Carver planned a trip to Japan in 1987, prompting Murakami to commission a queen-sized bed for his guest room � but the American�s failing health forced him to cancel.

Raymond died of lung cancer in 1988, which Murakami likened to �the slow fall of a giant tree,� and their first meeting was in the end their last. In 1993 Murakami contributed to a composite biography of Carver, writing that he �was without question the most valuable teacher I ever had and also the greatest literary comrade.�

Hat tip to Jay Rubin's Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, which supplied many of the details here. (Apologies if I've plagiarized anything by accident.) The litblog Rake's Progress also has a good post on the incident.