For Culture We Must Suffer

Having a period

2004-08-27T21:29:00.000-05:00

In Norway, if you are having your period, you could say there are "Communists in the summer house."

Or in Germany, "Aunt Rose is coming from America."

THE DAM LETTERS

2004-08-07T23:59:00.000-05:00

STATE OF MICHIGAN

Reply to:
GRAND RAPIDS DISTRICT OFFICE
STATE OFFICE BUILDING 6TH FLOOR
350 OTTAWA NW
GRAND RAPIDS MI 49503-2341

JOHN ENGLER, Governor
DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY
HOLLISTER BUILDING, PO BOX 30473, LANSING MI 48909-7973
INTERNET: http://www.deq.state.mi us
RUSSELL J. HARDING, Director

December 17, 1997

CERTIFIED

Mr. Ryan DeVries
2088 Dagget
Pierson, MI 49339

Dear Mr. DeVries:

SUBJECT: DEQ File No. 97-59-0023-1 T11N, R10W, Sec. 20, Montcalm Count-,),

It has come to the attention of the Department of Environmental Quality that there has been recent
unauthorized activity on the above referenced parcel of property. You have been certified as the legal landowner and/or contractor who did the following unauthorized activity: Construction and maintenance of two wood debris dams across the outlet stream of Spring Pond.

A permit must be issued prior to the start of this type of activity. A review of the Department's files show that no permits have been issued. Therefore, the Department has determined that this activity is in violation of Part 301,. Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act, Act 451 of the Public Acts of 1994, being sections 324.30101 to 324.30113 of the Michigan Compiled Laws annotated.

The Department has been informed that one or both of the dams partially, failed during a recent rain event, causing debris dams and flooding at downstream locations. We find that dams of this nature are inherently hazardous and cannot be permitted. The Department therefore orders you to cease and desist all unauthorized activities at this location, and to restore the stream to a free-flow condition by removing all wood and brush forming the dams from the strewn channel. All restoration work shall be completed no later than January 31, 1998. Please notify this office when the restoration has been completed so that a follow-up site inspection may be scheduled by our staff.

Failure to comply with this request, or any further unauthorized activity on the site, may result in this case being referred for elevated enforcement action.

We anticipate and would appreciate your full cooperation in this matter. Please feel free to contact me at this office if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

David L. Price
District Representative
Land and Water Management Division
616-356-0269
_________________________________________________________________________________
Reply:
Stephen and Rosalind Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, MI 49435-9751
616-677-1261
616-677-1262 Fax
steve@getipm.com
1/6/98

David L. Price
District Representative
Land and Water Management Division
Grand Rapids District Office
State Office Bldg., 6th Floor
350 Ottawa, N.W.
Grand Rapids, MI 49503-2341

Dear Mr. Price:

Re: DEQ File No. 97-59-0023; T11N, R10W, Sec 20; Montcalm County

Your certified letter dated 12/17/97 has been handed to me to respond to. You sent out a great deal of carbon copies to a lot of people, but you neglected to include their addresses. You will, therefore, have to send them a copy of my response.

First of all, Mr. Ryan DeVries is not the legal landowner and/or contractor at 2088 Dagget, Pierson, Michigan - I am the legal owner and a couple of beavers are in the (State unauthorized) process of constructing and maintaining two wood "debris" dams across the outlet stream of my Spring Pond. While I did not pay for, nor authorize their dam project, I think they would be highly offended you call their skillful use of natural building materials "debris". I would like to challenge you to attempt to emulate their dam project any dam time and/or any dam place you choose. I believe I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.

As to your dam request the beavers first must fill out a dam permit prior to the start of this type of dam activity, my first dam question to you is: are you trying to discriminate against my Spring Pond Beavers or do you require all dam beavers throughout this State to conform to said dam request? If you are not discriminating against these particular beavers, please send me completed copies of all those other applicable beaver dam permits. Perhaps we will see if there really is a dam violation of Part 301, Inland Lakes and Streams, of the Natural Resource and Environmental Protection Act, Act 451 of the Public Acts of 1994, being sections 324.30101 to 324.30113 of the Michigan Compiled Laws annotated. My first concern is - aren't the dam beavers entitled to dam legal representation? The Spring Pond Beavers are financially destitute and are unable to pay for said dam representation - so the State will have to provide them with a dam lawyer.

The Department's dam concern that either one or both of the dams failed during a recent rain event causing dam flooding is proof we should leave the dam Spring Pond Beavers alone rather than harassing them and calling their dam names. If you want the dam stream "restored" to a dam free-flow condition - contact the dam beavers - but if you are going to arrest them (they obviously did not pay any dam attention to your dam letter -- being unable to read English) - be sure you read them their dam Miranda first. As for me, I am not going to cause more dam flooding or dam debris jams by interfering with these dam builders. If you want to hurt these dam beavers - be aware I am sending a copy of your dam letter and this response to PETA. If your dam Department seriously finds all dams of this nature inherently hazardous and truly will not permit their existence in this dam State - I seriously hope you are not selectively enforcing this dam policy - or once again both I and the Spring Pond Beavers will scream prejudice!

In my humble opinion, the Spring Pond Beavers have a right to build their dam unauthorized dams as long as the sky is blue, the grass is green and water flows downstream. They have more dam right than I to live and enjoy Spring Pond. So, as far as I and the beavers are concerned, this dam case can be referred for more dam elevated enforcement action now. Why wait until 1/31/98? The Spring Pond Beavers may be under the dam ice then, and there will be no dam way for you or your dam staff to contact/harass them then.

In conclusion, I would like to bring to your attention a real environmental quality (health) problem; bears are actually defecating in our woods. I definitely believe you should be persecuting the defecating bears and leave the dam beavers alone. If you are going to investigate the beaver dam, watch your step! (The bears are not careful where they dump!)

Being unable to comply with your dam request, and being unable to contact you on your dam answering machine, I am sending this response to your dam office.

Sincerely,

Stephen L.Tvedten

xc: PETA

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2004-08-07T23:41:00.000-05:00

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2004-08-06T23:15:00.000-05:00

Quote:

Housework won't kill you, but why take a chance?

Elaine on Haruki - Notes from June Book Meeting

2004-07-20T17:15:00.000-05:00

In case you ever meet Haruki Murakami, please read my book meeting notes so that you can impress him with your almost frightening knowledge of his life and works.

WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE - SUMMARY

"Really, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, it's been a lot of fun being with you. No kidding. I mean, you're such a supernormal guy, but you do such unnormal things. . . . So hanging around you hasn't been boring in any way. . . . But tell you the truth, it's made me nervous too." The speaker is May Kasahara, a Japanese teenager who bears a strong resemblance to Holden Caulfield. She's speaking to Toru Okada, who lives down the street from May in Tokyo and to whom a series of very strange things has been happening.

Her words could also stand as a response to this absolutely mesmerizing, befuddling, unaccountably brilliant novel. Murakami is one of Japan's most popular writers, but while his previously translated books have been well received critically in the U.S., they have yet to garner overwhelming popular acclaim. This one will receive plenty of attention, but it's hard to imagine it sharing best-seller slots with the likes of John Grisham. It's just too much book for that.

Just what kind of book is it? That's the befuddling part. Plot summary is nearly useless: Toru Okada loses his cat and then his wife. He devotes himself to finding the latter but spends much of his time in the bottom of a well, hoping to pass through the wall and into an alternate world where the secrets lie. Meanwhile, he encounters a series of ever more puzzling characters, including a World War II veteran who recounts the horrifying story of the battle of Nomonhan, during which thousands of Japanese died meaninglessly in conflict with Russians and Mongolians. This overwhelming tidal wave of story washes over Toru Okada, who absorbs each new revelation implacably, hoping but usually failing to make sense of it.

Murakami is utterly at ease with multiple subjects, genres, and styles--surrealism, deadpan comedy, military history, detective fiction, love story. His canvas is as broad as twentieth-century Japan, his brush strokes imbued with the lines and colors of American pop culture. Oddly, it all holds together on the stoic shoulders of Toru Okada and his single-minded determination to reclaim the woman he loves no matter how absurd the world around her becomes. In the scary but never boring vastness of this novel, it's nice to find one buoy on the horizon we recognize. --Bill Ott

Haruki Murakami - His Life

"I was given life in this world on January 12, 1949, which means I belong to the baby-boom generation. The second world war had at last come to an end, and those who had managed to survive looked around them, took a deep breath, got married and started making children one after another. During the next four or five years, the world's population expanded - indeed, exploded, in a way never seen before. I was one of the nameless, numberless children produced during that period."

Delivered in the burnt-out ruins left after the intense bombing raids, we in Japan matured with the cold war and the period of rapid economic growth, entered the flowering of adolescence and received the baptism of late-60s counterculture. Burning with idealism, we protested against a rigid world, listened to The Doors and Jimi Hendrix (Peace!) and then, like it or not, we came to accept a real life that was neither very idealistic nor imbued with rock 'n' roll.

January 12, 1949
Born in Kyoto, Japan’s old imperial capital
His father was the son of a Buddhist priest and his mother the daughter of an Osaka merchant. His father, who briefly studied to become a priest, met his mother while both were teachers of Japanese literature. Although Murakami's mother gave up work, the household remained an environment with strong cultural traditions.

1950
Moved to the less picturesque Ashiya City (Hyogo Prefecture), and then later brought up in the port city of Kobe
During the 1960s, as a teenager he started rebelling against his father's belief in "stiff, formal" Japanese literature. "My parents were always talking about Japanese literature," he says, "and I hated it. So I read foreign literature, mostly European writers of the 19th century - Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Dickens. They were my favourite authors. …

“And of course when I was a kid I got a transistor radio. There was music - Elvis, the Beach Boys, the Beatles. That was exciting. And they became a part of my life."

From another interview: “American culture was so vibrant back then, and I was very influenced by its music, television shows, cars, clothes, everything. That doesn't mean that the Japanese worshipped America, it means that we just love that culture. It was so shiny and bright that sometimes it seemed like a fantasy world. We loved that fantasy world. In those days, only America could afford such fantasies, I was 13 or 14, an only child. Alone in my room, I would listen to American jazz and rock-and-roll, watch American television shows and read American novels.”

“I mostly read hard-boiled detective stories or science fiction -- Raymond Chandler or Ed McBain or Mickey Spillaine. Later I found Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote. They were all so different from Japanese writers. They provided a small window in the wall of my room through which I could look out onto a foreign landscape, a fantasy world.”

He would go and stock up on pot boilers: “I go to the used-book stores and buy a dozen, very cheap….I have read 'The Long Goodbye' about six times. I memorized some parts. But I did not want to write detective stories, I'm interested in the structure. The most important thing I learned from Chandler is the sense of humor and very sophisticated conversation. And the coolness.''

1963
Attends his first jazz concert, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
"I was so impressed," he says of the night he became hooked on the music's spontaneous warmth and the musicians' cool stance. "Since then I have been a very enthusiastic jazz listener."

1968
Theater Arts Major Student at Waseda University, Tokyo
Meets his future wife Yoko Takahashi
Entering Waseda University, he chose to study Greek drama. He was involved in the student radical movement. He later acknowledged that while he had thrown rocks and fought with riot police, 'the very thought of holding hands in a demonstration gave me the creeps'.

School didn't interest him much, and he spent most of his college days reading thousands of film scripts stocked at the Theater Museum of Waseda University.

“When a student, I was certainly thinking of writing something. More specifically, I wanted to write film scenarios. Scenarios first, and then novels, for I felt interested in films. That is why I chose to enter the Film & Drama Course in Waseda University, but I gave up writing scenarios halfway, thinking it didn't fit me. I didn't have the slightest idea of what to write or how to write in those days.

“Neither any material nor any theme did I have to write about. Such a person could never start writing a script (or anything else), which was a self-evident fact. But I liked to read film scripts anyway, so I went to the Drama Museum on campus almost every day, if not attending classes, and devoured all the film scripts in the West and in the East through all ages. Looking back on my student days now, I think this devouring helped me so much.”

1971
Married Yoko Takahashi
[In 2001 he thinks back: “I’ve been married for 30 years. Sometimes I wonder what would it be like if I had been single....If and if and if. I could go along that passage and find new strange rooms.”]

Murakami's parents disapproved of him marrying at such a young age, and of him turning his back on the 'salaryman' life which was held to be the Japanese ideal. 'When I refused to take a position in an office or a company, they were so disappointed, because suddenly I was an outsider. And to be an outsider in those days was very dangerous, very risky. In those days, the Japanese economy was so strong that you were safe if you stuck to the system. People thought you'd be safe for the rest of your life.'

From another interview, later in life:
“So, I myself hate those company people -- salarymen, businesspeople. … Honestly, I don't know why they are working so hard. Some of them got up at 5:30 in the morning to commute to the center of Tokyo. It takes more than two hours by train, all of it packed like this [hunches]. You can't even read a book. But they are doing that for 30 or 40 years. That's incredible to me. They come home at 10 p.m. and their kids are sleeping. The only day they see their children is Sunday. It's horrible. But they don't complain. So I asked them why not and they said it's no use. It's what all the people are doing, so there's no reason to complain.”

1974
Opened the Jazz Bar 'Peter Cat' at Kokobunji/Tokyo
When the Tokyo anti-war protests collapsed at the end of the 1960s, and the formerly anti-authoritarian peaceniks quickly and obediently joined Japan's large corporations, Murakami felt betrayed.

He suspended his studies at Waseda University. He and Yoko worked in a record shop by day and a coffee bar by night to save the money that, augmented by loans from a bank and Yoko's father, would allow the two 22-year-olds to open a jazz club in a Tokyo suburb.

The decision to start the jazz club was a risky one in that Japanese society. “When I was trying to find an apartment, the real estate agents often rejected me by saying that ‘Oh, you are in the bar business. No, no, we have no apartment to rent for the people of that kind.’ Even after becoming a novelist, I came across the similar rejections when finding a place to live in. ‘We only rent for the people who belong to the big companies listed in the Primary Tokyo Stock Market.’”

Called Peter Cat after Murakami's beloved deceased pet, it was a basement room that functioned as a coffee bar by day and a jazz club at night, with live bands at the weekends. At that time he was, he says, running away from himself. “I was a hermit in a wonderland of jazz.”

From another interview: “Philip Marlowe is Chandler’s fantasy but he’s real to me.” After his turbulent time as a student, “I just wanted to live like Marlowe.”

Murakami served drinks, washed the dishes, changed the records and booked the musicians. When business was slow, he read voraciously and studied for his degree, which he received in 1975 (Yoko had graduated three years earlier).

He recalls: “I married, started working, and then graduated from university. Driven by the severe everyday life, I totally forgot my wish to write something. To clear off my debts, I had to work from early in the morning till late at night like ‘a whipped carriage-horse,’ which sounds like a non-literary cliche, though. I continued it for seven years. As my bar served the "stuffed cabbage," for instance, I had to cut a full bag of onions into tiny pieces every morning. Still today I can manage to cut plenty of onions in a short time even without shedding tears. My hands automatically and swiftly move as if they knew how to do it.”

He was also getting tired of the drunkards and the fights.

He and Yoko have no children -- they were out of the question when the couple was running the jazz club, but Murakami seems to have had reservations about the idea anyway. “I can't have children,' he told an interviewer in 1984. “I simply don't have the confidence my parents' generation had after the war that the world would continue to improve.”

1977
Moved the bar to Sendagaya/Tokyo, a quiet neighborhood of the bustling city
He looks back in bemusement on the literary scene in his saloon: "It was a triple-A Elaine's. Less crowded [remember, no agents]. Editors, publishers, all back-scratching, then backstabbing each other. Since then, I don't trust anyone in publishing."

1977
He decides to write his first novel
He was lying on the grass on a beautiful day in spring, in the April of 1974. Sipping his beer and watching the baseball match, he suddenly decided to write his first novel.

“It was an early afternoon in spring and I went to see a baseball game between Yakult Swallows and Hiroshima Carp in Jingu Baseball Stadium. Lying down in the outfield bleacher, drinking beer, and when a player named [David] Hilton hit a double, I made a sudden resolution that ‘Now it's time for me to start writing a novel.’ This is how I started to write a novel. … It might have been the only ‘extraordinary’ incident in my life.” He bought a pen and paper that day and began.

1979
First novel Hear the Wind sing published (Part of the Trilogy of the Rat)
Hear the Wind Sing drew on memories of the student protests of his university days.

The subject was a cynical deejay being moved by a young girl’s story — Murakami was developing his recurring theme: that despite our loneliness we are all connected. The book looks back at the time of student dissent and incorporates several other Murakami’s favourite themes: adolescent metamorphosis, literature, jazz clubs. Critics and readers noted his cool, semi-detached tone and distinctly offbeat sense of humour.

The publishing house Kodansha was first to see the novel ("There are no agents in Japan," the author explains), and Murakami chose the publisher because it "is the biggest, very prestigious." He has remained with Kodansha ever since, and enjoys his relationship with editor Yoko Kinoshita. "It's not the usual thing, a woman publisher," he adds. "In Japanese companies it's mainly men who get good jobs. My editor is doing well."

1979
Gunzou Shinjin Sho (Gunzo New Writer Award) for Hear the Wind sing
Gunzo magazine's prize for rookie writers – this launched his literary career.

1980
Pinball, 1973 published (Part of the Trilogy of the Rat)

1981
Sold the bar and started to write full-time for a living
“When I was running the club, I worked so hard, until one or two in the morning. I don't like to talk with many people, but I had to do that all the time. I had to deal with some nasty drunks: it was sometimes very violent. I didn't like that, but I had to do it. That was the kind of life I led for seven years. And when I became a full-time writer I was so happy to get away from that. Writing is so precious to me that I made up my mind to write as hard as I could. I have the same feeling now.”

For relaxation he began his parallel career as a translator, often in collaboration with Motoyuki Shibata, professor of American literature at the University of Tokyo.

When he set out to write his next novel, it was the first time he had sat down with no idea of what he was about to write, letting the story tell itself: "It's kind of a free improvisation," he says of the method that still serves him well. "I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be. Many people don't believe me. But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next. I'm searching for melody after melody. Sometimes once I start, I can't stop. It's just like spring water. It comes out so naturally, so easily."

"Since I've been listening to jazz music so carefully and intensively, that rhythm is part of me. So when I'm writing my novels and stories, I always feel a rhythm. That's essential to me."

1982
A Wild Sheep Chase published. (Part of the Trilogy of the Rat) – his first book to be translated for the U.S. market
Noma Bungei Shinjin Sho (Noma Literary Award for New Writers) for A Wild Sheep Chase
"Rat," a nomadic friend of the unnamed anti-hero, sends him a photograph of some sheep from Hokkaido. The sheep picture comes to the attention of a shadowy figure simply known as the "Boss" -- a mythically powerful underworld kingpin -- who has a dire need to get a hold of one of the sheep in the photo. The Boss sends a messenger to the narrator making it clear that unless he finds that sheep, he will face financial ruin, if not worse. The sheep holds the key to the survival of the empire. The sheep had forty years previously invaded Boss’s brain. Nonetheless, the narrator treats his work seriously.

Murakami: “Somebody called it ‘The Big Sheep.’ I don't think that book was unusual. From the stylistic level, I have certainly borrowed a lot from Chandler.”

From another interview: Many people are feeling insecure. But I think that’s what I’ve been feeling all along, since I was 20 years old. … I’ve been writing about a very insecure world where there is an underground beneath your ground, and many mysterious things are moving around down there, in the dark. Sometimes you can see a very strange thing, just like the Sheep Man (from A Wild Sheep Chase). The Sheep Man doesn’t mean anything at all — he just appears. But he has a message as the Sheep Man, and all you have to do is accept that message. It’s not necessary to analyze it — just accept it as it is.

On his later popularity in the U.S.:
Murakami is quick to credit the translator of his novels, Alfred Birnbaum: "He's a good man, a good guy. His translation is so lively." Birnbuam, for example, came up with the English title for A Wild Sheep Chase; the original was The Adventure of the Sheep. "I have another translator, Jay Rubin," Murakami continues. "He's good as well. Alfred is more free, Jay is more faithful to the original."

After finishing A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami had a spiritual awakening. He quit smoking. He took up running and a near-vegetarian diet. Since taking up jogging in 1982 (and the following year running the Athens Marathon course by himself) he has competed in more than 20 full marathons, including New York (three times) and Boston (six times). "It takes strength to concentrate. Running helps me to be strong." He adds: "If you're genius, you don't have to take care of yourself like that. Truman Capote was a genius."

From another interview: “Most writers hate doing sports, but you have to be strong if you’re going to write rightly. When you’re young, you can do anything because you’re strong, and you have your own power. But when you’re getting older, you have to train yourself.”

1984
Moved to Fujisawa/Kanagawa Prefecture, a small city on the shore of the sea near to Tokyo
First visit to the United States
Murakami made two pilgrimages: one to Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald's alma mater, and the other to Port Angeles, Washington state, where he and Yoko stayed with Carver and his second wife, the poet Tess Gallagher. (Murakami had translated Carver's work into Japanese.)

“It was in the summer of 1984 that I visited Princeton, New Jersey, for the first time. … 1984 was the presidential election year between Reagan and Mondale. Everywhere I heard "Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. … The reason I came to Princeton was simple; Princeton University was the school F. Scott Fitzgerald graduated from and I wanted to see its campus myself. I had no special purpose for my visiting except that. My train stopped at Princeton and probably, I thought, I would have no business coming here again in my future, which made me to decide to drop in the university. … The Princeton Junction station is located all alone in vacant fields, and you could find no house where people are living. The passengers who got off at the station were only four; a woman in her mid-twenties, a black man around twenty, me and my companion [Yoko]. All we could do was sit in front of the station and wait for a taxi. It was quite a long time before a taxi came up. We had started to worry about ourselves when, eventually, one taxi appeared. Feeling relieved, all four of us pooled the one taxi. The woman took a seat beside the driver and the rest of us occupied the back seat. The taxi-driver was a middle-aged big white guy. The taxi started with our sense of relief, but after a while the black man next to me deliberately took his hair spray can out of a suitcase, and after shaking it up and down, started to spray on his hair. I could not understand why he did such a thing in a taxi-cab, but anyway the rest of us could hardly bear it. He kept on spraying and finally the driver pulled the car to the curb, got out, opened the back door and shouted furiously to the black man saying "You get out here!" At first, he grumbled and resisted, but maybe intimidated by the tough-guy-appearance of the driver, he got out with his suitcase, showing no further protest. He must have been stoned on drugs. The driver returned to his seat and continued to drive, and carried three of us to town, as if nothing had happened."

On their stay with Carver:
Haruki Murakami and Yoko visited Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher. This was their first meeting. Sitting out on the deck of the hilltop Sky House, the couples ate smoked salmon and crackers and lamented the death of small birds that had been crashing into a glass windbreak. Although the conversation was a little stilted, owing to the Murakamis' frail grasp of spoken English, everyone seemed to feel that something special happened that day. Carver later wrote a poem about it, dedicated to Murakami, the opening lines of which capture the peculiar essence of the occasion:We sipped tea. Politely musingon possible reasons for the success of my books in your country. Slipped into talk of pain and humiliation you find occurring, and reoccurring, in my stories. And that element of sheer chance.

"Raymond Carver was without question the most valuable teacher I have ever had, and also the greatest literary comrade," Murakami wrote after Carver's death from cancer in 1987.

1985
Moved to Sendagaya/Tokyo
Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World published (later translated to English)
Junichi Tanizaki Award for Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World reads like a collection of correspondence between Raymond Chandler and Robert Coover. The main character in Hard-Boiled Wonderland is put through the paces of the genre. He discovers that his subconscious has been scooped out and replaced by a mad scientist's idea of what a subconscious should be. He is visited by the gleefully perfunctory little-guy-who-talks-and-big-guy-who-smashes tag team. He is living in two worlds, the hard-boiled physical world and the world of his artificially manufactured subconscious, which, he discovers, is a narrative unto itself about a walled city that houses unicorns.

1986
Moved to Oiso/Kanagawa Prefecture early that year
Later that year left Japan to begin a period of wandering around that would last nine years
The Murakamis were growing disenchanted with the Japanese boom economy. Echoing the adventures of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Murakamis spent the last weeks of 1986 wandering the shores of the Mediterranean.

"I didn't like Japanese society so much when I lived in Japan and I wanted to get out," he says. "I'm a writer, so I'm free to go anywhere. We have no children, it's just my wife and me. So we got out. I just wanted to be an individual, to be independent, which was not easy in Japan. In Europe or America it's a natural situation. But for a while I was kind of lost. What am I? What am I going to do? What's the purpose of my life? What does it mean to be Japanese, to be a Japanese writer?"

They then travelled Italy, settling in Rome, where Murakami was to write the book that would finally establish him as Japan's pre-eminent literary superstar.

“I started to write this novel on Mykonos island in autumn and finished in Rome in spring. I planned to write a simple love story, as a change of pace. But once started, I was involved in it deeply and totally. It took about six months to complete, which was unusually fast for me. But, in fact, I could not stop writing.”

"I had never written that kind of straight, simple, rather sentimental story," he says, "and I wanted to test myself."

1987
Raymond Carver scheduled to travel to Japan, but falls ill
Norwegian Wood published (Norwegian Wood, named for the Beatles song)
When, in 1987, Carver was scheduled to travel to Japan, Murakami had a bed specially made to accommodate him in his home (Carver was 6ft 2in tall). But the trip was cancelled when Carver fell ill, and he died the following year. Tess Gallagher later sent a pair of her husband's shoes to Murakami as a memento, and a portrait of Gallagher and Carver hangs on the wall of the Murakamis' home.

Norwegian Wood changed his life, and not all for the good. Norwegian Wood was, Murakami says, a "very realistic love story, one guy falling in love with two girls, not translatable in English." A stripped-down version of Hear the Wind, set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, against a background of student protest and the dawning sexual revolution, Norwegian Wood is a beautifully crafted meditation on adolescent love and pain -- so sweet that you barely notice that it contains no fewer than four suicides.

'That was a very wild time, and some of my friends got lost and killed themselves,' says Murakami. 'I can say I have survived those days. And I just wanted to leave a record of that. I felt that was my obligation.'

From another interview: “You know, I had some friends who've been lost - some who killed themselves, some who just disappeared. I have the memories of those people, and I like to write something for them. That is my sentiment. But if I wrote about the actual people, the writing would be no fun at all. To make up the person, the character, that's the fun of writing."

A coming-of-age novel set partly in a college dorm, it was more accessible than anything he had written before—or since—and the Japanese version sold almost four million copies. Suddenly, Murakami was besieged by editors and fans.

The novel’s wistful nonconformity made it an anthem for a younger generation who felt that Japan's traditional values weren't so much wrong as irrelevant. The expression of their enthusiasm took many forms, as did its exploitation. They wrote to Murakami in the tens of thousand; they paid visits to the Shinjuku nightclub mentioned in the text; they bought CDs compiled from the featured music, boxes of chocolates done up in wrapping paper with a Norwegian forest theme, and guides to the book's various locations. Rubber Soul, the Beatles album on which the song had first appeared, had increased sales. Offers were made (and declined) for the film rights. Murakami was invited (and refused) to appear in television commercials.

1988
Dance Dance Dance - 1988, the third of the Trilogy of the Rat
It is murder mystery, but one in which the clues are revealed by chance rather than dogged investigation - often by a seemingly random psychic encounter. Our narrator has resumed a normal life as a freelance copywriter. He refers to this as "shoveling cultural snow" -- doing the thoughtless and thankless work that needs to be done to clear the path. He spends a lot of time alone doing absolutely nothing. He finds that his long-missing girlfriend is calling to him as if in a dream, and she is weeping. Once again, a chain of events is set in motion. He travels back to the strange hotel to find it modernized and corporate. He has another encounter with the Sheep-Man who tells him to "keep dancing." Through his relationship with these characters he solves the mystery of his missing girlfriend, not through directed investigation but just by staying engaged with life and society.

During Norwegian Wood’s meteoric rise, Murakami was in Rome, and did not quite realize what was happening. But from the moment Murakami arrived at the Tokyo airport to throngs of fans, the demands on his time never let up.

"When we were in Italy, we lived a very peaceful life," he says. "Actually, there was a kind of storm going on. I was so uncomfortable. I felt I was becoming another person. I was getting famous, but it was a fabrication. Before Norwegian Wood, it was a very cozy position I had. Then my life changed. But I survived it."

His home phone number was public. He felt pressured by the obligation of tarento (literally, talent) to become a full-time public figure, his daily life gridlocked by dinner dates with other public figures. "Celebrity is a problem in Japan," he says. "Japanese do not have any agents. Too many people would call, ask for me. My wife would say, 'He is busy.' But that embarrasses male callers. I had to respond."

At the same time, he was shunned by Japanese literary critics for producing a bestseller. Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe publicly criticized Murakami for "failing to appeal to intellectuals with models for Japan's future." With his references to American popular culture (the Beach Boys, McDonald's, etc.) Murakami was accused of being batakusai, or "stinking of butter": too American to be purely Japanese. He was accused of betraying the weighty novelistic heritage of Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Kenzaburo Oe, and replacing it with pop. Which is how Murakami was first promoted, as Tokyo's contribution to global hipster fiction -- an Asian answer to Tom Robbins, if not Thomas Pynchon.

Murakami says his take on the criticism: “Managing a bar, I have a lot of customers every day, and not everybody necessarily likes my place, or more accurately, just a few of them do. But strange to say, you can manage to carry on your business if one or two customers out of ten really like your place and if they wish to ‘drop by this bar again.’ Sometimes you can have a better result when only a few out of ten really love your place rather than when eight or nine customers merely feel that ‘it is not bad.’ This lesson came home to me, while I was running my bar, through the pains as if to have all the bones in my body crushed. Even when many people speak harshly about my book, I can believe, firmly and in the daily sense brewed through my own experiences, that it doesn't matter so long as one or two of them intuitively understand what I want to express.”

But it did cement his decision to leave Japan again.
"They hated me," he says of his critics, "and so I left." He and his wife went back to Europe, settling for a couple years in Greece.

Marukami on Greece soujourn: “I lived on a Greek island for a couple of years and although it was a very small island, everyone I talked to said, "I drive a Nissan. It's a very good car." After a week I was tired of that, but I realized that Nissan, Casio, Seiko, Honda or Sony were the only Japanese words they knew, the only Japanese things they knew. They knew nothing about Japanese culture, Japanese literature, Japanese music or anything like that. So I thought we have to do something to break through the isolation the Japanese have cherished for so long.”

1990
Moved back to Japan briefly in 1990, but almost immediately started to travel abroad again
Murakami: “We went back to Japan in 1990, at the height of the bubble economy, when people got rich and everybody was talking about money, money, money. We hate that kind of society.”

Luckily, he soon had a chance to go to Princeton: “When chatting with an American in Japan, I said something to the effect that ‘I'd like to get relaxed and write novels in a quiet place without any disturbance.’ Then he promptly met a person related to Princeton University and made an actual plan for going abroad. He said to me ‘Now Princeton University is inviting you. Your residential place has already been reserved. Pack everything up and go there by the end of next January.’ I like this kind of American alacrity.

January 1991
Moved to Princeton NJ and started as Associate Researcher at Princeton University
Later that year began the Wind-up Bird Chronicle
The Gulf War broke out when they were on the way to the American Consulate. “It was not a good sign for us. We couldn't feel at ease to live in America when it was at war with a country, even if the country was very far away. But all the paperwork had been finished, and we had no choice but to go to the U.S. … We didn't feel comfortable in the patriotic and macho mood of the society. Once I saw a student demonstration on the campus of Princeton with a placard that read "The Gulf War is something...." I remembered "the good old anti-war protest," but when I watched more carefully, I found it was a "pro-war" demonstration. I have no intention to interfere in somebody else's affairs, but I took the fact to heart that the times have really changed.”

He began to write Wind-up Bird, based on a simple idea: “When I started to write, the idea was very small, just an image, not an idea actually. A man who is 30, cooking spaghetti in the kitchen, and the telephone rings -- that's it. It's so simple, but I had the feeling that something was happening there.”

He also began to think about WWII: “The war is a big drawer to me, a big one. I felt that sometime I would use this, pull something out of that drawer and write about it. I don't know why. Because it's my father's story, I guess. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories -- not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation.”

He began researching the war at the Princeton library: “I was free to do anything in those days, and I went to the library every day, reading books, mostly history books. They have a good collection of books about what happened on the Mongolian and Manchurian border. Most of those facts were new for me. I was surprised to find that it was so absurd and cruel and bloody. I went to Manchuria and Mongolia after I finished the book, which is strange.”

During this time, Japan-bashing began to increase in the U.S. before the approaching 50-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor, in part generated by Gulf War patriotism, and in part because Americans frustrated about a stagnant economy. “I felt it rather tough to live actually in that kind of social ambiance. Besides a sense of uncomfortableness, the air surrounding me often had something like a thorn pricking me. Especially when December came, I rarely went out except shopping and often stayed at home. It was not only the case with me, but all the Japanese here felt something similar. … In one of those days, I was invited to dinner by an American acquaintance of mine, and at the dinner table, a white American (he was a retired professor though) let it slip and called me "You Jap...." in the conversation. That made all the people present deadly silent as if all of them had cold water poured on their head, and the host turned ghastly pale. This was the worst thing that could ever happen at an American dinner table. …”

After the riot hit Los Angeles, Murakami stayed inside and wrote. “After undergoing mysterious twists and turns, this long novel split into two cells; one became a rather long short novel (or a rather short long novel) ‘Kokkyou no minami, Taiyo no nishi’ and the other a rather long long novel ‘Nejimakidori Chronicle.’”

1992
Nominated Associate Professor at Princeton University
Published short, tightly focused South of the Border, West of the Sun (later translated to English)
In the novel South of the Border, West of the Sun, a man meets up with a childhood sweetheart and risks his marriage in an impetuous and ill-starred affair; but by the end of the book we are no wiser as to whether the affair has actually happened or is all simply a figment of his imagination.

He tells author Jay MacIrney (a fan): “I am after something Japanese. Why? Because, after all, I am a Japanese author writing fiction in Japanese. Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside. I think that is what will increasingly define my identity as a writer. By the way, do you know there is no equivalent in Japanese for the English word ‘identity’? That's why when we want to talk about identity, we have to use the English word.”

He enjoys teaching: “I feel more comfortable when speaking face to face in a small class, using my own words and following my own casual style. Sometimes after class, all of us went to a pub and enjoyed an open and frank conversation over a glass of beer. … Students, who assumed an affected attitude in the presence of a teacher during the session, now get relaxed and recover the childish sparkle in their eyes.”

1993
Moved to Santa Ana CA to teach at William Howard Taft University as the Writer in Residence.
Published The Elephant Vanishes collection of stories (later translated to English)
Unrelated characters all named Noboru Watanabe show up in several of the stories collected in The Elephant Vanishes.

1994
Published The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (NejimakiTori Kuronikuru)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a sprawling effort to connect the Imperial Japanese Army's violent 1939 incursion into Mongolia (complete with human medical experiments) to a disturbing portrait of present-day Japan as a land of dried-up wells, abandoned houses, men without rices. Although the book is long and abstract, it is by far his bravest stab at writing a masterpiece. For the first time ever, he grappled with his country's history and risked offending those Japanese readers who preferred not to think about such awkward matters as war crimes.

Murakami: “It’s storytelling that heals you. If you can tell a good story you can be healed. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle tries to be what I called a total book, a collection of stories being told by many characters. They are healing each other. The novel is a book of healing. When you are struck by the appearance of the outer world, a new landscape, it’s love that heals you. And I think good storytelling is an act of love.”

From another article: ''The motive for my work is the something that is gone, something lost. My protagonist is like Nick Carraway in 'The Great Gatsby.'

"He has two distinct styles," says his friend and admirer Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day. "There's the bizarre, anarchic style, and there's the very controlled, melancholy approach. Of the latter, South of the Border is beautifully judged, so fragile. It's almost like a piece of cocktail jazz you hear playing in a bar, a perfectly measured piece from beginning to end. On the other side is The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the berserkly inventive side where he keeps hitting you with things, and you're not quite sure what to do with them."

1995
Moved back to Japan
Haruki Murakami was living in a summer-squash, apricot, and pumpkin colored house, at work on a novel about marriage and family that was much more Japanese. He was missing good Japanese food and hot springs.

"The greatest thing about living outside Japan," he told an interviewer, "is I can be very interested in Japan."

He returned to Japan in 1995 after the Kobe earthquake, which destroyed his parent's home, and the sarin-gas attacks by doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. "I thought 1995 was a turning point for our society," Murakami said. "I didn't know if it was good or bad, only that everything had changed. At the same time, it was a turning point for me. I made up my mind that I had to commit to my society again."

Back in Japan, Murakami was to kick into overdrive. He translated short stories, nonfiction and children's books, written travelogues, essays, short stories, a short novel and two books of nonfiction.

1996
Yomiuri Literary Award for Wind-up Bird Chronicle

1997
Underground published
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a collection of thoughts and interviews with survivors and members of the Aum cult led by Shoko Asahara.

Writing the book, Murakami recalled an election during 1990, when Aum leader Shoko Asahara ran for the Lower House of the Japanese Diet in the Tokyo district where Murakami lived. "The campaign was a singularly odd piece of theater," he remembered. "Day after day strange music played from big trucks with sound systems, while white-robed young men and women in oversize Asahara masks and elephant heads lined the sidewalk outside my local train station, waving and dancing some incomprehensible jig." Like other passers-by, Murakami looked away. "I felt an unnameable dread, a disgust beyond my understanding."

For Underground, Murakami and his assistants were able to track down 700 survivors, of whom 60 agreed to talk. The stories of these people, preceded by short bios written by Murakami, are so plainspoken and moving (like Studs Terkel) that when we hear of the choking, stinging, blinding symptoms they had to endure, along with memory loss and what may be permanent paralysis of the throat, lungs and limbs for many, we are indeed struck by the human face Murakami has brought to this catastrophe.

We hear from a cult member who believes that Aum Shinnkyo's been treated unfairly, a young man aghast that pedestrians walked apathetically past people dying on the sidewalk, and a heroic subway employee for whom such an apocalyptic outrage was as inevitable as the Manson killings had been to Joan Didion back in 1960s L.A.

Murakami has said several times that he can relate to the cult members: “It was so sad to listen to the cult people. There was something missing....They were criticizing the social system of Japan, so they went to the guru, who offered a new system....The Japanese system offered a fantasy that the harder you work, the richer you get. The guru offered his system, his fantasy and story, so that people could dream. But it was dangerous.”

1999
Sputnik Sweetheart published
A slim and seductive love story follows the unnamed narrator as he falls into unrequited love with an old college friend Sumire. When she mysteriously vanishes on holiday with her (woman) lover Miu, the narrator visits the island (Saphos?) to help search for her and from then on the novel attempts to unwrap the mystery from the inside out. Clues present themselves but far from shedding light, they envelop the tale in thick cloud. Lost conversations and missing cats make appearances.

Murakami says, “When I published my new book, Sputnik Sweetheart, it sold 300,000. So I think I’ve secured my position, my own ground.”

2000
After the Quake collection of short stories published
The six narratives are linked by Japan's twin horrors of 1995: the January earthquake in Murakami's childhood hometown of Kobe, and the subway attacks two months later in Tokyo, his hometown since college. But neither event appears directly; all the action takes place in February, the month in the middle. The book has a healing, meditative power that prompted one U.S. reviewer to call it "close to flawless," and another to identify it as Murakami's "get-well card."

With "All God's Children Can Dance," Murakami seems to be digging even closer to his own personal core. The book focuses on his hometown, and the title story deals -- albeit obliquely -- with a relationship of which he has mostly steered clear: father and son.

Review of Kami no Kodomo wa Mina Odoru (All God's Children Can Dance) published on Feb.25, 2000
From Asahi Weekly Magazine (March, 17, 2000)
Reviewed by Akira Yasuhara, a former magazine editor and literary critic

Haruki Murakami wrote a terrific masterpiece after a long time.

I didn't appreciate any of his works after Dance, Dance, Dance and especially I severely criticized South of the Border, West of the Sun, calling this novel a very cheap Harlequin Romance. About his ultimate failure, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I pointed out which parts were bad and worthless, wasting 200-page-manuscript paper. (Don't read the books, otherwise you'll be a fool) Even about his recent Sputnik Sweetheart, though it might be a little better than the previous two works, it is really no good at all, if compared with his early works. Finally, I got angry at his not writing a "masterpiece" for too long, and I declared that his talent as a novelist had already been exhausted. This is all because we are very long associates and I thought highly of his talent.

The masterpiece waited for so long has just been published at last. It is almost ten years since I was deeply impressed by the novel of Haruki Murakami...

2001
Moved to Oiso/Kanagawa Prefecture
The Murakamis lived in Oiso, a beach resort near Tokyo, but he usually works out of a city-center apartment. The suburb of Osio is about 70 minutes from Tokyo on a fast commuter train. Very spacious, steel-framed, his home is modernist in style — though there are traditional tatami mats on the floor. The room is dominated by two enormous loudspeakers and a wall of vinyl: 7,000 jazz records.

Murakami does much of his writing at an apartment in Omotesando, a chic Tokyo neighborhood. His spartan office there is as businesslike as its inhabitant.

Writing his next novel, Haruki Murakami would get up at four o'clock every morning and make coffee. He would carry the coffee to his study, switch on his Apple Mac, put a Telemann concerto for woodwinds on the stereo at low volume and started the day's work.

"I make it a practice to sit at the desk every day, even if I don't write anything. I just sit at the desk with the keyboard and my hands like this." He spreads them out in front of him, as if resting them on a desk-top. "It's a kind of custom for me." There are days, he adds, when he writes nothing at all. What does he do on those days? "I do something. I imagine."

Five hours later he would rise from the keyboard, and set out for a lengthy jog. After that, an hour or two would be devoted to visiting record stores, where he would browse through the second-hand jazz sections. Then there would be time for a swim and a game of squash. In the evening, before turning in at nine o'clock, he would return to his desk and spend a few hours translating the work of American authors into Japanese. This routine lasted six months, weekends included, until he had completed the first draft of Ubime no Kafka (Kafka on the Shore).

After 9/11, he traveled to New York to lay flowers at Ground Zero.
As the novelist sees it, the war that opposes the United States and its allies against reputed terrorist groups like al Qaeda is a collision between incompatible networks, or what he calls circuits, whose apprehension of reality is every bit as irreconcilable as matter and antimatter."The open circuit is this society," Mr. Murakami said, "and the closed circuit is the world of religious fanatics: Islamic fundamentalists or groups like Aum Shinrikyo. I think they are all the same in a way. Their worlds are perfect, because they are closed off." In the universe of the fanatic, he said: "If you have questions, there is always someone to provide the answers. In a way, things are very easy and clear, and you are happy as long as you believe."In our open world, however, "Things are very incomplete … There are many distractions and many flaws.

2002
Kafka on the Shore published
It tells the story of a 15-year-old boy, cursed by his father, looking for his missing mother, who runs away from home, eventually meeting an old man with a mysterious ability to talk to cats.

With Kafka on the Shore, Murakami added his first full-length novel in seven years. It went to the top of Japanese best-seller lists on the day of its release and sold 460,000 copies in just two months.

Murakami believes Kafka on the Shore is connected to "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," for which he had wanted to write a sequel 15 years ago, but gave up. “But I feel like "Kafka on the Shore" is connected to that book on a deeper level. Two parallel stories combine in the end. The structure is similar. And the theme of both books is a story of two different worlds, consciousness and unconsciousness. Most of us are living in those two worlds, one foot in one or the other, and all of us are living on the borderline. That's my definition of human life. The title is about the borderline of land and sea, living and dead.”

The Author Today

He is the author of over 30 books (fiction and nonfiction) in his native language, 10 of which have appeared in English. He is also the Japanese translator of such American notables as Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, John Irving, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and J.D. Salinger (he has just completed the newest Japanese edition of The Catcher in the Rye, a novel he calls, "very dark—the author can't decide if he likes open systems or closed systems, freedom or control"). He has also translated both The Things They Carried and The Nuclear Age, by Tim O'Brien. As Murakami's fame increased, so his name on a translated volume brought a new audience to Fitzgerald, Capote and Carver. "His contribution is enormous," Motoyuki Shibata says. "Carver wouldn't be so popular in Japan if someone else had translated him. The same is true with Tim O'Brien and Grace Paley."

Murakami's work has been translated into 16 languages. In East Asia, his lyrical fictional style has spawned a legion of imitators dubbed "Murakami's children." In South Korea, where his books often hit best-seller lists, 50 volumes of his work have appeared in translation, including novels, short stories, travel pieces, essays and interviews.

He is commercially successful. That can be a curse in Japan, where the literati distinguish condescendingly between "pure" literature and fiction for the masses. Highbrow novelists compete for the tony Akutagawa Prize. Their down-market brethren wrestle over the Naoki Prize. Murakami, 53, has won neither (he has garnered lesser awards, including the Gunzo for debut novels.)

He used to respond to readers through his websites: www.kafkaontheshore.com and http://opendoors.asahi-np.co.jp/span/asahido/index.htm). “I answer my readers' e-mails, you know. I read about 100 per day, and I write 10 to 20 replies. I think it's necessary for me. I'm not interested in professional criticism, pro or con. I just don't care. But I think it's very important for me to read the words from my actual readers, the ones who pay their money to buy and read my books. They are very important. Sometimes they actually help me to think about the books I've written.
Most of them write about what they like and don't like very honestly. That helps. Very small things help me. Some readers say they like this detail -- a very small thing; just a piece of conversation, or the clothing a character is wearing or the beer a character is drinking. If you read 1,000 e-mails, you catch a vibration from the readers out there.”

The first book in English about Murakami's life and work, "Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words" by Harvard professor and translator Jay Rubin, appeared 2002.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

2004-06-28T17:55:00.000-05:00

I began this 600-plus-page book determined to be a good sport, ready to hike willingly down Toru’s shifting paths, to travel with him into the fourth dimension. While Toru found himself odd man out, this reader found herself on a forced march through Murakami’s House of Oddities. His surreal characters stand out more as creations of an author’s rampaging imagination than as parts of a whole working vision. The war scenes have a shattering power, but cannot compensate for the dangling threads the reader is left holding on to. The chaotic, unpredictable world Toru struggles to fathom is, at the end, just as unfathomable and the resolutions unsatisfying. No matter how noble the theme of Toru’s determination to get to the bottom of understanding, Murakami left me feeling unrewarded for my efforts. Maybe the uncut Japanese edition might provide the reader with more to grab on to, but by the end of the English version, I wanted out of the labyrinth.

To read about the issues of translating Murakami, read an email roundtable conducted from Dec. 18, 2000 to January 18, 2001.

http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/murakami/complete.html

The participants were:

Philip Gabriel, Murakami translator and professor of Japanese literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Jay Rubin, Murakami translator and pprofessor of Japanese literature at Harvard University.

Gary Fisketjon, editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

Advice to Toru

2004-06-20T19:39:00.000-05:00

SHUT UP AND GET A JOB!

Great quote

2004-05-27T10:42:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning for months to share this quote that I cut out of a NY Times Magazine article on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Unfortunately, I can't remember the author of the article, but here's the quote.

"I was in my first year at the University of Michigan when Jorge Luis Borges came to speak. I sat on the floor of a packed auditorium and remember the moment during the questions and answers when a graduate student rose to voice his vehement request for Borges to unequivocally denounce the realist novel. Borges, with his soft, blind stare, resembled an elegant saint levitating in an English suit as he answered, 'Young man, whether we are talking about Henry James or Robbe-Grillet, Conrad or Beckett, all of literature is part of the same dream and one of the few pleasures allowed to us on this earth.'"

I really thought that Borges's comment captured the feelings of our group (and he gives the obligatory nod to HJ). If we didn't already have a great name, then I think "One of the few pleasures" would be a good one for the group.

Tidbits from the May 18 Book Group meeting

2004-05-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

One, "sua" in Tamil means pig, so that was the true source of Uncle Matthew's and David Mitford's infamous "sewer" curse.

Two, and I can't believe I let this happen, I failed to share with you all a most unusual botanical occurrence at my house. Now whether this says something about Mother Nature and mysterious ways or merely speaks to slovenly housekeeping, I wanted to show you all the blooming, thriving tomato plant growing...in my rooftop gutter. I don't recall planting tomatoes anywhere and I'm pretty damn sure I'd remember planting them (or anything) in the gutter. Nevertheless, a beautiful healthy specimen is growing tall and strong in my gutter. We plan to take it down and rehabitate it this week.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2004-05-23T18:56:00.000-05:00

Elaine, I'm loving this book!

I've Never Felt so Free !!!

2004-05-20T18:10:00.000-05:00

The following anectdote is a sure sign that summer has arrived....We are studying "Summer Fun" at school. Hence, our unit this week is all about going to the Beach. We had the water table out, and my afternoon students (both girls, age 4) were happily splashing about; counting starfish, floating boats, etc.

One little girl who suffers from autism was having a blast, and giving me a running commentary on everything she saw. Near the carpet, I had laid out two "beach mats," and the children had earlier stretched out upon them to enjoy our "beach time." I turned for a split second to get more water for the table, and when I turned around, I saw my student, lying on the beach mat with her hands behind her head, just as happy as a clam. She had taken her shirt off, looked me right in the eyes and said "Ms. E, I've never felt so free !!!!"

Is anybody out there?

2004-05-17T11:36:00.000-05:00

Type, people!

Gentle Readers,

2004-05-15T22:08:00.000-05:00

Our foray into cyberspace is underway.

I'd like to share my found item for the day:

Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions.
ATTRIBUTION: A E Housman, quoted in report on Great Books discussion groups, NY Times 28 Feb 85

Post away! A