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Thanks to my marvelous hosts at Gettysburg College. I read from The Privileges in front of a capacity crowd; when I say "capacity," of course, I choose to ignore the fact that the students were all academically required to be there, but hey, it's a lonely life as a touring novelist and you have to take your buzz where you can get it. Undergraduates are always an unnerving audience, I feel: they are super-attentive and super-respectful but they don't react at all. When you're reading the same scene in public for the tenth time, and the lines that made the other nine audiences laugh earn only chilling silence this time... well, you start looking forward to the post-reading visit to that local bar they were telling you about, let's put it that way.

This was my third trip to Gettysburg, and as impressed and chastened as I always am by the sheer creative energy of the students (I went out for a pre-dinner reading with about a dozen of them and sat across from a young woman who majors in biology with a minor in creative writing and has been to every continent and described a recent family vacation in Antarctica), there's one feature of the visits that always stands out for me. The college employs a loose confederation of local retirees as drivers, to run various people-moving errands like, say, taking me back and forth to the train station, which is 40 miles away in Harrisburg. They tend to be garrulous characters. On my return trip to Harrisburg, I had a driver named Bob, who had professionalized his new gig by buying a pair of old-fashioned leather driving gloves. From Bob I learned a few things that will stay with me for a while: for instance, that Gettysburg was home, during World War II, to an Allied POW camp; that Bob himself is of German ancestry and once made a somewhat awkward trip to Germany to trace his own genealogical roots, which culminated in his sitting in the living room of a distant relative while she flipped through a scrapbook of young men wearing Nazi uniforms, pointing to each of them and saying, "Dead. Dead. Dead;" and that, in his rueful opinion, people in this country have forgotten all about 9/11 — an opinion that, as a New Yorker, I suppose I am ill-equipped to judge.

Anyway, here ends my week of virginal blogging. Thank you for reading, whoever you are, and thank you to Powell's for the license to ramble and

As much as I enjoyed the road trip to Gettysburg on Tuesday night, the timing still caused me some sadness because it forced me to skip what has become a meaningful ritual: watching the final season of Lost with my daughter. She is 13 years old, and the eighth grade of which she is a part is, as she would say, "officially obsessed" with the show. She owns, and wears to death, a t-shirt bearing the legend "4 8 15 16 23 42," which... well, in the words of the great Louis Armstrong: Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know.

The show itself reminds me mostly of the old David Lynch series Twin Peaks, in that it's a conspicuous victim of its own initial success — whole seasons of it were basically just advertising-farms. But here's what I love about Tuesday nights: watching my daughter engage with the show not just in the purely reactive, naïve way younger kids relate to stories (E.M. Forster: "Qua story, it can have only one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next"), but parsing it for its big and small concordances, for what the artists have put there for her to find. When she recognizes that the numbers on the cave ceiling correspond to the number sequence on that t-shirt of hers — when she recognizes that the story itself is not just a succession of confrontations and chase scenes, but that there is an intelligence hovering over it and spanning the whole of it, and that the intelligence itself is the exciting part — well, that is where a lifetime of genuine engagement with art begins, and sitting there and sharing her pleasure in this discovery is one of the highlights of my week.

I was just a little younger than she is the first time something similar happened to me. Bored in school, I picked up a discarded textbook from one of the higher grades and read a short story called "So Much Unfairness of Things" by C. D. B. Bryan. It was a story about a kid who is so terrified of failing his Latin exam and disappointing his father that he cheats; his roommate and best friend sees him and, in accordance with the school's honor code, turns him in, whereupon he is expelled. I am sure I read that story 30 times, because it was the first piece of fiction I'd ever read where it wasn't immediately clear whom you were supposed to feel sorry for. I kept thinking I was missing something. When it dawned on me that the confusion I was feeling was exactly what the author wanted me to be feeling, the whole notion of narrative art opened up to me, permanently. C. D. B. Bryan died just this past year. He certainly made me a reader, and probably a writer,

Writers like to feel sorry for themselves, which is easy to do in private, but when called on to feel sorry for ourselves in social situations we will often do so by sharing terrible book tour stories. Here is mine. Before I begin, I will ask you to type my name into your favorite search engine — if you like, you can even type "jonathan dee author," which would seem sort of foolproof, right? Except that there is another "jonathan dee author." He lives in Wales and writes New Age-type books with titles like An Illustrated Guide to the Tarot and Simply Face Reading. We have never met, nor can I imagine the circumstances that might bring us together.

So on a tour a few years ago to promote the paperback of my previous novel, Palladio, I found myself in Milwaukee in February. I had a reading that evening at a local bookstore, and before that, I was booked to appear on a local radio show. My itinerary for the tour listed only the name of the show ("Hotel Wisconsin"), a street address, and the designation "Live." I took a cab to that street address and discovered that it was a stage door. Beyond it was the Pabst Theater, which may be named after a brand of beer associated with reduced circumstances but is basically the Carnegie Hall of Milwaukee. (Here is a link to a nice video tour of the venue.) A band was rehearsing onstage. There must have been a thousand people in the audience — a shocking contrast to my usual radio gig, which consisted of myself and one other person sitting in a basement with headphones on. So someone onstage sees me looking frightened and brings the host over to meet me. "I'm so looking forward to this," the host says, referring to our five-minute segment, scheduled to air live about ten minutes hence. "I love your work. I thought maybe we could start out with the whole Chinese head-reading thing." That's right — he was under the impression he had booked the other Jonathan Dee.

Reader, all my life I will regret not being quick enough on the draw to have processed this whole catastrophe in an instant and replied to this man — who had, and likely still has, no idea who I am — "Yes. My thinking exactly. Let's walk out on stage, and then you bend over and I will read the bumps on your head." I would have had a story that would have had people buying me drinks for the rest of my life. Instead, I have this one

One of the defining features of blogging is the insta-rant — the opinion committed at the speed of typing not just to words but to global distribution, totally outflanking any temperate second thoughts. As someone who usually takes months if not years to declare any piece of writing finished, that idea is sounding pretty cathartic to me right now, and thus I will subject you to my feelings about Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, which I finally saw last night.

From a compositional point of view, it's stunningly well directed. I'll remember that overhead shot of Jeremy Renner pulling on the wire that produces six unexploded bombs from a pile of street rubble, or the later one of him standing helplessly in the cereal aisle, for a long time. Still, there was something gnawing at me all through the film, and by the time it was over I realized that there is something fundamentally off about not just The Hurt Locker but war movies in general, or at least pretty much every war movie since 1986's Platoon. The fact that Bigelow's characters' lives are in constant danger is treated as an existential dilemma, which it is not. They have traveled to a foreign place where they are so unwelcome that people are constantly trying to kill them: the primary question in these characters' lives, then, would seem to be "Why are they there?" It's not that Bigelow doesn't consider that question worth answering — it's that she doesn't even consider it a question. These men are on a series of "missions," and that is all you need to know. War is invoked not as a conflict involving right or wrong but as a first principle of the characters' existence. Maybe that technique seemed edgy back when Michael Herr wrote Dispatches in 1977, but now it just seems frustratingly lazy. I should say that this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether I (or anyone) supports or opposes the war in Iraq. The don't-ask-don't-tell approach to plot and character that The Hurt Locker relies on to set itself in motion doesn't offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.

There! That felt good. And speaking of war, I am off in just a few hours to historic Gettysburg, to read from The Privileges and answer questions and drink with my excellent friend Fred, who is responsible for the whole endeavor. A report from the battlefield later this

"Guest blogger" wouldn't feel like such strange designation if I had ever done this before; but reader, you are currently hurtling toward the end of the first sentence I have ever blogged. I will try to enjoy myself and not give in to feelings of fraudulence. Don't get me wrong, I can and do waste time on the Internet with the best of them, but in some respects I am an embarrassingly analog guy. I am not on Facebook. I write whole books on yellow legal pads. I do not own a cell phone.

Who am I? I am the author of five novels, the most recent of which is titled The Privileges. It is about a family. Because the young patriarch of this family ends up a hedge-fund billionaire, the book has gotten some attention as a novel about the lifestyles of the obscenely rich, which it sort of is, but mostly not. Money does not make this guy who he is — who he is makes him money.

I have grown a little sensitive about the cell-phone thing, actually. The great Jonathan Richman has a new song called "You Can Have A Cell Phone That's OK But Not For Me," and while it may not be another "Roadrunner," he is, as ever, on to something. For better or worse, I just don't live a life where people need to get ahold of me right away. But then, about a year ago, there was a front-page story in the New York Times headlined something like, "So Who Are Those People Who Still Don't Have Cell Phones?" The answer, it turns out, is smug, obnoxious, holier-than-thou hipster technophobes; and I realized that if I did not want it assumed that I belonged to or in any way endorsed this subculture, I had better get a cell phone pronto. I still don't have one, though. But that is laziness, not Luddism.

Anyway, while I am not exactly touring in support of The Privileges at the moment, I will be hitting the road on Tuesday and Wednesday for a reading in Gettysburg, PA, the Cradle of Liberty. That's not what it's actually called, but I have decided to get into the blogging spirit by approximating references I can't quite remember, instead of stopping to look them up.

Here is what I am not going to do: I am not going to go to a restaurant, take pictures of my food, download them, and call that a blog. That is beyond the pale. The Internet is such a bazaar of self-indulgences that I don't know why that particular one should bug me so much. But it really