Wikipedia Page That May Only Interest Me #1

By Matt Jussim

It has happened to all of us from time to time. You look up something on Wikipedia, and as you're reading the page, you stumble onto another link that interests you, so you click on it. Then as you're reading that page, another link tickles you're fancy, so you click on it. Eventually you have no idea how you got from looking up the movie Touch of Evil to an article on the Panama Canal, and then somehow end up reading one about the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles. Eventually at some point I have to close my laptop and cease the endless cycle of information that lives and breathes on Wikipedia. While most professors and teachers try to dissuade their students from using it as a reference, I haven't written a paper without it in recent memory. Michael Scott loves it: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information." So here's a Wikipedia page that may only interest me:

Raymond Carver was an American writer most famous for his short stories and poems. I stumbled upon his page after i first was looking up some information on Robert Altman's Gosford Park. Eventually I clicked on the director's name, and then soon after found myself looking at the page for his film Short Cuts, which was based on Carver's writings. I myself have never read anything by him, and I wasn't completely sure I even knew who he was exactly. The name sounded familiar, perhaps I had heard it in school, or on television once before. At first glance I immediately remembered the name Raymond Chandler. For a moment I thought I had just remembered the name wrong, and that Carver and Chandler were one in the same. But as I read I realized that Chandler, the author of many crime novels featuring his famed protagonist Philip Marlowe, and Carver simply shared a first name. Coincidentally, Robert Altman's film, The Long Goodbye, was an adaptation of one of Chandler's novels. Carver's writing is often compared to Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka and his short story "Where I'm Calling From" was selected by John Updike to be included in the collection The Best American Short Stories of the Century.