ON ASSIGNMENT: FOUR MONTHS OF DAILY TYPEWRITING is about combining writing, work, and family. For 38 years. Raising children, now enjoying the grandchildren. Being a presenter at a writers conference. Speaking on publishing as a business and self-publishing as an alternative. Combining fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and a movie script in the same book. Posting it online, daily, as I write it (the second half anyway--for the first half I had security issues with the defense contractor, at work). I think back to the old mail-art correspondence-novel David Zack was doing with his dog Bleeto out of the Immortality Centre, in Tepoztlan, Mexico. Copier art. All literature is world literature, Goethe said. What's it like to be a writer like Herman Melville in a culture that wants the books it sees on Oprah Winfrey or in a large pile at Wally World, big-box discounted. Melville worked for the Customs Service. When he retired, they gave him a gold watch, and wished him luck. "I'd prefer not to," he said. A Story of Wall Street. Wall Street is too big to fail. I failed. I botched my book. It is a final hash. From hacher, to chop small. To mince. I don't mince words. That's why I have to work as a technical writer, from time to time. I'm 70. ON ASSIGNMENT, my temporary assignment ended and I was reverted to my permanent rank: househusband. To say that ON ASSIGNMENT is about writing is like saying Moby-Dick was about hunting a white whale. It is, but it's so much more. It's about the human condition. It's also about decadence. Trying to maintain your standard in a heathen culture. A culture that worships celebrity. Think of Andy Kaufman pissing off the wrestling fans. Is he mocking us? No, no, wrestling is just as good as ballet. What am I--an elitist? Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism? An educated fool? You're making cat's cradles out of cobwebs. See Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. He's trying to write Typee and Omoo. And failing. He didn't fail, he succeeded. This is what it was like. Now try to see the world through your old eyes, the way you used to. Ha ha, you can't. Reading ON ASSIGNMENT has changed you. That's what art does.