Dear Larry and Hazel:

I finished writing AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION, OR THE FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: I JUST CALL IT A KUNSTLERROMAN yesterday (entry dated today), copied it, and mailed the manuscript to you.

Brenda and I watched the first disk of the first season of Curb Your Enthusiasm yesterday on DVD. Funny.

Jews are funny in New York. When they move to Delray Beach and tell you how backward you are, they aren't as funny, to me. When they say, "I'm walking, here," in traffic, a traffic their moving to Delray Beach created, where there was no traffic, before.

In one episode Richard Lewis told Larry David he looked like a Jewish Ratso Rizzo, in his workout clothes.

You mean Dustin Hoffman isn't Jewish?

In Key Largo, Humphrey Bogart called Edward G. Robinson and his gangster minions "city filth."

No bucolic paradise is a match for city filth. When it moves in it drags everything down to its level. Manners, courtesy, a slower pace all go. If you live in a bucolic paradise beware: it's coming, like air pollution and medical waste washed up on the beaches. It is...the zeitgeist.

I kept thinking, These are the people who reject my work as regional, and not of interest to anyone, commercially. Not viable.

These are the people who kept Daddy and Them in the can for three years.

But it got out, eventually. And Billy Bob Thornton did get to make it.

Now to go back to June 2002, where I left off, in THE KING OF DAILY TYPEWRITING, and even further back, to when I wrote a bylined column for the Delray Beach News-Journal, after Screed came out, and I left the bank.

Someone wants to read it. A fewwwww, as the mule said when asked if he wanted any carrots, which make mules fart.

And I want to write it. I have to write it. Whether I want to or not.

That's how you know if you're a writer or not. If you don't have to do it, you aren't one. If you do, you are.

What's it like to be a writer in a culture like ours?

People used to read my column, and say they liked it. When I had a column.

Ah, well. Back to the salt mines.

Jack

Q: THE KING OF DAILY TYPEWRITING is a book in three parts.

You have completed two parts. MINOR POET: A COUNTER-NARRATIVE TO WRITING PROGRAMS AND WRITER'S GUIDES and AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION, OR THE FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: I JUST CALL IT A KUNSTLERROMAN

A: Yes. I have completed two of the areas agents aren't interested in agenting. Poetry and autobiographical fiction.

Now comes anecdotes and ravings.

Q: Is there any point in writing an agent about THE KING OF DAILY TYPEWRITING?

A: There's no point in writing a book New York doesn't want to publish.

Unless that's the form your work has taken, and you are following the writing where it leads.

Which is reason enough to write a book.

The only reason, I submit.

Q: Is it a sufficient reason?

A: Sufficient unto the day is the typewriting thereof.

Q: How do you get your head back into June 2002?

A: It's where I left off.

I just take up where I left off.

One throws beginnings and ends in, titles, because it's more practical to break the meta-meta-metaseries up into manageable hunks. A book-length slice makes a good book.

Q: And the meta-meta-metaseries is?

A: 40-Year Run.

Q: Nelson Algren said it used to be if you went Hollywood you had sold out, but now, if you write what New York wants you have sold out. New York is Hollywood.

He said when he insisted on having some say over what they did with his material, and getting an honest cut, on the money, Hollywood wouldn't buy it, and if Hollywood wouldn't buy it, New York wouldn't publish it, because Hollywood was where the money is.

He said he couldn't bring himself to write a book he couldn't sell. He had lost his innocence.

A: Yes, he wrote journalism, instead of a fat novel he wrote line by line.

He wrote Who Lost an American? and Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way.

He wrote Conversations with Nelson Algren.

That's the kind of thing I write.

Because I can't sell my novels.

I put fiction in them and call them novels. I say daily typewriting is what the novel morphed into. On the Internet. And I'm the King of Daily Typewriting.

I invented it. Or perfected it.

It doesn't fool New York, though.

Q: Now you were being given a chance to show your stuff.

A sabbatical.

You would have a year to write, and wouldn't have to worry about what your employer thought of your intemperate ravings.

A: Yes.

When a door slams shut, another door opens.

Q: Don't lose your innocence. Keep trying. Fail again. Fail better.

A: Algren said you have to have an acquired innocence. An innocence tempered in the annealing flame of experience. Of defeat and heartbreak, failure and weariness of spirit.