LITERARY NOSTRUM

Y.P.R. 1. What’s shakin’?

Dan Kennedy I’m starting my fourth week back home after a little travel bender in which I think I clocked 35,000 miles in maybe a month’s time and felt like I had found the answers to everything but now maybe forgot or misplaced them. I am still/again hard at work on the next book—and last week received an unexpected and kind of surreal e-mail from my agent telling me that she’s sending over a foreign offer for Loser Goes First to be translated to Chinese, confirming my lifelong hunch that I am huge in the Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces, and that it would one day pay off modestly. Some days working on the new book involves actually getting down to writing. Today, so far, it has again involved taping another thirty pages to the wall and looking at them until I am convinced each page is worth anybody’s every last cent handed over to a bookstore clerk in 2005. In other news, my girlfriend Maria has rather defensively informed anyone who will listen around here that her hobbies are “Larry King Live” and “magazines.” Lately my rests on the blue couch are interrupted by the nightmare of an assistant gone stark-raving wild-dog insane on me, which I’ve embraced, because his behavior is always reminding me of this gray wolf me and Ben saw in Montana in the evening earlier this summer, and recalling the wolf that night puts me in a good mood to write more. Also, somebody checked out a book from the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis then sent it here to headquarters very anonymously. All about the search for the fourteenth Dalai Lama (J921.1996 Stewart, Whitney, 1959– The 14^th Dalai Lama: Spiritual Leader of Tibet) and folks here are trying to convince me this is some kind of spiritual message meant to find me. Wolf-boy stares at the book silently for hours before saying something random and spasmodic like, “Keep your mustache. And not as a joke.” At dinners everyone agrees on this: the fact that this Scott Peterson guy on CNN every night seems like bad news anyway you look at him. There’s this S.F. reading with Eggers and crew coming up, and then its back to New York after hanging around out there for the holiday weekend.

Mr. Kennedy is the author of the memoir Loser Goes First, which will be available in paperback on August 24^th. He is the editor of
Really Small Talk.