Today was the last teaching day of the semester, as Berkeley enters its first “Reading, Review, Recitation” period, which other schools call “Dead Week”. Normally, we’d have another week of classes ahead of us and wind things up around December 10th, but the RRR period was announced right around the same time the University started furloughing folks, so RRR may really be about the fact that there aren’t enough custodians still employed by UC to keep the classrooms clean. Anyway, my R4B students — the ones in the underground music class — asked me whether I was working on a new book, and I told them something I haven’t told you, dear reader. I am. I’m at the very beginning, just getting my feet wet, not really ready to tell you much about it stage of things. The proposal is mostly done, I’m hoping to knock down another three chapters or so in the bleak midwinter, and I’ll just let you in on a few things:

It’s a genre I swore I’d never mess with.

The people who wrote crappy reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably like it.

The people who wrote good reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably hate it (one of my students astutely observed that this means I am now following Bob Dylan’s career pattern).

It’s nonfiction, will be written in first person, will also involve field research and a lot of mucking about in rarely visited parts of the library, and will bear a closer relationship to much of the writing I did for Kitchen Sink than S&E did.

It will probably offend a lot of people.

More to come…