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- - - - Copyright 2001, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
- - - - Title: Making Sense of Neal Pollack
- - - - Making Sense of Neal Pollack
Yes, "that Neal Pollack. The three-time National Book Award-winning former lover of Margaret Thatcher. The man of whom Norman Mailer once wrote: "Without him, boredom would swallow the Republic whole." But before he moved to Philadelphia, he read there. Allow me, if you will, to recall my encounters with America's greatest living writer. Neal Pollack reads in the men's room: 30th Street Station, Sept. 13, 3:30 p.m. Neal Pollack stood on a stepladder in the tiled vestibule of the men's room. His magnum opus, "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature," open before him, he gazed out upon a dozen or so adoring fans and puzzled passersby and read from his essay "The Albania of My Existence." The first author to be published by McSweeney's Books, the maverick company formed by renowned memoirist Dave Eggers, was in the early stages of his first book tour. Train station bathrooms were only the beginning. He would go on to read at such unlikely spots as the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and a hotel room at the Stardust in Las Vegas. This was no standard-issue book tour-but Neal Pollack is no standard-issue author. Just as he recalled the pity he took upon Albanians "beset by unwanted refugees, obscure diseases and limited opportunities to express themselves through fashion," an Amtrak police officer asked: "What do you think you're doing here?" The loyal followers of the author's work-including three orange-wigged members of the Boston experimental dance troupe Monkey House-were told that they were trespassing and were shooed away. And Neal Pollack-that is, Neal Pollack, the humorist and former Chicago Reader writer who lampoons self-serving literary pomposity through the persona of Neal Pollack, America's greatest living writer-worried that he might wind up in the slammer. "Call Dave," he told his trusty assistant. Perhaps he was thinking of bail money, and the $1.4 million that Eggers landed for the paperback rights to his masterful post-modern memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He turned toward me. "Dan," Pollack whispered, "don't leave." If he wound up doing hard time for conducting a literary event in a public restroom without a permit, Pollack wanted the press on hand to chronicle his cuffing. The author escaped incarceration when the Amtrak officer found he had no priors. Pollack admitted he was worried-"but in the back of mind I was thinking, if I do get arrested, I would sell a lot of books." Neal Pollack stops for a beer: The Standard Tap, Sept. 13, 9:15 p.m. That evening, I had my second encounter with the author who makes a point of inserting himself at the center of his stories in order to mock indulgent writers for such publications as the New Yorker and Vanity Fair who do the same. (That did not stop Vanity Fair from calling "The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature "a winner ... inventive and hilarious." However, the Norman Mailer blurb taken from the Anthology jacket, like the National Book Award and the affair with Margaret Thatcher, is make believe.) I was about to order at the Standard Tap in Northern Liberties when in strode Neal Pollack, fans in tow. And so we supped on burgers and beer as America's greatest living writer regaled the table with his adventures covering the protesters at the Republican National Convention, which had been published in the four-part series "Philadelphia: Into the Maw" on http://www.mcsweeneys.net, the Web site of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly, the Eggers-edited journal to which Pollack is a regular contributor. Neal Pollack meets his people: Northern Liberties, Sept. 13, 10:30 p.m. Pollack and his fans headed to a loft party for another reading, with music by the local country duo She-Haw. I drove them. "I have come to read to my people!" the author shouted to the deserted streets of Philadelphia. Inside, he read from the "Anthology's "Letter From Paris" and gamely attempted to sing Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Afterward, the mustachioed Pollack, 30, who studied journalism at Northwestern University and comedy with Second City cofounder Del Close, wore a funny hat made out of newspaper. He characterized the high jinks that he and his McSweeney's cohorts indulge in as "gamesmanship, but not cruel gamesmanship. We're just playing with the form. We're like kids in the big literary candy store." Then he was gone, off on a six-week book tour. In Austin, Texas, he was the victim of a mock execution while wearing a George W. Bush mask. (See http://www.nealpollack.com for photos.) In Venice Beach, Calif., he was backed up by a ukulele player. And me? I was left to make sense of Pollack, and McSweeney's, on my own. My attempts to talk to Eggers, who started the Brooklyn-based McSweeney's in 1998, before the success of "Heartbreaking turned him into a literary "It" boy, were thwarted. Eggers did, however, consent to an e-mail interview. Without revealing the journal's sales figures, he typed: "McSweeney's was made to please a small number of people, if any people at all. For some reason more people like it than we expected, which is both good and bad." The precious, annoying mixture of irony and erudition of "Heartbreaking is ever-apparent on the McSweeney's site-as is the Eggers trick of preempting criticism by criticizing himself. The Web site has an "If You Are Reviewing or Writing About McSweeney's" link, which instructs writers to use the words "precious," "annoying," and "for the junior Harper's set." McSweeney's has a loyal following of, Pollack had told me, "people like me. They're not hipsters. They're book dorks. ... The median McSweeney's person is probably 27, college educated, marginally employed. ... In general, people who haven't had much to do since "Dr. Who went off the air." Feverish fascination with McSweeney's can be tracked on such Eggers-obsessed Web sites as http:www.aphrodigitaliac.com/mm/archive/foelog and the "Neal Pollack: Greatest Writer, or Insidious Monster?" discussion folder on ww.Salon.com. One favorite topic is whether the gregarious Pollack is really the reclusive Eggers in disguise. "The cult around Eggers is really out of control," says Laura Miller, book editor of Salon.com, where Eggers used to work. "But everything [Eggers] does is interesting. I always thought of him as ... someone who primarily gets really excited about other people's work." Of Pollack's "Anthology, Miller says: "If I was an Esquire writer, I don't know how I could go on after reading it. He shot down every fatuous genre of magazine writing there is." Eggers says he made Pollack the inaugural McSweeney's author because "he's one of the funniest people in America, and he's also a tireless performer. We knew he'd have a great tour and spread his gospel without mercy or sleep." He founded McSweeney's Books, he says, "to try publishing books by giving authors complete control and 100 percent of the profits. Just an experiment." It's one that works for Pollack, who received no advance but has netted $35,000 from the 10,000 copies sold of the $16 "Anthology. Next year, McSweeney's will publish Lawrence Krauser's "Lemon ("about a man's romantic obsession with a lemon," Eggers says). It will be followed by books from acclaimed authors Jonathan Lethem and Zadie Smith, and Eggers' next work, "Untitled Novel Involving Water. Neal Pollack walks among us: Upstage, Nov. 29, 10:15 p.m. I was pondering the meaning of it all on a cold night as I entered the Old City rock club Upstage to see the Australian pop band the Go-Betweens when, out of a dark corner, a familiar voice called my name. It was America's greatest living writer. Pollack shook my hand and informed me that he had completed his triumphant book tour and was now, in fact, a Philadelphian. To underscore this, he wrote his phone number on a Lucky Strike bar napkin, under the words "An American Original." He signed it: Neal Pollack, of Philadelphia. I will cherish it until the day I die-or auction it on eBay. Neal Pollack likes his turkey hot: Reading Terminal Market, Dec. 14, 1 p.m. I made plans to meet Pollack for lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. He ate hot turkey at the Dutch Eating Place-surely a sign he had embraced Pennsylvania's heritage as his own-and told me the inspiration for the "Anthology persona came in 1998 while he was writing "urban picaresque" stories for the Chicago Reader. He was reading magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker "and listening to a lot of NPR when all these narratives got jumbled in my head and something in me just snapped. I had to deal with this mixture of aesthetic loathing and professional jealousy." He dashed off four parodies-in addition to "The Albania of My Existence," they include "I Have Had Sex With 500 Women," "The Burden of Internet Celebrity," and "Portrait of an Andalusian Horse Trainer"-which Eggers published in the initial fall 1998 McSweeney's. Pollack says he moved here with his wife, Regina Allen, a painter and art teacher, because he had grown disenchanted with the gentrification of the Windy City. "I liked Chicago because it was a very real place, but it's become a stomping ground for every yuppie in the Midwest," he said. In Philadelphia, he "saw some of the Chicago I've been missing." Asked whether his decision to migrate-the couple moved into their Brewerytown house in late November-was an effort to reverse the trend of an American city that lost more population than any other in the `90s, Pollack replied: "I may not be 700,000 people, but I'm one man, with lots of readers. And I urge them all to join me here in the City of Brotherly Love." Here he will apply his prodigious talents to a new art form. In October, Pollack appeared at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, reading "A Spoken Word Poem for America." ("America is a sucker's bet/And a drunkard's dream./It is a poem written/Hurriedly/In Golden Gate Park/On a book tour.) At Eggers' suggestion, he has decided to publish "Poetry & Other Poems" next year. "I've written three so far," he said. "It might not seem like a lot, but they didn't take me very long to do. I figure I'll write about 60 poems next year, slap `em together and tour as the greatest living American poet. It's not going to be a problem." - - - -
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