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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.
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MAY 26 Someone said to me recently that Pittsburgh is a "great rock and roll town, in its rock and roll parts." Then I must have found one of its rock and roll parts last weekend, because I had one of the best rock nights in many years. Maybe my perception was skewed because I was putting on the show, but it was still objectively fun. Let me run down, oh, ten or more reasons why. 1. I appeared with the Johnsons Big Band. Formerly called the Johnsons, this band changed its name when it added a three-person horn section. Now it numbers nine people, and it is probably the greatest band in Pittsburgh. Rehearsing the night before the show with the Johnsons, I felt an overwhelming rush of testosterone, probably because they are all men, and I am rarely in a room with nine other men these days. Do I even have nine male friends, much less ones that play the keyboard and are named Chicken? Well, I do now, in Pittsburgh. All of the Johnsons are in other bands, and together, they seem to know everyone in town. That helped turnout, and it ensured that girls were taking my picture when I removed my shirt. 2. I played my show at Gooski's. Now, I'm not entirely sure of this bar's geneology, but it is in the middle of a section of Pittsburgh called Polish Hill, so I'm guessing it was once a Polish neighborhood bar, and it has now become one of those kinds of places that is a neighborhood bar by day and a punk club by night. I guessed this from the stickiness of the floor and the Stooges albums on the jukebox and the absurdly cheap beer. This place is a dark cramped smokebox and someone is always shoving a pool cue up your ass. The stage holds five comfortably, but it's not really a stage, more a raised platform. It's lit by Christmas lights, and the bartender turns them off when your set is over. It's really hard to see more than 10 feet in front of you. In the front room there are tables and barstools. Gooski's is designed to get you drunk. 3. The show involved a mix of my writing put to music, cover songs, and a couple original songs that I wrote. I tried to do some poems, but the audience started talking and, worse, leaving, so I pulled the plug on that section of the show. My favorite song was probably "Do the Ostrich," which I wrote. It's based on the first song Lou Reed ever published, which was a teen dance craze spoof called "The Ostrich." I've never heard the original, so I wrote what I imagined the song sounded like, and goddammit, people were dancing! At least 50 people were really dancing and singing along to a song I wrote. 4. I dumped a beer on a kid's head. Via email, I'd promised him that this would happen. Later, I gave him a free CD. 5. When attempting to sing "I Wanna Be Your Dog" in a duet with the Johnsons' lead singer, Terry, I strained a stomach muscle and crumpled to the floor in pain. How does Iggy do it? 6. I took off my T-shirt and flung it into the crowd. The guy who caught it brought it back because he didn't want it. Then I flung it in the other direction. Again, it was returned. Finally, a young woman got control of the shirt and seemed to want to keep it. After the show, she approached me. "It smells like literature!" she said. 7. At one point when I was singing, I saw someone in the crowd visibly wince. 8. When I was coming back up on stage for an encore, someone shouted, "Neal Pollack sucks!" I found him and spilled beer all over his shirt. "Yeah!" he said. "Yeah!" 9. Stu, the Johnsons' harmonica player, took off his shirt while I was working the crowd. He wanted to prove to me that he has a hairier chest than I. Stu, you have a hairier chest than I. You win. 10. After the show, a woman approached me and said, "I really appreciated that poem you did about the Big Jew Cock. Because I have a guy, he's not my boyfriend, we don't fuck, he's just someone I fool around with. He's Jewish, and I can feel his cock through his pants. It's very thick. Really thick. So you're accurate." I replied, "that poem is based on years of field research." She said, "I usually make him come in his pants." I thanked her for the story and moved along. 11. Outside after the show, a guy interviewed me with a tape recorder. He'd had a few beers. One question went, "so what're you gonna do next, probably?" My response, "who the hell knows?" 12. More than 200 people paid to see me put on a rock 'n' roll show. In Pittsburgh. Yeah! - - - - APRIL 22 T H I N G S I L E A R N E D O N - - - - 1. When people in Baltimore tell you that the turnout at your reading is not going to be good because there is a White Stripes concert that night at Towson State, believe them. In a town the size of Baltimore, the White Stripes are your competition, and you are not going to beat the White Stripes, because they are the greatest band going. 2. When only twenty-five people turn out for your performance, put on a full rock show anyway, because the Billroys, the cowpunk band assigned to you for the evening, are very good and don't seem to care whether they have an audience or not. Pretend like the room is full, even though most of the audience is hanging out in the back or playing pool. Take off your shirt and dump several glasses of water on your head, making the tech guy nervous. 3. Crowds at bookstores in Washington, D.C., are large and enthusiastic and enjoy references to Paul Wolfowitz. Also, people in D.C., on the whole, seem to be employed and buy lots of books. 4. When you are booked to do a 7 p.m. reading at a dumpy rock club on Queen Street in Toronto, make sure the day bartender knows about it so he doesn't end up telling people there's no show that night. Later, when a band of eighteen-year-old high-school students shows up to back you, treat them well, because they have a lot of energy and try very hard. Make a lot of noise, break several glasses, and scream very loudly because in Toronto, unlike in the States, sometimes they send television cameras to literary events. 5. Sheila Heti, of Toronto, is a great writer and creative person who will soon be published by McSweeney's, and when she tours, you should all go see her. 6. There are no good restaurants in Indianapolis. 7. The Del Rio in Ann Arbor is a great place to do a rock and roll show, because if one hundred people show up to hear you read, at least twenty of them will not be able to get in, which is good for business in the long run. Also, women there let you sign their butts. 8. Jim Roll, of Ypsilanti, Michigan, knows how to put on a rock and roll show with little notice and also has the second-greatest dog in the world. Her name is Bernadette, and she misses the woods. 9. The University Bookstore of Madison, Wisconsin, is a fine place to perform a scene from "Death of A Salesman" during a literary reading. Also, young people at the University of Wisconsin buy brownie mix on request. 10. The day before your tour ends, use your remaining budget to buy four bottles of wine at The Loring Bar in Minneapolis, and share those bottles with people who were at your reading and then have come to celebrate with you. It's always a good idea to get your readers drunk. 11. If you ask the beautiful women who run the Arts and Letters Series at the Dallas Museum of Art to put Junior Mints in the green room, they will comply. 12. If some people from New Jersey throw you a party in Dallas after your reading, and you eat three "special" cookies that night, do not eat bacon for breakfast the next day. If Chris McCall threw you that party, thank him profusely, even though you were green by the time you got home. 13. Imagine yourself in Jonathan Safran Foer's publicist's shoes when, on the first night of his respectable book tour, he put on a program with a cranky Boomer rock critic, a used book dealer from Brooklyn who specializes in African literature, a bald harmonica-playing hillbilly from Baltimore, and a guy with bleached-blond hair who likes to take his dog on stage. Change the lineup accordingly. 14. When you throw a rock and roll show in your home city to celebrate the end of your book tour, make sure you tell people about it, or else you and the long-suffering Billroys of Baltimore might end up strutting around on stage in front of fifteen paid customers at a 300-seat venue. Drink a lot of whiskey to compensate. Still, it was a good show, and someday, the people will know about you and your front-man destiny. Vow that next time, there WILL be a mosh pit. Fucking roll and roll, people. And now, I die. NP - - - - APRIL 1 My word, is it baseball season already? I began this book tour the Friday before the Super Bowl, and now the Indians and Angels are already battling it out on ESPN. No wonder I am wandering the earth in a daze, updating my tour diary with not enough frequency. Let me just tell you that the West Coast was a hurricane party of Spring Break proportions, only with drier T-shirts and smarter hosts. I have been so long in writing that I have forgotten a few details. Let me just, then, run down day by day, say some thanks, mention some highlights, and resume tonight in Baltimore, wearing a cowboy shirt and pretending to be some kind of honky-tonk angel. Remember, people of Canada. I'm coming for you! March 18, Seattle Conversation with John Hodgman at Richard Hugo House. Thanks to Kirsten Atik for the brownies and to Paula, who dressed as a polar bear and attempted unsuccessfully to attack me because the polar-bear head was too big. Thanks to Tommy Wallach who tried to outrap me. Thanks to John Hodgman, who endured my weed-fueled ramblings, embossing them with his own alcohol-fueled wit. Thanks to Ana Saskia, who sung to the crowd wearing a bright-pink wig as Paula unsuccessfully tried to maul me. March 19, Seattle Thanks to the Nancyboys, who played gamely behind me as I croaked my way through "Folsom Prison Blues" at the Tractor Tavern. Thanks to the 300 people in the audience who waited for the show to get better and enjoyed the show when it did. I thought my "Ring of Fire" was pretty good, and every time I read "Memories of Times Square" with a band, it just gets better and better. I also made my way through "Mama Tried" without too much trouble, and I definitely broke a bunch of beer bottles at the end there. Thanks to the people who asked me to sign their bodies. It was my pleasure. Thanks to Kim Ricketts and Dawn Martin, for enduring a night with me. Thanks to Matthew, for driving me around and letting me crash on his futon for a few minutes while my brain recalibrated. Thanks to Steven and Kym, for staying up late. March 20, Portland Thanks to Paul Collins and Jenny for letting me sleep upstairs, and to Kevin Sampsell, Elizabeth Miller, and all the folks at Powell's for letting me read in Hawthorne. Thanks for letting me do a pretty normal reading, and for letting it still be entertaining. Next time, Portland, I swear, I will make trouble. March 21, San Francisco Thanks to Stacey Lewis, Beth Lisick, John Longhi, the staff at Cellspace, Lars Mars and the band and the poets from Youth Speaks for enduring my rock and roll suicide, which included a disastrous rendition of a song from "My Fair Lady," which I will not ever do again, at least not at an anarchist performance space in the Mission. Thanks to Hecklina, my tranny, I wish it could have happened between us. Thanks to Vendela Vida and John for wearing my tees. Thanks to the twenty of you who stayed until it was over. Thanks to the Devilettes for being so hot. Thanks to Jane Lerner, my new best friend, for everything. March 22, Palo Alto Thanks to everyone at Keplers. Thanks to Barb Hansen, Miss Maggie, Mr. Matt, and Miss Stephanie, for playing the old time music and thanks to the crowd for making up the lyrics to our song which went like this, "well, you oughta see my J Lo, from Munich she did come, she shouldn't let the caterpillars crawl around her bum, get along home, J Lo J Lo get along home, get along home, J Lo J Lo, you've got a skin disease." You had to be there. Thanks to Shira Levine for the afterparty. March 24, Oakland Thanks to Shoshana Berger, the queen of DIY, and to Grace, for all the delicious ReadyMade schwag, and to the staff of Diesel Books for letting me lecture on such a sunny day. Thanks to Gregg, Aida, Helene, Bailey, and Hannah, for a great hike and subsequent dog wash. March 25, Capitola Thank you all you musicians who came out of nowhere and made a normal bookstore reading into a thirty-minute rock and roll party. Man, you guys should be in a band or something! Thank goodness I called for you on the radio and thank goodness you came, and I never even wrote down your names. Also thanks to the adult ESL class from the local community college whose teacher brought them to see what a "typical" American book reading was like. I hope you weren't disappointed. I do use quite a bit of Spanglish in my work. March 26, Los Angeles Thank you so much Mike Welch and Pilar from Track 16 Gallery, who hosted me and indulged my show-hogging tendencies. Thank you to Book Soup, for selling the books. Thank you, and I don't believe I'm writing this, to John Doe, for putting up with my bad interview style and for playing your folk songs. Thanks to Jerry Stahl for enduring me yet again and to Donnell Alexander, who is soon to bust out, and to Luis Alfaro for also enduring me. Thanks to Margot and Lloyd for giving me their bed. My lord. It is all just such a beautiful dream. Can I do this every year for the rest of my life? Please? Oh, please? NP - - - - MARCH 10 It has recently been intimated, in a weekly newspaper that once employed me, that I am "stuck in the star machine," unable to write about real people in real situations anymore. Well, la di da. If that's what wearing an outfit created for me exclusively by the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley and standing on a table in a Barnes & Noble in Chelsea while reading poetry means, all of which happened last week, then I guess you've gotta consider me a star, baby! If you think that writing and haute couture do not mix, then you should look more carefully at the clothing choices of such authors as John Irving, J.M. Coetzee, and David Foster Wallace, all of who look FABULOUS, all the time. I say this because yesterday I arrived in the city not of my birth but of my maturing years, Chicago, a place where uppity Easterners are seen as irrelevant, and, to some extent, they are irrelevant. Considering its distance from any other city of considerable size, Chicago has a remarkably rich cultural life, and I miss it terribly. They really should build more condos here, though. Not enough condos. Consider Shannon Walker, a transplanted New Yorker who now runs a Hudson Books stall in the American Airlines terminal at O'Hare. She met me at my airplane, and after an hour of struggle with luggage and security, I beheld her store, which is, undoubtedly, the greatest airport bookstore in the world. Shannon has a whole shelf of DONALD GOINES books, for pity's sake. "The older businessmen love him," she said. I have never seen an airport bookstore that carries Iceberg Slim. Shannon had placed my paperback in the bestseller section, even though it is not, as of this writing, a bestseller. "It will be at my store," she said. How could I not love this woman? Then I met her boyfriend, who works as a baggage handler for American. Shannon said, "I never thought I'd date a ramp guy." Well, this particular ramp guy treats her very well, and will go to museums and foreign films with her even though he doesn't understand them. He is also very handsome. Shannon is tired of interesting but unreliable men, and who can blame her? That ramp guy was hot. In the evening, I continued to bathe in my rock and roll pretensions at The Hideout, the greatest bar in Chicago, and possibly the world, with Jon Langford of the Mekons and Sally Timms of the Mekons, and John Rice, and the Johnsons Big Band of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The staff of Quimby's was on hand to sell my book, and Bloodshot Records, my record label against their better judgment, sold my CD, of which there are now 3,500 in print, and that number is rising. The ninety-six paid customers, many of whom were over twenty-one, saw the Johnsons play excellent songs, saw Sally sing a couple of lovely numbers, and saw full rock and roll renditions of "A Spoken-Word Poem For America," "It Is Easy to Take a Lover in Cuba," "Memories of Times Square," and "The Albania of My Existence." I debuted a new song, "The Ballad of Emmett O'Donnell," which is based on my time pretending to be Bob Dylan, and closed the evening with a very loud rendition of "I Wipe My Ass on Your Novel," where I stripped, stage-dove, jammed a finger, and spilled a nice young woman's beer. "Dude," she said, when the show was over, "you spilled my beer." So I bought her a beer. It was my penance to the good people of Chicago, because I have betrayed them for the star machine. Next stop, Austin, Texas. I am going to the doctor today, to have my liver lined with steel. Love, - - - - AUSTIN, TEXAS Emboldened by my stage-diving, microphone-screeching performance at The Hideout in Chicago, I flew down to Austin with a bellyful of indie rock conquest in mind. While I had been unjustly denied a festival showcase by the organizers of South By Southwest (who apparently didn't see the wisdom in featuring a relatively unknown writer among hundreds of hungry bands), I still felt that if I shouted loud enough, long enough, and well enough, that somehow I could claw my way to the top over the heaving bones of the other desperate souls longing to be discovered. Instead, I found myself on the Dudley and Bob show at 7 a.m. on a Thursday, watching as Dudley, the "most popular radio host in Austin," stuck a finger down his throat and vomited into a trashcan on the air. Then he left the studio so I could be interviewed by Bob and Charlie, who called himself the world's greatest lover and invited women to "suck peanut sauce off his nipples." He was kind of a lowbrow version of me, so I took pity on him. Then I read a piece and deliberately said the word "fuck" on the air so I could get them in trouble with the FCC. The rest of the weekend was just swimming. Jim Roll from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who has an album out called Inhabiting the Ball that features lyrics by Denis Johnson and Rick Moody and who was also unjustly denied a showcase this year, showed up at BookPeople, the greatest bookstore in all Texas, with two backing musicians, and they played behind me for what was probably the best reading of my life and everyone at the store whooped and went somewhat insane. My Henry Rollins imitation was, by the end, pretty sharp. The next day, I emceed the Bloodshot Records barbecue and got booed off the stage at one point for reading a poem that makes fun of Lucinda Williams. Later I dumped a beer on my head and menaced the crowd. Someone booed me again and I said to him, "fuck you, motherfucker, I'm a fucking Bloodshot recording artist." I'd been drinking. In all, I saw about fifteen bands. I also saw Fritz Lang's Metropolis with an original score, and on Saturday afternoon, I got real high and a friend took me to a bar off the beaten Austin track and we saw a hardcore band made up largely of people who work at the bar. There was no audience, save the regulars, and the place easily could have held five hundred. This guy was shrieking into the microphone, something about how "all the cops are gay," and the music was very fast and loud. A cute chick walked by the band and the drummer threw a stick at her. Later we talked to the lead singer and he said that people always throw things at them. "Because they don't like you?" I said. "No," he said. "They like us. They just want to throw things at us." Fucking rock and roll. - - - - MARCH 10 It appears that a man has been arrested in Chicago for storing cyanide in a secret underground passageway beneath an El station. His terrorist "group" is called the Realm of Chaos. This has nothing to do with my tour, but I still think it's interesting. - - - - MARCH 5 Well, here I am on the road again, living your dream so you don't have to. This diary is going to be different than last time, when I used my tour experiences as jumping-off points for delightful postmodern arabesques about the absurdities of pre-war American life. But now we are in a war, a war on terror, and there is no time for tomfoolery. All one can do now, as a writer, is to portray reality in all its bitterness. The time of ironic literary gamesmanship is at its end. Actual experience, deftly and tersely portrayed, is all that will save American literature from the trash compactor. So here goes: The reading at Brookline Booksmith was fine, pleasant even, and everyone did a good job, but I wouldn't say the place was filled with joyous people, with the possible exception of the young woman who caught my T-shirt. Afterward we sold some books and a woman asked how she could be me. I said, "grow a lot of body hair and move to Philadelphia." Well, I didn't actually say that, but I should have. Afterward, though, my friends and I went to the Kendall Cafe in Cambridge where Tim Huggins, a guy from Mississippi who owns a bookstore in Newton, runs a reading series called Earfull, which mixes up literature and rock and roll in the coolest possible way. I missed the first reader and Joe Pernice, the first musical act, but heard the second reader, Dennis Lehane, whose books sell hundreds of times of copies more than mine, but since you only read "literary" books, let me sum up his work in a pithy phrase. He's kind of a Boston Elmore Leonard. Lehane read and the crowd seemed to enjoy him. I have no criticisms of his books, which are great, or of his reading style, which is fine, but he went on a little long, only because the bar was very smoky and people were drinking beer and wanted to see rock and roll. I have this naive idea that in certain venues, writers need to be entertaining and not just read a book chapter. I was saying this loudly to my friends, but in a room separate from the reading, when a wormy guy in a bad shirt slapped me on the back and said, "would you guys please shut the fuck up?" We were all too surprised to respond, but needless to say the guy was a dick and we had done nothing wrong. Then the Dropkick Murphys, an Irish punk band of good standing, played many songs, including a great version of "The Ballad of the Irish Rover." The Murphys are very popular in Boston, and many of the people at this show told me they came out to see an acoustic set by them, but it sounded plenty loud and plenty great to me. After they were done, everyone pretty much left, but I was singing the almighty praises of Earfull. What a great idea, to put writers on the same bill as rock and roll! It makes the rock people have to sit still and think, and forces the writey people to rock. For those of us writers who spent our youth in bars listening to bands and drinking beer, rather than attempting to climb mastheads or get our MFA's in Midwest domestic fiction,it seems like the only way to live. I declare right now that writers must choose between rocking or not, and those who rock stand on my side of the line and those who don't go directly to the 92nd Street Y. Arthur Bradford and Ben Greenman both came to Earfull, along with a guy named Steve Almond who is mostly self-funding a 35-city tour this spring to promote his new book of stories, My Life In Heavy Metal. He won't be complaining about "publicity" in Writers on Writing. He knows, like I do, that publicity is fun, and that book tours rule. Let me just state again that Earfull rules and I hope scenes like it start appearing in other cities. Writers of America, prepare to rock. To prove my didactic point, I got up on stage with a house band and read my poem A Spoken Word Poem For America, which was well-received. Then I made the mistake of telling them to play I Wanna Be Your Dog, which they did, very loudly, so I no one could hear the words to my poem I Wipe My Ass On Your Novel. I thought to myself, what would Iggy do, so I took off my shirt and humped the microphone stand and threw myself off the stage, screaming all the while. The wormy guy came up to my friend Gregg and said something about how I should get a new gig and Gregg, who is really a good friend, said that the guy should fuck off because "Neal is the best writer of his generation." I'm writing this in Gregg's apartment overlooking the Charles River. He and his wife Aida are doctors who work with Partners in Health, an excellent organization that tries against hope to end inequalities in global health care. I am looking at a picture over the computer of a young girl squatting in a concrete trash heap and the caption "Guatemala City, Guatemala: Living in the refuse of other people's more privileged existence." Well, no one ever said Gregg was ideologically mild. They don't have a TV here, but I have read three books on Trans-Maya activism. We got a ride home from a guy named Dennis who works in the printing plant of the Boston Globe and wants to wear a mask because he inhales a lot of newspaper dust but won't because his co-workers would make fun of him. Dennis visits Jamaica very often and is familiar with Negril especially. He lives in Dorchester and, he informed us, his love life mostly consists of picking up freaky women from out of town. College students are too young, and Boston women, he said, forget it. "The men here are HAHD," he said. "But Boston women, they're WICKED HAHD." We will see, Boston. We will see. NP
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