Neal Pollack

In honor of this week's publication of Stretch, I thought I'd reprint this little essay I wrote for The Faster Times back in June. Hope you all enjoy.

NP

Soon after yoga school began, three weeks that feels like three months ago, a small group of people asked the management if the doors could open a little earlier. They wanted to meditate, starting at 6:45 AM, to help prepare themselves for the rigors of the day. This particular subsection of the yoga world tends to operate on a little-old-lady schedule, light early-bird dinner and up before dawn, so the request didn’t surprise me.

Though I’d rather scrape my anus with a carrot peeler than do even more yoga, I also tend to move pretty fast once I finally do get out of bed. I’m usually one of the first people to arrive at any event, class, or function. Therefore, while I’m not part of the go-go morning meditation bunch at yoga school, I’ve tended to get there while they’re still at the end of their inward bliss of solitude. I sit on the front step and receive visitors.

The meditators have apparently noticed. On Friday morning, one of them came up to me as I sat on my mat, not stretching.

“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends,” I said.

“For some reason,” he said, “your voice is the only one all of us hear while we’re meditating, and we were wondering if you could keep it down.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you’re meditating, so…”

“I know,” he said. “Trucks go by and all. But still. You’re really loud.”

Fresh off The Nervous Breakdown's excerpt of Stretch today, please enjoy the complete Google Reader feed of my Faster Times yoga column. You will be enlightened, or at least mildly amused.

Kirkus Reviews
June 15, 2010

STRETCH: The Unlikely Making Of A Yoga Dude
By Neal Pollack

Once upon a time, the author was a hot writer, a charmingly comedic iconoclast ever ready to poke a sharp stick in the eye of convention. The world at his doorstep, he did the “full retard,” making a narcissistic ass of himself, fueled by a steady intake of recreational intoxicants. His descent was meteoric.

In a review of his novel Never Mind the Pollacks (2003), the New York Times Book Review wrote that Pollack had gone from incandescent satirist to an “ordinary humor dork, yet another doughy, 35-ish white man with a goatee and thinning hair.” When his agent stopped calling, the author decided to regroup and, at the suggestion of his wife, try yoga. However, yoga—or at least its wayward applications: “high-priced self-empowerment for the over-privileged creative class”—is just the kind of activity that Pollack used to demolish with satire. But something clicked. He hasn’t abandoned snark and cynicism—they are the lifeblood of this quest, along with a healthy dose of self-abasement—but at his unassuming local yoga place, he found that the practice “calmed his inner pervert.” His circumstantial rage was chilled as he sweated through the routines, but he’s still a yoga bad boy, a bong-hitting carnivore with a taste for laughter, which makes him a highly entertaining guide as he investigates the good, bad and ugly of the yoga spectrum, from yogathons to yoga competitions to freestyle yoga rap. There is also a lovely authenticity to his discovery of his yoga fundamentalism—“the words of the ancients and a few sacred physical principles that humans have been practicing since the dawn of time.”

Both sincere and subversive, Pollack will likely inspire more than one reader to commit to yoga.

Here is the first "trailer" for Stretch.