Neal Pollack's The Maelstrom

I'm extremely sorry to those of you who used to occasionally depend on me for political or literary commentary. But there are quite a few other places on the Internet to find such things. For now, I will continue to report on my book-reading experiences, but until the Suns walk home with that trophy, this will be primarily a sports place, where the enlightened may, as lesser men than I say, "talk smack."

Let me smack, then, the Cretaceous "coach" John Thompson, who TNT mistakenly assigned to the Suns-Grizzlies game two broadcast the other night. Even though the Suns came back from several points down in the closing minutes to win, even though Quentin Richardson made a key block with time winding down to seal the victory, and even though the Suns have already proven themselves to be the smoothest and most versatile playoff team this side of Miami, the coach continued to say that the Suns couldn't play defense, that they are a "good team, not a great team," and that the Grizzlies are actually better and could win the series. After Memphis LOST, he said, "this loss should give them confidence going into Game Three." Tell me, how is that possible? Losing never leads to confidence. I have done a lot of losing over the years, so I know. My confidence has never been lower. Has anyone even watched the Suns this year? Do they not recognize poetry when they see it? John Thompson cannot get around the moving pick that has planted itself in his brain.

Charles Barkley, on the other hand, can talk smack about the Suns if he wants. I'm not about to tell Barkley that he's wrong. I can't help it. I respect the guy.

One more note: Giving Jason Kidd the ball for the game-winning shot is like asking me to be the writer who brings your publishing house back to profitability. It ain't gonna happen.

Posted by at 1:25 PM | Permalink

The title makes this entry seem a lot more interesting than it really is, but I wanted to tune all six of you into my latest Nerve column, which discusses the important and relevant subject of sex in Jewish youth groups. I'm sure someone from BBYO central command, if they get a hold of this one, will circumcise the rest of my penis.

As for the Apathy part, that's the title of the 16th book I've read this year. It's actually Apathy And Other Small Victories, by a young feller named Paul Neilan. It will be published by St. Martin's sometime this year. You know, if I didn't receive books to blurb, I might never read at all. Between having a two-year-old and the important business of watching baseball on television, I barely have the time to experience the transcendence of reading.

I did blurb this book, and I did enjoy it a lot. In fact, I laughed out loud many times. My blurb said something along the lines that this was what Albert Camus and John Kennedy Toole would have written if they'd collaborated on the screenplay for Office Space. In real English, it means that this book is some funny shit, and it's even a little bit gritty. Now that I've blurbed it, the book will never be heard from again. Don't tell publishers that's what happens to books I endorse. I may never read again.

Posted by at 2:30 AM | Permalink

My previous post was served with a possibly too large a side dish of cockiness. Since then, the Dodgers have lost two straight by a combined score of 15-2. It's a long season, and I can't make any definitive judgments yet.

But when it comes to basketball, I can. The Suns rule. I angered a Seattle Supersonics with my last email, and I quote his outraged perspective in full here. Let me reply first, and then you can enjoy his pathetic whining about a perceived injustice that occurred 12 years ago. Excuse me, young sir. Read this piece by an ESPN sports columnist, a man who is able to look at the NBA with relative objectivity, even if he is nerdy enough to still watch Survivor. Go home and kiss your Shawn Kemp bobblehead doll and gaze longingly at your poster of Gary Payton. Aloha, and thanks for the nice words. Now the email:

Hey Neal -

"I've long been a fan of your writing - I saw you last time you were in Seattle, I may have purchased one of your books, I always say nice things about you when The Stranger prints your articles, etc...This is why it pains me to see such talk on your site of the 1993 Phoenix Suns. It has been documented by many people - including sportswriters far more knowledgeable than I could even pretend to be - that Game 7 of the 1993 Western Conference Finals was the most ridiculous example of poor officiating in the history of professional basketball. More one-sided than the invasion of Granada. More one-sided than a dance-off between Paula Abdul and Stephen Hawking. I was 13 at the time. These things stick with you. Every one of those 64 goddamn free throws.

Now I love the way this Suns team plays ball. Old school, like it was meant to be. A true point guard running the floor and looking to pass first, a starting lineup filled with scoring threats, a bench teeming with - well, let's not talk about the bench. Unfortunately though, Phoenix has no shot. None.

Whatever deal Kevin Johnson made with the devil has long since expired. Which is too bad. Because, realistically, my Sonics don't have much of a shot. But there is just too much bad karma still lingering around the Suns from 12 years ago for them to win it this year - not the championship, anyway. It just can't happen. Regardless of the semi-recent rise of the republican party (the new energy bill frightens and confuses me), I still have to believe there is a certain amount of justice in the universe. And the universe remembers 1993. Hell, I know a lot of Sonic fans who do. I'm sorry - really I am. But don't expect the calls this time.

And good luck with Dallas."

We don't need luck with Dallas, pal.

Posted by at 4:09 PM | Permalink

It's difficult for me, a man who considers himself one of history's great underdogs, to accept the fact that my two favorite sports teams are at the top of their respective leagues and are, in fact, so dominant that for the first time in my life no one is able to make fun of them. I've followed The Los Angeles Dodgers and The Phoenix Suns with deep-rooted faith and transcendent passion for the last 30 years, and have received mediocre payback. The Suns went to the Finals in 1993, led by Charles Barkley at his impish playboy best, but got trumped by bald black Jesus and his first crew of disciples. The Dodgers won a title in 1981, a strike year, and 1988, when it was immediately decided that they were the worst team ever to win the World Series. Otherwise, there have been more than enough playoff games to keep me interested, but nothing to satiate me. I never felt like, say, Iraq compared to the United States, but more like Holland, a pretty successful sports fan country that always had to get out of the way of the mighty Lakers/Yankees jackboot.

Now, the Suns enter the NBA playoffs with the best record in the league, the number-one seed, home-court advantage throughout. How am I supposed to deal with that? This is no ordinary team. This is one of those teams that changes how a sport is played. The Suns are a bad-ass high-speed New Jack basketball ballet, led by a self-effacing Canadian guy who actually criticized the war with Iraq when it started and a droopy Southerner who has a vertical leap of about 100 feet and looks as though he smokes about an ounce of the Chron before every game. Then there's Amare Stoudemire, who is the living definition of bad-ass confidence on the court, and is a quote machine. "I have a tendency to elevate and dunk on people," he said recently. Indeed you do, Amare. The team's FIFTH scoring option tied for the league lead in three-pointers while still being engaged to a perky but talentless midlist sitcom star. You will have to endure reading about the Suns, if you read this dum-dum space at all, until June.

Meanwhile, over in Major League Baseball, the Dodgers are 12-2, hammering the hell out of every team they play, seemingly unable to lose a game, staging insane comebacks, getting great pitching and clutch hits, and generally confounding all the moron pundits (led by the inevitably wrong Joe Morgan) who said the team would be a disaster this year. But apparently, the Harvard-trained computer brain that put them together knows what he's doing. I also love the fact that my favorite player, Milton Bradley, is leading the charge instead of getting into fistfights with fans and ripping off his jersey on the field during important September games. My other favorite player is Carlos Zambrano of the Cubs, who also has a bad tendency to throw inside at key moments.

Hmm. Why do I like the talented players whose excessive tempers subvert their skills and good intentions? That doesn't make any sense at all...

Anyway, for the time being, I'm one of those assholes who paint their faces with team colors. Will whore for playoff tickets. Now, let's crush those Grizzlies (not a real team)!

Posted by at 6:20 PM | Permalink

I just got back from a weekend trip to Chicago that involved very important nerd business, as well as beer consumption and walking around neighborhoods that I once knew but now don't know very well at all. Still, I found a Harold's Chicken Shack when I needed one, and a cup of mate, and ate a plate of much-needed machaca on a Sunday morning. I would have had a heart attack on the El, but when you walk five miles a day, it tends to counteract, somewhat, the Italian beef.

There was plenty of time to read on this trip, and I smacked down books number 14 and 15 for the year. The first was an excellent and creepy psychological mystery by Liz Jensen called The Ninth Life Of Louis Drax, set in Provence, reminiscent, to some extent, of J.G Ballard, but shot through with a little more humanity. It seems I've read a lot of books lately that question our perception of the afterlife and how it relates to waking consciousness. That's just the fascinating kind of fellow I am. The Lovely Bones, which wasn't that good, was the most popular. Death Of An Ordinary Man was good, but written too experimentally to be widely appreciated. This one struck a nice balance. The plot was clear and tense, the characters very vivid. I also liked the fact that the book featured a clever nine-year-old protagonist, with many chapters in his voice, but didn't try to exploit that device for anything other than the story. I think you well-read types know to what other book I'm referring. Jensen is a mature writer very much in control of her material. Highly recommended.

Book Number 15 was another Hard Case Crime number: Little Girl Lost, by Richard Aleas, which got nominated for an Edgar Award this year. I liked this one as well. It's just as pulpy as any Hard Case book, and the plot moves pretty much by the numbers. As I've said before, noir/pulp plots don't really matter much. It's all about the atmosphere, and Aleas gives Manhattan a sinister tone that you don't see very often portrayed. The street descriptions seem authentic and earned. I also love the fact that the protagonist has a Reservoir Dogs poster in his boyhood bedroom at his mother's apartment, where he hides out whenever he's in trouble. The young detective character is very appealing, and Aleas leaves the story hanging enough so that he could come back, sort of like Easy Rawlins. This isn't as good as Mosley, but it's a solid effort worth reading, particulary for genre fans.

Meanwhile, I came home to the following letter. I will reprint it in all its absurdity, but let me tell you all now, in no uncertain terms, that I will not become a repository for Jonathan Safran Foer sightings, even fake ones. "Stacey," who sent me the sighting, later wrote back to say that she'd sent it to me as part of an assignment on "blogs, fact-checking, and gossip." My life leaks away from me, one hour at a time....

"So my friend Kristy and I saw Jonathan Safran Foer at the Duane Reade
on Broadway and 8th Street. This was April 7th, around noon. He was
wearing his coat that he wore in that Pages Magazine profile. He
picked up one of those cheap $1.89 shampoos. It was green, and he
stared at it for a really long time, maybe 20 seconds. I walked
really slowly by him (my friend was in the candy aisle then) and he
said kind of loudly, "Holy shit," and he was still staring at the
shampoo, and I had to get out of that aisle to laugh. My friend
Kristy was there too and she can verify. Safran Foer was alone as far as we could tell. He looked at the shampoos for a long time and then left without buying anything. He seemed really confused when he left. Kristy and I were going to follow him but he went into that subway station across the street, the 8th street one. It was definitely him, because Kristy and I were both at the 92 Y reading too, and saw him there, that was the night before."

What a crazy fake Foer sighting!

Posted by at 12:53 AM | Permalink

I've finished book number 13 in my year-long quest to read nearly a book a week. This one, you'll be pleased to hear, had a profound impact on my perception of self. It's been a long time, almost 20 years, since I could say that about a book. I'm speaking of Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into The Heart Of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Oh, great, you think. Now Pollack is going to start babbling about drugs. Exactly. But first, let me praise the book.

The book concers Daniel Pinchbeck's "spiritual journey," his gradual transformation from New York hipster intellectual to transcendent psychedelic guru. Yet somehow it still isn't annoying. That's because, much to my great surprise, Breaking Open The Head is a lucid, funny, and deeply weird work of literary journalism, one of the best examples of nonfiction prose that I've read in years. It's as though John McPhee, instead of writing about oranges, decided to drink yage instead. I really believe that, while on a DMT trip, Pinchbeck had an encounter with a white-mohawked lizard being at an intercelestial bar. That's a sign of gifted writing.

I found the book so convincing, I went on a drug trip myself. A couple of years ago, I ordered some herbs from a website that sells "marijuana alternatives". One of those herbs was a sizable bag of >salvia divinorum, a visionary plant that Pinchbeck talks about often in his book. I tried salvia once after I bought it, smoking a small bowl at, pathetically, a Flaming Lips show, but no visions emerged. I didn't even get a headache. This time, I decided, I'd be a little more systematic.

One midnight last week, I took a pinch of salvia from my bag. I rolled it into a ball and stuck it under my tongue. It tasted bitter, but not much worse than, say, collard greens. I gave it a chew, and then placed it under my tongue for another 30 seconds. I repeated this process a few times until I'd created a slightly acrid green brew in my mouth. I sloshed it around, and kept chewing. By degrees, I felt nauseated, but my stomach held. After 20 minutes, I spit the whole megilla into the toilet, put on some trippy music, lay down on my guest bed, and closed my eyes.

Almost immediately, I had visions. Great, thick green vines, ancient beyond measure, stretched out into infinite space. A being that looked like an Aztec God flew above them, spewing fire. I saw my head splitting open. Red goo poured out and melded into what appeared to be the cosmos. I had another vision, of me dancing with my son, that was a bit more pleasant. A large hole opened in the universe. I flew toward it. A beautiful woman in a white robe took my hand and guided me through. I opened my eyes, and the trip was over. Ten minutes had passed. I fell asleep, waking to my wife shaking me and telling me that it was time to go get my cholesterol tested. Cognitive dissonance had triumphed again.

The next night, I repeated the dose, and saw the woman again, but the main result was the sensation that my body was stretching out beyond its boundaries, getting sucked into infinite space. From reading Pinchbeck's book, this seems like a pretty common starting point for psychedelic exploration. The strange thing is that all other salvia users describe seeing the same woman. A shaman in the book describes her as the "salvia spirit".

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a supremely secular, unspiritual person. I wouldn't report seeing a mystical spirit, let alone positively, unless I felt that I really had. In that way, I feel like I'm following Pinchbeck's path, a little, though I'm not nearly as lost or alienated as he describes himself in the book. Last night, I did a third salvia chew. Nothing came of it, and around 1 AM, I fell asleep. Approximately two hours later, I snapped awake, aware that the room had become flooded with otherworldly light. Then it was dark, but, with my eyes open, I could distinctly see a stone warrior standing in the middle of the room. Then I closed my eyes, and saw the woman again. I seem to recall begging her to show me the secrets of the universe. The sensation of travelling through space returned, and then I fell asleep. This morning, when I woke up, I wrote my next Bad Sex column for Nerve.

I guess I say that last thing because I'm not crazy. I've just had a few plant-induced visions, and feel both confused and enlightened. The world has an odd twinge that it didn't before.

That said, baseball season, in all its post-steroid rationality, has begun. I feel very sorry for Pittsburgh Pirates fans. It will also be a long, boring summer in Washington, a championship year in Miami, and a year of surprising hopes in Milwaukee and Denver. Please don't make me talk about the Dodgers.

Posted by at 5:23 PM | Permalink

A Mitch Hedberg CD kept my wife and I laughing for several hours on a recent road trip, so for that, I thank Mr. Hedberg's ghost and now will leave the tributes to people who either have the time or enthusiasm or intelligence to write about such things at length.

I will also mostly ignore this piece, sent to me by one of my many friends who is trying to give ME a heart attack. On the one hand, I can sympathize with the author. My second book also received some critical attacks, and I began to feel desperate to the point of sending out embarassing emails. At the same time, those emails were never about keeping my book on the NY Times bestseller list. They were more about keeping my publisher from pulling the book off the shelves immediately. Besides, I'm constantly sending out embarassing emails. I actually am desperate for money and readers, all the time, and by some lunatic definitions, I'm successful. I guess one's perception of one's own failure is relative.

But really, I intended to write here about an odd Civil War-era horror movie called Dead Birds. I saw this on the last night of the South By Southwest film festival, and enjoyed it as much as I enjoy any horror movie, but I also saw its flaws. On the way out of the theater, I said to my friend, "That movie's backstory makes The Ring look like an episode of Diffren't Strokes."

Then, a week later, I get an email from the movie's writer, who had heard about my comment and wanted to know if he could use the quote in publicity materials. Of course I said yes. But I also wondered, in what universe will that quote help publicize a movie? And I also wondered how in the hell does something like that happen? Someone recognized me and then called my quote into the people who'd made the movie? Why was that news? You know, it's not like I get any of the actual benefits of celebrity, other than the occasional free drugs. This, then, is my destiny: Providing out-of-contest blurbs for experimental straight-to-video horror movies. I am the Ed Wood of literature.

Posted by at 1:15 PM | Permalink