Neal Pollack's The Maelstrom

I've stayed studiously quiet about the earth-shattering controversy that my recent New York Times Book Review essay caused, and I will continue to do so, because you all know that for me, it's always been about the work. A clarification, though: The end of my "persona" doesn't necessarily mean the end of my attitude toward the literary scene and other writers. I was a grumpy asshead before, and I will continue to be a grumpy asshead until the merciful day when I finally become brunch for worms.

You can probably imagine where I fall on the spectrum of the ongoing argument. As this funny article points out, culture with a capital C has suddenly become the provenance of sensitive young men with decent hair. Feeling has trumped thought and sentimentality has crushed anger with its steel-tipped boot of self-righteousness. Well, allow me to carve a path in the literary world for the fat and the bitter, and, in the case of my male compatriots, the inevitably balding. Follow me, losers! Let's give a secular prayer for the cranky, unfair opinion. As Alice Roosevelt Longworth, one of the hottest women in American history, famously said, "If you haven't anything nice to say, come sit next to me." Yeah, I'd fuck her corpse.

There is so much to blog about, it almost makes me hate blogs. Let's see: The President continues to ignore the coming apocalypse that is the Iraq War. As Spy magazine once said about President Bush's father: "He is just such a fucking asshole." It's time for us all to buck up and protest this stupid, greedy war for real. This website is a good place to start. If military families can have the courage to oppose the war, so can you.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court twiddles its sagging neck flesh while professional journalists go to jail for refusing to reveal their sources. A fine term for the court, indeed. We can't smoke pot, God is allowed on the courthouse grounds, local governments can seize our property at will, and kangaroo-court independent prosecutors can send journalists to jail for no good reason. Can I have a different country now, please?

But the most important news of all, naturally, is that the Phoenix Suns have traded Quentin Richardson and a 4'8" point-guard draft-pick to the New York Knicks in exchange for Kurt Thomas. I certainly enjoyed Q last season. He's a fun, flashy player with a knack for the dramatic. But it will be nice to have someone on the team who can rebound reliably, seems to enjoy guarding people like Tim Duncan, doesn't bash his head with his hands after every made shot, and continues to play during the postseason. Still, Q, it was fun. Take Brandy with you on the way out the door.

Perhaps you haven't seen my latest Bad Sex column on Nerve, about the important topic of the use of citrus fruit during passionate encounters. Enjoy. But if you don't, please don't tell me. It would hurt my feelings!

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The partisan foofaraw that dominated this week's news can be dismissed thusly: Republicans are asshole thugs and Democrats are spineless bag-carriers. Same as it ever was, and meanwhile this country lurches relentlessly toward the Second Great Depression.

Meanwhile, this Supreme Court decision has the potential to screw up the lives of thousands of Americans, certainly far more than Karl Rove's hetereosexual (yet oddly sexless) Roy Cohn imitation. If you own a home near developable land, as I do, you should be afraid.

I live near I-35, and just across the highway is an enormous redevelopment of Austin's old airport. Now what's to stop the Texas Department Of Transportation from seizing my house, at below market value, for highway expansion? More frighteningly, what if Lowe's or Wal-Mart decides that this would be the ideal patch for a supercenter? Eminent domain isn't evil, per se, but rare is the local government that considers the needs of citizens over those of moneyed interests. How far can I trust the city of Austin? Do you think a real-estate developer is going to care about the needs of my family?

But this isn't a Republican land grab. When I lived and worked in Chicago, I saw hundreds of families get kicked out of their homes, or get threatened with the possibility of getting kicked out, because the city had development plans for the University Of Illinois At Chicago. The entire Maxwell Street market district, the birthplace of the urban blues, was steamrolled in favor of a generic "University Village" concept, leaving only a plaque, a church, and a Polish-sausage stand in the wake of the development onslaught.

This Supreme Court decision is the demolition of Maxwell Street writ large. If you are a middle-class or working-class family in this country, and you've somehow scrapped it together to own a home, you'd better hope that you're not close to a major road or near any other "desirable" land. Because suddenly, private property means a lot less in this country. For many of us, our houses are the only real assets we have. They just lost a lot of their value.

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This weekend, I served as Saturday-night emcee for DemocracyFest, the second annual party thrown by activist liberals who are mad as hell but aren't going to take it anymore. The show was at Stubbs', a rock-n-roll ranch in downtown Austin, and Howard Dean was the main attraction. Dean showed up early and therefore went on stage early, and...oh, this is boring for you, isn't it?

I told several jokes, including this one: "Howard Dean's been getting a lot of grief lately for making the outrageous assertion that the Republican Party is dominated by white Christians. Well, that's pretty strong talk from the leader of a party of mixed-race bisexual Wiccans." And I introduced a few people: a high-ranking official in the powerful corporate PAC One Vote, One Voice, and also Jim Hightower and Jesse Jackson Jr., who I'm sure was none too pleased to walk on the stage after someone who'd just claimed that he'd spiked his orange juice with liquid amphetamines. If anyone is looking to book me for similar gigs, my speaking fee is $2000 a half-hour, or the highest offer. That means you could get me for 10 bucks (plus meals and bus ticket), or I might cost you $10,000. Literally, a crapshoot.

******

If any of you are coming to this space for the first time because you saw my essay about shedding my literary persona in the New York Times Book Review, welcome. Anyone who's not new to this space probably saw the piece two weeks ago, when I emailed out galleys to my 17 regular readers. Please ignore all "controversy" surrounding the piece, as it is part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to destroy me.

I have jacked my year's reading up to 28 books. I'm getting close to clinching my 50-book goal. Like my beloved Suns, I'm always stronger in the second half. Take whatever odds Vegas is giving you.

Number 26 was the lovely Natasha, by David Bezmozgis, a very self-assured and moving short-story collection about Russian Jewish immigrants in Toronto in the 1980s. I would put this book at the very high end of recent "literary" fiction, whatever that is, and, in fact, I think it's been a bit mischaracterized as a short-story collection. It's more like an immigrant version of Jesus' Son, with the same sense of passing time and the same cumulative effect. Young Jewish writers spend a lot of time imitating Issac Bashevis Singer by writing thin semi-parodies four times removed of his world, but Bezmozgis's book is a legitimate and vividly detailed account of a search for modern-day Jewish identity. Highly recommended.

Number 27 was Perfect Madness: Motherhood In The Age Of Anxiety, by Judith Warner, which a friend sent to the house after my family was attacked on Salon after I dared publish an article about some problems we were having with our two-year-old. The book is aimed at beleagured middle-class American mothers, so I ignored large swaths of it that really weren't aimed at me (though my wife read every word like it was Torah). But the core of the book is a cry for social change in a country that ignores the needs of all but the very rich. I totally agree with Warner: We need federally subsidized child-care in this country. There needs to be mcuh more public support for working parents. The military has the best child-care system in the United States, and it's subsidized by tax money. Why shouldn't the rest of us reap similar benefits? Except for health-care reform, and possibly pension protections, there's no more important issue facing American families.

Unless that issue is reading book number 28, The Areas Of My Expertise, by my very good friend and former literary agent John Hodgman. He is the funniest (and also the nerdiest) writer in America, and I'm glad he finally got off his ass and wrote a book. Buy it in October when it comes out, or buy it now and wait. Either way, it'll be October before you're howling on the toilet. At least for that reason.

Posted by at 10:48 PM | Permalink

Someone just called my attention to the fact that Reader's Digest, that source of all things green, has named Chicago the dirtiest city in America. The Cape Cod Room at the Drake Hotel, however, gets high marks for cleanliness.

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Yesterday we learned that esteemed novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, recently relocated to Chicago with his wife and young daughter, is making it his personal mission in life to revive the culture of The Drake Hotel's Cape Cod Room. I'm not one to criticize a writer's quirky dream of reviving the dying culture of a bygone age. Lord knows I spent enough time trying to do that in the 1990s, when I worked at a reporter at The Chicago Reader, with absolutely no luck whatsoever. But I managed to conduct my manic-depressive, quixotically hopeless campaigns without saying anything like the following, which Eugenides uttered to a reporter with no apparent irony: "I view it as a Denmark kind of place. Cold, well-run--a clean, beautiful, pristine city where you can have a nice life and bring up kids and not have a lot of stress. After living in Europe, Chicago reminds me of some of those cities."

Chicago is "well-run," in certain ways. And it's definitely cold much of the time. But the Chicago I knew was more like 1950s Krakow than Denmark. Week after week, I saw working families getting kicked out of their apartments or longtime businesses so they could be replaced by the types of people who want to "have a nice life and bring up kids and not have a lot of stress." Check that. Everyone wants those things. They were evicted in favor of people who can actually have those things.

I guarantee there are people in Chicago, lots of people, probably even the majority of people, who have plenty of stress in trying to bring up their kids, and not only because they're trying to keep them away from R. Kelly. Jeffrey Eugenides' kid is probably never going to enter the Cook County Juvenile Justice system, for instance, and his family probably isn't going to be evicted from public housing. I wax didactic, but Eugenides, who grew up in Detroit, for pity's sake, should know that cities may have mythical elements, but there's always an arsonist behind the scenes at Fairyland who wants to burn it down for the insurance money.

Did that make any sense at all? Anyway, this book that I edited, Chicago Noir, featuring more than a dozen original short stories about the real Chicago, will be published in September. There's nothing clean or pristine about this town. But there's boxing and cab drivers and itinerant jazzmen and semi-homicidal repair-shop owners. I would read it if I were you.

This weekend, the New York Times Book Review will publish a back-page essay by me that reveals, for only the third time, the true story of how my excessive drug use and penchant for rock-n-roll iconoclasm got me expelled from the McSweeneys empire, while also having nothing bad to say about Dave Eggers whatsoever. And I'm hosting a big left-wing hoo-ha in Austin on Saturday night. They're not letting me introduce Howard Dean--that would be dangerous--but I am introducing his brother. Gee! Maybe next week they'll let me introduce Joe Biden's daughter!

Aloha,
NP

Posted by at 1:35 AM | Permalink

You know, if maybe one-quarter of the people weeping on camera about how justice has been served in the Michael Jackson verdict cared that our our country continually flouts all known international law at Guantanamo Prison, we might...oh, what am I talking about? I guess this just goes to show that you can get a fair trial in America if you're the most famous person in the world and if you have millions of followers who treat you like a quasi-religious icon. The rest of the universe is not quite so fortunate. I wonder what this guy thinks about justice in America?

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Forgive the worst pun ever in the title, but I am going to step away from my newly-stated policy of not talking about politics to express my disappointment that the Supreme Court has ruled, in essence, against the use of medical marijuana. I'm a longtime friend of the cannabanoid lifestyle, but this isn't about lifestyle. It's about health care. One of the justices, I believe it was Old Man Stevens, said that in the current system, unethical doctors can give patients more marijuana than is necessary. First of all, you can never have too much marijuana. Second of all, if the Justice didn't notice, doctors are pretty good at slinging the drugs already.

Last year I went to the emergency room for a minor infection that was causing minor pain and they tried to shoot me with a morphine needle as long as my leg, and also gave me a big bottle of Vicodin when Advil would have sufficed. Two years ago, I went to my doctor, said I was depressed, and he had me on Wellbutrin before lunchtime. You can get Vicodin in this country for a painful zit, so don't talk to me about doctors getting loosey-goosey with the KB.

Here ends the editorial. The weekend found me away from home and I finished two books. One was ANOTHER blurb subject for me, by my friend Paul Collins. It's his new book, The Trouble With Tom, about his extremely entertaining search for the bones of Thomas Paine. But it's really a book about the ephemeral nature of ideas. There's a long section on phrenology that pretty much defines phrenology writing for our time. That was book number 24.

Book number 25 was a reread of The Plot Against America, because I recently attended a top-secret summit of Jewish hipster intellectuals. I wanted to check to see if two-thirds of the book was really as boring as I remembered, and, sure enough, it was. The first two chapters are incredible, and the long section where the plot unfolds is gripping and horrifying, as is the scene where the kid is on the phone after his mother gets killed in a Kentucky pogrom. I still liked the book, but would have preferred less domestic scenes and more cheesy scenes featuring actual historical figures, because I am a moron.

That is all. Toke on, Justice Scalia!

Posted by at 10:35 PM | Permalink

I've been getting little needles all day asking me to write about the feelings of loss I'm experiencing after the Suns got bumped from the playoffs last night by the Spurs. But I can't feel much worse than a little glum today. The Suns gave me so much pleasure and so much excitement all season that I can hardly call their ouster a disappointment. Winning a championship is the ultimate goal, obviously, but if ever a team deserved credit for style points, it's the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns. Impervious to the bullshit gossip and melodrama that surrounds most teams, these guys just went out and drilled it every night, transforming the game with thrilling flair and, dare I say, derring-do. They looked a little sore and beat-up last night, and finally succumbed to a far more experienced and slightly better opponent. All credit to the Spurs, who made an honorable foe, but more credit to the Suns. Never has a sports team brought me so much joy.

Farewell for now, my multimillionaire virtual friends. We shall see you at the top of the roller coaster next season. If I could order NBA League Pass today, I would.

Posted by at 9:33 PM | Permalink

Now that the furor appears to be abating over my ostensible lack of parenting skills--and many thanks to those of you who've written in support--I will stir up another nest of wasps with my latest Bad Sex column. This time, perhaps people will express outrage that I took a date to revival house instead of an actual movie theater, or that...But perhaps I dream too high and fly too close to the sun.

Instead, I would like to announce the arrival of several excellent books in the world. The first is something I contributed to called Bookmark Now, wherein an enthusiastic young man named Kevin Smokler has assembled a group of essays by not-yet-gray writers, discussing what it means to be a writer in a post-literary age. I contributed something about fan fiction. Other contributors include Tracy Chevalier, Meghan Daum, Robert Lanham, Christian Bauman, Adam Johnson, Elizabeth Spiers, and many more.

The second, and I count this one as number 22 on my list of books read this year, is The Clumsiest People In Europe, by my good friend and former best man at my wedding Todd Pruzan. I couldn't be more proud than if my dog had written this book, so I can't be objective. Instead, let me quote Dr. Pruzan from a self-promotional email he sent out this morning:

"The book is a cranky, caustic, funny and unsettling collection of nasty writing about geography for Victorian children, written by Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer and originally published between 1849 and 1854. I've written a brief introduction (which appeared in a streamlined version in The New Yorker in April) about Mrs. Mortimer and her writing, and supplied some interstitial information for this country-by-country screed. Otherwise, it's all Mrs. Mortimer, offering the perfect primer on why every country in the world really, really sucks (or did in the 1850s, at any rate)."

So there you have it. If you don't like this book, then you have a cold, cold heart. Pruzan is starving and is (off the record) about to be wed himself, so please support his cause.

Finally, let me recommend Tiny Ladies In Shiny Pants, by Jill Soloway, who I recently met at a top-secret retreat for Jewish hipster intellectuals. Jill is a producer and writer for Six Feet Under, and her writing is funny, charming, and provocative, and a necessary antitode to the anti-feminist backlash that has produced monstrosities like Ann Coulter, Paris Hilton, and She's Just Not That Into You or whatever the fuck that stupid book is called. Since Jill is a Hollywood person, let me pitch it like this: She's like Gloria Steinem crossed with Fran Leibowitz with a touch of Candace Bushnell and a pinch of Gilda Radner. Anyway, that's book number 23. If I didn't get blurbing assignments, I don't know if I'd make it all the way to 50.

Amare, I send this message: You are a man. Dunk wisely, and dunk well. Tony Parker is too pretty and he needs to crinkle his brow. Send the series back to San Antonio on Friday so I can actually attend a game.

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