Neal Pollack

Neal Pollack the character or me because there’s a lot of things I haven’t done. I haven’t done most things.

Well, I guess not. You know what I’m really down on the character this week, I’ve gotta say.

I’ve just kinda had enough. Somewhere along the line people started confusing me with a fictional character who bears no resemblance to me whatsoever.

Yeah, it’s my own damn fault. It’s getting really hard for me to refer to myself in the third person particularly when the third person I’m referring to isn’t me.

No, it really happened by accident. My first book was a compilation of short stories in the first person. The voice of an arrogant pseudo intellectual adventure journalist who also imagines himself to be a great literary figure. They were all in the first person and it just seemed appropriate if I was writing in the first person to name the character after me. I did title the first book and name the character after me. It just made sense, so I went with the material and then with the second book, Never Mind the Pollacks, it just made sense because I had a great title and I had to use it somehow. But there was never really a deliberate attempt to turn myself into a caricature. It just kind of happened and I’m gonna ooze out of that. I’m only 33 so I still have time to escape that trap.

No, I don’t think it hurt me at all. But I guess I’m just tired of it. I think it helped me. It was something that hadn’t been done before so I’m not ashamed of having done it. But the difference was that I intended it to be satirical and recently it’s sort of become not satirical and just kind of annoying. What I was trying to satirize no longer really makes sense. I still want to write satire but I’ve kind of exhausted that voice. The novel is written in a totally different voice, there just happens to be a character with my name.

When I started writing these pieces at age 27, I think that part of me wanted to be a world-weary sexual athlete for whom no experience held any mystery. So in some ways I was fantasizing about it but I also recognize the absurdity of that and the absurdity that any writer could be a figure of that magnitude in today’s culture. In some ways I was projecting my wishes and in other ways I was pointing out the ridiculousness of those kinds of personas and those kinds of desires, which I think a lot of writers share; particularly a lot of male writers.

Yes I have a SuicideGirls bio on my website.

I am a member. But that is a fake file. I think SuicideGirls is great but I also think it’s funny and ripe for parody. I’m not a body-piercing guy; I’m not a tattoo guy. A lot of them seem to like, science fiction, and fantasy books. I’m not into that kind of stuff. My tastes run basically counter to those of the SuicideGirls’ aesthetic. It’s not like I don’t appreciate it and its not like I wouldn’t want to be in a room with 20 SuicideGirls and in fact I had an opportunity when I was in L.A. . I visited the Girls’ Headquarters but they had all gone out to lunch and then I left before they came back. I’m the guy who leaves just before the SuicideGirls come back from lunch.

I am very much into Weisz. I think she’s an astonishingly beautiful person.

I’ve read a couple of interviews with her I saw her on The Daily Show once she seems reasonably intelligent.

So it’s that combination. I still hold out hope that someday that I will become actually…

No, no, no. Just be in a position where I could meet her on equal ground and I’m sure I’ll make her laugh. I’m sure of it, I know I will and I’ll have the entire conversation ready to go.

I’ve got a friend down here I put on readings on with. His name is Ben Brown and he told me about it one day. So I went online and checked it out. I gaped in disbelief for a while and then I went to the bathroom for about five minutes and then came back and continued looking. It was maybe about a year and a half ago. I thought it was very cool, very telling that the vast majority of the women on the site appear to live in Austin or Portland.

DRE [laughs] Do you have any favorite girls on the site?

No, I don’t; there’s too many and they’re constantly shifting. I like it when the girls have their meltdowns and sort of leave their pages. I think that’s really funny, when they have like a personal crisis and things just totally go berserk and they bow out. Those are my favorites because those are the most human moments. That’s when you see, for the most part, these are 22-year olds and they have the problems that come with being 22.

Right.

That’s the thing I’m 33 now so these women on the site wouldn’t talk to me as an equal and I wouldn’t talk to them as an equal. There’s a generational difference at this point and so I have to remember that there’s a conversational gulf that spans a decade and it can only be crossed if there’s a really strong mutual interest. Because people at that age go out all the time and don’t suffer any consequences from it. They’re constantly shifting romantic partners and they’re having all kinds of random emotional breakdowns that don’t correspond to objective reality. At my age it’s a lot of, two beers on a Friday night and I sit at my table at the bar and start to sulk. Then I just want to go home and watch SportsCenter. I’m married and I have a little kid so this is my life. I’m not a barhop. Occasionally my life is barhopping I do have nights out, but I don’t live the melodrama.

Well that’s fine, good for her. I believe that I don’t discriminate by age in terms of who I’m attracted to. In fact I find that as I reach my 30’s I find women in their teens and 20’s to be a less attractive. It’s weird how your tastes evolve with age, I look at women in the 40’s and 50’s and I think that they’re attractive.

Oh, she doesn’t care. She likes SuicideGirls. She’s on it too I mean she’s not a Suicide Girl, but my wife is a painter and she uses a lot of erotic imagery in her art. So she appreciates the fact that I keep up with trends and erotic imagery.

No, it’s not my excuse, but it’s my way of bringing her into my world. She has no problems with porn or the Internet or erotic art, she likes all of it.

My own life is not very interesting, I grew up in suburban Phoenix and went to Northwestern University where I majored in journalism and then I got a job at a newspaper in Chicago where I worked for seven years. In the meantime I did some improv and I had a couple of girlfriends. There just wasn’t much there. Since I started writing the pieces and I got to travel around. I do readings and since then my life feels like it’s been a little more interesting but still not interesting enough to warrant a memoir. The most interesting stuff about my life has been like my failed attempts to start a rock band and to throw really cool parties. All my failed attempts to become cool are very funny and interesting. But I’m not going to write a book about that I’m just gonna keep doing what I do.

Yeah, I do actually believe that people over intellectualize music. I just can’t believe that it just keeps replicating itself.

Mainstream publications don’t over intellectualize music they kind of over publicize it. That’s the difference. It’s just amazing to that the cycle continues on and but there is a small segment of the press and of music fans who do over intellectualize music. They take it way too seriously and a lot of the criticism I received for the book has been that I don’t care about music or that I don’t like music or that I have no heart for music. I don’t think that’s true, I do like music and I have a heart for it but that’s not what I’m writing about.

Yeah, which is a very rare occurrence, but you see a lot of rock critics on these VH1 shows looking terrible, pale and with bad hair. They don’t really sound smart and I just think they don’t understand how sad and ridiculous they are. Most writers don’t understand how sad and ridiculous they are.

I think I’m the rare writer who does understand how very, very sad and ridiculous I am. I’m just trying to be sad and ridiculous in a different way.

It was a plot point. I tried to write a plot, I don’t know if I was entirely successful but I also think that a character of that intensity probably would have to die.

Almost Famous was incredibly sentimental about rock and roll.

With rock criticism I just have a different point of view. I’m not sentimental about it and I hadn’t lived it when I wrote the book. Then I went on tour with the band and I think I would tend to be even less sentimental about rock and roll now. My tour was very challenging let’s put it that way.

The Neal Pollack Invasion. I was in charge of the tour and it was, I wouldn’t say it was a nightmare, I mean the guys I toured with are all very nice and very cool and very good musicians. We’d have some good shows but the logistics of touring and the certain kind of humiliations you suffer day to day like small crowds, bad crowds, bad weather, crappy food, too much drinking and , cold dank basements that you have to sleep in. Just shit like that.

It would be one thing if I were in my 30’s and I was in a band at the top where I could travel in a bus and stay in hotels all the time. I’m not saying that most musicians in their 30’s live like that, because most of them live like dogs. I really appreciate musicians more, because now I know how crappy their lives really are. But maybe if I were 20 I’d enjoy it a little bit more but I missed that boat. But I’m not gonna sentimentalize it either. My life on the road with the band was hardly the greatest month of my life.

No, I studied at ImprovOlympic. I never did Second City for some reason, I just didn’t have the money or the time because I had a full-time job as a reporter. Some nights I actually had to work but I did get to study with Del Close.

I was there at the same time that the Upright Citizens Brigade was.

Yeah, all of them they were in a group called The Family. It was Ian Roberts and Adam McKay and Matt Besser. I took classes with some of. I can’t say were friends because I was at the very bottom of the comedy food chain. They would put me on the improv teams that would play on Monday nights. I was so bad that I wasn’t even one of the guys that is so bad they make fun of him. It was fun watching though.

I guess I learned about comedic attitude from him, a take no prisoners, offend everyone you can, comedic attitude.

He was a warlock, a heroin addict and just a very, very, strange man. I can’t say I got to know him very well but I did take classes with him and I absorbed some of the essence, or I tried to; even though I was a complete failure.

I was a political reporter. I covered mayoral elections and labor disputes. I did a lot of stories about public transportation which was a particular passion of mine, Public Transportation Policy. Also I took up the cause of Mexican corn vendors and wrote a bunch of pieces about them. If a bar closed in Chicago I was generally there to chronicle.

I wrote for the first issue of McSweeney’s. I knew Dave Eggers a little bit through a friend of his I went to college with. Someone forwarded me an email saying he was looking for writing for the new issue of McSweeney’s. So I sent him a bunch of pieces which he to my great surprise published.

Some of them. So he published those and then I published something in the second issue of McSweeney’s and then when the website started I was contributing stuff to that and I started getting emails from people. That’s when I when I kind of got a whiff that something was going on. But I wasn’t in New York so I wasn’t part of “the scene.” So I kept publishing the pieces and they were pretty well received and I knew that Dave was looking to get into book publishing. I went over to his house one day and I said I’ll do whatever it takes to get a book of my stuff out there and we’re gonna make it really crazy and really fun and really different. He said, “Okay.”

Yeah, so we finish the book on Memorial Day of 2000. By July 4th it had been edited, laid out and sent to the printer. Then I was on my first book tour in September. It was an incredibly quick process. I self-funded my first book tour and I just drove all over the country giving readings sometimes in bookstores, but other times in public places like I did a reading in a fountain in Washington Square Park.

Yeah, well it was empty of water at the time. I did a reading in a train station in Philadelphia, at Fenway Park in Boston and Muscle Beach in LA. It was all very silly, very naive and some of the presentation was amateurish and not always good. But I had a damn lot of fun selling books out of the trunk of my car even though it was incredibly bad for me financially.

I do magazine writing and I’ve got modest book contracts. I’m getting the proposal ready for the next book now that I’m published by HarperCollins. It’s not quite as hip and grassroots but it is more stable financially and I write for GQ and Vanity Fair and The Stranger in Seattle.

When I lived in Philadelphia for a couple of years, because you know once you get a little bit of literary success the first thing you do naturally do is move to Philadelphia. But when I was living there I had a couple of tough years money wise. I quit my job and I didn’t have a book advance or anything and I had done a story for Men’s Journal where I went through Weight Watchers. Then Weight Watchers liked the story so much that they hired me to write the ad copy for their new men’s weight-loss program.

Yeah, it was bizarre but I made a lot of money doing it and it was really easy. The work experience was not painful so I would do something like that again if I needed to.

That’s not going to happen, The Balls of Summer is not going to be published, and it’s just a dream at this point.

I wrote about 40 pages of it but then my publisher rejected it because they didn’t like it. I’m going to try to publish the first chapter as a short story somewhere. Now I’m working on a book about New York. The ultimate New York novel that will incorporate parodies of every conceivable type of book that’s ever been written about New York. From Washington Irving through the present day.

I grew up in suburban Phoenix

I don’t remember.

It’s not worth taking about it was dull and generic. The only thing that saved my childhood from being completely dull and generic is the fact that I have a Jewish family. Which means that at least things around the house were lively but as soon as I stepped outside of the house every ounce of energy was just sucked from my brain by the general lameness of the place.

Pretty much since I was a kid I was writing parodies of stuff I was reading. When I was eight I would do these elaborate parodies. I wrote this parody of The Winds of War when I was eleven, that really got me popular in school. A friend of mine and I used to do Hill Street Blues comics.

Yeah, really nerdy. I was a really big dork in ways that are almost impossible to imagine. I wasn’t great at sports but I could play them but I was still l the first person that people thought of when they said, “Who could we beat up today?”

I love it even though I’m not doing it now. I needed a break from the grind of following the news and then writing about it every day for free. I enjoy doing it and I met a lot of really cool people through the website. It was fun being in the center of a very tumultuous political year. I felt like I did some good things on the side. I staged a couple of protests of first amendment violations of other bloggers, In general I think I wrote some pretty good humor, it wasn’t great every day but I’m proud of the work I did.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck