Jessa Crispin on the Pollack/McSweeney's smack down.
A few years back, one of my biggest literary crushes was on Neal Pollack. His whip-smart satires of bloated American writers like Updike, Mailer and Vidal were spot-on and hilarious. I would call friends to read them the best bits of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. Then I saw him onstage, reading from Updike’s memoirs in an '"Impeach George W. Bush" t-shirt, and it was confirmed. True love.
Not everyone, of course, finds Pollack as funny as I do. One of the unamused seems to be McSweeney's head honcho Dave Eggers, publisher, incidentally, of Pollack’s first book. When Pollack recently published an essay in the New York Times Book Review about the construction of the persona of the Greatest Living American Writer, and his desire to kill it off, it wasn't surprising that Eggers felt the need to respond in his usual humorless tone.
Humorless and overly reactive to say the least. Eggers responded so quickly to Mr. Pollacks essay, that you'd think he was part of the Right Winged media machine shoving talking points down our collective throats. What's sad is that for someone who is supposedly a genius, he just didn't 'get it'. Tsk tsk.
I've got your KING KONG trailer right here.
Alrighty, that's it for now, I know the content of the spew has been somewhat anemic as of late, but then again, I am somewhat anemic as I'm fucking bleeding to death (yes, again), I'm selling my ovaries on eBay, real soon. "Only used once a month for the past 27 years" enquire within. Within what, I'm not saying.
