Running Joke
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“I don’t think there’s as much interest now in politics and grand themes,” Pollack complained in the interview. “Norman Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead, a novel about his experiences in World War II. Gore Vidal pretty early on was writing novels about Roman history. Hunter Thompson wrote a book about the Hell’s Angels. I don’t see writers of this generation doing that. And when they’re told they’re good–it all seems very top-down, like the honor is bestowed upon them by, like, Talk magazine and Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, they publish these glossy photos of them, and it’s just, it’s about something different….I’ve written for the Reader for seven years, and for a time I was churning out ten- to fifteen-thousand-word melodramas about tenants’ rights struggles, and the battle to try to stop the CTA from cutting its bus lines, with a multicharacter narrative. I don’t know, it’s just that’s what appeals to me as a writer–as a real writer, as opposed to the writer of this book.”
Over the course of the anthology’s 153 pages, the joke eventually wears thin–by the end, it’s about as subtle as a late-90s Saturday Night Live skit. Yet here we are, nearly a quarter of the way through 2002, and somehow Pollack has parlayed it into the very sort of celebrity-writer career he meant to poke fun at. He’s been lauded by Rolling Stone as “hot” and Vanity Fair as “inventive and hilarious.” The book, which has sold between 12,000 and 13,000 copies in hardcover, was published in paperback on March 5 by HarperPerennial with ten new pieces. Last week the Chicago alt-country label Bloodshot released a CD containing nine readings from the anthology and its unpublished follow-up, “Poetry & Other Poems,” with musical backing by Chicago’s Pine Valley Cosmonauts; it’s also included in a three-CD set issued by Harper’s books-on-tape division. Pollack is now working on a satirical novel to be published by HarperCollins, “sort of a fake rock biography of a mythical rock critic,” he says. “It’s like a history of rock told from the point of view of two very different rock critics.”
Brother Act
Central Falls celebrates the album’s release with a show at Schubas on Friday, March 8.
