It's so cool that dudes can become parents and still have time left in their busy days to comment on blog posts, right? From the flying typing fingers of Neal Pollack, everyone's favorite Alternadad, comes an overshare that left us feeling this weird, poignant combination of relief and annoyance: Neal and his wife, he claims, are "done" with begetting.
It's not like Norman Mailer doesn't know that some of his books are way too long and overblown. It's just that he doesn't know that all of them are way too long and overblown! That's just one of the revelations we gleaned from yesterday's roundup of books that famous authors would trim the fat from if they could. We also learned that Ann Patchett thinks that George Orwell's best-known works are, respectively, "awful" and "beyond awful," that Stephen King has a cheesy, punny-science-teacher type sense of humor (duh), and that ubiquitous literary wunderdad Neal Pollack found The Satanic Verses too long by 40%. But the clear understatement o' the year award winner is Joyce Carol Oates, whose voluminous oeuvre includes approx. 400 jillion crappy books and like half of a good one (Foxfire!): "I'm sure I could think of many other titles that would benefit from being cut, including some of my own."
Writers Take Out Their Knives [NYT]
"At last, people in the publishing industry have been listening. This season has seen the birth of what I think it's fair to call a new subgenre in literary nonfiction: Call it 'dad lit,'" writes author Judith Warner on her TimesSelect blog "Domestic Disturbances" today. According to Judith, we should all be rejoicing about the publication of books like Neal Pollack's Alternadad because this trendlet means that men and women are now equal, at least in the realm of being allowed to write narcissicistic parenting memoirs. Whee! But some commenters on her post, which mentions her weepy response to passages from Alternadad, aren't as enthusiastic about Neal and his work.
Hey, do you have a burning question along the lines of "How do I best indoctrinate my son into good music? Do you have recommendations for good starter music? When is it too early to take a baby to see The Arcade Fire or Wilco?" Ask America's premiere hip-parenting expert Neal Pollack! His advice column, "Ask Alternadad," can be found on new parenting-blog agglomeration Offsprung, which is sort of like Babble, except it's not called Babble. Offsprung's slogan is "Your life didn't end when you became a parent." Heh. Oh, and for the record, here's Neal's deeply considered answer to the question above: "As far as music goes, Elijah received a heavy diet of punk rock early on, but that's because I was researching a book about the history of punk and playing in a band myself. While there's still plenty of rock in my rotation, I often spend the day listening to nothing but Miles Davis. Hell, I get excited when the theme to The Rockford Files comes up in my ITunes shuffle." Great advice.
Salon's got an excerpt of Neal Pollack's Alternadad up, and as is their wont, they've published the section in which Pollack debates whether or not to circumcise his son. In it, we learn that he's got a bit of a mommy complex and that he and his wife neglected to discuss circumcision until the week before their son was born. He's also, kindly, provided us with a lovely description of circumcision, in case you were curious:
More in the "a generation of self-consumed male hipsters have suddenly discovered parenthood, and we'll be forced to listen to them for years on end" department: did you know that author Steve Almond, formerly content merely to sit back and vindictively sling mud at bloggers, now has a pro blog of his very own? It's on new Nerve spinoff site Babble, and it's exactly as self-conscious and caught up in the tired 'bragging about how cool I used to be and now I'm not, but it's ok because parenthood is a Higher Calling than coolness' thing as you'd expect it to be. Witness this scintillating tidbit: "So I guess that's what we're doing: we're enjoying this time. Not doing much work. Not going out at all. Just sitting around worshipping our kid. It rules."
In this Gothamist interview with the perpetually self-consumed writer, we learn much we never knew, but probably could've guessed, about Neal Pollack: "I modeled myself back then on Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties, but I wasn't a Republican. I was academically nerdy. In terms of the kind of person I was, I got beat up a lot. It's not like I didn't have any friends, I just had a big mouth and the jocks didn't take kindly to me." Yeah, that sounds about right. What disturbs us more is the news that his upcoming book Alternadad—about the (gag us) foibles of being a "hipster dad"—has been optioned and he's turning it into a movie. We knew the grups were taking over, but now it's apparent that this is a trend that simply will not die. A generation of self-consumed male hipsters have suddenly discovered parenthood, and we'll be forced to listen to them for years on end. Really, it's enough to make you want to just crawl into a little ball and never read New York magazine again.
Stephen Glass, who "was fired from The New Republic five years ago for fabricating details in 27 stories," has written a roman-a-clef. About himself. (Proving thereby that one can do any number of dispicable things and still revive their career with 350 pages of the gory details.) Neal Pollack points out that he, too, has written a roman-a-clef about his days at The New Republic. An excerpt:
The new editor, Farty [Airputz]announced, would be his greatest pupil from Harvard, a brilliant young freshly-minted Ph.D. named Mandrew Mullivan. "And here he is!" Farty said, as he pulled back a curtain. There Mandrew stood, gleaming in the light. The perfect picture of male beauty and brilliance. His biceps rippled under his muscle shirt.
"I'm gay!" he said.
The staff of The New Century gasped.
"But I'm also conservative!"
More gasps.
"And my first task as editor of The New Century will be to order a poorly-researched hit job on Bill Moyers!"
Yes, yes. Very nice, Neal. But you neglected to mention other offerings in the genre:
· Jeffrey Dahmer's revision of the Malcolm Bradbury classic, Eating People Is Wrong.
· The Unabomber's first novel, It's in the Mail.
· The recently released roman-a-clef by an anonymous NYT fact-checker, The Corrections.
A history of lying recounted as fiction [NYT]
Neal Pollack, apparently feeling a bit threatened by literary bad boy James Frey, throws down the gauntlet (then picks it back up and ceremoniously throws it down again): "You think your appetites are bigger than mine, James Frey? You think you're a bigger rock star and a better writer than I am? Well, motherfucker, I challenge you. I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a tub of acid as deep as the moon. I want a tube of glue that tastes like a dumptruck of peyote. I want a boyfriend. I want a boyfriend. I want all that stupid old shit like letters and sodas, letters and sodas. I want to be the guy with the most cake.
I want your ass, Frey."
You're gonna Frey [Neal Pollack]
"Neal Pollack" on slamming the President at the South by Southwest music festival and the resulting wave of protests, or lack thereof: "No one attended the book-burning at St. Marks Bookshop in New York. That would have been SO 1998, and besides, Fischerspooner was playing in the secret basement of a club with an unpublished address in Greenpoint or maybe Red Hook." Neal recants (sort of): "I believe it is the right of every American, especially after a few beers, to call the President a pedophiliac. However, I must admit that this particular President probably does not molest children. My big mouth has gotten me into trouble one time too many."
I apologize to the President. Please don't ban my books... [NealPollack.com]
The Observer examines the polarizing effects of the Iraq debate on social life in Manhattan. Personally, I'm inclined to agree with Gawker interviewee Neal Pollack's line of thinking on the issue, which is basically, "Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up." But that never works. In my experience, someone always brings it up, and usually in such a way that you want to scream at them regardless of their position. Apparently, this isn't unique. "I've had shouting arguments on both sides," said [Kurt] Andersen. "Frankly and sincerely on both sides, because of the way the other person has drawn the line." Chris Buckley adds, "My idea of a good time is not a screaming argument over the cr me br l e over the Iraqi civilian casualties."
The unquiet Americans [Observer]
We're going to play a game. (No, not that one. Being drugged and shipped to Zimbabwe is only fun the first time.) It's called "Guess Which One of the Following Is a New York Band."
· The Upper Crust: Band members appear on stage dressed as 18th Century English Aristocrats while performing songs like "Friend of a Friend of the Working Class" off their debut album Let Them Eat Rock.
· The Yuppie Pricks: The band "wears John McEnroe-era tennis gear and denounce the 'service-industry scum' who come to their shows.
· The Sumerians: The band "wears animal-pelt loincloths and claim to be Mesopotamian time travelers from 16 million years in the future." They sing about weed, aliens, and Mesopotamia.
Bands courtesy of Neal Pollack and GQ.
"That sucking sound" [GQ - February issue]
