The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
Giorgio de Chirico, Le Cerveau de l’Enfant (The Child’s Brain)
Book 6 of 125:
The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
Neal Pollack
(Perennial, 2000, 206 pp.)
1. I first encountered Neal Pollack in an essay he wrote for Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, which I bought at Booksale-Farmers during the Palanca night last year. I enjoyed his writing the way many Pinoy, I believe, would enjoy satire. That’s why when I had to decide which books I’d buy from the ones I shortlisted on my visit in Booksale-Metro East two weeks ago, his The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature was one of the three books I ended up buying.
2. The book was originally published by McSweeney’s, a publishing house owned by Dave Eggers (and despite some people’s insistence, Pollack and Eggers are not one and the same); my copy, however, is the Harper’s Perennial edition. As an exercise in megalomania, the Anthology attempts to parody the obsessions and delusions of a male/American/writer. In the family tree of fictionalized Neal Pollack, we’d see that he was married to Subcommandante Marcos, sired by Che Guevara and Imelda Marcos. Truly, only Madame Imelda, the vanity incarnate herself, could give his lineage credibility.
3. Another Filipino reference in the book was in the “Chronology of the Author’s Life.” Pollack, in 1947, supposedly shipped out “for the Philippines with Wally Trumbull, who is stabbed during game of Pai Gow poker.” In yet another fancied Paris Review interview included in the book, Pollack shared the details: “Later, it was 1947 in Manila, I watched agape as Wally was stabbed during a wharfside game of Pai Gow poker. Wally’s insides gushed against my expensive shirt and he said, ‘You have to write, for me, forever’.” So the drive to write really began in Manila, after all. How’s that.
4. The hypermasculine Pollack, who supposedly had sex with celebrities as varied as Toni Morrison and Nicole Kidman, half-heartedly gave up his sexual hubris with a realization that echoes the closing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “freelance journalists who have sex with a one-hundred-year-old woman do not have a second opportunity on earth.” Yes, my friends, our hero did confess to have had sex with a hundred year-old woman.
5. And how about the complexity of this Postcolonial hybrid (hyphenated) identity from one of the essays, “Teen-agers, the Enemy Within,” in the Anthology: “We’re stoned all the time, says Wellington, a half-Nigerian, half-Filpino son of Swedish immigrants.” After mentions of Imelda, and Manila as a crime setting, I think this highly improbable, if not totally impossible, identity is the most neutral reference to the Philippines Pollack has written in the book. By neutral, of course, I meant non-detrimental.
6. In one of the last essays on the “mystery of the Jew,” Pollack mentioned Aharon Appelfeld, incidentally one of the last authors I read, with his For Every Sin, before 2007 ended. There’s also a “For Further Reading” section in the book’s Study Guide section. But like all the other details in the book, how could I treat it seriously, even if it included my personal favorite Calvino, and some other classics in the development of the novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick?
Leave a Reply