So, I finally got around to reading Neal Pollack's breakup with McSweeney's from the New York Times the other week, as well as Dave Egger's response. Now, for those who don't know, Neal happens to be a friend of mine; he's probably the one person I know from my old open-mic days, in fact, who has become more well-known than any of the others (with Michelle Tea giving him a run for his money, of course). And I have a story about Neal as well, which may shed a little light on that essay in the NYT, if you're interested in hearing it - I don't think this is anything Neal wouldn't mind me sharing with the public, which is why I'm mentioning it.

I first met Neal back in the mid-1990s, back when the poetry slam format (invented here in Chicago) was first starting to garner mainstream attention, and as a result there were dozens upon dozens of open mics here in Chicago, with hundreds of writers going out and reading new work on a weekly basis. (It was an amazing time to be a writer in Chicago, to be sure...but that's a whole other story I won't get into today.) At the time, Neal was pursuing a career in legitimate journalism, so already had a clip resume that impressed all us dorky unemployed poets - he was getting published regularly in the Chicago Reader and all kinds of mainstream national magazines, although of course they were simply journalism pieces and not his creative work. What Neal was also doing in those days, though, inspired by his growing frustration with traditional journalism, was writing these fake-journalism pieces on the side, which my friend Greg Gillam had been convincing Neal to come out and read at his literary events every so often; many of the pieces from those years, in fact, are the ones you now see in The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. And as most of you already know, the pieces in that book are piss-in-your-pants hilarious, and Neal was always this huge hit whenever he took the stage.

I remember one night in...hmm, this had to be 1997, 1998 or so...when Neal and I ended up at an Ashland bus stop after one of these events (the infamous "Poop Studios Sessions," to be precise), waiting for the bus to take us both back up to the northside, sitting around and shooting the shit about the show at which we had both just performed. And I was telling Neal about just how goddamn funny his fake-journalism pieces were, and how they were that funny precisely because they were such dead-on parodies of actual journalism pieces; not once in these pieces does Neal ever acknowledge that the piece is fake or a joke, which is what makes you keep laughing harder and harder, as the piece itself gets more and more ridiculous as it goes on. And I was telling Neal all this, and telling him that he should write more of them, and start getting out and performing them a lot more often too.

"Yeah, well," Neal replied in that quasi-nasal voice that I grew to love so much. "I don't know. I mean, they're poetry shows. Everyone's so serious, and the audience is there to see serious work, and you guys write stuff that means so much more than my stuff. I'm just writing these stupid little stories that I'm sure are just horrifying all these audience members who showed up because they thought they were going to hear...you know, serious stuff."

Ladies and gentlemen, Neal Pollack! This was always the most frustrating thing about Neal in those days, in fact, was that he was almost incapable of believing in his creative work, and in its ability to find a passionate audience. Taken in this light, then, maybe that essay in the NYT makes a little more sense; how he dealt with this by simply creating a fake persona, to go along with the fake journalism pieces he was writing, once he moved to New York and actually became the literary darling he is now. I could definitely see something like this helping Neal when it came to going up on stage and performing his work; I can easily picture him telling himself, "Okay, this isn't Neal Pollack about to go up on stage, it's 'NEAL POLLACK the Greatest Journalist on Earth.' And NEAL POLLACK's work doesn't suck, because how could it? NEAL POLLACK is the greatest journalist on Earth!"

It doesn't surprise me whatsoever that Neal eventually burned out on the gonzo shit-talking persona he created for his McSweeney's years, because fundamentally that's just not him; the Neal Pollack I know is painfully shy, with a comedically neurotic low self-esteem that wouldn't be out of place in a Woody Allen movie. I'm sure all those appearances as NEAL POLLACK wore him down, which is why it's not exactly a shock to learn that he just woke up one day and realized he couldn't do it anymore. None of this changes the fact that his work makes me pee in my pants in laughter every time I read it or hear him perform it; it's just that I know he has a big national fan base now, and I know it's fun to hear stories about writers you admire that you might not hear otherwise, and in this case I happen to have one of those stories, which is why I thought I'd share it with you.

By the way, there was a very interesting throwaway detail in Neal's NYT essay that I wanted to point out, in case you didn't notice it yourself; with all the success that Neal's now had, with the NYT essays and the sold-out shows, the appearances with David Byrne and everything else, he's still only actually sold a collective 25,000 copies of every book he's ever published added together. And this just proves something again that I mention here a lot, which is that even mainstream writers these days are not selling many more copies of their books than self-publishers are. If your main focus as a writer is simply getting copies of your book into people's hands, and actually getting them sold and read, let Neal's story be an inspiration for you; it is possible for a self-publisher to sell more books than NEAL POLLACK, the Greatest Journalist on Earth. In fact, it's easier than you think. (Of course, if you want to get invited to write essays for the NYT and perform with David Byrne, you do need some hot trendy New-York-based snotty publishing company backing you up - yet another lesson we can all learn from that essay.)