Yesterday, I was sitting around the pool with Hillary Duff, my young platonic companion, regretting the expense of putting in a pool just to keep her around. Roger kept the mojitos coming, virgin for Hillary, of course, until she said:

"No more virgins for me. I don't like virgins."

"Ahem," I said.

A half-hour later, after a vigorous and refreshing visit to the master bath, I returned. Hillary, much to my surprise, was reading the newspaper.

"What's revisionist history?" she said.

"Pardon?"

"President Bush is talking about this revisionist history. I thought there was just regular history and that's it."

"Well, Hillary, you've asked the right person."

Roger, who was clearing our glasses, rolled his eyes.

"Fuck off, Roger," I said. "Now, Hillary, revisionist history is when people with a political agenda take something from the past and attempt to bend the truth to suit their own purposes."

"I don't get it."

"Well, for instance, there are still people who claim the Holocaust didn't happen because they hate Jews and they want the Holocaust to happen again."

"OK."

"And equivalently, there are people who claim that President Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when in fact there weren't weapons. But those people are totally wrong. We went to war with Iraq to give an oppressed people their freedom, and anyone who says otherwise is a Holocaust denier."

"I think I get it," she said. "So, for instance, when the White House makes changes to an E.P.A. report to downplay the dangers of global warming, that's revisionist history."

"No," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't, you naive little girl! You're drunk! Roger! Take Hillary to bed."

"I'm not tired!" she said. "Or drunk! And I'm just getting started! It's also revisionist history when the U.S. overseer of Iraq outlaws all demonstrations against the American occupation. I thought we were supposed to be bringing the Iraqis their freedom!"

"In good time, my dear," I said.

"Yes, but President Bush promised them freedom immediately. If the administration is going to revise history itself, the President really shouldn't accuse his opponents of doing the same."

"Eh heh," I said. "Heh!"

"She has a point, sir," said Roger.

I became enraged. Sometimes, I cannot control the rage inside me. I pushed Roger in the pool.

"Goddamn it!" I said. "Don't you see? They tried to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge!"

Well, it's official. The book business can stop pulling itself up by its bootstraps, because Oprah's Book Club restarted yesterday. From here on, Oprah is only going to pick "classics," a word that's very vague, even when placed in quotes like I just did. But I must say that her first choice, East Of Eden, is an excellent one, and definitely "classic."

I've always loved East Of Eden. It's the kind of book that takes timeless themes and makes them timeless and unthematic, seemingly without effort. It's a beach read that you don't have to take to the beach. Oprah says it's the best book she's ever read. I wouldn't say that myself; you'd have to go a long way to top "Chesapeake," by James A. Michener. But East Of Eden is definitely in the top 15.

In case you're too busy or too lazy to read East Of Eden this summer, or in case you don't know how to read, I'm providing a summary of the novel here. You'll be able to see why Oprah picked the book; why, it's almost as if Steinbeck were the grandfather of all contemporary American literature. To wit:

Eden, the novel's heroine, is a low-level editorial assistant at Gloss, a fashion magazine for the "medium-breasted contemporary woman" owned by the Candy Nast media empire. Her boss, Emma Winter, the toast of Manhattan, is a sharp-tongued ballbreaker with a penchant for extinguishing cigarettes in her subordinates' eyes. Eden plots to kill her, or at least to write tender short stories for The New Yorker. While Eden's at work, her boyfriend, Chris Fray, struggles with with the twin demons of ego and heroin addiction and doesn't give a fuck what anyone thinks about him, especially not all the assholes who put less meaning into their whole novels than he does into one sentence.

Half a world away, a young writer named John Steinbeck visits Eastern Europe for the first time in search of a mystical manuscript ostensibly written by his grandfather, who was once the mayor of Odessa. Steinbeck begins his journey with the help of a sex-starved Slavic teen named Balki, who speaks in hilarious pidgin English and dreams of having sex with his mother's cousin. A tragic coincidence comes to haunt them both.

Meanwhile, in rural Michigan, the seemingly accidental drowning of a baby causes an entire town to reconsider the nature of grief and what it means to be human. Sully, an 85-year-old former slave, is visited by the ghost of her former lover, Postman Dead, and he teaches her to speak Gullah. A Japanese fisherman finds love on a raft with a talking tiger, and a millionaire novelist prattles on and on about how he was misunderstood as a Midwest teenager and about how appearing on television is beneath him. The early days of video-game invention provide a delightful backdrop for a study of American immigrant identity. Three suicide attempts and a misunderstanding later, the first chapter ends.

Oprah chose wisely indeed.

Meanwhile, you all just continue to give and give to the tour fund for The Neal Pollack Invasion, but we still have a long way to go before we meet our goals. A handy "Donate" button is to your right. Also, speaking of places where pledge drives tend to fester, I'll be appearing as the guest this weekend on Kurt Andersen's NPR show, Studio 360. A list of stations and air times can be found here.

Is there any group of people more antithetical to the free exercise of the democratic process than civil libertarians? Yesterday the "rights" crowd must have set a record for hypocritical whining. First you heard moans about the federal appeals court ruling that the Justice Department may keep secret the names of more than 700 post 9-11 detainees. Then came the bitching about President Bush's national-security exception in his historic and courageous ban on racial profiling. It's a classic case of wanting to eat your cake before you order dinner, a misguided notion in any country, much less one as great as ours.

What these "rights" "lawyers" don't seem to understand is that 9-11 changed the legal status of everyone in this country. Race is no longer a determining factor in falsely accusing someone of a crime. Either is gender or income level. No. Instead, the entire world has been arbitrarily divided into two camps: The friend, or "with us" camp, and the enemy, or "against us" camp. Those who the government deems "with" us are automatically granted, by the good grace of our God-appointed President, full freedom under the Constitution. Those who are "against" get nothing. It's a totally fair reclassification made necessary by the rigors of the War On Terror.

The names of the 700 people who were detained two years ago, or of the 400 Iraqis detained after a series of vicious firefights in the war without end, don't matter. In the new world of United States law their individual identities lack all meaning. This policy has proven so effective that our enemies are even committing suicide in our custody. To that I say, hooray. If we keep clamping down, soon most of the other team will commit suicide, and the world will once again be at peace.

Those who dare criticize the President and the Justice Department had better watch themselves. I'm not saying that they could be arrested next, but they definitely could be arrested next. We have a good system in place. Secrecy works.

Thanks to you who've donated in generous increments over the last two days. To your right is the button that will help you support the first tour of the best new rock band in the United States. Our operators are standing by.

The cowards who run PollackWatch have lately been stepping up their assault. First came the vicious series of parodies of some of my greatest blogposts, which I managed to quell through a combination of physical violence and legal threats. Then came the obscene phone calls to my mother in the middle of the night. The fact that she enjoyed the calls is beside the point. They were still terribly lewd. I generally tend to ignore my poorly-funded and ill-connected critics. But now these cowardly drones at PollackWatch, who are merely buzzards gnawing on my live carcass, are claiming that I'm a liar.

I may be many things, but a liar never. Since I invented the blogosphere on September 12, 2001 in a fit of patriotic rage, I've prided myself on my factual accuracy, unlike the now-deposed former leader of The New York Times, who ain't got two dirty nickels to rub together these days. When I conduct a smear campaign against one of my real or imagined enemies, or when I sing the praises of George W. Bush, the most just and fair President since the invention of the radio, I always use 100 percent accurate facts.

The PollackWatch hacks know nothing. Let's run down, and refute, some of their charges. By the end of this post, you'll be on my team for sure and forever.

1. They claim that in February of this year, I said, "You know, maybe letting the mullahs run Iran wouldn't be a tragedy. They seem like a pretty decent lot. If students ever try to protest their regime, I support their mass imprisonment and torture."

Well, OK. I may have said that. But haven't the PollackWatch people ever heard of irony? Hah hah. Hah hah. If anything, this week's extraordinary student protests in Iran only confirm the awesome power of U.S. hegemony over the globe, and also confirm the power of blogs. For without blogs, young Iranians would have no courage. Without courage, no protests. You may think I'm hedging, but I'm not. Do I look like a theocrat to you?

2. On yesterday's PollackWatch, there was this extraordinary passage: "Pollack claims to be pro-choice, pro-death-penalty, pro-teabagging, and pro-eating-meat on Fridays. Yet the Catholic Church, whic he says he supports 'without reservation,' stands opposite of everything he loves, and also everything he hates. How can a moral hypocrite like Pollack possibly live with himself?"

Very comfortably, thank you. I've never said that I'm for the molestation of children by priests. For one to claim so is to make a supreme error. I'm just against punishing priests for those alleged "crimes." This is totally in line with my support for a National Teenage Teabagging Association. I want to make sure that once supple mouths reach legal age, they're fully-trained for my enjoyment. Is that a sin? Also, I'm not "in favor" of child abductions. I just don't care about them.

3. PollackWatch cites a post from April where I said that the "bottom is about to fall out of the aluminum market," and that I then bought up a bunch of Alcoa shares on the cheap.

So? You were the suckers to sell, people. I had good information that just happened to be wrong. Don't crucify me because I'm famous and wealthy. I'm not going to go the way of Martha Stewart, the lady Christ of corporate America. Oh. And here's a tip. Sell your Krispy Kreme stock low. The bottom is about to drop straight out of the donut market. I have it on good word, from a reliable source in the industry.

4. For some reason, PollackWatch continues to harp on the fact that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the moment, and that I claimed there were while deriding critics as "enemies of the state who should be castrated."

Once again, I had good information. It's not my fault that my sources were unreliable criminals with a sinister secret agenda. I work very hard every day to bring you the finest Internet fact-based opinion writing, with very little gratitude and a lot of criticism. I wish the people at PollackWatch and Smarter Neal Pollack and Screw Neal Pollack, He Sucks, would get off my ass. It's either criticize me or criticize the natural enemies of freedom. Your choice, douche-monkeys.

Most of you understand my grand project and my ultimate design. You know that my efforts brought you the heads of Trent Lott and Howell Raines on platters, and helped gird the national loin against the twin threats of Islamofascism and Ashton Kutcher. You understand that if you donate just a few dollars directly to your right that my great band, The Neal Pollack Invasion, will be able to afford to play in or near your town this fall. Operators are standing by for your pledge, friends.

Thanks to the people who supported me financially yesterday, and to those who will give me money today and beyond. They understand my worth. They know that I'll be blogging long after the half-wits at PollackWatch have faded into the mists of time. They know that I'll always be noble and true. That is my solemn promise.

Regular readers of this site might notice a few minor design changes today. Well, no shit, asshole! I'm a fucking rock star now!

Yes, this is the new look for nealpollack.com to mark my gradual shift away from literary poser toward hybrid literary-and-rock poser. Please don't be afraid. The blog content actually isn't going to change at all. Starting tomorrow, all the hilarious political commentaries and jealous rants disguised as literary parody will return in magnum force.

Today, though, I'd like to point you toward the cleaned-up Products page. This is a good time to remind you that my novel Never Mind The Pollacks, definitely the greatest American novel of the decade not written by someone named Jonathan, is available for advance sales. My not-widely-anticipated but still excellent rock album will also be available soon. A sample song is available for your listening pleasure now. There's also a new mailing list, accessible directly to the right, that will inform you about my forthcoming public events as well as certain books and records that are about to appear. Updated Letters and Bio pages will be ready later this week.

Meanwhile, I'm going to make a mild plea. You've all loved this site over the past year. I don't need your money to keep it going. But I am planning to take The Neal Pollack Invasion on the road in the fall, a legendary rock tour that will span 17 cities. In early 2004, we'll hit another 10 cities in the West. But getting five guys around the country in a van takes money. So please go to the PayPal link on your right, and donate what you can. Give to The Neal Pollack Invasion so we can tour and bring you rock-n-roll magic. If every person who reads this site every week gave us just one dollar, we'd be solvent. If everyone gave two dollars, we'd be golden. Or give more if you can. We're such a great band, people. Help some brothers out.

Thanks to master chef Jen Robbins for the redesign. Visit Jen's site and become a citizen of Jenville. You'll be so glad. Also, many thanks to Ben Brown, my young ward, for continued technical assistance. Finally, go here for the greatest political protest song of our age, from the band NOFX. Punk lives.

Before I begin today's entry, which introduces a strange new plot twist into the accidentally Swiftian saga that is my life, I would like to point you somewhere. The 25 of you who regularly read my letters page will notice that many current letters refer to a piece I wrote calling for the metaphorical establishment of a "Party Party" to combat governmental efforts that are killing our collective buzz. The piece originally ran in The Brooklyn Rail and is currently being shown on Alternet.

Now to the topic at hand. Roger has lately been turning away a horde of paparazzi photographers, who somehow found my name in the Mount Winchester phone directory or possibly from the Guide To Winchester County Beautiful Homes, which last year featured my estate on the cover. The photogs don't want a picture of me. They haven't since my skin began to sag. Instead, they want to snap a photo of a lovely young actress who has been my constant companion this past month.

I speak, of course, of Hillary Duff, the teenaged star of Lizzie McGuire. Our relationship, as I alluded to in the title of today's entry, has Hollywood abuzz. And what a buzz it is.

Hillary and I met after the premiere screening of Agent Cody Banks, an excellent movie on which I served as script consultant. We went to an exclusive after-party at the Hollywood club Deluxe, where Ashton Kutcher promptly Punk'd me. Oh, that Ashton! What a lovable scamp!

After I changed out of my $1,000 suit, which had become stained, thanks to Ashton, with molasses and goat feces, I noticed Hillary and her then-boyfriend, teen singing senation Aaron Carter, snogging desperately in the coat room. My dormant erection began to stir, which I found deeply disturbing. I walked away to talk to Hank Azaria. But soon, I saw Hillary standing alone.

"Hello," I said. "Where's Aaron?"

"He went to get me another virgin Shirley Temple," she said.

"You two sure are cute together, I said.

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "His political opinions annoy me. He says that George W. Bush is a fascist quasi-dictator who will lie about anything as long as he can keep his hammerlock on power. I totally disagree. I think George W. Bush is awesome!"

I liked this girl.

"Go on," I said.

"And he's like, all, where are the weapons of mass destruction, and I'm like, shut up, Aaron, we were attacked by terrorists! Just shut up. And then he's like, we let the Iraqis ransack their own museums, and I was like, no way, they only stole 33 artifacts, or maybe it was like 3300, but anyway, it doesn't matter, because we're the liberators, and the bad economy was totally Clinton's fault."

"You sound just like me on my blog," I said.

"OH MY GOD?" said Hillary Duff. "You have a BLOG? That is so cool! I LOVE blogs!"

Since then, Hillary and I have been all over the world together: L.A., New York, Miami, the Bahamas, St. Moritz. The vile celebrity hounds keep photographing us, especially when we're the guests of my good black friend Shelby Steele, but I'm giving them nothing. You see, my relationship with Hillary Duff is totally platonic. I'm a mentor of sorts to her, a tutor. Though I've already had sex with her mother, twice, I would never have sex with Hillary, light of my life, fire of my loins.

Mostly, she lays around the pool looking bored, asking Roger to bring her lollipops. I cannot resist her, for she is, to me, the essence of American girlhood. She excites me to heights of linguistic brilliance, sometimes to the point where my language becomes obtuse. But never sex, never that. I just imagine her swinging her invisible tennis racket, and that's enough.

In a couple of weeks, I'm going to take Hillary Duff on a driving tour of some classic motels in the vicinity of Colorado Springs. There she will see the true America. There her real education will begin.

The recent resignation of Howell Raines from The New York Times, which I celebrated by renting a loft in Soho and throwing a massive teabagging party with all my friends, is conclusive proof that blogs have arrived as the primary form of character assassination in America. And when I say "character assassination," I mean "cleaning out the Fifth Column gutter by blowing minor details of a story way out of proportion." Without the analytical work of hundreds, nay, thousands, of creepily-obsessed geeks with an inflated sense of self-importance, King Howell would still be spreading his lies today.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you can trust everything you read on the Internet. It used to be that way, but democracy means that lies sometimes leak into the water supply. For instance, read this article by Elaine Cassel in Counterpunch, a normally reliable, even-handed publication. Cassel claims to be a "lawyer" and a teacher of "psychology." She reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered his prosecutors to review decades-old wiretaps and secret searches on more than 4500 people. She thinks this is a bad thing. But Ashcroft is just trying to determine if those people can be slapped with criminal charges under the totally just anti-terrorist legislation we call The Patriot Act.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with examining documents based on 25-year-old spy materials and using them to arrest people in secret in the middle of the night and subsuquently hold them indefinitely without charges. Falsifiers of the truth, like Cassel, still seem unwilling to realize that we're at war, facing a faceless enemy without name. Any one of her friends, or enemies, or someone she sees at the store, could be a terrorist who wants to kill her. No amount of paranoid dissembling is going to change that reality.

I suppose the good psychologist is also opposed to the new "Life Log" program being developed by DARPA, a strange but necessary cabal of scientists favored by the Bush Administration. What could be more benign than a centralized electronic system to keep track of every movement of every person in the United States? In fact, I don't think Life Log goes far enough. At SurveillanceCon 2002, my beleagured manservant Roger and I unveiled an idea for an invention that we'd hatched mostly to help us get out of debt.

It's called PeeTracker. Under our plan, every person in the United States would have a tiny microchip/satellite dish installed in their urethra. Therefore, when you pee, each molecule of your urine would contain a clear, easily traceable signal full of information. The second your toilet flushed, the government would know your exact location, your general mood, and whether or not you'd eaten asparagus recently. Your urine would be genetically branded, so if terrorists set off a nuclear bomb killing everyone on the Eastern Seaboard, we could reproduce the Eastern Seaboard through cloning. Only this time we'd get it right and populate the coastal plains with people who bear the "proper" genetic stamp.

Oh, I know it seems like a pipe dream. But five years ago, didn't the fact that bloggers would bring down the editor of the world's greatest newspaper also seem like a pipe dream? On the Internet, anything is possible.

Today I pull back the veil of my "character," which I do in this space periodically to rally you, loyal citizens of the Internet, when one of our own is threatened by the ever-swirling forces of proto-fascist censorship that have overtaken our government and our media. What am I talking about? Let me explain.

Radio-talk-show and weekend MSNBC host Michael Weiner, otherwise known to his half-dozen viewers and listeners as "Michael Savage," has filed a lawsuit against three websites to punish them for making critical comments about him. According to Savage's lawsuit, the sites, Take Back The Media, Michael Savage Sucks, and Savage Stupidity, have appropriated his name without his permission for commercial purposes, among other alleged crimes. This, of course, is nonsense.

In an excellent editorial, Don Waller of Take Back the Media spells out the issue better than I possibly can:

"We should get something straight here - this isn't about any of the charges in the lawsuit. It's not about loss of revenue, it's not about trademark infringement or defamation or damage to Weiner's reputation. It's not about any of these things.

It's about a large corporation attempting to take away the free speech of regular Americans with a point of view. It's about people with deep pockets using money and influence to run roughshod over people who don't agree with them.

It's about a radio blowhard with pitifully thin skin, whose radio show is failing miserably, and whose TV show can't even finance itself through national advertising due to its toxic, stunted, hateful, pathetic content, taking out his failure on web sites who speak truth to power. It's about boosting ratings, and providing talking points, and throwing red meat to a tiny audience who can't raise themselves out of bed in the morning unless they have a target for their festering hate."

At the end of the commentary you can read the lawsuit for yourself and make your own judgment. My judgment, however, has been made. We need to fight back, as a community, in defense of these three websites. That's why I'm proposing an Appropriate Michael Savage's Name For Your Own Purposes day on Thursday, June 26.

That's right. On Thursday, June 26, any of you with a website should appropriate Michael Savage's name for your own purposes. Flood The Zone, as the Republicans like to say. Savage won't be able to sue all of us. If he tries, he'll look like a bigger idiot than he already does.

I tried this tactic once before, on April Fool's Day, in response to Dick and Lynne Cheney's harrassment of our good friends at Whitehouse.org. Hundreds of us made fun of the Cheneys, and that story went away. But this one won't, because Savage, unlike the Cheneys, doesn't have anything better to do. If he somehow manages to win this lawsuit, it would be a stab in the heart of free speech in America. So let's not let him win. Right or left, Republican or Democrat, ideological or not, we all love our freedom of speech. So let's show Michael Savage we have no fear.

Thursday, June 26. Appropriate Michael Savage's Name For Your Own Purposes, whatever those purposes may be. Sharpen your Internet parody blades. Go to it, people.

Neal

The usual America-haters, such as journalists, elected representatives, and retired intelligence officers have been whining and carping and whining some more of late about our inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They seem to be upset because their side lost the war, and they're obscuring debate by accusing the Bush Administration of "lying."

These critics are disengenous, and possibly criminal. At best, the Administration is telling truth selectively, and there's nothing wrong with that. One person's doctored, fabricated, or misleadingly presented evidence is another person's rationale for saving a backward people from an unjust ruler. From the beginning, the Administration said that there "had been" weapons in Iraq in the "past," and that meant there "were" weapons in Iraq "now." Perfectly logical.

For instance, Colin Powell gave his presentation to the United Nations on February 5th. Now, there very well could have been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq then. Like Donald Rumsfeld has said, the Iraqis probably destroyed them. Or it's possible that the weapons may have just disappeared, magically or otherwise, or maybe been moved to another country we want to invade. Also, Saddam Hussein could easily have handed them off to Al Queda, which could attack us with them tomorrow, so we must immediately forsake all our civil liberties and live in fear for the rest of our conscious days. I wish I could go back in time and ensure that Saddam and everyone in Al Queda were never born. But perhaps that's getting off the topic a little bit.

My personal opinion is that the weapons were used during the war, but that they're very slow-acting. Approximately six months from now, all Americans who were in the Middle East during Operation Iraqi Freedom will begin feeling a mild itching on their skin, which will grow more intense over a matter of days, until they are wracked with agony, and then they will begin vomiting up clear yellow liquid. Soon, their brains will cease to function, and they will become zombie-like and begin eating their children. That's only in the first 28 days. If the infection spreads, all of civilization could be in danger.

How do I know this? From a special group of intellectuals housed in the basement of the Pentagon. They're my friends, and they happen to know these kinds of things. The President's wimpy adversaries have no access to this intelligence. Saddam Hussein possessed dormant flesh-eating zombie bacteria. The reason we can't find it, in the long run, is because it's already inside us, eating up our insides and destroying our souls. It may already be inside you.

So when the President says that we'll find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he means every word. He ain't just whistlin' shit, people. As we all know, George W. Bush was sent by the Star Creator to save us all. Many, many thousands of Americans are going to die unless we find the antidote. And only one country possesses the antidote.

Iran.

Those goddamn mullahs aren't giving it up, so we're going to have to take it by force. No more Americans are going to die overseas. As Sir Francis Crapshoot, my mentor at Oxbridge, once wrote, "ever."

Within days, I expect to be named the new editor of The New York Times, thereby fulfilling my historical destiny as the world's leading news-based decision-maker. But until then, I'm glad to continue my mission as the Ur-blogger of your hearts and minds. I ride herd, much like George W. Bush with the Mideast peace process, over the thoughts of millions. With utmost seriousness, I pursue my task like a hungry gutter mongrel.

That's why, when faced with a choice between betraying a publisher's weirdly-imposed embargo on a book's content and running an exclusive interview with the former First Lady and current Senator from New York, I go with the latter. I know Hillary intimately, but not that intimately, from my days as consigliere to the Clinton family, before terrorism, when the world was young. She sat down with me recently and talked about her foray into memoir and many other things. The Dave Eggers comments have been cut for space. This interview will remain posted until Tuesday. Enjoy.

Neal Pollack: This is your first foray into literature, because no one read It Takes A Village, and it's getting a lot of attention...

Hillary Clinton: Yeah, well, fuck that! I'm the greatest fucking writer of my generation! I don't give a shit about anybody else. Who the fuck is Dave Eggers to think he can publish a memoir at age 28 and call it a book? He only got published because, boo-hoo, you know, his parents, wah-wah, and it had nothing to do with his talent and hard work. Fuck him. Fuck them all. Fuck all that McSweeney's shit.

NP: Pretty harsh words. You sound like you should join the Underground Literary Alliance.

HC: Yeah? Well, fuck the ULA? Who do they think they are, a bunch of fucking coal miners? They haven't even written a book. Not one of them? I'm the former First Lady, a Senator, AND I've written a book! Not one of them is qualified to suck my tits! Fuck the ULA, fuck Rick Moody because he lives on an island, fuck them all. They're all just a bunch of privileged dick-bags who haven't had to work a day in their lives.

NP: So what is your book about?

HC: ABOUT? What is my book ABOUT? It's about America, jack, and how we live in it despite everything. It's about the big themes, which writers today are too pussy-whipped to address. I mean, fuck Jonathan Safran Foer, with his little magical-realist eponymous narrator shit. Fuck Jonathan Franzen. That's not a social novel. It's just a book about a professor who can't get his dick straight and then some other people. American literature today is just about belly-gazing. My book is about the grand things, like death, life, and fucking. Big topics for a big woman. Fuck everyone else. I really can't give a fuckety-fuck-fuck about them. I've got too much other shit on my plate. You know what I'm saying?

NP: I do. What do you think of James Frey?

HC: Oh. I love his stuff.

NP: What about Heidi Julavits' essay in the first issue of The Believer, where she calls for the end of snark?

HC: Fuck that. It's bullshit. I don't have time for that shit. I'm HILLARY CLINTON. Do you think I have time for literary party games? I swear, that whole McSweeneys thing is so forced. Do I want to go to church or read a fucking book? I want literature about real things, not some fucking sacrificial hipster rite. Who cares if it's well-designed? Mein Kampf is well-designed, and that fucking book caused a lot of trouble. Dave Eggers is really just a better-looking Hitler who doesn't hate Jews. I remember back in 1998, when it all got started, Bill and I were in the White House, and he was like, "have you heard about that McSweeneys thing," and I was like, "fuck that shit. It's all so twee and forced. America needs a REAL literature, about real things. I hate all those fucking writers except for Neal Pollack."

NP: Well, thank you.

HC: But now I hate your shit, too, Neal Pollack. Your writing is a stinking, narcissitic turd, just like that shit put out by your buddy Eggers, wah-wah, boo-hoo, I wrote a book Dave Eggers.

NP: I think you're being a little harsh.

HC: Oh, REALLY? Do you now? Well, fuck that, my book is about real things, like a country in crisis and a husband getting blowjobs. It's about a generation of people who got fucked and then fucked other people. What the fuck else do you want out of life? Nothing. That's why I'm Hillary Clinton, and that's why my book, Living History, is the only book that matters.

NP: Thank you for your time, Mrs. Clinton.

HC: Fuck. I got nothing but time. Come to my book-release party tonight. We're gonna have strippers!