Two Decades After Author Jim Goad Fell From Grace In Portland, Hes Re-emerged As an Icon of the Alt

[TexasTowelie]

Content warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of domestic abuse and racial slurs by the story's subject.

Two Decades After Author Jim Goad Fell From Grace In Portland, He’s Re-emerged As an Icon of the Alt-Right

Twenty years ago, Jim Goad was Portland's hottest new writer.

When he gave a reading of his first book in May 1997, fans spilled onto the sidewalks outside Reading Frenzy, the downtown counterculture bookshop owned by now City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly. They were there to get a look at the 35-year-old author with a rockabilly bouffant and a heart tattooed on his sculpted biceps.

"There were people out the door, peering in the windows," he now remembers.

Goad was then a breakout name in Portland, where he lived for 11 years. The Temple University graduate arrived here with a bit of notoriety as the creator of a crass zine called Answer Me! that printed "ironic" essays in favor of rape and abusing women. In Portland, he wrote his first and most infamous book, The Redneck Manifesto, which earned him a $100,000 book deal from Simon & Schuster.

Early reviews of Redneck—which opened with a chapter called “White N****rs Have Feelings Too” and uses the N-word a total of 76 times—were mostly positive. Florida’s Sun-Sentinel called it a “furious, profane, smart and hilariously smart aleck defense of working-class white culture,” while Publishers Weekly said he was “writing at the top of his voice” and “merits a listen.” Kirkus Reviews wrote that while Redneck was “sure to infuriate the liberal reader, he is also likely to make that same reader laugh ruefully, and often.” WW praised the book’s “brutally candid critique of American race relations.”

Read more: http://www.wweek.com/arts/books/2017/10/17/two-decades-after-author-jim-goad-fell-from-grace-in-portland-hes-re-emerged-as-an-icon-of-the-alt-right/