In Pollitt's excellent article she makes note of the downward spiral of her life while involved with this character, a spiral that included weight gain and the fact that she spent "many hours in my study, engaged in arcane email debate with strangers." Is this a reference to her brief LBO career?
Jacob Segal
---------- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 14:08:48 -0400 To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Subject: goosip
New York Post - July 17, 2002
[PageSix]
Revealed! The bad ex
WRITER/academic Katha Pollitt didn't name her ex-boyfriend in The New Yorker, where she calls him "a womanizer, a liar, a cheat, a manipulator, a maniac, a psychopath." But we will: He's Paul Mattick, 58, a philosophy professor at Adelphi University. Pollitt, 52, included a stinging critique of her ex-live-in lover in "Learning to Drive, which is partly about Pollitt finally getting her license. Pollitt, a longtime columnist for The Nation, claims her former beau had affairs with both "the drab colleague he insinuated into our social life" and "the young art critic he mocked as silly and second-rate." Mattick eventually left Pollitt for the critic. Pollitt admits she "never once woke him up with" a particular sexual act, "despite being told many times that this was what all men wanted . . . Perhaps the young art critic is a better girlfriend on these and other scores, and he no longer feels the need for other women. Or perhaps the deception was the exciting part for him, and he will betray her, too, which is, of course, what I hope." Mattick did not return calls.