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Thursday, April 08, 2004 I shouldn't be screwing around on the internet all morning but I am. I'll be heading off to Pennsylvania soon, to try to figure out what's happening between Arlen Specter and Pat Toomey in that battleground state. Toomey represents the final dismemberment of the left. Soon pro-life gun activists will be considered liberal as the American Theocracy consolidates its power. More on that race when I get off the train in Philadelphia. posted by Stephen Elliott at 10:54 AM  Wednesday, April 07, 2004 Reading tonight at Booksmith, on Haight. Also, I'm sending out a new poker report today. If you want to be on the mailing list to recieve poker reports send an email to: pokerreport-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Check out my friend Josh, the Sumo wrestler. Also, I love Talking Points Memo. posted by Stephen Elliott at 9:38 AM Tuesday, April 06, 2004 All this time off the campaign trail is making me antsy. I've been promoting my novel (which you can order from Amazon) but the trail is calling me back. Also, the final chapter of Looking Forward To It is due in three and a half months. Plus, as far as I can tell, most bookstores aren't even carrying my novel. So what's the point in promoting something that doesn't exist? Politics is all that matters anyway. My pal James Rainey is out on the trail, zipping around on press planes with Kerry and company for the LA Times. But I can't afford to do that. Still, it makes me feel like I'm out of the loop. I mean, I know the basics, that George Bush is intentionally trying to kill all of us. But the more nuanced details of the campaign, ie. Pennsylvania and Ohio, are slipping past my finger tips. It's time to get back on the road and start writing about my generation's final election. posted by Stephen Elliott at 11:19 AM Saturday, April 03, 2004 Happy Baby was reviewed in this Sunday's New York Times. posted by Stephen Elliott at 2:07 AM Friday, April 02, 2004 I have a new Poker Report up on McSweeney's. Look for my article on the Wisconsin Primary in the new issue of The Believer. Also, I know Republicans don't read the New York Times, which goes a long way to explaining our country's current mess. But at the cost of preaching to the choir check out today's Paul Krugman article. Continuing that thought for a second. Where exactly do Republicans get their information? I know about Fox, but I think there's other pipelines I don't have any access to. I was in a car in Portland last week and the driver told me he was voting for Bush. He didn't know I was writing about politics. All he knew was that I wrote depressing novels obsessed primarily with sadomasochism. And that's probably a good thing because the two professions don't exactly fit together well. So I asked him why and he said to me, "Well, you know, John Kerry wasn't even in Vietnam that long." And I was like, what the hell? You know Bush didn't even go, right? I just couldn't understand it. But it made me think a lot about conservative sources of information and mind control. There's a bigger and expanding picture to be looked into here. And if none of that means anything, and maybe it doesn't. I also have a fiction page with some short shorts. posted by Stephen Elliott at 8:40 AM Thursday, April 01, 2004 The Passion Of Iraq Let me see if I've got this straight. A body being dragged through the streets of Iraq, beaten bloody and strung up before a jeering mob is too graphic for the media to show, and certainly too graphic for children. But a body being dragged through the streets of Jerusalem, beaten bloody and strung up before a jeering mob is a transcendant spiritual event, an artistic masterpiece, and children should be bussed in from the churches to see it. Right? --Neil Elliott posted by Stephen Elliott at 11:34 AM Friday, March 26, 2004 Chicago is different than I remember it but it's still a great union town. Walking along North Avenue last night in the rain the neon was everywhere lining strange expensive restaurants with clean white tables. I was in Wicker Park, walking from Quimby's to the Empty Bottle. Wicker Park is miles from the lake and it was a ghetto that became hip and then gentrified into absurdity. Now it's expensive and lacks character and it seems that the people keeping the rents high must have forgotten why they colonized the neighborhood to begin with. I imagine people standing on their porches staring across Milwaukee Avenue to the Ukranian Village and the flat slab of broken concrete to the west and saying, "Why don't I live closer to the lake?" My fiance and I were gentrified out of Wicker Park in 1997, after the deal had already started to go down. We hit the village which had it's own problems but managed to survive. People ran out of money before crossing Division. I used to ride my bicycle from their to the John Hancock Building where I was temping for Blau Direct. They almost took me on full time but fired me when it was revealed that I had eaten all of the secretary's cookies. What happened was the secretary was taking a week off to close a deal on a condo she purchased in Hyde Park. She left six boxes of girl scout cookies in her desk and I ate them all. I ate so many cookies I threw up. It was around that time that I wrote this poem. Anyway, there's a couple of extenuating circumstances to the story and I still feel that I didn't deserve to be fired for eating the cookies. First, the drawer was open. So in theory, anybody could have eaten the cookies. Though anybody didn't eat the cookies, I ate the cookies. Still. Also, I was so bored. The kind of temp work I was doing was so mind numbingly dull it was deadly. Plus, I don't think she should have snitched. I know none of this makes my argument about not eating Andy Miller's loaf of bread sound good. I can't help that. Anyway, my bicycle was stolen across from the John Hancock building. In retrospect there was probably a bike rack in the garage but I didn't know about that at the time. My fiance was headed to law school and she wanted me to go with her, and I almost did. The summer of '97 was filled with decisions and anticipation and we ate corn on the cob smothered in butter on our front steps. Then Claire went to law school in D.C. and I moved to a ski resort and spent a season as a ski-bum writing what would become A Life Without Consequences. Anyway, it was a great reading last night at the Empty Bottle. And I wanted to mention that Politically Inspired contributor Mistress Morgana's story was chosen for this year Best Erotica collection, edited by Susie Bright. posted by Stephen Elliott at 8:54 AM |
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