Let the election year reading begin. I've started with Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. I can see that there will be lots of references to it in the coming months and I want to have read the source. I love the feel of the old interviews you can find on YouTube like this William F. Buckley 1967 interview with Alinsky. Try not to get emphysema from all the cigarette smoke. They seem beautifully burnished by the camera work, glowing with life and intelligence as they so politely point and counter. I love Alinksy's glasses; I may have to get a pair. Another interview I stumbled on is this Buckley 1968 interview with Leander Perez, one of the scariest political bosses Louisiana ever produced. After seeing this, I realize that Perez must be the model for every movie I've seen that has a southern bigot sheriff in it. You think they are making that stuff up and then you see this. Every five years I buy the next William Gibson book because I always have. This is his first book of essays. He is useful for an email signature: "The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." My poem of the day email has put me on to Sommer Browning who writes poems and comics. Here's one. I particularly like the Pacer reference. They’re saying irony is dead. And for a few minutes I thought I might die too—a woman who would buy a fifth of liquor and a pregnancy test just to see the look on the clerk’s face. It’s always strange to be born before the cusp of some new age, hanging onto nothing as if it were Los Angeles. I remember glaring through the windshield of the family Pacer, watching a thirty-foot man crack jokes on the screen. My parents were laughing, but I didn’t get the way something huge and astonishing could be flat, could not exist at all. Sometimes in rural Maine you see random acts of art. Usually it's a stack of firewood, built actually, and finished with design flair. And sometimes it's the artist who parks the machinery at the rental place.

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