Leave it to the flag-burning, cheese-eating, socialist liberal media elite to jinx a sure thing. With only days to go until the American elections, not only has the fortnightly New Mexico Sun News decided to print a cover with "Obama Wins!" on it, but the publisher Skyhorse has shown a cavalier refusal to knock on wood by soliciting contributions for a new collection, Letters to President Obama.
"We hope that you will want to contribute your own words, thoughts, perspectives and dreams in a letter for this new era in our history," announces the Skyhorse website.
Edited by academics from Cornell and Michigan universities, the book is slated for a 50,000-copy run in hardback next spring.Skyhorse's representative Bill Wolfsthal's response to the obvious question - what happens if you're wrong? - demonstrated the optimism typical of the Obama campaign. Well, in a manner of speaking. "The book might still be a poignant piece of history if Obama should lose," he said. Which, translated, means rest easy, chaps: the publishers will be all right.
Meanwhile, some unbuttoned commentary on the opposition from the novelist Stephen King in a recent Salon.com interview.
Referring to his 1979 The Dead Zone, in which an unwilling clairvoyant foresees nuclear devastation at the hands of a prospective candidate for the presidency, King referred to "that scene where Johnny Smith sees Greg Stillson in the future starting a nuclear war".
"Around my house," he added, "we kinda laugh when Sarah Palin comes on TV, and we say, 'That's Greg Stillson as a woman'."
I'm certainly no fan of Palin, but this seemed a bit harsh: as far as I could recall, The Dead Zone introduces Stillson by having him kick a dog to death, menace a youth with a broken bottle and pal up with a gang of brownshirt Hell's Angels carrying pool cues.
So I got my copy of the book out and turned to Stillson's first rally. And here is his election manifesto:
"We're gonna send all the pollution right into outer space!…We're gonna have clean air and we're gonna have clean water and we're gonna have it in SIX MONTHS!…We're gonna have all the gas and oil we need! We're gonna stop playing games with these Arabs and get down to brass tacks!"
Then Stillson starts throwing hot dogs into the audience.
"Hot dogs for every man, woman and child in America! And when you put Greg Stillson in the House of Representatives, you gonna say HOT DOG! SOMEONE GIVES A RIP AT LAST!"
Pretty much a full sheet, then, I thought, except the fast food.
Then out came this week's Knoxville News Sentinel from Tennessee with the headline: "Hot dog! Free food at events today": "'We'll have special McCain-Palin stickers and free hot dogs with all the fixins,' said Corey Johns, vice-president of the Knox County Republican Party."
Clearly we should be listening much harder to Stephen King.
Back on these shores, a pleasant surprise for the poet Peter Daniels. Though barely previously published, he has swept the board at the Arvon International Poetry Competition this year with Shoreditch Orchid, a 50-line poem on which he has been working since 1994.
The Arvon competition, founded in 1980, offered an extra prize this year to mark the 10th anniversary of the poet Ted Hughes's death.
The judges - Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald and Moniza Alvi - chose Shoreditch Orchid for both that and the main prize. So six grand - and congratulations - to Daniels, whose poem takes the form of a meditation from the back of a bus.
"The orchid has much more to do with the longer-term change that will one day take Shoreditch back to nature," he says. You can read it at telegraph.co.uk/arvon
http://snipurl.com/544up
