In Related Developments, Beatrice Endorses John Kerry

It's been a long, boring summer and it's only July. July 2003, to be exact, nearly a year and a half before two people you would never invite over to dinner, and probably wouldn't want to live in your town, will come head to head in the 2004 presidential election.

At the superhero supply center in Park Slope where nonprofit youth writing center 826 NYC conducts its workshops and after-school tutoring (and if you've got an afternoon free, how about volunteering? I am, once The Karen Black Project's in the can), Stephen Elliott dropped by last night to celebrate the publication of his campaign trail diary, Looking Forward to It--which, let me tell you, is the best book of its kind since Michael Lewis' Trail Fever, a wild, speed-fueled trip through the primaries where dinner is shared with Kucinich and mooched off the Kerry campaign buffet. He was joined by two of his cohorts in Operation Ohio, the voter motivation program he's launched for several swing states: David Amsden, who read from Important Things That Don't Matter, and Andrew Sean Greer, who shared a few passages from his bestselling The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Plenty of other writers in the room as well; I ran into Liz Kadetsky, and she said she spotted Jonathan Ames standing at the back of the crowd...and I'm guessing a lot of them drifted over to the after-party at the Loki Lounge, though I had to bow out after just one round so I could finish the long, long subway ride from Brooklyn to my Outer Borough before midnight.

If you'd like to see for yourself what makes Elliott's book so good, he's doing another reading at Pianos Saturday night in a benefit for Concerts for Change that will also feature Darin Strauss, Nick Flynn, and Lili Taylor. Oh, and you can also see the original master at work: Hunter S. Thompson on the '04 campaign trail...