Tuesday October 04, 2005

For Your Consideration

My former Memphis Flyer colleague Phil Campbell has always had a knack for getting into unusual situations. Before I met him, he organized a convention of people named “Phil Campbell” in Phil Campbell, Alabama. (You might recall his article about that in Might or its anthology.) In Memphis, he managed to bunk in the zaniest apartment complex in Midtown and fell in with a group of leftist protest junkies who were never happier than when their civil rights were being violated.

After that, Phil moved to Seattle, worked for The Stranger, and then hooked up with Grant Cogswell, a WTO activist who staged a punk rock campaign for Seattle City Council. This last adventure is chronicled in Phil’s new memoir, Zioncheck for President: A True Story of Idealism and Madness in American Politics, due out Oct. 10 from Nation Books. Named for Marion Zioncheck, a leftist Seattle pol who committed suicide in 1936, the book is a novelistic, funny, and deeply personal narrative of Phil’s involvement in the Cogswell campaign. We should all be so lucky as to have something this honest and compelling to write about. I hope the book is a big hit.

Phil will give his first reading from Zioncheck tomorrow night (10/5) at 7 p.m. at KGB. As the pub date approaches, I will devise some contest for giving away my copy to a lucky reader.

UPDATE:The Stranger has published, and posted, a long excerpt from Zioncheck for President.