Things to read

A terrific piece in Bookforum about a film, Writer of O, about the author of Story of O.

An interview with Gore Vidal by an Irish newspaper, conducted in Rome, in which a little exaggeration ("Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarised, everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of the government are in the hands of this junta") goes a long way. And Salon has a piece about a new book, The One Percent Doctrine, which looks at how the right wing pulled it off.