Daniel Sinker

This book is a Twitter feed that aggregates into an entertaining epic poem.

It’s journalist/web-geek Sinker’s unrestrained tweets under the fictional persona of Rahm Emanuel (former Obama White House Chief of Staff) during the man’s 2010-11 campaign for mayor of Chicago. I’m enamored of Emanuel and fascinated by his pit-bull, anti-people personality. I was especially fascinated to watch him glad-hand Obama supporters at one of the debates last month, and when I found myself imagining show more what was going on in his head, I pulled this from my TBRs.

Sinker began his @MayorEmanuel feed (bio: “Your next motherfucking mayor. Get used to it, assholes.”*) on the day rumors surfaced that Emanuel would run for the office that had been occupied by father-and-son Daleys for 43 of the last 56 years. Annotated with background and context where necessary, his couple-thousand tweets cover Emanuel resigning from the White House; returning to Chicago and facing residency challenges; finding innovative housing when the tenant renting his home refused to vacate early; commenting on his fellow candidates and the voters; and running his campaign. The real Emanuel blurbed the book with “My sentiments exactly,” and the entries do sound spot-on. For example:

Speech preview: I’ve spent these last weeks listening to your problems. And gone home every fucking night and poured bleach in my ears.

and

Who the fuck is in charge of cleaning the CTA stations? Because at this point I wouldn’t mind taking a fucking meeting with that asshole. {annotation:} The actual Rahm Emanuel visited every single CTA L station (The L is the public train system in Chicago, so named because much of the line is elevated aboveground) during his campaign, many of them multiple times. Most of them are not very clean.

Emanuel’s campaign team is mostly David Axelrod and Carl the Intern, but along the way they add a dog (“Hambone”) and a duck (“Quaxelrod”):

I’ve been shaking hands outside of PetSmart all morning. Last day I let Hambone and Quaxelrod set my fucking schedule.

The tweets also reflect non-mayoral events that happened along the way, e.g. the national mid-term elections, the rescue of the Chilean miners, Super Bowl XLV, Chicago’s Snowmageddon storm, and Jeopardy’s Watson computer challenge. Sinker wraps up by detailing his coming out as the feed author and meeting Emanuel.

I loved this book! I’d expected to read a few dozen pages and then tire of the format, but while I wasn’t looking it developed a whole story arc, and became a touching homage to Chicago. I had to detox from only five days of tweet-reading, vs. five months for those who followed it live. But like them, I’m so sad there’s no more.

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*The language is extraordinarily profane and vulgar ... and it faded completely to background after I’d read a couple hundred entries. I didn’t sanitize it here but I did limit it. show less

Chicken soup for the DIY soul, I found this book more inspiring and enlightening than I imagined it would be. I recommend it to anyone who isn't afraid to live their life according to their own agendas, not someone else's. I'm hyped to read the revised edition as many of these interviews were done right on the cusp of technological and political changes.

Like everyone else in the world, I'd have enjoyed this more if I knew more about Chicago politics, but at least reading the whole thing in full reminded me of why I heard about it in the first place (and why I didn't care all that much at the time): exiled Wisconsin senators ftw!

Weirdly, this is actually better as a Twitter feed; going back and re-reading @mayoremanuel still makes me laugh like a loon, but reading the book was just not as much fun. The commentary is nice, but kind of flat. (Fandom does DVD commentaries much better.)