SPARROW “Is it just me, or is there something about the Hudson Valley that makes every single person who lives here eccentric?” asks Sparrow.  He’s wearing a parka over an unseasonably bulky sweater, and removes his shoes  after sitting in Kingston’s Wing Shui Chinese restaurant.  He always carries a bag full of books in case he gets stuck in an elevator.  “I have anxiety–that’s why people think of me as a humorist.” Sparrow’s laugh is a sharp, percussive, double bark which sounds almost as if he’s saying, “Ha. Ha.” At readings, he riffles through dog-eared piles of paper painstakingly lettered in different-colored inks.  His comic timing is impeccable. Bob Holman once posted a sign outside the Bowery Poetry Club billing Sparrow as “the world’s wisest, funniest, and worst poet.” The native New Yorker got his mononame from a fellow employee at Mother Earth Health Foods in 1975.  He moved to Shandaken when his wife, writer Violet Snow, started yearning for greenery. “I begged her to go to Mexico–at least they have a culture.  As you may have noticed, living in America is like living in a shoebox.” Sparrow has run for president in every election cycle since 1996, when he ran as a radical communist in the Republican party.  His books Republican Like Me; Yes,You ARE a Revolutionary! and America: A Prophecy are published by Soft Skull Press.  He also writes for The Sun and the New York Observer; his Phoenicia Times column “Heard by a Bird” includes fictional gossip, imaginary bumper stickers, and biweekly portraits of actual clouds. Sparrow calls himself “a subsistence writer.  I grow just enough words to live.” Where would he most like to subsist?  He scratches his beard, then remembers a National Geographic he saw at a laundromat.  “The cover photo was this arid but bizarrely beautiful landscape, and I thought, ‘That’s where I want to live!’  It was Mars.”