I’ve been on a political-news fast since this morning. I’m refusing to get bitter, depressed, or frustrated.

I’ve been cleansing and renewing my mind with Looney Tunes and Doctor Who DVDs, with Comcast digital cable’s opera music channel, with the coffee-table book Playboy: The Photographs, and with the last two stories in my main man D.F. Wallace’s anthology Oblivion. And I’ve been trying to jump-start my one-month novel, to little success thus far.

Tomorrow, I’m likely to spend the day locked up with my yet-to-be-written novel. I might read only the sports and living sections of the newspaper. I’ll go out later that evening, but will instruct my schmoozing companions to stick to discussing personal and/or upbeat topics.

I’m sure that within a few days, I’ll have something to say about the national tragedies. Until then, let me remind you of a certain famous fictional political organizer, “Boss” Jim W. Gettys.

As played by future Perry Mason costar Ray Collins in Orson Welles’s film classic Citizen Kane, this “W.” is an admitted “no gentleman,” a crook and grafter. He’s the target of the egotistical-yet-populistic publisher Charles Foster Kane’s short-lived political career. (In the first draft of the screenplay, it’s clearer that Kane isn’t running for office directly against Gettys, but against Democratic and Republican candidates who are both in Gettys’s pocket.)

It ends badly. Gettys finds and exploits a scandal in Kane’s personal life. On election night, Kane’s right-hand man instructs the press-room staff at Kane’s New York Inquirer to use a pre-set front page headline, “Charles Foster Kane Defeated—FRAUD AT POLLS!.”

Kane wastes the rest of his life as a grumpy old conservative hermit, with no sense of humor and horrid artistic tastes.

Dear God, please don’t let me end up like that.

…in the SeaTimes, on a funny little slacker novel called Bald.

…in the Seattle Times today. This one’s about Selling Seattle, a British academician’s view of the ’90s national-media hype about our once-fair city.

…in the Seattle Times today, this one on the McSweeney’s “humor” anthology.

…in the Seattle Times today. This one recommends Sen. Robert Byrd’s Losing America, an anti-Bush book with a difference. (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page.)

A U of Wisconsin study’s named Seattle #2 in “America’s Most Literate Cities.” Minneapolis, our ol’ sister city at the other end of the historic Great Northern RR line, is #1; Portland’s #9. And where would you imagine the third-busiest readers to be? Why, Pittsburgh, of course.

…of the many things we saw and did last weekend.

First, our friends in the band Lushy played the last night of Eastlake’s Bandoleone restaurant. (The building’s coming down; the management has found a new site in Fremont.)

When filming a Ford SUV commercial downtown at night, be sure your camera’s mounted on something rugged and sturdy—like a Mercedes SUV.

Seahawks Stadium hosted a big England-vs.-Scotland soccer exhibition. So, of course, the George and Dragon Pub in Fremont hosted a huge postgame party. The joint was filled with raucous singing, replica team jerseys, and dudes with accents boasting to me about their love of drinking until passing out.

And our ol’ friends Elaine Bonow and Harry Pierce debuted their funky li’l soul band Stupid Boy at the new intimate Blue Button cabaret space.

Yr. obt. cor’s’p’n’d’nt is once again providing freelance book reviews to The Seattle Times. The first of the new batch is out today, concerning Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

…has a remarkably serious, positive assessment of the “graphic novel” phenom.

There’s another one of those research reports out that claims nobody’s reading in America anymore. And, like most prior reports of its type, its findings aren’t as dire as its headlines suggest.

Actual book sales, it turns out, have been flat or slightly increasing during the recent economic sadness. And that’s not counting audio books, e-books, and the good ol’ Internet (which is for the most part a reading exercise).

It’s the consumption of “literature,” that amorphously-defined area of non-genre fiction, that’s not kept up with population growth, or even fallen a bit, over the past two decades. (Although its audience decline in that era is not nearly as precipitous as that of network TV in the same period.)

I’m currently trying to get a PR job in a book-related company. What I’ll tell them is what I’ll tell you: Books aren’t going away any time soon. They are, as a character on Max Headroom once said, “a non-volatile storage medium.”

As for “literature,” it’s always been a specialty taste in this country. When book people wax nostalgic for the days when NYC publishing was run by tweed-suited gentlemen in funky little offices, they’re pining for a day when the book biz was so small and concentrated as to have been a boutique industry. The peak years of fiction book sales, roughly the ’50s through the ’70s, coincided with the peak years of mass-market paperbacks, when everything from Orwell to Salinger could be found on the drugstore spinner racks.

Among consumer-product industries in this country, the book industry is among the most resistant to change. Yet change it must, if it’s ever going to achieve its full potential as a business and as a force for influence on the culture at large.

More about all this later, maybe.

…here’s “the condensed Bill Clinton memoir.”

…to “Bloomsday,” the centennial worldwide celebration of the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. The hereby-linked Village Voice article even includes a photograph of Joyce that’s not the one you always see.

Today, some web links recalling the monstrous politics behind the happy-face mask.

• Dan Modela discusses Dark Victory, his book investigating Reagan’s lifelong ties to MCA, former parent company of Universal Studios and the most notoriously Mob-connected company in Hollywood. (Universal’s now being acquired by GE, which once sponsored a TV show Reagan hosted and MCA produced.)
• Third World Traveler has links to several accounts of Reagan’s disastrous foreign policies, includng his luuuvvv for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. (Among Ronnie’s enamored: Saddam, Osama, and Pinochet.)
• Mark Hertsgaard, in a 1996 interview, mentions how Reagan was given virtually free rein by a submissive Washington press corps.
• David Swanson remembers the secret Iran-hostage deal that gained Reagan the White House in the first place.
• William Rivers Pitt insists that ” virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.”
• David Corn, in a 1998 Nation essay, recalls “66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan.”
• And Greg Palast emphatically recalls Reagan as “a conman” and “a coward.”
• But Madison, WI’s Capital Times asserts that progressives oughta learn from Reagan’s “willingness to fight for his faith.”

Here’s our last batch of shots from the spankin’-new downtown library.

Have I any qualms about the PoMo (or is it NeoMo?) palace of info? A few.

The phunky phoam phurniture’s slick and tres comfy, but I dunno how the chairs and couches will survive under constant use-n’-abuse.

The kids’ area is boistrously joyful, but at least a little sound muffling might be nice. (The Mixing Station area can also be a little quietude-challenged.)

But aside from these minor qualms, I’d say the place is a solid hit. It’s got thousands of books, lots of other printed and audio-visual documents, dozens of makeout spots, clean restrooms, mod colors, free wi-fi, and more fun-type atmosphere than most retail stores.

…acknowledges there are as many as 20 Seattle barber shops specializing in “hip-hop” dos. Upon which one does the paper choose to focus? You guessed it: The one that’s in the north end and owned by two white guys.

SAD NEWS IN CULTURELAND: Northwest Bookfest has thrown down its last galley of type, and won’t be back this fall. That just gives us book-lovers the opportunity to start over and launch a brand spankin’ new Lit-O-Rama weekend.

I’d say: Forget about staging it in a funky but remote location such as Sand Point. Use the new library for a scaled-down fair; or bring the neo-modern aesthetic of the new library into the Convention Center, the Trade Center, the Seahawks Exhibition Center, or Key Arena. Make it festive, celebratory. Make it a fun gathering for people who will be spending the winter curled up at home with books.