…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.

Finally saw a complete episode of American Idol. Like most “reality” shows, it constructs a very specific, detailed fictional “reality.” This particular show’s fabulist conceit is that the banal rehashing of ’70s soul music is, and always has been, the main and only form of popular vocal music in the U.S.

A few years back, some baby-boomer intellectual wrote a book in which she whined about Those Kids Today, whose music didn’t got the same soul as that old time rock n’ roll. I don’t know if that author’s an Idol viewer, but the show’s conceit might fit her idea of a musical utopia, in a “be careful what you wish for” way.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, KOMO-TV anchordude Dan Lewis has started each 11 p.m. newscast on the station’s roof. This serves no journalistic purpose. I can only imagine three non-journalistic purposes for the ongoing stunt:

• To make the broadcast seem Important and Relevant, even though it’s usually a rehash of the most gruesome personal events already exploited at 5 and 6:30;
• To show off how Lewis’s carefully sculpted hair can remain perfectly in place, no matter what the weather;
• To let Lewis repeatedly drop the name “Fisher Plaza,” the station owners’ block-long, massively under-occupied office development.

AS THREATENED YESTERDAY, yet more shots of the new downtown Seattle Public Library, designed by Dutch celebrity-architect Rem Koolhaas.

On one of the chartreuse escalators, a cute yet stunning public art piece awaits in hiding. In this image, you can just barely see a porthole, though which other patrons can peer out, and thus become a temporary part of the art itself.

I’ve heard only a few criticisms of the place thus far. One patron told me the place was louder than a library oughta be. Another, believing a Seattle public building should express a “Northwest” character, criticized a lack of wood on the walls.

And one woman said the Dutch architect didn’t understand American fears; otherwise, he wouldn’t have designed so many nooks and alcoves in which homeless child-abductors might hide.

I believe this fear to be grossly exaggerated. I’m also SO tired of the anti-homeless “jokes” I’ve heard, even from self-styled “radicals,” during the weeks before the new library’s opening.

Yes, we need a dedicated downtown drop-in and hygiene center; despite the consternations of merchants. We need to take care of our less-privileged citizens, not demonize them.

A library’s not the place for those functions. But it is a place for other aspects of rebuilding one’s life, including self-education and job research. The vastness of the new library’s public spaces makes this possible, with relative comfort for all of us.

WE’LL RUN LOTSA LIBRARY PIX over the course of the week. Be prepared.

It was a glorious day inside and out. Everyone seemed truly joyous; as if this magnificent cathedral of popular learning would herald a brighter future for our troubled region.

Seattle’s been called both a “city of readers” and a “city of engineers.” The new Seattle Public Library’s primarily a feat of stunning engineering, and secondly a tribute to reading and to the imagination.

More importantly, out of all the fancy-schmancy new PoMo monuments in this town, it’s the one that’s open to the public every week of the year with no cover charge.

(Now, if the city’d only commit enough funds to properly run the place…)

Head Librarian Deborah Jacobs (like me, a onetime Corvallis-ite), the mayor, and most of the City Council were on hand at the opening, along with several drum ensembles.

Welcoming patrons from inside the Fifth Avenue entrance: Everyone’s favorite Action Librarian, Nancy Pearl.

The sign adjacent to Pearl reveals:

(1) The Koolhaas team’s penchant for bold colors, especially chartreuse (named for a liqueur invented by “Chartist” monks, and hence perfectly appropriate for a contemplative place), and

(2) The team’s choice of Futura Extra Bold as the library’s official typeface. You can tell near the top left corner of this page that I’m also a Futura fan. More significantly, it was the official typeface of the Sub Pop Singles Club, which probably led the Dutch designers to think of it as a “Seattle” font.

I was elated to see the “writers’ room” near the top of the building’s co-named for our ol’ pal Carlo Scandiuzzi, who booked rock shows at the Showbox before becoming a movie actor-producer, and member of assorted local arts/humanities boards.

The children’s area is vast, raucously noisy, and right on the ground floor. It’s got lotsa large, angular concrete posts, which may remind some oldsters of past fun times at the Kingdome or the Coliseum. It’s got games, toys, fun props, kid-sized computer desks and chairs, and a semi-hidden “story hour room.”

One person I met compared the vast interior to a set from a Jacques Tati film. I was thinking more sci-fi. Indeed, it’ll be hard for Paul Allen’s new Science Fiction Museum to look more science-fictiony than parts of the library.