…is peripherally involved in the latest fabricated memoir scandal.

That’s Marie Phillips, author of the novel Gods Behaving Badly, when she writes about wanting to be “a pop novelist”: “Maybe I can be like Ray Davies or Peter Blake. They’re no lesser because they aren’t Mozart or Michelangelo. They are doing something else.”

Jim Demetre has a response to Charles Mudede’s review of Seattle’s Belltown.

M. Coy Books is indeed shuttering, after 18 years on Pine Street. The last non-chain, general-topics bookstore in the downtown retail district has indeed lost its lease, and the two Michaels who run it have decided the business is too marginal to relocate. The Michaels have always supported my work, even when I was reduced to self-publishing.

THE VIRGINIA INN’S current incarnation closes Jan. 13. It will reopen in an expanded “double wide” format, including a full kitchen, in March.

AND CRANIUM, the local board-game enterprise that got big with a deal to sell games at Starbucks, is selling out to toy mega-monster Hasbro. The latter’s brands include Monopoly, Scrabble, Candy Land, and the locally-invented Magic: The Gathering.

…disappearing city-wise: Ballard’s Sunset Bowl, the last remaining bowling center north of the Ship Canal and one of Seattle’s last 24-hour eateries, has lost its real estate and is closing, probably by April.

And things aren’t looking that rosy for the lease of my fave new-book store, M Coy (the last non-chain general-book outlet in the downtown retail core). Details to follow.

…in I don’t know how long, my work is the subject of serious criticism. My erstwhile Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has written a nuanced, lucid review of Seattle’s Belltown.

Essentially, Mudede seems to like the book for what it is, but wishes it had more. That, I’ve learned, is a common response to Arcadia Publishing’s slim photo-history tomes. Arcadia’s formula of many pictures and few words has proven very commercially successful, here and around the country. But many aspects of any place’s story will necessarily get left out by this broad-strokes approach. Some readers would like more oral-history material. Some would like more human-interest anecdotes. Some would like longer passages about specific people and places of interest to them.

Mudede specifically wishes Seattle’s Belltown included more emotional, human history. He’d have liked more of “a sense of horror or sadness or wonder at the great and rapid sequence of events that shaped Belltown.”

And he’d like the book to have a stronger sense of advocacy. After all, he notes, the neighborhood’s an “explosive battleground of competing land use and architectural ideas, of private and cultural capital, and a variety of class issues. Even in a book as small as this, one wants the writer to take a stronger position on these pressing matters, presenting not only conclusions but also solutions.”

These are all good things to yearn for, and not just in books.

It’s a level of discourse beyond Arcadia’s format. (They are trying to move units through Costco and Walgreen’s.)

But it’s certainly something I can work harder at in my other forums, including the Belltown Messenger and this site.

Have I got answers to the ongoing disappearance of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, artist spaces, and the Crocodile? No, at least not any good ones, at least not tonight.

But let’s keep talking about it.

Seattle’s no longer America’s “most literate city”— Minneapolis is, with St. Paul third and threatening. And you thought the only thing separating Mpls. and St. P was the Mississippi River. (No jokes about “it’s damp enough here today it feels like the Mississippi River,” please.)

…to purchase a freshly autographed copy of Seattle’s Belltown or Vanishing Seattle will occur this Friday solstice evening, 6:30-8:30 p.m., in the exotic Wallingford district at Not A Number Cards and Gifts. Can you say “last minute gift ideas for the impossible-to-please”? I knew you could.

…who attended our intimate soiree and book signing Thursday evening at M. Coy Books, celebrating the release of Seattle’s Belltown. I even got to meet longtime local arts patron Polly Friedlander.

(Via Steve Mandich):

“Nice update on the Mercer Arena from Wednesday’s Nooze, though according to Jeff Obermeyer’s cool Arcadia book Hockey in Seattle, the Mets actually played at the Ice Arena at Fifth and University from 1915 to 1924. The Mercer Arena (nee Civic Arena) didn’t open ’til 1927. Here’s more from Obermeyer’s site.”

• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

As you might have perceived from the new image added to the top of the left-hand column, we’ve got another amazing, stupendous, enticing tome for your perusing pleasure.

Seattle’s Belltown is about exactly what you think it’s about. It covers 1.5 centuries of falling hills, rising buildings, homes, bars, theaters, hotels, P-Patches, streets, shops, and life. Get your copy now.

Our OFFICIAL PREMIERE is Thursday, December 6, 5-7 p.m., at M. COY BOOKS, 121 Pine Street. Be there or be trapezoidal.

How does the Hollywood establishment adapt the Great Atheistic Children’s Novel? By scrubbing all the anti-religious stuff out, naturally. (Link may require paid registration.)

…to our last update to our piece about the Amazon Kindle: That NEA study that claimed (or was interpreted by some pundits as claiming) Americans don’t read anymore? Probably not.

Danny Westneat’s rave review with reservations and my pal Paul Andrews’s more scathing piece about Amazon’s new e-book device (the latter admittedly written without having seen the machine in person) both refer to the old, tired meme of “The Book.”

This meme, which I’ve bashed before, can be divided into two arguments; both of them, I believe, are specious.

First, Andrews reiterates that chestnut argument I’ve been hearing my entire adult life, that nobody reads anymore (particularly those vidiot kids guilty of not being From The Sixties); thus, The Book, and with it all capacity for rational intelligence, has become the refuge of a small literate elite just like in pre-Renaissance days.

Second, both Andrews and Westneat trot out the notion that there’s something sacred about The Book, something that will never, can never, be equalled by any electronic device imaginable; and even if it could, hardcore “people of the book” (especially the older male ones) are, by nature, proud Luddites, who’d rather be living in some imagined pre-20th-century pastoral Eden.

Andrews cites a recent National Endowment for the Arts study claiming that “reading for pleasure” among adults has dropped bigtime since the mid-’90s. Actually, all “legacy media” have dropped bigtime in popularity, from broadcast TV/radio to newspapers and magazines to movies in theaters. The culprits: DVDs, video/computer games, them danged Interwebs, and more active leisure pursuits such as gyms.

And if book buyers really were such technophobes, Amazon wouldn’t have made its first market niche from them.

Folks “read for pleasure” on screens all the time these days. You’re probably doing so right now.

The catch is that Internet-based reading has, to date, emphasized short-form content, such as that featured in this splendiferous web-column thingy.

The trick has been to devise an environment that facilitates/encourages long-form reading; i.e. single book-length texts.

That’s what all the developers of specialized e-book reader machines have strived for this past decade or so. From what I’ve read about Kindle (I haven’t seen one in person either), they’re still not there yet.

But that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.

I can foresee something a little bigger than the iPhone or a little smaller than a Tablet PC, running open source software or at least non-encrypted file formats, that’s pleasant enough on the eyes for extended reading times, and which enables the total immersive feel of burying oneself in a good tale.

Further updates still: According to the SeaTimes’s Brier Dudley, Amazon didn’t develop the Kindle hardware here but in Silicon Valley. And Amazon indeed ignored the Seattle media at Kindle’s launch, not even inviting anybody from here to its big debut presentation in NYC.