It was announced today that we'll have the first poet reading at an inauguration in more than a decade: Elizabeth Alexander, the much-decorated author of, among other books, the poetry collection The Venus Hottentot and American Sublime, a Pulitzer finalist. Alexander, who currently teaches at Yale, is a D.C. native; her mother, Dr. Adele Logan Alexander, is a history professor at George Washington University, and her father, Clifford Alexander, served as Secretary of the Army during the Carter administration.

Nice interview in the latest edition of Bookslut with Dave Housley, the D.C author of the short-story collection Ryan Seacrest Is Famous (we profiled him in November '07) and coeditor at the literary journal Barrelhouse (which disclosed its Patrick Swayze anxiety in our pages last April). He talks a little about Barrelhouse, the story collection, and Swayze, but the best exchange involves a hypothetical scenario:

You are in a little room with Ryan Seacrest, 40 copies of your book, and an oversized toothbrush. Ryan Seacrest has a cellphone with your mother's number in it. He also has a squirt tube of skin bronzer in his tight jean pockets. There are no windows or doors in the room, but there is a TV, and Ryan Seacrest is trying to watch TV. What's going to happen?

Now, the most interesting part of this is that squirt tube of skin bronzer. I really feel like he might have that in his tight jean pockets. Do you think when he leaves the house he actually might have a squirt tube of skin bronzer? He probably would carry it in a little man-purse, or he'd have an assistant carry it for him and he'd shout "TAN" every now and then, and the assistant would have to come rub bronzer on Ryan Seacrest, and then by the end of the day, the assistant's $500 jeans would be the exact color of Ryan Seacrest's hair, because he's been given nothing to wipe his hands on, other than Ryan Seacrest.

Photo of Dave Housley by Darrow Montgomery

Art Taylor, a local writer, critic, and George Mason University English prof who also works on GMU's annual Fall for the Book Festival, has been making a few revisions to his novel in progress. The book is set in 1984, so he's been careful about matters of historical authenticity. Very careful: In a blog post he explains why he had to replace the word dickwad with the word dickweed in a passage. Dickwad only came into circulation in 1989, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, while dickweed started making the rounds in 1984, made famous two years later in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure ("You killed Ted, you Medieval dick-weed!")

No word on the provenance on dillweed, though I'd guess it was a way for Mike Judge to get dickweed past MTV's censors, in time making the word safe for AT&T ads:

Washington, D.C. is a complicated place. Journalists in D.C. bureaus are getting laid off in droves. Kids these days like Second Life and other avatar-driven games. Dave Johnson, a professor at American University, is clearly smarter than the rest of us, because he thinks he's figured out a way to reconcile all this by creating a game-like platform that presents a virtual D.C. that dynamically presents information to users by employing an algorithm that---oh, damned if I know. All I know is that he's asking the Knight News Challenge for about $1 million to create the thing. Here's an excerpt from his proposal, linked from Fishbowl NY today:

This project will build a working “SimCity” model of Washington, DC, visualizing the federal buildings and placing avatars of elected and appointed officials in and around them. Based in open source tools such as Blender and the Python language, the environment will be built from the ground up with hooks to work with other open source data-driven projects as well as social networking sites. (The interface and engine can be brokered to model any state's capitol, or any city in any state or nation.) Beyond the platform interface, the goal is to attach vast databases of public information: The effects of federal policies/politics on local policies/politics; the structure of financial relationships and their effects on policies/politics. Strong journalism – print, broadcast and new media – that relates these communities to Washington will be easy to find and new audiences will appreciate the relevance to their communities.

This may be an improvement over hiring a smart reporter in a D.C. bureau. I can't see how, though.

Todd Stewart of Vertigo Books was on the Kojo Nnamdi Show today offering a few recommendations for some of his favorite books of the year. I've read (and liked) two of the books in his list, Philip Roth's Indignation and Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns, which gives me a fair amount of confidence in the rest. With Black Friday approaching in these Depression-esque times, it's worth remembering that books are cheap and last forever. What else can you say that about? (Clever/tacky retorts to that question are welcome in the comments.) Stewart's full list below:

Fiction
Sway by Zachary Lazar
Indignation by Philip Roth
World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler
Peace by Richard Bausch
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Richard Pevear
Roseanna, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and The Man on the Balcony by Maj Sjowall and Per Waloo

Nonfiction
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt
Like a Rolling Stone: The Strange Life of a Tribute Band by Steven Kurutz
Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*#! by Art Spiegelman
Washington Burning by Les Standiford
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering Lewis

Everybody has their own way of finding their Zen. Some do yoga. Some smoke weed. Some turn cuddling into an odd, process-oriented group activity. Me, I stick to Voice of America Special English, which broadcasts news stories about the awesomeness of American culture to faraway lands, using a limited pool of vocabulary words spoken slowly. Very, very slowly. A VOA Special English broadcast feels simultaneously woozy and soothing, like a chopped and screwed version of NPR, or somebody softly whispering The Elements of Style in your ear.

I've let VOA Special English fall out of my regular listening habits for a while, but Comics DC reminds me of reason to tune in again: Yesterday the network aired a lengthy feature on comic books that includes quotes from staffers at Springfield's NOVA Comics and Games. An excerpt from the show should give you an idea of how simple the storytelling is:

Comics use drawings and words to tell stories that can be funny or serious, or a little of both. Comic books grew out of comic strips in newspapers.

One of the most successful early comic characters in America was Mickey Dugan, better known as "the Yellow Kid." He wore a yellow coat that was too big for him.

He was a character in a comic strip in New York called "Hogan’s Alley" by Richard Felton Outcault. It provided social commentary on the problems of cities.

But you really have to listen to the report to get the full effect. True, you may fall asleep on the Metro while listening to it. But that's a small price to pay for utter peace.

Last December City Paper editor Erik Wemple launched a series on City Desk called "Bad Gift Idea," which catalogued some of the worst things you could possibly give to your loved ones during the holidays. It proved to be one of the biggest features ever on this blog---gathering, at one point, more than 8 million pageviews daily.*

Its sole failing was launching a little too late---I've been getting wish-list requests since Halloween. So there's no time like now to start talking about bad gift ideas. To be fair, The Oxford Book of Death isn't exactly pitching itself as a great gift. But the timing of its publication in the United States---Dec. 15---suggests that it may catch the eye of a few last-minute holiday shoppers. Seems weighty. Looks smart. But totally inappropriate for SAD times.

If you're still tempted, OUP's blog has a few selections of famous last words from some historical figures. For my money (which won't be spent giving this book to a close friend or relative!), Andre Gide's is the best of the batch: "I am afraid my sentences are becoming grammatically incorrect."

* Totally made up. But what media organization is being honest in public about its Web traffic?

Years before it was a Sunday newspaper supplement that presciently united John McCain and a certain Sarah Palin lookalike, Life was a weekly newsmagazine that was the gold standard in photojournalism. Though it's probably bad news that signals the hastening death spiral of glossy news magazines, it's still interesting to look at the Life photo archive, which Google has just put online. Searching on the keywords "Washington DC" turns up some fun stuff, including the picture above of moving boxes at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, taken around the time of its opening in 1974.

William Ayers' appearance last night at All Souls Unitarian Church last night has been well-covered---today's Post has a thorough accounting of Ayers' day in D.C., as does the Wall Street Journal. Neither story, though, mentions the biggest noise the audience made during the evening. When Jeff Smith, executive director of DC Voice and moderator for the evening, asked Ayers an audience member's question about the DCPS, the mention of Michelle Rhee's name evoked a prolonged hiss from the audience. Ayers is a scholar of public education, and though he professed ignorance of Rhee and the DCPS, he's not so big on Teach for America, of which Rhee is an alum. He described TFA as a "mixed blessing," arguing that its method of alternative teacher certification has a built-in classist subtext: that teachers in low-income school districts aren't qualified, requiring well-heeled college grads to be brought in to fix things.

If the sanctuary was largely filled with people concerned about the state of public education, the sidewalk outside the church was filled with folks who aren't letting go of Ayers' connection to the Weather Underground. Raoul Deming, a bearded, middle-aged man who drove to the event from Philadelphia, held up a sign reading, "AYERS LIED PEOPLE DIED NO JUSTICE NO PEACE." The end of the election cycle hasn't lessened his anger at Ayers' attachment to terrorist activity. "These people killed people," he says.

Conservative rageblog the Jawa Report has footage of Deming and a few other protesters in front of the church:

William Ayers, favorite punching bag of rageoholic conservative bloggers, isn't reading at the 14th & V Busboys & Poets tonight as planned. The bookstore just sent an e-mail blast:

Due to the large number of people and media who want to attend the event with William Ayers, we have moved it to a venue that can accommodate a larger audience. It will be held at: All Souls Church, 1500 Harvard Street NW, Washington, DC 20009. The entrance is on Harvard between 15th and 16th. Street parking is available and it is walking distance from the Columbia Heights Metro.

The reading starts at 6:30 p.m. Should be interesting to see how much heckling takes place in a church...

Lots of chatter this week in newspapers and blogs about the news that William Ayers will speak at Busboys & Poets on Monday. Nobody really took much notice of this when I blogged about it about a month back. Clearly I need to take more swigs of whatever Michelle Malkin's drinking:

The violence-embracing Marxist is on the lecture and media circuit, hawking his repackaged memoir, promoting a new book on race, and basking in all the post-Obama victory attention.

While pondering the idea of how glorious it must feel to bask in all the attention you'll get at a reading at Busboys & Poets---on a Monday night!---scroll through the comments of Malkin's post, which ponders shooting Ayers for treason or bombing his house. Must be part of that Republican party-rebuilding effort I've been hearing about.

Buried in today's Style section is a story about what the Post dug up when it filed a FOIA request on author Norman Mailer, who died last year. There's not a whole lot of shocking news in the files, which may explain why it's buried in the Style section---Feds impersonated friends to extract Mailer's whereabouts, but otherwise the file seems largely stuffed with press clippings.

There's a big missed opportunity here, though. There are plenty of Mailer scholars---or just garden-variety lit nerds like myself---who'd love a peek at the file. So why won't washingtonpost.com, which prides itself on pioneering new ways to make stories sticky and engaging online---post a few jpegs or PDFs from it? If nothing else, I'd like to see the FBI agent's attempt at a review of Mailer's book about the '68 conventions, Miami and the Seige of Chicago. "It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style," the agent explained.

That's something the comic artist kept stressing to me when we spoke by phone about a week ago. But Spiegelman---best known for his two-volume graphic novel about his father's experiences during the Holocaust, Maus---in't about to deny his influence, either. In the Q&A below, he discusses his recently reissued 1978 collection Breakdowns (reviewed in this week's City Paper), the grammar of comic art, the legacy of his work, and more.

Spiegelman will discuss Breakdowns on Friday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose.

Read More "Art Spiegelman Is Not Arrogant" »

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are printing extra copies of today's paper. So is the Chicago Sun-Times. And the New York Times. And the Raleigh News & Observer. And---oh, whatever, looks like every daily newspaper in the country is printing extra copies. So when your grandkids ask, "What was it like when Obama got elected?" you can show them something. And when they ask, "What's a newspaper?" you can show them that too.

Of course you can. Black Plastic Bag contributor Brandon Wu has a great batch of images up on his Flickr page.