From now through Oct. 7, we’ll be running updates from the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival at our music blog, Black Plastic Bag. Check out our report from opening night and, if you’re disinclined to watch tonight’s debate, our picks for tonight’s shows.

Valleywag points to a Time magazine widget listing the results of a poll asking folks who will win tonight’s watch-it-through-your-fingers-like-it’s-The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Vice Presidential debate. The rest of the world gives it to Joe Biden, 83 percent to Sarah Palin’s 17 percent. Even Alaska is on the same train as everybody else (78 to 22). Delaware goes to Biden, unsurprisingly—but at a full 100 percent. When’s the last time an election poll went 100 percent in one candidate’s direction? Even Alan Keyes got a few points against Barack Obama in the 2004 Senate race.

As word has spread about Olsson’s closing its five stores yesterday, folks have flocked to the testimonials page the bookseller set up. A handful of writers have weighed in with their memories; a selection follows.

Like others above, I first entered the Georgetown store in the early 1980s and spent hours in the stacks finding new favorites. Olsson’s has given readers of DC good service.
And it has given writers in DC great support. When my first book came out two years ago, I was so pleased to give a reading at the Old Town store, where my family made up half the audience. I was getting ready to give a reading of my new book there next month when I got this sad news.
Thank you for everything! May the music and the word go on. —David Taylor

I am so terribly sad to hear this news. This is a huge loss for the community of book lovers. Ever since I moved to Old Town in 1974, Olsson’s has been part of my life. Upon finishing a good novel, I would walk down to Olsson’s and select another good read from Olsson’s big table or from the shelved staff picks. Olsson’s and I came full circle in July when I did a reading of my own book at the Old Town store. I was proud to be associated with Olsson’s at that event. This wonderful book store exuded a warmth that occurs only when the entire staff truly cares about books. —Solveig Eggerz

I share the sentiments expressed here (barring #15): vote local with your dollars, folks…it goes a long way toward shaping the kind of world that we live in.
On November 7, 2003, I visited the Arlington store to promote my book, UNFINISHED BUSINESS: THE LIFE & TIMES OF DANNY GATTON (an appropriately DC-centric subject). About 15 people turned out, and they asked me a lot of intelligent questions. After I finished, I also did an interview with Michael Buckley (WRNR-FM).
My favorite moment came from a guy who said, “I used to deliver the Washington Post during the ’70s, and Danny’s house was on my route: lots of barking, [antique] cars everywhere: it was one scary looking house!” All of us in that room shared a good laugh about that one.
I’ve done signings and gigs where the staff barely grunted in your direction, let alone looked you in the eye — that wasn’t the case here! Your staff went out of its way to make me feel welcome, and the clientele definitely came across as true book lovers.
I’d always hoped to come back on the heels of another book, so I’m as saddened as everyone else is here by the news. My best wishes go out to the employees and their families, and — once again — thanks for a great night! You made me feel right at home, and that’s all anybody like me can ask. —Ralph Heibutzki

Hola everyone,
I’m terribly sad about the closing of Olsson’s, and the cancellation of my own event there (originally set for Thursday, October 2, for a performance of my new memoir “Mexican Enough”). Thanks to all the staff who have supported my work over the years. I wish you the very best in your next endeavors. Thanks also to the readers/Olsson fans who have written me, asking about my event. I hope to reschedule in the spring. Please visit my website, http://www.MexicanEnough.com, for details.
Saludos,
Stephanie Elizondo Griest

I’m well aware that I’m hitchin’ up the Andy Rooney pants in asking this, but: Is it just me, or has journalism renewed its love affair with the “drop dead” headline? There’s a ton of ‘em at the moment, mainly attached to the ongoing bailout negotiations:

Washington to Wall Street: Drop Dead

However, it also encompasses Nobel Prize judges:

Nobel Chief to U.S. Novelists: Drop Dead

The Schwarzenegger administration:

Schwarzenegger to Seniors and Tenants: Drop Dead!

Hipster asshole pissing matches:

Hipsters to Real World Cast: Drop Dead!

And Sarah Palin:

The old girls’ club to Palin: Drop dead

I admit that I’ve been contributing to the problem; our eagle-eyed managing editor, Andrew Beaujon, caught me employing the headline device twice in the past few days. Clearly something is going on with journalists subconsciously. Maybe we miss the good old days of tabloid journalism, when you could put a shocker headline in print and people got excited about it, as the New York Daily News did when it first used the phrase in a headline. Maybe it’s just appropriate; that old headline referenced a bailout story, after all. Or maybe we’re just actively wishing each other ill in tough times.

Bad news for D.C. bookstores today: DCist reports that Olsson’s Dupont Circle store has closed. This follows the bookseller filing for bankruptcy in July; earlier this month Shelf Awareness reported that the local chain’s head book buyer and general manager, Alexis Akre, left the company.

Nobody’s picking up the phone at any of the chain’s stores. More as we hear it, but this is clearly a bad turn of events for both readers and authors. Olsson’s, especially the Dupont Circle store, provided a haven for readings by writers who weren’t big-deal enough to nab a slot at Politics & Prose; the events page on the chain’s Web site, still live, gives you a sense of that. Dupont Circle still has some top-shelf used shops, including Second Story Books and Books for America. But the fact that the sole places selling new books in Dupont is now Kramerbooks, a place that’s all about brunch and bestsellers, or Books-a-Million, which just deals in bestsellers, is more than a little disheartening.

Update: A press release on Olsson’s homepage announces that the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy:

Stephen Wallace-Haines, Olsson’s general manager stated: “In the end, all the roads towards reorganization led to this dead end: we did not have the money required to pay for product in advance, to collect reserves to buy for Christmas, and satisfy the demands of rent and operational costs. We were losing money just by staying open.”

With the help of Greenpeace, D.C. artist Mark Jenkins recently scared the bejesus out of authorities by staging some bear sculptures around town. The foofaraw has since died down, but today he tells BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz what he was up to. He doesn’t say too much more than what was in Greenpeace’s press release, but the post is worth a look for links to some of BB’s past coverage of the artist. About a year ago Jenkins told City Paper he was reconsidering his public sculptures; apparently he’s changed his mind.

WUSA has an article on its Web site addressing e-mailed rumors that you can’t wear campaign paraphernalia to the polls on election day. The rules actually differ depending on where you live in the DMV: Virginians can’t wear anything with a candidate’s name on it to the polls; voters in Maryland can, though poll workers can’t. The District has a strict ban:

Dan Murphy, with the DC Board of Elections and Ethics, tells 9NEWS NOW, this law was challenged back in 1998 and was upheld.

Murphy encourages all voters to play it safe and not wear the items. However, he adds, “If a voter does show up with something not allowed, they will be asked to remove it or cover it up. It will be November, so hopefully people will have coats.”

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in the story? Maryland has a “Rumor Control” site addressing false statements about voting rights. What evil S.O.B. is telling people that they can’t vote if their home is in foreclosure?

As anybody with eyes and ears knows by now, Sarah Palin isn’t so great at articulating what it means to be Russia’s neighbor. But if having an veep candidate who knows Russia-Alaska relations is important—and after all, “as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go? It’s Alaska.”—there’s an easy replacement. Lynne Cox.

I first learned about Cox back in 2002, when I was reporting a story about a distance swimmer in San Francisco. In that particular world, Cox is Derek Jeter, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, and the ‘85 Bears rolled all into one: She swam the English Channel in 1972, at 15, then took on increasingly ambitious (and bone-chilling) swims, efforts culminating in a 1987 trip across the Bering Strait. For that, she swam the two and a half miles between Little Diomede Island (U.S.) and Big Diomede Island (Russia). The next year, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev referenced Cox’s effort as an example of how two countries can come together. A uniter, you see, not a divider.

Cox was a fun interview—performing these sort of feats makes you admirably zen, it seems—and she’s a hell of a writer, too. A few years back she published a beautifully written memoir, Swimming to Antarctica, describing her feats in vivid, disarming detail. (Don’t agree to a competition in the Nile River. Dog carcasses.) I know nothing of her politics. But somebody so strong, so articulate, so capable of using Alaska to inspire peace agreements could be nothing but a boon for the Republican ticket. Just a suggestion.

Hey! Check it out: Today is National Punctuation Day, a day that’s scientifically proven to be the most-ignored non-holiday among the nation’s blog commenters! What’s the rationale for the holiday (which isn’t really a holiday [I mean, there's no card for it, and nobody gets a day off])? Glad you asked; according to the official Web site for the day, its makers intend to show that the “semicolon is not a surgical procedure.” Ha-ha!

How to celebrate? Well, if you look at the official Web site for the day, you learn right up top that you can make a deeply unappetizing-looking meat loaf (there’s a PDF page with a recipe, with an even worse photo); you can write an awful rap song; you can write a dutifully written essay. (Not to be confused with this, a dutifully written blog post. [You could say I dashed it off. (Ha-ha!)]) Or you could watch a moderately funny YouTube sketch:

You probably know by now that the newspaper industry is in the crapper—and no amount of image-heavy redesigns, promoted with the help of faux-U2 soundtracks, is going to staunch the bleeding. The same problems are hitting the magazine industry as well. There are plenty of canaries in that particular coal mine; personally, I get a read on it by going through my mail, which routinely includes a plea of some sort by Interview magazine to rejoin its roster of readers.

I subscribed to the magazine a few years back, seduced by a too-good-to-pass-up annual “media professional” rate of $18. I quickly realized I’d overpaid. Flipping through its pages—it kind of encourages flipping and repels reading—I was left with more questions than answers. Why did every record review read like a publicist wrote it? Why was Scarlett Johansson participating in practically every interview and photo shoot? Why was Devendra Banhart in practically everything else? What the fuck are you talking about, Greil Marcus?

So, I let my subscription lapse. Interview kept sending issues for a while anyway, with pleas to resubscribe. Then came mailings asking me to please, please sign up again, at ever-dropping rates. Online, they’re pushing a sub rate below $10. But they’re willing to sell even cheaper, based on the letter I got yesterday:

Tempting, but no. Sorry, Interview. Start offering me 12 issues for $2, and then we can start talking. I suspect that offer is coming soon.

If there’s one thing we can recognize around here, it’s gallows humor, and Chico Harlan snuck in a nice dig at the 100-losses-here-we-come Nats in today’s Post. In an item about the final game at Yankee Stadium, Harlan reported that one of the invitees to the celebration was Aaron Boone, the hero of the 2003 ALCS. Alas:

Boone declined: A prior commitment required him to play for the Washington Nationals.

Silver Spring novelist and mathematician Manil Suri was at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend to promote his new novel, The Age of Shiva. You can dig in our archives to find our interview with Suri, but the more entertaining viewing is the video below, in which he performs a Bollywood dance onstage at the fest:

In it, we’ll learn that John Wilkes Booth was concocted by a Baltimore Sun reporter angling for a Pulitzer.

In all seriousness, it does sound pretty awesome. I’m hoping this gets used for the promotional poster.

This isn’t the most relevant detail to fuss over, I know, given the horrible fact of Wallace’s passing. For me, and for at least one of my colleagues, Wallace was a supremely important writer—a guy who could not only access a fearsome arsenal of postmodern tools, but employ them sensibly, and make it look like he wasn’t playing you. Because he wasn’t playing you—as overstuffed as Infinite Jest was, there was no question that he wrote out of a real worry over what it meant to live in a hypermediated, hypermedicated world, and he brought that same spirit to his reporting and essays. It’s a ridiculously difficult trick to keep pulling off: Look at everything Don DeLillo has written after Underworld, or just about everything Dave Eggers has written, period.

But who had the news of Wallace’s suicide first?

The AP, says Air America; searching Google News’ archives, it would appear that the Los Angeles Times had it.

The news, in fact, first came from a book blogger, Edward Champion, who followed up on an anonymous tip. I make no grand statements about this detail—certainly nothing about how bloggers and Twitterers and such are going to somehow supplant journalism. True, I first saw the news on Champion’s Twitter post, but I’m not hearing the replacing-journalism business until there’s a competent Twitterer at every city hall meeting. Still, I will call it a proof of how good, genuine journalism can be done by individual practitioners who care about their chosen beats—regardless of whether you’re attached to a media organization. And though outlets like the AP and LAT certainly have their own resources with which to find a story, let the record show that they didn’t find this one first.

September is get-back-to-work month, which means a lot of publishers are going to start guilting you about reading serious literature. Hunkering down at home with the voice of a generation is one option. But you can also cheat a little by getting out of the house and letting others read to you. This month marks the return of three sizable book festivals. A quick guide follows.

Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival

What: Ten days of Jewish authors, authors of Jewish-themed books, and one film tribute to Amos Oz.

Where: Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center, 1529 16th St. NW.

When: Right now to Sept. 24.

The Big-Deal Event Is: Bernard-Henri Lévy, who discusses Left in Dark Times on Saturday, Sept. 20.

But You Really Should Check Out: Adam Langer, tonight, and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who speaks on Sept. 24.

Surprisingly, Thumpin’ It is Not a Sequel to Portnoy’s Complaint but Instead Is: the title of a book by Jacques Berlinerblau about “the use and abuse of the Bible in today’s presidential politics.” He speaks Friday, Sept. 19.

National Book Festival

What: Laura Bush-sponsored tribute to American literature and C-SPAN 2 tote bags. Plus: cookbooks, and, in a move that raises the hackles of at least one blog commenter here, folks dressed like characters in children’s books.

Where: The National Mall

When: Saturday, Sept. 27

The Big-Deal Event Is: Take your pick: Cokie Roberts, Richard Price, Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Alexander McCall Smith…

But You Really Should Check Out: Poet Stanley Plumly, U. of Maryland prof and author the well-received Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography.

Number of Novels Attendee and Former NFL Running Back Tiki Barber Has Written: Five. Get on the stick, Marilynne Robinson!

Fall for the Book

What: Annual book festival designed to make Fairfax County interesting for a few days.

Where: Mostly around the George Mason University campus.

When: Sept. 21-26.

The Big-Deal Event Is: Chinua Achebe, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart, at GMU’s Center for the Arts Monday, Sept. 22. Not to mention Sue Miller, Michael Cunningham, Ethan Canin, Charles Baxter….

But You Really Should Check Out: Porter Shreve, whose new novel, When the White House Was Ours, is set at a D.C. alternative school in 1976. It’s a story he knows from experience.

If You Were Hoping That Maybe, Somehow, Someday, Somebody Would Write a Book About Abraham Lincoln: Your ship’s come in. The schedule for Tuesday, Sept. 23 features no fewer than five Honest Abe scholars, including Daniel Mark Epstein, Andrew Ferguson, Michael Beschloss, Joshua Wolf Shenk, and James L. Swanson.