• David Belisle

Heather McHugh, the certified genius—by The Stranger and then, a few months later, by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur—is reading from a wide range of her work on Thursday, May 17, at Kane Hall at 8 pm. It's free. If you care at all about poetry—or humor, or life—you should go.

The Roethke memorial reading is a big deal. This is its 49th year. Past readers: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, Seamus Heaney, and other world-famous poets.

I'll be reading from the book that I first fell in love with, Jon Stone's The Monster at the End of This Book. Other readers include Sherman Alexie, Congressman Jim McDermott, a Rat City Rollergirl, several poets, a monorail driver, an air force pilot, and many more. During the day, First Book will be holding raffles and hosting a silent auction. Feel free to stop by with your favorite kid for a story (or two or three or seven). It's free and open to the public.

If you're not in the Seattle area or if you're otherwise occupied this weekend, I urge you to make a donation to First Book anyway. Fifteen bucks buys six books for a poor child who otherwise would have none. Literacy is one of the most important gifts we can give children; a love of books is likely to lead to a happy life. This is important stuff, and well worth your $15. I hope you'll stop by on Saturday and say hi.

Fantagraphics linked to this video: Stranger Genius in literature Jim Woodring made a video unveiling the mural he made at Facebook's newish South Lake Union offices, which Woodring calls "the most nourishing work environment I have ever been in." (He does note that he doesn't get out much, to be fair.)

So jealous of Facebook right now. If The Stranger's office walls weren't already littered with scraps of paper, Republican bumper stickers, and Teen People centerfolds of a youthful Ashton Kutcher, a Woodring mural would be ideal.

It will be easy for most readers to identify with the tension that builds early on in Jon Raymond's new novel, Rain Dragon. The narrator, Damon, and his girlfriend, Amy, leave Los Angeles in search of a home in the Pacific Northwest. They're tired of city life and want to find something earthier, more authentic. Specifically, they want to join a commune, something far away from the internet and commercialism, where people can live freely, simplify their souls, and finally—finally!—catch their breath. Who hasn't longed for a simpler life, somewhere else? The Northwest—hell, even a Northwest city like Seattle—is full of people from places with long histories looking for a relatively blank slate on which to write a little history of their own.

Of course, finding a commune that jibes with your personal philosophy is harder than it sounds. Damon explains that after a long search, he and Amy were left with "an herbal tea factory up in Bellingham [that] didn't seem very enticing" and Rain Dragon, an "organic farm in the foothills of the Cascades" that for three decades had "been churning out excellent yogurt and yogurt-based products," as well as "award-winning cheeses and holiday eggnog." When they arrive, Amy immediately falls in love with the idea of beekeeping and creating a line of organic honey-based products.

For Damon, though, the simple life is not that simple. It turns out that, after an existence devoted to education and office work, manual labor doesn't come easy to him. He feels unuseful, unliked, and strangely out of sync with everyone around him...

(Keep reading.)

Subliminal, it turns out, is an interesting study of the history of our relationship with the unconscious, but not much more than that. Mlodinow crams the book full of studies and experiments, and it can get a bit numbing after an extended reading session. But if read in small chunks over a long stretch of time, it can be a fascinating source of trivia. Mlodinow is a generous-enough host, and his anecdotes are well-told and obviously well-researched. But readers looking for information on how to access their own subconscious, or how to be more aware of unconscious decision-making, will come away sorely disappointed. (It's probably unfair to expect anything like that from Subliminal, but the subtitle—How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior—does suggest a personal approach; I'd argue that something a bit more passive—The Secret History of the Unconscious Mind, say—would be more appropriate.) As far as pop science books go, it's a solid, if unsurprising, example of the genre.

Mlodinow reads from Subliminal tonight at Town Hall. If you're interested in the book, I urge you to go check the reading out.