(1) The Northwest Bookfest is a relatively new institution. It was born in the same era as The Stranger and so is the product of the new Seattle, the Seattle that was shaped and constituted in the '90s. In this short span of time, Bookfest has managed to become the biggest and most important literary event in the city (if not the region), attracting about 25,000 book lovers every year. It's also the most ambitious literary institution in our city, yearning for more space, more visitors, more guests. Like the Washington State Convention & Trade Center and the Seattle International Film Festival, its operating philosophy is "The Larger the Better."

One of the reasons why this event is so restless (moving from its origins on Pier 48 to the Washington State Convention & Trade Center for a year, then to the Stadium Exhibition Center for two more, and currently docked at Sand Point) is that Bookfest wants to get it right, to figure out the place, the time, the combination that will transform it into a national and international event. Like most everything in Seattle, it craves the credibility of national status, and I heartily support it.

(2) How do I get to Bookfest this year? I live in Columbia City, and the bus that transports the wild mix of races and cultures downtown (the 7) is the most unpredictable bus in the whole of Metro's system. It operates under two extremes: Either there is no 7 at all, or too many--all at once three 7s appear, uselessly trailing one another. But this is just the start of my troubles: Once I'm downtown (at last!), I have to get on another fucking bus and travel up to Sand Point; then, when the day is done, I have to reverse this tedious process. The only consolation in all of this is that the buses heading to Bookfest will probably be on time because, for reasons that can only be racial, buses serving the northern neighborhoods tend to have an understanding with their schedules that the southern buses don't.

Nevertheless, I will go to Bookfest. I do want to see the super-great Charles Johnson, the super-smart Emily White, the super-funny Gregory Hischak, and the super-rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot ("Posse on Broadway" is an important work of urban poetry). And then there are the people from Monkey Puzzle (a new local literary journal)--David Perry, Joyelle McSweeney, Philip Jenks. All of it is wonderful. But as I don't drive, and I don't want to wait for the 7 forever and then wait again for a connecting bus, I'm considering canoeing to Bookfest.

Not far from my house is Andrews Bay, an excellent point of departure for my Bookfest adventure. This is the plan: Early Saturday morning, I'll drag a borrowed canoe down to the shores of Lake Washington, load it with supplies (a few books of poetry and bottles of red wine--paddling and drinking are not illegal in the wild state of Washington), and embark in the soft light of the autumn dawn. If I paddle like a robust 19th-century settler, or perhaps like Thoreau, I should arrive at Bookfest just in time to catch a panel that features Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk.

(3) I didn't much care for the Stadium Exhibition Center, which was, as John Marshall, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's book critic, once put it, "as welcoming [as] the inside of a refrigerator." I actually think that the hangar and circus tent that are to house this year's festival will certainly be more literary than the former "glamour box" (if I may borrow an expression from the penultimate chapter of Lolita--the greatest novel in the English language). In fact, I've enjoyed buying books at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library Book Sale, which is held in the fall and spring of each year at Sand Point. So, aesthetically, Sand Point is the better choice. But the aesthetic comes at the cost of the symbolic.

To move from downtown is to move from the very thing that gave Bookfest its air of great ambition. To be next to the twin bulks (the sports stadiums) or in the middle of a crop of corporate towers made the festival a part of the bombast and superego that is downtown Seattle; to exist at Sand Point, on the other hand, is to exist in the gentle but marginal wilds.