2003 Regrets, Clarifications, and Miscellany
- To offer some balance after a string of critical reporting on this year's staff changes at University Bookstore, the oldest and largest bookstore in the city, Mr. Frizzelle meant to write a column about how, compared to other local bookstores, the size and quality of University Bookstore's science-fiction section is unsurpassed. Mr. Frizzelle never got around to writing a column about how the size and quality of the University Bookstore's science-fiction section is unsurpassed because the idea of writing about science fiction makes him want to die.
- In a March 6 column called "Anatomy of Terror," Mr. Frizzelle wrote that the word "fallopian" is "inherently terrifying," which upset his mother, who brought him into this world and fed him and burped him and loved him and has never asked him for anything, not once.
- In the interest of tactfulness, Mr. Frizzelle refrained from mentioning the name of a "a certain Seattle Times editor who wore Birkenstocks" to a dinner party at Campagne thrown by the New York City publisher Grove/Atlantic Press this past spring. In the interest of factual disclosure, her name is Mary Ann Gwinn.
- An April 3 column was designed to look like an interview with Marcel Proust, even though Mr. Proust has been dead for 83 years. And he spoke French. Mr. Frizzelle regrets whatever confusion this column caused.
- An April 10 Nightstand contest about the vocabularies of pop musicians implied that Barry Manilow and Bon Jovi are stupid, which might have been depressing for avid fans of Barry Manilow and Bon Jovi. But it couldn't have been as depressing as the fact that not one reader entered the contest.
- In June, Mr. Frizzelle wrote an unflattering portrait of a bunch of lesbian performance poets who gave a reading at Re-bar. He doesn't regret this unflattering portrait; what he regrets is going to the reading in the first place, which he only did because Stranger editor Dan Savage made him.
- A column did not appear in this space in the July 17, 2003 issue, because Mr. Frizzelle was on vacation and the column he had prepared in advance of his vacation sucked.
- The July 31 Nightstand, which appeared one week after a feature story in which Mr. Frizzelle quoted someone likening everyone associated with Richard Hugo House to a "mafia," was printed under the headline "Rebecca Brando." This headline seemed to unfairly target Rebecca Brown. Mr. Frizzelle would like to clarify that it was not Rebecca Brown he meant to unfairly target.
- In late October, Mr. Frizzelle wrote two back-to-back Nightstand columns about how bad Bookfest is. Mr. Frizzelle recently reread what he wrote in those columns--he called Bookfest "cloying," "ridiculous," and "infantilizing"--and he doesn't take back any of it.
