Beck: Too slack to create his own album artwork.

—Apple’s iPod and iTunes face another challenger: now RealNetworks and SanDisk are teaming up to release a portable music player that more closely links with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody online music service.

—Dave Chappelle is moving back to Yellow Springs, Ohio. Chappelle recently spurned a $50 million offer to continue his Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central. (That sound you hear is Chappelle’s agent weeping.) Dave’s now back on the standup circuit.

—Beck drops the Nigel Godrich-produced The Information Oct. 3. What makes this album distinctive is the bonus DVD containing homemade videos for all 17 songs shot in the studio during the recording sessions. Also, each copy of The Information will contain a “blank package with one of four collectible sticker sheets specially designed by artists handpicked by Beck.â€� This allows Beck fans the chance to design a personalized CD cover—and it perhaps will sway the chronic downloaders to actually buy the album).

The U.S. vs. John Lennon documentary hits screens later this month. (Guess who won?) Special guests include Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Angela Davis.

—Jay-Z shockingly ends his “retirementâ€� with the release of Kingdom Come in the fall, and also shows dumbfounding respect for Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

And today Charles Mudede suggests that you keep up with this literary Jones.

Edward P. Jones

(BLACK FICTION) Edward P. Jones is the author of the historical novel The Known World, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004 and is set in Virginia just before the Civil War. What distinguishes Jones’s book from others that examine the institution of American slavery is that it focuses on the ownership of black slaves by black freemen. Jones’s short stories regularly appear in the New Yorker, and he is certainly one of the leading lights of contemporary black American literature. (Seattle Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4636, www.spl.org. 7 pm, free.) CHARLES MUDEDE