It’s a pretty diverse night in the Seattle readings world.

First, it’s the Poetry Slam at ToST. For reals, this time. It’s on Wednesdays now, not Tuesdays, like I said last week. Apparently, it’s been on Wednesdays for months and our calendar never represented that. I apologize to the Slam people, to ToST, and to you, the innocent Slog reader. To convey my apology to the world, I will embed a commercial for the Poetry Slam, from their website, at the end of this post.

Next, at the Central Branch of the SPL, there will be a discussion named “What’s Up With Autism?” I wish these discussions about important and serious ailments didn’t have such silly names. It sounds like a Sesame Street sketch, like adults trying to be “hizzip widda kids” or some such. And at Town Hall, John Gottman reads from Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. I bet there’ll be some really bratty kids in the audience.

The Main Event tonight is Richard Powers, reading at Benaroya Hall as part of Seattle Arts and Lectures’ current season. I write about Powers’ last novel in this week’s Constant Reader. A sample:

Richard Powers’s most recent novel, The Echo Maker, is all about brains and brain damage, and so it’s about perceptions and self-deception, and so in many ways, it’s also about the act of reading. Mark Schluter, The Echo Maker’s main character, suffers from Capgras syndrome, a rare condition caused by brain damage: Once he emerges from a coma, he believes against all evidence to the contrary that his sister, his friends, and even his dog have been replaced by clever duplicates sent as agents of a weird conspiracy. He thinks his home has been replaced by an exact replica and moved several inches to the side.

If you’re not willing to spend the big bucks to see Powers read—although you should also know that he’s reading a brand-new story commissioned for the event tonight about iPods and music before you decide not to go—David Shields is reading up at Third Place Books, and that’s free. I have tons of issues with Shields’ earlier books, but Charles Mudede had many nice things to say about his new one last week in the books section. The first sentence:

Though written in language that feels entirely liberated from the tradition of letters, from the tone of authority, from the heaviness of history—a language that sparkles not like special stones in the depths but purely on the surface of things—though the writing feels and flows with an energy that is new, sensitive to the thin film of the present, David Shields’s latest book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, sings a very old song.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here. And now, a message from Seattle Poetry Slam: