The Oregonian is going to cut ten comic strips to save money.

They've published a list of "safe" comics that won't be going away:

"Adams' Apples"
"Dilbert"
"Doonesbury"
"Get Fuzzy"
"Mother Goose and Grimm"
"Pearls Before Swine"
"Stone Soup"
"Zits"

Dilbert? Zits? Mother Goose and Grimm? Why are those safe? Hasn't Dilbert hanged himself in the face of all this terrifying economic despair? Even if you don't read the Oregonian, you can vote for your three favorite and three least-favorite cartoons here. Here's mine:

Although, if I had it all to do over again, I'd probably pick Cathy for #3 instead of Wizard of Id. And Ziggy was close, too.

There is something frosty about the current (relatively new) staff at Seattle Arts & Lectures, and five minutes into last night's Junot Diaz talk a cold pallor settled over the room. Linda Bowers, the (relatively new) executive director, was in the middle of an introduction that, for the life of me, seemed to have nothing to do with Junot Diaz—at least not the Junot Diaz that people who love Junot Diaz know. (Had no pen, couldn't take notes, can't support this assertion, but it seemed like she was talking about far-off landscapes and memory and love and human connection and blah blah blah—generic, uncontroversial stuff for a groundbreaking, certainly not generic writer.) Granted, introducing an author is an art, and notoriously hard to get right. Bowers' predecessor struggled with it too. But Bowers' predecessor's predecessor, Matt Brogan, was rather good at it, and the executive director before him, who also founded the organization, Sherry Prowda, was so good someone should just hire her back to do all of them. Prowda was in the crowd last night, sitting maybe 20 rows back. How I longed for her to be up there onstage.

It wasn't just the coldness of stultifying generalities that made Bowers seem frosty; there was something hard and mean in the way she ran the show last night. Possibly this is because the first thing Junot Diaz did was come out and make fun of her introduction. As Paul pointed out earlier, his first words to the crowd were: "Suuuper long introduction." Which he muttered in a kind of dazed disbelief, and which the audience loved, and laughed at—i.e., all of Benaroya Hall was laughing at Bowers. Diaz poked SAL in the ribs in other ways too, making fun of the way the Q&A question cards are passed to ushers, etc., but you got the sense that he was just being himself (he made fun of himself more than anyone) and just trying to deflate the pomposity of the proceedings.

Paul called it "the most profane reading that Seattle Arts and Lectures has ever put on," which sounds right. It was as if Diaz was saying to the crowd: don't let these frosty SAL types convince you that literature is boring. The guy said "fuck" at least 40 times, and the story he read had a bunch of instances of "nigger" and at least one "pussy" getting fingered. Before he began reading he apologized for how boring readings are, and this apology, coupled with the revelation that SAL administrators had asked him to read for a lot longer than he was willing to, made the crowd love him. In addition to making fun of SAL and making fun of himself, he made fun of Seattleites, made fun of Republicans, made fun of Dominicans—pretty much no one was spared. But you got the sense that Linda Bowers was pissed, felt slighted, and when she came back onstage to moderate the Q&A, it showed. She made a point of mentioning that there was extra time for questions, i.e., that Diaz hadn't talked for as long as he was supposed to. When the questions were underway, she was brusque and prickly. She was icy. They seemed to be at war with one another, Bowers and Diaz, although it was all subtext and oddly enough seemed to energize the Q&A: to question after question, Diaz gave some of the most elegant answers I've ever heard a writer give. Seldom has a SAL lecturer triumphed over circumstances the way Diaz did last night.

Last night, Junot Díaz read at Benaroya Hall in what was probably the most profane reading that Seattle Arts and Lectures has ever put on. SAL's executive director, Linda Bowers, introduced Díaz with a ten-minute survey of his work including quotes from Díaz's short stories, a passage from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and more quotes from reviews of his work. There were so many quotation marks in her introduction that it was hard to tell where Bowers' words ended and someone else's words began, and it was hard to tell why anyone should care. You don't stumble into a SAL event by accident: Tickets start at ten bucks. You already know who you're here to see.

From somewhere near the heart of the flurry of flying "s, Díaz appeared. He stood behind the podium and muttered, kind of to himself, "Super-long introduction." There was laughter and there was applause. Díaz explained that he wasn't used to reading for 40 minutes at a time; he announced that this was about 25 minutes longer than he felt comfortable reading. There was more applause, and he noted: "You'll just about clap for anything, yeah?" There was applause then, too. Before he started with the story, Díaz stopped and looked out at the audience (Benaroya Hall was very nearly sold out) saying "And, guys, you should be up here. This is super-fucking scary." This was met with applause, too.

To introduce his story, titled "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars," Díaz announced that he'd been working on "a sequence of stories about infidelity," in part because "People will read shit about infidelity. They just fucking like that crap." The story is about a narrator named Yunior who cheats on his girlfriend and then, as an apology, takes her on vacation. "Are there any high school folks here?" There was applause from the balcony, and Díaz explained the characters going on an awkward vacation together by saying, "This is what old people do, but it is super-stupid. But you'll probably do it one day, too. But you shouldn't."

Díaz also read an excerpt from Oscar Wao. It's perhaps only notable to me that he made 2 Star Trek references in 40 minutes of reading. And then it was time for audience questions. We learned that Díaz believes that "Every text reveals the blind spot of its author," and that "It's only through your vulnerabilities that a reader can come to you." Someone asked about the prevalent use of Spanish in his fiction ("My mom doesn't speak a word of English," Díaz said, "She's like a Republican nightmare") and his answer was the best of the night: "Learning to read is all about encountering words you don't understand. Unintelligibility in a text is a reason to form community," by making readers seek other readers to find meaning together.

There was much more, including whether men can be feminists (Díaz says no, due to their "colossal privilege"), how nerdy readers can come to terms with the fact that "The Lord of the Rings is incredibly schematic along racial lines," and he suggested three books for readers who enjoy his writing and are looking for something else to read: Out, by Natsuo Kirino, The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa, and anything by Edwidge Danticat. (I can vouch for Kirino and Danticat from personal reading experience, and I have heard good things about Ogawa's novel.) Díaz also confirmed that, as a lifelong sci-fi nerd, he was trying to work on some straight science fiction, but the books were so bad he trashed them. "It's not me being hard on myself," he said, "They're actually incredibly bad." And then came the post-reading reception, which consisted of VIPs, wealthy SAL donors, and a bunch of young Díaz fans—many of whom totally gate-crashed. They were exhilarated to have the chance to drink free wine and talk, however briefly, to one of their favorite authors. It was impossible to not share their enthusiasm.