Last night I picked up a useful piece of information from my across-the-hall neighbor, a 20-year building resident who’s proven to be a boundless source of neighborhood gossip and history.  The landmark Goldblatt building, located at the southwest corner of Chicago & Ashland, is most likely going to house a new Chicago Public Library branch serving Ukrainian Village & East Village.  If it does indeed come to pass, the new library will replace the existing smaller Eckhart Park & Midwest branches. I love the idea of a library in this good-looking former department store building, which I learned from my landlord was slated for demolition in the 1990s but saved at the insistence of neighborhood residents.  Hooray for adaptive reuse! I’m willing to take Burl’s word for it, since she seems to know what’s what, but there has been some official publicity.

At the University of Chicago, where the student hangout is the library and a prize is awarded annually for undergraduate book collecting, officials are expected to announce Monday plans to build another tribute to the university’s bookish character.

Almost as cool as the future existence of an underground library made of glass is that its major donor is the CEO of Morningstar, Inc., maker of the world’s greatest veggie corn dog.

Don’t ask me why I was looking at James Frey’s MySpace page, but I was, and I found out he’s flying right over Chicago on the tour for his latest book. I’d like to think he’s avoiding us because he knows we’re too discerning for him, but I know it’s really because he’s scared of Oprah.

When First Lady Laura Bush and daughter Jenna read to Naperville 2nd graders Monday for a national tour promoting their new children’s book, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience…”I see right now in the country there is so much competition for children: television, computers, video games. Children are not sitting down with a good book like I used to do. Reading is a wonderful way to improve yourself,” Laura Bush said.

I hate that I agree with Lar about anything.  Shudder.

Mac Arthur-Sanctioned Genius David Foster Wallace (b. 2/21/1962)

Poison Frontman/Rock of Love Star Bret Michaels (b. 3/15/1963)

Whether it’s objectively disturbing or one in a series of signs of my decaying mental state is not for me to judge. I would like to say that Rock of Love takes irony to dizzying new lows, and I would like to take us back to this 1993 interview with DFW, where he says something that should serve as a warning to all we sneering Rock of Love fans:

Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

In other news, Daisy is TOTALLY going to win.

James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

I will say this on public record: James Collins, you are a dickweed, and anyone who likes you deserves you. If we were seven and we were on the playground together, I would throw sand in your face and give you a wedgie. You and your ilk are the reason nobody cares about literary fiction. That’s right, it’s all your fault.

Anyone this judgmental about literature is intellectually incurious, by far too preoccupied with the way others see their class standing to genuinely care about something as banal as literature itself. Guess what? The more you use taste as a wedge to position yourself above others, the more people will hate you. Well, people meaning me, because you couldn’t be more obvious. That’s right, I said dickweed.

Oh, and I’m so sure you totally didn’t sleep with that girl in college because she liked Kundera! Yeah! You’re that discerning! I believe you!