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Go to the Municipal Services Building Courtyard (1401 JFK Blvd.) at exactly noon today and you’ll see a strange sight: More than 500 people will be reading books while freezing in place for two minutes. Hosted by the Center for Literacy, this demonstration is meant to raise awareness of illiteracy, surely a social issue that’s easy to forget — unless 500 frozen people are reminding you about it.

Skip lunch; go do something good and fun.

Perigee Trade, $19.95.

Don’t know what to do tonight? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

— Everyone I know who runs regularly raaaaaves about its benefits (and yeah, I’ve tried it a few times, it’s pretty cool), so it’s great that the local nonprofit Back on My Feet gets the homeless doing it. Drink to raise money for the org at Brews for Philly, taking place at Triumph Brewing Co. (117-121 Chestnut St., 215-625-0855) at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free, but the more you drink, the more money you contribute to the good cause.

— Speaking of good causes: DJ Reenie Kane, a regular on the lez nightlife scene, suffered from a heart attack at last month’s LGBTQ Indigo Ball. The fundraiser tonight at 8 p.m. at the Voyuer Club (1221 St. James St., 215-735-5772) goes toward Kane’s medical bills, and costs $10. Who needs the public option when you have friends? (Very much JK.)

— Meal Ticket, Critical Mass’ sister blog, has been telling readers about The Naked Pint: An Unadulterated Guide to Craft Beer’s launch party since last week. Since there’s a book involved (A&E territory!), as well as beer and women who love such beer, we thought we’d remind you. It happens at 6:30 p.m. at Fork (308 Market St., 215-625-9425) for $55.

Not satisfied? Check out today’s listings for more and more and more events.

Helen Horstmann, phillyfoodie.com

Foobooz Burger Cruise

Technically the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art kicked off on Tuesday night (and that doesn’t even include the Oct. 26 preview dinner with Ruth Reichl, or the First Person Arts-sponsored Welcome House you might have noticed in early October). So far there’s been a burger cruise, a “group eating” event, a movie screening, a festival salon and even a concert by Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter. Whew.

But the majority of fest events are happening this weekend, and there’s a lot of noteworthy stuff out there. We figured since we can barely keep track of it all, you might need some help, too. Here’s a rundown of don’t-misses (all events take place at Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St., and cost $20, unless otherwise noted):

treehugger.com

Going to Extremes >> If you’ve ever sat for hours at La Colombe, sipping perfect cappuccinos and people-watching the coffee shop’s Euro-fabulous clienetele, you have Todd Carmichael to thank. The La Colombe owner’s not just known for torrefaction, though — he’s a daredevil who’s trekked across Antarctica and has plans for the Namib Desert and Death Valley National Park. He’ll talk about his wacky adventures and misadventures and give audiences a chance to ask questions. Like, Who does that? Fri., Nov. 6, 7 p.m.

Karaoke Obsessed >> As many drunken nights at Yakitori Boy can attest, karaoke just sometimes … happens. Brian Raftery, like all of us before our first time, once thought karaoke was for chumps. We don’t know what his first song was, but it changed his mind, and now the author of How Karaoke Conquered the World and Changed My Life is an addict. He’ll read from his book, and then hand the mic to Sara Sherr, she of Sugar Town and the Khyber’s Karaoke that Doesn’t Suck, for some audience participation. Get ready to sing your heart out. Fri., Nov. 6, 9 p.m. Click For More »

Head over to brand-new quirkclassics.com, where our lovable local publishing house has just announced its third Quirk Classics title. First there was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, then there was Sense and Sensibilities and Sea Monsters … and now …

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadful!

Undead girls in frilly dresses? Sign us up.

From the site:

In this terrifying and hilarious prequel, we witness the genesis of the zombie plague in early-19th-century England. We watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naĂŻve young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. We laugh as she begins her first clumsy training with nunchucks and katana swords and cry when her first blush with romance goes tragically awry. Written by acclaimed novelist (and Edgar Award nominee) Steve Hockensmith, Dawn of the Dreadfuls invites Austen fans to step back into Regency England, Land of the Undead!

Is it too late to change our Halloween costume idea?

Visit quirkclassics.com to pre-order on Amazon.

St. Martin’s, 320 pp., $24.99, Sept. 17

Read a few pages of The Art of Disappearing and you’re caught. This may be her first novel, but Ivy Pochoda proves herself a master at weaving her own type of magic, enchanting us into a world both ethereal and grounded, beautiful and gritty. When I first read the description — it’s about a young woman, Mel Snow, who meets and falls in love with a magician named Toby Warring, whose talent is more than just smoke and mirrors — I was a bit skeptical. Another novel about magic? How many times can we immerse ourselves in the worlds of Harry Potters and Bella Swans before the fairy dust starts irritating our eyes?

But after a few chapters, I realized that this novel takes magic in an entirely different direction. These characters are adults living in adult worlds. Mel is a traveling textile designer — a random profession for a protagonist if I ever saw one — and seems to work her own kind of magic with fabrics, able to hear a unique song in each piece of cloth she encounters. She meets Toby in a Nevada saloon, where an instant connection leads them to an abrupt Vegas wedding. Darkly handsome and brimming with real magic, Toby continually weaves his illusions for Mel and for others, but only she knows that his magic is no trick. His skills never cease to fascinate: He changes white wine to red, conjures dancing shapes out of swirling sands, stops a bullet midflight and ultimately finds a way to create alternate realities. But Toby comes to Mel already laden with a heavy past, when one of his tricks went wrong and he made his assistant disappear for good. For a time, the newlyweds forge a happy life in Vegas, with Toby performing his magic shows and Mel designing fabrics; but it doesn’t last, and once again one of Toby’s tricks go drastically wrong. Click For More »

Marion Boyars, 336 pp., $17.95, Sept. 1

Imagination, according to the 11th-century Latin text The Great Ladder of Heaven, consists of 12 levels. On the lowest level are images we recognize from our everyday lives. On the second level are images that we haven’t yet seen, but can be sure are real, such as faraway lands or people. On the third level are images that nobody has ever seen, but that everybody knows exist, such as — if you happened to inhabit Europe in the Middle Ages — gold-guarding griffins.

These griffins, and many other creatures who occupied the third level of medieval Europeans’ imaginations, appear in Spike Bucklow’s The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages, a history of color, chemistry and cosmography in medieval Europe. Though a chemist by training, Bucklow largely omits modern science from the book, intending it rather as a “primer or visitor’s guide to the traditional world view.” By this book’s account, the traditional world was a place imbued with far more cosmic meaning and spiritual direction than ours.

To addicts of Dan Brown and other authors of crypto-religious thrillers, Bucklow’s book might be an especially intense fix. Almost every page illuminates a secret, symbolic meaning behind some literary or exegetical text. The “All the world’s a stage” monologue in As You Like It, for instance, is revealed to be an extended metaphor about the human soul’s journey through stages characterized by planetary qualities: a Martian (warlike) phase, an amorous Venutian period and so on. Click For More »

St. Martin’s, 308 pp., $23.99, Aug. 4

Susan Shapiro’s fictional debut, Speed Shrinking, proves that the memoirist and New York University instructor has a knack for cross-genre storytelling.

The novel, a semi-autobiographical twist of Shapiro’s life, finds bestselling self-help author Julia Goodman falling to pieces after her entire support system leaves town. All at once, the New Yorker’s husband heads to Los Angeles for a work-related trip; her newlywed best friend, Sarah, moves to Ohio; and, worst yet, Dr. Ness, her therapist, crutch and major lifeline, tells her he’s moving to Arizona and will only drop by the Big Apple every few months.

Our protagonist transforms into the “acclaimed self-help guru who suddenly can’t help herself.” Julia binge eats on cupcakes and other sugary goodness to deal with the loneliness, leaving her to figure out how she’ll lose weight and piece herself together in time from her Today Show appearance to promote Food Crazy, a book which, ironically, deals with food addictions.

To accomplish this, she decides to find a new therapist. Julia goes through eight therapists in an eight-day period — among them, Dr. Cigar, a man who, as his name implies, smokes cigars several times a day, and therapist No. 7, who has a ferret caged in the waiting room — until she’s had so much therapy from so many different approaches, she manages to pick herself up and roll with the punches. Click For More »

New York Times

We told you last month about Philly’s tie to the long-awaited publication of Red Book, the legendary, mysterious text by philosopher Carl Jung. (And how it cost about $100 to buy a copy. Woa.) For as little as $2-$10 (plus a measly Bolt Bus fee if you’re thrifty), by contrast, you can see the actual, original thing in person at the Rubin Musem (150 W. 17th St., New York City, 212-620-5000) through Jan. 5, 2010. Sez the press release:

More than two-thirds of the large, red, leather-bound manuscript’s pages are filled with Jung’s brightly hued and striking graphic forms paired with his thoughts written in a beautiful, illuminated style. Jung was fascinated by the mandala — an artistic representation of the inner and outer cosmos used in Tibetan Buddhism to help practitioners reach enlightenment — and used mandala structures in a number of his own works. Jung’s first known mandala-like work, Systema mundi totius (1916), will be on display. Created between 1914 and 1930, the Red Book has never before been seen in public, outside the circle of Jung’s family and very close friends. Alongside the 95-year-old volume will be a number of oil, chalk, and tempera paintings and preparatory sketches related to it and other original manuscripts, including the Black Books, which contain ideas and fantasies leading up to the Red Book. The exhibition coincides with W.W. Norton & Company’s publication of a facsimile and translation of the Red Book.

Crazy to think that just a year ago the publication of Red Book was considered a depressingly lost cause.

Maurice Sendak

Have you seen our clearly, childishly, obsessively excited Where the Wild Things Are coverage? The cover story? And the movie review? And and and the slideshow? Well OK then. In the cover, Lauren F. Friedman told you about the various incarnations the classic children’s book has taken recently — there’s the Rosenbach Museum’s Wild Things tours, the Urban Outfitters Wild Things leggings and even the Dave Eggers Wild Things novel, to name but a few.

We forgot to mention the Wild Thing Family Day taking place this Sat., Oct. 17 from noon to 4 p.m., at the Rosenbach (2008-2010 Delancey Place, 215-732-1600), for $5-$10 and kiddies under five for free. There’ll be Sendak-inspired crafts, readings and tours. Sounds like a wild follow-up to seeing the film, kids or no kids.

Knopf, 172 pp., $24.95, Oct. 6

The Igbo people of Nigeria periodically construct temples filled with clay sculptures of all the life-forms that inhabit their world: historical figures, legendary characters and individuals or scenes from their own community. When European colonial officials entered the daily lives of the Igbo, sculptures of district officers wielding a pipe and helmet began to appear. As colonizers spread smallpox south of the Sahara, human statues disfigured by the disease’s telltale spots joined the displays.

Renowned Nigerian author Chinua Achebe describes this tradition, known as mbari, as an example of his “precolonial inheritance — of art as celebration of my reality,” in his new essay collection, The Education of a British-Protected Child. Achebe’s reality has been intricately entangled with art both expressionist and manipulative. In these wide-ranging, dynamic essays, he examines the perils of mistaking art for reality, whether in the lofty chambers of world economic fora or from the fanciful visions of Joseph Conrad.

Once described by an Irish newspaper columnist as the inventor of African literature, Achebe is best known for the novel Things Fall Apart, about a Nigerian farmer who tries to resist the colonial regime imposed on his village by European missionaries. But a few years after that book propelled him to worldwide success, Achebe wrote a political satire about Nigeria that happened to culminate in a coup d’etat — and was published two days before the young nation’s first actual coup d’etat. He was acclaimed as a visionary by foreign critics, but nearly arrested by the coup-makers. Click For More »