Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal critic and National Council on the Arts member, shares today on his blog about two authors very close to the hearts of Big Readers.
http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2008/08/tt_sacred_to_the_memory.html

May 19, 2008
Weatherford, TX

Whenever somebody tells me a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes me so mad I want to spit. This bastard canard has more than a thousand fathers, but the most interesting share of the blame lands on two men who should’ve known better. A sentence reading “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book” appears in the novel Fathers and Sons by, of all people, the great writer Ivan Turgenev. But we owe the first appearance of the foul phrase in its present form to one Arthur Brisbane. A newspaper editor from Buffalo, Brisbane worked for yellow journalism tycoon William Randolph Hearst, which already explains a lot. In March of 1911, in a speech before the Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club, Brisbane advised his listeners to “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”

Katie Richardson’s Big Read poster for Weatherford, Texas., has a majesty almost, but not quite, beyond words.

Let’s take a minute here to consider this publisher’s audience: namely, a room full of admen. He’s exhorting them to emphasize pictures over words in their advertising. Could it possibly have escaped this newshound’s attention that pictures, in addition to their putative thousand words’ worth, also tend to require more column inches to do them justice than print ads do? I’m inclined to doubt it. As a newspaperman, in other words, Brisbane had every reason — except the truth, that is — to want a room full of advertisers to go tell their clients that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” What he really meant, though, was “a picture is worth a thousand dollars.”

I bring all this up not just because I no longer have a newspaper editor of my own urging me to get to the point quicker, but also because I’ve just returned from Weatherford, Texas, where the poster art by local designer Katie Richardson accompanied all materials for a stylish, just-concluded Big Read of Cather’s My Ántonia. Is that gorgeous or what?

But it all would have gone for naught, save for the Herculean efforts of principal grantee Weatherford College’s Linda Bagwell. From the look of her, Linda couldn’t decide whether to celebrate, cry, or pass out from happy exhaustion at Wednesday’s finale, and she more or less split the difference among the three.

Linda didn’t pull off a successful Big Read alone; no grantee ever does. Spirited volunteers had spent the afternoon squiring me through the Doss Heritage and Cultural Center, an impressive, appropriately barnlike new museum of the West, lately hosting Cather expert Betty Kort’s traveling photo show “Willa Cather and Material Culture.”

I also lucked into a tour of the Douglas Chandor Gardens, a botanical wonderland landscaped by a 20th-century British portraitist to both the great — Roosevelt, Churchill — and the merely solvent. As I understand it, Chandor had followed his Titian-haired socialite bride home to her native Weatherford to settle, right after the necessary divorces became final. My only regret is that I had just missed The Big Read party there, and with it the shade of Cather presiding silently under the wisteria arbor.

Dozens more partners had pitched in all month, including everybody from the Weatherford Independent School District to Tesky Western Wear — all to make Linda’s job a little easier. By the dozens she invited them up on the stage of the college’s capacious Alkek Fine Arts Center for a commemorative final picture, until it almost might’ve seemed more sensible to leave them in the audience after all, and invite the photographer on stage instead.

Practically last but nowhere near least was Katie Richardson, shyly accepting a deserved and unreserved ovation for her spectacular poster. It wasn’t worth a thousand words, but it had helped rope most of Parker County into an unforgettable April and May with My Ántonia. That’s a miracle beyond counting.

February 15, 2008
Washington, DC

Things ain’t what they used to be. Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach. Warren Zevon dead. Reading down. The list goes on.

There’s a word for this type of melancholy, and it isn’t griping. It’s elegy, from the Greek elegos, meaning a poem lamenting a bygone era or someone lost. For as long as there have been people to say it, there have been people saying how soft we all used to have it — back when publishing was a gentleman’s profession, when ballplayers didn’t juice, when fire didn’t make the cave walls all sooty. Not many people know this, but right after the Big Bang, guys said to a bartender, “Sure was nicer when all matter was compressed into a single point no larger than this shotglass.”

The Big Read author John Steinbeck interrogated the impulse to lazy elegy in his other triple-decker classic besides The Grapes of Wrath, the elegiacally named East of Eden. In it the sheriff’s deputy and his boss are riding across the valley to grill Steinbeck’s hero, Adam Trask, about how his monstrous wife, Cathy, happened to shoot him in the shoulder. The deputy looks out at the land and says — with Steinbeck’s great ear picking up every last word — “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

Steinbeck’s gift is to put into the deputy’s mouth a nostalgia that most of us feel at one time or another, and then to undercut it immediately. Sure, Julius misses the now-extinct California grizzly — but maybe if his own family hadn’t been so quick with a Remington, there might still be one or two left. Steinbeck doesn’t ridicule our elegiac reflex, but he’s far too smart not to point out the hypocrisy that often thrums under it like an aquifer.

Then again.

For almost as long as folks have been saying how soft we all used to have it way back when, there have been others who’ll say that’s a crock. They insist that everybody always thinks we’re living in, to invoke Thomas Pynchon, “the spilled, the broken world.” They like to write opinion pieces with elegiac quotes about how the automobile has ruined everything, or how insipid television is, and then – whoa, Nelly! – try to make you feel like an idiot for not guessing that the quote in question was written in 1910 or 1940, respectively. In other words, the world can’t be getting worse because folks thought the world was getting worse even when it was better, so how bad can it be?

Alas, there’s a logical flaw in this anti-elegy argument that wants exposing. Isn’t it just possible that the world has always been getting worse? That things seemed worse a hundred years ago because they really were, but that things seem worse now because they’re even worse than they were?

To which anyone might be forgiven for saying, “Thanks, and you have a nice day too.” I’m arguing no particular brief for either side. But it’s interesting to note that of the 21 fine novels to date on the Big Read list, elegies are conspicuous by their near absence.

Poetry may lend itself to elegy more than novels do, or than good novels do. As I look down the Big Read list, I see a lot more stories about what lousier lives we used to lead. A Lesson Before Dying, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl, The Age of Innocence – not a lot of nostalgia there. Only the pretty happy childhoods in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Ántonia’s sweet prairie eventually plowed under – have a look at it now, Willa, and see what “plowed under” really looks like – sound like wistful sighs over yesteryear.

In a weird way, Fahrenheit 451 is the most elegiac book on the list. It warns us of a dystopian future without books, a future whose roots could already be glimpsed when Bradbury wrote it half a century ago. If anything, Montag’s story aches with a kind of nostalgia for the present — a useful phrase, into which my preliminary provenance inquiries have proven inconclusive.

Dubious speculation about this expression, or about all things elegiac, are most emphatically welcome at kipend@arts.gov. And now, this post isn’t what it used to be. It used to be unfinished…

“After dinner, if there were no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read some book of which people were talking, and in the evening sat down to work, that is, read official papers, compared them with the laws, sorted depositions, and put them under the laws. This he found neither tiresome nor entertaining. It was tiresome when he might have been playing bridge; but if there were no bridge going on, it was at any rate better than sitting alone or with his wife.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 - 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

August 24, 2007
Washington, DC

When I was in graduate school at San Diego State University, I took a seminar in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather that changed my life. The course changed me because it provided the chance to concentrate on the best novels of two truly exceptional writers; to compare their controversial lives and literary themes; and to do it with an excellent teacher and enthusiastic classmates — what could be better for a “Literature Specialist” like me?

But there was something missing. As a child growing up in North Hollywood, California, the childhood places of Willa Cather (Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley) and Edith Wharton (New York City, Italy, and France) seemed fascinating and exotic. Cather’s family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was ten, and Wharton bought land in Lenox, Massachusetts, to build her home, The Mount. Red Cloud and Lenox seemed as far away as Uganda or Switzerland to a young girl like me who traveled often in the realms of gold, but never on planes or trains. Yet because of the sensual, vivid way these writers described the plains of Nebraska, the valleys of Virginia, the bustle of New York, and the hills of Western Massachusetts in their fiction, all these unfamiliar places felt familiar through my imagination.

“This place of ours is really beautiful… the stillness, the greenness, the exuberance of my flowers, the perfume of my hemlock woods, & above all the moonlight nights on my big terrace, overlooking the lake…” –Edith Wharton in a letter to Bernard Berenson, August 6, 1911 Photo by Erika Koss

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, but for 2007 it was time to make the journey to Cather’s beloved prairie and Wharton’s first real home. My work on the Big Read materials for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence fueled this abiding desire to travel to Red Cloud and Lenox. But for reasons more personal than professional, I suddenly needed to physically inhabit these places that transformed two of my favorite writers — if only for a couple days.

Reader, imagine my joy to travel from Washington, DC, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in March, where Betty Kort, Executive Director of the Cather Foundation, and I took a walk through Cather’s prairie. Then imagine my delight to travel to Lenox, Massachusetts, in July with Betty, where we met Stephanie Copeland, the President and CEO of the Mount, and ate lunch on that “big terrace” that faces Wharton’s splendidly restored gardens, under her unconventional green and white awning, which protected us from the unexpected rain. Imagine my excitement, when the wonderful Mount librarian, Molly McPhee, took Betty and me for a private tour into Wharton’s restored library, where I was allowed to hold her copy of the French translation of The Age of Innocence — bound by Wharton in green and yellow with “EW” inscribed on its leather cover! Imagine my pleasure when I slept for two nights in a beautiful home set in the quiet forest not far from the Mount, finally understanding why Wharton left her fashionable New York City and Newport homes to design, build, and decorate an isolated country estate of her own creation.

“If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land…I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven.” — from Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia Photo by Erika Koss

I hope Big Read organizers for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence will consider such a pilgrimage, and that high school teachers anywhere near Red Cloud or Lenox can afford to tackle the frustrating tasks of buses, chaperones, permission slips, and classroom time missed on required exams to give their students a first-hand experience with the sites that shaped these great American writers.

For although my passport now holds stamps from countries as far as Uganda and Switzerland, two places that I love best are right here in America.

August 16, 2007
Washington, DC

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery is to Canada what Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder are to the United States. And I have just returned from communing with her. As well as with Anne Shirely, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, and of course, Gilbert Blythe. I have been to Avonlea. I have been to Green Gables.

Somewhere in my growing up between Little Women and Little Men, and The Little House on the Prairie there was the little red-haired girl from Prince Edward Island (PEI) known to millions of girls around the world as Anne of Green Gables.

Anne Shirley was the creation of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who as a very little girl was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish, PEI, Canada following the death of her mother. Cavendish, and the nearby farmhouse of her elderly cousins, David and Margaret Macneill, became her models for the imaginary town of Avonlea and for Green Gables.

My husband, who can tell you anything you want to know about any character created by Ian Fleming, was happy to accompany me, and came away curious enough to want to read Anne of Green Gables. (He’s also happy to come shopping with me and he does the dishes. Can you say “Prince”? But I digress.)

What’s gratifying about a trip to Cavendish is that for the 12-year old girl in all of us (yes, all of us.), it’s all there, just as you imagined it. You can hike through the Haunted Woods, stroll down Lovers’ Lane, and walk through Green Gables admiring the tidy kitchen, the spartan bedrooms (people not only were shorter then, they had much less closet space and nothing so tacky as a home entertainment center.) and the well-appointed sewing room. The gardens are in full bloom, the barn is equipped to house a cow and make turnip mash — don’t ask — and the hayloft is stocked for winter.

Down the path through the Haunted Woods lies the actual home site of Lucy Maud Montgomery. The house is gone, but the foundation is there, as are the gardens and interpretive installations detailing her life there. (Anne of Green Gables isn’t on the Big Read list of selections, but wouldn’t it make an excellent young readers’ companion to My Antonia , which is?)

Green Gables in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Photo by Towle Tompkins

As a member of the NEA’s Big Read Team (I’m the one who talks to books and the characters in them, remember?), it was exciting to see so many people from across Canada and the United States flocking to this literary landmark. The license plates in the parking lot were from as far away as Manitoba and British Columbia and as near as PEI and Maine. (That one was ours.) We at the NEA often talk about the transformative power of literature. Here’s a wonderful example of just that. People who read a book, most of them years ago, were moved and excited enough by that book to travel to the ends of the continent to connect with its origins and its author.

And to my knowledge, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne Shirley achieved this fame without ever checking into rehab for multiple DUIs.

January 21, 2007
Fergus Falls, Minnesota

The topography of this ancient lake bed presents a seemingly limitless expanse. The prairie winds sweep across its level surface, turning the propellers of generators that provide electric power for rural homes. — The WPA Guide to Minnesota, 1938

Near as I could find out, the ’30s-era propeller-generators are gone. But the energy around here could light up cities a lot bigger than Fergus Falls, Minnesota, population 9,389 souls circa 1938, and (according to its genial Mayor Russell “Q”. Anderson) a few thousand more today. That may not seem like very many people, but when you consider that fully 550 of them turned out to kick off their Big Read of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the numbers start to look a mite more impressive. (Of course, everyone agreed that the beautiful weather helped, with the mercury shooting up well into the teens.)

The view from Fergus Falls’s Prairie Wetlands Learning Center, where Fergus Falls, A Center for the Arts hosted a kick-off reading for the community’s Big Read celebration of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Photo: David Kipen

Imagine if that same proportion of the population of Washington, DC, where I work, showed up in one place to decorate gingerbread men, go for horsedrawn carriage rides, and read aloud from one of America’s finest novels. Can’t you just picture 23,000 Washingtonians thronging the National Mall (or, as we call it in Minnesota, the “other” Mall of America), circle-dancing to a fiddle combo? Then again, I may have to eat my words this spring, when the Humanities Council of Washington, DC unveils its Big Read of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Washington seemed another world yesterday (1/20) at the Prairie Wetlands Learning Center, a quondam farm transformed into a spectacular compound of exhibits, classrooms, and bluestem grass vistas under mackerel skies that my poor photographic skills can neither do justice to, nor quite ruin. I did a highly extemporaneous 10-15 minutes on the Big Read and the national reading revival the National Endowment for the Arts hopes to help kindle with it, but Fergus Falls was way ahead of me. From the look of things around here, the NEA may have to start a new program next year designed to get people to leave off reading and do something else for a change — if only to ease demand on the Fergus Falls Library and Lundeen’s Books, which moved more than a hundred copies of My Ántonia yesterday, and have been selling out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books and Patricia MacLachlan’s Sarah Plain and Tall in between reorders.

Maybe I’ll work in more later about my invigorating whirlwind day in Fergus Falls –capped by an evening performance with the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony by my gracious host Rebecca Petersen of the F.F. Center for the Arts, who’s something of a whirlwind herself — but for now I have to pick up a newspaper and skedaddle for my flight(s) to Wallowa County, Oregon. More down the big road…

January 19-20, 2007
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

“Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train/And I’s feeling nearly as faded as my jeans. . .” — Kris Kristofferson, Me and Bobby McGee, as sung by Janis Joplin

Waiting for a car, actually. Operating on four hours’ sleep, fueled by slushy but surprisingly tasty orange juice, I’m hunched over a keyboard at the Best Western Chateau Louisianne in Baton Rouge, my best resolutions for timely blogging already in rags. But I wouldn’t be anywhere else for all the nutria in Louisiana, because yesterday I saw the future of reading in America, and for a change it doesn’t make me want to crawl back under the covers and weep.

I saw at least 420 people — the library’s indefatigable Mary Stein insists 500 — of all ages, races and religious regalia, gathered in Baton Rouge Community College’s handsome new proscenium theater, all to choke up at a 45-year-old black-and-white movie.

I saw freshly stamped copies of To Kill a Mockingbird donated by HarperCollins flying through the box office window of a makeshift library as fast as the librarian could check them out.

I overheard a librarian say that she was having a devil of a time keeping in stock the Reader’s Guides that my heroic NEA Literature office had created from scratch.

I grazed along a buffet offering such literary delicacies as Scuppernong Grapes from Boo Radley’s Garden, Dill’s Country-Style Sweet Gherkins, and “Gossip Fence Climber” Cucumber and Tomato Salad, returning later to my hotel room to see them all featured on the CBS Baton Rouge news 14 times through the night.

I was petitioned by Rabbi Barry Weinstein and enjoined to visit Renaissance Village, a guarded encampment of FEMA trailers for 3,000 souls who could really use a few hundred new books.

I met a student in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport reading José Saramago’s Blindness for fun, and a hotel night manager reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in between cramming for her teaching credential.

I did all this for the Big Read, a new initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to its rightful place at the heart of American life by encouraging folks to read and discuss a single book within their cities and towns. The upshot is, I’m going to be blogging my way around the country this year from a ringside seat at one of the most ambitious programs we feds have done for reading since we ran out of states to publish WPA guides for.

An aside here: Laborious writers should never start a letter by describing where they’re sitting, because they’ll probably wind up sitting someplace else before they’re done. So I’m wrapping up this post on the Red River instead of the Mississippi, wondering for the first time about all the other names the Mighty Miss must have had along its course before its Southernmost name prevailed.

But it’s dawn outside this chilly window in Fargo, N.D., just over the river from Minnesota, where just down the road in Fergus Falls an entire town is, with a little help from the NEA, reading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.

The day manager just huffed into the lobby from outside, and the first words out of his mouth were, I swear, “Langston Hughes!” He says it’s a line from Rent, but as a G-man filing dispatches from the front lines of the NEA’s war for literature and hungry for a little good news, I’ll take it. More down the big road…