May 12 , 2008
Boston, MA

William Faulkner wrote a screenplay for the Joan Crawford movie of James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce. Other hands eventually worked it over, but a copy survives. In it there’s a moment — and by the way, if any publisher were ever fool enough to collect my book reviews, There’s a Moment is the only title I ever wanted to give it — there’s a moment when Mildred’s African-American housekeeper consoles her over a lover’s death by singing the traditional spiritual “Steal Away.” In the margin of this never-shot scene Faulkner scrawled, “God damn! How’s that for a scene?”

I’ve always loved this story, because it gives the lie to the old canard that Faulkner hated screenwriting. Idiot producers he most assuredly despised, and he missed Mississippi something fierce, but he plainly took pride in the writing he did for the screen. He liked director Howard Hawks, for whom he co-adapted both Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (famously, the only picture to feature the talents of two, count ‘em, two Nobel-winning writers). And he loved Hawks script supervisor, Meta Carpenter, almost enough to leave his wife - - a tidbit that makes Faulkner’s great infidelity story, “Golden Land,” his only fiction set in Hollywood, Meta-fictional in more ways than one.

All of which would be a lot of ink to waste on a (so far, sadly) non-Big Read author, except that a) blogs don’t waste anything save, on an off day, time, and b) I finally got to hear “Steal Away” at Saturday’s triumphal finale to international folk-radio juggernaut WUMB’s Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird in Boston and Eastern Massachusetts. The renowned a cappella combo The LoveTones sang a whole medley of stirring, Mockingbird-appropriate spirituals. This set capped an inspiring morning that started with Janis Pryor asking me astute interview questions for WUMB’s award-winning public affairs show, and then adjourned to the University of Massachusetts-Boston’s large student union lounge for a morning of storytelling, Mockingbird-themed art, a short but sharp high-school theatrical adaptation of the novel, notably smart book discussions — e.g., Is Barack Obama the son Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell could’ve had in a saner world? — more chinwagging from me, and a special guest appearance by a convalescing raven from the Audubon Society. I guess mockingbirds are too intelligent to get themselves into any scrape that warrants much in the way of rehabilitation.

But all that was only the half of it. After an already full morning, resourceful founding WUMB general manager Pat Monteith and project director Mac McLanahan led a good 170 of the 230 assembled revelers down to the university’s Snowden Auditorium for the final judging round of the station’s contest for outstanding Mockingbird-related song. Though professional singer-songwriter Erik Balkey wound up winning for his heartfelt “Atticus Taught Me,” both Terry Kitchen’s happily political “Rainbow” and Mark Stepakoff’s Randy Newman-esque “String Him Up” had vocal partisans. My fellow jurors and I finally pronounced all five finalists worthy of inclusion on an upcoming CD, alongside Mockingbird-related offerings by professional troubadours including my co-judge Kate Campbell, who sang a too-short set filled with her witty, bittersweet songs of Alabam’ — especially my favorite, “The New South.”

So ended a day of good music, good radio, good fellowship, and better-than-average popcorn in Boston. Beantown doesn’t exactly have an illustrious history of interracial comity, but then neither does Topeka, where the first Big Read I ever saw brought the literature of Zora Neale Hurston into the very schoolhouse in which Brown v. Board of Education began. WUMB wants back in on The Big Read next year with Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I hope they make it in and I make it back. As the strains of WUMB’s signature “auterntic music” died away, I wished pooped but proud organizers Pat and Mac good luck. Then it was my turn to steal away…

April 4, 2008
Staunton, VA

This is either the most revolutionary idea I’ve ever had, or the dumbest. But first let’s just throw up some eye candy, shall we? I always like to put some art up to leaven these otherwise indigestible lozenges of prose, so here is “The Big Read Blues,” courtesy of the Staunton, Va., Big Read — about which more in a minute. So cock an ear at this and then I will be right back.

Cindy’s Big Read Blues (mp3)

I’ve shown you that because I want to make a point about the viability of things other than the printed word as a way to draw attention to, and enthusiasm for, the printed word — because what you are reading right now is, with a little luck, my first-ever dictated post. That is to say, I am enlisting oral culture in the service of written culture. I am going to make this maiden bow slightly hasty, but my rationalization for it is that blogging — which I can now do out loud thanks to a new Web site that transcribes dictation — rewards haste. Blogs are supposed to be spontaneous, and my tendency to bloviate at great length about The Big Read is probably, at bottom, at odds with the medium. It’s like using oil paints to write a novel.

This Web site supposedly makes it possible for you to call a number and speak what’s on your mind, in the same way that Steve Allen used to do, carrying a tape recorder with him at all times to keep track of his stray ideas. Well, if it worked for the man who’s used it to compose “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” then perhaps this is indeed the start of something big.

Because this is a shakedown cruise, I’m going to consume a little of it with a couple of links. I’ll be back in a second, but first I want to show you an example of just how spellbinding the spoken word can be as a means of encouraging folks to discover the written word. Here’s Dr. Edward Scott giving a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird in Staunton, Virginia:

http://www.newsleader.com/assets/mp3/AA102721311.MP3 [50 minutes]

Pretty powerful, eh? Now, so you shouldn’t think I’ve gone over to the dark, antitextual side completely, here’s Cindy Corell, community conversations editor at The News Leader in Staunton, Va., reacting in the paper to what you just heard:

http://www.newsleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080316/NEWS01/
803160323/1002/rss01

The literary essay as a form of daily journalism lives! Cindy followed up the other day with this email:

“We are having a blast! Of course, [our book is] To Kill a Mockingbird, and book clubs have jumped in all over the place.

We even have one here at the newspaper! And it’s mostly made up of folks from other departments! Imagine - a newspaper and its people who love reading aren’t all bunched up in the newsroom!!! That has been an eye-opener for people! And a good one…That’s been my favorite part of this month-long exercise. I’ve made new friends and bonded more closely with close friends — all because of words on a page! Beautiful!

Please know that you and the rest of the NEA Big Read circle have many fans in Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County, Va. Harper Lee got it started, the NEA created the program and people — just regular people from all over — are making it happen.

To all — many thanks!

Cindy”

I’m back, if only for the moment, so that I can dash off to give a keynote address of my own — a situation that will find me speaking aloud in, I hope, far less self-conscious fashion. I will only sign off here by saying I apologize for the rather scattershot nature of this, my first dictated blog post. I assume one gets the hang of it after awhile, and stops starting every sentence with the first person singular. I can only think back to my hero Rob Serling’s flirtation with dictated television drama, about which he wrote a terrific Twilight Zone episode with, I believe, Phyllis Kirk or Phyllis Thaxter, I’m not sure which, as the wife of a writer whose Dictabelts take on a certain supernatural quality. Anyways, wish me luck on this. I hope it will lead not just to more disjointed posts, but also more frequent ones.

Simply put, this is a work-in-progress, and if anybody has any reactions to it, by all means, let me know how it’s shaping up from your end. I’ll leave my email address: bigreadblog@arts.gov. So that’s it for now, and more dictablogs down the big road…

March 21, 2008
Washington, DC

Lately, politicians and pundits agree that America seems reluctant to talk about racism in any but the most sensationalistic terms. They’re not wrong, either. Quietly though, one city and town at a time, a nationwide program called The Big Read is starting to help Americans kick around subjects like race — and class, and free speech, and immigration, and any number of other topics that good neighbors usually make a habit of avoiding.

Nobody expected this civic side benefit when my colleagues at the National Endowment for the Arts and I went about hatching The Big Read. All we wanted was to arrest the mortifying erosion in American pleasure reading that, like a rush-hour mudslide, can narrow the road toward a humane, prosperous society down to one elite lane.

Cynthia Ozick. Photo © Nancy Crampton

But sometimes, instead of working against us, the law of unintended consequences is actually on our side. In the course of helping cities do successful one-city one-book programs, I’m discovering a nationwide hunger to talk about the very subjects that tend to make us nervous. Traveling around the country watching The Big Read work, I’ve noticed a real impatience with “polite conversation,” with having to choose one’s words so carefully that any hope of a natural give-and-take gets lost.

Take Wallowa County, Oregon, where a literary center called Fishtrap won a modest grant to do a Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been easy to treat the book like a period piece, showing the movie, hosting book discussions, having teenagers record oral histories of senior citizens who remember the Depression firsthand — all of which Fishtrap did, and did well. But they also devised a “hard-luck dinner,” where ticket-buyers didn’t know ahead of time whether they’d get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. That led to the kind of frank discussion that might be awkward in a checkout line, but somehow crops up spontaneously whenever a great book comes to hand.

Then there’s Lewiston, Maine, where the nationally ranked Bates debating team took up the question “Should communities have the right to ban books from school libraries?” in a public forum on Fahrenheit 451. Or Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where a keynote address on To Kill a Mockingbird and racial equality moved the city editor of the local paper to face up to her family’s slave-owning past. Or consider Waukee, Iowa, which chose arguably the most challenging book on our list, Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl , and has turned it into a citywide consideration of the Holocaust.

In Los Angeles, the County Library will celebrate Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima with — among dozens of other events this spring — “A Bulldozed Barrio: Recalling Chavez Ravine.” It’s a presentation by those inquisitive, award-winning mavens of The Baseball Reliquary, so don’t expect any checked swings about how the Dodgers wound up on land once promised for affordable housing.

Don’t get me wrong. The Big Read won’t solve America’s reading woes single-handedly, and a few candid discussions with our neighbors about issues we usually duck isn’t going to turn any American city into Periclean Athens overnight. (Even Athens lied to itself about slavery.) But anything that helps not only defrost the usual glacial pace of racial reconciliation around America, but also defuse artist-rancher misunderstanding in Marfa, Texas, and Russian immigrant tensions among the Mennonites in Ephrata, Pennsylvania — where they’re reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – is at least worth the candle.

How does the simple act of reading a good book and hashing it out with the person next to you break the ice for more and, just as important, less serious conversations? The NEA could conduct ten times as many surveys and evaluations as we’re already doing of The Big Read, and still never get to the bottom of that one.

My best guess is that reading is, sappy as it sounds, like falling in love: It works us over when we’re not looking. It unlocks us. We forget ourselves, and wake to find we’re talking more freely, laughing louder. We’re quicker to cry, and we blush brighter than we ever used to. To paraphrase the last line of the book that first hooked me –Jim Bouton’s Ball Four – you spend your time cracking open a book, and “in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

Translation is both the most parasitic form of writing and the purest. It’s writing without storytelling, without plot, or character, or any of the other gifts that only a few lucky fictioneers have it in them to deploy. No, translation is writing at its most elemental linguistic level, with the kit provided and only the words missing. It belongs alongside singing or acting or symphony conducting — an interpretive art, but no less an art for all that. Translation is what painting by numbers would be, if only the painter had as many colors handy as there are words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Is it Tolstoy… or Tolstoy?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I just finished up a translating project from the Spanish, but also because we only recently got our Tolstoy materials back from the printer and the CD presser. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich marks our first novel in translation — chosen for a reciprocal Read with the Russian cities of Saratov and Ivanovo, who’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird this fall while five American cities and towns prepare to tackle Tolstoy next spring.

Because we had to agree on a common translation just for consistency’s sake, we went with Lynn Solotaroff’s Bantam edition, but no preference or endorsement should be inferred. So long as folks are on roughly the same page, I kind of like the idea of multiple readers around the country getting together over different translations, comparing notes and discovering anew how even the tiniest decisions of diction and syntax can make all the difference.

Just look at the last line of Solotaroff’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Spoiler alert here, by the way, for anybody who expects Ivan to live happily ever after.) Solotaroff translates Ivan Ilyich’s end as, “He drew in a breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched himself out and died.” It seems a fairly straightforward sentence, one whose original Russian couldn’t possibly allow for that many variations.Now look at Louise and Aylmer Maude’s once-standard translation of the same sentence: “He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.” At first blush, they seem more or less the same sentence twice. Each starts with the same five words, and each ends with the same two.

In between, though, discrepancies creep in. Per Solotaroff, Ivan dies in the middle of his last breath. But according the Maudes, Ivan completes the breath, and only dies while sighing afterward. I tend to prefer the first version, since that one doesn’t oblige poor Ivan to breathe and then sigh, two operations that seem a little too similar to be readily separable. Points to Solotaroff here.

But now look at the other divergence. The Maudes have Ivan simply stretching out, whereas Solotaroff’s Ivan stretches himself out — as if there were anyone else Ivan might conceivably be stretching. Points to the Maudes here, and so a split decision overall.

Which one is closer to Tolstoy’s original? Which the more literal? And are they the same thing? You’d have to ask a Russian speaker for those answers, but the translators are presumably fluent, and it didn’t keep them from preparing subtly different interpretations. Still, each retains the indispensable idea of a life interrupted.

My translation work so far hews toward the irreverent, making free with a lot of colloquialism, anachronism, and general puckishness. My Spanish isn’t the greatest, either, so I probably couldn’t be slavishly faithful to the original if I tried.

Maybe most important, I’m translating a comic short story and novella by Cervantes and Cervantine comedy lends itself to a more timeless, postmodern tone than Tolstoyan solemnity. I’m hoping that readers can hear a Spanish magistrate say “I’m hauling you in” without thinking, “Hmmm. Would a 17th-century Englishman even say that?” By contrast, though, nobody wants to read The Plotzing of Ivan Ilyich.

Nobody besides me, anyway…

December 11, 2007
Baltimore, MD

As Herman Glogauer of Kaufman and Hart’s Once in a Lifetime would say, the “beauty part” of The Big Read is that it keeps outstripping anything we can mastermind for it. Right now we’re piloting a possible extension of TBR into what I have to keep reminding myself are called correctional facilities. The thinking around here goes that, while we’re working at getting Americans to read – something hardly anybody would dream of arguing with — we should also make time to do something for as friendless a population as you can name, i.e., people in prison.

Only hitch is, anything we can think of here in the office, Big Read organizers have already improvised out there on the hustings. Quite a few Big Reads have already incorporated some kind of correctional component, including the prison arts workshop in Canton, Ill., that created a remarkable 6-foot papier-mache copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (A Cantonese Big Read, October 12th, 2007).

So yesterday, when I took the train — up? down? over? — to Baltimore for a presentation to a conference of state arts agencies, who did I meet but a woman who’s already ringmastered a successful Big Read prison partnership? This was Catherine Richmond-Cullen, who as part of a Grapes of Wrath read in Scranton, Pa., brought Steinbeck’s novel – about, lest we forget, Tom Joad’s release from the graybar hotel and his attempt to make it on the outside – to a readership primed to appreciate it as few others ever have.

Take it from Catherine, none of this will ever be easy. Most prison regulations forbid giving inmates so much as a PostIt, which means you can’t exactly leave them books to read between visits. Also, prison regs are notoriously changeable, so that something a visiting facilitator could do one week may well be against the rules the next. Makes it kind of tricky to plan a curriculum. Also, as the NEA’s recent To Read or Not to Read study demonstrates, most felons tend not to be very big readers in the first place. Not to put too fine a point on it, the majority of prisoners can’t read, or not above a third-grade level.

Still, somehow, dedicated people like Catherine and Natalie Costa Thill, who does terrific writing workshops with prisoners in the Adirondacks, find ways to get inmates reading and writing. They do it with guided reading, where the fluent readers help nonfluent ones keep up. They do it with peer writing, where the literate prisoners help write for those who can’t. It all pays off, not least when the smartest inmates, who — as in school — are often the biggest discipline problems, suddenly become model prisoners for fear of losing their workshop privileges.

Here, amid the, ahem, artful chiaroscuro of this photo, Catherine is showing off some quotes from prisoners about The Grapes of Wrath. The one that stays with me is the guy who wrote about Steinbeck’s desert tortoise – the one that creeps across Route 66, gets sideswiped off onto the shoulder, and then just climbs back out and resumes his crawl. “The turtle,” this prisoner wrote, “reminds me of myself: hard shell – and a soft underside.” If this guy, reading literature for only a few sanctioned minutes a week, can recognize himself and his world in it, what excuse do the rest of us have not to?

November 1, 2007
Washington, DC

After the Russian Big Read delegation visited America last spring, most of us felt optimistic, but not quite confident. These officials from Ivanovo and Saratov seemed to get the idea of inducing a whole city to enjoy the same book for a month or so, but — amid the handicaps of jet lag, culture shock and simultaneous translation — we weren’t about to count any mockingbirds before they hatched. What if the Russians thought we were practicing cultural imperialism instead of cultural diplomacy, trying to shove yet more American pop culture down their throats? And what if a week of American-sized portions at D.C. restaurants had short-circuited their ability to take in all we were throwing at them?One week in Russia, a couple of inspiring school visits, three splashy kick-offs in two cities and beats me how many vodka toasts later, I shouldn’t have worried. My visits to New York and Massachusetts next week should only be so good. Forget the red-carpet treatment, the police escorts, the state dinner for international partnerships director Pennie Ojeda, Chairman Gioia, and me. All that was swell — the kind of thing that doesn’t faze the Chairman any more, but always has me checking compulsively to see if my fly is open.

No, what really wowed me was the kids.

Our first stop in Ivanovo was the local children’s library. Apparently, in Russia you go to a special library just for kids until you’re 14, at which point they’ll risk turning you loose in the grown-ups’ libe across town. I’ll admit this ageism goes against my grain a tad. I was always the kid reading The Andromeda Strain instead of The Wind in the Willows, and — even less forgivably — congratulating myself for it. But if separate libraries are all it takes to turn out kids as gregarious and inquisitive as the ones in Ivanovo, I’ll card the little ones myself.

Teen after teen stood up and got straight to the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird (newly retranslated and reissued by the Russian publisher Vagrius). A girl in back asked if the second-class citizenship that the black townspeople endured in the book was so different from what the Chechens are going through nowadays. A local law student invited for the occasion spoke movingly of the prejudice he still suffers as the son of a Tatar. And a teenage guy — a guy! — talked about the universality of a good book, and allowed as how “Writers have no nationality.” All the time I was thinking, Would somebody please pinch me? It’s not as if, by the midpoint of a five-meal-a-day trip, there wasn’t plenty of flab for the tweaking…