February 22, 2007
St. Louis, Missouri

Boon’s Lick residents showed an eagerness for literary greatness when they included among their Fourth of July toasts in 1817: “The Territory of Missouri — may it become the Nursery of Literature.”
– The WPA’s Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State

It’s not so much that Missouri is the “Show Me” State as that the other 49 are, by comparison, “I’ll Show You” states. There’s a refreshing unpretentiousness about this place and its Big Read of Fahrenheit 451, a confident reluctance to put on the dog — even in the putative birthplace of the hot dog. I started this paragraph desperate as usual for a lede and happy to tease out any thesis that might get me partway down the page, but the more I think about it, it may actually be true. Consider my day yesterday:

10 am. Ruddy and grinning in a blue pullover, KWMU public radio host Don Marsh welcomes me, Wash. U. English prof Richard Ruland, and his department chair, ace Big Read co-organizer David Lawton, into his studio for an hour’s discussion of Fahrenheit 451 with his listeners. An hour later we’ve plumbed Bradbury without deifying him, and Marsh throws it back to news with practiced ease.

12 pm. Back at the Wash. U. campus, a dozen Big Read partners and I tuck into lunch and a conversation that’s equal parts candid griping and heartfelt engagement with the program. Teacher Victoria Thomas speaks movingly about bringing free copies of the novel into a class under lockdown, where 33 kids have to share just 14 grab-bag anthologies that never leave the room. Apparently the students kept asking, “So we can really take these home?”

2 pm. Several students and I get to meet the dapper novelist Christopher Buckley, in town for a lecture, and still dazzled 48 hours later from a meeting in LA with his first literary hero: Ray Bradbury. He quotes Kurt Vonnegut remembering that when he used to place a story in the old Saturday Evening Post, within two days it seemed like everybody in the country had read it. Like being on 60 Minutes, Letterman and Leno all at once, Buckley says. Also says I should look at Peter DeVries for the Big Read, maybe Slouching Towards Kalamazoo or Without a Stitch in Time, and that Exley’s A Fan’s Notes is “gemiferous.” Maybe I’ll curl up with it at the airport when — uh-oh, when I miss my flight in two hours! Cripes, gotta run, more down the Big Road…

February 21, 2007
St. Louis, Missouri

A short post today to reflect a shortish day yesterday, begun with Washington University’s frank, funny Cheryl Adelstein picking me up at Lambert Field, then ended a few hours later with Lowell Bergman’s Frontline lullaby for my former profession, newspaper journalism. In between I attended the St. Louis regional finals for Poetry Out Loud, the NEA national initiative that gets school kids to learn and recite good poetry, midwifed last year by the agency’s Dan Stone and now shepherded by Leslie Liberato. [Poetry lovers and high school teachers looking for a great project for their students should check out the Poetry Out Loud web site.]

Someone at the St. Louis Big Read’s principal sponsor, Washington University, or maybe the dynamic Lisette Dennis of the Regional Arts Commission here, where the contest took place, noticed that Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach figures prominently both in the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud anthology and in Fahrenheit 451, and had the bright idea of gently yoking the two together at last night’s semifinals. Consequently, the sizable crowd of parents, peers and poetasters heard not only a bunch of gifted high-school students reciting from Margaret Atwood, Langston Hughes and others, but also one of the unenviable judges, actor-teacher Jack Hake, choke up the house with his reading of Dover Beach. After an understandably protracted judging huddle, the jury proclaimed an exuberant Brijhette Farmer the winner and the effortlessly natural Jeremy White her runner-up. Both are pictured above, letting the good news sink in.

Then it was off to the University City Library for an unusually engaging and well-attended book discussion of Fahrenheit 451, but I’ll have to save the details for tomorrow if I don’t want to miss my ride to KWMU, for their Book Club on the Air. Suffice for now to say that the library checked me out a copy of Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State, so we’re all sure to get our overdue WPA fix tomorrow…

February 16, 2007
Starkville, Mississippi

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”
– John Updike, The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953

I messed up last night. Lord knows it wasn’t the fault of anybody else in Starkville, Mississippi. Big Read organizer Nancy Jacobs picked me up on time at the airport, a trunkful of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird bound for the local continuation school in her car and a thick stack of Big Read clippings in her hand. The Starkville Public Library welcomed me with groaning potluck tables and more than a hundred friendly faces, and the children’s librarian helped me lay my hands on a copy of the WPA Guide to the Magnolia State in ample time for my talk. Nancy introduced me to Mayor Dan Camp, a dedicated new urbanist elected to keep the rebuilt stationhouse downtown; to Skip Descant of the Commercial Dispatch, scribbling like mad after asking a timely question about the future of libraries; and to a 97-year-old woman not yet resigned to making her age the icebreaker in every conversation. But the most important person in the room, I never talked to.

He was a teenage boy, under 15 from the look of him, but tall. His eyes were large and inquisitive. I didn’t see anybody talk to him, nor him to anybody else. He appears nowhere in all the sharp photos Harry Freeman obligingly shot of the great young local band, Nash Street, that opened for me, nor of the well-coiffed, mostly gray or white heads craned toward the podium later on.

What kind of teenager shows up at the public library on a Thursday night, alone, to hear some arts bureaucrat talk about literature and reading and To Kill a Mockingbird? I’m guessing he’s the kid Updike writes about in his Paris Review interview, the “countryish teen-aged boy” we at the NEA are tearing our hair out to reach with the Big Read. He’s one of the teenage male cohort in America that cares about books less than ever, whose reading numbers are diving while everybody else’s are merely declining, but I was too busy being made much of to care.

Of course, I’m self-importantly overestimating anything I could have said. Probably nothing would have scared him off of reading faster than some visiting federal functionary fawning over him. Later, though, when Harry was showing me the lovely note Harper Lee had sent declining an invitation to speak, I wished I could have shown it to the kid, but he left early.

February 15, 2007
El Paso, Texas

Prohibition served to awaken the city to its possibilities as a tourist resort. Thousands flocked in to troop across the river to Juarez, and El Paso throve accordingly. Today thousands of out-of-State visitors come here. El Paso gives its visiting dignitaries a frontier welcome. Yelling cowboys with barking six-shooters meet the train, and conduct the usually somewhat surprised visitor to an old time stagecoach. The Rancheros and members of the Sheriff’s Posse, two greeter organizations, ride in noisy escort to the stranger’s destination.
– The WPA’s Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State, 1940

This is the passage I read Tuesday in El Paso at the Doris Van Doren’s branch library’s Jazz and Blues Night — to the modest amusement of the library’s Jack Galindo, who had met me at the airport eight hours before with a disappointing lack of either gunplay or horseflesh. From the shadow of the airport’s 36-foot-tall statue of The Equestrian, whom locals are still deciding whether to name after a conquistador or melt down altogether, Jack spirited me to a rendezvous with the C-SPAN Book TV bus at the Cactus Bookstore and Café, where the borderland city’s Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird was already in fine voice.

One of the pleasures of bucketing around the country this year, looking in on at least 50 of the NEA’s Big Reads, turns out to be the discovery of all these quixotic little independent bookstores, many of them founded just in the last couple of years. Reading numbers may be in the tank lately, per the NEA’s Reading at Risk report, but apparently nobody’s told the Cactus’s Ginny Fischer and her agreeably raffish staff.
After singing for my supper on C-SPAN (check your local listings — or, this being Book TV, just tune in and hang around), Jack and I hopscotched our way to the aforementioned Doris Van Doren library, where I introduced Marcos Casiano and his suave band Kactus Jazz. There among the families gathered for the concert in the main reading room, from the moment I heard the bassist noodling around with John Williams’s main title from Jurassic Park, I knew I’d found kindred spirits. I made my now obligatory WPA citation, invoked the famous line from the book about how “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make “music for us to enjoy,” and relinquished the mike to the professionals.

***

Wednesday dawned with deceptive calm outside my hotel window, the bridge from Juarez over the Rio Grande into El Paso already jammed motionless, the adjacent El Paso-to-Juarez bridge all but empty. What followed was a happy blur of hammering out the last two essays in the NEA Lit department’s forthcoming Big Read Reader’s Guide to The Maltese Falcon, spreading the word about the Big Read on KDBC’s (the local CBS affiliate) sleet-led but unflappable midday newscast, and participating in El Paso-born film scholar Cynthia Farah Haines’s provocative discussion and screening of Horton Foote’s 1962 movie version of Mockingbird. I finally fetched up at the not surprisingly beautiful home of gallery owner Adair Margo (Chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities) and her husband, Dee, whose gracious hospitality and addictive enchiladas I enjoyed with their guests until hoarseness, exhaustion and satiety did me in at last. Where’s another Cokuccino when you need one?

February 13, 2007
Melbourne, Arkansas

“In a culture that now seems long ago and far, far away, T.S. Eliot was a rock star. The poet made the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and several years later 14,000 people turned out in Minnesota to listen to him talk about “The Frontiers of Criticism.”
– Michiko Kakutani, reprinted in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Although we didn’t quite get 14,000 people in Melbourne and Ash Flat, Arkansas, yesterday, who we got was cherce. North Central Arkansas isn’t as big as Minneapolis, after all, and I’m not exactly T.S. Eliot. (Though I will be visiting his native St. Louis next week). Just now I’m in midair en route to El Paso, looking back on an idyllic day and a half spent in and around Melbourne, thanks to the hospitality of Big Read sponsor Ozarka College. Several of these towns in the foothills of the Ozarks are making (or re-making) the acquaintance of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for the Big Read, just as the residents of Oregon’s Wallowa Valley were doing a couple of weeks back when I ducked in on them for 36 hours or so.

The parallels and divergences between these two Steinbeck reads are intriguing. For Oregon’s Steinbeck observance, the Fishtrap literary center plans, among other things, a Hard Luck Dinner, with ticket buyers not knowing ahead of time whether they’ll get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. Meantime, in Izard County, Arkansas, $3.50 at the Big Eat on Feb. 28 buys everybody beans, cornbread and fried spuds; a ’30s fashion show, for which Ozarka’s tireless organizer Joan Stirling pulled her mother’s old dress patterns out of retirement; a slideshow of WPA projects in North Central Arkansas; a performance from the stage adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath; public discussion with Ozarka’s English faculty; and finally a reading of Recollections of the Dust Bowl and Depression Days. That’s a book they’re compiling of memories from local old-timers, itself reminiscent of Oregon’s traveling photo show derived from student-conducted interviews with senior citizens. Each area’s approach reflects its own personality: Wallowa’s slightly more political, Ozarka’s perhaps more nostalgic, but united across the miles by their evangelical love for Steinbeck’s work.

After a couple of maybe-not-too-boring stemwinders yesterday from me with 150 or so students, faculty, and townspeople, Joan gamely drove me the couple of hours back to Little Rock, where we had thoroughly congenial drinks and dinner with Charles Portis, the great Arkansas author of, among others, the novels Norwood and True Grit. Mr. Portis prizes his privacy, so I’ll confine my public account of our evening to his remark when told about the other part of my job, helping award grants to emerging and established American writers: “I don’t know about giving writers money. It only encourages them.”

More down the Big Road…

February 8, 2007
Hartford, Connecticut

“If books are not good company, where will I find it?”
– Mark Twain, in a letter to M. Fairbanks

“I am reading Zora!”
– lapel buttons visible on coats all over Hartford, Connecticut

The first person to email the blog and tell me who “M. Fairbanks” was will win official bragging rights from the NEA. (Cash value negligible, alas.) Me, I had the still-fresh pleasure of re-reading some Zora Neale Hurston myself Wednesday, in the course of visiting a Big Read masterminded by the all-but-rebuilt Hartford Public Library, and abetted by partners around town including the built-to-last Mark Twain House and Museum.

In between meeting the Library’s sainted deputy chief librarian, Jenny Benedict, at 8:45 yesterday morning — she with the unenviable chore of chaperoning me around the Connecticut capital all day — and getting a magical nighttime tour of the Twain house last night from its abundantly knowledgeable director, Debra Petke, I didn’t exactly sit around in mukluks eating bonbons. First came an interview with Connecticut Public Television’s Ray Hardman (who promised in full view of his TV audience to read Their Eyes Were Watching God!), then storytime at the Sand branch library, with kids eating ambrosia while hearing the folktales Hurston recorded around the South for the WPA and the Library of Congress.

We came back to the main branch for lunch with city librarian Louise Blalock and enough partners to make readers out of all of Greater Hartford and half the Connecticut River watershed besides. Next it was Zora Hour, for which two intrepid librarians played the Big Read CD and led a discussion of the book with an attentive audience of library regulars, complete with juice and snacks. A guy named Winston, warm in a heavy parka, allowed as how Hurston so far was no Kahlil Gibran, but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Then off to the library’s Albany branch, where staffer Michelle McFarland confided that Ruby Dee’s audio book of Hurston was making converts right and left for this brilliant but challengingly dialect-heavy novel. After dinner it was over to Twain’s place for a lecture and reading by sore-throated but singular-voiced young novelist Tayari Jones. And finally, a late-night tour with Debra, Jenny and my gracious cousin/host Clare up towhat’s really the delivery room of the American novel: Mark Twain’s third-floor, triple-balconied, billiard-table-equipped writing study. “If books are not good company, where will I find it?”– in Hartford, for a start. More down the Big Road. . .

February 7, 2007
Washington, DC

“John Carroll chose the site [for Georgetown University] on the ‘old Potomak [sic] bluffs’ in preference to present Capitol Hill, which he regarded as ‘too far in the country’. Georgetown’s history, from the early days when students followed a regimen designed ‘to implant virtue and destroy the seeds of vice,’ has been enriched by many vivid personalities.” — The WPA Guide to Washington, D.C.

Here at the NEA we try not to make too many grand claims for the Big Read, careful to describe the program as “helping” to restore reading to the heart of American culture, rather than performing any restorations single-handedly or overnight. If, along the way, we manage to implant virtue and destroy the seeds of vice anyway, well, that’ll be gravy.

The Big Read visited those “old Potomak bluffs” of Georgetown just last Thursday, courtesy of an invitation from Professor Maureen Corrigan to address her class on Public Intellectuals. (And if the idea of me addressing a class on Public Intellectuals strikes anybody out there as amusing, just shut up.)

Professor Corrigan, in addition to teaching a full course load, reviewing books for Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and writing her own book, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, belongs to what we at the Big Read call our Reader’s Circle. The Reader’s Circle consists of 22 smart folks from various walks of life — including Professor Corrigan and everybody from the newsman Jim Lehrer to chanteuse Aimee Mann — who help us pick all the books on the Big Read’s growing list.

So Professor Corrigan introduces me to her class, and I’m handing around copies of the NEA’s Reading at Risk report (about how fewer than half of Americans read for pleasure anymore), and I’m following up with brochures on the Big Read — and a beautiful thing happens. They get it. The earnest bearded guy interning with E.J. Dionne gets it. The Alabaman who lights up when I mention Carson McCullers, she gets it. And the cineaste, who lights up after class when she can finally smoke, gets it. They get it so much, they ask all the right tough questions: How do we choose the books? Does F. Scott Fitzgerald really need the NEA’s help? And then they get it even more.

Bless ‘em, they don’t want to be the only surviving readers left in the whole country. There’d be a kind of rugged, embattled heroism to that, a certain Peabody-among-the Philistines inverse glamour I’m not immune to myself, but in the end it’s just too lonesome. I’d much rather feel outclassed by a gas station attendant or candy striper who’s better read than I am. Because that’s the public intellectual whose disappearance I fear most. Not the earnest émigré on the faculty of the New School for Social Research. Not the scribbler in a garret who cobbles together a living freelancing reviews and essays. No, the public intellectual I can’t manage without is precisely that: a member of the public — nontenured, unpublished — whose imagination can conjure up anything except a life without reading.

Next stop, Connecticut, and more down the Big Road . . .

Washington, DC
February 1, 2007

Thrusting its dark granite bulk and square clock-tower in stubborn nonconformity above the general level of other [Federal Triangle] buildings, and determinedly blocking completion of the grand circular plaza planned for opposite facades of the Internal Revenue and Post Office Department Buildings, the Old Post Office Building, Pennsylvania Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets NW, is a Romanesque landmark that Washington is slow to give up for the sake of a plan . . .
– The WPA Guide to Washington, 1942

What, you thought the blogging muse, Errato, only lit upon my shoulder when the Big Read has me traveling? No such luck. The NEA’s program to help get America reading again never sleeps — or not until you can walk into any bar in America, shout “How ’bout that Edith Wharton?” and have somebody stand you to a boilermaker. Far from sleeping, the Literature office’s 7th-floor aerie in the Old Post Office Building (pictured) is abuzz with activity at the moment.

Built in the late 19th century, the Old Post Office is home to three U.S. federal cultural entities: the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The OPO’s 315-foot high clock tower — a National Historic Landmark — offers a spectacular 360 degree view of the city, making the OPO a favorite stopping place for tourist and locals alike.

Station chief Molly is home working on the Teacher’s Guide for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but Whipcracker Sarah is here crunching timetables, and Desk Officer Erika is picking out perfect quotes for the McCullers Audio Guide. Me, I was working the seamier side of the street, buckling down to the Reader’s Guide for The Maltese Falcon, when Communications Ace Paulette sounded the alarm: We need a blog posting, and step on it! Swinging purposefully into action, pausing only to stopper my ears with XM Satellite Radio’s classical station against the siren song of office chatter, I declare it high time to show you briefly around the nerve center of the Big Read.

But then — “Blast!,” as Den Mother Chloey here likes to exclaim. Taskmistress Katey is stopping by to ask what’s become of all those performance evaluations, and Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier book review editor Bill Thompson is emailing to hear all about the Big Read. Our virtual tour of the Big Read office will have to demonstrate that most proverbial of virtues, patience, and wait a while. Meantime, heartfelt apologies for a breezy post, and I’ll report in again from Connecticut next week, and surely before. The traveling medicine show that is Big Read has 200 municipalities to reach this year, and I aim to visit at least 50 of them personally, so there’s ever so much more down the Big Road . . .