July 31, 2008
Washington, DC

An Essay on Vocabulary, Complete With a Quixotic Proposal

All new-learned words are only usefully imperfect synonyms for the ones we already know. I went looking for a Big Ride idea this morning, and came away with two new words too good not to share. I can’t keep these new rookies in my vocabulary on the bench a moment longer: they are “centroid” and “barycenter.”

The point on earth closest to everyone in the world on average is in the northern part of South Asia, with a mean distance of 5,000 kilometers (3,000 mi). Its antipodal point is correspondingly the farthest point from everyone on earth, and is located in the South Pacific near Easter Island, with a mean distance of 15,000 kilometers (9,300 mi). In America, the point on earth closest to everyone on average is in Phelps County Missouri.   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centroid)

Rock your world, don’t they? No? Of course not. Only a few words can take your breath away even divorced from their meanings. Words like “gossamer,” maybe, or “zephyr,” and who can say but even those two sounded unspectacular before you first heard them defined? (Interesting that “breath,” the irreducible atom of language, is precisely what they have in common — “zephyr” a breath of wind from the west, gossamer a spider’s web, that fragile latticework only a breath from collapse.)

Self-evidently lovely it’s not, but “centroid” means the exact center of any planar surface, where it could theoretically teeter on a pin’s point. I once wrote an essay called “How Many Angels” for the anthology My California, in which I went looking for the centroid of Los Angeles County, only I didn’t know enough to call it that. Instead I laboriously called it the point “from which you can’t get any farther away from one border without getting closer to another.”

Where was “centroid” when I needed it? Hiding in Wikipedia next to “barycenter,” apparently. No dictionary I’ve found takes the trouble to differentiate them, and why should it? Geometers will know, and who else cares? Near as I can tell, though, a barycenter belongs to astronomy as well as geometry, and frequently describes the point between two heavenly bodies around which they orbit each other. In short, a barycenter sounds like a centroid, only in three dimensions instead of two.

You’ve been very patient reading all this, and may even deserve to know why I brought any of it up. As you might expect with the Big Ride looming, I spend more time than ever looking at maps. Last night I remembered that the exact geometric center of America – the centroid, I now realize — is in Kansas. I looked it up this morning and not only learned the word “centroid,” but found out that America’s hovers somewhere around Meades Ranch in Smith County, Kansas. Cartographers and xenophobes, take note: In the lower 48, there’s more of America surrounding you in Smith County than anywhere else you could possibly go.

Unlike the American centroid, or barycenter, or the geodetic base point (these geomancers love their synonyms even more than I do mine), the center of American population gets around. As William Hurt says in Broadcast News of the line between news and entertainment, “They keep moving the little sucker, don’t they?” As relocators and immigrants have gravitated gradually Southwestward, the center of American population has doggedly followed them, till now it catches its breath somewhere in Phelps County, Missouri.

Where I’m going with all this, aside from Smith and Phelps counties, as soon as I can manage it, is that most education gives vocabulary a bad name. It might seem counterintuitive that anything could give vocabulary a bad name, since vocabulary is in the business of giving things good names, or at least memorable ones. But say “vocabulary” and all those itchy memories come flushing back: flashcards, worksheets, Use it in a sentence . Gaaah!

And yet vocabulary should be the most beautiful of all subjects, because without a good one the world is unreadable. All the Big Read writers have sizable vocabularies, with Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald probably tied for the biggest. Hemingway’s is the most selective, and Steinbeck and Twain’s are the most varied — owing to their prodigious knowledge of nature and profanity, respectively.

So if I could ask Microsoft for one favor – other than massive infusions of Big Read funding, now and in perpetuity — it would be the addition of a dedicated “definition” tab on their toolbars, instead of the current “dictionary” function, which you have to root around for under “research.” Similar shortcuts in Gmail and other email programs would encourage correspondents to get sesquipedalian without fear of puzzling each other. One of the impediments to a healthy, versatile vocabulary — and maybe the only drawback to having one — is the increasing loneliness of it. What’s the point of having a big one if there’s no one to share it with? Just think if vocabulary enlargement were only a click away. So a hyperlinked dictionary in every document, on every desktop, is my fondest wish.

July 28, 2008
Washington, DC

When I studied Geology in college, one of my favorite terms of the trade was time-contemporaneous. We used it most often to describe two completely separate rock formations that were deposited at the same time. For example, the Navasink Formation in central New Jersey is time-contemporaneous with the Fox Hills Formation in South Dakota, both being deposited roughly 75 million years ago.

Dan Brady, with his hand on the fault above the Fox Hills Formation, Badlands National Park, South Dakota

As The Big Read gears up for fall programming, I had the delightful task of shepherding all our previous guides through the reprinting process. In short, I read all the existing guides about four times each. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when one reads them all so close together, the links and coincidences of The Big Read writers become more pronounced.

So, in the interest of time-contemporaneousness, I developed this graphic.

I could look at this for hours. In fact, I have. It’s fascinating to me to think that authors as different as Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway shared a good deal of time on this earth, or that there was a magical decade in the 1840s that saw Poe writing the first modern detective stories, Longfellow crafting epic narrative poems, Tolstoy publishing his first autobiographical confessions, and Mark Twain gathering boyhood experience to be recounted later as fiction in the best of his books.

Another interesting cluster is in the 1920s, when Harper Lee, Cynthia Ozick, and Ursula K. Le Guin were all born. Perhaps because she hasn’t published since the 1960, Lee seems in no way a contemporary to Ozick or Le Guin, who themselves sit pretty far apart in my mind. Clearly something was in the water in the 1890s, as it saw Zora Neale Hurston, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, and Ernest Hemingway enter the world. And back in the 1930s, well more than half our Big Read authors where kicking around, from Willa Cather to Ernest Gaines!

I hope you find this as entertaining and interesting as I did. Look for more mind-boggling graphs to come.

July 25, 2008
Washington, DC

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The thing about Mark Twain is, every line he ever wrote is almost as quotable as the lines everybody already quotes. After a while you get the idea that John Bartlett and his quote-truffling successors just threw up their hands and started picking Twainisms at random.

I mention this because Time magazine recently anointed Twain its cover boy for the apparently annual “Making of America” issue. Near as I can tell, this issue is an attempt to broaden the franchise of the magazine’s signature Person of the Year cover, so as to make room for a Dead American Person of the Year too. The previous posthumous honorees have been Lewis & Clark, Ben Franklin, and presidents Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy instead of Franklin? In a pig’s valise!

We know what Twain would’ve thought about sharing his pedestal with TR: “Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one.”

See what I mean about the quotability? For more Twain on Roosevelt, by all means check out http://www.twainquotes.com/Roosevelt.html.

The Time stories actually form a pretty fair introduction to Twain, with only one or two solecisms. Two different writers get Hemingway on Twain slightly wrong. Papa didn’t say that all modern American literature can be traced back to Mark Twain, he said “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Not a small difference, to my way of thinking.

But the comic essayist and drawling Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me panelist Roy Blount Jr. is always a joy to read, even if they saddle him with the heavy lifting of the package’s biographical essay (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820166,00.html). He gets five pages, which is twice as much linage as anybody else gets and then some. Again and again, Blount makes the case for Twain as an endlessly renewable prophet, as when he quotes him on the “quagmire” of Roosevelt’s turn-of the-century Philippine-American War. Remind me to look up in the OED whether anybody beat Twain to that particular connotation of quagmire, but I doubt it. Two sentences later, Blount echoes Twain’s recognition that occupied casualties usually outnumber occupying ones when he notes that “more than 200,000 Filipino civilians had been killed, along with 4,200 Americans.”

Later on, Stephen L. Carter gets to the heart of Twain on race (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1820162,00.html ), even if he overstates the case a tad when he writes, “It might be fair to call [Twain] the inventor of the American short story.” I don’t know what E.A. Poe would have said about that, but knowing him, “I’ll send my seconds with a choice of weapons and have my satisfaction” is a possibility.

Still, these are quibbles. Time has come through with a decent primer on Twain for a general readership, a readership that Twain could take for granted as almost no one can anymore. As an examplar of The Big Read’s perpetual watchword in preparing our materials – essentially, inform the nonreader without boring the expert – Time has got it right.

Which Big Read author rates the next Making of America cover? I realize that’s exactly the question that Time’s Luce-ites (as they used to be called, in sarcastic deference to publisher Henry Luce) want me to ask, but it’s just too much fun not to. Unfortunately, the other novelists on the Big Read list haven’t changed America in ways conspicuous enough for the public eye to discern–however better the world might be if they had.

I’d argue that Twain helped “make America” because he wrote nonfiction as well as fiction. In his novels he created the quintessential American voice, as well as a model of bygone childhood against which we still measure the modern version. But just as important, in his essays he inveighed against a peculiar arrested adolescence that also shadows the American character.

Nonfiction can knock the world off its axis, but a good story well told can only hope to nudge it. Think of all the prose that’s changed the world: the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed. Only the Emancipation Proclamation could be said to have drawn inspiration from fiction, specifically Uncle Tom’s Cabin — which Jane Smiley claims to like better than Huck Finn, but believe that at your peril.

This ambidexterity between fiction and nonfiction is something I particularly admire about our Readers Circle member Wendell Berry, who throws in poetry besides, and also farms a spread of crops in Port Royal, Kentucky, in his spare time. During the Big Ride in September, I hope to look him up and ask him how he does it …

Real Poe and faux Poe

As shrines to ill-fated national figures go, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Va., isn’t exactly Graceland. Then again, you wouldn’t want it to be. It’s a couple of flagstone buildings drowsing beside a busy street, with self-guided tours and an atmosphere of melancholy dignity. The air hangs heavy with the ghosts of departed part-time executive directors.

And yet, for one of America’s towering geniuses, saddest sacks and queerest fish, it’s about the most perfect tribute a literary grave-robber like me could want. Poe never actually lived here, but we’re assured he visited the place during his army days sometime between 1827 and 1829, as part of a detachment attending the visiting Marquis de Lafayette. This is pretty much the literary equivalent of “George Washington Would Have Slept Here If He Hadn’t Thought Better of It and Slept Someplace Else,” but somehow it works.

The front door creaks open into the gift shop, chockablock with gloom-and-doom knickknacks. Want an obsidian raven to go with your iron-on tattoo of Poe? Look no further. The new exec director (an English major from a nearby college, seemingly undeterred by the fate of her predecessors) takes my donation and kits me out with a laminated tour map, about the size and shape of a coffee-shop menu.

The dank first room holds mostly artifacts from Poe’s relations — a mother’s playbill, a sister’s blouse, that sort of thing. As holy relics go, this is pretty attenuated stuff, too remote from Poe to rate much of a contact high. Far juicier is the scriptorium, with letters and other manuscripts from Himself.

Someday I should blog about great authors’ handwriting. Graphologists lavish so much attention on the scriptorial fingerprints of criminals and random customers, whose complexes are hypothetical and probably not all that interesting. Wouldn’t it be more provocative to look at the scribbles of actual writers, whose psyches are incontestably worth investigating? Poe’s hand, for example, is claustrophobic — tiny, careful, and regrettably quite light. It looks almost typeset, only against a platen overdue for its next inking. You get the impression of a man buried alive and losing strength, conserving both breath and paper.

The few buildings of the Poe Museum huddle around a spooky but peaceful rectangular courtyard, weirdly reminiscent of the church cemetery where Scottie discovers Carlotta’s grave in Vertigo. Today the quadrangle is incongruously decked out with a white canvas tent and ranks of matching folding chairs. Seems there’s a wedding at 5 o’clock. Anybody mind telling me who’d get married at the Edgar Allen Poe Museum? Board members? Writers? Goths?

At the far end there’s a plaster bust of a downcast Poe, looking suitably saturnine on a pedestal under a little Georgian shrine. I struck a parallel pose next to him for a quick snapshot, but next to his, my melancholy aspect looks predictably ersatz – the funk of a college student in psychoanalysis because he thinks it makes him deep.

Adjacent to the bust is a final gallery devoted to temporary exhibitions, though “temporary” in this time-forgotten hush is a relative term. It’s a small, well-arranged show, too, devoted to Poe’s continuing relevance to the visual arts. A nice selection of graphic novels repose on walls and in vitrines, but the big draw for me is a Poe issue from the late, lamented Classic Comics series.

Classic Comics, for those like me to whom it’s only a secondhand memory, was the brainchild of Albert Lewis Kanter, an eccentric publisher who decided that adapting great novels into comic books might be a way of sneaking literature under the pillows of impressionable children. The titles leaned strongly toward landmarks of melodrama and adventure, starting with The Three Musketeers in 1941 and suspending sadly with Verne’s Mysterious Island six years later. Along the way they made time for a “3 Famous Mysteries” issue, which featured a Guy de Maupassant story, Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, and Poe’s redoubtable detective C. Auguste Dupin, who taught Sir Arthur Conan Doyle everything he knew.

I slouched against a black-painted wall in this last gallery, admiring Kanter’s short-lived push for great literature among the pimpled and sweaty future of America. Predictably, it couldn’t but remind me of The Big You-Know-What. Is this what becomes of quixotic attempts to democratize good books? With my boss relinquishing his chairmanship early next year, will The Big Read wind up under glass somewhere, just another stillborn stab at taking good books down off the medicine shelf and smuggling them under the covers with a flashlight, where they belong?

Not if I have anything to say about it. That’s why I’m hitting the road this September in Rosie the BigReadMobile for The Big Ride, a cross-country road trip through roughly 30 Big Read towns in 25 days, designed to spread the word about the program in as splashy a way as possible. More about this as the itinerary crystallizes, with questions and curiosity cheerfully entertained at kipend@arts.gov in the meantime. In other words, don’t look now, but the Big Ride is rolling down the road toward a city or town near you, with Steinbeck in back poring over WPA maps, Hammett in the passenger seat violating open-container laws, and Edith Wharton hanging on for dear life…

July 14, 2008
St. Mary’s County, MD

My jaw was long and razor-burned, my hair a brownish pond icing up from the temples in. I looked rather pleasantly like a salt-and-pepper satan. I was tailing Sam Hammett down Great Mills Road in St. Mary’s County, Md., where he was born, but the trail was a hundred years cold.

Everywhere I went, I got “Sam who?” After a day of chasing played-out leads and a night at some fleabag, I was fed up and on my way out of town. While my imaginary Argentine secretary, Effie Peron, ducked into a filling station to powder her nose, I called the last number I had for the county tourism bureau. A courtly man with an accent like crab cakes and clotted cream answered. Louis Buckler, he called himself, and asked me my business. I told him.

“The Hammett place?” he said. “Try up Indian Hill Road. Big house, two or three stories, with a wing on the side. Two chimneys, even.”

“You mean it’s still standing?”

“Standing? Hell, it’s still in the family.”

I took the directions down and pointed my motor accordingly. A house approximating Buckler’s description loomed up on the left. We were barely out of the car when a couple with a child emerged and made us welcome.

“I’m Connie Little,” the frail said, extending a hand. “I’m the librarian around here.”

I introduced myself and brandished a buff-colored card at them.

“You’re from The Big Read?”

Grudgingly I allowed as how I was. It’s getting harder and harder to keep my hatbrim down and get a simple job done, what with all the hoopla about the Read, but the hell with it.

“So this isn’t Hammett’s house?”

“No, that’s back along Great Mills Road. Watch for the historical marker about him.”

“There’s a sign about him?”

“You can’t miss it.”

Effie said, “He already did.”

She folded her legs back into the passenger seat of the sedan with no great urgency, and we backtracked to Great Mills. It’s amazing how different a stretch of road can look when you’re headed back down the way you came. If I’d been the philosophical type, I might have made something of that. Sure enough, up ahead on the right was a weathered white sign marking Hammett’s birthplace.

A wooden sign commemorates the Hammetts’ ancestral pile, Hopewell & Aim. No points deducted for spelling, but the omission of “Red Harvest” seems a shame. Photo by David Kipen.

We snapped the marker with my Kodak and got back into my machine. Just as Buckler had described it – but nowhere near where he’d put it – down a dead end next to a driving range stood the house. It had seen better days, but you would have too, after all that time. I went around back and found a polite but wary woman there, picking cucumbers. She identified herself as a descendant of the family who’d bought out the Hammetts, and surrendered her name. It wasn’t his.

So much for Buckler’s story about Hammetts still on the premises. Together she and I circumambulated the property. On one side was a small manmade lake, on the other a jumble of rusting farm equipment. The man of the house came onto the porch, blinking. We stood there, me, Effie and the two of them. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but this wasn’t it. A squirrel scampered around a tall outdoor cage. The woman noticed my attention and answered it.

“He likes it here. We only lock him up on account of the dogs.”

Just then a gunshot echoed across the lake.

“That’ll be the sportsman’s club. It’s hunting season.”

I talked my way into the place. It was as if a 200-year-old farmhouse had eaten a suburban bungalow whole and washed it down with a swig of air freshener. The only trace that remained of the house Hammett grew up in was the view from a second-floor window above the front porch. I stared out of it a long time.

I’d come on a bad tip that led to a good one, with a dead writer in my head and an imaginary woman by my side. It was good to be there, hearing the gunfire, kidding myself that it all added up to something. My hostess tried to spook me with stories about weird noises at night, but I wasn’t biting.

Above the second-floor landing was a locked rectangular trapdoor, painted brown and scored with scratches. I tried to get a runelike symbol on it to look like an H, but no dice. Some doors you just can’t open. I was trying to picture Hammett up in the attic as a kid, woolgathering out the window, that week’s library books freshly devoured at his side. I took a picture of the trapdoor and hoped the snap might tell me what the original wouldn’t.

July 3, 2008
Washington, DC

Mark Twain’s advice about the adjective, “When in doubt, strike it out,” has been pressganged into service against a lot of language besides just adjectives. Nowadays, reckless editors use it against just about anything a writer might be on the fence about. Rules are tricky things, as I discovered while drawing up a list of useful ones for writers. But, as someone who used to work for a magazine that drew up an annual roster of the 100 coolest people in Los Angeles, I’m hardly insensitive to the appeal of good list. With that in mind, here are ten practical rules for writers, suitable for recent graduates but perhaps not completely irrelevant to old hands, either. Until the Salk Institute cooks up a vaccine against procrastination, these will have to do:

1. Join a writers group, if only for the deadline. Always, for anything you write, have a deadline. When you meet one deadline, make another. When you blow one, definitely make another, and by all means forget you ever made the first one. Guilt is not your friend.

2. Be funny. Whether you’re writing comedy or not, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be amazing, because writing well without at least occasionally being funny is almost impossible. Try to make a reader laugh, or at least smile, with the way you pace and phrase a line. If you can’t use language to provoke one of the commonest, most pleasurable experiences around — laughter — how in the world are you going to do the harder but not necessarily better thing, and make a reader cry?

3. Enlarge your vocabulary. I’m serious. Your vocabulary is your tacklebox. If you go fishing with only a couple of lures, you’ll catch the same kind of fish over and over. Bring an overstuffed tacklebox, and there’s no lunker you can’t land. Use your vocabulary judiciously, of course, because not everybody has as big a one as you do. But don’t be afraid, every once in a while, to use a word your reader might not know. How else are they going to learn? How else did you?

4. Keep it sensual. By this I don’t mean write dirty, I mean engage all of a reader’s senses, especially but not exclusively the visual. Whether with a description or a metaphor, create pictures in your audience’s head. If you want to write about abstractions, be a philosopher, and reach even fewer readers than you already do.

5. Make stuff up. There’s been a vogue lately for writing that feeds on pre-existing material: novels about a famous love affair, novels about a notorious calamity, novels about great writers, etc. This kind of novel can work, but something original is almost always better than something derivative — more surprising, more fun, more suspenseful. In fiction, as on Wall Street, derivatives are an easy payday, but they don’t create wealth; they only redistribute it. The trouble with making up a new story is, alas, that it’s harder. Does Antioch teach a full-length course in plotting? I wonder, because it’s the least teachable skill a writer needs. If only it were the least important.

A related point here: the difference between telling the truth and making stuff up is getting slippery lately. When in doubt, trust what works. If the true stuff reads better, you’re probably writing nonfiction, so take out most of the made-up stuff. If the made-up stuff reads better, you’re writing fiction, so take out most of the true stuff. If you can’t decide which stuff reads better, write poetry. There at least, the true and the made-up belong together.

6. Keep rewriting the ending till it’s perfect; then wait a week and write it again. Writing an ending is the great lost art in American fiction. With the possible exception of your first graf, your last graf is the most important. If you can’t decide between two endings, they probably both need work.

7. Go for broke. Odds are you’ll be broke anyway, so you may as well go for it.

8 . Write every day. I’ve never tried this myself, but I hear it works.