June 10, 2008
Minneapolis, MN

He looked like a fourth Pep Boy. He wore a pencil moustache, a crew cut, and owlish black glasses. The cigar, I’m probably making up. And that voice! Brooklyn or the Bronx, whichever one’s thicker. He used it to talk about books the way a great sports-talk host talks about sports: volubly, without repetition, as if nothing else in the world could matter. He was Matthew J. Bruccoli, and he was one of the best friends American literature and The Big Read, and any of his friends, ever had.

I first encountered Matt Bruccoli years before I met him, as the author of the Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Leave it to Matt, with his encyclopedic, even Googolic knowledge of Fitzgerald’s every word, to pick out from that treasurehouse the perfect, emblematic, unforgettable title.

Matthew Bruccoli. Photo courtesy of the University of South Carolina.

Meeting him had to wait until years later, not long after I arrived from the San Francisco Chronicle to become program director of The Big Read. Dan in audio was putting together one of our first Big Read CDs, about The Great Gatsby, and I just knew we had to get Bruccoli. It wasn’t easy. Arch-bibliophile that he is, Matt had taken to email like a duck to buckshot. Somehow, though, through a forest of intermediaries, I got through to him and, with a nervousness that looks absurd in retrospect, finally winkled him out of South Carolina and into the Big Read office.

My first impression was that he had walked up all seven flights. Bruccoli came in breathless, perspiring in suit and tie, carrying a plump satchel. After a few minutes of careening conversation that was like a table of contents for every conversation we would ever have, Dan ushered him into the audio booth, a notorious sweatbox.

In impassioned but scholarly, extemporaneous yet diagrammable paragraphs — not just on Fitzgerald, but on Hemingway and Hammett besides — Prof. Bruccoli held us spellbound for an hour easy, never once loosening his foulard, while all around him swigged water by the nalgene.

“Strivers!”, he cried, nailing for legions of Big Read listeners in one emphatically flung word the generation of ambitious dreamers for whom Gatsby stood in. Around the office even now, at the mention of Matt’s name, it’s a contest between Dan and me to see who can pronounce it with a more faithful New York honk. “Strivers!” The merest hint of an audible “r” is grounds for immediate disqualification.

Bruccoli was a striver too. Like the teenager in the stacks that Salinger and Updike used to fantasize about, Bruccoli was a bookish kid from an unbookish household. One day he wandered sweatily from a stickball game into a candystore, recognized Fitzgerald’s name on a paperback spinner from a radio play the week before, picked up Gatsby, and he was off to the races. If young Matt was anywhere near as good at stickball as he was at reading, the loss to American sport was incalculable.

Sixty years later, in the home he and Arlyn finally made in Columbia, S.C., he was still that same book-drunk Katzenjammer Kid, only all grown up, and living in the best candystore any kid with a sweet tooth for books ever had. People natter on a lot about book-filled houses, and they go on a lot about light-filled houses, too. Thanks probably more to Arlyn, their house is the only one I’ve ever visited that was both.

I’m sorry I’ll never see Matt lunging across his study to show me yet another association copy he’d picked up for a song. I’m sorry we’ll never put on the screenwriters conference we brainstormed about for the last year. And, maybe more than anything, I’m sorry for all the Big Read cities full of teenagers he won’t get to visit now, and contaminate with his enthusiasm for Fitzgerald in particular and life in general.

It wasn’t easy, but I had to smile when I saw in his local paper’s obituary that Matt had died “at his Heathwood Circle home.” That only made sense. Matt could never have died in a hospital room. Not enough books in it.

If I forced myself to sum up in a word this man so congenitally besotted with the American language, that word would be “bookman.” Matt Bruccoli was a bookman the way old wharf rats talk about “watermen,” men who, whether navigating the sea, fishing it or just looking out longingly at it, are unimaginable away from the their chosen element. Matt Bruccoli’s element was books, and I can’t even write about him without using the technology he so disdained to set this remembrance of him in the only possible font for it: Bookman Old Style.

June 3, 2008
Washington, DC

Last week in Los Angeles, thousands of publishing professionals descended on BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual four-day orgy of gladhanding and handwringing. If you’re reading this, the prospect of everybody from our Readers Circle member Azar Nafisi to Andre Dubus III converging just down the street from L.A.’s Original Pantry (”We Never Close”) might have had you calling friends in town for spare couch space.

But if you prefer not to read, especially novels or poetry — in common with more than half of America at the moment–then you probably don’t give a flying Wallenda. But, as it turns out, this nonreading cohort’s days may be numbered. If unemployment, prison, or early death don’t get them, as they disproportionately do with folks who know how to read but don’t, The Big Read is gunning for them too.

I need not to tell readers of this blog (recently recognized for excellence by the National Association of Government Communicators — which may explain why nobody’s heard anything about this ) that The Big Read is getting more and more Americans to pick up and devour good, meaty novels alongside their neighbors. What’s news is that, in addition to Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Rudy Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, The Big Read and its Readers Circle have just added four new titles to our growing list:

• A special selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s surreal short fiction and brooding poetry will acquaint cities and towns with this short-lived titan of American literature, whose dread-soaked dreams pioneered both the horror story and detective fiction. His verse marks the first appearance of poetry on the national Big Read list and, after The Maltese Falcon, the second appearance of a black bird.
• Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, will join the list and introduce readers to the agile, compassionate storytelling of a modern master, Her novels of immigrant and Native American families on the Great Plains have drawn accolades as recently as this year for her new novel, The Plague of Doves.
• Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey investigates the lives of five pilgrims killed in a bridge collapse, and deepens over scarcely a hundred pages to explore the question — sadly more contemporary than ever — of why violent, untimely death spares most of us, yet searches out an unlucky few. Also, for the first time among the now-twenty Big Read novels, students and theater companies will be encouraged to enrich their local celebrations of Wilder’s work with a production of his most enduring play: Our Town.
• The connected short fiction of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried follows a platoon of young soldiers into the jungles of Vietnam, where the brutality of war, the joys of camaraderie, and death’s fateful lottery await them all — and where even a fresh-faced American girl, visiting her sweetheart, can go frighteningly native.

Coming up in the blog: Posts on each of these books and writers, a Great Gatsby cruise, Big Read orientation in Minneapolis, and scads more…

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.

March 13, 2008
Washington, DC

At least once every 75 years or so, the federal government does something right for American literature.

In 1935, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration recognized that scribblers, no less than stonemasons and bridgebuilders, needed work, and created the Federal Writers Project (FWP) to “hold up a mirror to America.” In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts founded The Big Read, a nationwide initiative using one-city, one-book programs to restore reading to the heart of American life. With luck — and maybe an assist from the modest proposal below — by 2075 there may still be an audience, not just for great books but for newspapers, which taught me how to read.

The Great Depression and the New Deal seem much on people’s minds of late, and for alarmingly more than the predictable anniversary-related reasons. Bookstores this month are making room for Nick Taylor’s American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work. This fall they’ll stock the FWP-inspired State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America by Sean Wilsey and Matt Weiland. And this week several arms of the Library of Congress, including the indispensable Center for the Book and the American Folklife Center, will host a 75th-anniversary celebration and exploration of the New Deal. (For more on this event, go to http://www.loc.gov/folklife/newdeal/index.html)

For any writer, though, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be the American Guides, a series of travel books to all 50 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck called the American Guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.”

I bring all this up because I just got back from a long drive through Big Reads in Worcester, Mass.; Owednsoro, Ky.; and Terre Haute, Ind. Good citizenship and great readership made common cause all along the way. The weather even held up until I got caught in a brainstorm driving through Massachusetts: It suddenly hit me that Mapquest.com is pretty good for getting you from A to B, but, for points between, you might as well be locked in the trunk. There’s no provision for discovering any of America’s inexhaustible shunpike literature and history — precisely the lore in which the American Guides abound.

With that in mind, I’m callingfor the creation of a free, route-based, readily searchable online repository of all the text and photography from every last American Guide, with the Center for the Book’s literary maps to all 50 states thrown in for good measure. Copyright law here should prove less of a headache than usual, considering that the American taxpayer already paid for this priceless treasure house a lifetime ago.

As for the expense of digitization and organization, Mapquest itself is rumored to have a spare shekel or two lying around. Their website’s “Avoid Toll Roads” option has become a boon to motorists everywhere, but a “Seek Out Literary Birthplaces” link would have a charm all its own to advertisers as well as drivers. Readers of Zora Neale Hurston’s indestructible Their Eyes Were Watching God — the focus of thriving Big Reads from Milwaukee to Louisiana, and in 11 other cities and towns around the country just this spring — might possibly enjoy a Florida vacation even more if they had Hurston herself in the back seat, pointing out the sights.

I bring up Hurston especially because this Friday at 5 o’clock, I mean to shake the hand of 91-year-old Stetson Kennedy, who worked with her on the Florida Writers Project back when, as he remembers, lighting one of her ever-present cigarettes could have gotten them both lynched. In my travels for The Big Read, I’ve already shaken the hand of a man one handshake removed from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. I shook the hand of the great American novelist Charles Portis, who hasn’t granted an interview since Big Read author Harper Lee was cheerfully chatting up the press on behalf of her first novel.

Most important, I’ve hugged the Hartford, Conn., librarian who e-mailed me last week about a man in his twenties who “had never read a book, but decided to pick up The Maltese Falcon because everybody else was reading it…’Look how much I read,’ he told [the librarian] proudly. He left work saying that he was going home to finish reading the book tonight.”

That may not quite be the New Deal. But at a time when writers make headlines by lying, but can’t even get reviewed for telling the truth, The Big Read is a sweet deal just the same. I look forward to meeting one of the last survivors of the Federal Writers Project this Friday and shaking on it.

March 4, 2008
Worcester, MA

When I first heard about The Big Read sponsored by UMass Memorial Healthcare, I have to admit I pictured a couple of candystripers pushing a book cart down a hospital corridor. What I discovered when I fetched up in Worcester the other day was something altogether different, and leagues better. More about this soon I hope, but for now have a look at this shot of the sisters Labeeby and Irma Servatius.

Irma heard about Worcester’s Read of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and volunteered to play for the kickoff last month. That went so well that Sharon and Rosa of UMass invited her to come back to play for the finale I attended over the weekend. Out of her and her sister’s fiddles poured Telemann, Britten, and Mozart, accompanied by an extemporaneous interweaving of musical and literary commentary from Irma that would have done Leonard Bernstein proud.

I bring this up not just because it knocked my eye out, or because Irma’s new chamber orchestra deserves all the encouragement and support it can get, but also because of what ran in the L.A. Times last Monday. Under the headline “Big Read or Big Waste?”, some freelance blogger got off an op-ed piece at the expense of a certain nationwide reading program dear to us all.

This shouldn’t have bothered me so much. Time was, I’d have written most anything for a byline in my hometown paper, so I can’t really begrudge some other guy for coveting the same platform. But anybody who knows me knows how much I believe in The Big Read. The thought that we’re all going to have to work even harder to dispel a few misperceptions created by this piece, just set my ordinarily tepid blood to boiling. I fired off a letter to the editor, the gist of which the Times obligingly ran as follows:

Last week, a woman in St. Helens, Ore., thanked a nationwide program called the Big Read for getting her teenage son to dive into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon - - thanks I keep hearing, in different words, all across the country. But this Op-Ed article called the one-city, one-book initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts silly and sentimental, and asked incredulously, “Who could be inspired?”

Don’t take my word for its effectiveness. Ask any of the roughly 500 people who jammed a Big Read event last April in Santa Clarita to cheer for Ray Bradbury; or see for yourself, by attending any of dozens of Eastside events this spring celebrating Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Bless Me, Ultima.

Who could be inspired by such “unobjectionable” writers as Hammett, Bradbury, Anaya and Cynthia Ozick? Everybody from poor kids in East St. Louis to a Los Angeles now reeling from the impending closure of Dutton’s Books, to a cynical Angeleno ex-book critic like me. The NEA encourages all people to help arrest and, ideally, reverse the American reading decline in any way they choose, but the Big Read is working.”

And so it is. The Big Read worked in Worcester, and here in Owensboro, Kentucky, last night, and I daresay it’ll work in Terre Haute tomorrow. My thanks again to everybody who makes it work. Literacy coordinator Sharon Lindgren of UMass has statistics proving that readers live longer, and you are exactly the people I want living the longest…

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…

The farmer and the rancher should be friends. This home truth from Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for Oklahoma loses none of its infinite applicability by being, as I just embarrassingly found out, a misquotation. (Future blog post: The Causes and Sometimes Beneficial Effects of Inadvertent Misquotation.) The real lyric goes, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.” In other words, folks with more in common than not, should be nicer to each other than not. Hammerstein’s nostrum goes for not just farmers and the cowmen, but also writers and editors, writing professors and English professors, and — the indirect text of today’s sermon — books and computers.

If Leo Tolstoy could learn to ride a bicycle at 67, even my mother can master a computer.

Exhibit A in my brief is how much fun it is to read the print edition of the Sunday paper with the Internet handy. Want to know who won the liner notes category while reading the Grammys wrap-up? Look it up online. Want to remind yourself when the show of WWII internee Chiura Obata’s Yosemite paintings opens at the Smithsonian? Look it up online, then paste it into your calendar software. You get the idea.

Exhibit B is Michael A. Denner’s “Totally Unofficial Readers’ Blog for Champaign-Urbana’s BIG READ.” Prof. Denner sent me greetings at kipend@arts.gov and introduced himself: “I’ll be giving the keynote address at Urbana-Champaign’s Big Read — on The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’ve been blogging on my lecture, on my reactions to re-reading the novel.”
He thought I’d find it interesting, and was he ever right. It’s a terrific window into how a smart academic can write for a general readership and dispel the noxious stereotype of scholars as jargon-bound eggheads whose prose tastes like a tweed elbow patch. Check it out at the puckishly named http://ivanisdead.blogspot.com/.

Michael’s work is emblematic of how a lot of campuses around the country, such as Washington U. in St. Louis and Parkville in Kansas City, are starting to embrace The Big Read as a way of improving town-gown relations. It’s also a great way of creating a greater sense of fellowship among students, as colleges across the country are discovering with their campus reads, whether affiliated with The Big Read or no. And if anybody knows of some information clearinghouse where I can find a list of campus reads around the country, I’d love to reach out to any of them that could use a little NEA help to cope with all the demands of such an undertaking.

Finally today, a hearty hello to Victoria Hutter, just joining the Big Read as communications director designate. Victoria is a Broadway baby, through and through, as anybody lucky enough to see the annual NEA amateur theatricals she directs around here can attest. Probably it’s her new eyes on the blog that inspired this morning’s Hammerstein lede. Remarkable how, in ways not always apparent to the author, readership propels and steers a writer’s ship.

Speaking of which, keep those cards and letters coming to kipend@arts.gov. Do you have a Big Read blog like Michael’s? Clue me in…

One of the regained pleasures of no longer reviewing professionally is the inalienable privilege of writing about books I haven’t read. Thanks to the happy distractions of The Big Read, the universe of books I haven’t read isn’t exactly shrinking. The two books I most want to read right now are American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor, and Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream by Edward Humes. Taken together these books represent two of the best things the federal government ever did for its employers — i.e., us. As I hope to prove in a follow-up post, the pair also suggests yet another prime suspect in the perpetual Who Killed Reading? inquest, which The Big Read endeavors to interrupt by impolitely resurrecting the victim.

The book that started the American Guides revival.

Every 70 years, it so happens, the federal government does something important for reading and writing in America. In the 1860s, it was the Civil War — a monumental slaughter (as detailed in Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s new book This Republic of Suffering, also under the nightstand), but still trade publishing’s most popular perennial subject. Right now, Congress’s gift to literature is The Big Read. In between, in the 1930s, it was the Works Progress Administration, President Roosevelt’s initiative to get America working again.

Not surprisingly, my favorite part of the WPA was the Federal Writers Project. During the Depression, little different from bricklayers and bridgebuilders, almost all writers were out of work. The FWP stepped in and hired them to write, among other things, the American Guides: a series of travel books to all 50 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other glories. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck wrote of the American Guides that

The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it. It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating.

In addition to introducing legions of Americans to the amazements of their own country, the FWP incubated a cradleful of fine writers. If you’d walked into the Chicago office in 1937, you could have swapped water-cooler scuttlebutt with Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and the terrific, underrecognized African American writer and critic Margaret Walker, all working side-by-side. Thanks to Jabari Asim, by the way, late of Washington Book World and newly donning W.E.B. DuBois’s old eyeshade as editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, for the tip on Walker this morning at the National Book Critics Circle’s indispensable Critical Mass blog. I don’t know if that all-star Chicago office is a historical novel, stage play or a sitcom, but it’s sure as shooting a book proposal, as I keep telling my pal at the Trib, the Richard Daley biographer Elizabeth Taylor. Sorry, Liz, it’s open season now.

I see I’m nearing my word limit, and I haven’t even gotten to the G.I. Bill yet. Another day. Before I go, though, I just discovered that the American Folklife Center, the Center for the Book, and a whole lot of other jewels of the Library of Congress are hosting a symposium called Art, Culture, and Government: The New Deal at 75 here in D.C. March 13-14, with WPA films screening on the 15th at the National Archives all day long. A herd of Steinbeck’s red ponies and Gram Parsons’s wild horses couldn’t drag me away…

My memories of reading Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima last week in Marfa, Texas, are already receding into the selfsame happy, retrospective blur that this blog was designed to prevent. So, before memories of my present New York swing displace Marfa any further, a flashback…

The most outrageous story to come out of those 36 idyllic hours in Marfa, I didn’t even recognize as such until I casually mentioned it to Marcela Valdes at the National Book Critics Circle award nominations last week. Like the good journalist she is, she kindly pointed out that what I’m about to recount was a good story. The implication was that if I didn’t at least rough out a version of it somewhere fast, she’d be forced to do so herself and win embarrassingly wide acclaim for it.

I heard the story from Big Read co-organizer Joe Cabezuela as he toured me through his childhood alma mater, the Blackwell School. Joe is a friendly middle-aged Marfan, recognizable, with only a little prompting, from one of the high-school team photos that line the walls. Empty now but for memorabilia, the school isn’t a school anymore. From Joe’s description, in a way it never was.

Blackwell was where Marfa sent its nonwhite children. Despite some happy memories of Joe’s, and some good teachers who apparently did a lot with next to no funding, it sounds uncannily like the substandard school in Topeka that I visited in 2006 as the Brown v. Board of Education Historic Site. If not for a PTA that did what the school board wouldn’t, Blackwell might conceivably have been a school without books.

Nowadays, Joe wants to turn the Blackwell School into a historic site too. On the basis of something he showed me, I don’t blame him. There, in a corner of the surviving building, almost lost among yellowing photos and frayed uniforms, lies the coffin of Mr. Spanish.

Mr. Spanish was the name given to an effigy created and buried by the students — under teacher supervision — in a solemn assembly on school grounds. From that day forward, the speaking of Spanish was forbidden on campus, and anybody caught speaking his first language risked a good cuffing around. To contemplate that day, to stand next to the grown man once forced to participate in it, and then to look around at Marfa today, with its art galleries and fine independent bookstore and terrific new partly-bilingual public-radio station, is enough to give a visitor vertigo.

Marfa isn’t all the way there yet. To an extravagantly welcomed stranger passing through, the old Marfa and the new seem on cordial, nodding terms, friendly but not yet friends. That’s what made the Big Read kickoff at the stylish dancehall-turned-art-gallery Marfa Ballroom such a revelation. All of Marfa looked to be there, young and old, natives and new arrivals, all scoring their brand-new, free copies of Ultima. When San Antonio-based folksinger Azul invited the throng to join in on “Cielito Lindo,” there wasn’t a dry eye, or a silent voice, in the house.

In the mid-1960s the Blackwell School was closed, and all the students had to carry their desks through the streets to join their new classmates across town at the white school. The Blackwell School sat more or less empty until Joe and other alumni began to envision it as a new community center in town. A few years ago, they publicly disinterred Mr. Spanish from his shallow grave and restored him to his current place of honor in the Blackwell School exhibit. The irony is, they had to make a new Mr. Spanish for the occasion, because the old cardboard coffin and its contents had long since crumbled away to nothing.

January 8, 2008
San Francisco, CA

“The picture [of small-town Missouri in Tom Sawyer ] will be instructive to those who have fancied the whole Southwest a sort of vast Pike County, and have not conceived of a sober and serious and orderly contrast to the sort of life that has come to represent the Southwest in literature. ”

–William Dean Howells’ review of Tom Sawyer in the Atlantic Monthly

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

I know I only mentioned Howells’ reputation-making review of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad on Friday — at a link that appears to have crashed the University of Virginia’s server, no less. But I ran across this quote from Howell’s friendly piece on Tom Sawyer and just had to work it in.

The review may indeed be a little too chummy, considering that Howells and Twain had since the earlier review become quite close friends. What jumps out at me, though, is Howells’ endearingly Bostonian ideas about North American geography. First there’s his reference to “Pike County” — evidently more a byword for backwoods caricature then than now. Either that or maybe Howells was just, in Thomas Pynchon’s great phrase about misunderstood regionalism, showing off his ear before he had one.

Still more intriguing is his reference to “the Southwest,” someplace I always thought of as closer to Pike’s Peak than Pike County, Missouri. And then it hit me. To a Brahmin tenderfoot like Howells, 19th-century Missouri was the Southwest, just as Illinois was the Northwest — and wound up with the anachronistically named Northwestern University to prove it.

I’ve been griping about the coast-ism of the phrase “Pacific Northwest” for years, but it never occurred to me that the ever-mysterious East might have needed a Pacific Southwest to go with it. Then again, I can still remember the storied $25 no-reservation midnight flights between LA and San Francisco on PSA, alias “Pacific Southwest Airlines,” so traces may yet persist. Of course, by Tom Sawyer’s appearance in 1876 — fully a quarter century after California statehood — Howells should have known better. Sometimes they can be a little slow on the uptake out there in the Atlantic Northeast.