August 27, 2008
Washington, DC

25 states. 15 days. 8 novels. 2 countries. 1 Ford Escape Hybrid. 1 seriously saddle-sore G-man.

The Big Read initiative will hit the highway Sept. 12-27 for the Big Ride, a fortnight of events around the country designed to stitch together more than a dozen of the two hundred cities and towns hosting NEA-sponsored one-city-one-book programs during the 2008-2009 school year. As project director, I’ll have a ringside seat behind the wheel as all these communities come together for monthlong celebrations of great literature.

The tentative waypoints of the Big Ride loop, with this caveat: I brake for historical markers.

Among other pit stops on the trip, I’ll meet up with residents of Winston-Salem reading The Grapes of Wrath, help unveil an NEA-midwifed anthology of Mexican literature in El Paso, celebrate The Great Gatsby on a phantom pub-crawl of San Francisco’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, watch Coloradoans learn how to mush a dogsled team in tribute to The Call of the Wild, and just generally make a spectacle of myself in service of The Big Read.

Envisioned as the first of several such road trips, September’s Ride marks a sort of national debut for The Big Read. Developed three years ago in response to the 2004’s alarming Reading at Risk report ( http://www.arts.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php ) — which found that fewer than half of Americans today read for pleasure — The Big Read has given people in hundreds of cities and towns something in common to talk about more interesting than the weather. Never before, though, have consecutive events across the country communicated the ambitious scope of the project.

Since 2005, organizations ranging from libraries to zoos have received grants to create calendars of events around books they choose from a growing NEA list. The roster of more than 20 books includes stories as beloved as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and as new as Tobias Wolff’s Old School — a book I had the honor of reviewing in the San Francisco Chronicle just five years ago as the Chron’s book critic.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Motor Company, my colleagues and I at The Big Read now have an eye-catching, borscht-red, fuel-efficient pair of wheels to tool around the country in. Nicknamed Rosie — for the paint job, but also for Don Quixote’s old mount Rocinante — this hybrid gives the initiative a kitschy sense of adventure too rarely associated with reading nowadays. Here at the NEA, we avail ourselves of Rosie for transportation to keynote speeches, event introductions, even appearances in the occasional holiday parade. But Rosie’s trips have always been short hops — until now.

The whole idea of The Big Read has always been to remove from great books any taint of the medicinal, and restore the freshness that gave them their staying power in the first place. Cities and towns that participate report substantial upticks in library circulation, book sales, and general civic involvement. In other words, all indicators tell us that The Big Read is onto something. If a cross-country road trip in a hybrid can help rope lapsed readers into picking up a book, nobody should be above this kind of showmanship.

So watch this space for dispatches leading up to, and especially during, The Big Ride. Please bombard me at bigreadblog@arts.gov with any questions or suggestions about road food, deep-pocketed and/or philanthropy-minded gas or motel chains, audiobooks for company, mobile voice-recognition systems for dictation, literary sidetracks along the way, techniques for averting deep-vein thrombosis, and anything else that seems even tenuously relevant.

And please take a look at the tentative route map above. From the starting line here on Pennsylvania Ave. Sept. 12, to the breakers beyond Pacific Coast Highway Sept. 20, to the checkered flag back here on Sept. 27 at the National Book Festival, the Big Ride will help create readers from coast to coast and back again. If you find yourself anywhere along Rosie’s itinerary, or if you just see a red hybrid festooned with Big Read signage speeding by, by all means wave me down…

May 7, 2008
Delaware Valley, PA

Do you know the term “run of show”? It’s performers’ lingo for the printed rundown of every segment in any given revue, vaudeville bill, or other raree show. Submitted below, with abiding gratitude and wonderment, is an annotated run of show for last Friday’s kickoff of Pike County’s The Grapes of Wrath Big Read at the Delaware Valley High School auditorium, just inside the jagged Pennsylvania slice of the Penn-New York-New Jersey border pie. . .

“JAZZ BAND playing as audience enters under the direction of Lance Rauh

1. WELCOME REMARKS by Jeffrey Stocker”

A word here about Jeff Stocker’s American Readers Theatre, the principal grantee for this Pike County Big Read of Steinbeck: Beats me why more theater companies don’t apply for Big Read grants. To go by this troupe, rep companies have the showmanship, the elbow grease, and the chutzpah to round up partners all over town and put a Big Read out where everybody can see it. One instance of this is the terrific school participation that A.R.T. has lined up…

“2. GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY” performed by DVHS Band And Chorus under the direction of Gordon Pauling.

I have to confess, I was a mite skeptical of that “GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY.” Stocker introduced it by recounting how Steinbeck asked to have the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” printed on the endpapers to the hardcover edition of The Grapes of Wrath. The novel’s title comes from the song’s lyrics — written just a couple-three blocks from here, by Julia Ward Howe in the Willard Hotel, as all of us with bumper stickers reading “I Brake for Historical Markers” will tell you. But if the lyrics come from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” why not sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Still, any misgivings about the musical offerings were allayed in short order by the return of the high-school Jazz Band, and by some glorious musical surprises farther down the bill…

3. Introduction of DVHS Administration and Faculty by Dr. Candice Finan

4. Art Show on screen projections while Jazz Band plays

5. RED RIVER VALLEY performed by Dingman/Delaware Middle School Chorus under the direction of Brian Krauss”

Here’s where some real thought had obviously gone into the program. Up on a scrim behind the singers passed a montage of carefully chosen New Deal images by Dorothea Lange and other photographers for the Farm Security Administration. “Red River Valley” made the perfect followup to this medley, since it crops up not just in the John Ford and Nunnally Johnson’s classic movie of The Grapes of Wrath, but in just about every other picture Ford ever directed.

As you might expect of a Big Read ringmastered by a theatrical company, the film component of the Delaware Valley’s Big Read is especially strong. They’re showing The Grapes of Wrath, of course, but whose inspired idea was it to show Robert Riskin’s It Happened One Night, or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo? Great ideas both, the first for its pure screwball 1930s escapism, the second for its loving evocation of what movies and moviehouses meant to a country sandbagged by the Depression. Speaking of which, the vintage unrestored Milford Theatre in town is a real bijou in the rough. Anybody out there looking for a treasure is hereby enjoined to follow the neon glow to on Catherine Street in Milford, PA..

“6. Introduction of FILM FESTIVAL with showing of original trailer for THE GRAPES OF WRATH by Greg Giblin

7. “SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW” sung by Natasha Paolucci, DVHS student

8. “THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES” sung by Ray Weeks, Pike County HS”

There’s nothing like an old standard, belted out for all its worth by a teenager born around the time its copyright expired. Natasha Paolucci fairly sang the stuffing out of Yip Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” followed by music teacher Ray Weeks plangently crooning “Thanks for The Memories.” Just the thing for a Big Read wayfarer like me, pining from the road for the Jonathan Schwartz-programmed High Standards channel of our sainted Big Read partner XM Satellite Radio…

“9. AMERICAN READERS THEATRE read from THE GRAPES OF WRATH screenplay with Jared Feldman

10. JOFFREY BALLET SCHOOL presents “THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD,” performed by Danny Ryan and Nicole Padilla, choreography by John Magnus”

By this point, I was discreetly weeping. The whole kickoff was turning into a perfect distillation of the month to come, a sampler of the kind of meal I regrettably never get to stick around for. American Readers Theatre finally got to shine with one early and then one late scene from Nunnally Johnson’s Grapes of Wrath screenplay. The latter was Tom Joad’s climactic “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat” speech, which producer Darryl Zanuck used to take credit for with unwary interviewers — who didn’t that know it comes straight from the book.

Then came a mindblower. Turns out the choreographer John Magnus has a place in the area, so he corralled a couple of Joffrey dancers in from Chicago to perform a original pas de deux, set to Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Lovely, simply lovely.

“11. HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN,” performed by Sandy Stalter

12. CLOSING REMARKS by David Kipen, NEA Director of Literature, National Reading Initiatives

13. THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND,” performed by Natasha and Jared, with sing-along”

In between Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign song “Happy Days Are Here Again” and America’s shadow national anthem, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land “– in its true uncensored version, no small mercy — I took the microphone and snorfled out my lachrymose thanks for about double the allotted five minutes. Why had I never heard of Milford, Pennsylvania, before? Why haven’t you? All I know is, I wouldn’t have traded my aisle seat in the Delaware Valley High School Auditorium for Joel Cairo’s own orchestra seats at the Geary Theater in San Francisco.

There followed wine, cheese, and a whole lot of grapes, and at last a sorrowful look at the American flag bunting that became Abraham Lincoln’s impromptu death shroud, which reposes at, of all places, the Milford Historical Society. Then a festive wrap party hosted by Jeff Stocker and A.R.T. trouper Greg Giblin — who, I suspect, did a lot more of the heavy lifting for this thriving Big Read than he was letting on — and, belatedly, back to the nearby Port Jervis Comfort Inn for a warm bed and a too-early wake-up call. . .

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.”

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…

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?

July 13, 2007
Washington, DC

I hate to deluge the Communications office with yet another post, but by the clock on the wall, it’s time for Uncle David to dip into the ol’ mailbag and see what you blog fans out there in cyberland are exercised about. Turns out there’s a fascinating letter from someone who writes:

“I am curious of your stance on books which constantly battle censorship in schools and the public realm, such as Huckleberry Finn. Will you push to raise awareness of certain books which parents, or communities may deem inappropriate for the way they describe slavery, war, sexuality, inequality?”

Good question. As it turns out, there aren’t a whole lot of books out there that haven’t been deemed inappropriate by “somebody.” Here at the Big Read, at least three of our books reliably rank pretty high on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books: The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Farewell to Arms. I’d guess that the mystical elements in A Wizard of Earthsea and Bless Me, Ultima make them frequent targets, too.

But as for whether we’ll “push to raise awareness” of these or other potentially controversial books, my instinct is not to do any more pushing than our Readers Circle already did by putting them on the list. None of us would choose a book because it’s been banned, any more than we’d choose a book because it’s innocuous.

Our principal criterion is and always will be literary excellence. If that means ruffling a few mockingbird feathers, we’ll just have to live with it. Certainly Dashiell Hammett, author of our list’s Maltese Falcon — and nobody’s schoolmarm — isn’t going to be getting any posthumous medals from GLAAD any time soon.

As for Huck Finn, Big Read aficionados may have noticed that among our announced new additions for Fall ‘08 will be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the first place, Tom Sawyer is an unalloyed gem, and I’d argue a much deeper book than many smart people give it credit for. While more people may know a set-piece or two from Tom Sawyer — painting the fence, etc. — I suspect that more people have read Huck Finn, and one of things the Big Read endeavors to do as it hits its stride is to enlarge people’s ideas about
what is or isn’t canonical.

Second, Tom Sawyer is, on its own terms, a more successful book than Huck Finn. By that I don’t mean better, or deeper, or more worth reading. I only mean that Tom Sawyer realizes its own modest ambitions more completely than its sequel. The ending of Huck Finn just plain doesn’t work, as Big Read mainstay Ernest Hemingway was not the first to point out. The ending of Tom Sawyer, while perhaps less memorable, unquestionably delivers.

Third, as I’ve suggested, there’s more to Tom Sawyer than meets the eye, as there usually is to less-read books by great writers. Here, after all, is a book set in the antebellum South that begins with a scene about a fence–that is to say, a border — being painted white — that is to say, the opposite of black — as a result of somebody getting other people do his work for him. As Tom Lehrer once remarked, you don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out.

We do our best around here, but we need questions like this one to help keep us honest. So please, keep that correspondence coming. And in the meantime, check out the Big Read Blog’s maiden foray into the age of streaming video: some footage that Thomas Edison shot of Mark Twain …

June 8, 2007
Washington, DC

Bloggers are a gaggle of ignorant blowhards.

They are! All you have to do is speak ill of them and they fall all over themselves squawking about it, guaranteeing scads of free publicity to the unwary offender. There’s no surer ticket to instant notoriety this side of the MPAA ratings board, annoying whom has always been every controversial filmmaker’s shortcut onto the entertainment and op-ed pages. One of these days, some smart publicity-seeker is going to wise up and post an item saying something like, oh, “Bloggers are a gaggle of ignorant blowhards,” and just wait for all the Google hits to roll in.

He-ey…

Something like this even happened to a Big Read book once upon a time. When The Grapes of Wrath came out, it was denounced from one end of the Joads’ odyssey to the other. In Oklahoma, right upstanding pillars of the community attacked it as “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind,” all because it showed the squalor to which the Depression had reduced Oklahomans by the hundreds of thousands.

Sarah Cook with Big Read Readers Guides, outside the “Area of Refuge.” Photo by Molly-Thomas Hicks.

Steinbeck’s fellow Californians didn’t like his masterpiece much better. Agribusiness and its mouthpieces editorialized against The Grapes of Wrath, burned it, even published a counter-novel about how cushy the pickers really had it. Writer Rick Wartzmann, co-author of The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire — and a terrific voice on the Big Read audio guide to The Grapes of Wrath — is working on a book about The Grapes of Wrath’s reception in California’s Central Valley, and the story is enough to curl anyone’s toes.

Except, of course, for those of the Viking publicity’s department circa 1939, who knew free publicity when they saw it, and proceeded to milk the controversy for all it was worth. Cynical? Hardly. They had a great novel about a depressing subject to sell, and they were determined to sell it – in the words of that bestselling author Malcolm X – by any means necessary.

So yes, as in this photo shot outside the Big Read’s office door, literature is an Area of Refuge – whether from natural disaster, as the civil defense planners have ordained, or merely from the cares of the workaday world. But great social literature like Steinbeck’s is also an area of engagement with the world: its hugger-mugger, its shameless publicity stunts, even its bloggers, among whose ignorant, bloviating number I remain proud to count myself…

April 27, 2007
Miami, Florida

“And God keeps his appointment with Miami every sundown. Berthed on the east of Biscayne Bay, I can look to the western side, which I never fail to come top-side and do around sunset. Thus I get the benefit of his slashing paint brush all the way…The show is changed every day, but every performance is superb.”
–Zora Neale Hurston, in a winter 1950 letter

Miami has been reading that erstwhile Floridian Ernest Hemingway, not Hurston, but it’s always intriguing when two Big Read authors cross paths. There’ll even be a three-way confluence in Florida next January, when Cynthia Ozick’s largely Miami-set The Shawl joins eight other new books on the Big Read list. What other state boasts three Big Read books/authors, you ask? Answer, as they say, below…

Meantime, my Miami visit got off to a cuddly start with the unmistakable Michelin-man outline of a manatee, floating 17 stories beneath my hotel window and in no particular hurry. I, on the other hand, dashed downstairs to stroke, feed, or otherwise disturb the native fauna. Alas, by the time I got there, nature’s closest approximation of an inflatable pool toy had drifted off down the canal somewhere.

Who couldn’t write great literature at a desk like this, with a fishing reel and a stuffed oryx nearby, plus all your visitors safely behind a locked wrought-iron cage? Photo by David Kipen

Luckily, Alina Interian and Roselyne Pirson of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts drove up around then and spirited me out for a friendly debrief over lunch. Having met them last year during South Florida’s pilot-phase Read of Fahrenheit 451, I knew what to expect: never any apple-polishing, just unalloyed honesty. Alina wasn’t shy about wishing for some newer books on the list, so I was happy to trot out all the new titles for her. Just to be contrary, I started with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, savoring her mortification before throwing out our first 21st-century novel, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, plus all the others spaced more or less evenly between ‘em.

But at this rate, I’ll never get to the finale of the south Florida Big Read, a bus tour — which turned into a bus caravan, it was so oversubscribed — to Hemingway’s house on Key West. In preparation I’d read not just A Farewell to Arms but To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s only book set in Florida (or for that matter in the United States, unless you count the Nick Adams stories). William Faulkner and Jules Furthman’s script for the Bogart-Bacall-Hawks movie is more successful as a work of art, but boy is the book underrated. It’s got Hemingway’s best description of deep-sea fishing and his fullest, most ominous meditation on suicide. That’s not Bacall purring “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” but it ain’t hay.

Why waste time comparing apples and oranges, though, when you can eat frozen chocolate-covered Key lime pie on a stick? That was me, nuzzled by Hemingway’s bigger-than-ever army of six-toed cats, planted inside the security cage in the doorway of his second-floor writing study, just basking in the aura. I know it was juvenile, closer to fandom than to literary criticism. But after Hemingway’s Key West author Stuart McIvor’s informative lecture downstairs, we’d had our quota of literary criticism. It was time for a little basking, and I was more than equal to the task.

It all took me back to my first experience with Hemingway. I was in high school, and the teacher (more likely the school district, I now realize) had assigned The Sun Also Rises. The book possessed me so thoroughly that I wound up dragooning two classmates into a woefully underplanned troutfishing expedition into the High Sierra. All I remember now is devouring an entire delicious bagful of Snickers bars, heedless of the worm blood and fish scales on my fingers. That wasn’t literary criticism either, but it did for literature what literature does for life: flavor it, hallow it, light it up with Hurston’s “slashing paint brush” until it becomes something else, something finer.

And speaking of the High Sierra, the first state besides Florida to notch three Big Read books or authors is, you guessed it, California, with The Joy Luck Club, The Maltese Falcon, and at least half of The Grapes of Wrath. When I get to still-unrepresented Utah next month, I may have some explaining to do…

April 26, 2007
Stillwater, Oklahoma

I bring this up because I’m about to blog about one of the better Big Reads I’ve seen in my travels so far, specifically The Grapes of Wrath in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Unfortunately, I visited Stillwater a couple of weeks ago. In my defense, I had just blogged the day before. Also in my defense, it was late in the week, and anything I filed probably wouldn’t post until the following week. But my best defense is that I’m sure I had much better excuses at the time, before I forgot them all. Indefensible.

I can only take refuge in the procrastinator’s credo: When life gives you grapes, make Raisinets. So instead of performing my usual next-day, short-term-memory file-dump, I’m getting an early start on my long-term memories by reconstructing Stillwater without recourse to any cribnotes. And those memories consist of…

of…

of…

Yes! I remember fetching up at the Stillwater Library and having the Big Read coordinator there, Linda — no, Lynda! — Reynolds, show me their WPA photo exhibit. Right there, tacked onto the panels of a few eye-high, hinged bulletin boards zigzagging through the reference department, was a shot by Dorothea Lange of some Oklahoma family with its entire life piled high onto a precarious jalopy. I thought to myself, that’s a photo of the Joads. Intellectually, I’ve always known that the Joads stood in for at least 300,000 westward migrants, but until I saw that photo they were still, at some level, archetypal fictional characters. Not anymore.

Then that night I discovered that, to some Oklahomans, the Joads are neither tintypes nor archetypes so much as stereotypes, and libelous ones at that. The setting was the movie theater at the OSU Student Union, where the really dedicated university librarian Karen Neurohr had arranged to show the movie version, complete with captions for the hearing-impaired. An ESL teacher had brought her students to the screening, so that hearing and reading the dialogue at the same time might better fix Steinbeck’s language in their heads. A couple of bearish, gregarious guys from Libya seemed particularly engrossed.

Anyway, the movie slew the crowd the way it pretty much always does, and afterward the questions came with a large side of gratitude — until an older woman timorously raised her hand and wondered why Stillwater had to choose “this” book. Turns out that, in Oklahoma, The Grapes of Wrath is one very complicated masterpiece. Times have changed since the state’s congressman Lyle Boren called the novel “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind,” but it’s still the only representation of Oklahoma most Americans can name, and it’s not exactly a Valentine. It’s a tribute to human dignity under the most inhumane conditions, and not every Oklahoman wants to be remembered as poor, dirty, and ungrammatical, no matter how dignified.

Oklahoma State ESL students bask in the afterglow of a helpfully captioned screening of The Grapes of Wrath. Photo by David Kipen

I encouraged the woman a little, parried her a little, and finally I had to admit she had a point. There are times in the book — such as when Steinbeck has some Joad say “Chrismus,” even though spelling it right would sound just the same — there are times when Steinbeck’s respect comes mingled with just a whiff of condescension. It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it still bothers a few Oklahomans, but it’s there. Frankly, as a Californian, I’m entitled to a bigger beef with the book than any Oklahoman, since the Californians in it come off more inhumane than anybody. If the Oklahomans appear subhuman, it’s only because Californians reduced them to it.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I apologized. Right there in public, on behalf of my unconsulted fellow Californians, I apologized for how we treated the Oklahomans who came to us 70 years ago looking for nothing more than a day’s honest work and a night’s unrousted sleep. I don’t know if my apology helped, but it finally felt less hypocritical than defending a novel I love to a well-intentioned lady who couldn’t help reading a completely different book. I’ll always owe Stillwater for that overdue lesson in literary relativism. Beats the heck out of owing them a blog post…

April 4, 2007
Kansas City, Kansas

Please let me get this down before I forget too much of it. I just flew into Kansas City, Missouri, and rented a car from Janna at the Alamo counter, who noticed my Post-It-festooned Grapes of Wrath paperback and proceeded to fill me in on her classics-loving daughter and equally book-mad son — 400 Louis L’Amour paperbacks last year, Flags of Our Fathers just this week. I was still incognito when she said, “A book is the best gift you can give a kid,” but that’s not even the best part.

No, then I followed Molly’s Yahoo directions to my seemingly antiseptic airport hotel, and who should I find behind the reception desk but Kessa, looking up attentively from the pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Was she liking it?

Oh yes — even more than Juneteenth! Turns out she reads furtively on the job, and reads to her 11-year-old son when he still lets her. Then her co-worker looked up from down the counter and whispers, “I’m reading the best book, too: The Picture of Dorian Gray!”

“Wilde?” Kessa answers. “Oh, Oscar Wilde is just the bomb!”

By this point in the conversation — just to keep up — I figured I’d better identify myself as program director of the Big Read, whose kickoff celebration across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, I should’ve left for, eesh, 10 minutes ago. Here’s when Kessa looks me right in the eye and asks, “Well, what would it take to get something like the Big Read over here on the Missouri side?”

Collapsing on the floor in gratitude and, in Dashiell Hammett’s great phrase, making “more of a puddle than a pile there,” I recovered my composure long enough to fork over a business card and point her to http://www.neabigread.org. But all day long, I kept thinking about Kessa’s epidemic predicament: how to read at work when company policy discourages it.

Jessie, Emannuel and the other guys of Kansas City AYS, promising to read The Grapes of Wrath.

I thought about this at the kickoff event in Kansas City’s Memorial Hall an hour later, listening to Congressman Dennis Moore sing most of the verses from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” in a strong tenor. I thought about it palling around afterward with the kids from the AYS continuation school around the corner, and touring KCK’s steadily refurbishing library afterward, and admiring Minnesota Avenue’s lovingly restored Granada Theatre.

I’m still thinking about it now, the next morning: What can be done to show employers that reading at work — so long as customers aren’t waiting and heavy machinery isn’t involved — actually improves job performance? Certainly I enjoyed checking into my hotel far more with an engaged, literate desk clerk than I would have otherwise. Certainly CEOs complain enough about all the money they spend on remedial reading programs for some of their workers. What if companies started experimenting with the occasional Leave Your Daughter at Home and Bring a Book to Work Instead Day?

I know, I know, one transformative nationwide reading program at a time…