June 28 , 2007
Washington, DC

There I was down the road from the Mall of America, trying to shut it down. I was in a hotel ballroom, with all the green cantaloupe and hideous overbright chandeliers and stackable underpadded chairs that such a place entails, surrounded by the most unfailingly dedicated people I think I’ve ever met. They’re this fall’s Big Read organizers, representatives of the 117 cities and towns reading one of our dozen books between September and December. My only regret is that I didn’t have the time to compare notes with every last one of them, a dereliction I hope to redress during my barnstorming, stemwinding transcontinental road trip this fall.

Big Read organizers representing 117 cities and towns at the June orientation in Minneapolis. Photo by David Kipen

There were far too many great, larceny-worthy ideas in the air to play favorites by mentioning only a couple — at least until a later, fuller post. Suffice for now to say that if the whole country were one enormous Big Read megacity, the kickoff event would be one grape-stomping, falcon-swooping, geomantic, dipsomaniacal good time. After a while, all the books started to merge and blur on me. The Age of Wrath? The Maltese Mockingbird? Bless Me, Antonia?

The whole orientation felt a world away from our office, next to the other Mall of America. I work on the 7th floor of the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, right next to the National Mall, sometimes called America’s front yard. These have become the opposing poles of American life: the Mall of America and the National Mall, the shopping center and the front yard, consumerism and neighborhood.

And yet, consumerism doesn’t stack up as the enemy: As always, the enemy is incuriosity. If anybody’s going to bring the forces represented by the Mall of America and the National Mall together, my money’s on the 300 librarians, educators and impresarios in Minneapolis this week.

The trick is to co-opt the forces of commerce — and computers, and movies, and broadcasting, and all the other suspects so often framed for America’s reading decline — and use them in the service of reading, instead of against it. There’s nothing wrong with the electronic media, so long as people keep talking back to their screens. The active, engaged neighbors that reading literature creates, don’t need to be told this. They’re the ones who descended on Minneapolis to get a better handle on how to transform their cities and towns through the power of attentive reading. That’s not bookishness; that’s the very essence of activism.

It just occurred to me that in Minnesota, we weren’t too far from the headwaters of the mightiest river in America, the one that inspired America’s first great novelist. I hope it’s not overreaching to think that today we’re at the source of something, too — as our communications ace Paulette Beete said, something ginormous. And when, as we devoutly hope, a generation from now, more Americans are reading, becoming better citizens, better neighbors — when the Mall of America is a ghost town, with tumbleweeds blowing through its food courts and crickets chirping above the Muzak — hardly anybody’s going to know that it all started in the Grand Ballroom of the Minneapolis Holiday Inn…

June 25, 2007
Washington, DC

David’s at the American Library Association convention today, making converts to the good news about the Big Read, talking to libraries that have just finished their Big Reads, and congratulating the new grantees who wander by the NEA booth to get advance copies of the educational materials for their communities or take a look at the materials for the other Big Read novels. So I’m stealing this opportunity to give you my take on the two-day orientation for Big Read organizers in Minneapolis last week, where NEA Director of Communications Felicia Knight and I presented a session for grantees on working with the media.

In my last guest blog, I alluded to the fact that there’s a lot of work that goes on “behind the scenes” at NEA and at Arts Midwest in order to make the Big Read happen. I’ll spare you a recap and just say that sometimes — when my to-do list seems several volumes long — I need to be reminded why it is we work so hard on the Big Read, especially when many of us are also juggling several other projects.

I found my answer in the Orchard Ballroom of the Holiday Inn Select in Bloomington, Minnesota at approximately 1:30 pm on Tuesday, which is when each of the 117 Big Read teams shared what they thought was particularly unique about each of their programs. Although I’d read the list of new grantees several times, it wasn’t until the orientation that the sheer diversity of the Big Read grantees sank in. Of course libraries and centers for the book lead the list, which is to be expected — bringing readers and great books into enduring relationships is their mission. Not-so-obvious grantees included the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the RI Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Will & Company — a Los Angeles-based multicultural theater company, and two campuses of the State University of New York.

I lost track of how many great activities were mentioned as we figuratively crisscrossed the U.S., hearing organizers talk about how they were planning to use their Big Read events to address issues such as immigration, racial tension, the effects of war on veterans and their families, the preservation of community histories, domestic violence, and poverty.

A few highlights: The Brooklyn Public Library (NYC) will hold book discussions on To Kill a Mockingbird in 5 different languages reflecting the Borough’s diversity; the Arlington Public Library (VA), across the river from our offices in Washington, DC, is planning a community mural to celebrate Bless Me, Ultima; Spartanburg County Public Libraries (SC) has convinced Fitzgerald scholar (and Big Read Readers Circle Member) Matthew Bruccoli to lend his precious trove of Fitzgerald memorabilia for their Big Read of The Great Gatsby; and in Albuquerque, NM, Bernalillo County will host an event for curanderas in celebration of Rudolfo Anaya’s healer, Ultima.

Almost everything I read or see or hear in the media says that we live in a culture and at a time where the arts simply don’t matter. To misquote W.H. Auden, “The arts make nothing happen.” Yet all 117 organizations represented in that banquet room — and the 82 organizations that had previously hosted Big Reads — had come to the conclusion that the arts, specifically literature, were a proven, immediate, and necessary way to address the growing laundry list of what’s not going quite right in our country today.

Which brings me back to why do I — and all of the Big Read team — work so hard on the program? Allow me to answer by borrowing just a few of the many diverse responses to question 6 of the Big Read application — “Briefly discuss why you wish to participate in the Big Read” — from the 117 communities who are making the Big Read happen this fall and winter: “to address the issues of race prevalent in most Southern cities and to discuss the importance of place and self-worth”; “to provide an enjoyable experience that is intellectually stimulating and fosters a stronger sense of community”; because “the book’s emphasis on developing and recognizing qualities like integrity, conscience, respect, bravery, and maturity are lessons that have never been more important”; because “whether for instruction or recreation, reading informs the mind and expands the human spirit”; because “we have felt the reality of life as a community and have recovered through the essential grit of our people and our community togetherness”; and because “conversations with others about our values, ethics, and the important questions of our time are one of the things that make us civic and social persons.”

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…