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…

August 24, 2007
Washington, DC

When I was in graduate school at San Diego State University, I took a seminar in Edith Wharton and Willa Cather that changed my life. The course changed me because it provided the chance to concentrate on the best novels of two truly exceptional writers; to compare their controversial lives and literary themes; and to do it with an excellent teacher and enthusiastic classmates — what could be better for a “Literature Specialist” like me?

But there was something missing. As a child growing up in North Hollywood, California, the childhood places of Willa Cather (Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley) and Edith Wharton (New York City, Italy, and France) seemed fascinating and exotic. Cather’s family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was ten, and Wharton bought land in Lenox, Massachusetts, to build her home, The Mount. Red Cloud and Lenox seemed as far away as Uganda or Switzerland to a young girl like me who traveled often in the realms of gold, but never on planes or trains. Yet because of the sensual, vivid way these writers described the plains of Nebraska, the valleys of Virginia, the bustle of New York, and the hills of Western Massachusetts in their fiction, all these unfamiliar places felt familiar through my imagination.

“This place of ours is really beautiful… the stillness, the greenness, the exuberance of my flowers, the perfume of my hemlock woods, & above all the moonlight nights on my big terrace, overlooking the lake…” –Edith Wharton in a letter to Bernard Berenson, August 6, 1911 Photo by Erika Koss

I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, but for 2007 it was time to make the journey to Cather’s beloved prairie and Wharton’s first real home. My work on the Big Read materials for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence fueled this abiding desire to travel to Red Cloud and Lenox. But for reasons more personal than professional, I suddenly needed to physically inhabit these places that transformed two of my favorite writers — if only for a couple days.

Reader, imagine my joy to travel from Washington, DC, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, in March, where Betty Kort, Executive Director of the Cather Foundation, and I took a walk through Cather’s prairie. Then imagine my delight to travel to Lenox, Massachusetts, in July with Betty, where we met Stephanie Copeland, the President and CEO of the Mount, and ate lunch on that “big terrace” that faces Wharton’s splendidly restored gardens, under her unconventional green and white awning, which protected us from the unexpected rain. Imagine my excitement, when the wonderful Mount librarian, Molly McPhee, took Betty and me for a private tour into Wharton’s restored library, where I was allowed to hold her copy of the French translation of The Age of Innocence — bound by Wharton in green and yellow with “EW” inscribed on its leather cover! Imagine my pleasure when I slept for two nights in a beautiful home set in the quiet forest not far from the Mount, finally understanding why Wharton left her fashionable New York City and Newport homes to design, build, and decorate an isolated country estate of her own creation.

“If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land…I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven.” — from Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia Photo by Erika Koss

I hope Big Read organizers for My Ántonia and The Age of Innocence will consider such a pilgrimage, and that high school teachers anywhere near Red Cloud or Lenox can afford to tackle the frustrating tasks of buses, chaperones, permission slips, and classroom time missed on required exams to give their students a first-hand experience with the sites that shaped these great American writers.

For although my passport now holds stamps from countries as far as Uganda and Switzerland, two places that I love best are right here in America.

August 9, 2007
Washington, DC

No two people ever read the same book. Partly, this is because few people ever read the same two books in a row. Every book we read, we also read juxtaposed against the book before and the one after.

For example, if you read the first 21st-century novel on the Big Read list, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, back to back with Big Read mainstay The Joy Luck Club, you might come away reflecting on the ways two very different short story writers have transmuted a few rudiments of their personal histories into their first acknowledged novels. (Wolff had a rookie effort he’s not real proud of.) But if you read a doubleheader of Old School and, to pick another Big Read title, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, what jumps out at you might be how two self-deceiving male protagonists look back on their lives and justify their mistakes.

The Banned Authors monument in Berlin. Source: Flickr

I mention this because the importance of reading juxtaposition also goes for newspaper articles. Here’s a quote from a piece in the August issue of The Hill Rag, a better than average neighborhood newspaper here in town, about D.C.’s retooled Southeast Branch Library:

[Some readers, like Friends of Southeast Library’s] Wendy Blair, believe the Southeast collection now suffers from citywide library policies that sell readers short. “The idea that a library is a repository of the books you can’t buy or keep at home seems to have been shelved,” said Blair. “And the choice of which books — lots of Danielle Steele, no Jane Austen — seems sad.”

Taken by itself, this is interesting enough. It recalls the flurry of attention in the Washington Post and elsewhere last year when it came out that a Virginia library system was weeding its holdings based on circulation numbers. (Sadly needless to add, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and many other American classics were taking it on the chin.)

Now, watch what happens when you read that Hill Rag graf alongside this, from a recent issue of the South Jersey Courier-Post:

“The [school] board also passed a resolution affirming the use of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in the high school English curriculum. The vote was 6-2…A committee reviewed the novel, which details the lives of Chinese-born mothers and their American-born daughters, after a resident complained of passages described as sexual in nature.”

This, too, shouldn’t shock anybody who’s already noticed the curriculum wars bedeviling American school districts lately. But read it within a few days of that library-weeding piece, and it gives rise to the following modest proposal:
What would happen if an American library user (or parent) challenged a book, not on grounds of obscenity, or sacrilege, or any of the other reasons usually trotted out with the best of intentions — but because the book stinks?

Put another way, what if somebody challenged any of the widely read but unspectacular novelists whom libraries regularly stock in quintuplicate, solely because the potboiler is just flat-out not as good as the one copy of Sense and Sensibility it would displace?

Whoa, you say. Doesn’t that put local boards in the position of making subjective judgments? Yes — but that’s exactly what they’re already doing! Deciding whether a book qualifies as profane or blasphemous is every bit as subjective as weighing in on its literary value.

Unlike “appropriateness challenges,” though, “quality challenges” would get cities and towns talking about what really matters in literature, e.g., how much fun it is, how interesting it can be to talk about, how good language can work a reader over on frequencies, and at depths, that nothing else can quite reach. That, or it’ll make a mockery of book challenges altogether, which might not be so bad either. Either way, it’ll get people talking about books in terms of how good or bad they are, in addition to how godless or dirty.

All I’m saying is, if somebody else gets to challenge a venturesome book because the sight of it makes them want to cover their eyes, then I should have the same privilege because a bad book makes me want to hold my nose. Whether I have that privilege, we’ll find out when I visit the Southeast Library this week and try to challenge the worst book I can find…