November 30, 2007
Washington, DC

As I read some of the recent blogs—Paulette’s about her commendable effort to give up TV and David’s about what constitutes “literature”—I was reminded of the first time I encountered the art of Dashiell Hammett.

Ten years ago, before becoming the Publications Manager at the NEA, I was living in Norway with my wife, in Bodø, roughly 60 miles above the Arctic Circle (about 100 kilometers for those counting in metrics). We had no television for the year we were living there, which left time for lots of reading. I had already plowed through the small quantity of books we brought, which was a problem—I tend to get anxious if I don’t have something to read. When I don’t have a paper in the morning, I start reading the cereal box, or the wrapper of whatever food substance I am ingesting. This became problematic as my knowledge of Norwegian was quite bad.

So I went in search of reading material. Unfortunately, we were living in a small, isolated town whose library had a very limited books-in-English section. There was a used book store with English books, but they were mostly romance books, science fiction, and mystery novels—nothing I relished reading (though I did do a fair amount of sci-fi reading as a teenager). Still, it was something to read, so I picked three authors that I recognized but had mostly stayed away from due to their reputation as “genre writers” or “popular writers.” They were Martin Cruz Smith Gorky Park, Graham Greene The Power and the Glory, and Dashiell Hammett The Maltese Falcon. I had always assumed that if a writer was popular, it was probably because his/her writing was appealing to the lowest common denominator. Never have I been so wrong about authors as I had been about these three.

Although I knew Greene as the author of The Quiet American (which I hadn’t yet read at the time) and the short story “The Destructors” (which I read in high school and enjoyed), his work was regularly shunned in college. An English major as an undergraduate and an MFA recipient as a graduate student, I took many literature classes—not once did I read a Greene book. So The Power and the Glory took me by surprise with its strong narrative and amazingly perceptive character study of a drunken, fornicating priest on the run during the religious persecutions in Mexico in the 1930s. It was anything but a genre book—it was literature, and at the same time an exciting read (believe me, that is not always the case). The same was true of Gorky Park, which followed Moscow detective Arkady Renko during the Cold War years of the 1980s as he tries to solve the murder of two people in city’s park. The strong attention to character development made it much more than a run-of-the-mill detective story. And then there is Hammett.

Now I had seen the movie of The Maltese Falcon, the John Huston version, many times. I enjoyed it each time—from Bogart’s tough guy Sam Spade to Peter Lorre’s fey Joel Cairo to Sidney Greenstreet’s unforgettable Gutman—but had never picked up the book before. I have found that the best movie adaptations are often of books that are mediocre, and that good books just as often make wretched films (not always the case, as I was to find out). So I picked up The Maltese Falcon with trepidation; I was afraid it might ruin the movie for me.

Two things immediately struck me: one, the description of Sam Spade resembled nothing of Humphrey Bogart, and two, the brilliant dialogue from the film seemed to have come entirely from the book. In the first paragraph, the description of Spade is of a “blond Satan,” his face a series of v’s. Not exactly what you think of when you think of Bogart’s fleshy face. Throughout the book, there’s a hardness to Spade that Bogart managed to soften in the film, but to the character’s disadvantage in my view. The reason Spade survives is through his hardness and his unwillingness to “play the sap” for anyone.

And then there’s the dialogue—I say without hyperbole (okay, maybe a little) that Hammett is one of the finest writers of dialogue in the English language this side of Hemingway’s short stories. They are tough, simple sentences, but like Hemingway’s, say more than just the words alone. There’s implications and unspoken allusions sneaking around the edges of the sentences, which in a mystery like The Maltese Falcon, add to the intrigue. And they’re something that Hemingway’s often isn’t: funny. Hammett has his way with wisecracks and witty repartee that would make Oscar Wilde smile.

Years after I read the book, I came across a story, possibly apocryphal, about how director John Huston wrote the screenplay. Huston was way behind in writing the screenplay for the film, so finally he ordered his secretary to take the book and type out all the dialogue, and he would use that to work on the screenplay. She did so and left the typed pages on her desk before she went to lunch. In the meantime, the producers of the movie came by to see where Huston was with the screenplay. They were reading the typed pages when Huston returned. They congratulated him on an excellent screenplay and Huston just smiled and said nothing. A strong endorsement of the writing in the book if nothing else…

The Maltese Falcon compelled me to be less likely to categorize and dismiss a book because of its popularity or the “genre” it was written in. Good writing is good writing, whether it is decreed from on high by the literary gods to be “literature” or a paperback picked up at the airport. All that matters is the words on the page. And that’s the stuff that dreams are made of (which, incidentally, isn’t a line from the book—allegedly it was thought up by Bogart on the movie set…).

November 20, 2007
Attleboro, MA

*Except for Attleboro, MA

Just when you think the news about reading can’t get any more alarming, a statistic comes along that makes you swallow your gum in amazement. According to the NEA’s To Read or Not to Read report landing today, just 31 percent of recent American college graduates tested as “proficient in reading prose” last year. Thirty-one percent! This would have scared the lymph out of me in 1992, when the figure was still a whopping 40%. How did these people get into college, let alone out of it?

Just to take the most obvious ramifications, how are the other 69% even graduating, let alone making their way into the job market? What must the percentage of proficiency be for folks who don’t go to college? And I don’t think I want to know what the figure is for high-school graduates. How do you fill out a college application if you can’t read a page of prose without struggling, never mind write one? Or do young adults read more proficiently at freshman orientation, before all the keggers and the peer pressure and bad academic prose, than on graduation day? As my mother used to say, golly Neds!

“Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,” to quote Sonnet 29, “haply I think on” The Big Read — specifically, a BR finale I parachuted in on last week in Attleboro, Massachusetts. I must’ve liked what I saw, because I took 24 pictures there, and I still take digital pictures as if the roll’s about to run out. (For all the good that does.) As I look back over my makeshift slideshow, the memories come coursing back:

A picture of Attleboro middle-schooler Chantelle Deslauriers holding up her contribution to a glossy, handsomely designed local anthology helps communicate just a little of the electricity crackling the air at the Attleboro Arts Museum’s Reflections of 451 opening. This was hands-down one of the best examples of school participation in a Big Read that I’ve ever seen. Literally hundreds of teenagers, their families and teachers thronged the museum to display the artwork they’d mined from Bradbury’s novel: papier-mache phoenixes suspended from the ceiling, mechanical hounds made out of junked motherboards and scrapyard castoffs, even a giant green foam salamander to match the more sinister one adorning Montag’s fire helmet.

All this, together with clever video walls simulating Mildred’s in the book, and well-rehearsed blackout sketches performed by students on a makeshift stage. It helps to have a good college with a strong education department like Lesley University pitching in on a Big Read, but it helps even more to have energetic co-organizers like Joan Pilkington-Smyth and two “retired” (tell me another one) teachers like Vic and Iona Bonneville leading the charge. Memo to any remaining non-joiners in Attleboro: You can put your phones back on the hook now.

But there’s one more picture from Attleboro that can’t pass without comment. That’s a shot from the next day of the Attleboro Public Library’s 100th anniversary in the same palatial building, taken by me from the podium where I stammered out my not-so-few words of dumbfounded gratitude. In the picture, plainly visible, are the four founders of the library from 1907, impersonated by their inheritors, and stylishly togged out in up-to-the-minute frock coats and hoop skirts. Better yet, I remember their scripted material – so often forced or corny at these sorts of occasions — as genuinely funny. Too bad I didn’t take a picture of my notes while I was at it.

Next stop on my rewind of last week’s Massachusetts-New York swing will probably be White Plains — birthplace of the hoop skirt, incidentally. Will somebody please confiscate my WPA Guide to America before I swallow it whole?

November 9, 2007
New Paltz, NY

Is a backlog of unwritten blog posts a backblog? I’m pinned under a backblog this morning. I’m also lodged under my usual detritus of books, bedding and Big Read paraphernalia — lodging this time in New Paltz, NY, where last night I introduced Dr. Margarite Fernandez Olmos to an engaged audience full of Bless Me, Ultima fans. Speaking on the campus of our capable hosts from SUNY New Paltz, she spun out her idea of chicanismo magico (the Chicano version of magical realism), regularly relating it to her unashamed love of the Harry Potter books. Yes, Antonio and Harry each have an owl as a familiar, but that’s the least of the parallels Dr. Olmos drew.

I hope to go into greater detail about New Paltz in an upcoming post, but for the moment I’m flashing back to something that happened the night before. I was walking down the deserted main drag of Hudson, NY, with Greta Boeringer, the town’s alarmingly tireless librarian and Big Read organizer, after a little public keynote from me about Fahrenheit 451. We were nearing the storefront of the local tourism bureau when we noticed an object resembling a gray ball of yarn on the sidewalk. On closer inspection, it proved an owlet, wide awake and blinking at us from beside a concrete step.

We worried it might be hurt or sick, of course. Mostly it just seemed curious and a little indignant, as if wondering why we weren’t flying from tree to tree as people usually do. Greta and I marveled at it for a minute or two, then felt the usual guilty restlessness in the presence of a potentially transcendent experience that gives no sign of ending anytime soon. We had tiptoed around the owlet and a few steps farther when I remembered the snazzy new camera phone in my pocket. I crept back and snapped the shot you see before you – or would do, if only I could figure out how to pry it out of the phone. That owlet is staring out at me from my phone even now, mulling over why we humans inherited the opposable thumbs and he got all the brains.

I’d felt even stupider the night before in the movie-crazed burg Rochester, NY, where a nearly full house eavesdropped on the film critic and English professor George Grella and me jawing publicly before a screening of The Maltese Falcon. George roughed out a thesis I’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense: Sam Spade knows who killed his partner in the alley all along. Think about it. The explanation Spade cites at the end — Miles “had too many years’ experience as a detective to be caught like that by the man he was shadowing…but he’d've gone up there with you, angel” — represents no more than he knew from the very beginning. Has Spade possibly kept his knowledge of who killed Miles to himself for the whole book, chasing the falcon and dallying with Bridget purely for his own amusement?

I wish I’d thought about that before I spent last weekend in Minneapolis, helping to orient the 15 cities and towns doing the Falcon next spring. These amounted to just a fraction of the 127 new Big Read grantees, whose wiggy, unprecedented ideas all ricocheted around the Minneapolis Hilton like those fireworks in the basement from You Can’t Take It With You. Of the orientation, of the exemplary Falcon read that the Rochester literary center Writers & Books is putting on, of New Paltz and Hudson and all the rest — more later. For now, owl-like, I’m swiveling my head back around toward White Plains this afternoon…

November 1, 2007
Washington, DC

After the Russian Big Read delegation visited America last spring, most of us felt optimistic, but not quite confident. These officials from Ivanovo and Saratov seemed to get the idea of inducing a whole city to enjoy the same book for a month or so, but — amid the handicaps of jet lag, culture shock and simultaneous translation — we weren’t about to count any mockingbirds before they hatched. What if the Russians thought we were practicing cultural imperialism instead of cultural diplomacy, trying to shove yet more American pop culture down their throats? And what if a week of American-sized portions at D.C. restaurants had short-circuited their ability to take in all we were throwing at them?One week in Russia, a couple of inspiring school visits, three splashy kick-offs in two cities and beats me how many vodka toasts later, I shouldn’t have worried. My visits to New York and Massachusetts next week should only be so good. Forget the red-carpet treatment, the police escorts, the state dinner for international partnerships director Pennie Ojeda, Chairman Gioia, and me. All that was swell — the kind of thing that doesn’t faze the Chairman any more, but always has me checking compulsively to see if my fly is open.

No, what really wowed me was the kids.

Our first stop in Ivanovo was the local children’s library. Apparently, in Russia you go to a special library just for kids until you’re 14, at which point they’ll risk turning you loose in the grown-ups’ libe across town. I’ll admit this ageism goes against my grain a tad. I was always the kid reading The Andromeda Strain instead of The Wind in the Willows, and — even less forgivably — congratulating myself for it. But if separate libraries are all it takes to turn out kids as gregarious and inquisitive as the ones in Ivanovo, I’ll card the little ones myself.

Teen after teen stood up and got straight to the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird (newly retranslated and reissued by the Russian publisher Vagrius). A girl in back asked if the second-class citizenship that the black townspeople endured in the book was so different from what the Chechens are going through nowadays. A local law student invited for the occasion spoke movingly of the prejudice he still suffers as the son of a Tatar. And a teenage guy — a guy! — talked about the universality of a good book, and allowed as how “Writers have no nationality.” All the time I was thinking, Would somebody please pinch me? It’s not as if, by the midpoint of a five-meal-a-day trip, there wasn’t plenty of flab for the tweaking…