October 26, 2007
Ivanovo, Russia

Taking a Russian trip is like reading a Russian word: You won’t know whether you really understand it till near the end. In the meantime, a whirlwind of impressions loom out at me from yesterday’s Muscovite fog as I write you now from the lobby of the Soyuz hotel in Ivanovo — a town on the Volga where To Kill a Mockingbird is suddenly all the rage. Moscow in October had to be the only city I’ve ever been where dawn lasts all day. The misty overcast never burned off but hung around for hours, like a bear who knows you’ve got a jar of Skippy in your pocket.

This, in sharp contrast to our sunny reception indoors, where Chairman Gioia, the NEA’s International Partnerships Director Pennie Ojeda, and I fetched up Wednesday for a freewheeling public conversation at the Library of Foreign Literature’s American Center. Busts of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and others looked on skeptically as the Chairman and I fielded engaged questions about everything from the decline of American reading to who between Harper Lee and Truman Capote probably wrote more of the others’ work. (My theory: They wrote their own, but ghostwrote The Prince of Tides in collaboration.)

Several folks in the audience nodded knowingly when I invoked Carson McCullers’s old theory about Southern literature as the American Russian novel — a theory fellow Big Read listmate Ernest J. Gaines implicitly endorsed last month in a conference call with the NEA, speaking feelingly of his love for Turgenev. I’m starting to suspect that America may need the Big Read somewhat more than this impressively literate country does — or did, before the 50 channels of sensational news and nubile Russian womanhood in my hotel room began arriving. This barrage made our visit to the Library of Foreign Literature all the more welcome. If the Library of Congress is my White House, Russia’s American Center is my embassy: a corner of a foreign city that is forever America.

Here in Ivanovo, local dignitaries met us as we entered the city last night with bread, salt, and would you believe an official motorcade? As I told them all in my turn during the several toasts before dinner, I’m more accustomed to a police escort out of a town than into it. The same goes for my family, which got its last look at Russia a hundred years ago, one step ahead of the Cossacks.

What a difference a century makes. I’m looking ahead at a day full of school visits, museum tours, and even more borscht that I’ve ingested already. Three bowls in just two days! I may be in danger of falling behind on my blog, but I’m surpassing all expectations on my beet intake. Looks like I’ll have to let my own borscht belt out a notch.

Taking a Russian trip may be like reading a Russian word, but I’m having a great time sounding it out…

October 18, 2007
Arlington, Virginia

I can see the Arlington Central Library from my apartment balcony, a daily reminder of what a wonderful resource the library can be in our lives. At a minimum I go to the library once a month for books (pleasure and research reading), movies, music, and, every now and again, events. It just so happens that one of the events the library is hosting this fall is a Big Read for Bless Me, Ultima.

I was away the weekend of the kickoff but got home in time to see the Los Quetzales Mexican Dance Troupe getting into their cars before driving away, still decked out in full traditional dress. By the looks of it, I had missed out on a great time so I began checking my calendar for the next event I could catch.

Last Wednesday, David and I took the quick Metro ride out to Arlington, Virginia — really just commuting home for me — to attend a panel discussion by Professor of Folklore Margaret Yokum of George Mason University and poet J. Michael Martinez. Margaret has taught Bless Me, Ultima in her class “Folklores of the Americas” for 20 years and has a deep understanding of Anaya’s storytelling style and cultural influences. Michael, who grew up in Colorado and now teaches there, lent his unique insight into the book as the grandson of a spiritualista — a woman who talks to spirits, in the same hybrid magic/Catholic tradition as curanderas like Ultima.

Michael noted a common question from readers outside the Chicano tradition of Bless Me, Ultima: Is this real? Do healers really reverse curses? Concoct balms from field flowers? And more importantly, does it all work? In Michael’s experience, the answer is yes. He relayed a story about his grandmother’s first experience of death as a little girl, when her pet chick died. She was so upset that she held it in her hands and, not knowing what else to do, blew on it. When she put it down again, it got up, ran a few feet and fell over dead. She blew on it again, with the same results. A third time, same thing. Eventually, the chick could not be revived. But this was her first experience of the netherworld between death and life, an area she would reach through spirits for the rest of her days. I have to say, I got goosebumps.

I should also note that the folks at the Arlington Library started off the evening with a 20-minute documentary previously unknown to us in Big Read headquarters called From Cuandera to Chupacabra: The Stories of Rudolfo Anaya, directed by Kelly Kowalski. You can catch the whole thing here: http://www.knmetv.org/Anaya/anayaDocumentary.html. It has some great commentary from Anaya’s fellow writers and childhood friends, their personal reactions to his work, and some speculation about the origins of his storytelling style.

Following the presentations, Margaret led a discussion that included some great questions from the presenters and the audience. In addition to Michael’s about the reality of cuanderas, another question we tackled, was what does Ultima learn from Antonio and what does his future hold?

I’ll leave the other ten-plus communities examining Anaya this fall to answer those for themselves.

October 18, 2007
Albuquerque, New Mexico

A quick quiz today, inspired by a revelation I had while driving around Albuquerque the morning after Rudolfo Anaya’s standing-room-only, fire-marshal’s patience-trying appearance last week. Without thinking, what does this photo remind you of?

The Albuquerque Balloon Festival, taken on a cellphone from a rental car by your faithful roving correspondent

Don’t give up yet. Now look at this map, captured from the Big Read’s website and aggregating all 117 reads taking place around the country this fall . . .

The Big Read’s searchable, sortable Communities page at http://www.neabigread.org/communities.php

Uncanny, no? Same array of teardrop shapes, same seemingly random distribution. Makes me want to commission a Balloon Fest entry next year for every spring ‘08 Big Read, and fly them in formation to match our geographic spread.

Too much of a logistical headache? Tell that to organizers of the unorthodox Albuquerque Big Read, who know a thing or two about logistics. Greta Pullen and Judith Ann Garcia helped create a tripartite consortium incorporating the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the Albuquerque Public Library, and the literacy office of Bernalillo County. To put this in perspective, bear in mind that most Big Reads consist of one principal sponsor and scores of local partners. Albuquerque wanted a Big Read of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima so badly that these three outfits couldn’t decide who wanted it most.

So they teamed up as equals, and the results I saw were stellar. Rather than hold completely different one-time events around town, they created a recurring variety show of music, theater, art, storytelling and other acts, the better to get at time-crunched readers all over town. Should the gods ever smile on another Big Read application from Albuquerque, these partners are eager to take such a dog-and-pony show into hitherto uncharted Big Read territory. In addition to special events at established venues, they want to crash Rotary lunches, corporate conferences, you name it — any captive audience of folks who might not be caught dead driving somewhere expressly to attend a reading event, but who’ll sit still for one wherever they already are. Once you get them cornered, Rudy Anaya’s deathless story does the rest.

The Albuquerque finale was my first chance to attend a Big Read event with the author present, and Anaya proved gracious, self-deprecating, and deeply smart. He’s 69 and walks with a cane, in deference to the back pain that’s dogged him since a near-fatal teenage diving mishap that inspired his novel Tortuga . But to hear him talk and see him acknowledge the crowd’s thanks, he might have been a middle-aged man on the mend from a tennis injury. In front of easily a couple hundred people, Anaya reminisced about most nuevomexicanos’ original reaction to Bless Me, Ultima. They kept telling him, “You just wrote what everybody knows” — as if that were somehow cheating.

In New Mexico, what everybody knows is that Rudy Anaya made their lives the province of literature for the first time. I saw Carl Yazstremski pinch-hit at Fenway during his last season with the Sox, I attended Randy Newman’s first solo concert at the Hollywood Bowl, but never until Anaya in Albuquerque have I heard a native son receive an ovation so warm, so unhurried, so grateful. The Big Read was built for readers more than writers, and for nonreaders more than readers, but I still feel privileged to have seen a novelist and his city so in love. . .

October 12, 2007
Canton, Illinois

There are more or less two kinds of Big Reads. There are the big-city Reads, where partners beat their brains in trying to steal attention from a million overcommitted people. If they can dragoon maybe 15,000 habitual and reluctant readers into picking up a good book off our list, these organizers earn the NEA’s undying gratitude.

Then there are the small-town Big Reads, where another gaggle of partners run themselves ragged wooing 15,000 people overall — and sometimes it seems like they reach every last one. Fulton County’s Canton, Illinois, 35 miles outside of Peoria, is just such a burg. Any town where they can get 150 reservations to hear me speak either loves the Big Read like nobody’s business, or has me mixed up with somebody else.

A really Big Read. Photo by David Kipen

Yet there they were, tables and tables of them at the Canton Country Club, tucking into some remarkably persuasive Southern cooking in honor of To Kill a Mockingbird. I was overwhelmed and grateful and a little guilty, feeling as if I should’ve at least sung or danced, or maybe sawed Harper Lee in half. But nobody threw any fried green tomatoes, and I only wished I could’ve stayed longer.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only act on the bill. Carol Davis, Jenny Beal, Carol Blackfelner and their co-organizers did yeo-woman service in lining up the rest of a full bill. Troubadours Patrick Jenkins and Jim Bonnet for some rousing Depression-era musical numbers, a very polished troupe of college actors performed a scene from the theatrical Mockingbird and on the stage a gorgeous 6-foot papier-mache copy of the book, made in the local prison art workshop, dominated the room. Now that’s a Big Read.

All this, plus a float in the Fulton County parade, strong school participation, events sponsored by the local 4-H and YMCA, and a radio serialization of the book so popular that one or two pre-emptions resulted in a switchboard jammed with calls from irate Fultonians. If I lived in Canton and hadn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird yet, I wouldn’t go around admitting it this month.

Someday I’d like to get a Big Read into a real microdot of a town, just a wide spot in the road where all the kids have moved away and it’s just 40 or so bitter-enders and a post office — and then notch ‘em all, get 100% participation. It’s nothing I’d want to make a habit of, especially as we here grow a tad greedier for that high-hanging metropolitan fruit. But just once, for grins, it’d be nice to land The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, on every last ever-loving nightstand in town…

October 10, 2007
Las Cruces, New Mexico

In Washington, DC, where I live when I’m not on the road, the default question is “Red or blue?” In Napa County, near where I used to live, the question tends more toward “Red or white?” And in New Mexico, where I just completed a whirlwind Big Read tour, the question is always, always, “Red or green?” Either that or “Christmas,” a fiery combination of the red and green chiles that, separately or together, spice up just about everything edible in the Land of Enchantment.

The trip began on a not very Christmas-like note, with me pulling off the freeway outside El Paso to return an audiobook of E.L. Doctorow’s The March to a Cracker Barrel about 1,000 miles from the Illinois franchise I’d rented it from. That done, I could swear I recognized an intersection from my visit to El Paso in February for To Kill a Mockingbird. Sure enough, a minute later I was parked outside the Cactus Bookstore & Café, where I’d passed a delightful hour eight months ago sipping “Cokuccino” with proprietrix Ginny Fischer, her cheerful staff, and the crew of C-SPAN’s BookTV bus.

This time, to quote Thomas Pynchon (again), things are not so amusing. The Cactus has posted a closing notice, unable at last to compete with the chains, the distractions, and the same accursed unreaderly shortsightedness we’re all fighting against. Ginny’s keeping abbreviated hours these days, looking for someplace else to apply her prodigious people and prose skills, but her staff brought me up to date on the dispiriting news. Bookseller Michelle Brown, on the far right hand side of the photo I snapped in happier times, said that there may be other bookstore options driving distance from the Cactus, but “I’ll never set foot in them.”

Hungry for some good news, I fetched up that evening in Las Cruces, N.M., for the kickoff to their read of Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. It was my first visit to a burg doing this particular book, and I was totally unprepared for the zeal with which Las Cruces was taking it up. A couple hundred students, their parents, and a few plain old readers filled, and I mean filled, a cavernous high school gym. The NEA’s Reader’s Guides fairly flew off tables at the door. The Ballet Folklorico de la Tierra del Encanto performed traditional Southwestern dances with a precision born of long practice, but also with such contagious excitement that you’d think they were doing it all for the first time. And before the main event, poet and filmmaker Jimmy Santiago Baca and I bestowed on the local media what the supremely capable local organizer Mardi Mahaffy charmingly called an “availability.” As someone with a not exactly underdeveloped case of journotropism — instinctive gravitation toward the nearest journalist — my whole life is basically one long unrequited availability.

After Mr. Baca and I fungoed a few softball questions back and forth for a radio and a print reporter, everybody adjourned onto the hardwood for a short spiel from me and, from him, the keynote to end all keynotes. From the moment he walked onto the stage at the back of that gymnasium, Baca dandled and finessed the crowd the way Meadowlark Lemon used to juggle a basketball. In a subsequent piece for the El Paso Times, college teacher and poet John Pate described it better than I ever could:

“Taking time off his current movie-making schedule on October 5th to be keynote speaker for the NEA’s Big Read (neabigread.org) in Las Cruces, Jimmy Santiago Baca celebrated Anaya’s “Bless Me, Ultima” as the book that changed his life. (The Big Read is the National Endowment for the Arts’ initiative to raise reading levels across all segments of society.) Having just undergone Lasik surgery, he likened the book to literary Lasik. Before the book, he saw the world as an amorphous blur. After the book, he was able to see things clearly for what they were…

“Baca’s humble nature, coupled with his fierce allegiance to the authentic, makes him the writer’s writer. Lending his celebrity to causes like the NEA’s Big Read proves he is both a man of letters and a man of action. Reading is what saved Baca’s life, by his own admission. It may well be what saves America’s soul.”

In other words, Baca put on a clinic for anybody who aspires not to bore the stuffing out of a crowd of teenagers. Near as I can tell, it all boils down to some quicksilver combination of spontaneity, surefire storytelling — partly about how one day Anaya’s book found him in an Arizona jail and helped put him on a path to the writing life — and crack comic timing across two languages. I only wish I could send him to every Bless Me, Ultima city and town in the country. Judging by all the discounted editions of his books flying off the card tables after the free copies of Anaya ran out, he may wish I could, too.

All this was enough to send me back out into the starry New Mexico night with a clarity of purpose to rival the clarity overhead. In Las Cruces on Friday the question was “Re[a]d or unread?”, and the answer, just for a night, seemed never in doubt…

October 4, 2007
Washington, DC

Watching Charles Osgood on CBS Sunday Morning commemorate both the golden anniversary of Sputnik AND Gene Autry’s centennial, I couldn’t help wondering what our society will find to commemorate 50 years from now — the 50th anniversary of the 100th anniversary of Gene Autry’s birth? Really, isn’t there any new news worth reporting? Maybe a certain nationwide reading program, which could do with a little extra national attention, might come in for a few lumens of limelight? As you probably already know, The Big Read is never far from my thoughts. That, plus maybe the morning coffee was a tad too strong, may have given rise to the following hallucination from the Sunday paper…

It may be difficult for American youngsters today to understand the nationwide panic that greeted Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago when it first streaked across the literary firmament 50 years ago this fall. Long crippled by Soviet-style social realism, the sparsely funded Russian fiction program shocked the world with Zhivago’s meteoric rise. President Dwight D. Eisenhower initially dismissed the novel as only of “literary interest,” but America’s hitherto unquestioned superiority had plainly suffered a serious blow.

Meanwhile, youthful English majors had no such jingoistic pride to bruise. Across the nation, readers listened spellbound to the steady “ka-ching… ka-ching… ka-ching” ringing out from bookstore cash registers everywhere. Bobby Troupe and Julie London scored big with their novelty chart-topper, “Moon Over Stalingrad” and its uptempo flipside “Hot-Cha in the Dacha.” Merchandising entrepreneurs did a land-office business in “Yuri & Lara” lunchboxes.

To his credit, Ike soon realized that he had gravely underestimated the threat to U.S. novelistic hegemony. He promptly chartered the National Aesthetics and Style Administration, a crash program designed, among other worthy goals, to close the “simile gap.”

The fledgling agency’s first results were hardly encouraging. Several early prototypes experienced problems in the idea stage. Some painstakingly developed characters never even made it off the page before imploding.

Gradually, however, U.S. efforts began to close the distance. By executive order, Ike put campus writing programs on a war footing. Federal funds began pouring into promising startups including the Stanford Writing Program, under the direction of Canadian defector Wallace Stegner. There, under Stegner’s stern tutelage, such writers as Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), Ernest J. Gaines (A Lesson Before Dying), and Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) made their first tentative experiments in narrative-driven propulsion.

A small Christmas grant to writer Harper Lee resulted in the 1960 publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, restoring some measure of pride to the country’s beleaguered literati. John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1960, in part by accusing the Eisenhower administration of being “soft on modernism.” He soon committed the country to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a novelist atop the bestseller list and returning him safely to the literary establishment.” By 1969, with Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, American national literature had made good on Kennedy’s vow.

Recalling those heady days, novelist Thomas Pynchon recently allowed as how “1958, to be sure, was another planet. When the Zhivago reviews hit, I remember sitting around the Cornell Student Union drinking Red Cap Ale with Richard Farina, Jules Siegel and Mike Curtis, all those guys. We swore we were going to do Pasternak one better – not for America so much, but just for literature. I changed my major from engineering to English the next day.”