March 27, 2008
Norman, OK

Oklahoma librarian Susan Gregory writes,

The Big Read continues with enthusiasm in Norman. We held a wonderful program in a former Roman Catholic church, now home to a brilliant photographer and his wife who works for the OKC Animal shelter, on the edge of the campus. Robert Ruiz, whom you met, brought his mariachi band and they sang portions of the mass in Spanish after the group of about fifty heard presentations from an art history professor and a scholar from the English department. Candles illuminated the icons and crucifixes on the walls while the dogs howled and three cats prowled. I think that [Bless Me, Ultima author] Señor [Rudolfo] Anaya — and St. Francis — would be pleased. Next week, we’re hosting a program in Norman’s new organic grocery downtown. We’ve actually found a curandera in OKC and a Norman police officer whose grandmother was a curandera, so the evening should be fascinating, if not mystical.

We’re beginning a serious fight down here to get people to vote for a new library on May 13th. I know why reading is the core of my life. The challenge will be to find adequate words to help those who don’t — or won’t — read understand the power that a strong public library gives to a community. If you have any thoughts to share on the subject that I could purloin for presentations, please do…

Susan is already doing one of the smartest things a library can do to pass a ballot initiative, which is to run a Big Read during the campaign. My Hammett-reading Big Read friends in Spokane, whom I shamefully haven’t blogged about quite yet, are doing the same thing. The Big Read sure worked in Peoria, Illinois, where library funding had to win the support of a two-thirds supermajority, and managed it with percentage points to spare. Interestingly, there are two schools of thought about library bond campaigns. One is to synchronize them with major elections, so that every last library supporter will already be voting. The other is to put a bond issue on the ballot all by itself in a special election, so that only a few diehard library supporters can put it over the top.

Big Read participants listened spellbound to Mariachi Orgullos sing portions of the Mass in Spanish during a celebration of the book, Bless Me, Ultima, at The Chouse, formerly St. Thomas More Catholic Church, on March 14th. Photo by David Kipen.

Me, I can scarcely understand why anybody in their right minds wouldn’t support library funding in May or November. Here’s what I’d say to anyone on the fence in Norman, Spokane, or anywhere else:

Name me a great man or woman who never owned a public library card. I defy you. On the off chance they don’t use the card much anymore, it’s because they’ve parlayed early library use into the kind of success that buys you any book you need, or earns you access to a great university library.
The only reason I can think of not to support a library bond issue is if you’ve been so burned by the dumb things government sometimes does that you don’t trust it anymore to do a smart one. I can understand that. I can understand it better than a G-man like me ought to admit. But I promise you this: If you think your government wastes your money now, just wait till your local library cuts its hours, or closes completely. Just wait till people without library cards start casting the deciding vote — the few of them who bother to vote at all — to elect your leaders. Then you’ll see what governmental incompetence really looks like.

But if I can’t convince you to support your library, just make me this one promise in return. After the library bond passes without you, do me a favor and pay a visit to your new library. Look around you. See a librarian, who could be making triple the salary in a law firm across town, helping somebody who just lost a job find work. See a librarian connecting patrons with novels that somehow make them feel just a little less alone. See a librarian reading to kids whose parents don’t make the time to. See all this — and then see if you don’t, like me, find yourself supporting library funding every chance you get.”

Does Auburn, Ind., have the most breathtaking small-town public library in America? Photo by David Kipen.

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.”

March 4, 2008
Worcester, MA

When I first heard about The Big Read sponsored by UMass Memorial Healthcare, I have to admit I pictured a couple of candystripers pushing a book cart down a hospital corridor. What I discovered when I fetched up in Worcester the other day was something altogether different, and leagues better. More about this soon I hope, but for now have a look at this shot of the sisters Labeeby and Irma Servatius.

Irma heard about Worcester’s Read of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and volunteered to play for the kickoff last month. That went so well that Sharon and Rosa of UMass invited her to come back to play for the finale I attended over the weekend. Out of her and her sister’s fiddles poured Telemann, Britten, and Mozart, accompanied by an extemporaneous interweaving of musical and literary commentary from Irma that would have done Leonard Bernstein proud.

I bring this up not just because it knocked my eye out, or because Irma’s new chamber orchestra deserves all the encouragement and support it can get, but also because of what ran in the L.A. Times last Monday. Under the headline “Big Read or Big Waste?”, some freelance blogger got off an op-ed piece at the expense of a certain nationwide reading program dear to us all.

This shouldn’t have bothered me so much. Time was, I’d have written most anything for a byline in my hometown paper, so I can’t really begrudge some other guy for coveting the same platform. But anybody who knows me knows how much I believe in The Big Read. The thought that we’re all going to have to work even harder to dispel a few misperceptions created by this piece, just set my ordinarily tepid blood to boiling. I fired off a letter to the editor, the gist of which the Times obligingly ran as follows:

Last week, a woman in St. Helens, Ore., thanked a nationwide program called the Big Read for getting her teenage son to dive into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon - - thanks I keep hearing, in different words, all across the country. But this Op-Ed article called the one-city, one-book initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts silly and sentimental, and asked incredulously, “Who could be inspired?”

Don’t take my word for its effectiveness. Ask any of the roughly 500 people who jammed a Big Read event last April in Santa Clarita to cheer for Ray Bradbury; or see for yourself, by attending any of dozens of Eastside events this spring celebrating Rudolfo Anaya’s novel, Bless Me, Ultima.

Who could be inspired by such “unobjectionable” writers as Hammett, Bradbury, Anaya and Cynthia Ozick? Everybody from poor kids in East St. Louis to a Los Angeles now reeling from the impending closure of Dutton’s Books, to a cynical Angeleno ex-book critic like me. The NEA encourages all people to help arrest and, ideally, reverse the American reading decline in any way they choose, but the Big Read is working.”

And so it is. The Big Read worked in Worcester, and here in Owensboro, Kentucky, last night, and I daresay it’ll work in Terre Haute tomorrow. My thanks again to everybody who makes it work. Literacy coordinator Sharon Lindgren of UMass has statistics proving that readers live longer, and you are exactly the people I want living the longest…

February 19, 2008
Norman, Oklahoma

The four sorority girls were jockeying for position around me, giggling and shouting “Halo him! Halo him!” It’s times like this when the sacrifices we public servants make for our country really hit home.

Haloing, I hasten to point out, is apparently when members of this particular sorority — and you’ll have to forgive me for not catching the name, somehow — form a circle with their hands over the head of some lucky honoree. Because this sorority has chosen literacy as its favorite charity, my arrival in town struck them as reason enough to go into halo formation. (I am, after all, a “national book expert,” according to the front-page story in this morning’s edition of the Norman, Oklahoma Transcript.)

The rather more sedate image you see here is of Norman Public Librarian Susan Gregory posing with a couple of cheerful patrons beside the vehicular centerpiece of the Bless Me, Ultima Ultimate Altima Giveaway, an ingenious promotion devised by the Pioneer Library System’s Gary Kramer. The idea is, participants in The Big Read of Rudy Anaya’s novel can pick up an entry form to win the car at any of the 83 events taking place around town over the next two-and-a-half months.

That’s right, 83 events. (And counting, they hasten to point out.) They do things on a grand scale here in Oklahoma, and nowhere was this plainer than at last night’s kickoff in the showroom of Bob Moore Nissan. Turns out the aforementioned Gary Kramer used to teach English to the dealership’s Ricky Stapleton. When the library was rounding up Big Read sponsors, he rang up Ricky and for all I know threatened him with detention, because pretty soon the car dealer had donated the Altima pictured here, and signed on to host last night’s splashy gala. Tacos from Chico’s got scarfed, some fiery cumbias got danced to, speeches got made, and, best of all, the tall pyramid of paperback Ultimas wound up looking less like Cheops and more like Chichen Itza.

Come next morning, the graphic on the front page of my free USA Today at the Norman, Okla., Country Inns & Suites says that newspapers’ share of car dealership ad spending has dropped from 52% a decade ago to 27% in 2006. How USA Today knew that I’m probably the only person in America who might find this interesting this morning is yet another of The Big Read’s miracles, but the ad sales lost to newspapers have apparently migrated to the electronic media, direct mail and “other.” All I know is, if “other” refers to what I saw last night at Bob Moore Nissan, then “other” is definitely something else.

Everybody involved in the Norman Big Read — Anne Masters, Anne Harris and the rest of the library staff; all the Bob Moore dealership’s generous team; gifted Oklahoma novelist Rilla Askew; and R.C. Davis-Undiano and David Draper Clark of World Literature Today (Oklahoma University’s Ellis Island of international writing since its founding here three quarters of a century ago as Books Abroad) — everybody pitched in and had a conspicuously good time doing it.

Halo them.

My memories of reading Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima last week in Marfa, Texas, are already receding into the selfsame happy, retrospective blur that this blog was designed to prevent. So, before memories of my present New York swing displace Marfa any further, a flashback…

The most outrageous story to come out of those 36 idyllic hours in Marfa, I didn’t even recognize as such until I casually mentioned it to Marcela Valdes at the National Book Critics Circle award nominations last week. Like the good journalist she is, she kindly pointed out that what I’m about to recount was a good story. The implication was that if I didn’t at least rough out a version of it somewhere fast, she’d be forced to do so herself and win embarrassingly wide acclaim for it.

I heard the story from Big Read co-organizer Joe Cabezuela as he toured me through his childhood alma mater, the Blackwell School. Joe is a friendly middle-aged Marfan, recognizable, with only a little prompting, from one of the high-school team photos that line the walls. Empty now but for memorabilia, the school isn’t a school anymore. From Joe’s description, in a way it never was.

Blackwell was where Marfa sent its nonwhite children. Despite some happy memories of Joe’s, and some good teachers who apparently did a lot with next to no funding, it sounds uncannily like the substandard school in Topeka that I visited in 2006 as the Brown v. Board of Education Historic Site. If not for a PTA that did what the school board wouldn’t, Blackwell might conceivably have been a school without books.

Nowadays, Joe wants to turn the Blackwell School into a historic site too. On the basis of something he showed me, I don’t blame him. There, in a corner of the surviving building, almost lost among yellowing photos and frayed uniforms, lies the coffin of Mr. Spanish.

Mr. Spanish was the name given to an effigy created and buried by the students — under teacher supervision — in a solemn assembly on school grounds. From that day forward, the speaking of Spanish was forbidden on campus, and anybody caught speaking his first language risked a good cuffing around. To contemplate that day, to stand next to the grown man once forced to participate in it, and then to look around at Marfa today, with its art galleries and fine independent bookstore and terrific new partly-bilingual public-radio station, is enough to give a visitor vertigo.

Marfa isn’t all the way there yet. To an extravagantly welcomed stranger passing through, the old Marfa and the new seem on cordial, nodding terms, friendly but not yet friends. That’s what made the Big Read kickoff at the stylish dancehall-turned-art-gallery Marfa Ballroom such a revelation. All of Marfa looked to be there, young and old, natives and new arrivals, all scoring their brand-new, free copies of Ultima. When San Antonio-based folksinger Azul invited the throng to join in on “Cielito Lindo,” there wasn’t a dry eye, or a silent voice, in the house.

In the mid-1960s the Blackwell School was closed, and all the students had to carry their desks through the streets to join their new classmates across town at the white school. The Blackwell School sat more or less empty until Joe and other alumni began to envision it as a new community center in town. A few years ago, they publicly disinterred Mr. Spanish from his shallow grave and restored him to his current place of honor in the Blackwell School exhibit. The irony is, they had to make a new Mr. Spanish for the occasion, because the old cardboard coffin and its contents had long since crumbled away to nothing.

January 12, 2008
El Paso, TX

Having run a deodorant along my left jowl yesterday morning before realizing I wasn’t shaving, it’s probably not surprising that I should find myself in the El Paso airport just now, blogberrying. Luckily, I’ve started a feature here where I take each Big Read book and spotlight a key review that helped propel it into the culture. I had a feeling Bless Me Ultima might be a special case, so I asked Rudolfo Anaya how the novel first made its way:

Rudolfo Anaya speaking at National Hispanic Cultural Center. Photo by Katie Trujillo.

Dear David Kipen, glad to meet you at the Big Read celebration at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Alburquerque. And thanks for that … commentary you wrote (Separated at Launch, 10/18/07). Yes, love was in the air. I am blessed by those who came to celebrate my work.

In regard to early reviews of BMU, there were few. Most of us who were publishing with Quinto Sol in the early 70s — and with other small presses publishing the Chicano/a writers of that generation — didn’t get reviewed in the big time media.

We grew up in the midst of the Chicano Movement (Movimiento Chicano). Word of mouth got our books out to the public. Thank God for Chicano Studies programs in university campuses. That’s how we got invited to do readings and speak about our work.

I usually took a box of books with me to sell. We could never rely on the bookstores. Later, it got better. The bookstores would have the books available for sale. But for many years I had to cart my own books to readings, in the universities or in community venues.

All the writers did. The small presses didn’t have the resources to help with a lot of publicity. By the time I paid my publisher for the books and my meals I didn’t make any profit. But the books were out there and BMU was making ripples in the Chicano community, in the universities, and people began to take notice.

Those good days. I met wonderful people and most of the writers of the Movement. I would not trade those heady days for anything. We were in charge of our destiny and we made the most of it. I think we made an impact in the cultural life of our community at first, and then the ripples spread farther out.

Now thanks for all you do, and people like you who encouraged this country to read the diversity of its writers.

Rudolfo

January 4, 2007
San Francisco, CA

Happy New Year from the California desk of the Big Read! I’m newly ensconced here for a few days, drumming up Big Read applications in a few hard-to-reach corners of the country, looking in on the pilot program for The Big Read in Corrections, and hosing down the occasional office brushfire with a 3,000-foot hose — spraying what I hope is water, not kerosene. Leave that for Montag in Fahrenheit 451.

Next week I fly and drive to Marfa, Texas, which to hear Big Read organizer Alice Jennings tell it is even, shall we say, cozier, than anticipated. Notwithstanding its reputation as an arts mecca whose Lannan Foundation writers-in-residence cabins have hosted the likes of Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace, it’s still a tiny town where driving to the airport at 5 in the morning will apparently put me at risk of caroming off quadrupeds I’ve never even heard of. Marfa is apparently taking to Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima like a Californian to somebody else’s water, so this trip shapes up as another real treat, of which you can expect to hear more soon.

After Marfa I head to the Bay Area for, among other things, a mite more Big Read outreach. Outreach, for those as unfamiliar with this term of art as I was two years ago, is the delicate practice of encouraging cities and towns still unenlightened about the Big Read to jump in the pool, especially with our February 12 application drawing ever nigh. (As Jacques-Yves Cousteau used to say, see bottom.)

Also in San Francisco, my old colleagues at the National Book Critics Circle are hosting their annual award nominations announcement West of the Hudson River for the first time at 6 pm on Saturday, January 12, inside storied City Lights Bookstore at Columbus Avenue and Broadway. Joining me will be Big Read author Amy Tan, poet, painter, City Lights proprietor and all-around living landmark Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his fellow writer-publisher-activist Dave Eggers, and more West Coast writers than New York can shake a dismissive finger at.

Mark Twain. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

In between catching up with old friends, I’m newly tasked to begin some fruitful conversations about how the NEA can help restore book reviewing to its rightful place at the heart of American thought. With that in mind, I’d like to inaugurate a regular feature of the Big Read Blog, namely to spotlight the one old book review that arguably put each Big Read author or book on the literary map to stay. Contrary to partisans on either side of the old argument, the writers we love are both born and made, and the ones who make them have almost always been book reviewers.

Since I’m still sawing away at my Twain reader’s guide, the first review I’ll feature is novelist William Dean Howells’ reputation-making unsigned notice in the December 1869 number of the Atlantic Monthly for Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, savorable online thanks to the University of Virginia Library. Howells wrote, “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book, that rarely gets into literature…we think [Twain] is…quite worthy of the company of the best.” (A tip of the Big Read Blog chapeau to Ron Powers’ exemplary life of Twain for the referral.)

So screamed Mark Twain’s comet across the sky, with a national reach it never had before, never to dim again. I hope you enjoy this all-important footnote to Twain’s rise because, coming to this space, there’ll be discussions of a watershed review or two for all 21 Big Read books in the new year. That, along with much else and more of it, as the Big Read phenomenon gets called up from its record-smashing Triple-A season last year and reaches the bigs in 2008. See you here again in a couple of days, drop me a line at bigreadblog@arts.gov, and please apply for a 2008-9 Big Read at www.neabigread.org/application_process.php…

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…

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. . .