September 25, 2007
Oak Park, Illinois

Two things I learned in Oak Park, Ill.: 1) roughly a third of the world’s fresh water is in the Great Lakes, and 2) roughly a third of America’s creativity grew up or flowered in Oak Park. OK, I’m exaggerating, but it’s not just O.P.-reared Ernest Hemingway, the Big Read of whose A Farewell to Arms recently brought me to this idyllic village on the outskirts of Chicago.

Just check out this honor roll of American writing born or bred in Oak Park (deep breath): Charles Simic, America’s new poet laureate; poet Kenneth Fearing, whose mystery novels include The Generous Heart (my boss’s favorite) and The Big Clock, later adapted by Jonathan Latimer into a terrific film noir with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton; Charles MacArthur, who co-wrote The Front Page with Ben Hecht and once, when writing for the Chicago papers about a dentist accused of taking liberties with his female patients, improvised the headline “Dentist Fills Wrong Cavity”; Carol Shields, who wrote The Stone Diaries and other lovely novels; Edgar Rice Burroughs, who created Tarzan and improbably gave my boss the reading bug with his novel Princess of Mars; and, so you shouldn’t think Oak Park’s distinctions are strictly literary, Frank Lloyd Wright. Not bad for a town Hemingway chided for its “broad lawns and narrow minds” — though if you can cough up a provable citation for that quote, still-skeptical Oak Parkers will stand you to lunch.

Why would so much talent cluster in one place? According to local Redd Griffin, there’s a theory in Malcolm Cowley’s book A Second Flowering to the effect that the best writers come from the penumbra between town and country. There, the young artist grows up equidistant from, and responsive to, big-city sophistication and natural beauty alike.

Me, I say if you really want literary greatness, see to it that your father goes bankrupt. I’m serious. Fitzgerald, Dickens, Steinbeck, Nabokov, Hemingway, quite probably Shakespeare — each of these had his social awareness sharpened from an early age as a failure’s son. Anyway, that’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it.

The Oak Park Public Library and its partners are showing visitors and their neighbors such a good time this month, yet here I am nattering away about genius clusters. My two days in Oak Park began with a screening of the 1932 A Farewell to Arms, expertly intro’d and outro’d by genial film studies prof Doug Deuchler. The movie itself is an agreeable curiosity, with a stolidly sturdy Gary Cooper and a bracingly untheatrical Helen Hayes in the leads.

Then it was off to the Hemingway Foundation’s capacious museum, which does on a shoestring what the Steinbeck Center so professionally accomplishes in Salinas: It refreshes, through well-chosen artifacts and well-written text panels, a sense of the man and a thirst for his books. In addition to a cavalcade of dedicated board members and local philanthropists, I also met Aaron Mrozick, the impressive college student in this picture. He impersonated the young Hem far more convincingly than I impersonated a keynote speaker, and gave me new hope that Hemingway can speak to a younger readership beyond the obligatory English majors and fly-fishermen.

Next morning I took a fascinating tour of Hemingway’s birthplace and childhood home, lovingly restored by the Foundation after decades spent virtually unrecognizable as a boardinghouse. Next on this outfit’s to-do list is the sprucing up of Hemingway’s teenage family home, just a few blocks away. Later I met up with David Krause of nearby Dominican University, whose new gig on campus portends great things for Hemingway in particular and crosstown relations in general. Dominican and the Foundation are just two more examples of high-minded neighboring organizations with slightly overlapping missions who might never have found their way into each other’s Rolodexes if not for a certain nationwide reading program.

I could rhapsodize about the two sensational meals I had with Oak Park library executive director Deirdre Brennan, Keith Michael Fiels of the American Library Association, the Oak Park libe’s gifted P.I.O., Deborah Preiser and other dignitaries, but it would only make you hungry. Suffice it to say that, after a night of Italian food in neighboring River Forest, Hemingway himself would have forgiven the retreat at Caporetto…

September 25, 2007
Hartland, Michigan

“Road work ahead,” say many of the signs in Michigan — the unofficially nicknamed Orange Barrel State, I’m told — and truer bumblebee-colored words were never posted. So much roadwork will define this blog/job this fall that they aptly combine into one commingled blob.

Oh, I’ll still keep busy driving the office crazy by stetting most of my previous edits in the upcoming round of materials. I’ll still keep trying to distract the Big Read staff from how shamelessly we’re overworking them. I’ll still be kibitzing with Jo Reed on XM Radio till the shellfire of A Farewell to Arms and the hellfire of Fahrenheit 451 go up in twined smoke. (Come to think of it, maybe I won’t be spending quite half my time on The Big Ride after all.)

Today, though, finds me in Hartland, Mich., though not without some searching. As the name suggests, Hartland is a dreamy American town, dappled in fall by torn cloud and nourished this day on burgers, franks, and the Garden Club’s hard, tart, delicious apples. I wish I could say – as I did in remarks to several score assembled Hartlanders – that their Big Read kickoff was timed to boost turnout at their annual Heritage Days festival, with its classic car show and displays of Hartlandia. Alas, skeptical titters suggested vice versa.

Whichever, unfailingly jazzed organizer Carol Taggart’s attendance clicker had passed 500 last time I asked. Entering a raffle earned attendees a chance at some hardcover Bradburies. In addition, this photo I snapped before the camera batteries got thirsty shows a steady stream of locals collecting a paperback Fahrenheit apiece from the hundreds of copies bought and donated by the local paper, the Daily Press & Argus. (Some newspapers still know which side of the next circulation audit their bread is buttered on.)

In case you haven’t twigged to it already, I had a riproaring good time. So, apparently, did Congressman Mike Rogers, tickled over his 13-year-old daughter’s recent disappearance into a Gandhi biography. Also present were a respectful row of lay lobbyists for peace and universal health care, taking Bradbury’s message of free speech proudly to heart. Couple this with all the no less galvanizing Big Read days like this one last spring, and the sign on my way out of town looked wildly inappropriate. “END ROAD WORK”? I’m just getting warmed up…

September 14, 2007
Charleston, South Carolina

As program director for the Big Read, I could probably stand to have a little more in common with our target audience. The Big Read welcomes everybody, but it’s got a special soft spot for younger and so-called reluctant or lapsed readers. Well, I’m neither. I’ve only got about 30 reading years left, actuarily speaking — less, if my prescription keeps changing. The old advertising mantra applies here: Get ‘em while they’re young. So I got a particular charge out of last weekend’s youthful kickoff (two kickoffs, actually!) in toasty Charleston, South Carolina.

Peyton Jones next to a photo of Zora Neale Hurston, Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by David Kipen

See that picture of Zora Neale Hurston next door, looking out from Carl Van Vechten’s iconic photo at a sweet-faced young Charlestonian? That’s six-year-old Peyton Jones, fidgeting a bit through her mother Pat’s rip-roaring Gullah/gospel gig with Ann Caldwell and the Magnolia Singers. Peyton may have heard “Move Out the Way and Let Me Shine” once or twice before by now, but the healthy and diverse crowd swayed and clapped like it was Sunday morning instead of Sunday afternoon. Peyton, meanwhile, was resting her head on the seat of her chair when I put her up to this little bit of photogenic clowning. I only wish I’d had my camera hand free a minute later when I gave her my extra copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God. She may be a mite young for it yet, but there was no mistaking the smile of someone who already knows that books are for keeping.

Then it was off to the College of Charleston for a keynote talk by Zora’s indefatigable niece, Lucy Anne Hurston. You know a city’s really outdone itself when one kickoff event isn’t enough. You also know they’ve beaten the bushes for partners when the introductory remarks come not just from the Charleston County Library’s exhilarated manager and chief organizer, Cynthia Bledsoe, but also her board chairman, two college faculty members, a rep from Boeing (who’d helped get Their Eyes Were Watching God into the hands of GIs and their families on local military bases), a gushingly grateful carpetbagger from the NEA, and two members of Zora’s old Howard University sorority, the exuberant Zeta Phi Betas.

Jane Marshall, Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by David Kipen

Any other speaker might have been overmatched, but this was Lucy Anne Hurston. I’d been wowed by her once before, in Topeka last spring, but this afternoon she was even more powerful. She took us through her aunt’s life and her own, drawing unstrained parallels between Zora’s anthropological studies of Caribbean folklore and her own fieldwork with Haitian domestics and prisoners. The audience rode along with every riff and swoop of Lucy’s voice. Especially gratifying this time was the rapt proportion not just of college kids but of high-schoolers — thanks largely to teacher Jane Marshall, seen with one of the Charleston Big Read’s bespoke, indispensable handfans.

Later, Lucy, Cynthia and I adjourned to a local jernt for some shrimp and grits — “They’re like polenta!” we assured the New York-born, initially squeamish Lucy — and tried to worm her new discoveries about the Huston family’s ancestry out of her. She’s a close woman with a secret, so we’ll just have to wait for the contracted sequel to her fine first Hurston book, “Speak So You Can Speak Again,” and try not to drum our fingers too loudly…

September 11, 2007
Brunswick, Georgia

If a native of Savannah is a Savannan, is a native of Charlotte a Charlatan? I just flew from one to the other, and in an hour I leave for Washington. Ordinarily it can be tough to do a Big Read justice if I wait beyond the next morning to write up my impressions, but with Brunswick, Georgia, somehow I sense forgetfulness won’t be a problem.

Even if memory flagged, I have snaps of Brunswickians whose industry and enthusiasm even my meager photographic skills can’t obscure. Take Dr. Michael Bull and Al Davis, the superintendent and deputy superintendent of schools, respectively. On opening night’s “Be the Book” kickoff, to embody the novel both would salvage from Bradbury’s flames, each got into the spirit of Fahrenheit 451 by dipping into the closets of their municipal colleagues. Al borrowed a firefighter’s coat to preserve Fahrenheit itself. Dr. Bull hit up his baseball coach to represent Catcher in the Rye — a book, he pointed out, that’s survived its own trials with censorship. No flies on these guys — locals schools have distributed 2,600 copies of Fahrenheit to students in the 8th, 9th and 11th grades.

Local theater director Rob Nixon is working on a production of Fahrenheit, with music by the Athens, Ga.-based, band Kenosha Kid. When I showed off by placing the band name’s allusion to my beloved Gravity’s Rainbow, Rob did me one better by insisting that he’d wanted to dress as a character from Thomas Pynchon’s monumental novel, but ultimately decided in favor of another of his favorites. Using Photoshop to elongate a picture of himself into haggard hideousness, he pinned it onto his chest and topped it off with a sticker bearing the novel’s last line: “It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.” Any guesses?

Ringmastering this whole extravaganza was Heather Heath of the Golden Isles Arts and Humanities Association, who’s worked so hard masterminding more than a month of events that she only remembered at the last minute to don a makeshift costume of her own: a black pantsuit in mourning for Kurt Vonnegut, with a badge quoting “And so it goes,” the refrain from Slaughterhouse Five. Heather’s husband, Bryan Thompson, invoked mayoral privilege and declined to dress up, but emceed the unexpectedly enjoyable official proclamations with an aplomb befitting his long theater background. Librarian and venturesome First Amendment Film Series programmer Cary Knapp opted for mufti too, but a T-shirt paid tribute to Fahrenheit in its own way. It read, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it. – Mark Twain.”

Local theater director Rob Nixon. Photo by David Kipen

Then it was time for an authentic Low Country Boil, a regional tradition involving local shrimp, sausage, cornbread, sweet potatoes, and long bouts of satisfied groaning. Finally we repaired to the vintage Ritz Theatre for an after-hours peek at The Art of Reading, an exhibit by gifted, resourceful local photog Bobby Haven featuring locals caught reading. Two standouts: the entire high school drill team, going through a routine with books in hand, and a local skateboarder, perusing an unidentified paperback in midair.

And me? Mercifully unphotographed, I nevertheless got caught reading the Federal Writer’s Project’s American Guide again, whose Brunswick entry does it more justice than I have, and in less space. Maybe I’m a charlatan in or out of Charlotte…

September 7, 2007
Washington, DC

“I’ve always liked listening to the radio…That’s one of the reasons why in a lot of my books there’s somebody listening through a wall to somebody talking. Somebody’s always talking in another room. Maybe that’s the radio.” — Ernest J. Gaines

I don’t trust a library without a radio in it. In the Big Read’s book-jammed office right now, I’m listening to Scott Joplin’s “Solace,” marveling at how all his melancholy, plangent numbers mean so much more to me than years ago, when I only had ears for “The Maple Leaf” and Joplin’s other, more upbeat rags.

Radio’s much on my mind these days, since this coming week marks the premiere of The Big Read on XM, our new national weekday show. In case you haven’t heard, XM Satellite Radio is airing each of the Big Read audiobooks in turn, courtesy of Audible, Inc. Each book will be bracketed beforehand by the NEA-produced CD devoted to the novel in question, and after by a roundtable discussion of the book amongst me and a couple-three distinguished fellow readers — all ringmastered by XM Sonic Theater’s book-besotted host, Jo Reed. The first episode airs Monday at 2:30 am, 10:30 am and 4:30 pm Eastern time. (Bear in mind that Pacific time, as we used to say in California, is three hours behind and roughly a decade ahead.)

The first book will be Fahrenheit 451, read by Ray Bradbury himself. Over at XM last week, I joined in a wide-ranging, provocative conversation about Fahrenheit with Readers Circle member Nancy Pearl, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card, XM’s own Kim Alexander, and the sainted Jo. This, plus an interview about the show with XM’s Bob Edwards (taking a holiday from our fortnightly movie chats), and a few extra minutes of me jawing about the Big Read in general. All in all, not a bad way to get the word out to those few scattered Americans not yet doing a Big Read or following this blog with fanatical zeal.

Carson McCullers

The Big Read on XM represents just the latest chapter in the long, happy marriage of radio and literature. Dan Brady wrote in this space the other day about the recurrence of bridge-playing in several of our books, but radio may be even more pervasive. Most famously, Bradbury presents radio in Fahrenheit as an insidious force, anticipating the Walkmen and iPods with his descriptions of “seashell” or “thimble” radios “tamped into” oppressed citizens’ ears. More benevolent are characterizations of radio in both The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which classical music broadcasts become Mick’s solace and salvation, and A Lesson Before Dying, where Jefferson’s jailhouse radio gives him one tenuous nighttime connection to the outside world.

These two literary uses of radio strike me as ultimately truer to life than Bradbury’s cautionary one — though radio’s visual inheritors have a lot more to answer for. Unlike later electronic media, radio (whether delivered via satellite, computer, or crystal set) has one crucial thing in common with literature. It cultivates the very skill that too many educators today find alarmingly absent from their classrooms: the ability of students to make up their own pictures…

September 4, 2007
Washington, DC
“I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths.”
–Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Have you heard the good news? According to the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll, 1 in 4 Americans didn’t read a book last year. Drinks on me!

Er…what? This news doesn’t make you want to, in the words of my Beverly Vista Elementary math teacher, throw down your plates and dance in the mashed potatoes? Then look closer. Five years ago — according to the NEA’s Reading at Risk study — fewer than one in two Americans could answer yes to the question “Did you read a book for pleasure in the last year?” Now it’s down — up? — to one in four. Up, down or sideways, the upshot is this: The proportion of Americans who don’t read has shrunk in half.

Or not. Statistics are dodgy enough when you’re comparing studies derived from the exact same questionnaire, let alone two different ones. Ultimately, statistics only get you so far, because they’re numbers and not stories.

Ray Bradbury

Take the fast-proliferating statistics about American newspaper readership, and their implicit consequences for reading itself. Does it ultimately matter to anybody but a newspaper publisher whether circulation is “trending downward,” hemorrhaging like a hemophiliac, or merely gaining ground too slowly to satisfy Wall Street? There’s a fire going on, and the statistics tell us nothing memorable that we don’t already suspect. What we do remember, because Bradbury found the words to make it stick, is Faber in Fahrenheit 451 saying, “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths.” All the stats in the world don’t scare me as much as that one forbidding, foreboding sentence.

Likewise, whatever the crests or troughs or spikes say, reading is down. The rest is footnotes. I bow deeply before NEA Director of Research and Analysis Sunil Iyengar, without whose rigorous studies and evaluations the Big Read couldn’t even get down the driveway. He has another reading study due this fall that will likely scare the daylights out of you. But in the end, Sunil worries about the numbers so that we can worry about the books — ironic, since he used to write terrific book reviews for me at the San Francisco Chronicle. We can’t get so caught up with debatable fluctuations in reading numbers that we lose sight of a crisis almost nobody denies.

All of which by way of saying, it’s a long season. The Dodgers won yesterday, but they’re still four games behind with a month to play. The Big Read team is winning big, to judge by Sunil’s local evaluations, but we’re still way behind, and nobody knows how much of the season is left. With Labor Day now behind us, dozens of Fall 2007 Big Reads are now under sail in cities and towns across America. The home office is already steaming ahead with even bigger plans for next year. Me, I’m going into an XM Radio studio today to record a roundtable conversation about Fahrenheit 451 for their Big Read Show, which premieres nationwide on September 10.

All this information is what any self-respecting statistician would call anecdotal, but anecdotes are stories, and stories tell. Without them, statistics are just numbers. If you really want to hash around conflicting interpretations of something infinitely complex, read a book…