January 28, 2008
Auburn, Indiana

What if they held a Big Read and nobody came? I never expected to be asking myself that question when I reset my watch to match the dashboard clock in my rented PT Cruiser outside the Ft. Wayne, Indiana, airport. I’d had only the highest hopes as I tooled up the highway to Auburn, site of the first Big Read I’d ever attended for The Call of the Wild, Jack London’s indestructible story of the stouthearted sled dog Buck. Terra Firma, the education initiative of the DeKalb County Community Foundation, had pulled together a strong application. A nearby radio station was slated to cover the 1 p.m. kickoff festivities at the Eckhart Park Pavilion. The local constabulary was sending out their K-9 Unit. Stacks of mass-market paperback copies reposed on a card table by the door.

But there at the stroke of one stood TerraFirma director Judy Sorg, spruce in her January-weight jacket under the unheated pavilion’s drafty rafters, surveying a turnout consisting of two co-organizers — one of whom was turning around to leave. Worse, Judy seemed oblivious to the whole debacle. Was she deluded? One of those blithe Pollyannas whose façade of chipper optimism never permits a crack?

She’d seemed normal enough, even engaging, when I met her in Minneapolis at orientation in November. Then again, I was hardly one to talk. Here I was, about to preside over my first clunker after two years of unfailingly innovative local celebrations of American literature, and I was playing along, humoring poor Judy in her desperate charade.

I forget how exactly I realized that the PT Cruiser’s clock had been off by an hour. But you could safely color me relieved — maybe a bluish shade of relieved, since warm for Auburn can nevertheless feel a tad nippy to a fugitive Californian. Suffice to say that an hour later, all 151 souls allowed by the fire marshal, and perhaps a couple extra, had warmed matters up considerably. There were dog-safety demonstrations for kids, dog-sled demonstrations for would-be mushers, and a fascinating talk from Gail, the wolf expert at nearby Wolf Park, whose lupine howls had canines fooled for versts around.

The kickoff hosted at least the allowable 151 Auburnians; several live, stuffed and balloon animals; and one sociable 6-foot plush mascot frog, who probably qualifies as both. Photo by David Kipen.

Kids abounded, painting soup bowls and each other, nervously eyeing dogs up for adoption and parents who might or might not be. Each clutched a newly bestowed copy of The Call of the Wild in one hand and a Klondike bar in the other, unsure which to devour first.

Later, chowing down on cheese curds and other delicacies indigenous but far from indigestible, I congratulated Judy, her husband David (soon to appear in a much-anticipated local production of Much Ado About Nothing), Gail the uber-zoologist of the Midwest, Wendy Oberlin of the community foundation, and so many delightful others I’d rather omit here than misspell. As Buck and his teammates in the traces could have told you, it’s amazing what you can pull together when you pull together.

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 16, 2008
Washington, DC

All the best books are sequels. Think about it. The Odyssey? Sequel. Ulysses? Sequel. Huck Finn? Sequel. In that spirit, I hereby present a sequel to my earlier Twain columns, this one about Tom and Huck and their roles in their own — and each other’s — books.

It ought to be a fruitful topic, because Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — both the characters and their namesake books — represent two sides of the same raft. Tom is topside, sunny, always flirting with the rapids but still hugging the shore of childhood and civilized life. Huck, meanwhile, stands for the underside, the deep, dark, wet, turbulent, rushing confusion of adulthood and moral awakening. Each, naturally, reflects half of the raft of contradictions that was Mark Twain himself.

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

Nowhere is this contrast plainer than in three episodes that occur, with significant differences, in both books. First, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and then in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, each hero gets to live out every morbid, underappreciated kid’s greatest fantasy: to spy on his own funeral and hear how sorry everybody is, and then to come back from the dead to a hero’s welcome.

Tom merely lucks into his version of this perennial childhood fantasy, while Huck characteristically takes matters into his own hands. Inadvertently presumed dead, Tom sneaks back into town and has the archetypally delicious experience of secretly watching family, friends and sweetheart all cry their eyes out for him. Huck, on the other hand, deliberately fakes his own death to escape his father, who soon afterward — in a terrifying scene, even for readers who don’t know that Twain’s brother died in similar circumstances — turns up dead aboard “a steamboat that had killed herself on a rock.”

To paraphrase Ian Fleming: Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action. For Twain to use this scenario twice attests to the spell it always held over him. That he could use it to create two such different moods — the one robustly comic, the other “powerful lonesome” — only confirms his incomparable gift.

The second element both books share is the scenes Tom and Huck have together. Although Huck is the more mature character, Tom usually takes the dominant role in these encounters. An incorrigible know-it-all, utterly without self-doubt, Tom is forever forcing Huck into whatever scenario he’s borrowed from superstition, or from some pirate story he’s read. Huck plays along, much as Twain played along with his patient wife’s never permanently successful attempts to force him into quitting smoking, drinking, swearing, or writing his more sacrilegious books. Interestingly, by the end of their close yet tragedy-shadowed marriage, it was Livy who was losing her faith in divine providence.

The last thing both books have in common is their endings. Without spoiling either conclusion for readers lucky enough to have those surprises still in store, one can say that each book ends with the undomesticated Huck reluctantly agreeing to give Tom’s town life one more try. In a line eerily reminiscent of Twain’s marriage, Huck says on the last page of Tom Sawyer that “If [the Widow Douglas will] let up on some of the rougher things, I’ll smoke private and cuss private, and crowd through or bust.”

The notoriously maddening ending of Huck Finn turns out the same way. Huck improbably winds up back home with his friend the runaway slave Jim, and the townsfolk will get yet another chance to housebreak Huck.

One mark of a great book is that even its flaws strike us as heroic and brimful of significance. Huck is the classic example. Twain can fudge the geography all he wants with Huck and Jim getting lost in a fog, but there’s something’s fundamentally haywire with a slave narrative in which the Underground Railroad rolls straight into the heart of the Confederacy.

Yet look closer at the problem and see if it isn’t a flaw common to every imperfect life. Huck and Jim have gone wrong after the fork, they’ve overshot something crucial, they’ve lost their way and don’t know how to get back. Who among us hasn’t felt the same? Twain certainly did. He published his best book at 50 but lived to 75, and he never got his swing back as a novelist after Huck.

Huck and Jim’s journey is an endlessly renewable metaphor, so large and versatile that even its principal flaw echoes in the lives of its creator and his countrymen. Tom Sawyer, meanwhile — too mischievous for his teachers and aunt, but a model boy compared with Huck — embodies Twain’s, and America’s, quintessential tension between the wilderness of the frontier and the coziness of the parlor. Twain saw as clearly as anybody since that we’re all on this raft together, afloat between oceans, crewed by oarsmen of more than one color, tippy but not aground, not yet.

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 8, 2008
San Francisco, CA

“The picture [of small-town Missouri in Tom Sawyer ] will be instructive to those who have fancied the whole Southwest a sort of vast Pike County, and have not conceived of a sober and serious and orderly contrast to the sort of life that has come to represent the Southwest in literature. ”

–William Dean Howells’ review of Tom Sawyer in the Atlantic Monthly

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

I know I only mentioned Howells’ reputation-making review of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad on Friday — at a link that appears to have crashed the University of Virginia’s server, no less. But I ran across this quote from Howell’s friendly piece on Tom Sawyer and just had to work it in.

The review may indeed be a little too chummy, considering that Howells and Twain had since the earlier review become quite close friends. What jumps out at me, though, is Howells’ endearingly Bostonian ideas about North American geography. First there’s his reference to “Pike County” — evidently more a byword for backwoods caricature then than now. Either that or maybe Howells was just, in Thomas Pynchon’s great phrase about misunderstood regionalism, showing off his ear before he had one.

Still more intriguing is his reference to “the Southwest,” someplace I always thought of as closer to Pike’s Peak than Pike County, Missouri. And then it hit me. To a Brahmin tenderfoot like Howells, 19th-century Missouri was the Southwest, just as Illinois was the Northwest — and wound up with the anachronistically named Northwestern University to prove it.

I’ve been griping about the coast-ism of the phrase “Pacific Northwest” for years, but it never occurred to me that the ever-mysterious East might have needed a Pacific Southwest to go with it. Then again, I can still remember the storied $25 no-reservation midnight flights between LA and San Francisco on PSA, alias “Pacific Southwest Airlines,” so traces may yet persist. Of course, by Tom Sawyer’s appearance in 1876 — fully a quarter century after California statehood — Howells should have known better. Sometimes they can be a little slow on the uptake out there in the Atlantic Northeast.

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…