August 27, 2008
Washington, DC

25 states. 15 days. 8 novels. 2 countries. 1 Ford Escape Hybrid. 1 seriously saddle-sore G-man.

The Big Read initiative will hit the highway Sept. 12-27 for the Big Ride, a fortnight of events around the country designed to stitch together more than a dozen of the two hundred cities and towns hosting NEA-sponsored one-city-one-book programs during the 2008-2009 school year. As project director, I’ll have a ringside seat behind the wheel as all these communities come together for monthlong celebrations of great literature.

The tentative waypoints of the Big Ride loop, with this caveat: I brake for historical markers.

Among other pit stops on the trip, I’ll meet up with residents of Winston-Salem reading The Grapes of Wrath, help unveil an NEA-midwifed anthology of Mexican literature in El Paso, celebrate The Great Gatsby on a phantom pub-crawl of San Francisco’s Prohibition-era speakeasies, watch Coloradoans learn how to mush a dogsled team in tribute to The Call of the Wild, and just generally make a spectacle of myself in service of The Big Read.

Envisioned as the first of several such road trips, September’s Ride marks a sort of national debut for The Big Read. Developed three years ago in response to the 2004’s alarming Reading at Risk report ( http://www.arts.gov/research/Research_Brochures.php ) — which found that fewer than half of Americans today read for pleasure — The Big Read has given people in hundreds of cities and towns something in common to talk about more interesting than the weather. Never before, though, have consecutive events across the country communicated the ambitious scope of the project.

Since 2005, organizations ranging from libraries to zoos have received grants to create calendars of events around books they choose from a growing NEA list. The roster of more than 20 books includes stories as beloved as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and as new as Tobias Wolff’s Old School — a book I had the honor of reviewing in the San Francisco Chronicle just five years ago as the Chron’s book critic.

Thanks to the generosity of the Ford Motor Company, my colleagues and I at The Big Read now have an eye-catching, borscht-red, fuel-efficient pair of wheels to tool around the country in. Nicknamed Rosie — for the paint job, but also for Don Quixote’s old mount Rocinante — this hybrid gives the initiative a kitschy sense of adventure too rarely associated with reading nowadays. Here at the NEA, we avail ourselves of Rosie for transportation to keynote speeches, event introductions, even appearances in the occasional holiday parade. But Rosie’s trips have always been short hops — until now.

The whole idea of The Big Read has always been to remove from great books any taint of the medicinal, and restore the freshness that gave them their staying power in the first place. Cities and towns that participate report substantial upticks in library circulation, book sales, and general civic involvement. In other words, all indicators tell us that The Big Read is onto something. If a cross-country road trip in a hybrid can help rope lapsed readers into picking up a book, nobody should be above this kind of showmanship.

So watch this space for dispatches leading up to, and especially during, The Big Ride. Please bombard me at bigreadblog@arts.gov with any questions or suggestions about road food, deep-pocketed and/or philanthropy-minded gas or motel chains, audiobooks for company, mobile voice-recognition systems for dictation, literary sidetracks along the way, techniques for averting deep-vein thrombosis, and anything else that seems even tenuously relevant.

And please take a look at the tentative route map above. From the starting line here on Pennsylvania Ave. Sept. 12, to the breakers beyond Pacific Coast Highway Sept. 20, to the checkered flag back here on Sept. 27 at the National Book Festival, the Big Ride will help create readers from coast to coast and back again. If you find yourself anywhere along Rosie’s itinerary, or if you just see a red hybrid festooned with Big Read signage speeding by, by all means wave me down…

Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal critic and National Council on the Arts member, shares today on his blog about two authors very close to the hearts of Big Readers.
http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2008/08/tt_sacred_to_the_memory.html

August 7, 2008
Washington, DC

David Kipen at his partly cleaned off desk. Photo by Molly Thomas-Hicks.

I need to write a blog, and I need to clean off my desk. Rather than prioritize, I’ve decided to conduct a revolutionary experiment. I’m going to excavate the Big Read artifacts that bob to the surface while I decontaminate my workspace, and post on what I find. At this rate I hope to derive – and provide – copious blogging enjoyment, and also wind up with a clean desktop no later than next year. As we’ll find shortly, I’m not alone in fetishizing my desk…

Since I work from the outermost corner in, so as to impress my colleagues as soon as possible, the first item to catch my attention is a proof of the forthcoming revised Big Read catalog. This handy document lays out all the Big Read titles in a single stapled booklet, so as to make choosing a book easier for aspiring Big Read organizers. There’s a catalog meeting this afternoon, so I’d better leave the proof right where it is. This is an ominous precedent.

Before getting down to bare woodgrain, I first turn up:

• some draft footnotes for the second edition of our Mexico anthology
• a spreadsheet of all 208 fall and spring grantees
• some edited blog drafts
• a copy of the previous Big Read catalog
• some Big Ride travel authorization forms
• copies of Road & Track and Car & Driver (a road trip story is catnip to car mags)
• a production schedule for the next round of Big Read materials (unclear whether original or revised, so chuck it)
• a copy of our draft cooperative agreement with our partners Arts Midwest
• and seven books — books! — including a copy of The Maltese Falcon festooned with Post-its, and a 1996 photo book called The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz, in which only Tennessee Williams, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Piaget, and Robert Penn Warren have work surfaces that anyone in his right mind would call messy, and…

It so happens there are two Big Read authors in Krementz’s book, Thornton Wilder and Amy Tan. Wilder’s desk now reposes on display at the Hamden, Conn., public library, where I lucked across it one day on a bike ride. In Krementz’s copyrighted and therefore unlinkable picture, an elderly Wilder sits in profile, a tensor lamp giving the only light in an otherwise darkened room. Wilder has a pencil in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There’s a dictionary on a stand, a few books squared in a pile, and a pair of porcelain cups on a shelf, perhaps a holdover from Wilder’s youth as a diplomat’s son in China.

Wilder isn’t giving anything away here. There’s no sense of him mugging for the camera, or even studiously avoiding it. He’s a slightly forbidding figure, but he may be writing this nifty paragraph accompanying the photo, so I forgive him: “Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each day’s writing task. Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa Cather that she read a passage from the Bible (not from piety, she was quick to add, but to get in touch with fine prose; she also regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of). My springboard has always been long walks. I drink a great deal, but I do not associate it with writing.” I like this paragraph, and not just because he manages to work in two other Big Read writers.

Amy Tan’s photo is much more engaging. Her “yappy little” Yorkie, Bubba Zo, looks to be salaaming on a woven placemat. A stack of old calfskin-bound softcovers teeters atop a sheaf of typescript beside her laptop. The author herself smiles as she works, but her legs are tightly crossed, suggesting more concentration than she’s letting on above the table.

Tan’s note about her desk is interesting too, because more than half the objects in it are nowhere visible in the photograph: “I surround myself with objects that carry with them a personal history – old books, bowls and boxes, splintering chairs and benches from imperial China.” This photo was taken in New York, so maybe Tan is writing about her desk back home in San Francisco. Either way, the disparity suggests a fundamental mystery about writing. Even if we describe our surroundings in meticulous detail, the real writing happens in a space no emulsion can capture. Which, in the case of my slovenly desk, is probably just as well.