March 13, 2008
Washington, DC

At least once every 75 years or so, the federal government does something right for American literature.

In 1935, the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration recognized that scribblers, no less than stonemasons and bridgebuilders, needed work, and created the Federal Writers Project (FWP) to “hold up a mirror to America.” In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts founded The Big Read, a nationwide initiative using one-city, one-book programs to restore reading to the heart of American life. With luck — and maybe an assist from the modest proposal below — by 2075 there may still be an audience, not just for great books but for newspapers, which taught me how to read.

The Great Depression and the New Deal seem much on people’s minds of late, and for alarmingly more than the predictable anniversary-related reasons. Bookstores this month are making room for Nick Taylor’s American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work. This fall they’ll stock the FWP-inspired State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America by Sean Wilsey and Matt Weiland. And this week several arms of the Library of Congress, including the indispensable Center for the Book and the American Folklife Center, will host a 75th-anniversary celebration and exploration of the New Deal. (For more on this event, go to http://www.loc.gov/folklife/newdeal/index.html)

For any writer, though, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be the American Guides, a series of travel books to all 50 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck called the American Guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.”

I bring all this up because I just got back from a long drive through Big Reads in Worcester, Mass.; Owednsoro, Ky.; and Terre Haute, Ind. Good citizenship and great readership made common cause all along the way. The weather even held up until I got caught in a brainstorm driving through Massachusetts: It suddenly hit me that Mapquest.com is pretty good for getting you from A to B, but, for points between, you might as well be locked in the trunk. There’s no provision for discovering any of America’s inexhaustible shunpike literature and history — precisely the lore in which the American Guides abound.

With that in mind, I’m callingfor the creation of a free, route-based, readily searchable online repository of all the text and photography from every last American Guide, with the Center for the Book’s literary maps to all 50 states thrown in for good measure. Copyright law here should prove less of a headache than usual, considering that the American taxpayer already paid for this priceless treasure house a lifetime ago.

As for the expense of digitization and organization, Mapquest itself is rumored to have a spare shekel or two lying around. Their website’s “Avoid Toll Roads” option has become a boon to motorists everywhere, but a “Seek Out Literary Birthplaces” link would have a charm all its own to advertisers as well as drivers. Readers of Zora Neale Hurston’s indestructible Their Eyes Were Watching God — the focus of thriving Big Reads from Milwaukee to Louisiana, and in 11 other cities and towns around the country just this spring — might possibly enjoy a Florida vacation even more if they had Hurston herself in the back seat, pointing out the sights.

I bring up Hurston especially because this Friday at 5 o’clock, I mean to shake the hand of 91-year-old Stetson Kennedy, who worked with her on the Florida Writers Project back when, as he remembers, lighting one of her ever-present cigarettes could have gotten them both lynched. In my travels for The Big Read, I’ve already shaken the hand of a man one handshake removed from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. I shook the hand of the great American novelist Charles Portis, who hasn’t granted an interview since Big Read author Harper Lee was cheerfully chatting up the press on behalf of her first novel.

Most important, I’ve hugged the Hartford, Conn., librarian who e-mailed me last week about a man in his twenties who “had never read a book, but decided to pick up The Maltese Falcon because everybody else was reading it…’Look how much I read,’ he told [the librarian] proudly. He left work saying that he was going home to finish reading the book tonight.”

That may not quite be the New Deal. But at a time when writers make headlines by lying, but can’t even get reviewed for telling the truth, The Big Read is a sweet deal just the same. I look forward to meeting one of the last survivors of the Federal Writers Project this Friday and shaking on it.

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 22, 2008
St. Helens, Oregon

Why did Dashiell Hammett stop writing for publication at 40, with a quarter century left to live? And why has America stopped reading for pleasure at 232, again with plenty of time left on the meter?

The easiest answer is, always, to refute the question. (Or beg the question? What exactly is begging the question, anyway? Is that when I beg friends to keep asking me Trivial Pursuit questions long after they just want to go to bed?) That is, Hammett didn’t stop writing forever at 40. He stopped for a year, to take a drink — which turned into two years, which made it harder to start again after three, and where was I again?

Similarly, America didn’t stop reading for pleasure overnight. It hasn’t stopped at all, just slowed down so fast that our eyeballs are fishtailing. Which is why I take heart from a story that Chris, the proprietrix of the St. Helens Book Shop here in the Oregon hamlet of the same name, told me last night.

Ron Hansen, a member of the Shoestring Players, juggles multiple characters, accents and genders during a vintage, never-before-produced episode of Adventures of Sam Spade radio show, as a grudgingly benevolent presence looks on.. Photo by David Kipen.

She said a woman came into her shop the other day, raving about what The Big Read was doing to her son. The mother simply couldn’t get over what a change The Maltese Falcon had wrought in the boy. Improvising from a homework assignment out of the NEA’s The Big Read Teachers Guide, he’d worked up entire case files from different characters’ perspectives. He’d even borrowed a red “Top Secret” stamp off his father, an FBI agent, and festooned his report with “eyes only” warnings for his teacher. “‘My son is so grateful for this,’” I scribbled incredulously, trying to get the remembered quote down properly in a notebook I could no longer clearly see. “He loves this book.”

Here’s how it works. A resourceful librarian, like St. Helens’s Rick Samuelson, applies for The Big Read grant and wins it. He successfully encourages two local schools to assign The Maltese Falcon — no mean feat with a book full of gunplay, to say nothing of the scene where Sam makes Brigid strip, to prove she hasn’t palmed a grand off the fat man. (Maybe if Warner Brothers had had Rick on staff to run interference, John Huston could have snuck that one past the Hays Code.) Anyway, before you know it Hammett is on the syllabus, and now it’s all you can do to keep some hitherto uninspired teenage reader from running away to join the Pinkertons.

That’s just one encouraging story I heard last night at the lavishly talented Shoestring Players world-premiere performance of “The Persian,” an unproduced pilot script for what eventually became the Adventures of Sam Spade on radio. The indefatigable Rick had found it in some old-time radio buff’s anthology, dusted it off, and armtwisted the Shoestringers into mounting it live before, as it turned out, a rabidly appreciative SRO audience. (So you know, that’s standing-room-only, not single-room-occupancy.)

Thanks to copious soundboard wizardry, swivel chairs creaked, elevators wheezed, and highballs clinked. The only unsupplied sound effect, after the announcer delivered his last vintage Wildroot Cream Oil ad, was a raucous ovation…

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…

January 23, 2007
Enterprise, Oregon

For, generally, the writer believes that long after the best road of his day has been supplanted by a straighter and wider one, and long after the highest building has crumbled with time or been blown to bits by air bombs, this book will remain. And the makers of this Guide have faith, too, that their book will survive; in the future, when it no longer fills a current need as a handbook for tourists, it will serve as a reference source well-thumbed by school children and cherished by scholars, as a treasure trove of history, a picture of a period, and as a fadeless film of a civilization… — T.J. Edmunds, WPA State Supervisor, Oregon: End of the Trail, 1940

ENTERPRISE, OR — Ah, Wallowa County, where the snow-capped vistas (and the epigraphs, apparently) never quit. Good morning and “Hey,” as my NEA station chief Molly bids me say to all the Big Read coordinators, like Elizabeth Oliver here in Oregon, who make my visits so far such a pleasure. (Maybe “Hey” is related to “Say hey,” which her fellow Alabaman Willie Mays once made famous.)

Alas, no regional idioms catalogued here in Enterprise yet. Just new friends, old pleasures and one pervasive problem, which I’ve never seen better illustrated than yesterday morning in AP English class at Enterprise High. The students themselves were smart, funny, and to all appearances really digging The Grapes of Wrath. There were only nine of them, which was a pity, but that wasn’t the problem. No, the real shame was the ratio of girls to boys: try nine to zero, which pencils out to approximately infinity.

A display of novels by John Steinbeck and Big Read reader’s guides for The Grapes of Wrath at the Wallowa Library.

This, alas, is the dirty secret of America ’s reading statistics. Bad as the general picture is, as enumerated in the NEA’s Reading at Risk report and other places, for teenage boys the stats look even worse. That’s one reason, aside from their unimpeachable literary merit, that Fahrenheit 451 and The Maltese Falcon belong on the Big Read’s list of books for cities and towns to choose from. The American novel has a proud history of terrific genre fiction, and we may need the very best of it — mysteries, science fiction, I hope a sports novel before long — to reach young guys. That, and maybe the news that there’s a 9-to-1 boy-girl ratio awaiting the first guy who gets into AP English.

The anecdotal evidence was considerably more encouraging at Warren Johnson’s new Second Harvest bookstore in Joseph, Oregon, yesterday. That’s where I was busy buying a paperback of Lewis & Clark’s journals and sniffing around for Alvin Josephy first editions when a man walks in and — I swear to this on my oath as a public servant — asks, “Do you have a copy of The Grapes of Wrath?” Turns out it was one Dick Burch, a Wallowa County resident for eight years and, consequently, almost off probation as far as the locals are concerned.

Several hours later (and altogether too many book purchases among friends at Enterprise’s Bookloft and Soroptimists’ Club thrift shop the richer), I fetched up back at Fishtrap for a double feature of two classic Depression-era WPA documentaries: The Plow That Broke the Plains, and The Columbia. The ground floor of Fishtrap’s lovingly converted Coffin House bloomed with the smells of Don Green’s rarebit-like Turkish phyllo pastry as fifty-plus townsfolk, including several making their maiden appearances at the place, jostled for chairs and simulated attention to a visiting bureaucrat’s stemwinder. For all their day and a half’s bountiful good humor and hospitality, which I have to forsake tonight for tomorrow’s early flight out, I’ll just whisper one last wistful “Hey.” More down the big road…