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 18, 2008
Terre Haute, IN

Already they’re talking about disqualifying the Vigo County library from competing in Terre Haute’s annual Tablescapes competition, since they won last year for their Gatsby-themed Big Read table, and again this for the stupendous Falcon entry adjacent. Each place setting this year had crystal stemware and black plate bearing an appetizing prop, such as a pair of brass knuckles or a gun. Photo by David Kipen.

Thank heaven for site-visit reports, because my twice-a-week blogging regimen can’t half cover all the places I go. So when I get back from, say, Terre Haute, Ind., and last week’s eminently postworthy WPA conference takes up the space where I’d otherwise recap my Indiana adventures, I still have a site-visit report where I can write up my impressions. Right there on the form, Uncle Sam asks me to “[p]rovide a brief summary of your overall impression of the implementation of the project…”

In the case of Terre Haute, it’s hard to do this without resorting to superlatives. I fetched up in the Terre Haute Hilton Garden at the “Crossroads of America,” where the old highways 40 and 41 meet, only to find a detectives’ notebook in my room. Airport security later obliged me to relocate this witty spiral-bound notebook somewhere I probably won’t find it until my next trip, but I remember it held all manner of putative clues to the Maltese Falcon’s whereabouts. Appointments with famous no-shows from literature and film abounded in its pages, including one rendezvous apiece with everyone from George Kaplan — the nonentity Cary Grant is mistaken for at the beginning of North by Northwest — to Godot himself. (Perhaps Kaplan got waylaid north of town, where I’m assured Hitchcock filmed that picture’s famous cropduster sequence.)

Next up, the site-visit report form requires me to “[i]nclude any issues you feel may need to be addressed.” Frankly, the only issue that comes to mind is the regrettable brevity of my stay. I adjourned from the hotel to Terre Haute’s main library, where the resourceful librarian who’d ginned up the notebook proceeded to keep an all-ages ESL pizza party spellbound with her storytelling. Afterward we all went out for some convivial, beef-intensive Terre Haute cuisine at a converted stable (!), and next morning I breakfasted with assorted local arts dignitaries, who regaled me with lore of native sons Eugene V. Debs and James Jones, and had me contemplating a return visit at my earliest opportunity.

“Include any appropriate future actions you feel will benefit the organization,” goes the next item on the report form, and the one thing I can think of might be to hold all keynote speakers to an hour. I must’ve talked for two, easy, at my SRO lecture that afternoon. Folks seemed receptive, though, especially to my chaffing of the Mayor for not having read the book yet.

The last injunction on the site-visit form is, ” If you have answered NO to any compliance question above, please explain further.” That refers to the part above where it asks, “Did the organization comply with the stipulations of the agreement?” Well, the main stipulations are 1) to round up strong partners, which in this case included one of very few all-volunteer theaters nationwide whose budget reaches seven figures, 2) to involve the media, which in this case included the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, where my beloved quondam San Francisco Chronicle colleague Stephanie Salter gave us a nice write-up and promptly, alas, skipped town, and 3) to use The Maltese Falcon to get people reading like it’s going out of style. Which, with enough Big Reads like this one, it may just not be.

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…