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…

February 19, 2008
Norman, Oklahoma

The four sorority girls were jockeying for position around me, giggling and shouting “Halo him! Halo him!” It’s times like this when the sacrifices we public servants make for our country really hit home.

Haloing, I hasten to point out, is apparently when members of this particular sorority — and you’ll have to forgive me for not catching the name, somehow — form a circle with their hands over the head of some lucky honoree. Because this sorority has chosen literacy as its favorite charity, my arrival in town struck them as reason enough to go into halo formation. (I am, after all, a “national book expert,” according to the front-page story in this morning’s edition of the Norman, Oklahoma Transcript.)

The rather more sedate image you see here is of Norman Public Librarian Susan Gregory posing with a couple of cheerful patrons beside the vehicular centerpiece of the Bless Me, Ultima Ultimate Altima Giveaway, an ingenious promotion devised by the Pioneer Library System’s Gary Kramer. The idea is, participants in The Big Read of Rudy Anaya’s novel can pick up an entry form to win the car at any of the 83 events taking place around town over the next two-and-a-half months.

That’s right, 83 events. (And counting, they hasten to point out.) They do things on a grand scale here in Oklahoma, and nowhere was this plainer than at last night’s kickoff in the showroom of Bob Moore Nissan. Turns out the aforementioned Gary Kramer used to teach English to the dealership’s Ricky Stapleton. When the library was rounding up Big Read sponsors, he rang up Ricky and for all I know threatened him with detention, because pretty soon the car dealer had donated the Altima pictured here, and signed on to host last night’s splashy gala. Tacos from Chico’s got scarfed, some fiery cumbias got danced to, speeches got made, and, best of all, the tall pyramid of paperback Ultimas wound up looking less like Cheops and more like Chichen Itza.

Come next morning, the graphic on the front page of my free USA Today at the Norman, Okla., Country Inns & Suites says that newspapers’ share of car dealership ad spending has dropped from 52% a decade ago to 27% in 2006. How USA Today knew that I’m probably the only person in America who might find this interesting this morning is yet another of The Big Read’s miracles, but the ad sales lost to newspapers have apparently migrated to the electronic media, direct mail and “other.” All I know is, if “other” refers to what I saw last night at Bob Moore Nissan, then “other” is definitely something else.

Everybody involved in the Norman Big Read — Anne Masters, Anne Harris and the rest of the library staff; all the Bob Moore dealership’s generous team; gifted Oklahoma novelist Rilla Askew; and R.C. Davis-Undiano and David Draper Clark of World Literature Today (Oklahoma University’s Ellis Island of international writing since its founding here three quarters of a century ago as Books Abroad) — everybody pitched in and had a conspicuously good time doing it.

Halo them.

February 15, 2008
Washington, DC

Things ain’t what they used to be. Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. The Dodgers leaving Vero Beach. Warren Zevon dead. Reading down. The list goes on.

There’s a word for this type of melancholy, and it isn’t griping. It’s elegy, from the Greek elegos, meaning a poem lamenting a bygone era or someone lost. For as long as there have been people to say it, there have been people saying how soft we all used to have it — back when publishing was a gentleman’s profession, when ballplayers didn’t juice, when fire didn’t make the cave walls all sooty. Not many people know this, but right after the Big Bang, guys said to a bartender, “Sure was nicer when all matter was compressed into a single point no larger than this shotglass.”

The Big Read author John Steinbeck interrogated the impulse to lazy elegy in his other triple-decker classic besides The Grapes of Wrath, the elegiacally named East of Eden. In it the sheriff’s deputy and his boss are riding across the valley to grill Steinbeck’s hero, Adam Trask, about how his monstrous wife, Cathy, happened to shoot him in the shoulder. The deputy looks out at the land and says — with Steinbeck’s great ear picking up every last word — “Christ, I wish they hadn’t killed off all the grizzly bears. In eighteen-eighty my grandfather killed one up by Pleyto weighed eighteen hundred pounds.”

Steinbeck’s gift is to put into the deputy’s mouth a nostalgia that most of us feel at one time or another, and then to undercut it immediately. Sure, Julius misses the now-extinct California grizzly — but maybe if his own family hadn’t been so quick with a Remington, there might still be one or two left. Steinbeck doesn’t ridicule our elegiac reflex, but he’s far too smart not to point out the hypocrisy that often thrums under it like an aquifer.

Then again.

For almost as long as folks have been saying how soft we all used to have it way back when, there have been others who’ll say that’s a crock. They insist that everybody always thinks we’re living in, to invoke Thomas Pynchon, “the spilled, the broken world.” They like to write opinion pieces with elegiac quotes about how the automobile has ruined everything, or how insipid television is, and then – whoa, Nelly! – try to make you feel like an idiot for not guessing that the quote in question was written in 1910 or 1940, respectively. In other words, the world can’t be getting worse because folks thought the world was getting worse even when it was better, so how bad can it be?

Alas, there’s a logical flaw in this anti-elegy argument that wants exposing. Isn’t it just possible that the world has always been getting worse? That things seemed worse a hundred years ago because they really were, but that things seem worse now because they’re even worse than they were?

To which anyone might be forgiven for saying, “Thanks, and you have a nice day too.” I’m arguing no particular brief for either side. But it’s interesting to note that of the 21 fine novels to date on the Big Read list, elegies are conspicuous by their near absence.

Poetry may lend itself to elegy more than novels do, or than good novels do. As I look down the Big Read list, I see a lot more stories about what lousier lives we used to lead. A Lesson Before Dying, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Shawl, The Age of Innocence – not a lot of nostalgia there. Only the pretty happy childhoods in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Ántonia’s sweet prairie eventually plowed under – have a look at it now, Willa, and see what “plowed under” really looks like – sound like wistful sighs over yesteryear.

In a weird way, Fahrenheit 451 is the most elegiac book on the list. It warns us of a dystopian future without books, a future whose roots could already be glimpsed when Bradbury wrote it half a century ago. If anything, Montag’s story aches with a kind of nostalgia for the present — a useful phrase, into which my preliminary provenance inquiries have proven inconclusive.

Dubious speculation about this expression, or about all things elegiac, are most emphatically welcome at kipend@arts.gov. And now, this post isn’t what it used to be. It used to be unfinished…

The farmer and the rancher should be friends. This home truth from Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for Oklahoma loses none of its infinite applicability by being, as I just embarrassingly found out, a misquotation. (Future blog post: The Causes and Sometimes Beneficial Effects of Inadvertent Misquotation.) The real lyric goes, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.” In other words, folks with more in common than not, should be nicer to each other than not. Hammerstein’s nostrum goes for not just farmers and the cowmen, but also writers and editors, writing professors and English professors, and — the indirect text of today’s sermon — books and computers.

If Leo Tolstoy could learn to ride a bicycle at 67, even my mother can master a computer.

Exhibit A in my brief is how much fun it is to read the print edition of the Sunday paper with the Internet handy. Want to know who won the liner notes category while reading the Grammys wrap-up? Look it up online. Want to remind yourself when the show of WWII internee Chiura Obata’s Yosemite paintings opens at the Smithsonian? Look it up online, then paste it into your calendar software. You get the idea.

Exhibit B is Michael A. Denner’s “Totally Unofficial Readers’ Blog for Champaign-Urbana’s BIG READ.” Prof. Denner sent me greetings at kipend@arts.gov and introduced himself: “I’ll be giving the keynote address at Urbana-Champaign’s Big Read — on The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I’ve been blogging on my lecture, on my reactions to re-reading the novel.”
He thought I’d find it interesting, and was he ever right. It’s a terrific window into how a smart academic can write for a general readership and dispel the noxious stereotype of scholars as jargon-bound eggheads whose prose tastes like a tweed elbow patch. Check it out at the puckishly named http://ivanisdead.blogspot.com/.

Michael’s work is emblematic of how a lot of campuses around the country, such as Washington U. in St. Louis and Parkville in Kansas City, are starting to embrace The Big Read as a way of improving town-gown relations. It’s also a great way of creating a greater sense of fellowship among students, as colleges across the country are discovering with their campus reads, whether affiliated with The Big Read or no. And if anybody knows of some information clearinghouse where I can find a list of campus reads around the country, I’d love to reach out to any of them that could use a little NEA help to cope with all the demands of such an undertaking.

Finally today, a hearty hello to Victoria Hutter, just joining the Big Read as communications director designate. Victoria is a Broadway baby, through and through, as anybody lucky enough to see the annual NEA amateur theatricals she directs around here can attest. Probably it’s her new eyes on the blog that inspired this morning’s Hammerstein lede. Remarkable how, in ways not always apparent to the author, readership propels and steers a writer’s ship.

Speaking of which, keep those cards and letters coming to kipend@arts.gov. Do you have a Big Read blog like Michael’s? Clue me in…

One of the regained pleasures of no longer reviewing professionally is the inalienable privilege of writing about books I haven’t read. Thanks to the happy distractions of The Big Read, the universe of books I haven’t read isn’t exactly shrinking. The two books I most want to read right now are American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor, and Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream by Edward Humes. Taken together these books represent two of the best things the federal government ever did for its employers — i.e., us. As I hope to prove in a follow-up post, the pair also suggests yet another prime suspect in the perpetual Who Killed Reading? inquest, which The Big Read endeavors to interrupt by impolitely resurrecting the victim.

The book that started the American Guides revival.

Every 70 years, it so happens, the federal government does something important for reading and writing in America. In the 1860s, it was the Civil War — a monumental slaughter (as detailed in Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust’s new book This Republic of Suffering, also under the nightstand), but still trade publishing’s most popular perennial subject. Right now, Congress’s gift to literature is The Big Read. In between, in the 1930s, it was the Works Progress Administration, President Roosevelt’s initiative to get America working again.

Not surprisingly, my favorite part of the WPA was the Federal Writers Project. During the Depression, little different from bricklayers and bridgebuilders, almost all writers were out of work. The FWP stepped in and hired them to write, among other things, the American Guides: a series of travel books to all 50 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other glories. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck wrote of the American Guides that

The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it. It was compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating.

In addition to introducing legions of Americans to the amazements of their own country, the FWP incubated a cradleful of fine writers. If you’d walked into the Chicago office in 1937, you could have swapped water-cooler scuttlebutt with Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and the terrific, underrecognized African American writer and critic Margaret Walker, all working side-by-side. Thanks to Jabari Asim, by the way, late of Washington Book World and newly donning W.E.B. DuBois’s old eyeshade as editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, for the tip on Walker this morning at the National Book Critics Circle’s indispensable Critical Mass blog. I don’t know if that all-star Chicago office is a historical novel, stage play or a sitcom, but it’s sure as shooting a book proposal, as I keep telling my pal at the Trib, the Richard Daley biographer Elizabeth Taylor. Sorry, Liz, it’s open season now.

I see I’m nearing my word limit, and I haven’t even gotten to the G.I. Bill yet. Another day. Before I go, though, I just discovered that the American Folklife Center, the Center for the Book, and a whole lot of other jewels of the Library of Congress are hosting a symposium called Art, Culture, and Government: The New Deal at 75 here in D.C. March 13-14, with WPA films screening on the 15th at the National Archives all day long. A herd of Steinbeck’s red ponies and Gram Parsons’s wild horses couldn’t drag me away…

February 6, 2008
Omaha, Nebraska

As the mother of an aspiring zoologist, I spend more time in zoos than most children do.

My 9-year-old son never races through a zoo. He actually looks at every animal and even reads the plaque about every animal. He can explain interesting facts to anyone who will listen, such as: why snakes are not poisonous, why gorillas are not monkeys, or why bats are mammals. He wishes he could attend school at the zoo.

In Nebraska, some students actually do attend school at the zoo, thanks to the innovative leadership of Elizabeth Mulkerrin, the Education Director of Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo. In addition to boasting the world’s largest indoor rainforest, indoor desert, and nocturnal exhibit, the Omaha Zoo can now enjoy another claim: it is the first zoo to partner with a library and sponsor a Big Read. Elizabeth and her partners at the Omaha Public Library — Sarah English and Linda Trout — have created a successful and unique collaboration that I hope other cities might pursue.

Celebrating Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, the Omaha Big Read launched its kick-off on January 4, 2008, featuring Iditarod competitor Matt Anderson, talking before an audience of more than 225 adults and children at the Zoo’s auditorium. Their program of events includes book clubs, story-time with dogs, and film showings. The grand finale will be the Zoo’s annual “Read Around the World” on March 15. I was invited to help lead a teacher’s workshop — the first time that science teachers joined English teachers and librarians at one of the Zoo’s regularly scheduled educator workshops.

For me, this workshop spoke to an issue often on my mind: that English and science are more connected than curriculum sometimes reflects. After all, does it really matter that snakes are venomous, not poisonous? Does it matter that a gorilla is not a monkey? Absolutely. Because science, like poetry, teaches us to be precise in our choice of words. I fear the current decline in reading will cause Americans to lose the ability to use language conscientiously, and with it, our ability to articulate our thoughts clearly.

Such a decline also impedes our ability to describe the world around us vividly, so we are reduced to exclaiming, “Look at that green snake!,” instead of “Look at that beautiful Emerald Tree Boa.” Certainly the snake is still itself, whether identified by its given species name or not. But if we cannot name the things around us — flowers, birds, animals, trees — we are impoverished. And I wonder — to what extent is one’s view of the animal kingdom analogous to one’s view of people? If we consider apes and monkeys interchangeable, might we be more inclined to stereotype human beings? Is the failure to notice an Egyptian Fruit Bat’s five fingers comparable to the way we walk past those we don’t understand?

Bats — like wolves — have received a bad reputation from literature and film. Fear is sometimes based on misunderstanding, and novels don’t claim to teach science. In this way, a conversation can begin by asking what any particular literary work implies about the natural world, about ecology and conservation. In the workshop, we learned that the reintroduction of wolves in Wyoming has led to a healthy resurgence of rainbow trout. Who would have thought the trout would return with the wolves? But scientists have noticed that — without the fear of a wolf attack — caribou were taking their time to drink, thereby defecating in the clean water rainbow trout need to survive. This, my son would remind me, is a good example of the circle of life.

Jack London was also misunderstood, criticized both during his life and after for merely writing “dog stories.” Of course he did write several popular dog tales, but he also told other partly autobiographical stories—of his travels across America as a hobo (The Road), of his experiences living as a homeless man in the streets of England (The People of the Abyss), of his fight for success in the literary world (Martin Eden). He endured more physical ailments than I can name, and he kept writing despite hundreds of rejection slips before his 1903 success with The Call of the Wild. Like his canine protagonist, Jack London was a survivor. And since he educated himself at the Oakland Public Library, it seems especially fitting that a zoo and a library would unite to celebrate reading and science, community and conservation. As London himself said in a 1900 letter: “Never a night (whether I have gone out or not), but the last several hours are spent in bed with my books. All things interest me — the world is so very good.”

My son’s love for animals and zoos has taken me down an exciting road of discovery that I would never have traveled otherwise. I hope other parents and children might experience a similar pleasure together through The Big Read — and through the other books, animals, and humans they’ll meet along the way.

February 1, 2008
Washington, DC

We all know Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, redeemer of Zora Neale Hurston’s work, and fine commentator on The Big Read’s CD about Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God – but whatever happened to Margaret Wallace? If not for Walker’s championing in the pages of Ms. magazine, Hurston might still be languishing out of print. We’d have lost not just Their Eyes but Hurston’s wonderful essays, like the unreconstructedly joyful “How It Feel to Be Colored Me,” so bracing in expression, so sad in retrospect, which I read last night in Best American Short Stories of the Century. But without Margaret Wallace, Walker might never have read Hurston in the first place.

Margaret Wallace will be long dead now, and just 13 Googles mark her passing. She apparently reviewed for the New York Times quite a lot in the ’30s and ’40s, including pieces about Thomas Wolfe and Edna Ferber. Maybe she put other important writers on the map too, and we just don’t know it because some publisher credited her review to the Times, but omitted her name. Yet it’s just possible that without her Times rave of Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine on May 6, 1934, datedly but earnestly headlined “Real Negro People,” this early Hurston novel might have sunk without a trace, and Hurston with it. Instead, Margaret Wallace had the discernment to write the following words — hundreds more like them in the same vein too, sadly beyond Googling — and Hurston’s bones were made:

Jonah’s Gourd Vine can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race…Unlike the dialect in most novels about the American Negro, this does not seem to be merely the speech of white men with the spelling distorted. Its essence lies rather in the rhythm and balance of the sentences, in the warm artlessness of the phrasing…Not the least charm of the book, however, is its language: rich, expressive, and lacking in self–conscious artifice. From the rolling and dignified rhythms of John’s last sermon to the humorous aptness of such a word as “shickalacked,” to express the noise and motion of a locomotive, there will be much in it to delight the reader. It is hoped that Miss Hurston will give us other novels in the same colorful idiom.

This is a model of fine, necessary book reviewing. Margaret Wallace states her case, and then she makes it. She says what the book isn’t, and then what it is. She says it well, too. ‘Much in it to delight the reader” is a mite starchy, but “in the rhythm and balance of the sentences, in the warm artlessness of the phrasing’ uses Wallace’s own different rhythm to get at precisely what made Hurston such a revelation. Someone actively “looking to be offended,” in Pynchon’s rueful, useful phrase about political correctness, could take issue with the repetition of the word ‘rhythm’ to describe a black writer’s work, but please. ‘colorful’ is a bit on the cute side, too, the kind of inside joke a working reviewer tosses in occasionally to keep herself amused — not unlike ‘unreconstructedly,’ up above — but who knows how many other books Margaret Wallace was weighing that week?

I can just picture Alice Walker’s mother seeing this notice, or another one assigned by an editor who read this one and then decided to send Jonah’s Gourd Vine out for review after all. I can imagine Mrs. Walker going down to the local department store and buying a copy instead of renting it, which was also an option in those days, and taking it home and enjoying it, and Alice finding it in the attic, and remembering it years later, and finally writing the piece that sent Zora Neale Hurston shickalacking down the track to resurrection.

This is the way that natural selection has usually worked in the swampy ecosystem of literary reputation. What I can’t imagine is where we’ll be now that reviewers like Margaret Wallace, the indicator species in that particular pond, are dying out in most newspapers and magazines. To cite just one example among many, The New Republic lost its book critic, the estimable James Wood, to the New Yorker a few months ago, and he has not been replaced.

This is not news anymore. If editors would just give half the column inches to book reviews that they’re spending on handwringing about the lack of book reviews, we’d be out of the woods already. Instead, like Zora Neale Hurston before Alice Walker found her unmarked grave and paid to put a proper stone over it, Margaret Wallace lies in a potter’s field somewhere, unmourned, unrisen. Whatever happened to Margaret? Will no one lift her up again?