April 27, 2007
Miami, Florida

“And God keeps his appointment with Miami every sundown. Berthed on the east of Biscayne Bay, I can look to the western side, which I never fail to come top-side and do around sunset. Thus I get the benefit of his slashing paint brush all the way…The show is changed every day, but every performance is superb.”
–Zora Neale Hurston, in a winter 1950 letter

Miami has been reading that erstwhile Floridian Ernest Hemingway, not Hurston, but it’s always intriguing when two Big Read authors cross paths. There’ll even be a three-way confluence in Florida next January, when Cynthia Ozick’s largely Miami-set The Shawl joins eight other new books on the Big Read list. What other state boasts three Big Read books/authors, you ask? Answer, as they say, below…

Meantime, my Miami visit got off to a cuddly start with the unmistakable Michelin-man outline of a manatee, floating 17 stories beneath my hotel window and in no particular hurry. I, on the other hand, dashed downstairs to stroke, feed, or otherwise disturb the native fauna. Alas, by the time I got there, nature’s closest approximation of an inflatable pool toy had drifted off down the canal somewhere.

Who couldn’t write great literature at a desk like this, with a fishing reel and a stuffed oryx nearby, plus all your visitors safely behind a locked wrought-iron cage? Photo by David Kipen

Luckily, Alina Interian and Roselyne Pirson of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts drove up around then and spirited me out for a friendly debrief over lunch. Having met them last year during South Florida’s pilot-phase Read of Fahrenheit 451, I knew what to expect: never any apple-polishing, just unalloyed honesty. Alina wasn’t shy about wishing for some newer books on the list, so I was happy to trot out all the new titles for her. Just to be contrary, I started with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, savoring her mortification before throwing out our first 21st-century novel, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, plus all the others spaced more or less evenly between ‘em.

But at this rate, I’ll never get to the finale of the south Florida Big Read, a bus tour — which turned into a bus caravan, it was so oversubscribed — to Hemingway’s house on Key West. In preparation I’d read not just A Farewell to Arms but To Have and Have Not, Hemingway’s only book set in Florida (or for that matter in the United States, unless you count the Nick Adams stories). William Faulkner and Jules Furthman’s script for the Bogart-Bacall-Hawks movie is more successful as a work of art, but boy is the book underrated. It’s got Hemingway’s best description of deep-sea fishing and his fullest, most ominous meditation on suicide. That’s not Bacall purring “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” but it ain’t hay.

Why waste time comparing apples and oranges, though, when you can eat frozen chocolate-covered Key lime pie on a stick? That was me, nuzzled by Hemingway’s bigger-than-ever army of six-toed cats, planted inside the security cage in the doorway of his second-floor writing study, just basking in the aura. I know it was juvenile, closer to fandom than to literary criticism. But after Hemingway’s Key West author Stuart McIvor’s informative lecture downstairs, we’d had our quota of literary criticism. It was time for a little basking, and I was more than equal to the task.

It all took me back to my first experience with Hemingway. I was in high school, and the teacher (more likely the school district, I now realize) had assigned The Sun Also Rises. The book possessed me so thoroughly that I wound up dragooning two classmates into a woefully underplanned troutfishing expedition into the High Sierra. All I remember now is devouring an entire delicious bagful of Snickers bars, heedless of the worm blood and fish scales on my fingers. That wasn’t literary criticism either, but it did for literature what literature does for life: flavor it, hallow it, light it up with Hurston’s “slashing paint brush” until it becomes something else, something finer.

And speaking of the High Sierra, the first state besides Florida to notch three Big Read books or authors is, you guessed it, California, with The Joy Luck Club, The Maltese Falcon, and at least half of The Grapes of Wrath. When I get to still-unrepresented Utah next month, I may have some explaining to do…

February 22, 2007
St. Louis, Missouri

Boon’s Lick residents showed an eagerness for literary greatness when they included among their Fourth of July toasts in 1817: “The Territory of Missouri — may it become the Nursery of Literature.”
– The WPA’s Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State

It’s not so much that Missouri is the “Show Me” State as that the other 49 are, by comparison, “I’ll Show You” states. There’s a refreshing unpretentiousness about this place and its Big Read of Fahrenheit 451, a confident reluctance to put on the dog — even in the putative birthplace of the hot dog. I started this paragraph desperate as usual for a lede and happy to tease out any thesis that might get me partway down the page, but the more I think about it, it may actually be true. Consider my day yesterday:

10 am. Ruddy and grinning in a blue pullover, KWMU public radio host Don Marsh welcomes me, Wash. U. English prof Richard Ruland, and his department chair, ace Big Read co-organizer David Lawton, into his studio for an hour’s discussion of Fahrenheit 451 with his listeners. An hour later we’ve plumbed Bradbury without deifying him, and Marsh throws it back to news with practiced ease.

12 pm. Back at the Wash. U. campus, a dozen Big Read partners and I tuck into lunch and a conversation that’s equal parts candid griping and heartfelt engagement with the program. Teacher Victoria Thomas speaks movingly about bringing free copies of the novel into a class under lockdown, where 33 kids have to share just 14 grab-bag anthologies that never leave the room. Apparently the students kept asking, “So we can really take these home?”

2 pm. Several students and I get to meet the dapper novelist Christopher Buckley, in town for a lecture, and still dazzled 48 hours later from a meeting in LA with his first literary hero: Ray Bradbury. He quotes Kurt Vonnegut remembering that when he used to place a story in the old Saturday Evening Post, within two days it seemed like everybody in the country had read it. Like being on 60 Minutes, Letterman and Leno all at once, Buckley says. Also says I should look at Peter DeVries for the Big Read, maybe Slouching Towards Kalamazoo or Without a Stitch in Time, and that Exley’s A Fan’s Notes is “gemiferous.” Maybe I’ll curl up with it at the airport when — uh-oh, when I miss my flight in two hours! Cripes, gotta run, more down the Big Road…

February 21, 2007
St. Louis, Missouri

A short post today to reflect a shortish day yesterday, begun with Washington University’s frank, funny Cheryl Adelstein picking me up at Lambert Field, then ended a few hours later with Lowell Bergman’s Frontline lullaby for my former profession, newspaper journalism. In between I attended the St. Louis regional finals for Poetry Out Loud, the NEA national initiative that gets school kids to learn and recite good poetry, midwifed last year by the agency’s Dan Stone and now shepherded by Leslie Liberato. [Poetry lovers and high school teachers looking for a great project for their students should check out the Poetry Out Loud web site.]

Someone at the St. Louis Big Read’s principal sponsor, Washington University, or maybe the dynamic Lisette Dennis of the Regional Arts Commission here, where the contest took place, noticed that Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach figures prominently both in the NEA’s Poetry Out Loud anthology and in Fahrenheit 451, and had the bright idea of gently yoking the two together at last night’s semifinals. Consequently, the sizable crowd of parents, peers and poetasters heard not only a bunch of gifted high-school students reciting from Margaret Atwood, Langston Hughes and others, but also one of the unenviable judges, actor-teacher Jack Hake, choke up the house with his reading of Dover Beach. After an understandably protracted judging huddle, the jury proclaimed an exuberant Brijhette Farmer the winner and the effortlessly natural Jeremy White her runner-up. Both are pictured above, letting the good news sink in.

Then it was off to the University City Library for an unusually engaging and well-attended book discussion of Fahrenheit 451, but I’ll have to save the details for tomorrow if I don’t want to miss my ride to KWMU, for their Book Club on the Air. Suffice for now to say that the library checked me out a copy of Missouri: A Guide to the “Show Me” State, so we’re all sure to get our overdue WPA fix tomorrow…

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…

January 22, 2007
Enterprise, Oregon

ENTERPRISE…(3,755 alt., 1,379 pop.), living up to its name, is the bustling trade center for ranchers in the Wallowa Valley. . . — Oregon: End of the Trail, The WPA Guide, 1934

Forgive another dateline opener, but this one’s just too good to pass up: I’m sitting alone before dawn in the darkened reception lounge of the Wilderness Inn, blogging for the Big Read. This would be unremarkable, except that I’m a guest of the Ponderosa Inn across town (i.e., three blocks away). Because the Ponderosa’s wireless internet access isn’t all it might be, I shuffled through the empty streets to its sister hotel to try my luck. That’s where I found the door unlocked, the wireless impeccable and the couch beckoning. The coffee wasn’t on yet, but all the fixings were there if I felt ambitious. For somebody well-acquainted with hotels where the night clerk dozes behind an inch of bulletproof plexiglass, Oregon hospitality suits me down to the ground.

Craig Strobel shows off a traveling exhibit of Dust Bowl-era photos of local workers and families, including works by Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and other federally-employed photographers of the 1930s. The photos are from the Wallowa County Museum archives; the exhibit is displayed at the museum and in schools, storefronts, libraries, and municipal offices in five local towns. Photo: David Kipen

But I’ve known that since yesterday, when Big Read organizer Rich Wandschneider met me at the Lewiston, Idaho, airport with a handshake like to impair my typing skills. After I put away a 1-lb. Wimpy Burger (2 counting garnish!, per the menu), Rich put the truck in gear and commenced to regale me with stories of shaking hands with old-timers who’d themselves shaken hands with Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Rich is the founder of Fishtrap, a literary center the envy of cities a hundred times the size of Enterprise. Fishtrap won a grant last year to do Fahrenheit 451 for the Big Read’s pilot program, and now they’re back for seconds with The Grapes of Wrath.

Bulletin — the night manager just bleared into the office and tactfully suggested that the Wilderness doesn’t open till 7. More down the road, where I hope to use the hand that shook the hand that shook Chief Joseph’s to shake the hands of Enterprise High School’s AP English class…