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 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…

December 5, 2007
Perry, IA

Last night I saw a waterfall of corn. It was almost midnight, and I was driving through cornfields in Iowa. Since it is autumn, the farmers were working late into the night, taking every advantage of the dry weather to harvest the corn. The tractor lights were blazing so brightly that I remembered a line from Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: “Nearly always the sky was a glassy, brilliant azure and the sun burned down riotously bright.” As the corn descended from the combine’s auger into the wagon and the lights shone through it, the kernels glimmered like gold coins in a pirate’s treasure chest.

Carlos Dews gives the keynote for Hometown Perry Iowa’s Big Read. Photo by Iris Coffin

This is not an everyday sight for me — a Los Angeles native living outside of Washington, DC, on her first trip to Iowa. The leaders of Hometown Perry Iowa, a museum that celebrates small town immigrant life, invited me to attend their Big Read kick-off, where scholar and professor Carlos Dews gave the keynote lecture about Carson McCullers’ life and art.

Carlos and I enjoyed long drives and several meals with the organizers of Iowa’s only Big Read for this grant cycle. There were even Reader’s Guides in the waiting room of the Mexican restaurant where we had lunch! With Bill Clark, Iris Coffin, Donna Emmert, Kathy Lenz, and Mayor Viivi Shirley, we spent many hours talking about the novel and speculating about possible reasons why a rural Iowa town was the only Big Read community to have chosen McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Certainly the novel is dark. The characters are flawed, struggling, and often unlikable. The line between survival and despair remains perilously thin for these strong yet fragile creatures. But anyone who has experienced what Emily Dickinson described as the “formal feeling” that comes “after great pain” can appreciate the plight of McCullers’ six main characters.

I’ve never heard anyone identify The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as a love story, but for me, this is its most poignant theme. Until talking with Carlos, I had never considered the novel’s theme of faith. Amid all the tragedy, McCullers might seem to mock hope. Love, faith, and hope: but the greatest of these is love, says the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. A close look may reveal that the novel reflects all three.

The novel begins, “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” There seems no literary precedent for a protagonist like John Singer-a patient, thoughtful man and the town’s jeweler. His companion is a Greek named Antonapoulos, who is a rude, selfish glutton. Singer talks with his hands, but Antonapoulos rarely turns his head. Even “Singer never knew just how much his friend understood of all the things he told him.”

This is not a familiar love story. Similar to Flannery O’Connor, McCullers paints such peculiar characters, partly to demonstrate a clearer definition of love, one that is atypical and seemingly implausible. How rarely do we witness-not to mention give or receive-love freely bestowed without any intimation of sacrifice! When his companion is taken away from him, Singer is impoverished. At the end of a letter, Singer says of Antonapoulos, “the way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.” The presence of all the townspeople is no substitute for the man he calls his “only friend.” If we wonder what John Singer “gets” out of this relationship, we have missed the point.

During the Kick-off presentation, Carlos read a passage from McCullers’ other work The Ballad of the Sad Café to further illuminate her view of love:

The fact that [love] is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. …. [The lover] feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. …The beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be a stimulus for love. …The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. …A most mediocre person can be the object of love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. …. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

We don’t often think of the solitariness of love; we like to think of it as union. But in McCullers’ world, the heart that loves is destined to further loneliness, to further hunting.

The hunt itself, this quest for something elusive, requires faith. In the same way that Antonapoulos seems unresponsive to John Singer, so Singer hardly responds to his neighbors. He doesn’t initiate friendship or conversations, although he seems to embrace both. The five other main characters visit Singer’s room frequently, often repeating their stories to him. They never know what he really thinks. Of this, Carlos Dews observed, “What makes faith faith is that you don’t necessarily get any messages back from prayer or worship. Faith comes from the belief that someone is listening to what you are saying. That’s what John Singer is for many of these characters. He’s deaf and mute, so they simply have to believe he’s listening.”

A question that repeated like a fugue in Perry concerned the ending: Is there any hope by the novel’s last page? Part of the answer lies in the novel’s final sentence- “He composed himself soberly to await the morning sun.” Despite John Singer’s physical inability to speak, Biff Brannon might be the novel’s most mute character. This lonely restaurant owner silently serves the town’s misfits. Everyone else who visits Singer talks incessantly, but not Biff. After the death of his wife, he doesn’t confide in anyone. He is eccentric, solitary, and oddly infatuated with Mick Kelley. Yet at the very end, the O’Connor-like “moment of grace” is given to Biff-an ordinary, isolated man left to plan the novel’s final funeral, who is bereft of anyone to love. Despite his loneliness, perhaps because of his quietly tragic life, McCullers ends her novel with Biff Brannon.

Perry, Iowa, is encouraging others to read a novel that, for me, is ultimately about those three greatest things: faith, hope, and love. It asks us to cherish love more fiercely when it is found, to possess faith in what cannot be seen, and to await the rays of the morning sun.

September 7, 2007
Washington, DC

“I’ve always liked listening to the radio…That’s one of the reasons why in a lot of my books there’s somebody listening through a wall to somebody talking. Somebody’s always talking in another room. Maybe that’s the radio.” — Ernest J. Gaines

I don’t trust a library without a radio in it. In the Big Read’s book-jammed office right now, I’m listening to Scott Joplin’s “Solace,” marveling at how all his melancholy, plangent numbers mean so much more to me than years ago, when I only had ears for “The Maple Leaf” and Joplin’s other, more upbeat rags.

Radio’s much on my mind these days, since this coming week marks the premiere of The Big Read on XM, our new national weekday show. In case you haven’t heard, XM Satellite Radio is airing each of the Big Read audiobooks in turn, courtesy of Audible, Inc. Each book will be bracketed beforehand by the NEA-produced CD devoted to the novel in question, and after by a roundtable discussion of the book amongst me and a couple-three distinguished fellow readers — all ringmastered by XM Sonic Theater’s book-besotted host, Jo Reed. The first episode airs Monday at 2:30 am, 10:30 am and 4:30 pm Eastern time. (Bear in mind that Pacific time, as we used to say in California, is three hours behind and roughly a decade ahead.)

The first book will be Fahrenheit 451, read by Ray Bradbury himself. Over at XM last week, I joined in a wide-ranging, provocative conversation about Fahrenheit with Readers Circle member Nancy Pearl, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card, XM’s own Kim Alexander, and the sainted Jo. This, plus an interview about the show with XM’s Bob Edwards (taking a holiday from our fortnightly movie chats), and a few extra minutes of me jawing about the Big Read in general. All in all, not a bad way to get the word out to those few scattered Americans not yet doing a Big Read or following this blog with fanatical zeal.

Carson McCullers

The Big Read on XM represents just the latest chapter in the long, happy marriage of radio and literature. Dan Brady wrote in this space the other day about the recurrence of bridge-playing in several of our books, but radio may be even more pervasive. Most famously, Bradbury presents radio in Fahrenheit as an insidious force, anticipating the Walkmen and iPods with his descriptions of “seashell” or “thimble” radios “tamped into” oppressed citizens’ ears. More benevolent are characterizations of radio in both The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which classical music broadcasts become Mick’s solace and salvation, and A Lesson Before Dying, where Jefferson’s jailhouse radio gives him one tenuous nighttime connection to the outside world.

These two literary uses of radio strike me as ultimately truer to life than Bradbury’s cautionary one — though radio’s visual inheritors have a lot more to answer for. Unlike later electronic media, radio (whether delivered via satellite, computer, or crystal set) has one crucial thing in common with literature. It cultivates the very skill that too many educators today find alarmingly absent from their classrooms: the ability of students to make up their own pictures…

“After dinner, if there were no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read some book of which people were talking, and in the evening sat down to work, that is, read official papers, compared them with the laws, sorted depositions, and put them under the laws. This he found neither tiresome nor entertaining. It was tiresome when he might have been playing bridge; but if there were no bridge going on, it was at any rate better than sitting alone or with his wife.” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me…” — A Farewell to Arms

Having recently joined the Big Read team, I had some catching up to do — re-reading old favorites like The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Death of Ivan Ilych; cracking open known but hitherto unread classics like The Age of Innocence and A Farewell to Arms; and diving into titles unfamiliar to me, Bless Me, Ultima and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

Reading this material in rapid succession, your mind makes connections that it might not otherwise. One that sticks out to me is the proliferation of the card game bridge. In addition to the two quotes above, there was reference to bridge in another Big Read book that escapes me now (The Shawl? A Lesson Before Dying?).

I’ve never played bridge. None of my friends play bridge. My parents don’t play bridge. Maybe my Aunt Rosemarie plays bridge? If so, she’s my only connection to the game. What struck me was the casual way bridge is talked about in these books, woven into the background fabric of life. So much so that it is supposed to be the simplifying half of the metaphor for Catherine and Henry’s complex love affair. Bridge is assumed to be universal. Maybe today a writer would reference Sudoku or video games or another soon-to-be anachronistic entertainment.

[Disclaimer: I realize that bridge remains popular in some circle so, bridge players of America, please don’t flood David’s inbox with letters of protest, it’s merely that bridge has escaped my sphere.]

The prevalence of bridge in these great books begs question of how people spend their leisure time. As Reading at Risk showed, they’re not reading, and in my experience, they’re not playing bridge. It has been suggested that they are watching television, consuming digital media, and/or otherwise technologically occupied. This might be the case, but there are other considerations as well. Ivan is an aristocrat, Henry a wounded solider — they had plenty of time on their hands.

The thing about leisure time is that it’s a finite resource. We work most of the day, get home, have dinner, and then spend our 3 to 4 unclaimed waking hours decompressing with TV or with friends, going to the gym, or for some of us, reading. How can we persuade people they should spend more of their precious leisure time reading? It seems there are two modes of thinking on this. First, the Eat Your Vegetables school — reading is good for you — and second, the Reading is Rad school — My Ántonia is totally as much fun as Grand Theft Auto, dude. The trick, and what the Big Read is attempting to do, is to combine these two methods and take it a step further. Not only is reading good for you and fun, it goes beyond just you the reader. Reading can be a community event.

Bridge, unlike Solitaire, is a social game. It takes at least four people to play. Reading is more flexible. It’s for players 1 - 1 million. However you spend your leisure time, there are few activities that span millennia as popular choices. Reading is one; perhaps the only one that is timeless, good for you, good for others, and, in every sense, radical.

August 1, 2007
Washington, DC

In the Temple of Literature it’s not always necessary to talk about books in order to enjoy them.

The Temple of Literature, Hanoi, Vietnam. Source: Flickr

I don’t really believe this, of course. My work for the Big Read, and before that as a book critic in San Francisco, is predicated on the insufficiency of reading literature without kicking it around afterwards. What sometimes makes me impatient is a particular kind of book chat that I’ve engaged in myself, and that can even precede other, more worthwhile sorts, but that still makes my heart sink when it’s invoked above all else. I’m referring to the discussion of “themes.” Or am I being unfair?

You’ve been there. We’ve all been there. Say the book is The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The discussants take their seats around a lopsided table, and a designated moderator lobs the fatal question: What themes do you see in this book? Right away, even the crickets fall silent. Somebody munches a cookie, and it sounds like a rifleshot.

“Er…identity?” someone ventures. Encouragement from the leader. Nods all around. Identity. Definitely lots of identity in there. The person who said identity leans back, on the scoreboard already.

Jealous, another one pipes up with “Loneliness!” This is going well, thinks the leader. More nods from the rest. Loneliness. Definitely lots of loneliness in there.

Teacher’s pet going once. Teacher’s pet going twice.

“Self-definition,” somebody blurts. Kind of like identity, but we’ll take it. Self-definition. Definitely lots of self-definition in there…

The only problem with this brand of discussion is, it’s not a discussion. And it’s hardly limited to book groups. You’d see it nowadays in too many book reviews, if “too many book reviews” were still an imaginable concept. Up until the recent crisis in book criticism made all reviews an endangered species, it wasn’t uncommon to find phrases in your morning paper like: “Wagstaff’s compelling new opus is at once a poignant exploration of his recurrent themes of alienation, angst, and needlepoint, and…”

This is reviewery by catalogue, the laundry-list school of literary criticism. Wagstaff’s novel may indeed be about all those things, but until a reviewer tries to explain what the author says about them, and how she says it, he simply hasn’t said anything at all. Big Read mainstay The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is about self-definition, loneliness, and identity (though I wouldn’t give you much for a book that wasn’t). Does that even begin to plumb the intricacies of McCullers’ character development, or how she generates suspense without giving you any idea where the story is headed, or any of a dozen other nuances? I don’t think so.

Again, maybe I just got up on the wrong side of the muffin this morning. Themes are an indispensable part of any literary discussion, and frequently factor into why a city or town picks a Big Read book in the first place. Besides, book discussion with strangers can be ticklish enough without one or more don’ts heckling around in your head. But for an icebreaker, I can take What themes do you see in this book? or leave it alone. Give me What did you think? any day.

Speaking of What did you think, what do you think? Am I being too hard on a tried-and-true way of kickstarting literary conversation? Or does theme-happy book chat get on your nerves too? What are your reliable ways of getting a book discussion started and keeping it going? More about this, including your ideas — plus how we came to develop the questions in our Readers Guides as a way to build on useful but routine discussions of theme — in an upcoming post…