November 26, 2008
Washington, DC
As we work on the Reader’s Guide for Edgar Allan Poe, I’ve been thinking about how one might capture Poe’s fiction in one breath. Perhaps something like . . .
“Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction combined a boy’s fascination with all things gross and disgusting, a youth’s terrified idealization of the opposite sex, and a grown man’s guilt about never fully outgrowing either one.”
What’s your take? Let us know at bigreadblog@arts.gov.
November 22, 2008
Huntingdon, TN
The best interview I ever conducted has always been the mid-fatwa profile I did of Salman Rushdie for the LA Reader — until now. Tuesday night I got to have an onstage conversation about Twain and the reading life with Hal Holbrook and his wife, the actress Dixie Carter, in her native Carroll County, Tennessee, at her jewel-like namesake theater. I’m still vibrating with joy at the memory, and no one recorded it, so these brief lines will have to suffice.
The whole thing originated at Big Read orientation last winter. Dixie Theater executive director Lee Warren came up and asked if I’d come do an event during their Big Read of Tom Sawyer. Already knowing secondhand about the Dixie, I answered that if she’d let me do something with Hal Holbrook, I’d move heaven and earth to put it on my schedule.
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Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight.” Photo courtesy of Vintage. |
That’s how I found myself shaking like a wet hound Tuesday afternoon at the prospect of a soundcheck with a man I’ve admired most of my life, not just for his landmark one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, but for the Holbrook movie that more than any other, pressganged me into a career in journalism: not All the President’s Men, mind you, but the cheese classic Capricorn One. I even wrote a part for Holbrook as a Twain scholar in the only screenplay I ever wrote.
I’d seen Holbrook in person once before, at last year’s Broadcast Film Critics Association awards. Rheumy, frail, 82 and looking every minute of it, he stood besieged by reporters asking him about his soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated performance in Into the Wild. I wanted to go over but I didn’t, so I wound up kicking myself all the way home instead.
Now he was chivalrously shepherding his cherished wife backstage at the Dixie not two feet from me, and he looked a new man. Some elaborate health troubles behind him — the typical Yankee reticence about one’s own health and other people’s has no purchase south of the Mason-Dixon Line — he looked, it must be admitted, uncannily like late-life Mark Twain.
I asked him about it, and he copped to an actor’s disappointment at not getting to spend his quondam pre-performance 45 minutes making himself up to look like Twain anymore. He still tours Mark Twain Tonight! around the country, reaching into the 16 hours of material he’s salted away to pull out whichever two or so seem most relevant when the house lights go down.
The soundcheck went so well, with me taking the opportunity to start interviewing him and Ms. Carter right there already, that I was afraid we’d wind up leaving our game in the locker room. I needn’t have worried. They were such professionals that, come showtime, with a capacity crowd of 471 Tennesseeans including the mayor of Huntingdon (a high school beau of Ms. Carter’s) in attendance, I threw out my trusty soundcheck questions and pulled out the rest that I hadn’t got around to.
Near as I can tell, they relished the chance to keep the evening fresh. The one soundcheck story I wanted Holbrook to tell again was the one about his experience giving Mark Twain Tonight! at Ole Miss during the crisis over whether to admit a black student — before an audience composed equally of students, faculty, and armed National Guardsmen. Still, I didn’t want to pull the usual lazy interviewer’s gambit of asking, “So, Mr. Holbrook, tell the story about….” That tactic just makes an interviewee feel like a jukebox.
So I asked him which out of thousands of Twain appearances stood out most vividly in his mind. I was perfectly willing for him to talk about his 1960s Twain tour behind the Iron Curtain, practicing the kind of cultural diplomacy that we’re trying to rev up again at the NEA these days. (After the show, Holbrook offered to come to Washington on behalf of the arts in general and The Big Read in particular — something I dearly hope to take him up on.)
Well, Mr. Holbrook did an amazing thing. He took the Ole Miss story that had moved me to tears at three minutes that afternoon, put back all the detail I didn’t realize he’d taken out, and choked up the entire house at five minutes, himself included. I can’t do it or much else he said justice here — at least not in the scant space left me — but I’ll try to reproduce his answer to the one question I wasn’t about to leave Tennessee without asking: “What would Mark Twain think about America electing a black man president?”
Hal Holbrook said, “It’s as if you went to Philadelphia, and you looked at the Liberty Bell, and the crack was gone.”
November 20, 2008
Washington, DC
Growing up in New York City in the mid-1980s, one of my TV favorites was ABC’s The 4:30 Movie, a weekly, themed, mini-festival of classic movies. I distinctly remember huddling under the bedcovers, terrified, after a marathon of Vincent Price movies, which I’m sure included at least a few of the six films he did based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Price introduced me to Poe’s Roderick Usher and even to “The Raven,” which was the basis for a 1963 Price film. As The Big Read team decides which of Poe’s many works of poetry and short fiction to feature in the Reader’s Guide, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that any community hoping to host a Poe Big Read in 2009-2010 strongly consider a Vincent Price Meets Edgar Allan Poe Film Festival. I’ll bring the popcorn . . .and the blankets to hide under!
Here’s the first few lines from “The Fall of the House of Usher” to whet your appetite:
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. . .
November 19, 2008
Washington, DC
The most recent issue of Library Journal features a terrific article by Beth Dempsey on The Big Read - “Big Read, Big ROI: How the one-book program extends the library’s most trusted brand.”
Here’s a brief excerpt:
The Big Read is about big literature. Old or new, domestic or imported — the featured books are classics. [IMLS Deputy Director for Libraries Mary] Chute says there’s unique power in literary narrative reading. One of the most inspiring moments she’s had with The Big Read was listening to [NEA Chairman] Gioia describe the reasoning behind the program’s literature-only policy. “He told us that with fiction, we give the author permission to guide our thinking,” she says. “It give us the ability to empathize with another being . . . and that’s what triggers civic engagement.”
You can find the full article at http://tinyurl.com/5w4jvg.
November 14, 2008
Martinsville, Virginia
Located in bucolic Martinsville, Virginia, Piedmont Arts will host its very first Big Read next March. According to director of programs Barbara Parker, “We try to serve as a catalyst for as many arts and cultural opportunities for as many groups as we possibly can.” Parker spoke with the NEA about Piedmont Arts’ plans for their Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird and how she hopes it will benefit the Martinsville community. (Click to see Parker’s Big Read celebrity photos.)
NEA: Can you tell me about Piedmont Arts and about Martinsville?
BARBARA PARKER: [Martinsville is] one of those jewels that people don’t know about. Not only do we have the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s probably best known for Martinsville Speedway, which is the host to Nextel cup races. . . .What we found unusual about this small town area is that Piedmont Arts is here. We’re museum partners with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and we’re also an accredited museum by the America Association of Museums. In addition to that, [Martinsville] has a brand new Virginia Museum of Natural History. So to have two world class museums in an area of 70,000 people is amazing. We are about one hour south of Roanoke, Virginia, and one hour north of Greensboro, North Carolina, so we’re poised right in the middle of two metropolitan areas.
NEA: This is not just your first time with The Big Read, but also with any one community-one book project?
PARKER: We had talked with the library about doing [a one book-one community project]. What really got us excited and fired up about doing [The Big Read was that] I had booked Montana Repertory Theater Company to perform To Kill a Mockingbird for March 31, 2009. Everything just kind of snowballed after that. I found out about The Big Read by just plugging things in on the internet, and looking for activities that we could do to surround To Kill a Mockingbird. We had applied for NEA grants before, but primarily for exhibit-related activities. So this just seemed like the perfect, perfect thing. As I started reading about other activities that groups had done and the fact that Charles Shields, who is a Virginia author, wrote an autobiography of Harper Lee, I just went, “Oh my gosh, there are so many things that we could do to promote this, and it could be a really big thing for us.” Sometimes the stars just align, and this was one of those times.
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Barbara Parker explained that Piedmont Arts’ Big Read was an offshoot of plans to bring Montana Rep’s production of Mockingbird to Martinsville. ” [To Kill a Mockingbird] is my favorite book, my favorite movie, and to see it onstage . . . I just felt like it was something that was timely and that people would respond to. And so we took a chance.” Photo credit: Bernadette Moore/Piedmont Arts |
NEA: What are you planning for The Big Read?
PARKER: We started planning all these things, and we decided that if we got The Big Read grant it would be fabulous, but if we didn’t we would still go forward with some of them. Our kick off event is February 28. We’ll be distributing free copies of the book. We’ll have speakers, politicians, that sort of thing. Our honorary chair of The Big Read is Virginia State Senator Roscoe Reynolds, and he’s a lawyer. He always has a book with him, and he just lights up when you ask him what he’s reading. He was the perfect fit.
On March 9, Charles Shields. . . [will] be here doing a talk and book signing in our old courthouse uptown, and our uptown Rives Theater will present the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Our local writers group is sponsoring an essay contest called “Who’s Your Atticus?” and people should write in about 500 words or less about a person they know, [who embodies] that honor and sense of justice that Atticus Finch had. We’re actually giving cash prizes, and [the winning essay] will be printed in the local newspaper. We’ll have an exhibit of photographs by David Spear. He’s a North Carolina photographer, and he did a series . . . about a family that lives near him named the Neugents. It was in the 1970s when he actually did this series, but you would think it was in the Depression. The way this family lives, it’s just true poverty in the rural South that doesn’t change. When you look back at the characters of Bob & Mayella Ewell [in To Kill a Mockingbird], and how the way they lived influenced their reaction to what happened, I [see] the same things in The Neugents. One thing I’m most excited about is we are partnering with our local newspaper The Martinsville Bulletin, and everyday they’ll be printing a photo of someone reading To Kill a Mockingbird with the title “What Page Are You On?”
NEA: What effect do you hope The Big Read has on your community?
PARKER: I hope that it will . . . challenge people to go back and read To Kill a Mockingbird again. It’s something that’s read in the ninth grade here in Virginia, but I’ve read it several times, and it’s a book that’s not just for ninth graders. I think the lessons to be learned are timeless, and I really feel like — what’s the saying — those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it? And who would have known when we got this [and] when we booked this show, that we would have something like this historic election of Barack Obama? I think that this [novel] just reminds people what it used to be like, especially young people who are shocked when they hear stories about what it was like in our country for African Americans. . . .I think every town in the U.S. has a story to tell about prejudice, and there are still incidences of that. I just hope it reminds people of what things used to be like and how far we’ve come.
Aside from that, I really hope it promotes literacy. We have been a manufacturing town for a long, long time. Hooker, Basset, and Stanley furniture companies are all headquartered here in Martinsville or in the surrounding areas. [The town has] had the mentality for a long time that maybe education wasn’t as important as getting a job in the factory. Because of so many jobs going overseas that has changed. I hope it promotes the idea of how important education and literacy are. We want to try to get those non-readers to read also.
NEA: What’s on you reading list besides To Kill a Mockingbird?
PARKER: Oh, wow, I wish I had time to read more. I was a shy kid, and I came from a family of readers, so you know I read for escape and imagination. Now I read just for the silence of not listening to a television. The things that really stick with me are The Secret Life of Bees and The Lovely Bones, and I read Wicked after I saw the stage show. . . . I think [some of] my favorite books are The Great Santini and A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote.
NEA: Do you have anything you’d like to add?
PARKER: Just that we are so excited about [The Big Read], and we hope that this will be the first of many Big Reads to come. It’s an incredible opportunity. I cannot say enough about our local newspaper. They developed a cultural calendar to promote the events every Thursday of what’s going on in the community. I wish everybody had that kind of support from their local media. The community has come together: we have two other local foundations who have contributed funds to this project, so it’s been something that we can really wrap our arms around.
November 13, 2008
Washington, DC
It’s always a little embarrassing when your favorite lines or passages in a book are everybody else’s favorites too. My favorite moment in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and quite possibly in all of American literature besides, comes when Huck famously chucks generations worth of inherited prejudice and throws in his lot with the escaped slave Jim.
The key to the scene is that Huck doesn’t know he’s a hero. He honestly believes this act of transcendent brotherhood amounts to a moral failing on his part, but he can’t help himself. As literally as literal ever gets, Huck’ll be damned if he’s going to betray his friend:
“I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell…”
I’m thinking of this passage now because, okay, because I like the lump that forms in my larynx whenever I do. But it’s also on my mind because, regardless of how you or I voted for president, something pretty amazing happened last week. Like Huck on the raft, America overcame generations of conditioning and decided that some things matter more than race. Whatever happens politically, they can’t take that away from us. As Linda Loman says in Death of a Salesman, that’s an earthquake.
How did this happen? There’s no shortage of theories. It was the debates. It was the economy. It was the failure of the Bradley effect. It was the triumph of the Buffett effect. It was the flush of the Coriolis effect.
What was it? I’ll give you my theory in four words:
It was the memoirs.
Are they great books? Beats me. I haven’t finished reading them myself yet, and besides, I don’t review books for a living anymore. But there are millions of copies of the president-elect’s two memoirs in print. Pretty plainly, over the last few months, barraged with hours of unrelenting adversarial ads, millions of voters opted to do exactly what the NEA’s two major reading studies show that voters almost always do. They sat down to read.
Look at the beautiful accompanying photograph by Mark Quigley if you don’t believe me. Voters read, and readers vote. I’ll bet you anything that plenty of voters all across the country spent the last couple of months checking out the president-elect’s books and getting to know him. Whether they liked him is almost beside the point.
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Readers line up to vote. Courtesy of Mark Quigley. Flickr. |
That’s what books do. They are, as I’ve said elsewhere, the purest unfudgeable fingerprint of the human soul. You can lie for a sentence, or even a chapter. But over the course of an entire book, try though some disingenuous authors have, sooner or later even liar will get tired and tell the truth.
Did the president-elect mean for his books to introduce him so ingratiatingly to the country, and – even though the first one came out fully 13 years ago — to refute any eventual attempts to demonize him? Dunno.
Week after next I go to Huntingdon, Tennessee, to interview Hal Holbrook on stage about Twain as part of the town’s Big Read of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. For me, this looms as the consummation of a lifelong dream. I’ve admired Holbrook since I was a kid, when his appearance on television always signaled something sharp, maybe even important. Later I read his terrific introduction to the playscript he stitched together for his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight! This was the purest unfudgeable fingerprint of a smart man even more besotted with Twain than I was. I can’t wait to meet him, and to ask him what Mark Twain might have thought about last Tuesday.
November 12, 2008
Washington, DC
In honor of Veteran’s Day, it seems fitting to pay tribute to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, born out of Hemingway’s own experiences in World War I. From the Reader’s Guide, here’s an excerpt about Hemingway’s war service from the essay, “Hemingway and World War I.”
Ernest Hemingway was determined to be part of the action, but an eye defect kept him out of the main branches of the military. Hemingway was undaunted. In April of 1918, he applied to the Red Cross to drive ambulances in Italy and was accepted. He passed his physical exam and was fitted for a uniform that gave him the honorary rank of 1st Lieutenant.
Hemingway arrived in Milan in early June and was stationed at Schio in the Dolomite hills northwest of Venice. He saw little action. Frustrated, and with a desire to be closer to the front, Hemingway requested transfer to the Red Cross’s “rolling canteen” service, which operated along the more contested Piave River.
He had only been in Italy for about two weeks when he was nearly killed just after midnight on July 12, 1918, while distributing chocolate and cigarettes. The fragments of an Austrian trench mortar shell (called a Minenwerfer) ripped into Hemingway’s legs and killed several men around him. Despite his own wounds, he heaved one injured man into a fireman’s carry and began to move him back toward the command post. A machine gun then ripped open Hemingway’s right knee. The two men collapsed but somehow made it to safety. For this feat, Hemingway would later be awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra — the silver medal for valor.
Learn more about Aurora Public Library’s (Illinois) Big Read of A Farewell to Arms at www.neabigread.org.
November 6, 2008
Martinsville, VA
Though Piedmont Arts’ Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird is still months away, director of programs Barbara Parker is already hard at work. One of her favorite tasks is seeking out visiting celebrities she can photograph holding a copy of Lee’s seminal novel. Barbara hopes to wind up with 27 close-ups, which will run serially in Martinsville’s local paper during The Big Read. Her first three shots are below, along with her commentary on the meet-ups. I think you just might recognize some of the faces! Barbara will share more about Piedmont Arts’ Big Read so don’t forget to check back!
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Today, as we gather across the country to elect the 44th President of the United States, here’s some timeless advice from our 34th Commander-in-Chief.
“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”
October 31, 2008
Washington, DC
A National Book Award finalist for Home, Big Read author Marilynne Robinson is no stranger to prize winning. In 1980, Housekeeping won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. In this excerpt from the Reader’s Guide, Robinson talks about the signature lyricism that permeates Housekeeping (and the novels that follow it).
NEA: Housekeeping is such a lyrical book, particularly during some of Ruth’s internal musings. Do you write out loud?
Marilynne Robinson: I hear a voice that I would say is not my voice. When I read Housekeeping out loud, I hear it over again in my mind. I’m very interested in the musicality of language. I spend a lot of time just listening to Bach, just to hear how a sentence falls in a certain sense. So that’s what I do: I hear what I write, but I don’t speak it out loud. I hear it in my mind.
Don’t miss Marshall Public Library’s Big Read of Housekeeping which is taking place in and around Pocatello, Idaho for just two more weeks! Get details at www.neabigread.org.
