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…

April 26, 2007
Stillwater, Oklahoma

I bring this up because I’m about to blog about one of the better Big Reads I’ve seen in my travels so far, specifically The Grapes of Wrath in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Unfortunately, I visited Stillwater a couple of weeks ago. In my defense, I had just blogged the day before. Also in my defense, it was late in the week, and anything I filed probably wouldn’t post until the following week. But my best defense is that I’m sure I had much better excuses at the time, before I forgot them all. Indefensible.

I can only take refuge in the procrastinator’s credo: When life gives you grapes, make Raisinets. So instead of performing my usual next-day, short-term-memory file-dump, I’m getting an early start on my long-term memories by reconstructing Stillwater without recourse to any cribnotes. And those memories consist of…

of…

of…

Yes! I remember fetching up at the Stillwater Library and having the Big Read coordinator there, Linda — no, Lynda! — Reynolds, show me their WPA photo exhibit. Right there, tacked onto the panels of a few eye-high, hinged bulletin boards zigzagging through the reference department, was a shot by Dorothea Lange of some Oklahoma family with its entire life piled high onto a precarious jalopy. I thought to myself, that’s a photo of the Joads. Intellectually, I’ve always known that the Joads stood in for at least 300,000 westward migrants, but until I saw that photo they were still, at some level, archetypal fictional characters. Not anymore.

Then that night I discovered that, to some Oklahomans, the Joads are neither tintypes nor archetypes so much as stereotypes, and libelous ones at that. The setting was the movie theater at the OSU Student Union, where the really dedicated university librarian Karen Neurohr had arranged to show the movie version, complete with captions for the hearing-impaired. An ESL teacher had brought her students to the screening, so that hearing and reading the dialogue at the same time might better fix Steinbeck’s language in their heads. A couple of bearish, gregarious guys from Libya seemed particularly engrossed.

Anyway, the movie slew the crowd the way it pretty much always does, and afterward the questions came with a large side of gratitude — until an older woman timorously raised her hand and wondered why Stillwater had to choose “this” book. Turns out that, in Oklahoma, The Grapes of Wrath is one very complicated masterpiece. Times have changed since the state’s congressman Lyle Boren called the novel “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind,” but it’s still the only representation of Oklahoma most Americans can name, and it’s not exactly a Valentine. It’s a tribute to human dignity under the most inhumane conditions, and not every Oklahoman wants to be remembered as poor, dirty, and ungrammatical, no matter how dignified.

Oklahoma State ESL students bask in the afterglow of a helpfully captioned screening of The Grapes of Wrath. Photo by David Kipen

I encouraged the woman a little, parried her a little, and finally I had to admit she had a point. There are times in the book — such as when Steinbeck has some Joad say “Chrismus,” even though spelling it right would sound just the same — there are times when Steinbeck’s respect comes mingled with just a whiff of condescension. It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it still bothers a few Oklahomans, but it’s there. Frankly, as a Californian, I’m entitled to a bigger beef with the book than any Oklahoman, since the Californians in it come off more inhumane than anybody. If the Oklahomans appear subhuman, it’s only because Californians reduced them to it.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I apologized. Right there in public, on behalf of my unconsulted fellow Californians, I apologized for how we treated the Oklahomans who came to us 70 years ago looking for nothing more than a day’s honest work and a night’s unrousted sleep. I don’t know if my apology helped, but it finally felt less hypocritical than defending a novel I love to a well-intentioned lady who couldn’t help reading a completely different book. I’ll always owe Stillwater for that overdue lesson in literary relativism. Beats the heck out of owing them a blog post…

April 19, 2007
Washington, DC

I’d be writing this post from my desk if I could still fit behind it. But after spending four meals last weekend with the 10-person Russian delegation who’ll be running the Big Read in Saratov and Ivanovo this fall, I’m lucky if I can see my toes.

We met them for dinner in Georgetown Saturday night at Old Glory, a noisy barbeque joint that I immediately, to my mortification, found myself looking at through Russian eyes. The enormous platters of meat, with American flags enameled onto them, epitomized conspicuous consumption. (The delegation tucked into them with gusto.) The boxing on television suddenly seemed symptomatic of our violent culture. (Until I pointed the fisticuffs out to make conversation, the delegation didn’t really notice it.) The waitress went a little heavy on the make-up. (The delegation thought her cute and wondered if she might be Russian?)

Mary Chute, Deputy Director of Library Services, IMLS, addresses members of the Russian delegation. Left to right — Oleg Alalykin, Julia Nossova (translator), and Tatyana Kotlova. Photo by Chloey Accardi

Fortunately I was sitting adjacent to Dmitriy “The Polymath” Polyvyannyy, as congenial and erudite a fellow as I’ve ever met. Deputy rector at Ivanovo State University, Dmitriy knows Russian literature backwards and forwards, and it’s not even his field. He knows American literature better than I do, and I doubt English is even his second language. By trade he’s a political scientist and student of medieval Balkan history, and probably a lot else he’s too kind to humiliate me further by bringing up. Enough to say that he recommended a Robert Louis Stevenson novel I’d barely heard of, Black Arrow, and an O. Henry novel (!) I’d never thought to read, Cabbages and Kings. Boy, am I glad he’s helping to run the Big Read in Ivanovo and not over here, where he’d only make me look bad.

Sunday was a twofer, with stylish brunch at Lia’s in Chevy Chase and gratuitous but delicious Chinese dinner at Meiwah a couple of minutes later. At brunch I shared a delightful conversation with librarian Olga Tolstikova until I realized that she was my interpreter, and I was totally ignoring the delegates I was supposed to be brainstorming with. Dinner was more productive, with plentiful Big Read talk interspersed with angling tips from Saratov’s first deputy minister of culture, Natalya Tereshina. She fishes the Volga for perch and pike, and pronounces it much tastier since local commerce shifted more toward a service economy, and away from heavy manufacturing.

Monday was the main event, with the entire delegation visiting our office to get ideas about how to run a worthwhile Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird in Russia. The plan wasn’t to tell them exactly what to do, since what are we going to know about reading in Russia that they don’t? No, we just tried to fill them in on how a concept altogether foreign to them –– getting a whole city to read the same book and talk about it — works in America.

The delegation discusses the U.S. Big Read-Russia partnership. Photo by Chloey Accardi

This way, they can adapt it into something original that we couldn’t have come up with in a million years, the same as all the American communities are doing. I showed them photocopies of Williamsport’s “Walk in My Shoes” display for To Kill a Mockingbird, and they about flipped over it. Anecdotes were swapped, skepticism voiced — we weren’t being humored, not for a minute — and then they had to catch a plane to Asheville and Huntsville to see a couple of Big Reads in action.

Before departing for the airport, we all said our goodbyes over a quick hanger steak across the street, natch…

April 4, 2007
Kansas City, Kansas

Please let me get this down before I forget too much of it. I just flew into Kansas City, Missouri, and rented a car from Janna at the Alamo counter, who noticed my Post-It-festooned Grapes of Wrath paperback and proceeded to fill me in on her classics-loving daughter and equally book-mad son — 400 Louis L’Amour paperbacks last year, Flags of Our Fathers just this week. I was still incognito when she said, “A book is the best gift you can give a kid,” but that’s not even the best part.

No, then I followed Molly’s Yahoo directions to my seemingly antiseptic airport hotel, and who should I find behind the reception desk but Kessa, looking up attentively from the pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Was she liking it?

Oh yes — even more than Juneteenth! Turns out she reads furtively on the job, and reads to her 11-year-old son when he still lets her. Then her co-worker looked up from down the counter and whispers, “I’m reading the best book, too: The Picture of Dorian Gray!”

“Wilde?” Kessa answers. “Oh, Oscar Wilde is just the bomb!”

By this point in the conversation — just to keep up — I figured I’d better identify myself as program director of the Big Read, whose kickoff celebration across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, I should’ve left for, eesh, 10 minutes ago. Here’s when Kessa looks me right in the eye and asks, “Well, what would it take to get something like the Big Read over here on the Missouri side?”

Collapsing on the floor in gratitude and, in Dashiell Hammett’s great phrase, making “more of a puddle than a pile there,” I recovered my composure long enough to fork over a business card and point her to http://www.neabigread.org. But all day long, I kept thinking about Kessa’s epidemic predicament: how to read at work when company policy discourages it.

Jessie, Emannuel and the other guys of Kansas City AYS, promising to read The Grapes of Wrath.

I thought about this at the kickoff event in Kansas City’s Memorial Hall an hour later, listening to Congressman Dennis Moore sing most of the verses from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” in a strong tenor. I thought about it palling around afterward with the kids from the AYS continuation school around the corner, and touring KCK’s steadily refurbishing library afterward, and admiring Minnesota Avenue’s lovingly restored Granada Theatre.

I’m still thinking about it now, the next morning: What can be done to show employers that reading at work — so long as customers aren’t waiting and heavy machinery isn’t involved — actually improves job performance? Certainly I enjoyed checking into my hotel far more with an engaged, literate desk clerk than I would have otherwise. Certainly CEOs complain enough about all the money they spend on remedial reading programs for some of their workers. What if companies started experimenting with the occasional Leave Your Daughter at Home and Bring a Book to Work Instead Day?

I know, I know, one transformative nationwide reading program at a time…

April 2, 2007
Norman, Oklahoma

With cityreads, somehow everything just seems to go right the first time: A whole town comes together around the right book. That last-minute substitute speaker turns out to be better than the original would’ve. Strangers become partners and, stealthily, friends. Blogging from the road works the same way. The first few posts practically write themselves. Every email from a reader is like a message in a bottle to a still-hopeful castaway. In the photos, everybody’s eyes are miraculously open and un-Satanic.

But then, before you know it, all that airport food has mysteriously made your laptop 10 pounds heavier. You can’t find fresh emails for all the spam. That fancy new camera makes you nostalgic for the point-and-shoot. The WPA state guides get harder and harder to find. And, worst of all, you find yourself blogging about blogging (would you believe metablogging now has 617,000 google citations?), instead of about the absolutely crackerjack Big Read of The Grapes of Wrath that you just saw in Norman, Oklahoma.

My visit started a little ominously, as champion organizer Gary Kramer greeted me at the Pioneer County Library with the words, “We’ve arranged a brief PowerPoint presentation to show you all we’ve done.” I’ve given “brief PowerPoint presentations,” and most have been neither brief nor presentable. But within two slides I was wishing I’d been in the county all month, instead of just parachuting in for a day.

We broke for lunch at a local establishment called Abner’s, where I really wish my photo of a fried avocado had come out better. But the tastiest revelation here was our placemats. In an innovation I’d love to see replicated in as many Big Reads as possible, local organizers have devised a series of six placemats for use in restaurants all over town. Each contains a long passage from the book, and a sophisticated but refreshingly un-academic commentary from OU professor and World Literature Today exec director Robert Con Davis-Undiano. If you want to get people where they live, get ‘em where they eat, and that’s just what the Pioneer County team has done with these surefire discussion-triggering placemats.

After lunch we adjourned to Norman High School for a performance of Trucking With the Joads, a readers’ theater adaptation of the novel condensed to junior-class-assembly length. I was a little apprehensive about this, having fidgeted through some interminable high-school assemblies myself, but this impeccable production won the students over instantly. The only departures from rapt silence came when Mr. Levy, a beloved teacher, salted Woody Guthrie numbers in between scenes to rapturous ovations. I’d introduced the proceedings by relaying my NEA colleagues’ good wishes and mentioning that 50 free copies or so of the Steinbeck novel still remained of the 850 that the library had ordered — and reordered. Sure enough, the first question from an incredulous student after the lights went up was, “Where do we get those free books again?”�