Real Poe and faux Poe

As shrines to ill-fated national figures go, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Va., isn’t exactly Graceland. Then again, you wouldn’t want it to be. It’s a couple of flagstone buildings drowsing beside a busy street, with self-guided tours and an atmosphere of melancholy dignity. The air hangs heavy with the ghosts of departed part-time executive directors.

And yet, for one of America’s towering geniuses, saddest sacks and queerest fish, it’s about the most perfect tribute a literary grave-robber like me could want. Poe never actually lived here, but we’re assured he visited the place during his army days sometime between 1827 and 1829, as part of a detachment attending the visiting Marquis de Lafayette. This is pretty much the literary equivalent of “George Washington Would Have Slept Here If He Hadn’t Thought Better of It and Slept Someplace Else,” but somehow it works.

The front door creaks open into the gift shop, chockablock with gloom-and-doom knickknacks. Want an obsidian raven to go with your iron-on tattoo of Poe? Look no further. The new exec director (an English major from a nearby college, seemingly undeterred by the fate of her predecessors) takes my donation and kits me out with a laminated tour map, about the size and shape of a coffee-shop menu.

The dank first room holds mostly artifacts from Poe’s relations — a mother’s playbill, a sister’s blouse, that sort of thing. As holy relics go, this is pretty attenuated stuff, too remote from Poe to rate much of a contact high. Far juicier is the scriptorium, with letters and other manuscripts from Himself.

Someday I should blog about great authors’ handwriting. Graphologists lavish so much attention on the scriptorial fingerprints of criminals and random customers, whose complexes are hypothetical and probably not all that interesting. Wouldn’t it be more provocative to look at the scribbles of actual writers, whose psyches are incontestably worth investigating? Poe’s hand, for example, is claustrophobic — tiny, careful, and regrettably quite light. It looks almost typeset, only against a platen overdue for its next inking. You get the impression of a man buried alive and losing strength, conserving both breath and paper.

The few buildings of the Poe Museum huddle around a spooky but peaceful rectangular courtyard, weirdly reminiscent of the church cemetery where Scottie discovers Carlotta’s grave in Vertigo. Today the quadrangle is incongruously decked out with a white canvas tent and ranks of matching folding chairs. Seems there’s a wedding at 5 o’clock. Anybody mind telling me who’d get married at the Edgar Allen Poe Museum? Board members? Writers? Goths?

At the far end there’s a plaster bust of a downcast Poe, looking suitably saturnine on a pedestal under a little Georgian shrine. I struck a parallel pose next to him for a quick snapshot, but next to his, my melancholy aspect looks predictably ersatz – the funk of a college student in psychoanalysis because he thinks it makes him deep.

Adjacent to the bust is a final gallery devoted to temporary exhibitions, though “temporary” in this time-forgotten hush is a relative term. It’s a small, well-arranged show, too, devoted to Poe’s continuing relevance to the visual arts. A nice selection of graphic novels repose on walls and in vitrines, but the big draw for me is a Poe issue from the late, lamented Classic Comics series.

Classic Comics, for those like me to whom it’s only a secondhand memory, was the brainchild of Albert Lewis Kanter, an eccentric publisher who decided that adapting great novels into comic books might be a way of sneaking literature under the pillows of impressionable children. The titles leaned strongly toward landmarks of melodrama and adventure, starting with The Three Musketeers in 1941 and suspending sadly with Verne’s Mysterious Island six years later. Along the way they made time for a “3 Famous Mysteries” issue, which featured a Guy de Maupassant story, Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, and Poe’s redoubtable detective C. Auguste Dupin, who taught Sir Arthur Conan Doyle everything he knew.

I slouched against a black-painted wall in this last gallery, admiring Kanter’s short-lived push for great literature among the pimpled and sweaty future of America. Predictably, it couldn’t but remind me of The Big You-Know-What. Is this what becomes of quixotic attempts to democratize good books? With my boss relinquishing his chairmanship early next year, will The Big Read wind up under glass somewhere, just another stillborn stab at taking good books down off the medicine shelf and smuggling them under the covers with a flashlight, where they belong?

Not if I have anything to say about it. That’s why I’m hitting the road this September in Rosie the BigReadMobile for The Big Ride, a cross-country road trip through roughly 30 Big Read towns in 25 days, designed to spread the word about the program in as splashy a way as possible. More about this as the itinerary crystallizes, with questions and curiosity cheerfully entertained at kipend@arts.gov in the meantime. In other words, don’t look now, but the Big Ride is rolling down the road toward a city or town near you, with Steinbeck in back poring over WPA maps, Hammett in the passenger seat violating open-container laws, and Edith Wharton hanging on for dear life…

July 14, 2008
St. Mary’s County, MD

My jaw was long and razor-burned, my hair a brownish pond icing up from the temples in. I looked rather pleasantly like a salt-and-pepper satan. I was tailing Sam Hammett down Great Mills Road in St. Mary’s County, Md., where he was born, but the trail was a hundred years cold.

Everywhere I went, I got “Sam who?” After a day of chasing played-out leads and a night at some fleabag, I was fed up and on my way out of town. While my imaginary Argentine secretary, Effie Peron, ducked into a filling station to powder her nose, I called the last number I had for the county tourism bureau. A courtly man with an accent like crab cakes and clotted cream answered. Louis Buckler, he called himself, and asked me my business. I told him.

“The Hammett place?” he said. “Try up Indian Hill Road. Big house, two or three stories, with a wing on the side. Two chimneys, even.”

“You mean it’s still standing?”

“Standing? Hell, it’s still in the family.”

I took the directions down and pointed my motor accordingly. A house approximating Buckler’s description loomed up on the left. We were barely out of the car when a couple with a child emerged and made us welcome.

“I’m Connie Little,” the frail said, extending a hand. “I’m the librarian around here.”

I introduced myself and brandished a buff-colored card at them.

“You’re from The Big Read?”

Grudgingly I allowed as how I was. It’s getting harder and harder to keep my hatbrim down and get a simple job done, what with all the hoopla about the Read, but the hell with it.

“So this isn’t Hammett’s house?”

“No, that’s back along Great Mills Road. Watch for the historical marker about him.”

“There’s a sign about him?”

“You can’t miss it.”

Effie said, “He already did.”

She folded her legs back into the passenger seat of the sedan with no great urgency, and we backtracked to Great Mills. It’s amazing how different a stretch of road can look when you’re headed back down the way you came. If I’d been the philosophical type, I might have made something of that. Sure enough, up ahead on the right was a weathered white sign marking Hammett’s birthplace.

A wooden sign commemorates the Hammetts’ ancestral pile, Hopewell & Aim. No points deducted for spelling, but the omission of “Red Harvest” seems a shame. Photo by David Kipen.

We snapped the marker with my Kodak and got back into my machine. Just as Buckler had described it – but nowhere near where he’d put it – down a dead end next to a driving range stood the house. It had seen better days, but you would have too, after all that time. I went around back and found a polite but wary woman there, picking cucumbers. She identified herself as a descendant of the family who’d bought out the Hammetts, and surrendered her name. It wasn’t his.

So much for Buckler’s story about Hammetts still on the premises. Together she and I circumambulated the property. On one side was a small manmade lake, on the other a jumble of rusting farm equipment. The man of the house came onto the porch, blinking. We stood there, me, Effie and the two of them. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but this wasn’t it. A squirrel scampered around a tall outdoor cage. The woman noticed my attention and answered it.

“He likes it here. We only lock him up on account of the dogs.”

Just then a gunshot echoed across the lake.

“That’ll be the sportsman’s club. It’s hunting season.”

I talked my way into the place. It was as if a 200-year-old farmhouse had eaten a suburban bungalow whole and washed it down with a swig of air freshener. The only trace that remained of the house Hammett grew up in was the view from a second-floor window above the front porch. I stared out of it a long time.

I’d come on a bad tip that led to a good one, with a dead writer in my head and an imaginary woman by my side. It was good to be there, hearing the gunfire, kidding myself that it all added up to something. My hostess tried to spook me with stories about weird noises at night, but I wasn’t biting.

Above the second-floor landing was a locked rectangular trapdoor, painted brown and scored with scratches. I tried to get a runelike symbol on it to look like an H, but no dice. Some doors you just can’t open. I was trying to picture Hammett up in the attic as a kid, woolgathering out the window, that week’s library books freshly devoured at his side. I took a picture of the trapdoor and hoped the snap might tell me what the original wouldn’t.

July 3, 2008
Washington, DC

Mark Twain’s advice about the adjective, “When in doubt, strike it out,” has been pressganged into service against a lot of language besides just adjectives. Nowadays, reckless editors use it against just about anything a writer might be on the fence about. Rules are tricky things, as I discovered while drawing up a list of useful ones for writers. But, as someone who used to work for a magazine that drew up an annual roster of the 100 coolest people in Los Angeles, I’m hardly insensitive to the appeal of good list. With that in mind, here are ten practical rules for writers, suitable for recent graduates but perhaps not completely irrelevant to old hands, either. Until the Salk Institute cooks up a vaccine against procrastination, these will have to do:

1. Join a writers group, if only for the deadline. Always, for anything you write, have a deadline. When you meet one deadline, make another. When you blow one, definitely make another, and by all means forget you ever made the first one. Guilt is not your friend.

2. Be funny. Whether you’re writing comedy or not, be funny. If you can’t be funny, be amazing, because writing well without at least occasionally being funny is almost impossible. Try to make a reader laugh, or at least smile, with the way you pace and phrase a line. If you can’t use language to provoke one of the commonest, most pleasurable experiences around — laughter — how in the world are you going to do the harder but not necessarily better thing, and make a reader cry?

3. Enlarge your vocabulary. I’m serious. Your vocabulary is your tacklebox. If you go fishing with only a couple of lures, you’ll catch the same kind of fish over and over. Bring an overstuffed tacklebox, and there’s no lunker you can’t land. Use your vocabulary judiciously, of course, because not everybody has as big a one as you do. But don’t be afraid, every once in a while, to use a word your reader might not know. How else are they going to learn? How else did you?

4. Keep it sensual. By this I don’t mean write dirty, I mean engage all of a reader’s senses, especially but not exclusively the visual. Whether with a description or a metaphor, create pictures in your audience’s head. If you want to write about abstractions, be a philosopher, and reach even fewer readers than you already do.

5. Make stuff up. There’s been a vogue lately for writing that feeds on pre-existing material: novels about a famous love affair, novels about a notorious calamity, novels about great writers, etc. This kind of novel can work, but something original is almost always better than something derivative — more surprising, more fun, more suspenseful. In fiction, as on Wall Street, derivatives are an easy payday, but they don’t create wealth; they only redistribute it. The trouble with making up a new story is, alas, that it’s harder. Does Antioch teach a full-length course in plotting? I wonder, because it’s the least teachable skill a writer needs. If only it were the least important.

A related point here: the difference between telling the truth and making stuff up is getting slippery lately. When in doubt, trust what works. If the true stuff reads better, you’re probably writing nonfiction, so take out most of the made-up stuff. If the made-up stuff reads better, you’re writing fiction, so take out most of the true stuff. If you can’t decide which stuff reads better, write poetry. There at least, the true and the made-up belong together.

6. Keep rewriting the ending till it’s perfect; then wait a week and write it again. Writing an ending is the great lost art in American fiction. With the possible exception of your first graf, your last graf is the most important. If you can’t decide between two endings, they probably both need work.

7. Go for broke. Odds are you’ll be broke anyway, so you may as well go for it.

8 . Write every day. I’ve never tried this myself, but I hear it works.

June 26, 2008
Washington, DC

I suppose it had to happen. After our pilot-phase Big Read orientation here in Washington in 2006, a four-city orientation tour around the country the following year, and now three Minneapolis orientations, The Big Read has been discovered. Claire Kirch, ace Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly, saw NEA research and analysis director Sunil Iyengar and me on a panel at the annual book convention in LA a couple of weeks back. In a weak moment, I mentioned our then-upcoming orientation in Minneapolis. Next thing I knew, our modest little 500-grantee kaffeeklatsch was news.

I bring this up because our grantees are so conscientious about sending us their clippings, it seems only fair that we at the national level should pony up with ours. Claire wrote a nice story and took a photo of me and Big Read publicity honcha Paulette Beete flanking our new Big Read map with 208 little flags marked the locales of our new grantees. Every one of those flags represents another city or town embracing a terrific novel for a month or so at a time.

But there’s an underlying sadness in this for me, and it may help explain why I’ve been suffering from a pronounced case of blogger’s block ever since orientation: In a word, no more Big Reads till September.

The Big Read lays low over the summer, not to rev up again until school’s back in session. The office still hums, maybe faster than ever, since we have a slew of Big Read materials to turn out. But the subtle thrum of Big Reads by the dozens, all putting on programs and convening discussions and staging events — the nationwide shuffle of tens of thousands of pages all turning at once — that all falls quiet. Rosie the Big Ride, just donated to us by Ford, sits idle down in the Old Post Office building parking lot, slightly looking reproachful when I can even bring myself to look at it in the mornings.

This fall, Rosie and I will take to the open road again. Just the thought of it lifts my spirits. We’ve already got four site visit requests, and it’s not even July. In the meantime, though, I’m up on blocks, racing my engines and waiting for a starting gun that isn’t even loaded yet.

The logical thing to do, for me of all people, is read. I’m embarrassed to say which, but I’ve never even read one of the new Big Read novels. I’ve got biographies of Thornton Wilder and Edgar Allan Poe piled up on my nightstand, and a new review-model Kindle from Amazon to fool around with. I’ve got a commencement address to write, too, which won’t be easy in my current frame of mind.

Come the fall, I’ll probably look back on this brief interval of stasis and wonder how I could ever have taken it for granted. I’ll have too much to blog about, instead of not enough. I’ll file right away, instead of letting events blur before I blog them. Could this be what it’s like not to have literature in your life? To face each day without the consolation and stimulation of an evening’s reading ahead of you?
What an ingrate I am! Five hundred Big Read organizers have just converged on one overtaxed Midwestern hotel to learn how to share a great book with their neighbors, and all I can think about is September?

That tears it. I’m filing this blog, scoring some lunch, and coming back to my desk on a mission. The Big Read may be hibernating for the summer, but The Big Read staff is working harder than ever. It’s a privilege to work alongside them on a project I believe in, and I owe them my full commitment. September may be two months off, but there are people out there not reading, and preparation for the fall push is all. Come back Tuesday for another post, forgive me my punchiness in the meantime, and read yourself silly until we meet again…

June 22, 2008
Washington, DC

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his Hollywood days, when alcohol withdrawal reduced him to drinking Cokes by the crate Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress

For a commencement address I’m giving this weekend, I’ve been roughing out nine or so practical rules for better, more prolific writing. A tenth one just occurred to me, and it’s especially relevant to The Big Read’s writers: If drinking helps you write better, write fast.

I can almost forgive F. Scott Fitzgerald his drinking, since he fought the hardest against it. Drinking also gave Fitzgerald the opportunity to write about alcoholism as eloquently as almost anyone ever has. The scene of Nicole Diver holed up in the bathroom in Tender Is the Night, her childhood trauma sloshed up into the present by one highball too many, gives me the shakes even misremembering all these years later.

At least four Big Read writers shortened their careers by drinking: Fitzgerald, Hammett, London, and a newcomer to the list, Edgar Allan Poe. All but Hammett probably shortened their lives, too, and Hammett’s later life without writing was not a pretty one. He’d written well about drinking in a completely different way from Fitzgerald, making it uncomplicatedly glamorous in The Thin Man. Only a scold would begrudge Hammett the breezy comedy of Nick and Nora Charles’ liquid, lubricious rapport. But as his body lost its ability to metabolize the stuff, he kept coming back to the same half-written serious novel over and over, each time with diminishing returns. Alcohol became a way to assuage his guilt over success – if only by drinking away the proceeds.

London’s drinking rarely interfered with his 1,500-word-a-day quota, but it may have played hob with his choice and execution of material. Unlike Fitzgerald’s, London’s writing about dipsomania – principally the novel John Barleycorn – was not his best. Even though scholars have effectively ruled out biographer Irving Stone’s suicide scenario from Sailor on Horseback, it’s still hard to deny that a quarter century of drink had given his internal organs a good pickling.

Poe I know the least about, since work on his Readers Guide won’t start up in earnest around here until the most recent batch of guides is out the door. (I do have an eminently bloggable road trip coming up in a couple of weeks to prowl around Poe’s Richmond, and maybe his Baltimore.) But you don’t have to be a Poe scholar to know that he was no teetotaler, and died at 40 of murky causes possibly including “cooping” – the practice of keeping someone cooped up before election day, dosing him with alcohol, and then trotting him out under various identities to vote early and often. Even if unscrupulous campaigners indeed “cooped” Poe, they did nothing to him that he hadn’t done to himself on more than one occasion.

Women on the Big Read list seem to have dodged this particular bullet, with the possible exception of Carson McCullers, who certainly had more demonstrable physical pain to kill than any of the men. Why our women writers should be spared, I can’t guess, unless it’s that women like Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston had hurdles enough in cracking the boys’ literature establishment without booze to worry about. If Dorothy Parker ever follows Poe onto the list for short fiction and poetry, you can consider the omission corrected.

So — as I plan to rain on a good graduation party or two this weekend by saying — if drinking helps you write better, write fast. It’s not my place to go telling writers, least of all dead ones, how to live their lives. But what wouldn’t you have given for another few productive decades out of Fitzgerald, Hammett, London, or Poe?

June 10, 2008
Minneapolis, MN

He looked like a fourth Pep Boy. He wore a pencil moustache, a crew cut, and owlish black glasses. The cigar, I’m probably making up. And that voice! Brooklyn or the Bronx, whichever one’s thicker. He used it to talk about books the way a great sports-talk host talks about sports: volubly, without repetition, as if nothing else in the world could matter. He was Matthew J. Bruccoli, and he was one of the best friends American literature and The Big Read, and any of his friends, ever had.

I first encountered Matt Bruccoli years before I met him, as the author of the Fitzgerald biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Leave it to Matt, with his encyclopedic, even Googolic knowledge of Fitzgerald’s every word, to pick out from that treasurehouse the perfect, emblematic, unforgettable title.

Matthew Bruccoli. Photo courtesy of the University of South Carolina.

Meeting him had to wait until years later, not long after I arrived from the San Francisco Chronicle to become program director of The Big Read. Dan in audio was putting together one of our first Big Read CDs, about The Great Gatsby, and I just knew we had to get Bruccoli. It wasn’t easy. Arch-bibliophile that he is, Matt had taken to email like a duck to buckshot. Somehow, though, through a forest of intermediaries, I got through to him and, with a nervousness that looks absurd in retrospect, finally winkled him out of South Carolina and into the Big Read office.

My first impression was that he had walked up all seven flights. Bruccoli came in breathless, perspiring in suit and tie, carrying a plump satchel. After a few minutes of careening conversation that was like a table of contents for every conversation we would ever have, Dan ushered him into the audio booth, a notorious sweatbox.

In impassioned but scholarly, extemporaneous yet diagrammable paragraphs — not just on Fitzgerald, but on Hemingway and Hammett besides — Prof. Bruccoli held us spellbound for an hour easy, never once loosening his foulard, while all around him swigged water by the nalgene.

“Strivers!”, he cried, nailing for legions of Big Read listeners in one emphatically flung word the generation of ambitious dreamers for whom Gatsby stood in. Around the office even now, at the mention of Matt’s name, it’s a contest between Dan and me to see who can pronounce it with a more faithful New York honk. “Strivers!” The merest hint of an audible “r” is grounds for immediate disqualification.

Bruccoli was a striver too. Like the teenager in the stacks that Salinger and Updike used to fantasize about, Bruccoli was a bookish kid from an unbookish household. One day he wandered sweatily from a stickball game into a candystore, recognized Fitzgerald’s name on a paperback spinner from a radio play the week before, picked up Gatsby, and he was off to the races. If young Matt was anywhere near as good at stickball as he was at reading, the loss to American sport was incalculable.

Sixty years later, in the home he and Arlyn finally made in Columbia, S.C., he was still that same book-drunk Katzenjammer Kid, only all grown up, and living in the best candystore any kid with a sweet tooth for books ever had. People natter on a lot about book-filled houses, and they go on a lot about light-filled houses, too. Thanks probably more to Arlyn, their house is the only one I’ve ever visited that was both.

I’m sorry I’ll never see Matt lunging across his study to show me yet another association copy he’d picked up for a song. I’m sorry we’ll never put on the screenwriters conference we brainstormed about for the last year. And, maybe more than anything, I’m sorry for all the Big Read cities full of teenagers he won’t get to visit now, and contaminate with his enthusiasm for Fitzgerald in particular and life in general.

It wasn’t easy, but I had to smile when I saw in his local paper’s obituary that Matt had died “at his Heathwood Circle home.” That only made sense. Matt could never have died in a hospital room. Not enough books in it.

If I forced myself to sum up in a word this man so congenitally besotted with the American language, that word would be “bookman.” Matt Bruccoli was a bookman the way old wharf rats talk about “watermen,” men who, whether navigating the sea, fishing it or just looking out longingly at it, are unimaginable away from the their chosen element. Matt Bruccoli’s element was books, and I can’t even write about him without using the technology he so disdained to set this remembrance of him in the only possible font for it: Bookman Old Style.

June 3, 2008
Washington, DC

Last week in Los Angeles, thousands of publishing professionals descended on BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual four-day orgy of gladhanding and handwringing. If you’re reading this, the prospect of everybody from our Readers Circle member Azar Nafisi to Andre Dubus III converging just down the street from L.A.’s Original Pantry (”We Never Close”) might have had you calling friends in town for spare couch space.

But if you prefer not to read, especially novels or poetry — in common with more than half of America at the moment–then you probably don’t give a flying Wallenda. But, as it turns out, this nonreading cohort’s days may be numbered. If unemployment, prison, or early death don’t get them, as they disproportionately do with folks who know how to read but don’t, The Big Read is gunning for them too.

I need not to tell readers of this blog (recently recognized for excellence by the National Association of Government Communicators — which may explain why nobody’s heard anything about this ) that The Big Read is getting more and more Americans to pick up and devour good, meaty novels alongside their neighbors. What’s news is that, in addition to Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Rudy Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, The Big Read and its Readers Circle have just added four new titles to our growing list:

• A special selection of Edgar Allan Poe’s surreal short fiction and brooding poetry will acquaint cities and towns with this short-lived titan of American literature, whose dread-soaked dreams pioneered both the horror story and detective fiction. His verse marks the first appearance of poetry on the national Big Read list and, after The Maltese Falcon, the second appearance of a black bird.
• Louise Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, will join the list and introduce readers to the agile, compassionate storytelling of a modern master, Her novels of immigrant and Native American families on the Great Plains have drawn accolades as recently as this year for her new novel, The Plague of Doves.
• Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey investigates the lives of five pilgrims killed in a bridge collapse, and deepens over scarcely a hundred pages to explore the question — sadly more contemporary than ever — of why violent, untimely death spares most of us, yet searches out an unlucky few. Also, for the first time among the now-twenty Big Read novels, students and theater companies will be encouraged to enrich their local celebrations of Wilder’s work with a production of his most enduring play: Our Town.
• The connected short fiction of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried follows a platoon of young soldiers into the jungles of Vietnam, where the brutality of war, the joys of camaraderie, and death’s fateful lottery await them all — and where even a fresh-faced American girl, visiting her sweetheart, can go frighteningly native.

Coming up in the blog: Posts on each of these books and writers, a Great Gatsby cruise, Big Read orientation in Minneapolis, and scads more…

May 19, 2008
Weatherford, TX

Whenever somebody tells me a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes me so mad I want to spit. This bastard canard has more than a thousand fathers, but the most interesting share of the blame lands on two men who should’ve known better. A sentence reading “The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book” appears in the novel Fathers and Sons by, of all people, the great writer Ivan Turgenev. But we owe the first appearance of the foul phrase in its present form to one Arthur Brisbane. A newspaper editor from Buffalo, Brisbane worked for yellow journalism tycoon William Randolph Hearst, which already explains a lot. In March of 1911, in a speech before the Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club, Brisbane advised his listeners to “Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”

Katie Richardson’s Big Read poster for Weatherford, Texas., has a majesty almost, but not quite, beyond words.

Let’s take a minute here to consider this publisher’s audience: namely, a room full of admen. He’s exhorting them to emphasize pictures over words in their advertising. Could it possibly have escaped this newshound’s attention that pictures, in addition to their putative thousand words’ worth, also tend to require more column inches to do them justice than print ads do? I’m inclined to doubt it. As a newspaperman, in other words, Brisbane had every reason — except the truth, that is — to want a room full of advertisers to go tell their clients that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” What he really meant, though, was “a picture is worth a thousand dollars.”

I bring all this up not just because I no longer have a newspaper editor of my own urging me to get to the point quicker, but also because I’ve just returned from Weatherford, Texas, where the poster art by local designer Katie Richardson accompanied all materials for a stylish, just-concluded Big Read of Cather’s My Ántonia. Is that gorgeous or what?

But it all would have gone for naught, save for the Herculean efforts of principal grantee Weatherford College’s Linda Bagwell. From the look of her, Linda couldn’t decide whether to celebrate, cry, or pass out from happy exhaustion at Wednesday’s finale, and she more or less split the difference among the three.

Linda didn’t pull off a successful Big Read alone; no grantee ever does. Spirited volunteers had spent the afternoon squiring me through the Doss Heritage and Cultural Center, an impressive, appropriately barnlike new museum of the West, lately hosting Cather expert Betty Kort’s traveling photo show “Willa Cather and Material Culture.”

I also lucked into a tour of the Douglas Chandor Gardens, a botanical wonderland landscaped by a 20th-century British portraitist to both the great — Roosevelt, Churchill — and the merely solvent. As I understand it, Chandor had followed his Titian-haired socialite bride home to her native Weatherford to settle, right after the necessary divorces became final. My only regret is that I had just missed The Big Read party there, and with it the shade of Cather presiding silently under the wisteria arbor.

Dozens more partners had pitched in all month, including everybody from the Weatherford Independent School District to Tesky Western Wear — all to make Linda’s job a little easier. By the dozens she invited them up on the stage of the college’s capacious Alkek Fine Arts Center for a commemorative final picture, until it almost might’ve seemed more sensible to leave them in the audience after all, and invite the photographer on stage instead.

Practically last but nowhere near least was Katie Richardson, shyly accepting a deserved and unreserved ovation for her spectacular poster. It wasn’t worth a thousand words, but it had helped rope most of Parker County into an unforgettable April and May with My Ántonia. That’s a miracle beyond counting.

May 12 , 2008
Boston, MA

William Faulkner wrote a screenplay for the Joan Crawford movie of James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce. Other hands eventually worked it over, but a copy survives. In it there’s a moment — and by the way, if any publisher were ever fool enough to collect my book reviews, There’s a Moment is the only title I ever wanted to give it — there’s a moment when Mildred’s African-American housekeeper consoles her over a lover’s death by singing the traditional spiritual “Steal Away.” In the margin of this never-shot scene Faulkner scrawled, “God damn! How’s that for a scene?”

I’ve always loved this story, because it gives the lie to the old canard that Faulkner hated screenwriting. Idiot producers he most assuredly despised, and he missed Mississippi something fierce, but he plainly took pride in the writing he did for the screen. He liked director Howard Hawks, for whom he co-adapted both Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (famously, the only picture to feature the talents of two, count ‘em, two Nobel-winning writers). And he loved Hawks script supervisor, Meta Carpenter, almost enough to leave his wife - - a tidbit that makes Faulkner’s great infidelity story, “Golden Land,” his only fiction set in Hollywood, Meta-fictional in more ways than one.

All of which would be a lot of ink to waste on a (so far, sadly) non-Big Read author, except that a) blogs don’t waste anything save, on an off day, time, and b) I finally got to hear “Steal Away” at Saturday’s triumphal finale to international folk-radio juggernaut WUMB’s Big Read of To Kill a Mockingbird in Boston and Eastern Massachusetts. The renowned a cappella combo The LoveTones sang a whole medley of stirring, Mockingbird-appropriate spirituals. This set capped an inspiring morning that started with Janis Pryor asking me astute interview questions for WUMB’s award-winning public affairs show, and then adjourned to the University of Massachusetts-Boston’s large student union lounge for a morning of storytelling, Mockingbird-themed art, a short but sharp high-school theatrical adaptation of the novel, notably smart book discussions — e.g., Is Barack Obama the son Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell could’ve had in a saner world? — more chinwagging from me, and a special guest appearance by a convalescing raven from the Audubon Society. I guess mockingbirds are too intelligent to get themselves into any scrape that warrants much in the way of rehabilitation.

But all that was only the half of it. After an already full morning, resourceful founding WUMB general manager Pat Monteith and project director Mac McLanahan led a good 170 of the 230 assembled revelers down to the university’s Snowden Auditorium for the final judging round of the station’s contest for outstanding Mockingbird-related song. Though professional singer-songwriter Erik Balkey wound up winning for his heartfelt “Atticus Taught Me,” both Terry Kitchen’s happily political “Rainbow” and Mark Stepakoff’s Randy Newman-esque “String Him Up” had vocal partisans. My fellow jurors and I finally pronounced all five finalists worthy of inclusion on an upcoming CD, alongside Mockingbird-related offerings by professional troubadours including my co-judge Kate Campbell, who sang a too-short set filled with her witty, bittersweet songs of Alabam’ — especially my favorite, “The New South.”

So ended a day of good music, good radio, good fellowship, and better-than-average popcorn in Boston. Beantown doesn’t exactly have an illustrious history of interracial comity, but then neither does Topeka, where the first Big Read I ever saw brought the literature of Zora Neale Hurston into the very schoolhouse in which Brown v. Board of Education began. WUMB wants back in on The Big Read next year with Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I hope they make it in and I make it back. As the strains of WUMB’s signature “auterntic music” died away, I wished pooped but proud organizers Pat and Mac good luck. Then it was my turn to steal away…

May 7, 2008
Delaware Valley, PA

Do you know the term “run of show”? It’s performers’ lingo for the printed rundown of every segment in any given revue, vaudeville bill, or other raree show. Submitted below, with abiding gratitude and wonderment, is an annotated run of show for last Friday’s kickoff of Pike County’s The Grapes of Wrath Big Read at the Delaware Valley High School auditorium, just inside the jagged Pennsylvania slice of the Penn-New York-New Jersey border pie. . .

“JAZZ BAND playing as audience enters under the direction of Lance Rauh

1. WELCOME REMARKS by Jeffrey Stocker”

A word here about Jeff Stocker’s American Readers Theatre, the principal grantee for this Pike County Big Read of Steinbeck: Beats me why more theater companies don’t apply for Big Read grants. To go by this troupe, rep companies have the showmanship, the elbow grease, and the chutzpah to round up partners all over town and put a Big Read out where everybody can see it. One instance of this is the terrific school participation that A.R.T. has lined up…

“2. GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY” performed by DVHS Band And Chorus under the direction of Gordon Pauling.

I have to confess, I was a mite skeptical of that “GOD BLESS AMERICA MEDLEY.” Stocker introduced it by recounting how Steinbeck asked to have the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” printed on the endpapers to the hardcover edition of The Grapes of Wrath. The novel’s title comes from the song’s lyrics — written just a couple-three blocks from here, by Julia Ward Howe in the Willard Hotel, as all of us with bumper stickers reading “I Brake for Historical Markers” will tell you. But if the lyrics come from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” why not sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Still, any misgivings about the musical offerings were allayed in short order by the return of the high-school Jazz Band, and by some glorious musical surprises farther down the bill…

3. Introduction of DVHS Administration and Faculty by Dr. Candice Finan

4. Art Show on screen projections while Jazz Band plays

5. RED RIVER VALLEY performed by Dingman/Delaware Middle School Chorus under the direction of Brian Krauss”

Here’s where some real thought had obviously gone into the program. Up on a scrim behind the singers passed a montage of carefully chosen New Deal images by Dorothea Lange and other photographers for the Farm Security Administration. “Red River Valley” made the perfect followup to this medley, since it crops up not just in the John Ford and Nunnally Johnson’s classic movie of The Grapes of Wrath, but in just about every other picture Ford ever directed.

As you might expect of a Big Read ringmastered by a theatrical company, the film component of the Delaware Valley’s Big Read is especially strong. They’re showing The Grapes of Wrath, of course, but whose inspired idea was it to show Robert Riskin’s It Happened One Night, or Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo? Great ideas both, the first for its pure screwball 1930s escapism, the second for its loving evocation of what movies and moviehouses meant to a country sandbagged by the Depression. Speaking of which, the vintage unrestored Milford Theatre in town is a real bijou in the rough. Anybody out there looking for a treasure is hereby enjoined to follow the neon glow to on Catherine Street in Milford, PA..

“6. Introduction of FILM FESTIVAL with showing of original trailer for THE GRAPES OF WRATH by Greg Giblin

7. “SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW” sung by Natasha Paolucci, DVHS student

8. “THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES” sung by Ray Weeks, Pike County HS”

There’s nothing like an old standard, belted out for all its worth by a teenager born around the time its copyright expired. Natasha Paolucci fairly sang the stuffing out of Yip Harburg’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” followed by music teacher Ray Weeks plangently crooning “Thanks for The Memories.” Just the thing for a Big Read wayfarer like me, pining from the road for the Jonathan Schwartz-programmed High Standards channel of our sainted Big Read partner XM Satellite Radio…

“9. AMERICAN READERS THEATRE read from THE GRAPES OF WRATH screenplay with Jared Feldman

10. JOFFREY BALLET SCHOOL presents “THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD,” performed by Danny Ryan and Nicole Padilla, choreography by John Magnus”

By this point, I was discreetly weeping. The whole kickoff was turning into a perfect distillation of the month to come, a sampler of the kind of meal I regrettably never get to stick around for. American Readers Theatre finally got to shine with one early and then one late scene from Nunnally Johnson’s Grapes of Wrath screenplay. The latter was Tom Joad’s climactic “Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat” speech, which producer Darryl Zanuck used to take credit for with unwary interviewers — who didn’t that know it comes straight from the book.

Then came a mindblower. Turns out the choreographer John Magnus has a place in the area, so he corralled a couple of Joffrey dancers in from Chicago to perform a original pas de deux, set to Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Lovely, simply lovely.

“11. HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN,” performed by Sandy Stalter

12. CLOSING REMARKS by David Kipen, NEA Director of Literature, National Reading Initiatives

13. THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND,” performed by Natasha and Jared, with sing-along”

In between Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign song “Happy Days Are Here Again” and America’s shadow national anthem, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land “– in its true uncensored version, no small mercy — I took the microphone and snorfled out my lachrymose thanks for about double the allotted five minutes. Why had I never heard of Milford, Pennsylvania, before? Why haven’t you? All I know is, I wouldn’t have traded my aisle seat in the Delaware Valley High School Auditorium for Joel Cairo’s own orchestra seats at the Geary Theater in San Francisco.

There followed wine, cheese, and a whole lot of grapes, and at last a sorrowful look at the American flag bunting that became Abraham Lincoln’s impromptu death shroud, which reposes at, of all places, the Milford Historical Society. Then a festive wrap party hosted by Jeff Stocker and A.R.T. trouper Greg Giblin — who, I suspect, did a lot more of the heavy lifting for this thriving Big Read than he was letting on — and, belatedly, back to the nearby Port Jervis Comfort Inn for a warm bed and a too-early wake-up call. . .