June 8, 2007
Washington, DC

Bloggers are a gaggle of ignorant blowhards.

They are! All you have to do is speak ill of them and they fall all over themselves squawking about it, guaranteeing scads of free publicity to the unwary offender. There’s no surer ticket to instant notoriety this side of the MPAA ratings board, annoying whom has always been every controversial filmmaker’s shortcut onto the entertainment and op-ed pages. One of these days, some smart publicity-seeker is going to wise up and post an item saying something like, oh, “Bloggers are a gaggle of ignorant blowhards,” and just wait for all the Google hits to roll in.

He-ey…

Something like this even happened to a Big Read book once upon a time. When The Grapes of Wrath came out, it was denounced from one end of the Joads’ odyssey to the other. In Oklahoma, right upstanding pillars of the community attacked it as “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind,” all because it showed the squalor to which the Depression had reduced Oklahomans by the hundreds of thousands.

Sarah Cook with Big Read Readers Guides, outside the “Area of Refuge.” Photo by Molly-Thomas Hicks.

Steinbeck’s fellow Californians didn’t like his masterpiece much better. Agribusiness and its mouthpieces editorialized against The Grapes of Wrath, burned it, even published a counter-novel about how cushy the pickers really had it. Writer Rick Wartzmann, co-author of The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire — and a terrific voice on the Big Read audio guide to The Grapes of Wrath — is working on a book about The Grapes of Wrath’s reception in California’s Central Valley, and the story is enough to curl anyone’s toes.

Except, of course, for those of the Viking publicity’s department circa 1939, who knew free publicity when they saw it, and proceeded to milk the controversy for all it was worth. Cynical? Hardly. They had a great novel about a depressing subject to sell, and they were determined to sell it – in the words of that bestselling author Malcolm X – by any means necessary.

So yes, as in this photo shot outside the Big Read’s office door, literature is an Area of Refuge – whether from natural disaster, as the civil defense planners have ordained, or merely from the cares of the workaday world. But great social literature like Steinbeck’s is also an area of engagement with the world: its hugger-mugger, its shameless publicity stunts, even its bloggers, among whose ignorant, bloviating number I remain proud to count myself…

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 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?”�

March 26, 2007
Galesburg, Illinois

Reading a book with your neighbors, as the Big Read encourages people to do, is like seeing a movie with a live audience. It’s the exception. More people will always read alone than in a group, just as more people nowadays watch movies by themselves than with a crowd. But, as any fogey will tell you — there’s nothing like watching a movie in a theater. And there’s nothing like reading a book with company, whether it’s your family, your English class, or, as in this photo, 600 citizens of Galesburg, Illinois.

That’s roughly how many readers packed the beautiful 1916 Galesburg Orpheum for a free kickoff screening of The Grapes of Wrath last week, which I had the honor of introducing. There’s a protocol to these introductions: You thank your hosts, you explain why you’re there, and you talk about the book until folks start to fidget. In my case, I also like to snap a photo of the audience, to remind my office — especially myself — of the Big Read’s ultimate constituency.

As with anything done more than once, these little talks can start to feel insincere even when they aren’t. As I pressed Galesburg Big Read calendars into departing moviegoers’ hands after the show, I had my doubts about whether the Big Read had accomplished anything that night beyond just showing a great Henry Fonda picture and, just maybe, whetting people’s appetite for the book.

So imagine my surprise when right there in the lobby, beside the piles of bagged canned goods donated by the crowd as the price of admission, easily half a dozen Galesburgers came up and made me promise to thank the entire NEA Big Read office for bringing them the Big Read. Of course, this also reflects all the hard work put in on the local level by dogged organizer Gary Tomlin and his selfless volunteers. Just as much, though, I think it bespeaks the audience’s happy astonishment that somebody in DC actually worries and cares about them between elections. As with moviegoing, as with reading, citizenship itself is something best practiced not just alone, but with a few hundred friends and neighbors.

February 13, 2007
Melbourne, Arkansas

“In a culture that now seems long ago and far, far away, T.S. Eliot was a rock star. The poet made the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and several years later 14,000 people turned out in Minnesota to listen to him talk about “The Frontiers of Criticism.”
– Michiko Kakutani, reprinted in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Although we didn’t quite get 14,000 people in Melbourne and Ash Flat, Arkansas, yesterday, who we got was cherce. North Central Arkansas isn’t as big as Minneapolis, after all, and I’m not exactly T.S. Eliot. (Though I will be visiting his native St. Louis next week). Just now I’m in midair en route to El Paso, looking back on an idyllic day and a half spent in and around Melbourne, thanks to the hospitality of Big Read sponsor Ozarka College. Several of these towns in the foothills of the Ozarks are making (or re-making) the acquaintance of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for the Big Read, just as the residents of Oregon’s Wallowa Valley were doing a couple of weeks back when I ducked in on them for 36 hours or so.

The parallels and divergences between these two Steinbeck reads are intriguing. For Oregon’s Steinbeck observance, the Fishtrap literary center plans, among other things, a Hard Luck Dinner, with ticket buyers not knowing ahead of time whether they’ll get steak, hardtack, or go hungry. Meantime, in Izard County, Arkansas, $3.50 at the Big Eat on Feb. 28 buys everybody beans, cornbread and fried spuds; a ’30s fashion show, for which Ozarka’s tireless organizer Joan Stirling pulled her mother’s old dress patterns out of retirement; a slideshow of WPA projects in North Central Arkansas; a performance from the stage adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath; public discussion with Ozarka’s English faculty; and finally a reading of Recollections of the Dust Bowl and Depression Days. That’s a book they’re compiling of memories from local old-timers, itself reminiscent of Oregon’s traveling photo show derived from student-conducted interviews with senior citizens. Each area’s approach reflects its own personality: Wallowa’s slightly more political, Ozarka’s perhaps more nostalgic, but united across the miles by their evangelical love for Steinbeck’s work.

After a couple of maybe-not-too-boring stemwinders yesterday from me with 150 or so students, faculty, and townspeople, Joan gamely drove me the couple of hours back to Little Rock, where we had thoroughly congenial drinks and dinner with Charles Portis, the great Arkansas author of, among others, the novels Norwood and True Grit. Mr. Portis prizes his privacy, so I’ll confine my public account of our evening to his remark when told about the other part of my job, helping award grants to emerging and established American writers: “I don’t know about giving writers money. It only encourages them.”

More down the Big Road…