October 30, 2009
Washington, DC
Happy Birthday Rudolfo Anaya! To celebrate, why not grab a slice of birthday cake and settle in to watch A Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya. Here’s the short version of the film—by Lawrence Bridges—to get you started.
Check out the long version of the film (and captioned versions of both films) at The Big Read website.
October 29, 2009
Washington, DC
In a world saturated with self-help books, I still swear by the words of courage, inspiration, and even caution that I’ve found in works of fiction. Here are a few of my favorite words to live by from the pages of The Big Read.
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” — Willa Cather, from My Antonia
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”— Harper Lee, from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/ And departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time . . . “— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“What a curiosity it was to hold a pen . . . An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve!”— Cynthia Ozick, from The Shawl
“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.”— Marilynne Robinson, from Housekeeping
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”— Thornton Wilder, from The Bridge of San Luis Rey
“From today on, I’ll be whatever I choose to be at the moment . . . “— Rosario Castellanos, from “Cooking Lesson”
Visit The Big Read website to hear more from the authors in The Big Read library.
October 28, 2009
Frederick County, Maryland
Frederick County, Maryland, has been abuzz with Maryland Public Television’s celebration of the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Frederick’s Big Read went Hollywood by partnering with the 72 Film Fest, a juried competition and celebration that brings professional and amateur filmmakers together to create original works in 72 hours based on secret guidelines.
To tie-in with The Big Read, this year’s criteria included “the influence of Edgar Allan Poe.” The finished films—including “Best of the Fest” winner A Mouse Eye View—were screened at the historic Weinberg Center for the Arts during the weekend of October 9-10. Congrats to filmmaker John Saunders! (And thanks to Elizabeth Cromwell at the Frederick County Public Libraries for providing us with this award-winning footage!)
A Mouse Eye View from John Saunders on Vimeo.
Visit The Big Read calendar to find out where else around the country they’re celebrating Edgar Allan Poe.
With nearly 30 books to his credit, Walter Mosley may be best known for his 11 mysteries featuring the deceptively-named L.A. detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. In this excerpt from an interview with the NEA, Mosley muses on the complex morality of another hardboiled California detective—Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.
Hammett is always talking about heroes who are flawed, and so here you have Sam Spade [in The Maltese Falcon], who’s been having an affair with his partner’s wife. His partner gets murdered, and Spade has to figure out where he stands in relation to the world after the murder of this partner who he’s cuckolded. He meets a whole cast of characters, all of whom are untrustworthy, and he has to somehow find his way to making the right moral decision.
It’s always an interesting question when you’re talking about a novel. Well, how do novels work? Novels work on one level with character and character development. I think at the beginning of the novel, Sam Spade has one set of morals, which allows him, for instance, to cuckold his partner without having any disdain for him really. But he has to find a new moral code by the end of the book, so I don’t think that you could say what is his moral code, because it’s in flux, it’s changing. And even at the end, we’re still a little uncertain about it, because in order to make a decision, you have to almost always go against yourself, and I think that that’s a lot what the book is about. I think that [Spade] finds that he has conflicting desires, and because of those conflicting desires he comes up with a decision that nobody’s completely happy with, not the reader, not him, not Brigid O’Shaughnessey, not the Fat Man, not Joel Cairo, no one.
It’s an existentialist book inasmuch as somebody has to make a decision about how they’re going to live their life, and Sam Spade does that. And Sam Spade changes. He becomes a different man, even though I think he doesn’t believe it’s possible to become a different man.
Hear more on Hammett from Walter Mosley and others on The Maltese Falcon radio show. To find the falcon in flight near you, visit The Big Read calendar.
October 26, 2009
Billings, Montana
Montana’s Billings YMCA kicked off its Big Read of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine at the seventh annual High Plains Book Fest, which this year celebrated Native American literature. Featured writers at the book festival included Assiniboine and Sioux poet Mandy Broaddus Smoker, Northern Cheyenne poet and educator Franklin Rowland, Crow Indian poet—and Montana’s new poet laureate—Henry Real Bird, and Sioux Indian poet and actress Lois Red Elk. Here’s Red Elk’s answer to why she’s a reader as well as a writer.
I make it a practice to read something new every day to fill my brain cells with the accumulated knowledge of human kind. Reading is not only educating and entertaining, it restores my heart and soul, and it takes away fears and doubts. When Sitting Bull said, “Let us put our minds together to see what life we will make for our children,” my parents took that to mean I would read in both Dakota and English.
The YMCA plans to present more than 30 Big Read events—film screenings, book discussions, writing workshops and panel discussions—in five counties. Visit their page on The Big Read website for details.
October 23, 2009
Washington, DC
Even Sam Spade might have trouble keeping track of the infamous falcon these days since it has been showing up all over Rockaway Township during Rockaway Public Library’s Big Read of The Maltese Falcon. Big Readers of all ages (the falcon sports a checked cape and cap when hiding from the 12-and-under crowd) have been sending the library their guesses of the falcon’s location for a chance to win movie tix. So far, the bookish bird has shown up at the Rockaway Town Square Mall, the library’s Hibernia branch, and the local recycling center. Who knows where it’s winging its way to next?
Check out The Big Read calendar to find out where they’re celebrating Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon near you.
October 22, 2009
Washington, DC
Although on the surface Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club may not seem to have much in common, each novel is—in its own way—an investigation of the tension between the old ways and the new, between obeying the rules and breaking them. Who belongs and who doesn’t? Here’s what Tan has to say about why Wharton’s classic novel still feels current nearly a century after it was first published.
For me, The Age of Innocence has a lot to do with culture and society, and how we behave and conform so that we belong. It’s also about the ways in which others think we don’t belong, because of perhaps who our parents are, or how we dress or who we know, or how popular we are among others. . . .[W]e’re all concerned at some point in our lives about belonging. We’re especially concerned when we feel that we don’t belong, when a group of people has not accepted us, and you don’t quite know why. It wasn’t maybe necessarily anything you did, but to not belong is a huge threat, I think, to your existence. And you especially experience this in grade school and junior high and high school, and also when maybe you’re the new kid on the block, as I often was, because our family moved just about every year. In situations like that, you feel that someone decides whether you belong or not. And it may be because you wear plaid and not stripes, or you’re friends with somebody who others don’t like.
Often the rules and requirements are understood, but not spoken about. People notice why you’re less than they are, but they don’t tell you. Or you see something really embarrassing, but you pretend not to notice, even though you did. That is, to me, what The Age of Innocence is about, that pretense of innocence. . . .You’re measured by who your family is, you know, in the novel. You’re a Rushworth and you’re not one of the newer immigrants, you’re one of the older families. You didn’t have a quirky relative, a funny aunt who married too often, or your aunt didn’t dress you funny as a kid at the funeral. And all these things, your behavior, and what happened long ago are never forgotten. In this society that Edith Wharton talks about, all of this determines who you are throughout your life.
To learn more about Edith Wharton and her works, visit The Age of Innocence page on The Big Read website.
October 21, 2009
Washington, DC
Happy 80th Birthday to Ursula K. Le Guin! Here’s Le Guin—whose rendering of a student-wizard in A Wizard of Earthsea laid the ground for series like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter—on writers, wizards, and the birth of Ged.
What a wizard does is like what a writer does. He or she is making things out of words and making things happen with words. I saw the parallel. But I don’t know where it goes or really what to do with it. I’ve always been talking about language, about speech, about words, as a great power in our lives. This is obviously one of my themes.
I believe I’m the first who described a wizard having to learn his trade and go to school to do it. I started thinking that wizards can’t have always been old guys with white beards. So what were they like when they were fourteen? And that opens up a world, doesn’t it?
Today from 10:30 a.m. to noon, join Oak Grove Library for birthday cake and cheers in Le Guin’s honor, part of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Big Read of A Wizard of Earthsea. Check The Big Read calendar for details.
October 16, 2009
Washington, DC
In Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya wrote, “There are so many dreams to be fulfilled, but Ultima says a man’s destiny must unfold itself like a flower, with only the sun and the earth and water making it blossom.” In this interview excerpt, Anaya shares how he himself blossomed not just into a writer, but—as fellow author Tony HIllerman has dubbed him—”the godfather and guru of Chicano literature.”
Becoming a writer is an evolutionary process. There is no one certain point or occurrence or experience. I loved to read when I was in grade school. I used to write great book reports [and] book reviews and illustrate them. I also liked art. I noticed that when I was in high school I kind of quit reading and was not too motivated. And then I went up to the university and began to read literature, and that was it.
I think that whole idea of loving literature. . .starts that spark of, well I want to express myself also. I have these things, these emotions, and this beautiful past that I’ve known and people. I want to write about them and preserve them, and so I started writing poetry and short stories and novels.
I had had a very serious spinal cord injury accident when I was in high school, and that also figures a great deal into my life. Somehow that time of being in the hospital and dealing with recovery and seeing other kids my age really suffering a lot, seeing death, and then coming out of that experience was very important, informative. Again, that’s one of the experiences that told me you have to write, you have to record, not only what happened to me but what happened to people around me.
Somehow I always thought that there’s so much beauty in people, the people especially that I knew as a child. The town drunk was a hero to me. The ranchers that would come in and visit with my dad told fantastic stories, and I’d sit there and listen. And sometimes we’d sit around the dinner table or in the summers we’d go out and make a little fire near the house and tell stories and all of that. The whole idea of that oral tradition sparks the imagination.
Want to hear more from Anaya about his seminal novel? Check out The Big Read video guide on Bless Me, Ultima. (And don’t forget to visit The Big Read calendar to find out about Big Read activities taking place near you.)
October 15, 2009
Washington, DC
Betty Kort is the former executive director of the Willa Cather Foundation. Based in Red Cloud, Nebraska, the foundation is dedicated to preserving and promoting the understanding and appreciation of the life, time, settings, and work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Kort is also the photographer-curator of Willa Cather and Material Culture, a traveling photography exhibition of select objects important in Cather’s life and work. In this interview excerpt, Kort talks about Cather’s development as a novelist.
The. . . thing I would say about My Ántonia was that everything was an experiment. With O Pioneers! she took a big step in writing about immigrant populations, and no one was doing that. When [Cather] started out, I believe that she thought she probably had to write novels like people on the east coast were writing novels. And they were writing about sophisticated people in sophisticated settings. Her first novel was a novel like that, Alexander’s Bridge, and it was not a particularly successful novel, at least in Cather’s eyes. She had to come home to her roots, to what she knew best, and then she had to have the courage to write about common, ordinary people working the soil, and that took some time. That took some courage. And she also had to figure out a way to do it that would be successful and would compete against what was being written at the time.
Hear more from Kort and others on Willa Cather and her work on The Big Read radio show for My Ántonia. Visit The Big Read calendar to find out where a Big Read celebration of My Ántonia is taking place near you.