Sherry Chandler

National Bookmobile Day

Today, which I’ve persisted all day in thinking is April 15, is actually April 14 and April 14 is the first-ever National Bookmobile Day.

For more than 100 years, bookmobiles have served rural, urban, suburban and tribal areas, bringing access to information and life-long learning resources to all classes and communities as a central part of library service. National Bookmobile Day will serve to highlight their value and extend their reach.

I got this bit of information from The Bourbon County Citizen, our local weekly. The Citizen quotes State Librarian and Commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Libraries, Wayen Onkst, as saying:

Our fleet of 85 Bookmobiles is the largest in the nation. And the celebration is especially significant in Kentucky.

When I was a girl, the local general store was a stop and a drop spot for the local bookmobile. Back in 2005, I made a post on the subject in which I said this:

During most of the years of my girlhood, my aunt ran the country store at Sweet Owen, a once-thriving community that, like many in Owen County, had been drained of population and businesses by paved roads and the automobile. Once a week the bookmobile came to Sweet Owen store and, after it moved on, left off a little stack of books that sat on a shelf to be checked out on the honor system. I spent many a summer afternoon sitting on a little bench on the store porch, reading from this rather eccentric assortment of books. It was there that I discovered Dr. Seuss, Moss Hart, and Lizzie Bordon, and it was there that I read The Thread That Runs So True.

The Thread that Runs So True is Jesse Stuart’s memoir of his life as an educator in Eastern Kentucky. According to my friend, Georgia Stamper, Stuart was instrumental in starting the bookmobile program in Kentucky. Her essay, “Jesse Stuart, the Bookmobile, and Me” won the 2007 Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay at the LMU Mountain Heritage Literary Festival

You can read an edited version of essay here. This version was published in the Owenton News-Herald. The relevant passage runs like this:

Then, last summer, talking with longtime Greenup County librarian, Dorothy Griffith, I learned that many believe Stuart literally talked Kentucky’s modern bookmobile system into existence. Again, I felt like I’d had the breath knocked out of me.

One of the first of those funny looking mint green bread trucks stuffed with books had sputtered to a stop in the rocky parking lot of my country schoolhouse. Afterwards, I was never the same. Maybe I would have gotten to college anyway. But I can’t imagine that I would be the same person without the hundreds – maybe thousands – of books I plucked from the bookmobile’s shelves during my growing up years. How had Jesse Stuart known I was hungry for books? There simply weren’t any at New Columbus Grade School except for our textbooks. The nearest library was fifteen, crooked miles away, and no one I knew owned more than a few volumes.

The world had navigated curvy, old Highway 330, then bumped down graveled KY 607 to stop and pick me up for the ride. Never mind that we had no cafeteria, no central heat, no indoor toilet. With books – Jesse knew – we could go anywhere.

While the bookmobile concept traces its roots to several early efforts, former Kentucky State Librarian James Nelson gives Jesse Stuart much of the credit for Kentucky’s modern bookmobile system.

“There is no question,” Nelson writes, “that the real genesis of the state’s famous fleet of bookmobiles occurred at the organizational meeting of the Friends of Kentucky Libraries in 1952. It was at this meeting that Kentucky author Jessie Stuart made an inspirational speech about the reading needs of rural families, and his comments got the right people motivated in the way that movements need to succeed.”

Louisville businessman, Harry Schacter, president of the Kaufman-Straus Department stores, was sitting in the audience that September day when Stuart stepped to the platform to speak. The contrast between Stuart’s rural Kentucky and Louisville’s neo-European Seelbach Hotel could not have been more stark. More significantly, the access to books and education available to the children who populated Stuart’s stories was vastly different than that enjoyed by the privileged Kentuckians gathered in the Seelbach’s gilded ballroom.

Unfortunately, the text of Stuart’s speech that day has not survived. But we know from newspaper accounts that he told his audience 80 percent of rural Kentuckians did not have assess to library service – a situation shared by 60 percent of all Kentuckians. We know that Stuart, the teacher, would have reminded his audience of Kentucky’s shameful illiteracy rate. We know – because this was Jesse Stuart – that he talked as if the future of the state depended on what he said that day. We know that when he finished speaking, Harry Schacter was an inspired man. Jesse Stuart had set him on fire.

Schacter had both the means and the connections to move mountains. In this case, he set about moving mountains of books to the rural areas of Kentucky. Within less than two years, over $300,000 dollars were raised to purchase bookmobiles, and hundreds of thousands of books had been donated. Eighty-four bookmobiles – reportedly they stretched along the route for a solid mile – were presented to the Library Extension Service at the State Fair in the fall of 1954. One of those came to Owen County. Kentucky has been the national leader in bookmobile service ever since.

There’s a granite monument dedicated to Jesse Stuart in the courthouse square in Greenup. But the vibrant fleet of Kentucky bookmobiles is a living memorial that will echo throughout all time, as Jesse once wrote, “telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

The stature of of Jesse Stuart in Eastern Kentucky cannot be overestimated. My young poet friend Matthew Haughton has written a long poem in tribute to Jesse that describes this statue. Matthew was raised in Greenup and felt that monumental influence. The poem is called “The Stiltwalker of Greenup County” and it is a very good poem. It’s currently in a book manuscript looking for a publisher. I hope some day to be able to share it with you.

Jesse Stuart, the Appalachian Hugh MacDiarmid?

It struck me that the following passage, from Seamus Heaney’s essay “A Torchlight Procession of One” on the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, could also describe the man who might be called an Appalachian nationalist poet, Jesse Stuart. Both men were what you might call vernacular poets. McDiarmid’s work preceded Stuart’s by about ten years:

He was very clear-headed about his productions and in the 1960s wrote to a BBC producer as follows: “My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano, emitting not only flame, but a lot of rubbish.” From a person of less abundant capacity and with a less compulsive appetite for overdoing things, this could have sounded like an excuse; from MacDiarmid, however, it emerges as a boast. With him, the speech from the dock is sure to be a roar of defiance. No wonder Norman MacCaig suggested that the anniversary of his death should be marked each year by the observance of two minutes of pandemonium. “He would walk into my mind,” MacCaig said at the graveside in Langholm in 1978, “as if it were a town and he a torchlight procession of one, lighting up the streets…”

Still, although his vitality was epoch-making, MacDiarmid has probably written more disconcertingly than any other major twentieth-century poet. Anybody who wishes to praise the work has to admit straight away that there is an un-get-roundable connection between the prodigality of his gifts and the prodigiousness of his blather. The task for everybody confronted with the immense bulk of his collected verse is to make a firm distinction between the true poetry and what we might call the habitual printout.

— Seamus Heaney, “A Torchlight Procession of One: On Hugh MacDiarmid” in The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp 104-105

More coincidence

Who knew Jesse Stuart ran away with the carnival? As best I can tell, this was sometime in the early twenties when Jesse was in his late teens. Nobody seems to be really sure how long his career as a carnie lasted or how far it took him.

from Jesse Stuart — The Heritage by David Dick (Plum Lick, 2005):

Ladies and gents, let’s just put it down as the sorriest pack of starved carnival dogs ever was rounded up for the animal shelter. There might have been Henrí, the flame-swallower from Pittsburgh with his rapeseed oil-covered throat and a mouthful of kerosene to light the torch, gurgle the flames, and spew out the fire. And there, in imagination, might be a George, dear soul, the knock ‘em down kewpie doll warhorse from Wheeling. You remember old George, don’t you? He was the right man for the carnival: down on his luck, loser to the ladies, health eaten up by the constant cigarette dangling from the left side of his mouth, ashes growing so long they curved. Sure, you ‘member ol’ George.

and from Jesse Stuart himself in Beyond Dark Hills (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1996):

The street carnival was a fascinating place to me, the painted showmen, the dancing girls, the vagabond life and the old dull music of the merry-go-round — the whole thing was fascinating! I made up my mind t get a job and follow it. … Where a man settles in one place, his life would someday become empty, I thought. I would follow the merry-go-round.

Not quite serendipity

I have these little episodes in my life that are not quite serendipity, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.” The word comes from a Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” by the way, and entered the language via Horace Walpole in 1754.

But these little blips of mine are more like coincidence. The fact that they show up at the same time or in rapid succession looks like it ought to have some meaning …

Take yesterday. First, I went over to Rake’s Progress and learned:

On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun “Work in Progress,” the book which would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later…

The Rake himself picked this up from Today in Literature, along with the fact that not Harriet Weaver, nor Joyce’s wife Nora, nor even Ezra Pound cared much for this new style of writing. Their putdowns are funny and I suggest that it will be well worth your while to take a look. But the money quote for me came from Samuel Beckett, the dissenting voice in this crowd:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read…. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

A little later, I followed a link over to Slate, where, in an article called “The Instruction Manual,” Meghan O’Rourke had this to say about John Ashbery (the fact that Ashbery is showing up a lot is not even coincidence – it’s his new books):

At the center of an Ashbery poem isn’t usually a subject (à la Philip Larkin) but a feeling (à la Jackson Pollock). That feeling is conjured up by the interplay between aesthetic conviction and amiably bland bewilderment; amid all the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life is the enduring hope that, as one speaker puts it, “at last I shall see my complete face.” The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. It’s only then, for most readers, that the meaning begins to leak through.

And finally, Anastasios Kozaitis, who makes a Poem of the Day appear in my in-box every day, sent “Into the Dusk-Charged Air,” a John Ashbery catalogue of rivers that I confess to getting bored with about half the way down. O’Rourke gives me permission to do this – one of her recommended strategies for reading Ashbery is to quit a poem when you get bored with it. Anyway, I found this catalogue as dull as any Homer ever wrote, except that it contained this line:

…the Ebro is blue / and slow

Coincidentally, we own a Spanish-made tractor, brand-name Ebro, which my husband calls “the only tractor Caesar mentioned in his commentaries” and which is in fact “blue and slow.”

Now, if you think that maybe this string of coincidences means that I should run out and catch up to The New York School or even read Finnegan’s Wake when I have yet to get through Ulysses, then I have one more of yesterday’s facts to point out. According to David Dick, in 1926 when William Faulkner published Soldier’s Pay and Earnest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises, Jesse Stuart was at what was then Camp Knox longing to be Robert Burns or Edgar Allen Poe. We tend to run a little behind the curve here in Kentucky.

Am I just being silly here? I do believe poetry, and for that matter prose, should be musical, a pleasure to hear, as I’m sure did Stuart, Poe, and Robert Burns the lyricist. I love reading aloud and my family has suffered through many a listen-to-this. And, being involved in this collaborative exhibit, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the link between poetry and the plastic arts (see Secrets and Used, New and Out of Print). Mostly, I guess I think there are a lot of people who try to be Jackson Pollock before they have learned how to be Grant Wood. I’m still working on Edward Hopper.