Hello Art!Hello Words!

I was walking through work today, a hazy daze that was heavily lubricated with current nights of heavy drinking combined with sickness and medication.

I am telling you this because as I was walking in a practiced haze I saw information on "The National Endowment for the Arts: The Big Read" I immediately became very excited.

It is nonprofit grant funded program that has the following mission:

The Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. The Big Read brings together partners across the country to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment.

The current book they are reading is Old School, a novel by Tobias Wolff, a professor at Standford University. He is best known for his short stories, In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs. Wolff has been praised by The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Paris Review as one of the saving graces for American Lit. Wolff has words that are so beautiful and rich they almost seem unreal.

Why am I telling you this? People used to read, they used to be able to create a scene, a life inside their mind from words written on a page-- and in the medium of multi-media, computers and kindles, e-books and digital literacy, people read books less. This is sad. While cultural shifts are neat-- I would hate to see books become obsolete, a thing of the past and this program sees this shift and created a way to remedy it, or at least try.

Books <3