We are interested in different things, some obsessively. So this book has come into our little library (because we order all books on the topic), Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee by one Tom Dardis. We won’t say anything here about the warning that sounds in the mind of the reader when the author uses the relaxed form of his name on what might reasonably be considered a scholarly work.

Nevertheless, a warning of sorts it should have been. Skipping the Scotty chapter for now, we dive right into the saga of our man from Mississippi. And scrape the bottom of the pool. On the second page of the chapter the author states that at the beginning of The Big Sleep General Sternwood “is dressed completely in white.” Uh, no. Granted, the book bears the copyright dates of 1976 and 1981, so personal copies of movies were not the norm (even though Dardis states that the film “is an extremely popular rerun on television and is still frequently shown in film houses”), but Sternwood is wearing the opposite of white. He is dressed in a dark (perhaps black) suit, white shirt, dark tie, checked shawl, with a dark plaid blanket over his legs.

So what does this mean? What possesses a writer to make this stuff up. Does he somehow think it helps his case — more than the facts? Is it simple sloppiness? Or is it a kind of arrogance? Arrogance, as in: “Whatever. White. Black. They’ll believe me. I’m authoritative.” Yeah, but no.

He continues. On the next page he claims that Lauren Bacall’s famous line in To Have and Have Not about how to whistle is “You just pucker up . . . and blow . . . ” Yikes! As anyone who has felt a certain little tingle when he watches the scene can tell you, the line is, “You just put your lips together and blow.”

And this is how the world falls apart.

Alas, six pages later, another howler, smaller, but still; it shows how the author thinks. Even Blotner reports that after he bolted the studio his first week on the job, only turning up a week later, Faulkner claimed he spent his time wandering in Death Valley. Death Valley? Farmer Bill among the cacti? Blotner and Parini both imply that Bill was joking. Well, yeah. Because we all say that. Our Dardis, however, seems to think he was on the level, and points out that Death Valley has been a setting in a couple of movies.

This is as far as we’ve gotten, but the warning flags are flying high. Still, obsessives will get their information wherever they can, so we do anticipate, by hook or by crook, some good stuff to come.

Bottom line? This sort of arrogantly sloppy writing is unacceptable. You find it from time to time where you shouldn’t. In his otherwise all right In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature (Vintage — normally first rate — 2003), Christopher Woodward consistently mistitles Dickens’s little travel book Pictures from Italy Letters from Italy, and he does it every time the Great One’s lovely guide is mentioned (often), as well as in the bibliography and the index! Gosh, folks! We’re pretty sure there was Internet back then. Or your own bookshelf. Who relies on his faulty memory when accuracy is a glance away? Boy, is that annoying. Such an inaccuracy, such a gaffe calls into doubt whatever else you want us to believe and renders your book kinda useless in a bunch of ways.

Finally, Peter Ackroyd does this, also against Dickens, in a fashion. In his hastily thrown together Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, Ackroyd calls the first (and famously suicided) illustrator of The Pickwick Papers not Robert Seymour but Edward Seymour. Ouch! And this, despite the fact that his earlier Dickens is as completely wonderful and magisterial a biography as any written (and correct, too, at least as regards Seymour’s name).

The upshot? Not as bad as blindness or totalitarianism, for a book is almost always a better thing than no book; but one does get annoyed by completely fixable lapses that, let’s agree, harm both reader and author.

Two years ago, I was on a moderated panel of writers for young people — this was in Charlotte — attended mainly by young readers, but also their parents, local writers, librarians, and all manner of interested parties. The final portion of the hour or so was a question and answer period, and a nervous woman, overlooked once or twice, but who clearly had a question to get out there, was finally called on. She stood and said, with a hint of zeal, “Do you think you bear a moral responsibility when you write for children?” If memory serves, she made it clear she was ready to continue her question in a statement of her belief that writers be held to a standard a little to the right of Jerry Falwell.

This was a loaded question, and not one I was expecting (where do you get your ideas?). The fellow sitting next to me, a graphic novelist and newcomer to the children’s arena, said, without comment, “Yes, I do,” or perhaps, “Yes, I certainly do.” I felt at once, thinking of the scotch we had shared earlier, that as a recent entry into the children’s writers field he probably decided to give the answer he knew was sought and not make waves. Fine. I was next and gave a meandering answer — something about the great number of issues out there that we, as writers, could address — but said basically the same thing: Uh-huh.

If I recall, I had at the time been reading some fiction that had something vaguely political about it, and it seemed to me that writing can carry a good deal of moral momentum with it. Think, for example, of Invisible Man or Native Son or Black Boy — works of art, all, and yet powerfully moving on a more-than-personal scale. Perhaps these things were running through my head. There was also the belief that we as moral people — and who would advertise himself as immoral? — cannot help but invest our writing with some sort of morality and that the writing could not help but pass this along to our readers. The issue is a huge one, and you can slice up the apple a dozen different ways, but isn’t the real question one of consciousness? Does the moral momentum have to exist with the artist’s collaboration? If it’s intended, does the work then become something other than art? Knotty issues for a late afternoon. But my answer was, finally, one that would have pleased the questioner, and I felt in equal measures a bit cowed and a bit all right. I left it at that.

I was surprised, however, as the question made its way down the dais (well, they were chairs, actually, set in a wide semi-circle on an auditorium stage). One writer said something completely noncommittal as regards her moral content. And this set the stage for one of us — a writer/illustrator — who stated outright, with as fierce an intent as our questioner, that the writer had no responsibility whatever other than to tell a good story. That is his single duty. If he fails at that, he should not be doing what he’s doing, and the marketplace will get rid of him soon enough. End of discussion. Next question, please.

I felt chastised. It was what I should have said. The guy was right. I completely believed that. Politicizing art destroys it; politicizing it utterly, destroys it utterly. Of course! In describing the artist’s relation to world, Walker Evans once said, “I don’t think an artist is directly able to alleviate the human condition. He’s very interested in revealing it [italics, his, apparently].” Well, yeah. William Faulkner, perhaps a greater authority, said the writer must leave “no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” And I bow.

Clearly, there is a subject here that refuses to be exhausted. There are statements to be made on both sides. Is Guernica a study in composition and shape and color, or does it contain in its brush strokes moral outrage at the killing of civilians by fascism? What is PEN International saying when it mounts conferences to bring to light the cases of imprisoned writers? What is Amnesty International doing when it publishes limited editions of poets and novelists? Or, in fact, are artists like the photographer who takes a picture of an atrocity? He might have tossed his camera aside and stopped it, yes, but that’s not his job; that’s your job. There are all kinds of things to say about this. And maybe that’s the point of having a thinking mind. What do you think?

Recently, a book came into my workshop, The Collected Short Prose of James Agee, in which is included as engrossing a document as any I’ve found for quite a time. It’s Agee’s submission to the Guggenheim Foundation of his “Plans for Work: October 1937.” This is a wide-ranging descriptive list of nearly fifty projects that, as he states, “I am working on, or am interested to try, or expect to return to . . . ”

Among the jewels is one described as “An Alabama Record.” Ha! We know what that became (though Agee didn’t at the time). Another is for a commentary on Shakespeare in which he mentions a “good example” of a successful treatment of Marlowe’s Faustus staged by Orson Welles. Welles was known at this time, prior to his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938, as a stage actor, director, and producer for the Federal Theatre Project, and the founder of the Mercury Theater.

What struck me immediately is a round of connections.

Turner Classic Movies recently ran a 1932 film called The Cabin in the Cotton, a dreadful title (from the novel by Henry Harrison Kroll, the man responsible for the dreadful title) for a surprisingly interesting story about a young (?) man (Richard Barthelmess, in a fist-clenching performance utilizing an astoundingly narrow range of silent-film grimaces) pursuing a haphazard education while caught between his sharecropping family (and rustic sweetheart) and the high (again, I must ask: ?) class world of the plantation owner and his floozie daughter (played by a springy, cute Bette Davis in funky little outfits, in a role ever after mimicked by drag stars because of her one great line: “Ah’d like to kiss ya, but ah jest washed ma hair” — catch the scene on youtube, if you dare).

Here is the connection; slight, perhaps, but fascinating to me. The film is about sharecroppers (no state is mentioned, though at one point Madge Norwood (slender Bette) mentions that she’s hired a jazz band for her party and it’s “coming up from Memphis,” although, of course, “up” could, rurally speaking, just as easily mean “down;” so we could be in Tennessee, Georgia, or Mississippi. Be that as it may, the screenplay was penned by Paul Green, who later collaborates with Orson Welles in adapting novels for the stage (famously, Native Son by Richard Wright). Further, the actual information about sharecropping is liberally dispensed (the novel was a bit of a tract, I hear) and truthful, and the terminology (the annual “settle” of accounts), and the basic situation, wherein the farmer was always in debt to the planter, always kept uneducated, and ever patronized, are completely on target, according to what we know about the system.

And we know about the sharecropping system in large part (these days) from Agee’s famous collaboration with Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the “Alabama Record” he lists in his Guggenheim application. It’s just that round of person to person, work to work, collaboration to collaboration, art to art that is so fascinating. To me.

One more thing. According to Laurence Bergreen, Agee’s biographer, “Reading Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel Black Boy, Agee identified so intensely with the progrationist that he considered himself more of a black than a white Southerner . . . ” A situation, we might add, that makes for much of the creative tension of Famous Men.

And, finally, another item on Agee’s Guggenheim list is “A true account of a jazz band”. But I’ll let it go now; the “connections” game risks becoming silly.

On one of the many rainy days last week I headed up to the University of Connecticut to do some newspaper research for a book. Turns out, after consulting online catalogs and calling a couple reference librarians (including those at Bridgeport Public and the Sterling library at Yale), that UConn’s is the only library in the state with certain holdings. So I made the familiar trip, got to the junction of 195 and 44, known happily in my day as “Four Corners,” a little before 10am, and experienced the first shock of the day. My favorite college restaurant, Kathy John’s, has closed its doors. And windows. And everything else. You know you’re in trouble when the only car in the lot is an abandoned wreck. The “no trespassing” signs look even more ominous. But it’s all over when you read the cardboard sign taped to the door: “Sorry . . . ”

A tradition gone into the long good night.

Stopped at the Co-op, which in its previous incarnation, I used to work for; they seem to have gotten over it. Picked up a book for old times’ sake. Feasted on yogurt muffin (moist) and coffee (ditto). Headed into the main library; all by eleven.

Microfilm on third floor, readers on first floor. You just go up, collect the goods, and set yourself up at a reader station. Printing? Alas, no. The library has ordered new reader/printers and won’t reorder the supply of toner for the current printers. Well, we’re in summer session now, and it’s a minor inconvenience in these economic waters. We’re happy just to have the film of old newspapers.

Old newspapers! The ones I needed to consult were from 1959, and you’ll not be surprised to hear that on every single page was at least one story — buried over the decades to unknowing — worth retelling, a la our century. It’s harsh to realize how much is lost to the great ocean of the past that could, if retained, help us do a little better than we’re doing. I haven’t the time to go into specifics here — let’s talk after the book is under contract — but in primary documents, the nuances of history softened and dulled by regurgitation and general public awareness are seen in the original to be sharp, vital, and immediate.

Things being the way they are, the screen between a reader and film and the awkward mechanism used to make that film readable will have to suffice; but how much more present would the past seem if you were able to hold fifty-year-old papers in your hands, to feel the life in that crinkled texture? Someday, perhaps. Not on this project.

It may seem obvious, but isn’t the eloquence of human thought a product not of conversation, but of the printed word? In discussing literacy, I suppose I simply want to acknowledge that a mind will be able to express itself in subtlety only if its owner learns subtlety of expression, and that quality can most effectively be learned by reading it on the page.

It’s that old thing: I write to know what I think (who’s responsible for that nugget?). Reading is how we learn to express the depth and shading and nuance of sophisticated thought. Nearing the end of his life and looking over his work, John Cheever said, “A page of good prose remains invincible.”

You can live and die in that statement, and I’m sure a part of each writer does. But the subtleties we have to employ in managing our cities, our country, and the relationships of global cultures, as well our families and ourselves, are nurtured by just such a thing: a page of good prose. Or a poem. Or a novel. Or a biography, history, essay, or letter. Considered words, written in reflection and read in meditation. The fineness of the written word — and, surely, it’s not all fine, but the reader’s discernment is part of the process of developing eloquent thought — contributes to the refinement of its reader’s thinking mind.

The reflected thought, contemplated, absorbed.

That’s all.

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of speaking about literacy at Channel Thirteen’s Celebration of Teaching and Learning in New York. For their educational blog, I wrote a few words, and also chatted on the panel about a problem I see, and I’ve been wanting to look at this in more depth. I’ll begin here by excerpting a bit of the original post, but over the next weeks I want to develop the idea of quiet — in our minds, our lives, our reading. Quiet is becoming impossible to attain, because of the accumulated noise from public soundtracks, the jabbering of loud people, the roar of transportation devices, the blather in our own heads; for one, I’m convinced that we are losing or have lost one of the signal joys of human — to shut it all down and simply be.

I’ll begin with the idea of quiet reading.

As I see it, among those who do read, “quiet reading” — the manner of reading without distraction — is at least fiercely under attack, at most doomed. Because of the homogenization of culture and the pervasiveness of technology, even the youngest readers face a bewildering spectrum of distractions that cut into their time and ability to focus on reading.

Even then, much of the reading being done is secondary to the activity — such as Internet reading, the “reading” of video game manuals, web browsing, and the like. We could call this “noisy reading,” in which the paradigm of the solitary reader interacting with words on the page is drowned under near-constant music, whining computer fans, and flickering images, not to mention the “horror” of being alone.

The concept of quiet reading is probably already terminal; at the very least it faces awesome competition by an uncomprehending world. Authors for children have had to face this competition and adapt to it, hoping that books can form a part of that busy spectrum of activities — such as the inclusion of computer and non-book elements into the storytelling. But this is a losing battle.

To give a specific example of how adults have become inured to the problem, we carry books around with us. This is a defense, you say, against falling prey to the blaring world at large. But to admit that is to avoid the deeper issue. You may think you are reading Robert Frost on the subway, shelled up in yourself against the multitude of distractions of public transportation — but you are not reading Robert Frost. The quality of your reading is marginal. You want points for trying. You insist it’s better than looking at the shoes of the person across from you — which it is, certainly; all of that — but that tiny pride will work against you when you try to sit in silence and engage with words. You will hear a ghost, an apparition. Not the living breathing speaking man.

Of course, there are a thousand caveats. I live an hour from New York City. There is no quiet here. The bucolic parkway a mile from my house is a constant white roar. Hand tools, compressors, refrigerator motors, the sheen of noise when the water is run. Sure. Sure. They insist, too, that the past is the one place you can’t go to, so get used to it. I still think that there is something in words on paper that I’m not hearing or feeling or knowing because of the constant hiss of life but that is essential — or more than essential, if there is such a thing.

So the search begins . . .

The short version is: I won the Edgar.

The longer version is that each year the Mystery Writers of America award their stylish and weighty statuette of Edgar A. Poe to the best mystery of the year in a slew of categories: best novel, best first novel, best short story, best original paperback, best Young Adult, play, teleplay, film screenplay, etc. My book, The Postcard (2008, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers), won the Juvenile award. Alvina Ling, my indefatigable editor, and Ames O’Neill, L,B’s publicist, were there, along with my soldier of an agent, George Nicholson, and, of course, my wife, Dolores. Also in attendance: Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton, James Lee Burke, Harlan Coben, Lee Child (current President of MWA), and lots of other names from the top tier of mystery writing.

Descending from our room (yes, we decided to stay overnight at New York’s Grand Hyatt, which the MWA took over the assorted ballrooms of), the first bloke we see is John Green; the first blokess, Julie Strauss-Gabel, his editor. I’m happy to report that John won the YA Edgar for Paper Towns. Congratulations to them both!

Sadly, my co-nominee, friend, teacher, and inspiration, Patricia Reilly Giff, was unable to attend at the last minute, but I was rooting for her. Still, I feel as if a good part of my win is hers, too. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near that podium if not for Pat.

Still floating, though the unkempt mass of work on the desk is a power greater than gravity.

But, yes. The week that was.

I can’t say enough about the beautiful people at the Daves Avenue Elementary School in Los Gatos, Calif., who hosted an inspiring visit this week. It was Author’s Day at the elementary school, and I was privileged to chat with the sparkling second and third graders — Droonlings, many of them — while Sid Fleischman engaged the upper graders and Matthew Gollub the littler ones.

After a sunny, dry, seventy-degree day of presentations and signing and communal lunch (with lots of students selected as some of the school’s best writers — who blithely thought they were the lucky ones!), the three writers adjourned to Lisa Mammel’s quaint old-town house where at the longest dining table this side of San Simeon we supped with Lisa, her husband (and chef) Chris, their charming children Enza and Cole, Susan von Felten, the school’s principal, Amy Goldsmith, librarian, Billy Martin, 5th grade teacher, and another couple of folks who I’m ashamed to say I can’t recall the names of, though I can remember their twinkling talk.

There was some serious discussion around literacy and words, creative arts, education, and the paths people take, willingly and un, to get where they are. I had the odd sensation of being reminded of something I’ve never quite experienced before, a smart, bohemian-ish gathering of folks of all ages engaged at a long lively table in good talk. Must do this more. . . .

It was a CT to CA round trip of some 36 hours and far too short a stay.

Los Gatos (“the cats”) is fifteen minutes southwest of the San Jose airport, and squarely in Silicon Valley. If I had known — as I later discovered — that John Steinbeck and his wife lived there on Greenwood Avenue where he wrote a fair part of The Grapes of Wrath I might have been persuaded to stay longer; say, move in. One of the places I might have moved into was the Mammels’ gem of a house. Barring that, I would have taken any one of the bungalows on the northeast side of Broadway, adjacent to the Toll House Hotel where the authors were put up and where, yes, there was a cookie on the pillow at bedtime. Breakfasted in Le Boulanger on the corner of the nearby plaza. Heavenly. Coffee. Banana Nut muffin. Didn’t have my notebook, but the hotel’s telephone notepad which worked just as well. Read the complimentary WSJ from which this, from an article about Murray Perahia’s new edition of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas for the German publisher Henle:

“It’s not just a scholastic activity. I studied the sketches. It’s a great privilege to study the way Beethoven thought, and the sketches give you an insight. He thought in very long stretches. All four movements of the ‘Funeral March’ Sonata, for example, were an inspiration that came at one moment. But I think in all the sonatas he saw the whole picture. It’s the same with Mozart, music came in a flash — though it took longer in Beethoven’s case, and it was harder to get that flash worked out.”

A fascinating look at musical creation, and I’m once again startled by the similarities with literary creation. They both, after all, happen by scratching a wet tool on paper.

And now back east to dream of long warm green summer days and to get that flash worked out.

If I return, the first place
is a room, my first sense of it feverish,
the air thickening in it

and difficult to breathe.
A shadow like a smudge
in one corner of the ceiling prints

a dark brown hole in the white
over a posterbed
half slept in by my brother.

God knows what my dream was that sick night
when I thumped around and around
till the crib had wheeled across

the floor and pinned the door slam shut,
but when morning came
they pushed the room awake

and found me soaking
in a drift of covers,
the beat-up sunken rag of a toy

like a trophy in my hands,
his poor head
dangling empty from the legs

and a hundred
little bits of foam dribbling
down to the headboard

where I’d pulled all of his guts
out in my sleep.
My mother stood there, hushed

in the half light.
My grandfather was pragmatic:
“he’ll do it again,”

and shook his head.
My part in that collusion was saying
nothing, for I knew I had been right

to unstuff him,
and knew somehow that he assented, as if
it was a kind of purgation

like sweating out a fever
I had to do to keep him safe.
I knew we’d both come out alive.

But the dream began to loosen, and fell quickly
when she picked me up
trailing swaddles of bedclothes back to the bed.

Why all the fuss? I’d had a fever. It was simple.
But it was out of my hands.
I remember my grandfather

waiting in the hall
as I was lifted, dried and dressed.
It came out slowly,

days after the event,
that he’d taken that toy down to the basement
and shot it right into the furnace.

Later I went down to find some trace
left in the chamber.
I brought up a stool to the iron

face, pulled on the coiled grip
and looked in as the vent swung back
at cool stacked wood just lying there

dusty in the stairlight
from the kitchen. Another time,
though I was not alone, I stood

and peered at sparks
and ashes spitting off
the so-red center of the fire.

Don’t much care for this sort of Report, and now two weeks in a row, but have a sense of responsibility despite myself.

Have always liked the math problem, “what is the next value in this series?”

So, a list of books that have settled on the desk lately.

A Tragic Honesty (Bailey), The Promised Land (Lemann), The Journals of John Cheever, Train Whistle Guitar (Murray), How Fiction Works (Wood) What This Cruel War Was Over (Manning), Flannery (Gooch), Sweet Land of Liberty (Sugrue).

Then there was the lovely peaceful visit to Villa Maria Education Center in Stamford yesterday. Ah, love in action. Sister Carol Ann and her staff are angels of humor and hope.

Love Poems (Sexton).

What didn’t happen: turning one’s books face up to crowds, saying, “buy this one, then this one, then this one.”

Ah, here we go. Am now a podcast. iTunes, even. Or, you can be exploratory and look at Writerscast.com. That was fun. David Wilk is a lovely man, well-read, courteous, and professional. Thank you, David.

Well that Hemingway line. “All you have to do is write one true sentence.” Get it down to one true sentence and add another and another. But not too quickly.