Background
About the author, Tim O'Brien
Information on Tim O'Brien, including discussion questions and the teacher's guide, is available on The Big Read's web site.
About The Big Read
The Big Read was started by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to restore reading to the center of American culture. The program was sparked by a 2004 study that showed literary reading in America declining rapidly, at an accelerated rate, among all groups, especially among the young. Working in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA has brought The Big Read to more than 400 communities since the program's 2007 national launch. For more information about the national program, visit please visit The Big Read's web site.
About The Big Read - Wichita
In 2007, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia visited Wichita to participate in a grants workshop for arts agencies. In his remarks, he talked about this new project -- The Big Read -- and encouraged those present to create a Big Read program in Wichita. When it became evident that the Kansas Book Festival would not return to Wichita in 2008, the decision was clear: Wichita readers, as well as its lapsed and reluctant readers, deserved an opportunity to continue to participate in a community literary event. Due to the success of The Big Read in the Wichita area in 2008, 2009 and 2010, with more than 25,000 attendees and over 50 community partners and donors, partners sought a fourth Big Read grant for fall 2011 and events to make it the "biggest" Big Read. Previous books include Willa Cather's "My Ántonia" (2008), "Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" (2009), and Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (2010).
The Big Read - Wichita and those who support it have received several awards, including:
Announcement of The Big Read - Wichita by Mayor Carl Brewer, July 11, 2011
Thank you for joining us here today. I am pleased to announce that the Wichita Public Library has received its fourth straight Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Big Read is a program that encourages the entire community to read, discuss and celebrate a selected book. From October first through November fifteenth, the Wichita area will read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."
I’m proud that for the past three years our residents have collectively embraced reading by participating in The Big Read.
More than 25,000 people have participated in Big Read events offered by our libraries, museums, schools, universities, booksellers and others across the region. You’ve all helped stretch The Big Read beyond Wichita.
Why is reading so important? Those who read are more likely than non-readers:
• To perform volunteer and charity work,
• To visit art museums,
• To attend performing arts events,
• And to attend sporting events.
Readers enrich their lives and their community. Reading is a source of pleasure and a vital tool for personal development, community enhancement and civic connection. That's why we support The Big Read – that’s why I do as an honorary chair.
I'm pleased to announce that I have two co-chairs - Congressman Mike Pompeo and Colonel Ricky Rupp, base commander of McConnell Air Force Base. My wife Cathy has agreed to serve as honorary chair on a special event committee with Vicki Tiahrt. They will help support the Big Read/Wichita team with some noteworthy events you'll hear about in a few minutes. But, first, let's see this year's poster.
Remarks About This Year's Poster by Stephen Gleissner, Chief Curator at Wichita Art Museum
The 2011 Big Read Committee chose a work from the collection of the Wichita Art Museum as the visual image to accompany Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried."
The object is a lithograph by Robert Rauschenberg, titled Signs, which was designed and printed in 1970. [Copyright restrictions prevent the image from being used on this web site, but look for posters, bookmarks and billboards around the region starting in mid-August.]
The literature and art relate on multiple levels, most obviously in the technique of collage. Neither work is a straightforward narrative. O’Brien assembles 22 stories based on experiences rooted in the Vietnam War, and Rauschenberg assembles approximately ten images that he intended to be a group portrait of the decade of the 1960s, one of the boldest of which refers specifically to the Vietnam War, while others carry recollections of ideas associated with the War, such as the ‘60s counterculture and civil disobedience.
Tim O’Brien and Robert Rauschenberg share subject matter as well as technique. O’Brien’s stories highlight the objects carried through the War by his soldiers: from the most mundane, such as mosquito repellent, knives, and gum; to the talismanic, such as love letters, stones, and marijuana; to the most terrifying, such as each other’s corpses. All of those physical objects propel the transportation of non-physical phenomenon, such as memories, anxieties, and responsibilities.
Rauschenberg’s portrait of the ‘60s features the people who carried us through that decade—Kennedys and Kings, Janis Joplin, astronauts, and the young men drafted to fight in Vietnam. Those people carry things of heavy symbolic import as well: guns, flowers, blood.
O’Brien and Rauschenberg both adopt a matter-of-fact tone in these works of art. They appear to select neutrally and randomly from the popular culture of their day, which is one reason some art critics group Rauschenberg among the Pop artists. The emotions the art prompt are possible only with the overlay of our personal associations over the frozen images.
When he issued Signs in 1970, Rauschenberg wrote that his motivation was to convey the “love, terror, and violence of the last 10 years. The danger lies in forgetting.”
Tim O’Brien, rather, can’t forget. He is in a way the opposite of Proust, for Proust wrote frantically in order to remember the things and associations of his youth. O’Brien wrote our 2011 Big Read selection because he simply couldn’t forget, but somehow had to release, the emotions associated with the things carried by his fellow Vietnam War soldiers.