The Great Gatsby: The Big Read of 2013

the roaring twenties prohibition flappers it's all part of the great gatsby i'm kate mcintyre and today on k pr prisons we'll look at this classic american tale of love longing and reinventing yourself set in the jazz things that people shunning county public library is currently hosting its biennial be reprogrammed an initiative of the national endowment for the arts to encourage reading all this month and into the first week of march the library is hosting events tied to the great gatsby including concerts a big dance party the discussion groups and movie screening later this hour we'll talk to libraries staffers about some of those events as well as some campaign in advance for younger readers but first this introduction to the great gatsby produced and distributed by the national endowment for the arts author of art as jimmy

raining when i came back from these last bottom i felt that i wanted the world to be in uniform and a sort of moral attention forever i wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart only gets paid the man who gives his name to this book was exempt from my reaction ganske who represented everything for which i have an unaffected scorn if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures then there was something gorgeous about him some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life as if he were related to one of those and intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles that was sam waterston reading from f scott

fitzgerald's nineteen twenty five jazz age classic each individual lawyers it is probably the best known american novel the most widely taught american novel think of fire on a desert island and i had the american novel of the twentieth century it would be a welcome to the big read a program created by the national endowment for the arts in partnership with the institute of museum and library services the largest reading program in american history the big read is designed to unite communities through great literature here's your host poet and former chair of the nea dana gioia fitzgerald wrote the great gatsby at the height of the nineteen twenties jazz age of phrase fitzgerald himself calling

america had just emerged from the first world war it was experiencing an economic boom oh the roaring twenties introduced prohibition and a kind of post war hayes the decade is also remembered as one long and extravagant party it was the era of jazz and ragtime indulgence and easy money flappers bootleggers the great gatsby explores the complicated and exciting period actor producer and director robert redford the duo the rise of capitalism the twenties which of the roaring twenties and how there is so much emphasis on the elegance of the patrician qualities in american life the very very rich for some other characters can sit still book critic maureen corrigan so the jittery missed that critics talk about his character as in the jazz age that informs the dances that everyone's doing and the wild drinking and a fascination with the automobile it's all there in the end these characters the minute they sit still they get the great idea to drive into your hearing

you're driving out to long island they never seem to be able to to stay put and there's something that's almost to frenetic about their movements and they are searching for a good time that i think we associate director says it's everybody's trying really hard to have a good time there was music from my neighbors' house through the summer nights in his blue gardens amendment girls came and went like moths among the whispering some champagne at high tide in the afternoon i watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft are taking this on on the hot sand of his beach well as to motor boats let the waters of the sound trying planes over cataracts of foam on weekends as rolls royce became an omnibus bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight over his station wagon scampered like you risk your

man the bar is in full swing and sorting rounds of cocktails from the garden outside until the year is alive with chatter laughter and casual innuendo introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women louis ck the great gatsby is written in the voice of nick carraway a midwesterner who finds himself among them new york upper class make movies into a tiny little house in the shadow of the great long island nations most notably that is mysterious next door neighbor jay gatsby who throws notoriously extravagant parties next outsider perspective is one reason why the great gatsby is such a powerful novel he seems to condemn the lavish lifestyle of his neighbors even as he yearns to be

accepted in their circles the narrator of the great gatsby is a mining character but he's there to document what happens credit score matthew broccoli there is no scene i would make is not present and of course the miracle of the great gatsby the device the technique that makes it work is mick everything is filtered through mic and it is exactly the fact that nick carraway is looking on this world as an outsider and that he thinks that you know maybe there's another world that the world that he lives in a world which is more one dressed which is more beautiful which is more magical novelist dish can and he thinks that that world is the possible by money and that if he can only get the money he can have it and of course that vision of america as a place they can be wondrous if we have the dough born in st paul minnesota fitzgerald grew up in a

family of declining and precarious fortune his father was an unsuccessful businessman his mother helped support the family with her dwindling inheritance surrounded by financial anxiety fitzgerald developed a fascination with the very wealthy would only increase to we came to east princeton university a training ground of the american upper class nick represents have scott fitzgerald the same values the same background that both from the mid western city of educated ivy league east and both highly moral plea the material in singapore and inside outside a kid who played with the rich kids in town who went to dancing school with which kids and ham but whose father was a failure and i'm sure that this charles concentration on understanding of the complex reactions to wealth and the wealthy

began on summit avenue in st paul minnesota robert redford fitzgerald was obsessed with you arthur was obsessed with somehow someway wanting to belong to a coach himself coming from the midwest and coming from an area that was considered probably the provincial in those days that he had a dream to belong to that subset answer he wrote a novel about that green anybody that with the character of gatsby he became one of the great social novelists he was the first of the american right is to write seriously about money and how it works that's probably his greatest distinction of people said he wrote the first american gangster novel the great gatsby and a naturalist ruinous also why fitzgerald was the first american writer to write seriously about money and the effects of money on character robert redford played the title role in the nineteen seventy four film version of the great gatsby on a personal level my love people asked him are you gasping ice and halt no not all but on the other hand where i can relate is

that i wanted to play the part because i was very i had not done before played in desperate need and that was appealing to me and politically or desperate men caught up in the american dream illegally search for the american dream we never learn the full story behind the mysterious jay gatsby the characters in the novel spread a wild rumors about what he does for a living and how he made his immense fortune we do know one thing however that is unhealthy obsession with daisy buchanan complete only to disaster moral centers on a memorable and moving in exciting ways it is memorable when it was first published in nineteen twenty five the great gatsby received mixed reviews and mediocre sales of its commercial failure was a disappointment from which fitzgerald never fully recovered perhaps the novel's initial readers had trouble understanding gatsby a delicately

drawn tragic figure rather than a conventional romantic hero robert redford nobody can really get a grip on guest we couldn't really get a great because of this mysterious nature those were some of the reasons i wanted to one is an accurate way to prevent cure or a person constrained and just seeing inside with the dream and trying to control it and create an artificial personality to hide what might be insecure that was very appealing to me and just the elegance of the novel going to the screen gatsby to dream consuming passion of his life to win the heart of his costs of dc a green light shines from dc shoreline state across the waters of the long island sound maureen corrigan unocal love the idea that the first image you see of gatsby is standing out at the edge of his dark looking out to the green light is this thing that's an attainable whatever it is symbolized by the green light

she was curious one auto five years they've been walking down the street when the leaves were falling and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight they stopped here and turned toward each other now it was a call night with that mysterious excitement which comes at the two changes of the year the quiet lights in the houses were coming out into the darkness and there was the stir and bustle among the stars out of the corner of his eye gets we saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed the letter amounted to a secret place above the trees he could climb to it if he climbed alone and once there he could suck on the path of life go put down the

incomparable no wonder his heart beat faster and faster as daisies white face cannot goes on he knew that when he kissed this girl and for overweight and his a memorable visions to her perishable breath his mind would never robbed again like the mind of god so he waited listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that have been struck upon a star then he kissed her at his lips page she blossomed form like a flower and the incarnation was one thing that makes this novel so contemporary still is the fact that you can get at the truth and we're where's the center here have to ever get at what exactly certain especially dc was

feeling more important he's a green light she's sees the object that's out there so i don't think she's going to be alone and the character is meant to be and the woman you can have sisters is meant to be the object that somehow was never going to be commensurate with his capacity for wonder if that's who she is you grab hold of her and she'd dissolves into vapor some details of disease character seemed to be based on the great love of fitzgerald's life zelda sayre remarried in nineteen twenty and jay gatsby is hardly conventional leading man daisy buchanan is certainly troubling leading lady what gets be left for the war dc and in their youthful romance to marry tom buchannan a very rich and a conspicuously and faithful brewed robert redford the obliviousness and the sport major busy being driven in her own way and in

addition the atmosphere that she stepped into my inherent nature of it was absolute right to somebody it's more like she was himself stepped into the frame of others for people's lungs had money they have solid security is or was that lifeline what was missing was that in the book because tom buchanan the character clearly has a border side along with the socially correct so kind of a rough sketch we use a lot of the social criticism from inheritance not most of the art and she chose that or wash your passion to she wanted she wanted both ways today we're discussing the great gatsby you're listening to a pr preserve i'm kate mcintyre and

today it's the topeka sunny county public library big lead of the great gatsby earlier this month i visited with several library staffers about the great gatsby including tonya was the gatsby such a highly visual book on in terms of clothing on automobiles just the setting you can really picture in your mind so that it's awful lot of good programs that appeal to the audience i am dancing car shows are also additional music so that was there was a lot of programming could hack into it and that always figures into it but we also didn't pick a book to that is accessible in terms at him a large number of people can read it and get it on you know you don't pick something that someone's gonna get forty pages into and then go now this is too hard or this doesn't speak to me or just boring so gatsby fits that pressure to it it's a short novel you can read about for five hours if you're slow reader like me

and it's also just a good story to it that others timeless narratives that is that always speaks to the current time i don't think there's a time since guest is published that hasn't spoken to any particular decade on i think it as has his classic americana third debates i love my class in america is their class in america well we say there is that but there is so there's also rich versus poor on this isn't all that really doesn't have a middle class we see ourselves going through that note he wrote of the middle class kutcher robber barons who are just really sucking all the resources and the economy just for their own self gratification because they can and there's no trickle down so i guess the poor are viewed as objects toys things it can be used so it always speaks to i guess american economics american

class structure american social structure and always to me and has this one great didn't i see quite a lot of literature especially for the concert the nineteen twenties and that's the whole notion of the past this is an era where psychology in psychiatry are fairly new to western culture and you see a lot of people delve into their past their psyches in a way that hadn't been done om up to that time i think joyce and proust had started it but we see in the character of gatsby the whole notion of you can't get stuck on the past if you get fixated on the past to become solid cystic in your obsession the past you are never gonna move forward you can garner all the wealth in the world but if you get fixated on something that first time use your personal growth you are flawed as a character and that really does speak to everybody regardless of their economic level their

educational so i think that really captures the imagination i think that's why it it has endured and why it's a really good read it is that a great story you know it's interesting that you point this out as a timeless story because i think for most of us the great gatsby is so rooted in the nineteen twenties and was happening in the in america van this was a time of really rapid rapid change it between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty the technological advances that this country down with were phenomenal i think within a four year period we got radio motion pictures automobiles on the the telephone the vacuum tube that you put into amplifiers for radios and guitar amps sabina and that i was called to try out and that was invented air conditioning escalators flight

on it was an age where everything got fast really fast of all the sudden as an era nation that spans twenty five hundred miles we could communicate with each other it instantly we no longer had to wait for new music to work its way geographically from city to city you turn on a radio everybody shared the same music now which we take for granted on you to get someplace a place faster if you wanted to get somewhere you got in a car and use that off so everything moved much more quickly i think beyond invention jazz music also embodies that because also we have this new music that is really much more quickly with different complex reliance on everything just got passed and i think we see that in the characters of gatsby they're restless people they cannot keep still there's the same again gatsby where gatsby and daisy buchanan and tom buchanan and nick

there they're at the house and they all decided of minutes not as to drive into the city and once they get there it's like they just can't they just don't want to do it themselves they're so restless absolutely and the wrestlers because they i think their undeveloped people i mean they all they are rich that said they're nothing the rich and they're bored they you know get there and their lives are just from you know one entertainment to another entertainment to another entertainment and i guess if you are wealthy like that you didn't have to work and you do reach a point where it's what do i do and what i think it's sad because what they ought to do is it just results in using people for their entertainment and them discarding them can you talk about the role of women and how it was changing in that time period and how that's reflected in some of the female characters in the grown ups be good that's really exciting because what we have is the airport the car the new woman and so hemlines go up here get

short women are driving cars and women are drinking and so they are freed in a way to do as they please for the first time in american culture maybe western culture and they're not hindered by hoping homemakers are being the sword icons of piety that the whole notion of the victorian woman heard is really shunted aside for a new freedom and i think you see women trying to figure out what exactly they're supposed to do with all this new freedom but that's also coupled with the age of the women in this novel except for murdoch is you know a woman a wealthy and i go what do i do with all this time on my hands and but they also today i think about daisy in tom's child and you get that little hint they're not not everything has changed yet because daisy say english cause or portal for that

she wants which is to be a portal for this doesn't really want to grow up in and have this burden of responsibility for herself so i think there's there's i think an exploration of that and it kind of reflects on scott's and zelda's relationship is that also was not easy relationship because his elder was so headstrong to what extent do you think the great gatsby was autobiographical well for a little bit i'm reading recall there there are perils in terms of time and they're not exact but tom and daisy do reflect scott and zelda in terms of on the whole notion of old money and women still swim from the south they don't wanna marry a man who is new money they wanna marry old granny there's a difference the two will never meet and i think that and really never left

scott's mind even though he eventually got zelda just as gatsby hoped he would get daisy but they didn't have ben resolves that staying not being good enough to get you a rich girl that that love is not enough but i understand that although the great gatsby did ok in terms of sales when it first came out it wasn't all that well read it until after world war two time you tell me how that happened right when world war two is beginning and we were sending our troops overseas and big scribner's had tons of copies of gatsby laying in a warehouse because it was not a bestseller was critically well received nobody is buying is that thousands of copies in a warehouse and singers of the nineteen twenties so scribner's thought let's send these books to the troops and given some to read well at the time was right the troops at the book it sort of caught their imagination and a lot of the soldiers came back

and went to college on the gi bill i love a lot of public universities and for some reason i don't know what it is a lot of them came in with professors and they introduced this book into their classes a dissident early fifties and that's how gatsby got education that was until thirty years after was published and it was largely a populist movement coming out of that only the war but public universities and the gi bill and it has stayed in the canon ever since you know i guess that just goes to say they say that when you read a book you're reading you're reading about the time setting in which the book takes place in and when it's written by it but you also bring to it the time in which you were reading it and how you are for that message that's because you have the text in gatsby takes place in the twenties and nick is a stockbroker and so as i'm as a modern reader even as a reader in the nineteen forties you're

reading this tale excess on people with way too much money to pour stockbrokers are making lots of money really really quickly endured riesling oh but in seven years this is all going to come crashing down they still could never have known that writing at cbs only a reader reading after the fact if you can't read it without understanding that the great depression is going to happen to them and it's hard to feel like fitzgerald didn't have some sense of impending doom ok maybe baptist not the stock market crash that some sense that you can't keep up this kind of pace for this lifestyle cattle disease these are decadent people these are people that lies of complete access and decadence who have no regard for anything other than their immediate gratification and i think that in part what makes this a very american novel is that we have this kind of moralistic streak in us as a

nation where we go you know what these people are not good people they're not nice people to not ethical people they don't know how to treat people everything is viewed as something disposable and that can never sustain itself and that's pretty much a huge theme throughout american literature and faulkner has that exact same thing you know that a culture built on slavery can never sustain itself and we see that and foreigners characters in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties kind of images that i think is really iconic with the great gatsby is this idea of these huge a lavish parties with music and dancing when man and alcohol in the end you know wonderful buffet spreads and yet all of these parties the gaspe throws he's never even there i think it's a couple things were that anyone he showing just the emptiness

of having all of that money and nothing to do with any i think there is such a thing as having too much money and you can only do this for selling the job at showing the extravagance the decadence along the excess that comes with making that much money back quickly like you were doing at that time and then it's all to leak you can have all these bells and whistles but it's ultimately an anti experience if you're not developed as a person and get is a person who has never been able to move forward in life because of that thing that has been stuck in the past it's almost like ocd is he so fixated on daisy that no matter what he gets into how much when he has what lavish parties he can throw your surrounds himself with the noise an activity in the past that moment he strapped and he's always going to be an observer and a participant as much as he wants to participate what things about a lot of

american literature is that it's very west were driven that we are moving to the west into new times and this book is very much the opposite that's jay gatsby comes from the midwest and moves to the east the neck that narrator it's from the midwest he's living in the east what do you think its job was doing the bare that's interesting because when you get toward the end the novel you find out that jay gatsby had been obsessed with the west growing up near the wild west shows and he started out west and went east bestows try to talk about the you know the corruption of people and people with too much money and i think if he moved out west there's too much possibility there's too much expense so it's moving to the east where society was already established we had this sculpture

that was trying to mimic what was happening in england and europe with their big houses their big cars they're big parties and try to mimic the aristocracy but it's a sin that downton abbey takes place at the same time we draw a lot of parallels between gatsby and downton abbey this time around except at the downton abbey houses still standing and most of the mansions are built on long island between nineteen oh five nineteen eleven have been demolished so i think the east is set up as a as the established america and he could have done on the west there's no establishment there we still have you know the territory the west anything goes lawlessness out there an old money versus new money out west who cares there was no money out their own money was new money and so so he could and he addressed that and americans struggle with class and money if he had said it

in the west is nobody but nobody had classic think everybody had it that's tanya walls of a topeka sunny county public library which is hosting events all this month pertaining to the great gatsby you can find a list of those events on the library's website that you don't you don't you die t s e e p l dot org one of the library's signature events will take place one week from today on sunday afternoon february seventeenth kirk curnutt we'll talk about as scott fitzgerald and the great gatsby in a special multimedia presentation curnutte has been researching fitzgerald for the past twenty years since he joined the faculty at troy university in montgomery alabama that's the hometown of fitzgerald's wife felber printed joins us by telephone from his home in montgomery kirk thanks for visiting with us today why isn't about the great gatsby that makes it a good

big read book whoa whoa whoa oh a love story about america that numerical it's a long story but it's also about ambition month in a row think that time period is part of what attracts people speaking of the time period for reading this book in kansas in the twenty first century with how is it that we can relate to this book that takes place in new york in nineteen twenty five world a lot of the characters are actually midwesterners to begin what that scott fitzgerald was and i think as with all of his writing is a sort of interesting symbolism and geography so i would say right away i am i'm from michigan originally all my family is from indiana or not want a school in missouri and i identified very much with the votes of the

midwestern values that are in the book third of the trade in new york but you're better than new yorkers actually sixth you just mentioned at scott's fitzgerald was born and raised in st paul minnesota tell us a little bit about those early years and how those mom influenced him oh boy land there were some family morning on his mother's side but he grew up very much with a chip on their shoulder in terms of not belonging to the upper class there was a lot of special and cheery war ii in him and so i think those early years really inspired a lot of anxiety about whether they belong whatever group

at the time and do you think that's reflected in the great gatsby as narrator and made calloway caraway honestly i am one of the midwestern values that vick actually for those that will identify with very much is that sort of conservative ability to look at other people's behavior and sort of say you know that's a judgment or that or bomb criminals and i think he's earned seven that wealth is really rooted in that protestant work ethic and of course jay gatsby is a midwesterner to an important mission to become somebody is a part of that show

in a lot ways i think gatsby on end it about belonging is will work is huge move off some pretty crazy such as we are often told students and i imagine if a person's shoe david at seventeen bought a house across the street and steered it you're all white on her doorstep every night for hours on and public use movie and talkers gather look really yeah they're you know moment a creepy enough i think to get he's pursuing he's not aware of it because it is very much an amateur in a midwestern accent but yeah there's a lot of myths about are creating himself into the person he meant it if it works out you can read

gatsby of a love story but once it's sort of peel back the layers you discover that what gets these will in love with the idea of himself amid daisy buchanan it's really just the price would need confirmation of the creation so it is right now let's for the collection for romance of it is very worst abuses us about the book that it is more complicated than half kirk tell us about fitzgerald's princeton years going out of prep school year and it would be in their abortion so awe when we can only car it got in there in a very active in the literary and dramatist it if you have a terrible student and forgot ann shane

and you know if you were if you forgot a college in nineteen seventeen was really only one other option for you and when the army which is exactly what he dead ori and because he was a priest a man or had recently been you get to go in an officer and not a particularly good military person but you know there's a lot of in depth the sort of odd fascination with the ivy league what it means to be a yale mean what it used to belong to those <unk> interesting archive that's one aspect of the book that unleashed for most of us the colonel arrives at and we probably did offensively because very few of us are part of those circles idea of people this day that what about the heart they went to yale apartment for harvard

and i'm i might chuckle know my home when i do that that our preparedness on their part that made that you would be impressed by that sold after fitzgerald drops out of prints then he joins the army and it moves down to your neck of the words exactly a different authority it's really interesting for me the current interior and gets around to a couple different camps the lanes here in montgomery alabama which at that time in history even for provincial state capital and the other officers are looking for things to do and so they start going to the local country club dance in one night there he meets a young woman who had q an uneven and turned quietly kenya she loses her shot a high school

learn more oh man you really would be these sort of core story behind the best known for a kind cafe many of us came to the great gatsby from the nineteen seventy four movie with robert redford in that world tell me about how the great gatsby has come to the big screen several times over the years we'll include a very interesting when babs werman adaptation comes out on they are already surfacing but it's going to be the most successful is by looking at the trailer and seeing what they're doing work in certain visual but that it covered it with a towering person in the nineteen twenties which doesn't exist anymore although the trailer had been rediscovered and i'll be showing that alongside with a prayer and about mormons

in i think folks will see right away part of what the appeal of the movie version of gatsby earth and very simply put it gets beef parties or something just lavish and socialists about playing these so wonderfully decade and over the top get togethers you know the idea of people having orchestration the backyard and abiding in the polls broken champagne while crews it's very appealing what others say about part of the assertion with kathy and i don't think it's a negative thing all with the fashion they are very few of them get a chance to dress up like that and so it's a i go to great gatsby parties all the time i get to be invited to a great summer ari i will work on that for the next big reader

half again kirk curnutt is professor of english at troy university in montgomery alabama he's also on the board of directors of the f scott and zelda fitzgerald museum he'll be speaking at the topeka sunny county public library next sunday february seventeenth you can find out more at the library's website daddy daddy daddy you'd that tea as c p l dot org one of the reasons the great gatsby was chosen for this year's big read is that its excess of all although it's classic literature it's also a quick read but it's not for everyone so that topekans shawnee county public library is doing a companion program for younger readers i visited with marlena hodgkinson about their book wonder struck by brian cells make you think were a big book and say you pick it up it weighs about our no two pounds affect a good three inches they're yeah i mean there's over six hundred pages and it bad once you open it up you see right away that it's going to be a

pretty easy read over four hundred and fifty of those pages are illustrations seventies lovely black and white pictures that tell the story of the rose one of the two main characters as the story is told entirely with images so you get a lot of this beautiful artwork and her story is set in the nineteen twenties which is kind of our tie into gatsby i am the other character is ben and his story is that fifty years into the future and to the nineteen seventies and they're both sort of our last and looking for something and so it's the story of their quest to find a place where they belong in what way does that connect where the roaring twenties the jazz age that the setting of the great gatsby well when i was thinking about that timeframe one of the el women that work center sabatini art gallery mentioned that in the nineteen twenties where sway in king tut's tomb was opened and that there was a big

ham craze for egyptian fashioned sensor that kind of explained some of the fashion maybe some of the art deco staff and then it also ties in the book the children both find themselves and the american museum of natural history at some point in their journey and so i am that sparked my imagination i can see lots of programming opportunities at that so i'm going to begin with a program called wonders in the making and i've invited children to come in on got some specific tasks that i want them to help me with some creations that they can help us again work on some things that later in the month at the end of the month will display at the wonders revealed and so we will have our very own candidate wonder's sir natural history museum so an opportunity for them to go and explore call other things are going on so i do a program it's called wonderful

words and reagan explore how language has changed over time so will talk about slang from the nineteen twenties in the nineteen seventies in and try and tie it into the way we speak today and the other way that that ties into the book is that both of the children in this book are deaf and so on we're going to give kids a chance to see part of the book a reading from the book and interpreted in american sign language and teach them how to do a little signing under we do have some opportunities for the teens as well and they can come to a big read gatsby party and that could be a lot of fun they're going to have to dance through confession from the nineteen twenties they're going to have poker and then you have some nerve can target practice there'll be a lot of fun for the older kids and then friday again women a chance to come in later and make some flapper headbands

and as that one because both my daughters and letters and i could see the really enjoying that for our younger readers what you think about this arrow would be appealing to them you know it's almost a hundred years ago it in our young people it's hard maybe to make a connection with the time of the nineteen twenties i guess the thing that pops into my mind are those silent film set there are then that's also part of the book it the way they experienced no reason that so different from how we watch imax three d movies today so maybe to seeing those movies and black and white tin and the piano playing in the background but as polo played in here for their cancer silent film festival which has also taken place this month here in topeka who works with kids and kids who love to read what do you think it is about this book that would really grab them i think our work really does just pull the kids

than you can fit and studied the pictures and the way he changes the frame how can sort of panning in on their characters he does that with some walls at one point and with william leahy or one point and say can really just read the picture and then the fact that you can read this six hundred and eight page book so quickly in such a wonderful feeling for a kid but make no mistake pretzels it's not just it's not just i think adults would enjoy this because well he says this is a great book for adults as well it's the story of looking for a connection and present day life i suppose well anna had concern is a children's librarian at the topeka sunny county public library she's been visiting with me about their companion to the big read wonder struck by brian cells nick again there's events taking place all month and into march at the topeka sunny county public library as well as events scattered throughout topeka

to talk about those events i'm joined by diana friend manager of communications and marketing for the library or a day ago when you tried to take a big read but what appealed to you about the great gatsby well it's the party i mean at fitzgerald coined the term the jazz age and so it is about having a huge party that's what made gatsby popular and all of are trying to attack the girl well i think it's what appeals to you about it even in twenty thirteen the idf said decadence and the free in the bathtub gin and the prohibition in doing something that's not quite a you know within the moral standards of society so it lends yourself to beautiful music programs when we're very fortunate being from the midwest and with kansas city being so close by that we have some wonderful jazz artists and we

have a a leading experts dennis winslet is gonna come over and talk about the history of jazz in the midwest with us and at angela hagin bach who has helped us on other big reads is coming over and she has a her own reading group in kansas city and they all come when she performs here at the library dressed in period costume so you will see a panic and nineteen twenties cost him an ally in the audience as well as angela and her band when she performs here on the twenty fourth and then kevin well mine and queen bey had been working on a one woman show and telling the story of bessie smith one of the the renowned jazz singers and the library is very fortunate to be one of the performance places for that on march second so tell me a little bit about that event but it's more than just singing oh yes it's a theatrical performance kevin well mine who have

is an instructor at the university of kansas and he is also well known for his independent films that he's done that is actually and the director and producer i've the best he's blues is the name of the show they're putting on and that i'm being able to secure that the talents of queen day which she is a history making in her own write that people come from all over the world to hear her perform and she's gonna be doing it here at our library for free on a special saturday night performance in the library will close at six o'clock that bess he's blues will owe will reopen the doors to the public at six thirty and then saturday evening so get there early to get a seat his last time she was here we had standing room only the nineteen twenties was an exciting time not just in europe but really all over the country how are you trying to capture that with some of your programs well one of the things that

we're excited about doing it is we're doing and art and architecture of the nineteen twenties and to peek at south has several signature buildings that were built back in the nineteen twenties one of the most famous that i'm familiar with is the sumner elementary school and then at the monroe school which were the the subject of the brown v board court case that came out later that those buildings were built back in that time again the tile work the architecture we do hold the core the summer school is beautiful we also have some bank buildings at the doors breast panels up on our own millennium cafe which came out of the first national bank building that was torn down are very good examples of art deco work in the sabatini art galleries collection now we have several items that are art nouveau which their twenties gave birth to

a period of art that is named for it and they're so you can go up into our gallery right now and see items is a beautiful tea set that is just exquisite and different trends that will speak to all of that that on the twenty six to february you'll be able to hear about the arts architecture to war but we will also have it available online see you couldn't do it and your own self paced as you drive around peek and see some of these items there's so many events going on at the library this month any into march that are all around the big read how can people find out more about them well we have a web page and if he'll get a two tier c p l dot org slash big read it will take you to and the big repaid she can find out about the book you can find out about the event she can find out a little bit of history about the author wonder

striker children's book that is the best way that the one thing that we do want you to do is to put on your dancing shoes on march first because once again the art and architecture the great overland station which was built during that time beautiful restoration we will be dancing to their bigs than sams of clifford manning in the one o'clock job and that there the local air dance studio at the dance factory will have the girls performing nineteen twenties type dances and we also have barring the answers coming and to perform there because it's on the first friday our walk on march first dinoto our district is heavily involved in supporting the big read activities and anita law guest he was the co chair of that initiative has been talking all over tehran now we really appreciate her her helpers as serving as honorary chair of this year's degree

that's because any type of the clever has done several big reads within the last couple years what is that they think the hope to accomplish as a library as a community institution through a big tree of life won the national endowment for the arts started the degree because of the decline in literary reading not only among adults that really among young people and the sound by funding an initiative they were encouraging communities to you hold an event that would encourage everyone to read one book have supporting programs that go along with it so even you waiting gauging non reader into a literary activity and get people to talk about it and so i think that we have succeeded in that this is our fifth degree we do on every other year we were one of the app and this'll have pilot programs when they started back in two

thousand six and i'm proud to say that with her leadership for marie tyco our public services director that we are a community that it definitely enjoys reading and talking about literature and using their public library and that she is asked to come and speak all over the nation and in fact she is actually address congress beef four on the value of reading and the difference a program like degreed makes right now we're really enjoying the baz that is out there on the big read we actually had to launch in january because we had the public coming to us and asking us about it and it's because of our partnerships with people like kansas public radio more and more people are looking forward to the big read what's the next book they're already asking what the next book is how do you pick the next book you know have you ever thought about this or why did you pick this book so there it this is accomplishing everything that the nea is

hoping it's going to it's stimulating an interest and the great gatsby is a wonderful perk because it's short it's a hundred and eighty pages and people who say they don't have time to read they can say well maybe i could handle that and it's been out there long enough of going i think i may have read that in high school cared what i really like is hearing from people who say i read it in high school but i just re read it and i really enjoyed it i read it in high school just re read it and really enjoyed it it's the great gatsby by f scott fitzgerald all kinds of great gatsby events are taking place this month at the topeka shawnee county public library as they celebrate their degree with american classic find out more at the library's website daddy daddy daddy died t s e t l dot org again that's a t s e e p l and kinect entire kbr for science is a production of

kansas public radio at the university of kansas