So what’s this we hear about the International Festival of Arts & Ideas burning books on New Haven Green?

“I don’t think I can afford the license to do that,” laughs A&I exec director Mary Lou Aleskie, who clarifies the hot lit news. Following the success of this year’s Big Read project, which exhorted Greater New Haven to delve into Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the program will return. The next tome? Ray Bradbury’s anti-censorship sci-fi cautionary tale Fahrenheit 451. In the book—and the 1966 Francois Truffaut film, which you can be sure will be screened as part of the ongoing A&I festivities—reading is banned as a subversive act and all printed texts are relegated to bonfires.

Now that’s a community arts gathering!

Aleskie estimates that 14,000 people were touched in some way by the Mockingbird project: attending book clubs, readings and talks; picking up the special reader’s guide to the classic novel, or just taking the book out of the library and reading it. Of the 74 registered events concerning the book, only a handful were officially organized by Arts & Ideas. The others sprang up organically as excitement for the project grew. Some 127 organizations across the country are chosen by the National Endowment of the Arts to promote reading by having each community focus on a specific books selected from an NEA-approved list. Thanks to A&I’s promotional prowess, New Haven’s immediately became one of the biggest Big Reads going.

Aleskie says she chose Fahrenheit 451 to big-read this year partly because it was one of only a few on the NEA list that had a significant amount of “Spanish language support material.” She also just loves the book and its message: “The idea that,” to mention just one of the subplots, “someone would understand the need for books so much that they would memorize the Bible.” Aleskie first encountered Fahrenheit as “a precocious 11- or 12-year-old. When you’re a kid, you think, ‘This is wild and wacky psychedelic stuff.’ There’s a lot that just resonates.”

She plans for the festival to explore themes of censorship, civil liberties (“especially in an election year”), “the aesthetic of the future—how technology has evolved,” and even “kitsch—let’s remember that the firehouse dog in the book is a robot!”

The Big Read kick-off will be May 1, a date that is not only already imbued with images of freedom and revolution, but which neatly abuts World Press Freedom Day.

This of course is just the opening volley in what will soon be a cacophonic clatter of announcements regarding Arts & Ideas 2008. The festival, which holds most of its events in late June, hopes to release info on its headliners earlier than usual, spacing out the hype so that great events won’t get lost in the hullabaloo. Some preliminary incendiary literary pyrotechnics certainly doesn’t hurt.

carnott@newhavenadvocate