Author: doug-nordfors

UVA students, faculty and staff, excluding the health system, are beginning the academic year with new ID cards, and a conundrum.

Brad Sayler is concerned that UVA is now taking driver’s license info for the new IDs—another bit of personal data that could be compromised.

The cards, according to Shirley Payne, director for security coordination and policy, are part of an overall initiative by the University to discontinue the usage of social security numbers. In place of these are University ID numbers, created after the bar codes on the backs of driver’s licenses are scanned (unless a passport or military ID is presented as a form of identification). This process, says Payne, "adds assurance that we are giving a card to the right person."

The conundrum is this: While the elimination of social security numbers takes care of one personal-identity security concern, the inclusion of driver’s license numbers into the University database introduces another. And UVA has had some major breaches in its recent past. It came to light in April that hackers accessed personal info, including social security numbers, of 5,735 current and former UVA faculty members. Last October, UVA’s Student Financial Services inadvertently sent 632 e-mails containing students’ personal info and social security numbers to the wrong students.

Not surprisingly, Payne says the driver’s license numbers will be kept confidential. But that doesn’t appease Brad Sayler, who’s worked for 15 years doing computer support for the civil engineering department. The University has "taken two steps forward and one step back," in Sayler’s opinion. "The University’s track record clearly indicates that they don’t have the ability to stop all hack attempts," he says.

But there’s more to Sayler’s beef than concerns about security. "They’re not telling that they’re adding [driver’s license numbers] to the database," he says. "That’s what’s so disconcerting about the whole thing." He doesn’t understand why the University needs to store the numbers. "Why can’t they just look at the driver’s license?" Sayler wonders.

And there’s something else the University isn’t publicizing: the fact that upon an individual’s request, the scanned information will be removed from the database. After hearing second-hand from an ITC representative that this was possible, Sayler himself returned to Sponsors Hall, where the ID cards are distributed, and had his information removed. Still, he says, "there’s no way of verifying that it actually was taken off."

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The Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute, a public interest law firm that assists conservative Christian causes, is the subject of a new book, Suing for America’s Soul. Given the "red and blue" nature of America’s political consciousness, many potential readers will wonder if the book is biased in any way. "For a historian like me I think that objectivity is, at best, a goal to be sought but never reached. I always try to be fair in my scholarship," says author R. Jonathan Moore.

John Whitehead, founder of the locally based Rutherford Institute, gives a new book about the public interest law firm an "A" (with a few asterisks)

Quite a few things surprised Moore as he researched the book. The media often lumps Rutherford founder John Whitehead together with Christian Reconstructionism and other religious conservatives who want America to be a Christian theocracy. "However," Moore says, "his goals are much less ambitious, much more realistic and—from the perspective of outsiders—much less threatening. He wants Christians to have a fair shake in the marketplace of ideas."

Moore also found that Whitehead’s critique of Western culture, however debatable his opinions might seem, is broader than is often assumed: "When The Rutherford Institute takes up the cause of, say, a school teacher who has been told she can’t wear a crucifix necklace, this reflects Whitehead’s alarm about the encroachment of secularism upon personal freedoms." Moore says the Institute’s lawyers are disposed to argue that their client deserves to win his case because Christians are "just another special interest group—such as racial minorities, or women—that deserve equal rights in the public sphere."

So what does Whitehead himself think of the book? Though he doesn’t agree with all of Moore’s conclusions, he welcomes how the diligent scholarship illuminates the Institute’s uncommon impact on evangelical Protestantism. "It’s important," he says, "because it’s the first book that documents how it all began. It’s accurate in how it details the growth." He does wish that Moore had interviewed him, so that, he says, a few aspects of the book would have been more fine-tuned, such as how the Institute, founded in 1982, had a direct influence on some of the mirror groups that have formed around the country. "They’re more than clones," he says. Whitehead also strongly declares that Moore mischaracterizes the Paula Jones lawsuit against Bill Clinton, which first brought the Institute into the public eye, as an act of desperation.

But a few criticisms don’t stop Whitehead from recommending the book. "If I were a teacher," he says, "I would give it an ‘A.’"

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

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Let’s begin at the end. The final piece in the latest Virginia Quarterly Review is John T. Casteen IV’s incisive look at Poetry magazine’s long, strange trip since Indianapolis heiress Ruth Lilly bestowed some $200 million to it in 2002 and the young Christian Wiman took over as editor. Casteen compares the general voice of Poetry’s current brand of criticism to the notoriously surly (add Casteen’s words, “arrogant, masturbatory, spiteful”) reviews of poet William Logan.

Vine, thanks, how are you: Al Schornberg drinks to the future of the Virginia wine industry at the opening of his new tasting room at Keswick Vineyards.

As it turns out, flip back a few pages from Casteen’s piece and you’ll find one of those said reviews—Logan’s painstaking (read: painful) deconstruction (read: demolition) of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day. Logan immediately gets off on the wrong foot by calling the novel “untidy.” As anyone who’s read Pynchon’s spasmodically evolving mock-narratives knows, that’s like chiding Little Orphan Annie for having red hair. Logan then goes on to go after the book’s verisimilitude (his word), when Pynchon’s writing always deliberately exists on the fringes of reality. Logan is too smart to not be aware of this fact, but once he locks onto a line of attack there’s no stopping him. He can’t seem to find even a tiny, cobwebbed corner of his peevish mind for the book’s cunning humor. At least he eventually gets around to praising Pynchon’s style (“passages of consummate beauty”). But that’s before he supplies a dizzying array of near-dismissals of Pynchon’s talent and legacy.

Consummate beauty is in short supply in this issue’s four short stories. While their clear narratives work as a necessary counterbalance to the brazen inventiveness of artists like Pynchon, the writing itself is as stagnant and colorless as Pynchon’s is fertile and revelatory. Even the celebrated Mario Vargas Llosa’s luminous details aren’t sung to the tune of a style that flows and enchants.

The poetry in this issue steps in to fill that void. Edward Hirsch’s claims for the greatness of Jirí Orten in his introduction to the late Czech poet’s work don’t quite pan out, but there are plenty of other choices, such as two examples of Marianne Boruch’s supple approach to personal narrative and Robin Ekiss’ clear yet suggestive “Mozart’s Mother’s Bones.”

Several more treasures await the reader: Burke Butler’s terse, tense memoir of her father, Adam Kirsch’s finely tuned essay on Yeats, Pound, Auden and the Modernist ideal, Michael Collier’s fascinating overview of the journals of Louise Bogan, and—if you begin at the beginning—a series of unconventional photos and articles on Iraq.

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The English poet Philip Larkin once remarked, “Form is nothing. Content is everything.” Sounds straightforward enough—except that Larkin was famous for writing poems that are both formally pleasing as well as chock full of substance. The cheeky bastard was just trying to be clever.

Most readers would stand by the notion that good writing involves a dynamic partnership between the content and the way it’s presented. Nevertheless, most readers would also concede that books do come along that demand attention despite their surface flaws.

Law and order in Charlottesville: William A. James, Sr. uses fiction to cut straight to the core of racial tension in his latest novel, In The Streets of Vinegar Hill.

Such a book is Charlottesville resident William A. James, Sr.’s novel In the Streets of Vinegar Hill. Through the eyes of Gabe Owens, a Fluvanna County teenager who moves to Charlottesville, it tells the story of the buildup to the demolition of the Vinegar Hill neighborhood in 1963, precipitated, according to James, by the murder of a UVA student, which was essentially blamed on all the blacks living on “Hill.” The demolition, planned by City Council, was less about the murder and more about a thinly disguised excuse to get rid of a “slum” that was so close to the Downtown area.

Who ever talks about this event anymore? No one but James, it seems, and casting the past as fiction is the best way to light a fire in our city’s consciousness.

James is the author of several nonfiction books and one other novel (a prequel of sorts, the introduction rather awkwardly informs us) to Streets, and there’s a forcefulness to his writing that can be compelling—he knows what he wants to say and cuts through all the fog and just says it. But discerning readers may see his approach as coming at the expense of technique. A lack of fine detail leads to sentimentality; scenes come and go quickly with little scene painting; the sentences at times seem hurried, built on clichés rather than painstakingly chosen images or ideas.

Still, James has put a lot of intelligent work into creating a vast panoramic of a bygone era in 150 fast-moving pages. More importantly, in terms of illuminating this city’s identity, the content he’s nurtured is not just something—it’s everything.