I knew an old real estate boss in Western North Carolina who once offered me a piece of advice about growing a business. “It ain’t hard to make water come out of a pipe,” he said. “The hard part is sizing the pipe to get pressure.” I’ve had other people offer me unsolicited advice about business too, some of it very practical, normally delivered by successful men intent on making it sound easy and a little bit mysterious.
Like my Uncle David, who used to say, “You know the secret to making money, don’t you? You get out in front of it and let it run you over. Some of it will stick.” The line about the pipe has stuck alright, because it addresses the problem of scale, which is applicable in many fields, from philosophy to news to selling hot dogs. You can make a mountain out of a molehill, but it won’t change the view.
A map without a scale is like a mandala, a representation of the cosmos, a line to infinity. Think of Lewis and Clark pressing west with their parchments and surveying gear, not knowing if the next mountain range identified in bad French was 200 miles away or 2,000; 3,000 or 30,000 feet high. They learned to live with that uneasiness until it turned into a sense of wonder, and then they couldn’t ever learn to live without it, or so the legend goes. A map without a scale can help you make meaning out of chaos, but it can’t help you get from point A to point B.
This week’s feature on Charlottesville Area Transit’s new bus routes is about just that. We are a tweener city with big expectations for our services and grand designs for our ambition, but in the eyes of the state and federal government (or national advertisers, for that matter) we are a flea. The problem of scale affects everything we do, from how we make the buses run on time, to how we pay a living wage, to what we do with our recycling. Sure, the explosion of the Web-based economy has placed our pin prominently on a bigger map, but our physical realities haven’t changed. So what size pipe do you want?
One of my friends in town told me a while ago that he always liked what I wrote, but he wondered why I was not feared as an editor. I told him I was not sure, but that maybe it was because I was more interested in building the framework for conversations than expressing my own priorities. But there is more to it than that.
A few months back, I was accused of promoting hate speech because of something that ran in The Rant section of C-VILLE Weekly. A group of protesters came to the office with television cameras. I went out to meet them and to apologize and they shouted me down. One of them called me a Nazi, and others called our paper racist. It was an ironic turn for me, since I have worked as a community organizer and participated in that kind of protest. I didn’t say much at the time, but I had mixed emotions about what had happened. On the one hand I was contrite that an editing oversight the week after the Trayvon Martin verdict broke had led to hurt feelings in the black community and then to an uproar of righteous, liberal indignation mostly generated by white people.
On the other hand, I felt that our paper in my time running it had worked hard to change the discourse around race issues in Charlottesville, and I was miffed that I had gotten caught up in one of those newly-minted Facebook hurricanes that seems to drive the news weather so often nowadays. Still, I was not proud of our paper’s part in what happened, so I ate crow.
Last week, another media storm blew in the windows. This time I was accused of limiting free speech after I shut down the online comment section on a story about an alleged assault on the Downtown Mall. Our story, which Courteney Stuart reported, went viral after it got picked up on The Drudge Report. What I had read as an unresolved crime story that led into a number of complex local issues (safety on the Downtown Mall, local law enforcement, race tension, social media as a reporting tool) was reduced to an abstract by over 400,000 readers in a matter of minutes. Nationally, people took the assault as an example of black on white violence and used it to reflect on a host of conservative issues, like open carry and, to come full circle, the Obama administration’s handling of the Trayvon Martin verdict.
I shut the comments down because many of them were hateful, not in any abstract way, but very literally. You cannot say the n-word in our paper. Or call a race of people animals. Or threaten violence. The sheer volume of those kind of responses would have made deleting them a job distraction, so I closed the strand. I didn’t think twice about it.
After I made that decision, the hate-mongers turned on me. They called me names. Filled my inbox. Sent letters. A few of them even left threatening phone calls. One of them was actually scary. The ones who didn’t call me a traitor to my race said I was an enemy of free speech or a lily-livered liberal hack. I even got called a Nazi again, this time on Twitter.
All of this happened before the New Year on a Monday, and when I got in on Thursday there were people who were still wondering if I was an enemy of free speech. I am not. I am an editor of a newspaper, and typically newspapers protect the right to free speech. But that does not mean we put everything in our newspapers. If you want to call a race of people cruel names, write it on a posterboard and walk down the Mall. Don’t send it to our newspaper or put it on our website. If you want to talk seriously about race in Charlottesville, tell it like it is, but be polite about it and make an argument your neighbors can respond to.
A little context for this effusion of words. My wife and l spent a little bit more than a year living on the backwaters of the Wisconsin River in the Northwoods. I was the general assignment reporter at the Rhinelander Daily News. We had two neighbors on the river. On one side, the Wakeleys kept an out-of-town cabin. The elder Wakeley ran for Oneida County Sheriff every year and never got any votes. Before the election in 2008 he and his sons built an Obama bunker. In case the world went to hell because our country had elected a black president, they would have some canned goods and a hole to shoot out of. After we moved in, they prominently displayed a bumper sticker that read “Ignore the liberal, lying media.”
On the other side of us were the Bandows. Bill Bandow ran a surveying company that his grandfather had started before the turn of the century. Bill was a Libertarian sort of fellow of Acadian descent who worked for a Democratic county government. He didn’t want to be told what he could and couldn’t do with his dock on the river but he also didn’t want to see it ruined by vacationland seasonal residents with overcharged bass boats. In northern Wisconsin, no one talked about race; taxes, specifically for schools, was the topic that got people calling each other names. So there we were the three of us lined up in a row on a bend in the river that opened up first in the spring, inviting itinerant loons and cranes, otters and muskrats, pintails and wood ducks. We shared a view.
I have sometimes mentioned that I am a fifth generation journalist on my father’s side. I am not bragging. In fact, I would bet I am likely the fourth best newsman in that line. It is more something I relate as a way to explain the way I do my job, which is to say with a sense of the long view, so that when I get called names in the furious conversation that is media in today’s opinionated online world, it mostly rolls off of my back. In the past six months, I have been called a racist, first by liberal activists for allegedly publishing “hate speech” and last week by white supremacists for editing their hate speech out of our online comments stream.
When I was leaving the paper in Wisconsin, having reported on 20-30 stories a week for a year, I wrote an editorial, in more or less the same style I write this column, in which I told people what I thought of the issues I’d covered in the community. It generated an energetic comment stream. Some people called me, as they still do, a self-absorbed pseudo-intellectual spouting drivel. One commenter wrote to say that I would win a Pulitzer Prize when I learned to say exactly what I think.
Well, here’s what I think about being the editor of a newspaper and being called a racist by liberals and conservatives a few months apart and how that all relates to why I’m not feared as an editor. It is very difficult to be seen these days, and when you are it is usually because you moved against the grain, so that like a fish flickering in the shallows, you draw the attention of a cold eye looking for prey. I recently attended a dinner and the subject of race relations in Charlottesville came up. Some people thought the problem really didn’t exist, or if it did, that it was an unfortunate holdover from a past that we had already moved past. Other people, including myself, think the city stands at a moral crossroads.
The “race problem” in Charlottesville will solve itself in a few short years. The city’s black population is shrinking steadily, because there are not enough opportunities, culturally and professionally, for upwardly mobile African-Americans who grow up here and because those who remain poor are being priced out by the housing market and a lack of jobs. Increasingly, the city’s historic black neighborhoods will melt away, its population base concentrated around the public housing stock. When and if that stock deteriorates, federal funding evaporates, or the city implements a voucher system, its black population will drop dramatically before it levels off, probably somewhere around 10 percent.
The educated, mobile, professional class that is Charlottesville’s future doesn’t have a race problem; it is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and not tied to local history. So the question, with regard to race in Charlottesville, is whether the city has a moral obligation to help preserve its black population or whether it should let economics and demographics create a new equilibrium in which class is the primary delineation of social conflict. And that’s a question whose answers are liable to get you called a racist by people on both sides of the issue, which may be why it doesn’t come up much.
Matt Spence, CEO and founder of Natural Retreats, pictured on Bundoran Farm, the development his company purchased last May. Photo: Jackson Smith.
‘‘At the end of the day, self-doubt is a horrible thing,” Matt Spence, founder and CEO of Natural Retreats, told me during an interview at his Downtown Mall office just before the New Year.
Spence, a 44-year-old native of Richmond, England, is a former professional rugby player and Coca Cola executive. He speaks with the hint of a broad Yorkshire accent that has been muted by years working in London and Manchester in international business. He quotes Winston Churchill and says he doesn’t like movies where the bad guys win.
The company Spence founded, which operates, owns, and develops vacation and residential properties close to national parks in England, Ireland, Scotland, and the U.S., bought Bundoran Farm, a 2,300-acre property near the historic crossroads of Old Lynchburg Road and Plank Road that has been under cultivation since the days of early settlement, from Wells Fargo Bank in May of last year for an undisclosed amount. The farm’s history as a preservation development has been, to this point, a failure, after two successive ownership groups foundered under the pressure of a tragic accident and the real estate collapse, respectively.
Spence is attempting to resuscitate a housing development that since 2005 has sought to redefine upscale country living for retirees and the horsey set by creating a legally-binding, environmentally-focused community charter centered on land preservation and farming. He has also moved his company’s headquarters to Charlottesville in the belief that he can revolutionize the destination real estate industry by building a portfolio of properties aimed at both residential and vacation markets in areas of outstanding natural beauty from here.
“I’ve bet on Charlottesville. I think this town is going to be one of the leading lights in America in the next 20 years. I’ve met a lot of people in my generation, early 30s to early 50s, who are smart, nice, not judgmental, and very American, which is great,” Spence said. “This town has so many resources, but it’s got to take advantage of its opportunity to become a real center of influence on the East Coast.”
A view of southern Albemarle County from the sky. Photo: Jack Looney.
Spence is bullish in a way that hardly seems proper these days. Biscuit Run, a more conventional development on a similarly beautiful piece of land closer to Charlottesville, fell apart spectacularly, dragging its A-list investors into the mire with it. Picking up the pieces involved swapping the unsold land for preservation tax credits, a highly public mess tied to taxpayer money. The real estate market is recovering, sure, but the notion of value-added developments with huge commitments to natural preservation seems like a holdover from the heady days when money fell out of the sky.
From the outside, the endeavor to turn an historic North Garden agricultural homestead into a new kind of housing development has looked snakebit from the start. The Scott family sold the property in 2006 for $31 million to Qroe Farm Preservation Development, a deal Albemarle County officials approved for rezoning because of its specific vision as a low density community that would preserve the agricultural characteristics of land on which the Scott family had raised prized polled Hereford cattle since the 1940s.
The original developers, Robert Baldwin and David Brown, died in a plane crash later that year when their prop plane missed the property’s runway in the fog. Baldwin was most responsible for creating the project’s vision, which was essentially to sell 20-acre lots with two-acre pre-sited home envelopes, preserving the pristine agricultural property tucked in the rolling hills. Of the 2,300 acres that make up Bundoran Farm, 90 percent are written into perpetual agricultural easements and must be actively farmed. Currently, 1,000 of the acres are grazed as hay pasture, 26,000 apple trees occupy roughly 200 acres, wine vineyards sit on roughly 10 acres, and there’s another 1,000 acres of managed forest.
Prior to the acquisition from the Scott family, Celebration Associates, a development firm backed by equity partners Crosland LLC and The Springs Company, entered into a 50/50 venture with Qroe to acquire and launch the Bundoran Farm development. But as the real estate market crashed, so did Crosland, the equity partner, which eventually led to Wells Fargo taking title to both Bundoran Farm and The Homestead Preserve, a vacation community near The Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia.
Wells Fargo bid $7.5 million at the foreclosure auction and took over the property in 2011, keeping Celebration on as the development manager to continue selling lots, but the idea that the 100-home development would come to fruition looked bleak. Then Spence arrived last spring to announce that one of his companies, Natural Assets, had purchased the property along with The Homestead Preserve, and that another of his companies, Natural Retreats, had purchased Celebration Associates, whose founder Charles Adams had been managing both properties for the bank since the foreclosure.
In spite of the project’s recent history, Spence said the farm was a no-brainer investment for him. From October of 2010 through the two years of bank ownership, the development sold 26 home sites and its land prices have never dropped. Each of the 100 lots is platted with the county and the structure of the land preservation is rock solid on paper.
“I am not in any way concerned that Bundoran is not going to sell out. It’s going to sell out and do incredibly well. I’d be having a different conversation with you last year. But you can’t stop a market that’s moving forward like it’s starting to,” Spence said. “Best products will always attract when people are feeling good. We bought it because we believed in it. We actually bought it out of frustration and we scrapped hard with Wells Fargo to do it.”
Spence has purchased a lot on Bundoran and plans to build a home for his wife and two children there, just a stone’s throw from the runway that Fred Scott still uses occasionally to land his vintage biplane. The bravado Spence projects on his purchase of Bundoran is not accidental. He has big plans for his company and for Charlottesville. Selling 60 home lots in southern Albemarle County is the least of his concerns.
Spence’s portfolio of companies has its roots in his personal effort to save his family’s sheep farm, located in the midst of Yorkshire Dales National Park in northern England. But its rapid growth came during the international recession, as Spence snapped up operating agreements from failing high-end resort and residential developments, gradually buying them up when it made sense. He’s already replicated that model on a small scale with his U.S. venture, winning operating rights with a license to buy on sites like the South Fork Lodge on the Snake River in Wyoming and The Greystone Lodge on Lake Toxaway in the high mountains south of Asheville. From his perspective, U.S. properties are cheap right now, and the reason Bundoran languished in bank ownership for two years is that American real estate investors are gun shy. In fact, he said, they’ve lost their mojo.
“You can sometimes be scared of your own shadow,” Spence said. “Let’s just look at it. You got 2,300 acres. 1,100 acres is pasture when a lot of land in Virginia is 2,000 acres of trees. It’s undulating so you can see across it. It’s close to Charlottesville. It already has approvals. It has five or six miles of roads and fiber optics already built. I’m either dumb or I’m super smart and I don’t know which one it is, but we’re going to go for it because I can’t for the life of me think why no one is snapping this up.”
I’ve been asked many times why I got a divinity degree, and there isn’t a simple answer. When I think about the enduring weight of student loans and the concrete impact it’s had on my professional life (virtually none), I begin to wonder myself. But that kind of hindsight sells short my own path, ignores who I was when I decided to go back to school. And it also misrepresents the transformation I underwent as a young school teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Ultimately, I went back to school to study theology and its practical applications because I had rational questions about big things, like my soul, that needed sorting out. And those rational questions arose from experiences, moments of enlightenment, that were impossible to explain with the language and understanding that was available to me at the time.
My generation, Generation X, has been deeply engaged in pulling back the curtains, peering into the dark corners, gazing into the mirror, and wandering the globe in search of answers we can only find by looking into our own hearts. We’ve reached an age when we are starting families, settling down, and realizing that there are some things you can’t ever pin down. It’s an interesting time for us: We dropped out and tuned out and now, like prodigal children, we’re trying to fit in and sink roots without letting go of what we discovered. In the process, we are learning how to be happy.
This week’s cover story looks at how members of three very different generations have coped with one of the nagging 40-year questions that has shaped counterculture, (and pushed toward the mainstream) since the last Age of Aquarius: Are our souls connected to each other through some higher consciousness? It’s a puzzle tailor-made for an encounter with the moral and religious fragmentation initiated by globalization, and one that was also confronted by Carl Jung and many others early in the last century.
Welcome to the new New Age, where young people like Nick Lasky aren’t asking whether there’s something bigger out there so much as trying to figure out how to plug it in.
Every journalist gets into the business because he likes answering questions of one kind or another. Who’s moving the money behind the scenes? What color was the getaway car? When was the last time the budget was short? Where, exactly, does the water end up? Good reporters answer a lot of questions, but the essence of the job is to accumulate facts so other people can pin them down. Your professional credibility involves a dispassionate presentation of events. You are an observer, not a detective. So while from the outside the job looks like interviewing people and telling their stories, from the inside, it feels more like baking the bricks that build the truth or driving a herd of facts from the pen to the page.
When I was a teenager, a journalist colleague of my mother’s and a close family friend sent me a gift, a novel with the inscription “Nonfiction tells you what happened; fiction tells the truth.” A decade later, the same friend told me I’d never regret becoming a small town reporter, citing his own experience as a 19-year-old cub at the Bulawayo Chronicle, and on that recommendation I headed for the Northwoods for my first full-time newspaper gig.
This year, for my son’s first Christmas, he sent a note from his home in Wales, reminding me to read Dylan Thomas to my boy, citing in particular the passage in A Child’s Christmas in Wales that concerns gifts, aunts, and wasps: “…and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles’ pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”
At our little weekly newspaper, we try very hard to get the facts right, and we also try to tell a wide range of stories that reflect a more holistic picture of our community than the public record normally provides. This week’s feature is the sum of a year’s work, our version of everything about the wasp, except why.
Weather permitting, he can often be found working in his open-air office outside his home in White Hall, where he’s lived for 23 years. Photo courtesy Pete Myers.
In 1965 Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, destroying the unimpeachable authority of The Big Three and American manufacturing by tugging on a loose strand, the accident statistics of the Chevrolet Corvair. Nader became the voice of the American middle class and rode a wave of consumer advocacy to national prominence. Maybe for the first time, the Mad Men had to answer to angry men and women armed with scientific data.
In 1965, Ford Motor Company released the first Mustang, a product heavily influenced by a young and aggressive executive named Lee Iacocca, who famously said, “People want economy and they’ll pay almost any price to get it.” The Mustang’s success as a profit engine was the result of big styling, a low sticker price, and lots of optional accessories. It was a Ford Falcon dressed up as a fighter plane and sold with enough toppings that Serge Gainsbourg could sing about it. Nader and Iacocca were messengers, one with a whistle and the other a trumpet, announcing a new world order: There was nothing to fear but fear itself, and then there was fluoride in the water, and then, suddenly, it was all plastics.
I care about the environment and about the potential effects of climate change, but I also wonder what the hell to do about it. We’ve streamlined curbside recycling so it’s just like taking out the trash. As American consumption rises exponentially, so does mine. China, Brazil, and India are cutting down forests, leveling mountains, contaminating rivers and saying, ‘We learned it from you, Dad.’ Just because I wear silk-screened bamboo T-shirts, break down my cardboard, throw my coffee grinds in a bucket, and appreciate the value of free-range chickens doesn’t make me feel like part of the solution. Neither does the fact that my old sweatpants and tennis shoes make it onto a container ship bound for Mombasa.
That’s where this week’s feature comes in. Pete Myers is building an army and he wants you to sign up in the name of science. You’re a consumer and you want economy… What price will you pay for the truth?
Widely interpreted as a metaphor for J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal experience during World War I and afterwards, The Hobbit was originally published in 1937 with the alternative title There and Back Again. A comfortable bourgeois man is vacuumed out of his house into a global struggle between good and evil, then returns to the shire changed for good.
About a million Englishmen died in the Great War, and only a few years later another generation went to war and came home again, changed. The story of ordinary men capable of extraordinary courage keeping a lid on their experiences as they sipped their tea became a defining cultural narrative.
The stories we tell ourselves are important. I once took a 20th century American literature class in which the professor, an English literary critic, said all of our country’s writing can be understood in relationship to its East-West axis, which operates both geographically and temporally. He saw it in The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and East of Eden.
Our paradise is in the future, in the West, where progress lies, but we are stuck mourning our past, which remains in the East. In the ’50s and ’60s Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, and The Beach Boys helped us construct a myth about hitting the road bound for the Pacific Coast, and, to a large degree, people followed it, despite Bob Dylan’s warnings. California may not be full, exactly, but as a dreamland it’s at capacity. A million people found their way to San Jose; three times that many have settled in the O.C.
This week’s feature tells the stories of men and women who grew up in Charlottesville and left in search of greener pastures, only to return home again to start businesses and families. It touches on the larger story of the Baby Boomer generation and their children, Gen X and Y-ers who are increasingly moving home again. Meet the Boomerangers. I suspect we’ll keep telling ourselves versions of this story until we can answer a deceptively simple question: How do you make progress without moving up and out?
Sebastian Arcelus, who played Jake Brigance in Rupert Holmes’ 2013 adaptation of A Time to Kill on Broadway, greets John Grisham during the play’s opening night curtain call. The production closed November 17, just four weeks after it opened, and met with mixed reviews. Photo: Patrick McMullan.
John Grisham is serious about time. He doesn’t like long books, or long interviews, or long meetings. His life is tightly scheduled. He still wakes up early in the morning to write for three or four hours, the maximum he says he can perform the task efficiently. Then, normally, he heads to his office off the Downtown Mall, where he spends a couple of hours working on the business side of his business. I recently got an hour with him there.
The office feels like something out of The Devil’s Advocate, a perfectly decorated empty boardroom with a giant conference table. It’s a monument to success or it’s the law office he would have run had things gone that way. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. On his daily docket, our appointment would be followed by a conference call and then a fundraiser lunch for Terry McAuliffe. Bill Clinton would be there. Grisham is a major Democratic donor.
“You get tired of all the phone calls. Everybody asking for money,” he said. “There are no limits in Virginia so they ask for big checks. There should be limits.”
After McAuliffe was elected governor, Grisham was named to his inauguration committee. Such is his influence. Like a lot of people in the past month, I wanted to talk to the South’s bestselling author about how far he had come in the 20 years since he went from being a struggling courthouse lawyer in a small Mississippi town to one of the greatest literary businessmen in history.
“You’re one of the top sellers of all time aren’t you,” I asked, right at the beginning of our conversation. In part, I was ignorant of the answer and in part I was confused by how the industry measures that kind of thing.
“Behind who? Agatha Christie and who?” Grisham said, bemused.
“I don’t know. J.K. Rowling?” I said. “I don’t know what the stats are.”
Grisham speaks with a folksy Mississippi accent that makes him sound less intense than he is. His eyes are cool, and wander, then drill into you. I’ve had the same feeling sitting across from self-made millionaires before, but never with an author.
“The stats will drive you crazy,” he said. “Because I’ve been asked several times if I’m in the top five best selling authors in the world, and I always say, ‘I have no idea.’ You can look at the numbers any way you want to look at them. I think Agatha Christie is over 2 billion books and that’s one way of looking at it and she’s probably tops. If you look at when they publish a book who actually sells the most of each book it’s gotta be Harry Potter… or Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code sold 12 million hardback copies. Anyway, that wasn’t your question…”
If a writer who has sold over 300 million books can have a bugaboo, Grisham’s may have been resurrected by his recent literary return to Clanton, Mississippi, the site of his first book, A Time to Kill, which tells the story of Carl Lee Hailey, a black father who kills two white men for brutally raping his 10-year-old daughter.
“I’ve had people…well-meaning people… say why don’t you go back and write like you did with A Time to Kill. And I always say to myself—I don’t engage people like that or argue with them—I didn’t change anything. The Firm was a deliberate effort to be more commercial and more popular because A Time to Kill did not sell,” he told me.
Grisham’s latest book, Sycamore Row, hit stores in late October, climbing very quickly to the top of the bestseller list and garnering almost universally positive reviews. A bit of a media frenzy followed the release, in part because the book is the sequel to A Time to Kill, which recently enjoyed a very short run on Broadway as a play before closing November 17. Taken together, the new book and the play offered the chance for people to look at how far John Grisham has come.
The New York Times’ Charlie Rubin called Sycamore Row one of Grisham’s finest, “a grand, refreshing book,” and their book reviewer, Janet Maslin, also sounded her indirect approval: “Mr. Grisham does not seem to have revisited his most popular character for the usual writerly reason: desperation.” Nearly every reviewer has rated the book a worthy sequel to A Time to Kill and some have gone as far as to say it’s his best book.
There’s a certain amount of personal history, now industry lore, in what Grisham says. He finished A Time to Kill in 1987, got a $15,000 advance, and it was published by a small press in 1988 with a 5,000-book run. It was not until The Firm was picked up by Doubleday and Paramount Pictures in 1991 that his meteoric rise began. A Time to Kill was re-published after The Firm and The Pelican Brief had become blockbusters.
Grisham has a lot of fans, and a certain section of them remains devoted to A Time to Kill. I asked him why.
The writing business
“It’s more detailed, it’s richer, it has more layers to it,” Grisham said.
A Time to Kill took him three years to write. Three years of waking up at 5am and having the first word on the page by 5:30am, writing for three hours until the work day started and then enduring court, nearly asleep on his feet. His first draft was 900 pages, a third of which was eventually cut. There were many times when he wanted to give up and he’s never forgotten losing all that work.
“Well a third of it is a year. And I said, ‘I’m never doing that again. I’m not gonna write stuff that gets cut out,’” he said.
But there’s a certain amount of exasperation in his voice when he’s asked to measure the importance of A Time to Kill against his other works.
“I think people also tend to like your early stuff,” he said. “In popular culture if you’re an actor, or if you’re a musician, or a writer or whatever, we tend to like the early stuff. We tend to like the stuff we cut our teeth on.”
Does part of him miss the old life? Is that what Sycamore Row was about?
“Once I started, it brought back so many memories of that life. That life wasn’t bad. We were happy. We were real happy. It’s still pretty vivid, the 10 years I spent practicing law in that small town. And I think over the years it’s been reinforced. It wasn’t hard getting back into Jake. I’ll do it again,” he said.
Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey played Carl Lee Hailey and Jake Brigance in the 1996 film version of A Time to Kill directed by Joel Schumacher. The movie, a huge box office success, boasted a star-studded cast that included Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey, Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, Ashley Judd, Oliver Platt, and Charles S. Dutton. Photo: Courtesy of Warner Brothers.
Before Sycamore Row, A Time to Kill was the only Grisham book I’d ever read. I liked it very much. It felt like a cross between an ’80s movie, To Kill A Mockingbird, and the town in north Alabama where my father grew up. It also crackles with the meta-fiction of Grisham himself, an ambitious country lawyer trying to pull his young family out of financial struggle while taking on the legacy of racism in the South.
A perilous predicament: As we worry that our written language is being degraded by fractured modes of digital communication, there has never been a time when more people thought of themselves as writers. Journalism schools and MFA programs are full to the gills; self-publishing tools have made every retired person with a memory an autobiographer; and while kids these days can’t diagram a sentence, they rely on strings of letters lined up end to end to communicate their innermost feelings in real time.
Has the Internet imperiled the English language, doomed journalism to automation, killed the intimacy of personal communication, and cheapened the notion of the professional storyteller? Or are we in the midst of the type of media revolution (printing press, telephone, television) that comes with cultural casualties but results in a great leap forward?
At the end of my interview with John Grisham for this week’s cover story, we briefly discussed the future of the publishing industry, something he says he can talk about for hours. Grisham’s success predated the Internet and his laser focus on navigating the book business—understanding its ins and outs, personalities, and economics—has left him with an incredible vantage point from which to witness its molting process.
Barnes & Noble was the baby-snatching Grendel of the literary world when it emerged on the scene, destroying margins and dooming the mom and pop bookstores. Now Amazon’s digital publishing model is squeezing the lifeblood out of the big box books and mortar economy like a giant anaconda. The age of the paperback writer is over. Done and dusted. Only five major publishing houses remain. There are fewer marquee writers than ever. And yet, everyone dreams of becoming the next Rowling, Brown, or Grisham.
Do you believe in the past or the future? Do humans perfect culture or drift like flotsam along a cycle of growth and decay? Not questions for your local newspaper man to answer, surely. I’ll say a prayer to Charles Dickens, patron saint of ex-reporters, serial story-tellers, and blockbusting bestsellers, and believe there are still big stories swimming in the deep blue seas of our collective imagination.
Gabe Silverman died over the weekend. If you never met him, it’s your loss, but if you hung around the Downtown Mall much, you probably did. He was a real estate developer, I guess you could say, but he never dressed like one. Sometimes he looked like a super, puttering around in his green pickup truck with a slew of keys, smoking a cigarette out the window. Other times he looked like a cross between Keith Richards and Paul Hogan, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, a permanent wry smile etched into the lines around his eyes. I was introduced to him through a friend and only spent time with him on four or five occasions.
Here’s what I know about Gabe: He was a charmer who valued people. He hated whiners but loved to complain. He trusted young people to make decisions, because he remembered being a young person who made decisions. He cajoled, bullied, prophesied, and cut deals to realize his vision for the world, which could be both far-reaching and specific. He always thought everything could be better than it was, and he focused much of that energy on West Main Street, where he spent years hassling UVA, the city, and Coran Capshaw to do more to connect Downtown to Grounds.
Gabe saw a Charlottesville that needed to be more diverse, more demanding, more energetic, more fun, and more like the California he grew up in, where everything was both a real estate hustle and an opportunity to create a new scene. He was, at heart and by training, an architect. This week’s cover story on a dance contest that aims to promote hip-hop culture on the Downtown Mall is, I think, a fitting one to pair with our version of Gabe’s obituary.
Ty Cooper, an African-American agent and promoter, grew up in Harlem and came to Charlottesville after college at Norfolk State. In the span of a few years Ty became a board member at The Paramount Theater, which was a segregated institution in a segregated Downtown in the not-so-distant past. Ty is a hustler, an agitator, and a relentless worker who has a way of connecting his personal interests, his vision for the community, and his connections with people to make things happen. Don’t just stand there, do something.
