Editors have always lived inundated by information, but now everyone is. It makes me admire the simplicity of the Lakota, who recorded hundreds of years of history on a single buffalo hide, one picture for each year to cue the memory of a person who had learned the stories over the course of a lifetime. Their world was a struggle with the ever-changing forces of nature, so individual observation and intuition were more valuable than a systematic knowledge of the past.
Our world is a battle against forces we never really understand. We try to live healthily, to be good people, and to acquire wealth. We hope, in the process, that we can make enough meaning to endure, which is why we write. We are desperate to be remembered. By name.
As our society continues to evaluate the realities of the digital age, we move imperceptibly into it, so that one day soon we will look back and not recall what life was like before e-mail. This week’s feature is about the future of libraries—the very near future for county residents who will have some say about what their next one will look like.
But it’s also about the past and what libraries have meant to us. In our country, the public library has been a symbol of democracy. A town built a library from hard-earned tax money as a temple to the American Dream. The library was a sign of status, but also a commitment on the part of a community to move beyond scratching a living out of the dirt.
Maybe it’s because I work at a company that sells information that I understand our digital molting process in economic terms. American capitalism moves ecologically from a state of perfect competition towards monopoly. Technological ruptures break monopolies apart, destroying business models that have perfected the development and delivery of products by inhibiting the ability to replace them. Perfect competition grows new companies through the cracks, fostering innovation, but failing to establish vertical markets with healthy profit margins. As companies consolidate through attrition and acquisition, the monopolies grow back.
The question of the day: If information is the product and it’s free, how long does a revolution take?
Dave Matthews, John D’earth, and Carter Beauford met at Miller’s and have collaborated on different projects over the years. D’earth got his start arranging orchestral music when Matthews tapped him for a series of his performances with the Richmond Symphony. Photo courtesy John D'earth.
I discovered my love of jazz music at a club called the New Apartment Lounge on Chicago’s South Side, where tenor saxophonist Von Freeman held down a Tuesday night residency with his band for decades. A hard-drinking man who had played alongside the likes of Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, and Dizzy Gillespie, Freeman was a proponent of what he called “hardcore jazz,” an art he practiced until his death last year at age 88.
If you saw Freeman play, you got the sense of what he meant by hardcore jazz. He had that no nonsense, no nice guy approach to his band—saner than Thelonious Monk and looser than Wynton Marsalis, but still running through so many backup musicians that only the most rigorous and attentive music school kids could gig with him. He also drank vodka straight out of a tall glass during pauses, when he’d survey the room, his eye resting on individuals. Freeman didn’t expend much energy touring or recording, preferring to treat his residencies on Monday and Tuesday nights more like an oracle than a professional, his message broadcast through the mouth of his instrument to whomever cared enough to come down to 75th Street.
Von Freeman at the New Apartment Lounge…
This week’s feature on John D’earth is long overdue. He’s never been on the cover of C-VILLE Weekly, even though he helped put our town on the jazz map playing his Miller’s residency on Thursday nights. D’earth would be the first to tell you that there are many other people in his world who deserve recognition, some of whom (Jospé, Spaar, Beauford, etc.) are mentioned, and others, like Scott DeVaux and Dr. Roland Wiggins, who aren’t. Jacie Dunkle, who’s made Fellini’s #9 a regular venue for the area’s working musicians, also deserves a tip of the hat.
D’earth is a pied-piper, a standard-bearer, a keeper of tradition, and a wise man in a jester’s cap. Mostly, though, like Freeman, he is a teacher of jazz as a discipline, an art, and a way of life.
D’earth has used his Thursday night residency at Miller’s to help build Charlottesville’s jazz scene, incorporating young players from the programs at VCU and UVA with professional musicians. He is poised to release his newest jazz record, On, in July, which will feature his quintet: Pete Spaar, bass; Devonne Harris, drums; Wells Hanley, piano; and J.C. Kuhl, tenor saxophone. Photo: Justin Ide
When I met him at his cramped studio behind C’ville Coffee, the first thing John D’earth did was offer to teach me the trumpet. He insisted, in fact. We shook hands, and he told me he’d always wanted to be a writer. I said I’d always wanted to play the trumpet. So he cleaned his mouthpiece in the bathroom sink and handed me a horn.
Buzz your lips, he said, go ahead. Good. Now find a note. There it is. He played a B flat on the piano and told me to find it. Find another, he said. Far out. You’re playing “Blue Train.”
Hundreds of D’earth’s students and bandmates have experienced similar moments over the past 30 years. His face is much younger than it looks from a distance. His eyes, which seem almost black, flit around and then zero in on you. He moves with the energy of a kid who can’t sit still in class. His enthusiasm crackles off of him. The eyes are drilling into you, and he’s telling you you can do something you never thought you could do.
Robert Jospé, jazz drummer and UVA music instructor, knows the feeling. He met D’earth in 1967 at the Cambridge School of Weston, a prep school just outside Boston, as a teenager and they began a collaboration that continues today.
“John, in his own amazing way, on that first day said, ‘Man, you sound great. Oh Jos, you got this thing man,’” Jospé remembered. “And it was like I said, ‘I do? Wow? Shit. I got this thing? That’s great.’ It was empowering and exciting.”
Next month, D’earth will release a new record, On, with his quintet, his first release since the Thompson D’earth Band’s 2006 album When the Serpent Flies. As usual, D’earth’s engaged in a range of other projects, for money, pleasure, and creative endeavor. The last time I spoke to him, he was driving to Lynchburg to practice with a few guys, then heading on to Roanoke for a gig, then back to Charlottesville for the night before driving up to D.C. to play a wedding show with the Winn Brothers the following day.
Dawn Thompson met John D’earth and Robert Jospé in New York and pulled them into her band Cosmology. The group, pictured here in 1978, came to Charlottesville for the summer in 1981, and the three of them have lived here ever since. Photo courtesy of Daphne Latham.
His wife, bandmate, and collaborator Dawn Thompson has been battling cancer since 2007. She hasn’t performed since she started a series of radical treatments that included gamma knife radiation for a brain tumor. Her illness has put a heartbreaking stop to their fiery collaboration, which started in 1971, but not to their love story, which continues to unfold.
During our first interview, D’earth checked his phone every time it beeped, to make sure she didn’t need him. He speaks in distracted, searching elliptical arcs, moving from subject to subject like a hummingbird. When he lands on a bit of wisdom, he rests on it.
“So what is rhythm?” he said. “Rhythm is the frequency and duration of events. Simply put, when stuff happens and how long it lasts. And on that definition there is no thing in our perceivable universe that isn’t rhythmic in nature. So it’s the foundation of everything.”
My preconceived notion of John D’earth as one of those white jazz guys started to unravel. His legendary status in town is confining rather than flattering. He’s not a big fish in a small pond. He’s a big person in the world. Furious, dissatisfied, burning hot.
There’s a 700-page tome called The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. D’earth lives on page 175-76, tucked between Blossom Dearie, a New York jazz singer from the golden era, and Santi Derriano, a bass player of Panamanian descent. His entry is longer than most, written in shorthand code linking his name to other players in a way I can’t appreciate from outside the scene.
Up high it says, “Taught self scales and ‘took things off records.’ At 10, he became inspired by Shorty Baker’s work on Ellington’s ‘Willow Weep For Me.’”
The entry contains a litany of players he’s worked with, a kind of jazz genealogy, and if, like me, your jazz knowledge stops somewhere between Brubeck and Mingus, most of the names don’t mean that much. Guitar players like John Abercrombie and Tim Reynolds speak to the profound talent that has passed through Charlottesville. There are big names too, like Tito Puente, Bruce Hornsby, John Scofield, and Buddy Rich, testament to the wide path D’earth’s blazed in the music world.
What the entry doesn’t show is his influence as a teacher, as the unofficial godfather of a music scene centered in his adopted hometown, or the fact that these days he focuses his energy on composing symphonies.
Jospé (left) and D’earth, who met at the Cambridge School of Weston and formed the band Fire and Ice, pictured here just before opening for the Allman Brothers at a be-in in Cambridge Common in 1968. Photo: Maurice Jospé.
A love supreme
John Edward Dearth II was born in 1950 in Framingham, Massachusetts, and grew up in nearby Holliston with a father who had survived the Pacific theater of World War II and was obsessed with jazz music.
“He was a maniac for music and for jazz music. He was my first teacher. He revealed to me mysteries of art and music that are priceless,” D’earth said.
D’earth (he would add the apostrophe later in life) described his father as a larger than life figure with a split personality who could drink a quart of bourbon every day for weeks but never appear loaded. He would drive the family crazy by blasting his records through the night, but would also sit with his 2-year-old son and teach him to play the drum brushes on a metal tray, a practice he still keeps up.
His father was drawn to the complexities of be-bop partly because he could hear that much of it was based on the same standards the Great American Songbook that the big bands had popularized in the pre-war era, but the rhythms and stylings expressed a rawness that didn’t resonate with his buddies.
“He hated white bands that were corny and tight,” D’earth said. “Those were prejudices too, and I learned some of those prejudices early on.”
The family lived in a house that had been built in the 1690s and used as an inn, The Littlefield Tavern, during the Colonial period. The nearest neighbors were a half-mile away and the house was heated by fireplaces. D’earth’s parents divorced when he was 8 years old, about the time he got his first trumpet, which his mother bought for $15. On the first day, he walked outside into the yard and played to the trees, finding the scales on his own.
Alcoholism and violence were also part of the family story, something D’earth mentions matter-of-factly but doesn’t dwell on. Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five were his favorite band, but he loved classical music too. When he found out that Mozart composed from an impossibly early age, he felt terrible, like he was already late to the party. It’s the kind of mythological back story you want to hear from a prodigious talent.
Jazz instruction was harder to find in the early ’60s, but D’earth’s talent led him to Henry “Boots” Mussulli, a veteran of the big band days. His musical second father, the Sicilian alto saxophonist and arranger had opened the Sons of Italy Crystal Room, a speakeasy that had hosted the likes of Count Basie and Roy Eldridge in the neighboring town of Milford. Mussulli was part of a group of jazz teachers who helped to form the Berklee College of Music, but at the time he was also the director of the Milford Area Youth Orchestra, whose record jacket called D’earth “the workhorse of the band.”
One day Mussulli dialed a friend’s number with D’earth sitting next to him. When his friend answered, Mussulli said, “Listen.” He put the phone down, and cued D’earth. Together they began to play and improvise on the Charlie Parker be-pop classic “Confirmation.” When they finished, Mussulli picked the phone up again and said, “14,” and hung up.
The moment changed D’earth’s life. It was his confirmation, external acknowledgement of the gift he knew he possessed. As a teenager he was written up in Downbeat after a performance at the Newport Jazz Festival for “playing like a young Freddie Hubbard.”
On Mussulli: “What he taught me about professionalism and what it is to really know your stuff… to be uncompromising with yourself about it… I learned that from him, and everything unfolds from there. You’ve got to know two things in jazz: Tell your story and don’t copy people.”
D’earth’s mother didn’t like the education her son was getting at public school, so she found a way to send him to the Cambridge School of Weston, where he met Jospé and began to experience a wider set of people.
The headmaster of the school, Adolphus M. Cheek, who had been a pre-war Harvard football star, took a shine to D’earth. He had a deal with his alma mater that he could send two students per year there. So D’earth went to Harvard and Jospé went to NYU, moving into an apartment at 21st Street in Chelsea. Jospé says D’earth was an inspirational figure, the type of person who held people together. D’earth says Jospé is the kind of guy who’s always making stuff happen. He started making stuff happen in Chelsea almost right away, drawing talents like Elvin Jones and Michael Brecker to his loft apartment for musical jam sessions.
A picture from 1968 shows D’earth and Jospé waiting to open for the Allman Brothers at a be-in in Cambridge Common with their act Fire and Ice. It’s a sign of the times. D’earth wears a beret and Jospé a carefree smile. D’earth enjoyed the green pastures of Harvard Square, but his heart was in New York, and after one of the epic jam sessions at Jospé’s place, he decided to quit school and move to the city to chase his dream.
“They weren’t conscious goals. They weren’t like career goals,” he said of the decision. “I wanted to play at the highest level of jazz music. That was the goal. Now why did I want to do that? I don’t know. It wasn’t to make money.”
D’earth poses with Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby during the H.O.R.D.E. tour in 1994. Photo courtesy John D’Earth.
In New York, D’earth and Jospé ran into Thompson, who had moved to the city from Alexandria, Virginia, where she was a folksinger of growing reputation.
“She fascinated me from the beginning by coming to New York and being very unimpressed with the scene there,” D’earth said. “You know why? Because she knew that none of these guys, who were playing all this crazy stuff from their knowledge of music, couldn’t sing a harmony. They couldn’t do what she could do without even trying.”
Thompson pulled D’earth and Jospé into her band, Cosmology, and for the next decade or so the three of them would form the core of the group sharing a loft apartment in The Village that became a communal center for the band, its scene, an array of musicians, and their family, which included Thompson’s 6-year-old daughter Daphne.
“It was total immersion. It was extremely rewarding. Incredibly difficult and stormy at times. You know, the different functions. Who was going to fulfill the functions?” D’earth said. “We were young people. Study The Art of Loving for 40 years and get back to me. Figure out how to be a good person. That was a lot of what it was about. How to deal with the past, deal with conditioning, be straight up and be present in the moment.”
Thompson, whom her husband calls a “totally non-imitative” singer, sounds like a cross between Stevie Nix and Nina Simone with the lyrical stylings of a folk high priestess. Jospé is a groove drummer with jazz chops, influenced by Elvin Jones, but also by Motown and Ringo Starr. And D’earth’s a pure jazz man who can’t get Diz, Bird, and Miles out of his head.
“See the thing of it was, we all wanted different things,” D’earth said of the group. “So therefore you get the stormy relationship. You also get the synergy of a band being something a little bit different.”
The three of them freelanced gigs in their separate spheres. D’earth had attracted the attention of Al Porcino, a legendary trumpet player who had his own orchestra and was one of three musicians who traveled with Frank Sinatra. Porcino asked D’earth to play in his rehearsal band and then invited him to play on a gig for Mel Tormé at the Maisonette during which they cut a live record for Atlantic that earned five stars in Downbeat. For a young trumpet player, it was in invitation to the innermost circle of the business, a stamp of approval that would have had Boots Mussulli laughing down from heaven.
Later on, Porcino asked D’earth to stay on and travel to Japan with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra. He wanted to go, but Cosmology had gigs lined up. It was a decisive moment, no doubt colored heavily by the loft, his surrogate family. He turned the offer down.
“That was always a big regret. Going to Japan with Thad and Mel was the way young cats like me got noticed internationally. I said no because we had gigs with Cosmology. And I was so mad about it and conflicted. In the way that people do, I struggled with this moment for years. I will tell you… you talked about the push and the emptiness? Bravo. Beautiful language. I stood somewhere at my house when I was 40 or 41 years old, and I said to myself—it just came into my head—I forgive myself for all these decisions and all this stuff and all this not doing what I thought I should do. Forget it. Forgive yourself. Because there were good reasons for it. You’re in good shape, just go. That sounds silly, like something you read in Reader’s Digest, but it actually happened to me and it stuck. I didn’t feel those regrets anymore.”
There was no turning back from there. Cosmology took off in its own way, playing large festivals and earning a record deal with Vanguard, becoming the kind of mind-bending act that attracted music people but turned off the business operators because it didn’t fit neatly into a genre.
Thompson had played in Charlottesville with Cosmology even before she left for New York, and she was responsible for bringing them back. D’earth remembers a particular weekend when they drove down from New York to play, with John Abercrombie lying with his nose two inches from the roof of their van sleeping on a stack of instruments. When they arrived at the gig, they realized the space they’d been booked in could barely hold their band, much less an audience, and they were not happy.
“This is typical Charlottesville. This is my impression of Charlottesville,” D’earth remembered. “The Sitting Ducks were playing at The Stacks in the Library Restaurant downstairs and they heard what happened to us and they said, ‘Tell ’em to come play our gig. We’ll stand down on the gig. We’ll do it another time.’ I mean, that was not New York. It was word of mouth basically, and we had people around the block because they heard John Abercrombie was playing.”
It was the start of a sweet run for the band in Charlottesville. Sometimes they blew people’s minds playing avant garde stuff, other times they brought in cataclysmic talents from New York.
“People really dug it. They thought we were amazing,” Jospé said. “First of all we had really wonderful people playing with us… I think the level of playing that we were aspiring to and that we had achieved was something people responded to.”
In the summer of 1981, the group moved to Charlottesville to escape from Manhattan for a couple of months and pretty quickly had an offer from backers to set up their own record label and stick around for a while.
“Then it was ‘How do you make a living in Charlottesville?’” D’earth said.
A few weeks back I was sifting through perennials at Southern States and one of two women evaluating tomato varieties within earshot of me said, “I love this time of year. Everything seems possible before the heat, the bugs, and the weeds.” The gardener’s spring hopes and fears in a nutshell. As a brand new homeowner and an expectant father, the words implanted in my brain and swelled with metaphor.
There’s something delicious and inspiring about the preparation phase, the moment of maximum potential. I lie awake at night meticulously plotting DIY projects I will never execute, whose edges will likely never be quite as clean as I conceive. It keeps me from thinking about the child, who should be able to rest in my wife’s belly without the burden of my expectations for a few months longer, dreaming in placental intoxication about his or her own possibilities.
UVA has cleared out and the subletters are arriving on the Corner, barbecuing on porches and laughing late into the night. Our high school seniors have graduated, and every classroom around town is itching to close up shop, exhausted by testing, over and done with field trips. You can drive down Barracks Road any time of day (except right before a baseball game) without a hint of traffic. Summer is here—heat, bugs, weeds, and all. This week’s feature is a treasure hunt of ideas to help ensure that at least some of your summer dreams lose the cleanliness of concepts.
My best summer moments have usually involved something going wrong followed by a swim in cold water: a motorcycle with a burnt up battery on the shoulder of I-90 and a hotel pool; a mosquito infested camping trip in the Boundary Waters and a pothole lake; a terrifying hike on a Swiss mountain path in slippery tennis shoes and an alpine mere. I think there’s a message about summertime and parenthood in there. Growth through failure and revelation in relaxation. May your memories be sunburnt and bugbit.
Corbin Hargraves is a local financial advisor who sees the need for a more direct policy approach when it comes to making housing more affordable in Charlottesville. Photo: John Robinson
I have a friend, a very curious cat, who once whittled down the whole of the Calvinist theology he espoused to a seemingly innocuous point. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, he said. Never mind that he grew up in Communist Poland, hated Catholicism, and found religion in the black churches of Chicago’s South Side, his reasoning was impeccable: You can’t find grace without admitting sin.
I rejected the conservative parameters of the problem but appreciated the paradox. We live in a cultural moment where people seek not just to have their cakes and eat them too, but to Instagram their kids licking the icing off. I mean if the Depression presented theological problems akin to Abraham’s decision, we’re involved in some kind of psychedelic remake of Marie Antoinette feeding the 5,000.
In Charlottesville we want the best of the city and the country. We want the new economy and the old traditions. We want a small town with the accents of the big city. We want the South’s manners and the carpetbagger’s profit margins. I mean if we don’t deserve to be the poster children of the “You can have your cake and eat it too” Kickstarter campaign, then I don’t know what. But sometimes you actually have to make the either/or decision.
This week’s feature on Charlottesville’s affordable housing crisis spells out why this is one of those moments. Our city is in danger of pricing out its working people and its historic black communities, and in the process of losing its culture. Sure, Adam Smith’s invisible hand will continue to nudge us towards a shiny, happy future, but if we don’t dig in somewhere, we’ll end up being the place where Greenwich meets Buckhead in the Piedmont.
The Virginia Cavaliers baseball team, which only returned three seniors, fell short of back-to-back national championships.
Photo: Jeff Lack/ICON SMI BAJ/Jeff Lack/ICON SMI/Newscom
I have a friend who is a sportswriter of the old school, like Frank Bascombe or George Plimpton. He sees the game as a metaphor for every noble human experience from tragedy to exaltation. In that world, Mickey Mantle’s story is about an Okie who conquers the Big Apple with raw physical talent, then destroys himself, physically and psychologically, through alcohol and recklessness, and finally has the good sense to laugh it off.
In that world, there are the falls from grace (Pete Rose), the runners up (Jerry West), the magicians (Wayne Gretzky), and the superhumans (Michael Jordan). Perhaps more significantly, at least for Plimpton, there were also the men whose bodies become weapons for social change: Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali, Curt Flood, Arthur Ashe, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In that world, a game is never just a game. The country kid who kicks around the minors and emerges a hero in a major media market during a playoff run is The Natural.
I have another friend who’s a basketball coach. He wakes up in the middle of the night with a gnawing fear. The statistics, the geometry that cuts up the floor, the video footage are his information. The players are his materiel. Winning his beacon. His life is a pressure cooker of details. He hardly sees the game anymore, he sees games, lining up towards the horizon, every single one of them winnable. Every one equally losable.
This week’s feature on UVA baseball coach Brian O’Connor’s quest to build a dynastic program can be read as a metaphor for lots of things. But increasingly, I find myself looking at the game at face value, rejecting the larger narratives. Is there a message I can learn about life from the experience of LeBron or Tebow or Djokovic or Mayweather? When pro athletes cost millions to develop, stars earn the GDPs of small countries, and sportswriters are a dime a dozen, the coaches, who never say anything that can be used against them, are more interesting than the players. O’Connor’s achievements are architectural rather than inspirational, more Ayn Rand than Bernard Malamud. Maybe there is a metaphor in there after all.
Way back when Playboy started, Hugh Hefner expertly surfed the wave of a sexual and social revolution, selling cigarettes and Scotch via Mad Men-designed print adverts paired with corny profiles of topless coeds and Vargas girls. The setup made enough money to get him rich and to pay for 5,000-word interviews with Jim Brown on the white man’s burden or John Wayne on why hippies should be shot. Pick up a copy from 1972 at Ike’s Underground and you can read the debate over the Vietnam War or the legalization of marijuana in the letters’ section. It’s a trip.
The company hasn’t fared too well in the digital environment, and in 2011 Playboy Enterprises Inc. undertook a massive reorganization, slashing its staff by 75 percent and moving its headquarters to L.A. Licensing, not content, is the new name of the company’s topline/bottomline game, which may explain how it managed to name UVA the top party school in the country last year. While the sports at TJU aren’t up to snuff, the Google reporting explained, the sex and drinking life more than compensate.
Our UVA feature this week highlights a few things happening on Grounds that Playboy’s staff writers missed. Did they know, for instance, that the frats aren’t allowed to haze anymore or that undergrads are helping to eradicate whooping cough? Anyway, the piece about Lou Bloomfield’s MOOC “How Things Work” got me thinking. The prof spends 1,000 hours designing a class that draws 50,000 students to his virtual classroom, and he doesn’t get paid for it.
Meanwhile, down in the Bayou, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans’ longtime daily newspaper owned by the Newhouse family since 1962, announced that its tragic experiment to go digital had failed and that it would return to daily print production. During the about face, the company lost its content monopoly. Maybe we should update the whole “freedom isn’t free,” thing. Free isn’t even free. Can someone in Darden’s i.Lab run the topline/bottomline on that?
Director Fay Cunningham (right) and “cast mentor” Debbie Owen watch one of the final rehearsals before Hello, Dolly’s May 2 preview. Photo: Justin Ide
Sunday night, I watched a documentary called “Mariachi High,” which follows the fortunes of the mariachi ensemble at Zapata High School in a sleepy Rio Grande border town in Texas. The film is, more than anything else, about how a music teacher with a passion for tradition has created a reason for high school kids from a rural Mexican-American community with a high dropout rate to pour their hearts into something, and, in the process, learn to love school.
This week’s feature follows the cast and production team of Albemarle High School’s spring musical, Hello, Dolly! and reminds us how important the hours after the last bell can be. When everyone who is dying to get the hell out of there is gone, the kids who stay open up like night-blooming flowers. Cliques melt away, ages don’t matter, and being cool becomes about pleasing the adults who cared enough to stick around and teach you something they know how to do well. In the process, they open you up to a world that’s not just for kids. As AHS Theater Director Fay Cunningham says in the story, “We don’t do high school theater.”
Cunningham, I understand, has built a juggernaut of a drama program that routinely cranks out $30,000 productions from a base budget of $500 per year. Down the road at Monticello High School, Theater Director Madeline Michel is trying to build the same kind of tradition at a school that’s only 15 years old. Her kids—white, black, and Latino—are about to stage In the Heights, a play about race and identity in the mixed up part of Manhattan called Washington Heights, which was an old Jewish neighborhood that bordered on the heart of Harlem and slowly, and then not so slowly, turned Dominican. I lived there for two years just out of college. The fish market was Korean.
Race and gentrification are important news themes in Charlottesville, not because, as in NYC, they are imminent forces that will change our landscape the way a hurricane changes the beach, but because our small affluent city has the chance to deal with them better. To make music from the mashup. ¿Ya comprende?
The Virginia Quarterly Review completed a total overhaul today with the announcement of W. Ralph Eubanks as editor. The hire leaves the prestigious literary magazine with a full leadership team for the first time since the highly publicized suicide of its managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, in July 2010.
“It is an honor because of the publication’s storied 88-year history, having published many of my personal literary heroes, like Eudora Welty, John Berryman, and D.H. Lawrence,” Eubanks said of the job. “It is a challenge because I will be editing a general interest magazine in the digital age.”
Eubanks, who will be the magazine’s first African-American editor, is currently the director of publishing at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he has served since 1995. He will begin at VQR June 3, in time to oversee the magazine’s fall 2013 issue.
“Ralph has a deep understanding of how writers practice their craft,” said William R. Ferris, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “He also knows how to shape the work of a writer. In his capacity as both an editor and an author, Ralph has witnessed the evolving landscape of book and magazine publishing.”
During a phone interview Wednesday, Eubanks said he intended to expand VQR’s content in the areas of book reviews and literary criticism, to publish photo essays in both print and digital formats, and to build on the magazine’s legacy in longform journalism and narrative nonfiction, particularly with respect to environmental issues. He also outlined his plans for organizing the magazine into departments to create predictable expectations for readers and to offer more short-form entry points in the magazine.
“Magazines like the VQR are really carefully curated content,” Eubanks said. “That’s what the readers expect. They expect something that’s editorially sound, that’s stimulating, and that someone has put a great deal of thought into how it’s presented to the reader. That’s really what I bring to the magazine both in print and online.”
Jon Parrish Peede was named VQR’s first publisher in October 2011, arriving from his position as Director of Literature Grants for the National Endowment for the Arts to take over business and administrative duties. He joined editor Ted Genoways, who edited the winter and spring issues of 2012. Since that time, longtime contributor and interim editor Donovan Webster and Deputy Editor Paul Reyes have shared editorial duties with Peede and guest editors.
Genoways was placed on administrative leave briefly in 2010 due to allegations of workplace misbehavior in the months preceding Morrissey’s suicide. He was cleared of wrongdoing by UVA after an internal investigation and subsequently resigned in May 2012 after nine years in charge of the magazine. In July 2012, Kevin Morrissey’s brother, Douglas Morrissey, filed a wrongful death suit in Richmond circuit court naming Genoways and former UVA President John Casteen and alleging, among other things, that “as a direct and proximate result of the intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by Genoways, Morrissey died.”
Locally, the fallout from Morrissey’s suicide and the inquiry that followed cast a pall over VQR, but the magazine has continued to publish Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and photographers and collect prestigious national and international awards.
Over the past decade, VQR has won more National Magazine Awards than any other literary quarterly in the country, and in 2010 it was named to Utne Reader’s 10 best magazines of the new century. In 2012, Maisie Crow’s video “Half-Lives,” a documentary produced for the VQR website that tells the stories of survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, received the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Use of Online Video. The magazine’s spring issue, which focused on changes in the publishing landscape in the digital age, got props from New York Times media guru David Carr via Twitter: “Just got this spring issue of Virginia quarterly review. The issue, on the business of literature, is spectacular.”
At the time of Morrissey’s suicide, VQR was dealing with a significant administrative transition as it moved from the President’s office, where it had been nurtured by former President John Casteen, to the office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, headed by Tom Skalak. The transition coincided with the arrival of President Teresa Sullivan and, after Morrissey’s death, Sullivan instigated a review of the magazine’s financial administration and personnel policies.
Under Genoways, VQR had turned heavily towards long-form journalism focused on international issue cuts on politics, the environment, and war, and its total expenses grew from $347,243 in FY2003-04 to $795,670 in FY2009-10. During that period, its total income also increased significantly from magazine sales, endowed funds, and University support. After the review, Peede was hired to manage the magazine’s business matters, to expand its reach, to increase donations and secure grants, and to oversee personnel matters.
Under Peede’s leadership, VQR has continued its focus on international affairs reporting but presented a wider range of thematic subjects and landed big name fiction writers more regularly, like 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, whose story “Snow Blind” ran in the latest issue.
In hiring Eubanks, Peede, who got his M.A. at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, completes the remake of an editorial team that’s distinctly flavored by influences from his connections to Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Reyes, former senior editor of The Oxford American and a staff member at Harper’s, joined the magazine in 2012. Eubanks, who grew up in Mount Olive, Mississippi, during the Civil Rights struggle, is the author of the well-received memoir, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past.
“I’m very much shaped by being an African-American from a small town in Mississippi who grew up there during the Civil Rights movement,” Eubanks said. “That’s shaped who I am, it’s shaped what I’ve written, and it’s had an impact on a lot of the books I’ve done for the Library…making sure that those voices from history that at one time were not part of the historical conversation were present there. And that’s something that I plan to bring to the VQR. I don’t think it’s necessarily an African-American vision, I think it’s an American vision.”
Web Editor Jane Friedman, a former publisher of Writer’s Digest, was hired last year to lead the redevelopment of VQR’s website, which will roll out later this year. Both Friedman and Assistant Editor Allison Wright, who joined the team this year, teach in the media studies department in the UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences.
At The Library of Congress, Eubanks managed the publication of more than 80 nonfiction books on American history, photography, maps, and film in collaboration with leading trade publishers. Eubanks said photography would be “a very important part of the magazine,” and said he would draw from his experience managing the recent publication of nine Farm Security Administration photography books in the Library of Congress’ “Fields of Vision” series, which were published with introductions from contemporary authors such as Nicholas Lemann, George Packer, Francine Prose and Annie Proulx.
“Ralph Eubanks is a gifted editor, acclaimed author, and respected publishing industry leader,” Peede said. “We are fortunate to hire a seasoned editor with such enthusiasm for new technologies as well as a steadfast commitment to literature and exceptional journalism. Having come from the highest level of book culture, Ralph is devoted to creating works of permanence.”
VQR has print subscribers in 50 states, 24 countries, and six continents and is funded by close to $4 million in UVA-managed endowment and investment funds.
As humans, it’s hard for us to know with any sense of certainty where we are in history. The narrative ribbon that connects age to age is knitted with intergenerational strands that are longer than our lifetimes. But there are moments, ripples in our collective fabric, in which societies advertise their own watersheds. Think about the late ’60s and early ’70s in this country. Walter Cronkite reporting on The Beatles’ impact in America, a cultural evolution invading the news. You say you want a revolution, well, you know…
Jayson Whitehead’s feature this week intertwines the personal account of a writer struggling with the legacy of his conservative Christian upbringing with interviews of local artists whose faith drives them, even if it doesn’t necessarily pervade their work. To give the narrative context, Jayson talks about American Christianity’s struggle to cope with the challenge the ’60s presented.
The world had gotten too big for a thinking person to believe only a Christian could be redeemed. Absolute moralities didn’t hold up to a fast-moving cultural landscape in which -isms implicated the righteous and the damned alike. But more than anything else, it was the gospel of self-realization and self-expression that emptied the churches. All you need is love.
There used to be jokes, back when it mattered, about the fact that there is no one American Christian experience. A Baptist, an Episcopalian, and a Lutheran walk into a bar… In my lifetime, popular Christianity has experienced a mostly non-denominational resurgence with a practical, family-oriented message that has borrowed heavily from the narrative of the early church and its war against Hellenic culture and the Roman Empire. But American Christianity has mostly left the intellectual, artistic, and philosophical edges of our world alone in favor of stabilizing its congregational value systems.
The artists in Jayson’s story, and no doubt the communities that support them, are trying to accomplish something more ambitious by asking us to imagine there’s a Jesus.
