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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]