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George Garrett as a young professor.

Prolific author, screenwriter, professor, and beloved Charlottesville figure George Garrett died on Sunday at the age of 78. VQR owes a great debt to George for reasons known to us and, given George’s habit of quietly aiding others, surely many more reasons that are unknown to us. Though the onetime Virginia poet laureate was well known for his writing, he will may be remembered best for the hundreds or likely thousands of writers whose careers began under the tutelage and extraordinary generosity of Professor Garrett.

We’ve published more than our fair share of George’s work over the years, from “In the Briar Patch” in our Summer 1957 issue to “The Crossover Beard; or, the True Story of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (Among Other Things)” in our Winter 2005 issue, and a dozen more works in the five decade span between those two. As is appropriate to keep up with his generosity, we’ve published not one but two appreciations of George and his work, R.H.W. Dillard’s “George Garrett: An Appreciation” in the Summer 1999 issue and Casey Clabough’s “George Garrett’s South” in our Spring 2006 issue, the latter dedicated to the work, the former dedicated to the man.

The funeral will be on Saturday, June 7 at 11:00am, at St. Paul’s Memorial Church on University Ave. A larger memorial service is being planned for the fall.

If you would like to record a few words about how George Garrett affected your life, you are welcome to do so in the form of a comment here.

Update: the Washington Post, Richmond Times Dispatch, and New York Times have obituaries.

I’ve just finished adding Zotero support to our archives, embedding bibliographic metadata into every article. Zotero is a free plugin for the likewise-free Firefox web browser that automates the collection of materials for research purposes. When you read an article that you want to hold onto, you can add it to your Zotero collection, which stores a copy of the web page on your computer along with full bibliographic data. You can group the articles that you’ve saved into different sub-collections, such as one for each of the essays that you’re working on writing. It’s a fantastically useful program, created by our neighbors at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, just upstate from VQR.

If this is the kind of thing that sends a thrill through your inner library geek, check out CHNM’s other software.

David Rieff, who wrote about mother Susan Sontag’s life and death for us last year, explains why he had to lie to his mother about her impending death in The Observer:

[S]he could not keep up this determination to fight for her life against all odds on her own. That was where the people closest to her came in, where, without immodesty, for it was a position I found it almost unbearable to be in, I came in. In order for her to believe that she would be cured, my mother needed to believe that her loved ones were convinced of this as well. Virtually from the onset of her illness, what I felt she wanted from me – she never said this explicitly but the message was clear enough – was to find hopeful things to say about her prospects. She wanted optimistic or, at least, less pessimistic ways of construing even bad news, and – a kind of moral cheerleading, I suppose, and support for her hope, belief, call it what you will – that despite her advanced age and the spectacularly difficult cytogenetics of her specific case that she would be special, as she often put it, one more time and beat the odds.

Rieff wrote more about this in “Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir,” published earlier this year.

(Via A&L Daily)

Cartoonist and illustrator Charles Burns has a new book coming out, “Permagel.” The 12″x16″, black and white book is just 32 pages long, put out by French publisher United Dead Artists. (Here are another half dozen spreads.) Burns contributed his paired photographs to our Winter 2007 issue, demonstrating that he is a man of many talents.

(Via Boing Boing)

In a recent interview, Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, had this to say about VQR and the role of lit mags:

The VQR, the old Virginia Quarterly Review, which I remember in the old days as being exceedingly boring, is now 290 pages, too fat to hold. And it has color all the way through! And it’s sending writers on special missions to Africa and the Antarctic to do reportage. I admire this energy, but I think it’s misplaced. There are other formats better suited for journalistic confrontation. I don’t think a lit-mag should compete in the day-to-day arena. I think a lit-mag should be more like an old-fashioned museum: carefully curated, a rarefied atmosphere, a preserve for the elite.

This is the discussion I’m really looking to have—and the would-be mission of quarterly journals that I’m hoping to challenge.

First, what format is better suited for journalism? It’s certainly not television, or even radio. Commercial magazines with their obsessive focus on demographics and advertising? Newspapers that have ever-dwindling numbers of foreign bureaus? Our reporting from Iraq was nominated for a National Magazine Award this year (up against Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and National Geographic) and was last year a finalist for the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for War Correspondents (the only American publication nominated in the print category). And our special issue on South America won the National Magazine Award for best single-topic issue. Why shouldn’t we compete when we’re clearly capable?

Second, I’m disturbed by the notion of lit mags as “a preserve for the elite.” For one thing, that seems like the last place finisher who says he never really wanted to win anyway. It’s easy to justify your lack of success by saying you have smaller ambitions, but that just sounds like an excuse for mediocrity to me. But even if you’re going to set small goals, why make that goal “a preserve for the elite”? A preserve is just this side of a zoo, if you ask me, and I’d rather not accept my cage quite yet, if it’s all right with you. I’d rather run wild a bit longer with the people who prefer not to think of themselves as “the elite.” That’s too sanctimonious, too self-satisfied for my tastes. Elitists tend to like things the way they are. I’d prefer writers who have the power to imagine the world better than it is and the determination to use their talents and sweat to get even an inch closer to that ideal.

Maybe that’s what Howard Junker calls “pious, pompous, cliched ranting.” It’s what I call giving a shit. And I still do. If you think caring about the world is still the province of literature, then I recommend giving VQR a try—as a reader, maybe even as a writer for our pages. If you prefer your literature pickled in formaldehyde, then Zyzzyva may be just the journal for you.

For all those offended by the comments on this blog regarding certain especially inappropriate submissions, you can take solace in the knowledge that Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, has your back. He was shocked—shocked!—to discover bad things being said about the VQR slush pile. And in public! On our blog!

Of course, two weeks ago—on the Zyzzyva blog—Junker likened his own slush pile to a “barrel of crap” and a week before that compared it to John Bunyan’s “slough of despond.” (For those of you not up on your Pilgrim’s Progress, one scholar cited on Wikipedia explains that it is “the low ground where the scum and filth of a guilty conscience, caused by conviction of sin, continually gather.”)

But I’m sure Junker says all of this with love. Again, on the Zyzzyva blog, he explains:

Not to whine, but it takes tremendous energy and unbounded good will to read through the slush pile.

It’s worth it because, on occasion, there’s a diamond in the haystack.

It would be nice if these diamonds always sparkled and were therefore easy to spot, but often they don’t, they take on the coloration of the slush pile. They come on as unschooled, ill-packaged, clumsy, freaky, half-baked…

Again, I’m sure he means “unschooled” in the most complimentary way. “Clumsy, freaky, half-baked”—all hymns of praise.

And, in case you haven’t seen a copy of Zyzzyva, it’s also worth pointing out that it has long been the practice of its editor to publish embarrassing snippets from submitter cover letters on the back cover of each issue.

So there you have it: Howard Junker—champion of the slush pile, friend to the unsolicited submitter.

Update: Why do I suddenly feel bad for expecting Howard Junker to be rational?

On July 14, 1959, the Richmond News Leader ran an editorial by Ezra Pound entitled “Keynes Brainwashed Electorate with Economic Hogwash.” It was his first and last publication in the Virginia newspaper—despite a yearlong stint as its foreign correspondent in Europe. Jon Schneider unearthed the story of how Pound came to hold such an unlikely position, and in the current issue of VQR we publish Schneider’s narrative and Pound’s submissions to the paper. We also have a collection of Pound’s communications with VQR about the publication of “Canto 99″ at the same time, which includes some correspondence overlapping with the News Leader communications.

I sat down with Jon a few days ago to discuss how he came across these letters and manuscripts, and what they tell us about Pound’s life at the time.

Download as MP3

1) Artist Jason Polan has pledged to draw every person in New York. He updates the sketches on his blog daily. The man obviously likes a challenge, so let’s all move to New York. That’ll throw him.

It is possible that I will draw you without you knowing it. I draw in Subway stations and museums and restaurants and on street corners. I try not to be in the way when I am drawing or be too noticeable.

I suppose if you live in a city teeming with artists, you must relinquish your body (not to mention your words) to both amateur and accomplished poets, novelists, painters, etc. You also run this risk by sitting in a coffee shop.

2) The internet wrote a book! I don’t want to hurt the internet’s feelings, but I can’t get past the typos and the overeager prose in the first paragraph.

3) The Onion A.V. Club interviews the delightful Amy Sedaris. She eschews identifying as “author,” “actor,” “cupcake chef,” etc., and calls herself an entertainer. Reminds me of Michael Chabon’s recent essay in the L.A. Times:

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby. . .

Let’s all take a moment to fall in love with the image of Amy Sedaris wearing a leisure suit studded with blinking lights, her nose and extremities lubed up with sunscreen for a frivolous day at the beach. I hope her Creamsicle lasts forever.

4) On Slate, Meghan O’Rourke bypasses the Vanity Fair photo controversy and proposes that Miley Cyrus’s wholesome show was never so edifying to begin with:

Once, sitcoms taught kids to be true to themselves by showing what happened when, say, Greg Brady thought about cheating on a test, or how Sandy and Bud’s adventures with Flipper shaped their character. Hannah Montana instructs them in the proper etiquette of endorsement deals.

5) Lit blogger Mark Sarvas wrote a novel and Troy Patterson of the New York Times eviscerated it.

Harry does not seem to have been reread, never mind revised.

Burn! But I bet $10 that Patterson wrote his entire review around the crushing sentence above. And I bet another $5 that Patterson concocted the smoldering sentence before he even read the book, entitled Harry, Revised.

6) Alice Walker’s daughter writes of the perils of having an ultra-feminist, politicized mother.

I went over to her house to find out what the hell was going on. Never have I been so frightened by my mother. She sat me down and called me “someone who thinks she is a good person but really isn’t”. She said that because I wasn’t from the South and didn’t have the full memory of slavery (read: I am half white), that I don’t know what it feels like to be sold down the river.

I don’t want to pick sides, but I will say that this does not bode well for famous mother/daughter memoirs of the future.

7) David Gracer is fighting an epic uphill battle to convert America’s carnivores to insectivores. I’m still on the fence about eating bugs, but I find the name of Gracer’s gourmet insect company — Sunrise Land Shrimp — irresistible.

8) Soon (i.e. six months from now) to arrive in small towns across America — steampunk fashion. I have a few questions. 1. Must I read Jules Verne to master this look? 2. Do I have to know how to work a pulley system or a grandfather clock? 3. Do time machines come in my size?

I’m no Alan Greenspan, but I’ve been reading lately about the economics of fashion:

Each fashion cycle begins with the origination of a novel, attention-arresting idea adopted by a network of individuals, which induces each to reorganise their own consumption systems. As the novelty of the initial stimulus inevitably declines, the resources associated with the fashion depreciate in value.

I’m not sure if steampunkedness qualifies as a fashion cycle because the Times describes it as more of an intellectual movement. But as a word of advice, to be on the safe side, get your astrolabes and neo-Edwardian waistcoats while they’re still hot.

Things have been tense in Bolivia for the past week after Santa Cruz residents voted overwhelmingly to become substantially autonomous of the national government. President Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, has been socializing the nation, just last week seizing the telephone company and a trio of energy companies at the barrel of a gun. The landlocked nation is the poorest in South America. Its wealthy Santa Cruz province comprises the eastern third of the country, and they’re not willing to accept Morales’ plan to seize their assets to redistribute to the west. Morales and his Venezuelan ally, Hugo Chávez, insist that the United States is behind the Santa Cruz uprising.

If all of this sounds familiar, that means you’ve been paying attention. Edmundo Paz Soldán’s “Santa Cruz: Bolivia’s ‘Other Country’” was published on our website in conjunction with the release of our Fall 2006 issue dedicated to the issues of South America:

While the Eastern valley and the Andes are constantly struggling, Santa Cruz has a carnival atmosphere heavily influenced by Brazil’s boundless optimism and exuberance. In the Andean world scarcity is the norm; Santa Cruz is the land of plenty. In a word, Santa Cruz works; the rest of the country doesn’t.

We’ve addressed Bolivia’s economic and geographic divisions before, too. Lloyd Mallan took up the topic in our Spring 1944 issue with “Bolivia: Revolt and Counter-Revolt“:

It is no exaggeration to say that the recent Bolivian revolution is a synthesis of everything that we are fighting for and against in this war. [...] Bolivia, with the possible exception of Paraguay, has the doubtful distinction of claiming the most exploited and oppressed working-class in South America.

At the time, Great Britain’s efforts to build a railway to Santa Cruz had fallen a few miles short. It wasn’t for another decade that the connection was made, Paz Soldán explains, and it was decades until its development in isolation allowed it to develop a gravity of its own. It’s those physics that now threaten to pull apart the nation.

Two poems from Patrick Phillips’ “Boy” will be broadcast on The Writer’s Almanac this week. “Matinee” will be featured on Thursday and “Falling” on Saturday. “Boy” is one of the first four books in the VQR Poetry Series. Patrick can be heard reading works from his book in our podcast of the inaugural reading. (Via University of Georgia Press)

VQR wishes to apologize to any writers who took offense to our recent blog entries, in which we made public anonymized snippets from internal correspondence regarding our submissions. It seems obvious—and is regrettable—that some writers got the idea that VQR delights in belittling unsolicited submissions. Nothing could be further from the truth. This publication—and, indeed, its long-standing reputation—is built on a tradition of finding fine work by new writers amid the slush pile. Over the decades, this journal has been able to claim first publications by writers like Nadine Gordimer, Adrienne Rich, and Hayden Carruth—writers then wholly unknown and submitting over the transom. Since I took over as editor in 2003, I have worked hard to continue that tradition. We published the very first works of Pauline W. Chen and Martin Preib, both of whom went on to receive National Magazine Award nominations for their contributions. Many of the writers now in our regular stable began their association with VQR through blind submission—J. Malcom Garcia, Daniel Alarcón, James P. Othmer, Joshua Poteat, David J. Morris, Nicholas Schmidle, Neil Shea, Alessandra Lynch, Patricia Lockwood, and Glen Retief. Garcia and I still haven’t met—though his work has now appeared in VQR a half dozen times and will be included in next year’s Best American Travel Writing and Best American Nonrequired Reading.

In short, the tone of our blog post did not correctly represent our commitment to our authors. This is a disservice to our submitters, our readers, and our goals. However, I do think that the comments, if not their public airing, are a fair response to many of the submissions we receive and accurately reflect the righteous indignation that we often feel as readers. Too much of what we see these days strikes us as merely competent—well-crafted but passionless in its execution or, just as often, passionate only about the minor travails of the world of its author. No editor nor writer feels more strongly about the possibility of finding the universal in the small, but we also ravenously crave great writing that takes on big issues. Gutsy, fearless, hard-nosed writing. Writing that matters. Its absence makes us ill-tempered; it makes us question our enterprise. We work hard and want to see evidence of equal effort from writers. Such discussions, however, should be undertaken more thoughtfully than we have done thus far on the blog. I hope personally to rectify that situation and soon. Some writers have demanded to know why we have grown to feel such frustration toward our submitters. It’s a question worthy of a thoughtful answer—and will likely be as controversial as anything Waldo has said. But at least the discussion will center on what we consider the shortcomings of American writing, not a few comments meant to be private expressions of disappointment and frustration.

For now, suffice to say that we have certain things that we want so fiercely from American literature that we have made a misstep. We have descended in our discourse, when it is our stated mission to elevate the level of discussion whenever possible. That said, thoughtful articulation of what we envision—our call to arms, our mini-manifesto—will take a while to draft. We hope your interest in this subject is more than fleeting and deeper than personal indignation. We hope that you, too, care about what ails American literature and will have the patience to wait for our more considered statement and engage in an extended, productive discussion.

In the meantime, we have removed the potentially offending portions of the blog post, leaving our own impeachable statements but striking anything that might be construed as hurtful.

More soon,
Ted Genoways