Papa’s got a brand new bag.

Two separate, seemingly-unrelated thoughts, which I will cleverly bring together, in a manner not altogether unlike Dave Barry:

Thought The First
I’ve been a website developer since I was a teenager. I was, to my knowledge, the first professional website developer. (Period.) It’s been over a decade, and I’ve worked with dozens (hundreds?) of clients. Most of these clients I have loved — they have been smart folks with great businesses, and I’ve been proud to be an integral part of their operation. Of course, I’m working for these clients — I make what they tell me to make. I can arm-twist, cajole, beg, even plead, but at the end of the day, if they want their site’s text to be in 18 point Impact, then that’s what they get. Some clients have entrusted their site to a greater degree than others, but I’ve always found myself fundamentally limited, because I am, as the very nature of the relationship, an outsider.

Since the .com crash, in 2001, truly great clients have been few and far between. I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to arrange my life in such a manner that any clients that I have had since then really have been excellent, but it’s nothing like the go-go days of the late 90s, when nearly every client had a business model that I was really excited about and a vision to change the world in some small, fundamental way.

What I’ve occasionally allowed myself to dream of is having just one client. Which is to say, to work for an organization as their senior web guy. They’d have to give me the reigns, trusting me when I tell them that I know what I’m doing, and I’d make their website the best in the industry in whatever it is that they do. (Ignoring this here website you’re reading. Shoemaker’s son and all that.) I was even moved to write a resume (a first for me) a few months ago. But the positions that I’ve seen just aren’t worth it — I’d be nothing more than a web monkey. Thank you, no.

Thought the Second
I lieu of a substantial portion of high school, I all but lived on the University of Virginia grounds. I got a ride into town each morning with my father, who got to work around 8:30. Bleary-eyed, I’d remove my bicycle from the trunk of his Volvo, assemble it, and head towards the university. Though I ran a BBS for several years, it was clear to me that the internet would replace such networks Boardwatch prognostications be damned. And there was only one place in town to get internet access — UVa.

Clemons Library was my first discovery. They had monochrome DOS terminals and, thanks first to a borrowed Unix UID and later to UVa’s visionary Hopper Project (now the Monticello Avenue Virtual Village), I was able to access IRC, Usenet, Gopherspace, and the nascent WWW. That seemed good until I discovered Thornton Hall. Every one of them had 17″ monitors, 100MHz Gateway 2000s, Windows 3.1. I could install Mosaic, telnet, and even Wolfenstein 3D. It was heaven. (I discovered the Irix lab several months later. It was a thing of utter beauty.)

Somewhere in there, I learned that UVa offered services other than vast halls full of wholly unused computers. There were classrooms, professors, books, presentations, even the odd student. One publication that caught my attention was Virginia Quarterly Review.

I found copies of the UVa-produced lit journal sitting around in Alderman Library and, once, on a radiator in a computer lab. On the one hand, it looked sort of old and mysterious, like something that might have a treasure map within. (At the age of 15, I was just old enough to know that treasure maps aren’t found in old-looking literary journals, but just young enough to think that, well, it could happen.) I was aware that it was the kind of thing that I was probably supposed to enjoy, or at least pretend to enjoy, but the presentation and the stodginess of the whole thing was just so off-putting that I didn’t even bother. Not only did I not recognize the name of a single author, but the titles of the pieces were so dense and unattractive as to completely prevent any potential toehold into a particular article.

“The Significance of Birds.” “A ‘Tolstoyan’ Correspondance.” “The New Candide, or, What I Learned in the Theory Wars.” “The Cultural Cold War as History.” “Did Churchill Ruin ‘The Great work of Time’? Thoughts on the New British Revolutionism.”

Thank you, no.

After those few run-ins with the publication, I ignored it for years afterwards. Though I don’t doubt it appealed strongly to some audience, that audience clearly was not intended to include me. I wouldn’t read VQR any more than I’d join the Elks Club.

Flash forward to September. That was when I got my hands on a few recent issues of Virginia Quarterly Review. Damn. The Spring 2004 issue featured a cover by Eric Wight, depicting Michael Chabon’s Escapist, promoting the twenty page “Origin of the Escapist” comic within, as well as a chapter that had been cut from “Kavalier & Clay.” It also contained a trio of dispatches from correspondents in Iraq and Afghanistan, presenting harrowing tales of life in wartime, a piece by E.L. Doctorow, and an Edward Larson article about Harvard biologist Edward Wilson. The Summer 2005 issue included works by Gabriel Carcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Adam Clymer, and Steve Almond. Not just any works, with topics ranging from murder in the desert southwest to the 2004 election. And the Fall 2005 issue, my God, the Fall 2005 issue. It’s the first of four issues that will feature original covers by Art-freaking-Spiegelman, along with a serialized work, appearing only in Virginia Quarterly Review, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!”

When I wasn’t looking, Virginia Quarterly Review started kicking some serious ass. It’s every bit as good as The New Yorker, only it’s 300+ pages long, and comes out every few months.

Clever Combination of The Two Thoughts
Effective immediately, I’m the Senior Web Developer (I now just invented that title — I don’t really have a title) for Virginia Quarterly Review.

They asked me for advice on establishing a blog and, a week later, it was clear to all of us that I should be working for them. It’s a half-time gig, which is fine by me, and the scope of my duties is far-reaching and delightfully open. My job is to move VQR online. They have a website, yes, but they’re not a part of the internet in any meaningful sense. Between eighty years of archives featuring contributions by some of the world’s most talented writers and the ever-improving, ever-cooler nature of the publication, I have a tremendous amount of raw material available to me. Best of all, I think VQR is a wonderful publication for which I count myself lucky to be working — all enthusiasm is genuine, which is a rare thing in a job.

There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to make Virginia Quarterly Review the single best literary resource on the internet. I intend to do just that.