Ms. Harding: I just returned from a week away from town to read the July 22, 2008 issue of C-VILLE. In your piece “Read this first,” I think you kindly referred to my fans and their praise for my work. However, I was not totally certain that you were referring to me, as my name is Cindy Janechild, and not Cindy Brainchild. However, it would not be the first time I have been called a different name…Lovechild, Brainchild and more. All very welcome, but incorrect. I self-designed my name in 1975 to honor my mother, Jane Coville. Therefore, the “child of Jane,” Janechild. I would be interested to know if the reference to Cindy Brainchild was to me. And if there was a way to make a correction so that my fans really know who you were talking about.
Cindy Janechild
Charlottesville
Editor’s Note: Om and the postmodern problem
I first encountered the om prayer in the pages of Rudyard Kipling’s British Colonial picaresque novel, Kim, in which the protagonist teams up with a wise and seemingly guileless Tibetan monk to foil Russian gun runners in the Khyber Pass. Apart from being a writer with Dickens’ touch in
Editor’s Note: History or his story?
“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . .” read Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, handed down lo these 60 years. It was the
Editor’s Note: Love letters
I don’t write a lot of love letters. In fact, I don’t write many letters at all, which is a shame, because I love letters. It may have something to do with the fact that I work at a newspaper, or that I write a column that uses the word ‘I’ and blends a public […]
Editor’s Note: Everybody’s a critic
What does an artist need? A clean, well-lit place? Genius? A tortured soul? Or is the answer less poetic? Cheap rent, time to spare, and a bit of pocket money. Does an artist need theory, training, and genius underneath it all? Or will his art spring like a geyser from the darkest, deepest
Editor’s Note: The melting pot
When we publish our food listings magazine, Bites + Sites, the restaurant categories are always a bit of a conundrum. What do you do with a Russian-Turkish bakery or a French-owned restaurant that serves Virginia food or an Algerian-Mediterranean fusion joint or a Nepali-Indian place? When I
Editor’s Note: The problem of scale
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 […]
Editor’s Note: Thoughts about race from the liberal, lying, lamestream media
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 […]
Editor’s Note: On soul searching
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
Editor’s Note: The consumer’s environment
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
Editor’s Note: On the road and back again
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
Editor’s Note: The business of stories
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
Editor’s Note: Living with Gabe’s spirit
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
Editor’s Note: Turning the camera around
A reader recently called what I do in this column “simple-minded pablum.” Another reader, maybe I could even call him a fan, called it “an interpretive ethnography of our own people.” It’s not, as you know already, an editorial column in the strictest sense. I don’t interpret the news. Most of
Editor’s Note: The spirit in the season
When I stepped outside Saturday morning, buzzards were roosting in a bare tree at the back of the yard. The plants had frozen during the week and, taken together, the natural signals set off a kind of frenzy in me. I harvested the carrots and whatever else was left growing and trimmed the
Editor’s Note: Politics aside
The more I think about Tip O’Neill’s old adage “All politics is local,” the less it makes sense. When I first heard it in the ’80s, it sounded spot on. People care about their wallets and their backyards, and when they vote, they express those local priorities. But consider the negative space
Editor’s Note: The price of evolution
How much would you pay to save someone you love? Everything? How much, then, to save something you love from being lost forever? Depends on the value of the thing in question, right? Yet another magic mushrooming of the Internet spore is our obsession with price points. Forget coupon clipping,
Editor’s Note: The grass is greener
I remember reading a think piece somewhere (probably in The Stone blog) that talked about the correlation between musical training and academic achievement in school aged children. In the comments stream, a guy had written from France to say how “American” the story was. The intrinsic value of
Editor’s Note: Remembering war and teaching history
I am ashamed of my country’s memory. I get it. We were born into collective amnesia—so focused on making the future bright and so afraid of falling back if we looked over our shoulders that the stories we ended up telling were not so much lessons of the past as inoculations from it. No sense
Editor’s Note: Good, better, best
There’s a climactic moment in the film Friday Night Lights, a Hollywood adaptation of a book that tracks the fortunes of a small high school football team in its pursuit of a Texas state championship, when the coach delivers a halftime speech about what it means to “be perfect.” When I saw it
Editor’s Note: The stories behind the faces
It’s easy to think you know someone’s story when you see him every day. Working on the Downtown Mall, I play that trick on myself all the time. I see people going to and from work, watch the expressions on their faces change through the week, mark how they sneak away from the job to […]