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| Winter 2001 | - A MAGAZINE ONLINE - | Vol. 3, No. 1 |
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Editor's Column
The Sweet Sorrow of Parting
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| The Southerner Editor-in-Chief Glynn Wilson caught the afternoon before the first Mardi Gras parade 2001 in front of the statue of Jefferson Davis at the corner of Jeff Davis Boulevard and Canal Street |
Swampy air fills the backroom office of this two-bedroom shotgun house in a place they call Uptown, New Orleans, on a street named after a French water but pronounced like it's spelled, "Per-ri-ER" Street. Strange how such a French city ignores the French pronunciations of places.
Yet somehow it is an appropriate place for an epitaph, far from the Knoxville mansion where The Southerner magazine online was born and raised.
It is 535 miles south and west as the crow flies to be exact from Knoxville to New Orleans, at least according to an almost magic source of information available to anyone with $1,000 or so for a computer and a few bucks a month for Internet access. It is known as the World Wide Web, or Web for short.
Some people call it Cyberspace, and it is certainly virtual. The cool thing about it is, it just sits there at my disposal right behind the window in which these words are being typed like the world's largest library, or a second brain.
If all the information on the Web were printed out and stored today in one place, it would easily fill up a library the size of Birmingham, Alabama. Somehow that information doesn't faze even the brightest college students in New Orleans, however, and a sizable portion of the American South's population apparently could care less.
The first time that realization hit it really pissed me off. Not anymore.
"Time travels in divers paces," wrote Shakespeare, long before time was an issue in the 20th century sense, or in the Southern sense. At some time in a writer's life — or an inventor's — it must feel like a curse to experience being either behind the times, or ahead of your time.
Yet it is a built in defense mechanism to try and NOT feel bad about the demise of a business venture, unlike an affectionate member of your immediate family, who deserves to be mourned.
And of course there is always the possibility of resurrection. Just ask all those Americans and Southerners who voted for George W. Bush in Election Fiasco 2000, those who still believe in Jesus.
The Southerner was launched with the headline: "The New South Rises Again." It is unclear if even 12,000 people got it, judging by the maximum number of monthly hits to in the nearly three years of work contained in this archive. But that's OK too. That will just have to be their loss.
It is still our contention that "The South" will never rise again, not in any sense like the term is bandied about on T-shirts and Web sites by those who just can't get over the Civil War — or the fight behind it. It was, after all, "A big man's war and a little man's fight."
The big mules got what they wanted; little minds keep on fighting.
Like Willie Morris said, the Old South does exist, in a million homes and honky-tonks all over what is left of the Southern landscape of America.
But if the South rises it will be the New South, for by definition, an uprising is progressive. Unless it turns revolutionary. If that were to happen, the South as anyone knows it would surely die, as the Old South did during Reconstruction, or again during the Civil Rights Movement.
Even a writer as down-home eloquent as Rick Bragg recognizes the homogenization of the region, not just at every Interstate exit ramp and chain coffee shop. It will be hard for the South to keep up with the rest of the world and time without embracing the Internet, so it will. But give it time.
We will still be here if anyone wants to resurrect a distinctly Southern voice with high ambitions for journalistic excellence and literary style. If you know anyone who wants to sit in as guest editor and put an issue together, or anyone with a few hundred thousand to invest, get in touch. Heck, we'll print the damn thing if someone wants to pay for it. We may even consider doing it as a non-profit journal, maybe with a university affiliation.
If you want to see what was created here, the archives will be up for awhile, at least as long as we can afford the $11 a month to keep it stored on the server. Lest you miss my pun that means forever, or at least a very long time, potentially longer than any book can last in a library before acid eats the paper.
It is still our contention that what you see here is an advance look at the magazine of the future. And while we didn't break a lot of news, since that's impossible to do without the necessary resources, we did write about suburban sprawl early on, and we produced the definitive tribute to Willie Morris. It just didn't make us any money.
Meanwhile Mardi Gras beckons, so it's time to don a costume and head for the Quarter. Parting with a creation like a magazine is like parting with a fine woman, such sweet sorrow. But there is always another tomorrow.
Laissez les bon temps rouler!
— GW
Send e-mail to: mail@southerner.net
Or join us in a discussion of news and commentary of interest to the progressive American South, blogging, politics, or whatever, in our Web forum.
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