Lady Reporter

That’s what they used to call women in journalism: Lady Reporters. Cute, huh? And they stuck ‘em on the society desk to write about Margaret Mitchell’s little book, charity events and the Junior League. Well, Atlantan Katie Johnson wasn’t having any of that! Instead, she made the Civil Rights beat in the South during the sixties her own while working for the AP.

Johnson has had plenty of opportunities to tell her stories lately. The retired reporter, who covered the civil rights movement for the Atlanta bureau of The Associated Press, figures prominently in a new history of the wire service, “Breaking News” (Princeton Architectural Press). The book, which traces the world’s largest news organization from the Civil War to the war in Iraq, devotes a chapter to the rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Johnson practically jumps off the pages.

Though she hasn’t worked for the AP in 30 years, it has given her quite a few assignments recently. She was summoned to New York for an oral history session. She appeared on a National Press Club panel that was broadcast on C-SPAN’s Book TV. She was invited to be on the program at the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock desegregation crisis next month, even though she had nothing to do with that story.

“They’re treating me like a celebrity,” she says, laughing. “They sure didn’t treat me like that when I worked for them.”

Full story here. What’s baffling and shameful is that Ms. Johnson isn’t given so much as a footnote in the “The Race Beat,” the 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about reporting the Civil Rights movement by Hank Klibanoff, a managing editor at the AJC. What a glaring omission.

Help Save Our Books... And Teresa Weaver

The AJC seems to think that as people migrate to the Internet, they won't be needing books. And thus they won't need a mighty fine literary pages editor, Teresa Weaver, either. Nothing could be further from the truth.

First off... I just started yet another new book, The Glass Castle (mavelous) just this afternoon. Imagine that. I read almost as much as I'm on the Internets, which is a hell of a lot. There's NEVER been a time in my life when I wasn't reading at least 2-3 books at a time. But bully for me.

What really, really pains me good about the AJC's decision to give-up on books is their decision to let go of the book editor, Teresa Weaver. Now that just makes me madder than a hornet. I want to personally go slap that She Who Must Not Be Named (Jule-ee-duh Wallace) silly for this one clueless-decision alone.

Here's where it gets personal... the first editorial I ever published was green-lighted by Teresa when she was on the op/ed pages at the AJC. (Since the AJC's archives were not cached on the Internet back then, I can't link you to it, although if I wasn't so lazy I guess I could create a PDF... maybe later.)

It was an essay really, not so much an editorial; one not unlike the latest memoir-of-a-really-wacked childhood work I'm reading today. At the time I wrote that first essay, I was organizing my (first and only) rather tres she-she wedding... all by myself as I had "the only mother in America" completely and utterly disinterested in a daughter's wedding details.

I wrote about how I once tried to engage my loopy mother in some girly-girl chit chat about dress styles and champagne cocktails, and she (Mom) merely sang opera to me over her end of the phone line, while screeching periodically at her numerous "damn cats" while she shooed them off her porch with her broom, way far away, so it seemed, out in the pine woods of South Carolina. Mom had never organized a damn thing in her life, and she wasn't going to, poof, suddenly morph into Martha Stewart just for her only daughter's Big City wedding. The thought of even driving to Atlanta scared the bejeezus out of her anyway.

I gave-up on trying to interest Mom in wedding planning, and merely let her attend the event au natural where she entertained the guests marvelously with her unique, loopy freestyle babble about growing organic eggplants and teaching illiterate country folk's kids South Carolina history, which she knows like the back of her long, elegant, aristocratic hands, even though she ignores her thoroughly blue-blood upbringing too, and is far more comfortable in her life as a peasant.

Come to think about it, Mom was never at all interested in my wedding or my lame attempt at marriage, and she hasn't really said much to me ever since the marriage failed, although I know it (the failure) hurt her more than it hurt me. She might pretend that divorce doesn't exist, but at least she never once lectured me about my gross shortcomings as a wife. For that alone I am immensely grateful for her MO of total disengagement.

To this day, writing that first essay helped me begin to work through a lifetime of confusion about my mother's, uh, detachment from the minutia of my life, and to come to terms with it and begin to learn to accept my mother for... well, for whatever she is! And "normal" she never was -- and never will be.

Teresa Weaver green-lighting that essay gave me the encouragement and the impetuous to begin to be whatever I was really meant to be; to start exploring, seriously, my own artistic inclinations, should I ever stumble across any. I started a blog about my life because Teresa Weaver once used to publish my essays. She thought they were interesting enough to print, and thus she gave me that desperately needed stamp of, yes, mainstream approval I required to move forward with non-fiction writing, no matter the platform.

Today, I can't stop reading, and that too is often because of a book Teresa reviewed at the AJC. But more importantly, on a deeply personal, visceral level... because of Teresa Weaver, I will never stop writing.

And now I've got to stop because I'm trying really hard not to cry in front of my kid... but others are able to do more than shed sentimental tears; there's a petition to Help Protect Atlanta's Book Review circulating online. Please sign when you can.


HT: PS

"Everything I Write Has A Soundtrack"

This interview from Between The Lines (here as a podcast) kept me in the car long after I'd reached my destination, listening with fascination. Author David Fulmer has written a mystery novel, Dying Crapshooter's Blues, that incorporates Atlanta myths and legends -- and Atlanta's rich music history.

This podcast with Fulmer talking about Dying Crapshooter's Blues is from the book discussion show Between The Lines on WABE. In the interview, Fulmer talks about Atlanta's significant role in the birth of the modern music industry, something I previously knew nothing about.

Between The Lines is hosted by the delightful Valerie Jackson, Atlanta's former First Lady (Maynard's wife). Jackson's interviews are thoroughly compelling, and she's always so intrigued (so thus we are too) by the authors and their books she brings to her Thursday evening show on WABE. There's a pleasant touch of Momma (Susan) Stanberg about her; she's warm and engaging, a true fan of the material she's inquiring about. You can tell Jackson's a lifelong reader. She really knows her Atlanta and music history too, as we discover here.

If WABE has any other compelling, original programming though, I've yet to hear it. Unfortunately, Between The Lines, a half hour weekly show, seems to be it. And that's a shame. I know they, and our tax dollars, can do better.

Rejoice, We Have No Choice

The totally wacked-out writer Michael Chabon has a little tidbit here about The Future. (It took me all of a month to get through his freakin' brilliant review of the Dark Materials trilogy.)

As a (American) parent this graph naturally stood out:

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification — but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book.

Heck, my 6-year old daughter believes she's going to sing and dance to High School Musical forever. And that one day Troy (the boy lead in HSM. They're all "Troys" nowadays) will kiss her - on the lips. I am not going to tell her otherwise. I don't want her growing up to marry Chabon's little weirdo either, as what kinda childhood ideals would he have to fall back on/impose on her?

If more singing and dancing, feminine ideals in other words, were perpetuated in Western culture, we might not be in some of the cultural pickles we're obviously in now. Blame it on men and their violent pessimism. I'm really starting to think that most literary giants, other than Jane Austen and Tolstoy maybe, are full of shite. And yeah, particularly Faulkner. (Like Jamie Foxx saying "nigger," I can say stuff like that since I'm a white Southerner. Same argument, eh?) Maybe Chabon needs to pull an alethiometer out of his ass.

I hope, with my help, my kid continues to sing and dance her little heart out, for life. She'd better; her first talent show is this Friday night. Sheeze, all of us women folk had better be practicing our all-American moves... really really hard.

This post put together by this song, naturally enough:

Could U 2 Be Psychic?

I often have those odd moments where something I'd thought about in passing does come to pass, such as thinking about finding a four-leaf clover, then the next day looking down while walking the dog and viola, a four-leaf clover.

Or more horrifyingly serious, having a strange, ill feeling come over me about a hospital as I passed by one overlooking GA-400, then a couple of hours later rushing my child into that same emergency room. A few days before 9-11, I dreamt of planes swooping into NYC using the bridges into Manhattan as their pathways. I thought not a thing of it until... well, you know when.

Then there's that old devil boy-man, Eason Jordan. Now I admit to a slight obsession with Eason since he was such an Atlanta fixture, starting CNN with Ted and such, and then being one of the first people to be seriously "outed" in the blogosphere. (Over his remarks about journalists being killed in... wherever, Iraq I assume. While Eason was schmoozing it at Davos one year. No lack of ye olde irony there.) Then he runs off with Mariane Pearl (they were perilously close to the alter I hear before someone came to their senses. What was she thinking? Grief will certainly cloud one's good judgement I suppose) and resigns abruptly from CNN -- not necessarily in that order.

So I fell asleep last night thinking of that doofus Eason while reading an article about the making of the badly-titled, A Mighty Heart, into a movie. (Think A Mighty Wind. I often do.) Which is unfortunate as it is a beautifully written, powerful, all-in-one-sitting book. For me, it really was as close as I'll ever get to an inspirational/self-help title as the true love and the deep bond and the friendship shared by Danny Pearl and Mariane just lit-up the entire book.

What a tragic loss for her, yet an intelligent and deeply believable story for all of us who still believe, go figure, in heterosexual, monogamous, romantic love. Or at least cling to the notion of it being possible. It genuinely was so with those two.

I read the book in a wallow of pure bitterness and cynicism over romantic love never ever being sustainable between men and women. Ye olde post-divorce scenario I suppose. Nothing unusual to be in that classically bitter state of mind, having just been divorced then subjected to two subsequent and deeply disappointing relationships. I was in the "Never Again" mindset fer sure, but that book honestly helped drag me back up to a less hardened stance in the romantic love department. Can't say I've forgiven the Islamacist motherfuckers who beheaded precious Danny Pearl yet, but I've made great strides in keeping faith that men and women can co-habitate in harmony.

But I'm diverging from my intended topic... so I fell asleep wondering WTF was up with Eason, and wondering if the Brangelina flick would have a character playing that pumpkin-head (of course not), and low and behold, I wake to the news that Eason has launched... a blog! My my my... the unconscious workings of the mind never cease to amaze me.

Who's Your Daemon?

If you have read the Dark Materials trilogy, no doubt you've thought about what (animal) form your daemon would take. Well, that's always up for great interpretation, but the fan site HisDarkMaterials has a fun daemon name generator you will enjoy playing with.

My daemon name is Pura. That's like the Dark Materials equivalent of... Truthiness! I like it. Also, according to the site, Nicole Kidman has wrapped all her scenes. I cannot wait to see that marvelous ice princess as Mrs. Coulter. (They just need to change her first name to Ann for even more wicked fun and games.)

And The Golden Compass (book 1) movie website is now up. Immerse yourself here.

Harry Potter Puts A Spell On Laura Mallory

I hereby decree that the State of Georgia banish book banners to the rubbish bin of media oblivion! Looks like the kids from Hogwarts will be sticking around the Gwinnett County schools. And just in time for holiday hexes. The official vote is Thursday though.

Let's hope the kiddies out there have been stirring at their cauldrons well so that they can hex that hag good. And yeah, if anyone needs a nice, secular Happy Holidays shoutout, it'd be Laura Mallory.

So say it with me folks so they can hear it out there in Gwinnett County... HAPPY HOLIDAYS! And to Laura Mallory and whatever your freak-agenda really was, get back to the subdivision, read the books for chrissake, and leave the rest of the world free at last of your idiot babble, hon.

UPDATE: The case will be decided Thursday Dec. 14th at the State Board Room at the downtown Atlanta-based Georgia Department of Education. The website is here. Location here. The regularly scheduled board meeting begins, behind closed doors, at 8am. According to the GDE communications department, the "vote (on an appeal case) is taken without comment. Generally they identify the case by number only."

For the life of me, I can't find a case number associated with the Laura Mallory case on the website, which seems to be a very good one until you enter the search term "Laura Mallory." Then nothing pops up. No case number. Nothing. Maybe you can find it here.


FYI: J.K. Rowling's official website is a delightful time-waste. Find the secret body image rant! Love it.

Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Laura Mallory, Georgia Board of Education

Who's Got The Biggest Atlanta Press Club Party Line?

Let's see, other than being utterly boring and overpriced, the lines last night at the annual Atlanta Press Club's Holiday Author Party were longest for Mike Luckovich. Everybody likes Mike! And what's not to like? The dude wears vintage suits, is unfailing polite to the old folks, has beautiful manners, is wicked funny-clever. Won a Pulitzer if you don't believe me. Best of all, he blogs. (Well kinda sorta. It is, after all, a fake AJC blog.) Still, enough to make you swoon, for chrissake.

Mike is adorable-precious too, but no-go ladies as he's very married to a gorgeous blond. Little one at home, stuff like that. But, if you were toiling away over your Perfect Guy hot cauldron, as I've been known to do when the broom's in the shoppe, you probably would cook-up a potion that would deliver to your doorstep Mr. Luckovich. One of the best APC events I've ever been to was one where Luckovich and his French (also adorable, bien sur) counterpart from Le Monde led an overhead projected, draw-off "discussion." Priceless it was, ummm hummm.

Another book that sold-out while I was there was for this interesting title, The Race Beat. I'll add that one to the nightstand pile to eyeball longingly as I crash from the usual mommy-exhaustion. Lots of Christmas shopping accomplished though, and even ran into an old radio comedy show ensemble co-writer pal, Walter Sorrells, a veritable writing machine if ever there was. Walter remarked that he'd cranked-out ten books this year alone. My repy, "I wrote ten blog entries this year."

Still, was it worth the $20 cover and the $7 gin-and-tonic? Hard to say. Although there was a funny moment when Tom Hauk's name badge somehow got tangled in Maria Saporta's gorgeous tresses. Was hoping to run into yet more Southern writer pals, but writers are so notoriously narcissistic that they won't come the the annual event unless they have their own book to sign that year. Me, on the other hand, I've never gotten close to writing a book, let alone publishing one, so I go every year.

Put A Stake In It, That Southern Culture Is Dead

Faulkner's not dead; he was just passed-out drunk in his coffin all this time. Talk about dredging-up the past and going places maybe we just shouldn't be going... now some wretched Faulkner family member has sold a vampire script Faulkner wrote in his I'm Really Hammered phase, one that went on for over a decade, to a Hollywood producer. The producer seems deeply enamored, bless his heart, with that absurdist stereotype of some moss-ridden, Hazel Motes-y (or is that O'Conner?) "Deep South" naturally enough. From The Guardian:

Faulkner's estate has given the script to Lee Caplin, a producer who says he would like to set it in the Deep South. Little more is known but there is a revival of interest in adapting Faulkner's work to the screen. It is said Oprah Winfrey wants to make Light in August and Caplin is looking for a writer to adapt Faulkner's 1935 story Golden Land (the only tale he actually set in Hollywood) in the twisted style of a David Lynch film.

So Big Oprah and some fucktard producer who thinks that that drooling, fake gothicist David Lynch is no doubt a brilliant filmmaker are waiting in the wings to leech off the rest of the backwater vapors? Deep South is cool, eh? Most real southerners are so Deep South stupid they'd confuse Faulkner with Colonel Sanders, although he looks an awful lot like an aging Billy Bragg in the above snapshot. (He too likes the ladies much I hear.)

How about methed-out rednecks, mega-church mentalities, gated communities, ghetto culture, I Heart Bush stickers plastered on pickup trucks, fat developers in pink shorts on manufactured golf courses, Wal-Marts and NASCAR nowadays, you clueless Hollywood dickheads? Who'd want to film that crap?

Peach Buzzed Into A Stupor

Is Peach Buzz just not the lamest gossip site you've ever laid eyeballs on? They stumble on a catchy phrase/item about as often as I have a dinner-and-a-movie kinda date.

If you want the real poop on Amy Sedaris' journey southward try this from my pal Tom. He's got his finger on the pulse of Atlanta, when it's not on an Avid that is. (Or do you folks at Crawford use Final Cut nowadays? Either one, too much clicking and mousing for me. Blogging alone is almost more clicks-per-day than this bit of square-eyed Space can handle.)


Anyways... here's Tom's Take on Ms. Sedaris' visit:

So tonight was the night of Amy Sedaris' book tour stopping in Atlanta, at the odd time of 7:15PM at a suburban (Decatur) public library. All day I was mentioning this to friends, as I wanted to make sure Amy didn't come out to speak to a crowd of like 9 1/2 people plus the library janitor.

My wife and I pulled up with 15 minutes to spare and there was apparently some huge other event going on in downtown Decatur. Traffic a mess, no parking anywhere, people everywhere, and full-ish marching band of the doo-dah variety in the library parking lot playing "Louie Louie" etc.

We parked far away and walked and walked. As we got closer we saw this throng in a line of perhaps 700 people snaking around the band.

I asked someone walking toward us... what the heck is this event that someone has booked simultaneous with the small event we are here for?? "Oh, this is all for a book singing for someone named Amy Sedaris" was the reply. And as we got closer damn if half of those 700 people (600?- 1000? who knows) were clutching their copy of "I Like You".

We know this little library and there was no way 1/10 of those people were getting in. So we skipped to the side entrance and we walked into the 3- storey library proper as if we were there in "research."

We rode the elevators down to see if we could travel to the ground floor auditorium and sneak in that way but that elevator button was locked out. So we rode up, walked around some research space, then stepped into another crowded elevator to ride down again, this time Finding Amy (get it, ha) standing right beside us.

"We figured we'd never get in so we've decided to talk to you now" I joked. "Oh?" said the diminutive Ms. Sadaris, her mind seemingly elsewhere. Standing beside her handler, she sported a 50's-homage crisp shiny brown dress.

"The line you you; we'll never get in."

"There's a line?" she asked.

"Whoa jeez yes, you've not seen? It goes on forever," I said as I fired up my camera to show her digital-pix proof. (See above.)

She looked at my pix and countered, "Oh no, they aren't here for me," starting to look a little worried.

My wife looked her in the eye and said in friendly seriousness "They are here for you. It's a LOT of people. You should be at The Fox, not here." Suddenly the elevator opened on the restricted floor, as she got off she just said "What's The Fox?" as her handler blocked our exit.

So we didn't get in and I got no further pictures. But at least we saw her and talked however briefly and saw her real shock at what a sensation she, and her book, are becoming.

I'll bet when she sat in her Manhattan apartment putting this book together she never once said "this weird tome will be HUGE in the South."

Southern Denial

I have a confession to make... I miss my rural roots and the South Carolina countryside I grew-up in. Having lived in Atlanta's urban clusterfest for so long now I foolishly believed I'd evolved (de-volved) beyond all-things-agrarian. Talk about being in denial. But reading the evocative, achingly southern Memory's Keep, by UGA professor and novelist James Everett Kibler, is just about to break my heart.

I want to go home. At least for the holidays.

Is That Caitlin Singing In The Abby?

So much for the information age! Why am I just now hearing about arch anti-feminist writer, the ultra-fem Caitlin Flanagan? Maybe because I'm on a 3-month backlog of New Yorkers right now. Still, this woman is intriguing, although I gotta hate her, not because she's so icky-retro and loves marriage and suburbs and kittens and stuff. I just hate her already because she once tried to write a novel set in the Deep South. That from a woman who grew up in Berkley. Sacre Bleu! Or maybe I love her because at least she gave up that foolish sacriledge and went for non-fiction instead. Whew.

Whatever she does, she sounds like your basic hypocrite -- praising the at-home environment as a womanly ideal, yet really spending as much time cashing-in while out of it on book tours and cushy assignments.

Listen you elitist piece of shit... I don't know one mom out there who would NOT stay home with their (tiny, helpless) ones if their families could afford to do so, or if an asshole-jerk of an unsupportive spouse wasn't pressuring them to keep working, working, working until they dropped like flies.

That's what happened in my case, and yes, I got depressed and bitter too -- up until the point when I divorced his sorry ass. Bye bye blues then! And yes, Ann Coulter and your "Godless" BS, I go to church every Sunday, get on my knees and thank God I'm no longer married. Take that you barren-mind (uteri too it seems) opportunists.

From today's LA Times:

"She (Flanagan) calls herself an "at-home mom" who would "sooner miss a blood transfusion than an open house" at her sons' school. Yet she acknowledges that she qualifies as a working mother, with gigs at the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. And she has a second book in the works that will expand on her recent article on the "epidemic" of fellatio-obsessed adolescent girls. It's tentatively titled "On Their Knees."

OK... that's totally ick. Those kinda epidemics are for grownups only! And I'm blowin' (hee hee) off soccer practice and headed for the Rusty Nail for happy hour with my best feminista pal, Suzan, an indie filmmaker and mother of two. We'll be sure to knock a cold one back for priss-ass Ms. Flanagan here 'cause I doubt either one of us will be buying the junk she's pushin'. Nor that honky bleach-haired beast's either. (That trash-mouth's new book is out on 666 (6/06/06). I kid you not!)


tag: Caitlin Flanagan, motherhood