Southern Bookman

SEC football goes to 10-game conference schedule

The SEC always drew complaints for playing fewer conference opponents than other leagues.

While other conferences played at least nine in-conference games, the SEC stayed with eight, claiming another tough conference foe would be too daunting.

Instead, SEC powers were notorious for scheduling a couple of cupcakes from outside the league, along with one opponent from one of the other "power" conferences.

For years, the eight-game conference schedule was ironclad dogma for SEC coaches, although Alabama's Nick Saban espoused adding another conference game.

But the coronavirus pandemic has ended that era. The league announced Thursday that because of the coronavirus surge, each SEC team will play 10 conference opponents in the 2020 season. Anticipated regional matchups like LSU-Texas, Alabama-USC and Virginia-Georgia were cancelled.

Even SEC-ACC rivalry games like Georgia-Georgia Tech, Florida-Florida State and South Carolilna-Clemson will be scrapped. The ACC in announcing its Covid-19 plans this week offered a play-in game so that those in-state games could be preserved, but the SEC the next day slammed the door.

The SEC also announced its 10-game inter-conference season would begin Sept. 26.

Old-timers like me remember when football season always began on the last weekend in September, and teams played 10 games. Before ESPN pushed the sport to Labor Day, football was a fall sport, and "student athletes" weren't as burdened.

Playing a full conference schedule will be new for the SEC. Now the Big 10, Big 12, ACC and Pac 12 can't say the SEC plays a lesser conference schedule.

The pandemic doesn't care about those plans, and there's a high probability that college football will be curtailed, or not played at all. The New York Times reported Friday that American universities are already reporting a surge in Covid-19 cases, even before students return to campuses for fall classes.

A major outbreak on a college team similar to that of major league baseball's Miami Marlins will lead a team to forfeit one or two games, affecting league standings. The SEC moved its annual championship game to Dec. 19, meaning it would have a week or two at the end of the regular season for rescheduling games.

With players crashing into each other on each play, and sharing locker-rooms, college football looks like the perfect environment for Covid-19's spread.

 

 

 

 

Nastasha Trethewey's "Memorial Drive" examines pain of mother's murder

Nastasha Trethewey has left the South, following the release from prison of the man who murdered Trethewey's mother.

Trethewey, in one of the most heart-rending interviews Terry Gross had done for "Fresh Air,"  was overcome by the anguish she carries over her mother's slaying by Trethewey's stepfather. Trethewey was 19 when her mother was shot and killed outside of her home in suburban Atlanta.

Discussing her new book, "Memorial Drive, A Daughter's Memoir," Trethewey recounted to Gross a chilling scene in which her stepfather confronted her when she was a cheerleader at a high school football game. The Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate believes her stepfather intended on killing her, but decided not to because she greeted him cordially.

Trethewey also told Gross about the pain of growing up in southern Mississippi as the daughter of a mixed-race marriage. Her father was white and her mother black. Trethewey was born on Confederate Memorial Day, and grew up seeing the Confederate battle flag fly on her birthday.

Her mother and grandmother were civil rights activists in Mississippi, resulting the the Klan burning a cross on their lawn, the subject of one of Trethewey's poems.

Trethewey's leaving Emory University to teach at Northwestern outside of Chicago was a blow to Atlanta's literary stature. In the interview with Gross, Trethewey implies that she wanted to leave Atlanta because of  the anxiety she would feel living in the same city as her mother's murderer.

The critically accomplished "Memorial Drive," like Trethewey's poetry, widens the scope of Southern literature. For years, the black woman's experience in the South was expropriated and distorted by Faulkner and other writers.

Trethewey, Mississippian Jesmyn Ward and other black women writers are creating an enduring literature that tells searing truths about Southern violence and oppression. They are also telling inspiring stories of family love, dedication and overcoming.

Atlantans will recognize the title of Trethewey's memoir as referring to the road that leads from downtown Atlanta to Stone Mountain, where the massive sculpture of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee is visible from long distances. Trethewey told Gross about growing up near Stone Mountain, and the oppressiveness she felt viewing the Confederate shrine daily. Yet, she doesn't want the monument destroyed, she told The Los Angeles Times.

The road also passes Oakland Cemetery, where a towering monument honors the Confederate dead buried there and tourists visit the grave of "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell. Black slaves and free blacks also are buried there. Trethewey's poems and non-fiction examines such tangled strands of Southern life.

Trethewey in her work engages with the legacy of white-male-dominated Southern literature. In her brilliant"Southern Pastoral," the poet tells about a dream in which she gathers with the Southern Fugitives. In the poem, she pictures sipping bourbon with the dead white poets, and Robert Penn Warren lining her up to take a photo with the Fugitives, who wrote the Agrarian manifesto "I'll Take My Stand," steeped in Confederate nostalgia.

The poem ends with an echo of Quentin Compson's statement at the end of Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom," in which he denies hating the South. Trethewey's poem ends, "You don't hate the south, they ask. You don't hate it?"

For all the heartbreak the South's brought her, I believe Trethewey loves the South. We are richer for it.

Southern Pastoral

Natasha Trethewey

In the dream, I am with the Fugitive
Poets. We're gathered for a photograph.
Behind us, the skyline of Atlanta
hidden by the photographer's backdrop—
a lush pasture, green, full of soft-eyed cows
lowing, a chant that sounds like no, no. Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I'm offered.
We're lining up now—Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say "Race" the photographer croons. I'm in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father's white, I tell them, and rural.
You don't hate the south, they ask. You don't hate it?

 

 

Former Deadspin writers say "hey kids, let's form a web site." It's called Defector.

Estranged former Deadspin writers have formed a new online venture called Defector Media.

Defector Media will be owned by 19 out of 20 of the writers who quit Deadspin in November in a dispute with G/O Media, the web site's new owner. Each writer will own 5 percent of Defector Media, with rights to their own work, acccording to media reports.

Unlike Deadspin, a hallmark of the old free Internet, Defector will operate under a subscription model, rather than depending on ads. A subscription will cost $8 a month, with an annual discount.

In contrast to the Athletic, also a subscription model, Defector hasn't received any outside funding from venture capitalists. In a new take on the collective format, the writers are the sole investors. For more on the new site, here is a Slate interview with writer Maitreyi Anantharaman,

Fans of edgy writers like Drew Magary, Diane Moskowitz, David Roth and Ray Ratto have already given the site 7,000 subscriptions. Returning to the mix that ran the writers afoul of C/O Media, Defector will cover pop culture and politics as well as sports. C/O demanded that the then Deadspin writers focus on sports, which led to the mass resignations.

While looking at TV, films and social media, Defector will be sports-oriented, which will put it in competition with Athletic, as well as the still existent but struggling Deadspin, ESPN, Bleacher Report, MLB.com and the wounded former giant Sports Illustrated. Local newspaper that fought off the Athletic's staff raids will also have to keep an eye on the new site's reporting on local teams.

Led by Editor-in-Chief Tom Ley and business leader Jasper Wang, a Bain and Co. alum, Defector will begin podcasts next month, with the web site going online in September.

Defector represents another move away from the ad-based online model, which gave free access to viewers. Now, with a few holdouts like the New York Review of Books, Salon and others, most media companies have a paid subscription model, most successfully The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. A few local newspapers are also trying to generate online subscriptions.

The now dominant subscription model will bring greater competition and fragmentation. How much can consumers afford with the increasing number of TV streaming channels and media sites charging for articles?

Defector looks like a variation on the Substack model of authors receiving direct pay for their work. Such collectives have been tried before; here in Atlanta, "Like the Dew" was an online pioneer of the model. As local newspapers collapse, similar collectives have popped up around the country. Some are trying to survive as nonprofits.

Readers and viewers have a greater variety of choices than in the old days of one dominant local newspaper, three newsweeklies and three networks. Whether this results in a better informed public remains in question.

 

Covid-19 baseball strains game's traditions

Even baseball enthusiast Bob Costas thinks the covid-19 season is crazy.

Costas, appearing on Chris Cuomo's CNN show Monday night, questioned whether the makeshift 60-game season can continue after 17 Miami Marlins tested positive for the disease.

The Marlins outbreak has led to the cancellation of the team's home opener against Baltimore, and the postponement of the Yankees series against the Phillies, who played the Marlins over the weekend although one Miami player had already tested positive to the disease.

Despite his misgivings, Costas expressed hope that the season can be salvaged. He characterized the season as someone walking across a tightrope with fingers crossed.

While the games are strange, I couldn't resist watching our fine Braves club against the Mets and now Tampa Bay, where the seats are empty even without a pandemic.

Chip Caray and Tom Glavine, social distanced in a booth at local Truist Stadium while the Braves were on the road, gave entertaining commentary from watching play on TV monitors. In the old days, radio announcers called games from telegraph reports. Now they call the action from digital feeds.

I was glad to see the return of players like Ronald Acuna Jr., Charley Culberson, Ozzie Albies and Covid-19 survivor Freddie Freeman. Some players wore masks, others didn't. Manager Brian Snitker kept his mask on, even when coming out to the mound to change pitchers. A runner on first base had no way to social distance from the first baseman. The outfielders of course generally social distance, but Ronald still wore his mask.

The absence of fans wasn't that strange. The cardboard cutouts representing spectators reminded me of the electronic baseball game I had as a kid, with its fans painted onto aluminum stands.

The screwy schedule would have old-time baseball writers like Red Smith shaking their heads. The Braves remain in the National League, but their 60 games don't include any longtime senior circuit rivals like the Cubs, the Dodgers, the Giants and the Reds.

The Braves play a number of games against American League East teams the Yankees, the Red Sox, Tampa Bay and Toronto, now in Buffalo after Canada booted the Blue Jays out over coronavirus fears.

Unless they make the playoffs, the Braves won't compete against National League teams outside their division. The standards of a balanced regular season schedule and league teams competing against each other has been tossed out. This was a necessity because of the reduced schedule, but it still takes away from the ideal of fair competition.

After the Braves won an extra-inning game against the Mets, everyone was talking about how much they loved the new rule to place a player on second base when a tie game goes to the 10th inning. I suppose the rule shortened the game somewhat, but it still seems a violation of the game's spirit.

While the games were fine, I won't be heart-broken if this contrived season is scrapped.

 

 

Farewell, Peter Green

Out of all of the 1960s British rockers formed by the blues, guitarist Peter Green was the closest to the music's primal mournful spirit.

Native bluesman B.B. King acknowledged Green's clearly articulated style, saying Green produced "the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats."

Green, the founder of Fleetwood Mac, died Saturday at age 73, one of rock's great acid flameouts along with Syd Barrett and Skip Spence.

A native of London's grim East End, Green first gained fame replacing Eric Clapton in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. In 1967, he broke away to form Fleetwood Mac, joined eventually by fellow Bluesbreakers Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass. They were joined by guitarists Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan.

Along with his guitar artistry, slower and more technically precise than the pyrotechnics of Clapton and other guitar wizards, Green led the early blues-oriented Fleetwood as a singer and writer. Producing some of the most popular psychedelic progressions for drug trippers, Green also stayed true to the blues with songs like "Need Your Love So Bad" and "Black Magic Woman," later a huge hit for Carlos Santana.

His "Oh Well," which moves from power rock to folk reverie was a big hit for guitar fetishists, rivaling Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." The unexpected popularity of "Oh Well" won it a place on later versions of the band's album "Then Play On," which did that in many college dorm rooms across the United States.

Ravaged by LSD and schizophrenia, also a destructive combo for Pink Floyd co-founder Barrett, Green left Fleetwood Mac in 1970 before it reached its later huge popular success with Christine McVie, Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham. Spence, another acid victim, left Jefferson Airplane before its major stardom, forming the cult band Moby Grape and making the cult album "Oar."

Before reaching power pop stardom, Fleetwood Mac in their first album without Green put out another cult classic, "Kiln House," in which Spencer and Kirwan rechanneled Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Spencer and Kirwwan soon departed as well, missing out on the big money.

Green battled mental illness for years, periodically reappearing to perform with his old bandmates and others. Like Barrett and Spence, Green never stopped playing music.

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Christopher Dickey

Christopher Dickey's distinguished career as a foreign correspondent and author represented a triumph over his father, poet James Dickey.

Dickey, who died unexpectedly July 16 in Paris of heart failure at age 68, moved far beyond the shadow of his father, a major American poet who gained widespread popularity with his novel "Deliverance," turned into a landmark movie of Hollywood's fabled era of the 1970s.

The Paris bureau chief for the Daily Beast when he died, Christopher Dickey was known as a consummate reporter, writer, editor and mentor for young journalists.

Starting out reporting for The Washington Post in Mexico and Central America, Dickey advanced to the Post-owned news magazine Newsweek, covering Europe, Latin America and the Mideast. He possessed the guile to report on the inner workings of foreign governments, and the moxie to report on wars.

When moribund Newsweek was taken over by the Daily Beast, he found new success in online journalism, and as a commentator for NBC.

His "Summer of Deliverance" is one of the classic memoirs of growing up with a destructive literary father. Born in Nashville, Chris Dickey moved with his father to his native Atlanta and other Southern cities, and spent time in Europe.

Like another writer with Atlanta roots, Pat Conroy, Chris Dickey was damaged by his father, barely speaking to him for years. Chris Dickey blamed his bombastic alcoholic father for the death of his mother, also a serious alcoholic.

Like Conroy, Christopher Dickey reconciled with his father, who died in 1997. "Summer of Deliverance" is a story of forgiveness and redemption.

In TV reports, Dickey displayed the classic image of the worldly foreign correspondent, with the Paris skyline as his backdrop. He spoke with precise pronunciation, as if raised in posh British schools.

He separated himself from his domineering father. "Summer of Deliverance" details the pain his father caused him, and the gift he bestowed upon him: a passion for experience and language.

 

AJC's Jim Galloway looks back at bitter John Lewis-Julian Bond congressional election

John Lewis and Julian Bond's battle for Georgia's fifth district congressional seat in 1986 excited the recently merged Atlanta Journal-Constitution newsroom as few other events did.

The two lauded lieutenants of Martin Luther King Jr. had a close friendship, and sterling civil rights histories.

Lewis had suffered series injuries leading the Selma march, and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963.

Bond, one of 11 blacks elected to the Georgia House after the Civil Rights Act's passage and a state senator, was a national celebrity. 

The election of either would continue the district's civil rights legacy. In 1964, Fifth District Rep. Charles Weltner made history as the only Southern white congressman to vote for the Civil Rights Act.

Lewis' unexpected victory in the election ended the nationally lauded political career of the charismatic Bond, as AJC political columnist Jim Galloway noted in his column Thursday. Bond, who died in 2015, went on to lead the NAACP.

Amid the praise for Lewis after his death last week, Galloway shows that he could be a ruthless politician. During the campaign, Lewis accused his former close associate of drug connections and "laziness," a common Southern insult made against blacks.

I'd forgotten that the bitter Bond-Lewis battle was set up by Wyche Fowler abandoning the seat to run for the U.S. Senate against GOP incumbent Mack Mattingly. Fowler won the Senate race to hold off the GOP surge in Georgia for a few years. Fowler later narrowly lost the Senate seat to Republican Paul Coverdell.

After years of bitter competition carried out from separate newsrooms, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution merged their news staffs in 1982, but still put out separate newspapers, The Constitution in the morning and The Journal in the afternoon. Working in close proximity, the formerly bitter newspaper foes reconciled.

Galloway quotes former political columnist Rick Allen, one of the Constitution staff members forced to move from the eighth floor to The Journal's sixth floor. Later a CNN commentator, Allen entertained the combined staffs with his running commentary on the Lewis-Bond election. His sources assured him that a Bond victory was inevitable.

I was surprised that Galloway said that Lewis received support from white Buckhead. As a member of the Atlanta City Council, Lewis cast the deciding vote for extending Ga. 400 through the community. The road project was bitterly opposed in North Buckhead, which reviled Lewis and Mayor Andrew Young for supporting it. Buckhead business leaders Charlie Loudermilk and Sam Massell pushed the project through, with Young's backing.

The most steadfast opponent of the road was Coverdell, who for many years represented North Buckhead as one of the few Republicans then in the state Senate

After defeating Bond, Lewis held the seat for more than 30 years virtually unchallenged. His chosen successor, state Sen. Nikema Williams, is expected to keep the heavily Democratic district without much opposition.

When Lewis achieved his upset win over Bond, the AJC  was at the height of its strength. Over the years, declining circulation and ad revenue has decimated the number of reporters and editors. Galloway and a few other veteran journalists keep bright the newspaper's historical memory.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Paul Fusco

Photos of mourners watching Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train pass by from New York City to the nation's capital on June 8, 1968 are among the most famous images of the 1960s.

But most of Paul Fusco's photographs from that sad summer day lay hidden for 30 years in the Library of Congress.

Fusco, who died July 15 at age 89 in California, was a Look magazine photographer on the funeral train, assigned to cover the burial of the assassinated senator and presidential candidate at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia.

After Kennedy's funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, his coffin was placed on the last car of a funeral train and left Penn Station for Arlington, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

When Fusco wasn't allowed inside the car where Kennedy's body lay, he turned his Leica to the thousands of mourners who turned out to watch the train on its 225-mile trip. He took around 1,800 photos of the mourners holding hand-made signs with messages like "So long, Bobby."

Look, the biweekly picture magazine that competed with Life, didn't come out until a couple of weeks after the funeral, so it used  only two of Fusco's shots, printed inside the magazine in black and white. The photos didn't receive wide currency until Robert Kennedy's nephew, John F. Kennedy Jr., printed a number of them in a special edition of his George magazine commemorating the 30th anniversary of RFK's assassination.

Books containing the photos came out in 2000 and 2008. A large selection of the photographs were displayed in 2018 at an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Along with the Kennedy funeral photos, Fusco is known for chronicling the Cesar Chavez grape strike in 1966, and photos of California's counterculture, including a famous psychedelic shot of Janis Joplin.

He left Look when the magazine folded in 1971, quickly followed by Life, and joined the photographers' collective Magnum. Later in his career, Fusco took arresting photos of the AIDS outbreak, Chernobyl victims in Belarus, and survivors of soldiers killed in the Iraq war. Much of his work gave recognition to disadvantaged communities.

While escaping the Vietnam War, Fusco served as an Army photographer in Korea, receiving a bronze medal.

Fusco's RFK photos mark a turning point in American history, when Kennedy's progressive vision that galvanized millions died with him.

The photographer remembered his amazement at the number of people lining the railroad tracks when the train left the Hudson River tunnel and entered New Jersey.

Kennedy's aides, also surprised at the huge outpouring of grief, propped Kennedy's coffin on chairs so that it could be glimpsed as it passed by. Slowed to a crawl, the train made the usual four-hour journey in eight hours.

The crowd not only mourned the young senator and brother of slain President John F. Kennedy. They also mourned America.

 

 

Jazz pianist Bill Charlap returns to performance

A New York Times article about jazz pianist Bill Charlap's return to live performing left me longing for the pre-pandemic days of open culture.

Charlap after canceling a full summer schedule decided to give a solo concert at the rustic Deer Head Inn, "the oldest continuously running jazz club in the country," according to its web site.

After initially declining to perform at the Deer Head Inn, Charlap decided to travel to the hotel in Delaware Water Gap, Penn., in the Poconos Mountains near the Appalachian Trail. The club, which has drawn a stellar list of jazz artists, boosted Charlap's career when he started out.

Charlap performed alone  and wore a mask throughout his two sets. His audience was more than six feet from the stage, and practiced social distancing. But Charlap still took a risk in returning to live performance.

John Marhese's article stirred my nostalgia for the days when we could attend concerts, plays, movies and art exhibits without fear. In that now vanished era, my wife and I saw Charlap's trio perform at the Atlanta History Center in the spring of 2019 during the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival. Earlier, we saw Charlap's wife, Renee Rosnes, play at the Village Vanguard in New York City.

We also saw one of Charlap's most notable musical partners, Tony Bennett, in concert at Atlanta Symphony Hall in February, which turned out to be our last public gathering before the covid-19 shutdown. We had been scheduled to see Wynton Marsalis and the Atlanta Opera's "Porgy and Bess."

Such public events appear more and more distant as the virus surges across the country, and the Trump administration gives little hope of controlling the outbreak. The Times also had an article about the Boston Symphony's canceling of its Tanglewood  summer concerts, a New England tradition.

Unlike in the United States, Western Europe has reopened without a resurgence of the coronavirus. Here, events like Charlap's Deer Head Inn performance appear increasingly endangered.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, John Lewis

For years, I was proud that John Lewis was our congressman.

Then our North Atlanta neighborhood was gerrymandered into the district of some Republican yokel when the GOP took control of the Georgia Legislature.

That for me marked the beginning of the country's rapid decline into the GOP's destructive rule. The unfulfilled promise of Barack Obama's presidency led to the Trump wildnerness. But the 2018 election brought Lewis' House a wave of young colleagues inspired by his courage and dedication to civil rights.

Lewis, whose radical message he wanted to deliver at the March on Washington in 1963 was toned down by Martin Luther King, never lost hope for a better America.

I encountered him one time walking down Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta and shook his hand. He was gracious and inspirational even in that brief meeting.

After his death from cancer at age 80, many other Atlantans are remembering casually meeting him, how caring he was, the warmth of his smile.

He was a brave man, a hero, never too busy to say hello.