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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Havana Noir, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. Scoops, Packs, and Clubs

Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. Earlier this week he sent me this blog along with the following introduction: Even though I study news rather than make it, last week I was invited to give a “newsmaker” luncheon talk at the National Press Club. The occasion was the club’s centennial, the video of that talk is online here. I thought the condensed version below would make a good blog.

Boy was he right!  Below Ritchie talks about the National Press Club and its place in history.

The National Press Club is celebrating its centennial, raising a question about why journalistic competitors feel compelled to band together. Founded in 1908, the club had many short-lived predecessors. The Washington Correspondents’ Club, for instance, held several dinners designed to reduce tensions between reporters and their political sources during the difficult days of Reconstruction. Such nineteenth-century press clubs failed because they let their members run up a tab at the bar (the National Press Club has never extended credit), and because they were either press clubs, founded by reporters for Washington, D.C., papers that excluded national correspondents, or correspondents’ clubs that barred the local press, indicating the animosity between them. The genius of the National Press Club was that it combined reporters for both the local and the national press.

But only men. The club left women and minorities outside the parameters of mainstream journalism. Not until 1955 did it hold a vote of its entire membership to admit Louis Lautier, a reporter for the National Negro Publishers Association. Radio news broadcasters were also treated as second-class citizens at first, being permitted to join the club only as non-voting members. Women reporters founded the Women’s National Press Club, but the separation prevented them from covering the National Press Club’s regular “newsmaker” luncheons.

In 1956, the men offered a compromise by inviting women to attend the luncheons, so long as they sat in the balcony and left as soon as the lunch was over. While the men dined below, the women shared the balcony with television cameras, hot lights, and coils of electrical wiring. Women reporters appealed to the famous guest speakers not to participate unless they could dine below with the men. Among the few to comply was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, eager to publicize an American injustice. One who failed to offer solidarity was Martin Luther King, Jr., desperate to attract national press attention to the March on Washington. Dr. King spoke to an audience segregated by gender rather than race. Economic pressures on the club, whose membership declined during the 1960s, finally persuaded the men to admit women as members in 1971. Fittingly, the club’s centennial-year president is Sylvia Smith of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

Regardless of race, gender, or media, Washington correspondents have historically been caught in a creative tension between the scoop and the pack–between professional rivalries and forces that pull the competitors together. They spend much time together outside the same closed doors, riding the same campaign trains, planes, and vans, being handed the same press releases, attending the same press conferences, cultivating the same high-placed sources. This pack journalism is counteracted by each reporter’s dream of the scoop, beating everyone else to the big story that makes a difference.

Somewhere between the scoop and the pack, the club has provided a welcome respite for the working press. Formed for reasons of camaraderie, the club has helped to shape the press corps and to define legitimate reporting. Unique among world governments, the U.S. allows reporters themselves to determine who deserves a press pass. Both the press galleries and the press clubs have guarded this prerogative jealously, and have labored diligently to decide whom to admit. Sometimes they have been too narrow in their definition and too slow to diversify. But ultimately the galleries and clubs have expanded to accommodate a more diffuse news business, one that continues to evolve with each startling technological breakthrough. The Internet will not be the last. A central institution in this transformation, the National Press Club has provided a common ground for newsmakers and news reporters. It would be hard to image the Washington press corps operating without it.

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2. Bounty

Manuel Ramos


Crookneck from the neighborhood Valdez Honor Garden, thank you, Molly; Romas from Mary, gracias; and the Little Green Devils from my back yard; photo by Flo



MARIO ACEVEDO UP FOR COLORADO BOOK AWARD
Acevedo's Nymphos of Rocky Flats (Rayo 2006) has been nominated for a Colorado Book Award in the category of Popular Fiction.

The 16th Annual Colorado Book Awards ceremony happens on October 17 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, 1050 13th Street, Denver, CO; Donald R. Seawell Grand Ballroom; 6:00 PM Reception/Silent Auction; 7:00 PM Dinner & Awards Program. Proceeds from the event benefit Colorado Humanities and Center for the Book literacy programs for adults and K-12 students including Motheread/Fatheread, Authors in the Classroom, Letters About Literature and River of Words.

Click here for more information.

Mario's third book in his Felix Gomez vampire/detective series, The Undead Kama Sutra, is scheduled for a 2008 release, and he's spreading the news that the series has been extended by Rayo for at least two more books.

CHE'S WIDOW TO PUBLISH MEMOIRS
Aleida March de la Torre, widow of Ernesto Che Guevara, has announced that her book of memories, Evocaciones, will be published in March 2008. Guevara's fellow guerrilla fighter and collaborator during the liberation campaign in Las Villas (1958), said that she hopes that the book will provide "answers to all questions one may ask her on such an intimate topic. " Che Guevara married March de la Torre in 1959, after his "electrifying campaign in the central provinces that gave Fulgencio Batista´s tyranny the coup de gráce."

GREAT SOUTHWEST BOOK FAIR
The Second Annual Great Southwest Book Fair is happening on Saturday, September 29 from 9 AM to 6 PM at the El Paso (Texas) Public Library and the El Paso History Museum at Cleveland Square. Writers, publishers, historians and other literature enthusiasts from across the Southwest will convene to provide an international marketplace for books and Southwestern literature. There will also be presentations by some of the areas most respected authors including Denise Chávez, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Georgina Baeza, Christine Granados, Javier O. Huerta, Elizabeth Margo, and Donna Snyder. Attendance is free and open to the public. For more information call 915-543-5466.


NEW MARTIN LIMÓN
The Wandering Ghost
Soho Crime, November

One of La Bloga's favorite authors, Martin Limón, returns with another crime fiction novel featuring military policemen George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. Here's what Publishers Weekly said about this upcoming book:

"The turbulent Korean peninsula provides the backdrop to this fine military mystery, the fifth (after 2005's The Door to Bitterness) to feature U.S. Army criminal investigation agents George Sueño and Ernie Bascom. A crack combat unit stationed near the strife-torn demilitarized zone proves strangely uncooperative when a military policewoman disappears. The missing soldier had made herself unpopular with her chain of command when she attempted to testify against two GIs who accidentally killed a Korean schoolgirl while speeding. As Sueño and Bascom dig past the obfuscation, they uncover an unsavory mix of black marketeering, sexual harassment, corruption, rape and murder, risking disgrace in their quest to find their fellow cop before it's too late. Limón, a veteran who spent 10 years stationed in the Republic of Korea, captures precisely the experience and atmosphere of the tension that exists between the American military and South Korean society, two vastly different worlds bound together only by realpolitik. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."

The Poisoned Pen bookstore gave this book a great review that finished with: "This crazy case introduces a female MP, ... Jill, and asks a question central then and now: what will result when you drop a group of young, raw recruits into a traditional, foreign culture?" Good question.

HAVANA NOIR
Edited by Achy Obejas
Akashic Books, October


Brand new stories by: Leonardo Padura, Pablo Medina, Alex Abella, Arturo Arango, Lea Aschkenas, Moises Asis, Arnaldo Correa, Mabel Cuesta, Paquito D'Rivera, Yohamna Depestre, Michel Encinosa Fu, Mylene Fernandez Pintado, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Miguel Mejides, Achy Obejas, Oscar Ortiz, Ena Lucia Portela, Mariela Varona Roque, and Yoss.

Here's what Akashic says about its latest collection in its acclaimed and award-winning "noir" series:

"To most outsiders, Havana is a tropical sin city: a Roman ruin of sex and noise, a parallel universe familiar but exotic, and embargoed enough to serve as a release valve for whatever desire or pulse has been repressed or denied. Habaneros know that this is neither new -- long before Havana collapsed during the Revolution's Special Period, all the way back to colonial times, it had already been the destination of choice for foreigners who wanted to indulge in what was otherwise forbidden to them -- nor particularly true.

"In the real Havana -- the lawless Havana that never appears in the postcards or tourist guides -- the concept of sin has been banished by the urgency of need. And need -- aching and hungry -- inevitably turns the human heart darker, feral, and criminal. In this Havana, crime, though officially vanquished by revolutionary decree, is both wistfully quotidian and personally vicious.

"In the stories of Havana Noir current and former residents of the city -- some international sensations such as Leonardo Padura, others exciting new voices like Yohamna Despestre -- uncover crimes of violence and loveless sex, of mental cruelty and greed, of self-preservation and collective hysteria.

"Achy Obejas is the award-winning author of Days of Awe, Memory Mambo, and We Came all the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in dozens of anthologies. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Tribune, she was part of the 2001 investigative team that earned a Pulitzer Prize for the series, "Gateway to Gridlock." Currently, she is the Sor Juana Writer-in-Residence at DePaul University in Chicago. She was born in Havana."

NEW THRILLER FROM R.J. PINEIRO
Spyware
Forge, November

R.J. Pineiro, author of more than a dozen novels, has a new one hitting the shelves in November.

The publisher says: "Mac Savage, a former CIA officer; Marie Kovacs, a former nanotechnology scientist turned missionary; and Kate Chavez, a Texas Ranger investigating a murder, join forces to unravel a global conspiracy that starts with the diamond industry and ends with a plan to eliminate the human race." How can you not want to read this book after that intro?

Pineiro, who resides in Austin, was born in Havana in 1961. He has quite a bio, that you can read here.



Later.

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