Brick

Fare Thee Well Address

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the May 2012 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Dear Larry,

[NSNC Vice President Laurence D. Cohen is on the slate of nominees for the May 6 election, for 2012-14 president.]

This, the columnists presidency, has been a humbling experience. I’ve had plenty of humbling experiences in my life, so I should know.

When you were nominated for vice president, you asked me for tips so I suggested you consider U.S. vice presidents such as Alben Barkley and Charles W. Fairbanks.

Now I offer:

Hoist your opinions as the leader’s consideration counts.
Avoid saying anything, it’ll upset someone.

The board is a single entity, proved by many unanimous votes.
The board is a hydra of personalities, proved by many flurries of emails.

The NSNC is trending down like the rest of the print media.
The NSNC remains solvent with a consistent number of members, if you weigh 15 years not the last six.

While I have held several mid-level newsroom management jobs, a nonprofit’s presidency proved surprisingly different.

In business, workers accept pay in return for labor. That doesn’t mean the boss has much direct authority — that’s why bookstores have dozens of shelves of advice. In nonprofits, people offer to be officers and other positions for no or modest remuneration, so a president has little clout.

Persuasion is overrated. (Continued)

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Buy Low Sell High

Sunday, April 1, 2012

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the April 2012 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists

It must have been this time of year in 1999, I was on the phone with my mom about soon flying to Louisville, Ky., for that year’s NSNC conference.

“You go there and ‘network’ your heart out. That’s what they call it now, right? Chat people up and see if any of them will hire you.”

“Mom, that’s not how it works.”

“You always say that. Get over your shyness.”

“No, Mom. They’re all people like me, new columnists or seasoned columnists. None of them do hiring.”

“Maybe they can put in a good word for you.”

This was to be my second conference. I had a vision of Mike Leonard. We met at the 1991 conference and in early 1992 I interviewed at his newspaper in Bloomington, when my then-fiance was considering a master’s at Indiana University in the fall. We talked copy editing and reporting jobs. I liked the editors, but my beloved decided to go to grad school in a few years, and elsewhere.

“Look at your paper, Mom. Most dailies already have their columnists settled, and they tend not to leave plum jobs like that. Then I’m just a jerk to these great people.”

“I’m sure you know best.”

We repeated that conversation every spring until she passed in 2004.

So my advice to new and seasoned conference goers?

Don’t network, party.

I don’t think I’m tempering that when I elaborate: Party like a nerd, party like a geek, party like a writer: Observe, take lots of notes, get to know interesting people in the same or similar professions, share meals, hang out afterward in the hospitality suite.

If you are by nature a traveler you’ll love how every year the NSNC ends up in a new place, and usually not a conventional convention site. (Continued)

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The Last Irish Soda Bread Recipe

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Irish Soda Bread. The oven rise partially closed the knife cuts. Rustic looks awesome. Ben Pollock photo

In Food Section World, this long-evolved Irish Soda Bread recipe would be published before St. Patrick’s Day. But in Brick World, I bake a loaf on St. Paddy’s, relying on collected recipes and sometimes a new one that pops up. Brick could schedule the recipe for March 16, 2013, but why wait?

Every newspaper every year notes that the original of this quick bread (referring to baking soda and/or powder, not yeast) was unsweetened, essentially a round-loaf whole-wheat version of hardtack. These articles then decry the Americanized eggy sugary raisiny white-flour version. The authors all conclude with their semiauthentic, palateable compromises.

The following is my amalgamation of some of the compromises. (Continued)

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Fourth and Goal

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Completing the book list of 2011 shouldn’t be taxing. Its first entry after all took in the first three quarters. So where are we? Or to quote independent Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate James Stockdale (it IS a presidential year, after all), in a televised debate’s opening statement: “Who am I? Why am I here?” (which in context was a smart opening gambit, but misconstrued by pundits and comics).

With that, apologies for this being the Ides of March 2012. I had the draft, just hadn’t uploaded it. At the end of this month I should have my book report for this year’s first quarter. Or let it ride; we’ll see.

2011, Mid-September On

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, a humor novel but it got boring somehow, did not finish. In the following months I kept seeing Lipsyte’s name so I got the book from the library again. Same opinion. Brick is tough on comic novels, and wimpy protagonists have gotten way too popular.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King, collection of four “long stories.” I usually stick with lesser King, but there I was on Page 38 into the first novella, “1922,” and it was just a dysfunctional family taken to a bloody extreme. I wasn’t engrossed, just grossed.

House of Holes by Nicholas Baker. If there’s literary porn and magic realism then this must be literary magic porn. It is clever, and it should be ashamed of itself, but it’s not. Oh, it’s sexual, not erotic.

October 2011

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity edited by Michael Lewis, book on CD. A collection of articles about U.S. economic disasters since the 1980s. It was like listening to All Things Considered’s greatest hits. But the collection came out in mid-2008, thus kind-of before the current recession. Yes our Good Depression has old roots, explained here, but it’s more argument than fact.

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta. WTF about rock musician secondary characters? (Continued)

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OCD TT

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Mani languidly protecting 5 toys. The symmetric configuration is entirely his.

Mani guards 5 toys. The symmetric configuration is entirely his. Fifth is a plush tug toy parallel to the Nylabone behind his head. Black mass in upper left is Hopper.

I am not making this up. Nor did I touch the dog or his possessions. He did this.

Our 4-year Tibetan terrier Mani, whom we’ve had three years, loves Hopper, the stray young adult TT we adopted last Thanksgiving week. Inseparable. They can quarrel over toys, though.

Mani is the alpha although Hopper has 10 pounds on him (25 compared to 35). Mani keeps toys even when not playing with them. Hopper always lets him win. (They respect one another’s food, too). Once we coalesced into the larger pack, within a month, all that turned old news by now.

What is extraordinary is how Mani arranged the booty last night while the humans watched Stewart-Colbert. Geometric. Three Nylabones at his paws, a fourth behind his head and parallel to his body and lying on part of a plush tug toy, parallel to the fourth bone.

We were told early on that Tibetan terriers tend to be tidy. This wasn’t, however, anything we’d noticed before. We like the breed for its medium size and moderate energy and relatively hypoallergenic coat. Otherwise both boys tend to leave things where they dropped them, like their people.

Mani could have an artistic sense of symmetry.

My third thought last night was the dog has developed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, an otherwise human psychosis. OCD TT.

My second thought when I looked down from the sofa was Mani has seen the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know the scene, early in the movie, the apes receive an evolutionary (or counter-evolutionary) leap in wisdom, discovering tools, (for hunting, for food, for weapons). Our TT Mani, we better watch him, make sure those dew claws don’t develop into opposable thumbs!

My first thought? Grab the camera.

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Heisenberg? Not Bad, Heisen You?

Thursday, March 1, 2012

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the March 2012 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

With certainty, the renown physicist Garrison Keillor noted in his radio spot The Writer’s Almanac:

On this date [Feb. 23] in 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg first described his Uncertainty Principle in a letter. In a nutshell, the Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely we can determine a particle’s momentum, the less information we have about its position, and vice versa. …”

As social Darwinism is an informal, psychological interpretation of biological Darwinism, there seems to be a social Heisenberg, especially for writers.

Werner Heisenberg

(Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg had seven children, and he enjoyed playing the piano and mountaineering, Wikipedia tells us. As people of his time saw these activities as mutually exclusive, we can see how he came up with his principle.)

The principle’s scientific application, as I understood from school, is if for example a researcher takes stock of an electron as a particle it looks like a particle and if the electron is sized up with wave calipers then it acts as a wave.

Nothing’s original, but what I call Social Uncertainty Principle first came up in an early journalism job.

In about 1982 I covered a master class of guitarist Lee Ritenour at Texas’ Irving High School with notebook and camera. The assignment became a photo page with five or six shots and cutlines. I’m still proud of it, because I am not much of a shooter yet this was pretty good. But I came out of that afternoon jarred by how little music I heard while working.

I realized I had precisely observed a news event, even told the world (OK, a few thousand readers), yet I missed the joy of the music. Labeling it Uncertainty Principle gave me a warning I’ve tried to remember since.

Is There a Column in It?

Watching a presidential debate as a concerned American, even as a well-informed voter, is a casual experience compared to watching Republican throw-downs while figuring out what to write — what’s the opinion, how should it be cast and defended, and how to make it different from those of other columnists.

This is true for nonpolitical columns. When misadventure falls to the writer or a family member, the writer — reacting to the situation or right after — will be casting about for material: Is this an anecdote or just another blood pressure spike? (Continued)

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Who’d've-Thunks

Monday, February 13, 2012

I knew what to expect of The Artist, a “silent” film, meaning no talking, though it did have sound effects and music (and beforehand, ironically, the loudest-volume trailers since those running with Avatar).

Still, the teenage box office cashier warned My Beloved and me, while giving me $7 change for a twenty, “You know, right, there’s no talking in this one, don’t you? And it’s black-and-white. I’m supposed to tell you that.” The reminder was an order by her management, who’d heard the reports of movie goes demanding refunds over the lack of dialogue.

She did not know if anything like that had happened at the Malco Razorback in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

About two-thirds of the way through The Artist, only 100 minutes long, I saw a youngish man and a youngish woman walk out of the movie (they weren’t together). I wanted to hiss, “Punks! Does grabbing that half-hour mean that much to you, compared to junk I know you sit through?”

I liked The Artist a lot. Liked Tree of Life a lot. Enthralled by Hugo. There was The Descendants, liked that a lot, too. These are among the current Oscar Best Picture nominees that I saw.

MB and I went to these movies on the basis of critical acclaim. Hitting the parking lot, before we starting talking them through, I’d wonder each time, is this one Best Picture quality by my lights?

What qualifies as a great movie for me? I treasure quality. But that translates to competence — if every piece of the movie — script, direction, acting, appropriate music, appropriate effects — is spot-on, well, isn’t that their job?

Superlative for me means that the movie has had a profound impact on me. Two standards: First, it expanded my outlook or philosophy. The second standard is lower but still can make a movie great: Do certain scenes or even images meld into my mind immediately or later?

Let’s call those Who’d've-thunk? moments. Great movies like Sophie’s Choice and Apocalypse Now have maybe 10 of those moments each, minimum. Those two movies also hit my upper standard as well, outlook-changing / personal philosophy enhancing. But the lesser movie Cotton Club has enough of Who’d've-thunks to make my Great Movie list (among others: its Gwynne-Hoskins watch scene and Gregory Hines gun-riddled (Continued)

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My Friend Jeff Zaslow

Saturday, February 11, 2012

When you’re middle-aged, what the hell is a friend, anyway? Some of my favorite people I see for one long weekend every year, a conference. In between there will be a handful of emails and, these days, rather more frequently, single-sentence repartee on Facebook. I often have met their spouses, briefly, but damn if I know the names or interests of their children or if their parents are still alive.

Here in the home town, I do know those details of a good many people. They’re people my wife and I socialize with. Spend time with them no less than monthly. We’ve eaten in one another’s homes. We’ve attended the funerals of their loved ones and they mine.

Yet, I am uncomfortable calling members of either group good friends. I don’t know the definition anymore.

The image of friend that I cannot shake is the childhood one.

Those were close friends, you know nearly every thing about them and they you. I made those kinds of friends through college, but just for a few years afterward. (The best thing about Facebook, that would not have happened any other way — annual Christmas cards? You’ve got to be kidding — is reconnecting with those early friends.)

In terms of hours together and personal details shared — few — technically my conference friends are acquaintances. It also means that nobody bar one is a best friend. My Beloved is the sole owner of that title. But that insults all of us. These people that I know and who know me, either across town or across several states, well, we enjoy one another’s company immensely. So we must be friends. Even if we have to identify ourselves when phoning.

Columnist Jeff Zaslow (right) and professor Randy Pausch

I had a comfortable familiarity with Jeff Zaslow. I last saw him in June 2011 at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ conference, this time in Detroit. He lived near the city but he could spare the weekend barely a half-day, due to a book deadline. His reporting and writing career exploded with the success of The Last Lecture, the first of several memoir-ish books where he sat second chair to the big name. This opportunity allowed him to solo in book-length non-fiction projects, such as The Girls from Ames.

What did we talk about? I was helping run the conference, so we talked about scheduling and other logistics, but full of quips and winks.

Here’s the thing. We talked like friends.

We talked exactly like we work in the same newsroom and only last saw one another just before lunch (Continued)

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No Taking Ulysses for Granted

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the February 2012 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Spring — OK, this is winter but I’m an optimist — is busy-time for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

• We’re halfway through gathering entries for the annual Column Contest. Have you sent yours in? Bloggers: You can’t win if you don’t enter. Like previous years, online columns have two of the six categories. Newspaper is a proud part of our name, but newspapers these days take several formats. For the cost of two large supreme pizzas, you have a chance to be judged with your peers. If you’re one of the three finalists or, dare to hope, the winner, you earn bragging rights. Deadline is March 1, so there’s not much time.

Tell you what: For 2012, we’ll throw in an extra day to get your copy in: Feb. 29.

• Plans for the annual Columnists Conference are firming (detailed elsewhere in the newsletter). Like Easter and Passover, the conference is “early” this year, May 3-6.

For the first time in a spell, we’re convening in the South, Macon, Ga. Merle Haggard just left Macon the other day, feeling better than when the music legend arrived.

Expect to learn practical and current tips to improve your writing and improve the marketing of your work. Expect the informality and hijinks that other journalism and writing groups only wish they had.

He couldn't take any with him, no bill buried in Grant's Tomb.

• Underlying these is a call to join the NSNC. Annual membership is $50. That earns you discounts to the conference, $50 off registration for members ($100 off for nonmembers, though deducting the $50 for dues leaves …), and the contest, where the $45 fee is cut to $25. The contest fee is just 20 bucks’ different, almost half. That could add up if you enter in several categories. We allow that.

If you publish in different formats and styles, you can, say, enter three columns in a print category and three others as online works (that never were published in ink), as long as they’re all different columns. If you’re a broad-range scribe you might enter three serious pieces in General Interest and three funny ones in Humor (read the rules carefully). Is the NSNC treasury getting more cash from you? Sure, but you ARE upping the odds (Continued)

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Know When to Folder

Sunday, January 1, 2012

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the January 2012 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Who among us still owns a typewriter?

My Smith-Corona manual portable that saw me through high school and college is in the attic, but it works. On a desk for addressing envelopes is a bulky Royal office manual. I bought it when the Arkansas newspaper for which I interned in 1979 had been using computers for a year and saw there was no going back.

Every once in a while I love to hear the clacking and bell, to hit keys instead of tapping them. It’s inefficient to write a whole column on a typewriter then keyboard it into a laptop, unless it’s a project that needs a hard revision. Then the act of writing it all again leads to discovery of problems.

The last use for my typewriter has been developing column ideas, drawing them out, seeing if there’s anything to those “hmm notes” I discussed in the May 2011 e-Columnist (and blogged about in 2005 and less directly last year). My system probably is not original (what is?), but its source is forgotten.

Three Folders

Hmm notes are a few words jotted on the index card or smartphone you keep in your pocket to grab snippets of ideas or conversation so you don’t chance forgetting them.

When personal computing was new and cumbersome more often than not, I kept three manila folders handy. They were labeled Short, Medium and Long.

That card could be dropped in the Short folder, but it worked better to type out the hmm note on a clean sheet of paper, always adding the date. The typing could lead me to pulling out more of what I was thinking at the time. Just a paragraph. Sometimes, I was drawn to tossing it in the trash.

Every so often, (Continued)

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Fare Thee Well Address

Buy Low Sell High

The Last Irish Soda Bread Recipe