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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.

US 50 dollar bill obverse, series 2004

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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Havel and Me

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

I met Vaclav Havel once, while he was president of Czechoslovakia. We were in a castle.

Oh, and I avoided shaking hands with him.

Now, he’s dead. Not that I’d ever had a chance to renew the, uh, acquaintance.

Ben Pollock after a Czech meal 09-1992

Ben Pollock, after a meal in Prague, September 1992

In September 1992, I was in Europe for a traveling journalism seminar, whose lead sponsor was New York University. There were around a dozen of us. For nine days we traveled from London to Bonn to Prague and Bratislava, and Warsaw and Lodz. Some were wire editors, compiling international and national wire service material for our media outlets. This set included me, international editor (as my boss called the wire job) for Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, folks from the Austin paper and one of the Seattle papers, The Christian Science Monitor and a producer for ABC News. The others were reporters and columnists, such as from NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

I would have felt way out of my league, but all of these men and women were friendly, helpful and enjoyed teasing me about the chances that Gov. Bill Clinton could be elected president that November.

The intent of the seminar was helping us understand the new democracies of Eastern Europe, especially as they were in the midst of forming openly elected legislatures, democratically chosen leaders and, importantly, re-creating the agencies that maintain roads, enforce laws, run the military and smooth out trade disputes (etc.), from the rigidity and corruption of communist bureaucracies to fairer, more efficient models.

Meeting elected officials, many of whom were former freedom fighters, was fascinating. Listening to economists explaining how to correct decades of government ineptitude got old. But I took notes and photos, and my five-piece analysis (with three pictures) comprised 1 1/2 pages of the Sunday Perspective (opinion) section on Oct. 18, 1992. It even got a 1A tease box.

Outside of travel guides, all I managed in researching before the trip was Havel’s Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990. These were dense, closely argued essays; Vaclav Havel was known as a cutting edge playwright, but his nonfiction was the key to his leadership.

Stirin Castle 09-1992

U.S. journalists heading into Stirin Castle outside Prague, Sept. 1992. Ben Pollock photo.

On the second day of the Prague leg, we boarded a couple of vans for Stirin Castle. Maybe it was a half-hour drive. The building, a large old structure but probably rather small for a castle, housed the Institute for East-West Studies. (Nothing online about the institute now, and the castle seems to be a hotel).

We were told by the NYU staff who ran the program that we would watch but not participate in a symposium this institute was hosting. Havel was invited, but it was not known if he’d make it.

We were ushered into a large room with an open rectangle of banquet tables. The session already had begun. We sat in chairs lined up against a wall. At the center of the front table sat Havel, talking and gesturing. With a translator, we listened and took notes.

The program ended in an hour or two, and we filed out into a hallway. The main NYU guy came out, with news. Havel would come see us American journalists in the hall for two minutes (Continued)

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Occupied or Vacant, Engaged or Vacant

Thursday, December 1, 2011

An excerpt of this long-form column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the December 2011 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
Captain Renault: [aloud] Everybody out at once!”
– Casablanca (1942)

A correction has been noted. It is explained below the column.

The year 2011 has been so complex we may not figure it out until 2013. Think of it, from taking out Osama bin Laden to the Occupy movement, Japan’s tsunami to Herman Cain. The only stable part of American life was the economy, dour every month. The mass media has had another year of bumpy transition; standout events in journalism prove the exception in this year by being trivial, unless you were directly affected, then please accept my good wishes.

Air sickness bag from the old Frontier Airlines that otherwise could be placed on your plane seat to reserve it.

"The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said, without even looking round." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

The momentary loss of Jim Romenesko writing a well-regarded blog on news media news is the latest example of corporate journalism losing its way. Or it’s another inconsequential demonstration of panic in the halls of media. The Occupy movement of good intentions has set camp in executive suites, newsrooms and home offices.

On Nov. 10, Julie Moos (director of Poynter Online and Poynter Publications at journalism’s Poynter Institute at St. Petersburg, Fla.) wrote that Romenesko (director of an eponymous aggegator blog hosted by poynter.org) was engaged in a questionable journalistic practice, “incomplete attribution.”

Moos and Romenesko are not household names, (Continued)

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A Day at the Museum

Friday, November 18, 2011

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — Crystal Britches was speechless, standing in the setting sun on a recent afternoon in a parking lot in Bentonville, Ark.

“She did it. My old BFF really pulled it off,” Ms. Britches said of her periodic Best Friend Forever Alice. I, her ghost-publicist Noah Vale, had driven Crystal from her Fayetteville homestead north to see Raveenia, the Ozark Museum of Other People’s Art (o’MOPA) earlier this week. While we attended its dedication on the Bentonville Square Friday, 11-11-11, we avoided the site itself on the First Day as well as the exclusive previews in the days before that, to not detract from Alice’s Warholian moment.

“Noah, we’ve just spent nearly five hours in Raveenia. People want to hear my impressions, but I’m no expert on architecture. I hit museums whenever I can, but am not capital-C art Critic. You’re good with words, you do it. That’s why I hired you.”

“I’ll try; we certainly talked enough walking around,” Noah said. “But Crystal, I’m not trained in art or architecture. But this will work out, because if I attribute my hick thoughts to myself, you’ll look brilliant.”

“Thank you, Mr. Vale,’” said the plastic-pantsed philanthropist. On Sunday the 13th, the museum was surprisingly full of people from Little Rock, 216 miles away. Being the provincial capital, in several definitions, Ms. Britches drew stares from the preppy Rockers at her vinyl leggings covering loose khaki shorts, fairly modest for a still-trim woman in shall we call it late middle age. A brisk fall day, on top she wore a red Razorback hoodie.

“Here we go,” I said. I’ll throw together this commentary and if you sign off on it, we’ll have it posted on the blog Brick. She agreed.

A Moat Runs Through the Castle

Alice set up a series of connected buildings, forming a square with a jointed tail. That’s more or less six extant structures, Rather, architect Moishe Zaftig figured that out. Two of the structures, parallel to one another are built over a dammed creek so they’re also pedestrian spans. With air conditioning, (Continued)

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Crotchety Old Ppl

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

Reflections on the Paul Simon concert at Kansas City’s Midland Theater on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2011

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When a conversation turns to popular music, sometimes one is lectured on who has the definitive voice of the generation. Most of the time one learns it’s Bob Dylan. A dissenter will insist on Bruce Springsteen. No pontificator, interestingly, ever calls Paul McCartney our singular icon, despite his phenomenal musical strengths.

My choice for voice of our era is Paul Simon, for the poetry and incisiveness of the lyrics, the haunting or danceable melodies, that few of his songs become dated. Talented or mediocre musicians can cover many of Mr. Simon’s songs and sound pretty good, that’s part of the definition.

Sure, I admire Bob Dylan — and have seen him perform once, Little Rock mid-1990s (with Trout Fishing in America opening for him) — but his list of classics is far shorter. And what’s he done lately? Longevity may not be fair. One or two or a half-dozen tunes that everyone knows can define a musical genius — Woody Guthrie or Yip Harburg, say.

In the first full year of the second decade of the 21st century, 70-year-old Paul Simon has released So Beautiful or So What. He is touring to promote the album, and one week ago he played at Kansas City’s Midland theater. My Beloved bought us tickets; it was my birthday weekend.

“Rewrite” is my favorite off the CD, the narrative (fictional) lament of a Vietnam-era veteran who believes he has a book in him. He labors at a car wash, at night he writes, and revises, his novel. “I’m gonna change the ending / Gonna throw away my title / … All the time I’m spending / Is just for working on my rewrite, that’s right / I’m gonna turn it into cash.” This is a dancing song. (Want to be a great songwriter? Quit writing about yourself and talk through characters.)

The title track: “Ain’t it strange the way we’re ignorant / How we seek out bad advice / How we jigger it and figure it / Mistaking value for the price / And play a game with time and love / Like pair of rolling dice.” A haunting song.

Fortunately, he played both last Tuesday. He skipped my third favorite, the multigenre and partly spoken “Waiting for Christmas Day.” (Lyrics for all tracks can be found here.) But if he performed the whole album he’d have less time in his nearly two-hour show for those classics.

“So beautiful …” He played the main oldies: “Kodachrome” and “Mother and Child Reunion” from the second decade (the duo Simon & Garfunkel being more or less the first decade), “Diamonds in the Soles of Her Shoes” and “Graceland” (Continued)

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Bentonville Picture Show

Friday, November 11, 2011

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — What a lovely day for a dedication. This is free-range journalist Noah Vale, preparing a live blog for my client Crystal Britches.

We are here for the opening of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, although Ms. Britches prefers calling it the Raveenia Museum, the Ozark Museum of Other People’s Art (o’MOPA), in Bentonville, Ark.

Below begins the live blog. She’ll dictate, and I’ll write. Readers unfamiliar with Crystal Britches should understand she is a philanthropist “of a certain age” living in Fayetteville. Ark. Like her friend since childhood Alice Walton (well, they’re close confidantes some years and other periods, well …), Ms. Britches prefers behind-the-scenes acts of charity, manipulation and activism — whatever it takes for the Ozarks to realize its potential without compromise. “Which is a total contradiction!” she says laughing raucously. I should note the mid-day — nearing 60 degrees — is perfect for Crystal’s plastic pants over loose khaki shorts, the better to show off her older but still firm showgirl legs.

Friday, Nov. 11, 2011. Posts by Crystal Britches, straight chrono order

10:47 a.m. Museum creator Alice Walton — you go, girl! — and her architect Moshe Safdie walk to the front row from the street to the right. Who are those other dignitaries, Noah? Oh, Mayor Bob McCaslin with Arkansas Secretary of State Dustin McDaniel. What, Gov. Mike Beebe blew Alice off?

Cool Wrist Bands at Crystal Bridges dedication 11-11-11Looking around: This is a portable but rather large stage, with metal roof and also shade mesh hanging on the back and rear sides. The sound quality is top notch. As it should be. To the audience’s left is a portable Jumbotron, although it may be another brand.

The official Crystal Bridges promotion tent has stacks of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s 32-page supplement from Nov. 6, “Crystal Bridges: An American Spirit.” As well as commemorative rubber wristbands, museum brochures, special regional magazines and a pamphlet from a local bed & breakfast. Why that particular B&B?

The security is everywhere — city police, Wal-Mart badged security, unlabeled but uniformed guards. (Continued)

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Economical Greek Yogurt, No Way? Whey.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

Though we who note the news have known about the Greek economic crisis for quite some time, it seems to have come to a head here in the first week of November. Maybe if Greece exported more of that sunny yogurt, the budget would teeter back a bit.

But in checking stores here I saw Greek yogurt is made in America. For several months, this dairy treat has been all over the media. Then I checked the Internet and cookbooks in the Shady Hill manse library. Greek yogurt actually has been marketed in America for years.

Mainly, Greek yogurt turns out to be nothing special. Greek yogurt is any ol’ yogurt with the whey removed.

Whey?

Whey is a somewhat clear liquid thrown off when milk is cultured — to make cheeses and yogurt. Whey has vitamins, minerals and a fair bit of dairy protein. But by draining or squeezing it out, the remaining cultured (i.e., fermented or inoculated with microbes) milky goo gets even thicker.

When I make a quart of yogurt there’s maybe a quarter or half inch of whey resting above the white good stuff. Like the Dannon or Yoplait factories, I stir the whey back in. Yes, making your own yogurt is pretty easy, and without a special electric appliance.

Yes, yogurt can be had for roughly the price of milk.

  • 4 cups of any kind of milk
  • 1/2 cup instant nonfat dry milk (optional, (Continued)
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Where’s the Sin in Synchronicity?

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the November 2011 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

“How can there be any sin in sincere?
“Where is the good in goodbye?”
– “Sincere” by Meredith Willson in The Music Man

It may be yet another way of stalling the labor of writing, but I’m inspired when I chance upon quotes from writers. If you read a lot, you can find good advice for the project at hand — from unexpected sources.

Make no mistake: When I’m avoiding the task at hand, I’m not hunting for “affirmations,” those pithy quotes to boost confidence and to remind you to be grateful. Even the good ones seem shallow as printed in little books and cards at the cashier’s counter.

I’m not one to tape sentences of empowerment on the medicine cabinet mirror. The less I look in a mirror the broader my writing is. Plus I’m not reminded how fast the gray hairs are coming in.

For instance, a musician friend posted a link on Facebook to a YouTube video, “Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories.” It’s serious, but the old fellow could’ve done stand-up, with his comic timing. It had little to inspire me as a columnist/blogger/essayist, except for reminding of his fifth rule of writing, “Start as close to the end as possible.” You can find the Vonnegut rules here.

My problem when writing out an anecdote (similar to the fictional story, maybe too similar), is the same as when speaking it: How to keep the audience’s interest. My tendency is to mention any detail the listener might need. Zzzz. My wife, in contrast, tends to race to avoid boring the person to the point of improvising details that fit rather than including possibly tedious facts.

As a journalist, I have found her way is not rare, though it transfers risk to the reporter.

Starting “close to the end” easily rouses curiosity in the reader. Of course, the tale teller later back-fills (Continued)

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Litmus Flavored Columns

Saturday, October 1, 2011

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the October 2011 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Your president is looking out for your welfare. Thank me later.

Tracy Beckerman, chairman of the Social Media Committee, although an NSNC member for several years, still is trying to figure us out.

Just before Labor Day, the new board member e-mailed me: “I would like to have a better understanding of the place bloggers have in the NSNC and what distinctions we are making, if any, in terms of their roles in the organization. I get that there is some cross pollination between blogs and columns, but I think it is a slippery slope and there needs to be a way to differentiate between the personal blogs and the professional ones. Let me know if this is something you guys have already sorted out.”

We have.

“I don’t think bloggers have a different position whatsoever in NSNC. No distinction is made,” I wrote, noting we’ve had online columns as a contest category since 2000. Plus, here is Article III, Paragraph 3 of our by-laws:

“Regular Members shall be columnists in the United States and other countries, to include those employed by newspapers and other periodicals; those who are freelance, self-syndicated or otherwise independent writers; writers whose work is published on the Internet in any medium as online columns or journalism-oriented Web logs (blogs); and writers actively aspiring to be columnists.”

Tracy wasn’t quite satisfied with this answer and replied:

“I wondered about the blogger question for several reasons:

“A) I know a lot of bloggers from having attended blog conferences, and most of them had no knowledge of the NSNC. I informed them that they were able to join but was not sure if there were any restrictions based on the nature of their blogs.

“B) Having met so many bloggers and later having visited their blogs, I was stunned by the lack of grammatical attention paid to the writing. Although I know that many of these are meant as personal blogs, we are a professional organization and to that end, I thought there would be some criteria made, or some standards to be upheld for works that are published. I don’t know. Maybe I’m a grammar snob. I guess that would be a hard policy to create and enforce. The blog that put me over the top was (Continued)

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