Monthly Archives: March 2008

Turnips to Squeeze

Things are tough all over so what am I doing, about to crit­i­cize non-profits I favor? The endeav­ors — lit­er­a­ture, fine art, seri­ous music — are the sorts of things that keep me rooted here, but some of their staff mem­bers could use some free advice, for what it’s worth. 1. The lit­er­ary bimonthly Oxford Amer­i­can, …

Monday, March 31, 2008 – 11:34 am | By Ben | Posted in Body, Home, Street | Tagged | Comments (1)

Scary Comics Not a Contradiction

Copy­right 2008 Ben S. Pol­lock Book report: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed Amer­ica by David Hajdu When I saw this title online I had a flash­back. In an early pri­mary school year (the early 1960s) Mrs. Fried­man gave me for my birth­day a sub­scrip­tion to a Dis­ney comic book. …

Sunday, March 30, 2008 – 11:50 am | By Ben | Posted in Mr. Boo Klist | Comments Off

What Honesty Comes To

Copy­right 2008 Ben S. Pol­lock In the last cou­ple of weeks, Amer­i­can pol­i­tics took a big turn — all of it, from national to state to local. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., gave a speech to explain how he has devoted his life to act­ing on inclu­sive feel­ings of love and har­mony while fol­low­ing the min­istry …

Friday, March 21, 2008 – 11:26 am | By Ben | Posted in Body, Home, Street | Comments (1)

Famous Columnist School

Book report: The Art of Col­umn Writ­ing: Insider Secrets from Art Buch­wald, Dave Barry Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton, Pete Hamill and Other Great Colum­nists, by Suzette Mar­tinez Stan­dring The review­ing trade has a law that a critic doesn’t write up works cre­ated by friends. It’s a group of laws, actu­ally. When a periodical’s staffer or reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor …

Friday, March 14, 2008 – 11:42 am | By Ben | Posted in Mr. Boo Klist | Tagged | Comments Off

Club with No Members

Copy­right 2008 Ben S. Pol­lock My main club — only because inclu­sion means adher­ence to its rules before and beyond any oth­ers — is the Jour­nal­ist Club. The name for the rules col­lec­tively is Con­flict of Inter­est. Being an eth­i­cal per­son from early child­hood, even teach­ing a semes­ter of jour­nal­ism ethics to UA under­grads, demon­strates …

Thursday, March 13, 2008 – 11:47 am | By Ben | Posted in The Course of Words | Comments Off

Georgie Porgie, Porgy and Bess

The Democrat-Gazette pub­lished today my review of What Orwell Didn’t Know: Pro­pa­ganda and the New Face of Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics, Andras Szanto, edi­tor. I was so excited by this book, even though it was dis­ap­point­ing, that I wrote three Bricks refer­ring to George Orwell. Two of them were on rev­e­la­tions about today from his 1949 novel …

Sunday, March 2, 2008 – 11:09 am | By Ben | Posted in Mr. Boo Klist, The Course of Words | Comments Off