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Monthly Archives: March 2008

Turnips to Squeeze

Monday, March 31, 2008

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 [...]

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Scary Comics Not a Contradiction

Sunday, March 30, 2008

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 [...]

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What Honesty Comes To

Friday, March 21, 2008

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 [...]

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Famous Columnist School

Friday, March 14, 2008

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 [...]

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Club with No Members

Thursday, March 13, 2008

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 [...]

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Georgie Porgie, Porgy and Bess

Sunday, March 2, 2008

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 [...]

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