Brick

Ed Grisamore accept­ing Will Rogers Human­i­tar­ian Award at Oliver Win­ery, Ind. Photo by Christy Pollock

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Fri­day, July 9, 2010 — “Get Schooled” was the colum­nists’ theme this year, our con­fer­ence hosted at a uni­ver­sity for the first time, Indi­ana. Appro­pri­ately, our infor­mal wel­come Thurs­day night was at one of the town’s old­est col­lege hang-outs, Nick’s Pub.

The meat of a con­fer­ence like this is made up of lec­tures and panel dis­cus­sions, and this meet was one of the most abstract held by the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Colum­nists. A few peo­ple were dis­ap­pointed and I could see what they meant, but most loved it. Rus­sell Frank of Penn State called it mind-expanding. For the first time, My Beloved attended nearly every ses­sion, because the sched­ule looked promis­ing and it ful­filled that.

What was it? First, what it was not. There were nei­ther one-hour how-to’s on writ­ing and pub­lish­ing or state-of-the-business/craft analy­ses, which are our norm. Bloomington’s Mike and Mardi Leonard instead found peo­ple to talk about cre­ativ­ity itself, with a cou­ple of insight­ful tangents.

This and the next Brick are on the long side, but they’re not com­plete. More than ever this year, reportage and com­ment can be found at a spe­cial page at Columnists.com. The page is being updated as new blogs and columns come in, and will be archived indef­i­nitely. It’s not just that every con­feree got some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the next fel­low from the pre­sen­ta­tions, but also that the writ­ing is fine.

• • •

Lead­ing up to the con­fer­ence every year, one pro­gram whets my appetite. This time it was “Choos­ing the Right Words,” with three pub­lished nov­el­ists who are for­mer reporters or columnists.

Scott Rus­sell Sanders, a nov­el­ist but mainly a mem­oirist. For him (and me) columns are essays: “Mon­taigne cre­ated the word essay, defined as a trial, an attempt, and it also sur­vives in the word ‘assay.’ It looks for under­stand­ing that we don’t yet have,” he said.

His­tor­i­cal nov­el­ist James Alexan­der “Jim” Thom, par­tic­i­pated with his wife in all con­fer­ence events. Thom finds a famous moment to weave fic­tional pieces through: “The his­tor­i­cal inci­dent defines where I can go in my story, its boundaries.”

“We colum­nists — and I am a for­mer colum­nist also — are the first his­to­ri­ans of any­thing that hap­pens,” Thom said. “Com­pare some­thing present with some­thing in the past. To get the reader’s atten­tion, you have to con­nect [it] with the big picture.”

The celebrity role was played by Michael Koryta, whose lat­est novel, So Cold the River, has been well reviewed this sum­mer. He cited sto­ry­telling tech­niques, the nar­ra­tive tool­box, point­ing out “the visual points of con­trast: “All this [the tools of the nov­el­ist] can be help­ful to colum­nists. Show­ing place, story and char­ac­ter in short fashion.”

“As long as the pro­tag­o­nist wants some­thing, even just a cup of cof­fee, the audi­ence will go along,” Koryta said. “A novel always starts with char­ac­ter. I want to mir­ror the inter­nal bat­tle of the char­ac­ter with the plot, which is external.”

“I’ve always want to write fic­tion,” Koryta said. “But took Hemingway’s advice to heart, about any fic­tion writer should first work for a news­pa­per, for as short a time as pos­si­ble. [My] work­ing for a small paper was espe­cially use­ful, because it was small: Not too much expo­sure. Plus close wit­ness of great writ­ers” at their craft nearby in the newsroom.”

• • •

The communications-research pre­sen­ta­tion was near and dear to the NSNC, a pre­sen­ta­tion on a con­tent analy­sis of Bill O’Reilly. Let’s put “near and dear” in quotes, that’s it. O’Reilly spoke at our Philadel­phia con­fer­ence in sum­mer 2007 and his talk was, shall we say, con­sis­tent with his cable talk show.

Two IU aca­d­e­mics, Mike Con­way and Betsi Grabe, explained their award-winning paper, which stud­ied the lan­guage O’Reilly uses on his pro­gram The Fac­tor. Grabe and Con­way believe O’Reilly employs pro­pa­ganda tools, and cited two books from the 1930s, when Fas­cism and Nazi­ism surged, with the great help of radio. In this coun­try was the peri­odic growth of iso­la­tion­ism and hate speech. The vol­umes are The Fine Art of Pro­pa­ganda: A Study of Father [Charles] Coughlin’s Speeches — edited by Alfred McClung Lee and Eliz­a­beth Bri­ant Lee,  and The Fine Art of Pro­pa­ganda by the Insti­tute for Pro­pa­ganda Analysis.

From these Con­way and Grabe told us of the Seven Pro­pa­ganda Devices: Name call­ing, glit­ter­ing gen­er­al­i­ties, trans­fer, plain folks, band­wagon, tes­ti­mo­nial and card stack­ing. Their def­i­n­i­tions are self-evident and, while I’d agree, to me it’s also an applied form of rhetoric, which debaters, lawyers and even spouses use to enhance com­mu­ni­ca­tion as well as to game it. My con­clu­sion is the schol­ars have a point, now what? O’Reilly ain’t going any­where, and there’s more where he came from. Impor­tantly, it’s noth­ing new.

• • •

Din­ner was at the nearby Oliver Win­ery, with largely organic, locally raised food from the Farm restau­rant.  The Fri­day night event was high­lighted by Ed Grisamore of the Macon, Ga., Tele­graph accept­ing the 2010 Will Rogers Award for human­i­tar­ian works by a colum­nist. Grisamore said, “Once I might have said I was lucky, and now I’d rather say I am blessed, that I always wanted to be a writer.”

The soci­ety cre­ated a new honor this year, to thank long­time NSNC mem­bers for ser­vice to the orga­ni­za­tion and to mark their suc­cess­ful careers. The inau­gural recip­i­ents of the Legacy Award were Bob Hill, retired from the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, and George Smith of the Annis­ton (Ala.) Star. Smith said, “What we do is not rocket sci­ence. What we do is tell sto­ries about real peo­ple … just like Ernie Pyle did.”

• • •

It may have lit­tle to do with cre­ativ­ity, or come to think of it quite a lot, but the most-anticipated  speech of the week­end did not dis­ap­point. Debra “Debby” Her­benick, Ph.D., talked about her place of employ­ment on cam­pus, the Kin­sey Insti­tute, its his­tory and its founder, Alfred Kin­sey, played by Liam Nee­son in the 2004 bio-pic.

She noted the impor­tance of Kinsey’s cham­pion, late IU Pres­i­dent Her­man B Wells (no period after B). Oliver Platt played him in the movie. Wells’ name came up other times dur­ing the week­end. As a res­i­dent of the Uni­ver­sity of Arkansas’ home town for over a decade, I couldn’t help but admire Wells. Indi­ana is no more lib­eral than Arkansas, which is to say not much, so his suc­cesses in pro­mot­ing aca­d­e­mic free­dom to state offi­cials is impres­sive. I won­dered about the forested look of the cam­pus — that was Wells’ envi­ron­men­tal­ism. He fos­tered a top music school and cam­pus art museum (so fine I hope the cura­tors of Bentonville’s com­ing Crys­tal Bridges Museum of Amer­i­can Art have stud­ied its col­lec­tion and pre­sen­ta­tion), as well as recruit­ing inter­na­tional schol­ars, such as the brother of the cur­rent Dalai Lama and refugees from Nazi Germany.

Back to Her­benick. How she steered a mid­dle course in com­mu­ni­cat­ing itself pro­vides a writ­ing les­son. She could’ve made this a biol­ogy lec­ture. After all the insti­tute stud­ies biol­ogy and behav­ior. Or we could’ve watched her chan­nel a rou­tine by Chelsea Han­dler. After all a research facil­ity not only gath­ers but dis­trib­utes data. After her engag­ing talk she answered writ­ten, anony­mous ques­tions from us, demon­strat­ing a Kin­sey prin­ci­ple that she said began in the 1960s: “We pro­vide infor­ma­tion, not advice.”

• • •

My friend Bill Tam­meus guided the remarks of Alvin Rosen­feld from IU’s Insti­tute for the Study of Con­tem­po­rary Anti-Semitism, an on-stage inter­view, as seen on BookTV. Bill hav­ing left the Kansas City Star has con­tin­ued a reli­gious jour­nal­ism, explor­ing spir­i­tu­al­ity. Nearly every year he gives a pro­gram at the con­fer­ence, and it’s always worthwhile.

Rosen­feld hit all the expected marks, and that was dis­ap­point­ing. Bill and col­leagues in the  audi­ence kept after him with close ques­tions, but he kept to his lines. Wash­ing­ton politi­cians these days are accused of work­ing from the same scripts. Late night come­di­ans feast on show­ing clip after clip of Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans using iden­ti­cal catch phrases. I never thought of pro-Israeli Amer­i­cans doing that but gosh, Alvin, we’ve heard all this before, for 62 or more years. The same peo­ple are lis­ten­ing — well, doz­ing off because they’ve heard it before — and the same other peo­ple still refuse to lis­ten. The victim-to-underdog “shtick” no longer “kills,” to chan­nel Jackie Mason (Am I the only Jew never to have found Mason funny?).

• • •

Speak­ing of humor killing, Pulitzer Prize-winning car­toon­ist Joel Pett is hard. Talk­ing with him the evening before then after his pre­sen­ta­tion, he’s a quiet, gen­tle soul, remind­ing me of our mutual friend, the car­toon­ist John Deer­ing. But when Pett runs his slideshow then easel-and-marker live-show, I found refresh­ing his undis­guised ran­cor, anger and hos­til­ity. I enjoy lots of edi­to­r­ial car­toons online and haven’t seen in con­tem­po­rary edi­to­r­ial pan­els venom like Pett’s. It’s old-fashioned and in the best way. Where Deer­ing is thought­ful and pointed, Pett doesn’t bother clean­ing his knife in-between.

Open­ing for Pett, if that’s what it was, was NSNC mem­ber Rick Horowitz of Mil­wau­kee. Besides his print work, my friend Rick cre­ates video columns for pub­lic TV in Wis­con­sin, often employ­ing song par­o­dies, per­haps the Jew­ish Mark Rus­sell? No one then may have been sur­prised when he asked for vol­un­teers to sing with him, a child­like round about the BP oil gusher, “Hole in the Bot­tom of the Sea.”

It closes, “There’s a risk to the pol in the poll of the gasp at the slick from the plume from the spill / In the hole in the bot­tom of the sea.”

These are the sorts of insights that help colum­nists. Just like hear­ing fic­tion writ­ers. We have no lim­its, except the ones we put there. Pett — and Carl Hiaasen — have pub­lish­ers who under­stand read­ers want strong, unique voices and not timid­ity. Les­son: You can blame eco­nom­ics and it wouldn’t be wrong, but we do have other avenues if we choose. That’s why the Inter­net in gen­eral and blogs in par­tic­u­lar are growing.

I had a ques­tion of Pett, “You’ve said you’re the only employed car­toon­ist in Ken­tucky, We colum­nists have noticed that car­toon­ists are the canaries in the news­pa­per coal mine.”

Pett’s answer: “If you can’t bite the hand that feeds you, … it’s not real, it’s not fun. There were 250 of we car­toon­ists and now 54 of us — with jobs, that is. Democ­racy will sur­vive with­out car­toon­ists, but it will not sur­vive with­out reporters. The bas­tards will get away with even more.”