Thursday, February 18, 2010
A nice thing just happened. On Jan. 31, I was elected vice president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I’ve been a card-carrying columnist since 1991, joining during the run of my column Mirthology, in the old Arkansas Democrat. The post is interim, to cover after a resignation, until the annual membership meeting in [...]
Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock
Last Tuesday, May 26, the Ozark Poets and Writers Collective hosted the noted, and local, poet Miller Williams at the independent Nightbird Books in Fayetteville. What a turnout for such a space. The reading area — Nightbird just moved to a larger space, the fondly recalled Ozark Mountain Smokehouse, and soon [...]
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There’s been e-talk among the membership about renaming the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. I was for it, liked some of the proposals, but now I’m agin it. It’s not that I’m sore that my suggestion, International House of Toast (nod to Bob and Ray) was ignored.
We would be following the path of a larger, [...]
Copyright 2009 Ben S. Pollock
A newsmagazine commentary from a couple of weeks ago stopped me cold. I still think about it, in a similar way a comic panel from last year comes up, which has put me off Outback’s Bloomin’ Onions. These are like cloying old songs that once heard reverberate for days within the [...]
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Book report: Duma Key by Stephen King
I can be a snob sometimes: I enjoyed most movies based on Stephen King novels but read nothing of his until seeing a short story or two early this decade in The New Yorker. The plan’s not to catch up on everything he wrote, but so far I’ve enjoyed [...]
For decades, The New Yorker arrived 52 weeks a year, on the same day, must’ve been Tuesday, in Mom and Dad’s mailbox in Fort Smith. Rarely, it came on Wednesday. A little while before it dropped to 47 issues annually, the regular day ended, annoying Mom to no end. It might be at the bookstore [...]
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Here are three articles claiming with scant evidence that women are fiction and men non-fiction. The earliest comes from the March 24, 2008, edition of The New Yorker, which started out as possibly a look at where the two literatures overlap in either memoir or false memoir. But near the end it dives into [...]
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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 I [...]
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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 [...]
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Only some of the essayists in What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, edited by Andras Szanto for PublicAffairs Books, which I will review soon, think George Orwell (1903-1950) is the man for 2008. After all, their thesis is in the title.
Any other George you can think of already has [...]
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