Winston gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two Victory Gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose, only to be absorbed by crumbs from two Rick’s Bakery cookies. A just dessert for submitting to a biometric fingerprint scan, not for national security, but a private employer’s time clock. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

A vuvuzela blast.

Last year I asked my Facebook friends on my “Wall,” where conversations are texted (Is this English?), “Why are people so upbeat on Facebook?” I’d been on Facebook a few months, having been sold on it by NSNC veteran Dave Lieber (who pushed the social networking site in last month’s edition of The Columnist newsletter), and was amazed by the civility and cheerfulness. When people reported devastating news, if they didn’t spin it up, then the Wall responses were nothing but empathy and affirmations.

My query received a wide range of answers. Two resonated. One was that people intuitively want Facebook for uplift and you have to give it to get it. The other explanation was fear — fear of being disliked or rebutted … or worst, ostracized in Facebook by being either “hidden” or “removed.”

So I was hit by a bucket of ice water when a friend of over 10 years blasted me on Facebook in mid-August, over a column I “shared” by providing its Web page address. Worse, his comments got “liked.” The piece was by Robert Niles in the Online Journalism Review, “This Year’s Advice for Journalism Students.”

In his piece Niles — who early in his career had a reporting stint at the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind., site of the NSNC 2010 conference — updated the usual spiel of networking and specializing by noting that the depth of students’ online presence now will be judged by potential employers.

Of course he meant watch the silly talk and embarrassing photos, but mainly, Niles seemed to be saying that being published is being published, even if you’re doing it yourself. In other words, clips are clips. So post well. “When you read, watch or listen think always, ‘Would others find this interesting?’ That’s how you find the material you’ll need to fill your blog, Twitter feed or whatever else you publish online.”

Some professionals, perhaps the more traditional newspaper people, i.e. older, are threatened by that, in the same way authors debate that while talent can be developed, writing cannot be taught to just anyone.

Let me quote the online dialog that was posted after my link to Niles’ column.

My friend X—-: “Horse sh*t. I didn’t start by sucking a sportswriter’s golfballs as an intern and puking accolades to pay for the privilege. I got my foot in the door as a ‘copyboy’ and worked the streets. Chased cop calls, filed a few unpublished features about interesting people — got two or three pieces accepted each year — and studied ‘on the street’ with people who had spent their lives working ‘on the streets.’ Learned how to ‘get my facts on straight’ from people who had done so for 30-plus years before I ever showed up. Whatever ‘ojr.org’ is, this is the first and last time I will visit the site. Bunch of dilettantes who have no clue whatsoever, apparently. Feel-good cr*p for wannabe celebs.”

A friend of his left the comment, “You go, X—–!”

I tried to lower the heat with what I hoped was humor: “OK. Next caller! You do make strong points, X—–. Niles though is an experienced newspaperman, Midwest to Denver to, there you go, California — LA Times then USC. I think he’s about the most feet-on-the-ground of the gung-ho Internet journalism guys. He’s been solid on where we’re heading.”

Again, my friend, a longtime reporter: “Ben, I first met Geraldo Rivera when he was starting his career in ‘straight journalism.’ The idea that ‘every blog is valid reporting’ is absolute Geraldo Rivera horse sh*t.”

Two people clicked “like” on this.

I ended the thread with: “Your quote ‘every blog is valid reporting’ is nowhere in this piece. Nor does Niles mention or advise the exploitative sensationalism of Geraldo. The closest quote to this invented sentence is, ‘Everyone who posts online has the potential to create journalism.’ If he means any blogger can choose a topic, nail the facts and write clearly — wouldn’t that be an improvement over the ‘professional’ coverage of U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert? ‘What a maroon,’ as Bugs Bunny would say.”

In reading this now, maybe I didn’t handle this well — look up “Gohmert terrorist babies” online — but our new era scares folks. It should concern people who are comfortable with new media.

In a short time, 15 years perhaps, original work appears first online routinely. If a columnist doesn’t have a berth at a daily or weekly, a newspaper or magazine, or was dropped, the writer can set up a blog with a permanent web address. It can be done at no cost. It’s another option besides freelancing or moving to other formats such as books.

For we columnists, it means more places for where we can explain, report, comment and mock.

My friend isn’t the only one breathing hard.

Dan Gillmor asked in the Internet-only publication Salon (if it has new material every day, is it an online newspaper?) “Who’s a Journalist? Does That Matter?” He begins, “If you’re a creator of media, and most of us are these days in one way or another, what should I call you?”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is getting all ACLU on this, as can be seen at its page Bloggers’ Rights.

Want more confusion? Blogs are starting to be taxed.

The Philadelphia Inquirer just reported in “Is Philly Taxing Bloggers?” how city officials believe that blogs that make money are businesses so their creators must pay $50 a year or $300 for a lifetime privilege license.

Angry? Yes, I flared, then in debating myself I recalled sales tax on newspapers. Many but not all states exempt newspapers from adding sales tax to their price. Few states, on the other hand, exempt magazines. While tacking 7 cents to the price of a newspaper could cut rack sales, especially these days, I’ve never understood how we’re a necessity like groceries, also exempt from taxes in some states. I can’t see a First Amendment angle, either. As long as tax is owed across the board, those nickels help pay teachers and police officers.

But I studied further. It turns out that Philly’s Business Privilege Tax is not new. For many years, freelancers of all sorts have had to pay it, too. (How does City Hall know who to send that form to? The IRS tells it who reports such income.)

Thus, you can find lots on the Internet about the levy. After all, it’s something for writers to write about.

Government revenue is another sign that blogging is becoming mainstream. You may not make more than coffee money off it, but the puppy just heard the can opener.

* * *

Want to take a shot? — Comment at columnists.com or facebook.com/columnists.

– Ben S. Pollock, NSNC president

Northwest Arkansas Newspapers reported the most polished proposal came from a team effort of the city of Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas, summarizing that as follows:

“The Fayetteville-UA proposal was one of 25 site expansion ideas the Walton Arts Center received by a Monday deadline involving locations in Benton and Washington counties. Proposals from individual landowners largely amounted to offers to sell property to the arts center. Other chamber or municipality proposals offered multiple options for land and public support.”

Fayetteville’s proposal was a detailed package proposing a specific land-use design for the existing location, as well as three alternate concepts that could be considered. It was also the only proposal offering up the potential for funding totaling $33.4 million, according the proposal documents. The funding would come in the form of donated property, construction investment in future public parking facilities, street improvements and the construction of a $6 million multiuse theater, among others. The UA also offered the use of Bud Walton Arena and Razorback Stadium for performances.”

The online newspaper Fayetteville Flyer reports:

… the University of Arkansas has offered to make Bud Walton Arena and Reynolds Razorback Stadium available for Walton Arts Center programming. With seating capacities of 19,000 and 69,500, respectively, those facilities would add possibilities for large concerts that the city says could draw audiences from as far away as Dallas and Kansas City. Such performances would provide an additional revenue stream for the performing arts center complex.”

(The full UA-city brief can be seen as a PDF as published by the Flyer, which has no fee wall.)

Take that, Walton Family Foundation!

Is that unfair? Poking a bully with a stick is fun. The way to do this is have another bully standing with you. UA has bulldozed level the playing field, and complicated the issue with logic and clout. Perhaps Bentonville would be ideal site for a 2,200-seat theater for larger performances — those middlebrow Broadway extravaganzas based on animated movie musicals, with that stage lit only 60 nights a year and a foundation to cover the losses.

This would leave the 1,200-seat “theeeatah” with the highbrows and lowbrows of Dickson Street. Unless the WAC goes with the Fayetteville-UA plan of adding facilities adjacent to the current site. That’s what it’s offered all along.

Bud Walton Arena and Reynolds Razorback Stadium sit empty nearly every day. That’s UA’s new stick.

They’re open for a couple dozen basketball games and a half-dozen football games. Both get used for the two-day, annual Wal-Mart Stores Inc. shareholders and associates meetings. Commencement is in the arena. For years both structures largely stay empty. Other universities put shows in theirs, rock concerts and community events.

Nothing ever has moved UA to open Bud Walton Arena and Reynolds Razorback Stadium. Until now.

UA Chancellor Dave Gearhart says: “You want to buy land, hire designers, go through public comment then take years to build an auditorium too large for the area? Let me show you my pants. See that chain and ring? Has keys to every building on campus. I can unlock places  with 19,000 and 69,500 seats. Hellooo, U2, hey, Brad Paisley, wanna play Fayetteville?”

The university had the keys all along.

While avoiding graven images, there’s no writ against craven puns.

Mosque, ow, on the Hudson? Saying where houses of worship do not belong raises all sorts of red flags, no matter the neighborhood, no matter the religion. How could a house of prayer in the vicinity of New York’s Ground Zero not be a splendid idea? Besides, Moscow on the Hudson is recalled as a delightful movie from 1984; I wonder if it’s dated?

Ground Zero? Ground Zero Mostel!

Now there’s a Jewish radical with humor and chutzpah. I remember Zero Mostel best for appearances with Jim Henson’s Muppets. He is quoted as saying of Henson: “He has the best possible actors. If you have a disagreement with them, you can always use them to wash your car.” Ground Mostel, a real New Yorker.

* * *

Foodie program: Tomatoes no longer are tomatoes. A couple of the major frozen pizza brands, I saw when shopping this week, state in their ingredients list, “tomatoes (water and tomato paste).” In reaction I bought a Wal-Mart Great Value (house brand) pie. Its sauce ingredients start as, “Water, Tomato paste.” As it should be.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Weeks ago I checked ingredients of canned crushed tomatoes for homemade marinara. If you think “crushed tomatoes” implies squished tomatoes, juice, salt and of course some preservatives to make it taste American — well, check the ingredients. Some don’t have “tomatoes” at all, just tomato paste and related materials.

* * *

On Aug. 4, 1998, My Beloved and I began the basic tools of The Artist’s Way. On a free afternoon while running the Beaver Town Inn we saw a flyer at a Eureka Springs bookshop that Lisa Martinovic would be teaching a weekly workshop on the book in Fayetteville. Sounded just what we needed at that point in our lives. It was. We each bought a copy of the Julia Cameron volume, so we could scribble in them with ease. The class created our circle of friends in Fayetteville, partly inspiring our move there. What the book taught has been part of our lives since, especially me. Worth marking it on the calendar ever year. “Morning pages” in longhand are a miracle. No shortcuts.

It became a non-issue for me after reflecting on the opening scene of the first episode of the fourth season, July 25: It’s referred to with a wink, when a reporter asks him, “Who is Don Draper?” Most of us have similar transformations of identity, which while often more dramatic than Don’s, don’t have the arc of story for TV, books or movies. Maybe it’s because the changes are in how we redefine happiness and success, not the name on the driver’s license.

Yes, I’m another fan of the cable AMC series, though a latecomer, drifting in toward the end of the second season, then becoming hooked. We’ve rented DVDs of Seasons 1 and 2 to catch up.

Bert Cooper, the Cooper of the 1960s-era Sterling Cooper ad agency in Manhattan, is right when he said three years ago, in the penultimate episode of Season 1, that Don’s hidden identity, if he has one, doesn’t matter. The boss might know the truth. Sneaky Pete Campbell knows it but can’t get it confirmed.

Don’s old self doesn’t matter, because those of us who grow up have changed costumes at least once — we’re all drapers.

The audience learned Don’s identity in the first season. It constitutes plot because if his identity is blown, the life he built as creative director at what now is Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce collapses. Don was a Depression orphan named Dick Whitman. Dick’s mother, a prostitute, died in childbirth, his father a john. His guardians were hicks. In Korea, the real Lt. Don Draper is blown up in an accident just after a sniper attack, and the injured Pvt. Whitman has enough wits to trade dog tags. He barely met Draper, but his life can’t be any worse than what Whitman faces should he return home.

The real Don Draper had he survived might have made a dandy car salesman, moving on to copywriter then a Madison Avenue man (Mad Man). Dick Whitman might have had the same post-service career track, under his own identity.

A new man rose from that war, whatever his name.

The show has plenty of flashbacks, showing the child Dick, the young car salesman Don, but none in between. Was he a high school hotshot or the continuation of the timid boy? Maybe we’ll be shown, but it doesn’t matter. The big transformation happens at the end of adolescence, with others further on. [Don's now ex-wife Betty has yet to leave her teen years. Same with Pete. We have watched the transformation of secretary-to-copywriter Peggy Olson; her momma and Brooklyn parish priest might not recognize her .]

It doesn’t take a war. We all change. The bits in truth stay about the same; it’s what we see that changes. Young Whitman must’ve had innate salesmanship and creativity. He certainly honed survival instincts from the youngest age, given the abusive family that took him in.

A poor kid can do great. A kid raised well-off can squander advantages. There’s plenty of examples of each. Still, the formerly poor kid may be miserable, not seeing his successes. Which may not make him a failure. The middle-class loser just might be happy, so not a loser.

In that early episode, titled “Nixon-Kennedy,” set around Election Day 1960, Cooper blows off Campbell, who had been trying to out Draper, saying:

This country was built and run by men with worse stories. … The Japanese have a saying: a man is whatever room he is in, and right now Donald Draper is in this room.”

We are the clothes we wear. The imaginary hat you don heading out for the day — choose your metaphor — carries you through circumstances you couldn’t have imagined last year or back in school.

Some change names. In Facebook I see folks from way back have moved from Donnie to Don, Betty to Elizabeth, Richard to Rich, Edward to Ed — it doesn’t always move toward a more formal version. Last names sometimes change. William Faulkner was Falkner. Jon Stewart was Liebowitz.

Names don’t have to change for this transformation. They often don’t. Personalities don’t change much, though we wish they might and sometimes we think they do, when it’s just different facets of the self being used in a given year.

What I think happens is our definitions change — specifically what we need to be happy, and how we define success — when we finally have enough freedom to do something about it. Happiness isn’t necessarily situational, but success tends to be specific. Success is measurable and material, often with immediacy. Happiness has contentment and occasional ecstasy, so hard to measure at times it’s seen clearest in hindsight. We tend to adopt other people’s definitions of success, in home, work and avocation. Happiness may or may not “come from within,” as is said, but each of us does end up defining what makes it happen for us.

If that first transformation from childhood is figuring out how to move toward success, then a second transformation can come where we learn to enjoy happiness in its moments. I suspect the second metamorphosis more often is a further refining of measures of success.

Antihero Don Draper aims to be a success with family and with work. It would complicate a TV series, but it’s not juggling until there’s at least three — two in the air and one in hand. That ham needs a hobby. Works for me.

But what do I know? While I believe I’ve had between two and 11 transformations, my old classmates voted me “Least Changed” at my 20th high school reunion — true, no drapery.

Thank you for electing me president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Didn’t you hear? I have not published a running column since Sept. 16, 2001.

Instead I’ve written at www.benpollock.com/brick for nearly seven years. After the first year, the water warms up. Blogging is how I’ve coped with the recession and the panicking publishing industry. We’re all attacking this differently. The iceberg appeared so suddenly. As president, I’ll help the NSNC help you.

We cannot reverse the value of your home, though.

I joined the NSNC in 1991, toward the end of its First Wave: staff columnists but also writers like me, editors or reporters with columns on the side. Through conferences and newsletters we gave one another advocacy, support and education, leavened with irreverence.

In the mid-1990s the Second Wave began to roll in, free-lance columnists from veterans to novices. The First Wave hung on, with more staff columnists joining. High jinks ensued.

The Third Wave has started. We added online-only columns to the annual contest. Then we welcomed blog-columns, where entries must be bound by commonly accepted journalism values and honor the three-century history of newspaper columns in tradition, format, spirit and variety.

Important: The NSNC needs all three waves. The NSNC serves columnists everywhere at all levels of experience, in all media and formats, through education, support and advocacy. A column is a running series of essays, from personal to persuasive, employing research and reporting or extending to fantasy and satire. Written columns are the most common, but audio and video essays are no less valid. Journalism standards and ethics are observed in columns.

A column is a column in essentially any media. It’s a technical term, medium, meaning canvas, stone, paper, pixels etc. Newspaper as a medium is abstract. It always has had different forms.

Decades ago, neighborhood sheets would be run off on mimeographs (Google it) and be called X. In San Francisco and Liberia, a few journalists now write news and comment on chalkboards calling them X. Our papers call their websites online X. Salon.com and Slate.com update several times a day like multiple-edition X — they’re all newspapers.

So we columnists board the good ship NSNC — lifeboat or yacht — and watch for icebergs. Maybe I’m thinking arctic because it’s past 90 and not even noon yet in Arkansas.

– This column was first published in the August 2010 edition of The Columnist,
the monthly newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

The 2010 conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists ended with the annual general membership meeting. It had the usual agenda — the executive director reviews numbers from the budget (holding the course), of members (only slightly down), of contest entries (up a bit) — plus committee reports and (drum roll) election of officers.

Views and details on the conference are linked at a special page in Columnists.com. No one probably will write up the business session. Still, the page is being updated as new blogs and columns come in, and will be archived indefinitely.

NSNC Oath of Office, Sunday, July 11, 2010. Photo by Bonnie Squires

With no nominations from the floor, we elect a slate, conference chair, secretary, vice president and president. The last job on that list now is mine through summer 2012. I claimed all weekend that I’d vote for any write-in candidate, serious if they were, but none offered.

Now I start pleading for impeachment. The self-deprecation is getting old, but I did not seek this job. Helping the NSNC as a board member for five years has been a blast. But it has had a few resignations, due directly and indirectly to the Good Depression, so here I was Sunday, neither “acting” nor “interim” but letterhead-official.

What’s unexpected is how confident I feel.

The membership meeting aims for 90 minutes because people always start leaving for the airport, and President Samantha Bennett wrapped it up in 60, including a non-agenda discussion on the society’s advocacy role. I had ready an inaugural address, about what I said at the Thursday board meeting, but I scuttled that in favor of writing it up for the NSNC newsletter. I’ll post it as a Brick, too. But I did organize a mock Oath of Office, perhaps to join the Sitting Duck and Mystic Tie traditions.

NSNC Education Foundation Secretary Dave Lieber administered the oath. First lady Christy Pollock held an Ernie Pyle volume, on which I placed my left hand. In my right I hoisted a fountain pen. It was loaded.

I, (name), do soberly swear,
To advocate for the craft of columns, in the field of journalism,
To abide by the Code of Conduct of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists,
To represent the National Society of Newspaper Columnists as (title).
How great Art –
– Buchwald.
Thy Will –
– Rogers.
So help me, Erma and Ernie.

-30-

Columnists tour Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center in Bloomington, Ind. Photo by Christy Pollock

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Saturday night, July 10, 2010 — The learnin’ part of the Saturday portion of the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists ended at noon, unless you’re a columnist (published or not). The usual field trip either can be written about or learned from. Lunch and and tour this time were both, a visit to the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center.

• • •

The hour “On Creativity” featured not a writer but a veteran jazz composer and musician, David Baker, chair of IU’s jazz studies department. He was right, the chops of creativity are about the same for any of us.

Baker has three rules, and they seem to come from the motivational world.

1. From a late pastor, A.W. Tozer: “Time is a resource that is nonrenewable and nontransferable. You cannot store it, slow it up, hold it up, divide it up or give it up. You can’t hoard it up or save it for a rainy day — when it’s lost it’s unrecoverable. When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.”
2. “Excellence is not an accident. It comes from hard work and vision.”
3. A riddle: “I’m your constant companion,” and continues with good and bad traits, such as “I will push you onward or drag you down to failure.” and ends, “Who am I? I am habit.” Good advice from “author unknown,” but it’s office-poster copy.

Baker says he needs a deadline for composing. He finds word games helpful, he’s especially fond of anagrams, as they keep his mind sharp even musically. “Compose at a regular time. in a regular place, have all necessary materials at hand.” “I don’t get locked in any single element. Anagrams help in this. The goal is to state what you’re intending with the greatest possible economy. Anagrams help me see things from different angles, to find the best one, to find an unusual one.” “I’ve written over a thousand pieces; that’s not an overestimate. Some were awful and thank goodness have never been performed.”

Another good quote that Baker recited, and I didn’t catch its author, “Any music that is not heard live is doomed to extinction.”

Baker mentions he teaches a course on Duke Ellington. At the Q&A, I noted that Ellington and Pyle were contemporaries, coming into prominence in the 1930s, and ask how he makes Ellington relevant in 2010 to non-music majors and non-jazz fans, which we could use with Pyle, increasingly obscure with time.

“To teach Ellington, it helps to show what was contemporaneous with Ellington at the time. What we know and what is less known of those times. He didn’t live in isolation.”

• • •

The columnists couldn’t convene in Ernie Pyle’s home state and his home university without a panel on the renown newsman. Lauri Lebo is researching a book on Pyle’s life in the 1930s — before the World War II writing that engraved his name in history. Owen Johnson, an IU professor, is a longtime Pyle scholar. Moderating was longtime NSNC member Mike Harden.

They reviewed Pyle’s life. Johnson has a solid biographical essay online. In the 1930s Pyle traveled the country with his wife and wrote columns on small-town America. The panelists had a fun word for these pieces, “vagabondage.” I have a book of these, and they recall CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road.” But Kuralt died 13 years ago. That’s three generations of journalism majors who didn’t see him on TV.

The best feature of the hour was receiving a copy of a collection Harden co-edited, On a Wing and a Prayer: The Aviation Columns of Ernie Pyle, 1928-32. I read them on the return to Arkansas. I’d grown a little tired of the NSNC patron saint and his halo, but these pieces were a revelation. Ernie Pyle in his war columns had occasional wit, but a dozen years earlier he could be downright funny, even snarky.

• • •

An authentic buffet awaited us at the Tibetan-Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center: Mo-mos (dumplings), chicken and vegetarian, fragrant rice, marinated cabbage salad. A local woman, Dawa, dressed in native costume, touchingly sang traditional songs a capella (not on purpose but the CD player wouldn’t work), and the center’s director, Arjia Rinpoche, explained the center and the monastery elsewhere on the 108-acre grounds.

Also speaking was a center board member, Elaine Irwin-Mellencamp, wife of rock star John Mellencamp. They live with their children in Bloomington. She and Rinpoche summarized the principles of Buddhism (compassion and wisdom) and how a major center for Tibetan culture and Buddhism ended up in south-central Indiana. Well, it was founded by the eldest brother of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Thubten J. Norbu (1922-2008) was a professor at Indiana University.

The rinpoche (no mere monk but a high-level, recognized-in-childhood, reincarnated lama) also gave a short autobiography. Earlier this year, Rodale Books published his memoir, Surviving the Dragon: A Tibetan Lama’s Account of 40 Years under Chinese Rule. I’m halfway through it, and it’s a fast read, and sad. He stayed in China-controlled Tibet for years longer than other Tibetans (most of whom fled to India), which helped the people greatly but put him in danger many times.

We ate in the library of the center, of which one corner is a Buddhist alter, then had a walking tour, past prayer wheels (one solar-powered), two stupas (shrines), ending at the monastery, whose major room downstairs was a temple. No pews, folks, floor pads and just a few chairs, and by the way leave your shoes on the low shelves at the door on entering. The alter is stunning, full of two- and three-dimensional religious pieces. Nearby on two displays are holy books and ritual objects of major religions, whose spiritual leaders helped dedicate the monastery not that many years ago.

Some colleagues have put their insights on the center and overall conference in columns and blogs, many of which 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.

• • •

Besides the Sitting Duck award, which goes the easy column subject or target of the past year, the annual ugly tie award went to the same entity to BP.

The Sitting Duck specifically went to BP executives over their handling of their oil spew in the Gulf of Mexico. As the press release noted, “In this year’s case, the Sitting Duck is like shooting fish in an oil barrel.”

The Kramer Mystic Tie Award is named after Jeff Kramer, whose left-behind necktie at an NSNC conference in 198-something in Mystic, Conn., was mounted on a plaque. The contest is announced by the previous year’s winner, who gives a topic for which columnists have 24 hours to write its opening paragraph.

This year, 2009 winner Smiley Anders of the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate provided the set-up: “BP has a foolproof way to stop its oil gusher.” The winner was Brian O’Connor of The Detroit News, who explained the best cap for the leak has turned out to be a truck load of the pillow-sized, anatomically correct (well, not the colors), Peruvian fair-trade puppets, one of which was shown to us Friday by researcher and blogger Debby Herbenick of the Kinsey Institute.

• • •

There’s two kinds of speeches delivered by recipients of the annual Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award, older-professional to younger-professional tips and what newsroom veterans call war stories, the latter being journalists explaining how they won or lost major scoops, the odder the better. The best are a combination.

Our 2010 winner, Carl Hiaasen of The Miami Herald (not to mention best-selling writer of humorous mystery novels) did both. He accented “war stories.” How could he not, being a Floridian? (“You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco. … Florida, folks, land of perpetual sunshine. Let’s get the auction started before we have a tornado.”) — Groucho Marx’s character, The Cocoanuts, 1929)

One thing I’ve come to admire in Hiaasen’s books, whether adult or juvenile, are his manly men. Huh? His protagonists, and I say this as a straight guy, are hunks, reminiscent of the witty and decisive guys like Raymand Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. I love the Michael Chabons of our generation, but the men are too much like me, wimpy, with page upon page of wondering what to do. Hiaasen heroes just do it. May screw it up, but they up and do.

I mentioned that to Hiaasen, and he shrugged. That view was new to him, he said. He works hard to ensure his heroes have serious flaws. Well they do, but they’re still not sissies.

Hiaasen, 57, was a reporter then had a metro column that ran several times a week. Now it runs just on Sundays, and he writes from home.

“I don’t know how anyone stays fresh as a columnist without waking up each morning with a feeling of injustice, of anger. We have [plenty of] material.” “I think it’s good to be angry. … Newsrooms were exciting, the smoke, the energy. … Now they’re like mortuaries. I’m glad I don’t have to go in anymore.” “Stay pissed off. That’s my best advice. It’s what I tell students. It’s not hard.”

“I do believe in karma. Columnists can do good, even if we feel we’re not reaching anyone, maybe you are, it [may be just] one person.” “Jimmy Breslin said, ‘The worst sin for a news writer, is to be boring.’ With south Florida, I don’t have that excuse, though I have been boring sometimes.” “You have a duty to your readers to do your best.” Effective columns can have different frames: “You can write a scathing satirical column or a soapbox rant or just focus on one little guy [and how he was victimized].” “A columnist is a virtuoso. Not every piece is a masterpiece. I do think it’s the Lord’s work, and I don’t talk like that lightly.”

Along the topic of newspapers weakening, often apparently at the hands of short-term corporate owners who don’t understand their customers’ true wants and needs, Hiaasen said, “If you don’t do anything bad, you can outlast these bastards.” “You become more important to the community, the longer you go. Some newspapers dump columnists, and they live to regret it. The columnist is a franchise. It doesn’t matter the size of the community. It’s a voice that you can’t find in any other medium.”

Asked he how does both columns and novels, he said, “For me, it’s therapy. If I didn’t write satires, I’d take a rifle up into a tower.” “The advice I’d been given is, and it’s true: ‘Ass in chair,’” referring to a daily writing schedule, not waiting for inspiration. “You go home [from work, in the years when he was in a newsroom] and write. That’s it. No, it’s not easy on the family.” “Novel-writing uses a different muscle than columns, 100,000 to 120,000 words versus 700, 800 words.

What began his environmental focus? “I can’t show my kids where I played. Those places are gone, they’re parking lots or worse.” “The [BP] spill is an atrocity against the planet, a criminal atrocity.”

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.”

A college or visitors’ bureau — I forgot which and couldn’t find it again on the return to the airport on Monday, July 12 — mentioned it was No. 16 in the country for some best-of poll. In a poster, mention means boasting, else why would it be in the corridor welcoming you to the region?

Proud of 16th place?

Another placard, for West Baden Springs (Ind.) Hotel, proclaims it is ranked No. 15 as a destination hotel by Conde Nast Travel. Ooh, 15. Say I’ve got a couple or three thousand bucks to fly to then use the facilities of a resort spa. Wouldn’t I aim for one of the 14, probably hit a Top 10? (Caught my eye because we did stay there Sunday night the 11th. We were very happy with everything about the place, a top-shelf spa-resort whose staff are professional without being snooty, and my is that rare.)

Indiana Southeast University wants airport travelers to know it has the ninth best part-time MBA program.

These are bragging rights? I’ve never seen anything like that, not on highway billboards or news articles I edit.

Here’s a trick from Arkansas, which places often in two lists — among the most poor, most illiterate, most uninsured and the other list comprising the least wealthy, least literate and least sufficient medical insurance.

Round ‘em off.

The resort hotel, if it were in my home state, would be in the top 15. Think of all the resorts around, and that’s high praise. The business school would shout it’s in the top 10. Colleges like being in the top 10.

On a scale of 1-1,000, Brick has a Technorati Authority of 110. No. 1 most weeks is Huffington Post with a TA of 921. If you poke around in there, most blogs have an authority of 1.

On the other hand, a town up the road, Rogers, is No. 10 on the CNN/Money list of 100 Best Places to Live. Doesn’t need an “in the top 10,” not when there’s thousands of similar cities considered. Doesn’t need fluffing at all.