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Making Book

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Here it is September, and not only that but mid-September, and I have not posted my periodic list of books absorbed.

This will be the second year I have attempted a complete list of books. Some I read, some I hear, as CD sets in the car while commuting.

January 2011

Memento Mori, by Murial Spark. Although recommended on MaudNewton.com, it never grabbed my interest. Didn’t finish.

The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner. Book on CD. National Book Award, 1976. Solid novel. Sad. The tangents aren’t tangents, it all ties together. First person with no wavering, though of course the narrator is wavering — it’s his uncertain life, while he leads it. Set in the early ’70s, mostly a flashback to 1956, three months in Copenhagen, for him to heal from a heart attack and both he and his wife to begin to heal from the drowning of their young adult son.

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre. Book on CD. Do le Carre’s recent books all start out the same way? Well-drawn person who turns out to be a secondary character? Still, I enjoy his political thrillers. He found he didn’t need a Cold War setting, after all.

Literary Life: A Second Memoir, by Larry McMurtry. Short, oddly entertaining and it shouldn’t be. It’s pretty obvious McMurtry shot this volumne out to fulfill a contract. It’s not careless, but put much out there. Still, if you want to spend a couple of hours watching a great writer’s mind working, here it is.

February 2011

The Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Book on CD. Narrated by the author. Gladwell has made my my white list, he can voice audio books just fine. I’ve not let go of his 10,000-hour theory of success go in the months since. It is a valuable concept The book is broader than that — who and what are the outliers among us. Gladwell goes for the why, and it makes sense.

The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier. Don’t tell me it’s not fantasy in the Stephen King mode. But character driven more than plot driven, the latter being King’s mode. Little Rock references are used in one of the cities the novel is set in, but the city is not identified. A creepy small novel, with an ending not very satisfying — maybe that was on purpose. (Continued)

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Hill of Beans

Monday, September 12, 2011

And I feel like a beetle on its back
And there’s no way for me to get up
Love’ll get you like a case of anthrax
And that’s something I don’t want to catch
– Gang of Four, “(Love Like) Anthrax,” 1978

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

JUST AFTER ELEVEN — Two hundred eighty-something million Americans had nothing on the few thousand people who sustained a direct loss in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Me among the majority.

Maybe 9/11 cost me the career as I was predicting it at the time. Maybe it cost my mom aspects of her last years. Maybe it cost me what my 40s could have been and can’t be reclaimed in my 50s. But also perhaps substantially everything that happened through yesterday, the 9/11 10th anniversary, might have happened through 2011 regardless.

Would the United States have been in one or two wars in the greater Arabian Peninsula googolplex in the last decade? Probably, but maybe not two at once. Would the U.S. economy gone up and down 1 1/2 to 2 times? Sure, a lot can happen in 10 years.

Nearly 3,000 civilians and responders died in those first hours, survivors are suffering long-term ailments from inhaling toxic dust from the smoldering wreckage. To consider the first 9/11 decade does not denigrate true responses to the assault.

Volunteer military personnal (there being no draft to make participation — even with deferments and exemptions — more democratic) have been killed in action in the Near East for actions rationalized by 9/11. We mustn’t forget their individual sacrifice, even as we are compelled to question what soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen were sent to do. Openly doubting current and past leaders is an expression of American freedom.

“Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” — Death of a Salesman

On Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, My Beloved and I figured out details of how I would drive 50 miles to Fort Smith fairly early Tuesday.

Childhood home of Ben Pollock, far right

Childhood home of Ben Pollock, there on the far right with brown roof.

My mom, Joanne Mendel Pollock, was being discharged from St. Edward Mercy Medical Center and needed to get to her house, the family home since the mid-1950s. She’d had another serious emphysema episode and got intensive lung treatments and tests for a few days. This was the hospitalization that finally convinced her to move to assisted living.

Watching CNN and ABC delayed my leaving Tuesday morning. Maybe Mom should be put in a cab? A little checking put that option to rest. The National Guard was not closing the Interstate Highway System. I’d already gotten permission for a half day off; (Continued)

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The Room in the Elephant

Thursday, September 1, 2011

This column first was published as the “President’s Message” in the September 2011 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

The board of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists has been cleaning up after the party in Detroit. While washing glasses and emptying the trash, we share the usual mix of gleeful recollection of anecdotes and recriminations about disasters that could’ve been worse, just like any reunion or New Year’s shindig.

This conversation has continued longer than usual, out of necessity. Yet for feeling like the NSNC world is crashing in a bit, our data are looking pretty good. What color is the elephant in the room?

See over there, by the filing cabinet? That’s the national recession; if it’s a double-dip, where was the boomlet in the middle? Look here, on my desk, the print media are imploding (as are video media). Journalism will continue in some form, as will our leg of the profession — commentary and reflection — but individually we may not be able to wait for the toner to dry on what forms it will take.

Our numbers are stored in a trunk that we open in our bimonthly online board meetings. Also, our executive director hauls it to every conference: Each conferee gets the financial reports stapled to the agenda of the annual general membership meeting.

Those who studied them — especially our new officers (Vice President Larry Cohen, Treasurer Jim Casto and Membership Chair Rose Valenta in two-year posts and Social Media Chair Tracy Beckerman as a one-year member) — were struck by the numbers for the conference, membership, contest and financial.

We are asking if the conference is an endangered species. Can we afford to hold one in 2012? What aspects would have to change to avoid canceling our annual education and advocacy party?

If we lost money (Continued)

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Spread It

Monday, August 8, 2011

Facebook often is positive, and rightfully so. A Brick from 11 months ago supported that: The Future Just Showed Up: Like. Facebook is not all feel-good happy talk but controversy and deliberate negativity get moved down and out quickly — posts get “hidden” and friends become “unfriended.”

My last weekend post fell in between. Sunday afternoon I wrote a message on my Facebook wall for discussion:

Ever wonder about those fancy coffees and other products that promise to donate 5% of the price to some worthwhile charity?
Here’s how to donate at least 6% to education, law enforcement etc. in Arkansas: Buy school supplies anytime but today. (9.25% in Fayetteville)
2011 Sales Tax Holiday http://www.dfa.arkansas.gov/offices/exciseTax/salesanduse/Pages/taxHoliday.aspx

It got one “like” from a friend. Another friend reposted this to her wall, where it got no comments or “likes.”

First point is this seems normal for me, with 341 Facebook friends. Over three-fourths of my postings — I’ll send something up about 10 times a week — get no visible response. Responding to everyone all the time is not how Facebook works.

Second thought is I might have overshot. I was subtly, maybe too subtly, commenting on the national debt crisis. The Washington compromise promised spending cuts but no revenue changes at all, not even closing loopholes. Taxes pay for things we all expect. They’re not voluntary so they have to be fair. Waste must be kept to a minimum, which requires continuing oversight. That’s here, and nationally. I want the ambulance here in five minutes, and if there’s a nationwide pension, defense and now health care, I’ll pay but it better be done well.

So I didn’t buy sunglasses, shoes or even a ream of paper on School Tax Holiday Weekend, which were exempt from sales tax. I’m heading to Wal-Mart today (buying very few if any “school” supplies, incidentally). And pay my rightful share back into the community.

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3 Cheers for Saturday

Saturday, August 6, 2011

What, not four? Others are punditing U.S. economy very well.

Why there’ll always be real estate agents and contractors

In the HomeStyle section of the Saturday regional/state paper is the weekly Personal Space brief. Most weeks the subject, who is asked about her or his home and some biographical information, maneuvers to plug their business or charity. Tacky.

Today, though, the homeowner of the week praises the property.

My favorite space: There’s a road that leads up to our subdivision. It’s this great windy road that goes in between two wooded areas. … You come out of the city, and it’s almost like you’re in the country.
“… If I could do one thing to improve this space I would: Make it a little more accessible.”

That’s the American dream, in short metaphor.

Easy profit weekend

A tax-free weekend for school supplies runs today and Sunday.

In a somewhat restricted inventory, items that can be used for school, from office supplies (although, interestingly, nothing higher tech than calculators) to clothing (including “wedding apparel” (Continued)

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Blog On, Blog Off

Monday, August 1, 2011

This column first was published in the August 2011 newsletter of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

Instead of polishing this column, I should be sewing nametags into my clothes, shaking out my sleeping bag for WordCamp.

If I showed up with that stuff, even the geeks there would laugh. We’re all geeks at WordCamp. The one in Fayetteville, Ark., was a 9-to-5 workshop July 30. There’s an after-party at an Italian restaurant. We’re invited to talk websites over brunch Sunday, hosted by an ad agency. (Schedule conflicts kept me from the party and brunch.)

More than 100 WordCamps are held worldwide every year. They’re cheap (mine’s $30 including food, drink and a good-size gift bag). There’s local speakers, at that price sure, but experts from Texas and California are coming in. They help WordPress users at all levels in a spirit of sharing and community (“open source” is the term).

WordPress is free (open source) hosting software for blogs. But it’s grown to where full websites of major companies and nonprofits — not just blogs — use it (New York Observer, Le Monde, Anderson Cooper 360, even Martha Stewart’s blog). Our www.columnists.com is built on a WordPress platform.

This will be my second WordCamp. Earlier this month while being a smart-alec I realized — too late — I could’ve been a presenter, on content and use of tools.

I was at an area bloggers meet-up. An audience member asked how to make a caption appear when the cursor “rolls over” the image, and the speakers were stumped. Although I am neither a programmer or a coder, I blurted out the answer from my seat: “After uploading your picture, paste the same brief caption in both “title” and “alternate text” fields.”

Now, to fill the remaining 59:55 of my speech, that doesn’t (Continued)

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Walk It Off

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Book Report

Bad Dad by Dave Lieber

175 pages, cloth, Yankee Cowboy Publishing, 2011

What an unusual little book. Fort Worth Star-Telegram metro columnist Dave Lieber includes newspaper columns here, but it’s not a collection. (Dave’s is a watchdog, or consumer activist, column emphasizing solving suburban hassles.)

By the title, it might sound like long-form journalism exploring child abuse. Sort-of, but it’s shy of universal discussions of law, social tolerances, and psychology.

Dave reveals details of his family, his own childhood and even his nascent criminal record, yet it’s not quite a memoir.

Why “Dave” and not the author, or “Lieber”? Because Dave is a friend of perhaps a dozen years. I’ve met Karen and their son Austin (the hero of the book) any number of times. The three separately and as a family (Karen has other children, as well) are remarkable.

So I was prepared to read the book and like it, as I’ve read about all of Dave’s other books. But Bad Dad has a surprising bite to it, like a salsa whose heat you think you taste but then it hits you later.

The book is effective for the directions the author doesn’t go. I still don’t know if it was a mistake for Dave not to summarize the law and the current state of psychological and sociological research. Actually, he does hit this cultural background but very brief. Summarizing for a book project gives a journalist license to bleed words into page after page.

This book asks, when does modern American middle-class child-rearing turn into abuse?

Here’s Dave and Austin’s base story: A few years ago, when Austin was 11, he grew stubborn while the two were at a McDonald’s just a few blocks from their home. Dave managed his temper, then managed it a bit more by telling the preteen to walk home. He drove off. So both could cool down.

Some police officers
(Continued)

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Our Raveenia Museum

Friday, July 22, 2011

Copyright 2011 Ben S. Pollock

I. Crossing the Line

DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — Should her museum-progress trek be now or wait till it’s further along? My client Crystal Britches calls Fayetteville and Washington County home. For her, Bentonville and the rest of Benton County are places to visit. Unlike, say, Springdale, which she sees as merely one town up.

Fayettevillians know exactly what she means. Vice versa surely applies as well.

At Miss Britches’ bidding, I went to inspect the progress of the world-class museum that’s being built up there. Fayetteville is a classic college town but offers little art. We have a few galleries, artists open their studios sometimes and the university has some exhibit space, but no public or private art museums.

Bentonville has none at the moment, but that will change this year.

While I drive beyond the Benton County line a few times a month, I hadn’t taken time for the museum project of Alice Walton and her family. It’s been under construction a few years, with many opening date revisions. To keep onlookers away, its eventual roads either are blocked or unfinished at the points they join existing streets.

Trail from downtown Bentonville to museum. Photo from city, www.bentonvillear.com.

City of Bentonville photo

Instead, the art lover has to walk the one footpath to approach the proverbial knothole in the construction fence.

Now that the opening date 11/11/2011 has been set in concrete and mortar — unless it’s changed — the connected buildings are taking final form. The news media report that progress can be seen through that knothole.

Crystal Britches travels to Benton County far less than me. Mainly it’s to drive through and north to Kansas City for ballroom dance competitions, of which she is fond and why she wears over her clothes heat-retaining rain pants, an old-fashioned and perhaps wrongheaded way to keep her legs looking good.

Yet she has great love and pride for the entire area. Miss Britches not only gives money, but time and labor. With her personal plastic, she is a walking drop cloth. Yet her efforts are strictly behind the scenes. She hires me for public relations work precisely to avoid relating to others publicly.

Crystal Britches and Alice Walton have some things in common. They’re brilliant, personally and in business. They’re both wealthy enough for their personalities to not only be tolerated in their respective communities but celebrated. Still, Ms. Walton is a billionaire, Miss Britches but a millionaire, so the former’s quirks (Continued)

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Budget Hawk Takes Bath

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Hawk at home's near birdbath 16 July 2011. Photo by Ben S. PollockThere really was a hawk in our yard, I told My Beloved. She was out of town so this was on the phone. She believed me enough. After all, she’s the one who spotted the high nest this past spring, in an old oak in the back yard of the home next door. We occasionally saw a pair of hawks, and eventually we almost could see a couple of chicks poking their heads above the edge of the nest.

Across the our 1960s residential lane, we learned, a family of owls also had taken residence. We’ve heard their hoots but haven’t seen them. We also can hear hawk screeches.

Part of me thought this was a good thing. Predators would scare away the rabbits and opossums that eat my chard, sunflowers and bush beans to the ground. The latest folk remedy — a tablespoon of Tabasco in a quart of water, sprayed daily  — wasn’t working. Critters around here probably love hot stuff.

Two weeks ago, a doe appeared in our front yard one afternoon. Another deer was a couple of houses up. MB suspects, and she’s likely right, that new construction in formerly undeveloped areas to the west might be driving a variety of animals out.

Hawk alighting for far birdbath 16 July 2011. Photo by Ben S. PollockOne time a couple of weeks ago, I swore I might have seen a hawk perched on one of our two iron birdbaths. It was just as quickly gone, and I thought, that can’t be. But if it was, was it one of the hawk parents next door, or one of its young, grown rather large?

The sighting made me realize that when people swear by gardening fixes, other forces may be at play. My second planting of vegetables was doing OK — but this showed it might not be my garden pepper spray being effective.

Then Saturday, I was walking to the kitchen and through the enclosed sunporch I definitely saw a hawk. On the near birdbath’s rim. I backed up quietly then ran downstairs for the camera.

I shot a few frames through the glass. I had proof and could post here to Brick. Yet maybe I might get lucky and tiptoe through the back door and good one clear shot before it flew away.

Hawk at home's far birdbath 16 July 2011. Photo by Ben S. PollockThe hawk didn’t seem to care. I sat on a lawn chair for 20 minutes, watching and taking a number of shaky photos. These three were clear, though. At one point he flew to the birdbath closer to the back wall and fence. He calmly hung out there for a while, preening? Without better equipment, I had taken the best shots I could. When I stood, he looked around a moment then calmly flew away.

Did the hawk take a bath, like a robin or cardinal? Not that I saw. At one point his (or her) lower torso was fluffed out, but that was all. He may have leaned over for a quick sip of water twice.

I was out there long enough to worry. This guy is easily as big as either of our cats. Science says such sized birds go for very small animals, field mice, lizards and songbirds. But still. We let one cat out, on a harness, every few weeks for about an hour and under our supervision. Except when we go inside for a refill of tea. Now we won’t dare leave Tiki outside alone, even for a minute, tied up.

This hawk was not bathing, apparently, and he was not hunting. They do that from high in the air where the prey can’t see them. Unless the dude was admiring his reflection. War hawks, budget hawks, red-tailed hawks, at base they’re all feathers and fluff. And beaks and talons.

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Forward Slash and Burn

Monday, July 18, 2011

This is a reversal. Brick is all about the new. Live in the present, look toward the future. Dwell just a little on what’s past.

But the URL from which it sprang, benpollock.com, has been neglected. Oh, I tell myself, it’s an archive. It works well enough. Fast-loading, a reference for me when I am writing far from my files at home. Perhaps occasional readers of Brick head back there to see earlier work.

Usually I think these old essays get opened because of obscure search keywords people type into Google. As for me when I have reviewed its contents, it looks like a pile of junk. This past spring, however, I dived in, to ensure I wasn’t repeating myself in a new Brick, and saw lots of good writing, good organization and even wit. Amid only a few clunkers.

Logical enough. “Leave well enough alone,” my late Uncle Al Pollock was fond of saying. The website that appears before the forward slash, benpollock.com, is an archive of some five dozen columns I wrote for newspapers, real newspapers.

benpollock.com home page 2002-2011The website looks like it was built in 2002, because it was. Pure html code, not a lick of CSS, which was not widespread yet (if not in common use, it wouldn’t work for most people’s computers). No frames or other bells and whistles, though. I always liked a clean look. The yellow legal-pad image indicated my preference for writing longhand. Almost 10 years later, though, and you can almost see the edges curling from rot and smell the mildew.

Facts belie the logic. Analytics indicate all sorts of people go there and open the supposedly greatest hits of  my late ’80s-early ’90s newspaper columns, collectively called Mirthology, and my 1/1999-9/2001 newspaper columns collectively called Loose Leaves.  Plus a few guest columns. These two standing heds indicate my goals, humor in the first and mixed topics for the latter.

Forget all the muckety-mucks I’ve had to deal with and work under for decades:

My copy doesn’t suck.

Maybe if the parlor in which the columns are displayed was spruced up — paint the walls, wash the windows — my morale would improve and I’d write more (Continued)

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