Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock The difference between fiction and fact Friday 13 January 2006. I won’t do them the favor of hyperlinking these memoirists, James Frey and JT LeRoy. But there’s the names and here’s a news search engine. Memoirs are autobiographies and factual. The books by these men have been outed as not […]
Category: The Course of Words
Thoughts on literature, well, anything people write
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Bad lessons for writers
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Tuesday 10 January 2006. P.J. O’Rourke, in reviewing the novel Dog Days by Ana Marie "Wonkette" Cox last Sunday for The Washington Post, wrote: "Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words ‘Write what you know’ is confined to a labor camp. Please, […]
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Surpassing expectations, Ltd.
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Surpassing expectations by accepting limits Wednesday 4 January 2006. Last issue, The New Yorker praised James Agee. Actually, it was New Yorker movie critic David Denby. (If I don’t always agree with Denby, he’s about the only current writer who every once in a while drops in a sentence or […]
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Food, shelter and story?
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 24, 2005. Old School by Tobias Wolff provoked this riff. (I checked out the audio book from the library perhaps a year ago and returned it after hearing only most of the first disc, going by that’s when its familiarity ended. Having forgotten I had it out […]
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Falling from a plane’s easy
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Book’s as easy as falling out of a plane Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005. I own a lot of books, hundreds, and have read nearly all of them. This isn’t bragging, as I haven’t read all that much since college, except for my first copy-desk stint of 1985-87. They just add […]
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The Dickens with Harry Potter
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, July 27, 2005. Three cheers for Harry Potter and his inventor. J.K. Rowling may well be this generation’s Dickens. I’m not saying she is a perfect novelist or storyteller, although yes I am implying Dickens can be difficult, especially140 years later. But enough about Chuck. The Harry Potter series […]