Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock “In light that your entire talk focused on the importance of the imagination and getting at truth through invention, Mr. Rushdie, would you analyze, discuss or comment on the widespread public infatuation with memoir?” The UA moderator cut the 15 minutes of Q-and-A precisely. I wasn’t next at the microphone […]
On April 18, 1945, a Japanese sniper took out Ernie Pyle during a Pacific Island skirmish. Pyle was a beloved newspaperman, whose columns were anticipated by millions of readers of hundreds of newspapers. You couldn’t say that about a lot of journalists then, much less now. Most war reporting was conducted at the officer level, […]
The first-day coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings was, compared to most similar events, surprisingly restrained. CNN was unbearably repetitive. I couldn’t see more than five minutes at a time, due to impatience, but wasn’t it wonderful that the cable news station of excess kept guesswork and pseudo-psycho-pap about the shooter to a minimum. But […]
Writer Salman Rushdie is coming to town, and I recalled I wrote a column about his troubles. It was a peach, in my fuzzy memory, so surely I had posted it online, right? Well, it is there, now. It was from 1989, and I had to type it in earlier today because I wrote it […]
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Can a fortnight’s worth of writer topics fit together, and should they? Why, it depends on the size of your tent. Preferrers of small tents closely define their parameters. A writer must have New York-based publications to his credit. A journalist must be a full-time employee of a news factory. […]
The New Republic (subscription-only) reports that humorist, memoirist, monologist David Sedaris embellishes. A number of otherwise sensible commentators, like Slate’s Jack Shafer, jump on the fellow. Their point: If you laugh, it’s not journalism. If it has a coherent beginning, middle and end, it’s too good to be true. [Casablanca: Captain Renault: “I’m shocked, shocked […]