Poets and Scam-artists

This column is one of my most frequently copied, posted, and linked-to writings.  It's a bit dated now, but its message is valid and refers to online poetry entries as well as print versions.

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Would-be poets and scam artists

BY Allan Roy Andrews,

Former Editor, Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan

First published December 21, 1997

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Scams generally fall into two categories: those that appeal to our desire to make money--usually fast--and those that appeal to our vanity.

The Internet is chock full of the first type. All those complaints we're hearing about ``junk mail'' [aka "spam"] on the Internet, especially on popular service providers such as America Online, are largely directed against fast-buck operators attempting to lure us into a get-rich-quick scheme.

Many of these scams are built on a pyramid structure where the early birds make money, but the suckers at the tail-end come up empty.

Other scams give the illusion of something-for-nothing that in the end winds up costing quite a bit.

The best defense against this type of scam is keeping one's wallet or purse closed. Slap your hand when you reach for the credit card or checkbook to aid and abet the ``small donation'' appeals of ``you-can-make-thousands'' barkers.

If a scam artist can e-mail 100,000 people and get just one percent of them to part with five bucks, that hypemeister is $5,000 richer. And be sure of this: e-mailing 100,000 people on any given morning in today's techno-cyberspace is about as easy as buttering toast.

Then there are scams that appeal to our vanity.Of course, intelligent and savvy persons such as you and I never fall into such appeals, do we?

See how easy it was for me to win your agreement. All I had to do was drop a compliment, or appeal to vanity.

This vanity appeal is rampant in the creative writing subculture. Our world abounds with would-be poets and fiction writers. Every person who has ever put pen or pencil to paper to record some experience in free verse or lines that scan holds a dream of seeing his or her artistic work in print.

These amateur poets are great targets of connivers who gladly take their money in return for an overpriced collection of doggerel and unsophisticated verse.

Jenijoy LaBelle is professor of literature at Caltech and a critic of modern poetry. In order to read Prof. La Belle's gripe about the scam artists I've described, one would have to subscribe to the Chronicle, the newspaper of The Associated Writers Program. I doubt many readers of this column have seen that publication, so I'll summarize the professor's investigation.

I hope this will alert many sincere and devoted amateur poets to hang on to their money and share their writings with trusted friends, mentors and established and reputable publications.

Prof. LaBelle conducted a test stimulated by an ad for a poetry contest. I've seen this ad in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly. ``New Poetry Contest $48,000.00 in Prizes,'' the headline of the ad screams.

The ad explains that ``The National Library of Poetry to award 250 total prizes to amateur poets in coming months.''

Suspicious, Prof. La Belle talked three friends into submitting entries to one of The National Library's contests. Her first friend submitted a patchwork poem comprised of random sayings collected from Chinese fortune cookies. A second friend copied a lyric poem of Emily Dickinson's and entered it in the contest under her own name. The third friend wrote an original piece of irrational doggerel about female breasts.

All three of Prof. LaBelle's friends were notified that they were semi-finalists in the contest and that they should be ``genuinely proud of this accomplishment'' because they were possessed of ``a rare talent.''

By now you see how the bait and the vanity have been hooked. The next step, like one lifted from ``The Sting,'' is to get the ``poet'' to part with his or her money.

``We wish to publish your poem in a forthcoming anthology,'' Prof. LaBelle's friends were informed. To have a copy of this book, entitled, ``Sparkles in the Sand,'' the winners were urged to send in $49.95, plus $4 for postage and handling.

For an additional $20, the publishers would add a short biographical note about the poet. This note was allegedly designed to bring the writers to the attention of the media and the public.

Later, these ersatz poets were offered a chance to have their poems mounted under Lucite on a walnut plaque, an offer costing $38. Furthermore, they could have their poems recorded on a cassette tape for $29.95.

The tape, according to The National Library of Poetry, would feature a well-known narrator and baroque music accompaniment.

LaBelle's friends were offered a chance to join the International Society of Poets, with a membership fee of $125. Each one was notified he or she had been nominated as ``Poet of the Year,'' and could attend an induction ceremony in Washington, D.C., for a convention fee of $495, plus travel and hotel expenses.

``Whoever sends in some lame lines becomes a semi-finalist,'' LaBelle notes. From that point on, the scam is on.

The published anthologies, according to the literature professor, are ``jumbles of trivial or downright bad verse.''

Vanity and gullibility, LaBelle concludes, allow this operation to exploit would-be poets for its own greed and profit.

``Maybe nothing illegal is going on,'' LaBelle writes, ``but something unethical as well as unpoetical certainly is.''

And our vanity, this little test shows, can be costly when plied by a scam artist.

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 + National Society of Newspaper Columnists +

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at aroyandrews@gmail.com

Opinion Voiced as a Cartoon

This column appeared on the editorial page of the newspaper

published April 17, 1997, following complaints about a published cartoon.

By Allan R. Andrews, Editor,

Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan

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Cartoonists, especially editorial cartoonists, are controversial by the very nature of their work. In the space of about 25 column inches of a newspaper, often in 25 words or less, cartoonists raise the ire of many who disagree with the point being made.

There is not a working cartoonist alive who has not had to confront friend and foe alike to explain and defend his or her caricatures or succinct satires.

Because the cartoon is a picture, it packs a quick, powerful wallop not accessible to columnists limited to words only.

Gary Trudeau can express an opinion through "Doonesbury" in six cartoon panels with five or ten sentences where David S. Broder, Anthony Lewis or Ellen Goodman would require five or ten carefully crafted paragraphs and several more supporting paragraphs, to make the same point.

More often than not, a cartoon stands on its own, without accompanying news or commentary.

Alas, the cartoon's strengths--quickness, caricature, exaggeration and sharp wit in a small package--also define its greatest liabilities because anything that attempts to communicate quickly and with an economy of words is open to bias and misinterpretation.

Such appears to have been the case on March 24 when Pacific Stars and Stripes ran a cartoon by Chuck Asay of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph that made a dramatic point about African-Americans and abortion.

Above three panels that depicted a Ku Klux Klan rally, a Nazi rally, and an abortion-supporting panel, Asay asked the overriding question: "Which of these kills more Blacks?"

As do most of our free press's powerful and prize-winning cartoons, this one of Asay's was strong, shocking, and quick to the point on a sensitive issue; in fact, it compounded the argument by touching on two highly sensitive areas of American life: abortion and race.

The cartoon upset many readers and drew several phone calls to Pacific Stars and Stripes news bureaus, but not as many as when the answer to a crossword puzzle is missing or when the daily horoscope is missing a sign of the Zodiac. To date, we have received no letters to the editor on the cartoon.

[As of May 10, the newspaper had received only one complaining letter to the editor.]

Apparently one caller to our office suggested a lawsuit charging racial bias on the part of Pacific Stars and Stripes was being considered, and a report on the cartoon apparently reached headquarters of the Commander in Chief for the Pacific in Hawaii (where Pacific Stars and Stripes does not circulate).

At times cartoonists may overstep the bounds of decency and fairness; some have been suspended for slipping profanity into their panels.

Some simply offend a large base of readers. Many British newspapers dumped a cartoonist that criticized the queen, and a female cartoonist in America lost over 50 clients when she introduced a homosexual character into her strip.

The history of editorial cartooning is dotted with controversy.

"The Yellow Kid" first appeared in newspapers in 1895 controversially poking fun at American president William McKinley and perennial candidate William Jennings Bryan. The comic became so aligned with sensationalism that a whole genre of journalism arose from its origins, so-called "yellow journalism."

Richard Nixon was consistently caricatured as a politician with a five-o'clock shadow, a depiction the former president and his family detested.

Lyndon Johnson suffered being caricatured as a mule.

And one cartoonist helped deflate bombastic Sen. Joseph McCarthy with a comic character called "Senator Malarkey."

Just a few years ago, cartoonist Doug Marlette ran afoul of the Vatican when he caricatured the Pope as being blockheadedly unsympathetic to the ordination of women.

Most editors have learned that some cartoons are bound to raise hackles and stir a flurry of complaints. Editors try to judge cartoons in a manner laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is to demand that fairness and fair comment be guidelines.

Even when an editor disagrees with the viewpoint being expressed, he or she must measure the viewpoint against the standards of free speech and fair comment.

Like 'em or hate 'em, cartoons are a basic element of the free speech that characterizes the press in a democratic society.

To paraphrase the famous dictum of Voltaire: "I may disagree with what the cartoonist pictures, but I will defend to the death his right to picture such opinions."

Pacific Stars and Stripes purchases from syndicates more than 60 comics, cartoons and editorial columnists. By charter, Pacific Stars and Stripes is prevented from running editorials of our own; we are monitored by Congress to be certain we present a balance on the spectrum of conservative-to-liberal opinions in our pages, and each year our editorial page editor reports on how we have met that demand.

Cartoonist Chuck Asay, frankly, is one of the few cartoonists in America today who is overtly and enthusiastically in the conservative camp.

Stripes purchases his cartoon because he provides a balance to the several options offered that represent more liberal opinions.

Furthermore, Asay's newspaper in Colorado Springs has a reputation for being one of the more conservative newspapers in the nation with a readership that takes in the United States Air Force Academy and a host of conservative evangelical religious organizations that maintain headquarters in the mountain city.

Asay's cartoon runs in the newspaper and is syndicated worldwide by the Creators News Syndicate, from which Pacific Stars and Stripes purchases it.

Interestingly, the cartoon in question touched so sensitive a nerve that Asay's home newspaper chose not to run it, he told Stripes’ Managing Editor Mike Durant in a telephone call.

Nevertheless, the syndicate distributed it, and Asay's clients, among them Pacific Stars and Stripes ran the cartoon in its usual place on our Reader's Forum page.

A representative of Creators News Syndicate told Durant that there have been no unusual number of complaints to the syndicate concerning the cartoon in question.

More importantly, Asay told Durant that the theme of this particular cartoon had grown out of discussions Asay has had with black clergy in the Colorado Springs area who are concerned that African-Americans are not deeply enough involved in the anti-abortion movement.

Asay's cartoon was not racist, in the judgment of our editors; in fact, it was judged to be a cartoon of African- American advocacy.

Our editors felt the cartoon broached no limit of decency or fairness, despite being a strongly opinionated cartoon.

Yes, it was shocking; yes, it was strong; yes, it played off of historical biases; yes, it was succinct and pulled no punches. In other words, it did what editorial cartoons are supposed to do--arouse a reader's thinking cells.

Asay clearly is an anti-abortion advocate; his viewpoint differs little from viewpoints espoused by Pat Buchanan, William F. Buckley, and several other columnists whose anti-abortion opinions have run on the pages of Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Stripes neither endorses nor seeks to curtail such opinions. Stripes does not support any form of racism and would refuse to run any news story, opinion column or cartoon that we judged to be racist.

Pacific Stripes operates in the spirit of the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and a free press.

It is in that spirit of free press and fair comment, however, we defend a cartoonist's--in this case, Chuck Asay's--right to tweak America's sensitive public soul.

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Ernie Pyle and an Unknown

ERNIE PYLE AND AN UNKNOWN

By Allan R. Andrews, Editor,

Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan.

First published April 13, 1997.

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I've often remarked that cemeteries are for the living.

To walk through a quiet, garden-like compound marked with memorial stones provokes reflection. Though many are frightened at the prospect of traversing a graveyard, such a stroll can serve to remind us of our mortality and help us recall those who left behind the same work we are doing.

Late last year, business took me to Hawaii, and good timing allowed my wife to make the trip, giving us four days in Waikiki without the children.

For me, it was a first. I've crossed the Pacific Ocean numerous times since moving to Japan, but this was the first time I'd ever set foot on the soil of our 50th state.

As would any good first-time tourist, I took a tour of the Waikiki-Pearl Harbor area. We visited the Arizona Memorial, drove through Chinatown, stopped on a wharf not far from the Aloha Tower, and drove through the Punchbowl to visit the war memorial cemetery on the hill.

The tour bus on which we were riding merely made a pass through the cemetery, stopping briefly so passengers could admire some spindly legged birds on the lawn.

I looked out the window at the headstones. We had parked directly in front of the grave of Ernie Pyle, with the headstones of two unknown soldiers flanking the famous reporter's resting place.

According to our guide, being buried between two unknown soldiers was one of Pyle's requests.

Pyle died on April 18, 1945. A sniper's bullet killed him on the island of Ie Shima, just off the coast of Okinawa, where island-hopping American forces were making a push toward mainland Japan.

In previous tributes written about him, it's been said that Pyle died because he didn't duck. He apparently looked up to check that his companions were O.K. and that's when the sniper's bullet found him.

Saying that he didn't duck is itself a tribute to Pyle's doggedness in covering the war; he didn't duck danger.

He covered the blitz of London; he covered the landing on the beaches of Anzio; and when the assignment came, he went halfway around the world to cover the other front in Okinawa.

April 18 -- the date of Pyle's death -- has been officially designated as National Columnists Day in honor of Pyle. The organization that pushed for the official day, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, wants the memory of Pyle to remind those of us who write for a living of what comprises the best attributes of an American columnist.

The society urges columnists to remember Pyle and write about him each year as this anniversary of his death comes around.

Pyle is warmly remembered and accolades for him continue even 50 years after his death. It truly impresses me that Pyle remembered and asked to be buried among the unknowns who fought and died in defense of their country.

Pyle dropped out of Indiana University in 1923, short of a degree, but eager to go to work as a journalist.

Before he became famous covering World War II, Pyle was a national columnist who had crossed the United States 35 times.

When he did go to war, Pyle knew the danger. He said ``there's just no way to play it completely safe and still do your job.''

When then-President Harry Truman spoke to the nation of Pyle's death, he said, ``No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told.''

I think Pyle wouldn't have minded one bit that I'm going to attend to a lesser known soldier.

My colleagues in the NSNC will forgive me and understand, I think, if I divert my attention on April 18 of this year from Ernie Pyle and remember someone else.

I never knew this soldier, but his name is on an award we give annually to military journalists, and his story is mounted with photos in display cases in our lobby at Stars and Stripes in Tokyo.

His name, along with two others who worked for Stars and Stripes, is engraved in the new Arlington, Va., Freedom Forum Memorial to journalists who died doing their job.

Twenty-eight years ago, a gutsy newspaper reporter, cut from the same material as Pyle, argued his way into being given orders to report to Vietnam to cover the war there for Pacific Stars and Stripes.

Paul D. Savanuck dropped out of college--en route to a journalism degree--at the University of Maryland in his senior year in 1967 to join the Army. Echoes of Ernie Pyle seem to lie in his decision.

A native of Baltimore--born the year after Pyle died--Savanuck volunteered for duty in Vietnam. He did so as a challenge to himself. ``This was a point in my life where I could meet something head-on instead of avoiding it,'' the 21-year-old told a colleague. Again, an echo of Pyle's words regarding danger is clear. There's just no way to avoid it, Savanuck might have said.

I can't know for sure, but I have a feeling that Savanuck read just about every word that Pyle wrote. In the small record we have of Savanuck's war days, Pyle's shadow seems to loom large.

Pushing to become a Stars and Stripes reporter, Savanuck finally got his wish on April 4, 1969, when he was assigned to Stripes' news bureau in Saigon.

He filed a story with accompanying photos on a Philippine unit operating near the Cambodian border. It was the last story he wrote.

In a letter back to his parents and on a letter accompanying his attempt to gain admission to Harvard, Savanuck had written: ``I have found what I want to do . . . journalism, . . .''

Volunteering to do a story on pacification in the DMZ, Savanuck headed north. He camped with a cavalry regiment that was attacked by North Vietnamese troops. Wounded while taking pictures, he discarded his camera and rushed to help more seriously wounded soldiers.

He was hit in the back by automatic weapon fire. He was 23 years old when he died. The date was April 18, 1969.

On that day, Ernie Pyle, 1900-1945, met Paul D. Savanuck, 1946-1969, journalist.

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Mom's Tea and An Archbishop in New York

Tea time in New York

By Allan Roy Andrews
Stripes Former Managing Editor

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First published October 15, 1995 in Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan

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I grew up drinking tea.

No one ever left from a visit to our house without being offered a cup of tea.

Offered is the wrong word. No one ever left from a visit to our house without being prevailed upon to sit down for a cup of tea. To end a visit without a cup of tea insulted my mother as would the slamming of a door in her face.

I started drinking tea before I reached kindergarten, I think. I can't remember a time that I didn't join the family and guests for tea.

Tea held the same social honor in the homes of my aunts, cousins and near-relatives who, like my parents, were raised on the British-influenced eastern seaboard of Canada.

The importance of tea in my life resurfaced when I read about the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, visiting New York City (where my mother made most of her tea, incidentally).

Interviewed for the New York Times while he ate breakfast on the run, Archbishop George Leonard Carey drank coffee that morning, telling a reporter that back home in England he drinks tea, but in the United States ``the coffee is so good and the tea is not.''

My mother would heartily concur about America's lack of tea skills were she still alive, and having heard the archbishop, she'd have put the kettle on the stove to prepare ``a spot of tea'' for whomever happened to be near her at the time, probably saying something like, ``The archbishop should visit my house, then, if it's a good cup of tea he's looking for.''

My mother practiced a long-established ritual in preparing tea, a ritual passed on by her mother and one she attempted to instill in every tea drinker she met.

To be sure, my mother's ritual lacks the aesthetic ceremonial behavior associated with the Japanese preparation of tea, but her pragmatic rules guarantee the best tasting English tea possible.

In summary, my mother's rules, though never written by her, go like this:

1.- Use a clean kettle to boil water. Tea kettles have a way of sitting on the stove for weeks with only the change of rinse water cleaning them. My mother scrubbed her kettle, inside and out, and frequently cleaned its insides with cream of tartar.

2.- Use only cold water from the tap. This ironclad rule was emphasized because my mother, who knew little or nothing about chemicals and water supplies, thought the epitome of laziness exercised itself by using hot tap water to brew tea. I don't know the chemistry either, but tea made with hot tap water tastes awful compared to tea made with cold water.

3.- Bring the water to a rolling boil for several minutes. To guarantee the water's hotness, this rule is paramount and kept my mother from using whistling tea kettles. Such kettles begin to whistle as soon as the first steam escapes; their boil doesn't roll. When my mother made tea, steam nearly filled the kitchen as it flew from the spout of the kettle with almost the force of a steam locomotive.

4.- Always use loose tea. Teabags could disfigure my mother's face faster than a sucked lemon. In restaurants she might prefer them because she thought restaurant cooks failures at making tea, but few if any visitors were ever served tea made from a teabag in her house. In her old age she succumbed to the convenience of teabags, but by then she was rarely making her own cups of tea.

5.- Steep tea in a clean and heated tea pot. The correct word here is steep. Coffee is brewed, tea is steeped. Tea must steep in a pot for a minimum of two minutes. That was my mother's rule of thumb. Then it can be made to suit people's taste for strong or weak tea by pouring it straight or by mixing it with hot water from the kettle.

Drinking weak tea was accepted by my mother but always frowned upon. ``That's nothing more than dishwater,'' I can hear her saying to one of my aunts who preferred a hardly tinted cup of tea.

A tea strainer was optional in my mother's ritual; but before steeping the tea, the pot should be rinsed with a cupful of boiling water to prepare it for its steeping task.

6.- Keep the pot hot with a cover of some sort. Nowadays, fancy ``tea cozys'' are sewn, knitted, cross-stitched, even embroidered to be placed over a steeping teapot. My mother owned such fancy tea ware, but more often than not she'd drape a dishtowel or pot holder over the pot. The point was to trap the heat for the two or three minutes the tea steeped.

7.- Serve in a china cup. This final rule was less binding, especially when serving family and relatives, but it provided the final touch of grace that made a cup of my mother's tea one of earth's sensual pleasures and treasures.

One of my mother's prides was her collection of china cups. At the peak of her housekeeping years, she owned about 100 fancy tea cups, and many were displayed in our apartment. China cups provided a convenient source of birthday or Christmas (which, incidentally, came one day after her birthday) gifts for her.

Many in her collection were love gifts from my father. Many were from relatives and guests who spent extended times with us.

She kept each cup spotless and shining and knew without notes which cup was a favorite of every member of her family and of every person who ever drank at her table.

After my father died and she moved into a small apartment to live alone, she gradually gave away her collection to almost every woman she'd ever known. My wife has one of my mother's cups.

8.- Provide milk, sugar and lemon for the drinker's taste.

It's a shame the archbishop couldn't have visited my mother in Brooklyn. He'd have known it was possible to get a good cup of tea in the U.S.
 

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This essay was reprinted in Connections, a publication of Annapolis Area
Christian School, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 18-19.

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Allan Roy Andrews can be reached online at aroyandrews@gmail.com 

Ex-Cuban prisoner arrives at airport

The Boston Globe (ARCHIVE)

FORMER CUBAN PRISONER
GREETS FAMILY AT LOGAN

Author(s):    Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff 

Date: July 1, 1984 Section: RUN OF PAPER

Former Cuban political prisoner Humberto Noble Alexander was joyously reunited with his mother, sister, other relatives and friends last night at Logan International Airport.

Alexander was released by Cuban President Fidel Castro and flown to the United States with 47 other prisoners and the Rev. Jesse Jackson Thursday. Eighteen of the others were reunited with friends and relatives at a jammed Miami airport earlier yesterday.

It was the first time in 30 years that Alexander had seen his 73-year-old mother, Beryl, who lives in Salem, and the first time he had seen his sister, Paulina, in 25 years. The 50-year-old Seventh-day Adventist minister spent the last 22 years in a Havana prison.

"Where's Mom?" Alexander asked his sister as they walked hugging each other from the plane toward his mother and the gathering of friends and relatives who waited outside the jetway and gate. Reaching the group, the smiling son reached out and patted his mother's cheeks before they fell into each other's arms and began to erase the distance of three decades with a prolonged embrace.

"Welcome home, Noble," friends and relatives shouted amid repeated hugs, handshakes and high-fives.

Alexander's sister and his cousin, Jacqueline Alexander of Cambridge, had boarded the jetliner moments earlier to greet the released prisoner and lead him to his mother. Because of air traffic problems in New York and Boston, the plane's eventual arrival from Washington was delayed for two hours.

Asked at a hastily organized press conference why he had been imprisoned, Alexander said, "For preaching the gospel." He said the charge against him by the communist authorities in Cuba was that he was preaching counterrevolution.

Alexander said he will make a trip to Miami and then plans "to continue using the gospel, taking Christ to the millions."

Of the prisoners who remain in Cuba, Alexander said, "I won't forget them. I'm still with them." Alexander, who is divorced, left his former wife and a 22-year-old son in Cuba.

He said Castro released the prisoners because "he is seeking political favors. He thinks he can keep a lock on our mouths." The other prisoners in Cuba, Alexander said, told him and others who were released to "do all you can. We want the world to learn what is happening."

He called his release "a new birth" and said he wanted to spend time with his mother. Thursday's arrival in Washington marked the first time that Alexander, who was born in San German, Cuba, has set foot in the United States.

His mother, a native of Barbados, came to Boston in 1950 and moved to Salem the next year, hoping to bring her family behind her one by one. She returned to Cuba for the funeral of another daughter in 1954, and that was the last time she had seen her son until last night. Her daughter Paulina came to the United States in 1955.

"I didn't think he was going to make it," his tearful sister said. "I don't pray, but now I believe that prayers really do something," she said.

Another passenger on the plane from Washington, George Smith of Mesa, Ariz., who said he sat next to Alexander on the flight, said the former prisoner told him, "We should not trust Castro."

Leaving the press conference, Alexander went to a friend who was wheeling Mrs. Alexander in a chair supplied by the airline and said, "Do you mind if I do that?" He smilingly pushed his mother from the airport to the privacy of their family reunion.

Biography of Hank Williams -- a review

THE BOSTON GLOBE (ARCHIVE)

REVIEW / BOOK\

HANK WILLIAMS: TROUBADOUR IN COWBOY BOOTS

YOUR CHEATIN' HEART: A BIOGRAPHY OF HANK wILLIAMS, BY CHET FLIPPO.

SIMON & SCHUSTER. 256 PP. $12.95.

Author:    Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff 

Date: October 25, 1981, Section: BOOKS 

Moan.

It captures best an art form perfected by country singer Hank Williams. His musical style was the moan--as it was the style of his life. Of broken love or simple faith, Williams sang with a moan, and now Chet Flippo has chronicled the moans of his life. Flippo's biography is not a book of the heart; it reaches for the entrails and repeatedly peeks at the genitals.

This is a hard, sad book that tends toward iconoclasm, but it scratches away the gaudiness constructed around Williams by fan magazines and Nashville promoters.

But a sadness also lies in Flippo's lack of sympathy toward the mythology that surrounds Hank Williams. As with any folk hero, the myth is more important than the man, and Flippo borders on disservice to the legend of Hank Williams with his ruthless objectivity in detailing Williams' failings.

Williams is more than a country singer; he is an entire mythology: a prophet, complete with passion play, tragic ending and expression in sad songs of hope for the lost. Flippo's Williams is an immature neurotic, who found salvation less in a song than in a syringe.

By 1948, Hank Williams was the best-known country singer in the nation, and his songs--"Cold, Cold Heart," "Your Cheatin' Heart," and "Half As Much"--were picked up by popular singers and rendered into million-selling recordings.

In 1951, Williams' flaring career ended when he was found dead in his powder-blue Cadillac, a 29-year-old victim of his success and the psychic toll of the road, the bottle and their pharmaceutical companions.

Three decades later, country music has emerged from its barnyard roots to become the most widely sold music of the century, and Hank Williams remains its memorialized high priest. With a perspective of 30 years and a goldmine of correspondence released from the estate of Williams' first wife, Audrey, Flippo has written a definitive account of the life of Hiram (Hank) Williams.

In many respects, Williams is a prototypic rags-to-riches-to-tragedy story. Born into a poor white family in Alabama with a father who did little else than drink and a mother who did--quite literally--everything, Williams broke from his poverty and his maternal prison by playing the guitar, singing and by marrying. Williams' marriage proved a mere change of venue in his psychic trials, a brutal relationship between Williams and "Miss Ordrey" that is bared by Flippo.

If there was any solace in Williams' life, it came with the encouragement of Fred Rose, the urbane music publisher, who not only co-wrote many of Williams' songs, but also shepherded Williams' career until alcohol and drugs--enhanced by a congenital back disorder--made the singer's displays on stage and in the recording studio a tragic liability.

Fans of Williams will moan at Flippo's failure to strike any balance. For example, we are told Williams wrote country hymns in his meditative moments, but we are never shown those moments with the intensity that Flippo brings to the privacy of Williams' marital and sexual ponderings. Rather than trying to understand the "maudlin" nature of Williams' religious expression, Flippo brushes it aside and thus overlooks a major philosophical root--for weal or for woe--in the life of a singer who wrote more than a dozen religious songs, rarely ended performances without singing a gospel song and levied fines on band members--including himself--who took God's name in vain.

To be sure, Flippo is a sympathetic biographer, but he seems to relish taking us into the bedroom and the barroom where Williams showed his anger and violence while rarely leading us to the inner sanctum of self in the story of this gifted performer.

Flippo's is an almost clinical analysis of a mother and son love-hate relationship and of two marriages, one that seemed to run on greed and a second marked more by vaudeville than by vows.

We think we know Hank Williams better after reading Flippo, but despite the narrative style--which promises more than it delivers--we meet only a victim of the dominant personalities around him, and come away with the same answers that for decades have followed the question, "Who was Hank Williams?" He was a country singer who drank heavily, was abused by those around him and died too young.

But Williams has become more in death than he was in life, not because of the sentimentality or the industry that surrounds his memory, but because he is the encapsulation of the mythic troubadour in cowboy boots, and because he expressed so well the fundamental moans of our existence. Except for a brief concession to Williams as legend in his summary, Flippo neglects the myth, perhaps deliberately, for it is not the role of a biographer to perpetuate myths. But neither is it the role of the biographer to denigrate the dreams of adoring fans who found someone to teach them to moan melodiously.

Portrait of B.F.Skinner

The Boston Globe (ARCHIVE)

'WHY DO WE NOT ACT TO SAVE OUR WORLD,' HE ASKS

Author:    Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff 

Date: April 30, 1981,  Section: RUN OF PAPER

(This piece was reprinted in The Los Angeles Times)

Ten years ago, psychologist B.F. Skinner was selected in a magazine poll as the most easily recognized scientist in the world, and, because of his radical view of human nature, he was described by one critic as "the man you love to hate."

Now 77, dealing with the effects of radiation therapy for a tumor in his saliva gland and battling failing eyesight, Skinner remains the evangelist of radical behaviorism - although he appears more the wizened and reflective sage than the firebrand of the academic world.

Skinner's view of human behavior is a rigid environmentalism. Persons behave the way they do because of the positive feedback they receive from their environment - including other persons - when they act. If an act is rewarded, it will more likely be repeated; if an act goes unrewarded, it will likely disappear.

The Harvard researcher has suggested a Utopia could be created by applying his laboratory principles to society. His arguments raise the hackles of thinkers who depict humans as possessors of mind, soul and spirit - what Skinner decries as "mentalist" thinking.

His tenth book, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," published in 1971, suggested human freedom and dignity were useless nonscientific concepts and that social evils could be overcome only by scientifically manipulating rewards for human actions. The book thrust the mild but tough-minded psychologist into the center of controversy and into a limelight not usually enjoyed by university professors.

Many readers called his views enlightening and refreshing. The American Humanist Society that year named him "Humanist of the Year." Others reacted in horror to what they saw as the beginning of George Orwell's "1984," a world in which control of human behavior and emotions had run amok.

"That book was a kind of watershed between the '60s and the present," Skinner said in a recent interview. "The '60s were a time when every rule governing good group behavior was broken. We've learned that we can't have that kind of individualism. You have to support a culture.

"I didn't mean down with freedom." 

He said he was attacking what he saw as an early version of "Me Generation" selfishness that ignored the influence of environment on human action.

Skinner, who retired in 1974 and is now professor emeritus of psychology and social relations at Harvard, still maintains an office on the seventh floor of William James Hall on the campus, to which he goes from his Cambridge home every day to write and conduct a small research project.

He remains active as a convention and symposia speaker, sought by professional philosophers as well as psychologists to espouse his position.

His major project is writing the third volume of his autobiography. He has hired a young assistant to sort through the reams of correspondence and professional papers that will provide the meat of the book, which will cover Skinner's career as a Harvard University professor from 1948 to the present.

"I originally planned to have four volumes and most of the third is finished," he said. "But now I've decided to put the last two together and get it over with."

His two previous autobiographical volumes, "Particulars of My Life," published in 1976, and "The Shaping of a Behaviorist," published in 1979, have met with generally cordial reviews, but neither of them covers the years during which Skinner was embroiled in debate over his radical views.

Actually, everything that Skinner said in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" had been expressed decades earlier in both his research writings and in "Walden Two," his 1948 utopian novel that depicted a society managed by positive rewarding of appropriate behavior. Time magazine, in reviewing "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" in 1971, called it the nonfiction version of "Walden Two."

Although the writing of a novel is somewhat unusual among research psychologists, it seems an appropriate avocation for Skinner. As a young man fresh out of Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college near Utica, N.Y., Skinner moved to Greenwich Village determined to make a career as a writer.

He was a prolific writer in college, attended the Bread Loaf seminar for young writers and found encouragement in some personal criticism of his work by poet Robert Frost. But he forsook writing as a career and enrolled at Harvard when he discovered psychology.

After receiving his doctorate, he taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Indiana before returning to Harvard in 1947, where he would spend the rest of his professional life.

In 1971 he achieved the dream of every writer when "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" reached best-seller status. That same year, his colleagues selected him as the world's outstanding research psychologist, providing him a rare combination of popular and academic acclaim.

The aging psychologist still dabbles with poetry and retains a particular fondness for Hamilton College. Professional obligations will keep him from attending the 55th anniversary gathering of his class there in late May, but he has written a nostalgic rhymed ballad that a former classmate will read during the festivities.

While he read the stanzas recently, a smile crossed his face as his words carried him back to the New York campus.

"My smile still doesn't rise symmetrically at the corners," he said self-consciously, pushing his right cheek up with his index finger and explaining the effect of radiation therapy that sends him to Peter Bent Brigham hospital regularly for treatment.

The therapy makes his mouth dry, so he continuously sips water from a mug; it has also taken away his appetite.

"I can go a whole week without eating, but it keeps my weight down," he explained. "I take food now almost as if it were a drug."

His comfortable office is a bit cluttered with cardboard file cabinets stacked beside the wall. The files were sent by the Library of Congress, which will be the benefactor of his papers when he has finished with them.

Above his desk and on the wall opposite are paintings done by his youngest daughter, Deborah Buzan, the same daughter who became a cause celebre as an infant when Skinner built a device to ease his wife's child-rearing duties. Called an air crib, the device provided the infant a temperature-and-light- controlled environment in a glass-covered chamber with a rolling diaper that could be replaced as needed. The crib is often derisively called a "Skinner Box" and has been the source of many misconceptions regarding Skinner's paternal ethics and his daughter's mental health.

Deborah is a successful artist living with her husband in London; she recently exhibited her work at Royal Hall. Her father chuckles at the memory of his "air-crib baby" and says he visits her every year.

An older daughter, Julie, followed her father into professional psychology. She lives and works in West Virginia and her two children have made Skinner a proud grandfather.

Never one to rest on academic or social laurels, Skinner is presently investigating a behaviorist analysis of the future. He is scheduled to unveil his views at an international symposium in Europe next year.

With the persistent Utopian overtones that have marked his work, his preliminary paper for the symposium begins with the question, "Why do we not act to save our world?"

As with most of his social criticism, the paper calls for the application of a scientific technology of behavior to bring about change through the rewarding (or reinforcing, to use the proper behaviorist term) of actions. Advice is rarely followed, Skinner writes, unless some component of behavior is involved and is rewarded.

Despite his advocacy and defense of Utopian communities, Skinner has never actively participated in one. "I could probably rally a hundred or more willing followers," he said, "but I've always felt I was better off here, advancing the day, as it were."

Skinner remains a cogent and perceptive critic. Discussing the resurgence of the death penalty as punishment in the United States, he said, "I know perfectly well we're not going to get away without punishment in some form. But punishment of people by people has all kinds of unwanted byproducts."

The popularity of punishment, he argues, is a direct outcome of "the failure of permissiveness in schools and in society. We continue to have punishment because we have nothing better to put in its place," he said. "If we make it easier to get what you want by stealing rather than by earning, stealing will continue."

In a Skinnerian Utopia, be it a society or a schoolroom, punishment of inappropriate behavior is replaced by rewards for appropriate behavior.

Despite his own commitment to psychology, Skinner frequently argues against too steep an undergraduate education for students who want to become psychologists and argues instead for a more general liberal arts background.

He would recommend steeping students in his favorite author, William Shakespeare: "He is absolutely fantastic. There is so much richness in his writing. No one even comes close."

On that note, with a friendly handshake and a bent but pleasant smile, "the man you love to hate" said goodbye and went back to work.

ADDENDUM SIDEBAR:

Notebooks, B.F. Skinner

As with many writers, researchers and philosophers, B.F. Skinner has made a lifelong habit of keeping notebooks of his thoughts.

In 1980, psychologist Robert Epstein edited and published these thoughts under the title, "Notebooks, B.F. Skinner."

Skinner's wideranging entries include:

- Some baseball advice:

". . . a plausible technique of breaking up a batting slump. My guess is that a player is told what he is doing wrong or shown movies or videotapes of himself as he strikes out or grounds out easily. I suggested that, instead, he be shown a short film of himself hitting home runs. . . . Why do I think it will work? It could be a kind of imitation, but a more likely effect should be eliminating some of the current aversive effects of the slump. . . ."

- On the context of practical things:

"Toilet paper is useful - to wipe pens, clean eyeglasses, dry fingers, and so on. A roll is a more convenient form than a box-fold of tissues. Yet one resists mounting a roll of toilet paper near one's desk or worktable or even in a machine shop."