Bo-Bo Knows Mom's Got Mixed Feelings About the End of Her Column

On October 22, the Boston Globe published my swan song. Since 2006, I have enjoyed writing a weekly column for The Boston Globe Sidekick section ("Campus Calendar" during the school year and "Road Trips" during the summer). This edition of "Campus Calendar" is my last.

As of Friday, October 23, Sidekick will be no more. In fact, many of my favorite parts of the paper will be no more. Or--more accurately--most of the non-hard news content will be crammed into a single section. While it sucks to get a column yanked away from me before I was ready to let it go (I liked collecting the extra paycheck and keeping a big toe in the newspaper world), I'm sadder about what this means for journalism.

I'll grant that the kind of journalism I liked best isn't exactly the kind of stuff that was ever going to shortlist me for big awards. Hell, the kind of journalism I like best wasn't ever going to shortlist me for any awards. And I'll admit that all my proudest journalism moments came from focusing on meatier issues:

• an investigative magazine article about the surge in homeless families in Massachusetts,
• a reporter-at-large profile of the Million Mom March for gun control in Washington D.C, and
• an interview with a local World War II prisoner-of-war who trusted me enough to break down as he told me his story.
  

In fact, I have a friend with a PhD in chemical engineering (the last I understood of his work, he was researching strategies for growing bananas infused with vaccines) who called my recent profile of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult a "gimmick article" because of its "hanging with" premise--Picoult agreed to have a tarot reading done with a few million Boston-area public looking on via my article.

I say a good gimmick has its place. The standard profile asks a writer about the issue raised in the current book, offers information about the writer's local readings, and describes any interesting detours the writer took along the road to publication. The trouble? Most fans know all this. Enter gimmick journalism--give these fans a look at the question their favorite writer asks a tarot reader and take a snapshot of how she responds when the news isn't good, and the fan gets to glimpse one of the writer's previously hidden sides.

Will this kind of journalism win a Pulitzer? Hardly. But as I said before, it does it have it's place. Oh, yes, yes, and yes.

I know that the longer I go on here, the more it sounds like all this is just sour grapes. This couldn't be further from the truth. As a former journalist, I really liked keeping my skills honed and my bank account infused with extra green stuff. Yes, I'm sad to see this chapter close, but I embrace it as an opportunity to spend more hours on fiction.

And I'm finding that the universe agrees.

I'm within a week or two of finishing the rough draft of a novel about three misfit Elvis impersonators. When I walked into the Sidekick wrap party at Lucky's on Congress Street, where had the soon-to-be-ex Sidekick writers gathered? At the table under this Wertheimer photo of Elvis on a motorcycle. And within minutes of my arrival, the bee-bop band at the back was singing Frank Sinatra's That's Life. Salient lyrics?

"That's life
I tell ya, I can't deny it,
I thought of quitting baby,
But my heart just ain't gonna buy it.
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try,
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing:
Each time I find myself laying flat on my face,
I just pick myself up and get back in the race."

I'm not the biggest fan of hoo-doo voo-doo, but even a person more cynical than me would have to take this cosmic coupling as a sign.

What really bothers me about losing the column is this: The Boston Globe decided to combine Sidekick, Living/Arts, Food, Style, Weekend, and A&E into one daily tabloid section called G. While the mock up looks beautiful, and I have to give the Globe props for trying to maintain coverage in all these areas at a time when fiscal realities are more like nightmares, it bothers me that smooshing all this content into one space emerged as the best option. If a readership can be mapped to sections of the paper, hard news is the brain, business is the bottom line, and sports is the heart (particularly in this town), but the sections they're cramming together into G? These are the soul. Stuffing them into one box is like:

• slashing art funding in schools;
• a generation who can buy a single song on itunes and is never enriched to find that the song they hated when they first bought the CD has become the favorite;
• watching a movie before reading the book;
• watching a movie and never reading the book;
• never learning that the Beef-it's-what-for-dinner music is actually the "Hoedown" section of Aaron Copland's "Rodeo."
  

You get my point.

My husband recently bought a new piece of software that allows him to compose music and record a playback without having to record individual musical parts manually. Mostly that means he writes music with his instruments, translates it into line notation, and then has the computer play the finished score for him. He's been playing around with exercises that embrace his heavy metal teen years. I particularly like grooving to a song he calls "Pigs on Parade" (it's supposed to be a Nine Inch Nails homage), and I would share it here if I wasn't absolutely technologically useless. Suffice it to say it both rocks and rolls. Hard.

So Mike decides to share his little ditty with a few key people. The response? Accolades from the likes of me and a few others, a whole lot of crickets, and one particularly chilling response from a coworker:

Why would you do that?

Mike tried to explain about the creative urge.

Oh no, the coworker said. I'm am NOT a creative person.

Yikes.

We're all creative by nature, aren't we? I don't mean everyone's a musician or a writer, a painter or theoretical physicist. But when we decide to improvise our way to a scrumptious meal, invent plans C through Z when plans A & B fail, or dream up a perfect solution to mollify an angry client, we're being creative. We forget that at our great peril.

The value of the arts is not just about the poems or paintings or stories or novels or sculptures or plays or operas. It's about what these poems and paintings and stories and novels and sculptures and plays and operas make us think. So notice the arts around you while they're still around to be noticed. You'll be a little splash of technicolor in an increasingly black and white world.