Archive for August 2024
The invasion of the budding intellectuals
by David Benjamin “Wait a minute, Mrs. Twombly! Now that we’ve graduated, you want us to call you ‘ALICE’? That’s like having a friend named Alice and suddenly she asks you to call her ‘Spot’!” MADISON, Wis.—One Friday night in my seventeenth year, probably after a football or basketball game … Wait a minute, how…
Read MoreThe Oracle of Madison Avenue
by David Benjamin “I’m from Milwaukee and I oughta know/ It’s draft-brewed Blatz beer wherever you go!/ Smoother, fresher, less filling, that’s clear!/ Blatz is Milwaukee’s finest beer.” MADISON, Wis.—During my strange career interlude as a public relations flack in Boston, I became an avid reader of Advertising Age, the bulging weekly chronicle of the…
Read MoreThe paradox of smalltown crime
by David Benjamin “It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which……
Read MoreFlick’s tongue
by David Benjamin “Parents had nothing to do with school. Once you were out the door in the morning, your parents washed their hands of you. You became entirely the property of the school. St. Mary’s could do anything it wanted to me—hang me by my thumbs and tickle my feet—and Mom didn’t want to…
Read MoreNorma Jean and the Duke
by David Benjamin “You have to be a man first before you’re a gentleman.” —John Wayne, McClintock (1963) MADISON, Wis.—A couple of women recently scolded me for broaching the question—sensitively, I thought—of whether, how and when a guy should compliment a gal on her appearance. In the news that very week, coincidentally, a wave of…
Read More“A high-concept gritty romantic suspense thriller”
by David Benjamin “A writer returns home after a long evening’s work of waiting tables, only to find his house a pile of smoldering rubble. Policemen and firemen poke grimly through the remains. The writer leaps out of his car and runs over to a detective. “‘Oh God! My house! What happened? Where are my……
Read MoreHubba, hubba!
by David Benjamin “Whenas in silks my Julia goes,/ Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes.” —Robert Herrick MADISON, Wis.—Is it chivalry, I wonder, or sly salacity? How, without making the wrongimpression does a 21st-century guy compliment a woman on how she looks, particularly if she’s a total (but fetching) stranger?…
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