Posts by David Benjamin
Field of miscreants
by David Benjamin “Growing up is a ritual, more deadly than religion, more complicated than baseball, for there seem to be no rules. Everything is experienced for the first time.” ― W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe MADISON, Wis.—In the Wisconsin town where I lived ’til I was thirteen, there were two “official” baseball fields, complete with…
Read MoreThe deep end of the no-talent pool
by David Benjamin “[Peter] Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks.” — Elon Musk MADISON, Wis.—My friend Smedley has survived for decades as a Washington D.C. “insider.” The secret of his success is a chameleonlike knack for adjusting to the ebb and flow of the ideological tides in American politics. He keenly predicted, during…
Read MoreThe pitfall of expert advice
by David Benjamin “The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance.” ― Erle Stanley Gardner MADISON, Wis.—A while ago, during my futile search for new literary representation, I got rejected by a New York agent named Peter, whose full name I won’t reveal. Peter……
Read MoreThat’s the way you do the Varsity Drag
by David Benjamin “You gotta do the Black Botton/ Gotta do the Shag/ And the Charleston/ And the Varsity Drag/ Oh, how I love the ladies/ Wear collegiate, collegiate clothes/ We’re so collegiate/ Rather be a ladies/ Rather be a ladies man…” —Good News MADISON, Wis.—When I was sixteen, I added about two pounds to…
Read MoreHail, Oceania!
by David Benjamin “By word and deed, Trump treats Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping as his only real peers. Our allies, by contrast, are our subordinates. It’s as if Putin, Xi and Trump were feudal lords and each were entitled to his own feudal domain.” —David French, NY Times, 23 March MADISON, Wis.—Writing in 1948,…
Read MoreThe trouble with smalltown lit
by David Benjamin “The days of pioneering, of lassies in sunbonnets, and bears killed with axes in piney clearings, are deader now than Camelot; and a rebellious girl is the spirit of that bewildered empire called the American Middlewest.” ―Sinclair Lewis, Main Street MADISON, Wis.—A while ago, I was one of several writers reading passages……
Read MoreThe diversionary allure of desperate times
by David Benjamin “I learned how to read the distance of a flyball from the crack of the bat over the radio and the tone of Earl Gillespie’s response (he never, ever hyped a warning-track quail as a dinger).” —David Benjamin, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked MADISON, Wis.—It wasn’t an every…
Read More“Trump would … ”
by David Benjamin “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” —Vince Lombardi MADISON, Wis.—Right around the time he applies his Sharpie to an edict changing the name of Canada to Trumpanada and sending the North Dakota National Guard to invade Saskatchewan, Donald Trump is going to run out of weird-ass “executive orders” to dream up…
Read MoreWhy not sports?
by David Benjamin “We do this because it gives us, vicariously and from a great distance, a share in the glamour and the counterfeit heroism that accrues to sports champions. As we suffer through every day’s degrading race against our fellow rats, the Packers are an endless, regularly scheduled series of voyages into the unknown.……
Read MoreA Métro mystery
by David Benjamin “It’ll be quite quiet when you first get on/ But as that tram keeps moving along/ It’ll fill with people starting on their day/ They’ll be laughing and joking as they eat/ They’ll be passing plates along the seats/ Your night of heartache will soon seem far away/ And even though you’re…
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