Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, 8 July, noon - Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Mount Horeb Rotary Club, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin
Monday, 13 July, 11:15 am - Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Verona Community Center, 108 Paoli Street, Verona, Wisconsin
Tuesday, 14 July, 7 pm - A Dialog on Writing with Dave Wood, Whitehall Public Library, 18560 Scranton Street, Whitehall, Wisconsin.
The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “Overturn this!” — The Belgian soccer team MADISON, Wis.—The rumor isn’t true that Gianni Infantino has sent the World Cup trophy back to the shop to super-glue a gold bas-relief of Donald Trump’s scowl over the part of the globe where the Pacific Ocean used to be. Right now, this re-design is…
by David Benjamin “Men have become the tools of their tools.” — Henry David Thoreau MADISON, Wis.—One of the banks where Hotlips and I store our money communicates with its depositors only by app. I should note that I didn’t choose to patronize this bank—called CCF. I was shunted to it when a previous bank—HSBC—experienced…
by David Benjamin “Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.” ―Diane Ravitch MADISON, Wis.—When I was in fifth grade, a kid named Terry had the desk next to mine. We weren’t friends. We barely spoke to each other. So, I was a…
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.—When I dropped in, the other day, on Wilhelm “Clorox” Bienfang, America’s foremost idea man, he was wearing a red baseball cap emblazoned with four cryptic letters: MEOW. Of course, I figured his latest brainstorm had something to do with cats. Way wrong! After Bienfang revealed that the acronym on his…
by David Benjamin “There’s no living with a killing. There’s no goin’ back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand … a brand sticks. There’s no goin’ back. Now you run on home to your mother and tell her … Tell her everything’s all right. And there aren’t any more guns in the valley.”…
by David Benjamin “In England, very early in the second world war, we were all provided with buff-colored cards which told us, as well as any interested authority, who we were. They were called identity cards, and while no one much cared for them, they were grudgingly accepted as one of the nastier, if necessary,…
by David Benjamin “Serving in Congress is like having a second shot at high school.” — Barney Frank MADISON, Wis.—The day Barney Frank stepped into my office at the Mansfield (Mass.) News, I got no sense that he was angry about anything. He had established a reputation as a) probably the smartest guy in American…
by David Benjamin “Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” — Muhammad Ali MADISON, Wis.—According to journalist Michael Wolff, sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein boasted that he was, for a period of…
by David Benjamin “Jack Kerouac the last time he visited my apartment 704 East 5th Street, N.Y.C., he looked by then like his late father, red-faced corpulent W. C. Fields shuddering with mortal horror, grimacing on D.M.T. I’d brought back from visiting Timothy Leary at Millbrook Psychedelic Community.” — Allen Ginsberg, 1964 MADISON, Wis.—I come…
by David Benjamin “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain…” — from The…