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 “Sundance Kid: I can’t swim! “Butch Cassidy: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya.” — William Goldman MADISON, Wis.—Once, many moons ago, while researching a book about inventions, I toured a carpet factory in South Carolina. The company was a giant in its industry, with hundreds of non-union…
by David Benjamin “Get a haircut and get a real job/ Clean your act up and don’t be a slob/ Get it together like your big brother Bob … ” —George Thorogood and the Destoyers MADISON, Wis.—My favorite vignette in America’s endlessly recycling follicle wars appears in Robert Zemeckis’ little-noted but remarkably significant—and fun!—film,…
by David Benjamin “Back then, it was students against the institution. Now it’s very different because it’s student against student.”” —Paul Brest, professor emeritus, Stanford Law School MADISON, Wis.—When I was matriculating at a little liberal arts outpost called Rockford College (pop. 450), there were two noticeably outspoken right-wing students. One, from Boston,…
by David Benjamin “… conservatives … argue that the crisis in Americasn schools is … about leftist teachers propagandizing on critical race theory and giving kids new pronouns while denying them safe bathrooms.” —Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times MADISON, Wis.—In Nicholas Kristoff’s eloquent assessment of the real problem with American public schools, I…
by David Benjamin “Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.” —Stephen King MADISON, Wis.—My gun of choice is a .22 caliber rifle with a telescopic sight. It’s actually the only gun I’ve ever used. It belonged to…
by David Benjamin “Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.” —Luigi Pirandello (An ill-lit table in the dark corner of a bar in Hell’s Kitchen. A man, hatless and nattily attired in a custom tailored blue suit with…
by David Benjamin “When the shouting and tumult dies, the American people and president will realize that the unprecedented mudslinging against the committee by the extreme left-wing elements of press and radio was caused solely because another Fifth Amendment communist was finally dragged out of the dark recesses and exposed to public view.” —Sen.…
by David Benjamin “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?” — Sigmund Freud, to Marie Bonaparte NAPILI POINT, Hawaii—Once, in the course of writing a novel, my…
by David Benjamin “… Our morality is based, in large part, on mystical dogma, not reason, our lives are governed by superstition and prejudice rather than knowledge. Self-sacrifice is prized above self-interest and self-esteem. Society is placed above the individual. And the goal of happiness is lost in a labyrinthine maze of emotional responses, self-doubts,…
by David Benjamin “Data technologies do not simply predict the future by guessing what an individual or group might do or want to do in the future. It is rather that those futures already exist, completely realized, and they reach backwards into the present to guide it. The possible paths for our desires to travel…