Upcoming Events:
Saturday, 13 December, 6 pm
Book Talk, “Unexpected Variations on the Theme of Christmas,” Garden Wall Bookshop (formerly Kismet Books) 101 N. Main St., Verona, Wis.
Friday, 16 January, 6 pm
Book Talk, Signing and Sale, An Apartment in Paris, Benjamin's Mess, The Gathering Place, 715 Campus St., Milton, Wis.
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The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few.” ― David Brooks MADISON, Wis.—The word that comes to mind when I remember Philip Dedrick is “unassuming.” He was a tweedy man with a gray thatch of unruly…
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis.—Every Christmas season, I suffer an onset of password constipation. To shop for the holidays, I visit websites that I use infrequently, once a year at most. Usually, I’ve been there before. Typically, on my first visit there, I laboriously provided my personal data. Obeying orders, I made up a password…
by David Benjamin SOMEWHERE in Vermont—Santa Claus’s aide de camp, Olaf the elf, turned to Santa and said, “What’s that noise? Santa had finished his rounds in Canada and was guiding his sleigh toward the farmhouse of the Shaftoe family, in the northernmost reaches of snowy New England. From the pitch darkness came throbbing rumble,…
by David Benjamin “It’s all God’s timing, man … It was God trying to tell me to help my foot out a little bit.” —Jayden Reed, injured Green Bay Packer MADISON, Wis.—Katy, one of my coffee-shop friends, looked a little strange. She was wearing mostly men’s clothes as usual and pushing the walker she’s been…
by David Benjamin “The only thing these emails prove is that President Trump did nothing wrong. If anything, his crime was loving too much. And possibly too young.” —Ashley Padilla, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on “Saturday Night Live” MADISON, Wis.—One of the thousand rules drummed at me by parents, grandparents, teachers and…
by David Benjamin “To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.” —Henri Cartier-Bresson MADISON, Wis.—There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about Henry Aaron, the greatest hitter of all time and my childhood baseball…
by David Benjamin “All creatures kill—there seems to be no exception; but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge. Also—in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.”…
by David Benjamin “I wore only black socks, because I had heard that white ones were the classic sign of the American tourist. Black ones though — those’ll fool ’em.” ― Doug Mack PARIS—Hotlips has asked why I bother to compose formularies for American tourists in Paris who might—if offered the right advice—prefer not to…
by David Benjamin “Never eat anything than has to be explained.” —Snoopy PARIS—Hotlips and I, the other night, took our Japanese guests, Mako and Chikako, out to dinner in Paris, and blundered into Manhattan. From the outside, Lava, a new eatery on rue de la Montagne Ste. Geneviève, looks pretty French. The door and windows…
by David Benjamin “Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even life itself—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my…