Upcoming Events:
Monday, 9 June, 10:30 am
Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Fitchburg Community Center, 5510 Lacy Road, Fitchburg, Wis.
Saturday, 14 June, 1-3 pm
Meet & Greet, Barnes & Noble, West Towne, Madison
Thursday, 19 June, 10 am
Book Talk, An Apartment in Paris, Middleton Community Center, 7448 Hubbard Ave. Middleton Wis.
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The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin “Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.” ―Ambrose Bierce MADISON, Wis.—There must be studies about this. Trouble is, I haven’t seen any. But there…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Paris is the city of joy where the naive are taken by the neck and blackened on the scaffold, and where villains hold all sway … Purse-cutters and knifemen lurk in the dark.” ―François Villon PARIS—Neither Hotlips nor I were born here, or anywhere nearby, nor do we hold the precious carte…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Let us not assassinate this lad further. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” ―Attorney Joseph N. Welch, Army-McCarthy hearings, 9 June 1954 PARIS—Donald Trump is an indecent man. Worse than that—in the immortal formulation of Joe Welch, castigating…
Read More...by David Benjamin “The fact is, I don’t know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn’t collapse when you beat your head against it.” ― Douglas Adams PARIS—The fat girl was asking after me. Hotlips…
Read More...by David Benjamin “The objects of which Paris folks are fond– literature, art, medicine, and adultery.” — Mark Twain MADISON, Wis.—During one of my Paris sojourns a few years ago, I was visibly perplexed (Hotlips said to me, “You look perplexed. What’s gong on?”) by a big demonstration in Paris over a proposed French law…
Read More...by David Benjamin “The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, ‘Where is the best place to go to?’ He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had…
Read More...by David Benjamin “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.” — Donald Trump, 23 Jan. ‘16 It all started with a question from ABC News’ David Muir during the September 10 presidential debate. Muir asked ex-president Donald Trump his position…
Read More...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 More...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 More...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…
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