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
“CHIRP!” by David Benjamin “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” — Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne) PARIS — When the press acquiesced to being called “the media,” the door closed on Finley Peter Dunne and opened wide for Billy Bush. Marshall McLuhan introduced the term “medium” to…
Read More...Donald Trump’s Parisian sweetheart by David Benjamin “When I was a child, I talked like a child. I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” — 1 Corinthians 13:11 PARIS — My friends in the Trumpkamp think that non-Trumpniks like…
Read More...Out to dejeuner by David Benjamin “A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent.” — Eugene Atget PARIS — I follow, meekly, the footsteps of Eugene Atget. Atget was the original, essential Parisian, unable to get his fill of the City of Light. In the early days of photography, Atget fed…
Read More...Superego by David Benjamin “Hooray, excelsior and pow! The ship of state is sunk and dead, And we, the fools, are at the bow, From which the wise and good have fled.” — Benjie, The Id, 1966 PARIS — Bob Schuster was my first publisher. The imprint was SRTB Ketchachokee Publications. The four letters designated…
Read More...Pop quiz by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — One of the most entertaining moments in every election cycle is when a candidate who’s been saturated with talking points and pumped full of pat answers gets blindsided by a query that neither he/she, nor any of his/her handlers, ever saw coming. The latest example was when…
Read More...Building the better wetback trap by David Benjamin “… I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters…” — Donald Trump MADISON, Wis. — Among the more tawdry spectacles in a campaign that sets a new standard for tawdriness, Donald Trump’s tasteless display — during a…
Read More...The red-and-white blues (and yellow fringe) by David Benjamin “Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea…” — Justice Antonin Scalia MADISON, Wis. — The Stars and Stripes is easily the most battered and beleaguered flag in anybody’s history.…
Read More...Confessions of a navel observer by David Benjamin “It is hardly necessary to waste words over the so-called bikini since it is inconceivable that any girl with tact and decency would ever wear such a thing.” — Modern Girl, 1957 MADISON, Wis. — I went to Catholic school and developed a belly-button fetish. Looking back…
Read More...Demagoguery, Nelson Algren and other campaign notes by David Benjamin “I don’t want to seem racist or nothing but the black heritage has been raised in a certain way that there’s no incentive to get out and work because all of a sudden you have five kids and there are no dads around.” — Jack…
Read More...Why is this woman not an episode of ‘Criminal Minds’? by David Benjamin “Hill’ry Clinton took an ax, and gave Vince Foster forty whacks. “When she saw what she had done, she gave Chris Stevens forty-one.” — Popular children’s rhyme MADISON, Wis. — The latest kerfuffle over Donald Trump’s ambiguous call for “Second Amendment people”…
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