Upcoming Events:
Wednesday, 6 March, 1 pm
Reading & discussion, The Melting Grandmother and Other Short Works by David Benjamin, The Gathering Place, 715 Campus Street, Milton, Wis.
Monday, 1 April, noon
“The Craft & Quandary of the Storyteller in a ‘Non-Fiction Society,’” Janesville Rotary Club.
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The Weekly Screed
by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — My first assignment in journalism, as a college-student stringer for the Rockford (Ill.) Morning Star, was a murder. Alas, it was no mystery. A guy had been killed in a bar fight in Beloit, Wisconsin. The killer was in jail. My editor wanted me to go over to…
Read More...by David Benjamin “This is the way the world ends; not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.” ― Amanda Hocking, Hollowland PARIS — It has long been one of my items of faith that actor Stanley Tucci has never accepted a bad script. This conviction…
Read More...by David Benjamin “They’ll never want to see a rake or plow/ And who the deuce can parleyvous a cow?/ How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm/ After they’ve seen Paree?” ―Sam Lewis & Joe Young PARIS — Among my grandfather Archie’s four brothers, my favorite was Uncle Harry, partly because…
Read More...by David Benjamin “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” ―Grover Norquist It all started when the earth-moving equipment arrived and commenced ripping up the pavement…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Rodgers’ career probably is over. Few athletes come back stronger than ever from an Achilles’ rupture and, given Rodgers’ flirtations with retirement this past offseason, it’s hard to imagine him putting in 11 months of rigorous rehab just to play one more season.” ―Tom Silverstein, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel MADISON, Wis.—For the last few…
Read More...by David Benjamin “You can burn my house, steal my car/ Drink my liquor from an old fruit-jar/ Do anything that you want to do/ But uh-uh baby, lay off of my shoes/ Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes.” ―Carl Perkins MADISON, Wis.— One of my guilty pleasures is Emile Ardolino’s sneaky-smart…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov MADISON, Wis.— Let’s try to overlook the screaming irony of the Republican Party fighting for “parents rights” after winning a fifty-year crusade against women’s rights to control…
Read More...by David Benjamin “Catholic teaching was that no homicide was involved if abortion took place before the foetus was infused with a soul, known as ‘ensoulment’. This was believed to occur at ‘quickening’, when the mother detected the child move for the first time in her womb. It indicated a separate consciousness. “In 1591, Pope…
Read More...by David Benjamin “What finally saved the movies was the introduction of narrative.” — Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art MADISON, Wis.— Most contemporary writers crib from the movies. I do so voluminously and shamelessly. I grew up watching movies. I was the first kid in my grade to shlep downtown and go to the…
Read More...by David Benjamin Dear Dick: At long last, I’m writing to apologize for mooching my way, uninvited and unwashed, into your life and the bosom of your family. If you recall, it all started one summer day in 1964, when I mounted my bicycle and pedaled the three miles from a cramped, cluttered and…
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