Author: Benjamin
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Post #42: So Long Old Friend
I’m sure my parents played records by The Band when I was growing up. They must have. There was John Denver and America and Joni Mitchell and The Beatles and Neil Young and Elton John. There was Cat Stevens and Roberta Flack and Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones. I…
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Post #41: A Poem a Week (Roughly) for National Poetry Month
Today, in continued honor of National Poetry Month, I share with you Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” It’s long been a favorite of mine. Enjoy. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged…
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Post #40: The Wire
Admittedly, you probably need to have seen (at least some) of The Wire to make it through all 36 minutes of Erlend Lavik’s video essay on the “visual style” of the show, but it’s a fascinating and comprehensive look at an aspect of David Simon’s great television masterpiece that you…
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Post #39: Man with a Marker
One of the great things about teaching classic works of literature is that you’re arming students with a cultural bookmark that they carry with them for life. Who hasn’t been somewhere where people started talking about Of Mice and Men or Romeo and Juliet or The Catcher in the Rye…
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Post #38: A Poem a Week for National Poetry Month, Part One
In honor of the first week of National Poetry Month, I’d like to share with you a personal favorite, Billy Collins’s “The Lanyard.” Billy Collins–The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf…
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Post #37: Heavy Hearted
Heavy hearted this week. A teacher from St. Johnsbury, Vermont named Melissa Jenkins was lured from her house last Sunday night when the guy who used to snow plow her driveway called her out of the blue and said he and his wife were having car trouble just down the…
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Post #36: Bausch(ian) Wisdom
For me, one of Facebook’s on-going pleasures, and this is coming from a former Facebook doubter and critic turned addict, is getting status updates by the great writer Richard Bausch, who I met at Bread Loaf. I’m sure he doesn’t remember me, or the rather hilarious hour we spent sipping…
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Post #35: On the Road (to the movies)
I just watched the trailer for the new film adaptation of Kerouac’s On the Road. I didn’t even know an On the Road film was in the works, let alone around the corner. I’ve always sort of bought the notion that the book was mostly un-filmable because of its wandering…
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Post# 34: Utilitarian Description
I read a short passage in Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box the other night and I liked it so much, I wrote it down and am here to burden you with it. It’s a short passage. Here it is: “She glared at Jude, saw he was dressed, black Doc Martens,…
Benjamin Roesch 