Ben, Author at Common Reader

Every Path Has Multiple Meanings

I could not tell if the old-timer meant that if I walked fast enough I would not be bitten by bugs, or that he wanted me to get the hell away from him.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Hiking with the Lorax of Shawnee National Forest

By John Griswold

Sam Stearns is a rascal who has seen lively times. Some of those have been while working with other environmentalists—for almost four decades without pay and at significant personal risk—in defense of southeastern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest, which they hope will become a National Park and the world’s first climate preserve.

Essays

This Story Should Not Have Ended This Way

By Jeannette Cooperman

Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari gives advice regularly: so much was so hard for him, and he knows how to make it easier for other people. “Whatever you are going through, say, ‘Everything has an ending.’ We have a date to die, our food expires, a building will one day collapse. So whatever situation you’re in, it will have an ending. One day, it will be over. So there is no need to stress about life. And for any person who does not see that life is beautiful, please do not make it hard on other people.”

Essays

Villain or Visionary: How Great was Herod?

By Gerald Early

Martin Goodman absolves Herod of the murder of the innocents in the hunt for the baby messiah Jesus. He thinks Herod was likely dead when Jesus was born. Herod probably did not kill the Jewish innocents but what is unsettling about the man, his indomitable will, his swagger, and his ferocious “statecraft” is that he was probably, at that stage in his life, quite capable of ordering it done.

Reviews

New Documentary on the Artist Jealous of Pee-wee Herman

By John Griswold

Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman, insists on camera that the documentary must not be of the “tears of a clown” variety. It is an admirable attitude, but Matt Wolf’s film, perhaps inevitably, emphasizes Reubens’s problems.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Beethoven’s Immoral, Tasteless Usurpers, and Then Some

By Ben Fulton

What hurts so much about these depressing examples is that they reveal one of the world’s greatest composers to be little more than window dressing to our naïve hopes about enlightened hearts and human progress. How could an artist of such immortal genius be so powerless, almost helpless, when confronted by the darkness of the human heart? And if art as elevated as Beethoven cannot help save us from ourselves, who can?

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

When Worlds Collide, or Not

By Ben Fulton

Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out in their book A City on Mars, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.

Reviews

Peck of Dirt Is Heard from Again

By Chris King

While watching Peck of Dirt, I was thinking about the inscrutable, somewhat self-defeating, but ultimately lovable and inspiring character of the St. Louis rock music scene.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Sleeping on the Moon

By Chris King

I felt transported and in a kind of dream long before I found a place where I thought I might rest my head long enough to fall asleep, until I was shifted again by what seemed to be the constantly drifting bags of laundry. Sleep would not come right away, a defining experience of life at sea. Added to the queasy motion of the ocean, the heat, and the noise, was a fearsome apparition that Walt had warned me about.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Henry James in St. Louis

By John Griswold

Henry James said, “This vast grey, smoky, extraordinary bourgeois place seems to offer in a ceaseless mild soft rain, no interest and no feature whatever.” The Missouri Historical Society, for their part, has nothing tagged in their online collection for “Henry James.” Touché, maître.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches