Ben, Author at Common Reader

The Nominal Joys of a Discombobulated Text

‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Riddley Walker’ stand as scurrilous hold-outs, novels that experiment with form, juggle your expectations, and even jangle your nerves.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Remembering R.E.M. Explored by SLSO on Its One-Year Anniversary

By Chris King

Though St. Louis cannot claim the April 5 debut of “R.E.M. Explored” as the church in Athens can for the band itself, this performance featured a new sequence of the program that has become standard in subsequent concerts, not to mention the only time Mills’s compositions have been re-imagined by Marsh and Mallamud’s orchestrations and performed by a symphony orchestra on the iconic date of R.E.M.’s nativity.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

“Hands Off!” Rally in Illinois the Calm Before a Possible Storm

By John Griswold

No one was protesting in downtown Champaign, with its popular restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. No MAGA believer showed up with an assault rifle, as someone did in Indiana, or with a Nazi flag, as a man did in St. Louis’s Metro East.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Professor Snyder is Not Fleeing the Country

By John Griswold

The U.S. administration, destabilizing and unjustifiable in nearly all its actions, said Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “at its depth comes down to hero worship”—of Putin, Musk, Trump—but in the end we are sacrificing ourselves, “our children, our grandchildren, the possibility of life on earth….”

Society & Culture | Dispatches

Looking Hip in the Gaza Strip? My Useless Act of Indie-Rock Prophecy

By Chris King

Before the president of the United States publicly imagined the Gaza Strip as a hip Middle Eastern Riviera, I only ever told this story to mock myself at parties. It was one of my bits. It turns out I am a prophet, I would declare.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

House of Secrets

By Jeannette Cooperman

To new generations, the secrecy of the past is often baffling. A secret is a woman laced so tightly into her velvet gown that she cannot breathe or speak. We show up in jeans. Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison”: they isolate the keeper of the secret, require lies, breed distrust, and become the unwanted inheritance of a generation bewildered by the need to keep them.

Essays

Revolution and Its Limits

By Randal Maurice Jelks

Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is thought-provoking, well-written, and historically informative. It raises so many questions for activists and theorists in a reconsideration of Frantz Fanon.

Reviews

Remembering George Foreman, the King of the Comeback

By Gerald Early

George Foreman was not such a political naïf as he led people to think. He was castigated and ostracized by many Blacks in Houston. But he was on the road to becoming heavyweight champion of the world. He had a name, and even if his skills were not polished. He was big, strong, with a hard punch, and a willingness to train and follow his trainers’ instructions. What were his Black critics, those loudmouthed, street losers he left behind, going to be? Nobody was buying what they were selling. What Foreman learned early on was this: do not try to sell unhappiness. People are already more unhappy than you think.

Essays

The Raw, the Cooked, and the Difference between Them

By John Griswold

I had known her parents, and now all four of our parents were in their graves, and we were parents of grown children. We lived in the same metropolitan area. Why would it not be pleasant to sit together and imagine the futures that remained in each of our separate lives?

Essays

How Roy Ayers Put Soul on “Nice”

By Ben Fulton

Roy Ayers coasted on his unique sentiment and vibe. It was sublime, positive, and unfailingly warm and luminescent. What else would you expect a writer, any writer, to say about the musical talent who gave us the song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”?

Arts & Letters | Dispatches